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Lisa Mullins: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World. The twin attacks in Norway last week revealed a dark side of Scandinavian society that many people wouldn’t recognize, but is one that Swedish writer Stieg Larsson would have found familiar. Larsen wrote the best-selling novel “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and its companion volumes as well. Nick Fraser edits the BBC’s Storyville series of international documentaries, he’s also the author of the book “The Voice of Modern Hatred” it’s about the far-right in Europe. He says Larsen documented the Scandinavian extreme right, in both his fiction and in his non-fiction.

Nick Fraser: Stieg Larsson created a magazine called Expo, and it existed to document the activity of Scandinavian far-right groups. I think at the time he was criticized. People thought he was exaggerating the importance and the influence of these groups who, after all often consisted of very small numbers of people or people who worked alone almost, like this killer, but who had fantasies of being very important and very connected to bigger things. But he persisted with his work and he did very good work. And I think when he came to write his novels, he took some of the knowledge he’d acquired and put it into the novels.

Mullins: And how did he describe the extremism in the novels, in a different way than he did in his non-fiction?

Fraser: In the novels, he’s more concerned with violence against women than political far-right violence. But he builds up this picture – repressed men who are fascinated by guns, who are fascinated by secret societies. And I think you can see the character type, this killer with manifesto, in a lot of the truly awful men that Larson describes in his books.  In a more general way, I think he saw the Scandinavian Utopia as being fake. There was a sort of huge amount of talking about good feelings and about, you know, utopian visions of everyone behaving humanely and reasonably. But Stieg Larsson could see that this actually concealed really horrible behaviour. And I think it’s astounding to look at this atrocity in Norway and think, well actually you can sort of read his books much more literally than the 27 million people who’ve bought one or more of them, will have actually read them. I mean, they may think of them as fantasies, but they have a core of political perception. They’re not naive books. They’re clever books about the contemporary world.

Mullins: Does that mean that the stereotypes that we have of Scandinavia as being very safe, very measured, is necessarily upended? I mean, does that not exist anymore?

Fraser: Well I don’t know about being upended, but you’ve got to remember that the Scandanavian Utopia’s always had its dark side. I mean, there are many, many, many, many depressed writers about the kind of gloomous Scandinavia. So, I think that very utopia has its dystopia. If you live in a messy society, like Britain or the United States, if you don’t nurse the idea that, you know, utopia is possible, then you’ll probably find it easier to accept when things go wonrg. But the Scandinavians do have an idea of the perfectibility of their societies and they get tragically hurt when things go wrong as they have in Norway.

Mullins: Stieg Larsson faced personal consequences of writing about Europe’s far-right. Tell us what they were?

Fraser: Well, he received numerous death threats and I think he felt he lived in danger, and I think he was right to feel that he lived in danger. I think these people are actually very dangerous indeed, as this episode reveals. And you have to take very, very seriously their threats because, actually, these people don’t go away. They may be small in terms of numbers, but you have to keep a watch on them.

Mullins: Nick Fraser is the editor of the BBC’s the BBC’s Storyville series of international documentaries, he’s also a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine. Thank very much.

Fraser: Thank you.

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Keith Oatley is a cognitive psychologist, formerly of the University of Toronto, and a fiction writer (here’s his latest novel). Oatley and his research team measured the amount of fiction a group of people read, and then considered their levels of empathy. They discovered that the more fiction their subjects read, the more empathy they had for others. This is documented in Oatley’s book Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction. Oatley says that demographic known as the Introverted Bookworm is a bit of myth: reading fiction, in most cases, opens you out to the world. When reading a novel, you’re living with other people — often inside their heads.

Back to Jackie Collins: Does “trashy” fiction help on the empathy front as much as Tolstoy or Jane Austin? Oatley is silent on this, at least in his BBC interview.

I remember reading a potboiler called Acapulco by Burt Hirshfeld. It was the usual fare: film stars, psychedelic drugs, violence, sex. I read it while cramming for final exams at college. At night, I would be pretty wired from all the studying (not something I was especially used to). A chapter of Acapulco was the perfect sleep aid. Amusingly stilted dialogue, glamorous cocktails, deals by the pool, late-night beach liaisons: it sure beat thinking about Ibsen and Flaubert. Much as I loved getting inside the head of Madame Bovary, entering the mind of Acapulco‘s obnoxious movie producer Harry Bristol was, in its own way, more fun. And, who knows, perhaps it helped me empathize.

Also in this week’s pod: rumors have been spreading that former Chinese President Jiang Zemin has died. In response, authorities have blocked searches of certain words including a word for river (jiang) and heart attack.

And now, another extravanza from Nina Porzucki…

California’s legislature is moving to regulate how political candidates’ names are translated. The state is home to the largest Asian American population in the nation. Nearly a third of Asian American voters in California are not proficient in English.

Election materials have been translated into several Asian languages for years, but the law doesn’t specify how candidates’ names should be translated.

Consider the case of Mike Eng. Five years ago he was a candidate for the California State Assembly. “When I saw how my name was spelled [on the ballot] I almost fell out of my seat,” Eng says.

Eng was running for a seat in the California assembly. About 40 percent of his district is Asian American, with sizeable communities of Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean speakers. Under federal law, election materials in Eng’s district must be translated into those four languages. So when Eng was asked if he wanted his name translated onto the ballot, he thought, “Well of course.”

Officials translated Eng’s name literally, into what in Chinese sounded like Mike Eng: 麦 可 恩 (or Mai Ke En) Literally, the characters mean something like “wheat can be kindness.”

When Chinese characters are strung together to create phonetic transliterations of Western names, they can sometimes turn into pretty nonsensical sayings like well, “wheat can be kindness.”

Mike Eng wasn’t so happy with a name that “doesn’t mean anything.”

As turns out Eng, who is Chinese American, also has a Chinese name that was given to him at birth by his grandparents. His Chinese name has nothing to do with wheat or kindness, but means “pride of our national day.” This was the name used by the Chinese media, the name that many voters knew him by. So Eng ended up spending the rest of his campaign telling voters “that this person that sounded like wheat in Chinese was actually me.”

Despite the confusion Eng won the election. But the situation still bothers him.

Unlike English, written Chinese is based on meaning as well as sound. You might think Eng is hung up on the fact that his ballot name meant “wheat”. But meaning is a big deal in written Chinese, says lexicographer David Prager Branner.

Characters that are used in Chinese names are also part of everyday language. “The meaning is right in your face with the Chinese writing system,” says Branner. “You can’t escape it.”

Take Branner’s name. In English, no one really thinks about what “David” means. But when he uses his Chinese name 德威 (De Wei) Branner says the meaning of the two characters (“virtuous inner strength” and “the power to awe”) is right there.

Under the Voting Rights Act, certain jurisdictions are required to provide minority language assistance. This means translated materials, ballots, signs, bilingual poll workers. But federal law is silent about name translation.

Some states regulate how names appear on the ballot in character-based languages like Chinese, but not California. In California the rules change from one jurisdiction to the next. Assembly member Mike Eng’s situation was unfortunate but by no means the most extreme example of a name change.

Some candidates may even have used this grey area of the law to gain favor with Asian American voters. In 2010, someone named李 正 平(Li Zheng Ping) ran for San Francisco Superior Court Judge. Someone named Michael Nava also ran. It turned out that they were one and the same person. Michael Nava quite legally assumed the name Li Zheng Ping in some of his outreach to Chinese-American voters. Li Zheng Ping is a Chinese-sounding name, and a good one for a judicial candidate. In Chinese, it means “correct and fair.”

Assembly member Mike Eng likens the situation in California to the wild west. “If you want to say that my name means ‘giver of million of dollars in profits to local governments’ then one could list your name on the ballot that way” he says.

California State Senator Leland Yee has introduced a bill regulating how candidates’ names are translated into character-based languages.

“All of us want good sounding names that engender warmth with the Chinese vote” says Yee. “But when I think that when you do that solely for the purpose of gathering that vote and nothing else than I think it’s a little unfair.”

In 2009, an earlier version of the bill was vetoed by then Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who declared that individual jurisdictions should decide this matter on their own. But Yee re-introduced it this year.

“If Chinese Americans think that the voting process is a sham and that politicians are trying to trick them, then they are less inclined to participate in the electoral process” says Yee.

Dean Logan, the Registrar of Voters in Los Angeles County, says under the proposed law, he would have to decide on which translations to use in LA County. He’s uncomfortable with that.

“You could ultimately have someone challenge that in court which further delays the process,” says Logan.

It’s somewhat surprising that California, with its large Asian American population, lags behind other states like New York where policy about candidate’s names has been in place for well over a decade. But that may change in soon. Assembly member Mike Eng certainly hopes so.

“Your name is your identity. Your name is your heritage,” says Eng. He looks forward to the day “when we can have a ballot that does truly reflect the true identity of those that are running because that’s better democracy.”

Finally in the pod, a little thing on the people of South Sudan learning their new national anthem.

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So which Swedish city was Steig Larsson working in at the time of his death?

The answer to today’s Geo Quiz is Stockholm.

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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

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The Return by Roberto Bolaño. Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. New Directions, 224 pages, $23.95

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 was one of the most critically acclaimed novels of the past few years, yet I’ve met few people who could honestly admit to enjoying it. This is no doubt partially due to the book’s length, which is artistically unjustifiable except in the way it creates a kind of “literature of cruelty,” punishing the reader page by page.

It’s not that I mind long books; I recently finished Javier Marías’ stunning Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, a single story split up into three volumes whose combined page count exceeds that of Bolaño’s epic. The problem was more the unremitting squalid repetitiveness of it all. After the hundredth or so description of a prostitute’s brutalized corpse (the book concerns itself with a murder spree on the Mexican border), the book began teetering on the edge of self-parody.

This was always Bolaño’s greatest weakness (if the past tense can be justified; the late Chilean has managed to publish half a dozen books in the past three years, a fecundity matched only by the pulpiest of genre writers): a predilection for litany. Much of 2666 bored me, and I barely managed to get through his novel Nazi Literature in the Americas, a fictionalized encyclopaedia of Nazi novelists.

Yet it is this very tendency that makes Bolaño’s short stories so powerful. Without the dangerous freeedom granted by 1000 blank pages, he manages to create dense catalogs of misery and revelation, and packs more punch into fifteen pages than he managed in all of the second volume of 2666. To complete the metaphor, his recently published collection, The Return, is nothing short of a knockout.

What impressed me most about the thirteen stories in The Return was the coherence of Bolaño’s vision. Though the stories take place in different countries (The United States, Chile, Mexico, Russia) and different time periods, though some are straight fiction, some are vaguely autobiographical, and some even drift towards magical realism (such as the compelling, Borgesian yarn “Buba,” in which three players on a soccer team perform an African blood ritual that seems to bring them success on the pitch), each new tale feels like a chapter in a continuous narrative.

The aimless lovers and murderous lowlifes of 2666 and The Savage Detectives are back, only compressed and concentrated by the word limit. Four stories revolve around murder, and the title story concerns a man who dies and then watches, as a ghost, while a famous fashion designer molests his corpse.

The late Roberto Bolaño: Less is More

Two of the best stories take place in the world of pornography. In one of these, “Joanna Silvestri,” a famous pornographic actress visits Los Angeles and rekindles a romance with one of her old co-stars, who is dying. The scene where she finally leaves him is devastatingly sad: “I turned and Jack was there, standing by the gate, watching me, and then I knew that everything was all right and I could go. That everything was all wrong, and I could go. That everything was sorry, and I could go.”

Bolaño’s trademark nods towards metafiction are also alive and well, both in the character of his alter-ego Arturo Belano, and in such stories as “Another Russian Tale,” in which a German SS officer’s accidental mishearing of the Spanish epithet “coño” as the German word “kunst,” meaning art, ends up saving a man’s life.

Perhaps the most powerful stories are the ones that concern the ongoing mythology of Bolaño himself. In “Detectives,” two men discuss Arturo Belano, the young author and political agitator they found in the Chilean prison where they both worked during the Pinochet coup. Recognizing him as an old friend from high school, the men decide to set him free. This is an oft-repeated true tale from Bolaño’s life (and one he told before, from his own perspective, in the short story “Dance Card”), but here it is imbued with metaphorical force. When the detectives take Belano to be cleaned up, he fails to recognize himself in a mirror, even though the fact that others have recognized him was the key to his salvation. The mirror may be something of a cliché, but Bolaño is able to make it feel reflective.

In another story, “Photos,” we watch Belano look through the author photos in an omnibus of French poetry circa 1973, falling in love with the various poets, mourning their passing and, through them, the passage of time:

‘…then Belano thinks about his own youth, when he used to churn it out like Tron [one of the poets], and was perhaps even better looking than Tron, he thinks, squinting at the photo, but to publish a poem, in Mexico, all those years ago when he lived in Mexico City, he’d had to sweat blood, because Mexico is Mexico, he reflects, and France is France, and then he shuts his eyes and sees a torrent of ghostly, emblematic Mexicans flowing like a grey breath of air along a dry river bed…’

Having read two of the stories in this collection in The New Yorker earlier this year, I can attest to the value of a second look. Bolaño, presented through the medium of veteran translator Chris Andrews, is revealed clearly as both a master storyteller and a subtle stylist. I feel newly confident in recommending the great Chilean to friends, though I plan to put new emphasis on his short work. These stories do more than serve as an entrée to his novels. They manage to surpass them.

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

Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist Translated and edited by Peter Wortsman. Archipelago Books. 283 pages, $15.

Reviewed by Christopher M. Ohge

Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) remains intriguing to many literati because in many ways he out-romanticized the German Romantics. Having committed a ritual Selbstmord with a friend’s cancer-stricken wife, this literary bad boy has been fodder for book-chatters interested in the artistic suicide case, as well as the prevalence in his works of mental instability, sex, and violence. Nevertheless, he epitomized the Sturm und Drang of younger Goethe’s Werther—and, one could argue, took those sentiments further by living hard and rootless, offending polite society with his works, and leaving many of his peers scratching their heads—including Goethe and Schiller. Though underappreciated in his lifetime, Kleist’s work became essential to Freud’s formulating the death drive, Thomas Mann’s intricate storytelling, and Kafka’s obsessive characters.

Peter Wortsman’s translation of Kleist’s prose comes as a gift to fans of German literary history. The edition is decidedly minimalist from an editorial point of view, providing (aside from the prose) only some scattered contextual footnotes and a concise afterword by Wortsman (a memorable line, on Kleist: “a man at once more brilliantly adept at the practice of his art and more painfully inept at the business of living”). Wortsman preserves much of Kleist’s difficult sentence structures and punctuation, and succeeds at modernizing Kleist’s sometimes antiquarian prose (although bits like “any Tom, Dick, or Harry,” or “footloose and fancy free” seem forced; and the repeated use of the legalistic construction—“he believed that said situation could not be resolved”—comes off finicky). The selection is streamlined, yet carefully balanced, thus giving readers all of Kleist’s necessary lunacy and narrative brilliance nicely packed into 273 pages.

Of the four short stories in the collection, “The Earthquake in Chile,” and “The Betrothal in Santo Domingo” stand out, both for their doomed characters and poignant themes on the inscrutability of the will and the world. “The Earthquake in Chile” takes place during the 1647 earthquake in Santiago. It begins with a tutor named Jeronimo Rugero, who, having been incarcerated for falling in love with his pupil, Josephe, planned to hang himself in his cell. After the earthquake strikes, he is free to move hurriedly through the ruins and finds Josephe. In their ensuing idyll, she calls the earthquake an “act of deliverance”—in which sense? Ostensibly, it is Jeronimo’s “liberation” from prison, yet it is also in the sense of Kleist’s foreshadowing how the idyll is illusion, and how at the end the two lovers will be set free from evil. Here the evil is manifested in what Nietzsche called the flies in the marketplace, a “satanic rabble” led by a Dominican priest who, trying to interpret divine will, encourages them to dispatch any symbols of earthquake-causing godlessness.

Once Jeronimo and Josephe encounter the mob in the church, a series of misunderstandings leads to a gruesome scene. Jeronimo and Josephe end up dead, and Don Fernando, “that godly hero” who single-handedly extinguishes the mob, still loses his son. For Don Fernando, “it almost seemed to him as though he ought to be happy.” A not-so-certain deliverance for him, because in Kleist’s world of epistemological uncertainty, heroic acts do not always lead to liberation.

“The Betrothal in Santiago” is another story of tragic amour which is set during the 1803 Haitian slave revolt. In the house of the revolt leader, Congo Hoango (“a dreadful old Negro”), his mistress Babekan and her daughter Toni lead a desperate French soldier into their home. This particular stranger seems involved in a routine set-up until it becomes clear that Toni has fallen in love with him. And though one may feel instances of apparent racism similar to other slave revolt tales (Melville’s story “Benito Cereno” comes to mind), at the end, the tragic murder-suicide conclusion reminds one of Othello—except for Kleist there is no self-laudatory speech for the murderer, the soldier merely ends his life after having little to say.

Translator Peter Wortsman

The superficial skimmer of pages may have the most difficult time figuring out “The Marquise of O…”, the well-crafted novella in which shifting perspectives complicate a “mysterious pregnancy” story. But this Cervantes-inspired whodunit lacks the narrative pace of the other novella, “Michael Kohlhaas,” which concerns a horse trader of the same name whose “sense of justice turned him into a thief and a murderer” after a country squire called Wenzel von Tronka (referred to as a—or the—Junker) requisitions Kohlhaas’s horses and abuses one of his stable hands.

Enraged by the injustice done to him, and seeing a “world in such monstrous disorder,” Kohlhaas wages war through the country, and determines to exact revenge on the Junker without regard to the costs (and it is part of Kleist’s genius that we are uncertain who the real criminal is). Politically, justice is moot because Kohlhaas continues to lose his legal appeals on account of the Junker’s connections, and, ultimately, Kohlhaas represents a rabid metaphysical rebel in a world where justice may not exist.

Given the rampant dissolution in Kleist’s tales, it is initially surprising to read “On the Gradual Formation of Thoughts While Speaking,” a lucid philosophical treatise on the importance of “a certain excitement of the mind” in formulating one’s ideas. Sounds simple enough; but in fact, this essay harkens back to Plato’s Symposium, showing the value of thinking out loud, forming opinions and testing them with others, as well as, in a sense, recollecting what we already know through dialogue—“For it is not we who know, but rather a certain state of mind in us that knows.”

Kleist suggests it “is something else altogether when the intellect is done thinking through a thought before bursting into speech. For then it is obliged to dwell on the mere expression of that thought.” One can also be fairly certain Kleist would stand against our current test-based no-child-left-behind zeitgeist when he says “There is perhaps no worse occasion than a school examination to put one’s best foot forward … the examiners themselves must also undergo a perilous appraisal of their own intellectual capacity.”

The final piece of the collection, “On the Theater of Marionettes,” is a rumination about perception, suggesting the darker the mind’s reflection, the more grace radiates. Kleist once said in a letter to his publisher that his stories should be considered Moralische Erzählungen (moral tales). Kleist was a great moralist, as many often are when confronted with how terribly humans act toward each other, and how there seems to be little retribution except from violence, whether toward others or oneself. Human being, mechanical figure, and puppet-master—this was Kleist’s dynamic; how do we judge ourselves?

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Christopher M. Ohge is a Ph.D. candidate at Boston University’s Editorial Institute.

The King of Trees by Ah Cheng. Translated from the Chinese by Bonnie S. McDougall, New Directions, 208 pages, $14.95.

Reviewed by Harvey Blume

Chess has been of service to Western art and literature for a thousand years, mined, since it arrived in Europe about a millennium ago, for sport, psychology/psychopathology, and a capacity to reflect changes in cultural style. (There is such a thing as romantic chess, for example, parallel to romanticism in poetry and music. Is there such a thing as romantic poker, cribbage, blackjack or rummy?)

Instances of chess being raveled into our culture abound. To pick a few: In one medieval painting, Tristan and Iseult quaff their fateful love potion over a game. In another, a Christian and a Muslim, in what was still Moorish Spain, play peacefully, perhaps recalling the fact that it was the Arabs who brought chess to Europe. Skipping freely over centuries and media, we find that Samuel Beckett garnishes his 1938 novel, Murphy, with an absurd game of chess, set in a mental ward. (Not the first or the last time chess and madness compete for space). Then, as if to announce the dawn of the digital age —three decades before Garry Kasparov actually lost to IBM’s Deep Blue — Hal, the computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, checkmates its human opponent. It’s hard to resist mentioning that in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, the angel of death likewise mates the knight he has come for, in advance of concluding mortal business with him.

Tristan and Iseult playing chess.

But chess is a global pastime. More people play Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) than the variant we equate with the game. Yet for all its popularity, if Xiangqi plays a proportionate role in the arts of Asia, the results are not apparent, or perhaps, so far as literature is concerned, await translation. That’s one reason, among others, that the Chinese writer Ah Cheng’s recently reissued novella “The King of Chess,” is so special.

In it, the author probes chess much as the best of Western writers have. He asks of Wang Yisheng, its main character, and a Xiangqi prodigy, the same sort of question that has been asked often enough, say, of Bobby Fischer: Would he have been happier if he had devoted himself less to the game? Did chess empower his demons or give him, at least for a time, a defense against them? Wang Yisheng’s own response to such questions is: “How may one abolish gloominess? Only with the art of chess.”

Wang Yisheng perfects his game, and abolishes his gloom, in the aftermath of China’s cultural revolution, when he and other so-called Educated Youth are sent to the countryside to learn from the peasantry how to shed their stubborn bourgeois ways. Most never had bourgeois ways to start with. Wang Yisheng, for example, grew up a few grains of rice, a few drops of oil, away from starvation. When someone asks him, “Who did you learn your chess from?” he answers: “From the world.” In fact, he learned from outcasts and scavengers at the fringe of Chinese society, sharpening his skills by playing blindfold in garbage dumps.

Old Xiangqu Pawn

His teachers cared about the game to the detriment of learning how make a living because, to their minds, it expressed values older and deeper than those of Maoist politics. One, for example, praises Wang Yisheng for playing as their “Daoist ancestors,” might have wanted, and for understanding that, “To do nothing is the Way, and . . . also the invariant principle of chess.” The old master Wang Yisheng defeats in the culminating match of the story praises the Educated Youth for sending his “dragon to rule the waves,” adding that the, “scholar-generals of past and present could do no more than this,” and thanking him for demonstrating that “the art of chess has not wholly degenerated in China.”

Not the sort of language you’re likely to find in most chess manuals, this evaluation of chess is one of the ways Ah Cheng expresses resistance to Maoist mania. “The King of Chess” was published in China in 1984. Reflecting the author’s own experience as an Educated Youth, it was enormously popular. Ah Cheng followed it with two other novellas, “The King of Children” and “The King of Trees,” collected and re-issued under the latter title.

There’s startlingly good writing in all of them, though “The King of Trees” is flawed to some degree by a sort of sentimentalism, in which nature itself, in the form of ancient massive trees, sentenced to be cut down by the authorities, seem to speak back to Maoism. We are lucky to have these fine, powerful tales in English, and not only because one of them provides a new take on how and where chess can matter.

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Harvey Blume, is a writer, now in Cambridge. He likes chess for the game itself and for the way cultures come through it.

The Storm by Margriet de Moor. Translated by Carol Brown Janeway. Knopf, 257 pages, $25.95.

Reviewed By Roberta Silman

Margriet de Moor, a Dutch novelist born in 1941 and author of several novels before this one, was a classical singer before she became a novelist, and in The Storm you can feel a musician’s sensibility at work. Here she has created a surreal fugue-like narrative about two sisters, Lidy and Armanda who are, respectively, 23 and 21 and living in Amsterdam when the book begins on the morning of January 31, 1953. That is the day of the worst natural disaster in The Netherlands in 300 hundred years, when a winter hurricane and a peculiar tide combined forces to create a flood in the North Sea that destroyed the dikes protecting the southwestern part of the country and caused Zeeland to disappear. Almost two thousand Dutch people perished, as well as several hundred others in neighboring countries.

Both writers and readers are drawn to natural disasters because they create an urgency that usually makes for compelling reading, and in this novel, beautifully translated by Carol Brown Janeway, there are some wonderful set pieces. But in the end The Storm strikes this reader as a brilliant idea that somehow never becomes more than just that – a brilliant idea.

Lidy Brouwer, the older sister, has become pregnant by and marries Sjoerd Blaauw, who was, not at all incidentally, Armanda’s boyfriend. When the child, Nadja, is two years old Armanda proposes that Lidy take her place at a party for Armanda’s godchild in Zeeland – have a day off, get away from the boredom of child-rearing, enjoy the solitary pleasure of a long drive – and she will go to a party at Sjoerd’s half-sister’s home that evening. Thus Armanda sets in motion the tragedy that will haunt her for the rest of her life. Why de Moor needs to have this calculating set-up never quite comes clear, although it gives many of Armanda’s future actions a suspicious edge which skews the book in ways I’m not sure de Moor intended.

For there is a dream-like quality to this book, a sense of randomness which accompanies all disasters and fights anything intentional. The story runs in parallel lines: Armanda and Sjoerd and the Brouwers dealing with the disaster and the future without Lidy, and the rest of Lidy’s short life as she makes one understandable but bad choice, then faces the dangers that will ultimate lead her to her watery grave.

As you might guess, Lidy’s story has an almost excruciating intensity, and you begin to know this young woman so intimately that there are times while reading that it seems impossible that someone so vibrant will die. De Moor is also masterful in her portrayal of the secondary characters around Lidy, and she makes us identify with them very closely as they try to escape their terrible fate. I will never forget a chapter called ‘The Birth’ about two-thirds into the book. By now there is no doubt about the severity of the storm:

The sound of a storm defies words. Or rather, the effect it has. The world makes noises. There isn’t a moment of peace in which it isn’t creaking or rustling or banging or talking and uttering every possible nuance of lament until sometimes it even sings. Some of these noises can wait a little, but others are absolutely urgent.
Up in the attic, everyone had gradually become oblivious to the wind. The incessant hammering on their instincts, the incessant demands on their imaginative powers to foresee what could happen if they didn’t figure out a way to get out of here, had dulled their minds. . . Up in this particular attic, they were waiting for something that can be characterized, questionable perhaps but also not wrongly, as deliverance. . .

In contrast the story of those left behind has a monotony about it that is almost hard to believe, and although Armanda and her parents and Sjoerd and Nadja go through their share of suffering when it becomes clear that Lidy is gone, de Moor seems to have accomplished the task she set for herself when she refers to Schubert’s Winterreise in Wilhelm Muller’s words: “The dogs they bark, the chains they clink / The people in bed don’t blink.” The disparity in these two tales defies the true notion of the fugue in which the second part is really counterpoint to the subject part. Although the chapter in which Sjoerd goes to identify his wife (who turns out to be someone else) is stunning and memorable, a lot of the second part of this novel seems too filled with coincidence and not nearly as interesting or as strongly written. Here is Armanda brooding in church after the preacher has quoted Jeremiah’s song of sorrow and it is clear that Lidy is not coming back:

Wormwood and gall, all the wretched thoughts that do not make any soul more magnani-mous, including yours. And think of the little one who stayed at home this morning! Nadja! Yes, precisely. Should she have to grow up in such misery-ridden surroundings? God has taken your sister from us, and it is according to His plan. Stop. Pay attention. God’s cruelty is a great taboo. Let go of your narrow-minded outrage and reflect that His ways are not our ways. God encompasses even those of us who are not of unsound mind. And today He is giving you His simple commandment. Let her go. Live your life.

The truth is that I would have been happy to see a little outrage, a little more depth of feeling. At the core of these lives is an indifference that surprised me, and I felt that de Moor could have worked harder to choose details with more interest than how much these girls looked like each other or details about their sexual experiences. If they are 23 and 21 in 1953, they were teenagers during the Second World War but there is absolutely no mention of the war. In an historical novel which this is, by virtue of its starting with an event in the history of the Netherlands, it seems odd that while ruminating on the past none of these characters has any thoughts about their lives during the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam. Not even the girls’ parents Jan, a cardiologist, and Nadine, who certainly must have witnessed tragedies in that dire time – tragedies that might have given them a sense of kinship or comfort in their own awful predicament. The absence of the war robs the story of the emotional weight it could have had.

Dutch novelist Margriet de Moor

Since our own disaster of similar proportions (in terms of people dead) in our own country in 2001, we have all had a chance to see survivors at close range, and the weariness of these survivors did not seem believable. The fulcrum of the book is Sjoerd who, after looking for Lidy, seems to fade into a shadow as time goes by. Even the decisive scene in which Nadja discovers who her mother really was seemed bland and too matter-of-fact. Yet later, it is Nadja, alone, who achieves that “roundness” prized in characterization by E.M. Forster when she writes Armanda a letter about her sad first love and reminds the reader so poignantly of her mother.

The last part called “Responsorium” is a conversation between Lidy and Armanda, now in a nursing home, almost totally defeated by her life, and seemed an odd way to end this book that seemed so promising in the beginning. The material discussed there could have been woven into the narrative and might have made the novel more like a true fugue, leaving important questions unanswered, but giving the reader a better sense of what really went on between these sisters when they were growing up

So, when we reach the end of this somewhat unbalanced novel, we are left with some fabulous writing in spurts – like a group of Chopin Preludes or Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words, or even Schubert’s Winterreise. But a truly wonderful novel has to have more power, has to be more organic and willing to explore the complex themes within it and not merely present the working out of a terrific idea. It has to resemble, if we are really lucky, a Bach fugue, or a Beethoven sonata, or a Mahler symphony.

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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

Beside the Sea, by Véronique Olmi. Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter. Peirene Press, 121 pages

Rien Ne Va Plus, by Margarita Karapanou. Translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich. Clockroot Books/Interlink Publishing Group, 184 pages, $15.

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

While it is both reductive and unjust to attempt to characterize the literature of a nation (though not quite as idiotic as trying to delineate the ‘currents’ of today’s fiction), if someone demanded that I describe modern French literature in one phrase, I would go with, ‘seemingly normal people doing awful things to each other for inexplicable reasons.’

In Véronique Olmi’s French bestseller, Beside the Sea, a mother brings her two children to a beachside hotel, then smothers them to death with a pillow. In Margarita Karapanou’s Rien Ne Va Plus, a married couple torture each other while the author punishes the reader with a series of contradictory plot lines. It might be worth adding here that only the former novel is French, while the second merely has a French title. And yet the difference in intention between the two novels perfectly points out why my generalization holds. Olmi is cruel to no conceivable end, but Karapanou uses pain to make a point.

The protagonist of Beside the Sea, we quickly realize, is deeply disturbed. She has removed her kids from school and taken them on vacation, but from the first page there’s no mystery about what’s going to happen; these kids have slightly worse odds than the campers of Crystal Lake in Friday the 13th, or the CIA officers hunted by Predator. A considerable (and surprising) number of critics have lauded Olmi’s special insight into the broken mind of her protagonist, but I’m not convinced of the depth of the book’s exploration of extreme mental illness. The mother certainly sounds deranged — “didn’t I use to long to be knocked down by a car and break my leg so I’d finally have a good enough reason to be left in peace?”—but not exactly smother-your-children damaged.

The sense Olmi is skimming the surface isn’t helped by her refusal to give us any of the mother’s back story. Clearly she’s reached a breaking point, but exactly how has she raised her boys to their present age? And if she’s run out of money, how did she have enough before?

I can’t help but think of Laurent Cantet’s film Time Out (L’emploi du Temps), loosely based on the story of Jean-Claude Romand, the man who pretended to be a doctor for 18 years, then killed his entire family when it seemed the truth was about to come out. In his interpretation of domestic genocide, Cantet chose to leave out the murders, most likely for reasons of dramatic plausibility. For me, Olmi’s decision to provide violence without context is doubly flawed: horror-film shocking and intellectually disappointing. And while there’s no lack of good writing, the implication that someone capable of killing her children would also be capable of “narrating” a grammatical and correctly-punctuated story in the first person is suspect. And there’s nothing crazy about stream of consciousness; as Joyce taught us in the final chapter of Ulysses, that’s how every mind works.

Rien Ne Va Plus starts us off in a similar vein of inexplicable cruelty. The narrator, a female novelist named Louisa, has just married the beautiful and debonair Alkiviadis. And the first stop after the wedding? A gay bar, where Alkiviadis invites a fifteen year-old boy back to the house. There, Lousia is made to watch while Alkiviadis and the boy make love. The marriage ends in divorce and, finally, Alkiviadis’ suicide.

After a poetic interlude (“The end has arrived. But not even that can release me. Because there is no End. Amen.”), the book begins once more to describe the courtship and marriage of Louisa and Alkiviadis. For the first few chapters, the two seem terribly in love, but then everything shifts: “—Every time I want to write,” Louisa warns Alkiviadis, “I want to write love stories. But as soon as I pick up the pen I’m overcome by horror.”

By the next page, Louisa has become a monster.

She moves to America to have an affair with a painter (who fell in love with her through her novels). Next, after returning to Alkividias and marrying him, she runs off to Italy with an obese lesbian named Vanessa. Both of these partners are eventually rebuffed, violently, by Louisa. When she returns to her husband and ends up pregnant, she waits a few months before deciding to have it aborted. The reason she gives the doctor?

“Because I hate my husband, and I want to deny him the joy of having this baby.”

She eventually leaves him for good, going off on her own, and the book ends with Louisa asleep and peaceful. “At last! She is alone!” we are told, in a third-person narration that began only a few pages before.

So what differentiates the cruelty of Olmi from that of Karapanou? What justification could there be (assuming one believes that horror demands justification) for such inhumanity?

After their divorce, Louisa tells Alkiviadis that she lied to him constantly throughout their marriage, not only about big things, such as her many lovers, but also small things, such as going out to the movies when she really just sat in a café drinking espresso:

Perhaps it was because those lies gave life a phantasmagorical glow. I could turn each day into fireworks, shape it however I wanted, as if I were God. And the strange thing is that you actually liked it, you knew I was lying to you…

The reader has become Louisa’s lover, a feeling only deepened when we learn that the novel’s opening portion, in which Alkiviadis was the monster, is actually the novel-within-a-novel written by Louisa. Just like her ex-husband, we have been unable to leave Louisa, in spite of the many ways in which we’ve been manipulated, betrayed, and tortured. Karapanou points out the perverse paradox of fiction, that we seek truth in lies. This is a desire that is taken advantage of by works like Olmi’s, which are intended to disturb: the most horrifying lies are not necessarily the most illuminating, but they are invariably the most riveting.

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

The Museum of Innocence, by Orhan Pamuk. Translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely. Vintage International, 532 pages, $7.99.

Reviewed by Christopher M. Ohge

The latest novel (now in paperback) from Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk is The Museum of Innocence, a tragic story of a wealthy Istanbul man who goes against his societal code and chooses a deliberate life governed by passion. The book also proffers a profound depiction of Istanbul, a city whose identity is symbolized by the Bosphorus—a bridge between the Middle East and Europe, Muslim and Christian, traditional and secular. What results is an urban portrait recalling the grimness of Dostoyevsky’s St. Petersburg and the romanticism of Proust’s Paris.

“Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space,” declares Kemal, the main character of the novel, after he has seemingly lost everything—save the mementos of his beloved Füsun that comprise what he calls his Museum of Innocence. Aristotle’s distinction between time (a line connecting all moments in the present) and single moments of the present is ever-present in the book, suggesting that we need to stop thinking about a linear conception of experience: “sometimes these moments we call the ‘present’ can bring us enough happiness to last a century, as they did if Füsun smiled.”

The story begins with the happiest moment in Kemal’s life, just after he makes love to Füsun, his 18-year-old distant cousin. In the next chapter Kemal is having dinner with his fiancée, not Füsun, but the Sorbonne-educated Sibel, who represents the standard quasi-arranged mate for an upper class Turk like Kemal. However, the persistence of Kemal’s desire outweighs the conventional happiness he seems to have set up with Sibel. Kemal falls in love with Füsun after an awkward exchange over a fake handbag at her work, a popular boutique which so aptly gives its customers “a subtler illusion of being in a European city.”

At first, Kemal carries on a two-month affair with her at his parents’ flat in the Merhamet Apartments, indulging in such unruffled reveries as this:

It may well be that, in a moment of joy, one might sincerely believe they are living that golden instant ‘now’ … but whatever they say, in one part of their hearts they still believe in the certainty of a happier moment to come. Because how could anyone, and particularly anyone who is still young, carry on with the belief that everything could only get worse: If a person is happy enough to think he has reached the happiest moment of his life, he will be hopeful enough to believe his future will be just as beautiful.

Yet that sexually-induced bliss passes because of Kemal’s inability to break off his engagement; and Füsun, after airing some cleverly ambiguous grievances at Kemal’s engagement party, anticipates Kemal’s obsession: “When we lose people we love, we should never disturb their souls, whether living or dead. Instead, we should find consolation in an object that reminds you of them.” Füsun then disappears, and Kemal earnestly begins to collect things related to her. He eventually finally finds Füsun, who has married Feridun, a loafer/aspiring filmmaker (Istanbul being the third-largest film industry at the time). And after a seven-year, 10-month effort by Kemal, which includes delightfully mundane nights of “sitting” (a Turkish cultural staple; chapter 55 gives a thorough account) with Füsun’s family, taking Füsun and her husband out to carouse with the film crowd, and bankrolling his own film company, Füsun divorces her husband, and agrees to marry Kemal. However, the marriage never happens.

The climax, perhaps as predictable as it is cathartic, is perhaps a nod to the car-wreck conclusion in Truffaut’s film Jules and Jim; nevertheless, by the end of the book, there may be some sense of relief, as Kemal, who is described as disheveled and angst-ridden by others, wants to “Let everyone know, I lived a very happy life.”

Orhan Pamuk: His novel is about time and collectibles

With brilliant ingenuity, Pamuk’s novel addresses the strange nature of a common obsession: collectibles, which to him “were no longer just tokens of moments in my life, nor merely mementos; to me they were elemental to those moments.” The objects on display give the visitor to his museum “the particles of experience” to recall “the entire reality” of past events.

The novel’s unique frame story also offers a compelling experience: through the first 500 or so pages you think the narrator is Kemal, but it turns out that the story is being written by the eccentric wordsmith Orhan Pamuk, whom Kemal hired to write his story as an annotated guidebook for the Museum of Innocence. Pamuk’s narrative tactic is more than just authorial playfulness. Because the events are related through his namesake, Orhan, who is a character in the novel trying to inhabit the thoughts of Kemal in the first person, the potential sentimentality of the central romantic obsession is undercut with a bracing application of retroactive irony.

The extracts provided before the story reflect Pamuk’s eclectic influences, which include the celebrated Turkish journalist Celal Salik (who also appears in the novel), Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, perhaps the most important Turkish novelist before Pamuk (whose central concern was also time). While the essential theme of this book is the tension between East and West, many of the ideas stem from a great tradition of novels providing rambling philosophical investigations (Sterne), the prominence of passion (Hugo), and the pleasure of degradation (Dostoyevsky). Kemal’s love for Füsun also recalls M. Swann’s love for Odette in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past—poisonous, leading to utter degradation, yet also living in memory, and providing comfort in an increasingly inauthentic world.

What results is not only Pamuk’s answer to the great novelists who preceded him, but also, a dictionary of contemporary Istanbul, as well as a sprawling metaphysical investigation of time and happiness relayed by a Sisyphean man reveling in his memories of a life lived deliberately—and joyfully accepting the consequences.

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Christopher M. Ohge is a Ph.D. candidate at Boston University’s Editorial Institute.

Vera Wright Trilogy by Elizabeth Jolley. Persea Books, 568 pages, $19.95.

Reviewed by Roberta Silman

Elizabeth Jolley is known and acclaimed as an Australian writer although she was born in England in 1923 and emigrated to Australia in 1959. Internationally famous for over 20 volumes of stories, novels and non-fiction, she actually started to publish late – in her 50s – and was still writing almost until her death in 2007, at 83. From all the information about her in publicity sheets and on the Internet, she seems to have been a wonderful person – approachable, wise, compassionate.

Now Karen and Michael Braziller of Persea Books (Disclaimer: they published my second novel) have embarked on a project to make her better known to American readers with what is considered her most ambitious work, The Vera Wright Trilogy. In one volume is My Father’s Moon and Cabin Fever, which were published here in 1989 and 1990, and The Georges’ Wife, which came out in Australia in 1993 and is being published in this country for the first time.

In the online Australian Literature Diary is an entry by Jolley’s friend, Adi Wimmer whose loving remembrance was posted in March 2007. Towards the end Wimmer writes:

She had an incredibly hard life in the decade 1939-1949, how hard only a few people know, and they are very protective. The full story has never been told.

My sense is that the closest we have to the full story is this trilogy, that Vera Wright is partially autobiographical, although she becomes a physician instead of a writer, and that this terribly sad, often funny, and entirely memorable journey parallels Jolley’s own journey, starting when she was a young nurse, not yet out of her teens, during the Second World War and in the post-war years when she tried to find a place for herself in the continuing chaos that followed that enormous upheaval.

The operative word is chaos. In the first two volumes Jolley seems bent on conveying her experiences in a way that parallels the confusion that ruled her life, how she was utterly perplexed by the workings of a hospital for wounded soldiers and also congenitally crippled children. In describing the tumult, the intensity of wartime pressures and the way things worked not only there but in a place where she had employment afterwards, Jolley makes you feel as she did – at times utterly disoriented, incapable of obeying anything but the most primitive instincts, totally at sea about the practicalities required to provide for herself.

Yet at other times she seems absolutely in control, as when she describes the people she encounters in language so vivid that you can hear them making fun of her inability to fit in, or see them dancing in the bathroom in a paroxysm of lesbian desire. She seems afraid of nothing – all kinds of sex, cruelty, hypocrisy, tenderness, slap-stick and stupidity.

When writing about that time Jolley has said, “Literature is a study and exploration of human beings, and in a way, nursing is the same, and so it was really the right thing for me to do.” She also tips us off as to her unique method of telling a story, which critics have called fractured and sometimes feels like circling around an airport searching for a place to land, with, at times, so many repetitions that I found myself wishing she had lived long enough to edit out some of them.

In truth, sometimes they feel like hectoring, as if she has confused the reader (who is always far more intelligent than most writers acknowledge) with her mother who needed to be told everything ten times. But most of the time the strongest memories feel right, and near the beginning of Cabin Fever she seems to be laying out her method:

Memories are not always in sequence, not in chronological sequence. Sometimes an incident is revived in the memory. Sometimes incidents and places and people occupying hours, days, weeks, and years are experienced in less than a quarter of a second in this miraculous possession, the memory. The revival is not in any particular order and one recalled picture attaching itself to another, is not recognizably connected to that other in spite of it being brought to the surface in the wake of the first recollection.

Central to the three volumes are Vera’s relationship with her parents, their insistence on helping refugees from her mother’s native Germany during the war, her mother’s conventional way of the looking at the world which was such a direct contrast to her father’s complete acceptance of his daughter and her rather eccentric way of living. It is almost as if he recognizes that the “trouble” she gets herself into is a direct result of her futile search for a father-figure which has its genesis in their profound love for each other.

A Portrait of Elizabeth Jolley, Meg Padgham, 1977.

Like her father, the reader is expected to accept Vera in all her facets. Jolley spares us nothing – her adolescent crush on an older nurse who introduces her to the joy of classical music, especially Beethoven, her surrender to a man who is so elusive, so potentially evil that you almost shudder when reading about him and his deluded, Zelda Fitzgerald-like wife, her attachment to other people who clearly live on the fringes, her growing awareness of the connection between money and power, and her ultimate plight of becoming an unwed mother of not only one, but two daughters.

Although we are often charmed by this determined young woman who wants to know everything — almost like an archaeologist uncovering Pompeii – there were times when I found myself utterly exasperated at her inability to connect the dots in her own life and learn to protect herself a little. But the see-saw of emotions – the exhilaration when Vera becomes more self-aware, and the pity and fear when she seems to sabotage herself yet again are evidence of Jolley’s mastery and her importance as a witness when women had far fewer choices than they have now.

Slowly a more sensible, older Vera prevails, and the writing reflects her ability to make sense of the life she had carved out for herself — the narrative is easier to follow, and the tone is less hectic as she confines herself to the Georges – the well-off sister and her younger brother – who have taken her into their household, woven what sometimes seems like a spell around her, but who, in their strange way have given her the strength and courage to go on.

And when they get to Australia and she seems to be narrating the book from the vantage point of many years later, you feel her yearning for something different but also a newfound assurance of what she could only fitfully grasp before. At the end of Cabin Fever Vera says:

The strange thing about living, I often nearly speak of this during a consultation, is the repetition. It is as though the individual enters the same experience again and again. The same kinds of people make the same demands, and the giver, blessed with giving, gives yet again in what turns out to be the wrong direction.

There are few of us who cannot relate to such poignant honesty.

Although this trilogy is full of mystery and the reader has to work to plumb its depths, there are many, many pleasures – a string of characters worthy of Dickens, Jolley’s joy in nature, in the sense of place, her love of poetry and music. These three volumes are not for the faint-hearted, nor for those who like a linear story and an easy read, but something to re-read, again and again. Some of us will put it next to Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, or McEwan’s Atonement for its subject matter; others next to Virginia Woolf and Henry James and Karen Blixen and Hemingway for its directness of tone and original insights. But you will want it near – for it is a wonderful addition to our best English literature in its exploration of the infinite intricacies of the human heart.

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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