Published in Issue 31

In his 1924 History of Russian Literature, the critic D.S. Mirsky complained that Anglo-Saxon readers knew what they wanted out of a Russian writer, and that Nikolai Leskov was not it. But to read Leskov, he continues, is to experience a Russia that Russians themselves would recognize, a vast and haunted steppe populated by vagabonds and righteous men.

Mirsky’s judgment is related in the introduction to Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s new translation of The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories, stories by a writer who has long been adored in Russia but whose greatness has never been fully acknowledged in English. With Pevear and Volokhonsky’s translation, Leskov should at last receive the recognition he deserves. “Enchanted” is precisely how Leskov’s stories come to us, and enchanted is how we, his readers, leave them.

Pevear and Volokhonsky’s ambition in bringing Leskov and all his stylistic peculiarities into English is impressive, and all the more so for how it contrasts with their previous role as translators of Russian. The pair are justly famous for their renditions of the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists; their editions of Anna Karenina and Crime and Punishment have become the standard versions, and have won consistent and well-earned praise. The importance of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, however, has never been questioned, nor really has the belief that a new translation could illuminate aspects of the writer’s style that earlier efforts had somehow obscured.

With Leskov, the situation is different. Although he was highly respected in his lifetime (Chekhov named him his favorite writer), Leskov’s posthumous reception abroad has alternated between periods of neglect and periods of critical appreciation. And although his work has appeared in English before, he has never been regarded by Anglophone readers as equal to his great contemporaries. Part of Pevear and Volokhonsky’s task in translating him, then, has been to introduce us to a voice not so much new as unfairly ignored.

The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories includes seventeen tales that span nearly the whole of Leskov’s career. The world they reveal may indeed come as a shock to those who, as Mirsky implied, believe that all of Russia is contained in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Leskov’s Russia is windy and wooded, a cruel, magical place, filled with demons and saints, gypsies and kings. The stories are arranged chronologically, with several early novellas, such as “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” and “The Enchanted Wanderer,” at the beginning, and the shorter, denser “stories of righteous men” at the end. The selection itself already deserves praise, for it demonstrates that nothing was foreign to Leskov; he was as at home in a Moscow living room as in a Tartar tent on the steppe, as deft in comedy as in tragedy, as funny as he was wise.

As Walter Benjamin observed in his essay “The Storyteller,” Leskov’s work combines the two oldest categories of yarns: those told by the wandering sailor (that is, by someone who comes from elsewhere) and those by the “resident tiller of the soil” (a native grounded in local tradition and lore). Part anecdote, part drinking song, part fable and part myth, Leskov’s stories are illiterate in an ancient sense. They are profoundly oral events; they take their substance from the voices of characters and not from the conventions of genre, and may in fact pass through several generic types on their way to completion. “The Spook,” for example, might for a while seem like Russian magical realism, though it is later a disarmingly simple story of loneliness and misunderstanding.

“The Enchanted Wanderer” is similarly surprising: it begins as a rollicking bandit tale and ends in mystical ecstasy. The eponymous wanderer meets a band of workers near the border with Finland, and is eventually coaxed by them into telling his life story. He reveals that a moment of accidental but unrepented cruelty has been the cause of his enchantment: after killing a bystander by mistake, the wanderer was cursed to keep dying, but never die, all his life. And so he encounters, and perpetuates, one death after another (each in its own right a hair-raising tale), but always escapes, always endures, moving only slowly and painfully toward peace and absolution.

The plot of this long, breathtaking tale proves nearly impossible to predict. The reader is, like the wanderer, tossed haphazardly across time and space, and the experience is partly so striking because the structures that hold it together come from the oral tradition and not from the novel. Perhaps this is what Mirsky meant when he said that Leskov was not what Anglo-Saxons expected out of a Russian writer: Leskov was no novelist. Although he did try his hand at the form, “his genius was not suited to the genre of the novel,” Pevear explains, “and he knew it”.

“The Enchanted Wanderer” is much less concerned with psychological interpretation than with the performance of narration (though it certainly does not lack psychological depth). The story thus becomes a theatre of voices: “astonished listeners” interrupt the storyteller constantly, never in order to interpret, but only to demand confirmation of what they have just heard: “What … you and that Tartar … whipped each other? So you beat the Tartar? Yet it must have been terribly painful.” They provide opportunity for repetition; they encourage the development of thematic refrain, allowing the story to settle into itself and allowing us, isolated readers, to exist as some among many listeners. In this respect, as Benjamin remarks, Leskov undermines our readerly solitude by offering us a communality of experience.

One reason for Leskov’s lesser visibility among the great nineteenth-century Russian authors is his highly distinct use of language, which he himself identified as “untranslatable.” His Russian is so polyphonic, so well-tuned to local dialect, idiom, and wordplay, that it can’t help but suffer in the journey to English. But according to Pevear and Volokhonsky, Leskov has perhaps been made to suffer too much. Previous translations, they feel, have tended to smooth out the intentional oddness and playfulness of Leskov’s style. Their own version has made a great effort to preserve these qualities, and it has succeeded to such an extent that those who encounter this new Leskov will find themselves continually surprised by the writer’s inventiveness, by his subtlety and unexpected humor. Readers can look forward to stumbling upon such collocations as “the most internecine conversations” carried on by a travelling sovereign, or the “fatal appearance” of a character in “The White Eagle.”

Pevear and Volokhonsky have proven sensitive translators throughout their joint career, and for the most part, they handle Leskov as expertly as they have handled his contemporaries. They have given him space so that all his clamoring voices may speak for themselves, and when we Anglophone readers come across them, the Shandyesque digressions and the holy benedictions, we can recognize this Leskov, in English, as a king among Russian storytellers.

The translation achieves a few moments of absolute genius: “Lefty,” a story that Leskov himself once called “hardly translatable,” features a narrator who seems to constantly be mixing up words, botching idioms, and speaking in pseudoscience. This was the narrator responsible for the “internecine conversations” mentioned above; somewhat later, he describes the sovereign’s tour through an English cabinet of curiosities:

Then the Englishmen invited the sovereign to the last collection, where they have mineral stones and nymphosoria collected from all over the world, starting with the hugest Egyptian overlisk down to the subderminal flea, which cannot be seen with the eye, but causes remorsons between skin and body.

The translators have succeeded in conveying Leskov’s sense of humor (and not only at the level of wordplay, but also at that of self-irony and social commentary) as much as his delicate sense of tragedy. Leskov is for the most part undramatic, and the simple compassion and bravery of his characters have found in Pevear and Volokhonsky’s English words they can wholly inhabit and influence.

The only thing one may be tempted to complain about in The Enchanted Wanderer is its excessive number of annotations. This is not necessarily the translators’ fault; perhaps their editors merely sought to help readers unfamiliar with Russian history and culture to navigate the complex systems of references found in the text. But the flurry of superfluous notes threatens to bury those which are actually worthy of attention, such as note 26 to “Singlemind,” which features the entire text of Leskov’s original preface to his series of “stories of righteous men.” Although Leskov ultimately decided to suppress this preface, we are lucky to have it in this edition. It is a little jewel of a text, as much of a pleasure to read as “Singlemind” itself.

It is perhaps not unusual for writers to begin to resemble their characters. The situation Leskov has found himself in—of being perpetually re-discovered, never dying and yet constantly resurrected—is quite a Leskovian one. He is himself, of course, an enchanted wanderer and a righteous man. English readers will now be able to see why his stories have survived so long: they are not only charming and funny, poignant and exciting, but also astonishingly robust, better even than they are aware of being. One of Leskov’s narrators, listening to the tale of a storyteller, makes an observation that inadvertently holds for the author himself:

No matter how the storyteller tried to keep to the higher sphere of the incorporeal world, one could not fail to notice that the visitor from beyond the grave comes to earth in color, like a ray of light when it passes through stained glass.

We could also read this as a description of life in translation: Leskov, who like his own enchanted wanderer has never died though he has often been dying, comes to us now from beyond the grave by passing through the stained glass of our own tongue. It is a testament both to his own resilience and to the unmatched talent of his translators that he has arrived in such brilliant color.

Madeleine LaRue is a writer and translator. She lives in Berlin.

Published in Issue 31

Published in Issue 31

In his essay “Finding a Form,” William H. Gass wrote of himself (and his characters): “I read to escape my condition. I wrote to remedy it—both perilous passivities—and there is scarcely a significant character in my work who is not a failure in the practice of ordinary existence, who does not lead a deflected life. Often, though not always, they live inside a language, and try to protect themselves from every danger with a phrase.” Bearing this in mind, if Gass’s latest novel, Middle C, is not his greatest fictional work—in my estimation, that prize goes either to Omensetter’s Luck or “The Pedersen Kid”—it may very well be the clearest enunciation of these works’ formative desire.

What distinguishes Middle C from his other fiction, then, is not the that Gass’ protagonist, Joseph Skizzen, spends nearly a lifetime deflecting the dangers and horrors of life itself, but the ways in which the novel’s narrative voice buffers him from the responsibilities of being a protagonist at all. In this, the tale of his life, stretching from the Blitz of London while he’s a baby to his present professional crisis at a small college in rural Ohio, Skizzen rarely acts decisively. Indeed, those few moments he does so are mired in as much duplicity as self-doubt that Skizzen himself rarely knows his motivation, and pursues their consequences with fear and dread.

Skizzen, rather, is a born deceiver, his father having faked the family’s way into being considered Jews, so that they might escape as refugees from a not-yet Nazi Austria. After successfully surviving the war in London as fake-Jews, his father senses they could in fact thrive in North America if they became fake-English. To do so requires false papers the family does not have, though, so when Joseph finally makes it to America with his mother and sister, his father having flown the coop without them, they manage to do so only by lying their way back to the truth: that they are Austrians (yes) looking for Joseph’s Jewish father (no).

Alighting on America, Joseph discovers his affection (if not overwhelming talent) for music. He espies the distinctiveness of notes that form the chords that make music, and as he moves through life, from high school to college, he comes as well to distinguish the Joey of home from the Joseph at school. They are, of course, of a piece, but they not only stand alone, Joey can exist without Joseph, they must be played differently. Born into duplicity, Joseph grows into it naturally, discovering a third role to play after college, that of Professor Skizzen

It is striking to me, though, that one of Gass’s most plotted of novels (nodding more to the short fictions of Cartesian Sonata than of In The Heart of the Heart of the Country) manages somehow to remain so steadfastly anti-narrative. This is reflective in the third-person narration to which several reviewers have already taken exception. The story of Joseph Skizzen’s life, as it were, is secondary to its telling. A crucial element of Gass’s philosophy of fiction, reiterated throughout his many essay collections, is the construction of consciousness, which we should distinguish from its simple, straightforward depiction. What I see happening in Gass’s use of third-person in Middle C is a kind of complex layering infected by the sort thematic repetitions that inform the novel as a whole.

Unlike William Kohler in Gass’s previous monster of a novel, The Tunnel, whose first-person screeds construct for his reader the consciousness of a depraved mind, the narrative voice of Middle C fashions that of one distanced from itself. In what is surely his final novel, the blue streak of consciousness that has over the years been the identifying feature of Gass’s protagonists switches to the narrative structure itself, and in doing so maintains a subtle priority over that of Skizzen (or, indeed, any of the characters that inhabit Middle C). One of my favorite sentences of the book illustrates the effects of this sort of distancing: “How is this possible, Miriam would frequently exclaim, she said, when trying to convey to her grown-up boy her husband’s preoccupations, because Ray would treat her exclamations as a question, and then misunderstand its obvious import.” A sentence like this revels in, while maximizing the potential for, its narrative voice and the bleeding-over between past and present, and highlights that if the novel is going to say anything true, it will be multi-vocal and not always too-well mannered.

Middle C perhaps best can be regarded as the reverse-side of the sort of first-person novelty that Gass deployed in The Tunnel in such a masterful, if deeply unsettling, way. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that in that novel (as well as with Jethro Furber in Omensetter’s Luck) Gass is showcasing how inherently insidious virtuosic command over consciousness can be. We, for example, are invited to marvel at Kohler’s bombastic prose. At the beginning we are like his colleagues and students, confronted by, but envious of, and even sympathetic with, his way with words. By the end, however, we become like his wife, horrified not only by Kohler himself but by who Kohler has made us become, flag-holders of the Party of the Disappointed People. The Tunnel is a performance, Gass seems to be indicating, but it is one with no movement. (By his own description, Kohler’s is after all but a “Life in a Chair.”)

Movement, however, is what Middle C does best, and is most evident in the music that (perhaps heavy-handedly) structures and guides the novel. Noteworthy, I think, is what music gets the last, decisive word. It’s not, for example, Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” despite the fact Gass would seem to flag it for us as the structuring composition for the back-and-forth temporal swaying of the beginning sections of the novel:

He rocked the chair a bit forward to the right, a bit backward to the left, and a bit forward to the right again, in a rhythm that imitated the opening of the missing sonata, although at first he was unaware of the connection, rocking only as the grieving do, back and forth, as if their grief were a crying baby: dum doh dee dum doh dee dum doh dee dum. First, the heartbeat of the quiet world, steady, indifferent, calm, and then the higher incry of consciousness—Joey’s—fluttering, hovering, over it. He sat up then, stood up then, and went to the piano where he played the three-note base just as slowly as it was given—again and again—just as it was given. The initial dum became the final note not the first note of the triplet, while in the treble another triple was performing as though without a net. . . . The first dum was in a sense never the first dum again. Rather it was an end, so the music repeated, not its departure, but its return, again and again. . . .

Young Skizzen is overwhelmed by the beauty of the piece, but he finds it ultimately too precarious for his mediocre playing: “he couldn’t continue to make it is his.” Significantly, the piece itself is stolen from the music shop in which he discovered it, taken from his (and our) experience of the world. It seemed to me that at this point the narrative swaying becomes less rhythmic and more—caustic jerks forward in time, to Skizzen alone and manically consumed by the proper wording of a sentence he feels sums up his best hope and fear for humanity (namely, its prospect of survival), and suddenly back again to Skizzen clumsily negotiating his way between the social demands of Joey—Joseph—Professor Skizzen. The thematic repetitions become gradually more formalized, the narration increasingly fractured, everything prescribed to its atonal T like the masterworks of Skizzen’s professional expertise, Schoenberg. But then quite suddenly, as Skizzen’s deceptions appear to be headed for their endgame, he has lied about his teaching credentials and senses the truth has come out, we encounter a music whose claim is neither to beauty nor novelty: Béla Barók’s “Concerto for Orchestra.” Here,

various instruments enjoy their moment in the sun; turn and turn about, they are allowed to lead; and an ideal community is, in this way, imagined; one in which the individual is free, has its own unique voice, yet chooses to act in the best interests of all others.

As Skizzen says in his climactic lecture, every note making claims to purity, whether it be thought natural or new, is in a sense man-made—shall we say, narrated?—a construction of compositional oppositions: “These little wails of music, or bits of ragged scrape, are seeking a companion, a connection, even if only momentary, but always so they may give more sense to their sounds and make more of meaning’s music.” The key to finding meaning or authenticity in a world whose only misanthropic hope is to be damned to remaining doomed is not “in the little things” of life: one’s family, one’s friends, acts of compassion, etc. Rather, and this is what I find so gratifying about Gass in general, and what I appreciate in Middle C, it’s found in the cacophony of all these and their opposite—of discovering, as Skizzen does, that he is, in fact, a part of the world he wants nothing to do with. By the end, the divide has shrunk a little. The narrated Skizzen has momentarily caught up to the narration, and he (and the reader) senses that it will continue without him.

Brad Johnson is an independent scholar and writer living in Oakland, California. He blogs at Departure Delayed and An und für sich, and is currently writing his first novel.

Published in Issue 31

Published in Issue 31

This is a strange, engaging book that does not offer up its material to the reader without a struggle. Much of its strength comes from its juxtapositions, not only of idea with idea, word with word, phrase with phrase, but also text with image, image or text with white space, and in a larger sense, the abstract with the concrete. Doppelt is interested in how language intersects with itself and how that interaction can be manipulated. Her work is easily described as surreal, but more usefully characterized as a process of peeling away the layers of an object or phenomenon to get at the objects and phenomena underneath. She is not satisfied to see a mushroom, a moon, a worm. Instead:

The diorama changes before your eyes, matter interfiltrates and combines, malleable, alterable; it never ends: stones are moss, and moss, birds. Water moves deep down in the water, above, below, making bubbles of various sizes, the simple flower morphs into a double, a mushroom into a bird, an imperceptible point turns into a worm, which suddenly changes, is flying in red and green and azure. Clouds make vast, vague shadows, scenes take shape, images come and go, the field is kinetic.

The field—a loaded term throughout the book, which I will return to—is indeed kinetic, shifting with the viewer’s eye. The oddities of association, moss and mushrooms becoming birds for instance, are more than trompes l’oeil, although they are that too. They are a way of trying to get at something below the surface of mere observation or superficial understanding.

This goal of seeing beneath the surface is manifested in the structure of the book itself. Each page of prose poetry (or is it poetic prose?), printed only on the right side of the fold, is followed by a page of manipulated photographic images printed on the right side of the fold but with a ‘caption’ that often extends from the left side of the fold. The effect is to focus the eye intently on the right half of one’s ‘field’ of view, while maintaining a sense that something has been omitted. This absence is accentuated in the fact that the textual sections all begin with lowercase letters, as though continuations from a previous (unseen) page, and the single-line captions highlight the empty space above. I use the word ‘caption’ cautiously, because these lines are not at all simple descriptions, but rather are both a commentary on and a disruption to the viewing. The images themselves are presented as a collage or pastiche, often in pairs or in fours, and run the gamut from carefully composed portraits of objects to abstract geometrical patterns. Each is an individual ‘field,’ a confined space in which something happens, and together they make up another, larger field. This fractal creation of meaning is also a deconstruction of meaning: the book cannot be read as straightforward narrative.

Yet there is the temptation to attempt to read it as narrative. There are characters—a ‘he,’ a ‘she’ and a ‘you’—and an evasive first-person speaker. The ‘he’ is the main figure, and the reader, if she wishes, can engage in a kind of wild goose chase to try to determine who he is and where he stands in relation to the others, especially to the ‘I.’ And is the ‘she,’ as one might guess from context, actually a stand-in for the ‘I’? A few hints are offered, as in this early passage (there are no page numbers, as befits this kind of puzzle-book):

Neither scented nor smiling, no make-up, her mouth in a panic, she makes herself heard, low and continuous, a voice going white, full of predictions, inciting recollections, all in vivid images. It takes special techniques and a lot of practice to create the optical and acoustic illusions. Emanating from a charming statue, from an animal; georges schlick converses with a frog who has the voice of a bull, with a box—or with the head inside it—or behind the door or behind the field-green screen, the voice is sculpted, a second face. But then what happens to the thoughts and feelings that remain unfinished; what happens to actions never completed? She spoke in a strange voice not her own, screeches, stutters, yowls painful to the point of rictus. An animal in her throat, rigid raw raaah, it’s the soul of your ex-lover coming back in the body of a dust mite or some other insect clinging tightly to its host. Did you see it?

Do we see it? Do we see the ‘she’ as the creator of this particular “optical and acoustic illusion”? Do we see the ‘he’ as the “ex-lover” who haunts in the form of a parasite? In another passage near the middle of the book, the ‘he’ is described warmly, even lovingly:

The field is a field, fabricated, and he’s wild about botany, he has hay in his hair. He runs along the trails bordered in flowers, gathers them up, paper ones 81 red ones 42 scattered 39 painted 1 rare 63 dried 30—a portable and unlimited catalogue, but he keeps on working. He covers hills, climbs through the trees, gets lost, runs into charles plumier and jack barrelier discussing these marvelous and colorful gifts of nature. One of these days, he will himself become a plant, man sprang from the earth like a daisy or something similar.

This could be a former or current lover, or in any case a man with whom the narrator is intimately familiar. Or perhaps these clues are all a series of red herrings that match the false impressions of reality created by the manipulated photographs. The book is haunted by these impressions, and in some sense, the whole work is a kind of haunting, a Ouija board:

Who’s there, speak, go on, it’s moving, no doubt about it, yes, no, to the right or backward. Can you read my mind, never pick up what is dropped at the table that way you don’t eat too much or because, go on, finish the sentence, because crumbs belong to the dead. There the three-legged table bought in a toy store or the night table next to the bed with utensils on the round, oval, long, tall, open, squared, and extended. The world is a table, one knock for an A, 2 for a B, etc., animula takes 72, the magic number of naples. The furniture dances, matter turns neither plastic nor glass nor metal, why have you come, you want to change something in the lines above, why waste time on such trivia. And yet it turns, like the earth carried off in the middle by its rotation—a game, a real performance. Or maybe rosaspina, if you prefer, or perline. The room is dim and so encourages disintegration, broken spirits, an unknown worm, a thumbtack, an ardent opal that clears a path outside if this keeps up I’m going to faint. Can you read my mind, every crumb is unique.

There are echoes here, perhaps, of the susurrous Madame Sosostris, the “famous clairvoyante” of Eliot’s Wasteland. Instead of Tarot cards, there are crumbs, and tables, and a thumbtack. This is a world in which every small thing is unveiled or morphs into something else, and in collecting and studying such things—flowers, worms, photographic plates—hidden connections reveal themselves. As in a haunting or a prophesy, it is this sense of revelation, and not a concrete or scientific or narrative truth, that is the culmination of one’s efforts.

Instead of offering a direct path, The Field is Lethal encourages a wandering, a circling back, a kind of exploratory hunting that carries the reader through the text, sometimes with excitement, sometimes with frustration. This is not to understate the beauty of the images (both textual and photographic) that stud each page:

In the field, the mushrooms give off light, while the sunflowers seek it, and in the river, algae and eels discharge jolts of electricity . . .

Speechless machine rolling along on clay feet and hand indistinguishable, red, flour-fine, elastic, and impermeable, his body is human but altered, a scaffold for hypervoxels . . .

Micro-mirrors that reflect, distorting the sun, a glass disk that gives back light, moon, clouds, mercury colored, smooth metallic water, double suns, triple, rain pouring down more streaming than dropping . . .

Plants have appetites, feel sensations, drunkenness, bitterness, etc. Some of them sleep at night, daisies, for instance.

The recurring images of dancing furniture, flowers, worms, the sun and moon, “ex-glances sharp as rays,” magic carpets, water, bubbles, mushrooms, and of course the field itself, all serve to anchor the reader, if only in the air. The sudden expansiveness of the two-page spread of images that comes at the end of the book ties back to these repeated tropes, and it comes as a unexpected relief, a kind of centering and reassurance. It urges the reader to go back to the beginning to read it all again, to find new lines of correspondence and to connect the dots differently, in a new constellation of meaning. Whether these connections lead to some kind of emotional revelation or deeper universal truth, I suspect, will depend on whether the individual reader is taken in by Doppelt’s personal mythology.

According to an afterward by philosopher Avital Ronell, this book is part of a trilogy of related works that includes an invented ethnography and a work of pseudo-philosophy (neither, as far as I can tell, are available in English yet). The Field Is Lethal, dealing as it does with a blurring between the spiritual and natural world, seems like a fitting conclusion.

Swensen, a prolific poet herself, rises to the task of translating this fairly esoteric work. Her language is fluid but never lazy, and she recreates exquisitely what must have been very ambitious French:

The sun returns, it rises and moves on, choosing a path that radiates like the place d’etoile, it’s a wild point on the line, a super-engine of rotation, he goes round, like the world, the luminous rays form and dissolve. He accelerates faster and faster through the air at an indeterminate point he deviates slightly from the horizon, wrong way, the head turns, the eyes turn, all caused by the whirlwind, he stops and then again takes up his regular rhythm around the endless loop of freeway intersections.

This breathless yet controlled effect can be produced only by a writer completely at home in her language, someone who pauses only to consider carefully, not to second-guess. Keeping the French of “place d’etoile,” the former name of the enormous roundabout that houses the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, now known as the Place de Charles de Gaulle, is a graceful touch. Because the phrase is in lowercase, as are all of the proper names in the book, its literal meaning is brought to the fore, and in this celestial context, the ‘place of the stars,’ takes on more import as both the sun’s opposite (the night sky) and its very category. This, like names left as “madame lux” or “monsieur de palma,” maintains a fruitful sense of foreignness, a marker that we are reading a translation. These are occasional, needed reminders that the book is a manipulated object, that it has traveled a linguistic and cultural distance to come to us in its English-language form.

It is an important part of the reading experience to recognize a work as foreign and to approach it at least partly with that in mind. Swensen’s text is so sinuous and evenhanded that the book largely reads as though English were its original language, and this raises a thorny question. Doppelt’s original title is Le Pré est vénéneux, meaning literally “the meadow is poisonous.” Swenson gets much mileage out of choosing instead to translate pré as ‘field.’ It is a word that leads to many associations: magnetic field, a field of study, force field, farm field, a battlefield. It calls to mind Mark Strand’s “In a field / I am the absence / of field,” a truth very much in keeping with Doppelt’s work. Repeated phrases like “the field is kinetic” sound nicely scientific, even familiar. But is what Doppelt intended in fact something closer to “the meadow is kinetic,” which is much more organic in flavor, and, in some ways, more surprising in the way much of Doppelt’s poetry is inherently surprising, which is to say, in its appositions? According to an excerpt of the original text available on the web, Doppelt uses both champs (field) and pré (meadow). Swensen chooses to translate both as “field.” One can see why; it does make the poem easier to follow and more thematically cohesive. Yet perhaps it also diminishes one of Doppelt’s strengths, namely her evocative strangeness.

This is not a bilingual edition, but I hope readers will find themselves curious about the original French; enough to wonder about the title, or about which “you”—tu or vous—Doppelt used, an indication of formality or plurality that we lack in English and whose distinction is lost in translation. Still, to question individual word choices of a translator is a losing game. Such decisions are always the product of many deliberations and of weighing one consideration against another. Two languages never line up neatly, and Swensen’s larger success overrides any quibbles. The resulting poetry is well worth reading.

Eleanor Goodman is a writer and translator from Chinese. Her work appears in journals such as Pathlight, PN Review, Chutzpah 天南, Pleiades, The Guardian, Cha, and The Best American Poetry website. Her book of translations, The Selected Poems of Wang Xiaoni, is forthcoming from Zephyr Press.

Published in Issue 31

You can tell that Viola di Grado has a unique voice from the first line of her novel, 70% Acrylic 30% Wool: “One day it was still December.” If this line seems a little puzzling, the next one puts things in (ironic) perspective: “Especially in Leeds, where winter has been underway for such a long time that nobody is old enough to have seen what came before.” After having read this book, I hope I’ll never go to Leeds. Its constant grayness, cold rainy days, bland working class neighborhoods with dirty streets peppered with used condoms and vomit, which are depicted over and over throughout the novel, have made a lasting impression.

The narrator is a twenty-one-year-old girl who left Italy with her family when she was seven to move to Britain. The “Britishness” seeping from the novel is so overpowering that it’s easy to forget that the novel wasn’t originally written in English, but in Italian. Di Grado’s writing has an oddness that sounds, paradoxically, very English. It is odd in the way a surrealist painting is odd, and yet, one has a hard time thinking of the English version as a “translation.” This natural-sounding strangeness, for which we have to thank (at least in part) the translator, Michael Reynolds, is rooted in a vision of writing that comes from the fourth-century BCE Chinese Taoist philosopher, Zhuangzi, who, according to di Grado, believed that one had to “forget” language and not fall into the “fish-traps” of convention. In an email interview, di Grado explained: “One of the ways I did that was by operating a slight shift in meaning so that you recognize the word, but still feel like you need a sort of translation—that’s what many people told me about the language I use.” Intriguingly, Di Grado wrote her novel at the same age as her character, while living in Leeds as an exchange student in a big house she shared with twelve Russians!

In the middle of the night I would wake up and speak Italian. Since none of them spoke Italian, I’ll never know what I was saying. I think my core was trying to express itself, I think I felt caged. Living in a British environment made a difference: at some point, I would think a sentence in English and then translate it [into Italian], which is of course terrible, since being familiar with the language you’re writing in is essential.

There is no doubt that the most striking aspect of this novel is its style. But style here is not a mere ornament, as is often the case with many books focused on “craft.” Rather, the experience of language is at the core of the book—which is not to say that this is one of those books “about nothing.” The experience of language and of its absence—silence—are present here in many ways, beginning with the period of silent grieving after the narrator’s father’s death in a car accident. The narrator’s mother hasn’t spoken in months (or maybe years; we don’t know since it’s always “December”), and mother and daughter have developed a silent language: “She said the look, ‘Go ahead . . .’” The mother, who had been a beautiful, successful flute player, turns into a slob who spends her life unwashed and undressed until the day she begins a photography class in which she was enrolled by her daughter.

Camellia (the daughter-narrator) works as a freelance translator for an Italian washing machine company whose operating instructions often pop up within the narration, adding to the absurdity of it all. In the same interview, di Grado explained that she was interested in “the idea of applying the dumb, often surreal logic of these instruction manuals to life—one than is really messy. That’s what Camelia does, her life is a mess and this is one of her ways to clean it up through this distortion.” While Camellia is having sex with Jimmy, we can read these hilarious insertions: “During wash cycles the transparent porthole tends to heat up;” or: “Opening the porthole and placing clothes in . . .”

Jimmy is the mentally retarded brother of a young Chinese man, Wen, who works as a tailor in Camellia’s neighborhood and teaches her Chinese, a language that di Grado has studied herself. The reflections on various Chinese ideograms and the relationships between them are among the most intellectually stimulating parts of the novel, and they too are related to the narrator’s quest for a new language. In our interview, di Grado explained how studying Chinese and Japanese while writing a novel in Italian influenced her writing:

Learning languages that are so distant from mine has been essential for me to create a neutral space. These are ideographic languages, so by learning them I tried to treat Italian words as if they were ideographs—that is, words that have to be identified and recognized for their concept rather than from the immediacy of sound. I think ideographs have a more intimate connection with the world, and I wanted to give Italian words this intimacy, this power. It’s like taking their clothes off.

The relationship with Jimmy begins after Wen (who loves Camellia) refuses her sexual advances. In the end, the mystery of Wen’s refusal is solved, but a crime involving the mother’s new boyfriend (her photography instructor) gives the story an unexpected twist. The ending, as well as the protagonist’s sadomasochistic predispositions are reminiscent of Yoko Ogawa’s novels and female characters, who display the same paradoxical mixture of inner fragility and destructive tendencies toward themselves and the others. But the overall style of the novel, as well as di Grado’s style in real life (she is known for her extravagant fashion choices and her very dark lipstick) have an affinity with the Francophone Belgian writer, Amélie Nothomb, who, coincidentally, also knows Japanese. (As an aside, I should add that I saw Nothomb a few years ago at the Salon du livre in Paris, surrounded by body guards, wearing one of her huge hats, and having her hand kissed by a female admirer.) In our interview, Di Grado, who is an admirer of Nothomb, revealed that the Belgian writer has written her a generous letter about her novel.

Di Grado’s style, always ingenuous, moves between what could be called economically artful (“The blond woman in the film spoke rain and her mother . . . replied in rain”) and what to some may seem like hyper-hyperbolae (“Outside, the endless sadomasochism of the earth and sky, clouds lacerating innocent lawns with water”). Whatever the case, the style is a perfect match for the character’s inner turmoil. One of the novel’s greatest qualities is that the inner and outer worlds are a continuation of each other. The reader breaths the same air for the duration of the entire book, which makes it an emotionally challenging experience.

In a previous (video) interview, di Grado, elaborating on the fourth-century Chinese philosopher, had made the comment that literature is about destroying language and recreating it. It is a good description of what she does, and one of the best definitions of literary language I’ve come across. Not accidentally, Camellia is passionately destroying the “defective” garments she finds in the trash (thrown there by Wen) and then she pieces them together in new, unexpected configurations. Camellia seems to embody the author’s vision of language and the Japanese esthetic ideal of mono no ware, “born from the encounter of Buddhism and Shinto. It’s a literary ideal on which Heian period literature is based. It’s the sadness of things, the awareness that a thing’s closeness to death is the reason of its beauty.”

When asked about her writing process, di Grado compared the writer to a shaman:

“I think the writer is like a shaman. I begin with an image, an idea, and then, as the story unfolds, all the ideas come to me. My creative process is very chaotic and, like the shaman’s, it starts with a dream: I dream about the protagonist, and from that moment on I know the direction in some unconscious way. It’s like I know the direction inside the land of my unconscious in terms of where to go and where to pick things up.”

If creating means (symbolically) destroying the world in which we live and giving it a new shape, Viola di Grado is undoubtedly a true creator. I hope English-speaking readers will have access before long to her new books: a story about an egg ruling a country, inspired by Lewis Carroll’s egg Humpty Dumpty, and a novel (to be released in Italian this February) about a girl’s life after committing suicide.

Alta Ifland is a writer, translator and book reviewer. Born and raised in Romania, she studied in France and emigrated to the United States, where she writes in both French and English. She has published two short story collections (Elegy for a Fabulous World and Death-in-a-Box) and two books of prose poems.

Published in Issue 31

Published in Issue 31

I remember as a high school student in the late Seventies voraciously reading Plath’s roman à clef, The Bell Jar. Like many upper-middle class girls who dreamed of making it into the literary limelight, I identified with both with Plath and her sensitive and gifted alter-ego, Esther Greenwood, who travels to the bright lights of the big city to make her name as a writer. Instead of becoming famous, she loses her faith in the dream and, ultimately, herself. A botched suicide attempt lands her in the psych ward, a gated-community for promising, but deeply wounded, women like Esther and Plath whose potential was restricted by the narrative of male social privilege. Back then male domination drove promising young women mad and, if one takes Suzanne Scalon’s Promising Young Women into account, even now.

Plath’s ghost haunts the pages of Scanlon’s book, a non-linear narrative that hinges around Lizzie, a bright liberal arts student from Barnard and aspiring actress who has much in common with Plath’s protagonist. We’ve fast-forwarded forty years to New York in the early 90’s’; like Esther before her, Lizzie has come from the provinces to make a name for herself in the Big Apple and she, too, grieves for a lost parent, her mother who died when she was a young girl. These personal losses, coupled with the mounting disillusionments over career and relationship failures, drive both women to the mental ward. There, the similarities end. Lizzie comes to New York with some life experience: as a UCLA student, she lost her virginity to Nick Martini a D-list actor and screenwriter with whom she had a one-night stand. In The Bell Jar, social class plays a pivotal role in Esther’s identity crisis, while in Promising Young Women, Lizzie’s Irish Catholic faith fuels her sense of alienation and loss. As Lizzie struggles to come to terms with her mother’s death, neither the Church nor her education at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows has delivered on their promise of solace in the face of her yawning grief.

While the differences in characterization are fairly minor, Scanlon’s structure and narrative technique diverges sharply from the earlier work’s. Unlike Plath, who chronicles Esther’s descent chronologically using a traditional narrative style, Scanlon immediately plunges us into the world of Lizzie’s fractured psyche. We first meet Lizzie on Ward Six of a New York mental hospital; Scanlon leaves us guessing as to the identity of her first-person narrator whose wry observations paint a sad portrait of life on the Ward. We have no context for who she is or why she’s there or whether her point of view is reliable. As the narrative continues, Scanlon reveals Lizzie’s fractured identity, piece by piece, shifting from first-, to third-, to second-person so we feel her disorientation, and the blankness of it all in the Ativan induced flatness of her affect, the pain and confusion she suffers because of her inability to connect with anyone either on the Ward or off:

There is a kind of loneliness that comes from being with people. The kind that is more about a recognition of the failure of communication. The gaps. Like the other day this woman came over and I served her tea and her child played with my child. The woman told me of her career trajectory, which I have already heard in this same excruciating detail twice before. It involves a broken engagement and an incomplete PhD program. Which she considers a failure, having come from some ambitious North Shore whatever world. I nod, sip my tea, thinking about how hard it is to really truly connect with another human being.

This empty sadness pervades the novel in a patchwork that Scanlon stitches together to bridge the gaps, the disassociated pieces of Lizzie’s troubled soul. In key moments, her portrait of Lizzie is moving, especially the chapter that Lizzie narrates about her child-self trying to understand death and the meaning of her mother’s funeral. Scanlon captures Lizzie’s anguish with the image of her mouth frozen in a small o, the primal scream of loss.

Yet the droning emptiness at the heart of the novel and Scanlon’s literary pretensions come at a cost. Scanlon shows some daring in terms of content and structure, but these days, it is not enough to provide the unreliable and/or mad narrator. These techniques have been employed many times before, often with far more honesty, originality and power. Scanlon’s frequent name-dropping also detracts from the novel’s power: peppered among the obligatory references to Woolf, Stein and Plath are, among others, Joyce, Dylan Thomas, Chekhov, Oscar Wilde and Faulkner. Scanlon juxtaposes these names with those of pop culture icons, drama queens, like Meryl Streep, and Holocaust victims like Anne Frank and Viktor Frankl to suggest that Lizzie’s promise is as monumental and her suffering as great as the company she keeps. But she’s out of her depth. Scanlon has merely stripped the meaning from these figures and posted them to what feels like a prior-day Facebook wall. The references come off as too smug, as though we can feel good about ourselves because, like Scanlon, we’re in the know.

Another troubling aspect of Promising Young Women is that even though women have supposedly been liberated from the corset of society’s Mad Men narrative, they still love the straightjacket. Women’s affinity for this particular genre lends credence to WC Field’s wry observation “that all women are crazy; it’s only a question of degree.” After all, real men don’t read women’s lit; women do. And crazy, like a sexy pair of 5 inch Louboutins, sells. In this day of Shades of Grey branding, an aspiring woman writer can hardly get a book contract, no less appear on O, if she doesn’t go for the self-referential whip. Smart women’s inner-lives are far more complex than the publishing biz would let on which is why Lizzie’s case and this important theme deserve a more nuanced and skillful treatment than Dr. Roger, publishing in general, or even Scanlon offers. Take the sentence fragments which start one chapter—”Sometimes Molly refused. To get out of bed“—they hardly seem torn from the Joycean stream-of-consciousness handbook; or, consider the lackluster prose that conveys Lizzie’s reflections on her one-night stand with Nick Martini:

For an hour, maybe longer, I lay in the bathtub of Nick’s Hollywood Hills two-bedroom home high over the bright sadness of Los Angeles. I felt myself come alive. Lying there I knew I would be okay. The hot water washed away the wine and the smoke of the bar, washed away the cynical actors and the sad women.

Scanlon’s evocation of Lizzie’s tragedy, while heart-felt, is sad because it reveals how dull and superficial these mad women narratives have become since Esther struggled to find her way out of the bell jar. I loved The Bell Jar not because I found Esther or Plath’s suffering for their art romantic or hip; I loved their life, their vitality, wry insight, the smarts that allowed us, to transcend the suffering through literature, if only for a fleeting moment. Plath never returned from that last descent into the darkness, but her ability to illuminate the darkness still shines. Such smarts are what Scanlon’s Promising Young Women lacks, the lens that distances the writer from her creation to see the humor, bitterness and sad irony of a life lived through the bars of a woman’s broken consciousness. While Scanlon tries her hand at irony with puns like Our Lady of Perpetual Suffering, U-G-H, and the S.S. Roger (Lizzie’s term for her psychiatrist’s ward of affluent mentally ill young women), she takes herself too seriously, despite her love for Woody Allen. It is the wit and laughter that make the painful truth about sensitive women’s lives poignant. Without them, the author can only skim the surface when it comes giving voice to bright, promising women and their psychological troubles which are, even so many years after the Bell Jar, still all too painful and real.

Deborah Helen Garfinkle’s translation The Old Man’s Verses: Poems by Ivan Diviš was nominated for the 2008 Northern California Book Award. This year, she was awarded an NEA Translation Fellowship and a Translation Grant from the PEN Center USA for her work on Worm-Eaten Time: Poems from a Life under Normalization by Pavel Šrut 1968-1989. She is currently revising her intellectual history of the Czech Surrealist movement, The Surrealist Bridge: Czech Surrealism’s Interwar Experiment 1934-1938.

Published in Issue 31

Published in Issue 31

What happens to all the old, new things after two or three new, new things replace them? And what of the ideas and memories of which they are ultimately extensions and souvenirs? This is one of the larger questions, really, that Ander Monson poses in his most recent collection of poems, The Available World, though he does so in varying shades of subtly and explicitness. His discontent with the ever expanding, ever forward-moving present manifests as an ambivalent nostalgia, part hostility, part intrigue. “Everything here is swaddled in static,” he writes. This metaphor could serve as the descriptive core of the collection.

What is at hand, not what is to be dreamt up, what is to be recollected—Monson’s work draws its content from just that. And forget about tranquility. Monson, who grew up in the 70s and 80s, has had his perception shaped by material proliferation and change. As an example, in the ambit of pop gadgetry and culture the cassette displaced records and the 8-track; the CD overwhelmed the cassette. Now the CD has lost its luster. Once, it’s true, buying a computer meant choosing from a scarce selection apart from an “amber-screened Tandy, least sexy of all / conceivable IBM-compatible computers.” Innovation can seem inviting but it can also be the province of dispossession; in particular, dispossession by devastation of choice.

The poems take on many guises, including lists, elegies and, most notably, sermons. “Availability,” Monson’s most dense list, reveals just what is subject to inclusion and attention. Name it: “Princes. Prints of reclining princes, contemplating euthanasia: / a hundred doors opening in front of you until they curl closed / with a swish. And yes. C’est oui. And wine. Manuals for response / to wine.” Moreover, as entertaining accompaniment to the wine and wine manuals, there are “All of actor Wil Wheaton’s thoughts, collected.” Here the static starts to hiss and crack. These things do not match up, though they are often forcibly paired. On the one hand, the odd combination effects a certain ironic, celebratory humor. On the other, it jibes at rootless, middle-class appetites.

The kind of fraught relationship Monson has to The Available World stays what could otherwise lurch into didactic delivery from on high. He does not shy from implicating himself in an imbroglio of fleeting trends. In “Dear Boar,” a sort of elegiac epistle for a wild hog Monson inadvertently clobbered with the grill of his Nissan on an Alabama highway, he reappropriates the memory of “a burst of ham ambling afterward into the trees” as an opportunity for introspection.

And I see you circling back in dreams,
in the temperature of fur I picked out of the grate
(there is always more of it: tied flies
barbed later in my brother’s shoulder, that Russian winter
hat I wore through most of eighth grade in my short life
as a Communist, the dried out dandelion bursts
that haunt late summer evening air in Iowa
like paratroopers, like perspiration).

Monson not infrequently forces recollection through some form or another of technological mediation. In the case of the boar there is the car, which cannot avoid coming off as a source of injury. So too, not infrequently, the curiosity shop’s worth of technological apparatus in the poems appears smudged, darkly tinged, neither shining nor enticing. The following lines from “This Simulation: Tour,” a poem touching on memory, doubt, and reality’s unreality, illustrate the point: “You can see yourself in it if you reduce / the resolution low enough so it all goes / to dot and RGB representation of light. / Yes, that’s death you’re seeing.” The creative manipulation of additive color mixing can produce dazzlingly representational images, trompes-l’œil perhaps more lifelike than life. Seeing a constituent part—“yourself”—of the overall image necessitates breaking the primary colors away from one another. All the animation of the illusion seeps out between the seams.

Given the degree of pathos in such messages, it is a further credit to Monson’s self-awareness that the language with which he delivers them never runs away from him into a haughty or supercilious style. The language is, in fact, apt and it carries the poems with verve. Even in the case of the sermons, typically outlets for rhetorical intensity, sometimes invective, a cooler degree of poeticity tempers the more firebrand lyricism attendant upon the tradition of this form.

“The Calculus Sermon” pleads against the incessant enumeration of physiological woes. “Oh Christ then enough about the body / and its wealth of fault, its gilded inside / and all of its unhappiness and ruin.” Interestingly, the invocation that begins the sermon actually verges on blasphemy and positions itself contrariwise to any latent ecclesial implications. The twisted invocation establishes the expectation of further wryness, but still more interestingly, it never comes. Instead the tone shifts momentarily to an almost Romantic exaltation of human form channeled through natural wonder.

There are things beyond all this—cirrus
clouds glancing on the horizon, thunderheads
meaning upcoming inclement threat of hail

and dangerous ground-to-sky electricity
that is to the air like a strike of love
or a tenth-frame drunken turkey comeback

so improbable as to stun your friends into
submissions and promises to resume attending church.
The body is a beauty, silhouette

There is something deft in the transition from the wispy sibilants of “cirrus / clouds glancing on the horizon, thunderheads” to the more booming and palpable “meaning upcoming inclement threat of hail.” If lofty imagery threatens to carry the poem away, the bowling image grounds it securely, nearly to the point of collapse. If anything, it testifies to Monson’s willingness to draw afflatus from the entirety of his environs. Granted, the results are not always glamorous—bowling appearing in a poem being a case in point. But it’s the same churning current of any and all opposites running through the book that Monson intends to make a reader feel as an uncomfortable pulling sensation at the moment of this appearance, and at other moments like it.

Inclusiveness, coupled with ambivalence, leads to the most salient aspect, or non-aspect of the sermons—but, really, the argument could be made for the whole book. What it is, is that these poems stop blatantly short of prophetic utterance. They come up approximately half of the way to it. For prophecy, in its most pared down sense, is twofold. It is observational and inductively inferential. A prophet acutely observes the world over a long duration, studying its tells and tendencies in order to, next, construe the signs of the times into prognostications of what will follow. Monson writes so many of these poems as if they were snippets from logbook entries. That is to say that they do draw detail from the past and the present as it ineluctably yields to the past. But, that detail drawn, a wary restraint impedes its further progress into the future.

Now, Monson certainly believes in a future. He simply refuses to affirm an eschatology, let alone hint at it in his poetry unless playfully mocking it or gainsaying it outright. In the “Sermon, Now Encrypted,” he asserts that “There is not a land beyond this one when / the screen is cleared and our lives have been / lifted away like a spider net is from a set of ferns, / unfurling.” Of course there isn’t, not in a book so enmeshed in the fray of immediacy. These poems limit readerly experience to human moments, past and present, in a tenor that is utterly human—the alliteration and assonance of “Ferns, / unfurling,” for instance, more or less mark the ceiling of artifice. Voices and subjects range, but never too high and never too low, hovering over a meditative middle ground. This is not necessarily ground easily won; sometimes it is downright wearisome to negotiate through everything base and illustrious in The Available World in order to meet Monson halfway. Yet, it’s worth it. And in the end, it is the reader who must venture into prolepsis by considering what may yet come to pass, as suggested by the book’s final “Sermon in Ribbons:”

                                                                                           Let us
now turn
our hands and faces        up to God             or light
cast down         from satellites         and ask for something new.

Fill in the blank for “something new” as you will.

Derek Gromadzki is an MFA student in the Literary Arts Program at Brown University. His poetry is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Conjunctions, and Drunken Boat and has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Black Warrior Review, CutBank, The Journal, and other publications.

Published in Issue 31

Published in Issue 31

There is something immediately seductive about Sjón’s The Whispering Muse. The narrator, a peculiar old Icelander named Valdimar Haraldsson, receives a letter from an old acquaintance, inviting him on a sea voyage aboard the newly launched merchant ship, the MS Elizabet Jung-Olsen. Haraldsson, who has long been cooped up in his shabby Copenhagen apartment, reacts emotionally to the unexpected gesture: “my heart was filled with unfeigned joy, joy at being invited on such an adventure . . . joy that the buds looked promising on the boughs of the apple trees in the tiny patch of garden that belonged to my foolish neighbor Widow Lauritzen.” Something about this abrupt transition from a generous, lively description of apple boughs to a petty observation about a vexing neighbor is at once funny and provocative. This is not only characteristic of the novel’s voice; it is a subtle premonition of the narrative dynamic structuring The Whispering Muse.

One of Iceland’s most prominent contemporary writers, Sjón has set himself apart through his remarkable ability to weave together myth and modern life, allowing them enigmatically to echo one another. The Whispering Muse, beautifully translated by Victoria Cribb, is also based on this juxtaposition. Once on board the MS Elizabet Jung-Olsen, Haraldsson finds that the crew is entertained each evening by the stories of Caeneus, currently second mate but once a member of the legendary crew of the Argo, the magnificent vessel used in Jason’s quest for the golden fleece. Night after night, Caeneus holds to his ear a splinter of wood and listens intently while the muse within whispers to him, before embarking on another episode of his tale. The stories, as well as the words he chooses to tell them, are intensely beautiful and grave, filled with urgency and pathos. The narrator, however, is not impressed, and upon the tales’ conclusion is invariably found yawning, grumbling, and professing his disbelief about how long a fellow can “drone on” about his life. In fact, next to propagating his crackpot racial theories, pointing out the apparent faults of others seems to be one of Haraldsson’s chief preoccupations. In this manner The Whispering Muse veers vertiginously between the largely silly, mundane preoccupations of the narrator and Caeneus’s bold and shimmering visions of Antiquity.

The result is a unique hybrid: a novel fundamentally interested in the phenomenon of storytelling, but set in the mind of someone whose concept of a story is very narrow and conventional, and who views Caeneus’s surrealistic reveries as little more than self-indulgent oddities. (I will not go so far as to say that Haraldsson is not a storyteller at all, for I am convinced that nobody is entirely bereft of the storyteller’s impulse.) The presence of this seemingly incongruous narrator, however, in no way diminishes the emotional force of Caeneus’s myths; rather, it adds the tension essential to Sjón’s intellectual experiment. The Argonauts’ tale is embedded in an old coot’s memoirs because, preposterous as it may seem, much of what makes up the ancient heroes’ lives is also what makes up ours. There is the eternal conflict between desire and duty. There is the pressure to adapt to changing circumstances. There is also boredom, and getting sidetracked by illusions and fleeting passions. And even in this story within a story, there are more mises en abîme, more stories that the Argonauts encounter, react to, recoil from, or rejoice in.

And then there is the sea. In so many ways, this is the only suitable location for this tale, as well as, it seems to me, the natural companion of Sjón’s style. At sea, a different logic takes hold. The minds of men, as Ariel sings in The Tempest, “suffer a sea-change/Into something rich and strange” and the stories they produce become haunted by mirages and monsters. To match this setting, the scale of Sjón’s writing is grand, his words voluptuous and evocative of the sea’s dreadful power. Its power is not only to wreck ships and drive men mad; no, in the world of myth, Poseidon can descend on a beach and rape a maiden, let “[t]he briny sea flood every inch of [her] body . . . and wherever it went it felt like molten iron poured into the outstretched hand of a child.” The ships that move on this capricious surface, too, are often described like lovers. They rise and fall on the waves like “the rolling hips of Aphrodite,” and sometimes speak in passionate groans, as does the Argo when she encounters her old captain Jason on an abandoned beach: “Take me away. Sail me out to sea, the blue sea . . . Oh, how I have missed the feel of your strong feet walking my decks . . .”

The Whispering Muse is an intensely poetic work, not only because it vividly recalls the great epic poems, from drawn-out feasts to hyphenated epithets, but because it is confident in its rich and dramatic vocabulary. It is a poetry of abundance and profusion, like coral encrusting a submerged galleon. But there is nothing frivolous in this glut of detail and metaphor—not least because in a work so conscious of its own textuality, so deeply concerned with the act of creating art, no stylistic choice can be the result of pure whim.

And what about the secret of the muse? One late evening, over a bottomless carafe of brandy, Caeneus gives an account of his creative process. It goes like this: he listens to his gnarled piece of wood—taken from the bow of the Argo—until from the initial soft static there emerges a clear note: “as if a single grain of golden sand had slipped through the mesh of the sieve and, borne on the tip of the eardrum’s tongue, passed through the horn and ivory-inlaid gates that divide the tangible from the invisible world.” Of course, this is nothing Haraldsson can make head or tail of, but here is a powerful commentary on the making of art: the artist must undertake a journey, must dare to step from familiar, reliable ground into the formless, shape-shifting world of the unknown. It is much like stepping from land to sea. There is risk involved, and, unlike Haraldsson hopes, you can’t merely take a holiday over there: any journey, whether on a ship or a page, will transform you on the inside.

Tone-deaf as he is, perhaps Haraldsson has an inkling of this when he eventually steals Caeneus’s little wooden muse. Once you have visited the invisible world, you know you have to keep going back, because as any artist or reader knows, to be transformed, time and again, is to remain in motion, and to avoid a stagnant life.

The Whispering Muse, a marine fable of rare beauty and originality, is sure to inspire the urge to return to Sjón’s writing for the verve, humor, and verbal artistry one is sure to find in it.

Mona Gainer-Salim is a student of literature and illustrator. She lives in Vienna.

Published in Issue 31

Published in Issue 31

When Farah Field announced the opening of Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop (Field and Jared White’s pop-up shop, the only all-poetry bookshop in New York City) two Februarys ago on her blog Adultish, she wrote this: It is kind of an anti-capitalistic act because no one could ever pay what poetry is worth. This sentiment is exactly true ofher new book, Wolf and Pilot, too. There’s no way to pay what Field’s poems are potentially worth. If you could, it would be in the currency of jewels fallen from their settings, taped and re-taped paper doll outfits, brass buttons from your favorite coat, and coins from unidentifiable countries. This book is at once a fairy tale you may recognize from long ago, an alternate universe eerily similar to our own, and a history of four sisters written in their chaotic, collective voices.

Each poem in Farrah Field’s Wolf and Pilot contains the branches and multitudes of a world busy with complexities, the whelming story of the four sisters (Elsianne, Matilda, Emaline, and Aubrie), and their journey from out of their bedroom window. Wolf and Pilot often reads as if you’re squinting at a detailed scene in a sugar egg, or watching a troubling movie through netted fingers. In the first of four different sections of the book, the sisters disappear through the window of their room. The seemingly archetypal adults (the detective, the teacher, the mother) then set out in search of them. But the sisters are immersed in their forest hide-away where they watch animals and humans from a concealed distance. This shifts to them living with the detective and teacher as their new, caring parents, though one sister dies. Finally, they arrive at the new world the sisters and the new parents emerge into once their grief has subsided and their lives as humans develop.

The morning I finished reading Wolf and Pilot, really reading it, my husband entered the bedroom and told me that there was a dead cat in the neighbor’s backyard. He saw it through the bathroom window, thought it was sleeping, and then realized it wasn’t. That, he explained, must be what our dog was barking at last night. I immediately recalled this stanza from the second of four sections in the book:

Aubrie makes the sign of sleep
and points to dead animals.
On one side, they’re comfy and curled
yet smashed on the other.

At this point in the book, the four serenely feral sisters are enduring their life on the run in the woods, no longer fully integrated into the animal or human worlds. Throughout the whole book, but especially at this midway section, the sisters live partially in the animal world and partially in the human world. This gray area they exist in makes it more understandable that the distance between comfy and smashed would be so short for them. Is it sleeping? Or is it dead? Maybe the two can exist simultaneously. Following the same logic, characters endure unnatural transformations that are accepted as fact. In the poem “Wanting to Train Pigmy Goats,” as the image of their real mother is literally dismantled—she “pull[s] her face off at the nostril,” “threw one of her feet at [the sisters] and never lost her balance,” the sisters see a “horse family/stand[ing] close together in a big field.” The wildness of animals, even when smashed on one side, seems somehow more civilized than the unpredictability of their human family.

The forms of the poems exist as vehicles for the story of it all. Some are lineated and separated into stanzas of varying length, while others are kept in squared prose blocks. Oddly specific titles stand in contrast to the dreamy, hazy language of the poems. The last stanza of the first poem in the second section, “Bedtime Stories,” contains a rush of information in a single sentence that is broken up over several lines, tempered by a final line with a clear thought:

We are stronger than blackbirds
we don’t know what anything means we put our
hands on the cool glass called a window.
Once upon a time all adults used to be children.

The sometimes-scattered language of the poems reflects back on itself—especially when either a single sister speaks or all of the sisters speak in unison. Field creates a voice that sometimes sounds like the fragmented recollections of a victim of abuse, occasionally reminding me of the transcribed testimony of Elizabeth Smart, or the stories of people held captive in single rooms for years. This trauma is reflected in the language, forcing them to create skewed perceptions and dialects.

Mother didn’t know we knew
our birthdays. Twelve children died

of polio on mine. Fourteen of fifteen
September birthday holders

learn to be overlooked.
Here and there without a coat still.

I never went to school.
From our room,

I watched the rusted-clutch bus
choke its way to select houses.

When the voice is that of the girls speaking collectively, you are left creepily unaware of who is speaking or what is to be believed. Are the actions of the adults truly as strange as they are described? Or is it because of the girls’ filter? Here is one such instance of this disorientating strangeness, from “Our Food Will Not Come From a Cigarette Company,” in which the sisters take on the teacher and detective as their parents:

Our teacher needs a potato masher and time to think,
watching us hold the seeds, bored to sticks.

We can never be too aware of what’s really being said.
The detective sweated with the shovel
that kept hitting a large stone. He threw

his heavy coat on a pile of dirt. His own air
circled his face and the teacher told him not to swear.

Field’s words and plot are often weightless and untraceable, the extreme whimsy pinned down only by the steady rhythm and telling punctuation.

The mothers were like pulling a hangnail and watching the blood
rush back and forth underneath until it pops up to drown the tear.

Who could possibly know what someone else looks like anyway.

A habit of bodies is like lighting a stick on fire and breathing.
Under our fresh outfits, we’re variations of wolves at best.

Farrah Field’s Wolf and Pilot unravels a mottled mystery of sisters gone missing. It’s a page turner because it begins with a mystery. Where did the sisters go?

We don’t know how the sisters crawled out of the window,
the detective said, counting footsteps from the rocking chair
to the window, from the desk to the window as if the girls,
scattered around the room, one by one got up and left.

But as you persue the answers, it becomes clear—the sisters haven’t gone anywhere at all. New details and meanings rise to the surface and link together with each re-read—just what happened to the sisters? Did they runaway, or were they kidnapped? Who exactly are their parents? The sisters are there the whole time, speaking to you. And as you turn the pages, the mysteries of where they went and why don’t solve themselves neatly, instead the poems are built with imaginative holes—à la the father’s morning newspaper attacked by the scissors of his naughty children before he can get to it—but these are not just empty holes, they’re intricate cut-outs made with delicate flicks of Field’s thin-bladed shears.

Lesley Ann Wheeler is a poet and teacher who lives in Kansas City. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a coeditor of Strange Cage. Her chapbook, Dream Treatment, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press.

Published in Issue 31

Published in Issue 31

Unless he is John Keats, a poet’s letters seldom stand alone as literature. They might hold our attention as gossip (Lord Byron), psychiatric case study (Robert Lowell) or the after-hours thoughts of a combative poet-critic (Yvor Winters), but few could be pleasurably read without the additional scaffolding provided by the poetry. Even Marianne Moore, one of the last century’s great poets, was on most occasions a rather business-like writer of letters. In contrast, a reader unfamiliar with Keats’ verse can find his letters immensely readable with only occasional reference to the poems.

This prompts a question: What makes a good letter? How does it transcend its immediate context and purpose? What gives it the readability of a first-rate poem or essay? No formula is comprehensive, but wit surely plays a part (think of Flannery O’Connor’s letters), the unguarded humor of the moment. So too, the mingled impression of spontaneity, like good conversation in prose, with the care and polish of a seasoned writer. Perhaps the most important ingredient is revelation of character, the writer’s willingness to reveal, inadvertently or otherwise, some truth about himself. This should not be confused with confession, a contented reveling in one’s sins and misfortunes. The best letters, like the best poems, are simultaneously personal and not.

On the spectrum of letter-writing readability, Anthony Hecht (1923-2004) combines elements of Keats and Moore. He is never less than charmingly fluent, even in the letters he writes home from summer camp as a boy. In 1935, age twelve, in the first letter included in Selected Letters, Hecht writes from Camp Kennebec in Maine: “Mike and Meyer [a comedy skit] went over with a bang and Alan acted as Mike. I am learning to swim and as I am a freshman the boys are pouncing on me. I wanted to tell you that it has been raining here for two days and it is necessary to wear boots.” Already we hear the gift for comic timing in the future author of “The Dover Bitch” and “The Ghost in the Martini.”

For his themes, Hecht returns obsessively to death, barbarism and the human propensity for evil, while remaining a model of poise, technical elegance and erudition—a quality that frustrates readers and critics who subscribe to the imitative fallacy. Horror for Hecht was never an abstraction. He was a student at Bard College at the start of World War II. Expecting to be drafted, he enlisted in the Reserve Corps of the Army in November 1942. Hecht witnessed death in combat as an infantryman in Europe, and as a member of the 97th division he helped liberate the death camp at Flossenbürg. Two weeks earlier, on April 9, 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer had been hanged there. Hecht was assigned to interview surviving French prisoners, and decades later he told an interviewer: “The place, the suffering, the prisoners’ accounts were beyond comprehension. For years after I would wake shrieking.” Jonathan F.S. Post, the editor of Selected Letters, includes more than twenty letters written while Hecht was on active duty, but all are silent on the subject of the atrocities he witnessed. Post says “an element of official wartime censorship is operating,” but one suspects Hecht found his experiences defied language. Only decades later, in poems and interviews, could he articulate the shrieking.

Hecht as a letter writer is often at his best with confident, off-the-cuff assessments of writers, their lives and works. Of W.H. Auden: “He is the only man I have ever known who went to the same contorted pains to conceal his kindnesses from public notice the way most of us conceal our vices.” Of John Donne’s poems: “[they] shift direction, change mood, alter as a voice alters in the course of speech.” Of Adrienne Rich: “shrill, politicized, and narrow.” Of the descriptive passages in William Maxwell’s novel Time Will Darken It: “They are some of the most beautiful passages of their sort I knew, reminding me of Flaubert and Chekhov.”

By far the most interesting and valuable letters are those in which Hecht writes at length about his own poems, usually to trusted fellow poets or critics. His greatest poem was probably “Green: An Epistle,” a 151-line dramatic monologue written in 1970, published the following year in The New Yorker, and collected in Millions of Strange Shadows (1977). Hecht seemed to sense its greatness and was puzzled by it. Its theme, the human gift for self-deception, is a recurrent one in his work. While writing the poem, Hecht sent a draft to his friend the poet L.E. Sissman. In a letter dated Aug. 14, 1970, Hecht says he is “still too close to the poem and therefore not quite reliable about what’s in it.” He glosses the metaphors drawn from the theory of evolution, suggests some of the poem’s origins in his own life, and concludes:

There is, however, a sense of universal human corruption that is intended to embrace the reader along with everyone else. How can we recognize evil if we are untainted with it ourselves? Who is not tainted with it; and who, in the end, can be a reliable witness?

“Witness” shows up frequently in Hecht’s work. In a late poem titled “Witness,” he observes that the sea “Has infinite reserves; at each attack / The impassive cliffs look down in gray disdain / At scenes of sacrifice, unrelieved pain, / Figured in froth, aquamarine and black.” The rhymed pairing of “disdain” and “sacrifice, unrelieved pain” is characteristic of Hecht. Seventeen years after the letter to Sissman, Hecht writes again about “Green” to another friend, the poetry editor Harry Ford:

It is more precisely about the familiar modes of self-deception that almost everyone employs. It is therefore about illusion or delusions, and it consequently borrows the allegorical myth of Plato’s cave, transformed into a modern movie theater.

In Hecht’s poems, the impersonal is always informed by the personal, but seldom in a banally autobiographical manner. When we encounter coolness, suspect an underlying warmth. His narrators are notoriously tricky and multi-layered, a cunning series of Chinese boxes-within-boxes, never one-dimensional stand-ins for the author, even when, as in the concluding line of “Green: An Epistle,” he speaks of “Writing this very poem—about me.”

In the collection’s final letter, written to Eleanor Cook in August 2004, two months before his death, Hecht coolly informs the literary scholar that he has some “distressing news”—he has been diagnosed with cancer—but in the meantime he’s putting together an essay to be titled “De Gustibus.” It will, he says, “concern how deeply personal, quirky and often irrational, are our judgments of taste, about which we are sometimes very defensive, and about which we sometimes feel vulnerable, residing as these judgments do in some highly private inwardness, deeply severed from what we normally think of as our faculty of judgment.”

The letters serve to send us back to Hecht’s best poems—“Rites and Ceremonies,” “The Venetian Vespers” and “The Book of Yolek” among them—with a new understanding of their “highly private inwardness.”

Patrick Kurp is a writer living in Houston, Texas, and the author of the literary blog Anecdotal Evidence.

Published in Issue 31

Published in Issue 31

1

Readers who go into Laird Hunt’s Kind One looking for kindly characters are presented with an array of unlikely candidates. It simply cannot be Linus Lancaster, a farmer with delusions of grandeur (his farm is named Paradise) who beats his wife Ginny, rapes his young female slaves Cleome and Zinnia, and whips Alcofibras, the slave who tends his garden, to death. Yet, Lancaster has his own problems: on page 84 he is dead of a pig-sticker in the back of the neck, which, after all of his high-handed carrying on, feels like a kindness.

For a time it seems possible that Ginny Lancaster will be the kind one. Hers is clearly the central narrative in this novel of five connected narratives that begins with an unnamed well-digger and ends with a wealthy landowner named Lucious Wilson. The title could very well be referring to Ginny, who, tricked into becoming Mrs. Lancaster through false advertising and trucked off to Kentucky at the age of 14, is initially a friend to her new slaves, the sisters Zinnia and Cleome. But once Lancaster commences with his nightly “visits” to the girls and announces that Ginny is now “Mother” to them all, she abandons kindness in her humiliation and rage, slapping the girls as they bathe, hitting them with cooking spoons, and worse.

After Lancaster is murdered, Cleome and Zinnia take their revenge on Ginny, chaining her in a tool shed. During this time, Zinnia seethes with a barely contained rage and frequently threatens Ginny with the pig-sticker. In contrast, the now-pregnant Cleome seems the kindly one, but eventually it is Zinnia who provides Ginny with a way of escape.

In time, the aforementioned Lucious Wilson takes Ginny in. Wilson is the kindest character in the book. He falls in love with the distant Ginny and wants to marry her, but it becomes apparent that she will never really be free of her past as a tormented wife and abusive slaveholder. While important to the narrative—without him Ginny may not have had the stability to get her story down on paper—Wilson gets only a few pages to himself. He’s probably not the kind one.

In fact, it is doubtful that there is a kind one that this story is about. The title is missing an article, after all. It’s not about the kind one or a kind one but something else.

2

Laird Hunt has a reputation for a being a writer of difficult books. His 2006 novel, The Exquisite, took as its muse The Anatomy of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, the Rembrandt painting discussed at the beginning of W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. In The Exquisite,a Dr. Tulp and an Aris Kindt (the corpse at the center of Rembrandt’s anatomy lesson) inhabit not only two seemingly unrelated narratives but also share traits with characters in Hunt’s first novel, The Impossibly. Lest this précis of Hunt’s “difficulty” be off-putting, Hunt has said in an interview with Bookslut that “The Exquisite doesn’t so much call for readers to solve puzzles, but, in the face of multiple vectors of narrative, etc., to do some puzzling.” In other words, Laird’s books don’t require anything of the reader other than the willingness to go with the flow of the text and think about it afterward. In his follow-up to The Exquisite, Ray of the Star, Hunt wrote in long, chapter-sentences which made it difficult not to read the book but to stop reading it. All books should be so difficult.

Kind One is just as difficult to stop reading. Rather than propelling us through the narrative with the help of formal constraints, it presents us with five narrators telling parts of the same story. No one narrative is satisfying in itself but the combination leads to something like closure. The longest of these narratives, also entitled “Kind One,” is composed of Ginny’s memories of her life in Lancaster’s Paradise. The memories intersect each other, doubling back from time to time to recount the same events with a different focus.

Each memory starts on its own page, a device that often leaves plenty of white space during Ginny’s recollections. The effect is both of a narrator taking time to collect her thoughts or putting down memories as they occur to her.

3

I read Kind One for the first time last November, and when I finished, I was sure of three things: it was a book to read again and again, Hunt was a name I’d scan for in bookstores, and Kind One could be the basis of a fine film.

Kind One is a book of stark images, many of which would transfer directly to film without losing any of their power: Cleome hanging from a rope in Linus Lancaster’s well, Ginny bringing a paring knife to bed in order to freshen up a scar on her ankle, a piece of black bark with an eye looking out of it. Hunt isn’t writing with the screen in mind—his language is much more than dialogue and action—but Kind One is a quick read with recurrent images. A day or so after finishing the book it was hard not to feel that I’d seen a film of it.

In the opening section of the book—called “Overture”—a man digs a well. As he is finishing it, his baby falls in and dies. The death is clearly coming from a long way off thanks to sentences like these: “It rained the next day and the one after that. At first I tried to continue my work, deep below the earth, but the rain grew strong and the walls slick, and I knew I had lowered myself into a foolishness I might not emerge from.” After the death of his child, the narrator goes back into the well. “There were fresh earthworms floating in the water,” he tells us, “but I did not save them. Instead I reached down and pulled up handfuls of pebbles and put them in my pockets. Instead I moaned and tore at my beard.” The narrator tells us what he did and did not do in his grief, and subtly sets up the theme of decisions made and forks taken that occupies the characters in the rest of the book.

Another well figures prominently in the next section of the novel, “Kind One.” Down in the darkness of Lancaster’s well is Cleome, who is hiding from her switch-wielding master. When Lancaster tires of looking for Cleome, Ginny finds her there and asks what she’d done to make Lancaster so angry. It turns out that Cleome had spilled coffee on his shoe and caused him to trip when she tried to clean it up. Ginny laughs and says, “Sounds like maybe you deserved some switching.” Cleome does not laugh, and Ginny can feel “a cold coming up with her eyeballs out of the dark.”

With this cold comes a memory of the well-digger’s dead child:

Later, even though my wife asked me not to, I filled in the well. Our baby must be properly buried, I told my wife. She must be safe. And it did seem to me, during my labors and long after them, that my child was still down there, that she was crying and clenching her fists above the colored pebbles, that she was not buried safe and dry in the loamy dirt beside the stream.

This scene recalls the drowned ghost of Japanese drama and horror films, the vengeful ghost that will not cross over to the other side due to the circumstances of her death. I’m sure part of reason I could see Kind One as a film was because some of the genre tropes I’ve absorbed over my lifetime were activated by Hunt’s prose. But it’s not just me. In “
Post-Pulp Spaces: On Laird Hunt” Tobias Carroll thinks that some of Ginny’s punishment at the hands of Cleome and Zinnia seems “like something out of an old EC horror comic.”

A later passage strengthens the horror of Kind One. It comes when Ginny is shackled in the shed and sees the dead Alcofibras:

Then he stood still and looked at me, and looked at me and looked at me, and mouths grew up over his arms and legs and each one of them opened and all of them wailed at once, then went closed and quiet. Alcofibras then came up closer to me, his knees climbing to either side of him and his hands hitting together, and he leaned in close and when he did, ears came out of his forehead and his cheeks and his neck and his chest, until they were on every part of him and even the ears had grown ears and the ears were shaking, and I found myself sobbing because all they had to listen to was my poor breath and my poor heart, and all his mouth had had to wail to and all that eye had had to look upon was my poor self, shackled in the dark.

This is one of the scenes I saw days later, directed in the theater of my mind by Guillermo Del Toro.

4

In a recent interview in Bookforum, Hunt makes a parenthetical remark about how the title of his novel and Ginny’s section of the narrative is related to the Greek euphemism for the vengeful Furies of myth. Afraid of mentioning them directly, the Greeks referred to them as “the kindly ones.”

Thus, readers of Kind One need not look for kindly characters at all; it is a novel of checked rage finally spilling over. But Hunt also looks at what life is like after rage peaks. In the “Candle Story”section of Kind One, Zinnia goes on a search for Ginny in 1911, 50 years after she and the pregnant Cleome left Paradise and a chained-up Ginny. When Prosper, her nephew, asks who Ginestra Lancaster is, she tells us more about her relationship with Ginny:

There is a scar on my face that leads from my left temple to the bottom of my left cheek. It was no allowed to heal properly and even all these years later it looks raw. When he was a small boy, and one or the other of us sad and looking for comfort, Prosper took the habit of tracing that scar, gently, with his finger, like it was the trail he needed to follow to get us to where we needed to go. Sitting in that cart, under that tree, I took up his big hand and ran his long finger down that scar and said, “Ginestra Lancaster is the one who gave me that.”

Prosper sat silent with his finger on my cheek. There were frogs at work in some nearby pond and big black dragonflies haunted the trees. Prosper looked off into the green and blue and ran his finger up past my eye then back down again.

“And why are we looking for Ginestra Lancaster now?” he asked.

“Because I have something to return to her,” I said.

“Hate returns hate, Aunt Z,” said Prosper.

“Yes,” I said.

I took his hand and held my face against it for a long time.

Zinnia does not want to return hate but a gift Ginny had given her years earlier, for as she tells Lucious Wilson, she’d already gotten her use out of it.

Kind One acts as a sort of antidote to the kind of stylized rage we see in the work of a storyteller like Quentin Tarantino, whose recent movie Django Unchained also deals with slaves and their revolt. Unlike Tarantino, Hunt does more than use genre to make a statement about slavery and race in America. And it’s not that Hunt raises genre from disreputable depths with literariness, either; rather, he uses genre tropes (e.g., the drowned ghost) sparingly, to dig deeper into the reader’s consciousness.

5

As a film, Kind One could work rather well with a voiceover from one of the narrators. Prosper would be the most likely narrator, as his narrative takes place in relatively recent year of 1930 and represents the product, as it were, of the novel’s combined rage and kindness. I’m sure whoever made it would be tempted to have the whole thing be a series of flashbacks told by the impossibly old Prosper in 1968.

But telling it as a set of nested stories with no voiceover may be better yet. Perhaps the audience should be asked to puzzle out the connection between these stories, to wrestle with why it is named Kind One with so little kindness in it.

Chris Fletcher is a writer and educator who lives in Minneapolis, MN. He writes about literature, film, and freezing up in front of Geoff Dyer at Minnesota Pocket Journal.

Published in Issue 31