REVIEWED:
In Red by Magdalena Tulli (trans. Bill Johnston). Archipelago Books, 200 pp., $16.00.

Published in Issue 26

Because of the praiseworthy efforts of Archipelago Books, with the publication of In Red, we now have available translations of all four novels Polish writer Magdalena Tulli has written to date. Considering the general lack of attention given to translations by major American publishers, such a happy circumstance provides an opportunity to assess the work of this writer to an extent unfortunately not possible for too many translated writers, who are generally represented in English by at best an incomplete selection that may or may not include their most important work, or through which it is difficult to make a fully informed judgment of the important work because of the absence of needed context. Many writers are arguably subject to a distorted perspective due to the vagaries of translation, resulting no doubt in both the over- and the under-estimation of individual books in what is essentially a state of enforced ignorance for critics and reviewers.

Thus if English language readers had only Tulli’s first novel, Dreams and Stones, we might conclude her work is some hybrid of fiction and philosophical reflection, this novel a kind of poetic meditation in prose on the origins and development of a city. The city itself is really the novel’s only character, its various stages of growth the only plot. If we were further able to read Moving Targets, we might assume Tulli is a radical metafictionist, as it takes the motif of creation and makes it into a tale of specifically literary creation, following the efforts of an ineffectual narrator to invoke his characters and get his story started. This novel would seem to mark Tulli as a “postmodern” writer focused on the implications of storytelling itself. Adding to the mix Flaw (chronologically her most recent book), however, it would seem that Tulli’s novels can also be “about” something other than themselves. Flaw does not abandon the self-reflexive depiction of the dynamics of storytelling and the process of creation; rather it incorporates this concern in a portrayal of a fully made city with characters that do come to life, albeit more as a collective than as individual figures, and a story whose drama goes beyond (or is in addition to) the drama of narrative construction.

In Red is Tulli’s most conventional novel—which is not to say it could finally be described as a conventional work of fiction. Still, to the extent it does offer individuated characters, some degree of plot “movement,” and a strongly delineated setting, readers hesitant to commit to one of the novels that seems formidably experimental might find In Red a more comfortable introduction to Tulli’s fiction. But while the novel does provide somewhat more of the familiar elements of conventional fiction, it nevertheless doesn’t allow the reader to retreat altogether to conventional reading pleasures. If there are identifiable characters who are “developed” over the course of the narrative, there is no one character whom we are invited to regard as a protagonist. Indeed, while a succession of characters are introduced, most of them led to the same fate—early death— none of them are characters with whom we are likely to “identify.” Most of the focus is on figures of prominence and authority, primarily businessmen, and these characters in particular tend to blend together, as if each such character is another version of the previous. The procession of new characters in turn produces the novel’s narrative structure: a chronicle of notable personages and events in Stichings, a (fictional) town in a (fictional) province of northern Poland.

Stichings itself is really the main character in In Red, tracking what happens there through roughly the first half of the 20th century its primary concern. In this way it is perhaps not a radical departure from Dreams and Stones, adding people and their interactions to the portrayal of a city, superimposing their “story” on the story of the city’s growth. Although Stichings regresses as a much as or more than it progresses (at the end of the novel it is consumed by fire), it could be said to serve the same function in this novel, in a less overt, more outwardly disguised way, as the city does in Tulli’s first novel: as the vehicle for an allegorical representation of the act of literary creation. In Red’s enactment of this allegory calls less attention to itself and for the most part remains implicit, but the framing of the novel clearly enough emphasizes the symmetries of commencing and concluding the act of storytelling: “Whoever has been everywhere and seen everything,” the novel begins

last of all should pay a visit to Stichings. Simply take a seat in a sleigh and, before being overcome by sleep, speed across a plain that’s as empty as a blank sheet of paper, boundless as life itself. Sooner or later this someone—perhaps it is a traveling salesman with a valise full of samples—will see great mounds of snow stretching along streets to the four corners of the earth, toward empty, icy expanses.

The novel’s closing lines if anything make the parallel between the story of Stichings and the invocation of fictional worlds through writing even more apparent:

Traveling salesman in search of happiness or deliverance: if you wish to leave Stichings, do not hesitate for a moment: you have to do it between the capital letter and the period, without any broken-off thought, without waiting for the final word.

That the novel focuses on the act of creating a fictional “place” such as Stichings does not mean it fails to maintain the illusion that Stichings is a “real” place. Polish readers would no doubt finds its details and its portrait of the life of the city entirely genuine; for the rest of us, the illusion of reality certainly seems complete. The characters, however much they are deliberately made to echo and repeat, are still credible, recognizable human beings. The stories of success, failure, and misadventure in which they are involved are likewise recognizable and recognizably human. The reader could take the overtures to the “traveling salesman” as invitations to enter into the fictional portrayal of Stichings and its inhabitants, without necessarily reflecting on the process of literary composition or interpreting the mechanisms involved. Readers could certainly enjoy In Red as a lively narrative of the notable events in an out-of-the-way corner of Europe, although not so out-of-the-way that we can’t see ourselves reflected in the people living there.

However, while In Red could be read and appreciated for its more conventional, if at times eccentric, treatment of plot, character, and setting, such an appreciation would remain incomplete without the opportunity to situate this novel in the context of Tulli’s still evolving body of work. The access that Archipelago now gives us to this work in full allows us to see that Tulli is a writer who begins in an awareness of the artificiality of literary creation and the independent logic expressed by stories, but who has also endeavored to embody these concerns in narratives that appeal to familiar expectations of literary narrative. Even if we still cannot say that through these translations we can apprehend Tulli’s most immediate engagement of these concerns with the resources of the Polish language, nor can we experience the historical and cultural resonances of the depiction of this period in Polish history as readily as Polish readers, we can, thanks to the work of both the publisher and translator Bill Johnston, make a more concerted effort to estimate the achievement of this writer than we can with most writers we can know only through translation. My own tentative judgment is that her achievement is considerable, perhaps even singular, in the way it enlists “postmodern” strategies to further traditional goals of storytelling.

Daniel Green is a critic and writer whose work has appeared in a variety of publications and who maintains the literary weblog, The Reading Experience.

Published in Issue 26

REVIEWED:
Show Up, Look Good by Mark Wisniewski. Gival Press. $20.00, 224 pages.

Published in Issue 26

Early in Show Up, Look Good, Mark Wisniewski’s second novel, newly single Michelle meets up with an old friend, Barb, from the Midwest. Michelle has already been portrayed as a woman who attracts all variations of awkwardness and bad luck: she’s awakened to find her ex, Thom, “having his way, well, with a marital aid,” agreed to bathe an old woman as part of her rental contract, and experienced a blown transmission on her way to sell her Plymouth Reliant. Barb’s statement feels both prescient and prophetic: “Everyone in Kankakee . . . knows you won’t last in this city. In fact, quite a few of us are making bets about when you’ll be back.”

That city is Manhattan, and Michelle is determined, against all the absurd odds, to survive there. She is nothing if not resourceful—her money making schemes range from scalping David Letterman tickets to house-sitting an apartment used for afternoon trysts for random adulterers—but a larger force appears to be continually pushing Michelle backward. Memories of her inadequacy to satisfy Thom are compounded by further failures in love, her continual feelings of a being an outsider in the city, and the haunting fact that her mother died in childbirth. Her happiness is thwarted at nearly every step, and though the novel is wry and rambunctious, we feel more than a bit sorry for her ridiculous existence. In one great scene, Michelle is caught hawking the Letterman tickets, and she almost seems surprised that someone has taken offense. It’s not that Michelle is stupid, and she’s experienced enough in Manhattan to no longer be naïve; rather, she holds on to the hope that someone out there might help her, and that such help could be simply looking the other way when she acts foolishly. Rather than leaving the area of the Ed Sullivan theater and never coming back, Michelle stands in line for a show and is recruited for the “Stupid Human Tricks” act. Her trick: “lodge a beer bottle in my cleavage and chug it through a straw.” We’re embarrassed for Michelle as she performs her feat in a basement, “beneath a low ceiling of exposed pipes and wires”; she impresses the interns but is not selected to perform, and to make matters worse, she’s recognized by the security guard who ended her scalping business, given a canned ham, and told “to avoid the theater from now on.”

With enemies like these, Michelle could use a friend, and Wisniewski, a writer who exists in the loose genealogy of early Thomas McGuane, offers a few possibilities. They include a few nightmare roommates, an overly nice couple from Astoria that turn out to be swingers, and Ernest Coolridge, a mute former New York Yankee who has hanged with the likes of Al Pacino “we smoked cigars . . . just before Dog Day Afternoon.” Ernest communicates by jotting capitalized words on his notepad, and the typographical result is curious: moments of respite between Michelle’s fast-paced first-person narrative. The interruptions would be unnecessary in a calmer story, but Wisniewski uses Ernest to reposition the reader’s attention. Michelle’s breakneck narration feels appropriate to her metropolitan disorientation, and Ernest’s notes offer the closest to authentic grounding she receives in the novel.

Show Up, Look Good is not action-packed in the thriller sense, but it’s certainly attuned to the emotional speed of worry and anxiety, and the McGuane comparison feels particularly apt. McGuane, whose newer fiction tends to evoke his relocated home in Montana and the sentiments of the New West, plied his trade through language-driven, nearly sarcastic early novels in the sixties and seventies. From The Sporting Club, a farce set in a Michigan country club in the deep woods, to Ninety-Two in the Shade, the rivalry between guide-boat drivers in Key Largo, McGuane captured a particular linguistic cynicism, softening his absurdities of plot with pitch-perfect prose. Though Wisniewski’s fiction is firmly grounded in the present, the hints of McGuane are clear: a misguided main character who attracts the worst of life but plods forward. In the frantic last act, Ernest becomes more complex his aged do-gooder exterior might imply: his rental agreement with Michelle to house-sit the apartment reserved for midday affairs goes wrong when Michelle “glimpsed a woman’s legs sliding over the checkerboard tiles around the corner toward the elevator.” The implication becomes clear: “what I’m trying to say is that someone might have died in my apartment.” At first the action feels haphazard, but the reader has been rehearsed for this. The first sentence of the novel contains the admission that “I know of a secret murder.” Michelle is too cynical for melodrama, and the secret fades until these final pages, where the reader begins to better understand the narrator: she’s more than a woman who has fallen backward into bad luck. Michelle’s paved her own way through a succession of bad decisions. Her acceptance of Ernest rental’s contract is only part of the problem: she knows the murder victim, someone who, like her, “had been a slave to Manhattan.” The next lines sound like a confession: “she’d been to clubs and met men who’d seemed kind, and she’d bought salads by the pound at rat-infested delis just after five PM to save a dollar a pound, and she’d tried to like sushi and suffered through food poisoning and the sharp smell of a grease fire in the apartment across the hall.” The woman, much like Michelle, “cherished warmth of any kind.”

Such sentiment permeates Show Up, Look Good. Michelle’s relationships, both romantic and platonic, have been failures. She lacks “companionship,” and though others around her have quite dysfunctional relationships, at least they’re in relationships, hovering somewhere close to happiness. It may come as no surprise, then, that the one person who might guide her in the right direction is that ex-Yankee who, “for half a season . . . led the team in triples.” That anecdote might sound like an arbitrary statistic, but even Michelle recognizes that at least Ernest was in the books for something. And such half-hearted acceptance feels appropriate to the early McGuane tradition that Wisniewski resides within: for all the posturing and suspense of Ninety-two in the Shade, McGuane opted for a quick kill at the conclusion, since “this was not theater.” Wisniewski realizes the occasional flatness of life’s epiphanies, and his novel hits those real notes without petering into flat prose. Whereas McGuane reveled in the smirk of passing off his narrative to a side character while the two main players lie “in a pile at his feet,” Wisniewski remains with Michelle, despite her weaknesses. That authorial decision to stay the course helps the reader recognize the complexity of Michelle’s experience, and transforms her from type to individual, one worthy of attention and patience.

Nick Ripatrazone is a staff writer at Luna Park and an MFA student at Rutgers University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Esquire, the Kenyon Review, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere.

Published in Issue 26

REVIEWED:
An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor von Rezzori (trans. Philipp Boehm). NYRB Classics, 392 pp., $17.95.

Published in Issue 26

Gregor von Rezzori’s fictitious city Czernopol exists at the edge of civilization, on the border of memory and invention, lying “somewhere in the godforsaken southeastern part of Europe.” In reality it is Czernowitz, in the region known as the Bukovina, ceded by the Ottoman Empire to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1775, then after World War I part of Romania, annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, and now within the borders of Ukraine. Von Rezzori spent his childhood there, as readers of his other autobiographical volumes, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and The Snows of Yesteryear, will know. An Ermine in Czernopol is the only volume of the trilogy that’s an old-fashioned novel, rather than a set of connected novellas or portraits. It transfigures Czernowitz into Czernopol, seen from a child’s perspective with elements of fairy tale exaggeration. According to the publisher, this is the first complete English translation of An Ermine in Czernopol, which originally appeared in German in 1958, although there was a translation published in the U.S. in 1960 as The Hussar.

Czernopol is a border city, a cultural and linguistic melting pot “where you can find a dozen of the most disparate nationalities and at least half a dozen bitterly feuding faiths—all living in the cynical harmony that is built on mutual aversion and common business dealings.” It’s suspended in history between a feudal past, whose peasants still bring their pungent presence and goods to the city’s market square, and a globalizing modernity whose vanguard has arrived in Czernopol in the form of American jazz, which jostles with the old Viennese waltzes and gypsy music. The city is further divided between the imperial Habsburg past and the chauvinistic nationalism of the new Romanian regime: “Even in its deteriorated state this former grandeur was easy to see and hard to forget, not yet fully surrendered to the garish colors of the new rulers.” In the lull between the world wars there are signs of the catastrophe to come: Nazi demonstrations, swastikas painted on Jewish shops, and, in the climactic set-piece scene, a pogrom sparked off by ethnic tensions over soccer team allegiances.

Despite these ominous signs, the prevailing tone of the novel is one of good-natured amusement, which has something to do with the superior, detached attitude of the narrator’s family—as von Rezzori explains in The Snows of Yesteryear, his parents had come from Vienna, and so, “we considered ourselves as former Austrians in a province with a predominantly Austrian coloring, like those British colonists who remained in India after the end of the Raj.” The tone also has to do with the character of the city, where, “laughter . . . had been elevated to an art form, a folk art of unparalleled authenticity.” It was “the setting for most of the Jewish jokes circulating between Riga and the Levant.” As usual with von Rezzori, some of the best scenes in the novel have to do with his complicated encounters with Jews and the evolution of his attitudes from the traditional anti-Semitism of his family.

The narrator invariably uses the first-person plural—his memories, even his thoughts, are all from the standpoint of him and his siblings, particularly his sister, Tanya—as though recording the development of a fused sensibility. The novel is built around the children’s fascination with a symbolic figure, a hussar, Major Nikolaus Tildy, whom they see riding past their house one winter day, resplendent in a “cornflower-blue” uniform, escorting a horse-drawn sled bearing his fur-wrapped wife like a fairy tale queen. The tableau strikes them with mythological force. To them, this gallant cavalryman of uncertain origin—some say he is Hungarian, others are sure he is German, and his cold, reserved countenance is always described as “English”— represents all the old glory of the empire. He is the embodiment of the chivalric code, a medieval knight defiantly, rigidly standing for the ancient code of honor in a degenerate age: “the manly ideal from a supposedly bygone epoch, a world that had vanished.”

There is a certain ambivalence in the children’s idolization of Tildy, for they recognize that the romantic age of chivalry which he represents has been superseded by the new mechanized trench warfare which has left its devastation around the city, and whose tanks and machine guns have rendered the horse-mounted hussar obsolete: “We had been born into the war and to some extent were spawned by it . . . it lay in the world that surrounded us, a world distressed and distorted, not yet fully revived following the tumult of annihilation.” As fascinating to them as Tildy are the “termite-men,” the German infantry they saw marching past during the war. These soldiers seemed to utterly lack individuality, driven by some inner compulsion to burrow into the mud and blow themselves up in a kind of sacrificial rite, like “explosive larvae.” Perhaps taking a page from the German officer Ernst Jünger’s memoir Storm of Steel, which glorified the new warfare, von Rezzori’s narrator says, “So even in this war we found a new kind of beauty.”

Also contrasting with Tildy is Herr Tarangolian, who, as Prefect of Teskovina, is the head of the province. A friend of the narrator’s family who often visits their home and entertains them with his witty monologues, his ironic tolerance allows him to appreciate and mock the city in all of its disorder, while his impeccable “Levantine” suavity displays a different, more modern kind of chivalry: that of the cosmopolitan dandy and bon vivant. Herr Tarangolian regards Tildy with amusement and exasperation as a quixotic figure, “the last knight,” observing, “He loves bravery, style, élan, it’s in his blood. To ride out in single combat against the slovenliness of a city, of a country—that is truly a deed for hussars, beautiful and mad.”

The novel’s plot turns on the moment when Tildy’s rigid adherence to his warrior’s code collides with the city’s will to laughter. He responds to an insult directed at his notoriously slatternly sister-in-law by challenging the offending wag to a duel. When his civilian opponent refuses to duel Tildy challenges his commanding officer, a gruff colonel who points out with exasperation that the whole city knows the insult is only the truth. The general who heads the Czernopol garrison summons Tildy to his office; sympathetic and trying to be reasonable, he lets slip the same observation as the colonel, and is instantly challenged as well. The general then has Tildy committed to the local insane asylum for evaluation. During this confinement, Tildy becomes an unlikely party to a literary controversy after he seemingly discovers a fellow inmate to be a poet of genius, prompting a violent newspaper polemic over the authenticity of authorship, in which the real-life Viennese critic Karl Kraus champions the mad poet against anti-Semitic propagandists who claim that it’s all a Jewish plot to make a mockery of the purity of German verse.

The novel ends with a sordid denouement of tragically confused chivalry, curiously anticipating Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Although it feels like a cheap pastiche of cinematic clichés, it makes for a fittingly cynical sendoff to the world of yesterday and its last vestiges of dignity.

An Ermine in Czernopol is a hopelessly baggy novel, its plot overweighed with symbolism and missing the taut irony of the self-deprecating reversals that make Memoirs of an Anti-Semite so uncomfortably good. But it does succeed in producing a densely evocative impression of von Rezzori’s home city, which might well have been his chief aim. The old Czernowitz no longer existed by the time he wrote the novel, the Jews had been subjected to the horrors of the Holocaust, and most of the polyglot mix of other nationalities had been driven out. What was left? The epilogue to The Snows of Yesteryear tells of the author’s return visit in 1989, after an absence of more than 50 years; he found the place outwardly the same, the old buildings historically preserved, yet the streets sterile and empty: “The motley ethnic variegation had been replaced by a homogeneous breed of people,” the Ukrainians. The clangorous commerce, the mutual hatreds, and, of course, the laughter—all of it had vanished.

Joshua Lustig is an editor at the Facts on File World News Digest and a contributing editor at Open Letters Monthly.

Published in Issue 26

REVIEWED:
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (trans. Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel). Knopf. 944 pp., $30.50.

Published in Issue 26

The publication of 1Q84, Haruki Murakami’s biggest, most ambitious novel to date, seems to have brought his career full-circle. This is not simply because the book has widely been posited as Murakami’s Brothers Karamazov—that is, an attempt to write a meganovel summing up his life’s writing—but even more because of the trajectory Murakami has taken as a writer.

He published his first novel in 1979, Hear the Wind Sing. After that Murakami spent a full decade building his reputation in Japan without any serious incursion into the Anglosphere—that work would only begin in earnest in 1989, when A Wild Sheep Chase became his first book to receive wide distribution in the West. He achieved an early success in 1985 with a cyberpunkish neo-noir called Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which netted its author the prestigious Tanizaki Prize. Jay Rubin, one of Murakami’s principle translators, in fact says this book is his favorite Murakami novel, raving that it was “a shock after reading the black and white, autobiographical fiction that is such the norm in Japan.”

After Hard-Boiled Wonderland, Murakami, who has long had a difficult relationship with his home country, left his native Japan and began a period of wandering through Europe. He stopped in Rome long enough to write 1987’s Norwegian Wood, a massive bestseller that, despite his absence, made him a national figure in Japan. After Norwegian Wood Murakami continued to travel: he divided the years from 1991 to 1995 between writer-in-residence gigs at Princeton and Tuft’s University. It was during this time—after he had already published seven novels in Japanese—that he would write the title that defined his career and made him a worldwide commodity. When The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was published in English in 1997, Murakami was 48 years old.

By far Murakami’s biggest and most ambitious book at that point in his career, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was the prototypical breakout novel. A 1995 excerpt in The New Yorker (the book would appear in full in English in 1997) marked Murakami’s first appearance in that venue, a highly prized piece of literary real estate that he would soon come to dominate alongside the likes of John Updike, Alice Munro, and Jonathan Lethem. Upon its appearance in English the book received widespread acclaim. Writing in The New York Times, the delightfully named Jamie James noted that The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle exhibited something that would soon become synonymous with Murakami: a transnational eclecticism that many saw as a postmodern “world” style:

One of the preoccupying themes of Japanese literature in this century has been the question of what it means to be Japanese, especially in an era that has seen the rise and fall of militarism and the decline of traditional culture. But from reading the books of Haruki Murakami, one of the country’s most celebrated novelists, you’d never know he was Japanese at all: his characters read Turgenev and Jack London, listen to Rossini and Bob Dylan, eat pate de foie gras and spaghetti, and know how to make a proper salty dog. In Murakami’s early books, the references to Western pop culture were sometimes so obscure that they even flew over the heads of many Americans.

With the success of Wind-Up Bird, Murakami became an internationally recognized figure, and the translations soon followed. In 2000 two of his books were published in English (Norwegian Wood and South of the Border, West of the Sun). In the 2000s three more of novels followed, plus scores of stories and works of nonfiction. With wider translation, the prizes and the acclaim started rolling in and Murakami became one of the most famous literary authors in the world. Murakami has now been translated into no less than 44 languages, and each October he is bandied about as a serious contender for the Nobel Prize.

But even as Murakami’s reputation soared, the books that he wrote after The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle were unsatisfying works, little like that big, ambitious, name-making book. Sputnik Sweetheart, written in 1999, was a worthy if minor tale, whereas the relatively ambitious Kafka on the Shore (2002) fizzled and After Dark (2004) was hardly worth an afterthought. Transforming from a writer to an industry, Murakami also produced mediocre volumes of short stories (after the quake (2000) and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2006)), as well as a very trite work of nonfiction, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2008), and a strong work of journalism (Underground, 1997-8). Each of these books duly fed the legions of hungry fans and further expanded Murakami’s international reputation, but, with the exception of Underground, none came close to enlarging upon the universe that Murakami had built up until The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

With time there came rumblings that all this would change. Responding to the lack of another big book after Wind-Up Bird, and openly courting the Nobel Prize, Murakami began working on a long project that was to engage with Japan’s contemporary social and cultural turmoil as Wind-Up Bird had engaged with its World War II demons. In 2009 he published in Japan the first volume of what was to be the three-volume, 900-page novel 1Q84. Taken in the context of Murakami’s career, 1Q84 has a very clear place and purpose: after having given himself a solid perch from which to receive international acclaim with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Murakami hunkered down and wrote a number of minor works while building back the strength for his next big novel. Now that we may read Murakami’s serious follow-up to Wind-Up Bird, the question is whether or not it is a worthy successor.

1Q84 is the very long story of a lifelong love between two twentysomething Japanese, Tengo and Aomame, whose lives are narrated from the third-person in alternating chapters. (This schema is upset by the appearance of the detective Toshiharu Ushikawa, who gets his own chapters in the third and final book of 1Q84.) When the book begins their love hangs on the thinnest of threads: a chance schoolroom encounter when they were both children, which has apparently kindled a love that has lasted within them both for decades. Writ large, 1Q84 is the story of these two finding one another in the anonymity of a dark and foreboding Japan that has somehow jumped the tracks from 1984 into the parallel universe 1Q84.

Such outsized love stories as which Murakami embarks on in 1Q84 must be treated with extreme diligence, as they present sizable problems vis a vis believability, melodrama, and sentimentality. Murakami founders upon all three. It may sound ironic that a writer who indulges in the surreal as casually as Murakami would butt up against the problem of believability, but in attempting to piece together this gigantic love story Murakami relies far too often on chance and coincidence. This is more of a question of ungainliness than suspension-of-disbelief—one simply loses patience with a book that introduces so many eye-roll-inducing devices that serve no other purpose than to prolong the suspense so that Murakami may spin his plot for another hundred pages. Added to this is the fact that Murakami, for whom character has never been a strong point, makes Tengo and Aomame two-dimensional cutouts. Our lack of investment in them as individuals makes it difficult to become invested in their love, which, it must be said, rests on a rather lame premise.

Many of the world’s great long novels (Middlemarch comes to mind, plus much of Dickens) have stooped to keeping us enchained by forcing lovers apart on flimsy pretexts, but what makes those books so good is that their worlds are inherently interesting, so much so that we will gladly accept plot contrivances in exchange for the chance to immerse ourselves in them. Such is not the case with 1Q84, which feels as though it is a glued-together collage of various totalitarian motifs that have long since become old hat. One of the pleasures of a book like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is how Murakami rejuvenates an ordinary object like a well by creating an entirely new use for it. In that novel, Murakami has his protagonist shut himself in the bottom of a well for extensive periods of self-reflection, and later, hallucination. The well in Wind-Up Bird becomes a sort of touchstone, a metaphorical presence that continually develops throughout the novel, while also allowing a place for the plot to rest and rejuvenate itself. (It’s also brilliantly absurd: what’s a well doing in modern Tokyo? And why would anyone decide to head down to the bottom of it?) Before reading Wind-Up Bird I’d never imagined any well like the kind that occurs therein, and since reading it I’ve never encountered another well that comes close to Murakami’s. This well is precisely the sort of thing Murakami can expertly use to enliven the worlds he creates, but there is nothing nearly as interesting as it in 1Q84.

For example, we can consider the book Air Chrysalis, written in 1Q84 by a character named Fuka-Eri. At first this concept has promise: Fuka-Eri is a bizarrely sedate teenager with a remarkable story to tell, but atrocious prose skills. So Tengo’s friend, Komatsu, a powerful but seedy editor, gets Tengo to agree to rewrite it. Then they’re going to publish Tengo’s rewrite under Fuke-Eri’s name, submit it to Japan’s biggest book award, win it, and produce a lucrative sensation, à la J.T. Leroy. Though this is an inherently interesting concept, Murakami never makes it his own. There are scores of ghostwritten books published every year, and sometimes they even create huge acclaim for their authors. Murakami does nothing to distinguish his ghostwritten book from the ones that already exist in real life, or in other novels. The substance of Air Chrysalis does not succeed either: long after we’ve guessed as much, we’re informed that this surreal book is based on fact, but when it comes time for Murakami to actually show us the book’s “Little People,” who create the air chrysalis, the payoff is mediocre. Here is just one example, Murakami’s description of the separatist commune in which the Little People appear:

There is no television in the Gathering, and listening to the radio is not allowed except on special occasions. Newspapers and magazines are also limited. News that is considered necessary is reported orally during dinner at the Assembly Hall. The people respond to each item of news with cheers or groans—far more often with groans.

This separatist commune boilerplate, and not even very elegantly handled. If Murakami had so much as blithely stolen from David Koresh in Waco, Heaven’s Gate in San Diego, or even Jim Jones in Jonestown he could have easily done so much better. Any competent writer can lead us down the garden path with a well-worn conceit, but the Murakami that wrote Wind-Up Bird would have made it a path like none other and would have given us something worth discovering at the end of it. Murakami here talks a big game, even directly contrasting the Little People to Orwell’s Big Brother, but none of it ever goes anywhere remotely new.

More troubling is that in 1Q84, Murakami, who tends to plot so well that one supposes a genetic predisposition, continually lets his story slacken. Although the author skillfully revs up his massive plot machinery in the book’s first hundred pages, he then lets it stall, making us plow through hundred of pages more of largely uninsightful meanderings before finally revealing a few answers. By far the most poorly plotted section is the book’s fat middle, wherein Murakami keeps Tengo and Aomame largely secluded within closed rooms; in these surroundings the characters have little to do other than sit around and rehash plot points to no further illumination. The story simply sits itself down like a stubborn elephant, or perhaps it’s some profoundly prolonged act of hara kiri, the literary equivalent of “24-Hour Psycho.” This is completely contrary to Murakami’s best work, because the vintage Murakami never wallows in a plot point for very long. This is in fact the key to his success. One of the reasons Murakami translates so well is that the structure of his books—that is, the twists and turns of the story and the general development of the whole framework—are the most interesting and innovative things about his novels. Murakami doesn’t sustain a reader’s interest with the deep psychological underpinnings of his characters, nor for the beautiful descriptions of contemporary Japan, nor for his cultural riffs, nor philosophical musings. No, it’s simply that he keeps you guessing, and generally the answers transform what you’ve already read in substantial and interesting ways. The sloth with which Murakami leads us through 1Q84, plus the flopping of its few payoffs, make it one of his least intellectually stimulating books.

The book is also jam-packed with prose that sits leaden on the page. True, imagery has never been a strong point for Murakami, but 1Q84 abounds with paragraph after paragraph of highly repetitious prose full of awful similes and mixed metaphors. For instance, here, where Murakami details Tengo’s rewrite of Air Chrysalis:

Tengo then went back to his desk, switched circuits in his brain again, and read through his rewritten opening to Air Chrysalis on the word processor’s screen the way the general in the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory makes his rounds inspecting the trenches. He approved of what he found. Not bad. The writing was much improved. He was making headway. But not enough. He still had lots to do. The trench walls were crumbling here and there. The machine guns’ ammunition was running out. The barbed wire barriers had noticeable thin spots.

First notice the redundancy (which covers virtually every page of 1Q84): “He approved of what he found. Not bad. The writing was much improved. He was making headway.” Now also notice how much “pass the salt” detail is included here: “switched circuits in his brain” is unnecessary and ugly, as is telling us that Tengo read the work on “the word processor’s screen” and the belaboring of the comparison of Tengo to Kubrick’s general. I take apart this paragraph in such detail only because this is the experience of reading 1Q84—one constantly has the sense that if all the unnecessary junk-data were taken out, this book would come in at half its length, and be the better for it. The same can be said of all the unnecessary imagery and mixed metaphors, for instance: “His mind floated in the amniotic fluid of memory, listening for echoes of the past.” Or, in the very next sentence: “Like a cow in the meadow, Tengo was endlessly regurgitating fragments of the scene to chew on, a cud from which he obtained essential nutrients.”

Such linguistic hemming and hawing is indicative of another of 1Q84’s shortcomings: this is the first Murakami book I’ve read that seems in love with its own sense of seriousness. One of the things about magical realism is that in order to be successful it always maintains an ironic distance from the magical parts. One never really feels that the author believes in the magic in a straight sense, and for very good reason: getting too close to this material tends to turn it into something like a Disney cartoon or New Age mysticism. One of the nice things about Murakami is that you generally get the idea that he always finds the surreal points just as ludicrous as you do—this is what makes his books feel fresh and subversive—but here it feels that he wants you to take them with a hushed intensity. Achieving a sense of high drama when dealing with innately ridiculous scenarios is a hard thing to pull off (think of how much of Star Wars trips off that fine line between dramatic and hokey), and Murakami with his Little People thumping “hi ho” misses the mark. He does himself no favors when he sets so many “important” lines in boldface, and more than a few are even set in both bold and italics. (I suppose underlining too would have been a bit much.) The result is something I thought I’d never see: a very pedantic Murakami. Needless to say, a Murakami as invested in teaching you a moral as this one lacks his customary charm.

All this leads us to the unavoidable conclusion that after over 30 years and countless pages Murakami has very little left to say. If the mediocre books of the 2000s didn’t evidence it enough, this book does; in 1Q84 there is simply nothing that Murakami hasn’t said better elsewhere. I write this with a great sadness, as a reader who has loved Murakami’s novels and who feels a sense of shame at having to warn off other lovers of Murakami’s work. But there is no other verdict to register. 1Q84 is a great disappointment to the reputation Murakami has built as a writer, and it will not be remembered very favorably when assessing his legacy. It raises a serious doubt as to whether Murakami has anything left to tell us.

Scott Esposito edits The Quarterly Conversation.

Published in Issue 26

REVIEWED:
Ordinary Sun, by Matthew Henriksen. Black Ocean. 120 pp., $14.95.

Published in Issue 26

If an underworld were brought up and laid upon this world, like a muslin or a potato sack in the garden, and its caverns and tunnels splayed out flat as far as the eye could see, and grass and trees started to grow up through it, and sparrows flew through it, and bees bumbled in it, and all of this happened kind of extraordinarily but without a lot of hubbub, day after day after day, overlooking it all would be an Ordinary Sun in the sky. If pain and joy crawled out from inside the gut and gelled in a thin veneer over the skin, sticky and picking up lint and detritus day after day after day, an Ordinary Sun would shine upon and warm that skin. If angels existed in a handful of visceral details, if they might be anything else but for their name, and we fell in love with them, the way humans do, an Ordinary Sun would rise and set and rise and set on that love. If what is eternal is all right here before us—no end, no beginning, no after, and no before—just endless and endlessly existing, now, and now, and (changed) now, Matthew Henriksen’s Ordinary Sun is a book for this place.

Ordinary Sun at times feels like listening to confession in a parallel universe, a world like the aforementioned, with all the guts displayed on the outside, and the underworld on top. Make no mistake though: there is no otherworld. Henriksen’s world is this world. Who doesn’t recognize her own kind in lines like these, from “Corolla in the Midden”: “I do not dream. I just watch / fields burn, or ride // in cars that won’t get anywhere.” And later:

We are already too far gone to feign
loneliness, too blessed to accept

what surrounds our annihilating impending lack
of doubt, our angel flesh that won’t burn.

What makes this book feel so loaded is Henriksen’s investment in the act of existing in the poems, in imbuing words with symbolic and relational power, in not providing answers. “I didn’t say I see everything / in the dark, and I’m not inclined // to explain that when I say / ‘dark’ as I nod off I get lost,” he writes.

Indeed, this narrator both owns his thoughts and denies the existence of ownership. Much of this has to do with language; its baggage and shapeshifting. Henriksen seems compelled both to accept and deny this fact of language. It is everywhere in the crisp lines that simultaneously reveal and curtain, forcing opposites to meld and make new, or self-destruct. “. . . [T]he state,” he writes in “The Last Angel is Tattooed ‘Buttress’”:

of air is stone. Fabled, fluorescence turns to ash
and the ashes glowed, starry to the dirt.

There it was, through his fingers, the earth
an eternity. It made the fires cold.

He turns this unsparing eye on the self in “The New Surrealism”:

I am not more than light on the brickwork above
the D’Agastino and am the turning across that wall.

I am a blink as blank as the caught fish turning
its eye, or the stones turning always within.

I’m a hive blinding inward, and I’m fire cast through the eyes.
when I look, I see nothing, and when I turn away, I find,

for example, the dumpster behind
the hospital, the asters on the lawn.

This I is multiple, shimmering; it takes various mediums. It’s being. It’s shifting. It’s light, motion, and heat. The combustible cast upside down on the ocular. This I sees symbols in everything, finds a shaky holiness in the desecrated as well as the ordinary. Ordinary Sun is a rich minefield of a world. The reader is rendered unable to make assumptions in the face of mysteries addressed by name (“if you call it an angel, it’s an angel,” said Henriksen in an interview on KUAF radio) and this lack of hierarchy or dichotomy, this lack of a defining of experience allows unfamiliar symbols to effect their radiance.

It is a kind of poetics of divinity in eachness that unsparingly grants, if not divinity, then possibility. There’s a sermonlike quality to lines like these:

There was a Sunday I was blind
drunk and saw the sloshing of myself

in the same tree limb, and hated the breath
of myself, and loved the hatred of self

and all things, and found forgiveness in doing
violence unto my life, and loving my life.

The poem, “An Angel Unlearns the Libel of Exhilaration,” (a title that haunts me) begins with the speaker taking a boy to a movie about bicycles. The boy falls in love; then falls from the object of his love, which one might argue is the experience of love (and certainly maintains a likeness to parable). The poem concludes, “ . . . Forever turning, the // desecrating never ends. Amen”. The process of time enacts the decomposition of time and matter. Or, the experience of living is the act of desecrating, of making things unsacred. In the same breath, this loosening of the sanctity of eachness is regenerative: by making a libel out of calling certain things sacred and other things base, it takes a definition of sacred that no longer holds true and creates a new, more expansive meaning. What is a bicycle but a vehicle. What is a boy but a symbol. Oh: this is love.

And oh, this is humanity: it doesn’t end, but multiplies. We destroy and desecrate, we slander and libel, and all the while we love the world, we love it blindly.

“We’re living in a time made clear by the idea / that muddles all thought and mangles the age,” writes Henriksen, and later: “Out of the ashes we won’t rise.” In the desire for angels to appear, or maybe in the latent knowledge that this is eternity, that this life is afterlife as well as existence, comes a voice that speaks to a collective and willful ignorance:

. . . and let me tell you, it is nice,
the silliness we hope to make real, much better

than the actualities we tried to make unreal.

Immersed in this book, the reader experiences something akin to a concept of afterlife as memory, of existing alongside afterlife, both physically (in the decay of physicality around us) and metaphysically (as in an emotional or spiritual resonance that stays with a person long after the events that spurred the feelings have come to pass). Writes Henriksen, “ . . . and God continues snoring // in the wound round us and will until when to be is as was.”

For all the angels, for all the dead and desecrated in its pages, this book is for the living.

Ellen Welcker is a poet living in Seattle. Her first book, The Botanical Garden, was published last fall by Astrophil Press.

Published in Issue 26

REVIEWED:
Selected Poems by Jaan Kaplinski (trans. Jaan Kaplinski, Sam Hamill, Hildi Hawkins, and Fiona Sampson). Dufour Editions Inc. 256 pp., $27.95

Published in Issue 26

Jaan Kaplinksi is a humanist, having worked as a sociologist, a researcher in linguistics, an ecologist, and a lecturer on the History of Western Civilization at Tartu University. He has been a student of Mahayana Buddhism, as well as other Eastern philosophies. His humanism and spiritual inquiry is evidenced through the opening poem of the Selected, as he gestures to the East,

Sails come sailing out
from foreign pictures
sails on the Yangtze
sails on the River Li

but even when the poems are populated by more homely images, a Buddhist sensibility imbues their attentiveness to nature, their concern with transience, and their unadorned language. Much of this work is meditative, inviting contemplation.

Though sometimes referred to as a Modernist, Kaplinski’s poetry often has the feel of a classical, and older, poetics. The poems have a gravitas; they do not mock, toy, or play with the reader. They invite the reader to eavesdrop on the thoughts, remembrances, and philosophy of a person as they flicker and flow. This contemplative, philosophic strain is present in much of the work, but not all. History and politics appear and punctuate the air. This is not surprising since Kaplinski was a member of the post-Revolution Estonian parliament (Riigikogu) from 1992-1995, and has written extensively on politics and society. What is mildly surprising, perhaps, is how infrequently the poems turn outward and invite the world onto the page. When they do, the effect is often illuminating and vaguely threatening.

we are given too much and we are
very poor
we are taught too much and we know
nothing
but we too we do not want
to inhabit the same world
as an Oliver Cromwell or a Josef Stalin

Kaplinksi was born in Tartu, Estonia (the City of Good Thoughts) in 1941 to an Estonian mother and a Polish father. His father died in a Soviet labor camp while Jaan was a young boy. This primal loss seems to have imparted an acute awareness of mortality and the fragility of life. The cyclical patterns of nature are a leitmotif throughout these often musical, rhythmic poems. The natural environment is not background, stage setting, or capework. It is the thing itself. Describing the natural world through language is central to Kaplinski’s ontology. “There is so little that remains . . .” begins the opening poem of Through the Forest, then a catalogue of what remains in memory—the feel of snow, the wind, the perfume of the day:

There is so little that remains: the handful of last year’s snow
that I squeezed in my hand as we skied, the three of us,
towards Kvissental across the peat pond.
The wind in the heather between Vild and Audaku.
The scent of St. John’s wort and marjoram tea in Aruküla in the early morning.

Many of the poems in the Selected create such catalogues of memory, shoring up intimate, sensuous encounters with the natural world: vivid images of a bird flying across the dusk, aspen and birch trees, leaves, branches and sky. These are the memories of a man looking for, and making, meaning through the act of description. They are not the stained memories of a grim childhood or failed human relationships. They are not engines of bitterness. This type of memory is not nostalgia; it is poetic memory as an instrument of thinking. Later in the same poem:

Between the great fingers of the twilight,
which slowly close tight around us,
a few tiny crumbs sometimes fall. Something of us.
Something of the world. Something that remains undiscovered.
Goes on falling. We do not know where from, we do not know where to.

Knowing and not knowing and the inability of humans to feel secure in their knowledge of the world is a central concern. Kaplinski seems at home in this uncertainty. Arriving at knowing might be out of reach, but thinking, metacognition, inquiring, and searching for understanding are his major concerns.

He understands man as both a meaning maker and an image maker. In the poem that begins “Lines do not perhaps exist; . . .” he writes:

Points are of themselves, lines of us.
Lines are not real. Constellations, contours, profiles,
Outlines, ground plans, principles, reasons,
Ulterior motives and consequences . . .

He undertakes this meaning-making through the process of writing, in full awareness of the limitations of words and of the failure inherent in these instruments.

In the poem that begins “I do not write, do not make poetry, about summer, about autumn,” he writes:

If there is something I can do, perhaps it’s
observing that observation, grasping that seeing.
If that’s knowledge; perhaps it’s the opposite.
Perhaps, after all, poetry comes entirely from ignorance.
Is a particular sort of ignorance. And that
is much harder to learn than knowing.

This metacognition of the act of writing, of his social role as a writer and, specifically a poet, emerges in Through the Forest. He comments on himself, sitting at a table in an old “outbuilding” in front of the page, waiting for the poem to take shape. He writes about the struggle to write, about the not-knowing that is implicit in the act of creation. He observes that language fails repeatedly; despite this, poems are not exercises in futility. In “I ended up in literature . . .” he expresses this inherent tension between language and its limitations, understanding full well what is lost in the process of translating the world:

I sometimes dream of a language where there are no nouns, only verbs. . . . Like a remainder of an earlier living, changing and flowing world that gradually congeals, freezes into nouns, fossils, ice, theories, principles, and to which you try, more and more desperately and more and more resignedly, to speak of its own youth, of light, which as a flowing and a surging, and of life, which is light.

A remarkable feature of this Selected is the consistency of poetic voice. Four translators, Kaplinski included, create a cloth that feels whole. His music—its tempo, rhythms, tonalities—are not distorted by the different instruments. Perhaps his voice is too strong, or perhaps the instruments themselves are extraordinarily attuned to him. In either case, the effect is satisfying. A reader is not plagued with that uneasy thought that the poems would be better in the original.

The style, over the course of 30 years, evolves. Sometimes the formal appearance is spare, skeletal, consisting of two spinal columns down the sides of a page; sometimes a dense parade of words fill lyric prose poems. The language is mostly literal, often simple language. There is very little abstraction or obliqueness. The focus is on the image. Language is respected as a vehicle for expressing real things; language is not used for language’s sake. Words, though empty shells, have meaning. A folk tradition wreathes through many of the poems in repetitions, variations, and an interconnectedness of nature imagery that bespeaks an ancient cosmology.

This Selected brings together decades of poetic inquiry from one of Europe’s major poets. Like Chinese ink drawings, these poems have a deceptive simplicity, astonishing depth, and a purity that can only be achieved by a master in full command of his eye, heart, and hand.

Nicole Zdeb is a poet and educational assessment designer in Portland, OR. Her most recent chapbook, The Friction of Distance, (2011), was published by Bedouin Books. Find out more at nicolezdeb.com.

Published in Issue 26

REVIEWED:
Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life by Lev Loseff (trans. Jane Ann Miller). Yale University Press, 333 pp. $35.00.

Published in Issue 26

Leningrad, January 1964. The young poet Joseph Brodsky was writing at his desk, taking advantage of the rare moment of quiet in the communal apartment where he lived with his parents.

The 23-year-old had already been arrested, interrogated, and jailed. In the previous month alone, KGB agents had wrestled him into the back of a car, authorities had labeled him a social parasite, and his journals and papers had been seized. Solitude was undoubtedly welcome.

It was also, however, short-lived. The Soviet police burst in to tell the poet that if he didn’t find a job in three days, he’d be sorry. “I choked out some sort of response, but in the back of my mind I kept thinking that I had to finish this poem,” he told his lifelong friend Lev Loseff, author of Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life.

Brodsky’s insouciance was no gesture of contempt—or at least not only. He believed he held a distinct evolutionary edge—and went on to prove it by winning international acclaim and a Nobel, becoming a Russian poet, an English essayist, and, of course, an American citizen. In his opinion, poets were not only the forefront of civilization, but nothing less than the cutting edge of the human race itself.

Loseff boiled down Brodsky’s 1987 Nobel lecture to this syllogism: “Art is the means by which a social animal became an individual ‘I,’ and therefore aesthetics is superior to ethics. The highest form of aesthetic activity is poetry, and therefore the creation of poetry is the ultimate goal, the evolutionary goal, of the species.”

This, perhaps, provides the basis for what Loseff calls in those early days “a conscious moral stance, a struggle for inner freedom.” Brodsky’s p.o.v. was already providing a protective armor in 1964.

He would need it: a month after the unpleasantness in the Leningrad apartment, he endured the petty thuggery of a fixed courtroom trial, which Loseff describes with fresh insight. For Brodsky, however, the entire affair was almost beneath his notice. Don’t give your enemies your attention, he would later say, it only prolongs their life.

For Brodsky, poetry was a ticket out of this world. And in Russia, the poet is godlike. To know both is to understand the context for this erudite and often wise book—a work more likely to find readers among current fans, rather than find new ones. Yet Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life is simultaneously enlightening, perplexing, and exasperating.The knowledgeable reader is left feeling rewarded and cheated at once, as if invited to a sumptuous banquet and offered only canapés. The protean figure remains beyond the range of these pages. The door remains at once half open and half closed to us.

You’ll read no secrets in Loseff’s volume. But neither will you get Brodsky’s bewildering, mesmerizing blend of hubris and humility, charm, and abrasiveness. Brodsky was a Catherine Wheel of metaphysical brilliance, scathing insults, and intellectual splendor.

Russia’s longing for pure poet-heroes held an incandescent grip on the Russian psyche, and the nation bleaches its bards to an unearned whiteness. Writers have always claimed special moral exemptions for themselves—wishing to be something grander than simply a guy who wields a ballpoint or stares at an empty computer screen. Brodsky upped the ante.

He told Loseff that the lesser cannot comment on the greater, the mice cannot review the cat. Was he exempting himself from criticism? Certainly. But Brodsky was also the first to bend his knee to those he saw above him on the ladder—from Ovid to Auden. The sense of hierarchy may rub against the egalitarian Brodsky who once wrote, “Evil takes root when one man starts to think that he is better than another,” but the contradiction can be chalked up to his complex humanity as easily as his self-blindness.

While the worst within us may salivate for sordid details and evidence that our hero is no better than us, we look to be inspired and transported, too—many of us read memoirs and biographies for precisely that reason.

Recalling the frequent appearance of a star as “a sacred constant in Brodsky’s poetry,” Loseff writes: “But the star was always the point at which suffering and divine love were joined.” But that’s the very point of contact he erases, for the most part, in this literary life.

What’s to hide? For one, Brodsky’s life was messy, and the simple truth is that he was not a “nice” man—sometimes he could be a downright cruel one. A spate of unkind memoirs in recent years has uncovered a substratum of Russian resentment, but the boil has yet to be lanced in America. Those who didn’t know him remained transfixed by his perceived martyrdom—but Brodsky, to put it mildly, was not the martyr type.

A martyr is not necessarily a saint, in any case, and those who knew him didn’t turn to him for saintliness. He was spellbinding, an electrical jolt for the psyche. An encounter with him, as a colleague or as a mentor, could be life-changing and endlessly rewarding. Warts and all, the real man carries far more interest than the photoshopped one Loseff gives us. The portrait that emerges on these pages has lost its sizzle. One does not taste a single spoonful of borscht, or feel the nip of a single Russian snowfall.

So Loseff made a safe bet when he wrote Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life. He cautiously adopted Brodsky’s own position that the writing is the life, and bypassed any resistance from the gatekeepers.

Yet a real biography cannot come too soon for this curiously vaporizing presence in American letters. Many of Brodsky’s poems have not appeared in English at all, and many could be more effectively translated. Many of his letters are literary, not personal, and would find a grateful audience. A major American poet is disappearing from bookstores, from bookshelves, from our literary conversations.

Loseff’s microscope is focused on the early years—an instructive lens for an American audience. For example, we begin to see that the 1964-65 internal exile in the Archangelsk region really was, as Brodsky had insisted, one of the best times of his life—he was not being defiant, merely precise. After the trial, he had found quiet, at last—a straw pallet, a desk made of boards, and Oscar Williams’s New Pocket Anthology of English Verse. He taught himself English and discovered Auden under a kerosene lamp. It was the solitude and study he had longed for in Leningrad.

With his 1972 expulsion, Brodsky lost the psychological fixtures of his life, its few stable points—he also lost his poverty of spirit. Shocked and blinded by the loudness and bright colors in this otherworld, he wrote to Loseff: “Abundance is just as hard to take as poverty, maybe harder. The latter’s preferable because the soul is engaged. I personally can’t take anything in—everything seems to bounce around, I’ve got spots before my eyes.”

Then his compass found a new magnetic north. Within a day of his arrival in stopover Vienna, his friend, the Russian scholar Carl Proffer, drove him to Auden’s cottage in Kirchstetten just as Auden was walking back from the train station after a trip into the city.

The unexpected encounter baffled both sides: Brodsky’s limited English, learned only from books, was unintelligible; Auden spoke no Russian and, a little more than a year from his death, was constantly soused.

Brodsky wrote to Loseff about the Kirchstetten routine: “W.H. Auden drinks his first dry martini around 7:30 a.m. … since he writes with a ballpoint pen, the bottle on his desk holds Guinness rather than ink. … After lunch, a nap, which I think is the only sober hour in his day. … Before bedtime he sips some aged Chateau d’whatever…”

Brodsky was a houseguest for several weeks, nevertheless. The rapprochement would have a seismic impact on the rest of Brodsky’s life—but what was the fabric of this encounter, and what was the embroidery?

Loseff writes that Brodsky wrote verse “strikingly like that of an Anglo-American poet twice his age.” For the English ear, nothing could be further from the truth. Brodsky’s pent-up energy, restless intelligence, the relentless struggle to equal the sound of a passionless metronome—how different from Auden’s clipped, Oxfordian, well-governed intelligence and taut stanzas!

Loseff pretty much loses interest in the narrative somewhere in Austria. Thematic chapters follow, for the most part. Odd, given that nearly half Brodsky’s life, and nearly all his poetic career, was in America. Loseff blithely asserts that “whatever the next quarter-century might bring, from this point on, Brodsky himself would not change.”

Brodsky’s marriage gets little more than in a passing sentence—not even a mention of the Sept. 1, 1990 wedding in Stockholm City Hall. Crucial friendships and feuds, the womanizing, the ruthless climb to the top of the New York literary pile—and, on the other hand, the kindnesses to students and colleagues, the generous helping hand he extended to Russian friends in need (reportedly his Nobel money was showered on them)—all pass into silence.

Loseff’s lone voice in the published chorus is lyrical, sometimes sentimental, occasionally tendentious. “He could be irritable, he could be sharp. But he never hated anyone” he writes of Brodsky. It’s a ringing way to wind up a chapter, but … never hated, really? I guess it depends on what “hate” means.

The mother of Brodsky’s son, Marina Basmanova, is glossed as an artist with a Mona Lisa smile. A more impartial eye might see her not as a Beatrice or Circe but, as is usual in such cases, an attractive, ordinary woman who happened to become the obsession of an extraordinary man. (She has steadfastly refused interview requests.)

Similarly, Loseff insists on buttressing Brodsky’s credentials as politically liberal—apparently important to the biographer, but it doesn’t square with the anti-communist who bellowed to a crowd: “You liberals should try to solve one problem instead of diffusing your energy all over the world!” Loseff hits the target when he writes, “For him there was no human history outside individual human lives; the central object of a writer’s interest had to be the person whom history had made suffer most.” Brodsky expressed this way, in translator Jane Ann Miller’s non-poetic rendering: “So much light packed into this shard of star/at nightfall! Like refugees into a boat.” Loseff noted that “nowhere in Brodsky does the good attain such metaphoric intensity.”

Loseff dwells lovingly on the Brodsky before he acquired the urbane carapace—before the accumulating gossip, squabbles, fame, women, heart attacks, gossip, and marketing.

One transformative star-point of suffering occurred in that kangaroo courtroom—a courtroom designed, according to a witness that Loseff quotes, so that “it plunged all of us, the defendant included, into the depths of our utter insignificance.” Brodsky was alone perhaps beyond anything he had experienced in his isolated life. “Brodsky’s poetic philosophy is being born,” Loseff writes. “Suffering is taken as a term of human existence; the world is taken as is.”

The witness, writer Izrail Metter, said that the judge “couldn’t hurt him, couldn’t goad him into blowing up; he wasn’t frightened by her shrieking at his every other word. … from time to time his face expressed dismay, when no one seemed to understand him, or when he in turn could not fathom why this odd woman seemed so unreasonably hostile; he couldn’t seem to get across even what in his mind were the simplest of ideas.”

In bringing these unforgettable images to an American audience, Loseff delivers to us the matchless moment when Brodsky’s pure verse rang out from the cold heart of a weaponless war.

“To put it simply, I began to feel that I really didn’t need any other poetry apart from Joseph’s,” said Loseff, speaking to scholar Valentina Polukhina of his early friendship. “Of course I still needed poetry of the past. But contemporary poetry, my own included, was something I no longer felt any need for. Brodsky was saying it all for me.”

It wasn’t true, of course—or at least it didn’t stay true. Loseff began publishing poetry in 1979, and would became a distinguished poet before dying in 2009. But his Russian biography of Brodsky is probably the book for which he will be remembered in the America that was his home for three decades. Dead poet, dead author: destiny put both men on facing pages of a forever closed book.

Cynthia L. Haven has written for The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, World Literature Today, The Kenyon Review, and others. Her An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz was published earlier this year; Joseph Brodsky: Conversations in 2003. She was a Milena Jesenská Fellow with Vienna’s Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen. Her blog is Book Haven.

Published in Issue 26

REVIEWED:
Self-Portrait of an Other by Cees Nooteboom and Max Neumann (trans. David Colmer). Seagull Books. $25.00, 76 pages.

Published in Issue 26

As hard as you look at it, Max Neumann’s paintings don’t reveal much about his method, but two recent English-language publications imply that he must enjoy collaborating with luminaries of world literature. AnimalInside, reviewed in The Quarterly Conversation’s issue 25 by Christiane Craig, brought Neumann together with László Krasznahorkai, the prestigious Hungarian novelist only now building up a substantial reputation in the Anglosphere. In that book, Neumann’s images, a series built around the silhouette of a jumping dog, entered into a sort of conversation with short pieces by Krasznahorkai. They tag-teamed it, with the artist’s work inspiring the novelist’s work, which would in turn shape the next stage of the artist’s, and so on.

Even if Neumann and Cees Nooteboom didn’t follow the same method in creating Self-Portrait of An Other, they wind up with a book that seems to take the very same form, right down to the Roman numerals marking and separating each chunk of text. Krasznahorkai wrote brief pieces in AnimalInside, but Nooteboom goes even shorter, never exceeding about 230 or 240 words at a stretch, writing texts so isolated on the page that they often feel more like poetry than prose. They might be described as “prose poems,” but I prefer to think of them as ghost stories.

Those who primarily read English might best know Nooteboom as the author of The Following Story, a characteristically short and almost as characteristically prize-winning novel of a benign misanthrope. Voluntarily submerged in Latin and Greek classics, he inexplicably wakes up one morning in a Lisbon hotel room, the site of his near-passive complicity in a fateful act of adultery decades before. Nooteboom makes equally strong use of this narrator’s mundane romantic turbulence, his attempts to distance his mind from this turbulence by living exclusively in the distant past, and an extended experience of death that seamlessly embeds the everyday within the mythical.

I worry that my description of The Following Story won’t make much sense to anyone who hasn’t read the book, so I can only hope that it comes off like Nooteboom’s contributions to Self-Portrait: spare, evocative, and a generator of far more interesting questions than answers. In David Colmer’s translation Nooteboom writes with a haunting starkness:

He remembered the end of the friend who should have died after him. When he approached the deathbed, the sick man didn’t move, as if he was already tied in to something else forever and no longer expected anyone. His eyes were open though, he was staring out through the window without seeing anything. Only after a while did his friend turn his head toward him—slowly, searchingly. There was something very solemn about that movement. “You, here?” he asked, as if the visitor were lost, trespassing. “Yes,” he answered. The other’s eyes, which were as dark as ever, looked at him slowly, his gaze taking much longer than usual to reach him. The late light made the thin, transparent tube running from his nose to a machine look like a piece of jewelry, something from a world the other would never enter. Then the man in the bed smiled—equally slowly—and said, “You’re the last person I will ever see.” After that, neither of them spoke again.

Similarly eerie vignettes appear in many of the book’s 33 “chapters.” A lone observer receives visitors gripping “suitcases packed with genitals and teeth.” A man spots a girl whose face has disappeared: “She squatted in a hostile, hillside meadow and pissed with her legs spread, her child’s body turned toward him. The eye between her legs moved, looking at him from behind its arc of water.” Another man approaches and retreats from a pair of dogs feasting on a dead donkey: “Still chewing, they looked at each other briefly, then shrugged their shoulders like people who have been disturbed during dinner. That night in the travelling salesman’s hotel he had gazed intently at himself in the mirror, but the light was so dim his face was hard to make out.”

Pinning down the exact source of the fear and tension in each of these miniatures proves difficult. You could say the same about Neumann’s illustrations, which, despite having been drawn and painted on what look like cut-out panels of paper grocery bags, project an amorphous but fascinating menace. At first glance they evoke the clichés of psychologist’s-office doodles of disturbed children, but a deeper look reveals their fine visual control; the bright color and formal steadiness of his work in AnimalInside blend into the nightmarishness of Self-Portrait’s imagery.

Neumann prominently features vaguely humanoid figures in most of his illustrations, though they’re often blindingly white, without pupils, and missing limbs. (Strange as it sounds, one of the most viscerally relevant comparisons would be to the hockey mask worn by Friday the 13th’s Jason Voorhees.) Ears and knees spout jets of black; heads give way at the crown to primitively industrial-looking tubes; shabby but otherwise normal chairs, crates, and roosters exist alongside blankly staring grotesques with weaponized extremities. “Strange, unprecedented creatures,” Nooteboom calls these in his afterword, “dream figures that resist description.” That’s one way of putting it.

Despite its many small vectors of disturbance, Self-Portrait isn’t an overwhelmingly scary book. Even Neumann’s most malevolent apparitions, when you’ve gazed upon them long enough, become harmless, funny, and—dare I say it?—approach whimsy. Some of Nooteboom’s pieces describe the natural world in a way that brings to mind Borges (to whom critics often compare him) at his most quasi-mythical:

He saw the sea in the distance and then, almost immediately afterwards, the two stones: larger than a man, one dug into the ground and standing upright, the other laid horizontally on top of it. A ring of smaller, much rougher stones had been placed around the monument. He felt the change when he stepped into the circle. Now there was nothing except silence, the forms it adopted in this place. He sat down and thought about the people who lived here thousands of years ago. What were there voices like? No one came this way. The countryside could not have changed. The wind rustled through the holly oaks, making it sound as if someone wanted to say something after all. He laid his hand on the lower stone—a different, broader hand than the one with which he had written that morning—and remembered the name of the man he had buried not far from here, the sorrow, and the word that had existed for it. That night he dreamt of a building he had never see, a man in a blinding haze of light who kept his face hidden.

This contrasts sharply with Nooteboom’s tales of the city, which read like a silent film’s diagnosis of mass urban misery taken to a grimly organic level. Ants gradually strip clean the corpse of a rhinoceros beetle in a passage whose protagonist, observing the spaces emptied of eyes and a horn, “had seen faces like that in big cities, in the evenings when the offices closed and swarms streamed out on their way to distant homes . . . their conversations were about the plague and the cancer of ants, the sudden worthlessness of money.”

The rest of the time, the Dutch writer and German artist conjure up a world leaden with the bleak suspicion and pseudo-institutional terror of wartime Europe. The hairless, opaquely spectacled figure in Neumann’s cover image would make a readily recognizable international symbol of the kind of bureaucrat empowered to send you to death. An animal somewhere between highly trained attack dog and feral mutt bares his teeth under the words “SEMPRE LO STESSO.” Nooteboom writes of a man’s glancing encounter with his father, finding him “wearing a sinister uniform flecked with mold,” revolver in hand. “In the cold of that night that has never ended,” another man “sees the gleaming black car and the boots and peaked caps of the officers who don’t speak his language,” soon realizing that the pair of identical fur-coated women standing nearby have betrayed him: “Without understanding, he knows that this is about fear and flight.”

Limited to forms with little space for detail, Nooteboom and Neumann expend Self-Portrait of Another’s energy crafting the proverbial tips that imply vast icebergs beneath. Are the icebergs, in this case, the “dark sides” of two creators who have shown broader tonal and emotional ranges elsewhere? Or does that assumption come from my particular reading (and viewing) of their collaboration’s highly economical content? The proximity of Neumann’s words to Nooteboom’s images spark the kind of mental interactions the brain goes through at night, fashioning scenarios that seem elaborately amusing, ghastly, or both, out of the unremarkable materials of daily life. When we listened in childhood to campfire stories about phone calls that turn out to come from inside the house, we reacted so strongly to the thousand possibilities, most of them unpleasant, that rushed into our consciousness, produced by the information given us. Nooteboom and Neumann tell their stories in the same way, but with the intellectual and aesthetic richness that comes from a longer reach back into history, down into mythology, and across a wide swath of Europe.

Colin Marshall hosts the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. He also blogs at The War on Mediocrity.

Published in Issue 26

REVIEWED:
Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique by Gonçalo M. Tavares (trans. Daniel Hahn). Dalkey Archive Press. 343pp, $15.95.

Published in Issue 26

Someone once noted that it’s easy to have virtue when facing adversity but the real test of character comes when one is given power. To test this aphorism, one need look no further than Gonçalo M. Tavares’ novel Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique for evidence of how power corrupts and attracts the corrupt. The novel tells the story of a middle-class doctor, Lenz Buchmann, in an uncertain city, country, and time, weaving in and out of flashbacks and long digressive rifts on ideas or concepts that are clearly important to the author.

Tavares is a prolific writer from Portugal who at age 41 has won many prestigious European writing and book awards and has been published in several languages, including French, Hebrew, German, and Spanish. Tavares’ other works, including Jerusalem and the forthcoming Joseph Walter’s Machine (both published, like Technique, by the Dalkey Archive Press), also explore emotionally detached male protagonists who are on the cusp of brutal choices that will influence their entire lives. In his 2006 novel Jerusalem, for example, protagonist Ernst Spingler is about to commit suicide as the novel opens, but circumstance changes the course of the man’s evening. In Technique, too, we are given a pivotal scene as the novel opens, of the young Buchmann being forced by his father to have sex with a servant girl. The implications of this scene continue to reverberate throughout Buchmann’s life and his relations with women and even men.

As he goes to school and seeks his training as a doctor, Buchmann treats his patients with conscientious attention to detail but sees little in them beyond what he can diagnose and treat. For him, they lack any sort of humanity. Even when considering those closest to him, Buchmann has trouble reaching through to anyone’s human side: his brother, tortured and terrified, is little more than a conduit for Buchmann’s own belief in his superiority. His father, brutal and sadistic, is admired, but only insofar as Buchmann thanks the man for making him into a brutal and sadistic carbon copy. Though we are in the head of Buchmann from the beginning to the end of the novel, we are never given access to any kind of emotional core, and, indeed, there is an emotional hollow at the center of this work. While that is most likely Tavares’ intent, the reader is forced into an odd relationship with the story. As interesting as his ideas are, even in the most esoteric of novels one seeks out emotion as a way to mediate and access characters.

We know facts about Buchmann—he is married, he has a successful medical practice—but we know far less than we need to really get at the core of him as a character. Again, this is no doubt intentional, as Tavares is showing us the internal life of a monster that we are not supposed to identify with. Buchmann has little insight into his own life and he is completely detached from everything but ideas. At the center of the tale is the notion of power: political power, personal power, familial power, how we get power and how we keep it. How power builds up nations and how power destroys individuals. In addition, Tavares is interested in showing how doctors hold a certain sway of power over their patients:

Lenz had managed to save the man’s life, and during the operation had felt with unusual intensity the struggle between the two extremes of medical technique: his scalpel embodying precision, morality, the legality that this facet of technique both establishes and requires, and, on the other hand, on the sick man’s side, there were the clear results of an explosion likewise provoked by technique; the explosion that instantly establishes disorder— whether on a large scale (a battlefield of soldiers) or a personal one—and cellular panic, which is simply the temporary establishment of a marked immorality: there isn’t a single straight line left in a body that has just experienced the effects of an explosion. A bomb . . . is simply a machine designed to explode.

The novel is organized into short vignettes or meditations “on a theme,” which are often then subdivided into sub-themes. The titles add an editorial like objectivity to the story, the only time where one senses some kind of moral authority beyond the myopic and highly dysfunctional authority of Buchmann himself. In a section called “A Completely Inappropriate Song—The Brain,” we are told:

It isn’t intelligence, however, nor the extraordinary capacity for abstraction, but the rough and ancient capability to resist the outside world, the material and animal resistance that remain in that intelligence, which it is important to protect. A man who is illiterate, or unable to add three to three, can still consider his head a decisive point as long as he knows how to pick up a weapon and differentiate the blade end from the handle, the barrel from the trigger.

Again and again, violence and power and death are linked, one causing or betraying the other as Buchmann increases his profile in his city and country. He soon manages to get into the machinations of an important up-and-coming political party where he takes on a secretary whose father Buchmann’s own father killed during the war (sadistically, unnecessarily). Buchmann is fascinated by the young woman’s lack of knowledge of the details of her father’s death. He even sees himself falling into another power dynamic with the young woman’s brother, who has the same name as the murdered father, as if in some kind of reincarnated hell. Just when he appears to be on the verge of realizing his highest goal—a position of great power—Buchmann is diagnosed with a mysterious cancer-like illness.

Here Tavares’ own thoughts on the illnesses of his former patients casts an ironic pale on his own experiencing at surgery and recovery:

Illness was clearly a form of cellular anarchy, a disorder, an internal disrespect for the rules that some people even call divine, as they preceded any human arrangement. A body is not a city. There may have been a pre-existing map, but humans were not given the privilege of examining it and suggesting amendments.

What Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique offers is an interesting and highly clinical portrait of a pathologically ambitious man who uses ideas and his own refusal to be engaged emotionally in life to guide him through his choices and reflections. It is a meditative, odd kind of novel, one that is not so much of a cover-to-cover read than a slow, methodical one, requiring thought, rethought, re-reading, and serious reflection. Like Tavares’ compatriot, José Saramago, who died in 2010, Tavares work is complex and at times highly allegorical, allowing a good deal of reflection and analysis to accompany any reading.

Gregory McCormick is the Director of English Programming at the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival in Montreal.

Published in Issue 26

REVIEWED:
Is That a Fish in Your Ear? by David Bellos. Faber & Faber. $27.00, 384 pages.

Published in Issue 26

As director of Princeton’s Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication and a brilliant translator from the French, David Bellos has shaped and inspired a generation of literary translators. With his new book on translation, he now opens class to the nonspecialists. Grounded in a lifetime of teaching, thinking about, and creating translations, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything is that marvelous rarity, a book by a specialist that can be enjoyed by general readers. We live in an unapologetically monolingual culture, and, as Bellos notes, “translation is much less easy to see and understand when you are based in the English-speaking world.” His sprightly book reveals the invisible, demonstrating how translation permeates and shapes every aspect of our existence.

Approximately 7,000 languages are spoken in the world today. Of those, knowledge of nine—Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Spanish, Russian, Urdu, French, Japanese, and English—would, theoretically at least, allow one to communicate with ninety percent of the world’s population. Although Mandarin currently has the largest number of native speakers, English has the most nonnative users and is the foremost “vehicular” language, not only used by natives but learned by nonnative speakers for the purpose of communicating with speakers of a third tongue. (Those for whom English is the all-terrain method of linguistic transport may have an advantage, but not necessarily the upper hand: in these exchanges native speakers are in fact the less sophisticated users, since they have only one language with which to think.)

When it comes to publishing, English has a special use. Like French and German, it is not only a vehicular language but also a “pivot language” that can serve as an intermediary between original and target language. That gives English a special place in the international book trade, where translation into English is crucial to selling rights in other languages. (Bellos himself uses French as a pivot language for his translations of the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare.) Given that, as Bellos explains, translation requires knowledge of both language and culture, some pairs of languages defy easy exchange, making these go-betweens are crucial. (This also explains why J. K. Rowling has facilitated translation between Hebrew and Chinese.) Translation exchanges–imports and exports—occur between only about fifty languages, with an enormous trade deficit between English and everything else: fully 75% of translations involve English as either source or target.

Bellos explores the role of translation in law, journalism, history, politics, linguistics, science, and religion. He has a gift for making the arcane accessible and a flair for the obvious. The book is full of striking observations. “To know a language is to know how to say the same thing in different words—all words are translations of others”; “dictionaries exist thanks to translators, not the other way around”; “translation is the opposite of empire.” Along the way he lines up and knocks off various clichés and platitudes plaguing the field. Eskimos do not have a hundred words for snow; Frost did not say that poetry is what’s lost in translation, and even if he had, it’s not true; humor is not untranslatable. As proof of the last, Bellos offers a page from his dazzling version of Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual. In a Paris print shop, a character inspects a display of dummy calling cards, one of which is “Adolf Hitler: Fourreur.” “Fourreur” means “furrier,” but sounds like the German “führer.” Faced with translating the pun—a task analogous to rendering a crossword’s clues and answers in another language without disrupting the grid–Bellos considers the relationships between languages, sound, and meaning, then triumphantly produces “Adolf Hitler, German Lieder.” (Bellos cites another marvel from his Perec oeuvre in the chapter “What Translators Do.” ) Elsewhere Bellos praises Anthea Bell’s inventive versions of the Asterix comics for not only capturing the original’s humor but also improving upon its jokes, all within the restricted space of the dialogue bubble. Bellos also debunks more pernicious assumptions, including the false dichotomy of literal and “free” translation, and the notion that translation requires perfect equivalency. Bellos argues, rather, that a translation cannot be simply right or wrong, and that successful translation does not replicate or equal, but match.

Elsewhere Bellos talks of how the invention of simultaneous translation in the Nuremberg Trials shaped the structure of interpreting practices at the UN (illustrated by an alarming flowchart of the personnel and languages required for seamless interpretation); why Nabokov, whose mastery of English allowed him to seed Lolita with smutty puns, produced such leaden versions of Pushkin; and whether Freud wrote social science or literature. His analysis of Google Translate and other translation engines acknowledges their contributions, but points out that their results are predicated not on automation but on human effort. And, not surprisingly, Bellos’s sections on literary translation present the elements at play in fascinating, and revelatory, detail.

As opposed to the tone of most writing on translation, which ranges from funereal to bellicose, Is That a Fish In Your Ear? positively radiates cheer and good will. Even the deplorable pay rates for literary translation compared to legal, medical, and technical work do not disturb the author’s sunny view: Bellos notes breezily that, after all, rewriting novels is more fun, which may be true, but surely no justification.

But: no matter. “Translation,” Bellos remarks, “is another word for the human condition.” This beguiling book demonstrates that translation is a crucial part of how, and why, we live. Of course everyone interested in translation should read this book. But so should everyone else.

Susan Harris is the editorial director of Words without Borders and the co-editor, with Ilya Kaminsky, of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry.

Published in Issue 26