'70% Acrylic 30% Wool' by Viola Di Grado (Review)

Today's post is on another gem from Europa Editions that I missed out on the first time around, but it's a book that was well worth waiting for.  The writing is strange, and subtly disorientating, but the setting is very, very familiar...

*****
Viola Di Grado's 70% Acrylic 30% Wool (translated by Michael Reynolds, review copy courtesy of the publisher) is a wonderfully bizarre novel, one set in the English city of Leeds.  From the very start, the city plays a starring role in the story, mostly as a dark, depressing place, a town where it's always December and daylight is just a distant cultural memory.

Of course, we're not meant to take this literally (I think...) - this view of the city is an outward projection of the mental state of the main character, Camelia Mega.  Born in Italy and brought to Leeds at the age of seven, she is struggling to cope with the loss of her father (caught in flagrante with a lover - in a car crash) and her mother's retreat into an inner-world, one of denial and wordlessness.

Camelia seems set to follow her mother down the spiral when a chance encounter on the street with a young Chinese man, Wen, provides the impetus she needs to start living again.  In fact, Leeds even manages to get past December (eventually...).  A love story with a happy ending then?  You obviously don't know Viola Di Grado...

70% Acrylic 30% Wool is a fantastic book, a novel which defies simple clichéd explanations.  It gets its power from Di Grado's manipulation of language and the way in which she makes the ordinary bizarre, constantly leaving the reader grasping at thin air.  For me, this was a more personal reading than for most because I lived in Leeds for a few years, very close to the places Camelia describes; however, the Leeds of the novel is less that of my student years and more one of some post-apocalyptic nightmare.  As any self-respecting southerner will tell you, it's grim up north:

"It must have been seven in the morning but it was dark outside, like at any self-respecting hour of the day in Leeds.  They discriminate against daylight hours here, ghettoizing them behind curtains."
p.19 (Europa Editions, 2013)

I don't think the city's tourist board will be hiring Di Grado as an ambassador any time soon...

Things start to get better though, when Camelia meets Wen, the manager of a clothes shop, and starts taking private Chinese lessons (let's ignore the fact that they met after he recognised her clothes as something he'd thrown out in the rubbish...).  Camelia had been planning to study Chinese at university before her father's death, and she soon gets swept up both with her studies, and her growing passion for the young teacher.  However, when Wen (no pun intended) fails to respond adequately to her advances, things start to get very messy.  Occasionally literally.

As you might imagine from the mixed linguistic background of the story, languages and words (or the absence thereof) play a major role in the novel.  Camelia becomes obsessed with Chinese characters, painting them on pieces of paper, plastering them across the walls of her home and tracing them manically onto her arms and legs while watching television.  Everything she sees is decoded in the form of the radicals of the characters, transformed from real objects into inky-black depictions.

Her journey into language contrasts with her mother's retreat into silence (the silence, at times, threatening to infect Camelia, forcing her to vomit up words...).  Having said that, languages do not necessarily require verbalisation, and mother and daughter somehow communicate very well with glances.  And, of course, there's always music:

"She stood up there, so red at the top of the steep narrow stairs, stairs rotten with dust, like an upside-down Tower of Babel that instead of multiplying languages had destroyed them all.  And all this, the elision of all languages, just to get to this moment, to her standing there mute and breathtaking as she always was after playing her favorite piece." (p.157)

Camelia, though, most definitely prefers words - and action...

I still don't think I've managed to quite get the idea of the novel across adequately - this book is ever so slightly twisted (in a good way, of course).  As well as the above, there'll be blood, sex, betrayal, mutilation of defenceless clothes and flowers, and symbolic references to holes.  And Leeds.  Lots of walking about the centre and student areas of Leeds.

Which brings me to the only bad thing I have to say about 70% Acrylic 30% Wool...  Michael Reynold's translation is a good one, a very good one in fact, but it's written in American English, and for me that detracted from the finished article a little.  I was just too close to the setting of the book to be able to gloss over some of the vocabulary choices, even if the style of the language isn't noticeably American.  The place I used to go and buy crisps at late at night is not a 'gas station'; the thing I used to walk on to uni most days (OK, some days) is not a 'sidewalk'; wherever Camelia found the clothes, I'm pretty certain it wasn't a 'dumpster'; oh, and while Leeds can be pretty bleak at times, it's definitely not 'gray'...

Rant over :)  This is a great book, and I really hope that more of Wunderkind Di Grado's work is available in English soon (my Italian ain't all it could be).  It's not always easy to get your head around, and understanding Camelia's actions can be a nightmare at times, but you should definitely take 70% Acrylic 30% Wool for a spin.  Definitely not one for delicates though ;)

'Heaven and Hell' by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (Review)

Last year, as some of you may remember, I was on a bit of an Icelandic kick and managed to read several great books from the small island nation.  One I didn't get around to though was a book by Jón Kalman Stefánsson, a novel which several bloggers had raved about.  With the sequel, The Sorrow of Angels, out now, I thought it might be time to correct this oversight - and luckily, the good people at MacLehose let me have a copy of both :)

*****
Heaven and Hell (translated by Philip Roughton) is the first in Stefánsson's trilogy about a character known only as the Boy.  We begin with preparations for fishing for cod in the cold sea off the north Icelandic coast, in a team of six with his friend, Bá­­ður (a literary type who seems out of place in such a functional setting).  We're in the mid-nineteenth century, but it could really be back in the seventeenth century; life seems very basic - and harsh...

After a night of waiting and preparing, the fishing crews set off into the unwelcoming waters, and disaster (inevitably) strikes.  Sickened by the attitude of the other fishermen in the face of tragedy, the Boy sets off on a perilous journey back to a distant village, not caring if he survives the journey or not.  There he finds that in a land that doesn't appreciate outsiders, he's not quite as alone as he thinks...

Heaven and Hell is a great story with superb writing.  The first part of the book is dominated by the struggle between the fishermen and the sea.  The waters are a living entity: cruel, cold, deadly and majestic.  The poor sailors in their tiny 'sixereen' are at the mercy of something far greater than themselves, trusting their fate to 'an open coffin on the Polar Sea'.  Just returning to shore can be considered an achievement:

"And those on shore do not passively watch the boats land but instead lend a hand, there is a law beyond man-made laws because here it is a matter of life and death, and most choose the former."
p.75 (MacLehose Press, 2011)

For those who enjoy descriptions of man versus wild, this is the real thing, and the writer creates a poetic description of the battle for life.

On land, things are little better.  Near the shore, the village lies under almost perpetual snow, and the atmosphere amongst its inhabitants can be just as cold and forbidding.  There is a fixed hierarchy, where the owners of the big stores have entrapped the little people in their eternal debt, and the poor villagers live on a diet of credit, subservience, gossip and infidelity.  Outsiders are regarded with suspicion, and anyone a little different tends to drift into a certain circle, one centred upon the enigmatic Geirþúður.  Which is where the Boy comes in...

Stefánsson has a striking style, reminiscent at times of Saramago (a saga Saramago?).  His writing can be jerky, confronting and involved, with frequent rhetorical questions and addresses to the reader:

"A tidy man, that Pétur, like his brother, Guðmundur, skipper of the other boat, about ten metres between their huts but the brothers don't speak to each other, haven't done so in a good decade, no-one seems to know why." (p.16)

Another feature of the writing is superb imagery.  Stefánsson has a great eye for detail, and the reader is sucked into the pictures he creates, be they in the midst of a storm or in the snug of the local pub:

"This was in the evening, a dense cloud of cigar smoke in the room, they could barely see each other, or at least until one of them came up with the idea of opening the window onto the autumn and the sky coughed when the smoke was sucked out." (pp.118/9)

The narrator of the story occasionally switches eyes, following other characters away from what we have come to see as the 'centre' of the story.  When it leaves the Boy and accompanies another of the villagers or fishermen, it appears like a disembodied spirit (which, if we believe the narrative's frame, is exactly what it is...).

Heaven and Hell reminds me at times of a couple of the books I read last year.  In parts, particularly in its description of the hardship of life in Iceland, it is reminiscent of Halldór Laxness' Independent People.  The first section, with the focus on the importance of fishing is more akin though to a Faroese novel, Heðin Brú's The Old Man and his Sons.  Like many of the Icelandic books I've read, particularly those set in the past, it also emphasises the importance of books, stories... and coffee!  However, while coffee can cure all ills, literature is seen as the cause of disaster - poetry can be dangerous...

"Some poems take us to places where no words reach, no thought, they take you up to the core itself, life stops for one moment and becomes beautiful, it becomes clear with regret and happiness.  Some poems change the day, the night, your life.  Some poems make you forget, forget the sadness, the hopelessness, you forget your waterproof, the frost comes to you, says, got you, and you're dead." (p.85)

Please take care when reading...

Heaven and Hell is a great book, but it's hard to discuss the novel without giving it all away as very little actually happens over the course of the two-hundred pages.  Unlike many books, this one really feels like the first part of a trilogy, a set up of more to come.  Which is not a bad thing at all - I, for one, will be diving into The Sorrow of Angels very soon...

...just as soon as I've sorted out some thicker thermals ;)

'In Translation' by Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky (eds.) (Review)

Over the past couple of years, as regular readers may have noticed, I've become much more deeply involved in the translated-fiction side of life in the literary blogosphere, and my ratio of books originally written in languages other than English has sky-rocketed.  I've also found myself reading more in German, and for a while now I've been contemplating an alternate universe, one in which money and free time magically appear, allowing me to go off and study again, this time in the field of literary translation.  It's unlikely (sigh) to ever happen, but if I get many more books like today's offering, my arm might just be twisted...

*****
Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky, two noted American literary translators, have put together a wonderful book on the art and science of their metier, In Translation (published by Columbia University Press, review copy courtesy of Australian supplier Footprint Books***).  It consists of eighteen essays by leading translators and writers, each giving a small insight into the art of translation and the life of the translator.  The first section is mainly concerned with theory, and the essays here come complete with footnotes and academic jargon; the second part then moves onto practice, with real-life examples from a host of renowned practitioners.

Before we get onto the nitty-gritty though, we gain an insight into the unglamourous, and often thankless, role of the translator.  Peter Cole discusses the ethical dilemmas of the translator, often a choice in the eyes of the public between invisibility and treachery (to the author and to the original text).  Eliot Weinberger suggests an image of the translator as tradesman, not artist (one who really should be better paid!).  While David Bellos muses over the concept of 'foreign-soundingness', Michael Emmerich shows us how translation can be just as much about the visual as the phonological - in Japanese, snow literally (almost) falls down on the page...

If you think these issues sound a little abstract and unimportant, others are a touch more controversial.  Alice Kaplan, in an essay on the trials and tribulations of translating, talks about her battle of wills with authors (and her own translator), also mentioning the time when Nabokov ordered all the copies of a Swedish translation of Pnin to be burnt.  Whoever said the author was dead...

In the final act of the first part, Esther Allen cautions the unwary reader against assuming that translation is a given for any particular book; you see, it's not quite as straight-forward as that:

"...any given act of literary translation is a product of unique political, linguistic, cultural, technological, historical, and human contexts."
p.101 (2013, Columbia University Press)

The reality is that it takes a unique combination of factors, a whole myriad of planets aligning, to get any one particular work published in the English-speaking world.  Quality is only one small factor.

Once we dive into the practical side of things, we also get to hear from, and about, some superstars of world literature.  Maureen Freely discusses the problems of translating Orhan Pamuk, a story of an 'ethnically-cleansed' language, a head-strong writer and an unexpected venture into Turkish politics.  Cuban poet José Manuel Prieto explains the difficulties he had in translating Osip Mandelstam's most famous poems into Spanish, and Haruki Murakami explains how (and why) he took 'his' Gatsby into Japanese (on a side note, it was nice to see these last two in the collection - translated by Esther Allen and Ted Goossen - as a work on translation without any translated pieces seems rather silly...).

Once you've got your head around what you're going to translate, you need to give some thought to who you're actually translating it for.  One of my favourite pieces had Jason Grunebaum pondering this issue in translating a novel from Hindi into English.  Should he be concentrating on American English, or Indian English?  After all, if you're looking for a large potential market...

Laurence Venuti had a slightly different dilemma in wrestling with the issue of anachronism in his translation of 12th-century Italian poetry.  A poet monk criticising the Pope - what voice would work best in English?  Venuti's answer - Slim Shady:

You spoke with forkéd tongue
and deeply I was stung:
it has to lick my sore
to show the plague the door;
because I'm sure my grief
can't find the least relief
without the execution
of your absolution (p.205)

At any rate, it's certainly original...

If you're a polyglot, In Translation provides you with many great opportunities to test your skills.  Whether it's Russian, Polish, Hindi, German or 16th-century French ballad lyrics, there's something of interest in every piece.  My only issue with the collection (ironically) is that for the Englishman in me it's a little narrow, and slightly US-centric.  A piece on the US-UK language divide would have been nice (as would more British contributors...)

Still, it's a wonderfully-absorbing collection, one which has given my nascent ambitions a further push.  For those of you who think Goethe had more than Dan Brown on his mind when coining the phrase Weltliteratur, let's give a big thank you to the people who show us that there's a lot out there that is worth reading :)

Before I finish though, I'll leave you with some final advice from Susan Bernofsky, who discusses the need to let go of the original text, and the importance of both frequent revision of translation and taking the odd semantic risk:

"It takes a certain amount of pluck - not to mention aesthetic sense and the ability to write well in English - to let go of an original long enough to allow oneself to fully imagine the English words that will take its place, but without this no fully realized translation is possible." (p.233)

That sounds like a job for me :) 

*****
***Footprint Books say that this book is available in good Australian bookshops and directly through their website :)

'All Dogs Are Blue' by Rodrigo de Souza Leão

It's been a long time between drinks, but today I've finally got around to reviewing another book from great indie publishers And Other Stories.  It's another of their South American finds, this time from Brazil, and like Down the Rabbit Hole, it's a fairly short read.  It seems even shorter because of its compulsive nature - this is one you race through in a blur...

*****
All Dogs Are Blue by Rodrigo de Souza Leão (translated by Zoë Perry and Stefan Tobler, e-copy courtesy of the publisher) is a semi-autobiographical tale of time spent inside a mental institute.  An overweight schizophrenic is locked up after trashing his parents' house, and in a confusing stream-of-consciousness monologue, we learn a little about how he's ended up there and a lot about what happens within the asylum's walls.

From the very first paragraph, the reader is shown what to expect from Souza Leão's madness:

"I swallowed a chip yesterday.  I forced myself to talk about the system that surrounds me. There was an electrode on my forehead.  I don't know if I swallowed the electrode with the chip.  The horses were galloping.  Except for the seahorse, who was swimming around in the aquarium."
(And Other Stories, 2013)

Our friend is a little bit paranoid and obsessed by the idea that he swallowed a chip (which may have developed from the cricket he swallowed when he was a child).  There's a lot more to his madness than that though.

After an initial stint in solitary confinement, he wanders around the asylum accompanied by his (imaginary) friends.  Baudelaire is a calm fellow, but (unfortunately) he's not always around.  Rimbaud, on the other hand, can usually be relied upon to provide the writer with some company, even if he is a tad more aggressive than his fellow French poet.  An interesting point here for non-French speakers - Rimbaud is pronounced in English as 'Rambo' ;)

We occasionally get to see the effect of the illness on the speaker's family, especially his mum and dad.  While they seem to want the best for their son, he certainly feels a little betrayed by their decision to have him committed:

"He says I'll get out when I'm better.  I move towards him and kiss him on the face.  Is it the kiss of Judas?  Will I betray my father in my madness?  And what if two men came now and crucified me upside down.  Could the cross bear the weight of this lard-arse?"

However, in rare, lucid, moments, he is able to put his delusions aside and recognise the truth, accepting that there was something very wrong with his life:

"I cried because I was thirty-seven years old and living like a teenager."

One frequent theme of All Dogs are Blue is religion, with several mentions of beliefs, of both Christian and less orthodox varieties.  It's seen as something that keeps the people happy, even if it messes with their heads at times:

"Religion nowadays just fucks with people.  I think they knew there were a lot of alcoholics in here.  Religion isn't just the opium of the people.  But it's what keeps the people happy.  It's a sad thing when a nation needs religion to lean on.  It's worse than a lunatic who's been cured, but who will always need the support of another person to be happy.  Better to be an incurable lunatic."

In view of later events, this is an interesting viewpoint.  You see, when he eventually leaves the institute, he decides to immerse himself in religion - but not as you might expect.  Our lunatic decides that those who think that a bit of religion, football and music make everything alright in the world are the real crazy ones...

All Dogs are Blue, as mentioned in my introduction, is a work you race through, a real one-sitting book.  It's a story which gives you a flavour of Brazil, albeit in small glimpses through the bars on the institute's windows, but it's also a slightly unsettling glimpse into the writer's own problems.  It fits in very well with the rest of And Other Stories' back catalogue - edgy and ever-so-slightly bizarre. 

A nice addition is an introduction by Deborah Levy (the publisher's success story of the last couple of years) in which she explores some of the book's central themes.  She describes Souza Leão's blue dog as a rare breed of the more common black dog of depression, but it is also used as a link back to his 'normal' life, his childhood, before things went wrong.  Sadly, the writer never got to enjoy his success - he took his life the year All Dogs are Blue was published...

July 2013 Wrap-Up

While I may have posted plenty of reviews in July, there was a lot less going on behind the scenes.  You see, I spent half the month tackling a classic of world literature, a monster I've been steeling myself to confront for a long time now (but more of that next month!).  So if the numbers aren't that great, you know why ;) 

*****
Total Books Read: 9
Year-to-Date: 71

New: 9

Rereads: 0

From the Shelves: 3
Review Copies: 5

From the Library: 1

On the Kindle: 1 (review copy)

Novels: 5
Novellas: 1

Short Stories: 2
Non-Fiction: 1

Non-English Language: 8 (2 German, 2 Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, Icelandic, Italian)

In Original Language: 2 (2 German)

Aussie Author Challenge: 0 (3/3)

*****
Books reviewed in July were:

1) Snakes and Earrings by Hitomi Kanehara
2) Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño
3) A Handful of Sand by Marinko Koščec
4) The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith by Thomas Keneally
5) Rituals by Cees Nooteboom
6) Diplomat, Actor, Translator, Spy by Bernard Turle
7) animalinside by László Krasznahorkai
8) Three Strong Women by Marie NDiaye
9) Varamo by César Aira
10) An einem Tag wie diesem (On a Day Like This) by Peter Stamm
11) Professor Borges by Jorge Luis Borges
12) The Name of the Flower by Kuniko Mukoda
13) The Aleph and The Maker by Jorge Luis Borges

Tony's Turkey for July is: Nothing

No turkeys this month - perhaps in August.

Tony's Recommendation for July is:
Marie NDiaye's Three Strong Women

I have to say that this was a tough decision (again), not because I have a selection of great books to choose from, but rather because nothing really stood out above the rest of the pack.  In terms of writing, I would go with the Krasznahorkai piece, but it's really too short to warrant the award, and while I enjoyed the two by Borges, they weren't my favourites this time around.  I also loved Peter Stamm's novel, but I'm not sure it deserves to be up with my top picks of 2013.  In the end, then, Ndiaye's book of three related novellas was the only real choice in a month of good, but not great, books.

*****
What does August hold in store?  More of the same, I suspect.  I'm still working my way through some intriguing-sounding review copies, and I have a couple of library books to read to finish off my Spanish-language adventure.  Having said that though, it's all overshadowed by my previous review (the first of the new calendar month) - get your climbing boots on...

'Der Zauberberg' ('The Magic Mountain') by Thomas Mann (Review)

Recently, a climber in the Swiss mountains found a rather peculiar document as he was leafing through a book in the library of the hotel he was staying at - a building which, according to a receptionist he talked to, used to be a sanatorium specialising in the care of tuberculosis victims.  The document appears to be a tale of a climber's slow ascent of one of the local peaks, but it is (rather strangely) written as much in the form of a book review as of a true climber's journal.  It is possible that the climber was a little disorientated from the altitude (or sickness?), but the text is immensely confusing at times.  Perhaps it is best if the reader judges for themself...

*****
Day 1:
Today finally saw the start of my attempt to conquer The Magic Mountain, the peak the locals call Der Zauberberg.  It's one I've been wanting to tackle for a long time now, and the conditions seem perfect for the ascent.  I decided to take it easy to begin with; in fact, the first part was by train (the scenery is spectacular!).  I got chatting to a nice young man from Hamburg called Hans Castorp, who is spending a little time here visiting his cousin, and we both agree that the air up here is wonderful, guaranteed to improve your health.  I think this is going to be a great experience :)

Day 2:
The incline is still fairly gentle, which is a good thing - I haven't quite acclimatised to conditions yet.  Yesterday, I talked to a few other visitors in the village, some of whom have been here for a good while longer than I would have thought necessary.  Castorp doesn't appear to be taking to the mountain air - he was looking very pale this morning.  To be honest, I'm feeling a little tired myself - let's stop there and push on tomorrow...

Day 4:
Things are getting tougher as I push on up the mountain.  Today, I made the acquaintance of Settembrini, an Italian literary type, both scholar and philosopher - and a man who likes to speak his (and everyone's) mind.  I sense that if I fail in my endeavour and come tumbling down this mountain, it'll be his face that I see frowning down at me as I fall into the abyss below...

Castorp and Settembrini seem to have become as thick as thieves, and they are constantly having discussions on freedom and progress.  In particular, Castorp seems obsessed with the topic of time; it is said to pass quickly in the sanatorium (where the month is the smallest unit of time), yet the seven minutes waiting for a thermometer to take a reading seems like years (in fact, am I sure it's only been four days since I started off?  It seems like months.).

Settembrini is constantly warning Hans to leave the mountain as soon as possible (at times, I get the distinct impression that the warning is actually intended for me...).

Day 6:
I'm pushing on grimly again towards my planned stop half-way up the mountain; I could definitely do with a rest.  Time is flying by, yet it's also strangely dragging.  Some of Castorp's days, weeks, months pass in seconds, yet some minutes take days...

The going has become harder again as the climb moves from the physical to the metaphysical.  Castorp's obsession is now the human body, fuelled by an equally ardent obsession with the lovely Clawdia Chauchat.  He's spending his time reading and talking about bodies, looking at the aesthetic, spiritual and artistic sides, before descending into an analysis of protein and fat.  An endless biology lesson - Hans, what are you doing to me?!!!

It's high time I took a well-earned rest...

*****
Day 7:
After a relaxing interlude spent preparing for the ordeal ahead, we resume our climb.  Almost a year (a year?) has passed since setting off, yet our return to the lowlands remains a distant promise (do I mean mine or Castorp's?  I'm not really sure anymore...).

Settembrini!  Settembrini!  He's back to torment me, and this time he's brought a friend - Herr Naphta, a sick Jesuit with a love of corrupting philosophy and politics...  If only I could throw the two of them off the mountain, the climb would become much more enjoyable (alas, I fear the thin air is having an effect on me...)

Day 8:
Joachim, Castorp's cousin, has descended the mountain leaving Hans (like me) all alone.  Unlike me, Castorp is fine on his own up here - I'm struggling to keep up...

Day 10:
I'm lost, we're lost - we're all eternally and frighteningly lost...

There have been more metaphysical, metaphorical wanderings through the tortured, twisting discussions of the elegant Settembrini and the scowling Jesuit Naphta, and I'm starting to lose my grip on sanity and ice pick alike.  Why?  Why must they do this to me?  Is it not enough that I'm barely two-thirds of the way up this accursed mountain?  Must I be tormented by soulless imbeciles blathering on about revolution, nature and death?

Of course, there's also the literal, open-air wandering high in the mountains as Castorp and I cast caution to the (biting) wind and explore the local slopes on skis.  And we're lost.  The darkness draws ever closer, the gale is tearing at us like a thousand knives - and the snow continues to fall, unceasing, like fresh earth on a waiting grave...

Oh, and it's *bloody* cold...

Day 13:
What a few days...  A new companion on our ascent, Mynheer Peeperkorn, has certainly livened things up (and even managed to subdue the quarrelling pedagogues).  What a man!  What a character!  What a party!  Wine, Dutch gin and lots of fun...  Time to rest - my head is throbbing a little...

Day 14:
Peeperkorn gone, Clawdia departed - so near to the top and time is dragging (again).  Even Castorp's interminable patience appears to be waning.  Surely I can't fail so close to the summit?

Day 15:
I'm here!  I've made it to the summit!  I'm standing at the top, looking down upon the flatlands below.  Time seems to be standing still - while the ascent seems to have taken a very long time, in some respects it feels as if I only just set off to conquer the peak.  Time really is relative...

What next?  It would be a shame to just start back down now that I've made it all the way up here.  I might just check in at the 'Berghof' for a while (room 34 seems to be vacant).  Not for long, three weeks sounds good...

*****
Regrettably, this is all that remains of the text.  We hope that more light will one day be shone on what could be a remarkable literary find.

Then again, it may all just be a dream...

'The Aleph' and 'The Maker' by Jorge Luis Borges (Review)

After the success of Fictions, my first exposure to the world of Jorge Luis Borges, I was always going to try more from the Argentine master of the short story.  Luckily, my ever-wonderful library came up with the goods, in the form of a Penguin Classics edition with two collections included.  Time to dive back into the world of the meta-fictional and meta-physical...

*****
The Aleph, including the prose fictions from The Maker (translated by Andrew Hurley) has another two sets of early works from Borges.  The first is a series of short stories, reminiscent of the collection The Garden of Forking Paths, while the second is much shorter, full of pieces which are almost examples of flash fiction at times.  The Aleph, though, is the collection most similar in form to what I read a while back, and this similarity applies to the themes too.

The lead-off story, 'The Immortal', is a perfect example of this.  It's an intriguing tale, starting with that old Borgesian staple, an arcane document, one whose authenticity can be doubted, and it ends up as an improbable tale.  A soldier searches for immortality in a story which turns the idea of eternal life on its head:

"Among the corollaries to the doctrine that there is no thing that is not counterbalanced by another, there is one that has little theoretical importance but that caused us, at the beginning or end of the tenth century, to scatter over the face of the earth.  It may be summarized in these words: There is a river whose waters give immortality; somewhere there must be another river whose waters take it away."
p.15, 'The Immortal' (Penguin Classics, 2000)

In a lovely twist, the characters here are searching for water which will take away the curse of immortality.  Of course, we are once again faced with the dilemma of how much (and who) to believe in Borges' elaborate stories within stories.  Perhaps the document is just a hoax...

Many of the stories in The Aleph take place in the writer's native Argentina, and there are many tales of macho men in the wild west (or south!).  'The Dead Man'  is a neat little piece where a cocky gaucho thinks he can take down the big boss, little knowing that he is just a pawn in a bigger game.  However 'A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz' is a much subtler story, one which ends up being entangled in real-life Argentine history.  While the significance of the ending of this story (and many others) would sail right over the head of the average Anglophone reader, Hurley's excellent notes help to explain exactly what is going on.

Borges is great at writing short stories with twists, and there are some very tricky endings here.  In 'The Dead Man', the narrator discovers that a friend he remembers seems to have lived parallel, simultaneous lives, with different people remembering him in very different ways.  In 'Emma Zunz', we have a well-constructed story of a woman taking revenge for her father's demise.  Her actions leading up to the end of the story seem incomprehensible, but on the final page we understand why she has done what she did.

Of course, it wouldn't be Borges without a labyrinth or two, and there are plenty to be found in this collection.  'Ibn Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in his Labyrinth' is a story which doesn't keep the reader waiting for the content of the piece; however, titles (and labyrinths) can be most deceiving.  Another story with a maze is 'The House of Asterion', a brief, three-page tale of a 'deity' - one which seems a little bland until the final, fascinating twist ;)

*****
The Maker is very different to The Aleph.  It's a lot shorter and consists of several brief pieces; a nice addition, but not really a book in its own right.  The stories in this section, may not be quite as short as haikus, but they have a similar, thought-provoking effect.

Having also read Professor Borges recently (a translation of a series of lectures Borges gave on English literature), there were many familiar names and themes mentioned in The Maker.  The writer appears to have an obsession with the promise King Harold gave to Harald Hardrada in 1066 of 'six feet of English soil', and he's equally preoccupied with Don Quixote, Shakespeare and Anglo-Saxon poetry.  One piece from The Maker combines a couple of his interests nicely - 'Ragnarök' is a story of the end of the gods (and mentions Samuel Taylor Coleridge, another of Borges' literary obsessions...).

I enjoyed this collection a lot, and I only wish I'd had more time to peruse it at my leisure (unfortunately, I managed my time badly and had to hurry through my library copy).  It's a book to dip into and return to when you have an unhurried moment to devote to it - another time, perhaps ;)

'The Name of the Flower' by Kuniko Mukoda (Review)

The July theme for the Japanese Literature Challenge 7 is short stories, so it was off to the shelves to see if I had anything to fit this criterion.  As I rummaged through my ever-expanding J-Lit section, I did manage to find a couple of unread anthologies, but they were a little long (and after recently finishing a 1000-page German-language classic, I was in the mood for something a touch lighter...).  Finally, I stumbled across the perfect choice, the book you see displayed on the left of the page.  What makes my selection all the more apt is that I received it as a gift from Bellezza herself for my efforts during January in Japan:)

*****
Kuniko Mukoda was a television screen-writer, essayist and short-story writer, and The Name of the Flower (translated by Tomone Matsumoto, published by Stone Bridge Press) is a collection containing thirteen assorted tales from various original works.  It's a short book, running to just 150 pages, and it makes for fairly easy reading.  However, it's also well written, with keen observations on Japanese society in every piece.

The stories all focus on married life, from the viewpoint of both husband and wife.  Infidelity (traditionally tolerated in Japan, especially for husbands) is the major theme here, and most of the stories begin with a snap-shot of a domestic scene which slowly expands to include the shadow of betrayal lurking in the corner.  In a society where marriages were largely arranged (certainly at the time the stories were written), marital bliss seems hard to come by; in fact, marital indifference seems to be regarded as a relative success round these parts...

Many of Mukoda's female protagonists are betrayed by their husbands.  In the title story, 'The Name of the Flower', a wife realises that her husband has been using her, allowing her to help him become more cultivated so that he can attract other women.  In another story, 'I Doubt It', a man plays the dutiful mourner at his father's funeral:

"Now he was chief mourner.  Perhaps it was wrong to bask in this self-satisfied respectability, having just lost a father, but that was how he felt.  The general-affairs section of his company came out in force and arranged the whole program - the ceremony at the funeral altar, the wake, and the ritual farewell to the deceased.  It all reflected Shiozawa's position.  Those relatives he was not ashamed of came, and his friends paid their condolence visits.  He felt a twinge of guilt as he displayed the appropriate grief like an actor, but he told himself not to be concerned because every important occasion in life called for this kind of performance."
p.33, 'I Doubt It' (Stone Bridge Press, 2002)

However, his honest facade hides a multitude of secrets, involving extra-marital affairs and blackmail...

Before anyone gets too angry at Japanese men though, it must be said that the women are even worse.  The central character of 'The Otter' is an old man recovering from a stroke, and while his wife seems cheerful and supportive, she is actually scheming to sell the house from under him.  In 'The Window', a man remembers his mother's affairs, humiliated by the way his father was constantly cuckolded.  Now he believes that her genes have resurfaced in his own daughter, and he's afraid of the consequences.

Quite apart from the constant affairs, there are other consequences of these unhappy marriages, stories of two strangers living together.  In 'The Fake Egg', a woman who can't get pregnant wonders why she's even with her husband, while the protagonist in 'Ears', a man left alone at home on a rare sick day, attempts to resist the temptation to search the house for dirty laundry of a rather personal nature.  Trust is in short supply in The Name of the Flower, and most of the relationships appear to be those strictly of convenience.

The book says a lot about personal relationships, but Mukoda also opens a wider window into Japanese society, where conventions are markedly different to those of the west.  There is a strict adherence to roles within the work hierarchy, something the reader sees repeatedly in the pieces here.  Examples include the traditional visits by work colleagues to the funeral in 'I Doubt It' and the rather unorthodox (to western eyes) use of a work subordinate as a chauffeur (and lackey!) in 'Triangular Chop'.

I lived in Japan for three years (many, many moons ago...), and I loved the little touches which reminded me of my time there.  Characters eat noodles, fish and rice for breakfast, newspaper agents and money collectors stroll into houses and shout out as if they're part of the family; salarymen work (and drink) so much that they never see their house in daylight (as is the case in 'The Window') - oh, and, of course, there's the casual sexism:

"At last Makiko had heard what she was waiting for.  The real reason Makiko had decided to marry Tatsuo was her age - she was twenty-four." (p.102, 'Triangular Chop')

Yep, women, like Christmas cakes (as the story goes), are no good after the twenty-fifth... At this point, my female readers may like to take a deep breath and recall that these stories were written in the early 80s.  I'm sure things have changed slightly since then...

There's nothing too deep here, but The Name of the Flower is full of great sketches exploring Japanese marriage and offering a fascinating insight into Japanese society.  Tomone Matsumoto provides an excellent, smooth translation too, something that is not as common as I'd like in J-Lit.  Anyone wanting to explore the domestic side of Japanese life will enjoy this collection a lot - arigato Bellezza :)

'Professor Borges' by Jorge Luis Borges (Review)

After my recent experience with Fictions, I was keen to try more of Jorge Luis Borges' work (and I actually had a library copy of The Aleph sitting on my shelves).  However, while browsing the New Directions web-site recently, I saw a new book by the Argentinian legend, an intriguing piece of non-fiction - and thought it might be interesting to see what the maestro thinks about our literary history...

*****
Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature (edited by Martín Arias and Martín Hadis, translated by Katherine Silver - review PDF courtesy of the publisher) does exactly what it says on the cover.  Borges spent many years as a lecturer at the University of Buenos Aires, and this book brings together a series of lectures he held from one semester back in 1966.  The twenty-five chapters (or lessons!) provide the reader with a trip through time and English literature - Borges style.

We start with Anglo-Saxon poetry, looking at the differences in style between Beowulf and other historic texts, before jumping to the middle ages.  There's a (very) brief look at the Victorian novelists, especially Dickens, before ending with the romantic poets.  There is a lot on poetry...  Strangely, Shakespeare is mentioned only in passing (if frequently), and while George Eliot, Austen and the Brontës are absent, there's a whole lesson on Robert Louis Stevenson.

Borges has an idiosyncratic style, and his choices certainly reflect that.  In addition to the heavy focus on poetry, he also spends a long time looking at Anglo-Saxon literature, an era you'd expect to fill one or two sessions, not seven.  His lectures are not your usual meticulously planned talks, more a kind of informal, digression-filled ramble through literary history.  His goal seems to be less to deconstruct texts but to kindle interest in his students by discussing the history of the pieces and the lives of the writers. 

Of course, it's all done with a slight Spanish slant.  Barely a session goes by without a mention of Cervantes or Don Quixote (or both), and even in the sessions on Beowulf, Borges is able to find an Hispanic connection through the involvement of the Geats (Spanish relatives of the Goths).  When he says...

"Hence all descendants of the Spaniards would be relatives of Beowulf"
p.10 (New Directions, 2013)

...you might think he's exaggerating a little though ;)

Above all, Borges has an interest in the characters of the writers he discusses, the people, not the author.  He spends a lot of time talking about Samuel Johnson, using Boswell's biography of the great man to paint a humorous warts-and-all picture (he even describes the Johnson-Boswell pairing as comparable to that of Quixote and his trusty sidekick Sancho Panza...).  Another figure to receive this treatment is Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom Borges brings across as a somewhat lazy genius...

It's true that the book is just a transcript of off-the-cuff lectures, but it is amazing how he expounds and digresses, but manages to stay (mostly) on topic.  Borges is erudite, with an incredibly wide historical and literary knowledge - and, let us not forget, it's all from memory.  At this point of his life he was virtually blind:

"And now let us read some of Rossetti's work.  We are going to begin with this sonnet I spoke to you about, "Nuptial Sleep."  I do not remember all the details, but I do remember the plot." (p.187)

As a piece of writing, you won't find it particularly impressive - and that's because it's not writing...

It is inspiring though.  I frequently zipped off to the computer to look up the writers and works name-checked (Rossetti, Blake, Morris), often reading the poems mentioned before returning to the book.  One interesting find was Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book, a long poem dealing with ten views of the same crime, a work Borges mentioned in the same breath as Kurusawa's film Rashomon (adapted from two stories by Akutagawa).  Yep, erudite ;)

While I enjoyed this book greatly, not everyone agrees.  A Guardian review I saw really didn't like it, and had several reasons for criticising it.  The first was that this is not something Borges would ever have wanted published himself, and that's a hard point to argue with.  Then again, this is merely a translation of the Spanish-language original, so I think we can probably side-step that objection.

The second point was that this is just a standard series of university lectures and that there's nothing here a university student wouldn't have come across before.  That may be true to an extent, but for readers like myself, without a university background in literature, it does throw up new writers and works - plus there is the unique Borgesian slant...

The final point is that the lectures are dull and lacking in humour, and that's one I'd have to disagree with.  It's not obvious, but a subtle, dry humour pervades Professor Borges (perhaps easily missed if you don't read the book carefully enough...), and what appears to be dry conjecture could also be read as sly mockery:

"Johnson had a peculiar temperament.  For a time he was extremely interested in the subject of ghosts.  He was so interested in it that he spent several nights in an abandoned house to see if he could meet one.  Apparently, he didn't." (p.84)

All in all then, Professor Borges is a book worth having a look at, especially for those obsessed with all things Borgesian.  In fact, even the introduction explaining how the book came about is a fascinating one.  You see, we owe these pages to the unnamed students who recorded the lectures (on cassettes!) for lazy friends, and later transcribed them.  All good and well, except for the fact that these were university undergraduates working in a foreign language - which means that the transcripts were full of errors and, at times, illegible.

With the original tapes long reused, scholars had to reconstruct the original lectures from the half-baked second-hand copies the students had produced, leaving us with a sparkling, possibly imaginary, series of lectures which may or may not have happened this way (Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius...).  So did these lectures really exist?  Just as was the case (as Borges tells us) with Samuel Johnson, whose witty conversations were remembered and written down after the fact, we'll never really know the truth...

'An einem Tag wie diesem' ('On a Day Like This') by Peter Stamm (Review)

Recently, I've been neglecting my German-language reading, so I decided it was time to take a break from my review copies and library Spanish-language literature education, and pick up a book from my shelves.  It's by a writer whose work I've enjoyed before - and it's a nice, easy read too...

*****
Peter Stamm's An einem Tag wie diesem (On a Day Like This) is the story of Andreas, a Swiss forty-something teaching German in Paris.  He's lived in France for almost twenty years, and his life is in a rut.  He's never been married, has lived in the same, small apartment for a decade and meets two regular girlfriends for no-strings attached sex on a regular basis.

Events, however, conspire to shake up his routine life in a way he couldn't have expected.  A graded reader he is considering for his class, about a holiday romance, reminds him of his encounter with Fabienne, a French au-pair, back in his home village.  Then a visit to the doctor to investigate a nasty cough leads him to face up to the fact that he's not getting any younger.  Throw in an encounter with Delphine, a young trainee teacher, and Andreas' world is in a bit of a spin.  It's time for him to take a trip into his past...

As I've mentioned before, Stamm's style is deceptively simple, and I'm sure that the (kitschy) graded reader is a bit of a nod to this:

"Die Geschichte war unglaubwürdig und schlecht geschrieben, aber sie hatte verblüffende Parallelen zu Andreas' Geschichte.  Auch er war Fabienne nachgereist, allerdings erst nach zwei jahren.  Sie hatten sich während der ganzen Zeit geschrieben.  Andreas hatte den Kuss am Weiher nie erwähnt, aber seine Briefe waren voller Andeutungen gewesen.  Fabienne musste gemerkt haben, was er für sie empfand."
p.29 (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2011)

"The story was unbelievable and badly written, but there were startling parallels to Andreas' story.  He had also followed Fabienne, albeit two years later.  They had written to each other the whole time.  Andreas had never brought up the kiss by the pond, but his letters were full of hints about it.  Fabienne must have noticed what he felt for her." ***

At this stage of the story, the unwary reader might be tempted to say that Stamm's book is little better than the one Andreas is flicking through.  The Swiss writer's simple style always has a sting in the tail though; the story unfolds slowly and carefully, becoming more complex as it progresses.

It's a tale of nostalgia, and a warning of the dangers of revisiting the past.  Andreas begins to obsess about his youth, recalling his brief encounter with Fabienne and his return home for his father's funeral.  Even an old postcard is enough to have him remembering the old days, an idealised image of what was - and what could have been.  Gradually, he decides that the reason for the standstill in his life is partly his feeling of having missed his chance for love with Fabienne.

His actions later in the book though are to prove that nostalgia isn't all it's cracked up to be - you can't cross the same river twice (although at one point, he does, literally, and there's nothing on the other side of the bridge...).  Which is not to say that this justifies the path he took instead, far from it.  It's obvious that Andreas' life needs an impetus, and one has just come along in the shape of Delphine.  Will he realise this though?

One thing Stamm excels at is writing real people, people you can imagine meeting and talking to, flawed people, not types.  Andreas, like other Stamm heroes, is, well, a bit of a prick at times:

     >>Du bist ein Schwein<<, sagte Nadja mit vollkommen kalter Stimme.
     >>Ich werde dich vermissen<<, sagte Andreas.  >>Man kann so schön allein sein mit dir.<<
     >>Du bist allein, egal mit wem du zusammen bist<<, sagte Nadja. (p.84)

"You're a pig", said Nadja in a cold voice.
"I'll miss you", said Andreas.  "You can really be alone with you."
"You're alone no matter who you're with", said Nadja.***

Every time we start to try to empathise with him, he does something selfish and stupid, whether it's abandoning girlfriends in the cruellest possible way, or flirting with his best friend's wife after the two of them have just had a fight.  He treats women coldly and uses people when it suits him, and this effective characterisation, despite the simple language and plot, constantly throws the reader off balance.

I keep coming back to this idea of simple language simply because it is, well, simple.  Anyone wanting to read something literary in German would be well advised to try Stamm as a starting point.  He uses very spare prose, but the clear language somehow veils deeper ideas.  One linguistic feature I noted was an interesting use of the subjunctive for indirect speech (rather than using direct speech) at times.  It has the effect of distancing the reader (and often Andreas) from the other characters, enhancing the feeling of solitude Andreas already brings with him...

On a Day Like This is a great story of revisiting the past in order to get your future moving, and one I'm sure most people would enjoy.  I have a couple more from Stamm to come - I already had Wir Fliegen (We're Flying), a collection of short stories, on my shelves, and on finishing this book, I immediately bought his first novel(lla), Agnes, too.  Stamm was nominated for the Mann Booker International Prize this year, and I'm sure he'll pop up on more short- and longlists in the future.  This is a writer you'll definitely hear more about - even if it's only on my blog :)

***All translations into English are my own sorry attempts :)