The Duck Variations by David Mamet. Directed by Marcus Stern. Sexual Perversity in Chicago by David Mamet. Directed by Paul Stacey. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre at Zero Arrow Street, Cambridge, MA, through June 28.

Reviewed by Bill Marx

Death be not mentioned in David Mamet’s early short play, “The Duck Variations,” which was first produced in 1972. Of course, it is the playwright’s deft handling of linguistic indirection that makes the script, which deals with two old men trying to ignore oblivion, so genially comic.

Ironically, the aged treading warily around The End holds up better than Mamet’s once-shocking look at twenty-something erotic mores in “Sexual Perversity in Chicago,” first produced in 1974. The decades have not been kind to this play and its critique of fowl-mouthed macho puerility. What with the arrival of AIDS, texting, cell phones, and ‘hooking up,’ the piece creaks much more loudly than the squabbling geezers in “The Duck Variations,” who are brought to compelling life in fine performances by Thomas Derrah and Will LeBow.

The set-up of “The Duck Variations” is simple enough – two old men, Emil Varec and George S. Aronovitz, sit on a park bench “on the edge of a Big City on a Lake” on an Easter afternoon.They appear to talk about whatever comes into their heads, but a sense of fear, rooted in intimations of irrelevance, exerts an invisible pressure on the seemingly banal conversation, organized around fourteen ‘variations.’

The talk is often triggered by what Emil (Derrah) and George (LeBow) see around them: a glimpse of a boat inspires speculation about who is on board; the sight of a duck inspires an ongoing discussion about the bird’s life cycle, its relationship to predators, such as the Blue Heron, and the differences, if any, between ducks and pigeons. Their wrangling over the lifestyles of fowls, including the allegedly super-secret mating habits of “barnyard” ducks, generates plenty of wry amusement.

But the trivial observations, the pseudo-scientific generalizations about nature inevitably lead the pair to talk about extinction, which is just where they don’t want to go. “You upset me … with your talk of nature and the duck and death,” says Emil mid-way through the play. The joke is that these guys, who never leave the bench, are doing their best to ignore the fact that they are ‘sitting ducks.”

Mamet explores this dark irony with sympathy and humor, such as when Emil, unconvincingly but gallantly, tries to reassure George that there is a meaning to their exchange on the park bench: “There’s nothing that you could possibly name that doesn’t have a purpose. Don’t bother to even try … The very fact that you are sitting here on this bench has got a purpose.” While rooted in a touching need for solace, the shaky claim to significance is continually undercut by what the men say about themselves, as when Emil describes how he escapes his apartment (“Joyless. Cold concrete.” ) by going to the park.

According to the Mamet, the idea for the play came “from listening to a lot of old Jewish men in my life, particularly my grandfather.” Thus, even though “The Duck Variations” owes something to Edward Albee and Samuel Beckett’s exploration of talk as a hapless deferment from reality, the playwright’s deft use of Hebraic spin, his manipulation of homey rhythms and prosaic cadences, takes the notion in a fresh direction. LeBow and Derrah manipulate the dialogue with agility, especially showing how the confab wavers between an unspoken friendship and undercurrents of hostility – exasperation is a small price to pay when the enemy is lethal boredom.

The wonderful ending, in which George evokes the value of the aged among the ancients Greeks is a poignant meditation on the play’s tragicomic vision: “Old Men. Incapable of working. Of no use to their society. Just used to watch the birds all day. First Light to Last Light. First Light: Go watch birds. Last Light: Stop watching birds.” There’s little of Beckett’s cosmic terror in this evocation of geriatric uselessness, but it’s affectionately frightening nonetheless.

Mamet appears to care about Emil and George in “The Duck Variations,” which lends its satire of the gabble of isolated oldsters a gentle humanity, a saving sense of empathy. “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” offers some nostalgic chuckles, but it has lost a lot of its sardonic sting as an indictment of the savage mating rituals in the American urban jungle.

The influence of the aggressively misogynistic and sexual predatory blather of Bernie on his friend and co-worker Dan waxes and wanes through the course of the play, which is made up of a series of brief, explosive scenes. Dan meets Deborah: their coupling blooms and curdles under the jaundiced eye of Deb’s cynical roommate Joan and the cartoonish cad Bernie who, in one scene, reacts to a woman’s rejection at a bar with adolescent anger: “You think I don’t have better things to do? I don’t have better ways to spend my hours than to listen to some nowhere cunt try out cute bits on me? I mean why don’t you just clean your fucking act up, Missy.” The play’s caricatures have been molded to show us that in narcissistic America relationships between the sexes are driven by anxiety, insecurity, mythology, and distrust. The figures are too one-note to do more than trumpet that message.

To work, a production of “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” has to race along with ferocity and finesse. Under the lackluster direction of Paul Stacey, the play plods a bit, even with a game cast made up of first-year acting students at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute. The performers are capable enough, but they don’t deliver Mamet’s dialogue with the requisite snap and crackle. A few of the scenes fall flat or come off as forced. Bernie’s long-winded, fantasy-filled sexual conquests still generate laughs, but the play feels dated, light years from a sexual scene among the young that, at least from what I see and hear, is less obsessive and more relaxed, more about communal ‘peeling off’ and ‘hooking up’ than prowling for pick-ups. Speaking of pick-ups, Zero Arrow Theater has been comfortably converted into a cabaret for the evening of Mamet plays, including a bar, which was skillfully used for a couple of scenes.

These shows were part of a two month A.R.T. “celebration” of the work of Mamet, but what is called for now is thoughtful reevaluation, including critical speculation about whether the dramatist’s dedication to making films and TV shows has been healthy for his playwriting. His recent crude turn to the Right (”Why I Am no Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’”) could be part of the discussion as well. “The Duck Variations” displays a strong talent (if he wrote the play today, however, the geezers might salute “the unregulated free market”), but “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” suggests that some of Mamet’s highly praised plays — once their shock value has worn off — are beginning to show their age. Has Mamet written a play since 1984’s “Glengarry, Glen Ross” that would be considered major?

Starting in 1769 serious questions have been raised as to whether William Shakespeare (1564-1616) of Stratford-upon-Avon actually wrote the plays and poems attributed to him. For some years the true author was claimed to be Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626). So far, at least sixty persons have been put forward as the rightful writer. Notable among them are Christopher Marlowe (1564-93); Edward de Vere (1550-1604), 17th Earl of Oxford; William Stanley (1561-1642), 6th Earl of Derby; and Roger Manners (1576-1612), 5th Earl of Rutland. The roster has not been restricted to men: it includes Queen Elizabeth I herself (1533-1603), and – a recent addition – the Jewish poet Aemelia Bassano Lanier (1569-1645).

Edward de Vere -- Did He Write Shakespeare's Plays?

The Marlovians must deal with their writer’s widely witnessed mortal brawl at 29; they have to posit a faked death. With many plays in the canon generally assigned to the 1605-12 period, the Oxfordians have to confront de Vere’s death on 24 June 1604.

A local group, mostly Oxfordians, recently gathered for a two-day event in Watertown (May 29-30). The first day saw a one-man show entitled “Shake-Speare’s Treason,” written and performed by actor-turned-writer Hank Whittemore in collaboration with director Ted Story. This 90-minute dramatized lecture – a work-in-progress given in several cities – is distilled from Whittemore’s huge, 918-page tome “The Monument,” devoted to the Bard’s 154 sonnets

It is Whittemore’s theory that Her Majesty was not the “virgin queen” she claimed to be. He maintains that Elizabeth in the late 1560s began an affair with Edward de Vere, and, after staying out of public view for six months, bore a son, Henry Wriothesley [pronounced Risly], 3rd Earl of Southampton (1573-1624). Henry would join Robert Devereux (1566-1601), 2nd Earl of Essex, in the so-called Essex Rebellion against the government in 1601. This failed, and Essex was beheaded as a traitor, while Henry was reprieved and imprisoned in the Tower until Elizabeth’s death (the “three winters cold” in Sonnet 104). Henry, as royal issue, could have claimed the throne as King Henry IX, last of the Tudors. The Sonnets are viewed as written by de Vere to his son, the dedication to “Mr. W.H.” reversing the initials to conceal the identity of the addressee.

The second day was devoted to a series of illustrated talks, kicking off with an engrossing consideration of the Stratfordian’s will by Bonner Miller Cutting, president of the Lone Star Shakespeare Roundtable in Houston, Texas. The will, which was discovered in 1747, is, Cutting claims, “not an enigma, but a disaster.” She has examined some 2000 wills, and is amazed at what is not present in this one: nothing about books, manuscripts, musical instruments, maps, bequests to servants, or forgiveness of debts. She regards the celebrated bequest of “the second best bed and the furniture” to the testator’s wife (who is not named) as intentionally disparaging, whereas his sister Joan (named three times) is well provided for. The text is heavily revised, and two different inks were used, with the redrafted first page written later than pages two and three.

Journalist Mark Anderson addressed two topics in his remarks. He first spoke about the recent excitement in the media around the world concerning the Cobbe family’s portrait asserted by some, including well-known scholars, as a depiction of Shakespeare. Anderson mentioned a Times Literary Supplement article by Katherine Duncan-Jones, co-editor of the “Arden Shakespeare’s Poems” and author of a biography of the Bard. I tracked down the article (March 18 issue), and she persuasively proves that the Cobbe painting is one of several copies of a portrait (ca. 1610) known to be of Sir Thomas Overbury (1581-1613). Much ado about nothing.

Anderson then put on his other hat as the author of “ ‘Shakespeare’ by Another Name,” his 2005 biography of Edward de Vere as “the man who was Shakespeare.” He stated that the plays characterized people from de Vere’s life – which is plausible. Not so convincing was his statement that the author “stopped creating new work in 1604, stopped reading in 1604, stopped reporting in 1604.” He proposed that the standard chronology of the writings is “a polite fiction.”

We were then shown the beginning of Cheryl Eagan-Donovan’s film documentary about de Vere entitled “Nothing is Truer Than Truth” (an English translation of the de Vere family motto, “Vero Nihil Verius”). This film-in-progress, based on Anderson’s book, will eventually run 60 or 70 minutes, and will emphasize de Vere’s visit to Venice in his mid-twenties. From the opening fifteen minutes, one recognized two interviewees familiar to Boston audiences: Diego Arciniegas, award-winning actor and artistic director of the Publick Theatre; and Robert J. Orchard, executive director of the American Repertory Theater.

After a half-hour Twenty Questions game about Shakespeare and de Vere, we got back to serious business with a presentation by poet Marie Merkel, author of a book on “Titus Andronicus.” She was struck by a statement in the influential critic Harold Bloom’s essay on “The Tempest” (“Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human,” p. 673), “Mysteriously, it seems an inaugural work, a different mode of comedy, one that Beckett attempted to rival in ‘Endgame.’ ”And she cited the 2002 edition of the play by David Lindley, who spoke of the work’s “uniquely experimental nature.”

So Merkel decided to explore fully the specialness of this play. Among the features she found were staccato cadences, heavy enjambment, rhetorical austerity, neoclassic structure, the classical unities, and strong echoes of the masque and commedia dell’arte. She also compiled several dozen words that occur in “The Tempest” and in Ben Jonson (1572-1637) but nowhere else in the Bard’s plays.

Ben Jonson, claims a critic, wrote The Tempest and kept it a secret.

Her conclusion is that “The Tempest” was written by Jonson, who, she says, was still obsessed by this play in 1631. She doesn’t explain how Jonson came to provide his lengthy prefatory encomium to “my beloved, The AVTHOR Mr. William Shakespeare” in the 1623 First Folio of the plays, in which “The Tempest” was printed first. She is preparing a book on Jonson and the play, and will doubtless address this question.

The final symposium talk, “Shakespeare and the Succession Crisis of the 1590s,” was given by librarian – and longtime Oxfordian – Bill Boyle. His remarks were complex and resistant to easy summary. But he spoke of historian Sir John Hayward (ca. 1564-1627), who in 1599 wrote about the deposing of Richard II, the subject of the 1597 First Quarto of the Bard’s wonderful play. Boyle considers the play “a real legal treatise,” and it was by request performed on the eve of the Essex Rebellion. Boyle also talked about the long epic poem “Willobie his Avisa” (1594), which contains the first mention of Shakespeare and in which Avisa might have been a reference to Queen Elizabeth. And he spoke about Francis Meres’ “Palladis Tamia” (1598), which listed a lot of plays and poems, and saluted the “mellifluous and hon[e]y-tongued Shakespeare.”

Members of the U.S. Supreme Court have occasionally been corralled to judge moot trials about the authorship controversy – one took place in 1987, with Justice John Paul Stevens participating. Jess Bravin in a recent issue of the Wall Street Journal (April 18) updated the subject in an article distributed to symposium attendees. Justice Stevens now says of the Stratford man, “I think the evidence that he was not the author is beyond a reasonable doubt,” and he sides with the Oxfordians, as does Justice Antonin Scalia. Justices Kennedy and Breyer stick with the Stratfordians. Justices Souter and Ginsburg are unsure, and Justices Roberts, Thomas and Alito declined to comment.

Those who are new to the controversy or desire further argument should turn to the website DoubtAboutWill.org, which provides a Declaration of Reasonable Doubt and a debate by scholar Stanley Wells with Shakespearean actors Mark Rylance and Sir Derek Jacobi.

Full disclosure obliges me to state that in my youth I was an ardent Oxfordian. (The founder of the Oxford theory (1918) was the somewhat unfortunately surnamed J. Thomas Looney – pronounced, however, to rhyme with Tony). In the last half century, however, I have – for better or worse – rejoined the orthodox Stratfordian mainstream. But there remain a host of questions that have not been satisfactorily answered by anyone. So the battle will certainly continue for a long time.

Rupert: A Confession
By Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, Translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison, Open Letter, $12.95, 131 pages

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

I consider myself something of an expert in the seldom studied theme of impotence in film and literature. Most men don’t like to think about the topic, in much the same way they don’t like to think about death. In fact, impotence is worse than death. Thinking about death probably won’t kill you, unless you’re feeling particularly karmic. But thinking about impotence can actually lead to impotence. Best not to dwell.

Still, impotent men can make for potent protagonists; they have a lot to compensate for. Consider the film “Bonnie and Clyde,” where Clyde Barrow’s gun is such a blatant phallic symbol that Bonnie actually strokes it when she feels aroused. Then there is Jake Barnes of “The Sun Also Rises,” who envies the unbridled masculinity of Pamplona’s bullfighters, and spends his evenings making sure that if his war injuries didn’t make him impotent, his drinking certainly would.

My personal favorite “dysfunctional” protagonist is Karol Karol, of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s film, “White.” Unable to consummate his marriage to the character played by Julie Delpy (hard to believe, I know), and eventually divorced because of it, Karol gets his revenge by framing her for his own murder. It’s no erection, but you take what you can get.

All of this is to say that impotence can serve as a fine motivation for strange behavior. In the case of “Rupert: A Confession,” written by Dutch poet and novelist Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, the behavior in question is the brutal rape of a young women in an alleyway. Rupert is presented in the form of three long monologues supposedly delivered to the jury hearing his case. That no defendant would ever say something like, “I read like I was falling from the world, and I read a poem that smelled of the warm pelts of animals sacrificed to Artemis and that sang of a longing that was a sea to drown in…” unless gunning for an insanity plea implies that the narrator might not be in a courtroom after all. He might even be one of those damned unreliable narrators. Sigh.

Rupert’s defense rests on his relationship with the mysterious Mira, described as “Mira, my sugar-sweet, shimmering Mira, my masochism, my martyrdom, light of my lips, lymph of my cyanic sadness, sea of my swan dive, salt on my howling wounds…” In this thinly disguised bastardization of Humbert Humbert’s opening paean to Lolita (“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.”), Pfeijffer slyly transforms “loins” to “lips,” underlining Rupert’s failure to conquer his willing paramour.

When, as a result, Mira leaves him for one of his best friends (referred to always as “Benno, the bastard”), Rupert loses his mind. While wandering the streets in misery, he happens upon a gang rape in progress. Imagining the girl to be Mira, and as some kind of revenge, he pleasures himself while watching. The girl then wrongly fingers him for the deed—or that’s what he’d have us believe. He uses his impotence as an alibi; because he thought the woman being raped was Mira, and because he had never been able to get it up for Mira, he couldn’t have been the rapist. All the same, DNA evidence points to Rupert as the only assailant.

Though “Rupert: A Confession” is only 131 pages long, the vast majority of it is taken up not with the crime or the trial, but with Rupert’s mental perambulations. He ruminates on a range of subjects, such as the best layout for a city square, how to formulate the perfect insult, and the reasons why men who wear comfortable sweaters are jerks. All of this would be fine if Rupert were fun to listen to, but he isn’t. Aside from being a disgusting pervert who spends whole evenings organizing his pornography collection, he’s also an annoying, self-aggrandizing pedant.

Pfeijffer’s prose, at least in translation, is as difficult to read as (I imagine) his name is to pronounce. We’re never allowed to forget that the writer behind Rupert is a poet. References to T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” are sprinkled liberally through the book—aside from the near-constant verbal allusions, the poem actually comes to life in the form of a blind seer and a crazy woman pulling various Tarot cards out of her pants.

Though these manifestations are meant to be signs of Rupert’s madness, rather than actual characters, I couldn’t think of any justification for all the alluding (other than Pfeijffer’s affection for the poem). Nor was there any reason given for how Rupert came to know the poem so well, or why he would speak so eloquently in general. When your protagonist regularly comes up with sentences like, “I’ve seen her standing in sour-smelling alleyways with broken street lamps, late, at implausible hours, with lacquered loins of loss and a look of melting ice,” the reader deserves an explanation.

In spite of all these nods, Pfeijffer’s novel is far less indebted to Eliot’s poetry than it is to Nabokov’s “Lolita” (interestingly, the original Dutch edition of Rupert came out alongside a collection of Pfeijffer’s poems entitled “Dolores – Elegies”). Rupert is presented as a kind of spiritual successor to Humbert Humbert, in that both men are narcissists (“I’m calm, noble, and courageous,” Rupert tells us, where Humbert describes himself as “a great big handsome hunk of movieland manhood”), both are sexually damaged (a psychologist in “Lolita” writes on a card that Humbert may actually be impotent, recognizing that he is incapable of a healthy sexual relationship), and both distract from their sickness with fine words.

But while the two men both write as if they were on trial, Humbert is by far the more convincing criminal. It is a strange paradox of an antihero that he must be twice as seductive as a hero. A character engaged in generally good deeds will win our sympathy immediately; a monster must charm. Humbert’s defense is one of the smoothest in the literary canon (alongside Albert Camus’ Stranger, who explains away the murder he commits by saying, basically, that the sun was in his eyes), but Rupert’s never manages to persuade. If I had ever questioned his guilt, even for a moment, it would have meant that his voice had made an impression on me. But for all his verbosity, Rupert fails to defend himself.

For Humbert, the claim is simple: “it was she who seduced me.” Poor Rupert can only close by saying of himself: “Spectating is the only way to take part. If that’s his crime, he pleads guilty.” Like its protagonist, “Rupert” fails to convince the jury.

Liao Yiwu was arrested for writing and recording a poem about the squashing of the students' pro-democracy movement.

Reported by Bill Marx

When the Chinese government tanks rolled into the capital city of Beijing on the night of June 3, 1989 and brutally suppressed the students’ pro-democracy movement, Liao Yiwu was home in the southwestern province of Sichuan. The news shocked him to the very core. Overnight, Liao composed a long poem,” Massacre,” which portrayed, with stark imagery, the killing of innocent students and residents as vividly as Picasso depicted the Nazi massacre in the town of Guernica.

Without any chance of having his poem published in China, Liao made an audiotape of himself reciting “Massacre,” using Chinese ritualistic chanting and howling to invoke the spirit of the dead. The tape recording was widely circulated via underground channels in China. In another poem written at that time, he described his sense of frustration at being unable to fight back.

You were born with the soul of an assassin,
But at time of action,
You are at loss, doing nothing.
You have no sword to draw,
Your body a sheath rusted,
Your hands shaking,
Your bones rotten,
Your near-sighted eyes cannot do the shooting.

That tape of “Massacre” as well as a movie he made with friends of its sequel, “Requiem” caught the attention of the Chinese security police. In February 1990, as he was boarding a train to Beijing, police swooped down on him. Six of his poet and writer friends, as well as his pregnant wife, were also arrested simultaneously for their involvement in his movie project. As the ringleader, Liao received a four-year sentence.

Liao’s imprisonment in 1990 became a defining chapter in his life. Ostracized and depressed during his four-year incarceration, he rebelled against prison rules, only to be subjected to abusive punishment: He was prodded by electric batons, tied up, handcuffed and forced to stand in the hot summer sun for hours. One time, his hands were tied behind his back for twenty three days in solitary confinement until abscess covered his armpits. He suffered several mental collapses and attempted suicide twice. He was known among the inmates as “the big lunatic.”

In 1994, following international pressure, Liao was released fifty days before completing his prison term (The Chinese government claimed he was being rewarded for good behavior.) He returned home to find that his wife had left him, taking their child. His city residential registration was canceled, rendering him unemployable and subject to expulsion to the countryside. His former literary friends avoided him in fear. His only possession was a flute, which he had learned to play in jail. Liao walked through the noisy streets in his native city of Chengdu, and began his life anew as a street musician.

To make a living, Liao picked up odd jobs in restaurants, nightclubs, tea houses and bookstores. But his life at the bottom broadened the scope of his intended book about the socially marginalized people that he had befriended. The conversations with his prison inmates and people on the street gave rise to “Interviews with People from the Bottom Rung of Society.”

Among the 60 interviews selected for his book were a professional mourner, a human smuggler, a murderer, a beggar, a fortune teller, a burglar, a dissident, a homosexual, a whoremaster, a former landlord, a school teacher and a Falun gong practitioner. Like the author himself, all of the individuals were either thrown into the bottom of society during the various political purges in the Mao era or have been caught in the tumultuous changes of today’s evolving Chinese society.

The interviews are literary as well as journalistic – reconstruction rather than transcription of his conversations. Because the interviews required extra sensitivity and patience, he occasionally eschewed the usual tools of a tape recorder or a notebook. Whether he was in prison or on the street, Liao always spent a considerable amount of time with his subjects, trying to gain their trust before conducting any interviews. For one story, it could take three to four conversations on different occasions. For example, he interviewed a mortician seven times and then incorporated all his conversations into one piece.

In 2001, the Yangzi Publishing House published a sanitized and shortened version of the book and it immediately became a best seller. Yu Jie, a well-known independent literary critic in Beijing called the book “a sociologist’s investigative report, which can serve as an historical record of contemporary China.”

For the first time after the Communist takeover in 1949, Liao introduced the word di-ceng, or “bottom rung of society” to the country. The notion is anathema to supporters of Mao’s Communist movement, which strives to create an egalitarian society free of prostitutes, beggars, Triad gangsters, and drug abusers.

In the summer of 2004, three interviews from Liao’s book – the professional mourner, the human smuggler and the public restroom manager – appeared for the first time in English in the “Paris Review,” its inaugural issue under its new editor, Philip Gourevitch.

Following the “Paris Review” debut, Pantheon selected 27 stories in 2008 and published them under the title “The Corpse Walker, Real-Life Stories: China From the Bottom Up.”

Meanwhile, Liao continues to publish interviews, essays and poems on overseas Chinese websites and his works have become popular among young readers in mainland China. “I am trying to overcome, little by little, the fear that’s been inflicted on me,” he says. “By doing so, I try to preserve my sanity and inner freedom.”

Excerpts from “Massacre” (translated by Wen Huang)

Dedicated to those who were killed on June 4, 1989

A massacre is happening
In this nation of Utopia
Where the Prime Minister catches a cold
The masses have to sneeze to follow
Martial law is declared and enforced
The aging toothless state machine is rolling over
Those who dare to resist and refuse to sneeze
Fallen by the thousands are the barehanded and unarmed
Armored assassins are swimming in blood
Setting fire to houses with windows and doors locked
Polish your military boots with the skirt of a slain girl
Boot owners don’t even tremble
Robots without hearts never tremble
Their brain is programmed with one process
A flawed command
Represent the nation to dismember the constitution
Represent the constitution to slaughter justice
Represent the mothers to suffocate the children
Represent children to sodomize the fathers
Represent the wives to murder the husbands
Represent the citizens to bomb the city
Open fire, open fire, open fire
Shoot women, students and children
Shoot workers, teachers and venders
Riddle them with bullets
Aiming at those angry faces, shocking faces, contorted faces, despondent faces and tranquil faces
Shoot with abandon
The fleeting beauty of those faces moving toward you like tidal waves
The eternal beauty of those faces heading toward heaven and hell
The beauty of turning humans into beasts
The beauty of seducing, raping and trampling on your fellow citizens
Eliminate beauty
Wipe out the flowers, forest, school campuses, love, and the pure air
Shoot, shoot and shoot…
I feel good and I feel high
Blow up that head
Burn up the hair and the skin
Let the brain erupt
Let the soul gush out
Splash on the bridge, the fence and the street
Splash toward the sky
Blood turned into stars and stars are running
Heaven and earth have turned upside down
Shiny helmets are like stars
Troops are running out of the moon
Shoot, Shoot, Shoot
Humans and stars are falling and running
Indistinguishable, which are humans and which are stars
Troops followed them into the cloud, into cracks on the ground…

We live under bright sunlight
But we have lost our eyesight
We find ourselves on a street, so wide
But no one can take a stride
We stand in a crowd, supposed to be loud
But people open their mouth without sound
We are tortured with thirst
But everyone refuses water.

This unprecedented massacre
Survivors are those bastards.

Share/Save]]> http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/05/29/poet-and-dissident-liao-yiwu-memories-of-the-tiananmen-square-massacre/feed/ http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/05/28/world-books-interview-daddy-colossus/ http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/05/28/world-books-interview-daddy-colossus/#comments Thu, 28 May 2009 18:45:35 +0000 ArtsFuse http://blog.theartsfuse.com/?p=786 By Bill Marx

Sigmund Freud sets out a weirdly Brobdingnagian survival scenario for kids. Young children rely on their parents, dependent on the intimidating bounty and emotional whims of “adult” giants who could easily dish out too much smothering love or unconscious hostility.

Novelist Peter Stephan Jungk weaves a playfully tragicomic variation on this primal generational dilemma in his fantastical “road trip” novel “Crossing the Hudson” (translated from the German by David Dollenmeyer, Other Press, 232 pages).

Author Peter Stephan Jungk

The melancholic Gustav Rubin, with his virago of a mother, Rosa, in the car, becomes mired in an epic traffic jam on the Tappan Zee Bridge. The astonished pair spy the giant body of the deceased Rubin patriarch — the famed scientific genius Ludwig — stretched out on the Hudson River below.

Gustav’s confrontation with a corpse the size of a Macy’s Day Parade balloon (at one point, like a surreal mountain climber, he climbs up on the body) not only raises issues about the deep but haunting bond between a charismatic father and his bedeviled son, but explores the intricacies of mourning and the ambiguities of a Jewish family’s thorny past.

Jungk has written eight books in German, including the critically acclaimed biography “Franz Werfel: A Life in Prague.” Handsel Books has published English translations of two of his novels, “Tiger” and “Perfect American,” the latter, a fictionalized biography of the last years of Walt Disney, is being adapted into an opera by Philip Glass.

Via email I sent Jungk some questions about “Crossing the Hudson.” An admiring reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement suggested that the works of Franz Kafka and Philip Roth influenced Jungk’s tale of a giant Jewish father who won’t stay small or buried. I tossed in, for good measure, Donald Bartheleme’s study of bewildered sons confronting a bossy and undying dad, “The Dead Father.” As you can read below, Jungk sees this dadaesque dream as very much his own.

World Books: In what ways does the novel’s exploration of the complexities of the father/son bond build on ideas in your previous books?

Peter Stephan Jungk: It doesn’t

World Books: The novel’s surreal central image — the father’s giant body — suggests parable and parody. Is it one or the other?

Peter Stephan Jungk: It is always difficult for a writer to explore the reasons for his or her choice of images, ideas, situations. But I did feel - strongly even - that the image of the giant Father is a metaphor, a parable. Definitely not a parody! A clear metaphor for an overbearing, a powerful, famous, all-consuming father-figure. A father whose pride to be who he is surmounts that of his son by miles, by light years. He is “larger than life,” his intensity and his intelligence go far beyond his son’s capacities.

The image came to my mind one morning, 10 years after my own father’s death, lying awake one morning at 5 am … I saw the bridge, I saw the golem-like giant lying under it … and I knew I had to find out more about this strange image. And then one step lead to the next …

World Books: Donald Barthelme’s black comic novel “The Dead Father” features a grieving son who is left with “an inner voice commanding, haranguing, yes-ing and no-ing – yes no yes no yes no yes no, governing your every, your slightest movement, mental or physical. At what point do you become yourself?” Is this also the crux of Gustav’s predicament?

Peter Stephan Jungk: No

World Books: Did you set out to reexamine the images of Oedipal conflict presented by Jewish fathers and sons in Franz Kafka and Philip Roth?

Peter Stephan Jungk: No

World Books: What does the charged relationship between Gustav and his famous physicist father say about the gulf between those whose lives were directly touched by the Holocaust and their children?

Peter Stephan Jungk: I think many parents who lived through those terrible times preferred to spare their children the hardship(s) of being Jewish. They often downplayed or outright denied their Judaism, especially in Germany, Austria, and Poland. In the case of religious Jews it may be different, but the “free” ones tend to try to keep their children as untouched, as unfazed as possible.

In the case of Gustav and his father Ludwig, I guess that the son feels a longing for the roots of his forefathers. He even turns religious, keeping Shabbat, marrying a religious wife. His parents are quite shocked about this … their son going in the opposite direction they had chosen for him …

World Books: Please talk about the challenge of arriving at the novel’s tone, which combines the comic and the fearful.

Peter Stephan Jungk: Combining the comic and the fearful wasn’t something I planned or tried to achieve consciously. As so often in writing, an unidentifiable force takes over and decides what happens … decides what happens to the characters and decides what happens to the style. And to the writer himself …! I was rather surprised how funny the novel actually read in the end. This fascinates me most about the “art” of writing fiction: how the writer becomes a listener, a vessel for inspiration …

World Books: Why did you decide to set most of the novel during a traffic jam on the Tappan Zee Bridge? Why that bridge?

Peter Stephan Jungk: I feel bridges are close to our dreams. Especially bridges in the United States…they are so enormous, yet so appealing at the same time. The Tappan Zee seemed the right location for my novel since it’s the longest bridge spanning the Hudson…and because I know it so well, spending my summers not far away at a lake house, just like Gustav Rubin. But it’s not the lake mentioned in the book!

World Books: Jewish motherhood, in the form of Gustav’s hectoring mother and hysterical wife, doesn’t come off particularly well in the novel. Why?

Peter Stephan Jungk: Rosa, Gustav’s mother, just speaks the way she must. And so does Gustav’s slightly hysterical wife. I didn’t intentionally plan to denounce Jewish womanhood. But yes, I have personally suffered from the amazing powers and frightening manipulations of a Jewish mother …

Share/Save]]> http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/05/28/world-books-interview-daddy-colossus/feed/ http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/05/27/world-books-digging-the-foundation-pit/ http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/05/27/world-books-digging-the-foundation-pit/#comments Wed, 27 May 2009 16:44:07 +0000 ArtsFuse http://blog.theartsfuse.com/?p=754 By Bill Marx

In the latest World Books podcast I talk to Robert Chandler, who along with his wife Elizabeth and Olga Meerson has translated Andrey Platonov’s novel “The Foundation Pit” for New York Review Books.

The first English translation of the unexpurgated text of Platonov's masterpiece.

Platonov is considered by a number of critics to be the most impressive literary discovery since the fall of the Soviet Union. Russian poet Joseph Brodsky hailed him as a master of language, a 20th century innovator in the same league as James Joyce and Franz Kafka.

Andrey Platonov

This view has yet to be accepted in the West, though Chandler and others are helping raise his profile by providing translations of Platonov free of editorial and political mangling – Platonov, who died in 1951, suffered a lifetime of persecution, even though he was sympathetic to the goals of communism – his writing proffers an uncanny blend of the anti-utopian and the utopian.

The new translation of Platonov’s dark parable about Stalinist collectivism is based on a definitive edition of “The Foundation Pit,” which was made available in 2000. This English version reflects the influence of Samuel Beckett, its prose an unsettling mix of despair, humor, absurdity, lyricism, and empathy that marks this and other major works by Platonov. I talked to Chandler about the writer’s relationship with other authors, the difficulties of translating him into English, and the charge that Platonov is just too gloomy.

Translator Robert Chandler

Robert Chandler has translated a number of Russian authors, including Vasily Grossman. His translations of Platonov include the volumes “Soul and Other Stories” and “The Portable Platonov.” Those who want to learn more about Platonov should read Thomas Seifrid’s excellent new critical volume “A Companion to Andrei Platonov’s “The Foundation Pit.”

==================================================================================

And World Books is more than my weekly podcast - the online feature includes reviews, interviews, news, and commentary on international literature. You can also sign up for World Books podcasts at ITunes or The World.

Look for a new interview on the World Books page with Can Xue, a Chinese writer whose work has garnered critical accolades. Yale University Press has just published her novel “Five Spice Street.” Those who want to talk about that book or other issues about international fiction and culture should go to the World Books Facebook fan page. Agree or disagree, I want to hear from you.

Share/Save]]> http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/05/27/world-books-digging-the-foundation-pit/feed/ http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/05/12/world-books-writing-about-the-chinese-earthquake-a-year-later/ http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/05/12/world-books-writing-about-the-chinese-earthquake-a-year-later/#comments Tue, 12 May 2009 19:06:29 +0000 ArtsFuse http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/05/12/world-books-writing-about-the-chinese-earthquake-a-year-later/ By Liao Yiwu, Wen Huang, and Bill Marx

Each time a disaster hits China, we all become refugees and strangers in our own land. — Liao Yiwu

Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, 50, revisits the earthquake damaged Gu Temple in the town of Jiezi in the Sichuan Province. He was interviewing May 12th survivors for his book “The Big Earthquake.”

Dissident Chinese writer Liao Yiwu wrote about his experience of the quake for World Books a year ago and now he has an update (translated from the Chinese by Wen Huang) on the aftermath of the disaster in which he talks about writing a book on what he calls “a shameful chapter in contemporary Chinese history.” Liao Yiwu focuses on his recent attempt to leave his country to accept an Australian literary award for the volume.

On May 12, 2008, a major earthquake struck Beichuan in Sichuan province, about 80 kilometers from where I live. It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year.

I don’t know if the dead are resting in peace, but those who survived continue to be tormented by the memory of death. Recently, there’s been a number of stories circulating on the internet about the increase in suicide rates in the disaster area. A widely reported case involved a 33-year-old resident in Beichuan who had lost his wife and son in the earthquake. He used to be outgoing and optimistic, but he was found in a pool of blood with his wrist slit on New Year’s Eve. Luckily, his relatives discovered early and sent him to the hospital in Mianyang city and the doctor was able to rescue him.

A Chinese psychologist categorizes this incident as an example of “impulsive suicide” triggered by the Chinese holidays. The doctor says that every festival or anniversary causes an insurmountable amount of stress for survivors. That reminds me of two lines from a well-known Chinese poem: “A stranger in a foreign land I cast, I miss my family on festival days.”

Each time a disaster hits China, we all become refugees and strangers in our own land. The famine of 1959 and 1962 left thirty million dead. The Cultural Revolution caused the deaths of two to seven million people. The devastating earthquake in Tangshan claimed the lives of 240,00. We survivors struggle on, living a meaningless life like pigs and dogs. In the Mao era, the Party used to call on people to “wipe clean the blood stains on your face, bury the bodies of your comrades and move on…” If we use the Western standard to diagnose the mental conditions of Chinese, every one of us is probably suffering from some kind of mental illnesses such as post-traumatic stress disorder. We are all the descendants or contemporaries of various man-made and natural catastrophes.

I was caught in the middle of the earthquake one month after my book “Corpse Walker” was released in the United States. I rushed out of my house and survived. Suddenly, I found myself the center of attention from friends and the media. I talked non-stop about my experience and expressed my frustration at being unable to help. Then, some friends overseas reminded me of my duty as a writer: “You need to go to the epicenter and record real history. The misfortune of a country is the fortune of historians. This is an opportunity and mission from heaven.”

They were right. I felt like transforming myself from a lazy dog into a mechanical one. I dragged my girl friend and sniffed around the debris for months, interviewing survivor and listening to their stories. I kept what I had seen and heard in a journal every day. As summer turned into winter, I finally had the opportunity to compile my journal into a book called “The Big Earthquake.”

In January, news came from Australia that the Chinese version of “The Big Earthquake” won me an award from the Melbourne-based Qi’s Cultural Foundation. I immediately looked up the organization and realized that the award was set up in memory of a former Chinese political prisoner, Qi Zunzhou. Coincidentally, Mr. Qi was my alumni at the No. 2 Sichuan Provincial Prison, where I spent two years for writing and distributing my poem “Massacre” after the government’s crackdown on the student pro-democracy movement in 1989.

The prize came as a shock. It was a form of encouragement from one political prisoner for another. I was touched and enticed, like a prisoner hearing the sound of keys to his dark cell. I saw a ray of hope. Thus, based on the instructions from the award administrators, I carefully planned my trip.

As I began to marvel at the power of an invisible hand leading me and guiding me in life, my phone rang. It was from the local police who called to set up a meeting. It was a sunny afternoon, right after the Chinese New Year’s. Mr. Zeng, the local police chief showed up, he looked weary and distracted. He officially conveyed to me the government decision to reject my application for passport. When I asked for more explanation, he said: “You know what I mean.”

I nodded in response: “Of course. It’s going to be an eventful year - one year anniversary of the earthquake, the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen student movement, the 10th anniversary of government’s crackdown on Falun Gong and the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Those milestones pose many potential headaches for the government. I know…but what does this have to do with my traveling abroad? ”

Despite Mr. Zeng’s warning, I refused to give up. As public security officials in my hometown were busy handling the aftermath of the earthquake, I quickly changed my residential registration and obtained a new one at a small town nearby. With that new registration card I was able to obtain a passport, which the public security bureau in Chengdu had denied me nine times before.
In the next month, I lived in constant anxiety.

First, I submitted my visa application at the Australian consulate and went there for an interview. Seeing the hesitation on the consul’s face, I declared loudly: “I wouldn’t use this award opportunity to escape to your country and claim what many of my pathetic fellow countrymen have done - political asylum. I’m not a swindler. I’m a writer, who thrives on the tales of people living at the bottom rung of society. I’m rooted here despite the fact I hate here. The air in Australia is fresher but I can’t live on fresh air alone.”

The tone of my voice carried enormous confidence but deep down I experienced gnawing fear. It’s been a hard life as a writer. During the past two decades, I have interviewed more than 300 different people at the bottom of society and chronicled their lives caught in the tumultuous political campaigns and disasters. So far, none of my books was allowed to see the light of the day in China. Thanks to the internet, I was able to find space for my writings.

After much “begging,” I was granted a visa. I then consulted with a group of nerdy intellectual friends, whose detailed evaluations led to one conclusion: Brother, don’t act recklessly. We are living in a big country ruled by a powerful totalitarian government. Don’t even go closer to the immigration checkpoints at major airports. You could get yourself into trouble.

I emphasized the fact that I had legal documents – a passport and visa. My response triggered loud laughter: “Old Liao, you are over 50 years old, yet you still haven’t grown up. Your longing for freedom have blindsided you to the point that you don’t even see the reality.” Even my lawyer reminded me to cling to my passport if the guard stops me: “Don’t let them snatch it away.”

I was determined and came up with an elaborate plan. Together, my companion and I packed up a big package and boarded the train from Chengdu to Nanning, Guangxi province. I rushed over to the China-Vietnam border. I wiped out any traces of my escape by turning off my cell phone and closing my email accounts. The only thing I didn’t do was to have plastic surgery. On my way there, a smirk constantly appeared on my face - I would finally outsmart the Party – there is no way that they would know that I was trying to sneak out to Australia through Vietnam.

Looking back, it shouldn’t surprise me that I got caught at the immigration check points. As my girl friend and I joined the crowd and moved with the line, an officer spotted me and asked me to step out. I put down my travel bag, which stood as tall as me, and handed over my passport. “Is this your first time to travel abroad? Where is your domestic ID card?” he asked sternly.

I pulled it out of my wallet and presented it to him.

The officer took the information and entered it into the computer. He then raised his head and looked at me solemnly: “There is a problem. Could you wait inside this office for a few minutes?”

“Do you want to check my luggage?” I asked with feigned innocence.

“Yes,” he said. Then, four policemen followed me into an office nearby. They didn’t search me at all. They simply detained me for more than two hours while they checked with higher authorities. Finally, they produced a written report for me: Liao Yiwu, based on Article 8 of the Chinese Immigration Regulation, you have been barred from leaving the country.

I didn’t argue with them. Cold sweats streamed down my face.

I still wouldn’t give up so easily. After leaving the immigration office, I walked over to a border village. I scouted the border line – a huge muddy pool with several wooden stakes lined up in the middle. It would be equally challenging to cross over from there.

I returned to the bus station and got on a bus to Yunnan province. About twelve hours later, I arrived at Mengzi. Another five or six hours later, I found myself at Hekou County. I could see Vietnam from across the river. As I passed the immigration office, I encountered the same treatment. The power of the computer networks! Like a Chinese saying goes: The net of heaven stretches far and wide, coarse meshed but letting nothing through.

I spent two weeks traversing back and forth for thousands of miles. My plan failed miserably. I’ve returned to my hometown, exhausted. Yet, it was a beautiful dream of freedom. When I wake up, though, I’m still here.

While writing about the earthquake, my mind had reached a saturation point. For quite some time, I was reluctant to talk about the book and revisit the hellish scenes of death and pain. However, when news of the award came, I thought I could use the opportunity to see the ocean on the other side of the hemisphere and breathe some fresh air. Maybe the temporary freedom would help ease my jangled nerves. Now, I have to stay, the dream is certainly beyond my reach.

Each time I ran into some obstacles in life, I would blame it on fate. Considering the fact that I survived the devastating earthquake while so many people have died, I don’t have a single reason to complain. Therefore, I want to dedicate this award as tribute to the earthquake victims, as a memorial for masses that have been neglected, tortured and slaughtered, as a chronicle that records the battles between the masses and the corrupted officials and between memory and forgetfulness.

Many years from now, this award will help people remember my book, which testifies to a shameful chapter in contemporary Chinese history.

May 12, 2009, Chengdu, Sichuan province

Share/Save]]> http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/05/12/world-books-writing-about-the-chinese-earthquake-a-year-later/feed/ http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/05/08/theater-review-bacchae-to-basics/ http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/05/08/theater-review-bacchae-to-basics/#comments Fri, 08 May 2009 22:38:41 +0000 ArtsFuse http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/05/08/theater-review-bacchae-to-basics/ Sometimes I wonder if Euripides saw the very texture of reality as ironic. Saw the gods in their interactions with human beings as essentially playing. A frightening idea. But at least it entails the assumption that Euripides himself was not playing. Anne Carson, in her introduction to her translation of Euripides’ “Orestes” in “An Oresteia.”

Melissa Barker, Jennifer O’Connor, and Elizabeth Rimar strike Bacchic poses in Whistler in the Dark’s production of The Bacchae.

The Bacchae by Euripides. Translated by Francis Blessington. Directed by Meg Taintor. Presented by Whistler in the Dark Theatre at the Rehearsal Hall at the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, through May 16.

An Oresteia by Aiskhylos, Sophokles and Euripides. Translated by Anne Carson. Faber and Faber, 255 pages.

Reviewed by Bill Marx

Could it be that, as poet-scholar Anne Carson suggests, Euripides takes even the primal ironically? The thought occurred to me during Whistler in the Dark Theatre’s shouty production of “The Bacchae,” which approaches the play’s vision of Dionysian anarchy via athletic undulations and high decibel levels. Director Meg Taintor wants to evoke the tragedy’s terror, pain, and pity and at times she does – when the performers stop trying so damned hard to whoop the valleys elemental.

Most of the productions of “The Bacchae” I’ve seen over the years also strained at the libidinal leash, their campy rather than frightening pictures of the possessed women of Thebes often involving young actresses dancing, hooting, and bopping around with arty abandon.

Carson suggests that Euripides may be putting more spin on the “darkness” than we think. And, as perverse as it sounds, it may be fruitful for stage companies to bring a somewhat lighter touch to the classic’s amoral furies. “The Bacchae” is not just about how a transcendent “life-force” (in Taintor’s words) blows us away, but that Pentheus, too arrogantly rational for his own good, is unable to acknowledge the Dionysian roots of his own nature. Reason, or sanity, must admit the irrational desires and concerns that drive it; that’s the only way it can prevent these yearnings from sliding into an anarchy that endangers reason itself.

“The Bacchae” is not as much about the ambiguous strength of religion, as the “Boston Globe” critic claims (“an exploration of the power and limits of religious ecstasy”), but a warning to a secular mentality gone smug. Moderation survives because of its fragile recognition of the extremes.

The irony of the production is that the small space of the Rehearsal Hall invites a more intimate approach to sound, a softer evocation of brutal energy that would be expressed though pressurized containment, nuanced modulation, rather than full throttle delivery. For today’s audiences, the volume is jacked up everywhere – in the movies, on TV, and in theater presentations mic’ed to the max. Here is an opportunity to make us lean forward, to listen to fury whispered as well as shouted. A tragedy skillfully domesticated would be an interesting experiment.

But the production’s chorus, gung-ho and large-lunged, delivers most of its lines in a see-sawy monotone that runs roughshod over the language’s emotional ups and downs. Given that the Bacchants spend days yelling at each other before and after ripping cattle apart with their bare hands, you would think their voices might become scratchy. Praise to Dionysos, strengthener of vocal cords!

The quieter moments of the production fare better; they are stiff but sturdy. Phil Crumrine could play Pentheus as less of a spoiled repressed brat from the get go – it would be refreshing to see the guy try to think his way through the challenge of the Bacchants rather than, as is oh-so-customary, betray his sexual hang-ups so quickly and transparently. The rest of the cast members – Melissa Barker, Curt Klump, Jennifer O’Connor, and Elizabeth Rimar – are hardy and earnest, but never terrifying or thrilling.

Francis Blessington’s new translation, though clear and substantial, comes off as Masterpiece Theatre-ish, too ornately quaint for my taste, slinging such stuffy phrases as “wrapped in holy fawnskin,” “glib city vagabond,” and “camouflaged in leafy shrubs.” (Blessington is a John Milton specialist and it shows.) Those looking for a more radical (and Modernist) Euripides should pick up the translations of poet-scholar Anne Carson, whose latest volume, “An Oresteia,” collects her versions of three Greek tragedies that tell the story of the doomed house of Atreus: “Agamemnon” by Aiskhylos, “Elektra” by Sophokles, and “Orestes” by Euripides. New York’s Classic Stage Company produced the scripts last month – I wanted to see the productions but I couldn’t get away.

I agree with Helen Shaw of “Time Out” that the Aiskhylos and Sophokles texts call for a more buttoned down approach than Carson gives them, but her translation of “Orestes” is a lyric corker. The poet clearly relishes Euripides’s ambiguity, his irreverence, his ornery unpleasantness (no character in the play is remotely sympathetic), and his robust sense of showmanship. In “Orestes,” Carson applies an exuberant, Bonnie and Clyde approach to the anti-hero’s final violent confrontation with the law. She is willing to take risks, to embrace linguistic registers high and low, including the vulgar, such as in a slave’s reaction to an attempt on Helen of Troy’s life:

Where I come from people say bad shit
happening
when they mean death.

Another quaint barbarian idiom is real bad
shit happening—
that covers blood on the floors
and a houseful of swords.

If the directness of that approach tantalizes, move from “An Oresteia” to “Grief Lessons,” a volume (from New York Review Books) that brings together four other Carson translations of Euripides: nervy versions of “Herakles,” “Hekabe,” “Hippolytos” and “Alkestis.” In the preface to that book, the poet writes that in Euripides “some kind of learning … is always at the boiling point.” Carson has yet to translate The Bacchae” – I assume that its bubbling somewhere in the back of her mind.

Share/Save]]> http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/05/08/theater-review-bacchae-to-basics/feed/ http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/05/07/world-books-pen-world-voices-festival-%e2%80%93-a-critical-thought-or-two/ http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/05/07/world-books-pen-world-voices-festival-%e2%80%93-a-critical-thought-or-two/#comments Thu, 07 May 2009 22:08:24 +0000 ArtsFuse http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/05/07/world-books-pen-world-voices-festival-%e2%80%93-a-critical-thought-or-two/ Widening literary perspectives is admirable, but as the festival matures somebody at PEN has to decide what World Voices is supposed to be.

By Bill Marx

My admittedly small sampling of the 5th Anniversary of the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature in New York last week left me feeling baffled. I attended seven events: the prevalent atmosphere was of a gathering running on fumes, chugging along on earnest autopilot. With fewer big names attending than in the past – can you expect the same superstars to come year after year? – the World Voices Festival appears to be evolving from the heady excitement of its early days into the La Brea tar pits of good intentions, a global literary PSA.

Ironically, the theme of this year’s festival was “Evolution/Revolution,” but only one of the panelists I saw explored the idea – perhaps nobody else knew or cared. Ironically, World Voices needs to consider a revolutionary/evolutionary reconsideration of its purpose: it is exhilarating to bring together writers from around the world, to fight the good fight to widen literary perspectives. But now somebody at PEN has to figure out how to present these international voices in a compelling way, to decide, as the festival matures, what it aims to be. Or is the whole thing just about mastering the logistics of face time?

Is the festival about marketing? Then why were there no books from some of the participating writers for sale at the end of the readings? Is the purpose of the festival to learn about new or neglected authors? Then why, in the panel on the Russian master Andrey Platonov, was there no expert on the author? A woman in the audience who read Russian tried to answer questions on how the writer reinvented his native language. Rooting for his genius is fine – but wasn’t there somebody free in New York that night who could have offered detailed insight into Platonov’s art?

Why at a panel on literature and politics — a venerable but still dicey topic — was there not a single question from the audience? Could the chloroform of platitudes have sedated the crowd? Is the festival about contributing to the serious discussion of the considerable challenges facing international literature, such as the sharp-elbows politics of translation or the considerable virtues and vices of globalization? Then why at the “This Critical Moment!” panel, which featured reviewers from the National Books Critics Circle, was there more articulate cheerleading than nuanced discrimination or evaluation? The criticism never arrived, with or without an exclamation point.

For me, this year’s standout moments came when I learned something. Art historian T. J. Clark, reading a passage from the supposedly gloomy Platonov, dramatized the prose’s vibrant emotional registers, from the grotesque and the sentimental to the humorous. Or when there was a rare moment of feisty disagreement. At the “Where Truth Lies: A Conversation on the Art of Fiction” panel writer Roxana Robinson, in response to a pointed question about the role of humor in the novel, suggested that tragedy was the highest form of art. She used a quotation from Joyce Carol Oates to back her up. (Name a tragic novel by Oates.)

The other writers on the panel, their tragicomic feathers ruffled (aside from a laid back Horacio Moya, who was the standout at last year’s Thomas Bernhard panel), came to passionate life, defending the honor of comedy, suggesting that glum and depressing did not lead to catharsis. A profanity was uttered! The organizers should find ways to encourage civilized friction, lively interaction, rather than contentedly ringmaster round robins of readings.

After five years the massive size of World Voices has become problematic; although this was a reduced version of earlier festivals, perhaps it is time to think even more about quality rather than quantity. It isn’t just about the running around New York to catch the different sessions. A panel of four or five writers talking for around 90 minutes (reserving about 15 minutes or so for questions from the audience) leaves little time for substance. Fewer panels with a reduced number of writers would encourage a sharper focus: the panels would come closer to what they are billed to be – conversations rather than potted Q and A sessions. The relaxed talk between Israeli David Grossman and Leonard Lopate rolled along with ease while, perhaps because scheduled interlocutor Daniel Mendelsohn couldn’t make the session, the “conversation” with Hungarian author Péter Nádas turned into a series of abstract questions and thoughtful answers.

Frankly, the panels that worked best for me this year were the smaller affairs, such as the partyish atmosphere for “Four/Négy” at the Hungarian Cultural Center, which is located in a loft. The event was low key and chatty, with none of the snap-to-attention, get-out-your-your-notebook atmosphere of a cavernous lecture hall. Frankly, some of the events scheduled for the larger venues didn’t draw all that many people – the panels could have been held in a loft, though that would have meant the writers would have had to mingle with the hoi polloi.

Chad Post over at Three Percent has been thinking along these lines and suggests the creation of a salon:

What I envision is a restaurant or hotel lobby that would be accessible basically all day and night, where authors could come and go as they please, and readers would have an opportunity to ask a follow-up question to a particular discussion, or simply get their book signed. And since this would be a central meeting point, a bookstore could have all of the works of all of the authors on display at all times, providing a real opportunity for readers to browse what’s available and actually buy books. (That’s sort of the point, right? Getting readers interested in these authors?)

A meeting place makes sense to me. Online publicity, Facebook, and YouTube are making it easier to hear from and about the world’s literary voices. So PEN should make the most of the fact that the authors are available, in the flesh, to discuss issues and books. The PEN World Voices Festival will have to become leaner and more personable, come up with more provocative discussions and apply savvier marketing smarts if it is going to stop its slide into the staidly superfluous.

Share/Save]]> http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/05/07/world-books-pen-world-voices-festival-%e2%80%93-a-critical-thought-or-two/feed/ http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/04/26/world-books-review-a-sane-sense-of-a-warped-world/ http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/04/26/world-books-review-a-sane-sense-of-a-warped-world/#comments Sun, 26 Apr 2009 17:47:47 +0000 ArtsFuse http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/04/26/world-books-review-a-sane-sense-of-a-warped-world/ An erudite, absorbing, and often very funny account of Russia’s pathological inability to condemn the Communist Party.

Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia
By Jonathan Brent
Atlas & Co. Publishers, 335 pages

Reviewed by Anna Razumnaya

A certain jealous vigilance is to be expected when a Russian reads a book about Russia written by an American. I first opened Jonathan Brent’s “Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia” in a skeptical frame of mind brought on by the book’s bombastic title and the cover photo of a Communist rally: colorless male figures with faces disfigured and emptied of affect by years of hard drinking, holding up blood-red flags and—the focal point of the photograph—a portrait of Stalin. This packaging, presumably adopted by the marketing department of Brent’s publisher, Atlas & Co., is both in agreement and in a peculiar tension with what the author has to say in what proves to be an engaging and serious short book.

“Everything should take place slowly and incorrectly so that man doesn’t get a chance to start feeling proud, so that man is sad and perplexed,” Brent quotes Venedikt Erofeev, a cult writer of the perestroika years in Russia. His own impressions of the Russian society, its bureaucratic underbelly and ideological underpinnings, are filtered through the prism of a Kafkaesque sensibility that complements Erofeev’s ethos.

There is, of course, no such thing as the vaulted-ceiling, Brothers-Grimm-meets-Hollywood “Stalin archives” that the book’s title suggests. Stalin’s personal archives—funds, in archive-speak—exist and are preserved under the auspices of RGASPI (formerly the Central Party Archive) among scores of other documents pertinent to the history of the Communist regime. This is not to diminish the responsible and thoughtful reporting one finds in this book. Most of the action—and there is a lot more of it than one might expect given the subject—takes place not so much inside as at the figurative gates of the various Moscow archival institutions Brent engaged from 1992 onward as the editor of Yale’s Annals of Communism series. His negotiations with the gatekeepers are recounted with a keen eye for detail and frequently with memorable insight and wit.

It is the subtitle that is true to the book’s substance: Brent does “discover the new Russia” in observing the contemporary Russian state’s official position with respect to its communist past. This position reveals the way today’s Russia treats information about the old regime. Archives, as repositories of such information, and their functioning and accessibility are at the heart of this matter of the new Russian ideology.

A sculpture of the Soviet dictator at the Stalin Museum in Gori (Credit: Anna Razumnaya)

In his mission of excavating relevant historical material for the Yale series, Brent is uniquely well-positioned to observe Russia’s festering post-Communist predicament. One of the key encounters in the book is the author’s acquaintance with Aleksandr Yakovlev, a member of the Gorbachev administration and the engineer of the trial of the Communist Party—Russia’s equivalent of the Nuremberg Trial—meant to take place in 1992 but ultimately thwarted by the forces of political stagnation. Concerning this failed trial, Brent remarks:

No other state-sponsored project of national introspection and reconciliation has ever taken place. Unlike Germany, de-Nazified after World War II, Russia has never been completely de-Bolshevized. Instead, a widespread effort is underway to “normalize” the Soviet past.

Brent observes the manner in which this perversion plays out as aggressive nationalism evident as an undercurrent of the Russian day-to-day. The reader is made to share the book’s dismay at the rampant and unselfconscious anti-Semitism of extremist tabloids readily available from any newspaper kiosk. (Having never picked up such a tabloid myself, I can nevertheless recall the rental classifieds of the mainstream papers replete with phrases like “no Caucasians need apply”—the “Caucasians,” of course, understood to be ethnic minorities with origins in the Caucasus— Armenians, Georgians, Osetians, etc.) A bout of toe-curling embarrassment is triggered by the description of a circus act at the famous Circus on Tsvetnoy Boulevard:

“My Old Circus, My Love,” as the colorful brochure calls it, was founded in 1880 and has an honored place in Moscow cultural life. At the performance I attended, probably half the audience consisted of foreign tourists; many if not most were American and of these many were Jews . . . . When the chimpanzees came on stage, their antics immediately produced hilarity. One of them appeared wearing a white yarmulke along with awkwardly improvised payos, and danced the hora around the stage to traditional Jewish music. The foreigners in the crowd fell silent . . . . Was I supposed to find this funny—the little Jewish chimp dancing around the ring? But should I become upset while my Russian friend, with whom I had gone to the performance, found nothing objectionable? When I later pointed out to my friend that no other “religious group” had been mocked, he said, but the Jews aren’t a religious group. In Russia, they are a national group. . . .

During a trip to Georgia that took place days before the brief war between Russia and Georgia in the summer of 2008, my companion and I took a day trip to Gori—the Georgian town that was once a humble village where the boy who later became Stalin was born. Gori’s main attraction is its Stalin Museum—an impressive compound enclosing at its heart a low-slung wooden shack where it all began. The museum’s main building is an imposing space with cool, sweeping marble staircases and rows of rooms filled with photographs, newspaper clippings, maps, paintings of Stalin at various ages—Stalin as a boy surrounded by enraptured friends, Stalin as a young revolutionary shoveling the deep snow of distant exile, mature Stalin with his mother, Stalin at the Party Congress, Stalin with his daughter and with Soviet children—and Stalin’s personal possessions, preserved and displayed with enviable care and attention to detail.

The exhibits in Gori present an apparently unchanged vision of the productive and triumphant life of the beloved native son. (Credit: Anna Razumnaya)

The long portico, where stray puppies napped curled up in the shade on our visit, leads the visitor to Stalin’s personal train car—a tastefully plush car where the Father of Nations thought about the future of the country while traversing its vast spaces. Nowhere in the Gori museum was there a hint of critical reflection upon Stalin’s gory role in Soviet history. The exhibits appeared unchanged for decades in narrating the productive and triumphant life of the beloved native son.

When visiting the Stalin exhibit at the Museum of Revolution in Moscow, Brent encountered the same lack of a “guiding point of view: “nothing in the exhibit—no handout or narrative posted on the wall—indicated how to judge the man or his accomplishments.” Although in the up-to-date Moscow exhibit Stalin the hero was depicted next to Stalin the engineer of artificial famine and the gulag, there was the same curious indecision in framing the exhibit:

The purpose may have been to confront the viewer with the injunction, “Judge for yourself.” But this act of seeming high-minded social responsibility evades responsibility. Was Stalin, in fact, a hero of the revolution? Was he a hero of the Great Patriotic War—or was he responsible for one of the greatest military blunders of all time in allowing Hitler to invade unopposed on June 22, 1941? Can any of Stalin’s accomplishments be justified in the light of the horrors he produced? These are not simple questions to answer, and they are certainly not, as the exhibit suggests, self-evident.

It seems needlessly charitable to take such a soft view of Stalin as to say that these answers are not self-evident. The trouble with the exhibits in Gori and in Moscow alike is that they shy away from confronting the self-evident truth. It is symptomatic of the same public apathy that when the body of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lay in state at the Russian Academy of Sciences the day after my return from Georgia, only a trickle of people walked through the room to bid their farewell to the great writer and outspoken witness of the Communist Party’s crimes against the people. The rainy day could not excuse the fact that the plaza surrounding the building was nearly empty. Conceivably, a similar trickle of people could have been passing at the very same time through Lenin’s Mausoleum in the Red Square. The laxity of civic feeling, the indifference and cynicism with regard to politics, all mask the deep untreated wounds in the Russian national consciousness.

Reflecting on the origins of communism, Brent returns several times to the 1918 diary of the tsarina, which chronicles the surreal monotony of final days of the Romanov family, punctuated by striking shifts in the reality of the country outside the walls of their confinement. “At 10 they told us it was 12,” she wrote when the daylight savings time was decreed by Lenin for the first time in Russian history. “When Kafka’s Gregor Samsa wakes up to discover that he had been turned into a giant beetle, he tries to restore order in his life by vainly attempting to “get up, because my train leaves at five.” But when he glances at his alarm clock he understands for the first time that something is terribly amiss. . . .” Brent remarks on the head-spinning transformation of the country where the royal family was two hours closer to its execution because of daylight savings.

A glass case at the Stalin Museum filled with the tyrant’s personal stuff — cigars, pipes, the pen he used at the Potsdam conference; the photo ID on display is of his wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who committed suicide (unacknowledged by the exhibit). (Credit: Anna Razumnaya)

In the revolutionary moment, Russia was transformed into a country where terror took the place of morality. Inevitably, this radical break with the past produced a fascination, a violent charisma, whose remnants became a highly marketable brand of pastiche after the fall of the Soviet Union. In the eyes of the West, Russia is destined to remain a specter of gory kitsch and vaguely alluring violence embodied in red stars and black leather, until it faces the demons of its history instead of exporting them as the national brand of cool. (American youngsters who favor “CCCP” t-shirts and have no qualms about wearing World War II medals as jewelry should pause to think about what they are wearing and why.)

One of the signals of such a change of consciousness in Russia would be the burial of Lenin, but, for the moment, his enshrined if no longer venerated body continues to testify of the Russians’ pathological inability to condemn communism once and for all. “Inside the Stalin Archives” raises this issue with a remarkable degree of insight, but sadly, it does not presume to get the attention of its American readership without capitalizing on the kitsch appeal of Russia (which is precisely a product of Russia’s national pathology). It is nevertheless an erudite, absorbing, and often very funny account of an adventure in making sane sense of the strange, the foreign, and the bizarre. Lightly, almost as an afterthought, this book points out deep truths about Russia’s ongoing ideological crisis.

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The Twin By Gerbrand Bakker
Translated from the Dutch by David Colmer. Archipelago Books, 343 pages.

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

It isn’t easy to write a compelling novel about loneliness, for the simple reason that loneliness is boring. It makes for something of a paradox: the feeling of aloneness, both literal and figurative, counts among love, loss, and taxes as one of those ineluctable human experiences. We need to read about loneliness in order to understand our own; we connect to the disconnected, which hopefully keeps us from jumping off a building when we get dumped, or when a loved one dies. Yet both love and loss involve dramatic action of some sort; aloneness, on the other hand, is generally characterized by stasis.

In “The Twin”, Dutch author Gerbrand Bakker has accomplished the difficult task of rendering the static solitude of his protagonist into something dynamic and readable. In a prose style unhurried but visceral (translated without a false note by David Colmer), he creates and explores a loneliness that any reader would recognize as his own.

The loner in question, Helmer works on his family farm somewhere in the Dutch countryside. Though he lives with his sickly father, whom he loves and hates in equally depthless measure, Helmer suffers from a terrible sense of loneliness, which springs from a wound decades old: the death of his twin brother, Henk, killed in a car accident when the boys were still teenagers. Henk was their father’s favorite, and after he died, Helmer was compelled by guilt into leaving university and returning home to work on the farm.

The novel begins more than thirty years later. Helmer has moved his father into an upstairs bedroom so that they don’t ever have to speak, and a hooded crow has taken up residence in a tree, a sure sign of the infusion of loneliness into every aspect of Helmer’s existence. Here’s Helmer hanging out with his one friend, Ada, who lives next door. As she talks, his gaze wanders towards the window and he ponders his sense of alienation:

It’s a Saturday, the sun is shining and there’s no wind. A clear December morning with everything very bare and sharp. A day to feel homesick. Not for home, because that’s where I am, but for days that were just like this, only long ago. Homesick isn’t the right word, perhaps I should say wistful. Ada wouldn’t understand. Not coming from here, she doesn’t remember days long ago that were just like this, here.

The main action of the novel begins when Riet, the woman responsible for the car crash in which Henk was killed, sends a letter to Helmer. Riet, who was Henk’s girlfriend at the time of his death, initially seems to be seeking out a romantic connection, but eventually reveals that she’s hoping that her son, a teenager with—who would have guessed?—emotional problems, can work on Helmer’s farm for a few months.

Author Gerbrand Bakker holds up his healthy literary bloom.

Over the course of this boy’s stay at the farm, Helmer finally reengages with the world around him. It is the pacing of this reawakening that is the real wonder of Bakker’s book, accomplished through an insight into his protagonist that renders even the hoariest concept fresh, and the most banal event revelatory. For example, it eventually becomes clear that Helmer is gay, yet no line is drawn between his sexuality and his loneliness. Instead, Bakker subtly links Helmer’s orientation to his relationship with his twin, whose sexual awakening with Riet eventually alienated the two brothers.

Particularly poignant is a flashback from Helmer’s youth that he is constantly reliving, the day his twin told him they could no longer share a bed. It is the figurative death that prefigured the literal one, a trauma experienced backwards and so healed when Riet’s son (who is also named Henk) slips into bed with Helmer one night.

Everywhere are these thematic ripples, quiet but resonant. Helmer keeps two donkeys, whose surface similarity provides a self-indulgent recreation of his childhood relationship with his brother. Midway through the novel, he almost drowns beneath a pig, and is saved by Riet’s son. The hooded crow eventually disappears, but not before claiming its victim.

When a man from Helmer’s past finally convinces him to leave the farm behind, spiriting him off so suddenly that it practically feels like a deus ex machina, the reader doesn’t feel dissatisfied. Again, Bakker eschews the cliché; instead of ending the story when Helmer finds love, he goes a step further. Like everyone, Helmer still feels his loneliness acutely at times, even when he isn’t actually alone. In the final scene, Helmer leaves his lover in a hotel room and goes out to wander the empty streets and watch the sun set:

I know I have to get up. I know that the maze of paths and unpaved roads in the shade of the pines, birches and maples will already be dark. But I stay sitting calmly. I am alone.

I am alone, he tells us. Yet we feel the less so for that.

Share/Save]]> http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/04/26/world-books-review-the-twin-isolation-made-compelling/feed/ http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/04/23/world-books-review-wetlands-ick-just-ick/ http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/04/23/world-books-review-wetlands-ick-just-ick/#comments Thu, 23 Apr 2009 23:47:40 +0000 ArtsFuse http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/04/23/world-books-review-wetlands-ick-just-ick/ Charlotte Roche is one of the most famous authors in Germany. Thomas Mann must be spinning in his grave.

Wetlands By Charlotte Roche. Translated from the German by Tim Mohr. Grove Press, 240 pages.

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

On the subject of literary criticism, Martin Amis has written that “quotation is the reviewer’s only hard evidence.” But I’m going to quote “Wetlands” sparingly in this review. And that’s for your sake. I could explain why myself, but it’s probably more efficient for me to give you a sample: “I also love it when someone goes down on me while I’m bleeding. It’s kind of a test of mettle for the guy. When he’s finished licking and looks up with his blood-smeared mouth, I kiss him so we both look like wolves who’ve just ripped open a deer.”

Yep. I know. Yuck. (Just be glad you’re not Tim Mohr, the translator, who probably had to read that 15 times in the German, then try it out five or six different ways in English. Kudos, Mr. Mohr).

But let’s not be premature. After all, were not James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov both decried as pornographers in their time? Is not a single photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe likely to prove more viscerally disgusting than even the naughtiest bunch of words? Do not the films of Catherine Breillat receive critical plaudits, even though they invariably feature graphic sex and violence? As a fan of all the artists mentioned above, I would never knock something just for grossing me out. Important work is important work, whether it turns the stomach or not.

Yet my response remains: yuck.

“Wetlands” is the story of 18 year-old Helen, an unapologetic sex-maniac who is laid out in the proctology unit of a hospital for the entirety of the novel. Her injury relates to a shaving accident about which the less said the better. Over the course of a couple hundred pages, we are granted a close-up look at every part of Helen’s anatomy, but very little in the way of her character. Her parents are split up, and though she says time and again that she wants to get them back together, the reasons for this are never fully explained. Why did they divorce? Are they still in love? Do they love their new partners (alluded to but never described)? Helen doesn’t care. She doesn’t even know what her parents do for a living. Fine for her, but this reader would have preferred a little context.

The emotional hinge of the book is meant to be the revelation that Helen once came home to find her mother and brother passed out on sleeping pills in front of an open gas oven. But any pathos that Roche might have rung from this memory is ruined by her bathetic writing. When Helen tells her brother about the incident (he was too young to remember it), he gives a two-sentence response and leaves. Now, I’m not sure what I would say if I found out my mom had tried to kill both herself and me at the same time, but I’m willing to guess it would be a bit more dramatic than, “That’s why I always have those fucked-up dreams. She’s going to get hers.”

“Wetlands” is being touted as a novel of feminist liberation, but it ends up saying a lot less about gender than it does about mental illness (one reviewer compared it to Plath’s “The Bell Jar”, which is apt). Unfortunately, I don’t think Roche planned this. In interviews, the 30 year old ex-TV personality has said that her book was inspired by the wall of feminine hygiene products on offer at her local pharmacy. This isn’t surprising, as “Wetlands” reads far more like a polemic than like a novel. In a pinch, it might do for the syllabus of a Gender Studies or Psych class, but it hardly qualifies as literature.

Share/Save]]> http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/04/23/world-books-review-wetlands-ick-just-ick/feed/ http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/04/23/world-books-review-an-adventure-through-literary-time/ http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/04/23/world-books-review-an-adventure-through-literary-time/#comments Thu, 23 Apr 2009 23:34:29 +0000 ArtsFuse http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/04/23/world-books-review-an-adventure-through-literary-time/ An assured novel that celebrates, with considerable stylistic facility, an extraordinary engagement with the history of literature.

Rex by Jose Manuel Prieto
Translated from Spanish by Esther Allen. Grove Press, 288 pages

Reviewed by Alexander Nemser

Jose Manuel Prieto’s “Rex” is an adventure through time: not historical time, or physical time, so much as literary time, the dreamy, static continuum of impressions and formulations recorded across centuries and civilizations. As the novel points out repeatedly, and even suspiciously, this is, at the same time, an adventure through timelessness, through the alluring eternal present of Literature as it exists alongside our time-bound passage through life.

Literature’s living presence is felt from the start to completely color, even to derange, the perceptions of the novel’s narrator, J., a defiantly bookish young man hired as a tutor for the son of a Russian family living in southern Spain. The family is apparently in possession of otherworldly wealth, and J. arrives with his imagination raised to a frantic height of daydreaming by his obsessive reading of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.”

The protagonist is almost immediately disappointed by the lack of taste, with the “whisper of surf barraging the coast” emerging from silver column-shaped speakers, and everything shining with a “doubloon glint.” J.’s ward, Petya, the addressee of the narrative, turns out to be a child with a mind distorted to idiocy by television like “a vinyl disc scratched by an oversize needle”; his every movements are followed by Batyk, the family’s mysterious “Filipino butler” who in fact displays all the qualities of a native of the Russian province of Buryatia; and he is completely unable to identify how Vasily Guennadovich, the father of the house, acquired his money, as much as he makes inquiries of Nelly, his dazzling wife who appears wearing necklaces surreally tinted diamonds, but never leaves the house.

As J. begins his lessons with Petya, based exclusively around commentaries on Proust’s novel, referred to by the Borgesian phrase “the Book” (”Everything is there in the Book, everything!”), the tutor finds himself embroiled in an elaborate conspiracy of sordid motives and ambiguous threats.

What follows is a fantastic plot involving a scheme to sell synthetic diamonds to a pair of cold-blooded Russian gangsters, the development of an anti-gravity machine, a platinum blonde who glows “like a creature from another world, from Epsilon Indi of the constellation of Tucana,” and another, even wilder scheme to orchestrate the resurrection and imposture of the Imperial House of Russia, with Vasily masquerading as the lost king, one of the multiple implications of the book’s title. But as the story develops, “Rex” is hijacked, for the better, by the Prieto’s considerable stylistic facility, and, further, by his ambitious and generous project of engagement with the history of literature.

Like Vladimir Nabokov, whose presence is never far from the author’s work (one of Prieto’s earlier novels, “Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire,” is a kind of book-length tribute to the Russian novelist), Prieto possesses a talent for description through surprising and extended flights of imagery, as when J. relates how he watched the beguiling Nelly go swimming wearing a necklace of incredible red and blue jewels: “I would follow her progress with the attention of a sentry watching a submarine’s red and blue navigation lights in the dark waters of an estuary.”

And when the two go on a romantic walk along the coast, he imagines the two of them like “a pair of assistant directors scouting along the edge of a steep cliff for the right location to film a scene of love and complicity against the wide-open sky.” Prieto’s images give the novel an alternately lyrical, hallucinatory, and ironic quality, both enriching and deflating J.’s account of the outrageous, at times to the point of being pulp, sequence of events.

But Prieto’s main accomplishment is to have created a structure which so subtly and humorously enters into dialog with ideas of literary history: the way a new work is inextricably molded by its predecessors; the relentless drive of a work to outlast time and fortune; the fraudulence of commentary when faced with artistic greatness. The book constantly questions its own structure, doubts itself, and curls back around on its own premises: reviewing his own subject matter, J. asks, “Isn’t that enough for an original book, a straightforward book, written out point by point, without flashbacks or commentaries, should anyone, a primary writer, be disposed to do so?”

The text is punctuated throughout with fragments from Literature’s endless present, which appear in boldface, frequently without gloss, held up by J. as concentrations of wisdom, indictments of banality, even exact formulations of the phenomena he is recounting. In one funny moment, J., to prove the all-encompassing nature of Proust’s novel, demonstrates that even “The Matrix” was predicted by “the Book”: a description of “Saint-Loup’s two fists” wheeling in an “unstable constellation” of fists is shown to anticipate the scene in which a robotic agent catches up with Neo in a metro station and “launches a series of quick blows, a wheel of fists…like the blades of a windmill.”

Later in the novel, however, J. begins making much wider references to “the Book,” which turns out to contain not just Proust, but all of literature. And J.’s quotations from dozens of writers, from Herodotus to Shakespeare to Isaac Asimov, ultimately compose the very fabric of the novel. In this way, “Rex” ends up reading like a fanciful projection of what is to be found in between the lines of Literature itself, a reflection on the way in which literature and reality ceaselessly comment on each other, and an expression of mortal gratitude for the alternative Literature offers in the face of what is still unrealized.

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Brazilian writer Nelson Rodrigues — a master at evoking the humor and pathos of out-of-control libidos.

Life As It Is: Selected Stories
By Nelson Rodrigues. Translated from the Portuguese by Alex Ladd. Host Publications, 314 pages

Reviewed by Bill Marx

No nonsense British philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously described man’s life as it is as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” In this hypnotic collection of brusque short stories –- originally written for a weekly newspaper column during the 1950s — Brazilian writer Nelson Rodrigues poignantly and sometimes hilariously illustrates this glum vision through the fated lives of Rio de Janeiro’s middle class, hapless bourgeois puppets whose strings are pulled by a Freudian laundry list of outré sexual hang-ups, psychological insecurities, and self-destructive obsessions.

“Life As It Is” is a tragicomic Gatling gun, its stories perfectly aimed gunshots at the hypocrisies of a Catholic culture.

Usually only about four to five pages long, with minimal characterization and little physical description, Rodrigues’s tales shape tawdry subject matter — incest, infanticide, homicide, fetishes, death wishes –- with mathematical precision, economically serving up memorably corrosive images, from crushed parrots to dead babies in shoeboxes. The contradiction between the clinical and the seamy accounts for the stories’s snub-nosed power, which is limited by their mechanical, almost monomaniacal, focus on perversity.

But once you start reading the collection it is difficult to stop – curiosity grows about how Rodrigues will adroitly package yet another crippling case of infidelity, another death-dealing fetish, another sadistically displaced mania.

In “The Shoebox,” two days before her wedding to her attentive fiancé a young woman, Olivinha, unaccountably feels goose bumps. Her mother dismisses them as pre-marriage nerves, but the chills prove prophetic when an old woman “tiny, scrawny, overly polite” with “the face of a possum” delivers a shoebox to Olivinha. To her horror it contains “a little baby only days old, naked and dead.” After repeated questioning, Gilberto breaks down and confesses that it is his child. The story ends on a typical note of sustained satiric hysteria:

The wedding never took place. Gilberto, who was madly in love, tried to win her back. But every time she saw him, Olivinha doubled over. The mere sight of her ex-groom was enough to summon up the image of the dead angel in the shoebox. First it was only Gilberto. Later all men became loathsome to her and induced nausea. Finally she saw in every woman a possible killer of angels.

The sudden descent into madness – triggered by sexual energies gratified or denied – is the linchpin for many of the stories. Rodrigues’s characters are afflicted, to the point of terminal bedevilment, with desire.

My favorite melodramatic tales include “White Power,” which features a loving mother who, desperate to stop her baby daughter from crying for hours on end, mixes cocaine into the kid’s milk. That solves the problem until mom becomes an addict herself. “The Divine Comedy” opens with these deliciously gauche sentences detailing the anatomy of a marriage: “After seven years of marriage the only thing keeping the couple together were her husband’s blackheads. Marlene loved to squeeze them. Except for this profound and all-important task, they had nothing in common.” “

The Mystery Woman” features a playboy who falls in love with an envious friend’s alluring description of an astonishing beauty. But the buddy, Peixoto, dies without revealing the name of the fantasy female:

When he saw Peixoto there, on the table, silent forever, he knew he was doomed to love a woman he had never even met. He snapped. He threw himself at the body, he shook it, and screamed, “Tell me her name! I want the name! Tell me!”

This note of doom resounds in story after story, a whiff of gothic dankness that, at its best, infuses the soap opera doings with a tincture of expansive fear.

In his helpful translator’s note, Alex Ladd comments that Rodrigues’s stories have been compared to those of Damon Runyon and Ben Hecht. For me, the Brazilian’s emphasis on the connections between sex and death, his sympathy for the marginalized and hatred of brute authority, suggests Tennessee Williams. But Rodrigues lacks Williams’s lyricism and gift for delicate characterization – his bluntness is in the tradition of de Maupassant.

Also, Rodrigues learned his craft in the newsroom, so he generally focuses on exterior cause and effect (the world as screaming headlines), rather than on interiority. His victims and victimizers are types rather than nuanced individuals that demand your empathy. Thus “Life As It Is” reflects the strengths and weaknesses of an aesthetic of hard-boiled diagnosis, an expose of a society incapable of sustaining sane sexual and/or loving relationships.

Author Nelson Rodrigues at work.

Perhaps the sensationalized seediness of the stories explains why, at least so far, there has been so little critical attention paid to this entertaining volume. In Brazil, Rodrigues is a giant, best known for his ground breaking plays, such as “The Wedding Dress” (anybody in America willing to stage a translation of this or any other Rodrigues play?), though he also cranked out an enormous amount of prose, including writing pulp fiction under the pseudonym of Suzana Flag on his way to becoming an acclaimed sportswriter (!). The stories in the volume have provided the basis for a number of movies and TV programs in Brazil.

Given how much raunchy pleasure these stories contain, why has Rodrigues remained a regional enthusiasm? Ladd argues that the author’s language, which draws heavily on slang, has curtailed his appeal elsewhere. Perhaps the racy richness of the author’s Portuguese is missing, but Ladd’s sensible compromise – a moderately juicy English — catches the undeniable merits of “Life As It Is,” its lively vision of the louche sex lives of the middle class.

Share/Save]]> http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/04/20/world-books-review-%e2%80%9clife-as-it-is%e2%80%9d-%e2%80%93-a-wealth-of-fetishes/feed/ http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/04/12/world-books-review-come-see-conquer-rinse-repeat/ http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/04/12/world-books-review-come-see-conquer-rinse-repeat/#comments Sun, 12 Apr 2009 18:00:16 +0000 ArtsFuse http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/04/12/world-books-review-come-see-conquer-rinse-repeat/ This ambitious Norwegian novel works overtime to turn conventional notions of cause and effect topsy-turvy.

The Conqueror
By Jan Kjærstad
Translated from the Norwegian by Barbara Haveland. Open Letter, 481 pages, $17.95

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

Riddle me this: if a man finds out his wife has been cheating on him for years, then kills her, did the first thing necessarily cause the second thing? Occam’s Razor would tell us yes. Jan Kjærstad, on the other hand, would tell us no. But it’s not a simple, straightforward no. The author of the The Conqueror suggests that his protagonist, a famous Norwegian television producer named Jonas Wergeland, killed his wife because a stray hockey puck once shattered his ice sculpture, and because he wasn’t a very good musician, and because he once made love to a woman who ordered him out of the room afterwards.

Kjærstad believes that no event can be traced back to any one single event, that the causes behind our effects are nebulous and multiple, nefariously multifarious. To which the reader may respond: Duh.

The Conqueror is the second in a trilogy of novels about Jonas. The first was called The Seducer, and the third, The Discoverer (though, by the rules of rising action, that last one should have been called something like The Penetrator or The Beastmaster). In the first novel, a biographer tracked Jonas life up until the point where he found out his wife had been murdered. Now, it seems that the old biographer was gilding the lily, or else this one is doing the opposite.

Before he was convicted of murder, Jonas had all of Norway eating out of his hand, thanks to his “brilliant” television series, Big Ideas. Big Ideas was a collection of artsy documentaries in which Jonas recreated the lives of famous Norwegians. A handful of these shows are described to us in great detail in the novel. Here’s an example: “The program closed with a blatant sex scene, lingering kisses and ecstatic embraces in the grass, on the bounds of the permissible, and yet with a touch of the religious about it, as if there were a connection between physical love and religion.”

Only the best critics are capable of describing a work of art (in a non-written medium) and bringing it to life in prose. Novelists seldom possess the gift. In this passage, the translator misuses the word “blatant” (the sex itself can be blatant, but the scene that contains it cannot), but it is Kjærstad who inserts the vapid, colorless phrase about the “bounds of the permissible”, and who concludes by “blatantly” pointing out the connection between love and religion that any reader would have already inferred.

Kjærstad has a fetish for attempting to describe the indescribable. He takes on sex with a hyperrealist aplomb: the penis is compared to a bridge and a lever; the vagina becomes a “clearing in a forest”; the copulatory act itself is expressed in metaphors as visceral as “the slapping of a wet floor mop” and as wacky as “rummaging frantically in a drawer.” Jonas is such an unbelievably good lay, we are told, that his lovers never cry out anything as base as “Fuck me harder,” never cry out anything obscene, but instead sing out lofty demands such as “Love me lighter” and “Lift me higher.” Kjærstad wants to convince us that Jonas is a true sensualist, but one wonders why his lovemaking inspires women to recite Josh Groban lyrics.

But plenty of authors have gotten away with interspersing their literary fiction with awkward erotica (Roth springs to mind); Kjærstad’s writerly sins are at least as black as they are blue.

The plot of The Conqueror is a modified Arabian Nights. An unnamed professor writing a biography of Jonas Wergeland receives a visit from a mysterious woman: the ghost of Magrete, Jonas’ murdered wife. Apparently, she’s being granted day trips from Hell in order to tell the life story of her husband, thereby justifying his murder (as Betty Friedan spins in her grave like a kebab) and restoring his position as conqueror of the Norwegian people’s hearts and minds.

The bulk of the novel consists of fragments of Jonas’ life, recited by Magrete in a haphazard order that she insists is the only way they will make up a coherent, convincing story. Each fragment is about eight to ten pages long, and could stand alone as a piece of short fiction. They reminded me a bit of the George Willard stories in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesberg, Ohio—a Bildungsroman in bursts. Only where Anderson was using his stories to depict a milieu (hence the book’s title), Kjærstad has no such clarity of purpose. Though there’s beauty in the writing, it’s quickly revealed as gloss—light glinting off a newly shined butter knife. Without the glitter, there’s nothing interesting or even sharp there.

Though the tales span Jonas’ entire life, they are connected by various recurring characters and a smorgasbord of symbols and themes. There’s the dragon/snake figure. Demons and the idea of possession. The mutability of carbon and, by extension, people. The notion of great beauty and power secreted away. The bovine passivity of the Norwegian people: “Television was, quite simply, an invention eminently suited to a country which lay thus on the periphery, which was used to witnessing from a safe distance.”

Jan Kjærstad is so impressed with his own metaphorical muscle that he constantly has to flex it.

I’ve never so deftly tracked so many strands of symbolism through so long a novel. Alas, the credit can’t go entirely to me. Kjærstad is so impressed with his own metaphorical muscle that he constantly has to flex it. There is a scene from Jonas’ childhood wherein he builds a delicate castle out of snow and ice, which is then toppled by a hockey puck. The sensitive reader might see this as a first example of Jonas trying to become a conqueror and failing. But in case we miss it, Kjærstad references the ice castle every time Jonas suffers a comparable disappointment.

“How does one become a conqueror?” the book asks again and again and again. Kjærstad wants us to believe that the answer is complicated—481-pages-complicated—and can only be understood through the lens of Jonas’ upbringing, his parents professions, his lovers’ amatory peccadilloes, his childhood friends’ thoughts on Niels Bohr, his school papers, and his musical compositions (described about as successfully as are the episodes of his show). The goal is to do away with the notion of simple cause and effect. Instead, Kjærstad winds up utterly dependent on causality to bestow epiphanic power on his fragments:

“…this was the day on which Jonas learned that creativity can lie in the unexpected, in things one hadn’t thought of, and above all else: in simplicity.”

“It would not be going too far to say that Jonas Wegeland was granted his vision of life while standing before that glass case…that the seeds of his career, his creativity, were sown here.”

“Here, in Tokyo, he finally found his other possible, maybe even optimum, form…”

“The only thing he sensed, very faintly, was that his discus training was a preparation for something else. That there would come a time when he would need to use this pivotal action. That one day—possibly when confronted with something inconceivable—he would have to make the discus throw of his life.”

Kjærstad seems to be aware that “The Conqueror” is a haphazard collection of scenes, the notes for a novel, and so he appends significance to the end of each chapter in the manner of an artist who believes that plunking down a cruciform tree in the background of a painting will grant the work a religious profundity.

As the ghost of Magrete trundles towards anticlimax—Jonas cannot be saved by mere words—the professor rhapsodizes over his Scheherazade:

“She showed me that it was also possible to arrive at insight into a life through something seemingly fragmentary, strings of stories which at first sight are totally unconnected but which, when you get right down to it, constitute a new form of coherence and unity.”

How does one become a conqueror? Certainly not by tucking you into bed, shaking the mattress for an hour, and then insisting you’ve seen God. My guess is that Kjærstad sees himself as a writer in the same way that Jonas sees himself as a lover. He hopes the reader will beg to be loved more lightly, lifted a bit higher. But if he’s looking for a conquest, he might want to fuck a little harder.

Share/Save]]> http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/04/12/world-books-review-come-see-conquer-rinse-repeat/feed/ http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/04/12/world-books-review-%e2%80%9cthe-loving-specter-of-yiddish%e2%80%9d/ http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/04/12/world-books-review-%e2%80%9cthe-loving-specter-of-yiddish%e2%80%9d/#comments Sun, 12 Apr 2009 17:07:35 +0000 ArtsFuse http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/04/12/world-books-review-%e2%80%9cthe-loving-specter-of-yiddish%e2%80%9d/ The handsomely produced bilingual volume reflects a committed and passionate marriage of an exacting poet-translator and Yiddish poetry.

With Everything We’ve Got: A Personal Anthology of Yiddish Poetry
Edited and translated by Richard J. Fein. Host Publications, 218 pages.

Reviewed by Anna Razumnaya

Fortuitously, just before the publication of Richard Fein’s new anthology With Everything We’ve Got, I heard him read his poems and translations before an audience at Boston University. His manner of reading, which seemed unusually emphatic chiefly because it was unhurried and deliberate (“rapture fixes on one part, and turns to another, like a stream swirling, then sliding along,” as Fein writes in one poem), conveyed to me something that stayed with me for weeks afterward: the intensely personal nature of his engagement with Yiddish—“an intimate alienation,” in Fein’s own words.

This handsomely produced bilingual volume is the fruit of three decades of Fein’s sustained engrossment in Yiddish: the title of the book is borrowed from a poem by H. Leivick that calls Yiddish poets to write an elegy to their language. The book’s peacock-feather cover design brings to mind the peacock’s symbolism of immortality, and with the Yiddish poems set in a Hebrew typeface on the right-hand side in order to converge with the lines of translation on facing pages.

The collection does not pretend to displace Irving Howe’s authoritative Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, but the disclaimer of “a personal anthology” frees Fein to do something that the editor of a comprehensive anthology could not. First of all, it is the freedom to include only the poems that Fein felt compelled to attend to as a translator.

Having spent his boyhood avoiding Yiddish and the strange, Old World claims it exerted on his soul, Fein found himself lured back into Yiddish decades later, as if the language were a woman whose charms he had failed to appreciate as a younger man, but whom he now found irresistible. This reunion, however, only took place after the World War II, in the world where Jewish life had been disfigured by the Holocaust. Yiddish, a thriving language in a phase of literary experimentation and rapid enrichment in the pre-war years, emerged after the war as a dying language.

In The Dance of Leah, a book of essays exploring his preoccupation with Yiddish and the fate of its literature, Fein writes:

When I am involved in Yiddish I sense I am in touch with a world and a language vanishing bit by bit at the same time that I gather my energies and abilities to apprehend them. My contact with Yiddish yields new intensities to my life in the face of our shared mortality. I play out a personal fear in terms of my relationship to Yiddish language and culture. I touch the dying and return to my thoughts, to English. This is the origin of my impetus to Yiddish.

In the preface, Fein disavows the grim view of his anthology as a memorial to Yiddish: “This book is not a homage to Yiddish poetry. Translation is lust—a way of possessing the Yiddish poem—of being more intimate with its letters and words. . . .” Far from an unbiased “areal view” of a literature, the book is a fruit of the thirty-year committed and passionate marriage of the poet-translator and Yiddish poetry.

This is another departure from the existing collections of Yiddish verse, whose editors, for shortage of talent, have often relied on the translating efforts of students learning Yiddish in the classroom—often eager, but not always suited for the vocation of a poet-translator. Because of this limited talent pool, any anthology of Yiddish verse in translation striving to be comprehensive is bound to be uneven in quality.

Fein admits that his collected translations are not representative of either Yiddish poetry at large or the individual poets he has selected. But his treatment of the poets included in the volume—Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, Perets Markish, Jacob Glatstein, Abraham Sutzkever, to name several—rewards the reader by the richness of the translator’s response to the original. The volume is as much a collection of translated verse as a chronicle of the poet-translator’s engagement with his material: Fein adds his own poetic commentary as a counterpoint of “responsa” that he sometimes inserts between poems, sometimes places as an afterthought at the close of a section of a particular poet’s poems. In “The Return of the Repressed”—a reply to Abo Stolzenberg’s “Dream Canaan”, he muses:

It excites me to think of Ruvn Ayzland
tutoring the young Abo Stolzenberg
at a table at Schreiber’s Cafe: “You’ll find
your rhythms. You’ll become subject to them.”
“Watch how the wrong word turns into the right word”—
the two of them hunched over a table, just as
George and I work over our poems at Au Bon Pain,
where the converging of Mt. Auburn and Mass. Ave.
divides the traffic like a prow.

The scene between Ayzland and Stolzenberg is reenacted by Richard Fein and George Kalogeris, probably in the same manner that Richard tutored me one evening, at the same Au Bon Pain, helping me with my own translations of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. Hunched over a table, with my drafts spread out between us, it was mostly Richard talking, picking up a word that didn’t seem right, either in meaning or in diction, trying out alternatives, testing them for fitness by sound and mouth-feel until the solution came.

A poem written in tetrameter turned out to be unexpectedly difficult, because the changes Richard suggested violated the meter. He did not seem bothered by that at all. Only later I saw that this unconcern was a deliberate decision about what is essential to poetry. In his poem “Yankev Glatshteyn Visits Me in the Coffee Shop,” one of the “responsa” among the translations, Fein writes:

It’s all good and well that you translate me.
You need it more than I do.
I’m in Yiddish for all time.
Not that I mind, mind you.
Be my guest. But you,
you have to translate yourself
into English. Stop fretting
about starting late. Be like Yiddish
literature—grow into your gift.
Don’t brood over your unmetrical ear.
Listen to the truth-rattles in you,
your ear will catch on. . . .

For someone like myself who does not read Yiddish, the book is a revelation and a puzzle. The variant spellings of the names of poets like Yankev Glatshteyn, who was also known by his New World name, Jacob Glatstein, are not discussed in the otherwise helpful biographical notes at the end of the book. The mention of the “Great Stalinist Purges” in the biographical note on Izi Kharik should itself be purged of the word “Great.” The vastness of Russia’s national calamity can be described by other words—words that do not suggest “greatness,” however remotely.

The novelist and poet Perets Markish, a leading figure in Yiddish literature and during the war a prominent member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.

More importantly, such disparities of register as can be seen between the translations of Perets Markish in this edition, in Irving Howe’s Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, and in the Russian edition of Markish, perplex a reader like me and challenge one’s ideas about what Markish, or other poets in the volume, must sound like. At the same time, the shock of recognition and the profound emotional resonance Fein achieves with his translations and responses suggests that in translation, as in marriage, love is the best guarantee of fidelity.

Share/Save]]> http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/04/12/world-books-review-%e2%80%9cthe-loving-specter-of-yiddish%e2%80%9d/feed/ http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/04/07/book-review-allons%e2%80%99y-alonzo/ http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/04/07/book-review-allons%e2%80%99y-alonzo/#comments Tue, 07 Apr 2009 22:55:57 +0000 ArtsFuse http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/04/07/book-review-allons%e2%80%99y-alonzo/ Two French writers take on the notion of would-be writers on the run. Only one gets away with it.

Julien Parme By Florian Zeller Translated from the French by Christopher Moncrieff. Pushkin Press, 246 pages.

Tokyo Fiancee by Amélie Northomb Translated from the French by Alison Anderson. Europa Editions, 152 pages.

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

French author Florian Zeller — his novel deals with a would-be writer on the run.

I wasn’t planning to review these two books together, as I happened to read them one after the other only by coincidence. However, they have so much in common—and their differences perfectly point out why one is successful and the other is not—that I felt reviewing them at the same time would only help to clarify my opinions about them.

First, the similarities. Both authors are French. Both arrived on the literary scene at the age of 25. Northombe’s first novel was “Hygiène de l’assassin”; in Zeller’s case, it was actually his third novel, “La Fascination Du Pire”, that earned him the attention of the literati. Both novels are about would-be writers (in Northombe’s case, herself). Both novels are about the notion of escape, of what it means when we choose to run. Both novels are sparing in their use of description, and eschew a serious plot in order to develop a character.

The characters thus developed are where these two novels begin to distinguish themselves. The protagonist of Zeller’s book is Julien Parme, a 14 year-old boy with a criminal streak and ludicrous literary aspirations. His narration evokes a Holden Caulfield raised on a strict diet of Hemingway: “I was afraid I’d get his voicemail, but luckily it rang. But it just kept on ringing. And in the end I got his voicemail. Shit. I hung up. He couldn’t have heard his phone because of the music. I tried a second time. He still didn’t answer.” Parme fascinates mostly due to his acrobatic evasion of self-awareness; he is the kind of kid who rails against bullies even while stealing cash from a half-blind old woman.

The story takes place over a little less than two days. Julien steals his stepfather’s cash card and embarks on a brief adventure. In spite of the boisterous tone with which the book opens (First line—notice the missing comma: “At the risk of surprising you I’d like to tell you about the incredible thing that happened to me last year.”), very little happens on Julien’s odyssey. He goes to a party. He runs into a teacher outside of the classroom. He feels up a girl. He almost runs away to Rome. His decision not to flee comes on the second to last page; the book ends with the end of the rebellion.

“Tokyo Fiancee” finishes on a similar but entirely opposite note. The protagonist, twenty-three year old Amélie Nothomb (Nothomb calls the book fiction, but that seems more like a legal precaution than anything else), has spent the novel being romanced by a Japanese man while living in Tokyo. Though she agrees to marry him, she eventually decides her freedom is more important, so jumps on a plane back to her homeland of Belgium, never telling him she’s not planning on coming back.

Does that make Nothomb sound a bit unlikeable? You don’t know the half of it. Though we’re never made aware just how much of the story is fictionalized, “Tokyo Fiancee” references its author’s novels, her heritage (Belgian writer who writes in French and was born in Japan), and numerous details of her biography. So when Nothomb’s “character” waxes poetic about her beauty, brilliance, and athletic ability, it’s difficult to hold back the incredulity. The cover of the book doesn’t help: Nothomb framed by the rising sun of a Japanese flag, gazing at us with the gamine semi-seriousness of a deservedly more famous French Amélie.

All this would be forgivable if the book were a pleasure to read, but this is not the case. In fact, the first two-thirds of “Tokyo Fiancee” might just be among the worst published writing I’ve encountered. Here are two short bits that follow one after another on the same page:

#1: “The next morning, the punctuality of the Mercedes was equaled only by its white sheen.”

#2: “Rinri had changed. His profile as a driver was no longer as immobile and impassive. His silence deepened, with an interesting awkwardness.”

Describing gradations of writerly error can be difficult. For example, to explain why Thomas Wolfe is a better writer than Tom Wolfe, it is necessary to go into the minutiae of style, which most people couldn’t care less about. Explaining why Nothombe is terrible, however, poses no problem at all. Consider the first passage. This is a car that has already been described as “magnificently white” “too-white” and “whiter than ever”. But punctuality cannot be compared to whiteness, nor can a car be punctual, nor is a white sheen the same as white paint.

In the second passage, we have “profile as a driver” standing in for “face.” And while that face is described as more emotive than usual, the character’s “silence” is said to have “deepened”. This is both a cliché and an inanity. How does a silence deepen? And what makes that awkward? And what makes that awkwardness interesting? And how is he less impassive but more silent?

In her latest novel, Amélie Nothomb sings a song of herself.

Amélie Nothomb takes pains to portray herself as a free-spirited, deeply emotional woman. Julien Parme, on the other hand, initially comes across as a brutal, selfish child. So it’s ironic that Nothomb eventually betrays herself as a brat, while Zeller reveals Parme to be a sage. “So what if flight is not very honorable?” Nothombe pontificates at the end of her book. “It’s still better than allowing yourself to be caught. The only dishonor is that of not being free.” But Parme, at fourteen, returns from his adventure to face his mother, having recognized the cowardice of flight: “I took a deep breath to drive away my fears. And I got into the lift, hoping very much that she’d forgive me. That she’d forgive me for being who I am, and not someone else.”

Share/Save]]> http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/04/07/book-review-allons%e2%80%99y-alonzo/feed/ http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/03/15/70th-anniversary-of-the-german-occupation-of-the-czech-republic/ http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/03/15/70th-anniversary-of-the-german-occupation-of-the-czech-republic/#comments Sun, 15 Mar 2009 15:08:40 +0000 ArtsFuse http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/03/15/70th-anniversary-of-the-german-occupation-of-the-czech-republic/ By Helen Epstein, World Books Contributor

Although September 1, 1939 — the day Hitler invaded Poland — is regarded as the beginning of the Second World War, Czechs remember March 15, 1939 as the day it began for them. Seventy years ago the German armed forces occupied what is now the Czech Republic and declared it the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. There is very little in print in English about this period and there are two books now available in paperback that afford a glimpse of it. One is Peter Demetz’s “Prague in Danger: The Years of German Occupation, 1939-45: Memories and History, Terror and Resistance, Theater and Jazz, Film and Poetry, Politics and War; the other is War Mark Slouka’s “The Visible World.”

Today the term “Munich” is still used as a synonym for appeasement, but the significance of Lidice — the town Hitler ordered razed as a reprisal against the assassination of a high-ranking S.S. officer is largely forgotten. So is the fact that Victor Lazlo, the hero of the classic movie “Casablanca,” was a leader of the Czech resistance.

Demetz is a scholar who was a Czech teenager during the war; Slouka is a novelist and the American son of Czech refugees. Both look back on
an under-reported part of Central European history.

Share/Save]]> http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/03/15/70th-anniversary-of-the-german-occupation-of-the-czech-republic/feed/ http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/03/13/book-review-niall-ferguson-and-the-godzilla-economy/ http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/03/13/book-review-niall-ferguson-and-the-godzilla-economy/#comments Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:44:35 +0000 ArtsFuse http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/03/13/book-review-niall-ferguson-and-the-godzilla-economy/ By Harvey Blume

The Economy Cometh

Niall Ferguson, “The Ascent of Money,” Penguin Press, 2008

It’s way past time to utter the dread G word about the economy, the G word being “Godzilla.” The economy as we now experience it, is like the monster in the 1998 American remake: it rises from unfathomable depths before marching through Manhattan kneecapping skyscrapers with casual flicks of its tail. That movie was criticized for making Godzilla too big for the screen. It’s true that rarely could the extent of the creature be squeezed into a frame. But that’s just what makes American Godzilla such a good image of current crisis, the extent of which continues to defy efforts to frame and contain it.

If you’d like a somewhat more nuanced and informative guide to the crisis than pondering the ways of supersized Godzilla, it’s worth considering Niall Ferguson’s, “The Ascent of Money.” He writes: “It is not too much to say that in mid-2008 we witnessed the. . . symptoms of a world war without the war itself.” In a war a people gives of itself completely. Is nothing short of warlike effort what it takes to salvage the current economy? Ferguson doesn’t answer that pressing question. But he does provide an absorbing history of financial institutions, and of money.

If there is one thought to take from this book it is that financial institutions, per se, are not the enemy. Banking is not opposed to the developments of industry and technology that we credit for the modern world; it is an equal among those developments. The goal that Ferguson set for himself with this book was to, “break down that dangerous barrier which has arisen between financial knowledge and other kinds of knowledge.” He’s done well in that effort.

And it is a dangerous barrier. I suspect that many of us are undertaking to break it down on our own as best we can. Walter Benjamin once remarked that in the twentieth century we were all compelled to act like detectives (Benjamin himself had a pronounced weakness for detective narratives). Maybe, in the twenty-first century we are all, similarly, compelled to be economists.

Another virtue of Ferguson’s book is that it deals with gold, the gold standard, and the gold bugs who advocate it as the only inherently valuable form of money. Ferguson treats the issue historically. He shows that the Spanish empire, which amassed gold, nevertheless, because it lacked financial institutions, borrowed from the Dutch, who may not have had much in the way of gold but had created banks. He writes, as he describes the evolution of credit, that: “What the conquistadors failed to understand is that money is a matter of belief.”

In response to those who may still believe that gold is the only — as in Platonically — rock solid money, he concludes: “Money is not metal. It is trust inscribed.” It’s true, of course, though Ferguson doesn’t delve into the question — he’s not your financial advisor — that when economies flounder, individuals often revert to gold.

If there is a weakness to the book, it is that Ferguson insists, in a long chapter, on giving a Darwinian cast to the evolution — the creation, destruction, and survival — of financial forms. Perhaps it would be best in books of this sort to spare the reader that kind of prolonged exegesis and stipulate in advance: Darwinism assumed. Do it yourself.

Ferguson’s is a useful, mostly well-written book. He does at times fuss in his prose like the professor he is (Harvard, Oxford). But the book is better than the BBC show which will be out on DVD in April. That show, as seen on public television, cuts out key sections of his argument, rendering it puzzling and fragmentary. That’s television for you. However, the show, like the book, does convey that Ferguson, who is avowedly politically conservative, makes George Soros, who is anything but, the hero of the piece.
Enough said
Back to Godzilla.

Read more Harvey Blume at Chess: the Golden Thread

Share/Save]]> http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/03/13/book-review-niall-ferguson-and-the-godzilla-economy/feed/ http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/03/10/robert-walser-modernisms-mystery-man/ http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/03/10/robert-walser-modernisms-mystery-man/#comments Tue, 10 Mar 2009 20:24:22 +0000 ArtsFuse http://blog.theartsfuse.com/2009/03/10/robert-walser-modernisms-mystery-man/ By Bill Marx

Susan Bernofsky’s translation of Robert Walser’s 1908 novel won her a 2007 PEN Translation Fund Award. She’s followed that up by translating the Swiss writer’s first novel, “The Tanners.”

A recent World Books podcast explores two recent translations from the German of novels by the mysterious Swiss writer Robert Walser, an author whose fans included Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka. But while Walser was hot in the 1920s and 1930s, it took decades before his work was translated into English. New Directions is publishing translations of two of his early novels, both written at the turn of the century.

“The Assistant” appeared over a year ago; “The Tanners” will be available soon. Susan Bernofsky translated both books as well as a number of Walser’s short pieces. She is working on a book on Walser, who in the late 1920s entered an insane asylum, diagnosed with schizophrenia. The writer died in 1956.

Susan Bernofsky proudly holds up her recent Walser translations.

Bernofsky argues that it has taken 100 years for American readers to be able to appreciate Walser’s fiction, particularly his short pieces, which not only anticipate post-modernism but whose fragmented bravado suggest Walser may have been the first blogger. Our conversation ranged from the challenges of reading Walser to the reasons behind the neglect of his work and why she wanted to translated him in the first place. At the end of the podcast, I had Bernofsky an excerpt from Walser, an episode that centers on a the broken plate.

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And World Books is more than my weekly podcast - the online feature includes reviews, interviews, news, and commentary on international literature. Those who want to talk about that and other issues about international fiction and culture should go to the World Books Facebook fan page. Agree or disagree, I want to hear from you.

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