“From your window, can you see the moon?”

Tags

Excerpts, Fiction - Novella, Eileen Chang, Translation, NYRB Classics, The NYRB Classics Project, Karen S. Kingsbury

One of the first NYRB Classics I heard of—in tandem with John Williams’ Stoner—was Eileen Chang’s collection of novellas Love in a Fallen City. My bibliophilic enabler Aunt Anne sent me this book late last year, and it’s taken me this long to settle down and read it. And, you know, it was awesome.

For purposes of brevity [sorely lacking in my corner of the internet], this post is going to focus on the title novella. Which is, well, one of the best nerve-wracking, most quietly and dignifiedly tense love stories I’ve ever read. It mixes cultural mores of the time [turn of the century] with a classics cat-and-mouse trope. Everyone is at once impeccably mature and flawed.

Liusu is divorced, and family—who tends to highlight her uselessness, given her status—presses her to make herself useful once more. Through marriage, naturally. Enter Fan Liuyuan, rich and educated in Britain, scaring off all the young brides eager to catch him. It’s like [what I hear] Jane Austen [is all about], but certainly more compelling, with a more volatile relationship.

She could hardly believe it, but he rarely so much as touched her hand. She was continually on edge, fearing he would suddenly drop the pretense and launch a surprise attack. But day after day he remained a gentleman; it was like facing a great enemy who stood perfectly still.

How these two interact with each other, all the games, all the strategic teasing and withdrawal of affection, the little props and hints they throw each other, it all rings true, and with such an intense feeling.

One backdrop of their relationship: The woman’s place—“Basically, a woman who was tricked by a man deserved to die, while a woman who tricked a man was a whore. If a woman tried to trick a man but failed and then was tricked by him, that was whoredom twice over. Kill her and you’d only dirty the knife.” Okay. [In another novella, this tidbit: “In China, as elsewhere, the constraints imposed by the traditional moral code were originally constructed for the benefit of women: they made beautiful women even harder to obtain, so their value rose, and ugly women were spared the prospect of never-ending humiliation.” Just amazing, no?]

It’s status, yes, it’s the political climate of the time. But, you know, at the heart of the falling city is this solid love story that has the individuals involved the main source of conflict. Hell, one of the most poignant scenes in the novella, for me: when Fan Liuyuan, after a day of hide-and-seek, calls Liusu from his room, which shares a wall with hers. She picks up the phone and lays the receiver on the bedspread. In the stillness of the room, that most quiet of nights, his voice is so clear:

“Liusu, from your window, can you see the moon?”

She didn’t know why, but suddenly she was sobbing. The moon shone bright and blurry through her tears, silver, with a slightly greenish tint. “In my window,” said Liyuan, “there is a flowering vine that blocks half the view. Maybe it’s a rose. Or maybe not.”

And for a long time, neither talks. That charged scene, that scuttling courtship, an olive branch extended—as close as the two of them could admit that they felt for each other. Oh, I swooned. I pressed the book against my face, squealed, read the passage again, and swooned once more.

Also, in SashaLand, it’s not a love story if no one relents. Ladies and gentlemen, the relenting, in form of one of the best kisses I’ve ever read:

This was the first time he had kissed her, but it didn’t feel like the first time to either of them—they had both imagined it so many times. They’d had many opportunities—the right place, the right moment—he’d thought of it; she had worried it might happen. But they were both such clever people, always planning carefully, that they’d never dared to risk it. Suddenly it was reality, and they were both dazed. Liusu’s head was spinning. She fell back against the mirror, her back tightly pressed to its icy surface. His mouth did not leave hers. He pushed her into the mirror and they seemed to fall into it, into another shadowy world—freezing cold, searing hot, flame of the forest flowers burning all over them.

Thank you, and good night.

+ + + + +

Something personal. I want to scrawl this on creamy paper and hand it over to you. Because, you know, once again I’ve found in literature more of the words that come only as instinct to me at each end of our days together.

Here in this uncertain world, money, property, the permanent things—they’re all unreliable. The only thing she could rely on was the breath in her lungs, and this person who lay sleeping beside her. Suddenly, she crawled over to him, hugging him through his quilt. He reached out from the bedding and grasped her hand. They looked and saw each other, saw each other entirely. It was a mere moment of deep understanding, but it was enough to keep them happy together for a decade or so.

“Ahí vienen los toros. Here come the bulls.”

Tags

Fiction - Novella, Jan van Mersbergen, Laura Watkinson, Peirene Press, Translation

On Tomorrow Pamplona by Jan van Mersbergen,
translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson.

This is the contemporary adult, if slightly embittered, [male] road trip. Danny, a professional boxer on the run from some unnamable horror, meets Robert, a family man on his yearly pilgrimage to Pamplona. There’s not so much self-discovery here as there is a forcefully selective sifting of one’s life; not so much male bonding here as two men on the run doing said running together, and whatever destination will do. Eventually, we’ll feel as though Danny and Robert are simply stalling, having taken a step away from the usual trajectories of their individual lives. But Pamplona. Pamplona will push them forward, push them to finally act.

Tomorrow Pamplona, he hears Robert say. And, after a short silence, he adds: Don’t forget Pamplona.

Although both have their own reasons for this trip—and, true, even the fact that they’re running away from something is only hinted at with one character, and with the other, that precise something is revealed only until nearly the very end of the book—we see more of Danny’s life. Robert is a stand-in, albeit a necessary one—he’s a symbol for a possible alternate life: The man whose picture of his family’s in prominent display in his car, whose children’s toys litter the backseat.

[Funny, I was struck by how the meeting of these two seem to be a meeting of two possible trajectories in man’s life: One of adrenaline and fists, the other of briefcases and the hugs of children.]

It’s on Danny’s shoulder that we witness the events unfolding, and it’s Danny’s life we learn most of. There are two parallel narratives, and Danny’s at this the center of both—the present with Robert, and where he came from. It’s a gradual and tense build-up, a slow revelation that follows no conventional guide about segues. Revelations that are graver and graver, too.

Both narratives course steadily, their ends inevitable. Danny’s story is already whole, mind you—it’s all in how van Mersbergen chooses to reveal details. It’s not unlike running your hands slowly over a woven cloth, and gently unraveling the threads to look at them more closely. Undone, yes, but this closer examination makes the entirety more whole than ever.

[And when they brush against each other, it’s pure, chilling magic: A bull glancing against Danny triggers a memory of the brush of his girlfriend’s Ragna’s hands. Shiver.]

The structure paid off, though it initially made this a challenge for me to read. That is, it took me a long time before I resolved to finally read this book—I was too restless to settle down with it [—and then, it took me as long to think about it for this post, what I was going to say here—I was made too restless by the reaction it drew from me].

In many respects, this isn’t the book I usually read. It’s not exactly the characters. And, mind you, the subject matter isn’t necessarily hypermasculine—the road trip, the boxing, the bull-running: these are generally male matters, but they don’t make the book male. What made me apprehensive was that it seemed like the language was male, if only because it reminds most readers of the hard-edged brevity of Dead White Guy-Giants, Hemingway and Kerouac.

I am a fan of neither. And it’s not the directness of such novels, the straightforward tone that nonetheless makes room for diverse, multilayered readings—it’s that edge. The brusqueness, as though the narrator was barking or snapping off the words in between puffs of his pipe.

In Tomorrow Pamplona, that edge [that I can’t seem to define very well, haha] is omnipresent. The sentences are so tense, they’re almost brittle. To match/mirror the characters, their personalities. Their preoccupations. Their predominant moods. And, of course, the language effectively hurls the reader through the narratives, at the risk of agitated toe-tapping and pipe-puffing and repeated blinking and a hitched heart rate. See an exchange between Danny and Robert:

Can I ask you something? says Robert. When can you tell that you’re going to win?

Really early on.

Right at the beginning of a fight?

Yes. And when you’re going to lose? Can you tell that just as quickly?

No, that’s not something you feel, says Danny.

Kudos to translator Laura Watkinson for capturing this terse-to-brittle brevity, a sharpness that goes from languor to urgency—I wonder how hard it must have been to restrain the language, to capture what van Mersbergen accomplished. And, see, the language is never static: there’s always room for poignancy, for the lyrical that resides even in such tension. Here is Danny talking to Robert about his girlfriend Ragna, among what he left behind:

She smokes in bed, he says. He can picture her lying on the bed in a rectangle of white moonlight, holding her cigarette up at shoulder height. He’s sitting at the foot of the bed, leaning against the slope on the wall. One hand on her ankle. She’s smoking very deliberately, as if in slow motion. If he’d been sitting to one side, he could have seen her thoughts as they crossed her face in the mirror. Then things would never have gone so far. But he couldn’t see her face. And all he could feel was the soft skin above her ankle as he stroked it.

Think that’s what she’s doing now?

No, says Danny. That’s not what she’s doing now.

And what about you? What do you do when she’s smoking?

I watch her.

Yes, this book put me through the wringer. Reading it, and thinking about it afterward. It’s—forgive the pun—a heavyweight. On the one hand, it brings a marked diversity to the book list offered by small publisher Peirene Press. On the other hand, it is a very, very good book, made better because I resisted it at first, made better because I am rather glad that I, and many [more] non-Dutch-speaking readers, had the opportunity to read this.

Summer NYRBs

Tags

Fiction - Novel, Fiction - Novella, Translation, NYRB Classics, The NYRB Classics Project, Elizabeth von Arnim, Tove Jansson, Vivant Denon

April is the usual [hello, global warming] start of the summer here in the Philippines. I’d know, though, regardless of any calendar—the daily twenty-minute walk from the office to the train station has me wishing I could rub against an ice cube doing the mambo.

One of the things that the season [one of blasted two, here in my country] allows me to do is to submit to my O.C. tendencies and read books set in the summer. Mostly. Kind of. [Actually, what the three NYRBs I read for the start of summer have in common is that, uh, they all have red spines. I are dorkus.] The first two books, I’ve had with me for months—acquired November of last year, thereabouts. But I had to be my uptight self and read them this April. Because it makes more sense in my head that way.

What The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim and The Summer Book by Tove Jansson have in common: Summer setting the scene for a long-deserved / much-needed escape. Also, undercurrents. Also, unorthodox yet refreshing heroines.

In von Arnim’s case, it’s four women spending summer in an Italian villa—rest and relaxation are sought, and transformations are inevitable. Reading the plot summary—a summer escape to gorgeous Italy!, basically—you’d be threatened by fluff. [I shudder to think what today’s Hollywood would do with this premise. I am giving you the side-eye, Elizabeth Gilbert.]

But it’s all so catty and funny and endearing—those sharp undercurrents, each woman’s agenda. And their distinct perspectives of what escape—and change—means. What home stands for. [The fluff threatens after the fact, no?] We’ve got a docile young wife, a do-gooder community pillar, a doyenne stuck in the past, a too-beautiful-for-her-own-good socialite.

Jansson’s novel-in-vignettes feature a precocious six-year-old and her hardy grandmother. Their isolated island serves as a backdrop for their adventures, their tantrums, and some of their secrets. It all seems so quaint—but Jansson dispels that with a blink-and-you’ll miss it sentence: The child’s mother has died. Everything before and after this softly spoken sentence shines differently: The failed camping adventure, spending the night alone under the stars; the little creatures carved into the forest’s scraggly trees; the too-sensitive flowers hoarded and cultivated by the quiet father; the child’s treatise on earthworms and the conundrums of earthworm-splitting [a section too long to include here, yet all-too charming and sad].

This island and its inhabitants’ little joys—a flower growing beneath a dislodged rock—and its near-catastrophes—a sea storm, a new neighbor—hints at so many graver things. And Jansson’s restraint is startling.

Now. No Tomorrow by Vivant Denon is touted as a companion to Laclos’ Les Liaisons dangereuses—but whereas that was a manifesto and manipulative excess and rakehelling and salaciousness, Denon’s 32-page novella on genteel seduction and tables-turned role-playing is of exquisite delicateness. Sure, there’s illicit kisses and caresses. But it’s a hazy, dreamlike eroticism in these spare pages, involving circuitous promenades and conversations. Not to mention some of the loveliest passages about seduction. Basically, you’re compelled to quote the whole novella. But I will restrain myself to the following:

• Our souls met and multiplied; another was born each time we kissed.
• Our sighs replaced language. More tender, more numerous, more ardent, they expressed our sensations, they marked their progression and the last sigh of all, suspended for a time, warned us that we would have to offer thanks to Love.

The haze, this careful one-night seduction, the eroticism of so many things left unsaid [mostly the characters’ doing]: the reader is obliged to speculate, to fill in the blanks. This book, so much like the night itself, both for me and the lovers: “The night was superb; it revealed things in glimpses, and seemed only to veil them so as to give free reign to the imagination.” I saw what you did there, Monsieur Denon.

At the novella’s end, you immediately want to reread it, to experience the language again, to brush closer to the secrets each character holds.

* * *

A jaunty summer-wave from my part of the world. I’m off to haunt that cursed jigging ice cube. Until later.

Hello, from the Glittery Land of Lazy Bloggers

Tags

Fiction - Novel, Reference, Fiction - Short Stories, Fiction - Novella, Books About Books, NYRB Classics, The NYRB Classics Project, Nicholson Baker, Jonathan Franzen, Science, Alan Bennett, Elizabeth von Arnim, Stephen Hawking, William Trevor, Francesca Gould

I hereby drag myself out of the muck of the Glittery Land of Lazy Bloggers to publish this post. Although I love this space—after more than a year, still trying to figure out how to wiggle around here, actually—I do hate feeling like blogging is a job, egads and when the thought of attempting to chip away at my TBR Mountain Range has me whimpering: well, darling, it’s time to take a breather (whether or not I do so on purpose). Not to mention the occasional streak of maniacal listing of blogging tasks, largely self-imposed, mind you. Order can be nice, but it can be exhausting, limiting.

And so, I think what I’ve been reading since the month began can profess to my inherent battiness and flakiness. See, here’s a quick summary: I read about a Queen, then Italy, then the vagaries of the multiverses, then got introduced to a short story canon-iste, then suffered cerulean warblers, then two hundred pages of phone sex, then had tremendous dork-out moments with a manual that advises you on the disadvantages of eating your boogers. And then I followed all that with four romance novels.

I have been having so much fun. I’ve been feeling a lot of guilt about semi-abandoning this space, but I feel so free to be random and flaky and so very disorganized, haha. (I am not painting a very nice picture of myself, no?)

Oh, I had noble intentions. At the start of April, I picked The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett—a book nearly everyone has called delightful. The novella was a fairytale, in many aspects. It’s a (sadly) highly doubtful yet possible scenario of the Queen of England reading a book. Intrinsically, it’s about a reader meeting opposition in the larger, non-reading world. And I love the Queen’s steel of spine, here irrevocable all-consuming love affair with books.

Perhaps that morning I spent with this novella waiting for my ride to work was a prelude to the many moments in the past couple of days where I just stayed still and read—nothing but the book, the cup of coffee beside me, a cigarette or two. Just reading in our new living room—reading by daylight, egads! Because I immediately followed that up with The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim—whose discussion I will save for later because this surprising novel with its supposedly saccharine premise and dry humor: so much fun and lovely.

And then I had to crawl into the corner and whimper over The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. Which is, as you may have guessed, science—physics. And, dammit, I appreciate Hawking’s attempt to give the whole multiverse-theory, the-grand-design, the-theory-of-everything fiesta to me in layman’s terms but oh my god I feel so much smarter and well-informed but my brain is crying even now, days away from the paaaaain. A pain I tried to assuage with The Dressmaker’s Child by William Trevor—another Pocket Penguin—but I realized that, as much as I wanted to be all free and shit, I was beginning to feel restless. Because I couldn’t sit down and just finish the behemoth that’s been occupying most of my free time in the weeks before—the F-novel.

With Jonathan Franzen’s contender for the Great American Novel, Freedom, I distinctly remember feeling relieved: that odd liberty of coming to the party late. (I’ll be in the corner, nursing my drink, smiling at some far-off image of gahdamned cerulean warblers.) Too heavy to lug around for train-reading, I fled work to come home, inevitably wandering to this ridiculously self-assured book, reading, groaning, reading, reading. I nodded a few times, grimaced at some points—seriously, Katz, calling your peepee “a divining rod,” a “master prophet” or some such nonsense?—seriously, Franzen, what is it with you and your inability to describe a penis with a straight face?—From The Corrections, which I will always like best, describing poor darling Alfred’s as a “faintly urinary dumpling.” Behave, Jonathan, get a grip. I’ve got nothing to add, nothing at all. I won’t even say I’m a hundred percent Patty Berglund when I’ve got the blues and the mean reds. Where was I? Yes, that odd liberty of coming to the party late. I have nothing important to say here. I am glad I read this book. I really liked Freedom. Fuck the voice in my head for adding, Against my better judgment.

And then, well, I picked up Vox by Nicholson Baker and it was hours later when I looked up. Yes, this is two-hundred-plus pages of nothing but phone sex—divertive, digressive, cooky, only mildly degenerate. And then I spent an afternoon cackling over Why You Shouldn’t Eat Your Boogers, and Other Gross and Useless Information About Your Body, by Francesca Gould. I am an icky, immature child, and I can’t wait to read the two other books in the series, which is a lot of ickiness.

[That was a half-assed yet necessary-to-my-OC-interests recap.]

And I come to you with all these, four more romance novels (I could weep at that reunion!), several weeks’ worth of exhaustion, and, well, Scottish Shortbread Fingers (the best cookies ever). Until next time, everyone.

PS – Attached with the writing part of Lazy Blogger, is the necessary (and increasingly delightful) trips to all of the blog posts and blog authors who catch my eye, or make me drool. I realize it’s been months since I last visited some of your blogs, but I am always reading, star-ing items in my Google Reader like crazy. I am whining about my blogging inadequacies, haha. Give me a minute, and I’ll see what I can do to strike a balance, ok?

“And I am asking you, do you still remember?” — Journey Into the Past by Stefan Zweig

Tags

Fiction - Novella, Translation, NYRB Classics, The NYRB Classics Project, Anthea Bell, Stefan Zweig, André Aciman

#35 of 2011 • Journey Into the Past, by Stefan Zweig
– translated from the German by Anthea Bell;
– with an introduction by André Aciman.

In remembering a poem by Verlaine – In the old park, in ice and snow caught fast / Two specters walk, still searching for the past – a chilling epiphany falls our hero Ludwig, one half of an ill-fated pair of lovers [what other kind of pair is there in the wretchedly real love story?]:

Had not those specters searching for their past been muted questions, asked of a time that was no longer real, mere shadows wanting to come back to life but unable to do so now? Neither she nor he was the same anymore, yet they were searching for each other in vain effort, fleeing one another, persisting in disembodied, powerless efforts like those black specters at their feet.

Unconsciously, he must have groaned aloud, for she turned. “What’s the matter, Ludwig? What are you thinking of?”

But he merely dismissed it, saying, “Nothing, nothing!” And he listened yet more intently to what was within him, to the past, to see whether that voice of memory truly foretelling the future would not speak to him again, revealing the present to him as well as the past.

A probable a theory as any from the introduction by Aciman: “But the voice does not speak, or we will never know what it might finally say. What we do know is that these two, like Verlaine’s erstwhile lovers, are locked in their eternal colloquy in a cold park. If they do not move, it is not for fear of spoiling the moment or of being disappointed, it is not even inhibition that holds them back. Rather, it is because time can and does indeed terrible crimes. It will kill the very best in us and insist that we are still alive.”

This gets me every time. I am in love with this love story, and I am in awe of Zweig’s micro-focus of his characters’ loving, and their losing of that love—and the possibility of getting it all back, of resuming. If all ardor were this breathless, this lyrical, this wretched! [A welcome alternative to Werther’s wretchedness, really.]

The rest of this post further extols this novella, and embarrassingly so at some points. For clarity’s sake: this is one little book that has wormed its way into my heart, because, dammit, it knows what buttons to push. Sasha, you and your love stories!

* * *

A man and a woman, almost/would-be lovers, reunite after nine years. To take a train ride. To travel to a city only fleetingly visited—perhaps, hopefully, to re-fan the embers of their love.

Separated all that time by unimaginable distance, they now felt this silent intimacy with redoubled force. Dear God, how long and far apart they had been—nine years and four thousand days had passed between then and this day, this night?

And we are soon enough plunged into the past—which is as overwhelmingly constant for us as it has haunted our two lovers, especially Ludwig. Ludwig, who falls in love with his benevolent employer’s young wife, who, thank God, professes to loving him back. Can you see how Zweig writes about that moment where Ludwig’s love becomes known to him for the first time?

Leaving her, oh God, leaving her—how could he have ever contemplated it, how could he have made that decision as if he still belonged to himself, as if he were not held here, in her presence, by all the bonds of his emotions, their deepest roots? Physical pain, a blow struck through his whole body from the top of his skull to the bottom of his heart, a lightning bolt tearing across the night sky and illuminating everything. And now, in that blinding light, it was impossible to realize that every nerve and fibre of his being was flowering with love for her, his dear one.

And can you see how simply Zweig writes about his dear one’s own quiet epiphany?

The realization that she loved him was also a farewell.

• The ardor of their early love: “Hand made its way to hand, lips to lips, the restless blood of one met its kindred blood in the other, each longed feverishly for the other, every nerve burned for the sensuous touch of foot, hand, dress, some living part of the yearning body.” Oh, my goodness.

• What are two lovers to do but to insist that they will see each other as soon as time and their responsibilities and their commitments admit? But their separation lengthens. And, as is sadly usual, there are different preoccupations. He starts a new life, succeeds at his job and his role as a family man. We hear nothing about her [hell, did I even get her name?], but she is trapped in the war Ludwig had left behind.

• But, they reunite. Nine years later, they reunite. But [again], as the reviewer of this article from The New Republic rather [enviably] astutely states, “a sense of larger forces against which individual hearts cannot effectually contend” plagues our two lovers even in their reunion nine years later. That, and the disconcerting fact that they have changed, and perhaps these changes go against what they want, what they thought they wanted all along.

“Everything is as it used to be except for us, except for us!”

The words cut into her. Alarmed, she turned again.

“What do you mean, Ludwig?” But she did not meet his gaze, for his eyes were not seeking hers but staring, silent and blazing, at her lips, the lips he had not touched for so many years, although once, moist on the inside like a fruit, they had burned against his own burning lips.

Do you remember? he demands.

“I have waited nine years, keeping grimly silent, but I haven’t forgotten. And I am asking you, do you still remember?”

They’re frozen, still. Even now, when the coast is clear and all that. When they have the chance to do as their hearts had willed. Had. That’s at the heart of this tightly packed, intensely introspective, oh-so-swoonable novella: Is there a point to all this? Do we go on loving? Do we admit that we stopped loving one another, that we may love again? Why should we—why even try? Do we still even remember?

_________

• Imagine my surprise—and my giddiness—about three weeks ago, upon learning that the first Zweig I was about to read had the same translator as the book I just set down [and loved partly because of the rightness of its translation]. Are these two books the wonderful beginning of a bibliophilic relationship with Anthea Bell? I hope so, because the language in the two novellas leaves me no doubt of her awesome abilities as a translator.

• One of my favorite movies is Before Sunset, the sequel to Before Sunrise. I love them both so much, dammit. Aherm. In Sunrise, two strangers meet on a train, spend one fevered night together in the streets of Vienna—at sunrise, they promise they’ll meet again. In Sunset, it’s nine years later, they’ve made their own lives. Life happened, see. They meet again, at last. In this new meeting, they manage to talk about how they’ve been living, what happened to them after that train ride. From Roger Ebert’s review: “What they are really discussing, as they trade these kinds of details, is the possibility that they missed a lifetime they were intended to spent together.” What happened to their promise? What life could they have lived together, what, dammit, what? What happened to all those possibilities? Where you there in Vienna, in December? What’s going to happen next, Jesse?—Baby, you are going to miss that plane.

I stumbled upon this book in National Bookstore, and cried in raptures all the way to the cashier.

The Palimpsests

Tags

Anthea Bell, Fiction - Novella, Matthias Politycki, Peirene Press, Translation

#34 of 2011 • Next World Novella, by Matthias Politycki
– translated from the German by Anthea Bell.

A.

Hinrich Schepp, a happy-enough unremarkable man, finds his wife dead. Quite dead, on his desk—presumably, her last breaths were exhaled over his long-buried fiction manuscript, now festooned with her scribbled edits and notes for revision. What is a man to do? This is what our Hinrich does:

Finally he looked back at the stack of paper that Doro had left for him. Yes—it hit him like a sudden revelation—that was the first, the most important thing to do. He had to read those pages, find out what her last message was. How relieved he felt all at once! As if some kind of hope could be derived from that act. The idea that another action might be more appropriate, considering that he had spent half his life with the deceased, did not cross his mind.

His forgotten manuscript is now a palimpsest—his faux-fiction framed by his fresh-dead wife’s commentary, her marginalia, her editorial input, and her revelations. It goes beyond the I never loved you, husband device that one would expect. It’s much more complex than that—which is truly an impressive feat for its length [this welcome surprise, this magnified accomplishment is what I deeply appreciate about all the good novellas].

B.

This is a doozy of a book. It’s intertexuality with a domestic, ceaseless swing to it. One detail cloaked in another and another and another, that one risks forgetting the truth, and even the author plays on this forgetting and manipulates it to serve his purpose. Playful and experimental without drawing too much attention to its structure, without belaboring it—grounded on the chilling fact of how we must never take familiarity for granted, how we can’t even be certain of what is familiar to us anymore, what is real.

C.

Politycki’s novella is one of the best, most impressive, most remarkable books I have ever come across, frustrating flaw [that’s singular, okay?] notwithstanding. Couple that rock-solid vision of his, and that light tone with the constant undercurrent of doom—and the language, good lord, the language: it was seamless, and fluid and just right.

D.

Reading Anthea Bell’s masterful translation of Politycki has had me thinking long and hard about the peculiar relationship between translator and reader. Yes, the translator and the author have their own beef between them—but the reader encounters the translator’s version, her view, her language first. It is through her words that the reader encounters the author’s vision [further removed from the usual distance of us encountering that vision through the author’s own words].

See, I realized that a terse trust is at the center of this relationship. You have to trust the translator’s capabilities to articulate that vision, not necessarily the author’s language. And when something is off, that’s when the trust starts to waver. When the rhythm falls clumsy, for example. As mediator, the translator is tasked to coordinate the relationship between that author and us holding the book.

When I read Politycki through Bell, not once did I wonder if I was missing something. Not once did I wonder if she’d thought it wrong, if she was disloyal to Politycki’s language or his vision. I never thought that her comprehension-assimilation-delivery offended the original text. I never thought she deviated wildly, nor did I think that she woodenly conjured the corresponding word. It was all just right. I completely trusted Bell. Completely.

[I suspect that this is partly the reason why I find it so difficult to extract quotes from this tidy little book—the story it relays and its delivery are so finely attuned to each other, it’s awkward at best to snip a passage. Read the book, dammit.]

E.

Here is the dorkery version, quite helpful if you refresh yourself with B.—behold, a diagram. [I apologize, but this is how it appears in my companion notebook—I get pretty fussy here, obviously.]

So. Next World Novella, a book of shifting realities, opposing revelations, and the continual shattering of Hinrich Schepp’s truths:

# — I appreciate, very much, the sheer complexity of the details and their relationship with each other. I appreciate the details as they are, and most especially when Politycki uses them to form his different-hued parallelisms—also, how they play in the larger, shifting, overlapping realties scheme of things.

## — What is impressive about the novella is how, even though the realities are ever-changing for the characters and the reader, they never feel at odds. Sure, there is contrast, of course—but this isn’t a versus thing, despite the essentially contradictory nature of the revelations. Instead, they complement each other—it’s a whole, tight, careful novella. Yes, even the clumsy execution of that ending.

F.

Ah, that ending, which is a bone of contention for many who have read it and talked about it. Okay. I am aware of the author’s possible intention—quite noble, actually, to employ a cliché so horrendous—it’s in keeping with that whole shifting realties shtick. Yes, I understand. Still, it was horrendous. A cop-out. I’ve tried finding some grace in it, but I can’t. Although I have thought of a better alternative—why not echo the theme of last hundred-or-so pages, and simply install another reality. Why refer to the majority of the novella? Why not simply move one and—gah, if you are interested in duking it out with me, I have theories, muwahaha.

G.

I think I have said what I needed to say, although I teetered dangerously close to spoiling all the fun and wonder for anyone who hasn’t read this yet. So. If you need a summary, please refer to C.—and if you need an even shorter version, here it is: Yes to Next World Novella, a thousand times yes.