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

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

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

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

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

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

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

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

The late Roberto Bolaño: Less is More

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By the next page, Louisa has become a monster.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 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.

Summertime, by J.M. Coetzee. Viking, 266 pages $25.95

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

Upon putting down J.M. Coetzee’s most recent novel, “Summertime,” one can be forgiven for running straight to the computer and calling up the Wikipedia entry on its author. After all, when a novelist as critically successful (two Bookers and a Nobel, for starters) and famously reclusive as Coetzee writes a posthumous “biography” of himself, how can you help but wonder how much of it is true?

Coetzee has written two volumes of lightly-fictionalized autobiography before this, “Boyhood” and “Youth,” each of which is written in a close third person, so “Summertime” isn’t exactly breaking new ground. Yet the primary way in which it differentiates itself from the previous two books (aside from the fact that it actually says “fiction” on the cover)—the fact that the protagonist John Coetzee is dead—makes all the difference.

“Summertime” is a finale, a summing up of a life, and the portrait Coetzee (the author, now, whom I’ll refer to by only his last name) paints of his fictional avatar is so unforgivably cruel and insulting that it borders on the parodic. If this book is to be taken as fact, Coetzee sees himself as a talentless failure who has contributed almost nothing to the world at large. But the very writing of the novel seems to contradict that claim. So how much of it is true?

“Summertime” is comprised primarily of interviews with women who were significant in John Coetzee’s life during the mid-1970s. First we hear from Julia, a married woman with whom John had a brief and unsatisfying affair. Then there is his cousin Margot, with whom he shared an awkward night on the South African Karoo when their car broke down. Next comes Adriana, a Brazilian dance teacher and mother of one of John’s students. Finally, we hear from Sophie, a fellow professor who also was briefly involved with John romantically.

What binds these women together is their unflagging disdain for John Coetzee. Over the course of the novel, he is maligned in every manner possible. Julia, in-between describing John’s shortcomings as a lover, posits that it would’ve been impossible for any woman other than his mother to love him. Margot calls him a “failed runaway, failed car mechanic…Failed son.” Adriana, who rejected John’s obsessive attentions after accusing him of lusting after her teenage daughter, describes him as “a boy as a priest is always a boy until suddenly one day he is an old man.” She also mocks his abilities as a dancer. Sophie dwells less on the person than his work, claiming John Coetzee “had no special sensitivity that I could detect, no original insight into the human condition.”

The overall tone of this roast is aesthetic masochism. One could put a serial killer in a room full of his victims’ parents and expect to hear more empathy and understanding. So what is the point of all this abuse? Obviously, there are plenty of people in the world—including this reader—who have the greatest respect for Coetzee.

J.M. Coetzee: An unsmiling, difficult, and dark author?

This question is part of a more general one, which leads us back to Wikipedia. Unlike “Boyhood” and “Youth,” “Summertime” is heavily fictionalized. For example, during the decade at issue in the book, Coetzee (the character) lives alone with his father in a suburb in Western Cape Town. They are a sad, silent Odd Couple, pitied by pretty much everybody who knows them. But in reality, Coetzee (the real person) spent the 1970s with his wife and two children. What gives?

I don’t know exactly what Coetzee’s game is, but my guess is that “Summertime” lands somewhere between C. G. Jung’s “Red Book” and Bret Easton Ellis’ “American Psycho.” Coetzee is airing his deepest fears—that he has wasted his life, that he has never loved or been loved, that he is delusional about his own abilities—admitting that no number of awards or marriages or friends can ever fully dispel the universal human certitude that one is a talentless fraud and an unlovable misanthrope. At the same time, he is recreating himself as a monster, imagining how the world would respond to his worst vision of himself. John Coetzee is what J.M. Coetzee might have been, or what he might still become.

In this way, like many of Coetzee’s recent novels, “Summertime” is primarily experimental. While it lacks the lecture structure of “Elizabeth Costello” or the entertaining split-screen hijinks of “Diary of a Bad Year” (a humorously dark and portentous sketch of which is described in the John Coetzee-penned notebook entries that bookend “Summertime”), Coetzee’s newest is an exploration of the self as seen through the lens of fiction. He is able to leave behind his true personality, his true history, even his true abilities as a stylist (the book’s interviews are narrated and administered by John’s biographer, Vincent, who has all the poetic sensibility of the DSM-IV). From this null-place, Coetzee imagines an alternate-reality Coetzee, and tears him to shreds.

Perhaps that explains the incongruously sunny title of the book. There’s nothing like a little time with a monster to make you appreciate the human. “Summertime” is an affirmation of Coetzee as he actually is, unsmiling and difficult and dark. For anyone who is interested in the inner-workings of one of literature’s greatest living minds, “Summertime” will prove satisfying. Just don’t confuse the protagonist with the author. They’re like night and day. Or like winter and summer.

The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P, by Rieko Matsuura. Translated by Michael Emmerich, Kodansha International, 447 pages, $24.95

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

“He stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright in complete nakedness before us, and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth! we have no choice left but confess—he was a woman.”

With this short paragraph, Virginia Woolf introduced us to perhaps the most famous transgendered person in all of English literature: Orlando. “Orlando” is a fantastical reinterpretation of the life of Vita-Sackville West, Woolf’s friend and lover, told in the style of a swashbuckling romance. Midway through the book, the lothario Orlando falls into a coma and wakes up as a woman. In spite of the many ordeals she experiences in her reincarnation as a member of the fairer sex (including almost killing a man who is distracted by her shapely ankles), Orlando concludes, like Tiresias before her, that being a woman is a hell of a lot better than being a man.

The protagonist of Rieko Matsuura’s “The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P,” first published in Japan in 1993, comes to much the same conclusion, though by a far more didactic route. Kazumi is an ordinary twenty-two year old girl with a boring boyfriend and a passionate dedication to heterosexuality, until the morning she wakes up to discover the big toe of her right foot has become a penis. Her boyfriend breaks up with her, disgusted, and Kazumi immediately takes up with Shunji, the blind, piano-playing synaesthete next door. Soon after, the two of them join a traveling performance art troupe called The Flower Show.

Every member of The Flower Show has some kind of sexual deformity. Tomatsu’s penis actually belongs to his headless Siamese twin. Yukie has a set of teeth in her vagina. Aiko develops a painful skin rash whenever aroused. Kazumi travels with this band of outsiders on a few tours, dabbling in everything from lesbianism to threesomes to public sex. The bildungsroman concludes, disappointingly, with her return to a typical dyad with Shunji.

“The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P” was a major bestseller in Japan, and it’s easy to see why. The book is titillating, disturbing without being disgusting, and reads like a self-help guide on the subjects of sex and love. Though the majority of these advice nuggets are old news, a few merit the considerable page space Matsuura devotes to them: “But when I started teasing one part of Eiko’s body, I lost sight of the whole…before long, I began to feel that this whole process, trying one little trick after another in an effort to get a good response from the woman I loved, was no more than a kind of game.” Her argument that sex, friendship, and romance can’t ever be fully separated is thought-provoking, if not entirely convincing.

Matsuura has written many times about the various manifestations of love. Her book “Natural Woman” is a series of three novellas on the subject of lesbianism. More recently, she wrote “A Dog’s Body.” about the relationship between a woman with “species identity disorder” who turns into a dog and her friend-turned-owner. “The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P” is at its best when Matsuura gives her philosophical interest in the subject of love free reign. For example, though Kazumi does eventually end up in a monogamous heterosexual relationship, her homosexual breakthrough is painted as a logical epiphany, rather than a romantic one:

“How much did it mean, though, to say that Eiko and I were the same sex? We both had XX chromosomes, we both had female genitals, and out bodies weren’t different the way men’s and women’s were. But those commonalities seemed utterly insignificant compared to the fact that she and I were completely different individuals living different lives, with two separate physical bodies, and different sensibilities and ways of thinking. I put my hand on Eiko’s breast, and sure enough, it was different from mine in volume and shape…Eiko didn’t seem any more similar to me as a human being than Masao or Shunji.

Once I grew comfortable with the idea that it made no sense to set up distinctions based solely on how the sexes were paried in a couple—between homosexual love and heterosexual love—and that I had been rejecting same-sex love for no reason I could have articulated, everything became extremely, elegantly clear.”

Though some might argue that Matsuura is arguing against a biological basis for homosexuality, her thesis is actually far more revolutionary. She seems to believe that all of us are inherently pansexual, and only cultural mores keep us from exploring the boundaries of our ability to love.

Author Rieko Matsuura: Caught between story and message

Still, there’s a reason that gender studies textbooks are kept separate from fiction books on the shelves. Matsuura doesn’t seem to have ever gotten the whole “show, don’t tell” memo, and is constantly pausing the action so that Kazumi can expatiate for three or four pages on her emotional state. Here, we see her grappling with a recent sex dream about a woman: “It came as a blow, however, to have to accept that in my dream I quite enjoyed what Eiko and I were doing. That morning in Hakone, I was disgusted with myself for masturbating while fantasizing about Eiko’s hand; I swore I would never again indulge in such perverted pleasures. And yet now, less than a week later, I had been swept up in a similarly sick dream.”

In the hands of a creative translator, these musings could at least have been invested with a bit of personality, but Michael Emmerich fails to rise to the task. The very first page sets the stage for another four hundred and forty-six full of clichés (“mad dash”), useless adverbs (“timidly,” “neatly,” “slightly,” and “shyly” in three lines), and distracting grammatical lapses. Worse than bland, Emmerich’s dialogue is woefully inappropriate, considering the characters’ ages and the situations they find themselves in.

“What Tomatsu did last night was really the pits…” Kazumi says to Eiko, Tomatsu’s girlfriend, referring to the fact that Tomatsu raped Eiko onstage with Kazumi’s toe-penis. Ignoring the wild absurdity of the situation, I’m not sure I’ve heard anyone say “the pits” in my entire life, and certainly no one still living.

“Apprenticeship” may not be a bad book, but it’s not a very good novel. Matsuura’s imagination is limitless, but she’s yet to learn how to channel her best ideas into a plot. In the same way that Kazumi is caught between male and female, Matsuura is caught between story and message. “I know that this thing of mine isn’t a man’s penis,” Kazumi says. “It’s mine, for god’s sake! But men like you invest the penis with all kinds of ideas of ‘male dignity’ and your own personal narcissism, even though when you get right down to it the penis is just another bodily organ.” Sure, it’s a lesson that needs to be taught, but that doesn’t make it a story that needs to be told.

As God Commands by Niccolò Ammaniti, Translated from the Italian by Jonathan Hunt. Grove Atlantic/Black Cat, 400 pp, $14. 95.

Review by Tommy Wallach

In 2001, Niccoló Ammaniti’s novel Io non ho paura (“I’m Not Scared”) was published to great acclaim in Italy. The novel takes place in Tuscany during the so-called “Years of Lead, ” when both right and left-wing paramilitary groups carried out numerous acts of terrorism across the country. In 1978 alone, more than 600 kidnappings took place in Italy, mostly of Northerners transported and held for ransom in the South. “I’m Not Scared” tells the story of Michele, a nine year-old boy who, while out playing with his friends one afternoon, happens upon one of these kidnapped children in a giant hole dug near an abandoned farmhouse. It isn’t long before Michele realizes that nearly all of the adults in his small town, including his own parents, are in on the crime.

The cinematic adaptation of “I’m Not Scared” was one of my favorite films of 2004, and when I went back to read the novel, it proved equally compelling. Many books take on the disillusioning moment when a young boy first sees his father’s flaws, but Michele’s coming-of-age was particularly poignant. His parents had committed an unforgivable crime, and Michele’s struggle to reconcile his love for them with that fact lent the novel both an exterior and an interior drama.

Michele’s eventual attempt to save the kidnapped boy became at once an act of selfless bravery and of traditional rebellion, and the kidnapping was recast as yet another manifestation of the inscrutability of the actions of adults when one is young. In this way, Ammaniti seemed to me less like another Mario Puzo than an Italian David Mamet, creating a realistic criminal universe without any of the grandstanding or glorifying that gave us Michael Corleone and Tony Soprano.

His new novel, “As God Commands”, revisits much of the territory covered in “I’m Not Scared”. Again, there is a crime at the heart of the book, as well as a young protagonist. Christiano Zena is thirteen, the son of a neo-Nazi skinhead named Rino. The complexity of the father-son relationship emerges slowly and gracefully. In the first scene, Rino, in a drunken rage, wakes his son in the middle of the night and orders him to kill a neighbor’s dog with a handgun. But only a few chapters later, father and son are cleaning the house and baking together in order to convince their social worker of the healthiness of their domestic situation. The lengths to which Christiano eventually goes to protect his father leave no doubt in the reader’s mind that a strong bond of love exists between them.

In addition to Christiano and Rino, “As God Commands” features a sizable ensemble. There’s Beppe Trecca, the social worker mentioned above, who embarks on an affair with his best friend’s wife, Ida. Then there’s Danilo Aprea, whose plan to rob an ATM sets the tragedy of the novel in motion. Most disturbing of all is Quatro Formaggi (meaning “four cheese,” as in pizza, in Italian), the victim of an accidental electrocution that left him physically disabled and mentally deranged, who spends his days building a model village out of action figures and toys from fast food restaurant kids’ meals.

The action of the novel takes place over the course of six days, divided into three sections: Before, The Night, and After. While the middle section is ostensibly dedicated to the night of the heist, it quickly becomes something far more terrible. Just like Michele’s family in “I’m Not Scared,” the characters here are already well on their way to perdition by the time the novel starts, and their punishments come with a Biblical swiftness. While a subplot lifted almost whole cloth from Graham Greene’s “The End of the Affair” unfolds somewhat mechanically, the overall narrative carries the same tragic weight as that author’s best works.

In addition to the expanded cast, “As God Commands” differs from Amminiti’s earlier novel in that it is set in the present day. Though this robs the book of any historical resonance, it gives Ammaniti the opportunity to pepper his prose with pop culture references. Considering the tribulations of his young life, Christiano finds comfort in “the notion that great men have always had to struggle through shit on their own. Just think of Eminem or Hitler or Christian Vieri.” During the funeral of a girl who is raped and murdered sometime during the fateful evening at the center of the book, her schoolfriends can’t help but take photos and video on their phones: “In the dim light of the church the screens of the cell phones lit up like funeral candles.” Far from distracting, Ammaniti’s nods towards youth culture always ring true, deepenning the reality of his world.

Best-selling author Niccoló Ammaniti: Italy's Answer to David Mamet

“As God Commands” falters only when the plot threatens to overwhelm the subtle development of the characters. In the course of one evening, we get rape, murder, a coma-inducing aneurysm, a billboard somehow cutting a trailer in half as if it were a tin can (and exposing two adulterous lovers into the bargain), a hit and run, and a possibly miraculous recovery from said hit and run. While many novels revolve around a single fraught evening (“The Ice Storm”, “Atonement”, and “Mystic River” come to mind), it’s still a lot to take in at once. If novels had volume knobs, these would be turned up to eleven.

Still, “As God Commands” is far more stimulating than your average page-turner. Once again, Ammaniti has succeeded in telling a captivating story while developing convincing characters and relationships. Though this novel may lack the sharpness of “I’m Not Scared,” it makes up for it in scope. If the older book can be read as Ammaniti’s “American Buffalo,” this one is his “Glengarry Glen Ross.” Would it be crass of me to say I can’t wait for the movie to come out?

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?

Far North by Marcel Theroux, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25.00, 314 pages

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

“Every day I buckle on my guns and go out to patrol the dingy city. I’ve been doing it so long that I’m shaped to it, like a hand that’s been carrying buckets in the cold.”

So begins author Marcel Theroux’s “Far North,” a novel of post-apocalypse set in Siberia. It’s an interesting geographic choice for this kind of story, as Siberia is one of the few places in the world that already looks as desolate and ravaged as a post-apocalyptic landscape. Theroux, who has both spent time on the Great Steppe, and also filmed a documentary on settlers who have chosen to move back to Chernobyl, does a remarkable job evoking the breath-freezing cold of that world, giving even the novel’s most implausible ideas the ring of truth.

In “Far North,” climate change, along with the attempts to delay climate change, has led to world war, which may or may not have resulted in the end of human civilization (it’s never made entirely clear what has happened to the world outside of Siberia). The protagonist of the novel, Makepeace, is the sole remaining citizen of the town of Evangeline. Early in the book, we learn that this noir-ish, hard-nosed character is not at all what we expect: “Killing always sits heavy with me,” Makepeace muses after taking the life of a violent thief, “Whether that’s because of my being a woman, or because my disposition is naturally softhearted for another reason, I don’t know.”

Far from seeming gimmicky, Makepeace’s gender lends a tension to Far North that most examples of the genre lack. Post-apocalyptic novels tend to center around a taciturn male unafraid of kicking some ass (“I Am Legend,” “The Road,” “Dhalgren”), or if the author does choose a woman for a protagonist, she is invariably described as a passive sufferer (“The Handmaid’s Tale,” “The Unit”) or a maternal wise-woman (“The Stand”). I can’t think of another example of a character like Makepeace, who acts as any woman would if she wanted to survive in a post-apocalyptic world—in short, like a man.

Makepeace’s parents had moved to Siberia before the apocalypse, as part of a social movement aimed at escaping the twisted values and moral decadence of modern life. When survivors of the war arrived in Evangeline, they came into conflict with the settlers already living there. “It was like two different species colliding: the world that had a choice, and the world that had none. The strains between us were ratcheting up in secret. And even those who noticed it didn’t like to admit to it. The trouble lit slow, like one of those lazy damp leaf fires in autumn.”

When the story begins, Makepeace’s position as sheriff of Evangeline has become something of a sinecure, as she’s the only person still living there. So when a plane crashes right before her eyes, the time seems ripe for adventure. Makepeace leaves Evangeline behind and heads off in search of whatever new civilization has re-conquered the skies. What follows is a vaguely episodic account of her travels through the North. Everywhere she turns, Makepeace finds corruption and lawlessness. She is accused of being a spy, starved, beaten, and enslaved. And whenever you think things are about to take a turn for the better, they just get worse.

Author Marcel Theroux puts the world on ice.

For example, Makepeace spends several years working as a slave at a place called “the base”. After years of service, she is promoted and made a guard. Her responsibilities in this position including choosing prisoners to work in “The Zone”, a derelict city once known as Polyn, where the most advanced technologies of the old world were collected just before the apocalypse. Makepeace chooses her only two friends to do salvage work in Polyn, thinking it a favor, but it turns out that an anthrax attack during the war has made the place poisonous. All those who enter the city are killed afterwards, just to recover a few batteries or bits of circuitry.

Theroux posits that the wide distribution of knowledge and skills would prove the greatest impediment to rebuilding civilization after a worldwide catastrophe:

“We had been so prodigal with our race’s hard-won knowledge. All those tiny facts inched up from the dirt. The names of plants and metals, stones, animals, and birds; the motion of the planets and the waves. All of it fading to nothing, like the words of a vital message some fool had laundered with his pants and brought all garbled.”

Both the world and the characters of Far North are immaculately designed, so it’s a shame that the plot sometimes comes up short. A short love interest for Makepeace results in an unsatisfying coda to the primary action of the novel, and a tricky reveal in the final chapters seems similarly contrived. Theroux’s decision to make his protagonist a slave removes some of her agency, and slows down the middle of the book. That said, I felt a similar lack of action in Cormack McCarthy’s recent apocalyptic novel, “The Road,” and that book won the Pulitzer, so I suppose it’s not really much of a complaint.

In Makepeace, Theroux has given us a protagonist at once recognizeable and original, struggling to survive as a woman in a world that no longer has much need for the feminine. Her struggle finds a counterpart in the struggle of her world, a wounded creature itself on the brink of barrenness and death. In this way, Makepeace becomes a metaphor, both for the physical degradation of the planet, and the human impulse to survive. As she describes herself, “I thought that whatever hopes and convictions she had cherished, Makepeace was just another mask that life wore as it fought to renew itself, unsentimental, unsparing, fighting ugly.”

Ninni Holmqvist’s  speculative novel about the treatment of the elderly is harrowing but implausible.

The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist

Translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy, Other Press, $14.95, 262 pages

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

The use of the term “speculative fiction” as a more respectable sounding synonym for “science fiction” is attributed to Robert Heinlein, writing for The Saturday Evening Post in 1947. But since then, the two genres have diverged: “science fiction” now describes stories about the future, aliens, and quasi-magical technologies; “speculative fiction” concerns itself with alternate versions of our present reality—dystopias (worlds that suck), anti-utopias (worlds that are supposed to not suck, but actually do suck), and alternate histories.

The greatest exemplars of the latter category don’t test the limits of believability any more than do the greatest literary novels. George Orwell’s 1984 and  Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451 use exaggerations of actual historical and cultural phenomena to comment on the present. Because of this, speculative fiction must always be, first and foremost, believable. An implausible character in a novel is easy enough to ignore, but an implausible reality is like a shirt five sizes too small—no matter how elegantly it’s designed, we’re not going to get into it.

All great anti-utopian novels focus on a disturbing aspect of the present, pushing it to its most horrific conclusions. In 1984, it’s the panoptic police state. In Brave New World, the sexualization and Americanization of England. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the subjugation of women through the sanctification of childbirth. In Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit, the issue in question is the way the childless, especially the childless elderly, are looked down upon as irrelevant.

Dorrit Weger, a moderately-successful novelist, begins Homlqvist’s book becoming part of the Second Reserve Bank Unit for biological material. Here, women over the age of fifty and men over sixty—if single, childless, and without “important” jobs—are sequestered for their final years. The Unit is a glorified retirement community, with restaurants, movie theaters, and indoor gardens. The only catch: all the residents are expected to take part in potentially fatal medical tests, and over the course of five to ten years, donate their vital organs to less “dispensable” people (i.e. those with kids).

It was this term that first signaled to me the weakness of Homqvist’s anti-utopia. Any government sponsored program like the unit would come up with a far more convincing euphemism than “dispensable” for their test subjects: “the selfless” maybe, or “the martyrs.”  And just why would the elderly be desirable organ donors anyway? Kazuo Ishiguro’s most recent novel, Never Let Me Go, creates a far more convincing organ farm, where cloned children are bred from birth to be donors (a plot explored with far less subtlety and far more explosions in Michael Bay’s 2005 thriller, The Island).

Ninni Holmqvist -- her nightmare future is scary but but incredible

Not all of the political stuff is as tough to swallow, though the more plausible aspects of it may be unfamiliar to American readers. In a description of all the legislative developments that led to the unit, Dorrit tells us “first of all there was the law stating that parents must divide their parental leave from work equally between them during the child’s first eighteen months.” Many readers won’t know that this is an actual Swedish law (though the “minority” parent, generally the father, is only compelled to rear for two months at present).

Dorrit goes on to explain how this law led to compulsory day care, which then led to the expectation that everyone should have a child, and thus those who didn’t were labeled dispensable. But isn’t compulsory day care the very opposite of paid maternity/paternity leave? And doesn’t that just mean it would be so easy to have a kid that there would be plenty, so it wouldn’t matter if some people chose to be childless? In general, it seemed to me that Holmqvist was less concerned with creating a plausible reality than with making a philosophical point.

“I’ve never understood the point of winning just for the sake of winning,” one of Dorrit’s friends tells her early in the novel. “What’s the point in putting all your energy into being better than other people at just one thing, which is in fact completely irrelevant?” The Unit is a polemic against the world’s strivers, filling the world with their children and waste and infuriating presence. Dorrit mourns for her lost relationships with her sister and her dog, for her many novels which didn’t make her famous but brought her joy. Her very happiness in lonely dotage becomes the question at the heart of The Unit: how does one define a successful life?

When she meets a man in the unit, falls in love, and manages to become pregnant, the question becomes less academic. Holmqvist skillfully steers the novel away from a simple escape thriller, but the anti-utopia begins to fall apart at the seams. If Dorrit had a baby, she would no longer be “dispensable,” so why isn’t she allowed to keep the child and leave the unit? And why doesn’t she anyway? The answer is that it wouldn’t serve the plot, which ends with an unconvincing repudiation of Dorrit’s rebellious nature.

Holmqvist raises provocative issues, and Dorrit is a pleasant guide down the thorny philosophical slalom. Unfortunately, inconsistencies and implausibilities keep the novel from joining other classics of anti-utopian literature. It’s always fun to speculate, but somewhere along the line, The Unit leaves both speculative and science fiction behind, and enters the realm of fantasy.

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