A Time To Every Purpose Under Heaven

“And it’s a disquieting thought that not even the past is done with, even that continues to change, as if in reality there is only one time, for everything, one time for every purpose under heaven. One single second, one single landscape, in which what happens activates and deactivates what has already happened in endless chain reactions…Nothing is ever finished, everything just goes on and on, there are no boundaries, not even between the living and the dead, even that zone is quivering and unclear.” – Karl O. Knausgaard, A Time for Everything

Russian mathematician George Gamow, who counter-intuitively defined different sizes of infinity, might have considered an additional definition that could take into consideration the fact that, as a purely practical matter of our mortality, the world’s writers offer an inexhaustible abundance of riches. Still, on occasion I read a work that abruptly creates an event horizon in this infinitude, proves capable of bending the light that literature gives off to such an extent that most other novels suddenly seem - relatively speaking – dim and diminished.

I’ll risk this: Norwegian author Karl O. Knausgaard’s novel A Time for Everything (translated by James Anderson, Archipelago Books, 2008, initially published in hardcover under the title A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven) is the most breathtakingly original and subversive contemporary novel I’ve read in years. It’s also the most unusual, with a conceit I normally would have found utterly off-putting were it not for the inextricable pull of the first page.

I fear betraying the novel by being in any way reductionist, as A Time for Everything, like most great literature, defies encapsulation. It commands both the reader’s attention and pace, offering profound pleasures and challenges that crackle along the edges of consciousness and occasionally explode into it. There is nothing cheap in Knausgaard’s novel.

The skeletal outline of A Time for Everything appears anything but promising, and in fact sounds like the melodramatic quasi-religious mystical muddle one might find in a Dan Brown book: a treatise on - of all things – angels, incorporating retellings of biblical stories interspersed with the metaphysical speculations of a fictional 16^th century Italian theologian.

A number of strands tie A Time for Everything together including, as the underlying foundation, a biography of this fictional theologian, Antinous Bellori. As a young boy lost one evening in darkening woods, Bellori experiences a startling, life-changing encounter with two wraith-like angels, caught mid-meal as one of them sinks its sharp teeth into a fish plucked live from the water (this wildly imagined scene, one of the novel’s most unforgettable, rivals anything I’ve read in any literature for sheer impression and impact). Transformed, Bellori pursues a life-long obsession with these mesmerizing entities through an intellectual and theological inquiry that eventually results in publication of his obscure treatise, On the Nature of Angels – a book all but lost to time, like any number of those dusty volumes that line the endless shelves of Europe’s old libraries. The narrator identifies Bellori as belonging to that new race of early modern intellectuals like Pascal, Descartes, Bruno and Newton, whose solitary, tormented pursuit of knowledge opens the world while at the same time expanding its sense of loneliness and revealing “the horror” of reason’s “step into infinity,” that, once taken, reveals “no way back.”

A Time for Everything leads us exactingly through Bellori’s philosophical exploration into the nature of angels and their curious appearances in scripture. Who are they? What are they? Why do they suddenly appear without explanation in the Bible? What relation do they have to God and to humanity? Are they living or dead? Material or other? Are they perhaps a kind of negative of human beings? Direct representations of God or separate celestial colleagues? Emanations of God’s volition or independently-willed creatures? Why do they only reveal themselves when they do, and why only to certain persons? Rather than allowing these questions to come off as ponderous (or for that matter, ridiculous), Knausgaard manages to make Bellori’s line of inquiry engrossing not simply in its application of an empirical approach to biblical accounts (that A Time for Everything occasionally inspires a sense that one might be reading a peer-reviewed study of angels is enough to pull one out of Knausgaard’s seductive prose for a blinking moment of rational re-orientation), but also in its rigorous lesson in critical reading, using that bestselling text in the western world, the Bible – more specifically, its various, curious mentions of angels, seraphim, cherubim, and the like. These Knausgaard plumbs deeply and reconstructs into daringly imagined stories. What at times appears to be a theological inquiry – and it does, on that level, raise broadly stimulating, provocative questions about the relationship between the divine and the human, the immanent and the corporal, God’s omniscience and omnipotence, and the multivariate modes of human inquiry – is also a daring plunge into the glaring lacunae of the biblical accounts.

When the narrator abruptly departs from Bellori’s biography to lead us into the first of these retellings – of the story of Cain and Abel  - what appears in the Bible as a tale tossed off in a mere two lines is spun out into a hundred pages of narrative, the first page of which finds the brothers inhabiting a wide valley ringed by snowy mountains and boreal forests. Someone is wearing black trousers, a white workshirt, red spats. What’s going on here?

We appear to be in Norway, perhaps in the 19^th century. We’re most certainly not in ancient Mesopotamia. Why, given such a careful reading and questioning of the inconsistencies, contradictions and narrative holes in the Book of Genesis, are we suddenly thrust into a retelling so manifestly incongruous with anything suggestive of the Old Testament Middle East?

Knausgaard prods us to flesh out the biblical scene – cognizant that in order to do so one is almost wired to use his or her own referential context and that, in any case, one of the powers of myth is its ability to reconstitute itself in new guises. The biblical version gives us so little to go on – asks us to accept a story on great authority with almost no evidentiary detail while “cloth[ing] everything beyond the immediate in anecdote” – that to envision such a story as grounded in the actual lives of human beings demands a far greater accounting, a filled out context for being able to make sense of the divine Word in concrete human terms. To do this, Knausgaard takes the charge and runs at light speed. These retellings are stunning in their richness of detail, their vivid rendering of the characters, and in the astonishing vitality with which he relates these tales, which are full of glints of light, shadowy movements among the trees, the rush of rivers and the lavations of rain, of gestures, glances, intimations, the myriad ephemeral elements that mark and hold the present in glorious abeyance for an instant. Picking up A Time for Everything and opening it at random, one finds this numinous sublimity of the present throughout:

He turns and glances over toward the houses lying beneath a hill on the side of the field, and he sees that the figures, at this distance little bigger than beetles, will soon be home…And it’s as if they’ve held him captive, for only now, now that they’re no longer there, does the landscape he’s been in all day long reveal itself to him…The undulating cornfield with its grayish, dusty surface glimmers almost golden in the sunshine. The lush crowns of the trees that grow between the field and the encircling mountains on the opposite side of the valley form one single band of green, on the slope close to him one could pick out individual species: aspen, alder, oak, willow, pine, spruce. The small unique habitats they each support. The jutting ledge beneath the pine covered in places with dry, green moss, in others bare and bluegray, everywhere carpeted in yellow pine needles. The blooming rose-hip thicket that nestles close, the air above it heady with bumble-bees and wasps. Its roots reaching serpentinely across the mountain only to disappear into the earth nearby. The straight pine trunk blushing in the glow of the evening sun, the shadow it throws cross undergrowth and bushes, up across the hillside. The grassy bank below still flecked with wintry yellow, the barely year-old saplings that grow there, delicate and seemingly uncertain, as if they’ve ventured onto an ice that is so thin that they don’t dare to go on, or have the courage to turn and retreat to the safety of the forest, but must simply stand there motionless and wait until someone comes to rescue them.

Fiction can obviously do what a religious text like the Bible cannot, and as literature, the passages in the Bible that provide material for A Time for Everything come up embarrassingly short compared to Knausgaard’s luminous, expansive incarnations (A Time for Everything should find a secure place in those standard undergraduate course offerings on “The Bible as Literature”). But to imagine that A Time for Everything is a book specifically about this religion or this holy book would, I think, be to miss its larger scope. It is not simply an attempt to reinvigorate biblical tales, which it nevertheless does astonishingly well while pushing beyond the way that, for example, Roberto Calasso revived Greek and Hindu myths. Neither is this one of those works like East of Eden that employ biblical elements to add depth and mythic resonance to a contemporary tale. Nor does Knausgaard take a mere deconstructionist approach to these stories. If anything, his is what might be called a supraconstructionist approach, taking the grain of these tales and causing them to effloresce, spinning from the thin strands of their DNA a whole living world. Recapitulating biblical myth - by extrapolating, from these familiar tales told in the Bible via a few cursory and authoritarian bare-boned lines, lengthy narratives with flesh - is nothing new (as anyone who’s ever been to a Sunday sermon at an AME church can readily attest), but this is no evangelically-motivated attempt at enrichment. I can recall few novels that offer anything approaching the unexpectedness in Knausgaard’s reinventions. His retelling of the story of Cain and Abel is not simply an imagining of it in a humanly comprehensible setting, but a profound questioning – in completely unexpected directions - of murder and transgression. His retelling of the story of Noah and the ark likewise spares nothing in his insistence that we be charged with envisioning the reality represented by the myth: the crazed eccentricity of Noah’s obsession, the geological and ecological impact of a world covered in billions of tons of water (oh, and about those creatures of the sea?), and the heartlessness with which Noah had to have abandoned those left to drown, depicted in a scene made powerfully incarnate by the matter-of-factness with which the waters’ rising around a mother and child is recounted. Despite its flirtations with the immanent, A Time for Everything is a strikingly physical, body-centered novel. Knausgaard fleshes out these stories literally; their flesh-and-blood grounding involves occasionally shocking attention to the body.

Taking instances of angels’ appearances in the Bible and examining them in the manner that science has treated of physical phenomena, Knausgaard brings rationalism to bear on an ostensibly irrational phenomenon, approaching spiritualism head on with rationalist tools - not to dismantle it, but to establish a line against which it must be argued. A Time for Everything subverts fundamentalism by making a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible impossible in light of the empirical, in light of the evidence provided by the Bible itself. A question never far away is these tales is: how do we know what we know? When Noah’s sons see their father for the first time following his discourse with God, the narrator asks of one of them, “What was he actually seeing when he looked at his father?” This is a question that runs throughout Knausgaard’s novel: what are we actually seeing when we look at a character? When we read a text? When we accept as sacred a religious book like the Bible?

It is almost as though Knausgaard has set out to turn these religious founding documents on their head, and by so doing perform a sort of exorcism of fundamentalism. The radicalism of A Time for Everything lies in its firm insistence on the precariousness of rationalism, that at the dawn of the Enlightenment modes of inquiry into science and into religion (a treatise on angels, for example, in the case in point) were on a more or less equal footing, and that, given different circumstances, the latter might easily have dominated the former, leading to a completely different world. In one particularly engaging scene, the young Noah (envisioned as a precocious albino savant who cannot withstand the sun) tries nightly to work out a system for categorizing the world, a kind of rudimentary scientific method that harkens back to Knausgaard’s observation at the beginning of the novel that the world might easily have chosen to prioritize a religious inquiry such as Bellori’s theories of angels over the scientific method that gave us the Age of Reason. A warning about the fragility of human systems is implied, that the Dark Ages might well have continued and can always return (a not insignificant point in a world where religious fundamentalists and fanatics continue to attack inquiry and openness through denunciations, fatwahs, censorship, general anti-intellectualism, and even violence and terror).

Given the ambitions of A Time for Everything, it’s somewhat surprising to find, in place of ponderousness, a consistently scintillating narrative replete with wry humor, never condescending but at times almost teasing, good-naturedly pointing out contradictions and raising common-sense questions about biblical tales more often than not taken for granted (when they’re not in fact being taken literally). For example, when the angels arrive in Sodom, they are met by Lot, obsequiously waiting at the city gates like a typical tourist tout to entice visitors to lodge at his home. The scene as presented by Knausgaard has an element of hilarity to it:

The dust swirls about his feet. Even though he holds his robe above his knees with one hand, he’s so eager that he almost trips several times. And when he throws himself on the ground before them, he’s so out of breath that at first they can’t make out what he’s saying.

“Yoo-hoo, sirs, yoo!” Is what it sounds like. ”Yoo-hoo, sirs, yoo!”

At the same time, one never gets the impression that Knausgaard is baiting his readers; his encyclopedic knowledge of not only the Bible but also a whole range of Judeo-Christian theology makes that nearly impossible. He’s grounded as a good scientist is - in empirical inquiry refined into assertions that set a new bar for being challenged – yet never loses sight of the fact that he is first and foremost engaged in a literary enterprise, and an exceptionally rewarding one both in terms of the breadth and the captivating liveliness of his imagination.

The novel ends on a note of deliriously high humor – or almost. Reaching the last line of the novel I wished there had been a blank page inserted between it and the subsequent, deeply confounding “Coda,” which, left unread, would make A Time for Everything a different book than it is. In fact, in choosing to provide a coda to a story that ends as it does, Knausgaard provides us two novels, one for romantics and another for realists. This pointedly troubling section is a radically bracing departure from the rest of the novel (readers may be advised to pause before continuing with it). From one point of view, the coda – in which we encounter the book’s anguished contemporary narrator, a writer seeking solitude on a barren, isolated island off of Norway’s coast - seems entirely superfluous and unnecessarily complicating. In addition, despite the narrator’s vow to eschew self-absorption, the coda has the effect of being full of just that, almost a way of drawing attention to the struggles Knausgaard himself must have gone through in order to produce this rich, meticulous and vastly researched book (and if  A Time for Everything offers irrefutable testimony to the novel’s not being dead, it also resurrects the long dormant figure of the tortured artist). But from another point of view the coda provides the novel its most trenchant meaning, identifying at last its narrator and situating him in the contemporary world where angels have devolved from the incandescent entities they once were through various diminishing stages of incarnation into a form that has pretty much nothing to offer to anyone anymore, where the role they played in the stories of the Bible, as powerful intermediaries between God and humankind, no longer has meaning, and where even an attempt at awakening as extreme as the writer’s self-inflicted desecration of his own body (as though he could inscribe directly into the flesh a sense of significance) reveals him in a state of torment, bereft of the richness of meaning and assurance the world of faith and belief once provided, left only with the raw struggle to create.   

A Time for Everything is not a difficult novel, but it demands patience and careful attention. While the retellings of the biblical stories in which angels appear unwind with the delicate, measured pace and exquisite attention to detail that mark the best kind of storytelling, the interstitial explorations of theological questions require more diligent reading. However, Knausgaard’s forays into philosophy and theology in his ambitious work keep a steady, artist’s eye on the fact of A Time for Everything’s being a work of fiction. And as novels go, it is daring, thrilling, infinitely rewarding fiction of the highest order, playing among the angels where they themselves might fear to tread.

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. 

The Stories of Harold

The entry for George Selden Thompson in the multi-volume Dictionary of Literary Biography runs 12 pages long, detailing Thompson’s contributions to literature in the form of 17 novels for children, a couple of books on archeology and the classical world, and some credits for theatrical and film scripts. Thompson’s best-known work, states the Dictionary, written under the truncated name George Selden, is the award-winning, perennially popular children’s classic, A Cricket in Times Square - a story I loved as a child.

But the Dictionary makes no mention of what is arguably Thompson’s most singular contribution to literature, a now out-of-print 1974 novel entitled The Story of Harold, written under the pseudonym Terry Andrews. I knew nothing of the Thompson/Selden/Andrews connection when I picked up The Story of Harold last year after reading an article in the Guardian UK in which Edmund White recommended it as “one of the strangest” books he’d ever read. But some 30 or so pages into my reading of the book, captivated by its novelty, I sought to know more about the author.

I don’t know that I’ve ever had quite this experience: discovering, as an adult, an adult novel (and it is an adult novel) that engaged and impressed me to the equal degree that a children’s book, written by that same author, had when I was a child. I found The Story of Harold exceptional, absorbing, and unexpected, among the most tender, brave and deeply honest of post-war American novels.

Told in diary form, Terry Andrews’ The Story of Harold concerns a children’s book author, also named Terry Andrews, who has written an immensely popular children’s book, also entitled The Story of Harold - a contemporary fairy tale featuring a small person who wakes each morning with a sense that “Something is wrong!” and goes off to remedy the problem by supplementing his own efforts with a limited bit of magic at his disposal. Within these concatenated stories and shifting boundaries between truth and fiction are more stories within stories. And Terry Andrews - writer of popular children’s tales - is also a polymorphously polyamorous bi-sexual adventurer who lives for “the bliss that derives from oblivion” he finds in orgies, with pick-ups from bars and street corners, with swinging couples, in sado-masochistic homosexual encounters and in more anodyne, cerebral sex with a woman friend – a panorama of consensual sexual behavior ranging from the extreme to the transcendently subtle (he sternly warns his readers that “those of you who don’t recognize [sex] when it happens outside the flesh can leave the room right now”).

If this sounds like a novel written for shock value, eager to push buttons, one can rest assured that it is anything but. The cultured, inquisitive Terry - lover of opera, art and all things New York - is simply not the kind of author, narrator and protagonist to indulge in anything quite so puerile. In addition, despite its careful deployment of the tools of fiction, The Story of Harold conveys a palpable impression of searingly honest autobiography (alas, the Dictionary of Literary Biography is of no help in throwing light on this conviction). The seriousness underlying Terry’s story is underscored by this honesty as well as by a question at the book’s core: is life worth living?

For The Story of Harold is also a novel about suicide. From the first line, in which Terry states “Again last night, for a little while, I was able not to be alive,” readers are invited into a lengthy suicide note. Despite Terry’s wild sex life, he finds himself coming up repeatedly against relationships that fail to supply what he needs to feel happy or even alive; the frustrations of love offered to those who either can’t reciprocate or whom he fears won’t be able to embrace his complexity; an inadequacy in human contact (he even seeks warmth in subway seats just vacated by others). Fulfillment takes on the appearance of “the Impossible.” His frustration has reached a turning point just prior to the diary’s first entry, when a self-loathing and masochistic partner, Dan Reilly (“the brute with the damaged child inside”) manages to secure Terry’s promise to help Reilly fulfill a S & M fantasy of being burned alive, presenting Terry ample excuse for his own eventual suicide. He makes his purpose explicit to readers: an invitation to serve as witnesses to the case he makes for his suicide and as judges of its legitimacy.  By all rights, The Story of Harold could join what’s almost become an industry of confessional American narratives of dysfunction and be a depressing, sordid slog towards its narrator’s self-extinction. But far from dragging his readers into unrelenting misery, Terry promises, in his invitation to the voyage, to make the journey entertaining: “Come with me…We will have a lot of sex. You are going to laugh a great deal – people have no idea how blithe a suicide can be!”

The ensuing pages deliver on that promise, taking the reader through an often sharply funny and humane cavalcade of sexual and emotional feats of daring, a high-wire walk involving “the vertigo of those beyond repair” (this phrase Jean-Paul Sartre used in reference to Jean Genet came to mind repeatedly as I read the book), propelled along by Terry’s surpassing wit, acute intelligence, and gentle charm. Another buoyant force is the sheer exuberance of his writing, which at times bubbles beyond the confines of prose into song and poetry – mostly humorous little couplets, but occasionally intimate odes to those he loves, as gracious and moving as any communication any of us might ever hope to receive from a loved one. Equally piquant are Terry’s myriad delightful and piercing observations, as when he spies Jacqueline Onassis one night at the opera and describes her as, “A deity of sweet sadness – blithe, smiling, blinding mere mortals with legends of pain – still gowned in the aura of gorgeous disaster: an effigy of lovely grief…" - then adds, in typical Terry fashion, "Well, I hope I never meet her. She too must be a human being. And as in the case of all swans, beneath that graceful gliding there must be a pair of madly paddling flat feet.” Similarly lancing observations capture certain New York experiences, making The Story of Harold a memorable New York novel as well. Terry’s voyage towards his terminal goal makes frequent stops along the way to opine on New York’s landmarks (I’ll never be able to look at Lincoln Center the same way again) as well as its more pedestrian glories.

But some unanticipated complications occur along that voyage: a growing, unreciprocated love for a favorite S & M partner, Jim Whittaker, a handsome, happily married doctor with six children – one of them blind, all of whom are wild about Terry’s books; an on-going sexual relationship with Terry’s closest female friend, a recently widowed single mother, Anne Black; and, above all, the unwitting intrusion into Terry’s life of a seven year old “lump of a little boy” named Barney Willington. Barney’s well-meaning but obtuse mother, emerging from divorce, enlists Terry’s aid - a demand to which he acquiesces with grudging dread - in trying to help Barney adjust to the divorce and to a new father he’ll have once an impending new marriage is finalized (unsurprisingly, sending the child to a psychiatrist has been of no help). The story follows these compartmentalized, discrete threads of Terry’s life as the tension surrounding his planned suicide is enhanced by his unavoidably deepening relations to the people around him, particularly Barney. Out of Terry’s irrepressible generosity as well as his identification with the child (Terry too being the child of a neglectful parent), he takes on the task of getting through to this “glum little troll,” this “gob of underdone dough.” And Terry’s chief means for accomplishing this is through the telling of stories – more specifically, new, extended elaborations on Barney’s favorite book: The Story of Harold.

As Terry takes Barney out for walks in the park, to museums, and to the gym, these new tales increasingly serve to draw Barney out of his bovine docility; at the same time, they allow Terry a means of articulating his own inner angst by encoding, in the stories he weaves, the events unfolding in his own life. This is done so thinly at times that I immediately rushed to reread The Cricket in Times Square to see if it contained an encrypted adult reading; it does not, at least not obviously (some of you frowning parents may be relieved to hear), other than a blissfully tipsy little animals’ party…

I’m not sure there exists a better or (perhaps paradoxically) more innocent American novel about storytelling. The Story of Harold fundamentally illuminates the urgency of stories, their life-affirming and even life-saving “magic.” It recognizes, spectacularly, their psychological underpinnings, how myths and children’s tales float upon a foundation of psychosocial and psychosexual conflicts, work on resolution of those conflicts, and provide a means for negotiating life (the novel appeared, I might note, a few years before works by figures like Bruno Bettelheim and Jack Zipes on the secret lives and coded psychology of fairy tales, what Bettleheim termed “the uses of enchantment”). One of the key challenges for Terry is maintaining enough storytelling magic to keep Barney engaged and to draw him out into life. His elaborations on the adventures of Harold offer enchantment and structure to help Barney psychologically navigate his own capacity to cope with life. I need hardly add that these improvisations are delightfully entertaining, witty and inventive in themselves, and often cut around psychological wounds with surgical precision; it’s not for nothing that George Selden Thompson is recognized as one of the finest American authors of children’s books.

What’s perhaps most striking about The Story of Harold is its refusal to indulge in simple ironies and expectations. For one thing, it defies American Puritanism not through typical reactionism, but by postulating a world antipathetic to it and disentangling sexuality from the muddled morass of American morality - one of the only examples I can think of in American literature that does this successfully. In place of a reactionary response is an empirical experiment with truth: what if, in lieu of the mask of normalcy worn by American culture as regards sexuality, one simply tells the truth – that behind the façade of placid American sexual conservatism there’s a largely unspoken wide wild world of experience? The Story of Harold pulls off in macro the micro experiment that Terry, invited by Jim to dine with the whole Whittaker family one night, imagines would happen if one “simply stood up and tapped the glass, and spoke…a fact of total truth” to “encounter…the lies we all live.”  By this candid catalysis - “like matter meeting antimatter” - Terry manages to make manifest what is normally latent in American life. I know of no novel that succeeds so well in daring this transgression (though a criticism one might level is that the book’s tangible urgency to express Terry’s truth at times makes its diary aspects strain its novelistic ones). This is a work that could have been written nowhere but in the United States; it brings into the light both our national self-image of innocence and the latent content - not only sexual - that lies beneath it. In so doing, The Story of Harold offers readers the visceral impression that some essential dynamic in American life is being uncovered.  

I also don’t know that I’ve read an American novel of the period that seemed so deeply honest and so decent in a moral sense. Terry’s protectiveness of others, his conscientiousness in putting their care (and their stories) foremost, keep them insulated from his own frequent bouts of inner rage and despair. The most memorable elements in The Story of Harold are not its granular descriptions of sexual behavior or inventive treatment of storytelling, or even the question of whether Terry will carry through on his plan, but its emphasis on the fragility and strength of relationships. The most affecting scenes display an extraordinary respectfulness and tenderness in Terry’s relations with those he loves, his ability to pick up on fleeting nuances of emotion and vulnerability in others, his remarkable ability to make simple human communication meaningful: a literature of aspects of love. A deep appreciation for friendship (noted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of George Selden Thompson’s chief themes in his children’s books) also pervades The Story of Harold, a work in which, to paraphrase a line from Stephen Benatar, friends serve mercifully as God’s recompense for having families.

Edmund White characterized The Story of Harold as a “period piece,” but I think this characterization – though understandable from the point of view of looking back to the period of pre-AIDS sexual exploration in the gay world – misses the mark. Taken as a whole, The Story of Harold seems no more a period piece than does The Portrait of a Lady, and has as much to say about human interactions now as it did then. A few details place the action historically, but the book is surprisingly unfettered by these, notable given that scope of Terry’s diary – October 1, 1968 to March 21, 1969 – falls in the midst of the Vietnam War (“that arbitrary abyss of useless misery”) and includes the election and inauguration of Richard Nixon (“the most unlikely and depressingly inevitable of Presidents”). There’s little overt reference to these events, though there is a telling comment, early in the novel, regarding writers whose works are too fixed in the present, as well as some assurance that Terry is not completely oblivious to what’s unfolding outside his own “interior Vietnam.” Nonetheless, Terry’s aloofness from the movements of his time reveals a surprisingly apolitical, even conservative streak, with an impatient reference to the “Militant Hobbits” of the time, a tone that softens slightly when, in a scene near the novel’s end, he has a tryst with a young soldier facing deployment and expresses astonishment that such young people are actually being shunted off to war.

For all the daring and entertaining terrain The Story of Harold travels, what it may leave to many contemporary readers is a dispiriting sense of the relatively cautious and contracted quality of the times in which we now live. The heady, liberated view of sexuality taken by Terry seems wistfully grand in a world in which categories of sexuality are diced into ever-extended acronyms and those marginalized in this culture by their sexuality seek inclusion (albeit rightfully) in an institution as medieval as marriage. But viewed through this lens of contemporary concerns, The Story of Harold implies as strong an argument as any to underscore that the sexual orientation and private, consensual behavior of adults has nothing to do with their fitness to be responsible caregivers to children, and to put to rest the absurd lie that those whose sexuality doesn’t fit into heteronormative constraints can’t be wonderful guardians and parents.

And this, quite apart from these contemporary issues, is perhaps the central concern of The Story of Harold: the ways in which society treats its children, the importance of the care and feeding of young minds and hearts. It speaks in myriad and mature ways to the manner by which children – those embodiments of possibility - can have the life squeezed out of them by inattentive, unimaginative, even well-intentioned adults (who are today as likely to send them to the pharmacy as to therapy).  It’s a testimonial to how stories can help mitigate this outcome and provide all kinds of people – from misfit children to adults struggling with despair – with tools to navigate a life. And in this, The Story of Harold is a kind of American classic, a startlingly honest, moving, funny, inventive, playful and serious novel of psychological chiaroscuro that deserves a coyly revered spot in post-war American literature.

The Story of Harold was published by Holt Rinehart Winston in 1974. A paperback edition (with cover illustration by Edward Gorey) followed in 1975, and the book was again reissued by Avon in the 1980's. Although not easy to find in good condition, these books do resurface frequently on second-hand book sites – albeit usually at prices few can afford. 

Bolaño Maintains

Nazi Literature in the Americas, a 1996 Roberto Bolaño work, takes a simple structure: 30 brief biosketches of fictional South and North American “Nazi” writers, grouped under headings such as “The Mendiluce Clan,” “The Aryan Brotherhood,” “Speculative and Science Fiction,” spanning the early 20^th century to an indeterminate time in the future (one writer’s death date is given as 2021). Bolaño presents these biographies in the form of a literary encyclopedia. Anyone who’s ever opened a resource of the sort can attest to Bolaño’s ability to capture the style of such a work as well as the pithy hollowness of some of its pronouncements: “The descriptions of Andalusian gardens are meticulous and, in their way, interesting.”

This straightforward, almost fill-in-the-blanks organization makes Nazi Literature in the Americas appear as a kind of exercise or entertainment. There’s an arbitrariness (Why 30 writers and not 50, or 10? Why one aspect of fascism and not another?) and an extemporaneous, even wearying quality to Bolaño’s inventions.  Nonetheless, this small, inelegant book possesses a larger, concussive power, a Molotov cocktail capable of igniting vital discussion concerning the intersection of literature and politics.

Bolaño brings to Nazi Literature in the Americas an arsenal of references to literary figures, works, and movements, co-mingling the genuine with the entirely invented.  The name-dropping, showy aspect to this display of literary knowledge is likely intended to mirror the kinds of indulgent referential play in which writers, critics and scholars (and bloggers) routinely engage. Sometimes it’s used to damningly ironic effect, as when Thomas Murchison, an Aryan Brotherhood author, is cited as preferring, as his favorite writer, Mark Twain (a cutting and lingering irony in an age when a version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn expunged of objectionable racial terms can be taken seriously). More often than not, though, these references seem tossed off willy-nilly. One thing no one is likely to miss is Bolaño’s caustic sense of humor, expressed through some blackly funny character descriptions and a set of wryly imaginative literary inventions, such as Carlos Ramírez Hoffman’s sky-writing that promises to rain death upon the world (later to resurface in Bolaño’s Distant Star), or Cuban writer Ernesto Pérez Masòn’s coded work in 14 chapters of 25 paragraphs each, the first letters of which form anti-revolutionary acrostics like “KISS MY CUBAN ASS,” “USA WHERE ARE YOU” and “LONG LIVE HITLER.” Bolaño also delivers occasional deadpan, dead-on imaginings of fascist imagery, such as graces the cover of Pedro González Carrera’s Twelve, consisting of “the letters of the word Twelve…equipped with eagle talons, grip[ping] a swastika in flames, beneath which there seems to be a sea with waves, drawn in a childlike style. And under the sea, between the waves, a child can in fact be glimpsed, crying, ‘Mom, I’m scared!’”

Nazi Literature in the Americas is not, however, a simple compendium of fascist aesthetics. Bolaño provides plenty of examples of the kinds of writing that might be categorized as “Nazi literature” – overwrought patriotic paeans; racist and anti-semitic novels; odes glorifying violence; sentimental, self-absorbed epic poems; insanely paranoiac arguments (including a five volume, several thousand page critique of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness); an appalling collection of works by Argentino “Fatso” Schiaffino through which Bolaño limns the fascistic elements of professional soccer; and works that decry moral decay and urge a “resurrection” of this or that nation - often enough the United States, where such sentiments among right wing groups are pandemic.

But at the same time, Nazi Literature in the Americas recognizes the porosity of literature, the ways in which it’s difficult to pin a particular literary activity to a particular ideology. What’s most unsettling about Bolaño’s figures is not their monstrosity, political or literary; it’s their commonality with writers of any political persuasion: their artistic ambitions and struggles to transform something of the world into art. It would be difficult for any writer, I think, to avoid entirely the seduction of some of the literary excesses, sins and crimes that Bolaño describes (which, speaking of Mark Twain, vastly exceed in scope those that Twain cataloged in “Fennimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”). There are even glimpses of autobiographical elements in Nazi Literature in the Americas, an intimation of the pitfalls of writing skirted by Bolaño in an effort to create an original literature that doesn’t serve totalitarian ends. Clearly, in writing about certain aspects of these characters, Bolaño appears to be describing himself:

Yet in certain literary circles, both in Chile and elsewhere in Latin America, his poetic career, brief and dazzling as a lightning bolt, inspired a kind of cult, in spite of the fact that few devotees had an accurate idea of what he had written. Finally he left Chile behind, along with public life, and disappeared, although his physical absence (he had, in fact always been an absent figure) did not put a stop to the speculations and interpretations, the passionate and contradictory readings to which his work gave rise.  

While Nazi Literature in the Americas offers implied advice about what writers might want to avoid both politically and literarily, it provides not so much a series of signposts as a minefield. Literature is enmeshed in politics and ideology, inseparable from one’s political being – and the opposite is also true. Writing an Alexandrine doesn’t keep one from being a fascist – and vice versa.

Bolaño forces us back upon ourselves. He is the not the kind of writer to offer prescriptions. His literature has a kind of hard, evidentiary quality, like a fact put forward to dare refutation. In this way, Nazi Literature in the Americas stands as a kind of bulwark, almost an anti-monument against which other writers – and critics, scholars, and readers - will have to measure their political engagement as well as their often overblown assumptions about literature’s relationship to ideology. After reading Bolaño’s novel, it would be difficult for any honest writer not to be nagged by the question of his or her own political commitment and the wider question of what’s important in literature. In peopling his Nazi writer universe, Bolaño cuts down a wide swath of literary pretention of all stripes, questioning the priorities of literature as well as its practitioners’ motivations, decrying in one section the choice of a literary vocation as “a surreptitious form of violence, a passport to respectability” that can, “in certain young and sensitive nations, disguise the social climber’s origins.” In another, he scathingly mocks cultish literary movements by inventing a French school termed “barbaric writing,” in which the movement’s leader…“devoted himself to masturbating onto books by Victor Hugo and Balzac, urinating onto Stendhal novels, smearing shit over pages of Chateaubriand, cutting various parts of his body and spattering the blood over handsome editions of Flaubert, Lamartine, or Musset. That, so he claimed, was how he learned to write.” It’s not without some irony that the heading for the fictional appendices to Nazi Literature in the Americas, “Epilogue for Monsters,” uses “for” rather than “of,” again forcing us back on ourselves to question our own complicity in the luxury of comsuming the marginal minutiae of such a literature - lists of its secondary personages, titles and “Publishing Houses, Magazines, Places…” (a telling ellipsis) - when outside this often hermetic literary world are governments that oppress, torture, and murder.

As much as I alternately guffawed and cringed through my reading of Nazi Literature in the Americas, I kept feeling, in addition to a demoralizing impatience with these seemingly interminable sketches of mediocrity, as though I were missing something. The translation, by Chris Andrews, feels in no way inexpert or lacking. But humor being among the most difficult things to translate across cultures, I felt (a wholly immaterial point) that I was perhaps losing out on a great deal I might have better understood were I closer to the cultures and/or literary circles in which Bolaño moved. The novel surely contains references that would have had particular resonance among Bolaño’s literary colleagues. Nothing in the book, however, suggests an intended roman à clef. Or rather, it comes across as a kind of an inverted roman à clef, told at a slant, in which there exists no one-to-one correspondence or even the possibility of one given the implausibility of these characters, but instead (and more effective for it) a fiction that leaves its readers to ferret out moral and aesthetic real-world counterparts that approach them (of which there are plenty enough, even within ourselves). After all, Bolaño’s point is certainly not to engage in the literary games he scorches; he is, after all, writing in the context of a history and culture in which fascist governments, many propped up by the United States, oversaw the execution and torture of thousands upon thousands of persons.

Having just finished another novel about the intersection of literature with fascism, Antonio Tabucchi’s Pereira Declares: A Testimony (recently republished in English as Pereira Maintains), I couldn’t help thinking about the different approaches to the subject taken by these two authors. In Tabucchi’s novel (which I much preferred, in part because Tabucchi is such a stunningly gifted and quietly affecting writer more to my own taste, but in part, I’m almost ashamed to admit, because Tabucchi makes one feel less uneasy), the apolitical, innocuous Pereira, relegated, after decades as a journalist, to creating a weekly culture page for a conservative Lisbon newspaper, comes to a gradual political awakening after agreeing to take on an assistant out of pity for the young man’s impecunious situation. He asks the young man, an activist on the left, to write up some obituaries for living literary figures to be primed for publication as each writer passes away. Pereira is both appalled and entranced by these draft obituaries, which pull no punches. He can’t possibly publish them; their honesty places their subjects in a political context far too sensitive for publication under the fascist government’s watchful eye. But when faced with an act of raw political violence perpetrated by the government’s thugs, Pereira recognizes that what’s at stake in the writing of these obituaries is not an abstract matter of competing ideologies, but of truth. Writers in totalitarian regimes will in the end be measured not simply by their works, but also by whether they submitted or fought.

The one time when Nazi Literature in the Americas seems to approach the clarity and force of Tabucchi’s book is in the final portrait, of the sky-writing Ramírez Hoffman, distinguishable from the other sections by a first person narrator who turns out to be Bolaño himself, as well as by a palpable rage turned, for the first time in the book, against the “Nazi” writer in question. Here Nazi Literature in the Americas elevates from an exercise into something far more trenchant and meaningful. When Bolaño’s help is sought in tracking down Ramírez Hoffman, Hoffman’s pursuer Abel Romero states that “To find a poet, he needed the help of another poet. I told him that in my opinion Ramírez Hoffman was a criminal, not a poet. All right, all right, maybe in Ramírez Hoffman’s opinion, or anyone else’s for that matter, you’re not a poet, or a bad one, and he’s the real thing. It all depends, don’t you think?” Here at the end of the novel, Bolaño asks Romero not to kill Ramírez Hoffman: “Please don’t kill him, he’s not going to do any more harm now, I said. You don’t know that, said Romero, nor do I. He can’t hurt anyone now, I said. But I didn’t really believe it. Of course he could. We all could.”

Nazi Literature in the Americas represents a stark insistence that “we all could” partake in harm, that the horrors perpetrated in the totalitarian histories of South America’s recent past “can happen here,” and again. As humorous and acerbic as some of these invented encyclopedia entries are, they’re ultimately awful, dreary glimpses of the kind of mediocre hypothetical literary universe that fascism might tolerate. I read Nazi Literature in the Americas while in the middle of the current issue of Granta devoted to young, Spanish-language, mostly South American novelists, representing a vital and reassuring contrast to Bolaño’s parade of criminals and buffoons. In reorienting literature away from both frivolity and overblown overreaching, Bolaño – and a good number of his heirs, it seems - keep literature, in its evolving forms, relevant to the greater fundamental resolve to prevent the horrors of fascism from recurring.

Reviewed as part of The Roberto Bolaño Reading Challenge kindly initiated by Rise at In Lieu of a Field Guide.

Citizens of the Republic of Reading, Unite!

Philip Pullman's library closure speech

Heaven and Hell and Iceland

Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s intensely immersive novel Heaven and Hell (translator: Philip Roughton; MacLehose Press, 2010) tells of a nameless boy’s confrontation with death in an Icelandic fishing station and of his subsequent perilous journey overland to convey the news to the nearest village – and to return the book responsible, in part, for that death. Stefánsson divides his novel into two sections, each framed by a brief address from the dead that places the novel’s events some 100 years in the past. Heaven and Hell has an almost inevitable intensity; an isolated fishing community wedged between sheer cliffs and dangerous seas, tiny boats on an immense, icy polar ocean, and a sudden, howling storm are hardly elements that could fail to produce drama (nor does the book’s title suggest subtlety, for that matter). But if one expects only a stereotypically epic tale of human struggles against the sea, one might look elsewhere. Despite its dramatic elements, Heaven and Hell proves a surprisingly quiet, understated novel, in which even the transition from life to death comes as often as not with a whimper, not a bang. As in many winter novels, ice, snow and isolation conspire to crystallize and concentrate the action, and the novel has an intimacy and muffled resonance like the sound of one’s own footsteps walking through fresh snow. While technically the story unfolds during April, its setting - Iceland's wild Western Fjords region – still remains frozen and at the mercy of winter’s harsh vestiges, and the boy’s encounter with these elements is no less an envelopment in blinding winter than that of the children lost in the blizzard in Adalbert Stifter’s Rock Crystal.

As a meditation on death (without any intention on my part, this is the second such work I’ve read this month, following Laurent Gaudé’s La Porte des Enfers, making me wonder if this is the kind of book one to which one is subconsciously drawn when one reaches fifty), Heaven and Hell seems not so much a gesture of remembrance of specific persons, but a call to keep alive in memory the sacrifices made by a people on whose efforts an entire country was raised, whole human settlements made possible by an economy largely built on “the bones of cod.” It’s an acknowledgement, beyond the mere stone markers of the graveyard, of a people’s labor to find a place in the world and establish a community in the face of calamitous forces of nature.

As I read Heaven and Hell I kept flashing on several other works, including Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, in which the living and dead of a small town co-exist in close proximity and in which the transitory nature of life is backdropped by both the ever-present possibility of death and an acute, overarching awareness of deep time on a scale extending far into the past. This snapshot sense of a community carrying on a way of life and death through generations is also enhanced by Stefánsson’s presenting the characters encountered by the boy at the story’s center in a manner that emphasizes passage and succession. Characters who appear in the beginning of the novel slip into the past or into death, fall away as ghosts or memories, while new characters emerge to join those with whom the boy, an orphan on the cusp of adulthood, has crossed paths - for the most part glancingly - in his brief life.  

I found myself reading Heaven and Hell with the kind of concentrated attention to individual words and to syntax that the demands of poetry, more often than prose, put upon a reader. What marks the language in Heaven and Hell is not only its intense lyricism – and certain passages are starkly beautiful – but the compressive complexity of Stefánsson’s sentences, which can achieve a sort of concentrated, vertical integration of the present and past, interior thought and exterior observation, a juxtaposition of day-to-day physical artifacts with unrelenting existential questions that irrepressibly well up in the mind – sometimes all within a single sentence. Around what is essentially a simple story of a young person coming face-to-face with death and his having to decide whether or not continuing into adulthood is worthwhile, the novel manages to compress so much - layers and layers grafted onto brief scenes that evoke a whole culture, a sociology of human interactions, a history of a métier, of a fishing community’s relationships with one another, with their country, their god, their history, their deaths - that one scarcely notices that the action of the novel has unfolded over a mere three days.

The clearly delineated central story that threads its way through Stefánsson’s multi-faceted prose gives Heaven and Hell something of the aspect of a folk tale, and brought to mind Halldór Laxness’ Independent People (the sole Laxness novel I’ve read), obviously because of the Icelandic setting but also due to a similarity with Laxness’ quality of appearing to be making new tracks in an old road, of reinventing a popular history consciously rooted in the Icelandic sagas. Reading Heaven and Hell provided a great excuse for getting out my Penguin copy of The Sagas of Icelanders (any excuse for hauling out this book is a good one). Opening it at random I came across a passage that might easily have come from Heaven and Hell: “When they were ready to put to sea, high tide was in the afternoon, and since they had to wait for it they did not set out until late in the evening. A wild southwesterly gale got up, against the current of the tide, and the sea grew very rough in the fjord, as often happens. In the end their ship sank beneath them, and they were all lost at sea.” For all their complexity and frequent poignancy, Stefánsson’s sentences and style often echo the reportorial, matter of fact tone of a passage such as this.

But just as Laxness’ novel stands in a modernist relation to the sagas, Stefánsson’s novel stands in a contemporary relation to Laxness. As in many contemporary novels, Heaven and Hell contains a self-conscious meditation on language and literature, in this case on its power to console, enlighten, distract, perhaps alter the course of one’s life – even lead to death. This gently meta-fictional aspect is exemplified by the central role played by John Milton’s “Paradise Lost;” a finely bound edition of an Icelandic translation of the poem, in fact, helps propel the novel’s plot. The narrative also contains repeated moments in which the efforts to communicate through the word - from a few lines snatched from a great poem, to dictated love letters, to the final words of a dying mother and down to the most tentative, fragmented scribbles - stand out like heroic, miraculous assertions of the fact that one is alive, challenges issued to the threatening, savage caprices of the natural world through the human capacity to utter or scratch onto paper an affirmation, however humble, of both existence and of the human bonds that hold people together. But Stefánsson hardly romanticizes this capacity. Literature, writing, speech can alter the world, yes; and that, of this constitutive human ability, is about all one can say for sure.

The cod have no interest in any words, and yet have swum nearly unchanged through the seas for 120 million years. Does this tell us something about language? We might not need words to survive; on the other hand, we do need words to live.

In one scene, the boy can only seem to make sense of the newness of the world in which he finds himself by experiencing the awestruck, abrupt thought, “I’m inside a novel!” - which, of course, he is – and in which, of course, we are, immersed in our reading of it, our seeking in it some new way of structuring the world, finding in it, perhaps, intimations of the sublime or at least a deepened appreciation for what words may accomplish. And if in Stefánsson’s novel the smallest tatters of language can impact, alter, and even take or give a life, then the cumulative effect of the splendid language of Heaven and Hell makes for a powerful, affecting, and memorable book indeed. 

Korean Variations

 Here is something of a treasure trove of short fiction out of Korea about which I become more enthusiastic with each volume that I read: The Portable Library of Korean Literature.  Published by Jimoondang Press in Seoul, the PLKL consists of more than 25 pocket-sized books, each about 100 pages in length. A brief preface in each book explains:

The Portable Library of Korean Literature introduces readers around the world to the depth and breadth of a vibrant literary tradition that heretofore has been little known outside of Korea. These small books, each devoted to a single writer, will be appreciated for their originality, for their universality, and for their broad range of styles and themes. The goal of The Portable Library of Korean Literature is to bring Korean creative writing into the mainstream of world literature, where it deserves to be, by making Korean literature accessible to a wide audience. This is achieved by thoughtful selection, careful translation, and judicious editing. 


I can’t add much to that except to affirm what it says and offer my unalloyed support of the PLKL’s goal. I might also add that each volume contains either a novella or two or three short stories drawn from modern and contemporary Korean literature. The oldest selections I’ve read date from the 1930’s, the most recent from within the last 10 years. At the risk of appearing even more of a dilettante than I already am – knowing little to nothing about Korean literature, culture, or history, and also conscious that any collection can be skewed editorially, for any number of reasons, to exclude exceptional writers or offer a particular vision of what constitutes literature worth promoting – I still feel confident in recommending these books to anyone who appreciates engaging, imaginative, and outstanding fiction.

I stumbled upon the PLKL a few years ago thanks to France’s weekly Courrier International newspaper, which had published a series of “tear-out” supplements of short fiction from around the world. Each story impressed me, but I was dazzled by a selection from Korea (to my immense frustration, I can neither find my copy of the story nor, even worse, remember its title or author or seem to locate them searching Courrier’s on-line archives). When a subsequent issue of the paper featured a glowing article on another Korean writer, Gong Ji-Young, I was determined to have a look at what might be going on over there. I tracked down a slim volume of Gong’s work translated into English as Human Decency (translators Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, Kim Miza and Suzanne Crowder Han), which turned out to be one of the volumes of the PLKL. Out of curiosity, I picked up another in the series off an adjacent shelf in the library, Kim Young-Ha’s Photo Shop Murder (translator, Jason Rhodes). I greatly enjoyed both books and made a mental note to check out further volumes of the PLKL in the future.

Recently, I had occasion to think again of the PLKL, so I picked out four additional titles at random and fairly devoured them in an afternoon. What the PLKL preface says is true: the offerings represent a vibrant literature of widely varying themes and styles. I enjoyed each volume greatly, and, while not surprised by this variety, I was surprised by the consistent high quality of the selections. Though I would recommend all of these volumes, of the six I was particularly impressed by Kim Yu-Jeong’s carefully crafted, folktale-like stories in The Camellias, reminiscent in some ways of Saki’s biting humor and sharply conceived, situational vignettes; Kim Young-Ha’s clever and memorable take on the murder mystery genre in Photo Shop Murder (Kim appears to be one of the few contemporary Korean writers whose novels are available in English); Hwang Soon-Won’s “Bibari” in the collection A Man, an unusually evocative tale of a frail young refugee’s infatuation with a shellfish diver on Korea’s Jeju island; and Pak Wanseo’s riveting, starkly unsentimental novella Three Days in That Autumn, the story of a victim of a war-time rape who seeks her revenge by becoming an abortionist.

It would be absurd to try to draw any inferences about Korean literature as a whole from my reading of these six short volumes, but I have been impressed with the consistently mature, grounded quality of the writing. This does not appear to be a literature of cheap effects, abstract experimentation or trivial concerns. Nearly all of these books seem to deal with one or another of the great shocks to Korea over the past century: the Japanese occupation, the Korean War and American military presence, the brutal repression of intellectuals and students by the dictatorship, and, more recently, Korea’s emergence as a consumer society and the attendant loosening of tradition. This is not to say, however, that the works lack humor.

Courrier International’s hints that Korean literature may offer a number of literary treasures has been more than borne out by my tentative explorations within the Portable Library of Korean Literature. While I’m certain the PLKL represents a mere smattering of what’s to be found in Korean fiction and only the slightest hint of what today’s writers may be producing, I’m finding it a great introduction to a literature of which I have been until now, regrettably, almost completely ignorant.