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. 

Interlude in French

I recently sped through three novels written in French during the past 10 years and offer below some brief reactions and comments (any translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own):

Faire L’Amour (Making Love) by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (2002)

(an English translation by Linda Coverdale is available from the Dalkey Archive, and I've borrowed her translation of the title)

Belgian writer Toussaint has been on my radar screen for sometime. I seem to run across his books everywhere (nearly all of his work has been published in English, most of it by the Dalkey Archive), and my general sense from the little I know about him is that he’s one of the more respected young francophone writers. In Faire L’Amour, a novel about the dissolution of a love affair (and apparently the first of what’s come to be known as Toussaint’s “Marie” trilogy), one knows from the first line that something is far from right:

“I had had a vial filled with hydrochloric acid and I kept it on me at all times, with the idea of one day throwing it into someone’s face. “

This shocking initial note of potential violence serves as the high-tension wire on which the action of Faire L’Amour is strung. Or perhaps I should say the lack of action, since the novel’s two main characters seem paralyzed in self-absorption, entrenched in banalities, and – though aware their relationship has come to an end – remain mired in a passive attraction/repulsion as though some tacky, gooey substance keeps them from separating entirely. The first part of the novel unfolds over a single long winter night in Tokyo, where the couple have just arrived from Paris, jet-lagged and emotionally drained from the awareness of their impending dissolution. More alone than together even when together, the couple sleepwalks through the disorienting nightscape of Tokyo (the novel shares the insomniac atmosphere of Sophia Coppola’s film “Lost in Translation” as well as its view of Tokyo as alternately mesmerizing and estranging). Meanwhile, a series of earthquakes and aftershocks underscores the upheaval and fracturing of the characters’ personal lives. Toussaint’s taut, crystalline composition has the precision of an engineer, like something built by a hardware designer. This self-consciousness of style is enhanced by Toussaint’s having captured a sense of a generation for whom the world has shrunk, where connection by technology is a given but actual communication is not, leaving them adrift and passive in a cold and blinking electronic night while the trembling earth beneath them warns of the threat that everything could disappear in an instant.

La Porte des Enfers (The Gate to the Kingdom of the Dead*), by Laurent Gaudé (2008) (not yet translated into English) (*“Enfer,” the French word for “hell,” is distinct from the plural “enfers,” which specifically denotes Hades, the mythological underworld of the dead)

I’d never before heard of Prix-Goncourt-winning author Laurent Gaudé (nor had the person who gave me this book, who bought it entirely based on the cover blurb). The novel takes place in Naples; chapters alternate between 1980 (the year of a massive earthquake in the region) and 2002. From early in the novel, in which a six-year old boy is killed during a gun battle between rival gangs, Gaudé’s Naples is easily recognizable as that of Roberto Saviano’s gritty and gruesome piece of investigative journalism, Gomorrah. However, the novel takes an unexpectedly supernatural turn when the boy’s father is haphazardly thrown together with a transsexual prostitute, a street-wise bartender, a radical, elderly priest, and a drunken mystic who claims to have found an entry into the underworld – and thus a means for the father to venture into hell in search of his son. While such a histrionic plot sounds like it might be easily lend itself more to popular, mass-market fiction, Gaudé is a highly talented writer, and La Porte des Enfers becomes a serious mediation on the intersection of life and death, a new iteration of both the Orpheus myth and Dante’s “Inferno” (in a brief afterword Gaudé states that he wrote the novel to memorialize “my dead” – his friends and family members who’ve passed on). His sensitive, completely unsentimental depiction of the parents’ obliterating grief and rage is raw and grueling. Mixing history and myth, Gaudé offers up a number of fascinating accounts of attempts by the living to interact with the dead and, most effectively, of the myriad ways the living can be more dead than alive. His realism immerses one in the streets of Naples to the point where one can follow much of the action using Google Maps (this may well be the first time an alleged door to the underworld can actually be located using Google Street View). While I admired Gaudé’s talent – one can’t help but appreciate the hell he must have descended into in order to write La Porte des Enfers and his gesture of memorial - I can’t say that I loved his novel. Several scenes of violence struck me as entirely gratuitous, and above all, I found distasteful the unmeditated vengeance fantasy aspect of the novel (vengeance being my least favorite theme).

L’Échappée Belle (Beautiful Escape*), by Anna Gavalda (serialized 2001; revised by the author and published in book form 2009) (An English translation by Alison Anderson – French Leave - is forthcoming in April 2011 from Europa Editions) (*”L’Échappée Belle” literally means “the beautiful escape,” but also has a relevant idiomatic meaning in French of “a close call” or “close shave.” “Échappées Belles” is also the title of a popular French television series about pleasant travel destinations).

Of these three works in French, the one I least expected to like was also the one I enjoyed the most. I’d never given much thought to reading Anna Gavalda; I’d seen her books for sale in airports and train stations, and assumed they were probably slight, sentimental, commercial novels. My bad. In L’Échappée Belle, I discovered a greatly talented writer whose humor subverted expectations by being marked by what seems to me the rarest of elements in contemporary French literature: joy. The story of L’Échappée Belle is simple: three adult siblings brought together at a marriage none wishes to attend decide to skip out of the ceremony entirely and track down their fourth sibling for a stolen weekend of reconnection and recreation (quite literally, a “re-creation” of the childhood relations they shared). Gavalda’s characters are memorable, her writing clear and sophisticated. I remarked to a friend that L’Échappée Belle seemed to employ a much wider vocabulary than most contemporary French novels I’d read, as I seemed to be spending an unusual amount of time with the dictionary. The friend said she’d once seen Gavalda interviewed on television and was struck not only by her affability and modesty, but also by her rather bashful revelation that she could write anywhere - so long as she had a thesaurus with her. Gavalda reminds me a bit of Ann Tyler, but with a wit and political astuteness that moves her perhaps closer to Margaret Atwood. Of these three French language novels, Gavalda’s "beautiful escape" is, ironically perhaps, the only one of the three not to escape off to an international setting and the only one to acknowledge, even tacitly, actual political issues unfolding today in France. Jean-Philippe Toussaint may be better at characterizing the emotional gestalt of our times, but Gavalda, in one brief passage of L’Échappée Belle, questions and captures beautifully the frustration of a generation’s docile failure to confront reactionism with the force of indignation rooted in the openness, sensitivity and social concern to which many have consecrated their entire lives (I thought of this scene – in which the narrator recounts her regret at having let a bigoted remark about immigrants go unchallenged – while reading “Indignez-Vous!,” the 30-page call to indignation published this past December by 93-year old former Resistance fighter and diplomat Stéphane Hessel – a pamphlet that has become an overnight sensation in France and has sold nearly a million copies). My only disappointment in L’Échappée Belle is an embarrassingly petty and entirely personal one: Gavalda's inclusion of yet another example of what I can’t help thinking of as the “Mondo Cane syndrome” - that common coping response, when faced with an overwhelmingly incomprehensible, chaotic, and hostile world, of simply acquiring a dog. But I’m hardly one to criticize; we all have our escapes and means of coping (some of us have even opted to respond to the difficulties of the world by submerging ourselves in novels). Fortunately, L’Échappée Belle reminds all of us escapees that escape and denial are not the same thing, and that escape – particularly when stolen from the confines of hollow obligation and conservative social strictures – can be beautiful.   

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.