The lovely and talented Paris-based writer Anne Marsella has a new book coming out this summer! It's called The Baby of Belleville, and it looks to be as off-beat and wickedly subversive as her previous novel in English, Remedy. She sat down with Eve Jackson over at France 24 to talk about her latest work. Watch the video here.
You can also read my 2008 interview with Anne here.
So I'm teaching this class about the foundations of basically all of world culture, which, as you can imagine, occasionally requires that I read way outside the habitual boundaries of my curiosity. Recently, I have been immersing myself in reading about Sufi mysticism, Sufi poetry, and the life and work of the Ur-whirling dervish, the 13th century Persian poet Jalâl al-Din Rumi. I'm working with the translations done by Franklin Lewis almost ten years ago, in a text called Rumi Past and Present, and the poems are really fascinating.
But here's the thing, and this is maybe foolish of me to own up to: I never heard of Rumi before I was told I had to teach him. Which is strange, because I'm just learning that apparently in the late 90s Rumi was the most-read poet in America. So claims Lewis, and WS Merwin confirms this in his 2002 review in the New York Review of Books:
Franklin Lewis notes at the beginning of his exhaustive study of Rumi that on November 25, 1997, in the Christian Science Monitor, Alexandra Marks pronounced Rumi the best-selling poet in the United States. Professor Lewis's book, with its careful attention to Rumi's life and teachings, and to his reputation from his own time until the end of the late millennium, includes in the introduction a marveling survey of the fervor surrounding Rumi's name in recent decades. In a section entitled "Rumi-Mania" he writes of large, enthusiastic audiences at readings of versions of Rumi's poems by the contemporary American translator Coleman Barks, "who, more than any other single individual, is responsible for Rumi's current fame." By the late 1990s that fame, in a variety of forms, had become established in contemporary popular culture, in which Rumi was claimed as a forerunner of New Age aspirations, of heterosexual and homosexual eroticism, and of current manifestations of a quest for ecstasy. (The subtitle of Barks's most recent volume, The Soul of Rumi, is A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems.)
In case this phenomenon has escaped anyone it is worth repeating a few among Franklin Lewis's collection of highlights. According to William Davis in The Boston Globe of March 30, 1998, "spiritually driven commuters now unwind to audiobooks of Rumi's poetry as they sit in traffic jams...." And in New York, in that year, some four hundred people a day (celebrities among them) at the Jivamukti Yoga Center were doing "spiritual aerobics to a background beat that sometimes mixes rock music and readings of Rumi...." He enumerates concert recitations with live music on stage, and CD recordings.
Is this true? How did I miss this? I remember the late 90s as being a particularly touchy-feely New Age-y kind of time, but I always assumed that was my own personal shame, having to do with how old I was and the crowd I hung out with. Now I'm looking back to my late adolescence in a new light: I was a victim of a phenomenon emanating from the cultural hegemony of Deepak Chopra!
I can see why Rumi would have mass appeal; the poetry could be read in a way that emphasizes its sentiment of good-will and passionate pluckiness (see here, for example); but it could also be said that such populist readings attempt to de-Islamicize Rumi. In the Times Higher Education Supplement, Shusha Guppy writes
[C]ertain writers have attempted to "excise Islam from Sufism", as Lewis puts it, and present it as a "philosophy" and "pseudo-spiritualism". Lewis cites the late Idris Shah's The Sufis , as a notable example, in which God is almost totally absent.
This approach appeals to the modern mind, which finds the idea of a deity hard to accept, while longing for some spiritual basis to human existence. Sufism seems to be spirituality without pain. Yet Masnavi is often a commentary on the Koran: a quarter of the book, about 6,000 lines, are direct parapharases of Koranic verses. In Persia Masnavi has become "the Persian Koran", and the poet's popularity has soared since the 1979 revolution, perhaps because Rumi's ecumenical, gentle mysticism, with its focus on love and the tolerant spirit of Islam, contrasts with the official insistence on the minutiae of ritual observance and the oppressive use of the sharia.
Rumi is the only required text on our syllabus this semester; the rest was pretty much up to my discretion. I wonder what my students will make of it-- I hope we'll be able to read Rumi anchored within the context of Rumi (he was a preacher, after all) and to read his work as a spiritual text, steering clear of pseudo-spiritual sentimentalism.
And now, for your reading pleasure, I share with you one of my favorites in Lewis's translation:
Top of the morning, you're already smashed--
Yes you are, you tied your turban crooked!
I swear to God, all night last night til dawn
You were drinking-- pure wine, undiluted:
It’s plain in your eyes, your cheeks, your color
The sort you are-- wouldn’t put it past you.
Give the tipplers some of what you tasted
O Guardian of all created blessings
Today the lion prowls around for prey
The vale and mountain tremble at the thought
From him you’ll not escape by running!
Submit like head-bowed lover and you’re saved.
You will live on in blissful safety
Once you are joined to his eternal realm
Run away from all this talk, run sixty leagues,
You’re at sixes and sevens in talk’s trap
If you're in New York (and right about now, I wish I were), you might be interested to know that my esteemed colleagues in the English Department at the CUNY Graduate Center have organized a two-day conference (entitled, believe it or not, "Spanking and Poetry") to pay tribute to the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who was a beloved member of the faculty. More information here.
Ruth Franklin says in her New Republic review of the new Dalkey Archive anthology Best European Fiction 2010 what I wanted to say in mine, but didn't, as I just don't have the chops when it comes to contemporary American literature:
"I was surprised to find Smith (a British writer of Caribbean descent who lives partly in the United States) pronouncing a strangely antiquated definition of American writing in her introduction to Best European Fiction 2010, a new anthology edited by Aleksandar Hemon and published by Dalkey Archive Press. “It seems old-fashioned to speak of a ‘Continental’ or specifically ‘European’ style,” Smith (correctly) begins, but she continues: “If the title of this book were to be removed and switched with that of an anthology of the American short story, isn’t it true that only a fool would be confused as to which was truly which?” The differences, she argues, go beyond the “obvious matter of foreign names and places.” European fiction shows “a strong tendency towards the metafictional”; an interest in magic realism (one writer enjoys a fantasy breakfast with Murakami; another imagines that Gustav Klimt has 14 illegitimate sons all named Gustav); and an “epigraphic, disjointed structure” featuring abrupt endings. These stories, she concludes, “seem to come from a different family than those long anecdotes ending in epiphany, popularized by O. Henry.” And these writers’ models are not O. Henry or Hemingway, but Barth, Barthelme, Beckett, Kafka, Sebald.
O. Henry! When was the last time you saw a reference to him in a contemporary American short story—or anywhere else? What struck me about Smith’s description of this supposedly European style was how well it applies to new American writing. Today, the greatest remaining practitioners of the traditional, linear short story Smith seems to be invoking are Alice Munro and William Trevor—neither of whom is American. (She’s Canadian, he’s Irish.) Meanwhile, in American fiction, the kind of fragmentary, fantastic writing that was once experimental has now become common, thanks to the influence of literary journals such as McSweeney’s (as I once argued in Slate). Barth and Barthelme—both of whom are American—are most definitely among the progenitors of this work, but Murakami and Houellebecq are its current patron saints. Kafka’s influence, of course, is a given everywhere, but Sebald was far more popular in England and the United States than among his compatriots on the Continent."
Any observations I might personally make about American literature would be based on instinct and a partial reading history, but by no means do I feel well-versed enough in contemporary American writing to make this kind of claim.
However. I did ardently disagree with Smith's claim that only a fool would think he was holding a collection of American short stories in his hand. Call me a fool, but I don't care:
1) The influence of American writers like David Foster Wallace, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, et al, on these European writers is inarguable
2) The influences fuelling this European writing are exactly those that fuel American writers (as Franklin points out)
3) The only difference, then, is of cultural, social, political context. And *that* is what I focus on in my review. Which you'll get to see any day now. Right Scott?
Just got my copy of the latest issue of the Paris-based literary journal Upstairs at Duroc. I have a piece in this issue! It's number 11. (I was born on the 11th. 11 is a great number.) The issue includes work by Michelle Naka Pierce, Susana Sulic, & George Vance, among others, and translations by Jennifer K. Dick, Rufo Quintavalle, and Barbara Beck. You know, the kinds of writers whose work I'm usually admiring from the audience at IVY Paris. It's quite an honor.
You'll want to order your copy from WICE. They'll take care of you.
The new translation of Simone de Beauvoir's foundational feminist work The Second Sex was published in the UK in late 2009 (I wrote about it here). It took some time for Beauvoir scholars to work their way through it, and one critic in particular--feminist scholar and Duke professor Toril Moi-- found the re-translation to be mostly a failure, tearing it apart in a recent essay in the London Review of Books.
Moi's essay has made such waves that Margaret Simons, philosopher professor and Beauvoir expert (and author of the original essay alerting everyone to the fact that the Parshley translation was incomplete and inaccurate), sent out a call on a philosophy list-serv for corrections to the UK edition, "which the translators have another day or two to correct in the US edition." It's a relief, then, to know that although this translation may not be ideal, the howlers which Moi identified can at least be put right for the US edition (and future UK editions). I tend to think Moi will consider the flaws to be more than simply cosmetic; Simons, on the other hand, calls it a" tremendous advance over the Parshley translation in accuracy and completeness."
I guess we'll all have to stay tuned for la suite.
I've been thinking a lot about translation lately, in large part because I reviewed the Dalkey Archive Best European Fiction 2010 anthology for the Quarterly Conversation (forthcoming, I'll let you know when it comes forth). What seemed most interesting to me about that collection was the idea that there ever is a kind of fiction that can be classified as "European"; and the kinds of stories contained in that volume seem to suggest that translation can be a means of turning disparate cultures into one big melting pot. Then I read this piece on Néojaponisme-- a translation of Mori Ōgai 森鴎外’s Honyaku ni tsuite「翻譯に就いて」 (”On translation”), published in 1914 for a collection of essays on literary technique-- and it sort of complicates that idea, dealing, as it does, with a Norwegian text and Japanese as the target language.
Ōgai talks about the virtues of being "wrong" in translation-- adding or detracting from the original text; of most interest, I think, is the final section in which he contemplates how far a translation should go into the source culture. On translating Ibsen's A Doll House, he writes:
The sweets that Nora eats I translated makuron マクロン. Write rather amedama 飴玉, I was told. Advice like this simply boggles the mind. Tins of almond macaroons have been shipped here in great number so that you may buy them at Aokido whenever you please. Reflect, if you will, on the difference in situation between a woman of the West eating a macaroon and a child of Japan eating an amedama. I recall one scene in a novel by someone-or-other wherein two female university students in Paris’s Latin Quarter munch on macaroons as they trade stories of heartbreak. To switch those macaroons for amedama, of all things — well, it would certainly be comical. The gist of such teachings is that item should appear in translation as appropriately chosen items unique to Japan, but as for myself, I strive to avoid things unique to Japan, the better to produce an extraordinary effect. Furthermore, we only consider here cases where there is an appropriate corresponding item. When uniquely Japanese and inappropriate items appear, the results are quite unbearable.
To be continued when the QC review runs.
I can't wait to see the new Gainsbourg biopic, which opened in France yesterday-- watch the trailer here.
Obviously I love Gainsbourg (who doesn't?), but I'm also a big fan of the director, Joann Sfar, who is primarily known as a graphic novelist with a penchant for rabbi's cats. I did an interview with him a few years ago-- he was the nicest guy, and very patient with my nervous bumbling phone-French. The piece is still up, caught in the folds of the internet, although something strange has happened to the line breaks. Anyway, you can read it here.
I haven't been much interested in all the lists that are going around lately-- in addition to the end of the year, we just saw the end a decade, which brought so many changes to publishing, and what changes could the next decade possibly hold? and blah, and blah, and blah. But for once, one is worth your time. And of course it belongs to Richard Nash.* An excerpt:
5. The mechanically reproduced object will have its aura restored in this Age of Digital Reproduction and we'll wish, again, that Walter Benjamin could have seen all this.
6. In 2020 we will look back on the last days of publishing and realize that it was not a surfeit of capitalism that killed it, but rather an addiction to a mishmash of Industrial Revolution practices that killed it, including a Fordist any color so long as it is black attitude to packaging the product, a Sloanist hierarchical management approach to decision making, and a GM-esque continual rearranging of divisions like deck chairs on the Titanic based on internal management preferences rather than consumer preferences.
*Richard (former head of Soft Skull) is a brilliant guy. If you don't believe me, read his manifesto, a description of his new social-publishing project, Cursor, that is so far-thinking it left most people of us who read it saying "I'm not really sure how it works, but I think it will make sense in time." For semi-regular doses of Richard-wisdom, read his blog.7. In 2020 some people will still look back on recent decades as a Golden Age, just as some now look back on the 1950's as a Golden Age, notwithstanding that the Age was golden largely for white men in tweed jackets who got to edit and review one another and congratulate one another for permitting a few women and the occasional Black man into the club.
A piece I wrote this summer has just now run over at Bookforum; it's called Chorus Girls, and it's run in Bookforum's "Syllabi" section. As in, if I were teaching a seminar on chorus girls, these are the primary sources we would read.
From the cabaret to the nightclub, from the theater to the ballet, women who perform in public have attracted writers and artists for as long as women have performed in public. Unlike the prostitute, who, as Walter Benjamin once said, is "saleswoman and wares in one," the chorus girl is not exactly selling herself—she's selling a dream of who she mightbe. The gaze that falls on her is sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes singular, sometimes multiple. Onstage or off, the chorus girl is defined by her relationship to a necessary other—her audience—who, after all, may just be the reader.
HH: In The Life of Hunger, you created the neologism “jamaisien” [in French “jamais” means “never”]—denoting someone from the “country of never.” How do you recognize yourself in this idea? HH: Yes, on a lot of levels, and in different ways—as a woman, as a writer, as a foreigner living in France . . . But at the same time, it’s true that it’s also a lack, a deficiency. I suppose that if I’ve never been able to build anything except [constructions] out of words, it’s because of this deficiency. The place where I live in France—that some would call “my apartment”—is not fit for a normal person. It’s uninhabitable. There are, then, for me, these things lacking. Deficiencies for elementary basic things like this. The latest issue of Tim House features an interview with Amélie Nothomb, by the magazine's Paris editor, Heather Hartley. In between talking about Rilke, writing as pregnancy, and the importance of boredom, Hartley asks Nothomb about her concept of being a jamaisien-- a state of being without country, of having never had a country, that struck me as an interesting way of looking at a familiar problem. Here's the passage:
AN: In the whole idea. For me, it’s really a profession of faith. I think that perhaps everyone who has known exile or long-term expatriation can recognize themselves in this profession of faith. I imagine you recognize yourself in it?
AN: At the same time there are enormously very fine, wonderful sides to it [this idea of being “jamaisien”.] Right now, I’m in France quite a bit—almost all the time—and every day when I leave my house I say to myself, “This is extraordinary, I’m in a foreign country.” And it’s true this is not my country. I’m living abroad and I feel it. I have all sorts of proof that France is a foreign country. And this makes life much more interesting.
HH: Yes, and everyone who is a jamaisien . . .
AN: Absolutely. They all have this trait.
Being a jamasien is about a tension between supplement and lack, about having one country too many or too few, about the productive strangeness of being alien to a place and yet at home in it... occupying this grey area that most people couldn't stand to inhabit. Even for the jamasien (is the word becoming too precious?) to stand it, one must make use of it. It's quite a demanding position, not a passive one at all.
Anglophone feminists, rejoice! The new English translation of Simone de Beauvoir's masterpiece The Second Sex was published in the UK this week by Jonathan Cape (with the American edition set for publication by Knopf in April 2010).
Viewed by many as feminism's foundational text, Gallimard published The Second Sex in two volumes (to mixed reviews) in 1949. It sold extremely well (200,000 copies in its first week), and garnered Beauvoir followers in sectors of the French population who might otherwise have avoided the kind of philosophical treatises she was trained to write. The Second Sex broke down barriers, not least those of class and education.
An English translation appeared in the US in 1953, and was a bestseller there, too. Except that the translation was performed by a zoologist, one H.M. Parshley, who struggled no doubt valiantly but produced quite a sub-par rendering of Beauvoir's idiosyncratic French prose. Also, he cut about 20% of the book, which he felt was irrelevant.
Beauvoir scholars have been saying for years that a new translation was desperately needed,* but it took Sarah Glazer's watershed 2004 New York Times article to raise general awareness of the problem. Glazer writes,
In addition to misconstruing words and phrases, the American edition deleted nearly 15 percent of the original French text (about 145 pages), seriously weakening the sections dealing with women's literature and history -- Beauvoir being one of the first to declare these as legitimate subjects for study. Gone were numerous quotations from women's novels and diaries, including those of Virginia Woolf, Colette and Sophie Tolstoy, that she used to support her arguments. Little-known historical accounts of women who defied feminine stereotypes, like Renaissance noblewomen who led armies, also vanished from the English edition.
What went wrong with ''The Second Sex''? The answer may be as simple as the word ''sex.'' When Blanche Knopf, wife of the publisher Alfred A. Knopf and an editor in her own right, bought the book on a trip to France, she was under the impression that it was ''a modern-day sex manual'' akin to the Kinsey report, Deirdre Bair writes in her biography ''Simone de Beauvoir'' (1990). Alfred Knopf, who thought the book ''capable of making a very wide appeal indeed'' among ''young ladies in places like Smith,'' sought out Howard Madison Parshley, a retired professor of zoology who had written a book on human reproduction and regularly reviewed books on sex for The New York Herald Tribune, to translate Beauvoir's book. Parshley knew French only from his years as a student at Boston Latin School and Harvard, and had no training in philosophy -- certainly not in the new movement known as existentialism, of which Beauvoir was an adherent.
Capitalizing on the momentum kicked off by Glazer's article, Anne-Solange Noble, the foreign rights director of Gallimard, convinced Jonathan Cape and Knopf that they had to do a new translation, this time by translators who were feminists, who understood Beauvoir's arguments, and who would restore the missing 20% of the book. Sheila Malovany-Chevallier and Constance Borde, two Americans living in Paris, won the commission, and, with the support of the Centre National du Livre, the contracts were signed and the re-translating began. (See also Sarah Glazer's 2007 article in Bookforum for more on how this came about.)
Le Monde has the up to date story here.
*For a scholarly accounting of what's missing from the Parshley translation, and some of the issues at stake in translating Beauvoir, here is Margaret Simons's groundbreaking 1983 article, and here is one by Toril Moi from 2001.
I haven't seen the new translation yet, but I hope to get my hands on a copy soon.
If you aren't already subscribed to the Shakespeare & Co email newsletter, I highly recommend you put yourself on the list. Every month they send out a message stuffed with interesting tidbits, quotes, reviews, ideas, and news about upcoming events at the shop. You can sign up at their site, look in the upper left-hand corner for the words "sign up here".
This month's newsletter includes a few words from Michael Smith, author of The Giro Playboy and most recently Shakespeare & Co's writer-in-residence, on his time living above the bookshop in the special room reserved for visiting writers (which I hope he doesn't mind my excerpting here):
I had wanted to stay ever since a friend told me about this mythical room years ago, and now here I was, sitting at the big wooden desk below the guilded [sic] Belle Epoque mirror, hammering the words out while ‘Three Blind Mice’ peeled out from the bells of Notre Dame beyond the tall French windows... its gothic towers dominated the view from the little room covered floor to ceiling in rare and wonderful books... if you closed your eyes and reached out and picked one, it was virtually guaranteed to be fascinating... the place is a “free university” indeed... I would take a breather from the writing and the books and wander over the bridges of the islands while the Seine flowed beneath and Paris played out her promise to inspire the best in us... one afternoon I ended up in the Marais, and Proust’s writing room, which was covered in cork so he could work without the city sounds distracting him; I loved it; I thought my room, alive with the sounds of unfamiliar French police sirens and the ding dang dong of Notre Dame was better... one evening I found out Burroughs had written parts of Junkie or Naked Lunch in the same room I was staying in, and later on a great dirty cockroach scurried across the desk and winked at me from behind my cheese plate... the little bastard was a living link to a great and noble tradition, I thought, and I was very happy to be sharing that room and that tradition with him... so as I sit here now, remembering it all in the East End of London, I raise a glass to that noble tradition, and to Shakespeare and Co, and to all who sail in her. --Michael Smith
I'm not sure I would have found the cockroach as inspiring as he did (which is why I'm glad I'm a writer with my own roach-free apartment here in Paris), but the rest sounds pretty great.
You might remember that last year I mentioned there was a controversy here in Paris over an exhibit at the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris showing a number of photographs by André Zucca of a very normal-looking Paris under the Nazi Occupation.
That controversy lives again in a very fine essay by Ian Buruma in this week's New York Review of Books:
When a cache of these pictures was exhibited at the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris last year, the press reacted with dismay. How could this "celebration of the victor," "underlining the sweetness of life in an occupied country," take place "without any explanation"?
Buruma has an interesting take. "Perhaps there should have been more explanation," he writes,
but the pictures are only tendentious in what they do not show. You don't see people being rounded up. There is only one blurred image of an old woman walking along the rue de Rivoli wearing a yellow star. There are no photographs of endless queues in front of half-empty food stores. There are no pictures of Drancy, where Jews were held in appalling conditions before being transported east in cattle trains. But what Zucca's pictures do show, always in fine Agfacolor weather, is still revealing. They are disturbing to the modern viewer precisely because of their peculiar air of normality, the sense of life going on while atrocities were happening, as it were, around the corner.
Buruma effectively illustrates that there were at least two Parises under the Occupation, one normal one, for non-Jews, and one of "barbarity and evil, represented by this yellow star," as Hélène Berr wrote in her journal. Apart from those suffering deportation and death, the vast majority of Parisians under the Occupation were "just trying to get by."
What is interesting in Buruma's piece is his discussion of French journalist Patrick Buisson's 1940–1945 Années érotiques, which examines the way the body of the "Boche's girl," the French women accused of horizontal collaboration, became a site of conflict, occupation, and collaboration as much as Paris itself. Buisson "shows
that the presence of large numbers of German soldiers meant liberation of a kind for large numbers of French women: young women rebelling against the authoritarian strictures of bourgeois life, middle-aged spinsters yearning for romance, widows, women alone, women in bad marriages, and so on. Buisson does not ask us to admire these tens of thousands of women engaging in "horizontal collaboration," but to comprehend the complexity of their motives.
He is scornful of the movie stars, fashion folks, and social climbers who did better than most, thanks to their German contacts or lovers: Arletty, Coco Chanel, Suzy Solidor, et al. But he is just as hard on the men who took their revenge after the war on the army of unknown women who had strayed into German arms. Such women were stripped naked and paraded through the streets, shorn of their hair, their bodies daubed with swastikas, jeered at by the mob. Buisson writes:
When the Germans were defeated, or about to be defeated, the "Boche's girl" served as a substitute to prolong a battle that no longer held any dangers and affirmed a manliness that had not always been employed in other circumstances....
At last year's MLA in San Francisco, I gave a talk about Claude Cahun's wartime resistance activities on the Channel island of Jersey on a panel entitled "French Women Write the Résistance." We had a serious turnout given that the panel was at 8:30 in the morning, and during the discussion section a rigorous debate took place, which indicated to us (confirmed by this article) that this is very much a discussion people want to be thinking about right now, and thinking about in new ways. Couching the discussion of French resistance and collaboration in gendered terms seems to be one of these productive ways of re-thinking this historical moment. My co-panelists and I have put together a book proposal on the topic, which I believe is on submission at UPenn UP, so we'll see how that goes.
Meanwhile, do read Buruma's essay.
My review of Jeremy M. Davies's recent novel Rose Alley is up over at The Second Pass.
An excerpt:
“The authentic experiences of the nineteen sixties will be composed of memories that will be a little bit mistaken.” Thus runs the epigraph, by F.T. Castle, to Jeremy M. Davies’ Rose Alley, and it’s as good a description of the novel as any. Ostensibly about the filming of an avant-garde film set in Paris during the student riots of May 1968, it is more of an album de famille, a series of portraits of the eccentric personalities collaborating on the film.
Also called Rose Alley, the film is a Restoration drama about the ambush of Poet Laureate John Dryden in an alleyway near Covent Garden in 1679 by thugs working for John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, a rather bawdy fellow poet who was angered by Dryden’s essay on satire (and jealous of his favor with the king). But this historical kerfuffle is not the point. The point is, the film just can’t get made. Or rather, what gets made is in no way a fulfillment of the original idea.
The novel is structured as a trip into the archives of the film, decades later, compiled and catalogued by an unidentified narrator. You read it as if you’ve found a scrapbook of people you don’t know. (This involves a lot of rereading and cross-checking to make sure you’ve got everyone straight in your head; Davies has anticipated this, and has helpfully provided an index.) One by one, Davies trains his lens on the producer, director, leading lady, screenwriter, and assorted members of the cast and crew, zooming in tightly to look for the wrinkles and pockmarks, and just as the frame clicks into focus — just as we think we have a handle on this terribly strange and specific character — we cut to someone else.
Until the image clarifies, the characters feel as if they’re always getting away from us; peculiar details stand out, but the rest of the image blurs. “Here was the faux Jew with his six gold Stars of David swinging between open fifth and fourth shirt buttons, and then the real one with his Flemish accent, ersatz Spanish name, and Moorish features embalmed in a pale Northern face.” The screenwriter was raised by parents who stuttered so badly that they communicated exclusively by whistling the choruses of popular tunes: “He proposed with ‘Who Takes Care of the Caretaker’s Daughter’ — risky — and she accepted with ‘Deed I Do.’ ” The oddities of these deeply flawed characters are like nothing you’ve ever read in fiction; Dickensian with a dollop of Pynchon, or Barnesian (Djuna, that is) with a veneer of Nabokov. Cheeky, but brilliant, the novel is so sexual it can’t keep its hands to itself.