Svein Jarvoll, En Australiareise (A Journey to Australia), 1988.


Not long ago, I wrote a brief postabout the Norwegian writer Thure Erik Lund and his mind-boggling tetralogy Myrbråtenfortellingene. As you might already know, most of English-speaking readers first learnt about Lund from his mega-popular compatriot Karl Ove Knausgård. I have recently been told that there is one more Norwegian author mentioned by Knausgård whose writing is also challenging, experimental, difficult to translate and is little known outside his home country. The writer in question is Svein Jarvoll. His only novel En Australiareise (A Voyage to Australia) was published in 1988 and has since acquired a cult status among the few who have been capable of reading and appreciating it. The critical response, as usually is the case with challenging and unconventional novels, has mostly been that of puzzlement and incomprehension. Matthias Friedrich, the author of the German translation of the novel, which is scheduled for publication this year, has kindly agreed to write for The Untranslated a guest post about this remarkable work of literature.

Never, later in the life, have I had my finger on the pulse the way I had then with the girls living around us in those years. Later, I may have doubted whether Svein Jarvoll’s novel A Journey to Australia was a good or a bad novel, or whether Hermann Broch was a better writer than Robert Musil […].

Throughout My Struggle, Jarvoll is mentioned three times: as the translator of Adam Thorpe’s polyphonic novel Ulverton, as a writer who is able to talk precisely about what he does, and as the author of a strange novel called En Australiareise. But there’s nothing more than that. “Svein Jarvoll” is a name that may appear in an annotated edition of My Struggle one day. However, he is just a footnote in a truncated literary history despite his influence on Norwegian postmodern writers such as Stig Sæterbakken or Tor Ulven who both have been translated into English.
 En Australiareise was all but ignored when it was first published in 1988. One critic wrote about the novel’s “stylistic furor”, another needed to consult far too many dictionaries and lexica – but, of all things, was happy to find a reference to the Niffen, the sports club of Nordstrand (Oslo), in a passage of the novel which is a single run-on word: the so-called makrologos. And as Jarvoll said in an interview with the Norwegian magazine Vinduet, he once met a sailor in Northern Norway who told him that he had read En Australiareise, that he had expected a kind of personal account or autobiographical narration, but that he hadn’t understood anything of it.
What strikes the potential readers when they take a first look at the novel is its apparent nonconformity. It consists of two parts: Den gule boka (The Yellow Book) and Lonaquemor (which is Catalan for The Dying Wave). These two parts turn out to be very different from each other. The first one tells the story of Mark Stoller, a Norwegian traveller (although his name isn’t Norwegian at all) who sets off in València (Spain) and ends up in Australia. In between, he visits Ireland and undertakes a long train journey to Italy where sees Florence, Pisa, and Brindisi. The second part tells the story of Emmi who also travels; but she doesn’t leave Australia’s confines. Together with her friend Alice, Emmi battles her way through the jungle where her father Buster lives in a cabin, because she wants to visit him. In the cabin, she discovers a biography of a Norwegian anthropologist called Magnus C. Ztlohmul (who has a real-life prototype, namely the ethnologist Carl Lumholtz) and reads the book’s foreword before she decides to go back home.
Another thing that strikes the potential readers is its difficulty. The prose is dense, many texts are alluded to, and Jarvoll is quite ruthless when it comes to inventing new words which are impossible to track down, such as “Australopleust” in the first chapter; this means “one who is traveling through Australia”, but has a slight ironic touch. The novel takes in everything, from Dante’s Commedia and Rabelais’  Gargantua and Pantagruel to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man,  also featuring lesser known poets such as the Catalan Ausiàs March.
The first part itself is divided into nine chapters (or episodes); the second one is a single run-on text. There is no strict plot as the story seems to rely on coincidences and caprices. Additionally, the characters – especially Mark Stoller and his Danish girlfriend Lone, who accompanies him on his travels from Spain to Italy – just appear to be human. In fact, they are media in the etymological sense of the term – accumulators of (linguistic) signs. Their names aren’t random. For instance, Mark compares himself to Ausiàs March and takes a closer look at a poem which contains these verses: “A temps he cor d’acer, de carn e fust:/ yo só aquest que·m dich Ausiàs March.” (Sometimes, I have a heart of lead, of flesh and wood:/I am the one who is called Ausiàs March.) This poem focuses on melancholy and dying, two themes which have a significant influence on Mark Stoller: In fact, En Australiareise is a long conversation with death and the European tradition of danse macabre. Despite its morbidity, the novel is hilarious and funny; it has a Rabelaisian touch; it contains a lot of Joycean scatology. It is experimental in the sense that it intends to sketch a manner of speaking about death, the so-called thanatology, and takes into consideration every text which deals with dissolution and exitus. Right in the first chapter, Mark announces that he wants to “spall out the ground” of Dante’s Commedia, which means that he doesn’t want to construct a vertical, symmetrical world (as Dante does), but a horizontal world which could be defined, in Deleuze and Guattari’s words, as dissymmetrical: a surface which seems to be empty, but erodes bit by bit and shows that it’s composed of different layers. It’s a geological landscape with a history of its own, but it is also arbitrary in the sense that it re-orients the traveller’s point of view; he or she must concentrate on the things visible and independently connect the dots which appear to be isolated. Thus, Mark is able to undertake a voyage which leads him through the European landscape of death; he himself becomes Dante who encounters many personalities, such as the painter Buonamico Buffalmacco, who is responsible for the Trionfo della Morte in Pisa; in a long and exciting discussion with this man who seems to be the reincarnation of the defunct uomo universale, Mark develops his thanatology and listens to Buffalmacco who himself outlines the developments of his (occasionally obscene) dream life.
Lone, whose name Mark derives from the Catalan l’ona, “the wave”, is the person who represents the novel’s style. Some elements appear as sinuated repetitions: it occurs frequently that some hypotexts, such as Dante’s poem, are transformed and parodied. Nevertheless, Mark’s etymology is false; in fact, Lone’s name is an abbreviation of the Danish Abelone, which itself is another form of Appolonia. As a cognate of the name of the Greek god of the arts (including poetry), Lone’s name sets the novel’s tone. “Lone, you whose name means ‘wave’ in Valencian, here I shall draw your contour in ten waves, and the contour which sketches the beginning of my own journey, a journey which traces a crooked M on the map” – and here, Mark lists the countries he is going to visit.
 En Australiareise remains a novel ignored by the public, even in Norway, in spite of the re-issue, which was published in 2008 in Gyldendal’s series Forfatterens forfatter (Writer’s Writer). It is poet Mazdak Shafieian who is responsible for this second edition, and who has writtenan informative foreword which can be read in German. A German translation has been announced by Urs Engeler and is probably going to be released in the course of 2018; the novel’s very first chapter has already been published in the literary magazine Mütze. - Matthias Friedrich
https://theuntranslated.wordpress.com/2018/01/02/guest-post-matthias-friedrich-on-en-australiareise-a-voyage-to-australia-by-svein-jarvoll/


Imagine if Dante hadn’t got lost in the dark woods, but rather on an empty, glaring surface. Virgil wouldn’t receive any order of Beatrice to come and save him; Dante would be alone like a son without his father. The blazing sun would nearly blind him, but gradually, he would learn to recognize the dark and scintillating spots which were moving on the plain’s surface. Well-known references to his previous life as a poet and politician would emerge in front of him: Human beings, disguised as linguistic signs, and the texts themselves, crumbled by the weather conditions and the past time. He’d step up to them. He’d want to touch them. But they’d escape him forever. Filled with bitterness and melancholy, he would walk over this hellish surface; he would sense its tectonic movements; he’d realize that it consisted of lamellate layers.
This parable might serve as a kind of preliminary explanation for Svein Jarvoll’s novel A Journey to Australia, a text which is loosely based on Divina Commedia. Right at the beginning, the first-person narrator Mark Stoller states that he wants to “spall out the ground” of Dante’s poem. Its vertical structure, based on the symmetrically arranged Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise, cannot adequately picture the topography Mark envisages. He aspires to a horizontal surface which is totally flat and free of every striking constancy – a surface, though, consisting of multiple levels, which come into sight only after long meditations. They are composed of different time strata; on the ground level itself, Mark, who is the only visitor of this bizarre desert, can see scintillating, dark signs approaching him. They don’t seem to belong to each other, but bit by bit, he is able to discover vague similitudes; thus, he can unearth the past’s traces in the midst of what seems to be a flat present. Mark moves through this space, he travels, he sees, he registers. He himself is a complex composition of linguistic signs. Everything and everyone he encounters is a sign acting in Dante’s spirit, but it soon becomes clear that this is no simple imitation of the Commedia; the Italian poem implodes in a tragedy which at the same time is so heartbreakingly funny that it might be received as a comedy. Only pieces and fragments remain, splinters which Mark has to put together until a new, fragile ground appears under his feet. The result is a vast surface of references interacting with many other dimensions – although it is even, bromidic, plain.
This might sound as if the novel was only for those in the know, for a minority able to discover and identify each allusion to the most obscure and arcane facts. Of course it is: As one critic formulated it, Svein Jarvoll disposes of an “abnormal vocabulary” which is difficult to grasp. The whole book is a furious joyride, an eclectic combination of the vernacular and the silver-tongued, a catalogue of different stylistic levels, a juxtaposition of cock-and-bull-stories, pomowanker sophistries, mock attacks, mockumentaries, folk-etymological acadamese, unsavoury acrostics, immoral love-letters, pantagruelian wassails and banquets, of Irish knaveries, a poem in Ancient Greek, lists of irretrievable books, quotes in Latin, Italian, Catalan, German, French, English, and in other languages, some of them obscure, some of them amplified in a way which only can be characterized as a Joycean-Rabelaisian chitchat: the result is a Norwegian which hasn’t been heard before, a Norwegian cultivated and fostered in the midst of a blazing, Australian desert, a Norwegian consisting of gnarly roots and neatly trimmed twigs, sprawling willows and dry chunks of dust, of labyrinthine pleasure gardens and an exquisite cornucopia of dialectal insipidities, in short: a Norwegian which devotes itself to quite a few stages of its own development, from Riksmål to Bokmål and from Nynorsk to the most dubious patois.
But A Journey to Australia is no Oxen of the Sun. It doesn’t embrace the whole system of languages, only some parts of it. It adds new stratifications to a tongue which in its literary use often is devaluated as meaningless, trite, and vacuous. Paradoxically, the nebeneinander of Bokmål (the officialese) and Nynorsk (a standardized, dialectal form which is nearly exclusively utilised in written texts), as well as several hundred dialects, contributes to the conclusion that Norwegian is an immensely rich language. A fact Svein Jarvoll seems to be conscious about – he pulls out all the stops and styles an own, very dark manner of speaking: the so-called thanatology which offers a possibility to interact with the defunct.

If it has any purpose, A Journey to Australia is a voyage through a realm of the dead which isn’t situated in an obscure netherworld, but in an electric and eclectic present. Every sign moving around in this deteriorated space has lapsed into morbidity; the novel is a late medieval danse macabre with a modernist’s signature. Heinrich Knoblochtzer’s lithographical series Der doten dantz, published at the end of the 15^th century, might have served as an inspiration for a protagonist who, while travelling, encounters various persons, all of them in some way associated with death. Mark sets off in València, moves on to Ireland, to Pisa, Florence, Brindisi, and Australia. These are the geographical fix points of his trip; nevertheless, there is more to know. First of all, he isn’t alone; his girlfriend Lone Øgaardmose, a Dane, accompanies him from Spain to Italy before leaving him. Mark comes across a Belgian alchemist; a Spanish Ausiàs March aficionado; a trucker who at the same time is a Greek scholar; an Italian who presents himself as the long-forgotten painter Buonamico Buffalmacco; an Australian poeta vates; a German art student called Pia Sorg; two maggots whose names are Jack and Jock; and a phuri dai who is a soothsayer.
Jarvoll’s novel doesn’t have to offer as many historical personalities as Dante’s poem. But it is clearly structured around the Divina Commedia, more precisely: the Inferno. It lacks Dante’s moral and theological background; however, it takes up some of its characteristics. Firstly, it is a nekyja, a journey through the Orcus. The alchemist intends to find a “new language” which is capable of describing the most obscure arcania; the Spanish annalist tells Mark about Ausiàs March who wrote the so-called Cants de la Mort (Songs about Death); the Greek scholar is an expert in Sappho’s fragmentarily conserved poetry, an occupation Mark also becomes involved in: he realizes that every hole (in the late medieval text, in the world) is affected by “a certain kind of fecundity”; together with Buffalmacco, Mark develops a thanatology, a discipline which is supposed to describe his experiences in this Dantean hell of death; the Australian poet gives Mark an understanding of that “notions like past and presence don’t mean anything” in a country which “has no arteries and no heart”; Pia Sorg introduces him to the art of reversing Neoplatonism into a phenomenologically inexact science; the maggots are his sole company after Lone has left him; in a psychotic dissociation, he begins to comprehend that his whole life has been a danse macabre; and the phuri dai tells him that there are more than one thousand ways to read her tarot cards, and that every single one of them is right. This modest try might demonstrate that the novel’s content is impossible to resume. Whoever makes a stab at pressing its overabundance into a Procrustean bed, must bear in mind that potential readers, unless they are unnaturally benevolent or generous, will criticize the Journey to Australia as unreadable, as utter, utter, rubbish, as the stutter and babble of a shipwrecked mind. But the lucky few who are able to appreciate its vast scope of references and its overarching language will find a book which is suitable for them – a book which seeks to unify the tactile and the abstract, North and South, the visible and the invisible, in short: a book which intends to overcome any dichotomization. - Matthias Friedrich
https://theothermodernbreakthrough.wordpress.com/2018/03/02/svein-jarvoll-en-australiareise-a-journey-to-australia-1988/

Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, Décadence Mandchoue: The China Memoirs of Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, Earnshaw Books, 2011.         

Daniel A. Hoyt, This Book Is Not for You, Dzanc Books, 2017.





Winner of the inaugural Dzanc Book Prize for Fiction


Utilizing an innovative mashup of genres, ranging from pulp fiction, dark comedy, and metafiction, This Book Is Not for You charts the actions of nineteen-year-old Neptune, a misfit and punk haunted by the death of his parents. Having fallen in with an anarchist group determined to blow up a university building, he steals the dynamite instead, igniting an entirely different brand of trouble: the murder of his mentor; a three-way manhunt; and the mystery of the Ghost Machine, a walkman that replays snippets from his own twisted past.
Told in a nonstop chain of Chapter Ones, Daniel Hoyt’s debut novel explores the clash between chaos and calm, the instinct for self-destruction and the longing for redemption. – from the Dzanc Books website


“I stayed up all night listening to Neptune—part Holden Caulfield, part Huck Finn, part someone I’ve never met anywhere. Sharp-edged, defiant, profane, and brutally funny, he got to me in spite of himself.”—Kim Church


“The energy of Hoyt's prose carried me until I was reading at a pace I never do, and panting at that. A page-turner experimental novel.”—Carmiel Banasky


“This is not a confession, but a caustic blend of pulp and metafiction that surrounds a haunted Walkman, a murder, wishful anarchists and a constant reset for the reader. Every chapter is chapter one, but Hoyt knows just how to pull the strings..”—Andrew Sullivan






Hoyt’s debut novel (following a collection of stories, Then We Saw the Flames, 2009) is an unconventional whodunit in which who did it is not the point.
Nineteen-year old Neptune is at the nexus of many different storylines. He's a thorn in the side of the local Black Block, an anarchist commune whose dynamite he has made off with; a late-night knight in shining armor for his mentally ill former professor, Marilynne, whose life he cannot save; a link to the past for the mysterious Saskia, whose dead brother’s shaman-hexed Ghost Machine (a Walkman circa the 1990s) has started spinning the tape of Neptune’s life and cannot be muted or turned off. Adrift, multiply abandoned, alcoholic, and emotionally scarred, Neptune has a tough, wry, and at times movingly vulnerable voice which guides us through the underbelly of anarchic/punk Lawrence, Kansas, as he runs from the anarchists, the police, his past—both recent and way-back-when—and, most of all, his future. Will Neptune evade the anarchists, intent on either recovering their dynamite or enacting their revenge? Will he successfully overcome the minefield of his own personality to work things out with Saskia—who is beautiful, brainy, patient, penitent, and has many other Manic Pixie Dream Girl traits beside—and, most important of all, will he find out who killed Marilynne? Will he tell us if he does? Told in an unending string of first chapters, Hoyt's book beguiles even as it actively befuddles. Ultimately, though Neptune’s hapless violence, his psychic damage, his deep attachment to equally damaged literary lost boys like Holden Caulfield and Huckleberry Finn are both engaging and sympathetic, his insistence on refusing to tell the reader pertinent parts of his past and his near constant defensive rejection of the reader’s attention are relied on too heavily for the surprisingly slender weight of the plot to withstand.
The events get lost in the telling. Though the book is full of piquant details, juicy language, and the totally believable chaos of characters living on the counterculture fringe, it is outpaced by the restless, relentless energy of its main character’s voice.  - Kirkus Reviews



It’s time to stop talking about fiction categorically, time to shut the fuck up about metafiction, postmodernism, experimentalism. It’s time to remember Rabelais and Petronius, Burton, Arlt and that other guy (women? I suspect they are in the vanguard—I wish I could experience the genderrific thrill of having a lady named George enter the man’s world just to show them how easy it can be if you take your genitalia just a little less seriously). The history of fiction is a very long one, a history of free prose winnowed suddenly into a conformism commodified into an embarrassing self-regard—mirrors previously used to perform tricks became instruments of judgment. How it happened is not my concern, other than to say it took a great deal of cowardice, collaboration—in the shave their heads sort of way—and competition. Okay, yes, I AM disgruntled, but as things stand I am far happier that I am me and not Dan Brown, not Frank Conroy. I’m glad I’m not Dan Hoyt, too, but that’s because we never enjoy our own books the way we delight in the inspired works of others. And Hoyt is inspired, red hot, boiling—he’s a mad phalanx of lobsters with felt-once tip claws; and I’m going to let other reviews discuss his innovative moves—I’m going to tell you that I can’t remember the last time I came across so many memorable lines with such frequency, especially from a young first person narrator. It’s not only the descriptions, but the wisecracks, the attitude, the violently ambivalent truths of a man in the contracting idiocy of his time. Hoyt’s Neptune is an amazing literary creature, a narrative drive unto himself. And this is where I recall an obscure writer like Desani and his mad Hatterr and slide him into the review like an asshole, but I wouldn’t do that to Hoyt. I would do it to you, but not Dan Hoyt. The very notion is absurd—we need to shut the fuck up about other writers when we’re reviewing the current victim (every review is a violence done to the work of the author, every review). This may seem odd, but it is even about time we review the photos authors let their puppeteers attach to their books: and I’m damn glad a bald Hoyt with sleeves rolled up is looking at me, telling me he absolutely does not care what I think of his book. No sweater. No dog. No living room floor. Back to the book, the word choice is unparalleled, deft, but that goes without saying—if it wasn’t deft I wouldn’t be reviewing because I leave the reviewing of shitty books to others; no the word choice is consistently inspired: ‘burlap crackers’! See if you can top that. See if Joyce Carol Franzen can top that. It’s a work of literature and it has a plot, too, and you actually read it as fast as the narrator tells you to, tells you are, and unless you’re an asshole you will take your first origami lesson. As for the content of the book, I mean otherwise—the cover is great but for the five blurbs, all of which are right in praising the book, all of which fall short of sufficient praise, and each of which has at least one remarkable idiotic aspect (Listen to this shit: ‘A page-turner experimental novel.’ I would rip the head off anyone I caught putting that on my novel.)—the content of the book doesn’t matter in the least because the narrator is the book and it wouldn’t matter what he was going on about in his way. I probably should tip one of my Midwestern hats to Dan Hoyt, a lesser Pacino, phelt you can afford: the environment of his novel is up to date and survives, the characters what has been done to them, wires and everything…
Maybe one reason I like this book so much is that the narrator directly tells the reader a lot of what I think, but that passes because I have to get on with what I am writing—I like directly telling readers uncomfortable things and I don’t get to do it often enough. This book revels in it. I have spent far too much time writing for the one or two or three people who pop into mind as I write—P will like this, B will laugh at this, T will get this. The fact is, however, that we could not possibly have the detrital bloat of commodified cornholery that passes for literature without a plethora of morons not getting our books, not caring to get books, not advancing their selves through art, surrendering their selves lest art, merely paying lip service to art without even swallowing. Which brings me to my only problem with the book, not an uncomfortable one for me. I love great literature, and I read a lot of it, and I’m damn grateful for the current writers of it…But this is the first time I’ve ever read a book and felt that it might change my writing in some way in the future. It has an urgency that may finally lead to a necessary coherence in literature given the world that Arlt described is in its late menopausal stage. I might have to learn from Hoyt to maintain my relevance to myself. I might have to speed up to keep the urgency in sight. -Rick Harsh
https://rickharsch.wordpress.com/2017/12/15/this-review-is-not-for-amazon-dan-hoyts-this-book-is-not-for-you/


I did attempt to pass the time with a witty little novel, recently: something called This Book is Not for You by Daniel A. Hoyt on a little, unpronounceable press we’ll call Dzanc, if only we can ever learn how. This wild ride of a book reminds us that it’s not the tragedies that kill us; it’s the messes.
I must confess that the last time I encountered such a rude title with one sweeping, liquid gesture, I tossed it out of my twelfth-story window. But Mr. Hoyt’s voice sufficiently stilled my hand until I felt myself titillated and twitter pated and all around acidulated. So you see my confidence in my judgment is scarcely what it used to be. To that point, I cannot, with the slightest sureness, tell you if Mr. Hoyt’s new novel will sweep the country, like Main Street, or bring forth yards of printed praise…My guess would be that it might not, creeping forth like the finest small fish swimming in a school of sardines, but my God should it ever. Keep in mind that other guesses which I have made in the past year have been that Hillary would carry Wisconsin, that there might emerge a great dramatic critic for an American newspaper, and that I would have more than twenty-six dollars in the bank on March 1^st, so I’ll leave Mr. Hoyt’s career in more capable and, hopefully, corporeal hands. You can certainly do your part by buying a copy.
I feel Daniel A. Hoyt’s little book is too tremendous a thing for praises. To say of it, ‘Here is a magnificent novel’ is rather like gazing into the Grand Canyon and remarking, ‘Well, well, well; quite a slice.’ Doubtless you have heard that this book is not pleasant. Neither, for that matter, is the Atlantic Ocean. On the first page we’re greeted with a stern warning by a Kansas anarchist – of all things – who finds it so nice he repeats it mercilessly throughout the title and the entire book. But that’s part of the fun, to keep touching on a refrain so that the whole band keeps swinging. Left to his own devices, our narrator, whose beloved mentor got herself murdered and whose satchel contains enough dynamite to blow up the entire English faculty at Kansas University, certainly doesn’t seem mentally sufficient for narrative responsibility. He doesn’t seem sufficient for very much at all, but Hoyt knows a capable mule when he spies one, and he saddles the idiosyncratic and inarticulate Neptune (I’m so very  grateful Hoyt chose that name over Uranus) like a narrative beast of burden. Neptune perfectly illustrates the only dependable law of life – everything is always worse than you thought it was going to be.
The author finds a way to marshal the gritty, earthy and unseemly qualities of his narrator without succumbing to them. What we’re left with is a propulsive, profane, smart and very often hilarious work that compels you follow this ignoble Caliban the way we might follow that other low Midwesterner; Huckleberry Finn. As they say I say, A little bad taste is like a nice dash of paprika. - http://www.darrendefrain.com/this-book-is-not-for-you-daniel-hoyt/


Daniel A. Hoyt, Then We Saw the Flames: Stories, University of Massachusetts Press, 2009.
read it at Google Books
Read a story from this collection in the Kenyon Review


In this freewheeling debut collection, Daniel A. Hoyt takes us from the swamps of Florida to the streets of Dresden, to the skies above America, to the tourist hotels of Acapulco, to the southwest corner of Nebraska. Along the way, we encounter a remarkable group of characters all struggling to find their footing in an unsettling world.
Sometimes magical, sometimes realistic, sometimes absurd, these stories reveal people teetering on the dangerous edge of their lives. In "Amar," a Turkish restaurant owner deals with skinheads and the specter of violence that haunts his family. In "Boy, Sea, Boy," a shipwrecked sailor receives a surreal visitor, a version of himself as a child. In "The Collection," a father and son squander a trove of bizarre and fanciful objects. And in "The Kids," a suburban couple grasp for meaning after discovering children eating from their trash.
In each of these stories, characters find themselves challenged by the political, cultural, and spiritual forces that define their lives. With a clear eye and a steady hand, Hoyt explores a fragile balance: the flames―fueled by love, loss, hope, and family―shed new light on us. Sometimes we feel warmth, and sometimes we simply burn.


"Sharp, daring, and shot with moments of rare beauty, these stories grab you by the collar and refuse to let you go. Daniel Hoyt tears away the layers of our shared human experience to reveal the raw emotional truth at the core, and at the same time he uncovers the searing loneliness and desire that bind us together. This is a fearless and unforgettable book."―Julie Orringer

"A wonderful book that brings together thirteen stories that are odd bedfellows―now realist, now magical, now minimalist, now not. To read them is to wander untethered through Daniel Hoyt's highly developed imagination and to come away sometimes stunned, often thrilled, always amused, constantly surprised, and, from time to time, comforted. In a way, reading this collection is like changing channels on a very peculiar TV: the programs look different each from the next, but soon you realize that someone is controlling all of the programming, there are common threads running through every show."―Frederick Barthelme

"Variety is the spice of life, and Daniel A. Hoyt has a lot of spice. Then We Saw the Flames is a collection of short stories from one Daniel Hoyt, as he presents a fine compilation of short stories that go into a variety of topics, with the overlying themes of the challenges that everyone faces in their life. With plenty of entertainment crammed between the covers, Then We Saw the Flames is a great short fiction pick."―Midwest Book Review, Fiction Shelf

"Hoyt is a brave and capable writer and his collection provides an entertaining and exciting read."―North Dakota Quarterly




This is the way I like my fiction, when I get the feeling that no one else could write like this. That’s not to say that I think every story in this collection is high art. But unlike other collections I’ve read, these stories are tied together by a certain style. Each is quirky in its own way. But all of them could only have spilled out of one head. There are some normal (though low class) people doing mostly normal things, as in Last Call of the Passenger Pigeon. Well, except that an old man is teaching a troubled young boy, who has troubled young boy things on his mind like getting laid and stealing booze, how to make bird calls. How, in fact, to be the last person on earth who can make some of those bird calls. This would qualify as a really terrific story, except that ending took me away from the main character’s youth and into some coda-like passage that didn’t seem right. But don’t let that throw you. It’s well worth the read. Then there are some abnormal people doing abnormal things. In The Dirty Boy, a male character doesn’t shower for hundreds of days and becomes a minor media sensation. It’s thinly veiled sarcasm on our media saturated culture, with an under-toned parody of academia. It works, but again, the ending, this time only two lines so its effect is limited, seemed to me like that hangnail that keeps catching on your threads. Then there are the abnormal people we all are familiar with, such as terrorists, in this case caught in their own infinite loop. This was my favorite story, Black Box. Terrorists have hijacked a plane but the episode doesn’t end, all refreshments (to keep the passengers mollified) never run out, and the instruments in the cockpit don’t change. One of the hijackers "doesn’t believe in this overwhelming stasis." The passengers are not only not terrified, they are bored and have even gotten sarcastic. "Your wish is my command, Master of Disaster," one of the flight attendants says. Another cares no more whether they live or die. In my opinion, there’s more imagination and life on this plane than in any thriller with its requisite dark, menacing terrorists doing what you expect them to do. But here’s the even cooler part: One of the terrorists figuratively gives up and talks into the black box for posterity. Only the black box will outlast them, he says. Talking into the black box is all that’s left, the only place he can confess his sins, admit his failure, talk about his predicament. There’s rich irony and metaphorical static in this idea! The martyr seeking his eternal glory in suicide and death decides that an inanimate box will outlast him. This is the one story that I think has a terrific ending, too. In other stories, Hoyt includes immigrants, skinheads, orphans, and weird people who collect stuff. Don’t be put off by what I say about the individual story endings. We all know endings are so difficult to get right. Hoyt takes us on quite a journey with every story in this collection. You might be a tad wobbly pausing at each intermediate destination, but the overall experience is worth the price of the ticket. - Jason Makansihttp://www.theshortreview.com/reviews/DanielHoytAndThenWeSawtheFlames.htm



The modern short story is sometimes so short that it does something less than tell a story. Glossing over the standard narrative arc, it catches a mood or a vignette and preserves it, like a bug under glass.The 13 offerings in " Then We Saw the Flames" Daniel A. Hoyt's short story collection, meet this definition. Hoyt, a professor at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, writes dark, cynical and nicely crafted tales. They glimpse a certain sad reality but rarely develop in a way that gives you pause.
Take Paul and Crystal in "The Kids," for example: They're married, fat and cheating their way through the Atkins diet. You don't hang with them enough to relate or sympathize; instead, they seem rather repulsive.
The couple is incensed with a bunch of young miscreants who repeatedly raid their trash. They go vigilante and catch them. Their actions create headlines they weren't looking for because the thieves turn out to be foster kids who forage other peoples' garbage cans to keep their hunger at bay.
Or, as the Family Services spokesman puts it on television: "Even the best systems possess a degree of failure."
Sadly, you never got a close look at the kids, either. So you shrug your shoulders at the inept bureaucracy (how is that new?) and move on. Hoyt writes with style and contempt, portraying a society besotted with celebrities but dismissive of everyone else.
In "Five Stories About Throwing Things at Famous People," he mocks this misplaced attention through the testimonials of five nobodies who find a sense of purpose in making contact, literally, with famous folks. In "Black Box," we hear from a 9/11-style hijacker whose route to fame and martyrdom includes a smart-mouthed flight attendant.
In "Maria," the former maid of Maria Callas hints at the sorrows of an ordinary life during an interview about the opera star. In "Amar," the title character is a transplanted Turk in Dresden besieged by skinheads. He's either a poster boy or a cliche -- you choose.
The best story in the collection, "Last Call of the Passenger Pigeon," is slightly longer than the rest. Here Hoyt gives himself the space to develop his characters to the point of sympathy. A hapless single mother sends her alienated teenage son on bird-watching expeditions with an old geezer intent on imparting what he knows. Hoyt figuratively and, in one case, literally gets under their skin. The storyteller seems less detached and more mature.
" Then We Saw the Flames" reveals a writer with style to burn and the potential to bring greater substance to his work. - Emry Heltzel
http://www.cleveland.com/books/index.ssf/2009/07/daniel_a_hoyts_debut_then_we_s.html


This Book Is Not For You by Daniel Hoyt claimed it was not for me, but this book was exactly what I needed. I likely won’t be the only one to compare the tone of the narrator to that of Holden Caulfield in my beloved Catcher in the Rye, that was the first thing that struck the right chord with me. I’ve missed that kind of chaotic narration. My head has been so far in the clouds, I forgot how exhilarating that kind of brutally honest stream of conscious messed up word vomit can be. And I loved every word of it.
It was quick, it was witty, it was all over the place yet never strayed too far from the core story. It was violent but it was also vulnerable. It will make you laugh and it will also make you cry. It will make you question everything you’re reading and everything you know.
This was a gritty coming of age story about a boy named Neptune who had been put upon and put upon, not unlike the tragic heroes he often references in the book. He fell in with the wrong crowd, he committed some wrongful deeds, and when the only person who was close to him, a mentally ill old school teacher, winds up dead, Neptune’s world starts to crumble and come into focus all at the same time.
This was chaotic and it was hard to follow, but it was also clear. It was a mess of contradictions and things that felt like lies but you’re constantly told are not lies. There was a dark overtone of lost youth, of kids who fall through the cracks and are just trying to get by, but there was also a hint of a love story, of broken people finding broken people and mending into some kind of whole.
Whatever this was, Daniel Hoyt may be partially right, this may not be for everyone, but this book was definitely for me. - citygirlscapes.com/2017/11/08/arc-book-review-this-book-is-not-for-you-by-daniel-hoyt/


story: The Inevitable

Interview with Daniel A. Hoyt

Francesc Serés, Russian Stories, Trans. by Anastasia Maximova and Peter Bush, MacLehose Press, 2013.


read it at Google Books


Drift through outer space with a doomed cosmonaut whose engine is 'kaput!'; return to an irradiated village with an elderly couple who want to go home; ask yourself, did Elvis really play a concert in Red Square? Twenty-one impish and irrepressible stories by five neglected or forgotten Russian writers. Fresh-faced vignettes from modern St Petersburg; hair-raising tales of state insanity, snatched from the Soviet archives; dark fables from the days of serfdom, when the land was untamed and life was brutish and short. Each mines a discrete facet of Russian life, history or culture, and taken as a whole they sketch a historical arc from the nineteenth century to the age of the budget airline, offering the reader a unique combination of daring, wit, dash and charm.


Short Russian stories that could have been written at that time by a Russian writer. But have they been?
The author of these Russian Stories states: "Everything that happens in these stories strives to give shape to the history of a land and a country that could be imaginary. After all, might not the history of Russia over the last century and a half be thought of as a huge fable? With sagas of inconceivable magnitude, the country itself is so big that it hardly seems possible that it could exist..." These short stories cover a period extended from the XIX century, through to the era of low-cost airlines, from recreating traditional folk tales to portraying Russia’s difficult relationship in the twenty-first century. The stories speak of Russia from within Russia, far from trends that seek to turn this place into a no-place, or to dilute the individual and people as a whole in liquid societies.




Russian Stories is a collection of twenty-one short stories supposedly written by authors who, according to Francesc Serés, “are some of the best-known writers of contemporary literature today.” Certainly the journey these tales have taken—from Russian to Catalan (translated by Anastasia Maximova, a figment of Serés’s imagination or of his devilish wit), from Catalan to English (translated by Peter Bush, who appears to be a “real” person), to this edited anthology—represents many of the actual tales themselves, which narrate the journeys taken by the Russian characters depicted within them. In a 2011 interview with Marta Rebón, Serés stated: “Pensé siempre en mí, cuando escribía los cuentos” (I only thought about myself when I was writing the stories), which appears to point to Serés as the author of the Catalan stories later translated by Bush. The reasons for his deception are not, however, clear.
In the preface Russian translator, Anastasia Maximova, sets the changing scene in an industrial suburb where she grew up in the 1990s. The esplanade in front of steel blast furnaces is littered with defunct statues of Stalin and Lenin about to be reprocessed. Unforgettable, is her description of the trucked in lines of heads made from incredibly tough alloys. These are so durable that a special technique must be evolved such that the heads must be drilled with holes, and then buried below ground where inserted explosive charges are necessary to blow them apart. Throughout these stories, such descriptions also represent hazardous transitions in Russian society, the effects on individuals are sometimes stultifying, often painful but also meliorated and transformed by generosity, friendship and kindness.
The first two authors, both of whom are women, born in 1967 and 1949 respectively, deal with personal issues against the backdrop of economic failure and authoritarian misrule. In Low Cost Life, Low Cost Love, Ola Yevgueniyeva writes of the sad and drab lives of the ground staff hostesses on the Russian airline, SAS outside St Petersburg. There is a feeling of being unable to attain the attractive standards of the more fortunate western European crews. Even the bus transport to the airfield has hard wooden benches and the roads contain bumps and potholes. This disappointed sadness creeps into relationships with men; low self-esteem leading to lowered expectation of their dates. A sorrowful but somehow poetic realism penetrates this writer's stories. She writes too of resurgent nobility in St Petersburg's great houses by the Neva which have survived the revolution, war and famine. In The Russian Doll's House the ardent but impoverished Juri must wait for years distanced from the aristocratic and beautiful Mia. She must marry an oafish industrialist in accordance with her family's demands. The story is written in a spell bounding, elegant style that brings out the tragedy of restricted, almost unrequited love.
These stories have all been carefully chosen and reminiscent of the language and tradition in which Chekhov and Gorky once wrote. Indeed the book is dedicated to Mikhail Bulgakov. There are tragic-comic stories about the possibility that Elvis might have sung in Red Square, of the last lonely hours of an orbiting spaceman suffering the consequences of yet another system failure. Here then is a parable of a superpower in a state of freefall. The terrible ecological disasters of the Aral Sea and Chernobyl are treated. The latter portraying the return of an old, yet determined, couple to the dangers of an irradiated countryside and how their dutiful daughter is torn between fulfilling their wishes and what she thinks is their imminent demise.
As the tales pass backwards along the brutal path of Soviet history, misplaced idealism and naivety are revealed. The Russian Road long, hot and dusty finds the exhausted revolutionary Akaki returning the many versts to his home village. When he arrives he finds that among the peasants in the countryside little if anything has changed. His attempts to persuade folk there that in exchange for their potatoes they will receive a transforming new culture are met with astonished disbelief. Curious, thought-provoking and allegorical, Volkov's The War against the Voromians tells of a peculiar area where there is a gravitational field anomaly. The inhabitants are subject to a corresponding increase in weight, have thicker necks and an affection for their homeland. They sadly become subject to state sponsored research and suspicion by the authorities. Population dispersal is forced upon these unfortunate Voromians, victims of external manipulation that seems to prevail in so many of these accounts.
Kafka once wrote, A book should become an axe for the frozen sea within us. This collection, carefully selected, fulfils such a criterion. They have the transformative edge of original writing. - George Care
http://www.thebookbag.co.uk/reviews/index.php?title=Russian_Stories_by_Francesc_Seres
Fransesc   Serés is a Catalan   writer he studied fine art and Anthropology at university ,after this he became a writer he has publish over ten books of novel and short stories in Spain and has also produced a number of stage works . He is also a professor of art history and a Russophile .
Consequently , if it weren’t for this confession of mine , nobody would know that Elvis Presley gave a concert in Moscow’s red square.
Yes , you heard me , a concert in Red square in 1958.
It was one of the many demonstrations of strength the superpowers made during the cold war .A stupid one , but it was ,at the end of the day , a demonstration of strength .
Well imagine if the King had played in Moscow .
Frnacesc Serés happen in his love of Russian literature this lead him to coming  across a unmined wealth of lost , writing that hadn’t seen the light of day outside Russia .He gathered together 21 different stories from five new to us in the west  writers spanning the history of modern Russia .We start in modern Russia Ola Yevgueniyeva born in 1967 writes about Putin’s Russia stewardess contrast their world and the places they go and how their world is changing .Also a wonderful story of a chess match between an old gent and a young girl almost showing the change in modern Russia from the older player to the younger player .Then we move back through time with each subsequent writer .The next writer  Vera-Margarita she evokes the soviet past story of red square mentions of Lenin and Stalin .Then we get to Vitali Kroptkin and my favourite story Elvis Presley sings in Red Square ,did you know that Elvis had song in Red square in 1958 well he had new KGB files show ,a fun look at what could have happened had the King played in Russia .Then  we have Aleksandr Volkov he wrote of the post world war two soviet regime also how bizarre the state could be at times given the story about Voromians ,I liked this because it was just them remove the name and it is at heart of a number of incidents involving separate races with in the soviet sphere .The last writer Josef Bergghenko takes us to a pre world war two soviet times .
Voromians are pleasant , the odd one even looks at her as if he regonises her . one couple are called Var and Mirtila , like so many they ask her where they will be taken .She can’t think what to reply.
A group that have been moved by the purges .
Sounds wonderful doesn’t it well it is amazing to discover these unknown writers ,ha nearly had you no the book is entirely made up by the writer francesec  Serés it is an homage to soviet writing but also a look into maybe what might have been written .He manages to pull it off with great style each writers piece do seem as thou they are from a different voice they are completely from the hands of Fransesc  Serés he has playfully mixed styles of contemporaries of the figures he is writing about so you get sense of these writers writing in their time echoes of kafka the fun of Bulgakov  .A book for fans of Russian literature but also the likes of Borges .I also discovered an interesting interview here it is in Spanish but comes across reasonably well via google translate . - winstonsdad
https://winstonsdad.wordpress.com/2013/09/29/russian-stories-by-francesc-seres/


“Surface Effects” by Francesc Serés
Franscesc’s Tramlines story, written as part of his residency in Alexandria, is available to listen to or read for free on the interactive literary app Gimbal.


Francesc Serés is an award-winning Catalan author of novels, story collections, plays, and non-fiction. In 2013 MacLehose Press published an English version of Serés’s Russian Stories, which purports to be an anthology of non-existent Russian writers translated into Catalan. His narrative, The Skin of the Border, explores immigration to Catalonia. A regular contributor to the daily newspaper Ara, he lives in the northern town of Olot.

Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Empty Set, Trans. by Christina MacSweeney, Coffee House Press, 2018.              
excerpt
Read the first pages here 

The recent edition of La nueva novela puts the poet who aspired to "radiate a veiled identity" back into circulation.This article gives an account of unpublished aspects of the life of Juan Luis Martínez, shows his rejections and affiliations with Chilean poetry, and reveals the obsessive methodology of work that gave body to a work that is poetic and philosophical at the same time, and thatwith its unique humor and sense of absurdity, it continues to baffle readers of the 21st century.
Juan Luis Martínez después del silencio


La nueva novela, Publicaciones D21, 2016, 152 páginas, $70.000 (disponible solo en galería D21).

Andrés Barba, The Right Intention, Trans. by Lisa Dillman, Transit Books, 2018.

Nothing is simple for the men and women in Andrés Barba's stories. As they go about their lives, they are each tested by a single, destructive obsession. A runner puts his marriage at risk while training for a marathon; a teenager can no longer stand the sight of meat following her parents' divorce; a man suddenly fixates on the age difference between him and his younger male lover. In four tightly wound novellas, Andrés Barba establishes himself as a master of the form.
Lonely, desperate, obsessive characters inform the stories in Barba’s latest collection.
Barba (Such Small Hands, 2017, etc.), an acclaimed Spanish writer, is a master of the novella. Shorter than a novel, longer than a story, the novella is an underused form in American fiction. That’s unfortunate because, done right, it’s as exacting and harrowing as anything else you’ll come across. Needless to say, Barba does it right. His most recent book to appear in English contains four novellas. The characters they describe are destructive, lonely, obsessive. In one, a teenage girl, desperate to disappear, becomes anorexic; in another, a newly married man gives himself over to training for a marathon to the exclusion of everything else. They’re each consumed by the need to gain control over their own bodies. In Nocturne, which opens the book, a 56-year-old man takes up with a 21-year-old boy but can’t escape the fear that the boy will leave him. Like the marathoner and the anorexic girl, what he yearns for is a way to control his own desire, to overcome it entirely. Descent, which closes out the book, describes a trio of grown siblings and their tyrannical mother, who has fallen down and broken her hip. But as with the other stories, a plot synopsis doesn’t do Barba justice. These plots are deceptively simple. What’s not simple are the characters themselves, the ways that they struggle, and yearn, and fall down. Barba’s not eager to help them back up. There are no happy endings here, no false resolutions. Instead, we get the uneasy, unsettling mysteries we get in our everyday lives.
A gorgeous, fully realized collection in which each novella can be appreciated on its own as well as in concert with the others. - Kirkus Reviews 


Andrés Barba blew onto the American literary scene last year when Lisa Dillman’s translation of Las manos pequeñas (Such Small Hands) was published last April by Transit Books, a new press dedicated exclusively to translations. A slim book from a foreign author published by a small press could easily have come and gone without much notice, but Such Small Hands became something of a sensation in the translation world, scoring reviews in big publications and the devotion of independent bookstores around the country.
Such Small Hands, originally published in Spanish in 2008, is eerie and all-consuming. The book was inspired by a few lines from Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s story “The Smallest Woman in the World” that describe an incident in a Brazilian orphanage in the 1960s in which some girls took the life of a fellow orphan and hid her body for a week, punishing and playing with it. Barba explodes this purportedly true story into a full-blown examination of the inner psyches of orphanage girls, starting with the arrival of seven year-old Marina who is subsequently bullied and adored. The plot of Such Small Hands is fantastically creepy, mysterious, and enticing, but what is perhaps most exciting about the book is not the haunting games of orphanage girls; it’s how convincingly Barba portrays them.
His ability to inhabit the mind and language of his characters is a skill equally present in his second book to be published in the US, The Right Intention. In this collection of stories, Barba crafts four separate worlds using very little description, matched by Lisa Dillman in a hugely satisfying translation. His writing is populated mostly by the inner thoughts of his characters, and from there the reader can imagine and construct all the scenery, the full backdrop to their reading experience. Whereas Such Small Hands was almost otherworldly, each of the stories in The Right Intention feels utterly real. What Barba seems particularly interested in showing his readers is that moment of tension when the character knows they’ve gone too far. They’re already hurtling towards their own demise, or someone else’s. Their mind was most likely made up before the story even started. Marina of Such Small Hands comes up with an idea for a sinister game that results in her own catastrophic end. In each of the stories in The Right Intention, Barba shows us four people on their own road to ruin.
In “Nocturne,” Barba illustrates a love story that never has a chance to succeed because of one man’s crippling self-doubt. The story opens with a the narrator obsessing over whether or not to contact the author of a cryptic personal ad: I’m so alone. Roberto. (91) 4177681. After days of gnawing curiosity and desire, he finally submits and contacts Roberto. What follows seems to be a love story in the process of unfolding, but there are clues that the narrator will wreck everything, whether he plans to or not. Barba is interested in revealing the subtle ways in which people so easily take happiness and distort it into something ugly, the way people allow things that once inspired love to embody vitriol. Roberto’s age, at first enticing, becomes a source of pain as the narrator becomes “aware of the fact that there was a huge part of the twenty-one-year-old boy’s life that he would never be a part of . . . He was young, insultingly young, and always would be.” The narrator, incapable of letting himself go in the relationship, turns his fear of being rejected for his older age into something he despises in his young lover, and morphs his fear into cruelty, treating the boy (as he takes to thinking of him) with utter contempt, forcing an endgame. In under 60 pages, Barba takes us through the full gamut of emotions of someone who finds himself the object of a love that seems too good to be true, and who can’t help but accelerate it into oblivion.
In the middle stories of the collection, Barba tackles the impulse to destroy oneself from the inside out, using physical pain to erase emotional trauma. The characters of these stories drive themselves to physical and mental ruin to escape emotional pain. Barba illustrates how what looks like complete control can easily disintegrate, leaving utter chaos. Reminiscent of Such Small Hands, the tenuous connections between characters are rendered with aching clarity. Barba often traces a clear line, studying his characters’ mental and physical degradation as a result of the very thing to which they have turned as a means of emotional escape.
The final story, “Descent,” zooms in on a woman whose mother is sick in the hospital. We are thrown into the midst of her family drama when old pains resurface as the matriarch inches towards death. Whereas in the first three stories Barba’s characters seem intent from the start to tunnel into their own demises, in “Descent,” Barba presents his character with clear opportunities to choose between allowing her mother some final moments of joy, or enacting secret vengeance. In what is perhaps the least interesting exciting story of the collection, Barba and his translator nevertheless demonstrate a masterful ability to capture the atmosphere of the moment. The characters think thoughts that at first seem cruel, but quickly register as familiar, relatable. For example, as the woman reflects on her relationship with her mother, she compares her family to her husband’s: “When she first met Manuel’s family, she got the feeling that their relationships were completely unreal . . . Discovering later that their affection was genuine turned her against Mamá in a subtle way, because in the same sense that Manuel’s mother had been solely responsible for the love in his family, Mamá must have been to blame for the distance and envy in hers.” This resentment towards her mother culminates in the decision to inflict on her “the ultimate punishment.” Through a mundane story of relatively typical family drama, Barba reveals the surprising levels of cruelty we might be capable of reaching when a lifetime of anger, shame, and sadness morph into something else entirely.
Whether he’s writing about teenage girls in an anorexia treatment center or a man literally running away from his marriage, whether the story is creepy and enthralling or bordering on dull, Barba’s undeniable skill lies in crafting convincing characters that feel like friends, or like enemies, or like people you hope never to meet, whose downfalls feel dangerously possible. Edmund White said that with Such Small Hands, “Barba has returned us to the nightmare of childhood.” Perhaps with The Right Intention, Barba has revealed to us the nightmare of existence. - Emma Ramadan
http://www.full-stop.net/2018/03/06/reviews/emma-ramadan/the-right-intention-andres-barba/

“If only he could put into words what he feels it would be almost like thinking clearly, but he cannot think clearly.”
This is the distress signal sent up at a crucial juncture by the protagonist of “Marathon,” the third of the four novellas in Andrés Barba’s The Right Intention, a collection originally published in the author’s native Spain as La recta intenciónin 2002. With its intimations of an inability to communicate, paranoia, and worse (note that “almost”), it’s a moment of realization that could define any of the main characters in these stories—all of them well-off urbanites who succumb to a single, overwhelming obsession. The destructive consequences of those obsessions, traced with an almost clinical precision, are the substance of Barba’s absorbing, unnerving stories.
In “Nocturne,” a single, comfortably settled gay man in late middle age finds his life of routine upended by an infatuation with a much younger man he meets through a personal ad. The lover has no illusions about the life of quiet desperation he’s been leading, the disappointment he’s kept at bay: “It seemed impossible to him that he had held on this way for so many years.” The same objectivity manifests itself later, once the affair reaches the abrupt end he has done so much to bring about, when he declares to the younger man, all too plausibly, “now it’s going to take me five years to get over you.”
Barba raises the stakes, and heightens the emotional pitch, with “Debilitation,” an account of a teenage girl’s descent into anorexia. Her dysfunction starts with an unwelcome poolside kiss—“Luis’s ridiculous, almost unpleasant tongue like a soggy worm wriggling against hers”—and proceeds into a gruesome body horror of cutting and self-starvation before she winds up in an expensive private clinic. Inside, her steely will has to contend with not only a strict, eat-your-peas kind of authority but a witchy fellow patient and an unlikely love interest. Closure, recovery are still somewhere over the horizon when “Debilitation” reaches its close, but at its moving climax her pain unspools in a three-page sentence that is a tour de force for the translator, Lisa Dillman, as well as the author. (Here as in the other stories, Dillman’s skillfull rendering of Barba’s free indirect style, along with a number of casually deployed colloquialisms —“frumpier,” “meds,” terse teen-speak like “Are you into me?” and “It’s pretty messed up”— results in a text that stands on its own in English as a stylistic feat.)
From this ordeal it is a relative step down in intensity to “Marathon,” which might be described as a study in the obnoxiousness of the long-distance runner. Training for an upcoming road race with increasing single-mindedness, Barba’s marathon man is willing to jeopardize both his marriage and a nascent friendship with a fellow runner, conceivably the one person in his life who might be able to understand his fixation. As maddening as the athlete’s behavior is, Barba makes sure we tunnel into his perspective: “If anyone had asked if he was happy he wouldn’t have known how to respond. Perhaps by saying that he felt empty, and that emptiness was, if not happiness, then the closest thing to a state of calm he’d ever known, a calm that didn’t need to be spoken or shared.”
In the final story, “Descent,” a grown, married woman with children has to contend with a sudden injury to, and the subsequent decline of, her elderly mother. The ordeal is made even more trying by the fact that the dying woman is a horror, a tyrant whose neediness and emotional manipulations have turned her three grown children into basket cases. You might think this means the most extreme story has been saved for last, but there’s a subtle change-up in Barba’s approach here, a pulling-back from his previously tight focus, that makes “Descent” the most human and accessible of the four novellas. The material has room to breathe; not just because this family’s backstory is effectively sketched in over a few pages (and because the main character is given a supportive husband, free of her family’s pathologies) but because there’s a sense of contingency, an arbitrariness in the way events unfold around us, that eludes any fine-meshed authorial net. In the climactic deathbed scene, especially, absurdity tugs at mortality’s hem in a way that resonates with one’s own experience of this terminal moment. The young priest who arrives to administer the last rites is both awkward and incongruously handsome—and then: “Life, made more ridiculous by the presence of the hospital window, is the sound of a bus horn.” More than any of the other novellas in The Right Intention, this story made me curious to see what Barba can do in a novel.
As it happens, last year Transit Books brought out a 2008 Barba novel, the well-received Such Small Hands, also in a translation by Lisa Dillman, and he has written twelve books of fiction and nonfiction overall. He has also translated a pair of stylistically extravagant nineteenth-century literary renegades, Herman Melville and Thomas De Quincey, into Spanish. All of which furthers the impression one gets from The Right Intention that an American readership for this talented writer is overdue.
But if one can lament how long it took for The Right Intention to receive its passport into English, there’s a certain piquancy in the way these stories, encountered in 2018, evoke an irrecoverable moment that isn’t even twenty years in the past. Meaning, the short span of our millennium just prior to the arrival of cell phones, texting, social media, and all their attendant compulsions. (In a sequence that seems like a kind of historical fiction, the lover in “Nocturne” races from newsstand to newsstand to track down a copy of the magazine with the right personal ad in it.) Which isn’t to suggest that this quartet of novellas allows the reader to indulge in any easy nostalgia. Sentient people—the kind of people who read fiction in translation, for instance—like to chide themselves for the way the devices in their hands are rewiring their circuitry, messing with their heads. Barba’s stories are a bracing reminder that we were finding plenty of ways to torment ourselves long before the latest technologies made it so much easier for us. - Jeff Tompkins
https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/book-review/well-meaning-plans-give-in-to-destructive-obsessions-in-andres-barbas

Andrés Barba, Death of a Horse, Trans. by Lisa Dillman, Hispabooks, 2018.




Andrés Barba, Such Small Hands,Trans. by Lisa Dillman, Transit Books, 2017.
excerpt


The Guardian Best Books of 2017


Life changes at the orphanage the day seven-year-old Marina shows up. She is different from the other girls: at once an outcast and object of fascination. As Marina struggles to find her place, she invents a game whose rules are dictated by a haunting violence. Written in hypnotic, lyrical prose, alternating between Marina’s perspective and the choral we of the other girls, Such Small Hands evokes the pain of loss and the hunger for acceptance.


“Every once in a while a novel does not record reality but creates a whole new reality, one that casts a light on our darkest feelings. Kafka did that. Bruno Schulz did that. Now the Spanish writer Andrés Barba has done it with the terrifying Such Small Hands.”—Edmund White

“The news travelled through their skin, through the contact of their elbows at the table.” Dark, almost fevered, energies are traced with searing honesty – rage lays side-by-side with love as day and night flip with an intensity from one to the other. A strange unsettling novel that hews a remarkable sense within itself. - Kevin Gildea

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/such-small-hands-by-andres-barba-1.3365784

The following essay originally appears as the afterword to Andrés Barba’s Such Small Hands.

Every once in a while a novel does not record reality but creates a whole new reality, one that casts a light on our darkest feelings. Kafka did that. Bruno Schulz did that. Now the Spanish writer Andrés Barba has done it with the terrifying Such Small Hands, which introduces us to the psychosis of childhood emotions and midnight rituals. This is a unique book.
It is reputedly based on an incident that occurred in Brazil in the 1960s, in which the girls at an orphanage took the life of another child and played with her body parts for a week. But Such Small Hands is not a grisly fait divers. Following the lead of Jean Genet, who in The Maids turned a newspaper account of two psychopathic servants killing their mistress into a strangely hieratic, ritualistic tragedy, Barba has subsumed the grand guignol aspects of the bloody anecdote into a poetic meditation on love and childhood.
To signal that he doesn’t intend for his novel to be just a psychological study of little Marina, unable to express her grief after her parents’ death, Barba has introduced a Greek chorus of the other orphans. They are all in love with her; her introduction into the orphanage has changed their lives. She is beautiful and small and delicate. She has a mysterious scar on her shoulder caused by the same car accident that killed her parents; it seems almost like the scar where an angel wing was removed. The orphans are fascinated by Marina who, after all, lived a normal middle-class life with indulgent parents until recently; she has only lately joined their ranks and become orphaned.
Everything she does steals their attention. For instance, for a while she stops eating, repulsed by the sight of other girls stuffing their mouth holes. She seems somehow purer and stronger because of her fasting.
Then she invents a game in which each night, after lights out, Marina chooses a new girl to play the doll—passive, silent, asleep, motionless. Each “doll” is stripped of all her clothes and dressed in a special scratchy outfit. The girls are nearly hypnotized by this game, perhaps because it appeals to everyone’s fear (and forbidden wish) to be turned into an object, without a will or even motility, the unconscious target of everyone’s attention, utterly without responsibility for one’s actions (since one has none). Marina seems to understand the appeal of the game she has devised; she hints that she will be introducing a game hours before she reveals its exact rules and builds up enormous suspense and curiosity.

“Tonight we’re going to play a game,” she said.

“What game, Marina?”

“Just a game I know.”

“How do you play?”

“I’ll tell you tonight.”

“Can’t you tell us now?”

“No. Tonight.”

Ever since her parents’ death Marina has been playing with a doll given to her by a psychologist, perhaps for companionship, perhaps as a means of externalizing her bottled-up grief. The other girls, torn between their desire to love Marina and to hurt her, steal her doll and return it only limb by limb, in a terrible prefiguring of the catastrophe of this drama.
Although Such Small Hands is constructed around a plot that has all the inevitability and dignified horror of a Sophoclean tragedy, we read it with intense pleasure not just for its trajectory but for the ingenuity of its prose. As we submit to its murmuring cadences we thrill with the recognition not of familiar, ready-to-hand feelings but of long-forgotten ones. The psychologist Jean Piaget posited that children pass through stages of cognitive development that radically affect our perceptions of the world; if we could suddenly enter the consciousness of a child we would understand nothing since a child’s mental life is organized by entirely different schemas than those used by an adult.
Barba is not a scientist and his book is not the demonstration of a theory, but when we read a paragraph like this one about a dormitory of sleeping girls we are convinced that we are plunged into an archaic system of perception that we’ve forgotten but that is oddly reminiscent:
All together, they looked like a team of sleepy little horses. Something in their faces slackened, became friendly. They slept with an unbearable patience. When they were asleep they were like an oil painting, they gave Marina the impression that different faces rose up from beneath their faces, faces that bore no resemblance to their daytime voices: peculiar, polished faces. They had a defiant, challenging quality about them despite being at rest, like dozing predators.
This roiling, unstable perception of the surround reveals the almost psychotic, oneiric processes of a child’s mind that has not yet been able to understand the notion of object constancy, that doesn’t realize that there are things out there that remain the same no matter how they are illuminated by our imagination. Everything for a child is in flux, dangerously so, and Barba captures perfectly this seasickness, this instability.
When the girls cluster around Marina’s bed to play the dolly game, the chorus says:
How did our desire begin? We don’t know. Everything was silent in our desire, like acrobats in motion, like tightrope walkers. Desire was a big knife and we were the handle.
Anyone who has ever fallen asleep during a lecture knows that the mind instantly starts producing images as one is half aware of the setting and the speech, little cartoons that try to make sense of the waking and sleeping realities. This is the unmoored, precarious image-making of Barba’s girls. They can’t explain what they’re feeling nor why, they can only paddle in this ghastly fluid between reality and fantasy. Barba has returned us to the nightmare of childhood. - Edmund White
http://crimereads.com/how-andres-barba-turned-a-grisly-real-life-murder-into-a-terrifying-novel/

Such Small Hands is a short three-part novel(la). It begins with the aftermath of a horrific car accident: seven-year-old Marina survives, badly injured, but -- as she then often recites, in brief summary of her collapsed world --:
My father died instantly, my mother in the hospital.
       She spends quite a bit of time in hospital, where they try to help her with physical injury -- successfully, though she is slightly scarred -- and mental trauma. She is given a doll -- which she eventually names Marina as well. It is an alter ego of sorts, allowing her to project onto the object: stoically calm in its rigidity -- especially once the mechanism which had allowed its eyelids to close when the doll was laid down is broken -- and all-seeing: "she remained ever alert, like a visionary".
       Marina is taken to an orphanage -- which doesn't come with the usual bleak connotations, and is pretty and even fairly welcoming. For the girls there, it is an idyll -- knowing no other, it is their universe, and they are happily adapted to it. Marina is an outsider -- and remains outsider, among other reasons because of her memories of events and places outside this so narrowly circumscribed girl-world.
       The novel shifts back and forth between a neutral, third-person account, and then, once the action moves to the orphanage, a first-person-plural chorus -- the other girls at the orphanage, speaking as one, describing their actions and reactions once Marina is in their midst. Even as she joins them, and follows the same routines, Marina remains other: the 'we' does not include her and she is never truly one of them.
       That Marina's arrival upsets and then shatters the idyll is already hinted at in the girls' first words:
     It was once a happy city; we were once happy girls.
       Both Marina and the girls act -- appropriately enough -- childishly. The girls are curious about Marina, and try to include her, yet they also remain suspicious; even as they are drawn to her, and her difference, they act out against her. They are sometimes cruel -- but also seduced by Marina, who offers a glimpse of otherness -- other worlds, other possibilities. Marina is, and remains different -- in no small part, because: "She'd already lived so many things".
       With childish cruelty Marina's doll is broken -- breaking part of her, too. Eventually, Marina is driven to desperate invention: a game, of which she is the master, in which each night a girl is turned into and treated as a doll, specially made- and dressed-up, required to lie perfectly still and let herself be treated like a doll:
     Every night we'll all get to play with the doll and kiss her and tell her secrets. And she'll just look at us and listen to us, because she loves us, and we love her, too
       It is a creepy game, but the girls are fascinated by it and easily lose themselves in it, whether in the entirely passive role of doll or in 'playing' with whoever else is in the role. Unreacting, the doll allows the girls to reveal themselves to it in the way they can not to each other otherwise; their childish limitations -- the difficulty of communication -- seem transcended by dealing with this person-as-object.. But she is not, of course, an actual doll but a living creature -- and, more than that, one of them. Each of them steps in and out of this alternate role -- both afraid and eager --, losing themsleves in the spell of this unusual game.
       Marina controls the game, as puppet-master of sorts -- notably in making up the doll's face each time -- but catastrophe comes one night when she takes on the role of the doll. She is not meant to be the doll -- "But you can't, you're not allowed", the girls protest her desire to upset their assigned roles and this order, too -- but she desperately wants to be, and eventually gets her way. The girls -- as a mass, not individuals, the madness of the crowd -- then act, and treat Marina as the doll they want her to be; they are joyous, happy -- and that in a still childishly innocent way. Indeed: "We played with her all night". But it is anything but a happy ending.
       Barba's writing here, both in the more neutral third person and in the group-voice of the chorus of the girls, beautifully fits with the subject matter. The world here is one of childish innocence -- which is, realistically, far from a pure, idealized innocence -- and incomprehension. Marina is traumatized by the loss of her parents, but can't articulate the depths of her trauma; indeed, words are often lacking here, because the children are so young that they don't yet have the capacity (or vocabulary) to formulate more complex thoughts. So too the girls both act out and realize that their actions may be inappropriate -- hitting Marina when in fact they want to draw her into their circles, for example --but can't help but act childishly-impulsively.
       The childish universe, and especially its incomprehension about the consequences of actions, as well as the depths and fluctuations of the girls' feelings -- especially the powerful swings of their love and hate of Marina -- are beautifully realistically recreated, in a simple but precise language.
       A disturbing story, Such Small Hands is exceptionally well-told; indeed,it is a near-perfect story. - M.A.Orthofer
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/espana/barbaa.htm

Orphaned when her parents are killed in a car accident, a delicate little girl named Marina is sent to an orphanage, where she finds a world as mysterious and forbidding as any alien planet. In time, though, she reshapes this microcosm into her own dominion. Barba’s prose is both halting and haunting; simple balanced sentences whose opacity hint at an underlying fear and wariness. The perspective moves fluidly from the other girls at the orphanage—“Everything around her was contaminated, and so were we”—to Marina—“Marina could see the pulse on their necks, their sleep smell”—and back again. A pariah at first, Marina begins to earn the respect of the other girls when she kills a caterpillar and its burial becomes a communal act. At a seemingly random moment, Marina understands that she is different, a staggering realization that gives her a strange sense of empowerment, and prompts her to impose her will on the other girls. This transition, in which she turns the girls into her dolls (“We were all lovers and the game was our love.”) is as unsettling as Marina’s initial introduction to her new home, when she was the prey and they the predators. Interpret Barba’s elliptical story as you will, but chances are you won’t soon forget it. - Publishers Weekly

A newcomer to an all-girls orphanage invents a violent game for the other children to play each night.
Marina is in the back seat of her parents’ car during the accident that kills them both. “My father died instantly, my mother in the hospital,” is the refrain she hears, over and over again, from the doctors, nurses, and psychiatrists at the hospital. It’s the same refrain she repeats to the adults at the orphanage to which she is soon taken. Barba’s (August, October, 2015, etc.) fourth novel to appear in English describes the haunting, mysterious world of prepubescent girls. He switches back and forth from Marina’s perspective to the collective point of view of the other girls. They’re a kind of unified body, and Marina, who is new and freshly beset by grief, is not unlike a virus in their midst. One day, Marina impales a caterpillar on a stick, and the other girls gather round to watch. Not long after, Marina invents a “game” for the girls to play each night. “It’s easy,” she tells them. “Each night, one of you is the doll. I put on her makeup, and she’s the doll. And the rest of us look at her and play with her. She’ll be a good dolly, and we’ll be good to her.” It’s a dark, insoluble game, both erotic and violent. Barba’s descriptions of the furtive, nearly cabalistic world of children are wonderful and disturbing. The border between what is real and what isn’t has been fogged over. His writing is both lyrical and spare, and the slim volume, which can be read in a single sitting, carries a heft far outweighing its physical presence. Barba’s girls, and their game, will linger in the minds of his readers.
A darkly evocative work about young girls, grief, and the unsettling, aching need to belong. - Kirkus Reviews

BURIED IN THE MIDDLE of Clarice Lispector’s short story “The Smallest Woman in the World,” which was included in her 1960 breakout collection Family Ties, we learn of a horrifying (and purportedly true) anecdote about an incident that occurred in a Brazilian orphanage sometime during the 1950s.
Having no dolls to play with, and maternity already pulsating terribly in the hearts of those orphans, the sly little girls had concealed another girl’s death from the nun. They hid the corpse in a wardrobe until the nun left, and played with the dead girl, giving her baths and little snacks, punishing her just so they could kiss her afterward, consoling her.
Aside from evoking the image of playing with a doll, Lispector’s short story, which chronicles a French explorer’s encounter with the smallest woman of the smallest tribe of pygmies in Central Congo (also purportedly true), otherwise has nothing to do with the events at the orphanage. In a sea of several hundred sentences, the incident appears only in these two. Its connection to the story is, at best, a metaphorically moral and, at worst, a disturbingly tangential mise en abyme that jars us from our complacency but whose broader purpose remains a mystery. The anecdote compels us to consider everything from “the malignity of our desire to be happy” to “the ferocity with which we want to play.” But it is up to us to decide what it — and its relation to the broader story about the European colonization of Africa — is supposed to mean, exactly.
Andrés Barba’s novel Such Small Hands, originally published in Spanish in 2008, spends the entirety of its 83 evocative pages trying to figure out this meaning. Barba, a Spanish writer with a gift for expressing gallons of meaning from only a handful of words, has pointed to these two sentences when explaining the origins of the novel. He read them years ago and, it seems, they have fascinated him ever since. But the novel isn’t about Lispector’s short story. It isn’t even really about the anecdote. It is, instead, about something so alien to anyone who might pick it up at a bookstore: the psychological world of orphaned girls. The novel, which is set in the present, delicately observes this world mostly through the eyes of Marina, a seven-year-old girl who arrives at an orphanage following a car accident that kills both of her parents. We relive the accident and witness Marina’s ensuing haze in the hospital. Yet the people who treat her seem to be more affected by the accident than she does. Her questions about what happens next are met with the kind of incomprehension only an adult could provide: “‘You’re going to live in a nice new house, a very pretty place with other girls, you’ll see,’ the psychologist said. ‘No parents?’ ‘No. But it’s very pretty, you’ll see.’”
Depending on your cultural diet, the subject of the psychology of orphaned girls may sound either too cliché or too academic. But for Spaniards in the late aughts, attempting to understand the inner lives of children couldn’t have been a more popular endeavor. Children were everywhere in Spanish culture. In 2007, J. A. Bayona had released The Orphanage, a horror film about, among other things, the difficulties adults encounter when communicating with distressed children. The next year, just a month after Barba’s novel was published, Camino, a film about a girl who died of cancer at 14 and who is now in the process of becoming canonized by the Catholic Church, appeared in cinemas across Spain; it would eventually walk away with six of a possible seven Goya Awards — the Spanish equivalent of the Oscars. And, by the end of that year, the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón judicially decreed “the lost children of Francoism,” an estimated 30,000 children who were abducted from Republican parents during the Spanish Civil War and the ensuing Franco dictatorship, a crime against humanity. In each of these cases, childhood psychology — both fictional and real — took center stage: How brainwashed were these children? What could they have known about their own condition? Can society do anything to salvage their lives or their memory?
Such Small Hands unearths similar questions, not so much by providing an adult’s perspective on the matter, as these examples do, but instead by circumscribing the narrative to the point of view of children. Barba gives us two perspectives, both from the point of view of the children in the orphanage. Throughout much of the book, he alternates chapters: one from the perspective of Marina, another, from the perspective of the girls in the orphanage, who share a single, collective narrative voice. This may sound rather limiting, a self-imposed handicap on a Faulkneresque experiment in literary form. But it turns out to be liberating, in the same way that the Dogme 95 movement, which sought to free film from technological gimmicks by way of adhering to strict formal rules, yielded such master classes on scene and mood as Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen. For Barba, it’s the limits on narrative form that open the door for probing the psychological questions of childhood.
In the novel, the girls’ “emotions are translated into actions, sometimes touching and sweet, sometimes cruel, even violent,” writes Lisa Dillman, Barba’s translator, in her note at the end of the book. “It’s fair to say that Such Small Hands is in many ways about translation.” Without an excellent translator, such a broad view of the novel would have been lost on its readers. Fortunately for us, Dillman’s translation is exquisite, and we experience Barba’s surgical precision with tone and meaning from the operating room floor, not merely from the observation deck. With many translations, one can feel the depressions and scars from translators doing their best to stitch together myriad forms of prose in order to make up for the lack of precise English equivalents. Dillman’s translation, by contrast, is absolutely seamless. Consider, for instance, the orphans’ theory of Marina:
It was as if Marina had already seen all the movies, already gone on all field trips, already played all games; there was something terrible in her past. She’d already lived so many things. She buried her head in the pillow and saw everything, she rested her head and it was heavy as a rock, filled with memories, she pressed down on her pencil (How many pencils had she had? Thousands? Millions?) and even the pencil was a little envious, wishing she would use it to write all those things that Marina had already lived.
Just as Barba manages to capture the naïveté, wonder, and grandiose conclusion-drawing of what childhood thought is all about, Dillman manages to strike the right balance between not alienating readers with direct translations of labyrinthine Spanish prose while also not changing the meaning, mood, and metaphors of the original. What’s more: By the end of the book, I completely forgot I was reading a translation.
This theory of Marina, which the orphans formulate about halfway through the book, is also something of a turning point. Their earlier suspicions of Marina had been abstract. “From one second to the next something had broken: our trust,” the orphans conclude upon Marina’s arrival. They would treat her like a ragdoll, teasing her, hitting her, and making her feel like an unwelcome alien. “It was as if someone had written: ‘Now hate Marina’ and they’d all obeyed.” But, at the same time, they would hang on her every word. At one point in the novel, she goes more than a day without eating just, it appears, in order to prove it to herself. “Marina would go through what lovers sometimes do: she would become a slave more to the act itself than to the driving force behind it.” Her force of will mesmerizes the other girls. “There was something majestic and tough in Marina’s pallor,” they observe. Since that first encounter, they come to think of her as a God-like figure.
In the last section of the book, Marina invents a game in which, every night, a girl at random would be chosen to be a doll, completely at the mercy of the rest of the girls who would dress her, put on her make-up, and play with her. During the day, Marina continues to suffer the bullying of earlier, which increases with each page. But at night everything changes: the girls would worship her. As the day-and-night routine approaches its opposing extremes, their distrust of Marina resembles a loss of faith. By the end of the novel, their resolution predictably completes the Christian metaphor, with Marina as the Jesus figure. She inevitably suffers an appropriate, child-like crucifixion: as in the Lispector story, Marina becomes the doll that the other orphans will play with.
Have we learned anything about the “malignity of our desire to be happy,” the “ferocity with which we want to play,” or any of the other questions raised by the Lispector story? It’s difficult to say. The novel ends, like Breaking Bad, with a resolution in the form of a bowtie that doesn’t allow us to witness the fallout. What we learn has less to do with answering questions than with being reminded of the difficulties of childhood. Few of our difficulties, of course, compare to Marina’s. Some that do: bullying, ostracism, loneliness, misunderstanding, sadness — all of which are part of the emotional toll that comes with a new class, a new grade, or a new school. Such Small Hands returns these facts of growing up from the storage closet of mere abstractions to their proper place on the shelf of things children actually experience. Barba’s stunning and beautiful prose helps us realize that our adult incomprehension is not absolute. - Bécquer Seguín
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/mortifying-miniatures-on-andres-barbas-such-small-hands/

Marina, the seven-year-old girl around whom Andrés Barba’s chilling Spanish novella unfolds, has been wounded in an accident that killed her parents, her skin flensed from her ribs “like a curtain”. She is taken to live in an orphanage – “a very pretty place”, promises her psychologist, “with other girls”. She does not, however, go alone. She takes with her a wide-eyed doll, also called Marina, which is her constant companion: “The only one who didn’t lie. The only one calm, as if halfway through a long life.”
Both child-Marina and doll-Marina become the focus of the other girls’ attention in a manner that is part cruel, part adoring and part uneasily erotic. In time their affectionate but uneasy playfulness becomes a secret night-time game, of a kind of lascivious malice that may well trouble the reader long after the book has been set aside (“Desire was a big knife and we were the handle …”). The adults of the orphanage remain peripheral, unable or unwilling to put a restraining hand on the children: the presence most strongly felt is not that of the principal but of a statue of Saint Anne, whose welcoming arms are “black and inescapable”.
Barba inhabits the minds of children with an exactitude that seems to me so uncanny as to be almost sinister – as when the girls, while washing, see Marina’s scar. The effect is of having taken a bite of Eden’s forbidden fruit: all at once they become aware of themselves as mortal, and just as likely as Marina to be wounded. But the book is by no means without relief, nor is this a cynical exploitation of an atavistic fear of the child: the passages in which the other girls narrate their regard for Marina, in a first person plural voice, have an affecting tenderness. “Were we forgiving her? Was that what love was?”
It is Marina’s scar, and what it signifies, that eventually unpins the girls from the ordinary playtimes of children. Leslie Jamison, in her essay “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain”, writes of wounded women: “Violence turns them celestial … we can’t look away. We can’t stop imagining new ways for them to hurt.” This might have been the epigraph for the book: Marina is beatified by suffering, but the mere fact of her pain, stitched in scar tissue over her ribcage, is an enticement to more.
This is as effective a ghost story as any I have read, but lying behind the shocks is a meditation on language and its power to bind or loosen thought and behaviour. Since Marina and the girls cannot verbalise the intense confusion of their feelings, they resort to expressing them by altogether more direct means. Only when they are plainly told what they have done do they begin to think they have transgressed: “They put a name on everything. They said, ‘Look what you did.’ The names scared us. How is it that a thing gets caught inside a name and never comes out again?”
Barba’s use of genre conventions is both affectionate and knowing. All the ghost-story aficionado could ask of an evening’s reading by the fire is here: a child’s toy animated by longing and distress, and possibly by something more; an orphanage whose “classroom, dining room, bathrooms, closets [and] red-haired clown at the door with a chalkboard in his stomach” seem loaded with a malicious potential energy; the disrupting arrival of a stranger. But he also interrogates the genre, querying the limits of what it means to be haunted and haunting, and of what most affects the reader. The lingering impression is not, necessarily, that we might wake in the night, wondering if an object has moved towards us of its own accord; but that the world contains other and nearer evils that cannot be exorcised or placated.
As is ever the case when reading in translation, I wondered how closely Lisa Dillman’s prose mimicked Barba’s lexis and cadence in Spanish. From the first it is faintly odd, sometimes affectless, the phrasing occasionally slightly awry; but this is so wholly in keeping with the book’s uncanny effects and plays so significant a role in its accumulation of cool terror that I can only assume it is a superbly skilful translation playing close attention to Barba’s original.
An afterword from Edmund White refers to Barba’s source material: an episode in a Brazilian orphanage reported in the 60s. Generally I have a ghoulish look at distressing news reports; here I refrained. I was partly unwilling to fracture Barba’s fragile construction of tenderness and terror, partly too thoroughly unnerved.
The novel’s title recalls the final line of EE Cummings’s poem, “Somewhere I Have Never Travelled” (“nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands”), and I found myself returning to its verses as I pondered the full effects and meaning of the book. It is, yes, about language, wounding, wickedness: but it is also about how fleeting and how vulnerable is the state of childhood innocence – that “nothing which we are to perceive in this world/equals the power of [its] intense fragility”. - Sarah Perry
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/26/such-small-hands-andres-barba-review

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 https://www.ft.com/content/85e702ac-7c4c-11e7-ab01-a13271d1ee9c
 Such Small Hands is a magnificently chilling antidote to society’s reverence for ideas of infantile innocence and purity. Instead, Andrés Barba — one of Granta’s Best of Young Spanish Novelists — drags his readers into a hyper-real world of childhood, where children are the objects of horror and their games, rules and rituals the stuff of nightmares.Seven-year-old Marina is badly injured in a car crash that kills her parents. “My father died instantly and then my mother died in the hospital” is the refrain she internalises and repeats.“You could touch those words, rest your hand on each sinuous curve: expectant, incomprehensible words,” the narrator explains, using fractured, sensory-specific fragments to describe Marina’s experience: a silence that’s “solidified” like a “positive form”; the white of her exposed ribs gleaming through her “gaping flesh, sliced so cleanly that the skin fell away like a curtain”; the “metallic taste in her throat”; a desperate thirst.It’s not that language isn’t adequate — indeed, Lisa Dillman’s translation is as evocative as a reader could wish for, the “muffled, maritime sound of the road” right before the crash, the moment of impact described as that in which the car “jumped the meridian” — Marina is simply too young and too traumatised to be able to articulate the experience fully herself.Once she has recovered, she’s taken to an orphanage, but Marina isn’t like the other girls there. She’s different. As they take their morning showers together, the sight of the new girl’s scarred torso precipitates the collapse of the other girls’ collective identity: “Suddenly we saw each other seeing it, we differentiated each other among things, among the others, we differentiated her, her back, her walk, her eyes, her face like a vague feeling of fear.”This ominous Greek chorus begins with the low promise of danger — “One afternoon the adult said, ‘There’s a new girl coming. Don’t be scared.’ But we weren’t then. At first we weren’t scared” — but builds into a febrile, nausea-inducing hysteria: “Desire was a big knife and we were the handle.”After the accident, the psychologist treating Marina gives her a doll, but the girls at the orphanage tear the toy’s limbs from its body and bury them in the playground. Soon after, Marina invents a creepy night-time game for everyone to play — stripped bare and redressed, with their faces made up, the girls take it in turns to pretend to be the doll: “The differences between them diminished: from now on they were doll necks, doll hands, doll eyes and lips.”Like Jean Cocteau’s terrible “Game”, the bizarre version of life and death played by the teenage siblings in his novella Les Enfants Terribles, Barba’s grasp of the vertiginous balance between the real and the imaginary in the girls’ play is absolute. But whereas Cocteau’s protagonists indulge in a fantasy of childhood that keeps adult life at bay, Barba’s still undeveloped little girls have a far shakier grasp on reality. Hatred and love, rage and desire, the violent and the erotic — everything becomes entangled. As “gentleness” gives way to “incomprehensible hostility”, and the girls transform from a “team of sleepy little horses” into a pack of “dozing predators”, the path is set towards a shocking and bloody denouement worthy of the most spine-tingling horror film. - Lucy Scholes
https://www.ft.com/content/85e702ac-7c4c-11e7-ab01-a13271d1ee9c

Andrés Barba’sSuch Small Hands introduces Marina, a young girl who tragically lost both her parents in a car crash which has left her scarred, but alive.  After a period of rehabilitation at a hospital, she is taken to an orphanage, her home for the foreseeable future, with only her new doll for company.
The other girls at the orphanage have a happy life, but Marina’s arrival upsets the equilibrium, casting a shadow over their days.  Despite their desire to get along with her, the dark-haired girl with her sullen face (and creepy doll) just doesn’t fit in.  What ensues is a tale told from two sides as Marina and the girls describe life at the institution, which has rather different aspects depending on the time of day: when the sun is out, the new girl is shunned and picked on; at night, she becomes their leader. However, children can be rather cruel, and the games they play spiral out of control, almost without their realising it…
Barba has already had two books out in English, courtesy of the ever-interesting Hispabooks (Rain Over Madrid, a collection of four novellas, and the short novel August, October), and this is another impressive effort.  It’s a beautiful work, in terms of both content and appearance, and while it’s a relatively brief piece, there’s so much there to reflect on that a reread is inevitable.  Lisa Dillman, who is in the enviable position of translating both Barba and Yuri Herrera, has done her usual excellent job here, making Such Small Hands a delight to read.
Which is not to say that this is all easy going.  In truth, Barba’s latest work is a rather dark affair, in which he examines the psychology of young girls in a closed environment.  The real start of the story is Marina’s arrival at the orphanage, an event that disturbs the happy, organised life of the other girls:
“This is Marina,” they said.
And yet she didn’t look like us.  She had dark-girl eyes.  How could we describe her?  How could we say, “This is what Marina was like the first time we saw her”?  We might get tired, we might start to describe her and then have to keep going back to clarify things, and nothing we said would be right except for the feeling that you couldn’t really see all the way inside that girl.
She was always on alert.  Always.
p.32 (Portobello Books, 2017)
What they experience after the initial meeting doesn’t make them feel any better.  They’re taken aback by her dark moods, uneasy at the constant sight of the small, pretty girl standing ominously in front of the black statue of Saint Anne outside the building, and the reader initially shares their sense of foreboding.  When we later see Marina creeping out of bed in the middle of the night, sitting next to the girls’ beds to watch them sleep, it isn’t hard to share their feelings.
Cleverly, though, Barba turns this around by shifting the point of view, showing us how the other girls, frustrated by Marina’s otherness, begin to put her in her place.  Ignored in class and bullied in the playground, Marina just wants a way to get involved, even if she doesn’t really want to become another indistinguishable part of the group.  And it’s here that the doll motif comes into its own – when her own toy is stolen, she decides that it’s time to start a game in which the girls themselves are dolls, taking it in turns to offer themselves up to the group.
Part of the success of Such Small Hands is the way the narrative is structured.  Once the initial premise is set up, the story alternates between third-person pieces focusing on Marina and a Greek-Chorus-style first-person plural in which the other girls as a whole explain their swings between adoration and fascination:
Inexplicably, we all edged closer, without meaning to.  An inevitable attraction made us crave contact with her, seek out her voice, yearn for her to look at us.  We no longer cared about the animals, or felt scared about the wolf, or sorry for the elephant, or admired the glimmering grace of the dolphins; we wanted Marina’s contact, and we didn’t know how to cast ourselves into that desert. (pp.70/1)
The story constantly pivots on the feelings of the girls towards Marina, their breathless fascination with her stories of the outside world and their willingness to submit to her commands during the game contrasting with the ostracisation in class and the petty bullying in the playground.
What comes across strongly in all this is the sense that for the most part the characters’ behaviour is unconscious.  Far from planning to victimise or worship Marina, the girls are simply swept along by their emotions, unable to step back and consider whether the way they’re acting is appropriate.  While there are some adults in the story (virtually always described merely as ‘an adult’ or ‘the adults’), they’re shadowy background figures outside the main story, leaving the children to their own devices – and that’s the problem.  The girls have no idea how to deal with the swirling emotions caused by the change in their daily life, torn between the powerful feelings of attraction and repulsion they experience around Marina, often simultaneously:
We loved her furtively then.  Her eyes smiled sadly, the house relaxed, and we had to be very still and wait, to watch her again. (p.49)
And that’s after a little light bullying…  There’s a definite Lord of the Flies element to the book, and as you can imagine, it’s unlikely to end well.
In short, Such Small Hands is a wonderful short novel, complex in its ambiguity despite its brevity.  Just as the girls struggle to come to terms with their emotions, the reader is never quite sure whose side they should be on, if anyone’s, right to the bitter end.  Portobello have been very successful with translated fiction in recent years, with Jenny Erpenbeck’sThe End of Days taking out the final Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and Han Kang’sThe Vegetarian being awarded the Man Booker International Prize a couple of years back.  Short as it is, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Such Small Hands ended up in serious contention for next year’s MBIP – you heard it here first
- https://tonysreadinglist.wordpress.com/2017/09/04/such-small-hands-by-andres-barba-review/

Put simply: childhood is strange. Countless writers have tried to capture this strangeness, the landscape of novelty that is a child’s world. Such Small Hands, a slim and haunting novel by Andrés Barba, not only succeeds at this but does so in one hundred haunting pages. Each one of these pages is exquisite, and the end result is a perfectly expressed work that transmits the perverse and bizarre experience that is youth, where games signify life and death and where relationships are teased and pushed to the breaking point. Childhood: part fairy tale, part nightmare.
The novel opens in the midst of tragedy and the reader being told, at the same time as our young protagonist Marina: “Father died instantly, your mother is in a coma.” The family has been in a car accident and Marina, though seriously injured, has survived. Brief details of the accident flit in and out of Marina’s mind; before long her mother has also died and the aftermath is complete. Marina herself has been in recovery, and once she is ready to be released she is told she’ll be sent to an orphanage.
The book is told in three parts, and the second part shifts to a narrative spoken through the collective voice of the girls at the orphanage, who speculate what the newcomer will look like:
Some of us thought she’d be big, others said she’d be our size; some said she’d be very pretty, others didn’t think so. Her first triumph was this: we were no longer the same. We, who had been tamed, we, who made no distinctions among ourselves and our bodies, we, who all wanted the same things, were no longer all the same.
The collective voice isn’t just a stylistic choice, but crucial for the story since the group of girls are, in many ways, a single mass. Acting as a Greek chorus of sorts, they not only seem to sense the advancing change, even danger, that Marina will bring to their lives, but imbue it with a metaphysical weight that threatens to transform the lives they are fated to live out. Before Marina arrives this collective voice describes lunch at the orphanage: “It was as if we were all one mouth eating the ham, as if our cheese was all the same cheese: wholesome and creamy and tasting the same to all of us.”
The arrival of Marina is nearly as fraught as the return of Oedipus to Thebes or Agamemnon to Argos. Marina immediately stands out from the other orphaned girls in that she knew and still remembers her parents; she’d had a childhood of new dresses and toys and visits to Disneyland Paris and, most importantly, a family life. At first the girls bully Marina: “If the adult wasn’t watching, we hit her. Never very hard, usually just softly. She’d crouch to pick something up and we’d stab her butt with a sharp pencil. She’d flinch and we’d laugh.”Marina has the realization that she’s different and decides to stop eating, perhaps to feel in control or, perhaps, to control the other girls. This realization was like “carrying something haughty and cruel, like a flag. I’m different. Faith in that belief, even just for a moment, is all it takes for everything to change.” Marina’s fasting gives her the self-assurance needed to turn the tables; the girls are both intrigued and frightened by this strange archetypal phenomenon, by the new girl whose sense of quiet confidence is strange but irrefutable, a nature that quickly begins to impose its will upon them.
Throughout the novel the children appear as instinctive, sometimes frenzied animals on the verge of making some huge discovery about themselves. A trip to the zoo grants Barba the opportunity to draw subtle connections between these children and the beasts they observe. Amid the wolves and the peacocks Marina suddenly announces: “Tonight we’re going to play a game.” She says nothing more and the collective voice underscores how “the rest of the trip was tinged with the anxiety of the wait. The wait was essential.” Although Marina has become another animal, she still stands visibly separate from the pack and the allure and fascination she holds for the other girls is overpowering.
An inevitable attraction made us crave contact with her, seek out her voice, yearn for her to look at us. We no longer cared about the animals, or felt scared of the wolf, or sorry for the elephant, or admired the glimmering grace of the dolphins; we wanted Marina’s contact, and we didn’t know how to cast ourselves into that desert.
Few authors would equate a relationship between human beings to an arid desert, but the remainder of Barba’s tale bears out this unnerving metaphor.
For the game Marina has devised takes the novel into even darker territory. There is a strange dream-logic to Barba’s writing and the action of the novel begins to mimic the implacable forward-march of dreams. Marina’s game is very simple: once they’re left alone a single girl is chosen to be a doll and the rest of the girls undress her, apply makeup and dress her up again. Marina instructs all the other girls: “The doll has to be quiet; she’s not allowed to talk. And she has to be very pale and sweet and wear this dress. She’s like us, but in doll version; she can’t live without us.” Each night a different girl is chosen and the game proceeds. Here the collective voice grows increasingly claustrophobic and increasingly urgent as what happens to the doll-girl happens to all the girls. “Closing our eyes, we’d compel our bodies to produce the sleep-smell that convinced the adult it was okay for her to go.”
Barba’s earlier books in English translation, Rain over Madrid and August, October, evince the complicated distance between perception and reality, between how a character sees herself and how she is understood by those around her. Barba’s interest in the wordless transformations that occur in youth as well as the obsessions and fixations whose seeds are planted in life’s earliest stages are on full display in this novel. The reader can almost feel the children growing in both body and mind.
Like a puppet-master, or an idle Greek divinity, or even one of the three Fates, Marina is in control of everything; she chooses the child who will be the doll, simply says: you. The orphans come to play with the chosen child as if it were a doll, a smaller version of themselves. The perversity and logic of this ritual is impossible to ignore. “We’d start to undress the chosen girl, thinking trivial thoughts; that we never noticed that mole on her shoulder before, that her face leaned comically to one side, that her nightgown had Donald Duck on it and was frayed at the hem.”
Barba’s novel is a sharp, strange and highly authentic piece of fiction. There is not a superfluous word. In Lisa Dillman’s hands, Andrés Barba’s prose is nothing short of sublime; her renderings almost force the book’s readers to underline and read aloud passages by the dozen. In her translator's note, Dillman notes the power the book had over her when she’d first read it close to a decade ago, as well as her overwhelming desire to translate his singular story as a result. It is not hard to understand why: Barba writes his scenes in brief sketches, left for the reader to piece together like shards of pottery, revealing a motif in crisp outlines.
And this motif is one to take note of: childhood is indeed strange, but Barba’s prose imbues that stage of life with a menace rarely seen before. Playing with the chosen child, the chorus of orphans says: “And then we were discovering that her body was smaller than it had ever been. And with the smallness came fascination. Because anything small fits in our hand, and we can touch it, and move it, and guess what it’s for, and see how it works.” Barba’s readers would do well to take these lines to heart as they remember the haunting experience that is childhood. - Mark Haber
http://www.musicandliterature.org/reviews/2017/4/17/andres-barbas-such-small-hands

In the second section of 2666, Bolaño’s lit professor Amalfitano despairs that contemporary writers, rather than tackling “the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown,” instead “choose the perfect exercises.” The joke of this assertion – if it’s funny or not depends on your mood and/or vantage – is two-fold: the first part being that Bolaño is having his very own character assert that 2666, the very novel you’re reading, is itself an example of a “great, imperfect, torrential work.”
Such Small Hands, by Spanish author Andrés Barba, is a slender book that falls into that other category: a tidily executed project, one with tremendous tonal intimacy and rhythmic language. (Given the lovely and propulsive and inward-turned prose, it’s clear that translator Lisa Dillman has done a masterful job.) The basic story of Such Small Hands is simultaneously unique and familiar in its echo of fairy tale tropes: a girl’s parents die. She goes to live in an orphanage. Things get weird. Then they end.
In the first section, we follow the young girl, Marina, as she experiences the after-trauma of the car accident in which she is violently scarred and her parents are killed: Her father died instantly, her mother in the hospital, is the novel’s opening sentence, a sentence that functions as our refrain throughout the first section. Barba writes Marina’s slow recovery – of body, of mind, of language – in a hushed and distant third-person, creating a sort of trance state as he focuses on mood and rhythm of language more than the mundane process of recovery: “Over those two months of convalescence, Marina sank into [the doctor’s] looks the way you sink into a tub.”
Near the end of the first section, Marina is given a doll to help with her therapy: “Dolly repeated over and over, dolly always waiting to lift her arms and be picked up, and the past shrinking, the loneliness shrinking.” It’s this doll that she takes into the second section, to her new life in an orphanage. Here the novel opens up, if slightly: sections alternate between Marina’s point of view (written in that same distant third) and, quite effectively, a collective retrospective first-person told from the point of view of the girls in the orphanage. Alongside Marina’s still-fractured mental state, a new tension is introduced: the girls’ upset at Marina’s disruption of their prior seemingly idyllic state: “It was once a happy city; we were once happy girls.”
While the tensions that ensue are keenly captured, unsettling, and even awful, they’re inflicted upon us – and Marina, and the doll, and the girls, and one unfortunate caterpillar – in an almost context-free fugue state. We aren’t ever sure how to access Marina (more below), and nothing is told to us of how life was for the girls at the orphanage before Marina’s arrival. The implied idyllic state seems unlikely, and so this reads as if Barba has chosen to be faithful to the tidiness of his project rather than try to understand the more complex realities of orphanage life. To Barba, the point is Marina-as-disruption: the fact that and the manner in which Marina – through her scarredness (in the shower the girls gaze, rapt, at her wound), her worldliness (she has seen movies they’ve never heard of), her love for her doll (the girls dismember it), and her strange behaviors (she stabs a caterpillar) – disrupts their collective sense of self is all that matters.
The distance and lack of definition with which Marina is presented keeps her at arm’s length from the reader (and, too, the girls): she is a strange girl gone through strange things, and, like the girls, we watch her without empathy. That the girls are allowed voice means that we feel, more than anything, how deeply disturbed they are by Marina – but as we’ve known Marina longer, she doesn’t disturb us so much as seem like a wounded animal, wandering strangely through her shattered existence. In some ways this is one of the novel’s strengths: the well-captured collective ambivalence of the girls being perplexed by, envious of, and hateful toward a different other plopped into their harmonious collective existence. (One wonders if the novel might allow the reader a clearer situatedness if the Marina-centric sections were removed, if we shared only the girls’ vantage.)
One of the jacket blurbs compares Such Small Hands to The Virgin Suicides; this is misleading. While Such Small Hands does have a collective We unsettled by an Other, this group of orphaned girls is no stand-in for society, and the Other is not a representation of what happens when society begins to decay. In Eugenides’s novel, the boys are clearly haunted by the Lisbon girls, and the past tense is crucial to his tale; here, the orphaned girls are looking back at their short time with Marina without any clear self-criticism or self-awareness, and the impact and meaning of these events – either to us or to the characters (save Marina) – are ultimately hard to pin down. I’m not sure that this is a criticism; Barba has intentionally chosen not to hold the readers’ hand and reassure us that yes, the way we feel toward the book – toward Marina, toward the girls – is how we’re supposed to feel. Still, one might wish that we were clearly meant to feel more unsettled than uncertain.
The final section becomes literary: Marina, hated by the girls by day, takes power over them at night as she invents a game one of the girls (chosen by Marina) is dressed up and treated like a doll until morning. The chosen girl can’t resist, can’t speak, can’t be willful. This part of the novel speeds toward its conclusion, and the collective nature of the orphanage girls – they are never individualized – limits Barba to summary.
Ultimately, it’s the doll that defines Barba’s project. Dollness is referenced in the title. It is Marina’s therapy. The girls are transfixed by the doll until they destroy it, yet the doll rises again in Marina’s strange game, only to be destroyed once more. The use of the doll is more literary device than representation of reality; it is intricately psychological, symbolic, allusive . . . and not of the real world. And so with Such Small Hands: beautiful very much in the manner of a Sally Mann self-portrait: precise in its plotting and intention, thick with mood and gloom, with a quietly dreadful bizarreness. It’s disarming and strange and wonderfully awful – and constructed very skillfully. And as with Mann’s work, it feels constructed, more a carefully arranged system-in-a-novel than that imperfect torrent. This is not meant as a criticism, either: the second joke about Amalfitano’s assertion is that Bolaño’s non-2666 projects are tidy compositions, works less life-like than doll-like. Tidiness doesn’t diminish their excellence any more than it diminishes just how very impressive Such Small Hands is, along with the particular and quite apparent talent of Andrés Barba. - Sean Bernard
http://www.full-stop.net/2017/04/11/reviews/sean-bernard/such-small-hands-andres-barba/
Near the end of Peter Weir’s masterpiece Picnic at Hanging Rock, the young girl Irma, who has been missing for a few weeks, returns to Appleyard, an all-girl school in Victorian Australia, to say her farewells. She enters the room where her former classmates, dressed in white, are performing some exercises at some hanging beams. Irma stands in red between the beams, smiling. Her classmates, though, cannot bear to let her go quite so easily. They’ve been at Appleyard, “innocent,” while Irma was up to who knows what, and they must know. It’s suddenly an outright assault, as they demand to know what happened! This desire for forbidden knowledge, the jealousy, attraction, and hatred toward one who seems to know, is conveyed with all of its horror in that brief scene. In his novella Such Small Hands, Spanish author Andrés Barba extends the scene and modulates it all with tiny voices and gruesome games.
Marina is a young girl whose parents recently died in a car accident she was fortunate enough to survive. “My father died instantly, my mother in the hospital,” she repeats over an over again, this seeming to be one of the only phrases to gain any traction in her shocked mind. Now orphaned, Marina is sent to live at an orphanage with many other young girls, many of whom have never really known of a world outside.
Barba transitions from Marina’s voice, to the first-person plural of the group of girls, and back, throughout the novella, showing us how disconnected Marina is, how she longs for connection, and how much the group of girls longs for her experience. This can be a dangerous combination.
As the weeks go by, Marina remains on the inside of her own life, the other girls outside looking in, or trying to. And we’ve all seen this before. We’ve all been through this, as children, as adults watching children. The group is predatory. As much as they long to connect to this girl, to have what she has, there is a desire to annihilate her, as they themselves feel reduced in her presence.
But in Such Small Hands, Barba has Marina exert control with a strange game that embodies the desire, the undeveloped sexuality, the secrets, and the violence. The group of girls has no defense:
The room was still dark but we could hear her voice, boundless as the horizon. We know now, that we were brave that night, but we didn’t know then. We know now, too, that we didn’t have to go to her, didn’t have to get out of our beds, didn’t have to feel the cold of the floor tiles, that it would have been easy to take her violence and her magnetism in our hand and crush it. And yet we went.
This strange nightly ritual continues:
Closing our eyes, we’d compel our bodies to produce the sleep-smell that convinced the adult it was okay for her to go. And we’d lie there like that, motionless, for several minutes. Then, in the dark of night, a strange sound would send the first sign. We’d billow, like skirts in the wind. We’d start to live inside the game, the anxiety of the game. Soon the second sign would come; there would be no doubt now. It could be anything: a whistle, the sound of creaking wood, even silence. And then slowly, we’d get out of bed, without even brushing up against each other, and our bodies would feel lighter. Not even then would we feel the cold of the floor tiles, be afraid of the dark. We were the cold, the dark. And so we’d go to Marina’s bed, sleepwalkers, obsessed with one idea: starting the game.
It’s a troubling book, one I had to read twice to really fall into. My first read, I felt I was mostly skipping along on the surface, seeing a few passages that promised depths. My second, though, knowing where it was going, I was able to plunge into those depths. It was strangely invigorating and troubling. Something I recommend. -mookseandgripes.com/reviews/2017/08/17/andres-barba-such-small-hands/

Here we have Another of the writers that were on the Granta list of the best 22 Spanish writers. Andres Barba has had another book translated into English. This is the first book by him, I have read. He has written ten novels.He has a number of prizes for his books. He also works as a translator doing the works of Joesph Conrad and Alice in Wonderland being among them.
One day she said , “We have the same name: Marina.”
And what if , like her , Marina started to have fewer memories, hardly any memories,no mermories at all ?
“we have the same name ”
Because dolly was the only one who didn’t lie . She was the only  one calm, as if halfway through a long life. and she looked different from everyone else, Time passed over her, and she remained ever alert, like a visionary, astonished, lashless eyes(broken; now even when you laid her down, they wouldn’t lose)
The doll is the only one she trusted as others lied.
This is a very short novella clocking in at just 86 pages. It only arrived today and I took it with me when I went with Amanda to an appointment and read it whilst she was with the doctor in about an hour. It is the tale of Marina an orphan that has lost her mum and dad in a car crash,  or as she keeps putting it .””My father died instantly and my mother in Hospital. The book opens as she is pulled from the crash. Awaking with a scar on her tum. Also, a number people talking to her trying to get her to open up. One way is to give her a doll. The doll she also gives the name Marina. She is then passed fit to leave the hospital and travel to the Orphanage.This is where the story moves into two narratives her the first Marina,  then a collective voice of the fellow Orphans,  as they greet Marina. The orphanage is a strange world to her all them in bright dresses and the same black shoes. The Orphans aren’t kind to her and we see Marina through their eyes as well as hers in a frightening look at being young and lost in a world of fellow lost souls.Also, the violent and horrific way kids can treat each other.
When class was over we liked to play. We’d sing as the jump rope hit the sand with a dull crack. To get in the circle you had to pay attention, had to calculate the jump rope’s arc, its speed, adapt your rhythm to the chorus. Once you were in you felt exposed, tense, as if each time the rope cracked down, it hit your mouth, or your stomach. with each thump you went around the world.
There is a brutal nature to this play rather like in Lord of the flies which this part remind me of
Another of the current crop of books, I have read from Spanish in recent years.  That has a creepy surreal edge to the narrative two that spring to mind is The children and fever dream. Which both feature children and like this walk a line between real and surrealness. The Orphanage is where this story starts to turn a strange way.  Although the way MArina talks at the time has a vacant feel about it as though her heart has been ripped out of her. The black and whiteness of the statement about her parents hang in the air when she says it. This in Lit terms is an Amuse Buche of a book. A book that sets you as a reader minds racing far beyond it mere 86 pages. Also have to say the cover is rather creepy to this book as well. - winstonsdad.wordpress.com/2017/09/05/such-small-hands-by-andres-barba/


Rarely does a book come that only captures perceptual reality with such vigorous insight but also gives it a terrifying spin. Such Small Hands by Spanish writer Andres Barba, does just that. Translated lucidly by Lisa Dillman, the story is simple with echoes of folklore. Marina is the sole survivor of an accident that instantly kills her father and later on, her mother at the hospital.She has rote-learned these lines and recites them in flat affect. It shrewdly depicts how effortlessly children learn to put on a facade in front of adults. Marina mimics speaking in the monotone that she has seen adults use around her, which is devoid of any sort of depth or emotion.
Lips pronounce them without stopping. Quick, dry words. They come in thousands of different, unpredictable ways, sometimes unbidden. Suddenly they just fall, as if onto a field. Marina’s learned to say them without sadness, like a name recited for strangers, like my name is Marina and I’m seven years old.
Her psychologist gives her a life like doll as a companion after her release from the hospital which she also names Marina. She is placed in an orphanage where the tragedy that she has gone through marks her as an outsider in the eyes of the other girls who view her with curiosity and suspicion. They are wary of her and have trouble understanding her. She has externalised all her sorrow in her adoration of the doll which unsettles the girls who live a regimented life in the orphanage and  feed off each others loneliness. Marina is self-contained and does not need anyone else than her doll which infuriates the girls. It agitates and riles them that she is so far beyond their reach.
Marina is clearly grieving but is at that age where she has not yet found the vocabulary to express it which makes her desolation all the more raw. The fluid prose dismantles the well formed conventions of grief, focusing instead in giving delirious form to the chaotic mass of emotion Marina carries around with her.  She is not yet equipped to give edges and angles to her emotions so fittingly, her experiences are related in a hallucinatory manner. She is at the precarious stage between denial and realisation where she has an inkling of the loss that she has experienced but has still not fully grasped the crushing finality of death. She is yet to be hit by that overpowering realisation and until then, she is walking around in a haze, all the while aware of the looming truth in her periphery.
The writing is so intricate and metaphorical which gives the sparse narration an ominous undertone.
It viscerally evokes the loneliness and emotional detachment of kids at an orphanage. The girls in this story are starving for attention. Marina, with her doll as her constant companion and her grief as a black cloud over her, fascinates them. The girls form a single unit in the narrative and are narrated in a Greek chorus style. This serves to prove two functions in the story. It establishes Marina as  the outsider who is viewed with animosity and at times, vague interest. It also demonstrates the dynamics between the orphanage girls and Marina. They often gang up on her even though Marina’s obliviousness makes them envious.
They are in such awe of Marina and her peculiar ways that when she suggests that they play an absurd ‘living doll’ game, they readily agree. They are yearning to be adored so much so that they happily surrender to becoming dolls, trading off their humanness to turn into a lifeless, inanimate object of affection. It bleakly shows what the depravity of love and affection can do to children and their vulnerable psyche. This innocuous game has appalling consequences for Marina, which is made creepier by the fact that the incident is inspired by real events.
The eerie horror in this book is magnified by the girls’ naivety. Their malevolent acts are without any motives and driven purely by their instincts. They are not yet aware of metacognition which adds an ambiguous dimension to the story. Such Small Hands is a slim sinister novella  but packs a lot more ferocious intensity than books double its size. Twisted and unnerving, it gives a psychologically acute peek into the minds of little girls. - Rabeea Saleem
http://www.walesartsreview.org/books-such-small-hands-by-andres-barba/






In Such Small Hands (108 pages, Transit Books), the new novel by acclaimed Spanish author Andrés Barba (translated by Lisa Dillman), childhood abandonment and trauma are examined through the abnormal, ritualistic behaviors of Marina, a seven-year-old girl turned orphan. Following the unexpected deaths of her parents, Marina loses any control she once had over language and emotion. Placed in an entirely unfamiliar world, filled with cartoonish, seemingly identical little girls, Marina grapples with her black-sheep identity as she confronts complicated, and at times, horrific decisions that eventually lead to drastic consequences.
Loosely based on a brutal event that took place in 1960s Brazil, Barba’s twelfth book creates a narrative similar to other bildungsroman such as Oliver Twist and even Pan’s Labyrinth, maintaining a lyrically rich and devastating portrayal of adolescent struggle. Caught between the bookends of trauma, Marina finds herself in limbo as she fails to both perform and to cope with her emotions effectively.
Switching between a collective first person, gang-like perspective of the orphans and a third-person perspective for Marina, a deep sense of longing and tension is formed between the two voices. Despite hopes of finding friendship with her comrades, Marina and her peculiar behavior create a barrier of jealousy and anger that poisons the entire orphanage and ultimately leads to violence.
Meditating on desire and loneliness in an otherwise cold and de-sexualized world, Barba compares Marina to an imprisoned zoo animal. “Inexplicably, we all edged closer, without meaning to. An inevitable attraction made us crave contact with her, seek out her voice, yearn for her to look at us. We no longer cared about the animals, or felt scared of the wolf, or sorry for the elephant, or admired the glimmering grace of the dolphins; we wanted Marina’s contact, and we didn’t know how to cast ourselves into that desert.” Lingering every so often on ideas of physical touch and the young prepubescent body, the novel amplifies the importance of human contact in both a sweet and startling way.
Such Small Hands evokes a sensation similar to the horror of witnessing a child being dragged beneath a riptide. You want to help, scream, bury your face in your hands, but you also can’t fail to notice the poignant valor of an innocent life gasping for air, struggling against forces seemingly greater than us all. - Alexandria Liston
http://www.zyzzyva.org/2017/04/11/such-small-hands-by-andres-barba/

Some of us thought she’s be big, others said she’s be our size; some said she’d be very pretty others didn’t think so. Her first triumph was this: we were no longer all the same.

At the beginning of the year I set myself some goals and one of them was to try and read more translated fiction. Which I can say I have been successful with this in the fact I have read more translated fiction this year so far than any other year previously. I would like to thank Natalie at Granta Books for being so kind and sending me a copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.
Such Small Hands by Andrés Barba was originally written in Spanish but has recently been translated into English by Lisa Dillman and will be published by Portobello Books on the 3rd August, 2017 (Today). The story centres on (official blurb): “Her father died instantly, her mother in the hospital. She has learned to say this flatly and without emotion, the way she says her name (Marina), her doll’s name (Marina) and her age (Seven). Her parents were killed in a car crash and now she lived in the orphanage with the other little girl. But Marina is not like the other little girls. In the curious, hyperreal, feverishly serious world of childhood, Marina and the girls play games of desire and warfare. The daily rituals of playtime, lunchtime and bedtime and charged with a horror; horror is licked by the dark flames of love. When Marina introduces the girls to Marina the doll, she sets in moion a chain of events from which there can be no release.”
The first thing I would like to say about this novella is the fact it is beautifully written in a kind of a hypnotic way however, I just did not connect with this book in anyway. Such Small Hands has a very vast array of characters especially when it comes to little girls. Each one of the characters within this novella has quite an eerie and unsure aspect to them. Every character that you encounter within this book  leaves you with a haunting feeling that you can never really get to grips with.
Such Small Hands has many different themes running throughout however, three themes in particular run continually throughout this book and they are: death, childhood and creepiness. This novella is a very focused and precise read with a feeling of eeriness very present throughout the whole book.
I read this book back in June and I still don’t really know how I feel about it.
But of that violence was born a dark, gurgling pleasure, the supple feeling of having won, or being on the verge of winning.
Overall, Such Small Hands is a very dark and psychological reality and eventhough I personally did not connect with this story I would still recommend it to readers who like creepy, dark, strange and haunting kind of books. - wheretheresinktherespaper7  
https://wheretheresinktherespaper.wordpress.com/2017/08/03/such-small-hands-by-andres-barba/

Flannery O’Connor once said that any writer who’s survived childhood has enough material to last a lifetime. True enough, and in Spanish author Andrés Barba’s “Such Small Hands,” Barba’s particular feat is to have dramatized the minds of children still barely capable of articulating what they feel.
The first title released by Transit Books, a nonprofit publisher based in Oakland, this short, eerie novel inhabits the minds of small children, all girls, living in an orphanage. They’ve been orphaned as long as they can remember, so that the sole home they’ve known is with one another, along with a guardian they call “the adult.” “It was once a happy city,” they explain, and they were “happy girls,” their experiences limited to the orphanage garden, dresses, beds, jump-rope games, occasional one-day field trips and a fig tree they’ve termed “the castle.”
Into this prelapsarian innocence comes a stranger, 7-year-old Marina, whose parents have just died in a car accident. Her arrival upends the girls’ microcosm, her relative worldliness showing them how much they’ve lacked. Their confusion begins with their bodies: Marina was injured in the accident, sliced open to her ribs. She recovered, but she is visibly scarred. When they see her in the shower, the other children realize for the first time that they’re different from her, and that each girl is an individual: “we realized that we had bodies and that those bodies could not be changed.” (The narrative point of view switches between that choral “we” and a “she” reserved for Marina, which further highlights the experiential divide.) The newcomer has watched movies they haven’t watched, played games they haven’t learned; worse yet, she’s been to Disneyland, in Paris. She tells them she took a picture with Mickey Mouse, rode roller coasters, and saw a castle — a real one, the envious children think, because “it’s right there and it has doors and windows you can touch.”
Of course, the amusement-park edifice is not a real castle, but just a place for invented characters vivified by costumed humans, and part of the power of “Such Small Hands” comes from the girls’ faith in play-acting, a belief suitable to young characters so isolated that longing exceeds knowledge. To express their discontent, the girls ostracize, poke and hit Marina, but it’s when they steal and dismember Marina’s doll that they’re being especially hateful. For one thing, the doll comes from outside the orphanage walls; it’s from Marina’s previous life, which excludes them. It also lets Marina elude the rest of the group: “she’d stay away from us at recess with her doll in her hand and she’d love the doll. She’d go home, to her memories.” -  R.O. Kwon
https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Such-Small-Hands-by-Andr-s-Barba-11102031.php


Children can be so cruel. Easy when there's no perception of consequence. Perhaps that’s why they're a tool horror uses to tap into primal fears: we lament our own loss of innocence or shun those uncivilised things we once were. To cut through the psychology, kids are creepy little bastards.
Exhibit A: Andrés Barba’s Such Small Hands, where he takes us through the looking glass into a consciousness bordering on psychosis, or the mindset of a child. There are hints of Something Wicked this Way Comes in the blend of fantasy and terror that forms this worldview, but Barba’s tale is inspired by truth – a horrific incident in 1960s Brazil where a girl was killed by others at an orphanage, who then played with her body parts for a week. Thankfully, Barba plots a more psychological course in his fairly bloodless Gothic horror. Seven-year-old Marina is sent to a girls home after a fatal accident leaves her parentless. While her comfortable background distances her from the other girls, they obsess after her dangerously. She is god, monster and sacrifice.
It's a novella about many things, among them trauma, loss and longing, but most of all about simply being a child. Lisa Dillman fluidly translates impeccable literary technique, most notable when the girls – without parents to draw the lines within which their lives should be lived – speak in their anonymous first person plural, a sinister Greek chorus. They are legion. - Alan Bett     
http://www.theskinny.co.uk/books/book-reviews/such-small-hands-by-andres-barba
When I talk about my new-found love of short, sharp novels, I’m talking about books like Signs Preceding the End of the World and Mildew and The Boy Who Stole Attila’s Horse and Fever Dream (those are just some of the Spanish-language ones) – books that are dense enough to blossom into their own reality, and short enough that they reach a peak of intensity.
Now here’s another one. Andrés Barba is a Spanish writer who was named among Granta’s Best Young Spanish-language Novelists back in 2010. Such Small Hands is not his first novel to be translated into English (a number of others have been published by Madrid-based Hispabooks), but it is his first from a UK-based publisher (namely, Portobello Books). It is a novel of childhood, secrets and identity – and it’s very creepy indeed (the cover image above captures perfectly the mood of the book).  But it begins with the building-blocks: words.
Marina is seven when she’s in a car crash with her parents. Her memories of the event are abstract: sounds, speed, a sensation of thirst. She has learned to say, “My father died instantly, my mother is in the hospital, but not necessarily with a real understanding of what those words mean:
Lips pronounce them without stopping. Quick, dry words. They come in thousands of different, unpredictable ways, sometimes unbidden. Suddenly they just fall, as if onto a field. Marina’s learned to say them without sadness, like a name recited for strangers, like my name is Marina and I’m seven years old.(translation by Lisa Dillman) 
Marina has not yet formed for herself the language to describe what happened to her, so she ends up learning phrases by rote. There’s a gap between what she says, what she understands, and what she has experienced. It doesn’t stop there: Marina is told she will be sent to an orphanage, but has no way to conceive of what this might be. In the face of everything, Marina turns to the doll given to her by her psychologist. She gives the doll her own name, invests it with personality; it’s just about the only thing that feels real to Marina at this time.
When Marina has arrived at the orphanage, Barba’s narration switches to a disconcerting chorus, representing all the other girls. Until now, they have viewed themselves as being all the same – part of the same whole, even. Seeing Marina’s scar from her injuries introduces a difference, and sets off a cascade of realisation among the girls:
We became aware of each other and we felt naked before that body that wasn’t like our bodies. For the first time we felt fat, or ugly; we realized that we had bodies and that those bodies could not be changed. Just as she had materialized, we had materialized: these hands, these legs. Now we knew that we were inescapably the way we were. It was a discovery you could do nothing with, a discovery that served no purpose. We huddled together when she approached. We were afraid to touch her.
Following this, the chapters’ viewpoint alternates between Marina and the girls, each adding (or perhaps peeling back) another layer of the complex game of growing up together. The other girls are by turns fascinated and repelled by Marina, and they treat her accordingly. Marina herself realises that she is different, and tries in various ways to take ownership of that. Underlying these events is the ever-shifting logic of childhood, something captured in the fluid nature of Lisa Dillman’s translation. There’s an extraordinary sequence which weaves together an interview between Marina and the orphanage psychologist about the car accident, and an instance where Marina uses a stick to skewer a caterpillar in the playground, as the other girls gather around. This passage dissolves the boundaries of time and reality: disorienting for the reader, perfectly intuitive to Marina.
One night, Marina proposes a game to the other girls: they will take turns to dress up as a doll, in clothes and make-up that Marina has obtained; the doll will then remain quiet while the girls play with her. The girls’ chorus describes what this is like:
You are passed from one set of hands to the next, from one bed to the next. You’re never alone again. Safe inside the doll, you love harder, feel deeper, exist boundlessly, no moderation. And yet you disregard the sound of girls kissing your cheek. Nothing matters now.  The doll game allows each girl to experience individuality to a greater degree than she has before – albeit paradoxically by suppressing any thoughts or personality she might have of her own. It’s a deeply private experience that can only be articulated generically, and in that sense perhaps analogous to Maria’s experience of the car crash.
Marina herself cannot understand why the girls continue to bully her during the day when they’ll happily submit to her game at night. It’s another example of that fluid logic underpinning events… but let’s leave that there. The experience of reading Such Small Hands becomes increasingly claustrophobic as the book’s pieces fall into place. This is a novel that will continue to haunt me for some time; and, of course, I’ll be reading more of Barba’s work in the future. - David Hebblethwaite
http://www.davidsbookworld.com/2017/07/31/such-small-hands-andres-barba/


I had forgotten that it was Spanish Literature Month, but just in time a new arrival has allowed me to take part. This novella, by young Spanish author Barba (right), is  published on Aug 3. He is one of Granta’s Best of Young Spanish novelists, and has written twelve novels already.
Such Small Hands is a profoundly unsettling novella in a Daphne DuM or Shirley Jackson sort of way. At 96 pages, it has to be read in one sitting and disturbs even before you open the front cover, with that waxy pink doll looking at you!
Such Small Hands is the story of a seven-year-old girl called Marina who is orphaned when her parents die in a car accident; she too was badly injured. On the first page she learns how to describe her situation:
“My father died instantly, my mother in the hospital.”
During her rehabilitation in the hospital, she is given a doll which she calls Marina too. Her only possession, Marina the doll becomes her alter ego, and Marina channels everything into the doll, while outwardly remaining emotionless.
When Marina arrives at the orphanage, she and her doll are objects of immense interest to the other girls, upsetting their established hierarchy and taking attention from them. They respond by excluding her from their skipping games, bullying her whenever they can. Marina seems mostly unperturbed, playing with her doll, which is perplexing to the other girls – who would after all rather love her than hate her. She gets her own back at night; she wanders the dorm when they’re all asleep.
She’d slip out of bed felling the cold floor tiles beneath her feet and creep over to one o them. She’d get so close her lips would brush against her. She’d think, “If she woke up now she’d see me,” and that thought frightened her. She’d rest her head very carefully on the pillow, inhaling the girl’s breath.
Just like pain. Exactly like pain.
Then one night the other girls steal Marina’s doll.
“Give her back, give me my doll back,” she said.
So we gave her a leg. We broke it off.
Halfway through the story, this is the turning point. Marina comes up with a plan to control all the girls – one by one.  From this point, there is a creeping inevitability to the story’s conclusion, it’s a matter of how and when, but the climax is really quite shocking.
All the way through, the voices telling the story are the girls. However, Marina excepted, it is rare that a single voice of one of the others breaks into the text. Instead, they act as a Greek chorus – talking as ‘we’, which really builds the tension in the story. It becomes Marina versus a kind of hive mind.
As a portrait of the moods of childhood, the need for love and the hurt when it is refused, unthinking exclusion and unwanted interfering, low grade bullying, Barbas really nails it in this small community of young girls. Then he takes it up a level and shows us the horror of what happens when it’s taken to extremes, all cleverly executed out of sight of the adults who haven’t a clue what’s going on.
With the girls’ chorus and Marina’s internalisation, there is a dreamlike quality to the text, although it is only dreamlike in so far as nightmares always lurking nearby. Translator, Lisa Dillman has, I discover, translated several other novels by Barba and I am now very keen indeed to read more by this brilliant combo of author and translator. An afterword by American author Edmund White, explores some of the themes and the inspiration behind the story and makes for a fitting end to this little book. Highly recommended. (9/10) - AnnaBookBel
http://annabookbel.net/such-small-hands-andres-barba-lisa-dillman

This brilliantly realised and sustained Spanish tale may have been inspired by actual events, specifically the grotesque murder in a Brazilian orphanage of a young girl by her peers. What is beyond doubt, however, is its ability to creep deep beneath the skin.

Marina is seven when her parents are killed in a car crash. Sent to an orphanage, her presence arouses fascination, hostility and tenderness among the occupants, who narrate sections of the novel Greek-chorus style.

She is dwarfed by emotions she lacks the language to express, but what she does possess is a formidable power to bend the other girls to her will.

As fantasy seeps chillingly into reality, Barba repeatedly creates images that have the authentic strangeness of childhood imaginings: the gill-like mouths of sleeping children; the ancient, mask-like faces of caterpillars.

It is an eerie, uncanny world, but then, as the novelist Edmund White observes in a glowing afterword: ‘If we could suddenly enter the consciousness of a child, we would understand nothing.’

- Sephanie Cross
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-4758846/LITERARY-FICTION.html

Andrés Barba on Such Small Hands   


Andrés Barba, August, October, Trans. by Lisa Dillman, Hispabooks, 2015.                      



Fourteen-year-old Tomás goes with his well-off family on their usual seaside summer holiday, but he is at a stage in his life when nothing is the same. Sullenly detached from them, full of confused intimations of sexuality, he is also faced with death when his widowed aunt, who lives in the resort, is taken seriously ill. As he becomes close to her on her deathbed he frequents the forbidden in the form of some lower-class village kids—casually transgressive boys and even more alien, sexually knowing girls—that will get him involved on the last day in a gang rape of a vulnerable girl. Though when it is his turn, Tomás only pretends to do it—enough to save face with the boys. Back in Madrid, he wrestles with guilt and confusion. He finally decides to go back secretly, alone, to find the girl and apologize for what happened, but despite the moving scene of atonement and forgiveness, ambiguity lurks even in this redemption.




"Andrés Barba needs no introduction. He has his own intentional world perfectly contained and a literary gift that belies his age."—Mario Vargas Llosa




"A story that has been described as an explosive clash between Pavese's The Beautiful Summer and the adolescents of Gus van Sant's Elephant."—Daniel Entrialgo


"A new Spanish great, that’s all I need to say."—Lire


Andrés Barba’s August, October starts off full of charm: a teenage boy from Madrid ditches his family and the beach club to hang out with the local kids in a seaside town. Slowly the atmosphere darkens as he tries to adopt their code of violence. Although Barba has translated Melville, Conrad, and Defoe into Spanish, the writer whose ghost haunts August, October unmistakably is Harold Brodkey, with his deep interest in adolescent sexuality and his ability to conjure the last frontiers of childhood. Like Brodkey, Barba inhabits his young hero with a clarity that is both sympathetic and unflinching. —Lorin Stein

Fourteen-year-old Tomás’ life changes forever while on a beach vacation with his family in award-winning Spanish writer Barba's (Rain Over Madrid, 2014, etc.) newly translated novel.
This is a coming-of-age story, of sorts; Tomás finds himself estranged from his own rapidly changing body and from his family. Riddled with teen angst, he spends a great deal of time at the beginning of the novel feeling disillusioned with his parents, who, from his perspective, are “no longer bathed in the benevolent glow of childhood, no longer superior beings; they, too, had been strangely degraded somehow.” Tomás’ inner turmoil is familiar, certainly, but none of it makes him especially sympathetic—in fact, his perpetual bad attitude makes us long for him to just grow up already. Fortunately, our frustration is eventually offset by the relationship Tomás forms with four local boys from the poor part of town, or “forbidden territory.” The boys introduce Tomás to a world of casual sex that he finds simultaneously enticing and bizarrely repulsive. His struggle to balance his desire and revulsion—especially where one of the local girls is concerned—gives the novel a much-needed menacing edge that propels the story forward. Finally, on the night after Tomás’ aunt’s funeral, his new friends draw him into a whirl of drinking, drugs, and an act of unspeakable violence. The second part of the novel deals with the emotional aftermath of that night, as Tomás further isolates himself, keeping the events a secret, while his family grieves for his aunt. It's shorter than the first part and comparatively lighter. Tomás ultimately seeks redemption and finds it perhaps a little too quickly. We are left with the sense that, yes, bad things happen, but in the end, all is forgiven and life goes on.
This is a coming-of-age novel that can be captivating and possesses many strengths but an equal—perhaps greater—number of weaknesses.  - Kirkus Reviews


Andrés Barba (Madrid, 1975) was last year chosen as one of Granta’s ‘Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists’. He has distinguished himself across the literary field, with six novels (Katia’s Sister, 2001, has been filmed; Versions of Teresa won the Torrente Ballester prize 2006), short stories, and essays (The Ceremony of Porn won the Anagrama Essay Prize in 2007). His works have been translated into nine languages and so far, a couple of stories have made it into English.
Fourteen-year-old Tomás goes with his well-off family on their usual seaside summer holiday, but he is at a stage in his life when nothing is the same. Sullenly detached from his family, full of confused intimations of sexuality, he is also faced with death when his widowed aunt, who lives in the resort, is taken seriously ill. The double thread of sex and death cross in his obscure search for meaning, as he frequents the forbidden in the form of some lower-class village kids: casually transgressive boys and even more alien, sexually knowing girls; meanwhile he becomes close to his delirious aunt on her deathbed.
The climax comes when on the last day, he finds himself participating in a gang rape of a retarded girl who is like a mascot for the town kids. When it is his turn, he only pretends to do it, enough to save face with the boys.
In the second, shorter section, Tomás, back in Madrid, wrestles with guilt and confusion until he takes some money and his aunt’s keys, and goes back secretly, alone, to find the girl. Their day at her school fete is on the face of it a moving scene of atonement and forgiveness. However, ambiguity lurks even in this redemption: Tomás plays a loving older brother, and yet it is not quite like that for the young girl.
Andrés Barba’s crafted, sensual prose gives us this dark story from within Tomás’s groping feelings and thoughts, though it is not a first-person account. A powerful mixture of delicacy and violence, realism and interiority, characterizes the writer’s style, with echoes of bildungsroman classics from André Gide and Thomas Mann to Edmund White. The psychological complexities avoid triteness because they are always concrete, conveyed through perception and sensation. Barba is an artist who rehabilitates the personal, and whose themes of youth and age, vulnerability and stoicism, cruelty and candour, cause this very adult novel about adolescence to resonate hauntingly in the mind. - Lorna Scott

Tomás is 14 and beginning to feel a bit disgruntled inside his skin. He has finally noticed that his parents are far more stupid than he had previously suspected. They even look a bit funny when they are asleep. Their faces become puffy; they resemble “a couple of puppets worse for wear”. He knows; he has been spying on them.

This profound short novel – first published in Spain in 2010 – before his outstanding quartet of novellas, Rain Over Madrid, all of which were also sensitively translated by the US-based Lisa Dillman, belongs to the great coming-of-age stories. It seems simple and communal, almost matter-of-fact and devastatingly convincing.

Read it once at a gulp and then return to it. It possesses disarming genius and complex layers of truth, heightened by glimpses of understanding accompanied by near panic. Tomás has begun to drift between boyhood and the adult world. He taunts his mortality by a strange act of wilfulness while swimming which almost ends in disaster. The sensations throughout the narrative, both psychological and physical, are real and this is a story which delivers a palpable physical punch similar to that of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides (1993).

The one element of Tomás’s life, until this summer of shocking revelations, is his solemn sister. Anita is the one presence which binds Tomás to his real self, the kinder one tested by the need to assert his new personality in a world turned harsh. His emerging maturity is making him more critical, not only of his parents but of the city children he used to play with. “They were boys and girls from good families . . . and they behave like mini-emperors, a plague of 14-year-old serpents, green and shiny, taking over the small beach town every summer.”

His former playmates now repel him: “He’s begun to experience a strange feeling of contempt for them.” With Anita it is very different. Barba conveys the sibling bond with understated beauty: “He and Anita were close, the two of them formed their own private community. He would turn to her and suddenly become aware of her admiration – a gaze so steady he got the feeling that his face was being engulfed by hers . . and when they walked from the house to the beach, he’d slip her his hand, pretending to have done it unawares.”

The characterisation of the sister is extraordinarily astute: “Anita was an unusual little girl. Sometimes she seemed cold, as though she’d learned from the time she was a baby to absorb things without touching them at all, to go unnoticed, moving from place to place on her tiny little legs.”

Few writers have come closer to depicting the vividly secret inner world of a child. Anita’s empathy is unsettling. “She seemed very different, moved to an almost insufferable degree by other people’s pain, and that was when she walked the way she was walking now, as though dragging something behind her, something heavy and dense.”

The shocking burden is the illness of Aunt Eli, their father’s widowed sister, who appears to have entered a fatalistic mental state. Quite by random Eli mentions the Eiffel Tower and that she doesn’t want to die without seeing it. When her melodramatic statement is countered, she remains unperturbed: “You don’t know that, maybe I will die tomorrow . . . I’ve never travelled anywhere in my whole life.”

Tomás is moving at a rapid pace. The restlessness which has begun to control him drives him out to the estuary “because the estuary was where you weren’t supposed to go”. He wanders on, recalling his aunt referring to a man who had “turned up dead there’’. It is a wonderful phrase; Barba – and his translator – are alert to the unconscious ways in which ordinary speech frequently includes the incorrect. Tomás “didn’t know what he was hoping to find, he was trying to translate it into words, but he’d always been better at feeling than thinking”.

When he happens upon a group of four local boys, his first impulse is to threaten them with a rock. A brief display of bravado follows. The only way these relate to the world and to each other is by sexualised goading. “They couldn’t have been more than 14, and yet they were older than him, as old as fossil fish, as survival, as torture or neglect. They’d become realists. Their sexuality was clearly developed and that seemed to have created mysterious bonds among them . . . like wolves . . . hunting in a pack.”

Forming a wary alliance of sorts with them, Tomás joins the gang. The illness and sudden death of his aunt sustains some level of distance for Tomás from the boys. His final initiation into their society of violence and abuse involves an outrageous act of violation which, although he does not fully participate, preys on his mind. Back in Madrid he becomes ill. Again Anita steals the show as she keeps vigil by his bed, “sitting on the floor with a handkerchief tied over her mouth like a miniature bank robber”.

The closing quest sequence in which he runs away from his home in Madrid to return to the resort town completes an act of atonement. He imagines arriving at a doorway, “his hair ridiculously combed, smiling, holding out a bouquet of flowers . . . offering them to a girl who, in all likelihood, would run away if she saw him”.

At the close of the book he is standing at a bus station with a girl whose face is “so huge, so full of life, round as a pie” and simple goodness imbues the story with a grandeur rarely achieved. Think of the hyped formulaic fiction being churned out on conveyer belts by busy famous writers with international reputations and shrug. August, October is beyond impressive, it is the real thing, a study of how the mind and memory attempts to make sense of emotion and guilt; need and regret. -

Eileen Battersby

Andrés Barba’s fiction is a zone of transformation. In Granta’s Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists issue, Barba’s story, “The Coming Flood,” follows a prostitute obsessed with grafting a horn to her head. An excerpt from Barba’s Las manos pequeñas, appearing in Words Without Borders, portrays a group of orphan girls who ritualistically dress and treat one of their friends like a doll. Both works reinforce the mutability of personhood, albeit through extreme cases. In August, October and Rain Over Madrid, Barba’s first full-length works translated into English, the author attends to more conventional types of transformation: puberty, fatherhood, and grief. These transitions are not so much physical, as in the earlier texts, but emotional, and they signal a shift in Barba’s work, a move away from the gritty realms of prostitutes and orphans to the unspoken depravity of domestic life.

Christopher Middleton, Loose Cannons: Selected Prose, University of New Mexico Press, 2014.


read it at Google Books


These uncategorizable writings by a distinguished poet and translator are lively, erudite, and creative. Like his poetry, Middleton’s prose pieces are alive with incongruity, collage, and surprising juxtapositions. This extensive collection is the perfect addition to every student’s, scholar’s, and avid reader’s bookshelf.


“These thirty-three prose inventions of Christopher Middleton constitute the fourth pillar of an extraordinary literary oeuvre, the other three being his poetry, translations, and literary essays. Whatever one chooses to call these often astonishing miniatures, they are certainly Middleton’s wildest, most accessible, and most entertaining work, and they count as some of his very finest writing.”― August Kleinzahler, Foreword


“ He is an incomparable stylist, a wry ironist, a philosopher of words. The only category in which he fits justly is that of poet. - Guy Davenport

“Christopher Middleton is a late-modernist master, renowned as a translator and poet. These short prose inventions rank among his finest writings―erudite, witty, absurdist, and altogether delightful, with the wild accuracy of Jorge Luis Borges and Guy Davenport. Across their remarkable variety―literary-historical curiosities, meditations on art history, fables, satires, fantastic travelogues, minute observations of the natural world, deft sketches of café life―Middleton’s narratives bristle with intelligence.”―Devin Johnston


years ago, in an essay called “Why I Am a Member of the Christopher Middleton Fan Club” (The Brooklyn Rail, October 2010), I stated the need for “a selected prose that brings together all the different kinds of writing he has done.” Loose Cannons: Selected Prose (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 2014), which includes an insightful foreword by one of Middleton’s most vocal and articulate champions, August Kleinzahler, is pretty close to the book I had in mind.
The thirty-three unclassifiable pieces, some no longer than three pages, were selected from prose written between Flowers & Nice Bones (1969) and Depictions of Blaff (2010), a span of forty-one years, a period during which the prose poem became an increasingly popular form. Middleton’s short pieces are not prose poems, however. As Kleinzahler states at the beginning of his “Foreword,” “what Middleton “would refer to as ‘short prose’ are certainly [his] wildest, most accessible, and most entertaining work and count as some of his very finest writing.” I suspect that one reason why they are not better known is because they are not short tales with a beginning, middle and end.
In other words, Middleton’s short prose pieces are not prose poems as that term is conventionally understood, and they have little to do with the beloved Francophile tradition spawned by the posthumous publication of Paris Spleen (1869), Charles Baudelaire’s book of fifty-one prose poems. Middleton’s imaginative prose pieces are not motivated by disgust, nor do they, in opposition to prose poems by Charles Simic and Russell Edson, for example, seem to have an overriding theme, recognizable style or tic holding them together. If anything, they are in a league of their own, just as those pieces found in the astonishing book, Tatlin! (1974), by Guy Davenport, his friend and classmate at Merton College, Oxford (1948–52). As I see it, the imaginative prose of Davenport and Middleton constitute two of the more singular achievements in American letters.
Like Davenport, Middleton’s erudition is unrivaled in its grasp and comprehension of many sources. A prolific, innovative translator, he started translating Robert Walser’s fiction in the 1950s, in postwar, non-German- loving England, long before this unique writer was on anyone’s radar. In 1957, Middleton published his eye-opening translation of Walser’s The Walk and Other Stories. He has also translated the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Christa Wolf, Elias Canetti, Georg Trakl, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Lars Gustafsson. Along with his interest in Dada, Surrealist, and Expressionist writing, all of which were largely rejected in England, Middleton was a devotee of the experimental work of his own time and became friends with some of the most radically innovative poets of the century, such as Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop; the multilingual Romanian-born German poet and honorary member of OULIPO, Oskar Pastior (1927-2006); and the Austrian poets Ernst Jandl (1925-2000) and Friedrike Mayröcker (1924-). The other difference that sets Middleton apart from his peers is that, in addition to not aligning himself with the French tradition, Middleton doesn’t see himself as an heir to Ezra Pound, as did Davenport. Rather, as Gabriel Levin advances in his essay, “Middleton in Asia Minor”:

The stratification of languages and cultures—Hittite, Greek, Byzantine, Ottoman, Turkish—is, I believe, what has lured Middleton repeatedly since the early ’80s to this vast stretch of land which once comprised the northern arm of the Levant. It has been for the poet a quest in awe of revelation. (Chicago Review, 51: 1/2, Spring 2005, p. 119).

One of the memorable moments I spent with Middleton was sitting with him in the mid-90s in a café in Austin, Texas, where he has lived since 1966, listening to his enthusiasm, anticipation and excitement as he talked about his forthcoming trip to Yemen to learn more about Arabic. He was then in his early 70s and, as far as I could see, still an eager and curious student, someone who believes that learning never ends. Instead of claiming authority, he yearned to gain more knowledge.
Imagine prose that is neither anecdotal nor confessional, and you begin to get a sense of Middleton’s unclassifiable writing. Add to this his resistance to arriving at predictable poetic revelations, moments that appear to be blessed by a sudden universal insight, and you get a sense of why his writing has never quite gained the attention it deserves. We want revelations, however cliché, because they promise us comfort. Middleton comes from another tradition, which counts Herodotus, Plutarch and Thucydides among its originators. He is not in the habit of providing solace to the reader.
Inspired by these ancient classical writers, Middleton is simultaneously contemporary and mysterious rather than nostalgic and soothing, In “The Birth of the Smile,” within a span of less than two pages, Middleton goes from “the Sumerians” to “the smile inserted at the corners of Che Guevara’s mouth by the thumbs of his murderers.” Here, as elsewhere, Middleton is able to braid together different kinds of prose, ranging from history, myth and fable to a description gleaned from the mass media, without anything seeming forced or contrived. I cannot explain why it feels right that the author ends with Che Guevera’s post-mortem smile, but it does. At the very least, he is reminding us that a smile and cruelty are linked often enough to be unsettling. The fact that he refuses to step back and moralize after reaching this insight is just one of the many powerful things he does.
In “The Turkish Rooftops,” Middleton starts with the observation that “Turkish people like to sleep on rooftops,’ and then goes on to list the various things one might see on these rooftops (“Buckets, parts of cooking stoves, donkey saddles, lengths of rope, piping, sinks, scythes”), as well as to comment on “how, in Cézanne’s paintings of Mont Saint-Victoire, the mountain changes its clothes, sky its diagonals that shine or rain down upon the roof of the mountain.” What interests Middleton is the threshold between one order of objects and another. He is both scholarly and innocent and doesn’t privilege one above the other. Each of the thirty-three pieces in Loose Cannons contains something marvelous. Each of his sentences is a seamless synthesis of perception, information and music.
Perhaps Loose Cannons will help change our perception of Middleton’s considerable achievement. Instead of offering us easy reassurance, his prose (as does all his writing) seems motivated by what he states at the end of his “Prologue”: “Beauty is exuberance.” Here we might be reminded that the one lesson Middleton might have gotten from translating Walser or from reading Baudelaire is the latter’s observation: “The Beautiful is always strange.” The strangeness that Middleton leads the willing reader to is well worth beholding. - John Yau
https://hyperallergic.com/158025/the-beauty-of-christopher-middletons-prose/




In his brief Prologue to this new selection of Middleton’s significant contributions of literature, the writer argues that Loose Cannons should be recognized as a short prose work different from both the short story and the prose poem—elements of which these works outwardly share. Alluding to the writings of John Earle, Ben Jonson, Pascal, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Franz Kafka, and Kenneth Patchen (Borges and Robert Walser also come to mind), British writer and German translator Middleton suggests that his work belongs to a genre that displays “a resistance to the tendency of written prose to prolong itself, to expand.” For him, his writing process relates to what he calls an “antigram,” “a variety of imaginative writing which revolts against and may reverse the programmatic.” What interests him, he makes clear, is “something not-said, a hiatus, a vestige of mystery,” as opposed, presumably, to prose fiction’s thrust to delineate meaning through accumulation, if nothing else.
    “The antigram calls for (and should arouse),” Middleton asserts, “the most scrupulous thrift, panache, and refinement in writing as such.”
     As a lover of genres, I’m always willing to accept the notion that an author is attempting to mine new territory, is exploring boundaries of what we think we know or, more importantly, how we read something that, simply because of its surface appearance, we think we recognize but does not necessarily conform to what we have experienced in the past. Any knowledgeable reader can cite numerous instances of significant authors’ works being dismissed simply because they didn’t seem to fit into the confines of more normative perceptions of a particular genre. I have often repeated in these My Year volumes just such occurrences in connection with writings by Djuna Barnes, Wyndham Lewis, and numerous others. And even as the publisher of two books from which nine of these 33 prose works were selected—In the Mirror of the Eighth King (1999)and Depictions of Blaff (2010)—I must admit that I originally had difficulty, despite my immediate appreciation of the writing, defining their genres. The works of the former volume I simply ascribed to be very personal prose meditations, and the works of Depictions of Blaff I suggested to myself and to others as being an unusual kind of short prose fiction. And I must admit, that rereading those works in the context of the others, I more thoroughly enjoyed them as being cryptic and mysterious prose works with no narrative solution to their meanings.
     Middleton is also one of the well-read and informed academics (without being an academic writer) I know, and some of his remarkable prose works read a bit like satires of pedants discoursing on esoteric information—a bit like Raymond Queneau’s OULIPO-inspired writings—ramblings of a charming madman. Certainly all of the Blaff works might fall into that category, as well as pieces such as “From the Alexandria Library Gazette,” “Manuscript in a Lead Casket,” the frightfully futuristic “A Memorial to Room-Collectors,” and “The Turkish Rooftops.”
     Other works focus their attention on intense observation, revealing what is clearly Middleton’s art-critical facilities, often featuring a work or a series of works of art—prose works such as “Louis Moillon’s Apricots (1635),”  “The Execution of Maximilian,” “Le Déjeuner,” “A Polka in the Evening of Time,” or, on a more enigmantic  level, often involving what is not seen or is only somewhat visible in “Balzac’s Face” and “The Gaze of the Turkish Mona Lisa.”
     Still others appear almost to be meditations on history or, more specifically, the possibilities of history or, at least, recreating what might soon become history: “The Birth of a Smile,” “A Bachelor,” “Nine Biplanes,” “Or Else,” “Cliff’s Dwarf,” and “In the Mirror of the Eighth King,”
     But all do share what the Introducer of this work, August Kleinzahler, describes as forces of that are “subversive” and “ludic,” “liminal” and “disruptive,” in favor of any pre-conceived or determinative experience. Time and again, what might at first seem narrative, is transformed through metaphor into an animistic or even spiritual moment which one might describe as dissipating any plot- or character-based evocation. Although “Nine Biplanes,” for example begins with what seems to be a very specific time and narrator, an “I” located in 1940, the author redirects the reader’s attention throughout until what began as a concrete image has been miraculously transformed into a grotesquely unseen world, invisible from the eyes of the work’s original seemingly narrative voice. The work begins:




This is my list of the essential books of Christopher Middleton, the ones I believe you should read if you want to learn what he has been up to for the past 60 years: Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2008); Faint Harps and Silver Voices: Selected Translations (Carcanet, 2000): Jackdaw Jiving: Selected Essays on Poetry and Translation (Carcanet, 1998); Crypto-Topographia: Stories of Secret Places (Enitharmon, 2002); In The Mirror of the Eighth King (Green Integer, 1999); Palavers, and A Nocturnal Journal (Shearsman Books, 2004); If From The Distance: Two Essays, with an Introduction by Alan Wall (Menard Press, 2007). These seven books contain examples of all the genres and forms Middleton has written over the course of his career: poems, concrete poems, translations, prose (which cannot be categorized), essays, and journals. Ideally, there should be a selected prose that brings together all the different kinds of writing he has done; an up-to-date, comprehensive collection of his essays; a selection of his collages (The Troubled Sleep of America—40 collages with texts—was exhibited at the Laguna Gloria Museum, Austin, Texas in 1982); and a selection of his journals (none of which he wrote for publication, but which he now seems to be willing to publish). As it is, my list of published works adds up to around 1,500 pages, a formidable achievement by anyone’s standard.
I have not included on my list Middleton’s collections of translations of Robert Walser, Friedrich Nietzsche, Christa Wolf, Elias Canetti, Georg Trakl, Friedrich Hölderlin, Lars Gustafsson, and Andalusian poems “from Spanish versions of the original Arabic” (with Leticia Garza-Falcon). Middleton is a prolific translator, who began translating Robert Walser’s compressed fictions in the 1950s, long before this Swiss writer was on anyone’s radar in America or England. However, if you are still reluctant to plunge in or don’t know where to begin—I would suggest the Collected Poems is a good place to start—you could begin with what I consider the best introduction to his oeuvre: “Christopher Middleton: Portraits,” edited by W. Martin (Chicago Review 51: 1/2, Spring 2005). The issue contains illuminating essays, reminiscences, testimonies, an interview, bibliography, and examples of his writing. In his “Introduction,” W. Martin believes “a Collected Letters would be delightful to read at the very least.” One standout essay among many is Gabriel Levin’s “Middleton in Asia Minor”:

The stratification of languages and cultures—Hittite, Greek, Byzantine, Ottoman, Turkish—is, I believe, what has lured Middleton repeatedly since the early ’80s to this vast stretch of land which once comprised the northern arm of the Levant. It has been for the poet a quest in awe of revelation. (ChicagoReview, p. 119)

Despite all this, Christopher Middleton is a poet—an innovative lyric poet, in fact, and inimitable prose writer—who has continued to be overlooked, at least to the extent that, except for the Chicago Review (kudos to them), mainstream book reviews, middlebrow periodicals, and adventurous little magazines have consistently failed to address his work, particularly in America, where he has lived for over 40 years. On the rare occasions when they have addressed his work, reviewers tend to regard him as an anomaly, and make convoluted qualifications regarding his singular achievement, all of which ends up marginalizing him. Here is what Alfred Corn wrote in the New York Times Book Review: Middleton’s “effort is to escape the artifice of received literary ideas, and he has at least succeeded in doing that; his poems don’t sound like anyone in particular, not even his models. The gains bring with it definite losses.” In arguing that it is better to sound like someone else than to not “sound like anyone in particular,” Corn seems to be emphasizing that Middleton has neither an instantly recognizable “I” in his poems nor has he tried to develop a signature style. Here I part company with Corn and agree with Robert Kelly: “Style is death.” Middleton’s defining sin seems to be that his poems and prose don’t sound like anyone else’s, and they can’t be characterized by their style, which is not to say that he is without, as Corn implies, preoccupations or themes.
This is the rather deplorable situation that I would like to help redress, however inadequately knowledgeable I must admit to being when it comes to discussing the many subtleties of this poet’s achievement. I am not alone in this feeling. In his review of Intimate Chronicles (Sheep Meadow Press, 1996), the far more intellectual August Kleinzahler laid the problem bare: “His analysis, for example, of Mallarmé’s ‘Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire’ would frighten off wiser men than I from having a go at Middleton’s own poetry” (From an essay originally published in The Threepenny Review, (Winter 1998) and reprinted in the Chicago Review). This is where many people reading and reviewing Middleton’s work go wrong; they confuse his vast erudition for narrow eccentricity. They think he’s trying to pick up where Ronald Firbank left off, and that is not the case at all.
Clearly, Middleton has gained a small though loyal public, which is the case with many poets whose work I care about, but, for reasons I find perplexing, he has never crossed the line into the realm of wider recognition—Rae Armantrout, Susan Howe, Louise Glück, Paul Muldoon, Charles Simic, Mark Strand, and his friends Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop are practically famous compared to him. Outside his books, you are not likely to come across his name; he isn’t mentioned on literary blogs; year after year, he isn’t listed among the nominees for prizes; and he isn’t a past winner of an award or fellowship we immediately recognize; he isn’t talked about as a teacher of creative writing—all those measures we use to determine a poet’s importance. As far as I know, he has never received a Guggenheim Fellowship or, perhaps better yet, if he has received one, he has chosen not to list it among his achievements.
Aside from these mainstream markers, you don’t hear him being mentioned as an example of some tendency, good or bad. Certainly, no ready profile, however misinformed and generalizing it might be, comes to mind when we think of him, which isn’t the case with his peers: John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, and W.S. Merwin. In fact, I can think of many slightly celebrated poets whose work I don’t ever want to read again—even if I am stuck in a dentist’s waiting room, sitting next to the latest issues of the New Yorker—being embraced far more often, and tendentiously, in literary and semi-literary periodicals. And it is certainly easy enough to think of figures whose very names are mentioned in a hushed voice befitting a martyred saint—a status that Middleton has clearly shunned. What I am lamenting, however, is his absence from every list that I can think of, except neglected poets.
The bare bones of Middleton’s biography are as follows (my primary sources include Palavers, and A Nocturnal Journal, (Shearsman Books, 2004) and “A Retrospective Sketch” which was included in the Chicago Review). He was born in Truro, Cornwall, England in 1926. His father was an organist who started teaching music at the University of Cambridge in 1930. His mother read D. H. Lawrence. Growing up in Cambridge, “a city bristling with old bookshops,” he was by 15 “a nestling antiquarian.” He spent three and half years in the R.A.F. (1944–1948), studied German and French at Merton College, Oxford (1948–1952), where his classmates and friends included Rodney Needham and Guy Davenport. He “was never a student of ‘Eng. Lit.’.” He taught English at the University of Zürich (1952–1955). While teaching German literature in King’s College, London (1955–1965), he became interested in the Levantine, the worldwide symbolism of Paradise Mountains, Dada, and Expressionism. During this decade, he “helped to make the new German writing of the ’50s and ’60s accessible to British and American readers. [He] wrote reviews, gave radio talks. This work opened up the task of translating….” He first came to Austin, Texas to teach for one year in 1961–62. In 1966, at the age of 39, he returned to the University of Texas and taught German Literature and Comparative Literature until he retired in 1998. He thinks of where he lives in Texas as a “poor man’s Mediterranean.” He has literally hundreds of pieces of music in his head, no doubt because of the influences of his father. According to W. Martin, “It was through [Middleton] that I learned to read Hölderlin, the French and Russian symbolists, Plato of the Symposium and Phaedrus, and above all to appreciate the poetic power even of discursive language.”
I want to call attention to a few salient features that stick out from this brief biographical sketch. Middleton doesn’t have a homepage on the Web, and his Wikipedia entry is remarkable for how little it tells us. He is a widely learned poet and translator, not a constricted theorist and academician. He belongs to the generation that, in America, includes the poets I previously mentioned, as well as points to two English poets who spent much of their adult lives here, and who were widely admired during their lifetime, Thom Gunn (1929–2004) and Denise Levertov (1923–1997). Born exactly between these two public figures, Middleton is all but invisible compared to them. Is this because he was neither part of any group, nor been associated with any movement? Since coming to America in 1966, he was never part of an English department and seems to never have taught creative writing. This goes a long way to explaining why he remains an obscure figure compared to many of his peers. He never put himself at the center of a constantly changing group of impressionable wannabe poets, and made no attempt to gain authority in this manner.
At the same time, I want to make it clear that Middleton is not a curmudgeon grousing about what went wrong with civilization, poetry, and human beings. He has never called attention to himself in that manner. In fact, for all his passion and rage, there isn’t an ounce of Phillip Larkin-like grumpiness in him. He doesn’t hate Picasso, Pound, and Parker, which one suspects many better known poets do, but have become savvy enough not to admit it. After all, how many celebrated poets have incorporated collage, alluded to history and other literatures, been particularly sensitive to the unstable relationship between sound and sense, and masterfully used shifting registers and dissonance in their work? How many prize-winning poets resist writing the smooth narrative poem with a beginning, middle, and end? Not a lot, but enough, I believe, for me to ask the following question. Why isn’t Middleton’s work more widely read or, barring that, more widely praised, however little impact that might have on sales and reputation? Why has this poet glided gracefully under the radar for his entire career?
Again, Kleinzahler’s observations are helpful: “The poetry of Middleton is not easy to characterize, not least of all because no one Middleton poem truly resembles another, much less one book resembling another in style and subject matter.” In other words, there is no carry-over, nothing that might, after you’ve read one of his poems, help you read the next. You always have to start all over again. If you look at a Jackson Pollock painting from 1948—a so-called drip painting done during the period after he made his first breakthrough to abstraction in 1947—whatever you glean from it (method, all-overness, accretion) will help you look at another done by Pollock a year or two later. This is less the case with Middleton. According to Kleinzahler,

[H]e is a philosophical poet, in his fascination with time and the phenomenological, by which I mean in the complex ways of perceiving and thinking about how we perceive. He is not anecdotal and certainly not confessional. Poetry, for Middleton, is very much involved in the act of retrieving in language the imaginative experience or moment, letting it find its own pulse and exfoliate on the page. It detests ‘reportage’ or ‘brute discourse’; it wars against ‘languishing idioms.’ It is improvisatory.

This is what Alan Brownjohn wrote in the New Statesman: “His concern to produce an individual structure of perception for every place, thought, and experience he writes about results in a ceaseless and challenging originality.”
Kleinzahler’s observations hearkens back to Charles Baudelaire’s definition of modernity as the conjoining of “the fleeting and the infinite,” but after the death of God, with the promise of redemption the infinite once held now vanished into the cold vastness of the ever-expanding beyond, as I think Middleton recognizes. This doesn’t mean the visionary isn’t possible, just that it can resemble all those derivative, palatable, easy-to-get instances that so many poets parade before us. Middleton knows for all the seeming sameness of the world, it is never the same, and style denies that unending difference. Open and responsive from the beginning of his career, he was able to braid together distinct and different strands of perception, knowledge, and music, including the archaic and the modern, the mythic and familiar, and the unlikely and unexpected, without reducing either to an explanation of the other. He has never written poems that can be read as editorials on contemporary life; he never claims to be more sensitive than others. Which doesn’t mean that he has removed himself from the world (“The poet of the abyss / Takes to walking the puppy”, Collected Poems, p. 388) or from history or catastrophic events (“‘Abstraction,’ ‘pure,’ who can mean them now / And not in irony deplore their barbaric use? / Nothing out there pretends. In vague words fatality nests.” (Collected Poems, p. 607) Rather, his poems don’t culminate in a predictable poetic revelation, an “aha” moment that was telegraphed in the first line. He has never succumbed to that particularly American affliction of being cornball. The very first poem in his Collected Poems is a good example of what he does and doesn’t do.

Seven Hunters



1
On skins we scaled the snow wall,

seven hunters; roped, leaning

into claws of wind; we climbed,

wisely, for no fixed point.

There was no point we knew.



Staggered upon it at noon.

Drifts half buried it. The coils

Horns eyes had to be hacked free.

We lashed, as the moon rose,

Its black flesh to sledges.



It was dead as a doornail,

thank God. Labouring

The way down, by lick

We found a hut, beer and bread.



2

Some came in cars, some barefoot,

Some by air, some sprang from ships,

Some tore in by local train,

Some capered out of bed

And biked there with babies.



Like flies they filled the hot square.

The cordon, flung around the heap

Of black tubes, when the eye blazed,

Could not see. The crowd did.

Then we heard the first shout.



Now in our houses the streets

And houses have gone.

Here, underground, we

Who were seven, are one.

“Seven Hunters” has two sections. Each section is made up of fourteen lines, divided into three stanzas—the two five line stanzas are followed by a four line stanza (a sonnet but not a sonnet). The lines consist of mostly one-syllable words interrupted by a two or even three syllable word (“The cordon, flung around the heap / Of black tubes, when the eye blazed,”). Musically, the poem is terse and insistent.
“Seven Hunters” is an open-ended narrative in which the poet evokes two distinct worlds, but never brings them so close that the reader can reach out and grasp either one. Unable to extricate a story from this inseparable juxtaposition, the reader cannot arrive at some easy conclusion that the poem is about this or that. It is self-sufficient and in that regard has affinities with radical painting of that time. (In a recent email from Anthony Rudolph, I learned that Alan Wall, whose “Introduction” to If From a Distance: Two Essays is well worth reading, believes “Seven Hunters” starts from William Wordsworth’s poem, “We are Seven”).
Except for the poems that had been privately printed in two earlier collections, “Seven Hunters” is the first poem in his first book, Torse 3 (Longmans, 1962). By the late 1960s, with the publication of Our Flowers & Nice Bones (Fulcrum Press, 1969), Middleton no longer relies on juxtaposing two separate worlds, but is able to braid together distinct and unlikely strands of knowledge, memory, and perception into a fluid, changing whole, gaining for his work a greater fluency coupled with a subtler music (“You suddenly woke and saw / on the bedroom hearth an apple green / puddle of moonlight. It was the armadillo,” (CollectedPoems, p. 101)
Middleton’s measured dispersions of vowels and consonants in “Seven Hunters” reveal a sensitivity to sound as a potent poetic force (“Some capered out of bed / and biked there with babies.”). His use of enjambment is already linked to both a hesitation or delay in music and a time-based perception, and never seems contrived (“We lashed, as the moon rose, / its black flesh to sedges.”) His essay, “Ideas about Voice in Poetry” (pps. 88 – 101, Jackdaw Jiving) is a must read if you want an idea of the role sound plays in his thinking about poetry. Citing Mandelstam, Middleton advances that the “poetic word can go against the whole grain of the Saussurian view of language as a system of conventional signs; ‘The word is a psyche…” (Jackdaw Jiving, p. 93). The poet must use words (both their sound and sense) to make the poem the place where the experience and possible transformation from one perceptual state to another occurs. Learning from his study of German and French literature, as well as from his encounters with Dada, Surrealist, and Expressionist writing, the poet will raise the music of his writing to far more complex and intricate possibilities.
In contrast to many of his peers, Middleton did not embrace a nationalistic sense of the English language or England after World War II. He did not retreat from the world, as may lesser poets both here and in England did, and write local poetry. He did not strongly identify with a particular region, which is not to say that he disowned his past. Among poets emerging in the aftermath of World War II, he did something unprecedented and, to my mind, brave. He studied German and French, and met and translated German and French poets, among many others. His friends included some of the most radically innovative poets of the century, such as the multilingual Romanian-born German poet and honorary member of OULIPO, Oskar Pastior (1927–2006), and the Austrian poets Ernst Jandl (1925–2000) and Friederike Mayröcker (1924–).
“Seven Hunters” neither typifies Middleton’s poetry, nor exists as an isolated example. It is part of a possibility that he has explored throughout his career, the unpredictable meeting of the ordinary and the extraordinary, which can only be manifested in words, their particular music. Over time, this meeting has veered into the mythic, and, at other times, it is clearly rooted in specific instances, which includes something as unlikely as standing in the bathroom of the apartment of two good friends. The result is an ekphrastic poem on the tiles; “Berlin: Mommsenstrasse 7” (“Antiquish tiles in a house on Mommsen Street / Line three walls of a demure retreat: …Blue bees seem to ride the backs of butterflies, / Rocks ring a pool. A warbler perches there…”) The poem locates poet and reader in a familiar act: (“While you pee / There’s time to look around.”), and the reader is immediately brought into what Middleton, elsewhere, calls the “secret places,” in this case a bathroom. He believes that, as a poet, you can’t bring yourself to the moment of perception. Instead, you must be open to what the world gives you. (“Almost anywhere there’s a poem lying around / Waiting for someone to lift it up, dust it off, “ (Collected Poems, p 623). Given the range of starting points and subjects in poems and prose, he has remained remarkably open to the world he inhabits, and is passing through, for more than 60 years of writing.
Middleton’s poems seem to have their origins in at least five engendering possibilities. There are more, I am sure, but these are the ones that strike me as most prominent. They are rooted in the palpable world of direct experience, such as finding a dead “Tussock Moth” or seeing “Navaho children…sprouted from sand.” They can arrive unexpectedly as music, as in “Woden Dog” (“Wot doth woden dog / Por dog drageth plow”). They are encountered while reading (“Found Poem”), which is also the source of his many imagined dramatic monologues (“Mandelstam to Gumilev 1920”). There are his responses to a photograph or a painting. In fact, his ekphrastic poems are about many different kinds of works, including an oil sketch by Rubens, a kitsch print, a photograph of Chekov, the prints of Charles Meryon, a painting by Joan Miró, and a late painting by Balthus. Add to this list his poems on animals, which are every bit as good as any by D. H. Lawrence and, of course, Christopher Smart, but have a far greater range. He has written poems on cats (many times), armadillos (more than once), parrots, a coral snake, a wild horse, a magpie, and a puppy. In Middleton’s universe, everything and anything can become a poem, if you are ready to receive it. He is as conversant with the dead as Jack Spicer, but never once calls attention to it.
By not using the poem to build up to a cathartic event that promises a moment of revelation for poet and reader (“I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—”, as William Stafford famously declared just before pushing a dead deer off the road, into the river below), and refusing to use the space the poem occupies to tell the reader what it’s about, Middleton knowingly risks obscurity. And yet I would argue that he has a higher regard for the reader than those poets who use the poem to announce what they are writing about and why it’s important, as if we are children sitting in a ring, learning our lesson. Rather than straining after significance, I am convinced that he believes that it is everywhere, at all times, and that it is his responsibility to recognize it. In this sense, Middleton’s poetry and prose shares something with the poetry of Gustaf Sobin (1935–2005). (This unlikely connection was inspired by Middleton’s essay “Ideas about Voice in Poetry,” 1983, in which he cites lines from a poem by the then unknown Sobin on p. 97.) In fact, I think a comparison between Middleton’s Collected Poems and Sobin’s Collected Poems (Talisman House, 2010), which was edited by Esther Sobin, Andrew Joron, Andrew Zawacki, and Edward Foster, might prove useful.
Middleton certainly fits Theodore Enslin’s lauding of Sobin as “an amateur, in the highest sense of the word: a lover of the thing itself.” Born in different countries nearly a decade apart, and choosing as adults to emigrate to a country far from their own, both entered a diaspora in which they cut themselves off from their own language, and had to reinvent it in their writing. While both poets are highly responsive to what Middleton called the “collaboration between ear and eye…reinforced by the other senses, if not subliminally regulated by those senses” (“Ideas about Voice in Poetry”, p. 92), the difference is that his collaborations are as extensive as Sobin’s are narrow. In part, it has to do with their attachment to place. As Zawacki and Joron point out in their introduction, “[f]rom the beginning of his apprenticeship to [René] Char until the end of his days,” Sobin wrote in a “simple hut, with its small windows opening onto the wide fields of Provence.” Within the narrow purview in which he chose to dwell, the poet focused all of his attention on articulating states of ecstasy and illumination, trafficking in what Joron and Zawacki call the meeting of “eternity and the ephemeral,” a conjunction that knowingly invokes Baudelaire’s definition of modernity.
About memory, I would point to “The Lime Tree” (Collected Poems, pps. 465–467), a poem about the relationship of son and mother, which is every bit as sensuously complex and disquieting as Robert Duncan’s great poem, “My Mother Would Be a Falconress”. Middleton’s poem opens with these lines:

Thank you for giving birth to me in the first place,

Thank you for delivering me from the dark,



You whose round arms I stroked with feeling

Made presence atmosphere and contact known.



And I wanted not that Englishness;

I wanted deliverance from you so soon,

And about desire, memory, and the survival of the human trace in anonymous art—the poem strikes me as a self-portrait in which the “I” is noticeably absent—I will leave Middleton with the last word after one last observation. In the third and fourth lines of the poem it is clear how much more masterful he has become since “Seven Hunters” in his interlocking of vowels and consonants. A sinuous dance of sound and meaning reverberates throughout—“Gouged, all of a glug, out of yellow muck, / Now he skips on a disk and beats his bongo.”


Figurine of a Chinese Drummer

An agitator, to the life, so he has survived

Some sixteen centuries, none the worse for wear:



Gouged, all of a glug, out of the yellow muck,

Now he skips on a disk and beats his bongo.



Still his grin invites us into his tongue-hovel;

What’s here but a thin chicken, a battered child,



Yet he spoke the language of the Emperors,

Probably a Mandarin fashioned him and the scripts



Of all his stories

Which gave us the windows, took the good air in.



That kind of rhetoric, his, the top dogs welcome:

Whiskered statistics, plus a plug of grievance,



Promise that power stoops: it did, but sprang back

Offended by the stench, that much bulkier.



So we slope hoes, the bongo makes us hotter,

We stone our butchers, he holes up for years



And sharply, round the corner, reappears

Stumping along, legs all of a dither,



To make his village hum like a shut hive

With the wrongs of his clay, the rhubarb of his bongo. (Collected Poems, p. 563)
- John Yau
brooklynrail.org/2010/10/books/why-i-am-a-member-of-the-christopher-middleton-fan-club-by-john-yau




Described as “one of the most scrupulous of British poets involved in following the innovations of modernism,” by Douglas Dunn, poet and translator Christopher Middleton holds a unique place in contemporary British and American verse. Born in Truro, England in 1926, Middleton served in the Royal Air Force before attending Merton College at Oxford University. He taught at the University of Zurich and King’s College in London, and at the University of Texas-Austin from 1966 to 1998. Highly regarded as a translator, Middleton translated the work of major German authors including Robert Walser, Gottfried Benn, Christa Wolf, and Paul Celan. In 1987 he was awarded the prestigious Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize.
Middleton’s own poetry is notable for its erudition, playfulness, and openness to experiment. “Although its roots are in surrealism … and German Expressionism,” Brian Swann commented in Library Journal,“Middleton’s poetry is unlike any other. He specializes in lively juxtapositions, incongruities of collage, the play of forms …Vistas recede in a number of poems into the prehistoric so we are aware of mysterious correlations.”Middleton’s first collection of poetry to be widely published was Torse 3 (1962), which shared the Geoffrey Faber Award. Describing the volume as an “apprentice book of experiments,” Oliver Dixon in The Wolf noted the range and variety of Middleton’s effects: from blank verse to off-rhymed couplets to sonnets, the book is full of “‘developable surfaces’ that lay the foundations for later work,” according to the reviewer. One of Middleton’s continuing concerns has been the shaping of each individual poem to suit its particular subject. “His concern to produce an individual structure of perception for every place, thought and experience he writes about,” noted Alan Brownjohn in the New Statesman,“results in a ceaseless and challenging originality.” Such originality has often put Middleton at odds with the British poetry mainstream, though his stubbornly experimental streak is sometimes seen as a corrective to it. In his collection of essays The Pursuit of the Kingfisher (1983), Middleton calls for an “exigent poetry, hard-bitten poetry, which goes to the limits of the conceivable and thus relocates the centre,” descrying the “suave poetry” which he sees as dominating the British literary scene. Critic George Steiner has argued that Middleton’s “linguistic range, the severe seriousness of his conception of the role of the poet and of the poet’s reader in these ‘terrible times’, his unembarrassed celebration of the visionary, ‘transcendent’ potentialities in art and the imagination, are correctives to the retrenched provincialism of the current English manner.”
In books such as The Lonely Suppers of W. V. Balloon (1975), 111 Poems (1983), andThe Balcony Tree (1992), Middleton continued to explore a startling array of topics, themes, and forms. Denis Donoghue called 111 Poems “metrically inventive and various, these poems are remarkably alive to ‘the unknown thing beside us’; they listen for ‘the due sound’, and, as if watching birds, register ‘the timed flight of words.’“ Though not solely concerned with its own status, Middleton’s poems frequently interrogate the limitations of poetry as such. Perhaps as a result, Middleton’s poetry was lauded and queried in almost equal measure. Oliver Dixon noted that, like W.H. Auden and Thom Gunn, “relocation to the States seems to have been … a liberating move” for Middleton. “The approach towards language is increasingly fluid and Joycean,” Dixon wrote. “There are no pre-set formal templates within which to fit neat portions of confessional or descriptive subject-matter; each text is an inclusive act of discovering, through animated dialogue with some point of focus (be it human, animal, household object, historical locale), its own organic form.”
Although he lived in Texas for over 30 years, Middleton was a vital part of the contemporary British poetry scene, and his influence as an innovative poet open to the traditions of other languages, cultures, and even genres is increasing. The British literary scene hailed the publication of his Collected Poems in 2008 as a major event. 
In addition to his collections of essays and expository writing, Middleton published several books of prose, including Pataxanadu (1977), Serpentine (1983), and In the Mirror of the Eighth King (1999), and Loose Cannons: Selected Prose (2014).
Middleton died in late 2015. - www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/christopher-middleton



Edward Lear in February


Since last September I’ve been trying to describe
Two moonstone hills,
And an ochre mountain, by candlelight, behind,
But a lizard has been sick into the ink,
A cat keeps clawing at me, you should see my face,
I’m too intent to dodge.
Out of the corner of my eye,
An old man (he’s putting almonds into a bag)
Stoops in sunlight, closer than the hills.
But all the time these bats flick at me
And plop, like foetuses, all over the blotting paper.
Someone began playing a gong outside, once.
I liked that, it helped; but in a flash
Neighbours were pelting him with their slippers and things,
Bits of coke and old railway timetables.
I have come unstuck in this cellar. Help.
Pacing up and down in my own shadow
Has stopped me liking the weight it falls from.
That lizard looks like being sick again. The owls
Have built a stinking nest on the Eighteenth Century.
So much for two moonstone hills,
Ochre mountain, old man
Cramming all those almonds into a bag.- www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/12/01/christopher-middleton-1926-2015/






This week's poem, Sonnet of Irreconcilables, is from the 2006-2009 section of Christopher Middleton's Collected Later Poems, a magnificent winter harvest of recent work. It belongs to a gathering of poems headed For Want of an Axiom, whose epigraph quotes from Charles Lamb's Essays of Elia: "What an antique air had the almost effaced sundials, with their moral inscriptions, seeming coevals with that Time which they measured, and to take their revelations of its flight immediately from heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain of light!"
"Time is for music, on with it," proclaims the speaker in Vasily Kalinnikov Composes, a neighbouring poem in For Want of an Axiom. Music and time are recurrent themes. Another preoccupation is corruption – not as a natural, physical effacement, but as moral evil. That the breakdown may begin with language is implicated in the splintered structure of the sonnet, and the Orwellian insistence on responsibility towards "sensitive words" and, no less, to honest "statistics of bloodshed".
The poem's occasion is a radio broadcast. I admit I thought at once of Classic FM, but, of course, there's any number of stations and arts programmes that might be implicated in cultural dumbing down. The speaker at first seems playful. Sly musical puns lighten the tone: the announcer has as "audible smile", she "recites" and "notes", and her "time" is managed. The device suggests how the finesse of Mozart and his interpreter Alfred Brendel is crammed into a formulaic package. Even the "spurts of chatter" are subjected to minutely apportioned radio time.         
Time so measured makes space neither for the expansions of art nor history. A sonnet, however, can open connections or expose fractures. Line four resembles an intrusive newsflash from elsewhere, as if the radio's dial had been twitched. The word lifted from the musical lexicon, "soloists", works in various ways. All artists may be termed soloists, and some are idealists. Individuals have always been prompted by their art to fight for a bigger cause. However, the reference may not be so literal. The soloists who are fighting "radicals" are perhaps defending injustice rather than justice: they may be the soloists of terror.
The octet ends with the rhetorical but profound question about responsibility ("What are we doing to ourselves … ?"). The ninth line answers it forcefully, if indirectly, with an image of the starkest "irreconcilables". The wheelbarrow that's "stacked with body-parts" perhaps originates in another poetic universe. Could it be the once joyously "red wheelbarrow" of William Carlos Williams?
The triplet and couplet that conclude the sonnet seem to argue that music, contrary to the announcer's declaration, is not wholly sensuous. It goes beyond the senses to become, "As Rilke felt, 'breath of statues'…" It excites the intellect. "Temporal brain" suggests the "temporal lobes" and the evanescence of perception and knowledge. While the "mobility" of music has a bright agility that "thrills" the brain, "brute force", by contrast, "crawls subtly into the speech of a culture". Yeats's "rough beast" seems implicit in the deliberate, illustrative cliche, "brute force". There are instances, of course, where speech is more obviously debased than in the popularising spiel of an arts programme. Attention to the earliest "subtle" stage of "cheapening" demonstrates how, in undramatic and even well-intentioned ways, mass brutalisation may begin.
Readers new to Middleton's work might enjoy John Yau's thoughtful introduction in The Brooklyn Rail. Yau quotes another fine poet and critic, Alan Brownjohn, who wrote of Middleton in the New Statesman: "His concern to produce an individual structure of perception for every place, thought and experience he writes about results in a ceaseless and challenging originality." These words succinctly convey the poet's special quality. From syntactical organisation and vocabulary to the span of his intellectual sympathies, his "voice" is unique. But where there's little uniformity, a single example can't possibly do its creator justice. One might well infer that the poem of the week series is no more culturally responsible than the packaged Alfred Brendel recital, but at least this announcer can add: "Read the books!" - Carol Rumens
www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/19/poem-of-the-week-sonnet-of-irreconcilables-christopher-middleton


Sonnet of Irreconcilables
With an audible smile the announcer confides to us
That Mozart is sensuous: 'In fifteen minutes
Alfred Brendel will show our listeners how.'
Soloists perish fighting radicals in the mountains.
Next she recites an anecdote and notes her liking of it.
Her time is managed, spurts of chatter come on cue.
What are we doing to ourselves, cheapening
The sensitive words, or statistics of bloodshed?
There goes the wheelbarrow stacked with body-parts.
While music is intangible, 'breath',
As Rilke felt, 'breath of statues', and while
Bodies respond to it without sight or taste,
While its mobility thrills my temporal brain,
Brute force crawls subtly into the speech of a culture.




obituaries:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/07/christopher-middleton
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/christopher-middleton-poet-celebrated-for-his-urgent-and-vivid-verse-and-his-translations-especially-a6756446.html

Donald Westlake, Memory, Hard Case Crime, 2011.


www.donaldwestlake.com/blog/


THE CRIME WAS OVER IN A MINUTE –
THE CONSQUENCES LASTED A LIFETIME
 Hospitalized after a liaison with another man’s wife ends in violence, Paul Cole has just one goal: to rebuild his shattered life. But with his memory damaged, the police hounding him, and no way even to get home, Paul’s facing steep odds – and a bleak fate if he fails…
This final, never-before-published novel by three-time Edgar Award winner Donald E. Westlake is a noir masterpiece, a dark and painful portrait of a man’s struggle against merciless forces that threaten to strip him of his very identity.


While on tour, actor Paul Cole is caught in flagrante delicto with another man’s wife. The other man beats Paul into unconsciousness, and when he awakes in a hospital bed, he can’t remember where he is or what happened to him. Can a man whose memory is irretrievably shattered hope to rebuild his life? This previously unpublished novel was written early in Westlake’s career, and it feels that way: it’s written in the crisp, unadorned style of The Mercenaries, Killing Time, and 361, all of which were published in the early 1960s. Unlike most of Westlake’s books, Memory isn’t really a crime novel; it’s a psychological drama, the story of a man trying to find his way back to his own life. Westlake’s fans will note the author’s typically careful use of description and dialogue, but they may also be a bit stymied by his central character: Cole thinks of himself at one point as a steel marble in a pinball game... always in motion, and that seems just right for a man bouncing from moment to moment, reacting to events but never taking control of them. Compared to a typical Westlake protagonist, Paul Cole feels weak and ineffectual—likable but a bit pathetic. But this is no typical Westlake novel; in fact, in many ways it’s one of his most interesting books, simply because it’s so very different. For his fans, absolutely a must-read. - David Pitt


The career of late MWA Grand Master Westlake (1933–2009) spans 50 years with the appearance of this elegant, melancholy novel, written in the 1960s and never before published. Actor Paul Cole is on tour when he sleeps with the wrong married woman, and her husband puts him in the hospital, from which he emerges with short- and long-term memory problems. As he makes his way from the Midwest to his home in New York City, Paul struggles to remember his past and build a future while existing in limbo: unable to keep appointments with doctors or the unemployment office, meeting countless people too caught up in their own agendas or bureaucracies to help him. Lovely language and the overall discourse on the consequences of thoughtlessness make this a significant final work from a master. - Publishers Weekly




I can't believe there are still some readers out there who have never had the pleasure of reading a Donald Westlake novel. A man of multiple pseudonyms- at least seventeen by my count-  Westlake (1933-2008) had a writing career that lasted some fifty years. It's hard to say exactly how many novels he wrote. Most likely over a hundred, while some twenty-five of his novels have been adapted for the screen. Then there are his screenplays, not least of which is his adaptation of Jim Thompson's The Grifters, directed by Stephen Frears in 1990 (not to mention his screenplay for Dick Spottswood's 2005 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley Under Ground).
Most hardcore crime readers would no doubt favour Westlake's novels written under the name Richard Stark. For no other reason than those books mark the  essence of modern stripped-down, fast-moving tough-guy crime fiction in the tradition of  Paul Cain and Hammett. I suppose if Westlake is known for one book it would probably be The Hunter, if only  because that's the novel on which John Boorman based his 1967 film Point Blank. As excellent as Boorman's film is, it differs  considerably from the novel.
Then there are all those  Westlake comic crime novels featuring  John Archibald Dortmunder ("My own worst fears when I get up in the morning," said Westlake regarding his creation. "He's everything that can go wrong."). An unlucky criminal genius, Dortmunder first appeared in the 1970 Hot Rock, which began as a Richard Stark novel, but Westlake realised the novel, concerning someone who commits the same crime over and over again,  was moving away from the hardboiled style of the Parker novels. With his eccentric concept of criminality, Dortmunder would go on to feature in more than a dozen novels.
Other than the Stark novels, my personal favourite Westlake books are what I call his "social" novels, like  The Ax, The Hook and his final novel Memory, published posthumously by Hard Case Crime in 2010. Not that other Westlake novels lack a social dimension;  in fact, they are all subtly political regarding the way they expose society's fissures and failures. For instance,  the Stark novels, in which Parker, ever the individualist, battles against organized crime, in other words corporate capitalism.  But, for me, Westlake's "social" novels are more explicit in their critique and commentary, whether concerning, as in The Ax,  someone who finds himself unemployed, and so, to maintain his life style, sets out to murder anyone competing for the job he's after. Or, as in The Hook,  about a successful novelist who has come down with a case of writer's block, so, to once again keep up his life style and help pay off his divorce, hires a hack writer,  to write his next novel, which turns out to be a success. Which means even though the two writers will split the money, the hack writer, as part of the deal, and in what could be viewed as an updating of Highsmith's Strangers On a Train, has to the other man's divorce-seeking wife.
Likewise,  Westlake's final and posthumously published  (Hard Case Crime) novel, Memory, which I only came across recently. It's a novel full of surprises in which Westlake moves from  the social to the margins of philosophical speculation, as he examines the relationship between memory and identity. Writer Luc Sante has called this novel "hardboiled Kafka," and he's not far off the mark. Not without humour and never stretching credulity beyond breaking point, Memory recalls one of Westlake's earliest (technically his second novel, if one discounts earlier soft-core porn efforts), Killy, about a couple union organizers called into  a company town, only to be implicated in murder, although Memory is a more mature and well-rounded novel.  And, as usual, Westlake rarely wastes a word.
It's a novel centered on Paul Cole, a New York actor in a traveling  theater group working in a middle-American small town. There he has a one-night stand with a woman whose husband discovers them together and hits Paul on the head with a chair- "What a cliché," acknowledges Paul-  rendering him unconscious. He awakes in a hospital with amnesia. The doctors assure that his condition is temporary. However, the authorities make it clear that someone with such loose morals is not welcome in their town, so accompany him to the bus station where Paul gets a ticket as far as  his money will take him. Not to New York but to another small town where he finds work in a tannery. He more or less settles into life there, has friends, including  a girlfriend, but, though he doesn't realize why, he knows he must return to New York. It's only when he finally arrives there that his real troubles begin.
I can't think of many novels that examine so closely  the relationship between identity and memory, as well as its various implications. After all, if  one's memory is wiped out, where does that leave the entire nature vs nurture debate?  And what remains of the person? What is the person other than his memories? And if one's circumstances dictate, to some extent,  one's personality,  can one, should amnesia strike (that Paul has partial amnesia only complicates matters), simply start over?  Longer than the usual Westlake/Stark novel, Memory might also be Westlake's most literary effort. "Literary" in the sense of mainstream fiction. Which isn't to say other Westlake novels are not literary; in fact, they are deceptively so, even if they are left to define  their own particular literariness. Moreover, Memory might also be Westlake's most personal novel, as it delves into a subject befitting someone moving into the last years of his life.
I admit that  I'm no expert when it comes to Westlake's fiction, but I can  say that  I've appreciated everything  I've ever read by him. And, if nothing else, Memory seems to be a fitting end to a long and perhaps under-appreciated career.  If you haven't read Westlake, Memory is as good a place as any to start. And if you have read him, you won't want to miss this novel... - Woody Haut
https://woodyhaut.blogspot.hr/2018/02/i-remember-therefore-i-am-memory-by.html


While on tour with a stage-company, actor Paul Edwin Cole gets caught in bed with a woman by her husband. The husband beats up Paul badly enough to knock him out for fifty-eight hours and send him to the hospital; when he wakes up, Paul is a changed man. He remembers some things, like his name, but not much. His short-term memory is poor: he forgets things like the nurse's name. Not unexpected side-effects from a massive concussion -- except that in Paul's case they last. And last and last.
       It's not real amnesia, "it's just that everything sort of fades" is how Paul describes it.
I remember just bits and pieces of things. My memory is like a sieve, everything runs through it. In a few days, I'll probably forget talking to you.
       The theater-group ditched him and moved on, and the police are eager to get him out of town as son as possible, too, so after about two weeks in hospital they escort him to the bus station and send him on his way. His way is in direction New York -- his home address still rings some sort of bell, and he knows the key to figuring out who exactly he is lies back there -- but he doesn't have enough cash to get all the way there. So he goes as far as he can afford - a place called Jeffords --, and takes it from there.
       His limited memory makes things problematic. He has to write himself notes to remind himself of things. The lack of money is even more problematic, but he gets a job (in a tannery) and tries to save up -- which takes a while, because of his expenses, like room and board. The life isn't bad: he likes the family where he has a room, he likes the work. And he even gets himself a girl he likes, Edna.
       But his goal is New York -- he knows he has to go there, and eventually, when he has enough for the bus fare, he leaves Jeffords and heads back home. Except that it isn't really home any longer. A great deal is vaguely familiar, and he recognizes some of the people he encounters -- friends, his agent -- but he's not his old self any longer. And he's certainly no actor: he can't memorize lines, and he can't play the part -- any part -- either: the cocky, sure-of-himself man is now only a shell of himself. Try as he might, he can't recapture that old self.
       It takes him a while to work things out, but he realizes he's stuck in this condition. He can barely relate to the people he used to hang out with -- or rather, they have trouble relating to him -- and he has difficulty figuring out what he should do with himself. One thing he notices, however, is that some memories are sticking with him. There's a disturbing one of some metal object that plagues him, though he can't figure out exactly where to place that memory. But there's also the memory of Edna, and the inkling that maybe that life he abandoned was the better one for him.
       Westlake fashions a surprisingly compelling novel out of this fairly basic premise and simple story, managing an impressive balancing act with this material that could so easily get monotonous (or irritating) -- especially considering how long the novel is. Westlake injects some moments of tension -- encounters with the police, flashes of aggression, Paul's money trouble -- but for the most part this is a subdued novel (just as Paul is now very subdued) of a man trying to find his way, forced to tackle all those big philosophical questions -- right down to 'Who am I ?' -- in a much more direct way than most.
       Memory is a noir novel, centered very much on its now-loner protagonist. Paul thinks he has a mystery to investigate -- to figure out who he is -- and he goes through the detective-motions. But the pieces, even as they add up, don't help him. What he really has to do is figure out who he wants to be.
       Lost soul Paul sees he can't reclaim his life in New York, and he eventually makes his decision, whether to stay or go. But even in its ending, Memory remains true to the genre, existentialist noir through and through.
       It's bleak stuff -- though always with a bit of hope shining through -- and very good. Westlake shows he had the writing chops; it's a shame (and shameful) that his agent had him put it back in his drawer because it was supposedly 'too literary'. Recommended. - M.A.Orthofer
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/westlake/memory.htm

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Weekly Standard

LIKE MOST PEOPLE who spend too much time with books when they are young, I eventually developed the urge to write myself but found it difficult to write anything I enjoyed reading. Largely this was because I either tried too hard or was emulating so many different writers that I couldn’t establish any control over basic fictional techniques. I was too busy hunting through my Thesaurus for complicated-sounding words and manufacturing pretentious, apocalyptic stories about worlds and landscapes I didn’t know anything about.
Then, in my early teens, I attended a “speculative fiction” writer’s conference in Seattle. One of the guest writers was Harlan Ellison, known then (and now) as a funny, aggressive, short, challenging, charismatic, and unconventional writer of manifestly angry short stories, screenplays, and essays. (It may only be my imagination, but I seem to recall seeing him, on more than one occasion, marching around the lobby of our busy dormitory wearing only a terrycloth bath towel strapped around his waist while smoking a big ornate meerschaum pipe.) And while there are good reasons for remembering his larger-than-life personality­, to this day I recall him simply as a lover of books. He was constantly throwing around the names of writers I didn’t know, and I was constantly scribbling those names into one of the notebooks I was constantly losing. Then, near the end of that first uncomfortable week, when it was growing increasingly apparent to everyone (especially me) that my fiction was pretty bad, Harlan Ellison gave me a piece of piece of good advice that I have never forgotten: “Throw out that fucking copy of Finnegans Wake you’re always carrying around and go read Donald E. Westlake. He’ll teach you everything you need to know about writing fiction. Oh, and pick up some acne medication while you’re at it. Your face’s a mess.”
The day after Harlan Ellison issued his marching orders, my friend Gus Hasford and I took our daily walk into Seattle and picked up several Westlake paperbacks that were pretty widely available. We found them in the battered, rain-stained bargain boxes outside thrift stores, in the squeakily revolving racks at Safeway and 7-Eleven, and even displayed in the front windows of bookstores among the latest crime and mystery releases. As I recall now, they were distinguished by their almost uniformly terrible covers: lots of blank white spaces populated by office equipment, hippy-like women in short skirts and beads, and men in slacks, shirts, and ties (no jackets). And while there might be a gun located here or there among the mannequins, the images suggested middle-aged attractive people plotting murder while writing memos and typing correspondence.
Sometimes there was just a simple, iconic bank vault on the cover, or a bunch of Mad Magazine–style gangsters chasing each other around with machine guns. And the titles (at first glance, anyway) were likewise flat and anonymous-sounding: The Hot Rock (1970), Bank Shot (1972), and Help I Am Being Held Prisoner (1974) — the first three Westlake titles I took home with me that afternoon. My first impression was that they looked extremely boring and conventional, something my parents might like. I had no idea what this Harlan guy was talking about. They didn’t look like “serious writing” at all.
And so I picked one up that evening in the top level of my college bunkbed and didn’t put it down again until I finished well after midnight. And by sometime early the next afternoon, I had read them all.
Those first Westlake books zipped by so quickly that I wasn’t even aware I was reading them until they were over. And unlike all the “serious” and “noteworthy” books I usually tried to read, they never had me anxiously checking how many pages there were left until the next chapter, or looking up words in the dictionary, or skimming back over the previous pages to find something I had missed. Every image leapt off the page; every scene quickly set me in a location so vivid and immediate that it felt like I wasn’t entering some fictional space but simply remembering an actual location where I had already been. And every line of dialogue opened up the voice and personality of the character who spoke it. Take, for example, this opening page from the second Westlake novel I ever read, Bank Shot:
Within four brief paragraphs, two characters have come to life: a weary con man with some encyclopedias (the literary equivalent of swampland in Florida) he wants to sell and an obsessively “neat,” infinitely repeatable middle-class woman who’s so busy worrying about what the con man’s right hand is showing her (“We don’t have to go to Butte, Montana, do we?”) that she never realizes the left hand is offering her piles of glamorous stuff she will never see. Each image is vivid and exact — the stiff, plastic-looking curtains; the promo leaflets scattered over the table; and the blacktop curving off over the edge of the meaningless suburban planet — so that the reader is propelled into a landscape filled with voices, urgency, and confrontation. Then, just as the con man (his name is Dortmunder, and he eventually occupied more than a dozen of Westlake’s caper-comedies) awaits delivery of another 10-dollar bill to his wallet, he hears this supposed born-sucker in the other room calling the cops. Maybe, he thinks suddenly, she isn’t as dumb as she looks — and he turns out to be right.
That’s because nothing goes quite where you expect it to go in a Westlake novel, and these perfect little comic dislocations satisfyingly occur over and over again, always perfectly composed, always surprising, and always delivering what had to happen. Sentence after sentence. Scene after scene. And book after book. Until, of course, you start the next one.
Westlake didn’t wear “big ideas” on his sleeve, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t have them; and even at their most entertaining, his novels deliver an unforgiving picture of a postwar United States in which the overriding philosophy of social life is money: how to get it, how to keep it, and how to keep someone else from getting it from you.
On the one hand, there are the systems of cold commerce that drive criminal enterprises in the obsidian-black towers of Manhattan, presided over by well-salaried, faceless administrative hacks working for generic-sounding enterprises known only as the Organization or the Outfit. They send men out on jobs, collect the proceeds, and reinvest in further robberies, drug rackets, and prostitution rings. Unlike the racialized criminals of conventional crime fiction — from the paisans of Mario Puzo to the African-American and Latino street gangsters of Elmore Leonard and Chester Himes — Westlake’s bad guys are almost uniformly Waspish and unspecific, from the Carters and Fairfaxes of the Parker books to the multinational corporatist eco-villain, Richard Curtis, of Westlake’s recently rediscovered Bond pastiche, Forever and a Death (2017).
In Westlake’s universe, money isn’t just something you use to buy groceries and lawn ornaments; it’s a system of governance indistinguishable from the dull professional societies we work for, and from the politicians who do their bidding. It’s not an “urban” thing; it achieves its apotheosis in the suburbs, where the Organization’s CEOs and board members go home to play with their kids. In Westlake’s America, crime isn’t an aberration; it’s the way things work.
On the other hand, the Westlake “heroes” qualify as heroes almost entirely by virtue of their ability to work outside the big office towers and top-down corporate hierarchies; and as highly skilled, self-regulating freelancers, their main occupation is to steal money back from the corporate thugs who stole it from everybody else. For example, there’s the racehorse-betting cab driver, Chet Conway, in Somebody Owes Me Money (1969), who spends an entire novel dodging the guns coming at him from various gangland rivalries for no more altruistic a reason than his desire to be paid what he is owed on the only decent bet he ever laid down­. Meanwhile, his dad enjoys his twilight years trying to figure out ways to cheat the life insurance companies, and the girl of his dreams shows up just in time to teach his friends how to deal cards from the bottom of the deck.
Everybody is either a crook or a mark in Westlake’s universe, and the only distinguishing characteristic of the “good” crooks is that they only want to be paid what they are owed and not two cents more. They aren’t greedy. They don’t steal from other professionals like themselves. They always keep their word to colleagues. And once they get paid, they trot off happily to the next gig.
The “evil” side of the criminal universe, however, is a distinctly Trumpian one: an endless, escalating chaos created by the various competing crooks and gangsters who secretly run things. These stupid, hive-minded, overpaid white guys steal everything from everybody indiscriminately, even each other; then they try to turn everyone who doesn’t work for them into corporate drones like themselves — and if they can’t turn them, they kill them. The only people who survive outside this ruthless corporate world are freelancers, such as Alan Grofield (one of Westlake’s best series characters), a consummate paid-by-the-heist professional featured in another excellent novel, Lemons Never Lie (1971). (He originally appeared in some of the early Parker books, presumably to keep Westlake entertained while he wrote those humorless, hard, excellent little thrillers.) He always shows up to work on time; he never hurts innocent bystanders; and if he even suspects that any bystanders might be hurt on a job, he quits.
And when each job is over, he spends his hard-stolen money operating a theater-in-a-barn somewhere in the middle of deadly-dull Illinois, where he paints his own sets, directs, and stars in his own productions, bringing art to the vast American television-saturated wasteland. As Grofield’s girlfriend reminds him: “What you do is best. Taking from banks and armored cars and places like that. That’s not really stealing, because you aren’t taking from people, you’re taking from institutions. Institutions don’t count. They ought to support us.” Damn straight.
The publisher Hard Case Crime has undertaken a long-term project to recover many of Westlake’s least-known books, and they have already yielded some great and enduring stuff. Besides bringing out the first US paperback editions of Lemons and the 1962 novel 361 (former nice-guy Air Force serviceman seeks ruthless payback when somebody kills his dad), Hard Case has also published for the first time three long and remarkable manuscripts — suggesting that, hey, Westlake may have actually misplaced more good books than most of us will ever write.
In addition to the recently released Forever and a Death (which shows that Westlake might have transcended the eco-thriller genre as successfully as he transcended the comic caper and hard-boiled detective formats), Hard Case published Memory in 2010, a longish, noirish, 1960s-era novel about possibly the greatest threat to American “identity” — the fact that there might not actually be one. Paul Cole — another of Westlake’s frustrated artists — gets lost in middle America after a violent altercation with his girlfriend’s husband that leaves him with recurring amnesia. Over several months of struggling to return home to Manhattan, he keeps forgetting who he is and what he wants; he industriously slogs his way into a mindless factory job, a series of mindless new social responsibilities, and a potentially marriage-bound relationship with an interchangeable (and possibly even mindless) new girlfriend. Then, once he earns the money he needs to return to his old life in Manhattan, he launches himself into a new series of mindless routines all over again. Memory is a funny, microscopically exact picture of the haunting sameness of middle America, filled with the rigorous naturalistic descriptions and compulsions that drive Jack London’s Martin Eden and Zola’s L’Assommoir.
But the pick of the Hard Case lot is almost certainly The Comedy is Finished (2012), another unpublished Westlake novel that is even better than some of his oft-reprinted ones. In some ways, Comedy is yet another caper novel but set in the divided political world of ’60s America, when all the old lies about American exceptionalism were coming up hard against the ugly, CIA-sponsored geopolitical violence of Vietnam and Central America. (Contemporary United States, take note.) Out of all the several dozen Westlake novels I have read and enjoyed, Koo Davis is probably his greatest comic creation: a Bob Hope–like hack comic whose silly shtick of cornball USO shows and stand-up jokes about ditzy “flower children” starts to make him feel complicit in the American-Dream-turned-sour.
Kidnapped by a white-bread version of the Symbionese Liberation Army (middle-class white people clearly scare Westlake more than anybody, and the scariest of these privileged terrorists may well be Joyce, a former Brownie, Campfire Girl, and member of the Junior Sodality at her local church — uh-oh), Koo tries to take his situation seriously as a potentially doomed bargaining chip for a prisoner exchange with the FBI, but he can’t resist firing off corny zingers and toilet jokes at every opportunity. Even when he’s being beaten, poisoned, threatened, and lectured on dialectical materialism, he keeps seeing life as an endless comic routine in a country so stupid that it will probably never get the joke. According to the publisher’s notes, Westlake felt this book might read too much like Martin Scorsese’s 1982 film The King of Comedy, so he stored it away and it was eventually forgotten. But it is a richer, more politically complex, and more moving story — and a hell of a lot more fun besides.
When the final volley of bullets arrives in The Comedy is Finished, one of the kidnappers tells Koo: “It sounds like the critics found you.” And while it is likely that critics might not have found or appreciated a novel this good even had it been published back in the time it was written, Westlake clearly didn’t care too much about being taken “seriously,” continuing to produce serious-even-when-funny great books in a remarkable career that never ended until he died. Over several decades of calm, passionate literary production, he never wrote a bad sentence or a bad scene, and he produced so many good books that he needed a filing cabinet of pseudonyms just to keep up. Which, come to think of it, may qualify him as that rarest beast of all: the writer’s writer’s writer. There was always too much of him to go around — which means the rest of us have plenty of time to catch up. - Scott Bradfield
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/donald-e-westlake-the-writers-writers-writer/#!



Donald Westlake, Forever and a Death, Hard Case Crime, 2017.


The Bond That Never Was
Two decades ago, the producers of the James Bond movies hired legendary crime novelist Donald E. Westlake to come up with a story for the next Bond film. The plot Westlake dreamed up – about a Western businessman seeking revenge after being kicked out of Hong Kong when the island was returned to Chinese rule – had all the elements of a classic Bond adventure, but political concerns kept it from being made. Never one to let a good story go to waste, Westlake wrote an original novel based on the premise instead – a novel he never published while he was alive.
Now, nearly a decade after Westlake’s death, Hard Case Crime is proud to give that novel its first publication ever, together with a brand new afterword by one of the movie producers describing the project’s genesis, and to give fans their first taste of the Westlake-scripted Bond that might have been.


As Jeff Kleeman describes, at length, in his Afterword, the origins of Forever and a Death can be found in Westlake's treatment for a possible Bond 18 -- the next in the then-staggering James Bond franchise, at a time when all hinged on the 1995 make-or-possibly-break GoldenEye. Westlake ultimately didn't get the gig, but used some of the material in writing Forever and a Death (keeping a Bondesque title, but with no Bond-figure figuring in the story) -- though it was never published during his lifetime.
       The opening chapters nicely set the stage, with tiny uninhabited Kanowit Island, a mere two miles across, on the south end of the Great Barrier Reef, being readied, in spectacular fashion, so that it can be turned into an upscale resort by developer Richard Curtis. Some clever engineering by George Manville makes this the testing ground for the application of a soliton to raze everything to the ground -- a wave propagated through the island, breaking up everything solid. And, while useful for this project, Curtis secretly has something much bigger in mind if it works -- the British handover of Hong Kong a few years earlier cost him dearly, and he wants to exact revenge, and a larger-scale soliton would more than do the trick .....
       An environmental group called Planetwatch, and one of its leaders, Jerry Diedrich, show up just before the soliton is set off. Diedrich has become a big thorn in Curtis' side:
He's been after me since just around the time I left Hong Kong, and it's me that he wants, not polluters or environmental criminals or any of that, it's me. Most of that Planetwatch crowd is off doing something about the ozone layer or some fucking thing, but he's got this one bunch fixated on me, he's got them convinced it's a crusade and I'm the evil tycoon that has to be brought down. 
       Clearly it's personal -- though Curtis can't figure out why. And his bigger problem is that he does have things to hide, and so Diedrich's constant presence is more than just annoying. And then there's the question of how Diedrich always knows where Curtis is: there must be a mole in the organization, feeding him information.
       Kim Baldur is a young volunteer on the Planetwatch boat and, overeager, she goes over the side of the boat in her scuba gear just before the soliton is set off. She can't be expected to survive that -- but she does, and while the Planetwatch ship has to turn tail, Curtis' crew fishes her out. Curtis would rather she were dead -- causing enough legal headaches for Diedrich to keep him off his back for a while -- and since she's not he decides to help her along.
       When Manville realizes that girl still can be saved he knows what he has to do -- and that he's making a big and dangerous enemy in Curtis once he does. Stuck on a ship, escape isn't easy -- but Manville and Kim manage to make it to the mainland. They decide, however, that they don't have enough proof to go to the authorities -- giving Curtis time to begin to spin the story his way.
       Curtis really wants Manville and Kim out of the way, and he works to arrange that. Meanwhile, Diedrich reëmerges in the picture, too; Kim teams back up with him, while a kidnapped Manville is stashed in the Australian outback by Curtis until he can figure out how to handle the situation.
       The story eventually moves to Singapore -- Curtis' new base -- and finally Hong Kong, where Curtis' plan is meant to be set into action. Leading there, a couple of games of cat and mouse continue -- with some of Curtis' henchmen doing some dirty work along the way, though generally with mixed results. Still, the mole in the Curtis-organization is identified, and decommissioned (or rather: put to a different use).
       With Manville, Kim, Diedrich, and a helpful Australian policeman on his heels, Curtis still manages to stay a step ahead, and begins to put his plan into action. Will the good guys be able to stop him in time ?
       Forever and a Death has its moments -- but they tend to be of the cinematic sort. Although, character-wise, the novel doesn't much resemble a Bond-movie, it remains typical blockbuster action-fare, and from the opening scenes' soliton to the final showdown, most of this sounds like it would works better on the screen. (So also things like the question: "Is the submarine hooked to the bulldozer ?")
       Westlake also doesn't manage to keep the focus anywhere long enough. For a while, it seems Manville will be the dominant good guy hero -- but then he's stashed in the outback, twiddling his thumbs. More of a focus on the bad guy might have worked too, but Westlake doesn't go that route either. And the interactions with outside help -- an attorney, the police --, while showing some promise, are also mostly underused. Then there are the minor characters who come to the fore, but Westlake doesn't seem entirely comfortable leaving them there too long. It makes for an oddly paced -- indeed, often somewhat plodding -- novel, all the more noticeably so because it's well over four hundred pages long .....
       Forever and a Death could make an enjoyable action-film, but on the page it just doesn't work that well, with even the writing on the by-the-numbers and slightly uninspired side. This is a novel that probably would have worked much better either in much tauter form -- or expanded. At this longish middle length it just feels lumpy. (And while it's a good-sounding title, it's not exactly a great fit for the story itself.) - M.A.Orthofer
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/westlake/forever_and_a_death.htm

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The Westlake Review

Donald Westlake, The Ax, Mysterious Press, 1997.


For 25 years, Burke Devore has provided for his family and played by the rules. Until now. Downsized from his job, Devore is slipping away: from his wife, his family, and from all civilized norms of behavior. He wants his life back, and will do anything to get it. In this relentlessly fascinating novel, the masterful Westlake takes readers on a journey of obsession and outrage inside a quiet man's desperate world.


The Ax is narrated by Burke Devore. He's married, to Marjorie, and they have two kids in their late-teens, Betsy, who is already off at college, and Bill, . He worked at a paper mill for over two decades, most of them as a product manager -- until he got a yellow slip in 1995, telling him he was going to be let go, part of the company's massive restructuring plan. The transition was a slow one -- five more months on the job, a decent severance package, even continued medical insurance for a while -- but the recovery he imagined, finding a new job, hasn't materialized in the nearly a year since he was let go.
       Burke understands: the conditions aren't favorable, the power lies elsewhere, he has little to offer or bargain with.
I do know paper, and I could take over almost any managerial job within the paper industry, with only minimal training in a particular specialty. But there's so many of us out here, the companies don't feel the need to do even the slightest training. They don't have to hire somebody who's merely good, and then fine-tune him to their requirements. They can find somebody who already knows their precise function, was trained in it by some other employer, and is eager to come work for you, at lower pay and fewer benefits, just so it's a job.
       Burke and his family are still getting by -- Marjorie has two small part-time jobs, for example, which helps. But it's eating away at him, and he's decided he has to be pro-active. Not in the way the so-called experts suggest -- a course in air conditioning-repair is among their suggestions -- and not just by passively submitting resumés (as he's been doing -- even getting the odd interview here and there, only to be denied, again and again). No, desperate Burke comes up with a desperate plan: he has targeted a specific position at a relatively nearby plant, and the fact that it's currently filled isn't a problem: he's going to make sure it opens up -- and, when it does, that he's the best candidate for the spot. First he plans to wipe out the competition -- the similarly-qualified managers who are also hunting for the same kind of job -- and then he'll take out the guy currently in that position. When they look to fill the newly-opened position, he'll be their man. So the theory, anyway.
       It's a pretty hare-brained idea, but Burke has thought most of it through, and these are the lengths to which he's willing to go to. And that's what The Ax is: an account of his controlled but murderous rampage, all just to get his life on course again. Sure he has qualms -- "What have I started here ? What road am I on ?" -- but he honestly doesn't see any alternative. He's been driven into a corner, and this is his only way out.
       Despite the outlandish plot, Westlake's novel is mighty impressive. Burke is a difficult sort of character to present, but his cold rationality -- a forced sort of freeze, so that he doesn't let the horror of what he's doing get to him (too much) -- is convincing, and all the more believable when he struggles in confronting several of these men who are, after all, going through much the same thing he is: he can see himself all too clearly in each of them. The rationalizations are far-fetched, but Burke needs to convince himself, since he can't see any other way out. It's self-defense, he tells himself -- he has to kill:
In self-defense, really, in defense of my family, my life, my mortgage, my future, myself, my life. That's self-defense.
       It's a thin line, but Burke doesn't cross over to pure psychopath, and part of Westlake's accomplishment here is in how plausible he makes Burke's perverse crusade. Burke is believable as a character driven so to the edge that he's willing to go down this road, weighing the costs to his soul and deciding it's a price he has to pay.
       The Ax is an exciting thriller: Burke's plan is clever, but hardly foolproof -- beginning with the fact that if he's going to be using the same gun ballistics matches will quickly point to a serial killer with a very selective target-list. He's forced to take some chances, and he does have his run-ins with the police. There's a good deal of can-he-get-away-with-it tension, nicely handled by Westlake, but there's more to the book, too, including its critique, implicit and explicit, of a capitalist society that places shareholder value so far above any broader sense of community, and thus wreaks havoc on community. (It helps, and adds much to the book's power, that Burke and his victims are -- or were -- all securely middle management and middle class (or, as it turns out, not so securely ...).)
       There's also the effect on family, with Burke not realizing just how much his unemployment, and the way it has affected him, has affected his family, driving his wife to seek consolation elsewhere and ultimately pushing her to force him to go into counselling with her, justifiably concerned they aren't going to make it as a couple otherwise. Son Billy also gets in trouble with the law, but here Burke's transformation into a more take-charge kind of guy, more concerned with doing right for his family than simply doing right, turns out to be (at least in terms of seeing that Billy's future isn't ruined) a positive thing: whatever lessons Burke has learnt on his killing-spree haven't made him a better man or father, but they've made him better-suited to take on the challenges of a dog-eat-dog world of winners and losers.
       The Ax is a cold, dark, and very well-crafted novel. Westlake is very good at what he does here: this is very good writing, very good plotting, and a great character-portrait, lifting the novel far above mere sensationalist serial-killer fare. Burke Devore is just one of many who has has been devoured by modern capitalist society, but Burke chooses to fight back, the only way he can conceive of. He's decided on his priorities, and he's willing to pay the price (to his soul); that Westlake can send him down this path so convincingly is a terrifying indictment of modern America.
       Recommended. - M.A.Orthofer
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/westlake/ax.htm

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The Westlake Review

Donald Westlake, The Getaway Car(Non-Fiction Collection), University of Chicago Press, 2014.


“‘This is a book for fans,’ Stahl insists in his introduction — the sole misstep of his whole enterprise, because in fact this is a book for everyone, anyone who likes mystery novels or good writing or wit and passion and intelligence, regardless of their source.” ~ Charles Finch, NY Times Book Review
“Westlake was not this kind of writer, or that kind, not a crime writer, or a satirist, or a comedian. He was just a writer, and as good as they come.” ~ Malcolm Jones, The Daily Beast
“Westlake was a hugely entertaining and witty writer. Whether he is writing a letter to his editor or about the history of his genre, he remains true to his definition of what makes a great writer: ‘passion, plus craft.’” ~ P.D. Smith, The Guardian
“He was a storyteller of amazing inventiveness and range, of comic capers and noir thrillers, of manic romps and melancholy tales, of wacky adventures and clever conceits. His novels are set in the America he lived in. If you were to read widely in the Westlake oeuvre, you’d get a better education in the many complexities of American life than you would if you were to spend years studying for a Ph.D. in sociology or American Studies.” ~ William Kristol, Wall Street Journal
Samples from the book:
A Pseudonym Returns From an Alter-Ego Trip, With New Tales to Tell
The Hardboiled Dicks
Letter to Pam Vesey, copy editor at Marian Evans [The Daily Beast]


“There can be no question of my doing justice to the writing of Donald Westlake, also known as Richard Stark, Tucker Coe, and other cover names. For background you can go to his fine site or to Wikipedia, or this warm appreciation by Michael Weinreb. Here I just want to pay brief tribute to a writer who, like Rex Stout and Patricia Highsmith, seemed incapable of composing a bad sentence. Elmore Leonard gets deserved recognition as a laconic master of language, but Westlake was no less skillful. In some ways he was more ambitious and audacious.”
Read more: How to write: Professor Westlake is in, by David Bordwell — David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema (2013)


“When I first came across the fictional antihero known as Parker, he was in a hotel room, torturing a man who had tried to murder him in his sleep. I was browsing a specialty bookstore in Greenwich Village that, like most specialty bookstores, no longer exists; I had, by pure chance, picked up a skinny little volume called The Outfit, which doesn’t so much begin as get straight to the goddamned point. It is no secret that the man who wrote the Parker novels deliberately started many of them with the word “when,” thereby ensuring the rising action would not be muddied up with dull things like exposition; I contend that one of the most direct first sentences in the modern history of the novel details a telephone ringing when Parker is in the garage, murdering a man.”
Read more: The Many Lives of Donald Westlake, by Michael Weinreb – Grantland (2013)

“The Parker novels are but a small part of Donald E. Westlake’s illustrious career. This Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America penned more than 100 novels and short stories, as well as screenplays. Here’s a look at some of his forays into film.”
Read more: Parker as Parker: The Long Road to the Big Screen, by Valerie Kalfrin – Word & Film (2013)

Posthumous novels, of course, are not unusual. […] But what about posthumous novels that are neither the last work of a writer recently deceased nor a virtually completed work that, for some reason, wound up in the bottom drawer? Both of the Westlake discoveries are in that category. So two questions arise: Why weren’t they published while Westlake was alive, and would he have been happy to see them published after his death?
Read more: Westlake Lives! Two posthumous gifts from a master entertainer. — The Weekly Standard (2012)
“Donald E. Westlake was a twentieth-century master of crime fiction. Under the name Richard Stark, one of his many pseudonyms, he penned the legendary Parker novels, including three just brought back into print by the University of Chicago Press this week: Butcher’s Moon (1974), Comeback (1997), and Backflash (1998), each with a new foreword by Westlake’s friend and writing partner Lawrence Block. To celebrate their release, Press publicity manager and Parker masterfan Levi Stahl sat down with Brian Garfield, novelist (author of the cult classics Death Wish and Hopscotch), screenwriter, and an old friend of Westlake’s.”
Read more: Playing Poker with Parker: An Interview with Brian Garfield (2011)


The Black Tentacle, however, is something a little different. It’s an award we created specifically to recognize a novel that doesn’t quite fit the award description but is so exceptional it merits the highest praise. We don’t expect to hand out Black Tentacles every year. Of all the novels we read this year, there was one book that knocked our collective socks off; one book we have ceaselessly recommended; one book we honestly believe every single person who visits this blog should read and own and buy multiple copies of and give away at birthdays and bat mitzvahs and any other day that ends in “-day.” That novel is Memory, by the late, lamented Donald E. Westlake.
Read more: The Kitschies: 2010 Black Tentacle Winner– Pornokitsch.com (2010)


“Westlake’s writing felt like the work of a man half his age, someone still hungry to make it as an author. His storytelling retained its interest right up to the end. Losing James Crumley stung. Losing Gregory Mcdonald was a blow. Losing Westlake? That hurt. Especially since he showed no signs of slowing down in his writing and never lost a step. A rare feat, indeed, dear readers.”
Read more: Nobody Runs Forever: A Last Good-bye to Donald E. Westlake, by Cameron Hughes – The Rap Sheet (2009) [Includes farewell blurbs from many admiring authors.]

Just before Nobel season in 2006, the Los Angeles Times asked several commentators for prize recommendations. I suggested Westlake for literature: “Enough with honoring self-consciously solemn, angst-ridden and pseudo-deep chroniclers of the human condition. Westlake is smart, clever and witty–a prolific craftsman–and deep. But do the Nobel judges have a sense of humor? I doubt it.”
Read more: Donald E. Westlake, 1933 – 2008, by William Kristol — The Weekly Standard (2009)


“Crime fiction lost a don of the genre last week: Donald E Westlake, the author of more than 100 hard-boiled novels and mystery capers, died at the age of 75. Westlake’s legacy is not just a library of pulpy page-turners: he had a hand in a pack of classic crime movies, including Point Blank and The Grifters. Chris Wiegand presents a shot-by-shot guide to the best”
See more: Westlake at the Movies– Photo Gallery, The Guardian (2009)

“Donald Westlake started writing crime novels in 1960 and he made his entrance with a bang: his first one, The Mercenaries, was nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America, and deserved to be. Between then and his death this past New Year’s Eve, he wrote something like 100 more, won the Edgar three times, was named a Grand Master by the MWA, got an Academy Award nomination for his screenplay of The Grifters, and was called “one of the great writers of the 20th century” by Newsweek. Those are the facts of the matter. What they fail to capture is why people loved the man’s books and why they had the impact they did.”
Read more: Bloody and Rare by Charles Ardai in The Guardian (2009)

“There is a cliché (and clichés usually become clichés because they’re true) that comedians and comic writers are dark, angry, unhappy souls. Donald E. Westlake, who died on New Year’s Eve of a heart attack at age 75, was the funniest mystery writer who ever lived, and nothing about him, or his work, was a cliché. You wanted him at a party because he loved to laugh, just as he loved to make people laugh. He made it clear that he was never the funniest kid in school, but was always the best friend of the funniest kid.”
Read more: From Laughter to Tears by Otto Penzler in The Wall St. Journal (2009)



“Lest one confuse prolific output with mediocrity, think again. Westlake came of age during the heyday of the paperback revolution, when quantity was rewarded at a penny a word by houses looking for lurid tales worthy of the racy cover art. With families to feed and deadlines to meet, there wasn’t time to fuss over the right turn of phrase or elongated story lines — or to thumb a nose at a particular genre. During his six-decade career, Westlake wrote sleazy novels and children’s books, penned Oscar-nominated film scripts like “The Grifters” and epic television flops like “Supertrain,” dabbled in science fiction and even cooked up a biography of Elizabeth Taylor. But his best home was always crime fiction, as seen through the fun-house mirror of works written under his real name and by his darker alter ego, Stark.”
Read more: Under any name, Donald Westlake was a grandmaster by Sarah Weinman in The L.A. Times (2009)

“After watching a bare-chested dentist trekking through the jungle by torchlight to shake a spear at a sunburned accountant in a loincloth, you might think television reality shows were beyond satire. But that would be underestimating the puckish wit of Donald E. Westlake, who died of a heart attack last New Year’s Eve but still leaves us laughing with his final novel, a rollicking crime caper that pulls the pants right off the reality TV industry. ”
Read more: NY Times Book Review for Get Real, the last in the Dortmunder Series (2009)

On October 8th [2004] the Private Eye Writers of America gave me their annual Shamus Award [The Eye, Lifetime Achievement Award] at a dinner in Toronto, in conjunction with this year’s Bouchercon. Airplane schedules defeated my plan to be there to accept the award, but I sent along the following acceptance speech, which was read to the group by Bob Randisi. I was not the only one who was there in spirit only. Max Allan Collins introduced me, but he couldn’t be there either, so his astral spirit introduced my astral spirit, or something like that. Anyway, here’s what he said, and then here’s what I said. ~DEW
Read more: Don receives “The Eye” for Lifetime Achievement— Private Eye Writers of America (2004)

“Simply the best. One of the most accomplished crime writers ever, and certainly one of the funniest, Donald Edwin Edward Westlake was born in Brooklyn in 1933, and rambled around much of New York state, growing up, or at least that’s his story. He was raised in Yonkers and Albany, and attended college in Plattsburgh (Plattsburgh? That’s uncomfortably close to Montreal!), Troy and Binghamton, and finally Manhattan. “None to much effect,” he hastens to assure us.”
Read more: Donald Westlake– The Thrilling Detective

Zachary Schomburg, Mammother,Featherproof Books, 2017.
Read an excerpt
www.zacharyschomburg.net/


The people of Pie Time are suffering from God’s Finger, a mysterious plague that leaves its victims dead with a big hole through their chests. In each hole is a random consumer product. Mano Medium, a sensitive, young cigarette-factory worker in love, does his part by quitting the factory to work double-time as Pie Time’s replacement barber and butcher, and by holding the things found in the holes of the newly dead. However, the more people die, the bigger Mano becomes. XO, the power-hungry corporation bent on overtaking Pie Time, and Father Mothers, the bumbling priest, have their own ideas about how to capitalize on God’s Finger. By contrast, and powered by honoring his own lost loves, Mano fights to resist this exploitation by teaching death to those who can’t afford to survive it. As Pie Time and Mano both grow irrevocably, Mano must make a decision about how he can best fit into his own life. With a large cast of unusual characters, each struggling with their own complex and tangled relationships to death, money, and love, Mammother is a fabulist's tale of how we hold on and how we let go in a rapidly growing world.





“Like the younger sibling of Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar, but boxier and more etched on the page. And, Schomburg’s book is still utterly its own thing, strange and wondrous.” — Aimee Bender





review by Judson Hamilton





Zachary Schomburg, The Book of Joshua,Black Ocean, 2014.                                       








Zachary Schomburg has delivered his latest work from a dark place, where little machines repeat in a hollow voice, "this is only further proof of your badness." presented in a single narrative, THE BOOK OF JOSHUA is a sorry heart begged out of dreams, death & a horse's eye. It is an epic journey not only affirming that "there is a difference between sadness and suffering," but that Schomburg is one of the most unusual poets writing today, pushing his work beyond our familiarity. These poems have a thirst for blood, but they don't yet know exactly what to do with their hands. THE BOOK OF JOSHUA calls out in hunger and loneliness, "I didn't feel like living in anything not shaped like me anymore."


With wit, humor, tenderness, and his characteristic, logic-bending surrealism, Schomburg (Fjords, vol. I) probes into the subjects of futurity, personal history, and mythmaking. Short, dated prose poems (titled "1977" through "2044") comprise the book's first two sections, "Earth" and "Mars," and propel a narrative of discovery and self-making just beyond the borders of a recognizable world. In this dreamscape, the missing presence of "Joshua" haunts every turn: a figure in "a white boat floating on blood"; a name carved on the side of a spaceship; a name uttered by friends and family. This interlocutor, a vessel and keeper of dreams, acts as the big "Other" driving our protagonist's hopes and doubts. "I didn't feel like living in a thing not shaped like me anymore," Schomburg writes. "I woke up dangling from an umbilical cord... And there you were, Joshua, on the blood in a white boat, rocking." In the final section, "Blood," Schomburg reinserts the images developed earlier in lineated, page-wandering poems, once again addressing Joshua. But here, the narrative explodes: "white boat rocking// swans/ rocking// a cradle on a// dirty/ loop... // where were you I was calling." And the language only grows increasingly volatile from there: "do we even know enough to die// who are you what/ year is new." - Publishers nWeekly


In Stephen Crane’s poem “In the Desert” an inexplicably naked, bestial creature squats in the desert eating its own heart “‘[b]ecause it is bitter, / [a]nd because it is [his] heart.’” The essence of Zachary Schomburg’s latest book, The Book of Joshua, calls to mind Crane’s poem with its surprising, absurd, captivating logic and dreamscape. In an interview with Peter Stitt in The Paris Review, John Ashbery said, “I would like to please the reader, and I think that surprise has to be an element of this.” In The Book of Joshua, Schomburg, who has written three previous full-length books, delivers on surprise, and thus on pleasure. He has said of his own work, “Mostly I want my poems to generate their own energy through confusion. I want my poems to confuse the reader. Not a confusion in a cognitive or narrative sense, but in an emotional sense.”
Indeed, the narrative and rules here are associative, intuitive, and magical as opposed to logical, linear, and realistic, a bit like a dark Kafka parable. And that may be part of the game. Schomburg was born in 1977, which might seem irrelevant, except that the speaker of The Book of Joshua was born in 1977, as the first poem is titled “1977” and each poem is a year thereafter in the speaker’s life until 2044 when the speaker would be 67 years old. This composes the first two sections—“Earth” and “Mars.” The last section—“Blood”—sheds the years concept and the prose poem form, though it continues to operate with the same remixed diction and images. “Blood” transforms from narrative to loose, spacious verse that makes deliberate use of the page as blank white space to convey distance. The form suffuses the page, like blood, as it remixes earlier language.
So, who is Joshua? The whole book is an apostrophe addressed to a missing character named Joshua who seems at turns to be the speaker, the speaker’s Galatea-like creation, the speaker’s child, or the speaker’s alter ego. People persistently refer to the speaker as Joshua, though the narrator spends the book insisting he’s not. In the end, it seems, Joshua is merely AND importantly the self. As the speaker says in ‘1982,’ “[t]o see you for the first time was to see myself for the first time.”
‘1989’ is titled but there is no poem. The blank comes right after Joshua dies in 1988 when the speaker would be 12. The book, thereafter, becomes a lament filled with confused emotions and violent impulses played out in a constant push from image into image into absurd conclusion. Strung with guilt and feelings of wickedness, the whole thing feels faintly biblical, and faintly mythological. Though everyone in this Dali-meets-Hitchcock scene seems hopelessly disconnected, the book is full of images of attempted connection: telephone cords, umbilical cords, and heart veins in such poems as ‘1984’:
I wanted you to be real, so I made you into a machine that pumped my blood for me. You were a regular metal boy. You had a tape recorder where a regular metal head should be. Every night I hooked up my heart-veins to your mechanical heart. My heart-veins hung between us like telephone wires. I am a boy, I said. I am a boy, you said. Goodnight, Joshua, I said. Goodnight, Joshua, you said.
It’s impressive that this single narrative remains smooth in spite of its many erratic leaps. The book is much like Schomburg’s poem-films and poem-song projects (“Blood” is recorded with Kyle Morton as an audio project) which extend the borders of poetry, just like the prose poem once did. Schomburg said in an interview with Brian Brodeur, “Sometimes I find myself in this place where my brain and my heart are talking to each other, and I have nothing to do with it. I’m dead. And those two parts of me have forgotten about me. This is when I’m at my happiest, when I’m dead in this exact way.” That statement feels like the mission statement of the strange land of The Book of Joshua, which ultimately spins its own myths in a book that is built to feel symbolic, but isn’t really a straightforward metaphor for anything because, within the context of this world, these statements are literal. It’s not allegory but finely figured dream.
The cast of characters includes a character named Woman who seems to be a detached mother figure physically cut off from the speaker, though observing via some magical telephone, and recording the text known as the “Book of Joshua” by recording everything the speaker says and does. Other characters include God, Joshua, and the speaker’s father. The speaker’s father is never named and only appears as “my father” in a series of ten poems in “Mars.” The father, in an inversion typical of this book, is birthed by the pregnant speaker who admits, “I was not ready to be a son.” According to the speaker, all birth is essentially abandonment, and his pregnancy and fathering of his own father mirror the speaker’s creation of and loss of Joshua. The inversion causes an awkward and intense estrangement as the father, who eventually abandons the speaker on Mars by stealing their spaceship, writes, “Dear Joshua, you are a finite distance from me, and I am a finite distance from you, and that distance is eternally and hopelessly in flux.” There’s a palpable distance between all of these characters—between Joshua and the speaker, God and the speaker, the Woman and the speaker—like stars staring at each other in the dark: “God bless me, I said, but God was unable to bless anyone from so far away.” And although the book is explicitly an apostrophe to Joshua, the you is so inviting and pointed it’s impossible not to feel, as the reader, it’s you:
we are the same exact invisible
silent broken tree the same wall
of birds the same horse licking
and shining the same hole in
the air we have the same face.
If this is neither metaphor nor allegory at work here, then what are Schomburg’s devices? Repetitions. He used indices in his previous collections to organize, emphasize, and create opportunity for repeated words, images and themes, but he seems to have stopped with this book, which makes sense given that it’s not really a collection so much as a single narrative. And he maintains the basic philosophy of carrying threads and images; he just doesn’t need the gimmicky scaffold anymore. His imagery begins in a dream within this larger dream, as the speaker in ‘1978’ confesses, “I had my first nightmare about dangling by an umbilical cord from a white sky above a white boat floating on blood. In it, you were asleep or worse in the boat, your name carved on the side. Joshua, it read.” And he circles back to the beginning image many times: white boat floating on blood. As in: “[i]t made a white boat-shaped cloud that floated on the red sky,” or: “[t]he river became a giant wall of soft bloody wooliness,” or perhaps most hauntingly:
the horse is dead
underneath the bed
it grows the blood
your white boat floats on.
Repetition makes this book, even though in a playful meta-moment, the speaker actually cautions, “When you do something over and over again, it is as if it isn’t being done at all.” It’s as if the book were rejecting its own methods as unsound. The book also rejects the sort of traditional simile-and-metaphor model of building poems. At one point, in ‘1990’ there’s almost an outright attack on metaphor: “At the mouth of the cave was an actual mouth, and at the mouth of the river was an actual mouth. The mouths had big salt rocks for teeth that would crumble together as they spoke.” The mouth of the cave has an actual mouth because whatever this menacing magical dreamscape is, it’s not metaphor. Instead, this book is built of negation and misdirection: I am not Joshua, I am not a biblical allusion, I am and am not the poet as speaker, I am not a symbol.
Like Schomburg’s genre-challenging poem-film and poem-song projects, the tone here is morbid, yet ironically luminous and welcoming, an opposition that creates tension and electricity, that propels a reader through the narrative with a pleasant discomfort. Everything feels repeated, repeatable, reincarnated, rebirthed. It feels slippery. It all hearkens back; in fact, The Book of Joshua hones, smooths, and perfects the same modes and tropes Schomburg’s been playing with since the beginning when no one was around. Back in Fjords, Schomburg titled one of his poems, “I Am the Dead Person Inside Me” and that trope seems to continue into The Book of Joshua. Early in the story, the lonely speaker asks, “Is anyone there?” and follows up with “I couldn’t think of anything else to say, but maybe that is always the best thing, to just ask if anyone is there.” Well, I’m here in the land of Joshua, attached by its heart veins, and you should be too. - Bill Neumirehttps://heavyfeatherreview.com/2014/10/30/the-book-of-joshua-by-zachary-schomburg/


Birds. Horses. A boat. Blood. The color white. A telephone.
These and other recurring motifs and objects make up The Book of Joshua by Zachary Schomburg. It is a strange journey indeed; beginning in the year 1977 and moving through 2044, the first two sections titled Earth and Mars are prose poems with only the year as title. Schomburg was born in 1977 and the third section of lineated poetry, Blood, begins on page 77. This most likely is not a coincidence as numbers are important to the book, however, only 67 years elapse in book time (though the final section does not contain years or individual poem titles).
I bring these points up to note the meditative quality of the poetry. Moving as if through the speaker’s life and to a possible future, Schomburg questions himself, his place in the world, and what is expected of him through the birth of himself/Joshua and his maturation. 1981 has the speaker slowly growing:

While the speaker (who is possibly an avatar of Schomburg) and Joshua appear to be the same person, it is debatable. We can assess the similarities to Schomburg’s life (or time of existence), the fact that a character known as the Woman is writing The Book of Joshua in The Book of Joshua, or that The Book of Joshua in the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible is attributed to Joshua but most likely has several contributing authors. Arguments could be made for all three and perhaps other interpretations. Suffice it to say, the book is an amalgamation of various sources and ideas.
According to The Poetry Foundation, Schomburg himself wants his poetry to “generate…energy through confusion…in an emotional sense.” This is true of the book; strange things happen that the reader must grapple with: Joshua comes into being from the speaker’s throat (spoken into existence), the speaker makes himself/Joshua into a machine (much like our bodies mechanically regulate our temperature, blood flow, etc.) so that he can talk to him(self), travels to Mars, swims an ocean of blood, births his own father, and plays the game Family (like how we interact with our families). Yes, this sounds confusing, but ultimately it isn’t narratively confusing. It allows us to emotionally consider our lives, what we’re doing with them, why we act as we act, what it means to say something, and that we keep looking for something even though we don’t know what it is.

I think it’s important to look at an entire poem like this to understand the movement of the work: how things grow and shrink, questions are asked aloud and of the self, feelings are considered and communication and place are questioned for their validity. Dreams and nightmares clash in the speaker’s mind as reality and emotional identity are pursued seemingly through funhouse mirrors. Think about it: we go to carnivals and pay money to look at ourselves in variously-shaped mirrors. Certainly it is fun, but it also is a way we can be something else for a moment, or think we look a different way than we look. Are the mirrors in our homes (flat, regular mirrors) really telling us the truth when we look in them? Isn’t it strange how we can look smashing in one photograph and awful in the next? Schomburg takes us to this existential realm and allows us the opportunity to look at himself/Joshua/ourself. We can ask hard, emotional questions and decide how seriously we wish to consider answers.
I’ll admit the first time I read the book and arrived at the third section I was nonplussed. An immensely engaging story has been going on for 70-plus pages and now I’m confronted with line breaks and lots of white space. Much of these lines repeat what has happened in the first two sections and I was lost. This is part of the point though. In life, just as we begin to think we understand something, find a rhythm, get comfortable, something changes. We think back over what has changed and try to pinpoint what we thought and felt about the events preceding the change and we come up with fragments of thought, a distorted reality. Often we mull these fragments over and over in our minds before arriving at a somewhat abstract conclusion. This is what the last section of the book enacts as form:


Many of these ideas are all ready in our mind because we just read them. They return here in a different form and elicit different meaning with line breaks, white space, and brevity that make us take more time to pause and consider them in relation to their previous meanings. Time changes things or things change over time. We alter our understandings and make new connections. Joshua is the speaker is Zachary is me and you. Is robotic. Is equine. Is creating from the mouth and bird bones. This is definitely a trip, moving through the solar system and our blood stream simultaneously, issuing from mouths and entering ears, creating a new planet that is this same planet, learning what to do with our bodies and minds and importantly asking our emotional selves how we feel and that we do. I think you should get in the spaceship. Think you should go read this book. - Matthew Schmidt
https://thevoltablog.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/review-the-book-of-joshua-by-zachary-schomburg/

Zachary Schomburg’s The Book of Joshua is an unusual book. The eponymous character haunts the whole collection—and yet we’re never entirely sure who he is. Joshua is, at various points: a creature that emerges from the speaker’s throat, a robot, the speaker (who insists this is a mistake), a collection of dead birds, and a sailor on a sea of blood.
Despite Joshua’s disjointed identity, the book is unusually unified. It begins with a poem titled “1977,” and proceeds as a chronological narrative, a poem for every year. Near the start of the book, after the speaker becomes attached to Joshua (literally: their hearts are hooked together and robo-Joshua pumps the speaker’s blood), Joshua dies. The following poem/year is simply a blank page—we sense that the speaker is devastated beyond words by the loss. Much of the rest of the book narrates the speaker’s search for Joshua who, although dead, the speaker believes he can find.
The narrative doesn’t quite make sense—why look for Joshua if he’s dead?—and yet the force of the speaker’s longing is enough to make the reader accept this surreal plot. Though it may not make logical sense, the search for the dead Joshua makes complete emotional sense as a reflection of the psychology of grief. This blend of the surreal and the sympathetic plays out at the level of the individual poems as well. Take, for example, “1991”:

One night I dreamed that everything in the cave was different—the furniture, the wallpaper. When I walked to my bed, a little baby was sleeping in it. It wasn’t my bed. I thought the baby was you. Are you Joshua? I asked it. Are you the accidental baby of God? Are you a horse? Are you a tiny blue swan? Can I peel open your eyes? I asked it. I am sorry I am a strawberry patch, it said. And then growing from its middle came my own unforgiveableness, an impossibly beautiful strawberry patch to feed me forever.

Though the poem is full of surreal elements, they proceed in a strangely logical fashion: the speaker sees an unfamiliar baby in the cave where he lives, so naturally he asks what’s going on. The baby, naturally, answers: I am a strawberry patch. And sure enough, it’s true. This blend of sense and nonsense is Schomburg’s specialty, and he uses it to great effect throughout the book. “1991” reflects another more important key to the book’s success: even in its most surreal moments, it remains firmly grounded in pathos. We get the odd leap to a strawberry patch, yes—but we’re simultaneously reminded of the speaker’s sense of guilt following Joshua’s death, his touching sense of his “own unforgiveableness” that will “feed [him] forever.”
In other words, the book never resorts to strangeness merely for the sake of strangeness; rather, the surreal happenings are carefully selected images of the speaker’s loss. Indeed, strange as its surface may seem, the book always remains firmly anchored in emotional truth. Consider, for example, the frightening “1994”:

I stopped sleeping and started digging graves to jump into. I saw a horse eating her own horse babies. Horses sometimes get confused and eat their own horse babies, and then they groan for days once their mind finally clears. They groan, so ashamed, so afraid of themselves, and walk around in circles not eating anything. They are newly alone with bloody mouths. I had a new thirst for blood. I started to kill things I wouldn’t dare love.

Since the speaker in a sense gave birth to Joshua, we can’t help but read the horse as a metaphorical reflection of the speaker. So the horse’s shame and fear of itself are also the speaker’s, and we pity him. But immediately we are reminded of the speaker’s unforgiveableness: he has “a new thirst for blood” and starts to “kill things [he] would not dare love.” We sense that the speaker wants us to see him as the unforgiveable monster he believes himself to be—a complex portrait of guilt.
Yet the speaker does not seem beyond forgiveness. Rather, he’s a deeply sympathetic character, and he has the capacity for a strange sort of tenderness. He repeatedly tries to comfort a distraught character, and he sometimes emerges from his grief to act for others. Take, for instance, “2003”:

I decided I would be king of the island. I stumbled upon a field of headless corpses, and then I stumbled upon a field of heads. I collected all the heads in a large basket. This was my first act as king. Then I set them down miles apart from each other across the empty expanse. I put candles inside each skull so they’d look like stars to some other boy, some boy like me, maybe in space.

While we might expect the speaker to reunite the bodies with their heads, he has another plan. We learn he wants to make a sea of stars for “some other boy” to look at from space: he wants to make something beautiful for someone he can scarcely imagine. We sense also the speaker’s loneliness—the only place he can imagine someone “like me” is on a distant planet. Such loneliness is a constant and moving theme in the book. In “2000,” for instance, the speaker says:

I thought I finally found you, Joshua, floating in your white boat in the ocean. I dove into the ocean to save you, but when I surfaced, the white boat was gone. The ocean was a flat red floor. I floated past myself standing on shore. I stared at myself staring at myself. And I stared back at myself staring back at myself. There is more than one world in the world, and when a world finds another world it finally knows to feel alone.

Once again, though the scene is completely surreal, the emotional logic is fully present. We learn something true about what it is to be alone. But perhaps the most touching aspect of the speaker’s loneliness is that it is inescapable: in “2039,” the speaker explains:

I was tired, and I wanted to die. There was nowhere else to search and nothing else to do. I wanted someone to shoot me in the heart with a bow and arrow, but there was no one around. I laid on my back in the hole I had dug, and I shot an arrow far into the sky. When it came back down, it split my heart. It was finally time, I thought. But instead of dying, my heart just exploded into a flock of sheep and then began my burdensome years of being a shepherd. I knew I’d be horrible, these dirty sheep baaaing at my hole.

The speaker’s attempt at suicide only makes matters worse—within the bizarre logic of this universe, suicide leads to sheep which lead, naturally, to burdensome duties as a shepherd. The speaker tries to escape again in “2040”:

For my first duty as shepherd, I pushed all the sheep into the river. What a glorious massacre, I yelled. What a glorious day, the death of a broken heart! …

But in “2041,” we learn that there is no escape:

The sheep were not washed down the river to their deaths. Instead, all the water in the river was absorbed by the sheep. The river became a giant wall of soft bloody woolliness that trapped me forever…

So in “2042,” he tries a different approach:

I spent the year digging holes and burying wet red sheep in them: one billion graves, each filled with a dead sheep born from my split open heart…I looked for you, Joshua, in every grave I dug.

Though the shepherding becomes increasingly absurd, we’re reminded once again of the speaker’s loss as he checks each grave for Joshua. In that way, these sheep make sense, and their stubborn presence is as touching as it is funny.
Sympathetically surreal, funny and tragic, The Book of Joshua is an unusual book, and an unusually good one. Schomburg’s narrative—at once disjointed and unified—is fascinating as a project, and the individual poems stand strong on their own. Filled with wild flights of imagination, the book remains firmly grounded in the deep feeling of its speaker. The Book of Joshua is the surreal at its best—a gripping, challenging, and deeply rewarding experience. - J.G. McClure
http://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/reviews/the-book-of-joshua/





Zachary Schomburg, Fjords Vol. 1, Black Ocean, 2012.


As one of the most exciting new voices in American poetry, Zachary Schomburg's previous books have enthralled thousands of readers with surreal landscapes populated by gorillas in people clothes, jaguars, plagues of hummingbirds, and even Abraham Lincoln. His poems have inspired art installations, shadow puppetry, rock albums, and string quartets. In Fjords, Schomburg inhabits the icy landscape, walking among all his little deaths as he explores the narrow inlets between the transcendent and the mundane. These are poems to be read by torchlight or with no light at all. As Schomburg explains, There is so much blood in the trees. It will be easy to fall in love like this. 

"Schomburg is possibly the man who will save poetry for all of those readers who are about to give up on the genre."—The Huffington Post


It’s said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results, something Schomburg understands. In his third collection, “the world is always as it is, and always as it seems.” Narrative without losing lyrical beauty, witty without losing gravity, the poems—though fiercely contemporary—still uphold the priorities to delight (“I am working in the ticket booth of the movie theater when you come in and take off my pants”) and to instruct (“Nothing is anyone’s fault, which is something we must remember. The world is just a bag of seeds and there is nowhere for the seeds to be planted”). Capping off the book is an index (including classic themes—“Truth,” “Beauty,” “Death,” “Birth”—along with some new ones—“Airplanes, burning”), which suggests these poems should be reread, even referenced—as if this book is a manual for transcending “wild meaninglessness.” “Falling in love with the death thought is a way of never really dying,” Schomburg writes. “You let an idea hold you in its real arms.” These are wildly imagined poems to fall in love with and reread. - Publishers Weekly


Years ago, my grandfather told me a story about a man predicting his own death. The details of it are lost to me now -- I believe the man in the story dreams about his death, foresees that it will occur violently in a certain field. Attempting to avoid that fate, he acquires some vicious guard dogs to ward off danger. And then one day he comes to the very spot on which he's dreamed he'll die, and he becomes terrified, and the dogs sense his fear and turn on him. So he does die on that spot. Like something out of Oedipus, he's caused the death he knew was coming.
That story was in the front of my mind as I read Zachary Schomburg's third full-length collection of poems, FJORDS vol. 1. The book opens with the line "From the very beginning I knew exactly what would kill me." The curious thing about the speaker's prediction is not only that it's true, but also that it kicks off a series of innumerable other deaths, all perhaps caused by the speaker's own obsessions and anxieties.
If you are familiar with Zachary Schomburg's work, you'll be familiar with his compact prose poems, his preference for the sentence over the line, his surreal worlds, his intrusive animals that waver between comforting and terrifying. But FJORDS vol. 1 is not simply a retreading of old territory. It seems to follow a logical progression in Schomburg's oeuvre. The Man Suit, Schomburg's first book, can be read as a sort of discovery of the world. A waking up to the impossible weirdness of what we've all agreed to live in: an exploration of the most-present present. Scary, No Scary, book number two, is a nostalgic exploration of the bizarre nature of childhood -- and a reinterpretation of the present through that lens of the past. And FJORDS vol. 1 is about the future. It's about the fear that comes with talking about the future, with dreaming about the future -- and the specific fear of death that at times becomes so obsessive that it approaches a desire for death.
At times, Schomburg implies that we might desire death because of the nature of twenty-first-century life: a surreal, intrusive, over-stimulating, impossible experience. "I grew old distracting myself from what I knew to be true," the narrator says. How many of us have done this, are doing this right now? We know certain things to be true: global warming, obesity, overfishing, decreased attention spans, Michael Bay's existence, advertising, pink slime masquerading as meat. But to think about these things is terrifying. And so we distract ourselves instead: we check email, we watch YouTube videos of pigs playing with dogs, we TiVo Jimmy Fallon, we run ourselves ragged on treadmills at the gym.
What we don't do if we're trying to avoid reality is write poems, because writing poems is never really a way to escape. It is only a way to embroil yourself further, a way of reckoning. A way of experiencing these deaths and trying to come to terms with what they really are. Schomburg knows this.
And yes, "deaths" is plural. Because we all die multiple deaths, don't we? We die in our dreams all the time. We die in our memories. We die in our photographs. In "Death Letter," the speaker receives a letter stating that the woman he loves is dead. But when he arrives at her house with flowers to pay his respects, he discovers that she is still alive. "When I walk away, flowers in my fist, I think about all the different kinds of death. I wish she would have been dead just like the letter said. There is more truth in that kind of death."
Let's talk about truth. Schomburg's poems are manifestly not "true," in that they unfold in impossible worlds; yet there is something to be said for truth as a tone in Schomburg's work. For a kind of "sincerity" that is not cloying or maudlin because it takes surreal forms. It is possible to be truthful when talking about hawks made out of donuts, in a more real way than the truth that comes with a recitation of historical facts. I know that I am the most true when I am talking about irrational things. I am more true when I say "Sometimes I think the baristas at Starbucks are lying to me" or "I worry that if I get my teeth straightened I will not be able to recognize myself" than when I say "I washed a pair of jeans today."
"Truth" is an entry in the index to this book. All of Schomburg's books have indices, a device that verges on cute-gimmick territory. But the indices operate on more intentional levels. They seem, in part, to taunt the critic who would analyze the book; "Here, I know you're interested in themes, so I pointed some out for you." But they don't just identify themes, they testify to them. There is something to be said for acknowledging your obsessions, owning up to the things you can't get away from -- organizing them alphabetically to give them some semblance of order, when really they're raging inside your head.
"The world is always as it is, and always as it seems," as Schomburg notes in "The Animal Spell." There will always be black swans and refrigerators and fists and eyes everywhere we look. What can you really do about that but write it down and note the page numbers and try not to let it swallow you up? That is the only honest option. In "A Life In Space," Schomburg writes, "You promised me we'd live in a different universe, but when we arrived, everything was the same -- the gravity, the stars lined up like teeth." There is no different universe. There's just this one, over and over. These days, these deaths. And if there is any comfort, it only resides in the most dangerous territory.
Take "Neighborhood Plague":
My neighbors have been dying, one after the other in a row, each day, from east to west. You told me that if I didn't want to end up dead like my neighbors, that I should keep moving west. That seems like the last direction I'd want to move in.
We should not move in the direction that death is moving -- it will catch up with us, of course. It will sneak up on us from behind and take us and no one around us will care because everyone will be dying, too. No, the solution is to move in the direction from which death has already come. To go back into the wake of death. Only then can we begin to deal with it. Only then can we begin to stop being afraid and start listening. We all have a dead person inside of us ("I Am the Dead Person Inside Me"). And we have to let it breathe to cope with the life we live in now, the life of customized cake frosting and movie theaters and expensive dress shirts and events that seem like causes but don't reap any immediate effects, until we die, and then we think maybe that was the effect. Or we would think that, anyway, if we were still alive to think it.
Schomburg's meditations on death (and on the opposite but equal phenomenon, living forever, which appropriately enough shares an index entry with "Death") often seem to be a way of thinking about what it means to be present, to be breathing in the now, to be a human in a busy world. As much as the speaker might be attempting to fool you into thinking that he thinks it's all meaningless, this whole "let's eat breakfast and go to our jobs and watch movies" routine, it's clear he can't live up to his own cynicism. That he, too, is striving to prove what he feels in his (attacked) heart to be true: that there is some importance at the root of all this, that life (like Schomburg's poetry) will keep surprising us with meanings just when we've given up: "We think we've figured it out, and then it is a fist that comes exploding from our eyes." - Elizabeth Cantwell
http://www.bookslut.com/poetry/2012_06_019148.php










                                  

Zachary Schomburg, Scary No Scary, Black Ocean, 2009.



«Scary, No Scary, the follow-up to Zachary Schomburg’s acclaimed first collection of poems The Man Suit, is a book of skeleton gloves and skeleton keys—at once dark and playful. With loneliness and levity Schomburg takes the reader on a tour through a liminal world of dream-logic, informed by its own myth and folklore. Here there are new kinds of trees and new ways of naming the ages; jaguars and an abandoned hotel on the horizon. This book will crawl inside your chest and pump lava through your blood.»

«Schomburg is possibly the man who will save poetry for all of those readers who are about to give up on the genre. Scary No Scary is both funny and ridiculously original. A playful, mournful, and sometimes sweet collection full of fantastic images and odd dialogue.» - Kevin Sampsell

«The last great book I read was the very recent Scary, No Scary by Zachary Schomburg, released from Black Ocean Press in August. I was a big fan of the previous collection from Schomburg, The Man Suit, and was hoping that Scary, No Scary would be equivalent. It is not. Scary, No Scary is far better, much sharper and more drawn from images, shaking through the reader in its short and livid sentences.
Divided into sections, the overall text is still somehow connected by word associations: trees, hummingbirds, bones, empty houses, hauntings. And this is what made it so great for me, because it didn’t read like a collection but instead like fractures of an epic poem, fragments of a (prose) poem novel(la). I dove through once as soon as the mail came because the cover is vibrant and torturously teasing, but then the close of the text, ending with a new version of The Pond, one of my favorite releases from Greying Ghost, it begs you back through, asks you to wander again, electrified by its words.
Zachary Schomburg understands how to tilt a board filled with language up and towards his mouth. He rolls you down like that, to the teeth, staring at a black throat threatening everything. Scary, No Scary made me love poetry again, made me understand how it can fit together, how a collection can be a book, and how a book can stir and pour over me, ruffling all my feathers into new flight.» - J. A. Tyler

«There is an index at the back of Zachary Schomburg's second book of poetry, Scary, No Scary. Many books of poetry contain an index, usually an alphabetical list of the poems' titles. Schomburg's index, however, lists 84 themes that appear throughout the poems; for instance, “Birthday, or the idea of apologizing for missing one's party” can be found on pages 24 and 62, poems about “Leaving (and never returning)” can be found on 10 different pages, while “Sawing in half, or the idea of division” can be found on 6 pages, though you might want to also look at the poems listed under “Part-species, or hybrid species (see also Sawing in half).” Schomburg's poems, gracefully arranged across 79 pages, are just as strange and unorthodox as the index of themes, but the book's uncanny beauty isn't limited to these numerical games: this is a cohesive and (successfully) daring collection of poems, often reading like the diary of a delusional child-prodigy, with an absurd yet compelling narrative strung throughout.
As the title suggests, Scary, No Scary attempts to find the thin line (if it even exists) between terror and pleasure. What better way to do this than by relying on an adolescent's perspective, albeit a highly intelligent, highly promiscuous youth, living in a seemingly post-apocalyptic universe. The landscape of Scary, No Scary is unchartered literary territory: chandeliers made from broken dishes, nameless men and women transforming into trees, boys becoming hummingbirds, and twins named “Invisible” and “Not Invisible.” As frightening as all this might sound, Schomburg’s tone remains hilarious throughout: “Either way, let’s not just stand here/with our fingers up our butts.”
If Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is this generation’s great somber novel about the post-apocalyptic world, Scary, No Scary makes the end of modern civilization look a bit more fun, and much more psychedelic. Like The Road, Schomburg’s future universe is devoid of personal identity: “Neither of us have names / especially you.” Life is rather abundant as well, especially trees. We can all rest assured that the youth of the post-world will still be afraid of entering the woods late at night, not fearful of wild animals or witches, but fearful of finding what is “half-buried” beneath dead leaves, be it a bodiless woman or one’s own beating heart. Becoming part of the woods, too, is of great concern:
Soon you’ll be
more tree
than person.
You’ll go camping in the woods
and never come back.
Animal life is also abundant, especially insects and hummingbirds, both of which humans can randomly turn into:
How do you tell someone
their family is
tiny insects?
How do you tell someone
their boy is
a hummingbird?
Jaguars, too: “You were becoming more and more jaguar.”
But even with all this anthropomorphic action, the post-apocalyptic teenager still retains teenage desires. Unlike today’s youths, who are really only concerned with accidental pregnancy and unwelcomed transmitted diseases (if they are concerned about anything), the sexually adventurous kids of Schomburg’s future have bigger concerns, such as choosing “between floating eternally in a buoyant cage of hummingbird bones down a river of lava or a river of blood.” Break-ups, too, will take on a different form, as seen in the prose poem “Goodbye Lessons”: “I have to say goodbye... I will know that goodbyes are when you eat yourself to death.” In The Road, we had to be concerned with cannibalistic wanderers eating our children; in Scary, No Scary, we need to be concerned about our kids eating themselves. All concerns aside, these kids are still looking for a good place to make out:
I know a place where we can escape the dead hummingbird
problem, a pond no one knows about, cold and clean. It is fed
by a mountain stream. We can take off all our clothes there and
maybe have sex.
Scary, No Scary is organized into four sections. The first is mainly comprised of short, wonderfully sonic lyrics, reminiscent of Robert Creeley (in the midst of a bad LSD trip) or, more recently, Graham Foust (if Foust was an evil clown). These poems introduce the narrator and his views on the scarce world in which he lives. The second section consists mainly of prose poems, surreal yet darkly beautiful, like a horror-core band (comprised of musicians who really know how to play their instruments) interpreting James Tate. The final two sections are sequences, the first being “The Histories” and the second “The Pond.” “The Histories” tells a story of the narrator in his dining room (which doesn’t actually exist) setting a table with dishes beneath a chandelier (none of which exist, either) in a dark, floorless and ceiling-less house. All that exists, it seems, is the narrator, who simply describes this non-existent scene. “The Pond” may be referring to the pond where the narrator takes his lover earlier in the book, but we will never know for sure, since the narrator is unsure of everything:
At the edge of the pond
someone who looks like me
is holding hands
with someone who looks like you.
I begin to wonder who I am
because I don’t look like me.
So what are we to make of Zachary Schomburg’s universe in Scary, No Scary? Should we be fearful of what is to come after the apocalypse? Of course, but instead of being afraid of cannibals and violence, we should be afraid of morphing into hummingbirds and having to apologize for missing a friend’s birthday party. Will the end of the world bring just the “scary” or the “no scary” as well? As far as we can tell, there will be a combination of both. One of the only moments where the narrator actually tells us he is fearful of something comes from “The Black Hole”:“I’m afraid of myself.” Considering this could be said about most people today, things might not be too different. Hopefully, each day that comes after the apocalypse will flow into the next as perfectly as the movements of these poems.» - Timothy Henry


Zachary Schomburg, The Man Suit, Black Ocean, 2007.



«The Man Suit, a darkly comic debut from poet Zachary Schomburg, assembles a macabre cast of doppelgangers, talking animals and dead presidents in poems that explore concepts of identity, truth and fate. The resulting body of work walks a dynamic line often reading like anecdotal fables or cautionary tales in the form of prose poems. Through it all, Schomburg balances irony with sincerity; wit with candor; and a playful tone with the knowledge of inevitable sorrow.»

«The often funny yet haunting prose and verse poems of this eagerly anticipated debut deal with the subtle and unexpected ways things can transform, usually just beneath an observer's awareness. In "Postcard from the Arctic Ocean" the speaker can "make smoke signals/ by burning/ these postcards/ by the handful." With similarly flippant but persistent gestures, Schomburg pushes at the boundaries of logic. He asks for a willing suspension of disbelief and of order. Non sequitur and clever opposition govern this world: a homicidal monster- cum-TV celebrity is fired in favor of a "gorilla dressed in people clothes"; in "I'm Not Carlos,""tree machines" dial up the poem's speaker, calling him Carlos and demanding he hand over "the Man Suit." A poem called "I've Since Folded This Poem into an Airplane" admits Schomburg's comfort with the self-conscious and reflexive in poetry. If a few of these poems are slight, the best of them imbue whimsy with high emotional stakes, suggesting this collection's casualness has been carefully wrought. Schomburg may be one of the sincerest surrealists around.» - Publishers Weekly

"Zachary Schomburg is a wildly imaginative poet who will take you many places you've never been or even dreamed of, always with grace and quirky humor. Whether you are caught in Abraham Lincoln's Death Scene or the Sea of Japan, you are certain to enjoy the original vision of this highly entertaining poet. It's a book like no other." - James Tate

"It is a rare and fine thing when a poet momentarily affiliates his words and his cadences with the entirety of a world, thus freeing his poem from all burden of mediation, all transgression. In our own era, Rene Char and Pablo Neruda come most vividly to mind in this regard. With The Man Suit, Zachary Schomburg, quietly but with deep conviction, begins to join their company. His book is a blessing." - Donald Revell

"Zachary Schomburg's The Man Suit comes to us from the past but it is a thoroughly new book. It comes to us out of the familiar and it strikes us in the face with its novelty. You will recognize your own history, the history of our nation, the influence of Mad Magazine and Benjamin Peret. And underneath it all, and what holds it all together, however unlikely, is the deep and abiding love of the little things that make up our days." - Matthew Rohrer

«Delightfully bewildering, The Man Suit is less a book of poems and more an unlikely conglomeration of images and ideas that manage to function beautifully as one cohesive unit. These poems and paragraphs demand to be read aloud - both performance and text are indispensable to achieving the full effect.
The book does not waste time churning up the succession of poems before it. These poems spring forward or, when that’s not feasible, sideways. Do expect self-consciousness - the book buzzes with solipsism, paralysis, confusion and isolation. Yet somehow the dark undercurrent that fuels this collection never extinguishes the glow of its playfulness.
Take a look at the first three poems and try to keep a straight face. In just three pages Schomburg introduces a monster that’s supposed to be telling jokes, a gorilla dressed in people clothes, a pirate, a girl wearing a large, wooden wedding cake, and a man dressed as an avocado. The tone wavers between weird, hilarious, insightful, and subtly devious.
In the first poem, “The Monster Hour,” we see a monster on stage who keeps on trying to kill the audience instead of telling jokes. The monster doesn’t seem able to control himself, so the producers replace him with a gorilla and a Wurlitzer. It’s silly, slightly baffling, yet manages to edge itself up to something very familiar and vaguely haunting.
The second poem seems serious at first. It creates a possibly artistic scene in which a man and a naked women are trying to interpret the black square painted on her stomach. Then, where another poet might have written an oblique but mysterious aphorism, Schomburg writes simply, “A pirate enters.” The message is clear. Take off the black beret and put down the expensive pinot noir. You probably couldn’t tell it apart from boxed merlot anyway.
At this point one wonders if the book is going to be spitefully irreverent, but Schomburg dispels any fears with the third poem, “The Center of Worthwhile Things,” perhaps the thesis of the entire book. A girl dressed as a wedding cake and a guy dressed as an avocado make love on a cliff over a lake, and the speaker wonders at the lack of theatrical accompaniment to life’s quiet, but unusual moments, “It was a night of being backstage I thought, where nothing held its illusion, where everything was exposed as an actor.”
The Man Suit never fully lets down its guard though. That’s its charm. It deals in oceans and islands, opera singers and owls, axe-murderers and action figures. It is a collection of inquiries into how we are supposed to deal with this man suit once we’ve put it on. When we stand in the spotlight, whether on stage or at a party full of sadists and murderers, how are we supposed to handle ourselves?
Amidst the many clever, funny, and sometimes confusing poems are a few themed chunks. One is titled only pictorially: a black telephone beside a white telephone. It is oblique, sometimes funny, sometimes vaguely satirical. By the end of the twelve pages, though, it manages to create the sensation that maybe there are mysteries patterned in the banalities and common objects of everyday life.
Another chunk of the book, “Abraham Lincoln’s Death Scene,” was previously published as a chapbook. Its sixteen paragraphs read like the script for an experimental movie made by a director who was completely unconscious of the extent to which pop culture had scrambled his creative faculties. Expect sexy legs in fishnet stockings, Siamese triplets, religious symbols, splattered blood, flames engulfing practically everything, and far too many smoking guns.
The Man Suit is more than a collection of witty poems and off-beat jokes. Schomburg has encapsulated modern life in just one hundred or so pages. The bizarre imagination that spirals through the poems wonders, creates, and feeds upon itself. By the end of the book, as the things that haunt the space between consciousness and daydream take shape, the image in “A Voice Box With Words Still In It” will bring tears to your eyes, and even if you’ve read this review, you won’t know what hit you.» - D. Richard Scannell

«The Man Suit [is] really good—full of surreal images and dream logic
Here’s an image that stuck with me: a voicebox—removed from its throat—still full of words. A person can pick up said word-filled voicebox, and blow through it to hear what was left unsaid when the voicebox belonged to a body.
I am fairly certain that some time in the future, I will forget that I read about this voicebox in The Man Suit by Zachary Schomburg, and I will use it in a story, thinking I came up with it. I’m sorry, Zachary. Eventually I will remember, and then I will feel bad for stealing from you.
(This has happened before. I have an as-yet-unpublished story that features a character named Boy. I stole this from a Peter Markus piece I read on elimae. I thought it had been my idea. There are other examples.)
(Actually, I wonder if this post will serve to stop this from happening. If it will immunize me from the Schomburg voicebox image that could some day infect my writing.)
Is this a bad thing? I’m not sure it is a great crime for artists to steal from one another in this way. Art bubbles up from a subconscious place, and it shouldn’t shock anyone that the things that bubble up are dropped into the stew of the subconscious mind by other artists.
Are you familiar with the concept of sperm trains? Some animals create sperm cells that hook themselves onto one another. They drag one another toward their goal. And move faster. The voicebox, I’m pretty sure, will one day find another idea hooking itself onto it, and they will both swim out onto a page of my writing.
Because I feel bad that I will steal from you, Mr. Schomburg, I would like to at least pay you the royalty you should’ve gotten for the book I purchased used. If you would like, I don’t know, five dollars, you should write to me at giantblinditems at gmail dot com.
Please use the comments section of this post to cop to things you have stolen.» - Matthew Simmons

«In March of last year, I was one of a few editors who organized an off-site reading at AWP (The Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference) in Austin, TX. One of the readers that evening was Zachary Schomburg. His surreal, insightful, hilarious, heartfelt poems won me over immediately, and I have been keeping track of his work ever since. Luckily, Janaka Stucky of Black Ocean Press was also taken with Schomburg’s poetry that same night. After being a finalist for several major contests over the course of four years, The Man Suit was finally published by Black Ocean Press, and while it feels like this book could be on any number of larger, more decorated presses, the object that is The Man Suit could not contain Schomburg’s poetry any better. From the ominous cover by Lincoln, NE-based artist Denny Schmickle, to the prose poem-friendly trim size, to the black and white telephone icons that mark The Man Suit’s second section, the actual book makes me grateful that it ended up at Black Ocean.
I emphasize ‘contain’ because The Man Suit , as the title implies, is a book largely about costumes and what those costumes contain. The book is dotted with humans in costumes: an avocado and a wedding cake, a lung and a haircut, etc. And even when they are not in costumes per se, people are wearing log cabins and even whole ecosystems. One woman turns out to be an owl. In the section called Abraham Lincoln’s Death Scene , the backdrop is of course a theater, so costumes abound.
In fact, costumes are so prevalent that they become the norm, and it is the human form that becomes, in effect, the other. What Schomburg successfully manipulates in general is the reader’s perception of what is banal versus what is exotic and powerful—a regular opera singer, a tree, or a telephone becomes as unique as an opera singer filled with trees, a tree filled with inappropriately dressed women, or a telephone housing a family of tiny spiders. A regular human head becomes just as shocking as one that is blood-spattered.
True to form, The Man Suit ’s title poem, “I’m Not Carlos,” begins with a costume: “There is a whole forest of tree machines outside Saginaw / that have been programmed to turn on me.” Here, machines are dressed as trees. But this is not the only Schomburgian trope these lines employ. The use of Saginaw is another.
The locales in The Man Suit have an almost folksy myth-like quality to them (Johannes Göransson, on his blog Exoskeleton, points out that much of Schomburg’s tone may very well come from the American tall tale tradition). Pulled from either standard jokes or pranks—Lake Titicaca for example—or perhaps from Schomburg’s personal mythology, or simply from his vast imagination, places like the Electric Mole, Canada, the Sea of Japan, any number of Great Lakes or Prince-named islands, are appropriated from their world of origin and placed into the world of this book. His characters, when dressed up, have two identities: the costumed and the uncostumed. The same holds true for Schomburg’s locales. Like the Magritte painting in which we are confronted with both our cultural notion of a train and the surrealist image of a train barreling out of a fireplace, “I’m Not Carlos” forces us to oscillate between the Saginaw in Michigan and the Saginaw in The Man Suit . Between some guy named Carlos in the world and some guy named Carlos in a poem called “I’m Not Carlos:” “Sometimes they call me on the telephone and whisper / things. Give us the man suit, Carlos. Just give us the man suit .”
This is another Schomburg trademark: violence. Or in this particular case, the threat of violence. These tree machines are programmed to do the speaker in, especially, as it turns out, if they aren’t given the man suit. While it is shadowed by real-world violence, much like the places and characters of The Man Suit are shadowed by their real-world counterparts, this violence is not grotesque or worrisome. In one of the prose blocks in {Opera Singer}, Schomburg makes this explicit:
“Let’s hear {opera singer} while the forests
collapse in on themselves, while the fire takes the swans.
Things quickly get out of hand. Just as quickly, things are
restored.”
One gets the sense that most of the damage done by the violence throughout the book can just as easily be undone. I can imagine some readers pointing out this discrepancy between the actual thing and the thing in the book as a flaw—the neutering of such things as violence. It seems to me, however, that The Man Suit successfully negotiates a deal with the reader via the democratic surrealism with which all of its subject matter is treated, rendering such objections moot. The places in The Man Suit will only remind you of places, humans will only remind you of humans, and hemorrhaging will only remind you of hemorrhaging. By decontextualizing violence, much like he does his places and characters, Schomburg puts the impetus on the reader to note the resonance between the violence of their world, and the violence of his.
As the title implores us to believe, the speaker of “I’m Not Carlos” isn’t Carlos. But Carlos does appear and/or is mentioned, according to the handy index in the back of The Man Suit , seven times, and repetition like this is par for the course. Abraham Lincoln, or “Abe,” appears throughout the book, not just in Abraham Lincoln’s Death Scene . Even his famous log cabin is featured multiple times. Marlene appears and reappears in several poems, and then an “M” factors heavily in Abraham Lincoln’s Death Scene . The list of repetitive characters, themes, and places (even Saginaw is brought up again) is endless. My first instinct was to be critical of such arcs—it seemed that the now fashionable idea of a book as a unified whole and not simply a collection of poems got the best of Schomburg. I asked myself what the index might look like if the arcs were less manipulated and instead were organic results of an artist’s obsessions. But invariably, these arcs feel necessary, sewing the book together like a repetitive strain of melody played in various songs on a concept album. Perhaps the arcs could be more organic. Perhaps Schomburg’s fingerprints are a bit too prevalent in the creation of those arcs. But part of the book’s inherent music is its self-consciousness—a self-consciousness, in addition to the repetition, that may well be an organic aesthetic, one that has a lineage outside of poetry. David Letterman comes to mind, as if Schomburg is about to say, “Did you hear that, Paul… inappropriately dressed!”
For me, this self-conscious repetition is another extension of the costume idea, but instead of an actual disguise, the subject is denatured either by seeing it in a variety of contexts or through shear overexposure (like saying a word over and over again to make it sound weird). For Carlos, this repetition seems to haunt the speaker at times, making him question his own identity. In the third poem of the black telephone/white telephone section, not-Carlos is at a loss: “The white telephone is still ringing. It is a call for / somebody named Carlos—I’m sure of it. It is the only call I / seem to get anymore.” The tone here is one of exasperation, as if the speaker, himself disoriented by the repetitious phone calls, might be ready to concede that maybe they’re right… maybe he is Carlos.
Schomburg expertly defamiliarizes familiar things—for his readers and characters alike—so that the man suit, this thing that defines our human form, is itself a disguise, one that renders us a bit confused as to our own identity. Sort of the ultimate costume. What this allows us to do is view ourselves with rare objectivity. This, along with its breadthless imagination and its dueling undercurrents of despair and humor makes Zachary Schomburg’s The Man Suit an indispensable first book.» - Chris Tonelli

«Zachary Schomburg’s debut collection of poetry, The Man Suit, features a mysterious coffin floating through the night sky. The cover captures the essence of the poetry. In the collection, whales are able to talk, monsters have human qualities, and a lung and haircut have a relationship. Schomburg’s mixture of everyday meditations and bizarre occurrences will grip readers' attention. In “Policy for Whales,” Schomburg presents readers with the bizarre idea that,“There was a whale singing a sincere and flawless rendition of The Thrill is Gone in a nightclub.” As the poem demonstrates, Schomburg exercises admirable control over his juxtapositions, and thus leaves the reader amused and satisfied.
For a debut collection of poetry, it is a longer book at 105 pages, but Schomburg has divided it into several sections. The sections are little chapbooks that intensify the strangeness of the world he has created. The first of these chapbooks tells the story of two phones. In one poem the speaker says, “There is a man around here somewhere, in the woods behind my house, who has a white telephone for a head. He has loud buzzing chainsaws for arms.” Audiences will find enjoyment in the uncanny, and be reminded of the weird things they might have imagined as children, when the world was still fresh and unexplored.
“What Everyone Started Wearing” is one of the strangest poems of the collection. It begins, “Everyone started wearing small log cabins on their heads. They opened the windows so they could see each other, and they opened the front doors so they could speak to each other.” The idea seems unreal to a reader, yet it is delivered in such a matter-of-fact manner that we may want to acquire log cabins for our own heads, becoming the newest victims of contagious fashion.
Schomburg shifts from prose poems to free verse through the collection. The first poem, “The Monster Hour,” is a prose poem, while other poems like “Letter to the Late Baron” demand line breaks in order to dramatize the narrative of the story. The shifting of styles allows the reader to simply absorb the stories and laugh at the bizarre humor. This shift in format is quite effective, as the poems never become daunting to the reader, despite the risks taken throughout.
The other chapbook sections also tell stories of the strange, with titles like “Abraham Lincoln’s Death Scene” and “[Opera Singer].” The strange becomes expected and the normal unexpected with The Man Suit, to the extent that we may begin viewing our surroundings differently, perhaps with a more suspicious eye. The phone ringing on our desk may not be a phone after all.» - Frank DePoole

«It would be fair to say surrealism in American poetry had a late start. Probably delayed by the Moderns. Probably, as Dana Gioia asserts, the need for a meaningful dreamscape in art was met in other ways, like animated cartoons. So it seems that in the seventies, in American poetry, Edson, Tate, Simic and even Donald Justice tried out surrealism to release verse from its fences and prose poetry from its dull labor. Simic perhaps had atavism for surrealism by virtue of being Eastern European and having grown up in the middle of a war. Edson came to it most likely as the best vehicle for his everyman scenarios. Tate endured in that vein, turning out material that felt cut quite from its own cloth. But the need for automatic writing that has been crafted to represent something with the burning intensity of childhood’s mind — as Breton defines surrealism — persists into today’s aesthetics.
Zachary Schomburg’s debut collection of poetry The Man Suit takes surreal and meaningful stances, a few approaching disorder and chaos. The volume layers its themes and recurring figures the way music can double back to make sure your heart grows heavy: a sweetheart named Marlene, an ominous Everyman, Carlos, parables about the woods, myths about women like hollowed out trees later balanced by myths about men like hollowed out trees, macabre and giddy reinterpretations of history. The latter include not only the poems from Schomburg’s chapbook Abraham Lincoln’s Death Scene but sophisticated, abstracted cosmologies reminiscent of Edson or Simic or Tate, well-anchored in sadness and bright with touches of disarming humor.
The poems deploy weights and counterweight pairs like the civilized and the brutal; the real and the uncanny, or an almost grotesque sweetness trying to mask loneliness. These counteractive forces allow Schomburg to write poems about ontological absurdities already gestured at in American poetry. His poems distinguish themselves with a particular kind of humor, and by underscoring the fabricated qualities of history, and the sad finality of our destruction of nature.
There is in Schomburg’s surrealism a combination of the civilized and the brutal that insists on the extinguishable quality of humanness. Like Tate, Schomburg records a twisted, neighborly hope, or, like Edson, violent, dreary complications of the everyday. Some examples like “Far From Marlene” start out with the crowd viewing the magically afflicted, in this case, a man with birds nesting in his “messed up” hair. Soon the poem matches delicacy like,“Birds are in it/laying eggs” with “He’s heard this shit before/and he gets in full/karate stance.” The diction of the latter quote could seem sophomorically set against the quiet of the first lines except that the poem shifts point of view (or reveals a hidden point of view). The poem ends with the “I” writing the ubiquitous Marlene a letter about the guy with birds in his hair and ends with the understatement, “I go on to tell her/about the birds/and the cake/using some pretty/good cursive.” That “pretty good” emotionally removes the angry karate guy as a phenomenon, not an easy joke. All the objects in the poem, chocolate cake, a large knife, the cursive, Marlene, feel like a meta-message about automatic communication and numbness in the face of the brutal.
This pairing of the surreal and the plain – and the askew jump in point of view – removes reality and humanity from the poem, the way the idea of motion seems sucked out of a painting by Hopper. The effect has as much “joke” in the tone as surrealist predecessors, but the joke is not in the people and objects Schomburg sets before us. A similar paralysis occurs in many poems, like “I’ve Since Folded This Poem into an Airplane” in which Marlene, it turns out, is made of snow. In “Halloween” the speaker actually makes his own emblem of false feeling, a sock puppet – a move critic Frederick Karl would ascribe a Southern feeling for its combination of the grotesque and the formal – then uses it to rein in the unruly beard on the real face of the speaker. The speaker’s personality, feelings, self-constructed happiness, the body’s needs, become a process held at an eerie remove. When aliens in “I’m Not Carlos” ask the speaker “(g)ive us the man suit, Carlos,” Schomburg delivers a pleasurably spooky emphasis to haphazard, vulnerable existence.
What also feels new is Schomburg’s use of the historical in the portion of the book, “Abraham Lincoln’s Death Scene, “ also a chapbook by Horse Less Press. André Breton said, “(Surrealism) is by definition free from any fidelity to circumstances, especially to the intoxicating circumstances of history.” Yet, the long series of poems about Abraham Lincoln’s assassination allow the frame of history to appear.
The sequence starts with about five lines that seem a straightforward account of the 16th president’s assassination. Then the “angelic face” of M., the reader might think, is the recurring figure of Marlene suddenly gone back in time. Though the poem refers to the killer Booth and his expressions, wild figures tear logic apart: daggers in the ceiling, a sexy legged accomplice and a “blood-spattered St. Bernard”. The borders of this reproduction diorama have fallen down and randomness proceeds to cyclone anything through its winds. The attachment to the recurring, human characters is constantly torn apart. The reader has to reassemble the juxtaposed times, realities and objects over and over – including Lincoln killing “a few audience members… before turning the revolver on himself”.
Freud used to argue that the surreal didn’t really come from the unconscious, that surrealism was a quite an ego-dominated and shaped surface. Many parts of the Lincoln section seem to have rustic realistic edges and in others the speaker seems to wink at the audience, “M. thinks this is entirely untrue, but I have my suspicions.”. The outrageousness becomes broad, scrambled, and hard to engage with as in Japanese noise music, even for long passages. Then, suddenly, it seems the unconscious (or is it the conscious mind leading the unconscious) waves a little hand toward an end: In a cogent, sad, litany of flames shaped like various objects, the reader detects how Lincoln himself becomes meaningless and ephemeral as our history’s own insistent violence continues:
“A woman-shaped flame. A whale-shaped flame. An ocean-shaped flame. The woman-shaped flame is inside the whale-shaped flame. The whale-shaped flame is inside the ocean-shaped flame...A breach-shaped flame...A Lincoln-shaped flame directly behind Lincoln. It is his soul on fire. It has already left his body...A Lincoln-shaped flame. A Lincoln-shaped flame”.
By the end of the sequence, Schomburg’s speaker and his M. are back at home by a fire, and American insouciance and comfort in the form of the couple once again frame and keep at arm’s length an infernal, bloody, nonsensical history – the fire. The poem adds up to a performance piece, dotted with a humor and violence that could seem irrelevant except that the ignored lessons of history seem to be the undeniably urgent message set forth.
If Schomburg insists – with a kind of airy, goofy humor’s help – that human existence is ephemeral and numbed, and that history is a monster piece of chaos subsumed by self-interest, Schomburg’s surrealism seems ultimately to remind the reader that pure nature is ending. Early in the book, the poem “What Everyone is Wearing” uses ecosystems and trees on an absurd scale to permit a scolding chaos to whip up. The potentially environmental message is drowned by a deeply subjective, at-root cynical equation of nature and human existence: “The tiny canaries cleared some space in the trees on their heads to wear small apartment complexes there. The tiny rabbits: supermarkets. The tiny elk cleared space to wear small churches on their heads and even tinier people started worshipping there”.
These last lines of the poem critiques our hubris in the face of all of nature, and the changeable nature of our livelihood, sustainability, etc. This vulnerability to shape-shifting makes a particularly hilarious turn in “A Band of Owls Moved into Town”. The invasion of a small town by owls is discussed in the tsk-ing manner we save for urban sprawl or darker attitudes usually masking racism, “A band of owls moved into town. They shopped for groceries and ran for office, that kind of thing.” This satire of fears, rendered as xenophobia of owls, ends with an exchange between the speaker and Julia, a “daughter of new and prosperous socialites...”. She agrees that she and the speaker are the only two “who... who...” That’s the end of the poem. The reader is helpless before this kind of goofy punning that also implies the inescapable likeness between all – owls and townies: find your own parallels in real life.
Sometimes the fabulous chaos of The Man Suit makes a funny, absurd, strident sound that it also critiques, but other times the poems are in such focus at the joining point of the humorously surreal and the painful, that you can’t help but want to know what this young poet’s work will become in the next decades. I would bet Schomburg’s work will be truly frightening, and I would hope that it remains a bit moral and devastating, as in another of the poems that indicate an end to nature. In “A Voice Box with Words Still in It,” the last poem of the collection, our old friend, the somewhat ironically human Carlos finds a voice box “inside the throat of a dead sheep”. If you “blow just right” into the voice box, it reveals the bucolic and wholesome secrets only a human would think a sheep contemplates:“where the best and worst grass is” and“how to blend it”. An unknown speaker tests Carlos’ hypothesis and the true voice of the sheep blisters in this terror-filled line:
Me: {I take a shallow breath and blow}. I am dying, so cold without wool, and afraid.» - Cynthia Arrieu-King

Zachary Schomburg, Pond, Greying Ghost Press, 2009.


[also the final section of Scary, No Scary]

«Ponds serve as a marker. A marker of wealth. A marker of geography. A marker of personal history. But in the case of Zachary Schomburg's The Pond, it is a marker of a clear, but subtle shift in one of contemporary poetry's most exciting voices. Where Schomburg's first full length collection, The Man Suit, reappropriated James Tate for the wandering and curious, The Pond reads more like a discovery, albeit one you'd only share with your best friend/lover. There are moments in this book that are so bold and yet so innocent your face blushes as a sense of embarrassment creeps into your toes;
I'll show you the cave
where all the bats come from.
You'll show me that place
between your knees
where my hand goes.
The single most amazing aspect of this book though, is Schomburg's awareness of that fact...and his subsequent use of this awareness to turn you from voyeur to active participant.
Where many other poems by many other poets would place the audience in their usual role as onlooker, Schomburg's poems pull out the chair for you, invite you to sit, and the invitation is so cordial that every time he mentions "you" or "we" the reader is almost made to squeal with excitement. You are the one chosen to hear all these secrets, you are the one he loves, we are going to have quite the adventure figuring this world out. And though it has never been Schomburg's tenor to alienate the reader with dense language and general poet's trickery, the simpleness of these poems increases your need to connect with them... their eagerness to speak to you demands an equal eagerness to listen attentively, caringly.
It's in this way that The Pond becomes more like a reflecting pool. This collection is decidedly Zachary Schomburg and yet, it is decidedly me, decidedly you. The magic of these poems doesn't necessarily take place within the printed words, but in the space between what those words are meant to symbolize and how those symbols are acknowledged in the brain. Meaning, when Schomburg mentions "the pond," I envision a specific pond (it's the one in front of my aunt's house), as do you, and Schomburg does nothing to stop it, in fact, these poems only work when you imagine that pond, at which point, you are no longer being asked to play in Zachary Schomburg's world, rather, you unknowingly invite him to play in yours.
You spend most of the day in the pond.
Every time you blink your eyelashes fall out
and then quickly grow back.
I spend all day collecting them.
They're what I make boats out of.
We like to ride bikes and fly kites together.
It's in these spaces where our brains infuse Schomburg's lines into our actual memories, like a lie you've told one too many times, and though it might feel a little creepy to admit, isn't this what we all really desire in our poetry? To have it be lived by someone? To be a marker of some kind somewhere? Jack Spicer used to mention magic everytime he talked about poetry, and "The Pond" is as close to a magical experience as I've ever had reading poems. To be honest, it is the book that made me reconsider my stance on both magic and poetry...
Congratuations Zach, James Tate might be the master illusionist, but I'll take the wonder of a good coin-in-the-ear any day. Besides, you can only see illusions so many times before you figure them out, but done right, when a magician holds that coin to your eyes, your first instinct will always be to reach back into your ear.» - BJ Love
Zachary Schomburg, I Am a Small Boy, Factory Hollow Press, 2009.



«I Am a Small Boy is a small chapbook.
I Am a Small Boy is full of small poems.
I Am a Small Boy is a small snippet of a great poet.
Ten poems accompanied by drawings from Ben Estes, I Am a Small Boy is another grand and stellar collection by the venerable Zachary Schomburg.
What I find most interesting about this book is how much volume Schomburg is fashions from so few poems, so few lines, so few pages. Here, as in both The Man Suit and Scary, No Scary, the evidence that language needs little to expand, that it can in fact be the grain and the world all at once, rivers of meaning informed by simple drops collecting.
This is a boy who is lost. This is a boy who is longing. This is a boy who is dead. This is a boy who doesn’t know what he wants or is or does or will be. This is a small boy.
When you die
a secret is revealed to you.
This happens to everyone.
But I think I already know
what the secret is.
Probably I am dead.
Maybe birth is the real death.
Maybe living is the secret.
I Am a Small Boy is another way of saying poetry can be small.
I Am a Small Boy is how language molds into drifts.
I Am a Small Boy is another round of Schomburg that is fascinating and sprite.» - J. A. Tyler

Strange Behaviors: An Anthology of Absolute Luridity,Nihilism Revised, 2018.


In the land of the lurid, the weird are wonderful, and the behaviors on display are at their strangest. Welcome to Strange Behaviors! An anthology of literature’s freshest and loudest voices, a new-new wave of dangerous writers – letting their words run wild with madness. The stories that melt from their minds are emotionally charged, surreal, nihilistic, grotesque, horrific, depraved, often humorous, and always with a depth that just keeps getting deeper and deeper. This is literature for the misfit minds of rebellious readers.


In the place where there is the startling, the odd are superb, and the practices in plain view are at their most interesting. Welcome to Strange Behaviors! A collection of writing’s freshest and loudest voices, another new rush of unsafe authors – giving their words a chance to run wild with franticness. The stories that dissolve from their psyches are sincerely charged, dreamlike, agnostic, odd, horrendous, debased, regularly entertaining, and dependably with a profundity that just continues getting further and more profound. This is writing for the nonconformist personalities of insubordinate perusers. Go along with us… Including: Sam Richard. Theresa Braun. Jordan Krall. M.P. Johnson. Nicholas Day. Donald Armfield. Austin James. Alex Karl Johnson. Charles Austin Muir. Joseph Bouthiette Jr. Michael Faun. Zak A. Ferguson. Jason Morton. Stamp Zirbel. S.C. Burke. Eileen Mayhew. D.B. Spitzer. Howard Carlyle. Christopher Lesko. Ben Arzate. Loot Easton. Catfish McDaris. Dav Crabes. Dani Brown. Nicholaus Patnaude. S.E. Casey. Ross Peterson. Brendan Vidito. Justin A. Mank. Benjamin Clarke Younker. John Claude Smith. Shaun Avery. Kyle Rader. Calvin Demmer. Evelyn Joyce. Gomez Aggonia. Upper class M. Calhoun.


Last year, I sat down late one night after I'd been drinking. I banged out a piece that was dark, surreal, and violent. To top it off, it was a one act play. I filed it away as something I figured would remain unpublished. Then a small, relatively new press named NihilismRevised put out a call for an anthology. They were looking just for the kind of thing like that play. I sent them the piece, and they accepted.
 I'm sharing this anthology with some other great authors like Jordan Krall and Michael Faun, and I'm very excited for it. - Ben Arzate
http://dripdropdripdropdripdrop.blogspot.hr/2018/01/strange-behaviors-anthology-of-absolute.html

Jeremy Gavron, Felix Culpa, Scribe, 2018.
excerpt


Whose stories deserve to be told? And whose words should do the telling?
In Felix Culpa, Jeremy Gavron conjures up a work of extraordinary literary alchemy: a novel made out of lines taken from a hundred great works of literature.
It follows a writer on the trail of a boy recently released from prison, who has been discovered dead in the cold north, frozen and alone. But in searching for the boy’s story, will he lose his own?
Magical and moving, Felix Culpa is a living demonstration of how storytelling works, by sound and by rhythm, by elision and by omission, as well as by reference and by allusion. It asks what happens when we lose the narrative of our own life, and fall into someone else’s.

‘Felix Culpa is extraordinary: a wild, beautiful book which patchworks tiny scraps of other novels to create something haunting, resonant and absolutely original.’ - Olivia Laing


'Felix Culpa is a brilliantly eccentric accomplishment - one that is difficult, on a single reading, fully to appreciate - and it raises fascinating questions about authorship, plagiarism, and textual integrity … Felix Culpa's ingenious appropriations bring the dead to life and offer the living a parallel existence in very good company.' -TLS


‘One of our more innovative, quietly inventive and exciting novelists.’ Ali Smith, TLS


'Gavron is essentially a Mary Shelley of words: he seeks to galvanise old sentences, the members of all stories, with new life, in a new body made of the severed parts of many others.' - Mika Provata-Carlone


The pursuit of the Noble Savage — the wild child who seems to embody freedom — is an evergreen theme in romantic literature.
Gavron has, paradoxically, produced something entirely original from his hundred or so sources, investing what might have been a rather hackneyed tale of a writer’s search for some sort of meaning with an edgy noirish sensibility, and in the process also providing a kind of literary spot-the-source parlour game for readers. Handily, he provides a list of his sources in an author’s note, which I wish I had discovered earlier than I did whilst reading.
The narrative concerns a writer-in-residence at a prison who becomes obsessed with discovering the fate of a young prisoner found dead shortly after his release. In terms of setting, we are in a modern, rather desolate urban environment, though because of the nature of the technique, there is no consistency: it might be contemporary America, it might be Victorian London. Gavron’s sources are nothing if not eclectic, ranging from Mark Twain to JG Ballard, from Nadine Gordimer to Mary Shelley. The writer’s desire to know what led to the death of a young petty criminal leads him to question his own existence and to embark on a journey that takes on an almost mystical dimension as he abandons the trappings of civilisation.
The use of lines (and almost all the novel is single lines, often just short clauses, or even single words) from other novels means that the sense of character as well as location is slippery. The central character is sometimes ‘he’ if the quoted text is a third-person narrative, sometimes ‘I’, and there’s obviously no consistency in the tone, since we might have a line from an early eighteenth-century novel following one from a work published in the last few years. Quite a few of the sources are in translation, though some are used in the original language, so the reader is sometimes caught off-guard by a phrase in German or Spanish.
It is hard to convey the flavour of the novel without quotation, but a quotation doesn’t really manage to present the overall experience of reading the novel, an experience which I found oddly unnerving. All the usual narrative signposts by which we as readers navigate a story are removed by Gavron’s technique of textual assemblage, so that we seem to experience a central tale – the writer’s search for the truth about the boy, the Felix of the title – as well as simultaneously being immersed in a series of ghost narratives, prompted by half-remembered snippets of dialogue or description.  Here is a passage from early in the novel, when the unnamed central character has decided to pursue his enquiries. Here, as elsewhere in the novel, there’s a touch of metafiction, with the text presenting as a character a writer who writes about his own writing, and here seems even to be writing about this novel itself:

In his pocket an old half-used notebook he has turned round and begun scrawling in from the back frontwards.
Spidery handwriting full of crossings-out and corrections.
Fragments, nonsense syllables, exclamations.
Observations which he found scribbled on the walls of subway washrooms.
Overhears in the streets.
In the café where he sometimes takes his meals.
Eavesdropping, if necessary, and writing down whatever I heard them say that sounded revealing to me.
Foraging in used bookstores.
Pieces, it seems to him, of other stories, yet to be told.

By turns intriguing, exciting and exasperating, this is certainly worth your attention if you are interested in possible new directions for the novel. In the end, I was not wholly convinced by the experiment, which seemed to me to take over from the business of telling the story. As with Georges Perec’s La Disparition, written without the use of the letter ‘e’, one is moved to admiration by the author’s inventiveness and verbal dexterity, but not necessarily by the totality of the work. - Rob Spence
https://shinynewbooks.co.uk/felix-culpa-by-jeremy-gavron/





Collage works best when it works all at once, which is why it meets with most success in the visual arts and music, where, for instance, DJ tracks built out of a swarming multitude of samples are organised around the through line of a beat. In writing, poetry is where collage recurs most frequently, at least partly because poems are short and generally not dependent on the elaboration of plot in order to succeed. In a longer piece of prose it is less effective. That’s because the fundamental building block of prose narrative is not language: it’s time. So any piece of narrative prose that wants to work as a collage must do something more than just skilfully edit together a bunch of quoted words. It must do something with, and to, time: squeeze it, dilate it, punch holes in it, twist it into weird striations.
Felix Culpa is a collage novel in that the bulk of its text is made up of lines lifted from other novels. An appendix lists the 100 works by 80 or so writers that Jeremy Gavron has used as his raw materials, though the text is not purely collage: only 14 of the 33 chapters are made up of “entirely sourced lines”. In other words, 19 contain some original interventions. While this may have been impossible to avoid, it can’t help but take the gloss off Gavron’s attempted feat. It’s as though the French novelist Georges Perec, author of the seminal Oulipian novel La Disparition/A Void, a book that famously does not contain a single E, instead wrote a book containing some Es.
The plot of Felix Culpa is framed as a mystery: when the novel opens, Felix, a young thief who was sent to prison after accidentally killing an old woman, has died in mysterious circumstances a short while after his release. A writer in residence at the prison begins to investigate Felix’s death, encountering a young woman he was in a relationship with and finally the shepherd for whom he once worked. Felix culpa is also the Latin term for the Christian concept of the “fortunate fall”, the bad action leading to an ultimately good outcome, the archetypal example being humankind’s expulsion from Eden that presaged the coming of Christ. The plot is Christian-contoured, with Felix depicted as a criminal and killer but also as an unworldly innocent, ripe for transcendental redemption whatever his earthly transgressions.           
The book progresses in very short chapters, the well-spaced lines singly descending the page, as though it is in fact a poem:

Still going into the prison, reading the men’s writings, listening to their talk.

Fascinating facts and tales from the poky.

Pale wall of dreams.

Standing in a cell one evening while its occupant brews tea in the wing kitchen.

Hung with old calendars and magazine pictures.

High narrow slit of a window.

Looked out on a bare courtyard lit by electric lamps.

Full of the melancholy which seeps into the bones in prison at night.

This method does produce interesting, if mild, effects, with just enough variation in the sourced registers to impart a sense of a “voice” that is unsettlingly off, negotiating a liminal world brimming with negative space. But as the story proceeds more or less in sequence, the effect of the collage, as a purely linguistic device, begins to wane. The voice works best early on, when the plot is at its most notional, but by its final phase, lacking the ability to return to the kind of established plot points that drive traditional narrative conclusions, the energy dissipates. The novel is as short as a book of poems, with a word count not far into five figures, and it might have worked better as a series of (not necessarily related) collage poems.
A closer inspection of the appendix raises another slight disappointment: the source texts are a very respectable but tame collection of largely 20th-century literary classics written overwhelmingly by men. The few genre books in there are safely canonical selections – JG Ballard, Raymond Chandler. I did wonder if the novel was an elaborately dry satire of the essential sameness of the conventional male “literary” voice, but I don’t think so: in a book that is around 70% description of physical landscape, Gavron makes things very easy on himself by using no fewer than five Cormac McCarthy novels as sources.
And if the point of collage is the bringing together of not just disparate, but actively incongruous and even dissonant material to generate new perspectives and tonalities, then Felix Culpa fails to distinguish itself in this way, too. Although Gavron edits his sourced lines skilfully enough, he is not doing anything transformative with the repurposed material. In the end he is making a tastefully “literary” novel out of a bunch of other tasteful literary novels. Imagine if he pulled off a novel in a “high” literary style using only lines lifted from the works of, say, Jeffrey Archer and Dan Brown. Now that would be a feat. - Colin Barrett
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/28/felix-culpa-jeremy-gavron-review




https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/felix-culpa-by-jeremy-gavron-review-a-complex-narrative-but-perseverance-pays-off-1.3386613


The vintage parlour game Consequences requires each player to take turns in writing a phrase or a sentence on a piece of paper, then, concealing their contribution, to fold the paper and pass it on to the next player to repeat the action until a story is made out of the fragments. Postmodern writers such as Italo Calvino and Georges Perec played similar games, allowing their novels to emerge from formal schema and seemingly disconnected elements. Rich in literary and historical allusion, the results — Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller, say, or Perec’s Life a User’s Manual — are both dazzling and disconcerting: wordplay as serious literature.This is the territory Jeremy Gavron ventures on to in his new novel Felix Culpa. Its 33 brief chapters are made up of lines from 100 works of international literature (including Calvino); yet it’s clear that Gavron — a consistently interesting novelist who also wrote a much-admired memoir of his mother, A Woman on the Edge of Time — is aiming for more than a clever arrangement of borrowed finery.Gavron, for the most part, succeeds — thanks not simply to his choice and placement of quotations but also to the wholly credible tale that he creates in the process, merging detective story, mythic romance and medieval quest into a short, affecting parable for modern times. In many cases the lines he has lifted are so terse as to defy identific­ation, though there is a bibliography at the back for those who can’t resist an early peek at his sources — from Ballard and Bolaño, through to Kapuscinski and the King James Bible, with hefty doses of Raymond Chandler and Cormac McCarthy among the 80 writers listed.The body of a young man called Felix, newly released from prison, is found in the rural uplands to the north of an unnamed country — recognisably England in several lights, although Gavron constantly wrongfoots the reader with lines from non-English writers, making Felix’s plight a universal one.The novel’s landscape might variously contain the olive trees of Amos Oz’s Israel, the boulevards of Patrick Modiano’s Paris, the loud, colourful birds of Alan Paton’s South Africa and the cottonwoods of Mark Twain’s Missouri, often all on one page. So seamless are these juxtapositions that they do not appear incongruous.
The narrative, too, is elusive, slipping frequently from first to third person, as a writer stymied by his own lack of imagination (“Maybe the story I’m looking for doesn’t exist”) seeks inspiration from the inmates of the prison in which he teaches. - Catherine Taylor
read more here

“A fluent stream of words awakens suspicion in me. I prefer stuttering, for in stuttering I hear the friction and the disquiet. The fragmentary nature of thought,” says Jeremy Gavron with reference to his new novel Felix Culpa in the Granta series Notes on Craft where writers discuss their work. Except he doesn’t, as the article, like the novel itself, is largely made up of the words of other writers. In an interview on the Radio 4 programme Open Book, Gavron spoke of the book’s origins, noting that ten years ago it began as a conventional novel about a young man released from prison. As he wrote, a line from The Great Gatsby echoed in his head, a line he felt perfectly conveyed the experience of working in a prison (as he has): “Privy to the secret griefs of men.” As time went on he became more and more aware that the atmosphere and mood of works he had met as a reader encapsulated what he wanted to express as a writer, and so the novel increasingly became a patchwork of stolen lines – in the end from some hundred other novels, as he explains in a note at the end:
“The great majority of lines in this novel are sourced word for word from the hundred or so books, by some eighty authors, listed below. Fourteen of the chapters, including the last nine, are made up entirely of sourced lines.”
As Gavron has said, “All stories are made to some degree out of earlier stories,” though few writers have taken it quite so literally. In doing so he joins the ranks of writers who have previously rejected the traditional novel as inadequate, opting for a form of collage promoted by David Shields and seen in the late work of David Markson. Interestingly, he has not rejected plot but instead fragmented it. The novel tells a story: that of a young man, Felix, who, shortly after being released from prison, is found dead in mysterious circumstances. The prison’s writer-in-residence attempts to investigate the death, lending the novel the tension of the mystery genre.
The collage works best when differing voices are juxtaposed:
“Hours to commune with his own thoughts.
Learned your place.
Good dog and all’ll go well and the goose hang high.
Transferred eventually to the adult system.”
The slightly jarring change of person (which is frequent) and the appearance of dialect in the third line keep the reader on edge, further adding to the sense of mystery and ensuring identification with the writer’s need to piece together what has happened. Felix’s character, that of a criminal, but one who seems innocent to the ways of the world, further increases the gaps the reader must search to fill, evident in the book’s layout.
The style is particularly effective for evoking mood through the description of landscape:
“Sun swam across the sky
Hole in the road suddenly wink like a cyclops.
Few miles further.
Lilac evening.”
It also works well portraying the stilted conversations between strangers as the writer asks about the boy:
“Don’t suppose you know where he is?
Moves around should be here soon now it’s spring.
Anyone taken notice of a boy?
Stayed with him.
Sull young’n.”
If anything, however, Gavron has been too successful in blending together the lines he has chosen. With seventy-three of his writers male (not counting God) and only a few pre-dating the twentieth century, there is, strangely, a lack of variety in the narrative voice at times. Gavron also has a tendency to choose very short sentences, rarely over a line long: of the twenty-three sentences on the final two pages eighteen are six words or fewer (five are only two words). This slows the pace of the novel and, again, emphasises the search, but also creates a sameness of tone throughout.
Gavron has described Felix Culpa as “a journey through my own literary landscape” and it’s a pity he did not make the decision to go hard-core Oulipo by setting stricter rules on his sources. Think, for example, of Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World, a novel made entirely from fragments of text clipped from 1960s women’s magazines. Despite this, it’s a fascinating experiment with an interesting story to tell: a novel to read and re-read. - 1streading.wordpress.com/2018/03/14/felix-culpa/




Jeremy Gavron, A Woman on the Edge of Time: A Son's Search for a Mother Who Wanted More, Scribe, 2015.              






It's 1965, and in Primrose Hill, north London, a beautiful young woman has just gassed herself to death, leaving behind a suicide note, two small children, and an about-to-be-published manuscript: The Captive Wife.
Like Sylvia Plath, who died in eerily similar circumstances two years earlier just two streets away, Hannah Gavron was a writer. But no-one had ever imagined that she might take her own life. Bright, sophisticated, and swept up in the progressive politics of the 1960s, Hannah was a promising academic and the wife of a rising entrepreneur. Surrounded by success, she seemed to live a gilded life.
But there was another side to Hannah, as Jeremy Gavron's searching memoir of his mother reveals. Piecing together the events that led to his mother's suicide when he was just four, he discovers that Hannah's success came at a price, and that the pressures she faced as she carved out her place in a man's world may have contributed to her death. Searching for the mother who was never talked about as he grew up, he discovers letters, diaries, and photos that paint a picture of a brilliant but complex young woman grappling to find an outlet for her creativity, sexuality, and intelligence.
A Woman on the Edge of Time not only documents the too-short life of an extraordinary woman; it is a searching examination of the suffocating constrictions in place on intelligent, ambitious women in the middle of the twentieth century.


‘Gavron has written a book as brave and honest as it is heart-stopping and gripping. With the meticulousness of a detective and the heart and soul of an abandoned son, he sets out to examine a family tragedy so raw and agonising that it is rarely talked, let alone written, about. I felt for him — and every man, woman and child in this book — whilst at the same time finding myself unable to put it down. Yes, you sense him stepping, with touching sensitivity, through some desperately painful (and potentially dangerous) territory. But if authors can’t write about the mysteries closest to their hearts, then what point is there, really, in memoir?’ - Julie Myerson


“Jeremy Gavron’s quest to find his mother has produced a groundbreaking book and moving portrait of a spirited young woman—a ‘captive wife’—who refused to accept the social constraints of her time. Unforgettable.”—Tina Brown

‘A Woman on the Edge of Time possesses all the signature verve, imagination and elegance of Gavron's writing but he brings to this, the story of his mother's suicide when he was four years old, a particular burning, restless intelligence. The result is a memoir of devastating, heartbreaking power: I had to put my life on hold to finish it.’ -Maggie O'Farrell






“Occasionally one comes across a book that needs to be read as much as it clearly needed to be written. Jeremy Gavron’s impressive, tough yet affecting investigation into his mother’s suicide at the age of twenty-nine in 1965 is such a story. Hannah Gavron was one of the brightest and most vivid young women of her generation—I know because it was my generation too. She killed herself inexplicably only months before the publication of her study of young mothers’ lives in the early 1960s, the very first book of its kind in this country. She called her book The Captive Wife. Her son’s book, A Woman on the Edge of Time, is both his story—the story of the aftermath of a suicide—and his mother’s story. Growing up knowing little about her, with no memories of her himself (he was four years old when she died), he has pieced together her life with meticulous attention: digging up documents, tracking down scores of people who knew her, both bringing her alive and coming, at the end, to a heartbreaking understanding of her death. In one sense, what he has uncovered is a tragic personal story, one woman’s story, but it is more than that: Jeremy Gavron evokes the lives of all women in those pre-feminist years and so constructs a masterly portrait of an era. This is such a fine and beautiful book. A testament to a lost mother, and times past.”—Carmen Callil



‘The story is deeply affecting in itself but it is Gavron's sensibility and vulnerability that make this book so special, and so stunning. A Woman on the Edge of Time is a love letter to a remarkable woman as much as an obituary.’ - The Saturday Paper









Jeremy Gavron, An Acre of Barren Ground, Simon & Schuster, 2005.               


read it at Google Books


At number 30 the victim of a savage serial killer is found, and Inspector Abberline wonders whether he'll ever find the murderer they're calling Jack. At number 41 a man tries to hide his family in the shadows of a ruined London; 1500 years later, a gangster plays out the same story. At 246 a mammoth dies, and long afterwards, a giant's thighbone is discovered. Bangladeshis, Jews, Huguenots, brewers, soldiers, farmers and medieval monks - men on the run and families determined to make a new home. Each has come to Brick Lane. Each has left its ghosts.


Last year I published a book that was the true story of everyone who'd ever lived here in our home in Clapham. Though at the time I was proud that I'd managed to delve back in time as far as 1872 (when the house was built), it was only as the project evolved that it dawned on me what a meagre drop in the ocean that really was. What about all the centuries before? What about prehistory? I found myself strangely moved to discover that the land 34 Lillieshall Road was built on had previously been a cricket ground bordered by an orchard. But when, I wondered, was that ground mown and rolled, when was the orchard planted? My youngest son clamoured for us to go back to Roman times, but I had to call a halt. I'm no historian and anyway I needed to finish the book.
So I'm very much in awe of Jeremy Gavron for doing precisely what I could not begin to do. His daunting and completely extraordinary novel-come-social history deftly excavates one single London street, the East End's Brick Lane, but in such depth and with such empathy and gusto that it leaves you breathless. It's not all true - he calls it a novel and much of it necessarily admits to being fiction - but somehow the scale of what he's managed to achieve still knocks you out. No measly 100-year time limits here. Archives have clearly been used, but as a springboard not an end in themselves. Here, you feel, is an imagination that has let rip. The chapters - and their subjects, which range from people to plants, from mammoths to buildings - feel like random, bloody slices gouged straight from the whole shuddering raft of history 
So, for that matter, does the prose. Gavron bounces from immigrant Jews a century or more ago, through to more recent Bangladeshis, Huguenots, soldiers, medieval nuns - and I don't think I've ever read such a ventriloquism of diverse styles so dazzlingly and successfully combined in the course of a single novel. So the flat deadpan of historical text book is laid alongside bald 21st-century East End dialogue, a Victorian detective hot on the trail of Jack the Ripper is laid against an aching tale of a tortured dancing bear. And when, about half-way through the book, you reach a cluster of pages of graphic novel, you accept and swallow them unerringly - they make a perfect and neat sort of sense in the context of that part of the story (grasping young square-chinned City guy with mobile phone in search of funding for his dotcom business considers the financial sense of making his base the Old Brewery on Truman Street where his Jewish tailor grandparents lived from hand to mouth).
Gavron doesn't stop at people and animals either. Mosses and liverworts that have unfurled on this patch of land are touchingly catalogued - and the farther back in time the writer trawls, the more urgent his stories seem to become. In one of the most chilling chapters, a woman who belongs to some long-ago but unspecified age, gives birth to a baby clearly fathered by her own father. While she sleeps, he feeds it to the hog in the yard. The bloodiness of the episode is echoed later in a strange yet entirely fitting chapter on artist Gunther von Hagens and the (real-life) media frenzy that accompanied his exhibition of corpses called "Bodyshock" at the Old Brewery on Truman Street. And later, a touching description of the life of one Willy Wilson who sold birdseed outside No 216 Brick Lane and whom the author himself met.
Of course, Gavron has cheated. His book feels intensely complete precisely because he's abandoned the rules and gone where he liked and filled in the gaps wherever he fancied. But it doesn't matter a bit - still the effect is somehow dazzlingly, scarily real. And though I suppose it's inevitable that some chapters are more obviously gripping than others, in the end, a patient reading of this book pays off. I felt as though I'd swallowed a time-drug - it's exactly the effect of all these contrasts, the cumulative magic of the trip the author takes you on that leaves you so moved. Here, in fact, is the best sort of living museum - a novel of imagination and daring whose pages precisely convey the romance of that dizzying idea which lurks at the heart of all history. Stand on any given piece of ground in any place in the world and you won't be the first. Though no palpable trace may remain, you know that every sort of animal, vegetable and mineral drama must in the past have unravelled itself on that very spot.
- Julie Myerson
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/apr/02/featuresreviews.guardianreview22






‘Jeremy Gavron's astonishing book, An Acre of Barren Ground, is one of a handful of novels that I must return to and re-read about once a year.’ - Maggie O'Farrell




Jeremy Gavron, The Book Of Israel,  Simon & Schuster, 2003.       


read it at Google Books


Dunsk, Lithuania, 1874: brought home dying from the mill, an old man leaves his new grandson the only thing of value he owns - his name. In one Jewish family, the forename Israel is handed down from generation to generation. But as parts of the family move across the world - beginning in Lithuania at the end of the 19th century and finishing in London at the beginning of the 21st - different Israels in different countries have very different relationships with the name and the weighty expectations it represents.



There are those novels you feel have striven self-consciously to be different and those that are naturally and confidently different - they carry that quality of inevitability all fine writing contains. Within a few pages the reader knows that Jeremy Gavron has found a structure for his second novel, The Book Of Israel, that is his own and effortlessly unique.
Innovative and engrossing, this literary mosaic recreates the history of a family within which is contained the history of a people. Gavron achieves this by naming most of the chapters after books in the Bible - Genesis, Kings, Judges - though not in the same order. The device links a modern Jewish family (1874-2001) with its past.
Doris Lessing once wrote that there are no longer any rules for writing a novel. Narrative could now progress through prose, drama, letters, diary, stream of consciousness, quotations - anything.
This is what Gavron has done. Each chapter is a different voice in a different form - grandmother talking to grandson, the minutes of the synagogue's committee meetings, letters between sisters in England and South Africa. And, to recreate that "anti-semitism never far below the surface of English life", as Hugh Montefiore, the retired Bishop of Birmingham, once observed, there's a chapter quoting lines from novels by John Buchan, Warwick Deeping and Graham Greene which begins with the third edition of the Oxford Shorter English Dictionary in which "Christian" was defined as "Human, civilised, decent, respectable", while to "Jew" was "to cheat or overreach".           
Not that Gavron presents a picture of Jewish life that is all winningly full of suffering and honour. The squalor of immigrant life with six to a room, the urgency of sweating their employees as well as themselves over sewing machines and hot irons, the little bribes to survive, and the petty domestic squabbles are all recorded, but with the gentle touch of pity.
The writing is so confidently at home in its structure that by the time the author came to one of his last chapters he could create a character who took his place without needing to be named. It was enough to see from the style of diary he wrote ("Food B, wine B-") that it was a certain kind of gentile business acquaintance who admired Jews but couldn't resist describing them as "thrusting".
What confirmed for me the book's achievement was reaching the final chapter, discovering that it began with reflections on circumcision, and thinking to myself: oh no, Mr Gavron you can't write such a saga of Jewish family life and end with ambivalences about circumcision. You surely must end acknowledging the terrible conflicts raging within most Jews and Jewish communities over Israel's moral dilemmas in its conflict with the Palestinians. Which, later on in that last chapter, is exactly what he did. - Arnold Wesker
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/sep/21/featuresreviews.guardianreview11





Jeremy Gavron, Moon Pb, Penguin, 1997.


On a farm in the highlands of Kenya, a young white boy befriends his father's enigmatic African driver, Ernest. But their time together is short-lived: as racial tension in the country escalates, confidences are betrayed, trust is broken and loyalties divided.

Jeremy Gavron, King Leopold's Dream: Travels in the Shadow of the African Elephant, Pantheon, 1993.


The author's travels chronicle the African elephant's struggle for survival in a world where its tusks carry a deadly value, a battle paralleling old Africa's struggle to survive in the age of modern Africa.


On the trail of the African elephant, Jeremy Gavron has woven an extraordinary tale that is at once an adventure, a philosophical inquiry, and a haunting, evocative portrait of Africa. The elephant his explorations reveal is an intensely social being, loyal to its own kind, often traumatized by the disruption of its herd, and even able, according to some experts, to understand its own predicament: the deadly value of its magnificent tusks. For Gavron, the elephant's fight for survival is also a powerful metaphor for the broader battle of the old Africa to survive in the modern Africa of Coca-Cola, automatic weapons, and dictators with Swiss bank accounts. In his travels, Gavron has illuminating and sometimes comic encounters with most of the leading elephant experts in Africa, as well as with notorious poachers, ivory smugglers, and famous elephants themselves. Along the way he also explores other paths and listens to other voices, from forest Pygmies to wealthy hunters on safari, from mud-hut talk to the silent message of the ruined palace of an African Ozymandias. "Africa does not readily yield its heart, its secrets," Gavron learned in his years as a correspondent in Africa. "It must be approached indirectly, from aslant." This is the approach Gavron takes through his choice of haunting, resonant subjects, from the last elephant in Burundi and the history of the primeval gomphothere to the dream of a nineteenth-century king - once a grandiose colonial fantasy, but now the germ of an idea that may point the way forward for both the African elephant and the wondrous, beleaguered continent in which it lives.


A former Africa correspondent for the (London) Daily Telegraph , Gavron, who has a personal interest in elephants, returned to the continent to talk to scientists, game wardens, rangers, hunters, poachers, ivory smugglers and the keepers of elephant orphanages. He presents a sharply defined account of the conflict between wildlife advocates and the needs of the increasing human population. Gavron discusses "sustainable utilization," pointing out that governments and people alike should underscore economic imperatives to justify the preservation of wilderness. He cites the Kruger National Park in South Africa as a model system: species with destructive feeding habits are strictly controlled, and the park makes a profit from hunting, tourism and culling. Other innovative schemes for wildlife can be found in Zimbabwe, he notes, where some cattle ranchers are finding greater profit in wild animals because of tourism and sport hunting. Readers who follow the elephant story will find Gavron's account even-handed and illuminating. - Publishers Weekly


Gavron's book is an episodic retelling of his travels throughout the African continent. He recounts his efforts to locate the last elephant in Burundi, tagging along on a hunting safari in Kenya, and conversations with conservation officials in Tsavo national park. Along the way, the reader learns much about African history, both natural and political, and efforts to preserve African wildlife, especially the elephant. Gavron's elephants are noble, even intelligent, animals that must be saved. He accepts the necessity and wisdom of the ivory ban and condemns culling elephant herds. (For another point of view, see Raymond Bonner's At the Hand of Man , LJ 4/1/93.) Gavron is a good travel writer, and this is a very readable book. But he fails to deliver an in-depth exploration of Africans and their complex relationship to nature. For travel and natural history collections. - Randy Dykhuis

Jeremy Gavron, The Last Elephant: African Quest,  HarperCollins, 1993.
                  
Of all the endangered species, elephants are the most intriguing. Like whales, they are huge and intelligent. Much is known about them - their close family ties, their care for their own dying, their interest in their dead, their complex communication. This book is a journey in the shadow of the great beast, a portrait of its character, nature, culture and life, but also taking the broader view, looking at the elephant in the political, natural and human context. It is a book about the researchers, conservationists, the ivory carvers and elephant artists, the white hunters and African poachers, and the elephant's hired protectors. It shows too, how the fate of the elephant is entwined with some of the key African themes: overpopulation, land shortages, political instability, corruption and the lopsided meeting between African tradition and the modern world.

Alicia Kopf, Brother in Ice, Trans. by Mara Faye Lethem, And Other Stories, 2018.
 
www.aliciakopf.net/index.php/about/alicia-kopf/


“She thought that it was precisely when things get uncomfortable or can’t be shown that something interesting comes to light. That is the point of no return, the point that must be reached, the point you reach after crossing the border of what has already been said, what has already been seen. It’s cold out there.”

This hybrid novel―part research notes, part fictionalised diary, and part travelogue―uses the stories of polar exploration to make sense of the protagonist’s own concerns as she comes of age as an artist, a daughter, and a sister to an autistic brother. Conceptually and emotionally compelling, it advances fearlessly into the frozen emotional lacunae of difficult family relationships. Deserved winner of multiple awards upon its Catalan and Spanish publication, Brother in Ice is a richly rewarding journey into the unknown.


"In another country this book would have changed the course of its history." - Enrique Vila-Matas

"As if by sleight of hand, Kopf displays a wide range of emotions before us. Like the Poles, they are constantly shifting, and inevitably epic." - Agustín Fernández Mallo

"In an epistolic, polar update of Melville's Moby-Dick, Alicia Kopf's genre-defying book rises as clear and cold as an Arctic sea, floating with ideas that, like icebergs, are buoyed up by meaning and memory below their surface. This is an icy dissection of actuality and history, a frozen etymology of meaning. Slipping from Catalunya to the Ultima Thule, echoing a rapidly changing environment, Brother in Ice deals in personal retrieval and magical supposition in the whiteness of a disappearing world. In the process, it achieves a fugitive poetry all of its own.’ - Philip Hoare

"A unconventional look at a world that makes [Kopf] feel uncomfortable . . . a text in which the feats of polar explorers give way to a central autobiographical story about the equally harsh and arid trips through family relationships and within oneself." - El Pais

"Simultaneously serious and light, incidental and yet trascendental." - El Periodico
"A book, part essay and part autobiography, that is also a chronicle of a generation stalled in a world without horizons or certainties . . . An unusual book and the deserving winner of the Premi Documenta literary prize." - La Vanguardia


Alicia Kopf’s Brother in Ice (translated by Mara Faye Letham) is a very modern novel. This is not to say its intent is new: a portrait of the artist as a young woman (literally, as Kopf is perhaps best known as an artists and the novel began as a series of exhibitions). Kopf tells us in the opening chapter, as she links her artistic struggle with polar exploration, “I am also searching for something in my white, unheated iceberg studio.” Neither does its modernity lie in the casual mentions of social media, for example when the narrator considers whether to send a friend request to an ex-boyfriend she bumps into at a concert:
“The next day the question of whether or not to add him on the social networks gnaws at me.”
The novel’s modern sensibility begins with its form, a narrative in which autobiography and Google collide to create a series of factual blocks floating in a sea of individual memories. Perhaps the best example is the chapter ‘Snow Globe’ which begins with the discovery of a snow globe (the chapter titles are generally explanatory headings) “at the back of the drawer in an old dresser.” This is not, however, the regret reviving snow globe of Citizen Kane (which is, of course, name-checked) but the stimulant instead for a series of internet searches on the topic.
We see the same process on a larger scale when it comes to Kopf’s central metaphor of polar exploration. While books have been consulted according to a brief bibliography (including Fergus Fleming’s wonderful Ninety Degrees North), much of the information has been found online. (One chapter begins, “Comparing the Amundson and Scott expeditions on Wikipedia…”) The ‘Research Notes’ chapters, which are often dated, generally consist of a mix of diary entries and articles she has read online: ‘Research Notes III’, for example, is an extract from a Spanish scientist’s blog.
Neither a good or bad thing in itself, instant access to information can be a temptation to writers, leading them down search-engine rabbit-holes in pursuit of one more interesting fact. There are times when it feels as if Kopf is tumbling in this way, her fascination with polar exploration outstripping her artistic use of it. Though never dull, it does feel that a disproportionate portion of the text is a cut-and-paste of other people’s stories and that Kopf’s own life becomes the interruption.
Kopf also uses her arctic symbolism in reference to her autistic brother, though the title oversells the idea that it is about him or their relationship (I assume it also encompasses the polar explorers, whom she sees as ‘brothers’ too). True, he is occasionally mentioned (referred to in his first appearance as “a man trapped in ice”) but his story is tangential to the real purpose of the novel. In a Postscript Kopf states explicitly, “this book isn’t about your life, which is only yours.”
“I can only make only make images, fictions, only you know what you’ve lived through…”
This imaginative fatalism might go some way to explaining the preponderance of facts, and the absence of characters. Most other characters are reduced to initials, and their development is as limited; only the mother is partially visible, most suddenly when filtered through the narrator’s anger:
“I’m not asking for money. And asking for a ride to IKEA shouldn’t have to mean begging on my hands and knees.”
Such scenes of interaction are rare, however, even though the novel covers family breakdowns and broken hearts. The drama is in the portrayal:
“Doubt and loneliness are persistent. I don’t know if writing all this is worth the effort, or whether I have any right.”
It may seem I am criticising Brother in Ice for not being the novel I want it to be; in fact, my assumption is that Kopf’s has succeeded in her intention, a novel which is not so much a portrait of an artist as of an artefact. Rather than describing the narrator’s development from childhood to creator, she details the created object. In doing so she presents a modern sensibility lying somewhere between solipsism and narcissism, a shining landscape of ice, endlessly reflecting. - 1streading.wordpress.com/


Alicia Kopf’s Brother in Ice is subversive. At the beginning I went along with her story as I share Kopf’s evident fascination with the heady days of polar exploration, of nations racing to be first to reach an ever-moving target. I expected little more than a day or two’s immersion into a contemporary novel, of the kind I don’t read often~mostly because they offer nothing that I can’t find better developed in a novel that is tested by time=but what I found instead was an intricate study into how a modern human being constructs their idea of identity.
References to social media situate this contemporary novel but that isn’t what I mean by modernity. Children born in the late twentieth century may be brought up happily or unhappily, closer or more disconnected from their families, but the way they interpret and define themselves will be different from children in nineteenth century novels. What is clever and modern about Kopf’s novel is her feeling for how relationships with parents, the balance between selfishness and altruism that sets the tone for inter family dynamics, has shifted in secular, post-Freudian Europe.
If evidence of post-modernity can be discerned in the conflicts and compromises of family life, it is the degree to which modern human beings construct their identity from the terms of their private lives. The relationships in Kopf’s story, hopeful and tragic, are built from the substrate of exponentially increasing levels of narcissism and self-interest. In the end, Kopf’s family saga disguised as an account of a study of polar exploration, looks beyond the despair addressed at length by contemporary writers like Michel Houellebecq and offers the possibility that we can use language and, by extension, thought to see beyond our crisis of narcissism,
- timesflowstemmed.com/2018/02/20/alicia-kopfs-brother-in-ice/

Andrea Lowlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, Rescue Press, 2017.
excerpt: Brooklyn Rail
excerpt: Lithub


It's 1993 and Paul Polydoris tends bar at the only gay club in a university town thrumming with politics and partying. He studies queer theory, has a dyke best friend, makes zines, and is a flâneur with a rich dating life. But Paul's also got a secret: he's a shapeshifter. Oscillating wildly from Riot Grrrl to leather cub, Women's Studies major to trade, Paul transforms his body at will in a series of adventures that take him from Iowa City to Boystown to Provincetown and finally to San Francisco--a journey through the deep queer archives of struggle and pleasure.
Andrea Lawlor's debut novel offers a speculative history of early '90s identity politics during the heyday of ACT UP and Queer Nation. Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is a riotous, razor-sharp bildungsroman whose hero/ine wends his way through a world gutted by loss, pulsing with music, and opening into an array of intimacy and connections.


"I love this book, in all its ecstasy, wit, and hilarity. I laughed out loud in recognition and appreciation of Lawlor's spot-on portraitof an era, scene, and soundtrack, the novel's particular sluice ofpleasures, fluids, and feelings. The liberatory rush of Lawlor's writing is as rare as it is contagious, not to mention HOT. Paul is on fire,and an antihero for the ages."―Maggie Nelson

"Fast-paced and cheeky, full of intellectual riffs, of observations so sharp they feel like gossip, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is a touchingly sweet-hearted and deeply cool book. Andrea Lawlor haswritten a magic story, showing us the real magic of our world in theprocess. If you like your humor supersmart and your theory full of campand irony and heart, you won't be able to put this book down."―Michelle Tea

"I am such a fan. Andrea Lawlor's prose is restless, muscular and playfuland uncannily able to zero in on the cultural details that make the world Paul is traveling through shimmer and pucker with truth. Stealthtoo. Lawlor is either a good 'liver' or a good liar. They know.In Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl Lawlor takes the ancient trope of 'the changeling' and makes it be me,you. Paul's such a funny book that studies how studied we are especially when we go out. Who do we seek and who or what is seeking? It's a tight satisfying masterpiece which I am very glad to hand you if you happen to love sex, clothes, literature which now includes the apparitional blessing of a new elastic genre (which Paul initiates) that seamlessly makes both what's out there and in here less lonely, less fixed and less fake. This book updates the present. In Andrea Lawlor's fiction the dream walks, and I watch. Paul's got flickering feet like Mercury."―Eileen Myles

"Exploring the malleability of gender and desire, and paying homage to Virginia Woolf's 'Orlando,' the book follows Paul--sometimes Polly--as s/he searches for love and the 'uncontaminated truest' self. The quest leads through New York City at the height of the AIDS crisis, Iowa City's queer punk scene, off-season Provincetown, a womyn's festival in Michigan, and, finally, San Francisco. Lawlor successfully mixes pop culture, gender theory, and smut, but [their] greatest achievement is that Paul is no mere symbol but a vibrantly yearning being, 'like everybody else, only more so.'"― The New Yorker

"...a hilarious, original, gender-fluid novel replete with 1990s cachet, sex, and queer identity...a new benchmark for gender-nonconforming literature that introduces the undeniable skill,talent, and originality of new voice in fiction"―Foreword (starred review)

"...a witty and raucous portrait of LGBT radicalism during the early '90s....an exhilarating picaresque hero..."―TheWashington Blade

"An intelligent and dashing work, Paul Takes the Form is destined to become, in the time-honored tradition of The Price of Salt, Rubyfruit Jungle, and Valencia, the go-to coming of age novel for the latest generation of wanderlustful rabble-rousers."-Sarah Fonseca




A magical, sexual, and hopeful debut novel about transcending boundaries of gender to pursue emotional connection.
Lawlor (Position Papers, 2016) writes of Paul, a shape-shifter tending bar in a college town in the mid-1990s. Paul can change his gender and appearance at will and does so as he navigates in and out of various pockets of academia and queer culture. Paul is drawn to the act of attraction; he “relied on his ability to attract only the sorts of attention he desired,” and he shifts his form as a way of constantly challenging himself to connect with more people. Paul wants access to as many circles and bodies as possible. Lawlor’s prose is taut, self-aware, and carnal. As Paul tests his “own nascent malleability,” the author explores appearance, attraction, sexuality, and identity. Paul’s youthful exuberance and thirst for hookups are foils to his persistent feelings of isolation. The book is divided into several parts, most notably shifting when a visit to a Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival leads Paul (as a woman) to both a great love, Diane, and a confrontation with his own reasons for seeking sex. “What was sex, but newness?” he asks himself. Eventually Paul has to decide on the level of intimacy he desires; specifically, who he wants to tell about his body. This suggests that intimacy is knowledge of an identity that transcends the corporeal form. Dispersed throughout the story are short chapters with the feel of legends, each fable hinting at issues of gender. In the final third of the novel, Paul moves to the Bay Area, tests the limits of his ability to hold a form, and does his most mature self-examination.
This is groundbreaking, shape- and genre-shifting work from a daring writer; a fresh novel that elevates questions of sexual identity and intimacy. - Kirkus Reviews


With their debut, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, Andrea Lawlor delivers a hilarious, original, gender-fluid novel replete with 1990s cachet, sex, and queer identity. It’s an entrance that accomplishes what few writers can, addressing self-discovery, connection, and acceptance in a raucous, inventive way.
Have you ever wished you could be the opposite sex, whenever you wanted? Meet Paul, a shape-shifting, gender-nonconforming college student whose motivating desire is to be as hot as possible, no matter what sex he chooses to be.
Paul is adrift. Minimally showing up for classes at a Midwest college, Paul spends much time hunting for sexcapades, free coffee, and food. With Paul’s ability to consciously change appearance and gender, these interlope into as many subsets of queer culture, college life, and one night stands as are available, all while demonstrating their inexhaustible knowledge of riot grrrl music and running fashion commentary.
While providing all the aesthetic of mid-1990s queer culture, and satisfying all physical urges while morphing between man and woman, Paul’s shallowness masks deep feelings of isolation and yearning to connect with someone.
Lawlor masterfully exhibits their knowledge of gender identity by creating fully realized LGBTQ characters and avoiding stereotypes. They slyly intersperse the narrative with short, Brothers Grimm-like fables and fairy tales that question the historical impact of gender identity that is passed down from generation to generation.
Even with Paul’s snarky humor, the story makes a pointed case that desire, and being desired, are universal attributes, regardless of gender or sexual orientation. It subtly conveys Paul’s isolation by refusing to make Paul choose a gender or an orientation, instead having him search for a reflection, a kinship that supersedes anatomy.
Gender-fluid and gender nonconforming literature is underexplored in general, but Lawlor’s novel introduces hefty topics in a highly entertaining, fresh, and thought-provoking way. Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is a new benchmark for gender-nonconforming literature that introduces the undeniable skill, talent, and originality of new voice in fiction. - Monica Carter       
https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/paul-takes-the-form-of-a-mortal-girl/


“WHAT CONFIGURATION of power constructs the subject and the Other, that binary relation between ‘men’ and ‘women,’” asks Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (Routledge, 1990). “Are those terms untroubling only to the extent that they conform to a heterosexual matrix for conceptualizing gender and desire?” she continues. These are the foundational questions at the heart of Andrea Lawlor’s debut novel Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (Rescue Press, 2017), which quickly propels its readers into Paul’s world — an at times confusing and exhilarating environment in which sexuality and adventure know no limits. Taking place in the 1990s, the novel is a concoction of unexpected interactions that place Paul at their center, though he is no novice. He is able to change his appearance and gender on demand and in a manner of minutes. Switching from Paul to Polly, he is the kind of mythical character that readers usually encounter in works such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Nevertheless, Lawlor thinks up a character that is irreverent, oozing profusely of promiscuity, and cruising life as if it were a colossal sex club, sleeping with whomever comes his way or expresses interest in doing so.
We first meet Paul as a teenager and film aficionado aching to get his hands on a pair of breasts or an erect penis. Within the first 30 pages of the book, Paul has already been intimate with two individuals of opposite sexes, switching gender between the two encounters. We quickly learn that Paul’s gender is mutable and that he’ll transform his body any time he thinks he might get something from the person he is interacting with, be it a sexual release or conversation. At first, Lawlor’s prose feels intentionally confusing. Paul switches genders but the pronouns used to qualify him never change. He is always referred to with a male pronoun and very rarely does he introduce himself as Polly, his female counterpart. At least, to the readers, he is always spoken of as Paul. Interestingly, it is important for him that his name represent perfectly the individual he embodies, though he is not interested in facing the societal backlash that may come of it.
He wasn’t ready for the obvious question that so far no one had had the opportunity to ask in the sober daylight. What was he? Even a film major knew that matter must come from somewhere. When his penis went away, where did it go? Or was it all an illusion, something he could make people see?
While Paul apprehends the way in which he will be perceived, understood, and judged by those who walk the same streets as him, he also craves physical attention and grovels to be seen. It’s this kind of erotic need for attention and societal requirement of anonymity that makes Paul so exciting. The groveling here is not passive, nor is it submissive. It is completely empowering. His state of desperation for physical contact is a weapon of dominance and the fact that he identifies as not having a type, ultimately makes him a democratic lover, and, as a result, relatable and highly contemporary. It’s through Paul’s constant eye for the next encounter, a knack for spotting out those with the interesting stories, and his insatiable need to experience everything all at once, that Lawlor manages to make the body a social tool that can be used to climb up the ladder — or slide face down to the bottom, as the case may be: “Paul is the game; Paul hunts only hunters. He hunts to be hunted […] Paul is sex, he is effortlessly sexual, effortlessly masculine […] his body is public property, his face a test.”
His appetite for any lover fades when he meets Diane at an all-female festival. To attend, Paul has to transform and maintain his body in its female form, and attempt to blend in as much as possible without getting caught. Working shifts in the kitchen in exchange for free festival entry, Paul meets Diane, whom he almost immediately falls for. This is the first time Paul is forced to sustain a female appearance for a long period of time, though the text itself never ceases to call him Paul, and the characters within the story Polly. Diane does not know about Paul’s extraordinary ability. The dramatic irony that Lawlor puts into place at this moment and at every step of the way is in part the reason why each event that punctuates Paul’s life pierces through the reader relentlessly. Paul’s relationship with Diane will determine and redefine his general philosophy around relationships, which, up until this point, he runs away from before they become too involving. Readers watch Paul mature as a woman:
Paul felt a flutter of shyness, a shy girl flutter, the flutter of not knowing if he was making a friend or something else. This was a strange experience for him, for whom all were prey, and he located the feeling in his new body. He was now having girl-feelings. Weird.
Just like readers witness him work through the difficult task of navigating a sexuality that he at times cannot control and that places him in a community he does not always identify with:
He’d sense his own nascent malleability for years, since childhood. At first, he’d assumed all gays were like him and had quietly decided not to mention that they could choose. But he had pieced together over time, without revealing too much, that he was even to the gays a freak. He was alone in this world. He regarded other gays now with mild condescension.
That Paul blends in better in the world as a woman, an identity that hardly ever comes to life in the text itself, contributes to the question of his origin story. In what reads as a fairy tale episode, Lawlor interrupts the narrative to let the readers in on a secret: who Polly is. In this tale, Paul and Polly are twins abandoned by their parents in a forest. “I am driving to a place very far away, where only women and children live,” says a woman they encounter along the way. Polly chooses to leave with the woman: “Paul will only grow up to become a man, and he will have to leave then. I will come with you and never leave,” says Polly, quick to abandon her twin. “‘Brother,’ said Polly, and she placed her left hand formally on Paul’s shoulder. He felt a strange current flow through this body. ‘You will be son and daughter to our parents now.’”
This in mind, it’s easy to conceptualize Whitman’s famous saying: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” It’s also easy for one to read this work as one would read a fairy tale, believing every detail, not questioning the characters’ actions, and taking them as fact. Despite the countless interactions Paul has with individuals who keep coming and going in and out of his life, the stability of his character, the believability of his thoughts, and the scenarios he puts himself in are sure to bring you to the edge of your seat — especially if you have a thing for gritty and uninhibited sexuality in writing.
Ultimately, Lawlor has written an intoxicatingly rousing masterpiece, which, as Eileen Myles puts it, “is restless, muscular and playful.” Lawlor gives us a glimpse into what it might have been like to struggle with issues of sexual identity in the 1990s, though the supernatural elements of their characters’ features suspend the narrative out of time, rendering it a timelessly contemporary exposé of an antihero with a heart made of fire.
His skin was electric, buzzing, humming like drugs, like fear, like New York City sidewalks, like any moment before any time he’d ever kissed anyone important.


Navigating Secrets and Capitalism: A Week in the Life of Andrea Lawlor

Philip Sorensen, Solar Trauma, Rescue Press, 2018.




“Everybody / should be throwing up all of the time,” insists Philip Sorenson’s incendiary and tender second collection Solar Trauma, a book that defies category in deference to the “uncontainableness of things.” Sorensen writes to expose classification’s errors and terminate endings: “to reject the premise that space is ever empty or divisible,” to “reject purity and elsewhereness.” Like the wails made by a handtrembling over the theremin, Solar Trauma’s musical forms and anxieties slide and swerve. Unflinchingly fretful and frequently hilarious, these poems enumerate the radial, radical horrors the body can endure and inflict: “and when I cease // . . . // I become the body / from which I believe I already act // and split and split again / a dehiscence a thing a skin // essentially a constellation of threats.” This body of concern has no limit: think The Thing meets critical theory meets parenting meets polar devastation meets the internet; think of how to let anything go: “how can we get rid of this thing can we just throw it away what happens to it when // we do.”


Selected Publications:
Moria
Organism For Poetic Research
Strange Machine
Verse Daily



Philip Sorensen, Of Embodies, Rescue Press, 2012.


Like an army of flowering stones, Philip Sorenson’s Of Embodies evolves fixed positions into organic movement and marches straight into your open heart. These poems are the body and the text; the temple and a subject of discovery—their urgency manifesting itself in vanishing memory, actively decomposing letters, and what kind of material might survive you. These poems are interested in evidence, exact specimens, and wild living inquiry. Here there are indications of the inner workings of the earth, upsets, burials, blood, membranes, mouths, and “tongues learning to penetrate a word with the body to lean in and whisper but meaning is a fleeing.” Of Embodies was the Editor’s Choice pick for Rescue Press’ 2011 Black Box Poetry Prize.


Safety Book Interview #22

Baltasar Porcel, Springs and Autumns, Trans. by John L. Getman, University of Arkansas Press, 2000.
read it at Google Books




Catalan writer Porcel, now in his mid-60s and living in Barcelona, was born and raised on Majorca. The fictional town of Orlandis, at the westernmost end of that island, serves as the setting for this maze of tales, which--for want of a more precise term--may be called a novel. The narrative focuses on the present-day Taltavull family as its members gather at the clan's ancient island villa for a Christmas celebration. No single story is told. Rather, Porcel uses the occasion to dip into various Taltavull personal histories. What the author sacrifices in plot he regains in historical richness and depth, invoking time and history, the twin themes of his book. The narrative's governing emblems are the family's ancient, rambling and none-too-comfortable home--Taltavull Hall--and the erstwhile family business: alarm clocks. The members of the younger generation are introduced, but lacking histories, their stories are little more than brief character sketches. The adults are allotted longer accounts of family, commercial and erotic life that merge seamlessly with larger but understated themes of Catalan political and military history, especially Spanish Civil War history. Porcel scrupulously avoids nostalgia and idealization, the chief pitfalls of this genre. Getman's translation, based on Porcel's Catalan and Spanish versions, is engaging and often poetic. The reader is left with a vision of a clan that is not exactly attractive, "tied as if in a nightmare to the heritage of the place, the valley, the dead weight of the past." But the Taltavulls are admirable for their tenacity--rather like some hardy, weather-worn tree that survives despite the rocky soil and hostile climate in which it is rooted. - Publishers Weekly


A family gathering on the Balearic island of Majorca to celebrate Christmas generates the reminiscences that comprise this novel. The memories range as far back as the Spanish Civil War and involve places as distant as South America and Asia. One cousin, Cristofol, who abandoned his wife for Mexico and Peru after taking the lives of two dozen people during wartime, is chagrined to find that few remember him when he returns half a lifetime later. The retired commandeer Ignasi recalls his passionate affair with the Baroness Ingeborg, wife of one of the German officers stationed on the island, while admitting that he was never curious about what happened to the woman who now stands out in his old man's mind as the most beautiful he ever knew. Family members are split in their opinion of Arcadi the priest, who zealously campaigns to halt pagan rites on the tiny nearby island of Molta MurtaDonly to confront his own grandmother in the moonlight administering the rites. As Porcel examines the age-old need to impose order upon the chaos of memory, he hits upon atavistic undercurrents familiar to us all. Following on the heels of Horses into the Night (Univ. of Arkansas, 1995), this is Porcel's second novel to appear in English. Recommended for general readers. - D Jack Shreve


This is one of two of Porcel’s novels translated into English. Like many of his other novels it is set in his home town of Andratx, Majorca, thinly disguised as Orlandis. It takes place entirely during the course of one day, a Christmas Eve. When this is, is not entirely clear but it is clearly modern times as they have colour television. It is set in Taltavull Hall, family home of the Taltavulls, who are gathered for their traditional Christmas Eve dinner. Though it is set in such a limited time and place, it does, of course, refer to events elsewhere and at other periods. Indeed, it mentions the history of the family, going back to the sixteenth century.
The family had managed to survive with its clock business. This has ceased to function during the Civil War and, after the war, had not immediately reopened, because of lack of both supplies and markets. Once they did get going again, they found they could not compete with the Swiss. However, they were able to find markets in the developing world and Joan Pere, who had been delegated to find these markets, had been very successful. He spent most of his time abroad, which really did not bother him, as he soon felt at home anywhere, particularly as far as the opposite sex was concerned.
Near to Taltavull Hall is La Paret. The five women who live there are related to the Taltavulls. However, since their father had died, they have fallen on hard times as, essentially, they have virtually no source of income. Indeed, though all were adults when he died, none of them was even engaged, let alone married. Ramon Consolat was given power of attorney and he sold off the estate piecemeal, thereby accelerating their ruin. He did eventually marry one of the sisters, Caterina. Ramon is essentially a delivery man and most Saturdays (but not all) he turns up with a basket full of food for the sisters. - read more here:




https://www.themodernnovel.org/europe/w-europe/catalonia/baltasar-porcel/springs-and-autumns/



Baltasar Porcel, Horses into the Night, University of Arkansas Press, 1995.
read it at Google Books


Originally published in 1975, Cavalls cap a la fosca was hailed by the public and critics alike as perhaps the most incisive Catalan novel since the Spanish Civil War. It was honored with four prestigious literary prizes, including the 1976 Spanish Literary Critics' Award.
Horses into the Night, while firmly set in the postmodernist "magical realism" strain, remains entertaining and accessible; the narrator's search for his roots - especially for his father - among the myths, stories, lies, and truths of his family and hometown, strikes a universal chord. As the plot becomes increasingly textured with piracy, smuggling, the Inquisition, morbid familial relationships, eroticism, and occult occurrences, it is all but impossible to resist this epic story described by El Pais as a "Mediterranean novel flooded with light and bathed in darkness."


"Three small horses in gold on a field of black" are heraldic symbols of Escolastic de Capovara, an aristocrat from the town of Andratch in northern Majorca and the master of Son Capovara?until the thoroughly reprehensible Jaume Vadell appropriates both standard and demesne. Translated into English for the first time, this winner of the 1976 Spanish Literary Critics Award is really a gathering of gruesome and gothic stories about Jaume's descendants as they gallop toward oblivion. The Majorca described by the clan's wary survivor isn't a sunny vacation spot but an overripe Mediterranean cousin of Annie Proulx's and Howard Norman's Newfoundland, filled with characters scarred both by their isolation and by the hard environment of the sea. The Vadells in particular seem prey to foreign religious influences that wash up on shore: a few fall to the depredations of Moorish pirates; others to a fatal fascination with the schismatic Pedro de Luna (Benedict XIII). Although stories of incest (and its freakish results), horrifying revenge, autos-da-fe and unhinged monomania are not for everyone, for readers with a taste for the Grand Guignol, there is an undeniable cruel elegance to Porcel's prose ("like the solitude of my husband Ferran, already an animal, ringing his bell in his room for me to come to him, sitting there in his wheelchair, a survivor in the antechamber of a death that would not come"). - Publishers Weekly


excerpt:
“Was it the spell of autumn with its luxuriant, rusty foliage, Notre Dame rising in the distance, each stone so precisely cut and self-contained, its spire outlined sharply against the bleak gray sky? I don’t know…
I always get up late, toward midday. The heating system has created a stuffy atmosphere in the apartment, which makes me drowsy. I fix some orange juice and coffee. I open the window and sip the coffee slowly, then I light a cigarette. And I invariably ask myself how I would describe the huge gargoyles perched on the cathedral I see in front of me just across the river. It’s sort of an obsession, maybe tied to the dream that plagues me. Every night the dream traps me in its exhausting and vicious underground existence that I know nothing about, but carry inside me and have to relive…where vague, unidentified threats lurk…
I think the gargoyles come from a similar world. They have animal bodies with the sleekness of birds, perverted by beastly, sardonic human grimaces. The Seine flows by, smooth, stoic, and leaden.
I usually drop by the Shakespeare and Company bookstore. It’s right beside my apartment building on Bûcherie Square. The books, posters, and other unique objects, such as balalaika or shabby postcards from the twenties, fill the decrepit bookstore to overflowing and exude a heavy darkness. The man with the goatee always nods off behind the little counter. It moves me somehow to think of the shadows of Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Hemingway haunting this place from the time when Sylvia Beach had this shop on Odéon Street. It’s as if in that remote air, in the eroded neglect floating among those piled-up shelves, an echo of their time remains. Among the corners stuffed with books – most of them used – I find a trace of peacefulness.”
http://www.visat.cat/traduccions-literatura-catalana/eng/fragments/178/2////baltasar-porcel.html


excerpt from The Enchanted Isles by Baltasar Porcel

In Koli Jean Bofane, Congo Inc.: Bismarck's Testament , Indiana University Press, 2018.


To the sound of machine gun fire and the smell of burning flesh, award-winning author In Koli Jean Bofane leads readers on a perilous, satirical journey through the civil conflict and political instability that have been the logical outcome of generations of rapacious multinational corporate activity, corrupt governance, widespread civil conflict, human rights abuses, and environmental degradation in Africa. Isookanga, a Congolese Pygmy, grows up in a small village with big dreams of becoming rich. His vision of the world is shaped by his exploits in Raging Trade, an online game where he seizes control of the world's natural resources by any means possible: high-tech weaponry, slavery, and even genocide. Isookanga leaves his sleepy village to make his fortune in the pulsating capital Kinshasa, where he joins forces with street children, warlords, and a Chinese victim of globalization in this blistering novel about capitalism, colonialism, and the world haunted by the ghosts of Bismarck and Leopold II. Told with just enough levity to make it truly heartbreaking, Congo Inc. is a searing tale about ecological, political, and economic failure.




The definitive book from DRC? It captures the many tragedies of the country, remembering the colonial legacy without making it the sole driver at the expense of the agency of today’s actors. There is a wealth of Congolese literature out there: if you want more, start with Emmanuel Dongala Sony Labou Tansi.
Why you should read this: This is by far the best book I have read this century.
When I worked in Berlin, some colleagues came from several African countries for a meeting. When asked what sights they would see with their free time, they said nothing to do with the Second World War or the Cold War. Instead they wanted to see the place where the 1884 Berlin conference took place the conference were European powers divided Africa.

The main character in Congo Inc. is Isookanga Lolango Djokisa. He is an Ekonda -- a Pygmy -- but stands out because his unknown father wasn't, and so he wound up: "a good ten centimeters taller than the tallest Ekonda". In his mid-twenties, Isookanga lives in a village deep in the Congo countryside but has grand ambitions: "I'm an internationalist who aspires to become a globalizer". Under the screen name Congo Bololo he's an avid player of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game Raging Trade -- which, with its ruthless contest to exploit natural resources, is "the recommended game for any internationalist wanting to know how to get into the business world".
       Isookanga leaves his backwoods village and ventures to the big city, the teeming DRC capital, Kinshasa. Not easily fazed, he goes with the flow when he arrives, certain that he'll find opportunity. He befriends the teenage Shasha, called 'La Jactance' -- "the Haughty One" --, a leader among the shégués, the street kids of Kinshasa. The diminutive Isookanga is about their size, but of course much older, but they take him in as one of their own -- and he proves his mettle as a negotiator when one of them is killed by the authorities and they run riot.
       Isookanga also befriends Zhang Xia, abandoned in Kinshasa by his business partner after a failed venture and now unable to return home to China. Isookanga suggests an improvement to the packaging of his water-business -- enhancing the flavor of the packets he sells, and branding them as Swiss -- and that proves reasonably successful.
       Others who feature in the story include Kiro Bizimugu, a former brutal warlord who wreaked havoc as Commander Kobra Zulu, who has been given a cushy position as CEO of the Office of Conservation of Salonga National Park as part of the pacification process; Waldermar Mirnas, a MONUSCO (United Nations Mission for the Stabilization of the Democratic Republic of Congo) officer, who regularly calls upon Shasha to service him; the reverend leading the Church of Divine Multiplication, who devises a grand Ponzi scheme (and is the person Kiro Bizimugu's wife ultimately turns to to escape the husband who had scooped her up during his marauding, massacring time); and various street kids.
       The story does not focus solely on Isookanga, but also on these other actors, including slices from their pasts and how they got to where they are now, such as Shasha's harrowing, heartbreaking escape with her brothers that led her to Kinshasa. The reach extends to Zhang Xia's wife, hoping for his return, and the Chinese authorities' quite different impression of what he has been up to.
       Among the storylines is that of Kiro Bizimugu's ambitions to exploit the natural resources of the park whose conservation he is meant to be overseeing. He dreams of annoying nature wiped out of the way:
Kiro dreamed of a Congo made peaceful by napalm, where all that needed to be done was to exploit the riches of the subsoil.
       Isookanga continues to play at Raging Trade too -- a game that appears ever-closer to real life, as Kiro sees a potential partner in the young man and Zhang Xia turns out to have a computer disc with valuable information about the mineral wealth in the countryside, waiting to be exploited .....
       The individual stories appear to have fairly limited overlap at first, but Bofane brings them together nicely in the novel's resolutions, when various characters find their pasts, and some of their recent (mis)deeds, catching up with them. Nicely paced, the stories work themselves out neatly -- and horribly: it's not exactly happy ends all around.
       Congo Inc. doesn't shy away from horrors: while Isookanga lives quite safely, even on the streets, many of those he encounters have suffered or been responsible for the unspeakable. Bofane offers more than glimpses of these: when he notes that: "Each rebel group had its own technique to mutilate a woman's genitalia" he also goes on to describe them. If present-day Kinshasa is largely a safer-seeming space -- the one shooting, early on, is almost simply an unfortunate accident -- Bofane does have two of the characters get their violent comeuppance by the end -- quite shocking turns, really, because they aren't expected in a story where most of the violence has been left behind, in time and more distant place.
       Fundamental to the novel is the idea of 'Congo Inc.', the valuable resources that the country is practically overflowing with and that, from the rubber of Belgian Congo-times to the uranium vital to building atomic bombs to the essential minerals and metals which so much modern technology depends have made Congo Inc. the: "accredited supplier of internationalism". The focus is on recent history -- roughly from the Rwandan genocide, and its destabilizing effect on the Congo on -- but Bofane repeatedly points to the foundations of this in the past, with the root cause in the imperialist carve-up of the continent (hence also the book's subtitle, Bismarck's Testament).
       The vibrancy of the country is also captured: "At least in Congo anything was possible" -- but the endless possibilities are both for good and bad .....
       Isookanga's village-elder uncle comes to warn his nephew that, back home: "Something's happening in the ecosystem, Isookanga. Parameters are in the process of changing radically", and the young future chief does return home -- though without abandoning his internationalist ambitions. The two philosophies -- one grounded in the traditional, and leery of the encroachment of even just the radio antenna installed in the village, the other looking towards integrating with the global economy and culture -- look set to continue to clash, but Bofane leaves the story open-ended enough that it's unclear which will prevail. Despite the flashes of unimaginable violence and grim experiences, there's a sense of hopefulness throughout, and also in the conclusion, as well.
       Congo Inc. is vivid in its description -- in some places arguably disturbingly so -- and gives a great sense of the city, and the country's recent history, and what the population has had to deal with. It's also well plotted, a novel that brings together various lives and stories in both realistic and unexpected ways. Bofane does skim over this and that, but there's considerable depth, and profound reflection, too.
       An impressive work of the heart of contemporary Africa, and an excellent introduction to the vast country, culture, and history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
       [Note: In his Foreword Dominic Thomas writes that: "The DRC is one of the largest and most densely populated countries in the world". The DRC is indeed huge (at over 2.3 million square kilometres the eleventh largest country in the world), and it is one the most populous (16th, worldwide), but it is most definitely not densely populated (except of course, in urban areas): at Wikipedia, for example, it only ranks 183rd of 241 countries and territories, i.e. it is, in fact, among the more sparsely populated countries in the world. Parts of Africa are, indeed, densely populated (such as the Nile Delta), but on the whole, and despite a still rapidly increasing population, it remains an astonishingly empty continent.] - M.A.Orthofer
www.complete-review.com/reviews/congo/bofaneikj.htm