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.

Peter Filkins

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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)

Gish Jen

The title of Chinese-American writer Gish Jen’s latest novel, World And Town, suggests the story’s international resonance. Set in a small town in New England, the book examines the growing pressures — global and local, religious and technological — on the rural American experience.

In her earlier novels, such as Typical American and The Love Wife, Jen explores the thorny intricacies of the country’s culture clash. But World and Town stands as her most ambitious and dramatically powerful attempt to look at issues of identity and perception though an imaginative lens that this time around memorably jumps from the domestic to the cosmic.

World Books editor Bill Marx spoke to Jen about what her novel says about the impact of the world on the American small town in the new millennium.

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• Bill Marx’s Arts Fuse magazine
• ‘I Curse the River of Time’ book info

While the Women Are Sleeping, by Javier Marías. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa. New Directions, 129 pages, $21.95.

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

In a recent review of two French novels, I gingerly broached the subject of national literary characteristics (in the case of the modern French novel, I suggested ‘seemingly normal people doing awful things to each other for inexplicable reasons’ as one of the more common tropes). I say ‘gingerly’ because I recognize the reductiveness of trying to nail down trends, even national ones, in a medium as diverse as literature. However, While the Women Are Sleeping, Javier Marías’ new collection of older short stories—published between 1968 and 1998, with an emphasis on the early side of the range—seems to so perfectly embody what I think of as the Spanish and South American short story genre, that I figure it might be worth revisiting the notion of literary stereotypes.

As far as I can see, modern literature in the Spanish-speaking world begins and ends with Jorge Luis Borges, who published his best work in the 1930s and 1940s. Nobel Prize winning author J.M. Coetzee wrote that Borges, “more than anyone, renovated the language and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists.” Indeed, Borges’ influence can be seen in dozens of writers from dozens of countries. For the writers who have fallen under his spell, this influence is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because Borges is deservedly recognized as one of a handful of true innovators writing in the 20^th century. A curse because his style is so recognizable, imitable, and ultimately, played out. This is the feeling that much of Marías collection inspires: admiration for his ability as an impersonator, but overall, a not un-Borgesian frisson of having seen it all before.

Stories written on the Borgesian model have a number of qualities in common. The overall tone is that of a fairy tale gone dark. They often invoke a framing device at the beginning of the story, drawing attention to the fictional, narrative element of the work (‘The Garden of Forking Paths’). A majority of the time, the subject is, blatantly or obliquely, the act of writing itself, and the author commonly appears by his own name or a pseudonym (‘The Book of Sand’, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote’). Finally, Borgesian stories often revolve around the notion of authenticity, and are rife with doubles, triples, lookalikes, soundalikes, similar things with different names, and different things with similar names (‘The Library of Babel’, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote’).

What Marías brings to the table is his own central preoccupation: doom. I choose this word over the more common “fate” or “destiny,” because in Marías mind, any predetermination is inherently unfortunate. His masterwork, entitled Your Face Tomorrow (recently published in English by New Directions) concerns a group of men and women in London with the ability to see ‘people’s faces tomorrow’—to extrapolate outwards from a subject’s way of speaking, walking, and thinking to his or her capability for everything from murder to suicide to existential despair and joy. This power is not meant to be realistic—the characters in YFT are a bit like psychoanalytical superheroes—but it carries great metaphorical weight. Marías believes that we are all doomed to pretend not to know we are doomed.

Javier Marías: In his fiction he explores the concept of doom with the same depth and zeal that Proust brought to his exploration of memory.

This theme appears in the best stories in While the Women Are Sleeping, such as the title story, in which the protagonist observes a man on the beach constantly filming his beautiful young lover. The cameraman eventually explains that he films her because his entire life has been bent to achieve her love, and now that he has achieved it, he is only waiting for it to end. He wants a record of her as she was, in those last moments. He then admits that when her love or her beauty is gone, he’ll have to kill her, to maintain the purity of his adoration. He believes himself the rare man who has achieved his true desire, and thus is doomed now to a life of loss. This, however, is better than the alternative doom; as he explains it, “…the norm is for people to think they desire whatever comes their way, whatever happens to them, what they achieve as they go along or what’s given to them, and they have no original desires.”

In “Gualta,” a man meets his exact double at a party, and despises him. He thus resolves to change himself in every possible way, in the process becoming something of a monster. When he meets the man again, he finds that the other man has changed as well. Both of them are doomed to be exactly who they are.

Yet even as this story is indelibly Marías’, it invokes many of the Borgesian tropes discussed above, which  makes the tale seem derivative and predictable. “Gualta” is one of two stories in which a man meets his exact double, and the other feels like a dull retread. In “What the Butler Said,” a character named Javier Marías is stuck on an elevator with a butler practicing black magic against his mistress. Though the story the butler tells is creative enough, I was already rolling my eyes after the three-page italicized opening in which Marías describes the circumstances surrounding his meeting the butler, as if it had actually happened. Another story, “Lord Rendall’s Song”, also features an italicized opening, a short biography of the ‘author’ James Ryan Denham, who is actually an invention of Marías’ (surprise!).

The truth is I’m jaded. I spent my time with Borges in both high school and college, and though he is certainly one of the most brilliant literary tacticians of all time, I find his work far more intellectually stimulating than emotionally resonant. Marías’ work suffers from the same malaise, only without the originality or erudition of the master himself. Compared to Roberto Bolaño’s most recent story collection, The Return, which plays many of the same games (i. e. magical realism, author as character), Marías work feels like juvenilia. Of course, if asked to compare the two author’s recent mega-novels (2666 versus Your Face Tomorrow), I would choose Marías’ tome in a heartbeat, both for its surfeit of ideas and its emotional heft.

It seems to me that the novel form is where Marías really shines. The ten stories spread out across only 130 pages in While the Women Are Sleeping all feel like exercises of one sort or another. Half of them are simply decent mimicry of other writers’ ideas. The other half are studies in which one can see Marías beginning to formulate and execute his own style, to pursue his own themes. These stories are the more interesting, but they don’t hold a candle to the novels, where Marías explores the concept of doom with the same depth and zeal that Proust brought to his exploration of memory.

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

Three Sisters, by Bi Feiyu, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 279 pages.

Reviewed by Roberta Silman

Here is a novel of the 1970s from a young Chinese writer well known in his country for the screenplay, “Shanghai Triad,” and earlier works of prose, including Moon Opera, which was published in this country last year, as well as other forms of journalism.

On the jacket of this newest work to be translated (very well) into English, this novel is compared to Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress and Empire of the Sun. Let me say, at the outset, that Three Sisters is simply not in a class with either. Balzac was outstanding because it was buttressed by a love of literature rarely found anywhere as well as a poignant sense of discovery of a larger world, and Ballard’s autobiographical novel is one of the most moving books ever written about a childhood torn to pieces, a tale told with sweeping breadth and compassion.

The Three Sisters is a smaller work, a satire at once charming and exasperating, which circles around its characters in ways so repetitious in the beginning that a Western reader may lose patience. But persevere, because the middle section of the book is the best part and it raises interesting questions about face and shame in its exploration of the relationship between two sisters. And when Bi Feiyu describes the landscape and the cycles of life in the small farming villages as well as the slyness of some of the minor characters, he displays his considerable talent.

The set-up is this: Before the one-child rule was put into rigorous practice, the Wang family, who lives in the country in a small village, has had seven girls. The book begins with the birth of an eighth child, a son; finally, Wang Lianfang can command the respect that goes with his job as a prosperous branch secretary of the party. Soon, though, things begin to go wrong.

Wang’s wife, Shi Guifang, is too tired to care that she has finally produced a male child and decides to reward herself with a life of languor and laziness that doesn’t seem believable anywhere, let alone in Mao’s China. However, her decision may well rest on her resentment over her husband’s voracious sexual appetite; he is the Don Juan of Wang village and almost every woman there has been bedded by him. And when, in quick succession, a barren woman becomes pregnant by him, and he is found in another woman’s bedroom in flagrante delicto, he is removed from his job. And while he is negotiating over a husband for his oldest daughter, Yumi, two of his younger daughters are gang-raped, and the match falls apart.

Author Bi Feiyu: Satiric intentions undercut his latest novel

But far more interesting than this man, who seems to be no more than a cartoon, are the daughters, especially Yumi, the oldest, who gives her name to the first section of the book. She is sturdy, smart (if not as beautiful as her third sister), and she only has contempt for her father’s whores. She takes over the running of the household with incredible ability for a mere 17 year old.

Indeed, Bi Feiyu seems to have an uncanny understanding of young women and the way they use their sexuality to try to take control of their lives. As we watch Yumi maneuver her way through a very short courtship with an aviator (Yes, an aviator! the village almost swoons) we feel only pity and fear for her predicament as she naïvely tries to hold onto what she sees as her trump card. Here are Yumi and her intended during their last encounter:

Peng Guoliang was falling apart. So was Yumi, but she was not going to give in this time, no matter what he said. This stronghold could not be breached. It was her last defense. If she was going to hold on to this man, she needed to keep at least one fire of desire burning in him. Wrapping her arms around his head, she kissed his hair and said, “Don’t hate me, Elder Brother.”

The picture of Wang village is cruel (a combination of Shirley Jackson and Flannery O’Connor with none of their subtlety), the villagers a kind of Greek chorus, but not content merely to comment on events. When they start to intervene actively in Yumi’s affairs, she knows she will have to find another solution to the problem of marriage. She is soon married off to a widower much older than she.

In the second section of the book named for the third, very beautiful, and seductive sister, Yuxiu, things grow more interesting. We learn about the gang rape from Yuxiu’s point of view and begin to get a sense of what it meant to live under Mao.

Before eight o’clock in the morning, the main street. . .is, in essence, an open-air market that sends a jumble of smells from one end to the other. But after eight, the street undergoes a transformation, becoming clean and orderly. . .The middle-school PA system crackles to life, heralding a solemn moment: “Beijing time – 8:00 A.M.” Beijing time: distant, intimate, sacred, a symbol of unity, a sign that all Chinese citizens live planned, disciplined lives – not only the residents of Beijing, but everyone in the country.

Three Sisters appears to be a testament to the messiness of the lives in that huge country, a chaos masked by the semblance of order, a vast Potemkin Village. In a way, that is part of the fascination of this book – how entangled and miserable these lives can really become. The author’s satiric intentions fail him. Eventually we are involved in a touching story of Yuxiu’s love affair with a most unsuitable person, and caught up in her sister’s Yumi’s rage when she discovers the truth. The warm, happy household Yumi has created is about to be smashed.

I wish that Bi Feiyu had had the courage to tell us more about these complicated girls in the third section and give us a full-fledged novel, but he switches gears (and loses steam) and plugs in a schoolyard tale about the seventh sister, Yuyang, the most intellectually ambitious of the girls. This section is virtually unconnected to what has happened before, and seems unduly influenced by Muriel Spark (although updated in sexual matters) and doesn’t really deliver all that much punch, satiric or otherwise.

Still, this will be an eye-opening read for anyone curious about the Cultural Revolution, the mores of the families struggling to survive in China’s small villages, and the lives of the seemingly sexless women who labored so stoically in their Mao jackets.

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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

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By Bill Marx, World Books Editor

I question the idea that books for the beach have to go down as easy as piña coladas. My eccentric and eclectic list of fiction and non-fiction in translation is made up of volumes that demand and repay close attention. They also meet Durs Grünbein’s requirements for poetry: they contain a zest for life and plenty of intellectual curiosity.

In addition, I feel that the intrepid group of small presses that publish books in translation should be rewarded for their courage and perseverance in hard times. Thus while I have included some of the first-rate books from major publishers, I highlight offerings from less mainstream presses as well. Note that many of the books covered by World Books over the past few months, particularly Homesick and The Origin of the Species, are worth considering as well.

Feel free to send in other suggestions of worthwhile international fiction, especially those from smaller publishers.

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugresic (Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac, Celia Hawkesworth, and Mark Thompson, Canongate) Ugresic’s surreal fable presents, in three sections, imaginative elaborations on the archetypal figure of Baba Yaga, an ancient crone who kidnaps small children. The volume deals with women, witchcraft, and old age on a number of levels: it is an affecting report on the indignities and blessings of aging, a (somewhat broad) satiric send up of capitalism in Eastern Europe, and an acerbic investigation into shifting social and mythic perceptions of women and power.

The Bars of Atlantis by Durs Grünbein (Translated by John Crutchfield, Michael Hofmann, and Andrew Shields, Farrar Straus, and Giroux) A simulating gathering of wide-ranging essays from Grünbein, who is considered by many critics to be one of Germany’s greatest living poets. He is certainly no slouch as a prose writer, writing with inspired clarity and deft learning about his childhood in Dresden, love of deep sea diving, and belief that poetry serves as a “memento suspended over the abyss of existence.” Along his serious but never solemn way, the writer castigates the ugliness of contemporary architecture, extols the relevance of the literature of antiquity (it stands for “the nontrivial, the nonbanal in linguistic reflection”), and provides smart elucidations of a number of intellectual heavyweights, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gottfried Benn, and Georg Büchner among them.

Blooms of Darkness by Aharon Appelfeld. (Translated from the Hebrew by Jeffrey M. Green, Schocken Books) Another compelling Holocaust narrative, one of his finest, from Appelfeld, who this time around grounds a tale of Jewish survival in an inspiring if grotesque love story. His previous novel in translation, Laish, was magnificent but grim-to-the-bone. Here Appelfeld provides much more emotional complexity, the story’s horror and suspense leavened tenderness, even moments of humor. Hugo, an eleven-year-old Jew, hides from the Nazis in the apartment of a prostitute who serves German soldiers. Told from Hugo’s bewildered point-of-view (he spends most of his time in the woman’s closet), the novel methodically details the child’s sexual awakening and eventual romance with his savior, their passion coming to its inevitable end.

Case Closed by Patrik Ouředník (Translated by Alex Zucker, Dalkey Archive) This shaggy-dog send-up of TV detective yarns doesn’t really pay much attention to its manifold crimes (sneaky goings on in a retirement home, decade old murders, a rape), let alone punishments. Ouředník openly disdains plot; instead, he serves up a zany cultural critique of contemporary Czech society, its endemic incompetence and corruption unfazed by any of the political changes, authoritarian subservience comfortably giving way to capitalist phoniness. The sort-of main character, a prickly retiree named Viktor Dyk, sports a misanthropic sense of humor that made me laugh out loud, particularly his penchant for making up quotations from the Bible: “The eyes of the dead lend their sparkle to the stars.” “Proverbs 8:125.”

Death With Interruptions by José Saramago. (Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa, Harcourt) The Nobel Prize-winning writer passed away at the age of 87 on June 18, his funeral attended by over 20,000 people. His books, playful fables combining savage political satire with philosophical antics, have made him a popular writer in Europe. His novels, with their long paragraphs and sparse punctuation, never found that kind of acceptance here, though Blindness was made into a film. This 2008 effort isn’t one of his masterpieces (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis), but in light of his recent death this poignant and magnificently macabre meditation on death taking a holiday (“The following day, no one died.”) stands as a celebration of his ironic moral vision, a commitment to life’s underdogs that even embraces the Grim Reaper.

Hotel Iris by Yoko Ogawa. (Translated by Stephen Synder, Picador) Those looking for something kinky but classy this summer should turn to Ogawa’s strangely hypnotic tale of sadomasochism in a seaside resort on the coast of Japan. A bored seventeen-year-old, working at a beach resort, falls for an aging customer, a translator, who is all soft-spoken demurral in public but turns into a commanding sexual taskmaster in private. The tale is told from the innocent perspective of the girl, who never questions that submission brings pleasure. Critics who liked her earlier book in translation, The Housekeeper and the Professor, have been put off by the creepy eroticism, but Ogawa’s subtle exploration of the subterranean connections between pleasure and control elaborates on the psychological probing of Tanizaki Jun’ ichiro (The Key).

Oliver VII by Antal Szerb (Translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix, Pushkin Press) A Central European country is so deep in debt it has to sell itself to the highest bidder. A disgruntled king organizes a revolution so he needn’t take responsibility for the sale. Those are the surprisingly relevant quandaries tossed about in Szerb’s blithe but pointed entertainment, the last novel the writer, whose parents were assimilated Jews, completed before he disappeared in a labor camp in 1945 at the age of 43. Over the past few years, Len Rix and Pushkin Press have presented superb translations of Szerb’s impish fiction; Journey By Moonlight stands as his highest artistic achievement, but this book is a delight, a thoughtful romp that fits knotty issues of authority, nationalism, illusion, and identity into a stage farce structure. The king, hiding away in Venice, is forced by con men to act as the head of state in order to steal from . . . himself. Szerb proffers an amusing variation on the message of Max Beerbohm’s “The Happy Hypocrite: A Fairy Tale for Tired Men”—act a role long enough and you become what you impersonate.

The Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zambra (Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, Open Letter) A gentle tale of longing narrated by a professor of literature who, while waiting for his wife to return home, muses on his past and what his step-daughter will think of him and the novel he is working on. A graceful testament to the ambiguities of memory and communication, the novel wisely never lets tired strains of angst or regret overwhelm “a love of this world.” Zambra’s first book, Bonsai, won Chile’s Literary Critics’ Award for Best Novel; it was translated into English and published by Melville House.

A Splendid Conspiracy by Albert Cossery (Translated by Alyson Waters, New Directions) The novel’s worship of indolence is tailor made for vacation reading. In fact, if Cossery (1913–2008) had his way you would never go back to work. The writer left Egypt as a young man for Paris, where he hung out with Albert Camus and other French intellectuals while leading a life of hedonism (he estimated he had slept with over 2,000 women). Cossery’s fiction financed his bohemian lifestyle and promulgates his anarchistic perspective. This 1975 novel features a police inspector in a small Egyptian town who suspects “terrorists” are kidnapping and/or killing some of its most notable citizens. Cossery’s gang of gleeful indigents, who mock everything but leisure and sex, are suspected to be the culprits. In one striking passage, the ringleader of the laid back crew expresses sympathy for those dedicated to destruction: “The tiniest bomb that explodes somewhere should delight us, for behind the noise it makes when it explodes, even if barely audible, lies the laughter of a distant friend.” A fascinating read in the age of terrorism . . .

A Time for Everything by Karl O. Knausgaard (Translated from the Norwegian by James Anderson, Archipelago Books) Angels are definitely not to be fooled with in Knausgaard’s powerful recasting of God’s celestial pecking order. In the sixteenth century an eleven-year-old boy glimpses what he believes are a pair of angels in the woods. Thus begins a psychologically crippling, life-long obsession with all things angelic, a search that uncovers fascinating suggestions that angels may be the tortured offspring of man and the divine trapped between two realms, the earthly and the transcendent. Knausgaard provides memorably concrete reinventions of Bible stories as well, from a topsy-turvy telling of Cain and Abel to a shocking version of Noah’s ark, told from the point of view of those who are left to drown as the big boat floats by.

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By Bill Marx

Last year marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species. The bicentennial provided plenty of opportunities to recognize Darwin’s contributions – as important now as they were in 1859 – and the importance of evolution in modern science. What the celebration also made clear is how Darwinism is expanding beyond the field of biology, providing a new perspective on virtually all human-related subjects, from anthropology and psychology to morality, politics, culture, and art.

How did the imagination evolve? Books such as Australian scholar Brian Boyd’s provocative study On the Origin of Stories explore the evolutionary origins of creativity and storytelling. In his ambitious and provocative novel The Origin of Species, Canadian writer Nino Ricci looks at how Darwinian ideas shape the consciousness of Alex, a thirtyish graduate student in Montreal during the 1980s who is trying to use Darwin to make sense of his wayward life and dissipating literary studies.

Ironically, Alex finds an evolutionary focus once he befriends Esther, a woman suffering from multiple sclerosis, and deals with his past, including his discovery that he has a five-year-old son and coming to terms with a horrendous encounter with nature “red in tooth and claw” during a trip to the Galápagos Islands.

Ricci has won international acclaim for his books, which have been best sellers in Canada. His first novel Lives of the Saints won a number of awards, including Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and England’s Betty Trask Award and the Winifred Holtby Prize. Lives of the Saints formed the first volume of a trilogy that was adapted for a miniseries starring Sophia Loren, Sabrina Ferilli, and Kris Kristofferson.

The Origin of Species also won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. I spoke to Ricci about his interest in the dark side of Darwinism, how evolution shapes his understanding of Canadian culture, and the strong presence of Montreal in his book.

World Books: How does The Origin of Species fit into your writing career?

Nino Ricci: This is my fifth novel. The first three were a trilogy, a kind of family saga that started in Italy and then moved to Canada and ended up in Italy in the third book. The books were fictional, but they are somewhat based on my family history. My next book was Testament, a secular re-imagining of the life of Jesus.

The Origin of Species continues my idea of writing books that take place at different times periods, but also at seminal moments of change. Jesus ushered in a world view that was with us for many centuries and is still with us. It seems to me the next big thing to come in after Jesus was Darwin, because he challenged fundamental notions of who we are and what life is. We are still coming to terms with some of those insights and I wanted to find a way to look at Darwin and evolutionary theory in a fictional context. The novel is set in the present day, the 1980s in Montreal, but Darwin and Darwinian theory form a significant backdrop to the story.

World Books: You are picking up a popular theme in contemporary thought. Darwin has become increasingly influential over the past decade or so.

Ricci: Legitimately so, but I hate to think I am riding the crest of a trend. Actually, I thought of this book about 20 years ago. It just took me a long time to get around to writing it.

We are coming to the point as a species where we are more willing to face certain kinds of truths about what we are. Freud comes up in the novel and he was formative in my own intellectual development, though as I wrote this book I came to see Freud in a different light, in some sense he steps back from the void that potentially opens up when you follow Darwin to his end point.

As dark as Freud can be, there is still a sense that humans occupy a special place in creation, that there is a kind of end point to existence, such as psychic wholeness or self-understanding. Freud debunks a lot of the old mythology, but he looks comforting when compared to Darwin.

The end point of Darwinism is a kind of biological determinism: all the things we value could be reduced to genetic switches and chemical reactions within us, so what we call love is in a Darwinian context a genetically evolved mechanism for ensuring procreation. When you pass human history and human civilization through that sieve you can end up with a picture that can seem sterile and even nihilistic. For that reason there has been resistance to follow Darwin through to the end point.

World Books: How, as a storyteller, do you shape your narrative to reflect Darwinian ideas?

Ricci: First off, I am not arguing in favor of Darwin. I wanted to explore how evolution impacts our lives on a daily basis. The novel’s main character, Alex, an English graduate student, uses Darwinian theory to think about literature and the world around him.

What interested me in a more practical sense is how Darwin sheds light on our tendency to over idealize the importance of humans in the scheme of things, which may have led us down some bad roads. For one thing, it has led us to think we are the masters of creation, that creation is there for our benefit as opposed to being elements within creation, elements within an ecosystem and that everything we do has effects on other aspects of the ecosystem.

Also, I believe that much that has passed for psychology over the past 100 years has been a bit soft, really, in its reasoning and its methods. If we shift the lens a bit, begin to think in more biological terms it might lead us to a deeper understanding of why we behave the way we do.

Charles Darwin: Still revolutionary after all these years

Why is it that we have such tremendous brutality going on in so many parts of the world next to this idea of ourselves as being civilized and moral beings? It might have something to do with our not coming to terms with our real nature, and until we do we will not be able to change or improve our behavior. Even in terms of how we deal with each other as human beings, our territoriality, our dysfunctional relationships, I find that it is helpful to keep a bit of Darwinian framework in your mind, to consider elements of animal behavior, such as protecting space or fending off a competitor.

World Books: You seem to take a dark view of Darwin. Yet there is research today that suggests that evolution is as much about the creation of community as it is a celebration of ‘the survival of the fittest.’

Ricci: That is a great point because in fact that gives us a sense of what it means to go forward in Darwinian terms. Yes, we see evidence of communal behavior all around us. In the novel, the character of Esther, who has MS, embodies different qualities than than those we would associate with ‘the survival of the fittest’ type of universe. And, as you say, much of the work being done in evolutionary theory today sees edible evidence around us that cooperation can be as successful a strategy as competition.

World Books: The novel is set in Montreal during the 1980s – in what ways were you talking about the evolution of the city?

Ricci: Place is very important for me in everything I write. I was very conscious of Montreal being a place with a long history and an interesting cultural mix among English and French that often leads to tension.

I am not sure I want to take the evolutionary theme too far though, because I hate to reduce the novel to me looking at Montreal in a schematic way. What I wanted to do was to look at the complexity of urban experience, seeing the 1980s as the beginning of a certain economic outlook we are now beginning to see the end of. It is closely connected to Social Darwinism, what in the 1980s we called the rise of Neo-Conservatism. Ironically, this approach was a resurgence of the liberalism of the 19th century that started with people like Darwin, who suggested the idea of letting the strong survive. Liberalism of the 19th century had a much different meaning than it does now.

I also wanted to look at the urban environment in terms of immigration, the mix of different kinds of cultures, different realities that coexist even though there are very few lines of communication among them.

It interests me to explore how immigration fits into Darwinian terms. Who are the people who immigrate? What does it mean for a country to accept immigrants? Is that some kind of beneficence the country is showing? Or is it a purely calculated act to cherry pick the best people and bring them into your country essentially to improve the genetic and intellectual stock?

World Books: The novel’s main character, Alex, comes off as somewhat cynical about the questions you raise about Darwin and the urban experience.

Ricci: I thought of Alex as a sort of everyman. He is just a guy trying to get by, to have a meaningful relationship, often behaving like a typical guy, starting relationships with women and ending them out of fear of commitment or whatever it is without intentionally behaving like a cad, yet somehow instinctively doing so. Someone at whom life has thrown a number of curve balls at this point, and in fiction you need conflict, to put the main character behind the eight-ball for things to happen.

In this case he is that unfortunate victim, but someone who brings a wide interpretative lens to his experiences, someone who is trying to see the big picture, someone who is trying to make sense of the contradictions he sees and tensions he sees in himself. He is trying, as many people are, to live the good life, but isn’t sure how to go about doing it.

World Books: Alex’s skepticism is balanced by his ready wit, intellectual honesty, and vulnerability.

Ricci: It is always a conflict for a writer to know where to draw that line. On the one hand, you want readers to be engaged with the main character. If they are not engaged in some way they will throw the book against the wall. At the same time, you want a character that challenges the reader. So you want them to have behaviors that make you uncomfortable.

Fiction seems to be a place where you can think about those sides of yourself that you would just a soon suppress in your daily life and that you don’t like to appear in your public persona. That was part of what I was trying to do with Alex. To take him to places that were awkward and uncomfortable, but they are places where many of us go to at one point or another.

Alex’s cynicism is common to that era, maybe less so now. But his cynicism is also an avoidance of commitment. If you are cynical about everything it frees you of having to commit to any belief system, and it frees you of trying to make a positive impact on the world around you.

But it’s also a fear of making the wrong choice, of believing in the wrong thing, of being a committed socialist and then discovering ‘oh, no, that system was flawed.’ Underneath this uncertainty lies the character’s commitment to truth seeking; his cynicism is partly an attempt to put everything to the fire if possible and seeing if it survives.

World Books: Mid-way through the novel Alex remembers a traumatic voyage to the Galápagos Islands, a novella length tale that takes the reader out of the urban experience of Montreal and into a more primal adventure crowded with Darwinian echoes. It is a nervy structural gamble.

Ricci: I thought of it as the peeling back of the layers of Alex’s psychology, but as also a revelation of the deeper thematic layers of the book. Alex has an itch at the back of his head he hasn’t dealt with. And it is only in the middle of the novel that he has progressed a bit, partly through his relationship with Esther, a positive and maturing force in his life, so that he is ready to re-integrate that painful material.

He’s ready, for instance, to own up to his son, the son he has discovered he has in Sweden. He’s also met a friend with a son who is his own son’s age and this allows him to have a direct experience of what it is like to have a child that age. He’s also confronted, through Esther, with the possibility of her death and what that might mean.

World Books: In that sense, the book is about Alex’s evolution from the familiar figure in pop culture of the boy/man into a mature adult.

Ricci: Men have a tendency to get stuck in that ambiguous stage, particularly in our time, when it is possible to defer the big life choices (marriage, career) indefinitely. I am not saying that is a bad thing, but it does allow this possibility of perpetual childhood.

In many of my books women are the strongest characters. In The Origin of Species I was conscious of my attempt to deal with men. In a certain way men are at a crisis point in Western society. I am not sure we have quite understood the feminist revolution. I am not sure it has taken as deeply as it should have, but at the same time we feel a kind of directionlessness associated with that fundamental shift in our awareness of the relationships between the genders. And we haven’t found our way to the next step of self-definition.

World Books: Did you have male readers specially in mind when writing The Origin of Species?

Author Nino Ricci: In a certain way men are at a crisis point in Western society. I am not sure we have quite understood the feminist revolution.

Some of the research done studying the connections between evolution and storytelling shows that when you look at story formation in very young children those are the kind of stories they tell: the world is about to be destroyed and I came along and saved it. My son wrote stories like that and even girls write stories like that when they are two years old. It is an elemental story pattern; the problem is that we are not going beyond that.

World Books: What is the value of fiction for you?

Ricci: Fiction plays an important role in providing paradigms for understanding the world. The most important thing literature does for readers of any age, but particularly adolescents, is to make them feel they are not freaks, that what they think and feel is valid. And if you just give them anodyne, sterilized narratives, that are not saying meaningful things to them, they will not find the things that speak about the places in them that aren’t being acknowledged elsewhere.

World Books: In what ways are you a Canadian writer?

Ricci: I may not be the best person to point out how my writing reflects Canada. But the issue of identity is one that comes up often in a Canadian context, and I think it comes up often in any country that is not a central power, or feels itself on the edge of empire.

As a Canadian I am most likely to engage in those types of questions because our national identity and our cultural identity has been a problematic one from the start and continues to be. We have two official languages, we have two official cultures that are in tension with each other. We also have our indigenous past which we have not really dealt with and we have all these immigrant groups, as you have in the US, who come to Canada.

But but unlike in the US they often don’t feel a strong national identity to attach themselves to here and continue to keep a strong identification with the place they came from, so we end up with a lot of pockets of identities and not always a strong sense of what makes them cohere.

There are dangers in that kind of identity ambiguity, but there are also advantages. As a writer, it gives me the freedom to question things on a fundamental levels about who we are and how we define ourselves.

This is my only book where the specific question of Canadian identity comes up very directly. But I see it in an international context. I see this as an important question on many different fronts. The deeper issue of nationalism runs throughout the book: how do we identify ourselves? What does it mean to identify ethnically, for instance?

World Books: What were the literary influences on The Origin of Species?

Ricci: One of the things I find in American writing is a confidence Canadian writing lacks, the sense that you are allowed to say anything. Writers sometimes go further because they take for granted that there is no territory that is forbidden. Whereas in a country like Canada it seems more likely that a kind of cultural cringe will seep in, You feel you don’t have the authority or the right to go beyond a certain point.

I had Richard Ford’s Independence Day in mind. It is not a plot driven novel, things happen, somebody gets shot, but it essentially takes a study of a real estate agent and selling houses into very deep places. Increasingly, as I wrote the novel, Ulysses was in the back of my mind, a book that I have a problematic relationship with. But I was attracted to the idea of a character walking the streets of the city, the novel being about the city as seen through one character’s mind.

I would certainly have to include Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, a novel I loved years ago. What I took from that book was the creative desire to fit in everything. The story is about plastic and the Second World War, but it is also about obscure African cultures and the history of the world. Pynchon manages to go almost everywhere, some of them places where we might never really have wanted to go to.

But that encyclopedic urge is something that informed The Origin of Species, especially Alex’s sensibility. His wants to somehow make everything fit, despite his unease that literature may not be be that place, that literature may be too exclusive, too structured, too false to experience to ever really embrace all the muck and grime in the world.

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  Future readers, of course, may read their books electronically on kindles, iPads and the like.  In the meantime the real books populate real book stores and libraries.  The older a book is, the smellier it is.  Here’s The World’s Alex Gallafent.

ALEX GALLAFENT:  Thomas Lannon doesn’t usually go around sniffing the books.  But here’s what he gets when he sticks his nose into an 18th century domestic accounts book.

THOMAS LANNON:  It has a nice musty, it’s musty.  I would call it musty, but what is must really?  Do we know what must is?

GALLAFENT: A profound question, one of many for Lannon.  You see, he works for the New York Public Library in the Manuscripts and Archives Division.  He inhales again.

LANNON: It has a shoe box.  There’s a shoe box.  It has a shoe box-ness.

GALLAFENT: Shoe box-ness, mustiness, variations on a theme.  That scent lying on the periphery of our experience when we pick up an old book.  At least it lies on the periphery for most of us.  A couple of years back a Slovenian chemist named Matija Strilic was conducting research in the conservation departments of European libraries.

MATIJA STRILIC:  And every now and then I notice conservators smelling old paper as if they were able to tell whether its more or less degraded by the way it smells.

GALLAFENT: He was intrigued.

STRILIC: And I thought well, perhaps there is some substance to it.

GALLAFENT: There is, a chemical substance no less.  The smell is made up of VOCs, volatile organic compounds.  The VOCs are given off by paper as it slowly degrades, as it dies.  Strilic, who’s based at the Center for Sustainable Heritage in London, began analyzing the relationship between smell and paper.  Surprise, surprise.  The smellier the book, the more fragile, the more at risk it tends to be.  Now Strilic is developing an extra sensitive book sniffing machine.

STRILIC: An artificial nose with which we could potentially replace the nose of a conservator, or perhaps enhance the scent, if you like.

GALLAFENT: Until then, the New York Public Library will have to make do with the noses of Thomas Lannon and the Head of Conservation, Shelly Smith.

LANNON: It smells of pockets, people’s pocket.

SHELLY SMITH:  Or your uncle’s hat.

LANNON: The inside of a purse.

SMITH: Yes!

GALLAFENT: They show me a book from Pakistan that’s redolent of onions.

LANNON: It has a bit of an onion smell.

SMITH: You might be right.

GALLAFENT: And even though that’s probably thanks to how the book was stored, Smith says books from different countries often do have different smells.  In some places book are made from high quality paper with most of the acidic content removed during processing.  But in some part of the world, the paper industry is less advanced.  Paper gets made more or less directly from mashed up trees with the corrosive acids left in.

SMITH: And as it ages it gets very dark, it gets very brittle and does give off a different type of smell.

GALLAFENT: And is that true even today with new books being published around the world?

SMITH: Absolutely.  Absolutely.  As a matter of fact some materials that come here from the library, we automatically reformat because we know that even though they are new materials, they won’t last very long because they’re made of that quality of paper.

GALLAFENT: So the smell of a book contains useful information about it’s physical state.  But there’s more.  Smells seep into our consciousness, especially the smells we get while reading old books.

AVERY GILBERT:  Rich smells that kind of permeate the entire experience of handling the books and reading them.

GALLAFENT: Writer Avery Gilbert is a self-described smell scientist.  He remembers precisely the smell of a old Latin school book from his childhood.  A book with glue, pasted along it’s spine.

GILBERT:  To this day I can remember that acrid glue smell and image the Latin Dictionary perfectly.

GALLAFENT: The smell makes a book more than a book, it gives it extra life, character and sometimes as Lannon and Smith have discovered, it can capture the essence of a book, even a relatively boring one.

LANNON: This is a book about books.  It’s a list of books purchased by the library showing the date, April 1923.  This one smells a bit of concrete, I think there’s some concrete.  Or maybe, it smells like a gymnasium.

SMITH: Institutional, like linoleum.

LANNON: It smells of the color gray.  It smells like what it is I suppose.

GALLAFENT: For The World, I’m Alex Gallafent in New York.

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