'A True Novel' by Minae Mizumura (Review)

When I first heard about today's choice, I was intrigued and very keen to get a copy.  I'm always happy to find new-to-me female Japanese writers, and a nice long book based on a Victorian classic sounded like something I would enjoy, especially during January in Japan.  I'm happy to report that it definitely lived up to expectations - truly, a novel that reached great heights :)

*****
Minae Mizumura's A True Novel (translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter, review copy courtesy of Other Press) is an 850-page reworking of the classic novel Wuthering Heights.  However, it's far from being a simple rewrite, being transplanted to Japan and progressing much more languidly than Brontë's tempestuous novel.

The prologue is told by a writer called Minae, a Japanese woman who has spent large parts of her life in the United States.  One day, a young Japanese man, Yusuke, approaches her, wanting to talk about a man that they've both encountered, Taro Azuma.  Azuma started off in the States as a chauffeur, a protégé of Minae's father, but eventually became a wealthy businessman before disappearing from the public eye.  Curious, Minae agrees to hear Yusuke's story - and it's a good one...

Burnt out by work the year before, Yusuke spent a week in the Karuizawa region, where he encountered Azuma and an elderly woman, Fumiko Tuschiya, at a small cottage.  She then spent several days telling the visitor a story, one about a man, a woman, two houses and a childhood love that extends beyond the grave.  For those obsessed with Victorian literature, it's a very familiar tale :)

A True Novel is a wonderful book.  It's a novel which compels the reader to take the time required to enjoy it; in fact, the writer (through Fumiko) makes sure that we are very clear as to what kind of tale this is going to be:

"I'm afraid there'll be a lot of digressions"
"That's all right."
"A lot.  Really a lot."
"No, it's okay."
The woman joined him on the porch and began.
p307 (Other Press, 2013)

Let me warn you now - she's most certainly not joking...

The reimagining of Wuthering Heights is a very clever idea, and for those who have read Brontë's novel, there are many instantly recognisable parallels.  The Heathcliff character is the brooding Taro, a moody outsider with an incomplete education and a dubious cultural heritage.  Even Minae recognises the clouds in his soul with her excellent comment:

"Why does he have to be so gloomy?' (p.57)

Yoko, the daughter of the family that helps Taro, fills the Cathy role, and she is every bit as headstrong, passionate and stubborn as her Victorian counterpart.

A True Novel is a much expanded version of Brontë's novel though, and much of that is because of Fumiko, the Nelly Dean of Mizumura's work.  In many ways, she is actually the main character here, and the story she tells Yusuke concerns herself just as much as it does the two star-crossed lovers.  We learn far more about her than we ever do about Nelly Dean, but there is something she has in common with the Victorian housekeeper - there is a lot more to her than meets the eye...

If A True Novel were simply a transplantation of Wuthering Heights into the Japanese countryside, then it would just be a superior form of fan-fiction, an entertaining curiosity.  However, there's a lot more to the novel than the Brontë factor.  One of the more interesting features of the book is its portrayal of the evolution of Japanese society after the Second World War.  As Fumiko progresses from farm girl to maid to successful working woman, we are shown a society recovering from the wartime disasters.  Mizumura describes the shift from post-war ruin to the economic boom, an event which showered money and Japanese ex-pats all over the world.  Later, we also see the bubble burst, an event which has serious consequences for several of the protagonists.

There's also a personal dimension to this social description.  In Minae's prologue (and post-script), the writer describes a woman caught between two worlds, one nostalgic for the country of her childhood.  She misses Japan, the books, the language, even the smell of the earth around her childhood home.  The irony is that when she returns, it's not her Japan any more; she is too Americanised, and Japan itself is unrecognisable from the country she left behind...

At the risk of outstaying my welcome, there's yet another aspect of the novel which has to be mentioned.  In addition to the Wuthering Heights parallels and the autobiographical side to the story, A True Novel is also an examination of J-Lit traditions.  In Japan, there is a strong culture of the 'I-Novel', a semi-autobiographical, confessional style of writing, and this is often contrasted with the imported European style of big, chunky novels told by an omniscient, impersonal narrator - in Japanese, a 'true novel'.  In this book, Mizumura (along with her alter-ego Minae) plays with the two different styles.  She says:

"What I set out to do was thus close to rewriting a Western novel in Japanese." (p.159)

In fact, she succeeds in combining the two forms - the prologue is an I-Novel, the rest is her attempt at a 'true novel'...

All of which simply means that it's a wonderful book, a great story with an excellent translation.  However, it's actually a beautiful object too - a two-volume box set with gorgeous covers and several black-and-white photos inside, depicting some of the settings for the novel.  When you consider how long this rambling review has been (and that I could have written a whole lot more), you'll realise what kind of book this is.  Perhaps some readers will find it a little slow, particularly in the middle of     Fumiko's extended story, but anyone schooled on Victorian blockbusters will know that there's nothing wrong with a story that takes its time :) 

A True Novel is a book which will appeal to readers of both of J-Lit and V-Lit, and if you love Wuthering Heights, it has that extra appealing dimension.  I'll leave you with one last quotation, this time from a scene where Yusuke (the Lockwood character...) is struggling to sleep in an unfamiliar bed:

"The night was warm, yet a chill ran through his body.  A ray of clear, bright moonlight shone at a sharp angle through the doorway.  In that clear light stood a girl wearing a summer kimono.  With her frizzy hair flaring out around her head, she stared up at Yusuke in the top bunk, her eyes wild, her tiny fist tightly clasping a round festival fan..." (pp205/6)

It's me, it's Yoko, I've come home - I'm so cold...

The 2014 Tony's Reading List Awards

A very good day to you all - welcome to The Tony's Reading List Awards for 2014!  The blog has been running for exactly six years now, and as always I'm celebrating the anniversary with my round-up of the good, the bad and the downright awful by handing out a few of my cherished prizes.  So, without further ado, let's see who soared and who bombed in 2014 :)

*****
Once again, we begin with the Most-Read Author Award, and heading the list this year are a couple of rather familiar names:

1=) Haruki Murakami (4)
1=) Natsume Soseki (4)

3=) O Chong-hui (3)

3=) Hwang Sok-yong (3)

I have to say that this award hasn't been completely finalised yet as the Koreans have put in a steward's enquiry.  While the Japanese pair take it 4-3 according to the stats on my list, O's three include various novellas and stories which could easily have been counted differently...

Nope, the verdict's in.  Haruki takes the prize, regaining the award he won back in 2009, and the Grand Master of J-Lit joins him thanks to a couple of December reads - well done, sirs :)

*****
After that close tussle, let's move onto a more clear-cut race, the struggle for the Most-Read Country award:

1) South Korea (30)

2) Japan (20)

3) Germany (11)

4) France (7)

5) Italy (5)

Boom!  After one book in six years (and one that was worst in class at that), the Koreans romped home in 2014, with only a late Japanese surge making the race look even a little bit competitive.  My new-found interest in K-Lit has been the story of the blog this year, and I suspect that things will look fairly similar in 2015 as well.  The ten books I read and reviewed from the Dalkey Archive Press Library of Korean Literature beat out every other country, aside from Japan and Germany, on their own ;)
 
If we look at the annual statistics for English-language books versus the rest of the world, you'll see that my focus on literature in translation continues to sharpen.  Of the 130 books I read, only 8 were originally published in English, meaning that an astounding 122 (of which I read 15 in the original language) were originally written in a language other than English.  Even last year's 90% hit-rate has been surpassed - those are big numbers, no matter which way you look at it...

*****
While it's all well and good to reward the enjoyable books of the year, New Year's Eve is also a time to reflect on the complete stinkers, which is why I always look forward to the Golden Turkey Award.  This year, once again, there were four contenders for the drumsticks:

The Frontier Within by Kobo Abe

Butterflies in November by Auður Ava Olafsdóttir

Why Translation Matters by Edith Grossman

One Spoon on This Earth by Hyun Ki-young

And the winner is...

One Spoon on This Earth!  Another award for the Koreans, then, although it's not one they would have wanted.  However, it's only right that I give an honourable mention to the person who made it all possible, translator Jennifer M. Lee.  Believe me when I say that this award really belongs to her... 

*****
Having dished out the minor awards, it's time to get down the real focus of the night, the Book of the Year Award. As has been the case for a few years now, each of my monthly wrap-ups has seen one book singled out as the pick of the month, and only these titles have been found worthy of contending for the ultimate honour (links are to my reviews). Many wonderful books have missed out because of this system, to which I can say only one thing - tough luck.

January - A True Novel by Minae Mizumura (Japan)

February - Anatomy of a Night by Anna Kim (Austria)

March - Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier (France)

April - Where Tigers Are At Home by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès (France)

May - They Were Counted by Miklós Bánffy (Hungary)

June - Tirza by Arnon Grunberg (Netherlands)

July - Paris by Marcos Giralt Torrente (Spain)

August - There a Petal Silently Falls by Ch'oe Yun (South Korea)

September - Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb (Hungary)

October - Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai (Hungary)

November - The Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard (Austria)

December - Zone by Mathias Énard (France)

Twelve of the best, I'm sure you'll agree :)  There are three nods each to France and Hungary, and two books from Austria, with works from Japan, Netherlands, Spain and South Korea rounding out the dozen.  Unsurprisingly, there's no room for an Anglophone book on the list this year...

Of course, where there's a longlist, there's also a shortlist, and here's mine: 

A True Novel

Where Tigers Are At Home

Seiobo There Below

The Old Masters

Zone

At which point, after a few stiff drinks, I had a good, long think before making my final decision - and here it is. The Tony's Reading List Book of the Year for 2014 is (highlight the blank area below with your cursor to see the winner):

A True Novel by Minae Mizumura

(translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter, published by Other Press)

Much more than an updated Japanese version of Wuthering Heights, A True Novel explores how much you can trust other people's versions of a story - and the wonderful product Other Press have developed makes the book even better.  Well done to everyone involved :)


*****
That's all for this year - it's time to look ahead now to the seventh year of the blog, a year that's going to get off to a quick start as January in Japan is about to begin!  Here's hoping it's a good one for all of you, and I do hope you'll join me again occasionally in 2015 :)

'Light and Dark' by Natsume Soseki (Review)

You may have seen our current Golden Kin-Yōbi giveaway of the book on the left, but I was actually lucky enough to recently get a copy of my own.  Columbia University Press very kindly sent me one of these beautiful hardbacks of the master work of a great Japanese writer.  Unfortunately, he never got around to finishing it - although some beg to differ on that question...

*****
Light and Dark (translated by John Nathan) is a novel Natsume Soseki was writing during his final, fatal illness.  The book, a meticulous psychological study of a married couple around the time of the First World War, first appeared in daily serial form in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, and it consists of 188 sections, each around two pages long.  Very different to his early, humorous works, it's generally considered Soseki's masterpiece.

The main characters of the story are Yoshio Tsuda, a thirty-year-old recently married company worker, and his wife Nobiko, usually called O-Nobu.  What little plot there is centres on Tsuda's stay at a small doctor's clinic to undergo, and then recover from, minor surgery.  Before the operation, he visits a few friends and relatives, and he receives people in turn while he is convalescing.  Not a lot really happens in terms of action, but beneath the surface...

Soseki uses his story to probe at the mental state of his main characters, and he takes turns in following the husband and wife.  As each stumbles into social encounters, the bland words they utter are of less significance than the thoughts churning inside their heads - the writer is much more concerned with what's going on inside than out.  A good example is a typical thought Tsuda has when 'talking' with his wife:

"Tsuda had the feeling that a failure to declare the absence of any particle of doubt would reflect on his character as a husband.  At the same time, to be seen as a pushover by a woman would be painfully distasteful.  Despite the battle for supremacy inside him between these two aspects of his ego, he appeared cool and collected on the surface."
pp.106/7 (Columbia University Press, 2013)

Soseki, in a Henry James-esque manner, offers us an insight into each speaker's thoughts and strategies - for this is all about games...

The main theme of the novel is married life and the way two people negotiate their roles and identity inside a marriage.  Tsuda and O-Nobu are recently married, but the two are not ideally matched; thus arises a battle for supremacy, one full of misunderstandings and conflicts.  While O-Nobu feels lighter away from husband, she is determined to possess him wholly, feeling that only she understands what is going on beneath his implacable exterior:

"Everything I have written in this letter is true.  I haven't lied, or exaggerated, or gone out of my way to put your minds at ease.  If anyone doubts this, I shall detest him, disdain him, spit in his face.  Because I know the truth better than he.  I have described the truth beyond the superficial facts on the surface.  A truth that is understood only by me.  But this is a truth that will have to be understood by everyone in the future." (p.178)

Both she and Tsuda profess to love each other; but what does that actually mean in a Japanese marriage... 

Their marriage is certainly not a relationship in isolation though.  They are surrounded by concerned (or interfering) family and friends, and in the Japan of the time, these are rather strong, heavy ties (in fact, more akin to chains...).  With many of these people, particularly Tsuda's younger sister O-Hide, quietly despising O-Nobu, both Tsuda and his wife have battles to fight on several fronts.  This makes it even more important for the two to resolve their differences and show a united face to the Okamotos, Yoshikawas and Fujiis.

There is, however, an obstacle to this coming together, and Soseki gradually hints at a deeper issue.  The reader eventually guesses at (then is told of) Tsuda's prior attachment to a woman who has since married someone else.  This strand takes us to the final pages of the book, where Tsuda goes to a spa resort in an attempt to revisit the past - whether to exorcise it or accept it we'll never know...

Reading Light and Dark is not always easy work, but it's a wonderful creation.  Where the surface is calm, with all the 'players' keeping an even, smiling countenance, beneath the facade a whirling pool of emotions is to be found.  It's almost like a chess game with each player desperately trying to stay a few moves ahead of the opponent.  However, there is the occasional eruption, such as a confrontational scene with O-Hide and Tsuda, one which is wrought with emotion.

With slightly old-fashioned language, little plot and a slow pace, I doubt that this would be a book for everyone.  However, I found it excellent, and Light and Dark is a must for real J-Lit aficionados.  I'm a big Soseki fan, and this takes pride of place in my personal library
:)

*****
A welcome added extra in this edition is an introduction by the translator, John Nathan, in which he discusses the plot and his treatment of the translation.  He explains that the decision to keep as much of the style of language as possible was a deliberate one, and a decision which avoids homogenising the text (the James comparison was his too).

Interestingly, he also touches on the abrupt ending and informs us of four attempts in Japanese to complete the book (including one by Minae Mizumura, author of A True Novel), plus an attempt by Kenzaburo Oe to analyse how the story may have continued.  However, Nathan also suggests that perhaps Light and Dark is complete in itself - it's not as if the ambiguous ending is rare in J-Lit  (e.g. Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's Some Prefer Nettles or The Makioka Sisters).  My opinion?  You'll just have to read the book and decide for yourself ;)

'Paris' by Marcos Giralt Torrente (Review)

Time for my second contribution to Spanish-Language Literature Month, and today's offering is from a publisher who deserve to be highlighted this month.  Hispabooks is a fairly recent addition to the ranks of publishers who focus on literature in translation, with their speciality being... well, Spanish literature :)  I've already reviewed a couple of their titles, and this book is one which comes very highly recommended indeed - an intense story made (mostly) in Madrid...

*****
Marcos Giralt Torrente's Paris (translated by Margaret Jull Costa, review copy courtesy of the publisher) is an excellent, psychological novel, a book which looks at the weakness of memory and the dangers of reliance on a single person in your life.  It's written in the form of a monologue told by a middle-aged man looking back to his childhood and, in particular, events surrounding his ne'er-do-well father and his enigmatic, saintly mother.

While the pair have long since parted, there was a strange attraction between the two, one which even the father's spell in prison failed to break, and this forms one of the central issues the narrator attempts to get to the bottom of.  However, he's also fascinated by something which he will never be able to learn the whole truth about (his mother, the only one with full knowledge, is suffering from dementia and has no memory of earlier events).  He believes that the key to the final breakdown of his parents' relationship lies in the time his mother spent in Paris, a time which could reveal several secrets - but it's possible that there are other, darker truths out there, just waiting to be brought into the light...

Paris is intense and powerful, and the combination of great writing and an intriguing secret makes for an excellent novel.  It was the unanimous winner of the 1999 Premio Herralde de Novela (a Spanish prize for debut novels), beating Andrés Neuman's Bariloche into second place.  For a first novel, it's a surprisingly complex and developed piece of writing.  However, the flip side of that is that it should come with a warning - you'll need a lot of concentration to stick to the task at hand.

The novel centres on the figure of the mother, a portrait of the mother as a martyr to her family.  She's a woman who's very good at keeping secrets, holding her true feelings deep within:

"Talking about herself would have meant allowing her "self" to surface, and that was something she simply could not allow.  What she felt and how she really was had to be covered up, concealed beneath hundreds of protective veils - either learned or innate - that established a distance between her and the suffering or hopes that were watching and waiting inside her."
p.40 (Hispabooks, 2014)

The author develops his picture of the mother with a slow, steady build up of details.  A controlled, measured woman who knows her man will disappoint her, she wants to believe in him, despite knowing full well that he will never change. Which rather begs the question - why does she stay with him for so long?  And, more intriguingly, does she have a few more secrets of her own?

As much as the novel is about the mother, though, there's also a lot to discover about the narrator, a man searching for truth among the rubble of half-remembered events.  He's never really sure of the events he discusses, constantly talking around the facts, either because he can't remember them or because he never knew them in the first place (in several places he explains that he was never privy to the whole truth).  In fact, the same is true for the poor reader as we are strung along a little, never really knowing what, or whom, to believe.

While calling him an unreliable narrator might be a touch extreme, it's true that caution is called for when trying to get to the bottom of the story.  His mother's loss of memory fuels his obsession with the past:

"I can no longer separate what she told me from what I know now, from what she gradually confided to me in later, lonelier years, and from what I've since found out for myself, what I dared to think, or what I made up." (p.64)

Much of what he tells us is 'pieced together later', the product of his imagination, although he is the first to admit the problematic nature of his conclusions.  The language used reflects this; it's incredibly tentative and halting, full of conditionals and modals.  The text abounds with phrases such as 'must have been', 'may have said' and 'I will never know if...'.  Still, that doesn't mean he isn't playing with us...

Paris is also about subjectivity, and Giralt Torrente discusses at length the way in which we can confuse facts and feelings:

"Things happen, and later on you might recount them to someone else with more or less exactitude, and the image you convey will not be so very different from the original events.  What you were feeling, though, what was going on inside you while those things were happening, is more a matter of silences.  We can get quite close in our description of events, but we will never be able to describe their very essence, an essence tinged with despair, or joy, or with both at once." (p.37)

Which doesn't stop the writer, and narrator, from trying to pin down the essence of those distant events.  We are drawn into this game too, tempted to judge the characters - the mother, the father, the narrator, his Aunt Delphina.  The problem is that with only a few of the facts, we can never be completely sure that we're right.

The writing is excellent, with a style reminiscent of Saramago and Marías (there are definite shades of A Heart So White here). Paris consists for the most part of long, precise sentences, full of complex clauses, constantly folding back on, and contradicting, themselves.  Of course, this is all aided by the choice of translator - Jull Costa, as always, does a wonderful job, meaning that the book never reads like a translation.

Paris is a very good book, and for those who like his style, there's more out there from Giralt Torrente in translation.  His story collection The End of Love is already available, and Father and Son (which, as Tiempo de Vida, won the Premio Nacional de Narrativa in 2011) will appear in English in September.  So is he the next big thing in Spanish?  Well, there's certainly a lot to like.  Paris is a fascinating, complex novel - even the cover, while initially plain, reveals something about the plot.  It's definitely not an easy read, but it's certainly a rewarding one :)

*****
Before I finish, there is one little issue I want to address here.  This is my third Hispabooks work, and all three have had British translators (Rosalind Harvey, Jonathan Dunne and Margaret Jull Costa).  While the translations definitely feel very British, for some reason, the books use American spelling conventions, plus the occasional, jarring Americanism.  It's a trend I'd already picked up in the first two books, and reading Paris merely confirmed it.

These (rare) Americanisms particularly stand out in Jull Costa's excellent translation.  Examples include 'jelly' instead of 'jam', 'wash up' instead of 'wash his face'/'have a wash', 'bills' instead of 'notes' and 'Mom' instead of 'Mum'.  It's not a huge thing, but it seems an odd stylistic choice to me, almost as if the publishers are hedging their bets with the variety of English.  It's likely that most people wouldn't notice, but I like to think that when it comes to translations, I'm not most people ;)

Any thoughts?  I'd love to hear if anyone else has noticed this trend - and what you make of it...

'The Plains' by Gerald Murnane (Review)

I've been meaning to read more Australian literature for a while now, but my focus on fiction in translation has got in the way of that a little.  Actually, that's a slight understatement - in the first eight months of the year, I didn't manage to review a single Australian book...

However, with a trip to the Melbourne Writers Festival on the agenda, it was time to crack open one of the many books languishing on my shelves.  Gerald Murnane is a writer I've been wanting to try for some time, and (as I mentioned in my festival review) he's certainly an entertaining speaker.  Let's see what I think about his writing ;)

*****
The Plains, one of the first titles in the Text Classics series, is a short novel written back in 1982.  It follows a man who ventures into inland Australia to explore 'the plains', an undefined area away from the noise of the east-coast cities.  His reason for visiting the interior is to work on a film, a piece which will capture the splendour of the wide-open expanses, and after a short period of adjustment, he meets a group of local landowners, whose patronage is vital if he is to be able to work on his project.

Things are very different on the plains, though, and time passes differently to how it moves in 'Outer Australia'.  As the days pass, we suspect that there is very little chance of the film ever being finished, the man's lengthy stay reaching epic proportions.  Still, the longer he works on his project, the more he realises that the plains are worth studying - even if he'll never be able to understand them completely.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is pretty much the whole plot of The Plains - if you're the kind of reader who likes things to, you know, happen in a novel, then I'd advise you to cut your losses here and go and find something else to do.  This is a work which moves at its own pace, a novel which, while it might be interested in may things, has little time for a reader who isn't prepared to settle down and forget the call of the outside world for a while.

The physical setting of the novel is the key to understanding it, and the filmmaker lays it out for us right at the start:

"Unchecked by hills or mountains, the sunlight in summer occupied the whole extent of the land from dawn till sunset.  And in winter the winds and showers sweeping across the great open spaces barely faltered at the few stands of timber meant as shelter for men or animals.  I knew that there were great plains of the world that lay for months under snow, but I was pleased that my own district was not one of them.  I much preferred to see all year the true configuration of the earth itself and not the false hillocks and hollows of some other element.  In any case, I thought of snow (which I had never seen) as too much a part of European and American culture to be appropriate to my own region."
pp.6/7 (Text Classics, 2012)

At times, the novel takes care in its description of the outside environment, the lengthy, unhurried passages contributing to the leisurely pace of the novel.

However, the detailed description is actually at odds with the vague nature of the location of the plains.  We know that we are in the interior, but where exactly the filmmaker has ended up is fairly unimportant.  One thing we do know is that the plainsmen have a great suspicion for anything which comes from the coast - or "Outer Australia"...

The filmmaker learns of the two great art groups of the region, rivals who debate the nature of the beauty of the plains.  However, when a third group attempts to spread its own views, the Horizonites & Haremen unite to drive out this 'foreign' concept:

"They discredited it finally on the simple grounds that it was derived from ideas current in Outer Australia.  The plainsmen were not always opposed to borrowings and importations, but in the matter of culture they had come to scorn the seeming barbarisms of their neighbours in the coastal cities and damp ranges.  And when the more acute plainsmen had convinced the public that this latest group were drawing on a jumble of the worst kinds of foreign notions, the members of the despised group chose to cross the Great Dividing Range rather than endue the enmity of all thinking plainsmen." (pp.33/4)

This idea of hostility to the big cities and 'Inner Australia' as a true nation might seem far-fetched, but it really is a different world away from the East Coast (Western Australia, for example, the large state on the other coast of the continent, often sees itself as a very different entity to the rest of the country...).

Putting aside the disputes with Outer Australia, though, life passes slowly on the plains, frustratingly so for anyone hoping to get things done.  The filmmaker's wait for an audience with the landowners takes much of the first part of the novel, and his days in the landowner's private library (mostly spent gazing out at a restricted view of the plains) pretty much fills up the rest of the book.  In fact, the more you think about The Plains, with its nameless characters, the futility of the main character's quest, with a film never to be finished, the more other writers' work comes to mind.

The quiet, ever-changing library, and the odd sense of time passing and yet standing still, definitely has shades of Borges, albeit a much more relaxed Borges, but the sheer futility of much of what happens reminds me unmistakably of Kafka.  We mustn't forget that this is Australia, though.  While Kafka's protagonists race around, shouting, blustering, hoping to force their way into seeing the right people, Murnane's creation is very much a man of his people.  He's happy to take his time - his appointment is in a pub, not a cramped office - and while he's waiting he may as well have a beer or five, as do his interviewers when he finally gets to join them...

The Plains is a beautiful, understated piece of writing, a relatively short book, but one which leaves the reader with a lot to think about.  Quite apart from deciding which of the rival camps to side with on the question of the beauty of the plains (does it lie in the vast, endless horizon or the microscopic detail of ears of wheat?), we are asked to contemplate the idea that possibilities are more important than achievements.  You see, when things are achieved, the other possibilities disappear (which again hints that the man's film is highly unlikely to be completed...).

The people of the plains go in for their own form of philosophy, one which looks for the meaning of life in a focus on very subjective truths:

"What might not follow, they ask themselves, if there should be nothing more substantial in all our experience than those discoveries that seem too slight to signify anything apart from their own brief occurrence?  How might a man reorder his conduct if he could be assured that the worth of a perception, a memory, a supposition, was enhanced rather than diminished by its being inexplicable to others?  And what could a man not accomplish, freed from any obligation to search for so-called truths apart from those demonstrated by his search for a truth peculiar to him?" (pp.110/1)

Which is probably a good place to note that any attempt to decipher Murnane's work is probably doomed to failure.  As he said in his talk at the Melbourne Writers Festival, nobody could ever come close to understanding what he wants to say through his work and what his novels mean to him...

Still, despite being indecipherable (and virtually plotless), The Plains is a great read, a soothing piece of writing which leaves you vaguely glimpsing a concealed philosophy, but unable to quite discern its contours - and yet you're not really that bothered (this is Australia, after all...).  I'm definitely keen to read more of Murnane's work, especially his first book, Tamarisk Row, and his latest, A Million Windows, as they were the ones discussed most in his talk.  Outwardly, Murnane and his novels are very Australian, but there's definitely something else waiting to be discovered at the core of his work - if you're just patient enough to wait for it to reveal itself...

Oh, while you're waiting, why not get yourself a cold one? ;)

Tony at the Melbourne Writers Festival (Part Two)

As noted in my prelude post, the decision to attend the Melbourne Writers Festival session described today was very much a last-minute one.  However, being a fan of the longest form of fiction, a session entitled The Future of the Novel was always going to attract my attention :)  The session was one of many around the world celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the legendary World Writers' Conference held in Edinburgh, and while this session was a little more low-key than the chaotic events in Scotland in 1962, it was still entertaining.

The session was chaired by Scottish-Kiwi academic and writer Liam McIlvanney and also featured 'transmedia creator' Christy Dena (even after briefly chatting to her, I couldn't tell you exactly what that means - my fault not hers, I assure you).  The star attraction though was Teju Cole, author of the prize-winning novel Open City, and it was Cole who kicked things off with a ten-minute keynote address.

He started by explaining what he felt about the novel, focusing on works which (in the words of Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky) 'elongate the perspective of human sensibility', with Cole saying that: "...excellence in the novel is not one-dimensional."  After a brief summary of the history of the novel, including a comment on the retreat of English-language writing into the safe realm of consensus and prize shortlists, he moved onto his main focus, Twitter, which he described as a novel with no end, evergrowing, but with no single responsible author.  Is this one form of the novel of the future?

*****
After this, the three writers sat down for a panel discussion, one which primarily focused on Twitter and other forms of social media.  Cole and Dena discussed the idea of the 'perpetual present' of Twitter, whereby the 'reader' is carried along on a stream of... well, consciousness.  In fact, it was suggested that Twitter may well be the end destination of the journey of writers like Joyce and Woolf towards penetrating the human psyche and exposing it to the world.  Nobody was saying that this is entirely a good thing though ;)

A further idea which was explored was the effect that online exposure has on a writer and, consequently, on their work.  Cole talked about readers: "finally having that conversation with the author you admire - and being disappointed", to great laughs from the audience.  McIlvanney asked whether this time spent online could affect writers and eat away at their valuable writing time, but Cole was of the opinion that, for him at least, this time was productive and helped with his thought processes.  He doesn't like the mindset which tries to convince him that he's wasting his time online and that he 'should' be working...

However, he does admit that the immediate nature of responses on Twitter can affect the writer and their thoughts.  As he wryly noted: "All opinions are valid - until you start encountering all opinions!".  It is here that the novel has a great advantage as it still offers the reader solace, in what Cole described as 'a place of perfect slowness'.  This relaxation is something you may find hard to find online...

In the following Q & A session, I asked the panellists what they thought the novel would look like in thirty or forty years (mainly as I thought the discussion had wandered away from that focus at times).  Dena thought that the print book would still be around, but mainly as a collectors' item, and she envisaged the future writer as a master of multiple media, print, social media and audio.  Cole's initial response was of information downloaded instantly to contact lenses - and everyone would be reading something like Fifty Shades of Grey ;)  Afterwards though, he said that it didn't really matter whether the print novel would survive in its current form.  There would always be people with drive and talent (or, as he put it, 'forceful creativity'), and these people would always create great works of art :)

*****
This was a great session, very entertaining and informative, even if I'm not quite sure that the speakers really stuck as closely to the topic as I'd expected.  While McIlvanney and Dena spoke well, their role was really to act as a foil for Cole, a very intelligent and likeable speaker who namedropped international writers (including Australian poet Les Murray) in a way guaranteed to endear him to me.  While it's probably a very bad idea to read books based on how nice a writer is, I may well have to check out Open City at some point soon... (postscript: I'm about half-way through the book and enjoying it immensely.)

And that's all for today, but stay tuned for my final piece from the festival.  My next post will be my report from the Andrés Neuman session; hopefully, Cole's comment about meeting authors you admire won't ring true...

'Faces in the Crowd' by Valeria Luiselli (Review)

Some of you may be aware of Three Percent's World Cup of Literature, which ran parallel to the FIFA shindig earlier this month, and it came as no surprise that Roberto Bolaño's By Night in Chile was the eventual winner (the judging panel was stacked with Bolañistos...).  More surprising though was that the beaten finalist was Mexico, represented by a relatively unknown contemporary female writer.

What better way is there, then, to finish off Spanish-Language Literature Month in style while also ushering in the next big blogging event, Women in Translation Month, than giving this one a go?  None, that's what.  Off we go to Mexico City, or perhaps New York?  Bear with me - it's about to get a little confusing...

*****
Valeria Luiselli's Faces in the Crowd (translated by Christina MacSweeney, published by Granta Books) starts off with a writer sitting at home in Mexico, jotting down memories of her younger days in New York in the few minutes she can snatch from her domestic duties.  It seems to be an ordinary, albeit interesting, story of a woman frustrated to be tied down by daily life when an artistic spirit is aching to be released, and as it is, it's a great read.  However, this simple, alternating pattern of now and then soon develops into something more.

The catalyst for this is a chance discovery in a New York library which sets the younger narrator off on an obsessive hunt for traces of a dead Mexican poet.  As the interest in the elusive Gilberto Owen grows, he begins to have a voice of his own, and the voice of the present-day narrator also fractures, with extra strands added where events take a different turn.  By the end of the work, we're no longer sure exactly whose voice is controlling the novel any more...

Faces in the Crowd is a wonderful piece of writing, elegant, poignant and light when it needs to be:

"I worked as a reader and translator in a small publishing house dedicated to rescuing 'foreign gems'.  Nobody bought them, though, because in such an insular culture translation is treated with suspicion."
p.1 (Granta Books, 2012)

Very true, as we're all aware, but a good example of an odd bit of bite.  The book is actually many stories in one all jumbled up, intertwined but separate, and it's up to the reader to both separate them and work out how they interconnect.

The initial focus is the writer looking back at her youth, focusing on regrets and memories from the vantage point of her older self.  She talks about her New York friends - Moby, the literary forger, Dakota, the singer, Pajarote, the student -, but we're not sure how true it all is:

"All that has survived from that period are the echoes of certain conversations, a handful of recurrent ideas, poems I liked and read over and over until I had them off by heart.  Everything else is a later elaboration.  It's not possible for my memories of that life to have more substance.  They are scaffolding, structures, empty houses." (p.4)

The longer the novel goes on, the more we begin to doubt the stories we are told about the time in New York.  We're told that a novel is being written, and there's a sense that the writer's 'memories' are just as fictional as her fiction.

We definitely can't trust her (we're not even that sure who 'she' is), and it soon becomes clear that we don't even know whose story this really is.  While initially the woman relates events from the life of Gilberto Owen, a (real-life) Mexican poet who walked the streets of New York decades before the woman's time there, later the tables are turned, and Owen appears to be seeing the women himself.  He gradually takes over the book, his ghost seeping through the pages, parallel lives threatening to overlap...

If there's one idea that suffuses Faces in the Crowd, it's that of ghosts - the novel is full of them.  The most obvious one is the spirit supposedly living in the writer's house in Mexico (cleverly named 'Without'), but the characters themselves fulfil the role of ghost for each other.  The title comes from seeing faces on the subway, in windows of passing trains, and everything has echoes of the past, resting places for ghosts - even if that's not such a good thing:

"There's nothing so ill-advised as attributing a metonymic value to inanimate things.  If you think the condition of a plant in a pot is a reflection of the condition of your soul, or worse, that of a loved one, you'll be condemned to disillusion or perpetual paranoia." (p.13)

There are plenty of examples of this in the book - books themselves play a major role here...

Faces in the Crowd is an excellent piece of writing and a well-mapped out novel.  I wasn't quite sure initially when the book took a turn towards Gilberto and away from the female narrator, but the complexity of the structure definitely added to the book, and I was convinced by the end of the story.  There's beautiful, terse writing throughout, and I have to admit that I spent a lot of my first half-hour's reading alternating between perusing pages, then noting down quotations ;)

In terms of influences and similarities, Luiselli's book owes debts to several literary ghosts.  While the first third has several echoes of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, there's also more than a hint of a more imaginative Knausgaard (albeit it in far fewer words!).  However, a book that also came to mind was Teju Cole's Open City, especially in the way that Owen and the narrator unwittingly follow the same paths, leaving their own faint traces on the streets of New York.

Luiselli is a talent that doesn't need to hide behind comparisons, though; I loved this one, and I already have Sidewalks on hold at the library.  While I'd heard of it before, I'm not aware of it having been up for any prizes, which is fairly surprising as this is a very good read.  I hereby prounounce Faces in the Crowd as the Costa Rica of The World Cup of Literature, the one story most neutrals will be taking out of it.  Hopefully, more people will now be aware of how good it is :)

*****
Christina MacSweeney's translation was a good one, a major part of the book's success, but I just picked up on one thing which may (or may not) have been an error in translation.  It has to do with a film the family were watching, 'Raining Hamburgers' - which is a literal translation of Lluvia de hamburguesas, the Latin-American title of a certain animated film, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs... I wonder if that was intentional?  If anyone can shed any light on this, please let me know ;)

'Le Grand Meaulnes' by Alain-Fournier (Review)

After working my way through a whole pile of review copies in an attempt to give myself some breathing space before my IFFP reading got underway, it was time for something a little different, a return to old comforts.  I was looking for something I hadn't read in a while, and I also wanted to practice my increasingly rusty and creaky French before I found it too difficult to bother with.  The answer?  Well, my shelves have something for every occasion ;)

*****
Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes, published in 1913, has become a true French classic.  It's the story of François Seurel, a teenage student, whose life is turned upside-down one day by the arrival of another boarder at the Seurels' village school - Augustin Meaulnes.  Le grand Meaulnes, as he is soon dubbed by his classmates (both for his size and his charisma), becomes firm friends with the smaller, frailer François, taking over as the head of the class, the shining star of the establishment.

One day, however, Meaulnes skips school, having decided to take a horse and cart to pick up François' grandparents from a distant railway station.  Unfortunately, he fails to return that day, with the horse and cart being returned after dark by a traveller who found them abandoned in the middle of nowhere.  A few days later, just as François' father is on the verge of departing to tell Meaulnes' mother of his disappearance, the weary student makes a dramatic entrance into the schoolroom.  Once he has recovered, François persuades him to tell the story of his journey - and it's a very good one...

Le Grand Meaulnes is a wonderful story of the magic of youth, a time when all kinds of adventures seem possible.  François (along with the reader) lives vicariously through Meaulnes' hopes and dreams of finding his true love.  However, in the final part of the book, it becomes a more sombre adult affair, a tragedy of dashed hopes and expectations.

The story revolves around Meaulnes' brief stay at 'le domaine perdu', a lost estate in the middle of nowhere.  Eight days before Christmas, the daring young student finds himself in a run-down, semi-deserted castle, in the middle of his very own fairy tale.  On a walk through the grounds, he glances into a stream and barely recognises himself:

"Il s'aperçut lui-même reflété dans l'eau, comme incliné sur le ciel, dans son costume d'étudiant romantique.  Et il crut voir un autre Meaulnes ; non plus l'écolier qui s'était évadé dans une carriole de paysan, mais un être charmant et romanesque, au milieu d'un beau livre de prix..."
p.78 (Fayard - le Livre de Poche, 1983)

"He noticed himself reflected in the water, as if angled towards the sky, in his disguise of a romantic student.  And he saw another Meaulnes; no longer the student who had made off in a farmer's cart, but another being, charming and novelesque, in the middle of a fine romance..."
(my translation)

The strange lights and laughing children he then encounters are heralds of preparations for the arrival of Frantz de Galais and his new bride - you see, he's gatecrashed a wedding...

It's here that he encounters the sister of the prospective groom, Yvonne de Galais, a beautiful, unreachable fairytale princess, and he falls hopelessly in love.  However, having left in the dark, with no idea of the direction his carriage has taken, Meaulnes is unable to find out exactly where he has been.  On returning to the drab everyday life of his studies, he vows to spend his youth searching for the scene of the wedding, hoping desperately to find the young woman who has stolen his heart.

Finally, through François, he uncovers the secret of the lost estate - and the two young lovers meet again:

"Puis le group entoura Mlle de Galais.  On lui présenta les jeunes filles et les jeunes gens qu'elles ne connaissait pas...  Le tour allait venir de mon compagnon ; et je me sentais aussi anxieux qu'il pouvait l'être.  Je me disposais à faire moi-même cette présentation.
  Mais avant que j'eusse pu rien dire, la jeune fille s'avançait vers lui avec une décision et une gravité surprenantes :
  "Je reconnais Augustin Meaulnes", dit-elle.
  Et elle lui tendit la main." (p.204)

"Then the group gathered around Madamoiselle de Galais.  They introduced the young girls and the young folk she didn't know...  It was almost the turn of my companion; and I felt every bit as nervous as he must have been himself.  I readied myself to make the introduction.
  But before I could say a word, the young woman moved towards him with surprising decisiveness and gravity:
  "I recognise Augustin Meaulnes", she said.
  And she offered him her hand."

So everything ends up happily ever after?  Not quite - unfortunately, life doesn't always run like a fairytale...

While the the book is entitled Le Grand Meaulnes, in fact, it is just as much about Seurel, and the longer the story goes on, the more he comes to demand our attention.  François grows up and matures, gaining a position as a village teacher and having to take care of his friends.  As Meaulnes dashes off on his fairytale adventures, Seurel is the one left behind in the real world.  The poor young man also has to deal with his unspoken love for Yvonne, which is subordinated to his platonic love for Meaulnes; in the end, he is left with sadness, and crushed hopes...

Le Grand Meaulnes is a wonderful novel with some beautiful writing.  In addition to a compelling, fascinating story, the book is full of elegant description, especially of the country surrounding the villages.  It's a story about fairytales and what comes afterwards, and the writer explores what happens after the end of the conventional myth.  When the two lovers find each other, and the reader closes the book happily, it's really just the start of the story.

My edition came with an introduction and a detailed afterword (the French are very big on supplementing their classics...), allowing me to discover that the novel was based on actual events.  The setting is the fictionalised scene of Alain-Fournier's childhood, and the romance with Madamoiselle de Galais is based on the writer's own unrequited love for a young woman named Yvonne de Quiévrecourt.  Allowing his creation to find his true love was, perhaps, the writer's way of dealing with his sadness.

Sadly, Le Grand Meaulnes was Alain-Fournier's only novel.  The First World war broke out the year after its publication, and towards the end of 1914, the writer was killed in battle - his body was never found.  With a life, and career, cut tragically short, all that remains as his legacy is a wonderful novel of shattered dreams...

'War and Peace' by Leo Tolstoy (Review)

After flying through a whole pile of short translated fiction recently, I was left with a lot of reviews to write - meaning that I needed a book which would give me time to catch up with my blogging duties.  Hmm, a big novel that I've been meaning to reread for some time...  I think I might just have the right book for the job ;)

*****
Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (translated by Rosemary Edmonds) is, by any definition, a big book.   It is a great novel about a great war, at the time one of the biggest and most destructive ever.  The novel starts in 1805, and the first book (125 pages) introduces the reader to our dramatis personae.  The second book then takes us through their experiences at and during the Battle of Austerlitz - and that's just the start.  We then follow our characters through the the years of an uneasy cold war until Napoleon attacks Russia in 1812, which is when the story really begins.  Finally, Tolstoy adds an epilogue of seven years to tell us how our friends fared after the defeat of the French - plus some philosophical musings to finish it all off.

As I said, it is a big book ;)

War and Peace is an epic, and its scope allows us to follow Tolstoy's creations across a decade as they grow up, grow old and (in some cases) change.  We see Natasha Rostov as a sprightly girl, then as a beautiful young debutante.  Later she matures, learning from mistakes and hardened by the necessities of the war, finally achieving motherhood in the epilogue.  Another of the major characters, Pierre Bezuhov, appears on the stage as a plump, naive buffoon, but the war gives him the opportunity for him to show his true colours; by the end of the novel, he is a familiar, middle-aged friend.

Although the characters change in many ways, just as in real life, they only change within the constraints of their personalities.  Those who turn out to be disappointing people have the germ of this disappointment in them from the very start.  The writer merely allows time to bring out what is initially partially hidden.  Boris' snobbery, Sonya's sanctimoniousness, Petya's impetuosity - they are all there at the start of the novel for any reader to see.

But what is War and Peace actually about?  The answer is that it is a book about everything (which is, perhaps, why it is so long...).  Tolstoy, through his characters, ponders the big question of the meaning of life, and he uses his 1400+ pages to explore various answers.  Pierre and Prince Andrei wonder if it is about work or personal development; Maria tries education and the care of others; Boris works for his own gain, while Dolohov merely has fun wherever he can find it; Petya longs for glory, but his sister, Natasha, is aching for love.  Somehow though, nobody seems to be able to find the right answer.

Pierre is especially troubled by existential matters (when not overcome by marriage problems) and spends years looking for a reason to live.  At one point, he muses:

"Sometimes he remembered having heard how soldiers under fire in the trenches, and having nothing to do, try hard to find some occupation the more easily to bear the danger.  And it seemed to Pierre that all men were like those soldiers, seeking refuge from life: some in ambition, some in cards, some in framing laws, some in women, some in playthings, some in horses, some in politics, some in sport, some in wine, and some in government service. 'Nothing is without consequence, and nothing is important: it's all the same in the end.  The thing to do is to save myself from it all as best I can,' thought Pierre.  'Not to see it, that terrible it.'
p.636 (Penguin Classics, 1982)

You will have to read the book to find out how (or whether) Pierre is ever able to find what he is looking for...

Much of what I have said so far applies more to the 'peace' side of the book, but large parts of the novel are (of course) devoted to the war.  Tolstoy paints a masterful picture of the conflict, ranging from the delusions of the commanders looking down from the heights of their posts to the experiences of the peasant soldiers on the ground.  While there is no doubt that we are on the Russian side (constant mentions of 'our line' and 'our troops' ensure we never forget who we want to win), there is no hint of jingoism or revisionist reporting - the writer is as critical of his own side as he is of the enemy.  He describes how the majority of senior officers are only interested in their own affairs, seeking to discredit rivals and ensure their own advancement.

Despite the multitude of Generals, Tolstoy believes that things happen the way they do for a reason - and that military commanders have very little to do with how wars unfold.  Despite the appeal of the 'Great Man' theory, the impossibility of free will and control means that the soldiers fighting hand-to-hand (or running away...) have more influence on the course of a battle than any command Napoleon might give.  In the chaos of war, letting things run their course is the only way to go...

...and this is exactly the way another of Tolstoy's major characters (a real-life one) handles affairs.  General (later Prince) Kutuzov, the man who saved the Russian army from annihilation after Austerlitz, is recalled in his country's hour of need - but he is not exactly the epitome of a knight in shining armour.  He is an old man, in need of sleep and a good meal, and he is unwilling to rush things in the way his advisers would like him to.

However, it is this reliance on 'patience and time' that eventually brings success.  The General allows events to happen as they should and prevents people from doing stupid things for no reason - which is perhaps the best thing a commander can do.  In part then, War and Peace is just as much a demand for the reappraisal of the actions of the much-maligned Kutuzov as it is a novel.

One more thing that War and Peace is known for though is the second half of the epilogue, forty-odd pages of metaphysical ramblings that sum up the ideas Tolstoy has just spent 1400 pages setting out.  In that sense, it is akin to putting up a ten-foot barbed-wire fence on the home straight of a marathon race, expecting the reader to increase their mental efforts just when they were hoping for a nice, easy jog to the finishing line.

It is important though because this is where Tolstoy tells you what it is all about ('it' being everything, of course).  I won't claim to have understood it all, but the main focus is on the idea of free will versus necessity, and you begin to get a sneaking suspicion that Tolstoy's answer to all of his questions happens to be God.  Which is great if you are a Christian.  If you are not, it is a bit like reading a murder novel and then finding out that the killer is never revealed...

I will let Tolstoy finish this off for himself though, as after all that writing, he probably does it better than I could.  The very last sentence of the novel reads:

"In the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist and to recognise a dependence of which we are not personally conscious." p.1444

My last sentence?  War and Peace is actually a very readable and enjoyable novel - don't let my review put you off ;)