Published in Issue 27

With his second novel, The Flame Alphabet, Ben Marcus has diverged from the path he trod while becoming one of America’s best-known experimental fiction writers. He’s written a plague fantasy told in first-person by a middle-aged, Jewish husband and father living in the suburbs. It is cold and coherent in its execution, with one narrator and a clear plot, and reading it is a crushing sort of experience. It’s a deliberate shift for Marcus into both traditional storytelling and humorless despondency, one he seems to have chosen with care.

It is wholly unlike The Age of Wire and String, Marcus’ first book. There, forty-some darkly absurd short stories form a guidebook to an apocalyptic ur-America, where soil, air, cloth, and food seem to have strange religious significance. Marcus’s second book and first novel, Notable American Women, featured real and fake blurbs, mixing quotes from George Saunders with one from “Ben’s father.” The Flame Alphabet shows none of the sort of fun that characterized the first two books. It is such a dramatic turn for Marcus and such a remorseless tragedy that if it had been published with a self-referential blurb, it could only have been an earnest warning from the author: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

The book begins with the narrator, known only as Sam, getting in the car with his wife, Claire to leave behind their daughter forever. An unreal plague is destroying human communication, and in turn, American society. “It was early December. Year of the sewn-up mouth,” Sam tells us. The plague is first understood to be “language toxicity” found in the speech of Jewish children, although it later affects all adults who hear or read children’s language. Eventually, all efforts to communicate cause adults intense suffering, as the body undergoes “Language death, when the body is saturated.” Sam comes to see words as “a long, slow venom,” and says “that this poison flowed from Jewish children alone, at least at first, we had no reason to think. That suffering would find us in even more novel ways, we had probably always suspected.”

As Sam and Claire endure symptoms akin to radiation sickness, his bitterness devolves into caustic humor.“Maybe this was the quiet before the really fucking quiet,” he says. Sam and Claire are quickly and implausibly separated. Sam drives north alone through New York State and winds up at an institution called Forsythe, where he is forced to search for a cure under the watch of the book’s villain, an anti-Semite named LeBov. Later, away from the facility, Sam muses alone about his wish to have his family back together.

In looking for an explanation for a book like this from Marcus, one that lacks his previous quirks, formal brilliance, and expansive humor, the most plausible conclusion is that he wrote it in order to establish the early history of the world in which his other books are set, to explain the plague that destroyed America and brought about that strange, Dust Bowl era.

One key flaw is that Marcus spends far too much time in the first half of the book cataloguing Sam and Claire’s immense physical suffering without showing how they feel about it. There are scores of sentences like: “In the waiting room neighbors stared at their pee-soaked laps, hacked into fistfuls of cloth. Some went shirtless from pain,” and “Something streamed down my legs when I coughed . . .” Sam’s narration grows ever more obtuse, as if he must toughen up to survive, and his motives and true feelings are given short shrift. The lack of focus on Sam’s feelings creates immense distance between him and the reader, a distance that feels at best like stubbornness on Marcus’s part, at worst an unwillingness to do the kind of work required when presenting a traditional story about a loving and devoted family man. Occasionally Sam insists he’s acting out of love for his family, but his actions and thoughts shift so suddenly—later cheating on his wife, no mention of his daughter for long stretches—that his devotion seems too shallow to even been excused as an ironic pose.

From there the book becomes a jumble. In the second half Sam is shown as fatally isolated, a persecuted man testing letters in search of an alphabet that will save humanity and restore his family to him. Human trials kill hundreds at the Forsythe facility during “speech fever treatments.” Marcus includes historical research and interesting experiments—quotes from Ovid, an alphabet made of ice, Rebus writing—yet it amounts to nothing in this strange world reminiscent of an art installation, or a Burroughs-esque dreamscape, with bird-size moths, soldiers wearing foam helmets to keep out sound, and coils of wire placed in human mouths. Some small hope comes from a “new Hebrew lettering paradigm,” then fades, as it must, apparently in line with the book’s locked trajectory.

At every turn Marcus puts Sam’s thoughts on the darkest path possible, the only justification for this gloom being that this book is meant to explain the plague that wiped out America. Marcus mercilessly grinds his narrator into the ground, literally: isolation and numbness are the only ways left for Sam to survive in such a nightmare place. Marcus’ vision follows old tropes about apocalypse and feel very similar to those Michel Houellebecq uses in his novel The Possibility of an Island, which also relies on terse language driven by nihilistic self-loathing. But where Houellebecq’s characters feel real, Sam’s story doesn’t sound like that of a living character. It’s a tough-guy pose driven by a desire to believe, or to make us believe, he saw it as his job as a man to assume blame for the plague that ended life as we knew it.

At times Marcus’s language is given some air through quick, short chapters that deliver the blow-by-blow of Sam’s cheerless existence. The sentences feel like hard-won prose for Marcus. In a scene before Sam and Claire are separated they are at home in their terribly afflicted state, dripping pus and with blackened gums. Claire, in a rare moment of strength, rolls over to see if Sam wants to have sex. Sam describes her as, “Seeking, it would seem, someone to leak on.” This is disciplined disgust, as unyielding to sentimentality as Houellebecq, but without the rants or manic highs. There might be grim beauty in passages like this one, except that the book is one long dark passage:

Sitting with my wife, whose disgust pulsed over me, I laughed to myself over these assessments, thoughts of a final or irresolvable darkness. . . . The side effects of fighting, the side effects of knowing nothing, the side effects of being done with it and somehow, for no reason I could detect, still alive. One uses one’s deathbed energy to project meaning where none can be found. How does the species possibly benefit from such an action?

Marcus also places Sam in a world rife with anti-Semitism, much of his despair attributable to his fear of persecution. In fact Sam and Claire worship underground: they are “Reconstructionist Jews following a program modified by Mordecai Kaplan,” who practice a “covert method of devotion.” This involves worship by a man and his wife in a small hut over “a Jew hole” in the woods, where an orange cable comes up through the ground. By using a fleshy mechanical “listener” device, or “Moses mouth,” Sam can tap into sermons that are broadcast through the wire by rabbis. A rabbi Sam listens to via the orange cable encourages Jews to embrace blame for the plague. “An incredible opportunity has arisen,” Rabbi Burke says. “We have the chance to take the blame for something extraordinary, an incomprehensible affliction.” These messages trigger thoughts of a greater purpose for Sam. “In blame is a chance to step into responsibility, to make of our bodies absorbent parcels for the accusations of others. . . . He insisted that blame can have no literal meaning; there really is no such thing when you love the Name, our term for Hashem.”

The visions Sam presents are like some of the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes come to life, with Sam propping himself up as the receptacle of all hatred toward Jews. “We had, it seemed to me, succeeded perfectly at being misunderstood,” he says. “Again and again our huts were surveilled, seized, burned, for fear that the Jew was drinking something too important out of these holes, drinking directly from God’s mind, eating a pure alphabet that he alone could stomach. There were the fearful rumors. Such an apparatus, if true, was too good for Jews alone.” This fantastic take on the poisonous idea that Jews tap into secret knowledge they keep from the Gentile world becomes part of the plot later when LeBov tortures Jews at the Forsythe lab, forcing them to search for a cure by tapping into the mysterious underground orange cable together.

Gradually in The Flame Alphabet after so many narrative choices that drop Sam down darker and darker holes, the novel starts to feel false. Marcus’s forebears—among them Burroughs, Houellebecq, Beckett—balance painful absurdity, obscene cruelty, and hyperviolence with the human urge to overcome terror by laughing sometimes, even if the laughter was only in despair. Marcus’s first two books had that kind of balance, making them feel more truthful, but Sam’s resolute despondency feels false. After Sam’s life and everyone else’s have been ruined and the world is a sickened mess, he even goes so far as to wonder why “was it not worse? Why was the person himself not gutted of thought?” Sam’s gloom after years of living alone becomes empty and contrived; it banishes all humor, hope, or notions of salvation. In The Flame Alphabet it feels as if every time Marcus was required to make a narrative choice, he opted for gloom.

Matthew Jakubowski is a freelance writer and a member of the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in Philadelphia.

Published in Issue 27

Published in Issue 27

This English edition of a small German volume (published in 2010 by Suhrkamp) retains its slightly misleading title and authorial attribution: the “war diary” kept by the great Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann in 1944-45 takes up only fifteen pages of the book. According to the textual notes, the extant diary entries were typewritten on six pages, presumably from original, now lost, handwritten copies. (It isn’t clear when or why the transcription was produced.) In those pages, she describes, among other things, the development of a relationship at the end of the war with a Jewish soldier in the occupying British army, Jack Hamesh. The majority of the book is made up of Hamesh’s letters to Bachmann after emigrating to Palestine; the remaining pages consist of a series of annotations and an informed afterword by Hans Höller. While the whole volume is clearly valuable to Bachmann readers, who must be accustomed to fragments at this point, it would be fortunate if the letters could also find an audience among those interested in Jewish and Zionist life writing.

The diary entries comprise two separate, episodic accounts of the end of the war in Klagenfurt, when Bachmann was 18. In the first account, she describes the chaotic circumstances under which she must, like any 18-year-old, plan her future: for example, she signs away her right to go to college in Austria as the price of enrollment in a teacher’s college, thereby exempting herself from military service. The terms of this unfortunate bargain are short-lived: in the fullness of time she will attend several Austrian universities and receive her doctorate. Smaller escapes, though, punctuate these earlier entries. In one instance, the students of the town are sent out at 7 am to dig trenches for the defense of Klagenfurt—”[a]ll the children were there for the digging but not a single teacher”—and are left exposed and defenseless, near factories, when the air raid sirens begin. Full of disgust and outrage at the mendacity of the teachers, Bachmann flees the work site alone on her bicycle. She then refuses to return to the teachers’ college, assuming (correctly, it seems) that she and another deserting friend won’t be missed. Closer to home, she is more calmly defiant. She writes, “I have firmly resolved to carry on reading when the bombs come”—citing Rilke’s Book of Hours and Baudelaire (with minor errors) in French—and then reflects:

Perhaps it’s sinful just to sit and look at the sun. But I can’t go back down in the shelter any more, for hours, with the water running down the walls, and it gets so stuffy it almost makes you faint. You’re not allowed to talk because of the air but still the dull, mute masses in there are unbearable. I find the idea of perhaps perishing down there with the lot of them, like a herd of cattle, horrifying. At least in the garden. At least in the sunshine.

Bachmann famously described the entry of Hitler’s troops into Klagenfurt as the end of her childhood. From these pages, though, it isn’t clear what immediately followed. Here she seems to exist in a liminal zone between self-determination and powerlessness: she has worked out tactics of flight, but not full resistance or solidarity with others. This is an understandable response to an unclear, variable threat. Her good luck has spared her any immediate physical danger; the authorities she encounters are despicable but petty. But the bombings are quite real, as is the threat from the invading Russian army. She concludes these wartime passages with an uncanny image of sharing her bed with her childhood doll, who “can’t say ‘Mama’ any more, nor can I.” “No, there’s no point in talking to grown-ups anymore,” she laments. What will follow this silence: adulthood, or death?

In the subsequent diary entries, she continues to alternate between cynicism about social norms and forthright enthusiasm. When she meets Hamesh in the process of obtaining an identity card (she describes him as “short and on the ugly side”), he asks her peremptorily about her involvement in the Bund deutscher Mädel, the Aryan girls’ organization. She is terribly flustered: while her involvement was fleeting, she can only nod in affirmation, assuming a disavowal would be taken as an admission. She does manages to deny that she was a leader when prompted, but “simply can’t understand why you blush and tremble when you’re telling the truth.” This puzzlement becomes a refrain—she neither knows why Hamesh wants to speak to her again, nor why she’s so nervous when talking to him. When they talk about literature, her confusion and uncertainty immediately clears up: literature is solid ground. Intellectual camaraderie forms the basis for their friendship and affection; it also appears to furnish an introduction to philosophy and social theory for the young Bachmann, whose reading has mostly been literary.

The status of their relationship remains uncertain and somewhat fraught. She claims that everyone was shocked at her “going out with the Jew”; she takes pains both to tell her mother that the relationship is innocent, and to condemn the public bigotry: “I told her I’d walk up and down through Vellach and through Hermagor ten times over with him, even if everyone gets in a stew about it, especially then.” Behind both protestations are intense, inchoate feelings:

We talked until evening and he kissed my hand before he left. No one’s ever kissed my hand before. I’m out of my mind I’m so happy and after he’d gone I climbed up the apple tree, it was already dark and I cried my eyes out and thought I never wanted to wash my hand again. . . . This is the loveliest summer of my life, and even if I live to be a hundred it will still be the loveliest spring and summer.

This evocation not of adolescent love, but of its precursor—wild joy in oneself and others, in defiance of all lessons and social expectations—infects the reader with uneasy delight. As becomes quietly apparent in the Hamesh letters, it doesn’t seem to have made the transition to love. We don’t have Bachmann’s replies, but they must have been disappointingly scant. The force within her euphoria seems, in the end, to have been more basic. toward the end of the “loveliest summer” paragraph she writes: “I’m alive, I’m alive! Oh God, to be free and alive, even without shoes, without food, without stockings.” In his afterword Hans Höller takes pains to link passages in the diary to other writings of Bachmann’s, particularly a section of The Book of Franza in which a similar encounter with a soldier plays out with a difference. He resists, though, a deeper account of how all of these experiences serve to build the literary world of love and death—and of impulsive, passionate childhood and an educated, fragmented maturity—of Bachmann’s entire oeuvre. The bookish quasi-romance is indeed a pivotal experience: finding an interlocutor, a(nother) reader, to share the literary garden, whether or not the bombs fall, whether or not there is anything to be done for community, country or any of a multitude of others. While Bachmann and Hamesh read Marx together, it seems that they will work out the answer to that final question differently.

In an epilogue not present in the German edition, Hans Höller reports that he was able to uncover much of what little information about Jack Hamesh survives. We learn through the diary that he was brought to England from Vienna through the Kindertransport, and that he joined the British Army. Apparently he was born in great poverty and apprenticed to a cobbler at the time of his flight from Vienna in 1938, when he moved to Palestine; he worked on several kibbutzim before joining the army, and returned to Palestine after being discharged. His lack of formal education—which he laments in one of the letters—makes him a surprising intellectual mentor for Bachmann, and it may be that she overstates the significance of their shared literary interests in his life. He rarely mentions books in his letters, which are frankly affectionate and often emotionally raw. More often, he uses the letters as an occasion to reflect on Israel/Palestine, the fate of nations, and his own uncertain destiny and efforts to be optimistic. In an early letter he admits that they didn’t get to know one another particularly well; when he describes Bachmann later as “A great woman, a brilliant researcher, and an ideal mother,” it is both touching and comical. The letters, over time, begin to register the gap between Europe and Israel in reality and imagination. It is hard to imagine what Bachmann made of his statement that “Not one Arab has had to leave his land” in the course of Israeli nation-building; but one also wonders how sincerely Hamesh intended his assurances that her difficulties were much more severe than his own.

Bachmann is a highly performative writer, and it is fascinating to read this early, apparently private document against the many personae and ironies of her later work. It is somewhat curious that this and other juvenilia, such as the “Letters to Felician,” have been translated into English while so much of her critical writing remains unavailable. Authors are not always well served by the publication of their immature writings, and in Bachmann’s case, critics seem eager to assimilate them into the unity of her work, sometimes naively. Adolescent writing is full of self-fashioning and failures of self-fashioning, particularly in diaries. The much more sophisticated treatment of identity, as well as the themes of these brief pages, in all of Bachmann’s mature work is of a different order entirely. If indeed she “just kept quiet about [her] poetry” in conversation with Hamesh, the encounter is necessarily limited. While Hamesh has his limitations as an interlocutor for her, even at this early age, his own words detail a fascinating, at times ambivalent transformation into a citizen of a new land: a role his “dear Inge” would never fully play. They would be interesting to read within, or alongside, a volume of similar letters to Europe from Israel.

Jessie Ferguson is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at Stanford University. Her research focuses on essayism in twentieth-century fiction, and on fictionality and its discontents more broadly.

Published in Issue 27

Published in Issue 27

Michael Kimball’s novella Us originally appeared in the U.K. under the title How Much of Us There Was. Tyrant Books has now brought it out in the United States, where Kimball was born and lives, and his website lists the widespread praise that the book has received. Here are but two of the many accolades: “disarmingly simple, gorgeously structured, and as achingly sad a book as I have ever read. I had to stop a couple of times. I really did” (Matthew Simmons, HTMLGIANT); “Michael Kimball’s Us is heartbreakingly lovely . . . the writing’s a pleasure, and sometimes you just need to read something with weight” (The Paris Review). But a closer examination of Us makes one wonder if the book deserves such rapturous praise.

At first, the book’s content seems likely to be stark and affecting. A man, eventually identified as Grandfather Oliver, is woken in the night by his wife’s shaking and “seizing up.” An ambulance takes Grandmother Oliver to the hospital where she lies for an unspecified time in a coma, until she slowly returns to consciousness. It takes her more time to get back the ability to talk and move, but she does, and is well enough to be discharged. She returns home under the care of her husband. This goes well enough for a while, but both are aware of the preciousness of the time left to them, as expressed in the chapter “How We Slowed Our Time Down”:

We found ways to make our days longer. We followed the sun around our house—from our bedroom and the bathroom in the morning, to the kitchen through noon, the living room through the afternoon, and the dining room for the evening.

At night, we turned all the lights in every room of our house on. We turned the lights on the front porch on. We turned the lights on the back porch and over the garage on too. We wanted to keep the darkness that surrounded our house and us as far away from us as we could.

Inevitably the wife deteriorates, and the husband calls the doctor, “but he said that he couldn’t help her anymore unless we took her back to the hospital. But I couldn’t take her back there or think of any other way to help her anymore.” The couple practice “home death,” and eventually take sleeping pills together. The wife dies; the husband lives on to see to her funeral and burial, and to grieve.

Though this is ostensibly a sad and simple story, two aspects of the writing blunt its emotional impact. Us is told in the voices of two main characters. The first is the husband/grandfather. The second is the unnamed grandson. (Oliver’s wife speaks a few times in his dreams.) This grandson pops up now and then to offer his opinions on death and describe how his grandfather exists after the death of the grandmother. He gives us a picture of what the grandfather does (such as trying to talk to spirits), and supplies certain information (only the necessary information) about family members. Notably, his speech is quite similar, in its orderly sentences, muted tones, and colorlessness, to his grandfather’s.

Here, for instance, is the grandson reflecting on his wife’s recovery from ear surgery:

She slept in our bed by herself and I stayed far enough away so that I would not bother her when she could sleep—even though she still couldn’t really hear—but near enough to her so that I could hear her if she woke or needed anything or needed me.

The grandson refers to relatives of his who had become seriously sick: “Nobody ever really got any better. Everybody died inside a hospital or came home from the hospital and died in their bed.” Compare that to Grandfather Oliver when he relates searching for his wife after her admittance: “Some of the people didn’t move or look at me when I looked inside their hospital room at them. They were dying in different ways and at different speeds.”

While numbness may be appropriate for Grandfather Oliver, who has been woken by his wife’s violent incident, after which his life is never the same, the grandson, who states he’s seen many relatives die “inside a hospital,” surely would feel loss in a personal manner and express it in his own terms. Yet instead of giving the grandson his own way of speaking, Kimball relies on a darker typeface to distinguish him from Oliver, and this is insufficient. The grandson’s language, like his grandfather’s, is filled with repeated words—death, dying, hospital, and so on—and his clauses rarely stray far from the simple. This choice on Kimball’s part denies a two-generation gap in sensibility, and it allows the repetitiveness to lead characters into babble. The effect is soporific. Sweeping generalizations of those who, of course, have to die in a hospital or in their bed go unchallenged and leave me wondering: Where does the grandson want or expect people to die, in the United States, in this current time?

The second aspect of Us that caught me by surprise is the very existence of the grandson. We are more than a third of the way through the novel when he shows up. This may have initially seemed a good idea, but it opens the book to structural issues. The first pages situate readers inside Oliver’s mind in a convincing manner. As the novella goes on we’re shown his thoughts and feelings, but no children or grandchildren are called, or call, and no nephews, nieces, sisters, or brothers visit. Not until Kimball inserts the grandchild into the book do we know Oliver has any family.

A straightforward narrative from the grandfather’s point of view provides a bleak picture, as we imagine him on his own, and it might make his tale match the Paris Review’s description of it as “heartbreakingly lovely.” But there is a family. Why don’t they appear in Oliver’s thoughts? If the purpose of their absence is to underscore how lonely Oliver feels, then what explains the medical personnel and the presence of other patients? The exclusion of every family member from Oliver’s consciousness requires an explanation that Kimball fails to provide.

But let’s consider the possibilities that Oliver is unable to think of family due to his misery, or that at some point in the past there’s been a severe rupture. In either scenario, beyond the medical community no one is there to help. But we know from the grandchild’s words that the family “stayed in the viewing room of the funeral home for all the viewing hours on all those viewing days.” From feeling sympathy for an elderly man without a family, I moved to disliking a selfish old guy who didn’t think much of being a father or maintaining strong ties with others. Oliver’s complete seclusion is a serious subject worth addressing—indicative of a monstrous ego or a harmful codependence—but it goes by without a word. (Exactly why Oliver can’t take his wife back to the hospital is similarly protected from comment or examination.)

Such self-centeredness touches on the above-mentioned problem Kimball has in making two rounded characters. Only Oliver has substance, yet what we learn from his grandson removes the sympathy felt for the grandfather. We hear a lot about Oliver’s love for his wife, and we get very little else. Apparently he can only keep living if his wife stays alive. It’s a common enough occurrence that the remaining spouse dies soon after the other spouse dies, especially if a broken heart is involved, but that isn’t a given in all circumstances. One would expect some hint of what the grandfather thought of his family, or of his attempt to talk about his loss.

Reviewers of Us find its appeal in its style, as best summed up by Time Out Chicago: “The sentences and even paragraphs simulate the stunned but dutiful response to the suffering of a loved one: short, raw and somewhat elliptical, wrapping themselves around the small tasks at hand and the larger questions constantly raised.” How the combination of illness, grief, and death is presented by a writer is one thing; the emotional trauma associated with those subjects is another, and they go unexplored in Us. The reviewers cited on Kimball’s webpage have ideas about what death looks like, and for them this book’s style is what captures their hearts—as they read of the death of a fictional character. We’re not so far removed from the scene of desperate 19th-century readers storming the docks for news of Little Nell, a death that would not have been so affecting—or, perhaps, manipulative—if written in a different style.

Much of what Kimball does is competent and well-crafted. His steady look at the death of a woman and all its consequences comes at a time when so many of us (at times with deep relief) sequester aged parents and other relatives in a home so their deaths can occur antiseptically. But Kimball’s performance is so smooth that it’s bland. Again we come back to the prose style that, as shown above, is almost always unadorned, lacking in resonance and replete with repetitiveness; there’s no flare of poetry, no untidy rhythm, and no excess. No matter the occasion, Oliver will always be inoffensive, never erupting with feelings or using an adjective for no good reason. He is controlled, and the result is gray, uninteresting prose.

In Us the theme of death is nicely wrapped up in a meat-and-potatoes kind of story, with the salt of irony left off the table. If the grandson had been left out of it we would have a bitter and haunting depiction of one man’s empty life, and drawn from that an appreciation of a society that has forgotten its elders and done away with the importance of family and friends, leaving our most vulnerable in the hands of white-coated medicos whose actions at best stall the inevitable trip to the beyond. Us is an earnest book that risks nothing, and bores through its aesthetic drabness. There’s not enough ambition behind it, and that’s something to grieve over.

Canadian writer Jeff Bursey has written reviews and articles for journals in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. His first book, Verbatim: A Novel, was published in October 2010 by Enfield & Wizenty.

Published in Issue 27

Published in Issue 27

Since embracing economic reforms in the early 1990s, India has undergone swift and wrenching changes that are remaking the country from the ground up. As village and farmland give way to tech companies, call centers, factories, and malls, these new landscapes are increasingly peopled by new archetypal characters, much as the similarly radical transformation of the American West brought the world the cowboy.

In this sobering series of profiles laced with memoir and reportage, Siddhartha Deb examines several such figures, including the self-made man, the ubiquitous engineer, the rural farmer, the migrant laborer, and the urban working woman. Through the stories of several Indians from these groups, Deb, a novelist and native of India who teaches at New York City’s New School, reveals a composite portrait of a country in transition that is fascinating, troubling, and—to Western readers—unpleasantly familiar.

There is Chakravarthy Prasad (“Chak”), an engineer and onetime Illinois resident who is building a million-dollar house in a gated community that recalls the McMansions he saw in America. There is Arindam Chaudhuri, the founder of a dubious management school whose famous-for-being-famous image poorly withstands the scrutiny of investigative bloggers. There are middle-class strivers, an “army of Gatsbys” who have embraced the Bhagavad Gita’s warlike philosophy to justify their indifference to the poor—old Hindu wine of caste resignation in new bottles. (Similarly, Chak has adopted a guru who tells him the war on terror doesn’t matter, since one cannot change the world, only oneself.) There is Esther, a migrant waitress in the “unforgiving city” of Delhi who endures an epic daily commute; her boyfriend comes home from a stint in UAE and texts his lover there under Esther’s nose.

A striking barrenness marks many of these lives. Engineer S.S. Prasad claims never to have heard of global warming; he writes “nanopoems” in unintelligible zeroes and ones, then inscribes them invisibly on microchips at his workplace. Employees at tech firms like his are so engulfed by their jobs that happiness companies provide them with on-the-spot physical exercises and word games during the work day.

In some cases, the aridity is literal. Deb spotlights the disaster taking place in the lives of rural Indians in the form of dry wells, deadened soil, and lakes full of chemicals. Having switched from growing millet, many farmers are being driven out of business by the cost of sinking wells for thirstier market crops like soybeans. They are committing suicide by the hundreds of thousands, a profoundly underreported phenomenon.

Then, too, there is the plight of the migrant factory worker. By avoiding the conflation of poverty with squalor, Deb pinpoints what is terribly wrong in a steel-plant barracks full of men from all over India who share no common language, take turns sleeping in a single bed, and piss in a gutter running down the center of the room. They have no job security or upward mobility and few worker protections. More importantly, though, they keep no potted plants or touches of home. There are no women, no children playing, no colorful saris hanging out to dry. In the new India, these men and millions like them are adrift in the worst way: “[They were] cycling in and out of jobs and returning to their villages to recuperate from their hard labor and loneliness before setting out again when the money ran out.”

This is India lurching simultaneously into the Industrial and the Information ages, and even as it churns out new millionaires and creates a small middle class, the trip is destroying many lives. But land-use overhauls and migrations aside, the profoundest change in the subcontinent is voiced most clearly by Chak: India is shifting from a high-context to a low-context culture. In low-context America, people’s interactions focus on the reason that has brought them together, whereas in high-context India people have traditionally interacted in all kinds of ways, building strong social networks. But as villages are bulldozed by office parks, Deb neatly points out, “it would be possible, in some years—or maybe it was already possible—to put the Walkman on in India and ignore the maid coming in to do the cleaning.” Thus goes the loss, for worse or better, of a sense of place.

Signs of this loss are everywhere. The management school’s graduates become its faculty in a Mafia-like family, their fierce loyalty to their school’s culture having seemingly replaced older codes. Jabbar, a Bhopal activist, is a paragon of high-context India, his office crowded with working-class and poor people, yet he has gone almost unnoticed by people in power. His counterpart Sathyu has an internationally recognized organization with a website and visitors from Greenpeace and Bard College; he is building an eco-friendly medical clinic. Yet in his office, “the gas victims seemed to appear only on posters on the walls. . . . You could have efficiency or popular support, international alliances or deep local roots, it seemed, but not both.”

A high-context society, with its rich and varied social ties, can offer its poor a modicum of social protection; its erosion renders their futures, if possible, even more bleak. It is this process Deb captures in meeting after meeting. “In such a landscape, the poor—all those left behind by the creation of a low-context society—were like ghosts.”

The author seldom strikes a false note, with transitions among autobiography, journalism, and history handled deftly. He combines a measured voice and sometimes quiet wit with psychological insight, noting the empty platitudes an instructor feeds to a class of “dutiful” middle-class management students (“‘Leadership is about changing your colors like a chameleon to suit the situation’”) and interpreting the arrogance of a boss doing push-ups in front of his employees (“He was rewarded with embarrassed laughter, which is probably what he wanted”). His eye, too, is as good as a camera. “The bench was made of a plank balanced on bricks, perhaps one of the most common sights in India.”

Most importantly, Deb gets at the quality of the loss that India is undergoing, at what price is paid by a country that builds a hotel containing “‘a separate spa village complex’ . . . which meant that a fake village would replace the real village that had existed here.” The feeling recurs throughout the book in certain words: Incongruous. Fake identity. Displacement. Contradictions. Glittering surfaces. Deference, desire, and nervousness. ‘They don’t know who they are.’ Insecure and uprooted. Lost, unfit somehow. And he is quietly nostalgic for the India that is disappearing, as in the “rough utilitarianism” of a village not yet encroached upon by consumerism: “Here, there would be no escape from the self in objects or in technology . . . no shopping aisles where I could wander, picking out items that momentarily created an image of a better life. There was no escape here except through human relationships.” If India continues to remake itself at its current pace, such places may find themselves becoming ersatz villages. Or ghost towns.

Jenny Blair is a writer and MD in Vermont. She co-edits the literary magazine Brink and is a two-time winner of the National Headliner Award.

Published in Issue 27

Published in Issue 27

Only in 1976—after near fifty years of censure and oblivion—were the mislaid works of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky recovered from amid the Soviet Archives. Scholar Vadim Perelmuter, chancing upon a brief epitaph in the writer Chengueli’s journals, went in search of them: “Today, December 28, 1950, Sigizmund Dominikovich Krzhizhanovsky died, a writer-visionary, an unsung genius. Of whom, in life, not one line was ever published.”

The first English-language publication of Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction would not follow until 2006, three quarters of a century after its conception. His extensive repertory consists principally of short stories, of which there are more than one hundred, as well as five novels. The first of these novels selected for English translation (by Joanne Turnbull) and publication this year through NYRB Classics is The Letter Killers Club.

Of course, all new light cast upon such unloved fictions is kind, soft, and humane. Consequently, certain reviews of Krzhizhanovsky’s work read like the gentle, penitent congratulations of friends for the one just come out a coma after a great many years. This is to say that joy and wonder are touched with regret, distraction, and even private indifference. The inconvenience of such late revelations is practical: how to consider a fiction in the context of a literary conference from which it has been precluded, all of its thoughts, its purposes, pertaining to a history to which it does not fairly belong. Appropriate respects are paid: comparisons to Borges, Beckett, Kafka; Krzhizhanovsky’s writings are, with so many compliments and decorations, wedged in upon their same, full shelf.

Yet, Krzhizhanovsky’s project is positively contemporary, and ingenious. His work expresses a deep and committed science, an “algebra” (as he describes his own project) of language. It is a sharply methodical literature, absorbed by both technical and figurative experiment. It should not be—yet again—shelved. Even dead sixty-two years, Krzhizhanovsky is, by all rights, a new writer and The Letter Killers Club new fiction.

In the novel, a “pure reader” is invited to sit in on the weekly meetings of a secret society of which all members are “ex-writers.” The club’s guiding principle is the renunciation and prohibition of the printed word, all following an incident years prior in which the club’s president was made to give away his library. During meetings, members are known only by nonsense syllables—Tyd, Rar, Das, etc. Every Saturday evening one member, or “conceiver,” takes his turn at telling a story and so demonstrating a “theme.” The novel records in quick and sharp-cut language the “minutes” of meetings attended by the reader. Members’ stories, irregular in both length and density (three pages or forty), make up the better part of the novel. They are systematically punctuated by discussion, dispute, brief and troubled reflection.

Krzhizhanovsky’s intention seems the demonstration of a very particular literary impossibility, which is best expressed in the story “The Bookmark” (gathered in the collection Memories of the Future, also published by NYRB Classics). Therein, the “theme catcher” remembers a “caricature” from an English magazine:

In the first picture, the girl (she’s carrying a basket) has caught up with the receding stagecoach; but to climb up onto the high footboard, she must put her basket down; having scrambled up onto the step, the girl turns around to collect her basket, but the stagecoach has already driven off; in the second picture, the poor girl jumps down, dashes back for her basket then runs after the lumbering stagecoach. She again reaches the step and this time settles her basket on it first; but while she is doing this, the stagecoach picks up speed, and the girl—in the third and last picture—exhausted and out of breath, plumps down in the middle of the road and bursts into bitter tears. . . . The literary stagecoach will not wait, which is why the poet with poetry in hand, given the conditions today, cannot possibly gain the elusive step: if the poet jumps into literature—then poetry is left behind, left out of literature; if poetry manages to attain the step, to attain an artistic level—then the poet, excluded and rejected, is left completely out.

So essential to the character of Krzhizhanovsky’s writing is his early and abiding commitment to music. A musician himself, Krzhizhanovsky identifies a conflict between literature and poetry, where poetry expresses the spontaneous and particular color of the letter, the word; and literature, the systems and structures that exploit words as strict units, in the service of “themes.” The distinction then is between the deliberate structures, which convey themes, and the words that such structures control and extinguish.

In Russian, as in English, Тема (theme) refers, independently, to a theory of musical analysis developed by Rudolph Reti during the early twentieth century. It is a melodic or harmonic sequence—the “material” which iterates throughout a work, giving structure, though undergoing modulations, variations, and evolutions. Reti writes specifically of “the thematic process.” He insists upon the importance of a deep and certain unity, “homogeneity in the inner essence,” that still allows for “variety in the outer appearance,” such that a composer “changes the surface but maintains the substance of his shapes.” Reti writes of thematic transformation, compression, dispersion, the “thinning” and ”filling” of themes, as well as “polythematism.”

Given his musical education, Krzhizhanovsky was almost certainly familiar, if only somewhat, with this very concentrated and particular notion of theme. Das’s story, the longest in The Letter Killers Club, demonstrates more explicitly the extent of Krzhizhanovsky’s interpretation.

A scientist concocts a species of parasitic microorganisms or “vibrophags,” which, infiltrating the brain, feed upon “vibrations, on the energy-producing discharge of nerve cells.” The same scientist then develops a strain of vibrophags that parasitizes “only the motor nerves, insinuating itself between will and muscle,” such that affected persons lose control over their own musculature.

Finally, this discovery is brought to bear, first on mental patients, and then upon the population at large. An engineer imagines a “single, central innervator” or “ex,” which might control and direct, collectively, a population’s muscles. Eventually, all persons, save a few politicians and scientists, are made into ‘ex-persons.’ Their bodies are controlled by “exes,” which compel them to work, as automatons, in factories. The ex has its “precise, musical score.” Ex-persons walk with “a jerky yet metronomic gait, rapping out exactly two steps per second.”

Despite their total, physical subjugation, the minds of such automatons remain intact. Yet, when two or three are finally emancipated from the ex, they fall to pieces, sobbing and convulsive. Just so, it is the Theme that instructs and compels words, that necessarily suppresses their specific, internal energies and momentums. They are put to work, made to serve a “single, central” thematic mechanism, its “score.”

Fev’s later story is of a peculiar vision in Venice, wherein the teller, seated on a restaurant terrace, imagines himself surrounded by all the thousands of persons to have died the same day:

. . . thousands upon thousands of agonies prevented me from seeing the day: the thousands of suns tumbled down into darkness; I saw a multitude of wax-like, sharp-featured faces with bulging white eyes; a sweetish decay threading my nostrils to my brain would not let me think or live. I remember it pierced me almost physically. I sat down at a little sidewalk table, the waiter brought me a place setting and at just that moment I saw thousands of them—lying on tables, mouths slack, slowly growing cold, helpless and frightening, banished from today to never. I did not eat my slowly cooling minestrone; my mind was feverishly trying to step out of that accursed black square. Then suddenly to the rescue came my theme. It flooded me all at once. In its grip, I remember, I rose mechanically quickly paid the . . .

Then, it is the same, notorious “theme” that flashes upon him, in order that he should forget his horror, only to rise “mechanically” from his chair. It is this briefest story that will decide the novel’s troubled end.

Krzhizhanovsky’s works are brave and imaginative experiments in structure, in the fictional potentialities of structure. There is in his writing the Dostoevskian tendency to put themes in the mouths of his characters, and of his characters’ characters, such that a finished fiction consists, essentially, of durations, proportions, and internal harmonies, of deep thematic and linguistic polyphonies.

As to the particular structure of The Letter Killers Club, it would seem driven by a dark and telling pleasure: the slow and meticulous cultivation of pure possibilities, raised only to die on the vine. Indeed, all stories told therein die quick and natural deaths precisely because not put down in words.

Christiane Craig is an American student of literature living in Paris. She has worked as a proofreader and assistant on several of The Cahier Series’projects.

Published in Issue 27

Late last century, Geoff Dyer visited the Leptis Magna ruins in Libya and experienced the atheist’s equivalent of a revelation. In a Prospect essay from 2000 he describes walking through the Palaestra, “an expanse of grass and scattered columns,” where he was suddenly seized by

the sense—which I’ve had in only a few places in the world—of entering not so much a physical space as a force-field, where time stands its ground . . . [Leptis Magna] is not a place you enter, but the dream-space of the past: a zone.

Grass and scattered columns? Metaphysical insights and implications? A force-field beyond time? Fans of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker—in which the unnamed title character leads two men, known only as “Writer” and “Professor,” into an abandoned disaster area called the Zone—will recognize the terrain immediately. When Dyer published an expanded version of the essay in his 2003 travel book Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, he didn’t settle for mere allusion; in the book Leptis Magna is no longer a zone; it is now the Zone. Pivoting off the sight of the ruins, Dyer writes in Yoga,

If it weren’t for Stalker, I’m not sure I would ever have realized that the place I wanted to be—and the state I wanted to be in—was the Zone. Before I saw Stalker, I only had the need, the longing. In some sense I might have been to the Zone prior to seeing Stalker, but part of being in the Zone is realizing you’re in the Zone, and since I didn’t know there was such a thing as the Zone, I was not really in it.

Now we have Zona, Dyer’s book-length explication of the film that he has been mulling over in print for more than a decade. Like the film’s journeying hero, who devises his route by randomly tossing bolt nuts and trudging after them, he’s taken his time getting to the point. But the end result is revealing; despite its critical trappings, Zona reads like a personal history, even more so than Dyer’s many actual personal histories.

Of Dyer’s other books, Zona most resembles Out of Sheer Rage, his 1997 paean to D.H. Lawrence. That too is a self-examination disguised as an exegesis—of “the writer who had made [Dyer] want to become a writer.” But he barely discusses his initial encounters with Lawrence’s writing or the reasons why Lawrence made him want to write in the first place. (For that you’ll have to read his introduction to the Modern Library edition of Sons and Lovers, included in his 2011 omnibus Otherwise Known as the Human Condition.) Instead, Out of Sheer Rage is infamously a record of its own creation, a book about writing a book. At every point the action is occurring now, because every anecdote, digression, and close reading exists only to explain how the book came to be. Like everything that Dyer has written to this point, it feels relentlessly youthful, a celebration of the here and now and all the ways—sex, travel, drugs, books, nervous breakdowns—that we can fill it.

Same for the wonderful essay “Sacked,” also from Otherwise. Ostensibly a chronicle of Dyer’s first and only experience being fired, it’s actually a tour through his post-collegiate years. The job itself is a MacGuffin— it turns out that the initial ten pages of memoir are merely a setup for Dyer’s explanation of who he is, at the desk, at the very moment he writes. Looking at his diary from that time, Dyer boasts,

It meant nothing to me, that job. Compared to the books, the films, the parties, the drugs, the women, the sex, the laughing, the drinking, the clubs, and the friends, that job—and the career of which, had I been unlucky, it might have formed a part—was insignificant.

The soul of Zona, however, is defiantly in the past, amid that riotous procession of drugs and movies that “Sacked” commemorates. As such, this is the first of his books that that reads like the work of an older man. Which isn’t to say that the book is crotchety or nostalgic or even more stylistically reserved than usual—he still writes in the same charming, scholarly free-associative register, and his ability to synthesize arts criticism and memoir remains nonpareil. But Zona, though structured as a present-tense tour through Tarkovsky’s ruminative pseudo-sci-fi film, is really a reminiscence of Dyer’s past viewings. “This book is an account of watchings, rememberings, misrememberings, and forgettings,” he writes in an early footnote, “it is not the record of a dissection.” Out of Sheer Rage, by contrast, unspools into wilder, more unforeseen territory, but could nevertheless be aptly described as a dissection.

“The first few times I saw Stalker were during a phase in my life when I took LSD and magic mushrooms quite regularly,” Dyer explains, as if we couldn’t have guessed. This admission comes during his description of a scene midway through the film, when the three exhausted travelers lie down by a stream and fall asleep while discussing the role of art and artists in society. We then get an extended footnote about the role of age in determining one’s own personal canon of films. “I suspect it is rare for anyone to see their—what they consider to be the—greatest film after the age of thirty,” Dyer writes. “After fifty, impossible.” (Incidentally, he turns 54 this year.) By seeing Stalker when he did, his “capacity for wonder was . . . subtly enlarged and changed.”

Perfectly understandable. As he says, we’ve all had our own moments of “enlargement” thanks to art, moments that are by definition the product of our being a certain age. But then, Dyer, who (I say with great gratitude and respect) has written some of the most irrepressibly immature and self-obsessed books I’ve ever read—but whose saving grace has always been his self-awareness—goes full Dad:

It happens that the phase of my getting into serious cinema . . . overlapped with the intensely creative period of what might be called mainstream independent filmmaking, when American directors, having absorbed the influences of the European auteurs, carved out the freedom to realize their cinematic ambitions. I saw Taxi Driver when it was first released, and Apocalypse Now (and Jaws and Star Wars, which, together with the financial catastrophe of Heaven’s Gate, heralded the end of this phase).

I saw Stalker slightly later but I saw it when it came out, within a month of its release, when Tarkovsky was at his artistic peak. I saw it, so to speak, live.

Beyond the first paragraph’s cursory, obvious treatment of contemporary film history, this passage is unique in Dyer’s writing for being so blatantly nostalgic. Even when he occasionally wrote with a blasé, seen-it-all-before weariness, it never before registered as so resigned and reflective. In “Editions of Contemporary Me,” an essay on jazz in Otherwise, he describes the “evangelical zeal” that he developed for house and techno music in the early 1990s, when he would have been in his early 30s. More recently, in 2006, Dyer rapturously described the artist Idris Khan’s composite photographs as “an out-of-body experience made flesh.” In both cases Dyer appears to have experienced the “wonder” that he values so strongly in Zona, despite his relatively advanced age. Perhaps music and visual art are different; tellingly, Zona’s age-specific criteria for valuing art only extends to movies, though this seems bizarre coming from a writer who has so seamlessly integrated photography, prose, poetry, music, and now film into his personal canon.

So, what could account for the sudden fuddy-duddification of Geoff Dyer, whose recent novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi contained extended odes to cocaine and anilingus? It’s worth considering his subject. Stalker is foremost a movie about time and epiphany. The Stalker himself (played by the hunched and looming Alexander Kaidanovsky) is a beaten man with a beleaguered family and a prison record. The Zone, assumed to be the byproduct of a meteorite or alien invasion, is heavily guarded by police, and the “stalkers” who guide people across its border are more like underground shamans than a discrete professional class. This particular monkish journeyer routinely risks his life to escort other lost souls because the Zone is the only place on earth he feels useful and fulfilled; outside he has only a harried and angry wife and a disabled daughter, who may or may not have inherited her handicap because of her father’s experience in the potentially radioactive Zone. The Stalker is a natural born seeker, but one with a rapidly declining faith in his only reliable source of transcendence.

When the Stalker returns from his trip with Writer and Professor, he is in despair, convinced that no one cares about the Zone as much as he does. He’s a proselytizer without an audience, which is nearly indistinguishable from a madman. But the movie’s final shot is haunting, miraculous even. Dyer calls it “one of the all-redeeming moments of any art form,” and I would add: Spoiler Alert. Stalker’s daughter, Monkey, alone in a room at home, directs her silent attention to a table, where three glasses begin to move as if by telepathy. Visually the shot is magnificent, simultaneously simple and unbelievable. But its thematic implications are even more inspiring: rather than a failure and the possible cause of his daughter’s handicap, the Stalker is revealed to be a true seer. The supernatural forces to which he’s devoted his scanty life do indeed exist, not in a quarantined no-man’s land but in his own home.

Though his life may be tragic, the Stalker’s faith is heroic—he’s right about the one thing in life that he cares most about, even if he likely won’t ever know it. Stalker is open-ended enough to function widely as a metaphor, but my preferred reading corresponds with Dyer’s: Stalker is an artist, sacrificing his own stability to guide strangers to profundity. By Dyer’s own admission he himself has passed the point of ever again finding a new Zone, a film that will move or unsettle him like Stalker did. So Zona is more soberly pensive than Out of Sheer Rage, and lacks its structure of ongoing inquiry. It is Dyer’s attempt to guide people down the path he took to get to an earlier revelation decades ago. It’s not his most inspired work, but it’s essential for anyone looking to discover the origins of his extraordinary voice and career.

John Lingan is a contributing editor to The Quarterly Conversation.

Published in Issue 27

DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY:
Todos los cuentos by Cristina Fernádez Cubas. Tusquets, 2008.
Los últimos percances by Hipólito G. Navarro. Seix Barral, 2005.
Parpadeos by Eloy Tizón. Anagrama, 2006.
La vida ausente by Ángel Zapata. Páginas de Espuma, 2006.
La familia del aire: Entrevistas con cuentistas españoles by Miguel Ángel Muñoz. Páginas de Espuma, 2011.

I

Collections of short stories are generally considered difficult to market, and thus they’re often looked down upon by editors who acquire new works of literature in the United States. This fact is no less true when it comes to editors who acquire works of foreign literature translated into English, an already notably under-represented group. To make matters worse, what stories that do get translated are often lumped into anthologies of what you might call stories from over there, which obscure the full range of an author’s talent beneath the idea that one story is a representative sample.

This is all very important in the case of Spanish literature, which in recent decades has seen a rebirth of the possibilities of the short story. For authors of what’s called the New Spanish Short Story, this tendency has hidden a great burst of creativity that began in the early 1980s and flowered during the 1990s and 2000s (the few stories that have been translated have been relegated to obscure editions unavailable in the United States). From the stories of the fantastic by Cristina Fernádez Cubas to the structural inventions of Hipólito G. Navarro and the surrealism of Ángel Zapata, Spanish short story writers have created an exciting and diverse body of work marked by its openness and dedication to pushing the boundaries of the form.

The renaissance of the Spanish short story is generally considered to begin with the 1980 publication of Cristina Fernádez Cubas’ Mi hermana Elba (“My Sister Elba”). Defining literary movements and influence is rather tricky, but contemporaries such as Enrique Vila-Matas have noted, “she gave us a brilliant book, outside the fashions of the moment, that opened a road for the rebirth of the short story among us.” (La familia del aire, pg 54) That shift, coming a few years after the death of the dictator Franco, helped writers open the form and break with the past both in terms of style and content, moving away from social realism and toward new and freer structures with greater expressive possibilities.

The brilliance of Cubas’ stories springs from the use of the fantastic, the small elements of unreality that exist alongside otherwise commonplace events. The result is a narrative logic that is slightly askew. With this logic she creates strange physical transitions that mirror the ephemeral but seemingly real transitions from youth to adulthood, or from conventionality to independence.

In the story“Mi hermana Elba,” the adult narrator rediscovers her childhood diary, leading her to describe the years she and her sister Elba spent as isolates at a convent school. One night while sneaking through the nun’s quarters with her only friend, Fatima, a nun approaches. The narrator panics, but Fatima leads her to the corner where they hide. The nun walks by, staring right at them but not noticing; the girls have entered one of the mysterious spaces where you can disappear and yet still be there. It gives a certain power to them as long as they are uninterested in the adult world. Elba, the youngest, always trails behind, sometimes lost, her voice pleading for her sister, as if she is haunted by what is to come. Later, after the narrator has turned her attention to boys, Elba dies in an accident. In the shocking last paragraph the narrator reads from her journal entry on the day of the funeral.

Era el 7 de agosto de un verano especialmente caluroso. En esta fecha tengo esritas en mi diario las pablabras que siguen: <<Damián me ha besado por primera vez>>. Y, más abajo, en tinta roja y gruesas mayúsculas: <<HOY ES EL DÍA MÁS FELIZ DE MI VIDA>>.

It was the 7th of August of an especially hot summer. On that day I had written in my diary the following words: “Damián kissed me for the first time.” And farther down in red ink and thick capital letters: “TODAY IS THE HAPPIEST DAY OF MY LIFE.”

In that one brief paragraph Cubas perfectly captures the transition from childhood with its attendant self-absorption. At the same time she lets Elba’s haunting voice hover, unexplained, a kind of phantom. Whatever it is, the narrator, who refrains from giving her adult reaction to the experience, seems uninterested in examining it, and the reader is left to wonder what that adult has thought of the events since then.

In addition to considering the transition to adulthood, many of Cubas’ stories follow women as they find their independence. In “Los altillos de Brumall” (“The Attics of Brumall”) a young woman must regain her independence from her old village priest as he tries to control her with a blackberry jam that makes her long to return a forgotten place where the church is the only institution. Or in “El lugar” (“The Place”) a young bride suddenly transforms into a model housewife, but that transition, and each of the increasingly strange ones she makes, are but a search for an unavailable freedom. It is only when she dies and is put in the great family vault with its gothic statues of angels that she finds a peace of her own. Each of these stories shows how, during the escape from youth or from the powerful forces of convention, Cubas forces her characters to interpret the strange effects of those confrontations.

Cubas’ prose is elegant, and there is a calmness to the pacing that evolves at a novelistic pace. That careful attention to detail also means that over 30 years she has published just the five collections contained in Todos los cuentos, (each collection containing but 4 long stories). The expansive framework allows her to create little worlds filled with the strange and grotesque. From the abbey of nuns who kill unwanted village cats in “Mundo” (“World”) to the pale young shut-in who is an idiot around his parents but completely lucid when the narrator sneaks into his room “La venta del jardín” (“The Garden Window”), her command of the short story form is masterful.

II

Hipólito G. Navarro’s work is marked by a deep devotion to the short story. For Navarro, the critical element to each story is to tell the same things in ways that, at least in appearance, seem completely different. In each story in 2005’s Los últimos percances (“The Latest Misfortunes”), he continually explores the short story, either restructuring the form, describing the process of its creation, or playing with its actual role outside the literary. But it’s important to note that Navarro’s playfulness is not limited to the metafictional realm. His work is also full of humor that underlies the disappointments his characters often experience.

El aburrimiento, Lester (“The Boredom, Lester”), often cited by writers and fans of the short story as one of the more important collections of the new Spanish short story, continually reworks the form so thoroughly that none of its stories resemble one another; of all Navarro’s collections, it also contains his most intricate stories. “Semillas, simientes y pilatos” (“The Chinese Chest”) is about a Chinese chest with a lacquered landscape on the side of it. The only way to open the chest is to know the correct order to press the elements of the scene. A grandfather explains to his grandson how it works and then begins telling a story that explains the order of the buttons one must click. The grandfather’s fantastical story is funny, full of non sequiturs and comments his daughter has to shout down lest he give the boy bad ideas. Finally, in a typically Navarro turn of the comically futile, the chest is opened, and after all the involvement of the story within a story, the reward turns out to be three magic seeds that are thrown away by the daughter. The reward, clearly, is not really important, it is the search via narrative that is the key. “Semillas” is the best example of Navarro’s love of story. The game shows how stories encode knowledge, in this case the combination to the chest, and how that knowledge shifts as stories shift according to the whims of the teller.

While Navarro’s interest in playing with language and structure is always evident, his stories can also have a personal edge that burrows into his characters and finds them alone, never quite getting what they want, as if some great joke has been played on them. “El tren para Irún, por favor?” (“The Train to Irún, Please?”) is one of his most personal stories. The linguistic game here is that every sentence is a question, but each question leads the narrator closer and closer to his father, whom he will meet when the train he is on arrives in Irún. The rhetorical search of the narrator’s internal monologue parallels the train journey, and each of these parallel the search for meaning within a story.

Los tigres albinos (“The Albino Tigers”)and Los últimos percances, continue with the inventions of El aburimento, but instead of longer and elaborate stories, Navarro condenses his stories into dense mediations that find the characters closed in, isolated. “Base por altura por dos” (“Height Times Width Times Two”) interweaves two narrators, one a painter the other a writer. Both remember a summer years ago when they pushed their twin off a balcony to his death. The writer notes that his twin loved to paint, and their mother still has his paints; the painter notes his twin loved to write and their mother still has his stories. In the game of doubles the question becomes, which twin fell; likewise, one can also ask who is really constructing this story? Has one twin become the other in an act of guilt? It is the back and forth between the two twins, each melancholy in their descriptions, that makes this characteristically open-ended story a dark re-envisioning of survivor’s guilt.

Y, claro, ahora, desde esta posición de privilegio, nosotros, los de hoy veinticinco o treinta años después, completos y enteros el uno con el otro afortunadamente, uno pintando—no importa cuál—,el otro con los folios—no importa quién—, constuimos a nuestra manera similar y diferente el justo muro que eleve las barandillas para que esos niños que retozan hoy en otra arena terminen sus juegos sin los accidents previsibles, y continue sin mancharse de tragedia el porche bajo las acacias donde a veces se aburren las parejas por las noches atravesadas de grillos del verano, y donde en otro tiempo, quién lo diría, hilvanan los abriles con los mayos los pespuntes musicales de los ruiseñores.

And, clearly, now, after that privileged position, we, twenty or thirty years later, fortunately complete and made whole one another, one painting—it’s not important which—the other with the papers—it’s not important who—we made in our own way, similar and different, the proper wall that raises the railing so that those children who today play in their own sand finish their games without incident, and continue without staining with tragedy the balcony below the acacias, where from time to time the couples are bored during the summer nights filed with crickets, and where in other times, who’ll say, sew the Aprils to the Mays with the musical backstitches of the nightingales.

Despite all the narrative games and metafictional constructs, there is always a sense of humor. In “Las notas vicrias” (“The Vicar’s Grades”), two teenage boys are given an old piano, and they spend hours practicing with it. At the same time, the father of one of the boys, who gave them the piano, rents out an old cabin to a stranger who no one in town knows. One day the boys go to the piano to play it, but it sounds terrible, and everything they learned to play sounds wrong. Then they see the card of the piano tuner, and it is obvious they had learned to play on an out of tune piano—everything they know is now wrong. One of Navarro’s cosmic jokes has been played, but the boys get their revenge: the old cabin where the stranger/piano tuner lived mysteriously burns down. The balance between the experimental, the experiential, and the humorous are what make Hipólito G. Navarro’s stories so original.

III

Eloy Tizón first came to prominence with his collection Velocidad de los jardines (“The Speed of the Gardens”), which was known for its lyric and perhaps even baroque writing style. Parpadeos (Blink), on the other hand, is stripped down in its language, and from the first story, “Pájaro llanto” (The Crying Bird), the focus is on something desperate. As the story opens the narrator says that for the first time in his life he has heard a bird crying. The narrator takes it as an emblem of his daily isolation, a life lived amongst millions of anonymous people. In a moment that sets the tone for the collection the narrator says,

No moriré por esto, lo sé; apretaré los dientes y seguiré adelante con mi vida espartana, y después de unos cunatos meses de soledad seré como todo el mundo; seré tan feliz y desgraciado como el resto de la gente en los álbumes de fotos, ni más ni menos, y seré único y no me diferenciaré en nada de los demás. Seré una foto.

I will not die that way, I know that; I will grit my teeth and continue on with my spartan life, and after a few months of solitude I will be like the rest of the world; I will be so happy and unhappy like the rest of the people in photo albums, neither more nor less, and I will be the only one and I won’t be able to tell the difference between myself and anyone else. I will be a photo.

The routine that hides one’s life is evident in El inspector de equipajes (“The Baggage Inspector”), where for ten years a cuckolded, then divorced, airport baggage inspector lives a life of complete frugality so he can put on his finest suit and deposit his meager savings every Saturday in a bank. After ten years he decides to withdraw the money little by little, living his life in reverse. But one does not recover the past that way, and in one moment he sees the teller, the one he has visited every Saturday for ten years, age instantly. He sees that his emotionless life is actually the reconstruction of it through surrogates,

Él le está agradecido por ocuparse de la contabilidad y del estado de sus ahorros que Iriarte fue entregándole como un pretendiente cada sábado a lo largo de nueve años sin tregua, sin saber que eran para esto y la vida en común de señales de que ha comenzado a arreglarse.

He was grateful to her for looking after the accounting and the state of his savings, which Iriarte had delivered to her like a suitor every Saturday during nine years without a purpose, without knowing that they were for this, nor that a clandestine life of signals had begun to arrange itself.

Tizón applies that everydayness to old stories too, imagining the characters in the Heidi series as adults. Heidi is an administrative assistant, Clara an artist, and her father on trial for fraud. The lives are disappointments. In another continuation of a popular work, Mr. Spock is a confused bisexual condemned to penal colony on a moon because he accidently saw his captain naked. In some way or another these characters overcome their solitude, and whether it is of Vulcan logic, Swiss mountains, or big cities, what remains is more than just a photo. The great strength of Tizón is to capture that idea with such disparate stories.

IV

Ángel Zapata is a surrealist, a theorist of the short story who also works as a professor of creative writing (the only one of the four), and his writing is informed by a tight adherence to his theories. For Zapata, clever, well-crafted stories from specialists are just one more product to sell. What he is looking for is an “aperture, and engagement and a mode of experience that allows one to enter the life that another is giving you.” (La familia del aire, pg 125) His theoretical ideas are evident in “Días de sol en Metrópolis” (“Sunny Days in Metropolis”), where a frustrated man narrates the preparations for a party. He doesn’t want to do it, feeling he’s being emasculated, and between arguments with his wife he compares himself to Superman, who, of course, doesn’t have to put up with party preparation. But that rage turns the story inward, and the two stories merge and grow strange: Superman has to fight an invasion of mutant geese because the people are afraid of everything. In the end, after making foie gras factories for the geese, Superman, with nothing left to do, ends up using his laser vision to open cans of fish, just as the narrator does with his hands. The trick here is that the story, although apparently in third-person, is actually in first; just as he has been since Sigel and Shuster created him, Superman here is a projection of the author’s weaknesses. The narrator becomes Superman, but since he is still the narrator, nothing really changes.

“Mientras dicen adios” (“While They Say Goodbye”) is a Beckett-like experiment that from the first line asks the reader to imagine something they are already imagining:

Imaginen la estepa. ¿Qué estepa? Igual me da: una estepa cualquiera.

Imagine the steppe. Which steppe? It’s all the same to me; any steppe.

Zapata puts the reader on guard—reality is not here, but this isn’t reality in the first place. On the steppe is a truck driver in his cab, and he sees a man on the horizon, his arms outstretched like a sleepwalker. He is not one, however, “just an imbecile that looks like one,” and he comically keeps his arms outstretched at all times. Zapata replaces the first illusion with another. The two of them sit in the cab and attempt to say something concrete about themselves, but all they can arrive at is the idea that not having an answer is the most truthful answer one can have. In that deep isolation that the narrator continues to remind the reader to imagine, the best the two men can say is, “hope is the last thing you can lose.” Yet the statement is also an empty truism, especially since they are not hopping for anything. Only when a circus troop passes by are they able to escape the steppe and transform from stagnant to restless. But that restlessness is unsaid—the narrator tells the reader not to imagine it. The story after the story, a common literary device, is not important, yet obviously for Zapata to explicitly say that makes the emphasis even more pronounced. It is that kind of emphasis that make Zapata’s work the most challenging of any of these authors and a find for lovers of the surreal.

While there are many others Spaniards currently focusing on the short story, Cubas, Navarro, Tizon, and Zapata are considered among the most important. It is difficult to find one uniting principle to their work, which is for the good. Reading any one of these authors will expose the reader to a masterful range of ideas that are marked with a great devotion—to not only to the short story as a genre but its expansion and rejuvenation.

Paul Doyle is a writer, teacher, and web developer based in Seattle. He writes about literature and film, especially Spanish and Arabic language literature, at By the Firelight. He was recently published in the literary journal Under Hwy 99.

Published in Issue 27

Published in Issue 27

There’s a rarely acknowledged fallacy at the heart of both book reviewing and that loftier and more expansive discipline, literary criticism: the judgments that critics put forth are mostly subjective—albeit based on evidence, argument, and elucidation—and each critic works with his or her own rubric. Even so, we must acknowledge that whatever we hold as our traditional rules of book reviewing must at times be set aside when the work in question is sufficiently experimental or, simply, unusual.

Such is the case with the novels of Lars Iyer. A lecturer in philosophy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Iyer is the author of Spurious—which won The Guardian’s “Not the Booker Prize” last year—and, now, Dogma, a sequel to the previous work. Both books are novels in name only—bookstores require these convenient taxonomies. In reality Iyer has written scabrous philosophical comedies about two men—W., a moderately successful writer and intellectual, and his layabout failure of a friend, Lars Iyer. The plots follow their delirious, often drunken, conversations about life, religion, and the end of the world (which they believe is soon approaching). They’re like two very well read David Mamet characters, skydiving without parachutes and laughing all the way down.

The Iyer character narrates the books, and he actually says very little. Most of the text is W. incessantly hectoring his friend, telling him that he’s a wastrel, a drag on his own life and work, a ghastly mess, and various other forms of disappointment. Spurious began its life as a blog—something I only learned after reading—and the book does, in retrospect, have a bloggy feel: the chapters are short and jumpy; there’s almost no organizing principle; and W.’s pronouncements tend to have an off-the-top-of-my-head kind of spontaneity, albeit offered with humor and even brilliance. Here’s one of W.’s typical rants, from Spurious:

Which one of us is Kafka and which Brod?, W. muses. We’re both Brod, he says, and that’s the pity of it. Brods without Kafka, and what’s a Brod without a Kafka?

We are both Brod, W. says, and Brod for one another. When an ass looks into the gospels, no apostle looks back; when Brod looks into Kafka, it’s only Brod who looks back. I am his Brod, W. tells me, but he is my Brod, too.

I am his idiot, but he is mine, and it’s this we share in our joy and laughter, as we wake each day into the morning of our idiocy, wiping the sleep from our eyes and stretching.

This is how it goes for these “mystics of the idiotic.” W. is the pontificator; Iyer is his amanuensis, recording, listening, rarely chiming in, absorbing the fire hose of his ramblings. Kafka is their god, with various other European intellectuals of the modernist Jewish varietal occupying lesser places in the pantheon.

Little happens over the course of Spurious. There is no progression per se, except in Iyer’s flat, which is being consumed by mold. When Dogma opens, the mold, or “damp,” has receded, but now the apartment is infested with rats. One plague leaves, another enters.

Dogma has slightly more story than Spurious, though you might need a magnifying glass to find it. For part of the book, W. is on a lecture tour through the American South. The sense of an impending apocalypse is now more acutely felt, though occasionally the two men find solace in “Dogma,” a sort of religious code that may be intended to form the heart of this book but is quickly lost in the hurricane of chatter. As in Spurious, W. and Iyer wander (it’s not always clear where; there are no real “scenes”), exchange religious parables (Iyer is a Hindu; W. appears to be a lapsed Jew), and prattle on. Occasionally W. lets loose with some criticism of capitalism (“How long was it before market forces triumphed?, W. wonders. How long before competitiveness did away with friendship and community?”), but Iyer, the author, is not interested in building a sustained argument.

It is here that Dogma forces me to question the utility of my traditional reviewer’s rubric. Because anyone reading Iyer’s work and expecting pathos or unity of time, structure, and narrative—any of those pesky shibboleths of the novel—will be disappointed. On the other hand, these books, if considered under the broader banner of “fictions,” are genial entertainments—like encountering your favorite college professor slumped over a bar, desperate for a willing listener.

A professor himself, Iyer is an omnivorous consumer of the humanities. There doesn’t seem to be a European artist or intellectual who he hasn’t chewed over. And his related ability to invoke anyone from Wittgenstein to the Austrian poet George Trakl is a crowd-pleaser for those readers who appreciate writers who are voracious in their appetites. Moreover, his characters’ overriding sense that we are living in some sort of pre-apocalyptic time—fated to be undone by climate change, civilizational decay, or our own incipient madness—seems to reflect something authentic about our own unstable reality. When these thoughts are communicated in darkly, desperately humorous ramblings, there is then a lot to enjoy, if not much to move you.

Well steeped in the Western canon, Spurious and Dogma at times reminded me of the experimental novels of David Markson. While there isn’t any of Markson’s encyclopedic sensibility, the books share a tendency to accrete information, often of a very dark bent, and they are attuned to mortality’s quickening approach. Like Markson, Iyer repeats himself and continually returns to the same things, seeking perhaps to create an impression of something, rather than to communicate the thing itself.

And yet, that leaves us sifting through the pile in hopes of finding something to hold onto. I appreciate Iyer’s references; his worshipful excitement is infectious; and there’s a welcome way in which these books feel quite up-to-date, such as a funny anecdote when W. becomes addicted to the game Civilization 4, destroying one newly purchased, unopened copy before he can relapse. Iyer has distinguished himself as a writer of great comic ability, and I would certainly snap up anything else he might write to see how he deploys this blend of erudition and wit.

But in the end, it’s hard to divorce oneself from the notion that these books are insubstantial (however deliberately), and that we enjoy the mind behind them more than the books it produced. Spurious and Dogma ask us to forgo the pleasures of story without leaving us much to feast on in its stead. Pursuing one of the book’s threads—the narrator’s infested apartment, W.’s academic life, their road trip through the U.S.—with even half-hearted attention would have left a far more solid foundation on which Iyer could present his monologues. The voice, after all, requires a body.

One can still find tantalizing fragments of satire here—for example, W.’s “college is going to specialize in sport instead” of academics—but this kind of imaginative brio is mostly left in reserve. Spurious and Dogma also lack the formal innovation of Markson’s work while failing to stake out new ground in the admittedly difficult terrain of experimental fiction. I had fun reading these books, but they left me little to savor or to long remember. Unfortunately, that makes them more Brod than Kafka.

Jacob Silverman is a contributing editor for the Virginia Quarterly Review. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, and many other publications.

Published in Issue 27

Published in Issue 27

The lodestar of modern Catalan letters died in 1983, with little recognition outside her homeland. In part it was the twentieth century that had occluded her. She spent her most productive years exiled by choice from Franco’s Spain, every few years sending home another manuscript to a country that at best discouraged her language, at worst outlawed it in the street. (DON’T BARK, read the signs in Barcelona government offices; SPEAK THE LANGUAGE OF THE SPANISH EMPIRE.) Her later years saw the return of Catalan prizes and Catalan bestsellers, and she regularly claimed both distinctions. But she continued to write at a double remove—from an anonymous existence in Geneva, for a half-clandestine reading community—and this, as much as her uncompromising style or subject, committed her in life to a reception in the minor mode.

Today, of course, Spain is a country whose constitution enshrines minority languages as “objects of especial respect and protection,” and the Autonomous Republic of Catalonia now holds up Mercè Rodoreda as a national treasure. Barcelona offers commemorative sculptures, libraries, gardens in her name; government-supported institutes sponsor conferences and translations; a yearlong festival marked her 2008 centennial. Her international champions include Gabriel García Márquez, who has set the deslumbramiento—blinding brilliance—of her prose beside that of Juan Rulfo. Yet she has not, somehow, found the same readership in English as the younger cadre of male Iberians—Goytisolo, Marías, Lobo Antunes—to say nothing of her closer contemporaries, Saramago and Cela. Apart from two recent, welcome titles from Open Letter, her English catalog has drifted in and out of print. To be sure, fame is a black box. But there is no question that Rodoreda is a uniquely difficult writer—not in her sentences, which are as clean as any in the century, but in the starkness of her emotional climate. Her subject, both in the earlier domestic books and the later irrealist ones, is the destructiveness of desire, the brutishness of power, the primacy of hunger and death. She was not alone, in or out of Spain, in choosing these topics. Her particular power and challenge lies in the style that she created to address them: a fearsomely pure deployment of words, empty of rhetoric, in which the beauty of the world shines so clearly as to seem a kind of cruelty.

She is a hard author to pin down. It is impossible, for instance, not to think of her as a feminist when the suffering of the powerless, and of women in particular, commands so much of her attention. Yet in a late interview she declined the label. In her opinion, she said, feminism was “a little bit literatura.” To distance herself from literature is of course to take a literary position; here it is the modernist project, rejecting the literary structures of an earlier age. There are books whose events are not plotted, but simply drift through the everyday, or are knocked off course by incomprehensible blows from without; whose objects carry no meaning but their own inscrutable existences; whose characters include no heroes or villains, since every possible action hangs suspended in a neutral moral field. This is the mode of Flaubert, in most ways the mode of Proust and Joyce, and Rodoreda too makes it her own.

“I would like to say something about the innocence of my characters,” she writes in a late prologue.

Had I to appear as the coryphaeus in an imaginary ancient tragedy, I would approach the public and begin my recitation this way: ‘Before the sun, the clouds and les esteles—as Bernat Metge calls the stars (quantes esteles ha en lo cel)—I can swear that my parents made me innocent.’ But I am a person like others, laden with personalities, and perhaps the most marked of my multiple personalities is a certain kind of innocence that has consoled me in the world where I have been given to live. Wishing to write with a certain idiosyncrasy, I have cultivated over the years—and this is innocence—a kind of purity—which must mean, at heart, being oneself—with the fewest adulterations possible. I have cultivated a forgetting of everything that seemed harmful to my soul, and an admiration for those things that do me good: the ineffable moments given me by the quiet force of flowers, the slow patience of precious stones, the purity of earth and the great abysses of the sky, at once so near and so far, where all the constellations shine and tremble.”

She has slipped from talking about her characters to talking about style, and her chosen images are both beautiful and inhuman. In particular the flowers, a favorite theme, are well glossed by Beckett’s insight into Proust: that his people are flora rather than fauna, and follow their desires with as little moral sense as budding plants. Innocence is blind, and need not exclude even murder, as Rodoreda’s fiction discovers more than once. A lifelong gardener, she had no illusions about botanical struggles for water and light. In one of her novels a girl dies impaled on a laurel branch; elsewhere a boy responds to his mother’s beating by planting himself up to the knees, hoping to sprout roots and leaves; her last book is about a village where men are ritually murdered and stuffed into trees. The laurel, certainly, points to Apollo and Daphne. But where Ovid uses metamorphosis as an escape hatch, to be invoked when divine lust or wrath have carried matters past any possible moral balance, Rodoreda does not see nature as a state of repose. Still her love of a beautiful flower is real. And since the distinction between nature and culture is unimportant to her, she also lavishes description on jewels and clothes, furniture, dishes, household linens—in short, all of the domestic articles that a feminist of her generation might have rejected as shackles or mystifications. She is a very hard author to pin down.

There was an early Rodoreda, separated by twenty years and two wars from the author whose books are read today. Mercè Rodoreda i Gurguí was born in 1908 to a bookish, lower-middle-class family in the Barcelona suburb of Sant Gervasi. An only child, she quit school at age ten and finished her education in the family library. Her grandfather died when she was thirteen, and her uncle Joan, fourteen years her senior, returned from Argentina with a small fortune. They fell in love, received a papal dispensation, and married on her twentieth birthday. The following year a son was born.

The teenage Rodoreda had expected marriage and motherhood alone to satisfy her, the Barcelona of the thirties held other doors open to women. Her literary career began in 1932, a year after the Spanish republic, with a novel titled Sóc una dona honrada? (“Am I an Honorable Woman?”, untranslated). She paid to have it published—which is to say, property laws being what they were, her husband paid. More remunerative work followed, largely through magazines; by the time the war started, she was hosting conferences on “Woman and Revolution” and writing propaganda articles for the Republic. Her novels of this decade—there were five in all—have been called “psychological” in style, which is one way of saying that they don’t yet read like Mercè Rodoreda. In later life she refused to have any republished except Aloma (1938, untranslated), the last and most successful, and this only after she had reworked the prose from beginning to end.

Aloma is both autobiographical—the story of a lower-middle-class girl of twenty-three, something like her creator, who falls into an ill-advised love affair with her brother-in-law—and deeply bookish. Each of the twenty short chapters takes an epigraph which might come from Boccaccio or Proust, Elective Affinities or The Sexual Tragedy of Leo Tolstoy. Aloma’s own name is taken from Ramón Llull, the medieval originator of Catalan literature. Amid these precocious touches from a writer still in her twenties, a violent imagination occasionally comes alive to sound the themes of entrapment and victimhood. Aloma’s opening challenge, “Love makes me sick!”, is made literal in the story of a stray cat who is assaulted by the neighborhood tom and repeatedly births her litters in the backyard, making so much noise that a neighbor finally clubs her to death. The cat returns to Aloma in a dream, now wearing shoes and glasses, and implores her, “Don’t let them trick you, don’t get married, read, read….”

There is nothing subtle in this sequence, but its placement at the start of a coming-of-age story is striking, to say the least. Rodoreda is already suspicious of literatura as a maker of ideologies, and she has Aloma take the cat’s advice but take it badly. The book she chooses is a serial romance; as in other corrective fictions, it leads to a disenchanting real-life affair. By the time that Aloma escapes, pregnant, into the city’s underworld, she has resolved to join those “girls who face life without illusions.” Something like that is the young Rodoreda’s sense of authorial vocation—though Aloma herself, it is implied, will turn to a grimmer career.

There is, unfortunately, no barrier to reading Aloma as the author’s reflection on her own decade of marriage. Her literary activities had brought her into connection with Andreu Nin, an anarcho-syndicalist and man of letters whose Catalan translation of Anna Karenina ended up giving Aloma its first epigraph. Between the writers there was mutual esteem and friendship, perhaps more. A letter from Nin, contents unknown, appeared in Rodoreda’s household and prompted a terrible scene that concluded with her husband throwing himself at her feet and kissing them—a gesture that finds queasy echoes in her later stories of unhappy marriage. In 1937 she separated from her family. The war had flared; Nin was detained on the Ramblas, probably by NKVD agents, and was never seen again. In 1939, a few months before the defeat of the Republic, Rodoreda boarded a government bibliobús and fled with ten other writers to France, where a kind of exiled artist’s colony had been set up at a chateau in Roissy-en-Brie. Aloma had just been awarded the Premi Crexell, and she found herself a celebrity. She seems to have made a scandalous impression at the chateau: she laughed loudly, she wore pants, she caught flies in the communal dining hall and drank them down with her wine. She started an affair with the writer Joan Prat, whose marriage was likewise in a state of separation. The writers’ colony soon broke up, in part because of the amorous disturbance, but Rodoreda and Prat would remain together throughout the war and for two decades afterward.

She left little account of the war years in France, other than what appears in her fiction. There is the story “Orléans, 3 Kilometers,” with its mesmerizing scene of the city in conflagration, and the descriptions in her novels of hunger: “what’s a crust of bread when you’re starving? Even to eat grass you’ve got to have the strength to go out searching for it.” They found themselves in Paris, Limoges, Bordeaux; they subsisted on her work as a seamstress. In a letter written at the war’s end she summed up, “I have met very interesting people and the sweater I am wearing is inherited from a Russian Jewess who killed herself with Veronal.” Soon after the peace, a mysterious paralysis took hold of her right arm and left her unable to write. She spent hours in the Louvre. She saw exhibitions by Klee and Mirò. A screening of Méliès’s Trip to the Moon affected her deeply. Later she would say that she gave up writing for twenty years because it seemed there were more important things to do, but this may be a selective memory. Displaced from fiction, her creative drive found outlet in painting watercolors and making collages. She also produced a small body of poetry; like other exiles, she took Ulysses as her theme.

Prat found a position as a translator with UNESCO, and he and Rodoreda relocated to Geneva. They had some contact with the young Julio Cortázar, not yet the author of Rayuela, who impressed her with his sense of vocation: he had determined, he said, to spend as little of each year as possible earning money for subsistence, and to keep the rest for writing, music and travel. After four years of paralysis, she regained the use of her arm as inexplicably as she had lost it, and she and Prat came to an arrangement. They would live together, at a certain remove, since his work often took him to Vienna; her name would be Madame Prat as far as the neighbors were concerned; and he would see indefinitely to her financial needs so that she could take up writing again.

As Rodoreda’s fiftieth year approached, she began to publish stories with an exiles’ press in Mexico. In 1957 Spain lifted its ban on the Catalan printed word, and the following year she broke her long silence with the collection Vint-i-dos contes (“Twenty-Two Stories,” well represented in Martha Tennent’s Selected Stories of Mercè Rodoreda). These stories document a second apprenticeship, consciously undertaken by a writer not yet satisfied with her achievement. They vary widely in style and subject; what links them is their tone of disillusion. (Il·lusió: their favored word for happiness and pleasure, aspirations and dreams.) Many are quiet vignettes of lower-class Barcelona, with no plot other than the marking out of limits. At their strongest they are reminiscent of Dubliners, and conclude with the same gesture that, in Joyce, is doubtfully called “epiphany”: an apparition of cosmic sadness that exceeds the sufferer’s understanding and may frustrate representation entirely.

Not all narrators here are women, but where they are, they tend to follow Rodoreda’s basic story from Aloma forward: a woman meets a man, and unhappiness follows. The story of seduction, with its infinite possible variations, is played out deftly. The narrator of “Before I Die,” a free-spirited art student, is accosted by a man who claims that she has taken his café table. She throws her drink at him. He wipes his trousers. He makes her a gift of two doves, which she roasts and serves to him. The subsequent story of marriage, and the slow suffocation of becoming the lady of a house, is equally well drawn. After being bluntly told by a serving woman, “It’s not good to be sad,” the narrator concludes, “That was how I learned what they call seny,” invoking the word that Catalans have used for centuries to describe their own national character. Its connotations are of practicality, compromise, common sense: a slightly more worldly version of the innocence whose cultivation allows Rodoreda to get by in the world. Yet “Before I Die” turns out to be a story where seny is not enough, and finishes with an uncharacteristic turn to the melodramatic. The husband turns out to have a secret, becoming a villain, and the narrator’s heroism consists in rejecting him and life together. One feels that this is the kind of thing Rodoreda would later dismiss as literatura, and she will not indulge the mode again.

While writing these stories she was also conceiving four or five different novels: most of her remaining life’s work, in fact, which would take twenty-five years to write. The first to be completed, though late in publishing, was Jardí vora el mar (1967, “Garden by the Sea,” untranslated), a diffuse work in which an estate gardener stoically recounts the romantic intrigues of his masters and his daily work with the plants. The next was La plaça del Diamant (1962, “Diamond Square”), her first full-length masterpiece and still the most generally loved of her works. It was rendered into English by David H. Rosenthal, the best of her translators, as The Time of the Doves.

The breakthrough of this novel is the appearance of Rodoreda’s mature style. Though many earlier stories approach it, only here does her hard transparency find its full range. The narrator Natalia, another working woman, relates her experience simply but with fine modulations:

It was a calm, cloudy day. Whenever a ray of sunshine got through, the lady’s shawl would sparkle and so would her coat, which was fly-colored like Father Joan’s cassock. A gentleman coming the other way said hello to her and they stopped for a moment and I pretended to look in a shop window and I saw the lady’s face in the glass and she had big jowls like a dog and the lady started crying and suddenly she raised her arm a little and showed the gentleman the candles and they shook hands and both went on their way and I started following the lady again because it kept me company to watch her and to watch her shawl fluttering a little on each side in the breeze she made walking.

It reads like an anecdote being spoken aloud, but unobtrusively, without conversational markers. Whether the phrasal units are split into sentences or concatenated with “and” (the lightweight Catalan i), they are uniformly short, concrete, heavily weighted toward the physical and domestic, though they can extend to cover outbursts of emotion as well. Sentence by sentence, they work out the quality of innocence. To maintain that quality over the length of a novel shows magisterial restraint on the author’s part.

Natalia’s walk takes place at the book’s deepest trough, in a Barcelona flattened by war. She is gathering courage to buy a bottle of hydrochloric acid, which she plans to pour into her children’s mouths in order to save them from death by starvation. “I went down the stairs,” she says, “feeling like they were very long and ended in hell”; and then describes the tiles and the railing. Her innocence, if innocence is the word, is the solvent that allows heaven and hell to hang in suspension beside the mundane. Every twenty or thirty pages the narrative lifts its austerity long enough for a metaphor, and they are without exception stunners. “The main altar, all covered in golden lilies with gold-leaf stems and leaves, was a scream of gold pushed farther and farther up by the pillars until it reached the spires on the roof, which gathered up the scream and sent it on to heaven.” The same is true of the occasional surreal outbursts, not all of which can be attributed to Natalia’s hunger-addled imagination. When she first kisses her fiancé, the Lord appears in a cloud and, reaching out with long arms, shuts himself inside, as if closing a cupboard. Much later she will meet a flood of tiny red bubbles, like fish roe, containing the souls of the war dead.

The seduction plot is brutally brief in this instance. Natalia is accosted at a street festival by a young man, Quimet, who insists that she dance with him and says that she will be his wife by Christmas. With his monkey’s eyes, jealous caprices, suspicions of the devil and bouts of rage, Quimet is one of Rodoreda’s most unsettling creations, all the more so because of his wholly plausible fits of adolescent enthusiasm. One enthusiasm is for the Republic; another is for filling the house with birds that he plans to sell. These creatures, coloms in Catalan, are rendered differently in the two English translations: either it is The Time of the Doves, or else The Pigeon Girl. Joseph Conrad once complained that no English word is a word, that each has moral connotations blurring its edges. A dove is peace, fidelity in marriage, the carrier of the olive branch, the third person of the Trinity. A pigeon spreads disease and shits on statues. It is conscripted as a messenger or bred into grotesque shapes; it is inexterminable as the rat. A colom is all of the above. The ambivalence that these animals can carry in Catalan is what makes them the emblems of the book. They give Natalia her adopted name—Quimet dubs her Colometa—and they give her domestic plight its sensory correlative. It is obvious that they will never make money; Quimet gives away two of every three pairs; the house is full of their stink; they take over the rooftops, the children’s room; they scratch, they peck; strangest of all, they are also winged creatures and beautiful.

The doubleness of the coloms is of a piece with the novel’s general moral suspension, in which Natalia—incredibly—never condemns her appalling husband outright. It is not the case that, as Natasha Wimmer has written, Rodoreda’s women exhibit an “almost pathological lack of volition.” We see Natalia deliberate over two marriage proposals, and her choices, though questionable, are made at liberty; she must find work on her own; when she decides that life inside a dovecote is unbearable, she personally destroys the enterprise by shaking the eggs lifeless—a campaign she refers to, without irony, as “the great revolution.” That is at least as much volition as one expects in, say, an Edith Wharton heroine. What Natalia almost never does is express judgment. Her two marriages are both made with misgivings; as we read, we feel that one turns out far better than the other. But Rodoreda understands that every home is both a shelter and a trap, and her business is not to resolve that doubleness. She never ceases to turn things about, showing the shelter in the trap, and the trap in the shelter, until a final account becomes impossible to conceive.

The events of revolution and war are likewise shown entirely from below. The phrase that Rosenthal translates as “the war started” reads in the original: va venir el que va venir. What came, came. By Natalia’s account, one might at first assume that nothing came but a gas outage. War is a disruption of the minutiae of life that it is her business to record; it is hunger and shortage of work. Though she suffers for having a husband who supports the Republic, to have her express support for the cause, which had meant so much to Rodoreda, would violate the book’s logic. Rodoreda’s people face the impersonal world not in the way of the bildungsroman, which integrates the self into that world, nor in the way of naturalism, which has the world destroy the self, but through a simple juxtaposition, always tentatively posed. La plaça del Diamant ends as if it were a comedy, with a wedding that ought to be a conciliatory ritual. But Natalia’s son has started his military service and is dancing with the fascist uniform on, and her daughter has inherited Quimet’s monkey eyes and demonic aspect: “that thing that’s so hard to describe but it’s all to make you suffer.” The sense of wonder that marks the great writers comes, in this book, by way of an extraordinary fictional effect: the sense that no piece of it could stand for anything other than itself.

Two more novels followed in the next decade, both more or less realist. El carrer de les Camèlies (1966, translated by Rosenthal as Camellia Street, out of print) teases out the hint of picaresque in La plaça del Diamant—the unpredictable events, the alliances suddenly formed and broken—and makes it into a fully realized structural principle. Cecilia C., another narrating innocent, is made to repeat the seduction plot again and again, in variously extreme modes; among other things the book is a study in male jealousy. We often see Cecilia kept under lock and key—in one harrowing sequence she is continually drugged—and it says much for Rodoreda’s stylistic integrity that of all the beings in Cecilia’s world, only the author seems never to exploit her. The book’s turning point comes when Cecilia decides to make her pattern of liaisons into an explicit business. In other hands this might read cynically, as a harlot’s progress. Rodoreda treats it with the same ambivalence as her earlier subjects, and once again what should structurally be a happy ending turns strange and sad.

Mirall trencat (1974, translated by Josep Miquel Sobrer as A Broken Mirror) is a quite different major work, constructed to look, at least in its beginning, like a nineteenth-century family chronicle. A marriage is made, an inheritance is secured, a house is founded, and then—the novel’s great surprise—nothing happens but life, and the slow transition into death. Along the way we pass all the components of melodrama: theft, adultery, concealed parentage, murder, the possibility of incest. The war too makes a background appearance. But the book is so determined not to assemble these elements into a consecutive plot that its effect is of a series of set pieces: serving girls bathing outdoors, the aged master straightening the spines in his library, and again and again the moment of death, since we do see most of the characters arrive at their ends. The reader expecting a genuine nineteenth-century novel may find this a tedious business. But Rodoreda has been master of her form for some time now, and the project of Mirall trencat, like that of Lampedusa’s The Leopard, is the slow disassembly of the nineteenth century. She refuses to mete out rewards or punishments; she will mark no act as an absolute transgression. In the last chapters the human world fades entirely away, ceding place to the animal and vegetable kingdoms, and to an ever-growing population of ghosts.

Written along the way was La meva Cristina i altres contes (1967, translated by Rosenthal as My Christina and Other Stories), a collection of unpredictable short works, most of them masterpieces. Many take place in a rural, vaguely premodern setting, where the fear of witchcraft stands in for the constraints of small-town life. People turn into animals, sometimes explicitly, sometimes obscurely. “A White Geranium Petal” is a tale of marital sadism made bearable, and even beautiful, by the intercession of a cat figure that wanders between life and death. The Cristina of the title story turns out to denote a whale that swallows the narrator and becomes his home for a number of years. In these stories, and in the concluding colloquies of Mirall trencat between the living and dead, the realist Rodoreda disappears for good.

Even Rodoreda’s champions sometimes shy away from the very late work. She has become a fabulist, which is new, and her bleakness is less mitigated than ever. Still it should be understood that her aims have not changed. It has been said that late Rodoreda is atypical in using male narrators—though of all her novels, only La plaça del Diamant and El carrer de les Camèlies are actually narrated by women. Again, it is said that the late works abandon her domestic focus, though all the elements of domestic according to Rodoreda—physical detail, physical labor, exhaustion and hunger, the doubleness of security and imprisonment—are still in place. If these elements project more starkly than before, they do so through the loosening of late style. As the artist’s vision turns hermetic, the hand lets drop certain canons of realism; as when the late Titian or Rembrandt blur darkness into their forms, or in the black paintings that were Goya’s endgame. Literature may have no better answer to the grotesques and devouring gods of the Quinta del Sordo than Rodoreda’s last two novels of metamorphosis and ritual sacrifice, wandering and war.

Quanta, quanta guerra… (1980, “So much war, so much…,” untranslated) is the story of Adrià Guinart, an adolescent who runs away from home to fight in the Civil War. The book is only obliquely a war novel. Fear and chance soon separate Adrià from his detachment, and he spends the rest of the book drifting through the ravaged country, begging or stealing his food, working odd jobs, receiving unprovoked beatings and listening to stories. Though his situation recalls the original Spanish pícaro, Lazarillo de Tormes, he is far less worldly. By the middle of the book he has chanced to inherit a property, and does what Lazarillo would never do, giving it away. His wandering innocence might better suggest Don Quijote, but again, Rodoreda’s grimness is not Cervantes’s cynicism. In many ways the book is closer to the chivalric romances that Lazarillo de Tormes and Don Quijote are supposed to have displaced. Adrià is a knight errant of the lowest social order, with no definite quest, wandering only because, as he puts it, “I liked to go my way alone so that I could look at things nice and slow.”

Early on Adrià is given a lady to champion: the girl Eva, whom he meets bathing in a river and thereafter in a handful of dreamlike scenes, some of which really are dreams. Their relations, though chaste, provide Adrià a catechism in love: “She didn’t like people who loved her. Loving her was like tying her up, like not letting her move. She needed to feel free to go where she wanted, and to help whoever she wanted, without the help turning into an obligation. I like you… because you don’t tie me up, and because you have that face.” One of Rodoreda’s innocents has finally met another. We are granted a glimpse, very rare in her work, of a relation between men and women that could end in something other than subjection; but first the war must be got through.

Many of Adrià’s encounters are historically situated: we see trucks and planes, soldiers and corpses. Others suggest folklore or myth. The influence of surrealism has grown so strong that at times—when Adrià, leaving home, sees his dead father holding his infant self in his arms, or when Eva’s eyes are described as violet spangled with gold—the novel seems to continue the vein of Spanish poetry that was cut short with García Lorca’s death. Adrià’s search for food and shelter is glossed by myths of wartime, one of which is worth quoting at length, if only because an English version is still lacking:

And then a rain of stars began to fall. I had never seen such a thing. They’re weeping because it’s war, said the old man, who had sat up and seemed to have always known me. The stars all fell to one side; the wind from the heights must have kept them from falling in a straight line. Many burned up in the air, others made it to the ground. There were pink ones and blue ones. They’re tired of seeing so much death. I’d always heard, I said, that a rain of stars announced a war; I never thought they could keep falling when the war had gone on so long. They come in different kinds: there are those that announce a war, and then these, that maybe are trying to say we’ve had enough and who knows when it will stop… wars, my boy, everyone knows when they start and no one knows when they finish. That’s something even children know, I said. What do you mean? That if everyone knows something, it’s not worth repeating. I’ve noticed how people talk just to talk, and always say the same things. What should they do instead? They should just say what’s worth saying, and that’s it. Life, if you don’t know how to remember it, is a repetition. Why don’t you want men to repeat themselves when they talk? Because I’m sick of it. Well, you mustn’t like it any better that you too are only a repetition.

Too much of this would ruin the book, and Rodoreda is careful to alternate these dialogues with concrete, fairy-tale encounters. We meet a man who carries an embalmed cat as his totem, a man who eats honey until he becomes round as a ball, a man who walks with his back to the sun and moon so as always to adore his shadow. Their life stories are given to Adrià as naturalist tales of unhappiness, each punctuated by a moment—“then the war came”—that wrenches life from its context. Each new episode is disconnected from that before.

The technique is new, but the intent of the earlier books remains: to write war from the bottom up, as a series of interruptions that can’t be forced into a story. Of course only a certain type of war novel is possible from these premises. The Tolstoyan survey of troop movements and council rooms is foreclosed. War, under this view, is a state too disruptive to fit inside history; it asserts itself as the cosmic force of Heraclitus, father and king of all, and breaks history apart. Juan Benet, whose novels portrayed the Civil War as a freezing of time, embodied this force in his mythical Numa, a guardian of the wilderness who annihilates all intruders with a shotgun. The end of Quanta, quanta guerra… confronts Adrià with a similar figure out of time, who is revealed—uniquely in Rodoreda’s work—as an instance of absolute evil. Here Eva’s lesson of freedom in love finds its letter-perfect reversal, and a few pages condense the old themes of domination and domestic entrapment into one of the blackest nightmares in European literature. To confront it, either in opposition or in redemption, is as senseless as confronting the war itself. Adrià responds in the only way he can. No further task is left him but to bury the dead, and to return to a home that may not remain.

Rodoreda’s last novel was an intermittent labor of more than twenty years, and remained unfinished on her death. Though her editors have assembled a compact reading text of La mort i la primavera (1986, “Death and Spring,” translated as Death in Spring by Martha Tennent), it may well be that the book is necessarily partial, unfinishable in the manner of Kafka’s longer narratives. The setting is another ahistorical village; the form this time is a mad ethnography of its social practices. Pregnant women are made to wear blindfolds so that they will not fall in love with other men. A single prisoner is punished for theft by being kept in a cage until he begins to neigh, at which point he is said to have lost his humanity. The village is placed above a subterranean river, and every year a man must swim the underground passage, suffering mutilation of his face, to ensure that the supporting rocks are not being washed away. When the villagers approach their deaths they are taken to a forest, where pink cement is poured into their mouths to prevent the soul from escaping with the last breath. Once they are choked lifeless they are entombed upright in trees, which gradually digest them.

Of all Rodoreda’s books this is the most static. The published version arranges the village descriptions around a skeletal plot in which the narrator, a boy of fourteen, sees his father die and marries his sixteen-year-old stepmother, a naif with a withered arm. They make inconclusive gestures at upending the social order, throwing away the coloring for the cement and rearranging the markers in the forest cemetery; later the narrator suffers a more concerted ostracism, and is finally made to swim the underground river. Still these have the feeling of temporary deviations, and do nothing to diminish the sense of the village itself as timeless protagonist. “I can begin the story of my life wherever I wish,” says the boy; “I can tell it differently… I cannot remove anything or add anything.” In an alternate arrangement of Rodoreda’s fragments, he would have lost his status as sole narrator.

When the English Death in Spring was published, some American reviews, seeking a context for its extremity, compared it to Blood Meridian. The comparison does not go deep. McCarthy’s is a frontier story, which is to say that it is about the edges of empire, and its version of Mister Kurtz, like the original, plays out the fantasy of a civilized intellect dropped into a wasteland and made a god. Rodoreda’s violence, by contrast, is institutional. She makes no claims about the human state beneath its social veneer, since her society is not a veneer but a structure of force legitimized by myth. This is not to say that her people are automata; many of the villagers, for instance, question the practice of murder by cement. But there is no outside to the law of violence. The distinction between nature and culture has been obliterated. Not only do humans engage in animalistic struggle; nature itself has taken on the human qualities of ritual and malice. The local bees are said to possess the use of reason, deliberately pursuing people and carrying pieces of gravel to steady themselves in the wind. A local black bird, the “mourner,” lays an annual clutch of three eggs, which it then yields to an invading white bird—though if the white bird is slow to take over, the black bird will crush its own eggs or peck the hatchlings to death. Once the eggs have hatched, the black bird kills the white bird and recovers its brood: two black fledglings, one white. This is natural science out of Herodotus, and its inversion of modern nature writing is one of the most uncanny and frightening things in the novel.

La mort i la primavera is a hard book to read. Its moral appeal, however, is no different from that made by the writer in her twenties who began her a novel about a young woman with the death of a cat. What Rodoreda asks of her readers is a minute attention to suffering; what she offers in exchange is a minutely worked beauty. Not every reader will want to make the bargain, and it may always set limits on her popularity. She enlists in no cause, and offers no remedy for pain but that which comes in the bare act of attention. Nonetheless she is a great modernist author, precisely in the tradition of Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett. Like them she offers a vision of life that might be characterized as nihilistic, and like them, she threads that vision together with an idiosyncratic formal beauty and the moral force of refusing all false consolation. I will show you life, is the message of books such as these. Here are its conditions. You may have it under no others. Do not look away.

Paul Kerschen’s most recent work of fiction, The Drowned Library, was published in November by Foxhead Books.

Published in Issue 27

This roundtable honoring the work of the novelist Clarice Lispector occurs on the occasion of the re-translation and re-publication of five of Lispector’s greatest works by New Directions and Penguin Modern Classics. For this roundtable I spoke with Barbara Epler, Benjamin Moser, and David Randall, each of whom are currently working with Lispector’s works in various capacities. For more on Lispector, see Leora Skolkin-Smith’s essay “Words Are living Tissue,” previously published in The Quarterly Conversation, and Colm Tóibín’s essay, “A Passion for the Void,” published in this issue.

Barbara Epler has worked at New Directions since 1984 and became its president in 2011. She edited Benjamin Moser’s new translation of The Hour of the Star.

In addition to making a new translation of The Hour of the Star for New Directions, Benjamin Moser is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography. He is the series editor of the new edition of Clarice Lispector’s works being published at New Directions.

David Randall is a British impresario based in Monte Carlo. He has been involved in a number of theatrical projects in London and New York and is currently working on the film adaptation of Why This World.

Scott Esposito: For me, Lispector stands as one of the most distinct and strangest authors that I’ve discovered among writers working in the past 50 years or so. Part of her work’s inherent strangeness is that she seems to appeal to different people for widely different reasons. So could each of you talk a little about when and why Lispector first “clicked” for you, what that was like, which book of hers (or about her) you were reading, and how you’ve come to see her writing in the time since.

Benjamin Moser: The first time I encountered Clarice Lispector was as a sophomore at Brown, already half a life ago. I had happened into Portuguese class because I had failed miserably to learn Chinese, and I wanted to study another language. By the third semester, we were already able to read short works of Brazilian literature, and one of them was Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star. When you read for a living, as you and I do, it’s sometimes hard to remember how meeting a book can be like meeting a lover, but that is what I felt. From the very first lines—her dedication to the musicians and the spirits who had haunted her life—I just fell in love with her. Which could sound like an exaggeration, but I think that my having spent the last decade writing her biography, Why This World, and translating her work (I was thrilled to be able to translate The Hour of the Star itself in the new New Directions/Penguin Modern Classics series) proves that we were a good match. At least she was for me! I couldn’t help wondering, especially with Why This World, what she would have thought of my interpretations of her life and work.

Barbara Epler: I discovered Clarice Lispector while working at New Directions as a young assistant editor; I think New Directions started publishing her work in the mid-80s, and I first fell in love with The Hour of the Star. Maybe you never get over your initial crushes, but in any case that remains my single favorite Lispector novel: I loved it in the Ponteiro translation and I love it in Ben’s new translation.

However, it was another project, Lispector’s Selected Crônicas, which completely cemented my love for her work.

I had a great and very thrifty boss, Griselda Ohannessian. The Lispector books were never great money-makers and when she saw me falling in love with the very long, large cloth edition (500-some-pages-long) Discovering the World, which Carcanet Press published, containing all her crônicas (a free Brazilian form of short pieces published in newspapers), Griselda put her foot down. “No, that’s an absolute door stopper.” So I whined and carried on, and eventually Griselda said I could make a selection, but the book would be a paperback and under 228 pages. By running it a bit tightly, I managed to get about four-fifths of the Carcanet collection into our Selected Crônicas, and got in all my favorites, such as “In Favor of Fear” (“I am convinced that at some time during the Stone Age I was definitely ill-treated by some man who loved me. Ever since then I have been haunted by a secret terror.”). Or the wonderful “Princess” series, about a baby chicken and the terrible little girl next door (as much as you can say anything she writes is exactly “about such and such”).

I think by spending a lot of time judging and juggling which ones would go in, and smuggling as many as I possibly could, I felt as thick as thieves with her vision. I love how everything you discover in her works is so unexpected, so visionary, and yet so true. Lispector is uncanny.

I love the mini crônica “Yes,” which runs:

I said to a friend:

—Life has always asked too much of me.

She replied:

—But don’t forget that you also ask too much of life.

That is true.

David Randall: My discovery of Clarice is probably rather haphazard and less conventional than your other contributors! As a producer I am always looking out for new properties to license, especially something exotic, unfamiliar, and with undercurrents. So, in the summer of 2009, whilst on a boating holiday (no pun intended!) with the family, the first thing that caught my eye when a copy of the International Herald Tribune was put in front of me was the book review page with a portrait of Clarice accompanying Fernanda Eberstadt’s review of Ben Moser’s Why This World, as it rather resembled the physiognomy of my youngest daughter Adriana (who happens to be an actress!).

Then upon reading the enthusiastic review, I was fascinated by the whole story and decided to make contact with the author. Eventually I did so, bizarrely through Facebook (I joined especially as a sleuth!), and the rest as they say is history!

I was fascinated by Clarice’s early life and the suffering of her parents and their escape from the horrors of Eastern Europe. I was also very interested by the extraordinary transformation that Clarice underwent and her elevation to the status of a media celebrity, all the more surprising given her “foreignness” in Brazil.

My way into the literature was through Ben’s masterly analysis of her stories, and only afterwards did I purchase translations of the books and start to delve into the individual works, starting with The Hour of the Star and followed by Near to the Wild Heart.

Getting to know Ben Moser has an itself been education, not only because of his extraordinary erudition but also because of his comprehensive grasp of Brazil and the Brazilians and his knowledge of their culture and customs.

The reason that Ben’s biography of Clarice Lispector is so significant is because in my view it gives a supremely insightful description of her almost unfathomable depths of symbolism and mysticism, which have helped to create a legacy that even today is not just revered but almost worshiped as a cult. Also, Ben managed to show the demons that possessed Clarice and how the imagery in her writings derives from not only long traditions but the most lurid episodes in her childhood. Tempered as she was by a traumatic experience of [her father] Pedro’s progressive sickness and the catastrophic fire in her home that left her permanently disfigured, we are able to glimpse the suffering out of which was born some of her great writings and her unique philosophy.

Working alongside Ben to develop a screenplay intended to bring Clarice to a far wider audience given her significance as a great twentieth-century writer has been a fascinating and rewarding experience, and we have found an association of like-minded people, all of whom are devoted to preserving Clarice’s reputation in the literary world.

Therefore, I can claim that through no single book have I been converted to the cause but rather more by the mesmerizing beauty and abundant talent of a unique genius.

Scott Esposito: Professionally, each of you is approaching Lispector in a different capacity—translator, editor, film producer. So I’m curious to know which aspects of her books stick out for you most while you’re working with her in your professional capacities.

Benjamin Moser: As I’ve been translating and then editing the translations of other people of her work, I’ve really come to appreciate just how hard it is to get her right in English. I can draw on more than a decade of doing this kind of thing—one of the challenges of Why This World, my biography of her—was trying to find a convincing voice for her in English. I think I did, and I always tell Brazilian audiences that I speak to about my biography that by reading it in Portuguese, they are getting closer to her voice, but they’re also missing one of the things that I am proudest of, which is that I think I managed to create an English sound for her.

So one of the professional skills I have developed is not just translating from Portuguese, which is hard enough, but translating Clarice Lispector’s Portuguese, which is a very strange, allusive, and poetic language. Doing it well requires knowing what she means when she uses certain words in certain contexts. A lot of them wouldn’t be obvious if you weren’t familiar with the rest of her work—but it’s very important to keep the echoes there. And even though I am going slightly batty trying to edit four of these books simultaneously, one of the advantages of doing them all at once is that those words and concepts are fresh in my mind throughout the series. But of course it’s an impossible job. I’m rereading Johnny Lorenz’s translation of A Breath of Life today, which is a particularly hairy one because it is posthumous and existed only in fragments, and feeling grateful for the tight deadlines—if I didn’t have them, I could fiddle with it until the end of time . . .

Barbara Epler: The whole Lispector re-launching began innocently enough: our plan had been to bring out a new edition of The Hour of the Star in the old Pontiero translation with an ardent Colm Tóibín preface. (With a backlist of our size—about 1,100 titles from 75 years of publishing—we are always trying to repackage classic backlist to reach more readers.)

That was all we had planned, but then I met Ben. I’d very much admired his biography, so I have a drink with Ben when he’s in town, and he is amazingly persuasive, and I get on board the big project of four new translations with Penguin UK, for which he would serve as series editor.

And suddenly, in a phone conversation a few months later about those four books, I mentioned I was going to press with our new edition of the old translation of The Hour of the Star with the Tóibín preface, and Ben came out of the bag at me. He offered to translate it for free and within three weeks. I said, “I think that’s crazy.” Ben said he couldn’t stand not doing it. (And “free” is a magic word around New Directions. Though I did land in the doghouse here with publicity and production for making the book late, even by that fairly little bit.)

Then exactly on time, his translation arrived: startling, bracing, and utterly convincing. The Pontiero Hour of the Star on first reading is odd enough; like one’s first try at sea urchin roe sushi: I’ve never forgotten my first read.

Ben’s is more like ingesting the whole sea urchin, spines and all, and yet for all its spikiness a thrill and a joy as it goes down—it’s truly transporting.

And for me, when you mention trouble spots, Scott, as well as “professional skills that are uncommonly needed,” here we go.

I am bent on fixing grammar and addressing various rough spots and making the English read as smoothly as possible (up to a point, of course, especially with a writer as radical as Clarice). So, while I loved the energy and verve of his new translation, I still had many little fixes. And then I had to unbend my mind and, yes, bend my backbone. Because 95 percent of my edits were rejected: as we spent a couple of hours on the telephone (after he’d read my scanned edit), a colleague was in my office as I gave up point after point; Ben would reply when I fixed a point of grammar: “Barbara, Clarice knew proper Portuguese; she chose to splinter that construction” or “Barbara, Clarice could have made that grammatically correct: she chose not to!” I’d concede, muttering, “OK, OK . . .” and I well remember how my co-worker looked at me with pity as I was swatted down again and again. Though in spots here and there Ben would remark, “Oooh, that’s a good one! That’s my mistake! Yes please fix that!”

Ben is after the most radical and close-to-the-bone reproduction of Clarice’s original oddities.

And for me, it took a new talent to accept that: having worked through the new translation overnight, fixing things, and then to meet with such resistance, and then decide to be open-minded.

My reward has been several rave responses. And nearest and dearest, our VP Laurie Callahan (who had always been a little cool about my Lispector enthusiasm over the years) burst into my office after she’d read his new version: “Now I know why you love her work! She’s amazing!”

David Randall: I’m probably most taken by the more vividly phasmagorical themes and elemental devices, such as consuming (or being subsumed into) a cockroach, or the dwelling upon chicken and egg and ovaries and similarly idiosyncratic imagery and symbolism. Right now her peculiar vernacular in those fantastical episodes and mystical aspects that derive from her own life or intuitions of mortality are the focus of my attention.

Of course much will depend on our screenwriters and director, but my predilection is for generic development of layers of meaning drawn from the progress of Clarice as a young student, incipient author, woman, mother, muse, and, posthumously, shrine and occult myth, even to hordes who have not the skills to decipher her prose. I’m focused on building up gossamer layer by layer, image by image Clarice’s syntax and figures of speech, so that a sort of lacquer-layering of coats of varnish constructs an opaque coat that occludes yet reveals at its core a phosphorescence.

Set is a remote key and subtly shifting chromaticism and unfamiliar uncomfortable harmonic the Clarice symphonic poem should seduce, yet bewilder and leave our audience craving for more. I need them to exit the cinema and rush to investigate and purchase or download Lispector’s books and read Ben’s masterly biography That is my aim.

Scott Esposito: Even though I usually try to stay away from bringing an author’s personality and life into her work, I want to do that here, for a few reasons. First of all, this Lispector resurgence arguably got sparked by Ben’s biography of her, which was a success in part because Lispector was such an amazing person. And then there’s the fact of Lispector bringing her life into her books in various ways, even though they’re not necessarily autobiographical books. So I wonder, to what extent do you think Lispector’s life and her eccentricities conditioned the kind of writing she created? Do you think that the Brazil she lived in—which experienced quite a bit of upheaval and incredible disparities for various strands of the population during her lifetime, plus was an exotic, strange place—had something to do with it?

David Randall: Undoubtedly Lispector’s family history and formative years – her mothers prolonged suffering and sacrifice as well as her fathers devout faith and rigorous intellectual supremacy (and his cruel humiliation as an impoverished hawker and diminished demise as penniless immigrant) endowed the young Clarice with a set of values and defiance at suppression as well as a rich tapestry of almost Yeatsian insistent cumulative momentum of idee fixes, leit motifs and mystical metaphors and images that were to populate her novels in various guises and metamorphose throughout her output.

The Portuguese language proved inadequate to contain her kaleidoscopic world view and searing expressions and Lispector rearranged and modified syntax and grammatical rules to convey her unique language – some of this due to her having adopted the language rather than having it as her maternal tongue ( her lifelong speech impediment emphasising the differentiation and her “otherness.”

On the political issues she marched for democracy under the generals’ regime and was discriminated early on against by the diplomatic establishment. Travelling widely and posted to Genoa and Berne (I trust I am not mistaken with her missions) she gained a sophisticated view if the battle for survival and must have been relieved when Brazil expediently decided to ally itself with the USA rather than Germany.

Her notable tall beauty distinguished her status as Gurgel Valente’s wife and precipitated her into the forefront of Brazilian society and created a mythology surrounding her origins and background.

The dichotomy between familiarity and “strangeness” was and remains at the core of Clarice’s enigma and appeal.

Benjamin Moser: There’s a “school of thought” that wants to separate an artist’s work from her life, which I think is completely absurd: if that were the case there would be no reason at all to write a biography except as a compilation of anecdotes and gossip. As I tried to show in Why This World, her life was profoundly affected by all sorts of political and cultural events: the horror of her origins in Revolutionary Ukraine gave her a very specific theology, which might be called a theology of God’s absence. And her experience of the Brazilian culture in which she spent her life is reflected all throughout her work: her engagement with both its high culture, like the writers and artists who were her friends, as well as to the popular culture she absorbed from her poor childhood, her interest in the supernatural, for example, is there wherever you look.

Barbara Epler: I don’t know how to answer that. I am certainly fascinated by her beauty and by the beauty of Brazil, and by Elizabeth Bishop’s comment that Clarice was the least literary-minded writer she’d ever met. I am fascinated by the idea of those two knowing each other. I am also fascinated by her conversations with taxi drivers: I bet they were crazy about her. But all in all, I am stumped. She swims in deeper waters than I can dive to. Though I do have the strong feeling that she would have been even more exotic and strange in Iowa.

Scott Esposito: I’d be curious as to what you see as Lispector’s core themes, or if there’s any one thing that’s important to a majority of her works. You might also look at this question as asking if her books feel as though they’re in dialogue with each other, over which questions, and how some books can address questions others can’t.

Barbara Epler: The greatest element in Clarice is the magical beauty of her writing, but the central theme to me would be her mysticism. Of course, I have been gazing into Clarice’s work quite a lot, especially lately with the five new translations New Directions has been undertaking, and as Nietzsche says, when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. In other words, my take on her mysticism may be the product of a little too much gazing . . .

For me as a reader the constantly surprising beauty of Clarice’s writing carries and embodies her mystical obsessions. She distills potions from mysticism, beauty, pain, longing. Reading, we drink the potion and feel mystically transported. It’s odd to reach for near-occult terms, but that feeling of being mystically transported over a series of works, comes with a greater and greater feeling of freedom: book to book, she offers her readers more and more glimpses of mystical freedom.

To me it is amazing she started out as a genius (and hailed as such) with her first book in 1943 (Near to the Wild Heart) and went up from there—up and up. Her 1964 Passion According to G.H. is such a stunning work of greater genius, and only eclipsed for me by the 1977 Hour of the Star (I can’t help it: still my most beloved), but now I am being knocked for further loops by her 1973’s Agua Viva and the breathtaking posthumous Breath of Life. How did she—injured and burned (and after a three-day stint in Hell, as she described her first days after the fire), afflicted with a lethal disease and facing death—become more and more alive in her writing? It’s spooky that she stated in Near to the Wild Heart, “Nothing will impede my path until death-without-fear.”

New Directions will next tackle her Collected Stories, and I hope to arrange them chronologically as I want to find out if my feeling of her trajectory of greater and greater mystical freedom will be borne out. That’s my belief and it will be interesting to see it tested again. (Nietzsche also said that it only takes a casual stroll through a lunatic asylum to show that faith does not prove anything.)

Benjamin Moser: This was one of the most fascinating things about writing my biography: seeing how her philosophy evolved throughout the course of her life. Her very first statement about God, published in a journal at her law school, stated that “above mankind there is nothing else at all.” She had become an atheist out of rage at the God who exiled and killed her parents. But she also came with a very strong mystic vocation inherited from her father. And so she eventually sought God not above herself but inside herself—and to see that evolution is one of the most fascinating reasons to read her books in the order they were written.

David Randall: “You see my son, time becomes space here” (“Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit,” Parsifal, Act 1, Scene 1)

I preface my inadequate comments with an apparently (shockingly) incomprehensible juxtaposition and incompatible language and context, given Lispector’s ethnicity and Wagner’s Parsifal’s anti-Semitic connotations.

And yet is Gurnemantz’ description of the pastures of Montsalvat (and later the Good Friday episode in Act 3) and his stoicism in the face of foolishness and peril so alien to Lispector’s Weltanschauung?

I think one of the more fascinating and profound common factors, or threads is Lispector’s peculiar brand of silence as a crucial ingredient to both structure and plot in her works, especially the novels. There are many interesting treatises of the significance and intentions behind the discourse of silence in Lispector’s canon. In Near to the Wild Heart there is purported to be an “annihilation of intimacy,” and, allegedly, an abiding theme is the destruction for the capacity for silence. A particularly telling quote is “Lispector’s work acts as a model for a heterosexual relationship where the characters participate in a complex form of intimacy, fueled by silence.” Silence and intimacy resolve into a cradle for the “ethics of the intimate”—a sort of male/female reciprocity ensues. Some attention has been made of the themes of “interiority of self” and “silence and intimacy” in the context of a struggle between self and love as a mediator of desire.

I particularly appreciated Susan Katherine Dulaney’s university treatise Clarice Lispector’s an Apprenticeship, or the Book of Delights: The Role of Silence in the Cultivation of Intimacy. It comprises a very detailed analysis of An Apprenticeship and examines her discourse notably through Luce Irigaray’s prism, but also Kalamaras’ slant, amongst a slew of writers into whose work she delves, to perceive their responses and hypotheses.

Scott Esposito: To close out, I’d like to ask you all about Lispector with regard to feminism. On the one hand, her books seem extremely well-suited to the ideas typically associated with feminist thought. But on the other hand, her work seems like such an outlier—and her life itself was so strange—that I’m hesitant to lump her in there with authors who were working more consciously as feminists. So I’d like to ask you how you see her work–feminist or not. And regardless of how you view it, do you think it added (and still adds) to surrounding conversations?

Barbara Epler: I was all set to answer that saying Clarice Lispector is a feminist seems like a case of a cage in search of a bird, as I think of feminism being about bringing about the emancipation of women, and if you’re Clarice, you are a genius, you have emancipated yourself, you have eclipsed all the male writers, you’re flying far from labels and categories, somewhere very, very far away, etc. etc.

But then a colleague just read aloud a stupid review of the bad Muriel Spark biography: the reviewer calls Muriel a “difficult writer.” The sexism bubbling under the surface—oh these difficult women!—of such a facile dismissal of the least difficult of authors (her books are so hard to put down; they’re boxes of bonbons; they are dangerous to have around: you’ll get nothing done the day you open a Spark novel) made me realize why we still need labels like feminist. I should not go with that first impulse. So: Yes she is a feminist. She is a one-woman one-writer revolution and if that’s not being a feminist, what is?

As to what all her work adds to conversations, I’d say an endless aesthetical, cultural, spiritual wealth . . .

Benjamin Moser: I don’t think that Clarice liked to associate herself with political labels. And she has a wonderful line in which she says that she didn’t like the name “women’s pages” in the newspaper (she worked for many of them, dishing out tips about eye makeup and mayonnaise) because she thought that that implied that the world of women was somehow segregated from the world of men.

That said, she was most definitely a feminist. She was one of the very first women law graduates in this country. She was one of the very first female journalists. She was Brazil’s first great woman writer and a great deal of her work centers on women and women’s lives.

But I think that her feminism came more from a general belief in the dignity and equality of all people—powerfully engrained, and based on the early experience of seeing her family destroyed by racism—than to the kind of political feminism that one sees in writers who were her contemporaries. (I’m thinking of people like Simone de Beauvoir.)

Scott Esposito edits The Quarterly Conversation.