It was his writing shed, in fact and it sits in a village about an hour west of London, in Buckinghamshire. The shed is in exactly the same condition as it was in 1990. That’s when the author of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” died.

Dahl’s family is raising funds to move the contents of the one-room building to a nearby museum.

So, what’s the name of the English countryside village where Roald Dahl once lived and worked?

Pictures: Inside author Roald Dahl’s writing hut

The answer is the village of Great Missenden, England.

If all goes according to plan, the famous shed will move to the Roal Dahl Museum and Story Center next year. And it’s turning out to be quite an endeavor. Anchor Lisa Mullins talks to BBC television program host Leah Gooding about this big move.

Roald Dahl wrote many of his famous stories here, including Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. (Photo: BBC)

The Gathering of Young Thinkers (Photo: Jeb Sharp)

By Jeb Sharp

It was just a few days before the anniversary of the earthquake. I had been invited to attend a meeting of a youth writing group in Port-au-Prince.

American graduate student Laura Wagner helped start the group. She was living in Haiti at the time of the quake.

Like so many others, she was trapped under the rubble and injured. In the aftermath she wanted to do something that felt useful. She teamed up with her friend Marlene Jean-Pierre, a student and community organizer, and the group was born.

“It’s a very open place,” says Laura Wagner. “People know each other; they talk about things without a lot of reservations or fear. One of the rules of the group is that the texts go out, but what happens in the group stays in the group. I think in a lot of ways it’s actually kind of therapeutic. It’s not conceived that way and we’re not professional therapists, but it’s sort of a place to meet and talk about things.”

The writers range in age from 16 to 25. Most are students, a couple are teachers. Some go by names like G-Love and Atom.

They meet most Saturday afternoons in this a classroom in an elementary school in Pont Rouge, not far from Cite Soleil.

News reports don’t usually describe Cite Soleil in flattering terms – outsiders generally regard it as a crime-ridden slum – but these young people want you to know it’s also a vibrant neighborhood full of creativity and talent.

The Gathering of Young Thinkers

They’ve called themselves the Konbit des Jeunes Penseurs – the Gathering of Young Thinkers.

Marlene Jean-Pierre explains that these are people who aren’t in art school or performing arts school, but who know how to write really well, are very expressive and have lots of opinions about their community.

“The idea is to have a place where they can come together to express a new vision for their country,” she says.

And they do that by reading Haitian literature and writing their own poems and stories – about the earthquake, about cholera, about religion, but also about life and love and sex.

Laura Wagner and Marlene Jean-Pierre (Photo: Jeb Sharp)

Laura Wagner says there’s also a lot of teasing.

“Haitians joke a lot,” she says. “When they’re comfortable with you they’ll make fun of you, which is why when I’m late I have to sing.”

Marlene Jean-Pierre smiles and says she thinks the group laughs too much sometimes. But on this occasion, just a few days before the anniversary of the earthquake, there’s not a lot of laughing, at least not yet.

People straggle in. The tone is subdued. It’s the same all over the city. People are bracing themselves.

Laura Wagner asks where everyone is. It turns out some of the group are late because they’re preparing a special performance.

I’m here to sit in on a regular meeting, but it looks as if today’s meeting will be irregular. Still, the delay gives me time to interview a member of the group, 19 year old poet Assephie Petit-Frere.

But first she peppers me with questions. What’s your name? How old are you? Are you married? How many kids do you have? What is your goal as a journalist? When I tell her I hope journalism makes things better, she says, “In Haiti, our leadership lacks responsibility for the people.”

Everyone felt the ground shaking

I ask her what happened to her during the earthquake.

“I was at school,” Petit-Frere says. “We were writing. The teacher was in front of the class. One student said ‘What was that?’ Then everyone felt the ground shaking.

Assephie Petit-Frere (Photo: Jeb Sharp)

“I was on the second floor,” she continues, “and I felt as though my feet were going into the ground. The school collapsed but not evenly. The floor above us fell on the students at the front of the class. I saw a hole and crawled out. And then I saw the whole four story school had fallen. Everybody was crying Jesus Jesus and when I got out I thanked God I was alive. I had survived.”

I ask Assephie Petit-Frere if she’ll read one of her poems for me. It’s called Cruel Love. She doesn’t have a copy with her so we use my iPhone to pull up the group’s website.

She reads the poem off the tiny screen. It is indeed about cruel love, and betrayal and loss. Eventually everyone arrives and the session begins, about an hour later than usual.

Lanmou mechan

– Assephie Petit-Frere
Listen to the poem

The mystery performance turns out to be a five-minute piece about the earthquake.

It’s a simple piece but the effect is powerful. A couple of people leave the room in tears. Others go out to console them.

Marlene turns to me and says, “If you’d been here during the earthquake, you’d be crying too.” I suddenly feel self-conscious, not sure whether I should keep recording. The writers invited me here to witness their weekly meeting, not to expose their pain.

A few minutes pass. The room fills back up. And what happens next transforms the room. Laura Wagner translates for me: “They’ve promised they’re going to do a text that’s going to make people not sad anymore.”

People start reading silly poems and telling jokes, about anything and everything, about women, about breadfruit, about a young man, eager to impress his new girlfriend’s family, trying to blame his farts on the dog. Unsuccessfully.

Laughter fills the room

Soon everyone is spluttering with laughter. Some people are doubled over. The grief dissipates, stamped out by all the hilarity. Now I understand what poet Assephie Petit-Frere told me earlier.

“I like the group,” she says. “Ever since we came together, we’ve been happy. If you have a problem, it goes away.”

Marlene Jean-Pierre, Andy Bien-Aime, Scott Laguerre (Photo: Jeb Sharp)

That’s for sure. But as Wagner also points out, humor does allow these young people to assert their humanity.

To control their own stories a bit. And to laugh at all the awfulness around them.

One of the main goals of the writing group is to project a different image of Haiti than the one you see on the news. These young artists yearn to be seen as full human beings, not just victims.

Laura Wagner wants that for them too. She translates their material into English and posts it on the group’s website. “I’m like their agent,” she says.

“But they do all the work.”

• Website for the Gathering of Young Thinkers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Carol Zall
The current issue of British literary magazine “Granta” focuses on Pakistan. In Granta’s own words, the nation of 200 million people speaking nearly sixty languages is “one of the most dynamic places in the world today.”

Granta’s editor, John Freeman, says there’s currently an enormous amount of writing talent in Pakistan. While there may be many places in the world that deserve to have an entire issue devoted to them, says freeman, there aren’t always writers available who can tell their nation’s stories. But he says that’s exactly what’s happening right now with Pakistan.

“It’s a thrilling moment literarily, but obviously there’s some serious themes at work here and there’s a lot at stake,” Freeman said.

Granta’s Pakistan issue features both non-fiction and fiction, as well as poetry and artwork. The magazine opens with a novella called “Leila in the Wilderness” by Pakistani-British author Nadeem Aslam.

Aslam was born in Pakistan and moved with his family to England when he was fourteen. At the time he did not speak any English. But since then, he’s written three acclaimed novels in English.

His new novella, which he wrote for Granta’s special issue, is set in modern-day Pakistan, but with the very first words, Aslam invokes a sense of times past.

“In the beginning, the great river was believed to flow out of a lion’s mouth, it’s size reflected in its ancient name – Sindhu, an ocean. The river was older than the Himalayas.; the Greeks had called it Sinthus, the Romans Sindus, the Chinese Sintow, but it was Pliny who had given it the name Indus.”

“Leila in the Wilderness” deals with problems facing women in Pakistan today. Although the story’s details make it clear that it takes place in the present, there’s still much in the writing that feels mythical. Aslam says he wanted to lull people into thinking that they were in some exotic land.

“And then suddenly a mobile phone rings, and you are shocked, I hope, to think that this is actually happening now,” Aslam said.

The story’s heroine, Leila, is 14-years old, and has been married against her will to an older man from a powerful family. Her husband expects her to bear him a son, but when the time comes, Leila gives birth to a girl. The child is taken from her by force, and killed. Meanwhile, Leila’s enraged husband is persuaded to give her another chance. Time and again, however, Leila gives birth to baby girls, and continues to suffer abuse at the hands of her husband and mother-in-law.

At one point when Leila feels particularly threatened, she grows wings and flies away from her tormentors. With that flight, Aslam’s tale departs the realm of the everyday – but the author insists that the circumstances of the story are very much rooted in the real world.

“You know, no one in Pakistan has ever sprouted wings, but the real things are real,” Aslam said. “It is my understanding that Pakistan is among those countries where the ratio of men and women is inconsistent with the rest of the world. Millions of women are missing.”

Aslam says that much of his fiction is based on real events in Pakistan, including one newspaper article he read about a woman who accused doctors of switching her male baby for a female one at birth, only to admit later that she had only made the claim because her husband had threatened to throw her out if she gave birth to another daughter.

“I wouldn’t be able to make up half the terrible things in all my books,” said Aslam. “The beginning is always something in the news. I always say that news is the most emotional program on tv for me.”

Aslam says that anyone who reads his work can see how deeply critical he is of the injustices in Pakistani society today. But he says that criticism is born out of love for his native land.

“It all comes out of a place of love, you must understand that I am critical of Pakistan in my writing but I am also aware that we are a very young country,” Aslam said. “We are 63-years old. Let me ask you: ‘What was America like when it was 63-years old?’”

While Aslam says he won’t whitewash his country’s problems, he’s still keenly aware of the negative image that many outsiders have of Pakistan. Still, he doesn’t think it harms Pakistan’s reputation to focus on problems like the ones Leila faces in his novella. He points out that everyone in the story who hears of Leila’s troubles tries to put an end o the injustices she’s suffered.

“So you know, they too are Pakistani, so that is the Pakistani that I am proud of, and I hope to be part of, in that there are bad things, but that resistance is always there, and that is something we have to count on,” Aslam said.

While Aslam’s tale recounts terrible events, it’s also a story about love, loyalty, and above all, hope. In that sense, his fiction reflects his own attitude towards Pakistan.

“I cannot subscribe to this notion that Pakistan will fall apart,” he said. “I mean, it might, but I am not going to begin from that point. I can’t …because I love that place.”
Download MP3

During our show on Nov. 15, 2010 the entire second half of the broadcast was dedicated to issues and culture in Pakistan. To explore our special coverage in full please see:
Granta issue explores Pakistan
Truck poetry in Pakistan
Shehzad Roy’s politically charged Pakistani pop

• Granta issue 112 on Pakistan
• Nadeem Aslam at Random House
• Kamila Shamsie’s ‘Pop Idols’ in Granta
• Declan Walsh’s ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’

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

Reviewed by Bill Marx

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GALLAFENT: He was intrigued.

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

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

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

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

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

SHELLY SMITH:  Or your uncle’s hat.

LANNON: The inside of a purse.

SMITH: Yes!

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

LANNON: It has a bit of an onion smell.

SMITH: You might be right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SMITH: Institutional, like linoleum.

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

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

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

The Changeling By Kenzaburō Ōe. Translated by Deborah Boliver Boehm. Grove Press, 468 pages, $26.00.

Reviewed By Tommy Wallach

I wasn’t feeling entirely qualified to review the newest novel from Japanese Nobel Laureate Kenzaburō Ōe, “The Changeling.” It’s the first of his novels I’ve read, and also intensely autobiographical. Just a few weeks ago, I cited autobiographical interest as the main selling point of Coetzee’s most recent novel, Summertime. In order to avoid missing out on the more intimate aspects of Ōe’s book, I decided to do what any diligent critic would do in such a situation: I looked him up on Wikipedia.

What I found there—a description of an author both intellectual and accessible, so dedicated to his political philosophy that he remains the only person in history to refuse Japan’s Order of Culture—convinced me that I owe it to myself to read more of Ōe’s work.

It also made “The Changeling” come as something of a surprise, because the book had the opposite effect on me. It’s a long, discursive, and ultimately unsatisfying novel which, from the little I know of Ōe’s history, doesn’t do justice to his oeuvre.

The story concerns a fictional stand-in for Ōe, named Kogito after Descartes’ famous epiphanic statement: cogito ergo sum. Kogito is trying to come to terms with the suicide of his brother-in-law, the filmmaker Goro. Goro also has a real-life counterpart, the director Juzo Itami, who killed himself for the same reasons as Goro: a journalist was about to reveal information proving he’d cheated on his wife with a much younger woman.

Goro leaves a number of pre-recorded audiotapes behind him, and “The Changeling” opens with Kogito having odd, obsessive conversations with the Goro on these tapes.

The monologic tapes temporarily obfuscate one of the major weaknesses of Ōe’s writing (and Deborah Boliver Boehm’s translation): his dialogue. I’ve often found something stilted in English translations of Japanese dialogue, but this book takes that awkwardness to a whole new level. Most conversations sound like two people reading to each other from prepared statements:

You’ve had a lot of direct experience with the terrible specificities of yazuka violence, and the fact that you haven’t even touched on that topic in this conversation just makes me feel more acutely aware of its terrible menace.

Aside from the repetition of “terrible,” notice the odd commentary “in this conversation,” the writerly adverb “acutely”, the implausibly formal “terrible menace”. Seldom does the reader feel like human beings with real emotions are actually speaking to each other; they are simply making verbal presentations.

But it isn’t just the dialogue that proves problematic. What possible explanation is there for faux-poetry like “the way the moon glittered fiercely on the surface of the river below, which was like the bottom of a deep abyss…”. How can the glittering surface of a river be anything like the bottom of a deep abyss? Ask translator Boehm, who must take the bulk of the responsibility for these inconsistencies.

Ōe isn’t off the hook either, however. Perhaps for fear of being too obtusely self-involved, he’s constantly forcing his characters to tell each other things they already know, like in this passage where Goro relates to Kogito the story of Kogito’s courtship of Goro’s sister: “You did manage to find a copy of “The House at Pooh Corner,” as I recall, and you sent it to Ashiya. The correspondence that ensued was the beginning of your relationship with Chikashi.” Oh, is that how I met my wife? I’d forgotten!

The story bounces around in time and space, often using Goro’s recorded tapes to evoke moments in their shared history. The book is at its best when it dwells on the odd intricacy of their relationship, which is equal parts love, jealousy, and sexual tension. As the novel progresses, we discover that Goro and Kogito shared some kind of traumatic event in their past, and it seems inevitable that we will eventually hear about it.

Nobel Laureate Kenzaburo Ōe

Unfortunately, we don’t learn about this trauma organically, but through the kind of cheap and embarrassing authorial invasion common to works of genre fiction written by high school English students. For the first 350 pages of the book, Ōe keeps referring to something called “THAT” (the traumatic event), but refuses to describe it. Apparently, no one ever told him that it doesn’t count as dramatic tension when you tell your reader you have a secret, but you won’t reveal it unless he wades through 6 hours of narcissistic rambling.

When we finally learn what the THAT is, Ōe fails utterly in evoking it as any kind of critical juncture. The last part of his novel inhabits the head of Kogito’s (Ōe’s) wife, who finds in Sendak’s picturebook “Outside, Over There” a metaphor for her relationship with her brother.

Apparently, she believes that Goro returned from THAT a changed man, an idea that gives the novel its name. But while these musings may be of some interest to a Japanese audience that has followed the tabloid story of Itami’s suicide, they meant almost nothing to this American.

The one saving grace here is that Ōe at least has a sense of humor about what he’s done in “The Changeling”. At one point, Kogito’s wife takes him to task for his “insufferable propensity for self-reference,” inserting himself into all his novels “under some contrived pseudonym”. But there is a darkness to this self-deprecation. On one of his tapes, Goro tells Kogito what he thinks of their artistic careers in severe terms:

“When you think about people who do the kind of work we do—selling the ‘new flowers’ of kitsch and the ‘new stars’ of kitsch by the yard, as it were—we don’t have that much time left, and we need to come to terms with that fact and ask forgiveness for having lived on lies.”

There is a noble naivete in taking honesty to mean autobiography, but Reality TV is not inherently more genuine than a sitcom, and the digressive relation of experience isn’t enough to float a novel. I have faith that Ōe can do much better than this, but maybe that’s just a bit of credulity on my part. I believe everything I read on Wikipedia.

For decades, the writer Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was banned in the Soviet Union. She wrote stories about domestic despair and Soviet censors demanded optimism. Petrushevskaya’s writing was just too dark, but today she’s a living legend in Russia. And she’s always reinventing herself. Her newest endeavor? Cabaret. Recently Petrushevskaya visited New York City and sang for an audience of Russian émigrés. Kiera Feldman reports.

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya performing in New York (Photo: Kiera Feldman)

• The Fountain House by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

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

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World. Romanian born German writer, Herta Muller, has won this year’s Nobel Prize for literature. Muller grew up in Romania under the dictatorship of Nicolai Ceausescu and in the shadow of World War II. She later emigrated to West Germany. Her work reflects those experiences depicting what the Nobel committee called the landscape of the dispossessed. The World’s Jeb Sharp has this profile.

JEB SHARP: You may not have heard of Herta Muller but she’s well known in the German speaking world. Her life and writing span many of the most terrifying experiences in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. Part of what makes her so interesting is that she’s German but not German. She grew up a member of Romania’s ethnic German minority.

BRIGID HAINES: She writes in German but she always says that her writing is very influenced by the Romanian language in way more poetic and has lots of lovely metaphors which she incorporates into German.

SHARP: That’s Brigid Haines, head of modern languages at Swansea University in the UK.

HAINES: Her father was an SS officer and that’s something that’s always disturbed her because she never quite knew what he did in the war. So she had to deal with the legacy of the German guilt. But at the same time she was growing up in a totalitarian regime.

SHARP: And not just any totalitarian regime but that of the hard line Nicolai Ceausescu. Not surprisingly one of Muller’s big themes is dictatorship. By the time she was a student she was in trouble with the authorities as an intellectual and dissenter. Later she was fired from her job as a translator because she refused to collaborate with the Romanian secret police. Muller draws continually on her life in Romania in her writing says Haines.

HAINES: This is an experience that she can’t leave behind. It’s taken hold of her and she writes extraordinarily well about it.

SHARP: Haines got to know Muller a few years ago when she was a writer in residence at Swansea. She says she was great with the students especially in bringing to life what it was like to leave Romania and come to the west – in her case Berlin in the late 1980s.

HAINES: One of her books was reviewed in Die Zeit, a German weekly newspaper, and she wanted copies of this review. And so she went out and bought 20 copies of Die Zeit. What she didn’t know was that you can photocopy in the west. Because in her experience the only photocopiers in the country, in Romania, were owned by the secret police. She’s a very good ambassador for … . Well for keeping alive the sense of horror and terror and the lasting trauma of dictatorship.

SHARP: But what sets Muller apart is her use of language. She writes novels, essays, poems, and even creates collages out of words and pictures. Poetic is the word that comes up most to describe even her prose. Lyn Marven of the University of Liverpool says her German is infused with Romanian imagery.

LYN MARVEN: The novel that was translated as The Passport is actually called Humans are a Pheasant in the World. And the pheasant in German, she says the pheasant is; well you can picture a pheasant. You know it’s proud. It struts its stuff. It walks in front of cars on the road. It rules the place. But in fact in Romanian the pheasant is a loser. And so it’s one that can’t get off the ground. And that, the dual language, you know the two different backgrounds and that to me seemed very striking. That on the one hand you’ve got this beautiful bird but on the other hand it can’t fly.

SHARP: Marven says Muller often draws her metaphors from nature and the countryside. Her best known work in English is The Land of Green Plums.

MARVEN: The Land of Green Plums uses the image of the unripe plums as something that makes her feel sick. It might even be dangerous. And that’s a metaphor for the knowledge that’s inside her about her father’s past.

SHARP: Marven and other fans are celebrating Muller’s prize today despite a bit of grumbling that the Nobel literature committee is too Eurocentric.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Christopher Merrill writes: The new South Africa is the setting for this taut crime novel by Deon Meyer, an Afrikaans writer with an eye for the complications wrought by the end of apartheid, the iniquitous political system instituted by descendants of the Dutch settlers. It turns out that few in this country can escape their history, certainly not Lemmer, a personal security guarrd with a checkered past, including a stint in prison for murder, or his client, Emma le Roux, an expert in branding who believes that she saw her brother on television—twenty years after he vanished without a trace. Determined to find him, Lemmer and Emma set off for the Lowveld, a popular tourist destination, and there they discover some hard truths, experiencing along the way no shortage of close calls—with a black mamba, with men in ski masks, with the past itself. A thoroughly enjoyable read.

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Anchor Jeb Sharp speaks with Pulitzer-Prize winning author Tracy Kidder about his newest novel, Strength in What Remains, the true story of a man who survived the ethnic violence between Burundi and Rwanda and managed to find his way to the United States.

Click here for more information about the book.

Here’s a short video of a part of the interview:

An Interview with Author Tracy Kidder from Clark Boyd on Vimeo.

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

JEB SHARP: A young man named Deo has memories as disturbing as those of the Afghan refugee we just met. Deo is the subject of a new book. It’s called “Strength in What Remains.” The author is Tracy Kidder. His 2003 book, “Mountains Beyond Mountains” told the story of a doctor’s mission to revolutionize healthcare in Haiti. Kidder profiles another extraordinary man in “Strength in What Remains.” Deo was born to a poor rural family in the central African country of Burundi. He was 24 years old and working at a hospital when the horrors began.

TRACY KIDDER: He escaped first the onset of ethnic civil war in Burundi but unfortunately for him he escaped to Rwanda where six months later the genocide began. He escaped back to Burundi. At that point he ended up… It’s too complicated to explain. But he ended up flying to New York City. So he arrived in New York City with $200 in his pocket, a visa obtained under false pretenses, no English, no friends or relations, memories of horrors so fresh that he sometimes confused past and present. He had a bad time there for a while. First ride on a subway he was lost for most of the day. He eked out a sort of living delivering groceries for $15 a day. He lived in tenements, abandoned tenements in Harlem and then in Central Park and yet less than two years after that he was a student at Columbia University. And I think even more improbable and interesting than that, he’s gone back to Burundi, built a remarkable medical facility and public health system in a rural village which they sort of hope will be a beacon for the rest of the country.

SHARP: So in a sense there are many chapters there. There’s Deo and his coming of age in Burundi. Becoming a medical student. There’s his becoming embroiled, engulfed, in the ethnic violence of that period in both countries – in Burundi and Rwanda. His flight to New York sort of getting through all kinds of things and then this other chapter of returning to Burundi and building a clinic. But I wonder. You start the book with the flight to New York. Tell us a little bit of just what it is to flee the kind of violence he fled.

KIDDER: I’m not a great expert on this because I didn’t live through it. But I do believe in being able to extend one’s imagination. The way I chose to do this was to tell the story as he told it to me over many, and sometimes rather painful, sessions of talk. But this is a book in part about memory. The idea is to see him in the throws of these memories. I mean that’s one of the costs I should think for any survivor.

SHARP: What were those memories? What’s most striking about some of the key things that happen to him?

KIDDER: Well I think the first and strongest one is of being in the hospital where he was working as an intern. A big hospital in a pretty rural part of Burundi and it was the day after the president, the first elected president of Burundi, had been assassinated. And, for lack of better term, militia men had come to the hospital and they were, as near a Deo could tell conducted a rather indiscriminate slaughter. And he ran to his room and hid under his bed but he forgot to close his door. And it was for that reason when they came to his door they decided he had left. So he lay there and listened to the massacre and then when they had left he set off on foot. That’s indelible memory of course. And there were others. When he was crossing the border into Rwanda there was a woman, a Hutu – he’s a Tutsi – who saved him.

SHARP: She pretends he’s her son.

KIDDER: Her son. Yeah.

SHARP: And there’s a terrible, terrible moment in a banana grove where he comes across a dead woman whose baby is still alive.

KIDDER: Yes. The baby is still alive and he is utterly exhausted and the place is just full of corpses. He remembers saying to himself I can’t help that baby. I can’t. I can’t do anything and he sort of got up and staggered away until he couldn’t see the baby and then went to sleep for he didn’t know how long – whether it was a day or two days. And [INAUDIBLE] doesn’t know what happened to the baby but almost certainly it died. And he still feels a bad about that you know although… I mean one does I suppose.

SHARP: As you say the story is as much about memory as it is about the account of survival either from the genocide or in New York. And in the prologue to the book you talk about this Burundian term gusimbura.

KIDDER: It’s a very… It’s unusual. A linguist friend of mine said he knew of no language that had a single word for this.

SHARP: What does it mean?

KIDDER: Gusimbura means to remind people of something unpleasant in particular by naming the dead. And it’s not a good thing to do. It’s a very rude thing to do. But I was introduced to this word by Deo as we drove to the place where he was born and raised. Suddenly he was warning me not to mention the death of this childhood friend when he was a little boy. And it stuck with me. You know I found myself writing late in this book lines to the effect that of course we need these memorials to genocide, of course we need to remember, or else this business of never again will never be anything more than an empty self-enhancing platitude. But I also feel like too much remembering can choke a person, even a culture, and a feeling that there was also something to be said for a culture with a word like gusimbura.

SHARP: So Deo goes back to Burundi to build a medical clinic in the place where his parents have ended up after the war. Tell us about that. Tell us about what it was like for him to go back to Burundi and how he found meaning in the work there.

KIDDER: Yeah my trip to Burundi with him was just incidental to what he was really up to. This was 2006 and he was beginning the foundations of this public health and medical system. With an enormous amount of help – he’s quite a charismatic guy – and he’d rallied a very large number of American friends and the number of which they’ve grown and grown. The clinic is fully functional now. They saw 20,000 patients the first year. It’s about 30,000. They come… People come from all over Burundi because the care is good and it’s free to all those who really can’t afford to pay. People even come from as far away as Congo and Tanzania. And my favorite story is of the one man who showed up that didn’t really need medical help to come from a long distance. Deo said why have you come? And he said to see America. Which actually I’ve sometimes thought that was misconception for us to live up to but in a sense this is a good side of America, a really good side of America, this clinic. And it has tremendous support from our State Department and from a lot of Americans.

SHARP: Tracy Kidder’s most recent book is “Strength in What Remains.” Tracy Kidder thank you so much.

KIDDER: Thanks for having me.

SHARP: You can find a video of Tracy Kidder talking about his new book on our website. That’s The World dot org.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.