Thieves Like Us

The cover of Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim’s novel Stealth (2007, translated into English by Hosam Aboul-Ela, Aflame Books, London, 2009) features a slightly chubby boy of perhaps six years old, wearing an ill-fitting blue sweatshirt and shorts, looking expectantly at the camera. Behind him, almost indistinguishable from the dingy, monochromatic background, stands a middle-aged man – the boy’s father - wearing a fez, his thick mustache beneath sharply downward-sloping cheekbones. Each appears to look into the camera with independence, as though being photographed alone rather than together. This photograph is described within the pages of Stealth, an autobiographical portrait of the relationship between Ibrahim and his father, and captures the flavor of the novel perfectly: an image marked by time, a worn, threadbare atmosphere suggesting poverty barely kept at bay, a sense of distance between child and adult, the child looking forward with hesitant anticipation, the adult receding into the background with a stern expression in which pride and resignation mix. Photos appear frequently in Stealth, and Ibrahim’s novel itself develops like a Polaroid photograph, gradually emerging from obscurity into the superannuated color and definition that capture a fleeting moment, now past.

Set in Cairo in the early 1950’s, but with a telescoping sense of time that ranges from the father’s youth to the present, Stealth impressionistically covers a brief period of the writer’s childhood. Through powerfully atmospheric and intimate vignettes it unveils the quality of this relationship between father and son. In italicized flashbacks - memories of the boy prompted suddenly through the alchemy of association - a picture also begins to emerge of the child’s absent mother and of the reason for her absence. Ibrahim masterfully suggests details here and there that begin to accrete into a fuller back-story of an intelligent, defiant, and afflicted young woman whose life has been circumscribed by obligation, marriage and cultural expectations.

Ibrahim’s (rather, his translator’s) wonderfully apt title choice underscores children’s means of appropriating information about the mysteries of the adult world. The unnamed boy learns of this world by stealthy observation – peering through windows, doors left ajar, skylights, keyholes, glimpsing around corners into rooms where adults interact, furtively exploring the contents of drawers and closets, eavesdropping on conversations and unfamiliar noises. By means of these stolen glimpses, the child inquisitively gains burgeoning knowledge of adult behavior and relations, and in particular intimations of his father’s loneliness, declining health and fortune, frustrations with women (who come and go through the home as housekeepers, potential new spouses, and surrogate mothers), his religious practices, relations with friends and relatives, political beliefs, and hints of his conflicting emotions around being a single parent. Stealth also employs the prism of the central father/son story to refract light onto a whole set of cultural phenomena and a history of mid-century Egypt, lending the novel a depth and relevance beyond the simple familial relationship it describes. Along the periphery of the child’s grasping vision, the reader catches glimpses of the corruption of Egyptian politicians and businessmen; reaction to events of politics, war, terror, and scandal; rituals and practices of holiday celebration; the difficult and limited options faced by women; the imprisonment of those targeted unjustly for their political opinions; the passing popularity of certain songs, films and fashions.

The child’s fractional understanding of this adult world is emphasized by a fragmentary, almost cubistic aesthetic in describing his manner of apprehension, in which only parts are grasped, and not the whole:

I open the door carefully and look behind me. Father is deep into his nap. I go out to the living room. I walk softly to the door of the constable’s room. It is shut. I put my eye to the keyhole. The end of the bed. Four bare feet over it. The feet are all tangled and they’re not moving. I go over to the skylight and have a look at the window of Um Zakiya. It is open. The side of her bare arm is showing. I go around the table. I notice a mouse running towards the bathroom and the kitchen. I go back to Mama Tahiya’s room. I hear moving inside, so I hurry back to our room.

The sensual details of Ibrahim’s recollections provide the novel an astonishing richness and immediacy invested with a child’s selectivity and impressionability: a wooden wardrobe that has only three ball feet, the fourth replaced by a piece of wood that causes the left door to always remain open a crack; old train tickets used as domino pieces, the destination on one side and hand-drawn dots on the other; a black-clad woman on a tram “whose thighs hang over the edge of the seat a little;” a cup of rusty nails by the bedside that the child’s father fills with water each night. One can almost smell the fenugreek cooking (without ever even having actually experienced the cooking of fenugreek). The vividness of these details recreates a complete world, immerses one in the mysteries of a child’s perceptions, through which life is learned as often as not via stolen glances snatched from the interstices where adults aren’t looking.

Stealth is an extraordinary portrait of childhood and an affecting appreciation of a father – and by inference, an even more poignant elegy to a missing mother.  It’s also an intimate and penetrating glimpse into Egyptian culture and history. And, in its stealthy way, it is also about the origins of the impulse to become a writer, from one who has become among Egypt’s most prominent and compelling.  As that country now enters a significant new chapter in its history - and as Ibrahim’s latest novel, Turbans and Hats, has just been published last month in Europe and is beginning to garner praise as a turning point in Arabic literature - one hopes that Ibrahim will finally find the world audience he deeply deserves. 

Late Night Thoughts After Reading Edith Grossman's "Why Translation Matters"

Only when fortuitous personal circumstances essentially forced me to become serious about learning French did I realize the many splendid paths that knowing a second language would open, not least of which was the one that led into literature in French. I began to discover a number of wonderful writers previously unknown to me: Jean Giono, Boris Vian, Albert Londres, Daniel Pennac, Patrick Modiano, François Cheng, Amélie Nothomb, J. M. G. LeClézio, Emmanuel Carrère, and numerous others from the francophone world beyond France, such as Belgium’s Henry Bauchau and Morocco’s Tahar Ben Jalloun.

An even greater revelation, however, was in learning of many authors from around the world whose works had been translated into French but were difficult or impossible to find in English. While the paucity of translated literature published in the United States each year has earned it notoriety as the “three percent” problem, France – with a strong and respected tradition of translation, weighs in with a percentage closer to 20%. My knowledge of French meant that I suddenly had access to a vast new source of literature translated from other languages. An entire world opened before me as I began to find writers from Japan, Scandinavia, Italy, Greece, the Middle East, China, and many other places around the globe whose work simply wasn’t available in English, or available in only highly limited selections. It was thus, for example, that I had my first exposure to a young South American writer named Roberto Bolaño, whose Étoile Distante I picked up in French after reading an article about him and being surprised to find none of his work in English (nearly a year later, By Night in Chile would be the first Bolaño work to arrive in English translation).

Below I highlight several works I read in French and wished to see translated into English. To date, only one of these works has appeared in English; the others wait too patiently for someone to take up the task. (Translations of the titles are my own; my apologies to more adept translators who may certainly quibble with my amateur choices):

Un Roi Sans Divertissement, by Jean Giono (France)

(A King Without Diversions)

Originally in French; untranslated into English

Jean Giono occupies a place in French literature that merits him the widest possible readership. North Point Press issued several of his works in the United States in the 1980’s, and readers may be aware of him through the perennial gift book for the gardener in the family, The Man Who Planted Trees, or perhaps from the 1995 film “The Horseman on the Roof” based on one of his best-known novels, but Giono’s work still remains in woefully limited availability in English. His rapturous novels of life in the French countryside mesh spiritual and moral questions with the marvels of the natural world. His 1947 novel Un Roi Sans Divertissement - perhaps the highlight of my reading year when I read it in 2007 –dates from Giono’s late period, technically the first in an ambitious projected cycle of novels meant to encompass the human condition. Divided into three linked tales and stretched over five years in the life of police captain Langlois, Un Roi Sans Divertissement takes place in a remote area of Isère in southeastern France, though Giono quite explicitly asserted that the geography of these works of his late career was a fictional creation. The first section follows the search for a serial killer in an isolated, snowbound rural area – an unusual topic for Giono, to say the least. There’s some suggestion of a pot-boiler aspect to the novel, apparently intended to attract American publishers, but there’s no attendant deficiency in the quality of the literature. Un Roi Sans Divertissement contains perhaps the most exquisite descriptions of autumn and winter I’ve ever read. Readers from the English-speaking world would do well to flock to the streets to protest the lack of a translation.

Suite Française, by Irène Némirovsky (France)

(Suite Française – it can’t be improved upon with a translated title)

Originally in French; English translation by Sandra Smith published in 2006

By now the world has discovered Némirovsky and, more significantly, begun to give her work its proper due. Suite Française, her major work, now appears in English even in an Everyman’s Library edition and consists of two linked novellas (of five interrelated novellas Némirovsky planned, she only completed these two prior to her arrest and subsequent execution in Auschwitz). Hundreds of works of literature wrestle with the horrors of World War II and the world’s having allowed Nazism to emerge, and while many are exceptionally powerful works, none that I’ve read has quite captured, as Némirovsky has, the quiet, docile manner by which ordinary people acquiesced to fascism. This is not a novel of the camps or of the battlefield; its focus on ordinary persons allows it to transcend the specifics of WWII fascism in France to serve as a potent warning of the ease with which people can go along and end up complicit with the most heinous of fascist atrocities.

Amrikanli: Un Automne à San Francisco, by Sonallah Ibrahim (Egypt)  

(Amrikanli: An Autumn in San Francisco)

French translation from Arabic by Richard Jacquemond; untranslated into English

If there were one work I read in French that might serve as the poster child of the “three percent” problem, it’s this 2003 novel from Egyptian author Sonallah Ibrahim (published in French translation in November, 2005). I could argue that some other works on this list may be more deserving, but the sheer inconceivability of the lack of an English translation is unmatched, given Amrikanli’s American setting (San Francisco) and its thematic treatment of the collision of Middle Eastern and American cultures in the contemporary world. Ibrahim is routinely viewed as one of Egypt’s most significant writers. Shortly after Amrikanli’s publication in the Middle East (where it became a bestseller), Ibrahim caused a scandal by publically refusing Egypt’s top literary prize, declaring illegitimate the power of a corrupt and oppressive Egyptian government to bestow the award. I tracked down the book in France after a friend mentioned hearing of an Arabic writer who’d written about San Francisco. I took up Amrikanli assuming it to be a travelogue; only several pages in did I realize it was in fact a novel. The story uses a fairly conventional conceit of the stranger in a strange land, following the almost picaresque adventures of visiting professor of Egyptian history Shukri as he navigates the cultural landscape of San Francisco. While the novel takes place in 1998 as the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal is unfolding, it nonetheless inhabits the shadow of the destroyed twin towers and speaks, indirectly, to post-9/11 U.S.-Arab relations. The large amount of contemporary Egyptian history woven into the narrative is a welcome education for those of us ignorant of what is arguably the most important nation in the Middle East. I found Amrikanli mordantly funny in places, and a complete surprise that changed forever my embarrassingly small conception of contemporary Middle Eastern writing. That it remains almost completely unknown in the United States eight years after its publication seems little short of disgraceful, and only serves to underscore Ibrahim’s implicit criticism of American insularity and self-absorption. And while the optimal moment for an English translation of this novel may perhaps be past, American readers, in particular, deserve the opportunity to engage Ibrahim’s caustic, funny, eye-opening and important work.

La Forêt des Renards Pendus, by Arto Paasilinna (Finland)

(The Forest of Hanged Foxes)

French translation from Finnish by Anne Colin du Terrail; untranslated into English

I don’t know of any writer quite like Finland’s Arto Paasilinna, at least I know of no other writer with a national stature like Paasilinna. His novels come with such regularity as to be regarded almost as an annual cause for celebration in Finland (I’m starting to join that ritual, and find myself reading one of his works about once a year). Like Jean Giono, Paasilinna expresses a deep connection with nature. He is also capable of tremendous wit - subtle, playful and often absurdist - and of crafting completely indelible images. Of the handful of Paasilinna works that I’ve read, La Forêt des Renards Pendus has been the most arresting and enjoyable, a sustained blend of black humor with an appreciation for the mysteries of the natural world that is rare in the literature of any country. Like many of his novels, this one takes place in  Finland’s frozen far north, where a thief on the run and a drunken military commander deserting his responsibilities wind up sharing a camp in a remote boreal forest with - as often turns up in Paasilinna’s work – an especially sentient representative from nature, in this case a clever fox.

Parfum de Glace, by Yoko Ogawa (Japan)

(My initial literal translation of this title as Ice Cream Flavor seems to miss completely the tone of the novel; I'd always privately thought of the title as Perfume of Ice; I think a better translation of the French might be Frozen Scent. In any event, I will be curious to see what title the novel will be given when it's finally translated into English, and would be grateful if anyone has any insight into the original Japanese title, Kōritsui ta kaori, 凍りついた香り).

French translation from Japanese by Rose-Marie Makino-Fayolle; untranslated into English

At the recommendation of a French friend, I picked up a short Yoko Ogawa work – La Petite Pièce Hexagonale (The Small Hexagonal Chamber) - and quickly became hooked on Ogawa’s elegiac, crystalline, intimately haunting novels of separation and loneliness, filled with imaginative, lyric imagery. Her characters may be isolated individuals inhabiting melancholic landscapes, but they are also seekers whose intellectual and emotional curiosity draw them towards epiphanies and discoveries, often of exceptional beauty, at those intersections where solitude and connection collide. Fortunately, Ogawa’s fiction has begun to be published in English; however, Parfum de Glace has yet to appear.

Comme Tous Les Après-Midi, by Zoyâ Pirzâd (Iran)

(Just Like Every Afternoon)

French translation from Persian by Christophe Balaÿ; untranslated into English

I’m usually not much of a fan of short fiction, but I enjoyed this collection of stories. It’s of a genre that I think highly important: fiction that depicts the lives of women who might otherwise remain invisible. Many of Pirzâd’s short pieces are focused, affecting glimpses into the everyday domestic lives of women in Tehran, including a moving story in which a housewife dreams all day of writing down a story she’s thought of but, prevented from doing so by onerous household responsibilities, manages just a simple paragraph she triumphantly steals from the one moment of the day she finds to be her own. In another vignette, two men face one another on park benches while eating their lunches, both of them having made observation of others into a sort of pastime. It’s a nice conceit: two people, each playing the role of the writer, each assuming incorrectly that the world isn’t observing right back. A more unusual story concerning a reported invasion of locusts seems a thin political metaphor, but is successful nonetheless in delineating how propaganda can inspire a whole people to alarm, panic and drastic overreaction, a sort of mini “War of the Worlds.” Pirzâd’s novel Le Goût Âpre des Kakis (The Bitter Taste of Persimmons) won the 2009 Courrier International Award for international literature.

L’Art de la Joie, by Goliarda Sapienza (Italy)

(The Art of Joy)

French translation from Italian by Nathalie Castagné; untranslated into English

Despite a rather mundane title, Sapienza’s massive novel is a memorable, engaging work of 20^th century Italian literature that deserves wide readership and recognition. Published posthumously – Sapienza died in 1996 – this epic Sicilian novel begins in 1900 and follows its main character, Modesta, across nearly the entire span of the 20^th century in Sicily. While I was disappointed by the relative tedium of the final chapters of the novel, the lengthy opening chapter, a simply stunning rendering of Modesta’s difficult childhood in rural poverty, can almost stand alone as a novel in itself and was some of the finest writing I read in all of 2005, when the novel first appeared in French.