Martin MacInnes, Infinite Ground, Atlantic Books, 2016.


martinmacinnes.com/


“Stunning—a totally original, surreal mystery shot through with hints of the best of César Aira, Vladimir Nabokov, Angela Carter, and Julio Cortázar. Smart, clever, and honest. I doubt you’ve read anything quite like it.” —Jeff VanderMeer


Carlos has disappeared. A retired inspector takes the case, but what should be a routine investigation becomes something strange, even sinister. As the inspector relives and retraces the missing man's footsteps, the trail leads him away from the city sprawl and deep into the country's rainforest interior, where he encounters both horror and wonder.show more

On a sweltering summer night at a restaurant in an unnamed Latin American city, a man at a family dinner gets up from the table to go to the restroom . . . and never comes back. He was acting normal, say family members. None of the waiters or other customers saw him leave.
A semi-retired detective takes the case, but what should be a routine investigation becomes something strange, intangible, even sinister. The corporation for which the missing man worked seems to be a front for something else; the staff describes their colleague as having suffered alarming, shifting physical symptoms; a forensic scientist examining his office uncovers evidence of curious microorganisms.
As the detective relives and retraces the man’s footsteps, the trail leads him away from the city sprawl and deep into the country’s rainforest interior . . . where, amidst the overwhelming horrors and wonders of the natural world, a chilling police procedural explodes into a dislocating investigation into the nature of reality.


An electrifying piece of work: strange, terrifying, riveting, and written with scintillating intelligence. In its thinking about the porosity between the human and the non-human, it stands shoulder to shoulder with Ballard, Lem, VanderMeer, Tom McCarthy. — Neel Mukherjee


Brimming with with strong, startling ideas… A curious and often remarkable book –Liam Hess

A novel of intelligence, grace, cunning and warped imagination, one that melds and sometimes clashes styles and influences to create something original and unsettling. It is a bravura performance, and one that announces Martin MacInnes as one of our most exciting new voices.  –Stuart Evers


Labyrinthine, beautifully written and teeming with ideas about fiction and reality that linger long in the mind… A frighteningly good debut novel. –Lee Rourke
A talent of the first rank… We want to be informed and entertained, I might also say, provoked and enlarged, and Martin MacInnes delivers on all fronts with writing of genuine bravura and originality. –Christopher Potter

This is the work of a most singular and inventive mind, matched by writing with real flair and clarity. It is a book alive with ideas and cock-eyed intelligence, brimming with passages of genuine brilliance. Infinite Ground does that magical thing that only the very best novels do: it makes you see the world afresh. Dazzling stuff. –Graeme Macrae Burnet

A surreal crime mystery at one level and at another a profoundly serious exploration of the fragility and isolation of modern life. — Saltire Literary Awards panel

Towards the end of this impressive and finely textured debut, there is a chapter entitled “What Happened to Carlos – Suspicions, Rumours, Links”. This is the only named chapter and it lists a series of variations related to the disappearance of the novel’s missing person – 29-year-old Carlos. These range from Carlos not being Carlos, to Carlos never having disappeared at all, or Carlos being the victim of a “sudden and giant molecular distortion”. The final speculation is No 29: “Carlos isn’t here. Carlos isn’t gone. This isn’t everything. This is a brief light.”
Of course, the list is no more or less of an account of Carlos’s disappearance than fiction itself accounts for reality. And, in a sense, that is the point; Infinite Ground takes place in an unnamed South American country, and Martin MacInnes’s first novel is deep in sub-Borgesian territory. This is fiction as a metaphorical labyrinth of the mind – wherein what happens may or may not have actually occurred; wherein experience and imaginings are indistinguishable; and everything is equally true and untrue.The opening citation, meanwhile, is from The Passion According to GH– the 1964 novel by the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, written in the form of a nightmarish monologue detailing an existential crisis following the accidental crushing of a cockroach. (The link back to Kafka is more than merely entomological.) Foremost among MacInnes’s subjects – thus we glean – are the fractured nature of consciousness and the fabric of reality itself.
Ostensibly, though, Infinite Ground is about an unnamed inspector trying to find Carlos by way of interviews and crime scene reconstructions. And for a while, MacInnes somewhat craftily benefits from the plot-pull of this setup. But if the inspector is the protagonist circling Carlos’s central absence, then “Suspicion, Rumour, Link” No 5 warns that the investigation might well be no more than “an indulgent and morbid fantasy created by a man in middle age in grief for his dead wife”. Another way to read this book is as a meditation on the nature of the human psyche under the intense pressure of loss and isolation.

Twenty years ago, this review would, by now, have used the word “postmodern”. And certainly, there are meta- and micro-games afoot. At roughly the midpoint of the narrative, the inspector gets lost in the unnamed city and finds himself in an “excited jostle” of people circling some incident. But “he hadn’t even noticed he was in the middle of it … [he] had passed right through it and missed his chance, seeing and learning nothing”.
Similarly, the inspector has “a problem of perception”. He starts to believe that his dreams of being in a forest, the “intensity of his exertions” there, might explain everything else. “He played with the old childish idea that the relationship between dreaming and waking life should be inverted, the experience of the former comprising the more significant period.” The last section of the novel, part three, is duly called “The Forest”, and its dream-like lyricism is by far the best writing in the book.

Throughout, MacInnes’s prose demeanour is slightly antiquarian – people “purport” and “assign … temporary monikers”. In the forest, while others are occupied with cameras, the inspector’s “leather pouch” contains “his own set of optical lenses”. This sets up a tone that creates a necessary out-of-time feel; but that sometimes chafes against modernity so that, for example, MacInnes has to clumsily append “and he didn’t have his phone” to an explanation of why the inspector cannot find the address of a hospital.
In terms of word selection, however, MacInnes is clearly a serious artist. There is a skilful and delicate cadence to many of the paragraphs. Images are novel and precise. The jungle air is “antic” with mosquitoes. The inspector’s forest tour group lacks the “shrill buoyancy” normally associated with such parties. A mechanic, Miguel, “threaded wire while he talked, his words small and conservative next to the fluency of his hands”.
Occasionally, MacInnes pushes too far, perhaps: “The words were mute, like the hummed melodies remaining in the ground surfaces of nightmare-weathered teeth.” But even this image is interesting and – on closer reading – a restatement of his main theme, if slightly off.

Jared Joseph, Drowsy. Drowsy Baby, Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2017.  


Read Excerpt


Jared Joseph’s Drowsy. Drowsy Baby is a book and the translation of a book. It is a scroll named Jenny, after Noah’s unnamed wife, both pictured and absent. Like Edmond Jabès, Yoel Hoffman, and Susan Howe, Jared Joseph viscerally merges questions of linguistic, textual, and memorial representation with the persistent violence of religious narrative, historical trauma, and familial haunting. What emerges is a poetic experiment or examination of God and fragment, a book of poetry insistent on challenging the emotional and formal impacts of a page and a life. Drowsy. Drowsy Baby is a book and the translation of a book. It is a song named Joseph, after an unnamed player piano, both pictured and absent.


While reading Jared Joseph’s book, I wrote to him, The honorable thing to do would be to put quotation marks around the entire text, or like pointing someone in the direction of the nearest cathedral, basilica. I was thinking, at the time, of the spectacular, effervescent, and eternally unfinished Sagrada Familia (in Barcelona; shifting landscapes, for a minute). Neither cathedral nor basilica, it is a temple. Expiatory. Where people go to atone. That to describe Jared Joseph’s book would be like putting quotation marks around la Sagrada Familia. No longer impossible, easy: a signpost, an arrow, a finger, a gesture. To not only bind the reader to the space Jared Joseph has created, but Jared Joseph to, among other expressions, his great great grandfather, in the fashion of an even more expiatory, and ultimately effervescent, experience. – BRANDON SHIMODA

Jared Joseph’s profoundly ambitious Drowsy. Drowsy Baby is simultaneously a mystical text, an autofiction driven by Nabokovian madness, the result of a termite artist eating his way through history, a no-holds-barred conceptual hoax, a personal genealogy. It is a book of fear and a book of defenses: from the violent and treasonous acts depicted in the pages, to the writing techniques of montage and erasure, the book is involved in a constant tugging between violence and protection, attack and defense.– JOHANNES GÖRANSSON

Drowsy. Drowsy Baby is a timely, hybrid work of powerful recollection—By way of the poet’s “difficult lyric,” a “combination of the story of Joseph and the story of [my name],” Jared Joseph courts autobiography to unveil vexed family histories as poetic translation suspended in free fall…a great great grandfather figure pushed from a cliff into the abyss—one of many deep sites of this poet’s reclamation. Joseph’s writing emerges, fusing beautiful prose, linguistic glitches, proper names into surprising forms: “Claude…Cloud” is where Nation and Person meet up in Joseph’s at once
idiosyncratic and capacious landscape. Hence, Drowsy. Drowsy Baby is as much rendered pastiche as it is slumbering flight—“If I can retrieve something…I think it says something.”  For Joseph, homonyms often reign: tear/tear reveals the contact zone between liturgical genealogy and local bar love, an urgent politics of now, where playful punctuation beats, as if it is the breath itself—fields of commas induce coma, interrogations beget interrogative fields, suspended question marks mark the unconscious, where language is both erasure and concrete, a brilliant display of heart and the human mind.– RONALDO V. WILSON


1) Why poetry?
Poetry is the only place I feel like myself, and when I feel untethered to the pressures of being myself. Poetry is a hallway of talking, a difficult room. “Everything is a receptive sensor” writes Jon Woodward in a poem, he ends that poem with that line, which is a way of making the poem endless, it senses you or reads you. Someone told me once he wrote an apology that made several people cry. That is why I am a writer he said. I remember being disturbed by this. To write out of a need for forgiveness is one thing, I think, an interesting thing. To believe forgiveness exists at all is another. To believe rest exists. Writing a poem is like sleeping. Once a woman caught a white moth in her hand (this means in the night) that I hadn’t seen, I saw instead her fist, and then she opened her fist and the moth crumpled to the ground and twitched she stomped on it, and then she stomped on it, and to make sure its pain was done she stomped on it and twisted her boot to twist the moth out its own axis. That night I dreamt someone I had loved and I had not forgiven wearing a white moth gossamer dress in a smoking bar, and when she glided toward the exit she passed me and her each eyelash was that white moth, her eyes were closed. I woke up and my bed was sweaty and I was sitting. I’ve written this poem so many times I do not know anymore if I had that nightmare ever even at all. It is important to me to be a moth underneath a boot.
2) Do you feel like poetry is more or less important & relevant today?
I don’t know. A poem is built, formed, conceived, felt, seen, experienced, revised, slashed, rejected, beloved, shared, received, saved, stored, treasured. A poem isn’t fracked or leaked. A poem is banned sometimes, maybe this correlates to the fact that a poem isn’t translated easily. A poem isn’t translated. To translate is to take the foreign, and to re-code it as domestic. To translate is to appropriate something by way of rendering it appropriate, relevant. You ban or censor or deport a person word or thing that does not translate appropriately. I like that about a poem.
3) Tell us about one poet who has greatly influenced you as a writer and a thinker.
I think about Jalal Toufic a lot and his poems and his prose and his prose poems, or other things whatever they are, he has a book I have a hard time categorizing called Distractions so maybe those categories are all distractions or maybe he just writes distractions. In the Qur’an it is recounted that God creates Adam from clay, and then commands the angels to bow to Adam, and all the angels bow to Adam, but the angel Iblis doesn’t, he protests that he is made of fire and that Adam is made of clay, so Iblis is better than Adam. And this sin of pride or arrogance gets Iblis cast into hell, “I will fill Hell with you” God says. “I will fill Hell with you.” So Iblis becomes the devil, the ruler of Hell, and Iblis tells God he will make it his mission to mislead all humans forever. And so the pride and arrogance Iblis displayed before God had him cast him out of heaven and into Hell, and this is where evil comes from; Iblis’ revenge against Adam is making all mankind sin and stray from God. This distancing from God – this distraction – is what Toufic picks up on in Undying Love, Or, Love Dies, which is the most beautiful title in the world. Toufic says of Iblis that this is how it went, mostly. However, the real reason Iblis didn’t bow was not arrogance, not that he thought himself better as fire than Adam as clay, but because he loved God too much to bow before anyone that wasn’t God. The fire thing is just a pretense; Iblis was the most loyal of the angels; it was not self-love, but love for God that made him refuse to prostrate himself before Adam. And then Hell is filled with Iblis: “Iblis was dazzled by these debased states: how could all this come from him, an angel? Idolatry, love of sacrilege, anger, lechery, lying, laziness, sloth, betrayal, a treacherous tongue, and the other vices and sins Rimbaud catalogues in A Season in Hell are not what one finds in hell, but a manner of forgetting it.” So all evil and sin comes from Iblis’ melancholic need to forget his love and to distract himself from his undying, or dead, love. The evil that Iblis scatters upon mankind is not active revenge against Adam, but a sort of almost autonomic mist Iblis releases to obscure his acutely painful love for God. So I try to remember everything and be as melancholic as possible, which can be annoying, even arrogant.
4) Tell us about one lesser-known contemporary poet who you’d like more people to know about.
Cecilia Corrigan. I think everything she writes is brilliant, I think her performances are brilliant, I remember seeing her doing a reading for the first time and I couldn’t believe anyone could be so intelligent. Titanic is one of my favorite books in the world, Corrigan published it in 2014, her interview with Felix Bernstein about it is very great, she says among other things “One of the questions that Titanic is asking is whether typing ‘I want to be with you’ over iMessage is semantically different than saying ‘I want to be with you’ at a payphone booth, or in person.”
5) Share with us one of your recent poems and tell us a little bit about its context.

Newest Ninja Turtles

Robotic man talking or malfunctioning about trust says he
just needs to know everything his girlfriend is
his girlfriend is doing, he don’t mind his girlfriend
hangs out with her girlfriends, he is adam
-ant about this he just wants to know her eve
-ning plans nightsly and to know to be on gard
-en duty or not all night sprinkling grass. He wants to
be the first, at the bar telling me these stories that individual
-ize him but all the time I think you are insane normal,
normal grass, normal bullet, normal water bucket and sand castle
he says he is friends with Meester, what the fuck this means, like
God? He said
you missed my heart. She shot me in the arm the
leg the elbow the temple somehow I survived the temple
my tribe somehow survived its several
-times destroyed temples
but she missed my heart, temporary cemetery,
“pain graveyard.” I went swimming in the San Lorenzo
River with Shawnee, Joseph went swimming in
the San Lorenzo River with Winona, if my love
did not survive your love will not survive
my middle name Joseph, Joseph. As the morning sun rose
it has not. It is gray and Marissa says it
is depressing. Perils from the sea, fog from the
prison cemetery. Feeling all the leaves came over my sore.
Ginger Ale. Andy said you put that so clearly, that is
the clearest smartest way of stating that and hugged
me, I have no idea now what I said then. What the fuck this means, like
the ocean? Let’s walk through your next pay period. Every planet wants to grow
a strawberry. Every buried mound wants to grow
a baby boy. Every baby boy wants to row
the whole ocean is an oar. Every oar wants
either oar. She made a real effort but you can’t row a boat
without arms. Where have I lived, what cities. Who cares
Derwood Rockville Potomac Madison Tianjin New York
City Cartaya Granada Madrid Iowa
City Oakland Santa Cruz. Good job
Jared you have vertigo. I don’t want clarity, I don’t want
alacrity. DO I cross the cities off now is that what
I did I can’t take it any longer give me
vertigo don’t go with me come take my hand my hand
I dreamt my hand I dreamt I’d just woken up and
had no time even to, get to work the which I was late for.
Underneath the wood print
I could hear the sirens.
I thought of mowing down the celebrators but I cannot stand the smell
of grass screaming. I don’t want transparent ground I know
already the foundation’s strength and make of fear and liability
to tear apart itself whenever it will deem itself
boring. The most poetic dream came flowing like
a childhood scene: you think you’re funny but you’ve never been
funny. You think you are my son but I look at you and see
cities I wish I’d never been in and made mad decisions in
July clothes. I don’t like that line break what that line
I don’t love. I don’t not love. I forget
the necessary words, the right ones, so I transcribe them
all. The keys, the Styrofoam cup. The drufyls looking
at Amber. The foal I saw a farmer name mber.
Ammiel Alcalay, other names that start with A. I am
tired, my memory is tired. A sunnyside cop. I rode
fast down Laurel, as if hoping my July clothes would burn up
off me, the clothes in my room that are hers would burn up
off me, I hang up my heart / is settled. The beveled walls,
the deviled egg specials. I look down and my hands are
normal. I was too asleep. I was also the hardest part of waking up
is Folgers out of your cup and I wast’ waking up and knowing this was a couch and I
had somehow made it to Nadia’s, my house’mate’s, couch
fell asleep there, full asleep there, with bathroom towels for
blankets. In July the feeling of snow may march backwards on
through April O’Neill
Contexts:
I found this poem in a notebook a couple weeks ago and made it into another poem, this one. The narrative sort-of recounted happened in June, that’s why June is the one month not mentioned. The bar was the Asti in Santa Cruz, California, which everyone calls the Nasty Asti, because it is fucking disgusting. You can smoke in it, or at the time you could, and the bartenders who work there are really nice and capable and smart people and a lot of my friends go there, but also sometimes you get stuck next to an asshole who is telling you intimate details about how much of an asshole he is, without actually knowing that he is such an asshole. It reminded me of the ways I am an asshole, and would like to not be, so my way of empathizing with him is to write as him, while we are both actually malfunctioning drunks, hi-malfunctioning drunks. I don’t remember his name. Meester is a dj in Santa Cruz. “normal grass” is a line Sara Peck or I came up with, I don’t know now. “You Missed My Heart” is a song by Mark Kozelek and Jimmy LaValle. It is bizarre that I put “pain graveyard” in quotes and not “temporary cemetery,” because “temporary cemetery” is a quote from Marissa from the poem (who also lives), and “pain graveyard” is just me, but I think I wanted to distance myself from it because I thought it was so stupid, but apparently I needed it in the poem, and then I decided there has got to be a My Chemical Romance or Slipknot song called Pain Graveyard, so I took my chances and put it in quotes. My neighbor is named Joseph. Shawnee is named Shawnee. Winona is named Winona. I expected the sun to rise but I went outside and it was not convincing. I have no idea what I told Andy, probably it was in the Asti, and I probably threw up under a booth all memory of that night. Puns are stupid, but iamb what iamb. DO was a typo, but I like it. “don’t go with me come take my hand” is a mishearing of the chorus of Exuma’s “You don’t know what’s going on,” that actually goes “Come go with me / Come take my hand,” which is more beautiful. Grass terrifies me, apparently. A kid at summer camp once told me “you think you’re funny but you’re not funny” and I sometimes hope that he’s in jail. I have not seen the newest ninja turtles movie. https://entropymag.org/national-poetry-month-featured-poet-jared-joseph/




JARED JOSEPH is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop MFA program in poetry, and is currently pursuing his PhD in Literature at the University of California – Santa Cruz. Recent poems have been published in Fence, Noo Journal, and Spork while his and Sara Peck’s collaborative book here you are is available from Horse Less Press.

Cristina Rivera-Garza, The Iliac Crest, Trans. by Sarah Booker, The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2017.
excerpt


On a dark and stormy night, two mysterious women invade an unnamed narrator's house, where they proceed to ruthlessly question their host's identity. While the women are strangely intimate--even inventing a secret language--they harass the narrator by repeatedly claiming that they know his greatest secret: that he is, in fact, a woman. As the increasingly frantic protagonist fails to defend his supposed masculinity, he eventually finds himself in a sanatorium. Published for the first time in English, this Gothic tale destabilizes male-female binaries and subverts literary tropes.


The story begins on a dark stormy night when the unnamed protagonist lets a mysterious woman into his house, all while waiting for a different woman, his ex-partner. He soon finds himself in an unexpected circumstance with both women, whose remarkably eerie presence makes him question their real intentions as well as his own reality and, for some unbeknown reason, even his gender.
Cristina Rivera Garza fills every chapter with suspense and nonstop mystery. Nonetheless, the plot is not centered in resolving these mysteries, but rather, it provides the reader a mind-bending journey filled with symbolism and a reality that follows its own rules of logic. Like Dali's clocks, time and space melt before the reader's eyes as we discover the secret of The Iliac Crest. - Gerald A. Padilla


In this surreal queer novel, a mysterious woman disrupts the unhappy life of a doctor and forces him to confront the hidden depths of his gender identity.
“How is it possible that someone like me allowed an unknown woman in my house on a stormy night?” asks the narrator of Mexican writer Rivera Garza’s (No One Will See Me Cry, 2003, etc.) second novel to be translated into English. The unknown woman at the door claims to be Amparo Dávila, a major Mexican fantasy and horror writer from the 1950s and '60s. Dávila insinuates herself into the narrator’s life, weaving a fractured story of a conspiracy that resulted in her disappearance—and a precious stolen manuscript. To the narrator's horror, Dávila befriends his spurned former lover, starting up an intimate—and possibly erotic—relationship. The two women devise a secret language he cannot penetrate and, ultimately, reveal the narrator’s deepest fears. "I know you are a woman," Dávila whispers to the narrator one evening. Convinced that the two women are tormenting him on purpose, the narrator sets out to uncover Dávila's secrets so he can be rid of her. His quest leads him through medical archives and the lusty streets of the North City, uncovering doppelgängers and the depths of his own truth. Rivera Garza’s taut language drives the mystery forward, and she plays cleverly with the literary and political histories of Mexico, the importance of queer visibility, and the silencing of female authorship.
An existential gothic tale about the high stakes of understanding—and accepting—the self.  —Kirkus Reviews


“An intelligent, beautiful story about bodies disguised as a story about language disguised as a story about night terrors. Cristina Rivera Garza does not respect what is expected of a writer, of a novel, of language. She is an agitator.” —Yuri Herrera


“Like the ocean itself, Cristina Rivera Garza writes a world where borders shift and dissolve. In the curves of the fantastic, the highest realism is born. This world is weird. This world is so deeply true. Reader, I love this wholly perfect book."—Samantha Hunt


“Warning: Cristina Rivera Garza is an explosive writer yet to be fully accounted for in English. She is an insubordinate stylist, a skilled creator of atmospheric and haunting language, and The Iliac Crest is a willfully queer piece where the workings of her wild imagination destabilize everything.” —Lina Meruane





Cristina Rivera-Garza, No One Will See Me Cry, Curbstone Books, 2003.




Joaquín Buitrago, an ex-photographer of prostitutes and a portraitist in the mental hospital of La Castañeda in 1920, believes to have identified in one of the patients, Matilda Burgos, as a prostitute who he met years before in La Modernidad.  

His obsession to confirm Matilda’s identity leads him to get a hold of her medical records.  Joaquín will learn that she was a country girl adopted by her uncle, a doctor, and led a peaceful life until Cástulo, a young revolutionary, hid in her room from the authorities. This served to open Matilda’s eyes:  the social turbulence will lead her to break away from her uncle and to take refuge with Diamantina Vicario, whose house is used to cook up political conspiracies.  Her death will affect Matilda to such an extent that she will begin to wander without a direction, outside of herself, and to try out all types of occupations and positions, including the horizontal one.  While the photographer learns of so many vicissitudes, he becomes convinced that Matilda and he must attempt at a life together.  From their common defeat of morality and reason, and with a will fractured by a repressing society, they seek to found among the ruins an uncertain future that will, to some extent restore their liberty.


“There are books that […] take some time to receive the recognition that they deserve.  I believe that this is the case of the extraordinary novel by the Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza, titled Nadie me verá llorar (No One Will See Me Cry).  It was published in 1999 and has not reached the deserved repercussion.  I have given the book to European editors that did not know her either.  Their enthusiasm runs similar to mine.  We are before one of the most notable works of fiction, not only within Mexican literature, but rather in the Spanish language at this turn of the century”.
- Carlos Fuentes,El País


Joaquín Buitrago works as a photographer in a mental hospital in Mexico City at the beginning of the twentieth century. As a child, his first photographic memory was when, just by his house, he saw a badly beaten woman. The impression was like a photographic imprint on his mind. He took to photographing bodies in the morgue, not the whole body but only parts, such as the blue fingernails of a man who had committed suicide or the marks on the neck of a woman who had been strangled. At the Academy, he was highly critical of Mexico City. His friends would take him around the city to show him the glories of it. He would take them to the morgue or the flophouses or the hospitals for the indigent, to show them the seamy side of the city. Things changed a bit when he met Diamantina but it soon became apparent that this was a relationship that would not work and Diamantina moved on to Vera Cruz.
Now, he has a variety of problems. He had initially been a successful society photographer but then, in 1897, he had travelled to Rome, where he met Alberta. He divides his life in the period before he met Alberta and the period after he met her. Since he met her and lost her, his life has changed. Indeed, it has effectively gone downhill. He has worked in a prison as a photographer. He has photographed prostitutes, hoping, in his own way, to find a woman like Alberta. Now he is employed by a large mental hospital to photograph their patients. Not only has his career gone downhill. He is now addicted to morphine and finds difficulty in sleeping. - www.themodernnovel.org  read more


An Interview with Mexico's Cristina Rivera-Garza




To think about Cristina Rivera Garza is to think about the experience of turning, in the sense of movement, of transformation, of beginnings. Like the experience of reading her writing, to turn back is at once a solitary and social experience. As Rivera Garza writes in The Iliac Crest, "something happens in the world when you turn back.” In her work, Rivera Garza calls you to navigate her words, her poetry, her expressions, and the borders she inhabits, inviting you to re-envision the world around you.
Championed by literary critics, Rivera Garza is one of the most important voices of this century. Born in Tamaulipas, Mexico, she writes fiction that breaks with conventional forms and reimagines history. Themes of borders, history, gender, sexuality, migration, illness, and class dynamics are central to her work. She is best known for her novel Nadie me verá llorar (Tusquets 1999), which has won several prizes, including the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award in 2001. Her other novels include: Lo anterior (2004), La muerte me da (2007), Verde Shanghai (2011), and El mal de la taiga (2012). Translations of Rivera Garza’s work into English complement a growing body of strong, female, Mexican voices that include Valeria Luiselli, Guadalupe Nettel, and Carmen Boullosa. Furthermore, her literary voice, with its unique way of telling a story while addressing issues such as gender and migration, is especially pertinent to contemporary society.
In this dossier, we present the beginnings of a chronological arc of Rivera Garza’s stories. It is our hope that this collection shows her experimentation with literary form and her ongoing exploration of space, borders, and transgression. The first two stories, “There Is Also Beauty in Alienation” and “Never Trust a Woman that Suffers” come from one of Rivera Garza’s earlier collections, Ningún reloj cuenta esto (2002), “The Hostage” was published in the later La frontera más distante (2008), and “Spí Uñieey Mat” is a blog post from El milenio and will be published in her collection Dimunitus to be released later this year. Whether in medium or literary form, Rivera Garza continuously pushes against the expectations of the short story genre.
Although her writing shifts in response to the world around her, certain themes persist throughout Rivera Garza’s work. There is a consistent interest in spatial and temporal geography as characters move through marginalized and foreign spaces. One might think about the young Mexican woman living in San Antonio who is uprooted and relocated to New York City to translate a series of letters. Or the Vermillion Woman and Chicago Boy who seem more comfortable navigating their memories than the spaces in which they find themselves in the present. Or perhaps the way that tears form a peculiar, intimate connection between an abused boy and an anxious man, a connection that challenges traditional notions of chronological time. Finally, there is the estuary that seems to be located at the end of the world in which a young woman takes on a position as a museum attendant to find time to read. What seems to unite these disparate spaces is a sense of belonging and not belonging, of finding oneself a stranger in a strange land.
That constant sense of simultaneous presence and absence, of belonging and not belonging hints at the image of the border – both physical and metaphorical – that functions as a unifying theme in Rivera Garza’s work. Whether they are strange words in a foreign language that appear in images of marshes or the twisting of previously established knowledge, she constantly contests preconceptions because her writing is about that movement, about subverting and transgressing pre-established limitations. She asks her readers to question gender binaries and expression, to take another look at history, to move over political borders, to jump between the realms of fantasy and fiction, and to explore the possibilities of language to create this movement. - Sarah Booker Aviva Kana
April 2017


Cristina Rivera Garza is an award-winning author, translator, and critic. Her books, originally written in Spanish, have been translated into multiple languages. She is the recipient of the Roger Caillois Award for Latin American Literature (2013), the Anna Seghers-Preis (2005), and the only two-time winner of the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize (2001; 2009). She received her PhD in 2012 in Latin American history from the University of Houston, where she is currently Distinguished Professor in Hispanic Studies.


http://literature.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/criveragarza.html

Margarita Karapanou, The Sleepwalker, Trans. by Karen Emmerich, Clockroot Books, 2010.   


               
"Margarita Karapanou leads us into the labyrinth where God lives. One must read her as one reads Rimbaud or Blake... Karapanou's insistence on tearing off our everyday clothes and ridiculous masks makes her, indeed, a truly remarkable writer." - Jerome Charyn
At the opening of Margarita Karapanou's stunning second novel, in disgust at mankind God vomits a new Messiah onto the earth. Or rather, onto a Greek island. Populated by villagers, ex-pats, artists, writers, this island is a Tower of Babel, a place where languages and individuals have been assembled, as though in wait for something as horrific and comic as this second coming. The Sleepwalker moves deftly and dizzyingly between genres-satire, murder mystery, magical realism, its own brand of Theater of the Absurd-following Manolis, the new Messiah, as he moves through this place like a sleepwalker, unaware to the very end of his divine nature. Manolis, in his guise as policeman, leaves nothing unchanged by his passing, as the island shifts from a conventional locale for upper-class tourists and drifters to a place where the surreal comes to life and the sun refuses to set. In The Sleepwalker Karapanou has created an unforgettable depiction of a dissolute world, desperately comic and full of compassion, a world in which nightmare and miracle both uneasily reside.


Karapanou’s book feels like a naïve form of modernism, each of the text’s short, storylike chapters a work of bricolage built from the diverse materials circulating in her cluttered mind. Like the best art, her plots unfold without self-consciousness or apparent purpose, yet they resist simple interpretations and have an impressive structural solidity. Her extremely muscular, tight prose makes a fine medium for the book’s relentlessly surreal, breathtakingly complex happenings, reminiscent of a Latin-inflected Pynchon. Though the book thus described may sound like a mess, The Sleepwalker in fact exudes a sense of strong thematic unity in its slow, relentless progress toward apocalypse—which, when it does arrive, is just as rich, satisfying, and inevitable as everything that has led up to it. - Scott Esposito


Reading the late Karapanou's (1946–2008) dizzying novel, which won the French prize for best foreign novel, is like sleepwalking, as the title suggests. The story takes place on a small, unnamed Greek island steeped in intrigue, sexuality, deception, mysticism, and crawling with cheeky expatriate artists. Manolis is the police officer who governs the town but more than that, he is the handsome, slim-hipped, tortured, and violent son of God. Each chapter, told from the perspective of Manolis and the various ex-pats, is a short story of its own, ranging in style from magic realism to horror. The sum of these parts is an engrossing novel that entrances readers, enabling them to understand its cast of motley characters' incomprehensible actions—many played out in dreams. The tenor of Karapanou's (Kassandra and the Wolf) final novel is best summed up by Manolis himself, as he observes the group of characters who come and go from his island: "The others just drank and cried and used art to disguise their hopelessness; for them art was the last stop, their final excuse to live a little longer." - Publishers Weekly


On a Greek island where writers and painters gather, a new messiah sent down by a bored and bitterly disappointed God introduces mayhem to set straight the "small and ridiculous" beings who put pleasure and beauty above Law.
Originally published in 1985, but available in English only now, Karapanou's second novel (following Kassandra and the Wolf, 1974) helped establish her as one of Greece's most admired postmodernists. The author, who died in 2008, also established herself with these books as one of the most wicked and unsparing observers of modern life. Her artist characters are all suffering to begin with, bogged down in unfinished or unrealized works and lost in unfulfilling relationships. A painter is able to turn out only headless figures. A novelist who is too self-absorbed to enter his characters imagines "a violent death that might put me, just for a second, into the state you need to be in if you're going to write." His fantasy is realized. When the messiah, a cop named Manolis, takes his place among them, all charm and comfort on the surface but with devilish aims inside him, dark forces sweep through the community, leading to rape and murder and disappearances. Part crime novel, part satire, part metafiction, part phantasmagoria, the book is anything but somnambulant. Karapanou writes with a headlong intensity, maintaining a jaundiced but playful tone even when the violence is at its most shocking. There's a kind of centrifugal force at work, pulling the large cast of characters helplessly toward a heart of darkness.
An absurdist tour de force about lost souls and a lost deity by a criminally neglected Greek novelist. - Kirkus Reviews



Originally published in 1985 after her harrowing fictional debut Kassandra and the Wolf, Karapanou's second novel The Sleepwalker confirmed her reputation as one of Greece's most talented postmodern writers and one of her most imaginative chroniclers of human alienation. Part dystopia part satire, this surreal tale of lost souls, and a dethroned deity, is not so much a murder mystery as it is a murderer's mystery: the reader knows who is killing the islanders, but is left to wonder about the killer’s motives and real identity.â�¨ â�¨
The novel starts with an embittered God who, disappointed by the "small and ridiculous" human beings who put pleasure and beauty above Law, vomits a new Messiah onto an unnamed Greek island (clearly modeled after a real island in the Aegean Sea, Hydra). Emmanuel, as the Messiah is called, is a blond and strikingly handsome police officer who goes by the name Manolis; this Manolis is the murderer whose killings set the novel’s plot in motion. He is the savior men deserve, "made in their image and likeness." The islanders "adore" this beautiful cop—and particularly so the members of the island's eccentric community of bohemian expats, who worship beauty above all things.
Nearly all of these artists are suffering from a lack of creativity. They came to the island to find inspiration, but the island has betrayed them. "A prison smothered in flowers," the island is blindingly, flawlessly beautiful: it stifles inspiration rather than fuelling it. As one character, a devotee of Cioran, puts it: "would Kafka ever have written his Metamorphosis if he'd been smacked in the face with a view like that every morning?" The novelist Luka keeps repeating to herself "I have to write," but her hand seems paralyzed. To Mark, a gifted painter who can only turn out images of headless boys, the island is an infernal place: "this must be what hell is like . . . to have the same beauty constantly before you so your eye can never rest on anything ugly or plain." He used to draw the island incessantly and under his strokes the place would be born again. However, the harmony of the artist and his surroundings has ceased, and the island is now empty and full of frustrated ambitions.
In Karapanou's world, art brings neither redemption nor joy. In the words of the newly minted Messiah, "the island is full of writers . . . They all come here and drive themselves crazy, this one can't write, that one can't stop, they all go nuts in the end." What drives artists insane is their hubristic presumption to be able to capture man's fleeting emotions on paper (or canvas) and endow them with enduring significance. However, the artists fail because human feelings are transient and impossible to gauge. Through her blood-thirsty, tortured Manolis, Karapanou is tipping her cards: her writing repudiates any facile pretence of "realism." Instead it represents a wild celebration of the imagistic and the absurd. Karapanou’s writing style is fragmentary and cinematic, each chapter an almost self-contained vignette. She favors striking images (often laden with symbols) over psychological analysis. She deftly moves between opposite registers—the slapstick and the tragic live side by side in the same paragraph, and sometimes even the same sentence. This multifaceted tone is masterly conveyed by Karen Emmerich’s fluent and vibrant translation, which also enhances the almost electric, centrifugal quality of Karapanou’s sentences. The plot may at times seems disjointed and puzzling, yet her writing has a haunting, mesmerizing quality and a brutal, seductive power that keeps the reader engrossed to the very last line. And rather than looking dispersing or unnecessary, the fragmentary nature of the book acts as a vortex that sucks its readers in and allows them to experience the same disorientation and bewilderment Karapanou’s characters are going through. Her divine serial killer embodies her critique of Realism and rejection of bourgeois conventions, in society as well as in art.  In the words of the Chief of Police, Manolis is "a fag, a cocksucker, a lady's man, a sex fiend, a murderer—what can I say, I've never seen anything like it." Karapanou's Messiah is radically anomalous: at the same time a victim of God's inscrutable designs and victimizer, savior and assassin, homosexual and heterosexual, pious and blasphemous. In Manolis all traditional dichotomies blur, and yet the God fashioned by Karapanou appoints him as champion and restorer of the old order. â�¨
With the exception of Mark and Luka, the island's cosmopolitan artists are inveterate do-nothings who use art to disguise their hopelessness. They clutter the place with their idleness and disrupt the traditional societal structure the locals try to maintain with their rituals: "for Manolis that kind of disorder was worse than murder." The foreigners' Satanic drive is bent on altering God's prescribed order. From this perspective Manolis's killings are an indispensable service: "to kill was something clean, the nostalgia for a kind of order." These killings, then, are akin to sacrifices.  Sacrifice reestablishes and celebrates the divine order of things and man's place within it. God created the world "in a moment of unlawfulness," and his Son's murderous paroxysms mimic that instant of unlawful creation. Manolis always stabs his victims while having sexual intercourse with them. Rather than terror, what his victims experience is therefore death in a state of ecstasy, filled with "an inexpressible pleasure." Like in the myth of Semele Karapanou is obviously referring to, being pierced or penetrated by a god brings about deadly rapture. 
One morning the islanders wake up to find themselves totally surrounded by trash. No one bothers to collect it. The garbage comes to life and spreads like the gods' plague. Manolis takes upon himself the task of cleaning up the island: "If I don't do it, who will?" Like in Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, God's motives remain unfathomable to the Anointed: "I'll never be able to understand your infinite perversion. First the murders, now this." He's only a blind tool in the hands of a superior, remote entity. He is the Sleepwalker of the title, carrying on actions he has no control over or no understanding of: "I'm at the center of a dream that lights up the world and guides it. I feel like the island is that dream, and I'm the one dreaming it." On the day of the Assumption, after the island's mules offer God the ultimate sacrifice by trampling to death most of the islanders in religious procession, Manolis vanishes—or rather, he meets his final apotheosis as Helios, the Sun god. From then on, the sun never sets and shines, motionless, on the island, disinfecting the ground and pushing all inhabitants indoors. Like one of Manolis's ecstatic victims, the island gives itself to the sun/Helios "like a body"—all human traces erased, the island is finally redeemed.
Karapanou's savagely ironic tour de force ends therefore with its very own catharsis, the horror and confusion expunged by an eternal summer day. Her main character's progression from Angel of Death to destructive natural force and her identifying salvation with the removal of mankind confirm Karapanou's ferocious misanthropy. She seems to relish the violence Manolis unleashes on the islanders—first as serial killer, then as scorching heat. A the same time though, her all-embracing sun that penetrates the painter Mark "with masterly strokes" reveals her nostalgia for a lost communion of man and Nature. It was that harmony that once allowed Mark's art to flourish and make sense of the world. Karapanou's tale of the "second coming" is all about recreating that harmony. Revitalized by the new Messiah's assaults, the artists stop sleepwalking and retrieve their voice. Mark can finally complete one of his portraits, and Luka's next book just flows out of her. The sun engulfs the island, and the island is one with God again. - Valentina Zanca



Margarita Karapanou, Kassandra and the Wolf, Trans. by N. C.  Germanacos, Clockroot Books, 2009.
excerpt


"No retelling of Kassandra and the Wolf can explain its charm, or its riddles. ... [It] is one of those rare creations that come alive mysteriously, without any antecedents. The book is original, terrifying, complete. It invents its own history, eases in and out of nightmare as it mingles dream and fact. Kassandra and the Wolf is a short, muscular novel with an absolute sense of craft. ... The language throughout is merciless and crisp. ... [A] stunning achievement: a lovely, sinister book."- Jerome Charyn


Margarita Karapanou's Kassandra and the Wolf was first published in 1974, and went on to become a contemporary classic in Greece, receive international acclaim, and establish its 28-year-old author as an intensely original new talent, who garnered comparisons to Proust and Schulz.Six-year-old Kassandra is given a doll: "I put her to sleep in her box, but first I cut off her legs and arms so she'd fit," she tells us, "Later, I cut her head off too, so she wouldn't be so heavy. Now I love her very much." Kassandra is an unforgettable narrator, a perfect, brutal guide to childhood as we've never seen it--a journey that passes through the looking glass but finds the darkest corners of the real world.This edition brings Kassandra and the Wolf back into print at last--a tour de force and, as Karapanou liked to call it, a scary monster of a book.


"The novel disquiets, un-eases, disturbs, but intrigues. There is a coolness to its execution, Karapanou's testing of the limited perceptions of an emotionally damaged child who cannot speak for herself compels focus less on those harrowing events and more on their translation into lyric story." - Joseph Dewey


Kassandra and the Wolf is the story of a young girl who relates episodes from her life up until she begins school. The short chapters -- fifty-six in all, in a 115-page book -- reasonably convincingly present a child's undifferentiated view of the world, with little sense of cause and effect (and consequences), but the voice and impressions aren't always persuasive.
       That there are some unpleasant family-issues here, especially with mom, is clear from the first chapter, which reads in its entirety:
     I was born at dusk, hour of the wolf, July, under the sign of Cancer.
     When they brought me to her, she turned her face to the wall.
       That reaction is extreme, but throughout the book there is a lack of connexion to family members, certainly at any level that she can handle. At best, she's treated as a sort of sex-toy by some of those who look after her; it's hard to call what she's subjected to abuse (though that's clearly what it is) since she too sees it as a sort of playing. With children closer to her own age she also displays what comes across as a largely natural curiosity about the body -- but, of course, it generally isn't seen that way by adults.
       Still, sex is omnipresent, and even her grandmother offers the young girl some advice for when she's older:
     "Then, when the Gentleman takes you to be his Lady, when he puts on his pajamas and you put on your nightgown, and he stands upright and naked and then on top of you, don't ever show you like it. Just imagine that you're in the parlor, cross-stitching swans and peacocks. If you like it so much you can't stop yourself, pretend you've got stomach cramps. because if you were to moan, the Gentleman would divorce you and, with the name you have and the position you hold, that would be terrible
       Fortunately, she also gets other advice elsewhere ("learn the secrets under the sheets, open your legs and let the little stars and hurricanes into your belly"), but all of this seems way premature given her age.
       At its best, Kassandra and the Wolf captures childish (not-so-)innocence just right, as when Kassandra gets a lovely doll from her mother (also named Kassandra) and:
     I put her to sleep in her box, but first I cut off her legs and arms so she'd fit.
     Later, I cut off her head too, so she wouldn't be so heavy. Now I love her very much.
       At its more frequent worst Karapanou's attempts at conveying childishness sound ponderously silly:
     One morning, I couldn't hear. I quarreled with sounds. I turned into a table. I turned transparent.
     It rained from the sky, and the raindrops turned to tears on my cheeks. I chewed words, so heavy I couldn't lift them, turned to pebbles in my belly. I changed shapes constantly. (Dumb) words came out of my mouth, and the air around me tore them in pieces.
     Letters turned to reptiles.
       Kassandra stutters, but the realistic descriptions of this are far more affecting than this sort of approach.
       The very casual sexual abuse throughout the book is disturbing. But, while not quite benign, it is also presented in a way that it's obvious that that is not the worst thing that is happening to Kassandra. And the most horrific chapter in the book comes when she desperately wishes for a kitten: her grandmother finally gives in and Kassandra is overjoyed -- "It was the first time I felt happy, as the grown-ups called it in the parlor" -- but her grandmother tells her that she's only borrowed the kitten, and that it must be returned at the end of the week. Kassandra's reaction is plausible but of singular cruelty, and when the child acts out this way it is more disturbing than any of the violations she is subjected to.
       There is some cohesion to the scenes and some progression to the story, but Karapanou generally only touches on events before moving on to something else, barely exploring what the effects might be. In some cases that's sufficient, but in most it's not. The book ultimately feels much too thin -- and much too much like it's trying to get by solely on the sensational.
       The uneven writing, far too often devolving into the 'artsy', doesn't help either: there are some powerful undercurrents here, but Karapanou doesn't let them flow naturally through her narrative. The voice isn't convincing as that of a six-year-old child's -- and only some of the observations are -- and overall there's far too little here that works.  - www.complete-review.com/reviews/greece/karapanm.htm


This sophisticated little monstrum horrendum (not at all like The Godsend, to follow) is described as ""the first novel to reveal infant female sexuality"" although Kassandra is six. Beyond her primal concerns, whether in dreams or for real, she's a real Katzenjammer Kid--cutting off the head and legs and arms of her new doll (""Now I love her very much""), or making pipis or poops on the floor, or singing ""Three Blind Mice"" with two forks in her hair, or biting her way through ten governesses. Author Karapanou is Greek and some of her Kassandra's experiences have appeared in avant garde periodicals over here. Her precocity may serve to provoke more purposeful interpretation--the comparisons to which you're directed are Beckett, Kafka, and Kosinski. Goodness knows, this is much S-M-aller stuff. But then curiosity kills the cat--oh no, that was Kassandra sticking needles in her kitten's eyes. - Kirkus Reviews


Born in 1946 and writing through the Greek and international upheavals that marked the following decades, Margarita Karapanou today remains a unique writer, though during her lifetime she was not alone in plumbing and picking at the definitions of novel and chapter, fiction and dream and character. In part this is due to her strong female voice, which will be heard loud and clear in these two new translations of her work.
Kassandra and the Wolf, for example, is a book about girlhood, reading like Angela Carter-meets-Judy Blume. A series of one-line- to a-few-pages-long “chapters,” Kassandra offers the narrator's observations, wishes, dreams, nightmares, daymares, thoughts, obsessions, pathologies—the reader never learns which (if any), or to what extent. Indicating both the mentality of a child and the nature of the subconscious, the topics jump without understandable transition from child abuse to Sunday church and dinner rituals to the repeated (and varied) suicide of Kassandra's uncle. At times the book could be a fairy tale—our young protagonist is very casually presented with both wolves and baskets of sweets—and at other times a parable, with many of its characters named simply by their profession or relationship to Kassandra.
Readers will be disturbed by the matter-of-factness with which young Kassandra talks about the multiple times men in her own household rape her, as well as the narrator's related obsession with “pipi” and “poopoo” and creepy attitude toward her often-absent mother. It's also difficult to read that Kassandra seems to like her premature sexuality, encouraging men sometimes through playful flirtation and physical advancement. Child Kassandra writes, “On Sundays, I become a child, filled with joys and beautiful thoughts; I brush my hair 100 times; I become good.” Certainly one would not think that, despite the narrator's words and actions, this sex is consensual and allowable, but by discussing this taboo and complex subject in a taboo and complex way, Karapanou gives a new strength to her female character.
While even adventurous readers may be uncomfortable with this book’s nonlinear telling and relentless lack of answers, readers will also be delighted by what grounds Kassandra and the Wolf: Karapanou's language. The word-pictures kaleidoscope—at times literally, as dinner becomes after-dinner games becomes Kassandra running down the stairs to demand of the housekeeper stories from the Greek Civil War—and at other times metaphorically (“A word like a snake stares at me: there's a pot like Grandmother's chamber pot, a mouth in the middle, and next to a nail scissors. . . . At the tail there's a ladder. I count the scribbles, examine them closely. I like this word.”) In still more places, Karapanou pulls off being both literal and metaphorical at once: “I'm alone again. I stick my tongue out vaguely at Miss Benbridge because she's driven away my friends and lovely pictures. I act the ape at her, the Chinaman, and then the frog. In a picture, I cover her in dung, turn her into a horsefly and a cockroach, and, finally, I turn her into a water glass, which I throw out of the window.”
And when the dark gets to be too much, sometimes—sometimes—Karapanou sheds some lightness, impossible to resist despite the ever-present crust and the reader's attempts to remain sober. The following is the odd, but also oddly cute, eleventh chapter: “One afternoon Zakoúlis came to play with me and Konstantínos. It was cold and he was wearing a coat with a hood. We said we'd play hide-and-seek. I lifted Zakoúlis up and locked him in the big cupboard, near the ceiling. Then we forgot about him and went to eat lemon creams. 3 days later, they finally found Zakoúlis. He was still wearing his hood, but he'd gotten to be very small, like an olive.”
There are versions of this story because there are multiple versions of real marriages and people, too, and because, manifested as literature, the multiplicity of these relationships is downright fascinating to read. What is confusing, however, isRien's second part, a skinny prayer sandwiched between the book's other two much heartier sections. Who is praying—likely, but not assuredly, Louisa or Alkis—and if the prayer's recipient is God alone, or someone else as well, are not clarified. That may be frustrating but acceptable, an unfinished puzzle to languish over, but what is truly sad is that Karapanou's language becomes obtrusively coy here, with phrases like “The game starts again from the beginning. The end is always another beginning” and “Eros is diabolical.” Readers would understand the similarities and distinctions between the book's other parts without this hint in between. Perhaps the line that will really make readers wonder if Karapanou trusted us to read along is this: “My God, so distant and close: —If I come to hate you, it will mean I have finally begun to believe in You.”
In both Kassandra and Rien, Karapanou is at her best when her female characters are unrelentingly in charge—and also, one could argue, most out of control. It would certainly be worth reading more of Karapanou's books, as well as those of her Greek female contemporaries. Hers are horror stories wearing sparkling, precious jewels. - Kristin Thiel


Kassandra is an eight-year-old girl living in Greece some time after the Civil War of 1944-1949. Her family appear to be upper class: she says she lives next door to the palace with her grandparents and servants, including an often replaced governess. Her mother lives in Paris and her father – in a very memorable chapter – is placed in an asylum.
Many people visit the house. Numerous family members and some friends of the family – ambassadors, poets, playwrights. Death in various forms befalls many of these visitors either during or shortly after their visit to the house. Either their behaviour is violent or overtly sexual (often both) or Kassandra’s behaviour is violent or overtly sexual in their presence.
Early in the book, Kassandra’s mother buys her a doll:
She was big, and she had yellow strings instead of hair.
I put her to sleep in her box, but first I cut off her legs and arms so she’d fit.
Later, I cut her head off too, so she wouldn’t be so heavy. Now I love her very much.
Then a couple of chapters later, she discovers masturbation:
Singing to myself, I put my hand into my panties for a bit of company. But I went numb and furry, a sweetness wrapped right around me, and I couldn’t stop.
Faster and faster, I was going to burst. Candies like weights, like sugared almonds, rose from my soles to my belly, and I was filled with syrup. Thick honey trickled from everywhere, and I was drowning in sweetness.
All of a sudden, when the sweetness had blocked my throat, the house started to shake and rain began to fall from the sky. The earth opened up and swallowed the houses all around, one by one. I pulled my hand out of my panties quickly.
 Re-reading these sections, I wonder whether Karapanou intended us to question the guilt and confusion that often accompanies girls who behave violently or sexually. Kassandra rarely feels guilty and on the occasions she does – like the masturbation scene – she quickly moves past it. If the protagonist were an eight-year-old boy I suspect our reaction to him removing the limbs of an action man or suchlike and discovering masturbation would be quite different.
One chapter has her grandmother advice about becoming a Lady and meeting a Gentleman. Her advice on sex is:
…don’t ever show that you like it. Just imagine that you’re in the parlor, cross-stitching swans and peacocks. If you like it so much you can’t stop yourself, pretend you’ve got stomach cramps. Because if you were to moan, the Gentleman would divorce you…
 Faní, the servant contradicts grandmother’s advice, telling her to:
…Learn your body: learn to squeeze it, embroider it, water it, and kiss it.
 Kassandra concludes:
Nights now, I stay awake until morning. I never liked cross-stitching anyway, and I’ve got plenty of time before I become a nice Lady.
The novel’s mostly written in short vignettes with the occasional slightly longer chapter. It becomes clear as the book progresses that these scenes are in no particular order – characters often die and then reappear later, which also leads us to question whether they have actually died or if this is an eight-year-old’s interpretation of something they’ve been told or a misunderstanding. Karapanou shows childhood as a bewildering time, one where it’s difficult to understand the behaviour of adults and society’s expectations of you. There is punishment for comparing genitalia with a friend but not for adults who sexually abuse. Possibly the deaths of many of the people in the book are what Kassandra imagines for them in retaliation for behaviour which she does not know how to deal with.
The content, tone and style of Kassandra and the Wolf reminded me of both The Notebook by Agota Kristof and Reasons She Goes to the Woodsby Deborah Kay Davies. So much so, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover they were both influenced by Karapanou.
Kassandra and the Wolf is a short, sharp, piercing and disturbing read. It’s a brutal and compelling look at childhood from a non-conforming girl’s point-of-view. An excellent start to #WITMonth. - naomifrisby


One of literature’s youngest child narrators, six-year-old Kassandra is also one of its most unsettling. In fact, with her detached, vicious and sometimes bizarre accounts of life at her grandmother’s home in Athens, she often seems every bit as embattled as Birahima, the former child soldier in Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah is not Obliged. 
Too young to feel obliged to present a socially acceptable persona to the world, Kassandra is unfailingly frank. Whether she is describing her torture and killing of the kitten ‘Borrowedy’, who is lent to her for a week, or her sexual abuse at the hands of grandmother’s chauffeur Peter — ‘He panted and sweated. I didn’t mind it too much’ — she overturns society’s tacitly agreed modes of talking about things again and again.
Even the favourite authorial trick of getting the reader onside by making the protagonist a book lover is disregarded here, with Kassandra declaring: ‘I don’t want to learn reading and writing’.
Sometimes, this unchecked verbalisation has great comic effect, as in the case of the PhD or ‘doctor’s desertation’, as explained by Kassandra’s acquaintance France:
‘Well, you see, you take a book and go to the middle of a desert or something and then you bury it in the sand for a long time and then you dig it up again and you find that all the words have got mixed up like the sand and then you put them all back in place only this time you put them back any way you like.’
Yet for all her frankness, Kassandra finds herself repeatedly sidelined, silenced and misunderstood. Where she releases outbursts of oddities or obscenities that reflect the troubling associations of her mother’s distance and her inner world, her refined relatives see only naughtiness and disrespect. Repeatedly chastened and instructed on ladylike behaviour, she develops a stammer before retreating into silence — ‘But I do talk to them, only I don’t use words’, she tells the specialist hired to assess her.
The danger of failed communication is made clear in the sad fate of Uncle Harilaos, who, having declared his desire to kill himself on several occasions, takes his own life.
Society, it seems, is not set up to accommodate so naked an expression of needs and longings. If Kassandra is to survive, she must learn to disguise and smother her impulses and join in with fashioning the conversational cat’s cradles the adults spin over her head. She will gain her place in the world this way. But she will also lose something too.
Compelling, strange and savage, this is a rare example of how a book’s cover can reflect the contents within. - Ann Morgan  ayearofreadingtheworld.com/tag/margarita-karapanou/



Margarita Karapanou, Rien ne va Plus, Trans. by Karen Emmerich, Clockroot Books, 2013.

The story is simple: a love affair ends badly. A woman and a man marry, then cruelty, infidelity, and divorce. But this novel tells their story twice, from opposing perspectives. Our sympathies are inverted; we don’t know whom to trust; the distinction between truth and deception blurs, and then seems simply to dissolve. The novel shifts deftly between endless oppositions: lover and beloved, angel and demon, master and slave, reader and writer. But inevitably both stories must arrive at the point of rien ne va plus: the moment in roulette when all bets are off and you either win or lose—the moment when the game becomes fate.

In her first English translation, Greek novelist Karapanou (1946–2008) details a complicated marriage between a successful veterinarian and an incipient writer, with several intriguing outcomes. On their wedding night, naïve bride Louise witnesses her icily handsome, urbane husband, Alkiviadis, proposition a boy in a bar. Humiliated but attracted by her husband's homosexuality, Louise is nonetheless repelled by his need to control her; what follows is a crushing divorce and, then, a suicide. But that's just the first draft; Karapanou resets her story with recombined leads and an even darker slant; in this version of events, Alkis is an adoring husband who wants a baby, and Louise is a spoiled, manipulative, self-destructive character repulsed by Alkis's offer of stability and unconditional love. Ghastly details of pregnancy and abortion alternate with charming episodes of travel and discovery, such as Louise's visit to America in mismatched company. Beginning simply, this remarkable tale escalates in conflict and complexity, and proves even more engaging the second time through. - Publishers Weekly




Karen Emmerich speaks about the difficult pleasure of translating Margarita Karapanou from the Greek.


“I run with the future ahead of me and the cops behind me”: A roundtable on Margarita Karapanou

Daniela Cascella, Singed: Muted voice-transmissions, after the fire, Equus Press, 2017.


“It starts with no story but a circular / It starts with no story but a spinning / It starts with no story but a spinning into before that is to come…” Daniela Cascella’s Singed: Muted voice-transmissions, after the fire starts not with creation, but destruction – a library ravaged by fire. What of the singed debris can be salvaged? Which of the disfigured inkblots deciphered? How much will be remembered? Re-written, re-invented, re-imagined? Singed, only to sing again?The condition of instability permeating Cascella’s project is already conveyed by the book’s title, Singed, at once a reference to burning/singeing and a mistaken past form of “to sing.” The title thus posits writing as located at the interference of a burning and a singing, unmaking and making meaning. Writing, not foreknown or guaranteed, can here only be enchanted through rhythmic events: “Of hearing a rhythm in reading, a song sometime, voices sound words, wh-h mh-m maybe that is why.”
Singed carries further what Cascella began in her previous two books, En Abîme: Listening, Reading, Writing (Zero, 2012) and F.M.R.L.: Footnotes, Mirages, Refrains and Leftovers of Writing Sound (Zero, 2015). In the former, she explored listening and reading as memory-based activities both creative and critical; the latter’s “deranged essays” operated across sonic patterns, assonance, repetitions, and complemented reading with voicing.
A synthesis of the two projects, Singed performs a transmission of knowledge in a condition of instability across languages, media and cultures. The text attempts a multilingual type of writing, not “in translation,” but in “trance-lation”: between languages, ceaselessly trancelating words, rhythms and silences in a state of otherness in motion. In Singed, Cascella presents memory as sonically associative (“Will the song’s murmur muster a mourning?”), meditating on how to undertake writing vis-à-vis silence.
“The smell of singed paper haunts me. Is this a burning, is it a song? Sing, singed.” Cascella’s radically experimental poiesis conceives of text as a space of doing but also stillness, of transmission but also interference. In Singed she writes criticism that includes silence, repetitions and dead ends; that retains mystery and the unspoken, in a language out of synch; that interrogates the very the necessity of using language: “Where does the necessity to speak and write arise from, and what are the hooks I can hold on to in the absence of records?”
By means of improvisatory techniques spinning outward from the eye rhyme, in which similarities in spelling promise a rhyme that is not heard as such, Cascella’s rendering plastic of words time and again compels the reader to imagine and experience her writing’s multiple potential soundings. Singed is a powerful effort to compose from the memory of a writer without a library, a writer with a library destroyed. ––David Grubbs


Polymorphous and polyphonic, Cascella takes us on a quiet, highly personal walk through an eclectic range of texts and recordings, exploring their resonances with grace, dignity and humour. ––Juliet Jacques


This is a book about lost books, lost voices, learning to speak, no, to sing; to sing again, to read and write again after fire––it begins with what is lost. Yet, there is memory, recollection, impression; there is song that precedes speech––it might be called la lalangue. Encounters––literary, artistic, religious–resonate. Cascella’s writing is precise and ardent, leading the reader through a sophisticated, moving, intricate archive. It is a book to which I listen as  I read it. I hear it now. ––Sharon Kivland


Cascella finds the grain of the voice in writing, drawing attention to words as both blunt signifiers and aetherial presences, teasing the distance between the two. She draws on a variety of traditions, whether Leiris, Michaux or Lispector, to make something uniquely her own, a way of writing that shimmers between narrative, memoir, criticism and sound made print. ––C.D. Rose


This is a text that could only emerge out of an intensive dwelling on listening to sound, music and those inner and internalised voices that speak silently of our listening, the incantation that remains private until written or voiced, sliding to the centre of the spell, now preoccupied not so much with the sound world but a greater domain of the unheard, unintelligible, unspeakable, always moving voice. –– From the Afterword by David Toop



Daniela Cascella is an Italian writer based in London. Her research is focused on sound and listening across a range of publications and curated projects. Before moving to London in 2009, she worked in Italy as a curator and as a contributing editor of Blow Up music magazine (1999-2008). Her latest book En Abîme: Listening, Reading, Writing is available through Zero Books from September 28th 2012. For comprehensive information please visit www.danielacascella.com or visit Daniela’s blog at www.enabime.wordpress.com

ER. Could you give a synopsis of what the book is about; its themes/topics etc.
En Abîme explores listening and reading as creative and critical activities driven by memory, reshaped into the present. At the core of the book is an idea of aural landscape as a constantly changing and historically defined cultural experience that I expressed by adopting an expansive approach across poetry, visual art and literature. I devised a three-layered structure through which the book’s narrator revisits, at different points in time, a number of places in Rome – the Protestant Cemetery sung by Pier Paolo Pasolini in The Ashes of Gramsci, via Appia, the Catacombs, among the others – and attaches onto them a series of connections to her recollected archive of poetry, music, literature. The words of Herman Melville’s Roman diaries, Pasolini’s verses and films, a number of other songs and poems build up a mise en abîme; knots of visions and densities of prose are juxtaposed with sparse moments of stillness, as the book zooms in and out of the archival fiction of a city, morphs into criticism and abstraction, and back into a literary landscape [see related blog post].

ER. When did you begin writing it and how did it manifest?
DC. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently: where does the book come from? When I was working in a journalism context, writing features and reviews for magazines I would often write in my notebooks a different version of my articles – at times more fictionalised, at times more playful, or poetic, or abstracted; I was never sure where these texts belonged, and I suppose because the journalistic work was constantly and consistently ‘out there’, for many years I didn’t think that the other writing would ever come to the surface; so there was always an internal – albeit unexpressed – tension in my work, between a very focused (and published) type of writing and another, hidden version. Of course, like in every Romantic tale or book, the hidden double takes over – be it with tricks, or sudden revelations – until it cannot be hidden any longer. I think this book is exactly the place where my ‘other’ writing took over.
I also thought a lot about how to write after listening [see related blog post]. How to claim for a writing and reading experience which could have the same authority as the experience of listening? How to determine a ground for writing which would not be seen as ancillary or dependent of the act of listening, but could stand in and of itself and perhaps trigger an opposite movement: from reading to listening? Thoughts on fabulation came along and contributed to the project. And so did the awareness of writing as an act of crossing an edge: simply put, a sheer act of volition, a ‘step into’. I thought of my writing as performing this ‘step into’, and I thought of how the space of writing is built before and after this step: in listening, in spending time listening, in building up a wealth of experience. The idea of ‘having done’ something, having been in a place, the load of experience that shapes you uniquely, all informed this book.

ER. It’s not a conventional read by any stretch of the imagination. Can you talk about the structure of the book?
DC. The book is actually a mise-en-abîme – a narrative within a narrative within a narrative. There are some more or less hidden tricks that I used in the text to formally structure this mise-en-abîme, but I don’t think it’s necessary to supply a ‘user’s manual’ here: I’d rather have the text unravel in each reader’s experience, than reveal its supporting structure. What I’m keen on saying is, I was interested in employing three different but very close degrees of subjectivities and seeing what happens when you place these slightly different ‘I’s together. The decision to use these layers is also an attempt at placing my words in different degrees of proximity to the moment of listening. It was generated by the awareness that writing and listening can never be one, there will always be something missing, as Robert Walser once wrote. I use the expression ‘unsteady unison’ to talk about this: listening takes you over, in many different ways, and it’s an experience that defines your sense of being, and of being in a place. In recalling the experiences of listening that animated my book, I felt they were so distant and dead, in time, and yet so embodied, present, alive in the space of recalling. So, writing after listening is loaded with a strong feeling of detachment, of separateness, and yet there is this strong sense of ‘having listened’, ‘of ‘having been there’ that weighs upon you – I want to explore this space between the moment I listen and the moment I write [see related blog post].

ER. Did this structure aid the writing of the book?
DC. As often is the case in my work, once I’ve found a structure (or a tone, or a shape) the writing moves much quicker. In a few cases in En abîme I deliberately use repetition in the text: the same paragraph, with slight variations, reappears in different chapters to articulate situations that can seem different and then turn out to be actually attached to the same experience. A vague, yet not entirely grasped sense of ‘having been there’ inhabits the pages of the book; I tried to inform the writing with the mixture of distance and embodiment that I’ve just discussed above.

ER. Although the book is non-linear it seems heavily researched although not in an academic, question and answer sort of way.
DC. When I started writing the book I was very frustrated with reading essays and books characterised by a theory-driven approach to sound and listening, in which the sense of direction was very clear, too clear. I felt the need to experience the territory of listening rather than drawing its map and – to carry on with the territory analogy – instead of just measuring the land and its geological features, the need to consider instead the unknown phenomena and creatures that you encounter, and the weather, the seasons that constantly reshape it. To convey a sense of discovery, not just safety. I also felt the need to introduce other references, and to propose a way of writing sound which is not referred to the writings of theorists but is shaped through the words of writers and poets.
At the beginning of all this reasoning is the fact that I approach a subject such as listening in a non-academic way. The book is not theoretical and it is not a survey either: to a certain extent, the actual prompts for this book were not listening, not sound, not art or film, but the act – the pleasure, the struggle – of writing, in and of itself. There was also the need to attempt a writing attached to and shaped by experiences and details and what is peripheral, marginal perhaps, but constitutes listening as much as what is usually distilled and canonised – what is usually left out because it won’t be generalised [see related blog post]. As a writer, the more I thought of sound in theory, the more I found I didn’t have much to tell, or at least I didn’t have any intention to focus on theory in my work. The ‘show, don’t tell’ tactics helped a lot, and so did reading an essay by Flannery O’Connor, The Nature and Aim of Fiction, where she writes of ‘all those concrete details of life that make the actual the mystery of our position on earth’. Listening, like the devil, is in the details! On the other hand I realised that what I could and most of all wanted to say/write was in fact more related to the experiences of listening and all the passing thoughts attached to them, and all the ways you could inhabit a place (in listening, in reading, and then in writing) without necessarily understanding it. To recall that invaluable and transient moment of the encounter with a sound, an image, a string of words, before you can figure them out. And how these stretch and change in time and challenge the habit of listening. All these had to be at the core of my book.

ER. And in terms of the books non-linearity?
DC. In terms of structure, the book couldn’t be ‘linear’ because while working on it I did not aim at writing how listening and reading function but how they affect you – which is not linear or whole or concluded: you stumble into the past, you enter a reference and suddenly exit it as the sheer sound takes you over, and so on. It’s about being attached to a place through listening (sometimes even when we don’t want to) through different angles and registers, being always there and always removed. I have nothing to conclude, but that’s not because I don’t have anything to say. That’s also why I used the expression ‘archival fiction’ – the book is a function of my archive, and not just a physical archive but what I could call my archives of listening, which are both fact and fiction.

ER. You also write in a first person narrative yet as you say constantly blur fact with fiction – why did you write it in this way?
DC. At one point in the first part of the book I quote a song whose first verses are ‘I lost all my strength and my ability’: I use this verse as a device throughout the book, voicing the loss of one’s sense of self and only finding it again at the end as a polyphonic ‘I’, after having inhabited different ‘I’s and places. A recurring theme in the book addresses losing one’s voice in the beginning and finding a way of saying something throughout nonetheless: building it through writing, rather than by defining it a priori [see related blog post].
Also I think the more you turn inward, the more you become estranged from yourself and rather than self-absorbing, this process in fact flips over to the outward, which is after all what is so typical of the listening experience. Only yesterday I was reading one of the essays in the catalogue of the Edvard Munch show at Tate Modern, discussing Munch’s obsession with self-portrait, and I was struck by a quote from Sören Kierkegaard referring to a ‘quiet transparency in which the inner reposes in a corresponding outer’. I seek this quiet transparency.

ER. Does your nationality have any impact upon the type of autobiography/first person narrative?
DC. I’m sure part of my approach to autobiography has to do with the fact that I wrote the book in English, even though my first language is Italian. Writing in the first person in English definitely feels more distant and detached than my Italian ‘I’ – the language I learnt to feel and think and listen in. At the time of writing En abîme I’d only been living in England for a couple of years, so I felt not entirely here or there with language; I really wanted to capture this slippery moment in the use and the shaping of my ‘being in a language’ and listening and writing in it – or, better, on its edges.

ER. So would you say the ‘I’ that you use isn’t necessarily a conventional autobiographical ‘I’?
DC. Yes, definitely. A lot of the book is fictionalised and I’m still not sure how much of that I want to reveal in my sources: what ‘really’ happened, what I projected, or anticipated, or imagined. Of the places I write about, at least one of them I have never been to – and yet, it doesn’t come across as more or less vividly as the other places I write of. A lot of the book happens on the margins of a half-recalled, half-imagined hazy idea of the city of Rome; when making these decisions, I thought a lot of how E.T.A. Hoffmann never visited Rome and yet he wrote of it in his book Princess Brambilla by looking at Callot’s engravings of Rome: the perfect rendition for his fantastic tale, in between dream and reality, set in the Carnival.
However, the songs, poems, films, sounds that I write in the book are very close to me. I suppose the closest to the ‘authentic I’ is in my sources and in my experience of them, in my being with them at different times – ultimately you can find me in the bibliography, discography, and in the act of writing: in what the writing went through and how it was sifted by my listening and reading experiences. In The Predicament of Culture by James Clifford there’s a chapter entitled ‘Ethnographic Self-Fashioning’ that I’ve read so many times throughout the years, and that helped me a lot in thinking about where I place my writing. I like to think of En abîme not as autobiography but as self-ethnography. There’s a ‘graphein’, a writing element that I’m really attracted to, how the self is shaped in writing. Clifford also shows how Joseph Conrad’s self is fashioned out of a ‘not being in a language entirely’: this happens in bi-lingual writing. It makes you ask these types of questions: where is the self?

ER. Could you have written this in Italian?
DC. I don’t think so. As I said before, the book was born out of the need to write in a state of removal, of fluctuation, so it was crucial to use a language I’m fluent in, but not quite so comfortable in. I needed to retain a certain hesitation in my tone, to embody the unsteady unison in my words. A little anecdote here: I recently wrote something in Italian, and I ended up grasping for words! When I started to get back into my first language, I really got a sense of the artifice and the construction of the ‘I’ in my native tongue [see related blog post].

ER. This makes sense when thinking of the ‘Archival Fiction’ tag within the title. Which category will the work reside in when it’s on the bookstore shelf?
DC. En abîme can be found in the ‘literary criticism’ category, which I’m quite happy about. But this was one of the issues when I started to look for a publisher: which discipline does this book belong to? Apparently it didn’t fit into the ‘music’ or ‘sound studies’ categories. The moment I saw its form – a novella, a long-form story – rather than the discipline it belongs to, I understood a better way of presenting it.
Wax Cylinder recording of Daniela reading from En abîme by Aleks Kolkowski

ER. I noticed there’s also no introduction as such…
DC. There are already many voices in the book and I just didn’t want to have another layer, particularly one that would be explanatory. I don’t think the book needs that type of support and framing; the bibliography reveals that side of things enough. It’s the same with the omission of footnotes. I just wanted it to be experienced as a piece of writing in itself, with all the references and notes at the end for anyone who wants to find my sources and details of my quotes. This is the reason why I really like Salomé Voegelin’s foreword: it does not explain my text, it resonates with it.

ER. How do you begin/structure your writing in general.
DC. Initially when I write I know little of where I’m going. I can’t see from A to B in my drafts, I don’t see a trajectory, rather a series of visions (Joan Didion called them ‘shimmering images’) and rhythms that need to cohabit, at times even in spite of themselves and of what might be predictable. So I work with clusters of words and thoughts, gradually adding on to them. I have a strong feeling of where I am, but not where I will go. It’s a constant process of self-motivation, to stay close to these clusters as they appear, and to trust them. I never set out saying ‘I want to prove this or channel that’, writing for me is about responding to something else, something coming from outside – be it a sound I hear or a book I read – rather than being generated by me deliberately and out of the blue saying ‘today I’m going to write about that’. I’d say my writing process is not speculative, but experiential. So when all these clusters have taken space, and expanded, then I think the really hard and excruciatingly enjoyable work begins: editing, arranging words, leaving out (a lot), working with forms. In fact researching a book works for me in two parallel ways, not only researching a topic, but also researching a form, a language and its structures.

ER. Where do you think this attention to shape comes from?
DC. I think it’s got to do with writing it in English – not only did this choice place me, as I said before, in a terrain vague: it also allowed me to see the form and the sound of language in a more exaggerated manner. Those moments of transition where I used very long sentences, typical of Italian language, yet employing English words: or, the repeated use of Latin, for example, which in Italian is a lot more common than it is in English. I sought to render these moments of transition. I also think that the attention to form comes from the very way my writing language has been shaped throughout the years – since I was a teenager I was immersed in fiction, and what really shaped my thinking and what formed my language is undoubtedly literature and poetry. In writing a short book I also hoped that the form could be experienced in its totality more clearly than if it had been a longer text. ‘To be read in one sitting’, to quote Poe.
To go back to your question on form: I have an attraction to surfaces, a soft spot for the shape and the look and the sound of things, my first response when I read a book or listen to a record or look at a painting or watch a film, is always about their texture, only later I become concerned with what they might be ‘about’ as a deliberate way of thinking, because ultimately what they are ‘about’ resides in what they sound like, what they look like or move, and so on. I just don’t trust casual forms or shabbiness. I suppose that’s why Pasolini appears so often in my book [see related blog post].

ER. Is there a book which opened up this way of writing for you?
DC. A very early influence. Earlier this year I read again Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and I realised I’ve been returning to this book once every decade! So, apart from obviously having laid the grounds for a project of ‘comparative reading’ when I’m in my seventies, I have this sense of being physically affected by this book. I remember spending summers as a teenager reading it and being engrossed, not trying to understand, just experiencing it. When I re-read it this year things fell into place, and I realised it had been with me all these years, although I didn’t rationally know it.
In terms of more recent works, the list can be too long, but in general I’m always inspired by the work of writers and artists who are not easily canonised, who liberate their form instead of being caught in it, who don’t care about being prescriptive, who play freely with their past. Some of them also appear in my book: the Italian writers Giorgio Manganelli, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Cesare Pavese; Herman Melville who is still so much of an enigma; Steve Roden; David Toop; the Italian performer Chiara Guidi; musicians such as Mike Cooper and Mika Vainio; in a very diagonal yet very meaningful way, Michel Leiris.

ER. What is the relationship between listening and reading for you?
DC. Listening and reading seem to occupy a fairly similar starting point for me. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a pure listening moment without it being reflected in my reading, but again that’s just part of how I work. The books I read inform the way I listen – and feel and think. And that’s basically how this book took shape. I was thinking about how certain places and landscapes would always reappear in my attempts to write about sound, and my thoughts would always return to certain places.
At some point in the book I quote a sentence by Antonio Gramsci that has always meant a lot to me: he wrote in his Prison Notebooks about ‘the organic adherence by which feeling-passion becomes understanding, therefore knowledge’. These words have always been for me as foremost keys into listening. To listen is to grasp a deeper sense of place, of self, of stories. In Italian the verb comprendere, to understand comes from Latin and means to embrace. It is expansive, not normative. It embraces diversity. Sapere, to know, comes instead from a verb that means to have a taste of, to catch a flavour. And sentire in Italian means both to feel and to listen. Gramsci’s claim for ‘a shift from knowing to understanding, to feeling, and back, from feeling to understanding, to knowing’ encompasses the expanding function of listening: from having a taste of something to embracing it – ultimately, to knowing it.

ER. It’s clearly a very creative, artistic work – where do you position yourself as an artist, researcher or writer?
DC. At the beginning I thought I would write a book on ‘sound’ – I say ‘I thought I would’ because the idea was very blurred, certainly more an expectation, some sort of cause/effect silly reasoning than a real interest for me – something like: ‘OK you have curated sound-related projects for all these years and have written on sound, now why not collect it all in a book?’ sort of vague and predictable trajectory. I wasn’t satisfied, it was as if I was playing a part that did not belong to me. I just couldn’t think of ‘sound’ on abstract terms, or grasp it as a topic, as if it was a category. So I began looking backward to what had really animated my experiences of listening, what had drawn me to researching sound more and more? It was a sense and the shape of ‘being there’ before any recognition or awareness, that had nailed me to a number of listening experiences, and in turn these were always contaminated and impure: I couldn’t even start considering writing them in and of themselves, as if under a glass case. I realised my writing sound had to reflect the way I’d always experienced it: on different registers and languages and matters. My first degree was in Art History, I worked as a music journalist for many years, and even before all this I grew up reading fiction… Why did I have to ignore all this? I really began enjoying writing En abîme when I realised the book could embrace all of it. I ended up going into visual arts territories and into Italian traditions and history – I really couldn’t entangle them and deny they were part of my hearing.

ER. Do you ever write in situ, in the places you write about in the book?
DC. Most of the book was generated by displacement – written about elsewhere. I write in situ very rarely and when I do, it’s mostly to catch the rhythm of a sentence that occurs in my mind and how words are stitched together. It’s important to say that for me this book is not a nostalgic longing for an ‘original’ or uncontaminated place or time. In fact it’s the opposite, it’s got to do with ‘re-visiting forward’, and with writing this re-visiting in a different manner every time.


ER. How does your blog function for you – is it to generate ideas?
DC. It started because I had all these research notes and wasn’t sure what to do with them, also I wanted to somehow add another layer to the project. More recently I have been posting reviews and other texts not strictly related to the book but informed by the same approach. It’s a place where I can have all these different voices and hopefully give a sense of what I’m doing on different registers. The blog is great because I can experiment more, not be constrained by deadlines, use fragments (a form that I’m researching a lot at the moment) as well as longer texts which are not published elsewhere. Much like what I used to do with writing alternative reviews in my notebooks. It’s good that it’s there for readers – and it’s been helpful for others to find the writing. Things are also more immediate there and they have a sense of being more than a note in a book.

ER. What are you writing next; do you have another archival fiction on the way?
DC. At the moment I’m developing two new projects, both of them at very early stages so I won’t talk too much about either. The former is a collection of fragments and longer texts on lesser known or published writers and artists – whose work is too peripheral and certainly not ‘of the moment’, even insular in certain cases. It might end up being the first book I write that is not strictly related to ‘sound’ (although I like to think of it as a voicing). The latter book is a satire.

ER. And finally as always Ear Room asks: what does the term sound art mean to you?
DC. Oh, the very awkward moment I feared! It’s odd, isn’t it, this whole ‘sound art’ ghost and how some artists seem haunted by it to the point of denying it. The ghost cannot be ignored though, as annoying and nerve-wracking as it might be. Maybe we could just be like mediums: channelling the ghost although not always understanding the sense of its presence; and the space of listening won’t always coincide with the space of explaining; and sometimes this resounding ghostly space can be a bit of a con, or a mock-up, and other times it can speak straight to you and nail you to what is meaningful.
To go back to your question: I like to think of sound art as a non-canonised way of shaping listening – wandering around and being surprised. The less you can grasp it in a definition, the more I’m attracted to it: at its most self-effacing. Working in ‘sound art’ always meant for me the freedom to be in a field that, not being defined, allowed me to play with and ponder on thoughts and words which wouldn’t be able to exist together otherwise. The relation between sound art and the attempt to define it is like the relation in geometry between a curve and its asymptote line: they do not fall together. The former tends to touch the latter ad infinitum. And the curve will never be straight. I think sound art is a way of being elsewhere, and never quite straight.

Texts

• En abîme
  ongoing
  My blog on Writing Sound.
  http://enabime.wordpress.com
• En abîme: an interview
  2012
  Earroom website
  read
• The whole landscape flushes on a sudden at a sound
  2012
  Fondazione Aurelio Pietroni, San Cipriano Picentino, Italy
  Short text in Viso come territorio / Face as Territory exhibition catalogue.
• Your voice has / cosey complex
  2012
  Koenig Books, Cologne, Germany
  Edited by Maria Fusco and Richard Birkett.
  'A major new publication shifting Cosey Fanni Tutti from noun to verb. This new book is the first major publication discussing and theorising Cosey as methodology'. Contributors include: Martin Bax, Gerard Byrne, Daniela Cascella, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Diedrich Diederichsen, Graham Duff, Anthony Elms, Chris Kraus, Patricia MacCormack, Clunie Reid, Rob Stone, Corin Sworn and Cosey Fanni Tutti. Designed by Zak Kyes.
  http://mariafusco.net/editing/cosey-complex-book/
• Lines written at the end of a dream, when I encountered leif elggren's 'the sudarium of st. veronica'
  2011
  Psykick Dancehall Recordings / Put the Music in Its Coffin, Glasgow, UK
  Text for Leif Elggren's 'The Sudarium of St. Veronica'.
  read
• A landscape
  2011
  SoundFjord, London, UK
  Text on Steve Roden, published on the occasion of his London residency, 26-30 March 2011.
  read

Selected articles and reviews

• Luciano chessa / luigi russolo
  Interview in Frieze Blog, London, UK, 18 July 2012
  read
• Sonic somatic
  Review of Sonic Somatic: Performances of the Unsound Body by Christof Migone in The Wire. Adventures In Sound And Music, #342, London, UK, August 2012
• Soundworks
  Review of Soundworks website in The Wire. Adventures In Sound And Music, #342, London, UK, August 2012
• Luigi russolo, futurist
  Review of Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Art and The Occult by Luciano Chessa in The Wire. Adventures In Sound And Music, #341, London, UK, July 2012
• Pauline oliveros
  Article in Frieze Blog, London, UK, 21 May 2012
  read
• Listening to noise and silence: towards a philosophy of sound art
  Review of Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art by Salomé Voegelin in The Journal of Sonic Studies, Leiden University Press, vol. 2, May 2012
  read
• John wynne
  Review of Wynne's Installation no. 2 for High and Low Frequencies in frieze.com, Frieze, London, UK, 1 May 2012
  read
• Phonographies
  Article on Aleksander Kolkowski's wax cylinder archive in Frieze Blog, London, UK, 15 December 2011
  read
• Off the page
  Report in frieze.com, Frieze, London, UK, 28 February 2011
  read
• David toop. sinister resonance
  Interview in frieze.com, Frieze, London, UK, 17 August 2010
  read
• Chris watson. whispering in the leaves
  Review in frieze.com, Frieze, London, UK, 28 June 2010
  read
• Bill fontana
  Review in frieze.com, Frieze, London, UK, 12 May 2010
  read

Tony Duvert, Odd Jobs, Trans. by S. C. Delaney and Agnès Potier, with an introduction, by S. C. Delaney. Wakefield Press, 2017.
Excerpt


“A satirical, caustic, and yet delightfully light collection of fables, the book comprises twenty-three narratives from an imaginary village where denizens perform the strangest—and dirtiest—traditions and professions.” —The Paris Review


Odd Jobs is exactly what the title promises: a collection of unusual jobs held by a variety of local villagers. Each of the twenty-three very short pieces focuses on one such profession; almost none are of the traditional labor-force kind, but rather specific to this locale and its unusual ways (though several sound like they could be useful ...).
       So, for example, the collection begins with 'The Snot-Remover' and 'The Wiper', who take care of bodily functions. The snot-remover sets up outside school, and employs a small pump -- not like in the good old days, when practitioners still relied on a small reed pipe to suck out the snot ..... The wiper -- yes, that sort of wiper -- does his daily rounds, but isn't allowed in homes: "When wanting his service, one poked out one's ass across the threshold".
       Several of the positions are considerably more extreme, and suggest a society that is in many ways medieval. There's a variation on the (original) whipping-boy concept, the village council deciding:
parents could no longer punish their own boys; they were, rather, only to assault those that were designated as service children, who'd wait on the promenade, in plain view.
       There's also a variation on the traditional idea of jus primæ noctis, with a 'screwer' charged, on wedding nights, with deflowering: "the husband while the husband deflowered his wife" (with the wealthy bribing the screwer to get out of it ...). Even more outrageous, there's the 'skinner' -- who handles the traditional skinning of a child when a woman gives birth to her thirteenth, part of the preparation for that occasion, when: "one of her other children would be sacrificed, serving as the banquet's main course".
       Though comic, the edge to these tales is obviously sharp and hard; there's much here that is amusing, even funny, but it's a cruel, dark humor, too.
       Good -- but often quite shocking -- fun, artfully presented. - M.A.Orthofer

Tony Duvert, District,Trans. by S. C. Delaney and Agnès Potier, with an introduction, by S. C. Delaney, Wakefield Press, 2017.

District describes, in ten vignettes, the sad, sordid, and sinister aspects to a section of an unnamed French city, and the manners in which the ghost-like human entities that inhabit, live, and wither within it are molded, moved, and absorbed by its spaces. A noisy metro station, old tenements, buildings going up, along with the fixtures of French communal life: the open-air market, the public garden; the little shops and bars, the lively town square—the ugly and mundane, the coarse and unmentionable sit side by side with the occasionally burgeoning beauty. With a sense of voyeuristic tension and queasy complicity, the reader is taken on an outcast’s tour of city life—from construction site to metro, from bar to brothel—an analysis of communal living in the past tense from the perspective of the absolute exile. One of Duvert’s last books, it is also one of his shortest: an unexpected return to the roving, fractured eye of the Nouveau Roman that had informed his earliest work.

Excerpt


As the title implies, District is about a locale -- a specific- more than every-place, but also anonymous and similar to any number of others. Ten chapters or pieces focus on different parts of it, such as a bar, a brothel, a market. The descriptions and scenes are both detailed and loosely sketched, and shift easily from the realistic to extremes of the imagination, beginning in the opening 'Construction Site':
There were mounds of sand that looked like giant anthills. For the cement; for the children. Most of the daycare center was built, but it hadn't been completed. It didn't have flooring, the children could fall, no cellar, no ground, no earth: the children could go into hell.
       The abyss is all around: in 'The Bar' the drinker reports on the recurring rumbling that's heard there -- and spins it out into a helicopter overhead, bombs dropping, complete devastation .....
       In 'A Billboard', a billboard, showing a couch with a naked figure on it, is described very precisely. Yet there's nothing to it beyond the picture, no text or logos that would indicate what is being advertised or announced:
Thus the various passersby circulating at the level of the massive billboard simply ignore it, and none try to guess at its possible message.
       So also, Duvert seems to be suggesting, so much else around us -- depths of meaning we choose to overlook, or remain blind to.
       Meanwhile, the explicit, written, is presented also as something with an entirely different use:
A book -- cheap; in the train station they're bought to use as toilet paper, on the can you tear off five, ten pages, then slip the book back in your pocket. After several trips it's down to its cover.
       A short, tight collection with stark and vivid imagery ("Near the threshold, a pool of vomit stretches out in the shape of a tongue"), District is an impressive, if small (a mere forty page-), collection of place-defining vignettes. - M.A.Orthofer




Tony Duvert, Atlantic Island, Trans. by Purdey Lord Kreiden and Michael Thomas Taren, Semiotext(e), 2017.


A forgotten gem of French literature, Duvert's version of The Lord of the Flies: an indictment against the violence embedded in a middle-class community.Tony Duvert's novel Atlantic Island (originally published in French in 1979) takes place in the soul-crushing suburbs of a remote island off the coast of France. It is told through the shifting perspectives of a group of pubescent and prepubescent boys, ages seven to fourteen, who gather together at night in secret to carry out a series of burglaries throughout their neighborhood. The boys vandalize living rooms and kitchens and make off with, for the most part, petty objects of no value. Their exploits leave the adult community perplexed and outraged, especially when a death occurs and the stakes grow more serious.
Duvert's portrayal of adult life on this Atlantic Island is savage to the point of satire, but the boys and their thieving and sexuality are explored with sympathy. A novel on the loneliness of childhood and the solitude induced by geographical space, it is also an empathetic and generous homage to youth, a crime novel without suspense, and an unsettling fairytale for adults.
Atlantic Island today is a forgotten gem of French literature: Duvert's own version of The Lord of the Flies, it is attentive to details and precise in its depiction of French mores and language. An indictment against the violence embedded in a middle-class community, it is also a love letter to childhood, incorporating the heroic vistas in which a child needs only a fertile imagination to become the secret hero of his or her own life.


Spotlight on … Tony Duvert Atlantic Island (1979) (on Dennis Cooper Blog)




Tony Duvert, Diary of an Innocent, Trans. by Bruce Benderson, Semiotext(e), 2010.


Now in English, Duvert's shocking novel about a sexual adventurer among a tribe of adolescent boys in Northern Africa.
"I'd find it amusing if, in a few centuries, the only thing that our descendents condescend to retain of our artistic production, the only thing in which they'll see worlds to admire, to penetrate, the only thing that they'll show off as precious in immense museums after having flushed down the toilet all our acknowledged masterpieces, the only thing that will give them nostalgia and love for us will be our porn." -- from Diary of an Innocent
Exiled from the prestigious French literary circles that had adored him in the 1970s, novelist Tony Duvert's life ended in anonymity. In 2008, nineteen years after his last book was published, Duvert's lifeless body was discovered in the small village of Thoré-la-Rochette, where he had been living a life of total seclusion.
Now for the first time, Duvert's most highly crafted novel is available in English. Poetic, brutally frank, and outright shocking, Diary of an Innocent recounts the risky experiences of a sexual adventurer among a tribe of adolescent boys in an imaginary setting that suggests North Africa. More reverie than narrative, Duvert's Diary presents a cascading series of portraits of the narrator's adolescent sexual partners and their culture, and ends with a fanciful yet rigorous construction of a reverse world in which marginal sexualities have become the norm.
Written with gusto and infused with a luminous bitterness, this novel is more unsettling to readers today than it was to its first audience when published in French in 1976. In his openly declared war on society, Duvert presents a worldview that offers no easy moral code and no false narrative solution of redemption. And yet no reader will remain untouched by the book's dazzling language, stinging wit, devotion to matters of the heart, and terse condemnation of today's society.


Shock value aside, the book is intelligent to its core. Duvert's style is consummate, his devices elegant, his methods seductive; Bruce Benderson's translation is clear and stately. -Review of Contemporary Fiction

'I always write completely nude, and I don't wash before,' writes Tony Duvert, whose explosive Diary of an Innocent is part tract, part porn, part theory, part fiction, and (I presume) part fact. Certain pages of Gide, Genet, Hocquenghem and certain scenes from Bresson or Pasolini suggest themselves as mild precursors, but Duvert goes further, filthier, faster. Only the Marquis de Sade outpaces him. Must we burn Duvert? I pray not. This book, troubling and memorable, interrogates with delicate strokes the damaged state of contemporary sexual relations. - Wayne Koestenbaum

Diary of an Innocent by Tony Duvert is a truly scandalous work, but first and foremost a work of great depth and freedom.... A book that reinvents the seduction of literature. - Abdellah Taïa


Originally published in France in 1976, Duvert's novel is a stomach-churning, pornographically-minded trip through the back alleys of an unnamed city narrated by a man with a penchant for young boys. Structured as a loose series of graphic sexual encounters with boys as young as seven and as old as 17, the story meanders through the narrator's days seducing street kids—and their families—with his modest wealth. These children are both the "innocents" of the ironic title and, some of them, hustlers themselves, a few of them offering their younger siblings in exchange for money, while others willingly engage in sex with the older man. The longest relationship he has is with the sulky Francesco, who mopes when other boys come knocking but eventually breaks things off. Society at large is the narrator's primary foe and he spends half of the book imagining a new world where homosexuality is the norm, heterosexuals are shunned and "the high point of human perfection is located in childhood." In the end, the descriptions of the narrator's unapologetic pleasure derived from sex with young boys remains shocking but nothing more.  - Publishers Weekly


‘I’d find it amusing if, in a few centuries, the only thing that our descendants condescend to retain of our artistic production, the only thing in which they’ll see worlds to admire, to penetrate, the only thing that they’ll show off as precious in immense museums after having flushed down the toilet all our acknowledged masterpieces, the only thing that will give them nostalgia and love for us will be our porn.’ Striking a similarly truculent tone throughout, French author and libidinal polemicist Tony Duvert’s recently translatedDiary of an Innocent presents a parodic memoir of bedroom philosophy interspersed with a collection of quixotic observations and sexual inventories-in-miniature that are almost Swiftian in ambition. Written in 1973 – the same year as the author’s anarchic ‘how-to manual’, Good Sex Illustrated– the novel represents Duvert at his most literary and pornographic.
Assuming the role of a poète maudit in exile, Diary of an Innocentis set in an unnamed city – perhaps in Morocco or Algeria – where the narrator discovers a cornucopia of pubescent desire. The resulting documentation of his pederastic transgressions mines much of the same territory described in William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959), The Thief’s Journal (1949) by Jean Genet, and Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972): part epistemology, part personal mythology. ‘It would be better to think of a name for certain boys,’ explains the narrator of the fictional christening process of his anonymous lovers. ‘I’ll take them from a novel by Quevedo [The Life of the Adventurer Don Pablos de Segovia, Ideal Tramp and Image of the Swindler, 1626]; I have hardly any books here, and that will do. I just need to follow the order of the first chapter [but] choosing accurate or attractive ones isn’t important; it’s enough for chance to decide.’

Beneath the scandalous accounts of ‘boy love’ that run through these fractured recollections, the mission of Diary of an Innocentis more ambitious in scale. Duvert is not only determined to take every mother and father to task for the sexual manipulation of their children, but to evidence how the oedipalized family is a molecular extension of the West and its regulation of libido for profit. ‘In middle-class families, manners have barely changed since the time when they had bachelors to admire the watercolours of their daughter,’ he writes, ‘[but] today, they invariably show you the little ones’ drawings and psychoanalyze them. They make aghast commentary if the images the brat produced are conformist; his duty is primitive art, not imitating big people. I dodge the requests for Freudian drivel.’ So Duvert’s salacious trysts with itinerants and juveniles, which fill the bulk of the 250-plus pages, invoke as much of the libidinal-economic as they do an Olympia Press ‘porno book’, transforming these playful, tanned bodies into the prelapsarian antithesis of western capitalism, French culture and secular humanism.
For his part, Duvert is rarely apologetic about his transgressions and, rarer still, does he cloak them in the circumlocutions of a fashionable, academic rhetoric. ‘To become straight,’ he explains matter-of-factly, ‘you have to transform your cock into a phallus, that well-washed instrument of power. The asshole can remain dirty, but you’ve got to sew it up, forget the half of the penis that joins it, favor the external part and confine orgasm to that part.’ Such ‘non-discourse’ discourse might be shocking to some and downright offensive to others (the overly squeamish need not inquire on the narrator’s erotic musings on farm animals, stray dogs and worms). But the importance of Duvert’s controversial labour cannot be overstated, not only because of its unrepentant advocacy of a so-called aberrant sexuality, but for the larger task of building a radical, narrative cosmology – polymorphous, heterotopic and dedicated to a politics of pleasure. As French scholar Bruce Benderson explains in the novel’s preface: ‘The fact that many passages of Diary of an Innocent were repulsive to me and that I identified that repulsion as much more than a matter of taste is merely proof of the efficacy of Duvert’s purpose […] One could say he has chosen to lie down with the Devil in order to escape the narrow boundaries of social experience – and thus achieve an unusual kind of transcendence. As I have tried to show, such a stance probably could not be more foreign and more distasteful to the American mind.’ So while Diary of an Innocentcontains a fascinating and essential reminder of a particular past dedicated to unspoken desires, Duvert’s pornographic transfiguration likely has no greater foe than the American reader of the new millennium. - frieze.com/article/diary-innocent

I first heard the name Tony Duvert on Dennis Cooper's great (and on going) blog, and was intrigued that he was a French writer (my obsession) and wrote about sexuality that many will feel questionable. "Diary of an Innocent" reads like a sex diary, rant, social theory, and a feverish dream all at once. The back cover liner notes says 'novel' but I wonder if it is - but that's not the issue of the book. What the book is about is a man who enjoys gay sex with various young boys in what may be somewhere in North Africa. It is also a social critique on the nature of passion and how it plays itself out in the 'mainstream' world.
Towards the end of the book he writes about heterosexuality as an outlaw fringe group lurking in the shadows of homosexual world that is both funny and quite insightful in how structure rules the world. In another one of his books (which I haven't read) "Good Sex Illustrated" he attacks the fact that a child's sex is conditioned and controlled by the structure of family and state - and are taught not to for fulfil their sexuality or desires. So through the eyes of Duvert, Western sexuality is part of a system that these kids are pooped out to fill out a role that family, state, and whoever wants to control.
"Diary of an Innocent" is a complex and very frank book about sexuality and how that plays out in a very constructed culture and society. - Tosh Berman    tamtambooks-tosh.blogspot.hr/2010/09/tony-duverts-diary-of-innocent.html





Tony Duvert, Good Sex Illustrated, Trans. by Bruce Benderson, Semiotext(e), 2007.


A scathing view of sex manuals for children and society's hypocrisy of over sex that argues for the rights of children to their own bodies and their own sexuality.
Why is pleasure "doubled" when it's "shared"?... Do you really have to cut pleasure in two so that it'll exist? I mean, if it's doubled when there are two of you, then it must be tripled when there are three, quadrupled when there are four, centupled when there are a hundred, right? Is it O.K. for a hundred to share? And if I get used to trying it all alone, why is it that I'll never love anyone again? Is it that good alone and that awful with others? ; from Good Sex Illustrated First published in France in 1973, Good Sex Illustrated gleefully deciphers the subtext of a popular sex education manual for children produced during that period. In so doing, Duvert mounts a scabrous and scathing critique of how deftly the "sex-positive" ethos was harnessed to promote the ideal of the nuclear family. Like Michel Houllebecq, Duvert is highly attuned to all the hypocrisies of late twentieth century western "sexual liberation" mass movements. As Bruce Benderson notes in his introduction, Good Sex Illustrated shows that, "in our sexual order, orgasm follows the patterns of any other kind of capital... 'good sex' is a voracious profit machine." But unlike Houllebecq, Duvert writes from a passionate belief in the integrity of unpoliced sex and of pleasure. Even more controversially now than when the book was first published, Duvert asserts the child's right to his or her own playful, unproductive sexuality. Bruce Benderson's translation will belatedly introduce English-speaking audiences to the most infamous gay French writer since Jean Gênet.

A writer criminally undertranslated and consequently barely known in the primarily English-speaking areas of the world.... Duvert is one of the more significant and idiosyncratic contemporary French fiction writers. He's also one of the most mysterious. - Dennis Cooper


The family, in Tony Duvert's iconography, is the mainspring of oppression, "breeder of meat and whittler-down of men. As a 'producer' unit, it is ... capable only of destroying the children that it turns out."

It's not a startlingly original assertion. But that's mainly because this petulant little book was first published in 1973 in the wake of cult writers like David Cooper with his optimistic prediction of The Death of the Family and R. D. Laing who diagnosed families as the cause of schizophrenia. Both were strongly influenced by the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and his elevation of the orgasm as a force for liberation.
It's not clear why the publishers have seen fit to revive what can only be seen as a curiosity of its time, except perhaps to test how well it has survived. Duvert sets out to demonstrate the commodification of sexuality through examination of a five-volume sex education manual, published by Hachette. Each volume is directed at a different age group, and each features an idealised nuclear family in order, according to Duvert, to reinforce capitalism's tyranny. But in the light of subsequent work, especially Foucault's majestic history of sexuality, his conclusions seem crude and unformed.
Even more naive is Duvert's interpretation of why sex is seen purely as a means to procreation. The family, he argues, is a microcosm of an industrial machine where fathers are the owners, mothers producers and children the product. Nowhere does he acknowledge that this analysis was first made, more cogently, a century earlier by Freidrich Engels.
Duvert's castigation of the family and his railing against the reduction of sex to market forces spring from a passionate advocacy of unfettered sexuality. Children, he says, are taught to be ashamed of erotic desires and to repress sexual instincts. Little girls should be able to regard their burgeoning breasts as playthings; little boys should revel in their hanging testicles and hardening penises.
And clearly it's those little boys who interest him. Each chapter begins with a blurred photograph of a small boy's pencil-like erection, ostensibly to show how sexuality is dehumanised in commercial society. But the repetition of the picture merely serves to highlight what appear to be the author's own preferences. An unsettling amount of his diatribe is a paean to the act of masturbation, leading to a more sinister subtext: a child's right to sexual exploration with adults.
Fathers, apparently, deliberately exaggerate the evil intents of strangers. "The paedophile," Duvert claims, "goes beyond being simply a pervert, a squanderer: he's the father's rival."
He even argues that the pederast is preferable to the parent: "To buy his protection, the children or adolescents will have to give in to him, submit their sex to him, as they do for the father; but instead of being castrated, they'll only be harnessed."
But it's not any old child abuser Duvert is defending. It's specifically middle-class, wealthy homosexual preyers upon children. "The homosexual protector offers, outside the family, what that family can't give." You can't help wondering why he protests quite so much.
Throughout his polemic, Duvert continually generalises about children: their sexual make-up, their need for physical and erotic expression and their repression by market forces and the family. You need to know children quite intimately to be able to make such claims. Since Duvert had none of his own, how did he manage it? - www.timeshighereducation.com/books/good-sex-illustrated/400485.article

Oisín Curran, Blood Fable, BookThug, 2017.
Read an Excerpt: Open Book


Maine, 1980. A utopian community is on the verge of collapse. The charismatic leader’s authority teeters as
his followers come to realize they’ve been exploited for too long. To make matters worse, the eleven-year-old son of one adherent learns that his mother has cancer.
Taking refuge in his imagination, the boy begins to speak of another time and place. His parents believe he is remembering his own life before birth. This memory, a story within the story of Blood Fable, is an epic tale about the search for a lost city refracted through the lens of the adventures the boy loves to read. But strangely, as the world around them falls apart, he and his parents find that his story seems to foretell the events unfolding in their present lives.


“A family drama, a fantastical voyage, and a poetic reflection on love, death and betrayal, this extraordinary coming-of-age novel exposes the difficult relationship between free-thought and blind faith, evasion and enlightenment. Oisín Curran’s Blood Fable is an adventure for the heart and soul.” —Johanna Skibsrud


“This careful and loving rendering of a child’s mind proves that acts of storytelling were once not so much vehicles for escape but instead crucial rehearsals for being. A remembrance of lost time—or maybe, to reference its Buddhist undergirding, an alaya-vijnana, a storehouse consciousness—Curran’s vision of boyhood is perfect in details and sublimely moving. Blood Fable is a magnificent double take, which—like a bistable optical illusion (duck or rabbit?) —allows two universes to coexist. A rapturous adventure tale where the very essence of adventure is subverted so that fantasy and reality conflate; this is done not for temporary trickery but to deepen our comprehension of the real.” —Eugene Lim


“The dark magic in Blood Fable is just a story (within a story), but that somehow makes it more, and more truly, magical. It is a story about how stories are made, how they help and refuse to reflect our lives, as resonating versions of the world refracted through the prism of imagination. On almost every page something threw me gloriously off balance and I couldn’t stop asking myself: how does Oisin Currin manage to write so consistently, compellingly, hauntingly well? I will reread this book.” —Jacob Wren


“Blood Fable is, for me, a perfect book; it is the novel I always wish I were reading. In its twin stories—one of an eleven-year-old boy and his flawed, beloved parents and the other a wild tale of love, peril, and adventure across underground tunnels and seas—are all the wonder and terror of childhood, refracted by a luminous imagination. Through the wide eyes of a child, Curran plumbs the world of adults with compassion and acuity. Blood Fable is a quest, a question, a story of searching—for understanding, insight, heroes—and of failing, finding in their stead the imaginative mercy of love. This is a joy of a novel, glittering, wondrous, and strange. I remain in its thrall.” —Rebecca Silver Slayter


OisínCurran, Mopus, Counterpath Press, 2006.


"An astounding debut novel, written with courage, innovation, wisdom, style. Oisîn Curran leads us onto a topology of narrative surfaces that appear and disappear seamlessly: subway terrorists in an urban density, a bucolic meadow and stream, postapocalyptic devastation, a ninth century abbey, forty-fifth century conspiracies. The narrative here allows one to enter the creative guts of storytelling, to experience it as a living force. Curran is like Beckett, Woolf, Joyce, Barnes, Bernhard, Celine, Faulkner, in whose work powerful prose excavates the ground of narrative itself, and exposes the sources and necessity of storytelling."

“Ostensibly, Mopus is William Bluebottle’s 24-hour romp through shifting times, places, and points of view in pursuit of his lost dog and ghost sister. Curran’s masterful work of concise metafiction is cinematic and dreamlike, but it is also understated and lyrical. Like Kelly Link’s stories, the telling is matter-of-fact, but there is something eerie about the world it is set in. Some other works that come to mind are: Mark Danielewski’s 'Only Revolutions,' David Mitchell’s 'Cloud Atlas,' Flann O’Brien’s 'At Swim-Two-Birds,' and Jeanette Winterson’s 'Art and Lies.'”

"one of the best, genuinely experimental novels i’ve read in a long time… a daring and ambitious book, successful in its narrative high-wire act, oddly grounded in the current moment of apocalypse-always while circumventing completely the self-aggrandizing disaster movie poses. a consistent and non-sugary feeling of nostalgia, of remembrance of time just and long lost, sustained throughout.
structurally, this book’s the shit. or, to say it differently, it’s got beautiful answers to the novel’s problems of character and plot. why have we spent time playing with mobius strips and contemplating klein bottles? because their strange topologies are not only uncanny in their impossible possibility–but because they are metaphors for (or doorways to) the collapsed multi-possibilities of each particular existence. curran has composed an equivalent in prose, where doubles and ghosts and doppelgangers and recursive loops and variations on themes are all used to profound effect.
it’s a bit unsettling to not know where you are, which happens a fair amount, especially in the beginning, but the book slowly unfolds itself… and then refolds upon itself over and over… great books are worth reading again, but this one almost requires the second time through.
a close relative to two similarly slim, similarly cult-classic-y, dense episodic novels: david ohle’s MOTORMAN and jaimy gordon’s SHAMP OF THE CITY SOLO… but while i love those two books, MOPUS’ style, for better or worse, is less aggressive and confrontational than MOTORMAN’s and less pyrotechnic look-at-me than SHAMP. MOPUS is more straight-up lyrical, with rich and graceful passages describing place and nature. one downside: while in the midst of the book’s whirlwind, the characters’ emotional lives are rendered fairly straightforwardly, more surface-level observations and depictions than the deeper interiors one might expect…
but pretty damn great book. oh, and: after donald harington’s WITH and way better than auster’s silly TIMBUKTU–it’s got the best description of dog-mind i’ve ever." - Eugene Lim


One of the most overlooked books of the past ten years, about a guy named Bluebottle searching for his white dog through 24 hours of a shifting nightmare terrain full of ghost-people and deformed air. It’s not so much terrifying as it is haunted, and continuously shaking your expectation of how a story can be told. This one does things with senses you don’t expect a text to, which caused people to keep comparing it to Joyce and Beckett, but really it’s just the kind of machine you need to pick up and eat. The first sentence is: “Start in the dark with the clatter of leaves and two birds talking, invisible flowers bloom.” - Blake Butler
Read an excerpt here

Mujie Li, Mirage Time, Dostoyevski Wannabe, 2017.


"Mirage Time starts another language in the midst of English.  It is one whose vocabulary is intricate and subtle, emphasising sensual intensity of every sort. Words and experience, and experience in words, are given powerfully fluid and irrevocable force." - Matthew Fuller


An apartment is in a diseased state; swirling in the vortex of memories, footage of violence and pain moves around its rooms, causing contractions and sprouting schizophrenically, shuddering towards death. A desert banquet unfurls, and things vibrate in the trip. Stories begin to proliferate: tribes hunt for love, urban space metamorphosises, dreams are smuggled hence accidents happen, names of things become symbolic, and a strange botany configures variations of hope. Mirage Time is a large sensory ecology which comes into being across scales and states of experience. With sections of texts in its three sequences interweaving with each other, the text reads itself in a perceptible movement across each sequence.
Written in a prose-lyrical style, a structural experiment in which words, phrases and sentences intensify sensations and are composed of movement, the text itself produces a vivid new sensual order. Mirage Time insists that the world is voluptuous.

Kristjana Gunnars, Rose Garden: Reading Marcel Proust,  Red Deer Press, 2002.




Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction.
Combining the genres of fiction, memoir, the familiar essay and theoretical speculation, The Rose Garden forms an unusual synthesis. The protagonist and narrator is a Canadian literary scholar on study leave in Germany. While there, her involvement with her books on the one hand and a love relationship on the other creates a surprising blend of life and fiction. Her readings in classical European texts forefront the question of a woman reader's response. Her involvement with her lover makes her wonder why there is so little difference between life and literature on the level of experience. This is an uncommon book that defies traditional rules of style and genre and provokes the question of what meaning literary works actually have in our lives.


Kristjana Gunnars, Prowler, Red Deer Press, 2002.

A powerful postmodern novel combining the elements of a psychological thriller with the history of a people trapped by landscape and politics. A poetically charged text prowls the isolation and heartbreak of a girl growing up in Iceland in the post-war years, and her later experiences as an immigrant in North America. What emerges is a widening mystery of origins in which every word becomes a clue to the unspoken.

Kristjana Gunnars, Night Train to Nykobing, Red Deer Press, 2002.

A woman hopelessly in love boards the night train to Nykobing, Denmark, not knowing if the lover she leaves behind will ever be with her again. Then, through attempts to write her distant lover a letter she knows will never be sent, she recounts a long vigil, inspired by love, and her conspiracy with a waiting heart. Night Train to Nykobing is a transformative tale that articulates the dense codes of love and the intensity of a life on the edge of abandonment. But this also is a story of return, finally, to a heart that has wandered through the desert of time.
 

Kristjana Gunnars, The Substance of Forgetting, Red Deer Press, 2002.

In the tradition of Marguerite Duras, Gunnars explores a multi-layered romance-between East and West, rural and urban, silence and words.


"A sparse but lyrical prose that fully engages the reader."- Books in Canada


"Magical,as delicious as the escape of a hazy mountain morning."- University of Toronto Quarterly



Kristjana Gunnars, Any Day But This, Red Deer Press, 2004.



On the Sunshine Coast of Canada, people live and die, come and go, caught in webs of their own making. The stories in Any Day But This follow those webs to their probable conclusions.
Everyone has bad days and in these stories, people can hardly tell the bad days from the good. But the spirit is stronger than circumstance, and memory vies with determination. One thing remains true in all the variations of fate: life hardly ever turns out as you expected. Here are stories of love and loss; of claiming, losing and reclaiming dignity, heartbreak, grief and joy. In these tightly wrought stories, characters find their masks removed to reveal their true selves within.
One woman slowly realizes she belongs to a class she secretly despises, while another finally decides to face her worst fears and then cannot find them. A gregarious man unexpectedly finds himself alone and friendless while another bravely walks into life's worst nightmare and discovers it's not so bad. The dilemmas and conflicts Gunnars' characters face are those all of us encounter.





Kristjana Gunnars, Silence of the Country,Coteau Books, 2002.


The poet, having been in Norway for six months, returns to her British Columbia home only to find she must write herself back into both her physical and psychic landscape and environment.These poems are rites in the task of bringing the poet back home. With the poetic craft and precision of language she is noted for, Kristjana Gunnars takes us along on her re-entry into the sights, the sounds, the smells, the colours, the light, the landscape, of her west coast home. She also experiences occasional flashbacks to her exile in a faraway country, Norway, which is reminiscent of her own Icelandic home, and at the same time strikingly different.Appearing at first to be deceptively small and simple, these poems, when pressed, reveal deepening layers of imagery and emotional complexity. It takes supreme skill to create powerful, satisfying statements in such brief poetic packages, but Kristjana Gunnars proves herself more than capable of meeting the challenge.

Kristjana Gunnars, Zero Hour, Red Deer Press, 2002.


The story of a daughter's vigil over her father's death and her journey through grief in the aftermath of his decision to die with dignity. An unforgettable book, a poetically charged memoir of the author's passage through grief.




Kristjana Gunnars: Essays on Her Works, Ed. byMonique Tschofen  read it at Google Books




Reading and Writing Experimental Texts: Critical Innovations, Ed. by Robin Silbergleid, Kristina Quynn  read it at Google Books

Metanoia: A Speculative Ontology of Language, Thinking, and the Brain, Ed. by Armen Avanessian and Anke Hennig, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.



Fusing speculative realism, analytical and linguistic philosophy this book theorises the fundamental impact the experience of reading has on us. In reading, language provides us with a world and meaning becomes perceptible. We can connect with another subjectivity, another place, another time. At its most extreme, reading changes our understanding of the world around us. Metanoia- meaning literally a change of mind or a conversion-refers to this kind of new way of seeing. To see the world in a new light is to accept that our thinking has been irrevocably transformed. How is that possible? And is it merely an intellectual process without any impact on the world outside our brains?

Innovatively tackling these questions, this book mobilizes discussions from linguistics, literary theory, philosophy of language, and cognitive science. It re-articulates linguistic consciousness by underlining the poetic, creative moment of language and sheds light on the ability of language to transform not only our thinking but the world around us as well.


Table of Contents:
Introduction by Levi Bryant

I Poetics
Principles of Ligual Poiesis
The Poetic Function of Language (Jakobson)
The Potentializing Function of Language (Guillaume)
Poietic Linguistics
The Myth of the Arbitrariness of the Sign
Speculative Poetics

II The Analytic Circle
The Ligual Creation of a True World
Triadic Logic of the Sign (Pierce)
The Poetic Triad
The Linguistic Turn, or: the Signified as Predicate of the Signifier
S means X by Y (Kripke, Meillassoux, Harman)
Lingual Things and the Ontology of Individuals (Strawson)

III Speculation
Aspects of a Poetics of Thought
The Speculative Triad
Subject – Object – Other: our Methodical Constellation
Abduction as a Poietic Procedure
Poeticizing Philosophy

IV Cognition
Metanoia is an Anagram of Anatomie173
The Recursive Structure of Cognition (Metzinger and Malabou)
The Coevolution of Language and the Brain
Aspects of Universal Grammar (Chomsky v. Leiss): Generative, Extra-linguistic, Cognitive
Semiotics of the Brain (Deacon)

Epilogue
The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth!
Matters Ethical (and Religious)
Going Beyond Thought: Temporality




“How does reading texts actually alter our minds? This simple but important question is at the core of Metanoia. Armen Avanessian and Anke Hennig's intricately argued intervention updates literary philosophy for the 21st century. Synthesizing linguistics, poetics and cutting-edge neurophilosophy, Metanoia powerfully vindicates the claim that literature can transform our consciousness.” –  Mark Fisher
                    
“'In the concept of metanoia Avanessian and Hennig discern a phenomenon that is far more pervasive than the religious register and its conversions, but that lies at the core of thought and language. There is a power of language, thought, and speech to transform both the subject and the world. How is it, Avanessian and Hennig wonder, that a book, a poem, a conversation, or a line of thinking can fundamentally transform both the subject and the world?'” –  Levi Bryant

Anna Kavan,Ice. Penguin, 2017. [1967.]


seraillon.blogspot.com/2011/08/incredible-glacial-dream-scene.html


Ice came out in 1967 and was the last of Anna Kavan's books to be published in her lifetime. It won the science fiction book of the year after being nominated by Brian Aldiss. He has since admitted that he didn't really think it was SF, but thought the award was the best way to encourage more people to read her work. His plan worked: Ice is by far the best known of Kavan's books, and I adore it.
The story follows three characters as they struggle against one another and almost certain annihilation. An ice shelf, brought about by some sort of nuclear war, is engulfing the world – Kavan's pun on the cold war may not be subtle but it is terrifying. The landscape is bleached; snow uniforms the landmarks and smothers the towns, cities and dilapidated buildings. Roads are blocked and the waterways of the world frozen solid, hampering the unnamed narrator as he pursues a nameless "ice maiden", as brittle as Venetian glass, with long white hair. She's being held by her husband, "the warden", a high-ranking military man who, with an army of obedient and bullying administrators, polices the country.
Kavan doesn't often name the characters in her books, instead giving them descriptive titles or nicknames. In Ice, countries, places, buildings and roads are also anonymous, adding to the sense of instability and uncertainty; we are completely lost in an oneiric dystopia without a single signpost to orientate us or show us the way out. The narrator is supposed to guide us but he slips into daydreams and hallucinations and we don't know what to trust or believe. It's not many pages into the book that we realise that this isn't a story about characters negotiating a war-torn country, but rather about the narrator fighting his paranoid, panic-stricken mind as it threatens to overcome him. This isn't a plot spoiler; in fact, it's almost impossible to give a spoiler to this book. Its meaning shifts with each reading.                       
I periodically reread Ice because I love the writing and the uneasy feeling it gives me – like reading a really good ghost story. But I also come back to it time and again because I think it tells the fascinating story of Kavan's 40-year relationship with heroin. The similarities between the white snow in the story and the powdered form of the drug I'm sure aren't coincidental.
I was once told that Kavan's love affair with heroin began when she was prescribed it for a sports injury at the time when it was administered as a painkiller in a glass bottle with a pretty label. She soon became wholly dependent on it, and when it was criminalised in the 1950s, was so worried about running out that she stockpiled it. When her body was found in her London home in 1968, it's rumoured that there was enough heroin in her flat to kill the entire street. She suffered from deep, debilitating depressions which caused her to spend time in asylums, but believed the drug allowed her to write, and that writing helped her manage her illness. I see her need for the drug mirrored in the narrator's desperation to reach the ice maiden. The story's winter weather clogs up the roads and hampers the narrator in his quest, but he continues, believing that once he has the maiden with him, all will be well.
That's my seasonal read. It's not heartwarming, it doesn't have a single picturesque landscape or sleigh bell in it. It's strange, unsettling and harsh, but that's why it's ideal. I hope you enjoy it and I look forward to reading what you think. - Hannah Freeman    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/dec/21/ice-anna-kavan-winter-reads


In his introduction to Anna Kavan’s novel Ice, first published in 1967, a year before her death, Christopher Priest describes it as a work of ‘literary slipstream, one of the most significant novels of its type’. This genre arose in the US in the late 80s; Priest defines it as fiction that ‘induces a sense of ‘otherness’ in the audience, like a glimpse into a distorting mirror, perhaps, or a view of familiar sights and objects from an unfamiliar perspective…it imparts a sense that reality might not be quite as certain as we think.’
He names JG Ballard, Angela Carter, Paul Auster, Haruki Murakami, Borges and others as exponents of this kind of writing. Slipstream portrays ‘images of the ordinary world through shifting mirrors and distorting lenses, without attempting to explain.’
Ice’s strangeness is apparent from the very first paragraph. An unnamed car driver learns that the unidentified country through which he is travelling is experiencing severely unseasonal cold weather. He reveals little about himself except that he has spent much of his life abroad ‘soldiering, or exploring remote areas.’ Later he appears to be involved in covert operations for the military, or in espionage.
The world is dying: it’s ‘doomed’. Ice is taking over, perhaps because of some obscure scientific mishap, or else through the use of doomsday weapons:
An insane impatience for death was driving mankind to a second suicide, even before the full effect of the first had been felt.
Our first person narrator, the man in the car, is obsessively searching for a girl with moon-white hair and alabaster skin. ‘I needed to see her; it was vital’, he reveals, but never says why.
She is fragile and thin, and appears cowed, crushed. We’re told she had been treated cruelly as a child by her mother; she is a ‘victim’, with ‘no will’ of her own. When she disappears the narrator abandons all his own affairs to search for her: ‘Nothing else mattered.’ His urgency is increased by ‘the approaching emergency’.
But the almost plotless narrative constantly implodes. What appears to be a narrative line suddenly disappears. In mid-scene we are taken somewhere else, possibly in flashback – or possibly leaping forwards in time: the transition is never explained. With the surreal logic of a dream these shifts render what’s just happened irrelevant or inexplicable.
The man feels compelled to find the girl, but she is inaccessible or hidden away. For much of the novel she is in the power of a brutal warlord known as the warden. He treats her like a prisoner. He abuses her psychologically and sexually. The narrator eventually manages to spirit her away, but he too treats her badly. She fears and detests them both.
At times the identities of the searching man and the cruel warden appear to merge; at times he doesn’t seem to know which one he is. She finds it impossible to distinguish between them and their dastardly treatment of her: ‘there’s no difference’ between them, she says. The narrator’s grasp of reality is tenuous:
 My ideas were confused. In a peculiar way, the unreality of the outer world appeared to be an extension of my own disturbed state of mind.
Soon after this moment he becomes aware of ‘an odd sort of fragmentation of my ideas.’ Then again, ‘this was the reality, and those other things the dream.’ Later:
 Nothing but the nightmare had seemed real while it was going on, as if the other lost world had been imagined or dreamed. Now that world, no longer lost, was here the one solid reality. 
I found the novel weirdly compelling. It has a crazed logic of its own: the novel’s world is, as the narrator says, ‘a field of strangeness where no known laws operated.’ The searching man’s obsessive quest has the manic grandeur of Ahab’s pursuit of the white whale.
I’ve written about two other Anna Kavan books: Julia and the Bazookais a collection of short stories which frequently deal with her addiction to heroin. The Parson has some of the strangeness of Ice.
Priest insists that this novel is not just an extended metaphorical account of Kavan’s heroin addiction, that the ice is not the drug, the girl (victim and holy grail) is not the drug. But I couldn’t help finding this a satisfactory way of interpreting the narrator’s hallucinatory compulsion to find the elusive girl; his obsession causes him more suffering than pleasure, and he abandons her when he does achieve his goal:
When I considered that imperative need if felt for her, as for a missing part of myself, it appeared less like love than an inexplicable aberration, the sign of some character-flaw I ought to eradicate, instead of letting it dominate me.
She’s described like those models a few years ago who earned the unpleasant label ‘heroin chic’: skinny, haunted, bruised.
On the other hand I agree that such a reading fails to account for all of the novel’s bizarre layers and surreal motifs (such as the narrator’s fascination with singing lemurs: the Indris). It can also be seen as an effective protofeminist allegory: just as the world’s men bring about global disaster with their suicidal weapons and Cold War ‘collective death-wish’, so they reify women; the girl-victim is a cipher for the warden and the narrator: she’s their prey, and their aim is to dominate and control her, to possess her, stifle her individuality and identity. They are sadistic bullies, as threatening as the ice-fields that are advancing across the earth’s surface. - Simon Lavery tredynasdays.co.uk/2015/03/anna-kavan-ice/


I’ve written before of how sometimes work, life generally, can wreck my reading of a book. A busy period, a week passes without a page turned, and suddenly a great book has become a chore. I don’t remember what’s going on or who the characters are or why the plot involves a chihuaha*. The book becomes staccato and dissolves into incoherence.

My reading life began with my parents’ bookshelves. I would read anything with a naked woman on the cover. I picked up the 1967 Picador edition of Ice with its image of a pale girl at the foot of a flight of stairs and read it breathlessly in a way that mostly eludes me now. It was so new to me, a sort of apocalyptic not-quite-science fiction that crackles with erotic violence and dread.
Kavan makes such great assumptions of her reader that it is almost flattering how obscure, how ungenerous she is willing to be with her writing. The narrator’s hallucinations or dreams interrupt the text with no warning and nothing – not a single character – is given a name. As a young woman who suffered from extremely disturbing dreams there was comfort in the way Kavan gave my fright a shape and a beauty and did not try and explain anything away. The book is full of half-heard snatches of conversation, shimmering snow and bruised flesh. Just as we think we have found our way, like the narrator we are plunged elsewhere to negotiate an unfamiliar landscape – or a room that appears a certain way in one moment and completely transformed the next. Even the girl in the story is an amorphous beast, transparent and silent and growing thinner by the moment. ‘She’s dying,’ her husband tells the narrator at one point. ‘As we all are.’

Some people see the book as a metaphor for Kavan’s heroin addiction. I think that is terribly neat and boring. It’s unfortunate that a writer’s biography has to be laboured over, especially if that writer is a woman. But Kavan systematically destroyed personal correspondence and diaries in an attempt to resist precisely this. What a writer, and what a vision. What a perfect book to read in preparation for the end of the world. - Eli Goldstone


Anna Kavan’s last novel Ice is a disturbing, eerie story. It takes place in an unsteady world threatened by impending disasters and destruction: a global war is being waged while the world has entered a “new ice age” (131). Snow and ice are gradually covering the surface of the Earth, which makes movement and travelling difficult. Yet the novel opens on a scene in which the narrator is driving his car to visit “friends in the country” (6), a married couple. The narrator is still attracted by the woman of the couple who used to be his lover before she left him. She is an albino, referred to as “the girl” throughout the novel. At the beginning of the second chapter the girl vanishes: she leaves home and no one knows where she is. The rest of the novel stages constant action yet it does not have a plot as such: it is an account of the narrator’s obsessive hunt for the girl, who is in turn dead or alive, a fugitive, a guest or a prisoner in a rapid succession of scenes. The text thus displays the double paradox of an endless chase in a frozen, end-of-the-world context. - Céline Magot  read more


Anna Kavan’s Ice is a novel of relentless, evanescent beauty that depicts a world in which two explicitly linked forms of violence dominate and inexorably and insanely destroy it. First published in 1967, on the eve of the second wave of feminism, Ice has never been regarded as a significant work of proto-feminist literature, although scholars occasionally include it on lists of sf by women written before the major works of feminist sf burst onto the scene in the 1970s. The novel’s surrealist form demands a different sort of reading than that of science fiction driven by narrative causality, but the text’s obsessive insistence on linking the global political violence of the Cold War with the threateningly lethal sexual objectification of Woman and depicting them as two poles of the same suicidal collective will to destroy life makes Ice an interesting feminist literary experiment. - L. Timmel Duchamp  read more






About a year ago, I attended the guest of honor talk at ICon, the Israeli science fiction and fantasy convention. The speaker was Neil Gaiman, and his topic was dreams. With typical low-key irreverence, Mr. Gaiman sidestepped his assigned subject. Nothing, he claimed, is quite so boring as actual dreams, in which the mind's processing centers, cut off from the senses and from higher reasoning, continue to churn and light up, producing certainties and causal leaps ("and suddenly it wasn't my high school gym teacher; it was my mother" is my best recollection of Mr. Gaiman's way of describing this effect) that have no relation to logic, narrative, or even metaphor and symbolism.
Anna Kavan's Ice unfolds with a similar dream-like logic. Or perhaps a more accurate term would be nightmarish. It is a short novel (the Peter Owen reissue is less than 160 pages long), and quite repetitive. Its primary purpose seems to be to achieve the effect that Mr. Gaiman, in his talk, dismissed as all but impossible—to place the reader in the narrator's dream-like state, to convey not only illogical turns of event and senseless certainties, but the claustrophobic eeriness they produce. It achieves this goal in its very first sentence—"I was lost, it was already dusk, I had been driving for hours and was practically out of petrol"—and never lets up.
Ice is told in a first person that is so tight as to be alienating. The narrator, who remains nameless throughout the novel, describes the present moment with almost no context—we learn very little about his past throughout the novel, and what we learn doesn't cohere into an image of the kind of person he is. His emotional reactions are mercurial and erratic, with almost no explanation of how they come about. A similar alienating effect distances us from the novel's other characters—the woman (who is invariably referred to by the narrator as "the girl") with whom the narrator is obsessed and her husband, who is sometimes known as the Warden—whom we view only through the narrator's eyes, and who very seldom get to speak for themselves. The novel is made up of a series of set-pieces, each with much the same structure: the narrator travels to meet the woman and her husband, is greeted with coldness from the latter and with revulsion bordering on hysteria by the former, and walks away in disgust, only to encounter them again elsewhere. The backdrop to these partings and reunions is a planetary catastrophe. Great sheets of ice are enveloping the planet, which is swiftly becoming unlivable. The looming apocalypse sparks war and civil unrest, in which the narrator and the Warden are often caught up, and to which the woman often falls victim, though she is always resurrected in time for the next iteration of her story. At times there are dreams within a dream—visions that the narrator has of the woman and her husband, in which she is always mistreated, and sometimes killed.
Despairingly she looked all around. She was completely encircled by the tremendous ice walls, which were made fluid by explosions of blinding light, so that they moved and changed with a continuous liquid motion, advancing in torrents of ice, avalanches as big as oceans, flooding everywhere over the doomed world. Wherever she looked, she saw the same fearful encirclement, soaring battlements of ice, an overhanging ring of frigid, fiery, colossal waves about to collapse upon her. Frozen by the deathly cold emanating from the ice, dazzled by the blaze of crystalline ice-light, she felt herself becoming part of the polar vision, her structure becoming one with the structure of ice and snow. As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of her world. (p. 21)
It is only in these interludes that the narrator's presence recedes from the novel, though they seem, always, to conform to his perception of the woman as childlike and doomed, and of her husband as a cruel, abusive man. When Kavan returns us to what passes, in Ice, for reality, the narrator is so prominent as to drown out not only the other characters, but the distinguishing features and details of his world. "The situation was alarming, the atmosphere tense, the emergency imminent" (p. 22), he tells us early in the novel, but without elaborating. Later, the narrator rents a room in a foreign country, to which he travels in pursuit of the woman. His landlady is "evidently reluctant to admit a foreigner to the house where she live[s] alone; I could feel her suspicious dislike" (p. 34). There is no description of the landlady with which Kavan can support the narrator's observations. In this scene, as in most others, Ice is driven by the sense of knowing, without sensory evidence or rational thought, that permeates dreams.
Ice's plot doesn't so much progress as spiral inwards, tightening in on the moment in which the encroaching ice leaves only the narrator and the woman alone in the world. Even this point of convergence, however, isn't the novel's purpose—indeed, the story ends ambivalently, holding out the possibility of yet more iterations of the narrator's story to come. Ice is an exercise in sustaining an emotional tone—an oppressive, terrifying, senseless one. It succeeds at this task admirably, making for a reading experience that is not so much pleasant as irresistible, and an emotional impact that proves very difficult to shake off.
Published in 1967, Ice is the best-known novel by a little-known author. Anna Kavan was the pseudonym of Helen Woods (1901—1968), whose career spanned several decades and encompassed more than a dozen books. Her novels—the later ones, published under the Kavan pseudonym, in particular—are informed by her struggle with mental illness and an addiction to heroin, and she is often compared to Kafka. She is often referred to as a feminist writer, though in reference to Ice this seems to me a dubious assertion. While there is no denying that the novel is suffused with misogyny, with the narrator's obsession with his beloved frequently giving way to violent urges and the desire to dominate and infantilize her, calling it a feminist work seems as justified as describing a novel that comes out against genocide as humanistic. The narrator's excesses are too broad and hateful to constitute a meaningful statement against real-world misogyny.
On top of reissuing Ice and several of her other novels, Kavan's publishers have also posthumously brought to light a "rediscovered" work, Guilty. There is a natural tendency to distrust such novels, with readers and reviewers making the reasonable argument that, had the novel been finished and worthy of publication, it would have seen the light of day within the author's lifetime. To a certain extent, Guilty seems to justify this bias. It gives off the impression of not having cooked quite long enough, and there is a dissonance between its first two thirds and final third that suggests that a final rewrite might have been planned and never carried out. Nevertheless, it is by no means an unworthy read.
Guilty is a more straightforward novel than Ice. Although it is also narrated in the first person, its narrator—a man named Mark, who at the beginning of the novel is a young boy, and who is accompanied into manhood by the narrative—is allowed to observe his surroundings and to draw his conclusions about the world from available evidence. The world he lives in is also more finely sketched than the dystopia described in Ice, although not to the extent of being recognizably our world, and yet its diversions from recognizable reality are not sufficiently explored to constitute what we tend to think of as worldbuilding. At the beginning of Guilty, Mark's father returns home, a decorated veteran of two wars, and promptly destroys his uniform and medals and speaks out for pacifism. The vehemence with which society excoriates and rejects him for these opinions—Mark is withdrawn from the local school for fear of persecution and his parents' marriage collapses in almost no time—draws on the real-life experiences of pacifists (according to the introduction, by Jennifer Sturm, Kavan was the lover of a conscientious objector during WWII) while shading ever so slightly into unreality when Mark's father decides to leave his family in order to find "a country where there was peace, where people lived together in friendliness and goodwill, and the air wasn't poisoned, as it was here, by hatred and the bitterness of old wars or the fear of new ones" (p. 34).
In its first two-thirds, Guilty is occupied by a gentle perversion of the tropes of the coming of age novel. Mark experiences his first taste of disillusionment when his father's return from war, instead of expanding his family and providing him with the male role model he's been craving, shatters it, and robs him of his mother's affection by reducing her to a neurotic, petulant mess. Like a common young adult protagonist, Mark believes in his ability to influence the wider world, and yet when the time comes for his father to leave home for what will turn out to be the last time, Mark hesitates.
Nothing in the quiet cottage suggested that anyone but myself had observed the taxi's approach. I was the only person, so far, who had seen it, which, in terms of magic, gave me absolute power over it. I could make it turn back, disappear—thus preventing my father's departure—simply by giving the sign. ... I knew I ought to give the sign that would alter my father's fate. But I didn't want him to stay at home; on the contrary, I was rejoicing because he was about to leave me alone with my mother once more. (p. 41)
Though irrational, the guilt for failing to prevent his father's departure follows Mark into young adulthood. It is soon added to by his other failures to behave in a heroic manner. He abandons his mother to her misery, preferring the company of books—or of the family friend, the mysterious and powerful Mr. Spector—and later forgets her completely when he goes off to school. When Mark's father returns unexpectedly and announces the discovery of a peaceful country, to which he proposes to transport his wife and son, Mark balks and forces his parents to delay their journey, thus leading indirectly to their deaths when another war breaks out and they are killed in a bombing. What we observe in the first two thirds of Guilty is the maturation process of a wholly unremarkable person, someone who is petty and self-centered, but not exceptionally so, who is capable of kindness and friendship, but only to a limited degree, and who believes, in spite of all available evidence, that they hold the fate of the world in their hands, because to relinquish that belief and accept their helplessness would be more than they could bear.
After his graduation, Mark moves to the city, where Mr. Spector finds him a job and relatively luxurious living accommodations. It's at this point that Guilty steps just that bit further into surrealism, in a sudden tonal shift that jars, and grates at the reader's sensibilities. Finding a place to live in the city, we are told, is exceptionally difficult, and Mark is ostracized for his fortunate connections by jealous coworkers. Later, when he falls in love with and becomes engaged to a woman named Carla, it falls to him to secure them a home (Mr. Spector has forbidden Mark from sharing his illegally obtained apartment with anyone else), and his life is consumed by the Kafkaesque bureaucracy that governs housing assignments. Here, according to Sturm's introduction, Kavan is once again drawing from her real-life experiences of trying to find a place to live in wartime London, but her descriptions of Mark's corresponding travails are deliberately tinged with unreality:
As I grew accustomed to the scene, the details gradually emerged, and I saw a number of officials seated at large desks, like static islands, around which flowed sluggish streams of applicants, barely seeming to move. ... What first struck me was the uncomplaining patience of all these people, for whom no convenience whatsoever had been provided, not even a wooden bench such as is to be found in the most Spartan waiting-rooms. ... After I'd been in the room a few minutes, I found the light was starting to make my eyes ache. The naked tubes, fixed to the ceiling, diffused a stark white glare which lit up some faces with a ghastly pallor, distorting others by deep black shadows. This dazzle, no doubt, was the reason why all the officials wore eye-shades, extending in front of their faces like the peak of a jockey's cap, casting a black pointed shade, which gave them all a curious similarity to one another, almost as if they were masked. (p. 141)
Into this nightmarish realm an initially high-spirited Mark enters, determined to secure a home for himself and Carla, and thus their future. Over the coming weeks and months, he is worn down by this system, becoming paranoid and obsessed, stealing away to the housing office at any free moment in order to assuage his constant and irrational fear that, just at that minute, an opening has become available. In short order, Mark becomes discouraged and cynical, and when a mysterious official opens the office on Christmas day and offers him a placement, a by-now deranged Mark is so convinced that he is being toyed with that he refuses to even consider it. (Kavan never reveals whether the offer was genuine or whether Mark was indeed being further manipulated by the housing office; her depiction of the bureaucracy is by this point so surreal that both interpretations are believable). In the end, the only way for Mark to overcome his obsession is to lose everything—Carla, his fancy apartment, his job, and his friendship with Mr. Spector—and start anew somewhere else.
The sudden tonal shift has the effect of making Guilty seem like two books, artificially sewn together, and of muddying its intended effect. Is the novel's final third a betrayal of the naturalistic coming-of-age novel it starts out as, or were the descriptions of Mark's childhood and boyhood nothing more than extended scene-setting for the Kafkaesque satire that was Kavan's true goal? It's hard to escape the conclusion that Kavan planned—or should have planned—a final edit, which would smooth over the jarring shift in the novel's tone, and bring its two parts closer to becoming a coherent whole.
Coming away from Guilty and Ice, one has the impression of an author whose fiction should be read not for its fine details—for well-drawn characters, believable settings, or clever dialogue—but for its emotional effect. In this respect, Kavan is nothing less than a revelation. In spite of its flaws, Guilty is, at its best points, as irresistibly claustrophobic as Ice (perhaps more so, because of the veneer of normalcy which initially lulls the reader into a false sense of security). Kavan is a deeply disturbing author, in the best possible sense of the word, whose novels demonstrate the rare capacity to elicit emotion while bypassing reason and logic. As dreams do. - Abigail Nussbaum







Anna Kavan, I Am Lazarus, Peter Owen Publishers, 2013. [1945.]

The tortured life of Anna Kavan brought her some reward in terms of great pieces of art. Her drug addiction bore fruit in the Julia and the Bazooka collection of stories; while this companion volume recalls her experience of the asylum—powerful, haunting works which can be harrowing but are full of sympathy too.


Kavan’s view of the capital and some of its war victims in this momentous era are typically original and oblique: ‘Lazarus’ is a patient revived from catatonia who somehow remains institutionalized; the Blitz spirit is coolly stripped of cheeriness and never-say-die in ‘Glorious Boys and ‘Our City’; there is a Hithcockian horror story in ‘The Gannets’, while in ‘Who Has Desired The Sea’ and ‘The Blackout’ the ‘shell-shocked’ have ultimately only seen war exacerbate old, long-suppressed psychological wounds. Chilling but compassionate classics, the I Am Lazarus collection is an essential and honest document of the time – and of Anna Kavan.




The story’s opening paragraph introduces an English doctor who distrusts “anything he did not understand,” particularly “this insulin shock treatment there had been such a fuss about” (p.270).
Polish neurophysiologist and psychiatrist Manfred J. Sakel introduced insulin-shock therapy:
Sakel had used insulin to tranquilize morphine addicts undergoing withdrawal, and in 1927 one addict accidentally received an overdose of insulin and went into a coma. After the patient recovered from the overdose, Sakel noted an improvement in his mental state. Sakel hypothesized that inducing convulsions with insulin could have similar effects in schizophrenics. His initial studies found the treatment effective in 88 percent of his patients, and the method was applied widely for a brief period. Follow-up studies showed the long-term results to be less satisfactory, and insulin-shock treatment was replaced by other methods of treatment. [1]
Until the discovery of the tranquilizing drugs, variations of insulin-shock therapy (also called insulin-coma therapy) were commonly used in the treatment of schizophrenia and other psychotic conditions. With insulin-shock treatment, the patient is given increasingly large doses of insulin, which reduce the sugar content of the blood and bring on a state of coma. Usually the comatose condition is allowed to persist for about an hour, at which time it is terminated by administering warm salt solution via stomach tube or by intravenous injection of glucose. Insulin shock had its greatest effectiveness with schizophrenic patients whose illness had lasted less than two years. [2]
Two large studies carried out in the USA in 1939 and 1942 gave him fame and helped his technique to rapidly spread out around the world… . [However], Initial enthusiasm was followed by a decrease in the use of insulin coma therapy, after further controlled studies showed that real cure was not achieved and that improvements were many times temporary. [3]
The opening four paragraphs of Anna Kavan’s story introduce us to the unnamed English doctor who lives in a village near the wealthy Mrs. Bow. When the doctor plans a motor trip to Europe, Mrs. Bow asks him to stop in and see her son at the clinic where he’s being treated for dementia praecox, an outmoded term for what we now call schizophrenia. Readers are guided not to think highly of this doctor: “The English doctor was not a very good doctor. He was middle-aged and frustrated and undistinguished” (p. 270). When Mrs. Bow had told him of her plan a year earlier to send her son to the clinic for treatment, the doctor had opposed the idea. “It was a useless expense. It couldn’t possibly do any good” (p. 271).
Not wishing to offend the rich Mrs. Bow, the doctor stops by the European clinic:
He glanced at the beautifully kept gardens. The grounds were really magnificent, the watered lawns green in spite of the dry summer, every tree pruned to perfection, the borders brilliant with flowers. (p. 271)
The clinic superintendent, who “had exactly estimated the unimportance of his companion” (p. 272), describes Mr. Bow’s prognosis:
“We’re very proud of Mr. Bow,” he said. “He’s an outstanding example of the success of the treatment. He responded wonderfully well from the start and I consider him a quite remarkable cure. In a few months he should be well enough to go home.” (p. 272)
Apparently the mediocre doctor from England who had dismissed the possibility of a cure was wrong about the treatment given at this clinic with the perfectly manicured grounds.
The superintendent takes the doctor into a workroom where some patients, including Mr. Bow, are working with leather: “The different pairs of hands, large and small, rose and fell over the table… . The Englishman looked uneasily at the faces and at the hands which seemed to be rising and falling of their own volition in the banded sunshine above the table” (pp. 272–273). Mr. Bow, with his “flat, hazel eyes,” “sat stiffly correct in his place at the sunny table” (p. 273). This opening section of the story ends with the doctor’s reflection on what he has seen:
“I should never have believed it possible,” the Englishman said with emphasis and repressed indignation. “Never.”
He felt disapproving and indignant and uncomfortable without quite knowing why. Of course, the boy looks normal enough, he said to himself. He seems quiet and self-controlled. But there must be a catch in it somewhere. You can’t go against nature like that. It just isn’t possible. He thought uneasily of the young inexpressive face and the curious flat look of the eyes. (p. 274)
Then the focus of the story abruptly switches to Mr. Bow:
He spoke to no one and nobody spoke to him. He methodically went on sewing the pigskin belt with steady, regular movements of his soft hands… All around the table were different colored shapes whose mouths opened and closed and emitted sounds that meant nothing to him. He did not mind either the shapes or the sounds. They were part of the familiar atmosphere of the workroom, where he felt comfortable and at ease. (p. 274)
And suddenly the reader begins to see what the English doctor vaguely sensed but was unable to understand: that the outside viewer’s perception of Mr. Bow’s existence is vastly different from Mr. Bow’s own. On his way to lunch Mr. Bow walks “rather stiffly” through grasses that respond felinely to his touch: “like thin sensitive cats they arched themselves to receive the caress of his fingertips” (p. 275). Daisies growing in the field “had yellow eyes that squinted craftily through the grass” (p. 275). In the washroom
Several coats hung on the wall. Thomas Bow avoided the washbasins nearest the coats. The hanging shapes filled him with deep suspicion. He watched them out of the ends of his eyes to make sure they did not get up to anything while he was washing his hands. (pp. 276–277)
And when Mr. Bow enters the dining room
The young man looked round cautiously. The pretty dresses of the women gave him pleasure but he was not at ease. At any moment something might pounce on him, something for which he did not have the formula. He waited tensely, on enemy ground… . The waiters, like well-trained sheep dogs, skillfully maneuvered the patients toward their chairs. (p. 278)





Anna Kavan, Julia and the Bazooka, Peter Owen Publishers; Reprint ed., 2009.


Anna Kavan now stands alongside Virginia Woolf as one of Britain's great 20th-century modernists. In this posthumous collection of Kavan's short stories, some of the author's most compelling writing is revealed, inspired in great part by her personal experiences—especially her nearly lifelong addiction to heroin. An important literary work, these narratives highlight the shadowed world of the incurable drug addict and probe the psychological aspects of addiction


Onto these twelve brief stories, the English author, who died in 1968, die-stamps with increasing intensity her ""black hole"" vision of tormented consciousness -- the terror and despair of not-being in which the world outside is ""a vagueness, like a room if you look at it out of focus."" More recently Joyce Carol Oates has explored the sexual context of this female sense of ego-absence that can only he filled with a male presence -- which, before complete consummation, recedes and vanishes. Kavan's male saviors also fade -- into the sea, into grossness, into a Mercedes, into silence. Like early Oates, Kavan's tales are filled with roaring machines (her heroes are racing-car drivers), frigid vistas of ice and snow, and guilt in the wake of loss: ""he still enters my dreams. . .a loss. . .should have been prevented, for which I am myself to blame."" There are stories of exotic landscapes filled with blood and snakes and orchids, ""masked dummies"" from the outside world, and hospitals with the everpresent bazooka (syringe). Kavan's images have a drug-trip brilliance, and her prose, often curiously banal (""I live alone in my mind, and alone I'm being crushed to suffocation. . ."") still has the hypnotic effect of a busy abacus -- bright beads clicking back and forth over the steel certainties of desolation. - Kirkus Reviews

Maia Dolphin-Krute, Visceral: Essays on Illness Not as Metaphor, Punctum Books, 2017.


Read and Excerpt from Visceral Here!


Memoirs about being sick are popular and everywhere and only ever contribute to pop narratives of illness as a single event or heroic struggle or journey. Visceral: Essays on Illness as Metaphor is not that. Visceral, to the extent that it is a memoir, is a record not of illness but of the research project being sick became. While rooted firmly in critical disability and queer practices, the use of personal narratives opens these approaches up to new ways of writing the body—ultimately a body that is at once theoretical and unavoidably physical. A body where everything is visceral, so theory must be too.
From the gothic networks of healthcare bureaucracy and hospital philanthropy to the proliferation of wellness media, off-label usage of drugs, and running off to live a life with, these essays move fluidly through theoretical and physical anger, curiosity and surprise. Arguing for disability rights that attend to the theoretical as much as the physical, this is Illness Not As Metaphor, Being Sick and Time, and The Body in Actual Pain as one.
A sick body of text that is—and is not—in direct correspondence to an actual sick body, Visceral is an unrelenting examination of chronic illness that turns towards the theoretical only to find itself in the realms of the biological and autobiographical: because how much theory can a body take?






Maia Dolphin-Krute is a writer and artist based in Boston, having graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University in 2014. She is the author of Ghostbodies: Towards a New Theory of Invalidism (Intellect/Chicago, 2017) and the chapbook Aron Ralston: States of Injury (glo worm press, 2016). Her essays and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in American Chordata, Full-Stop, Gigantic Sequins and elsewhere, and her performances have been shown at venues including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She is also an Ideas Editor for The Deaf Poets Society, an online journal of deaf and disabled literature & art. Currently, Dolphin-Krute is engaged in a long-term project about the forms of freedom that become possible when continually modulated by physical experiences and material proximities; about how do you “live with.” More information about this and other projects can be found at Ghostbodies.

My Shadow Book by Maawaam, ed. by Jordan A. Rothacker, Spaceboy Books, 2017.
excerpt
www.jordanrothacker.com/


Percy Shelley once remarked, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
What if Shelley was right, but his understanding didn’t go far enough? What if there was an ancient, interdimensional, supernatural cabal that strives to direct human progress, that has worked tirelessly in the darkness to save our world in spite of our enlightened penchant for destruction? Novelist and literary scholar Jordan A. Rothacker shares his discovery of the notebooks of Maawaam, a Shadow Man and member of the secret society of Shadow Men and Women. What does Rothacker’s discovery mean for our world? Will Maawaam’s cryptic fragments, like the Rosetta Stone, provide a key to understanding this ancient and powerful tradition?
Science fiction or memoir; poetry or prose; art manifesto or political call to action; wisdom or nonsense? What is Maawaam’s Shadow Book but what lies between, what lies in the shadows. – from the Spaceboy Books website


“My Shadow Book contains multitudes. It’s a fascinating collage of quotations, diaries, drawings, aphorisms, confessions, short fictions, and political manifestos. Concealed within is a clever Mobius strip narrative and an invitation to a secret society comprised of history’s most subversive artists. It’s many potential books in one, waiting only for a reader to bring it to life.”  – Jeff Jackson


“Jordan Rothacker’s ebullient, entrancing, playful, linguistically sensuous My Shadow Book is a triumph of narrative and structural inventiveness. As the intrigues and mysteries unfold, Rothacker’s polyphonic storytelling becomes a journey of ever-increasing entrancement. Invoking the epic speculative works of Clarice Lispector, Milorad Pavic, Edmond Jabés, and Borges, My Shadow Book is a masterfully crafted kaleidoscopic reinvention of literary beauty: a fragmented, arcane, haunting, and deliciously luxurious complexity of shimmering light that illuminates the very edges of thought and language.” – Quintan Ana Wikswo
In the summer of 2011, novelist and scholar Jordan A. Rothacker discovered a box containing the journals of a being known as Maawaam. Thus begins My Shadow Book—part literary manifesto, part metafictional frame narrative. The novel itself is credited to Maawaam, while Rothacker gives himself the title of editor. This framing device, the found manuscript, is used throughout literature as a way of creating verisimilitude in the reading experience. By claiming to have found and compiled Maawaam’s papers, Rothacker gives the novel legitimacy as a real, authentic document, while also absolving himself of any blame for the contents: he simply discovered these writings, and so is not responsible for their creation.
Despite Rothacker’s apparent effort to distance himself from the fiction, in Maawaam we have the character of a struggling writer. He calls himself a Shadow Man, a “double agent” writing in the darkness while presenting himself as a functioning member of society in the light. Is “Shadow Man” another way of saying “artist,” or is Maawaam otherworldly? Perhaps both. In his journals, Maawaam quotes William S. Burroughs, Anna Kavan, and Guy Debord; he writes about his love life and his deepest anxieties; and he includes excerpts of stories, poems, and novels he’s trying to write. He is deeply human. And yet all of this takes place in the shadows, where he convenes with other Shadow Men and Women. Maawaam refers to regular people as “the people of the sun.” He fragments his journals with a series of black stars, both to indicate section breaks and to remind readers that he lives by the light of a different, darker sun.
As in his previous novel And Wind Will Wash Away, Rothacker here displays his wisdom, subversive influences, and literary prowess. He crafts a character better read than most of us, but also greatly troubled by his own psyche. Maawaam’s ruminations read like a love letter to suffering artists everywhere:
There are those nights when you get up to go to the bathroom—she remains there asleep—and you catch your reflection and you can see he is dying and you feel like you’re dying and you can feel it, the dying slowly and you wonder, is this how everyone feels all the time?
That question—is this how everyone feels all the time?—is fundamental to why we read. Literature gives us the opportunity to glimpse other lives and understand how other people think and feel, and the more we read, the more we realize that our feelings can be found reproduced in countless others.
Maawaam is obsessed with the phrase “give up the ghost,” which he interprets as a Shadow Man giving everything to the people of the sun. This sounds like both an unburdening of the soul and also a form of death. He says: “I have tried in my own way to be free… I have tried in my own way to give up the ghost. So many ghosts to give up before the final ghost.” These ghosts are the innumerable lives he’s created in the shadows, through fiction and poetry. For Maawaam to give up the ghost he must share his work with the world—a monumental task requiring him to finish the stories, poems, and novels he’s begun, or show them to us in their rough, unfinished state.
In The Secret Name, one of the novels Maawaam is writing, the protagonist (named Landry Bread) is sent on a journey to discover his “secret name.” Landry is a hopeless guy living in Atlanta, and wants nothing more than to believe there’s something more to him, some secret other self waiting to be discovered. Instead, what Bread finds is a novel titled Amerika the Beautifuk by a mysterious and enigmatic author named Maawaam (a book within a book within a book). Here we have the character, Maawaam, discovering his own secret name inside the text he’s writing:
in finding that name, and writing that character, I was writing a role for myself. I could write the novel, The Secret Name, and I could stage it like I found it, a manuscript in a box somewhere, and I am just the editor of it, and the actual author is this MAAWAAM. He is the author of the inner and outer text. The story of Landry Bread just floats there in the middle.
The writer is essentially and irremediably tied to his work. Attempts to detach from the writing—through pseudonyms, frame narratives, and invented worlds—invariably lead the writer back to himself and his own anxieties and obsessions. But there is also pleasure in inhabiting this invented world. Maawaam’s mind is labyrinthine, and while it may contain some fictionalized elements of its creator, it is unique and compelling, and worthy of being explored in the closeness My Shadow Book achieves.Rothacker’s novel, disguised as a journal containing a novel (and so on), is at times dizzying. The form is challenging in its unyielding metafictional twists. Identities are nested one within the other. What makes the novel so impressive is how, through all of these experiments in storytelling, Maawaam’s vulnerability and desire are thoughtfully articulated and reiterated in various aphorisms, quotations, and poems, in a feedback loop of loneliness and longing.
This is a strange and ambitious novel. To invent a writer whose work is as bizarre as Maawaam’s and then to lead the reader into those works, is no easy task. Rothacker writes from the heart, but disguises that heart in shadows. Or maybe he truly has discovered a heart in a box of papers in a shadowy closet, and he is illuminating it for us here. Either way, My Shadow Book is sharp and singular and full of mystery. - William Morris




Jordan A. Rothacker,And Wind Will Wash Away, Deeds Publishing, 2016.


WHAT IS BELIEF? What is it to believe in something, anything? And how far are you willing to go for that belief? Atlanta Police Detective Jonathan Wind believes in truth, but otherwise he doesn t normally have time for questions like these; he has crimes to solve and killers to catch. But this case is different. This case will challenge everything he s ever thought or known. It s also personal. It s 2003 in Atlanta, and the jewel of the Southeastern United States is sprawling far and wide with new industry and burgeoning markets. The city is at once a remnant of the Old South and an international cosmopolis. However, in And Wind Will Wash Away Atlanta isn t just a setting, she is practically a character herself, a complicated character with many layers, layers that most people traverse every day but barely notice. Jordan A. Rothacker s thrilling first novel follows Detective Wind as he peels back the layers of his beloved city, pursuing the truth behind the strange death of his mistress, Flora Ross. This pursuit leads him ever deeper into a world of sex workers, goddess worshippers, Aztec revival cults, blood sacrifices, and spontaneous human combustion. Rothacker s book takes readers into the religious underbelly of Atlanta, yet is essentially a story of people and the ways in which they struggle to relate to one another and to the world in which they live. Part mystery, part police procedural, part theological treatise, and part love story, And Wind Will Wash Away is a debut novel like no other.


An Atlanta detective, hoping to explain his mistress’s fiery death, dives into a world rife with strange religious beliefs in Rothacker’s (The Pit, and No Other Stories, 2015, etc.) unconventional thriller. Police Detective Sgt. Jonathan Wind keeps his relationship with prostitute Flora Ross a secret from everyone, including his girlfriend, Monica. So he says nothing when he recognizes a crime scene: it’s Flora’s apartment, including what appear to be her charred remains. The fire seems to have been concentrated on her body, damaging little else, so Wind’s partner, Detective Sonny Ledbetter, suggests spontaneous combustion as the cause. The detectives first question psychic Tia Maite, whom Flora saw weekly, but once it’s clear that the investigation’s going nowhere, Sonny closes the case by marking the death as accidental. Wind, however, was in love with Flora and is determined to learn more about her “spiritual pursuits”—a part of her life she kept private. He cashes in his vacation days and initiates an unofficial inquiry. After he meets Flora’s friends and interacts with a group of Goddess worshippers, he ultimately examines his own views on various religions, identifying himself as an agnostic. He also becomes sure that a Goethe-quoting albino dwarf had something to do with Flora’s demise, which is seemingly confirmed when two other men accost Wind while citing Goethe passages. Answers may finally lie within a bizarre ritual—but not necessarily the answers Wind wants. Although a traditional detective story provides the foundation of this novel’s plot, the author zeroes in on his protagonist’s inner conflict. There’s a great deal of philosophizing, including a nearly 20-page dialogue on such subjects as philosopher Immanuel Kant and theism’s limitations. Wind, though, has many nuances, and his collection of myriad Pez dispensers (all of historical figures) sometimes sparks discourse or, in one case, flashbacks. Rothacker’s prose meticulously details the action and environment with typically exquisite results: “a solid one-story brick house...corresponded to a darker, ink-rendered version beneath the pen of Jonathan Wind.” Metaphors of fire and wind are in abundance in this story, which is more concerned with understanding than resolution. Readers may be disappointed by the ending, though, which eschews a nice, clean wrap-up and fully embraces lingering doubt. A penetrating, provocative tale of a detective who psychoanalyzes as often as he investigates. - Kirkus Reviews


Rothacker’s debut novel is a rambling narrative that’s missing a plot and is instead overstuffed with dense, arcane knowledge . Atlanta Det. Sgt. Jonathan Wind lands a new case that triggers an obsessive and bewildering quest for truth. Upon investigating charred remains, Wind discovers the victim to be his mistress, Flora Ross. The cause of death: spontaneous human combustion. Disagreeing with the final verdict of “accidental death,” Wind decides to search on his own, to make sense of Flora’s death and learn who or what was really the cause. Digging deep into Atlanta’s religions, spiritualities, histories, and cultures, Wind confronts questions without answers, testing his core beliefs. Wind’s mental meanderings throw the plot out of sync, forcing readers to decipher the connections between the mystery and the tangential moments of insight into character . Wind seems hollow despite copious descriptions, flashbacks, and inner monologues; his Pez collection comes across as Rothacker’s unsuccessful attempt to give him some quirky humanity. His perspective on his own relationships remain shallow, isolating him from the other characters and, unfortunately, the reader. - Publishers Weekly


Reviews of the book:
Cleaver Magazine
As It Ought to Be
Cultured Vultures
Interviews about the book:
Cease, Cows
Great Writers Steal
The How The Why




Jordan A. Rothacker,The Pit, and No Other Stories, Black Hill Press, 2015.

excerpt (pdf)

As a micro-epic The Pit has a little of everything: small town American gothic, detective fiction, spy thriller, Hollywood drama, folklore, science fiction, historical fiction, surrealism, horror gore, punk romance, and satire of American capitalism and consumerism. The Pit, and No Other Stories, might be a familiar reading experience to that of viewing the ABC television program, Lost. Many characters, different story lines, obvious points of connection, some less obvious, and many fun, stage-setting red herrings. The Pit has deep important themes about the failings of the American dream, exploitation, and objectification of humans, but it also expresses a deep veneration for storytelling, narrative, and the triumph of the human spirit through art.


Rothacker opens his novella with a vivid image of a small community in which all inhabitants eventually are hurled into, well, a pit. Just as the title suggests, the Pit is our central location. In a town, aptly named Pittsville, our narrator who remains as mysterious as the Pit itself has ventured down below in search of a watch promised to him by his grandfather upon his deathbed. The first chapter pulls the reader into a world where the inevitable is a focal point, and hints at it as something to strive towards. This is not a world of traditional burials and ash scattering; once someone has expired they are given to the Pit in a funereal fashion. After the narrator witnesses his grandfather “going over” with this promised watch still secured to his cold wrist, he sneaks out to see just how far he can reach to get back what was meant for him. As soon as he falls in, Rothacker changes the channel.
We land in 1959 New York City, inside the office of a private investigator in conversation with a potential client who has no more information on his target than a nickname, The Speckled Hen. Not only have the time and place transformed, the way of talking and character’s tones are completely new. There is a hardboiled feeling added to the plot–yet a dark curiosity felt with our first character remains within this American Noir portion of the novella. This curiosity, along with the Pit, continues to rise, fall, and rebuild itself throughout the remainder of the novella.
From the P.I.’s office, we are taken on a wild ride through rainy Shanghai in 1945, fast forward to a Hollywood in 1982, drop down to Chicago in 1956, eventually falling further back in time to 1812 West Africa. There is a natural attempt to piece together the characters encountered in these various time periods and locations but Rothacker turns the corner so rapidly that the threads seem to unravel quicker than they’re sewn. This isn’t a jab at Rothacker as his chapters are packed with enough life to quickly settle you into your new environment. He’s done the research and taken the time to carefully craft the people we experience within a limited space. Many of the voices we find in The Pit are as varied as the stories we find them in. There are moments of West African Islamic Law, Mao’s takeover, and UFO sightings. Some characters return while others make a single yet impactful appearance such as an American Indian grandmother from 180 BC who begins a journey from which she may not return. However, everyone we encounter eventually meets a very similar fate that is difficult to ignore.
The Pit is an existential take on the after-life, the talk of where we go afterwards except modeled by an almost tangible place. The Pit, And No Other Stories is exactly what is presents itself as, it may seem at first as if the first six chapters serve as seven different stories all beginning with our unnamed character who falls into the Pit accidently, but slowly they begin to intertwine and unwind until we realize that there is indeed, only one story here. It is a novella full of histories and ideas. It is a story about the trials and obstacles that fall into our path as we desperately try to unearth the genius within something we deeply care for.
The Pit is a journey in it self, a ride with flashes of life and an ending in a place, in a world, you didn’t anticipate but because of Rothacker’s craftsmanship, you find yourself wholeheartedly accepting.
An Interview With Jordan Rothacker:
M: The Pit, And No Other Stories is just that, what a brilliant title, it takes place within many time periods and places, with a variety of voices. When did you stumble upon this idea? Did you fear for your reader? (Meaning, because there were so many sub plots though they all tied into a bigger portrait…)
J: Thank you. I worry that the title is cumbersome, especially when people ask, “So you wrote a novel, what’s it called?” and I tell them and then they ask, “Is it a story collection?” and I say, “No, it’s a novel. It’s The Pit, and No Other Stories.” I occasionally feared for my reader, but ultimately I trust my reader. Due to television shows like Lost or really so much in film and television and literature, people handle far more non-linear narrative than they realize. And of course it’s linear when it comes down to it. You start at the beginning of the book or film and you read and watch to the end, a straight line. William S. Burroughs used to talk about, in the 50’s and 60’s, how literature was behind visual mediums, but ultimately it is the way humans naturally tell stories, we jump all over the place, we digress, we give flashbacks and even flash forwards as we hint to the punch line of the story before we get there. In some ways I see The Pit as a more accessible or dumbed-down version of what Burroughs has done in so many novels in regards to form or what Italo Calvino had a good time playing with.
M: I’ve studied many religions myself though not to your degree or level. What influence would you say your M.A. in Religion had on this novel? What about the ideas of death within the religions you’ve studied?
J: The first novel I wrote, about ten years ago, is very much a religious novel. I actually took on the M.A. in Religion as research for the book (which is set in Atlanta and the reason why I did the MA in Georgia) and my M.A. thesis was comprised of two chapters from the book followed by an exegesis and annotations. I specialized in religion and literature in my coursework. It’s a discipline mostly coming out of Chicago and it is often said to begin with a text like The Heart of Darkness. Horror and horror in the face of the Modern is explored in this study. I also got into post-colonial studies and now combine that with romanticism in my PhD work and dissertation. Both Romanticism and Post-Colonialism are a reaction to the Enlightenment in their own ways. They seek to return a voice—and power—to those marginalized by the Enlightenment Project, so that includes the feminine, the indigenous, the non-white, the pagan, and often merely the religious, for religions are irrational, like the arts. All the “Others” of the often male, rational, white, Euro-American “Self.” While writing The Pit these thoughts certainly got in there. I thought about Burroughs a lot as I wrote this book and I often think of him in a religious context, as a mythmaker like Borges, Faulkner, Danilo Kis, and Amos Tutuola, like Hesiod, or Snorri Sturluson who wrote the Eddas. The Pit for me is a roundup of how I see different American myths. As far as a religious connection with death, I mean, it’s right there in the first chapter, The Pit is a funereal site. This weird small town gothic setting has a secret from the outside world that involves how it handles death. There is a lot of death and religion in the book, come to think of it. I think you’re on to something…
M: Reading through the novel, I couldn’t help but feel similarities within other greats that I’ve read, particularly Slaughter House Five by Vonnegut. Was this an inspiration for you? What other inspirations did you have writing this?
J: I hadn’t thought of that Vonnegut book, but without giving anything away for someone who hasn’t read The Pit yet, I can kind of see it in the “outside of time” stuff. I do like that book though; I re-read it a few years ago on the plane over on a visit to Dresden. It certainly enhanced my Dresden trip. As for other inspirations, I got to meet Margret Atwood at a reading a few years ago and I was so giddy, she’s so great. One of her books that had a great effect on me I read back when I was like 19. It was a slim collection called, Murder in the Dark. It was the perfect book for that age, too. It showed me how ok it was to break down form in a really interesting way and how much can be done with so little space. The Pit was about me returning to that youthful excitement of playing with form. For some reason in my twenties I couldn’t feel legit without writing a long naturalistic novel. That novel has yet to be published, but direct inspirations for The Pit would be Burroughs’ Cities of the Red Night and Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night A Traveler.
Romanticism and Post-Colonialism are a reaction to the Enlightenment in their own ways. They seek to return a voice—and power—to those marginalized by the Enlightenment Project, so that includes the feminine, the indigenous, the non-white, the pagan, and often merely the religious, for religions are irrational, like the arts. All the “Others” of the often male, rational, white, Euro-American “Self.” While writing The Pit these thoughts certainly got in there.
M: What about some subconscious inspirations, who are your favorite writers?
J: That’s always a tough question, but I guess it’s a bit easier than asking what my favorite book is. For that question I’d give you a list of books, most likely categorized. Of living writers I have a deep love and appreciation for William T. Vollmann. His brilliance, breadth, and proficiency is really seen in an artist, as well as the heart and social conscience he brings to his work. Reading him makes me a better writer, thinker, and person. Some times I say he is our Tolstoy and Dostoevsky wrapped up in one.  He is one of the great living American writers and for skill and importance I put him up with Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, Cormac McCarthy, and Thomas Pynchon of our country today. As far as other favorites go, Maggie Nelson is brilliant and the way her mind is able to harness great thoughts and deliver them with such style gets me really excited. I really love Steve Erickson and look forward to a new book from him next year and Cesar Aira blows me away. Writers of the past who get me super excited—just the first few that spring to mind—are William S. Burroughs, Anna Akhmatova, Hesiod, Ovid,  Ousmane Sembene, Frantz Fanon.
M: This novel really ignites existential thought, not only through the construction but the ideas presented, ideas many people avoid. I found myself, while reading the novel, constantly thinking and venturing into deeper places. Was this the intention you wanted for your reader? Or did you envision the reader at all?
J: I love that you read it as existential. I mean I finished it after really loving what a perfect creation the first season of True Detective was. That show brought me back to reading Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, E.M. Cioran, as well as the Ligotti and Chapman that inspired it; and Vollmann had just published his gothic masterpiece, Last Stories and Other Stories. Delving into that infectious darkness, letting the pessimism wash all over you can be an engaging journey. I have to live in the world and get up every day and experience the joy and beauty of life and the people I love, but I never stop thinking about how humans are the worst species, that ultimately we are doomed. People love going to these places, the fantasy of darkness, horror movies, and literature. The arts let us tour these dark places. That’s why I think of this as an entertainment or a jive book. I’m glad it made you think and I hope it makes others think and value life in regards to death, but there are a lot of people in this world, this country and abroad, who don’t have the luxury of dabbling in darkness because they live some pretty awful situations. There’s one book that I read last year, which still haunts me deeply entitled The Corpse Exhibition, by Hassan Blasim. He is an Iraqi who now lives in Finland. The book is a collection of stories all set in contemporary war-torn Iraq. They are masterful and horrific, sometimes even surreal, and very hard to characterize. I’ve called them “war-zone gothic” for lack of a better term. Though the stories are macabre and might feel like horror writing, the thing that hits you the hardest is to know that they are based in an awful, awful reality that is part of daily life for so many people.
M: Where does death come into all of this? Does it? You seem to bring a metaphorical sense of death and sit it next to concrete examples.
J: The pit of the title is a funereal site for many who encounter it in the book. For others it involves new life in a weird way—but I’ll give no spoilers. There is a real cyclicality about life and death that flows through this book. It’s hard for me to imagine this giant deep Pit that is described in the first chapter without thinking of Ouroboros. That ancient Greek symbol loved by alchemists. It is the “tail-eater” and like many great serpents of myth—the Midgard serpent comes to mind—it is often associated with beginnings and ends. So, it is all about death but also new life, kind of how the Death card in the tarot just represents change. In some ways, and I don’t want to give too much away, but it seems like, in the book, that inside the Pit is a sort of liminal space, or a bardo, as mentioned in some Buddhist teachings. A between life and death, a place of becoming and potency, the place where the shaman or the artist goes in their practice. Hemingway was asked once what he thought about death, and he replied that it was “just another whore.” Maybe in The Pit it’s “just another trope” or “just another metaphor.”
M: You bring life to characters from many different walks of life (Black Muslims, American Indians, Chinese, even a man who sees a UFO), what sort of research was involved with this?
J: That’s the fun of a book like this and the restrictions I had upon myself: each section and plot line involved its own problem solving. Some sections required research by studying maps, digging through histories and chronologies, and some sections were just pure imagination pouring forth. I’ve taught an African Diaspora Literature class at UGA I think 20 different times over six years and yet still I went in to telling my own original slave narrative from a cautiously researched place. The device of that narrative voice in those sections worked out pretty well.
M: Why did you choose the particular backgrounds and stories you chose?
J: The whole book began for me with that first story and writing it to try my hand at this American trope of the small town gothic, a Shirley Jackson or even Mark Twain type thing. And then it became for me all about exploring all the different American tropes I like, the detective noir, the sc-fi, the southern slave narrative, a nautical/pirate story, Native American folklore, a desert roadtrip, aliens sightings over a cornfield, the tragic Hollywood fall of an actor, and even corporate business. Some are, of course, more serious than others and I spent the most labor and worry over the Native American and the African American slave portions.
M: I took note of some sentences that stood out to me, would you mind elaborating or explaining your thought behind two of them for fun?
J: Sure!
M: “With his father gone, Quentin stopped even pretending to hide how free Amadou really was, or how integral he was to the business… The African-American experience is the most important lens by which to understand America itself.” I was really intrigued by this.
J: In Steve Erickson’s last novel, These Dreams of You, a great book about race in America—so good that I even taught it despite the fact that he is white—he mentions that the American Dream belongs most to the African-American because it was betrayed for them (their ancestors) en route and yet they have stayed for generations and made America home despite the betrayal.
M: “I watched the black bile sparkle and pour from my mouth like stars from a pitcher in the sky… But to her my front was an appetizer. And she was the most frightening and real woman I’d ever met.” The imagery in of a pitcher filled with stars is very poetic.
J: That image just came to me; I think I was picturing something astrological, like a medieval drawing of Aquarius maybe. I guess I also pictured how activated charcoal would look if one were to vomit it. I’ve never tried ayahuasca actually. - Melissa Ximena Golebiowski  asitoughttobe.com/2015/10/05/jordan-a-rothackers-the-pit-and-no-other-stories/


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Jordan A. Rothacker is a poet, novelist, and essayist living in Athens, Georgia where he earned a Masters in Religion and a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia. Rothacker majored in Philosophy at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York and his life has been split between Georgia and New York (where he was born); he dreams of going west. His journalism has appeared in periodicals as diverse as Vegetarian Times and International Wristwatch, while his fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays can be found in such illustrious venues as Red River Review, Dark Matter, Dead Flowers, Stone Highway Review, May Day, As It Ought to Be, The Exquisite Corpse, The Believer, Bomb Magazine, and Guernica. For book length work check out Rothacker's The Pit, and No Other Stories (Black Hill Press, 2015), and novella (or "micro-epic" as he calls it) and his first full-length novel, And Wind Will Wash Away (Deeds Publishing, 2016). His fiction can also be found in The Cost of Paper: II (2015), The Cost of Paper: III (2016), and The Cost of Paper: IV (2017), anthologies from Black Hill Press edited by William M. Brandon III. He loves sandwiches (a category in which he classifies pizza and tacos) and debating taxonomy almost as much as he loves his wife, his son, his dogs, and his cat, Whiskey.

Douglas Luman, The F Text, Inside the Castle, 2017.


“Mapping the Silk Roads within us, Douglas Luman’s lapidary erasure of Marco Polo’s travels in their various literary iterations—from Rustichello da Pisa’s Medieval account to Italo Calvino’s postmodern rendition—is aflutter with “different flags / of an embroidered / glittering fringe.” Luman’s work deepens our understanding of history, interiority, and poetic making (as a form of unmaking) itself. “I have never seen and will never see / a fragment,” this voice testifies, amid the ruins. Wondrously, we emerge from Luman’s archaeology of civilizational disorders with a new sense of the imaginative constellations overhead: “The sky is filled with stars. There is / the blueprint.”” - Srikanth Reddy

“Many of us know Marco Polo’s name and place in history, but The F Text complicates, reinvents, and reconstitutes what we know—of the man himself and of the myth of human progress and discovery that surrounds him—by breaking the received narrative open, and leaving stuttered lines and ample spaces in its place. As “the outskirts of The question / begin to gnaw at / the answers,” the fragmented words, lines, images, and the strange new body they collectively build become the genuine discovery here. The F Text is a gorgeous, spare volume that shows how narrative, like “a Citie / it selfe / may be sundred, and taken downe like a Tent,” and how what rises in its place becomes a monument not to one man or to one version of human history, but to the shifting, mysterious nature of existence itself.”- Laura Sims

Żanna Słoniowska, The House with the Stained Glass Window,
Trans. by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. London, MacLehose Press, 2017.


In 1989, Marianna, the beautiful star soprano at the Lviv opera, is shot dead in the street as she leads the Ukrainian citizens in their protest against Soviet power. Only eleven years old at the time, her daughter tells the story of their family before and after that critical moment - including, ten years later, her own passionate affair with an older, married man. Just like their home city of Lviv, which stands at the crossroads of nations and cultures, the women in this family have had turbulent lives, scarred by war and political turmoil, but also by their own inability to show each other their feelings. Lyrically told, this is the story of a young girl's emotional, sexual, artistic and political awakening as she matures under the influence of her relatives, her mother's former lover, her city and its fortunes.


"The House with the Stained-GlassWindow is remarkable, a gripping, Lvivian evocation of a city and a family across a long and painful century, at once personal and political, a novel of life and survival across the ages" - PHILIPPE SANDS


"This story could only have happened in Ukraine. And then again it could have happened anywhere, because the blood on the blue-and-yellow flag is just the beginning of an intimate tale about four generations of women" - ZOFIA FABJANOWSKA-MICYK


"A moving, incisive saga about women entangled by historical events" - ANNA SZULC


"Sloniowska is a fascinating story-teller who also gives insight into the reality of life in Ukraine. This is an astonishing literary discovery" - JUSTYNA SOBOLEWSKA


"A city of women's mysteries, and History, which the author constantly re-interprets. Zanna Sloniowska surprises and seduces"  -JAROSLAW CZECHOWICZ


"This novel was written as a challenge to crushing, cruel history; it arose from a desire to give a voice to the individual experiences of women. But at a certain point it turns in a direction contrary to its original ambitions, and the counter-history disappears in the fog of exploding smoke grenades" - DARIUSZ NOWACKI



Toward the middle of The House with the Stained Glass Window, the Ukrainian-Polish writer Żanna Słoniowska’s debut novel, the unnamed narrator tells us that her great-grandmother occasionally falls into fits of hysterical sobbing, which her grandmother explains as having to do with “the past.” “I imagined ‘the past’ as an uncontrolled intermittent blubbering,” the narrator says. This definition is not a far cry from the idea of the past portrayed in The House with the Stained Glass Window: not blubbering, but certainly not controlled by human forces, intermittently entering the present day until it infiltrates it, saturates it, and finally becomes indistinguishable from it.
The novel centers around four generations of women who live under the same roof in Lviv, in a house noted for its enormous stained glass window. The window sets the present-day plot in motion: it is because of the window that the novel’s narrator, who we only know as Marianna’s daughter, meets Mykola, her mother’s former lover, and begins an affair with him herself. A relationship like that would provide enough internal and external conflict to fill a novel to its brim, but Słoniowska does not dedicate much page space to it. Instead, if anything, the affair serves as a springboard to the past, to exploring the irresistible pull of it.

Through the stories Mykola tells Marianna’s daughter and the memories they stir up in her, we learn that Marianna was an opera singer and Ukrainian nationalist who was shot and killed when her daughter was eleven. Marianna’s commitment to singing is slowly overshadowed by her commitment to the fight for an independent Ukraine—a turn of events that surprises her family, who place a high value on art, and who are of Polish, not Ukrainian, descent. Marianna’s daughter craves to know what Mykola can tell her, while at the same time recoils from the painful reminder of her mother’s absence. Memories beget more memories: Marianna’s daughter recalls her childhood in Soviet-controlled Ukraine as well as the stories her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother would tell her about themselves, each other, and their cities, until we cannot avoid noticing how uncannily the patterns in the lives of the four women repeat themselves.
Readers witness these personal and public histories by following the logic of the narrator’s memory, leapfrogging between analogous events and images. A chapter ends with characters walking home after watching a statue of Lenin come down and the next chapter opens with characters crossing a street. Within a few lines, however, we realize we are following different characters now, years later, on their way to a more domestic scene. Or a chapter ends with someone walking through the snow, and the next begins with our narrator telling us the snow has melted by now; soon it turns out we have not skipped to spring, but gone back in time, to different characters, to a different situation.
It is no surprise that the past draws Marianna’s daughter so intensely; she is a product of Lviv, and the city has the past embedded in its streets and buildings as much as Marianna’s daughter has it embedded in herself. As Mykola is a professor of art and Marianna’s daughter is an art student at the university, they spend their brief moments together walking through the city and talking about its history and architecture. The prose shines brightest when Słoniowksa illuminates the connection between the city and its people, as when Marianna’s daughter shows us how she and Mykola are products of the city: “…we had hatched out of its streets and were inscribed into them: he was the spiked halo of the Pensive Christ on top of the Boim Chapel, I was the head of a lion carved on its base, he was the cracked steps leading into the Dominican church, I was the polished, pine-cone shaped knob on the door of a Renaissance house.” Their connection to Lviv is inevitable, a fixed and fundamental embodiment.
Present-day politics loom as large as the politics of the past for the characters, a fact that comes across most poignantly when Słoniowska signals them in unassuming moments, often set against a domestic background. After Marianna’s daughter is told to make a wish, for example, she considers the fate of her country alongside her closer-to-home concerns: “Just one wish—it would have to be something big. For Aba to be well again? To be lucky in love? For the fall of the Soviet Union?” The bonds of family, the pull of love, Ukrainian independence: having grown up under the influence of these forces, Marianna’s daughter naturally offers them equal consideration.
A novel like this one, in which place so concretely shapes character and plot, asks a translator to find a way to convey a hidden layer of unspoken information. The House with the Stained Glass Window assumes a Polish reader’s knowledge of the geographic region; you can get through the book without it, but the action might feel muddled and only half-explained, characters’ motives or pasts might make less sense. Anticipating this problem, translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones offers a brief overview of Lviv and Ukraine’s history in a translator’s note to give readers a sense of how often borders were won, lost, and redrawn.
A Polish reader would also know that Lviv comes up quite a bit in Polish literature, largely because the city was under the control of the Kingdom of Poland for centuries, when it was called Lwów. After over a century of being known as Lemberg under Austro-Hungarian rule, it reverted to Polish-controlled Lwów again between the end of World War I and the end of World War II, at which point it became a part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It is unsurprising, then, that Lviv often symbolizes a lost homeland in Polish letters. One of Poland’s best-known contemporary poets, Adam Zagajewski, was one of Lviv’s many Poles who were forcibly relocated west when the borders were redrawn after World War II; his poem “Going to Lvov” is a beautiful example of the longing and nostalgia the city can evoke.
However affecting and sincere this emotion may be, a different side to the story—not an opposing one, necessarily, but a vision of the events refracted from a different angle, with a different focus—is always a welcome development in a country’s literature. The House with the Stained Glass Window is unique in that it is a book about Ukrainians fighting for their independence written in Polish, as opposed to a book about Ukrainians fighting for independence written in Ukrainian, or a book about Poles yearning for lost land written in Polish. This is a book about a family that is both Polish and Ukrainian, that lives in a city that is at once Ukrainian, Polish, and Soviet, and about what that looks like and means. Creating links such as these between nations that have a long history of contested borders is no insignificant literary feat.
The translation also reflects the history of shifting powers in Lviv through the very name of the city itself. In the original Polish of the novel, Słoniowska exclusively calls Lviv by its Polish name, Lwów, which is how the city is typically still referred to in Polish speech and literature. Few Polish readers would think twice about it, though the repeated refrain does perhaps create a subconscious feeling of continuity in a reader’s mind—a sense of stability amidst the changes. In her translation, Lloyd-Jones translates the city’s name as its various incarnations of Lwów, Lvov, and Lviv depending on whether Poland, the Soviet Union, or Ukraine is the ruling power. On the one hand, seeing the city called by its different names reads as naturally to an English speaker as seeing the city consistently called Lwów would to a Polish speaker. But it also serves a couple additional purposes: first, it helpfully reminds the reader of Lviv’s tumultuous history, and second, it marks the different points in time that the book recreates, which is especially helpful in light of the book’s nonlinear sense of time.
Though the nonlinearity may occasionally confuse a reader, the book’s project isn’t to make certain a reader remembers exactly which event happened when, but rather to bring out patterns, to show history repeating itself. A year matters less when an event could have happened, and did, in any number of them. The House with the Stained Glass Window offers a strikingly crafted window into how our lives are a mosaic of the things that happened before us, which is not to say our lives or the world stand still. Lviv is living proof; Lviv, which isn’t only Lviv, but palimpsests of Lwów and Lvov. - Victoria Miluch


Set across a difficult century, The House with the Stained-Glass Window depicts the changing face of Lviv (also known by the names Lwów, Lvov, Lemberg and others) as it is claimed by different political powers—Austria-Hungary, Poland, the Soviet Union, Ukraine. The novel closes in 2014 with the Euromaidan Protests.
Entangled in these currents are four women—Marianna the opera singer, Marianna’s daughter (a painter), Marianna’s mother and Marianna’s grandmother. They hardly come across as being terrifically brave or pure. They are messy, often struggling with relationships and attachments that go nowhere; they frequently fail to communicate with and convince each other of their passions and deepest desires. But running through the tumult—domestic and social—is the artistic impulse, passing from one generation to another. It is an activity that injects some order into the chaos. And the shining and glittering stained-glass window that hangs in the house of the women of this story becomes something of a redeeming force, pointing out to a sort of transcendence, a state of being that is greater and higher than the surrounding situation.
I would highly recommend this novel to those interested in Central and Eastern Europe—for it is thorough (and over that, luminously poetic) in its examination of the history and culture of this region.
—-
Read a few excerpts:
...My great-granma was an unsuccessful opera singer, my granma was an unsuccessful painter, my mother was a successful opera singer, I would be a successful painter, my daughter would be an unsuccessful opera singer or a successful painter, her daughter, depending what my daughter chose, would be either a successful opera singer or a successful painter, lack of success times lack of success equals success, like in mathematics. We are like Russian dolls, one in the belly of another, it’s not entirely clear who is inside whom, all that’s apparent is who is alive, and who is not, we are like Russian dolls transpierced by a single shot, but I used to think Great-Granma wasn’t in this chain. She was an unsuccessful opera singer, so my grandmother is an unsuccessful painter, but my mother, although she was a prima donna, is now dead.


...The art school was located in a large residential building; at the time nobody knew that a few years later it would fall into ruin, and everything would be evacuated from it, including the shabby cinema on the ground floor, which would mean it could be quite officially demolished. Soon it would be joined by the Soviet Union, and they’d fall apart in parallel, in a race – nothing could save them from a hideous death right at the heart of the city, though the building would outlive the empire. Just before its demise, the young people would cover it in colourful slogans; later on, the city would miss it, like somebody missing a front tooth, except that no-one would know if the gap it had left was a sad, senile one, or a temporary one between milk and permanent teeth.


...The topography of our flat was fixed for good: just as the seas, mountains and deserts never change their position on the map, so the position of the furniture, fittings and domestic appliances was immovable in our house. This permanence of objects was probably a response to the instability of human fate.  - onartandaesthetics.com/2017/10/26/the-house-with-the-stained-glass-window-by-zanna-sloniowska-on-the-changing-city-of-lviv-a-family-and-art/


This is another from Maclehose new collection of press editions of books from around the world. This book is by one of the rising stars of  Polish fiction. Żanna Słoniowska she won the Conrad prize a prize for a debut novel and also the Znak prize which had over a thousand books in contention for it. She was born  In Lviv in Ukraine but now lives in Krakow. She works as a Journalist and Translator.
On the day of her death, her voice rang out, drowning many others, rancous sounds. Yet death, her death, was not a sound, but a colour. They brought her body home wtrapped in a large, blue and yellow flag – the slag of a country that did not yet exist on any map of the world. She was tightly shrouded in it, like an Egyptian mummy, thoug in one spot on the surface a dark, blood-red stain was breaking through. As i stood and starred at that stain, I was strucj by the feeling someone had made a mistake.
The opening and her mothers death and the first mentio of Blue and Yellow .
This book is set in the town of Lviv, in fact in a way it is as much as a character in the book as the people that live in the House with Stain glass. The story is told through the three woman who all live in the house and really cover the whole of the last century. The house in Lviv in Ukraine is home to Great Grandma grandma Aba and Mother Marianna and her Daughter. All live in the house the books open as Marianna is killed, she is a famous Opera star and leader of the movement to free Ukraine from the Soviets. The story is told from the daughter’s point of view she tells of her grandmother’s  struggles and during the wars. The loss of the fathers in history. Also, the grandmother could have been a painter and due to circumstances missed out. The daughter herself many years later start an affair with an older man as we see how the fight to get the blue and yellow flag was flown has affected all those living behind the stained glass window in Lviv four woman and hundred years of history.
That winter in the mid -1990’s , Balconnies started falling on peoples heads and walking close to the houses became dangerous.
“Mind your head!”wnet the refrain to anyone who ventured outside.
“Yesterday, on So and Son Street, balcony mouldings from tje second floor of house number six collapsed onto the head of a woman walking below” I read in the newspaper “Although the pieces of plaster were not heavy, she was seriously injured and taken to hospital.#
This made me thing of those advert” have you had a balcony hit you !! ” as the kept falling on people .
The other great female writer about Ukraine Svetlana Alexievich this book shows the true spirit of females in the Soviet Era. Also the constant struggle of the sleeping giant that was Ukraine. This is a portrait of family but also on a great scale of the country. from the grandmothers war time and exile from the original homeland through the mother’s struggle to lead the first movement to freedom, To the present day told from the daughter and those recent years we also saw on the news where the country kept going one way to another. The other character in this book is Lviv one of those great towns full of ghosts and touch so much by the history of the 20th century. An amazingly confident book for a debut novel. - winstonsdad

In the later stages of Żanna Słoniowska’s exceptional The House with the Stained-Glass Window, the novel’s narrator is escorted through the Ukrainian city of Lviv by her older lover, Mykola, who promises to show her “a few things that were discarded or forgotten”.

With the right guide – someone who knows where to look – one may glimpse the vestiges of the city’s previous incarnations: the Austro-Hungarian Lemberg, the Polish Lwow, the Soviet Lvov – a rosary of shifting identities, overlapping and intertwining.

This city, still beloved and contested by both Poles and Ukrainians, is the novel’s richest and most complex character. Its story is unlikely to be known by the majority of Anglophone readers, and yet Słoniowska and her translator, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, rise to the challenge of guiding the reader through the city’s calamitous past and tumultuous present; like Mykola, they peel back the paintwork to reveal the stories beneath.

The novel is also a tale of four generations of women: ethnic Poles drawn into the struggle for Ukrainian independence, whose lives are deeply interwoven with that of their city. “We are like Russian dolls transpierced by a single shot” remarks the narrator. Her mother, a singer at the opera house, dies for the cause of Ukrainian independence from the USSR. “Her voice was born out of her head like Athena from the head of Zeus, and the essence of that voice was abundance and excess”. Indeed, the narrator’s mother’s voice permeates the novel, existing as something personal for the narrator and as something public, belonging both to the revolution and to the opera’s audience. “Mama was much bigger on stage  than in life, and frankly speaking, she wasn’t Mama” – this much the daughter is forced to recognise as she grapples with her mother’s dual role as star and martyr, as a possession both of her fans and of the revolutionary cause.

Few writers are capable of combining the personal and the political with as much skill as Słoniowska. By defining the idea of homeland as something “movable” and by creating a space for a unique borderland identity, she delivers a narrative that is vital for our times. - Gary Perry

Franz Fühmann, At the Burning Abyss: Experiencing the Georg Trakl Poem, Trans. by Isabel Fargo Cole, Seagull Books, 2017.


At the Burning Abyss is Franz Fühmann’s magnum opus—a gripping and profoundly personal encounter with the great expressionist poet Georg Trakl. It is a taking stock of two troubled lives, a turbulent century, and the liberating power of poetry.
Picking up where his last book, The Jew Car, left off, Fühmann probes his own susceptibility to ideology’s seductions—Nazism, then socialism—and examines their antidote, the goad of Trakl’s enigmatic verses. He confronts Trakl’s “unlivable life,” as his poetry transcends the panaceas of black-and-white ideology, ultimately bringing a painful, necessary understanding of “the whole human being: in victories and triumphs as in distress and defeat, in temptation and obsession, in splendor and in ordure.”
In 1982, the German edition of At the Burning Abyss won the West German Scholl Siblings Prize, celebrating its “courage to resist inhumanity.” At a time of political extremism and polarization, has lost none of its urgency.


[He] gave us, the lost and confused, exactly what we needed: the stability of a direction leading out of the past…. The world fell into black and white; it was ‘all perfectly simple’ … This completely dualistic picture of the world … was precisely herein a counterpart to the worldview which had formerly dominated our thinking, but it passed itself off as a complete break with the Old, and the only possible break at that.… [H]e stood behind the lectern, both hands raised adjuringly, exclaiming to the auditorium with the solemnity of one announcing a truth of faith: “Tertium non datur! There is and can be no third way!”(Franz Fühmann, At the Burning Abyss: Experiencing the Georg Trakl Poem, 1982)
The year was 1946, the scene was an “antifascist school” in the USSR where denazified German POWs were schooled in socialist ideology to prepare for leadership roles in the fledgling East German state. Franz Fühmann (1922-1983) arrived in East Germany in 1949 with the fervor of the born-again and established himself as a cultural apparatchik. His short story cycle The Jew Car (1962) examines his youthful embrace of Nazi ideology and the gradual moral awakening that culminated in his socialist conversion–a “happy ending” which he revisited, sadder and wiser, in his last book, At the Burning Abyss. A firm believer in the socialist idea, Fühmann was bitterly disillusioned by its dictatorial practice: vaunted as the sole humane alternative to fascism, socialism had proved to be cut from the same cloth, “a soiled coat turned inside out.” Fühmann’s painful journey between ideological extremes resonated with unexpected force as I translated At the Burning Abyss amidst escalating political polarization in Europe and the US.

Tertium non datur–Fühmann was haunted by dualism, the iterations of true and false, and and or, found in philosophical logic. His papers are filled with enigmatic attempts to encode existential problems as Boolean operations. His vast card files, covering an eccentric range of subjects, embellished with doodles and rebus-like headings, both embody and ironize the obsessive need for systemization. Headings like BÖSE/GUT (EVIL/GOOD) or even Bösegut (Evilgood) illustrate how extremes, by nature, end up filed away together as a single thematic unit. Fühmann asked what goes on within these binaries; what he sought was the “excluded middle,” the “third way.”
He found it neither in pure logic nor in a new dogma, but in the apocalyptic poetry of Georg Trakl (1887-1914), which during the war had first shaken his faith in the Nazi cause. In the new socialist society, just as in Nazi Germany, this sort of literary “decadence” was taboo, viewed as promoting nihilism, passivity, and depravity. Trakl’s dark themes (addiction, incest, death) had no place in socialism’s official optimism, and his enigmatic images subverted its simple, socially utilitarian truths.
After struggling for years with his “addiction to the numbing verses of the decadents,” Fühmann embraced them as a crucial expansion–not a contradiction–of socialism’s humanist vision, and fought to introduce them to East German audiences. In 1975 he was finally allowed to edit the first GDR edition of Trakl’s poems. They had become so bound up with his own life that the search for Trakl’s truths became a search for his own: what he intended as a brief introduction ended as the book-length essay At the Burning Abyss. He delved into fundamental questions: What is the “good” of literature that offers no uplifting visions or moral edification, only darkness, confusion, and pain? How (and why) do we grapple with poetry’s ciphers? What are the tensions—constructive, destructive—between political ideals and literary language?
To read Fühmann now is to confront the persistence of these questions. In our historical moment, language itself has, once again, become a central political battlefield, scrutinized for its potential to perpetuate trauma and injustice. On the right and the left, outrage can be triggered by single words or turns of phrase, hairs are split to the point of political rift—not because these issues are specious, but because they touch on profound paradoxes.
Fühmann begins with a paradox that at first seems purely aesthetic:
Trakl’s colors express and evoke opposing sensations: white is the color of snow but also that of mold; yellow is gold-like but also fecal; green is May foliage but also the corruption of the flesh, so “green” implies both hope and fear.—We shall take this opportunity to generalize these observations of Trakl’s poetry, grasping the essence of the poetic word as a unity of opposites…
Now he seizes on something still more esoteric, a fine point of German grammar. Wort (word) has two plurals: Wörter (on the superficial level of grammatical units, words in a dictionary or a word count), and Worte (on the deeper level of entire thoughts, e.g. “Goethe’s words”). In this pedantic distinction, Fühmann discovers a dizzying force–as if, splitting hairs, we were splitting the atom.
[T]his logic implies nothing less than the existence of two languages, homonymous in their basic elements and yet essentially different, a language of science and one of poetry, two languages in which identical-seeming building blocks are utterly different: … “Red” is the name for the retinal impression of the frequency 4 × 10; and “red’”says a unity of life and death.
In this vision of language, the most ordinary-seeming word is revealed as possessing an almost magical power, able to embrace and synthesize the starkest dualism. Evilgood.
Trakl, he argues, mastered
the Wort in the sense of the plural Worte whose essence is the contradictory unity of human experience. Thus each interpretation of poetry is on the right track so long as it is able to embrace at least one element of that unity of contradiction; at the same time, this means relinquishing the claim to be the only right interpretation.
Contradictory unity, the unity of contradiction: here Fühmann articulates a concept whose dialectic propels an increasingly nuanced argument, in opposition to the “perfectly simple” truths of political dogma:
“True” … became the most important word of its time, but was … applied not to statements but to concepts and their underlying socio-psychological realities: “true belief,” “true freedom,” “true interests,” “true fatherland,” and thus, too, “true art” and “true poetry.” —Not “This reasoning is true,” but “This is the true reasoning.” … [I]ts antonym was not “untrue” in the sense of incongruence with reality but, rather, “false” in the sense of “illegitimate.”
Political dogma is a rigid language of pseudo-objective Wörter, codified to the point where meaning dissolves. The alternative lies in uncontrollable Worte, congruent with an ambivalent reality containing the full range of human potential, bright and dark.
Ever since the Cold War, western societies have sought a “third way” to transcend the Right-Left dichotomy. From social democratic reformism in Western Europe to the neoliberalism of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, the term has become identified with wishy-washy “moderates” or cynical compromisers. Today, the “centrism” offered as a panacea for political polarization suffers from the same perceived lack of character. We have a vivid notion of political positions in their radical, extreme forms, but a “centrist position” is by definition indefinable, the nebulous splitting of a difference, an abstract point derived by mechanical calculation. It appears as a mental void in which nothing much is happening—at most some muddled quest for equilibrium, a craven retreat from the tension of holding unambiguous positions.
At the Burning Abyss does not describe a “third way” in the political sense of Fühmann’s era, not even the “third way” of the Prague Spring which Fühmann fervently supported. He is not interested in splitting the difference between socialism and capitalism, much less socialism and fascism. He does not seek to define a political position, “centrist” or otherwise. Indeed, he refuses to dictate any position to the reader: he embraces, and invites you to embrace, the stark contradictions and the tug-of-war between them, just as different interpretations of a poem tug the reader back and forth in an endlessly fruitful process of truth-seeking.
Fühmann’s invitation to seek political and poetic truths within contradictions, within the flux of unresolved tension, remains as radically challenging today as it was in Cold War East Germany. He does not “show a way out” of our dilemmas, but suggests that we can make them fruitful by accepting ambiguity as inevitable–and potentially liberating. When political polarization is experienced as existential and all-encompassing, individual words bear the burden of a Manichean struggle, forced to signify either harm or healing. But as he explores the force of each word’s internal tension, Fühmann shows how they resist rigid control–even for the most humane ends–and enlistment in political battles. Far from fostering pessimism, his vision might help free us from the entrenchment and attrition of battles over words, creating room for the full range of subjectivities whose fractious interplay makes up the collective human process of truth-seeking.
What is human is the whole human being: in victories and triumphs as in distress and defeat, in temptation and obsession, in splendor and in ordure, in compulsions and in freedom, that in which he is a symbol of dignity and that in which we shudder before him!
For Fühmann, a humane language is one that encompasses this whole human being: as a “unity of contradiction.” In its embrace of paradox, the poetic word unites what the political word divides.
I saw once more the image of my teacher, and I heard his “tertium non datur,” but it had turned against him.—I agreed with him: Wholly, or not at all.
Isabel Fargo Cole



Franz Fühmann, The Jew Car: Fourteen Days from Two Decades, Trans. by Isabel Fargo Cole,Seagull Books, 2013.




Originally published in 1962, Franz Fühmann’s autobiographical story cycle The Jew Car is a classic of German short fiction and an unparalleled examination of the psychology of National Socialism. Each story presents a snapshot of a personal and historical turning point in the life of the narrator, beginning with childhood anti-Semitism and moving to a youthful embrace—and then an ultimate rejection—of Nazi ideology. With scathing irony and hallucinatory intensity, reflections on the nature of memory, and the individual experience of history, the cycle acquires the weight of a novel.
"Fühmann’s work, beginning with The Jew Car, can be read as a great literary self-analysis in the spirit of Freud. Through his work, he not only became conscious of his own thinking as it was seduced by totalitarianism, he also became capable of describing the mechanisms of a fascist upbringing with striking poetic power, transcending all theory."—Die Welt, on the German edition