Jan Křesadlo, GraveLarks,Trans.by Václav Z J Pinkava,Jantar Publishing, 2016. [1984.]excerpt


Set in Stalinist-era Central Europe, GraveLarks is a triumphant intellectual thriller navigating the fragile ambiguity between sado-masochism, black humor, political satire, murder, and hope. Zderad, a noble misfit, investigates a powerful party figure in 1950s Czechoslovakia. His struggle against blackmail, starvation, and betrayal leaves him determined to succeed where others have failed and died. This extended edition includes critical texts and analyses with illustrations by Jan Pinkava, Oscar-winning animator. GraveLarks is a fictionalized account of the life of French troubadour poet Villon set in 1950s Stalinist Czechoslovakia. The vagabond and ""bohemian"" Villon is transposed into the vagabond intellectual and ""bohemian"" Zderad. Singing, drinking, deviant sex, and blackmail ensue. The author and publisher Josef Skvorecky described the text as ""the most original, shocking, truthful, and artistically very interesting works of contemporary Czech fiction.""



..."I consider [this book] to be one of the most original, shocking, truthful and artistically very interesting works of contemporary Czech fiction. It is profound, ironic, witty and - what is rare in today's writing - it betrays a learned author, who, in spite of the width and depth of his knowledge, has remained an acute observer of real life and real people. It is not often that one finds, in fiction of any nation, a portrayal of the Stalinist fifties that has been executed with so much freshness, incisiveness, charming cynicism, accuracy... it is also devoid of any sentimental seriousness and it makes excellent reading even for those who are not interested in the political background against which the macabre story is played out. I think that an English-language publication of this novel would be regarded by those who know what literature is all about as a discovery." - Josef Skvorecky


"GraveLarks successfully employs Menippean satire, characterized by a fragmented narrative, frequent shifts of stylistic register and point of view, and the wish to lampoon not so much an individual but a general state of mind (.....) In the bleak world of GraveLarks, criminality and creativity are intimately intertwined" - Andrei Rogatchevski  Andrei Rogatchevski, The Times Literary Supplement


“A complex torrent of black humour mixed with rollicking slapstick clowning, of sexual exploitation mixed with warm family love, of sharp, pointed, observations mixed with bizarre and fantastic episodes reminiscent of Meyrink and Kafka.” — John Howard, Wormwood


Not many authors of fiction caution their readers in the narrative: ´...this book is somewhat disgusting in certain parts and this is about to happen now. If you wish you might easily skip this section with minimal damage to your understanding of the plot.....´. Jan Křesadlo does it twice in his masterpiece. In both cases what follows is a display of somewhat embarrassing behaviour of the main protagonists. Křesadlo´s honest and direct contact with his reader is one of the characteristic features of his writing. He wrote Mrchopěvci in Czech during his exile in England in the early 1980s and a doyen of the Czech literature Josef Škvorecký immediately snapped the manuscript up for his exile Czech and Slovak 68 Publishers in Toronto. It was a happy choice because Křesadlo received for Mrchopěvci the highly respected Egon Hostovský Prize in 1984, the same year in which the book came out.
Jan Křesadlo (the pen name for Václav Pinkava) was born in Prague in 1926 and died in Colchester a few months before his sixty-ninth birthday. In fiction he was a late starter, after a vexed as well as varied career in clinical psychology both in Prague and England. I knew him well as an enthusiastic leader of the London Sokol choir and I can say without hesitation that he was a man on the verge of genius in several fields. He had composed music and written essays in the field of logic as well as psychology long before he took up his pen or rather computer to try his luck in fiction. He was also an outstanding poet writing in Czech and classical Greek. Mrchopěvci is a partly biographical story set in Prague of the early 1950´s when Pinkava met his future wife in a church choir. Yet he would deny as he indeed did that he became a victim of politically motivated homosexual blackmail which is described in the book in some detail. The main protagonist, Zderad, is a gifted singer in a small male choir who sing at funerals - hence the title of the book. The behaviour of the individual members of the choir is selfish, materialistic and kafkaesque that when one of them (Tůma) dies, they could not care less where he was buried: ´.....what is certain that he couldn´t have afforded a funeral with singing and his life-long colleagues didn´t consider him worth losing the little money they could earn elsewhere at the time of this funeral....´.
The homosexual blackmail of which Zderad becomes a victim is the leitmotiv of the novel on which Křesadlo illustrates the essentially corrupting influence of Stalinism. It is often the case with the first work of a ´budding´ author that some themes become recurrent even in later works. Such theme in Mrchopěvci is sexual deviation which in fact was Václav Pinkava's specialisation in his field of clinical psychology. This theme reappears in several of Křesadlo´s dozen or so novels and books of short stories.
As a journalist but not a literary critic I can only declare my feelings about Křesadlo´s work and let others pass their professional judgement on it. I admire Mrchopěvci and his work in general immensely for its courage, honesty and mysticism, although I am well aware that Křesadlo has his detractors in print as well. When it comes to putting Křesadlo to some convenient artistic "box", or giving him some useful "label", then I can say that Křesadlo has been described as a "post-modernist" for instance by Karel Janovický, the Plzeň born musician and journalist living in London. Among other convenient labels is "neo-decadence" in the style of Ladislav Klíma. One thing is certain - whatever the "boxes" or "labels", Křesadlo is his own man which I believe could be shown as stemming from his virtual isolation in English exile at a time when he started writing fiction.
Mrchopěvci is the first of Křesadlo´s novels translated by his gifted family into English. The translation is superb, although I find the explanatory notes at the bottom of some pages often intrusive. It would probably be much better if they were placed at the end of the English version. The illustrations by Křesadlo´s Oscar-winning son Dr Jan Pinkava are superb. My favourite is a contour of Stalin´s face in the sky over the Žižkov mausoleum in Prague where the first Communist president Gottwald and one of the most dogmatic Stalinist leaders of all times was resting at the time of the story.
Křesadlo is a phenomenon which will survive many of us. And there can hardly be a better entry of his works into the new millennium than the English version of Mrchopěvci.
I sincerely hope that this is merely a start. - Milan Kocourek



Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is always a pleasure to have the opportunity to speak about an author whom I consider to be a literary figure of the 21^st Century. His novels and collections of short stories could be concluded with the same words that Stendhal used in closing his The Charterhouse of Parma (La Chartreuse de Parme; 1839) TO THE HAPPY FEW. Jan Křesadlo could also have been sure that his work would be read a hundred years on. Today's happy few who have discovered Jan Křesadlo's comprehensive and exceptional work amid the proliferation of older and contemporary Czech authors, will enter a world which is both demanding and entertaining, a space which is both wise and playful, bizarre and cruel - in truth the very world of our own happiness and anxiety.
When the reader comes up against Křesadlo's works of literature he is beset by a suspicion that he has come up against a phenomenon which has gone beyond the humanly possible, something out of this world. Perhaps Fate has simply played a lighthearted trick by placing so much talent into the being of one man - talent which would have sufficed for a number of successful men, Václav Pinkava, for that is Křesadlo's real name could have been a significant philologist. He had mastered both the written and spoken word of classical Latin and middle Latin, classical Greek, German (which he learnt from infancy at home), and also English, French, Spanish, Italian, but also Hungarian, Romany. Slovak, Upper Lusatian, Russian and Pali. During his student days he enrolled to study Sanskrit under Prof. Lesný, the expert in Europe. For his own purposes he constructed the Urogal language (Fuga Trium) and the Sub-Tuřín dialect (Obětina). He was fascinated by various alphabets - for example he was able to use the difficult Old Slavonic Glagolitic script to write the Czech language. He loved to play on words and this has become a trade mark of his personal style. He could have been a succesful musician. He had the gifts of an absolute ear for music and a superb voice. When, after the purges of February 1948 he became a member of Prague's Catholic semi-underground, his "missa parodica" Spiritus Flat Per Deserta, on the theme of Ježek's Vítr vane pouští, became a popular hit. His novel Vara Guru includes a musical score - Postmaster Kodra's Requiem - his own composition which was performed at the office of the mass for the deceased Václav Pinkava in the old church od Sv. Mikuláš in Vršovice. All his life he was involved in various musical activities, one of these was his experience of the world of funeral singers or "Mrchopěvci", which he describes in such a superb way in his literary debut, the novel which was awarded the Egon Hostovský prize. He was an active musician both at home and abroad. He could also have been a professional logician and mathematician. he was often invited to lecture at international conferences of higher mathematics because of his discovery of a broad class of functionally complete multiple-valued logics, named Pinkava Logics. he was so proud of this feat that it was his wish that the four symbols of the basic functors be carved in the corners of his headstone. He could have been a philosopher - he began his studies at University with this subject. He could have been a professional caricaturist - one who was both biting and witty, pleasant and merciless. One only has to look through the pen and ink drawings which he published in his novels - this time in the guise of illustrator Kamil Troud. he could have been, and in truth he was, an excellent clinical psychologist - both in Prague and in Colchester, where he worked his way up to the position of Principal Psychologist and became an honorary member of King§s College. London University. I personally believe that he could have been a much better literary historian than I am myself - if, that is, he had wanted to spend time on such ephemeral activity.
In the end he went professional with the one talent which I consider his greatest - he became a Czech writer in exile. As an author he remained a personality which was always different, one which withstood outside pressures, one which was received positively or negatively, but hardly ever with indifference. This controversial individualist lived life as a Czech at a time which demanded collective totalitarian assent. In the Czech lands of his birth he chose to take up the position of a solitary outsider, constantly prosecuted but never broken. The first such incident was during the Nazi occupation when he was expelled in his fourth year at grammar school for ridiculing German language teaching. The second time he was expelled from Charles University during the winter semester of 1948/49. It was only by a miracle that he was freed in a trial, naturally a political trial, during which he had been accused of preparing an armed uprising. he only narrowly escaped being conscripted into the notorious "Black Baron" unit. Thanks to an absurd stroke of luck he was able to return to university to study psychology in the 50s - a former employee of his father's business who was grateful that his boss had once paid for his false teeth had become a nomenclature cadre with influence over admissions to higher education. As a graduate Pinkava was only able to take up a position which no one else wanted - in the clinic for sexual deviations. This became a significant experience in his life. As late as 1968 after earlier delays he defended his thesis for the Candidature (the equivalent of a PhD) - which, in line with the Soviet model, was the only "ticket" to a place among experts, a place almost impossible to aspire to from outside the communist ranks - and in the autumn of the same year he emigrated to England, complete with his family.
Pinkava's life is chracteristic of that section of his generation which had never identified itself with the communist vision of a brighter tomorrow. This is the source of Křesadlo's almost obsessive distaste for Milan Kundera's view that the "better half" of the nation enthusiastically joined in the Marxist-Leninist ideology (Kniha smíchu a zapomění) and this is the source of the evaluative expressions "Stalinist Nightingale". He quite justifiably considered himself and those like himself to be the "better half" and this is the point of departure for his works.
His life experience together with his creative inventiveness and extensive reading are the fertile soil from which such interesting work grew. Křesadlo's entry onto the literary scene is marked by a number of handicaps. He made his debut as a prose writer at the age of 58 when others of his generation were already well settled and entrenched in their literary positions. He was an educated traditionalist who felt the link between the wrod art and artisan (n. a skilleed workman; craftsman), he valued the craft of literature - and he was master of it. What is more, he had what I call " the talent to horrify": he saw things as they are, not the way they should be. He knew about strange behaviour in abnormal situations, he wrote of unbridled passions, of the loss of common inhibitions, he was provocative in creating an atmosphere of looseness and the fall of social standards. The World Order is refuted, it turns int grotesque" The apparently closely familiar world is suddenly unmasked as strange and dishonest, the existing sense of direction fails and the curtain rises on the bizarre theatre of reality. Among the motifs of the grotesque are madmen and individuals who are mentally disturbed, there are anthropomorphic monsters, fantastic animals, mutants, in whom the features of various real life creatures are combined.
I would also like to mention a problem which has sometimes caused Křesadlo to be excluded from the ranks of Czech literature - it is the frequent motif of overexposed sex. Tha majority of critics fail to notice that in Křesadlo's work these moments are always a method for parody and radical irony. perversions, ritual sex, the whole palette of sexual deviations are for the author a fundamental metaphor for the failing of tried and tested conservative values and social instinct, a metaphor for barbarism, upheaval and chaos. Křesadlo was a moralist in the best sense of the word. Unusual sexual practices - as he called them - were a tool for ridiculing the semantically empty segments, always the subject of bitter parody. His rejections of cheap sentimental optimism, his distanced sarcasm, his biterness over socierty's rejection of wisdom - these are the reasons why Křesadlo destroys, why he violates the accepted codes of communication with intentional non-conformism. Křesadlo's insane world of fanatics and demagogues is deviant and extreme. The grotesque smashes the universal image of communist progress.
Radical eclecticism is a frequent element in Křesadlo's texts: his own personal experience of life combines with his knowledge stemming from extensive and indepth reading. The result is a text similar to the palimpsest of the Middle Ages. When the scribe scraped the original text off the parchment and then wrote his new text over it, the old text could still be seen behind the new. Similarly, in Křesadlo's works it is impossible to distinguish clearly between the elements of other works of literature and the author's own. The author himself continually comments on this syncretic structure, thus forcing the reader to notice it. he makes him play with meaning, search for it, ponder. Frequently Křesadlo imagines how he himself might have written someone else's text - and sometimes he also does so. For example he had read Fischl's idyll Kuropění and he wrote his own version of the life of the country doctor in the novel Zámecký pán aneb Antikuro.
When the reader enters the bizarre world that is Křesadlo's prose (a total of thirteen books have been published in the period 1984 -1996) he may well at first feel himself buried under a mound of examples of strange behavious in abnormal situations. The deeper he delves into that world, however, the more it will fascinate him. he will be able to appreciate how the wonderful narrative diverges into numerous digressions, how the author both entertains and torments him, and how he tactfully educates him. It is unfortunate that the reader only has access to a small selection of Křesadlo's poetry and that the exceptional translation of Seifert's Věnec Sonetů into English is so difficult to come by.
In conclusion I would like to express my hope -which is supported by the interest shown by my students - that the band of the "happy few" fans of Křesadlo's work will continue to grow and that you will also find your way to enjoy his legacy.
- Dr. H. Kupcová


The literary cultural heritage of Central Europe in the 20^th century tends to be associated with a few legendary names: Kafka, Werfel, Rilke, later Canetti or Milosz, and Milan Kundera, who is venerated more abroad than in his native country.
In truth, however, the world of Central European literature, encompassing the century as it draws to a close, is much richer than that and we witness many more inspirational authors, often denied the scope to publish during much of their lifetime, or, having lived and worked in exile, reaching their readership after an uncomfortable delay.
Such writers have paradoxically tended to enter the context of the domestic literary scene as latter-day novices, albeit swiftly acquiring the status of literary classics upon critical review.
In modern Czech literature, just such a living classic storyteller novelist was, until his premature demise, the author Jan Křesadlo (1926 - 1995), whose creative energy covered such areas as poetry, classical philology and music, as well as novel-writing.
He did not publish as a young man, was persecuted during the Nazi occupation of Prague and again after the Communist coup of 1948 and then spent years working at the Prague University Teaching Hospital outpatient clinic for sexual deviations.
After August 1968 Křesadlo opted for exile in Great Britain and settled with his immediate family in Colchester, where he worked as the Head of Psychology at Severalls Hospital. In Colchester, he was known under his own name of Dr. Václav Pinkava, and known for (among other things) his contributions to the theory of Multiple Valued Logics, and for being an active member of the Czechoslovak emigre community in London.
He started writing only in his retirement - whereupon his very first book, a biting political parody of the Czech situation under Stalinism - Mrchopěvci (the title is pejorative slang for Funeral Singers) won him the prestigious Egon Hostovský Literature-in-exile award in 1984.
Jan Křesadlo was more than a mere writer: thanks to his outlook on life and broad range of interests he fully represented The Renaissance Man. From his perspective, his books about the tragic absurdities of civilisation in Central Europe and beyond (in fictitious countries or on an invented planet mimicking Earth) are sarcastic moral tales, holding up a series of distorting mirrors to mankind.
That is not to say that Křesadlo's books are full of moralising lectures to his fellow man or monotonous pleading for moral rectitude: his world-view was, first and foremost, enlightened and knowing, and this artist and thinker harboured not the slightest doubt that this world is not reasonable or wise - that it can even fall prey to its own tendencies to entropy, and is capable of creating forms of society which are anti-life.
The period which Křesadlo experienced at first hand - life in Czechoslovakia during the time of the Soviet political protectorate, the time of political delusions and immense twisting of the moral fibre under power-struggle pressures - is an example of such an absurd social existence.
It was to this theme, this case-history of social co-existence, that the author constantly returned, linking it variously to a political form of sexual deviation, to the period of Satanism in Bohemia, to a time of lost faith and hope. His vantage point was his critical scepticism, his critical faculty, even more critical as more values were forsaken, in particular as mind-science and morality were reaching their nadir beyond Central Europe.
Jan Křesadlo's books are a body of fascinating postmodern parables of European and Czech social circumstances in the latter half of the 20^th century, and his thematic excursions into other times and foreign space (something to which he devoted his monumental epic Astronautilia, written in parallel Czech and Ancient Greek verse!) are sarcastic metaphors, illustrating the loss of humanity in a period of history which seems to have entirely lost its sense of direction.
With this view of the world and Man's place within the scheme of things, Křesadlo makes a worthy successor to George Orwell as well as Graham Greene (in particular in his trilogy Fuga Trium) but by contrast we find in his work an incomparably broader palette of genres, ranging from anti-utopian sci-fi (Girgal) through surrealist poetry in prose (Dvacet snů), allegorical poetry satire (Vertikální spílání) right up to a party-piece discourse debunking the false legends of Czech exile (Obětina).
Even where Jan Křesadlo seems to be merely depicting those obscure and bizarre, albeit characteristic aspects of Czech provincial life (e.g. in the novel Vara Guru or in Království české a jiné polokatolické povídky), his effervescent, vivid storytelling is once again a metaphor for the inescapable issues of existence in the modern world.
At the same time he manages to combine a higher plane of universalistic discourse about the world at large with a remarkable empathy for all his figures, of whom he tends to speak with the hint of a smile, putting them in enlightened perspective, which, however, often ends in a wincing grimace.
This peerless creator is only gradually being discovered by Czech literature, but it is clear that literature's future beckons to this exceptional writer and polymath. For the world according to Křesadlo will not go away. Quite possibly, the world will increasingly become Křesadlo's world. - Vladimír Novotný


Czech émigré writer Jan Křesadlo (Vaclav Pinkava), an unexpected interlude in my reading – and another fascinating example of an Eastern European author emerging to prominence after the fall of the literary Iron Curtain - came to my attention by mention of him on a forum concerning literature that contributors wished to see translated into English. In fact, one of Křesadlo’s novels – Mrchopěvci (English title: Gravelarks) – has been translated, in a bilingual Czech-English edition by Mata Press of Prague with black and white illustrations by Křesadlo’s son, Oscar-winning animator Jan Pinkava (two items in this edition that fit my book publishing wish list: attention to binding, with quality paper and a ribbon bookmark, and the courtesy - understandably extendable only to short works - of including the original language version to accompany the translation). Reproduced in the book is a 1987 letter from Josef Škvorecký heaping praise upon the novel - which Škvorecký’s own publishing-house-in-exile, Sixty-Eight Publishers, issued in Czech in Toronto in 1984 - and soliciting interest for an English translation. Alas, it took another 12 years for one to appear, this 1999 Mata edition, which then apparently vanished like a comet. My search of on-line booksellers turned up zero available copies, not even from Mata in Prague, so I was happy to find it in my local library. Gravelarks, a wild, blackly funny work of biting protest and deceptively light-hearted sarcasm aimed at communist rule in Czechoslovakia - “after the year 1948, but still long before the period of the ‘thaw,’ as in so many other émigré novels” - takes its title from the occupation of its main character, an ordinary young nobody named Zderad who, having fallen out of favor with the dominant Stalinist political paradigm, must support his wife and infant son by singing dirges at funerals along with other “gravelarks.” It’s a gray existence, unleavened by the coffin-shaped apartment he inhabits with his family in a grimy part of the city and by the ostracism he experiences as an outcast from the state. But, as the narrator repeatedly observes with Candidean optimism, it still isn’t (quite) “the worst of all possible worlds.” One day after singing for a funeral, Zderad finds himself suddenly plunged into a greater, more nightmarish humiliation when confronted by a tall, pale stranger who produces a photocopy of an anti-Stalinist bit of doggeral Zderad wrote - in Greek - while still a grade school student. Under the oppressive paranoia of the time, however, even such an innocuous little poem would signify “practically a death certificate for its creator,” and the stranger is able to coerce Zderad into a crumbling tomb in the cemetery and subject him to sexual blackmail.

As the blackmailer demands new and increasingly florid encounters, Zderad’s situation is further complicated not only by his diverse attempts to uncover his exploiter’s identity but also by his awareness of a psychosexual power dynamic in which he obtains both profit (he’s paid for his “services”) and an embarrassing element of pleasure:

The cruel mental pleasure of unspeakably obscene power over the horrible blackmailer fused with the sepulchral lover’s revolting but effective caresses, spiced with his muffled sobs and grunts. The posterior of the stinking mandrill, which is incredibly obscene, offends the more sensitive visitor to the Zoo, yet it shines with a symphony of delicate and pronounced hues of greens, reds, blues and purples. Metallic shining flies for example of the genus Calliphora which revel in excrement and carrion, are of a similarly glorious coloration, as are many species of dung beetle. Thus the radiance and glory of Being permeate all its levels. Uninfluenced by the spectacle it was illuminating, the flame of the candle burned with a beautiful and glorious brightness, and, at the same time, Zderad’s lust also flared up in spite of himself. Pulsating, it glowed colourfully with ever greater strength until it finally exploded into a cosmic firework.

The novel follows Zderad’s various attempts to unyoke himself from this sordid exploitation, find inner courage and identity, and rediscover the moment of romantic tranquility and happiness he’d experienced years before when he first met his wife while swimming at a lake in the countryside. Křesadlo’s narrative takes the reader on a picaresque journey through the vicissitudes of Stalinist rule, recounted by a charming, lively, self-interrogating émigré narrator, acutely conscious of his role as storyteller and of his obligation to avoid falling into typical literary pitfalls such as those of the emerging genre of “Easterns,” which of necessity contain “secret policemen, blackmailers, whores and other typical characters” just as “Westerns” contain common elements of “guns, horseriding and the odd bit of cattle ranching.” What results is a freewheeling, anything goes narrative punctuated by bits of musical score and phrases in Greek, propelled with a rocketing narrative velocity that can nonetheless stop on a dime for the narrator to interject his own views or question his own narrative style, even shift gears entirely by suddenly inserting, as an “Intermezzo,” a brief parable in order to more thoroughly (and grotesquely) get across a point.

Křesadlo’s contempt for the communist regime infects the novel at every turn; it’s spiked with scathing references to dogma and institutionalized politics; to the “Youth Unions,” “Joyful Corrective Centers” and other statist institutions with Orwellian names; to the “consumers” who “got out” and turned their backs on those left behind; to acquiescent intellectuals in the West; and in general to the “radishes” (red on the outside, white on the inside) who constituted “most of the contemporary population of Czechoslovakia.” The narrator reserves special scorn for state-supporting intellectuals and for the dreadful state of Czech literature of the time (in a somewhat performative self-interview Křesadlo wrote in the 1990's, his distaste for Milan Kundera was apparent):

…a desert…almost total…the better writers of the future were at that time still in a state of embryonic latency. Some, but not all of them, were writing and publishing true and honest byzantine odes to Stalin, only in the Czech and Slovak languages, of course…

Commenting further on the severity of the literary drought, the narrator notes that the only other books still to be found were those in antiquarian bookshops, “remnants of eliminated ethnic groups” to “be had for next to nothing, because, comrades, who’d want to read them?”

If there’s one element I found slightly bothersome in Gravelarks, it’s Křesadlo’s use of “sexual deviance” as a metaphor for communist corruption (Křesadlo held a degree in psychology and worked for years as a clinical psychologist at the mental hospital affiliated with Charles University, specializing in sexual aberrations). As though there are not already in literature enough homosexual characters portrayed as monsters, Křesadlo appears to go even one better by referring quite simply to Zderad’s exploiter as “the Monster.” But at the same time, the character is so utterly over the top – what starts as a altogether ordinary sexual act blossoms into an astoundingly baroque variety of sexual obsessions and pathologies, both homo-and hetero-sexual, and increasingly monstrous, incorporating even kidnapping and murder – that it’s next to impossible to take him seriously as anything other than metaphor. It’s abundantly clear that by rendering Stalinist communism as a grotesquerie of sordid sexual depravity, Křesadlo mocks the brightly polished, seamless moral certitude of the state’s self-congratulatory self-image. And to be fair, Křesadlo - who, during his lifetime, was instrumental in efforts to decriminalize homosexuality in Czechoslovakia - provides another, far more sympathetic homosexual character as a foil. Still, while this may simply reflect a weariness of such depictions on my part, not to mention the American cultural lens through which I couldn't help but view the book, the device struck me as uncomfortably close to the manner in which, for example, religious fanatics expediently and routinely assign blame for all of a country’s woes to “sexual deviance " (of course, we've all seen what lies beneath that particular brand of polished, seamless moral certitude...).

In the end, though, Křesadlo’s evident talents trumped whatever slight misgivings I had regarding his choice of metaphors. I found myself frequently laughing out loud while swept along by his glittering, barbed, ebullient, acrobatic prose and delighted by the sheer dexterity and breadth of his language, his frequent use of outlandish, comical imagery, and the occasional descriptive gem (i.e. “The sky was as mild as a cow’s eye”). One can only hope that Gravelarks will return to print in English, and that more of Křesadlo’s works will be made available to allow English readers to explore further this remarkable novelist / poet / scholar / composer / linguist / activist. I would be especially interested to see a translation of what is purported to be his magnum opus: “Astronautilia,” an epic science fiction poem modeled after Homer’s “Odyssey,” running to more than 6,500 lines, and written entirely in classical Greek, with Czech translation on facing pages. - seraillon




Seven Sparks: an anthology of seven short stories by Jan Křesadlo,selected and translated by VZJ Pinkava
Poetry


https://issuu.com/jantarpublishing/docs/gravelarks_sample

Manuel Pérez Subirana, Losing Is What Matters, Trans. by Allen Young, dalkey Archive Press, 2017.





When his marriage and career fall apart, a young lawyer sets out on a desperate mission to recapture the promise of his youth. His attempt leaves him stranded between a past he no longer recognizes and a life that’s no longer his—and he soon begins to suspect that the surest path to happiness lies in simply giving up. A moving, tragicomic novel about defeat, memory, and the seductive prospect of losing it all.


“Mature, free-flowing prose with Proustian comparisons and images—very rare for a first novel. An author endowed with a style in the tradition of the finest narrative, with a densely personal world.”
—Joaquín Arnáiz


A Spanish lawyer’s life falls apart in the days after he’s dumped by his woman.
Spanish novelist Subirana plumbs the depths of despair in this philosophical portrait of a man whose life is becoming undone. We meet 33-year-old attorney Carlos Mestres Ruiz in the hours after his lover, Elisenda, has broken off their yearslong relationship, and he’s a mess. In alcohol-fueled waves, he wanders the streets of Barcelona, wondering where and when things went wrong. “Love is a promise that is never wholly kept,” he tells us. “Strangely, its failure hardly hurts at all. There’s no precise moment, for instance, when we confront disappointment, no precise moment when the illusions are shattered. We give up on love and barely realize it, like someone who grows tired of waiting for a letter and eventually forgets to check the mailbox each morning.” After Carlos misses a courtroom date in the midst of a hangover, his professional life starts to unravel as well. Ruiz’s companion in his mourning is Alberto Cisnerroso, a long-lost friend from university with whom he reconnects and whose nihilistic cynicism he eventually shares. Pulling on a slot machine in yet another bar, Alberto sets Carlos straight. “You pull here and set the universe in motion,” he says. “A simple, straightforward universe, with fixed rules. And you lose: of course you lose, you always lose. That’s the point. To play to lose, to give yourself over to defeat, to fulfill your destiny in a perfect, known, comprehensible microcosm free of lies and deception.” It’s a jaundiced and familiar tale of boy loses girl, but in Subirana’s talented grasp, the novel becomes a more serious and elegant cautionary tale about the importance of being true to one’s real self and the damage that reverberates around us when we try to be who we’re not.
A wonderfully written portrait of a man who must lose everything before he can be free.  - Kirkus Reviews


At thirty-three Carlos Mestres Ruiz, the narrator of Losing is What Matters, is a bit young to be going through a mid-life crisis, but that is essentially what is chronicled in this novel. He's puttering along comfortably enough, living with a woman in a long-term relationship and working, reasonably successfully, as a lawyer in small firm -- and then suddenly he's not: out of the blue Elisenda dumps him and clears her things out of the apartment they've shared for more than three years.
       It's a shock, and it hits him hard. Suddenly completely at sea, he looks for a hold in the past: he gets in touch with a former university friend whom he had lost touch with, Alberto Cisnerroso -- an indifferent student (and ultimately drop-out) who came from a wealthy family and offered, back in those days, a glimpse of an entirely different, carefree way of living:
a way of life that I myself had, of course, at one point judged misguided, but which now struck me as the only true and authentic way to live.
       Alberto's dissolute lifestyle had appealed to the young Carlos, and for three years he happily indulged -- but the course-correction, getting him back on track, came soon enough as Carlos did what parents and society expected from him: complete his studies, get a job, find a life-companion. Now, a decade or so later, Carlos sees and seeks escape there again: he doesn't turn to any of his contemporary friends -- and it's unclear that he actually has any -- but rather gets in touch with Alberto again. As it turns out, Alberto is still as aimless and debauched as ever, never having changed his ways, and so Carlos can almost seamlessly pick up where they left off. However, while the alcoholic excess and well-into-the-morning carousing maybe a return to the good old days (though times, and their old haunts, have changed ...), it's also kind of tired and old, providing some escape for Carlos but only in the moment.
       There are other consequences too: going on a bender means he misses an important hearing the next day, an unprofessional lapse that leads to a very upset client. His boss is quite understanding, but it's still a problem and seems likely to lead to the client making a complaint to the Bar Association -- probably only leading to a slap on the wrist, but still an annoyance.
       Carlos can't get his head back in the game, but at least the weekend is approaching. Another long night out with Alberto doesn't get him anywhere either, nor can he clarify matters with Elisenda -- and so he takes regression a step further, heading back to his hometown:
I was set on recovering my past. I wanted to reconnect with the boy who lived in that town years ago, and i had the feeling that if I succeeded, if I managed to rekindle inside me some of the happiness the town had given me as a child, I could face the future with renewed strength.
       Of course, it comes as little surprise that... you can't go home again. With no family still there, and staying at a hotel, it seemed an unlikely plan anyway, but Carlos gave it a shot.
       Increasingly battered and bruised, and indulging in rather too much alcohol, Carlos does find some clarity. It becomes clear to him that his relationship with Elisenda was doomed -- that he was fooling himself about their life together, and that the crash had to come sooner or later -- and also that he isn't really cut out to be a lawyer. He's fine at his job -- if little more than that --, but he doesn't find it very rewarding, and can't imagine he ever will.
       Carlos doesn't exactly bottom out, but he comes to realize he was aspiring to wrong heights. He followed the standard blueprint, but he realizes he's quite unremarkable and that even this traditional not-quite-fast-track wasn't his speed. Admirably, he's willing to throw it all overboard -- helped by Elisenda's push -- and let his life drift elsewhere. Where that will lead isn't entirely clear -- though he has been writing this story, and one can't help but see some similarities (age, profession) between protagonist and aithor ... -- but he's accepted mediocrity and found he doesn't need ambition.
       It's an interesting life-lesson novel, especially given where Carlos has made it in life -- not very far, and still far from the end. Capitulation-to-life novels usually involve younger protagonists -- university age -- or much older ones, who have been through it all. Carlos hasn't seen or done that much, but he also admits defeat -- and he's fine with it. (It's also not a generational thing -- Carlos is an odd man out in the 2003 novel, in a still vibrant Spain that hasn't been bludgeoned by the financial crisis yet.)
       Carlos' limited adventures -- generally in an alcohol-daze -- can get to be a bit much, and his bumbling can annoy, but Pérez Subirana has a fine writing-touch, and in Allen Young's smooth translation there's a controlled feel to the narrative that supports the otherwise potentially too full-of-abandon tale. There's some fine and well-put reflection here; Carlos may act immaturely -- and wallow in childish and youthful memories -- but the writing is entirely adult. Indeed, the writing is thoughtful -- as is, ultimately, Carlos (though certainly not always in the moment) -- and with its interesting antiheroic conclusions Losing is What Matters is an appealingly different (accepting and) finding-one's-way-in life novel. - M.A.Orthofer

Gareth Twose, Sven Types of Terrorism, Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2017.
sample (pdf)





‘The Aleksandr Technique’, from Gareth Twose’s poetry collection Sven Types of Terrorism, was inspired by email updates “written” by a toy meerkat during its shipping to the poet’s home. The meerkat in question, named Aleksandr Orlov, is a recurring persona deployed across media platforms by the car insurance company comparethemarket.com. As one of the company’s marketing tactics, a toy meerkat is sent to every customer that buys car insurance online. In response, Twose’s sequence cannibalises the affective appeal of the company’s gimmick – its ‘Aleksandr Technique’. Turning the faux-update on its head, Twose appropriates the meerkat’s narrative for a bewilderingly Dadaist odyssey through consumer society on the levels of system and language:

15. Landing at Dover, Aleksandr notices the slippery when
    wet quality of five day old English consonants. In the
    corporate hands.

Discussing Rimbaud, Sean Bonney has pondered the political upheavals of the 2011 riots: “How could what we were experiencing, I asked myself, be delineated in such a way that we could recognise ourselves in it. The form would be monstrous.” With some irony, Twose’s sequence of updates offers this monstrous self-recognition, deploying the persona of Aleksandr the meerkat as catalysis – as a proxy experiencer. Through the voice of Aleksandr and his imagined travels, Twose exposes a continent that is far from well:

[…] he describes noticing during his travels across
Europe how the skies are full of Farage balloons,
modelled on an antique dirigible.
[…] the word ‘businesskat’ is mentioned 2030
times, nearly as many times as the word ‘choice’ is
mentioned in the Health and Social Cattery Act 2012.

Twose’s world is beset by right-wing miseries and Aleksandr, the furry face of media-savvy capital, is perfectly placed to whistleblow. But Twose’s poem is more than an affirming litany of political grievances. Co-opting the marketing device as a poetic persona empowers an intelligent, focussed critique of capital on the linguistic and formal levels. Twose’s first update gives a clue towards this particular function of the text:

1. The meerkat is not cited in any of the case studies that
   form part of the research used to justify the complete
   synthetic personalization of language.

“Synthetic personalization” here refers to an idea from the sociolinguist Norman Fairclough. A disingenuously “strategic” communicative technique, it gives “the impression of treating each of the people huddled en masse as an individual”. Twose’s experience of personal address delivered by an inanimate, inbound toy would certainly qualify Fairclough’s term; it is this disingenuous linguistic manipulation which is targeted for subversion by Twose. By de-familiarising and parodying the Aleksandr persona, Twose disrupts its ability to carry a disguised marketing agenda. The persona and the language it uses are liberated from domination by capital. This liberation is performed through the recuperative elevation of Aleksandr’s language as a specifically poetic language – a metamorphosis carried through by three poetic modes (all traditional enough in the field of “linguistically innovative” poetry): ironisation, what I will call “hyper-realisation” and the decoupling of narrative sequence.
Firstly, we see Twose inject a postmodern formal self-consciousness into the sequence:

76. A strategic listening pause.

and

86. Skip ad.
87. Skip ad.

In turn, the formal artifice of expression is foregrounded against the core impulses of any marketing text (where unconscious ingestion of content is paramount).
Twose also ramps up the over-arching tone of the original Aleksandr advertisements to a ridiculous pitch, with the poet’s meerkat becoming a hyper-real parody of its original self:

8. Fleeing Meerkovo as a result of some local ethnic
   cleansing and visiting Monaco for the first time rubbing
   fur with the riches and famous, Aleksandr’s smoking
   jacket bursts into flames of caustic love.

Framing Aleksandr’s adventure against a background of ethnic cleansing and migration adds moral gravity to the situation (Meerkovo = Kosovo?). This impinges upon the comic book adventure style utilised by the original advertisements, folding its appealing escapism back onto the political structures of the real world. Additionally, Twose pushes Aleksandr into ideological positions and forms of knowledge laughably at odds with the interests of a car insurance company. Aleksandr, for instance, becomes “leader of the Meerkovan Liberation Army”, and is imbued with a visionary sort of structural insight:

50. I am a refugee from la langue, a linguistic
    migrant. You have a choice.

Twose cuts up and frustrates the smooth flow of narrative sequence. Between updates, Aleksandr continuously shifts location, context and company without any sense of firm trajectory or geography. The meerkat-as-marketing-tool has gone rogue.
Through these interventions the poem subverts capital’s instrumentalisation of language in favour of a language that runs free and causes problems. Passive ingestion is impossible – the interpretative problems of the text call upon the reader to become decidedly active. Aleksandr is appropriated by the poet and transformed into a trace liquid, exposing the topography of the flows of capitalist Europe in which it travels. Changing from an object to a perceiving subject, the persona becomes liberated enough to perform its symbolic exposé of capital and state.
That said, one obvious problem of Twose’s poem is that we are not entirely sure what is being critiqued. A right-dominated system, certainly, but how can we be more specific? Finance, politicians, austerity, neo-colonialism are all blurred together chaotically. Remembering Bonney, however, we understand this to be the experience of the capitalist simulacrum at ground level. In this, ‘The Aleksandr Technique’ takes an obviously modernist urban aesthetic – experiment and gyre – and applies it to the twenty-first century’s eminently virtual topography. This is the value of Twose’s text: the militation of “innovative” poetry’s trademark neo-modernism into a tool for focussed linguistic critique. In creating poetry from advertising-speak, language is seized from the jaws of domination. As a collection Sven Types of Terrorism carries this further, rattling off multiple poetic sequences, of which ‘The Aleksandr Technique’ is only the first. All find and disturb different areas of contemporary life drowned by capital.
Twose’s innovative and humorous subversion of comparethemarket.com’s email updates echoes other attempts to claim the forms of contemporary media as poetic forms. Roger Whitson’s intriguing work with Markov chain algorithms (which transform the tweet into a site for a unique form of poetry) comes to mind. The value of ‘The Aleksandr Technique’, then, is that it shows how poetry has a social role in making us conscious of contemporary language and its hidden ideologies. If “linguistically innovative” poetry is to avoid accusations of elitism and ludic irrelevance in the face of crisis then attention should be paid to this poem. With it we see how poetry can be put to work in a legitimate, socially useful way: as an interruption in the silent flows of nauseating capital. - Dylan Williams

JR Carpenter, The Gathering Cloud, Uniform Books, 2017.  


The Gathering Cloud aims to address the environmental impact of so-called 'cloud' computing by calling attention to the materiality of the clouds in the sky. Both are commonly perceived to be infinite resources, at once vast and immaterial; both, decidedly, are not. Fragments of text from Luke Howard's classic Essay on the Modifications of Clouds (1803) and other more recent online articles and books on media and the environment are pared down into hyptertextual hendecasyllabic verses. These are situated within surreal animated gif collages composed of images materially appropriated from publicly accessible cloud storage services. The cognitive dissonance between the cultural fantasy of cloud storage and the hard facts of its environmental impact is bridged, in part, through the constant evocation of animals: A cumulus cloud weighs one hundred elephants. A USB fish swims through a cloud of cables. Four million cute cat pics are shared each day. A small print iteration of The Gathering Cloud shared through gift, trade, mail art, and small press economies further confuses boundaries between physical and digital, scarcity and waste.
A print book based on The Gathering Cloud, featuring a foreword by Jussi Parikka and an afterword by Lisa Robertson, was published by Uniformbooks in May 2017. PURCHASE ONLINE HERE
The Gathering Cloud was commissioned by NEoN Digital Arts Festival, Dundee, UK, 9-13 November 2016. Many thanks to the curators Sarah Cook and Donna Holford-Lovell. Portions of this text were first performed during the South West Poetry Tour, 1-8 August 2016. Thanks and curses to Annabel Banks for suggesting the hendecasyllabic constraint. Thanks to Jerome Fletcher, Kay Lovelace, Michael Saunby, and the Informatics Lab at the Met Office for discussions on code and the weather. And thanks to everyone at if:book, New Media Writing Prize 2016, and Saboteur Awards 2017.


The Gathering Cloud makes slow reading. Let's start with the title. It trips off the tongue, doesn't it? Rolls around in the mind like a marble you've had since childhood. But there's something unfamiliar about it, too. 'The gathering cloud' evokes a threat – the gathering crowd, perhaps; words haunted by expectation; a riot just about to begin. The gathering cloud sounds material and immaterial at the same time. It could signal rain, or warmth, or happiness for shepherds and fishermen, if only you knew how to read it. Could the ancients interpret celestial data? Can Google analysts do it now?
Every sentence in JR Carpenter's literary artwork, The Gathering Cloud, is as resonant and expansive as its title. The work is so full of meaning, in fact, that it pushes beyond its own borders. Both a piece of digital literature commissioned by Neon Digital Arts Festival, and a book published by Uniform Press, The Gathering Cloud hovers, as an aesthetic experience, in between (it also exists as a printed A3 zine, distributed in more informal ways).
Its theme is climate change. Or, more precisely, the material effects of technologies euphemistically named 'cloud computing' on the health of the planet. Or the systems of knowledge that reveal and obscure our relationships to our world. Or the impossible responsibility of human actions that have a global impact. Or, in Carpenter's characteristically succinct language in the afterword ('Modifications on The Gathering Cloud'):
Online, The Gathering Cloud appears as a palimpsest of moving images, interacting as a series of animated gifs. To read this work is to move with it. Fragments of text respond to the hover of your mouse. Symbols march across the screen and align in multiple combinations. The experience, in other words, is just like using the internet. There is more here than you will ever be able to discover, and yet the format entices you to keep looking. The world of the browser is both (seemingly) infinite, and controlled by your gaze.

The first images you see are cloudscapes taken from Luke Howard's Essay on the Modifications of Clouds (1803). Howard was the first person to devise a popular and scientific naming system for the clouds in the sky. His process was based on natural history classifications, Latin naming principles and the fact that clouds are subject to endless change. His project was such a success that we still use his cloud nomenclature today. But, as Carpenter points out, 'The language of The Cloud is a barrier.' Here, she is talking of the language of cloud computing, and how its association with the mutable territory of the sky fails to communicate its dirty, real-world effects. But the language of the clouds is also, always, a reference to Howard's system and its structuring aim: a grand attempt to explain the (previously) unexplainable, to box in the search for knowledge, to capture what is not still there.
The illustrations that accompanied Howard's published text were minutely detailed etchings based on his own watercolours. In the book, Carpenter describes the journey of the images as technological as well as scientific artefacts, 'Translated into cross hatching,' she writes,
Carpenter uses these pictures, then, to draw attention to how we understand the world as well as what we (try to) understand. Onscreen, she overlays them with photographs and illustrations of animals – elephants, birds, beetles – which echo metaphors evoked in fragments of her poetic text ('A cloud the weight of one hundred elephants', for example, 'How many more birds/ have been captured and tagged and stored in The Cloud?'). Like the etchings, these animal images bear the time-stamp of specific systems of thought. Some are scientific and precise, for example, and belong, stylistically, to a process of classification: illustration as pedagogic tool.

In a final conceptual twist, each of these interwoven, visual elements has been 'materially appropriated' (Carpenter writes), 'from publicly accessible cloud storage services.' These, then, are pictures of weather clouds, and of the ways we think about weather clouds, and of the technological border patrols that control the ways we think. These are images preserved in the hardware of server farms, which means they are also images of the billow of fossil fuels, the gasp of countless lives and minerals, ground into the earth over geological time, as unimaginable in scale as the size of the data stores themselves, or the climate change precipitated by the energy they need.
And here is the context for Carpenter's words: lines of hendecasyllabic (eleven-syllable) verse arising inside, on top of or behind the images, borrowing and interpreting found texts from Howard's nomenclature and contemporary media studies. All of this, finally, is the context for you: the reader/user, dragging your finger across your mouse pad as you enact the dynamic complexity The Gathering Cloud represents:
As a work of digital literature, then The Gathering Cloud is an extraordinary marriage of concept and content. By which I mean literally extra-ordinary: representing and exceeding the ordinary functions of its source images and texts. While the work is hosted online, however, its rhizomatic affect has less to do with technology than with attention. In an interview in 2010 Carpenter said, 'I imagine my target audience being people sitting at desks pretending to do other things. Like work, for example. Or writing. Because they are already pretending, their minds are wide open¹.' The Gathering Cloud is a lucid dream space for people not entirely in charge of their dreams.
*
The most obvious difference between the printed and online versions of The Gathering Cloud is that the book feels primarily textual. Featuring an extended prologue, the book showcases Carpenter's writing on spacious pages, interspersed with occasional black and white 'plates' taken from the digital piece. Simply framed in this way, the power and precision of her words come to the fore. The hendecasyllable format produces a bare, pared down kind of language that sounds natural and restrained, like a conversation with someone who has much more to say. Describing the ancient Roman philosopher Lucretius' theory of clouds, for example, Carpenter writes:
Meaning hangs like a lifetime between these lines. The gap between 'nothing' and the exhalations of the earth is as big and as small as a breath being held.
Like the skeleton of a bird's wing, each line in Carpenter's perfectly crafted, fragile text takes the body of the work in a new direction. And yet, the most thrilling element of the book is not textual, but visual.

In print, some of the words appear greyed out. Twenty-first century readers recognise this allusion, immediately, as a hyperlink; but of course, there is nothing to click on a printed page. A book is an emblem of past decisions in a way that online experiences pretend not to be. These un-links, then, are uncanny. They promise potential, in the same moment as they fatally disappoint. They wave to the future but they are, literally, pulped emulsions of the past. They call to a space beyond the page, ripe with forbidden fruit, humming with endless desire: more knowledge, more dreaming, more distraction.
These un-links represent everything you want and everything you can't have. They are the spaces for you to dream in and the alarm that stops you dreaming. They are the endless potential of the internet, and the finite resource that will shut it down. In other words, just as the online version of The Gathering Cloud performs the limits and aspirations of older systems of thought – the acid hatch of etchings, the earnest naivety of visual or linguistic classification – so the printed work performs the futile urgency of lives lived online. In each case, the performer on centre stage is the reader/viewer, forced to confront her own ambitions and her impotence as she navigates through mutable worlds.
This, in a nutshell, is our relationship with climate change: it is about us, but bigger than we can comprehend; we are compelled to act, but crave direction; we want to dream, but we are afraid to lose. Crucially, Carpenter asks us to inhabit this relationship, not the climate itself: her work is emotional, not didactic. Instead of explaining climate change, Carpenter explores the extent to which it can possibly be imagined. Then, gently but firmly, she pushes the borders of our thoughts, and gets us to imagine some more.
'Like a muzzled creature', Carpenter writes, 'the cloud strains to be/more than it is.' The same could be said for her work, of course, and for the people who move through it. In a perfect echo of the systems of weather and data that are its subject, different iterations of the The Gathering Cloud (whether real or imagined) are held, within the reader, as memory, as action, and as technology of thought. The Gathering Cloud could signal rain, or warmth, or happiness for idle browsers,if only you could trace your finger along each acid scratched line. Could the ancients sculpt the hubris of the searching gaze? Can the Google server farms do it now? - Mary Paterson

Sibylle Lewitscharoff, Blumenberg, Trans. by Wieland Hoban, Seagull Books, 2017.


Not a word is wasted by Lewitscharoff in this superbly written novel where everything is significant. Themes and style alike contribute to the overall effect: a clever blend of poetry, philosophy and comedy by an author who is a master of her craft.


The Blumenberg of the title is indeed German philosopher Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996) -- biographically and otherwise clearly recognizable as such. Still, Blumenberg is nowhere near traditional fictionalized biography, as is clear from its opening scene, in 1982, the Münster professor looking up from his work in his study to find a lion there. It is a creature that remains a presence for most of the rest of his life -- "One even gets used to something as extraordinary as a lion, he thought contently" soon enough --, unseen by (almost all) others, but entirely real to him. At his death there's a: "trace of lion's smell in the room", and some: "short, dull, yellowish hairs that could hardly have come from a human head" (but no one really notices either).
       How real is the lion ? Real enough. Blumenberg accepts -- and welcomes -- his presence, and rationalizes:

     The lion has come to me because I am the last philosopher who can appreciate it.

       As to its nature:

     The lion did not function as Wittgenstein had believed. 'If a lion could speak, we would not understand it.' Blumenberg certainly understood it. The lion acted as a confidence generator that lightly smoothed down the hairs of protest that kept standing up in Blumenberg's thought.

       It's a good influence on him, too. So, for example, Blumenberg finds he's now less envious -- no longer jealous of, say, colleague Habermas' popularity. And:

The lion helped establish clarity and trust, in the small personal things as well as the larger ones.

       But this isn't entirely a philosopher-and-his-new-animal-best-friend novel. The lion is a presence, but an almost spectral one -- and even more so in the significant chunks of the book in which attention turns to others, especially several of Blumenberg's students.
       This isn't a continuous, flowing narrative. The chapters are discrete pieces, some continuing the story from one to the next, others going entirely elsewhere. While the novel as a whole progresses more or less chronologically, even the Blumenberg-chapters include retrospective pieces, such as one that recounts an extended 1956 trip to Egypt. Others focus on the (more or less tragic) fates of several of his students -- while there are even some in which the narrator steps forward, questioning the entire narrative undertaking: 'A Brief Interlude about Where the Narrator's Responsibility Ends' is the title of one of them.
       One of Blumenberg's students -- though he is almost entirely unaware of her -- is Elisabeth, called Isa, whose out-of-nowhere suicide and its aftermath make up a significant part of the story. Another is Richard, who abandons his studies to go traveling in South America and meets a grisly fate. Another mutual friend of Isa and Richard's, Gerhard, also figures significantly -- and survives longer, though Lewitscharoff doesn't let him off the hook either, offering a quick preview of his death in 1997, age thirty-nine (adding that he left behind: "a wife, an eight-year-old daughter, boy of one and a half, and an extremely cheerful, not yet fully-housetrained terrier he had given his children for Christmas").
       Yes, Blumenberg is full of disparate elements and threads. Blumenberg, his philosophy, and his own life-experiences, including during the Second World War, inform the text, yet Lewitscharoff uses them very freely -- creatively, even; to repeat, this is nothing like standard fictional-biography fare, and the biographical aspect, the use of Blumenberg-as-protagonist, shouldn't overshadow Lewitscharoff's much larger intentions. Even as much is presented soberly-realistically, there's also a mystical feel to the novel -- even beyond the lion-figure.
       It is all decidedly odd, too -- with Isa, for example, "hopelessly bound to a novel", as:

     Everything that happened in Her Lover (Belle du Seigneur) by Albert Cohen was about her, with Blumenberg in tow.

       Lewitscharoff dangles such intriguing pieces all over, without expanding on them in the ways one might usually expect. Readers are left to make their own inferences and draw their own conclusions, to connect the pieces (or accept that they don't connect ...).
       Even on the surface, the novel is a puzzle: the meaning of, say, one chapter-title -- 'No. 255431800' -- only clarified (in an incidental mention) three chapters later (it is the number on Isa's ID card, found with her mangled body after her suicide).
       All this (and more ...) makes Blumenberg dreamy and bewitching on the one hand -- and annoying on the other. It offers 'story' -- and, indeed, some good, conventional stories and episodes along the way -- but repeatedly twists itself into very different kinds of narratives. It requires readers to be open to its unusual approaches -- which can be asking a lot, here -- offering uncertain (in all the meanings of the word) rewards.
       Accessible on some levels, this isn't any easy book; it can be frustrating (especially to the reader wanting or expecting something different from it). Lewitscharoff definitely goes her own ways; for those willing to follow, it's a heady, interesting experience. - M.A.Orthofer


review at Tony's Reading List



Sibylle Lewitscharoff, Apostoloff, Trans. by Katy Derbyshire, Seagull Books, 2013.

Greeted with howls of protest when it was published in 2009 (while also earning the Leipzig Book Fair Prize that same year), German novelist and playwright Lewitscharoff’s English-language debut digs into the histories of a troubled family and a shattered nation and comes up with nothing but outrage and contempt. An unnamed narrator—who misses nothing and hates everything—and her infinitely more sociable sister are being escorted through Bulgaria by Rumen Apostoloff, an old family acquaintance, on the return trip home to Berlin from their father’s burial. As they travel, Rumen bravely attempts to share with these women some of the sights of his homeland while regaling them with stories of local history, most of them regrettably violent and grim. As they roll along, Lewitscharoff’s narrator contemplates her father’s suicide, her mother’s unhappiness, and her sister’s unsinkable attitude, while fiendishly riffing on Bulgaria’s dreary landscapes, horrid food, and mafia-controlled culture. Lewitscharoff’s caustic prose can be occasionally overbearing but it’s her sharp-eyed, unsentimental, and even lyrical musings that make this novel a spiky, pungent pleasure. - Publishers Weekly

When we meet the narrator of Apostoloff, she and her sister are travelling to Sofia, Bulgaria from Germany in order to (re)bury their father as part of a plan hatched by a fellow Bulgarian exile. Their father, who killed himself at 43, is part of a group of 19 Bulgarian exiles who emigrated from Sofia to Stuttgart sometime in the ‘40s. An old friend of their father’s, Tabakoff, wants to bring these exiles—“scattered across the graveyards of Stuttgart”—literally back home.

Tabakoff, with a first-class business plan in cryoengineering (the Bulgarians had, after all, provided mummified foodstuff for the Russians while they were in space), had enough money to spare to tempt the family members of the deceased to accompany the exiled bodies back home in a convoy of limousines. The person in charge of ferrying the narrator and her sister to and fro while they’re in Bulgaria is Rumen Apostoloff.

The narrator and her sister, whose names we never learn, are the product of what the narrator calls a Bulgarian-German friendship: Bulgarian father, German mother. The narrator considers this Bulgarian-German connection as dubious as the Bulgarian-Soviet connection. The weight of their father’s overburdened life hangs over the sisters’ present lives; but while her sister has grown up to become a well-adjusted adult who knows how to make nice and maintain the peace, the narrator herself is contentious, opinionated, verbally-aggressive, and absolutely laden with irony.

While Apostoloff chauffeurs them around the country, the reader only sees Bulgaria through the narrator’s eyes, and she’s less-than-charmed by what Bulgaria has to offer. Bulgaria, after all, stands for her father. And her father, as she tells us, “usually has his noose” with him when he appears in her dreams. It comes as no surprise, then, that Bulgaria also appears equally tragic and absurd in the narrator’s estimation.

Sibylle Lewitscharoff, who has won a string of awards for her previous books, has given us an absolutely unlikeable and completely beguiling and whip-smart narrator whose dark and morbid musings on both her father and her father’s nation are funny but acerbic, occasionally even unpleasant, but always compelling and disturbing (or usually both). Her “patriphobia”, as she calls it, is bleak, but full of affection, so that even when she’s telling us of her father’s inability to find a mood and stick with it, we get the sense of a full character: a displaced, depressive exile who formed strong friendships, someone who was charming and well-liked and who sang beautifully and thought that fishermen made the best philosophers.

Meanwhile, Apostoloff is a Bulgarian stalwart who glowers and fidgets as she showers the country’s food, people, customs, culture, and architecture with contempt. He is, of course, much more enamoured with her sister, who smiles placatingly and listens carefully as Apostoloff waxes lyrical on the Bulgarian National Revival. Apostoloff acts as their Hermes, crossing boundaries and bringing Bulgaria into full view for the sisters, but the narrator is determined to look askance at the fruits of this nation, unable to separate the noose around her father’s neck from the fragments with which Bulgaria is puts itself together in the 21st century.

The narrator clearly sees Bulgaria with prejudiced eyes, and while she’s self-conscious and astute enough to know when she’s projecting her family history onto a country, it’s never quite clear if she’s aware enough to know when she’s simply being a Eurocentric snob. She finds Bulgaria’s food, architecture, and people wanting by standards she’s used to in Germany. Bulgaria always comes up short by Swabian-infused calculation—its buildings too crude, its food too oily, its women too blonde, its men too thuggish.

When she finally approves of a Bulgarian entity—a house in Plovdiv—she notes the delightful salons with frescoes that tell of a “longing for Versailles and French customs”, it’s hard not to read the narrator of Apostoloff as an exile in search of her perfect Europe. It probably should come as no surprise that Lewitscharoff’s narrator adores the novels of Martin Amis, and she does in fact come off like an irreverent Amis character, if Amis had the knack for writing brainy, funny women.

As Apostoloff progresses it might seem that while Lewitscharoff’s narrator is grappling with a prickly family history, the novel is making a wider political comment. The German aversion to the Soviet Union seems to live on in the narrator’s indictment of Soviet communism.

In Bulgaria, she sees proof of its past ugliness and depravity everywhere, in remnants of Stalinesque apartment blocks and dreary “mummified communist teabags”. And although the narrator describes herself as a leftist, she’s committed to bourgeois comforts and values, and is certain that if beauty is to be found in Bulgaria, it would have had to come by way of Western Europe. This is no mere casual disgust for a country and a culture that makes up half of her DNA—this is hate, it’s the kind of hate that keeps the narrator going through tourist sight after tourist sight.

By the time we get to the end, we discover that the narrator does indeed enjoy hating Bulgaria as much as she enjoys hating her deceased father (or what he said, did, and stood for). What Lewitscharoff has done admirably—aided by Katy Derbyshire’s sharp translation—is to base an entire novel on this hate and the troubled fascination it so often breeds, showing us how it cannot but invite an engagement: that hate cannot exist without love entering the equation at some point, whether in the past, present, or as yet-uncertain future.

Love, however, is not a word that the narrator throws around lightly. She might even scoff at it. But as surely as she loved her complex and perplexing father, the reader thinks, it might be possible for her to come to love Bulgaria in the same reserved and hesitant way.

In this charming and frustrating novel, the ugly feelings are the only ones that receive the most attention from the narrator and the author. Hate seems to provide a way in for the narrator to reckon with the two big things that frustrate her: Bulgaria and her father. It’s important to good-naturedly indulge in hate, she tells us at the end, if only to keep the dead in check. And, we might add, to keep those alive in hope. - Subashini Navaratnam

Enormous paternal eyes penetrate the roof of the number 6 tram. The woman riding inside cowers at her dead father’s gaze. She tells us about her teenage LSD trips and the “Christian thunderstorms” that would flare up overhead. Other times, her voice lacquered in sarcasm, this narrator depicts her Bulgarian homeland. She spits out lyricisms about its garbage-strewn streets, inedible cuisine, and population of “blonde bombshells.” At the height of her moods, she swerves into tangents on Bulgarian angels whose wings would be “ceaselessly colliding, getting tangled…crackling and crunching.”

This narrator breathes an unlikely mix of fear, mania, humor, and spirituality into Apostoloff, the first novel by Büchner prizewinner Sybille Lewitscharoff to be translated into English (translation by Katy Derbyshire). The story begins when the narrator and her sister, two grown women living in Germany, agree to a grand scheme. A rich neighbor from their childhood community reveals his desire to salvage his circle of deceased Bulgarian friends by uniting their remains in a communal Bulgarian grave. He offers the sisters a large sum of money to allow for the excavation of their father, who committed suicide when they were children. They assent. Their father’s skeleton undergoes cryoengineering, a Russian technique that turns his bones to crumbs, and their wealthy friend invites them to join the grandest funeral procession that Bulgaria has ever seen. On the way they meet Rumen Apostoloff, the Bulgarian patriot who chauffeurs them on the post-funeral tour that comprises the rest of the plot.

But Apostoloff’s storyline is merely the vehicle for its thematic cargo. The events of the sisters’ journey are far less intriguing than the fierce brew of questions they stimulate: What is salvation, what is damnation, and how do we respond to the divine? As the narrator moves from one Bulgarian site to the next, she contends with the death of her father and the afterlife of her post-communist fatherland. Through a series of encounters and breaks with divinity, the narrator begins to churn out some complex answers.

At the novel’s highest thematic lies strange, nationalistic salvation. Every day of the sisters’ trip presents a new bid for Bulgaria’s undecided fate. Rumen takes it upon himself to portray his post-communist country with heavenly merit. He drives the sisters to monasteries, churches, and monuments, recalling the holy sites’ histories with gusto. He points out the hills and the sea and relishes each chance to adorn the Bulgarian landscape with praise. Rumen’s national loyalty is no act of self-indulgence. When they arrive at the monument to 1300 Years of Bulgaria, Rumen trembles with emotion to describe the meaning of the mosaics: “It was remarkable, more than remarkable,” he begs his companions to understand, “that the communist party…wanted to mark Bulgarian history, and not only the history of communist Bulgaria as was usually the case, but the history of Christian Bulgaria.” Bulgaria, for him, is a country of tiny miracles.

The narrator has none of it. If Rumen is Bulgaria’s angelic advocate, she is its devilish detractor. She sees the same monument Rumen praises and unleashes an inner diatribe: “Rough filth, miscreant filth, insidious filth, repugnant, extortionate filth—yes and yes again, but this monster cannot be stormed with words.” She hopes that Bulgarian artists will be forbidden from so much as touching mosaics that could become future shrines. Throughout the novel, the narrator continually finds occasion to point out the decay left over from communism’s absolution. The cities, the countryside, the churches, the people inside of them—anything Bulgarian-bred has little worth. Each divine encounter that Rumen cultivates, the narrator strikes down. Even her narrative method seems calculated to her cause. With lyrical streams of consciousness, she costumes her ugly surroundings in beautiful language and then disrobes them. Her thoughts speed through images in poetic cadence—but each beat checks another box on the list of Bulgaria’s shortcomings.

Parallel to the national issue of Bulgaria’s redemption, the narrator contends with the individual issue of her father’s suicide. He too faces judgment. Many times, the narrator is kinder to her father than she is to her country. She recounts his Orphic voice, his prized gynecology practice, and his willingness to listen to made-up newspaper stories read aloud by his young daughter. When the narrator imagines her father in various forms of afterlife, divinity starts to shimmer. Angels become a refrain in her thoughts. She compares her father’s impeccable hearing to spirits who “pick up even the tiniest grains of messages in the words floating, drifting, fluttering on the draughts.” She pictures his voice among the angelic choirs and one day launches into a frenzied and elaborate portrayal of Bulgarian heaven. She shocks Rumen and her sister with descriptions of celestial choruses so powerful they “echo incessantly.” Angels crowd into her mind and speech as she propels her attention upwards toward the empyrean.

Her ascent only lasts a few hundred feet. She brushes up against the divine only to jerk away. Her references to angels are cut short by qualifications (“A terribly silly example, I know”) and demoralizing digs (“Just eat your angel salad and be quiet for a while”). When the angels retreat, her father enters her mind with a noose draped around his neck. She speaks of him time and again as a miserly creature, a man who attempted multiple suicides before landing on the right technique. She criticizes her father’s parenting skills and pointedly counts him among St. Augustine’s massa damnata, those undeserving of salvation. She memorializes him with her sardonic lyricism as “that large, ugly thing in the evening sky, drawn like a smudge of dirt,” and she assures us that “worms have gnawed away all the hirsute Bulgarian flesh on his bones.” Ultimately, her father cannot escape the bond that ties him to deplorable Bulgaria. The journey only begins once his bones have been dug up and reburied with his compatriots’ corpses. They undergo judgment together.

Toward the end of the novel, Rumen Apostoloff delivers a striking quote. He professes to the narrator, “I understand the difference between our lives and the consequences.” Unlike his companions, he sees the distinction between Bulgaria’s pain and the wounds the country incurred on its residents. He knows the difference between a pile bone-powder and the haunting spirit of dead father. Amidst the narrator’s divine struggle, Rumen pulls salvation from his life like a dirty bedsheet. He rejects the narrator’s evaluative system—and his choice paradoxically saves us. If not for Rumen, the story would straddle a line of cynicism all too entertaining and all too easy to dismiss. The chauffeur keeps the wheels in check. He is the constant alternative to the narrator and the reality she gives to us. There is good reason the novel is titled Apostoloff. - Stephanie Newman

Apostoloff is a road-trip book, two sisters from Germany being chauffeured through contemporary Bulgaria by the eponymous, local Apostoloff -- Rumen ("Rumen is our Hermes"). Their main reason or excuse for coming to Bulgaria is already behind them -- "It ended last Sunday in Sofia, although not for my sister and me, because we decided to spend a few extra days in the country" -- but it also continues to haunt the narrator (the younger sister), as the novel is also one down memory lane -- little of which is visible en route, but rather unfolds in her mind and recollection.
       Alexander Tabakoff is the one who got them here in the first place: the last survivor (and, financially, by far the most successful) of twenty Bulgarians who came to Germany at the end of World War II (Bulgaria was an ally of Germany in both World Wars ...), he wanted to now, quite literally, "bring home his one-time companions" and (re-)inter them in Bulgaria. The two sisters' father was one of the original twenty, and they take a handsome pay-off in order to go along with this crackpot scheme. Still, all the others can also be convinced (or bought) and so there was a convoy of luxury limousines transporting everyone, dead and alive, from Germany to Bulgaria.
       The sisters' father, a successful doctor, was actually the first of the nineteen to die, a suicide at age forty-three, when the girls were still young. Naturally, his death -- and this transporting-his-remains reminder of it -- weighs heavily on them, especially since, as the narrator admits: 

     We don't know much. So what ? It's clear enough -- even if we'd majored in Bulgarian Studies, Feta Cheese Production and Indo-German Suicide with a focus on the psychopathology of male gynaecologists -- we'd still be out of the question to serve as magistrates on the matter of our father.

       It's not surprising the sisters have daddy-issues. They also have Bulgaria issues -- "We've had enough of Bulgaria before we even get to know it properly" -- and Apostoloff is no happy sightseeing tour, as the narrator complains and picks at pretty much everything they see and encounter in this "ridiculous and bad country". From the dangerous driving conditions and indifferent (and possibly tainted) food and service to the mafiosi they meet, they're not really having the trip-of-a-lifetime. That's part of the fun of the novel -- Lewitscharoff's impressive way with words includes an enjoyably wicked side, too, and what she takes down she takes down hard yet with the finest of pin-pricks, too -- but it also makes for some heavy and somewhat dreary going. And this is a novel dealing with death, too, after all, so there's already that .....
       The narrator is a bookish sort (reading Amis'Koba the Dread for... enjoyment (?) on the trip) and among the few things that connected her with her older sister in youth was their love of books (even as they had very different preferences). This added literary element to the narrative is rather enjoyable -- right down to the narrator comparing Tabakoff's limousine (as opposed to Apostoloff's Daihatsu) to Raymond Roussel's fancy vehicle, suggesting: 

     In principle, Roussel was right -- being driven around the world with the curtain closed and never getting out to look at anything is well worth emulating. 

       Yes, she isn't the world's most enthusiastic tourist -- and the attitude of course also reflects the carefully walled-off world she's made for herself in not quite dealing with her father and his death (even as he haunts her in her dreams), among other things.
       There's a sense of Apostoloff being part of a larger narrative, from the obviously autobiographical aspects of the text (it seems to hit and sit way too close to home) to allusions to some of Lewitscharoff's other work (Hans Blumenberg's lion already appears here -- an idea that she went on to turn into the full-fledged novel Blumenberg (2011)). The novel does come nicely full circle, the narrator even closing her eyes on the ride to the airport ("not wanting to take this hideous image of Sofia onto the plane with me"), but it is still only a partial resolution of what seems a much larger picture.
       Lewitscharoff writes crisply, dryly, stylishly -- it's simply good reading, regardless of what is actually happening (though note that I did read this in German, comparing every now and then with Katy Derbyshire's valiant efforts to recreate the prose in English: it says a lot that it still reads well in English, but that version pales beside the sparkle of the original). But even as there's some appeal to the moaning about all things Bulgarian, and the reflections on the long-dead father and the sisters' own paths there's not quite enough story to it all. Perhaps because of the constant travel -- they're always going somewhere -- the fact that the story doesn't really get anywhere beyond laying dad to rest wears it down a bit. Dealing with the deceased might be story enough, but it doesn't feel that way here -- it doesn't feel like that that's the whole story (or, indeed, that we get the whole story).
       Impressive, in many ways, but also a bit hard to like. - M.A.Orthofer

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Sibylle Lewitscharoff has won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for her debut novel Pong in 1998. A member of the German Academy of Language and Literature and the Berlin Academy of Arts, her most recent novel Blumenberg was awarded the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize in 2011 and shortlisted for the German Book Prize. In 2013, she was awarded the prestigious Georg Büchner Prize. 

Gunnhild Øyehaug, Knots, Trans. by Kari Dickson, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.
A mesmerizing collection of playfully surreal stories from one of Norway’s most celebrated writers
First published in Norway in 2004, Knots is Gunnhild Øyehaug’s radical collection of short stories that range from the surreal to the oddly mundane, and prod the discomforts of mental, sexual, and familial bonds.
In both precise short-shorts and ruminative longer tales, Øyehaug meanders through the tangled, jinxed, and unavoidable conflicts of love and desire. From young Rimbaud’s thwarted passions to the scandalous disappearance of an entire family, these stories do the chilling work of tracing the outlines of what could have been in both the quietly morbid and the delightfully comical. A young man is born with an uncuttable umbilical cord and spends his life physically tethered to his mother; a tipsy uncle makes an uncomfortable toast with unforeseeable repercussions; and a dissatisfied deer yearns to be seen. As one character reflects, “You never know how things might turn out, you never know how anything will turn out, tomorrow the walls might fall down, the room disappear.”
Cleverly balancing the sensuous, the surreal, and the comical, Øyehaug achieves a playful familiarity with the absurd that never overreaches the needs of her stories. Full of characters who can’t help tying knots in themselves and each other, these tales make the world just a little more strange, and introduce a major international voice of searing vision, grace, and humor.


Formally playful, poignant, understated, and often acutely funny, Øyehaug's English-language debut teems with humanity.
In this collection of short—and short-short—stories, fluidly translated from the Norwegian by Dickson, Øyehaug swipes a deft finger through messy layers of human experience and inspects with a keen and generous eye the everyday tragedies, tender absurdities, and quiet joys of life. In the book's spectacular opener, "Nice and Mild," a man paralyzed by anxiety and indecision heads to IKEA for blinds for his son's room. As he talks himself out of the car, across the parking lot, and into the store, he thinks "this could be the start of a virtuous circle," the first step toward a new proactive self, the blinds "a lifeline that's been thrown to me from dry land as I flail and flounder in the waves." In "Small Knot," a son is tethered to his mother for life, and beyond, by an uncuttable umbilical cord in a delightfully morbid and literal rendering of familial bonds and their reverberations through the future. In "Deal," a girl's bicycle breaks shortly after she sets out to run away, and she misses the last ferry out of town. Stranded, she strikes a curious deal with a neighbor who has rescued her and is in need of a little rescuing himself. "Gold Pattern" is a melancholy in-coitus account of a vaguely coupled pair with intermittent and unequal passions, a heart-pricking tale of progressive loss and longing. And in “An Entire Family Disappears,” a grand-uncle rattles his family at a funeral by telling a tale of how easily they might not have come to exist, told in dramatic form with the story unfolding entirely in stage directions.
A near-perfect collection about the knots we tie ourselves into and the countless ways we intertwine in the pursuit of sex, love, compassion, and family. - Kirkus Reviews


Norwegian writer Øyehaug’s newly translated collection charts entanglements of all kinds, from difficult families and first loves to more metaphysical experiments that combine a crisp minimalism with endearingly offbeat conceits. “Small Knot,” for instance, literalizes a fraught mother-son relationship with an umbilical cord that remains intact well into the son’s adult life—and even after the mother’s death—while a lonely woman longing for more encounters a UFO in “Vitalie Meets an Officer.” The best of Øyehaug’s miniatures deal with elusive emotional states, like the confession of love for a terminally ill man in “It’s Raining In Love,” the jealousy experienced by the friends of a highly successful encyclopedia salesman in “Echo,” or the contemplative ecstasy of a woman named Edel whom, in “Two by Two,” thinks that “nature has been abandoned and we are to blame, we have focused on language and become complicated.” Øyehaug transfigures a trip to IKEA, a late-night bathroom break, the lonely vigil of an egg and prawn vendor. Other stories read like surreal drawing room plays, offering a glimpse at the private lives of Arthur Rimbaud and Maurice Blanchot. “Meanwhile, on Another Planet” concludes “What can we learn from this? That impossible situations can arise on other planets too.” This kind of dry, odd, understated humor comes to seem a hallmark of Øyehaug, whose stories are as original as they are joyously delicate and tranquil. - Publishers Weekly


An umbilical cord that cannot be cut –– even after death –– turns out to be less of an impediment than one might think in Knots (176 pages; FSG), Gunnhild Øyehaug’s eccentric collection of short stories. Emotional and mental knots are as binding and problematic as physical ones in these surreal and memorable stories, translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson.
Øyehaug’s stories run brief as they oscillate between the bizarre and the everyday. In the opening story “Nice and Mild,” a man suffering from anxiety ventures to IKEA to buy curtains for his son, while in “Grandma is Sleeping,” a woman refuses to let in her family inside her home. And the story “The Object Takes and Exalted Place in the Discourse” reads about as theoretical as it sounds. 
These vignettes are windows not only into the tangled lives of Øyehaug’s characters, but the possibilities of the short story form: some feel like scenes from a play, others contain footnotes that introduce a new character’s perspective. No matter how experimental, the stories benefit from Øyehaug’s skill at creating fully realized characters. She treats these individuals with compassion, humor, and occasional severity—and they in turn ensure the stories in Knots are consistently surprising and memorable.
While most of the stories in Knots are not overtly connected, repeated elements—allusions to Rimbaud, themes of longing and compulsion, and the motif of knots— give the collection a sense of cohesion.  At times, plotlines from one story will resume later: “Take Off, Landing” follows protagonist Geir until he watches his acquaintance Asle, stone in hands, jump off a dock—a hundred pages later, the story “Air” picks up from that very moment. “Deal” follows a young runaway as she receives a ride home from a local source of scandal, a man whose story continues in “Two by Two.”
Knots begins with a quote from poet Christophe Tarkos: “One of two things: either the spiral/Or to be sent out into the air,” and Øyehaug fittingly embraces a lack of resolution, oftentimes leaving things unsaid. At the end of several pieces, an authorial voice enters to offer glib asides or lessons. After a conflict unfolds between two aliens in “Meanwhile, on Another Planet,” a clinical voice sums up the story’s moral: “What can we learn from this? That impossible situations can arise on other planets too. We don’t need to think that we’re the only ones who struggle and fight. Another striking feature is that they communicate through pictures.”  These rare moments of authorial intrusion are unsettling precisely because the rest of the stories, no matter how surreal they may become, feel genuine and earnest. Even with the presence of floralh-patterned UFOs, the most unexpected surprise in Knots is how moving the stories prove. - Libbie Katsev


review by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky: The short story collection Knots is lit-fiction hackwork


Gunnhild Øyehaug:
Sometimes you read something that changes the way you write. My short stories exist, as texts, somewhere between what you call stories and short prose. Dubliners by James Joyce changed my short stories, and after that they were changed by Kafka’s stories, and after that it was Daniil Kharms’ short prose (or prose poetry), combined with a strong love for anything written by Virginia Woolf.


I’d been writing short stories since I was a teenager, heavily influenced by the Norwegian short story master Tarjei Vesaas, and perhaps also the Norwegian short story master Johan Borgen, and the Norwegian pulp fiction queen Margit Sandemo. I suppose I took the drama from the pulp fiction and combined it with Vesaas’ heavy symbolism and Borgen’s dynamic, entertaining narration in a way that many times has made me think that I’m glad my short stories from my teenage-writer’s period have never been found again. Still, I think there might be traces from that heavy combination in my writing, but when I read Joyce, at the age of 22, it was a revelation.


I loved the way he turns the stories around just before the ending, how they are all centered round and built up to this moment of revelation, the so-called epiphany, and I loved in particular the story of Eveline, who wants nothing more on this earth than to be able to leave her oppressed life as daughter and housekeeper for her violent father and as a mother for her brothers, but who, given the chance to leave, stays.


The story takes place a couple of hours before she’s going to escape together with her secret fiancé, a sailor, to Buenos Aires, she’s at home waiting nervously. She reflects upon her life, seeing all the familiar things in a different light now that she’s going to leave, and towards the end, when she’s at the harbour, she lets go of her fiancé in the chaos of people boarding the ship: “No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy.” Her fiancé cries out for her, they are separated by the movement of the crowd, and this is the terrifying, last sentence: “Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.”


And this was my reaction: I felt I knew who Eveline was, why she clung to the iron railing. Even though her life was so different from mine in every way, I knew that feeling. And that feeling was what I wanted to write about in Knots, to try to see it from as many angles I could, and in as many different life-tanglements as possible, be it a man tied to his mother by an umbilical cord for the rest of his life, a woman not able to erase her desire for a man who doesn’t love her, a young girl who tries to hide from the rest of her family so she won’t have to play the piano for her grandfather who’s visiting, or aliens struggling with their personal relationships.


Joyce’s stories’ impact on my own stories were at the same time contrasted by a radically different influence: that of Kafka’s shortest short stories. Kafka’s shortest short stories provided the confidence that anything is possible, in terms of form, in terms of theme. For instance “The Trees,” which consists of only four sentences, comparing us to trunks in snow, how it looks as if the trunks could be tipped over by just pushing them lightly, “but no, you can’t.” Because the trunks are connected to the ground, beneath the snow.


And Daniil Kharms proved how free and subversive a piece of short prose can be, he discards narrative structure, he discards symbolic meaning, he discards just about anything, for instance in the text Blue notebook no. 10 which begins: “Once, there was a red-haired man who had neither eyes nor ears. He had no hair either so he was called ‘red-haired’ only theoretically.” As it turns out, this man hasn’t got anything at all, so the text concludes: “In fact, we would rather not talk about him any more.”—there is, literally, nothing to say. He doesn’t exist.


The Norwegian writer Dag Solstad writes about short prose as genre in an essay called “Spilleren” (“The Player”) where he suggests that short prose is not a genre per se, but a method. He locates the need for this method in the writer’s attitude towards his or her role as a writer. “Short prose is a demonstration,” he writes. “It demonstrates role awareness,” he explains, also characterizing it as “an attempt to demonstrate freedom.”


To me this is true. The truth about writing short stories to me is that is gives you freedom. I don’t have to think about the novel’s need for some kind of plot, or development, I can concentrate on the situation, the moment, the thought, the feeling, or even the nature of language, or on the nature of narration itself. The narrator can swoop in, and swoop out again, and even make the heavy, iron-like lumps of human experience float like a feather in just an instant. And that’s why I think we need short stories so desperately.

Wu He, Remains of Life, Trans. by Michael Berry, Columbia University Press, 2017.                 
read it at Google Books






On October 27, 1930, during a sports meet at Musha Elementary School on an aboriginal reservation in the mountains of Taiwan, a bloody uprising occurred unlike anything Japan had experienced in its colonial history. Before noon, the Atayal tribe had slain one hundred and thirty-four Japanese in a headhunting ritual. The Japanese responded with a militia of three thousand, heavy artillery, airplanes, and internationally banned poisonous gas, bringing the tribe to the brink of genocide.
Nearly seventy years later, Chen Guocheng, a writer known as Wu He, or "Dancing Crane," investigated the Musha Incident to search for any survivors and their descendants. Remains of Life, a milestone of Chinese experimental literature, is a fictionalized account of the writer's experiences among the people who live their lives in the aftermath of this history. Written in a stream-of-consciousness style, it contains no paragraph breaks and only a handful of sentences. Shifting among observations about the people the author meets, philosophical musings, and fantastical leaps of imagination, Remains of Life is a powerful literary reckoning with one of the darkest chapters in Taiwan's colonial history.










“A massacre involves a fundamental betrayal of life by life itself”: searing experimental novel by the pseudonymous Taiwanese writer Wu He.
Wu He the writer—the name means Dancing Crane—and Wu He the character and narrator are not quite one and the same, though this novel, originally published in Chinese in 1999, recounts events in the author’s real life. Following modest success as a writer of short stories and literary novels, Chen Guocheng took up a historical and anthropological investigation of an event that Taiwan had long forgotten: the massacre of hundreds of members of Taiwan’s Atayal tribe by Japanese colonial police and soldiers nearly 90 years ago. Now called Wu He, Chen ascends into the country of the Atayal to explore what happens to a people brought nearly to extinction by an act of genocide. In an onrushing, stream-of-consciousness narrative that takes a single paragraph over the length of nearly 300 pages, Wu He answers that question, drawing on the voices of native people known simply by names such as Elder, Cousin, and Girl. The people are suspicious: what, they wonder, is a stranger doing poking around in their past? “There’s a hell of a lot to research when it comes to you Han Chinese,” says one bluntly, “why don’t you go home and research yourselves?” It’s a good question, one that doesn’t deter Wu He, who tucks into the indigenous fare of flying squirrel stew and the like and, as the anthropological saying has it, goes native—though not quite as native as Cousin might like, for she encourages him to chuck it all and head deeper into the mountains to become one of them and “lose yourself for the rest of your life!” In the end, the anthropologist becomes as much an object of study as the people he is researching, with all sorts of implications.
A brilliant but immensely challenging work, of great interest to students of contemporary Asian fiction—and of the literature of atrocity and remembrance as well. - Kirkus Reviews


Although the era of literary modernism has strictly passed in the West, some in Taiwan’s literary circles continue to hope for a masterpiece in the style to appear in Chinese, comparable perhaps to Joyce’s Ulysses. When Yu Sheng (餘生), published in English last month as Remains of Life, appeared in 1999, many thought the miracle had finally happened. Its subject is the Wushe Incident.
This was the massacre of 134 Japanese at the Wushe’s elementary school’s sports ground on Oct. 27, 1930 by the Atayal community. It was followed, beginning the next day, by a Japanese assault on the Atayal with heavy artillery, bombs (including experimental incendiary bombs) and an internationally banned poison gas that resulted in the reduction of the group from around 1,200 to some 500.
A third attack took place on April 25, 1931 in the form of another Japanese assault, this time on a detention center, in which almost 200 more Aborigines were killed, with over 100 of them decapitated. The Atayal survivors were forcibly moved to a site 40km from Musha known today as Qingliu, formerly called Chuanzhongdao, or Riverisle. These survivors are the origin of the term “remains of life.”
Taiwanese author Wu He (舞鶴; real name Chen Kuo-chang, 陳國城) went to Qingliu in the 1990s to investigate these events and try to find descendants of those involved. The eventual result was this stream-of-consciousness novel, now translated into English by Michael Berry.
The original book received critical acclaim in Taiwanese and other literary circles, formed the basis of a two-part film Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale (彩虹戰士:賽德克巴萊, 2011) and a documentary two years later called Pusu Qhuni (餘生—賽德克·巴萊). It was translated into French as Les Survivants, also in 2011.
A sensation the original may have been, but it doesn’t make for easy reading in English. There are no paragraph breaks anywhere in the entire book, and only a handful of periods. The narrating voice veers widely, from philosophical speculation as to what makes human beings capable of such violence to incidents the author experienced in Qingliu. Tamsui, where the author lived for many years, also features — he writes of “watching the colors of night move in on the nearby mountains and river” there. But the translator in his Introduction twice calls it “a difficult text,” and even goes as far as to refer to Wu He’s “sometimes nonsensical ramblings,” and passages in the book that he found “challenging or just plain weird.”
It’s true that there are attempts to discriminate between the inhumanity of the original massacre, its worth as an act of resistance and the status, heroic or otherwise, of its leader Mona Rudao and it’s being in the Aboriginal tradition of a ritual head-hunt. But such an analytical approach doesn’t dominate. Instead, what we have is an experimental novel whose stream-of-consciousness isn’t the ideal format for a balanced historical evaluation.
Nevertheless, at one point the run-up to the 1930 Wushe Incident is outlined — the unsuccessful 1911 attempt by the Japanese to get the Aborigines to give up their arms and ammunition (perceived as an assault on the dignity of a hunting culture), the order the same year for them to hand over all collections of human skulls, the 1916 prohibition of opium consumption, the 1917 prohibition of tattooing, the 1918 command insisting on short hair for men and the outlawing of the traditional practice of deforming the front teeth of adolescents and the 1922 banning of indoor burials. Then, in 1926, the Atayal handed over 1,319 rifles and 8,086 bullets to the authorities. Clearly the advice of one of the first Japanese to set foot on Taiwan was being followed: “If you want to colonize the island of Taiwan,” he’d said, “you must first tame the wild savages.”
Wu He certainly never comes to any conclusions about the Wushe Incident and what followed. He says, in one of many rambling, discursive pages, that he feels the time has come for conclusions, and hints at a few: that many Aborigines refused to take part, so the issue was controversial even before the first massacre happened, and that the state of affairs prior to 1930 was not so dire that the very existence of the communities was threatened.
But there is nothing final about such thoughts, and indeed Wu He writes that he wishes that “during my walks round this island nation I was able just to deeply observe and didn’t have to take any notes, raise any criticisms, or offer any conclusions.” There’s something very American about this, calling to mind Melville, Whitman or Thoreau, and, of course, it’s also an attitude that tends towards the literary rather than the historical. After all, no informed reappraisal of the Wushe Incident would be hailed as literature in the way Remains of Life in its original Chinese form has been.
Traditional novels contain a chronologically-developed plot and characters who are defined, among other things, by the way they speak, and Joyce retained elements of both in Ulysses. There is no trace of a developing plot in this book, however, but there are characters — among them Girl, a grand-daughter of Mona Rudao; an affectionately depicted half-wit initially called Mr Weirdo but later referred to as Deformo; and a Buddhist nun, simply called Nun, who has set up a makeshift shrine in a freight container on mountain land designated by the government as out-of-bounds.


The 'Musha Incident' is a famous and notorious one in the history of Taiwan. On 27 October 1930, aboriginal villagers in the then (since 1895) Japanese colony of what we now know as Taiwan attacked those assembled for a sports meet, killing 136 Japanese. The aboriginal tribes still practiced headhunting rituals, and the Japanese victims were decapitated; retaliation, when it came soon later, was devastating, decimating the Atayal tribe, with its few surviving members then relocated to a reservation some forty miles away.
       Remains of Life is essentially a novel in which the author, writing in the first person, examines the Musha Incident (and the 'Second Musha Incident', an inter-tribal headhunting attack) and the fall-out and consequences over the decades since. Wu He lived in Riverisle, as the place where the Atayal were exiled was called, and spoke with survivors and their descendants -- the: "Remains of Life who had survived the calamity" --, and his account is a mix of reporting, documentation, analysis, and fiction. There is a strong autobiographical element, as Wu He is very much part of the story -- describing what he experiences and who he encounters -- and his commentary includes his own opinions, and his own struggles with writing about this subject: it is a personal story, too:
to make a sincere attempt at exploring the erratic nature of my own life over the past several years through this novel
       Form is influenced by content: one of Wu He's struggles throughout is how to write on the subject, and how much traditional structure to impose on his writing:
Writing is unable to extract itself from the conventions of grammar and form but do words have the freedom to rave nonsense ? Is raving nonsense a means of speaking the truth or does the truth bleed into the words transforming language into a cauldron of raving nonsense and chaotic ramblings, without the freedom to express nonsensical ramblings writing loses its most fundamental freedom and writing itself also becomes transformed into a mere "tool"
       Remains of Life is a particularly challenging text to read because it is written without any paragraph breaks and with very limited punctuation -- it is essentially a single, run-on stream-of-consciousness sentence, even as it incorporates dialogue and others' accounts and commentary. While not simply nonsense-raving, the word-flow is certainly also far from straightforward; appropriately, given the subject matter, it is not a comfortable read, but readers should be aware of its challenges -- merely finding a spot to interrupt one's reading (or then jump back in) is difficult, and at over three hundred pages it is no quick read, regardless how deeply one manages to immerse oneself in it.
       The Musha Incident can be seen as a sort of last gasp uprising against the colonizer, long after the local Chinese population had essentially accepted it -- but Wu He warns about romanticizing that idea, considering events also in the context of the traditional headhunting rituals the tribes still practiced.
       As he then also frequently notes, the afterwar period saw a continuing if different form of subjugation and colonization of the aboriginal tribes, the (Chinese) Taiwanese society the dominant cultural and political power, the 'White Terror' -- the martial law that lasted from 1949 to 1987 -- long limiting dissent. And so, for example, a local whom he asks about the tribal history notes:
The only thing that people of my generation think about is going out to the cities to make money, we've almost completely forgotten the traditional legacy that our ancestors have left us with, my father lived through the Musha Incident, he never says much about it, he keeps most of it inside
       Wu He even begins his novel by reminding of the rapid recent modernization and transformation of Taiwan, noting that he had first heard of the Musha Incident when he was a teenager, and: "the economy of this island nation had yet to take off, there were still no McDonald's fast food restaurants". He removed himself from modernized, contemporary Taiwan previously, and his foray to Riverisle and into this subject-matter is another attempt to capture what is rapidly being lost and transformed.
       Occasionally, he is almost resigned, facing that common problem of history:
I too have asked myself many times whether all my questions about "the Incident" were superfluous, after all history has already decided what its place is to be, the political has already lauded it with glory and honor
       Yet Wu He's account shows the value of further engagement with the subject -- and, specifically, its present-day interpretations. So, for example, modern-day influences and the debate about them still reflect on the past ones:
"A little bit of new technology comes into the reservation, and before long we are destroyed, assimilated," Cuz-Hub said that he couldn't accept that, but he couldn't help but accept what was happening before his own eyes, "I'm not really willing to use words like 'invade' or 'assimilate,'" if we talk about invasion then we must also reflect upon why we didn't resist invasion, and if we talk about assimilation we must also ask ourselves why we didn't resist assimilation
       Many of the names given to the characters are basically simply descriptive -- Deformo, Weirdo -- and a central figure in the novel is simply called Girl, a granddaughter of Mona Rudao, who led the 1930 assault. Girl contains many of the dichotomies is confronted with -- a seeker, too ("One day I'm going to set out in search of ..."), a local who has ventured out but also wishes to return to the historical, a tribal representative yet also influenced by the foreign (notably in constantly playing classical Western music, for example). In his brief Afterword Wu He notes that one of the main objects of the novel is to examine: "the Quest of Girl".
       Yet the narrator is as much a central figure, and his own quests also at the heart of the novel -- the understanding and interpretation of 'the Incident' and its larger implications long beyond it, as well as his own struggles-as-writer. He expresses ambivalence about rebellion, even as he understands its important role both in history and society and in his own life and writing:
I began to grow rebellious during my teenage years, that rebelliousness continued and can even be seen in my writing today -- writing is itself a form of rebellion, I really despise endless rebellion [...] I know that there is a way to bring an end to this rebellion, but the key to resolving this issue lies not in suppressing rebellious actions, it lies in truly facing up to this thing called "dignity," those who rebel against something and those who fight to safeguard something are simply expressing two sides of teh same coin, what they both fight for is dignity
       Wu He's narrative is an outpouring, and only to a limited extent a story; the fascinating historical events and his encounters do make for an often engaging read, and his efforts to consider both the Mushu Incident and its aftermaths are fascinating -- but it is not easy to get through. Too lively and varied to be a slog, Remains of Life also remains a frustratingly slippery text. - M.A.Orthofer






The Musha Incident is a dark moment in Taiwan’s colonial history (1895-1945), as well as a long-forgotten one. On 27 October 1930, the indigenous Atayal people decapitated 134 Japanese soldiers. Japanese revenge was brutal, bringing the Atayal tribe to the edge of extinction. Later, the Nationalist government labeled the Incident a heroic retaliation against Japanese invasion, but condemned the Atayal’s primal ritual of headhunting.
Taiwanese writer Wu He was not satisfied with this highly superficial and politicized discourse and determined to uncover the truth of this period of history and its legacy. The result is this novel. First published in 1999, Remains of Life was recently introduced to the English-speaking world by Dr Michael Berry, a professor of Modern Chinese literature and film at UCLA. Thoughtfully and insightfully, Berry has devoted his translation to maintaining the novel’s original experimental writing techniques. The entire book contains one single paragraph over the length of nearly 300 pages, with only a few sentence breaks, multiple names for each character, and stream of consciousness. Reading this novel is an intellectually challenging and rewarding process.
To answer critical questions on the margins between memory, imagination and interpretation, Wu He returned in 1997 and 1998 to the Atayal reservation, a small mountain town in central Taiwan, where the unrest started and continued. He interviewed and befriended the survivors of the Incident and their descendants. From these oral accounts, he determined that, seen from indigenous perspective, the Incident has an entirely different focus on freedom and dignity: for the Atayal, headhunting is less about violent resistance against Japanese colonization than a time-honored tradition and source of meaningful indigenous pride.
Wu He is not the first to use the Musha Incident as source material. Before Remains of Life, there have been a comic book, a movie, and another novel based on the Incident , not to mention numerous scholarly works. Wu He’s approach, though, is unique and innovative. His novel does not directly confront the bloodiness of the Musha Incident, but opens a space including fictional details, modernist thoughts, and alternative ways to understand history. As outlined in Wu He’s afterword, his text consists of three layers. The first is the legitimacy and accuracy behind the “Musha Incident” led by Mona Rudao, as well as the “Second Musha Incident”; second, the quest of Girl, the narrator’s Atayal neighbor who travels back and forth between the deep mountains and an urban lifestyle; and lastly, the remains of life, that he visited and observed while on the reservation, leaving its meaning an open question.
In this novel, the fractured narrative that integrates monologue and stream of consciousness pushes readers to question conventional historiography: How has history been told? Who has the authority to record and comment history? For example, the novel presents alternative opinions on Muna Rudao, the leader of the Musha Incident. While nationalist discourse constantly describes him as an anti-colonial hero, the Atayal people think that he was “a man of courage and insight”, resisting so-called civilization and defending a traditional way of life. Another voice comes from Mr Miyamoto, a pro-Japanese tribe member, who considers Muna Rudao less a hero because he misused his dignity to slaughter third-rate samurai. Wu He here argues that there is hardly any true independent history. The novel does not limit itself within memory. Wu He links the (de)mystified history of the Musha Incident to his doubt about modern-day assimilation. If it is an accepted rule that human history is always a linear development, what we would lose in this unavoidable progress? The novel challenges the assumption that a more advanced civilization is entitled to judge, change, or even eliminate, primitive civilizations in the name of modernization. The Japanese who slaughtered hundreds of the Atayal in the colonial period with modern military weapons could be regarded as being much more savage. The Nationalist government’s project to incorporate indigenous people is no less discriminating or destructing than the Japanese policies. They both labeled Atayal people and their traditions as being backward, and both led to environmental and moral devastation. According to the narrator, indigenous culture today has been repeatedly consumed for new political agendas. Wu He reveals that, from military invasion to capitalist exploitation, not only the Atayal are losing their population, language, belief, and lifestyle under the pressure of modernization and urbanization, but also abandoned by the rapid growth in Taiwan.
The novel mixes in events in the author’s real life, such as his military service and his reclusive life. In fact, the Atayal’s struggles of “the primitive to blend itself into civilization” reflects the author’s own identity crisis—his own frustration and anxiety as a male Han intellectual. Sometimes the narrator taunts his own culture, considering cursing a Chinese trait and referring to the privileged class in Taiwan as “male chauvinist Chinese pigs”. Yet  at other times, he holds firm to Han ethics, including mixed feelings towards Atayal people’s worship of female reproduction. The narrator senses “the incredible charm and magnanimity of the primitive.” So while Girl expresses her joy with primal and natural sexual desire, the narrator ambiguously judges Atayal women according to the golden Han Chinese Rule of  chastity, which he apparently takes it as an index of civilization. Hs is also ambivalent about Atayal-Japanese interracial marriage.
The novel presents a surprising degree of carnivalesque writing, featuring perhaps the most absurd and wild sexual fantasy in contemporary Chinese literature. The narrator is constantly obsessed with sexuality, conducting dull discussions comparing women’s bodies in Taiwan, Japan and America; or having tedious conversations with Girl on “missionary-style”. Girl’s body is treated as the metaphor for the fate of the tribe.
Although his Han Chinese identity determines that he is an outsider regarding the Musha Incident, the narrator, or the author Wu He, is ambitious enough to reexamine this period of history. Instead of attempting a monumental epic, Wu He picks up fragmented moments and the remains of life to reveal the never-healed scar of indigenous people in Taiwan, a society rich in multiculturalism and ethnic diversity. The very act of writing provides freedom from the oppressed sexualized body and social restrictions. The seemingly absurdity in the novel nonetheless reflects Wu He’s honesty and humility. - Yu Zhang

Dylan Krieger, Giving Godhead, Delete Press, 2017.




















Audio Player

designated hitler

Poetry/Fiction








Dylan Krieger is a transistor radio picking up alien frequencies in south Louisiana. She lives in the back of a little brick house with a feline reincarnation of Catherine the Great, sings harmonies incessantly to every song she hears, and sunlights as a trade mag editor. 

León Ferrari, The Words of Others, Trans. by Antena (Jen Hofer with Tupac Cruz and Román Luján), X Artist's Books, 2017.


The Words of Others (Palabras ajenas) is the first full English translation of the Argentine artist León Ferrari’s uncompromising literary masterpiece (1967). A critique of the Vietnam War and American imperial politics, the book weaves together hundreds of excerpts from newspapers, periodicals, works of history, the Bible, and other sources. Ferrari conceived a dialogue among supposed voices of authority, insisting on the equal complicity of individuals such as Hitler, Lyndon Johnson, Pope Paul VI, and God in perpetuating unending cycles of violence. This translation results from nearly three years of work, including thorough investigation of Ferrari’s sources. It accompanies an exhibition of seminal works by Ferrari, curated by Ruth Estévez, Miguel A. López, and Agustín Diez Fischer at the Gallery at REDCAT as part of Pacific Standard Time’s Los Angeles/Latin America initiative, which will see the text performed by a cast of over forty artists, actors, and other recognized figures.
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Originally organized as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, an initiative of the Getty, this is the first solo exhibition of the Argentinian artist León Ferrari (b. 1920, Buenos Aires; d. 2013, Buenos Aires) in the United States, and features the first full performance of his seminal 1967 publication Palabras ajenas (The Words of Others). The exhibition focuses primarily on Ferrari’s influential practice from the 1960s to the 1980s, with a particular emphasis on Ferrari’s literary collages, most notably Palabras ajenas, an important Vietnam era anti-war piece written in the form of a dramatic script.
Ferrari considered his literary collages to be a central element of his practice, yet many remained unpublished or had only minimal circulation as limited editions or as sketchbooks. The exhibit re-visits many of these works, exploring an uncharted territory while marking a turning point in both the understanding of his work, as well as the aesthetic forms of political intervention that emerged in Latin America. This profoundly contemporary project highlights the obscenity of war, the ways the media represents it, and the role of political and religious discourse in the expansion of Western culture. - pamm.org/exhibitions/words-others-le%C3%B3n-ferrari-and-rhetoric-times-war




- danielclavery.com/?p=10589



León Ferrari and Mira Schendel: Tangled Alphabets, The Museum of Modern Art, 2009.




León Ferrari (born in 1920) and Mira Schendel (1919-1988) are among the most significant Latin American artists of the twentieth century. Active simultaneously in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s in the neighboring countries of Argentina and Brazil, they found inspiration in the written word and in the eloquence of spoken language, and they both used language as important visual subject matter. Published to accompany the first comprehensive survey of the work of each artist in the United States, this essential catalogue presents new insights into the artists' groundbreaking work and examines the connections and collisions between the visual arts, writing, politics and religion in their oeuvres


Tangled Alphabets charts the careers of León Ferrari and Mira Schendel, two twentieth-century artists who made language central to their dense, lyrical explorations of the visual world. The earliest piece by Ferrari on display is “Mujer” (Woman) (1960), a simple and delicate jug-like form that renders the slightly distorted fullness of a pregnant female body. Ferrari experiments with the alphabet in a similar fashion. His animated depictions of words and letters expand with volume until they settle at the edge of legibility.
After an early engagement with paintings composed of flat geometric forms, dark muted colors, and thick, grainy textures, Schendel’s work became concerned with mark-making that aligns the act of writing with drawing and evokes the passage of time. In the 1960s, she began placing thin sheets of Japanese paper on plexiglass stained with oil paint and then inscribing a visual collusion of lines, letters, circles, and words with sharp objects including her own fingernails. Drawings such as “A trama” (A fabric net (1960)) and her “Escritas” (Written) series resulted from this process. In these works, the almost transparent materiality of paper becomes a threshold between the physical immediacy of the present and the intangible passing of time. Only the work of Cy Twombly can compete with Schendel’s ability to make images composed of calligraphic gestures and scratches appear simultaneously time-bound and ephemeral, crafted and spontaneous.
The graphic and expressive potential of the alphabet is the primary but not the only link between Ferrari and Schendel. Both bodies of work emerged out of traffic between European and South American modernism. Both used language to meditate on the tangled relationships among religion, politics, and the body, and their art indirectly testifies to the violence that shaped their lives. Ferrari was born in Buenos Aires to Italian parents. His father was an artist and an architect, and he trained to be an engineer. A piece such as “Carta a un general” (Letter to a general (1962)), an ink drawing of twisting and illegible words, foreshadows his work’s investment in writing against repressive forces. Ferrari actively protested the military dictatorship of Auguste Pinochet, and moved to Brazil in 1976. His son Ariel disappeared during Jorge Rafael Videla’s “Dirty War.” In São Paulo, Ferrari created “Planeta” (Planet (1979)), a spherical sculpture composed of stainless steel wire and the desire to create “an imaginary planet.” “Planeta” displays a gorgeous tension between transparency and opacity, fragility and sturdiness. The more you see through its netted form, the more the solid architecture of its composition comes into view.
Schendel was born in Zurich to Jewish parents in 1919 and grew up in Milan as a Catholic. Still classified as a Jew, Schendel moved across Europe in her twenties to escape fascist persecution. After the war she settled in Brazil where her talent for drawing, which had emerged with an obsessive force in early childhood, transformed into an almost religious commitment to art. The Holocaust seems to have provoked in Schendel an urgency that manifested in her striking visual depictions of the human voice and its fragility. In the 1970s, Schendel began her “Toquinhos” (Little Things) series: pieces of transparent acrylic that hang from the ceiling, upon which Schendel places small acrylic boxes or windows that display and contain punctuation marks, numbers, piles of letters and thin pieces of fabric. In these “Toquinhos,” Schendel suggests that language emerges out of the transparency of nothingness, and the act of seeing holds language precariously in place.
Ultimately, Ferrari and Schendel’s pictorial investigations of language took their work in vastly different directions. Before her death in 1988, Schendel’s work settled into an austere minimalism allowing for meditations on how line impacts color and shape. In an untitled piece from her series “Sarrafas” (Splints (1987)), Schendel placed a white rectangle at the bottom of a large square of wood painted light taupe. A narrow three-dimensional line of wood, painted black and set at a slight angle, cuts across both parts of the painting with sober clarity and could stand for the lines that compose the alphabet’s recognizable forms. Ferrari, on the other hand, took a decidedly critical turn in his late work and produced collages that unequivocally accuse the Catholic Church of proselytizing genocide and modern warfare. In his series “Relecturnas de la Biblia” (Rereadings of the Bible (1986-88)), Renaissance angels open curtain onto scenes of nuclear disaster; Michael the archangel pokes a pile of corpses with his spear; a Byzantine Christ escorts a fighter plane down the sky. These “rereadings” possess sarcasm so ruthlessly apt they outdo John Heartfield. Propelled by threats of erasure, Ferrari’s and Schendel’s explorations into language’s multiple appearances—as shapes, expressions, lines, and ideas —worked to allow a world without mechanized violence to come into view. - Kimberly Lamm


Leon Ferrari (1920–2013) was an Argentine artist whose work in literary collage, sculpture, and a range of other media confronted the abuse of power in politics and the church

Elvira Navarro, A Working Woman, Trans. by Christina MacSweeney,Two Lines Press, 2017.


Globally acclaimed as a meticulous explorer of the psyche’s most obscure alleyways, Elvira Navarro here delivers an ambitious tale of feminine friendship, madness, a radically changing city, and the vulnerability that makes us divulge our most shameful secrets.
It begins as Elisa transcribes the chaotic testimony of her roommate Susana, acting as part-therapist, part-confessor as Susana reveals a gripping account of her strange sexual urges, and the one man who can satisfy them. But is Susana telling the truth? And what to make of Elisa’s own strange account of her difficult relationship with Susana, which blends her literary ambitions with her deep need for catharsis? Is this a true account of Elisa’s life, or is it the follow-up to her first novel that she has long been wanting to write? In one final surprise, A Working Woman concludes with a curious epilogue that makes us question everything we have just read.
With her penchant for finding the freakish side of the everyday, her precisely timed, mordant sentences, and her powerful, innovative style, A Working Woman confirms Elvira Navarro as “the subtle, almost hidden, true avant-gardist of her generation” (Enrique Vila-Matas, El País). A Working Woman masterfully uncovers the insecurity lurking just beneath the surface of every stable life, even as it points the way toward new concepts of what the novel can be.




“This author’s literary talent is a natural gift… the subtle, almost hidden, true avant-gardist of her generation.” — Enrique Vila-Matas


“Elvira Navarro is an enormously gifted and disturbing young writer with an unusual eye for the bizarre; she captures personal fragility with deceptively detached prose that stays with us like a scarring incision.” — Lina Meruane


“Navarro is one of Spanish literature’s most interesting contemporary writers.… A Working Woman represents a major leap forward in her work.” — Perfil


“The book surprises the reader. . . . Disconcerting in the best possible sense.” — El Cultural


“The singular thing about this novel is…the narrative voice.” — El País


I heard great things about Elvira Navarro's A Working Woman (Two Lines Press) when the book published in Spain a few years ago, with praise by authors such as Enrique Vila-Matas. I later spoke with Christina MacSweeney when she was working on the English translation: she confirmed this was a book I needed to read.
A Working Woman tells the story of two women living together in the outlying districts of Madrid during the last European recession. The book invents a language and a structure to portray the outskirts of the city—and the characters' job insecurity—like no novel has done before. It speaks intelligently and originally about mental illness, tracing the relation between insanity and modern economics.
Navarro is one of the most daring writers in the Spanish-speaking world, and MacSweeney has done an amazing job in bringing the originality of her voice into the English language. - Daniel Saldaña París


I’m increasingly fascinated with characters who buy out of the system, both in literature and life. I wrote my first book about this very thing as it relates to the Mexican drug war. Elvira Navarro’s A Working Woman (Two Lines Press) touches on this as it relates to the Spanish economic crisis. But I also talk about the very real characters, too, with my childhood best friend who isn’t a writer but a DC insider who seems just as confounded by the mechanizations of his city these days as everyone else.
We talk about our old things—the Spurs, personal/professional life, marriage, music, books—but lately we’ve been talking about the news a lot like (I imagine) everyone else. It used to be that you could forecast certain things: elections, poll numbers, pledged money, persuadable voters, approval ratings, etc. My best friend made his career on big data. But what should you do when people buy out of an old system en masse? When people cleave off and cleave out an alternative truth and reality for themselves?
In reaction to the current anti-realpolitik, I can’t help but wonder if I’ve done the same but to the other extreme. To root yourself in reality in 2017 is, to some extent, to rage against the post-truth era. The truth is now radical, which is weird! I like to think of myself as rational and self-admittedly not very edgy. Of course, I believe I’m in-the-right: I’m a staunch feminist. I believe in social justice. Being a professor, I believe in empirical and peer-reviewed research and the truth. In sum I believe in, you know, not being a bad person. And only recently, in the wake of certain conversations with my childhood best friend, I’ve come to wonder: is that because I can still afford to buy into that system? Because, in some sense (however small the gains might seem to me), to the people who bought out of the system, might I be a perceived winner of the old status quo? Is it that I can still afford to be not a bad person? Moreover, would I feel the same had the system failed me?
I’d like to think, yeah, I’d still be into not being a bad person. Though in heeding the realities of 2017 I can’t not look away from those characters who opted out of that seemingly rational decision—rooted in human decency—not to be bigoted, not to be racist, not to be misogynist. In a sense, those who opted out of being a decent human being. But then what is that anymore? And is that definition centered?
Elvira Navarro’s A Working Woman, translated by Christina MacSweeney, interrogates the psyche of characters mired by the Spanish economic crisis and the realities and lies they build around themselves in search of catharsis.
The novel is narrated by dual unreliable protagonists, Elisa and Susana, who become roommates at the urging of Elisa’s friend, German, who plays a key role in the disintegration of their relationship toward the end of the book.
The novel opens with Elisa’s disclaimer that “this story is based on what Susana told me about her madness. I’ve added some of my own reactions, but to be honest, they are very few . . . ,” which keys us into Elisa’s own penchant for reality distortion, for rewriting the events as they actually happened. Perhaps, as a form of escapism and/or longing for the literary novel Elisa wants to write or perhaps as a way to take Susana down a peg if only in her own mind.
By the end of the book we’re not so sure if Elisa has crafted this narrative from her own reality as a struggling copyeditor at a large (but uninspiring) Spanish literary press, or if all of it (her entire subjectivity as presented to us) is just another alternative reality that’s actually part of her novel-in-progress, which we know she’s writing—a simulacrum of her true life, a coping mechanism alternative reality which she uses to deal with her personal traumas of finding herself further and further outside of the geographic valence of her old pricey apartment at the heart of Madrid, which is to say further and further outside of high-brow society and definitely further outside of economic security amidst a shrinking book market that rarely pays Elisa what she’s owed on time.
From Elisa’s opening lines, we jump into first person Susana who, presumably using Elisa as a therapist or sounding board, opens up (but not really because she’s unreliable) about her frustrated sexual desires and her relationship with Fabio, a man who has dwarfism, who fulfills them. It becomes apparent as the book progresses and Elisa’s voice begins to dominate the narrative that we realize Susana is a pathological liar unwilling or incapable of any true intimacy, which frustrates Elisa who wants to know the truth about this woman she’s living with.
We come to learn, via Elisa, that Susana lives in a curated present informed by an imagined past. It’s no surprise this tendency toward curation is what ultimately leads Susana to an almost accidental career in visual art toward the end of the book. Susana’s success in part widens the rift between the roommates, though the full realization of this decayed interpersonal fabric is foreshadowed in Elisa’s sense of dread that’s reflected throughout her sections of the book.
Elisa finds herself fascinated with the decay of the neighborhood around her which is located in the outskirts of Madrid, a place where historically and presently the undesirables of the city have been pushed out to live. Nearby are the ruins of a former prison Elisa keeps returning to. And the neighborhood itself becomes a kind of tether back to reality and a reminder to Elisa about the unsustainability and inescapability of her life that’s constantly under assault from the financial demands of life, which are actually very modest.
For both characters, to disengage from reality is to survive. To confront reality is to exacerbate their psychoses. I think deep down, as they’re living it in the moment, both Susana and Elisa know this disengagement from reality and each other is irrational but necessary. And the tragedy when they finally do bridge the gap between them—when they have to cooperate within the parameters of a mutual reality—is that their fears are not only confirmed but realized when everything comes unraveled. Reality undoes them. And nothing is ever the same again.
Bringing this full circle, I think what fascinates me about this book is that I’d never thought about post-truth as a coping mechanism before. It brings up the question: how much of our dignity is tied to the way we interface with reality? And what becomes of us when reality does not validate who we tell ourselves we really are? Or who we should be?
Navarro’s book was originally published in Spanish in 2014, long before the 2016 presidential election. So, it’s not as if the idea of post-truth and reality warping in A Working Woman are in conversation—they’re not. But I also think there are parallels that can be drawn between the populist moment we’re in today and, say, the things that have given rise to populism across Europe in the wake of the financial crises there, especially the Spanish economic crisis.
Reading through A Working Woman, Elisa and Susana are characters whose chaos definitely affects the way they operate in the world, but they have tendencies to implode into themselves rather than explode. I am haunted by these characters, especially when I think of the very legitimate leftist populist gripes concerning the capitalist exploitation of cheap labor (Elisa) or the isolation and desire for human connection experienced by workers heavily involved in the gig economy (Susana). But what is the left’s relationship to post-truth? I think we have one, though it looks something more like that implosion than explosion.
We now know that economic insecurity has played no small part in the shift into post-truth. And part of what I wonder now is how much of my own anxiety about the current era comes from the fact that so many people have bought out of the system in which I, like I suspect many readers here, were winners (if only perceived winners) of that system. Readers, literati, mostly college-educated, employed, probably middle-ish class. Does that make us losers in the post-truth era? The reality of that has yet to unravel. - Daniel Peña


Excerpt:
Except for the occasional weekend away, I usually left the apartment at night, which meant my encounters with the guys from the truck became almost routine. I continued to haunt the old prison, which had become a forest of rubble, a steep forest through which cockroaches scurried, and emitted a false glow at night—what in fact glimmered on the rubble were the lights from the Avenida de los Poblados. But it was as if those Dantesque fragments had light bulbs within them. I’d scramble through a hole in the wire fence and stay there quietly for a long time. I had the feeling that place was armor-plated, that it was enduring. The floodlights that had once picked out the shadows of the prisoners had been dismantled, and I didn’t dare explore the ruins for fear of falling. So I walked around them. Fear didn’t catch me; if large suburban parks like the Casa de Campo were being abandoned, with even the criminals going to ­places where they could get their hands on something more than hard carob beans and verbena petals, what was so different about that awkward heap of rubble? Before they pulled down the prison, I’d discovered that some of the cells—hardly much larger than six feet by four, and in which you couldn’t take two turns without feeling dizzy—were occupied. They had posted a security guard so the panopticon didn’t end up as a Romany village, but at night they turned a blind eye to a few solitary down-and-outs. In the occupied cells, I found the belongings of their nocturnal lodgers; everything had been extracted from dumpsters, which made the sight of overcoats and blankets on spindly hangers ­rather paradoxical. Before, I had gone to the prison with a girlfriend who was making recordings of the silence in the center of the penitentiary. If my friend had been with me now, it would have been impossible for her not to register the sounds of that deformed urban skeleton and its creaky joints. But, back then it was as if we were in a tomb, with the crypts blocking out the hum of traffic. And now she would also have been able to record the guys from the truck, whom I’d seen stop by the wire fence one day, negotiate the gap, and snoop around with strong flashlights. They didn’t see me. I was a long way away, quietly hunched down out of sight: there was a candy wrapper on the ground at my feet, and I could hear the chirping of insects. The third night I saw them playing daredevils on rotten planks; I realized they were looking for something that wasn’t cardboard. My discovery shouldn’t have been surprising, but then I know nothing of the criminal underworld. What I did know was certain materials were being stolen for resale on the black market. Copper ­mostly. Yet it didn’t ring true for me that, after years of standing empty, there would be anything of any value left in the prison. I don’t know exactly what they were pilfering, but expected to see them carrying long, sharpened sticks, weapons. I felt the need to stand up, and as I did brushed against some piece of corrugated iron that fell with a loud clang. The five Romanies turned, and shone their flashlights in my direction; my knees were shaking slightly, and although I very much wanted to hunch down again, I couldn’t even manage to breathe. They stood very still, making sweeps with their lights. The only things behind me were wire fencing, trees, and darkness. “Who’s there?” they shouted, followed by, “If you don’t get out of here, I’ll slash you.” Another one of them answered, “It’s a cat or something, dumbass. Let’s go.” The following day a number of front loaders turned up and cleared the area. What was left looked like a morass of gritty sand. I went back one last night, without being able to find the center of the lot, because I suddenly felt vulnerable, with too much city on either side to the horizon. I stayed close to the wire fence with its geometric design, and further on, to those weightless pincers that emerged from the darkness in the park. That night, I made my way home with a clear head, following a new route. I amused myself by zigzagging left and right, sometimes taking long detours because I liked going along unknown streets. I’m not sure just when I found myself in a stretch of neighborhood I knew.





Elvira Navarro, The Happy City, Trans. by Rosalind Harvey, Hispabooks Publishing, 2013.




“I feel terrible. Although he doesn't say it, I know he had been hoping the whole time that I would explain it all somehow; but I can't explain it, because I don't understand anything.” These disturbing words, almost a distillation of the entire text, close the novel The Happy City by Elvira Navarro, who featured in Granta’s The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists issue in 2010.
The stories of Chi-Huei—a Chinese boy whose family has come to Spain in search of a better life—and his friend Sara—a girl strangely fascinated by a homeless man—comprise two separate yet complementary sections, presenting the reader with a detailed account of their life circumstances and the nuances of their perspectives: the genuine, as-yet untamed voices through which the book’s pre-adolescent protagonists negotiate the world around them, their initial astonishment finally turning to frustration as they gaze upon their dehumanized society.
A pre-teen’s first faltering steps towards sexuality, social pressures, the way polarized outlooks on life coexist at the core of the same family, those first experiences of disillusionment as we awaken into the adult world: these are some of the themes that Navarro lays out for her readers in order to reveal, with razor-sharp control, the constant duality that exists between the outward appearance of things and their inner reality.


Granta introduced the anglophone world to Elvira Navarro by naming her one of the best young Spanish language novelists in 2010, but Rosalind Harvey’s translation of her second novel The Happy City marks her first full-length work in English. The 2009 Spanish original earned both the Jaén Fiction Award and the Tormenta Award for Best New Author. Stepping into The Happy City, I felt that I had gone back to a former version of myself, empathizing with, even enduring, the pain of one of life’s inevitable metamorphoses. We find Navarro’s protagonists cracking through late childhood’s barriers into early adolescence, confronting the often formidable awareness that emerges as children naturally rebel against adult sentries whose control over their subjects conversely slips. The adolescents roaming this cityscape are presented in two separate novellas. One story relates the immigrant experience of a working class family through Chi-Huei, a young boy longing for maternal love and affection. The second is narrated by Sara, a comfortably middle-class, only child smothered by overly attentive parents. The city in question, Madrid, is the only character in the book whose growth is not measurable. More than merely comprising the story world, it connects the two tales by playing the role of an omnipresence holding the burgeoning adolescents captive in a determined quadrant of city blocks. Although not branded as Young Adult, it fits the bill.
The first novella begins with Chi-Huei in China. An unaffectionate aunt, “the old woman,” fosters him for a fee while his grandfather, step-grandmother, parents and older brother set up a Chinese restaurant and rotisserie in Madrid (13). They call the business Happy City, hopeful nomenclature. The family toils to establish itself and sends for the boy as the story unfolds. As the second son, he is expected to excel academically, and in turn, eventually pour this success into the business. Chi-Huei’s acrimonious receipt of and incongruity with this fate and the family who present it increase as he grows:
The most difficult piece of the puzzle as Chi-Huei settles into his new life isn’t learning language, culture, or accepting how and where his family fits into it; rather, it’s realizing he doesn’t feel love for the woman who brought him into the world. Chi-Huei grows to resent his family as he reacts to increasing pressure to surpass their expectations, voiced predominantly by his mother. “With his mother, there was no transition between the most absolute distrust and unlimited love, between her total devotion on the afternoons at the beach and her anger and ferocious, impending criticism” (33). The onerous mother-son interaction is foreshadowed by the unloving aunt who raised him in China. Chi-Huei questions whether to disavow this troubling relationship, whose bitterness he may perpetually endure, for in the schism created between them in his mother’s zealous drive to provide him with a “better” life, she emerges as a ruthless, cold maternal figure who abandoned her younger son, first geographically and ultimately, emotionally.
Navarro relates Chi-Huei’s story in the third person, juxtaposed with Sara’s first person account. This effect conveys the immigrant experience as marginalized, its characters revolving in a circle amongst one another. Sara represents integration for Chi-Huei, first presented to us as a conquest of his, more in terms of status and class than sexually, although inevitably, given their ages, sexuality is in play. Eventually Chi-Huei’s relationship with Sara sours and catapults him to a position of frustration that speaks to his dissonance with the mainstream. As the resentment between the two builds, “Naturally it didn’t even occur to him to cross the road and go to her house. He had never visited his friend during the week, and to cross this threshold now would have been to expose himself too much” (74). Thus, Navarro keeps him from assimilating, in spite of his effort. It is worth noting that Sara’s story only fleetingly mentions Chi-Huei, “the Chinese boy” as “something like my first boyfriend” (122). Sara details, instead, a disenchantment that crescendos to an inability to relate to the entirety of her peer group as her mania for a local vagrant consumes her.
Sara’s world is presented as a veiled, gated one with constraints thrust upon her by her parents every step of the way. “I am not allowed to play beyond the limit, and the most I do is to look over from the other side without stepping over the imaginary line my father drew one day with the tip of his shoe, a line I accept, although with a few small exceptions” (100). In response, she finds refuge in the most obscure, far removed location she can within the confines of the city blocks she is allowed to traverse: a French homeless man, an immigrant who, unlike Chi-Huei, rejects conformity with alacrity.
Sara and the homeless man study one another, seeking each other out with great care to attract no untoward attention. Navarro delicately and repeatedly brings the reader to the precipice of sexuality, in its most innocent form in Sara’s daily rituals. At a bus stop, she is “left behind in the race and am the last one in the line that forms at the steps. This period when I expose myself to the homeless man’s gaze seems eternal to me, and I’m also embarrassed to reveal how shy and awkward I am” (118). As a tenuous layer is shed, her bravado emerges:
Is the obsession fueled only by innocent discovery and escape for Sara? Although the Lolita aspect is never overtly broached, the possibility floats in the air – will the interaction transcend the senseless, platonic conversations conducted in the neighborhood bar? “…I can’t understand why my questions irritate him so much, although I’m not totally satisfied with them myself…” (161). Sara’s internal world is a deluge of interrogatory rhetoric: what motivated the man to drop out of society and arrive on the streets of her neighborhood as a derelict? What drove him to this life? If she could only understand this, she could understand him. These questions are superficially answered, but his motivations and “dogma” alluded to in the lengthy conversations between the two are, frustratingly, never divulged and the reader is left to make assumptions.
Navarro dives headfirst into the embodied experiences of two disparate characters as she explores adolescence in the context of awakening. The enlightenment her characters achieve extends beyond their immediacy into the city, where the marginalization of outsiders is a line drawn in the sand, rousing in their young lives both angst and powerlessness. Harvey’s seamless translation of the lyrical prose places the reader in the middle of Madrid, stuck and frustrated, pushing boundaries but hitting walls. - Kate Lynch


Elvira Navarro won the Community of Madrid’s Young Writers Award in 2004. Her first book, La ciudad en invierno (The City in Winter), published in 2007, was well received by the critics, and her second, La ciudad feliz (The Happy City, Hispabooks, 2013) was given the twenty-fifth Jaén Fiction Award and the fourth Tormenta Award for best new author, as well as being selected as one of the books of the year by Culturas, the arts and culture supplement of the Spanish newspaper Público. Granta magazine also named her one of their top twenty-two Spanish writers under the age of thirty-five. She contributes to cultural magazines such as El Mundo newspaper’s El Cultural, to Ínsula, Letras Libres, Quimera, Turia, and Calle 20, and to the newspapers Público and El País. She writes literary reviews for Qué Leer and contributions for the blog “La tormenta en un vaso.” She also teaches creative writing.

Rios de la Luz, The Pulse between Dimensions and the Desert, Broken River Books, 2015.


riosdelaluz.wordpress.com/   
Ear to the Ground by Rios de la Luz
                   




“Rios de la Luz’s writing blows minds and breaks hearts. A sort of new and bizarre Tomás Rivera, Rios is able to blend the familiar of the domestic with the all the wilderness of the universe. Her stories will grab you in places you didn’t know you had, take you by those places to where you’ve always wanted to go—though you never knew how to get there. Buy this book and enjoy that journey.” —Brian Allen Carr


“In The Pulse between Dimensions and the Desert, Rios de la Luz’s writing is electric and alive. It grabs you and pulls you into her universe, one that is both familiar and foreign, a place where Martians find love, bad guys get their ears cut off, and time travel agents save lost children. In this innovative, heartfelt debut, de la Luz takes her place as a young author that demands to be read and watched.” —Juliet Escoria


The Pulse Between Dimensions and the Desert (102 pages) , Rios de la Luz’s debut collection of stories, is a vivid and honest book. Each story is rich with culture in the interspersing of Spanish in the dialogue, the narratives, and even the foods. The cadence of the narratives is quick and unforgettable. The book jumps from incredible surreal stories to hard-hitting goose-bump inducing truths. The narratives don’t limit themselves to one point of view. First, third, and second person narratives are all given the chance to seduce the reader into a world where time machines are built, “you meet your soul mate in a planetarium on mars,” and the “viejita who lives on the corner en la casa azul” tells the future.
Although I enjoyed each of the stories, I gravitated more toward the small (flash fiction) stories. The economy of language in each piece is refreshing, honest, and stimulating with lines like “I want to talk about my brown skin,” and “My curls are geometric half-moons with a hint of coconut.”
The story order and the level of detachment between each narrative are of particular interest. This book is structured in a way where each story can be read on its own, yet even with my A.D.D. mind, I still found myself reading the entire book cover to cover; I put the pieces together to see how the characters were related. There was enough of a balance and disassociation between narratives to make me still doubt their interconnectivity.
The narrators range from young children to grown adults. There isn’t one precise age group being developed. There is innocence in each narrative, as well as a corruption of innocence that lingers behind each story. There are grudges, there is anger, there is love.
Each female protagonist, young or mature, is extremely badass. From narrators that slice open their own hand to preserve a lie to knife-wielding investigations, each turn of the page presents a character that emits protective and curious personalities. The narrators and characters of these stories are ruthless, raw, and intrepid. It’s a bit odd how cold and mature the children are, as if the children know more than even the adults in the stories understand.
The topics covered in these stories that are refreshing to read. From the “pads like diapers [that] stuck to the bridge of my panties because I was petrified of tampons getting stuck inside,” to the “bush” that “overcame the tightness of my skirt and created a puffy cloud over my pubic mound,” taboo female topics that are almost always talked around are being forced into the light.
The most important subjects this book fearlessly tackles are queer discrimination, sexual abuse, physical abuse, as well as microaggressions. These four ideas are laid out in a painful manner for the reader to either identify with or acknowledge as existing.
Microaggressions are well illustrated in this book, from the tiring question “Where are you from?… No, where are you really from?” to comments by other characters about skin color, the sounds of native languages, and sexual abuse related to race.
Identity weaves its way through each narrative. In one story, the narrator states, “under the influence of mescaline you, looked into a mirror and saw accuracy in the depiction of your being.” And in the story “Rosario,” another mirror scene takes place: “at the age of fifteen, I used to look at myself in the mirror in strangely padded bras. I pretended that my skin was lighter. My hair was lighter. My eyes were lighter.” This commentary on identity is heartbreaking, and depicted in such a striking, open fashion.
Rios de la Luz has created enchanting worlds in such a small amount of space. After the end of this book, I wanted more. I was addicted to the language, the bravery, the depth of the characters as well as the worlds I emerged into. If you want to become immersed in culture, strong characters, and poetic language, then by all means, occupy your hands with this book. - Sara Khayat


Rios de la Luz explores the “inner workings that were happening in her brain” while writing her first collection The Pulse Between Dimensions and the Desert, and Scott’s suggestion that her stories resemble the Martian gemstones depicted within each, being unique, energetic, fresh, multifaceted, and yet interconnected(0:03:30). Notions of magic realism, time travel (0:17:50), science fiction, Junot Diaz, Ray Bradbury, Lucius Shepard, Star Trek, Doctor Who, and her love of outer space and comic books (0:20:15), especially Los Bros Hernandez’s Love and Rockets, emerge, as well as working with her publisher Ladybox Books, a rising imprint of Broken River Books and being part of the dynamic small press community in Portland, Oregon (0:32:00). The discussion also explores diversity as a rising force in both authors and audience for spec-lit (0:48:00), including Rios’ identity as a “Latina-Chicana-Bruja” writer but “mostly just a strange brown girl,” as well as using Spanish to reset rhythm in her narratives, growing up in El Paso, discovering her favorite writer Sandra Cisneros and her passion for creating young characters like herself, including her excitement in seeing female, African and Guatemalan leads in Star Wars and a black Hispanic super-hero in Spider-Man Miles Morales (0:59:15). Another ever-present element in her writing is the guardian abuela, reflecting the importance of her grandmother and great grandmother to whom she says she “owes so much” (1:10:45). Also queer characters, the awkwardness of puberty (‘Church Bush’) (1:23:30), disappeared women, dead children (‘La Reina’), her complicated feelings about borders and a short reading of her hauntingly beautiful story ‘Marigolds’ (1:30:20). Finally, Rios talks about what’s next (1:35:45) for her including flash fiction, zines, two horror stories, a bizarro tale and a novel, as well as recommending poet Yesika Salgado aka Yesika Starr, fellow Ladybox Books author Meliza Bañales, aka Missy Fuego, and Vanessa Mártir.  listen






The H Word: Sadako, Mitsuko, and Sleep Paralysis


Rios de la Luz, Itzá, Broken River, 2017.


The Magician
I saw a light

Keith Waldrop, Light While There Is Light: An American History, Dalkey Archive, 2013. [1993.]





One of the unheralded masterpieces of twentieth-century American fiction, Light
While There Is Light is acclaimed poet Keith Waldrop’s autobiographical novel about the myriad ghosts left behind by his family. Born to a deeply religious mother, the narrator and his siblings are led across the US as she searches for the “right” religious sect—a trip that ends with her speaking in tongues, and finally her total isolation. But no synopsis can do justice to the beauty of Keith Waldrop’s measured, wise, and unembroidered prose, illuminating the fear, madness, and destruction within hearth and home—though never repudiating his love for same. In a tradition that stretches back through Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner to Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe, Keith Waldrop and Light While There Is Light are American treasures.


“What I would like, I think, is to live a while longer. But not again.” - Keith Waldrop
Light While There Is Light is called variously a fictional memoir, an autobiographical novel, and a masterpiece of twentieth century American fiction. I appreciate that the Dalkey Archive released it as Fiction. Somehow it feels better to call this a novel – and Waldrop seems to understand that. In reality I think that most readers assume a first person narrator should be equated with the author – what’s satisfying about this book is that it doesn’t seem to matter if you do or not. Despite the obvious allusions to the life of Keith Waldrop the person, and even the pictures that show Keith Waldrop the person in the text, this is a novel, not a memoir.
Compared to, say, Waldrop’s other work, this book is very accessible – readable even – and I’ve returned to it multiple times since receiving the book. I’ve enjoyed returning to it to go back and read a passage. It’s also illuminating (the book is full of light puns) to return and notice the kinds of motifs and themes that Waldrop uses throughout to create a kind of unified whole. It’s something that I would be happy to continue to read and reread, but also recommend that almost anyone read – It’s something that I’d recommend to friends, family members, writers, etc. There’s something to be learned from Waldrop’s sentences.
Despite what I would call a “straightforward” quality of the prose, every bit seems composed with intense attention to diction and pacing. It’s poetry, and it also bears poetry’s intense loyalty to peculiar internal logics:
Waldrop meanders through his own life thematically more than chronologically – though it does proceed in a relatively ordered fashion. Light Where There Is Light reminds me of W.G. Sebald’s books, and most specifically Rings of Saturn.
Both have the kind of detached, slightly melancholic, and drily humorous narrator, and easily shift from memory, to recollection, to reminiscence. There’s also the peculiar feeling that the narrator might not be trustworthy – or that the narrator might be fabricating half of the story (a kind of death of the author double bind, wherein the reader is trapped in the belief that at least the author is fabricating one story, instead of multiple layers of story) for the sake of symmetry or cohesion.
One anecdote, that Waldrop calls, “The spookiest story I ever heard,” near the beginning of the book, I actually wondered for a second if it was was from a book by Sebald – though I haven’t gone back to try to confirm or deny this suspicion. Not only was Light Where There is Light composed before Rings of Saturn, but it also seems completely irrelevant where the story comes from because it is so essential to this book., or at least to the understanding of the book.  The little parable is so evocative – so essentially metaphorical and like a synecdoche for the whole work that it’s almost hard to believe that it’s anything but an invention of Waldrop’s.
The book starts as an origin story. It’s not really an origin story of Keith, the Narrator, but more like the beginning of the root cause of the series of family misadventures that form the book.  The narrator’s own birth and conception remain obscure.
What the real focus on is the adventures and misadventures in the faith of the narrator’s mother, who only adopts more fundamentalist attitudes after her first husband disparagingly refers to her as a “Sunday school girl.” In a way, that frames the struggles of the narrator’s mother to find a kind of heaven on earth as hopelessly oppositional. She goes to battle with this conception that her first husband had of her by trying to confirm it.
Despite a disparate variety of goals and activities, Waldrop the narrator sees his family united under a ”dissatisfaction with the world.” With a tag line like that it is a sad story. Everyone dies. Death is unceremonious. It doesn’t matter much how hard you’ve work to transcend the flesh; you inevitably do.
It’s not a book that sucks you along with plot, but one that charms you with insight, and poetry. It’s a text of illumination, and I said, but it’s gradual. There’s no throwing the light on, but more like a slow burn. More of a gradual unfolding, or peeling back.
That’s probably why this is a novel, and why Waldrop sees it as possibly his most important work. In an anecdote in the introduction, both Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop are surprised by this minor revelation.
The book continuously unfolds to reveal symmetries and resonances that probably even the author didn’t suspect until afterwards. Unlike a memoir that careens through a narrator’s life to a logical redemption, Light Where There Is Life is a careful exploration – not teleologicallly driven, but transparent in its framing, its lenses, and its literariness (to use a rather stupid word). What I mean is that Waldrop takes a stretch of time and experience and creates from it a novel – a piece of literature – and that’s why it’s not a memoir or an autobiography.
Like Jaimy Gordon says in the introduction, this book is singular. There are probably others that bear similarities, but I can’t think of many that I’ve enjoyed reading and rereading more. - Leif Haven


For the poet Wallace Stevens, “God and the imagination are one”—or, more exactly, in the absence of a God, the human imagination must re-enchant the world. “Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar”: poetry’s power is “the power of the mind over the possibility of things.” This is why, for Stevens, “Poetry is a means of redemption,” a substitute religion.

My imagination is poor. In my dreams, for instance—where one would suppose wishes can be fulfilled without hindrance—if I dream the events this account describes, they are not usually changed, but in what should be a world nearer to the heart’s desire, they play again, just as I tell them here, exactly as already experienced. It is as if despairing, even of imaginary improvement, I contrive instead to set my affection on the damned world, this very world, as it was and as it is.

The history of my mother’s religious opinions should be told as the record of a pilgrimage. As I imagine most pilgrimages, it was less the struggle towards a given end than a continual flight from disappointment and unhappiness. Neither the joys of heaven nor hell’s worst prospects provide as forceful a motive as the mere emptiness of the world.

This compelling selection of recent work by internationally celebrated poet Keith Waldrop presents three related poem sequences—"Shipwreck in Haven,""Falling in Love through a Description," and "The Plummet of Vitruvius"—in a virtuosic poetic triptych. In these quasi-abstract, experimental lines, collaged words torn from their contexts take on new meanings. Waldrop, a longtime admirer of such artists as the French poet Raymond Queneau and the American painter Robert Motherwell, imposes a tonal override on purloined materials, yet the originals continue to show through. These powerful poems, at once metaphysical and personal, reconcile Waldrop's romantic tendencies with formal experimentation, uniting poetry and philosophy and revealing him as a transcendentalist for the new millennium.

When the shortlist for this year’s National Book Award in poetry was announced, the odds-on favorite, Frederick Seidel’s Poems: 1959-2009, was nowhere to be found. Bill Knott raised the alarm on his blog, “Critically acclaimed as the book of the year, and…it’s not even on the NBA shortlist—what's with that?” Meanwhile, somewhere deep in Brooklyn, the editors of Harper’s and n+1 got together to organize protests and sloganeer. (“Where the hell is Fred Seidel?” they painted on their placards. “Hey, hey, NBA, which rich poet didja spurn today?”)
No one else seemed much troubled, even though Seidel’s Poems had attracted so much media attention—of the kind usually reserved for the hosts of televised cooking competitions, not mere poets—that its omission by the judges had to count as something more like a message than an oversight. In headier days all this might have inspired a rollicking scandale littéraire, but we are wiser now, and poorer. At worst, we figured, the awards were a desperate attempt to sell books few people wanted to read; at best, a clutch for a cache of ever-less-valuable cultural capital. Besides, who’s got time to quibble about awards when having a book printed on actual paper by an actual publisher once more seems the astonishing thing?
I’ll leave it to others to decide what the NBA judges wanted to tell us by leaving Seidel off their shortlist. But I’d bet there wasn’t a volume of poetry published this year that was less like his Poems than Keith Waldrop’s Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy, the book that won the award. Forget Seidel's suicide bombers, Italian motorcycles, and Japanese virgins. Waldrop could care less:
My “world” is parsimonious—a few
elements which
combine, like tricks of light, to
sketch the barest outline. But my
void is lavish, breaking
its frame…
“Lavish void” is a nice way to describe the stalking ground of Transcendental Studies. The book is draped in a gauze of dreamy premonition, and all its “legendary details, called from the distant / future where each thing has its / end” are stilled to a vague, translucent quietude. It’s no surprise to learn that Waldrop wrote most of the poems after midnight.
At times this midnight mood seems an end in itself: “When the sea subsides into utter calm, changing clouds caught in its / clarity, then fishermen say the sea // is thinking about itself.” Other times it is propaedeutic, revelatory:
Flat. Dimmed. Everything
tastes the same. Ships idle in port. On
the other hand, sounds may be
louder, colors brighter, a red
roof like a flame.
In lesser hands, the parataxis of sentence fragments can be wearying, the stuff of well-deserved parody. (My thoughts. Deep. Broken. Deep. Did I mention deep?) But Waldrop is too skilled to let the technique drag him down. He threads his stanzas on a line of understated music, keeping them fresh and moving, making them—his word—cantabile. These poems demand a certain reverence, or at the very least patience, but whenever solemnity threatens to overwhelm, Waldrop delivers up a minor drollery to counter the ballast. Thus the first line of “How to Find Water”: “Easier if there are springs.”
It is the mood, more than anything, that unifies the three sections of Transcendental Studies, but Waldrop comes nearest a statement of purpose in “Silk,” a poem that appears exactly halfway through the book and gives us some idea of what he’s up to:
Below a certain intensity of light, colors fade to black and white—or rather, to gray. Things are seen best then. . .
. . .
Instead of panning across the things that are, I wait.
. . .
From what I see, see at this particular moment, I turn, bringing to mind everything invisible, the rest of the world, my small view’s vast remainder.
“It is hard for us—creatures of the surface—to reckon with depth,” Waldrop writes. Transcendental Studies is the song of a man who has learned to hold his breath underwater for a very long time. - Robert P. Baird

Keith Waldrop is a quiet major poet, a major poet of quiet. His accomplishment is difficult to describe because his work refuses, in Bartelby-like fashion, the twin traps of impassivity and affectation: “On my one hand, / stasis—on the / other, striving for effect.” In one of his very few interviews, Waldrop says: “I think the worst fault a poem can have is striving for effect.” Waldrop never strives; instead, he haunts—his presence is all the more powerful for barely being there, like a ghost you discover in a familiar photograph.


Keith Waldrop is a quiet major poet, a major poet of quiet. His accomplishment is difficult to describe because his work refuses, in Bartleby-like fashion, the twin traps of impassivity and affectation: “On my one hand, / stasis – on the / other, striving for effect.” In one of his very few interviews, Waldrop says: “I think the worst fault a poem can have is striving for effect.” Waldrop never strives; instead, he haunts—his presence is all the more powerful for barely being there, like a ghost you discover in a familiar photograph. There are plenty of direct statements, moments of humor and pathos, but we come to know Waldrop most through his subtle, exquisite compositional decisions: the way he breaks a line or collages found language. I think here of the perfectly balanced epigrammatic poem “Proposition II”:

Each grain of sand has its architecture, but
a desert displays the structure of the wind. 

I read the poem as a tiny ars poetica: Waldrop has composed two lines of eleven syllables each—syllables of sound/sand whose arrangement displays the structure of Waldrop’s thinking just as a drift makes visible the activity of the wind. We intuit the author from the architecture, from the traces he has left.
Ghosts are everywhere in Waldrop’s work, but they’re not supernatural occurrences: a ghost for Waldrop is more a felt absence than a felt presence. As he wrote in his brilliant autobiographical novel, Light While There Is Light—recently reissued by Dalkey Archive—“my ghosts merely disappear. I never see them. They haunt me by not being there, by the table where no one eats, the empty window that lets the sun in without a shadow.” In his first published book of poems, A Windmill Near Calvary, Waldrop echoes this sentiment: “The terrible thing about / ghosts is that we know they are not there.” That’s a fine shorthand for Waldrop’s gentle but rigorous skepticism: his poems explore the desire for something beyond the visible, and confront the nothing that is there. But that’s not just a journey of despair; it’s also a recovery of wonder before the actual world—each grain of sand, and the relations between grains.
In a poem in Windfall Losses—only now do I see the “structure of the wind” in Waldrop’s titles—he calls for a “phenomenology of ignorance,” and in part that’s what this volume is: a beautiful, delicate, and various exploration of the endless (and so objectless) activities of thinking and feeling, the truth always just out of reach. Activity over stasis, but ignorance over false effects. It’s rather surprising that Waldrop—perhaps the most erudite writer I know—should so often avow his ignorance, but that position of unknowing has allowed him to see and sound what would escape the perception of the more egotistical poet. Sometimes reading Waldrop I feel like I’m attending a séance. No ghosts appear, but the mundane objects—both the things words are and the things words describe—start to stir a little, start to glow. “Loved houses are haunted,” ends the poem from A Windmill Near Calvary I quoted above. “And I have / no explanation.” This essay appears as the afterword in Keith Waldrop’s Selected Poems. - Ben Lerner


Keith Waldrop has some affinities with ancient theologians tasked with the impossible proof of God while watching a spider spinning a web: “support for a god or / perch for a bird”. The poems are ruminative and meditative, attentive to things (glockenspiels, sundials, a widow’s walk, Orion, “blob-like clouds”) only to see them effervesce into their associative nets: Whitman meets Kant. At one point he describes his work as a “diary in memory,” and with this generous selection of poems from Waldrop’s long and distinguished career we are fortunate to remember the life he lives (has lived) through language. “I /would never give up anything I have, in /return for mere certainty.”
- Michael Davidson


This gathering of Keith Waldrop’s poems written between 1968-2013 provides point-instants of light–taut messages whose music holds flesh to the bone. Deeply devoted to the local and particular, Waldrop reveals, for instance, the consonance between his home city and the meaning of providence as the doctrine of an election over which one has no control. In these subtle, haunted poems, even punctuation can be transcendently attended through the ear. Reading this taut work filled with wordplay and insight, I recover memory traces present in “a little comma or/slightest/ pause.” This collection is a quiet splendor. - Susan Howe

“Selected Poems by Keith Waldrop gathers work of the quiet major poet and major poet of quiet from between 1968 and 2013. Waldrop never strives; instead, he haunts—his presence is all the more powerful for barely being there, like a ghost discovered in a familiar photograph.”—Alex Crowly

“This big selection reaches back to 1968 and stretches forward into the last few years, making a case for a poet who has penned long sequences, stand-alone lyrics, miniatures reminiscent of Robert Creeley, ambling prose, and verse-chorus-verse song lyrics in the manner of Stephen Sondheim.”—American Poet

“Selected Poems is important evidence of what a long life in poetry, in which “nothing could / possibly be out of the question” (18) because the key questions concern the nature of nothingness itself, can actively bring us back from the waters where nothingness lives, thus bringing that nothingness to life.”—Zach Savich,Jacket2

“Waldrop, winner of the 2009 National Book Award for Transcendental Studies, has long been an important and celebrated figure, both as a poet and translator, in contemporary American avant-garde poetics. This retrospective volume covers a career that spans nearly a half century, running from 1968’s A Windmill Near Calvary to 2013’s The Not Forever. Whether it’s his relatively straightforward early poems (“Money/ is pure spirit. It’s what you convert/ things into so as to carry their/ value without their weight”) or his more multifaceted later work (“as I was/ reading the/ book closed like an eyelid// universe immersed/ in sleep// refined to/ amethyst”), Waldrop’s poetry is grounded against the constantly shifting geometries of an oblique world by quiet traces of memory, ghosts, and a sensitive consciousness. Deploying a great range of formal devices and rhetorical tactics that reflect his work as a translator, teacher, and publisher, Waldrop (who, with his wife, Rosemarie Waldrop, edits Burning Deck books) has established his own brand of semitranscendental ecologically and psychologically astute poetics while displaying a perspective, sense of humor, phrasing, persona, and array of mannerisms that are distinctly American. “I love these wooden houses that/ the rich built, and we live in,” he writes in “Diminished Galleries.” This collection is an excellent introduction to an essential American poet—the “words lost/ in the music” that will leave readers wanting more.”—Publishers Weekly

Whereas, in fact, the
cinnamon bird brings us cinnamon
and we haven’t any idea
where the cinnamon grows.

I only know where it
is I’m looking
from what I’m
looking at. Objects
thin into
etymologies. I see
by getting about. I
remember by wanting

[…]

My knowing with-
draws, unknowable, amid
widening rings of
devastation. A sphere
of torment. Pain
expanding.

[…]

Individual
things are
real enough. It’s only
the sum of things
that’s false.

[…]

Memory
breaks down to
memories.

I cultivate my field of nothingness
a bit extravagantly. (I know the world exists.
I do not know

how the world exists. I do not know how
I know the world exists. Empty mind
is a greedy darkness. Brightness is
all there is. From a bright point
light pulsates, throb after throb, into the
ravening dark.)

Keith Waldrop is not modern. He is a scholastic philosopher living in Providence, Rhode Island, close to the grave of H. P. Lovecraft, familiar with Augustine and Jaspers, Hegel and Barbara Guest, a poet given to the assembly of non sequitur, but not at all aggressive or dogmatic, in fact, a poet of a certain quality of mind that one calls urbane, intelligent, skeptical, observant, conceptual, detached, and learned, but never to the point of strain, given to short lines and clean line-breaks on “the” and “into,” and brief sentences that swerve, so that the non sequitur is never a beak, a blunt disregard but something much more subtle, a straying away into, following the mind where it leads. And quite often, in the Selected Poems, the mind wants to think on the plane of abstract concept, quite often on the plane of observable particulars, sometimes about eternity, or souls, or laws of motion, or bird, or the Emperor of China, or vitreous humor, or “dark spaces,” or sleep and dreams—like a Symbolist, not like a Surrealist—the range of possible thoughts, as Waldrop says of books yet to be written, being infinite. Keith Waldrop is not modern but he spans many traditions, and this is what (how) he is likely to say, in 1983, before I knew him:
The poems seem to come from a man with a taste for byways—theosophy, alchemy, fundamentalist theology in Kansas—in the syntax of “there is” and “it is present,” as brought before the speculative mind, and wondered about. - Mark McMorris


Keith Waldrop includes a quote from Immanuel Kant as an epigraph to his long sequence, “Potential Random,” that captures much of how his poems think:
…in deep sleep, the mind may come closest to
perfecting rational thought. We have no reason for
asserting the opposite, except that when we wake we
do not remember our idea.
First, the notion that there is a “perfect rational thought” that is worthwhile or even meaningful to speak of—this is a fascination Waldrop shares with the German philosopher. But where Kant seems to be deriding the proposition that perfect thought might be attained in sleep, Waldrop indulges it. The poet is less interested in empirical evidence and systematic thinking than he is in dream, wandering, speculation—the spaces between sense, more than sense. “I build houses that I will not inhabit,” he writes in “Poet.”
Waldrop’s poems proceed with caution, pondering their own movement. In “Insisting Objects,” Waldrop writes:
This is a poetics of careful deliberation, aware that language is a container that experience will contort itself to fill. Waldrop has said in interviews that he spends little time writing but tons of time revising. This might be hard to believe when scanning the very long list of his publications, until you attend to the poems, which seem written in geologic time. The poet makes a mark, and then looks at it, hard. What have I done? “Now what / is possible?”
While Waldrop wends through a number of (often surprising, often energetic) poetic forms across his career, he seems to arrive at the guiding epistemology relatively early on. “Keith means ‘wind,’ according / to What to Name a Baby” he writes in “Conversion” in his first book, A Windmill Near Calvary (1968). After this moment in the Selected Poems, Waldrop’s own name and most identifying features are blown away. From the beginning, his poetry is interested in the unknown and unknowable, an active seeking that nonetheless preserves elusion. The only thing that is certain for Waldrop is that things won’t stay the same. “Reality is what does not change,” he writes later in the same poem, “i.e., reality, / is what does not exist, held desperately.”
More than three decades after A Windmill Near Calvary, the speaker of “Potential Random” looks to the sky for answers: “He had been told that the number of stars in the sky, whatever it is, is just the right number.” Soon we realize, though, that whatever that number is, it isn’t. “Hints reach him that stars of an earlier generation, crumbled to dust, haunt all the corridors,” he writes later in the poem. The number of stars in the universe—like the poem and like ourselves—exist in a state of constant change. At the end of a long career, stasis has not lost any of its seduction for Waldrop, who has kept up the endless, iterative process of its renunciation.
In an afterword to the Selected Poems, Ben Lerner summarizes Waldrop in an acute formulation: “a quiet major poet, a major poet of quiet.” This surely describes the atmosphere of much of the work, which elevates quietude, slowness, and care to an aesthetic—and perhaps even ethical—ideal. “Those who roar most loudly rarely sing in time,” Waldrop cautions us in “Doctor Transom, Notes for a Memoir.” He eschews such reckless abandon. But the unique quality of Waldrop’s poetry is that it blends this quietude with humor and song. How refreshing that a poet who at times seems allergic to exuberance can also produce expert doggerel, as in “The Wind Is Laughing,” which opens:
At other times, Waldrop’s humor is subtler, an off-hand absurdity delivered into his collar. “What Herr Stimmung Admires”—a list poem about the protagonist of his book The House Seen From Nowhere (2002), a hapless foil for the poet—ends with goofy bathos; the final thing Herr Stimmung admires is “rolling hard-boiled eggs downhill.”
Emily Dickinson’s funniness and commitment to song are often overshadowed by attention to the mysteries of her abstract philosophical thinking; I worry something similar might happen to Waldrop. And it would seem, in his case, that the stakes are high. What kind of appetite is there among contemporary readers for poetry so committed to abstraction, elusion, and the unknown? “Note also, this poem is quite impersonal,” he writes in “Potential Random.” Not everyone can afford to be impersonal, the feeling is. Not everyone can afford to be quiet. Or to not know.
Will Waldrop, and poets like him, continue to be read? “Think of how many, by now, have escaped the world’s memory,” as he asks us to do in his poem “Tuning.” “To a person so little conscious, what would it mean to die?”
I can’t predict Waldrop’s future readership, though I can attempt to measure the loss were it not sustained. In his long career as a poet—not to mention the jaw-dropping list of his translations (mostly from French, but also from Chinese)—he has insisted on humility in an ongoing secular wandering. “I / would never give up anything I have, in / return for mere certainty,” he writes in Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy, which won the 2009 National Book Award.
Yes, not everyone can afford to be quiet. But, in those who can, is it not surely a virtue? Waldrop’s work also reminds us, over and over, of the spiritual satisfaction of aesthetic pleasure. In an artist statement for an exhibition catalog A Grammar of Collage, he writes of his collage work, “To the extent that there is a purpose to what I do, its end is the ‘enjoyment of a composition.’” Omnidawn has given us a concise and consumable selection from a lifetime of deliberate, pleasurable making—deliberate, pleasurable wandering. Is that not something artists—any artists—ought to celebrate? - Sean Pears

Antiquary

Some people try, before cashing in, to make
their lives into shrines. Mine seems to be turning out,
as predicted, a small provincial museum, the kind
that might have in some corner or other one work
you could be interested in, if you knew it was there.
Memorials and keepsakes hang around, half catalogued. Some
curiosa, here and there a whopper — who else
could maintain a scarlet nose drinking
Dr. Pepper? I have my precedents. Lots of men
shuffle off, leaving a ball of tinfoil too large to get
out of the attic or half a century of the New York Times
or some other mess. I keep everything. Old
gods and old ads fade together; both
show better on a neutral wall. Philosophies, old hat,
catch dust on a rack. The trouble is
I’m a glutton. The floor is cluttered,
the shelves go across the windows. I trip
sometimes over ancient arguments or
a lid I can’t place, or claim two different heads
to be Saint Thomas’s. Nothing, nothing will I
surrender. There is little enough as it is.
I may, of course, croak tomorrow, stumbling
from the larder, but I will not set
my house in order.




Poetry
The Real Subject: Queries and Conjectures of Jacob Delafon, with Sample Poems (Omnidawn, 2004)
The House Seen from Nowhere (Litmus, 2002)
Semiramis, If I Remember (Avec, 2001)
Well Well Reality (Omnidawn, 1998, with Rosmarie Waldrop)
Analogies of Escape (Burning Deck, 1997)
The Silhouette of the Bridge (Avec, 1997)
The Locality Principle (Avec Books, 1995)
Potential Random (Paradigm Press, 1992)
The Opposite of Letting the Mind Wander (Lost Roads, 1990)
Hegel’s Family (Station Hill, 1989)
A Ceremony Somewhere Else (Awede, 1984)
The Space of Half an Hour (Burning Deck, 1983)
The Ruins of Providence (Copper Beech, 1983)
Windfall Losses (Pourboire Press, 1977)
The Garden of Effort (Burning Deck, 1975)
A Windmill Near Calvary (University of Michigan, 1968)

A brief interview with Keith Waldrop (conducted by Rusty Morrison)

It is such an honor to be the publisher of your selected. When you offered Omnidawn this work, I couldn’t believe our great good fortune. In these pages are so many of the poems that are, for me, essential reading; I believe they are essential reading for any poet. And I’m delighted to see in this work a selection of the poems from THE NOT FOREVER, which Omnidawn published in 2013. As I wrote in the book description for that work, “these poems take not only mortality, but also the impossibility of truly assessing mortality, as their endlessly inexplicable subject.” These poems “assess the quintessentially human inability to exact knowledge from the existence that we live, as well as from the inexistence that we each are veering toward.” The poems frightened me, and yet they ‘friend-ed’ me too: they are ferociously generous in their candor. Since those poems offer a reader some of your recent work, can you tell me a little about your intentions for that book?
I think you have gotten the book right. I couldn’t express it better.
Here’s a very wide open question! Is there something you might say about your poems, some sense about them that you might want to express, since this is a selection from all your work?
All my poems are about the self-evident, about the givens of experience, poems of the ground rather than of the figure. They point to transitions, those edges from which we infer things—and a world of things.
(The ground referred to is not the invisible, merely the unseen.)
They assume the truth of Whitehead’s claim (in arguing the kinship of poetry and philosophy): “Our understanding outruns the ordinary usages of words.”
I wonder if you could speak to the ways that individual poems or a series of poems will evolve into a book length work, how a project evolves for you?
By the time I think in terms of a project, that is of a book, many of the poems were either more or less finished or in progress. Or, for a large part, were simply words or phrases that might possibly go somewhere in something I might (eventually) write. Gradually some words gathered into lines and I tried to see where they were leading me and to what extent they might suggest lines, and then poems.
Much of what I collect in this manner is eventually dumped and other parts are put aside for later looks. This sort of thing goes on continually and I have large batches of what may turn out to be used some other time.
I am usually slow about trying to decide what I am actually doing. What I put into files in the computer (I no longer write by hand, because I find it hard to read my handwriting) gets too large, so I often throw out portion. This is not a way I decided to write, it’s simply what I’ve found myself doing. I do occasionally get something down onto paper.
Would you discuss your relationship to revision?
I revise endlessly. Most sections of the ms are umpteenth versions of a text now buried.
I wonder if you’d be willing to share any thoughts about any of the specific works in this selected?
[Analogies of Escape]
Does Analogies of Escape answer Claude Royet-Journoud’s question, “will we escape analogy”? Does it not rather use that famous line as the enigma for a set of variations—a theme always there, under the interplay of verse and prose, but never actually sounded? The author of these “analogies,” in any case, finds all analogies, all answers, questionable.
[Haunt]
Words are haunted by, for instance, meaning. The first section of this book proposes on a disproportionate scale, assuming (with Whitehead) that “the primary function of a proposition is to be relevant as a lure for feeling.” Words here are decoys, hoping to entice the real thing within range. The second section is elegiac. The third tries—skeptically—to follow certain words to their own haunts.
[Transcendental Studies]
In Transcendental Studies, I have tried to reach what is beyond my grasp—not heaven, of course, but unnoticed possibilities of our own world. Or, even, impossibilities (which would include, I suppose, heaven).
I have used collage as one means of reaching out, getting immediately past my first reactions and best intentions. But the collage elements are, in this book, merely elements. I have shifted them, added, changed.
“Falling in Love While Asleep” is the thematic center of the book, with its emphasis on “the edge that… defines… a surface,” while “A Picture Postcard of the Queen of Sheba” examines such a surface. The collection is framed by a vision of Darwin’s “Archipelago”—where oceanic uncertainty washes around a few solid statements—and “The Untold Witch,” an almost abstract love poem.
Would you note any authors with whom you feel a kinship? Were there any authors whose work influenced your more recent writings? &/or Who are you reading currently?
A difficult question. Pound was very important to me for a long time. Also H.D. One of the last courses I gave before my (fairly recent) retirement was on Beckett, several of whose plays I have produced and played in. Also I have learned something from certain French poets (whose work, in some cases I have been much involved in translating). I’m not sure how much that is relevant to this particular question.
Would you tell me a bit about yourself? Anything you are willing to share that might not be in your short bio that is published in the book?
Just at the moment, nothing that I can think of.
You generously let us use one of your gorgeous collages for the cover image of this book. In so many ways, the image speaks for itself. If you’d like to comment on the choice, I’d love to hear. But mostly I want to thank you for letting us use it. - www.omnidawn.com/product/selected-poems/





Keith Waldrop, Several Gravities, Ed. by Robert Seydel, Siglio, 2017. 

http://sigliopress.com/book/several-gravities/


For nearly four decades, Keith Waldrop has been creating a lyrical body of visual art that mirrors his extraordinary oeuvre of poetry, fiction, and translation. Like his collage poems, Waldrop’s visual works are enveloped in quiet tensions and ghosted impressions. They construct densities of atmosphere and architecture, drift and dream. Rich in textual and visual play, romantic and contradictory in their shapings, his collages use traces of memory to gesture toward the absent and the invisible.
Edited and with an essay by Robert Seydel, Several Gravities features a substantial selection of these radiant collages in a full color, hardcover edition, and includes a previously unpublished serial poem as well as an essay by Waldrop that enunciates the relationship between this author’s distinctive visual and poetic practices.



With candles burning in devotional space and stairs leading to inked occult openings, Several Gravities brilliantly documents the “potential random” so generative to Keith Waldrop’s wizardry as visual artist, prose stylist, and master poet. Whatever he compels—or compels him—is living, shining, astonishing.—PETER GIZZI





This juxtaposition of prose commentary, verse and collage is a fascinating and illuminating work in itself. Several Gravities also serves as a bright window onto the landscape of Keith Waldrop’s poetics and creative life. It is suffused with his ineffable mix of gentle irony, humor and incisiveness, a tonal palette I have much admired across the decades of his deeply imaginative engagement with poetry, prose, drama and the visual arts.—MICHAEL PALMER




Keith Waldrop talks with host Charles Bernstein about growing up in Kansas, the influence of Christianity on his poetry and his work as a translator:


http://artonair.org/show/keith-waldrop-conversation










KEITH WALDROP (b. 1932, Emporia, Kansas) is the author of over two dozen works of poetry and prose, an eminent translator, and with wife Rosmarie Waldrop, founding editor of the influential and innovative Burning Deck Press. His trilogy of collage poems Transcendental Studies (UC Press, 2009) received the National Book Award for Poetry, for which he was also nominated for his first book A Windmill Near Calvary. For his lifetime contribution to French literature, Waldrop received the rank of Chevalier des arts et des lettres from the French government. Publishers Weekly has written that Waldrop is “one of the most important writers, translators, and publishers of avant-garde literature in our time.” He is currently the Brooke Russell Astor Professor of the Humanities at Brown University.

Anouck Durand, Eternal Friendship, Trans. by Elizabeth Zuba with an introduction by Eliot Weinberger, Siglio Press, 2017.


Winner of the French Voices Award for excellence in publishing and translation!

Albania and China? Comrades? Who knew? A timely book about dictatorships, propaganda and friendship. Imagine Art Spiegelman meets Chris Marker, told in gorgeous “tricolor” photography, a knock out! —Richard McGuire


When the Nazis invaded Albania, young partisan Refik Veseli and his Muslim family hid Jewish photographer Mosha Mandil and his wife, while Mosha’s two small children posed as Refik’s siblings. Despite the dire circumstances, Mosha instilled in Refik a great passion for photography and a friendship was forged in the crucible of war. After liberation, the Mandils left for Israel, inviting Refik to join them, but he stayed behind to contribute to his new nation, not knowing that he would never see his dear friend again. 
Artist-writer Durand begins the story decades later in 1970, when Refik, having risen in the ranks as a state photographer, is allowed to travel to China and attempts to mail Mosha a letter, free of the Albanian censors. 
In a deft construction of the fictional, personal and historical, Durand imagines Refik’s voice and inhabits private thoughts that seem haunted by the specter of surveillance. With nuance and restraint, she weaves his story of enduring friendship with Mosha into another in which the blunt alteration of history and extraordinary acts of censorship take place on a grand scale, as two ostracized regimes—China and Albania—attempt and ultimately fail to embrace. 
In Eternal Friendship, the obscured path is the most revelatory, images that seem to have one message have many, and photography—used at the behest of merciless state powers—becomes a tool for resistance, liberation and human connection.

The happy social-realist people of Enver Hoxja’s Albanian utopia, like other smiling citizens photographed in the Stalinist empire, look sincere in retrospect. For me, they are exuding nostalgia for a childhood inhabited by the official happiness of people caught in the long exposures of my mother’s photoshop. We lived in a similarly symbolic world, but now, after decades of war and irruptions of tribal bloodshed, I can weep for something so benign-looking. Anouck Durand has managed to create an ambiguity of her own in the very bosom of artifice, with words and photographs that reveal only now, in our shaky present, the dark side of the ordered delirium of an orwellian world.  —Andrei Codrescu


A graphic poem, a photo novel, an archive-based comic book — Eternal Friendship is a rare juxtapositional mix of genre and media, such that history, the history of ideas, and the bodies that mediate both are captured with tone-perfect temporal lucidity. —Christian Hawkey


Pariah nations often develop a cynical affinity for one another. When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, your only hope for a partner is with another outcast state. North Korea has no friends in the G20, and so Kim Jong-un must extend his pudgy hand to fellow dictators in Burundi, Zimbabwe, and Syria. No one else will have him. Stranger bedfellows have enjoyed brief hook-ups in global politics. During the 1970s, for instance, as much of the world was shunning Israel and South Africa, they allied, gradually and then closely, and shared nuclear secrets. If others won’t let you into their club, you may have to start your own.
The odd couple in Eternal Friendship, a non-fiction graphic novel, is the People’s Republic of Albania and the People’s Republic of China. The time is 1970, when the leaders of both nations—Enver Hoxha and Mao Zedong—were desperate for aid in developing their back-ward, struggling rural economies. In 1961 Albania severed ties with its former sponsor, the U.S.S.R.; and China soon did the same. They couldn’t afford to be that choosy. Neither country had any support in the anti-Communist West either. Their public expression to the world of “Eternal Friendship” masked the abject convenience of the marriage.
Against this historical backdrop, the French artist Anouck Durand reconstructs the story of the photographer Refik Veseli, a Muslim Albanian, and his fellow photographers (men and women) during their four-month visit to Peking (as Beijing was then called.) As he died in 2000, before she could interview him, the words that Veseli speaks here are from her own imagination. It is therefore fiction but based on documentary facts.
The Chinese had invited this contingent in the mistaken belief that they could sell the dirt-poor Albanians their ridiculously clumsy and outmoded tri-chrome process: a way to produce color prints from black-and-white film. As the Albanian photographers were already printing in color and quite satisfied with Kodak Ektacolor film, when they could obtain this capitalist product, the purpose of the trip was a non-starter.
Events are told in the first person, through Veseli’s eyes. His imagined words are used as captions for archival color and black-and-white documents of the period—the postcards, posters, official news photos and reports generated by the governments of Albania and China; and the snapshots, photo-collages, and hand-written letters saved by the Albanian participants on this trip. The intercutting between these two visual rhetorics—the bombastic propaganda of totalitarian states, and the more tentative, personal imagery of individuals—reinforces the theme of the book.
The iconography of Communism was uniform over many decades, regimes, and continents: its photographs or illustrations pictured a smiling populace eager to take up arms; bountiful wheat harvests; sturdy new infrastructure (factories, docks, iron bridges) and lots of lethal weapons, preferably missiles on parade along immaculate boulevards. Albanian and Chinese propaganda were strikingly similar, both borrowing from the symbolism produced in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Color photographic prints of the period, in every country, what-ever its politics, tended to be oversaturated or out-of-register, adding to the campiness of these staged scenarios.
The story of Veseli’s life isn’t larky fiction, however, and the details that he relates about the perils of daily existence under Communism are all too familiar. He is terrified of his own government. In a series of panels, he speaks of the “stains” on one’s record (having a relative who did fight for the Albanian Communists during WWII, or who has a link the Russian “imperialists”) that can lead to a jailing—or worse. He is equally aware of brutal scrutiny by his Chinese hosts. After asking an innocent question of a woman guide, he senses that he has said something wrong and never sees her again. Security protocol before a visit with Mao dictates that cameras be disassembled to make sure they don’t contain explosive devices.
Three-quarters of the way through the book, Durand switches gears and takes us from Mao’s China, back to Europe during WWII. This lurching transition concerns Veseli’s friendship with Mosha Mandil, a Jewish photographer who was hidden (along with his two children) from the Nazis by Veseli’s family in 1943. Mandil had survived and emigrated to Israel.
The hinge in the narrative that suddenly carries us into the past is a letter that Veseli, during his visit to Peking, wants to send to his friend Mandil. He believes it has a better chance of finding its way to Israel uncensored if posted in China rather than in Albania. Another Albanian photographer, heading home, is enlisted to mail it during transit, in Moscow. The innocuous document—purely a message of friendship, as we read—is nonetheless loaded with potential dynamite. If read by a government official, Veseli or his friend could end up in prison.
This is the dramatic highlight of the China portion of the book. It ends, as Durand carries us into the future toward the inevitable dissolution, in 1978, of the eternal bonds of friendship between Albania and China. A 24-page “Letter from the Central Committee of the Party of Labor of Albania” makes it official.
Enmity soon replaces handshakes. Photographic evidence that the two countries were ever at all close is destroyed. Durand presents us with prints where the faces were scratched out of group portraits. Documents had to be shredded. It is only by chance that the personal photographs from the China trip survive: one of Veseli’s colleagues, Pleurat Solo, was put in prison in 1984 for “pornography” (he had photographed an actress in the nude.) The authorities burned his entire professional archive but were unaware of his family album, which contained the pictures that appear in this book. Without these accidental records of a forgotten episode in 20th century history, no one would be the wiser.
In telling this story, perhaps because she confined herself to working with found materials, Durand has skillfully avoided a number of visual clichés about China during the Maoist era. Red is an accent color in these pages rather than pervasive, as in a poignant photograph of Veseli and a colleague visiting an elementary school. They tower over the children, each dutifully clutching the little red book of the Chairman’s sayings. We learn that Veseli runs a photo studio in Tirana, the Albanian capital. The glowingly wholesome color portraits he composes (and retouches) for his middle-class clientele add another layer to his biography, and may be seen here as its own kind of disinformation. Photography in this book obfuscates as much as it illumines.
The year 1970 in retrospect marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War. The fear that monolithic Communism would conquer the world was already fading. Nixon’s epochal visit to China was only two years away, and the country was charting its own course. “As a Marxist-Leninist party, the Chinese Communist Party is not at all afraid of being isolated, and will never be isolated,” Mao boasted.
The title of the book underlines its theme. The conclusion—that totalitarian states can never be friends with each other for long, whereas ties of love and respect between individuals can survive the worst forms of systematic oppression—may be too heart-warming and pat for some readers.
Tales of moral courage are uncommon, however, and the shared heritage of Muslims and Jews, both targets of historic persecution, is too often overlooked, even in the vast literature of the Holocaust. The final pages of the book reproduce a letter from 1987 in which one of Mandil’s children nominates Veseli’s family to Yad Veshem in Israel for being “righteous among nations” in risking their lives to save complete strangers from the Nazis. As he notes here, of 120 Jews exiled from Yugoslavia during WWII, none “failed to find shelter within the Albanian local population, whether with poor villagers or with owners of estates and manor houses.”
If we hadn’t realized it earlier, this section makes it clear that we’re reading this story only because some people chose to behave honorably and to value friendship above all else.
In the last pages of Eternal Friendship. Durand cites (and thanks) all of the people who contributed archival material for her touching and original book—a reminder that writing and preserving history is always a collaborative effort. - Richard B. Woodward  collectordaily.com/anouck-durand-eternal-friendship/

Liliana Colanzi, Our Dead World, Dalkey Archive Press, Trans. by Jessica Sequiera, 2017.


A young woman suffers a mental breakdown because of her repressive and religious mother. A group of children is fascinated by the sudden death of a friend. A drug trafficking couple visits Paris at the same time as a psychopathic cannibal. A mysterious wave travels through a university campus, driving students to suicide. A photographer witnesses a family’s surface composure shatter during a portrait session. A worker on Mars sees ghostly animals in the desert and longs for an impossible return to Earth. A plastic surgeon botches an operation and hides on a sugar cane plantation where indigenous slavery is practiced.
Horror and the fantastic mark the unstable realism of Our Dead World, in which altered states of consciousness, marginalized peoples, animal bodies, and tensions between tradition and modernity are recurring themes. Liliana Colanzi’s stories explore those moments when the civilized voice of the ego gives way to the buzzing of the subconscious, and repressed indigenous history destabilizes the colonial legacy still present in contemporary Latin America.


The real and the unreal merge in this latest collection by a young Bolivian writer.
A young girl discovers that a schoolmate has died of an asthma attack. “The funeral is at seven,” her mother says, instructing Elsa, the family’s nanny/maid, to have the girl ready by then. “Elsa, I asked as she braided my hair, where do the dead go? The dead never go, she answered me, her mouth full of bobby pins.” At the funeral, the girl and her classmates gather before the coffin. Then, suddenly, “the hall, people, coffin, flowers, our own astonished bodies, everything levitated in a single iridescent shaft of light.” So ends “Alfredito,” the second story in Colanzi’s (Permanent Vacation, 2010) latest book. It’s a telling moment in what is anything but a conventional collection of stories. In “Cannibal,” a man waits for his drug-trafficking girlfriend in a Paris bar. In “Story with Bird,” a disgraced surgeon hides out on a country estate run by slave labor. In story after story, the everyday ends up merging, one way or another—by sloping gently or by veering suddenly—with the otherworldly or the absurd or the untethered or some combination of these. There is no way to predict what is coming. As soon as you’ve found a foothold in Colanzi’s world, her rules of engagement will suddenly shift. “Our Dead World” ends in a line of verse; neither that story nor “Story with Bird” ends with a period, never mind a complete sentence. “Family Portrait” shifts rapidly between various points of view. Colanzi is an original talent with an utterly unique vision. Still, this slim collection doesn’t entirely satisfy. Colanzi might strip the rug out from beneath your feet, but then she seems to falter. So what, you might wonder. What comes next? Maybe her next book will satisfy more fully.
An unpredictable, formally inventive collection of stories still leaves something wanting. - Kirkus Reviews


The eight short-yet-powerful stories that make up this collection reveal an intriguing new voice in translated fiction, in general, and speculative fiction, in particular. Each piece is unnerving in its own unique way, whether it deals with a lonely colony on Mars, a a psychopathic cannibal in Paris, or a girl pushed into a nervous breakdown by her fanatical mother. And while some of these stories skirt the boundaries of “speculative fiction,” they all hold up a warped mirror to reality, inviting us to question how we perceive that very reality every day.
One main theme running through Our Dead World is the collision between the natural/ordinary and the unnatural/bizarre/unexplained. A colonist on Mars sees deer running past, a group of children experience the shock of a friend’s death, a young boy may or may not have been taken by aliens with the coming of a meteorite, a girl senses a strange “wave” that drives people to commit suicide. Colanzi’s narrative voice is perfectly poised and unapologetically mischievous, refusing to let the reader guess what twists and turns may lie ahead.
Of these eight stories, my favorites have to be “Meteorite” and “Our Dead World.” The former opens with a brilliant paragraph reminiscent of the start of Wells’s The War of the Worlds:
The meteoroid traced the same orbit in the solar system for fifteen million years until the movement of a comet pushed it toward Earth. Even so, it took another twenty thousand more years before it collided with the planet, during which time the world passed through an ice age, mountains shifted and the waves gave landmasses a new shape. Innumerable life forms died out forever, while others battled ferociously, adapted and repopulated Earth. When the object at last entered the atmosphere, the pressure of the shock reduced it to an explosion of blazing fragments that were consumed before they hit the ground. The essence of the meteorite survived the violent disintegration; the igneous ball, a meter and a half in diameter, fell on the outskirts of San Borja. Its spectacular descent from the heavens was witnessed by a couple at home, arguing at five-thirty in the morning.” (39)
The narrative lens zooms us in toward this arguing couple along the same trajectory as the meteorite, as if we readers are the meteorite, falling to Earth an an incredible speed toward a specific point. Once it “collides” with the Earth, though, the narrative speed slows down drastically, as we jump into the mind of one man (Ruddy) whose insomnia and hyperactivity, caused by diet pills, are making him irritable and paranoid. Soon we learn about the young boy who had only recently begun working at Ruddy’s farm and was seriously injured. The boy’s earlier comments about fire coming out of the sky and his own “gifts” take on a whole new meaning once the meteorite hits and the boy disappears.
In “Our Dead World,” a woman fleeing from painful memories on Earth begins seeing visions while helping set up a colony on Mars. After one colonist commits suicide, she starts to understand just how alone she and her colleagues really are. Woven in with her thoughts about the mission are the woman’s memories of her pregnancy and painful breakup back home. Hope and despair intertwine in this piece and leave the reader with more questions than answers. - Rachel Cordasco


On her Twitter feed Liliana Colanzi describes herself as a paranormal investigator. If when reading that you think of someone wearing a grey jumpsuit who tears around New York in pursuit of supernatural ghouls well then sorry you are in for a disappointment. Liliana Colanzi’s stories are much more subtle and have far more substance than that.
 The first story in the collection “The Eye” sets the tone. The main character is a teenage girl who must endure the attention of her overly religious mother. Try as she might her mother’s presence hovers over her life. She conforms with the expectations forced upon her. Meanwhile her university professor tells her to learn to disobey. Her rebellion comes in the form of an act of defilement with a fellow student who had previously rejected her.
Something moves beneath the surface of each of these stories. Something which is not quite tangible but which for the protagonist, deeply disturbing. An unknown, unseen, force which transcends both time and space and moves the story toward its inevitable conclusion. 
In “Cannibal” a couple trafficking drugs arrive in Paris the same time that a cannibal is loose in the city. The young woman, Vanessa, goes missing and the unnamed narrator is left worrying about her fate. Based on past experiences he imagines what Vanessa is up to and her inevitable fate. In the process, he reveals a secret from his own past. Meanwhile reports on the news continually run stories of the cannibal on the loose in Paris.
Undoubtedly these stories are South American in character. Native culture interacts with the cosmopolitan 21st century and is denigrated without its influence being clearly acknowledged.
“The Wave” relates the story of a young woman from Bolivia who’s studying in Cornell University. Her mother phones with the news that her father, now ill, has fallen and injured himself. The woman begins her journey back to Santa Cruz the city to which she said she’d never return.  The Wave in question is a rather disturbing force which moves relentlessly through the World leaving malevolence in its wake.
“From my porch I could see the Wave embracing the city with its long pale arms. The whiteness refracted all visions, amplifying the voices of the dead and the tracks of deer migrating toward the false safety of the forest.”
Any Cop?: The unknown, the mysterious, the other is present in each of the stories in this collection. This collection is hard to categorise, not quite magical realism it transcends both realism and fantasy. Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi has an utterly unique voice, and one which is destined for further success. - bookmunch.wordpress.com/


​It’s time for my first Latin American choice of this Spanish Lit Month: a collection of short stories by the young Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi, published by Dalkey Archive in a smart translation by Jessica Sequeira. These stories inhabit a place where the line between the real and the supernatural stretches thin; they’re animated by the existential tension that this implies.
In ‘Meterorite’, ranch owner Ruddy has trouble sleeping, a side-effect of his weight loss pills. He has plenty to occupy his mind, too – not least paying off the mother of the peasant boy he took on, who was then kicked in the head by a cow that Ruddy had shot. The boy’s mother said he could “speak with higher beings”; in the days before his injury, the boy had declared that “a fire would appear in the sky to take him away”. Superstitious nonsense, thinks Ruddy – yet, on the night of this story, he believes that he sees the kitchen door move by itself; and there is the meteoroid, burning up in the sky after travelling here for thousands of years. Ruddy is so worked up that it hardly matters to him whether there’s some supernatural agency at work – nor does it matter to the story, which builds up like a storm, then breaks with dread and fury.
Colanzi’s stories tiptoe back and forth across the line between real and supernatural, merrily smudging it at times. ‘Alfredito’ revolves around the death of the narrator’s schoolfriend. The whole concept of Alfredito being dead feels profoundly wrong to her:
And now I had to get used to the monstrous idea of Alfredito’s dead body, prepared to occupy its place in the cemetery, where it would begin its slow journey to putrefaction. Alfredito, I realized, was no longer the boy running in the countryside with arms outstretched, but was now something else. Would his parents be afraid of his body? Would they be able to touch it, to kiss it?
“The dead never leave,” says the narrator’s nana; and, throughout the story, Alfredito’s death is never presented as completely final, because the narrator won’t countenance it. We are introduced to a whole cast of friends and family, enough for a novel, in the space of a few pages. This narrative density gives the tale a heightened energy that carries the reader along, and might even allow an impossible door to open…
In ‘Cannibal’, a couple arrive in Paris to the news that a notorious cannibal is also present in the city, somewhere. The pair are here for an illicit liaison; but first one of them, Vanessa, has some drugs to take to a party. The entire story is told from the viewpoint of Vanessa’s lover, who stays in the hotel, thoughts churning around in his mind. His fears over what might happen to Vanessa fold back into his anxieties about their relationship, and he becomes effectively a cannibal of his own thoughts. This story won the Aura Estrada Prize in 2015, and it’s not hard to see why.
The title story of Our Dead World seems to me to tie the collection together. Its protagonist, Mirka, has taken a lifetime contract with the Martian Lottery, working on the colony for the next round of inhabitants. She has left behind her partner Tommy, but their old life won’t let go of her so easily. Neither will Earth itself: she keeps hallucinating the presence of deer and other animals on Mars. In this story, you have the mingling of real and supernatural; prose woven into a dense tapestry (dialogue between Mirka and Tommy is embedded within the Mars-set text); and a concern with human emotions (the title ‘Our Dead World’ could refer as easily to Mirka’s relationship with Tommy as to Earth or Mars).
I’ve enjoyed reading Colanzi’s stories in this collection, and I hope there will be more to come in English translation. - David Hebblethwaite         


For a time, while living in New York in my twenties, Carl Jung’s Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies was consistent livre de chevet. The symbolic value that Jung assigned UFO’s in his relatively straightforward historical record of mysterious things seen in the sky held a complicated double significance for me. Weekends as a child spent camping at Table Rock Lake in Missouri, a place marked by urban legend as a notorious hotbed of UFO activity, primed me to take pleasure in fantasizing about the terrible sublimity of the potential of intelligent alien life. It was a heady combination of beauty and fear, contemplated while trembling inside a flashlight-illuminated tent.
EYE: “Loss of the eye or loss of sight can lead to something healing or creative, to the opening of clairvoyance, to the ‘third eye’ of ‘inner sight,’ transpersonal awareness,” writes Bruce Marshall in The Human Body: The Eye, Window to the World. But in Lilana Colanzi’s story “The Eye,” in which a young woman emotionally abused by her religious mother a la Carrie forces herself to vomit an eyeball into a toilet, the new vision the eye portends seems anything but a gift. “She used her fingers to spit up a bitter liquid that burned her throat, but relief was some time in coming. From the toilet bowl, emerging in the middle of a bubble of vomit, she saw it appear. The Eye. It was missing an eyelid, but in the dark blue iris the girl recognizes the gaze – mocking? threatening? – of her mother. The Eye – was it possible? – smiled.” She thinks The Eye is an omen for something, or a signal. Perhaps for the end of the world. Later on she almost has a sexual encounter with a boy in a movie theater that is instead interrupted by a spiritual awakening. She has opened herself up to the enemy and finally understands her purpose, which is mixed up with a homegrown eschatology: “The Eye had disappeared, and in her bones the girl could feel the crackle of the first balls of fire setting off towards Earth. She had begun.”
A second and more immediate meaning for an almost devotional reading of the book came from my having recently returned from military service, which included two deployments to Iraq. Jung argues that what the historical phenomenon of UFO sightings portend is an act of cosmic synchronicity. People see saucers, or flying golden discs, or “chariots of the gods” when there’s some kind of vast, incomprehensible harmony between inner and outer states. A sign of synchronicity. Simultaneously, Jung wrote, they also symbolize the collective advancement through a liminal state and into a new world. He took the modern infatuation with UFOs as a symptom of our moving together into the Age of Aquarius (his words, not mine). And so for a year or so Jung’s little book on UFOs sat on my nightstand, the odd and optimistic symbol of my own passage into what I hoped would be a brand new world of civilian identity. A personal jubilee in which a radical rebalancing of force and energy would be achieved.
METEORITE: Colanzi’s story “Meteorite” is about a flabby, diet-pill addicted rancher who is confronted by the strange energies of both alien life and his peasant workers. A comet portends the strange events — which include spectral invaders and death —- at the beginning, as it did for the three wise men, Julius Caesar, the Norman invasion, and Montezuma. “The meteoroid traced the same orbit in the solar system for fifteen million years until the movement of a comet pushed it towards Earth. Even so, it took another twenty thousand more years before it collided with this planet, during which time the world passed through an ice age, mountains shifted and the waves gave landmasses a new shape. Innumerable life forms died out forever, while others battled ferociously, adapted, and repopulated Earth. When the object at least entered the atmosphere, the pressure of the shock reduced it to an explosion of flaming fragments that were consumed before they hit the ground.” And then a boy dies after a cow kicks him. Or aliens abduct him.
Lilana Colanzi’s collection of short stories, Our Dead World, lucidly translated from Spanish by Jessica Sequiera, sunk me deeply back into the more primal fears of my younger self, half awake and dreaming in the fire light, where UFOs weren’t odd gestures of a grand symbolic unity, but simply mysterious invaders from the unknown. The oldest dynamic of any invasion played out simultaneously in registers both majestic banal: the one where the mystery that the invaders bring renders you mysterious to yourself.

WAVE: The Rig Veda relates the mystery of waves to the question of a prime mover:
There was neither non-existence nor existence
Then; there was neither the realm of space nor
The sky which is beyond. What stirred? Where?
In whose protection? Was there water, bottomless deep?

The wave is emblematic of movement itself. In “The Wave,” the annual wave of suicides on campus corresponds with a young writer’s return home overseas. On the way home, a cab driver tells her an amazing story that both reaffirms and recontextualizes her metaphysical ache: “There, beneath the golden light, was the house of my childhood. The clouds peeling away in tatters. The long journey. The old Dream. The Wave suspended over the horizon, at the beginning and ending of all things, waiting. My worn-out heart, shivering, trembling with love.”
Colanzi’s work moves in the opposite direction of Jung’s in every way, both stylistically and in meaning. Instead of incorporating fringe events — maybe called miracles in other contexts — into a unified theory of the symbolic nature of human consciousness, Colanzi’s work disintegrates our faith in the existence of a coherent reality itself. Colanzi works in horror, and that’s exactly what horror is supposed to do. It acts as a rejoinder to the Apollonian faith in our role as curators of a universe that naturally replicates a cogent order. Horror shows us this order infiltrated and broken down, the cosmic balance out of sync, and the total inability of the intellect to pierce the decay of meaning. In this sense, horror is a metaphysical humility.
CASKET: Not just a casket, but a child’s casket. Penny Colman tells us that before boxes were used to bury the dead, bodies were just wrapped in cloth or animal skins. Sometimes nothing at all. The casket is supposed to be something more permanent, a cross between a vessel and an abode. Built for mysterious movement inside of a cold permanence. “Alfredito” is the strongest story in this collection. Children learn about death not through the passing of an adult, who is a stranger anyways, but through the death of one of their own. A school friend. Anyone who had a friend die as a child understands the way that the presence and absence of the departed blend to create a third energy. The funeral scene in “Alfredito” is a triumph of mystical rhetoric that crescendos in a Catholic satori: “At that moment, the neon cross above us twinkled with the intensity of a diamond. The hall, people, coffins, flowers, our own astonished bodies, everything levitated in a single iridescent shaft of light. It was like our lives departed from us a moment to rise in shining vision, which left us inundated and overflowing.”
So Colanzi’s stories work within a genre that resists intellectual systemization, but her powers aren’t bound up within the genre alone. Many writers use the clichés of their genre like training wheels, making up for a lack of individual talent by leaning heavily on commonly recurring characteristics: the cowboy slinks away to another plateau after saving the day, the child accepts the supernatural threat long before the adults, human political constructs are mirrored in those of extraterrestrial cultures. Half of genre fiction writes itself. So maybe in Colanzi’s case it’s more accurate to say that she’s a writer of literature who works in a horror idiom. And though she has all the markings of being able to fit snugly within au courant political categories (she’s a young Bolivian woman currently living in the United States who writes from that perspective) her power as an artist derives from something deeper than either her identity or medium. Or maybe it’s better to say that both are subsumed by her talent and transformed. Her real genius doesn’t derive from either of these things, but more from the Keatsian negative capability to unweave the anodyne and assemble its spent threads in a disturbing pile, perhaps still half-recognizable from childhood. - Scott Beauchamp 


As I said the other week , I have been adding a few new titles from my own money to the tbr pile , this is a new writer from Bolivia , I was attracted by the fact there has been so little lit from the country , Liliana Colanzi is  writer , journalist and editor . She currently lives in New York this is her third collection of stories and the first to be tranalstated into English by her
She ran to the bathroom, hoisted her foot on the toilet bowl and lifted up her skirt . She took the razor and without breathing made a crosswise cut on her thigh where some old scars were fading , she gave herself three ,four ,five quick slaps on the face until the bathroom mirror returned an image of burning cheeks . Then she tucked her hair behind her ears a, cleaned the blood from her thigh with a piece of toilet paper, flushed it away and went back to bed , where she stayed reading Maira Dimma’s The marvelous Secret of the souls in Purgatory until she fell asleep.
A girl marks herself in the opening story of the collection
Now this is a strange collection of short stories , mostly all have a hint of  sci-fi in there  nature , I was reminded in part of Early Murakami and other writers  . It has a mix of real and surreal worlds touching. A wave in one story comes across a university coming across making the students kill them selves, this is stories about stories . A man on Mars see ghostly animals in the desert of Mars as memories of his home on earth surface . , a family gather for that yearly photo and sparks fly . A dead youngster is being buried and a daughter and her  religious mother discuss what happens after you die  . A couple on the run in Paris run into a killer as they  arrive in the city , but are they to be dinner .
The day we arrived in Paris the police confirm the cannibal is hiding in the city. He lands on a commercial flight and the airport cameras show him passing through security controls, barely disguised in a copper coloured wig. He wears a Mickey mouse T-Shirt and has a distinct beauty and fragility that makes him look like an adolescent rock star than a butcher. It’s May and raining and from the seventh floor of the hotel the streets of Paris look like an Ocean off moving heads with colourful umbrellas floating here and there.
A couple in Paris the same time as a potential killer .
This is a short collection of eight stories that mix real life and magical realism.But also a future that could be where creatures have gone and come back in ghostly views , echos of Amazion Indian  powers and magic. I felt this is a nice short taster of what could be a new voice from her country , has already won a major prize for Spanish female writers under 35 .This is a writer trying out styles  a mix of everyone from Classic JG Ballard with the sense of abandon worlds and Murakami earlier works , where explained things happen this crops up in Colanzis work like in Early Murakami books . Also a nod to Borges this is a collection from upcoming new writer .A collection you can read in an evening . - winstonsdad


In 1940, Maria Simma, then aged twenty-five, awoke to an apparition. A man was pacing at the foot of her bed. She attempted to speak to him but he remained silent. She tried to seize him but found herself grasping air. With admirable equanimity, she returned to bed; the man disappeared.
The next day, Maria visited her parish priest, who identified the visitor as a soul from Purgatory and instructed her to ask of any future spirit, “What do you need of me?” That night, the same man returned and Maria, in another remarkable display of sangfroid, attended to the plan. In response to her question, the man informed her how to reduce his time in purgatory (three holy Masses for his intentions) and departed. Maria went on to serve other purgatorial petitioners in a similar way.
Early in Liliana Colanzi’s new short story collection, Our Dead World, a young woman reads Maria Simma’s The Marvelous Secret of the Souls in Purgatory. It’s a propitious reference. Throughout this book Colanzi masterfully explores liminal states – not just the intersection of this world and the next but the boundaries of the earthly, animal, human, cosmic, and spiritual.
The story Alfredito slips disconcertingly between these domains. It begins with an image of brutal violence as the narrator observes her neighbour killing a pig, “battering the creature with blows of his hammer”. She then discovers that her schoolfriend, the Alfredito of the title, has died and wonders “Where could Alfredito be? In Heaven or Hell, or maybe his spirit was wandering through the world?” but soon matter-of-factly describes his “body … beginning to decompose and feed the worms”. The story then pivots when another friend reveals that “(l)ast night Alfredito appeared to me” and relates how she questioned the ghost. He, unlike Maria Simma’s interlocutor, declared “I’m coming back” and the story culminates in a scene of mystery, hope, and expectation.
Such intimations of the numinous recur throughout these stories but are destabilised by the circumstances of their reception. Colanzi’s characters are often under intense psychic pressure and mentally disintegrating in response to societal, familial, or historical pressures. “The Eye”, which opens the collection, focuses on a young woman who lives with a religious and authoritarian mother, amid “dolls – gifts from her mother that she didn’t dare throw out”. This woman suffers the ignominy of her mother’s close surveillance, not least the sniffing of fingers and underwear, and descends into self-harm. Her university offers no sanctuary, intensifying the pressure by reinforcing female subjugation; a male professor callously dismisses her diligence with advice that she should “learn how to disobey” and mercilessly gives her a “mediocre mark”. Graffiti in a bathroom stall read like a condensed social-media feed and push her further beyond the edge of reason:
Slut whoever reads this long live pee-pee Yeni sees visions FEMEN long live MOVEMENT FOR SOCIALISM free, beautiful and mad women I’M GOING TO KILL YOU MISERABLE SLUT.
She becomes increasingly delusional and pursues a final act of debasement with a male classmate who had earlier betrayed her. This happens in a cinema where “on the screen a woman howled, dragged beneath a madly advancing mechanical reaper, her guts flying to one side”, and she has a vision of the “gears of a great destruction … set in motion”, “the end of days”, a perverse revelation.
Domestic oppression pervades this collection. In “Family Portrait”, an extended family gathers for a formal photograph, observed by a photographer and his assistant. When the assistant suggests “(l)ife must not be so bad if you have family”, the photographer responds contemptuously. This is a study of deepening misery across three generations – a severe and disciplinarian grandmother, her damaged and violent son and her alienated and repressed grandson. The grandmother has been rendered insensate by a fall, for which her son might bear some guilt. Colanzi interrupts the third-person narrative with the son’s piercing internal monologue. She dispenses with commas and full-stops to convey the urgency of thought:
no one knows what it was like living without a husband and without a peso the only thing we had was discipline and without her I wouldn’t be who I am … love is tough that was always her motto and now I know she’s right
When the third-person narrative returns, the gathering descends rapidly towards violence. The photographer’s assistant bolts from the scene.
That internal monologue is one of many formal techniques that Colanzi employs in pursuit of emotional intensity. From her wide repertoire of devices, her use of Beckett-like parataxis is particularly effective in turning the psychological screw. The story “Our Dead World” intertwines a first-person narrative of exile on Mars with paratactic remembrances of the tragic circumstances that preceded the journey, while the complex and brilliant “The Wave” – much of which is a fable told within a story within the story – uses the same technique to achieve a resonant ending:
There, beneath the golden light was the house of my childhood. The clouds peeling away in tatters. The long journey. The old Dream. The Wave suspended on the horizon, at the beginning and end of all things, waiting. My worn-out heart, shivering, trembling with love.
The final fiction in this work, “Story with Bird”, is the culmination of both this technical virtuosity and many of Colanzi’s themes. This polyvocal piece interweaves the story of a Bolivian plastic surgeon, in hiding after a botched job on the wife of the Argentine consul, with an indictment of the exploitation of the Ayoreo people, indigenous to forests of Paraguay and Bolivia.
While existential threats abound for characters in this collection, for the Ayoreo devastation is potentially imminent and absolute. The Ayoreo are nomadic hunter-gathers, whose way of life is dependent on the forest. Cattle farming, deforestation, violation of their territory, missionary contact and other incursions make their situation precarious. The book’s epigraph, and by extension its title, draws on an Ayoreo song:

This is the trunk of all stories, it tells of our dead world

This evokes a state of being explored by Jonathan Lear in his in his book Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Harvard University Press, 2008). Lear relates the situation of the Crow Nation of North America, in the period following their settlement. The Crow were previously “a vibrant tribe of nomadic hunters” with a culture entirely based on warfare in protection of territory. The starting point of Lear’s investigation is a quotation from chief Plenty Coups, a leader during the period of transition:
I can think back and tell you much more of war and horse-stealing. But when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell into the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.
Lear explores what it means for a worldview to be eradicated, so much so that its absence represents an end to experience (“After this nothing happened”). While this form of cultural catastrophe is almost impossible to imagine, it increasingly represents the undertone to global developments. In the case of the Ayoreo, it is an immediate and tragic reality: for some it has already happened; for the few uncontacted people, it is impending.
In “Story with Bird”, Colanzi uses direct testimonies of Ayoreo people to devastating effect. These brief, recounted narratives, collected by the anthropologist Lucase Bessire, are deeply moving. They describe both the violence of the Ayoreo experience and the world-shattering effect of their persecution:
I don’t know what to say. We ate honey. We killed fish. We were dirty. I don’t know my story. I don’t know what to say. My thoughts and my memories are gone. They won’t come to me anymore. I don’t know my own story. It is done.
The struggle to survive, perceive, and express is profound. Colanzi builds the story to a fitting conclusion by allowing narrative itself to disintegrate. Here she appears to draw on Frank Kermode’s proposition, in The Sense of an Ending (Oxford University Press, 1967), that “the clock’s ‘tick-tock’” is “a model of what we call a plot”. He also proposed:
The Bible is a familiar model of history. It begins at the beginning (‘In the beginning…’) and ends with a vision of the end (‘Even so, come, Lord Jesus’); the first book is Genesis, the last Apocalypse.
Colanzi, who bravely begins this book with a degraded form of revelation (in “The Eye”), ends it with a return to storytelling’s essence. In the final pages of “Story with Bird” the doctor descends into delirium. The text becomes a haze of decadent images, then bleeds into one last heart-wrenching Ayoreo testimony before finally reducing to a variant of Kermode’s foundational form:

Tick tack tick tack tick tack tick tack tick tack tick tack …

In this short book, Colanzi offers an extraordinary density of ideas, transmitted in shape-shifting and affecting prose. The translator, Jessica Sequiera, deserves immense credit for her deft rendering of this complex work. - Alan Crilly


Liliana Colanzi, a promising young writer from Bolivia, delves into her country’s complex histories, indigenous and colonial, in Our Dead World. The stories in this elegantly translated volume proffer a profoundly existential vision — a richly layered and varied darkness. Colanzi grapples with a number of powerful themes: mental illness, tradition and modernity, exploitation, and armageddon. Her tales are deeply rooted in the oral traditions of Bolivia — alluding to its myths, legends, and superstitions — but they are also situated in the socio-political context of contemporary global society. The focus is on life on the margins: racial, ethnic, and linguistic tensions. But Colanzi is not just out to update old legends or to limn Bolivian national consciousness. At their best, her stories offer a seamless blend of folklore, magic realism, and speculative fiction that transcends the limitations of nationality, probing the depths of a universal, painfully human, consciousness.
As befits its title,  Our Dead World is about the ghosts of the past and the unborn future, asking such questions as “how did we get here?” and “where are we going?” These interrogatives often prompt enigmatic and bleak answers. In “Alfredito,” a story about a group of children dealing with the sudden death of their friend, a child asks her grandmother, “where do the dead go?” Her grandmother replies, “the dead never leave.” History, the past, the world of the dead, are continuously part of the present, existing in some liminal space. But such a sentiment negates salvation, too.
Given this perspective, the volume is understandably saturated with a sense of dread, dripping with apocalyptic sentiments. In the title story, a worker on Mars is under intense pressure: she longs to return to Earth, but is forced to accept her fate of dying in the lifeless Martian environment, the “miles of ochre-colored dunes where nothing was alive, a silent desert that breathed down your neck, eager to kill you.” She was selected for the “Martian Lottery” because she lived near a Chernobyl-like nuclear disaster on Earth; exposure to radiation made her suitable for conditions on Mars. When she receives a message her former lover is having a child with another woman, the woman begins to unravel. Her only way to rebel against what she calls “the Great Senselessness of our condition” is to engage in a fruitless, carnal act.
While there is no overt reference to climate change or environmental catastrophes, the circumstances of our inhabiting a dead planet like Mars, together with the nuclear accident, resonates with current ecological concerns. Our colonization of a dead planet (we can’t take care of the one we have) smacks of  imperialism, “the conquest of other worlds.”  “Story with Bird” is the collection’s most direct critique of brutal expansionism. The story is an indictment of the exploitation of the indigenous Ayoreo people, told from multiple perspectives that include first person accounts from an anthropological source. The yarn (and the collection) ends with an ominous ticking clock, possibly counting down to doomsday. The absence of a period at the end of the sentence is a sign of continuation, but just what the future consists of is unclear:
Tick tack tick tack tick tack tick tack tick tack tick tack
The scope of the stories in Our Dead World moves with ease into a fusion of the phantasmagorical and the psychological. “Meteorite” centers on Ruddy, a farmer. He becomes fearful of an exploited, underaged worker who claims to “speak with space people” and warns that they are coming. An accident on the farm, caused by Ruddy, nearly kills the boy. At the same time, Ruddy happens to see a meteorite fall from the sky. “The meteoroid,” Colanzi writes, “traced the same orbit in the solar system for fifteen million years until the movement of a comet pushed it toward Earth.” The coincidence of the meteorite (which could contain ‘space people’ for all Ruddy knows) and the accident seems to case a spell on the man, who develops an irrational fear of the unknown.
In the surreal “The Wave” a young woman returns to Bolivia from America when she learns that her father is dying. She is also fleeing “the wave,” a physical manifestation of (her?) psychosis as well of a fate manifested through suicides on campus. This death instinct has followed her family forever. A cab driver tells her about a woman he met on the road who was seeking healing in the desert. After eating the flesh of a cactus in order to stay alive, she is given a revelation about interstellar and cosmic beings. She finds an eerie peace once she learns about the imminent destruction of the Earth.
Colanzi delivers some risky, but important, messages in these enigmatic stories. She is trying to tell us something indispensable about who we are as a species — and to probe our complicated (and increasingly troubled) relationship to the earth’s environment and to each other. She believes that there are valuable lessons to be found in myths and the nooks and crannies of history, in what happens in the remotest of places. Ironically, the people who live in those marginal places are often at the greatest risk of imminent destruction, at the forefront of fragility. The collection’s title comes from an Ayoreo song: “This is the trunk of all stories, it tells about our dead world.” If the dead never move on, as “Alfredito” would have it, then there is no other world than a world that teems with extinction, vulnerable life surrounded by the never quite absent. - Lucas Spiro

Liliana Colanzi (Bolivia, 1981) has published the story collections Permanent Vacation (2010) and Our Dead World (2014). She studies comparative literature at Cornell University, and edits the Enchanted Forest series for the publisher El Cuervo. In 2015 she won the Aura Estrada Prize. Colanzi is considered by critics to be one of the most promising voices of the new Latin American narrative, and this book is an ambitious formal and thematic leap.

Iliazd, Rapture: A Novel, Trans. by Thomas J. Kitson, Columbia University Press; Tra edition (May 16, 2017)


The draft dodger Laurence yearns to take control of his destiny. Having fled to the highlands, he asserts his independence by committing a string of robberies and murders. Then he happens upon Ivlita, a beautiful young woman trapped in an intricately carved mahogany house. Laurence does not hesitate to take her as well. Determined to drape his young bride in jewels, he plots ever more daring heists. Yet when Laurence finds himself casting bombs alongside members of a revolutionary cell, he must again ask: is he a free man or a pawn of history? Rapture is a fast-paced adventure-romance and a literary treat of the highest order. With a deceptively light hand, Iliazd entertains questions that James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Thomas Mann once faced. How does the individual balance freedom and necessity, love and death, creativity and sterility? What is the role of violence in human history and culture? How does language both comfort and fail us in our postwar, post-Christian world? Censored for decades in the Soviet Union, Rapture was nearly lost to Russian and Western audiences. This translation rescues Laurence's surreal journey from the oblivion he, too, faces as he tries to outrun fate.


Magical... like a wizard's spell. - Aleksandr Goldshtein

[An] absolutely peculiar world that engulfs the reader from the first line. - Boris Poplavsky

A closely guarded secret of Russian literature, the prose of Ilia Zdanevich, better known by his artistic pseudonym Iliazd, has never left the narrow coterie of literary connoisseurs. Censored in the USSR, thanks to the author's dissidence from the official Soviet ideology and aesthetic, and spurned by Russian émigrés because of his leftist politics and unapologetic stylistic and narrative experimentalism, Iliazd's work has been rediscovered only recently, challenging received wisdom about twentieth-century Russian literature and its place in transnational modernism. Now, for the first time, this rapturously narrated parable mythologizing the life of the Russian avant-garde is available to Anglophone readers. This tale of murder, kidnapping, passion, betrayal, treasure hunt, and political terrorism is set against the backdrop of a fantastic land inspired by the author's native Caucasus. The novelistic repertory of modernism grows richer and more diverse as Rapture joins contemporary French, Italian, and Anglo-American experiments pushing the limits of the genre. - Leonid Livak








The early 20th century was a time of great change and upheaval; it produced wars and revolutions, but also a great flowering of experimentation in the creative arts. The whole of Europe was affected, but a particularly distinctive strand was seen in Russia, and the avant garde in that country was known for its art, poetry and literature. The decades that came after saw the crushing of individuality and many writers, in particular, got lost in the repression; they’re still emerging from that obscurity nowadays, and a recent name to be added to that list is Ilia Zdanevich, known by the simple pseudonym Iliazd.
Iliazd (1894 –1975) came from an interesting time and place; born in Tbilisi, Georgia to Polish/Georgian parents, he studied Law in St. Petersburg and fell in with the avant garde art movements of the time. He worked with artists such as Goncharova and Larionov, as well as becoming involved in Futurism, Dada and surrealism. Leaving his home country and moving to France in the early 1920s, he reinvented himself, working through a career in writing and the visual arts, eventually becoming an innovator in typography and design. In fact, it’s for these latter two that he’s most remembered, so it’s fascinating to see his early experimental novel from 1930 make it into English for the first time.
Rapture tells the story of Laurence, a young man who escapes to the mountains to avoid being drafted. Here, his life takes a different turn, as he stumbles upon a penitent monk and murders him, for no real reason apart from the fact that the Brother annoys him. Laurence then takes up a life of crime, forming a band of brigands and demanding obeisance from the locals. And a strange lot these are, particularly a group of ‘wennies’ living in a village with a name no-one can pronounce and singing a song with words no-one can understand. However, a chance encounter with Ivlita, the beautiful daughter of a forester who lives in seclusion in a carved mahogany house, changes his course. He whisks Ivlita away, depositing her in the mountains, and makes for the big city to steal money and jewels with which to worship her. Here, he falls into a completely different milieu, becoming subordinated by Basilisk, a cold politico with hypnotic eyes; and the kind of crimes he undertakes are very different from simple theft. Will Laurence escape from the city and make it back to Ivlita and the mountains? Has Ivlita remained faithful? And what will the future bring for both of them?
And gradually it dawned on the young man that words were to blame for everything, and that words, which had raised him to the dignity of a bandit, were now standing guard over him and suffocating him, and he needed a new word to ward off failure, a spell that undoubtedly only the wenny knew and could teach.
That rather simplistic plot summary belies the complexity of Iliazd’s novel, which is brimming with imagery, allusion and fantastic elements. Angels appear, dead monks seem to come back to life, nature itself is a living entity. These rather spellbinding effects appear throughout the sections of the book set in the flatland or the highland; by contrast, the city is portrayed as a very different place, full of the contradictions between rich and poor, glamour and degradation.
In fact, contrasts abound throughout the book: the clash between city and country; the differences between the highlanders and the flatlanders; the ugliness of the wennies compared with the beauty of Ivlita. The difference between Basilisk and Laurence is striking, and the latter is very much out of his depth when dealing with the educated city men; this could be read as a comment on how easily the ‘simple folk’ were influenced by the professional revolutionaries during the fall of the Romanov dynasty. But Iliazd has no time for the ruling classes either, with the emperor being portrayed as an idiot, controlled and manipulated by the secret police who create plots and assassinations for their own ends.
Rapture is an intriguing, complex work, with odd experimental touches (for example, there are no full stops at all at the end of paragraphs). The mix of two very different settings is fascinating although at times I felt the two locations did not sit altogether comfortably together. The book, however, did seem to me to draw on earlier works and authors; the village sections, with the cretins singing mindlessly and the credulous and shifty locals, brought to mind Saltykov-Shchedrin’s satires; whilst the political shenanigans and assassination attempts were reminiscent of Bely’s Petersburg or Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Basilisk in particular is a cleverly-named and sinister character, manipulating Laurence from behind the scenes; and there is ambiguity about his final fate (like much in this book!) as it is unclear whether what Laurence thinks happened to Basilisk actually did or whether it’s imaginary. The book does suffer a little in that it reflects the usual unsatisfactory attitude to women that prevailed in so many of the avant garde movements of the early 20th century; we are back to the Madonna-whore cliché and Ivlita has to either be pure or a slut, which is a shame.
But Rapture really is a mixture of slapstick and philosophy; it abounds with scatological references (truly, the author seems to have had a thing about excrement and the obscene!) and the translator must have had great fun rendering them into the vernacular. The language is dazzling, the action picaresque, but beneath the surface Rapture asks a lot of questions. The concept of rapture itself, which seems to be fleeting and necessary and after which the characters seem to be chasing, is somewhat undefined and is different for each person; for example, Ivlita seems only really happy when communing with nature. Laurence is torn between his obsession with Ivlita and his desire for freedom. And religion seems no real answer, nor does politics so I ended up thinking we might all be happier singing mindless songs like the wennies!
Translator Kitson provides an excellent introduction which discusses Iliazd’s life, as well as putting this book into the context of his times and surroundings, whilst discussing its deeper meanings. According to him, it contains many sly portrayals of key figures in the various movements to which Iliazd belonged, although I confess I didn’t pick these up. I don’t think that matters, however; as what is here is an adventurous, experimental and thought-provoking novel which most definitely deserves more attention than it’s received over the years. - Karen Langley



Who is Iliazd? It will most likely be the first question asked when anyone comes across Rapture, “the first complete literary work by Iliazd available in English.” Iliazd is the pseudonym of Ilia Zdanevich (1894–1975), a Russian writer/typographer who hung around Paris in the early 20th century, drifting in and out of some of the Modernist period’s most significant circles — Futurism, Dadaism, Cubism, Surrealism, even Coco Chanel. While not on the same activist level as Gertrude Stein (or Carl Van Vechten in Harlem), he was a sort of avant-garde jack-of-all-trades: his little black book must have been a who’s who of significant artists. Aided and abetted by Columbia University Press’s Russian Library, Thomas J. Kitson has come up with a fascinating translation of Iliazd’s first novel, Rapture, an eccentric volume that will hopefully bring some welcome attention to this obscure literary figure.
Iliazd took up art and poetry during World War I, a time when progressive artists in Russia and Europe were thrown into a panic. The chaotic conflict suggested that either nothing meant anything anymore, or it was up to artists to reinvent a meaningful world based on new principles. Manifestos were the rage, and Iliazd spent much of his early creative life in Russia penning Futurist tracts and taking part in public debates about the direction of art and poetry. His ambitions brought him to Paris in 1921, where, along with his writings, he began concocting livre d’artiste These elaborate volumes — made in collaboration with the likes of Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Max Ernst, and Joan Miro — made his reputation in the decades to come.
His prose pieces, written during the ’20s and ’30s, have been overlooked. Rapture was the only novel of his published during his lifetime (in 1930 under his own imprint 41°). The manuscript was rejected by every publishing house in Russia — it was deemed offensive to the ideological tastes of the day, and mostly ignored by those that mattered in France. In a move that harkens back to the PR of the Parisian Dada scene, Iliazd slipped notes into copies of his novel in the only Parisian bookstore that carried it. His words to prospective buyers: “Russian booksellers refuse to sell this book. If you’re that inhibited, don’t read it!”
In one sense, Rapture is a daredevil novel. Murder, romance, betrayal, and treasure hunting push the fast-paced, helter-skelter narrative forward. Laurence is a deserter from the army who demands that he shape his destiny. His quest for independence takes the form of banditry in a mountainous dreamscape based on Iliazd’s childhood home in the Caucasus. He terrorizes the countryside, robbing and pillaging, but somehow leaves the traditional society of peasants, hunters, and loggers unruffled. Laurence comes across the ethereal Ivlita, the daughter of a former forestry administrator who has lost his mind. She has been trapped in her father’s house (built of ornately carved mahogany), reading the books in the library and communing (at least indirectly) with nature. Laurence is eventually propelled by political turmoil, and his devotion to Ivlita, to move his illegal operations into the lowland cities. His need for plunder leads to ever more dangerous and elaborate heists, often involving people he does not know or trust, including a parodic revolutionary cell who want to score big in order to fund their movement.
Of course, Rapture is more than a parody of the picturesque adventure genre; it represents Iliazd’s declaration of personal transformation, an announcement that the next stage in his metamorphosis was on its way. Kitson writes in his preface that the novel is a kind of roman a clef, Iliazd’s way of “reckoning with the Russian avant-garde.” It is his ambivalent farewell to Futurism, an evocation of the dynamism of this “furiously creative” period. Figures such as Larionov, Mayakovsky, Goncharova, Kruchenykh, and Burliuk are found in disguised form in the narrative, but it is not necessary to have a PhD in Russian Literature to enjoy this book.
The result is a kind of impish experimentalism. Iliazd eschews time and space; the novel’s setting is never made clear. A village is referred to as “the hamlet with the incredibly long and difficult name.” A particularly “goitrous, or wenny” family lives and sings songs of weird unintelligibility, similar to the Joycean neologisms in Finnegans Wake. This and other examples of linguistic slapstick is a nod to the Futurist technique of ‘beyonsense.’
Rapture also raises philosophical questions about perspective, discouraging us from identifying with any particular character. In the beginning, when a wandering monk gets caught up in an unlikely snow storm in a fantastical landscape, there are “Voices added to voices, unlike anything recognizable… Occasionally, they tried to pass for human, but ineptly–so all this was obviously a contrivance. Someone started romping on the heights, pushing down snow.” Iliazd’s characters are subject to a cruel, capricious Writer/God, the victims of a kind of sadistic black comedian whose imagination anticipates the pratfalls of postmodern humor. Underneath the hijinks is a serious intent: to mangle fiction and language in ways that raise primal questions about the value of realism, naturalism, even economics.
This unruliness will undoubtedly be frustrating for some. Inexplicability abounds. Ambitions and desires are discarded the moment they are achieved. The relentless illogic of Rapture undercuts all human activity (art included), seeing it as “an attempt made with unsuitable means.” One of Iliazd’s mantras serves as the strongest counter to the book’s implacable pessimism: “A poet’s best fate is to be forgotten”; sometime in the future someone will understand the value of Iliazd’s early stab at deconstruction.
Perhaps more decades need to pass; Iliazd is not in the same league as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. In Rapture he comes across as kind of Modernist bellwether reflecting (rather than mastering) the yen for iconoclasm that was energizing European bohemians at the time, the call for the radicalization of life, psychology, literature, art, and politics. Still, the novel is a worthwhile curio (a minor classic of Modernist literature, perhaps) that grapples, entertainingly, with the era’s artistic, structural, and revolutionary quandaries. Rapture does not upset conventional views of the Modernist period, but it is pretty interesting to look at — another facet on the gem. - Lucas Spiro


In March 1913 a young man started a riot in a Moscow theatre with an American shoe. During his lecture, ‘On Futurism’, Ilia Zdanevich, an eighteen-year-old student from Tiblisi, Georgia, held up a Vera brand shoe before his audience and tauntingly claimed that it was more beautiful than the Venus de Milo because it could literally raise people above the filth of the earth. This combination of Russian nihilism – one of Dostoevsky’s characters famously remarks that a shoe is worth more than Pushkin or Shakespeare – with Marinetti’s worship of technology so incensed the audience that they attacked the speaker. The ensuing melee so badly damaged the theatre that Zdanevich had to forfeit his fees. The incident established his reputation as a provocateur and theorist, and was symptomatic of the kinds of extreme reactions Modernist art was provoking from audiences: two months later the premiere in Paris of Stravinsky’s ballet, The Rite of Spring produced a similarly violent response.
Over the next few years it may have appeared that Zdanevich was content with his role as an aesthetic propagandist. He continued to espouse Dada-esque manifestoes, notably the Everythingist manifesto, which advocated borrowing techniques from wildly different genres and styles, with the aim of being liberated from either current or previous artistic conventions. According to this view the ‘fullness’, rather than the coherence of a work of art was what mattered. What he didn’t seem inclined to do was risk putting any of this grand theory into practice by producing art. Not that anyone could accuse Zdanevich of being a dilettante: in 1916 he was a war correspondent in eastern Anatolia, while the following year he worked on an archaeological dig in Georgia. After the October
Revolution he was still giving lectures –intriguing ones, judging by
 
some of their titles: ‘On the Magnetism of Letters’, ‘Orthography and Straining’ and ‘Tyutchev, Singer of Shit.’ However, by this point Zdanevich was also writing zaum poetry, an experimental form whose sounds lacked discernible meaning yet were still supposed to be profound, not so much nonsense as ‘beyonsense.’
If Zdanevich had remained in the Soviet Union it’s likely that his work would have been proscribed, as happened to most other avant garde writers (though even the champions of Soviet realism might have struggled to identify counter-revolutionary messages in beyonsense). An intimation of this made him leave in 1920, telling people it was too hard to make pure art free from politics. He spent a year in Istanbul waiting for a French visa, and arrived in Paris in 1921, where, in what seems a highly symbolic act, he rechristened himself as ‘Iliazd,’ a combination of parts of his first name and surname. But there were also strong continuities with his life in Moscow. ‘Iliazd’ continued giving lectures and readings and unsurprisingly found common cause with the Dadaists. In 1923 he organised a Dadaist soiree that also ended in a punch up, but on that occasion it was a matter of Dadaist rivalries, rather than the audience’s fury. The fact that in 1928 he tried to publish a novel in Russia also suggests he hadn’t entirely cut ties with his former life. But he couldn’t have picked a worse time to do so – publishers were being shut down and their editors arrested as ‘Trotskyists.’ Iliazd’s novel was unanimously rejected. In 1930 Iliazd self-published the novel in Paris (which he funded by working as a designer for Coco Chanel). Even there he faced obstacles – only one store agreed to stock the book because of its ‘obscenities.’ He found much greater success making beautifully designed livres d-’artiste (artists’s books) with Picasso, Miro Ernst and Giacometti from the late 1930s on. It’s said that in the mid 1970s he could be seen wandering round Paris’s Latin Quarter wearing a sheepskin coat, herding a flock of cats before him.

Given Iliazd’s career as a poet and theorist, one might expect his 1930 novel Rapture to be a formally and linguistically challenging novel, a sort of Finnegan’s Wake with shades of early Le Clézio. Instead it’s a fast-paced, mordantly funny yarn that borrows from (and subverts) the adventure genre.
A lot happens in this book. There are stabbings, shootings, heists, betrayals, murders of every kind. There are blizzards, drunken wakes, hunts of epic carnage after which ‘the slaughtered beasts showed black from afar, a magnificent hill.’ Though the action of the novel is generally realistic, at moments it scales successive peaks of fantasy, as when a snow white archangel descends, blowing a trumpet, after which ‘a sloth of bears issued toward the cemetery’ where they ‘settled back on their paws, and begged alms.’
At the epicentre of this chaos is Laurence, an apparently likeable, modest, fun-loving draft-dodger whose criminal career moves swiftly to murder then banditry (followed by lots more murder). Laurence himself doesn’t appear until the middle of the third chapter; the book instead begins with an account of the perilous peregrinations of a monk, Brother Mocius, through the mountains, during which he drinks brandy, masturbates, and nearly dies several times. While this is frequently presented as a spiritual test, Iliazd also constantly undermines the elevated gravity of these moments with interjections of uncertainty:
Finally, trumpets sounded. The winds broke free of the surrounding ridges and diving into the valley, beat about fiercely, but you couldn’t tell why. On the right, unclean spirits made the most of the disarray by sending up an infernal roar, and from behind, something like violins or the whine of an infant in pain barely bled through the tempest. Voices added to voices, unlike anything recognizable, more often that not. Occasionally, they tried to pass for human, but ineptly—so all this was obviously a contrivance. Someone started romping on the heights, pushing down snow
Though playful, this introduces one of the main themes of the novel – that nothing is ever what it seems, or rather, that nothing is stable, no thought, state or feeling can last. Its characters (like all of us) repeatedly fail to grasp ‘the phantom of constancy.’ Instead everything is in a state of ceaseless transformation, as Ivlita, a forester’s daughter, observes during a lovely moment of pantheistic rapture:
She already saw that trees were not trees, but souls who had passed their way in earthly form and were passing it now in the guise of trees. It turns out that trees advance, cliffs migrate, the snowy veil undulates.
Though Rapture is full of spirits and angels it doesn’t occupy any consistent ontological position, as illustrated by the view of Ivlita’s father who is ‘neither a believer nor an unbeliever and thought there were neither angels (evil or good) nor miracles; everything is natural or normal, but there are, so to speak unusual immaterial objects we know nothing about since, for now generally speaking, we don’t know anything.’
Rapture perfectly embodies Iliazd’s idea of fullness despite contradiction. Even simple statements about character are quickly refuted, often in the same sentence. An old man who has ‘irrevocably lost his mind’ is then described as ‘the wisest shepherd.’ His wife is said to be ‘well-preserved and beautiful, despite her monstrous goiter and hunchback.’ The novel doesn’t claim that there’s no such thing as truth – just that we can’t know it. Truths are compared to treasures which ‘really did exist, but only so long as they went unclaimed. Find them, and they’d crumble to dust.’
Even at the level of punctuation there is no certainty; none of the paragraphs in the novel end with a period. Perhaps this is meant to suggest that all meaning must eventually dissolve into the white abyss of the page. This, at least, is Brother Mocius’s fate. At the end of the first chapter a stranger (who we later learn is Laurence) appears and throws him off a precipice.
Laurence’s explanation for why he kills the monk echoes that of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment– it’s a rational and impulsive act that is an expression of his free will. Later in the novel he kills a sailor on a similar whim, and has no qualms about other murders. The novel matter-of-factly relates that for him ‘Eliminating the watchmen, his wife, and his small daughter was easy.’ Yet in his own mind Laurence has a moral code. He believes that a murder committed freely is acceptable unlike a murder committed under compulsion (for example as a soldier). Apparently, ‘murder is the only way to make freedom visible.’
Amongst the highlanders Laurence’s moral calculations aren’t challenged. In the village which has an unprounceable name (even for its inhabitants) only funerals inspire real celebrations. The general view there is that ‘Murder itself was nonsense; who hadn’t, one might ask, had occasion to murder?’ When Ivlita and Laurence become lovers she also tries to convince herself that she doesn’t mind his violence, because ‘bear law was no worse than human law.’ As the body count of the novel increases, Ivliita and Laurence’s relationship becomes increasingly strained, as does her reasoning to excuse his behaviour. Eventually she tries to pretend that what is unambiguously bad is in fact its opposite, so that rather than ‘condemning evil, she found in it the most profound manifestation of good order and human uplift.’
The first major challenge to Laurence’s worldview comes from a Marxist group of robbers who strive to make ‘everyone equally poor.’ They supply Laurence with ‘the means of production’ (soldiers and dynamite) and engage him in dialectical reasoning, telling him ‘You seek freedom, but necessity propels you, the party strives for what is necessary and is therefore free.’ According to them, Laurence isn’t free because he has made death a kind of commerce. Eventually Laurence realises he’s logically trapped between being immoral and free, or innocent yet controlled:
had he really been killing just to kill, proving that freedom exists? But that meant there was no confusion , and those who suspected a boundlessly ill will in Brother Mocius’ murder had been right, and Laurence was, in fact, an evil man. At the same time, Laurence knew he was no villain, and he was sure that if paradise existed, space would be found there even for him. Then what was he? A plaything of the elements?
But as the novel gleefully stresses, there is a way out of this philosophical bind. Death is the only state of perfection, the only solid fact. Souls ‘all go on living, not their own life, but their death, their freedom from the empty human way of life.’ Iliazd compares life to a swoon, and laments that ‘Alas, if choice exists, that means death is not yet, and the swoon is not over. Oh, to regain consciousness.’ Free will is thus an imperfect state, a kind of dreamed delusion. Only after death do we wake.
Iliazd once claimed that a poet’s best fate is to be forgotten, but while this novel has taken a long time to find a new audience, there’s nothing musty about Thomas J. Kitson’s excellent translation, which makes the prose of the book seem fresh. Though the novel offers few philosophical consolations, there’s an air of celebratory defiance to the way it offers its bleak pronouncements, from which a reader, if so inclined, might conclude, à la Sartre, that art and its attendant raptures is another way to escape the swoon of life. As Iliazd said in a lecture in 1921, ‘reason is mendacious, poetry is immaculate and we, too, are immaculate when we are alone with it.’ - Nick Holdstock






Rapture is an odd novel, a sort of adventure tale that takes on (and in) mythical proportions (and elements), set in a faraway no-place (much of it in a hamlet with an: "incredibly long and difficult name, so difficult even its inhabitants couldn't pronounce it") that is clearly modeled on the Caucasus. It is a novel of an indeterminate time but can easily pass for the lawless 1920s, with the Soviet Union slowly encroaching -- an unnamed political party figures prominently in trying to shape the political future here -- but the outback still out of the reach and control of centralized powers and a world unto its own.        The novel begins with a Brother Mocius, journeying, as he often did, in the harsh local conditions. Brother Mocius escapes a natural death but not an unnatural one -- tossed, rather than falling, into the abyss. His death and and bizarrely sensational burial ("the believers pried the corpse from its coffin, filled the coffin with brandy, and, down on all fours, slurped it straight from the coffin", among other things) shake things up in this out-of-the-way (and set-in-its-own-(unusual-)ways) area. (As it turns out, Brother Mocius surprisingly goes on to shake things up elsewhere, too.)
       The central figure, however, is one Laurence, a worker at the local mill who had been hiding in the woods to evade a visiting draft commission. He isn't much liked at his workplace and has no friends, but he's a successful type -- "everywhere and always he was inevitably the hero". His arguably impetuous actions force him to flee even further from civilization, and he finds a haven with a local goitrous family -- 'wennies'. He also comes across the bewitching Ivlita -- "an altogether exceptional phenomenon" -- raised in comfortable isolation, and: "short on rapture".
       Laurence adopts the role of bandit -- a local overlord, who also strikes out with his band of wennies. There are road-adventures -- attempted heists, including a daring one of a train, as well as ones with larger political implications, with Laurence sensing he is being used as a pawn -- while there is always the beautiful Ivlita to draw Laurence back.
       It is a chaotic world -- with pockets of exception, as, for example:
Ivlita knew now that there was no disorder in the world and that everything was confiend in a perfect structure 
       Laurence and Ivlita's union is not a happy love story of larger than life figure, and her pregnancy not the joyous culmination of their fates. Their combative relationship, and the story, doesn't have a happy end -- just the one they were fated for.
       Rapture is both traditional regional adventure tale -- adapted for and reflecting its times -- and experimental fiction, Iliazd taking liberties with story, style, and language. In upending -- in a variety of ways, no less -- readers' expectations, Iliazd's variation on this kind of tale offers very different satisfactions. A vivid, often comic, and always harsh story it veers between exciting pulp and much more ambitious mythifying near-poetry; it's also almost surprisingly accessible -- and a fun, if twisted, read.
       Rapture also comes with a thorough, fairly lengthy (over forty-page) Introduction by the Translator -- apparently deemed necessary to provide background about an author who (in this context) is almost entirely unknown as well as to situate the novel in its time, place, and the circumstances around it. All this is useful, in a way, but can also be a distraction -- the novel, like any decent fiction, stands up perfectly well all on its own. - M.A.Orthofer



Thomas Kitson on a Neglected Gem of Russian Modernism

Rachel Levy, A Book So Red, Caketrain 2015.
Read a 34-page excerpt (PDF)
excerpt






“A Book So Red’s linguistic singularities, formal contractions, and world comprised of the existential non-sequitur coalesce into an astonishing aesthetic teratoid: the vacuum-packed denarration. The narrator’s skewed, oblique, and painful relationships teach us the only real comedy is the sound of laughter in the dark all the way down.” - Lance Olsen


“Rachel Levy is a wizard—gory, tender and wickedly funny.” - Noy Holland


“It’s as if Rachel Levy put the carcass of the novel on the butcher block: choice language cutlets remain.” - Sara Levine


“Heartbreaking, horrifying, beautiful and ugly, the narrator of Rachel Levy’s A Book So Red explores her world from the inside out with the precision of a mapmaker. From Munich to an American farm to Berlin and through a cast of characters, the one constant is her miraculous and astonishing voice.” -


“Rachel Levy, here in what might at first appear to be a pint-sized collection of fractured miniatures, offers us instead heaving-with-feeling fictions that are elliptical and driven by suggestion, though what is most fully and singularly revealed here is a world where much is said—too much, this too might be true—so that what is left unsaid, what the speaker chooses to tell just us—her listeners in this sequence of most private tellings—takes on the heft of a bedside confession.” - Peter Markus
A Book So Red was the winning manuscript in the 2014 Caketrain Competition, as judged by Peter Markus.


The best metafiction tells story as competently as it supplies the usual imperatives to reconsider the act of reading fiction (by which I mean, what that act is good for, if anything) and the ideological ramifications (political, aesthetic, and so on) of certain modes of literary representation. Rather than confine herself to mixing a new bag of old tricks or verbalizing a schematic diagram of how the old tricks work, the author devises a middle way, combining traditional storytelling elements with fresh self-awareness, reaching for a new genre of storytelling or rhetoric when the one in use loses its edge. In other words, the best metafiction says no to nothing but instead remains open to everything.
Some recent examples I know include Susan Steinberg’s Spectacle, Amber Sparks’s May We Shed These Human Bodies, Gabriel Blackwell’s The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised Men, Joanna Ruocco’s Another Governess/Least Blacksmith: A Diptych, Blake Butler’s There is No Year, and Tim Horvath’s Understories. I am not attempting to form a “best of” list (my reading is nowhere near up-to-date) or to be exclusive but to give a sense of the kind of fiction I mean, fiction where story mixes freely with narratorial self-study.
Rachel Levy’s very short, sad, and funny novel A Book So Red (Caketrain 2015, Paper) is another example. As a novel, the object looks and feels light, presenting about a hundred pages and perhaps ten thousand words. Further challenging formal expectations is the book’s narrative organization into seventy-eight brief chapters, some as short as half a page. The writing, frequently dialogic, is parceled into discrete episodes that occur chronologically, though these episodes are themselves grouped into (roughly) four larger sections, which are neither titled nor marked off by breaks but signaled by shifts in setting, character, and storytelling. The book’s conflicts and comic set pieces dramatize this same problem of formal expectation. The novel opens with the nameless first person narrator attempting to romance a recently divorced man (named, it turns out fatefully, Horst) who responds by articulating his disappointment and irritation with the narrator’s supposed inadequacy as a woman. While Levy plays this arrangement for laughs (Horst’s first words, about his recent divorce settlement, reveal a bloodless and unimaginative vision of life: “I have taken her ostrich”), she makes it clear that the imbalance in their partnership favors Horst (a bar late in novel, perhaps representative of the wider world, “bustle[s] with Horst-like men”). Horst may prove a selfish and cold-hearted lover with an emotional dependency on a nasty little lapdog, but it is the narrator who endures loneliness, unsatisfying sex, frequent insults and snubs, a lost foot (this is, among other things, a portrait of a fallen woman), and finally banishment.
Subsequent sections take place on a farm where the narrator’s father maintains a chilly distance from his daughter; a country estate where the point of view and storytelling shift to somewhat destabilizing third person fable of chambermaid violently taking her lady’s place (is the narrator this chambermaid? is she an imposter on this count, too?) and where Horst lies ailing after an accident; and finally Berlin, where the narrator feels old and unwanted (“Soon I would die and leave no sexual partners to mourn the loss of me”) and finds short-lived hope in a relationship with a woman named Mitzi. Having embarked on this journey toward the next disappointment, the narrator describes what will be a doomed attempt at eating a holiday cookie:
In the beginning I tried to eat a human-shaped cookie left out on a plate. There were three circles of icing between the face and the groin. I started at the bottom so I could eat the head last. That way it could experience everything. (109)

This comical and unsettling image pulls together much of the foregoing material. It suggests the pain of loss (seriocomically, for the cookie) and the pleasure of sweet spots (for its eater), which reflects the narrator’s arrangement with Horst. But the metaphor is more complex than that, as anyone with a body and sharp eyes has by now noticed: the erotic language of second sentence suggests the three most prominent erogenous zones on the female body between groin and head, which, when “eaten,” deliver pleasure to the female body as well as giving excitement to the owner of the operative mouth. Also contradicting any supposition that the eater will claim all the pleasure are the prepositional phrase and subsequent noun-predicate combination that open the paragraph: one senses eating will be work for the narrator. The act of eating, in any sense of the word, requires effort. Any act of eating will require an encounter of resistance. The act of eating cannot exist without the state, for something, of being eaten.
Perhaps, then, it would prove useful to consider eating-and-being-eaten as a single phenomenon: one cannot exist without the other. The same might go for taking-and-being-taken-from, as well as for writing-and-being-read. In all of the above, a two-way exchange of pain and pleasure maintains. Further, the processes above have the effect of disorganizing states or quantities. One moves food; another possessions; the other meaning. The baker cannot put back the flour and sugar the customer has chewed up and digested; the robbed cannot generally reclaim what has been taken; nor can a writer or storyteller restore the first arrangement of unread written material after a reader has made new sense out of it. Like anything else in life, writing depends on a transactional counterpart for its existence. In this world, it seems, one must not only eat or be eaten: one must eat while being eaten. One hopes to outlast the others, or to at least enjoy a lion’s share.
The cookie image is charged with this meaning by, among other things, a description from earlier in the novel–one in the chapter sharing the novel’s title–in which the narrator’s father refers to the stomach of a slaughtered bull as “[t]he book… When he slit open the stomach, the folds fell apart like pages.” This description calls the reader’s attention back to novel’s unusual formatting, its composition of many short chapters. The reader becomes aware of the text as the cuts of the butchered (sometimes literally) narrator; the reader sees a novel or story as the butchering of life-experience, the cruel necessity of the trimming away of certain parts; perhaps the novel (this is a book so read, after all, using such literary materials as fairy tale images, proverbs, the fallen woman figure, and the marriage plot) has been in need of a good butchering. Beyond the formal issue, there is the matter of interpreting or making sense of any free-standing being or thing as an act of butchering. We cut people to bits to make stories of them; we do the same thing to ourselves, choosing what to tell and what to omit. This book, whether imagined as a series of cuts or bites, presents a character, itself an artificial band of consciousness, as more accurately imagined as a frequently broken and crooked line as opposed to a continuous straight one. Turns out the self is a kind of fiction, too.
A Book So Red asks to be read as much a platter of the most select cuts as it does an account of a woman’s undoing by (sometimes sexual) takers (though, yes, uptight male reader, she is a taker, too, just like everyone). A consequence of this formal execution is the invitation to read the book as one wishes to, just as one might be invited to act as one wishes on another’s body in certain kinds of romantic relationships–especially those in which women might be considered a kind of chattel (however consciously or publicly). Making the text a dare to be bad reader is, I think, a gambit that succeeds for Levy in the end. The reader reading this book takes measure of its narrator’s suffering, and in taking measure, looks for what she has overlooked: all the losses this story leaves out, all the slings and arrows a ravaged storyteller–who might be anyone–never even bothers to remember, never supposing a reader–or a listener–might ever care to know. This novel is not merely a book about fiction but a challenge to listen, to look, and to read more closely. - Hugh Sheehy


There are many ways to go about breaking realism; perhaps to get it where it would most feel it — the bitterest of cuts — would be in its marriage plot; that’s one of its major guts! Rachel Levy, in A Book So Red, lays this gut out on a barn floor and gives it 88 new notches, one for each page of this short but powerful novel.
Literary critic Naomi Schor defines realism (particularly in the 19^th century) as “a representational mode wedded to the marriage plot and the binding of female energy.” To rewind, Descartes wrote, “I think, therefore I am” — Cogito ergo sum— in 1637. This is logic that invests in the contained and progressing consciousness of an “I,” and it also implies that language can represent experience. Seemingly seamlessly, ergo the oily tentacle. Though Barthes warns, “[T]here is no antipathy between realism and myth.” Myth being intrinsic to these representations — myth being problematic, to say the least, for Barthes, in its oily simplicities, its pretense of natural order. Marriage being full of this pretense, presented often as a completion of the plot, end to all confusion, the completion of people. You complete me. What is at stake? Our enjoyment of complexity, opacity, difference, different lives, lesbianism . . .
A Book So Red begins with divorce — “We were in Munich, celebrating his divorce.” The speaker interacts, in a series of short exchanges, with a male-pronouned thing who later becomes the name “Horst.” They dialogue in brief bursts — the pages fly — about divorce, about damp sausages and the brightness of Germany’s sun, though as these conversations proceed they are interrupted by new names — the appearance of things like “Bethany,” and “Lizbethitis”—“because she was one who begged for a cure.” Speaker plus Horst cannot complete anything. They put each other down. They think about other things. They aren’t in causal communion. Levy’s rhythm is one of undercutting, and what she undercuts most is the ergo, the smooth logic of realism (she does this manually, with blunt negation):

It’s called a penis.
It was hard. I had no idea it was there.
“I’m coming,” he said, and it had nothing to do with me.

The speaker hopes Horst will come with to Auschwitz — “‘You know what?’ I said. ‘We have so much in common. I’ve never been to Auschwitz. You’ve never been to Auschwitz. Let’s go together!’” What to make of this desire? This interest reads actually as earnest: “To Auschwitz: would he come?” It is the I-thou-iest question. In a book that takes things and cuts them with such constant ferocity, levity, and delight, this desire sounds real— Will you come with me to Auschwitz? Can we share in this sign of total obliteration? Will we together understand the world as gone (The world is gone, I must carry you, Paul Celan)? Hope in co-mourning, in co-horror, I want to touch you through Auschwitz, through this end.
The “I” constantly triangulating its desire . . .

Love was painful: a stapled nipple.
Love was tender: a warm washcloth to the nipple.
Love was generous, and we had so much to give to Horst. We had so much to share with Horst, the staple and I.

Levy torques, tortures, cliché — “I have so much to give,” like a line unspooled by machine from a bachelorette on television, now fucked in its pronoun, something we give, this love, staple and I, I and thou staple, to Horst. Changing the automatic language of cliché, of rote representation, of reality television, changes — explodes, opens — the possibilities for desire. Desire expands, complicates (to staples, to other women) when you fuck with clichés.
Levy’s style harkens back in content and in form to Flaubert, for whom there is always something else, outré-desire, outré-horror, très-Bataille, on the outskirts of plot, Madame Bovary’s marriage plot — but then, he does inskirt these things with meticulous clausal insertion. Surgeon. In this example, Flaubert paints a scene of pastoral charm, only to inskirt this oozing shit:

Rouault must be one of the well-to-do farmers. There was with him only his daughter, who helped him to keep house. In the stables, over the top of the open doors, one could see great cart-horses quietly feeding from new racks. Right along the outbuildings extended a large dunghill, from which manure liquid oozed, while amidst fowls and turkeys, five or six peacocks, a luxury in Chauchois farmyards, were foraging on the top of it.

This paratactic mixture of manure and peacocks undercuts F’s theme of a pastoral romance. He slices some shit into his plot, if to fuel then also to soil, to foil, the desire. The middle of A Book So Red extends a series of farm fragments involving, like Madame Bovary, a farmer’s daughter who is ripe for marriage, as was Emma: “I want to be clear. I was raised on a dairy farm. I was old enough to marry. At nightfall, Father gave me a mug of warm milk.” Where F performs the adulterous content of his text with sentences that also philander, clauses unbeholden to each other, tones akimbo, L undercuts the marriage plot with other, extremely otherous, content. Her farmgirl does not advance in romance but toils in thoughts of the Holocaust:

cat·tle, n. Property.
deer, n. Woodland animal.
Clear-cut, twofold.
The God of Adam cleaved deer and cattle, forest and farm. He is a deer let loose, he gives us our words. The herds of cattle are perplexed! He makes my feet like the feet of the deer and sets me on high places. He was driven away from men and fed grass like cattle.
I practiced good penmanship.
The Yiddish word for “deer” is “hirsh.” The men of that name were fated as cattle, corralled, slaughtered.
It was impossible to be precise.
But one must choose a side. I must choose.

A Book So Red evades capture by marriage and divorce plots, both, both of which are traps, false choices — (“First capsize the bathtub. Then, as if trapping a beetle beneath a cup, place the tub directly over the marriage bed.”) — landing perhaps on an out, a lesbian partnership — “And then there was a woman.” But this, too, is unstable — the love, like any word, slips, triangulates, activates something altogether else: a staple, a shoe, a glass, an emberous nub of lipstick. I find this text hopeful, as hopeful as its visit to Auschwitz. Hopeful in what it acknowledges is gone, and if it evades old modes, in what it evades towards — often to sound and texture, a writing that is alive to the slowness, the a-romantic ardor, of its objects, a stew “held to bright chunks of carrot like aromatic glue,” a realism flayed — manually, with guts — of its many myths. - Caren Beilin


The lightning-quick flash fictions that make up Rachel Levy’s A Book So Red read like skin blistering: before you become aware of your delicious discomfort in such daring prose, there’s a bubble, erupting. Each section ends, leaving you a little sore, perhaps wishing for someone to hold your hand. Readers of Levy’s work are dazzled and humbled, made aware that life has more bite than we’ve acknowledged. This writer teaches us that, as one of her characters accuses another, we are bad tourists—we are reticent, and not nearly so capable of swallowing a stapled nipple, a beheaded horse, a dismembered, plastic foot, as Levy herself is in her lacerating sentences and knife-like forms.
Levy writes. And she delivers; she chooses snippets of the most unsettling paroxysms, the most cutting images. She borrows from the conventions of fairy tales, 19^th century marriage plots, and the spare realism of the late twentieth century—and ultimately overturns each of those forms, proving them insufficient for our time, capable only of partial truths. Levy’s own language is one that says partiality is truth; language is the only through-line. And she offers us language unfettered by fear or stupidity or the need to comfort or explain:
This is the bed-time story your mother would have told were she as able to live within misery as Levy’s narrator, as unapologetic to admit: “I used to believe in the wholeness of things.” But the wholeness of things, be they narratives or characters or histories or relationships, Levy insists, is a myth we can no longer afford, a position none of us should be obsequious enough to take up. This is a bed-time story for the initiated and the unafraid among us, a bed-time story we can confront only when we are quite certain of our aloneness.
All the solace Levy has to offer is this: if we pay endless attention, if we give to our experience all the scrutiny it deserves, perhaps, in a lifetime, we too can generate a language to mediate it. Perhaps, we too can learn the resounding truth that:

Kazufumi Shiraishi, The Part of Me That Isn’t Broken Inside, Trans. by Raj Mahtani, Dalkey Archive Press, 2017.


Naoto Matsubara works in a Tokyo publishing house, though the work doesn’t particularly interest him. What does interest him, we soon discover, is the purpose of life. Naoto ponders the powers of love, attachment, and mutual care by examining closely his own friends and lovers, searching out how exactly his connection to them confers meaning on his life. Along the way, Naoto also draws on the thought of many writers and philosophers, including Tolstoy, Fromm, and Mishima.




The title of this novel, The Part of Me That Isn’t Broken Inside, certainly suggests a seriously damaged narrator, yet Naoto Matsubara comes across as fairly confident -- sure of himself, and not much prone to wobbly vacillating (though he does drink to considerable excess rather regularly). While his actions are often impulsive, there's a sureness to the way he barrels ahead. It's a combination that works well in this narrative, which is basically a year-in-the-life story of the narrator, more or less bookended by his twenty-ninth and thirtieth birthdays, a slow-boil novel that holds back on its explanation of what broke Naoto and shifts from seemingly almost aimlessly meandering to being more sharply, darkly focused in building up to its conclusions.
       Naoto has a good job, working for a major publisher. He's now in the editorial department, and though he says he doesn't really care much which part of the business he's involved in, he seems fairly dedicated to and serious about his work. Still, his reason for applying for the job after university was only that the company reportedly offered the highest salaries (ah, Japan ...). He has a half-sister that he sends money to, because she's looking after their terminally ill mother; he's not at all close to his mother and avoids visiting her -- and his father abandoned the family when he was an infant.
       When the novel opens he's celebrating his birthday with a trip with his girlfriend, Eriko. The relationship seems to be going well -- so of course as soon as he's back in Tokyo, "I decided it would be better to stop seeing Eriko for a while", the first indication that he maybe has some issues with closeness and being involved with someone. As it turns out, he's involved with several women, including Teruko Onishi, a married woman with whom he has a purely sexual relationship (and who slips him money, to help support his mother's care), and bar owner Tomomi, a single mother who has a young son, Takuya. Naoto has few real friends, but two people -- also damaged, in their own ways -- do occasionally spend time at his apartment, often sleeping over: Honoka, a student whom he tutored when she was a teenager, and Raita. Naoto has a truly open-door policy -- he doesn't lock his apartment door when he's not there (or when he's there alone).
       The Part of Me That Isn’t Broken Inside presents and circles around these relationships, and Naoto's interactions with these different people, slowly filling in more background or revealing more about them. The situations shift over the course of the year. Eriko gets closer to Naoto, even as he makes clear his discomfort:
I've never actually lived in a house where I've felt comfortable enough to invite friends.
       (Honoka and Raita are in a different category, and Naoto's open-door policy for them is his way of providing a sense of support they can't find elsewhere, a not-quite-last resort that they can always turn to.)
       Naoto's relationship with Tomomi is tested, too, as he moodily swings between considerable sacrifice and abandoning her. And Naoto's mother passes away -- something that obviously affects him, but which he only casually mentions to Eriko in the most awkward circumstances. He's not a sharer -- "You've never spoken so much about yourself", Eriko observes -- but then given his grim childhood and how it still weighs on him -- including some understandable issues with his mother, who was never really a mother figure -- it's not surprising.
       There are other relationships and deaths as well, and Naoto even moves to a new apartment, an attempt at a larger relocation that's doomed until he deals with all his issues and demons.
       Eriko diagnoses:
You're a person with a hole in his heart. It's afflicted, and it can never find fulfillment. You may have tenderhearted feelings, but your mind is whimsical and cold, although not so cols as to drive a person into a corner.
       And she also finds:
you're always trying to find radically unique answers regarding things about this world -- answers that are all your own. You hesitate to engage in everyman's joy, in everyman's contentment, or even in everyman's sorrow. Instead you're always complaining that there should be a brand new kind of happiness out there waiting just for you, or a sorrow that only you can suffer.
       Naoto is a man of strong opinions, and he's built up a protective shell around himself of his philosophy. His hurt is deep, and his only hold is certainty about a few things -- including:
the question I continue to think about every day.
     Why is it that I don't commit suicide ?
       The Part of Me That Isn’t Broken Inside is, in fact a deeply and overtly philosophical novel -- but Shiraishi strikes an excellent balance between his narrator's existentialist theorizing and the supporting activity in the book. It helps that the others don't indulge Naoto too much -- Eriko complains: "There you go again with your weird nonsense. You're so full of it", and Honoka teases him: "Actually you're quite clueless about a lot of things, aren't you ! Such a shame". Better yet, Shiraishi's carefully layered narrative ultimately reveals a foundation supporting both philosophy and character fully -- impressively done. As importantly, he doesn't force a simple, rounded-off happy-end conclusion to the story.
       With a late, secondary twist, focused on one of the other characters, an act of violence ending in a death, Shiraishi arguably reaches too far, but in its (relatively, given its proportions) limited effect on Naoto it doesn't undo what else he's built up. But it has the feel of Shiraishi trying too hard, in a novel that otherwise works very well on its smaller, everyday scale.
       When Naoto finally opens up about his mother, and an important substitute figure in his life, his character comes into focus, Shiraishi artfully building up to those points with a narrative that until then seemed much looser and vaguer, Naoto seeming to act out yet actually flailing. His treatment of those in his life -- especially Eriko -- can seem harsh and occasionally cruel, and Eriko seems almost too understanding, but it does fit with the character and his history - and the way he sees the world in his philosophy. Details such as his inability to forget anything, in particular, impress -- and are worked well into a variety of aspects of the novel.
       The Part of Me That Isn’t Broken Inside is exceptionally well done, a novel that seems to meander almost aimlessly along with its self-indulgent narrator yet is a tight and profound exploration of human hurt and intimate relationships. An impressive work. - M.A.Orthofer





Kazufumi Shiraishi, Me Against the World, Translated by Raj Mahtani, Dalkey Archive Press, 2016. 

A jaded journalist inherits an abandoned manuscript penned by an old acquaintance who has recently passed away. The writing―a collection of ruminations on the nature of existence by a fifty-three-year old businessman who, as far as the journalist remembers, was a kind and gentle soul―is nothing short of shocking. In it, this apparent everyman―whom we know only as Mr. K―writes that he has a son, daughter, and wife, but has no love for them. He claims that humans are like cancer cells, destroying Mother Earth with their unrestrained propagation. He looks at our mortal destiny with an unflinching honesty and turns to psychic mediums for clues to the afterlife, wondering what immortality―if it were possible―would mean for our spiritual well-being. Me Against the World takes the reader down the rabbit hole of the raging mind of this man, who only rejects the world in order to save it from itself.


I have a son and daughter, and a wife, but I have no love for them. Humankind is a cancer; people are cancer cells. We have abandoned Mother Earth and are destroying it with our unrestrained propagation.
This is the nihilistic opening line of a manuscript by a 53-year-old family man, which can be taken as the voice of the author. Where do we come from? And where are we headed? These are the questions he goes on to examine. More than the former, though, it is the latter he is concerned with?in other words, the question of death. Our awareness of where we come from is problematic, given that all we have to go on are hazy memories of infancy. But we have many examples we can turn to when it comes to where we are headed. One of them might be possession by the dead, and psychic mediums may provide insight into such occasions. Ultimately, though, death is something we cannot escape. No one is immortal.
But even if we could attain immortality, it would be at the expense of a spiritual life. All our exclusive relationships?parent-child, brother-sister, friends, lovers?along with our virtuous feelings of love and succor, and even our very sense of individual identity, would become unnecessary. Eventually we would probably end up yearning for death rather than trying to avoid it.
In other words, ours is an existence in which we must die. There are numerous people who preach (whether in a religious, spiritual, or simply humanistic context) that love is the only way of escaping the fear of death, that love is something absolute that transcends death, but it is these people we should beware of. The "true love" that the author is at pains to convey is fellow-feeling and compassion. Such a love is powerless against death, which is why it is so universal and all-encompassing. It is only once you stop praying for the happiness of the special people in your life, he declares, that you can set your sights on neutralizing evils such as poverty, violence, war, discrimination, persecution, and fanaticism. - www.booksfromjapan.jp/publications/item/1142-me-against-the-world


When my grandparents were not dead, I would go alone to see them, usually for lunch. Not often because I lived far away, but when I visited my parents I liked the midday, midweek drive to my grandparents’ Orange County subdivision while the world was at work. Having only the three of us felt novel partly because we had no recourse to the set roles and scripts that otherwise constitute family drama. We could speak freely. My grandfather could speak freely. For example, the time he looked intently at me over an egg salad sandwich: “They say you can make a difference, that everything is filled with meaning. They are lying. Life means nothing.” Hearing that, it was like relief. The pronouncement was surprising, even for him. He was more or less known for being a curmudgeon, partly why we got along so well. Also, we both liked poetry and egg salad sandwiches, both of which go largely underappreciated in my family.
Kazufumi Shiraishi’s misanthropic Me Against the World begins there, in the subdivision, at the condo’s beige kitchen table, or wherever you associate the most predictable interactions with the most predictable people in your life. The character Mr. K (Mr. Kazufumi? Mr. Kashyap? Does it matter?) whose journal we are supposedly reading, after a staid life filled with un-objectionably fulfilling his obligations, then begins to articulate something other.
You see I don’t love my children, nor do I love my wife.
Their existence is meaningless to me.
An existential thrill sets in, one I don’t remember feeling since, say, The Stranger or Nausea, both guiding lights during my late teens. The book then proceeds with a homespun philosophical interrogation of/tirade against death and the idea of it for about a hundred pages. The philosopher will say, that’s it? What can you get done in a hundred pages chasing after such a perennial? The fiction reader: Do I have to wade through all one hundred? I’ll say it outright. You can get a lot done and you should wade through all of them.
There is real pleasure in the way Mr. K makes his way through his line of reasoning, in the shape of his thoughts. The explanatory tropes he uses and the weirdly curated thought exercises and facts culled from popular media, funneled through the curious divagations of his thinking, these give depth to the character and energy to the prose. We get paranormal reality TV and Enola Gay. We get the “enormous drawing paper measuring ten meters in height and twenty meters in width” on which the self is but an ink stain. Even though not longer after the drawing paper gets scrapped — actually “We are like the paper patterns tailors use.” Or how, in another extended metaphor, those who advocate for “a great force for good” are merely God’s spies on the battlefield, no different from any spies deployed by any imperial power.
And if we are to follow his train of thought, where does Mr. K lead us? While not particularly rigorous in approach (that is not the point) nor particularly new in scope, there are little gems that feel fresh, excavated by the process. Cancer is suicidal, we learn. Ghosts are only capable of uninteresting platitudes. That by “carrying out mutual destruction . . . we are made to perceive and appreciate the true pleasures of life.” Not the least of these surprises is the volta towards the end. The reader having been drawn through the wringer of a peculiar kind of negative theology, arrives at a stance of equanimity and compassion, but a skeptic’s stance, one highly specific and personal.
“I saw myself in Camus’ The Stranger,” quotes translator Raj Mahtani from an interview with Kazufumi in his postscript. The little novel was apparently an early and magnetic influence during the author’s charmingly literary childhood cloistered on account of chronic respiratory issues. No surprise given the clear if superficial congruencies between Existentialism and certain strains of Japanese lit. For a certain set, what’s better? You get moral permission to inhabit the voice of a first-person asshole poised to wipe the bourgeois smirk off the reader’s face by way of the unvarnished truth, the really real. Even if that voice must be a male’s and of a certain privilege.
But this is not that exactly. Kazufumi is working against the backdrop of another terrible global political morass, equally all-consuming and equally likely to debilitate with apathy, but with a different texture. The current toxic media environment and rainbow hues of terror alerts are pervasive and pernicious in ways unlike the specter of out and out world wars. Second, the method is hybrid. While Mr. K is more or less doing atheistic philosophy, he doesn’t give up on the Buddhism of contemporary Japanese culture in which he is steeped. Lastly, he let’s himself get somewhere. There might be some shortcutting, but that doesn’t entirely undermine the moment of arrival.
In the introduction, the fictional journalist responsible for getting Mr. K’s notes published justifies his decision: “I thought it would be a good idea to personally hand over this collection of notes to those around twenty years old.” And it’s true; of the multiple ways to take this work, it’s hard to shake the reading in which there’s an unwritten subtitle, something like Letters to a Young Curmudgeon. The younger me would have been enthralled. He would not have noticed so much the spots where the terrain felt well trod or where the path skirted solipsistic onanism. But there’s more than enough thrill in the premise and delight in the execution to find you the whole way through. You walk away with a hard won sliver of compassion for Mr. K and continued gratitude to Dalkey for making acclaimed contemporary voices like Kazufumi available to a broader audience before they’re totally dead. - Nabil Kashyap


“Is this book a novel trying to do philosophy or is it philosophy masquerading as a novel?” This was the question I found myself asking over and over again as I made my way through Kazufumi Shiraishi’s Me Against the World. Right from the opening page, Shiraishi’s work seems to deliberately confuse genres. “The Publisher’s Forward” is actually a fictional introduction to “K,” the recently deceased salaryman whose philosophical musings make up the bulk of Me Against the World’s one hundred or so pages.
This foreword gives the impression that Shiraishi has literary ambitions for the book we are going to read. A book based on the words of a man who is already dead seems to be a reference to Kokoro, a novel by Japanese literary giant Natsume Soseki, whose face once graced the surface of the one thousand yen note. The final section ofKokorotakes the form of a suicide note from an older man, known only as Sensei, to our younger narrator. And if this similarity wasn’t enough for the reader, Shiraishi heavy-handedly hammers it home by having his deceased character, “K,” bear the same name as Sensei’srival in love. Yet despite its literary pretensions and perhaps a preoccupation with death, Me Against the Worldbears very little resemblance to Soseki’s masterpiece.
First and foremost, Kokoro is a novel with a plot. It follows a series of characters through various parts of their lives. And while it certainly raises philosophical questions through doing so, I would never really call it a work of philosophy. Me Against the Worldon the other hand is a book without a plot. Beyond the “Publisher’s Forward” which briefly details the events of K’s life, nothing really happens. K is the only character who is ever named (well, except for his cat Hachi). And the only events that K describes to us are a series of hypothetical situations which he uses to illustrate his philosophical viewpoint, including a particularly graphic one involving a father taking his revenge on the man who raped and murdered his daughter.
And while there is nothing wrong with mixing genres, these hypothetical situations and a series of powerful metaphors—which Raj Mahtani does a good job of translating, such as one that compares humanity to uncontrollably multiplying cancer cells—still don’t constitute a story. Instead they are being used by K to espouse his philosophical argument. And the philosophy of Me Against the World leaves something to be desired.
K’s ramblings often lack a certain degree of philosophical rigor, and I found myself constantly disagreeing with his claims. Early on in the book he talks about the existence of the soul. He says that it would be ridiculous to doubt the existence of the soul, but that even if we do it shouldn’t change anything. Elsewhere, much of K’s discussion revolves around the idea of death: What does it mean to die? What happens to us after death? What would happen if people lived forever? Yet his discussions about death are all based on the assumption that we have a soul. K never addresses the counter-argument, in this case whether or not we even have a soul, and this failure to anticipate an objection is not the mark of a strong argument.
These moments in the book infuriated me. This was no Socratic dialogue; K had no interlocutor to push back against his often totally left-field claims. Furthermore, in the foreword our editor has already asked us for forgiveness over the often shocking things that K has chosen to write about. This feels like a weak excuse to allow the author to get away with bad arguments by saying, “Well, it’s not really me saying this.” Shiraishi uses the form of the novel to allow him to get away with some rather weak philosophizing, with K as his mouthpiece.
Yet, as it turns out this isn’t an entirely fair characterization of what Me Against the World is doing. By the end of the book I began to see how it was more like a novel than I had given it credit for. The book didn’t suddenly shift into meaningful plot but Part II of K’s writing served as a sort of climax to the work. There is a sudden shift in topic, moving from a discussion about death to one that is focused on love. Without revealing too much the move helps bring together some of the more absurd things that K has written. I’m still not sure whether to call Me Against the World a novel or a work of philosophy, but  I would recommend it to someone who is willing persevere through its frustrations.
- Stephen McHugh


Kazufumi Shiraishi’s Me Against the World is, according to its subtitle, a novel, but would be more accurately described as a work of philosophy with a fictional framing device. The “publisher’s foreword” fictionalizes the main text by presenting it as the work of a Mr. K, an old friend of the “publisher.” Their friendship was not what one would describe as intimate, but it was marked by deeply meaningful exchanges through correspondence and in person. Over the course of this lifelong friendship, the two meet at least once a year until Mr. K dies suddenly of a heart attack at fifty-three and entrusts a manuscript he was working to his friend, in whom he had never confided about his writing.
After the publisher has piqued the reader’s curiosity by sharing his compulsion to have this manuscript published and by seeking to soften or justify the manuscript’s abrasiveness, the foreword ends and we are plunged into the main text, a rabid stream of consciousness reminiscent of Journey to the End of the Night, full of contempt for humans and anger at having to live among them. Mr. K asserts at one point that human beings are to the planet what cancer is to human beings–an endlessly multiplying, malignant organism:
Each and every one of us is something like a cancer cell. While cancer cells can metastasize anywhere and are able to adapt and grow in any environment, there really isn’t a single thing that can be considered significant in their existence or in their nature to carry out unlimited proliferation.
This likening of human beings to cancer is the first of many analogies Mr. K uses to describe the human condition. To anyone who’s read epistemological philosophy (willingly or unwillingly), reliance on analogies recalls the work of thinkers who firmly believe in the universe’s explainability. But it soon becomes clear that—as the “foreword” preemptively pointed out—many of these analogies are faulty, either because they compare two things that are not analogous or because the analogy is used to support a conclusion that does not follow from it. What appear to be analogies are really more like free associations, just as what appears to be reasoning is more like a string of loosely connected musings assembled in such a way that it looks like a work of philosophical argumentation as long as you skim over what the words are saying. This, and the way Mr. K criticizes anything and everything humans do to make their lives a little bit bearable, makes for tough reading and the occasional eye roll.
Mr K. has little patience for widespread beliefs and for the ways that people reassure themselves or organize their lives. Of physics and scientist alike he says: 
In effect, what they’re doing is picking up random stones littered on the ground, then coloring them and showing them off before us as if they were something precious and rare. They commercialize “death”—which is in fact the most ordinary and commonplace phenomenon you can find in the world—by decorating it in various ways . . . I believe the psychic medium resembles the career scientist very much. Of course, priests of existing and new religions are also similar in this regard.
Mr. K’s mistrust of rationality, of the scientists who he believes deify it, and of religion and superstition—as well as his passionate and oracular voice—bring to mind Nietzsche, specifically The Gay Science. Like Nietzsche, Mr. K pinpoints the foolishness of the beliefs we hold on to as balm (or opium, Marx might say) for our creeping awareness of our pointless existences and our inevitable deaths. But even to a reader who agrees with this vision of the world, the narrator is at his most abrasive in these passages, particularly where he criticizes care for one’s family and friends as a feel-good farce. In emulating Nietzsche, Mr. K sometimes veers into the tone of those who have read Nietzsche hastily and without depth and want to provoke and to seem superior by proclaiming the majority of humanity weak and stupid.
Just as irritating are the meditations on revenge, justice, and responsibility that make up the midsection of this slim but slow-moving book. We are introduced to extreme and off-putting scenarios—rapes, murders, accidental deaths—and called upon to imagine what kind of punishment is appropriate. If someone kills a child, would the father of that child be justified in killing the murderer? Or would justice or revenge be better served by killing the murderer’s family so that he might experience the same grief that he inflicted? If your girlfriend dies in an accident on her way to meet you, to what extent did your actions cause her death? And so on. Given the casual, detached tone of these passages, their point might be to drive home the horror of the human condition, that the world is so disgustingly cruel that horrible acts of violence do not warrant dramatics or outrage because they’re commonplace enough to merit nothing more than a shrug.
But Me Against the World hinges on explaining a much smaller-scale, less visible tragedy: “Dying has never been our true suffering. All of our sufferings, in fact, have been born . . . from having to live in this mutable world.” Just as happiness is only perfect in anticipation, death is most fearsome when we’re alive and constantly aware of it, every change in the world a reminder of the passage of time. What we fear about death, Mr. K contends, is forever losing consciousness, our relationship with our incomprehensible self:
When physical death is imminent, what is horrifying to you above all else is not the prospect of parting from your beloved wife or your young children. It’s the prospect of parting from yourself.
Eventually, the combative tone subsides, as though the narrator has accepted death and now just wants to reason through its implications. It becomes clear that what he seeks to do is to defy the indignity and inevitability of death by writing toward some discovery, some purpose for his life. It’s rare for a philosophical work to have character development, but this progression seems to qualify: Mr. K, for all of his off-putting or unfounded judgments, for all his bitterness and misanthropy, is shown to be one of us. He has spent his life hoping, if not quite effectually, to accomplish something exceptional that might justify his existence. He has cast aside the consolations and reassurances of science and religion and other beliefs, and he has also tried the give up on finding meaning, and yet peace of mind still evades him.
But some kind of clarity and resolution does come at last. Unlike some of Nietzsche’s corny imitators, the narrator ends up proving, in the end, that he had a reason for hacking away at religion, superstition, family, and every other value widely embraced as solution to the problem of death. The narrator’s conclusion, and his recommendation to all of humankind, is to cast off affection for individuals in our lives in favor of developing real compassion for all members of the human race—a change that will, for Mr. K, lead us to a more just world. In a shift of mood and tone reminiscent of Albert Camus’s The Stranger, the last pages suddenly turn from clipped pessimism to lyricism and evoke a sense of hope and vindication. Mr. K comes to the Camusian conclusion that although we must die without ever knowing why we exist on this earth:
Real love is a small encouragement for all of us who must die. Which is why every kind of human being, every kind of living thing, deserves to be loved equally. You could be a good person or a bad person, but your inevitable fate of death will remain unchanged. The true nature of love is in fact an infinite sadness for every presence, every being that must die. The true character of love is in fact a never-ending flow of sympathy for us beings who remain in the dark about why we were ever born, what we love for, and what we die for. Love can never overthrow death. But that’s why love can come close to us . . . Just by bringing to life the compassion within you, you can neutralize the abominable, diabolical program that has been built into the world—the program running the algorithms of poverty, violence, war, discrimination, persecution, fanaticism, and other true sins.
Even upon finishing the book, this reader remained at a loss as to how Mr. K arrived at his conclusion of universal love through his series of convoluted and often unpleasant digressions. But when one thinks about it for a while, one realizes that these kinds of thoughts about the human condition, or anything else, are never linear—and they don’t even have to be logical or consistent to lead us to an epiphany that is greater than the sum of the thoughts that preceded it. Still, it is a strange and maybe even triumphant accomplishment to start from utter misanthropy and disgust at the world—hurling insults at it, showing it the truth of its own ugliness—and end with a stunning display of hope. - Emily Lever


Me Against the World begins with a (fictional) 'Publisher's Foreword', a fifty-year-old writer describing the origins of the text that makes up the bulk of the novel. This writer met the author of the text, a Mr.K, quarter of a century or so earlier, and they had remained friends -- albeit of the long-distance sort, meeting: "only about once a year, if we met at all" but staying in touch through correspondence, with the writer always sending his work to Mr.K, who would respond with comments. At the age of fifty-three, Mr.K passed away, and recently, a few years later, his widow passed on to the writer a manuscript of: "Mr.K's private musings, which is the book you hold".
       This Foreword gives a brief overview of Mr.K's life, as perceived at some distance by the writer -- useful insofar as Mr.K.'s two-part text is a sort of 'I-novel', and gives only a limited, inside perspective in Mr.K's own voice. The writer also notes that he felt compelled to publish Mr.K's work -- "I passionately believed that" -- and does so without revising it, despite the fact that:
I couldn't but help find various details objectionable and have also spotted a considerable number of inconsistencies from the outset. 
       Similarly, even though he finds: "the title is slightly too provocative for comfort" he left that too unchanged.
       The writer also claims: "I've decided to refrain from expressing my personal opinions here", but over the mere seven pages of the Foreword does, in fact, express quite a lot, directly and indirectly. He both makes some excuses for Mr.K and states, emphatically:
But let me just say that every young person should read Mr.K's writings. I would very much like that.
       Meanwhile, he acknowledges that:
I have also been suffering from a sudden attack of depression again after ten-odd years, and at present I find myself incapable of holding my pen for long
       It's no stretch to imagine that Mr.K's text, and what he expresses there -- all that material the writer believes young folk might benefit from ... -- weighs heavily on the writer ..... Because heavy it indeed is .....
       The Foreword feels like the most 'fictional' part of the novel, the closest to offering story. Mr.K's text does offer a few stories too, but even these tend to be thought-experiments more than an attempt to recount from life or imagination. So the Foreword is central to the novel, shaping it, and the reading of the rest of it -- including by the writer subtly undermining aspects of Mr.K's text and arguments.
       The two-part text itself then reads more like an essay -- or, indeed, philosophical text -- than anything else. It is a personal argument -- its opening entirely personal, for example: "I am married with one son and one daughter" -- but more concerned with theory. Mr.K offers his life-vision -- but that is one that insists our day-to-day lives are of essentially no significance, and that we focus on entirely the wrong matters, and are missing the point.
       As already hinted at in the Foreword, Mr.K quickly gets to one of his points: "I don't love my children, nor do I love my wife". In fact, he pretty much has no feelings for or interest in pretty much anyone -- an attitude he thinks is easy to explain:
The reason I am unable to sustain any interest not only in other people, including my family, but also in myself is because I myself -- the very person who should be the subject of my interest -- will eventually expire.
       Oh, yes, Mr.K's 'Me Against the World' is a study of existential despair, taken to its obvious extremes. It's all about death -- inevitable death, which really throws a spanner in the works. Since we know death is coming ... well, there's no point to anything, right ? Yes, for Mr.K that's the crux of the matter -- all matters. Conversely -- so Mr. K --: "If we can realize immortality every problem in this world will surely be resolved".
       Yes, there's more than a touch of the Houellebecqian to his philosophy too:
     Strictly speaking, sex to humans is a means for realizing pleasure. And that's the very reason why human sexual intercourse has ended up becoming so infinitely disgusting. I can conclusively say in fact that it has become the height of depravity itself, having lost its essential point -- which is reproduction.
       There's some appeal to these extreme positions -- and a character beneath, revealing himself and his lonely struggles of 'Me Against the World' -- and even the basic idea (we're going to die so what else could possibly be the point ?) and some of the consequences he draws from it are intriguing. But it's so poorly argued as philosophy, and there's so little intellectual rigor. If it's convenient to his arguments, then a TV demonstration by a 'psychic' isn't questioned in the least: "As far as you can tell from watching the program, it's impossible to doubt his ESP". The bar for 'impossible' has to be higher than that -- and it isn't here, as Mr.K throws around with absolutes and certainty without bothering with any sort of foundations or explanations (much less proofs).
       Of course, the lack of foundations allow for another reading, too -- that Mr.K offers not a world-view but a desperate and despairing lament for his own personal failure, that when he speaks in generalities and universals what he is in fact bemoaning is his own inability to connect and feel:
     I believe we are simply not endowed with the faculty to accept from the heart, to deeply appreciate, a peaceful, quiet and beautiful world.
       Are Mr.K's writings -- which we know he struggled over for a decade -- simply a flailing reaction to rhe modern condition, to the intense personal isolation Mr.K experienced and which he was unable to free himself from ?
       As such the novel would indeed be more 'a novel' -- but there's not quite enough along those lines for it to be a success as such either. (Additionally, the many poorly- and mis-argued claims frustrate the exercise, regardless of its nature.)
       Me Against the World is, conceptually, an interesting work of fiction -- but the reliance on Mr.K's text, and the weaknesses of that text (specifically, a truly shocking lack of intellectual rigor -- this is stuff that wouldn't pass in a beginner's philosophy seminar) make for a relatively frustrating read. There's appeal to the outlandishness of Mr.K's philosophy -- but their proponent can't do them justice here. - M.A.Orthofer


August honors the dead in Japan, so it’s fitting that Kazufumi Shiraishi’s raw discourse on mortality makes its English debut this month. Originally published in 2008, “Me Against the World” breaks from Shiraishi’s fictional works, offering the author’s undiluted musings on life. As told The Japan Times in a recent interview: “I had tried to include the ideas of this work in all of my previous novels, but I was at a point where I wanted to thoroughly sort out my thoughts and record them in one book, so I wrote the whole thing in one go. It took about a week, like writing an extended memo to myself.”

Using his background in fiction, Shiraishi created a loose narrative form. In a constructed “Publisher’s Forward,” a fictional journalist provides a brief explanation of a Mr. K and their friendship to introduce the manuscript he has inherited after Mr. K’s sudden death. The rest of the book is the manuscript itself, a series of entwining, metaphorical reflections on the biggest questions in life. For Shiraishi, these questions have preoccupied him since childhood. As he explains: “Why are we here? What is the reason for us to be on this earth? It’s no joking matter. This is something I’ve been thinking about from the time I was young. As a child, I really wanted to know.”

As an adult, Shiraishi’s unblunted examination spins into heady, addictive mind candy. The English translation, by Raj Mahtani, captures Shiraishi’s contemplations with profound simplicity. The brilliance of “Me Against the World” is found in its contradictions, its pragmatic nihilism somehow morphing into compassionate biocentrism, its metaphorical imaginings mired in a reality that lays bare the ironic absurdity of existence.
The opening of the “manuscript” jars in its harsh appraisal of love and humanity, drawing the reader into a seeming rabbit hole of negativity. As Mr. K soon explains: “Humans too lead meaningless lives, having no reason to be born. What’s more, humans have broken away from Earth — their life-support system, their mother — and are destroying her as they please before indiscriminately propagating themselves. To Earth, humans are without a doubt nothing more than cancer cells.”
Discussing everything from psychic beliefs to religion; romantic love to reincarnation; and comparing human life to an oscillating thread, an ink spot, a “paper pattern tailors use,” the spiraling, philosophical meanderings gradually converge on a simple pinpoint of truth: Compassion is the only answer in the face of such epic farce.
Catching up with the author, it comes as no surprise that the young Mr. K, as in Kazufumi, the son of acclaimed novelist Ichiro Shiraishi, read voraciously and questioned incessantly as a child. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gide, Sartre, Camus — as a teen and young adult, Shiraishi looked toward the intellectuals of Western literature for answers. For a long time, however, he never considered following in his late father’s footsteps.
“I never dreamed I would become a writer. To be a writer, you have to come up with something only you can write. It took me a long time to find this,” he says. “I wasn’t convinced I could write something only I could write.”
First finding work as a journalist and editor, Shiraishi was encouraged to write by the efforts of his twin brother, Fumio, also a published novelist. Nearly 20 years since his 2000 debut novel “A Ray of Light,” Shiraishi has enjoyed both commercial and critical success. Awarded the Naoki prize for “To an Incomparable Other” in 2009, (he and his father are the only father-son pair to have each won the prize), he also won the Yamamoto Shugoro Prize in the same year for “Remove this Arrow from Deep in my Heart.” “The Part of Me That Isn’t Broken Inside,” published in 2002, became a national best-seller and is upcoming in translation from Dalkey Archive Press.
Shiraishi calls “Me Against the World” “a fitting debut” to Western readers, grappling as it does with the existential questions more commonly addressed in classic Western literature.
“Japanese tend to be more concerned if a person’s life or death is beautiful, or aesthetically pleasing,” he points out. “People in the West seriously debate philosophical issues like the meaning of life and death.”
For Shiraishi, a discussion on death naturally begins with love: “If you trace its origins all the way back, like going upstream a river, you find that the root of love, it’s fundamental cause, is death. And that’s what I wanted to say in this novel.
“In other words, if there is no death, there is no love. Human beings perish, without fail, within a brief passage of time, far briefer than, say, a tree. Human existence involves consciousness, which fades away along with the body, before we disappear, in the end. And love is something that compensates for this ephemerality.
“If we don’t die, there is no love, no nothing; no family, no marriage, nada. In other words, if you think about what’s truly everlasting — well, everyone thinks that love is eternal, but what’s truly everlasting as an absolute truth. What forms the foundation of love — it’s our mortality, isn’t it? The act of dying itself?
And that’s what I wanted to say. That’s also why Mr. K, when he thinks about love, is left with no choice but to think about death.” - Kris Kosaka


To an Incomparable Other                                                         

A man and a woman, both from well-to-do families, respectively figure in this pair of novellas about love. The title work centers on Akio, the third son of a distinguished family whose great-grandfather was a successful entrepreneur. Whereas his father and both his older brothers are talented academics, Akio was a mediocre student and now at 27 makes his living as a sales rep for a sports manufacturer. Akio’s wife Nazuna is a beautiful younger woman he married two years ago against his family’s wishes after meeting her at the cabaret where she worked. One day Nazuna suddenly leaves him to go back to her hostessing; as she confesses, she is carrying on an affair with a childhood friend, although the man, too, is married with a family of his own. Akio’s plaints find a sympathetic ear in his boss Michiko, and little by little he becomes attracted to this self-proclaimed “homely” woman six years his senior. Although he briefly goes back to Nazuna, he divorces her when he is transferred to China. Upon his return he marries Michiko, whom he nurses through relapsed lung cancer and eventual death.

The second tale, Kakegae no nai hito e (To an Irreplaceable Other), reverses the premise: this time the role of protagonist falls to a privileged woman whose father is the president of a power-line company and mother the head of a hospital pediatrics ward. Although engaged to an elite company colleague her own age, the woman finds herself enthralled by the sexual expertise of a former boss in his forties. Through both scenarios the author calls on us to reexamine our own life choices. - www.booksfromjapan.jp/publications/item/442-to-an-incomparable-other

A Ray of Light
At the young age of 38, Kōsuke Hashida is chosen to head the personnel department of a company that belongs to one of Japan’s largest conglomerates. A rising star on the corporate fast track, he is engaged to be married to 28-year-old Rui Fujiyama, daughter of an oil company president and niece of his own company’s head, Ōgigaya. One day Hashida comes to the aid of a junior-college student, Kaori Nakahira, when the owner of the bar she works at is giving her a hard time. As their friendship grows he is soon giving her advice on finding a job, offering emotional support, and helping her out in a variety of other ways. Having been abused by her mother and older brother as a child Kaori is mentally fragile, and she remains terrified of her brother, who continues to try to approach her.
Hashida’s smooth-sailing career encounters choppier waters as he gets drawn into a power struggle within the company. An exposé appears in the newspaper about political shenanigans orchestrated by Ōgigaya to curry favor in connection with oil field development in Indonesia. As Hashida conducts his own investigation of the matter it comes to light that some 200 million yen in political funds have gone missing, and there are calls for the president’s ouster. Although Ōgigaya is indeed guilty of embezzling the money, he manages to save his own skin by shifting the blame to his loyal aide Suruga; he resigns as president to become chairman of the board. Having been thrown under the bus by his boss, Suruga commits suicide in despair, and Hashida is so disillusioned with Ōgigaya that he quits the company.
The now jobless Hashida tries to break off his engagement with Rui, but her love is strong, and she refuses to let him go: they begin a new life together. While Hashida and Rui are away on a trip, Kaori is attacked by the brother who has been stalking her, and a blow to the head leaves her in a vegetative state. Although Hashida has always been concerned about Kaori’s safety, he regrets that he has been out of touch with her while things developed with Rui. When he rushes to the hospital to see her, her fiancé Yanagihara reveals that the person Kaori really loves is Hashida. Yanagihara gives Hashida a letter addressed to him from Kaori in which she states her determination to stand on her own two feet, without Hashida’s help. Realizing for the first time what is really important to him, Hashida breaks up with Rui; vowing to remain at Kaori’s side until she recovers consciousness, he decides to file marriage papers.
The story of ill-fated love between hero and heroine shines like a single fleeting ray of light amidst the dark realities of corporate culture in this strong debut work by an author who has subsequently gone on to win the Naoki Prize. -www.booksfromjapan.jp/publications/item/2957-a-ray-of-light

The Lightless Sea                                                           
A man at a crossroads in his life reflects on his past and the choices he has made while desperately seeking a ray of hope for the future.
For the last ten years, 50-year-old Shūichirō Takanashi has been president of Tokumoto Industries, a mid-sized wholesaler of building materials with upwards of 500 employees. Avowing frugality as his credo, he is proud to have successfully steered the company through difficult economic times by reining in expenditures, but now he finds it difficult to maintain his former sense of purpose and drive. With no blood relations left and having lost his wife and son to divorce, he is completely alone in the world. The story recounts events spanning a little over a year before he yields the post of president to a successor and retires.
Takanashi’s predecessor, Michiyo Tokumoto, is constantly on his mind. Tokumoto Industries was founded by her husband Kyōsuke. In 1976, when Takanashi was 11, a company car in which Tokumoto Kyōsuke was riding hit Takanashi’s little sister Atsuko in a traffic accident, and the girl was left with a permanent limp. Two years before this, their father had run off with a young employee of the coffee shop he operated, and their mother died five years later from stomach cancer. The orphans were subsequently supported by Tokumoto Industries, and when Takanashi graduated from high school, he went to work for the company. This was four years after Kyōsuke Tokumoto died and his wife Michiyo had taken over as president at the young age of 39.
Not long after Takanashi begins working at the company, Michiyo initiates a sexual relationship with him, which they carry on secretly for twelve years. Three years after they end their relationship, Takanashi marries Junko Tokumoto, Michiyo’s daughter with Kyōsuke, at Michiyo’s behest. Junko soon bears a son, but it is the child of a man she was seeing before she got married. Takanashi and Junko divorce, but Michiyo taps him to be her successor as president of the company as she herself becomes chairman of the board. Meanwhile, Takanashi’s sister Atsuko disappears while snorkeling in Bali and is confirmed dead at the age of 24, and a private investigator he hires reports back that his father died at the age of 60.
Along the way, the various difficulties faced by supporting characters with whom Takanashi is close?Hanae, who sells urns that purify water from a street stand, and her grandmother Kinue; Mr. and Mrs. Horikoshi, whose son was sentenced to life in prison for murder?deliver a variety of jolts to Takanashi. He makes it through these trials, as well as a takeover attempt led by Tokumoto Industries’ main bank and his own effective removal from office, but as he then lays the groundwork to reopen the old coffee shop his mother had operated, he attempts to take his own life. The result of the attempt is left unknown. - www.booksfromjapan.jp/publications/item/3637-the-lightless-sea

Domício Coutinho, Duke, the Dog Priest, Trans. by Clifford E. Landers, Green Integer, 2009.




excerpt


Born in Brazil, novelist Domício Coutinho immigrated to the United States in 1959. His first novel, Duke, the Dog Priest,comically explores Nova Eboracense, Brazilian New York, with its dazzling mix of priests, brothers, nuns, students, church workers, parishioners, city luminaries, and a dog named Duke who wants to become a priest—making for a wonderfully fantastic novel.

Serafinski, Blessed is the Flame: An Introduction to Concentration Camp Resistance and Anarcho-Nihilism                   
read it here


This book, with a name from a poem by a partisan fighter, takes two things that would not necessarily seem to go together, but that, on second thought, are made for each other. An introduction to anarcho-nihilism becomes tales of resistance in the Nazi concentration camps, almost all of which failed (in the sense that the resisters died), and for which there was never much hope that they could do anything but fail, which are then analyzed in light of anarcho-nihilism. This book is an excellent example of taking anarcho-nihilism seriously, as a call to action that has nothing to do with the expectation that we will succeed at making the world better. For those who are confused about anarcho-nihilism, and also for those who use the word nihilism as a trendy way to talk about the same actions that leftists have been doing for decades, this text will be an especially helpful road sign.




“What does it take to resist in absolutely futile and overwhelming situations? Inside of the Nazi concentration camps, places ruthlessly designed to eradicate all possibilities for resistance, inmates organized, sabotaged, and reflexively fought back against their oppressors. Within each of these stories we can find a simmering spirit of anarcho-nihilism, a tendency that challenges us to translate our feelings of hopelessness into wild and joyous forms of attack.”

Rodrigo Hasbún, Affections, Trans. by Sophie Hughes, Pushkin Press, 2016.


excerpt






'He is not a good writer, thank goodness. He is a great one' - Jonathan Safran Foer


A gripping novel about an unusual family's breakdown, set in 1950s-60s South America
Loosely based on real events, Affections tells the story of the eccentric, fascinating Ertl family, headed by the egocentric and extraordinary Hans, once Leni Riefenstahl's famous cameraman and Rommel's 'personal photographer'. Having fled Germany shortly after the country's defeat in the war, the family now lives in Bolivia. However, shortly after their arrival Hans - an enthusiastic adventurer and mountaineer - decides to embark on an expedition in search of Paitití, a legendary Inca city. The failure of their outlandish quest into the depths of the Amazon rainforest proves fateful, initiating the end of a family whose subsequent voyage of discovery ends up eroding everything which once held it together.
Against the backdrop of the both optimistic and violent 1950s and 1960s, Affections traces the Ertls' inevitable breakdown through the various erratic trajectories of each family member - from Hans and his constant engagement in colossal projects, to his daughter Monika, heir to his adventurous spirit, who joins the Bolivian Marxist guerrillas and becomes known as 'Che Guevara's avenger' - and the story of a woman in search of herself, the story of the heartrending relationship between a father and a daughter, the story of a family adrift.








'Hasbún's writing has a strange power. He likes to reach into the darkest places. Reading him is like... a journey to the brink of an abyss' - El País


“Dark, deep, disturbing. No concessions, no sweeteners: here everything hurts. Through this ably crafted family saga, Hasbún manages to explore the permanent conflicts and contradictions of a whole nation.” —Andrés Neuman



"In Affections, a family elegy is woven into an epitaph for the radical politics of South America and the result is an act of literary hypnosis you won't soon forget."  —Adam Haslett



"Concise yet wild, haunting yet exuberantly full of life, Rodrigo Hasbún's Affections achieves all sorts of artful, intoxicating contradictions. What a gloriously unpredictable book." —Idra Novey



“A dark, stunning novel, Affections is charged by a brilliant kaleidoscope of perspectives, the voices of exiles, a post-war German family in Bolivia. Hasbún has spun a tale of displacement, of political turmoil, in which the characters’ motives are as complicated as the Bolivian jungle they explore. It’s a fascinating book." —Lynne Tillman



"It's hard to decide which character is more fascinating in Hasbún's masterful blend of history and fiction about a German family living in La Paz in the decades after the war. As the quick-paced narrative covers from the search for a lost city in the Amazon to the brutal guerrillas in the Bolivian jungle, the inner lives of each family member build up to enormous emotional payoff. This is sharp storytelling, both in the political and intimate fronts." —Daniel Galera



“Affections is a masterpiece, its spare mosaic narrative mesmerizes and brilliantly explodes in the reader's imagination like slow fireworks that will never fade. With its Chekovian emotional intimacy, the razor sharp and tragic political insight of a Coetzee or Bolaño, the seamless enchantment of a Dinesen tale, this novel feels timeless.” —Francisco Goldman



"This is a finely atmospheric book...It’s a work of sympathetic imagination, written with cool economy, elegance and understanding. It’s a reconstruction of real lives, real historical events, but Hasbún’s achievement is to make it perfectly fictional, which is to say truer than fact. I read it straight through first, with no idea of its historical truth, no knowledge of Hans Ertl beyond the name, no memory of the woman who in Hamburg assassinated the Bolivian diplomat who had been the policeman who ordered the hands of the dead Che Guevara be cut off. Learning of this made the second reading interesting in a different way, but didn’t enrich it. The truth of fiction of this quality is that it reminds you how much of life that really matters goes on in the mind and heart." —The Scotsman (UK)



“Los afectos is a miracle of writing: Rodrigo Hasbún can concentrate two continents, fifty years of history and the collapse of a family in just one hundred pages. He works with extreme delicacy on the Erlts’ biography by creating a literary version of them which is wonderful for its consistency and clarity.” —Giorgio Fontana



“With a direct, unvarnished style, harsh in some way, but with a great sense of rhythm, the author hooks the reader until the very ending of the novel, which is unexpected as much as suspended." —Marco Ostoni





“Hasbún never tricks the readers, but he surprises them, and displays his heroes with a sort of warm coldness which plays with our curiosity and lets us freely imagine what’s left unsaid.” —Goffredo Fofi


Hans Ertl was the director of photography for Leni Riefenstahl’s film Olympia. Though never a member of the Nazi Party, he also worked as the official photographer for Marshal Rommel and the Afrika Korps. After the war he was blacklisted in Germany and in 1950 he emigrated with his wife and three daughters to South America, first to Chile and then Bolivia. There he made documentary films, one about the search for a lost Inca city, and then bought a farm where he would live until he died in his nineties. The oldest daughter, Monika, was his favourite, working with him on his documentaries. She married another German exile, a dull businessman. Oppressed by the poverty and social inequalities of Bolivia, she founded an orphanage and was then drawn into radical politics. Adoring and hero-worshipping Che Guevara, she became a guerrilla fighter or terrorist and later his avenger. Her commitment separated her from the father she had loved. She was killed in an ambush by the security forces. The two other sisters led more normal lives, Heidi returning to Germany where she became a successful businesswoman, the youngest,Trixi, remaining unhappily in Bolivia. This is tremendous material for a novel, dramatic and full of moral complexity. No wonder the young Bolivian novelist Rodrigo Hasbún was attracted to it. What is remarkable, however, is what he has made of it. The easy option, which someone less talented and original might have taken, would have been to write a political thriller. All the material is here in waiting for such a book that, well done, would have sold in airports worldwide. Nazi background, exotic locations, Che Guevara, police brutality, a beautiful and idealistic assassin; altogether a rich stew. Maybe somebody will still write that novel, heavily weighted with research, and it will be a big success.Hasbún’s success is of a different order. He has written a spare narrative, little more than a novella in length, in short, impressionistic chapters, spoken through the voices of Monika (addressing herself as “you”), the other daughters, the brother-in-law who loved her too late and lost her, and an unidentified narrative voice. Everything in the drama is here counterpointed with the ordinariness of life in a land where you don’t feel at home and yet seek to belong. The title indicates where his interest lies. Affections is the theme, affections not strong enough to hold a family together. The father is presented as a “phantom”; you’re always aware of him and he is always slipping out of sight. Monika is a mystery. What turns a beautiful, intelligent girl, so close to her father, into an activist, terrorist and assassin? Events and the reflections they give rise to are presented to us, now in memory, now in a shifting present. But things get “distorted and lost in memory.” “It’s not true,” Trixi thinks, “that memory is a safe place.” “We end up,” she says, ”turning away from the people we love the most.” She does so painfully and reluctantly. The middle sister, Heidi, does so determinedly. But actions have consequences for other people. You get blamed for what you aren’t yourself responsible for. Trixi comes to the sad conclusion that “knowing how to be alone was my one great achievement in life”. Or perhaps that’s not so sad, but a sort of success. Hasbún is a writer who invites you to look at the other side of the coin. This is a finely atmospheric book, admirably translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes. It’s a work of sympathetic imagination, written with cool economy, elegance and understanding. It’s a reconstruction of real lives, real historical events, but Hasbún’s achievement is to make it perfectly fictional, which is to say truer than fact. I read it straight through first, with no idea of its historical truth, no knowledge of Hans Ertl beyond the name, no memory of the woman who in Hamburg assassinated the Bolivian diplomat who had been the policeman who ordered the hands of the dead Che Guevara be cut off. Learning of this made the second reading interesting in a different way, but didn’t enrich it. The truth of fiction of this quality is that it reminds you how much of life that really matters goes on in the mind and heart. - Allan Massie


The Ertl family produced two infamous members whose lives are fictionalized in Hasbún’s moody and spare novel. Hans Ertl was a famous Nazi cinematographer exiled to Bolivia after World War II, where he became obsessed with finding the Lost City of Paititi. His eldest daughter, Monika, who accompanied him on an expedition to find the mythological land, married into a wealthy family before becoming radicalized, joining the Marxist revolutionary movement, and becoming a guerilla fighter. All of this is known as fact, but through his measured and oddly ethereal writing (reminiscent somewhat of Paulo Coelho), Hasbún creates a sort of double exposure of the Ertl family’s slow demise over the upheaval roiling through South America. The impact of Hans’s restlessness on his family—his three daughters and their mother—frames the narrative, which unfolds through multiple points of view. Somehow, it is Trixi, the sister who stayed behind with her mother while the rest of the family sought Paititi, whose staid narrative provides the most powerful moments: from her unhappy, cancerous mother deliberately introducing her to cigarettes at age 12, to the devastating paragraph in which Monika corrects Trixi’s naive belief that her older sister’s lover died accidentally: “They kicked his spine until it snapped.” This is an inventive, powerful novel.  - Publishers Weekly

A German family heads to Bolivia after World War II, sparking decades of internal strife amid political revolution.
Hasbún's brisk, sensitive U.S. debut is a fictionalized story of the Ertl clan, which emigrated to escape the ruins and political embarrassments of Nazism. (Patriarch Hans worked as an assistant to propagandist Leni Riefenstahl.) But Hans’ dream of exploring a new land absent politics slowly erodes. Central to that shift is his daughter Monika, who, after a failed marriage, joins Che Guevara’s revolutionaries; “she felt that she had at last found her place in the world.” Her decision, and the violence that follows it, creates a blast radius around the rest of the family, especially her sisters, Trixi and Heidi. But though Hasbún’s narrative is rooted in politics, its key strengths are his remarkable command of time and characterization. The novel is short but gallops across a half-century’s worth of transformations in Bolivia, and sections narrated by individual characters are marked by a surprising depth of emotional detail given the story’s brevity. Reinhard, the brother of Monika’s husband, can’t reconcile “the intriguing Monika from the early days with the impossible Monika later on.” Heidi describes the disoriented family as like “soldiers searching for a war, or interplanetary beings,” while Trixi laments the “doses of horror” that Monika’s radicalization created; Monika herself hardens over time, becoming someone with “no emotion, no memory.” More detail about each of these characters would be welcome; the book feels at times like an epic historical saga that’s been cut down to size by an especially aggressive editor. But in stripping down the story to its barest essence, Hasbún has intensified the effects of each individual scene; the volumes' worth of drama contained in the family’s life emerge by suggestion and implication.
A one-sitting tale of fragmented relationships with a broad scope, delivered with grace and power.  - Kirkus Reviews
       
Rodrigo Hasbún’s Affections (translated by Sophie Hughes, review copy courtesy of Pushkin Press) begins in the Bolivian capital of La Paz in 1955.  Hans Ertl, a German film-maker and explorer who brought his whole family across the ocean a few years earlier, has just arrived home after another extended absence in the mountains.  His presence is to prove short-lived, though, as he heads off again in search of a legendary lost city, taking his elder daughters, Monika and Heidi, with him, leaving his long-suffering wife Aurelia at home with the youngest daughter, Trixi.
Affections is not your average family drama, though.  The first half of the book slowly sets the scene, only for the story to take off in the second part.  You see, Bolivia in the 1960s and 70s was a rather turbulent place, and it turns out that Monika is to find herself in the thick of the political and social turmoil.  As the family drifts apart, so does the country, leaving chasms that will prove almost impossible to bridge once the dust has settled.
Hasbún’s novel is relatively short, but it’s very effective and a pleasure to read.  While Affections is based on real people, the writer has used them as the basis for his tale, reimagining their relationships around certain infamous real-life events.  Ertl and his family did emigrate to Bolivia in the 1950s (as a Wikipedia search will confirm), and despite initial adjustment issues, they became part of a German diaspora, a fortunate elite in a poor country.
Our first view of the story is as a description of three very different sisters, gradually growing apart.  The middle sister, Heidi, is homely and cheerful, her crush on Rudi, her father’s assistant, setting the course for her later life (and eventual disillusionment).  Her younger sister Trixi is close to her mother, and having arrived in Bolivia at a young age, she makes a life for herself in La Paz, even if she does seem to drift through a languid, goalless existence.
However, from the very beginning, it’s clear that our attention will mainly be focused on the eldest sister, Monika:
Yes, she’s the only one who matters now, the misunderstood child, the chaotic, rebellious teenager, the woman who went on to lose all perspective and no longer knew where to stop and ended up hurting herself and others.//Yes, if you pressed me I would say this is the definition of her that sticks: the woman who went on to cause so much hurt.
p.41 (Pushkin Press, 2016)
Larger than life, fierce and independent, Monika is close to her father but able to stand up to him, and her inherited sense of adventure eventually develops into an attachment to a cause.  Yet this description of a woman who brings chaos wherever she goes is very close to the truth.
This was a time of revolutions and uprisings in Latin-America, and while the Castros and Guevara changed society elsewhere, Bolivia is also affected.  Reinhard, Monika’s brother-in-law, senses that a change is on its way:
Reinhard is critical of the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement and its methods.  He says it’s not enough to give land to the Indians, and less meaningful still to let them vote (“Vote for whom?” he asks, when your husband challenges him, “Vote for which of the little white men exploiting them?”).  He tells us it’s brewing, that those of us present should hold onto our hats and our wallets, should be trembling in our boots.  You’ve never heard anyone speak like this before, his words unsettle you. (p.65)
Monika is infected by his beliefs, eventually becoming more heavily involved with the leftist struggle (far more involved than Reinhard himself) than she could ever have thought.
While the second half of Affections is set in a time of turmoil, the text largely avoids the actual fighting and atrocities.  Instead, Hasbún focuses on the spaces between the murders and the thoughts of the people involved.  He uses a variety of narrators and narratorial styles (something translator Sophie Hughes will have been very used to from her work on Laia Jufresa’s similarly structured Umami), with Reinhard’s repetitive monologues (//Yes…) particularly distinct.  The obvious stand-out among the characters is Monika, not only because she appears throughout the other characters’ sections, but also because her strand is written in the second person, distancing the reader from the main focus of the novel.  In a way, the other characters appear to be in orbit around her (even if she’s the one constantly on the move).
Looking back at what I’ve written, I suspect that I haven’t really explained the book as well as I might have, but that’s partly owing to the nature of Hasbún’s novel.  A lot remains unsaid, and it’s up to the reader to decide what to take from the story.  The writing is excellent, calm and measured, yet compelling, whether it concerns descriptions of rainforest adventures, nights of passion or the tense wait for battle.  As we circle around to end the novel with Hans, who has been absent for much of the book, we are forced to reflect on the events of the years separating it from the start.  Affections, then, is a work which can be read in several ways – but it’s certainly one which can be read many times too. - tonysreadinglist.wordpress.com/2016/09/06/affections-by-rodrigo-hasbun-review/





Hans Ertl was a German cinematographer who made his name working with Leni Riefenstahl on the propaganda films she made for Hitler in the 1930s. Olympia (1938), for example, their documentary about the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, once famous for showcasing then-groundbreaking cinematic technique, is now infamous for its glorification of Aryan athletic supremacy.
Such was Ertl’s reputation with the Nazi elite, when war broke out in 1939 he was conscripted into the military as a war correspondent, famously earning the title of “Rommel’s photographer” for his documentation of the field marshal’s North Africa campaign.
After the war, with the country and the party he’d spent his career lionising now defeated, Ertl was banned from working in Germany. Along with many of his contemporaries, he fled to South America to begin a new life. He and his family – his wife, and their three daughters: Monika, Heidi and Trixi – arrived in La Paz in 1952.
He shot two final documentaries in Bolivia in the 1950s before his career was brought to an abrupt end in 1961 when mid-filming a new project, he lost his footage in an accident.
Retiring to an isolated farm, he stepped back from the limelight only for his eldest daughter Monika to take centre stage instead. In 1969 she joined the guerrillas fighting in Che Guevara’s National Liberation Army of Bolivia, soon becoming the most wanted woman in Latin America after she assassinated Toto Quintanilla, the man supposedly responsible for cutting off Guevara’s hands after his execution. She was hunted down and killed in 1973.
Faced with such riches to mine, a less daring writer would surely produce a doorstop of a family saga. Rodrigo Hasbún, however, boldly strips his narrative right back, and, in a writerly intrepidness that matches the adventurous spirit of both Ertl and Monika, constructs a haunting account of the family’s Bolivian years, the key to which is an elegant sparseness.
Rather than retelling the facts of their extraordinary public history, Hasbún is concerned with an intimate examination of the slow collapse of the family as experienced from within: a sister who became a “mystery”, a father who was always a “phantom”.
The story of which he pieces together through vignette-like chapters: a series of episodic moments spanning a period of more than 20 years and narrated from multiple perspectives.
Slight, mercurial and more than a little strange,Affections is like a rare bird of paradise; the kind of creature one imagines Ertl and his companions encountering during the expedition deep into the Amazon jungle with which Hasbún begins the story.
Filming the first of his two Bolivian-set documentaries, Ertl sets out in search of the lost legendary Inca city of Paitití (the Lost City of Gold); Monika and Heidi accompanying him, along with the man Heidi will eventually marry, and the woman who will become Ertl’s lover.
Wearing strange “green rainforest suits,” they push through the thick fog tracing the footsteps of the Conquistadores of yore: “We looked like lost skydivers. We looked like soldiers searching for a war, interplanetary beings.”
It’s an experience that is formative for each and everyone involved – even little Trixi, who is left at home with her mother – a journey into the interior, both physically and psychologically, that lays the groundwork for so much of what’s to come.
Beautifully translated by Sophie Hughes, Affections is a richly atmospheric and evocative portrait of fractured familial bonds that takes the reader into the darkness where the protagonists dwell.
“It’s not true that our memory is a safe place,” thinks the adult Trixi. “In there, too, things get distorted and lost.
In there, too, we end up turning away from the people we love the most.” - Lucy Scholes


If you thought your teenaged years were a struggle to work out the world, and yourself, consider that of Heidi Ertl. Or either of her sisters – this book serves as a sort of tribute to these three real-life women, and the lives that came out of their very disjointed youth, forced to be rarefied from the norm by their family uprooting. Father Hans was one of Leni Riefenstahl's key cameramen, and a Nazi military photographer, before taking the whole family into post-war exile in Bolivia. Their mother would have followed him to the ends of the earth – as in part would their daughters, the older two of which start the book by joining him on an expedition to discover a lost Incan city. Heidi finds young, instant love on the trek – but sees the dark side of such emotions, too. Older sister Monika, who might well be manic depressive, finds something else, while the baby of the family stays at home with a maudlin mother. So much here could be the hook on which to hang a full novel, but if anything it's the reaction of them all to this unusual formative journey that inspires this book.
And it has to be said that while it's not a full novel – nobody would struggle to read this in two hours – it's just as rich as you'd want. Part of that must come down to the different narrative voices used. We just get used to seeing Heidi's point of view of the expedition, when we jump to her kid sister and her Christmas back at home. The oldest girl joins in too, in an unusual second person voice. A man crops up, with a weird paragraph formatting and with everything starting with a Yes,… as if he's responding to a questioner or rehearsing to himself the giving of a statement. Plain narration from outside the sisterhood and their larger family is thin on the ground.
But nothing reads thinly about this book. Rodrigo Hasbun has been receiving accolades at home in Bolivia and elsewhere, and this proves why. It's taut, it's a little strange – certainly it took me to a much different place than to where I was expecting from the opening chapters – but it says a lot. There's a richness here you would appreciate and, to repeat, expect much more readily from a larger, denser read. If you have an understanding of Latin American politics and history, well – you've got the icing on the cake. I got an eye-opener to a family I'd never heard about, and one which certainly held my interest despite the lack of relevance the Bolivian audience would definitely find. But that's not to say this reads as a faction about these women's lives, however remarkable – the author's note points out this does not intend to be a faithful portrait, rather a novelisation of the events and characters. Those events and characters, and the way the book addresses the theme of the after-effects of displacement, are certainly worth sharing a little time with. - John Lloyd



Interview with Rodrigo Hasbún - The White Review