Chinese writer Liao Yiwu

On his way to the Cologne literature festival earlier this week, dissident Chinese writer Liao Yiwu was escorted off the plane by the Chinese authorities and handed over to the police for interrogation. He has sent an open letter to the world, available in English, asking for help.

I became acquainted with the writings of Liao Yiwu with the publication of the English translation of The Corpse Walker in 2008, an expansive volume of oral history, banned by the Chinese authorities in 2002, that offers a view of five decades of China’s history from the colorful perspective of the marginal and forgotten, the derided and the outmoded. Yiwu’s collection of 60 interviews was trimmed down to 27 in Wen Huang’s translation. I spoke to Wen about the translation and Liao Yiuw.

I followed up in 2008 when Liao Yiuw provided me a section of a diary he was writing about living through the earthquake in Sichuan province.

Liao Yiwu provided me an update on the aftermath of the earthquake a year later and then, on the 20th anniversary of the brutal suppression of the Tiananmen student movement, he provided me excerpts from “Massacre,” an epic poem about the violence that landed the writer in jail.

He is a fine writer and a brave man.

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Abdo Khal—winner of the Arab Booker

By Bill Marx

Saudi Arabian author Abdo Khal won the $60,000 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the Arab Booker) for his novel Spewing Sparks as Big as Castles, which is also known as She Throws Sparks.

Taleb Alrefai, who served as chair for this year’s panel of judges, said, “The winning novel is a brilliant exploration of the relationship between the individual and the state. Through the eyes of its two dimensional protagonist, the book gives the reader a taste of the horrifying reality of the excessive world of the palace.”

In 2008, I spoke with journalist and novelist Jonathan Levi, who co-founded the literary magazine Granta, serving as its U.S. editor until 1987. The writer has just visited Saudi Arabia, and he spoke to dissident novelist and journalist Adbo Khal and other authors about the state of Saudi writing. Levi talks to me about Khal’s challenges and what else he learned about literary life in the country. Along with a podcast of the conversation, there’s an excerpt from a Levi essay on the trip that deals with his encounter with Abdo Khal.

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Below is an excerpt from an essay Jonathan Levi wrote after his visit to Saudi Arabia. In this section, he recalls his meeting with Abdo Khal.

At four o’clock on my last full day in Saudi Arabia, Ebtihal Mubarak [a reporter for the Arab News] and I finally sit down in the coffee shop of the Jeddah Hilton with Abdo Khal. I’ve only read Ebtihal’s quick translation of the first chapter of his novel Immorality. But looking across at him, with his high, mahogany cheekbones and Yemeni brush mustache standing out against his white thobe and ghutra, he looks a little bit like a thug who’s gone respectable. Abdo is the first writer Ebtihal has brought me who isn’t solidly middle-class.

“I was born in the south,” he tells me through Ebtihal’s translation, “a very poor farming family. “My father died. We moved to Jeddah and all I wanted to do was read romantic stories so I could get on with the girls in the neighborhood. My mother thought I was going bad, so she sent me to Riyadh. Riyadh was like Siberia—if you wanted to punish someone, you sent them to Riyadh.” Luckily, Abdo was rooming in the house of a man with a big library—Dickens, Hugo in Arabic, Mahfouz, and Darwish. Somehow, in 1976, at the age of fourteen, Abdo found Allah and became an imam. He really was a southern boy, I thought, images of child preachers out of Sinclair Lewis and Eudora Welty turning the Hijazi Mountains into the Ozarks.

“I was out in the streets preaching, ‘you’ve got to believe in jihad or you’re going to hell.’ I really believed it. I even went home and tore up all the pictures and smashed the TV.” But Abdo’s spiritual leader was someone slightly more frightening than Elmer Gantry or Jerry Falwell. Juhaiman Al Otaibi was a militant fundamentalist who, at the end of 1979, in the company of 200 followers, attacked the Grand Mosque in Mecca and took hundreds of hostages, protesting the corruption of the royal family. It took two weeks for the government to retake the holy places. 250 people died, 600 were wounded. 68 terrorists were beheaded in the aftermath. Juhaiman was one. Abdo could have been another.

“Except in 1977,” Abdo says, “some friends from the south found me. They told me, ‘we’ve got something to show you.’”

Our club sandwiches and Pepsi’s arrive. Abdo takes a mouthful of fries and waits for the waiter to move off.

“It was in Old Jeddah, an old house that had been turned into a cinema. We sat down. My friends were giggling. Then the movie came on. It was called ‘The Cow,’ and it was pure porn!”

I eat half my sandwich waiting for Ebtihal to stop laughing, uncover her face and translate.

“The next day, they took me to the U.S. Consulate and we climbed a tree outside the wall. Inside was the swimming pool and a bunch of ladies in bikinis.” One boy fell off the tree into the Consulate garden and broke his leg. All the American women gathered around him. “He got to see the Cow for free,” Abdo laughs and takes a sip of his Pepsi. “So I stopped preaching and started writing.”

“Society is suffocating,” Abdo says, as we talk about Immorality and Saudi Arabia. “People aren’t human. They walk in fear, not from the government but from everyone around them who is telling them how to live.” Life means being afraid of everyone. There is more life inside the grave than out. All tender human feelings are buried. Ebtihal nods even as she translates for me. “We all become victims,” Abdo says. “And victims are deformed, amoral characters.”

I say goodbye to Abdo. I think, maybe this guy from the south, this sometime fundamentalist, this potential pornographer, while he may lack the epic sweep of Tolstoy, has the makings of a Saudi Simenon, or at least a Jeddah James Ellroy. I promise to try to get him to the States or England to meet western writers. He says something in Arabic to Ebtihal and laughs.

“What was that?” I ask as we walk out of the lobby into the light.

“Next time,” my Bedouin Virgil says, tucking her hair securely into her hijab, “he promises to take us to see ‘The Cow.’”

Brecht At Night by Mati Unt, translated from the Estonian by Eric Dickens, Dalkey Archive Press (Baltic Literature Series), 209 pages, $13.95

Reviewed By Bill Marx

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
There will also be singing
About the dark times.

Bertolt Brecht, Svendborg Poems

But can an artist who has absorbed some of “the dark times” sing of them? Questions of political opportunism, as well as the twisted prerogatives of creative egotism, drive Estonian writer Mati Unt’s postmodern, historical novel Brecht at Night. Unt isn’t concerned about how playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht sang about the rise of Hitler and Stalin or the outbreak of World War II in Europe.

Instead, Unt examines, via an arch vaudevillesque irony, the narcissistic machinations of Brecht in the year 1940 when, fleeing Nazi Germany, he and his entourage of wife, mistresses, and children end up in Finland, the guests of playwright Hella Wuolijoki, a rich Communist sympathizer with Estonian roots. It is the portrait of the artist as a determinedly abstracted man, aside from his paranoid fear that Hitler has sent out assassins to kill him.

Unt’s Brecht is primarily concerned with making it to America, not attempting to make sense of the gathering forces of the night, which would touch on his uneasy relationship with the Soviet Union, Stalin, and Communism. The general impression left by the book is that it isn’t fear of censorship so much as a pervasive, inner decay that holds Brecht back from dealing with reality: “The worse thing for a writer is not, Brecht thinks, having to keep your mouth shut. It’s a lot worse when you have nothing to say via that mouth.”

Sadistically, Unt, a narrative kibitzer in the book, surrounds Brecht with realities that should have given the writer plenty to talk about. He provides excerpts from non-fiction accounts (newspaper articles, academic studies) of the horrendous happening in Europe, with a grim emphasis on the Soviet Union’s thuggish highjacking of Estonia. He also provides potted biographies of Brecht’s friends and lovers, showing how they were used and abused by Brecht and by history, camp followers betrayed or left on their own to survive.

All of this could have been heavy-handed—Brecht the selfish artist slapped around, over and over, in a circumscribed barrel. At his best, however, Unt brings sardonic humor to the dark proceedings, perhaps tapping on his own feelings about being an artist (playwright, novelist, director) bottled up by the Soviet Union. Unt’s Brecht chooses to see the world through Marxian rules, Hegelian hocus-pocus: “The covert theme of the book is, of course, dialectics, Brecht’s greatest love.” That streamlined notion of Brecht’s vision isn’t entirely fair, at least to his poetry, which at the time made use of ambiguity and skepticism, a satire made of mockery.

Still, the character’s intellectual triangulation amusingly seems to free him from looking too deeply at the demands of the here-and-now, aside from the sexual and secretarial demands he makes on the women in his life. (Unt draws on John Fuegi’s biography The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht, which details the author’s swinish treatment of women.) Occasionally the author tries to wake Brecht up via an impish surrealism, such as having a very un-dialectical frog pop up in his room to give him a scare.

Unt includes a memorably funny chapter about a real-life Estonian government official who served as a stooge for the Soviets named M Unt (no relation to the author). The guy counts down his acts of repression before his bosses murder him: “Lithuania has been accepted as part of the Soviet Union (3rd August). There’s still time to go before my death.”

Still, it is difficult to keep the inventive black humor coming, and by mid-point Brecht at Night increasingly shoves the title artist aside to chronicle the lethal facts of Soviet domination. The book’s imagination gives way to presentation; it suggests that Unt lost interest in drawing (and re-drawing) ironic attention to Brecht’s disinterest in reality, his obsession with bourgeois comfort during a time of chaos. If Unt had included more of the undialectical consciousness that informs the (anti)lyrics in Svendborg Poems, the book’s exploration of the amoral writer-in-exile would have been richer and more compelling. Unt has a considerable reputation as a stage artist—but there is surprisingly little dramatic conflict in the book. His Brecht devolves into a didactic puppet.

Unt’s other novels available in English, Things in the Night and Diary of a Blood Donor, tap on rich veins of fantasy (apocalyptic meltdown, vampirism) to evoke the brutal truths about the somnambulism of life under (or after) the domination of the Soviet Union. In Brecht at Night the author speaks openly and powerfully about the crimes of authoritarian barbarity, the degradation of creativity and morality, and the slippery slope of self-involvement. But one misses his customary wildness, his imaginative gusto, as he goes about it.

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The Ninth by Ferenc Barnás, translated from the Hungarian by Paul Olchváry, Northwestern University Press (Writings from an Unbound Europe), 159 pages, $16.95

Reviewed By Bill Marx

A brilliantly unconventional look at life in a small village outside of Budapest in the late 1960s, Ferenc Barnás’s marvelous novel The Ninth comes off as an inventively dour, sardonically humorous version of Huckleberry Finn, except that the book’s nine-year-old narrator can’t light out for the territories once he begins to understand the duplicities of home, society, and morality. His indigence is too overwhelming, his family situation too absurd (he has nine siblings), and the soft authoritarianism of the government too robustly restrictive.

What’s more, Barnás gives his observant child hero an additional handicap—a disability that makes it difficult for him to speak and to read. Thus, the book’s central metaphor works itself out with grim logic: in surroundings this resolutely repressive, everything of value—creativity, morality, truth, and humanity—is bottled up inside, pressurized. What sort of steam could escape the Communist stopper? The answer suggests why Barnás’s third novel, which he admits is autobiographical, takes the form it does—a child’s frank, fanciful, and anarchistic view of moral survival amid repression.

Yet Barnás doesn’t revel in the gloom, an admirable artistry of refusal that turns away from predictable opportunities for extremism to nurture an indirection and subtlety that only deepens the factual surrealism of the situation and the time. The ninth child lives in a poverty-stricken, secretive, Catholic family that scrapes along by selling rosaries and religious gewgaws condemned by the Communist government. The boy’s domestic and school life is marked by starvation, overcrowding (the ten children sleep in three beds), overwork, and abuse. His father is tyrannical and short-tempered; his mother is kind but passive. In the course of the book, the family’s exhausting focus, under the father’s stern command, is to earn enough money to move into a larger house.

Barnás conveys the environment’s barbarism through ironic humor (“One afternoon, when for some reason I wasn’t in the mood to mutilate frogs out in the yard with the others . . .”) and memories of violence that are kept offstage (“the other day our father gave us twenty lashes on our soles for being late, he used the iron’s chord but it was better than watching klaro get it . . .”). Catholicism serves as a rich satiric source of meager solace, wry hypocrisy, and amusingly secular observations, such as the peculiar but understandable satisfactions the inarticulate kid finds in serving as an altar boy: “It’s so good to see people shut their eyes while sticking their tongues above the tray! Nowhere else could I see so many different sorts of tongues; lots of them are quivering, and some are colored stranger than I ever would have thought.”

Ferenc Barnás

It is this agile emphasis on homey detail rather than trauma and despair that has led the book’s too few reviewers to dwell on Barnás’s admirable modesty and nuance. For me, The Ninth is all the more provocative because it depicts, through a nimble exploration of a child’s stream-of-consciousness, the vicissitudes of his imagination and the tee-tottering state of his soul amid the village’s sickening perfidy, corruption, and stupidity. When the kid steals money from his teacher and spends his ill-gotten gains on cakes and candies for his classmates, the idea is not to stage a pint-sized crime and punishment.

Barnás wants us to watch his narrator shape the parameters of the self he will become, dramatizing whether the child will absorb the guilt and spiritual poverty around him or become an individual by embracing the possibility of change, by speaking the self-incriminating truth. Memorably, his confession seems to burst out of him, against his will: “Everything becomes even hotter inside me as something begins surging up into my chest, something sure to gush into my mouth in no time: the saliva is already sour in my throat, as at other times. ‘It was me,’ I say.” What looks like a modest tale of growing up becomes a far more ambitious examination of the formation of an ethical consciousness, almost out of thin air, in an authoritarian state built on lies and coercion.

Barnás’s nine-year-old narrator is a brave construct, an unconsciously sophisticated consciousness that filters life’s hardships and decisions through a startling innocence, an amoral earnestness. The character’s emotional life is weirdly attenuated, his thoughts often taking on a gnomic vagueness redolent of post-modern philosophy: “It must count a lot, what we assume on account of what, and what we imagine we hear in what; at least that’s what the last month taught me.” Translator Paul Olchváry skillfully captures the novel’s fascinating blend of arch artificiality, sharp-eyed realism, and antic fantasy, all at the service of depicting the inner life of the marginal among us.

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By Gary Schwartz

Rembrandt, An elephant Inscribed Rembrandt ft. 1637 Vienna, Albertina References: Benesch 457. Bisanz-Prakken 2005, nr. 54

In June 2009 a grand conclave of Rembrandt specialists took place at a castle in Sussex. Herstmonceux was bought in 1993 by the amazing Alfred and Isabel Bader, who donated it that same year to Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario as a study center abroad. The Baders have endowed Queen’s with choice Dutch paintings from their collection and with top experts to curate them and to teach Dutch art. They have turned Queen’s into the most important academic center for the study of Dutch art in North America.

Alfred and Isabel Bader were in the front row of the two long days of the Rembrandt conclave, which they sponsored. Given the circumstances – notably that none of the more than 50 scholars in the room had at one time or other not been pilloried in print or pointedly ignored by one or more of the other participants – the atmosphere was friendly if somewhat strained. Personally, I found it difficult to join meaningfully in discussions of points about which I had written extensively and which were batted about the room in opinionizing sound bites.

One point about which I have not published until now I did try to put into play, without success. It concerns the number of drawings that are so firmly given to Rembrandt that they can serve as a basis of reference for other attributions. The concept was sensibly introduced into the literature by Peter Schatborn, the retired chief curator of prints and drawings of the Rijksmuseum. In the introduction to the exhibition catalogue Rembrandt: the master and his workshop: drawings and etchings (p. 10), held in Berlin, Amsterdam and London in 1991-92, writing of the need to separate the corn from the chaff in the attribution of drawings to Rembrandt, Schatborn wrote:

In order to accomplish this distinction, the first thing that has to be done is to establish which drawings can be regarded with some measure of certainty as the work of Rembrandt. These form the core of his oeuvre. Except for a small number of borderline cases, specialists are in broad agreement concerning this group. The autograph status of the drawings in the core group is determined by signatures and inscriptions in Rembrandt’s hand and beside that by the function of drawings as preparatory studies for autograph paintings and etchings. It is rather surprising that the group of “certain” drawings that can be formed in this way is small, in any case not much larger than about seventy drawings.

At the exhibitions, it was being said that Schatborn had drafted his list in collaboration with his colleague Martin Royalton-Kisch of the British Museum. In subsequent discussions with them, they confirmed this. From the start, I found it impossible to believe that the number of such drawings was as small as 70, and my skepticism has only grown throughout the years. Part of the research I did for my book on Rembrandt in 2006 was to keep track of drawings that I came across that matched Schatborn’s criteria. It had 125 items.

I have been waiting impatiently all this time for one of two developments to take place. Either for Schatborn and Royalton-Kisch to publish the list and let the rest of us judge it, or for one or more colleagues of theirs in the field of Rembrandt drawings to subject their statement to critical scrutiny. Since neither of these things has happened, I seized on the Herstmonceux gathering to force the issue. The following exchange took place:

Schwartz: Peter, do you still think that the core list of Rembrandt drawings is no larger than 70?

Schatborn: Yes. It may be a bit larger, say 75.

Schwartz: Have you ever published the list?

Schatborn: No.

Schwartz: Why not? Shouldn’t you and Martin back up your claims with argued information? In preparation for my book of 2006 I began assembling a list of the drawings that answer to your criteria, and there were 125 items on it.

Schatborn: If you show me your list I will cut it down to 75.

If anyone else in the hall shared my impression that this was a trifle arrogant, they kept it to themselves. As I sat down, Holm Bevers of the Berlin print room, the third member of the troika of main Rembrandt drawings specialists, leaned over and said to me helpfully, “Anyone can make that list. Just go through Benesch [that is, Otto Benesch’s six-volume catalogue of the drawings of Rembrandt] and you can make it by yourself.”

Well, I have now done so, with consultation of more authorities than Benesch alone. And I am showing it not only to Peter Schatborn, but to all interested parties.

The upshot is this. There are 20 drawings that are signed by Rembrandt and another 24 with inscriptions by him. No doubt is possible concerning five drawings that were indented for transfer to the etching plate. That makes 49. For the one painting and one etching for which we have the largest number of related drawings, St. John the Baptist preaching and The hundred-guilder print, 18 sheets are known. That leaves room for three (or eight, if you are being expansive) more drawings on the Schatborn-Royalton-Kisch core list.

Rembrandt, Seated old man, ca. 1630

On my list there are however not three or eight above those 67 but 101 more drawings that are related so closely to autograph paintings and drawings by Rembrandt that they serve the purposes of a core list. In order to submit them to your judgment, I have taken the trouble to make scans of all the drawings, paintings and etchings concerned and to add them as adjuncts to the Schwartzlist.

Not all the relations are visible in this form. However, each and every one of these relations has been broached by respected specialists and nearly all have been confirmed by others. To my knowledge, the authenticity of not one of the 168 sheets has ever been doubted in print by Schatborn, Royalton-Kisch or Bevers.

There is only one explanation I can imagine for the small number of drawings on the Schatborn list. That is, that he takes the notion “preparatory drawing” excessively literally, limiting it to drawings that are exactly equivalent to a composition or detail in an autograph painting or etching and that can be dated before the painting or etching. I have employed a more general criterion for about half of the 101 sheets referred to above. That is, any drawing whose attribution is generally accepted that is undeniably related to an autograph painting or etching. On the nature of such drawings we have the testimony of Arnold Houbraken (vol. 1, 1718, p. 257), who wrote:

With regard to art he was rich with ideas, so that you frequently see him making a great number of different sketches of one and the same object, full also of changes in the figures and poses as well as the arrangement of the clothing; for which he is to be praised above all others – especially above those who employ such figures and clothing in their work as if they were twins.

This picture is reflected perfectly in the examples on my core list. It is a rich compendium of drawings, covering the full range of Rembrandt’s work from early to late, from the most informal to the most elaborate modes, from renditions that show variants of the finally chosen solution to some that correspond like twins, in all the kinds of subjects that Rembrandt created. The list offers wide opportunity for the responsible attribution to Rembrandt of comparable drawings that are not directly related to known paintings and etchings. I fail to see why, given the possibility to construct a list of this kind, one should prefer to work with a far more restricted list of core drawings that offers so many fewer possibilities for comparison with other drawings. A list of the kind of which Houbraken so rightly disapproves.

For the sake of clarity and to keep the website pages within bounds, I have divided the list into nine sections, to which I provide links below:

1. Signed drawings: 20
2.With inscriptions in Rembrandt’s hand other than a signature: 24 drawings
3. Indented for transfer to the plate: 5 drawings, used for 5 etchings
4. Related to the compositions of history paintings: 20 drawings related to 16 extant paintings and 2 that are lost but known through prints
5. Related to details of history paintings: 22 drawings related to 10 paintings
6. Related to painted portraits or figures: 10 drawings related to 8 paintings
7. Related to etched compositions: 32 drawings related to 20 etchings
8. Related to portrait, figure and genre etchings: 22 drawings related to 19 etchings
9. Related to landscapes: 13 drawings related to 1 painting and 8 etchings

In all, the nine sections contain 168 drawings, a list that can surely be added to. The 119 drawings that are included because of their relation to a painting or etching (other than the five indented ones) are connected to 37 paintings and 47 etchings.

For each drawing, I provide an abbreviated reference to Otto Benesch’s catalogue and with few exceptions to a standard authority later than Benesch. The references are given in full below.

The issue involved is more important than merely a question of numbers. It has far-going consequences for our reconstruction of Rembrandt’s working method and our understanding of his art. These consequences will be addressed in Schwartzlist 302. It will appear in time for the next get-together of Rembrandt specialists, at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles on February 2nd, at which the opening talk is: Peter Schatborn, “The core group of Rembrandt drawings.” There I hope to spark a more satisfying discussion of this matter than that at Herstmonceux. Unless, of course, Peter Schatborn succeeds to the contentment of the field to slash my list back down to 75.

Please address reactions to Gary.Schwartz@xs4all.nl

References in sections 1-9 of the Core list of Rembrandt drawings

Ackley et al. 1989
Clifford Ackley et al., exhib. cat. From Michelangelo to Rembrandt: master drawings from the Teyler Museum, New York (Pierpont Morgan Library) 1989

Ackley 2003
Clifford S. Ackley, exhib. cat. Rembrandt’s journey: painter, draughtsman, etcher, Boston (Museum of Fine Arts) 2003

Bomford et al. 2006
David Bomford et al., Art in the making: Rembrandt, London (National Gallery Company) 2006

Bakker 1998
Boudewijn Bakker et al., Landscapes of Rembrandt: his favourite walks, Bussum (Thoth Publishers), Amsterdam (Gemeentearchief Amsterdam) and Paris (Fondation Custodia) 1998

Benesch
Otto Benesch, edited by Eva Benesch, The drawings of Rembrandt, 6 vols., London (Phaidon) 1973

Bevers et al. 1991
Holm Bevers et al., exhib. cat. Rembrandt: the master & his workshop: drawings & etchings, Berlin (Altes Museum), Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) and London (National Gallery) 1991

Bevers 2006
Holm Bevers, Rembrandt: die Zeichnungen im Berliner Kupferstichkabinett: kritischer Katalog, Berlin (Kupferstichkabinett Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) 2006

Bisanz-Prakken 2004
Klaus Albrecht Schröder and Marian Bisanz-Prakken, exhib. cat. Rembrandt, Vienna (Albertina) 2004

Blankert 1997
Albert Blankert, exhib. cat. Rembrandt: a genius and his impact, Melbourne (National Gallery of Victoria), Sydney (Art Exhibitions Australia) and Zwolle (Waanders Publishers) 1997

A corpus of Rembrandt paintings
J. Bruyn et al., A corpus of Rembrandt paintings, 4 vols. to date, first three vols. published by Kluwer under imprint Martinus Nijhoff, Dordrecht 1982, 1986 and 1989; vol. 4, by Ernst van de Wetering, was published by Springer Verlag, Berlin 2005

Giltaij 1988
Jeroen Giltaij, De tekeningen van Rembrandt en zijn zijn school in het Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam (Museum Boymans-van Beuningen) 1988

Hinterding 2008
Eric Hinterding, Rembrandt etchings from the Frits Lugt Collection, 2 vols., Bussum (Thoth Publishers) and Paris (Fondation Custodia ) 2008

Lammertse and van der Veen 2006, pp. 52-53
Friso Lammertse and Jaap van der Veen, Uylenburgh & son: art and commerce from Rembrandt to De Lairesse, 1625-1675, Zwolle (Waanders) and Amsterdam (Rembrandt House Museum) 2006

Logan 1995
Carolyn Logan, entries on drawings in exhib. cat. Rembrandt/ not Rembrandt in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: aspects of connoisseurship, vol. 2: Paintings, drawings and prints: art-historical perspectives, New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 1995

Magnusson 1992
Börje Magnusson, “Rembrandts teckningar / Rembrandt’s drawings,” in exhib. cat. Rembrandt och hans tid: människan i centrum / Rembrandt and his age: focus on man, Stockholm (Nationalmuseum) 1992

Peck 2003
Sheldon Peck, Rembrandt drawings: twenty-five years in the Peck collection, Boston 2003

Röver-Kann 2000
Anne Röver-Kann, exhib. cat. Rembrandt, oder nicht? Zeichnungen von Rembrandt und seinem Kreis aus den Hamburger und Bremer Kupferstichkabinetten, Bremen (Kunsthalle Bremen) 2000

Royalton-Kisch 1992
Martin Royalton-Kisch, Drawings by Rembrandt and his circle in the British Museum, London (British Museum Press) 1992

Schwartz 2006
Gary Schwartz, The Rembrandt book, Brussels (Mercatorfonds) 2006

Schwartz 2007
Gary Schwartz, “Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, Simeon with the Christ child in his arms, with Mary and Joseph,” in: In arte venustas: studies on drawings in honour of Teréz Gerszi, presented on her eightieth birthday, Budapest (Szépmüvészeti Múzeum) 2007, pp. 170-72

Scrase 1996
David Scrase, Rembrandt and the nude: prints by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), online catalogue of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Starcky 1988
Emanuel Starcky, exhib. cat. Rembrandt et son école, dessins du Musée du Louvre, Paris (Réunion des musées nationaux) 1988

Tümpel 2003
Christian Tümpel, “Jesus und die Ehebrecherin und Rembrandts Notizen auf Zeichnungen mit Historien,” in Thea Vignau-Wilberg, ed., Rembrandt-Zeichnungen in München / The Munich Rembrandt drawings: Beiträge zur Ausstellung Rembrandt auf Papier…, Munich (Graphische Sammlung München) 2003, pp. 161-75

Vignau-Wilberg 2001
Thea Vignau-Wilberg, exhib. cat. Rembrandt auf Papier: Werk und Wirkung, Munich (Hirmer) 2001

Van de Wetering and Schnackenburg 2001
Ernst van de Wetering and Bernhard Schnackenburg, exhib. cat. The mystery of the young Rembrandt, Kassel (Staatliche Museen Kassel) and Amsterdam (Museum het Rembrandthuis) 2001

De Winkel 2006
Marieke de Winkel, Fashion and fancy: dress and meaning in Rembrandt’s paintings, Amsterdam (Amsterdam University Press) 2006

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Gary Schwartz was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1940. In 1965 he came to the Netherlands with a graduate fellowship in art history and stayed. He has been active as a translator, editor and publisher; teacher, lecturer and writer; and as the founder of CODART, an international network organization for curators of Dutch and Flemish art.

As an art historian, he is best known for his books on Rembrandt: Rembrandt: all the etchings in true size (1977), Rembrandt, his life, his paintings: a new biography (1984) and The Rembrandt Book (2006). His Internet column, now called the Schwartzlist, appeared every other week from September 1996 to April 2007 and has been appearing since then irregularly. His most recent book on Rembrandt is one of the six titles nominated for the Banister Fletcher Award for the most deserving book on art or architecture of that year.

In November 2009 Schwartz was awarded the coveted tri-annual Prize for the Humanities by the Prince Bernhard Cultural Foundation of Amsterdam.

© Gary Schwartz 2009.
Reactions to Gary.Schwartz@xs4all.nl.

For those interested interested in the work and lives of classical musicians, or if you teach feature writing, magazine writing, cultural reporting or non-fiction narrative, the profiles in “Music Talks” make a perfect holiday gift or useful addition to the classroom.

It is a volume of 4000 word-and-under profiles of celebrated artists by resident Culture Vulture Helen Epstein. The line-up includes such stars as Vladimir Horowitz, Leonard Bernstein, violin teacher Dorothy DeLay, James Galway, and Yo-Yo Ma. Many of these interviews appeared in the “Sunday New York Times” or other national publications.

Jonathan Baldo of the Eastman Music School has been using these pieces for 20 years and persuaded Helen to get the book back in print. Luckily the Authors Guild Back-in-Print program made that possible. David Hajdu at Columbia and Megan Marshall at Emerson are among the professors who find them helpful to students.

The new edition is available online and at music outlets like the shop at Symphony Hall in Boston. Order through the link below to Amazon and theartsfuse receives a (small) percentage of the sale.

By Bill Marx

The time has come for a brilliant collection of stories, written in the 1920s, about the Soviet future.

Some of my favorite books from around the world this year raise the thorny issue of the relationship between literature new and the old. The critical and commercial reception of a translation in English often depends on the quality of the translation. Thus the reputation of many works of international literature has been hampered by ham-fisted or inexpert debuts into English, an issue compounded by the corruption of texts because of political or social censorship.

Ironically, when superior, unexcised translations appear later they make surprisingly little impact, as if art was simply a matter of timing. American publishing puts a discouraging spin on Ezra Pound’s much-quoted adage: here literature turns out to be yesterday’s news that stays yesterday.

For example, how should we evaluate Robert Chandler’s compelling rendition of an unbowdlerized edition of Andrei Platonov’s masterpiece about Soviet authoritarianism “The Foundation Pit”? Is this a new book? Or, after two earlier versions, is this volume mainly of interest to scholars?

Is this translation necessary?

The flip side of the translation question touches on the influence of economics. How many versions of Franz Kafka in English we need? Oxford University Press has just released new versions of “The Castle” (translated by Anthea Bell) and “The Metamorphosis and Other Stories” (translated by Joyce Crick). Both read well, but are they really necessary? Shrinking column inches for book reviews in newspapers and magazines means that there will be few (if any) meaningful critical comparisons among competing versions.

This preamble explains the presence of “old” new volumes on my holiday list.

Please keep in mind that these are rough times for publishers, especially small presses specializing in challenging books in translation, which is why I have done my best to choose volumes from presses located some distance from the mainstream.

At this point, placing books on your gift-giving list becomes an act of cultural investment, along with the considerable readerly playbacks of stuffing your stockings with international fiction and non-fiction. Each year the paradox grows increasingly absurd: cultural pressures mount on American publishing to shed its provincialism, yet the number of books translated into English remains relatively small.

Fiction:

1) Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. Translated by Joanne Turnbull. (NYRB Classics) A Russian writer whose morbidly satiric imagination forms the wild (missing) link between the futuristic dream tales of Edgar Allan Poe and the postwar scientific nightmares of Stanislaw Lem. Little of Krzhizhanovsky’s work was published during his lifetime because it was simply too bizarre (and politically incorrect) for the Russia of the 1920s. I think we are more than ready for him now – an impish master of the fatalistically fantastic.

2) Your Face Tomorrow Volume Three: Poison, Shadow and Farewell by Javier Marías. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa. (New Directions) The final installment in Marías’s super spy novel extraordinaire, a final playing out, to the point of demonic exhaustion, of the last century’s obsession with double agents, secret codes, voyeurism, and betrayal. An epic dramatization of backstabbing on all levels – from the psychological to the metaphysical – comes to a fascinating if complicated end.

3) The End of Everything by David Bergelson. Translated by Joseph Sherman. (Yale University Press) First published in 1913, Bergelson’s prophetic novel makes use of a surprisingly nervy minimalism to tell the tale of a beautiful woman from a privileged background whose life is shattered by a marriage of convenience – a searching diagnosis of the anxious hollowness at the center of Jewish life during the turn-of-the-century.

4) Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto. Translated by David Slavitt. (Harvard University Press) An at times intentionally zany new version of one of the literary high points of the Italian Renaissance, an epic crowded with jousting men and monsters that influenced Spencer’s “Faerie Queen,” that Shakespeare lifted a plot from, and that Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges admired. Slavitt’s spiffy translation entertainingly reinvigorates the melodramatic, satiric, battle-heavy antics of Ariosto’s prolix fantasy. Orlando’s impossible passion for the pagan princess Angelica is conveyed through playful iambic pentameter and rhyme:

A wonderful horse, but a horse is a horse and it’s not
a hippogryph. Still, in a joust or fight
his courage and strength could never be forgot.

I await Terry Gilliam’s movie version.

5) The Salt Smugglers by Gerard de Nerval. Translated by Richard Sieburth. (Archipelago Books) This volume is the rib-tickling oddity of the year: the first translation into English of an experimental novel that, back in 1850, appeared in a French newspaper masquerading as reportage. The powers-that-be had passed a law essentially banning serial novels; Nerval engagingly took up the challenge and concocted this deliciously subversive piece of “journalism,” a humdinger of humbug that scrambles fact and imagination amid a swashbuckling quest for an elusive book. Of course, Nerval deftly lampoons notions of authority, fiction, and censorship along the way.

6) The Golden Calf by Ilya Ilf & Evgeny Petrov. Translated by Konstantin Gurevich and Helen Anderson. (Open Letter) A satire of political and economic corruption in 1920s Russia whose delicious blend of the daffy and the acidic resonates today. A larger-than-life con man, Ostrap Bender, leads a crew of scallywags on a surreal rampage of chicanery. This is the first complete version in English of a 1931 novel whose charmingly jaundiced view of avariciousness is worthy of David Mamet and Ben Jonson.

Non-Fiction:

1) Dostoevsky: A Writer in his Time by Joseph Frank. Edited by Mary Petrusewicz. (Princeton University Press) Not a translation but so what? Frank’s monumental five-volume study of Dostoevsky deserves to be read, if only as an inspiring lesson about how much more thrilling a focus on ideas can be than the standard biography’s obsession with the connections between creativity and the subject’s personal life. The series has been condensed with incisive care and respect, giving those with limited time (and budget) a chance to engage with a revelatory vision of the Russian writer’s enduring greatness.

2) Knut Hamsun: Dreamer and Dissenter by Ingar Sletten Kolloen. Translated by Deborah Dawkin and Erik Skuggevik. (Yale University Press) This biography doesn’t have the intellectual heft of Frank’s but its tortured subject, Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, offers a life of Dostoevskian complexity, a manic mix of genius and moral blindness. A celebrated writer (his fans included Isaac Bashevis Singer and Ernest Hemingway) who won the1920 Nobel Prize for Literature, Hamsun collaborated with the Nazis during the German occupation of Norway. He never renounced his wartime actions, including a much-publicized visit with Adolf Hitler. “If there is one thing I have learned in this work,” writes Kolloen in the book’s Preface, “it is the following: each of us contains more fateful contradictions than we can ever fathom.”

3) Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings by Natsume Sōseki. Translated by Michael K. Bourdaghs, Atsuko Ueda, and Joseph A. Murphy. (Columbia University Press) The nerdiest pick on my list, but for fans of one of Japan’s greatest novelists (“Kokoro,” “Kusamakura”) this volume of his literary criticism offers insights into his fiction as well as some prescient ideas about realism and multiculturalism. Much of the volume is made up of excerpts from Sōseki’s science-minded “Theory of Literature” – some of which are dated and dense. I suggest reading the informative introduction and skipping around until you hit pay dirt. For example, this interesting passage on the value of individuality from Sōseki’s essay “Philosophical Foundations of the Literary Arts”:

It is only when one has an ideal that is new, profound, or broad, only when one tries to realize that ideal in the world but finds the world foolishly prevents this – only then does technique become truly useful to the person in question. When the world prevents us from developing our ideal in real life, then the only avenue remaining is to use technique to realize that ideal in the form of a literary work.

4) Woman from Shanghai by Xianhui Yang. Translated by Wen Huang. (Pantheon) An oddly titled but fascinating book whose fables of humanity shed gruesome light on the horror of the Chinese gulags. Author Xianhui Yang spent three years talking to survivors of a prison camp that had been set up in Jiabiangou (China’s northwestern desert region) during the late 1950’s. Over three thousand Chinese citizens, condemned as “rightists” by the Communist Party, were sent for “reeducation” in the compound, which still cannot be spoken about without fear in the author’s homeland. To escape censorship, the interviews were published as works of fiction in China, though they are based on fact.

5) On the Life and Death of Languages by Claude Hagège. Translated by Jody Gladding. (Yale University Press) A polemic by a noted French linguist alarmed at the accelerating death rate for languages around the world – he claims that at the current pace half of the world’s five thousand languages will fade away within the next century. The book proffers a passionate and often eloquent argument against efforts to establish English as a single world language: “To defend our languages and their diversity, especially against the domination of a single language, is to do more than just defend our cultures. It is to defend our life.”

6) Towers of Stone: The Battle of Wills in Chechnya by Wojciech Jagielski. Translated by Soren A. Gauger. (Seven Stories Press) This riveting work of reportage by an award-winning Polish journalist supplies an overview – flinty, empathetic, and complex – of decades of warfare in Chechnya. In 2008 the volume’s memorable vision of violence as Sisyphean absurdity won the international Literatura Frontera Award in Italy.

Much new material since the October update for those with an interest in international literature.

Justine Hardy: Kashmir has been her beat for 20 years.

My latest podcast features an interview with journalist and author Justine Hardy, whose latest book (published by the Free Press), “In the Valley of Mist: One Family in a Changing World,” continues her exploration of life in Kashmir, a perspective that makes a determined effort to look beyond the stereotypes of crisis. I was particularly curious about what Hardy has learned covering the volatile region as a journalist and novelist. What does fiction do that non-fiction can’t?

Also in World Books: a thoughtful piece by translator and critic Tess Lewis that goes beyond the whiffs of information whipped up at a moment’s notice by the American media about the books of Herta Müller, who recently won the Nobel Prize for literature.

And I posted an interview with a leading Cuban writer about one of my favorite books in translation this year. I questioned, via email, writer José Manuel Prieto about the English translation of the late Guillermo Rosales’s “The Halfway House,” a powerful novel about exile, revolution, and mental illness.

Coming up on World Books: An extensive piece by Helen Epstein that examines the recent publication and translation (ninety years after it was begun) of C. G. Jung’s confessional meditation “The Red Book.” According to the volume’s editor and co-translator Sonu Shamdasani, “The Red Book” stands in a select company of books that exerted an enormous influence on social and intellectual history even while it was unpublished.

What is a Judicial Review? It is a fresh approach to creating a conversational, critical space about the arts. The aim is to combine editorial integrity with the community-making power of interactivity. This is our first session.

• Review by Ian Thal
• Review by Timothy Longman
• Review by Peter Cohen
• Artist response by Shawn LaCount
• Summary by Bill Marx

As coverage of the arts in the conventional, mainstream media wanes, critical discussion of the arts online has settled into two extremes: there’s the corporate dream of an omnipotent “Google” reviewer for all and the chaos of opinions fired off in individual blogs of varying quality and intellectual integrity.

My aim with the Judicial Review, of which there will be one a month in the coming year, is to fashion a mid-way between these two unsatisfying polarities — to create a flexible place where professionals and nonprofessionals, artists and amateurs can exchange views and judgments about the arts. This will serve as a model for a civil conversational setting that will invite independent discussion as well as encourage participation in the arts.

First on the docket for Judicial Review: John ADEkoje (Samuel Mizinga), and the cast of The Overwhelming

The inspiration for the Judicial Review is the U.S. Supreme Court. Arts events will be evaluated by local panels of “judges” who will post majority and dissenting opinions in the form of written reviews or via video- or podcasts. The panel will be made up of a combination of professional critics and non-professional observers.

Our goal is to introduce a supervised space for educational, passionate, and incisive conversation about the arts that draws on the strengths of various levels of expertise. By doing so, it is hoped that the judges will learn from each other as well as offer a variety of perspectives that will invite responses that will deepen readers understanding of the arts and the craft of criticism.

In any trial there is a place for a “Friend of the Court” brief. The Judicial Review will include a space for the artists themselves to have their say, to contribute to the respectful exchange. The arts organization under review will be invited to file opinions.

This idea is my response to the considerable challenges and opportunities that the web poses for criticism of the arts, reflecting my belief, after 30 years of writing and reading arts criticism, that a review’s verdict, while essential, is not its most important value. Criticism is at its most vital when it fosters spirited dialogue, when critics help us take the arts seriously by connecting creativity with our thinking and feeling selves.

For that kind of connection to thrive on the web the emphasis must be placed on the value of the collective give-and-take, on generating information and curiosity, on stimulating the slip and slide of reasons and evaluations. We have much to learn from each other. I invite those who would like to take part in this experiment as “judges” to email theartsfuse (staff@theartsfuse.com). I would also like reactions to the idea, suggestions for improvement, directions to take, etc.

Below I summarize the majority opinion of the three judges. Company One director Shawn LaCount then contributes a “Friend of the Court” brief.

— Bill Marx, Editor

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The Overwhelming by J. T. Rogers. Directed by Shawn LaCount. Presented by Company One at the Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, through November 21, 2009.

Cedric Lilly (Joseph Gasana),
Doug Bowen-Flynn (Jack Exley) in The Overwhelming

Majority Opinion:

The bottom line decisions of the three judges are pretty much the same: each felt that the production was worth seeing. Company One was praised for staging a script that deals with an international issue of moral and political importance.

Because it leans heavily on the tired notion of Americans as myopic innocents in a strange land (Rwanda in 1994), J. T. Rogers’s play ended up disappointing performer Ian Thal and playwright Peter Cohen. The dramatic set-up didn’t bother Timothy Longman, the Director of the New African Studies Center at Boston University, who was more disturbed that the script reinforces, rather than undercuts, clichés about Rwanda.

Dissenting Opinion: None really, though Peter Cohen strikes the harshest note regarding the Company One performers. He believes they are pitched at too high a decibel level.

Judge # 1

Ian Thal

Any contemporary play that depicts Westerners abroad in the midst of what is euphemistically called a “human rights catastrophe” draws comparisons to Tony Kushner’s “Homebody/Kabul.” Whether or not the latter served as a model, J.T. Rogers’ “The Overwhelming” explores the weeks leading up to the 1994 genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsis through the eyes of visitors from America. In this case, the innocents abroad are the family of Jack Exley (Doug Bowen-Flynn), an academic attempting to track down a Tutsi Doctor and former college roommate played by Cedric Lilly.

To Rogers’s credit, the protagonists encounter a supporting cast of Rwandans, expatriates, and diplomatic workers who pursue their own agendas and seize their own opportunities in a morally bewildering setting. These characters attempt to determine what the Exleys know, what they want the Exleys to know, what the Exleys believe, and what they want to Exleys to believe. These insiders act at cross-purposes to one another to enlist, distract, or shape the perceptions of the outsiders.

Rogers, however, fails to meet Kushner’s challenge: the play is undermined by the author’s reliance on the cliché of naive Americans bumbling far from home. Where Kushner’s Ceiling family is made up of memorable characters, Rogers’ Exley family are barely even stock: back in 1994 the script’s protagonist, a political scientist specializing in international relations and grassroots activism, would not be so foolish as to believe that UN peacekeepers would take action against human rights abuses. For two years running UN troops had already been passively witnessing ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. That Jack studies grass-roots activism yet praises his activist friend to a government official of a rival ethnic group is a ludicrous plot device: Rogers telegraphs to the audience not just the identity of killer and victim, but how the killer will be led to his victim.

Rogers wants it both ways: Jack’s supposed to be a nondescript everyman who serves as an audience surrogate yet also have the intellectual chops to turn up in the wrong place at the wrong time for the sake of a research project. (Rogers could have worked harder to make Jack sound more like a professor who was making a last ditch effort to land tenure.) Actor Bowen-Flynn is unfairly left in the position of having to pump life into a hero who is little more than a container for lazy plot devices.

The other members of the family fare slightly better because their naiveté comes by virtue of being along for the ride. Jack’s wife, Linda (Lyndsay Allyn Cox), is written as a narcissistic writer of creative-nonfiction, a stereotypical self-absorbed idealist blind to the genocidal rhetoric of anyone who promises her a look at The Truth. Ironically, the fact that she clings to her African-American identity blinds her to the encroaching menace. Jack’s teenage son, Geoffrey (Gabe Goodman) at least makes no pretense of understanding Rwanda and is thus the first to grasp what is happening.

Richer opportunities for the actors are found in the supporting cast: the nimble Tory Bullock, who plays Gerard, the porter whom Geofrey befriends, makes good use of the role’s possibilities for physical comedy. Cedric Lilly’s portrayal of the missing activist-doctor embraces both comedic subterfuge and the tragedy of the difficult decisions that have to be made in wartime. Mason Sand and Peter Brown (each in two roles) play a range of foreigners who see the precedents or harbingers of the oncoming genocide but because of world weariness, lack of actionable intelligence, or realpolitik savvy are unable to avert history. Because of Jack and Linda’s ignorance, these telling signs of the time and place are left addressing no one but the audience.

Director Shawn LaCount and stage manager Jillian Levine do an admirable job of keeping “The Overwhelming” running along at a fast pace and, despite the play’s considerable flaws, focused on the important themes that Rogers seeks to explore.

Ian Thal is a mime, commedia dell’arte actor, puppeteer, poet, playwright and teacher in Somerville, MA. His play, “Total War,” holds the dubious distinction of attracting protests despite never having a production.

Judge # 2

Timothy Longman

When I first traveled to Rwanda in 1992, the country was largely unknown in the United States. “Rwanda,” several people asked me before I left for a year of research in the country, “Isn’t that a woman’s name?” Even in the immediate aftermath of the 1994 genocide, the country’s main claim to fame remained Dian Fossey and the movie “Gorillas in the Mist.” For the first several years, when I gave a public lecture about what happened in Rwanda, I was inevitably asked, “What about the gorillas?”

The terrible violence that swept Rwanda in 1994, killing as many as 800,000 people, ultimately caught the attention of the international community. While Burundi’s civil war was longer and Congo’s wars have killed more people, Rwanda has become the rare African tragedy that has garnered widespread notice in the West. A morbid fascination with the intimate nature of Rwanda’s violence has inspired a series of best-selling books, movies, and plays that have elevated the Rwandan genocide to iconic status. The name “Rwanda” has become shorthand for brutal, incomprehensible slaughter.

“The Overwhelming,” currently in a gripping and well-acted production by Company One, represents the most successful play to date about the Rwandan genocide, having been staged at the National Theater in London, the Roundabout in New York, and the Next Theatre in Chicago. The story centers on a naïve and idealistic academic, Jack Exley, who travels to Rwanda with his family in early 1994 to research a book on grassroots activism. Having organized the trip at the last minute at the invitation of an old Rwandan friend, Jack is ill informed and ill prepared for life in a country in the midst of civil war and political transition. Jack, his wife, Linda, and son, Geoffrey, develop friendships with several Rwandans. But none of their new friends are fully truthful, and they all seem to be involving the Exley family in secretive plans.

While “The Overwhelming” takes place in a context of spreading violence, the play itself is a mystery and psychological thriller. Set in the months just prior to the genocide, the play focuses on the mounting tensions in the country and the confusion of outsiders seeking to understand a complex and deteriorating situation. The play poses a series of moral questions. How would you react if confronted with violence? What would you sacrifice to save the life of a friend? Would you have the courage to do what is right when confronted with a life and death situation? How would you even know which choices are right?

Fedna Jacquet (Emiritha),
Gabe Goodman (Geoffery Exley) in The Overwhelming

As a moral parable about the naiveté of foreigners and the ambiguous line between right and wrong, the play’s setting in Rwanda is almost incidental to the story. Yet the fact that the end of the story is known, that the viewers know in advance that one group represented in the play is going to commit genocide against the other, undermines the plays intended mystery. Since we are already predisposed to believe that the Hutu in the play are evil and the Tutsi are victims, the audience is not drawn directly into the moral ambiguity but instead watches from a distance to see if and when the American characters will clue into the truth of the situation.

The final revelation that the Tutsi characters may not be entirely blameless serves as more of a distraction than a complication, since it cannot justify the attempt to annihilate all Tutsi from the face of the earth, as the Hutu Power militias ultimately sought to do.

The danger with fictionalized accounts of this sort is that the audience often focuses less on their artistic truths than on the window that they supposedly provide to an unfamiliar culture. While most have now heard of the Rwandan genocide, many people know only the vaguest details. As an audience talk-back following a recent Company One production demonstrated, many audience members turn to the play not only for inspiration but also for information. The idea that the play has a documentary authenticity is promoted by liner notes and press coverage touting the playwright J.T. Rogers’s research on the topic and travels to Rwanda and the real-life moral crisis he encountered in his own dealings with Rwandan consultants.

Unfortunately, the portrayal of Rwanda in “The Overwhelming” is inaccurate on a number of points. The play nicely captures the reticence of Rwandans, who are generally parsimonious with the truth in order to protect themselves. But Rwandans are also notoriously self possessed, keeping their feelings and true thoughts tightly bottled up. The displays of sharp temper and overt emotion at various points in the play do not ring true.

The factual details about events are also mistaken on several key points. The period in which the play is set was a time of sharply rising ethnic tensions, but there was very little violence, outside a few high-profile assassinations. The idea portrayed in the play that ethnic massacres were gradually spreading seems to suggest a much more random form of violence than the well-planned genocide a few months later actually represented.

Certain decisions in this production tend to emphasize the degree to which Rwanda is more of a symbol than an actual setting for the play. The decision to dress Rwandan actors in distinctly West African garb (a Nigerian Agbada and Ghanian Kente cloth) is jarring to anyone familiar with East Africa, as is the comical North African servant outfit worn by the Exley’s household worker.

These criticisms aside, I quite enjoyed Company One’s production. The story is compelling and the acting quite strong. As an evening of provocative and entertaining theater, I would highly recommend “The Overwhelming.” As a window into understanding Rwanda and its genocide, however, other more accurate sources are available. This play unfortunately does not push beyond the iconic status of Rwanda’s tragedy.

Timothy Longman is director of the African Studies Center at Boston University. He has traveled and researched extensively in Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa. He lived in Rwanda in 1992-93, conducting research for his dissertation, and he returned to Rwanda in 1995 to direct the Human Rights Watch field office. His book, “Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda,” was recently published by Cambridge University Press. He is currently completing the book “Memory, Justice, and Power in Post-Genocide Rwanda,” based on field research he conducted there from 2001 to 2006.

Judge # 3

Peter Cohen

I found “The Overwhelming” a difficult evening of theater that often disappoints but ends quite compellingly.

Most certainly, “The Overwhelming” is not an easy play to produce. And for that alone Company One has my respect. They could have gone for the safe bet, fare that is easy to digest; instead, the troupe chose a story about genocide, set in the African country of Rwanda in 1994.

Given the shape the world is in, at present, this play is not an unreasonable choice - just think of Darfur or Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Technically, Zimbabwe’s disintegration is not a case of genocide, but the violence that Mugabe and his clique have visited on it comes close.

Obehi Janice (Elise Kayitesi)
and Lyndsay Allyn Cox (Linda White-Keeler) in The Overwhelming

But while I understand the reason for presenting such a play, I have a problem with this particular one. The story is quite contrived; instead of vibrant, engaging dialogue you get speeches and little lectures; and instead of confrontations that reveal who the characters are, and what they struggle for, you get shouting matches. The director could have done more to stage the play in a manner to offset its shortcomings.

And yet the last scenes make up for much of that. All of a sudden you do have conflict - and a truly tragic one at that. And much of the effort that went into the play pays off. I will not reveal the play’s climax, except to say that in those final scenes we get a real sense of what happened at the time in Rwanda - how shockingly easy men (and women) lose their humanity, almost as if they had lost nothing more than an umbrella or a hat. And that what we hold to be enduring and reliable - our institutions, our values, our art - turns out to be of little more protection than a soap bubble’s skin.

The play has a quite large cast and the director, Shawn LaCount, does not always seem to know what to do with them all. But the troupe includes talented actors of African origin (and accent). In particular John Oluwole Adekoje, Tory Bullock, Chima Chikazunga and Obehi Janice - they all have cameo moments that breathe life into the play. But the flat dialogue makes it hard for everyone to shine for too long.

Finally, I wish the set-designer Sean Cote, had given more thought to the fact that the play is set in Central Africa - I missed the colors, the visual chaos of a developing country. Obviously such effects - for a small theater like Company One - are also a question of money. But not just; more could have been done, not with money, but with imagination.

So, again - if you are one of those people for whom the pleasure of going to the theater includes being challenged - go see this show. You will be rewarded with a powerful finish.

Peter Cohen studied at Princeton and Harvard. It was at Harvard, at age thirty-one, that he broke through with the non-fiction novel “The Gospel According to the Harvard Business School,” which became a bestseller. Cohen’s play with music, “A Ship to Zion,” was produced by a Kingston, Jamaica, company. It won its lead actor the Jamaican Oscar for best male actor; the original production was subsequently invited to Zurich, and to the Caracas International Theater Festival.

Some of Cohen’s plays have been produced by prominent European theaters such as: Schauspielhaus Zurich (in cooperation with Swiss National Radio); Kulturfabrik Kampnagel, Hamburg; Hackesches Hof Theater, Berlin; Theaterhaus Gessnerallee, Zurich and Theater Freiburg, Freiburg i.B., Germany.
In May 2009 a new play, “To Pay the Price,” got a full production Off Broadway; Bob Kalfin, a veteran of Broadway, directed.

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Friend of the Court brief:

Director Shawn LaCount

First, I’d like to thank all of you for your thoughtful critiques. It’s great to be part of an ongoing dialogue on theatre, and I hope we’ll have more opportunities to engage like this in the future. I will say that as a founding member of the company dedicated to “changing the face of Boston theatre,” I would love to see some of the diverse faces in the Boston theatre community participating in the discussion.

It’s no surprise that three critics with different areas of expertise found different strengths and weaknesses in Company One’s production of “The Overwhelming,” and all of you have certainly given us a lot to think about. What I found most interesting, though, are the questions of cultural sensitivity and veracity raised by all three, so I think that’s where I’ll focus for this response.

With a play like this, I think we all – cast, crew, director, audience member – have an inclination to try to provide answers: what makes a genocide or a holocaust happen? But I don’t think we’re capable of that. They continue to happen all over the world, time and time again, even though we say we’ll never let them happen again. So at some point in the rehearsal process, we decided to move away from the idea of putting an academic or historical stamp on the events. It felt condescending, in a way – as if we were taking a superior national, cultural, or racial view.

That’s not to say the show doesn’t provide answers, but I think the answers are not political. I think the answers are individual, paralleling the country’s conflict with this family’s conflict, and speaking to how we make our decisions, specifically in the face of our deepest fears. I always think the concept of “fear” makes for good drama.

Like Professor Longman, I was troubled by the idea that the audience is seeking an historical record in this production, and if I can speak for the playwright, J.T. Rogers, I don’t think his recounting of his research is intended to give the piece a documentary authority. Our approach was not to educate, but to illuminate major questions – to put the audience in the shoes of many different characters, all asking, “What would I do?” If anything, “The Overwhelming” emphasizes that the very idea of truth is always subjective, and there is no neutrality when it comes to issues of life and death. I think that’s what makes it such a good story, and one that I wanted to take part in telling.

A number of new pieces on World Books since the last update in September, including my podcast interview with Benjamin Moser about his biography of Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) entitled “Why This World” from Oxford University Press.

The Brazilian writer’s challenging stream-of-consciousness technique, lack of political bite, physical beauty and, Moser argues, her Jewishness, worked against her brand of genius during the great Latin American literature boom of the 1960s and 1970s. In his compelling biography Moser makes the case, at enthusiastic length, that Lispector is ripe for rediscovery.

A number of major writers agree. For Nobel prize-winning writer Orhan Pamuk she is “one of the twentieth century’s most mysterious writers.” Colm Tóibín insists that she is “one of the hidden geniuses of twentieth century literature, in the same league as Flann O’Brien, Borges, and Pessoa. Her stories and imaginative procedures are utterly original and brilliant, haunting and disturbing.”

The podcast page includes a list of books for those interested in Lispector — I am currently reading the new edition (Haus Publishing) of “The Apple in the Dark,” translated by Gregory Rabassa at the moment and it is a dreamy beauty.

Other World Book offerings include Tommy Wallach’s favorable evaluation of “As God Commands” Italian author Niccolò Ammaniti’s follow-up to his international best-seller “I’m Not Scared.”

New contributor Roberta Silman finds Paula Jacques’s autobiographical novel “Light of My Eye” to be a heart-wrenching chronicle of the dissolution of Egyptian Jewish life, the story of a family “chased out of Paradise.”

Finally, even after five centuries a classic work of Spanish literature, Celestina, with the assistance of a lively new version in English by acclaimed translator Margaret Sayers Peden, proffers all the sex, drama, and violence necessary for an HBO mini-series. Critic Mónica Szurmuk revels in the lurid melodrama of it all.

October includes the usual line-up of plays by seal-of-approval dramatists, Edward Albee and Conor McPherson, but there’s some welcome new blood, from Punchdrunk’s athletic adaptation of “Macbeth” to “Little Black Dress,” playwright Ronan Noone’s latest salvo at our national psyche, and “The Overwhelming,” the Boston premiere of a critically acclaimed study of Americans blundering in Rwanda.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee. Presented by the Publick Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA, through October 24. The tantalizing acting team of Shakespeare and Company’s creative monarch Tina Packer and the preternaturally controlled Nigel Gore as the embattled Martha and George may add some zing to this acidic warhorse.

Bash by Neil LaBute. Presented by Theater on Fire at the Charlestown Working Theatre, Charlestown, MA, through October 17. I have been increasingly critical of LaBute’s theater work, but this early collection of monologues centered on Mormons in trouble possessed considerable firepower when I saw a production years ago. It will be interesting to see if it still carries much sacrilegious punch.

Little Black Dress by Ronan Noone. Presented by Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, Boston, MA, through October 25. Local playwright Ronan Noone continues to examine the dark side of America in his latest play, which deals with “the twisted dreams lurking behind the video arcade.”

The cast includes two Elliot Norton Award-winning actors, Jeremiah Kissel and Marianna Bassham, along with newcomers Karl Baker Olson and Alex Pollock. BPT is also serving up an offer that will be hard for some to refuse: Wear your little black dress to the show and receive $5 off a General Admission ticket. Discount applied at the box office.

Everything in the Garden by Edward Albee. Presented by the Brandeis Theatre Company, Laurie Theater, Brandeis University, October 8 through October 18. It is hard not to be curious about this student production of a rarely produced play by Edward Albee. The 1967 script is an adaptation of a 1962 play about desperate suburbanites by Giles Cooper.

Sleep No More, by the British theater company Punchdrunk. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre at The Old Lincoln School, 194 Boylston Street, Brookline, MA, October 8 through 31. The award-winning British theater company Punchdrunk makes its U.S. debut with this no doubt highly combustible (given that the A.R.T.’s fall motif is “Shakespeare Exploded!”) version of “Macbeth” told “through the lens of a Hitchcock thriller.”

Watch your step because you may stumble into “something wicked”: “The audience will have the freedom to roam the environment and experience a sensory journey as they choose what to watch and where to go in this unique theatrical adventure.”

The Seafarer by Conor McPherson. Presented by the Merrimack Repertory Theatre, Lowell, MA, October 15 through November 8. I find most of McPherson’s plays to be top heavy with gab, but this script was nominated for four Tony Awards, including Best Play. And it revolves around a high-stakes poker game well lubricated with alcohol, so maybe this time around the dramatic action will amount to more than talk.

Shooting Stars by Stephen Dietz. Presented by the Trinity Repertory Company, Providence, Rhode Island, October 16 through November 22. The publicity tells us this is a “truly smart romantic comedy”: “A young man and woman fell in love in college, and promised each other they’d change the world. Twenty years later, they meet unexpectedly in a snow-bound airport.” Chances are the world hasn’t changed all that much, but maybe a loving bond is in the offing? Fred Sullivan Jr. directs.

The Overwhelming by J.T. Rogers. Presented by Company One at the Boston Center for the Arts, October 30 through November 21. I was in Chicago last spring and there was considerable buzz about this play, so I am grateful it is receiving its Boston premiere. The plot deals with Americans behaving badly in Rwanda in the early 1990s; Shawn LaCount directs.

The Donkey Show Conceived by Randy Weiner. Directed by Diane Paulus and Randy Weiner. Presented by the American Repertory Theater at Zero Arrow Street, Cambridge, MA Presented by American Repertory Theater, at OBERON (Zero Arrow Theater), Cambridge, MA through January 9, 2010.

Reviewed by Bill Marx

Shakespeare in Disco Inferno: Tytania (Rebecca Whitehurst) carried by the fairies (Cameron Oro and Mike Heslin) Photo: Marcus Stern.

The notion that theater should be visceral and interactive isn’t new: back in the ‘30s Bertold Brecht famously asserted that theater should aim for crowd-friendly, live-or-die side-taking energy of a baseball game. But for Diane Paulus, the new artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre, the impression left by her fun (given your level of tolerance for disco, high-priced drinks, and Shakespearean kitsch) but silly debut production/disco dance party suggests that theater may not be at the center of her version of a theatrical event. At least this time around, drama turns out to be an attenuated side show at the circus.

Brecht the Marxist desires theater that galvanizes all ages. Paulus, programming in a balkanized American consumer culture, tailors her theater events for niche audiences. “The Donkey Show” is firmly aimed at a younger demographic that is into ‘70s retro: to my surprise, the audience knew the words to “YMCA.” No chance, however, that they will be exposed to any of Shakespeare’s poetry during the evening — there are no lines from the play while the plot has been sliced, diced, and snorted into an incoherent hash of sex, drugs, athletics, and supernatural doings at the Mafia-owned Club Oberon.

In “The Donkey Show” Shakespeare’s romance exists solely to provide opportunities for gymnastic eye candy. Sweaty, nimble, and buff, A.R.T. cast members jump, skitter, climb, cavort, and undulate among the dancing party goers; they scamper up and down the walls, platforms, tables, and stairs in the cabaret-ized Zero Arrow Theater. Their colorful costumes are skimpy and glittery; the lighting glaring.

The conga line of disco tunes, from “I Love the Nightlife’’ to “Never Knew Love Like This Before’’ provide jokey commentary on the dramatic action, such as it is. To my eyes, the audience’s attention drifted during the broad Bardic interludes: the young’uns were patiently waiting for the next classic boody-shaking song to spin. And who could blame them? The Bard has a snow ball’s chance in Paulus’s “Disco Inferno.”

Still, watching the pleasure-seeking mob of twentysomethings boogying away, flirting with the performers and practicing pick-up lines is a refreshing sight given the diminishing army of Gray Panthers who usually attend the theater. And for those oldsters who survived the disco period it was amusing to hear the tunes and even shake an antique groove thing.

Fairies on Fire: Cob Web struts his stuff... (Cameron Oro, Eric Johnson, Tom Fish, Mike Heslin). Photo: Marcus Stern.

Beyond saying that the experience was galvanic but empty, Paulus and Weiner’s dance-a-thon disarms criticism. The A.R.T cast members execute lots of gender bending and wild pantomime during the evening but the event isn’t about calibrated comic performances but the art of hyper-shaking a leg.

The ideal evaluators of “The Donkey Show” would be an “expert” panel inspired by Reality-TV shows such as “So You Think You Can Dance,” with numerical scores for the best hoofers. For me, the quartet of male fairies (Mike Heslin, Cameron Oro, Tom Fish, and Eric Johnson) stole the show, flipping and flopping with the maximum of personality. They had no dramatic role to play so they had the most freedom to do their own thing.

The challenge for Paulus is that, once she pulls in the young, will she provide anything provocative and dramatic for them or for the rest of us?

The with-it “Boston Globe” reviewer argues that some of the darker elements elements in Shakespeare’s play are on display but I don’t see them amid the campy exhibitionism. Yes, cocaine is used for nefarious sexual purposes and there’s an imaginatively stylized image of woman-on-donkey action. But the illicit is treated as just another giddy part of the cartoon antics, a funky parody of chic “bad” behavior. How disturbing can a show be that advertises in its program that it is not just entertainment but a potential franchise (”The Blue Donkey Show”?), available to perk up “birthdays, girls’ nights out, bachelorette parties, corporate events, and more.” (What about Bat Mitzvahs?)

The most intriguing part of “The Donkey Show” is that, even though it claims to be a nostalgic homage to the outré hedonism of the ‘70s, it was first produced in 1999, its success in New York and around the world paralleling the rise and fall of the Bush Administration, the cheerleader for the deregulated economic excess and shop-till-your-credit-card-dies mania that has led to the current worldwide financial blow out. In this sense the show reflects rather than examines the party-on-to-disaster spirit of the time.

Of course, Shakespeare knew that living “la vida loca” could only last for so long: during the final speech in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” Puck returns the delighted if chastened audience to reality (”That you have but slumb’ red here/ While these visions did appear”). But Paulus and “The Donkey Show” don’t want the good times to stop: “Don’t let the party end when the DJ stops spinning. Share your pics and videos on our fan page” proclaims the program. It will be fascinating to see when the belly flop into escapism ends and contact with reality begins in Paulus’s populist dreams.

Instead of a critique for World Books this past week I finished up a review of Australian writer Kate Grenville’s historical novel “The Lieutenant” for the “Los Angeles Times.” This is a well-written, well-meaning study of understanding between colonized and colonizers in the 18th century Australia; the emphasis is on the experiences of a resolutely enlightened individual who sees the barbarity of the “civilized” point-of-view.

The most engaging aspect of the book is how Grenville shows that science, and its generation of a non-religious but moral point of view, creates empathy for non-Europeans. For H. G. Wells, unfettered empiricism leads to imperialism — for Grenville it encourages an appreciation of cultural difference, which results in mutual respect.

Mario Bellatin: A Mexican experimentalist

Evelio Rosero's novel The Armies won this year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

MIchael Tilson Thomas hosts his musical memoir about his grandparents, The Thomashevskys, at Tanglewood

by Helen Epstein

I’m a fan of the serious introspective kind of memoir, that tries to wrest meaning from existential and emotional chaos. But I’m also drawn to those memory projects that document people and events that have disappeared or been disappeared from history. This second type of memoir is usually a labor of love, demanding years of exhaustive research in archives, personal interviews and over the internet.

Because such excavation leads the explorer in many different directions and often turns up diverse wonderful documents – genealogical and business records, maps, family letters, diaries and photographs, to name just a few artifacts — some memoirists choose to construct websites rather than go through the lengthy process of writing and publishing a narrative.

Memoir has extended the concept of such memory narratives across all the arts these days: weaving the narrator’s personal memories and research memory into music, theater, dance, painting, photography, and performance. The deft and polished Thomashefsky Project, now in its 10th year of development, mixes all of it up into a true multi-media memoir.

The Project belongs to Michael Tilson Thomas, veteran conductor and now Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony. Although Tilson Thomas grew up playing classical music and worked closely with such giants of that world as Heifitz, Piatigorsky, Stravinsky and Boulez – to name but a few – the Yiddish theater world of his grandparents Boris and Bessie always loomed large. Their story is, in fact, the stuff of family myth: as mere teenagers, the two of them came out of what the conductor calls “Nowhere, Ukraine” to become stars of the American Yiddish Theater.

Boris (1868-1939) fled Russia at age 12, crossed the Atlantic in steerage, and became a child soprano at the Henry St. Shul in New York at 14. He saw Yiddish theater for the first time in New York City when a friend took him, fell in love with it and decided that he could do it too.

Although Roumanian actor and playwright Abraham Goldfaden – who is generally credited with establishing the first Yiddish Theater — took his company to Russia, Boris had never seen those productions. Czar Alexander II’s assassination in 1881 and the pogroms that ensued prompted a huge emigration of Jews – including Yiddish actors – to western Europe and the United States. All Yiddish Theater was banned in Russian in 1883, with the result that it migrated west with its audience.

At 16, according to Tilson Thomas, his grandfather was gifted and driven enough to have become a leading man, touring up and down the Northeast corridor from Boston to Washington, D.C. In Baltimore, a 14-year-old girl named Bessie saw the show, fell in love with the star, and a year later moved in with him.

Boris died before his American grandson was born in 1944, and did not tell him his version of events. But Bessie lived until 1962 – “lived the lobby life of a Hollywood hotel,” according to her grandson, with “flame-red hair into her 80s, cigarette-holder, big sun glasses, and huge stack of Yiddish newspapers.”

When she came to her son’s home in the San Fernando Valley, she’d take Michael aside and say, “Your parents are nice conventional people. But you — you’re like me!” She told him stories of her glory days, sang the songs she had once sung onstage, gave him the tails she wore in her trademark trouser roles and sighed, “You don’t know who I am.” As a teenager, Michael found his grandmother fascinating but was neither interested in the music nor in the Yiddish language. Both she and Boris left behind long memoirs of their experiences in Yiddish, along with boxes of photographs, theater posters, scripts, scores, costumes and newspaper clippings that sat untouched for half a century.

A scene from The Thomashevskys at Tanglewood

Michael Tilson Thomas says nothing about his parents’ relationship to his flamboyant grandparents but one infers that they distanced themselves from the Yiddish world. Theodore Herzl Thomashefsky, Michael’s father, changed his name to Ted Thomas, married a schoolteacher and moved from New York to California.

The conductor doesn’t say what, exactly, prompted him to dig into the enormous number of family documents but the Thomashefsky Project began in 1998 as an attempt to document the family stories with dates, facts and context. The research team uncovered more than 1000 items including not one but three untranslated memoirs by Bessie and a clip from the 1935 film “Bar Mitzvah” a clip of which was shown, was found, restored and is owned by The National Center for Jewish Film. After performances in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco beginning in 2005, the material has been streamlined to run two and a half hours.

Although the stage of Seiji Ozawa Hall was meant to suggest a cabaret, the 35-piece orchestra, the four miked actor-singers, the screen on which posters, photographs, film clips, and English subtitles were projected made the audience feel as though they were part of a giant wedding. “Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome,” the conductor greeted the audience from the middle of the stage, and urged them to clap along with the circus-like overture to Joseph Rumshinsky’s Khantshe in amerike.

“That was the March of the Jewish suffragettes,” he explained and “the greatest success of the 1915 season as played by Madame Bessie Thomashefsky.” Then he launched into a unique blend of memoir and musicology.

The Thomashefsky Project aims to “educate, elevate and entertain.” It also recreates in far more polished form than the original a disparaged, poor people’s theater, its characters, its language and especially its music. In the growing Yiddish-speaking Northeast corridor of the U.S, in the 1890s and 1900s the Thomashefskys and their work were considered “shund ” – trashy, schmaltzy, and low-brow – compared to the more intellectual Jacob Adler, who produced serious translations of plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen and Shaw and whose daughter Stella Adler, became the doyenne of American acting. When Jacob Adler announced that he would be doing a Yiddish King Lear,Boris responded with a Hamlet “translated and improved” by Thomashefsky.

Shund or not, I found Michael Tilson Thomas’s fast-paced resurrection of Goldfaden and Rumshinsky’s century-old songs and skits great fun. Michael Tilson Thomas made for a relaxed, engaging narrator and his four performers, Judy Blazer, Neal Benari, Ronit Widmann-Levy and Eugene Brancoveanu were uniformly excellent. The BSO players made the most of the simple, often predictable music.

Although the multi-media blitz of acting, graphics, sound and narration were too much for an Old Media type like myself to take in all at once, the Thomashefsky Project made for an evening where everyone left smiling.

Helen Epstein is the author of memoirs “Children of the Holocaust” and “Where She Came From.”

Two new World Books reviews up at PRI’s The World.

Alexander Nemser lauds “An Elegy for Easterly,” a collection of sharply-written stories by Petina Gappah that explores the hyperbolic disaster of Robert Mugabe’s presidency. “Here are the daily lives of the country’s mechanics, bankers, students, housewives, traveling salesmen, beggars, and madwomen, everyone lost in the flood of Zimbabwe’s inflated currency.”

I review “Anonymous Celebrity,” Brazilian writer Ignácio de Loyola Brandão’s surprisingly entertaining satire of our culture’s terminal obsession with fame. The fun served up by this book is unexpected because the target — the tyranny of the photo-op — is so easy. But this is a highly inventive burlesque of the desire to be over-the-top.

Author Drago Jančar

Jančar won the 2007 Jean Améry Award for Essay Writing. The citation reads:

A novelist, playwright and essayist, the Slovene Drago Jančar, born in 1948, is one of the most prominent figures of Central European literature. A dissident par excellence who has maintained a critical distance to the rulers of every regime and has never shied away from breaking national taboos and intellectual fashions, Jančar, as an essayist, knows how to put forward his arguments based on historical knowledge, consistent thinking and passionate ethics. However, he does not care for dogmatic certitude but rather for questioning such certitudes and showing the inconsistency of things. In numerous books including the last published collection of essays “Brioni”, Jančar has proved to be an independent thinker, competent stylist and an author who takes up Central European history with all its upheavals in order to constantly renegotiate the key questions of our epoch.

Two more reviews posted on my World Books page at PRI’s The World.

Tommy Wallach doesn’t think promises of profundity are kept amid all the rampant obscurity in Yoko Tawada’s “The Naked Eye.”

I have fun reviewing two horror novellas by Swiss writers that cast a skeptical eye on their country’s superstitious masses. Jacques Chessex’s terse “The Vampire of Ropraz” deals with ghastly mutilations in a Swiss village at the turn of the century, while the classic nineteenth-century novel “The Black Spider” serves up chillingly glorious visions of the Devil unleashing hordes of killer bugs on the countryside.

Next week for World Books I plan to review “Anonymous Celebrity,” Brazilian writer Ignácio de Loyola Brandão’s amusingly acidic satire of our self-destructive obsession with fame, fortune, and gossip.

You want a racy, nineteenth-century epic about sex, sin, drugs, and prostitution set in China? Here it is.

Two more pieces on international fiction for World Books, the feature I edit for PRI’s The World.

A review of Night Roads, a compelling novel by the neglected Russian writer Gaito Gazdanov. Set between the two world wars, the book is narrated by a cab-driver who wheels guiltily and memorably through the streets of late night Paris.

I’ve also come up with a short but juicy list of challenging summer reads, international fiction (such as the stunning Cuban novel “The Halfway House”) that calls for concentration, especially on the beach. I may add some more volumes in the coming week.

Also ready to be posted on Monday: Tommy Wallach reviews Yoko Tawada’s “The Naked Eye,” a stylized-to-the-max tale of kidnapping and alienation.

I am juggling editing and writing duties between two blogs, theartsfuse and World Books for the website of BBC/PRI’s radio program The World, which is produced at WGBH in Boston. The section aims to be a critical conversation made up of reviews, commentaries, interviews, podcasts, and news stories about international literature. Respected fiction and non-fiction writers as well as journalists invite readers to evaluate books and draw connections between culture and current events. For interested artsfuse readers who are not familiar with World Books here is a round-up of what was posted last week on the page, along with some coming attractions.

Posted on World Books Last week:

Tommy Wallach reviews Marcel (son of Paul) Theroux’s novel “Far North,” a post-apocalyptic novel set in Siberia that the critic believes does “a remarkable job evoking the breath-freezing cold of that world, giving even the book’s most implausible ideas the ring of truth.”

Mr. Short Fuse, Harvey Blume, examines “The Mao Case,” a mystery novel by Qiu Xiaolon in which the author’s favorite gumshoe, Chief Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai police force, looks into the spooky revival of Mao worship in contemporary China.

I posted an interview with John Bolcom, who translated the remarkable collection of stories “There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late At Night” by Cao Naiqian. The author, in his day job, is a police detective in the Public Security Bureau of Datong City in rural China, Sharp, bleak, and minimal, these tales of peasant life on the edge revolve around incest, bestiality, suicide, murder, and mental illness. After I read the volume I had to talk to Bolcom about Naiqian, whose brusque style offers a compelling alternative to the kind of over-the-top Chinese fiction that gets translated.

Gaito Gazdanov -- Russian Cab Driver Extraordinaire

I have also posted a new World Books podcast, an interview with Hungarian writer Ferenc Barnás. His autobiographical novel, “The Ninth” provides an alternately bleak and antic look at life in Hungary under Communism. The narrator is a nine-year-old boy, the ninth child in an eccentric family defeated by material and spiritual poverty. Out of the boy’s struggle to survive amid squalor Barnás creates a nervy moral fable.

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.

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