The Return by Roberto Bolaño. Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. New Directions, 224 pages, $23.95

Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 was one of the most critically acclaimed novels of the past few years, yet I’ve met few people who could honestly admit to enjoying it. This is no doubt partially due to the book’s length, which is artistically unjustifiable except in the way it creates a kind of “literature of cruelty,” punishing the reader page by page.

It’s not that I mind long books; I recently finished Javier Marías’ stunning Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, a single story split up into three volumes whose combined page count exceeds that of Bolaño’s epic. The problem was more the unremitting squalid repetitiveness of it all. After the hundredth or so description of a prostitute’s brutalized corpse (the book concerns itself with a murder spree on the Mexican border), the book began teetering on the edge of self-parody.

This was always Bolaño’s greatest weakness (if the past tense can be justified; the late Chilean has managed to publish half a dozen books in the past three years, a fecundity matched only by the pulpiest of genre writers): a predilection for litany. Much of 2666 bored me, and I barely managed to get through his novel Nazi Literature in the Americas, a fictionalized encyclopaedia of Nazi novelists.

Yet it is this very tendency that makes Bolaño’s short stories so powerful. Without the dangerous freeedom granted by 1000 blank pages, he manages to create dense catalogs of misery and revelation, and packs more punch into fifteen pages than he managed in all of the second volume of 2666. To complete the metaphor, his recently published collection, The Return, is nothing short of a knockout.

What impressed me most about the thirteen stories in The Return was the coherence of Bolaño’s vision. Though the stories take place in different countries (The United States, Chile, Mexico, Russia) and different time periods, though some are straight fiction, some are vaguely autobiographical, and some even drift towards magical realism (such as the compelling, Borgesian yarn “Buba,” in which three players on a soccer team perform an African blood ritual that seems to bring them success on the pitch), each new tale feels like a chapter in a continuous narrative.

The aimless lovers and murderous lowlifes of 2666 and The Savage Detectives are back, only compressed and concentrated by the word limit. Four stories revolve around murder, and the title story concerns a man who dies and then watches, as a ghost, while a famous fashion designer molests his corpse.

Two of the best stories take place in the world of pornography. In one of these, “Joanna Silvestri,” a famous pornographic actress visits Los Angeles and rekindles a romance with one of her old co-stars, who is dying. The scene where she finally leaves him is devastatingly sad: “I turned and Jack was there, standing by the gate, watching me, and then I knew that everything was all right and I could go. That everything was all wrong, and I could go. That everything was sorry, and I could go.”

Bolaño’s trademark nods towards metafiction are also alive and well, both in the character of his alter-ego Arturo Belano, and in such stories as “Another Russian Tale,” in which a German SS officer’s accidental mishearing of the Spanish epithet “coño” as the German word “kunst,” meaning art, ends up saving a man’s life.

Perhaps the most powerful stories are the ones that concern the ongoing mythology of Bolaño himself. In “Detectives,” two men discuss Arturo Belano, the young author and political agitator they found in the Chilean prison where they both worked during the Pinochet coup. Recognizing him as an old friend from high school, the men decide to set him free. This is an oft-repeated true tale from Bolaño’s life (and one he told before, from his own perspective, in the short story “Dance Card”), but here it is imbued with metaphorical force. When the detectives take Belano to be cleaned up, he fails to recognize himself in a mirror, even though the fact that others have recognized him was the key to his salvation. The mirror may be something of a cliché, but Bolaño is able to make it feel reflective.

In another story, “Photos,” we watch Belano look through the author photos in an omnibus of French poetry circa 1973, falling in love with the various poets, mourning their passing and, through them, the passage of time:

‘…then Belano thinks about his own youth, when he used to churn it out like Tron [one of the poets], and was perhaps even better looking than Tron, he thinks, squinting at the photo, but to publish a poem, in Mexico, all those years ago when he lived in Mexico City, he’d had to sweat blood, because Mexico is Mexico, he reflects, and France is France, and then he shuts his eyes and sees a torrent of ghostly, emblematic Mexicans flowing like a grey breath of air along a dry river bed…’

Having read two of the stories in this collection in The New Yorker earlier this year, I can attest to the value of a second look. Bolaño, presented through the medium of veteran translator Chris Andrews, is revealed clearly as both a master storyteller and a subtle stylist. I feel newly confident in recommending the great Chilean to friends, though I plan to put new emphasis on his short work. These stories do more than serve as an entrée to his novels. They manage to surpass them.

Beside the Sea, by Véronique Olmi. Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter. Peirene Press, 121 pages

Beside the Sea, by Véronique Olmi. Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter. Peirene Press, 121 pages

Rien Ne Va Plus, by Margarita Karapanou. Translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich. Clockroot Books/Interlink Publishing Group, 184 pages, $15.

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

While it is both reductive and unjust to attempt to characterize the literature of a nation (though not quite as idiotic as trying to delineate the ‘currents’ of today’s fiction), if someone demanded that I describe modern French literature in one phrase, I would go with, ‘seemingly normal people doing awful things to each other for inexplicable reasons.’

In Véronique Olmi’s French bestseller, Beside the Sea, a mother brings her two children to a beachside hotel, then smothers them to death with a pillow. In Margarita Karapanou’s Rien Ne Va Plus, a married couple torture each other while the author punishes the reader with a series of contradictory plot lines. It might be worth adding here that only the former novel is French, while the second merely has a French title. And yet the difference in intention between the two novels perfectly points out why my generalization holds. Olmi is cruel to no conceivable end, but Karapanou uses pain to make a point.

The protagonist of Beside the Sea, we quickly realize, is deeply disturbed. She has removed her kids from school and taken them on vacation, but from the first page there’s no mystery about what’s going to happen; these kids have slightly worse odds than the campers of Crystal Lake in Friday the 13th, or the CIA officers hunted by Predator. A considerable (and surprising) number of critics have lauded Olmi’s special insight into the broken mind of her protagonist, but I’m not convinced of the depth of the book’s exploration of extreme mental illness. The mother certainly sounds deranged — “didn’t I use to long to be knocked down by a car and break my leg so I’d finally have a good enough reason to be left in peace?”—but not exactly smother-your-children damaged.

The sense Olmi is skimming the surface isn’t helped by her refusal to give us any of the mother’s back story. Clearly she’s reached a breaking point, but exactly how has she raised her boys to their present age? And if she’s run out of money, how did she have enough before?

I can’t help but think of Laurent Cantet’s film Time Out (L’emploi du Temps), loosely based on the story of Jean-Claude Romand, the man who pretended to be a doctor for 18 years, then killed his entire family when it seemed the truth was about to come out. In his interpretation of domestic genocide, Cantet chose to leave out the murders, most likely for reasons of dramatic plausibility. For me, Olmi’s decision to provide violence without context is doubly flawed: horror-film shocking and intellectually disappointing. And while there’s no lack of good writing, the implication that someone capable of killing her children would also be capable of “narrating” a grammatical and correctly-punctuated story in the first person is suspect. And there’s nothing crazy about stream of consciousness; as Joyce taught us in the final chapter of Ulysses, that’s how every mind works.

Rien Ne Va Plus starts us off in a similar vein of inexplicable cruelty. The narrator, a female novelist named Louisa, has just married the beautiful and debonair Alkiviadis. And the first stop after the wedding? A gay bar, where Alkiviadis invites a fifteen year-old boy back to the house. There, Lousia is made to watch while Alkiviadis and the boy make love. The marriage ends in divorce and, finally, Alkiviadis’ suicide.

After a poetic interlude (“The end has arrived. But not even that can release me. Because there is no End. Amen.”), the book begins once more to describe the courtship and marriage of Louisa and Alkiviadis. For the first few chapters, the two seem terribly in love, but then everything shifts: “—Every time I want to write,” Louisa warns Alkiviadis, “I want to write love stories. But as soon as I pick up the pen I’m overcome by horror.”

By the next page, Louisa has become a monster.

Rien Ne Va Plus, by Margarita Karapanou. Translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich. Clockroot Books/Interlink Publishing Group, 184 pages, $15.

She moves to America to have an affair with a painter (who fell in love with her through her novels). Next, after returning to Alkividias and marrying him, she runs off to Italy with an obese lesbian named Vanessa. Both of these partners are eventually rebuffed, violently, by Louisa. When she returns to her husband and ends up pregnant, she waits a few months before deciding to have it aborted. The reason she gives the doctor?

“Because I hate my husband, and I want to deny him the joy of having this baby.”

She eventually leaves him for good, going off on her own, and the book ends with Louisa asleep and peaceful. “At last! She is alone!” we are told, in a third-person narration that began only a few pages before.

So what differentiates the cruelty of Olmi from that of Karapanou? What justification could there be (assuming one believes that horror demands justification) for such inhumanity?

After their divorce, Louisa tells Alkiviadis that she lied to him constantly throughout their marriage, not only about big things, such as her many lovers, but also small things, such as going out to the movies when she really just sat in a café drinking espresso:

Perhaps it was because those lies gave life a phantasmagorical glow. I could turn each day into fireworks, shape it however I wanted, as if I were God. And the strange thing is that you actually liked it, you knew I was lying to you…

The reader has become Louisa’s lover, a feeling only deepened when we learn that the novel’s opening portion, in which Alkiviadis was the monster, is actually the novel-within-a-novel written by Louisa. Just like her ex-husband, we have been unable to leave Louisa, in spite of the many ways in which we’ve been manipulated, betrayed, and tortured. Karapanou points out the perverse paradox of fiction, that we seek truth in lies. This is a desire that is taken advantage of by works like Olmi’s, which are intended to disturb: the most horrifying lies are not necessarily the most illuminating, but they are invariably the most riveting.

The Changeling By Kenzaburō Ōe. Translated by Deborah Boliver Boehm. Grove Press, 468 pages, $26.00.

I wasn’t feeling entirely qualified to review the newest novel from Japanese Nobel Laureate Kenzaburō Ōe, “The Changeling.” It’s the first of his novels I’ve read, and also intensely autobiographical. Just a few weeks ago, I cited autobiographical interest as the main selling point of Coetzee’s most recent novel, Summertime. In order to avoid missing out on the more intimate aspects of Ōe’s book, I decided to do what any diligent critic would do in such a situation: I looked him up on Wikipedia.

What I found there—a description of an author both intellectual and accessible, so dedicated to his political philosophy that he remains the only person in history to refuse Japan’s Order of Culture—convinced me that I owe it to myself to read more of Ōe’s work.

It also made “The Changeling” come as something of a surprise, because the book had the opposite effect on me. It’s a long, discursive, and ultimately unsatisfying novel which, from the little I know of Ōe’s history, doesn’t do justice to his oeuvre.

The story concerns a fictional stand-in for Ōe, named Kogito after Descartes’ famous epiphanic statement: cogito ergo sum. Kogito is trying to come to terms with the suicide of his brother-in-law, the filmmaker Goro. Goro also has a real-life counterpart, the director Juzo Itami, who killed himself for the same reasons as Goro: a journalist was about to reveal information proving he’d cheated on his wife with a much younger woman.

Goro leaves a number of pre-recorded audiotapes behind him, and “The Changeling” opens with Kogito having odd, obsessive conversations with the Goro on these tapes.

The monologic tapes temporarily obfuscate one of the major weaknesses of Ōe’s writing (and Deborah Boliver Boehm’s translation): his dialogue. I’ve often found something stilted in English translations of Japanese dialogue, but this book takes that awkwardness to a whole new level. Most conversations sound like two people reading to each other from prepared statements:

You’ve had a lot of direct experience with the terrible specificities of yazuka violence, and the fact that you haven’t even touched on that topic in this conversation just makes me feel more acutely aware of its terrible menace.

Aside from the repetition of “terrible,” notice the odd commentary “in this conversation,” the writerly adverb “acutely”, the implausibly formal “terrible menace”. Seldom does the reader feel like human beings with real emotions are actually speaking to each other; they are simply making verbal presentations.

But it isn’t just the dialogue that proves problematic. What possible explanation is there for faux-poetry like “the way the moon glittered fiercely on the surface of the river below, which was like the bottom of a deep abyss…”. How can the glittering surface of a river be anything like the bottom of a deep abyss? Ask translator Boehm, who must take the bulk of the responsibility for these inconsistencies.

Ōe isn’t off the hook either, however. Perhaps for fear of being too obtusely self-involved, he’s constantly forcing his characters to tell each other things they already know, like in this passage where Goro relates to Kogito the story of Kogito’s courtship of Goro’s sister: “You did manage to find a copy of “The House at Pooh Corner,” as I recall, and you sent it to Ashiya. The correspondence that ensued was the beginning of your relationship with Chikashi.” Oh, is that how I met my wife? I’d forgotten!

The story bounces around in time and space, often using Goro’s recorded tapes to evoke moments in their shared history. The book is at its best when it dwells on the odd intricacy of their relationship, which is equal parts love, jealousy, and sexual tension. As the novel progresses, we discover that Goro and Kogito shared some kind of traumatic event in their past, and it seems inevitable that we will eventually hear about it.

Unfortunately, we don’t learn about this trauma organically, but through the kind of cheap and embarrassing authorial invasion common to works of genre fiction written by high school English students. For the first 350 pages of the book, Ōe keeps referring to something called “THAT” (the traumatic event), but refuses to describe it. Apparently, no one ever told him that it doesn’t count as dramatic tension when you tell your reader you have a secret, but you won’t reveal it unless he wades through 6 hours of narcissistic rambling.

When we finally learn what the THAT is, Ōe fails utterly in evoking it as any kind of critical juncture. The last part of his novel inhabits the head of Kogito’s (Ōe’s) wife, who finds in Sendak’s picturebook “Outside, Over There” a metaphor for her relationship with her brother.

Apparently, she believes that Goro returned from THAT a changed man, an idea that gives the novel its name. But while these musings may be of some interest to a Japanese audience that has followed the tabloid story of Itami’s suicide, they meant almost nothing to this American.

The one saving grace here is that Ōe at least has a sense of humor about what he’s done in “The Changeling”. At one point, Kogito’s wife takes him to task for his “insufferable propensity for self-reference,” inserting himself into all his novels “under some contrived pseudonym”. But there is a darkness to this self-deprecation. On one of his tapes, Goro tells Kogito what he thinks of their artistic careers in severe terms:

“When you think about people who do the kind of work we do—selling the ‘new flowers’ of kitsch and the ‘new stars’ of kitsch by the yard, as it were—we don’t have that much time left, and we need to come to terms with that fact and ask forgiveness for having lived on lies.”

There is a noble naivete in taking honesty to mean autobiography, but Reality TV is not inherently more genuine than a sitcom, and the digressive relation of experience isn’t enough to float a novel. I have faith that Ōe can do much better than this, but maybe that’s just a bit of credulity on my part. I believe everything I read on Wikipedia.

1)     Tweet. Get this out of the way first. It’s only 140 characters, for God’s sake, and people need to know what you’re doing. If you don’t know what to Twitter about, consider starting a Twitter novel about someone writing a Twitter novel, because that wouldn’t be annoying at all.

2)     Emails. How many people have written to you since you started writing that Tweet I told you to write? Probably a dozen. You’re a writer, after all, and everybody loves getting emails from a writer. So get to it! Tell your mother that you only need $500 this month. Tell your ex that you’ll stop calling her five times a day when she starts loving you again. And tell those people offering to make your penis bigger to stop emailing you and send the samples already.

3)     Personal blog. After the emotional turmoil of writing to your ex, it’s time to pen a lengthy journal entry for the entire world to see. It’s not enough to know that you cried; the world wants to know how long you cried for, whether you were curled up in the fetal position while doing it, and what you thought of last night’s episode of 30 Rock. Don’t leave them hanging. You haven’t twittered for, like, an hour now.

4) Tweet again.

5)     Obscure and almost funny blog you started a few years ago when you first heard the word “blog”. Maybe it’s twee Photoshop collages you create using old Degas prints and pixellated pictures of adult film stars. Maybe it’s the place you log every use of the word “bazoombas” you can find on the internet. Maybe it’s just an old-fashioned collection of videos featuring kittens meowing at the camera. But remember, your six fans have been waiting for days for the newest entry, and it’s your responsibility to satisfy them. Odds are if you leave them without fresh content for much longer, they’ll kill themselves, for pretty obvious reasons.

6)     Facebook/Buzz/Flickr/MySpace Comments and Comment Responses. Don’t be stingy with your words, fellow writer. Remember that everyone out there is just as creative as you. And if you don’t weigh in on their various postings–be they photographs of how drunk they got last night or their response to that TalkingPointsMemo piece responding to that Huffington Post piece responding to that New York Times piece on the history of Bejeweled–you’ll earn yourself a reputation as a one-way street. Don’t expect anybody to bend over backwards for you if you won’t have the decency to bend over for them.

7)     That book you’re writing. Alright. The time has finally come to open up that Word document and…

8)     Shit. Database Entries. Okay. Sometimes your boss is going to come in. When that happens, just minimize all the other windows as fast as you can and say something distracting like, “Wow. This project sure is a lot harder than you made it out to be. I’ve barely gotten anywhere!” Hopefully he won’t look at your screen until you’ve got that admin portal open.

9)     Tweet again. You almost just got fired! People need to know!

10)   That book you’re writing. Okay. Now that everything else is out of the way, now that you’ve finished at your job, eaten some dinner, gone out and had a few drinks, watched those TV shows you Tivo’d last weekend, had another couple of drinks, and passed out, you’re finally ready to start working. It’s four in the morning, and that pounding in your sinuses isn’t just a hangover, it’s the creative juices waiting to burst out of you!

11)  Well that’s what happens when you drink too much. It doesn’t need to slow you down. Get to work!

12)  Outline. Well, you can’t just dive into these things without planning (if you could, you wouldn’t need this list, would you?). Spend some time thinking about your plot, your characters, your setting. Maybe a nice walk around the apartment would help. No, keep away from the couch. The bed, too. No, don’t call anybody. Put that cell phone away. I know it technically has a keyboard, but you’re not going to use it to write your novel. No, you’re not.

13)  Texting. See? I told you you wouldn’t. That’s not a novel. That’s a drunk text that you’re sending to your ex-girlfriend. No. Don’t you dare send the same message to more than one person. Don’t hit send. Oh God.

14)  Poetry. Yes, that’s a very lovely poem about your loneliness. Rhyme is definitely overrated, as is spelling and not separating each word with a semicolon. On the plus side, the fact that all of those girls chose not to take you up on the whimsically pornographic offer you made in that text message means you finally have time to work. Let’s get to it! Yes, the coffee shop next door does have nice wooden tables, liberally spaced electrical outlets, free wi-fi, and a marginally attractive barrista. You’ll certainly be able to concentrate there!

15)  To-do List. You’re absolutely right. Time to be realistic and chalk today up as a loss. Tomorrow will be different. Tomorrow, you’re not just going to work on your novel, but also on that half-finished play you started last year, that musical about Nikola Tesla, those short stories, that other novel (the sci-fi one you’ll only publish under a pseudonym), and your interconnected series of avant-garde films about toast. Nothing ensures efficiency more than a to-do list.

16)  Tweet your resolve.

[This is the blog I write regularly for the literary website Untitled Books.]

Submission Guideline Statement: “DailyRejection prefers that you submit only one story at a time, or up to five poems at a time.”

Euphemism category: bid for mercy

Translation: Seriously? You were thinking about sending two stories at once? Aren’t you the least bit grateful that we’re letting you send anything at all? If someone offered to let you urinate in their kitchen sink, would you respond by asking if you could do it twice? Just piss in the sink and go home. As for poems, they’re generally way shorter, so we can stomach two or three. But if you’re more into writing long poems, please just send one. Or better still, none. Or just stop writing them altogether. What about haikus? We love haikus.

Submission Guideline Statement: “DailyRejection responds to all submissions within 1-3 months.”

Euphemism category: creating realistic expectations

Translation: Einstein, the smartest man ever to walk this Earth, was the first to realize that time is relative. Obviously, we at DailyRejection don’t count weekends as “time”, per se. And it isn’t as if we’re going to count the hours we spend sleeping. Likewise, time spent eating, cooking, lovemaking, reading, writing, and voiding waste cannot reasonably be considered “time”. “Time” shall be defined as any hours we spend at our desks, in our offices, actually looking through submissions. If you must have a hard number, you can expect a negative response to your submission in approximately 1-35 years, though keep in mind that the lifespan of the average literary journal in this economic and intellectual climate is far less than that. Similarly, most of our editors are already at death’s door, thanks in large part to having read your submissions.

Submission Guideline Statement: “DailyRejection is happy to accept simultaneous submissions.”

Euphemism category: stroking your ego

Translation: This fantasy you’re entertaining, that more than one literary journal might accept your work, thus initiating some kind of heated bidding war between them, is highly adorable. It makes us want to tousle your hair and buy you a Beanie Baby.

Submission Guideline Statement: “Only previously unpublished works will be considered for publication in DailyRejection.”

Euphemism category: bid for mercy

Translation: Everybody’s band managed to open for Guns n’ Roses once, and odds are if you keep sending these Hail Mary passes to journals, some half-asleep editor will accidentally put the accepted sticker on your Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope. But one concert doesn’t make you Aerosmith, and one story doesn’t make you Fitzgerald. Write something else, you lazy ass. If we Google your submission and it comes up as already published in the Best American Short Fiction On the Subject of Flightless Birds of 1998, we will bring all our considerable influence to bear and ruin your career for ever (possibly by nominating you for a National Book Award).

Submission Guideline Statement: “To get a better grasp of whether or not we might like your work, please read through a few issues of DailyRejection before submitting.”

Euphemism category: shameless request for money

Translation: Nobody reads this magazine. Seriously. The editor hasn’t read it in years. It’s like, twelve people, now. And all of them are only doing it so they can submit something. Please, for the love of God, read a literary journal. Writers don’t matter when nobody’s a reader. Don’t you get that? Stop updating your Twitter and read a goddamn literary journal.

Submission Guideline Statement: “DailyRejection regrets to inform you that we can no longer accept electronic submissions.”

Euphemism category: bid for mercy

Translation: What is wrong with you people? We thought putting that electronic submission page up on the website would make life easier, but as soon as we did it, you started sending us everything you’d ever written down in your entire lives. Grocery lists do not count as stories, nor do Dear John letters or (most) suicide notes. Whether or not the Excel spreadsheets were meant to be experimental or ironic, we found them impossibly dull.

Submission Guideline Statement: “DailyRejection requests a moderate reading fee for your submission.”

Euphemism category: shameless demand for money

Translation: Believe it or not, reading your stories is not a pleasure. The majority of your submissions make us wish that Homo Habilis had not developed the brain lateralization necessary to support a primitive cerebral analogue to Broca’s area, allowing for linguistic development in Homo Erectus and full-blown language in Homo Sapiens. The others make us wish we were dead. Our $50 reading fee ($5 per haiku) will not come anywhere close to paying for the years of therapy that our readers will require in order to recover from your submissions. Have you ever seen a Vietnam veteran who can’t relax, can’t sit still, can hardly stop shaking, because the traumatic events they experienced decades earlier still haunt their every waking moment? That’s what our readers are like. And they don’t get subsidized health care.

Submission Guideline Statement: “For all submissions, please ensure that your name appears on every page. Also, please number your pages.”

Euphemism category: you’re an idiot.

Translation: Please make sure none of your story is written in nonsense words, and that you have printed out the pages, rather than mailed us the computer itself. Stories written onto the surface of your monitor will not be accepted. Remember that the mailing address should go on the outside of the envelope, not the inside, and that when we request a word count, we mean the number of words in your story, not the number of words that you know. Also, it’s also worth noting that socks should be put on before shoes, and food goes in your mouth, not all over the table.

Submission Guideline Statement: “We look forward to reading your story.”

Euphemism category: stroking your ego

Translation: We don’t.

So here’s the kind of thing I think about: if and when I publish my first novel, it will be placed on bookstore shelves between the works of David Foster Wallace and those of Jeanette Walls. Of course, I’m making a couple of assumptions here. First, that my book actually ends up on the shelves, rather than the discount racks or the discount tables or next to Tech Stock Investing for Dummies and that year’s National Book Award semi-finalists in a pulping facility. Second, that neither Mr. Wallace nor Ms. Walls’ undergo some James Frey-like fall from grace, and their books remain in print. But if we take these two tiny details for granted (along with my getting published in the first place) I can count on the two of them serving as my bookends for years to come.

I think this is a pretty lucky break. Jeanette–I’m going to go with first names, seeing as we’re neighbours now–had a massive bestseller with The Glass Castle (technically a memoir, but her newest book is fiction). And David’s Infinite Jest is one of the biggest novels to be found anywhere in the bookstore–a definite eye-catcher. Of course, Walls’ memoir is partially about her father’s alcoholism, and Wallace suffered from a depression so severe he eventually killed himself. What if the dark themes of my shelfmates have some on effect on me? I never stood much of a chance of avoiding an addiction to booze or Zoloft by the time I managed to publish a novel in the first place, but the proximity of David and Jeanette certainly won’t help. Maybe I should change my name.

Tommy Amenorhhea, perfectly positioned between Martin Amis and Jonathan Ames, would be lumped in with them as a brilliant social satirist. Tommy Sondheim would write heavy novels about imprisonment and death and illness (as metaphor) from between the bars of Solzhenitsyn and Sontag. Tommy Bombeolachimbomba would definitely become the next Hispanic superstar author, with his prime location between Bolaño and Borges. A year ago, Tommy Nackered could’ve nabbed a killer spot between Nabokov and Naipaul; then Ralph Nader wrote a novel. (Is there anything that man can’t ruin?). Tommy Coekelicot could put some much deserved distance between the subtle genius of J.M. Coetzee and the hackneyed self-helpiness of Paolo Coelho. Tommy Wolfe would only further confuse fans of Look Homeward, Angel and The Bonfire of the Vanities. Or I could go for broke, change my name to Damien Brontë, and finally get between those smug sisters.

Do other would-be authors think about stuff like this, during those two to three hour lulls in which we sit at the computer doubting we’re any more creative than an ATM (and confident we’re far less useful to the world)? I’ve read enough memoirs to know that envy, self-doubt, narcissism, competitiveness, and hubris are to authors as homosexual impulses are to conservative congressmen. But a preoccupation with one’s possible alphabetical companions on bookstore shelves? Is that just me?

I never attended an MFA program in Creative Writing, which has nothing to do with the fact that many of them rejected me. Seriously. I mean it. Anyway, the point is that I don’t have anybody to ask about stuff like this. Every day, I go out to a coffee shop (Tully’s in San Francisco’s Cole Valley today) and put in my hours. Most mornings, the offer of a free mini-cup of peppermint caramel gingerbread mocha is the most I can hope for in the way of human interaction. I’ve got plenty of friends, and a great part-time job as a GMAT instructor, but I very seldom communicate with other writers, which is a shame, because writing is already one of the most isolating professions out there, short of lighthouse keeping and being Ralph Nader.

I conceived of this blog as a way of reaching out, in the hopes that other people might find some consolation in the similarities between my experience and theirs. I imagine the majority of people that come to book-related sites are would-be writers like myself, well-acquainted with submission guidelines, Glimmer Train contests, query letters, reading fees, agencies, contracts, payment in copies of the magazine, writing workshops, and, of course, rejections. Rejections that come like a slap in the face and rejections that come like a kick in the crotch. Boilerplate rejections and personalized rejections. Rejections with detailed explanations and rejections full of mystery and euphemism. More than anything else, I believe it is rejection that bind us all together. These rejections are the reason we need a community, people willing to listen to what we have to say (even if they won’t pay us for it).

As for my credentials, I’ve yet to publish a novel, though I’ve written five of the damn things. I’ve loved and lost two agents, and my shorter work has appeared in places like McSweeney’s and Tin House. But more important than this, I write every day. I sift through literary magazines and get annoyed at the ubiquity of Joyce Carol Oates. I submit stories and then immediately re-read them, only to realize they needed at least twelve more drafts, and now I’ve alienated the editor with my supreme tectonic badness and she’s going to spend the rest of the day telling all the other editors and publishers she knows what a twat I am. In other words, I’m in the same boat as thousands of other struggling writers–fanatical with self-doubt, fantastically pessimistic, and perpetually polishing my Nobel acceptance speech.

I hope to update this blog every week, with a riff on whatever aspect of the writerly life has struck me with particular force that week. I’ll do my best to keep it up as long as my MacBook can retain a charge, or until I take my place between David and Jeanette on a bookstore shelf near you. If anything I write about in the posts to come strikes a chord with you, please leave a comment. It may be the only communication that I have with the outside world that day.

In closing, thanks so much for your time, and for your submission. Unfortunately, we’re going to pass. This is a tough marketplace, and we can only take on projects that we’re particularly excited about. Writing is a highly subjective field, however, and we feel confident another editor may feel differently. Really. Good luck with that.

Tommy

Summertime, by J.M. Coetzee. Viking, 266 pages $25.95"

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

Upon putting down J.M. Coetzee’s most recent novel, “Summertime,” one can be forgiven for running straight to the computer and calling up the Wikipedia entry on its author. After all, when a novelist as critically successful (two Bookers and a Nobel, for starters) and famously reclusive as Coetzee writes a posthumous “biography” of himself, how can you help but wonder how much of it is true?

Coetzee has written two volumes of lightly-fictionalized autobiography before this, “Boyhood” and “Youth,” each of which is written in a close third person, so “Summertime” isn’t exactly breaking new ground. Yet the primary way in which it differentiates itself from the previous two books (aside from the fact that it actually says “fiction” on the cover)—the fact that the protagonist John Coetzee is dead—makes all the difference.

“Summertime” is a finale, a summing up of a life, and the portrait Coetzee (the author, now, whom I’ll refer to by only his last name) paints of his fictional avatar is so unforgivably cruel and insulting that it borders on the parodic. If this book is to be taken as fact, Coetzee sees himself as a talentless failure who has contributed almost nothing to the world at large. But the very writing of the novel seems to contradict that claim. So how much of it is true?

“Summertime” is comprised primarily of interviews with women who were significant in John Coetzee’s life during the mid-1970s. First we hear from Julia, a married woman with whom John had a brief and unsatisfying affair. Then there is his cousin Margot, with whom he shared an awkward night on the South African Karoo when their car broke down. Next comes Adriana, a Brazilian dance teacher and mother of one of John’s students. Finally, we hear from Sophie, a fellow professor who also was briefly involved with John romantically.

What binds these women together is their unflagging disdain for John Coetzee. Over the course of the novel, he is maligned in every manner possible. Julia, in-between describing John’s shortcomings as a lover, posits that it would’ve been impossible for any woman other than his mother to love him. Margot calls him a “failed runaway, failed car mechanic…Failed son.” Adriana, who rejected John’s obsessive attentions after accusing him of lusting after her teenage daughter, describes him as “a boy as a priest is always a boy until suddenly one day he is an old man.” She also mocks his abilities as a dancer. Sophie dwells less on the person than his work, claiming John Coetzee “had no special sensitivity that I could detect, no original insight into the human condition.”

The overall tone of this roast is aesthetic masochism. One could put a serial killer in a room full of his victims’ parents and expect to hear more empathy and understanding. So what is the point of all this abuse? Obviously, there are plenty of people in the world—including this reader—who have the greatest respect for Coetzee.

This question is part of a more general one, which leads us back to Wikipedia. Unlike “Boyhood” and “Youth,” “Summertime” is heavily fictionalized. For example, during the decade at issue in the book, Coetzee (the character) lives alone with his father in a suburb in Western Cape Town. They are a sad, silent Odd Couple, pitied by pretty much everybody who knows them. But in reality, Coetzee (the real person) spent the 1970s with his wife and two children. What gives?

I don’t know exactly what Coetzee’s game is, but my guess is that “Summertime” lands somewhere between C. G. Jung’s “Red Book” and Bret Easton Ellis’ “American Psycho.” Coetzee is airing his deepest fears—that he has wasted his life, that he has never loved or been loved, that he is delusional about his own abilities—admitting that no number of awards or marriages or friends can ever fully dispel the universal human certitude that one is a talentless fraud and an unlovable misanthrope. At the same time, he is recreating himself as a monster, imagining how the world would respond to his worst vision of himself. John Coetzee is what J.M. Coetzee might have been, or what he might still become.

In this way, like many of Coetzee’s recent novels, “Summertime” is primarily experimental. While it lacks the lecture structure of “Elizabeth Costello” or the entertaining split-screen hijinks of “Diary of a Bad Year” (a humorously dark and portentous sketch of which is described in the John Coetzee-penned notebook entries that bookend “Summertime”), Coetzee’s newest is an exploration of the self as seen through the lens of fiction. He is able to leave behind his true personality, his true history, even his true abilities as a stylist (the book’s interviews are narrated and administered by John’s biographer, Vincent, who has all the poetic sensibility of the DSM-IV). From this null-place, Coetzee imagines an alternate-reality Coetzee, and tears him to shreds.

Perhaps that explains the incongruously sunny title of the book. There’s nothing like a little time with a monster to make you appreciate the human. “Summertime” is an affirmation of Coetzee as he actually is, unsmiling and difficult and dark. For anyone who is interested in the inner-workings of one of literature’s greatest living minds, “Summertime” will prove satisfying. Just don’t confuse the protagonist with the author. They’re like night and day. Or like winter and summer.

The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P, by Rieko Matsuura. Translated by Michael Emmerich, Kodansha International, 447 pages, $24.95

Perils of the Pansexual

This novel about a young woman who wakes up to find that her big toe has become a penis was a major bestseller in Japan, and it’s easy to see why. The book is titillating, disturbing without being disgusting, and reads like a self-help guide on the subjects of sex and love.

“He stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright in complete nakedness before us, and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth! we have no choice left but confess—he was a woman.”

With this short paragraph, Virginia Woolf introduced us to perhaps the most famous transgendered person in all of English literature: Orlando. “Orlando” is a fantastical reinterpretation of the life of Vita-Sackville West, Woolf’s friend and lover, told in the style of a swashbuckling romance. Midway through the book, the lothario Orlando falls into a coma and wakes up as a woman. In spite of the many ordeals she experiences in her reincarnation as a member of the fairer sex (including almost killing a man who is distracted by her shapely ankles), Orlando concludes, like Tiresias before her, that being a woman is a hell of a lot better than being a man.

The protagonist of Rieko Matsuura’s “The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P,” first published in Japan in 1993, comes to much the same conclusion, though by a far more didactic route. Kazumi is an ordinary twenty-two year old girl with a boring boyfriend and a passionate dedication to heterosexuality, until the morning she wakes up to discover the big toe of her right foot has become a penis. Her boyfriend breaks up with her, disgusted, and Kazumi immediately takes up with Shunji, the blind, piano-playing synaesthete next door. Soon after, the two of them join a traveling performance art troupe called The Flower Show.

Oct. 12, 2009 | Once upon a time, the film projector was the teaching tool of the future. Schools all over the country purchased the temperamental, whirring machines, prompting a flood of educational shorts that offered instruction on everything from personal hygiene to sandwich making.

Kino International has just released the best of the bunch on two DVDs, titled “How to Be a Man” (1949-1970) and “How to Be a Woman“ (1948-1982), and many are as cringe-worthy as you might expect. In the hilariously hyperbolic cautionary tale “Car Theft,” two teens go from stealing a hat to stealing a car to running over a toddler in about 11 minutes. In “Girls Are Better Than Ever,” a nutritional video sponsored by the Milk Council, a voice-over describes a young, healthy-looking blond woman who is “worth looking at.” In “Dance, Little Children,” which explores a small Midwestern town’s syphilis outbreak, a narrator whose creepy intensity wouldn’t be out of place in a horror film asks, “Who is to blame if young people respond to what an anxiety-ridden world seems to be telling them?” as the camera zooms in on the posterior of a girl dancing the jitterbug.

But a surprising number of the featured shorts stand the test of time. “Fears of Children,” in which a 5-year-old boy is coddled by his mother and pressured by his father, ought to be required viewing for every parent. “Improve Your Personality,” despite its egregious name, explains how we can change the way people affect us by improving our own understanding and empathy.

As Skip Elsheimer, the man responsible for archiving these films (and whose online collection of vintage television commercials will make your day), explains in a couple of fascinating interviews on the discs, “[These films] seem conservative … but they’re talking about very forward-thinking things. They realized … the parents are not responsibly teaching the kids about these issues.”

Viewed this way, these educational shorts are more than a campy throwback to a time when sex ed videos featured silhouettes of women with bobs and men in fedoras. They are historical documents, insights into the fears and hopes of earlier generations. “Let’s Make a Sandwich” isn’t just a film about how to make an open-faced tuna melt; it’s an illustration of the belief that a woman who couldn’t make a sandwich in 1950 would never find a husband. Now that’s educational.

Read it at Salon!