David Wellington: The Last Astronaut

Wellington, David (2019), The Last Astronaut, orbit
ISBN 978-0-356-51229-7

David Wellington’s “The Last Astronaut” is a dull and disappointing entry in a time of vibrant and varied science fiction. His language and vision echo Michael Crichton’s repetitive plots of American danger from foreign and alien forces. Wellington offers his readers a surfeit of ideas, draws them into the book only to end on the sourest of notes: having given us a broad range of characters from a variety of backgrounds, we’re left at yet another take on Heart of Darkness.  . It is so very clearly and unambiguously a Kurtz character that it re-orders the experience of reading the entire novel after that. The ability of science fiction to explore ambiguities and ontological possibilities is fully cut short by this simple summary of the story. Furthermore, he trivializes Kurtz to a mere plot device, neglecting the social and historical significance of the original character and his adaptations. The Last Astronaut is not devoid of entertainment value, but it is too long, too superficial, and too self-referential for its own good. It is competent, suspenseful, fine.”

Oh the possibilities! The book starts when an alien object appears in space, on a collision course with earth, an object that is quickly discovered to be some kind of spaceship. It is resistant to attacks, it does not react to any kind of communication, so NASA reactivates its dormant space program, putting the last astronaut it sent into space at the helm of the project. If you’ve seen more than one disaster movie, you know that this relatable, vulnerable character is on a team with a cerebral scientist, a quirky genius and a taciturn military character with some secret task. There’s also a second team, sent up by a company that tries to cut a deal with the aliens for profit. The book tracks the first team’s progress – discovering the object, entering it, slowly figuring out what kind of life and intelligence is at work here. Wellington sets up four very distinct and recognizable genre types, and gives them the right roles in the plot, but he declines to really work with the possibilities inherent in the setup. It is not until the stress of the environment, various injuries and concussions push the team into becoming exaggerated versions of their selves does Wellington really lean into the typology he was making use of the entire time. Much like his characters feel around in a mushy, changing environment, the readers of the novel prod and pry their way through an imprecisely crafted work of genre fiction.

It is clear that Wellington has a basic understanding of the elements he uses and a facility at creating suspense. His description of the unusual environment within the alien spaceship is accomplished and clear, but time and again he comes up short from elevating his work. The Kurtz character is the most glaring example: he’s a member of the for-profit team that competes with the NASA team to establish contact with the aliens. There’s an obvious connection here with Conrad’s Kurtz, an ivory trader, in whom various imperialist and capitalist narratives converge. When Marlowe comes upon Kurtz, he finds him ill, and violent. What’s more, as Peter Firlow notes, Conrad frames his own experience in the Congo as one where he is embracing a larger, fuller consciousness, which, in its various facets, is depicted in the two different experience of Marlowe and Kurtz. Wellington, too, has his Kurtz mingling with, so to say, the natives, embracing a different, broader kind of consciousness. But whereas Conrad’s text, experience, and most of the classic riffs on the subject provide interrogations of the way racism, capitalism and imperialism intersect, Wellington presents a surprisingly clean, color-blind version of the story. There are many writers who used similar bits and pieces without losing either context or implication, most notably Gwyneth Jones, but for Wellington, everything is dropped in favor of a story as clean as white marbled floors. For all the options thrown at us at the beginning, there are no complexities at the end. The solution is physically and actually difficult, but morally, there’s no doubt. Morally, for most of the book, there is only one obvious path. Wellington has taken a genre that has offered difficult moral choices for a century and cleaned it up of all quandaries and problems. It is absolutely vexing why Wellington sets up a novel with so many genre set pieces only to then offer the most anodyne execution of the genre, without even fully using the set pieces (much less subverting them).  

The Last Astronaut is not a bad book, and it is a book for someone who wants a quick and undemanding science fiction ride, but that’s where it ends. It is “The Core” of science fiction disaster movies. Curiously, my edition came with a preview chapter from Megan E. O’Keefe’s Velocity Weapon, which is a much superior take on writing a simple enjoyable science fiction with the building blocks of generic science fiction. 

James Ruddick: Death at the Priory

Ruddick, James (2001), Death at the Priory, Atlantic
ISBN 1-903809-44-4

The Charles Bravo case is a well-known mystery for True Crime enthusiasts. You may have encountered it in one of the countless books or TV shows that explore its details. In 1876, Charles Bravo died of poisoning, and four suspects emerged: his wife Florence (in her second marriage), her housekeeper, her former lover (a distinguished doctor), and a former stableman. None of them were convicted of the murder, but their complex sexual histories were exposed. Agatha Christie called it “one of the most mysterious poisoning cases ever recorded.” The case remains unsolved to this day, and James Ruddick’s book is not a definitive answer, but an (at the time) new addition to the ongoing speculation. This review will be brief, as I have no intention of reading the other 20 books on the subject. I should also note that this book is mainly for those who are unfamiliar with the case, or only know it superficially. If you have already read more than 2000 words on it, or watched a TV show that came out after this book, you can skip it. Ruddick’s writing is good, and the structure is excellent, but the main merit of this book is the presentation and organization of the facts. This is no Alias Grace, but a concise 200-page account of a fascinating case.

That said, if you, like me, are new to the cause Charles Bravo – this is an intriguing entry into the historical True Crime canon. There are some drawbacks to the book – the story of a woman’s desperation, repeated abuse, and rape at the hands of two different husbands, and her potential decision to clear up this situation by poisoning the second of the two should not have been written by a white male writer who isn’t particularly attuned to the situation (although he tries). But it is rare to read a book that is written with such a supple and readable prose, while at the same time keeping a tight lid on the proceedings. There is a little narration, a little psychological speculation, and quite a bit of in situ self inserts – but at 200 pages, we are offered the full facts of the case, and a broad (if occasionally misleading) summary of the various theories. Ruddick’s final explanation isn’t different from others already offered, but if you are new to the subject, it makes for engrossing reading, you get a sense of the entire situation, and Ruddick’s personal biases, though enormous and unstated, are so incredibly glaring that they do not block the view of the entire situation.

I will not go into the details of the case and the motives for suspecting any of the usual culprits. But Ruddick’s treatment of the two main suspects reveals his biases. They are the widow and her loyal servant. Ruddick, writing in 2001, provides a sympathetic context for the hardships of Victorian women. He frequently mentions the abuse they endured, especially Florence, Bravo’s widow, and their lack of options. He repeats these contexts after his conclusion. For Ruddick, misogynist abuse is woven into the story. Yet, we read about Florence being raped repeatedly, without Ruddick ever calling it that explicitly. He depicts different types of marital sexual intercourse, but they are all forcible rape, meant to dominate Florence. He even implies that Florence was raped to coerce her into marrying Charles Bravo. His failure to label every sexual act between Bravo and Florence as rape creates complexity and ambiguity where there is none. And there is more: during her first (abusive) marriage, in her 20s, Florence receives treatment, and soon starts an affair with James Gully, the sexagenarian doctor who runs the facility. Florence describes this relationship as consensual, but the ambiguity about the power abuse in the second marriage casts doubt on Ruddick’s ability to assess the consent in this affair.

Here as everywhere else, Ruddick is hesitant to offer a truly fundamental critique of the situation, which also blocks him from seeing other motives for Florence’s housekeeper Jane Cox. Her motives historically tend to be viewed as financial in nature, and Ruddick deals with that, but the alternative is entirely ignored. That alternative consists in seeing her mistress raped regularly and seeing her switch from a situation with dubious consent to a situation with no sexual consent whatsoever, which might work as motivation for someone with a strong sense of community and care. In fact, the connection between the two women, which entirely escaped James Ruddick, is so woven into the material that Shirley Jackson, whose novel We have always lived in the castle is inspired by the Bravo murder case, was troubled by the possibility of having written a lesbian narrative. Ruth Franklin, in her excellent memoir of Jackson, cites a letter, in which Jackson refers to that possibility as a fear of being seen (even by herself) as a lesbian. “[The novel] is about my being afraid and afraid to say so.” Jackson, unintentionally, saw a deeper connection in the case than Ruddick, despite his stated years of research in archives.

That said, the biggest blind spot to the book isn’t in the analysis of the case in the strict sense at all. It is in the overall contextualizing of the sexual politics of it. This would be a bigger essay – but there are some odd asides that Ruddick never follows up on. Jane Cox, the housekeeper, eventually inherits a huge plantation in Jamaica. And she’s not the only character with a family connection to the West Indies. Ruddick, towards the end of the book has a brief chuckle about some coincidences: “The family of James Gully, for instance, owned coffee plantations near Kingston, Jamaica, while Charles Bravo’s family had originated in Kingston and had made their money from exporting the coffee grown by Gully’s grandparents. Later, the Bravos had moved to St Ann’s Bay, which eventually became the home of Mrs Cox and her children.” To Ruddick, this is “random and without meaning.” So of the characters in the book 2 of the 3 men Florence sleeps with are from Jamaica, as well as her housekeeper, commonly seen as a linchpin in the murder. It is incredible that Ruddick at no point discusses the sexual politics of colonialism, the structure and function of colonialist violence as it impacts the bodies of those who are its subjects. And how partaking in colonialism in a colony might affect, change, or determine the mindset of the colonizer as well. To offer that short little paragraph as a summary of funny “coincidences” is incredible.

I don’t think it matters, ultimately, who pulled the trigger, so to say (there’s also a suicide theory, which, if I understand the internet correctly, Ruddick represents very badly and incompletely) – the book, which prides itself on offering a lot of contexts, given the paucity of information available, subtracts from the story the most relevant questions. The way Charles Bravo uses impregnation through rape as a weapon to acquire the fortune of the rich widow Florence is impossible to examine without recourse to the context of his origins in Jamaica. His reaction to the other man in Florence’s life is empty without connection to their shared beginnings in colonialist exploitation in the West Indies. And the role of Jane Cox has to be analyzed in connection with her roots and understanding of the sexual politics of colonialism. A book that has a curiously apropos connection to A Death in the Priory is Jean Rhys’ rewriting of Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys gives us a white immigrant from Jamaica, daughter of impoverished former planters, who is driven to madness by her English husband. The psychology of Antoinette, her situation with regard to class and race, as well as her connection to Grace Poole all offer examples of a complex conversation the ingredients of which are right there in the Charles Bravo murder case.

None of this is offered by Ruddick, who, instead, includes a photo of “the author search[ing] for Cox’s descendants in the West Indies.” His bias is enormous and almost offensively obvious, but because it is so obvious, it does not entirely erase the accomplishments of the book as outlined earlier. He doesn’t obfuscate or hide these biases, and, as with many other books, you just have to do some additional work of your own to level and contextualize his theories. There are many problems with this book, but within the broader context of historical True Crime as a genre, most of which is bad, gullible trash, this is quite decent for what it is. If you don’t know the case, it’s a good read  – and a good jumping off point for more reading.

Leonardo Sciascia: Equal Danger

Sciascia, Leonardo (2003, 1971), Equal Danger, NYRB
[Translated from the Italian by Adrienne Foulke]
ISBN 9781590170625 

In my previous review of a Sciascia novel, the brilliant To Each His Own, I made an embarrassing mistake – I compared the vibe of the novel with that of a favorite movie of mine, , going on and on about the similarities in how they view power, corruption and the pervasiveness of the Mafia. That movie, Cadaveri Eccellenti, does have many similarities with the Sciascia novel – but that is to be expected, as it is, in fact, based on another novel by the very same writer, as I found out last autumn. How have I not known that a favorite movie of mine is based on a novel? So I went ahead and read the novel – Il Contesto, translated as Equal Danger by Adrienne Foulke and published in a reliably gorgeous edition by NYRB books. Equal Danger is set, as are most of Sciascia’s books (with some notable exceptions, like his book on the Moro Affair), in Sicily, but the difference to To Each His Own is its exact setting and timing. Equal Danger is an urban novel, and a direct discussion of political intrigue, rather than an indirect fable of village politics that Sciascia uses to shine a light on wider politics. It is also, fascinatingly, less tightly written than the previous novel, despite the grittier genre it’s placed in. Whereas the previous book was narrowly focused on the intrigue at its center, and the unraveling of village life, Equal Danger is filled with diversions and allusions to literature and philosophy. There is even a multi-page poem that serves to display a character’s political and social views. And yet, between the allusions and the notes on literature and culture, the screws of political intrigue keep tightening, as a murderer uses the corrupt gaps in Sicilian policing to go after all the judges and lawyers that he blames for an unjust jail sentence.

Sciascia’s trick in the novel is to treat the murderer the same way he treats the corrupt conspiracy at the center of the book – we barely see either, we see bits and pieces, fleeting glances, mostly from the consequences of their presence rather than the presence itself. At some point, Sciascia’s protagonist, Inspector Rogas, remembers a proof of God in the form of finite but incomplete knowledge, Borges’ “Argumentum Ornithologicum” – and the same mental operation applies both to the corruption as well as the murderer. I am not spoiling the book here – this is not a whodunnit. This is a book about knowledge and the ways you go about discovering, treating, and organizing it. We’re told that Inspector Rogas has a bad reputation among his colleagues: he’s “a man of letters,” a reputation gained from his unusually well written reports, his acquaintances among writers and journalists, and his general bookishness. In fact, Rogas’ bookishness cannot be reduced to the usual caricature of a well read man – where other writers like to name every single canonical book and writer their protagonist has read, in a performative show of erudition, Sciascia only occasionally names writers and books precisely. The Borgesian proof is only fleetingly attributed to Borges, just offered as a quote; similarly, at some point, Rogas remembers a phrase from a “tedious, famous Italian novel” – and never once mentions that it is I promessi sposi, Alessandro Manzoni’s 19^th century classic, which is usually translated in English as The Betrothed (most recently by Michael Moore in 2022). These quotes or allusions serve less as signposts for the novel and its plot; instead, Sciascia replicates for us the workings of his protagonist’s mind – a bookish person, who organizes the world according to the structures and organizations he knows.

Inspector Rogas, in fact, has an orderly mind, and is at odds with the world around him, which is often unreliable, disorderly, dishonest and dangerous. At one point, he’s mentally thinking about the police archive, to access a photograph – but he immediately remembers the disrepair of the archives : “….and there flashed into his mind the recollection of what disorder and neglect reigned over things that were preserved and cared for.” If this quote strikes you as curiously elevated for something occasioned by the thoughts of trial manuscripts and police evidence, you are correct, because Rogas continues: “how relatively easy it was to remove from historical archives a decree of Charles VI or a note of General Carco, and from court archives the bound copy of trial proceedings.” He is proven right, of course, about the state of the court archives, but this passage demonstrates more – here, as in other books, particularly his historical novels, Sciascia is at pains to stress the historical continuity between the malaise of present day Sicily and historical Sicily, the way archives and knowledge are subject to the whims of the political will of the present. Rogas has difficulties shining a light on what is happening, but not for want of seeing clearly. It’s not the compilation of knowledge that’s the problem – it is the dissemination and preservation of it. Rogas comes upon the identity of the murderer fairly quickly, through systematic inquiry and thought. But it is the matter of everything else that increasingly eludes him. There is a political will to pin the murders on someone else, and while nobody explicitly prevents him from his job, Rogas keeps running into hindrances and barriers. People lie, dissemble, send him on wrong paths – paths he knows will not lead anywhere, in fact. This is underlined by the state of mind Rogas has upon writing up one of his reports – it is laced with ironies that will not be understood by those that read it, but only by historians interested in archives.

Among all the digressions and disquisitions, the most important one comes late – it is a discussion with a judge. The judge, who was part of the system that unjustly jailed a man, does not believe in judicial mistakes, as he says: “Whether an accused man may or may not have committed the crime has never had any importance for judges.” Truth is not helpful in establishing and maintaining a certain order: “confession of a misdeed on the part of someone who has not committed it establishes what I call the circuit of legitimacy.” It is “objective proofs” that lead to mistakes, he closes. This is central not only in establishing a baseline for how justice works in the world of the novel – it also prefigures the way the book will end. Not wanting to spoil the ending, what is important here is that the end of the basic plot is not the end of the book. Instead, we are granted a re-interpretation of the ending, a re-contextualization into the political and narrative necessities of Sciascia’s present day politics.

And this is why the judge’s speech is also a focal point of Cadaveri Eccelenti, Francesco Rosi’s movie adaptation of Sciascia’s novel. Many of the interior workings of Rogas’ mind did not make it onto the screen, understandably. We understand as viewers that Rogas is systematic and competent, but his fundamental bookishness is left behind on the pages of the book. The movie is more interested in the political corruption, and in fact expands on it – the novel was published in 1971, and the movie came out in 1976. In between was the rise of the so-called Years of Lead, which Sciascia could only suspect and hint at. The movie expands on the corruption by making the behavior of Rogas’ superiors more explicit, more contemptible, and by turning the tentative wiretaps of Sciascia’s novel into full video surveillance. Where we suspect the turn in events by following Rogas in the novel, the movie makes us feel the oppression and the violence of the capricious corruption of power at every point. The novel and the movie are both masterpieces, and are each perfectly adapted to their medium. The book, with its focus on archives, writing and narrative, and the movie, with its focus on surveillance, sounds, and the inescapable weight of the punitive gaze of power.

Sciascia’s afterword offers the anxiety, fear, even, of publishing such an outspoken condemnation of his contemporary situation. Indeed, he suggests the book may not even be about Sicily. It may be a book about an imaginary country. Even the movie, then, although it is unable to divert its gaze from the reality of Sicily, represents the final movie in Francesco Rosi’s cine inchieste (investigative cinema) series of movies. It is the last movie of Rosi’s great dark investigations of the mafia on the silver screen, and while Rosi would go on to shoot more classical movies, it seems apropos that Cadaveri Eccelenti, a movie about the difficulty of saying something objective and provable about the Mafia, based on a novel about the same difficulty, by a writer who appended a note explaining his very real fears to his own novel, would be a kind of end point for Rosi.

Erik Svetoft: Spa

Svetoft, Erik, Spa, Fantagraphics [translated by Melissa Bowers]
ISBN 978-1-68396-696-8

This is going to be a brief review – there is surprisingly little to say about a 300 page graphic novel. That’s because the book has two aspects – an aesthetic Jekyll and Hyde, so to say. Svetoft’s art becomes increasingly convincing and engrossing, but the plot, if that’s the right word, of the book is entirely negligible. The writing, as it is, is just downright awful. The art and the imagination behind it is extraordinary. Ah, well.

To begin at the beginning: Erik Svetoft is a Swedish artist and illustrator. His work has sporadically appeared here and there, but he made the biggest splash with his fifth book, “Spa.” This is his first book with text – and that’s apparently where the trouble began. In English, you may have encountered his work in Vice, where he demonstrated his wide range of skills. Each of the pieces in Vice is different and intriguing in its own way. Svetoft seems as comfortable with symbols and structures as with grotesque imagery and Lovecraftian inventiveness. He sometimes gets close to the edges of satire, but it’s always just an interpretative offer, a possibility in a creative voice that relishes ambiguity.

That doesn’t change in “Spa” – the ambiguous voice, that is. “Spa” is set in a spa, and is sold by Fantagraphics as “a satiric critique of consumer society and the ‘wellness’ industry.” I’ve also seen reviews claiming that in the book, “the conformity of the soulless luxury society is exposed. The ugliness behind the facade becomes visible.” That’s all nonsense. I mean, I can see that as part of the intended message, but in many parts of the book, Erik Svetoft the artist and Erik Svetoft the writer are at odds. There are visual allusions to Bosch and other artists, but in many places, a major influence seems to be a Japanese surreal tradition, with Suehiro Maruo and Junji Ito as my main points of reference.

There is a nameless, often unexplained horror that drives their best work, a terror that hides equal parts in us, as well as in the darkness of our surroundings. Though it’s fundamentally related, it’s not a broader cosmic terror as with Lovecraft, it’s smaller and deeper. The world in “Spa” disintegrates as the book progresses, but we also find that it has the quality of our worst nightmares in repeating itself. Things happen, other things are repeating themselves – and nothing is ever explained. There is a dark fluid – sometimes water, sometimes not. There are decomposing bodies and invasive animals. Svetoft draws on a broad tradition. There are doppelgangers, automata, and the Spa itself is a classic gothic mansion with its endless hallways and rooms. The physical boundaries of the human body are unstable, and endangered both by the forces of the “Spa” as well as by our own infirmities.

This sounds great – and it is, if not for all the words. Maybe it’s Melissa Bowers’ translation, but at best the writing in the book is superfluous, at worst, it drags the book away from its strengths. Because – no, Fantagraphics didn’t invent that interpretation out of whole cloth. The book does offer that reading in its text and broader structure. And by God I wish it didn’t. Stripping ambiguity from the material in order to offer a statement, a meaning, a clever analysis, is one of the worst habits comic writers can have. I have never been as annoyed after reading a book that contains so much gorgeous art.

The easy targets of attempted satire do not frequently lead to good outcomes – sure, the wellness industry is ridiculous, and yes, rich people are almost as funny as those trying to live a lifestyle beyond their means, even if just for a weekend. There are two movies in Oscar contention this year that trained their sights on the very same target, and both contain facile jokes and easy satirical layups. However, they are both powered by significant writing skills – skills Erik Svetoft does not possess, not even partially. What’s worse is that the art does not help his endeavor here – instead, it often seems to countermand the ideas of the book, giving readings that outpace the writing in complexity.

In fact, despite the admiration I had for the art, my primary feeling upon reading the book was annoyance. Should YOU read it? MAYBE? It depends on how much tolerance you have for facile satire and terrible writing – because everything else about this book is fantastic.

Bookish Presents

Bookish presents for Christmas and other semi-festive recent occasions.

Yael Inokai: Ein Simpler Eingriff

Inokai, Yael (2022), Ein Simpler Eingriff, Hanser
ISBN 978-3-446-27231-6

In an overall not great year for German-language literary fiction, Swiss novelist Yael Inokai’s third novel, Ein Simpler Eingriff (“a simple procedure”) was among the better entries. Like many of its contemporaries, Inokai opts for a simple, poetically weighed language that often veers close to schmaltz, but never quite tips over. In this short novel, Inokai tells us about a nurse at a hospital where a new procedure has been invented and is being used on unsuspecting patients – an operation that will remove your feelings of anger and your impulses to be criminal and generally bad. It’s set in a vague past, anchored by old technology, and a kind of operation that we would not do to mentally ill people today. Inokai’s protagonist develops feelings for one of her patients, and, more importantly, falls in love with a fellow nurse. The novel is not very interested in the nuts and bolts of the treatment or the specific details of the hospital structure. Inokai instead gives us a story that is primarily about vibes – and about relationships: between the protagonist and the other nurse, between the protagonist and her own family, between the protagonist and the physician, who invented the procedure, and finally, between the protagonist and the patient.

Despite reviews (and the book cover) focusing on power structures, and on the budding lesbian relationship, it is the latter relationship, between Meret, the nurse, and Marianne, the patient, that is actually structuring the book and its ideas. In order for us to understand the impact of the procedure, we are given two distinct periods in this relationship: the time before the operation, when we see Meret interact with the patient at length, and the time after the operation. It should be, if you have read any novels dealing with this sort of topos, no surprise or spoiler, that the operation does not result in a well-adjusted patient. Instead, Marianne has lost most of her memory and all of her personality. It is an invasive and damaging procedure. Inokai is not, as I said, extremely interested in the procedure itself, and the way she tells us of its effects relies heavily on the literary history of the topos. This is a very 1960s kind of operation, with the obvious literary antecedent in Ken Kesey’s classic novel of mental ward mayhem, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. There are no surprises here, as in a tale of psychological horror, the reader follows the text along to its horrifying conclusion. At no point during the times when Meret and Marianne play cards, read books, discuss childhoods, are we ever expecting anything less than the utter catastrophe we are given. And when we find Marianne after the operation, changed, bland, with empty eyes, it does not come as a surprise, but as the expected result of 1960s psychiatry.

I say 1960s psychiatry – but there’s an intentional vagueness. Inokai mixes two tropes. Kesey’s novel and others like it often focused on all genders – the treatment of depression, “criminality” and schizophrenia was liberally applied to people regardless of gender. That said, there is a second literary tradition: that women who are prone to anger, prone to resistance and general societal strangeness are easily medicated, hurt and subjected to exactly the kinds of operations depicted in Inokai’s novel. That’s why Kesey, despite the book being the standard reference in reviews of Ein Simpler Eingriff, isn’t the right reference point at all: it is the history of medicating women. From the Yellow Wall-Paper, to the Bell Jar and Susanna Kaysen’s celebrated memoir, there is a long track record in writing of the many attempts by men to control the emotions of women, ideally by cutting out some wayward part of them. This explains why, despite review after review suggesting that Inokai writes about hospital hierarchies, she at no point does any such thing. We know what a novel dealing with hierarchies in mental health looks like – this is not it. She is talking about misogynist violence. The three examples offered in the novel is a woman treated for being a petty criminal, a woman treated for being irascible, and, finally, a treatment is explicitly sugested to the protagonist as well: for being a lesbian.

Gendered violence in health care is a long and widely explored topic, and Inokai does not add anything specific to it; instead, she offers a meditation on what it feels like to be at the intersection of the various ways to inflict mental health treatment on women. Meret works within the system, observes the elements happening in it, and through her own personal relationship also understands what it would mean to be subjected to it. In the end she breaks out of the system, galvanized both by her partner Sarah, as well as by her transformative experience of accompanying Marianne through the procedure. The book is written with clarity of language, even though the descriptive aspects are all intentionally vague. Inokai loves one-sentence paragraphs, short descriptions. There are entire paragraphs like this “I was thirsty. I grabbed my cup, it made a noise. I retracted my hand.” Or the following two consecutive sentences, each given its own line: “So that was the history of shame. // There was also a history without.” Inokai’s simple but very stylistically controlled language does not employ reduction to open interpretative holes in the story, open emotional gaps. Instead, she elides descriptions and details, and focuses on emotional phrasing above all else. Inokai’s control of language is excellent.

What’s disappointing is that Inokai, while shining a light on a past practice, is using the harm done to a maybe mentally ill person to help the protagonist to grow. It is tempting to make her partner’s influence the deciding factor behind Meret’s changes – but that is wrong. In fact it is watching Marianne vanish after the operation and only surface in bits and pieces, as well as an encounter with a different woman, who, after the operation, seems devoid of personality. Meret specifically notes the strange smell emanating from the woman. Honestly, I did not expect that a novel in 2022 would use someone else’s illness to help build character for a person unaffected by the issue. In this light, even the late suggestion that Meret could also be affected by the mindset behind the operation, seems slightly unpleasant, given that she, factually, is not yet. Meret (and her partner Sarah) never lose control of their agency, never have to fight for their mental state against a family and medical apparatus that is predisposed to harm them. It is true that potentially, they could both be subject to the problem, but within the novel they are not. And their agency is essential for the denouement of the novel. It is watching people harmed by the system that build Meret’s character, dealing with a, at the end, mentally disabled woman, that changes Meret’s mind – Marianne is a mere object to move Meret from point a in the book to point b.

This is also the biggest difference between the Kaysers and Bell Jars of the world. That we are observing Marianne from two angles: from the point of view of her family, who is very happy to cut her out of their lives, and from the point of view of Meret, who is a significant part of the system that physically harmed her, is, in some ways, not an improvement on the mindset that created the “simple procedure” in the first place. There is no inside view, there is just another gaze from within the medical system on someone trapped in it. I have attempted and failed to write about Donald Antrim’s recent excellent memoir of receiving electro shock treatment – the difference between Antrim discussing his feelings, fears and results, to a potential book written by someone unaffected, offering the point of view of someone sympathetic but unaffected, is stark. And this closes the circle to my slight misgivings about the pathos. I have friends who are critical of pathos when it comes to people with mental illness discussing their situation, but surely, pathos by an outsider, who is moved into emotionality by a patient that she helped treat, is worse?

Despite these misgivings, Ein Simpler Eingriff is a very good novel and among the best published last year. The criticism of gendered violence, of the connection between patriarchy and mental health treatment, the way, Inokai offers us a debate on self-actualization on multiple levels is impressive, and what’s more, unlike many of her contemporaries, she’s in complete stylistic control from the word go the last line of the novel. She mirrors themes of the book in the way she deals with metaphors and observations, it’s just a very impressive performance and a book worth reading and translating.

Alisa Ganieva: Bride & Groom

Ganieva, Alisa (2018 [2015]), Bride & Groom, Deep Vellum
trans. Carol Apollonio
ISBN 978-1-941920-59-6

This is the first novel by Alisa Ganieva I have read – and one of embarrassingly few novels by contemporary Russian writers on my shelf. Bride & Groom (published in Russian as Жених и невеста) is an excellent novel, and my appreciation of it has only increased as the weeks passed between finishing it and sitting down to type up this quick note. This is the second novel by Ganieva to be translated into English (and her third work of fiction generally), with a third (Оскорблённые чувства, translated as Offended Sensibilities) coming down the pike this year, and all reviews and comments on it note the progression from the previously translated novel, The Mountain and The Wall (Праздничная гора) to this one, as one where the writer moves from a more macro to a more micro perspective, from a novel concerned with a whole country to one dealing with one small town and two youngish people who may or may not get married. All three novels are translated by Carol Apollonio who finds such a lively and idiom-rich English language for Ganieva’s words that I am occasionally suspicious of it.

All of her novels are set in Dagestan, a Russian republic in the very south of the still quite enormous Russian Federation. Like many of the republics at the fringes of Russia, it has had a capricious history before being colonized by Russia – in recent years, it has similarly known upheaval. As Ganieva notes in various interviews, Dagestani identity has been eroded by Soviet rule, and while it has a long Islamic history, today’s Islamic movements in Dagestan, such as the 1999 attempt to create an “independent Islamic State of Dagestan,” are not an evocation of old rules. As Ganieva says:

“[young people] began re-finding their roots and many found them in what turned out to be a superficial version of religion. They’re trying to eliminate the Soviet lifestyle, but they’re not truly Dagestani either. They’re trying to be Arabs or, I don’t know, general Muslims.”

What Bride & Groom discusses is how these cultural attempts to find one’s identity put young people in Dagestan in a bind. The Russian state’s grasp on local laws is famously weak this far away from Moscow, as various waves of laws since the early 2000s paradoxically demonstrate, including a ban on the title of “president” for local leaders and an abolition of mandatory minority language teaching in 2018. In effect, this leads to complex layers of local chieftains attempting to control their fiefdoms by using violence, local religion, as well as good old-fashioned corruption. None of this is exactly new. Ganieva’s major success in her novel is to show how these folds of power and violence interact with age-old patriarchal structures, making marriage, the sacrament at the center of her novel, both an instrument of social control and an attempt to establish control over the smallest local community: individual households.

What she also discusses is how women are consistently under threat of power being exercised against them. Violence and control happen to them, though, in a pivotal episode at the very end, they can push those in power a little to achieve their own minor ends. Truly every woman in the novel has to be vigilant of the men in her life, careful to occupy the correct role. Men consistently talk down to women, abuse women, and use marriage as a way to control women and at the same time elevate their own position in life. In her excellent polemic Tomorrow Sex will Be Good Again, Katherine Angel explains why the focus on consent is blind to the many expectations and demands put on women by various systems of power, and how people often operate under a fiction of consent.  It is extremely hard to say that anyone in the novel cares about women’s consent for anything, but consent, explicit consent is frequently given, and not under explicit threats of violence.

Instead, the threats are, mostly, implicit threats, a tapestry woven by the incessant chatter. Marriage is a protection from men. Being in love with a man who does not, then, marry you, is the worst-case scenario. You don’t have to be pregnant for it, but you will then no longer find a husband, unless you are willing to compromise especially deeply. Angel discusses sexual mores and agreements as attempts “to be safe from violence” – and indeed, in Ganieva’s novel, women weigh one act of violence against the other. And even if you accept the above example as a kind of misstep, a wrongdoing, a sin, an action that a woman cannot do in this small town on the fringes of Russia, without condemnation – Ganieva offers other examples of women condemned for the actions of men without any previous mistake.

A man who had sex with a woman presented to us as a prostitute (more likely merely a woman who agreed to have intercourse with said man) comes home to the small town to marry. The woman follows him, having been impregnated. She comes with an army of support, brothers, mothers, in order to interrupt his engagement. Though his own army of friends and family try to prevent a confrontation, the pregnant woman’s mother utters a black curse in the middle of the engagement celebration. The engagement is called off, everyone involved is some level of embarrassed. In later pages we learn that this is a black mark on the fiancée. Not on her husband-to-be, not on his family, not on his friends who made unpleasant jokes about his prostitute earlier. This woman, whose only mistake was picking the wrong partner, is now single, old(er) and effectively unmarriable. She, too, will have to make some kind of compromise, if she does not want to entirely forego the protection of marriage.

In yet another interview, Ganieva notes that while there is indeed “the general perception of women as some kind of property of the family that has to be protected from the outside world” – the internet has not changed things in the slightest:

“the Internet is becoming an instrument of control and surveillance. Compromising evidence on women recorded on mobile cameras by men has turned into a regular blackmailing technique. Secret male groups in social networks are used to accumulate and exchange compromising information about young women.”

In fact, the female protagonist’s flirtatious behavior with a man leads to her being pressured, stalked, and threatened by said man who promises to marshal power, violence, and influence in order to force her into marriage.

This is the first time I mentioned either protagonist of the novel and that’s because the novel is not primarily propelled forward by plot, but by the inexorable accumulation of events, pressure, violence. While there are two protagonists who will have an amorous relationship, Bride & Groom doesn’t just mean specific people, it designates the entire power structure, that mixture of fear, superstition and corruption that pervades everything and that women are at the receiving end of. The book is told in alternating chapters from the point of view of two youngish people approaching their 30s. Both have worked in Moscow and have returned home for a visit. Both meet friends and stay with family, and both are pressured by their respective family to get married. The book charts their movements – and in more broad terms, their movements towards each other. However, as we follow them around town, we find that they encounter different realities.

Marat, a young lawyer, has the respect of important people around town, and his parents rent him a banquet hall in the hopes for his engagement to happen before his visit ends. Marat and his friends speak badly of women, it’s what you do, after all, and he is among the people laughing at the abovementioned prostitute jokes. However, the main topic of conversation are not women. It is the former mayor, it is the rise of Islam and the tensions between the two major Muslim communities in town, weighty topics like that. For Patya, a young woman who has held an office job in Moscow, most conversations revolve around men. Not just because she is not included in political conversation. But also, because she and her friends have to negotiate a very different set of threats and fears. She is not afraid of the growing tension between abstract communities of Muslims, she is specifically afraid of a man named Timur who is a vocal leader in his mosque. And so on. Her mother does not offer the gift and prospect of a banquet hall – instead, Patya is inundated by threats and complaints.

Ganieva’s writing, in Carol Appolonio’s translation, is occasionally a bit static – but much of the value of the novel is not on its surface. Beyond the aspects I mentioned, and which clearly interested me most, there’s an entire additional level of allusions to Islamic myth and sufism. Symbolic colors and objects abound. In the afterword of the Deep Vellum edition, it is Ganieva herself who explains these connections and subtexts. In the end, the paths of the novel’s characters arc towards dissolution “into the substance of the divine.” While the novel can be a bit slow going at times, its multi-layered structure rewards re-readings. What’s more – I may be unreasonably drawn to the dour aspects of the book. Go read this excellent review in Asymptote which notes the light and enjoyable traits of the novel, comparing its patter to Jane Austen.

Katherine Addison: The Angel of the Crows

Addison, Katherine (2020), The Angel of the Crows, Tor
ISBN 978-0-7653-8740-0

Fanfiction has had an interesting few decades. Some of the biggest bestsellers of the past years are rewritten pieces of fanfiction, most famously 50 Shades of Gray, and the Throne of Glass books by Sarah J. Maas, the first chapters of which turned up on fanfiction.net. There are also a ton of writers of speculative fiction who started writing fanfiction, and shifted into original writing after learning the craft while dealing with other authors’ material.  So there’s a lot of examples of fanfiction in published literature – and yet still The Angel of the Crows is a book unlike any other I have read. Addison offers us a novel set in 19^th century England, with a character named Doyle (as in Conan Arthur), and an obvious Sherlock stand in character. There are police inspectors named Gregson, Lestrade and Bradstreet, as well as a character named Moriarty. Not only is the book not disguising its debt to Sherlock Holmes, it also offers the usual fanfic twists on the original material: there’s a gender swapped character (who may be trans), there are vampires, werewolves etc. There are inserts from history – most importantly, the throughline of the book is the hunt for Jack the Ripper. The most important change, however, is the character of Sherlock – we are given an Angel. Crow, the Angel of London.

Indeed, Addison explains this in a note at the back of the book.

As a reader and sometime writer of fanfic, this was fascinating. “For those of you who do not know, there is a thing called fanfiction, wherein fans of a particular book or TV show or movie write stories about the characters. Fanfiction, as an umbrella term, covers a vast variety of genres and subgenres. One of those subgenres is something called wingfic, wherein a character or characters have wings. The Angel of the Crows began as a Sherlock wingfic.

If you search for the tag on AO3, you’ll find that they are overwhelmingly queer – and certainly offer complex sexual or ace relationship dynamics. And while there is some allusion to queerness in “The Angel of the Crows” – Addison never commits entirely, and it feels a bit off. That said, this has all the hallmarks of fanfiction, it is fanfiction for better or worse. In fact, that is the book’s biggest problem. It is impossible, without spoiling it, to list all the incredible ideas and inventions Addison has stuffed into this book. Just the structure of angels, hell hounds, it’s full of ideas and mythology.

But underneath all this is a retelling of Sherlock Holmes stories. It begins with “A Study in Scarlet,” it ends with “The Hounds of the Baskervilles” and fills the rest with stories “The Sign of the Four” and “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.” Addison also draws historical murders into the Sherlockian tales, from Jack the Ripper to the Ratcliff Highway murders. There is a lengthy note about her research and recommended books at the end. The biggest downside to all this is that, like much fanfic, she is too excited by the changes to characters and the new dynamics this opens to do anything to the plot itself. Once you see what Holmes story you entered, you will be able to follow it entirely from memory. In many spots, this is just a retelling of Doyle’s classic tales, but with changes in representation. In some sense, this exposes some fundamental bankruptcy in certain kinds of contemporary literature, the superficiality of a certain kind of change, paying lip service to representation by handing your character a different kind of hat. It is the video game character creation screen model of literature.

It’s too bad because I really like this writer. Katherine Addison is the nom de plume of writer Sarah Monette – and this is her second novel. Often, writers adopt pseudonyms for forays into other genres, but the two novels published under the Addison name could not be any more different in genre. The similarities are in the fundamental approach. Addison’s debut novel was The Goblin Emperor, a fantasy novel reviewed on this blog. Its most interesting characteristic is the complete resistance to grimdark tropes and structures, all while writing a deeply and richly imagined world full of intrigues. It is not that The Goblin Emperor did not have villains and dark characters – it is that their moral alignment was never hidden by the author, there are no betrayals, no senseless trudge through the fog of war and cruelty. In a way, writing a detective novel (rather than a noir) seems a logical continuation of Addison’s literary project. There are no murky characters at the end of a Holmes story, and Holmes powers of detection offer a bright light into ambiguities and rumors. In fact, this is so unusual for today’s popular forms of storytelling, that most adaptations of the books transform Moriarty into a more ambiguous, generally evil, tricky character. It is true that Moriarty was invented for complex metafictional reasons and in a way breaks the plane of storytelling, but there’s a misunderstanding which leads to this typical strange Sherlock tale in adaptation.

Addison’s departures are of a different kind. As someone uncomfortable with letting ambiguities sit in a narrative, her “wingfic” additions to Holmes are designed in a way that removes even the small smattering of ambiguity in Holmes’ stories. Holmes, the gaunt, stranger person, who has attracted all kinds of actors and scripts dealing with the lacunae in Doyle’s descriptions of the character, is easily explained by Addison as an angel. Things that require explanation and depth in a human being become immediately plausible in an angle. The sharp observation, the aloof stance, the way of talking and relating to people? Of course, an angel, that makes sense. And so on throughout the entire book. The classic Holmes stories are full of superstitious people who are tricked into believing rumors rather than archly look at facts. Addison translates all the superstitions into actually supernatural events. The dressed-up dog, pretending to be a family curse in “Hounds”? It is an actual hell-hound; I’m loath to add more details, because with the lack of plot related surprises in the book, the way Addison turns the stories’ elements literal is the main additional, interesting element remaining. This is not the first time I noticed this literal bent in contemporary literature and criticism. I have friends who are genuinely struggling with reading satirical books in a satirical way, stuck on the literal level.

That said, if you took out the Doyle stories from the book, this would be infinitely better. The inventions are manifold and impressive. Addison has built an entire bestiary and theology that she never explains in detail. Explanations are sprinkled throughout, done with a superb control of information and language. If not for the slavish attention to Doyle’s work, the additional elements are easily on par with China Miéville’s best work, and this is no overstatement. It isn’t towards the end that we learn about a prison for people of supernatural origins, there are structures of power for vampires who are also entirely abstinent. Being a hell hound can be an infliction. Like an illness or an std, in some sense it is literalized trauma. There are different orders of angels It is so full of ideas, all of which are fully realized and consistent. One wishes that the stories underneath all this were also original. I think I would have appreciated this more if I had more of an appreciation for the work of Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes stories I have always considered significantly inferior to Chesterton’s Father Brown.  

Catherynne M. Valente: The Past Is Red

Valente, Catherynne M. (2021), The Past Is Red, Tor
ISBN 978-1-250-30113-0

I have complained on this blog about the disrespect shown to genre writers who are regarded a notch below mainstream fiction writers, despite often being just as good – or better- stylists. M. John Harrison is often a standard example, as he is clearly one of the best living British novelists, maybe the single best male one, and yet his work does not receive the plaudits that the boring mealy assemblages of platitudes by Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes often do. There’s a curious justice to the fact that he is currently on the jury giving out the Booker Prize, when almost every book of his had deserved at minimum shortlist consideration in previous years. But despite Harrison being the go-to answer (there’s a famous Miéville note on the subject), the same complaint should apply to his fellow “genre” writers Gwyneth Jones and Catherynne Valente. I have reviewed Gwyneth Jones here (a better writer than Harrison), and I am a great admirer of Catherynne M. Valente – she has been consistently producing imaginative fiction that’s complex, well written and unusual. Her most famous book is The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, the first in a series of YA novels about a young girl named September who gets drawn into the faery world. My favorite Valente novel is Palimpsest, a novel in the style of M. John Harrison’s Viriconium, and the best recommendation to give out to anyone who has read early Gaiman and who would like something similar but better. I feel like Valente has recently been given more of a spotlight and she has made the absolute most of it, with 2021 seeing the publication of two short novels and 2022 another, heftier YA novel in the style of the Girl series of books, all three of them excellent.

The first of the two 2021 books is The Past Is Red, and it is a combination of two related novellettes, one of which had already been published in 2017. It is also an absolute masterpiece. The first half, “The Future is Blue”, won a Theodore Sturgeon award in 2017, and in 2021, Valente added the second half and published the whole thing as a novel(la?). Despite being the best book on the shortlist, the book was merely shortlisted for the best novella Hugo. It is easy to see why Becky Chambers’ book won the award though. Chambers’ work, as a signature book in the solarpunk genre, is a much more open and positive view of the post apocalypse. In fact, it is one of three novellas on the 2021 Hugo shortlist that share the theme of technological collapse in a way. Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race, which inverts the usual narratives of both fantasy and first-contact science fiction, draws on similar ideas. Where Becky Chambers has her protagonist, who lives in a post-technology world, encounter and befriend a robot, Tchaikovsky’s protagonist is a scientist who is watching over a post-technological human colony, giving a new gloss on the old magic/sufficiently advanced technology chestnut. Both books draw from a contrast between technology and an Edenic technology- free world, where the contrast is used for color and fun, but there is no urgency, no threat, no real problem here. Surely, I’m not the only one thinking about books like Canticle – where technology has been wedded to a certain permanent menace.

This is why Valente’s novella is such a gift to contemporary science fiction. The Past Is Red sits in an interesting spot in this technology vs fantasy divide. The question for post-technology science fiction is always – what do you do with the existing technology? What happens to the existing things? We have all learned, when urged to recycle, how long it takes for things to go away. The usual way texts deal with this is what Tchaikovsky’s book does: the hub, the spaceship, observatory station etc., is now seen as a tower. The main character’s life, by constantly going into stasis, exceeds the lifespan of the colony humans, and technology turns into myth. A house is a house is a house, I suppose. But in order for there to be an Edenic green post-apocalypse, with overgrown electrical equipment, a lot of things have to go right – these are not real dystopias. Valente understands this and updates the fear permeating books like Canticle for our modern age. The apocalypse in her book comes from a surfeit of events that have destroyed earth. Climate change, certainly, but the destruction is so complete that a series of other problems have been added to the list. It is hard to describe this without spoiling a central revelation of the second half of the novel, but before things went to shit, humanity was more advanced than we are now, but even ideas of off-world colonies end up beset by threats and problems. This information is given to us here and there, in drips and drops. “The Future is Blue,” the book’s first half, is particularly impressive at avoiding info dumps. The two halves are tonally different, there is a sad, elegiac sense to the second half of the book, which accommodates the occasional offer of complete pieces of information more smoothly.

“The Future is Blue” on the other hand moves quickly – there is a quirkiness to the narration of events which are objectively less than ideal. Much of Humanity lives on a floating enormous garbage patch called Garbagetown. Garbagetown consists of – well, garbage, and generations of living in these conditions have led to the restructuring of the garbage. People are just as unaware of technology from before the apocalypse as in Chambers’ and Tchaikovsky’s books, but they are not untouched by it. Valente does not reject technology to build a world – instead she recognizes just how much of our world consists of varying levels of technology. People living in Garbagetown can barely use some of the technology they have, they can certainly not understand it. The use of technology has devolved into rituals and magic, and those parts of Garbagetown that run on technology that is still working (there are some functioning machines and there is electricity) are naturally the richest. “The Future is Blue” is one long flashback, narrated by Tetley, the most hated girl in Garbagetown. From her we learn that naming, one of the most common mechanisms in fantasy fiction, is not automatic – parents don’t name you; you go out into the world and the world names you, often through the interaction with objects in the world. And as all objects in that world are our garbage, there’s complex relationship between the traditions and narratives of the world of Garbagetown and our own world and narratives. This is a clever spin on the way traditions work in many indigenous cultures, where maturity is connected to an epiphany, encounter, or act in your teenage-age life. Insults have become a central element of discourse on Garbagetown, and many names derive from insults received on that fateful outing.

Names from our world – brand names, descriptive names, things, in other words that are carried by objects permanently in the form of trash with labels and text and messages – become words in the world of Garbagetown. The original meaning is completely lost and all we are left with are new sources for words in a world with rapidly diminishing stimuli. There is a connection to Waterworld, as the inhabitants of Garbagetown are permanently living in hope of finding terra firma somewhere. People have noted this with regards to Costner’s box office bomb, but the combination of in-narrative utopian ideas within a dystopian setting really underlines and contextualizes the way prophecies and utopias rely on a trace of meaning, an unrecoverable place that suggests a meaningful path but can never entirely be reached. Tetley in the end removes a real-world connection to this permanent hope, which makes her the most hated girl in the world. There are so many more ideas Valente uses – for example: Tetley becomes, as punishment, a homo sacer, a person outside of the law who can be beaten or killed without consequences. That said, there is no such thing as law in the post code civil sense of the word in Garbagetown. It is all ritual and violence. Gifts, threats and other primal elements rule the world of Garbagetown. Fittingly, the writing is sometimes downright rhythmic, dense, some of the most concise prose published in all of 2021.

In the “The Past Is Red”, Tetley flees Garbagetown on a boat – and encounters a piece of technology that still works, but unlike the simple electricity in Garbagetown requires knowledge in order to get it to work. It is an artificial intelligence which has to be activated. During the course of the book, this AI will connect Tetley to a girl named Olivia who lives off-world, but at no point does Tetley entirely understand what is happening on a technological level. This second half of the book is much less dense, softer and more emotional. It exists primarily to close the story of “The Future is Blue,” which gives very little context and information. Olivia and the AI are talking equal parts to Tetley and to us, as ambassadors of this world to us, who share more with us than Tetley does. There is no additional reasons for hope in that new narrative, Valente does not soften the brutality of this post-apocalyptic world, but she does give us something: hope as a function of our humanity, and community as a fundamental element of how we as humans work and survive. I cannot tell you how tired I am of the “lone man on the moon” science fiction stories, written by men, who have wives and mothers cleaning after them. In The Past Is Red, even on the boat in the middle of the ocean, far away from Garbagetown and with no destination, Tetley looks for – and finds – connection. To the AI, to the mysterious girl Olivia, her partner Goodnight Moon, and, ultimately, in the flawed, cruel, brutal humans in Garbagetown. Sometimes that is all we have – and much of the best contemporary fiction is recognizing this. There is no escapism in this book, but it is still not “bleak” – hopelessness, apathy and self-isolation are ultimately luxuries, often requiring the care-work of others who are relegated to the background of the texts.

Yukito Ayatsuji: The Decagon House Murders

Ayatsuji, Yukito (2007 [1987]), The Decagon House Murders, Pushkin
trans. Ho-Ling Wong
ISBN 978-1-78227634-0

Murder by Death, Neil Simon’s brilliant (though dated) cinematic parody on the whodunit, featuring parodies of various well-known detectives, from Hammett’s Nick and Nora to Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, is successful both as a parody and a pastiche of the genre. Or rather: genres, plural, because while Sam Spade, from Raymond Chandler’s dour oeuvre, and Miss Marple, from Christie’s sharp pen, are both in the business of dealing with the aftermath of violent murder, the books in question are very different. In the end, Simon has to settle on one specific tone, and he picks the perceived comfort of a Miss Marple setting. An old country manor, and a series of attempted murders vaguely in the style of Christie’s And then there were none. The greatest strength of Simon’s parodies is not in the characters themselves, though their foibles and habits allow us to identify them immediately, it is the metafictional way Simon mocks the basic act of solving mysteries. During the movie, each detective offers a solution, and each solution comes with its own logic, inherent to that specific writer’s preferred way of structuring surprises and revelations. Simon’s final series of revelations, uncovering (twice) the culprit, is similarly partially based on the famous plot of And Then There Were None, before he finally pulls the rug on the whole structure of logic and inference. Neil Simon understands what makes these mystery genres work, and he plays them off against each other, and in conversation with the audience, letting them ultimately in on the joke. The detective genre, as all genres, is a big, magnificent toy box of narrative, where variations and repetition make stories recognizable and surprising at the same time. A good mystery writer has the skill to work the algorithm in a unique way, without losing the functionality of the tools of genre. Simon, meanwhile, is not a mystery writer and does not use any of the tools: instead, he displays them for us.

Yukito Ayatsuji’s 1987 Japanese mystery classic The Decagon House Murders is oddly similar to Murder by Death. It, like the movie, uses And Then There Were None as a foil, and in it, nobody, just as in Simon’s movie, takes a step back and uses Christie’s novel as a blueprint to solve the case (though Ayatsuji’s characters are more than aware of it – the murderer explicitly refers to it in his brooding introduction). As with Simon, the plot revolves around a group of people named after famous detectives, isolated in the countryside. Unlike Simon, Ayatsuji offers his readers very little humor – and for good reason. The Decagon House Murders is a straightforward murder mystery. The guests are brutally murdered one by one, following Christie’s blueprint, with the murderer’s involvement similar to Christie’s book. There is one major difference between the structure of Christie’s novel and Ayatsuji’s, and that’s the fact that there are two narratives in parallel: the events in the eponymous house, which is on an isolated island, and events on the mainland, which, to anyone aware of the story of And then there were none, provides a clear clue as to the identity of the murderer. It undersells The Decagon House Murders to call it a straightforward mystery – in fact, it is intentionally formally strict. It is a so-called Honkaku novel. As this introduction to the genre explains,

Those who write in this style abide by “fair play” rules, which requires that all clues necessary for the reader to solve the crime be present in the text, as dictated in 1923 by S.S. Van Dine in his Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.

And since in Honkaku novels, “the solutions are dependent (…) on solving the physical mechanics behind the actual crime,” giving us a clear clue as to the identity of the murderer is not a black mark against the book within its specific genre. The whole book is a work of love, dedicated to Golden Age mystery writers – and yet for all that dedication, it is remarkably joyless and bland.

First things first. The plot: members of a university “Mystery Club” are invited to spend a week on an isolated island, where previously a horrible murder had happened. They land by boat and will not be able to maintain contact with the outside. Rather than use their own names, the members have nicknames

derived from the American, British and French mystery writers they all respected so much: Ellery Queen, John Dickinson Carr. Guston Leroux, [Van Dine] and Edgar Allan Poe. The two women were called “Agatha” and “Orczy”

after Agatha Christie and Baroness Orczy. There are two houses on the island, the “Blue House” of which only ruins remain, and the Decagon House. We are offered a blueprint of the Decagon House in the first chapter, which furnishes us with a wealth of information. The fact that an unsolved murder happened on the island (in the Blue House) becomes immediately relevant, as former members of the Mystery Club, back on the mainland, receive letters saying, “My daughter Chiori was murdered by all of you.” The envelope is signed by the architect who designed both buildings on the island and who himself died recently under mysterious circumstances. Chiori died of alcohol poisoning at a party, and in a way, all seven Mystery Club members on the island were responsible. This of course echoes the fact that Christie’s original novel assembled a group of criminals who each escaped justice for a particular crime. Meanwhile on the island, the next morning, there are seven notes, one per visitor, labeled “First Victim,” “Second victim,” etc. And so the murderous puzzlebox unspools, and murders, one by one, the visitors, while the Murder Club alumni on the mainland, unaware of the ongoing murder, try to solve the mystery of the threatening letters. The final solution is clean, and devoid of surprises or extraneous information, as demanded by the rules of Honkaku. What’s also clean is the story – clean of psychology, sympathy or depth.

By using nicknames, Ayatsuji does not do what Neil Simon does – there is no inherent difference to the way the seven doomed visitors deal with the threat that takes one from their midst each day. Ayatsuji is severely disinterested in examining the narrative differences between the seven different writers and how that might shape a world view, and an approach to logic and perception. Instead, we are given seven largely interchangeable characters, mere stock characters to drape a plot over. That’s the main use of the nicknames – it removes the individuality from the characters. That does lead to certain unpleasant elements – misogyny creeps in. Not just the misogyny from the male characters towards the female characters, but also from the author towards his own female creations – having one of the women die via poisoned lipstick is just one of many superficial treatments of gender. To be fair – Ayatsuji just doesn’t care, and neither does his ideal reader. Using stock cliché as a way to fill in the gaps in characterization just has a way of allowing bigotry to creep in.

That said, this book is first and foremost about the whodunit puzzle, and that one is nice, as far as it goes, but in his urge to abide by the Honkaku “fair play” rules, we are given too many hints to the solution too early and are thus not surprised by the revelation of the murderer. Ayatsuji foreswears many traditional comforts of the mystery novel in order to give his readers a clever puzzle, and yet, as a puzzle, it doesn’t surprise us with the solution. Instead, we watch the story from the outside, much like the audience of Murder by Death, but the amusement is of following one specific mechanism unfolding, of knowing how and why it will unfold, and of anticipating its workings. There’s not so much humor here – rather a kind of grim self-satisfaction of understanding how this works. If you enjoy being right, and nodding along to something being executed in a formally correct but predictable way, boy do I have the novel for you.

The book ultimately brings to mind the famous opposition between Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown offered by Antonio Gramsci in his notebooks. To Gramsci, Father Brown is a Catholic “who pokes fun at the mechanical thought processes of the protestants” – and Sherlock Holmes is petty, narrow and pretentious. How this fits into Gramsci’s politics is examined here, but I want to just note that this gap, this difference also explains why I was left so dissatisfied by the book. Father Brown’s work relies on empathy and introspection – but while we are given an emotional reason for the murders, there is no empathy and next to no introspection. For Chesterton, empathy opens new connections, an understanding of how things work beyond simple appearances, which helps Father Brown deduce the solutions. For Yukito Ayatsuji, there is nothing beyond appearances, except for the one deception that is central to the And then there were none-style plot.

Ayatsuji’s disinterest in deeper motivations comes to a head late in the novel when a decimated group of Mystery Club members suspects one another, offering the blandest of motives which are so laughably dull that Ayatsuji calls them out himself: “rather a simple attempt at a motive, “ one character offers by way of derision, moments before suggesting another, equally plain motive. The fact that the writing is also monotonous does not help. The translator Ho-Ling Wong cannot be blamed for it, since, from what I can tell, older editions of this novel come with an introduction by fellow Honkaku luminary Shimada Soji, who calls the writing in the original Japanese novel “clunky” and the characters “vacant.” In this sense, the translator did a magnificent job in retaining these qualities in the English text. And yet – is it enjoyable? I mean, WEIRDLY, it is a very quick and smooth read – despite all the issues I have with this novel.

The biggest failing of the books comes in comparison with Murder By Death – Neil Simon did not set out to write a satisfactory mystery, which also contains parodies. It is all parody. That said, Simon offers a funny but clear understanding of the mechanics of various Golden Age mystery writers. If you pick up any of their works, you will recognize the qualities and structures Simon satirized. The same cannot be said of The Decagon House Murders. There is absolutely no meaningful relationship between this novel and Christie’s work – or indeed the work of many of the writers used as nicknames. There is no understanding of what makes Christie’s most famous mystery work, the way modernity and traditionalism intersect in her depiction of class and gender, nothing, in the pages of the book. There is a reason Christie’s work has endured, and that reason cannot be found only or even predominantly in the mechanics of her cases. Look, I’m sure Ayatsuji perfectly understands her work, as a devotee to Golden Age mysteries, but the novel as a text has no interest at all in really relating to the writers it supposedly pays homage to. This is the most disappointing aspect of what is, despite all this, quite a breezy mystery.

Tess Gerritsen: The Sinner

Gerritsen, Tess (2004), The Sinner, Ballantine
ISBN 978-1-101-88739-4

The Sinner is the first novel I have read of Tess Gerritsen’s series of books about homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and Maura Isles. This is a surprisingly good book. I say surprisingly because the first third is a bit of a slog. Gerritsen, judging from this book, is not a gifted stylist, nor is she particularly gifted at using broader observations to elevate the dark and bloody subject matter of her books. But this book is extraordinarily well constructed on levels that have only tangentially to do with the crime at hand. Structurally, Gerritsen has an incredible understanding of the various implications of the crimes and the suspected criminals and has her own investigative team implicated in interesting ways. Central to The Sinner is the way our bodies can be compromised by us, by ideology, by greed. Gerritsen herself, as a novelist, is implicated in this.

The underlying crime, which is revealed towards the end, is one motivated by racism, by the blindness of white people to the plight of poor people of color and by the way white institutions center the issues of white people which is why the underlying crime went unrecognized for such a long time. And in her novel, Gerritsen notes the problem, but entirely replicates it by offering a white set of investigators and criminals, with people of color reserved as witnesses and victims. This is not inherently a bad quality of the book – books whose criticism accidentally implicate the book itself are a genre all onto themselves and are frequently worth reading.

So what happened? Someone broke into a convent, murdered two nuns, one of them pregnant. Then, a murdered, mutilated body is found. “What is she, black? Latina?” As Rizzoli, Isles and the Boston PD attempt to figure out what happened, Gerritsen, for a long time, in hindsight, does not move closer to identifying the culprit, instead offering us what ends up being investigatory lateral movement, which is the most interesting part of the book. Walking through the convent, Jane Rizzoli, the tough as nails Boston cop, feels off, unwell, strange. The reason, as everyone will guess within pages, is that Rizzoli is pregnant. The way this affects her body, and leads her to ask questions of herself, of her relationships, and of her family history ultimately acts like an inverse Greek choir to the investigation of the dead nun, who kept her pregnancy quiet. Rizzoli dives deep into the culture of secrecy at the convent, uncovers how a community of women may structure secrets and support. How grief and female trauma can be written into the very architecture of such a community.

All the while Rizzoli herself struggles with having rejected these kinds of communities. Not until a long conversation with her own mother towards the end of her book can the detective deal with her fears. It also inadvertently demonstrates that the police force, despite the ballyhooed support structure among cops, is primarily a space for male power. When a colleague and friend misinterprets Rizzoli’s friendliness as flirting, she has the additional pleasure of dealing with the not uncommon problem of explaining to a man that friendliness is not an invitation to fuck. Rizzoli’s isolation stands in stark contrast to the connections at the convent. Also, Rizzoli’s personal arc is almost entirely unrelated to the broader criminal activity. Maura Isles on the other hand has a small, entirely banal personal arc that’s related to the convent (it’s trite paint-by-numbers “nuns were mean to me in high school” personal trauma), and a major personal arc that is directly tied into the crime. This one, too, has to do with community and trust.

For a writer whose book so intensely relies on personal feelings to contextualize and elevate the criminal issues at hand, Gerritsen is remarkably bad at writing emotions. All of these examples above work best as paraphrase. On the page, Gerritsen assures us that “she found no comfort in this bleak place, where death had walked, contemptuous of holy symbols” and when Isles has sex, these are the words offered to us: “She welcomed him into her, urging him on, and though she lay beneath him, it was not in submission. She took her own pleasure, just as he took his, claiming her due with a soft cry of victory.” And while “Rizzoli seemed to carry her own heat source within her, the fever of her outrage,” the nuns “were dying flames, flickering out one by one.” This wattpad level of emotional subtlety is this book’s biggest weakness.

It’s not that the writing is overall terrible – Tess Gerritsen is no Patricia Cornwell – it is what is often called “serviceable” – clear enough, and at times genuinely good at dealing with spaces and movement. There is a lot of nodding and are you thinking what I am thinking, but never so much that it obscures the clear lines of morality that are essential to this kind of book. And Gerritsen’s lines are the right ones – unlike writers like Harris, who has a deep suspicion of deviant sexuality, for Gerritsen it is the more common ones: corporate greed and the cowardice of people involved in the workings of global corporate greed is the big bad, whereas the actual murderer here is an individual, a cog in the machine that needs greasing with blood now and then, to write in Gerritsen’s idiom. She’s not wrong, this is fine, and the latter half of its 400 pages is genuinely engaging. I don’t know if I should read more of her work – much of this book’s

Travel, Books & Bookshops

So as I noted, I was traveling the past two weeks – and as I am wont to do, I acquired some books. The slideshow below shows some of the excellent bookshops where I bought some of those books, and at the end, the complete total. That total includes presents from Robert Archambeau, who is a lovely, kind person, and a copy of Simenon’s Maigret which I found in a box in Brussels.

I want to note one bookshop in each city in particular. In Chicago, the Pilsen Community bookshop is a well stocked, well curated bookshop which would be worth a visit even if Pilsen wasn’t one of the nicest neighborhoods in all of Chicago – which it is.

In New York there are many excellent bookshops. East Village Books and Codex in particular, also in the East Village, are very good, and shops you could spend hours in. But there is a shop simply named “Bonnie Slotnick’s Cook Books” run by a passionate woman who used to work in cookbook publishing. We spent at least 30 Minutes just talking to her – if you go to just one bookshop in New York, and you have *any* kind of interest in food writing (the shop contains cookbooks, memoirs, essays, of every age and price range).

In Boston I did not in fact visit my two favorite bookshops this time around. Raven is a wonderful little shop off Harvard Square – but Grolier Poetry Bookshop, just around the corner from Harvard Book Store, is one of the most unique bookshops I have ever been to. A well stocked, lovely little shop that highlights poetry, which isn’t usually at the forefront of bookshops. It is run by people who aren’t just passionate about poetry books, but about poets as well.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Boston, Me & Frank Bidart, 2019

As I am preparing to travel to the United States once again – it has been two years since the last visit – I am slowly recovering from two very bad years (as most of you), I meant to discuss something that happened on my previous visit to the states.

That visit involved the publication of my chapbook, as well as an appearance at the 2019 ALA. Also present at the ALA in Boston: Frank Bidart, who gave a reading. Frank Bidart is my favorite living poet and I had written about him on this blog.

At the reading, due to a scheduling issue, an introductory speaker had been needed on short notice and I had the incredible and rare fortune to be allowed to introduce this poet who has meant so much to me as a person and writer.

There is very little else I can say at this point that will offer an adequate explanation of the gravity and importance of that moment. I did end up forcing my chapbook in Bidart’s hands and I think I emailed him a ton of poems, because I could not resist. Please read my short text on Bidart and please read his poetry.

I’m flying to the US in 3? days and in slightly more than a month I will marry, so things, overall, are looking up. If you want to support me/us, go here.

Denise Mina: Rizzo

Mina, Denise (2021), Rizzio, Polygon
ISBN 9-781 1534-314405

As I may have pointed out in previous reviews: I am a great admirer of the work of Scottish crime novelist Denise Mina. Unlike many other writers in her genre, her work is animated by a creative unrest – an impatience with seriality and the form of the typical mystery novel. She has started three different series of novels, centered on the police, on reporters and on a personal investigator. In parallel, she wrote a series of standalone novels, some of which, like the celebrated The Long Drop, are historical true crime novels.

I have not written new reviews here in a while, and several new novels came and went in the meantime; I have copious notes on The Long Drop in particular, which is a deeply admirable book, in the way it connects Mina’s well-established sense of place and local and social connections, with a sharp recreation of a historical crime. There is a curious contrast between Mina’s approach to true crime and the work of a writer like Helen Garner, whose books, while also very good, deal more in the individual psychology of crime, which, when applied to real people, always has a bit of a haut gout.

And another thing happened in this break – I read my first Denise Mina novel which is bad. Though I say “bad” – Conviction is among her best reviewed books. For me, nothing came together in this attempt to fuse diverse kinds of storytelling – adventure, crime, storytelling, and…podcasts? The central animating device of Conviction is the attempt to solve a crime while simultaneously recording a podcast about it. Very Only Murders in The Building, you say? Accurate, but at the same time, satire isn’t Mina’s strong suit, and her strengths in connecting and grounding violence in characters and places are at odds with the basic satire the book revolves around. The book reads like it was fun to write and it is entertaining enough to read, but some of Mina’s novels belong among the best novels in their genre and that’s just a very high bar to clear.

Rizzio, however, very easily clears that bar. This very short novel deals with an episode in the life of Mary Queen of Scots. It was published as the first entry in the “Darkland Tales” books, where Scottish writers reimagine Scottish history in fiction. The next entry was Jenni Fagan’s Hex, which is also excellent, and in Autumn 2022, Alan Warner (whose Morvern Callar is one of the best Scottish novels of the 20^th century) will follow. Jenni Fagan’s novel(la) retells the North Berwick witch trials – focusing on one particularly famous historical figure and contextualizing it in a feminist reading of history. And it makes sense to write a book about transient everyday figures who are frequently forgotten by history, or whose memory is slighted by the broader strokes of history. Books focusing on these characters often provide genuine insight into the structure of historiography and the way power moves and shakes narratives.

There’s also a certain freedom in these books, unburdened by the weight of libraries of literature expended on characters and events. This does not mean that writers generally just invent things. Margaret Atwood’s best novel, Alias Grace, is an examination of a 19^th century murder, written to correct the historical record established by a contemporary account. Similarly, Denise Mina’s own The Long Drop is scrupulously detailed and does not draw its strength from invention, but from re-contextualization of violence. The book ends on a description of the way Glasgow has entirely changed since then: “the city is reborn so completely that it becomes a memory of a memory of a place.”

Rizzio is a condensed little book about the 1566 murder of David Rizzio by a conspiracy intent on ending Mary’s reign as queen. And while the initial plot was not successful beyond the actual murder of Rizzio, an Italian courtier and secretary of Queen Mary, in short order Mary was in fact deposed, and imprisoned, first in Scotland, and later in England. These are all famous characters. David Rizzio’s murder has been depicted in numerous books and movies, and the list of texts dealing with the reign of Queen Mary is truly endless. In some way, the shape of public narratives of Queen Mary, from Walter Scott, through Antonia Fraser and to Denise Mina is a full history of the way British literature has changed. There’s nothing of substance you could add to the story, no secret psychological explanation, no twist, no uncovered conspiracy.

And Mina does not attempt to do so – she explains her method to the reader by way of a prefatory quote from Borges:

“The exercises in narrative prose that make up this book overly exploit certain tricks: random enumerations, sudden shifts of continuity, and the paring down of a man’s whole life to two or three scenes. They are not, they do try not to be, psychological.”

As I mentioned before – this eschewing of psychology is something that Mina has done before in her true crime fiction. What’s new is the playfulness of arranging scenes and chronology. Stylistically, this book also reads more like her true crime fiction – for these books, Mina has pared down her style, jettisoned superfluous descriptors, and offers us plain declarative sentences. Short sentences, with a minimum of hypotactical flourishes, just telling us what happens, who is doing what. The chapters are short, the scenes are set with extraordinary effectiveness. The nimble clarity of Mina’s writing in Rizzio almost reads like an exercise, meant to demonstrate mastery of a certain style.

The plot of the book does not deviate from the known story of Rizzio’s murder – but Mina is not interested, contrary to what might be expected, in Mary’s reactions to the events, at least not primarily. Mary, who is surprised by the plot, which involved her craven husband, flees, but otherwise does not have a hand in the events, which are primarily shaped by the push and pull of people who are interested in power, but not interested in the opinion of the woman who currently holds it. “These are the men who fill history books with their squabbles and claims and resentments. The Great Men of History.” And while the events of the book precipitate and contribute to the fall, imprisonment and eventual death of Mary Queen of Scots, the plot itself fails – these men, as Mina notes have not changed history, even though they are convinced of it, as events unfold.

And while I noted that there is a contrast between the story of The Long Drop, after all, just the story of a serial killer whose murders became part of urban legend, and Rizzio, the story of one of the most famous characters in all of British history, in terms of how well represented each story is in historiography, the two books end on a similar note. After Mary fled, her rooms in Holyrood were first closed and then abandoned to the point where there are no authentic objects in these rooms that Mary personally interacted with, only objects which are “traditionally associated” with Mary. The way even famous, unquestionably important and powerful historical figures can be subject to the flotsam and jetsam of history, when they are female, is remarkable and deplorable.

Rizzio is a short book about the violence of misogyny in both history and historiography. And somehow, in these few pages, Mina also manages to tell the stories of people entirely lost to history, of the everyday folk who are moved on the board to plan or escape plots. This is one of the least flawed books I have read in a long time, which manages to offer both depth and brevity, clarity of observation and breadth of vision. If you have not read Denise Mina’s work yet, maybe this is the time to do so.

Some books

@sibaerisch

and there is more#booktok #aynrand #atlasshrugged #jonathanfranzen

♬ original sound – Schitt’s Creek

Birthday present

Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips: Bad Weekend

Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips (2021), Bad Weekend, Image
ISBN 9-781534-314405

Ed Brubaker’s niche, if you will, are comic books nibbling at the borders of masculinity. Some of my favorite works of his involve characters like Daredevil (his run with Michael Lark is probably the best – outside of some of Frank Miller’s work) and Captain America. Coming to terms with violence, balancing responsibility and the inherently transgressive work of superheroes is a constant theme. Outside of his work involving caped crusaders, Brubaker has carved himself a niche writing comic books about crime, usually with his collaborator Sean Phillips doing pencils and ink. I will admit, I am not as interested in these books, particularly those, like Criminal and Incognito, that deal with crime in a doggedly realist way. The first run of Criminal, collected in several trade paperbacks, ended a few years ago – but recently he re-launched the series, collecting the issues by storyline rather than issue by issue. Bad Weekend is, to my mind, the most interesting collection of the bunch. It is not, somehow, about crime at all.

In Bad Weekend, Brubaker and Phillips (with colors by Sean Phillips’ son, Jacob), tell the story of one comic book convention weekend, and of one legendary comic book artist’s decline, and his life of frustrations and regret. Bad Weekend is brief, but its story is told with a surprising amount of subtlety and breathing room given the brisk pace of the plot. It’s a bracing but excellent read, and if you’re interested in (yet another) tale of an old man’s decline and bitterness, then I can strongly recommend it. Both Phillips and Brubaker have been telling this kind of story for such a long time that the only surprise is the specific kind of characters and setting, but it’s enough to elevate this beyond the usual inky shadow of violence and crime to a story about the real darkness that powers the history of this colorful art form. It is by far my favorite work the Brubaker/Phillips team has produced in its long, long collaborative career.

First things first: this is not a roman à clef – Brubaker isn’t giving us a portrayal of a specific artist. Looking at his frustrations, you do immediately think of outsize artists like Jack Kirby, particularly given the fictional character’s penchant for fantastic tales over plain corporate ones. Or indeed, with Bad Weekend’s Hal’s insufficiently remunerated work on cartoons, one thinks of Alex Toth. I would, however, suggest a third artist, who, given his popularity towards the end of his life – and his seeming ubiquity in movies and on TV – wouldn’t seem to fit the bill of a frustrated, indebted, bitter comics industry veteran: Stan Lee. But crucially, the book is set in 1997, before the current boom in superhero comics on TV and the big screen. Earlier this year, Abraham Riesman wrote a magnificent biography of Stan Lee, True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, which offers a much more nuanced, and indeed occasionally harsh portrait of the legendary creator. Addiction, gambling, the mob – Stan Lee’s life ran the gamut. Hal, Brubaker’s protagonist insists that comics are dying – and in 1997, the comic book industry was in a real crisis. In 1996, Marvel had to file for chapter 11 bankruptcy – far from the titan it appears to be today, and other publishers were similarly struggling. Smaller companies like Defiant and Valiant went bankrupt; in a sign of the new age of comics we’re experiencing, Valiant relaunched itself in 2012, with a big slate of books and artists on board, and has since published some of comic’s most exciting titles, like Jody Houser’s Faith.

In 1997, when Bad Weekend is set, nobody expected this kind of bounce back – least of all artists like Hal, who had lost most of the rights to their titles anyway. So instead, what Brubaker gives us is a meditation on what it means to be a fading comic book artist – how you interact with archives, and participate in the creation of new archives and archival structures. Hal has sold off most prints he owns, so he signs fake animation cells to authenticate them, making very little money off them. As we meet him, he arrives at a convention where he’s about to be given an award for his life’s work – but he doesn’t care about industry awards, particularly since this industry is declining to pay him fairly for all the work and characters he has created – a familiar complaint among artists. He gets a former assistant of his to serve as his guide around the convention, and it is from that assistant’s point of view that we follow the story. Years ago, he discouraged said assistant from pursuing a career in comics, letting the then-young man get entangled in a crime-adjacent life. Now, he needs his help to recover prints that he has been trying to dig up for a while. Through break-ins and violence, we retrace some of the paths these objects sometimes take, we see fragments of Hal’s life outside of this specific “bad weekend,” as events slowly come to a head.

The final revelation, which explains the urgency at the heart of Hal’s weekend endeavor, is equal parts heart-breaking and illuminating, helping us shine light on some of the moral quandaries of a career in comics. Brubaker tells his story in small pieces of pertinent information, scattered around a fairly regular story of small time crime. The crime isn’t the point, it’s incidental, it’s the only path open to Hal at this point in his life. His memory is going – he repeats himself, forgets details, etc. – and his life is barely holding together. This connects Hal to Brubaker’s other, less artistically talented criminals. They are not supervillains, created for a life of crime, crime is incidental in their life as well, it’s a means to make lives wrecked by violence, capitalism and mental breakdowns work, a means to be able to go on among others, head held high. For all the burglary, assault and forgery committed on this “bad weekend,” Hal isn’t ashamed of any of it. In fact, he’s trying to erase something that nobody outside of the industry would consider shameful in any way – but that, more than the financial situation, is what prevents Hal from being himself, freely without bitterness and shame. In this way, Hal is just like most of Brubaker’s male characters – using the toxic fruit of masculinity to combat feelings of (imagined or real) inadequacy, themselves created by masculinity. The toxic ouroboros of masculinity and the circle of violence informs much of Brubaker’s work – and in Bad Weekend, he gives us a particularly well crafted, dense, moving version of it.

Christmas Presents

Kind people have given me presents for Christmas, several of which have made me quite happy. Have you had good holidays?

On Theodore Roethke

A chain of fortunate circumstances has led to a very brief essay of mine being published in a new guide to the work of Theodore Roethke, among august company like Jay Parini, Frank Kearful and Camille Paglia. You can find the book here, and, one assumes, at your favorite online retailer.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone. I hope you are having a nice holiday. I’m spending Christmas Eve entirely without my family, who is pandemically spread around their own little hearths all over Germany, but it is what it is. This too shall pass. Take care of yourselves.

I’m aware of how fortunate I am – I’m in good health as always, I have a home and people who love me, and a family similarly untouched by Covid. I’m very worried about some of my friends, including a couple in London, who are very close to my heart and have been on my mind throughout this whole horrible time.

#TDDL: a summary. Part 2: The Good

So you have seen me announce my TDDL coverage and then nothing happened? Apologies, did NOT have a good week. Anyway, yesterday the awards were voted on by the jurors, and I thought that’s a solid opportunity to summarize the past 3 days of readings for you.

I split my summary into three parts: the writers I did not like, or didn’t like enough, my favorites, and then a third about the actual results. Here is part 1: The Bad, which you should read first.

My favorites are, in this order:

Helga Schubert

Laura Freudenthaler

Egon Christian Leitner

Lydia Haider

Audience Award: Hanna Herbst

In the first summary I grouped the writers by similarities rather than by chronological order or preference. I would like to continue doing it here, and there are two obvious groups. The odd woman out is Laura Freudenthaler. I’ll begin with an admission: I listened to the story and was bored, looked at the text and was a bit nonplussed by some elements of the style and was ready to dismiss it, until one of the readers I value most suggested I have another look (because of that reader I had another look at Lisa Krusche too, but that did not help. More on Lisa Krusche at the very end of Part 1). And I was wrong. Freudenthaler’s story is an extraordinary achievement. Structurally it moves like a melody, with a devastating, literally explosive ending – and it’s a testament to her skill that a big, devastating, fiery end, after only 8 pages of story, feels earned, and not like a gimmick. Freudenthaler, like Ally Klein at TDDL 2018, does a remarkable job of making anxiety feel real. Moreover, she excels at using real scientific facts about the developments of peat fires or other phenomena of spontaneous underground combustion organically, as a way to illuminate the knowledge we have about her story. As a writer, Freudenthaler has a knack for the curious detail – like the sound of a burning fire, sucking in oxygen, and its similarity to the sound of an asthmatic person having an attack. Freudenthaler connects insides and outsides, a personal violent episode leads us into the story and a massive conflagration leads us out. It touches on political concerns, but indirectly, trusting the protagonist’s anxiety to carry us over.

Much more overtly political are Egon Christian Leitner and Lydia Haider. Both of them extraordinarily Austrian in their talk and both of them explicitly, directly and forthrightly political. Neither of them really helped their texts by reading them aloud. Egon Christian Leitner has a large body of work of largely fragmentary or rather: episodic prose about life on the margins. Unlike exploitative texts, like Bachmann participants Neft and Schutti, Leitner is always empathetic and clear about his own speaking position. The language evades simple emotive tendencies, it doesn’t try to manipulate the reader, it grounds marginalized people in the details of their own realities. Despite the clarity of the language, it’s not plain or journalistic, instead Leitner’s tone is deliberate and clean. His reading, regrettably, was offered in a monotone that emphasized some of the structural repetitions, but undersold his skills at deploying sarcasm and other forms of pointed humor. Leitner stood out, and is one of my favorites because his work felt genuinely unique – not filled with the phraseology of Bachmanntexts past, or leaning on the imagery of 1990s fiction or nonfiction, it felt almost sui generis, though particularly 1970s Austrian literature can offer further examples of work written in Leitner’s style. A similar mixture of sui generis with echoes of brilliant texts in the Austrian tradition is found in Lydia Haider’s text. Where Leitner’s text was dominated by the reasoned speaker’s voice, Haider’s story teems with voices. A text about contemporary politics, violence and right wing rhetoric, it borrows from a completely different Austrian tradition, most famously Jelinek, whose later novels and plays interrogate the violence inherent in common and popular phrases. I will admit, I am not as well read in other examples of that tradition. At the end of her presentation, Haider reads from a copy of plays by Werner Schwab, furnishing us further venues of reference and interpretation. The text is dense, and Haider’s intensely dramatic reading regrettably covered up its details – revisiting it quietly, its well-turned language reveals a skilled writer, with an urgency that’s equal part literary and political. Much of it is flashy, clearly, but the unusual language, the thoughtful engagement with a tradition, and the examination of contemporary issues lift it beyond all the texts discussed in the previous section. Both Leitner and Haider’s texts are unthinkable without assuming that these writers see themselves, as Otoo noted, as citizens as well as writers, and they present us also with an answer to some of the lazy reactions to Otoo’s speech, such as irritated (and irritating) complaint, Otoo were expecting us to learn a bibliography before or instead of engaging with the issues. What Otoo did instead, with several examples early in her speech, is ask for a literature that’s thought- and careful, that considers questions of solidarity, and that brings empathy to not just its characters, but its readers, as well. The jury could have noted any of that or other links to Otoo’s speech, which would have been especially apropos in Leitner’s case, but they decided to ignore it instead.

And finally, my favorite writer of the competition – she was my favorite before everything started and consistently my pick to win it all: Helga Schubert. Helga Schubert and Hanna Herbst presented texts about parents, and they did so one after the other. Of all the writers in this post, Hanna Herbst is the weakest, and on the level of writing, she does not reach some of Lisa Krusche’s heights. At the same time, her texts also do not evince some of the downsides to Krusche’s text. Herbst is not, as far as I can tell, primarily a literary writer – and this text, though it may become part of something larger, feels specific to a moment. Herbst’s text is gimmicky – a remembrance of a father that’s filled with small bits and bobs, frequently unpleasantly precious. If you’ll think of the music of Belle & Sebastian, the films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet or Silvain Chomet, you can guess at the tone. Through it all, the text, however, retains a genuine, a moving core, and unlike other texts in the previous section, never reproduces racism. In fact, it’s the rare text that feels carefully crafted even though it’s sometimes overrun with unexamined common phraseology. There’s a sense of a kind of writing that came out of creative writing departments in the early 2000s, like Paul Harding’s Tinkers. One episode had the father ask his daughter to bring her three favorite books to him, only to burn them without explanation, a story that Hanna Herbst manages to invest with a sense of connection and mystery – everything seems polyvalent, resonating with different energies, a good text. Its biggest disadvantage was to be presented immediately after Helga Schubert gave us a story about remembering a mother. Schubert’s text swings wildly, it can be tender, cruel, warm, violent, personal, political – it’s a rich text by a writer who has been ignored by the literary establishment for a long, long time. A psychoanalyst by training, the prose she published in the 1980s is at times staggering in its use of economy. The story “Schöne Reise,” collected in the collection of the same name, reads like Carver after Lish was through with him. And Schubert preserved this quality. Politically, Schubert had always been complicated, I recommend reading a conversation she had with Rita Süssmuth, published as Gehen die Frauen in die Knie? in 1990, where Schubert evades expectations of feminist assumptions, harshly critical of GDR society and politics. The politics of the story she presented at TDDL were similarly complicated, but ultimately overshadowed by the portrait of a difficult mother – a mother who tells her daughter on her dying bed that she wasn’t wanted, and that she wants acknowledgment for giving birth to her despite that. It’s part of the power of Schubert’s story, that she ends up outside of the hospital, giving her mother that gratitude, without rancor, or damaging resentment. And though it’s tempting to retell bits and pieces of the story which can move the attentive reader to tears, what truly sets it apart is Schubert’s stylistic sharpness. Take sentence length for example – the normal sentence here is short, but not remarkably so; yet when she expands her sentences, they immediately fill up with detail and direction. Strangely, the story never feels like Schubert had to fight to get it into this shape – she’s just this skilled. I feel obligated to state that the story is not as good as some of the 1980s work, but it’s more generous and expansive than that work.

My next post discusses the actual awards (spoiler: I’m not unhappy).

#TDDL: a summary. Part 1: The Bad

So you have seen me announce my TDDL coverage – and then nothing happened? Apologies, did NOT have a good week. Anyway, today the awards are voted on by the jurors, and I thought that’s a solid opportunity to summarize the past 3 days of readings for you.

And boy did we have some readings. There were no truly excellent texts on the first day, balanced out by some odd walks on the Caucasian side, and then there were two to three spectacular readings on the second day, and a solid third day. I’m not going to go through them chronologically, so as not to needlessly repeat myself. Writing about everything at once allows me to be slightly less vitriolic than I usually am – seeing the arc of a year’s crop of invitations is intriguing.

One of the most significant developments was the dialogue that the texts had with Sharon Dodua Otoo’s speech that introduced the events. Otoo’s speech very calmly discussed the role of race in German literature – she spoke clearly and eloquently about solidarity, lived experience, about the room to write yourself in a white society when you’re Black, when you’re Othered, by readers, publishers, other authors. What does representation mean to Black artists? The most urgent question, regarding this year’s competition, surfaces early in the speech: do some white writers write the way they do because they imagine their readership exclusively white? What are the expectations regarding literary “speech” – Otoo cites Chinua Achebe, who declared that “writers are not only writers, they are also citizens.”

And so to these three days of readings, with one (1) writer with Egyptian roots and one (1) writer with Kosovan roots, and everybody else with less complex backgrounds. How did these writers rise to the challenge of being “not only writers, [but] also citizens?” Poorly, for the most part.

I’m splitting the post into the writers I did not like, on the one hand, and a second post about my favorites, and then a third about the actual results.

My favorites are, in this order:

Helga Schubert
Laura Freudenthaler
Egon Christian Leitner
Lydia Haider
Audience Award: Hanna Herbst

This post, however, is about the others.

Let’s begin with the interesting, inoffensive, but banal – Meral Kureyshi and Jasmin Ramadan offered light texts that were written with skill and invested with some intriguing energy, but fell flat, ultimately. Both concerned with questions of gender, they differed in tone – Kureyshi read us a soft, pensive monologue about a woman’s love life. There isn’t one bad sentence in the whole story, on the contrary, it contains several striking observations and comments, but it lacks, ultimately, something to draw the reader through it. The opposite is true for Jasmin Ramadan. Author of several novels, her story is punchy – a sharp look at modern gender dynamics, written in a light, quick style, which, for this kind of award and environment, was a bit too light. Acknowledging the difficulties of calling something “literary” without qualifying the precariousness of that judgment, this text still fell short of what is considered literary, at least in this context. And there are certainly questions here, questions I would have liked the judges to ask, about representation of female writing, and of writers of color, and what the limits of our idea of literary writing mean for this kind of writer, particularly because Ramadan consistently works with the most fascinating notions of representation in her literary work. Hers was the first text, and a fantastic opportunity to tie a discussion of the text into the Rede zur Literatur, which supposedly frames the whole week. Spoiler alert: the judges did not refer back to Otoo’s speech a single time. Not that first day, nor any day thereafter. Not surprised, but still disappointed. It feels off, slotting Kureyshi and Ramadan somewhere into the middle of the field, but it is what it is.

Similarly in the middle, but for entirely different reasons, is another pair of writers, Jörg Piringer and Levin Westermann. Every year, there’s at least one poet – and it is remarkably often that poet who wins an award. Nora Gomringer won the main award, for example. Poets writing prose can be exciting. Unexpectedly, this year, we were offered poets writing poetry. And not just text that is written in short lines. In their readings, both Piringer and Westermann emphasized the structural qualities of poetry. Jörg Piringer offered a history of our current reality, connected to a metaphor from martial arts. He worked in free rhythms, but scrupulously emphasized the ends of lines, forming the poem as much orally as he did on the page. The reading was more rhythmic than the writing – a veteran of the digital poetry scene, indeed, often considered a pioneer, Piringer’s reading was impressively sharp, powerful enough to make readers read past many of the less than sharp observations of history and the present. The martial arts metaphor sits uncomfortably in the middle of a text which does not in any way reflect on the patriarchal nature of historiography, written for an implied audience that does not particularly need that kind of reflection: white, tech-savvy men. The masculine obsession with martial arts fits this pattern too well, not to mention the pronounced performance of the whole text. Still, until I reread Lydia Haider’s remarkable text quietly tonight, I considered Piringer’s poem one of the four best texts of the competition. I was never in danger of considering Levin Westermann’s text one of those. Westermann is an accomplished, widely published poet – and in his text, he shows himself to also be widely read. An early quote from a Matthew Zapruder poem cannot but make us think of Zapruder’s recent, mildly controversial book Why Poetry, a defense of poetry, which may as well serve as an explanation of why Westermann offered up this text. Other writers cited in the text include Rilke, Dillard and Jorie Graham. The text itself consists of rhythmic but irregularly metered and highly irregularly rhymed lines, making strong use of repetition and other kinds of form to produce a formally dense text, which has next to nothing to say that cannot be found in Zapruder’s text. The occasional political notes struck are bland, and drown in the incessant formal games that Westermann, unlike some late Graham, never convincingly connects to something that matters. The effect is strangely masturbatory, a display (sound, fury etc.).

Speaking of masturbatory – male writers tend to come to Klagenfurt with texts celebrating, well, themselves, in one way or another, and it’s never the stylistically brilliant ones either. Last year, an award was handed out to a navel-gazing story of a writer writing about his day walking through his city, picking up groceries (details may vary), having a series of extremely minor epiphanies, presented in the flattest prose imaginable. And the streak continues, unabated, with the next pair. Leonard Hieronymi and Matthias Senkel offered badly written stories that were largely pointless literary exercises with the sole purpose of centering the writers in question, though, superficially, their stories appear to be different. Matthias Senkel presented a story about a mystery, about an archaeological dig, written like a mosaic, composed of sections set in different periods. It tries to use scientific vocabulary to make the story discursively complex, with notes of Richard Powers and similar writers, but he entirely lacks a broader view or any sense of style. His is not the worst written story of the competition, but it’s also not too far off. His goal is one of faking layers of complexity to catfish readers into overlooking the blandness of the actual writing on the page. Some of the dialogue is downright risible, the information in the story closer to wiki-sourced infodumps than to well-digested and productively used knowledge, and the various attempts to play or toy with the reader a transparent ploy to engage in dialogue with a very specific (white, male) readership, which is curiously popular in German literature, as attested to by the popularity of the Barons of Blandness Thomas Glavinic and Georg Klein, both of whom have made a career of papering over poor writing with various kinds of metafictional games, in the case of Glavinic with some additional limp masculinity. Speaking of which: Leonard Hieronymi entered a story into the competition that read like a carbon copy of the travel stories written by Christian Kracht and friends in the earlyy and mid-1990s. It’s almost not worth discussing. Hieronymi, member of a group called “The Rich Kids of Literature” (it’s an English-language title, because of course it is), writes about getting horribly drunk, then taking a trip to the Romanian city of Constanta by the Black Sea, meeting famed Romanian poet Mircea Dinescu. There, he evokes Ovid and his exile, which he wrote about in the beautiful Tristia. In between all this he offers observations of Romania that switch between the banal and the offensive, and in the end he returns, having learned nothing. The expectations inscribed in books like this, the sense of who writes, who reads and who gets written about is stark, but at least, let me say that, Hieronymi comes close to making his politics explicit.

That’s not true for the next group of writers, Katja Schönherr, Lisa Krusche and Carolina Schutti. Let me start with Schutti, because I have very little to say about her story that I hadn’t said about her novels before. To quote my pre-Bachmann review:

Carolina Schutti has a tonal consistency that is admirable, if maddening. In her very first book she zeroes in on a style that seems derivative, but really isn’t epigonal in any typical sense. She doesn’t echo specific writers as much as a general tone. As a concert pianist she has said in an interview that she always writes for listeners as well – and indeed, from the first line you can hear the voice in these books. And you know, eerily, what this voice is? It’s the typical note struck by the average reader at the Bachmannpreis – this measured pronunciation that situates texts right between light and somber, investing pauses and turns with meaning that they don’t have on the page.

And

these books are… specific cultural performances, with a specific audience in mind. Schutti, from page one, line one of her first novel, immediately seizes on a tone and style and never abandons it. Open any page at random, and you can hear it spoken slowly into a microphone in Klagenfurt. And honestly, they probably make for great analyses by scholars and judges, just not for particularly good literature. The expectation behind this style is what’s truly remarkable – it’s an inherent expectation of importance, an arrogance of whiteness that is at times breathtaking.

I also note the sense of exploitation of marginality. All of this is exactly true for the story she presented. Tone, style, exploitation, all there. Again, someone on the margins, again, someone struggling with language. And like other Bachmann-writers in previous years, for example Stephan Lohse, she doesn’t shy away from indirectly using Blackness as a way to feed and expand her already dubious narratives of marginality. Her protagonist, in a moment of crisis, sees a documentary about Africa on TV, exclaiming “Ich bin in Afrika.” Schutti’s text is a paint-by-numbers Klagenfurt text, in the worst way. Her books sound like they should be read at TDDL, so did her story, which she read exactly this way, and she uses the same tropes of marginality to elevate her text into a borrowed relevancy. At least, one is tempted to say, Katja Schönherr’s protagonist isn’t marginalized. Just a regular white female character. But Schönherr also, almost aggressively, makes it clear that she has a very specific implicit audience. I’ll admit, it’s bad luck that her story came out when we are all so much more aware of the necessity of elevating marginalized voices, when people march to protest the disregard for Black and trans lives. Let me tell you what Schönherr’s story is about in the least judgy vocabulary: a (white) woman goes to the Zoo with husband and daughter, struggling with her life, worried she might die (she’s not ill). She sees an orangutan who picks up a sign (we are never told which) and holds it up. A conversation between various onlookers ensues, as they debate whether the apparent demonstration by the ape is right-, or leftwing, or neutral. Complaints arise that the demonstration isn’t narrowly tailored to ape-relevant concerns, and the protagonist slowly comes around to feeling solidarity with the orangutan, who, she feels, should be allowed to have its say. After the sign is abandoned, she acquires orangutan costumes and goes to the zoo with her daughter, costume-clad, with the sign, to continue the protest, until she gets kicked out. To cite Otoo, as the judges have conspicuously not done: who is this for? Who is this about? Who is included, who is not? If every writer is a citizen, and if we are to look at who the writer’s empathy is for, how do we read texts like Schönherr’s? Using the figure of public protest merely as a mirror for a white woman’s ennui and an a fear of death is deeply strange and unpleasant – and shows a profound disengagement with the reasons for such public protests, not to mention other…issues with the story. Similar problems of disengagement are displayed in the text by Lisa Krusche. Of the three in this final group, it is by far the most well written. I admit, I had to read it multiple times to engage with the tone and the writing, but there you are. That said, her story about disaffected youth, a sense of connection with an environment that in Krusche’s pen turns even the inorganic organic, and virtual spaces suffers from the exact same problem as Schönherr’s story. The same questions apply – though she masks it better than Schönherr’s plain offering. The central theoretical text for Krusche’s story is Donna Haraway’s late-career book Staying with the Trouble, in which Haraway completes a disengagement with real, tangible change, with a connection to intersectional feminist issues, in favor of a loose examination of kinship and inter-species solidarity that was a long time coming in her work. This excellent essay by Sophie Lewis explains in detail where the problems with Haraway’s book are. Krusche’s story would have been tonally off in any year of the competition, but it sounds a particularly discordant tone this year, particularly. It’s not just that the police as an institution is noted and dismissed as “maybe inherently humorous,” which, I have no words. The use of virtual spaces in narratives is especially fraught. There are copious essays noting why texts like Ready Player Go are structurally racist, and what the imagination of whiteness in virtual spaces really means. Afrofuturism has offered much pushback to these imagined spaces, and clarified why there are no real neutral visions of the future. Krusche does not engage any of these questions and offers, at the end, a general pessimism, a view of revolution that is colorblind in the worst way. It’s an unpleasant text, masked by a sometimes stunningly beautiful sense of reality, borrowed straight from JG Ballard’s unpleasant dystopias of white distress. Sophie Lewis makes it abundantly clear that Haraway’s avoidance of empathetic solutions to patriarchal and racist violence (in fact, she specifically reproduces racism in the book) isn’t a byproduct, but an essential structural component of elevating oddkins and “kinnovations” over families and the masses of humans. The same is true, though less focused, of Lisa Krusche’s text. To connect the text to Sharon Otoo’s speech: who is its audience? Who do we have empathy for? Krusche’s text is about whiteness in multiple problematic ways. Nam Le, in his sticky book-length essay on David Malouf, notes the role of the bush, the untamed wilderness, in the imagination of colonial settler writing. He writes that for immigrants, “whiteness is our bush” – for Lisa Krusche, the old oppositions are active. The bush is still the bush, dystopian, wild, decaying. The contrast even to writers like Vandermeer, with all his flaws, is instructive. A text inspired by a past that we should be learning to read critically instead.

More on the writers I wanted to win in the next post.

 

#tddl: Germany’s Next Literary Idol, 2020 edition.

If you follow me on twitter,you’ll see a deluge of tweets this week from Thursday to Saturday under the hashtag #tddl, let me explain.

I will be live-tweeting the strangest of events from my little book cave. Read on for Details on the event in general, what happened in the past years and what’s happening this year. Here are some anticipatory remarks from earlier in the week.

So what is happening?

Once a year, something fairly unique happens in Klagenfurt, Austria. On a stage, a writer will read a 25-minute long prose(ish) text, which can be a short story, an excerpt from a novel, or just an exercise in playfulness. All of the texts have to be unpublished, all have to be originally written in German (no translations). Also on stage: 9 to 7 literary critics who, as soon as the writer finishes reading, will immediately critique the text they just heard (and read; they have paper copies). Sometimes they are harsh, sometimes not, frequently they argue among each other. The writer has to sit at his desk for the whole discussion, without being allowed a voice in it. This whole thing is repeated 18 to 14 times over the course of three days. On the fourth day, 4-5 prizes are handed out, three of them voted on by the critics (again, votes that happen live on stage), one voted on by the public. All of this is transmitted live on public TV and draws a wide audience.

This, a kind of “German language’s next (literary) Idol” setup, is an actually rather venerable tradition that was instituted in 1977. It’s referred to as the “Bachmannpreis”, an award created in memory of the great Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann, who was born in Klagenfurt. The whole week during which the award is competed for and awarded is referred to as the “Tage der deutschsprachigen Literatur” (the days of German-language literature). Since 1989, the whole competition, including all the readings and all the judges’ arguments are shown on live TV, before, the public was only shown excerpts. The writers in question are not usually unknowns, nor are they usually heavyweights. They are usually more or less young writers (but they don’t have to be).

This year there’s a Coronavirus-related shift online. Only the moderator is in Klagenfurt, Austria. Everybody else joins via video. The readings are pre-recorded, while the judging happens on live video. Since everything is on a three-ish second delay, this might get messy.

So what happened in the past years?

The 2016 winner was British expat writer Sharon Dodua Otoo (here’s my review of some of her fiction), who read a text that was heads and shoulders above the sometimes lamentable competition. And you are fortunate – you can now purchase it in a bilingual edition here and I *urge* you to get a copy. Incidentally, the German judges were still slightly upset about Otoo’s win the following year, which explains why 2017’s best writer by a country mile, John Wray, didn’t win. It’s the revenge of the Bratwurst. The 2017 winner, Ferdinand Schmalz, was…solid. A good example of the performance based nature of the event – having one effective text can win you the pot. It was overall not, you know, ideal.

Given the issues with race in 2016 and 2017, it was interesting that the 2018 lineup skewed even whiter and much more German. It was thus no surprise that the best text, a brilliant reckoning with Germany’s post-reunification history of violence, Özlem Dündar’s text in four voices, did not win, but she did win second place. But the overall winner, Tanja Maljartschuk, a Ukrainian novelist, produced a very good text, and was a very deserving winner. And Raphaela Edelbauer (whose brilliant book Entdecker I reviewed here) also won an award. Three out of five ain’t bad folks, particular with people like Michael Wiederstein in the jury. So of course, 2019 went even worse. None of the adjudicated awards went to someone challenging the order of things. Here is my summary from 2019. It was depressing.

So what’s happening this year?

Somehow, the organizers came up with a brilliant idea. Each year, a writer introduces the events with a so-called “Rede zur Literatur” – a State of the Literature speech. This year, they gave Sharon Dodua Otoo the reins, who delivered a brilliant speech on Wednesday night (read/see it here) that managed to be trenchant and measured and relevant all at the same time. She ended it by mentioning some important Black German writers – none of whom have been invited this year, or last year, or the year before. Because of course not.

As for this year’s field – it’s…interesting. Not for diversity reasons, that’s still clearly off the table – except for Jasmin Ramadan, a writer with Egyptian roots, and Meral Kureyshi, born in Prizren, it’s as white as you’d think. That said, there are two writers this year who count among classic writers in their or any field. Most important: Helga Schubert. Schubert has been an important writer for all my life. She wrote a bona fide classic nonfiction book about female complicity in the Third Reich, the still-powerful Judasfrauen. She also writes short stories which are so unbelievably well made, I cannot help but have the highest expectations for this year. The other is Jörg Piringer, who is an important figure in early digital poetry. I have written reviews of the work of Meral Kureyshi (which is good) and Carolina Schutti (which is not), linked below.

I have misgivings about the field! And yet…I cannot help but be excited. Follow along! There’s a livestream! You can also read the texts during the competition here. So here’s the full list, which I posted below, sorted by reading days/slots.

Thursday
10.00 Uhr Jasmin Ramadan
11.00 Uhr Lisa Krusche
12.00 Uhr Leonhard Hieronymi
13.30 Uhr Carolina Schutti
14.30 Uhr Jörg Piringer
Friday
10.00 Uhr Helga Schubert
11.00 Uhr Hanna Herbst
12.00 Uhr Egon Christian Leitner
13.30 Uhr Matthias Senkel
14.30 Uhr Levin Westermann
Saturday
10.00 Uhr Lydia Haider
11.00 Uhr Laura Freudenthaler
12.30 Uhr Katja Schönherr
13.30 Uhr Meral Kureyshi

 

 

 

2 Novels by Carolina Schutti

Schutti, Carolina (2010), wer getragen wird, braucht keine schuhe, Otto Müller
ISBN 978-3-7013-1178-1
Schutti, Carolina (2012), einmal muss ich über weiches Gras gelaufen sein, Otto Müller
ISBN 978-3-7013-1193-4

As has become tradition on this blog, as the Bachmannpreis rears its head, I’m reviewing some books by writers invited to perform there, though I never really get around to reviewing all that many. I already reviewed a novel by invitee Meral Kureyshi (click here), a while ago, actually, and here now is a review of two novels by Carolina Schutti. Schutti is a writer with a truly impressive track record. Not only does she have a PhD in German literature (she wrote a dissertation on Elias Canetti), but she’s also won a plethora of awards for her books – novels, novellas and other texts. And yet – to say I felt let down by the two novels under review is to understate how grueling the experience of reading these short books really was. I’ll say this for her: Carolina Schutti has a tonal consistency that is admirable, if maddening. In her very first book she zeroes in on a style that seems derivative, but really isn’t epigonal in any typical sense. She doesn’t echo specific writers as much as a general tone. As a concert pianist she has said in an interview that she always writes for listeners as well – and indeed, from the first line you can hear the voice in these books. And you know, eerily, what this voice is? It’s the typical note struck by the average reader at the Bachmannpreis – this measured pronunciation that situates texts right between light and somber, investing pauses and turns with meaning that they don’t have on the page. Both books use language to tell the story of people who struggle with it – who struggle with telling a story of themselves, and as a result, it is deplorable that Schutti declines to give them that voice. Instead she sets them up with a boilerplate reservoir of phrases that are all too common in books like this. And there are so many books like this. There’s an unpleasant lure to characters who are at the margins of language and society – not the truly aphasic, but the reticent ones, the ones who live between languages, or the ones with mental illnesses that make for dramatic performances.

And so her debut novel, wer getragen wird, braucht keine schuhe, (those who are carried have no need of shoes) focuses on an 18 year old girl who struggles with communication. She manages to work from a limited set of phrases in her work as a server, but once she meets a man and her life opens up, that language is no longer sufficient. There is a sudden turn, as a walk through the woods leads to a confession on the part of the protagonist, and eventually, a complete collapse. It is language, at every turn, that leads her astray, language, that condemns her, and language, at the end, that helps her pull herself together – or apart, depending on your reading. This tendency, to present a text that is primarily about language and not as much about actual lived experience, is a Bachmann cliché, and in some ways, last year’sline-up and results were a confirmation of this tendency, with Ronya Othmann’s autofictional text sidelined, and Sarah Wipauer’s rich, but not myopically self-centered text entirely ignored. It is difficult not to read these texts about mentally marginalized people by those in academia with some suspicion, as an exercise in tone and form. But even formally, this is upsettingly thin. It seems to strive for a switch from a certain simplicity in the early chapters to a much richer set of poeticisms in the last chapter, but nothing in the early chapters is actually simple, per se. These seem like the most mathematically average sentence length, with the typical number of adjectives for books written in German in the 21st century. And while there are more poeticisms towards the end, they veer sharply into Lifetime Movie sententiousness. As a comparison, for simplicity and formal mastery, take fellow 2020 Bachmann invitee Helga Schubert. In her story “Schöne Reise” we find truly reduced sentences, which bloom in extremely specific spots. The narrative, of a state-sanctioned Black Sea holiday, is tense, a story like a tightly wound spring, begging to be read and re-read. There is not a single sentence in Helga Schubert’s story that you don’t feel is crafted for this story specifically, and there’s no immediate comparison, except with her peers among the best writers of her generation. Not a whiff of epigonality.

This has, necessarily, to do with what I consider the most difficult mode of writing: simplicity. Everyday details and sparse language is the most difficult combination to pull off very well. Schutti’s attempts, at least in the two novels I read, from another problem that seems to me particularly German – the overuse of useless detail, particularly around food. The amount of times we are treated to individual bites of food in between thoughts or dialogue, intended to show the banality of passing time, in contemporary German literature is an absolute mystery to me. In the debut novel there’s a whole paragraph involving the serving of soup. Is this the German variety of show, not tell? Who did this to you? It is so pervasive, and such a sign of thoughtless paragraph writing – writing, that is, that’s concerned with what a paragraph is about more than about the individual sentences constructing the paragraph. Not to overuse Helga Schubert as a reference, but after all, she IS invited to this same competition, and her collection Schöne Reise, which contains the abovementioned story, is full of people cooking or eating, and there isn’t a single “biss in sein Brötchen” type of paragraph structure. I’m fine knowing you’re eating your food, carbs and all – do not list individual bites for me. It does not enhance anything.

Another issue with these books about people struggling with language is that the writers of those books tend to be especially highly educated – and so they offer observations that are incredibly complex but are couched in simple situations. Like Schutti, when her protagonist looks yearningly at the windows of rich people and observes that the people inside, unafraid to be robbed, “send out some of their light, it falls hard upon the asphalt, right in front of her. She cannot pick up this light, though she can climb inside, or step over it.” etc. This is highly poetic, if not particularly good, and entirely out of place with the much plainer and banal observations in the immediately preceding sentences. Somehow, and I think we can blame this on writers like Peter Handke, the margins of language have become a playground for these poeticisms toying with the perception of reality. In books like Schutti’s debut, however, it just feels exploitative. Talking about people who are really, genuinely marginalized, and coating their lives with self-serving language games seems dubious. When it’s this badly executed, its worse. There’s also often a racial component to it, and that Schutti’s second novel, einmal muss ich über weiches Gras gelaufen sein, “I must have walked across soft Grass once,” is about immigration and the learning and unlearning of language, and uses many of the same tools and tricks of the first book, confirms this theory. Now, the book is autobiographically inspired. Its protagonist is a woman who has lost the ability to speak the language of the place she came from as a child, Belorussian. Schutti herself is the child of immigrants and has lost the ability to speak their language, Polish. Immediately, these references, and connecting the struggles with language to learning or failing to learn a language gives the typical spiel more heft. The execution though is no better than in the debut novel. The immediate comparisons that come to mind, including Aglaja Veteranji’s brilliant novels, or Melinda Nadj Abonji’s underrated debut novel Im Schaufenster im Frühling, all serve to emphasize how flat, in the end, Schutti’s constructions end up being.

To be clear – these books are both exceptionally competent – but not as novels. They are specific cultural performances, with a specific audience in mind. Schutti, from page one, line one of her first novel, immediately seizes on a tone and style and never abandons it. It’s inconsistent, yes, but consistently so. Open any page at random, and you can hear it spoken slowly into a microphone in Klagenfurt. And honestly, they probably make for great analyses by scholars and judges, just not for particularly good literature. The expectation behind this style is what’s truly remarkable – it’s an inherent expectation of importance, an arrogance of whiteness that is at times breathtaking. An unbelievably fitting writer for Klagenfurt, then. It’s a surprise it has taken so long.

#TDDL 2020 – some anticipatory remarks

This is less like a full post and more a note – I know this blog has been mostly dormant these past weeks, but the annual deluge of posts regarding the Bachmannpreis is about to hit the blog. The Tage der deutschsprachigen Literatur (TDDL – the days of german-language literature) are about to begin.

This year is different in multiple ways. Due to Coronavirus, the event is largely online – there is no audience, and the writers and judges are not crammed into a sweaty tent in Klagenfurt this year.

Another change – each year the readings are inaugurated by a longer speech, the Rede zur Literatur. Last year, we were offered a narratological note involving Wrestling metaphors. That year’s speaker was Clemens Setz. This year’s speaker is Sharon Dodua Otoo. You know what I think about her. There was always heightened significance to her choice, particularly given the extraordinarily privilege-blind judgments in the past several years, which increasingly sidelined interesting and/or non-white writers in favor of an insular view of what good and praiseworthy literature can and should be. Here’s my commentary on last year’s results.

So giving Sharon Otoo the reins to, in a way, define the framework for this year’s discussion, was always going to be interesting and necessary, particularly given some of the publicly uttered resentment towards her. However, if anything, this year’s long overdue discussions of the role of race in policing, public policy and health care, not just in the US, but also in Germany and Austria, have further emphasized the pivotal role of this year’s speaker. The field of writers (more on that Wednesday-ish) this year is barely more diverse than last year’s, with some really dubious choices, politically and literarily.

At the same time, in publishing, some truly amazing books have come out (or are about to come out) which challenge the narrow idea of literature propagated by the #tddl judges. Cemile Sahin’s Taxi and Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Serpentinen Angst, for example, are two of the best German-language debuts to come out in years and years, and books like Deniz Ohde’s Streulicht are on the horizon.

Who knows, maybe this is the year when the Bachmannpreis judges truly reckon with the diverse realities of writing and living in Germany, and do not retire to their bleached, boring, insular view of literature and culture.

#Gaddis2020 – a start

Since Twitter is about to embark on a big group read of William Gaddis’ two first novels, what with NYRB reprinting them, I wanted to share my favorite quote from The Recognitions, which, together with JR, ranks among my favorite novels – though I do think A Frolic of His Own is Gaddis’s most underrated book. Not as easy to read as Carpenter’s Gothic, not as Bernhardian as Agape, Agape, and not as spectacular as the first two. And yet, it is very good. That said, below, three quotes from The Recognitions, a masterpiece. If you feel intimidated by its heft and erudition – Gaddis worked as a researcher before he published this book – Steven Moore’s excellent and extensive “Reader’s Guide” is worth bookmarking. In fact, I recommend it. I’m sure there isn’t a greater expert on William Gaddis on earth. I’m not a huge fan of these “group reads” – but if that is what gets you into these two novels, then so be it. The Recognitions was an absolutely eye-opening reading experience, which was among the small handful of books that set me on the path of reading that I am on to this day, hurtling after books, trying not to drown.

 

“Something like writing is very private, isn’t it? How…how fragile situations are. […] Delicate, that’s why they keep breaking, they must break and you must get the pieces together and show it before it breaks again […]. That’s why most writing now, if you read it they go on one two three four and tell you what happened like newspaper accounts, no adjectives, no long sentences, no tricks they pretend, and they finally believe that they really believe that the way they saw it is the way it is, when really…why, what happened when they opened Mary Stuart’s coffin? They found she’s taken two strokes of the blade, one slashed the nape of her neck and the second one took the head. But did any of the eye-witness accounts mention two strokes? No. […] They write for people who read with the surface of their minds, people with reading habits that make the smallest demands on them. […] Why, all this around us is for people who can keep their balance only in the light, where they move as though nothing were fragile, nothing tempered by possibility and all of a sudden bang! something breaks. Then you have to stop and put the pieces together again. But you never can put them back together quite the same way. You stop when you can and expose things, and leave them within reach, and others come on by themselves, and they break, and even then you may put the pieces aside just out of reach until you can bring them back and show them, put together slightly different, maybe a little more enduring, until you’ve broken it and picked up the pieces enough times, and you have the whole thing in all it’s dimensions. But the discipline, the detail, it’s just…sometimes the accumulation is too much to bear.”

***

“Do you know what it was? That everything was so afraid, so uncertain God saw it, that it insisted on vanity in His eyes? Fear, fear, pessimism and fear and depression everywhere, the way it is today, that’s why your [Flemish Master’s] paintings are so cluttered with detail, this terror of emptiness, this absolute terror of space. Because God isn’t watching. Maybe he doesn’t see. Oh, this pious cult of the Middle Ages!”

***

“What did you want from [this poet] that you didn’t get from his work? […] This passion for wanting to meet the latest poet, shake hands with the latest novelist, get hold of the latest painter, devour…what is it? What is it they want from a man that they did´n’t get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he’s done his work? What’s any artist but the dregs of his work? […] What’s left of the man when the work’s done but a shambles of apology.”

Embarking on Ammons

Birthday Presents

Among my birthday presents, arriving through the mail as I am between homes and houses, was the enormous two volume edition of A.R. Ammons complete poems. The astonishment, first, that it exists. His name had slipped to the back rows, the less than notables, the – if not forgotten ones, then the ones, whose names start to slip our mind. Transcendentalism in American poetry, wasn’t there this guy, what was his name again…? And beyond this astonishment, a small surprise at the size of this, his hefty, large oeuvre, coming, of course, with a preface by Helen Vendler, who else, maybe this is mainly for her, maybe she lost track too, as books somehow started to accrue.

How do I read Ammons? We’ll see – I own some Ammons and have read all of that, but it is dwarfed by the reality of his output, the voluminous lack of restraint of a poetic masculinity that I am not sad to see leaving the stage. I will likely find the books I know and adore, and see what comes before and after, how much context and words and air surrounds the Ammons I know. I have gone straight to some of my favorite Ammons and already, I have changed while Ammons hasn’t, he hasn’t even left the protective awning of Helen Vendler’s critical support. In “Garbage,” Ammons derides an unnamed female poet, citing her words: “if I’m in / touch […] then I’ve got an edge: what / the hell kind of talk is that,” offering instead a calculated ethics of writing and rewriting, echoing the praxis of poets like Lowell, of whom his friend Kathleen Spivac remarked: “I’ve never […] seen a poet rewrite his poems so much.”

Looking at these volumes, over 900 pages each, at first I wondered whether this might not be the right poet for our searching, environmentally sensitive times, particularly poems like “Garbage” – but Ammons is difficult, he uses his voice not always to shine a light – often he uses it to hear himself proclaim. His Homeric gestures in “Tape for the New Year,” written to the background noise of drums and an imagined chorus, have echoes in the self-importance of some male Beat poets; they, too, are difficult to read today.

Reading my way through Ammons’s poetry is a daunting task, but the work’s voice, and the poet’s awareness of form and material, of the warp and woof of textures and melodies, is worth persevering, I think.

 

Berit Glanz: Pixeltänzer

Glanz, Berit (2019), Pixeltänzer, Schöffling
ISBN 978-3-89561-192-6

I have reviewed a brilliant recent German novel for World Literature Today. It’s an inventive novel that pushes the envelope creatively but it holds back on the political implications of her story. It is by far one of last year’s best novels by a German author. It should be translated as soon as possible. You can read the whole (too short) review here.

New Poems

This blog has been semi-dormant in the past year. So I’ll start by uploading, in vaguely reverse chronological order, some of the things I have been doing in the past months (not a lot, no worries, I didn’t suddenly succeed at something). In December I published three poems in Ben Mazer’s Art & Letters journal.

 

 

 

A Darwinian-Ovidian Tale

“There are four young friends wandering about in an underground world full of the debris of the past. One of the young people is called Donatello. The story involves a delivery to an unknown address. It is centered on a father figure. What is the text? Both the movie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Marble Faun. (…) Like the film, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel (…) is a Darwinian-Ovidian tale of a creature halfway between man and animal”

– Barbara Johnson

Anne Katharine Green: The Leavenworth Case

Green, Anne Katharine (2010 [1878]), The Leavenworth Case, Penguin
ISBN 978-0-14-310612-8

Anne Katherine Green is widely seen as a precursor to modern mystery novels – or one of the first modern mystery novels, depending on how you want to judge eras. Michael Sims’s introduction makes clear how much writers like Arthur Conan Doyle and especially Agatha Christie owe to Green’s work and to her 1878 debut novel The Leavenworth Case in particular. This book’s portly detective, who breaks his case by inviting all suspects into a room and explaining the facts of the case to them is clearly what Christie based her chubby Belgian detective Poirot on. In my experience, many of these “precursor” novels are interesting, often better literature than their more generic offspring, but also sometimes more dull, less concentrated and shaped. If there’s no genre conventions to use and work with, sometimes there’s a bit of Victorian shapelessness to some books, excuse my frank language. But the case of Anne Katherine Green is interesting.

With crime novels, what I as a reader particularly enjoy is reading the environment outside of the plot – issues like class, race, culture, and their reflection in the objects surrounding the plot and characters. Because mystery novels are often epistemologically locked rooms, we as readers enter them as a detective enters a locked room where a murder has happened. We examine the interior, the paneling etc. And while the world of the mystery may seem to roam across broader landscapes, in reality, for the reader, they are all locked rooms, and we enter them suspiciously. This has interesting effects. The author’s implicit biases become part of the narrative and furniture. In influential books like Dorothy Sayers’s debut Whose Body?, the author’s antisemitism becomes part of the structure, part of how we read and understand that novel. I’m not saying anything new, McHale’s disquisition on postmodernism has already sufficiently explained how detective fiction and modernism are connected.

But I found it necessary to explain because of how extraordinarily well made Green’s debut is, and how it appears to address these critiques and ideas. The book is narrated by a Watson type character, a smart person who comes close enough to the mystery’s solution at various points that the resolution can be genuinely surprising. He travels, interviews suspects, collects, saves and presents evidence – and the tone of the novel is extraordinarily melodramatic, designed for the reader to follow this proto-Watson through New York and into the heart of a complex family intrigue. But he never gets a real grip on the solution – that is reserved for the detective. His name is Mr. Gryce and he is introduced like this:

And here let me say that Mr. Gryce, the detective, was not the thin, wiry individual with the piercing eye you are doubtless expecting to see. On the contrary, Mr. Gryce was a portly, comfortable personage with an eye that never pierced, that did not even rest on you. If it rested anywhere, it was always on some insignificant object in the vicinity, some vase, ink-stand, book, or button. These things he would seem to take into his confidence, make the repositories of his conclusions; but as for you—you might as well be the steeple on Trinity Church, for all connection you ever appeared to have with him or his thoughts. At present, then, Mr. Gryce was, as I have already suggested, on intimate terms with the door-knob.

The first sentence, as Sims notes, is a reference to Wilkie Collins’s detective Sergeant Cuff from the 1868 novel The Moonstone, who is described as having eyes which “had a very disconcerting trick, when they encountered your eyes, of looking as if they expected something more from you than you were aware of yourself.” The psychologist detective is its own tradition, but the detective who reads and interprets his environment is a different – and much more interesting – one, in my opinion. Green’s Mr. Gryce is almost a parody of these characters, but appearing long before them – his obsession of not looking into your eyes but carefully observing objects, things, appearances, is stressed more than once in the novel.

This makes him the perfect foil for the protagonist and his melodrama which is almost exclusively focused on psychology, on talking to people, trying to understand them, trying to intuit them. Detective fiction has more than once served as an analog for literary criticism, but this novel, curiously, long before the advent of academic literary New Criticism, offers a powerful and convincing rejection of speculative psychology. What matters are facts – and context, and plausibility. From Peter Szondi, we learn that an interpretation needs to be consistent, and so Mr. Gryce solves his case because he notes that of all the evidence he found, “the chain was complete, the links were fastened, but one link was of a different size and material from the rest and in this argued a break in the chain.” So he ends up offering a Poirot-esque confrontation that leads to a confession.

Mr. Gryce is not an unfathomable genius like Sherlock Holmes – and maybe in this the voice of a female writer becomes clearer. There’s no fetish of masculine genius here – Gryce is led by the facts and the quality of his analysis against his intuitions, and is in the end surprised by the confession. Usually the Watson character is the reader analog – he is our representation in the story. We’re smart but not that smart, observant, but not that observant. But The Leavenworth Case recalibrates this – the Watson character is there to show us the world, but our real analog is Mr. Gryce. We feel with Green’s Watson-like character, and we follow him on his adventure, but as readers thinking through the story, we are more like Mr. Gryce. We create a chain of evidence, and we don’t get all the way there – but neither does Mr. Gryce. The unpleasant celebration of the inexplicable, beautiful genius of Sherlock Holmes, sometimes offered with evidence that was not visible to us as readers, is undercut here. He is encouraging: when the narrator finds a piece of evidence, Gryce tells him: “don’t show it to me. Study it yourself and tell me what you think of it.”

Anne Katherine Greene wrote this novel over several years, pushing herself to finish it, publishing it finally to great success. She married a younger man and actor who later became a famous designer, but she was the primary breadwinner. It would seem counterintuitive then that Green was not a feminist, and in fact spoke out against suffrage in 1917, but here, as with writers like Mary McCarthy, the work itself is more complex. “[G]etting a wife,” we learn, is “the same as (…) acquiring any other species of property.” But in the novel, it is the female characters who plot, who shift things around, who cloud the waters, and men who have to try to hang on to this wild ride. In fact that quote is from a conversation where a man is trying to hang on to the facts of a contract in a situation where life has long made other plans. There is a malleability to this world, a kindness and a depth to its objects that justifies looking at them closer – and though many aspects of The Leavenworth Case became formative for the genre of modern mystery novels, one feels a bit miffed that Sherlock Holmes, who first turned up ten whole years later, has had so much influence on mystery fiction. Everybody in Greene’s novel loves, admires, fears and thinks – Sherlock just sneers. I can’t help but feel we need more of the former and less of the latter.

*

As always, if you feel like supporting this blog, there is a “Donate” button on the left and this link RIGHT HERE. 🙂 If you liked this, tell me. If you hated it, even better. Send me comments, requests or suggestions either below or via email (cf. my About page) or to my twitter.)

Blake Crouch: Dark Matter

Crouch, Blake (2016), Dark Matter, Pan
ISBN 978-1-4472-9757-4

I’ve said it before, on this blog and elsewhere – the power of science fiction is to make familiar things less so, to expand the way we read, both texts as well as the world that surrounds us. That doesn’t mean that all texts have to be Dhalgren, but they don’t also have to be Crichton light. It is particularly odd when basic structures of our world as we know it, are lazily reinforced in fiction that would not need to be tied to them. Some books are under-girded by sexist stereotyping but are otherwise well meaning and expansive in other ways. None of that is true for Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter the most disappointing book I can remember reading in a long time. Not the worst, mind you, there are a lot of bad books out there and I do read epic fantasy. But the most disappointing. A book I was told was, to quote a blurb, “mind-bending,” when, in the end, there wasn’t as much bending as settling. My god what a boring book Dark Matter turned out to be. A book about the multiverse, about identity, reality, about who we are, or at least that is what it could have been. Instead, Dark Matter is about one man’s quest to get back the woman he feels he owns. It’s utterly baffling that anyone who has ever read a good science fiction novel would look at this godawful mess and think, yes, this is good, I have no notes for the author. To be clear – this is not about the prose. With genre, I am willing to make compromises. Not everybody is Brian Evenson. So yes, the prose is absurdly bad. It’s not overwritten purple prose. It’s merely plain, and banal, and utterly unaware and directionless, with its writer having invested as much effort into crafting interesting sentences as he has into the structure of the novel as a whole.

The main effort, clearly, went into researching the science behind it all. The whole book has a massive masculinity problem, as has the odd modern obsession with science over philosophy (Neil Degrasse Tyson is a particularly noxious example) and general forms of thought. Science fiction has always attracted scientists and sometimes they have not been the greatest stylists. But writers like Asimov and Clarke are considered classic writers because they use their background to dig deeper into the soft flesh of the world, to grope for possibilities, for pushing our understanding. There is none of that here, or in the current fascination with science, or rather, engineering, as an answer to all our problems. Fittingly, the book has a blurb by Andy Weir, whose Martian had also disappointed me, a book unwilling or unable to imagine anything beyond an engineering problem. But Dark Matter even undercuts the Martian on the marketplace of ideas. And it’s such a bummer, because as always, the science is truly fascinating and begs for someone to find the right literary approach. What’s worst is that the book isn’t even any fun. I have a big heart and soft spot for genre books that may not enlarge the language or possibilities but are greatly enjoyable. That’s not the case here. There is no difference between the incessant, dour, seemingly unending monologue of Crouch’s protagonist and all the many thousands poor, put-upon white men all over mainstream fiction who walk through their cities, their banal, unfair worlds, eager to stick it to the lesser people around them, and to stick it into a woman, any woman, ideally a woman that somehow belongs to them. These are worlds that give the lie to Galileo – the earth doesn’t revolve around the sun, it revolves around the taint of mediocre white men who think they are geniuses in disguise.

Only in this case, Crouch constructs a fictional universe that does revolve around his unbelievably unbearable protagonist. He gives up the game real early – his protagonist used to be a brilliant scientist, and teaches at a second rate college now, because he gave up his career to raise a child with a woman who’s an artist. Yes, this is the same gender split as in Charlie Jane Anders’s reactionary novel. But what’s worse is that he makes the woman such a wooden regurgitator of the praise he feels is owed to the protagonist.

I move to the cabinet beside the sink, open it, and start hunting for a box of fettuccine.
Daniela turns to Charlie, says, “Your father could have won the Nobel.”
I laugh. “That’s possibly an exaggeration.”
“Charlie, don’t be fooled. He’s a genius.”
“You’re sweet,” I say. “And a little drunk.”
“It’s true, and you know it. Science is less advanced because you love your family.”
I can only smile. When Daniela drinks, three things happen: her native accent begins to bleed through, she becomes belligerently kind, and she tends toward hyperbole.

Who is he talking to here? This last condescending remark – who is he arguing against? Do men have to explain their silly wives, even when they are fictional? Don’t mind her, after a few drinks, you know how she gets. And also – “hyperbole”? This misplaced modesty is both unpleasant and typical. We know, from the rest of the book, that it’s true, that the protagonist has indeed made a spectacular discovery. He made it largely on his own, which is not how big scientific discoveries are made, but coming up with a team of scientists would have complicated Crouch’s shitty narrative, so it’s one man, one theory, and, crucially for the plot, once that man vanishes, nobody can reconstruct what happened, not even with all notebooks and data intact. I mean, he’s a real genius, and somewhere in Crouch’s infested mind, this is how geniuses work in science.

So what happens in the book is this (spoilers, spoilers, etc): a version of our protagonist, who didn’t abandon his career for a baby, creates a machine that allows people to access the infinite other selves that exist in the multiverse. You have to take a drug, and hop into a kind of time machine, which is half TARDIS, half HG Wells. Now, that scientist visits our protagonist, takes him and basically does an exchange of hostages, takes over his happy family life. Our protagonist, meanwhile wakes to a world where he is a successful scientist who has made a pact with a ruthless billionaire. Chaos ensues. Eventually, the protagonist decides to get back to his original “world” and reverse the exchange. He takes with him a female scientist who, of course, is a psychologist, because GOD forbid there are female physicists in Crouch’s dick-shaped worldview.

Now, due to complications and an equal amount of stupidity on the part of the so-called genius that’s our protagonist and the so-called “mind-bending” nitwit who wrote him, a proliferation of versions of the protagonist, a multitude of selves, descends on this original world, and in the end, after some chases, some gun- and knife-fights, the protagonist escapes with his wife and child, into the multiverse. If this sounds like a stupid plot, it is. But the most bizarre thing is that the idea isn’t necessarily bad? Crouch is aware that his scientific research gives him no firm ground to stand on, ontologically. Differences between the multiverses are minute, the same applies to the different versions of the protagonist. At no point does this lead Crouch to introduce the idea of undecidability, of ambiguity, into the book. Everything in the book is always exactly clear, exactly nailed down. We know that the world he lands in last is the original world, because he can tell, of course. And what’s more important, because we always follow his voice, we are never shaken in our faith that the person we’re listening to is the original one, the real one, the one who “deserves” to get the wife.

If anything’s mind-bending, it’s the author’s utter gall to write a novel based on a science of ambiguity, and undecidability, and make it absolutely, boringly immobile. Nothing changes, nothing is odd or unexpected. We are always where we need to be. It’s always clear what’s real and what’s not, who’s real and who’s not. And added to that, we are let into the mind of our protagonist, who needs his wife back – not any old version of her, but the one he met and fucked. I mention that part, because that part is particularly important to him. He’s obsessed whether the self that replaced him temporarily fucked his wife better than he did. It’s constantly on his mind, and once he re-acquires his wife, it is one of only a handful questions he asks, and she, of course, answers in detail. And symbolically, she only becomes fully his (and comes fully on board with this multiverse story he tells her) after they have sex and he re-asserts his territorial importance.

This is a story about two things: about identity and how fractured it is in a multiverse, and about love. But this is a diseased, greedy, kind of love where the woman is a mere bit player. And the question of identity? We are never, not for one moment, shaken in our sense of who we follow, who is where, and it feels like taunting when Crouch has his stodgy, surprisingly stupid protagonist say: “My understanding of identity has been shattered – I am one facet of an infinitely faceted being who has made very possible choice and lived every life imaginable. I can’t help thinking that we’re more than the sum total of our choices, that all the paths we might have taken factor somehow into the math of our identity.” But of course, he has to say it, absolutely HAS to, because the novel doesn’t fucking say it anywhere in the way it’s made. And as if to affirm all this, the very next sentence is “but none of the other Jasons matter. I don’t want their lives. I want mine.” I thought these facets are inseparable? They are not? Who’d a thunk it.

Dark Matter has already been optioned for the screen and it will make a passable movie, maybe even a good one. The writing already reads like explanations for the screen. As far as thrillers go I have read worse. But this is mainly disappointing, because of what it could have become, instead of what it is, a spoonful of spunk after 300 pages of masturbatory, uninspired middle-of-the-road thriller fare. Sad.

*

As always, if you feel like supporting this blog, there is a “Donate” button on the left and this link RIGHT HERE. 🙂 If you liked this, tell me. If you hated it, even better. Send me comments, requests or suggestions either below or via email (cf. my About page) or to my twitter.)

On Predictions

So one year ago, not exactly one year, but more or less, God don’t start counting the days, ok it was early May 2018, 9th, or 10th, I don’t know – anyway, Scottish musician Scott Hutchison died a year ago by his own hand, or by his own volition anyway, he was found, after people looked for him for a while, floating in the River Forth, the latter being a river near/in Stirling, Scotland, and he was found there, dead, after a well documented struggle with depression, his band’s fifth album having come out recently, anyway, so they were doing a tenth anniversary tour of their album The Midnight Organ, and song #13 on that album is called Floating in the Forth, and is about suicide, let me quote it: “And fully clothed, I float away / (I’ll float away) / Down the Forth, into the sea / I think I’ll save suicide for another day” (oh yeah that worked out a-ok), I mean, if you’re thinking I used the word “floating” in describing his suicide because of the song, you’re not wrong, you know, but what else was I going to say: he was found drowned, puffed up, buoyant, drifting, bobbing, I mean of course I am going to say “floating” – it is the most fitting word here given the musical antecedent and this is always creepy, right, like an announcement, then again, ten years is a long time for an announcement, so maybe the anniversary tour was a reminder, sometimes we really don’t need reminders of our worst instincts, and anyway so I was looking at my first collection of poetry, because, you know, I don’t write poems like that any more really, I’m working on distance and structure more, but there is a lot of very direct unvarnished depression in my first book and I was looking at it and wondering whether if something happens to me and I am the miscreant who had done the happening, whether someone could look at the book and think, huh, lookit this poem this sounds a lot like what happened and what would it mean I mean I don’t think i am that person any more, but maybe at the end of the day that person is like Schwartz’s heavy bear who walks with me and I will never get rid of them and then some day, someone will look at the book and say, huh, will you look at this, he predicted it, I mean what if I suicide Nostradamus, you know.

Me, reading

Here is a picture of me reading in late May on my trip to Boston. This is Cambridge at the “Poetry Readings at Outpost 186” series of readings with Andrew Singer’s art all around me. Picture by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright. Among the texts I read was a brand new poem about my grandfather who has died in June.

#tddl: the winner is…privilege?

So, man what a bummer this day was. Yesterday I wrote “what’s notable about today’s writers is just a continuation of things I already noted. This is the first time that the selection and treatment of writers seems so cohesive – and not in a good way. Following along in real time is like looking at a thesis statement, of a thesis you do not particularly care about.”

This absolutely continued in the award voting. In my German language commentary I wrote a 1000 word mini-essay on how these awards exemplify the typical Bachmann-text and I cannot summon the energy to do it a second time. But the main thing to understand is this: there are always typical Bachmann texts, and texts that are different. If your text is good enough, it will make it onto the awards list even if it doesn’t fit the mold.

There was no room for exceptions this year. The special kind of voting leads to every award coming down to a two-text runoff ballot, so for four awards you can have up to 8 texts competing – and since the shortlist (voted on before the beginning of the public awards voting) consists only of 7 texts, you’d assume all texts get a look-in. Not so. Each of the four runoff votes involved Yannic Han Biao Federer’s text, until it won the fourth award. The winner is Birgit Birnbacher’s text – excellent and fitting for Klagenfurt. Leander Fischer’s and Yannic Federer’s catnip won second and fourth place respectively, and Julia Jost won third place. The only other text that made it into the runoff election was, bizarrely, Daniel Heitzler’s absurdly bad story. Although both Sarah Wipauer and Ronya Othmann had made it to the shortlist, neither of which even received runoff consideration, not to mention an award, which is enduringly strange.

It felt like a circling of the wagons around the cultural capital that is amassed by the gatekeepers represented by the Bachmannpreis-jury and the whole unsavoury theoatre surrounding it. “We are important and the texts we like are important” seems to be the message. As all people of privilege in Germany and Europe and the world are circling the wagons, whether it is men, or white people or the financially dominant class, afraid of losing that privilege, this group of critics, professors and academics replicates a process that is happening everywhere, shutting the door hard on difference. But what today’s awards also make clear is that a solid portion of the public is no longer behind them. In this small microcosm, this is represented by the public vote – which went to Ronya Othmann’s important, excellent text, who thus won the fifth, public award. This tension, the closing of doors by the gatekeepers is regrettable, but what’s most remarkable that the two best writers of the competition are two young women, who have not even published one book of prose – and thus represent an exciting future.

Below is my list of all my posts about this year’s award:

#tddl: Germany’s Next Literary Idol, 2019 edition.
#tddl, Day One: Holes In Space
#tddl, Day Two: A Privilege Sandwich
#tddl, Day Three: Mollusks and Nazis

 

 

 

 

#tddl, Day Three: Mollusks and Nazis

If you follow this blog you are likely not fluent enough in German to have followed the Bachmannpreis livestream (see my post about the  2019 event) so here is a brief summary of how day three (of three) went. The writers who read today* were, in this order: Ines Birkhan, Leander Fischer, Lukas Meschik, Martin Beyer. You can read all the texts here, if you are so inclined. For my account of day one click here. For my account of day two click here. For a German summary of the whole thing, which I also wrote, for Faustkultur, click here.

If yesterday’s post was a bit on the long side, today*’s summary is likely to be more brief. That’s not just because the Saturday slate of writers, as every year, is one writer shorter than the other days, but also because in many ways, what’s notable about today’s writers is just a continuation of things I already noted. This is the first time that the selection and treatment of writers seems so cohesive – and not in a good way. Following along in real time is like looking at a thesis statement, of a thesis you do not particularly care about.

The big exception was Ines Birkhan, the first reader of the day. Now, to be entirely honest, I went into this, intrigued but not expecting a lot. I had read her debut novel before, which was entirely unique, but not necessarily in a good way. Chrysalis read like a quickly written piece of fan fiction, you know the kind – it’s always a bit too long because the writer does not have the mot juste, like, ever, but also lacks the literary training to have easy access to cliché. So yesterday we had two different kinds of exact descriptions in the Federer and Birnbacher text. Federer spread out the vast microscopic observable detail and had absolutely no wish or ability to cut to down to an exact, resonating image or phrase, and he used literary clichés judiciously. Birnbacher was extraordinarily good at the good, exact observation, and tough on cliché. Birkhan’s novel somehow turns up in a third space. There are no clichés in it, but every description, and half the accounts of what happens read like someone had to paraphrase a text in an extraordinary hurry. It seemed very bad, but at the same time very original. So, originality, but at what cost? The second book was better written, with a Jelinek-inspired use of sexuality and a very political surrealism, about contemporary events. The story she read on Saturday, an excerpt from a forthcoming third novel, was much better than each. Gone was the awkwardness of descriptions, everything was much better. She was on similar conceptual ground as the very first reader of the competition, Katharina Schultens. Both offered a spec fic that drew on human transformation, and both had a bit of a vague sense of place. But where Schultens missteps both linguistically and literarily in her treatment of plot and structure, Birkhan’s text is tight, moves the reader forward. She integrates the descriptions of animals and morphology much better, an absolutely solid text, one of the best of the competition. You’d think a jury that had been kind even to the crappiest of stories (Gerster, Heitzler) would reflect this, as well. Instead, what happened was that two thirds of the jury absolutely savaged the text, to the point where the person who had invited it, Nora Gomringer, was constantly forced into a corner. The leader of the pack, Insa Wilke rose to a spectacular furor that was so strong, she kept coming back to the text and her hatred of it even in later discussions. It’s an absolute mystery to me why the jury reacted like that, especially since they had been so kind in the previous days. It is my personal theory that the similarity (but obvious deficiencies, compared to Birkhan) of Schultens’s text which had been invited by Wilke, and some other kind of resentment had played a role in it. Who knows. What I can say is that the hostility was so overwhelming that the critics ended up forcing Birkhan to defend her text, something that had not happened in a long, long time. Birkhan’s reply was elegant and smart. She pointed to the literary influence of Konrad Bayer, and briefly sketched some details of how the text was made. What a spectacle, what an undignified treatment of a text and its author, and fellow members of the jury. And what a dignified author.

The rift in the jury was quickly mended with the second writer of the day. If my statement about Federer yesterday was that he appealed to the jury, especially biographically, the same applied tenfold to the second text. Leander Fischer’s story was Bachmannpreis-catnip. Clever, well written, playful. Entirely devoid of relevance, but at the same time extraordinarily well made in the exact way the jury likes. There is no way this text dents the top three of Wipauer, Othmann or Birnbacher, or at least it should not, but it reads and sounds like a text that should do well. I don’t have much more to say, as I was neither interested nor intrigued by the text, though I can at least appreciate and laud the skill involved.

That skill was, confusingly, absent with the third text. i say “confusingly” because Lukas Meschik, despite his young age, is already a seasoned novelist, who writes novels at a rapid clip, some of them quite ambitious and voluminous. So when he turned up with an autofiction about his father’s burial that was among the dullest texts ever presented in Klagenfurt, it did make my head turn. This text is a kind and generous text about a father that appears neither ambitious not ambiguous. It is entirely unclear why a prolific and seasoned writer would turn up with a text like this. Some in the jury were similarly puzzled, at least one of the judges suggested the same inversion they had all suggested applied to Daniel Heitzler. To be honest, i was surprised this opinion wasn’t more widely adopted since Meschik was more deserving of reasonable doubt than Heitzler – there is something to be said about routine and work ethic in writing. It produces, as we could see from Federer’s text, a certain consistency. This apparent break here, in favor of uncomplicated sentimentality is at least unexpected.

The final text of the day, however, was a real humdinger. If you thought that Silvia Tschui’s text from day one upset me, you ain’t seen nothing yet. For context, for day one’s anger and this, maybe you need to understand that what’s happening in many countries, the rise of the radical right to insitutional power or at least coming real darn close to it, is happening in Germany too. What we also have is a kind of revisionist overton window that keeps moving to the right. The wave of texts about Germany-as-victim, jumpstarted by Günter Grass’s very bad but very explicably very popular late-career novel about the sinking of the Gustloff, Crabwalk (for my take on Grass and his career go here), were the beginning, but once we look at Germans as victims of Soviet aggression and Allied bombing (ignoring why it happened, who and what the populace had supported for how long), then it’s not that much of a leap to also look at the German officers and soldiers and the straight Nazis and ask how bad they were, really. A TV movie event called Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter took this and ran with it, with the barely concealed subtext being “sure they all say we were bad, but look we were like you, but look at the Polish people, much worse!” It is quite something that there was so much room to move to the right, given the insane amount of former Nazis whitewashed after the war and leading the country. Baden Württemberg, one of Germany’s most properous and largest states had a former Nazi judge as governor, and Chancellor Kiesinger was an NSDAP member, not to mention all the writers and professors and judges and the vast majority of the new country’s Foreign Office, and much of the new party FDP and on and on and on. But there was always bit of shame, a bit of underhandedness. They weren’t really members, not really Nazis, etc. etc. This is slowly starting to fall away which should terrify everyone living in this country. It is in this atmosphere, then, that Martin Beyer presented his text, a short story about the execution of the Scholl siblings. The Scholl siblings were genuinely part of the resistance against Nazi Germany. Principled, generous, forthright young people though what they did would barely make a dent in the resistance stories of other countries. They, like the Edelweißpiraten, wrote leaflets to the population. There was no real, active, armed, broad resistance in Germany, compared to France, or Poland or most other countries (for reasons I do not need to spell out), so the actions of Hans and Sophie Scholl truly stood out. They are unquestioned heroes in German history and culture. A story dealing with their execution thus has to deal with an exceptional amount of weight, and requires an exceptional amount of moral clarity and literary skill and investment. NONE of which is found in Beyer’s story, which focuses, of all things, on the executioner. Now, the actual executioner is a fascinating figure. The Nazis had their special #1 executioner shipped in, Johann Reichhart. He is an infamous murderer, but also, after the war, he was employed by both the Allies and the Bavarian state. His son, burdened by the pressure of being Johann freakin Reichhart’s son, committed suicide, I mean there is clearly a story there, also setting him in opposition to these famously principled young people. None of which is exploited by Beyer in any way. He makes an unknown, one time assistant to Reichhart his focal point. Why does he do this unpleasant job? Oh, to make money. Oh, because he is a victim of the war. Oh, because he has lost a brother in the war. Oh, of course his family HATES Hitler. This claim to OF COURSE have hated Hitler is such a well trod path in the history of Germans lying to themselves. It is particularly interesting that it came up this time of year since a group of scholars have just found out that the supposedly authentic diary A Woman in Berlin, about a woman in Spring/Summer 1945, which focuses on rapes by Soviet soldiers. As it turns out numerous passages had been added by the author to the text, specifically focusing on her supposed resistance to or dislike for the Nazis. I mean it’s such a remarkable lie to include in a story – and not undercut it in any way. The text is written in the most unambitious 19th century style, with no contrasts, no critique. There are small inserts to make us realize the poor man’s war trauma (what a poor widdle Nazi!), which contain some odd misogyny. It’s not that Beyer calls his protagonist a hero, in fact, he suggests his protagonist may be a bit of a psychopath, but that, too works as a kind of defense. The Scholl siblings barely make a dent in this story, which has the primary function, intentional or not, to make the protagonist relateable. A bad text, in most ways, and for once, the jury largely let the writer have it. Although, to be fair, with nowhere near the hostility they treated Birkhan with earlier this morning, still a mystery to me.

So at the end of a mostly bad day, nothing changed in who I think should win the awards, i.e. Wipauer, Othmann, Birnbacker and Jost. But I would advocate for the fifth award, the public vote, to go to Birkhan.

 

Below is my list of all my posts about this year’s award:

#tddl: Germany’s Next Literary Idol, 2019 edition.
#tddl, Day One: Holes In Space
#tddl, Day Two: A Privilege Sandwich
#tddl, Day Three: Mollusks and Nazis

 

*this post is about a week late, let’s pretend it IS “today”

 

#tddl, Day Two: A Privilege Sandwich

If you follow this blog you are likely not fluent enough in German to have followed the Bachmannpreis livestream (see my post about the  2019 event) so here is a brief summary of how day two (of three) went. The writers who read today* were, in this order: Yannic Han Biao Federer, Ronya Othmann, Birgit Birnbacher, Daniel Heitzler, Tom Kummer. You can read all the texts here, if you are so inclined. For day one click here. For a German summary of the whole thing, which I also wrote, for Faustkultur, click here.

There was a strong sense on Tuesday of what the gatekeepers of culture want to be written and published and what they would rather wasn’t. Yesterday had two excellent texts, Sarah Wipauer’s story, which is clearly top of the class this year, and Julia Jost’s. There was one mediocre story by Andrea Gerster, as well as one badly executed, but interesting story by a very talented writer and then, there was a mess of historical revisionism, with a dose of literary cliché. There was no clear sense, as there often is during Bachmannpreis-competitions of texts that fit a mold and texts that don’t. Day two had it in spades.

The first text was written by Yannic Han Biao Federer, a writer with a perfect biography, who has won several literary awards, and has very quickly become part of the cultural gatekeepers himself with his work at the Literaturhaus Köln. Biographically, he appears to be straght from central casting: academical background. work in journalism, work in cultural institutions, awarded some key prizes, and debut novel with one of the leading literary publishers in Germany. No wonder his story, taking almost no risks, offers such a flat take on personal narrative. There are small metafictional twists, slow, detailed observations, and just enough relevance to save the story from utter blandness. It’s not that Federer’s text is bad – it is not. It reads like a chapter from his novel (review likely forthcoming here) – a consistency which points to strong literary control and skill. The blandness is not accidental: Federer’s story is carefully, and skillfully designed to be bland. One is tempted to read the story and the environment its read in in terms of Bourdieu’s theory of practice, in that the (sub-)field of Bachmannpreis is a very specific field. The judges, as well as the audience consists of people of varied background. Academics, successful writers, journalists, people who have or are working as gatekeepers in various cultural institutions. It’s a big field, but also narrow in that they all share a similar sense of references. They have all read this kind of text before. This is like New Yorker poetry, where, dependent on who is editor of the poetry section, the kind of poetry that gets published almost becomes its own genre which you then can see turn up in all kinds of other journals and places. Reading and rereading Federer’s story, it becomes clear that its very specific kind of dullness – it’s a kind of writing that develops when you write a lot of submissions for places, and have to be aware of word count. There is no description that is wrappped in one, two fitting phrases, it’s all extended to the point of maximum ennui. Despite the author’s Asian heritage, which is also mentioned in the story, there’s also a sense of whiteness about the whole thing – or rather: privilege. This was highlighted by two things: the enormous praise by the judges, and by the next story to be read.

Ronya Othmann was on the mound next and immediately hit us right between the eyes with a fastball. A story that couldn’t be more different. Not drowning in descriptions, she used the names of places and people to carry a lot of the descriptive weight, it is a story about how a young yazidic woman who lives in Germany comes to terms with the genocide committed against her people by the IS. Othmann, trained in an MFA, uses this training to make sharp observations about what temporal and geographic distance means. What language means. How do you speak about something that has never been widely or fairly represented in the media of the languages you use to speak or write. The violence against the Yazidis has often been framed in terms of a broader war against the IS – the complicity of the Turkish government, clearly stated by Othmann, never really plays a role in these narratives. What’s more, there is an obsession with particularized, sexualized violence in the media – what does this mean for a young woman, whose family is only alive due to a quirk of personal history. Without being able to migrate (or having a car), her family would have suffered the same fate as all teh murdered and raped people of her ethnicity who stayed behind. Witnessing survival has a long and harrowing literary history, and has perhaps been best described by Primo Levi. There are many survivors of the Shoah who did not really survive – they stayed alive, until they couldn’t any more. People have been writing about this for decades and it is remarkable and laudable that Othmann found new and fresh literary ways to examine this same issue. She discusses quite specifically the question of how to comprehend the fact that she and her family are alive. Are they alive or have they merely survived? Othmann struggles with the binary language between life and death. It is not an accident that one of the best and clearest books on suicide, which attacks the morally freighted binary of life and death has been written by a survivor of the Shoah, Jean Améry. Whereas Federer’s text turned on a metafictional chuckle of bourgeois life in Cologne, Othmann’s text turned on the question of identity. Othmann uses several layers of writing: there is the typing up of recorded conversations, journal entries, and of real actual travels. The story ends with the narrator seemingly shedding the ambiguity of language, coming up right against questions of reality and speech. A remarkable story – not without flaws, but executed with enormous skill. The first sign that Othmann might be in trouble was the Twitter commentary. The twitterati, among them people with some cultural influence, reacted – oddly. There was a worry (yes, worry) that one would be guilted into…what? praise? attention? I feel that if you read a story about genocide and your primary comment is – “Oh no, I’m being morally blackmailed” – I feel I cannot help you. What is this “blackmail” you speak of? Blackmailed into caring? That’s such a remarkably white statement – and it was sort of echoed by the judges. Hildegard Keller felt she couldn’t properly criticise the text’s deficient grammar with a Yazidi survivor sitting right there. I mean, how dare she just turn up and tell a story that is unpleasant. What happened to the long meandering descriptions of mint-colored walls? I mean, the nerve! Other judges decided to re-open the very well trod paths of debates on witnessing and fiction, on truth and literature. There are literally hundreds of thousands of books on the topic. Frankfurt, for example, has a whole frigging professorship dedicated to the topic. What’s the need to re-legislate the topic? I mean literally yesterday, for inexplicable reasons, a judge decided to use Imre Kertesz’s searing work as a comparison for Silvia Tschui’s German nonsense – Imre Kertesz addresses the topic in his work! To be honest, I am not sure it’s plausible NONE of them were aware of this. The longer this discussion went on, the more it seemed like they needed an excuse not to engage with the text. The unwillingness to have a literary discussion about a text, which is written with such excellent literary skill (if anything, one of its flaws is that you can see the MFA training a bit too clearly in it) struck an unpleasant note this fine Friday morning.

The final text this morning combined two things: being palatable to the judges and exquisitely written. A absurdist-but-relatable story about a woman who’s relatively poor, struggles with a life that is less than she and others hoped for. She takes smaller jobs to not preclude the possibility of writing A Novel, but what sounds like depression, family struggles and other issues prevent her from giving her life a shape that she would be satisfied with. It’s a ramshackle, unfinished, unformed life, like many people still lead it today. Suddenly, a cabinet appears mysteriously. Birgit Birnbacher, already one novel under her belt, writes this story with enormous skill – it is much funnier than I made it seem, it is cleverly structured, addressing racial, gender and other concerns, even metaphysical ones, without ever having to strain. It’s not quite as flawless as Wipauer’s tale, but that’s in part because where Wipauer sticks the landing perfectly, Birnbacher stumbles in the last sentence. If this was a poem, every reader would tell her to just strike it and be done with the whole thing. That seems like a minor flaw in a major, excellent story, and it is. Birnbacher joins Wipauer and Othmann among the favorites to win it all. The judges, meanwhile, agreed. Praise was unanimous and detailed. There was no sense of “we have a thirty-something woman in front of us, how can we discuss a story about a thirtysomething woman,” meanwhile. One wonders why.

Birnbacher’s story concluded the morning readings and the good portion of the event. The two afternoon readings – hoo boy. The first, a story by Daniel Heitzler, is hard to talk about. I mean you’ve all heard of Poe’s Law, right (definition here) – this was a perfect literary equivalent. On the surface, this is just a very bad story. A very bad story, structured badly, drowning in adjectives and adverbs, mindlessly run through a thesaurus, like that high school essay we’ve all seen (“Students: Stop. Halt. Discontinue. Terminate. Cut it out with all the thesaurused smart-person words in your essays.”). I remember, on a literary forum that I’m not entirely sure still exists, someone once explained to me that Julian Barnes’ novel The Sense of an Ending wasn’t a cliché-riddled mess, but specifically invoked the clichés involved in talking about death. There was nothing in the text that suggested that, except that forum member’s goodwill. I mean, the books Barnes has published since have disproved that theory, but as an approach, it stuck with me. It’s a literary Poe’s Law: an awful literary text is indistinguishable from a very good parody of an awful literary text, if there’s no wink in the parody. Sometimes the sheer skill involved provides the wink: Robert Coover is probably the best example: his parody and homage to Louis L’Amour-style WEesterns, Ghost Town, or his homage to Noir novels in, uh, Noir, are written with enormous skill. On the “wink” side of things is maybe John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, which is hilarious. Not his best book, but Barth incorporates winks into the style he parodies. There is nothing, nothing of the sort in Daniel Heitzler’s story. The best we get is a comment in the intoductory video that he’s a fan of American postmodern literature, especially Beat and David Foster Wallace. Sure, nothing bad has happened with young devotees to DFW’s work. Sure. You know I was once at a meeting of the DFW society at a conference where they had a roundtable dedicated to salvaging the bad reputation of DFW’s work, created by his acolytes and the unsavory facts that had come out about DFW’s own misogyny. So faced with a young man, essentially subscribed to a problematic literary tradition, the judges decided that the text could not possibly be this bad – it had to have been done on purpose. i have thought long and hard on the fact that all the judges except one insisted on reading the text this way and I think this goes back to the assumption, shaken by Otoo’s nonchalant interview after her win: “we are smart and important people. A writer wouldn’t dare come here with a text this bad. Ergo, it has to be good.” That this judgment appears to be solely a creation of the subfield of Bachmannpreis thinking becomes clear once you look at the unanimous rejection of the text on Twitter.- there wasn’t a torn opinion. Nobody read the text and thought: oh this is intentional. Personally, I have limited patience for intentionally bad writing anyway. If you make me read ten pages of bad prose that you artfully and cleverly shaped to be this friggin bad, I still have to read ten pages of bad prose. There’s a masturbatory quality to this kind of writing, and let me tell you, I have never seen it practiced by female writers. I feel that says something right there.

I don’t know what to say about the final story that I didn’t already suggest even before he read. Read my original TDDL post for notes on who Tom Kummer is. Kummer is a kind of inverted mirror of Federer, the first guy to read today. Kummer is also a production of gatekeepers’ goodwill, but not by following all the rules and pleasing all the right people. He did it by projecting an image of being “the last Gonzo writer” (snort), a literal quote. The bad boy of literature. He turned up, and read a story in a kind of faux-Clint Eastwood drawl that sounded sleazy and unpleasant. His story, about a limousine driver was unpleasant and bad. For someone, who became infamous faking exciting interviews with celebrities, his dialogue was dragging and boring. The story was entirely without ambiguity or tension. Everything was stated plainly and then, for the people in the back, re-stated. The story is unpleasant start to finish, from some lazy racism to literary and explicit misogyny, as well as the weirdest description of a father caressing the naked body of his child i have ever seen. The protagonist’s dead wife re-appears as an octopus-like monster, the only other woman, an accomplished researcher, is, wait for it, an antifeminist who produces a drug to further male sexual enjoyment, because, no kidding, we have too long been interested only in female lust and pleasure – which, I mean, she has never seen any porn or TV or movies, I assume? Or commercials? I mean, what? And for some reason, this turns the protagonist on to the point of considering sexually assaulting his passenger, a thought that he discards after a long struggle. There are no, zero, zilch redeeming qualities in this story, but its invitation shines a light on what’s acceptable and what’s not. Writing a story about genocide gets the judges to equivocate and stay distant. Writing indirectly about rape, on the other hand, raises no red flags. Tom Kummer and Yannic Federer, each in their own way, offer a take on what privilege means in German-language literary culture.

So it’s a day where two of the competitions two best texts so far get sandwiched by an odd duo. At the end of the day, the four best texts are, in this order. Sarah Wipauer, Ronya Othmann, Birgit Birnbacher and Julia Jost.

Below is my list of all my posts about this year’s award:

#tddl: Germany’s Next Literary Idol, 2019 edition.
#tddl, Day One: Holes In Space
#tddl, Day Two: A Privilege Sandwich
#tddl, Day Three: Mollusks and Nazis

 

*this post is about a week late, let’s pretend it IS “today”

#tddl, Day One: Holes In Space

If you follow this blog you are likely not fluent enough in German to have followed the Bachmannpreis livestream (see my post about the  2019 event) so here is a brief summary of how day one (of three) went. The writers who read today were, in this order: Katharina Schultens, Sarah Wipauer, Silvia Tschui, Julia Jost, and Andrea Gerster. You can read all the texts here, if you are so inclined.

Ah, what a day, what a day! Five women, two science fiction stories, murder, Nazis, and divorce proceedings. I’m telling you, things were on fire! Well, maybe not so much on fire as occasionally slightly warm. Tepid maybe? Look, honest to God, a clear favorite emerged today, reading a story without any recognizable flaws, and a runner up turned up as well, also very well executed, mostly, and the rest, well, tbf, there are five slots to fill every day, not everyone can be a winner.

The first reader was Katharina Schultens. Schultens is an exquisite poet, and what’s more, a poet of the kind that should be easily transferable to prose – long, looping sentences, complex rhythms, all of that. What’s more, there is a strong vision behind the text she read. Not everything became clear – it is an excerpt from a novel, but it appears that the text is a Ballardesque vision of a future (it is set two hundred years after 1984) after some ecological collapse. Regrettably, one would have, given the very real ecological threats today, hoped for a more relevant kind of catastrophe, say, speaking of Ballard, something like The Drought; instead her vision veers towards the post-human, with Vandermeeresque landscapes threatening deformed or changed descendants of humanity. She’s not just somewhat apolitical regarding our very real ecological crisis, which is a bit problematic – but in addition, completely (apparently) randomly, she uses the heat of Africa as a metaphor, which seems a bit tone deaf given that any ecological disaster would hit countries in Africa harder than, say, Germany, so if you are steering clear of politics, maybe not lean into the Africa-as-metaphor too much, yes? I mean, it’s white blindness, I suppose. And then there is the confusion and dullness of some of the fiction. Speculative fiction that takes such a big leap needs a proper story telling backbone – which this text, very specifically, does not have. There are great, meaty descriptions of situations and things, and there are rail-thin, meandering sections of what you’d have to call plot? It is very odd, how strong talent and strong vision somehow leads to a mediocre text.

The second reader was Sarah Wipauer. Wipauer’s text, almost irritatingly, has no flaws that I can see. Last year, a hole was discovered in the ISS – seemingly drilled from the inside though it wasn’t clear who drilled it and why – it necessitated an unscheduled spacewalk to plug it from the outside. As far as I can tell, it is still entirely unclear what happened. As a writer, Wipauer is intrigued by space stories, and by the quirks and oddities of small news stories, and she took this event and turned it into a ghost story set in Austria. There’s everything in it that  you could possibly fit – provincial history, medical oddities, and Wipauer appears to be able to manipulate syntax at will to fit the story and the individual voices in it haunting these events. Towards the end the story tightens even further, including social pressures regarding class and gender. There is not one word too much, and the story wraps up beautifully. No matter what the rest of the days bring – this has to be one of the five best texts.

It is with text three that things started going off the rails. The author, Silvia Tschui, appeared to present at first a bucolic story (an excerpt from a novel), written with tight craftsmanship – oh how I was mistaken. It became clear real fast that #1, she pursued a kitsch kind of writing, offering a cliché depiction of a childhood on a farm, with mild doses of violence, lessons, and the kind of dialogues that someone who grew up in the city assumes are spoken in the countryside. So far so dull, but then the story took a bad turn. I mean, excuse me, for not immediately assuming the worst – but it’s true: bucolic clichés have a special function in literature, especially German literature. Farmers are often used to show a nation’s real backbone, and attacks on farmers are the way the political right tends to frame foreigner invasions. In Germany, the so-called conservative revolution was particularly enamored with that figure – the work of Hermann Löns – in particular the 1910 Wehrwolf – was used as inspiration (Löns died in 1914), and many books in the 20s, and particular 30s, repeated and enlarged these motifs. In the early-to-late oughts, German literature added another trope, that of Germans-as-victims. The Germans in today’s Poland and the Czech Republic and Hungary fled the approaching Soviet army and often lost everything. Tschui’s text connects the bucolic motif with those revisionist stories of victimization. They are all the rage in German TV shows and movies. In Tschui’s text there are German farm boys scared of an Enemy who is sudden, cruel, mean, and is connected, in the broader narrative of the novel, to a East European mythical figure, that the Germanic boys have been told to be afraid. The (post)colonial aspects of German/Prussian occupation of Poland have not been discussed as broadly as they should have, but this text reads exceptionally exploitative, with an almost archetypical and racialized sense of an Other. As a result, the text was both literarily bland and politically dubious. Did this come across in jury discussions? Except for Hubert Winkels’s fairly clear words, the other judges steered fairly clear of the text’s issues. Honestly, what would you expect?

The afternoon readings were less eventful overall – the first story, a story from the Austrian countryside by Julia Jost, was very well done – mostly. A story about an Austian childhood, with pedophile priests, knives, Nazi heritage and more. The story is written with enormous energy and humor, clearly, CLEARLY the second-best story of the day, magnificent in many ways – though the ending is a bit of a dud – the writer had to tie up all her plot points so it becomes plodding real fast.

And finally, the final story – a banal tale of child custody and motherhood – the story itself isn’t necessarily banal – we are quick to label women’s stories as banal because they don’t conform to masculine hero narratives. And indeed, there are issues in the story here and there that piqued my interest – but the story is told with no literary energy, no skill beyond the routine of a prolific novelist. She needs to get from one end of the story to the other – and by Jove, she will get there. Choice of words seemed almost random in its banality.

On Friday the readers will be

10.00 Yannic Han Biao Federer
11.00 Ronya Othmann
12.00 Birgit Birnbacher
13.30 Daniel Heitzler
14.30 Tom Kummer

 

Below is my list of all my posts about this year’s award:

#tddl: Germany’s Next Literary Idol, 2019 edition.
#tddl, Day One: Holes In Space
#tddl, Day Two: A Privilege Sandwich
#tddl, Day Three: Mollusks and Nazis

 

#tddl: Germany’s Next Literary Idol, 2019 edition.

If you follow me on twitter, you’ll see a deluge of tweets this week from Thursday to Saturday under the hashtag #tddl, let me explain.

I will be live-tweeting the strangest of events from my little book cave. Read on for Details on the event in general, what happened in the past years and what’s happening this year. CLICK here if you want to read a summary of Day One.

So what is happening?

Once a year, something fairly unique happens in Klagenfurt, Austria. On a stage, a writer will read a 25-minute long prose(ish) text, which can be a short story, an excerpt from a novel, or just an exercise in playfulness. All of the texts have to be unpublished, all have to be originally written in German (no translations). Also on stage: 9 to 7 literary critics who, as soon as the writer finishes reading, will immediately critique the text they just heard (and read; they have paper copies). Sometimes they are harsh, sometimes not, frequently they argue among each other. The writer has to sit at his desk for the whole discussion, without being allowed a voice in it. This whole thing is repeated 18 to 14 times over the course of three days. On the fourth day, 4-5 prizes are handed out, three of them voted on by the critics (again, votes that happen live on stage), one voted on by the public. All of this is transmitted live on public TV and draws a wide audience.

This, a kind of “German language’s next (literary) Idol” setup, is an actually rather venerable tradition that was instituted in 1977. It’s referred to as the “Bachmannpreis”, an award created in memory of the great Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann, who was born in Klagenfurt. The whole week during which the award is competed for and awarded is referred to as the “Tage der deutschsprachigen Literatur” (the days of German-language literature). Since 1989, the whole competition, including all the readings and all the judges’ arguments are shown on live TV, before, the public was only shown excerpts. The writers in question are not usually unknowns, nor are they usually heavyweights. They are usually more or less young writers (but they don’t have to be).

So what happened in the past years?

The 2016 winner was British expat writer Sharon Dodua Otoo (here’s my review of some of her fiction), who read a text that was heads and shoulders above the sometimes lamentable competition. And you know what, the German judges were still slightly upset about it the following year, which explains why 2017’s best writer by a country mile, John Wray, didn’t win. It’s the revenge of the Bratwurst. The 2017 winner, Ferdinand Schmalz, was…solid. A good example of the performance based nature of the event – having one effective text can win you the pot. It was overall not, you know, ideal.

Given the issues with race in 2016 and 2017, it was interesting that the 2018 lineup skewed even whiter and much more German. It was thus no surprise that the best text, a brilliant reckoning with Germany’s post-reunification history of violence, Özlem Dündar’s text in four voices, did not win. But the overall winner, Tanja Maljartschuk, a Ukrainian novelist, produced a very good text, and was a very deserving winner. And Raphaela Edelbauer (whose brilliant book Entdecker I reviewed here) also won an award. Three out of five ain’t bad folks, particular with people like Michael Wiederstein in the jury.

So what’s happening this year?

Michael Wiederstein is a bit of a caricature, it seems to me. I noted his invitee Verena Dürr and the dubious discussion of her text back in 2017 (go read it here), and this year he really, REALLY brought his F game. In the most dubious field of writers since I started writing about the award, he made the…ah, just the most exquisitely bad choice of all. His invitee, Tom Kummer is famous. Now and then there’s a famous writer – John Wray is an example. Tom Kummer isn’t famous for being a good writer. Tom Kummer is famous for being a plagiarist. Caught not once, but multiple times. For falsifying interviews first. For cobbling together texts from his own and others’ older texts. For falsifying quotes and using incorrect details. He was given chance after chance after chance.

German and Swiss tastemakers have decreed: this man deserves more chances. He is precious. He is our gonzo hero. The usually very good Philip Theisohn called Kummer’s elegy to his deceased wife – like all of his work of questionable originality – “moving.” What it is, most of all, is fucking awfully written. There’s a bad tendency in German literature to look at some American writers – Thompson, Salter, Hemingway – and see their simplicity as simple. All of this is facilitated by translation, of course. I love Hunter Thompson’s work. Thompson was a fantastic writer. Not always, not in all of his texts, but his stylistic sharpness and moral clarity are rare in literature. Philip Theisohn cites Kummer’s admiration of Thompson in writing that “Kummer, the last real gonzo, was led by the conviction that a world of lies doesn’t deserve truth either, only more lies, which led to his infamous fake interviews in Hollywood.” – #1 there are still New Journalist writers out there, and the masculinist veneration of “Gonzo” has always been suspect to begin with. and #2, if you ever read Thompson with dedication and care – he primarily cares about the truth. Post 1974-Thompson is a bit complicated in his approach to the self in his work, but the use of fictionalized self, and using your own perspective as a distortion to better see the truth has a profoundly moral impetus with Thompson, whatever other faults he had (he had a lot) – there’s none of that in Kummer, and even Theisohn knows better than to claim otherwise. Kummer, his deceptions, his toying with truth and originality never had a goal beyond the celebration of one Tom Kummer. This navelgazing white masculinity is all too common in literature, and at least half of the TDDL field often suffers from that; and Michael Wiederstein, the juror, is the perfect embodiment of this white male navelgazing element in German literary culture. Da wächst zusammen was zusammen gehört.

The rest of the field is also a bit dubious. Among the writers I have read in preparation, Ines Birkhan is very original but very bad, Andrea Gerster and Yannic Han Biao Federer seem flat and dull. Lukas Meschik is prolific, somewhat interesting, but boring. And then there are the three writers I have the highest hopes for. Ronya Othmann and Katharina Schultens are very good poets – Othmann in particular writes exceedingly well and should be immediately seen as a favorite, based on potential. And there’s Sarah Wipauer, who has not published very widely, but she has a blog here which contains short, exquisite prose, and I have read texts unpublished on- or offline, which are similarly exquisite. Wipauer, Othmann and Schultens, in my opinion, lead the field here, by quite a solid margin.

I have misgivings about the field! And yet…I cannot help but be excited. Follow along! There’s a livestream! You can also read the texts during the competition here. So here’s the full list, which I posted below, sorted by reading days/slots. You’ll see the whole thing kicks off with two of my favorites on day one, in the two first slots.

Thursday
10.00 Katharina Schultens
11.00 Sarah Wipauer
12.00 Silvia Tschui
13.30 Julia Jost
14.30 Andrea Gerster

Friday
10.00 Yannic Han Biao Federer
11.00 Ronya Othmann
12.00 Birgit Birnbacher
13.30 Daniel Heitzler
14.30 Tom Kummer

Saturday
10.00 Ines Birkhan
11.00 Leander Fischer
12.30 Lukas Meschik
13.30 Martin Beyer

 

Below is my list of all my posts about this year’s award:

#tddl: Germany’s Next Literary Idol, 2019 edition.
#tddl, Day One: Holes In Space
#tddl, Day Two: A Privilege Sandwich
#tddl, Day Three: Mollusks and Nazis

 

On finding Frank Bidart

I had some collection by Frank Bidart on my shelf for what felt like almost a decade before I even looked at it. It was In the Western Night. I do not remember why or when I bought it. One night, desperate to find words to tide me over to the next day, I took it off the shelf. I was 23 and alone, marooned in a life I had not chosen and a body that had just appeared around me. Frank Bidart spoke of bodies, of fathers, of the unreality of one’s own face in the mirrors. In a new poem, Bidart speaks of learning American history from a Lowell poem. In these earlier Bidart poems that I found on my shelf, the Bostonian stateliness of Lowell is made to up a life that has more doubts, an a fuller body to deal with. There is no scaffolding in Bidart’s poems – it is Bidart’s breath, his rhythmic heart that pushes everything into its place. 25 years old, living in the ruins of an old, collapsed country, I touched these words and marveled. I found Bidart. And with every new book I found him again. In the more recent poems, even more of the scaffolding falls away, lines survive on the strength of Bidart’s invocation of an unsentimental sentimentality, an exploration of the body around one’s body, of the words in plain, exalted speech. Many years later, I sit in a crumbling apartment, in Germany’s former capital, touching the ruins of my lives with the words I have, exalted, plain. And still, when I am desperate to find words, I reach for Bidart on my shelf.

Autobiography and Community

In what I am currently writing I have become quite interested in the way autobiographies and autobiographical work constructs an imagined community, obviously Benedict Anderson doesn’t quite apply here, but he also doesn’t NOT apply, you know? Instead of looking at the way autobiography explores the self, and applying various ideas of selfhood and truth etc. to it, I have become more interested in how reception theories shape what we understand of autobiography – if we shouldn’t read them in relationship to the self and ideas of the self, Freudian self-analysis and whatnot, and instead read them as texts written to be read by an audience. Written to interact with a specific literary field. Autobiography is a public act, and I think some interactions between writer and audience can be described by using Marcel Mauss and the gift. And now I have been thinking – and I’m sure this is not true for every autobiography. Say, Robert Lowell, a tall, white, straight man. But, say, you look at Mary McCarthy (because that’s my topic) and the situation turns. Or the tradition of Jewish autobiography. This is two steps. One, looking at the outside effect of autobiography and entirely excluding the self-exploratory aspect of it. Two, see in what way this works to construct a sense of (a) community, or a pole within a literary field. So that’s where I am. Any comments?

Catherynne Valente: Space Opera

Valente, Caterynne, Space Opera, Saga Press
ISBN 978-1481497497

One of my favorite science fiction novels is The Killing Star by Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski. The situation is simple: in the future, with humanity having colonialized the solar system and about to step outside, someone notices we exist and might be a threat, and, just to be safe, nukes the whole of humanity before coming in and mopping up what’s left. It is a dark novel that provides an unsettling answer to the Fermi paradoxon, and its logic is grounded in our history of colonialism and imperialism. Catherynne Valente’s Space Opera takes a very similar premise, and spins it into one of the funniest novels this side of Scalzi’s Redshirts (it’s funnier than Scalzi). Humanity has reached the brink of leaving for space, and now the sentient creatures of the universe are auditioning us for space adulthood. How you may ask? After a devastating civil war in the galaxy, a singing competition was instated to test sentience. You have to take part. If you are an applicant species, you can’t come last – if you come last, your planet is wiped clean and re-seeded. So one day, the universe is knocking on earth’s door and asks for humanity’s champion. That champion is a washed up British glam rocker: brown, queer and old. What comes next is hilarious – and smart.

The obvious comparison is Hitchhiker’s Guide, with its satirical phantasmagoria of space, but the most apt comparison to me is the work of Terry Pratchett. Like Pratchett, Valente suffuses her extremely funny writing with some ultimately serious thinking about who we are as a society and who we ought to be. Pratchett’s work is less about dwarves, wizards and inedible streetfood than it is about community and how we as humans – and more precisely, the English –struggle with and understand community and humanity. One wonders what Pratchett, who died in 2015, would have made of Farage and Brexit and Trump. Well this is an option: Catherynne Valente takes one of the big projects of post-WWII Europe, the Eurovision Song Contest (née Grand Prix Eurovision) and blows it up to galactic scale. She keeps the current rules (including the stupid stupid current vote split between popular and jury vote), and adapts them to a larger scale, with aliens of all shapes and sizes, and includes the genocide-for-losers option (though it only applies to applicant nations. Established nations who come last are merely shamed for it. Valente is an unexpectedly funny writer, the book’s joke density is extremely high, with standalone jokes, allusions to pop music, to Eurovision history, to books, and more wrestling for space, but even so, we’re always led by a clear political sense of what’s good and proper.

Racism, for example, isn’t, and Valente gets in multiple hits at it. This connects Space Opera to another novel that I can hear humming in the background: Gwyneth Jones’s Bold as Love. Gwyneth Jones is one of the most underrated and most brilliant writers of SF today, and her Bold as Love cycle focuses on a mixed-race British rock guitarist, connecting rock music with British politics, and for all the fantasy hijinks in Jones’s books, there is a serious contemplation behind it all, which Valente shares. Both Valente and Jones take contemporary culture, signifiers of identity and skew them away from assumptions of whiteness and “Britishness.” Valente gets explicit – once her protagonist, Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes gets picked, the British public is upset: a brown immigrant from a Muslim background? Couldn’t they have picked someone….whiter? There is a tendency in some science fiction to externalize debates on racism to aliens and make it about purple beings discriminating against green beings – not so here. Like some versions of Doctor Who, Valente never disengages from actual racism, though she does use galactic racism as a canvas as well. In Space Opera, things are terrible on Earth, and things are terrible in the Galaxy, and one doesn’t replace the other.

In fact, Valente’s novel is a perfect example of the possibilities of science fiction. Yes, it is a endlessly hilarious take on Eurovision, but it also exemplifies what Samuel Delany has written about science fiction expanding literary language and possibilities. It takes a genre considered bad (Delany says “When far-future sf fails, we usually call its degenerate form “space opera”) and elevates it. Valente uses the camp and exaggeration inherent in the form to speak to a larger issue about violence and war and, most of all, community. If you have read any of her other books, in particular what I consider her masterpiece, the 2009 Palimpsest, you won’t be surprised at the precision and craftsmanship throughout the book. Jack Vance, one of the SF legends, had written a tongue-in-cheek take on space opera in his 1965 Space Opera, but somehow Valente’s book exceeds this and many other novels like it. There is no flab, no fat on the bones of this novel. Even her very prose is complex and dense with allusion and humor. Her humor is not harsh, not cheaply ironic. It is full of puns, verbal energy – it’s like a three ring circus act. What’s more (and important to understand) is that Valente (like me) unironically loves the ESC. The book comes with quotes from some favorite songs and a long dedication to its founder in the afterword. Irony is cheap. This book is not. The book demands to be re-read in delight, excitement and admiration. Space Opera is very funny, very serious and very, very good.

*

As always, if you feel like supporting this blog, there is a “Donate” button on the left and this link RIGHT HERE. 🙂 If you liked this, tell me. If you hated it, even better. Send me comments, requests or suggestions either below or via email (cf. my About page) or to my twitter.)

A note on Death

I have been working on fiction/memoir relating to my family – there are a lot of stories to be told, a lot of paths to followed. Most of my immediate family, two generations, one generation back, are some form of immigrant. But my grandfather is currently dying as I type this and everything is stopping in its tracks. I cannot properly explain what a loss this loss of my grandfather would be – would, mind you. He’s had an incredible life so far, and I’m visiting him across the country tomorrow, today, that is, later today, I suppose.

Death is strange. As a weird man who has been obsessed with death, largely my own death, but also that of others since childhood, a man who visits cemeteries, and is largely alone in this – it is not accompanied by a real fascination, or a gothic habit. It’s just – death.

But this is different. Today – yesterday, I suppose, I mean, dates get blurry when you write at night – my father, who lives far away from me, apparently locked himself in a room to cry after he had a phone conversation with my grandfather. I myself was stuck in a different room for an hour, similarly struggling. The image of my father in his bedroom, not able or willing to communicate with his family, bereft, even though nobody has died yet, feels like the fingers of death on our lives, a moment that we will all remember, even those, like me, who have not been there. Something has broken in him, in us, and there’s a feeling that it has also infected our memories.

How far back does death reach? Already, I find it difficult to call upon memories of my grandfather that are not touched by death, memories of my own life. At every important turn in my life, he was there, usually quiet, grumbling. A broad man of small stature who worked hard for everything in his life, who worked hard to survive. And my father, a much taller man, in his room, this moment which I have not witnessed myself, it pulsates in my imagination. I have not been able to shake it.

The first and last time I remember seeing my father cry was when his grandfather died. We all stood at his grave, my father cried, I couldn’t cry. I pinched myself – there must be a way to cry, but nothing happened. My father cried, standing in the cold on the slighly hilly cemetery in the little East German village. I stood there, pretending to cry, ashamed of failing some protocol. This time is different. i have been intermittently crying for two weeks. Maybe I am becoming a warped version of my father. Maybe that is what death does.

Portrait with cat

Reviewing poetry

I don’t do it. Not on this blog anyway – though I would obviously take a commission to do it. And I published one of Ben Mazer’s book two? years ago. But overall – I don’t do it. I find it exceedingly difficult. And I write so much academically about poetry, and I write poetry myself and love to discuss poems, with poets and readers. But writing reviews of poetry – somehow my brain or pen doesn’t quite bend to the task. When I review a book like Herta Müller’s poems, if you look closely, I did not in fact review the poems as much as I reviewed context and translation. I have, I think, I flatter myself, a good, solid sense of what makes a good poem, of what good poetry is, and I hope that this sense transcends, at least somewhat, my own very narrow taste, I mean who knows, but I don’t review poetry, I can’t sit down and line by line offer my take and how do I end it with “you should read this book, if…” – of course you should read it, you idiot, it’s poetry. Even bad poetry is worth your while. So, I don’t really review poetry. Poetry reviews me.

Curzio Malaparte: The Kremlin Ball

Malaparte, Curzio (2018), The Kremlin Ball, NYRB Classics
trans. Jenny McPhee
ISBN 9781681372099

I reviewed Malaparte’s posthumous and strange novel for Review 31.

For better or worse, The Kremlin Ball gives us a point-blank perspective on Malaparte’s literary and personal inclinations: his egomania, his disdain for simple people, his attraction to totalitarianism, and his conflicted feelings towards masculinity. That alone makes it well worth reading.

You can read the whole thing here.

Celan’s friends

I saw today that Stephen Mitchelmore has tweeted about a possible publication of an English translation of Celan’s Collected Posthumous Prose. The book, a thick, dense tome, is indeed wondrous, some of it in French, some in German, some in Romanian. The translator is Pierre Joris. The connection of Joris here is interesting, I find, and I want to say a word or two about Celan, his friends and his published correspondence.

There are so many volumes now of Celan’s correspondence (the only one I’m lacking is the one with his wife, because it is an expensive French “coffret” – and I assume the German version, though much cheaper, is translated and what would be the point of that) – but they all – every single one – have the same shape. Celan meets people with kindness, sadness and enthusiasm. He’s clearly difficult, but an extraordinary and intense person. Then, mid- to late career, fatigue sets in. Everything starts when Yvan Goll’s widow – Claire Goll – starts a public campaign that smears Celan as a plagiarist of her husband’s work. It is enormously untrue, but damages Celan immensely. And it’s not just the publicity and Goll’s loud attacks – there’s also the dubious reaction from his friends.

German critics, then as now, have a complicated relationship to Jewish literature. Henryk Broder has defined it as the difference between dead and living Jews: Germans feel guilty about dead Jews – but they will leap at the opportunity to attack living Jews. As a survivor of the Shoah, Celan straddled the line. When he entered German cultural life, his biography, in connection with his astonishing work, insulated him, gave him praise, protection and a certain status in German culture. But the Goll Affair exposed how precarious his situation was. Celan felt under attack – as a person, as a poet, as a Jew. And suddenly he found himself among Germans. Barbara Wiedemann’s valuable edition of documents around the Goll Affair show that the most engaged of his friends were Jews themselves, like Peter Szondi (a brilliant philologist and survivor of Bergen‐Belsen, who drowned himself a mere year after Celan’s departure, and 7 years before Améry’s ‘suicide, another survivor of the Shoah).

If you look at the letters, you can see the exact point where Celan turns to suspicion. It hams his relationship with Bachmann, whose sometime-lover Max Frisch had no empathy or understanding for someone not as securely ensconced in a country and culture as Frisch was, and it ends several others. Surrounded by Germans, Celan sees how tenuous his sense of home and security is. Like Peter Szondi, he looks towards Israel as a home. There is very little in his work that comments on Israel, but several passages in the collected prose refer to Israel. In his poem “Denk Dir,” written during the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, he describes Israel as “dies wieder / ins Leben empor-/ gelittene / Stück / bewohnbarer Erde.” (~ “This piece of land, suffered up into existence”). Like Szondi, he never moved there. Szondi’s motivations for not doing so may mirror Celan’s – Szondi writes in a letter to Gershon Scholem that he felt “at home” for the first time in Israel and that it was “unbearable,” this feeling. He was no longer able to be comfortable, after 40 years of alienation, genocide, and then living among the people who engineered that genocide. Celan’s relationship with Israel was certainly extraordinarily complicated, but he was clearly, unequivocally, a defender of the Jewish homeland.

Now, to get back to the English translation of the Collected Posthumous Prose. Pierre Joris is, in many ways, a typical representative of the Anglo-saxon left when it comes to Israel. His focus is on Palestine, and he is vocally, loudly, pro-BDS, a virulently antisemitic movement. To see his name next to Celan’s work gives me the shivers, but somehow, it feels fitting. Celan grew to be suspicious of many of his friends, aware that their relationship to the – for him, existential – questions of Jewishness, security, home, was different from his. Joris seems not atypical among his friends. Celan – like Améry, like Szondi – was ultimately dependent on the language of those who, a few years earlier, wanted to murder him and his family, he was dependent on structures partially built by murderers and lived subject to laws carried out by former murderers. The chancellor of Germany in the last years of his life was a former Nazi party member. Living in the language of Germans and among Germans, building a sense of home and language, informed much of his work. It is cruelly fitting that even in translation, he is dependent on the language of people with antisemitic sympathies.

Christmas Presents

Belated picture of my Christmas presents

 

 

New poem

In case you missed it, I had a new prose poem out at Hawk & Whippoorwill.

Thank you for reading my things

McCarthy Progress

Paulette Jonguitud: Mildew

Jonguitud, Paulette (2015), Mildew, CB Editions
ISBN 978-1-909585-03-4

Is it still a translation if a book was translated by its author? There’s something to that transition that many writers find a bit daunting. Yoko Tawada, for example, an author writing in both German and Japanese, does not translate her Japanese work into German. Thus, the Japanese novel which was translated into English as The Emissary, arrived in German later than in English, and in a translation by her longtime translator Peter Pörtner, despite the author being not just fluid in German, but regularly producing excellent novels and essays in this language. Another example regarding translations to Germany is Mikhail Shishkin, who is a professional translator between Russian and German, and yet, he does not translate his own Russian novels into German. In other cases, most famously Joseph Brodsky, it has been argued that Brodsky’s English equivalents of his Russian poems are inferior to the work produced by professional translators. As I said, it’s a bit of a curious issue. Why not regard the “translated” text as a new creation by the author? In any case, these are some of the questions raised by Mildew, Paulette Jonguitud’s (in many ways) masterful novel(la). Jonguitud is a Mexican author, and this book was published as Moho in 2010, and translated by the author in 2015. I found as I read and reread the book that one’s perception changes depending on whether we read it as a translation or as a new creation or re-creation by the author. I don’t think the book improves if we read it as translation – occasionally we come across strange changes in register, slightly uneven syntax, and other linguistic choices that I suspect read absolutely natural in the Mexican original. There’s a part of my brain that reads these passages as ‘mistakes,’ as infelicities, as problems that editors or a more careful translation could or should have fixed. I find that these passages don’t stick out as much if we read the book as an original English translation.

Here’s why: the protagonist is a mentally unstable woman, and the book an interior monologue as she comes to terms with some horrible things that happened to her and in her life, as she’s preparing for her daughter’s wedding. If we read the stylistic oddities as related to her state of mind, they seem less odd than if we read them as related to the language of origin. And in this way, they add to the tapestry of the book – the sometimes odd syntactic choices can make a fussy impression: the language of someone who is trying to piece together what has happened in the past years, months and – crucially- hours. Constanza, the protagonist, is preparing herself and her daughter’s dress for the imminent wedding, but as she prepares, she notices a stain on her leg. The more time passes, the longer and larger and greener the stain grows, the titular ‘mildew’ slowly envelops her body. Jonguitud uses well-trod literary ground, but she remakes it new. The book weaves memory and worries, past, present and the possible future into a seamless narrative. The book is conceptually heavy, but never loses the fat meat of literary narrative and psychology. Unlike other books that have seemed too skeletal to me, like fellow Mexican writer Luiselli’s novel Faces in the Crowd, which was all concept and structure, Jonguitud’s book has emotional and narrative depth beyond the conceptual playfulness. Constanza appears before us: believable, distressed and lost. She doesn’t know what’s happening to her, and neither do we – we look at her past for clues, much as she invokes her own past as what has led her to this point and the green growth on her body. I’ll spoil it now: while there is a revelation towards the end, we never really get an explanation for the mildew. The book beautifully ties everything together in the dark last chapter, but that’s not an explanation.

And there’s a good reason for that. I will say I am leery of writers who use disfigurement and disability as a cheap metaphor – too often in books where, once the ‘problem’ is cleared, the disfiguration also clears up. It was in our heads all along! Sontag has warned of the use of metaphor to discuss illness: “illness is not a metaphor, and […] the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.” But here’s the thing: it’s not really a metaphor, and not really an illness. And it doesn’t clear up. I honestly expected it to be in the narrator’s head – a manifestation of her fears, her self-hate, her guilt. I know this – the feeling some part of your body has developed a life of its own, the Sancho Panza to my anxiety’s Don Quixote, rushing the windmills of my mental health. It was instantly believable – but when Constanza’s daughter comes in and sees the mildew, and thus the mildew becomes a real object in the real world of the novel, we move out of these simple equivalencies. That we don’t get a reality based solution to what the mildew is means that we’re in a very different territory here. The obvious siblings of Jonguitud’s story include writers like Kafka, and his stories of the world’s terrifying, unexpectedly cruel and monstrous reality. The world suddenly turns on many of Kafka’s narrators and suddenly things we considered workable tactics in dealing with our environment slip out of control, change, become strange or threatening or both. Constanza isn’t suddenly disabled, or possessed – no, a real, physical mold has started to grow on her, something that inhibits her movements, even, not a discoloration, it’s suddenly there, it’s part of her reality and she has to deal with it. It mirrors the way things have changed in her own life, how certain people and their actions have become part of her reality and she had to deal with them.

There is an obvious Deleuzian angle here – but it’s indirect, in the way that much of the important theory of our time is Deleuzian in one way or another. When Foucault said that we would view the 20th century as Deleuze’s century, he was right – but off by a century. And I don’t really want to dig into the theoretical angle here, but I do want to note how extraordinarily rich in meaning Jonguitud’s mold is. Depending on how you approach the book, it can be seen to be about a vast variety of things. There is the obvious issue of the body – of the way women are socialized to view their bodies from birth to the end of their lives – and how other women often reinforce the pressures and expectations of physical womanhood. What is feminine, what is attractive, what is worth having? In this reading, the mildew is what Sontag called a “punitive […] fantasy” – but Constanza didn’t do anything wrong – except to be born a woman into a patriarchal society that places certain values on certain physical manifestations of feminity and womanhood. And yet – she’s clearly complicit in these narratives to a certain extent – and complicit in something much worse, as it turns out. The most obvious reading of the book would be an ecofeminist one, about how power separates and controls things, how certain forms of speech control and damage. There’s so much here, but it’s hard to really discuss without giving away some crucial details of the book. In some ways, one can read the book as an attempt at connecting the “becoming-minor” with “becoming-woman” as Deleuze and Guattari suggested in their Kafka book (I appear to circle back to Kafka here).

Suffice to say that Paulette Jonguitud’s Mildew is darkly brilliant – condensed but rich, one of the best books of its kind that I can remember reading. Stylistically it’s not without flaws – but it’s not all bad, either. Jonguitud’s English is simple – I am not a fan: simplicity is the most difficult style – there’s nowhere to hide. I sometimes have the suspicion that the reception of writers like Kafka in translation is also one of simplicity of language – in German, there’s nothing simple about Kafka’s language which consists of carefully layered tenses and conditionals, of precariously balanced registers and complex descriptions that can take many readings to unfurl. We don’t get that here. The language in Mildew is plain – but even so, the book is brilliant and everyone should read it.

*

As always, if you feel like supporting this blog, there is a “Donate” button on the left and this link RIGHT HERE. 🙂 If you liked this, tell me. If you hated it, even better. Send me comments, requests or suggestions either below or via email (cf. my About page) or to my twitter.)

Mary McCarthy

So I’m starting work on a Mary McCarthy paper due in May and this amazing interview seems like a good start:

Marie Kondo Lite

At least in my corner of Twitter, the new Marie Kondo netflix show has caused ripples of upset – less about the suggestions regarding cleaning your apartment she makes, and more about how those suggestions apply to books. To a bookish person, the basic mantra – hold up something and see if it sparks joy, if not, chuck it out – can apply to pillows or knick-knacks (though even there there is resistance), but surely not to books. As Ron Charles notes in his exasperated complaint about Marie Kondo’s show and book(s), she says holding it up does not include reading from that book, because that might muddle your opinion. I mean, God forbid that reading a few sentences might spark joy that seeing a cover might not. Strictly speaking, I share that upset opinion, and my apartment, with all of its walls lined with books, bears witness to that. Similarly, I also understand the other side of this, given that I know that romantic partners may have had a hard time accepting the vast sea of books. Certainly, my decision to hold on to a lot of books is indulging a personal sense of memory, loss, words, a very personal sense of comfort and a quiet sense of pleasure. It ties into other personal habits that are difficult to square with partners, like my penchant for nighttime writing and constant reading.

That said, everything changes eventually. This past year, due to space issues, I had to cull some books. This week, among many others, I got rid of a book I have owned for almost exactly two decades – for some reason, I bought Thomas Lehr’s bildungsroman Nabokovs Katze when it came out in 1999 and have kept it around until today. I carried it from apartment to apartment, from one corner of Germany to another one and finally to Bonn, where I have lived too long already. So this week, I took the book from where it was on my shelf, I looked at it, and considered why I own the book – the answer is: because I own it.  Back when I read it for the first time, I disliked the book, and the one time I reread it since, I liked it even less. As a reader, I never had a ton of patience for these flat autofictional titles where some masculine erotic fantasy is offered as a lazy masturbatory replacement for introspection. And I have less patience for this nonsense today. There’s a well regarded Spanish writer that an acquaintance of mine translated into French that I tried real hard to appreciate, but this writing, particularly with a connection to cinematic knowledge or background, is so common, and boring and dull, and I don’t need that kind of thing in my life. What makes it worse, Lehr is stylistically dull dull dull despite inexplicable critical praise for his style. So out it goes.

This is my Marie Kondo rule adaptation:

• Did I like it?
• If not, is it interesting?
• If not, is the book as an object worth keeping (rare/beautiful book?)?
• If not, is the book worth keeping as a memory support?
• Is it part of some collection?

In the case of Thomas Lehr’s voluminous meditation on a masturbatory boyhood and lazy cinema references, the answer to all of these is no. The only reason I own this specific book is because I have owned it for two decades. Which is no longer acceptable given the danger of being crushed by my own books. I own too many books to keep one on the shelves that fits none of these categories. Bye bye.

Paris Bookshops

Last time I was in Paris I went to (and recommended on the blog) a bunch of bookshops. This time I wasn’t there for a conference so I had time to visit more, but I would only recommend three of them. They are from left to right (click to enlarge): the Librairie Vendredi at the top of rue des Martyrs, Le Monte-en-l’air, nestled between a church and the busy rue Ménilmontant, as well as the queer-themed Les Mots à la Buche, just around the corner from tourism hotspot rue des Rosiers. At the bottom, all the books I bought, minus one that I cannot currently locate.

Happy New Year

The past year was not ideal, at least for me, but let’s hope for a better new year. It began at the riverbank of the Seine, in Quai d’Orléans, fitting, since I’ve been writing about Bishop for about seven years now. In the weeks and months to come I need to work on getting more of my writing and reading published somehow, I mean for what it’s worth I do a lot of it. Thank you readers who have stuck around for indeed sticking around.

Happy 2019!

Bookshop Addiction

So I’m in Paris for a few days around New Year’s – though I haven’t actually figured out what to do ON New Years – and I arrived today. I’m a bit under the weather, a burgeoning cold, exhaustion, depression, everything somehow caused me to stay inside for much of the day – the first thing I did once I did leave the apartment was to go to a bookshop. I have a list of bookshops in Paris I find intriguing (and last time I visited, I went to a bunch), and I somehow can’t stay away. I can’t stop buying, sorting, reading books – and bookshops are more than just a conduit for this addiction. They are powerfully rich places – when I visited Poland and Finland this year, I went into several well reviewed bookshops, although they did not stock books in languages I can readily read or even understand. I’ve expressed my admiration for booksellers before, but it bears repeating: I love bookshops and I cannot stay away.

25 Favorite 2018 Albums

I don’t usually make this list, but last year I made one, and somehow as i was taking notes I decided to make another one this year. This year saw me go to more concerts – seeing The Breeders and Mitski in concert was a delight, and their albums some of the best of the year. Below my favorite albums of the past year (“Freedom Summer” is an EP, but I enjoyed it so much, it made the list. There’s nothing really surprising on this list. What are your favorite albums?

Mitski – Be the Cowboy
Pusha-T – Daytona
Nipsey Hussle – Victory Lap
Robyn – Honey
Kali Uchis – Isolation
SOB X RBE – Gangin
The Breeders – All Nerve
John Prine – Tree of Forgiveness
Mount Eerie – Now Only
Haiyti – Montenegro Zero
Sarah Shook & the Disarmers – Years
Danger Dan – Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben
Travis Scott – Astroworld
Earl Sweatshirt – Some Rap Songs
Deafheaven – Ordinary Corrupt Human Love
Vince Staples – FM!
Rosalía – El Mal Querer
Kacey Musgraves – Golden Hour
Sleep – The Sciences
A.A.L (Against All Logic)- 2012 – 2017
Car Seat Headrest – Twin Fantasy
Translee – Freedom Summer
Saba – Care For Me
Ezra Furman – Transangelic Exodus
Neko Case – Hell On
Anderson .Paak – Oxnard

Merry Christmas

 

 

Zinzi Clemmons: What We Lose

Clemmons, Zinzi (2017), What We Lose, Penguin
ISBN 9780525505051

In German journalism, there’s been a shock recently: Claas Relotius, an award-winning journalist, admitted to having invented the majority of facts and descriptions in his long, meandering tales of Syrian orphans or Yemeni prisoners or Texan racists. Apart from all the implications regarding the SPIEGEL fact checking system, and the institutional racism that underwrites the whole affair, some have noted the recent confluence of journalism and fiction, primarily about how journalism has taken up the tools of fiction. Now, if you make a point about journalism, you’re wrong about it being a new phenomenon. But there’s a particular aspect in the way it bleeds into fiction, not the other way around. I’m not talking about nonfiction novels, per se, either. There appears to me an increasing amount of fiction written with the journeyman routine and simplicity of journalism. I’m probably wrong about when this started, but I wouldn’t be surprised if all the novelists that sprang up around journals like n+1 wouldn’t have been one of the first waves of this happening. Look, we live in a time of memoir. There are so many excellent memoirs being published recently, it’s hard to keep up. Depression, mormonism, motherhood, Lord knows everything is somehow covered, and because no two stories are exactly alike we are not tiring of it. Most encouragingly, the recent wave of memoirs or memoirist essays, is largely led by female writers, with Tara Westover (Educated) and Terese Mailhot (Heart Berries) being two especially stunning examples just from this year alone. It seems however, as if this has started seeping into fiction – the tone, the structure, and, regrettably, the style.

This is not to say that the memoirs I mentioned are badly written. They are not. But they are written with an eye for a specific kind of simplicity – and many of the fêted autobiographical essays that have been published on the internet and shared thousands of times, are often even more simple. It has become so recognizable a style that I can’t help but recognize it in the pages of Zinzi Clemmons’s debut novel What We Lose. There is much to admire about the book, and there are many fascinating aspects to what Clemmons does here – with blind spots sometimes as intriguing as moments of insight. But all of this is told in a language that you could call “restrained,” as I have seen reviews call it. You could also call it bland. Almost everywhere, wherever you open the novel at random, it is written in the style of the well meaning personal essay, published by one of the many great online journals. There are two exceptions: sometimes, Clemmons employs short, declarative sentences and line breaks for poetic effect, which never, to my mind really works. And sometimes, greatly emotional moments in the book do benefit from the language, which, on a handful of pages, creates an exciting tension. But it’s never the tension of fiction. Many of the nonfiction novels that arose from New Journalism managed to tell a fact based story, a report of some sort, with the effervescence, the linguistic breadth, the power of fiction. The New Journalists were more than journalists, they were brilliant writers, and they married a brilliance of style to the craftsmanship of journalism and managed to get a bit closer to what we imagine truth is than mere journalism could. There’s no real comparison to the SPIEGEL affair – part of the reason Claas Relotius was never suspected was that his (in hindsight, obvious) inventions were cloaked in the drab and predictable language of SPIEGEL journalism. He just lied, he didn’t extend the vocabulary of journalism to reach for something more, something deeper.

And this is the strangest thing about Clemmons’s novel. There’s some autobiographical link, given that both the novel’s protagonist and Clemmons share some biographical facts – and as a long autobiographical essay you’d praise this book. It could be tighter you might say. It could interrogate some situations better, you might say. But this would absolutely be an interesting portrayal of a mixed-race woman with South African ancestry, who struggles finding her place in the world, struggles in relationships, and struggles with loss, both loss she lived through, and potential loss. Given that this is a novel, you’d imagine Clemmons somehow expands this brief, reaches for possibilities beyond what the autobiographical essay allows for. And she is playful with form. She includes pictures, graphs. Some quotes are not immediately marked as quotes, allowing for a text that sometimes swims between facts and invention – and I feel someone needs to write an account of the various ways WG Sebald’s outsize popularity among writers in anglophone countries has shaped a certain kind of fiction, but that’s not the place to do it. But none of this really pushes the book into a new place. Sebald, particularly in translation, reaches, and in the best moments achieves, a kind of sublimity that is uncommon, and that stems from the way he uses memory and objects, literary texts and observations, to situate himself in an inbetween world of text and reality. It doesn’t happen in What we lose. It’s curious: Clemmons cites various memoirs, from Obama’s to Mandela’s and Lorde’s, and makes a point about how they are tethered to a moment, how textuality limits the trace of autobiography, but then doesn’t really go anywhere except constantly pointing out small moments of indecision, where the life of her protagonist shifted but didn’t have to.

Her protagonist, who is very certain of her own intelligence, never engages with life – her own or that of others, and sleepwalks through her life, as she sleepwalks through that account of her own life. It is so striking that it made me wonder whether the blandness and obliviousness was intentional. If the bland style reflected the protagonist’s unhurried, superficial account of her life. I mean, it’s a lot. The protagonist’s family comes from a rich part of South Africa, and she’s terrified of the country. Clemmons juxtaposes her protagonist’s privileged musings with a study about real and imagined levels of crime in Durban, South Africa. She quotes at length from that study, which makes for compelling reading, and then – just moves on. The study functions as a reproach to the protagonist’s tense opinions, but the next time she returns to South Africa, this topic doesn’t come up again. Some of the book’s effects are effects of juxtaposition, where quotes and citations outshine the things we learn from the protagist’s own point of view. If the idea of the book is for us to critically read the memoir-style narrative for its failures and blindnesses, this still sticks the reader with a lot of blind, bland writing, even if the overall book is critical of that. The protagonist points out the gaps in the heroic narratives about Winnie Mandela, notes the violence in her biography. She then declines to further examine the topic. Or does she? Are we supposed to read the memoir-style passages with Winnie Mandela’s myth-making and her violent actions in mind? This allows for intriguing analyses of the novel – but not necessarily for a great reading experience, because, as I’m sure I’ve written before: writing things in a bland style to criticize blandness, still forces the reader to sit through the generic internet blog memoir style blandness for a whole novel.

That’s it though – as a metafictionally heightened comment on a bland woman’s encounter with grief and loss, there’s much to love about the book. The book shines most when you describe it, not when you quote it. The way the chronological structure of the book creates a genealogical continuity, all while focusing on loss and fear, is exciting. Meanwhole I can’t find any paragraph or sentence in the book I would love to quote to illustrate this. It’s odd – but as a novel, the writing has to be relevant here, and as interesting as the book is in many ways, it reads bland at best. This is the life of a woman who is terrible at self-reflection, and the book makes this clear constantly. It does not provide the literary tools to elevate the resulting text into great fiction.

*

As always, if you feel like supporting this blog, there is a “Donate” button on the left and this link RIGHT HERE. 🙂 If you liked this, tell me. If you hated it, even better. Send me comments, requests or suggestions either below or via email (cf. my About page) or to my twitter.)

Elizabeth Hand: Generation Loss

Hand, Elizabeth, Generation Loss, CR Crime
ISBN 978-1-4721-0279-0

Hand, Elizabeth, Available Dark, CR Crime
ISBN 978-1-4721-0278-2

Over the past year I have read quite a few crime novels in between doing work and other things, and I’ve increasingly felt that there are two specific things a good crime novel will do well: it will have mastered the generic structure of uncovering a crime (subverting the structure is its own kind of mastery), and it will be about something unrelated to the murder business. I find I am easily tired of the Elizabeth George type of contemporary crime novel – where characters and setting basically fill in the gaps in the mystery structure. I understand the appeal – and a well executed generic mechanism can be a thing of beauty, and is often underrated by “literary” critics. Novels that do both aspects well, however, are rare. One such writer I enjoyed greatly is CJ Sampson whose novels set in Henry VIII’s time work enormously well as crime novels, but who also use the historical context as more than attractive setting. Similarly, some of the most lauded crime novels of the past years take on the topic of racism in the American South, like Lori Roy’s Bent. Moreover, it appears to me, writing a novel that connects both spheres – or just writing an exceptionally tightly structured crime novel – can be like catching lightning in a bottle – often, previous and subsequent attempts fall far short of the mark.

All this is to say that Elizabeth Hand’s novel Generation Loss is an almost perfect example of what I enjoy in a crime novel, and the one sequel I have read of it, Available Dark reads like an underdeveloped print of what made the original book succeed – and indeed I am apprehensive of reading the third and most recent installment. Generation Loss is not Elizabeth Hand’s debut – far from it. Hand has been writing speculative fiction since the early 1980s, but for her 2007 novel Generation Loss she switched into realism, producing a noir crime novel that seems quite unique in setting and outlook, but underneath the hood of this remarkable book is a finely tuned generic crime mechanism. The introduction of characters, of the central mystery/crime, the small revelations that drive the plot and finally the big confrontation and resolution are both generic and extraordinarily well paced. But just as a lot of midsize cars built by the same company have the same motor but appear to be different brands, what makes Generation Loss so unique is Hand’s choice of setting and characters. Much of the plot may be mechanical, but Hand’s mastery is so deft that the plot’s movements seem to derive from an internal logic of settings and characters rather than from the execution of a genre-based mechanism.

The protagonist of Generation Loss is Cass Neary, who works in a bookstore and is generally quite miserable. She is a photographer – or rather, she used to be a photographer, who produced one well regarded book and then fell into obscurity. When the novel opens, she barely makes a living as a clerk in a bookshop. Like Elizabeth Hand, Cass Nearly is a craftsman – when she talks about photography, and when she takes her own picture, we quickly find that her relationship to her art is not one of vague ramblings about the nature of art and photography. Cass is interested in the mechanics of what makes a good photo – how to manipulate film, focus etc. I cannot tell whether her comments will seem insipid to a real photographer, and of course, many of the comments take the form of information dumps in convenient dialogue for readers like me, but it never seems overwhelming or bothersome. It is always tied to Cass’s personal approach to art – Cass’s first and only book featured dead and destitute people of the 1970s/1980s punk scene, and her ideas about photography, as well as the artists she admires, are all centered around this concern with (and sometimes paradoxical seeming distance from) reality. The book starts when Cass is offered a job to interview a legendary photographer who lives on an isolated island off the coast of Maine. She arrives, only to find that the photographer knew nothing of an interview, there are children disappearing in the area, and one morning, the photographer is found dead.

Cass’s interest in photographing the dead becomes a central element of the book’s resolution, but more importantly, Hand quite cleverly connects the genre of realist noir to the protagonist’s preoccupation with realism in photography. Many of the character’s musings on her art can be applied to the book’s own genre, with the conventions of realism being questioned quite intently. The conventions regarding what passes for real, and what does not translate not just to the mechanics of plot, but also to the minutiae of style. Hand’s style is self-consciously modern and hard-boiled. She uses pathos that’s quite typical of the genre, in order to shift into certain emotional states that she does not want or need to explore in details not typical of the genre and not expected of this kind of naturalist fiction. Not having read her other novels, I’m obviously speculating, but since this is her first noir contemporary novel, and it is written in a pitch perfect noir contemporary style, she must have created it for this book – and it never reads as parody. Additionally, though Hand is far from the first one to do it, she inserts a female protagonist into a male genre – thus drawing additional attention to questions of gender. This also gets repeated on the level of photography – or the art world in general. On the island(s) off the coast of Maine, she encounters not just the legendary photographer she was sent to interview – and who is a woman. She also meets male artists, and as if to drive the point home, there is a child that connects these two characters. Art, biology, and the anxiety of influence appear and reappear in various guises throughout.

That’s what sets this book apart – it’s not the female centered take on noir, it is not the excellent execution of crime genre writing. It is, instead, the fact that somehow, despite actually running on the rails of genre, it appears to be motivated and pushed and formed by art, and by the protagonist’s obsession with it. Cass Neary is a close cousin of Thomas Bernhard’s Der Untergeher, an artist brilliant and talented enough to be able to recognize genius and to understand the gulf between her talents and that of the true standout artists of her genre. Cass is obsessed with art, and it is only fitting that the final confrontation is between her and another art obsessive. Everything fits and clicks.

That makes it a bit of a disappointment that her next novel, Available Dark, does not rise to the same heights. We appear to meet another art obsessive, we appear to be drawn into another maze of the arduous space between art and life, as Cass Neary is flown to Helsinki to help assess the value of a set of photographs. Instead, in this book, photography and the art and technique of it is incidental. Available Dark sidles up even closer to noir conventions, with Neary sometimes merely following the winds that blow her across the icy Scandinavian plains of a baroque plot. As the resolution presents itself I was more irritated than anything. A lot of stupid people doing stupid things and killing other people for even more generic, stupid reasons. I know that a lot of crime novels are centered around the stupid things that stupid people do (and the half-clever ways they try to cover it up), but that’s not what I find interesting. There’s a disturbing thing that happens at the end of Generation Loss that I am unwilling to spoil, but it is entirely in line with that book’s general theme, but it expands it, and opens up Cass Neary’s world into another direction – it’s tough to see it fall by the wayside within the first couple of pages of Available Dark, serving merely as motivation for Cass to take that Helsinki job. However, whatever misgivings I may have about Available Dark, they don’t tarnish Generation Loss, which is fantastic. Read it if you like that sort of thing. It’s good.

*

As always, if you feel like supporting this blog, there is a “Donate” button on the left and this link RIGHT HERE. 🙂 If you liked this, tell me. If you hated it, even better. Send me comments, requests or suggestions either below or via email (cf. my About page) or to my twitter.)

Herta Müller: Father’s on the Phone with the Flies

Müller, Herta (2018), Father’s on the Phone with the Flies, Seagull
Translated by Thomas Cooper
ISBN 9780857424723

I reviewed the first major translation of Herta Müller’s poetry for Full-Stop:

Internationally, Herta Müller is best known as a novelist, but since winning the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, Müller has not published a single novel or collection of short stories. Her publications since 2009 consist of essays, interviews and — poetry. Indeed, this is the first time since her earliest days as a writer that Müller does not use narrative prose as her main mode of writing. In the 1980s, Müller abandoned her youthful poetry in favor of writing short narrative prose — and eventually, novels. It is as a novelist that she became famous and critically acclaimed. Yet her beginnings as a poet — much like Thomas Bernhard’s — have shaped not just her early prose, but much of her subsequent writing. Regrettably, as with Bernhard’s poetry, her first translated poetry for an American audience is marred by a translation that does not rise to the challenge and promise of the text. A warm and vibrant poetry is turned into small, dour, humorless lumps, like a game of Chinese whispers among IRS employees.

You can read the rest here.

 

*

As always, if you feel like supporting this blog, there is a “Donate” button on the left and this link RIGHT HERE. 🙂 If you liked this, tell me. If you hated it, even better. Send me comments, requests or suggestions either below or via email (cf. my About page) or to my twitter.)

A brief appreciation of Uwe Johnson

Uwe Johnson. Man. In a turn of luck for anglophone readers, the complete Jahrestage is now available in English, in a brand new translation. I have few words for how much I admire Johnson as a writer. There are no reviews of his work here (apart from these letters) because I find it difficult to explain exactly why I admire his work so much and how exactly it’s made. The book I make people read to explain my admiration isn’t, by the way, Jahrestage. It’s Mutmassungen über Jakob, his debut novel.

Mutmassungen has been recently published in a scholarly edition that I of course own though I haven’t read it yet. Mutmaßungen is a book about East and West Germany, about heritage, about family, about the epistemological limits in dictatorships. It’s a masterpiece, and one of the best German-language novels of its time, and yet and still it is far from Johnson’s best novel, which mainly speaks to Johnson’s unbelievable skill. And while you can describe the book in this language that describes what this book is about, for me, the real kicker is the writing. I just took the book from my shelf and started reading.

It starts with a simple declarative sentence – with an implied question. “Aber Jakob ist immer quer über die Gleise gegangen.” – ‘But Jakob always crossed the rail tracks.’ The language is simple and unmarked. The next three sentences are pieces from a dialogue, first restating then interrogating that initial statement. They are written in colloquial language – but halt! It is not merely colloquial. The syntax is glittery, moving with uncommon elegance, managing the colloquial and the tentative dialect with a powerful sense of stylistic sureness and exactitude. Johnson’s use of colloquialisms, his absolute dedictation to the way language and places intersect, interact and identify each other is almost Faulknerian – as is Johnson’s sheer linguistic prowess.

Next Johnson includes a description of someone crossing the rail tracks at night. Is it maybe Jakob? “…war vielleicht Jakob zu erkennen.” This small phrase in the middle of a description that’s otherwise precise and clear as early morning air in Mid-winter, undermines what we know that we CAN know here. It introduces us to the fundamental sense of insecurity over what we can know. In the next paragraphs we return to the dialoge – between who, we don’t (yet?) know.

And then we have a small passage in cursive, the interior voice of Gesine Cresspahl, who is also the protagonist of Jahrestage, reflecting on her father and, following that, a straightforward paragraph about her father, Heinrich Cresspahl. While the beginning of the novel, with its dialogue, its questions, its insecurities about what we can know or say – is most characteristic of what kind of novel Mutmaßungen is, it is those two paragraphs, the half-sentence in cursive, and the half-page introduction to Heinrich Cresspahl that give us Johnson most fully.

In them, Johnson uses a style that is both traditional and old-fashioned, as well as modernist and clever. Johnson is fond of inversions and slightly outdated, even archaic words and constructions. “…er entbehrte seine Tochter” isn’t quite right for the time. There’s a sense of mild stiltedness to much of this – but it’s never accidental. Johnson, a young man, just graduated, his teacher the underrated Ernst Bloch, has, from the first book, an uncanny sense of style. The stiltedness and occasional archaic turn contrast with Johnson’s skill at making syntax glide, of moving in between places and topics with a well placed comma and an unexpected inversion.

And then, man, then we’re off to the races. what I described, these first two and a half pages of the novel, they tell you what’s to come – fragments, a mystery, and a unique stylistic voice. I have never really reviewed Johnson (I once submitted/gave a conference paper just for the opportunity to write SOMEthing about Johnson), on this blog or elsewhere and that’s because I find it so hard to explain how unique and enormous this writer is, was.

Everything in Johnson’s work follows from this book. Stylistically, thematically, morally. There’s a beating moral heart to this book that finds its conclusion in the towering achievement of Jahrestage, but we meet it for the first time here. Writing, speaking, understanding, these are moral endeavors, these are things asked of us as writers and artists – and Johnson always persevered.

Johnson wrote with obsessive attention to detail, he typed and revised his letters, he didn’t try ti drown out other voices, even in the strange moral missteps such as the paranoid-but-brilliant Skizze eines Verunglückten, he’s still present and what’s present until the last page is his unique style and voice. Even in the sloppier third installment of Jahrestage, it never entirely abandons him. He’s always Uwe Johnson, to the last.

And if I want to remember why I can’t write about him, I just open Mutmassungen über Jakob to the first page, read the first pages until I am speechless, breathless and moved. Uwe Johnson. He’s the real deal. One of the titans of literature, even if other, vastly worse writers in the German language have garnered more praise and attention. It’s good that Jahrestage get all this attention now. They deserve it.

Accurate

From David Plante’s Three Difficult Women

Mur Lafferty: Six Wakes

Lafferty, Mur (2017), Six Wakes, Orbit
ISBN 978-0-316-38968-6

I’m behind on reading all kinds of lists and books – and this year’s Hugo shortlist is no exception. For whatever reason, the first book I picked off that list is a novel I had never heard of by a writer I had never heard of: Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes. It was an excellent choice: Six Wakes is a very good science fiction novel. For some reason, reviewers of science fiction – and genre generally – are obsessed with the question of ‘transcending genre’ – can a book be more than ‘just’ a genre novel? It is a bad question and the books that ‘transcend genre’ can be quite dull, to be honest. And it is applied more often to science fiction and fantasy novels than to crime novels, for example. And while it’s true that certain novels, mired in genre conventions, may not be appealing to a general public, it is not due to immutable literary laws. SO yes, it is true: there may be readers who may not take to Six Wakes, because it is written within the conventions of science fiction – but at the same time, it also has all the trappings of a conventional mystery. Most of the book’s events could also take place in a locked house, or a house locked down due to weather phenomena – and inside the house, a drama between six individuals with their secrets develops. It would be a quite traditional set-up, if not for the fact that the house is a space ship, and the house itself is a character here. But everything truly science fictional has happened in the past, and Lafferty cleverly restricts the possibilities of the book’s present in such a way that you could replay most of its plot with Agatha Christie’s vocabulary and furnishings. This allows us to appreciate what the truly unique elements are that science fiction brings to this particular table: questioning the limits of what it means to be human, in a way that is just not possible for a plain ‘realist’ mystery. Lafferty won’t win any points for language or concision here – the book is a bit longer than it needed to be – but it is an exceedingly intelligent book, which, like all good mysteries, is very well constructed. This is a genuinely good work of science fiction, and I cannot for the life of me come up with a reason why you shouldn’t read it. Should it win the Hugo? Probably not – but it is a strong field this year. It is still one of the better science fiction novels I’ve read over the past years.

It’s a bit of an irritant: Mur Lafferty, the internet tells me, has written a lot of books and I have read none of them before Six Wakes. At the same time, this appears to be her first foray into ‘proper science fiction,’ after several books that sound more like urban fantasy. And while I enjoy zombies as much as anyone, a book that interrogates our sense of identity and self – and the future of the way we construct those two things – is more up my alley. On the surface, the book is about a generation starship which is run by a small crew of six people. One day they all wake up with no memories of what happened – except the knowledge that one among them is a murderer. The rest of the book is spent figuring out who dun it and what it means for their mission. The actual details of that surface plot are a bit more complicated, and I’ll get to that in a minute. But the most interesting aspect of the whole book was the unexpected decision by Lafferty to make much of the book about religion and faith. One character in the book has an obvious, strong connection to the topic, but ultimately, the question of religion and faith touches all the characters, and Lafferty yokes her discussions of what it means to be human to the question of what it means to have faith. There is no snideness or irony to any discussion of faith here – it is, excuse the pun, enshrined by the author as a fundamental human act, one that helps us and our selves, our morals and values cohere in a way that nothing else does. And it is the aspect of humanity that is the first to be endangered when the basic parameters of being human fall by the wayside and we can become, technically, immortal. Over the past five, six years, there’s been an on/off debate about secularism, and the role of faith in our world – this debate left its fingerprints all over the humanities. At every conference, someone brings up at least Charles Taylor. The religiousness of everything has been offered, denied, interrogated. It is quite refreshing to see a use of faith that does not take sides in this debate, that takes faith seriously as a technique of the self. This is not about God. This is about people.

And people are, in some ways, on their way out in the world of Lafferty’s book. At least people as we define and understand them today. Cloning has become viable – more than viable, it has become an almost everyday occurrence, a tool. In fact, abuse of cloning has become enough of a problem that laws dealing with it have been enacted. Lafferty’s invention here is the idea, which I have not seen before, of the use of cloning. Books involving cloning very rarely follow the interesting uses such a technology might have: in this case, a form of immortality. Humanity has learned how to make mindmaps – and if you want, you can have your mindmap implanted in a clone that carries your DNA, thus living on for as long as someone is there who can wake a new clone and imprint it with your most recent mindmap. There is, in the world of Lafferty’s book, a debate between humans (people who have not exceeded the “normal” human lifespan) and clones. Since there is always only one version of each person (multiple clones are banned by law), clones are as individual and unique as normal humans. This development also gave rise to a new form of hacking. If you hack someone’s mindmap, kill them, and wake a clone with their modified mindmap, you have created a version of the same exact person that may be more to your liking. A rebel who is no longer interested in being a rebel, for example. She does not make the connection more explicit, but this is the first novel I have read that almost directly engages with the ideas put forth by Achille Mbembe in his seminal essay “Necropolitics” – and puts a new spin on it. The new technology of cloning was at first a wild field of possibility – the law, specifically, to rein in the numbers of clones (only one at a time) seems like an exercise of sovereign power in line with Mbembe’s ideas.

The cloning technology also allows for longer distances to be bridged in space travel, with the crew dying and waking up again anew in the cloning bay. And indeed, this is what happens as the book opens – with one crucial technical problem: before death and revival, the mindmaps had not been updated – indeed they had been wiped of everything that happened since they were loaded into the ship’s data. What’s more, the previous bodies of the crew were not properly disposed of. They are found floating around the ship with signs of violent death. Someone stabbed, strangled and poisoned the crew. It stands to reason that it was one of the six. It could have been any one of them. Not only do they not know – the murderer him or herself also does not know since all six mindmaps have been wiped clean. The rest of the book is dedicated to resolving that mystery.

Six Wakes very specifically works on two levels: each person’s memory of the time before the ship’s take-off is a dive into Lafferty’s ideas and the political and social consequences of technology as she envisions it. That part is straight – and very good – science fiction. Everything that happens on the ship after waking, could strictly speaking, with one significant difference (the AI on the ship plays a major role), be rewritten as a Gothic mystery. The ship functions as a big gothic mansion. The six people in it barely know each other. They all have secrets that they hide from one another and the revelations of those secrets will lead straight to the discovery of the murderer. While this story has SF elements, it doesn’t need them, and it is quite clever of Lafferty to write a novel so clearly in two different conventions. It allows her questions about humanity and identity to resonate on different levels as well, allows her novel to push and pull at the reader in two different, but entirely conventionally recognizable ways, which makes the fundamental ideas of the novel stand out. The impression, structurally, is one of craft and care – which, regrettably, doesn’t filter down all the way to the sentence level. The book is too long for the story it tells, and many paragraphs feel padded and superfluous. Long mystery novels structured like Lafferty’s tend to employ incident, conflict and revelation more densely. She does not do that – and at the same time, many of the recollections that form the backbone of the crucial SF parts of the novel are not structured at all with notions of conflict, they are meant to add up to a final revelation, to add up to a picture of the society and this difficult technology it has brought forth. And there is one final weakness: almost all mystery novels I have read suffer from a very weak conclusion and revelation. Six Wakes doesn’t escape that particular fate either.

And yet – this is a very enjoyable book, despite its weaknesses. It is very smart, its ideas unique and cleverly used. The use of genre is done with judiciousness and care. It is not meant to be analyzed sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, but as a whole the book holds up very well to careful critical (even academic) analysis. This book is very good.

*

As always, if you feel like supporting this blog, there is a “Donate” button on the left and this link RIGHT HERE. 🙂 If you liked this, tell me. If you hated it, even better. Send me comments, requests or suggestions either below or via email (cf. my About page) or to my twitter.)

Warren Ellis/ Phil Hester: Shipwreck

Ellis, Warren; Phil Hester et al. (2018), Shipwreck, Aftershock
ISBN 9781935002802

If you read comics, you will have come across Phil Hester’s work here or there – he’s inescapable. And not like the ubiquitous mediocre artists. Hester’s work is always excellent. Shipwreck is no exception. Every panel, every page works. There’s a touch of J.H. Williams III about the panel layouts here, and a couple of younger artists have produced similar work, particularly in the way Hester relies on his inker here for depth and stature. And then there is the writing. Shipwreck is one of many projects by Warren Ellis, who has something of a renaissance these days – he has never gone away of course, but the recent creator owned comic books published by Image Comics (Injection, and, more relevant for this book, Trees), as well as his work on characters like Karnak or Moon Knight has been exemplary. Shipwreck is unusual among all these titles by being self contained. It’s a 6 issue comic, collected in one trade, published by Aftershock. The tendrils that Shipwreck extends towards other comic books are too numerous to list, but the book never feels derivative. It clearly feels like part of a longer comics conversation, yet its structure and character is quite unique, and Hester’s bold pen contributes to this certainly.

Shipwreck, like many great contemporary comic books, is high concept: a man lands on a strange world. As it turns out, he built a machine that can jump to a parallel earth, an attempt made in order to save the ballooning population of “regular” earth. This parallel earth is a strange hellscape – Ellis’s depiction draws from various ideas of postapocalyptic landscapes. The tropes are all there as expected: strange bars, unexpected encounters, no large communities – this is about isolated individuals strewn across a large vista of rocks and ruins. At the same time, we learn that somehow this world of destruction and mystery has a high level of technical expertise, plus a level of organization that allowed them to insert a spy in “regular” earth’s mission, there to sabotage it. This parallel earth is an earth of violence tropes, of fear. Towards the end of the book, a character from parallel earth says to the protagonist: “nobody understood you back there because you were afraid of everything and they weren’t. you’ve come home.” This insertion of fear here points to what Ellis is doing with the tropes and narratives here – he’s condensing them into one sharp image: the leap. It is a Kierkegaardian leap, this leap from one earth to the other, and Ellis has exposed it as such, with all the implications it has for other texts in this vein.

To my mind, the comic books that I thought most immediately about were Ivan Brandon and Nic Klein’s Drifter and Jeff Smith’s Rasl. Drifter ran through multiple trades until it ended beautifully last year. It is about a man who lands with his ship, seemingly dropped out of time – traveled through more than just space. There are contradictions and mysteries that Brandon wraps around an engaging story. While Brandon’s story, in turn, shares a lot with many other recent comic books about space-as-wild-west (Copper is one excellent example), his inversions of time and identity made his book stand out. The dominant narrative – who shoots who, who does what, all of these are diversions in the greater mystery of time and place. Drifter is full of leaps, and even engages the idea of religion, but manages to still wriggle out of it, boiling it down to a personal journey of melancholic self-discovery. This comic, towards the last trades, has some of the loneliest and emotionally gripping panels I can remember reading from a comic in this genre. Nic Klein’s art is essential to this. I’ve been meaning to do a review of Drifter for a while, but I never quite got around to it. The book’s final revelations aren’t real revelations in the sense that we are genuinely surprised – instead, we can kind of guess at everything after the first trade, but Brandon manages, with great skill, to use the majority of his run to carefully tease out all the implications and turns in his concept. The result is a wonderful comic that everybody should consider reading.

In many ways, Shipwreck uses very similar moments of revelation, the landing of the ship, the alien-but-familiar landscape, down to the way Hester renders moments of surprise, and mental strain. Another book that is similar, though in less immediately obvious ways, is Jeff Smith’s Rasl, which he published in four volumes a few years back. Smith is most well known for Bones, but I’d argue that Rasl is a greater accomplishment. RASL is a book about science, indirectly referencing various debates about the Manhattan Project and the viability and exploitability of various forms of scienti´fic progress. But more relevantly, it is about a man who straps a device to his body that allows him a form of interdimensional travel. The protagonist in Shipwreck also has a device that allows him a specialized form of travel – it allows him to jump short distances – i.e, disappear and reappear somewhere not too far away. Like RASL’s device, this one takes a toll on its user. There are a couple of scenes that read like direct references to Smith, but it’s hard to tell with such a broadly allusive book like Shipwreck. Smith does tether his story to religion, but more in the sense of a general meaty mysticism rather than something more specific. Smith’s book is effusive and inspired rather than precise and direct. Ellis’s book is the latter, more than supported by Hester’s inorganic, angular lines.

As a whole this reads like a master’s comment on a whole genre – it feels less like fiction, and more like metafiction. A comic book disquisition on craft. There is a lot of “story” in the book but at the same time, the book doesn’t appear to be interested in story. That Ellis can do story is evidenced by his own Trees. Shipwreck reads more like a proof of concept, a master showing up his disciples. Or: Masters, plural. Hester, too, has been around longer than many fêted contemporary artists, and has provided great art all this time. I first encountered Hester’s work on Kevin Smith’s iconic Green Arrow run – whatever you think of Smith’s work in comics, Quiver is a masterpiece, and Hester’s art is a big part of that. His work here is recognizable – but it, too, seems to dip into current trends, but on a much higher level. As I said – a proof of concept comic, by a legendary writer and a legendary artist.

A note towards the end: this was published by Aftershock comics. I have never heard of this publisher before – but the book is well produced, and it’s not just Ellis who writes for them these days. There’s a book by Garth Ennis, and one by the powerhouse pairing of Palmiotti/Conner, as well as a comic by Cullen Bunn, who seems to be everywhere these days.

*

As always, if you feel like supporting this blog, there is a “Donate” button on the left and this link RIGHT HERE. 🙂 If you liked this, tell me. If you hated it, even better. Send me comments, requests or suggestions either below or via email (cf. my About page) or to my twitter.)

 

Afternoon Coffee

When you start reading a book

in translation and as you pass through the first pages you realize with a sunken heart that you walk among the ghosts of the source language and the shuddering testimonials to the translator’s unwillingness or inability to invent an original English equivalent. Bummer.

(This post may or may not be related to my reading of Herbert Lomas’s translation of Johanna Sinisalo’s Troll: A Love Story.)

Mawil: Kinderland

Mawil (2014), Kinderland, Reprodukt
ISBN 978-3943-143904

The Western discourse on Socialist literature has always been ideological in the sense that we as readers expected something from the literature coming out of the Soviet bloc, and imbued that with literary value. This has at times led to the promotion of mediocre but very critical writers. Wolf Biermann is one of them, and the charade that the continued literary life of Monika Maron is should be filed in the same category. Sometimes, the way these expectations are dealt with is entertaining: I can highly recommend reading Heiner Müller interviews from his middle period of work – he is constantly, as a writer known to be at odds with the leaders of the GDR cultural establishment, prodded to please say something critical, and instead he goes on and on about the problems with capitalism, savagely critical of leftwing “symbolic” criticism and endorsing violent change. Another example is Rummelplatz, a novel that was not allowed to be published in the GDR, and the rejection of which had sent its writer, Werner Bräunig, into an early grave. The rejected manuscript is literally a museum piece now: in the German History Museum in Bonn, it is presented among other articles of “proof” of socialist repression. As I point out in my review on the blog, Rummelplatz is an odd candidate for such a hallowed spot in the museum of Why Socialism Is Evil: Bräunig’s novel explicitly and at length points to the many acts of exploitation that happened in West Germany and how East Germany had risen from a couple of potato fields to an industrial nation, against the threat of Western sabotage. It’s critical of some mechanisms of the GDR without endorsing the alternative. Like many writers of his time, like Müller or Wolf, Bräunig favored a change in the system, rather than a change of system. These books, half in and half out of discourses on socialism, are in my opinion the most interesting of the bunch. But it is a careful balancing act that isn’t so easy to pull off. Mawil’s thick brick of a graphic novel, Kinderland (named, I think, after this 1986 song), doesn’t quite manage this. That said, it’s certainly a more worthwhile addition to the body of literature about the GDR than many widely praised fictional statements on Why Socialism Is Evil.

Kinderland slips in and out of discourses. It is a story of life in the last years of a country heading towards dissolution. There are different books in it: a paint-by-numbers book about socialism as fighting dissent and being in favor of conformity, a book about growing up in the GDR, a book about isolation and growing up abandoned, a book, strangely, about alcoholism, and finally, an exciting tale of a boy who discovers his table tennis talents and mounts a school-wide table tennis tournament. Not all of these books fit extremely well together, and when I read it for the first time, I felt let down and disappointed. But upon rereading the book a few times, I have found it to be quite interesting. The combination of disparate elements works in its favor – life at the tail end of the GDR was confusing and complicated, as I, who started elementary school in the GDR and ended it in a united Germany, can personally attest. The book’s greatest strength is its careful attention to details. The slang, words, objects, the rhythm of life under the socialist regime are written with the vividness of memory, and I think it is the exactness of the book that leads to some of its complications and problems. I cannot vouch for most of it – but there’s a curious echo in my reader’s memory here. As a boy I read many of the books in my father’s library. And since my father lost his reading appetite when he became an adult, those books were largely young adult books, some of them exciting tales about being a teenager in the GDR. In my head, when I read Kinderland, the details I knew about through family stories, the details I personally observed, and the details I remembered from YA books written for GDR youth come together to create a feeling of verisimilitude. And one wonders how much of the plot and structure of Mawil’s book can be tied to his own reading, and his own indirect knowledge.

Mawil’s art is the real deal – he manages to slow down and speed up his story at will, provide a genuinely exciting table tennis game even for people who have never played or followed a single complete game of table tennis. As an artist he is not necessarily what I would call an original artist – most of his techniques can be attributed to examples from Belgian comics to Chris Ware and in particular Seth, though it’s the latter association that makes me think the art’s roots are a bit deeper, like Seth’s own are. But if you have read Seth, and Ware, and maybe Rube Goldberg, you’re not surprised by anything the book does – but it is entertaining. Mawil has full control of moods, speed, and humor in a way that I always greatly enjoy in comic books. He also uses the art to tease the reader with possibilities. The story, ultimately, is a low key story, which ends in a low key way, with two boys trying to seal a friendship. But it is presented to us immediately under two different auspices: the cover, with a sea of pioneer-blouse wearing kids and one dissenter in their midst, suggests that the story is about political dissent. The first page on the other hand presents a number of toys and childhood objects that anyone who grew up in the GDR can readily identify – there’s no other function of these panels than to signal to the reader a sense of nostalgia – or ostalgia, as it is often called. Neither impression is true for the direction the novel will take. All the working class misery, all the many, many characters who are clearly alcoholics (alcoholism was specifically a scourge of the GDR), that precludes a safe nostalgic reading. Similarly, a character in the book, a conformist girl called “Angela Werkel” is clearly an allusion to Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor. It’s not true – in the sense that Mawil, as a boy, did not meet Merkel who was much older at the time of the events described. But the inclusion of someone who did well under socialism, and did very well after socialism, who is shown to be intensely conformist, but also kind-hearted, is a suggestion that what really counted was not the content of one’s party allegiance but the content of one’s heart, bland as that may sound.

The main character, called Mirco Watzke (Mawil’s real name is Markus Witzel), is also one of the least interesting ones. His childish excitement, anger, frustration and happiness is well rendered, but is drowned in all the typical generic discourses on childhood which Mawil makes no attempt to break or criticize. The really fascinating character is a boy named Thorsten. He is the boy on the cover who does not wear the uniform (Mirko Watzke is the boy to his right). He’s not ideologically opposed to the GDR, he’s just a misfit. His father has left the family to pursue worldly riches in West Germany, which has turned his mother into an alcoholic. He basically lives alone, and his abrasive character means he has difficulties making friends. It is hard not to see the disillusioned, broken teenagers in Clemens Meyer’s novels about the period after reunification (very well translated by Katy Derbyshire) in Thorsten’s future. In fact, one could argue that the whole book takes on Thorsten’s shape. The contradictions in his character and the contradictions in this wild ride of a novel seem to fit. The biggest weakness of the book is Mawil’s apparent decision not to jettision his autobiographically inspired protagonist. The genre of coming of age book, where the protagonist plays straight man, and mostly narrator and observer to a wild friend or acquaintance, would have been a better fit for the material in this book. But then one has to wonder about the politics of writing this book. In a world where a novel of not-quite-dissident writing gets a spot in a museum, where the memory of the not-so-distant past is intensely politicised, Mawil’s stops and starts.

*

As always, if you feel like supporting this blog, there is a “Donate” button on the left and this link RIGHT HERE. 🙂 If you liked this, tell me. If you hated it, even better. Send me comments, requests or suggestions either below or via email (cf. my About page) or to my twitter.)

In Lieu of a Review

Tallinntraveling

For the first time in what feels like forever, I will be having a holiday-holiday, and not just a handful of days wrapped around a conference. I will be spending a few days in Tallinn next week – and afterwards a few days in Helsinki. Anything you can recommend me in the way of spending my time in Tallinn? Or things to read? I am currently reading Sofi Oksanan in preparation for the trip. Tipps? Suggestions? What is essential to eat?

On Selfies and Poems

I sent a couple of poems away to a competition two days ago and it makes you wonder as you look at the pile of poems that you’ve amassed since your last book: is this really you? Can’t you do this better? Didn’t you write something last week that you liked better that you think works better that is smarter more lyrical more worth pouring into poetry but then you look at that and it already congealed into strangeness and it feels like a selfie you took last week where you have too many chins and awkward hair and didn’t your face look better – I mean I take a load of selfies for various reasons and you know those jokes and sketches where a guy in the mirror mirrors all your movement, tricking you into believing they are real and meanwhile you look at the screen saying: oh, that guy looks nothing like the guy in the mirror, nothing! but you look at your selfie and you scream that guy looks nothing like me and for fuck’s sake this isn’t even Heraclitus, this is just embarrassing to be honest and you know what’s embarrassing? These poems, and you don’t know who to show them to for triage because you don’t want to be embarrassed in front of people you genuinely respect so you sit on the floor in a pile of poems and your weird face looks up at you from every angle, bald spot here, strange torso here and so on and on until you go blind and dissipate nec corpus remanet

Jorge Ibargüengoitia: The Dead Girls

Ibargüengoitia, Jorge (2018 [1977/1983]), The Dead Girls, Picador
ISBN 978-1509870172
Translated by Asa Zatz

For a novel called “The Dead Girls,” Mexican author Jorge Ibargüengoitia isn’t particularly interested in said dead girls. In the introduction to the new edition of the book, Colm Tóibín compares the novel to Roberto Bolaños 2666, in particularly section 4, “About the Crimes.” He fails to note that, in contrast to Ibargüengoitia, Bolaño does talk about “the crimes” at length, and he presents stories from the lives of many of the murdered women in Ciudad Juarez, which is Bolaño’s focus. He notes the investigation, and presents a possible murderer. Section 4 of 2666 is a real punch to the gut. There’s no sense of the situation being ameliorated or prettied up for the reader, and despite Bolaño’s complex use of postmodern techniques throughout his work and in this novel, as well, there’s no sense of postmodern playfulness clouding the seriousness of the crimes. That is not the case in Ibargüengoitia’s 1977 nonfiction novel which takes a case ripped straight from Mexican headlines in the 1960s, and which had produced a sensational, gut wrenching Mexican movie just the year before Dead Girls was published, and retells the story with the vast instruments available to the well trained postmodern novelist. There’s something distasteful about Ibargüengoitia’s literary project here, and it is not the smell of a dead body which is described at length towards the end of the book. This book has to be read with two lenses – as a literary project by Jorge Ibargüengoitia, and as a literary text that has no outside and does not partake in public discourses. As the latter, The Dead Girls offers a lot of delights. Ibargüengoitia uses mirrors, inversions, symbols, and parodies various discourses of detective and police and general nonfiction writing. He uses witness accounts, he uses doubt, humor and an almost surreal Gothic construction with a lightness of touch that is truly impressive. If not for the dubiousness of Asa Zatz’s translation, the book, viewed under that second lens, can only be praised.

But there’s the language, of course. When Picador decided to reprint a couple of classics and commissioned new introductions for them, they did not, for the few books that had been translated, commission new translations or edit the old ones. Asa Zatz’s is the original translation, and it is one of those cases where you can see, without looking at the original text, that something is off. In various places you can see inversions that appear to mimic the Spanish original, rather than present an organic English orginal in its stead. There are a few other problems that are more like mistakes (some pronouns and deictic expressions appear to be off), and the overall impression is one that makes the reader lose faith in the translator. How does the original novel deal with dialect? With low class speech? Am I getting from The Dead Girls what a Mexican reader would get from Las Muertas? Raymond D. Souza says that “there is considerable variety” in the book between “literary discourse,” “popular language” and “legalistic and journalistic jargon.” There’s no such variety here, really, in the English version. A contrasting example would be Lisa M. Dillman’s work on the novels of Yuri Herrera, which, particularly in Kingdom Cons and Signs Preceding the End of the World, does some very interesting stuff with language and register and which I’ve long admired. The claim – without looking at the original – that a translation is “good” is always dubious. But in some cases, you can tell when a translation isn’t, let’s say, great, and that’s, at least to my mind, the case with Ibargüengoitia’s novel. That said, those of us who have read literature in translation for years and have still not cleaned up our act to learn more languages up to easy reading level, we are used to these small roadbumps in reading and read right over them. And as one’s reading of The Dead Girls takes up speed and you look at all the angles and curiosities in the fictional mansion that Ibargüengoitia has constructed, you – or at least me- start noticing these issues less and less. It doesn’t mean they are not there, but the book’s machinery covers them up quite well.

What’s more: the novel’s chosen style is dry journalese, similar in some sense to Garcia Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, but in a less serious register. There’s also a framing temporal inversion in The Dead Girls, though the main plot is offered in drab chronological order, and since Ibargüengoitia was friends with Garcia Márquez, it’s not implausible that Ibargüengoitia’s 1977 novel had some influence on Garcia Márquez’s 1981 novella. That said there’s a key difference between Ibargüengoitia’s book and the common texts that would come to mind as comparisons, whether it’s Garcia Márquez or Bolaño. Chronicle of a Death Foretold takes liberties with the historical facts but his liberties, apart from the final reconciliation, do not ameliorate the situation or the facts, the novella merely artistically heightens the situation. That, Ibargüengoitia also does. But that is not where he stops. The Dead Girls is very loosely based on the Las Poquianchis case. Las Poquianchis were two to four sisters (there were four sisters in the family, all four were jailed, but the central case revolves around two of them) who ran a couple of brothels in Mexico and murdered 91 people, most of them women. The case, when they were eventually “caught” and charged, gained an enormous notoriety in Mexico. For example, a tabloid, colorfully called Alarma! more than tripled its circulation while the trial of las Poquianchis was ongoing. In 1976, a year before Ibargüengoitia’s novel appeared, a movie just called Las Poquianchis came out – and it detailed the case in a lurid and sensational manner. The sisters did not just run brothels, they also didn’t “just” murder prostitutes, they also, according to many reports, toured the countryside and trafficked young women – tricking and forcing them into prostitution. Of course, these reports are hard to parse for truth, particularly since this perceived thread of the roving immoral madams perfectly fits the typical narratives of moral panic. For Mexico City, Martha Santillán Esqueda has provided an excellent account of the way public moral panic was stirred up around this topic, particularly since the abolishment of prostitution in Mexico earlier – and the resultant web of illegal brothels and corrupt officials maintaining the web. Esqueda also points out that, when polled, many prostitutes suggest they were there of their own free will – and these questions are impossible to answer without taking into account the economic pressures on these inevitably very low class women.

And Ibargüengoitia reaches for these ambiguities with both hands. His book is constructed of pastiches of various kinds of journalistic media – from witness accounts to re-tellings, to official documents. At the end of the novel he presents a famous photo of Las Poquianchis and some of their prostitutes, but he mirrors the picture and erases all their faces (it’s easily googleable though). The novel begins with the caveat “some of the events described herein are real- all the characters are imaginary.” It gives Ibargüengoitia leeway in constucting a much smaller, much more contained, much more symbolically resonant text. Instead of a criminal enterprise and four brothels and 91 murders in the span of only about 10 years, his book’s situation focuses on just one “wandering” brothel, and five murders. While many of the original murders happened during the active running of the brothels (some murders were as prosaic as rich male customers being murdered for the money), all of the murders in The Dead Girls happen after the brothels are shut down and the prostitutes and the two sisters cohabitate in a sealed off house that was built as a brothel but never used. Ibargüengoitia uses various elements of the Gothic novel for his purposes. By making a sealed off, dark house the scene of so much of the book’s drama, he inverts the broad expansiveness of such a region based crime as human trafficking and prostitution into one narrow cramped space. He uses gender as a signifier – the domesticity of the arrangement is used in the crimes, and in some of the murders. Not to mention that the first body buried isn’t a murder per se, but dies violently at the end of a long and complicated healing process, an irony that is central to the way Ibargüengoitia built his book. A fine irony pervades much of the book anyway. While the 1976 movie screamed about corruption, Ibargüengoitia uses allusion and suggestion to decry the machinations of the state. The framing crime, the one that brings the sisters down in the novel, is an act of female jealousy and hot temperedness, while as far as I can tell the original sisters were brought down when a mistreated prostitute escaped and told her story to policement that were not paid off by the sisters.

91 murders, of those roughly 71 dead women – often underage girls. Ibargüengoitia takes the number and the names off this crime and writes a book about writing about crime. Some of the murders in the book happened by accident – maybe. A lot of it is due to a complicated situation. To a spurned, angry gay official who was embarrassed publicly and is taking it out on the sisters. Not one of the murders was committed in a callous way. Prostitutes are sold off, but we don’t learn their names because they were homely, and so what if this is human trafficking. Ibargüengoitia does not take a moral stand, and as a novelist, it’s stupid to demand one of him, but these nonfiction novels that stand in the liminal space between truth and invention – there are different rules that apply to them. There is much to be admired about the construction of the book: the city/farm dichotomy that was part of the public moral outcry, is tampered with in clever ways, space (up/down, inside/out) is manipulated in clever ways. How witnesses work, how narratives are structured, Ibargüengoitia’s novel is full of allusions to these topics and discourses. For a topic centered, in Mexican discourse at the time, around “white slavery,” Ibargüengoitia is at pains to point to the relative darkness of skin of several actors in the book. But the “dead girls” of the title – they get short shrift. And not just the 70+ dead girls that died at the hands of the real Las Poquianchis. But also, honestly, the five dead girls of the novel. Ibargüengoitia interrogates, towards the end, the labels of victim and perpetrator, and while, in isolation, that’s fine, in the liminal space of this kind of book, it’s incredibly dubious. His framing only works because he reduced the situation so much. It does not work with 70+ dead women and an uncounted number of trafficked, raped, mistreated women.

I think there’s a strange kind of tendency of writers, particular progressive writers, of, faced with the awfulness of moral panic, to sanitize the effects of prostitution. The whole recent debate around Dante “Tex” Gill’s potential onscreen portrayal in the movie Rub & Tug by Scarlett Johansson never really touched the fact that Gill was famous for taking over a number of “massage parlors” which were really brothels. During Gill’s ascendancy to a prominent place in Chicago’s underworld, “at least four women with ties to the rub parlors were murdered or died under mysterious circumstances” – but the debate around Johansson was entirely one about whether Gill should be portrayed by the actress and not about the role of forced prostitution and rape in public progressive discourse. There’s actually quite a solid amount of admiration for Gill in many of the think pieces written about the affair around the movie. I think there’s a certain blinkered blindness, a lack of empathy to women which I think is woven throughout books like The Dead Girls, even if they are as well made as this one. When I noted how powerful and excellent Lydia Millet’s fictional portrayal of this lack of empathy for women was in my review of My Happy Life, I could easily have referenced Ibargüengoitia’s novel. But it is quite good. It is hard not to recommend, if you can deal with the other aspect of it.

*

As always, if you feel like supporting this blog, there is a “Donate” button on the left and this link RIGHT HERE. 🙂 If you liked this, tell me. If you hated it, even better. Send me comments, requests or suggestions either below or via email (cf. my About page) or to my twitter.)

Diversity: #tddl and the Tin House workshop

If you follow this blog, you may have seen my complaints about Anselm Neft’s reading on the second day of TDDL and its aftermath on social media, where Neft defended his use of racist and sexist slurs because of his use of a specific voice. Of course, his “friends” came out in support of literature and against “censorship” and attacked his critic. So far, so German.

But as it turns out, Neft’s awfulness is maybe part of a larger political moment. I recommend the most recent episode (Jul 19) of the excellent Still Processing podcast. To summarize: apparently, during this year’s Tin House Summer Workshop in Portland, Wells Tower, an established author, presented a text which sounds eerily similar to Neft’s: like Neft, Wells Towers appropriates the voice of a marginalized person, a homeless person in both cases, and uses this set-up as an excuse to be offensive and insulting to other margínalized people. Apparently, there was an intervention there, particularly after a night of reflection.

This is also an indicator of the different ways in which the two counties deal with this moment. No such reflection appears to have helped Neft and the various supportive voices in the German-language literary community.

Again, I recommend you listen to the July 19 episode of the Still Processing podcast.

Alfred: Come Prima

Alfred (2014), Come Prima, Delcourt/Mirages
ISBN 978-2-7560-3152-1

Despite the Italian title, Alfred’s award winning graphic novel is French. Alfred, whose name is Lionel Papagalli, is a 40something artist and writer from Grenoble. This book is a marvel of emotional storytelling. The basic beats of the book are well known and common enough that we all know a novel or movie or comic book about this topic. Two sons return home to their father to figure out the intergenerational sociocultural dynamics between emigré children and their parents. The what isn’t the most important part of Come Prima – it is the how. This large book is consistently spellbinding and moving. Alfred does more than just tell a story about a father and a son, he also, in various registers, tells a story about fascism, about what it means to be working class in a changing world, how we construct our futures relative to our pasts. To what extent are our identities tied up in our memories? Like all good comics, the major achievement of Come Prima is not to ask novel questions, it is to find unique artistic ways to ask and maybe answer them. As the cover suggests, the book is largely a road movie kind of story: two brothers take a decrepit little car to go to Italy, to bury the ashes of their father. On the way we discover various nooks and crannies of the family history, and both brothers gain depth as we hear more of their stories. Alfred has at his disposal an enormously malleable artistic grammar where a shift in colors and realism allows him to show shifts in emotion and tenseness. The main graphic effort in the book, however, are sections painted entirely in blue and red colors, with no black outlines, passages that indicate formative memories – both kinds of drawing, the realistic leaning main visual narrative and the memory paintings, come together in two enormously powerful panels towards the very end of the book. To be clear – Alfred doesn’t offer a particularly insightful tale here – this is all effect and emotion. But it is fantastically done, and truly compelling.

Alfred makes some interesting choices regarding his setting. The book is set in 1958, as we learn from a radio broadcast heard somewhere on the road, and while much of the beginning of the book draws on noir, we soon find that the war, which, after all, had just ended 13 years earlier, is casting a shadow on many of its characters. It is a curious achievement by Alfred to decide not to focus on that aspect specifically, despite it being a central part of why the characters are who and where they are. What this creates is a story that we can all recognize, a story that is, as I said originally, very common: the damaged older brother, the ruptured family relationships, the strange characters encountered on the road – but giving it that historical context deepens the story, and also, implicitly, interrogates those other stories for such a context. The “noir” label generally is interesting that way – the term “film noir” was invented by a French critic in 1946 – and generally, French noir is considered as having peaked in the postwar era, as contrasted with American noir, whose heyday was in the 1940s. It’s true – there’s a whole batch of French noir in the prewar era, including the enormous Le Jour se lève, which I have rewatched just last week, as well Pierre Chenal’s 1939 screen adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice, which was the first adaptation of that seminal noir novel (the first American adaptation followed much later in 1946); there’s no denying the importance and centrality of post-war noir as a force in French and world culture, from the novels of Gallimard’s série noire, inaugurated in 1946, to the films of Jean-Pierre Melville and Jules Dassin. The war, also often implicit in these movies, is also a force in all of them, even clearer, in some ways, in the extremely political Italian noir of the 60s and 70s. Contrary to the usual noir lighting and cinematography, Alfred shifts the genre into the light – Come Prima is positively flooded with sunlight. Outside of that, I think the comic is engaged in a dialogue with the genre of film noir and its validity for our narratives of today. I went on and on about film noir because it’s not necessarily explicit in the comic – apart from the very noir beginning of the book.

But leaning heavily on the tradition of film noir allows Alfred to lightly touch on complex questions of masculinity in some vignettes here and there without having to play the scenes out to the end. The book begins by introducing the older brother, Fabio, a failed and failing boxer, who shies away from a steady job. The implications of boxing for discourses of masculinity are clear (Mailer, Oates), but most of the other scenes in the book deal with the issue as well. Fabio is visited by his younger brother Giovanni, who is asking him to come home to bury his father’s ashes, which Giovanni brought with him. We never meet the father in the book, but the whole tale is about dealing with father figures and one’s own relationship to maleness and fathers. Giovanni, as it turns out, is a father, as well, one who has abandoned his child. Fabio fights on the streets and in the ring to deal with insecurities and vulnerabilities. Even the few female characters are tied to fatherhood and masculinity, from Fabio’s girlfriend in the present, who tries to convince him to take a job with her father’s company, to Fabio and Giovanni’s adopted younger sister whom Fabio has never met. We are rushed through scenes and characters, with Alfred spending languid moments looking at landscapes or focusing on small moments rather than elaborately written scenes – but his reliance on genre means that he can do that without the whole thing feeling rushed. He plays with genre in other ways too – the memory passages are presented to us with increasing narrative detail – every time they return we come closer to some revelation – but when we finally know everything, the “revelation” is a minor detail, and instead of rushing towards some dark family secret, the passage of memory panels turns out to be a quest for a fullness of memory. There’s no secret at the end of this tunnel – at the end, this story is about being honest to yourself about why you have led the life you have, what your various failures mean within the context of your own life and that of your kin. And that, I think, also leads back to the forgetfulness of masculinity, and the erasure of history by the victorious and the virile.

This is particularly salient here because the period of rupture is the advent of fascism. What Alfred here does is extremely clever: he does not use fascism’s destruction of families as the point where this family breaks apart. That’s such a common narrative, but his point of departure is just before everything crashes down. Fabio and Giovanni’s father was a left wing unionist during fascism. He was beaten, broken, he saw friends being killed. In fact, adopting that girl is a direct result of these devastations. And yes, his son was on “the other side” – but not when these things happened. Fabio joined the black shirts as a young man in order to hurt his father and in order to belong to something different, something bigger. By making this narrative part of the novel’s general discussion of masculinity, he implicates the latter in the former – general narratives of masculinity in fascism. In the end, Fabio leaves for Africa and later France before fascism completely takes over, allowing Alfred to include this dark chapter of history but having his story be about more than that. The absent father and his values of cooperation, kindness, solidarity provide the moral background in a story that implicitly interrogates the value of Grand Personal Narratives that always focus on violence, women and alcohol. In the end, the past and the present fuse beautifully into a contemplation of life by Fabio who has always been on the run. “Come Prima” means “as before” – and while we know from Heraclit that we cannot live exactly as before, sometimes we need to return to our origins before we can begin again.

*

As always, if you feel like supporting this blog, there is a “Donate” button on the left and this link RIGHT HERE. 🙂 If you liked this, tell me. If you hated it, even better. Send me comments, requests or suggestions either below or via email (cf. my About page) or to my twitter.)

Kim Deal on stage

So I saw the Breeders in concert recently, which was quite exhilarating as an experience for a lifelong fan of the band who has never seen them on stage.

Mathias Enard: Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants

Heads up: this is not a review – I reviewed the novel on this blog in 2010. My review is here. I just want to draw attention to it as a brand new translation of the book, by Charlotte Mandel, a very good translator who also translated The Kindly Ones, is about to come out. So if you click on the link you’ll find my 2010 review of the book. As you can probably tell, I had a bit of a mixed opinion of the book. And it is still my least favorite Ènard. I do like it more today than I liked it then. And Énard is generally speaking a very good writer I think we all agree, more or less. And while this is not a new review, I have blogged a couple of new reviews over the past week. You can see all of them here. How did you like this book?

Jelinek on Stage

I went and saw a breathtaking production of Jelinek’s Winterreise on stage – a Viennese production on a stage in Cologne.

 

Lydia Millet: My Happy Life

Millet, Lydia (2002), My Happy Life, Holt
ISBN 978-0-8050-6846-7

So I have a lot of books in this apartment of mine, as I said yesterday. And this includes several books by whole writers. Those acquisitions were made on reputation alone (and usually favorable pricing situations). One such writer is Rachel Cusk. Another one is Lydia Millet. I own several of her books but haven’t read a single one. So I started with the one that seemed most obviously appealing to me from afar: the 2002 novel My Happy Life. This book is fascinating and absolutely brilliant – and it works with a naïve protagonist – or someone who prefers to tell their story as if they were one – and includes the resulting lacunae of details that are part of our stories and memories – the exactness of fact. Writing like this requires a stylistic discipline and a different exactness of detail that makes this kind of fiction extraordinarily hard to pull off. The easiest out is to use a child or a mentally ill person (or both), because that lets you off the hook in a lot of ways. The resultant bright eyed look at what is often a dark story can be effective, but has a whiff of gimmick about it. When it comes to mentally largely competent adults, the results are often a bit flat and boring or tired – and, most importantly, muddled. I think there’s a misunderstanding about these kinds of narratives. Just because someone doesn’t understand the world as we do, they are not looking at it through a mist. Children are extremely sharp observers.

What Millet pulls off in My Happy Life is a story about a woman who presents to us a world view that is more gentle than the common way we view the world, but she does this in layers and layers of observation, allowing us to see not only that her life is clearly anything but happy – in fact a continuous nightmare – but also how it has become what it is. At its core, it is about the female experience, or a female experience – how power and men grasp at the totality of womanhood – in its essential, basic elements: presentation, representation, self-reliance and biological reproduction. At every step of the way, society grasps at Lydia Millet’s protagonist and fucks her over, denying her agency, free will, and the most basic amount of empathy. In fact, that is what’s ultimately the toughest part about the book – all the men who are unable or unwilling or both to provide some empathy for this put-upon, strong, resilient woman. Why not say your life was “happy” if saying otherwise does not have any advantages among people socialized as men, or socialized to support or defend men. The exactness of detail and style throughout this book is nothing short of brilliant. Millet pulls from multiple registers, uses them all expertly, has always complete mastery of plot, dialogue, and the empire of signs that constitute our reality. In a blurb on the back, someone calls it a “dreamy whirl” – but there’s nothing dream-like about it. Millet’s protagonist may not call a spade a spade, but she describes the spade extremely well, and the distance from what she describes with utmost realism to the name she uses for it has its own literary function.

I mean, before I melt further into this puddle of praise, here’s what the book is about: it is the bildungsroman of a woman who grew up in an orphanage and ended up locked in an empty, abandoned former mental hospital. Her present situation is the framing narrative, that’s where we begin and end. We also stop there in between. From her cell in the mental hospital, she tells us about her life. Her happy life that begins in an abusive orphanage. There are things you don’t think at the beginning that become really clear towards the end of the book – everything in this novel is anchored to wider literary discourses, talks to a broader tradition of literature, a very Irigaray kind of project, overall. So this orphanage is also, of course, all the other orphanages and all their other orphans. And reading it this way recasts various characters in her novel in a different light. The bully – because each bildungsroman set in an orphanage has this morality play about masculinity in it and early fights to persist – here is simply allowed to do what he must, and the woman lets him do that for his own good. Nobody stops him, nobody asks about the beatings and their physical traces on the young girl – things just happen. What the protagonist is taught is how to apologize. She learns to say “excuse me.” She learns to cloak things in a different light. She learns that if she speaks up, if she steps out of line, she will be blamed. At school she is raped – and as a punishment, she’s kicked out of school. She attempts suicide a bunch of times, attempts for which she is punished. She is assaulted and abused by various boys and men early in her life – and that’s how she learns to look at things from a brighter side – it makes things more bearable. These are just a handful of pages that I am summarizing in such detail because what Millet does is a recasting of the common theme of orphanage abuse into the situation of a female protagonist who cannot expect empathy from her readers – much as she cannot expect empathy from people around her. Millet shows how these narratives curdle into terror when you change parts of them.

I mean the Irigaray-like “mirror” is one thing, but My Happy Life reads throughout like a conversation with various feminist theories. But it’s also a critique of pure intellectualism – the protagonist’s pain and trauma are things she learns from – and constructs a view of reality that seems disturbing. Early on she calls abusers “warriors” who “will not be stopped by skin” because “they want to catch the soul. They think that souls are heart and bone, residing in a certain place, and can be known by traveling.” She closes with a declaration of love for the abuser du jour and as a reader you have a couple of options here in how to parse this. One thing is off the table – the naivete of the uneducated, the simple of mind and brain. Throughout her life, Millet’s protagonist is seen reading books. It’s never specifically stressed, but unflaggingly mentioned, in all parts of her life, the protagonist is reading books. She’s clearly not stupid – nor uneducated in a practical sense. What Millet presents to us, instead, is the uselessness of pure knowledge. The protagonist’s knowledge is also embodied – how you deal with the world and how the world deals with you. Much later, the novel’s doublespeak is given a different analogy: on a Polynesia-sounding island (“huts on stilts”?) she learns various words in the local language and reflects on the distance between words, meaning and representation. And as we move from orphanage and school to various phases of her adulthood, Millet engages in similar doublespeak of her own, giving us examples of different power structures that we easily recognize, from capitalism to imperialism, and equating them to the abuse of patriarchy, which the early sections of the book taught us about. This, we learn, is all related – the abuse of power taken by men is replicated in the abuse of power in capitalism, which is replicated in imperialism. This is like that, and the protagonist moves through all of it until she ends up, for no good reason, in a mental hospital. She does acquire occasional problems, but when she describes what could be a delusion, and someone takes her literary, she corrects her interlocutor: this is just a figure of speech. So much for naivete.

And she undergoes all of this explicitly as a woman. Her attempts to find a job land her jobs as a maid and a cleaner. She is repeatedly raped, for a good portion of the book she is continuously raped by an industrialist who keeps her locked up and takes some kind of whip to her body that ends up covering her whole body in scars. This section reminded me of another book I meant to review. Stephen Graham Jones’s book The Least of My Scars is a masterpiece of thriller writing, about a serial killer who is completely without remorse. He is kept as a kind of pet in a house by some rich guy who hand delivers his victims to him and, one assumes, takes his pleasure from that. Like Millet, Jones’s style is masterfully precise, but the obscurities are different, what Jones does is invert externalities into this small apartment, rewriting serial killer narratives, inscribing them into the walls and architecture of one house. Jones uses various serial killer tropes and shifts them around. I should have reviewed that book first, however, since reading Millet makes me see what Jones doesn’t really touch: gender. Women in his book are objects – objects to be murdered (The Least of My Scars is extremely graphically violent), but also objects to be owned. There is an interesting differentiation he makes, but it pales when compared to My Happy Life – the various rooms and enclosures of Millet’s book mirror the rooms and enclosures from literary history, and as much as Jones condenses typical narratives, and violently savages the assumptions of interior monologue and serial killer psychology with his protagonist who has no inner life, his novel stretches into the psychology of those around him – but not into the women. Millet’s protagonist is colonialized top to bottom, from her psychology to her womb. In something of a particularly dark part of the novel, she gives birth to a son, who is then taken away from her. So maybe there’s another similarity between Jones’s book and Millet’s – Jones’s serial killer protagonist uses all parts of his victims in his acts – and Millet’s protagonist is used completely, by a patriarchal society that has no respect or patience for those among it who are assigned female at birth – and immediately, like Millet’s protagonist, shunted into the machine of patriarchy, capitalism and imperialism. That Millet connects all this to a mental hospital suggests that we should interrogate the nature of trauma, oppression and mental health.

*

As always, if you feel like supporting this blog, there is a “Donate” button on the left and this link RIGHT HERE. 🙂 If you liked this, tell me. If you hated it, even better. Send me comments, requests or suggestions either below or via email (cf. my About page) or to my twitter.)

Cockroaches and Books

So I have a lot of books in this apartment of mine, they are sprouting like a malignant plant and God knows there are many, many unread one – it’s not just a museum of The Things I Have Read, I keep buying books like a meth addict. And sometimes there are whole writers whose work I have surreptitiously acquired in bits and pieces but never gotten around to read. I don’t know how long I will have to wait to shuffle off my mortal coil but while I am forced to stick around, I keep digging into these shelves, adding things, replacing things, reading, reading, reading. I have no real prejudice when it comes to genre, though I obviously have strong opinions when it comes to quality. My books are in three languages, the three I read most easily, German, English and French, though I have a small brace of Russian books here. As I type that last sentence, I am left to wonder whether I have written this prose piece before, whether I have forgotten that I wrote it, whether my life or my memory of it which, ultimately, is the same thing, have folded in on each other again. My memory is notoriously bad. I write about books here so as not to forget. Between the ages of 14 and 25 I had read Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” more than 6 times, as somehow, the previous readings had left no permanent imprint in my brain – and I was delighted again, every time. Sometimes I have a memory of some text or voice and it sits in some recess of my brain like an angry, cornered rat, attacking my present thinking. That is another reason to keep all these books around; I can get up and pick books off the shelves until I find the text whose ghostly memory haunted whatever I was presently reading. But primarily, these books are not about the present or the past – they are about the folds of future possibilities. These malignant plants that have taken over all the walls in this apartment and some of the floors and night stands and window sills they are the texts and books that I might read in whatever time I have left remaining. So I write and write and write, a poem or an essay per day and I read from these books, these walls of paper and how could I ever switch to ebooks: my life is here, printed and bound and sorted onto shelves. It cannot be deleted with a push of a button and neither can I. Like a cockroach, i stick around.

Reading on the roof

Jakob Nolte: Schreckliche Gewalten

Nolte, Jakob (2017), Schreckliche Gewalten, Matthes & Seitz
ISBN 978-3-95757-400-8

So I complain about translation a lot here, and if you’re following this blog, I’m sure you’re a little bit tired of it, but among the whining about infidelity, and cheating the reader etc. there is another effect that is a bit underrated. Jakob Nolte’s subpar but interesting sophomore novel Schreckliche Gewalten is a good example of that. Here’s the thing: I love Thomas Pynchon’s work to a frankly upsetting degree, but his work suffers from the same problem that other Americans also have in German translation. It’s depth of style. Somehow, in the 1960s, German translators decided that in order to give German audiences a real feeling of “Americanness” in style, there had to be a certain ease of style too, a certain “Americanness,” if you will. Which leads to some writers like Saul Bellow or Philip Roth to read much less stylistically complex than they do in English. I’m not here to debate the literary value of Bellow or Roth, but, missteps aside, it’s inarguable that they were, on a sentence by sentence level, quite excellent prose writers. They don’t read like that in German, on a sentence by sentence level. And postmodern writers like Barth and Pynchon fared even worse. Pynchon can be quite a knotty writer of prose, and for a long time, translations did not reflect the complexities of his style. But generation on generation of writers grew up on his books in translation. Gravity’s Rainbow, for example, was translated by none other than Elfriede Jelinek – Pynchon’s books had the imprimatur of literary royalty, whatever the details of style. But if you are a young man whose literary proclivities lead him down the path of postmodernity, there’s a chance you won’t just have structural debts to the writers that inspired you – you’ll also have stylistic debts. And while Jakob Nolte is clearly a well read author who very clearly has a solid command of English, the most striking thought I had while reading his novel was – how it read like a poor man’s Pynchon in terms of structure, but nothing in any way like Pynchon in terms of style – and honestly, I think I blame translation for this.

But to get to the actual book at hand. Schreckliche Gewalten did very well when it came out, it was longlisted for the German Book Award, and, given the slightness of the text he read, it was likely on the strengths of the novel that Nolte was invited to the Bachmannpreis this year. And I will be honest – I did not go into the book wanting to like it. The first pages were such a drag, after the explosive early events that I dreaded reading the whole thing. But I did – and it wasn’t such an awful torture. It never improves regarding the quality of its prose, but Nolte does a few very interesting things with – not structure per se, but the way he sequences narrative passages. He moves in and out of pastiche, half the text is metafiction, the other half mixes other kinds of narrative. There’s a fascinating energy in this novel, and this may sound strange but while I don’t know that I would recommend the actual novel to anyone, I strongly recommend a translator have a look at the text and consider translating it. There is something captivating about Nolte’s book, its turns and twist keep you engaged as a reader – and while I advocate fidelity in translation, a less ethical translator could shift the quality of Nolte’s prose a bit upwards and the result would be an absolutely solid book. Honestly, Schreckliche Gewalten is quite a ride, a messy book, but I do enjoy messy books, this just isn’t, au fond, very good. In many ways, this is “precociously brilliant young man” territory, flirting with the so called polymath novelists like the late David Foster Wallace or the great Joshua Cohen. But both Cohen’s and DFW’s prose is excellent – and Nolte’s isn’t, which keeps bringing me back, like a bad-taste boomerang, to the first paragraph. What’s more, the prose is so low-key that despite the plethora of voices and quotes and paraphrases populating the novel, there’s a sense of a single specific voice behind the text – and it’s like that dude at the party who needs to explain to you why Star Trek: TNG was the best Star Trek and why Star Trek Discovery isn’t a real Star Trek show, and then he explains to you why The Wire was the pinnacle of prestige TV and why Elon Musk is right about [fill in any social issue]. That dude, you know, who begins most of his sentences with “well, actually” and appears to know a lot, but it’s mostly surface level sub-wikipedia chatter, with blind spots that you can attribute to specific bias fairly easily.

I mean, I don’t know. Maybe I should first say what the book is about: a mother turns into a werewolf, eats the father. She tells her children that once a generation, a gene carrying this disorder activates. So that would mean one of the children is doomed – except they are twins. They then deal differently with the issue – the sister stays at home while the brother travels abroad. In the end – sorry for spoiling you, both turn. My primary association was with Tournier’s masterful Les Météores (incidentally, how did the academy hand out TWO Nobel Prizes to French novelists while Tournier was alive and did not give one to him?) – but Nolte has less interest in the human condition. For Nolte, everything has a metafictional tie to narratology or typology. But he doesn’t stop there in his structuring – his twins, a boy and a girl – are separated on a gendered basis. There’s a good and a bad reason for that. The good reason is a discoursive one. It allows him to discuss feminism, by having the girl become part of a radical feminist group, and be engaged in mild acts of domestic terrorism, before getting caught up in other parts of 1970s radicalism and upping the ante. The boy meanwhile travels to Afghanistan, following typical male narratives of adventuring. While both children are sexually active, this, too follows typical patterns. There is a metadiscursive, critical element here – the gendered structure reflects and spotlights the gendered narratives that so many of the texts the book is built of are filled with. At the same time, Nolte keeps on doing this page after page, chapter after chapter to the point where you’re wondering how critical this is. He invents a female killer who is out to kill the mother, but instead begins an affair with the female twin. He writes sex scenes that are badly written porn manuscripts, and then “flips” them to show us clichés embedded in them, but these “flips” which he does a few times are so ineffective, and so transparently “clever” in a self satisfied way that they begin to grate.

Everything about the novel begins to grate at some point. There is a clever use of ethnicity, and a similar narratological use of problematic discourses on race and imperialism, but after a hundred pages of the same patterns repeating again and again, one tires of this too, and becomes maybe a tad suspicious of this blonde white young man who revels in his amusing games with fictionality and race. Particularly since he’s such a bad writer. There’s another thing. Pynchon’s best books are not just written in a dense, erudite prose, they are also endlessly inventive. Of the 350 pages here, Nolte manages to keep about 150 at a greater pace. Those 150 pages, in the middle, are where the book is most entertaining – he switches perspectives suddenly, moves in and out of characters and narratives, explains historical or invented literary facts, with just the tiniest hint of Vilas-Matas to make it just enjoyable enough – but he takes a bit to get going and runs out of steam towards the end. Everything, truly everything about this book screams “debut novel by precocious 19 year old Wunderkind novelist” – but while he’s young (*1988), he’s not that young, and this is not his debut.

And if he’s not a 19 year old Wunderkind novelist with his debut novel – what is this? My gut feeling early in the book that never really left me blames German translations of and reception of writers like Pynchon, DFW or Barthelme. This is what happens if an influential book or writer is only partially presented to their readers – as a maker of plots, say. I am sure that some of the influence of Dostoevsky, whose uneven, rough style is not always translated accurately as uneven and rough (again, German translations may be among the worst) can be charted similarly. I have also wondered whether the way Japanese and Latin American writers of late postmodernist periods have been translated into English has shaped certain stylistic pecularities of very literary young contemporary writers. But that’s only tangentially related to Schreckliche Gewalten. The book is too enjoyable in the middle to be really bad. But nobody in their right mind would call it good. At best, in its best moments, it is an interesting mess. At its worst, it is boring and boorish. Those two sides of it are not well balanced – which, in a novel about twins is, possibly, its own metafictional commentary. It doesn’t improve the book, however.

*

As always, if you feel like supporting this blog, there is a “Donate” button on the left and this link RIGHT HERE. 🙂 If you liked this, tell me. If you hated it, even better. Send me comments, requests or suggestions either below or via email (cf. my About page) or to my twitter.)

#tddl: the winner is…

On Sunday, the winners of the four prizes plus the audience award were announced. Yes, that’s right, I’m a bit late. Sue me.

If you feel you need to catch up with what’s happened over the three days of readings – and I recommend you do take a gander – here is my summary of Day One., a day about whiteness and the blindness of writers and judges in the face of it. Here is my summary of Day Two, a day mostly about mediocrity and the praise it can elicit if it is narrowly tailored to MFA standards (in this country: Literaturinstitut (see this review). And finally, here is my summary of Day Three, a day which saw the competition’s best text by a country mile, and one of its worst and if you’re still completely lost as to what the hell is going on, here is my general post about this year’s event. If you want, you can read all the texts here, though you should hurry, they won’t be online forever.

The five winners

So on Sunday, the venerable judges voted in a dramatic fashion. The day was full of surprises. You know what wasn’t a surprise? That the best text, a brilliant reckoning with Germany’s post-reunifaction history of violence, Özlem Dündar’s text in four voices, did not win. It didn’t even come in second, not until Bjerg’s MFA-by-numbers meditation on fatherhood and sad white men had its place in the spotlight.. Last year’s decision to sideline the politically interesting texts for Schmalz’s solid, but politically empty monologue was, as it turned out, a sign O’ the times. At least this year’s winner, Tanja Maljartschuk’s text, was very good, and sharp enough in focus and moral clarity, likely the second best text in a field that was, overall, stronger than last year’s.

Indeed, of the five texts I personally considered best, my three favorite texts also won three awards. Only Corinna T. Sievers, whose sharp text about womanhood, sex and the struggles of addiction confounded the judges, and Ally Klein, whose text about anxiety and panic attacks, a text which I would not have properly understood without help myself, went unrewarded.

The five writers as I would have liked them to win

Dündar did win an award – the third place Kelag award. And Raphaela Edelbauer won an audience award. Regrettably, the second and fourth place awards went to Bov Bjerg and Anna Stern respectively. I want to talk about these for a moment: most observers of the voting that led to Anna Stern award saw judges changing their vote, voting tactically – because here’s what almost happened: Joshua Groß’s bad text almost won, because Klaus Kastberger suffered some kind of mental breakdown and kept throwing his hat in the ring for Groß’s text which was politically and literarily dubious.

It was stunnning. I could not believe it – but in the end the explanation is simple enough. Despite women winning the majority of this year’s awards, the structure of the Bachmannpreis favors men. The reason women did well this year (unlike last year, for example) is that Edelbauer, Dündar and Tanja Maljartschuk have written texts that are generally considered among the best texts, across the board. Nobody could have excluded those three texts from awards. But that a mediocre writer of MFA or Literaturinstitut pabulum like Bov Bjerg not only gets praised , but also takes home an award at least three women would have deserved more, is a sign of a certain tolerance of white male mediocrity – or rather, a certain critical appreciation for a tone and style of writing, a nonchalant irrelevance.

Indeed, Kastberger compounded his sad performance when he praised Bjerg as one of the most relevant German writers of our time – which, if true, is a horrible indictment of contemporary German literature. Honestly, I don’t think it’s true, but it’s instructive that this is where Kastberger’s brain went, this is his category for Bjerg – and maybe that also explains his support for Joshua Groß. Important Male Novelist – a category he leaped to defend.

There’s another little nugget that turned up in the award’s aftermath: Anselm Neft, whose text used slurs and appropriated the voice of a socially weaker person with a language of cliché and stereotype that aimed for effect rather than depth, went on a Facebook rant about a critical voice on Twitter. He defended his use of that language and slurs and assembled a crowd of angry Germans who agreed with him. That crowd contained almost every signifcant participant in the #tddl-discussion on Twitter, plus some of the judges. Everybody agreed that it should be fine to use slurs against Roma and stupid, biased or cowardly to complain about this minor matter. Interestingly, among his supporters appear to be people involved in running the award: in the comments, he noted that someone had told him that he had only barely lost out on the audience voting, which Raphaela Edelbauer had ended up winning.

The whole sorry affair both underlined why texts like Dündar’s that critically interrogate German narratives have a steep hill to climb to win an award like this one, and why writers like Neft and Bjerg will for the foreseeable future have a shortcut to such honors. There’s no topic like the vague sadness of adult white men to win awards. That’s been true for decades, and at least on the basis of this year’s TDDL, it still appears to be true.

#tddl: Day Three: The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

Things are coming to an end. Day Three closed the active portion of the Bachmannpreis with a thoroughly interesting set of texts. Tomorrow prizes will be awarded. At least one of today’s writers should win one, as we have seen the best text of the competition (as well as one of the worst) but we’ll get to that. Meanwhile, here is my summary of Day One. Here is my summary of Day Two. Here is my general post about the event. If you want, you can read all the texts here. The writers today were Jakob Nolte, Stephan Groetzner, Özlem Özgül Dündar and Lennardt Loß.

It was a short day, and not overall as annoying as some previous days – apart from one very bad text, there were two meh texts, one fantastic text, I did not run out of white wine and also I took a nap which is always lovely.

Jakob Nolte, whose novel I’ll review soonish, started the day with a story that seems a bit boring and written slightly sloppily, but upon reading his novel it appears to be written in – his style, I guess? That does not make it good though – it was mostly boring and uninteresting. A couple of crooked metaphors, odd grammatical choices etc. It’s a perfect middle-of-the-road text. Not good enough or bad enough to create excitement, but after day one started with death, and day two started with anal sex, starting day three with a mostly meaningless story about a woman on a beach wasn’t such a bad change of pace. The racial politics of the text were a bit dubious, but so is Nolte’s work generally. His novel uses various people of color to provide meaning and depth to the tale of ethnically German twins born in Norway, which is the whitest possible constellation. In comparison, the story wasn’t that bad.

In a sense the whole day was slowly building to Dündar’s excellent text, as the second writer, Stephan Groetzner, produced a humorous, clever and satiric text about – look, I’m not entirely sure. The text was partially set in Moldova and in Austria, and in its Moldovan sections it sidestepped the usual German tendency of filling these texts up with local color that always feels at best a bit exploitative (see Nolte, Jacob) and at worst a bit racist (see Neft, Anselm). Instead, the text was filled with Austrian terms – from local Austrian myths to Austrian vocabulary – specifically signposting his intentions by having models in Moldova have vegetable based nicknames, all of which were words that only exist in the Austrian variety of German. Groetzner is German, and this rubbed Klaus Kastberger the wrong way – mind you, this is the same Klaus Kastberger, who last year listened to a story about service personnel of color – and urged us to re-learn how to deal with servants.

Thank God the next text was brilliant. Özlem Özgul Dündar presented a brilliant text. A chorus of mothers, echoing various writers from the German tradition (I particularly heard Jelinek, but I am biased) presented the facts and emotions around an unnamed calamity, where neo-fascists burned down a house inhabited by foreigners. The most likely reference is to the 1993 Solingen arson attack, but other elements appear to be referencing other arson attacks that happened at the same time. I say “neo-nazis” but the people involved in the Solingen attack were largely “normal” young men, some with solid background. And in other arson attacks, like the one in Rostock-Lichtenhagen, which happened around the same time, a whole mob joined the attackers. Dündar’s story touches on many of these beats, and also provides a harrowing and moving account of what it feels like to have been there, to have died there, to have survived it. Her textual means were precisely attuned to the needs of the material – and while the text was presented as prose, it showed the author’s background in playwriting and poetry. An enormous text – slighly marred by some of the reception, as some of the judges, in particular Michael Wiederstein, who grew up near SOlingen, appeared to have no great interest in neo-nazis.

There’s a weird thing in Germany where this country has an obsession with Nazis in the period between 1933 and 1945, but attempts to blank out the topic of Nazis after that period, especially Nazis that were born after the war, or even later. That explains why Wiederstein, Mr. No Historical Memory of Events Happening After 1990, invited Lennardt Loß, whose awful, awful text, an excerpt from a very likely lamentably awful novel, is centered around an old Nazi (a “real” Nazi) and someone who was part of the RAF, the left wing terrorism that was particularly active in the 1970s in Germany. There are so many distasteful things about the text, from the dumb use of parallel guilt between someone supporting the RAF and an actual Nazi – but the text itself, with its stilted dialogue, miserable prose and misshapen structure, was almost as offensive on a purely aesthetic level. Loß, with no particular interest in history outside of Wikipedia entries ended day three on a bad note.

I mean it’s a fool’s game to predict the jury but Dündar’s text was so goddamn good that only a moron wouldn’t vote for it to win, but we’ll see.

#tddl: Day Two: The Unbearable Whiteness of Being Boring

If you follow this blog you are likely not fluent enough in German to have followed the Bachmannpreis livestream (see my post about the event) so here is a brief summary of how day two (of three) went. The writers who read today were, in this order: Corinna T. Sievers, Ally Klein, Tanja Maljartschuk, Bov Bjerg and Anselm Neft. . You can read all the texts here, if you are so inclined. For a summary of the first day click here.

The day started with a text about a nymphomaniac female dentist, in a story by Corinna T. Sievers. With a few exceptions here and there, Sievers’s style was exceptionally clear and sharp, mostly, again, with a few exceptions, allowing the writer to modulate events and tone with some ease. Oh, and the story was largely pornographic. The scene ends on a slowly and carefully described blow job, performed by the dentist on one of her patients. This was not a surprise. In the novels I’d previously read of hers, explicit sex scenes were the rule rather than the exception. But it’s worth a closer look. These are novels about child abuse (in fact, two out of three novels broach the topic), crime, alcoholism, dysphoria. Two out of the three feature middle aged female protagonists who are struggling with the pressures and expectations placed on them in some way or another. To note one in particular, the widely acclaimed novel Maria Rosenblatt: it takes up the stucture and language of crime novels, with frightening ease, and inverts many of its assumptions. How does the story change if we turn the boozing detective who fucks around into a woman? How do other elements of the story have to stretch and adapt? Reviews of the book all mention its sexual explicitness – by comparison, just among the books I reviewed this week – I can assure you, despite the incredible flood of penises in Stephan Lohse’s novel, no review focused on the homoerotic or queer centering of male genitalia – we’re used to dick, as described by dudes. So far, each novel makes specific, different use of the explicit sexuality that appears to be Sievers’s hallmark – so if this writer is so clever what’s the point with the story as presented at the Bachmann-Preis? To understand you have to look at the complicated history of the Bachmannpreis. In the very first instalment, in 1977, Karin Struck presented a story involving female bodily functions and was severely upbraided by one of the critics: nobody is interested in the thoughts of a woman who menstruates! By contrast, a few years later, Urs Allemann took an award home with a story about a man who admits his pleasure in sleeping with infants. And there is one more possible contextual allusion: in her introduction, Sievers mentions Martin Walser as a writer she admires. On the one hand, yuck! On the other hand, a few hours after the reading, I had to think of the year Walser’s daughter, Alissa, presented a half-incestuous atory about a woman who uses her father’s money to purchase sex and then talks to him about it. Walser also took home an award – with a story that had possible autobiographical implications. Now, Sievers is, by profession, a dentist, and choosing to present a story about dentistry, when she had not done so in any of her previous novels, seems strategic, implicating her audience in the performance in a way that she could not have done with a written story. Her slow, strangely paced reading contributes to that theory. And there’s more: the reaction to the text, particularly by the male jurors, some of whom, like Klaus Kastberger, joked that they would want to get an appointment at her practice, “though we should talk about the price,” appears to have justified most of her literary choices. The story, much like Raphaela Edelbauer’s story that opened the first day, had significant problems, but, like Edelbauer’s text, on balance more good things than bad things and in my opinion had been the second best text presented at the competition thus far.

This assessment didn’t change after the second text of the day, an excerpt from a forthcoming novel by Ally Klein. Klein’s story did not appear to be any good – bad imagery, a surfeit of adjectives, flabby structure, more like a pile of excited descriptions than a serious piece of fiction. But as I browsed twitter, I came across a series of tweets by Sarah Wipauer, a writer who suffers from periodical and incapacitating panic attacks and as a sufferer of this affliction. She immediately recognized the symptoms in Ally Klein’s text. She was not just moved to tears, but brilliantly explained how the very deficient seeming nature of the text, like its images and adjectives and banal seeming prose was actually further evidence of its literary treatment of specific symptoms, and what seemed vague and imprecise was, in reality a well-made, precise text about this particular affliction.

The morning was brought to a close by a story by Tanja Maljartschuk. Maljartschuk has published multiple award-winning novels in Ukrainian – she has never published a longer narrative originally written in German. That said, her story was absolutely enjoyable. The most classically written story so far, written with professional routine, it is a story about a migrant who is constantly in danger of being picked up by the police, and an older woman with dementia. Their paths cross, as a strange combination of acts takes place, in a scene of biblical and literary allusion, the protagonist steals some money from the old lady, but ends up washing her feet, as he is, at the story’s end, arrested, with certain doom in his future. The benign theft has echoes of two texts in particular – there’s the encounter of Bishop Myriel and Jean Valjean in Hugo’s classic novel – and a sequence of scenes from Clemens Meyer’s debut novel Als wir träumten, where a whole group of impoverished, disillusioned young men steal from an older woman, but also take care of her, in a strange sense of symbiosis between two disadvantaged groups. Much as in Lohse’s racist text from yesterday, this echo connects racial and class issues, but unlike Lohse, Maljartschuk connects the two levels with skill and ease. If anything, the story is too well made, hiding its skill under a clear, startling veneer. By far the best story of the competition so far.

The two afternoon readings were kicked off by Bov Bjerg. I don’t have a ton to say about this one, in part because my initial and also my second impression are/were wildly at odds with the audience reaction on Twitter and the jury’s enthusiastic reaction. I’ll write a review of his bestselling novel Auerhaus one of these days and will use the opportunity to go into more detail. What it is, is a very well made story about a father and a son, about depression and the fear of your child inheriting your own suicidal ideation. I may not understand panic attacks, but boy do I understand that fear. I want no child of mine to grow up suffering as I did and do. And on some days that does translate to: I want no child(ren). That said, the story is incredibly flat and boring and banal – incredibly so. It’s not its simplicity. I love well made simplicity. But I think the right comparison here is with the Maljartschuk story that preceded it. Both texts were well made, but while the achievement of Maljartschuk’s story is that of an experienced writer who has worked on their craft – the “well-made” aspect of Bov Bjerg text is that of MFA-taught well made writing. I have complained about the MFA-taught slickness before, particularly about the two major MFA mills in Germany, the Literaturinstituts in Leipzig and Hildesheim. I believe that the positive reaction to the story and the inability to see the exceptionally formulaic nature of its achievement (in other words, it’s literally institutionally well-made not literarily well made) is connected to the way the literary critical system in this country is set up – with Leipzig and Hildesheim producing a specific kind of writing, influencing the critics’s sense of the literary field – and in turn, the critics’s expectations shaping what is taught as a “well-made story” in Leipzig and Hildesheim. In a sense, this story was made for this stage, in a terribly boring cercle vicieux. This is not a bad story by any means, just an awfully dull one, the wrong kind of well made, with a fundamental expectation of universality that is typical of white men, which is why the lack of diversity this year is such a problem.

At least with the day’s final story, written and presented by Anselm Neft, we were back on more reliably German ground, as Neft appropriated the experience of marginalized people, used racist slurs against Roma, absolutely crowded his text with clichés and sloppy prose, and was generally not so much an embarrassment to the proceedings, but a solid representation of a year of this award with the largest percentage of German writers of recent years (Edelbauer was the only Austrian writer on the list this year). I admit, reader, I fell asleep during the story. I reread it later, but honestly, it wasn’t even offensive enough to keep yours truly awake.

Tomorrow’s group of writers is odd. I have no sense of who I really want to win the award. Tomorrow starts with Jakob Nolte, whose well received last novel is actually pretty bad (review forthcoming), and Stephan Groetzner, who reads exceptionally obnoxiously. God knows.

+

#tddl: Day One, the Great White Nope

If you follow this blog you are likely not fluent enough in German to have followed the Bachmannpreis livestream (see my post about the event) so here is a brief summary of how day one (of three) went. The writers who read today were, in this order: Raphaela Edelbauer, Martina Clavadetscher, Stephan Lohse, Anna Stern and Joshua Groß. You can read all the texts here, if you are so inclined.

The day began with the writer I was most excited to see. Not because I thought it was the best writer in the competition, but because Raphaela Edelbauer‘s book is such a lovely accomplishment and yet I had no idea how she’d approach the writing of fiction proper. One of her book’s strengths is a sense of how the languages of fiction and science and history are connected – and in her text she achieved much of the same thing. A text that ended up being about the terrors of history implicated both science and the people who partake in it. How we deal with nature and how we deal with our fellow human beings – at the same time, the parts of the text that were fiction proper were not nearly as good as the nonfiction sections. Edelbauer does not have a mastery of the first person narrative yet – indeed most disappointingly, she does not bring the same attention and care to the first person fiction narrative that she brings to the nonfictional work. The prose in the latter is multifaceted and complex, while her first person narrative frequently falls flat. The text overall had a curiously conservative and polished feel despite the author’s young age – the skill in the nonfictional passages still meant that the text ended up being an above average achievement. What a way to start the day!

Particularly since the second author of the day was Martina Clavadetscher, whose novel I loved, and who brought prize winning cachet to the competition. Her text, on the printed page, looked like her novel, short, poetry-like lines, and occasionally poetry-like rhythms and small rhymes even. In the early goings, her text about death and the predicaments of the female experience, was dense with well turned phrases and potential. Quite soon, the text flattened out into – I guess, boredom? As it turns out, Clavadetscher appears lost in the short form – she was unable to impose any kind of real structure on the text, which meandered from paragraph to paragraph. On the way to the end it shed all of the well turned phrases from its beginning and picked up a large assortment of empty clichés. A big disappointment.

Stephan Lohse’s text on the other hand – hoo boy. Lohse’s debut novel, published last year, had an underlying, but underdeveloped queer narrative that was among the strongest points of that otherwise middle of the road coming of age novel. His story is about two poor marginalized white boys – and as in his novel, he has a very good handle on the male teenage experience. The best part of the story is an interesting though underdeveloped queer facet. There’s a twist here though – the main character identifies with Congolese revolutionary Patrice Lumumba – although in a key paragraph of the novel Lohse complicates this and it’s worth explaining in detail: when during a class discussion children pick who they want to be when they grow up, he answers “black.” His teacher – the only non authorial voice of authority in the text – defends him against the derision of his fellow students: being black isn’t about the color of your skin, it’s about how you feel on the inside, whether you are “dem Wesen nach ein Schwarzer” – whether you are a black man on the inside. Like some nightmare James Schuyler had in the 1930s, that’s that in the story. The rest of the story is split between a conversation between the two boys and infodumps about the life of Patrice Lumumba. At its core the story is a story about marginality and struggling with marginality by appropriating the language and experience of another race, but the author never undercuts the basic assertion of the teacher in the story – and is unpleasantly comfortable with giving the boy, who just goes by Lumumba, numerous lines where they boy uses a form of Bantu as a way to fill in the gaps of his white experience.

But while authors can be blind to these kinds of faults in their work, the panel of literary professionals that judged him should have seen and noted the issues. Nora Gomringer came closest by noting that the story is a bit delicate (“heikel”). As for the other judges, they continued their sterling performance from years past by just sailing past the racial or even, really, class issues of the text. New judge Insa Wilke even saw this text as a significant contribution in a current progressive conversation about race – and if you believe that I have a racially dubious bridge to sell you. But as it turns out, her own invitee had his own problems in this regard.

First however, after the much needed break, was Anna Stern. Her first novel was a mess of names and structure, and though her second book was much clearer and more readable, her text was a messy, unstructured chaos that read like a first draft in literally every single sentence. Most of the audience on twitter admitted to being confused, although in text we did not pass, riverrun, past Eve’s and Adam, but merely through the crucible of a text of modest means and no proofreader.

The day was brought to a close by Joshua Groß. I had previously read three of his books though not reviewed here. Groß’s writing is an update on 1990s pop writing, particularly on the German tradition of the writers around Christian Kracht. Groß uses ironically refracted misogyny and an affected lightness of tone and inconsistently applied contemporary references to write a pop cultural tableau without the depth of his forebears. In his 2014 novella Magische Rosinen, his protagonist is a “rapper” who travels to Brooklyn a lot – he’s no Patrice Lumumba, but there’s an uncomfortable sense here of a white bourgeois writer of enormous privilege to use the terms of black culture to fill in the margins of an ultimately meaningless contemporary identity in our social media age. And it’s not just Groß – young privileged white German writers have seized on this moment to explain why they feel so uprooted. Simon Strauß, Botho Strauß’s son, has just published a novel about youthful nihilism that veered – like its author – sharply right. Strauß, like his father, has written a book and essays that align him with the rise of the far right in all areas of German cultural and political life. Joshua Groß’s project – such as it is – appears different, but it’s only different to a point. He’s also very happy to work on shaping white German identity by means of appropriation – and as some of Christian Kracht’s career has shown, the line between this kind of party nihilism and right wing celebration is a precarious one.

I haven’t even mentioned the actual text Groß read yet, but it’s a forgettable riff on American culture, particularly on mechanisms and events surrounding an NBA game in Miami. The text is replete, as all of Groß’s work, with misogynist staples and clichés etc etc etc. The most notable part of it is the defence of the text by Insa Wilke, the judge who invited the author to read. Wilke appears to believe the text is cutting edge, giving a much-needed update on 1984’s panopticon. In doing so, she not only ignores Thomas Mathiesen’s 1997 coinage of the synopticon in his classic essay “The Viewer Society” (and its web 2.0 updates, for example Doyle 2011), but also literally the whole body of pop literature and the body of work of writers like William Gibson and many others. It’s baffling, but it is evidence that the Bachmannpreis, over the past years, has turned into a search for the Great White (literary) Hope, and the racially troubling texts in the last three years are no accident, and the praise for texts like Lohse’s and writers like Groß isn’t either.

Raphaela Edelbauer’s text is the best of the bunch so far, but apparently, Lohse is the frontrunner. I mean who the fuck knows.

Raphaela Edelbauer: Entdecker: eine Poetik

Edelbauer, Raphaela (2017), Entdecker- Eine Poetik, Klever
ISBN 978-3-903110-13-7

Raphaela Edelbauer is the writer I am most excited to see at this year’s Bachmannpreis. The only book of hers I have read is the magnificent Entdecker – Eine Poetik, a book about writing that is filled, absolutely filled to the brim with unexpected images, with fresh words, with humor and brimming with insights and clarity. If you are a translator, you should absolutely sit down and translate this book. Edelbauer is among the younger writers in this competition, but her book is heads and shoulders above the work of many of her fellow competitors.

Entdecker draws on Edelbauer’s own prodigious sense of language, on a sense of story and narrative – tied into the languages of science and discovery. She moves from Humboldt to Wittgenstein and Auerbach with an ease that is almost depressing. The first section, a “beastiary,” reads a bit like Ken Liu’s Nebula-nominated story “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” but stripped of the genre ballast and transposed into Humboldtian spheres. Texts as animals – brilliantly conceived and executed with rare skill.

The second section, on minerals, begins as a disquisition on minerals, but immediately invents a character and his story to help explain how mining works. In doing so, Edelbauer assembles and disassembles this character – and the tools of storytelling themselves. Without ever sounding obnoxious or pretentious, she dives in and out of representation, offering a comment both on the language of science and the structure of narrative in the process. There are so many dry, constructed books making the rounds in English translation, intellectually interesting, but written without inspiration or power. Edelbauer is the exact opposite of that.

Since this is just supposed to be a brief note and not an analysis, I cannot go into details about the way she uses theories from Deleuze to Haraway and many others without ever namedropping any of them. Her makeshift protagonist turns into mineral, into machine, into text and back into narrative. He becomes object through the machinations of language, laid bare for all to see. Similarly, the chapter on cartography – like a long riff on Elizabeth Bishop’s poem and theories of narrative and cartographic and mental mapping, she tells bits of stories, reveals them as types, uses the language of science and the metaphors of fiction. There is depth and breadth to her writing, but it also works on a sentence by sentence basis. Open the book to any page and you’ll see excellent writing.

My favorite section is one towards the end called “Anatomy” – it’s the most fiction-like part of the book, and largely charts a trip through human anatomy – a literal trip. The protagonist’s travels and travails through the bends and shapes of the human body are told with a fresh eye to how these stories can or should be told. They also combine various ideas brought up earlier, from maps to gravitational theories. Some of this prose reads like a pastiche of 19th century writing, with the same focus on exclamations, and the same way of dealing with heightened emotions and imagined horrors. There’s a clever connection here by Edelbauer between style, and content and a smart way of connecting various origins of specific discourses, all while remaining engaging and readable.

I don’t know what she’ll do at the competition, how this will translate into a sustained piece of fiction, but I am extremely excited to find out!

Stephan Lohse: Ein Fauler Gott

Lohse, Stephan (2017), Ein Fauler Gott, Suhrkamp
ISBN 978-3-518-42587-9

In my loose series of reviews of books by participants in this year’s Bachmannpreis, I continue to not necessarily pick the cream of the crop for review, by accident. Stephan Lohse is an accomplished actor – surely something that will help him in this competition that requires of its authors to perform the text. He’s also a novelist and the 2017 novel Ein Fauler Gott (~a lazy God) is his debut novel. He’s not the first German-language actor to turn to novels. Particularly notable among the recent actors-turned-novelists are Josef Bierbichler with his good novel Mittelreich, and Joachim Meyerhoff, with his ongoing, slightly dull, series of autobiographical novels. It is Meyerhoff that Lohse most resembles. There is very little heightened literary attention given to structure and characters in Lohse’s book, which relies mostly on theme, and the power of nostalgia and recollection. And sadness, I suppose. There are two protagonists in Lohse’s novel, one is a 11 year old boy, whose interior life is treated with detailed empathy and care – and his mother, who, as she unravels psychologically, is ushered through a series of scenes all of which might as well be subtitled “this is supposed to be sad.” Maybe it’s because I also read some books by fellow Bachmannpreis competitor Corinna T. Sievers, but the flat and frankly flippant way Lohse uses the mother’s psychological struggles didn’t sit right with me. It doesn’t help that the boy’s story, after a somewhat interesting beginning, slips into the most typical kind of adolescent boy’s coming of age tale imaginable. I know they are common in all the languages, but my God there’s maybe something especially dull about the German version, however widely they’ve been praised. If you have read any of these books, say Thomas Lehr’s Nabokov’s Katze, or literally any other book in this vein, you will not be surprised by Lohse’s book at any point. What’s more, his lack of empathy towards the mother is also mirrored in the odd way he treats the occasional racism of his characters. Saying “this happened in the 1970s, that’s just what people thought” is no excuse, my good dude. It strikes me as additionally dubious that the only other text I found online is a very very brief text about African child soldiers on the Suhrkamp blog, which, in its absolute inability to transcend its sources and add something to the material, seems appropriative more than anything else. In a way, after last year’s readings, Lohse seems to be a fitting candidate for the Bachmannpreis stage.

The novel is set in 1970s Germany, and spans one year in the life of Ben and his mother Ruth. The book opens as Jonas, Ben’s brother and Ruth’s son, suddenly dies of a mysterious illness. Stephan Lohse makes excellent use of this situation at the beginning. In fact, the first 50 or so pages of this book made me very excited. Too bad the rest of it is largely about penises and the disorderly mind of a slightly off-kilter boy of medium intelligence and observational skills. Jonas is an absence in the lives of boy and mother – and in the beginning, Ben imagines his brother around him, something his mother expresses jealousy of. This set-up is so rich with literary potential. Using the narrative of adolescent confusion, but lacing it with a non-supernatural imagined absent presence? It works extremely well for a handful of pages, until Lohse just drops it, and moves on to much more conventional tools and tales. I don’t understand this choice – the only way it makes sense to me is the author’s unwillingness to jettison the autobiographical connection. In fact, I don’t know to what extent the book is indeed autobiographical, but the choices seem to indicate such an inspiration. Why did the boy at some point replace his absently present brother with friends? Because…that’s what happened! It’s an awful excuse in a novel, but seems the best excuse for the choices here. The majority of the novel is a pretty straightforward year in the life of a slighty odd boy. He has odd neighbors, a grandmother with dementia, kisses a girl for the first time, and explores his own penis and the penises of several other boys, though apparently non-sexually. On a trip his accommodation burns down, and it ends on a mother-son roadtrip into the sunset, as if to say: look, look, this IS the kind of book you thought it was. The lack of a will to shape and push his material is never as clear as when, towards the end of the book, for no good reason, we find ourselves in a ten page summary of one (in numbers: 1) inconsequential game of football (or soccer, as you prefer) played among school boys. It leads to a revelation for the protagonist: he wants to become a goal keeper, but why should the reader care? These kinds of scenes are so common in young adult novels, or novels by adult men about their childhood that we’d recognize the scene and its emotional and literary significance in a two page summary, but God beware that Lohse restrict his – at this point – slightly unfocused ramblings.

Indeed, it’s not just the book that is chronological, it feels like the writing of it was too. The last things we read in the book strike me as the last things written for the book. All the ideas and structures that seemed to be interesting at the beginning fall by the wayside as the mother flattens into a caricature and the boy’s life paradoxically rounds into type. Some of this appears to be due to – to be fair – the writer’s inexperience or lack of skill. This is, after all, a debut novel, although Lohse isn’t a spring chicken any more. Here’s another aspect: the switch of perspective, the first two or three times it happens, is revelatory. The book’s first pages are written in the style of a child, and as a reader, I was immediately worried about the gimmickiness of this mechanism, but the first time we read the mother’s perspective, it beautifully balances out the boy’s language, and adds additional elements, like the jealousy of his imagination I mentioned earlier. This, too, passes. During this year of mourning, improbably (and unevenly), the boy’s language, almost like a literary mirror of his voice, changes, becomes more adult, and at the same time, some clusters of words that appear to be tied to the boy’s language, reappear in the mother’s perspective as well. For an actor, whose life is focused on words and voice, Lohse shows a curious disinterest in either of those elements. I think for debut novelists, the flow of words is something that is typical – indeed, beautifully contained debuts like Clemens Setz’s excellent Söhne und Planeten are more rare than you’d want them to be (but then, also, look at his second book). The untamed river of words also swallows up some interesting and some troubling aspects that you’d wish the novel made some more conscious use of. One is the mother’s past, who came to Hamburg as a refugee after the war. Some of Lohse’s comments about the GDR appear to be factually challenged, and some just biased. Similarly, the book contains off-hand references to Africans, to “Czech greediness” and to “drunk Russians in the woods.” It makes occasional fun of people for their disabilities (a woman’s harelip makes the boy think of a hippopotamus, for example) – none of which, I’m sure, is meant maliciously. The author just doesn’t particularly care.

The same is true for the question of queerness. I have always wondered about the penis-centric nature of male adolescent literature, which are full of cock, but even for the genre, this book quite overflows with teenage boy’s genitalia. There’s a constant tension of queerness throughout the book, which, after everything, is the most interesting part of it. A chaste, “accidental” kiss is reciprocated later. The boy, somewhat inadvertently, jerks off his best friend. Another boy, a bully, ends his beating of him by rubbing his crotch on him until he comes in his pants. Twice the author goes out of his way to mention that the male protagonist feels an unease with terms for female anatomy, and in the early parts of the book he also tries on make-up. The way the book deals with the protagonist’s queerness is maddening, because gay or not (the book doesn’t commit on this), it does inscribe a queerness into his adolescence, but it doesn’t quite manage to structure it into the narrative. It just keeps coming up. Again and again. The reason the boy starts playing football is so people won’t consider him “a gaylord” – but after the absolutely overdetailed account of the game, the author doesn’t return to it. It’s like seeing someone start a line of code without ever closing it, and you keep going down the code and – nothing. The way he ties some of his childhood to reading Karl May doesn’t help because the reader can’t help but think of the way Josef Winkler’s masterful autobiographical studies examined what being a reader of Karl May has meant to his adolescence – and how the sometimes difficult nature of it ties into his later obsession with Jean Genet, whose work on queerness and death could have provided the same clarity for Ein Fauler Gott that it provided for Winkler’s prodigious oeuvre. But it didn’t, and so what we are left with is a book both filled with good ideas and bad executions, a muddled book that is curiously self-satisfied. I don’t know.

*

As always, if you feel like supporting this blog, there is a “Donate” button on the left and this link RIGHT HERE. 🙂 If you liked this, tell me. If you hated it, even better. Send me comments, requests or suggestions either below or via email (cf. my About page) or to my twitter.)

#tddl: Germany’s Next Literary Idol, 2018 edition.

If you follow me on twitter, you’ll see a deluge of tweets this week from Thursday to Saturday under the hashtag #tddl, let me explain. I will be live-tweeting the strangest of events from my little smelly book cave.

Once a year, something fairly unique happens in Klagenfurt, Austria. On a stage, a writer will read a 25-minute long prose(ish) text, which can be a short story, an excerpt from a novel, or just an exercise in playfulness. All of the texts have to be unpublished, all have to be originally written in German (no translations). Also on stage: 9 to 7 literary critics who, as soon as the writer finishes reading, will immediately critique the text they just heard (and read; they have paper copies). Sometimes they are harsh, sometimes not, Frequently they argue among each other. The writer has to sit at his desk for the whole discussion, without being allowed a voice in it. This whole thing is repeated 18 to 14 times over the course of three days. On the fourth day, 4 prizes are handed out, three of them voted on by the critics (again, votes that happen live on stage), one voted on by the public. All of this is transmitted live on public TV and draws a wide audience.

This, a kind of “German language’s next (literary) Idol” setup, is an actually rather venerable tradition that was instituted in 1977. It’s referred to as the “Bachmannpreis”, an award created in memory of the great Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann, who was born in Klagenfurt. The whole week during which the award is competed for and awarded is referred to as the “Tage der deutschsprachigen Literatur” (the days of German-language literature). Since 1989, the whole competition, including all the readings and all the judges’ arguments are shown on live TV, before, the public was only shown excerpts. The writers in question are not usually unknowns, nor are they usually heavyweights. They are all more or less young writers but they don’t have to be novelists.

The 2016 winner was British expat writer Sharon Dodua Otoo (here’s my review of some of her fiction), who read a text that was heads and shoulders above the sometimes lamentable competition. And you know what, the German judges were still slightly upset about it last year, which explains why last year’s best writer by a country mile, John Wray, didn’t win. It’s the revenge of the Bratwurst.

This year’s lineup, with the exception of an interesting writer here and there, seems similar in quality, but whiter and more German than any recent line up. Although they did, similar to 2016 and 2017, invite a writer who hasn’t published anything originally written in German yet, which is always an intriguing proposition. It’s Ukrainian novelist Tanja Maljartschuk. Her fiction has already been translated into English and published by Cadmus Press – you should have a look.

Outside of this – there’s a bestselling novelist this time, some dubious looking male writers, Martina Clavadetscher, whose most recent novel I absolutely loved, and Jakob Nolte, who uses science fictional elements in his very interesting work. I have a weird gut feeling about who the judges might gravitate towards this year, given last year’s dubious choice, but since I’m awful at predictions, I’m not going to go all out here.

The real change this year is a shift among jurors. Nora-Eugenie Gomringer, whose most recent collection of poetry I reviewed here, joins the jury, as does Insa Wilke. Regrettably, they do not replace any of the lamentable jurors that made last year so frustrating (see particularly my account of Day Two of the competition). They do bring “the heat” – as they say. I read some of Corinna T. Sievers’s novels, an author invited by Gomringer, and they are excellent.

There are many bad signs. I had to put away a book by Joshua Groß after three pages due to its 1950s style sexism. It’s an overall very male, very white and very German list (the best German-language writers are not – in fact- German). And yet…I cannot help but be excited. Follow along! There’s a livestream! You can also read the texts during the competition here. So here’s the full list (I have written some comments or reviews for some of these writers, you can find those linked directly)

Bov Bjerg, D
Martina Clavadetscher, CH
Özlem Özgül Dündar, TUR
Raphaela Edelbauer, A
Stephan Groetzner, D
Joshua Groß, D
Ally Klein, D
Stephan Lohse, D
Lennardt Loß, D
Tanja Maljartschuk, UA
Anselm Neft, D
Jakob Nolte, D
Corinna T. Sievers, D
Anna Stern, CH

A Note on Özlem Özgül Dündar

Dündar, Özlem Özgül (2018), Gedanken Zerren, Elif Verlag
ISBN 978-3-946989-07-3

After a review of Anna Stern, who will read at this year’s Bachmannpreis, I want to turn to another very intriguing writer, similarly young, also slated to perform in Klagenfurt at the same competition. Özlem Özgül Dündar writes poetry, prose and drama. She’s roughly from where I currently live, and she studied philosophy in Wuppertal. Then she went on to study literature at one of our two dedicated MFA universities: Leipzig. She’s a translator, which is an excellent training for any writer. But of her own work, she has not as far as I can tell published anything in book form beyond this thin little collection of poetry, which came out earlier this year.

But what a poetry it is. Despite many many dissimilarities, the writers she immediately made me think of, in terms of poetry, are Wolfgang Hilbig and Said, but mostly the former. Dündar’s interest is not in an interlocutor, not in a playful encounter with music and tradition. In her poems all lines appear to be the same length, but that’s a trick – indeed, it’s an artifact of printing: they are all fully justified so that words line up evenly on left and right margins. The poems themselves are narrow, and the author sometimes breaks them up as if she was counting syllables or letters or some other Moore-esque approach to form, but I’ve gone through multiple poems now and I cannot get a consistent syllable length within the poems. What it is is a conversation with that kind of writing.

What’s more, her poetry almost monomaniacally obsesses over the distance between the self an others, about the way we move through space and how we limit our own spaces and how others limit our spaces. Words, in some poems become just as much of a spatial gesture as physical gestures do. And in her poetry, the way she treats line breaks, it mirrors that same interest or obsession. For a first collection, it’s an astonishingly smart and careful effort. The connection, to me as a reader, to Hilbig’s poetry is the interest in the self and its delimitations, the self and its necessities, and the many ways those necessities are broken up. In contrast to Hilbig, however, the language itself throughout Gedanken Zerren is fairly simple – the complexities of Dündar’s poetry, to my mind, come from repetition and her management of breath and speed. Hilbig made heavier use of pathos inherent to word choice, I think

Özlem Özgül Dündar has done well in open mic competitions, and she has also won serious literary awards – which suggests her work works well on the written and the spoken level. Since I have read this book in anticipation of her participation in a prose competition, there are limited ways in which this very impressive book can help me do that. She has written essays that share her poetry’s breathlessness, and there’s a chance her performance will similarly arrange simplicity against a complexity of structure and rhythm. Whatever happens, I am already intrigued.

 

Two novels by Anna Stern

Stern, Anna (2014), Schneestill, Salis
ISBN 978-3-906195-17-9

Stern, Anna (2016), Der Gutachter, Salis
ISBN 9783906195438

This coming Thursday, the Bachmannpreis will begin again and I will, again, follow along, glued to the TV screen. Excitement, excitement, excitement. I will write a separate post listing this year’s changes and authors, but this time I have read some of these writers in advance. One of them is Martina Clavadetscher, whose most recent novel I have reviewed quite enthusiastically here.

Another is Anna Stern. Anna Stern is a German writer who lives and studies in Switzerland. She has published, as far as I can tell, two novels and, most recently, a collection of short stories. To assess her performance in Klagenfurt reading those stories would have been most fitting, I did not, however, have enough time and money to purchase the complete oeuvre of Ms. Stern. Instead, I read her two novels. While I didn’t particularly like either of them, there’s an obvious, sharp progress between novel one, the 2014 Schneestill, a puzzlebox novel drawing on noir, on Auster, and probably also on Simenon, and novel two, the 2016 Der Gutachter, a more grounded, urgent book about a murder and people living off the Bodensee. There is more authorial control, depth, and narrative sharpness in the second book compared to the first. That said, both books live, in my opinion, in the boring wasteland between the fetid depths of “awful” and the airy heights of “great.” Both books are…ok. Difficult to distinguish from many other middle of the road crime novels published in Germany, and hardly among the more interesting.

Schneestill is set in Paris, and you can tell the author is very excited to share that with us, because there are occasional French words, dropped into the text for local color. People meet in cafés and while there’s a long noir tradition in German fiction connected to Chandler, Goodis and Hammett – this novel’s atmosphere seems specifically French. There’s the shadow of Simenon over everything in this book, with a postmodern admixture of Modiano – and his American progeny, Paul Auster. Simenon’s dense but short book live off a sense of absolut clarity, even if things are obscured, there’s always a sense that if you find out the right facts, or can shift your position to a more advantageous one, you can see how it all connects. There’s a moral imperative to that kind of structure in Simenon, or at least that’s how I remember his work. Modiano, whose masterpiece is a surreal alterative history of the Third Reich in France, destabilizes this clarity. In the trilogy immediately following his debut, he destabilizes the certainty of seeing clearly, of being able to remember clearly, of there being an obvious truth, and not just the muddle of history. And while his later work would work this search for a truth to a finer, clearer point, giving his whole oeuvre a certain urgency and direction, it is this trilogy that influenced a young American writer named Paul Auster, who stripped Modiano of the sense and weight and responsibility of history, and turned it into a career of writing clever, navel-gazing novels, often built like a puzzle, with mostly lamentable prose. While Anna Stern explicitly names Ian Rankin as one of the pillars of her work (in Der Gutachter). I cannot help but see Simenon, Modiano and Auster in Schneestill.

There are two different melodies woven through the book, something that Stern retains in Der Gutachter. One is a story about obsession, about gazes, about seeing, watching, interacting with people. A young man sees a mysterious woman in a café, immediately falls for her. As he comes home, he finds that she has just been released from prison where she had been sent for a murder a few years earlier. This does not dampen his ardor in the least – on the contrary, much as it would any of the five hundred indistinguishable protagonists of Auster’s novels, it increases his obsession. He tries to find her again, creates a web of gazes to trap her. In the end, and under curious, complicated circumstances, he meets her – and she tells him her story, like a charming Parisian Scheherazade. This melody is refracted in different ways, among them the obsession of another character which complements – and complicates – the original protagonist’s obsession. This search for the truth through an examination of the streets of Paris and the faces of its women, this is where the novel retains the closest ties to Simenon, as well as in the moral question that dominates this part of the book: what is a murderer – and can we trust, engage with, understand, and ultimately, forgive a murderer – even before we ever met them? Can I balance the evidence of my eyes and my heart – with the rational, bleak truths offered by the world around us? Stern’s protagonist, in his quest to find that woman, becomes a creep, and this is by far the most interesting part of the book, because Stern acknowledges this, though not for long. There’s a short period, just a handful of pages towards the end of the book, where you can almost read it as a criticism of not just the male-centric narratives of Simenon, Modiano and Auster, but also of the many many writers that followed in their wake. But regrettably, that’s not what Stern is interested in.

She’s more interested in memory and guilt, which is the second melody woven throughout the book, and this is sort of where we lose Simenon, and enter into Modiano territory, but it’s Modiano as seen through the lens of Paul Auster. I have to repeat: she mentions Auster nowhere in the book, but it’s hard not to see him as being an influence here, maybe indirectly, since Auster’s influence is felt in a lot of fiction, regrettably. The question of what happened, who is at fault in the murder case, and how does what happened change those involved becomes the most dominant one as the book rushes to a finish. Unlike Simenon, or some of the crime novels specifically cited by the author, the book isn’t really interested in the circumstances of what happened, it isn’t really interested in the awfulness of guilt and the way it deforms those that live with it. All of the book, including the knotted conclusion, seems to be more of a literary game with the various ways to express all these themes. It’s a riff on a couple of different writers, with the only thing that distinguishes this book from its predecessors being the flat writing, that sometimes morphs into a very poetic register, but without giving us a feeling of authorial control or interest. A smart, well-read writer, but a bland, not very well written novel, was my initial impression upon finishing it.

By contrast, the tone of Der Gutachter is much more consistent, and the novel is faster to summarize. It is not a complicated puzzlebox of conflicting melodies, it does not draw on a smorgasbord of writers. Instead it is something more simple: a crime novel with an environmentalist’s conscience. It begins as a story about a Gutachter, an evaluator, who suddenly goes missing, presumably murdered. The book’s protagonist is a police officer who takes roughly a week to find out what happened, and structurally, it shares the same weak ending that a lot of crime novels have – having a long explanation at the end that collects all the ideas and leads that we picked up along the way in a sufficiently dramatic way has always been a crutch for crime novels, and their main weakness. But as the detective finds out who killed the evaluator, he also takes the time to find out about what his last evaluation was about – giving expert testimony on the ideal phosphorus levels in the local lake. That seems simple, but as the police detective collects evidence, he also collects information about the complexity of the topic. Anna Stern has studied Environmental Science in Zürich, which explains why the detective’s enlightenment takes the form of didactic info dumps which we as readers cannot escape either. That said, the topic of what grounds one’s life, how livelihood can become more than just a job, but something ingrained in one’s identity, all of this gives an urgency and moral clarity to Stern’s second novel that the first one lacked. The style of the book, while still nothing to write home about, is much more consistent, a much better read overall.

There are no longer Simenon, Modiano or Auster in the background here. Au contraire, the writing has turned to much more Germanic sources. Although – sources less connected to her German origins and more to her present Swiss background. There’s a long tradition of Swiss (and Austrian) writers using a slightly distant, objective-seeming style, using the protocols of institution and office to create their stories. Despite the detective protagonist, Der Gutachter is not written in the style developed by German noir writers. Instead, I hear echoes of writers like Max Frisch, Hermann Burger, Albert Drach and Adolf Muschg throughout the book. I mean, obviously I mean no comparison – these four, particularly Burger and Drach, are absolute masters of their craft, but it’s impossible not to hear them here. Stern herself takes care to mention Ian Rankin here, and there’s absolutely a sense in which Rankin and the tradition of Scottish crime writing more generally (for example Denise Mina) have left their fingerprints here as well, though not necessarily stylistically. The Scottish tradition of crime writing strikes me, who hasn’t read that much of it, as being particularly interested in social backgrounds and social motivations, and these end up being essential to understanding the novel’s murder case. But it is the contrast between the institutional, careful tone of the detective’s narrative, and the wild, angry complaints from the local fishermen, that really encapsulates the book’s conflicts between disinterested analysis, and modern science and economy on the one hand, and one of the oldest professions on the other. Usually, especially reactionary writers will use peasants as a foil to criticize modernity, often with anti-Semitic overtones (think Hans Fallada). Anna’s use of fishermen is smart – it removes certain connotations and increases the connection to the land. That said – the style of Burger, Muschg or Frisch is hard to pull off. Burger is one of last century’s best German-language writers, and Frisch isn’t far behind. It’s hard to write like this without slipping into a certain blandness – and Stern does not succeed in evading this fate.

But all criticism aside: honestly, I am curious about where this writer is going. If I could do it again, I would read neither of these two books and I cannot see myself recommending them to anyone. But at the same time, I can see many readers who like these kinds of novels enjoying them, and as far as I can tell the books have been published to good reviews – and indeed, the author has been invited to participate at this year’s Bachmannpreis, after all, one of German-languahe literature’s most prestigious awards. There’s absolutely a good, solid chance that I am way off on this.

*

As always, if you feel like supporting this blog, there is a “Donate” button on the left and this link RIGHT HERE. 🙂 If you liked this, tell me. If you hated it, even better. Send me comments, requests or suggestions either below or via email (cf. my About page) or to my twitter.)

Selfie from San Francisco

Returning with books

So I went to San Francisco and bought a bunch of books, God knows why. A lot of it is genre diversions.

Some San Francisco bookshops I loved

A trip to San Francisco.

About to give a conference paper on William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell and the Puritans. Wish me luck? I have some free time. if you happen to be in town, I would love to meet you. I’m flying to SF tomorrow.

Dire le monde pour l’inventer

Souvent, lorsque je parle, quand je suis face à face, je m’étonne d’entendre, en même temps que l’autre, ce que je viens d’énoncer à l’instant : je me découvre. Aussi, lorsque l’autre s’énonce, peut-on quelquefois, en des moments privilégiés, devenir cet espace offert à la compréhension. Mais dès que l’attention fléchit, je bredouille, sans arriver à poursuivre un cheminement. Comme si, pour dire, j’avançais sur un tapis tendu par l’attention d’une altérité soutenue. En d’autres mots, comment pourrait-on articuler la langue dans une bouche, si ce n’est, toujours déjà, dedans l’oreille du voisin ? Et cette langue, qu’invente-t-elle d’autre que ces catégories du monde que forgent, avec ces mêmes vocables, nos fictions mentales ? En d’autres termes : parler, c’est dire le monde pour l’inventer.

Maurice Olender/Un fantôme dans la bibliothèque

Masatsugu Ono: Lion Cross Point

Ono, Masatsugu (2018), Lion Cross Point, Two Lines Press
Translated by Angus Turvill
ISBN 978-1-931883-70-2

Lion Cross Point is a gentle little book about how to deal with violence, trauma and memory. Its author, acclaimed novelist Masatsugu Ono, offers us a fractured narrative of a boy’s past and present – and maybe his future. The novel has an incomplete set of details about the events that shaped its protagonist – because it relies on that protagonist to furnish these details. In many ways, the novel is a description of a process of memory recovery, as Takeru, the ten year old boy at the heart of the story, slowly dredges up more and more details about his past, as revelations about his family – and a ghostly apparition, serve as catalysts, telling him it is ok to share his story, to go on, to be. The book is short – and uses its space extraordinarily well. There are no wasted lines, no throwaway observations. As with all translations, it’s hard to judge it stylistically, and it has a few oddities in how it deals with Takeru’s interior monologue that could be either stylistic choices by Ono, or translation artifacts. Overall, however, the novel’s simple language works remarkably well and never lends itself to a certain blandness or coldness that many lesser practitioners of literary minimalism exhibit. I have complained about them on the blog before. This is an enormous little book, and I have to thank the translator Angus Turvill, as well as the publisher, for bringing this writer into English of whom I had never before heard. Neither, to be honest, had I been aware of the publisher, Two Lines Press, which has done a remarkable job here, on all levels.

Like an orchid, Lion Cross Point has many layers and opens itself slowly and languorously, as we read through it. As least that was my experience. Ono has an interesting preoccupation with names and places and structure, and he doesn’t ease us into the book. In fact, in some ways, reading the first third or fourth of the book is a process of learning, of understanding how to read the book and its events. In this, we follow in the footsteps of Ono’s protagonist, who slowly learns how to read his own life. How do we understand kindness if we were raised in a harsh, impoverished, cruel environment? In these situations we might be confused about the forces that make people care about us, bring us food, for example, or protect us against violence. Takeru’s examination of his life and his past slowly unearths these acts of kindness and the people who offered them, and we see him slowly move from – not suspicion, but confusion – to a kind of acceptance. It is ok. Right up to his own acts of neglect and violence, Takeru looks at his hands and his heart and struggles to accept himself and his place in the world. He’s not the only person in the book who struggles, and through Takeru’s fractured memories, we see the other people – not clearly, but outlined sharply. There’s his mother, who suffered a great deal of abuse and wasn’t able to protect Takeru and his brother. And there’s his brother, whose affliction forms a central element of the book, but is never misused by the author for easy emotional points.

As we meet Takeru, he’s visiting his family’s village over the summer. It is the friendly kindness of the villagers that serves as a catalyst for Takeru’s journey to understanding and speech and self expression, particularly a trip to a local aquarium. Twice, Takeru frames his understanding of a past event as sprung from something he witnessed in the village. One of the more interesting aspects of the translation is also tied into the village – dialect. I think we who read translations are all aware of the pitfalls of translating dialect, or not translating it. The German translation of Kelman’s masterful How Late It Was, How Late, a novel written wholly in Scottish dialect, is rendered entirely in standard German. A difficult decision, but what dialect would you pick to mimic Scottish? There are many more examples like this. In Lion Cross Point, translator Angus Turvill has opted for a clever middle ground between dialect and standard English. He uses small contractions, and “g-dropping,” to signify country dialect. The way it is employed makes the fact of dialect very clear – g-dropping is today a particularly clear sign of down-to-earth, lower-class usage of English- without committing to any specific dialect. It’s not a perfect solution (I have a personal obsession with the topic of translating dialect), but I found it an unusually brilliant and effective one. It also has the additional advantage of helping us wade through Takeru’s sometimes chaotic montage of perception and memory.

This chaos, however, is more than just a result of Takeru’s fractured and traumatized mind. There’s also, I feel, an underlying discourse about names and meaning and identity that vacillates somewhere between Searle, Kripke and Wittgenstein. Early in the novel, a character insists on the similarity of two names and what that means for the bearers of those two names. What does a name mean, what does it signify? Where do the lines between the two entities blur? Ono does this repeatedly, but with particular emphasis in two places: one is the one I just described. The purpose of that character’s comparison of names is, I think, to help Takeru find a place in the village and understand that he is part of that village’s past. Part of the cluster of descriptions that mean “Takeru,” to talk about it in Searle’s terms, have to include the surprisingly mysterious history of the village and the landmark that gave the novel its name. The other instance of this is a loose association of Haiti, the country of origin of one of Takeru’s benefactors, with Heidi, Johanna Spyris character (though in this case more specifically the anime incarnation of it) and Haiji, a classmate of Takeru. The purpose of this second chain of family resemblances is a bit more complicated, I think, but there are other cases throughout the novel that are not so obviously marked. If you started this novel with a mild irritation at the many names that are introduced in short order (some characters are introduced multiple times), these passages show you why Ono built his book around these names and places.

Indeed, the fact that Takeru doesn’t learn to read his past in a clearer and more benevolent way until he is “home,” i.e. in the countryside where his family is from, says something to the importance of places. As with other aspects, we as readers are also primed to understand this book as being centrally concerned with place by several early scenes, including a prayer to the shrine of the ancestors in the house Takeru arrives at. There is an implied preference for the countryside as a locus of understanding yourself that’s common in world literature, but has particular significance in much Japanese literature I’ve read, and so seems heightened. Family, land and self seem linked – with our current self not much more than the topmost inscription on a complicated palimpsest, and older layers occasionally shining through in the form of ghosts and visitations.

The central topic is indeed meaning, and I think both in a more abstract sense, and in the sense of memory interpretation: how do we give meaning to the various parts in our life and the people therein? Who are we? Speaking of ourselves means balancing the pain and the joy and accepting who we are. It’s okay. Masatsugu Ono’s novel is a remarkable achievement which brilliantly deals with complicated questions and always remains emotional and humane throughout. I have, in this review, skipped over many plot details, particularly of the ghostly apparition, but they rely on the same mechanisms that I sketched above, and since I think you should read this book, I didn’t want to deprive anyone of the joy of discovery, of the journey through the folds of Lion Cross Point.

*

As always, if you feel like supporting this blog, there is a “Donate” button on the left and this link RIGHT HERE. 🙂 If you liked this, tell me. If you hated it, even better. Send me comments, requests or suggestions either below or via email (cf. my About page) or to my twitter.)

Coverdesign and translation

Apparently, in German translation, Donleavy’s masterful debut novel The Ginger Man is sold a scandalous bodice ripper.

Fallow

When what you do has to do with writing and thinking and translating and writing, having a temporary mental breakdown means all your work comes to a stop. I am writing again this month, but I have no idea how to reply to a lot of emails from people I solicited last year, or friends who gave me opportunities or look at my list of places to send abstracts or poems or short stories, God knows I write a little of everything somehow.

This is not to complain although it may read like it. But as I am sitting here at my computer, looking at drafts and notebooks, the devastation of two fallow months is enormous, and translates into setbacks, and possibly other fallow months down the line. And I have lived with this for so many years, losing a week here, a month there, and it has cut deep gashes into my CV and you can’t explain this to people. If I can’t write I can’t write. I can push myself here and there, but there’s a limit.

And then I sit here, balding, tired, on a cold March night, with a cat on my lap, a weird writer-translator version of Dr. No, I guess, picking up the pieces, writing a new draft here, a new poem there. And this is how it goes. And this is why I have this blog. I don’t put a lot of work into these reviews but they help clear the mud from my brain sometimes. It is very helpful and I am grateful for every single person who reads this blog, making me feel slightly less alone in this cave of books and manuscripts and cat toys and empty coffee cups.

thank you

The Mokers

modoc. n. One of the several small dummies set up to be knocked over by baseballs at a carnival tent; hence, a stupid person.
mohosca. n. Muscle; energy used in work.
mojo. n. Any narcotic.
mokers, the. n. Despondency; dejection; the blues.
mokus. n., adj. 1. Drunk. 2. Liquor.
molasses. n. A good-looking used automobile displayed to attract customers to a used-car lot.
moldy fig. 1. A prude; a pedant; one whose views or tastes are old-fashioned. 2. Specif., a person who prefers traditional jazz to the progressive forms.

The Pocket Dictionary of American Slang. Eds. Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner. Pocket, 1967.

Jenny Offill: Dept. of Speculation

Offill, Jenny, Dept. of Speculation, Vintage
ISBN 978-0-345-80687-1

If you think back on the final two pages of Michael Chabon’s sophomore novel Wonder Boys, you’ll remember it ends with the writer-protagonist jettisoning his monstrous manuscript, “the whole exploded clockwork” – he calibrates his “writerly perception of depth” and sets out to write a book that “sounds true,” written in the rhythms of daily domestic life and not the writerly obsessiveness of his previous alcohol fueled existence. This – the recalibration, the rejection of an unwieldy manuscript failure, it has a mirror in Chabon’s own life, who, after his jaunty little debut novel, spent some years on a large manuscript that he eventually abandoned. This is all to say that Jenny Offill’s own sophomore novel Dept. of Speculation has a similar sense. Offill’s narrator-protagonist, the nameless “wife,” works at a college, and is struggling to complete a second novel, constantly fielding requests by friends, colleagues and acquaintances to produce this difficult second book. At the same time, Dept. of Speculation is, in some sense, that second novel, published 14 years after Offill’s debut. And much as Chabon wove a fictional narrative around the personal struggle to produce a good second novel, Offill’s book tells a story of a disintegrating relationship.

It starts uneventfully, describing academic life, a lovely marriage and an “evil” but adorable child. Things go a bit off the rails when the husband turns out to be an adulterer, but Offill fills even the lovely charming early portions with shadow and doubt. Being a writer and being a teacher and being a wife and mother are three different kinds of being, and she never feels quite adequate to all of them. Offill’s style is flat, in the way many contemporary ‘experimental’ dullards are, but she rises above them by making the flatness a part of the narrative. The structure, full of short sentences and short paragraphs, seems fragmented, but it isn’t really. It’s sequential and coherent, but the paratactic perniciousness of the book creates a distance, makes us follow the narrator into her own stressed, unhappy, distracted mind. As, towards the end of the novel, things go bad, the narrator switches to talking about herself in the third person, further increasing an effect that has been part of the novel all along. This is a surprisingly rich novel, for all its straightforward elements, and the various detailed kinds of flatness in it. The first time I read it I read it in one sitting and it’s hard to imagine the book working when broken into multiple sittings. The book’s intense coherence would fall apart and all you’d be left with would be some angsty statements in short sentences and short paragraphs.

Dept. of Speculation is interesting in how it uses form without abandoning emotional significance. There’s the instrumentalized flatness of course, which the book uses well, in contrast to some other widely praised, intensely dull recent prose works. She also uses our narrative expectations in undermining our readings. As I said, the switch from first person to third person, with no accompanying stylistic change, seems to be done in line with the other attempts to create some distance in the book. At the same time, Offill fills her novel with doubt. There is the narrator’s side gig of being a ghost writer for a failed astronaut businessman (failed as astronaut, not as businessman). It’s a curious insertion into a book that doesn’t stray that far afield with other details. Offill’s narrator is economical with details. We don’t even get names for anybody involved, there’s not a lot of extraneous description, the book obsessively circles the same topics: writerly impotence, anxiety, love and some details of domestic life. Offill is exceptionally disciplined, so the ghost writing seems strange. One obvious effect is to show the difference between writing about one’s own life or follow one’s own inspiration on the one hand, and just lending your words to someone else’s life, someone else’s partially imagined experience. Another effect comes later. There’s a scene where her husband writes a short story and files it among her class work. The details remind her of her own life, but she assumes a female student who recently attempted suicide, is behind those words. This is a kind of ghostwriting too, but while in ghostwritten books, the real author spends their existence behind the curtain, in this case, the narrator becomes the audience.

Clearly the novel is preoccupied, outside of the details of the story of domestic bliss and upheaval, with the authenticity and directness of writing, and while we may assume that the narrator at some point starts talking about herself in the third person, which reflects her increasingly troubled state of mind, an equally plausible possibility asks us to question our assumptions regarding narrator/protagonist/writer. I will admit, this is the second time I started this book. First attempt, last year, I abandoned the book because I was bored. But I think I was wrong. This book is actually quite interesting, and it uses its limited palette, and its humdrum plot in order to do something with plot and narrative. In many ways it reads, once you resolve to read it this way, like a very classic postmodern work from the 70s, but without the now-boring irony and laid-back chuckle at life and people.

The story it tells, despite what I think is some intense postmodern tomfoolery, is still moving, still emotionally resonant. And that is no small feat. Overall, I think, Offill walks a very thin line here. It’s playful and interesting, but also written with substance and purpose (unlike, for example, the Luiselli novel which I didn’t find sustaining beyond its levels of playfulness). It’s emotional and direct without being drab and dull. What I most appreciate is how Offill pulls off this flat style without joining the ranks of all the bores like Blake Butler, who I think is a better editor than novelist. I’d like to repeat this: I think this book is fundamentally interesting, and I will likely return to it at some point to look at it from yet another angle. There’s other books I read this week and might review, like Brit Bennett’s debut novel, that I found so uninteresting, I considered getting rid of my copy. Bennett’s book is maudlin, clichéd, socially and formally conservative. It’s also much less of a tightrope walk. Whatever Bennett does, it does so forcefully, with all possible risks smashed out of the book by an MFA reading group. Offill takes a risk, I think. And for a slim book like that, it offers a bunch of angles to its readers, all of which involve rereading the whole book and its details. The student who attempted suicide, for example, is given quite a bit of space, and her inclusion raises questions of genre and representation, that I cannot go into here.

One interesting aspect of the book that I want to mention in closing is that in some ways the novel functions like a funhouse mirror of John Williams’s 1965 novel Stoner, which took both book nerds and the wider reading public by storm when it was republished in 2008. I have some…issues? I guess, with that novel, but that’s maybe for a different post or a different venue. It’s curious though, that it’s always these kinds of books that do well upon being rediscovered. Stoner, and the work of, what’s that Hungarian called? Sándor Márai, that’s it, and who could forget Hans Fallada’s unfortunate resurrection, after he was correctly buried by German critics in the 1950s. But, again, that’s not the point here. What I did want to say is that Dept. of Speculation feels in so many ways like a companion piece to Stoner that I wouldn’t be surprised if it was partially intentional. I mean, obviously the campus novel has a long tradition, and one wishes that some novels in the genre would be reread more often, like Jarrell’s funny novel, but in many ways Offill’s book feels like a direct reply to Stoner. And I don’t merely mean in the way the two novels employ gender. Offill’s attitude towards realism and representation, which I think I sketched earlier, also feels like part of a communication with John Williams. Or maybe not. It’s a good book, is all.

 

*

As always, if you feel like supporting this blog, there is a “Donate” button on the left and this link RIGHT HERE. 🙂 If you liked this, tell me. If you hated it, even better. Send me comments, requests or suggestions either below or via email (cf. my About page) or to my twitter.)