Jean Paulhan, Progress in Love on the Slow Side, Trans. by Christine Moneera Laennec and Michael Syrotinski, University of Nebraska Press, 1994.
read it at Google Books

Jean Paulhan (1884–1968) is renowned in France both for his unrivaled skill as an editor and for his own subtle yet incisive writings. Paulhan directed the Nouvelle RevueFrançaise for thirty years, helping to make it into the foremost literary journal of his generation. Many of the most celebrated French writers of the period—Artaud, Bataille, Blanchot, Caillois, Camus, Giono, and Ponge, to name only a few—owe their rise to literary prominence in large part to Paulhan's rare vision, insightful criticism, and unfailing support.Although best known for his theoretical writings of the 1940s and 1950s, Paulhan established his reputation as a writer with his short fictional tales, or récits, composed during or just after World War I. Many of them have the war as their backdrop and are autobiographical in origin, evoking Paulhan's time in Madagascar, his brush with death while suffering from pneumonia, and his awkward love life. More than the subject matter, it is the precise, restrained lyricism of the prose, and Paulhan's attentiveness to the quirks and subtle twists of language, that make these stories so remarkable for their time. This book contains a selection of five of the best-known récits: Progress in Love on the Slow Side, The Severe Recovery, The Crossed Bridge, Aytre Gets Out of the Habit, and Lalie. Maurice Blanchot's tribute to Paulhan, "The Ease of Dying," is also included.
In 1945 Paulhan received the Grand Prix de Litterature and in 1951 the Grand Prix de la Ville de Paris; he was elected to the Academie Française in 1965.




This slight but remarkable volume contains five short stories written by Paulhan (1884-1968), a celebrated French critic and essayist, between 1910 and 1917; a lucid introduction by Syrotinski; and a concluding essay by the proto-deconstructionist critic Blanchot that's so heavy-handed that Syrotinski feels compelled to prick at it: ``The reader might wonder, in following Blanchot's labyrinthine path through Paulhan's thought, whether he doesn't end up burdening the recits with a kind of philosophical gravity.'' That would be a shame, for these mostly autobiographical tales are so dreamy and fragile that any extraneous weight could cause them to crumble. The title story involves a young soldier away from home and the arduous process by which he courts three French women-the title being no exaggeration. ``The Severe Recovery'' is a disorienting firsthand account of the delirium of a young man who, like his wife and mistress, shares his name with a character in the first story-leading to the confused aura projected by the tale. ``The Crossed Bridge,'' the vaguest story in this highly elliptical collection, is about a man's dreams on three consecutive nights. Without exception, Paulhan's narrative stance is reserved and observant, even to the point of distortion. His language, brilliantly translated, is painstakingly precise, with the narrators often retracing their linguistic steps in order to clarify the exact nuances of their descriptions. The result is that the things and images being described are rendered nearly inane. Paulhan, judging from these astonishing tales, was decades ahead of his time: a fully formed postmodernist writing during the overtures of modernism.  - Publishers Weekly

Jean Paulhan, U Catullus, Badlands Unlimited, 2011.


U are Catullus, a young poet who loves Lesbia and hates Cicero. Being who U are, U also enjoy drinking, going to parties, and cursing at the gods. This is the simple premise behind "U Catullus," Jean Paaulhan’s ingenious e-book. Based on the work of the scandalous Roman poet Catullus (87 B.C. - 57 B.C.), the reader is called upon to make decisions within the epic poem that lead to different storylines and outcomes. In lyrical poetic form, "U Catullus" unfolds like an ancient Roman version of TMZ, or a libertine novella for our interconnected age.

Melpomene, Bagabone, Hem ‘I Die Now, Vantage Press, 1980.




“Bagabone, Hem ‘I Die Now (1980) is perhaps the first novel that was purportedly written by a computer.
The back flap of the dust jacket states this about the book’s origins: “Can a computer write a novel? To find out, some experts in literature, linguistics, and computers at the Institute of Science and Technology, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, programed a computer, Melpomene, with English verb patterns and semantic (i.e., meaning) units drawn from twentieth-century women writers, as well as D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and some ‘angry young men’ of the 1960s. Then they added some patterns and units from Pidgin English and French, and the astounding result is Bagabone, Hem ‘I Die Now. Melpomene, which is the name of the Greek muse of tragedy, picked the title; translated from Pidgin English, it means, ‘Bagabone (a character in the novel) is dying.'”
Following its publication, Computer World published an article (“Publisher Claims Computer Composed Novel”, 25 Aug. 1980, p. 23) effectively defeating the publisher’s claim about the work’s computational origins. In the article, AI experts deem the novel to be human-written, and another source reports that there is no ‘Institute of Science and Technology’ at Jagiellonian University. Moreover, due to its mode of operation, the publisher (Vantage Press) would apparently have been paid to print the book. The copyright holder for Bagabone was a human—an Englishman named G.E. Hughes—who could not be reached by Computer World. (Intriguingly, this copy of the book is inscribed by one ‘Eric Hughes’, though this could be coincidental.)”
Publisher Vantage Press, New York, 1980
via James Ryan (xfoml)
PDF (40 MB)
Internet Archive

Sandra Huber, Assembling the Morrow: A Poetics of Sleep,  Talonbooks, 2015.                

Roque Larraquy, Comemadre, Trans. by Heather Cleary, Coffee House Press, 2018.




In the outskirts of Buenos Aires in 1907, a doctor becomes involved in a misguided experiment that investigates the threshold between life and death. One hundred years later, a celebrated artist goes to extremes in search of aesthetic transformation, turning himself into an art object. How far are we willing to go, Larraquy asks, in pursuit of transcendence? The world of Comemadre is full of vulgarity, excess, and discomfort: strange ants that form almost perfect circles, missing body parts, obsessive love affairs, and man-eating plants. Darkly funny, smart, and engrossing, here the monstrous is not alien, but the consquence of our relentless pursuit of collective and personal progress.




“I love Comemadre. But here I am, days after reading, still asking myself what kind of book it is. Is it humor? Horror? Is it about art? Science? Philosophy? One thing is certain: it is just the kind of book that you’ll want to recommend to your friends over and over again, and here I am, still doing it!” —Samanta Schweblin


“Moving from a sanatorium at the beginning of the twentieth century in which the doctors decide to use their patients as fodder for a deadly experiment, to an artist at the beginning of the twenty-first who pushes the fleshy manipulations of Chris Burden and Damien Hirst to a new extreme, Comemadre is a raucous and irreverent philosophical meditation on the relationship of the body to science and to art. Walking a line between parody and critique, this is a grotesquely funny and powerful book.” —Brian Evenson


“Comemadre is one of the wildest and most disturbing novels I’ve read. With a language that dissects the world while describing it, Roque Larraquy constructs a dark fable about the annihilation of the body, about perversions of art and science. Heather Cleary’s magnificent translation does justice to this extravagant gem—composed like a Hieronymus Bosch diptych that sets us before the monsters of unleashed reason.” —Daniel Saldaña París


“Who the devil is this Roque Larraquy? His first book seems like an artifact written with four hands—amid laughter and hidden from everyone—by Jorge Luis Borges and Witold Gombrowicz. Or maybe not Gombrowicz, but Virgilio Piñera. Or maybe not Borges, but Villiers de L’Isle-Adam adapted by Paul Valéry (did you know Valéry spent his youth digging up skulls to make calculations?). What is certain is that this truly magnificent novel exudes intelligence, humor, cynicism, cruelty. Cold passion with unsettling—and unexpectedly moving—effects.” —Ignacio Echevarría



“Larraquy spent seven years writing his first book . . . and another three passed before the appearance of his second. We don’t know how long it will take him to publish his next one, but we intuit that there will be a third and a fourth, because in what we’ve seen of his work up to now there is a discernible literary project—a project that’s difficult to define, for which terms like ‘story,’ ‘novel,’ or ‘poetry’ are insufficient.” —Maximiliano Tomas



“In spite of having all the necessary ingredients for a historical novel (the clinic, sordid and suburban; the positivist, anthropometric delusions), it’s not a historical novel; in spite of possessing, at first glance, the traits that generally mark ‘realistic fiction,’ (the cross between conceptual art, spectacle, and biopolitics; the gray areas of death, sickness and animalism as thresholds of humanity), something in its tone subjects the reality to a process of distancing treating it as a foreign body—alien—neither completely alive nor completely dead.” —Diego Peller






Larraquy’s delightfully terrifying debut tells of a twisted medical experiment and a shocking art installation a century apart. In 1907 at the Temperly Sanatorium, a few miles outside Buenos Aires, Doctor Quintana’s superiors propose a disquieting experiment in the name of science: decapitate patients without damaging their vocal cords and, in the few seconds while the severed head maintains life, ask it what it sees. Quintana, who believes “to be present, but not participate directly, is the dream of every doctor,” passively goes along with conducting the experiment; he’s more interested in the sanatorium’s head nurse, Menéndez, who rebuffs his increasingly forceful advances. One decapitated head says “I’d like some water”; another “screams for nine seconds straight.” The experiment soon gets out of hand, culminating in a violent, thoroughly unsettling event. Afterward, the novel switches and is narrated by an unnamed Argentinian artist in 2009 whose displays include a live baby with two heads. He meets Lucio Lavat, another artist who looks just like him, and the two conceive a gruesome installation. How Larraquy ties the two halves of the novel together is surprising and brilliant. Throughout, there is a focus on bodies: a patient believes “each word [she] utters is a fly leaving her mouth”; at one point, the artist thinks, “people with long fingers touch things as if they were leaving a trail of slime on them”; and the book’s title refers to a plant that produces flesh-eating larvae. Shuttling between B-movie horror and exceedingly dark comedy, the novel is somehow both genuinely scary and genuinely funny, sometimes on the same page—a wickedly entertaining ride. - Publishers Weekly





“The prose is distilled but rich—like dark chocolate.” —Chicago Tribune“Comemadre creates a full circle of the grotesqueries humans inflict upon one another in pursuit of immortality. . . . Read Larraquy to experience a strange waking dream from which there is no escape.” —Arkansas International
“. . . [I]t’s a brief novel, but its impact is massive.” —Vol. 1 Brooklyn


“In this dark, dense, surprisingly short debut novel by the Argentinian author, we’re confronted with enough grotesqueries to fill a couple Terry Gilliam films and, more importantly, with the idea that the only real monsters are those that are formed out of our own ambition.” —The Millions

“. . . a deeply unnerving and morbidly fascinating novel . . .” —Booklist

“Larraquy ventures into the gothic here, only to push beyond it into an even more disquieting realm of obsession, transformation, and the monstrous unknown.”—Words without Borders

“Funny, grotesque and smart.” —Brazo’s Bookstore

“Like a beloved B movie, this is the campy horror show all my fellow sickos have been waiting for.”—Keaton Patterson


“Larraquy has written a perfect novel: spare, urgent, funny, original, and infused with wonderfully subtle grace. I neglected my domestic duties to devour it.” —Elisa Albert


“Comemadre is a sensory experience: images repeat, ‘confession’ has a smell, and obsession feels palpable. The two narrative threads within this wildly strange and perversely humorous novel map the expansive life of the mind, the drive to make a mark on history, and the impact of transgressions in art and science. If a Dalí painting could speak, it would tell us this violently charming tale of ants marching in perfect circles and bodies pushed beyond the limits of the possible.” —Elizabeth Willis

“I’m not entirely sure what the fuck just happened, but, whatever you might say about Roque Larraquy’s Comemadre, you sure as hell will have something to say. A dizzying, macabre, yet ultimately deliriously delicious tale of medical testing, decapitations, botanically-born flesh-eating larvae, unrequited love, deformities, and extreme art, Comemadre won’t soon be easily forgotten (if ever it is). Larraquy, an Argentinean screenwriter who has also penned two books (Comemadre being the first translated into English), is whirlwindishly creative and evidently possessed of a prodigious, if darkly tinged, imagination.
Two distinct narratives, ultimately linked yet set 102 years apart, combine to grotesque and lasting effect. Larraquy writes fantastically and, however unlikely it may seem given its obsessive subjects, with considerable humor. The same unsettling, disquieting feeling one might be left with after engaging, say, Georges Bataille’s The Story of the Eye or fellow Argentinean author Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream is present in spades. Comemadre never flinches, however much its readers inevitably must. Comemadre lures, bedevils, and ultimately enamors—distending reality (and decency) in the process. Feral fiction at its finest, Larraquy’s Comemadre is beach reading if you inexplicably find yourself marooned with Piggy, Jack, Ralph, and the rest of Golding’s deserted island boys.” —Jeremy Garber




Roque Larraquy’s Comemadre is a short novel about heads and about bodies. It explores the fragile space between life and death, unveiling the alienation inherent in both. The throbbing pulse of the book, which ties together its many disparate and overlapping narratives, is a confrontation with the ways that self-realization can also lead to violence and the objectification of others.
The book is split into two primary narratives. The first takes place in Buenos Aires, 1907, and focuses on Doctor Quintana and his associates at the Temperley Sanatorium. Quintana is a character of considerable nuance, difficult to classify, in equal parts admirable and horrifying — a truly human portrait of a complicated individual. The Sanatorium’s owner and founder, Mr. Allomby, is interested in the notion that a head, once severed from the body, can survive for up to nine seconds. He tasks Quintana and the others with the seemingly impossible job of capturing these moments between life and death and interrogating them. Bypassing any semblance of medical ethics, they engage in a series of depraved experiments in search of answers and personal achievement. They focus on beheadings and attempt to extract from these severed heads nine second prophecies into the afterlife.
The bioethical questions in the story reveal the book’s fascination with locating the seed of individual human cruelty — what degree of collateral harm a person is willing to allow. Early in the novel Quintana addresses his medical superior about the moral implications of the experiment, but even as he does so he feels weak and worries about his position:

I’ve just told him that I think it might be necessary to ‘review — for lack of a better term — ethical aspect of the experiment, in the hope that . . . ’ and I feel an urgent need to erase my mouth, grab a scalpel and cut myself a new one, and then start over.

Their conversation continues and the superior responds by celebrating Quintana’s moral inclinations, even as he does nothing to practically address the concern:

“Your colleagues, Quintana . . . Your colleagues . . . None of them came to discuss this with me. They must be wearing out their rosaries right now, wondering whether they’re going to hell or what. You’re different. Trustworthy.”
“Thank you.”
“This business of speculating with the lives of cancer cases is pretty distasteful, wouldn’t you say? I agree. You need mettle, yes, but you can’t rub out the basic emotions that make us men, make us human. When we cut off that first head, that’s when we’ll see who’s who. The one with the steady hand, the one who feels no pity for the patient, that’s who we’ll need to fire. God only knows what he’s capable of.”

As suggested by this dialogue, the novel is not concerned with excoriating particular bad actions, and it would cheapen the text to read it as a mere dystopian warning against particular medical experimentation. The doctors’ cavalier attitude toward their patients’ potential suffering and their willingness to experiment with human bodies illustrates Larraquy’s broader conviction that our capacity for violence is more readily flexible than we like to believe.
As the doctors carry out these experiments, they are competing for position within the Sanatorium’s hierarchy. But they are also contending for the affections of head nurse Menéndez. The pursuit of Menéndez in many ways usurps the more fantastic elements in this first section of the book. Her fate becomes immediate and crucial to the reader. Larraquy achieves this effect by granting access to the grandiose internal narrative of Quintana and his maddening desire for Menéndez. Her story, much like the novel itself, borrows from different genres depending on the particular situation. At times it reads like a romance and, at other times, like a thriller. In the end, her fate is little different from that of the patients in the Sanatorium. Both she and the patients are made objects of the doctors’ insatiable curiosity, and everyone suffers for it.
The novel then jumps forward one hundred years. This second portion is almost entirely composed of a letter written by an Argentinian artist to an academic who has taken an interest in his work. The artist’s work is unveiled slowly and considerately through the story of his childhood and development as a prodigy. In a series of artistic concessions, the artist engages in extreme manipulation and transformation of his body. Our artist encounters his doppelganger, who so happens to also be an artist, and the two begin working together. The first modification our artist makes is to cut off his finger and hang it as part of their first joint exhibit. Modifications continue and become central to their work, eventually leading the artist to undergo surgery that will erase any slight differences between his face and the face of his look-alike. Many of the same themes are picked up anew in this second section: a focus on the body, the pursuit of sexual acceptance, and the ways that an unerring pursuit of a thing can, in fact, pervert the thing it pursues. Despite differing significantly in plot, the two sections of the novel are brought loosely together at the end, looping the mirrored themes through one another and leaving the reader with something akin to resolution.
Maintaining separate storylines throughout the first and second half of the novel is a unique facet of the text. Despite the scattered details and shared histories that eventually links the two narratives, there is very little in the plot that directly connects them, and their linkage relies on a thematic ascent. The polyphonic quality that results from the narratives sharing the same title enhances the sense of programmed disorder Comemadre naturally induces. The book is unsettling in its depiction of severed bodies, merciless characters, and ominous dreamscapes. Creating this sense of disturbance seems to be a part of Larraquy’s artistic intent. By unmooring the reader, he creates a reading experience that allows for shock in the face of violence, an increasingly difficult task for an artist. Juxtaposing two disparate stories allows the form to match the disconcerting content.
Comemadre is Larraquy’s second novel, but his first to be translated into English. It’s a complicated text, one that defies easy categorization, in a large part due to its wordplay. Heather Cleary (who has translated César Rendueles, Sergio Chejfec, and a selection of Oliverio Girondo) does a glorious job at capturing the nuance and the comedy of Larraquy’s language. For example,

I stand so my feet are aligned with hers. Must I approach her now, or do I have some time to spare? Time it is. One of my shoelaces extends across the room, laces itself through her shoe, inches up her uniform, wraps itself around each of her buttons, and ties itself in a delicate bow at her neck. If I gave a good kick, those buttons would go flying.

As it is in this scene, the absurd is planted and buried throughout Comemadre, creating a sense of constant doubt and uncertainty. The writing is sparse and evocative, even as it takes considerable risks. The effect accomplishes a great deal in short spaces.
By tempering even the darkest of moments of the story with grand metaphors, scathing interiority, and the comically absurd, Larraquy pulls the rug out from under the reader’s despair, humanizing the seemingly inhuman cruelty of its characters. It’s essential that the story feels empathetic and relatable if Larraquy is to effectively raise questions of cruelty, alienation, and guilt. The comedy of the text allows the reader to form a certain kinship with the characters, while their increasing cruelty forces the reader to reckon with the centrality of violence in the lives of these deeply human characters.
Comemadre is a story about the limits of science and discovery, about the purpose and process of art, about the dangers of the unchecked male ego, and much more. Beneath each of these distinct intentions, though, the book is not fundamentally theoretical, but relational. Larraquy imagines a complicated world of webbed human bonds that span generations. Each of these bonds is pulling on another, creating unique tension, unique threats, and unique possibilities. Larraquy’s scientists and artists attempt to uncover their true natures on both personal and existential fronts. In the process, their desire to be validated and accepted by others becomes all-encompassing. As these relationships carry the narrative and take center stage, it becomes apparent that guilt and desire can easily transform into violence once acted upon. The profound tragedy suggested by Comemadre is that in the absence of extended validation, that validation is too often stolen by force. At the book’s fundamentally relational foundation, Larraquy demonstrates that the tenderness which results from shared vulnerability is often undergirded by a violence springing from the same source. - Stephen Mortland
www.full-stop.net/2018/07/17/reviews/stephen-mortland/comemadre-roque-larraquy/




The year is 1907 and a medical director at a clinic in Temperley, Argentina — a province of Buenos Aires — presents a French study to his colleagues. The proposition of the study in short: the human head remains conscious with full use of its faculties for nine seconds after decapitation. The tradition of an executioner holding the head aloft after chopping it off is only in part for the audience. It is also for the decapitated head — providing it the final spectacle of the cheering crowd.
This French study — with no facts or references, as one colleague points out — is the occasion for Argentine writer Roque Larraquy’s Comemadre. Translated by Heather Cleary, this is Larraquy’s debut novel in English and it arrives like a shockwave. It has already earned the wonder and admiration of contemporary horror stars like Brian Evenson and Samanta Schweblin. Schweblin writes, “Here I am, days after reading it, still asking myself what kind of book it is. Is it humor? Horror? Is it about art? Science? Philosophy? One thing is certain: it is just the kind of book that you’ll want to recommend to your friends over and over again.”
The nearly indescribable approach is part of the fun of Comemadre, especially given the confidence and poise of its delivery. “This is what I propose,” the medical director says to the room. “We select a group of terminally ill patients and sever their heads without damaging their vocal apparatus […] We then ask the heads to tell us what they observe.” In the perspective of despicable Doctor Quintana, we carry out this absurd and horrifying experiment.
While the characters in Comemadre sometimes pause to hesitate over the ethics of persuading their patients to consent to a life-ending experiment, they all tend to err on the side of science, or at least improving their own alpha standings in the sanatorium. Each man in this story is also smitten with Nurse Menéndez; in the competition to see who can secure the most volunteers, the competitors care less about the professional bonus than the opportunity to impress their crush. “We’ll go out to dinner once a week. And to the opera,” Quintana says to Menéndez in one of the sections that resembles a scrappy love letter. “When no one’s around, I’ll nibble your backside. I’ll give you a stole to cover your neck, and you’ll remove it only for me.”
But the desperate and sweaty-palmed pursuit of Menéndez acts as more of a fuel than a distraction for their mission, and incredibly, the experiment works. One decapitated head says, “Welcome,” and another “Just like I dreamed.” The heads say, “He doesn’t love me,” “Children last,” and “No eyes or nose, but a mouth.” Not all of the chopped heads speak, but most of them do. Each time you think the experiment has reached a feasible end, it continues. Before long, the doctors feel that nine seconds is too short for proper analysis. Quintana reveals his new vision to his colleagues: “Multiple devices, in a circle. Donors looking at one another. The guillotines activating sequentially, every nine seconds. Each head picking up where the last one left off to make a full sentence, a paragraph […] A string of words worth the expense and efforts of this team.”
To startling effect, this already-short novel reaches a surreal and sudden end when it abruptly splits, launching us to Buenos Aires in 2009 into a new story about the moral and bodily limits of the contemporary art world. The two sections are connected by, among other things, Quintana’s great grandson Sebastian. Sebastian has inherited a variety of his great grandfather’s possessions, including notes and manuscripts and vials of the black powder of the title plant. This plant’s sap produces anomalous microscopic animal larvae that can make a body digest itself. As it’s explained in the book, the Spanish name for the plant died out in Patagonia years ago, but it lives on in England as motherseeker or mothersicken. In the sanatorium in 1907, Quintana used it to successfully address the problem of the pile of bodies generated by the experiment. Quintana’s great grandson uses it again, in a way that again goes beyond what we once thought feasible. Comemadre shocks on each page, and it’s also very funny. It is absurd and straight-faced and frighteningly self-assured.
The characters in Comemadre can be a lot to stomach; the doctors are xenophobic misogynists who talk of eugenics. The artists are self-saboteurs and pain-seekers. They are almost all egomaniacs. But in pursuit of their madness and defense of their image, these characters tend to end up under the knife themselves. In the first section, one researcher insists very quickly on participating in the experiment; they accidentally bobble his head post-decapitation, muting his final speech. In the second, two artists can’t agree on which should get facial reconstructive surgery so they look exactly the same. They finally agree what’s most fair is to choose a third face to imitate, and both have their noses readjusted and skulls shaved.
Part of the horrifying joy of this novel is how safely you can rest in the hands of a maniac as the narrative world is built and burned down around you. In a scene in the first story, we encounter Quintana persuading a patient to consent to the life-ending experiment. The man is of Italian descent and Quintana explains that Mother Nature is wise and it had endowed southern Italians with high levels of potassium. Unfortunately, he says, the potassium affects the chemical structure of the serum (a placebo) they had used to try to fight the patient’s cancer. Quintana is clear and confident, and the patient agrees to the experiment. “The patient doesn’t understand,” Quintana says, “but it’s enough for him that I do.” No reader would be able to know where this story is going. But it’s enough that Larraquy does. - Nathan Scott McNamara
https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/horrifying-joy-roque-larraquys-comemadre/


Let’s begin with death. “Let’s say that in the course of all human experience, death is pure conjecture: it is, as such, not an experience. And all that which is not an experience is useless to mankind.” The speaker here is Ledesma, one of a cadre of lovelorn, thoroughly chauvinistic doctors up to no good at a sanatorium just outside Buenos Aires. The year is 1907 and the hospital’s director, through a preposterous ratcheting of macho brinksmanship, has inveigled his staff into carrying out a radical procedure to plumb the afterlife. Volunteers lured by the promise of a miracle cure for their inoperable cancers are sweet-talked into donating their bodies to science, then promptly beheaded under observation. In the flickering seconds of brain activity remaining, the heads are asked to report on the other side. A few of their enigmatic responses are worth repeating: “Children last,” “Just like I dreamed,” and the puzzling declaration “There are people who don’t exist.” Unsatisfied with these teasers, our narrator Dr. Quintana recommends a rapid sequence of decapitations, so a dozen heads will speak in turn, together voicing an eloquent stanza or a “string of words worth the expense.” Then the staff have an asado, quaff wine, and go ice skating.
And that’s only a morsel from the first half of Argentine writer Roque Larraquy’s slim novel Comemadre, now available in an English translation by Heather Cleary. The second half is, joltingly, set in 2009 and concerns the reminiscences of a world-famous nine-fingered contemporary artist (the missing finger is part of an installation, of course). He takes us painfully through his catalogue raisonné, starting with a childhood as an obese prodigy, moving on to a lusty mid career, and culminating in a cretinous, if not spectacular, act of vanity (hint: it involves surgery and carnivorous larvae.) “If the world shames me, if even the most vulgar creatures look good next to me, it’s without my consent,” he says.
The two stories eventually dovetail, as the artist, in search of evermore uncouth subject matter, breeches the legacy of Quintana’s sanatorium—but in getting there we’re treated to a pair of surreal gothic tales of science and art, each reaching their convergent point of annihilation. Grotesque, outrageous, and insanely funny, the novel has almost no equal in literature; all that cavorts into mind are chronicles of excess, like Bataille’s Story of the Eye or Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden.
Unholy itself, and pointedly about the subject of unholiness, Comemadre is the kind of humanistic text that awakens one’s “inner primate,” an atavism much discussed by the characters. It’s a perverse comfort in the long night of the soul, a horror in the light of the day, and it might even jolt a resigned reader into reappraising some of the things that make literature worthwhile, even if you wind up losing your head in the bargain. - J.W. McCormack
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/roque-larraquys-comemadre/

The title of the deeply unsettling and beautiful new book from Coffee House Press names a carnivorous plant, the comemadre, that produces an organism that devours its own mother: “a plant with acicular leaves whose sap produces (in a leap between taxonomic kingdom that warrants further study) microscopic animal larvae. These larvae devour the plant, leaving only tiny particles behind: the remains then spread to take root in the soil, and the process begins again.” With the constant presence of this flesh-eating, matricidal plant, Comemadre explores the extent of corporal manipulation to which some people will go in the search for transcendence.
Written by Argentine author Roque Larraquy and brilliantly translated by Heather Cleary, this novel is composed of two loosely-connected stories that explore scientific and artistic modes of dissecting the body in the hopes of learning about something that exists beyond reality. In the first half, a group of doctors at a sanatorium on the outskirts of Buenos Aires in the beginning of the twentieth century learn that an individual continues to be conscious for nine seconds after his or her head has been severed from the body. With this in mind, they set up an elaborate experiment meant to induce the patients—or victims—to articulate their experience in those nine seconds. The second half takes us nearly a decade into the twenty-first century, introducing the reader to an artist and his double who, in the name of art, destroy bodies by severing fingers, surgically transfiguring themselves into another man, and introducing the comemadre to a man’s leg. While the two halves more or less read as separate stories, they are connected by themes of the body, sexual desire, and knowledge, tiny details or imagery that reappear, such as little metal frogs, and family connections. As a whole, this is a meticulous and startling exploration of the male body and monstrosity.
While the novel does provide a glimpse into the two historical contexts, signaling the role of the medical institution in early twentieth-century Argentina and depicting the twenty-first century middle class, this is a novel about the corpus. The narrative explores masculinity, male desire, and sexuality while also raising questions about the body as a commodity and the connection between body and identity. For example, ethical dilemmas are raised in the preparations for the experiment but are solved by the separation of body and self, as the doctors argue: “As far as I’m concerned, once the blade does its work, Juan-or-Luis Pérez is no more and what we have is a head, with functions limited to those of a head.” Paralleling such discussions, however, various animals creep and crawl across the pages as a constant reminder of the potential for the perfection of form and to mark that the text is operating within a liminal space:

I look out the window: there are the ants, marching around their crack in a perfect circle. They are the animal reality nearest to me (I could go down there and smudge out that circle with my foot), along with the flies in Sylvia’s face, Papini’s apes, the Cartesian duck, and the hypothetical amphibian lurking inside Menéndez.

The setting of the sanatorium, the animal imagery, and the heads severed in the name of science, suggest that this text is operating in a space on the fringe of society, and even of humanity.
While the first half of the book is stronger in its narrative cohesion and effect, the second half excels in its experimentation as perspectives, style, and form shift quite fluidly while also creating subtle bridges to the first half. Relics and traces of the past continuously show up throughout the text, effectively conflating and manipulating time. Severed heads, photographs of hands, metal frogs, scars, notebooks, and the act of writing are prominent throughout the novel. At the same time, however, the book is haunted by a plant that devours evidence, that erases that intersection of time. The language, which Cleary does a remarkable job transforming into English, draws the reader into the story, making him or her complicit in the horror through his or her spectatorship. The consumption of this novel is quick, but the text will inevitably continue to haunt its reader. - Sarah Booker
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2018/07/09/whats-new-in-translation-july-2018/

There is a plant “whose sap produces […] microscopic animal larvae” that can consume rats “from the inside out.” It can only be found on “Thompson Island, a small landmass in Tierra Del Fuego,” within Argentinian screenwriter Roque Larraquy’s debut novel Comemadre—the name of this plant of spontaneous generation. Translated in the novel as “motherseeker or mothersicken,” this fictitious plant and its larvae symbolize the dual powers of violence to create and destroy. First as crime, then as art. It is an unmistakably self-conscious symbol for an unrepentantly self-conscious novel, going so far as to have the artist-narrator of the second part dissecting a biographer’s write-up of him and his legacy. Thankfully this consciousness doesn’t eat the novel from the inside out. However, the primary issue of the novel is precisely the necessarily maximalist philosophy this consciousness requires for its slim 129 pages. By the time the comemadre plant has been introduced on page 74, it becomes just another symbol in a long chain of symbols as opposed to the centralizing (and titular) symbol it intends to be.
The comemadre is even introduced as “a botanical digression.” A digression from what, you may wonder? By this point, the initial narrator, Quintana, a doctor at Temperly Sanatorium in 1907 Buenos Aires, has already dragged the reader through a minefield of concepts. First, he ogles the head nurse, Menendez, who, he says, “fits entirely into the space of those words.” Her existence is reduced to the textual and external. Menendez, instead of being pregnant with meaning, becomes a pregnant pause, the ellipses of her identity-concealing occupation. Then a coworker and rival for Menendez’s attention, Papini, tells a layered joke about a “‘fellow [killing] his wife because she wouldn’t tell him what she was doing on the bidet’” in order to explain phrenology. This is followed by a demonstration by the head doctor:

Next to [the duck] is a wooden box of average size. Its lid, which opens down the middle, has a large, round aperture at its center, bordered by the word ergo. Under the lid is a blade that shoots out horizontally with the speed and force of a crossbow. On the sides of the box, next to the reliefs of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, are the words cogito and sum, respectively.

The head doctor decapitates the duck, its head “[remaining] on the ergo,” while “it looks at us. Or thinks the thoughts of a duck.” This demonstration is followed by a report from an eighteenth-century doctor who recorded a similar event in humans at the guillotine. It’s at this point, fourteen pages in, that we arrive at the guiding story of Comemadre: Can the doctors of Temperley Sanatorium convince patients to be guillotined and then get them to talk about the afterlife? In other words, unlike these preceding moments of textual and external understanding, can the doctors transcend exteriority?
Probably not, as several images later (including a fake serum, tin frogs, and circling ants) Quintana’s story concludes with his visceral and violent act of propagation upon Menendez; Quintana, in pursuit of transcendence, makes a mother of her, becoming the motherseeker eating her from the inside out. The savagery of this (pro)creative act is reduced in the second part, taking place in 2009. Here, all that remains of Quintana is his journal, which becomes the inspiration for a final art piece for the artist-narrator and his partner, Quintana’s great-grandson. To be frank, the problem this poses is too great for the novel to overcome: the holistic feeling of Quintana’s story, as troubled as it is by abundance, is broken apart in the section of the novel that reads like an extended afterword. Over-comprehensive is the word. There is too much weighing on Quintana’s story to recontextualize and revitalize it effectively. On its own, in fact, Quintana’s story would have been complicatedly interesting. It resembles Ernesto Sabato’s 1948 Argentinean classic The Tunnel, another story of obsession and the possibility of transcendence. A refreshing, Modernist turn.
As it is, however, Comemadre is not a bad debut in the slightest. Roque Larraquy is a strong monologist. One of the most memorable moments being the previously mentioned explanation of phrenological characters via a man’s curiosity about what his wife does with a bidet. The second part, insomuch as it is an extended monologue, hits the right notes for a narrator-artist with such memorable lines as “I think, no one likes a child prodigy in a Dior vest.” And while his characters often border on tropes—Doctor Papini is a familiar figure as the big idea, all bravado comic relief—there does remain an air of mystery about Quintana’s motives. At times indifferent as Mersault in Albert Camus’ The Stranger, at times as technically cruel as the Nazi doctor Mengele. A concentration camp survivor once said that “I have never accepted that Mengele believed he was doing serious medical work […] He was exercising power.” This would be a fitting description of Quintana. Strikingly, Josef Mengele fled to Buenos Aires after World War II.
And as for the translation by Heather Cleary, it is hard to imagine Comemadre functioning as effectively as it does without her. Much like her work on Sergio Chejfec’s The Dark, she brings clarity to writing that is dense and overflowing. While these two projects are markedly different—Chejfec’s writing is mazy, Larraquy’s is layered—they both require a translator that can parse their complications. What rough edges exist in this novel are inherent to the novel. Quintana, observing the doctors of the Sanatorium applauding their American benefactor for proposing to head nurse Menendez, notes that she is “condensed, made material; she adopts her decisive form.” This would be an accurate description of Cleary’s contribution to the novel as well.
At the end of the description of the guillotine box for the Cartesian duck it follows: “the phrase and figures clearly bear allegorical weight, which diminishes the charm of the whole.” A more fully formed reflection on Comemadre doesn’t exist. Just as the comemadre larvae spontaneously generate in the plant’s sap, symbols seem to spontaneously generate in the leaves of the book. The larvae themselves are stored in a black powder that is described by the artist-narrator of the second part as having “an irregular texture.”Comemadre has an irregular texture. It wants to mean too much, so much that it inserts addendums to inform you of its intent. Perhaps Archibald Macleish’s final words in “Ars Poetica” are overstated. But when I read almost wonderful novels like this one I’m still reminded of them: “A poem should not mean/but be.” - Justin Goodman
www.cleavermagazine.com/comemadre-a-novel-by-roque-larraquy-reviewed-by-justin-goodman/




Comemadre, according to one of the narrators of Argentine Roque Larraquy’s short, eponymous novel, is “a plant with acicular leaves whose sap produces (in a leap between taxonomic kingdoms that warrants further study) microscopic larvae. These larvae devour the plant, leaving only tiny particles behind; the remains then spread to take root in the soil, and the process begins again.” The only remaining samples of comemadre belong to British gangsters who use it to dispose of evidence, much the way Larraquy himself seems to have done, narratively speaking, with his invented plant. In spite of its titular prominence, comemadre appears only fleetingly in the novel, as if it had been consumed by the larvae of other plot devices, and yet its metaphorical sap is everywhere. Comemadre is a book about liminality, the spaces and connective tissues between things, and the transformations that take place in transit from one world to another, whether they are the taxonomic kingdoms of art and science, or life and death.
Comemadre is divided into two parts. The first takes place in 1907, at a sanatorium in Temperley, Argentina. The narrator is one Doctor Quintana, a physician at quack clinic offering a miracle cancer cure that reels in terminal patients who are then cajoled into participating in a grandiose, metempsychotic research experiment: to learn what awaits us after death. Led by their boss, Quintana and the rest of the clinic staff launch a “scientific” experiment under the hypothesis that, since the brain remains active for several seconds after decapitation, decapitated people will have a slim margin during which they can report on what they see. One of the doctors predicts that the “results will be more like poetry than prose… A fortune-teller’s opacity: ethereal nouns, verbs with no easily identifiable subjects.” When Quintana and his colleagues at last get down to guillotining their patients, their experiment unravels, as does Quintana’s authority over the story he’s telling, which itself seems to become a report from a different world.
The second part of Comemadre is set in Buenos Aires, in 2009. The narrator is an obese gay artist who is responding to a dissertation about his life and work by a scholar at Yale. His novelistic annotation tells the story of his sentimental education from lonely child genius to art-world phenom after he meets a doppelgänger who imitates him and becomes his collaborator. Like the Temperley doctors, he uses the human body—his own, however, in his case—to test the boundaries of human experience. And through a stranger former lover, his story ends up folding backs into Quintana’s a century later.
Comemadre is as weird as it sounds, but way funnier than it sounds. It is absurdist theater with an ache for transcendence. Stubbornly oblique and intricately disjunctive (the two parts’ stories’ ends feel fittingly decapitated), the novel reads like fragments from some great beyond, which made me curious not just about the gaps the reader must fill in, but Larraquy’s process of creating them. We emailed during several weeks.
—Aaron Shulman


read the interview with the author here

E. F. Granell, The Novel of the Tupinamba Indian, Trans. by David Coulter, City Lights Publishers, 2018.
excerpt






Picaresque novel of the Spanish Civil War written by one of the most important post-WWII members of the Surrealist Movement.
Written by Galician surrealist artist and revolutionary E.F. Granell, The Novel of the Tupinamba Indian is a picaresque, Cervantes-influenced allegory of the Spanish Civil War. Set against a cruel landscape peopled by generals, priests, conquistadors, poets, witches, and nuns, Tupinamba Indian embodies Granell's wartime experiences while transforming them through his lush and incendiary surrealist imagination.

"E. F. Granell's The Novel of the Tupinamba Indian, often cited as the most crucial surrealist novel of the Spanish Civil War, is brought to its fullest hallucinatory powers in this exquisite translation by David Coulter. In an ever-shifting world populated by nameless, iconic stock figures—the Priest, the Conquistador, the Bishop, the General, the Grand Turk—the Tupinamba Indian (whose head, slashed off by a conquistador, remains detachable/attachable in a brilliant metaphor for colonialism) wanders, stumbles, and thrives in a war landscape where time and space morph. At once horrific and humorous, the book is gifted by Granell's light touch and dry wit, his natural facility for an unstraining surrealism, unlike any other. A war novel, a political allegory not only of the late '30s but also our current political moment, and prefaced by the brilliant Benjamin Péret (who claims that in Granell's voyage 'chance replaces the compass'), The Novel of the Tupinamba Indian arrives in English, for the first time, and is, most importantly, an absolute delight to read."—Gillian Conoley

"Eugenio Granell's The Novel of the Tupinamba Indian exists not unlike an arcane planetary body floating outside the dictation of an over-arching solar gravitas, thereby invoking verbal hallucination via clairaudient spontaneity. Singed by the disruption and scandal that fuels conflict, Granell's Tupinamba Indian magnificently registers the author's experience with the didactic inferno of war and his ability to imaginatively ascend above it. We, in the English-speaking world are now showered with Granell's authentic verbal grace so artfully rendered from the Spanish original by the lingual respiration of David Coulter."—Will Alexander


"A man endures a brutal civil war in Spain that turns his life upside down. A former violinist, become journalist and combatant, suffers defeat and exile. Escaping into France, he finds his way to the Americas, settling for a time in Puerto Rico. There, an exceptional sense of humor filters through his war experience, fleecing expectations and convictions, and freeing him to levitate this personal and collective history into a madcap romp through a violated landscape. Where tragedy emerges with the Fascist victory, prologue to World War Two, laughter curdles its edges then burns it up. Where the sentimental gathers tears, magic takes over. With a twist of the wrist this water turns red; a delicious bloody drink to spice an afternoon game. No group is sacrosanct, no one beyond reproach, priests, intellectuals, and leader (aka Franco, our 'tiny Grand Turk'), included. The 'man,' our author, of course, is Eugenio F. Granell, acclaimed surrealist artist and writer. Now his dark, funny, penetrating expose of what the civil war meant, and what other like-wars can mean, comes to us in a fine English translation."—Allan Graubard,

"This extraordinary novel by the last Spanish surrealist is finally available in English, in David Coulter's dazzling translation. Literally inverting the colonial gaze, the beheaded-re-headed Tupinamba Indian has a 360 view of the savageries of western civilization. While the main focus of Granell's parodic travelogue is on Spain's fascism and the brutality of the Civil War, no '-ism' escapes his critique, certainly not Soviet-style communism, and not even surrealism itself. A brilliant, bloody carnivalesque, this novel is most outrageously funny when the history it reflects is at its most devastatingly tragic. Translations into American English often defang the original's sarcasm or dull its critical edge. But David Coulter's translation renders powerfully both the novel's kaleidoscopic multiple perspectives and its deliciously caustic notes."—Chana Kronfeld

"One of the finest of all novels written by surrealists."—Michael Richardson,








Artist, musician, socialist, veteran of the Spanish Civil War, writer, and professor, Eugenio F. Granell (1912-2001) was one of the leading figures of the post-World War II international surrealist movement. He formed close friendships with such figures as Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Wifredo Lam, Benjamin Péret, Toyen, and the revolutionary writer Victor Serge. Upon the defeat of the Republican government in 1939, Granell was exiled from Spain for 46 years, living in the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Puerto Rico and New York City where he resided from 1957-1985. Beginning with his participation in the exhibition Surrealism in 1947 (Galerie Maeght, Paris), curated by Duchamp and Breton, Granell participated in every exhibition mounted by the Paris group. He is the author of two novels, short stories, and the poetic treatise Isla Cofre Mítico, among others. Returning to Spain in 1986 Granell exhibited throughout Spain, Portugal, and Europe. In 1995 the Fundación Granell was established in Santiago de Compostela, dedicated to the study of surrealism, mounting exhibitions and performances as well as providing library and archives for research.

Armonía Somers, The Naked Woman, Trans. by Kit Maude, The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2018.


A groundbreaking feminist classic from 1950s Uruguay, The Naked Woman was met with scandal and outrage due to its erotic content, cynicism, and stylistic ingenuity. The novel follows Rebeca Linke's ardent, ultimately tragic, attempt to free herself from a hostile society. Juxtaposing fantastic imagery and brutal depictions of violence, Somers will resonate with readers of Clarice Lispector, Angela Carter, and Djuna Barnes.







The first English-translated work of the late Somers (1914–1994) is a momentous allegorical tale of power and lust from 1950 that remains relevant in 2018. On her 30th birthday, the sullen Rebeca Linke leaves her home, hops on a train, and travels to a cottage deep within the wilderness, where she strips nude and tries to cut off her own head. Surviving this self-inflicted attack, she reattaches her cranium, sheds her “conventional consciousness,” and wanders the nearby fields and forests. Cut by tree branches while moving through the forest, Rebeca’s nude form inspires a dangerous lust in the men who catch glimpses of it. Rebeca passes through a secluded house in the woods, and her presence arouses the woodsman inside—who, after she leaves, rapes his wife. Later, a pair of farmers flee when they spy her and spread word of her existence through a local village. Soon, the village men form a mob, determined to find the naked woman skirting the trees, and a misogynistic frenzy of violence and sexual envy erupts. This short yet undeniably powerful take on the viciousness of the male ego exposes the soft underbelly of “civil society,” showing that just beneath the surface is man’s base animal nature. Somers’s novel is a surreal, gripping experience. - Publishers Weekly


One woman’s feminist awakening leads a village to ruin.

Nearly 70 years after it was published, Somers’ haunting and timeless novella has been translated into English for the first time. Somers, a Uruguayan feminist who died in 1994, recounts one woman’s transgressive journey toward autonomy. On her 30th birthday, a bored Rebeca Linke finds herself longing for a remarkable thing that has yet to (and may never) happen. Under cover of darkness, she travels to her country cottage, withdraws from the world, and casts away all societal responsibilities. Beneath the moonlight, in a dreamlike state, Linke decapitates herself—symbolically, of course—and re-enters the world naked and free. Slipping into bedrooms and appearing in fields, her ghostly, erotic presence—now calling herself Eve—quickly drives the village insane. Sick with sexual desire and lost in their misogyny, the men simultaneously dream of her and dream of killing her. It’s not only the men who fear what Eve will do to their orderly yet fragile existences; the women resent her nudity and wonder if she’ll undo the normalcy they enjoy. Somers’ similes are as gorgeous as they are effective: “But now the man’s desire had swelled like a river after the rainy season” and “he hacked away at her as if she were a tree trunk.” Imbued with magical realism, mysticism, and biblical themes, Somers’ novella poses questions still relevant today: “Had she, a naked, destitute woman, really caused all this madness? Or was she was being used as an excuse for something already lurking inside of them?” The larger truth is as naked as the woman haunting the countryside.
A lusciously brutal resurrected classic. - Kirkus Reviews


“I am so grateful that a new generation will be able to read this surreal, nightmarish book about women’s struggle for autonomy—and how that struggle is (always, inevitably) met with violence.” —Carmen Maria Machado


“The extraordinary power of The Naked Woman lies in the mysterious sensation of a metaphor whose meaning is being suspended. Like all literary greats, Somers offers no answers, she just amplifies the questions.” —Andrés Barba




“A fiery, imaginative meditation on the reach of embodied consciousness, The Naked Woman is a timely translation of a Latin American hidden jewel. Wild and brilliant, Somers speaks to us in the here and now of our troubled present."—Cristina Rivera Garza


“Too strange and scandalous for her time, Armonía Somers is a feminist legend.” —Lina Meruane


“Armonía Somers is an extraordinary writer whose erotic fairy-tale world is akin to that of Angela Carter. Thanks to Kit Maude’s perceptive rendering, the English-speaking reader can now discover one of the most original, and unfairly neglected, Latin American authors of the past century.” —Alberto Manguel




“This short but savage novel is essential reading. Hallucinatory, surreal, and beautifully brutal. Like a dream-vision that gets under your skin.” —Julianne Pachico


The 1940s were a good decade for the arts in Uruguay. The writers Carlos Quijano and Juan Carlos Onetti founded the influential leftist weekly Marcha in 1939. Joaquín Torres García, Uruguay's leading modern artist, opened a studio in the capital, Montevideo, to train the next generation of painters. A community of writers, artists, and critics was taking shape there, and by 1945, that community had become a full-on cultural boom.
The artists and writers of that boom are called the Generación Crítica, or the Generación del 45, and include some of the most exceptional minds in Uruguayan history, many of whom remain famous today. For the most part, they were realists, leftists, innovative and independent thinkers. None, however, were nearly as innovative as the fantastical, experimental near-Surrealist writer Armonía Somers, who belongs to the Generación del 45 by age only. As far as Somers was concerned, she and her work belonged to no one but herself.
Somers' first novel, The Naked Woman, translated by Kit Maude, is a wild, brutal paean to freedom. It's a challenging book, one that took nearly 70 years to make its way into English. Somers — a pen name, she was born Armonía Etchepare — opens casually enough. "As much as she'd been hoping otherwise, Rebeca Linke's thirtieth birthday began with exactly what she had expected: nothing." That line could lead anywhere. The next scene could be a party, a bad family dinner, a marital fight. But in The Naked Woman, Rebeca heads to a remote cottage, strips naked, and cuts off her own head. Then she "[shoves] it back on like a helmet" and ventures, still naked, into the woods. - Lily Meyer
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/31/662229798/fierce-and-mysterious-the-naked-woman-walks-in-dark-dreams




Originally published in 1950, this slim novel packs a major wallop. Somers (1914 – 1994, pen name for Armonía Liropeya Etchepare Locino) was a Uruguayan writer, pedagogue, and a major force in Latin American feminism. And although she was a prolific writer, this publication of The Naked Woman is Somers only novel translated into English. Highly surreal and somewhat reminiscent of Djuna Barnes or Clarice Lispector, the novel tells a dreamlike tale that is also heavy with a feminist critique of society, its inherent misogyny and repression of female sexuality. This is an important work of twentieth century feminism whose central meaning clearly resonates today.
On her thirtieth birthday, the protagonist Rebeca Linke decides to take a journey from her comfortable life in the city to a cottage in the country. Before she leaves, she removes her clothing in a clear gesture toward what it is to come later in the novel. She travels by train wearing only a coat, the presence of her naked body becoming the central power and symbol in the novel. Eventually arriving in the country, she leaves her coat behind in a field and in a dreamlike sequence in the cottage, attempts to cut off her own head. While the violence of this act is shocking, it is a necessary part of her progression from Rebecca Linke to the woman she will become. Of course this is a world of symbol and metaphor—her symbolic self-decapitation is just the next step on her journey to shrugging off conventional consciousness.
Once Linke has re-affixed her detached head to her body, she travels through the night into a world full of sky and forest. She revels in her freedom—alive to sensation and to the reality of the power of her naked body. When she arrives at a hut in the woods, she moves into the bed of the heavily masculine woodsman and his frail wife. The woodsman believes her to be a dream as she whispers in his ear calling herself “Eve.” Unable to meet her desire with his own “Eve” leaves the hut. In his anger and frustration with his own impotence the woodsman brutally rapes his wife, a foreshadowing of sexual violence later in the novel.
As Eve travels through the nightmare world of forest and village, she inspires curiosity, lust, and ultimately violent rage in the men who see her naked body. Farmers glimpse her luminous body in the forest and spread word of her to the local village. In their mixture of desire and frustration, the men of the village come together into a destructive and violent mob. They cannot control or contain her and so decide to destroy her.
But it isn’t just the men who want to destroy Eve. The women of the village are horrified by their husband’s new-found lust, the “red-hot night of the woman” eclipsing “the effort of thousands of restrained evenings during which the women, instinctive economists, went about rationing chastity and lust so as to ensure that the community grew in a measured, orderly way.” The power of Eve’s sexuality as represented by the vision of her naked body is such that the villagers’ carefully controlled lives are violently disrupted and they respond to her with the “jarring inevitability of a natural disaster.” Eve's presence has inspired the villagers to forget “the fears society had drummed into them” and they become intensely sexually aware. Even the local priest has visions of Eve’s naked body and feels a desire rise in him that he has never known. His deacon claims that the woman is a “naked beast” and must be the mother of the Devil. But in his sermon, the priest claims that Eve is the first woman, the eternal Eve and that the villagers are not worthy of her presence. For the priest, the villagers “hated the unknown” and only knew how to express their fear through hatred. He concludes that the luminous body of the naked woman represents a beauty and freedom the villagers do not have access to, “A single incarnation of freedom cannot exist without starting a war.”
In an extended scene toward the end of the novel, Eve stops to speak with Juan, a married villager, and they become lovers (albeit briefly). When Juan asks her for her name, she renames herself “Phryne” (in a nod to the Ancient Greek courtesan tried for impiety). As she and Juan discuss the nature of love, the town descends on them. Refusing the priest's guidance, the deacon and the villagers rename Eve/Phryne, “the Naked Woman” and see her only as “primitive, brazen, obscene.” Juan attempts to protect her by covering her body with an old raincoat but it is too late, the villagers are on him. She is saved only when the village itself catches fire in a biblical blaze. In this build up to the end of the novel, TheNaked Woman asks the central question, “Had she, a naked, destitute woman, really caused all this madness? Or was she being used as an excuse from something already lurking inside of them?” In the midst of the conflagration, the priest strips himself naked and walks into his burning church in a final rebellion against the small minds of the villagers and their limited understanding of the sacred. As the villagers turn to save their homes from fire, the naked woman walks to the forest and the river and here she becomes Rebecca Linke again in a beautiful, albeit disappointing final act. - Yvonne C. Garrett
https://brooklynrail.org/2018/11/books/Armonia-Somerss-The-Naked-Woman




On Translating Armonía Somers's “The Naked Woman"




Born in 1941, Armonía Somers was a Uruguayan feminist, pedagogue, novelist, and short story writer. Though considered to be part of the literary generation of 1945 in Uruguay, her style and use of a pseudonym set her apart. She passed away in May 1994. The Naked Woman will be her first novel translated into English.

Marina Van Zuylen, The Plenitude of Distraction, Sequence Press, 2018.


A second look at distraction, extracting untold pleasures from its alleged dangers, defending and celebrating the unfocused life for the small and great wonders it can deliver.This short book takes a second look at distraction, extracting untold pleasures from its alleged dangers, defending and celebrating the unfocused life for the small and great wonders it can deliver. It tracks the paths of writers that built their works around non-linear thinking. Bergson called on distraction to sharpen our perceptions; Proust's greatest epiphany came from stumbling, not walking in a straight line; Nietzsche never trusted a thought that didn't come from perambulation. The wanderings documented in these pages carry none of the stigma of attention deficit. Quite the opposite. In Montaigne's words, there is a marvelous grace in letting thoughts be carried away at the pleasure of the wind. It is time to side with some of the great propagandists of so-called wasted time and cultivate controlled mental mayhem. Come join the ranks of the great hedonists of meandering thought.



This is a jewel of a book―an appropriately meandering reflection on the benefits of diversion, detour, boredom, and disorientation. In a culture wedded to attention and purposefulness, we have forgotten how valuable it can to be choose the indirect route, to allow ourselves to get lost. The Plenitude of Distractionruminates on the links between creativity and openness. How might one wander willfully, or achieve a state of “disengaged engagement”? Marina Van Zuylen shows how creativity and insight come to those who are willing to turn away from the always-urgent demands of the task-oriented life. The volume is itself an associative flânerie through the minds of Montaigne, Nietzsche, Hume, Cervantès, Dickens, Eliot, and more. This book plucks a small pleasure from the talons of the relentless, reasonable demands of every day. ―Scott Carpenter






Marina van Zuylen is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Bard College. She was educated in France before receiving a B.A. in Russian Literature and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Harvard. She is the author of Difficulty as an Aesthetic Principle: Realism and Unreadability in Stifter, Melville, and Flaubert (G. Narr, 1994) and Monomania: The Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art (Cornell University Press, 2005). She has taught at Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, and the University of Paris VII. She also serves as the national academic director of the Clemente Course in the Humanities.

Marcelo Cohen, Melodrome : A Story from the Panoramic Delta, Trans. by Chris Andrews,  Giramondo Publishing, 2018.


read it at Google Books

Lerena Dost is a dominant and successful woman until she and her psychoanalyst Suano Botilecue cross an ethical boundary and are disgraced, after their sexual relationship is made known. Both lose everything.
Then, a chance encounter with a mysterious woman in an elevator plants a number in Lerena’s mind, which she plays in the lottery and wins. She decides that she will not touch her new fortune until she can reward her benefactor, who turns out to be none other than Dona Munava, the famed leader of a spiritual cult hidden away in the countryside far from the city.
Lerena and Suano set out on a road trip to find her, travelling across the Panoramic Delta, a futuristic world strangely like our own, but with its details, its settings, and even its language altered in unexpected ways.
The author’s musical and inventive style, brilliantly translated by Chris Andrews, creates a hallucinatory atmosphere, in which the one-time lovers relive their relationship, and confront its consequences.

‘A fundamental name in Argentinian literature of the last two decades.’ — Fernando Bogado, Radar


https://www.amazon.com/Melodrome-Story-Panoramic-Marcelo-Cohen-ebook/dp/B07GXFN1V5/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1541427696&sr=1-5&keywords=Marcelo+Cohen

Hector Meinhof, Three Nails, Four Wounds, Infinity Land Press, 2018.


http://hectormeinhof.com/


This is the illustrated scripture for the new dark ages, it will be read and beheld again and again - Martin Bladh


a hundred and eleven rooms: sterile rooms, electric rooms, padded rooms, interrogation rooms with one-way mirrors, a kitchen, a large dining room and a photographic studio in the attic.
In conjunction with the asylum there was a small chapel,
a mortuary, staff quarters and a barn. Behind the barn,
beside a forest of spruce and fur, the patients’ cemetery stretched itself across the north side of the mound.
It was as though the area had been struck by a peculiar curse. Strange incidents kept occurring, acts of insanity, abuse of animals, unexplained disappearances.
In the grounds of the insane asylum, seven girls aged eleven were walking about...






The opening pages of this book have something of the atmosphere of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, seven eleven-year-old girls having a picnic, drinking rhubarb juice, talking about their hair but, rather than dreamlike, things soon become nightmarish, starting with the discovery of a hanged puppy in an insane asylum cemetery. The reader may have intuited that something was amiss, the short chapter being bookended by images of sinister monks and nuns and dead infants in their tiny coffins taken from Hector Meinhof’s collection of vintage death, post-mortem and medical photography. Inside the asylum, the girls discover an anatomical model of a pregnant woman from which they extract the foetus. They explain, “We’ve been told that the patterns seen on a person’s fingertips are traces left by the soul when it entered the body. Therefore you animate every object that you sculpt with your soul.” This evokes Roland Barthes’ claim in Image—Music—Text that “One can see here the difference between photograph and painting: in a picture by a Primitive, ‘spirituality’ is not a signified but, as it were, the very being of the image. Certainly there may be coded elements in some paintings, rhetorical figures, period symbols, but no signifying unit refers to spirituality, which is a mode of being and not the object of a structured message.” In this intense yet delicate book, the textual and photographic binary system creates a vacillating spirituality somewhere between light and dark, now and then, here and there, life and death.
In Photography and Death, Audrey Linkman explains that “Motives for the commission of post-mortem portraits in the nineteenth century must have been many and varied, relating to the specific circumstances of each individual loss. Unfortunately, few early examples survive today in contexts that would explain the reasons behind their commission or which could clarify their meaning and significance to the bereaved. The post-mortem portrait implies a desire to see and remember the person in death. Possible explanations for the practice can therefore be sought in the rituals surrounding death, and the feelings of duty and obligation owed by the living to the dead.” For the girls in the narrative, ritual is everything, bloodletting, torture, the Eucharist, communion and baptism are perverted into Catholicism as Sadean institutionalism, or a thanatic Lewis Carroll as re-imagined by R. D. Laing.

Barthes again, “Truly traumatic photographs are rare, for in photography the trauma is wholly dependent on the certainty that the scene ‘really’ happened: the photographer had to be there (the mythical definition of denotation). Assuming this (which, in fact, is already a connotation), the traumatic photograph (fires, shipwrecks, catastrophes, violent deaths, all captured ‘from life as lived’) is the photograph about which there is nothing to say; the shock photo is by structure insignificant: no value, no knowledge, at the limit no verbal categorization can have a hold on the process instituting the signification.” And that’s what happens in this book, the photographs of dead babies and children, of emaciated and diseased bodies, of executions and post-mortems have no signification in themselves but transmogrify from traumatic to beautiful through the surrounding textual thaumaturgy – “Death is the eidos of that Photograph.”
Torture is a form of ritual, a limbo between life and death, health and sickness, freedom and incarceration, and the girls, fasting and emaciated, practise their pre-serial-killer skills of vivisection on horses, kittens and swallows, while the preceding photographs remind us that “Limbo represent(s) an ‘unduly restrictive view of salvation’, as ‘people find it increasingly difficult to accept that God is just and merciful if he excludes infants, who have no personal sins, from eternal happiness, whether they are Christian or non-Christian.’” Dan Fox further explains that limbo exists in “delimited spaces”, in the torture of birds and the resurrection of insects, in those non-places of asylum and hospital ward, in the wound and the wounded, the shroud and the shrouded.

This is a world in which God is dead, where the end times are accelerating, where church merges with asylum, innocent girls become torturers, love becomes insanity and the art of light is used to portray darkness. One of the girls says, “And inside the dark room, as you fall on your knees in front of the door: a rectangle of shut-out light, the light of the very life forbidden to you, creates a frame around the darkness that your future is opening up.’ It is, as another explains, a “tableaux of the destruction of mankind” where all that will be left will be the records, until they finally fade and turn to dust. The text and photographs in this book produce, as Barthes writes, “not a consciousness of the being-there of the thing (which any copy could provoke) but an awareness of its having-been-there. What we have is a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjunction between the here-now and the there-then. It is thus at the level of this denoted message or message without code that the real unreality of the photograph can be fully understood: its unreality is that of the here-now, for the photograph is never experienced as illusion, is in no way a presence (claims as to the magical character of the photographic image must be deflated); its reality that of the having-been-there, for in every photograph there is the always stupefying evidence of this is how it was, giving us, by a precious miracle, a reality from which we are sheltered.”

The book as object is exquisitely designed and produced, marble-white pages, the feel of funerary stone, a book of remembrance and of what is possible. And, however strange the subject is, it does provide us with a reality, the reality of suffering. Barthes once more, “the photograph is undialectical: it is a denatured theatre where death cannot ‘be contemplated,’ reflected and interiorized; or again: the dead theatre of Death, the foreclosure of the Tragic, excludes all purification, all catharsis.” What Meinhof does here is create a space in which the history of the nineteenth and twentieth century are delimited by violence, dead bodies, torture, emaciation and crucifixion but also by technology, birth, faith, art and memory. In The Ongoing Moment, Geoff Dyer states, “In photography there is no meantime. There was just that moment and now there’s this moment and in between there is nothing. Photography, in a way, is the negation of chronology.” Three Nails, Four Wounds, accelerates time through memory, the “Photograph(s) may correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death. Life / Death: the paradigm is reduced to a simple click, the one separating the initial pose from the final print” and the speed of the shutter becomes “an explicable nano-flash of consciousness that looks to us like a transition between two significant points of entry and exit, but is merely an accident in infinite nothing” as is life. Despite its necro-nostalgia, Hector Meinhof’s Three Nails, Four Wounds reads as hermeneutical eschatology, it reads as though he has chronicled the future – this is how it will be. - Steve Finbow
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/a-matter-of-light-and-death/





Hector Meinhof is a Swedish author and musician. Meinhof is a classically trained percussionist, and studied at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. Meinhof has worked with many orchestras and ensembles in Sweden and abroad. He was a member of the critically acclaimed percussion ensemble Kroumata, and now has a duo for scenic music called Hidden Mother for which he has composed several sound performances and rituals. Besides chamber music and symphonic music, Meinhof is hired for all kinds of musical projects, for example he made the percussion parts on the CD Closure by the post-industrial band IRM. Hector Meinhof is also a collector of antique photography, specialized in post-mortem, medical and religious themes.

Marream Krollos, Big City, FC2, 2018.           
excerpt
A Date In the City






Marream Krollos’s Big City is astructurally innovative work of prose composed of vignettes, verse, dialogues, monologues, and short stories. Alone, they are fragments, but together they offer a glimpse of the human condition and form a harmonized narrative of desire, loneliness, and beauty. Through language that builds, destroys, and violates, Krollos maps the geography of our contemporary condition, a haunting meditation on human togetherness and isolation.
Krollos plays with the tension between the voice of the lonely “I” produced by the urban experience and the polyphony of the city itself. A city is a chorus and a collection of traces; it is a way of being with others and the concretization of the social divisions that keep people apart. As a lifelong city dweller, Krollos is obsessed with the way that cities shape our experiences of the world, our ideas about inside and outside and self and other.
By mapping the emotional highs and lows of particular (though often anonymous) beings, the book creates a geography of the urban consciousness. The sensation of reading this lyric work of fiction is akin to how one experiences an attentive walk in an unknown city: one becomes attuned to the tenor of its many voices, how the languages lift and flourish, and how the micro and macro became integrally linked.

Anna Maria Hong, H & G, Sidebrow Books, 2018.
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In this hybrid novella of trauma and survival, Anna Maria Hong re-imagines and extends the tale of Hansel and Gretel, breaking its received patterns of abandonment and abuse to set G. to wander a world racialized and gendered by power dynamics at every turn. Survivor, artist, hero, G.'s decisive action at the Witch's oven becomes the kernel of a new identity, independent and resilient, capable of transforming cruel stories into a cunning, masterful feminist bildungsroman.


“I shoved her into that oven because I instinctively knew that it would be the end to something that I had already felt working its way around me like a fog or a cloud of smoke, a pattern, in the old parlance. I killed her because I didn’t want to hear another heroic or awful story from those vehement lips, another woe—rational or ludicrous—from this person who could not break the habit of malice in spite of her extraordinary powers.”

"In H & G, Anna Maria Hong brilliantly re-visions the 'Hansel and Gretel' fairytale for the post-post-modern 21st century. Or explodes it, producing a text brimming with biting wit, feminist insight, psychological incisiveness, and a hybrid narrative daring that turns genre on its head. G., a 'Korean American fraülein' who is 'sick of the high road' is willing to tear the whole fantasy edifice of our illusions down as she journeys toward deeper truths, and thankfully, she and H. take us along for their sometimes-frightening, always enlightening rides." --John Keene




"H & G is more than a fractured fairy tale for the Doom Generation. It's a mordantly funny dismantling of loss and abandonment, a game of Chutes & Ladders played by Angela Carter and the Woolf of Orlando, a spider that waits for its victim to stop struggling before moving in. It suggests that the great escape is just the prelude to an unhappily ever after in which old traumas collapse under the weight of new discoveries. It is a brilliant, bracing book." --Josh Emmons

"This prose, built closely beside one of the most primeval European tales, is full of delectably strong phrasal nuggets and more. Anna Maria Hong unfastens and opens the original narrative, filling in all the icy distress that we already know, then adds the allure of burning sugar." --Stacey Levine


Gretel is all grown up but still lost in the wilderness of her own psychology in this acute and eerie reimagining of the classic fairy tale.
Hong's (Age of Glass, 2018) rendering of the iconic story includes all the familiar elements: A faithless father and wicked stepmother abandon two children in an enchanted wood, where they meet a hungry witch in her candy house. The traditional focal point of the story is when brave Gretel rescues her brother by pushing the witch into the oven, but—while the book deals with the grisly (and sticky) aftermath of the witch's demise in queasy detail—in this iteration the reader is directed to consider what comes next. H. and G. have returned home to their father's cottage and grown up. H., who "had always wanted to go home," who "wanted badly to believe that his Father loved him...that it was only temporary insanity that had made him pack his children off into the forest," has kept living the life that was meant for him before his abandonment. G., on the other hand, has remained the same girl "who had survived a great trial through remarkable grit, force, luck, and ruthless decisiveness" and has left home at the age of 10 with nothing but a small red box and her abbreviated name. Both H. and G. carry with them the laborious scars of their childhood, and Hong brings to bear her considerable formal talents as a poet as she explores the nuances of those scars. Told in the form of poems, lists, outlines, dreams, and endless, cyclical alternatives, the book pushes past the blueprint of the story's original framework and delves into the hazy realms of identity, memory, pain, and healing. Eventually, Hong comes to a specific and slippery truth about the societies we embed ourselves within: "Abundance and logic can cure everything but heartache and the drive to drown it or kill it."
In a book that is part tale, part confession, part scholarly analysis, Hong occasionally gets lost in the luxury of her own language. What remains, however, rises above a simple modernization to gleam as tantalizing and as strange as the wink of a pane of sugar glass glimpsed through the boughs of the deep, dark woods. - Kirkus Reviews

Our culture’s obsession with fairy tales and superheroes is both a premodern revival of myth and a form of compulsiveness. It doesn’t matter that Spiderman has been played by multiple actors or that Disney creates microvariants of identical coming-of-age stories. Myths are meant to be retold, and the more retelling, the greater their power. Nor does it matter when the work winks at the audience with an awareness of artifice and convention. (See Guardians of the Galaxy, or Robert Coover’s debauched fairy tales.) Skepticism is a crucial component of the genre, as fairy tales are not just about first enthrallment, but the full cycle of spell, disillusionment, and reenchantment. The fact that a spell is always ready to wear off defines its power—its precariousness stakes its claim. Artifice must be rewoven, if only by force. In this regard, irony is merely the self-awareness that we are doomed to repeat stories that are not our own.   

 

Anna Maria Hong’s H & G takes a different approach as it brilliantly tells and retells the Hansel and Gretel tale, in prose and verse. Unlike Coover’s postmodern fairy tales, however, H & G does not ultimately reenact cycles of disillusionment and forced reenchantment. Taking its inspiration from the trajectory of the story’s original heroes, it models an escape from enchantment into a more fully human realm.

 

Repetition frames the book’s structure, as H & G spins out alternative beginnings, middles, and ends to the story, such as one where the children, having burned the Witch’s house, enact the same vengeance on the cottage of the father who abandoned them. In another, trapped in a different home, they dissolve a steel floor with their tears. There is a “New Witch,” who suckles the adult H every day in a ritual that supposedly allows the world to continue.

 

Certainly, in Hong’s art, myth and fairy tale have a recurring, traumatic power. The book begins:

 

The candy gets on the inside because we eat it and eat it like thieves, like children under a great burr of clouds made by a god in a slothful mood.

The candy gets on the outside and sticks like tragedy, marking us as the worst type of person.

 

This “stickiness” is not just compulsive story-(re)telling but also the suffering inflicted by a genre that traffics in misogyny. In H & G, G is a “Korean American Fraulein,” and the book explores the development of the hero’s independent cultural identity in a world full of abusive, white, Anglo-Saxon figures and stories—like the violent Grimm tales and the monsters who populate them. A case study in this recapitulating narrative of trauma is the Witch, a frustrated artist and community activist who enslaves H & G to focus on her life’s work of building candy houses. Beaten as a child and harassed as the only woman at the “Institute of Culinary Rheology and Design,” the Witch’s main failing is that she reenacts the cycle of abuse she experienced. G’s act is to sever that cycle:

 

I shoved her into that oven because I instinctively knew that it would be the end to something that I had already felt working its way around me like a fog or a cloud of smoke, a pattern, in the old parlance. I killed her because I didn’t want to hear another heroic or awful story from those vehement lips, another woe—rational or ludicrous—from this person who could not break the habit of malice in spite of her extraordinary powers.

 

As in this passage, H & G enacts a demystification—“the end to something” that’s a “fog” of compulsive reenactment. The power of Hong’s art is first to construct and then dissolve the frame of myth. Hers is an abjuring magic. Part of this return to reality is accomplished through the book’s deeply original voice—both detached and brutal, lucid and ludicrous—which tends to resolve and thereby dismiss absurd, received situations in a moment of clarity and insight. In terms of plot, we learn that G has long departed the magical wood, recognizing her brother’s moral laziness and her father’s murderous abandonment. She travels far over the sea:

 

[doing] many jobs that would satisfy many bosses in different lands: picking oranges in the South, serving beer to the pale men and occasionally women in L________, gathering signatures for the population counts in R______, selling books of mostly low value in the big city of B________, and of course more cleaning and carting and lifting.

 

This is not to say that escaping the loop of reenchantment necessarily means happiness. G’s misfortunes continue, sometimes echoing her original trauma but taking different, pointedly ordinary forms. A mentor sexually harasses her. She meets a man who promises to show G a realm “under the bed,” which turns out to be unromantic, dusty space. Over time, G eventually realizes that her situation is not archetypal and timeless, but unluckily her particular experience:

 

It was another thirty years before G felt that very few people wanted to eat her or do her monstrous harm. Most people, she concluded, had enough of a handle on themselves to be indifferent, and only a few were wired to commit murder, cannibalism, child sacrifice.

 

To avoid repetition is not entirely possible—as G reflects, “We did not know what spell the Witch had cast to make us feel that things were not over.” And since compulsion is born of trauma, and racism and misogyny help enact it, there’s an understanding that repetition is part of the nature of the world. It is, however, possible to grow up, and to become a person who both confronts oppressors with their own fire, and who can also “walks away from misery” to stand, like G does finally, outside “the great and terrible stories.” In their place, Hong leave us with stories that are more ours to tell:

 

Some endings cannot be rewritten, and that’s alright. The ones who did the damage must want to be forgiven. In the meantime, put down the stone that wishes for rescue. Step through door after door without looking back. Be in the new strange.

- David Greenberg in Iowa Review

Anna Maria Hong, Age of Glass, Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2018.


"'The engine of alchemy / was rage. The small man's history of winning / was long but irrelevant,' remarks Anna Maria Hong midway through AGE OF GLASS. This caustic suite of ludic sonnets upcycles old stories--myths, fairytales, fables, clichés--into bright, prismatic spells for the end of days. 'Slant reuses / the cant of the box,' the canny speaker incants. 'A palindrome pulse / recalibrates luck.' Open this book to any page and you'll be met with lines so timely, so tonic, and so lexically dexterous you'll feel enchanted, however fleetingly, to cohabit this age."--Suzanne Buffam

"Like the 17th-century Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, whose sonnets echo and upstage a notably male and European literary tradition, Anna Maria Hong demonstrates in her own labyrinthine sonnets 'the monstrous breadth' of her poetic abilities, offering in them radical interpretations of myths and fairy tales that speak to our time and dazzle us with their wit and linguistic virtuosity. No one is writing like Anna Maria Hong in this AGE OF GLASS."--Rosa Alcalá

"Anna Maria Hong's poems--in this case a book of astoundingly innovative sonnets--confirm to us the credo we store in our hearts: that with intelligence, musicality and a love of language poetry can make any subject compelling and revelatory. But it takes a poet with a rare talent like Anna Maria Hong to make us see and joyously declaim what we believe. AGE OF GLASS is a book I've been hoping to read for a long time, from a poet whose work I've admired for a longer time."--Khaled Mattawa

"The sonnet, that most venerable of verse forms, can never go out of fashion for long, because there's always someone out there revitalizing it. One such someone is Anna Maria Hong, whose terrific book, AGE OF GLASS, consists almost exclusively of sonnets that revel in the intricacies of their artifice. Anna Maria Hong will build a poem on variants of a rhyme (misogynist, grist, zest, testy, beast), exulting in the surprises in store when you let the sounds of the words direct you to their meanings: 'Like a moron one persists, like a priest / or catechist chanting at a bris.' But her verbal brilliance is not all this poet offers. She gives us life in its raw vitality. We see through AGE OF GLASS darkly but accurately. Sometimes she makes us laugh: 'The fuck you in me crosses the street to / avert the fuck you in you.' Fierce intelligence is always at work, whether the subject is a figure of myth or fable (such as Cassandra, Pandora, Circe, and Medea) or the 'ages' of woman and man."--David Lehman


Hong torques the traditional sonnet in her exceptional debut collection, finding new ways to tease out eye-opening elements from the venerable form. Though she mostly resists end rhyme in favor of internal musicality, rarely does a reader encounter such successful, winking inner rhyme. In “A Parable,” one of the few non-sonnets here, Hong writes, “it was on to the hermitage, the last stage,// where we would presage the image of ecstasy/ and thus emboss our legacies.” Where other poems might bow under the weight of these sonics, or risk mimicking the limerick, in Hong’s deft hands the rhymes create a propulsive effect. She evokes the aged as often as the contemporary, filling her poems with religious iconography and Greek mythology as well as such modern affectations as “blah, blah, blah.” Yet as Hong shows in “The Ivory Box,” it is the human that stays sacred; her speaker avows, with an almost visible smile, “I’m the holy stuff,/ the nod blown up inside your head.” Here is a history that doesn’t progress but circles back on itself, the titular age revealed as a permanently fragile, transparent state. - Publishers Weekly




Generally speaking, poetry reviews and fiction reviews keep to different sides of the room. After all, a novella is a different form than a sonnet, with different limitations, rhythms, and expectations tied closely to word limits and structures. It’s easiest to compare apples to apples, rather than apples to peaches.
But Anna Maria Hong’s Age of Glass, a poetry collection of sonnets (both traditional and mutated), and her novella H & G (a postmodern prose collage based on Hansel and Gretel) go deep into the modernized fairytale in ways that make the two books seem more related than separate.
Of these two projects published in 2018, she says:
“I started drafting the poems in Age of Glass in the mid-aughts and ended up working on that collection for 14 years. The initial idea was to draft 100 sonnets, although I found that I liked writing them and interrogating and stretching the form so much that I just kept going, drafting well over 300 sonnets over about seven years, and then revised and shaped those into a collection. One of the main strands in Age of Glass are the fairy tale- and myth-inspired poems, most of which are dramatic monologues from the points of view of female characters whom I wanted to imbue with more agency and idiosyncrasy than they inhabit in the old tales. I was aware of working in a feminist tradition of reworking received stories to spin new meanings and found that approach very satisfying—a way to reclaim personal voice as well.
In the sonnets comprising Age of Glass, Hong can take poetic compression and beautiful play with language to surprise and delight the reader:

Every age an age of glass. A slipper shoes
the foot, takes giant steps of tock and tick,
a cone blown, known gone, glass is fashioned, metal
spun to color, mineral made light,
and this is the last poem I will write
Glass is sand is time falling loose
A gap of glass is wrapping, a bottle
( ) or swan ( ) of the human whose
hand will flip the glass, grabbing it
by the neck. Every time a nick.
And it is our glass to raise and smash.
A female silhouette, a shape, a vase
With two closed ends, one met. Two cones have kissed.
And the skin of our limit is glass.

Movement through Age of Glass is fast but covers a lot of literary ground. Poems in the collection span mineral-named ages, to then encompass Greek myths, to explore then icons of enchantment like tonics, boxes of many colors, to Little Red Riding Hood’s hood, to qualities passed down only through the mother (hologynic), to the riddle of the Sphinx. Not all pieces are strict sonnets, but they all apply the same condensation rigor to the line and require similar attention to the musicality of the phrasing and end words.
Hong writes of the novella H & G that it “was a much faster project, and I embarked on it after having retold the tale in at least one poem featuring the twins, as I think of them. The Grimms’ version of Hansel and Gretel always fascinated and bothered me, as it resonates with many of the themes that animate my writing in general: hunger and greed, bad decisions with terrible consequences for others, abandonment, unequal treatment based on gender, and triumphing through trauma. The tale also features a female protagonist, as it’s Gretel or G. who takes decisive action to dispense with the Witch and save herself and her brother, and I wanted to explore the different choices that each character makes in the face of trauma and its aftermath. I’d always thought it improbable that they would just return to their father’s cottage after all that, and I also wanted to create a middle and an ending that arrive somewhere other than the original domicile.”
Here, in the opening lines of the “Sticky Stuff” section that opens the book, Hong warns us that candy is not merely candy and that she will be delving into the worst aspects of this fairytale.
“The candy gets on the inside because we eat it and eat it like thieves, like children under a great burr of clouds made by a god in a slothful mood.
The candy gets on the outside and sticks like tragedy, marking us as the worst type of person. It sticks at the worst time.
What was the worst time? We can’t remember it, but we can feel it like a smear of embers inside our small chests…”
In the rest of the novella, Hong pulls no punches describing the emotions around parental abandonment, untrustworthy adults, different ways of getting lost. How Gretel, the clever one of the duo and the only one who sees the witch for who she is, copes with the aftermath: therapy, imagined different outcomes, confronting the father and evil stepmothers, confronting race, gender and class bigotries that emerge as their story is re-interpreted by people who were never there to save them.
We see how the witch fell in love with H (but also wants to consume him). We see how the Witch makes Gretel feed H, continuing his passiveness and apathy toward real danger. We see many variations on the escape from the house as the site of trauma, relived in memory and dreams. And the rescuer, the Huntsman (called Ranger P. Charming in one section) – is he sinister or a cardboard cutout of a friendly figure? What happens to children who grow up, never able to relax their vigilance?
And what of Hong’s next project, Fablesque, which focuses on animal tales and fables rather than humans and will come out from Tupelo Press in 2020.
Of the upcoming book, Hong says, it is “more directly autobiographical than my previous work, as I relate some familial stories, which intersect with the partitioning of the Korean peninsula into North and South, as that event and World War II and the Korean War dramatically impacted both of my parents’ lives and those of their families, as well as everyone living in Korea during the mid-20th century.
“I think of these familial stories as akin to the fairy tale and myth in their intensity and their outsized effect on young minds and hearts, although of course, these tales are true and informed by large historical forces. One of the questions that I continue to explore is how one can re-shape received tales of all kinds to give more agency to the listener/reader/writer, so that rather than being caught up in someone else’s narrative, she has the power to harness those tales to shape her own destiny.” - Betsy Aoki
http://www.iexaminer.org/2018/07/age-of-glass-fairytales-deconstructed-for-our-times/


Oh, the delight, when, after thinking about American sonnets for some weeks here at the Kenyon Review blog, the Cleveland State University Poetry Center released Anna Maria Hong’s debut poetry collection, Age of Glass, winner of its First Book Competition. Like Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, forthcoming in June, Hong’s book-length sonnet sequence, published in April, both engages with and subverts its tradition. Unlike Hayes’s “American Sonnets,” in which the visual density of a single fourteen-line stanza reinforces the lack of a set end-rhyme scheme and directs the reader instead toward the dense internal musicality of Hayes’s lines, Hong’s sonnets often take Shakespearean form with three quatrains and final couplet, cuing the reader to metrical choices, end-rhyme schemes, and stanzaic moves. This is not to say that Hong’s sonnets are any less internally dense or wild in their musicality than Hayes’s; to the contrary, both seem to use their versions of the sonnet form to provide the seams at which to burst with sheer imaginative and linguistic force.
With a dizzying range of diction and willingness to follow word play and pattern while bleeding between our own contemporary world and worlds of fairy tale and myth, Hong’s sonnets in Age of Glass seem to continue some of the conversations initiated by the poets of Stephanie Burt’s discussion of “Elliptical” and “Nearly Baroque” poets. The titular glass seems to speak to the collection’s forms and materials – Hong’s language as a substance of glitter and shine, shaped under high heat, the finely wrought artifice of which can then be shattered and wielded as a formidable weapon.
I find transition from one state to another and the taking of both social and personal power and agency to be compelling concerns at the core of the collection, often viewed through a gendered lens (“For the carried / margin. For the feminine conclusion” [64]), and enacted through both physical and narrative shattering, explosion, or rending:

“The world would crack extravagantly spent, / a shining exemplar or ornament” (3), “In the distance, always / the glass sea breaking. It was our time to savage” (5), “a way to blunt the need / for evidence of our humanity / and return the universe to light and speed” (7), “The angels turned me / like a face and gave me a new name, turned / my face like revolution” (9), “I’m the holy stuff, / the nod blown up inside your head” (11), “interest dipped, tinted, rinsed, and fenced, / looped and linked like a tarnished chain reaction” (22), “grip it, strip it, flip it hard– / ramp my shard” (27), “The world has burned her skin to make another” (48).

Here, Pandora ends her myth, “I flipped my lid and changed my name to Sally” (15), the old woman who lived in a shoe declares, “‘No music will uncap / the shoe. We must unhorn it with ourselves” (25), and the “newfound foundlings . . . give fate a firm shove” (26). In these reworkings, as elsewhere in the collection, the dynamics are sufficiently complicated, leaving the reader to think and rethink the implications, as in this new Aesopian dialogue:

“Goodbye, luck, you idiot,”
said the Fox to the Grapes.
“I love you,” replied the Grapes. (27)

Hong embeds poetic remixes within her castings of fairy tale and myth, with Eliot’s Prufrock respun in familiar idiom in “Persephone” (“The seed was my ticket to plummet. Each / to each, the fat lady sang to me” [16]), and Bishop’s “Casabianca” echoed in “Circe” (“The former us in me would like / to be jettisoned too or at least have / a deck to leap from” [14]). The poems reflect on themselves as poetry and literature, reflect on themselves as reflections:

“First, let’s find a future infant matron // and a falling apart version of the f***** up / fairy tale fiction of the fraternal Grimm” (26), “The King is bored by my antics, which are / after all, useless . . . I become the Minister of Implication, // my senses enriched as uranium / and no less stable” (28), “Give me liberty through diction and / fiction refined as sugar and oil– / product and process, again, again” (29), “Done with iambics, I wrote / the following instead” (30), “Come and tempt me, / mimetic” (35), “What this caper // slash tragedy needs is a new beginning, middle, / and ending” (36), “The morals vary, but not really” (44), “I’m writing this up for no one you know” (62), “I raise my voice / inside your throat; I hum a viral children’s / storyline” (65),

There are poems that willfully engage the absurd, particularly those that insist upon a particular repeated sound throughout. The reader who thinks sound’s an unsound engine, who can’t handle Hong at her “Bloom // a planetarium or a sherpa qua valium ferrying the blahs, / a chrome dome harem through the chutzpah of time” (49) and her “Rover / at the clavier, riven averrer and tourniquet // remover, glutting on slivers from the striver’s / market, surfing the quaver like a bouquet flower” (42), should perhaps seek more plainspoken poems elsewhere. But for the rest of us, here is language both ductile and brittle, both seductive and resistant. There are also moments of great clarity, as in the ending of “The Hologynic”:

I could go anywhere.
I had no fear. The gods I’d known were dead

inside me, where such things apparently
matter. I was ferociously happy.

But the clarity isn’t the “reward” for the twists and turns and puns and play – they’re inseparable facets of the same intense making. The release of Hong’s and Hayes’s sonnet collections in the same season only underscores the individuality (and glorious talents!) of both poets, revealing the alchemy that can result when an individual voice and vision engage with (both reveling in and interrogating) poetic constraint. “I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat / Grinder,” writes Hayes. “Box is Noah’s boat. Box is a bully / pulpit. Box is the antagonist in / a one-person show. Box is fully // present. Box is heart, blood, womb, and skin,” writes Hong (59). - Dora Malech
https://www.kenyonreview.org/2018/05/age-of-glass/




The sonnet is inexhaustible. Magnetic, mesmerizing, bewitching, nearly every poet is drawn to the form at some point in their career, whether they long to write the perfect sonnet, the Shakespearean, Petrarchan or Spenserian, or they desire to break the form, queer it, manipulate it, celebrate its mutability; they want to discover what magic can happen within those fourteen lines. For some poets the rule of the fourteen line is the only rule they follow, for others it’s the volta that defines the sonnet; poets like Ted Berrigan and Bernadette Mayer have loosened the sonnet into a mere skeleton of form. Other poets, Anna Maria Hong among them, are drawn to the challenge of formalism itself, and use the form to crystalize their own language. For all poets, even the most plainspoken, are drawn to the mysterious power of sound.
Anne Carson wrote in “The Glass Essay,” “It is as if we have all been lowered into an atmosphere of glass,” and this is the atmosphere of Anna Maria Hong’s debut collection Age of Glass. Inspired by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka’s 19th century glass sculptures, one which graces the cover of this collection, Hong’s sonnets are akin to these gorgeous specimens of blown glass. The Blaschkas, Hong explains in her notes, were glass replicas of natural specimens, most often plants and invertebrate creatures. Within them science and art comingle, as within the sonnet where an almost mathematical formalism is brought to life with the breath, the way glass is formed also by the breath—the breath of the artist trapped inside, preserved. And yet, we no longer see the breath of the artist or poet, but what was formed by it.
Hong’s innovative sonnets elevate the natural and human world by preserving it, and yet these sonnets also break the glass or disfigure the glass, “it is our glass to raise and smash,” to allow for deeper truths about sexism, misogyny, and power structures, to emerge:

“Ma beauté, some men are continents, others,
trinkets.” So said some French philosopher
or would have said, if he weren’t so sexist…
                        (“Champion Under Wood”)

The anti-Christ was good, but the Misogynist
was superhuman. An A-list antagonist,
not your quotidian vermin, the kind of beast
who makes women apologize to exist.
                         (“Plainest Hymn”)

And yet, Hong is less interested in thematics than she is with language itself, the poems in Age of Glass revolve around language, one might say the thinginess of language. Hong’s poems often feel as if sprung from their rhymes and their rhythms, creating poems highly aware of their own artifice, poems that at times critique the artifice of the sonnet historically, particularly love sonnets. In “King Worm,” Hong constructs an entire sonnet out of four words “I” “do” “love” “you” as if searching for the finite number of configurations within those words, and within love itself, but also underlining the futile elements of language as well. At the center of these sonnets is subversion, Hong works to expose cracks in the glass of language, fairytales, myths, and fables and with her pen she makes more cracks. In the Age of Glass, anything can break, and many things perhaps should be broken.
Grimm’s fairytales are deconstructed, refracted, and retold to reflect their injustices. In “F, H & G” Hong uses the letter F to recast the tale of Hansel and Gretel in a frustrated light:

…First let’s find a future infant matron
and a falling apart version of the f***** up
fairy fiction of the fraternal Grimm.
At forest’s fringe, our agon begins,
as fur-clad, feral children fling crumbs from
fastidious limbs. Full of fail, unfettered,
these orphans are furious, as only those who
find themselves flung can be. Their futile litter
has fueled their hunger for the candy house
of revenge. These newfound foundlings, forsaken twins—
one fat, one finally fed up—give fate a firm shove.

“[G]ive fate a firm shove,” an action most characters caught within such diabolical fairytales wish they could do—something we’ve all wanted to do at times. Hong, in reinventing fairytales and myths gives fate a firm shove, and allows for goddesses like Persephone to escape the heroine/victim cycle and speak with a voice from this age, “Believe it or not,” Persephone says, “I’ve been better off dead.”

In many ways, Anne Maria Hong’s Age of Glass is a challenging book, it is riddled with riddles, puzzles, cast spells, elixirs, pure language play; the poems are as obscure and opaque as they are clear and dazzling. It is this unexpected texture and Hong’s degree of experimentation with formalism that makes this book both exciting and relevant. Hong concludes the opening poem, “The Copper Age” with the lines, “The world would crack extravagantly spent, / a shining exemplar or ornament.” This collection is at times a shining exemplar of the sonnet and a linguistic ornament, but it is at its best when illuminating the cracks in world and transforming them through language into art. -Anita Olivia Koester
http://greenmountainsreview.com/recasting-the-sonnet-review-of-anna-maria-hongs-age-of-glass/





Anna Maria Hong, FABLESQUE, Tupelo Press's Berkshire Prize, forthcoming in 2019.

Gamal al-Ghitani, Zayni Barakat, Trans. by  Farouk Abdel Wahab, The American University in Cairo Press, 2010.

“In the course of my long travels I have never seen a city so devastated. After a long time I ventured out into the streets. Death, cold and heavy, hung in the air. Walls have no value here, doors have been eliminated. No one is certain that they will see another day.”
The Egypt of the Mamluk dynasty witnessed a period of artistic ostentation and social and political upheaval, at the heart of which lay the unsolved question of the ruler’s legitimacy. Now, in 1516, the Mamluk reign is coming to an end with the advance of the invading Ottomans. The numerous narrators, among them a Venetian traveler and several native Muslims, tell the story of the rise to power of the ruthless, enigmatic, and puritanical governor of Cairo, Zayni Barakat ibn Musa, whose control of the corrupt city is effected only through a complicated network of spies and informers



Zayni Barakat is set in Egypt in the 16th century, chronicling the rise (and semi-fall) of Zayni Barakat ibn Musa during a time when the Mamluk dynasty is on its last legs, and culminating in the conquest by the Ottomans.
       Zayni Barakat himself remains a somewhat shadowy and distant figure, as the story is presented in the form of both official announcements and accounts by others -- which often include hearsay or gossip, as well as spy-reports on him.
       Zayni Barakat is given one of the most powerful positions in Egypt, the Markets Inspectorship. As Muhtasib he not only oversees most aspects of commerce, but is also responsible for safeguarding public morals. The official decree regarding his appointment remarks on his: "virtue and integrity, his honesty and righteousness, his strength and firmness, his revered respectability, his showing no favouritism to the high and the mighty, his piety", and he impresses almost immediately by coyly turning the position down. Of course, eventually he can be convinced to take it -- and proves a firm- and fairly even-handed bureaucrat.
       Wielding a great deal of power, Zayni Barakat tries to implement his own ideas. He addresses the people directly -- something no Muhtasib ever bothered to do -- and promises to control not only Cairo but all of Egypt. And he warns that: "he will have agents monitoring, policing and staking out inequities wherever they occur; and these agents will inform him."
       In a suspicious world, where power is tenuously held, many are concerned about his plans and his powers, and so he is also being spied upon and monitored. There's a pervasive culture of having informants and of turning anyone and everyone into a collaborator -- making for a world with little trustworthy foundation, as everyone shows a false face and double-deals. Zayni Barakat's openness towards the people -- a willingness to address them directly -- is also perceived as a threat by those in power, who never bother having anything to do with those they rule over, relying on their own spies to be their eyes and ears and connexion to the world.
       One of Zayni Barakat's ideas is to light Cairo at night, by hanging lights in all the streets and alleys which his men would light each night. Surprisingly -- or perhaps not -- , many prefer darkness, and it proves a very controversial idea, eliciting some heated objections:

Demand that he ban the lamps, which pierce the veil of modesty, which encourage women to go out after evening prayers. [...] The lamps are a sign of the end of time. They are indications of a world deviating from God's design.

       The reactionary forces ultimately triumph in this case, and the lamps are withdrawn, Egypt stumbling back into familiar corrupt darkness rather than embracing the new and the new possibilities it would offer. Here and elsewhere it is also (relatively) petty obsessions that distract from the true threat, which comes from without: almost before they know it, the Ottomans have come and easily conquered.
       Zayni Barakat is, of course, not merely a novel about backward attitudes and the difficulty of political and moral reform in the 16th century, but also meant to remind readers of the situation in modern Egypt. As Edward Said notes in foreword, Zayni Barakat obviously corresponds to Gamal Abdel Nasser:

Al-Ghitani's disenchanted reflections upon the past directly associate Zayni's rule with the murky atmosphere of intrigue, conspiracy and multiple schemes that characterized Abdel Nasser's rule during the 1960s, a time, according to Ghitani, spent on futile efforts to control and improve the moral standard of Egyptian life, even as Israel (the Ottomans) prepared for invasion and regional dominance.

       Zayni Barakat is not an exemplary reformer: manipulative and willing to employ many of the same methods as those in power (if, arguably, to less nefarious and/or personal ends) he seeks to impose his vision by almost any means possible (and he's perfectly willing to continue doing so under the next regime ...). He wants better for his country -- he is certainly more fair and just than almost all with any power or money -- but it's too radical a departure, and the system won't bear it. Still, his story makes for a very colourful tale, with al-Ghitani effectively using a variety of perspectives to convey the implications of Zayni Barakat's actions.
       Appealingly exotic, and while it may not have the same resonance for Western readers that it might for a Middle Eastern audience Zayni Barakat is also successful simply as a historical fiction. Worthwhile. - www.complete-review.com/reviews/egypt/ghitani.htm




Gamal al-Ghitani, The Book of Epiphanies: An Egyptian Novel, Trans. by Farouk Abdel Wahab,The American University in Cairo Press, 2012.


Upon returning from a trip abroad, the author–narrator learns that his father has died during his absence. Crushed with grief and guilt, he begins a journey of discovery of self and existence. Beset by doubts and at times despair, he almost gives up, but then is granted the priceless gift of appearing before the mythical–mystical Diwan, the council that oversees all affairs of this world, keeping a record of everything that has ever happened or existed and righting wrongs past and present. With the guidance of the Great Master, the Prophet’s grandson al-Husayn, he is able to witness events of his father’s life, his own life, and that of his beleaguered country as he progresses through Sufi states and stations.
Granted the ability to be in several places and various eras simultaneously, the narrator is able to bring together heroes and villains and great events and debacles in Egypt’s and all of Islam’s history. Alternating scenes depict the historical martyrdom of al-Husayn in Karbala, and a fantastical confrontation between two camps fighting over the soul of Egypt: in one camp we meet President Gamal Abdel Nasser, al-Husayn, the narrator’s own father, and a ragtag army of valiant but ill-equipped Egyptians in combat with one led by Jimmy Carter, Anwar Sadat, and Menachem Begin.
This surrealist novel with political and mystical overtones and an edge of satire reveals one of Egypt’s greatest living writers at his finest.

Gamal al-Ghitani, The Zafarani Files: An Egyptian Novel,
The American University in Cairo Press, 2009.

An unknown observer is watching the residents of a small, closely-knit neighborhood in Cairo's old city, making notes. The college graduate, the street vendors, the political prisoner, the cafe owner, the taxi driver, the beautiful green-eyed young wife with the troll of a husband - all are subjects of surveillance. The watcher's reports flow seamlessly into a narrative about Zafarani Alley, a village tucked into a corner of the city, where intrigue is the main entertainment, and everyone has a secret. Suspicion, superstition, and a wicked humour prevail in this darkly comedic novel. Drawing upon the experience of his own childhood growing up in al-Hussein, where the fictional Zafarani Alley is located, Gamal al-Ghitani has created a world richly populated with characters and situations that possess authenticity behind their veils of satire. 

Gamal al-Ghitani, Pyramid Texts, Trans. by Humphrey Davies, The American University in Cairo Press, 2007.

Annihilation (excerpt)


Weaving strands of Sufi mysticism and medieval Islamic history into ancient Egypt's most enduring symbols, "Pyramid Texts" beguiles the imagination with its masterful use of language, its haunting parables, and its glimpses of divine revelation. In a series of chapters each shorter than the last - so that they taper ultimately into nothingness - the Gamal al-Ghitani traces the obsessions that have drawn men over the centuries to the brooding presence of the pyramids. 






Pyramid Texts is literally a pyramid of texts: the book (novel ? story collection ?) consists of fourteen texts that grow progressively shorter, the last few only a sentence or a few words long, culminating in the final one that offers: "Nothing. Nothing. Nothing." Al-Ghitani builds his way to this point by also moving from more straightforward narrative to more mystical impressions and evocations.
       There are several 'stories' among the texts, but even among these al-Ghitani's approach is rarely straightforward narrative. The first text, Anticipation, is fairly straightforward, but presented in short bits, each separated by some words of (not necessarily obviously related) wisdom, such as: "Time, and the law of the appointed term, dictate that what was distant at the beginning will become close". The last of these is: "Each path leads inevitably to another", and this is a book full of such paths. The pyramids are always the focus. In some of the texts the paths are literally on the pyramids: one evocatively describes the experts who climb the structures, knowing the exact paths that one has to take, while in another a group enters the labyrinth-like interior of a pyramid. But even for those at some distance, in Cairo proper, it's always the same: "The pyramids were always with him."
       Al-Ghitani offers a many-toned paean to the pyramids, effectively conveying their grandeur and mystery. Rather than detailed realistic description he takes a more mystical approach. The group that enters the pyramids, for example, diminishes in size (though they hardly notice) until the experience is entirely an individual one -- a story that easily stands on its own. In Realization the Caliph orders measurements taken of the pyramid -- and after much work Ibn al-Shihna the Measurer has to report the apparent absurdity that:

"The width at the mid-point is equal to that at its base. Neither more nor less. The length of each side is four hundred spans. My lord, there is no slope and no decrease."

       But for al-Ghitani the pyramids are inherently unknowable: even 'measuring' them in any traditional sense is pointless. Such mysticism doesn't always translate well, but comes across fairly effectively here: Ghitani offers enough good twists and ideas that it doesn't sound too hokey (most of the time). Still, this (dominant) aspect of the book may not appeal to those who don't have the patience for this sort of thing. Those who do have the patience are, however, rewarded by a pretty decent spin of ideas and concepts.
       One can't help but feel that something -- a certain feel -- is lost in translation, but Pyramid Texts works quite well in translation too. And there are many bits that impress -- such as the opening to Annihilation, a typical example of the feel and presentation and subtlety of the book:

     ... Of an old family, much noted, mentioned in manuscripts that have yet to be printed.

       Certainly of interest. - www.complete-review.com/reviews/egypt/ghitani2.htm




Gamal al-Ghitani, The Book of Illuminations


A severed human head is floating in the sky above the holy city of Kufa. After a while it spots an iridescent green bird slowly approaching it. When the bird is close enough, it becomes apparent that the strange creature has a human face. The head recognises the features of Khalid Islambouli, an Egyptian officer who led the assassination of President Anwar Sadat during the Victory Parade in Cairo on October 6 , 1981, and was executed together with the other conspirators by a firing squad the following year. The bird inserts its beak into the flying head’s mouth and gives it three drops of a sweet drink that immediately alleviates its hunger, making it forget the taste of all the food ever consumed before. There is a bleeding wound in the body of the anthropomorphic bird. A drop of its blood flies into the outer space to become a star, the Star of Khalid. When the bird flies away, the head continues its solitary travel through the air until it sees somewhere in the desert a group of armed men. The troop of seventy is led by the second president of Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser, and its mission is to take revenge on the murderers of Husayn ibn Ali, son of Prophet Muhammad’s cousin Ali ibn Abi Talib, who was killed and decapitated in the Battle of Karbala on October 10, 680. The participants of the punitive expedition eventually come toe to toe with an enemy force comprising thousands of fighters. The opposing coalition includes the army of the second Caliph of Umayyad Caliphate Yazid ibn Muawiya (it is they who slaughtered Husayn and his companions), Israeli troops, agents of Mossad in mufti, US quick reaction force servicemen, and mercenaries of all types. Amidst this motley rabble, cowardly keeping to the rear, is discernible Nasser’s notorious successor Anwar Sadat. The other well-known political figures supporting the assassins of Husayn are Jimmy Carter, John Foster Dulles, Ronald Reagan, Moshe Dayan, and Ariel Sharon. A ferocious battle ensues: the arrows are fired, the lances are thrust, and the swords are crossed. The supporters of Nasser (most of them were killed in the Arab-Israeli wars in another spacetime) put up a stiff resistance, but the strengths are unequal, and they fall one by one until there is only one man standing – their leader. The enemy fighters close in on the defenseless Nasser from all sides and pierce him with arrows. The treacherous Sadat delivers the coup de grâce by lopping Nasser’s head off with a sword. The horde of marauders then pounces on the headless body and rips its clothes off for souvenirs. The flying head contemplates the massacre with great bitterness, knowing all too well that it cannot interfere and change anything. It’s role is that of a passive observer. What makes the whole thing even more unbearable is the fact that amongst the fallen supporters of Nasser is its father. The head belongs to the acclaimed Egyptian writer Gamal al-Ghitani, and it was detached from his body some time before by the great master of Sufism Muhyiddin ibn Arabi aslo known as al-Shaykh al-Akbar.
A hasty disclaimer is in order. This wacky episode is in no way representative of al-Ghitani’s novel, and, if you approach it expecting something in the vein of Robert Coover’s The Public Burning with Oriental colour, you will be gravely disappointed. Despite its non-linear structure and a heavy slant towards the supernatural or, rather, the mystical, the book mostly deals with a very straightforward story based on the biographical facts of the author’s life as well as the life of his parents. It is a very personal book that can even be regarded as an exercise of self-therapy couched in the form of a novel. I ended up having love/hate relationship with it. It certainly did not turn out what I had expected it to be. At some points I found it hard going and even thought of abandoning it altogether. Nevertheless, I am glad to have experienced this peculiar novel, for I have learned a lot of new things and had an opportunity to look at the known political and historical events from a perspective different to the one I am used to. This book will not be to everyone’s taste, but there is little doubt that it is an important literary accomplishment that should not be ignored by a serious reader of world literature. As you probably know, last year Gamal al-Ghitani passed away. I have decided to read and review The Book of Illuminations as a tribute to one of the most important contemporary writers in Arabic. While working on this review I benefited a lot from Ziad Elmarsafy’s study Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel that has a whole chapter dedicated to al-Ghitani’s book. Where the credit is due, I will say so. The numerous annotations by Khaled Osman, the translator of the book into French, have also been of great help: without them a lot more would have passed over my head than it eventually did. I also apologise in advance for all the inconsistencies in the romanisation of Arabic terms here, but since different sources used different approaches to this task, I resigned myself to keeping the transliterations the way they had been presented in each of the texts I consulted.
First things first. Some of you may ask: “Why did The Untranslated choose to review a book that has already been translated into English and is easily available to anyone interested?” Well, not so fast, folks. Let the fact that Gamal al-Ghitani’s novel can be found in English (published as The Book of Epiphanies  by The American University in Cairo Press) not mislead you: it is just a partial translation of the original work. It is enough to compare the page count: the French translation which I have read has 874 pages, and the Arabic original – 815 pages. Now compare that to the piddling 288 pages of the English version: to say the least, a lot has been left out. As I have already said elsewhere, it is my philosophy not to read a book at all rather than read its abridged translation, which is why I regard al-Ghitani’s novel as good as unavailable in English, and will continue to look forward to its complete translation.
The original title of the novel is Kitāb Al-Tajalliyāt, where the first word means “book” and the second one is the plural form of the word tajallī which, being an important concept in Sufi philosophy, is rich with connotations and, therefore, can be translated in various ways. Here is what Ziad Elmarsafy writes in this regard:

The signifier tajallī from which the title is taken covers a wide semantic field. In The Book of the Definitions of Sufism Ibn ʿArabī defines it as “The secret illuminations that are revealed to the hearts [of the believers]. Revelation of this sort is a privilege reserved for the initiated, making manifest the presence and behaviour of the divine in the cosmos. […] In Ibn ʿArabī ‘s Kitab Al-Tajalliyāt, the author relates a series of dialogues with all of his [dead] predecessors on the Sufi path, who appear to him through the process of  tajallī. Were we to attempt a synthesis of the semantic field of tajallī in Ibn ʿArabī’s idiom, we would say that the word refers to the apparition, revelation, disclosure or unveiling of a given thing, person or idea that would normally be hidden in the order of the unknown or unknowable.

Not only does the title of al-Ghitani’s novel contain this rather complex term, but, taken as a whole, it is an allusion to the name of a treatise by one of the most celebrated Sufi mystics of all time. Of course, such homage found in the title of a novel is not such a rare case. We can recall here, for example, William Gaddis’ masterpiece The Recognitions whose title has been borrowed from a third-century religious romance believed to have been written by Clement of Rome.  The French translator of al-Ghitani’s novel in his introduction states that although the literal translation of tajalliyāt is “theophanies”, he has chosen to render this word in French as illuminations (illuminations) to  reflect better the way the Egyptian author utilises the term, for he applies it for a wide range of the narrator’s mystical experiences that are not limited to the manifestation of the sacred, but also include the apparition of the profane. Taking my cue from Khaled Osman, I am going to refer to the novel in English as The Book of Illuminations.
One of the cornerstones of Sufi philosophy is the notion of journey or voyage (safar), the category which is applied to the spiritual journey of the novice on the way to unity with God. Such a voyage will consist of different stations, and the traveller may experience a number of states. The station (maqaam) denotes a certain stage in Sufi’s development achieved through his own hard work and through the guidance of his mentors. Each maqaam is a merit earned by the Sufi’s conscious endeavors on the spiritual path. In contrast, the state (haal) is a transitory state of mind that is granted by God to the mystic, and, being a product of God’s grace, it cannot be attained by intentional effort. All these concepts are used by al-Ghitani as the titles for the three parts of the novel: 1. The Journeys, 2. The Stations, 3. The States. Thus, just by looking at the title and the table of contents, we get a hint that the novel is steeped in Sufi philosophy, and that the novelistic form has been used to disseminate among the readership some of the concepts developed by Sufis, most probably presenting them in a new light. One realises upon completing the novel that these assumptions are actually true. In anarticle, the author himself stresses the tremendous role played by the writings of ibn Arabi in the composition of the Book of Illuminations.

I have relied upon the language of Ibn ‘Arabi. I have made pains to penetrate into its secrets, into the essence of this essential writing which is rare in the entire corpus of Arabic prose, into that amazing imagination which runs free with its particular visions and its ability to manifest itself.
In this respect, the book Kitāb al-Tajalliyāt is thick with the presence of Ibn ‘Arabi. He is a leading personality, and, as such, has guided me and solved problems that I have faced. He has made me see the truths of being and the details of humanity. Just as he ventures the propagation of an epistle in his amazing general introduction to the Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, I have ventured the propagation of my view. What I want is to announce it to my people and to the children of mankind. Six-and-a-half years were spent in the writing of the Kitāb al-Tajalliyāt. Time shaped its production since my dear mother passed away three years into the writing of this book. It seems that the Kitāb al-Tajalliyāt is externally an expression of pain brought about by loss and death. However, essentially, it is an expression of life and the rare struggle on the part of those who are simple for the sake of the continuation of the dearest thing the Creator has given us.

The main impetus for writing the novel comes from Gamal al-Ghitani’s personal tragedy: the death of his father Ahmad al-Ghitani. When it happened, the writer was abroad and could not be present at the funeral. The ensuing feelings of loss, remorse and irreversibility inspired the author to write a novel in which his alter ego is granted the mystical gift of being able to travel in time by means of illuminations, thereby regaining the lost time when his father was still alive as well as rediscovering and reassessing his own self. In the introductory part called The First Illuminations the grief-stricken Gamal tells us how a mystical entity called the Divan is manifested to him and how its custodians endow him with the supernatural ability to travel within illuminations. We never get the exact explanation what the Divan is. When Gamal sees it for the first time he admits that his terrestrial vocabulary is insufficient to describe it. The best he can do is to say that some of the elements of this enormous edifice bring to his mind huge cenotaphs to unknown soldiers, the delicate façades of Asian temples, and natural canyons cutting through mountain ranges.  It is some kind of mystical headquarters that oversees our world, rules over our destinies and determines the shape of things to come. Personally I was reminded of the Aleph from the famous short story by Borges. The Divan is governed by a triad of historical personages belonging to Ahl al-Bayt (literally “People of the House” a term used to denote the family of Prophet Muhammad). Its president is Sayyeda Zaynab, daughter of Ali and Fatimah, and her two assistants are her brothers Hasan ibn Ali and Husayn ibn Ali, revered as the second and the third Shia Imams respectively. Every Saturday evening of Earth time the governors of the Divan hold a session during which they decide on the major events for the coming week.
Gamal’s wish to overcome the limitations of time and space is granted by the Divan. His subsequent journeys consist of three major stages covered in each of the three parts of the novel, and for each stage he is appointed a guide assisting him in each series of illuminations. In the first part his guide is Husayn himself. In the second part this mission is taken over by ibn Arabi. As for the identity of the third guide, it is open for conjecture, as Gamal is forbidden to reveal it. In the course of the mystic voyages under the guidance of the three masters Gamal revisits and relives both the past of his family and that of his country. He witnesses the events before his own birth, travels to the ancient times at the dawn of the Islamic civilisation, and also re-experiences the major events in his own life taking a detached view of himself. Following Gamal’s time travel is not always an easy task for the Western reader, as the amount of the required cultural baggage to fully understand the text is rather formidable. Just to give you the idea: imagine that you have to read Moby Dick knowing next to nothing about all the Biblical allusions running through it. Of course, you will be able to accomplish your reading, but your lacunae will be tremendous. In case of The Book of Illuminations, the concentration of all the Islamic lore diffused in it is even stronger: al-Ghitani integrates into his text numerous references to a variety of Sufi treatises as well as direct quotations from the Qur’an. Not to be lost in this wealth of information, the reader also needs a guide, and, luckily enough, this role is brilliantly fulfilled by the translator of the novel who has compiled an impressive collection of more than 300 end-notes explicating most of the obscure allusions and clearly indicating the origin of each Qur’anic quotation.
By visiting different episodes in the past as well as talking to inanimate witnesses of his family history, such as a stone wall, a palm tree, and a plot of land, Gamal gradually puts together the puzzle of his father’s life story. On the whole, it is a rather plain story of Ahmad al-Ghitani’s struggle at achieving social mobility and giving a better future to his children. Ahmad leaves his native city of Guhayna in Upper Egypt and sets out to Cairo in a mortician’s wagon with a big dream of receiving education at the prestigious Al-Azhar University and subsequently gaining financial stability and a higher social status. Although his ambitions mostly remain unfulfilled, he does manage to settle in the capital, get a menial job at the Ministry of Agriculture and later bring over his family. By his self-abnegating labour, grim determination and self-sacrifice Ahmad succeeds in providing for his children decent education and making it possible for them to escape poverty and get on in life. Despite all the supernatural elements and the mysticism, The Book of Illuminations is mainly a factological exploration of  the destiny of a single Egyptian family being pushed towards a better life by the perseverance and stoicism of the father. The story of the al-Ghitanis is narrated with an overwhelming feeling of gratitude, for the abandoned dream of Ahmad al-Ghitani has been vicariously fulfilled in the accomplishments of his son.
Besides narrating the story of his parents, Gamal al-Ghitani also tells us about the major military conflicts in the Middle East as well as about the host of political and social issues faced by Egypt during the presidencies of Abdel Nasser and his successor Anwar Sadat. At first glance, Gamal’s admiration for Nasser is liable to cause a certain bewilderment in anyone familiar with the author’s biography.  It is exactly during Nasser’s regime that al-Ghitani was arrested for political dissent, put in jail and subjected to torture. The writer’s imprisonment and tortures are recounted  in  unflinching detail in the third part of the novel. In spite of all that, Nasser is represented as one of the narrator’s spiritual mentors. In one of the illuminations he even speaks in the voice of Gamal’s father. Sadat, on the other hand, is shown as evil incarnate. Never called by his name, he is referred to in the original Arabic as الجلف الجافي (al-jilf al-jaafiy). This alliterative epithet is rendered in the French translation as butor brutal, and the corresponding English equivalent would be “brutish boor”. By depicting Sadat in a most derogatory manner and by pouring on him torrents of curses, al-Ghitani shares the hatred of many Egyptians who believe that Nasser’s successor betrayed his nation when he signed the Camp David Accords with Israel’s Prime Minister. For this deed, in the writer’s view, Sadat has forever secured a prominent place among the arch-villains of the Arabic World. For Al-Ghitani the greatest virtue of Nasser is his care for the poor and the oppressed which found its expression in his socialist reforms. Nasser as the leader of common folk  is opposed to the supercilious and luxury-loving Sadat who has alienated himself from the majority of his nation. The personal suffering of the novelist cannot overbalance what he sees as the biggest humiliation in the history of the Arab Republic of Egypt perpetrated by Sadat when he sat at the table of negotiations with the Israeli leadership. The writer’s opposite attitudes towards the two presidents are vividly presented in the illumination summarised at the beginning of this review: Nasser is depicted as the valiant champion of the just cause intent on avenging Martyr Husayn, whereas Sadat is shown as a cowardly and treacherous creep sided with Husayn’s  assassins.
By mentioning the oneiric episode of the battle in the desert, I, most probably, will provoke a legitimate question: what is the meaning of al-Ghitani’s flying head that is observing this gory tableau? As I have already said, the head of the narrator was cut off by the Sufi philosopher ibn Arabi, and, in fact, it is just one of the several instances of the supernatural experience undergone by Gamal which Ziad Elmarsafy in his analysis of the novel identifies as “separation from the self”. When ibn Arabi’s sword falls on the neck of the novelist, this separation in the scholar’s words takes “brutal physical form”. The symbolism of decapitation in the novel is closely related with the martyrdom of Husayn ibn Ali. When al-Ghitani finds himself transported all alone to the city of Kufa in the distant past and is approached there by ibn Arabi, he desperately begs the philosopher to reunite him with Husayn, his guide appointed by the Divan at this stage of his journey . By subjecting the narrator to the same fate as befell Husayn in his earthly existence, ibn Arabi both grants al-Ghitani’s wish and teaches him a lesson. As to what kind of lesson this symbolical execution exactly denotes, I guess there might be various interpretations, especially by those who are more familiar with Sufi philosophy than myself. As for the mystical separation of al-Ghitani’s self, one of its instances occurs when the writer is taking part in a literary colloquium in the Moroccan city of Fez. A mysterious stranger in a white bournous, who is invisible to everyone but al-Ghitani, beckons to the writer, and the latter splits into two versions of himself, one of which follows the summoner while the other stays in the conference room. The stranger takes the separated self of Gamal to the famous Al Qarawiyyin mosque where he witnesses all the major Sufi philosophers, mystics and hermits from all periods of history assemble for a prayer. After this grandiose spectacle, the double of  al-Ghitani  is catapulted by a rainbow into the outer space where he travels through the galaxies and nebulae at the speed of light. Elmarsafy identifies this incident as an instance of mi’raj or “spiritual ascension”. Although this term is primarily used with regard to Muhammad’s ascent to heaven, Sufis saw in mi’raj the culmination of the spiritual development and the acquisition of ultimate mystical knowledge.  Another noteworthy doubling of  the narrator takes place in an alternative past, in which the young Gamal lives with his family in Paris. In this version of the past his father works in an embassy; he is a poet and a political exile opposed to the regime of Anwar Sadat. Gamal meets a beautiful girl called Laura and immediately falls in love. They have a passionate affair whose outcome is a stunning revelation that Laura is none other than the female version of al-Ghitani. In general, the category of self is constantly challenged throughout the novel, being shown as unstable, unpredictable, and misleading. Not that one would expect something else form a book shaped to such an extent by the writings of Sufi masters.
For me The Book of Illuminations works best during its various miraculous and mystical moments, perhaps because they are unlike most of what I have encountered so far in Western literature. The weakest parts of the novel, in my opinion, are those in which al-Ghitani minutely narrates the everyday domestic problems of his family in Cairo. Although the hardships experienced by his parents and himself aroused my sympathy, I have to confess that all those recollections of childhood were a chore to read, and I tried to race through these episodes as fast as possible to reach the next instalment of fantastic journeys, transformations and revelations. It is a long and uneven novel that has as many flaws as merits, but despite my mixed feelings about it I consider my time with it well spent, and if I was given the supernatural ability to revisit the past like its protagonist, I would not  try to dissuade my earlier self from reading  and reviewing it.- https://theuntranslated.wordpress.com/2016/03/19/the-book-of-illuminations-%D9%83%D8%AA%D8%A7%D8%A8-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D8%AC%D9%84%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%AA-le-livre-des-illuminations-by-gamal-al-ghitani/





Gamal al-Ghitani, Egyptian Novelist With a Political Bent, Dies at 70 ...

Miguel Ángel Bustos, Vision of the Children of Evil, Trans. by Lucina Schell, co-im-press, 2018.            


Simultaneously prophetic and blasphemous, Vision of the Children of Evil by Miguel Ángel Bustos presents a mystical rejoinder to the inequities of the Americas, a revision of history through the motif of divine descent, as relevant and revolutionary today as when the poems first debuted in the 1960s. In Bustos's poetry, language is both a tool of subjugation and a device to conjure a strange world that transcends the one we only think we know. And like a postcolonial Rimbaud, he repurposes symbols to develop his own: universal, synesthetic, and above all, musical. Polyvocal, intertextual, and hybrid in form, these books span aphoristic fragments, prose poems, lyrical prose chapters, and linguistically experimental free verse, voicing Spanish colonizers and invented indigenous characters alike. In this bilingual dual edition featuring both Fantastical Fragments (1965) and Vision of the Children of Evil (1967), anglophone readers have their first opportunity to experience Bustos's poetry, as the poet fell victim to a double silencing in Argentina—he was disappeared at the beginning of the 1976 military dictatorship and, subsequently, his work was suppressed and his name absented from the literary record. Lucina Schell's translations are nothing short of extraordinary—urgent, adept, and possessing the necessary temerity to match wits with a poetic voice as strident as Bustos's. A poète maudit whose untimely death was ironically brought on by his leftist politics, Miguel Ángel Bustos reinvents the origin myth of Argentina—and the Americas—laying bare all its promise, all its pain.


This essential voice of a "disappeared" poet from the brutal period of Argentina's Dirty War is electrifying. Miguel Ángel Bustos's poetry shakes me with its aching sense of existential abandonment—just as "a land that trembles like the lung of a boy." His work is populated with demons, vampires, fantastical cabinets, hallucinations, llamas, condors, tigers, a word-womb of prophecy, the Legion of the Children of Evil, and "the rust on the nail that eats at you." His dark visions exhilarate, infect, inflame. Like César Vallejo or Alejandra Pizarnik, he is a poet who eats radiance even as night falls in his poems (to paraphrase him). A poet, journalist, and anthropologist, he diagnoses society's diseases and trumpets the damage they do to the human soul. Writing at a time when Argentina was plunging into horrifying repression in a series of violent coups, Bustos fuses the eerie visions of Baudelaire, Nerval, and Poe with the prophetic tones of Milton and Blake. Bustos's prediction held true: "When I die, the prophet in me will rise like a child without morals or motherland." I'm grateful for Lucina Schell's artful rendering that recreates the visceral yet oneiric impetus and the adroit wordplay of Bustos's poems. The appearance of this translation is an event to celebrate. —Rachel Galvin

Poor Miguel Ángel. I’ve always said he had the worst luck. There are lucky dogs — but he’s one unlucky dog.

He had looked for work. The offices emery-polished and the banks full. He had looked with the utmost sadness.

One day he crossed an avenue — Corrientes, I believe, or 9 de Julio — and disappeared.

“Mother I was Christian like those who landed before on these shores.
 I sleep on a cross
 I die on a cross the cross was the first cry

I heard arriving in this world.
 Cross of the most sorrowful blood.
 Men have climbed the cross. Transformed into

mute gods. Tied in bronze and crystal they cry out.

Naturally I won’t untie anyone so weak poor corpse” (continues, p. 47)

https://medium.com/anomalyblog/was-miguel-ángel-bustos-the-argentinean-poet-who-prophesied-his-own-death-59a6c6435048

Miguel Ángel Bustos (1932-1976) was a major poet of the Argentine Generation of 1960, an illustrator, and a literary critic. During his lifetime, he published Cuatro Murales (1957), Corazón de piel afuera (1959), Fragmentos fantásticos (1965), Visión de los hijos del mal (1967), winner of the second Buenos Aires Municipal Prize for Poetry, and El Himalaya o la moral de los pájaros (1970). Bustos's last book was published with the support of a grant from the National Foundation for the Arts. His poetry was included in many contemporaneous anthologies of the Generation of 1960, and in 1998 Alberto Szpunberg published the anthology of his poetry Despedida de los ángeles. Bustos studied painting with Juan Battle Planas in the 1960s and had a solo exhibition of his artworks in 1970, with a catalog written by Aldo Pellegrini. In 2014, Miguel Ángel Bustos and Emiliano Bustos had a joint exhibition of their paintings and drawings at the Centro Cultural Borges in Buenos Aires. During the 1970s, Bustos worked primarily as a literary critic for Siete Días, Panorama, La Opinión, and El Cronista Comercial, and his collected prose was published in 2007. His collected poetry was published in 2008, the first time it had appeared in print in more than thirty years. On May 30, 1976, Bustos was arrested by military police and for decades remained "disappeared," his work censored. In 2014, Bustos's remains were identified by forensic anthropologists. It is now known that he was executed by firing squad on June 20, 1976.

José de Piérola,Fabulations, Kernpunkt Press, 2018.



http://josedepierola.com/website/index.html


Encompassing thousands of years, Fabulations is composed of minimalist short stories that straddle history and fiction, fact and imagination to tell stories as varied as the early effects of human civilization on our planet or the strange relationship between machines, chess and the human mind. These fabulations, intimate and panoramic, are imaginative periscopes that reveal part of our shared human experience from fresh, new angles.


Flowers that grow from light bulbs. Bullets stopped by an iPod. A ship and woman taken apart piece by piece. FABULATIONS is a collection of minimalist short stories that straddle history and fiction, fact and imagination. Encompassing thousands of years, this collection is at once intimate and panoramic. Each story aspires to be an imaginative periscope to see part of our shared human experience from a new angle.


"De Piérola welcomes his readers into fabulous worlds, from distant places and times to familiar neighborhoods, from strange loops of reality to the stone and dust of our own cities. Each story is rooted in human desire, in real people, and there is an urgency in reading them, a reluctance to put the book down, as you might miss something. And you don’t want to miss anything de Piérola writes.  The spirit of Cortázar, Robert Louis Stevenson, Borges, Poe, welcome you into these fabulous places of the imagination.The stories are beautiful and heartbreaking." - Daniel Chacón

"Fabulations is marvelous and startling: utterly original, gravely essential. Elegantly traversing chronology, geography and narrative structures, what is historically absurd with the protest of imagination, it provokes and disturbs, pierces and resonates, sings through Calvino’s credo that literature is “the search for lightness . . . to the weight of living,” handling terror, irony and humor all at once in the same palm, and so nimbly, that at times all we can be sure of is the measure of time. José de Piérola is a writer of extraordinary power. These stories are deftly rendered with such sensitivity that he arrives, through the fabulist narrative, at a masterful calculus of who through history we have been—and in so doing, ennobles who we can be, and who we are." - Sasha Pimentel

José de Piérola (Lima, Peru) is a fiction writer translator and literary critic. He worked for more than ten years as a computer consultant before he left his career to complete a Ph.D. in Literature at the University of California, San Diego in 2007. His novels El camino de regreso and Un beso del infierno chronicle the civil struggle in Peru during the 1980s. He has also published the novels Summa Caligramática and Shatranj: el juego de los reyes, and the short story collections Sur y Norte and Máquina del tiempo. He has translated The Art of Fiction by Henry James and L’Etranger by Albert Camus to Spanish, and Quechua Magic-Religious Tales from Lucanamarca by José María Arguedas to English. Fabulations is his first work in English. He teaches fiction writing at the University of Texas, El Paso.

Blume Lempel, Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories, Trans. by Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, Mandel Vilar Press and Dryad Press, 2016. 


Several stories can be read on-line: "The Little Red Umbrella" in Brooklyn Rail, "Neighbors over the Fence," in Pakn Treger, "Pastorale," in K1N, and "The Debt," in In Geveb."


Blume Lempel is a fearless storyteller whose imagination skilfully moves between the realistic and the fantastic, the lyrical and the philosophical. Her subjects like her settings - Paris, Poland, Brooklyn, Tel Aviv, California - range widely. A Holocaust survivor speaks to the shadows in her garden; a pious old woman imagines romance; a New York subway commuter forges a bond with a homeless woman; a middle-aged woman opens her heart on a blind date; an argumentative couple gets lost in a blizzard; and in the title story, a mother is drawn into an incestuous relationship with her blind son. Readers of these superbly translated stories by Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub are in for a stunning literary journey.


 "A splendid surprise and a significant revivication of a brilliantly robust Yiddish American writer."- Cynthia Ozick


“I am a housewife, a wife, a mother, a grandmother—and a Yiddish writer. I write my stories in Yiddish.  [. . . ] Because I speak Yiddish, think in Yiddish. My father and mother, my sisters and brothers, my murdered people seek revenge in Yiddish.” (215)
There was a time when book-length translations from Yiddish were not such a rarity. Commercial publishers and smaller independent presses once saw a market for the likes of Sholem Asch, Chaim Grade, or Israel Joshua Singer. These days, however, translations from Yiddish seem to be entirely the preserve of a dwindling handful of university presses. In this context, the release of Blume Lempel’s Oedipus in Brooklyn, co-published by independent presses Mandel Vilar Press and Dryad Press, comes as a welcome breath of fresh air. Doubly welcome is the fact that Lempel has arrived into English at a time of increased appetite and enthusiasm for rediscovering the works of neglected female writers.
Blume Lempel (1907-1999) was one of Yiddish literature’s genuinely unique voices and this volume, comprising a selection of twenty-two stories taken from Lempel’s collections, a rege fun emes (A moment of Truth) 1981, and balade fun a kholem (Ballad of a Dream) 1986, gives the reader a taste of her range and thematic preoccupations. Lempel was a controversial writer, not just for the fact that she dealt with taboo topics such as incest, abortion, madness, suicide, etc. but for the unsettling candor and clarity with which she shared her inner world. Lempel’s essay “The Fate of the Yiddish Writer” rounds out the collection, serving as a fitting coda. In it she defines her writing as, “the putting down on paper of that which will not leave me in peace” (217).
Indeed it is this same inability to find peace that unites Lempel’s protagonists, a disparate collection of bag-ladies, beggars, refugees and retirees. Each is haunted by the traumas of the past, whether it be memories of war and genocide in the old country, or the smaller tragedies of modern life in France or America.
Lempel’s prose is muscular, unflinching, and uncompromising, capable of striking shifts in tone . . .
This tendency to lurch from the lyrical to the grotesque, often with dizzying unpredictability, is one of the qualities that give these stories their power.
The translators Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub are both authors in their own right (Taub is a poet, while Cassedy is an accomplished prose writer) and together they produce a translation which is sharp, vivid, and polished. Their translation is particularly strong in those moments when Lempel dwells on images of horror and brutality:
Even those stories that do not touch on violent events directly are tinged with a faint patina of unarticulated suffering. When dealing with certain themes, however—changing sexual mores, for example, or the bitter culture-shock of old-age—Lempel throws in the occasional pinch of irony, a dash of self-deprecation.
As sacrilegious as it may be to say, the book could have benefited from being shorter—not that any of its contents should have been excluded, but there is a certain “homeopathic” quality to Lempel’s prose insofar as it is more potent in small doses. The reader is therefore advised to consume these stories in moderation: binge-readers run the risk of becoming numb to Lempel’s tonal shock-tactics, to the detriment of some very strong stories in the latter half of the collection.
Stylistically, Lempel is one of a kind, but the pantheon of forgotten female Yiddish writers is still densely packed with contenders, waiting for their chance to be rediscovered. If the current volume finds the readership it deserves, then it is not unrealistic to expect more of Lempel’s stories to appear in English at some point. And, with a little luck, perhaps some day readers will come looking for the next Blume Lempel. - Daniel Kennedy
https://readingintranslation.com/2017/11/15/trauma-ballads-blume-lempels-oedipus-in-brooklyn-and-other-stories-translated-by-ellen-cassedy-and-yermiyahu-ahron-taub/







Blume Lempel (1907-1999) was born in Khorostkiv (now Ukraine). She immigrated to Paris in 1929 and fled to New York on the eve of World War II. She wrote in Yiddish into the 1990s. Her prize-winning fiction is remarkable for its psychological acuity, its unflinching examination of erotic themes and gender relations, and its technical virtuosity. Mirroring the dislocation of mostly women protagonists, her stories move between present and past, Old World and New, dream and reality. This book is the first English language collection and translation of Lempel's stories and is based on a manuscript that won the 2012 National Yiddish Book Center Translation Prize

Javier Moreno, Alma, Trans. by Peter Kahn, Quantum Prose, 2018.




This is not a book. As the title suggests, this is a soul: an Alma. But a soul, make no mistake about it, is not something from another world. It is a conglomeration of images and words, reproductive data made available to anyone for the satisfaction of the democratic and mephistophelian instinct (who has never desired the soul of another?). This novel speaks to what we are--or are not--prepared to share. Maybe we don't know yet what intimacy is, maybe it is the negative of our own image. It is also possible that the only intimacy left to us is that of words.


"Kubrick, Malkovich, Einstein and everything else. A piece of quantum prose."--Don DeLillo

"The only possible points of comparison for Javier Moreno's ALMA, a book made of sentences, dealing with the materiality of the living, and obsessed with sorting, would be those texts that are most luminous and uncanny. ALMA, unlike anything else I have read, brings together certain amazing qualities of Craig Dworkin's Legion (which consists entirely of statements from a psychiatric diagnostic instrument), of the more radical of David Markson's novels, and of the quietly fevered voices from the writing of Roberto Bolaño. Is it a soul? A novel? Interesting questions--but in any case, ALMA is a configuration of words that demands to be sorted through, one that is compellingly unhinged, open and shut."--Nick Montfort

"A whole book of poems or an entire novel could be written out of every three sentences from this book, a sequence of sharp, strictly poetic and intelligent concatenations, neither pretentious nor forced."--Agustín Fernández Mallo

"Alma is an exploration, from a space of creation, of the limits imposed on the concept of identity by the new conditions of identity (and the experience of such identity), inaugurated by the turn of the century."--Jara Calles




Javier Moreno is a Spanish writer, poet, mathematician and literary critic. He is the author of the novels Buscando Batería, La Hermogeníada, Click (Recipient of the FNAC New Talent Award 2008), ALMA (Finalist Premio Mandarache 2014), 2020, and Acontecimiento. He also wrote the collection of short stories Atractores Extraños and the books of poems Cortes Publicitarios (Miguel Hernández Award, 2008), Acabado en diamante (International Prize La Garúa, 2009) and Cadenas de Búsqueda. Moreno writes criticism for the literary journals Revista de Letras and Revista Buensalvaje.