Conversational Reading

The Rachel Shihor Interview

admin — Wed, 22 May 2013 08:04:48 +0000

These are the facts: Rachel Shihor is an Israeli writer. She is a professor of philosophy and an accomplished academic. Two of her novels, The Tel Avivians and Yankinton, have been published in Israel. Days Bygone, a series of excerpts from Yankinton, is her only work to date that has been published in English. (See this profile of her in The Quarterly Conversation.)

Up until April of this year, that was about all I had been able to discover about this remarkable writer. Meanwhile, everybody I talked to about Shihor’s work had confessed to being captivated by her language, and expressed their hope, to a man, that more would be available for them to read soon. The verdict is clear: Shihor’s fiction is one of those rare gifts readers may encounter once every few years: writing to linger over, to discuss, to share.

I contacted Rachel in April and was delighted when she agreed to meet me in Tel Aviv, both to talk about her work and to learn more about her life. This interview is the result of that meeting and an ensuing email correspondence.

It is also my great pleasure to announce that her collection of shorts, Stalin is Dead, will be published by Sylph Editions in November 2013.
— Mona Reiserer

Many of your novels are set in Tel Aviv. Of course, there is The Tel Avivians, and inDays Bygone the narrator remembers her childhood in Tel Aviv. Did you grow up in here too?

Well, I was born in Poland, in 1937, two years before the war. I remember the day the Germans arrived. My family was on vacation at a well-known resort, Zakopane, popular with Jews and non-Jews alike. We were in a dining room, a very large one, when we heard a cry, “The Germans are here!” All around me I heard chairs falling to the ground. Everything was in uproar, and first of all we just wanted to go home, because we were in a strange city and we needed to be at home before we could decide anything. My family and I spent a year under German occupation. I remember my mother knitting the yellow star to my coat. We came to Israel, then Palestine, in 1940: nobody could believe it when we told them that we came in 1940. I was three years old when we arrived, so yes, I did grow up in Tel Aviv. I remember it all in so much detail … many, many details. As a child of two, the sight of Zakopane – the world returned to chaos – influenced my whole life.

Most of my writing is about this connection between being peaceful and being frightened to death at the same time. It is a riddle, an absolute riddle, how the people who survived the Holocaust are still able to live. My writing is about trying to understand this.

When did you begin to write?

I began maybe 15 years ago. I always felt that I wanted to, but I did not start properly until I was near the end of my professional life. At school I was always good at writing compositions, but I was also interested in philosophy, so I made teaching it my profession. But through all that time I always felt the impulse to write fiction.

I know you have written academic papers about religion and the philosophy of religion, and your fiction too is often concerned with questions of God, belief, and the implications of belief. It seems to me that many of your characters are suspicious of belief and tend to see it as a delusion. Am I correct in this assessment?

God fulfills a very important role. And of course this topic always resurfaces in literature. You cannot read Kafka and remain ignorant of religious thought and theological questions. You cannot read The Castle, for example, and escape the idea that the human race is ensnared by hierarchies. Religion depends on these hierarchies. It depends on the fact that there are people who want to reach the castle, and their idea that reaching it will fulfill some deep and persistent need. But actually the castle is not so sacred and important; it is nasty and corrupt and disgusting. It is savagery behind closed doors.

However, the quest for the castle is not unequivocal: not everybody is trying to reach it, not everybody has the same view of it, though they are all riveted by it in some way. And those who represent the castle (the messengers) can be very surprising figures who defy our expectations and hopes. The concept of the castle, so it seems, avoids clarity.

It is the same in “Before the Law”. Year after year, the traveller begs to be admitted to the Law, while the gatekeeper denies him. The gatekeeper appears to have incredible power, but actually the gatekeeper is also just a man. When the traveller is finally at the end, lying on the ground and almost blind, and wants to ask one last question, the gatekeeper leans down to him and explains, “This gate was just for you. Now I am going to close it.” There is no such thing as a law that is only for one man. When we see someone on the street who has his own law, we put him in a madhouse. That is the condition you find yourself in: that you continue always to struggle, to wait, to grieve, all the while knowing that you won’t get there.

I want to ask about the allegorical element in your stories. In Stalin is Dead,

the stories often very powerfully illustrate a concept: for instance, you sometimes use animals to illuminate a characteristic of humans. Why are animals so well suited for this?

For a while I wrote many stories about animals. Animals are a parable, a reflection of society. Animals represent the social part of humans – the weakness, the passion, and also the destiny. They represent the things humans are often afraid of in themselves.

One of my pieces, “The Mouse”, is a visual poem in the shape of a mouse’s tail. Or the trail of a mouse scurrying back and forth, restless and unable to find repose. The shape of this story pleased me so much that I went to Steimatzy and bought a book on how to draw animals. When I was young it was my dream to become an artist – a painter – a big dream, that I did not tell to anyone.

Often your characters are outsiders, either because they are refugees, or old, or even dead. Even within families they often position themselves as observers rather than participants. The narrator in Days Bygone/Yankinton is like that.

Yes, but you must also remember that the young girl in Yankinton is perhaps an old woman, too.

She is looking back on her childhood. Who knows how she saw herself when she was a child? All she has now is what she can remember. The part where she visits her grandmother in the hospital is an example. The nurse shows the young girl her grandmother’s flesh by opening her upper coat, saying, “Oh, her skin is so nice. I hope that when I’m your grandmother’s age, my skin will be like that.” It is the nurse’s job to be cheerful and positive, but it is not a good compliment. For the grandmother, it is a terribly painful thing to hear, even more so because the nurse does not address herself to her. You cannot fully understand this pain when you are young, but you can feel that something is wrong. Only later can she understand why.

The people I write about are refugees in one way or another. People who came here after the Holocaust may seem to be free now, to live their lives, but they are still refugees. Often my characters are also introspective and ambivalent. They don’t always know the answer. But at the moment I am writing a novel about a different sort of character. It is about a woman who is very emotional, passionate, not an intellectual. She is very young and full of contradictions. A simple heart, like Felicité in Flaubert. She is living in Poland at the beginning of the war, but she does not leave in time. She has just married, but her husband is killed soon after.

Is it very different writing about such a character—a simple heart, as you say?

There are characters like that throughout my fiction, but usually they are not the main protagonists. In a way they are funny, these characters who always know what is right. In Yankinton, the mother always stands next to the radio when they play the Hatikva, at rigid attention like a soldier. They used to play the hymn every evening at the end of the radio program. And the whole time she is standing there, the mother is filled with the conviction of being right, thinking how wrong her family is not to join her in this patriotic act.

These characters are so comical because, of course, we seldom know what is right. Often we know a lot about what not to do: we must not kill, we must not wound, we must not steal. But what to do is a more ambivalent question. At first, the woman in my novel – her name is Eva – does not have this ambivalence either, but as the story goes on she becomes more skeptical, she looks inwards more.

Will this novel be published?

Ornan [Rotem, who translated Days Bygone and Stalin is Dead into English] said he thinks he knows why publishers are often not interested in my work: people expect a story to have a plot: a beginning, a middle, an end, with some kind of moment of revelation: they expect that something changes. My stories are not like that. In life there is rarely that kind of moment, that is so common in fiction: insights seep into you slowly, over time.

I don’t know if this novel will be published, but that is not my concern at the moment. The important thing is to write. I write every book as though it is my last.

The Novels of Kim Young-ha

admin — Tue, 21 May 2013 07:53:42 +0000

Colin Marshall in the LARB:

Within 50 pages, Kim name-checks The Death of Marat, Henry Miller, Oscar Wilde, William Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath, Gustav Klimt, B.B. King, Animal Kingdom, Chupa Chups lollipops, Chet Baker, Antonio Banderas, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Stranger Than Paradise, at which point the book only has 69 pages left. Comparisons to Murakami come easily, and those looking for his South Korean equivalent will, at least in this particular novel, find pieces of what they seek: modern topics, pop references, narration that refuses to strain for belletristic heights. But Kim writes with a harder edge, under a darker cloud; these fragments of Western culture signal less international engagement than personal isolation, and if some of Murakami’s characters handle their aloneness happily, you can’t necessarily say the same for anyone in Kim’s first novel. Its nameless narrator, while not exactly unhappy, persists in a closed state of perfectionist drive: a drive, in this case, to scout out the potentially suicidal, stoke within them the conviction to actively take leave of the world, and finally position them to perform the act itself. His clients, who must pay in advance, clearly also pay handsomely: after each successful job, this narrator takes a long trip abroad — Prague, Vienna, Paris — and integrates the latest suicide’s story into a novel of his own, to be published anonymously.

The Uncollected Fiction of DFW

admin — Tue, 21 May 2013 06:32:47 +0000

It’s coming, Dec 1.

Marketing the Bolano

admin — Sat, 18 May 2013 12:01:05 +0000

This caught my eye, mostly since I just got through delivering a paper on precisely this topic.

Javier Calvo: The other day I saw a book by Alejandro Zambra on a list of the most anticipated books of 2013 in the United States, and I wanted to ask you this: what do you think of this phenomenon, which to me is one of the most important things that have happened in American publishing in a long time? I’m talking about the attention Spanish-language fiction has been getting since Bolaño. How have you experienced this change as a translator, reader, scout, etc?

Mara Faye Lethem: Do you see it as so distinct from the Boom? Because I don’t.

Javier Calvo: I do see significant differences from the Boom. To begin with, I think the boom was much more a strategy, and as such it had a center. And when I say strategy, I say it almost in the sense of the British Invasion: we’re going to take over North America. Here, I don’t see too much strategy, and as a matter of fact I don’t see how an editor could hope to get rich on the books of Aira or Zambra. Secondly, the Boom in America was a much more asymmetrical phenomenon, the rich neighbor’s consumption of a series of consumer elements related to exoticism and magic.

Look, for example, at the resounding failure as strategies of all the “commercial brands” of exportation of Latin American literature: McOndo, the Crack Movement…

In the current case it’s true that Bolaño has been sanctioned by the American world of culture as the “Chosen One” to replace GGM [Gabriel García Márquez] as the Great Novelist in Spanish, but I also see differences: it seems to me that the acceptance of the new literature in Spanish already lacks that aspect of consumption of the poor, the exotic, and the distinct. I believe that now, strangely, it already has a certain aspect of normalcy, acceptance of the two-directional cultural tides that exist between Spanish and English. Although this may perhaps be overly optimistic.

Mara Faye Lethem: Well, when they talk about Aira as the new Bolaño, yes, that implies a certain strategy of marketing. I think that the case of Bolaño has been an astounding example of the unpredictability of the editorial world, and the strategy of buying books in other people’s styles is ridiculous, but shows no signs of waning. I suppose people’s lack of vision, as well as their fear, just get bigger and bigger than their risk-taking….

I suppose I see the Boom in another way, as the time when people that thought of themselves as educated had to have read certain authors in translation. Maybe I’m naïve, but I didn’t see it as cultural colonialism, just as an opportunity to open up the conversation.

In the United States, there has always been a very limited interest for literature in translation, but it has existed: Smilla’s Sense of Snow, Banana Yoshimoto, etc. And I think that Latin American literature, based on proximity and on actual interest, has always occupied an important place. Always taking into account that it is translated very, very little. I see that editors are still relying a lot on things like the Granta list to make their selections. But yes, I perceive a major recognition of the poverty of a reading culture that places more weight on exportation than importation—yes. Also, I’m seeing more literary agents from the Anglo-Saxon world represent foreign authors.

A couple comments:

Someone during the presentation raised the point about McOndo and Crack. I don’t really know enough about those movements to say why they never caught on in the U.S., other than to say that they never really made sense to the American marketplace like Boom authors and Bolano have. As far as I know them, they defy a lot of U.S. stereotypes about what Latin American fiction is, which obviously makes them hard to commercialize in the U.S. as Latin American fiction.

I’m also curious about this point of Aira being promoted as the new Bolano. While that’s not inconceivable (people grafted Bolano to Garcia Marquez despite their writing having almost no significant similarities), I’m not seeing Aira being discussed in that way. Perhaps that has something to do with New Directions having more integrity than your average publisher, and perhaps it has to do with Aira forming his own category in such an obvious way that even hack reviewers find it hard to make the connection.

Or perhaps it has to do with the fact that post-Bolano we’re seeing authors (like, for instance, Alejandro Zambra) who make a lot more sense as successors than Aira.

Gaddis in the NYT

admin — Fri, 17 May 2013 17:53:38 +0000

It’s nice to see Gaddis’s letters reviewed in the Times, even if this review is symptomatic of that paper’s decline.

Kinda ballsy to make the lede how the critics completely messed up on The Recognitions and J R and then not quote from the Times’ participation in said fiasco . . .

Technology!

admin — Thu, 16 May 2013 14:30:20 +0000

It’s almost as though they learned nothing from the past decade.

For the moment, data about how well MOOCs work are diffuse and scant. A cornerstone of the case for them is a randomized study that Bowen helped plan, through the Ithaka organization, a Mellon Foundation spinoff. It showed no significant difference in educational outcomes between online learning and traditional classroom learning. The MOOC in question was a statistics course, however, and a “hybrid” one: its students had a weekly in-classroom Q. & A. session. When MOOCs are a purely online experience, dropout rates are typically more than ninety per cent.

“I feel as if we’re very much in the experimental stage,” Kathleen McCartney, a developmental psychologist and the dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, told me one afternoon in her offices on the edge of the old Radcliffe Yard. This summer, she’ll leave Harvard to become the president of Smith. In May, 2012, when edX was announced, Alan Garber, the provost, asked her to serve on its board. “It really is a value-added question,” she said. “What is the value added that a college or a university, and professional schools within the university, can offer?” Later, she got up to look for a paper that had impressed her. “This guy is a really good thinker,” she said, handing me a printout of a report by Michael Barber, an adviser to the publishing and education conglomerate Pearson, with two co-authors. The paper, titled “An Avalanche Is Coming,” was released this past March by the Institute for Public Policy Research, a British think tank. The avalanche in question, according to the report, is the upheaval that digital culture will bring to universities. Its authors write, “The one certainty for anyone in the path of an avalanche is that standing still is not an option.” For instance, it says, Brezhnev’s Soviet Union was in the path of an avalanche and didn’t prepare—look what happened. Also, Lehman Brothers. The foreword was by the economist and former Harvard president Larry Summers.

Interesting article. It shows how much humanities higher education is under assault now from technology.

On the Road

admin — Tue, 14 May 2013 15:40:42 +0000

Traveling this week. Blogging might be a little light.

Gombrowicz’s Kronos

admin — Mon, 13 May 2013 13:24:58 +0000

Witold Gombrowicz was a strange guy. Kronos, apparently his last unpublished text, sounds like an especially strange book.

The new book lays out Gombrowicz’s meticulous monthly tabulation of concerns – his erotic ventures as lists of partners’ first names and his health and lack thereof are the carnal, corporeal priorities. Then travel, meetings, invitations, exchanges of gifts and letters. In finding a form for his unrelenting self analysis, the new book gives the writer something of a last word on his life.

A key work that was conspicuously absent for decades – as a full biography of Gombrowicz remains conspicuously absent – publication of Kronos is a fixating coup de theatre. The book opens with a facsimile of the page for his first fifteen years, the lines largely blank, a warning that anyone can envision such a memory project, but few dare undertake it. On those original sheets, his note taking shape-shifts over the decades, from graphic notation to synopses in his concise scrawl, evolving in their appearance along with his efforts to organize material. One concession in WL’s edition is the need to adapt and transcribe the hundred handwritten sheets to conventional paragraphs. The absence of the writer’s distinctive, infectious tone is another.

Running commentary adorns the bottom of pages, as a system to let the array of facts he compiled breathe and fill, rather than as an academic apparatus. . .

No word on a translation yet, though one imagines there will be one soon. For now, the diary.

Not a Concern That I Have

admin — Mon, 13 May 2013 11:01:44 +0000

We seem to be in a weird place right now vis a vis books. For the most part, Jaron Lanier comes across as non-alarmist non-techno-utopian in this interview (e.g., “My cyber-friends think if you can just come up with a perfect scheme, that some perfect digital scheme will solve all the problems.”) but then we get on to the book business and it’s “oh my god!!!!”

To me a book is not just a particular file. It’s connected with personhood. Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say. And what I’m concerned with is when Silicon Valley looks at books, they often think of them as really differently as just data points that you can mush together. They’re divorcing books from their role in personhood.

I’m quite concerned that in the future someone might not know what author they’re reading. You see that with music. You would think in the information age it would be the easiest thing to know what you’re listening to. That you could look up instantly the music upon hearing it so you know what you’re listening to, but in truth it’s hard to get to those services.

I was in a cafe this morning where I heard some stuff I was interested in, and nobody could figure out. It was Spotify or one of these … so they knew what stream they were getting, but they didn’t know what music it was. Then it changed to other music, and they didn’t know what that was. And I tried to use one of the services that determines what music you’re listening to, but it was a noisy place and that didn’t work. So what’s supposed to be an open information system serves to obscure the source of the musician. It serves as a closed information system. It actually loses the information.

Granted, some people see books as data points. Like Franco Moretti, for instance. I don’t worry about people like Franco Moretti ever not knowing the name of the author of the book he’s reading. I think most reasonable people can agree that a world in which people use books as raw data can co-exist with a world in which people see the value of reading a whole book and knowing who the author was.

The Spotify example is a little strange (and to be honest, typical of the of the other illogical comparisons Lanier makes in the interview). Spotify makes a lot of sense for music in a world where where songs tend to be 3 – 4 minutes long and people are very used to having ambient music that they don’t have to pay very much attention to everywhere. I can’t imagine something like Spotify for books ever having any sort of appeal. If you want to look at the “Spotify for books” that currently exists right now, it’s Goodreads. People on Goodreads know who the authors of the books are. People on Goodreads are very invested in reading the whole book and reading it deeply.

I see the argument a lot that “the Internet did X to the music business, therefore it’s going to do X + 1 tot he book biz.” No. Books and songs are very different things. Different packages, different media, different convertibility to digital, different uses, different audiences.

Graphs, Maps, Trees

admin — Fri, 10 May 2013 11:19:49 +0000

Somewhere at the intersection between the social sciences and literary criticism we find Franco Moretti’s writing on literature.

“The form of any portion of matter, whether it be living or dead,” writes D’Arcy Thompson in his strange wonderful book On Growth and Form, “may in all cases alike be described as dur to the action of force. In short, the form of an object is a ‘diagram of forces’ . . .” Diagram: Cartesian space. But diagram of forces. The distribution of events between the Black Forest villages and the administrative towns is the diagram of a conflict between local forces and national ones; Mitford’s rings, the result of the village’s gravitational pull over her perambulating narrator; Balzac’s divided Paris, the battlefield between old wealth and ambitious petty bourgeois youth. Each pattern is a clue—a fingerprint of history, almost. “The form of an object is a ‘diagram of forces,’ in this sense, at least, that from it we can . . . deduce the forces that . . . have acted upon it.” Deducing from the form of an object the forces that have been at work: this is the most elegant definition ever of what literary sociology should be.

“Theories are nets,” wrote Novalis, “and only he who casts will catch.” Yes, theories are nets, and we should evaluate them, not as ends in themselves, but for how they concretely change the way we work: for how they allow us to enlarge the literary field, and re-design it in a better way, replacing the old, useless distinctions (high and low; canon and archive; this or that national literature . . .) with new temporal, spatial, and morphological distinctions.

Quotes and images from Graphs, Maps, Trees by Franco Moretti.