Selected Poems, Adonis (translated by Khaled Mattawa), Yale University Press, 400 pp, $30.

By J. Kates

That a poet of such stature as Adonis is so little known in the United States is one more measure of Yankee insularity. This one can’t even be blamed completely on lack of translations, because his work has been available through a glass darkly for many years, mostly thanks to the work of Samuel Hazo, although those versions are hard to come by now. A new edition of Selected Poems from the Yale University Press, translated by Khaled Mattawa, pays homage to Hazo’s earlier compilations by trying not to cover the same ground, easy enough to do with a poet who has written so much. This gives us a broader reading of the poet’s work, but makes it a little difficult to triangulate by different versions in English to a sense of the original.

There is a lot of ground to cover. Adonis, born Ali Ahmad Sa’id Esber in Syria on the cusp of 1929 and 1930, actively writing poetry, prose and criticism since he was a teen-ager, and still living and writing in Paris, has influenced contemporary Arabic poetics since the 1950s and dominated their discussion and practice since the 1970s. He has been compared to both Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot in his modernist sensibility and influence — perhaps both in one person makes a better comparison.

Selected Poems provides for English-language readers (the original Arabic poems are not included) excerpts from most of his publications beginning with First Poems (1957) through Printer of the Planets’ Books (2008). Mattawa’s comprehensive introduction explains his choices and his omissions, as well as the sweep and significance of the poet’s life and work. It includes a discussion of the impact his critical writings have had on the development of Arabic-language poetry and Arab culture: “[Adonis] argues that a revolution in the arts and in how they are received can generate imaginative strategies at all levels of society. Arabic poetry, he believes, has the responsibility of igniting this mental overhaul in Arab culture. It should not be used to advocate political policies that do not touch the root of Arab cultural stagnation.” As Adonis wrote in 1987,

No, I have no country
except for these clouds rising as a mist from lakes of poetry.
. . . my language, my home —
I hang you like a charm around the throat of this era
and explode my passions in your name
not because you are a temple
not because your are my father or mother
but because I dream of laughter, and I weep through you
so that I translate my insides . . .

(“Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter”)

Adonis -- His verse contains multitudes.

A poet so wedded to his language must inevitably suffer somewhat in translation, but the agonies are not apparent and the English is persuasive. Mattawa brings Adonis across straightforward and refreshingly de-orientalized. Where Lena Jayyusi and John Heath-Stubbs in Modern Arabic Poetry had translated: “A king, this is Mihyar, / He dwells in the / kingdom of the winds /and reigns in the land of secrets,” Mattawa gives us more simply: “King Mihyar / lives in the dominion of the wind / and rules over a land of secrets.” Whether “lives” and “rules” reflect Adonis’s Arabic diction better than “dwells” and “reigns” I don’t know enough to say, but Matawa’s verbs do less to feed stereotypical evocations of West Asian verse from the days of Burton and Fitzgerald. “Dominion” may give us pause, but “in the dominion of the wind” is as high-mannered a sound as we get.

Songs of Mihyar of Damascus, which came out in 1961, is considered Adonis’s turning point to full maturity. The persona of King Mihyar comes before us like the avatar of a Hindu deity, an epic mystic or a prophet for whom all the personal pronouns are interchangeable:

I came to you from an earth without sky
filled with God and the abyss,
winged with eagles and gales,
barraging, thrusting sand
into the caverns of seeds,
bowing to the coming clouds.

(“Thunderbolt”)

By 1965′s Migrations and Transformations in the Regions of Night and Day, the voice has turned more intimate and more contemplative: “I have become a mirror. / I have reflected everything.” (“Tree of the East”), and Adonis’s 1968 book is all Stages and Mirrors, but with geography and history asserting themselves more directly:

Everything stretches in history’s tunnel….
I turn this map around,
for the world is all burned up:
East and West, a heap
of ash gathered
in the self-same grave.

(“West and East”)

“My country” (that will seem to be spurned in the 1987 poem quoted above — does Adonis contradict himself? He contains multitudes) has a more conscious character in following poems. It “runs behind me like a river of blood” and is “this spark, this lightning in the darkness of the time that remains”
Singular in a Plural Form (1975) explodes language and form (if we can trust the translation) into one long Song of Songs

Shall I separate myself from myself?
Shall I mate with it Is mat
ing a moment of singularity or doubl
ing? Shall I take up another face? and wh
at does a body do that is spotted with wounds that do not he
al?

that admits explicitly (as Solomon did not) mortality: “And man, I say in your name: / I am water playing with water.”

And so it goes, for another thirty years, love and death, prophecy and cosmic citizenship, an interweaving of Arabic and European mythology, and that questioning of art that is art:

And you, poetry,
will you continue your gifts, taking us to coincidences,
states where we see again people, creations, things, impulses,
abundane, diversity, uniqueness,
the wakefulness of nature and the insomnia of matter?

(“Concerto for 11th/September/2001 B. C.”)

The margin of this review is too small to contain it all. The remarkable proof of Adonis’s poetry is in the reading, and Mattawa’s Selected Poems gives the anglophone world a nutritious and flavorful taste.

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

J. Kates is a poet and literary translator who lives in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire. He helps run Zephyr Press.

The Weekend, by Bernhard Schlink. Translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside. Pantheon; 215 pages; $24.95

Reviewed by Christopher M. Ohge

Following in the footsteps of the mega-bestselling The Reader (1995), Bernhard Schlink‘s novel, The Weekend, offers another portrait of contemporary German guilt, ethical exploration, and erotic compulsion. The sister of recently-pardoned terrorist arranges a get-together in her country home with the hope that Jörg will re-engage in the “social contract” amid the tranquil setting with former friends and comrades. The obligatory revelations and confessions follow, enlivened by some clever plot twists and asides that occasionally make the book engaging. Still, the artlessness of Schlink’s prose (at least in Shaun Whiteside’s translation) flattens the story’s characters and potentially fascinating debates about action and inaction in today’s Germany.

In terms of history, the novel will be somewhat opaque, at least for some American readers. To appreciate the moral intricacy of Schlink’s story, one has to be more familiar with the political turmoil resulting from the terrorists actions of the leftist Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) in 1970s West Germany.

Born during the non-violent student protests of the 1960s, the RAF became a political target of the German authorities by initially staging protests, then bombing right-wing or capitalist institutions, and eventually assassinating government officials. In an effort to crush the RAF, the country’s much-beloved President Willy Brandt passed anti-terrorist legislation that, for a time, trampled on the civil liberties of West German citizens. To combat these (perceived) authoritarian measures, the RAF escalated the violence in its succeeding iterations. In all, it is a complicated, fascinating story of power politics in the age of terrorism (sound familiar?).

Thus Schlink’s novel has fascinating history and issues to deal with, and the book begins with promising discussions about Jörg and the past among the weekenders. They belong to a generation whose parents “conformed and shirked resistance.” So, to counter the passivity that led to the rise of the Nazis, revolutionaries like Jörg and his comrades believe they were forced to fight a state that was becoming authoritarian (the RAF’s standard justification for violence).

Schlink wants to convey the powerful guilt that the German people still feel after World War II, how they are still rightly disturbed by displays of nationalism and religiosity under the banners of truth and justice. While one of the visitors, Karin the bishop, suggests danger in the relativistic idea that “Time and time again in history truths have been imposed successfully—right truths as well as wrong ones,” the narrator makes it seem as if “there are as many truths as people freely living their lives.” This illustrates how the lack of a coherent national purpose complicates the actions driven by lofty proclamations of idealism.

Author Bernhard Schlink -- His novel is fascinated by the power of resignation.

Quickly, however, it becomes clear that former comrades-in-arms have bought into the conventional thinking. Most, despite their reluctance in seeing Jörg, use the opportunity to sort out old scores with him. Worse, Jörg’s defense comes off as unimpressive and rather insipid. Ultimately, Schlink admires the former revolutionaries for slogging through the mechanisms—also aptly called, “small successes”—of daily bourgeois life. In the end, when the weekenders bail water out of the cellar, their “spectacle of collaboration” trumps the revolutionary proselytizing.

The awkwardness of Schlink’s writing compounds the story’s lack of intellectual and dramatic tension. The rain is always “rustling” in this book: there’s the “rustle of the rain,” “the rain rustled,” and so on—sometimes twice in the span of two pages, and a couple of instances in the same paragraph. Schlink even creates water-logged romance: “Ulrich held his wife in his arms until the rustle of the rain reached their hearts. Then they too made love.” Rustling love?

The leftists attending The Weekend are also cliches. Marko, the lone archetypal radical in the house, spouts uninspiring rhetoric about “the revolution,” including rants about joining “forces with our Muslim comrades” to “fight the system.” It may be an example of Schlink’s ironic jab at the far Left, but Ilse’s jottings in her notebook about her novel-in-progress about a German terrorist and 9/11 are cringe-worthy: “It had been emotional, emotional and gooey. Now Jan felt as if he and the woman were dancing a perfect dance in bright, cold light. What purity of pleasure, and again: what rush of freedom!”

Schlink’s most interesting observations are on the nature of German resignation to the way things are. One character posits that “we live in exile. What we were and wanted to remain and were perhaps destined to become, we lose. Instead we find something else.” The problem is that his figures have no counterculture juice left in them, except for Marko, who is an emotionally overwrought half-wit. Jörg should have been a flawed pillar of rebellion, but he comes off as a failed father battered by defeat.

Thus the novel is a sedate testament to giving up by giving in. Jörg is reconciled to his exile from idealism, like everyone else. And while The Weekend underscores the continuing tensions between Ossies and Wessies, the novel ends just as it began — disinterested in political solutions, reconciled to living in a society raising generations that are content to be disenchanted, guilt-ridden, and terrorized by specters of the past.

Peter Filkins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Modern Poetry of Pakistan, edited by Iftikhar Arif and Waqas Khwaja, Dalkey Archive Press, 2010, 298 pp, $16.95

Reviewed by J. Kates

A few years ago, Dana Gioia, then chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, conceived an ambitious international plan, engaging other countries in projects of reciprocal anthologies of contemporary writing. The pieces were to be chosen by editors within the writers’ own culture, then handed over to translation editors and translators in the receiving culture. The project began in a collaboration with Mexico. Here follows a backstage disclosure: I became involved with the second volume, of Russian poetry. The process, I can testify, was risky, laborious and bureaucratic, the results interesting and uneven — but ultimately enriching the American side of the bargain.

The book under review here, Modern Poetry of Pakistan, published by the same publisher as Contemporary Russian Poetry, comes at the tail end of the project. It is clear that ambitions have been lowered, expectations diminished — but not to the point of losing all value. This new collection is no longer bilingual, as the earlier ones were; and it lacks the immediacy of contemporaneity; more than half the contributors are dead, some as long ago as the 1970s — the oldest poet born in 1877, the youngest in 1966 — a span of almost a century of writing. (By way of contrast, all the Russian poets were born after World War II.)

We as a culture know so little of the poetry of the rest of the world that all literary news is urgent and enlightening. The only questions are, how much, and in what ways? I come to Modern Poetry of Pakistan as most readers will, and are meant to, not as an expert in south Asian poetry, but as a curious outsider who knows very little about it, looking for an introduction. We find one hundred forty-eight poems by forty-four poets who have written in seven languages. The multiplicity of languages alone tells us much about where these poems are coming from, and might lead us to expect a wide diversity of verse.

The originating editor, Iftikhar Arif, seems to have drawn from a narrow aesthetic. It’s uncertain how representative this is. Has there really been so little experimentation in Pakistani poetry? No cross-fertilization from dynamic schools of writing outside the received tradition? The editor is to be commended for letting eleven women’s voices be heard among the forty-four, but none of the women included speaks distinctively as a woman, and most of the poems feel traditional in form and content. Although the younger poets — they are presented chronologically by birth — loosen up considerably, the tone echoes older diction. “Every loss conceals a victory, / your lap will bloom with flowers. / Lose everything in love and see,” written by Pushpa Vallabh (b. 1963) in Sindhi, and translated by Azmat Ansari and the translation editor Waqas Khwaja, does not sound all that different in register or language from “A thousand obstacles at every step, neither love’s company nor reason’s counsel. / It is hard to keep a steady step, for the feet find no footing on the ground, ” by Hafeez Jalandhari (b. 1923) translated from Urdu by Khurram Khurshid and the editor.

Indeed, “Persian poetry and its conventions are very often the source and inspiration” of the verse in Modern Poetry of Pakistan, according to the introduction written by Khwaja, and by far the most common single form represented in the book is the ghazal, with eighteen pieces explicitly labeled as such, and a few others looking suspiciously similar in form. Poems called ghazals are translated here in varying ways, more or less consistent with strict expectation. Nazir Kazmi’s “Ghazal: Bearing Hints of Bygone Days” appears in quatrains without any rhyme or repetition in the English of Mehr Afshan Farooqi — it would be useful to know if this deviation exists in the original Urdu or not, but the notes that supply helpful references for Qur’anic, historical, mythic, and other cultural allusions don’t enlighten us here.

Pakistani poet and editor Iftikhar Arif

There are fifteen translators among the seven languages, most working in collaboration. This does not help a reader appreciate the variety of voices of the original poets. Does Pakistani poetry of seven different languages over nearly a century really maintain such an evenness of tone and level of diction as a first reading through of this book provides? Admittedly, any different culture looks homogeneous at first glance, and only familiarity discerns difference. Admittedly, accomplished translators from these various languages may be harder to find than those from Spanish or Russian, but there are ways to include others that the editor has not, apparently, attempted. And there are odd discrepancies. When we read in Fahmida Riaz’s biographical note that “she has given great thought to . . . choosing a rustic diction for its familiarity rather than employing a more formal Persianized expression” this is useful information that might be reflected in a translation, but “If my life be spared, / I would with folded hands point out, / O noble master, / that in your perfumed chamber lies like a corpse, / decomposing” (translated from Urdu by Yasmeen Hameed) hardly bears this out.

In all, Modern Poetry of Pakistan smacks of the editors’ having taken the bland, easy way out at almost every stage. It takes second, third, closer readings to discern individuality among the poets, and there are several lovely and powerful poems that emerge from such close reading, poems of love and politics and of faith — not the mere journal entries of so much Western verse. It is remarkable how many of these poems turn on questions. Ata Shad’s “Traveler,” translated from Balochi by Azmat Ansari and Khwaja, invites the reader to

step into my heart —

the earth is burning.

Why do you turn your face from one who gave you sanctuary?

Are you sure you understand what you are doing?

Despite our eyes, we are blind,

the heart is far removed. . . .

Traveler,

step into my heart,

The whole earth is on fire.

However limited Modern Poetry of Pakistan may be as a broad cultural introduction to a contemporary scene, it does help us to step into more than one Pakistani heart.

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J. Kates is a poet and literary translator who lives in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire. He helps run Zephyr Press.

Gish Jen

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

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

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

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• ‘I Curse the River of Time’ book info

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

Reviewed by Christopher M. Ohge

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

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

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

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

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

Translator Peter Wortsman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviewed by Harvey Blume

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

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

Tristan and Iseult playing chess.

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

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

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

Old Xiangqu Pawn

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

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

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

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

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

By Bill Marx, World Books Editor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Bill Marx

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charles Darwin: Still revolutionary after all these years

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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