Lisa's Other Bookshelf

Fear and Loathing in Mongolia: Tea of Ulaanbaatar

2013-05-12T18:36:00.001-04:00

Christopher R. Howard’s Tea of Ulaanbaatar is, hmm, a gritty account of a Peace Corps volunteer’s life in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Writing “life and work” just doesn’t seem to fit here because Warren, our anti-hero, doesn’t appear to spend much time at his job teaching English: he’s too busy going to bars, spending time with his Mongolian girlfriend, and (ab)using tsus, a red tea rumored to inspire all sorts of madness.

Though Tea of Ulaanbaatar doesn’t quite feel fully realized, it does some things very well. Howard succeeds nicely at showing the disaffection of Warren and his fellow Peace Corps volunteers, most of whom seem to be engaged in ongoing attempts to escape something or somebody, whether through travel or tea. They are a grotesque lot, led by Samantha, the over-mascaraed and overwrought medical officer for the Peace Corps who oversees the volunteers. And then there’s the atmosphere: urban decay, moral decay, discos, desperation (public and private), and, of course, crime. Oh, and Warren is phobic about germs. Very phobic. He scrubs and he’s a little obsessed with the bubonic plague.

It’s more difficult to explain what didn’t quite come together in Tea of Ulaanbaatar. The nihilism and nastiness seemed real enough but the appearance of the criminal aspect of the book—which begins with the idea of exporting lots of tsus to the United States—felt a bit too much like an attempt to amp up the book with action. Some elements, particularly the grotesqueness, the hallucinations (or realities?), and Warren’s memories of a girlfriend, felt a little too easy. Still, I have to give Howard credit for writing such a vivid book. Tea of Ulaanbaatar is apparently based, to some degree, on Howard’s own experiences: according to the bio on the book, Howard “spent a few months of an aborted Peace Corps sojourn in Mongolia in the late 1990s.”

Up Next: Mihail Sebastian’s The Accident then Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home and Jerzy Pilch’s The Mighty Angel. I have quite a few books piled up, particularly after skipping last week because I grated off the tip of my finger and couldn’t type!

Steen’s Spare, Brave Lionheart

2013-04-21T19:52:00.000-04:00

Thorvald Steen’s Lionheart, a historical novel I read in James Anderson’s translation from the original Norwegian, is that odd book that walks—very successfully—a fine line between mundane and (to borrow blurb verbiage) riveting.

Lionheart tells a stark life story of England’s Kind Richard I, from a tender young age—when his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, begins preparing him for life as a Crusader—and ends with his death from gangrene caused by a kitchen knife that lands in his shoulder because he is too slow to duck. Though the Richard the Lionheart I found on the Internet died from an arrow, I rather like Steen’s version, particularly since Richard is wearing no chain mail and has just eaten two chicken legs before the fatal knife throw.

Steen’s cause of death for Richard fits an almost surgical-feeling sense of the absurd in Lionheart. Steen focuses largely on Richard’s relationships, showing Eleanor’s meddling control (I think I wrote “Freud” somewhere in the margins), the sense Richard might have liked to be a poet, and a bit of an obsession with his enemy, Saladin. And King Philip II of France. And a beautiful nun. There’s action, too, with battles and an imprisonment, but Richard comes across most of all as a conflicted man who thinks maybe he’s destined to fight the good fight, for God.

I realize it’s dangerous to get too many of my history lessons from fiction—and movies like The Lion inWinter, where I first met both Eleanor, reincarnated in the form of Katharine Hepburn, and Richard, as presented by Anthony Hopkins—but books like Lionheart make the fictional versions so much fun I can’t help myself. Steen’s spare mixture of history, court and familial conflicts, novelisticness, and dry humor might not work for you, but it worked mysteriously well for me, and Anderson’s translation read well, too, creating a nice example of a translated text about the distant past that’s written in modern language.

Up Next: Christopher R. Howard’s Tea of Ulaanbaatar and Charles Elton’s Mr. Toppit…

Disclaimer: I received a copy of Lionheart from University of Chicago Press, which distributes books for Seagull Books in the United States. Thank you very much!

Image credit: Portrait of Richard I, from 1620, from BritRoyals.com, via Wikipedia Commons.

Arnon Grunberg’s Relentless Tirza

2013-03-31T16:43:00.000-04:00

Arnon Grunberg’s Tirza, which I read in Sam Garrett’s translation from the original Dutch, is a spectacularly compelling portrayal of a spectacularly awful personal breakdown. What makes Tirza work so well is that Grunberg doesn’t just offer a detailed psychological portrait of his main character—the hapless Jörgen Hofmeester—he also writes about societal and financial breakdowns that go far beyond just Hofmeester. At its core, Tirza is about fears. All sorts of fears.

Tirza takes it name from Hofmeester’s youngest daughter: Hofmeester is preparing food for Tirza’s high school graduation party when the book opens. There will be lots of homemade sushi. And there will be fried sardines, a Hofmeester specialty. The party turns into quite an event, partly thanks to the recent return of Hofmeester’s wife—who dresses tartily in her older daughter’s clothes—and partly because Tirza brings home her new boyfriend, with whom she’s about to fly to Africa. The boyfriend reminds Hofmeester of Mohammed Atta, a circumstance that will contribute to some very unfortunate consequences.

Grunberg’s intimately close third-person narrative gets inside Hofmeester’s sad head, describing his present woes and delving into his past problems, too, circling back and forth from past to present. It feels as if we learn everything about him, like how his wife left him (and their role plays, yow!), his mistake in collecting the rent from his upstairs tenant, and, especially, Hofmeester’s ideas of what is right. Living in the right place, portraying the right image, and all that. And then there’s Hofmeester’s obsession with Tirza, whom he calls his Sun Queen, repeating frequently that Tirza is gifted. Hofmeester has also been fired (sort of) from his job as an editor of translated fiction (hmm…), leaving him with nothing to do but spend his time at Schiphol, waving to passengers he doesn’t know and carrying around pencils to edit a manuscript from an Azeri author.

What a place to spend your days.

For those of us who read a lot of Russian literature, one of the funniest-saddest pieces of Hofmeester’s problems may be his interest in nihilism. Hofmeester’s the dad who reads Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to his daughter every night. Reviews from Tirza aren’t so positive:

“Go away,” she would shriek when he came into her room. “I don’t want any notes from under the ground, I don’t want to hear them. Go away, Daddy. Go away, just go away.” She fretted and fumed, but he would sit down on the foot end of her bed and read to her for fifteen minutes from Notes from Underground. You can’t start too early with an introduction to the great Russians. Catch onto nihilism as an adolescent and you won’t have to go through it yourself later on.

Hofmeester isn’t quite Dostoevsky’s underground man but he certainly is sick and spiteful and he certainly may have some liver problems, too, after all that wine he’s been drinking. Hofmeester worries that he’s superfluous, something that’s not much of a stretch after losing his job to his own lack of success, his wife to other men, and his children to adulthood. Worst of all, Hofmeester’s biggest problem is Hofmeester himself, “Hell was not other people. It was him. Hell was deep inside him. Tethered, hidden and invisible, but still alive, still warm. Glowing hot.”

I wrote “ouch” next to that passage and realized, as I paged through Tirza, that I’d scribbled “ouch” and “ha ha” in the margins far more than I usually do… Grunberg’s details about Hofmeester and his life combine beautifully, creating an unappealing character who becomes, like Dostoevsky’s underground man, predictably unpredictable, and Garrett’s translation reads very fluidly, creating a voice that compelled me to write all those ouches and ha has.

Up Next: Thorvald Steen’s Lionheart, a return to the Crusades.

Disclaimers: I received a copy of Tirza from Open Letter Books, a publisher with which I always enjoy discussing literature in translation, including a specific piece I’m translating.

Photo credit: Cjh1452000, via Wikipedia/Creative Commons.

Detectives Times Two: Ishiguro’s Orphans and Mishani’s File

2013-03-26T10:54:00.000-04:00

Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, the third Ishiguro novel I’ve read, has led me to start thinking of Ishiguro as the Meryl Streep of novelists: Ishiguro and Streep both seem capable of taking on any voice from any era. When We Were Orphans is, like Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day, a first-person narrative: private detective Christopher Banks tells the story of how his parents went missing when he was an expat child living in Shanghai in the 1910s, leaving him an orphan. He returns to find his parents in 1937, during the Battle of Shanghai.

What intrigued me most about When We Were Orphans was a fuzziness that begins with language: Christopher’s voice feels a bit formal, wordy, and distant, even in suspenseful allegorical action scenes during the Battle of Shanghai, when he’s trying to reach a house where he believes his mother is being held. He’s already missed his chance to leave the country with a woman who’s invited him to run away with her… she’s an orphan, too, and their attraction is a strange one that seems more predicated on aloneness than anything else. As Christopher sums up in the book’s last paragraphs:

But for those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm.

Most of the book describes Christopher’s chases after various shadows: from playing games in Shanghai with his neighbor Akira, a boy from Japan, to research in London about the Shanghai from which his parents disappeared, to the on-the-ground search for his mother when he’s an adult. With those chases comes the creation of personal myths. Those begin in childhood, too, with Akira touchingly reinventing the kidnappers as people who “took great care to ensure my father’s comfort and dignity in all our dramas” during the boys’ role play rescues of Christopher’s father. Christopher describes many aspects of his friendship with Akira in tremendous detail, including an episode where they take something from a servant’s room and dialogues in which Akira calls Christopher “old chap.”

Of course it turns out that not all Christopher’s memories are quite right—though some are surprisingly helpful—and being sentimental gets a bad rap toward the end of the book. But memories are transformative for Christopher, who took on his profession because he felt he had a responsibility to find justice: he sometimes sounds a little like he thinks of himself as a loner superhero. He even carries a magnifying glass. And he says detectives have “little inclination to mingle with one another, let alone with ‘society’ at large.”

Though I enjoyed When We Were Orphans for the almost ridiculously consistent voice Ishiguro creates for Christopher, insights into memory (fuzzy or otherwise), and Christopher’s lifelong existential wanderings, those good technical qualities occasionally made the book feel a little too surgically correct, too hermetically sealed within Christopher’s mind to be as interesting as it might have been.

If you’re looking for a straight-ahead international detective novel, you might want to try D.A. Mishani’s The Missing File, translated from the original Hebrew by Steven Cohen. Mishani’s police procedural novel tracks Avraham Avraham’s work on the case of a missing teenage boy: Avraham is (yet another) heavy-smoking bachelor detective with a territorial streak, and Mishani also gives him a penchant for watching Law and Order and a passion for analyzing detective novels. The Missing File moves along at a decent pace though a detour to Belgium feels a little like it was pasted in for a very specific reason and I thought a strange schoolteacher, one of the most developed characters in the book, caught a bit too much of Mishani’s attention. The novel is absorbing enough though, with some surprises at the end, and the narrative voice is spare in Cohen’s translation, which generally reads smoothly. The back cover of my book, by the way, calls Mishani “a literary scholar specializing in the history of detective literature,” which probably helps explain some of Avraham’s ideas on solving real-life and fictional crimes.

Up Next: Arnon Grunberg’s Tirza, a book I think I’d describe as a combination of “stupendous” and “stupefying.” In a good way. Then Thorvald Steen’s Lionheart.

Disclaimers: I received a copy of The Missing File from publisher HarperCollins, thank you!

Esmahan Aykol’s Baksheesh

2013-03-03T16:47:00.000-05:00

Esmahan Aykol’s Baksheesh, which I read in Ruth Whitehouse’s translation of the Turkish novel known as Kelepir Ev (“bargain home” according to Google Translate), is the second in Aykol’s Kati Hirschel “Istanbul mystery” series; it follows Hotel Bosphorus, which Whitehouse also translated. I guess I’d call Baksheesh a moderately cozy detective novel that draws on multiple genres: Kati Hirschel, a German woman who speaks Turkish almost like a native, owns a mystery book store and, you guessed it, solves a murder herself.

It’s Kati’s search for what I think is the bargain home in the original Turkish title that leads her to pay the baksheesh in the English title… and to find her way to trouble. Kati meets the dead man when he is still very much alive, and she’s even considered a suspect in his death because she threw a ceramic ashtray (apparently a supremely heavy ceramic ashtray) at him, making his head bleed. The other Big Problem in Kati’s life at the time of Baksheesh is that she and her lawyer boyfriend aren’t getting along.

Alas, my biggest impression of Baksheesh is that Aykol wrote it for a very specific target audience: cosmopolitan woman (or perhaps aging Cosmo girls?) experiencing midlife angst due to relationship “issues,” the onset of wrinkles, and, yes, even impending menopause. Though Kati certainly needs to take herself out of contention for a murder charge, it felt that her conversations with a police investigator were as important for her to win compliments and propositions as for her to pump him for information about the case.

Aykol also includes, often rather awkwardly, a fair bit of cultural information in Baksheesh. Her details on how people dress, though, feel more like magazine writing than fiction: “Nowadays, all middle-class Turkish women wear shorts, miniskirts and tops with cleavage bursting out, even from high necklines.” There’s also a mention of the male habit of kissing female hands, plus details on clothes for mourning. The cultural background that comes through characters’ life situations—a family business that includes parking facilities or a pop singer’s quick career—tends to feel far more organic to the story than Kati’s commentaries.

Though I’m sure Baksheesh will find readers content with a light book about a plucky German woman living in Turkey, I wish Aykol had dug deeper when she created Kati’s character. I would have been more interested if she’d found something darker and more intriguing than superficial treatment of topics like aging, smoking, or a petty-sounding tiff with the boyfriend. Or, alas again, even the mechanical-feeling sleuthing.

Disclaimer: I received a review copy of Baksheesh from Meryl Zegarek PR; the book was published by Bitter Lemon Press. Thank you to both!

Up Next: Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, then Arnon Grunberg’s Tirza.

Better Late Than Never! Favorite Books from 2012

2013-02-24T17:36:00.000-05:00

One of you left a comment last week asking if I’d posted about favorite books from 2012… No, at least not until today: I came home from an early winter trip to Moscow with a cold that left me zombified through the holidays and then, I admit, I forgot. Looking back on my posts from last year, I see several titles that I enjoyed very much. I’ve linked previous posts to book titles.

Patrick Ouředník’s Case Closed (translated by Alex Zucker from the Czech original Ad Acta) is probably my favorite among all last year’s posted books, thanks to absurdity and Alex Zucker’s wonderful translation.

Joseph Roth’s Job (translated by Ross Benjamin from the German original Hiob, Roman eines einfachen Mannes) makes the list because of Roth’s storytelling, Benjamin’s translation, and a setting in the waning Russian Empire.

Herta Müller’s The Hunger Angel (translated by Philip Boehm from the original German Atemschaukel) is another book with a largely Russian setting. I also appreciated word play that must have been difficult to translate.

Ben H. Winters’s The Last Policeman, a detective novel set in pre-apocalyptic New Hampshire, might be my favorite English original book from 2012: Winters’s combination of humor and sadness works well.

Here's hoping you're enjoying the new year!

Disclosures: Included in previous posts.

Up Next: Back to regular scheduled programming with Esmahan Aykol’s Baksheesh, then Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans.

Existential Bathroom Visits?: Karabashliev’s 18% Gray

2013-02-18T16:46:00.000-05:00

Zachary Karabashliev’s 18% Gray, which I read in Angela Rodel’s translation from the original Bulgarian, is a lively and lovely blend of love story, road novel, and self-discovery, all told by a first-person narrator named Zack. Zack begins his story with “She’s been gone nine mornings.” “She” refers to his wife, Stella, who left him. Stella is an ever-more-successful artist, Zack works in clinical trials under, well, false pretenses, and they emigrated to the U.S. from Bulgaria. Zack doesn’t take Stella’s departure well. He goes to Tijuana, where he ends up in possession of a big bag of pot, then decides to drive to New York City to sell it.

What makes 18% Gray work so well is that Karabashliev asks Zack to alternate stories about his present and his past: in italicized passages, Zack describes how he met Stella, their life in Bulgaria, and the disintegration of their relationship. The two timelines converge at the end of the book. The novel also includes brief dialogues from the past that beautifully combine the mundane and the intimate—many are about Zack’s photography and/or Stella’s painting. These various types of text might sound as if they’d result in a choppy novel, but they have the opposite effect because they integrate memories of Stella into Zack’s present life despite her physical absence on his road trip.

Another reason for18% Gray’s success is that Karabashliev isn’t afraid of any kind of material. Pretty much everything seems to work for him: there’s that rather unlikely bag of pot, there’s a chase scene, there’s the eternal search for espresso on the road (something I relate to all too well), there’s a failed suicide that Zack happens upon on the side of the road, and there are trips into men’s rooms, complete with olfactory and audio effects I hope never to witness in real life. There’s even one scene at a truck stop, where Zack eavesdrops—whilst standing on a toilet seat, for sanitary purposes—on a conversation about relationships. Though I’m not quite sure I’d agree with Zack that that particular conversation is especially “existential,” one of the best aspects of 18% Gray is Karabashliev’s ability to combine, with tremendous sincerity and grace, elements like bathroom humor, an extended parallel of painting and photography, difficulties for immigrants, and lost love. Plus the meaning of it all.

Finally, I should mention how much I enjoyed reading Angela Rodel’s translation: her version of 18% Gray reads smoothly and Rodel has a great sense of humor, something I noticed in her translation of Thrown into Nature, too (previous post). Early in 18% Gray there are two medium-length paragraphs where Zack mentally promises all sorts of things to Stella if she shows up “at the door right now.” Here’s the second paragraph, which I think nicely sums up 18% Gray, Karabashliev’s writing in Rodel’s translation, and Zack’s character. I’m sure you’ll recognize something in here:

I will not correct you when you’re telling jokes, I will not interrupt you when you’re excited about something, I will not sing over your favorite songs, I will not be a smartass when we watch sentimental movies, I will not share my opinion about every single thing, we will not have Josh and Katya over for dinner ever again, we will never ever go to Vegas again, ever, I will not rent Hitchcock films, I will not order Chinese, I will not leave the room when we fight (what am I saying? we won’t ever fight!), you will never see me picking my nose, I will not burp loudly (or strain to fart on purpose), I will never be silent with you for so long, never, I will never watch CNN, I will never promise you the moon—you are a star, Stella.

Disclaimers: I received a review copy of 18% Gray from Open Letter, a publisher with which I always enjoy discussing literature in translation, including a specific piece I’m translating.

Up Next: Esmahan Aykol’s Baksheesh. Then Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans.

Therese Bohman’s Drowned

2013-02-10T17:44:00.000-05:00

Therese Bohman’s Drowned, which I read in Marlaine Delargy’s translation of the Swedish original Den drunknade, is a neatly constructed, smoothly translated psychological thriller with lots of twos: two sisters, two visits, and two sides of one man. Drowned is suspenseful, in a matter-of-fact way, so I took some leisurely walks on the treadmill because I didn’t want to stop reading. I’ll go light on details to avoid spoilers.

The main story is this: Marina, an art history student who lives in Stockholm, goes to Skåne to visit her sister Stella, a plant specialist who plans city gardens and lives with a writer, an older man named Gabriel. They live in an old house that Gabriel inherited from his grandmother, along with a cat named Nils. The weather is hot:

It is different now, sultry and oppressive, as if a thunderstorm is coming… My head feels fragile, as if a headache is just coming to life deep inside and will soon make its presence felt, sending out crackling impulses of pain that will thud against my forehead and my temples, as if I were inside a thunder ball.

Oppressive heat rarely improves moods and Bohman offers up some tense situations that generate suspicions. She also gives Stella lots of plants to care for, at home and at work, and uses them symbolically, even creating a romantic sense of danger when Marina discovers aphids on Stella’s nasturtiums. The sap-sucking aphids appear on the page after the horrible headache:

When I look closer I can see that the undersides of the leaves are covered in aphids, great black clumps of them, they are on the stems bearing the flower heads too, covering them completely so that the stems look thick and black, uneven. The more I look, the more aphids I see.

Marina’s second trip comes in the fall: it’s now cold in Skåne but lots more than the weather has changed. My memorable plant in the cold part of the book was an orchid, perhaps because of the orchid’s sensitivity to temperatures. Or perhaps because I’ve found something vaguely menacing about orchids since I met Harold in Twin Peaks.

Nothing in Drowned appears to be particularly complex and most of its plot turns are predictable in a “Don’t open that door!” kind of way. But it’s a smart book and Bohman uses her oppositions—Stella/Marina as star/water, hot/cold, winter/summer, and so on—in ways that help keep the story taut. Limited house space and characters enable Bohman to develop characters, along with their relationships, weaknesses, and fears, with tremendous efficiency. Delargy’s translation flows nicely and creates an appropriate voice for Marina’s age and moods. Everything works here. As for the title, let’s just say everybody’s drowning in some problem or other… and that John Everett Millais’s lushly creepy painting Ophelia is a subtext in the novel.

Disclosures: Other Press gave me a copy of Drowned at BookExpo America; I enjoyed speaking with Other about translated fiction.

Up Next: Zachary Karabashliev’s 18% Gray, which I also enjoyed very much.

Image Credit: John Everett Millais’s Ophelia, via Wikipedia.

A Possible Novel? Faulks’s A Possible Life

2013-02-03T17:19:00.001-05:00

I’ll start by saying I find it impossible to refer to Sebastian Faulks’s latest book by its official full name, so I’m shortening it: A Possible Life~~: A Novel in Five Parts~~. Call me whatever you like—primitive, reactionary, and/or uncreative—but without common characters or settings, either geographical or temporal, A Possible Life is, for me, a book of five stories of varying length.

The stories in A Possible Life are of varying quality and interest, too, and I’ve noticed that favorites among professional and citizen reviewers vary a lot as well. Each story is named for a character. They are:

“Geoffrey,” about a boarding school teacher, cricketer, and World War 2 prisoner of war. I thought this story, which tells of camp atrocities, the boredom of undercover work with the French Resistance, and the depth of emotional aftereffects, was by far the best in the book. It felt the most elemental and the best constructed.
“Billy,” the first-person story of a boy in Victorian England whose poor family gives him to a workhouse, where he meets his future wife.
“Elena,” which tells of an alienated scientist in a not-too-distant future that feels vaguely dystopian or post-apocalyptic. Or something. This story felt especially contrived to me.
“Jeanne,” the tale of a woman who cares for children and a household in rural nineteenth-century France.
“Anya,” the interminable first-person reminiscences of a British musician’s affair with an American folk singer. This story is dated 1971 and contains a gratuitous reference to Anna Karenina.

Faulks’s stories were almost fascinatingly vivid: they kept me just interested enough to read the whole book searching for common threads. The book’s back cover suggests that risk and searches for “the manna of human connection” link the pieces. I certainly can’t argue with that: each story includes a relationship or encounter that’s somehow risky, even taboo. There’s also often a feeling that chance—or fate, or the random factor, or whatever else you’d like to call it—affects characters’ lives.

What felt strongest to me was the force of characters’ memories. Memory is a particularly strong element in “Geoffrey,” where the title character remembers cricket matches to help stay sane in a concentration camp. Geoffrey returns to teaching after the war but memories eventually send him to a psychiatric hospital. There are some nice touches in “Geoffrey,” particularly the contrast of communal sleeping arrangements at the school, the camp, and the hospital. Mentions of Geoffrey’s linguistic abilities were interesting, too, including this, “‘The best way to sound French is to imitate someone,’ said Geoffrey. ‘As though you’re acting.’” Later, when Geoffrey is forced to interpret for new arrivals, he uses courtesy words and improvises when he’s left at a loss for what to say, knowing what awaits the group.

Wall Street Journal reviewer Sam Sacks wonders how readers will react to Faulks’s inclusion of details about the camps, concluding with this, “Some will be glad that Mr. Faulks has shrugged off the taboos that surround fictional portrayals of concentration camps to write them like any other historical experience; others may think it alarming that this singular event in human history is so open to being mined for popular fiction.” After reading Vasilii Grossman’s Life and Fate (post from my other blog), which felt more detailed, personal, and emotional in depicting a camp, I can’t say I found Faulks’s scenes as alarming as Sacks did simply because they were part of the story. I found the scenes memorable and effective. They were, necessarily, disturbing as they conveyed—with, I think, proper levels of respect and balance—a sense of how the extreme horrors of the war push the fictional Geoffrey to various forms of escape.

I think Faulks plays with memory on a deeper level in all his stories, too, presenting characters and situations that are so familiar I could see the plot twists coming. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: I love Vladimir Propp’s analysis of the basic plot elements of fairy tales. Unfortunately, I can’t say I thought Faulks was successful in creating a ~~novel~~ book of stories that I would call evenly transcendent or instructive in its use of archetypes. Put bluntly, most of the stories just weren’t interesting or unusual enough.

I do, however, recommend the book for “Geoffrey”—and I’ll keep the book because of that one story—though I should say, out of fairness, that many readers seem to praise “Anya,” the story I found most tedious. I cannot understand why... though I suspect a reader’s favorite or most admired story in A Possible Life may be the story that acts most on his or her deepest memories, be they literary or life-based, good or bad.

Disclaimer: Thank you to publisher Henry Holt for a review copy of A Possible Life.

Up Next: Therese Bohman’s creepy and smooth Drowned.

Twitchy Stories: Levy’s Black Vodka

2013-01-27T17:24:00.000-05:00

Deborah Levy’s Black Vodka collects ten short stories that are almost painfully pithy: in my last post, I described Levy’s stories as “twitchily enjoyable, instant gratification with mini-epiphanies that completely absorbed me.” Twitchy stories are especially difficult to write about because they’re so here-and-now: it’s hard to retain and then convey the feeling of instant gratification that comes from those mini-epiphanies without retelling everything. By contrast, I think sneaky, slow-burn short stories, like those in Quim Monzó’s A Thousand Morons, which I wrote about last time, are easier to describe because they leave behind more traces of atmosphere and mood.

All that said, I thoroughly enjoyed most of the stories in Black Vodka… and have nothing but respect for Levy’s ability to write compact observations of contemporary culture, pain, alienation, and the strange details that accompany them. I also love Levy’s directness, like this, from “Black Vodka”: “After a while she orders a slice of cheesecake and asks me if I was born a hunchback.” This isn’t a line I’d marked while reading, it’s one of many lines I noticed in a random flip through the book. I don’t idolize lovely sentences because, alas, lovely sentences rarely pile up to form lovely stories or lovely novels… but Levy does pretty well with hers.

Here are a few notes on four stories I particularly enjoyed:

“Shining a Light” is set in Prague, where one Alice has arrived without her baggage. She meets two Serbian women at an outdoor movie screening then meets a man, Alex, through them, setting up opportunities for Levy to parallel losses of physical baggage and homeland baggage. Alice does fine without wardrobe changes, “Later, when she walks over the cobblestones towards her hotel in Malá Strana she realises that arriving in a country with nothing but the clothes she is wearing has made her more reckless but more introspective, too.” The story was commissioned for an installation by the Wapping Project; four writers were asked to write texts to accompany a photographic narrative.

The main character in “Stardust Nation” drinks cognac out of an eggcup in the early morning: the story felt almost comfortingly familiar to me, with wonderful elements of madness and transference that I won’t describe, lest I give the whole story away. I think the familiarity came from some of the odd Russian stories I’ve read… And I wrote “kind of sweet” on the Contents page next to the title “Simon Tegala’s Heart in 12 Parts,” a twelve-installment story of a man who, among other things, “[decides] to throw the I Ching to discover if Naomi loved him.” He also buys an old Cadillac to please his beloved. But…

And, finally, there is “Vienna,” which begins with this, “‘Before I forget,’ Magret’s voice is low and vague, ‘I want to test my new microwave.’” Sure, why not? She tests with langoustines, a rather risky test, I’d say, but the microwave works. So do the languages, cultures, millennia, and sadness Levy piles into “Vienna,” a story that only takes a bit more time to read than Magret’s langoustines took to cook.

After writing this post, I Googled, curious to find what others might have written about Black Vodka, which comes out in late February. I found this Literateur piece by Alex Christofi, who sums up the collection with this, “Here, as in her previous plays, stories and novels, her writing exhibits a rhetorical severity which, at its best, has a mythic, lullaby quality, experimental and at the same time simple and beautiful.” Black Vodka is my first Levy book so I can’t compare, but Christofi’s description certainly fits Black Vodka. And “rhetorical severity” has a nice ring, doesn’t it?

Disclosure: I received a review copy of Black Vodka from And Other Stories; I met Stefan Tobler, publisher at And Other Stories in 2011.

Up next: Moving on to longer stories with Sebastian Faulks’s A Possible Life: A Novel in Five Parts, a book I’d call a collection of five long stories. Then Therese Bohman’s Drowned, a not-very-long novel. And Zachary Karabashliev’s 18% Gray.

Sneaky Stories: Monzó’s Morons

2013-01-13T19:24:00.000-05:00

As someone who reads fiction of all lengths but much (¡much!) prefers novels, it felt like a slightly strange twist of blogging fate to first receive two story collections… and then read them in rapid succession: Quim Monzó’s A Thousand Morons, in Peter Bush’s translation of the Catalan collection known as Mil Cretins, and Deborah Levy’s Black Vodka. What struck me most—beyond the reminder that I truly do love short stories and should read more of them—is that the two writers’ stories had such opposite effects on me. Monzó’s stories about the absurd and alienated are sneakily enjoyable, slow-burn stories I didn’t necessarily realize I’d enjoyed until I finished them. Levy’s stories are twitchily enjoyable, instant gratification with mini-epiphanies that completely absorbed me. Today I’ll look at a few of Monzó’s stories; Levy’s are up next time.

Here are a few of the morons I particularly enjoyed:

My favorite story may well be the first, “Mr. Beneset,” about a son who visits his father in an old people’s home. The son finds his father at a mirror: “He is straightening some lingerie, black and cream lingerie, the sort the French call culottes and the English French knickers.” Mr. Beneset tells his son to knock before entering, but, oh well, it seems Dad Beneset didn’t hear the knock because he wasn’t wearing his hearing aid. It’s not the touch of voyeurism or lingerie that appeals to me, it’s the quiet, sad absurdity of Mr. Beneset’s life and advanced age, housed in a place where people die (“leave”) around him, where life is lived by the meal schedule but there’s freedom and time to fuss over lipstick and nail polish. But not, it seems, to shave one’s legs for wearing tights.

“Love Is Eternal,” the second story, begins with the chance meeting of a former boyfriend and girlfriend. They get back together… and each of them does something moronic, bringing the story to an O. Henry-ish twist ending that implies a special sort of hell for the narrator boyfriend. I think personal hells might be a key to being a Monzó moron: these people live in their own private torture zones. I enjoyed “Praise” a lot, too: writer Daniel Broto is asked in an interview to name a book he recently enjoyed: he mentions one and then has to live with the consequences, partly because he raises the expectations of the man who wrote the book he cited. People! Do us all a favor! Never tell someone “We should meet for coffee!” unless you mean it.

Being a long-form fiction kind of reader, I can’t say the microstories interested me as much as the longer ones, but some were fun. “Beyond the Sore,” with a man who’s asked to comment on a book he hasn’t read, focuses on the issue of how to respond without being a total moron… what a pseudo-problem! Honesty is so obviously the path of least moronism, I don’t get why people can’t get over this one and tell the truth. And then there’s “The Fork,” which addresses an age-old question: If a fork falls on the floor and nobody notices, did the fork fall?

A fork falls in one of Levy’s stories, too, so I’ll pick up there next time…

Disclaimers: I received a review copy of A Thousand Morons from Open Letter, a publisher with which I always enjoy discussing literature in translation, including a specific piece I’m translating. Open Letter also gave me not one but two tie-in A Thousand Morons t-shirts… hmm, a subtle hint? The shirts have the same design as the book cover so have a “special” look when worn on a body. Thanks a lot, Mr. Beneset!

Fire: Fahrenheit 451 and The Book Thief

2012-12-31T16:45:00.000-05:00

I first read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 a long time ago, probably in high school: about all I remembered until last week was that firemen started fires rather than preventing them. And their specialty was burning books, which were outlawed.

Same as mine.
Price: $1.25

When Ray Bradbury died earlier this year and I read, a little later, Russian fiction that referred to him, I took out my old copy of Fahrenheit 451. The glue in the binding cracked and the pages were yellowed, but the story itself felt ridiculously up-to-the-minute, despite having been written in the fifties. The biggest surprise was that Bradbury all but predicted reality TV, viewers’ extreme attachment to TV characters they think of as family, and viewers’ extreme attachment to their TV parlors and equipment. Even Christ has become one of the TV family, making, as one character says, “veiled references to certain commercial products that every worshiper absolutely needs.”

The personal stories of Guy Montag, the fireman who begins collecting books and doubting his work, and his TV-addled wife Millie, felt secondary to me compared to Bradbury’s dystopian world, where people drive so super-fast that billboards are super-long and people no longer listen to each other because their TV friends seem realer than their real friends.

[Now, watch out for spoilers…] Montag’s sudden, fiery separation from his job and his wife are less surprising than the fact that his escape is carefully tracked and presented by the media. Even more interesting, though, is that Montag finds readers—some are former professors—who memorize books so they can recite them. This reminded me of Soviet-era samizdat (self-publishing, often on a typewriter) and memorization of forbidden poems. The idea of carrying books around in one’s head, combined with the pictures of future TV and the relative peace outside the city (there’s also a war going on…) made the book well worth rereading.

I read another book involving book burning—Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief—but it’s set in the past, Nazi Germany, instead of the future. The Book Thief is probably as familiar these days as Fahrenheit 451 so I won’t go into detail... you probably already know, for example, that Death narrates this thick novel about a girl named Liesel Meminger who goes to live with a foster family in a town called Molching. I very rarely read young adult books but this one caught me, probably because I thought Zusak made a wise choice in making Death his first-person narrator. For one thing, as an omnipresent and omnipotent narrator, Death can offer, occasionally and a bit officiously, historical details that readers might or might not already know. But Death (the narrator) is also surprisingly compassionate and humorous, as is Zusak’s book, thanks to characters like Liesel the book thief, her accordion-playing foster father Hans, and her friend Rudy who reveres Jesse Owens, a dangerous habit in Nazi Germany.

Up Next: Quim Monzó’s A Thousand Morons.

Where There’s Smoke (on the Cover): Halfon’s Polish Boxer

2012-12-16T17:02:00.002-05:00

There are times when cover art truly does complement—and perhaps even compliment—a book’s content: Eduardo Halfon’s The Polish Boxer really is a smoky wisp of a book, with just 188 smallish pages and several ethereal plot-like lines that float through ten stories of varying length. I read the book in the English translation of the Spanish original El boxeador polaco, which was translated by Daniel Hahn, Ollie Brock, Lisa Dillman, Thomas Bunstead, and Anne McLean… with the help of Halfon, who lives in Nebraska but frequently returns to Guatemala, where he was born. Their work, which crossed many time zones, feels seamless, creating one voice.

The Polish Boxer is almost as difficult to describe as smoke, too: these linked, first-person stories are thoroughly imaginable and tangible, but they also dissipate, blending together like smoke and fog, leaving lovely traces of meaning as Halfon explores identity and meaning. Halfon’s made-for-metafiction-narrator is an academic named Eduardo Halfon. On the first page, Halfon-as-teacher describes a classroom scene meant to instruct readers, too, mentioning an essay by Ricardo Piglia that discusses “the dual nature of the short story,” which contains a visible narrative and a secret tale. This first story, “Distant,” tells of a scholarship student who writes poetry; he meets after class with Halfon, making the individual student feel like a secret tale set against the backdrop of a more visible, public narrative about class meetings.

Halfon begins dropping hints about the Polish boxer—and his grandfather and Auschwitz—in the next story, “Twaining,” about a trip to North Carolina for a Mark Twain conference. We continue on to “Epistrophy,” in which we meet Eduardo’s dishy girlfriend and hear Serbian-gypsy pianist Milan Rakic play music not listed on the program, than advance (after a quick stop in “White Smoke” at a Scottish bar that’s not in Scotland) to “The Polish Boxer,” which begins with the number, 69752, tattooed on Eduardo’s grandfather’s arm. Eduardo’s grandfather tells him it’s his telephone number, tattooed so he won’t forget. We know that’s not true.

The Polish boxer, according to the grandfather, is someone who helped save him in the camps… but the story turns out to be (maybe? truly?) untrue, even if it sounds like a great story. Even better, on the last page of the book, two of Eduardo’s grandfather’s friends discuss him, offering details that don’t quite match Eduardo’s memories of his grandfather, showing, once again, the shiftiness of identity and how we describe it.

I particularly enjoyed the story line about Rakic, in which Eduardo flies to post-war Serbia—wars are important in The Polish Boxer—to find the man, who’s sent him postcards from all over as he tours. Eduardo enlists the help of gypsies in Serbia, who look at Rakic’s photo and say he can’t be a gypsy. The gypsies, Eduardo says, look as if “they existed outside of this world.” I think the same could probably be said about Eduardo, his grandfather, his girlfriend and her orgasm drawings, the elusive Milan Rakic, and all the rest of us. A number tattooed on an arm may be indelible and it may symbolize a lot, but identity—in the sense of a person’s real, personal depths—is something as elusive and subjective as a wisp of smoke.

Disclosures: I picked up a copy of The Polish Boxer from Bellevue Literary Press at BookExpo America. Thank you!

Up Next: It remains to be seen…

Jennifer Egan’s Goon Squad

2012-11-23T17:13:00.001-05:00

Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad is that annoyingly near-perfect book that I admire tremendously for its technical qualities but can’t quite find myself loving because it feels too hermetically sealed. I’m sure you already know about the book: it won a Pulitzer, a National Book Critics Circle award, and lots of other honors. And one chapter of the book is written and presented in PowerPoint form.

A Visit from the Goon Squad strings thirteen stories, one of which is written in PowerPoint form, though you already knew that, into a novel that zigs and zags between characters and times, returning often to two core figures. Bennie is described on the back cover as “an aging former punk rocker and record executive.” Sasha is “the passionate, troubled young woman he employs.” Put in more direct terms: as a kid, Bennie was in a band called The Flaming Dildos, which I take as a name that refers to fakery and imitations of, ah, more real things, and Sasha is a klepto who loves to keep and display what she steals.

During the course of the book, Egan introduces us to those same Flaming Dildos, a bunch of San Francisco teenagers, including Bennie, who want to be punks, and shows us how they and the people around them behave and age, not always very gracefully. Time is the goon squad here and Egan neatly threads this and other motifs, like Sasha’s stolen goods, through the stories. Conformism and its “non” are everywhere, too: Bennie and his friends aren’t much punkier than I was. Sure, I went to see the Dead Kennedys when a friend decided to be a punk promoter one summer but my spikes were really a bracelet, not something dangerous.

“Neatly” is my problem with A Visit from the Goon Squad: I enjoyed reading the book, looked forward to reading it, and think it’s very, very good, but it feels a little too much like how Bennie hears digitized music:

Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead.

The italics are Egan’s. And the voices in Goon Squad were a little digitized for me, not quite gritty or distinct enough to make some of the chapter-stories in Goon Squad feel fully polyphonic or convincing. One of the most interesting chapter-stories was “Selling the General,” which connects less to Bennie and Sasha than most of the other pieces and describes the efforts of Dolly (a.k.a. La Doll), a p.r. specialist attempting to improve the image of a dictator. I don’t think it’s coincidental that the story is less connected and less music-related than most of the others.

The final story-chapter, “Pure Language,” set in a future New York City, imagines even more ubiquitous uses of mobile devices and txt language than we have now (*shudder*) but the hero is the guy without an online presence, “a guy who had lived in the cracks all these years, forgotten and full of rage, in a way that now registered as pure. Untouched.” And there, again, is my misgiving about the book, a misgiving that feels slight and churlish: the book lacks real rage. That may be intentional but I can’t be sure because the book felt so polished, so cleanly written and so careful, even a tiny bit high-flown. In other words, it felt technically perfect but most of the tone and language felt so smooth—too controlled, digitized, and ironic—that they crowded out the book’s messages and characters for me.

Disclosures: I bought my own copy of the book. I met Jennifer Egan, a college classmate I never knew in college, at a reading in Portland several years ago. I’ve read and enjoyed most of her books, particularly Look at Me.

Up Next: Eduardo Halfon’s The Polish Boxer, another book of linked stories.

Cutting Humor: Orly Castel-Bloom’s Dolly City

2012-11-11T17:16:00.001-05:00

Dolly City, a wonderfully sick and absurdly humorous novel that I read in Dalya Bilu’s translation from the Hebrew, gets off to a strange start that offers a feel for what’s to come. When Dolly’s goldfish dies, she takes the fish out of the bowl and then does this:

I laid the fish on the black marble counter, took a dagger, and began cutting it up. The little shit kept slipping away from me on the counter, so I had to grip it by the tail and return it to the scene of the crime.

That’s not even the end of the second paragraph! (And no, this isn’t one of those books that’s just one long sentence or one long paragraph.) At this pace, it’s not long before Dolly kills someone and brings home a baby (not her own), a boy she calls Son. Dolly, a supremely unreliable narrator who claims to be a doctor, takes concerned motherhood to extremes, cutting Son open whenever she thinks he might be ailing. She also etches a map of Israel—“Biblical period… just as I remembered it from school”—into his back. Later she takes attachment parenting to extremes and glues him to her back. “Grotesque” can’t begin to describe Dolly and her life.

The doting, controlling mother line of Dolly City was most comprehensible for me, with Dolly becoming the ultimate clingy mother, admitting she uses her own (but not really her own) child as a guinea pig she says she opens and closes like a curtain. Toward the end of the book, she asks, “What kind of a thing is motherhood if you can’t take care of your child nonstop, one hundred percent?” Dolly defends her behavior to the final line of the book, where she says, “I knew that after everything I’d done to him—a bullet or a knife in the back were nothing he couldn’t handle.” Orly Castel-Bloom, by the way, dedicated Dolly City to her daughter.

Along the way, Dolly addresses topics like Holocaust survivors, practices medicine on the street (she offers her elementary school teacher an enema), and describes Dolly City as “the most demented city in the world,” a place with dense fog, impossibly tall-sounding buildings, and rattling trains. Dolly City is one of the more demented books I’ve read—and enjoyed—in a while, with hilariously twisted humor, a cubist feel (from all the tall buildings?), and, in a book where nothing but nothing feels normal, more defamiliarization than Shklovsky could shake a scalpel at. Bilu’s lively translation, with a voice that smoothly conveys the horror and humor of Dolly, gave me the impression she enjoyed working on Dolly City.

Up Next: Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.

Benjamin Stein’s The Canvas

2012-10-21T17:29:00.000-04:00

Benjamin Stein’s The Canvas, which I read in Brian Zumhagen’s translation of the German novel known as Leinwand, is a book where I literally wasn’t always sure which side was up or down: the book is structured, physically, as two books in one, and each book-side is narrated by a main character. The reader is presented with the choice of either reading each story individually or flipping the book, chapter by chapter, and watching the two stories intersect.

I chose the second option and used a magnetic bookmark. I began—randomly, I think—on the side narrated by Jan Wechsler (Europublisher who receives a mysterious bag of stuff he thinks just can’t possibly be his), then switched over to Amnon Zichroni (an Israel-born psychic of sorts who moves around)… and back again, chapter by chapter, until their stories met in the middle. In Israel.

If I had to summarize the wonderfully complex The Canvas in one awkwardly simplistic phrase, I think I’d say something like “existential confusion, nicely rendered.” The Canvas looks at some of my favorite topics—identity, memory, (ir)reality, and how they all fit together—and makes them exponentially more complicated and relevant by placing them within present-day historical memory of the Holocaust and, in particular detail, Jewish identity. Historical memories float to the surface of The Canvas in the person of a shadowy violin restorer and memoirist named Minsky, a character modeled on Binjamin Wilkomirski, a real-life (our life!) writer who fabricated a Holocaust memoir in the 1990s. Meaning we have fact/fiction and fact/fiction in The Canvas. These lines, from Jan Wechsler, concisely sum up a lot about the book, “Cultivating fables is complicated. You need a good memory. Otherwise, you’re sunk.”

I found Amnon Zichroni’s half of the book more interesting than Wechsler’s, though, and not just because Zichroni lives in Portland, Maine, for a while, where he does a residency in psychiatry at Maine Medical Center, a hospital where I used to work as a medical interpreter. Zichroni’s skills include using touch to read into people’s pasts, and his single-day reading of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita is a touchstone in his half of the book. Zichroni refers to chains of events and determinism in one long paragraph that references M&M. Here’s the second half of the paragraph:

I knew that Annouchka had already spilled the sunflower oil. And it really almost drove me out of my mind that I didn’t have the slightest idea how to save Berlioz from losing his head when he so persistently refused to at least accept that something else was directing people’s lives—namely, the sometimes grim, poetic hand of Hashem.

That’s particularly lovely stuff—Annouchka and that damn sunflower oil all over again!—if you’ve read M&M, another novel, by the way, that blends distinct story lines and questions of faith.

Oddly, I think the physical layout of the book called The Canvas, with its demand that the reader flip back and forth, is one of the reasons the novel works. Though it would be easy to say the flipping felt like a cheap gimmick and annoyed me a reader, I think the flipping reinforces, through the actual physical action of turning the book, physical aspects of identity, location, and, well, which end is up, all of which are important themes in a novel that I read as an existential thriller. The Canvas read smoothly enough in Zumhagen’s translation that the novel could feel like a thriller with consistent voices. The book contains a glossary of Jewish and Yiddish terms, twice, once at the end of each man’s story. It’s very fitting to offer those words at the heart of the novel, back-to-back, facing two ways.

Disclosures: I received a review copy of The Canvas from Open Letter, a publisher with which I always enjoy discussing literature in translation, including a specific piece I’m translating.

Up Next: Orly Castel Bloom’s horribly, hilariously demented Dolly City.

Where There’s Smoke: Thrown into Nature

2012-09-24T15:48:00.000-04:00

I realized last week that I never posted this piece, though I wrote it nearly a year ago…

Milen Ruskov’s Thrown into Nature, a contemporary novel translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel, tells the story of Nicolás Bautista Monardes, a sixteenth-century Spanish physician who advocates the use of tobacco for medicinal purposes. The novel is a picaresque—generally an entertaining one—narrated by Monardes’s assistant, the hapless, unreliable, and Portuguese Guimarães da Silva.

The reader witnesses all sorts of cures and odd episodes in chapters with titles like “For Long Life,” “Intestinal Worms, Enemas,” and “For Protection Against the Plague and All Manner of Contagions,” and Monardes holds forth on matters of religion, nature (the human is “a pipe, through which nature passes”), and politics.

I especially enjoyed a scene based in England, in which King James I holds a debate called “Whether the frequent use of tobacco is good for healthy men?” Says da Silva, “The question mark here is pure hypocrisy and is intended solely to satisfy the formal requirements of debate.” da Silva’s comments about his seatmates at the debate are, like many other passages in the book, funny in a slapstick way. As da Silva takes notes and draws a Star of David, one of his neighbors “stared bug-eyed at the star on my sheet. I quickly crossed it out and grabbed my quill such that I—ostensibly accidentally—showed him my middle finger.”

Of course part of the fun of all this for me, a twenty first-century reader who used to write quite a bit about drug discovery and development, was reading about political debate around a substance used as a medical treatment. And of course our modern-day vilification of tobacco puts loads of irony into watching Monardes and da Silva advocate its use to cure just about everything, puffing away on cigarillas as a preventive measure. da Silva, however, records this:

“I’ve been sustaining myself with tobacco for twenty years longer than you have,” replied the doctor. “There seems to be something in tobacco which causes such a cough. After many, many years.

Today is a bad day for tobacco, I thought to myself.

Perhaps even more interesting: Monardes was a real person and, according to the Special Collections Department of the library at the University of Glasgow, “Monardes made tobacco a household remedy throughout Western Europe and his gospel was accepted by the majority of European physicians for more than two centuries.” I don’t know if Ruskov smokes but Bulgaria is apparently a big tobacco-using country: according to data on Wikipedia, Bulgaria ranks fourth in the world in number of cigarettes per adult per year, 2,437.

I would be remiss if I didn’t add that I thought Rodel’s translation read nicely, conveying humor and a stylized voice.

Disclosures: I received a copy of Thrown into Nature from Open Letter Books, a publisher with which I always enjoy discussing literature in translation, including a specific piece I’m translating.

Up Next: The Canvas, by Benjamin Stein, an Open Letter Book that I’m enjoying very much… fitting since I’ll be going to Rochester, NY, home of Open Letter, for the American Literary Translators Association conference next week. I loved last year’s conference in Kansas City so can’t wait!

Image: Portrait of Monardes, from user Valérie75, via Wikipedia.

Seven Quick Points about Deon Meyer’s Seven Days

2012-09-16T15:13:00.000-04:00

I read Seven Days in K.L. Seegers’s translation of the Afrikaans original 7 Dae, written by Deon Meyer.

Seven Days is part of a series featuring detective captain Benny Griessel but Seven Days reads just fine on its own; I haven’t read the precursors.

Meyers mixes episodes from Griessel’s personal life—counting his days of sobriety and showing his struggle to start a relationship with a lovely singer—with his investigation of the murder of an ambitious and artificially shapely female attorney.

The case is urgent because a sniper is shooting at policemen, promising to shoot one a day until the attorney’s killer is found.

The novel is well-structured and nicely paced, and I thought Meyer did particularly well populating Seven Days with a varied bunch of investigators and the tensions between them.

Bonus for me: I couldn’t help but enjoy the small Russian subplot!

Disclaimer: I received a copy of Seven Days at the Grove/Atlantic booth at BookExpo America, thank you! -- I always enjoy discussing literature in translation with Grove/Atlantic.

More Fiction with Finnish: A Fool’s Paradise and We Sinners

2012-08-26T17:55:00.000-04:00

Anita Konkka’s A Fool’s Paradise, which I read in A.D. Haun and Owen Witesman’s translation of the Finnish original Hullun taivaassa, and Hanna Pylväinen’s We Sinners share more than Finnish ancestry: structurally, both books link vignettes or stories into novels, and both books offer straightforward writing and rather bleak, atmospheric pictures of loneliness.

I read A Fool’s Paradise first, enjoying Konkka’s first-person narrator’s dark humor: her storyteller is an unemployed young woman who’s involved with a married man and enjoys referring to Russian literature and writers. In the first chapter, she has a stone from Pasternak’s grave in her pocket. The woman’s accounts of her life, much of which isn’t particularly interesting in term of activity, read, to me, like a stream of vignettes, often incorporating observations about strangers and descriptions of dreams. “Our life passes in sleeping and waiting,” she says. She also says her only duty in society is to report to the unemployment office.

It’s Konkka’s use of detail—a bird flying into a room, a gypsy on a ferry, childhood memories of learning about Yuri Gagarin—and tone, as conveyed by Haun and Witesman, that made A Fool’s Paradise so strangely engaging for me. Here’s an example:

A young man is distributing leaflets in front of the K-Market and asks whether I believe in Jesus. No woman has ever asked me that. Perhaps they’ve agreed that men will save women and women save men, since people are more responsive to the allure of the opposite sex.

Repentance and sin are, as promised by the title, a crucial element of We Sinners, a novel-in-stories that chronicles the lives of the Rovaniemis, a family of Finnish descent living in the U.S. that has nine children. The Rovaniemis are Laestadian Lutherans who aren’t allowed to watch movies or TV, go to school dances, use makeup, or drink alcohol. Among other things. Of course they break the rules a lot, and several of the Rovaniemi children leave the church during the course of the book. One of the younger Rovaniemis sums up the church this way, “It’s a kind of Lutheranism where everyone is much more hung up on being Lutheran than all the other normal Lutherans. End of story.”

All those rules and alleged deprivations (I love life without a TV!), along with the expected transgressions from all manner of sinners, were less interesting for me than Pylväinen’s grace in structuring the book, her debut novel. She tells the family’s story chronologically, economically covering a couple decades in under 200 pages by carrying threads from one story to another. In the first story, children get chicken pox and their father, Warren, may be offered the job of pastor at their church… Pylväinen starts the second story by letting the reader know what happened for Warren.

Pylväinen also creates an interesting illusion with her story-chapters, many of which focus on a key episode in one character’s life with references to other family members. The characters—from father Warren, who grits his teeth from anger until a crown breaks, to Brita, a daughter whose first press of the keys on her new piano is silent—are members of a crowded family living in a crowded house but they often feel tragically alone in their anger, disappointment, and relative poverty. Much of the siblings’ interaction comes through solidarity in leaving or staying with the church.

Two scenes involving the mother, Pirjo, especially stuck with me. In the first, her discovery (at the movies!) that one of her sons is gay seemed especially alienating for everyone involved, “She felt slapped, she felt rejected, she felt like he had looked at the life she had made for him and he had spit on it.” So much for forgiveness. Toward the end of the book, Pirjo tells one of her daughters over the phone, “We’re here to remind you of what is right. We know you know in your hearts what the right thing is, of course we know you know that—” But then her daughter cuts her off, yelling, “Assholes!”

Up Next: Seven Days by Deon Meyer.

Disclaimers: I received a review copy of We Sinners from publisher Henry Holt, thank you!

A Not-So-Jolly Jester: Makine’s The Life of an Unknown Man

2012-08-15T20:31:00.000-04:00

Andreï Makine’s The Life of an Unknown Man, which I read in Geoffrey Strachan’s translation of the original French La vie d’un homme inconnu, is the kind of book that makes me grumpy. The novel details—and I do mean “details”—the emotional and geographical wanderings of a little-known Russian émigré writer living in France who decides to visit the motherland after his much-younger girlfriend dumps him. Shutov, the writer, is a sentimental guy and he wants to visit an old flame.

Peterhof/Petrodvorets at Saint Petersburg's 300th
Anniversary

Shutov’s surname may be rooted in “shut” (sounds like “shoot”), the Russian word for a clown, fool, or jester, but he doesn’t fit in with St. Petersburg’s carnivalesque atmosphere at the city’s anniversary celebration. He says, “Nothing has changed in thirty years. And everything has changed.” Right. A paragraph later, when Shutov tells himself, “I was wrong to come…,” I wrote “Yes, you were!” in the margin. Reason A: As we all know, you can’t step in the same river twice. Reason B: The trip is a colossally awkward plot device designed to give Shutov a chance to observe changes and fail to have a soulful reunion with Yana, the old flame, who is now a busy businesswoman… but miraculously redeem the journey by meeting Volsky, an old man who inhabits a room in a former communal apartment Yana now owns.

It’s Volsky’s last night in his room before moving to a nursing home, and Shutov watches over him, listening to his life story, which includes the blockade of Leningrad, reaching Berlin for the Soviet Army during World War 2, Stalin-era imprisonment, and a love story involving numerous coincidences. Volsky’s life hits on numerous elements of the mythos of Soviet Russia and Leningrad, combining the miracle of survival and the ability to find a certain happiness amidst chaos, arrests, and death. The problem here isn’t the material, which is important, it’s Makine’s treatment, which makes Volsky feel like a clichéd composite of the Soviet period right down to a tear-jerking final trip to an old site before he moves to the nursing home.

Even worse, Volsky is a tool to inspire Shutov to find perspective on his own dull life. If, that is, the reader can believe this self-centered guy is ready for perspective. This element of the novel felt especially literarily cheap and obvious because Makine summarizes the novel’s action and message at the end, lest the reader missed something. An example: “The violent feeling suddenly overcomes Shutov that he will never be a part of the Russian world that is now being reborn within his native land.” But we knew that many pages ago.

The Life of an Unknown Man reminds me of a Soviet-era package tour to Russia: a schedule stuffed with group meals in hotel dining rooms and ideological excursions, but no contact with Russians other than tour guides and food service personnel. Sure, you see the important sites and many of them are lovely. But you feel manipulated, told what to think. There are lots of Russian novels available in translation that address World War 2 in the Soviet Union and/or the Stalinist repression that I’d recommend over Makine’s The Life, everything from I(rina) Grekova’s Ship of Widows to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Two other Soviet-era books that have become classics: Anatolii Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat and Vasilii Grossman’s Life and Fate.

To be fair, I should note that lots of readers enjoyed The Life of an Unknown Man far more than I. Among them: Kirkus, which starred it; Amy Henry on The Black Sheep Dances; Mary Whipple on Seeing the World Through Books; Viv Groskop in The Observer, and M.A. Orthofer on The Complete Review, who links to numerous other reviews.

Notes on two other books: I had so much difficulty with G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen, a clunky and contrived attempt to mix a Persian Gulf cyberthriller with djinns and The Thousand and One Nights that I stopped reading half-way through. Grumpy again! I also read the first hundred or so pages of WiesławMyśliwski’s Stone Upon Stone, in Bill Johnston’s translation. Stone Upon Stone is very good, vignettes of rural Polish life that come close to qualifying as stream-of-consciousness, but it’s the kind of book I’m best reading over time, in chunks, so I don’t lose the nuance. I read wonderful passages about farming, the significance of a new road, and melees at dances. It’s easy to see why Bill Johnston won the Best Translated Book Award for Stone Upon Stone: he creates a memorable English-language voice for Myśliwski’s first-person narrator. It’s a book I’ll study and analyze, too, because its narrative voice feels like a Polish cousin to some of the Russian-language stories I’ve worked on.

Disclaimers: Thanks to Amy Henry who sent me a copy of The Life of an Unknown Man that she received from Graywolf Press, whom I also thank. Amy also facilitated my copy of Stone Upon Stone from Archipelago Books—thanks to both of them! Finally, I picked up a copy of Alif the Unseen from Grove/Atlantic’s booth at BookExpo America; I’ve always enjoyed speaking with Grove/Atlantic about literature in translation.

Up next: Anita Konkka’s A Fool’s Paradise. Then Hanna Pylväinen’s We Sinners. I think it’s my summer for Finnish-related books… I may have to read Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book next.

Image credit: Saint Petersburg’s 300th Anniversary, from www.Kremlin.ru

Identity Theft: Frayn’s Skios

2012-07-29T19:45:00.000-04:00

Michael Frayn’s Skios is both fun and funny, an entertaining farce about mistaken identity at a Fred Toppler Foundation conference—“Innovation and Governance: The Promise of Scientometrics”—for a bunch of schmoozing jetsetters and would-be intellectuals who gather on a fictional Greek island. Skios tells the story of two Dr. Norman Wilfreds and the silly havoc they wreak on themselves and the people around them.

The passport-proven Norman Wilfred is scheduled to lecture at the conference about the management of science… but ends up at a distant house on Skios instead of the lavish conference site after being mistaken for one Oliver Fox. The ersatz Norman Wilfred, whose real name is, yes, Oliver Fox, is coming to Skios for a fling but decides to become Dr. Wilfred when he sees a woman holding a Norman Wilfred sign at the airport and decides “that would have been a good name to have.” Fox-Wilfred also sees that Nikki Hook, the woman greeting him, “plainly wanted him to be Dr. Wilfred.” Fox-Wilfred isn’t one to disappoint.

There are many layers of humor lurking in Skios, from the repetition of identity-based gags—like Spiros and Stavros, brothers and taxi drivers, who think real-Wilfred must be “Phoksoliva,” which real-Wilfred thinks must be a Greek expression—to a receptionist answering the phone by saying “How my dreck your call?” And then there’s satire involving empty-headed conference attendees, who are all too eager to believe that Fox-Wilfred is real-Wilfred. Even if they’ve met him in the past.

Identity in Skios is all about belief and labels, that people fit the labels they present; this plays nicely on contemporary thought that something will happen if you believe in it enough. Perhaps what’s most telling on Skios is that the person at the conference who most pesters Fox-Wilfred, asking him real scientific questions, is shunted aside over and over because he’s inconvenient: maintaining the illusion of Fox-Wilfred is more comfortable. Of course the illusion is also entertaining and suspenseful for the reader, as when Fox-Wilfred comes up with an absurd and messy magician-like act with coffee cups in an attempt to evade answering the questions.

There is plenty more illusion, fake, ersatz, and faux in Skios, from Nikki’s blond hair to a Russian woman’s apparent lack of English: Mrs. Toppler, the former Vegas dancer who heads the foundation, tells Fox-Wilfred to entertain one Mrs. Skorbatova at dinner by just talking, telling him, “A mouth opening and shutting. That’s all most people here want, when you come right down to it. Plus one of your nice smiles.”

Frayn ends the novel with far more of a semiotic bang than I’d expected. He sets it off with a careless action (involving sweets) that spurs an utterance—an English word that has multiple meanings—that prompts an inappropriate reaction. This misunderstanding has much, much worse consequences than the Fox-Wilfred matter but Frayn still manages to end the book on a humorous note, with Mrs. Toppler thanking her conference guests. Everything is only what you say it is.

Skios, by the way, was long-listed for the Booker Prize last week. Skios is listed on the Macmillan Web site here, with a brief excerpt.

Up Next: Andreï Makine’s The Life of an Unknown Man. Then G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen.

Disclaimers: I received a review copy of Skios from the publisher, Henry Holt. Thank you!

Riikka Pulkkinen’s True

2012-07-15T14:48:00.000-04:00

Riikka Pulkkinen’s True, which I read in Lola M. Roger’s translation from the Finnish original Totta, is a novel about family, death, and dying that tells the story of three generations. Though it’s the grandmother, Elsa, who is dying in the present day, Pulkkinen tells much of the family’s collective story through an affair in the 1960s between Martti, Elsa’s husband, and Eeva, the nanny for their daughter Eleonoora.

The situations in True—a torrid affair with the nanny while Elsa is away on business—sound trite and soap opera-ish, but Pulkkinen offers a new angle by letting Martti and Elsa’s granddaughter, Anna, imagine the affair. This isn’t a stretch for Anna: she and Martti have a long-standing habit of looking at strangers and inventing life stories for them. Anna combines imagination with her own life, projecting her own pain, left over from her relationship with a past boyfriend’s young daughter, onto Martti and Eeva’s story, thinking Eeva would also suffer from being separated from Eleonoora.

Interpretations of reality and relationships float through True. Martti, a prominent painter, tells stories, too, through his art, including portraits of the women in his life, and Elsa is a well-known psychologist. Pulkkinen also weaves in the social changes of the 1960s, referencing protests about the Vietnam War and sending Eeva to Paris. Eeva is no activist, though, and Pulkkinen contrasts the personal and the social. Here’s a paragraph from one of Anna’s chapters imagining Eeva’s voice:

No one will admit it but all of us are actually more interested in the lake and the sauna and the half of a blueberry pie on the table than we are in the fact that reality is being created at this very moment in offices and meeting rooms and on speakers’ platforms and who knows maybe underground in the kinds of groups whose names have only just been thought up.

Pulkkinen refers to other Finnish sweets, including some of my favorites: breads with cardamom, which my mother used to bake using my Finnish grandmother’s recipe, get several mentions as do candies from Fazer, which I used to buy in airports on my way to and from Moscow. I suspect they draw on Finnish readers’ senses and—more importantly—memories even more than they draw on mine.

In Rogers’s translation, the narrative voices of True feel neutral and, considering the emotional subject matter, almost flat, as they describe landscapes, family relationships, and even Elsa’s death, which the reader knows must come. But Rogers’s tone felt true to me: it prevented the novel from becoming maudlin, and it fit nicely with True’s Finnish settings, where characters endure, with stoicism, hot saunas, cold swimming, and all sorts of emotional pain and distance.

I think it’s the combination of stylistics, Finnish motifs, and, of course, stereotypical elements of stories about family—meaning everything from the book’s narrative tone to the birds, the sweets, the lake, the rotting boards in the sauna, the love of ice cream, and even the closet holding Eeva’s old dress—that hold True together, making an old story feel worthy of retelling, with, of course, variations.

Disclaimers: I received a review copy of True at BookExpoAmerica from Other Press, thank you! I enjoyed speaking about Russian literature in translation with Other Press during BEA. More on disclosures: here.

Up Next: Michael Frayn’s Skios, which I enjoyed very much.

Image credit: Photo of Finnish breads from Mikalaari, via Wikipedia.

What Are the Odds? Ben H. Winters’s The Last Policeman

2012-07-01T13:53:00.001-04:00

The Last Policeman is a new type of mashup novel for writer Ben H. Winters, co-author of such titles as Android Karenina and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters: in The Last Policeman, Winters sets a murder mystery in pre-apocalyptic Concord, New Hampshire, creating a suspenseful and thoughtful combination of crime and natural disaster that asks refreshingly everyday existential questions of everyday people.

Winters’s narrator is Hank Palace, a police detective who insists on investigating an apparent suicide—the dead man is a “hanger” whose body is found in a McDonald’s men’s room—because his instincts tell him something isn’t right. “A man is dead,” he says. Of course people die all the time, hangers are common in Concord, and everybody in The Last Policeman is going to die in fairly short order. They’re counting down the months until an asteroid known as Maia will hit. For me, the acceleration of everyone’s demise—and the reactions it produces—is the source of the appeal of a full-on literary natural disaster like Maia. An asteroid is the ultimate unexpected guest who walks in on a static dinner party (or state capital) and changes everything.

It’s Palace’s practical, calm, and consistent voice that makes The Last Policeman work. Palace is a relatively softboiled guy in a pretty hardboiled world, though he began experiencing the trauma of unlikely events as a child, he lives alone, and he loves being a cop. Given the importance of the asteroid, unlikely events and long odds are a big theme in the book. Here’s Palace on the odds:

But that’s how it works: no matter what the odds of a given event, that one-in-whatever-it-is has to come in at some point or it wouldn’t be a one-in-whatever chance. It would be zero.

The dead man, by the way, worked in insurance, an odds-based industry that’s not a great line of work when the world’s about to end. Of course much more than the insurance industry has collapsed in The Last Policeman: people go “bucket list” to fulfill their worldly dreams, ignite themselves, perpetuate conspiracy theories, take to drugs, stockpile weapons, and slack off at work. But not Palace:

Still, the conscientious detective is obliged to examine the question of motive in a new light, to place it within the matrix of our present unusual circumstance. The end of the world changes everything, from a law-enforcement perspective.

A little later, Palace, an observer of the social contract, notes the continuing responsibilities of cops, saying the public relies on them. And he laments later that the asteroid becomes “an excuse for poor conduct.”

Winters shows us plenty of poor conduct but he also shows us people like Palace who keep on with their lives, solving crimes, serving up eggs, and making espresso. Winters has a light hand in The Last Policeman, balancing humor, darkness, and pathos, offering up lines that made me laugh then sigh. Here’s a female cop telling Palace about chasing someone: “…you know, Palace, this is it. This is the last chance I get to run after a perp yelling, “Stop, motherfucker.”

The Last Policeman, which will be released July 10, 2012, is the first novel in a planned trilogy.

Disclaimers & disclosures: I received a review copy of The Last Policeman from Quirk Books, from Eric Smith, whom I’ve enjoyed seeing at BookExpo America, and who’s a friend on Facebook. Thank you!

Up Next: Riikka Pulkkinen’s True... I’m glad to be back to my usual reading routine after a busy spring!

Herta Müller’s Hunger Angel

2012-05-28T20:55:00.000-04:00

Herta Müller’s The Hunger Angel, which I read in Philip Boehm’s translation of the original German Atemschaukel, is a painful but frighteningly lovely account of a young man’s internment in a Soviet labor camp after World War 2. Leo Auberg, who calls himself a Transylvanian Saxon, tells the story of his travel to the camp, his years spent there with coal, and his return to his family in Romania, to, among people, the grandmother who’d said “I KNOW YOU’LL BE BACK” and the “ersatz-brother Robert,” born while Leo was away. I think the term “ersatz-brother” gives a nice feel for the sort of dark humor Müller brings to the book, with, of course, crucial help from Boehm.

As a veteran of Russian camp fiction, the book took me back to Varlam Shalamov (for Müller’s brief, stabbing vignettes) and Solzhenitsyn (for Leo’s ability to find moments of relative happiness and his fear of freedom “outside”). But what struck me most about the book—probably largely because of my own interests—was Müller’s conscious use of language, both as a creative tool for herself as a writer and as a theme for Leo. Though her hunger angels, who hover over each prisoner, are strong, her use of language is even stronger as she creates ways to write about horrible experiences. Here are a few examples, plus some commentary from Boehm:

The Sound of Russian!: Early in the book, Leo says that “The Russian commands sound like the name of the camp commandant, Shishtvanyonov: a gnashing and sputtering collection of ch, sh, tch, shch… After a while the commands just sounds like a constant clearing of the throat—coughing, sneezing, nose blowing, hacking up mucus.”

As a Russian teacher who often tells her students not to make the sound kh so gutturally that they sound as if they’re trying to cough something up, this passage, well, struck me as a wonderful combination of finding a way to describe a language’s sound while finding a way to express the newness and unusualness of the sounds for Leo’s group. I even brought the book in to read the paragraph to my first-year Russian students, who’d commented on Russian’s harsher qualities.

A Mix of Languages/Hunger Words: A single word can generate a lot of thought for Leo: in “the skinandbones time,” Leo says the prisoners are given “kapusta,” cabbage, though “cabbage soup in Russian means soup that often has no cabbage at all,” a subversion of language. Leo then goes on to explain that “cap” in Romanian is “head” and “pusta” is the Great Hungarian Plain. “The camp is as Russian as the cabbage soup, but we think these things up in German,” he tells us. Leo then goes on to say that “kapusta” isn’t a hunger word… so he lists hunger words, words like mincemeat, hasenpfeffer, and haunch of venison, that inspire tastes in the mouth and “feed the imagination… Each person thinks a different word tastes best.” There’s also an episode a couple pages later where Leo is caught, by the afore-mentioned Shishtvanyonov, carrying cabbage [sic?] soup in bottles. Leo says he wants to bring the soup home. Though he’s not sure why he saved the soup, Leo reinvents the soup as a medicine, saving himself from punishment. Conclusion: the word “kapusta” can signify many things.

Homesickness & Parasites: For me, one of the saddest uses of language involved “homesickness” (mentioned as “heimweh”) as a euphemism for problems like lice, bedbugs, and hunger. A few pages later, Leo notes his personal uses of words and the separation of the words from what they signify, offering the example of the Russian “vosh’,” which he uses for bedbugs and lice, not remembering the meaning of “vosh’”to Russians. “Maybe the word can’t tell one from the other. But I can,” he says.

Also: The Cuckoo Clock: I have to mention that I thought Müller did nicely bringing clocks and the passage of time into the book, too. A chapter in the first half of the book is called “On the phantom pain of the cuckoo clock.” In it, Leo wonders, “Why did we need a cuckoo clock here. Not to measure the time.” Leo concludes that the barracks clock belongs to the hunger angel, saying a certain question [which invokes superstition] is most important, “Cuckoo, how much longer will I live.” When Leo returns home, alive, though many of his campmates have died, “The clock ticked away beside the wardrobe.”

To Summarize: The Hunger Angel felt especially successful to me because Müller balances the harshness of reality—camp deaths, camp privations, camp parasites—with a linguistic playfulness that simultaneously reflects and rejects that same reality. Episodes of absurdity mix with harshness, simultaneously giving the novel an air of reality and abstraction, as well as some wonderfully dark humor.

Finally, I want to say that I think Boehm’s translation finds a consistent voice, both fluid and linguistically marked, for Leo. Boehm quotes Leo in his Translator’s Note, “I carry silent baggage. I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words.” Boehm then writes of Müller, “In one novel after the other, it has been Herta Müller’s special calling to find words for the displacement of the soul among victims of totalitarianism.”

Disclaimers: I received a review copy of The Hunger Angel from publisher HenryHolt. Thank you very much!

Up Next: I’ve had a hard time finding something to follow The Hunger Angel… so settled on something predictable, another Swedish murder mystery. My next post won’t appear until mid-June, after BookExpo America.

The Journey of James Vance Marshall’s Walkabout

2012-05-06T16:42:00.001-04:00

Walkabout, a short novel by James Vance Marshall (pseudonym for Donald Payne), is a peculiar trip through the outback with two children from a “comfortable home in Charleston, South Carolina” who are stranded after a plane crash. They set off on foot for Adelaide, meeting a lone Aborigine boy as they walk. I saw Nicolas Roeg’s film version of Walkabout in a sociology course in college so knew the basics—the trio of kids and the outback—but was surprised (though why!?) at how much tones differed, with the film stranding the kids through an episode of violence rather than a plane crash.

What I remember best about the film, which I saw, oh, about thirty years ago, is the contrast between meat for sale in an Australian city—prekilled, pretrimmed, for sale in bulk—and do-it-yourself meat in the outback. I don’t know if my memories are correct but that’s what stuck with me: urban life that’s far removed from nature, food sources, and metaphorically, a knowledge of self. Little of the “civilized” side of the food aspect of the contrast is contained in the book beyond a stick of candy that the girl, Mary, carries in her dress pocket. Once it’s gone, she and her brother, Peter, starve until they meet the boy on walkabout.

Marshall emphasizes differences in culture and behavior codes—or “sacred orders,” as we called them in my sociology course—with passages like this one about Mary, who’s rather inhibited:

The things that she’d been told way back in Charleston were somehow not applicable any more. The values she’d been taught to cherish became suddenly meaningless. A little guilty, a little resentful, and more than a little bewildered, she waited passively for what might happen next.

Beyond being embarrassed by nudity, Mary’s internal crisis has a racial element:

It was wrong, cruelly wrong, that she and her brother should be forced to run for help to a Negro; and a naked Negro at that.

But here’s Peter, who is younger and more able to adapt than his sister:

Peter watched him. Inquisitive. Imitative. Soon he too started to brush away the leaves and pluck out the blades of grass.

Marshall uses such obvious language often in Walkabout, occasionally taking an anthropological tone to tell us, for example, “Physically, the Australian Aboriginal is tough,” and describing walkabout in terms of tribal traditions.

The Biblical overtones in the book felt obvious, too, with the Aborigine boy taking a Christ-like role—he even teaches Peter to fish—and sacrificing his life. There’s also this line about a billabong, “The river that ran out of Eden couldn’t have been more beautiful.” And that brings me to the book’s biggest strength: descriptions of the landscape and its birds, plants, and non-human mammals, and observing how the children learn to use and respect nature so they can survive. Walkabout felt most successful when Marshall stepped back and let his characters be characters. I didn’t need him to tell me about their differing value systems, particularly given all he’s able to show through their differences in language, (in)abilities to find food, and comfort wearing clothing.

Up next: Herta Müller’s The Hunger Angel, which has a strong Russian theme.

Disclosures: I read the New York Review Books edition of Walkabout, which I bought myself. I always enjoy speaking with NYRB about translated fiction.