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• Sanjay Patel’s website

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MARCO WERMAN:  The Ramayana is one of the great epics of Hindu literature.  The story is more than 2,500 years old and its long, 24,000 verses in Sanskrit.  Artist Sanjay Patel summarizes the saga this way.

SANJAY PATEL:  At one point evil get unchecked power in the form of a ten-headed demon named Ravanna.  And because his power is unchecked, Vishnu, this great Hindu god, creates an avatar named Rama on earth and this avatar is exiled from his kingdom and sent to the jungle for about 13 years at which point his wife, Sita, gets kidnapped by Ravanna, the ten-headed demon and sends Rama on a quest to find her and destroy Ravanna.

WERMAN: Sanjay Patel is an artist at Pixar Studios.  He’s worked on animated films like Monster, Inc. and on TV’s the Simpsons, but in his spare time he’s put together a book that brings the Ramayana to life with more than 100 stunning illustrations.  Sanjay Patel grew up in California and he says image from Hindu mythology, like a flying monkey named Hanuman were like part of the wallpaper when he was a kid.

PATEL: There was a lot of vivid Hindu ichnography all around the house, but since you grew up with it, it felt actually very normal in a way that you just never really paid any attention to it actually.  You know, every morning my father would conduct a puja or artee which was a sort of a prayer ceremony where he would sing and chant the deities names and I would sing the songs, but I wouldn’t really understand what the songs meant, but there would be all these things to look at which was the idols of the gods or the illustrations of the gods and you know it’s something that I didn’t really question but it sort of burned a big impression in my mind.

WERMAN: So with your book, “Ramayana Divine Loophole” are you kind of taking all of these myths and legends from that wallpaper and giving them greater spirituality?

PATEL: I think what I did was, those images were burned in my mind, the framed illustrations and devotional photos from my parents.  And then I think what I wanted to do was to see them in a light that was much more exciting and modern and contemporary.  And so I really looked at the mythology, I had to really understand that characters and stories and once I began to understand what the characters were symbolizing, it was really easy then to redesign the imagery to make it fitting for my world and my contemporary lifestyle.

WERMAN: Let’s talk about the illustrations.  This book is full of lavish, colorful, really fun illustrations and I’m reminded at times of some of the explosive dramatic artwork from Disney like in the film Snow White when the evil stepmother appears.  It’s just this explosion.  Should I not be surprised by that since you’ve been working at Pixar for 13 years?

PATEL: No, it’s no surprise.  I am very much cut from the Disney cloth.  I went to a school called Cal Arts which is in southern California.  It was actually a school set up by Walt Disney in the ’50’s to train his animators and so I’m very much steeped in the Disney tradition and I feel like the artwork was very much informed by mid-century design, animation design and I paired that with other modernists that I admired and then I really looked at Hindu imagery that was all around me as I grew up and somehow I threw it all in the soup and I think what came out was this bizarre, contemporary, modern and ancient looking book called Ramayana.

WERMAN: Do you have a favorite illustration from Ramayana?

PATEL: I have two actually.  I really love the illustration of where Hanaman goes to Lunta, that’s where Ravanna the ten-headed demon lives.  The demon actually tries to set Hanaman’s tail on fire and the demon doesn’t know that Hanaman has magical powers and so the monkey extends his tail and ends up setting fire to the entire kingdom.  It’s just such a vivid image of all these demons in panic and this one little monkey somehow upsets all the demons and I just thought it was such a vivid, iconic image and I really was excited to illustrate it.

WERMAN: You said that there were two illustrations that you really liked.  What was the other illustration?

PATEL: You know I was really excited to illustrate when Rama first meets the monkeys and bears.  The monkey tribe that Hanaman comes from and the bear tribe, I was so excited because it was just such a neat idea that this mortal has to work with these divine animals to restore harmony in his world.  I just thought that was such a beautiful metaphor for things that are missing in our modern day life, the sort of disconnect from nature and it was just so exciting as a visual artist to have this blue warrior meet these divine monkeys and bears, it just was really, really, really fun to illustrate and I couldn’t wait to tackle him.

WERMAN: This is a second book you’ve done Sanjay, on Hindu themes.  The first book was “The Little Book of Hindu Deities”.  How has taking these religious themes into art from India allowed you to balance your Indian and American identities?

PATEL: That’s a great question.  So it wasn’t something that I even was aiming toward, this idea of using my art as a tool to sort of explore my identity, but as I’ve done more and more of this artwork, I’ve realized that it’s actually very personal to me and yet completely in the realm of what I do professionally and so it’s been really exciting to have something that’s personal and at the same time can be very relatable to both Indian Americans, and animation students and just people in general who can appreciate the graphics of the stories.

WERMAN: Its kind of mid-century modern as you say, meets Hinduism.  The book is “Ramayana Divine Loophole”.  Sanjay Patel, we’ve got illustrations from your book on our website, the world dot org.  Very nice to speak with you Sanjay.

PATEL: Thank you so much Marco.

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February by Lisa Moore. Grove Press, Black Cat, 320 pages, $14.95.

Reviewed by Roberta Silman

Some of our best American fiction writers are Canadian — Robertson Davies, Alastair MacLeod, Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro. And Saul Bellow and Mavis Gallant, who were both born in Montreal but who settled in Chicago and Paris. Into this esteemed company now comes Lisa Moore, who was born in St. John’s, Newfoundland in 1964, and who is every bit as good as her compatriot forebears.

Already honored as a finalist in the Scotiabank Giller Prize contest for her story collection, “Open,” and her novel “Alligator,” which also won the Commonwealth Writers’ prize for the Caribbean and Canada region, Moore is a gifted writer whose prose has an urgency and precision rarely found in someone so young.

Her second novel “February” reveals how Helen O’Mara, a young mother of three and just pregnant with a fourth, deals with the terrible loss of her young husband, Cal who was drowned when the self-propelled oil rig, Ocean Ranger sunk in February of 1982. In using this real event as a lynchpin for her novel, Moore explores the devastation to the O’Maras and their extended family with enormous sympathy and intelligence without ever becoming maudlin.

Helen is already in her mid-50s when the novel begins – her three daughters and two grandchildren live in St. John’s, where she and Cal grew up and married when they were 20 and 21. They had just ten years before Cal’s body was one of the 22 bodies – out of 84 – found when the Ocean Ranger went down. Although Helen seems — to her family and friends — to have adjusted to her widowed existence, she lives a lot of her life in her mind, and in the past when she was bringing up the children alone and before that, with Cal, during the early years of their marriage when they were doing all the hard stuff and beginning to build a life together.

She is also fiercely proud. “Sherry had imagined her to be lonely. Helen was flooded with shame. The blood rushing to her head, making her ears ring. She would not be pitied.” And as she interacts with her children, her in-laws and her sister, both now and in the past, you learn not only to respect her, but to love her, as these finely drawn characters also do. Only Helen’s son, John, her eldest, is far away, and, surprisingly, it is he who changes Helen’s life with a phone call from the airport in Singapore:

His mother was groggy and panicked all at once….
John, his mother said.
She says she’s having a baby, John said.
Who says? his mother asked.
A woman, John said. Who I slept with.
Whom, his mother said. She was half asleep.

And then after John has gone over what happened with the woman carrying the baby, or maybe what he thought had happened:

John wanted his mother to dig deep into the secret womanly knowledge buried in the pheromones and cells and blood of that murky, heady thing he thought of as femininity, and to report back: John, you owe that woman nothing.
A baby, his mother said.

No quotation marks, no hesitations, just their hopes and flaws and prejudices, as well as their amazing ability not to gloss over anything.

One of the most remarkable things in “February” is how Moore erases time, how the past will come up and hit her characters in the face, as when Helen is getting her grandson’s skates sharpened, or when John is having a business lunch in New York. At one point John thinks: “The present is always dissolving into the past…It gets used up. The past is virulent and ravenous and everything can be devoured in a matter of seconds. And later Helen decides: “The past yields, it gives way, it goes on forever. The future is unyielding. It is possible that the past has cracked off, the past has cluttered to the floor, and what remains is the future and there is not very much of that. The future is the short end of the stick.”

LIsa Moore: A writer who knows how to erase time.

Cal is making his way up to the deck. He is hauling himself hand over hand up the stair rail. There is a monstrous crevasse in the concrete ocean and it inspires a terror that is full of calm.
They knew all along. It was decided…
The Royal Commission said there was a fatal chain of events that could have been avoided but for the inadequate training of personnel, lack of manuals and technical information. …
Cal is on the deck and he is almost gone. Please go, she thinks, Please go, let it be over.
Because his panic is in her skin, just as he has made love to her and just as she had his four children, and just as she has watched him sleep and cooked his meals and made up a notion of what love might be and followed through with it. . .
Helen knew Cal’s moods and the two of them gossiped and made up stories and held each other and fought and were careful about what they said, even in anger. And his panic is inside her. The panic of facing death.

As I re-read “February” for this review I realized how much it evoked another favorite book — Virginia Woolf’s “Jacob’s Room” — in its finely drawn obsession with someone missing. How pleased Woolf would be to see her legacy so beautifully rendered by Lisa Moore.

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Roberta Silman is the author of “Blood Relations,” “Boundaries,” “The Dream Dredger” and “Beginning The World Again,” as well as the children’s book, “Somebody Else’s Child.” She can be reached at rsilman@verizon.net.

Henning Mankell photo: Dr. Jost Hindersmann

We’re asking you to name that cold hole in Sweden. We’re back with the answer — and more from mystery writer Henning Mankell…

For our Geo Quiz, we asked you to name the small village in Sweden where Mankell grew up.

The answer is Sveg. Mankell’s newest book is set nearby. It’s called “The Man From Beijing.”

As we hear in this reading by Mankell — the story begins with a WOLF finding its way into a crime scene…. listen:
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Extra audio

CHANGE IN SWEDISH SOCIETY
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Author Henning Mankell speaks with The World’s Katy Clark about how crime entered the rural areas of Sweden and how that reality has influenced his writing.

CRIME AROUND THE WORLD
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Katy asks if Mankell’s stories are unique to Sweden or could the stories play out in any culture?

TELLING STORIES IN AFRICA AND EUROPE
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Mankell describes the different story telling styles of Europe and Africa.

THE IMPORTANCE OF LANDSCAPE
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Makell tells why landscape plays such a big role in his wrting.

THEATER
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Mankell talks about his work in the theatre in Mozambique.

WHY AFRICA?
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Katy asks Mankell why Africa has been so important in his life and in his work.

Monsieur Pain by Roberto Bolaño. Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. New Directions, 124 pages, $22.95.

Reviewed by Monica Szurmuk

The late Roberto Bolaño’s slim but hypnotic “Monsieur Pain” is an antithriller, a work that proffers the nervy tension of the suspense genre but not its neat resolution. Against the background of the Civil War in Spain, the rise of Nazism, and the imminent breakout of World War II, Bolaño constructs a masterfully elegant narrative with deft touches of irony, dramatic tautness, and even a slightly painful humor, a trademark of his literary project.

The story takes place in 1938 Paris when one of the foremost South American poets of the twentieth century – the Peruvian César Vallejo – lies in a hospital bed dying. The mesmerist Monsieur Pain is called to the writer’s bedside to save his life by Madame Reynaud, a young widow Pain is in love with, and who is a close friend of Vallejo’s wife. Both Vallejo and Pain are real life characters, as are Mme Curie and her daughter Irène, and Vallejo’s wife Georgette. Vallejo died mysteriously in Paris in 1938, and while this death is the excuse for the novel, the mystery is not solved, though the anguish around it defines the peculiar tone of “Monsieur Pain.”

When Madame Reynaud asks Pain to come to the hospital, for example, he inquires about the patient:

“I’m not a doctor, Pierre,” she answers. “I don’t understand these things, it’s something I deeply regret, as you know; I always wanted to be a nurse.” “Her blue eyes shone furiously,” the narrator affirms. “It was true that Madame Reynaud had not pursued advanced studies (in fact she had not pursued any studies at all), but that did not prevent me from considering her a woman of lively intelligence.”

A few lines later, she clarifies “with the intonation of someone reciting a text learned by heart” that Vallejo is suffering from the hiccups and that “in extreme cases, hiccups can be fatal.” A slew of doctors of different nationalities strive to solve the case, that of a man whose organs are working perfectly but who has a fatal case of the hiccups.

Roberto Bolaño: This book offers his customary mix of irony and earnestness.

One of the most celebrated recent Latin American authors, Chilean-born Roberto Bolaño died in 2003 at the age of fifty, leaving behind a massive literary production mostly undertaken in Mexico and in Spain. In this early work Bolaño’s mastery is already clear, as are some of the characteristics that were going to become his trademark such his slippery mix of irony and earnestness, and the self-consciously kaleidoscopic nature of his narrative, reminiscent of two of the major Latin American writers of the twentieth century: Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar.

In “Monsieur Pain” we follow Pain around the streets in Paris in search of a crime that probably does not exist. While he searches for clues and inches closer to the heart of the mystery, the levels of corruption, opprobrium, and heartbreak multiply. Yet despite that sense of discovery we are not any closer to the resolution of the mystery or to a better knowledge of Pain as a character.

An epilogue entitled “Epilogue for Voices: The Elephant Track” features an anonymous character reporting on the future of the characters of the novel. In true Borgean tradition the time-traveling only contributes to the story’s uncertainty, a general sense of uneasiness regarding what is true and what is false, what is real and what is fiction.

One reason to read “Monsieur Pain” is that it offers an entertaining peek at the narrative strategies that Bolaño would develop later in his major works such as “The Savage Detectives” and the monumental “2666.” The best reason to curl up with it, however, is that it is a good read – baffling, exquisite, and also a bit disturbing. It is one of those rare page turners you won’t want to put down, even after you figure out that essential pieces to Bolaño’s puzzle are missing.

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Mónica Szurmuk is Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Instituto Mora in Mexico City. She is the author of “Mujeres en viaje: escritos y testimonios,” “Women in Argentina, Early Travel Narratives,” “Memoria y ciudadanía,” and co-editor of the “Diccionario de estudios culturales latinoamericanos.”

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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.

Ordinary Lives,by Josef Skvorecky. Translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson. Key Porter Books, 237 pages, $14.95

Reviewed by Roberta Silman

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1924, Josef Skvorecky has produced a body of work that makes him one of our greatest contemporary writers. I suspect the prose is even more beautiful in his native language, (he has become the most beloved Czech writer of his time), but I first came across him in an English translation in 1979 when I read his gorgeous prose poem, a novella called The Bass Saxophone, a meditation on youth and yearning, the seduction of jazz and the pain of dislocation that was part of the life of every young Czech during the Second World War.

Then, in 1984 he published perhaps his most ambitious work, The Engineer of Human Souls, a huge novel juxtaposing Skvorecky’s exile in Canada (he emigrated there in 1968) with his past in Central Europe when his country was devastated, first by the Nazis, and then, after the War, by the Soviets. One of the great pleasures of that book is to see how deeply Skvorecky loves literature, especially our American writers, and how willing he is to reveal that obsessive love as he interacts with his students.

Until his recent retirement he taught English literature at the University of Toronto and ran a small émigré publishing house with his wife of more than fifty years. Engineer was nominated for a Nobel prize and in the 25 years since there have been several more novels – one of my favorites is Dvorak in Love, subtitled A Light-hearted Dream – and detective stories, but Skvorecky has somehow eluded the Nobel prize committee. Perhaps this latest, and possibly last book, Ordinary Lives, will make them take notice.

Although only 201 pages in this excellent English translation by Paul Wilson who has collaborated with him since Engineer, this newest novel has the urgency and magnitude of Skvorecky’s best work as it explores “an ungovernable torrent, scarcely even thoughts” that assails Danny Smiricky, Skvorecky’s alter ego in all his books, who has come back to his fictional hometown Kostelec for two high school reunions – in 1963 and again in 1993.

The volume also proffers the wisdom that comes with living long enough to sort out so many of the mysteries which plague us when we are young. And although at first it may seem confusing to sort out the friends who have come back to these reunions, Skvorecky gives us copious notes, which tell us about these people and refer back to his earlier books, enticing us to read or re-read those previous works.

Both sections of Ordinary Lives begin with the opening I remembered from The Bass Saxophone, “Twilight. Honey and blood. Indifferent to the historical situation of nation and town, it spoke to me, aged eighteen, on the leeshore of a land-locked lea in Europe, where death was less extravagant, more modest . . .” As I read, first “it spoke to me, aged thirty-nine,” and then “it spoke to me, aged sixty nine,” I thought I might feel a sense of resolution, of peace, at the unfolding stories of this group, meeting in the very same Hotel Beranek where The Bass Saxophone had taken place.

Josef Skvorecky writes books that not only embrace his native country, but all of us, in all our flaws and nobility.

But even in his eightieth year (this book was first published in Czech in 2004), Skvorecky has no time for nostalgia. He is determined to show us what really happened to these ordinary people with their ordinary dreams, and when you read, over and over again, about how they were thwarted, not by bad choices, which sometimes happens in countries like the United States and Canada, but because there were, literally, no choices except how to connive and survive under the Nazis and their totally crazy racial laws and then the Soviets and their equally crazy machinations against those who refused to join The Party, and then during the botched efforts at freedom, e.g. the Prague Spring, until the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Throughout the book you feel the outrage and frustration at all the might-have-beens, if onlys, and finally at how political beliefs and governments formed far from a town like Kostelec can ruin lives. Forever.

Hilarity mixes with sadness when you learn how people resorted to bizarre solutions merely to live, how they lied, betrayed, hurt those close to them, because they were naïve, or just plain dumb. And because these are the people he grew up with, you feel a sense of intimacy that only the best books can give a reader, as you despair with Danny over how broken some of them are, and how lucky he was to escape and start a new life. At one point, though, when he is called an “emigrant,” he corrects the speaker with “exile.” Let’s get this straight, once and for all, he seems to be saying.

And yet exile has its price. Here is Danny facing himself:

“I was suddenly overwhelmed by indifference, the kind of indifference I had only experienced in Canada when I realized, with a sensation of bliss, that nothing could happen to me there, except that I might die in a plane crash, a quick and, I hope, definitive death. Indifference, our mother, our saviour, our destruction. When I wrote that line a long, long time ago, it was an automatic triad, the instinctive impulse of the conscious mind to organize everything into groups of three, a habit that has lasted down through the ages and is said to have its roots in heathen superstition. Today, I’d exclude destruction, and I’m not even sure anymore that indifference is our mother. But it is certainly our saviour.”

I don’t know another living writer with such a large world view. His compatriot Gustav Mahler said “a symphony must embrace the world.” In his amazing body of prose, Skvorecky has written his own symphony, embracing not only his native country, but all of us, in all our flaws and nobility. And as you make Danny Smiricky part of your literary world, you see that this man who can smirk, who can smear the truth when he’s in a tight spot, is one of us – and that everything he and we have done in the course of our ordinary lives matters more than we could have ever dreamed when we were young.

Roberta Silman is the author of Somebody Else’s Child, a children’s book, Blood Relations, a story collection, and the novels, Boundaries, The Dream Dredger, and Beginning The World Again, and many stories and reviews published here and abroad. She can be reached at rsilman@verizon.net.

Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity By Loren Graham, Jean-Michel Kantor. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 239 pp., $25.95

Reviewed by Anna Razumnaya

Naming Infinity is a short, accessible book about mathematical imagination. It focuses on one—albeit prolonged—moment in the history of mathematics: the first three decades in the development of set theory. Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor, who collaborated on Naming Infinity across the Atlantic, propose that these new developments in mathematics came about as the result of the Russian mathematicians’ exposure to the ideas of their colleagues in France and, crucially, to the mystical beliefs of the schismatic religious movement whose followers were known as Name Worshipers.

The central intuition of the Name Worshipers was a recognition of the intimate connection between a name and the existence of the object named. Name Worshipers consequently saw the name of God as a point of connection for human beings with divinity itself. The official Orthodox Church saw Name Worshiping (imyaslaviye) as a heresy and sought its eradication. Once confined primarily to St. Panteleimon Monastery on Mt. Athos in Greece, imyaslaviye was inadvertently disseminated across Russia when, in 1913, Nicholas II ordered to remove heretical monks from the monastery and transport them by ship to the Russian mainland.

Russian mathematicians familiar with Name Worshiping—principally, Dmitri Egorov, the founder of what became known as the Moscow School of Mathematics—used the metaphysical intuition of imyaslaviye as a step toward new development in set theory. This new branch of mathematics captivated Egorov during his travels in Germany and France, where he attended lectures by Poincaré, Darboux, Hadamard, Lebesgue, Hilbert, and Minkowski.

Founded by Georg Cantor, set theory enjoyed a phase of exuberant development in France, but it soon became clear that the strong French rationalist tradition closed off the imaginative possibilities necessary for its further growth. Conservative mathematicians saw the new theory as a species of speculative metaphysics rather than mathematics in the proper sense. It took a new sensibility and a new style of doing mathematics to overcome these imaginative constraints. Dmitri Egorov and his mathematical circle—or, rather, the triangle uniting Egorov himself, Nikolai Luzin, and Pavel Florensky—possessed just the right kind of intellectual temperament. Incidentally, all three of these mathematicians happened to sympathize with the mystical views of Name Worshipers.

The authors of Naming Infinity struggle to balance this interesting fact against the risks of it being misinterpreted as grounding mathematics in mysticism. Consequently, they never quite bring themselves to articulate the precise extent to which the ideas of the Name Worshipers affected the members of the Moscow School of Mathematics. Name Worshiping is mentioned—“named”—but then abandoned without due exploration.

The fruitfulness of the encounter between the religious and mathematical types of imagination is an intriguing topic. However, the authors never articulate fully which of the Name Worshippers’ beliefs spurred the problem-solving in a stagnant area of mathematics. It also remains unclear whether those beliefs became permanently incorporated into the Moscow style of doing mathematics, or whether they were discarded, like Wittgenstein’s ladder, after they provided the necessary imaginative impulse.

What remains of the plot is reducible to a series of formally notated theorems where commentary is, in a sense, superfluous. Here Naming Infinity faces the same challenge as any other popular book about mathematics: the challenge of divided readership. The mathematically savvy readers will already know the formal side of the story and so will have no need for explanations beyond a brief sketch. The non-specialists will be similarly more interested in the social and historical contexts of the ideas. In both cases, it is the flare and verve of the way the story is told that makes or breaks the book.

Luckily, mathematics owes the bulk of its progress to personalities with such a surplus of eccentricity that personal tics alone are often enough for an exciting book. Naming Infinity has some of that anecdotal quality. Its real strength, however, is in the authors’ skill at isolating the key actors in the story, their personalities, motives, and intellectual styles—and fitting these elements together in a way that bares the machinery of creativity and ambition. To the reader’s dismay, one may find that human destinies are routinely trapped by that machinery.

To tame the complexity of their plot, the authors have organized it in an series of elegant triangles: the three key French mathematicians—Émile Borel, Henri Lebesgue, René Bair—form “the French trio”; likewise, Egorov, Luzin, and Florensky, are framed as “the Russian trio”. These two triangles are in turn triangulated with set theory itself, showing how its growth came to be catalyzed by the shifting approaches of the French and the Russian schools.

Naming Infinity is a straightforward, kinetic, and seductive read. Cause gears into effect, fueled by the aspirations and propensities of the large cast of characters surrounding the “Russian trio”: mathematicians with varying proportions of talent and ambition, political manipulators—exemplified by the slanderous Ernst Kol’man—and the manipulated. There are deeply moving biographical sketches of figures like Nikolai Chebotaryov, who sacrificed his academic career in the name of principle, Pyotr Kapitsa, a physicist kidnapped by the Soviets from England, and Nina Bari, who edited Luzin’s posthumous papers before throwing herself under a subway train.

Dmitir Egorov, the founder of what became known as the Moscow School of Mathematics

At their best, Graham and Kantor expose, elegantly and economically, the motives of seemingly hard-to-explain actions. Movingly, they uncover the reasons behind the political acquiescence of Pavel Alexandrov and Andrei Kolmogorov, whose homosexual orientation gave the regime a convenient fulcrum for blackmail, and behind the suicide of Lev Shnirel’man, elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences at the astonishing age of 28.

In describing the life trajectories of their subjects, the authors are unafraid to take sides, show their sympathies, even judge. There is something refreshingly honest in their striving to be fair to their real-life characters without feigned impartiality. This considered generosity and the passion that shows itself in the copious quantities of documentary and anecdotal evidence gathered by Loren Graham in Russia, make the book a fascinating read despite its shortcomings. Just as a stimulating conversation, even when left incomplete, opens the mind to new ideas, Naming Infinity suggests new ways of thinking about mathematical creativity and intellectual excellence.

Harvard University Press could have been more thorough in checking difficult spellings in the book. The Solovetsky Archipelago in the White Sea is repeatedly referred to as “Solovetsk” Islands. (The single-letter suffix “k” is common at the end of city names but does not work that way in names referring to landmasses.) The name of St. Panteleimon is spelled as “Pantaleimon” throughout. While the illustrations supplied by the authors are carefully attributed, the publisher has not bothered to credit Mikhail Nesterov’s 1917 painting, “Philosophers,” reproduced on the jacket. The painting is a double portrait of Pavel Florensky—a member of “the Russian trio” (wearing a white priest’s cassock)—in conversation with philosopher Sergey Bulgakov. It is part of the Tretyakov Gallery’s collection in Moscow.

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Anna Razumnaya is a freelance translator and a doctoral student at the Editorial Institute at Boston University. Her translations of two poems by Osip Mandelstam are forthcoming in Pusteblume.

• Video: Patua scroll book
• Tara Books: Tsunami

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KATY CLARK: This past weekend marked the five-year anniversary of the Asian tsunami.  230,000 people were killed in the disaster; more than half of them were in Indonesia.  But the tsunami also devastated parts of Thailand, Sri Lanka and India.  Now an Indian publishing company in the city of Chennai is commemorating the event with an extraordinary publication.  It’s called “Tsunami”.  Gita Wolf is the founder and director of Tara Books.  She says Tsunami is published as a scroll in the tradition of Indian Patuas or scroll painters.

GITA WOLF: The patuas are actually bards and singers as an artist and what they used to do is they would go from house to house singing and showing their scroll, it was like a picture book.  So what they have done here is actually relate and narrated the events of the Tsunami.  It’s a scroll that’s been taken over into the book form and they’ve gone on to make a dirge out of it.  Make a ballad; make something that commemorates the dead.

KATY: I’m wondering is this an art form that is still practiced today?  Do you still have people walking around wandering from village to village with these patua scrolls to tell stories?

GITA: Yes it is and it isn’t.  I mean it’s also grown a lot and many of them are now artists who actually sell the scrolls.  And they actually paint pictures so it’s like a word picture that’s painted.

KATY: And this beautiful book you sort of unfold it and if you kind of stand it on end it’s about five feet tall or so and the colors are just these vibrant yellows and reds and blues.  Describe sort of how this book came to be.

GITA: Well we actually met these patua painters at an exhibition and they had this beautiful scroll.  They are a husband and wife team called [PH] Moinanja Adib.  And you know I asked them whether they’d like to turn this into a book for us.  So you know they came down to our publishing house in Chenai and worked with us for a month.  And then we came up with this scroll.  It kind of folds up into a book but it retains the scroll form.

KATY: There is actually a song that goes along with this patua scroll book that you’ve made.  But let’s play a little bit of it right now.

[INDIAN MUSIC]

KATY: And those again are the artists who created the book, singing the words to the story, which in the book that I have anyway the words are in English.  Describe what we see when we open this up.  I mean as I’m, I was talking about the colors, and we see this that “Tsunami” is sort of this demon with red bloodshot eyes and flaming black hair.  Describe what else we see.

GITA: Yeah so we see, you know this demon and you see the lot of people being carried away by the waters.  And along the banks you see reporters, you see people and helicopters trying to rescue people.  And you see you know bodies of animals, children, men and women floating down and trees.  And then you also see the viewers who are looking at this on television.  And you’ll see people who are morning on the banks of the river.  And they also talk about how people forgot to stick to their communities and the way they do and, how Hindus and Muslims were buried in each other’s burial grounds or cremated.  And they also talk of help and friendship.

KATY: I’m curious whether the Tsunami still looms large in people’s minds there in Chenai in southern India.

GITA: I certainly think that people who have been directly affected by the Tsunami and it’s quite a traumatic feeling and I don’t think that people have lost their fear of the sea and the fear of what nature can do.  Some of them still you know are in makeshift housing and you know there has been a lot of suffering.  So yes I don’t think it’s forgotten so easily.

KATY: Well it’s a really the book is a really beautiful way of commemorating what happened.  Thanks for sharing it with us.

GITA: Thank you, thank you very much.

KATY: Gita Wolf is with Tara Books.  A video of the artist making the screen-prints for “Tsunami” and singing the Tsunami ballad depicted in the scroll is on our web site TheWorld.org.  This is PRI.

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

American Writers in Istanbul: Melville, Twain, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Bowles, Algren, and Baldwin by Kim Fortuny. Syracuse University Press, 238 pages. $34.95.

Reviewed by Vincent Czyz

Ostensibly, the purpose of “American Writers in Istanbul,” as stated in the foreword, is to examine “both the ways in which each author reacts to the great city and the placement of their writings about Istanbul … within their total oeuvre.” Which authors you ask? Literary legends such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Ernst Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and James Baldwin. As an avid reader, a writer, and a former inhabitant of Istanbul (for nearly nine years), I was determined to like, laud, and recommend this book. It is with genuine regret that I have to do just the opposite.

The concept is as alluring as rumors of an ancient city uncovered during excavations for a subway, but what we get is a lot of opaque over-theorizing and sloppy thinking on the part of the author, academic Kim Fortuny, who seems bent on applying every class she ever took in post-colonial theory and Orientalism to every sentence composed by these writers. (Ironically, she treats America as a colonial power as though the Turks didn’t grab every square inch of land and subjugate every people they came across from Central Asia to Eastern Europe.)

Moreover, the writing itself is a poster child for the bad academic writing Orwell scourged in his essay “Politics and the English Language.” That is to say: Don’t use a long word where a short one will do; don’t use jargon if you can find everyday English equivalent; and don’t be verbose if you can be succinct.

Let’s start with the mess she makes of poor Melville, who visited Istanbul in 1856. The celebrated author of “Moby-Dick” writes: “Cedar & Cypress [are] the only trees about the capital. –The Cypress [is] a green minaret, & blends with the stone ones. Minaret perhaps derived from cypress shape. The intermingling of the dark tree with the bright spire expressive of the intermingling of life & death.” Fortuny interprets the passage in this way: “His familiar play with the symbolic potential of juxtaposed particulars in the world, whichever the world, leads him to apply minarets and cypresses to the questions of existence, a question that transcends, because it does not exclude, disparate avenues of inquiry, of faith.”

Not only does her commentary fail to add anything, it actually muddies Melville’s perfectly clear passage.

When Melville describes the scenery during a boat trip, Fortuny turns this into: “Melville resorts to painterly discourse to represent the interplay of topography and water along the Bosphorous, and his geographical references are repeatedly North American, but again rather than enacting a historical space that privileges an outsider’s point of view, Melville seems to abandon his imagination to the immediacy of the place.”

Should we be surprised that an American writing for an American audience makes comparisons to North American landscapes? I give her credit for admitting Melville wasn’t “enacting a historical space”—whatever that means—in some politically incorrect way, but again, not only does her commentary fail to add anything to Melville’s lucid prose, it makes these pages reek of academia the way a mortuary reeks of formaldehyde.

Mark Twain: Placed on the anti-Orientalist rack?

Seen moving about, far away in the dim, arched aisle of the Great Bazaar, they look as the shrouded dead must have looked when they walked forth from their graves amid storms and thunders and earthquakes that burst upon Calvary that awful night of the Crucifixion. A street in Constantinople is a picture which one ought to see once—not oftener.

Fortuny responds, “While the final ungrammatical ‘oftener’ compromises the credibility of the speaker in the passage on the ‘shrouded dead’ above, it is aimed less at self-mockery than deflating the momentarily grave contemplation of Istanbul women: Twain must dismiss whatever weight the biblical reference has lent them; they must not be allowed to drift away enriched by any metaphorical sophistication …”

All this from the “ungrammatical” nature of one word! But if Fortuny picked up a dictionary, she’d discover that “oftener” isn’t in the least ungrammatical—particularly in the 19th century. In fact, about 17 years earlier, Hawthorne wrote (in “The Scarlett Letter”): “There was something ugly and evil in his face, which they had not previously noticed, and which grew still the more obvious to the sight the oftener they looked upon him.”

So this entire paragraph of wild over-reaching can be deleted along with the bad pun (“grave contemplation”). What’s more, Fortuny has missed the point: it is not a compliment or metaphorical enrichment to compare living women to zombies—even Christian ones.

Again and again Fortuny will stretch Twain on the rack of the anti-Orientalist, the invader from the West, when in fact the writer did not despise Oriental culture—he lavishes praise on both a reform-minded Egyptian leader and Syrian peasants—it is empire he detests, which he demonstrates in vitriolic passages about America’s imperialistic tendencies. When Twain describes a trio of dogs sleeping on a street and a drove of sheep that step over them—simple description without commentary—Fortuny observes “The city that [Twain] attempts to control through traditional Orientalist tropes, like the street dogs, does not notice the American tourist’s passage.”

For starters, “trope” is a literary device, not a cliché. (The book is full of malapropisms, including “sublimated” for “subsumed” and “syntactical” for “verbal”). More to the point, how could Twain possibly hope to “control” Istanbul with a passage about street dogs? As for her assertion that the city doesn’t “notice” Twain’s passage, the city as well as the rest of the world is still noticing his passage—hence, this book.

I only have space enough to showcase what Fortuny does to two writers, but rest assured, she will mangle them all though not always to the same degree (Hemingway gets off lightly). The only writing worth salvaging in this book is the passages by the famous authors themselves, and I suggest you find them elsewhere.

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Vincent Czyz is the author of the novel “Adrift in a Vanishing City“. He is also the recipient of the Faulkner Prize for Fiction and two fellowships from the NJ Council on the Arts. His work has appeared in “Shenandoah,” “AGNI,” and the “Massachusetts Review.”

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Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector by Benjamin Moser. Oxford University Press, 479 pages, $29.95.

Listen to World Books interview with Clarice Lispector biographer Benjamin Moser

Reviewed by Monica Szurmuk

The biographies of Jewish-Latin American authors often include a place of birth on the other side of the Atlantic. One of the merits of Benjamin Moser’s superb biography of Clarice Lispector is that it starts on the other side of the ocean, in pogrom-ridden Ukraine where in 1920 Brazilian writer Lispector was born in a dismal social and political situation. Lispector’s parents were encouraged to have a baby as a way to heal the first stages of Mania Lispector’s syphilis, contracted when she was gang-raped by Russian soldiers. Baby Chaya was born healthy, and the Lispector family, which also included two older daughters, was able to escape Ukraine and get to Brazil.

Chaya became Clarice, keeping in the ce a mark of difference even after she had been renamed using a Brazilian first name whose usual spelling in Portuguese is Clarisse. Brazil could not heal the wounds of the parents, but it was a fertile ground for the three Lispector girls, who flourished and succeeded. Moser traces the indelible marks of Lispector’s past in her life and writing. He shows how the author’s insistence on her Brazilianness was also peppered by a reliance to let go of her past marked by an attachment to a slight foreign accent, and to a complex set of readings that included Spinoza and the Jewish mystics.

Lispector grew up in Recife, in the northeast of Brazil, a medium-sized town with a small but vibrant Jewish population. When she was fifteen, the father moved the family to Rio de Janeiro in the hopes of finding Jewish husbands for his three daughters. Clarice finished high school in Rio and graduated from the most prestigious law school in the country. She also started working as a journalist, had her first heartbreak (she fell in love with gay writer Lúcio Cardoso), and published her first novel “Near to the Wild Heart” in 1942.

A year later she married diplomat Maury Gurgel Valente, and following her husband she lived away from Rio for almost two decades, an exile that proved to be very traumatic for a woman whose attachment to the city was remarkable. In 1959, Lispector returned to Brazil with her two sons after divorcing Maury, and she lived close to the beach in Rio until her death in 1977, a day before she turned fifty seven. She went on to author nine novels, eight collections of short stories, as well as several children’s books, and hundreds of pages of journalism.

Moser is clearly in love with Lispector, a condition that infuses the biography with an almost romantic spirit. As Clarice would have it, Moser learns from her, apprentices under her. While the level of research carried out is impressive, there is still a slight tentativeness about the biography that makes it more endearing. In these little uncertainties, Moser’s love for Lispector emerges, and the passion for certain knowledge of his idol — paixão for Clarice – shines through as always incomplete, as always in vain. This ambiguity mirrors the nebulous genius of the author. French writer Hélène Cixous circled around Lispector’s writing in much the same way: “if Rilke had been a Jewish Brazilian born in the Ukraine. If Rimbaud had been a mother, if he had reached the age of fifty. If Heidegger could have ceased being German.” Moser’s combination of biography and literary criticism nimbly questions the relationship between life and literature, and ultimately reveals the immense complexity of Lispector’s works.

Benjamin Moser: He may have fallen in love with the subject of his biography.

Moser has done an amazing amount of research on Lispector’s life, and the author emerges as a complete yet complex figure. A full two chapters are devoted to the undoing of the Lispector family in the Ukraine, including a series of pogroms in which the extended family was decimated, and their livelihood and possessions lost. The gang rape of Mania Lispector is a turning point for the family. The rape, and the ensuing debilitating illness supplies, for Moser, the key to understanding Clarice Lispector’s creative project. He traces in Lispector’s major writing the presence of the mother, her sexual violation, and a daughter’s desire to save her.

Mothering and motherhood were fundamental in Lispector’s life. Her mother died when she was eight, after years of suffering, a paralyzed figure in the family’s balcony in Recife. Lispector herself would become a doting mother to her two sons, and also a substitute mother for other children, including the daughter of her psychoanalyst. In order to support herself after her divorce and her return to Rio Clarice contributed several columns in newspapers, most of which required her to write from the persona of a housewife, and a mother. She was a terrible businesswoman, who until very late in her life managed her finances very badly, receiving almost no royalties for her work.

Lispector was a public figure, honored by monuments in the wretched town in Podolia where she was born, and in Recife where she grew up. She combined looks and intelligence; talking about meeting her in Texas, Latin American literature translator Gregory Rabassa claimed that he “was flabbergasted to meet that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf.” For the millions of readers in Latin America who already know her, Lispector remains somewhat of a mystery. Moser’s biography fills in many factual blanks, but it does not render her completely knowable because it would be impossible to fully analyze the creative force behind Lispector’s stunningly diaphanous prose, a literary mystery that remains with us.

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Mónica Szurmuk is Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Instituto Mora in Mexico City. She is the author of “Mujeres en viaje: escritos y testimonios,” “Women in Argentina, Early Travel Narratives,” “Memoria y ciudadanía,” and co-editor of the “Diccionario de estudios culturales latinoamericanos.”

Aleksander Hemon: Robert Frost said that poetry is what is lost in translation, Joseph Brodsky said that poetry is what is gained in translation. I would go with Brodsky.

By Vincent Czyz and Bill Marx

Getting the word out about first-rate new international fiction has been a challenging problem for publishers interested in broadening the horizons of American readers, who tend to be isolationists when it comes to contemporary fiction. Dalkey Archive Press has come up with an ingenious approach to the problem: this year it has inaugurated an annual series of books dedicated to a round-up of European short stories. The volume’s design reflects the look of the ever-expanding series of “Best American [fill in the blank and year]” books, a line-up that includes volumes dedicated to compendiums of the year’s best essays, short stories, travel writing, sports reporting, poetry etc.

The Trojan horse approach seems to be working — my local book store set up a prominent display of “Best American [fill in the blank] 2010″ tomes including, nestled right in the center, “Best European Fiction 2010.”

Of course it doesn’t hurt to have the acclaimed writer Aleksander Hemon as the book’s editor. Hemon was born in Sarajevo; he moved to the United States in 1992. He is the author of the novel “The Lazarus Project,” which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Award and three collections of stories, “”Nowhere Man,” “The Question of Bruno,” and “Love and Obstacles.”

The World’s book critic Chris Merrill put “Best European Fiction 2010″ on his holiday reading list and World Books has posted a review of the book by writer Vincent Czyz. Vince and I sent a few questions about the promising series to Hemon. His replies are below.

World Books: There doesn’t seem much doubt that the short story has fallen in status and prestige. As you point out in your introduction to the volume, there was a time when every “decent newspaper or magazine” printed them. What signs do you see that the short story is alive and well? Is the form healthier in Europe or in America?

Aleksandar Hemon: Well, it is being written all around the world and it has the vitality of form, as it is more conducive to experimentation and play than the novel, if for no other reason then because it is shorter and, in some ways, easier to shape. I also think that the short story can easily be published on the web–many a blog posting is the size of a short story–so it is capable of surviving the death of print.

World Books: What are some basic differences, if any, between American and European short stories?

Hemon: It is hard to generalize, as there are many European sensibilities and traditions, but the European short story–and European literatures at large–are not afraid of intellectually engaging the reader, of making the reader work. They do not operate under the looming shadow of entertainment which has tainted so much of American literature. The fear among the American writers that the reader is going to flee to watch the movies or television or surf the web if some form of entertainment, some kind of emotional roller coasting, is not offered is downright epidemic.

World Books: What do you think the strengths of this collection are?

Hemon: The diversity of forms and ideas. I believe literature is an inherently democratic undertaking, and you can hear all kinds of voices in this collection.

World Books: Would you agree that narrative for the most part has fallen out of favor among European short story writers?

Hemon: No, I wouldn’t. I would say that many European writers do not take narrative for granted, nor “story” as a self-evident category. They question the way the story is told in an ever-changing world.

World Books: How would you answer the charge that stories such as Jon Fosse’s “Waves of Stone” is too disconnected from ordinary experience?

Hemon: So one could claim for the “Goldberg Variations,” or Cubist paintings, or John Ashbery’s poetry. Besides, who gets to decide what “ordinary experience” is? On the one hand, in the Nazi Germany, worshiping the Fuhrer, living with the sense of Aryan superiority and demeaning the Jews were ordinary experiences, and so they burned art that did not comply with their standards of acceptable ordinariness. “Ordinary experience” is not a self-evident category and it needs to be questioned and challenged, which is what literature can and must do. The word “ordinary” is directly related to the word “order,” therefore always appealing to those who would like to impose law and order on everything, including language and imagination.

Given that literature is inherently democratic, the reader can simply skip Jon Fosse’s piece and move on to a more ordinary experience.

World Books: There seems to be a devaluation of emotions in European short stories. This in turn seems tied to characters that aren’t given much psychological heft or even physical description. Would you agree with these observations? If so, how do European writers make up for it?

Hemon: There is a particular kind of intentional fallacy that is common among American readership: the belief that the final result of the writer’s intentions are the emotions produced in the reader and that, therefore, you can understand a work of literary art by analyzing your own emotions. I have to go against this in pretty much every class I teach. This approach makes the reader’s (volatile) emotions the measuring rod of art; entirely suspends other modes of reading (intellectual, philosophical, historical); favors the most conservative writing–formally and politically–and makes Oprah the reigning empress of American publishing. Soap-operaish qualities are demanded from literature, which can encompass so much human intelligence and imagination and history.

It is also condescending to the readers, who are treated as children who will throw a fit if they’re not given the treat of emotional satisfaction.

I don’t think that European writers–the tens of thousands of them– need to make up for anything. There is a vast range of approaches and sensibilities, only parts of which are visible in this particular anthology. We hope to make that range more visible over time, with each subsequent collection of European fiction we publish.

World Books: Who do you think are some of the European short story writers to watch?

Hemon: I’d rather watch literatures: I was particularly impressed with the Baltic representatives in the collection: the Finnish, Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian pieces.

World Books: Are the writers in the anthology examples of authors who shape their fiction to address a global audience? Are there first class writers in Europe whose work resists adequate translation?

Hemon: Dan Brown (a cynical emotional manipulator) shapes his fiction to address a global audience. Great writers have integrity and sovereignty; they write what they write out of some kind of inner need, in pursuit of knowledge that is available only in literature. Rilke (whose work could also be accused of being removed from ordinary experience) believed that great art can only come out of necessity. I’m sure that there are writers in Europe who have yet to be translated or translated adequately–every great writer needs a great translator– but I do not believe that there is untranslatable literature. Robert Frost said that poetry is what is lost in translation, Joseph Brodsky said that poetry is what is gained in translation. I would go with Brodsky.

>>> Purchase these books here and support The World

• Holiday Books 2009
• See book illustrations and books covers

THE LITTLE PRINCE: Deluxe Pop-Up Book by Antoine de Saint-Exupery,
translated from the French by Richard Howard. English Translation
copyright (c) 2003 by Richard Howard. Illustrations by Antonie de
Saint-Exupery, copyright 1943 by Harcourt, Inc. Copyright renewed (c)
1971 by Consuelo de Saint-Exupery. Present edition (c) 2009 by Gallimard
Jeunesse. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing
Company. All rights reserved.

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman. This is the World. You’ve gotten gifts for pretty much everyone on your list, or at least you’ve thought about what to get them. Here’s the problem. What about the kids? You’ve ruled out the zhu-zhu pet, Elmo Live, and anything to do with High School Musical. Well, you can’t go wrong with a good book. The World’s Carol Zall has been talking with writers and getting suggestions. Carol, the first book on your list is a really intriguing book called Tails from Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan.

CAROL ZALL: That’s right. Shaun Tan is an Australian writer. He is probably best known for his book The Arrival, which got a lot of attention a couple of years ago. Now he has this new collection, Tales from Outer Suburbia, which is a really hard book to describe. It’s got a lot of short pieces in it and a lot of illustrations to go along with the pieces. Shaun Tan presents this kind of quirky world of outer suburbia.

MARCO WERMAN: This is like a suburbia I’ve never seen before. We’re in suburbs of somewhere in Australia and there is weird things that happen. For example, there is this kid named Eric who is like this weird looking adorable house guest exchange student who lives in the pantry but he’s the size of Stuart Little and his head is shaped like a leaf. He is also kind of scary looking.

CAROL ZALL: Yes, he’s a very funny weird little drawing. I actually spoke to Shaun Tan and I asked him where he got the idea for Eric. This is what he told me.

SHAUN TAN: In my sketch books I do a lot of random stuff. One of them was this tiny little drawing of a character with three points on his head, something like a diamond that the third point made and looked fairly immaculate. I had written the name Eric underneath. For some reason, I thought that was hilarious. This weird little character had such an ordinary familiar name.

CAROL ZALL: That’s where Shaun Tan got part of the idea for this little story, which ends up in the book called Eric.

MARCO WERMAN: It’s just a surreal and delightful book. You know the thing about Tales from Outer Suburbia is that it may fall into a kid’s book category but an adult would easily appreciate getting this book. The next book also works the same way.

CAROL ZALL: That’s right. The next book is very different. It is called The Magician’s Elephant by Kate DiCamillo. She’s an American writer but the book is set in this kind of mythical Eastern European city. This is a novel of 200 pages. At the center of it is this magician who was trying to conjure up lilies but instead got an elephant that came through the roof.

MARCO WERMAN: Not good.

CAROL ZALL: Not good. The person who recommended this book to me was author Brian Selznick. This is what he had to say about why he thinks this book works so well.

BRIAN SELZNICK: There is a sense from the very beginning that you are dealing in a place where everything means something larger. When you have this image of an elephant crashing through the roof in this miraculous way, it feels very much like a parable. You start thinking about things in your own life that are impossible or things that have come crashing down around you and how things that are a miracle and are beautiful also have these dark sides.

MARCO WERMAN: [SOUNDS LIKE] Julian’s author Brian Selznick there who we interviewed a couple of years ago when he came out with The Invention of Hugo Cabre. The Magician’s Elephant is kind of like a road runner cartoon where its really dark underneath but on the surface it’s just an elephant falling from the sky and messing things up.

CAROL ZALL: You could say that. You could also say that it works on a lot of different levels.

MARCO WERMAN: Right and although you said it’s 200 pages, the print is spaced out. I can easily see an 8 year old reading this book. The other books that you’ve picked are more straight ahead children’s books aren’t they. Let’s start with Waiting for Winter by Sebastian Meschenmoser.

CAROL ZALL: That’s right. This is a book for little kids. This is a German writer. The book has been translated into English. We picked this just because it’s a really fun book. It’s about a squirrel. The squirrel wants to stay up. It doesn’t want to hibernate. It wants to stay up until it sees the first snowflake of winter. A lot of the pages are just white with brown or black sketches of trees but you have these little dashes of color.

MARCO WERMAN: That little charcoal and crayon drawings are lovely.

CAROL ZALL: Overall it’s just a really nice book.

MARCO WERMAN: Speaking of illustrations, here is a new edition of Alice in Wonderland. I don’t know how the original illustrations from way back then could be topped but somehow this manages to work really well.

CAROL ZALL: Yes, this is a new edition of Alice in Wonderland. The illustrations are done by Rodney Matthews. He is a British fantasy illustrator. All of the images in this book are really colorful, fantastic and kind of drawing from the visual idiom of fantasy.

MARCO WERMAN: The talking cards.

CAROL ZALL: Exactly. We’re looking at this double-paged spread. You have these talking cards.

MARCO WERMAN: Pink sky, purple castle and red roses.

CAROL ZALL: Exactly, and something that kind of looks like outer space behind them and they are painting the roses. There is a lot of just really beautiful illustrations in this. We thought it would be a great gift for someone on your list if you wanted to give them a classic but with a twist.

MARCO WERMAN: It really capitalizes on the trippy side of the story of Alice in Wonderland. Now Thumbelina is a slightly different case.

CAROL ZALL: That’s right. It’s like an updated classic. This is a re-telling of the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale story. In this case, it is retold by Brian Alderson. The illustrations are by Bagram Ibatoulline. This is obviously for little kids. For that reason, we decided to go to an expert. We talked to our technology correspondent Clark Boyd’s daughter, Sophia.

SOPHIA: Thumbelina, Thumbelina, Thumbelina.

MARCO WERMAN: Translation, two enthusiastic thumbs up.

CAROL ZALL: Ha, ha. No pun intended. She also had a little bit more to say. Here is what it was.

MALE: What do you think of this book?

SOPHIA: Good. Ouch.

MALE: Is your thumb caught in the book?

SOPHIA: Yes.

MALE: It’s a very heavy book isn’t it. Let’s get your thumb out of there. Ah, your thumb is stuck. There we go.

MARCO WERMAN: Janet [PH] Maslins thumbs never get stuck in the book I bet. You’ve got one more book for us Carol. What is that? I don’t even know what this is. You said it is a surprise.

CAROL ZALL: That’s right. We have one more book. It is yet another classic that’s been redone with a twist. This is a pop-up edition of The Little Prince. I have saved it Marco. I have forbidden you to see it because I wanted to get your reaction here in the studio. I’m actually going to hand it over to you.

MARCO WERMAN: Any special place I should get it? How about right in the middle?

CAROL ZALL: Okay. I want you to get something that pops up.

MARCO WERMAN: That’s already very impressive. This is a street sweeper on whatever planet that is and it pops right out of the book. Oh my gosh, here is the Little Prince on top of a mountain. This is very impressive. I thought they had kind of worked the Little Prince franchise as much as they could but they actually squeezed one more thing out. Oh, and they turn. This is very cool.

CAROL ZALL: It’s really nice. For people who love the Little Prince, this is just a great gift.

MARCO WERMAN: The World’s Carol Zall. Thank you very much for making this selection of children’s books for us this year.

CAROL ZALL: You are welcome. It was fun reading them.

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