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

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

A once neglected masterpiece of Cuban literature is now available in English

By Bill Marx

Guillermo Rosales destroyed most of his work before he committed suicide in 1993, but the anguished Cuban writer published a short novel during his lifetime entitled “The Halfway House.” Neglected when it first appeared, the book is now considered a modern classic.

Translated by Anna Kushner for New Directions, “The Halfway House” is a masterful kick-in-the-teeth. The plot revolves around a man who, after his release from a Miami psychiatric ward, struggles to maintain his sanity in a hellish halfway house while grappling with his traumatic memories of the Cuban Revolution. An unconvincing note of sentimentality in the book’s final pages doesn’t dilute the story’s gaunt, gut-wrenching impact.

Acclaimed Cuban writer José Manuel Prieto, author of the novels “Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire” and more recently “Rex” (reviewed by World Books) contributes an informative prologue to “The Halfway House.” But his discussion left me wondering why it took so long for Rosales’s savagely beautiful book to be translated, and how he is viewed in Cuba today. I fired off email questions to Prieto, whose thoughtful responses, via the expert translation of Anna Kushner, are below.

World Books: In your introduction to “The Halfway House” you write that the novel is “one of the best Cuban novels of the second half of the twentieth century.” Why was the initial reaction of Latin American critics to the novel so lukewarm when it was published in 1987? What are their estimations of the novel today?

José Manuel Prieto: The reaction was so lukewarm because it was published by a little-known publishing house with small circulation. Another factor was the stigma of living and writing in Miami, which was still very strong back then. You simply wouldn’t pay attention to an author like Guillermo Rosales, he was something lowly, an enemy of the Revolution, which still had a strong mystique.

Today this has all changed, making the book’s acceptance possible. Now you can understand what the book says, what it recounts, understand it’s not made-up. It corresponds to a real situation. And it was written by a real author, a very talented one. This didn’t escape the notice of the jury members who awarded it prizes in the 1980s. The novel, which was praised by the esteemed Mexican writer Octavio Paz, started to make the rounds, although just barely, and slowly it became well-deservedly famous among Cuban exiled writers.

Its stylistic achievements, its brevity, efficiency and its deep artistic and emotional impact can be compared to the work of authors such as Alejo Carpentier, Reynaldo Arenas, or Guillermo Cabrera Infante.

World Books: What particular resonances, political or literary, does this “lost masterpiece” have 20 years after it was published?

Prieto: From a literary point of view, the resonance is enormous. “The Halfway House” is a book that, while very Cuban, is simultaneously universal. As I’ve said, its literary quality is undeniable and its language is very efficient, very “American,” perhaps it’s even worth saying that it’s “Hemingwayesque,” since Rosales expertly internalized the influence of authors such as Ernest Hemingway.

It’s one of the few books which denounces the Revolution’s excesses and psychological damages with great literary dignity. The book never falls into propaganda. Rosales knew how to develop his own alphabet based on his experiences and, undeniably, he had a very powerful story to tell, that of a man whose spirit has been broken, a “loser” who ends up in a mental institution and who is able, once inside, to notice everything, to be a witness to the horror.

World Books: Critics are anxious to view this novel as a dank version of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” set in Miami. But you compare it to the fiction of Milan Kundera and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Why the resistance to the book’s vision of totalitarianism?

Prieto: I don’t think it’s a completely mistaken reading, that is, the view of the mental institution replicating the State in which an individual, the patient, fights to maintain his humanity.

My reading, however, takes this into account as a jumping point: that Figueras, Rosales’ main character, comes from a totalitarian state in which the State’s presence is still much larger, incommensurately larger. I get the impression that, despite its seriousness and its reach over the greater part of the 20th Century, the totalitarian experience has yet to be completely understood. In other words, it’s easier to “read” a work like Rosales’ from a more classic, bourgeois if you will, perspective. But as I lay out in my prologue, Rosales should be read in the same vein as Milan Kundera or Primo Levi’s novels, and less in the classic tradition of a “story of madness,” like Anton Chekhov’s novella “Ward Number Six.”

World Books: Do you see any humor in the book – or is “The Halfway House,” in the words of one of its insane characters, “the tragedy of a final melodrama without any prospects”?

Prieto: That’s a good question. Rosales’ vision is quite dark, it doesn’t lend itself to irony nor does it try to be sarcastic. Nonetheless, where humor does play a part, where he allows himself to joke, is in his dreams. I’m talking about those appearances by Fidel Castro who moves around as agile as a mountain lion, dodging bullets, or that scene, which has its roots in Cuban folklore regarding wakes (there are endless jokes on this theme), in which Fidel Castro pops out of his coffin and asks, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, for some coffee. He then says: “Well, we’re already dead, now you’ll see that doesn’t solve anything, either.” These are the moments of subtle humor in the book, but in the immediate reality of the asylum there’s no humor, just suffering, hardship.

World Books: What do you see to be the challenges of translating “The Halfway House” into English? Has anything been lost in this translation?

Prieto: Anna Kushner, the translator, did an excellent job. She is of Cuban descent and is perfectly bilingual; almost all of the reviews mention the high quality of her translation. Anna was able to grasp all of the nuances of Rosales’ Spanish, which, in fact, is fairly direct. Rosales, as his main character says, is a great admirer of Hemingway. He belongs to that tradition of Cuban writers who are removed from the baroque prose styles of Alejo Carpentier or José Lezama Lima. He is closer to a sparse, frugal Spanish literature that has been largely influenced by the English of American authors (another example of this, save for the vast difference in subjects, intentions, etc. would be Jorge Luis Borges).

Given that, the book seems to be an ideal candidate for translation into English. Remember that even the title of the book in Spanish was in English. It is called “Boarding Home.” Great thought was given to changing the title since a “boarding home” isn’t exactly a mental institution. Thus, as paradoxical as it seems, a novel that already had an English-language title, which seemed ready to go with its original English-language title, had to be changed because the title didn’t work in English. An irony.

But this doesn’t diminish the book’s impact in the least. The English version maintains, as I’ve already said, all of the power and elegant brevity of Rosales’ writing.

World Books: In your introduction you also argue against an autobiographical reading of the book – but doesn’t Rosales’s troubled life, which ended with suicide in 1993, explain his deep understanding of mental illness?

Prieto: The descriptions of the mentally ill, the world that Figueras finds in the “halfway house,” are undeniably taken from real life. By the time Rosales wrote this novel, he had spent many months confined in these types of institutions and was unquestionably ill, a man who was seriously mentally disturbed.

What I argue against in my preface is reducing the book to a simple autobiographical novel by a mentally ill person, viewing it as a sort of memoir. I think that it is a book, on the contrary, that is thought through to the tiniest detail, a real work of art, a novel in the strict sense of the word. Indeed, the narrator’s illness is not the book’s main subject, the narrator is completely lucid: he sees and “reads” everything happening around him with utmost clarity, he passes definitive and weighty judgments. His observations, furthermore, are informed by his reading, he is more of a literary being than an insane man.

We could look at it from another angle: we are not introduced to a world of hallucinations in which we need to fight against ghostly emanations. A bit like the “cloud” that always hangs over the Indian in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

José Manuel Prieto

The world that Rosales describes is completely real, tangible, and even terribly lucid. That is the book’s power. If the narrator were truly “crazy,” then we’d have a distorted “impressionistic” image of reality, we would hear voices, etc. I believe that at no point was Rosales looking to paint a subjective picture, reality as seen through the distorted prism of a mentally ill mind, but rather quite the opposite, he wanted to paint an objective picture in a mentally ill milieu. Thus his main character is, perhaps, the sanest person with the greatest aptitude for critical thought in the whole book. It’s something that really stands out. And that’s what leads to the book’s combination of deep emotional impact and unquestionable veracity.

World Books: One of the characters in the book, a woman Figueras falls in love with, is an artist. Does Rosales draw links between art and madness? Does he idealize the connections?

Prieto: Rosales is interested in highlighting that there is salvation through art. The only person who is not completely out of it is Frances, the woman with whom Figueras falls in love, another patient. She is able to create, to leave a record of the horror. This is also the most urgent task that Figueras imposes upon himself. He is a man of letters, a writer… In fact, one is left with the impression after reading this book that Rosales always thought of himself as an artist, very conscious of the responsibilities and the trade of a writer.

In exile, he found the possibility of putting into writing not only the story of his life in the asylum, but also—and this is the most important thing about the book, to my understanding—delivering a harsh and critical judgment on two things. First, the abandonment of a certain sector of the exiled, a denunciation of the cruelty of the American dream, but also, secondly, of his life within the Revolution, of his revolutionary past in Cuba. To speak of the effect on him and on his country that a figure like Fidel Castro had, whom he “interrogates” in his dreams.

The artist is the person who is capable of articulating his ideas, of leaving testimony of something that would otherwise happen without leaving a trace. And who is able to articulate it not only intellectually, but emotionally. One of the virtues of this book is that it is memorable, that Rosales, in a short expanse and with a reduced, deliberately reduced, alphabet of situations and expressions, is able to transmit such a powerful message, which cannot leave the reader indifferent.

World Books: In your latest novel, “Rex,” literary history plays a pivotal role – in what ways has Rosales influenced your writing? On the surface you appear to be very different writers stylistically: he is a minimalist, you a maximalist.

Prieto: No, Rosales hasn’t influenced me in any way. I read him relatively recently, he was unknown to me previously. His style and his concerns are very different from what I set out to do with a novel like “Rex,” which is a book that does not aim to be a portrait of reality, but rather, a literary game, or to put it in plainer language, perhaps even precisely Nabokovian or Proustian. I see the novel as a vehicle not only for telling a story, but also for contributing reflections that go beyond the plot, that can cover essays, philosophy, etc. I’m more interested in, I’ve always been more interested in, that type of book.

Nonetheless, if there’s something in common between my book and Rosales’ book, it’s that it relays the circumstances of a survivor of totalitarianism. In both “Rex” and “The Halfway House,” the characters have left behind a traumatic experience, of life within a Revolution, in the universe of mirrors that a totalitarian country is. In the case of Rosales, the experience has damaged him deeply. Figueras tries to save himself, he makes optimistic plans with Frances, but he fails. The ending is pessimistic; I would call it dark.

For the main character in “Rex,” just as for the ones in the other two novels in my Russian Trilogy, the experiences were less traumatic, the tone is different. Nonetheless, the protagonist is conscious, and it’s very obvious in, for example, the “Encyclopedia,” that he has a very critical attitude of living life under a harsh regime like that. I would have loved to have given “Rex” to Rosales for him to read, to have heard his opinion about it. I am sure that I would have learned a lot.

Anna Kushner translates from Spanish, French and Portuguese. She is the translator of three books, “The Halfway House” by Guillermo Rosales, “The Autobiography of Fidel Castro” by Norberto Fuentes and “Jerusalem” by Gonçalo Tavares. Her writing has appeared in “Dzanc Books Best of the Web 2008,” “The Bucks County Writer,” “Crab Orchard Review,” “Ep;phany,” and “Wild River Review.”

The Armies by Evelio Rosero. Translated from Spanish by Anne McLean, 224 pages, New Directions, $14.95

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

At the beginning of Evelio Rosero’s novel “The Armies”, the protagonist, Ismael, a retired professor in his seventies, spies on his young neighbor Geraldina over the wall between their properties. Geraldina enjoys walking around her yard naked, knowingly teasing Ismael. “I ask nothing more of life than this possibility,” Ismael thinks, “to see this woman without her knowing that I’m looking at her, to see this woman when she knows I’m looking, but to see her: my only explanation for staying alive.”

It’s a typical statement from the typical creation of a typical older male novelist. Perhaps from reading too much Marquez and Roth, I thought I could pretty well predict where the story was going: Ismael would eventually conquer the beautiful woman, body and soul, and there would be an extended (and slightly nauseating) sex scene. That instead the book would end with mass murder and necrophilia never crossed my mind. Disturbing political novels ought to carry a warning label.

Evelio Rosero has been writing about the miseries of his native Colombia for three decades now. His novels, many of which take on the internecine wars, kidnappings, murders, and political upheavals of his country, have won numerous awards (including, humorously enough, the National Literature Prize from the Colombian Ministry of Culture). His work is notorious for being brutally realistic, even hyperrealistic, and “The Armies” is no exception.

To highlight the horror, the novel begins with a brief idyll. The setting is San José, a small town somewhere in Colombia. For a few pages, we enjoy Ismael’s thwarted lust, his wife Otilia’s resigned patience with his wandering eye, and the pleasures of small town life. But darkness quickly seeps in. There is an invasion of soldiers, guerrillas or paramilitaries of some sort, and the police charged with protecting San Jose are no better than the invaders. Soon, Otilia has been kidnapped, along with Geraldina’s husband and children.

What we are given to understand is that this is only the latest in a long string of attacks. Most of San Jose’s residents have lost loved ones, either to violence, or to the threat of violence. There are almost no young people left in San Jose:

“They’ve all gone in this past year.”
“All of them?”
“All the girls and all the boys, Is mael.” She gave me a reproachful look. “The most sensible thing they could do.”
“It won’t be any better elsewhere.”
“They had to leave to find out.”

“The Armies” doesn’t have much by way of a plot; another attack begins soon after the first one, and it is still going on when the novel ends. But in spite of all the terror, Rosero manages to get in some beautiful writing (aided in no small part by his translator from the Spanish, Anne McLean). A grenade is “an animal with jaws of fire that will dissolve me in a breath”. Dawn “descends from the mountaintop like fluttering sheets”. Best of all is the ways in which Rosero connects sex and death, as when Ismael watches Geraldina in her misery:.

“I proceed behind Geraldina, trying in vain not to recognize her besieging scent, my eyes involuntarily exploring her black-clad back, and catching a glimpse, beneath the mourning, of her legs, her sandals, the radiant movement of her body, her whole life diffusing and proclaiming, beneath the veils of fatality she is suffering in this world, the perhaps inclement desire to be possessed as soon as possible, albeit by death (by me?), to forget the world for one moment, albeit for death.”

There is also plenty of time left over to wonder at the inanity of war, and this war in particular. We are told very little about who or what the armies are fighting for, aside from the fact that San José represents a “strategic location”, and is surrounded by thousands of hectares of coca.

Instead of a lot of political explanation and historical background, we get anecdotes. The chief of San José’s police force has a mental breakdown and kills a handful of civilians, then is promoted to work in another city. A bomb-sniffing dog is buried with military honors while men lie rotting in the streets. When Ismael is told that his name is on a list of collaborators to be killed, he laughs, “Why do they ask for names? They kill whoever [sic] they please, no matter what their names might be. I would like to know what is written on the paper with the names, that ‘list’. It is a blank sheet of paper, for God’s sake. A paper where all the names they want can fit.”

Colombian author Evelio Rosero: He explores the inanity of war.

The only thing that can really be said against Rosero’s novel is either irrelevant or a deal breaker: it isn’t particularly fun to read. When the darkness falls over Ismael, it is never to rise again. Nothing is so bad that it can’t get worse. The manager of a local café receives the index fingers of his kidnapped wife and daughter in order to extract a higher ransom. The city’s empanada vendor’s severed head is found in his grease boiler. One woman watches her son die, then is killed and raped (in that order) by a group of soldiers.

What we’re supposed to take away from all this brutality is unclear, and the moments of light are so few and far between that they seem almost rote when they arrive. Near the end of the book, Ismael sits with Geraldina, and his trembling hand falls on her knee. Old habits die hard, apparently.

“It is the emotion, Geraldina. Or it is my lechery, as Otilia would say.”
“Don’t worry, profesor. Stick with love. Love conquers lechery.”

That may be so, but the armies in San José are fighting for neither love nor lechery. They are fighting for greed, which it seems nothing can conquer.

The Naked Eye. By Yoko Tawada
Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky. New Directions, 256 pages, $13.95.

Review by Tommy Wallach

A reviewer courts considerable danger when he or she condemns a book that is densely surreal or murkily allegorical. Complaining that the story’s symbols are foggy may invite charges that subtleties in the plot were missed; objections to the lack of a clear narrative will lead some to think that the book’s deeper political or moral themes were ignored. But promises of profundity are no defense for rampant obscurity; I read Yoko Tawada’s “The Naked Eye” in constant suspense, convinced that at any moment it must start making sense. It never did.

This may be a matter of taste, or a lack of patience with arty difficulty for its own sake. The prolific Tawada has a considerable reputation in Europe: her writing — novels, plays, poems, essays, and short stories — has garnered a number of awards, including the Akutagawa Prize and the Goethe Medal.

As far as I can discern, her latest novel revolves around a Vietnamese teenager (known sometimes as Anh Nguyet, or “the pupil with the Iron Blouse”; for clarity’s sake, I’ll just refer to her as “the girl”) who is invited to give a speech on Communism at an International Youth Conference in East Berlin. The time period is unclear, as is the duration of the novel (trying to parse the passage of time in the book turns out to be as frustrating as trying to locate the hour on a Dalí wristwatch). Once in Berlin, the girl meets Jörg, a German radical who is either her boyfriend or her kidnapper. She fails to show up for her speech and then decides to go back to Vietnam by way of Moscow. Unfortunately, when a stranger lies down in front of a train to stop it, the girl gets on and ends up in Paris. Here, she takes up with a French prostitute named Marie, and becomes obsessed with the films of Catherine Deneuve.

This is where the novel really starts to get weird.

Each chapter in “The Naked Eye” is titled after a different Catherine Deneuve movie, from Repulsion to Dancer in the Dark. The girl spends her days watching the same films over and over again: “…the silver screen was the bedsheet upon which I did all my living and sleeping.”

As the book progresses, the content of the chapters becomes more and more related to the chapter’s title film, until we are left reading what feel like essays written for an undergraduate cinema studies class. The girl’s philosophy, a childlike regurgitation of Ho Chih Minh’s propaganda, proffers the only readerly fun in these long and tortuous critiques. Upon meeting a prostitute for the first time, the girl isn’t scandalized by the thought of sex being sold for money, but by the fact that rooms are rented out to facilitate the sex. Renting rooms, after all, is a capitalist crime.

Describing a scene from Les Voleurs, the girl narrates, “Juliette is surrounded by many male eyes. The eyes of the policeman Alex are windowpanes made of frozen tears; the eyes of his brother are glasses filled with golden whiskey.” It’s a beautiful image, and there are more than a few of them served up in Tawada’s descriptions, but a couple of trenchant or evocative takes on obscure French cinema does not a satisfying novel make.

“There was no longer any woman whose name was ‘I,’” the girl gushes to the imaginary Deneuve in her head. “As far as I was concerned, the only woman in the world was you, and so I did not exist.”

The prolific Yoko Tawada

This points out one of the major flaws in the book. The nameless protagonist really doesn’t exist. She has no agency, and is content to wander the streets of Paris watching films and suffering. She takes a job as a test subject for beauty products, but the position’s dramatic potential is wasted. She nurses certain homosexual fantasies, but never acts on them. When we find out at the end of the book that she has gone blind, though still goes to the movies just to experience the sounds (“In a film without images, most people are merely footsteps.”) the irony is supposed to be affecting. But we have learned nothing about her, really, and so can’t summon up any empathy.

Tawada asserts in the forward of the novel that she wrote the book simultaneously in Japanese and German (her two native tongues), and then translated backwards to produce two full texts, one in each language. She explains that she began in German, but then “certain parts of the story began occurring to her in Japanese.” This is unconvincing as well as pretentious. A story is a story, and language is language. A story never arrives in words; it must be translated. Perhaps if Tawada had been more concerned with creating a narrative, rather than deconstructing one, the language wouldn’t come off as so forced. Whatever the explanation, Tawada is every bit as culpable as translator Susan Bernofsky for sentences such as this one, to be found three lines into the first chapter: “The gaze of the nameless lens licks the floor like a detective without grammar.” Come again, please?