The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama. Edited and with an introduction by Xiaomei Chen. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 1120 pages. Cloth: $95.00.

by Siyuan Liu

In 2007, China celebrated the centennial of its modern Western-style spoken theater known as huaju (literally “spoken drama”). It also turned out to be a golden opportunity for an updated anthology of its dramatic literature two and half decades after the pioneering 1983 collection Twentieth-Century Chinese Drama, edited by Edward M. Gunn. To that end, the new Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama, authoritatively edited by Xiaomei Chen, one of the leading scholars of the field, and expertly translated by an outstanding group of scholars and translators, is a monumental gift to students and general readers of huaju.

Within its 1,120 pages, the volume includes twenty-two plays penned between 1919 and 2000 from mainland China (19), Taiwan (1), and Hong Kong (2). The nineteen plays from the mainland include eleven from the republican era (1911-1949) and eight form PRC (1949-), which are further divided between four from the Maoist era (1949-1976) and four from the following decades. In her introduction, Chen explains that she based her selection criteria on three interlocking principles: “My strategy was to situate this anthology first in the context of modern Chinese literary and cultural history under local and global circumstances, and second is the context of comparative drama and theater. Third, I bore in mind various formalist traditions of both East and West across time so that Chinese theater could be introduced more substantially to readers of world drama and theater in terms of dramaturgy”

One way to evaluate the volume is to compare it with its predecessors. English collections of huaju plays were published in China as early as 1941 and several US anthologies in the 1970s reprinted PRC plays than had been translated in China, but Gunn’s 1983 volume was the first comprehensive anthology of modern China drama in English. It includes sixteen plays from 1919 to 1979, of which six (out of twelve plays before 1970) are also selected for Chen’s volume, suggesting a possible dramatic “canon,” at least until the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976.

The six overlapping plays are: The Main Event in Life (1919) by Hu Shi, often considered the first important huaju play; Yama Zhao (1922) by Hong Shen, a powerful indictment of the warlord era using expressionist techniques borrowed from Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones; Oppression (1925) by Ding Xilin, one of the earliest huaju comedies; Under Shanghai Eaves (1937) by Xia Yan, the high artistic watermark of the leftist dramatic movement of the 1930s; Guan Hanqing (1958) by Tian Han, a representative of pre-Cultural Revolution RPC drama; and The Red Lantern (1970) by Weng Ouhong and A Jia, one of the revolutionary ‘model’ plays during the Cultural Revolution.

As for the other plays from the same period that only appear in Chen’s volume, some are indisputable classics, such as Tian Han’s The Night the Tiger Was Caught (1922-1923), Cao Yu’s Thunderstorm (1934) and Lao She’s Teahouse (1958), while others reflect recent scholarly attention to gender issues (Bai Wei’s Break of out Ghost Pagoda (1928)), republican-era comedies (an additional one act by Ding Xilin (A Wasp, 1923) and Li Jianwu’s It’s Only Spring (1934)), and previously ignored works on ideological grounds (Ouyang Yuqian’s After Returning Home (1922)).

On the other hand, none of the three post-1976 plays in Gunn’s volume makes it into Chen’s anthology, in which the first post-Mao play, The Bus Stop by Nobel-laureate Gao Xingjian, premiered in 1983, the same year Gunn’s volume was published. The Bus Stop (and Gao’s previous play Absolute Signals) signaled the beginning of a decade of highly creative and often controversial plays, as reflected in the wave of English anthologies in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Moreover, one of these volumes, An Oxford Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama co-edited by two scholars from Hong Kong, also pays tribute to the rise of contemporary theater in Taiwan and Hong Kong because it includes equal number of plays from all three regions.

One of their choices, Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land (1986) by Stan Lai, becomes Taiwan’s representative in Chen’s anthology, thanks to its ingenious combination of tragedy and farce in dealing with the issue of love and separation between mainland and Taiwan because of China’s civil war. Similarly, the relationship between China and Hong Kong also provides the backdrop for Joanna Chan’s Crown Ourselves with Roses (1988), which focuses on the island’s changing fortunes between 1950s and the late 1980s and the consequences of such change on its citizens. In comparison, Anthony Chan’s Metamorphosis Under the Star (1986) is a fable depicting the loving but destructive relationship between a cabbage and a caterpillar and the latter’s metamorphosis under the star.

Apart from The Bus Stop, Chen’s volume includes another play from the 1980s—1988′s Wilderness and Man, which is excluded in other collections partly because of its delayed stage success until 2004, when a production reconciled the play’s philosophical distance with its brutal depiction of the exiled youths in the northeast wilderness during the Cultural Revolution. The anthology’s two remaining plays of the post-Mao era are the 1996 Geologists, a sequel of sorts to the 1961 The Young Generation (also included in the anthology) because it portrays the lives of a generation of geologists between 1960 and 1995, and the 2000 sensation Che Guevara, a romantic polemic ostensibly about the Latin American revolutionary. The production swept China with its unabashed eulogy of armed revolution, criticism of bureaucratic corruption, and evocation of Cold War tensions that refueled neonationalist fervor of the time.

Xiaomei Chen, editor of THE COLUMBIA ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN CHINESE DRAMA. She not only comes up with a collection of significant plays, but provides a deft history of contemporary Chinese theater.

Chen provides a superb critical introduction by contextualizing the genesis, critical analysis, reception history, and her students’ reaction of each play. Indirectly, she presents a brief introduction to modern Chinese drama. The introduction often contains astute observations that unravel decades-old ideological readings, such as her discussion of Cao Yu’s Thunderstorm, which also serves as a good example of her general approach. She starts with its production and speculates why critics initially overemphasized the play’s anti-capitalist message while overlooking its humanitarian intentions, followed by a fascinating discussion of her students’ perceptive reading of the play’s three Nora-like characters in overlapping love triangles. Chen concludes her assessment of Cao’s “paramount place in the history of modern Chinese drama.”

Indeed, Chen’s feminist reading forms a major through-line in the introduction, underlying the significance of gender issues in modern China, thus the persistent recurrence of Nora’s Chinese incarnations, from the heroine in The Main Event in Life who leaves her parents in pursuit of true love, to the girl trapped in a remote village witnessing the death of her lover in The Night the Tiger was Caught. Then there are the clusters of women determined to leave home, hungry for financial independence in the face of social unrest in such plays as Breaking out of the Ghost Pagoda, Thunderstorm, and Under Shanghai Eaves.

Nor were these feminist concerns eliminated after 1949 when, as Chen observes about The Young Generation, “again women had to let the political and ideological agenda of nation building in socialist China subsume their subjectivities as women.” Finally, in The Bus Stop, “[i]n a time that questioned and rejected Maoist values and ideologies, [two] post-Mao women characters longed to experience the domestic ‘bliss’ of Zifang, [the wife abandoned by her US-educated husband] in Ouyang Yuqian’s After Returning Home, and to fulfill their roles as ‘gracious wife and loving mother’ (xian qi liang mu), the traditional Confucian patriarchal ideal of women.” Here, the feminist lens brings focus to an important aspect of China’s tumultuous twentieth century and its circuitous paths of social change as performed on stage.

Chen assembled a stellar group of translators whose works are, for the most part, accurate, colloquial, and stage-friendly. Some translations are updated from earlier renditions in favor of a more idiomatic style. A good example is Amy Dooling’s* updated version of Tian Han’s Guan Hanqing, which is based on a 1961 translation published by Beijing’s Foreign Languages Press and included in Gunn’s anthology. A comparison of the first sentence in both versions demonstrates my point. First, the Foreign Languages Press version: “Come on, Erh-niu, what can you gain by looking on? We must see to the house.” Now, Dooling’s translation: “Come on Erniu, what’s the point of watching? There’s housework to do.” Apart from the updated use of the pinyin system of names, Dooling’s version is obviously better suited for the stage.

In fact, some pieces were expressly translated for performance, such as the two Ding Xilin comedies A Wasp and The Oppression by John B. Weinstein and Carsey Yee. Two authors, Stan Lai and Joanna Chan, both educated in the US and directors themselves, translated their own plays. Moreover, Teahouse was translated for its 1978 European tour by the famous Chinese actor, director, and translator Ying Ruocheng and revised by Claire Conceison. The result is a superb rendition of a very difficult piece for translators because of the play’s extensive use of Beijing idioms by a large cast of characters interacting through three historical periods. The linguistic prestidigitation is necessary to convey the play’s classical stature as the quintessential “Beijing-flavor play.”

This Beijing-flavor and period-specific lingo is also the hallmark of two other plays in the anthology—The Bus Stop and Geologists, which at times seem to pose linguistic hurdles for the their translators who, unlike Ying, are not from Beijing or mainland China. There are a few factual errors that may result from not knowing local customs. For example, in Geologists, the well-known Beijing snack shuibadu (boiled lamb tripe) is translated as “pig tripe,” a reference that will be a surprise to its local sellers who are predominantly ethnic hui, a group of Chinese Muslims who have largely assimilated with the majority han people but still maintain certain cultural and religious identities, including the taboo against eating pork.

A scene from Theatre HAN LLC's 2009 production of Gao XingJian’s THE BUS STOP. Photo: Ho Chang

Similarly, the translation of the famous cigarette brand Daqianmen into “Big Front Door” in The Bus Stop is the result of not knowing that its package design features a prominent drawing of Qianmen (the Front Gate), one of the gates of Beijing’s historical city wall, now still standing at the south end of Tiananmen Square. Because the play frequently uses the brand as a springboard to “backdoor” (houmen), i.e., connections, the drawing on the package makes “Big Front Gate” the only meaningful translation.

Similarly, the rural Hunan province terminologies in The Night When the Tiger was Caught also challenged the translator, as when the Chinese character for the measurement of dan (roughly equals sixty kilograms) is mistaken for its more common meaning of stone, pronounced differently as shi. Consequently, the line that praises an eighty-year-old man for still being able to push two dan of grain up the hills (tui qi liangdan guzi shangshan) is translated as “he even pushed two boulders up the path.”

More difficult, of course, is to convey the distinctly combined flavor of locale and time—the youthful enthusiasm of the 1960s, the cynicism of the early 1980s, or the chattering patterns of Hunan peasants. In Geologists, for example, when the young college graduate Lu Dasheng becomes excited when talking to his female classmate Lu Jing about how they are helping to contribute to China’s petroleum independence, he embraces her but—as the stage direction tells us—only “in a comradely manner” (tongzhi shi de). This is rendered in the translation as “in a properly friendly manner,” which certainly conveys the idea of being proper, but misses the play’s extraordinary sensitivity to period jargon that was a key ingredient to its stage success.

Of course, these minor translation issues aside, the anthology’s excellent selection, colloquial and stage-friendly translations, and illuminating introduction undoubtedly make the volume the authoritative choice in teaching and reading modern Chinese drama for the foreseeable future.

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Siyuan Liu teaches at the University of British Columbia, where he specializes in Asian theater. Since 2006, he has published extensively on twentieth-century Chinese and Japanese theater.

* A previous version of this review incorrectly spelled Amy Dooling’s surname. We regret the error.

Lodgings: Selected Poems, Andrzej Sosnowski, translated by Benjamin Paloff, Open Letter, 163 pp, $13.95

by J. Kates

For a long time, modern Polish poets were seen by American readers only through the dark lenses of Cold War rhetoric and a mythology of “captive nations.” We were introduced to a number of interesting poets, a surprising number of whom were not driven by politics, but the context of their presentation was, tinged with the ferrous oxide of the Iron Curtain. But now a new generation has arisen that knew not Joseph, refreshingly influenced by Western poets as diverse as Algernon Swinburne and Frank O’Hara, and making easy connections with Paris and New York. Among these is Andrzej Sosbnowski.

Sosnowski, born in 1959, has such stature now in Poland that it is unfortunate that the edition of his poems translated by Benjamin Paloff in Lodgings is slightly unreliable. For the first five poems for which I have easy access to comparative texts, one (“What Is Poetry”) has dropped its terminal climactic line entirely, and another (“A Song for Europe”) mistranslates “forty” as “fourteen,” where the number matters.These may be anomalies, but a random sampling that yields a 40% error rate does not inspire confidence. There are other curiosities — a title left untranslated without explanation, and so on. The translations may very well be for the most part sound, and are vouched for by some who know Polish far better than I do; but when I read a loaded phrase like “nocturnal emissions of factories” (given in another translation as “factories spew by night”) I don’t know where the pun originates, or what to make of it.

You won’t find out much about the poet from Lodgings. There is a brief biographical note at the end, yet you’ll have to go somewhere else for information and context about Sosnowski’s place in contemporary letters. The Paloff and the publisher provide no notes, and only the briefest of introductions, mostly bibliographical.

For poems that the translator claims are pervasively allusive, readers are given no critical information — that the Korea of Sosnowski’s first book Life in Korea is the name not of a country in East Asia, for instance, but of a district of Warsaw; or that Hel is less a Germanic mythical allusion than a geographical location on the Baltic. Paloff alerts us to “the initial difficulties of reading Sosnowski’s work,” but neither elucidates these nor explains how he deals with them in English.

Poet Andrzej Sosnowski -- a major Polish poet whose verse reflects American influences.

Without the original Polish texts, Lodgings exists in a kind of suspended animation, unattached to anything around it. Paloff does refer briefly to Sosnowski’s literary relationship to American poets he has translated, but the only direct connection he makes is between John Ashbery’s “What Is Poetry” and Sosnowski’s response. In a little interview tucked in just before the last poems, Paloff talks with the poet almost exclusively about American correspondences, yet Sosnowski himself seems relatively uninterested in chasing these down: “This is something that only you, and eventually your readers, can sense and know for yourselves. I have read quite a bit of American poetry, and I’ve translated some. Has some of that rubbed off on my own poems? I don’t know.”

The poems exude an exuberant air of playful language, and sometimes I don’t care if the voice is Sosnowski’s or Paloff’s:

to hell with your distant voice in the receiver
to hell with drops of dew on lilac
tears of alder above the mill what did you do
with that light the deutzia flowers charlock the view of delft
what was your last magic my make-up artist
the last vaginalia turned out so pale
followed by horrendalia that’s now so-so
over the rainbow . . .

(“Spring Rounds”)

Sometimes, though, it makes a difference: one image in the original “Czym jest poezja” turns on a rhyme of two words, glos and los, “voice” and “fate.” Paloff has gone for the rhyme, “voice” and “choice,” at the laborious expense of meaning.

Does meaning matter here — is “fate” the same as “choice?” Underneath the playfulness of Sosnowski lies an insistent earnestness, a sober engagement that comes across at his best in the longer poems, as in “dr. caligari resets the world” and in the “The Oceans,” a Swinburnian double sestina:

How difficult it is, essentially, to understand this shadow,
which meanders behind me through all the oceans,
through the foam, like the Flying Dutchman, outpacing the day
on crescent-moon sails as it assaults the night with our belongings!

We do want to know what Sosnowski has to tell us.

Lodgings offers a generous selection of poems from Sosnowski’s books from 1992 through 2010. A few of Sosnowski’s poems have been available before, but not in such profusion. For this, we must be grateful, and hope that this tantalizing look at an intriguing Polish poet will spark more, and more reliable, English versions.

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J. Kates is a poet and literary translator who lives in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire. He helps run Jephyr Press.

Selected Poems, Adonis (translated by Khaled Mattawa), Yale University Press, 400 pp, $30.

By J. Kates

That a poet of such stature as Adonis is so little known in the United States is one more measure of Yankee insularity. This one can’t even be blamed completely on lack of translations, because his work has been available through a glass darkly for many years, mostly thanks to the work of Samuel Hazo, although those versions are hard to come by now. A new edition of Selected Poems from the Yale University Press, translated by Khaled Mattawa, pays homage to Hazo’s earlier compilations by trying not to cover the same ground, easy enough to do with a poet who has written so much. This gives us a broader reading of the poet’s work, but makes it a little difficult to triangulate by different versions in English to a sense of the original.

There is a lot of ground to cover. Adonis, born Ali Ahmad Sa’id Esber in Syria on the cusp of 1929 and 1930, actively writing poetry, prose and criticism since he was a teen-ager, and still living and writing in Paris, has influenced contemporary Arabic poetics since the 1950s and dominated their discussion and practice since the 1970s. He has been compared to both Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot in his modernist sensibility and influence — perhaps both in one person makes a better comparison.

Selected Poems provides for English-language readers (the original Arabic poems are not included) excerpts from most of his publications beginning with First Poems (1957) through Printer of the Planets’ Books (2008). Mattawa’s comprehensive introduction explains his choices and his omissions, as well as the sweep and significance of the poet’s life and work. It includes a discussion of the impact his critical writings have had on the development of Arabic-language poetry and Arab culture: “[Adonis] argues that a revolution in the arts and in how they are received can generate imaginative strategies at all levels of society. Arabic poetry, he believes, has the responsibility of igniting this mental overhaul in Arab culture. It should not be used to advocate political policies that do not touch the root of Arab cultural stagnation.” As Adonis wrote in 1987,

No, I have no country
except for these clouds rising as a mist from lakes of poetry.
. . . my language, my home —
I hang you like a charm around the throat of this era
and explode my passions in your name
not because you are a temple
not because your are my father or mother
but because I dream of laughter, and I weep through you
so that I translate my insides . . .

(“Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter”)

Adonis -- His verse contains multitudes.

A poet so wedded to his language must inevitably suffer somewhat in translation, but the agonies are not apparent and the English is persuasive. Mattawa brings Adonis across straightforward and refreshingly de-orientalized. Where Lena Jayyusi and John Heath-Stubbs in Modern Arabic Poetry had translated: “A king, this is Mihyar, / He dwells in the / kingdom of the winds /and reigns in the land of secrets,” Mattawa gives us more simply: “King Mihyar / lives in the dominion of the wind / and rules over a land of secrets.” Whether “lives” and “rules” reflect Adonis’s Arabic diction better than “dwells” and “reigns” I don’t know enough to say, but Matawa’s verbs do less to feed stereotypical evocations of West Asian verse from the days of Burton and Fitzgerald. “Dominion” may give us pause, but “in the dominion of the wind” is as high-mannered a sound as we get.

Songs of Mihyar of Damascus, which came out in 1961, is considered Adonis’s turning point to full maturity. The persona of King Mihyar comes before us like the avatar of a Hindu deity, an epic mystic or a prophet for whom all the personal pronouns are interchangeable:

I came to you from an earth without sky
filled with God and the abyss,
winged with eagles and gales,
barraging, thrusting sand
into the caverns of seeds,
bowing to the coming clouds.

(“Thunderbolt”)

By 1965′s Migrations and Transformations in the Regions of Night and Day, the voice has turned more intimate and more contemplative: “I have become a mirror. / I have reflected everything.” (“Tree of the East”), and Adonis’s 1968 book is all Stages and Mirrors, but with geography and history asserting themselves more directly:

Everything stretches in history’s tunnel….
I turn this map around,
for the world is all burned up:
East and West, a heap
of ash gathered
in the self-same grave.

(“West and East”)

“My country” (that will seem to be spurned in the 1987 poem quoted above — does Adonis contradict himself? He contains multitudes) has a more conscious character in following poems. It “runs behind me like a river of blood” and is “this spark, this lightning in the darkness of the time that remains”
Singular in a Plural Form (1975) explodes language and form (if we can trust the translation) into one long Song of Songs

Shall I separate myself from myself?
Shall I mate with it Is mat
ing a moment of singularity or doubl
ing? Shall I take up another face? and wh
at does a body do that is spotted with wounds that do not he
al?

that admits explicitly (as Solomon did not) mortality: “And man, I say in your name: / I am water playing with water.”

And so it goes, for another thirty years, love and death, prophecy and cosmic citizenship, an interweaving of Arabic and European mythology, and that questioning of art that is art:

And you, poetry,
will you continue your gifts, taking us to coincidences,
states where we see again people, creations, things, impulses,
abundane, diversity, uniqueness,
the wakefulness of nature and the insomnia of matter?

(“Concerto for 11th/September/2001 B. C.”)

The margin of this review is too small to contain it all. The remarkable proof of Adonis’s poetry is in the reading, and Mattawa’s Selected Poems gives the anglophone world a nutritious and flavorful taste.

=============================================================

J. Kates is a poet and literary translator who lives in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire. He helps run Zephyr Press.

The Weekend, by Bernhard Schlink. Translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside. Pantheon; 215 pages; $24.95

Reviewed by Christopher M. Ohge

Following in the footsteps of the mega-bestselling The Reader (1995), Bernhard Schlink‘s novel, The Weekend, offers another portrait of contemporary German guilt, ethical exploration, and erotic compulsion. The sister of recently-pardoned terrorist arranges a get-together in her country home with the hope that Jörg will re-engage in the “social contract” amid the tranquil setting with former friends and comrades. The obligatory revelations and confessions follow, enlivened by some clever plot twists and asides that occasionally make the book engaging. Still, the artlessness of Schlink’s prose (at least in Shaun Whiteside’s translation) flattens the story’s characters and potentially fascinating debates about action and inaction in today’s Germany.

In terms of history, the novel will be somewhat opaque, at least for some American readers. To appreciate the moral intricacy of Schlink’s story, one has to be more familiar with the political turmoil resulting from the terrorists actions of the leftist Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) in 1970s West Germany.

Born during the non-violent student protests of the 1960s, the RAF became a political target of the German authorities by initially staging protests, then bombing right-wing or capitalist institutions, and eventually assassinating government officials. In an effort to crush the RAF, the country’s much-beloved President Willy Brandt passed anti-terrorist legislation that, for a time, trampled on the civil liberties of West German citizens. To combat these (perceived) authoritarian measures, the RAF escalated the violence in its succeeding iterations. In all, it is a complicated, fascinating story of power politics in the age of terrorism (sound familiar?).

Thus Schlink’s novel has fascinating history and issues to deal with, and the book begins with promising discussions about Jörg and the past among the weekenders. They belong to a generation whose parents “conformed and shirked resistance.” So, to counter the passivity that led to the rise of the Nazis, revolutionaries like Jörg and his comrades believe they were forced to fight a state that was becoming authoritarian (the RAF’s standard justification for violence).

Schlink wants to convey the powerful guilt that the German people still feel after World War II, how they are still rightly disturbed by displays of nationalism and religiosity under the banners of truth and justice. While one of the visitors, Karin the bishop, suggests danger in the relativistic idea that “Time and time again in history truths have been imposed successfully—right truths as well as wrong ones,” the narrator makes it seem as if “there are as many truths as people freely living their lives.” This illustrates how the lack of a coherent national purpose complicates the actions driven by lofty proclamations of idealism.

Author Bernhard Schlink -- His novel is fascinated by the power of resignation.

Quickly, however, it becomes clear that former comrades-in-arms have bought into the conventional thinking. Most, despite their reluctance in seeing Jörg, use the opportunity to sort out old scores with him. Worse, Jörg’s defense comes off as unimpressive and rather insipid. Ultimately, Schlink admires the former revolutionaries for slogging through the mechanisms—also aptly called, “small successes”—of daily bourgeois life. In the end, when the weekenders bail water out of the cellar, their “spectacle of collaboration” trumps the revolutionary proselytizing.

The awkwardness of Schlink’s writing compounds the story’s lack of intellectual and dramatic tension. The rain is always “rustling” in this book: there’s the “rustle of the rain,” “the rain rustled,” and so on—sometimes twice in the span of two pages, and a couple of instances in the same paragraph. Schlink even creates water-logged romance: “Ulrich held his wife in his arms until the rustle of the rain reached their hearts. Then they too made love.” Rustling love?

The leftists attending The Weekend are also cliches. Marko, the lone archetypal radical in the house, spouts uninspiring rhetoric about “the revolution,” including rants about joining “forces with our Muslim comrades” to “fight the system.” It may be an example of Schlink’s ironic jab at the far Left, but Ilse’s jottings in her notebook about her novel-in-progress about a German terrorist and 9/11 are cringe-worthy: “It had been emotional, emotional and gooey. Now Jan felt as if he and the woman were dancing a perfect dance in bright, cold light. What purity of pleasure, and again: what rush of freedom!”

Schlink’s most interesting observations are on the nature of German resignation to the way things are. One character posits that “we live in exile. What we were and wanted to remain and were perhaps destined to become, we lose. Instead we find something else.” The problem is that his figures have no counterculture juice left in them, except for Marko, who is an emotionally overwrought half-wit. Jörg should have been a flawed pillar of rebellion, but he comes off as a failed father battered by defeat.

Thus the novel is a sedate testament to giving up by giving in. Jörg is reconciled to his exile from idealism, like everyone else. And while The Weekend underscores the continuing tensions between Ossies and Wessies, the novel ends just as it began — disinterested in political solutions, reconciled to living in a society raising generations that are content to be disenchanted, guilt-ridden, and terrorized by specters of the past.

As one of the judges (fiction division) for the Best Translated Book Awards, organized by Three Percent, a resource for international literature at the University of Rochester, I am posting the 25 book long list of the finalists for the 2011 fiction prize for listeners and readers of The World to comment on, augment, and generally kick around. The point of the BTBA is not simply to recognized high merit (in fiction and poetry), but to expand the consciousness of the reading public. This is one of the few prizes in the country that honors original works in translation; at the very least, it should stimulate conversation about the importance (and neglect) of literature in translation.

Selection criteria include the quality of the work itself, along with the quality of the translation. All original translations (not retranslations or reprints) published between December 1, 2009, and November 30, 2010, were eligible. World Books has covered three of volumes on the list. There are reviews of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation and David Grossman’s To the End of the Land. And I spoke to Per Petterson for a World Books podcast about his novel I Curse the River of Time.

Founded in 2007, the BTBA have grown from humble online proclamations of support to an awards ceremony and a $5,000 cash prize—awarded to each winning author and translator, thanks to the support of Amazon.com.

The 10-title fiction shortlist will be announced on Thursday, March 24th, concurrent with the announcement of the finalists for the poetry award. Winners will be announced on April 29th in New York City, as part of the PEN World Voices Festival.

This year’s set of august judges consists of Monica Carter (Salonica), Scott Esposito (Conversational Reading and Center for the Art of Translation), Susan Harris (Words Without Borders), Annie Janusch (Translation Review), Matthew Jakubowski (writer & critic), Brandon Kennedy (bookseller/cataloger), Michael Orthofer (Complete Review), and Jeff Waxman (Seminary Co-op and The Front Table).

Below is the list. I will start off the invitation to comment with a few observations: I found the humor of César Aira’s The Literary Conference strained — the volume seems far from his indelibly weird best, such as An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter or How I Became a Nun. Anyone agree? And Javier Marías’s Bad Nature, or with Elvis in Mexico is an amusing doodle, but it doesn’t come close to the three volumes of postmodern-noir splendor in his Your Face Tomorrow trilogy. Of the two Albert Cossery books on the list, A Splendid Conspiracy seems to me to the superior work from the patron saint of poetic indolence.

What Do You Think? Feel free share your in enthusiasm and reservations. Click here

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The 2011 BTBA Fiction Longlist (in alphabetical order by author):

The Literary Conference by César Aira.
Translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver.
(New Directions)

The Golden Age by Michal Ajvaz.
Translated from the Czech by Andrew Oakland.
(Dalkey Archive)

The Rest Is Jungle & Other Stories by Mario Benedetti.
Translated from the Spanish by Harry Morales.
(Host Publications)

A Life on Paper by Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud.
Translated from the French by Edward Gauvin.
(Small Beer)

A Jew Must Die by Jacques Chessex.
Translated from the French by Donald Wilson.
(Bitter Lemon)

A Splendid Conspiracy by Albert Cossery.
Translated from the French by Alyson Waters.
(New Directions)

The Jokers by Albert Cossery.
Translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis.
(New York Review Books)

Eline Vere by Louis Couperus.
Translated from the Dutch by Ina Rilke.
(Archipelago)

Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck.
Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky.
(New Directions)

The Blindness of the Heart by Julia Franck.
Translated from the German by Anthea Bell.
(Grove)

Hocus Bogus by Romain Gary (writing as Émile Ajar).
Translated from the French by David Bellos.
(Yale University Press)

To the End of the Land by David Grossman.
Translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen.
(Knopf)

The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson.
Translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal.
(New York Review Books)

The Clash of Images by Abdelfattah Kilito.
Translated from the French by Robyn Creswell.
(New Directions)

Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico by Javier Marías.
Translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen.
(New Directions)

Cyclops by Ranko Marinković.
Translated from the Croatian by Vlada Stojiljković,
edited by Ellen Elias-Bursać.
(Yale University Press)

Hygiene and the Assassin by Amélie Nothomb.
Translated from the French by Alison Anderson.
(Europa Editions)

I Curse the River of Time by Per Petterson.
Translated from the Norwegian by
Charlotte Barslund and the author.
(Graywolf Press)

A Thousand Peaceful Cities by Jerzy Pilch.
Translated from the Polish by David Frick.
(Open Letter)

Touch by Adania Shibli.
Translated from the Arabic by Paula Haydar.
(Clockroot)

The Black Minutes by Martin Solares.
Translated from the Spanish by
Aura Estrada and John Pluecker.
(Grove/Black Cat)

On Elegance While Sleeping by Emilio Lascano Tegui.
Translated from the Spanish by Idra Novey.
(Dalkey Archive)

Agaat by Marlene Van Niekerk.
Translated from the Afrikaans by Michiel Heyns.
(Tin House)

Microscripts by Robert Walser.
Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky.
(New Directions)

Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer by Ernst Weiss.
Translated from the German by Joel Rotenberg.
(Archipelago)

Modern Poetry of Pakistan, edited by Iftikhar Arif and Waqas Khwaja, Dalkey Archive Press, 2010, 298 pp, $16.95

Reviewed by J. Kates

A few years ago, Dana Gioia, then chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, conceived an ambitious international plan, engaging other countries in projects of reciprocal anthologies of contemporary writing. The pieces were to be chosen by editors within the writers’ own culture, then handed over to translation editors and translators in the receiving culture. The project began in a collaboration with Mexico. Here follows a backstage disclosure: I became involved with the second volume, of Russian poetry. The process, I can testify, was risky, laborious and bureaucratic, the results interesting and uneven — but ultimately enriching the American side of the bargain.

The book under review here, Modern Poetry of Pakistan, published by the same publisher as Contemporary Russian Poetry, comes at the tail end of the project. It is clear that ambitions have been lowered, expectations diminished — but not to the point of losing all value. This new collection is no longer bilingual, as the earlier ones were; and it lacks the immediacy of contemporaneity; more than half the contributors are dead, some as long ago as the 1970s — the oldest poet born in 1877, the youngest in 1966 — a span of almost a century of writing. (By way of contrast, all the Russian poets were born after World War II.)

We as a culture know so little of the poetry of the rest of the world that all literary news is urgent and enlightening. The only questions are, how much, and in what ways? I come to Modern Poetry of Pakistan as most readers will, and are meant to, not as an expert in south Asian poetry, but as a curious outsider who knows very little about it, looking for an introduction. We find one hundred forty-eight poems by forty-four poets who have written in seven languages. The multiplicity of languages alone tells us much about where these poems are coming from, and might lead us to expect a wide diversity of verse.

The originating editor, Iftikhar Arif, seems to have drawn from a narrow aesthetic. It’s uncertain how representative this is. Has there really been so little experimentation in Pakistani poetry? No cross-fertilization from dynamic schools of writing outside the received tradition? The editor is to be commended for letting eleven women’s voices be heard among the forty-four, but none of the women included speaks distinctively as a woman, and most of the poems feel traditional in form and content. Although the younger poets — they are presented chronologically by birth — loosen up considerably, the tone echoes older diction. “Every loss conceals a victory, / your lap will bloom with flowers. / Lose everything in love and see,” written by Pushpa Vallabh (b. 1963) in Sindhi, and translated by Azmat Ansari and the translation editor Waqas Khwaja, does not sound all that different in register or language from “A thousand obstacles at every step, neither love’s company nor reason’s counsel. / It is hard to keep a steady step, for the feet find no footing on the ground, ” by Hafeez Jalandhari (b. 1923) translated from Urdu by Khurram Khurshid and the editor.

Indeed, “Persian poetry and its conventions are very often the source and inspiration” of the verse in Modern Poetry of Pakistan, according to the introduction written by Khwaja, and by far the most common single form represented in the book is the ghazal, with eighteen pieces explicitly labeled as such, and a few others looking suspiciously similar in form. Poems called ghazals are translated here in varying ways, more or less consistent with strict expectation. Nazir Kazmi’s “Ghazal: Bearing Hints of Bygone Days” appears in quatrains without any rhyme or repetition in the English of Mehr Afshan Farooqi — it would be useful to know if this deviation exists in the original Urdu or not, but the notes that supply helpful references for Qur’anic, historical, mythic, and other cultural allusions don’t enlighten us here.

Pakistani poet and editor Iftikhar Arif

There are fifteen translators among the seven languages, most working in collaboration. This does not help a reader appreciate the variety of voices of the original poets. Does Pakistani poetry of seven different languages over nearly a century really maintain such an evenness of tone and level of diction as a first reading through of this book provides? Admittedly, any different culture looks homogeneous at first glance, and only familiarity discerns difference. Admittedly, accomplished translators from these various languages may be harder to find than those from Spanish or Russian, but there are ways to include others that the editor has not, apparently, attempted. And there are odd discrepancies. When we read in Fahmida Riaz’s biographical note that “she has given great thought to . . . choosing a rustic diction for its familiarity rather than employing a more formal Persianized expression” this is useful information that might be reflected in a translation, but “If my life be spared, / I would with folded hands point out, / O noble master, / that in your perfumed chamber lies like a corpse, / decomposing” (translated from Urdu by Yasmeen Hameed) hardly bears this out.

In all, Modern Poetry of Pakistan smacks of the editors’ having taken the bland, easy way out at almost every stage. It takes second, third, closer readings to discern individuality among the poets, and there are several lovely and powerful poems that emerge from such close reading, poems of love and politics and of faith — not the mere journal entries of so much Western verse. It is remarkable how many of these poems turn on questions. Ata Shad’s “Traveler,” translated from Balochi by Azmat Ansari and Khwaja, invites the reader to

step into my heart —

the earth is burning.

Why do you turn your face from one who gave you sanctuary?

Are you sure you understand what you are doing?

Despite our eyes, we are blind,

the heart is far removed. . . .

Traveler,

step into my heart,

The whole earth is on fire.

However limited Modern Poetry of Pakistan may be as a broad cultural introduction to a contemporary scene, it does help us to step into more than one Pakistani heart.

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J. Kates is a poet and literary translator who lives in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire. He helps run Zephyr Press.

By Helen Epstein

Author Heda Kovaly in Prague, 2000

Readers of last Saturday’s New York Times found a remarkable story on the obituary page: the eyewitness account of a twentieth-century life by a Central European, literary woman who survived both Hitler and Stalin.

I met Heda Kovaly in 1985 through a mutual friend, Wellesley history professor Jerry Auerbach, who knew her from the Harvard Law Library where she was a beloved resource for hundreds of students and professors.

Like Heda, I was born in Prague. Like my mother, Heda had been deported from that city during the Nazi Occupation, survived the camps, and returned to Czechoslovakia. Like my mother, she hoped that the worst part of her life was over and that she could start afresh.

Then came the Communist putsch of February 1948. Unlike my parents who were able to bundle me up and get to the United States that summer, Heda remained in Prague. Her husband became a member of the Communist government until that government turned to a series of Stalinist show trials. Rudolf Margolius became one of the 11 Jews hanged after the infamous Rudolf Slánský trial.

Our mutual friend thought we should meet and so we did. Heda had written an account of her life in Prague until 1968 in Czech. As Andre Orzoff wrote in a review, “Kovaly’s moving story was first published twenty years ago, in the shadow of the Prague Spring. Initially, Kovaly’s book served only as an extended pro-logue to a philosophical treatise on the events of 1968 by emigre philosopher Erazim Kohak. In an unsuccessful attempt to make these two texts more parallel, Kovaly’s work was given the same chapter headings and subheadings as Kohak’s: an artificial and un- wieldy division of Kovaly’s tense, sparely told story. ”

Author and Heda Kovaly in Cambridge, 1989

Alfred Kazin, reviewing the English-language edition for the New York Times Book Review in 1973, noted the imbalance in the volume. His review all but ignored the treatise, commenting that “[Kohak’s] chapers are rational, sensible and intellectually admirable without touching the heart. Heda Kovaly’s chapters are the burning facts.”

I agreed and agreed as well to work with Heda on a new translation, in fact a new version, of her memoir. I was not a translator, but I was pregnant with my first child and unable, I then thought, to generate any more creation of my own.

Translating what became Under a Cruel Star was a labor of love as well as a work of feminism. There were few memoirs around of a life that spanned Nazism and Stalinism. None was written by a woman. And there was another subtext: I had grown up in New York City, among children of black-listed Communists who were using the same survival strategies that Heda used in Czechoslovakia.

Working with Heda was not a piece of cake. She was an accomplished translator with a long bibliography of credits to her name. She was also a woman of the Zsa Zsa Gabor generation—petite, elegant, flirtatious, and self-effacing, insisting that I drop my feminist ideas and recognize my husband for the saint she thought him to be.

I, often despite her, was engaged in the project of writing women back into history, improving my Czech, and learning about the fate I’d so narrowly escaped when my father declared that the Communists were Nazis in a different colored uniform and got us out of Prague in 1948.

Heda and I translated her work at our dining room table. A year later, my husband and I published it ourselves and wrapped 6,000 copies in mailers at that table. Then we hit the phones, got people to read it, and were able to interest Anthony Lewis in reviewing it. It was his review that helped sell the book to Penguin in the U.S. and many publishers abroad.

Critic Clive James called it “necessary” reading, and over the years Under A Cruel Star has been adopted as a university text in international relations and European history as well as in memoir courses. It has been inspiration to readers everywhere but particularly, after the Velvet Revolution, to those in her beloved Prague.

Heda returned to live there in 1996. Although she spent nearly three decades in the Boston area and made several deep friendships here, she never stopped missing her home. She was able to live in a beautiful apartment near the center of town and to walk the streets she had walked as a girl.

May her memory be a blessing. May her book continue to inspire readers and writers.

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Helen Epstein has written a biography of Joe Papp. Her translation of Heda Kovaly’s memoir of Stalinism, Under A Cruel Star, is also available on amazon.com.

The Wrong Blood by Manuel de Lope. Translated from the Spanish by john Cullen. Other Press, 288 pages, $14.95.

Reviewed by Mónica Szurmuk

The Wrong Blood is a mistranslation of the original title of Manuel de Lope´s 2000 novel La sangre ajena,  first published in Spain. In Spanish, “Ajena” means “not mine,” and metaphorically applies to what is foreign; it does not carry the suggestion of error in the word “wrong.” This linguistic point is significant because the novel deals precisely and concretely with what one claims as one’s own, and what one rejects as “other.” In the case of blood, this becomes eerily suggestive: how do we decide what is our blood?, how do we define blood relations and animosities? In this superb novel, blood refers to the way families are built and preserved as well as to the bloodbath of civil war.

Like many recent literary works published in Spain, The Wrong Blood deals with the Spanish Civil War, a conflict that lasted three years (1936-1939) and claimed the lives of half a million Spaniards. It also inaugurated forty years of tyrannical rule by Francisco Franco, and plunged Spain into a period of obscurantism and violence. The recent interest in revisiting the Civil War is fueled by the boom in oral history studies as well as recent trials of Spanish military personnel in human rights violations during the 1970s in Latin America.

Unlike the political terror in those countries, Spain’s dictatorship lasted almost half a century: two generations of Spaniards grew up without a public acknowledgment of what happened during the War. Reconciliation and memory came late; the reverberations continue to haunt the present. The recent granting of the prestigious Comillas Prize in biography and history by Tusquets Publishers to A cambio del olvido by Jon Juaristi and Marina Pino, a memoir of the authors´families history during the Spanish Republic and the Civil War, attest to the resonance of the historical trauma in Spanish society.

The Wrong Blood focuses on the lasting effect of the Civil War on the lives of two women whose lives are marked by the war: Isabel is widowed, María Antonia is raped. A succession of events that I will not reveal ties their lives together, and blends their blood. Set in the monumental landscape of the Basque Republic, close to the French border, the novel shows that, living in isolation, the women construct a life for themselves, making the best of their losses during the Civil War. Their secret is shared by a country doctor who lives next door and was spared participation in the War because of a crippling accident.

In the novel’s vision of the present, Isabel’s grandson joins María Antonia and the country doctor in Hondarribia, the estate that Isabel has bequeathed to María Antonia. He arrives from Madrid to study for his notary public certification, and in spite of his interactions with María Antonia and the doctor, returns to Madrid with little awareness of the secrets that bind together the women of Hondarribia.

Spanish writer Manuel De Lope: his novel explores the ambiguities of memory.

The presence of blood in the novel is prominent, yet mercifully there are no graphic descriptions of the cruelty of war. Instead, we are privy to the personal thoughts of those who experience the violence first-hand. The memories of a “red” captain who, in the moments before he is executed, remembers the wet footsteps of his wife on the floor of their honeymoon suite are paradigmatic of de Lope’s narrative and its determined focus on interiors. The writer is fascinated by both the interior spaces of houses and the subjective worlds of his characters. As he is dying, the captain painfully recalls his honeymoon: ”… there was something exceptionally painful in recalling it, like an excess of pleasure whose absence torments the mind.”

Nothing escapes the violence: the captain is killed in a schoolyard by a firing squad, his blood “now beating in (Isabel)’s womb.” His wife receives two of his letters as well as knick knacks of his life on earth:

The letters arrived, the first because it had been deposited in a box in the main post office and because of the absurdly good postal service, which continued even in the darkest moments of the rebellion, and the second because it was delivered after the captain’s execution with his belongings, that is a watch, a souvenir of Loyola, a hip flask, and some other knickknacks of the kind that the executed always seem to have about them, but not including his field glasses, which had been confiscated as military equipment.

The novel focuses on how the imagination builds our sense of the past, limning the passionate ambiguity of remembering. “There could be no greater misfortune, no greater solitude” de Lope writes, “than memory.” Balancing the domestic and the tragic, The Wrong Blood explores the ways in which political history and personal histories intertwine: it is an invaluable reminder of how, in the midst of war, love and continuity preserve potential for a richer life despite what seems to be utter disaster.

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Mónica Szurmuk is Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Instituto Mora in Mexico City. She is the author of “Mujeres en viaje: escritos y testimonios,” “Women in Argentina, Early Travel Narratives,” “Memoria y ciudadanía,” and co-editor of the “Diccionario de estudios culturales latinoamericanos.”

My Prizes: An Accounting by Thomas Bernhard. Translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway. Knopf, 129 pages, $22.

Reviewed by Bill Marx

Understandably, little has been written about the dismal science of literary awards. With so much power and prestige at stake, writers and judges (often interchangeable groups) are wary of talking about the sausage-making means, focusing instead on the headline-grabbing ends (establishing literary standards, honoring worthy work, enlarging the readership for first-rate fiction and non-fiction). Here and there a book on the sociology of book awards turns up or someone examines their ‘soft’ culture power, such as Julia Lowell’s informative study about China’s government-fueled campaign to win the Nobel Prize in literature for its approved candidates. (Expatriate rebel Gao Xingjian was an ugly surprise for the country’s honchos.)

Incisive looks into the absurd machinery of awards — the compromises, hypocrisies, double-dealing, and plain old incompetence — are rare, perhaps because those involved generally accept that, for the sake of sales and credibility, the backstage doings must not be booted about in public. (Of course, gossip about the inside wheeling-and-dealing flies hither and yon.) Awards are the epitome of the consumer guide mentality – the premise is that the best volumes are selected by authorities for those who don’t have the time or expertise to evaluate what to read. The elemental problem is that a committee, always stuffed with too many cooks, inevitably serves up bland and safe fare — after all, a spice-less winner has to satisfy the majority of the panel’s tastes. And when the majority has its condescending idea of how the “popular” palate can be elevated, the outcome — cultural pablum — is predictable.

Writer Thomas Bernhard -- He chomps on the hand that feeds him.

One of the few writers to look seriously at book awards is novelist William H. Gass, whose essay “Pulitzer: The People’s Prize” in his collection Finding a Form does a fine job dealing with the game of marketing “quality,” excoriating “the critics and customers” who year after year treat the Pulitzer goings-on as if they were about recognizing genuine merit. He comes to this stinging conclusion:

Because we have a large, affluent, mildly educated middle class that has fundamentally the same tastes as the popular culture it grew up with, yet with pretensions to something more, something higher, something better suited to its half-opened eyes and spongy mind, there is a large industry of artists, academics, critics, and publicists eager to serve it — lean cuisine, if that’s the thing — and the Pulitzer is ready with its rewards.

Add to the near-empty shelf of books dedicated to exposing the award-giving industrial complex Thomas Bernhard’s My Prizes: An Accounting, an amusingly acidic polemic whose vat of vitriol, tossed at the well-heeled complicity of the intelligentsia and the state, makes Gass’s jab at the Pulitzer look positively pollyannish.

A brilliant, misanthropic (in the Swiftian tradition) and self-consciously difficult writer, Bernhard waged war against what he saw as the corrupt, anti-Semitic ethos of postwar Austrian society. For him, Austrians never accepted their Nazi past, and he was determined to rub their noses in this repression. His talent was undeniable, so the authorities, for the sake of pumping up civic pride, would give Bernhard awards for his work, especially early on in his career.

The prizes, at least from Austria, eventually stopped coming because Bernhard was not like the imperious Jean-Paul Sartre, who just didn’t show up to accept his 1964 Nobel Prize for literature. Bernhard accepted the awards, often delivering at the ceremony a short speech that left the powers-that-be sputtering in anger. His speech at receiving the Austrian State Prize had the politicos shaking their fists in his face and racing out of the room:

The state is a construct eternally on the verge of foundering, the people one that is endless condemned to infamy and feeblemindedness, life a state of hopelessness in every philosophy and which will end in universal madness.
We’re Austrian, we’re apathetic, our lives evince the barest disinterest in life, in the workings of nature we represent the future as megalomania.

Call it anarchistic boorishness, an artist chomping on the hand that feeds him. But at least Bernhard is honest about why he welcomes the awards — he needs the money, especially because the amounts, given European largess to its culture-makers, are considerable. He admits he is as vile as those handing out the lucre: “I despised the people who were giving the prizes but I didn’t strictly refuse the prizes themselves. It was all offensive, but I found myself the most offensive of all. I hated the ceremonies but I took part in them, I hated the prize-givers but I took their money.” Many writers share the sentiment — few would be so forthright to admit it.

Once established as a writer of international stature, Bernhard donated award cash to charity, but he eventually decided not to accept any more prizes. Of course, by that time official recognition in Austria was no longer an issue: the premieres of Bernhard’s plays, such as Heldenplatz, which was recently staged in London, were often greeted by protests, boos, and denunciations by outraged critics and officials.

Whispers of Nazism ... Barbara Marten as the housekeeper and Hannah Boyde as the maid in the recent Arcola Theatre production of HELDENPLATZ. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Smoothly translated by Carol Brown Janeway, My Prizes is made up of two sections: in the heftier part of the short book Bernhard reminiscences about awards and ceremonies: the shorter section contains the speeches. The set-up makes effective use of Bernhard’s brilliance as a farceur, his bile-ish wit. As a writer, Bernhard drives Ibsen’s Enemy of the People to absurd extremes: the demented and much-abused truth-giver goes so over-the-top he becomes a feral clown, a quixotic madman.

One prize gives him enough cash to put a down payment on house: there is nothing quite like going house-hunting with Bernhard. He buys the first rural cottage a real estate agent shows him, a money-pit of a wreck with rotting floorboards and piles of rat feces. Another prize gives him the dough to buy a chic English sports car, a vehicle Bernhard totals, barely surviving the collision, during a jaunt in Hungary. The sardonic point appears to be that the money may be tainted — it only brings more black comic misery.

Not all the awards are greeted with disdain. Bernhard’s moving description of winning The Literary Prize of the Federal Chamber of Commerce is as close as the ornery writer comes to sentimentality. He won the award for a volume in his autobiography (superb, and entitled Gathering Evidence in English) where he describes his time as a very young man working as an apprentice salesman. That the prize could be seen as more as a homage to him as a worker than a writer tickled Bernhard. Closer to the bone, Bernhard receives the award from a man who knew and admired the author’s beloved grandfather, a man who, the author learns, has been diagnosed with cancer and only has weeks to live. On the jaundiced side, Bernhard in another piece describes being a judge on a book award panel in which a fellow judge manipulates anti-Semitic sentiments in order to have his favorite win the award.

For many, Bernhard is a challenging read, given his rich screed-of-consciousness prose style: his paragraphs are long, their punctuation scarce. But My Prizes, published in 1980, nine years before the writer’s death, adds another memorable twist to Bernhard’s visionary rictus.

Jenny Erpenbeck's new book Visitation explores decades of German history.

Visitation, by Jenny Erpenbeck. Translation from the German by Susan Bernofsky, 151 pages, New Directions, $14.95

Reviewed by Christopher M. Ohge

That Jenny Erpenbeck’s latest novel, Visitation, is ambitious is unmistakable, for it is undeniably difficult and precisely crafted. Following in the footsteps of T.S. Eliot, who suggested that in such a difficult world we should appreciate and study difficult literature, I think it a moot point as to whether the novel ultimately succeeds in its being difficult.

Is it difficult for difficulty’s sake?  Or is the challenge created for an artistic purpose? After finishing this novel I have to admit my own ambivalence, not based on, admittedly, the book’s philosophical import, but because of the way it reads.

Better described as a series of vignettes, the novel initially plays at the edge of chaos, which makes it very hard to follow early on. This is not a book to read quickly for an entertaining plot, nor is it one to appreciate for its initial lucidity. Yet the frustration is often counterbalanced by a glimpse into the author’s pensive vision of history and nationhood. As we move through Visitation‘s multiple perspectives, captivating moments, examples of poetic prose, provide a cathartic payoff to slogging through the initial confusion.

Erpenbeck’s view of history is part of an intellectual tradition evoked by Samuel Johnson’s pithy line—“patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”—as well as that of German intellectuals who warned about the dangers of nationalism, from Goethe’s assertion “Patriotism ruins history” to Nietzsche’s condemnation of Wagner.

Jenny Erpenbeck -- She supplies a pensive vision of history and nationhood.

Germany’s citizens are sensitive to overt displays of national pride reinforced today by memories of nationalism-gone-wrong during the two World Wars. Keeping this caution in mind, Erpenbeck presents two inescapable verities: people—their dwellings, and the regimes that rule over them—come and go; nature transforms but remains. The title (Heimsuchung) also suggests some uneasiness; in German it also means “infestation” or “plague” upon something. What exactly is being visited upon, and is the visitation connoting an infestation?

Set at what one character aptly calls “this one particular bit of earth located not terribly far from Berlin” in a single modest house located on a lake in the Brandenburg woods (note: to the east of Berlin). An intriguing prologue about how the lake was formed over tens of thousands of years from glaciers provides a prehistoric frame for the main story, which begins sometime in the early 20th century and follows generations of dwellers in the house who experience major changes from Nazi Germany to the end of the GDR. Each chapter jumps back and forth through time, focusing on a particular perspective, individual or collective, such as a single person (like The Gardener) or a small family (Wealthy Farmer and his Children).

The premise is promising, but the first third of the book seems like erratic, abstract episodes with underdeveloped characters about whom we care very little. Paragraphs jump from vague descriptions of banal activities and social mores to even vaguer commentaries on non-events. At the Architect and his wife’s dinner parties “they all laugh and laugh, another beer, another glass of wine, oh yes, not for me, thank you, maybe just a glass of seltzer. In this way the architect and his wife pass the time on many evenings both for themselves and for their guests.”

Either Erpenbeck is guilty of ostentatiously obscure writing, or the translator, Susan Bernofsky, has done the prose some disservice. For example, the long strings of relative clauses (correct in German, but simply a run-on sentence in English) in this paragraph. They not only reflect brazenly strange writing, but also the translator’s decision to keep the German grammar: “Locks the toolshed, the golden spoon lure he once fished with dangling from the key, … rinses his hands in the bathroom, two hours from now he’ll be sitting in the S-Bahn to West Berlin, his fingernails still rimmed black with dirt, he draws the crank…” The use of repetition to weave the pieces of the story together also becomes stylistically self-defeating: “the chief mogul, who was really the chief consul.” What is the use of being told the same thing twice?

Yet, if you wade through what seems like the intentionally clunky prose of the first third, then you will discover the author connects the diffuse images and characters. You become intrigued by the erratic nature of the prose and some of the narrative begins to make sense.

One particular moment, which is indeed one of the first indicators of better prose to come, involves the first appearance of “The Girl.” This chapter illustrates how each paragraph in each chapter presents a different point in time. The randomness begins to assume order as we learn that this girl is Doris, the niece of Ludwig (the cloth manufacturer from an earlier chapter). It becomes clear that she is in a Nazi-occupied ghetto, where she is alone, hiding, and facing starvation.

It is here that Erpenbeck evokes the philosophical underpinning of the novel:

“None of the people who once knew who she was knows any longer that she is here. This is what makes the transition so insignificant. Step by step she has made her way to this place, almost to the end, in other words, her path must have a beginning, and at the point of this beginning she must have been separated from life by as insignificant a distance as now separates her from death.”

The emphasis on the insignificance of transience—and transition—underlies Visitation, which here powerfully conveys the purgatorial nature of many of its characters, who feel removed from life and death because those who knew them are either strangers, or are dead (a fact echoed when the narrator says toward the end that “Now, a lifetime too late, she is on her own”).

Capturing ordinary experience so eloquently, and glossing over quickly moments of death, even gruesome ones associated with the Holocaust, Erpenbeck exhibits a pastoral quality—not “elegiac,” as the blurb on the back cover would have it, but more akin to the modernist pastoral in Virginia Woolf’s novels (To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts in particular).

Rather than a family or whatever cluster of domestic relations, the house ends up being the story’s main character, and nature the prime mover. Accordingly, the house, the lake, and the woods are given the most descriptive passages.

Also, images concerning memory and ritual recur throughout the book, with a complexity that makes you want to re-read in order to retrace the treatments of, say, the ritual coin-collecting during a wedding procession, or the colored windows in the house overlooking the lake. Much of what seems odd at first eventually becomes clear in hindsight as the assortment of images eventually culminates in poignant scenes involving rape, murder, suicide, mental illness, political tumult, genocide, and foreign invasion.

The concluding infiltration targets the rotting house, which is summarily demolished after the “illegitimate owner” takes over the property. History seems to end once the house is torn down. Survival is found in the value of scattered bits of narrative centered on a speck of earth, where “Happiness grows out of disorder, just as infinity grows out of the finite lake.”

The Blind Owl by Saghegh Hedayat. Translated from the Farsi by D. P. Costello. Introduction by Porochista Khakpour. Grove Press, 146 pages, $14.

The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost by Kim Sok-pom. Translated from the Japanese, and with an Introduction by Cindi L. Textor. Columbia University Press, 144 pages, $24.50.

Reviewed by Bill Marx

Before talking about the artful complexity in The Blind Owl or the satiric playfulness in The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost, attention must be paid, especially during the Halloween season, to their memorable images of horror, from the macabre hallucinogenic visions that bedevil the narrators in Saghegh Hedayat’s haunting tale of mental meltdown to the waves of blood that surge through Kim Sok-pom’s disturbing send-up (?) of the tall tale, an exploration of the “living dead” anchored in the real-life brutality exercised by the South Korean government on an armed peasant uprising in the island of Cheju-do in 1948. Make no mistake about it – both books are more than a little scary, mainly because they bottle up Gothic energies rather than let them run wild.

In her introduction to The Blind Owl, contemporary novelist Prorochista Khakpour pays homage to the power of Hedayat’s novel, a cornerstone of contemporary Iranian literature that endures (since its serialization in 1941–1942) as both a critical and popular success, despite periodic censorship in Hedayat’s homeland. As a child, Khakpour wanted to read it badly, but her Iranian father refused to have it in the house, insisting that he would see to it that “she never got her hands on it …” because “it had caused many suicides in Iran after it was published. …. And, well, if you must know, the author also committed suicide.” Hedayat gassed himself to death in 1951; his masterpiece reflects a sensibility that doesn’t rebel against the solace of religion so much as finds it purely of aesthetic interest

Of course, when Khakpour became older she read the dangerous book. Surprisingly, given the build-up, The Blind Owl not only met her expectations but exceeded them. Not that the novel made her suicidal, though she found it disturbing. She saw that Hedayat treats madness with the wizardly acuity and finesse of Edgar Allan Poe. Khakpour mentions Franz Kafka as another influence on the book, but for me the book melds many of Poe’s central motifs –  solipsism edging into dementia, the decomposition of mind and body, the perverse attraction of self-destruction – with modernist techniques. The result is an intricate version of “A Tell Tale Heart” that’s set in a hall of mirrors.  Heydayat is the real missing artistic link, rather than the ghastly American H.P. Lovecraft, between Poe and the sophisticated psychological horror of today.

The Blind Owl is divided into two parts: in the first, a young opium-besotted narrator, who ekes out a living by illustrating pens, has a vision of a mysterious woman (“An angel of hell”) who embodies a delusive key to the universe: “One glance from her and mysteries and secrets would no longer have existed for me.” Her apparent demise sends her monomaniacal suitor, who at one point contemplates necrophilia, “falling into an infinite abyss in an everlasting night.”  The second half of the novel grows out of the the first half, but it features an older, much more aggressively insane narrator, also addicted to opium, obsessed with murdering his despised wife, whom he believes is unfaithful. As his body mysteriously decomposes, surreal  images and incidents  (such as that of men battling with cobras in pitch black rooms) return from the earlier section of the book, though in twisted or ‘reverse negative” form.

Through the intricate patterning, the exotic imagery, the creepy crawl to the inevitable act of violence, Heydayat elegantly conveys the most harrowing nightmares of the inner life: “The sensation of horror as usual aroused in me a feeling of exquisite, intoxicating pleasure which made my head swim and my knees give way and filled me with nausea.”  The Blind Owl, in D.P. Costello’s solid 1957 translation, lives up to its international reputation as an extraordinary depiction of the clotted spirit, the dissolute mind dedicated to constructing emblems of its fate, consciousness trapped in a self-made web of  love and hate, spirituality and degradation, pleasure and pain. If  the book leaves you shaken don’t blame me for putting it into your hands.

Kim Sok-Pom’s The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost, first published in 1970, also imagines a form of death-in-life, though the story’s folk tale approach, with its sardonic supernatural trappings, takes a more overtly political form, perhaps because it was written by a zainichi, “a permanent resident of Japan who is not of Japanese ancestry.” Kim was born in Japan; his Korean parents immigrated from the island of Cheju-do. The author chose to write in Japanese, but there is no mistaking his existential sense of humanity lost somewhere betwixt and between – between colonial subject and colonizer, human and inhuman,  heaven and hell. The book appears be an “inspiring” yarn of the marginal (perhaps in ghostly form) striking back at the tyrannical, but it consistently undercuts being a simple allegory of good versus evil, suggesting that sin has spread to the point that “heaven and earth are full of bitter spirits who keep screaming and searching for something…”

The book’s protagonist, a priest named Mandogi, is a physically strong but mentally limited man whose elemental religious belief, despite his sadistic mistreatment by the powerful, strengthens his sense of morality.  His instinctual inner life is governed by a simple piety that makes him easy to take advantage of and at times comical. Still, some find his humanity ironically threatening: “He had a habit of staring gently at people, his eyes glowing deeply like those of an innocent, unselfish child. People couldn’t stand his stare for long, but he didn’t know how else to look at them.” Yet Mandogi’s unearthly (Dostoyevskian?)  saintliness doesn’t restrain him from an act of violent revenge.

Iranian author Sadegh Hedaya: An heir to Edgar Allan Poe

Mandogi’s vengeance, triggered by the Four-Three Incident of 1948, is symptomatic of the heinous horrors taking place daily on Cheju-do. With the apparent complicity of the American government, the South Korean police and special forces are crushing an armed peasant revolt – perhaps controlled by communist sympathizers – with sadistic brutality. The authorities are burning villages, raping women, torturing anyone suspected of being a rebel. (“In our Republic of Korea,” boasts a police captain, “as long as you don’t agree with commie ideas,  you’re allowed to rape, steal, and murder.”) Compounding this vision of degradation, Kim includes a flashback to Mandogi’s bleak time as a work slave in a Japanese chromium mine. The predominate color of the latter part of the book is red, from images of conflagrations and subversive political “reds”  to scenes awash in blood (“In the blink of an eye, the  room has become a slaughterhouse, the room swelling with blood, filthy blood”).  Kim intimates that this is history’s horror show, scarlet crimes repressed deep in the crevices of Korean and Japanese memory.

This may make the book sound grim, but it isn’t. Kim balances, albeit clumsily, a number of emotional tones, from the fractured fairy tale doings of Mandogi’s life in the temple to his truly bizarre sexual encounters, instances of apocalyptic terror giving way to wry comedy, such as this amusing description of an officer struggling to record a prisoner’s forced confession: “This was the first time he was asked to write something down, and he couldn’t get the tip of his pen to touch down gently, as if it was a plane crash landing.” Translator Cindi L.Texor is generally up to the challenge, but sometimes her sentences leave the reader a bit baffled: ” The violent sound, which had emphasized the silence and reticence in the room, was resounding in its emptiness.”

The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost succeeds as a very dark black comedy, almost Swiftian in its ferocity. Even “ghosts,” such as the hapless Mandogi, have to rethink how they go about frightening flesh-and-blood targets who have been coarsened by unspeakable atrocities: “On this island, where the victims of untimely deaths are piled high, all the way to the heavens, perhaps it could be said that the ghosts have had to reevaluate how they go about haunting.” For Kim, the barbarity of the 20^th century meant reinventing the ghost story.

C by Tom McCarthy. Alfred A Knopf, 2010, 310 pages, $26.95

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

Per Martin Amis’ recommendation, I typically read books for review with a pen or pencil in hand. Whenever a sentence strikes me as being particularly interesting, I mark it with a vertical line along the margin. Then, after I’ve finished the book, I transcribe all the relevant lines into a document, for reference during the actual composition of the review. While the number of lines thus transcribed doesn’t necessarily correspond with my opinion of the book, it’s seldom the case that a book without many worthwhile quotations ends up getting a glowing write-up.

The new novel from Tom McCarthy, entitled simply C, has the opposite problem. I have three full, single-spaced pages of quotes, and yet I’ve no idea what to make of the book. Its contents are as enigmatic as its title, and though McCarthy proves himself on every page a writer of profligate talent, the overall effect of the book is hard to name. Just what exactly is McCarthy getting at?

C concerns itself primarily with Serge Carrefax, a child born around the turn of the 20th century who, like Forrest Gump, ends up taking part in many of the era’s most important movements. He’s the son of a scientist deeply involved in pumping technology into society. He retires to an Eastern European spa for some Thomas Mann inspired taking of the waters. He is in the English Air Force during World War I. He wanders about with the demimonde of London, becoming a heroin addict in the process. He travels to Egypt with an archaeological expedition. What an entertaining catalog of adventures! Where’s Tintin when you need him?

The only problem is that Serge is not a character, but a cipher (to make use of McCarthy’s alliterative trope). More than that, he’s a sociopath. At two points in the novel, McCarthy draws attention to Serge’s erection: first, during his sister’s funeral, and second, while engaging in a dogfight during World War I. As a child, upon learning that his sister has become sexually involved with a man more than twice her age, “Serge is overtaken by a sudden sense of vertigo—as though the surface of the path he’s standing on, and of the lawn and flower beds around it, had all turned to glass, affording him a glimpse into a subterranean world of which he’s been completely unaware till now although it has been right beneath his feet: a kind of human wasp-nest world with air-filled corridors and halls and hatching rooms.” Serge is immaculately incapable of dealing with human emotion. Instead, he sees everything through the lens of technology.

If McCarthy has any kind of thesis, it is that even those technologies that purport to bring people together end up having an atomising social effect. Here’s Serge listening in on a homemade radio receiver to a distress call from a sinking ship:

“The Admiralty put a message out instructing amateurs to stop blocking the air. Serge ignored the order, but lost the signal beneath general interference…and heard…among its breaks and flecks, the sound of people treading cold, black water, their hands beating small disturbances into waves that had come to bury them.”

It’s no longer legitimate to speak of “likeable” or “unlikeable” characters, but Serge is a truly harrowing protagonist.

Author Tom McCarthy: He writes better sentences than Thomas Pynchon.

I didn’t read McCarthy’s well-received first novel, Remainder, so I took it upon myself to at least read about it. What I learned, primarily, is that McCarthy is an “avant-garde” writer. Now, excusing the fact that this proverbial “garde” seems never to actually arrive, this does force one to read McCarthy in a new light.

C is meant to mirror Pynchon’s genre-defining V in numerous important respects—the stint in Egypt, the bohemian urbanites, the imposition of war, even the references to radio frequency (Pynchon suggested that the famous Kilroy drawing was actually a schematic for a type of radio filter)—which is all very clever, yet it seems to no greater purpose than to set McCarthy up as Pynchon’s literary inheritor. Far from a gentle referential nod, this is more like headbanging.

Thankfully, McCarthy greatly surpasses Pynchon as a writer of sentences, which more than redeems the occasional dullness. Here are two descriptions of the sun, the first from during Serge’s time in the air force, the second from his Egyptian expedition:

“The sun, rising behind hills, is tearing the mist into gauzy shreds.”

“As afternoons run into evenings, [the sun] becomes so saturated with the toxins all around it that it can no longer hold itself up and, grown heavy and feeble, sinks. Serge watches it die time and time again, watches its derelict disc slip into silvery, metallic marshland, where it drowns and dissolves.”

Serge is allowed such flights of descriptive fancy because of his status as observer, and the novel is the better for them. However, it is no insignificant trade-off.

While C features a strong thematic foundation, as well as dazzling flights of description, it features almost nothing in the way of either characterization or psychological insight. Instead, one is treated to page after page of explanations such as this one:

“The detector’s brass with an adjusting knob of ebonite; the condenser’s Murdock; the crystal, Chilean gelina quartz, a Mighty Atom mail-ordered from Gamage of Holborn. For the telephone, he tried a normal household one but found it wasn’t any use unless he replaced the diaphragms, and moved on to a watch-receiver-pattern headset wound to a resistance of eight and a half thousand ohms.”

Though McCarthy shares Pynchon’s penchant for torturous, deliberate dullness, he is also blessed with Pynchon’s talent for making the incomprehensible wildly entertaining. For all of the faults of C, one can’t help but keep turning the pages. McCarthy is exploring a darkness that is unpleasant, tedious, and disturbing, but also timely and fascinating.

At the spa, before taking part in a war that he will unapologetically enjoy, Serge is forced to wander about carrying a jar of his own feces, for study by the staff doctor. He muses about the impossibility of salvation, of being healed by anything as simple as spring water:

“…all the water that’s gushed through the Mir since its inception would never purify him, wash his dark bile away, because the water’s dark as well. It’s bubbled up from earth so black that no blessing could ever lighten it, been filtered through the charcoaled wrecks of boats and tumour-ridden bones of murdered ancestors, through stool-archives and other sedimented layers of morbid matter.”

It is psychological determinism of the most pernicious sort, but that doesn’t make it any less true. The laws of physics, the language of science, have always better served the cause of pessimists than that of optimists. Which is to say, it isn’t one’s mentality that eventually causes the glass to be seen as half empty. It’s evaporation.

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Tommy Wallach is a writer and musician, and more of his work can be found here.

Aliss at the Fire by Jon Fosse. Translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls. Dalkey Archive Press, 120 pages, $12.95.

Reviewed by Bill Marx

On September 10, Norwegian writer Jon Fosse became the third recipient of the International Ibsen Award, following such theatrical heavy hitters as French director Ariane Mnouchine (2008) and Peter Brook (2009). The prize committee recognized the writer for “his uniquely dramatic authorship, one that opens scenic gates to the wordless mysteries that pursue humans from birth to death.” In Europe, those gates are wide open: Fosse is the author of over 30 plays that have been translated into over forty languages. Next month, one of Fosse’s most produced plays, Someone is Going to Come, will be presented in Beijing; at the same time his most recent script, I am the Wind, will be staged in London. Outside of the United States, Foss is hailed as a major living dramatist whose works have a global appeal.

In America, Fosse is virtually unknown. His plays have been rarely produced here; at least my Google search came up with only one production. (The YouTube trailer for Winter, which looks to be about a woman attempting to seduce a guy in the park by taking off her clothes, comes off as sexist rather than erotic.) Why is Fosse a non-starter? Truth is, American theaters are not interested in (or curious about) non-commercial international drama, so it could be the usual case of provincial neglect. It could also be that Fosse specializes in the kind of irritating experimental (and state subsidized) European drama that wallows in épater les bourgeois – inscrutable, emotionally arid scripts of resolutely abstract despair that win big awards and accolades among the denizens of a rarefied theater and literary community.

Or Fosse could be, like Thomas Bernhard, a playwright of genuine talent whose knotty scripts are worthwhile, but pivot on visions of modern life that are so dark and difficult that they won’t “sell” over here. There’s only a slot (labeled “Downer”) for one Beckett on the American playbill.

Curious about Fosse, I picked up the Dalkey Archive Press translation of his novel Melancholy, a slice-of-madness narrative that details the breakdown of nineteenth-century Norwegian artist Lars Hertervig, a painter of genius who suffered from mental illness and died penniless at the turn-of-the-century. I cut my reading teeth on Beckett, Sebald, Kafka, Bernhard, etc, so I am not only acquainted with the depths of the post-modern night but insanely fond of them. Still, I couldn’t get through this book: the determined pessimism, the monochromatic assault of childlike dissociation, the cement slabs of gloom, were just too much. Beckett and company leaven their horror of existence with poetry and black comedy; their books also contain an elusive sense of a road that leads elsewhere – an ironic whiff of possibility that serves as a gift of grace to both characters and readers.

In Melancholy (at least as far as I could get), Fosse enjoys being an indifferent welder, melting shut each of Hertervig’s light and air holes. It feels like the portrait of the artist as a brain-damaged rat in a sadistic trap.

I swore off Fosse. But the news of the International Ibsen Award, and the heartfelt assurances of the Dalkey Archive’s publicist, sent me to the latest of the Norwegian’s prose works in translation, the 2005 novella Aliss at the Fire. I am not ready to help organize a Fosse drama festival, but the book displays a much more emotionally and intellectually expansive palette than the psychotic Melancholy. Still, Fosse’s flight from the psychological and embrace of the archetypal drive him toward a mechanical determinism that threatens to turn his work into more of an absurdist stylistic exercise than a compelling revelation of existential pain. And humor remains absent; does a Fosse comedy exist? The prospect is tantalizing but also frightening to contemplate.

Jon Fosse: A writer whose global success doesn't extend to America.

Aliss at the Fire gets around Fosse’s gaunt limitations by way of its compact length, haunting female narrative voice, and imaginative approach to time-tripping, multi-generational longing: this is a ghost story that (may be) told by a spirit who can’t stop mourning the death of her beloved. For Fosse, poltergeists appear to live in an eternal traumatic “now,” so throughout the book spooks walk in and out of each others hells – perhaps the “pale purple” fire of the title in English.

The set-up is brusquely tragic. Lying on a bench in her home near a fjord, Signe dreams of an event in late November 20 years before that has left her paralyzed spiritually and perhaps physically. Her husband Asle senselessly took his small boat out onto the water during a rampaging storm and disappeared. No explanation for Asle’s suicide is offered. It wasn’t martial discord, at least according to Signe, who suggests that the couple shared a stark but affectionate relationship. (Fosse even uses the word love!) No, the reason for Asle’s trip to oblivion appears to be a destined compulsion, articulated by a bedeviled chorus made up of earlier generations of Asle’s family, to join them in the darkness:

… and it is as if silent voices are speaking from them, as if a big tongue was there in the walls and this tongue is saying something that cannot be said in words, he knows it, he thinks, and what it’s saying is something behind the words that are usually said, something in the wall’s tongue, he thinks, and he stands there and looks at the walls …

The book revolves around that oxymoron of “silent voices”: Fosse’s aim is to evoke the insinuating power of self-destructive forces that lie beyond our control. The book’s challenging prose is crafted to suggest how these energies melt down time and memory: the book’s sentences are held together by commas, no periods. (Though there is the occasional question mark.) Names are capitalized but nothing else. Long, winding sentences are punctuated by short bursts of dialogue.

The demanding style calls for concentration, and Damion Searls’ lucid translation helps make the voices and episodes recalled by Signe easy to follow, even when a ghost suddenly walks into the woman’s story and takes us back to another time and another traumatic drowning. At its best, particularly when describing the cold and forbidding landscape, the writing attains an icy lyricism, though there’s with an insistent neurotic undertow, the familiar Sartrean rhythm of the hell of other people:

what ties two people together? or at least tied her to him, and he, well yes he was tied to her, him too, but maybe not quite as much as she was tied to him, but still, yes, yes, tied together, they were, he to her, she to him, but maybe she was more tied to him then he was to her, that may well be, but does that mean anything?

What ties do mean anything? For Fosse, the invisible trumps the visible — in fact, the living don’t seem to have much of a chance in the face of the past, which makes me wonder how the playwright generates drama out of metaphysical bullying. Still, this is a compelling read, so don’t hold my feet to the fire.

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To The End of the Land by David Grossman. Translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen. Knopf, 582 pages, $26.95.

Reviewed by Roberta Silman

Once in a while we get an inkling of what it must have been like to open the pages of such novels as Anna Karenina, Great Expectations, The Sound and The Fury, The Great Gatsby, To The Lighthouse, or The Slave when they were first published, before any reviews or critical essays were written about them.  We understand what it must have been like to feel the greatness of the prose almost viscerally and to know that with the reading our angle of vision has changed forever.

That is how I felt when I finished David Grossman’s new novel, To The End of the Land, translated superbly by Jessica Cohen. It surpasses anything he has written before, and, for me it surpasses anything I have read in decades.  For here is a novel  that makes you feel as if you are living it as you read – something not quite possible in masterpieces of quite a different order, such as A Hundred Years of Solitude, or works by Borges or Cortazar or Calvino.  Or even in Ulysses, which is so heavily buttressed by Homer.

To The End of the Land is rooted in a reality so vivid, is so radiant with life, and is so precise in its delineation of its characters that it would be an important addition to the world’s literature at any time.  But its publication now, when leaders of Israel and the Palestinian Territories are trying to broker a lasting peace, makes it required reading in a way few novels ever are.  For it is about the devastation of war, how war erodes the human spirit, yet how that spirit is far more resilient that we may have ever suspected.  Moreover, it is written with a humanity, an intimacy and a generosity that make it unique.

Although well known in Israel, where he was born in 1954, and in Europe where he has received many prestigious prizes, Grossman is not as famous in this country for his fiction as he is for his leftist politics and his non-fiction book, The Yellow Wind, which deals with Israeli Palestinian conflict and in which he is fiercely critical of Israeli policy.  Or for the devastating fact that he lost a son in the 2006 war with Lebanon.  At the close of To The End of the Land, is a note worth quoting in its entirety because it tells the story exactly:

I began writing this book in May of 2003, six months before the end of my oldest son, Jonathan’s, military service, and a year before his younger brother, Uri, enlisted.  They both served in the Armored Corps.
Uri was very familiar with the plot and the characters.  Every time we talked on the phone, and when he came home on leave, he would ask what was new in the book and in the characters’ lives.  (“What did you do to them this week?” was his regular question.)  He spent most of his service in the Occupied Territories, on patrols, lookouts, ambushes, and checkpoints, and he occasionally shared his experiences with me.

At the time, I had the feeling – or, rather, a wish—that the book I was writing would protect him.

On August 12^th, 2006, in the final hours of the Second Lebanon War, Uri was killed in Southern Lebanon.  His tank was hit by a rocket while trying to rescue soldiers from another tank.  Together with Uri, all of the members of his tank crew were killed: Bnayah Rein, Adam Goren, and Alex Bonimovitch.

After we finished sitting shiva, I went back to the book.  Most of it was already written.  What changed, above all, was the echo of the reality in which the final draft was written.

The novel begins with a Prologue dated 1967 when war has begun in Israel and three teenage kids – Ora, and Avram and Ilan – are stranded in a hospital with high fevers that create delirium and also a freedom possible only when people are young and in dire straits.  As Ora and Avram share their confusion and their secrets, first with each other, and then in the presence of the other boy, Ilan, you know that this triangle will grow into a haunting connection that only death can break.  Yet Grossman does it with such a light touch, with such authority (somehow you know who is speaking without the usual guidelines), and with so much wit that you are intrigued and enmeshed in these young lives before you know it.

And then, suddenly, it is 2000 and Ora (Or is light in Hebrew) is in a taxi driven by her Arab friend, Sami, taking her second son, Ofer, back to active duty although this is exactly opposite of what she had planned – to hike with Ofer, just the two of them, in the Galilee after Ofer finished his tour of duty.  How had they gotten here?  She goes over it in her mind:

[She asks,} “But did they call to let you know?”  Because she remembered she hadn’t heard the phone ring. . .

“What difference does it make who called?  There’s an operation, and there’s an emergency call-up, and half the country’s being recruited.”

Ora wouldn’t give in—Me?  Pass up getting pricked with such a perfect thorn? she asked herself later—and she leaned weakly against the doorway, crossed her arms over her chest and demanded that he tell her exactly how things had progressed to that phone call.  She would not let up until he admitted that he had called them that morning, even before six he had called the battalion and begged them to take him, even though today, at nine-zero-zero, he was supposed to be at the induction center for his discharge, and from there to drive to the Galilee with her.

Once Ofer has returned to active duty Ora is trapped, first in the cab with Sami as he uncharacteristically makes her uncomfortable on an errand of his own, and then back in her flat where she seems doomed to wait through the next 28 days of Ofer’s tour for word of him.  However, something in her rebels and she decides that she will put herself out of reach of all communication and take that hike by herself, or, better yet, with her old friend, Avram, whom she hasn’t seen in years, who is just a shadow of who he used to be, but who, to her surprise, consents to join her.

The rest of the novel is a walk, sometimes a tramp, sometimes a real hike up mountains and down, during which we get a sense of Israel’s natural beauty, and during which they meet other people and occasionally interact with them.  They prepare food, they sleep, Ora writes in her notebook, but mostly they talk, and as they talk Ora brings Ofer to life for Avram, and we learn how these three have lived since their fateful meeting.  Grossman takes his time, but each page is gripping as we find out more and more about Ora’s marriage to Ilan, about her two sons, Adam and Ofer, and about Avram’s life as well.

Unlike Scheherazade Ora tells only one story -- of her complicated family, but like the ancient storyteller, it is to save a life -- not her own, but Ofer’s.  For if she and Avram don’t know Ofer’s fate, then surely he has to stay alive.  This is the kind of magical thinking we all know, especially those of us who have children.

Author David Grossman displays an uncanny insights into the details of family life.

What makes the book so remarkable are Grossman’s uncanny insights into the details of family life – often observed only by women, we have mistakenly led ourselves to think – as well as his ability to erase chronology and move around in time.  Ora and Avram’s lives are, literally, turned inside out, revealing parts that are so painful to read that one sometimes has to close the book for a moment to take a breath.  And yet there are other parts so surprising, so amazing, that you feel that these two people are being reborn, that they are not only trying to keep Ofer alive, but are becoming alive to each other again.  As they talk, their lives and memories become so intertwined that we are in several moments at once.  This is a marvelous achievement, what every writer hopes for and what Grossman does seamlessly, but which requires enormous skill.  For by the end, every piece in a puzzle increasingly jagged fits together and finally reveals to the reader the complicated truth of the Ora, Avram, Ilan triangle as well as the tremendous costs of living in a country beleaguered by war since its inception.

I don’t know if my reaction to To The End of the Land was so strong because it could be about my own life, if not for the accident of chance which led my father from Lithuania to America while several of his siblings fled to Palestine to escape the Nazi terror.  I’m sure that’s part of it.  Because I finally understand in ways I never did — even after poring over Amichai and Oz and Yehoshua – how perilous life is in that tiny country for a woman with children, for a man who has had to continue to live after capture and torture, for children to whom death is a constant reality and for people who live, day in and day out, surrounded by friends and neighbors (like Sami) whose feelings are never entirely clear and whose trust can never be entirely taken for granted.  How perilous it is to live a life so permeated with fear.

Yet shining through all that is Ora and her astonishing capacity for love.  Here she is in a scene when Ofer has come home:

She retreats into the depths of the kitchen, brimming with animal happiness.  If she could, she would lick him all over–even now, at his age–and scrub off everything that had stuck to him, restore the childhood smells that still linger in her nostrils, her mouth, her saliva.  A wave of warmth spills out to him inside her, and Ofer, without budging at all, moves a whole hair’s breadth away from her.  She feels it, and she knew it would happen: he seals himself off with that same quick shift of the soul that she knows from Ilan and Adam, from all her men, who time after time have slammed their doors shut in the face of her brimming, leaving her tenderness fluttering outside, faltering, turning instantly into caricature.

Grossman is an Israeli writer, just as his idol, Sholem Aleichem, was a Yiddish writer, but a passage like this compels universal attention and is only one of many that reveal the tremendous value of this novel.  I urge everyone I know, and don’t know, to buy To The End of the Land and savor it as I have.  (I hope the Nobel Prize Committee has read these galleys, too.)  For here in the first decade of this troubled century David Grossman has given us a work of art so complex and tragic yet so beautiful that it will surely be cherished by future generations, not only as a testament to his remarkable gifts but also to the memory of the child he and his wife lost while he was writing it.

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Roberta Silman is the author of Blood Relations, a story collection, three novels, Boundaries, The Dream Dredger, and Beginning the World Again, and a children’s book, Somebody Else’s Child. She has recently completed a new novel, Secrets and Shadows. She can be reached at rsilman@verizon.net

Writing in the Dark By David Grossman. Translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen. Farrar, Straus Giroux, 131 pages, $18

Reviewed by Bill Marx

In this stirring but slim 2008 collection essays, celebrated Israeli novelist David (See Under: Love,  To the End of the Land) Grossman argues that issues of war and peace, individual vision and mass delusion, nationalistic self-love and self-loathing often come down to the choice of words. Exploring the intersection of politics and literature, the book serves as a useful reminder that, in a country mired in crisis, serious writers must take on the Orwellian responsibility of cleansing away linguistic pollution, the immoral debris of rote response.

An outspoken activist and advocate for ‘relinquishing the Territories and ending the Occupation,’ Grossman insists that the signs of Israel’s moral decay are evident in the emergence of “a special kind of language” that is “usually a manipulation on the part of those who wish to prolong the distorted situation. It is a language of words intended not to describe reality but to obfuscate it, to allay it.” The six prose pieces in Writing in the Dark suggest that by offering “the right language” literature deepens and complicates a culture’s bedrock perceptions of reality and possibility.

Three of the volume’s essays touch on the impulses that drive an imaginative response to atrophied language. Grossman looks at the dreamlike strategies in his own fiction as well as offering disappointingly brief glances at the autobiographical influences of writers such as Bruno Schultz and Sholem Aleichem. Grossman says his novels are not about exercises in didacticism; instead, his stories are rooted in the creative urge to feel “the sweetness of liberty, which I thought I had lost” as well as provide a way to escape from the dire “claustrophobia of slogans and cliches.” The creative act is a kind of liberating magician’s trick in which the writer miraculously sheds worn masks and words – he is no longer a victim caught in an intolerable situation.

Interestingly, the author says writing non-fiction offers some of the same rewards as fiction: it makes Grossman feel as if he is “reclaiming parts of myself that the prolonged conflict had expropriated or turned into ‘closed military zones.’” Leaden language deadens the souls of individuals and countries, leading to the author’s passionate conclusion that writing literature “is partly an act of protest and defiance, and even rebellion, against this fear – against the temptation to entrench myself, to set up an almost imperceptible barrier, one that is friendly and courteous but very effective, between myself and others, and ultimately between me and myself.”

Author David Grossman calls for imaginative empathy in the face of dehumanization.

Images of imprisonment – external and internal – reverberate throughout the collection. Grossman often poses Israel’s ‘official’ prison house of language, which he describes as a self-idealizing rhetoric driven by fear and anxiety, against a more private, rich, and supple language that undermines calcified attitudes by tapping “the soul of literature. The freedom to think differently, to see things differently. And this includes seeing the enemy differently.”

Three pieces in the collection deal more directly with political issues, though they dwell on with the same vision of an Israel whose cultural responses are hardening, its spiritual resources weakening dangerously: “We know that prolonged existence in a state of hostility, which leads us to act more stringently, more suspiciously, in a crueler and more “military” manner, slowly kills something within our souls and finally hardens like an internal mask of death over our consciousness, our volition, our language, and our simple, natural happiness.” The latter charge is contained in a controversial speech Grossman gave after the death of his twenty-one-year old son, Uri, who was killed during the last weekend of the 2006 Lebanon war. At a Tel Aviv rally in memory of the assassinated premiere Yitzhak Rabin, Grossman claims that “there is no king in Israel … our leadership is hollow. Both the political and military leadership.” A year later, Grossman ignited headlines by not shaking the hand of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert at a prestigious awards ceremony.

Grossman’s sensible call for imaginative empathy in the face of “a situation whose essence and methodology consist entirely of dehumanization” sometimes settles into a round-up of grand-sounding platitudes that contradict his demand that language do more than guard against “the fear of fear.” His implied division of his homeland into forces of good and evil invites the charge that his demands for openness may ossify into stereotype as well. A review by Benjamin Balint in “The Jerusalem Post” of Writing in the Dark posits that while Grossman is on firm ground when he talks about creating empathy “with the Other” in literary matters, his ventures into political matters open him up to charges of “vulgarity”:

There is something to be said for a voice of conscience that urges us to strip away the layers of indifference and detachment that dull us to the suffering of others and to recover our moral sensitivities. But neither David Grossman’s shrill self-condemnation, which sounds so close to the condemnations regularly heard from Israel’s self-declared enemies, nor the stale tradition which it continues, supplies that voice. The reason for this is twofold. First excessive political pessimism is as much a mark of escapism as Pollyannaish optimism. Second, self-examination ceases to edify the moment it crosses into self-disgust. Self-laceration is not a form of self-knowledge.

Balint willfully misreads Writing in the Dark as an exercise in masochism, a self-indulgent wallow in the painful gap between Israel’s ideals and its behavior. Grossman’s bleak assessment of the state of his country’s soul not only pushes his angst deeper than that, but energizes his belief that literature must offer flickers of utopian possibility, that the artful refreshment of language serves as an invaluable counterweight to the rhetoric of stasis. Grossman is gloomy, but he is still searching for the right words to describe his country’s bedeviled condition. Given the horrific drubbing language is taking in America’s war on terror, our writers should be challenged and inspired by his example.