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

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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.

The Palimpsests

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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.

On Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius; translated by Jamie Bulloch

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Excerpts, Fiction - Novella, Friedrich Christian Delius, Jamie Bulloch, Peirene Press, Translation

Friedrich Christian Delius’ novella, Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman, is a single 117-page-long sentence. Yes, there is only one period. [I counted.] We are in Rome, 1943 — with a young, pregnant German woman, and her one, long, breathless utterance: a thought stretched, branching here and there to the past, the present, the possibilities of the future; of her husband, her baby, the war.

only just arrived and immediately alone again, highly pregnant in a dangerous, foreign place, it was a shock, at twenty-one almost herself like a child that cannot walk without help or stand on its own two feet, exposed in a totally alien country and a totally alien language,

I admit I initially felt apprehensive — to me, having experienced several postmodern scares, it smacked of gimmick. But Delius’ novella worked. It was affective, effective, compelling. Two things as to why, me thinks:

1] This was an apt character with the right circumstances, in an apt setting, the right atmosphere. That is: yes, I do want to stay with this young mother pregnant and alone; yes, I do care about her thoughts.

2] The sentence, one would naturally think, could very well be unwieldy, rather stifling too. But Delius — and, of course, translator Jamie Bulloch — allows this sentence to fall into a rhythm that doesn’t trivialize, doesn’t sound jokey, doesn’t feel overwrought. These read like a person’s thoughts, with high pitches and low points. This is a stream of consciousness, with rough waters, some turbulence here and there, but mostly smooth, languorous sailing, hinting at depth.

[I can’t help but think how fun and challenging the crafting of a 117-page-long sentence could have been!]

In the past year, I’ve read several books set [either in whole, or partly] in the war — Irène Némirovsky immediately comes to mind, with Suite Française; and, a novel where the characters have pretty much eclipsed the factuality of the war raging outside them, Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude. I loved how these books focused on lives who have filtered out the vastness of the war, it’s all-encompassing connotations. In most of these books, too, there are select individuals, or a setting, which forms a microcosm. People compelled / intent to keep the war at bay — whether they do it consciously or unconsciously, with both will and disposition. In Delius’ novella, there is this one young mother.

And she has very particular thoughts. Not even about being a soldier’s wife — a Nazi soldier’s wife, too boot, one so frightfully unaware [her husband, after all, does not stand for anything else than love and family -- unlike what we might think!] — but her steadfast innocence.

And, borne out of this trait: one of the gutsiest parts of her stream of consciousness — the parts I liked the most — were when she allowed herself rebellious thoughts, selfish ones: There shouldn’t be a war, for I want my husband. All very simple, really.

and she could not help thinking

that so many die each day on the battlefronts, each head a life, each life a gift, each life at the centre of other lives, although she knew that everyday it was thousands more than these men here, but with these heads, all so different from each other, it was easier to imagine what each individual life meant, just how many hopes, efforts, joys and pains, and yet she felt how narrow her power of imagination was, because in truth she was only thinking of one life, the one which influenced and affected her most,

It’s a distancing, at least that’s how it begins — “There might be a war, but it doesn’t involve me,” and “There might be a war, but I am not involved.”

she sensed something within her rebelling against the constant obligation to stifle the feeling of longing with her reason and faith, because feelings were forbidden in wartime, you were not allowed to rejoice with happiness, you had to swallow your sadness, and like a soldier you were forced to conceal the language of the heart,

This is how a rebellion takes form in a time of war — or any situation that is near-mandatory in its collectiveness, in its concept [skewed or not] of solidarity. It’s a sly admission, humane, deep-seated too: she wants her husband back, she wishes for the baby to be born into a shiny future that isn’t necessarily the result of the war now being waged.

she should not allow herself to feel this longing, it was not appropriate for a German soldier’s wife, who ought to be waiting patiently at home, first for the final victory and then for her husband,

I love the little curlicues of bitterness. And it’s not because she’s young and naïve — it’s because she’s human. We are allowed to be self-serving, we are allowed to be selfish. We’re allowed not to think about the bickering of powerful men, of smoke and ammunition, of the broken lives of strangers — we are allowed to simply wish the one we love home.

The form is the perfect vehicle for this young mother’s insight, which transcends: the possibility of loss, and even the reality of an entire world’s machinations, can fade away, for as long as one holds on to the conviction that he will come back.

At the novella’s end, our heroine decides to write a letter that very evening. I don’t know what history has dictated for her, her husband, her family — but I am, at the book’s close, at ease with the fact that our young mother won’t be swayed from hoping.

Short Fiction Weekend

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Fiction - Short Stories, Fiction - Novella, Lydia Davis, Translation, NYRB Classics, Irène Némirovsky, Peirene Press, Friedrich Christian Delius, Elizabeth Hardwick

I like bibliophilically attacking the weekends. I mean, although I make certain to have time to read during the workdays [train, long lunch breaks, when boss isn't looking, haha], there’s just something free and home about being collapsed on the bed for hours at a time, just reading and not caring. So: Add to the pile on the floor beside the bed, glare at the world to leave me alone, and read. This weekend, in keeping with my harebrained idea to go mostly-short-fiction this month and after, I chilled with three collections and a novella, which were in different states of Currently Reading. Mmmm.

I finished two collections this weekend – Samuel Johnson is Indignant by Lydia Davis [the third in her Collected Stories] and Dimanche and Other Stories by Irène Némirovsky. It’s love. I reached an epiphany of sorts re Davis; reading Némirovsky’s short fiction reminded me how she can be both lovely and ruthless at the same time. Ah.

What I started this weekend: Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius and The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick. I picked up Delius earlier this week, but I knew a 117-page sentence deserves my complete attention. Also, I’ve read only two stories so far in the Hardwick collection, but man, where has she been all my life? I’m in love. For seriously.

Ah, work tomorrow. Ah, bag ready to smuggle in some Hardwick. Ah, long weekend a-coming. Orayt.

/ confetti

marginalia || Stone in a Landslide, by Maria Barbal; translated by Laura McGloughlin and Paul Mitchell

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Fiction - Novella, Laura McGloughlin, Maria Barbal, Paul Mitchell, Peirene Press, Translation

My second read from the folks at Peirene Press: Stone in a Landslide by Maria Barbal [translated from the Catalan by Laura McGloughlin and Paul Mitchell]. A Catalan classic, and in its first English edition, the novella is the reminiscences of 80-year-old Conxa: where she came from, how she grew up, the work she did, the love she had, the children she cared for. The heartaches too, of course.

I read the first book from Peirene, Beside the Sea, a while back, and I loved to bits and pieces. And I gladly dipped in to this one. But something wasn’t right, even from the very start. I’d read the first twenty or so pages, and found that it couldn’t engage me. I set it aside. And then I picked it up again after a couple of days.

And the same thing pretty much happened. I found Conxa’s voice too calm, too restrained. It put me at a distance, though it felt like I was just sitting beside her, looking back at her life with her [in my head, we're knitting -- don't ask why, as I don't know what to do with a needle].

Theoretically, that could’ve worked: the sparse prose, the matter-of-factness of it all. No hysterics, no histrionics. Just the story. Just the key moments of her life. I have loved many books that bear a resemblance to Conxa’s voice, to Barbal’s language.

But I simply wasn’t part of Stone in a Landslide. With her voice, that calm/placid tone — it felt like Conxa herself was intent on not reliving her life. And I kept asking myself why I was with her in the first place.

Perhaps I wasn’t in the right mood for the tone, I couldn’t welcome those calm reminiscences, couldn’t appreciate the contrast of the hardship and passions of Conxa’s life and her actual storytelling. Because as much as I like the calm, the dignified, the stoic — I need a jump in my pulse once in a while. I didn’t like feeling I had to read on, because I had to be polite to Conxa.

I’m not saying the shortness is the flaw, or that Barbal packed too much. I am conscious of how Barbal told the story, aware of why a contemplative tone was needed in this kind of reminiscing. But. Again, I wasn’t getting it. I wasn’t getting the book, I wasn’t getting my reaction to the book. I’ve been almost certain that I love this.

A quick look around the blogosphere says that this is an almost universally loved book. And I feel kind of bad about that, because I do understand the merits of the work, I get how it could have appealed. A part of me thinks that maybe it just wasn’t the right time.

Maybe I’ll return to this. Yes, I think so. Because a part of me still deeply feels that this is a Sasha Book. And it’s so disconcerting to be wrong about that. Oh well.

---

• I am definitely going to read the third offering from Peirene Press, Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius. It’s a novella-length sentence, y’all. It’s risky work, and I’m excited for that. I’m trying to feel it out, waiting for the “right” time to devour it.
• As always, many thanks to Meike, and Peirene.

marginalia || Beside the Sea, by Véronique Olmi; translated by Adriana Hunter

Tags

Adriana Hunter, Fiction - Novella, Peirene Press, Translation, Véronique Olmi

There’s always something infinitely satisfying about books that take risks. Most especially when those books are good. How to balance subject matter or form or technique and the reader it must lead to? How to fine-tune that balance between craft and the artist’s intentions? How to ruffle the bejeebies of a person, and still have her, at the book’s close, go Wow, what just happened to me, do it again, please? And how, dear god, how, to accomplish all that in just a teensy bit over a hundred pages?

How does it even work, really?

In Véronique Olmi’s slim and tidy and terrifyingly affective book, Beside the Sea, risks come by the bucketful. Its very premise gives you a glimmer of those risks — a mother brings her two sons beside the sea, but you just know all is not well. The novella begins with We took the bus, the last bus of the evening, so no one would see us. Quite mundane, really. The mother is bringing her children out to see the sea.

But I’ve always believed that in shorter fiction, the dictum of Every Word Matters is even more pressing: You have a hundred pages to make your story matter; you do not dilly-dally. In Olmi’s novella, we are hooked, then strung along, from that very first line.

I am gushing, and I’m just at the first sixteen words of the book. Beside the Sea is just such a disquieting book, and so very powerful. And we are warned, those sixteen words. Doom and gloom await you. And getting there isn’t a ray of sunshine either. It’s not so much horror that I experienced nor was it madness that I felt was at the center of that disquiet. Something was just not right. And the more I read, the more certain I grew about that. And of course I had to read on.

The book has such a taut narrative, and it’s mostly due to Olmi’s handling of the revelations — Knowing what to reveal, how much of it one should, when, and how. Olmi succeeds with this, it’s made for engrossing storytelling. That hint of something not quite right — I will go back to this over and over. What the mother is, for one, we’re never quite certain. We want to define her, we want to know what she is. The mystery is multi-layered. For one thing, we are in the head of this character. It’s through her that we know this story. But we know so little of her, really. The answers we want, to Where are you from?, to What are you really doing here?, to Are you really going to do this? This unnamed mother is not so much an unreliable narrator so much as she’s a disquieting person.

No matter how firmly we have planted ourselves in her mind throughout this narrative yet still knowing so little; and as much as it is in our nature to know more, to be curious — We are satisfied with what Olmi has chosen to reveal about this character. I don’t have the theories to back this up, but I just know that I was satisfied because she was good.

See how the entire narrative leads to that conclusion. Yes, you can see that coming from a mile away, but it doesn’t matter. Olmi makes certain that we don’t miss a thing, that we are with her as she reveals, as she tells her story. Every scene is important, every word. And the means is as significant, as grave, as the end.

I’m just at the tip of the iceberg really. You know the blurby phrase, “slim powerhouse” — this is that. It just packs so much. As soon as I was done with it, I realized that this would be a joy to read over and over. That if anyone would ever have the mad idea to give me a teaching position, this would be one of those books that’d just be perfect to teach and dissect and wonder at. Because I’m just so sure that no matter how many Whys and Hows I throw at it, those questions won’t be answered the way I want them. Because Olmi, man, that Olmi sure knows what she’s doing.

__________

• Beside the Sea was the first offering from “small” publishing house, Peirene Press. To ye lucky souls, if Book Depository ships to your country, I heartily suggest you go clicky. Yes, this is shameless plugging. But there is a need for more people in the world to be disturbed so artfully. UPDATE: The Book Depository now ships free to the Philippines. Wasak!
• Reading Begets Reading: Am currently making my way through Wish Her Safe at Home, by Stephen Benatar, reissued by NYRB Classics. You see that gorgeous book at the sidebar? Yes, that? I’m reading that. Because that, too, is about madness. But of a completely different kind. [I am tempted to call August the Unofficial Madwoman Month.]