As much as I love good writing, literary magazines are a fairly unknown quantity for me (virtually all of my reading is good old-fashioned books, preferably novels). However, I'm always open to new literary experiences, and receiving things like the work you can see in the photo make it very easy to try something a little different. Be careful, though - looks can be deceiving ;)
*****
Granta 127: Japan (review copy courtesy of Australian distributor Allen & Unwin) is the latest edition of the quarterly magazine for new writing. This issue has been released to coincide with the first-ever edition of the Japanese version of the magazine, and for this reason, the content is a hybrid of work from Japanese writers and artists and contributions from Western writers. Oh, and it's very pretty, too :)
The layout and design are excellent, and (naive as I am) I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was actually a book, not a magazine, with full colour throughout. There's a mix of genres (stories, poems, non-fiction) plus art and photos, the most memorable of which is the cover, from Yuji Hamada's 'Primal Mountain' series:
"With this work, what is most important is the image of a mountain in the viewer's mind. In other words, it is not the maker of the images who establishes and delivers what is to be seen; rather, I surrendered the work to the viewer's first impression, which led me to title the series 'Primal Mountain'." (translated by Ivan Vartanian)
'Primal Mountain', p.97 (Granta Publications, 2014)
Oh, and there are some ads too - it is a magazine, after all ;)
Of course, our focus is on the writing, and there are some big names on board. One of those is Hiromi Kawakami, author of The Briefcase (AKA Strange Weather in Tokyo), and her contribution is 'Blue Moon' (translated by Lucy North), a real(?) story of an agonising wait to see if the writer has cancer. It's a poignant piece, with haikus in snowy Russia and reflections on death:
"The Universe, I myself, the birds winging through the skies, the snowflakes swirling through Moscow... No one sees the beginning of these things, and no one can predict how they will end. How precious it is, how precarious it is to be living."
'Blue Moon' (p.113)
The writer's brush with death encourages her to think more about what it means to actually live.
David Mitchell is another of the big guns, and his story 'Variations on a Theme by Mister Donut' is an excellent piece - well, six, actually. The story looks at a brief moment in time in one of the ubiquitous budget coffee shops, seen by six different people, each of whom has arrived at that moment by a very different path. The grumpy old man, the hard-working manager, the foreign 'English teacher', the Burberry-clad young woman - a nice cross-section of Japanese society gathered around one shiny counter :)
Perhaps of more interest, though, are the new discoveries to be made, and there are plenty of good writers here who aren't quite so well known in the West. I enjoyed Kyoko Nakajima's 'Things Remembered and Things Forgotten' (translated by Ian M. McDonald), a clever story about memories of the past (and how they might not always be too accurate). Another to impress was Hiroko Oyamada's 'Spider Lilies' (translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter), another of those odd, slightly off (Ogawaesque!) tales which Japanese writers excel at, this one connecting flowers, breast milk and maternal jealousy...
As can be expected, recent events have made their mark on Japanese writing, and Toshiki Okada's 'Breakfast' (translated by Michael Emmerich) is one which touches on post-Fukushima depression. In this story, a woman flies back to a Tokyo she denies exists, merely in order to cut her only remaining tie - with her husband:
"An awareness of how impossible it was for her to visit Tokyo without marking out the beginning and end of her stay, anger at the circumstances that made her feel this way, a wrenching sense of guilt toward Tokyo and all the people who lived here, this tangle of emotions bore down on her relentlessly, crushing her."
'Breakfast' (p.35)
It's an excellent story, made better by its elaborate, comma-laden style, wonderfully written - and translated :)
The gloomy outlook isn't confined to Okada's piece, with several of the other writers sharing his sense of pessimism. Yukiko Motoya's 'The Dogs' (translated by Asa Yoneda) is a strange story set in the mountains in winter, with sinister canine companions and a town slowly disappearing without a trace. However, when it comes to strange, Tomoyuki Hoshino can always come up with the goods (c.f. We, the Children of Cats and Lonely Hearts Killer), and in 'Pink' (translated by Brian Bergstrom), he describes a freak heatwave which drives people to spin around and around - cooling themselves and speeding up time in the process...
As mentioned, apart from the great translated J-Lit, there's plenty here from outsiders looking in. Ruth Ozeki's 'Linked' is a short piece looking at her grandfather's life, attempting to understand him and his art. Another interesting view is from Pico Iyer's 'The Beauty of the Package', in which the writer examines the tacky Japanese wedding 'experience' and wonders if it's actually beautiful after all if you look more closely. There's also a non-Anglophone view, as Andrés Felipe Solano's 'Pig Skin' (translated by Nick Caistor) was originally written in Spanish. It's an amusing story about a writer who gets inspiration from a chance encounter on a ferry, a Colombian-Japanese-Korean co-production, brought into English by the excellent Mr. Caistor :)
Sadly, there are limits to my energy (and the length of a review people can be expected to read) - there's just too much here to do justice to. I haven't even mentioned Sayaka Murata's amusing take on the sexless Japanese in 'A Clean Marriage' (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori) or Toh Enjoe's 'Printable' (translated by David G. Boyd), a story set in a post-3D-Printer world. Well, I have now, obviously ;)
*****
Granta 127: Japan is an excellent addition to my Japanese library, and it's a must have for anyone interested in J- Lit (and with Bellezza's Japanese Literature Challenge 8 starting this month...) - but wait, there's more! If you go to the Granta website, there's some exclusive online content free of charge, including excerpts of some stories (with comments by the translators) and extra stories, including one by Yoko Ogawa. What are you waiting for - get over there, now!
It all makes for an intriguing, multi-faceted look at a fascinating country. As it says on the back cover:
"Everyone knows this country and no one knows it."
That may be very true, but this collection will help you learn just a little more about the land of the rising sun ;)
I first heard about today's book a good while back when McSweeney's Quarterly Concern devoted a whole edition to its game of literary Chinese Whispers. Having been tempted to give it a go back then, I was very pleased to hear that it would be appearing elsewhere in book form - and it's now even reached Australia...
*****
Multiples, edited by Adam Thirlwell (review copy courtesy of Australian distributor Allen & Unwin), is a book centred on a simple, yet potentially dangerous, idea. An original text is taken, translated into a second language, then translated into another language, then... you get the idea. There are eleven strands to the book, and most of the original stories eventually end up in six different, mutated versions. As you can imagine, the end product rarely bears much of a resemblance to the original...
The cover proclaims that the book consists of "12 stories in 18 languages by 61 authors", and if you think I'm going to review all of them, you've got another think coming. While not all of the efforts were stellar, there were several which had me noting the writer's name down for future reference (and a couple which had me adding names to my Sheldon-Cooperesque list of mortal enemies). The best way to look at this though is probably to take a couple of examples from the strands.
One of the shorter pieces was 'Geluk', originally written by Dutch author A.L. Snijders, and Lydia Davis' (presumably) faithful translation ('Luck') was followed by Yannick Haenel's French version, 'Chance' - one which was a lot smoother and may have betrayed the style of the original a little. Of course, as Haenel says in his endnotes:
"And no doubt I wanted, when translating this heartbreaking text in which a young man and a young woman do not manage to fall in love, to re-establish the love that - I'm sure of it - exists between them. I make them live together when, it seems, everything keeps them apart. I swear that I didn't do this deliberately. I really believed what I wrote, while I was writing it. You see, I'm not an anarchist, a little antichrist, and above all, whether I like it or not, I am French."
p.94 (Portobello Books, 2013)
You see, it's not his fault he changed the story - his blood made him do it ;)
I was quite happy to accept Haenel's tongue-in-cheek excuses, but the next step wasn't quite as palatable. Heidi Julavits ('Chance') back-translated Haenel's version into English, but as her French wasn't amazing she decided to use a dictionary guess the words she didn't know... Which meant that Peter Stamm's typically elegant version ('Zufall') used, and built upon, some of the ludicrous errors Julavits incorporated (including moving the music lessons detailed in the story from the attic to the garden!).
Once Jeffrey Eugenides had given the story its third lease of life in English ('Happenstance'), it was over to Sjón to tie things up in Icelandic ('Atvik'). Sadly, I wasn't able to make much of this one, except to note that it was about a third of the length of the original. Happily, the great man cleared this up for us in the notes - you see, he allowed his son to memorise Eugenides' version and then had him recite it back three weeks later. And into the book it went...
Hopefully, the above description gives you the idea. Each time the stories go through another pair of hands, something happens to them. Sometimes the changes are minimal, occasionally the style changes radically, and in some versions the story is radically altered. Danilo Kiš' story 'Cipele' ('Shoes') survives several interpretations virtually unscathed, but when Camille de Toledo gets hold of it, it is transformed into a tale of a writer's struggle to the death with Google Translate (and a most interesting one it is too!). While John Banville's subsequent rendering is a beautifully elegant piece of writing, I'm not quite sure how he managed to return to something close to the original after de Toledo's effort...
Of course, these digressions are what makes Multiples worth reading; if the job had been carried out by professional translators, with larger foreign-language vocabularies and smaller egos, the end result would probably have been more accurate, but not half as entertaining. I'm not sure many readers would have stuck around for six fairly similar renderings of a short story, especially when half of them are in a foreign language...
Having said that though, Thirlwell cleverly acknowledges that many readers will not be that proficient in foreign languages themselves, and every second story in each strand is in English. I suppose that's just the way the world is... English is also privileged in another way - the stories written in foreign languages actually use a slightly smaller font (possibly as the publisher isn't expecting those stories to be read as much...).
As you would expect, I gave it my best shot, and while the Icelandic, Urdu, Hebrew and Chinese stories were beyond my reach, I did attempt to read as many of the versions as I could (or thought I could, which is by no means the same thing!). Luckily, thanks mainly to the predominance of Romance and Germanic languages, I was able to at least struggle through all but seven of the interpretations. I'm not saying it was easy though ;)
There's one more point to be made about Multiples though, and it's one which may surprise you. The original stories come from a variety of languages and include some by very well-known writers (e.g. Enrique Vila-Matas, László Krasznahorkai, Franz Kafka, Kenji Miyazawa), but... they don't actually appear in the book in the original form. When I first realised this, I was a little confused (not to mention disappointed), but the further I got into the book, the more I thought that this was a shrewd decision. You see, it seems rather apt that the reader gets to see copies of copies of an original whose existence we have to take on trust, which all makes for an elaborate construction based on a hollow centre - very deconstructionist ;)
I'm not sure this will be everyone's cup of tea (and you'll certainly enjoy it more if you have at least some background in languages), but Multiples is a fascinating look at what happens when writers are let loose on a task which really belongs in the hands of trained professionals. While some of the authors do their best to stay on task, often doing a respectable job, many are unable to resist the temptation to adorn the texts with their own style. Perhaps the final word, addressing this point, should go to Dave Eggers, in what is the whole of his comments on translating his Kafka piece:
"I took some liberties." (p.159)
Some of you may well have heard of the name Tove Jansson in connection with her famous series of stories about the Moomins. Others may even know that she went on to write works of fiction for grown-ups too. However, I doubt that anyone is aware that I have a very big bone to pick with Ms. Jansson...
You see, I read Comet in Moominland when I was a child - at about the same time as Halley's Comet was being discussed on television, leaving me with the horrible feeling that the world was about to end. Luckily, I (eventually) got over the trauma; otherwise, I could never have brought myself to try any more of Jansson's work ;)
*****
All of which brings us to today's book, Art in Nature (review copy courtesy of Australian publishers Allen & Unwin), a short collection of stories linked loosely by the theme of art and artists. Thomas Teal's excellent translation from the original Swedish, combined with a fairly light, playful style, makes this a book you can whisk through in a couple of reading sessions. Despite this though, there's a lot below the surface for the reader prepared to dig a little deeper into Jansson's world...
Many of the stories focus on artists, creators of all kinds who are connected by their inability to separate their talents from their personal lives. While this can lead the reader to sympathise with their plight, for example in the case of the titular hero of The Cartoonist (a man who is worried about exactly what happened to his predecessor), some of these people are simply not very nice.
In A Leading Role, a reasonably successful stage actress, about to take on her first major role, realises that the perfect model for the character she is to play is her cousin, a shy, dowdy, middle-aged woman. The actress invites the cousin to spend some time in her summer house, where she proceeds to intimidate and bully her poor relative - just to see how she reacts under pressure...
This charming woman is nothing compared to another of Jansson's creations though. The Locomotive is narrated by a nasty, unreliable character, a man who spends his spare time meticulously painting pictures of trains - despite never having been on one himself. An habitual loner, he becomes obsessed with a woman he sees at the local station, only to turn on her when she starts to get a little too close.
The story is told as a series of diary entries, but the writer continually interrupts himself, unable to write down his ideas clearly enough for his liking. At one point, he even decides to switch from first- to third-person, in order to achieve a more objective sense of detachment. The actual effect is to heighten the feeling that the writer is a little detached from reality...
Several of the tales feature characters who have their best years behind them, and The White Lady, a story about a group of women out for an evening at an exclusive restaurant situated on an island, is probably the most telling of these. A night that starts with levity and humour ends with the women feeling old and past it, faced with the reality of youth and beauty. In a nice touch, the story ends with a heavy irony; as the friends wait for the boat to take them back to the city:
"Look!" May cried. "There it comes. Isn't it like Charon's ferry or something? You like similes."
"By all means," Ellinor said. She was tired and in no mood for anyone's similes but her own. (p.64)
I wonder how many writers secretly feel like this ;)
Although the English title of the collection is Art in Nature, the original Swedish-language version was named after another of the stories, The Doll's House. This was one of my favourites, a story centred on a retired craftsman who decides to fill up his dull, empty days with a project to build a two-metre high edifice. The project begins on a whim, organically, seemingly building itself, but once the craftsman starts, he is unable to cut corners:
"Alexander was in the grip of a passion for perfection. He was not aware of how closely, how perilously, perfectionism and fanaticism are related." (p.76)
Gradually, the fanaticism begins to overshadow the perfectionism, causing some issues on the home front...
On the whole though, the title for the English-language edition is an apt one. While not all the stories have art and artists as their focus, most of the better ones do, and the title story itself (the first of the collection) is actually a fitting summary of the book as a whole. An old man is the caretaker of a temporary, outdoor art exhibition, a huge success which is scheduled to be wound up when the weather gets colder. One night, when he discovers a couple who have stayed behind in the park to celebrate a new acquisition, we see that the artistic aura of the exhibition has rubbed off on him. His thoughts as he gets ready to sleep that night could act as a motif for the whole collection:
"But what I said was completely right, he thought. It's the mystery that's important, somehow very important." (p.21)
And that mystery is the beauty of all art :)
