Parts Unknown

A young officer named Giovanni Drogo sets out on a journey to his first post in the temporary company of a colleague, and looks back over his native city.

They had reached the brow of a hill. Drogo turned to see the city against the light; the morning smoke rose from the roofs. He picked out the window of his room. Probably it was open. The women were tidying up. They would unmake the bed, shut everything up in a cupboard and then bar the shutters. For months and months no one would enter except the patient dust and, on sunny days, thin streaks of light. There it was, shut up in the dark, the little world of his childhood. His mother would keep it like that so that on his return he could find himself again there, still be a boy within its walls even after his long absence—but of course she was wrong in thinking that she could keep intact a state of happiness which was gone for ever or hold back the flight of time, wrong in imagining that when her son came back and the doors and windows were reopened everything would be as before.

I read Dino Buzzati's novel The Tartar Steppe probably forty years ago and hadn't given it much thought since (although I kept my copy) until I chanced upon a second-hand copy of an Italian edition a few weeks back. I don't speak Italian and have never studied the language, but with my Spanish and French and regular reference to Stuart C. Hood's 1952 translation I can pick my way slowly through it. There are advantages to reading this way; not only does it give me access to Buzzati's actual language but it forces me to linger over every sentence, to read and re-read. A book I could probably breeze through in a couple of days in translation should keep me occupied for weeks.

Buzzati's book has, inevitably, been compared to Kafka's The Castle (solitary man summoned to mysterious fortress for purposes that remain obscure), but it has a lightness and a sadness of its own.

In a gap in the nearby crags (they were already deep in darkness), behind a disorderly range of crests and incredibly far off, Giovanni Drogo saw a bare hill which was still bathed in the red light of the sunset—a hill which seemed to have sprung from an enchanted land; on its crest there was a regular, geometric band of a peculiar yellowish colour—the silhouette of the Fort.

But how far off it was still! Hours and hours yet on the road and his horse was spent. Drogo gazed with fascination and wondered what attraction there could be in that solitary and almost inaccessible keep, so cut off from the world. What secrets did it hide? But time was running short. Already the last rays of the sun were slowly leaving the distant hill and up its yellow bastions swarmed the dark hordes of encroaching night.

New York Review Books, which has made a point of keeping Buzzati's work accessible in English, has issued a newer translation entitled, for some reason, The Stronghold.

(Not) Reading George Eliot

Two hundred pages into my second attempt to read Middlemarch I've thrown in the towel. I went into it with high hopes, having recently enjoyed the 1994 BBC series, which I didn't see when it first ran. I discounted my earlier experience with the book a few years back, which had ground to a halt after maybe twenty-five pages, and I did make good headway for a while this time, and even found myself appreciating Eliot's unhurried, almost dialogue-free narrative style. But after a while I just couldn't stay awake through one more page-long paragraph describing the characters and attitudes of provincial doctors or bankers or marriageable young women. Every sentence glistened with wit and intelligence, but the plot moved at a glacial pace. Now and then an anecdote would perk things up briefly — the most intriguing being the episode of Dr. Lydgate's passion for a French actress who stabbed her husband to death on stage — but it just wasn't enough. In fact I think I would have enjoyed the two hundred pages I did read even less if I hadn't been able to imagine the splendid BBC cast fleshing out the written page. It made me want to head back to Dickens, or, for whatever reason, to Turgenev's Hunting Sketches. In fact the idea of brief "sketches" is now very appealing. Ah, well.

Stateless person

The narrator of this novel by the elusive writer who called himself B. Traven is one Gerard Gales, an American seaman who oversleeps while in port and loses his identification papers when his ship sails without him. Unable to prove his identity, his nationality, or even his legal existence, he is deported from one European country to another until he finds a freighter whose captain has reason not to be fussy about documents. As it turns out, the aptly-named Yorikke, on which Gales becomes a stoker's assistant, is a dilapidated ship of fools, doomed to be scuttled for its insurance payoff. If the first part of the book is bureaucratic satire, lighter but also sharper than Kafka's in The Trial, the rest is largely taken up with harrowing descriptions of the working conditions of those who tend the boilers. Unlike the Kafka of Amerika, who never crossed the Atlantic at all, Traven clearly knew from first-hand experience what a stoker's existence was really like. But even at its grimmest the book never loses its dark sense of humor. The Yorikke, Gales assures us, is actually thousands of years old. Its apparent timelessness gives the tale yet another dimension.

Who was B. Traven? He usually claimed that, like Gerard Gales, he was an American whose documents had gotten lost. Sometimes he blamed the destruction of his birth record on the fires caused by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. He may have even believed it, and it may even have been true, although few scholars now give the idea much credence. That he was the same person as one Ret Marut, a German actor and radical writer whose paper trail went cold in the 1920s, is no longer seriously questioned, but then who was Ret Marut? We may never know with absolute certainty.

The Death Ship was originally published in German as Das Totenschiff. The earliest English-language edition, issued in 1934 by Chatto & Windus, was translated by Eric Sutton. It was followed almost immediately by an American edition brought out by Alfred A. Knopf, of which my Collier Books edition above is a reprint. No translator is indicated inside the book. Traven, who reportedly didn't like the Sutton version, chose to translate the novel himself for Knopf, expanding it as he did so. His command of English was faulty, however. The German scholar Karl S. Guthke explains what happened:

The manuscript of The Death Ship that arrived in New York in 1933 was couched in an English that would have raised the eyebrows of most readers. As Knopf editor Bernard Smith reported, the text was so Germanic in vocabulary and syntax that it could never have made it in to print. And for good reason: Traven himself had translated the novel (as he was to translate the other novels Knopf would bring out), at the same time giving free rein to his lifelong passion for rewriting, cutting, and inserting new material. Knopf asked Traven to agree to a revision by Smith. Traven asked for sample pages and was favorably impressed. After instructing Knopf that only grammatical, syntactic, and orthographic changes were to be made, he authorized Smith to rework the entire manuscript. "This entailed treating about 25% of the text," Smith recalled. "In any given paragraph there was sure to be at least one impossibly Germanic sentence, and sometimes an entire paragraph had to be reconstructed." Smith stressed that his contribution in no way involved what could be considered literary or creative work on the three novels he revised. He had merely turned Traven's translations into acceptable English. It was clear to Smith from the beginning that English was not the translator's mother tongue; the syntactic thread was German, and even in Smith's reworked version the German original rears its head from time to time.

B. Traven: The Life Behind the Legends

The treatment of American place-names in the Traven-Smith version is a bit off. Referring to Wisconsin familiarly as "Sconsin" might just slip by unnoticed, but Chicago is casually referred to as "Chic," Cincinnati as "Cincin," and, least likely of all, Los Angeles as "Los." Other than that and a few eccentric colloquialisms the novel doesn't particularly "read like a translation" at all. Weirdly, it winds up being a work of American literature.

Traven, who would stubbornly maintain the fiction that his novels were originally written in English, allowed his German-language publisher, Büchergilde Gutenberg, to issue a new German "translation" in 1937 based on the Knopf version.

11 Rue Simon-Crubellier

When I first read this 1978 novel by Georges Perec in David Bellos's translation years ago I recall being entertained but also perhaps a bit underwhelmed. This summer I'm reading it in the original (with the translation on hand as a crib) as a way to keep up my French. In some ways it's ideal for the purpose. It's made up of fairly short, self-contained chapters that I can read at a relaxed pace of one or two a day, and it's not particularly slangy or conversational (street French not being something I'm up on). The grammar I can handle; the hard part is the vocabulary for material objects (clothes, home furnishings, tools) which Perec delights in ennumerating. (In fact the cataloguing of objects was part of his compositional method.) These are, as it turns out, the very things where my English vocabulary is weakest; thus when Perec refers to an aumônière, I am little wiser when I turn to Bellos and find that this is "a Dorothy bag." My eyes begin to glaze over when Perec, at his most maniacal, devotes several pages to the contents of a catalog from a hardware manufacturer. Fortunately, such extreme moments are rare.

For those unfamiliar with the book, La vie mode d'emploi captures a snapshot of the inhabitants and furnishings of a Paris apartment building at one instant in June 1975. In addition to describing them synchronically, he also moves back in time liberally in order to narrate the stories of the present and former denizens of the building. There's also a frame tale involving an expatriate Englishman named Bartlebooth who wanders the world for twenty years painting harbor scenes, which he sends home and has made into jigsaw puzzles. Puzzles and games fascinated Perec, and the writing of the novel was itself structured by the use of various constraints and procedures, such as a "knight's tour" in chess, in which the knight visits every space on the chessboard exactly once. But arguably the parts are more interesting than the whole.

Comparing the two versions raises new puzzles. Why, for instance, in the list of paintings created by a tenant named Franz Hutting, did Bellos translate

14 Maximilien, débarquant à Mexico, s'enfourne élégamment onze tortillas

as

14 Maximilian lands in Mexico and daintily scoffs four nelumbia and eleven tortillas

and for that matter what on earth are "nelumbia"? Why does

21 Le docteur Lajoie est radié de l'ordre des médecins pour avoir déclaré en public que William Randolph Hearst, sortant d'une projection de Citizen Kane, aurait monnayé l'assasinat d'Orson Welles

become

21 Dr LaJoie is struck off the medical register for having stated, in front of Ray Monk, Ken O'Leary, and others that, after seeing Citizen Kane, William Randolph Hearst had put a price on Orson Welles's head

with the parts in bold (my emphasis) being apparently gratuitous additions by the translator?

As it turns out, there is method to Bellos's changes. According to a table available here, each painting description in the original conceals the name of one of Perec's friends and associates. Thus "s'enfourne élégamment" hides (Paul) Fournel, which Bellos has reproduced with the mysterious "four nelumbia." Similarly, "Kane, aurait" reveals (Raymond) Queneau, prompting Bellos''s "Ray Monk, Ken O." (Harry Mathews, by the way, is tucked into "Joseph d'Arimathie ou Zarathoustra.")

These diabolical devices, of which there must be many examples throughout the novel, add to the book's fascination, but also provoke some frustration. What else, one wonders, is one overlooking as one reads innocently along?

Effingers (Coming Attractions)

One to watch out for: a promised English-language translation of Gabriele Tergit's family saga Effingers, which was originally published in Germany in 1951 but only recently "rediscovered" and reissued there to general acclaim. Robert Normen has a description on the website of The German Times:

In the best way, this epic 900-page novel resembles another historic family saga: Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. Mann’s story of four generations runs from 1835 to 1877. It may be no coincidence that Tergit’s book begins the very next year. Effingers is set against the backdrop of a changing German society steeped in the comforts of Bismarckian Prussia. Modernization and an economic boom bring affluence and changing norms, which are reflected in the contrasts between the city of Berlin and Karl’s and Paul’s small hometown in southern Germany. After World War I, anti-Semitic sentiment slowly but surely takes hold and the Effinger family must reluctantly learn that they are not the German clan they aspired to be.

NYRB Books has previously published a translation by Sophie Duvernoy of Tergit's earlier novel Käsebier Takes Berlin, and they have signed Duvernoy up for Effingers as well, though apparently no date has been announced. In the meantime, a snazzy-looking Spanish-language version has just been issued by Libros del Asteroide in Barcelona.

More information is available at The German Times.

Ostalgia

This novel set in a fictitious Eastern European country was published in 1983, that is, the year after the death of Leonid Brezhnev, but superficially at least it's very much a book of the "Brezhnev era" and also of the Margaret Thatcher years. The Iron Curtain and the Iron Lady are both long gone, of course, so I was curious to revisit the book now, having liked it so much when it first appeared.

The central character of Rates of Exchange is a British academic named Petworth who is dispatched on a two-week lecture tour sponsored by the British Council. He arrives in a country that has been "pummelled, fought over, raped, pillaged, conquered and oppressed by the endless invaders who, from every direction, have swept and jostled through this all too accessible landscape." The official language spoken in Slaka is a farrago of Slavic and Romance elements as well as loan words from English and other tongues, and it's prone to overnight shifts in dialect as different political factions in the country vie for influence. Much deft comedy is had from all this and from the inevitable misunderstandings that go along with travel and with translation, and Malcolm Bradbury is nothing if not fluent and witty about all that. But there's more here than simply mocking foreign ways. Petworth never knows whom he can trust among the officials and cultural figures who wine and dine him and usher him around the country, but he himself is an unsettled figure, a middle-aged man of middling accomplishments, with a muddled marriage, in short, he can scarcely be regarded as "a character in the world-historical sense" as one of his interlocutors puts it. He is no more in control of his life than are the people he meets, all of whom are either working for or looking over their shoulders at (generally both) the ubiquitous state security apparatus. The book is suffused with an uneasy melancholy that doesn't go out of date with geopolitical changes. If it's true that one can't really imagine this novel being written today, it nevertheless hasn't lost one bit of relevance.

"The nastiest Christian I've ever met"

And some books are just not meant for one ... I picked up The Idiot because I was more or less housebound for a few days and tired of dipping half-heartedly into insubstantial books I had already read. I hadn't looked into Dostoevsky at all since re-reading Crime and Punishment fifteen years or so ago, and The Idiot was one of the few long novels in the house I had never read. I knew even less about it than I do about the author's other major late works, The Possessed (to use its most familiar title) and The Brothers Karamazov, neither of which I own.

I don't exactly regret reading it, now that I've finished, and nothing stopped me from tossing it aside halfway through (I didn't), but it hasn't raised my estimation of the author. (The gratuitous title of this post, by the way, is a mot of Turgenev's.) For 600 pages various infuriating characters, including the feckless hero Prince Myshkin, rant and rave, shift emotions with little prelude or logic, and essentially do nothing (until the final pages). In his rare moments of coherence Myshkin reveals himself as the worst kind of spiritual reactionary, engaging in anti-Western (and vehemently anti-Catholic) tirades that embarrass even his not exactly progressive social circle. Granted some cultural differences (and exasperation on the part of the reader), but I found it difficult to follow and mostly not worth the trouble. To be fair, there are some brilliant set-pieces, but they can't redeem the novel as a whole.

I can, however, see why Kafka regarded Dostoevesky highly, and in saying so I don't mean to sneer at either writer. Strip Dostoevsky of the political and religious baggage, a few dozen patronymics, and a few hundred pages, and you have the core of a potentially interesting existential or psychological novel, even if the result might turn out to be deemed ultimately unsuccessful. But everything in this novel speaks of artistic force, and nothing of artistic control.

I would have been amused, however, if Edward Gorey (who did cover art for a few of Dostoevsky's other works) had been given the opportunity to illustrate this one. His gentle satirical eye would have provided welcome relief.

The Indifference of the Dead

Machado de Assis:

In life, the watchful eye of public opinion, the conflict of interests, the struggle of greed against greed oblige a man to hide his old rags, to conceal the rips and patches, to withhold from the world the revelations that he makes to his own conscience; and the greatest reward comes when a man, in so deceiving others, manages at the same time to deceive himself, for in such a case he spares himself shame, which is a painful experience, and hypocrisy, which is a hideous vice. But in death, what a difference! what relief! what freedom! How glorious to throw away your cloak, to dump your spangles in a ditch, to unfold yourself, to strip off all your paint and ornaments, to confess plainly what you were and what you failed to be! For, after all, you have no neighbors, no friends, no enemies, no acquaintances, no strangers, no audience at all. The sharp and judicial eye of public opinion loses its power as soon as we enter the territory of death. I do not deny that it sometimes glances this way and examines and judges us, but we dead folk are not concerned about its judgment. You who still live, believe me, there is nothing in the world so monstrously vast as our indifference.

Epitaph of a Small Winner is the American publisher's title of the first translation of the most famous work of the Brazilian novelist Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908). It was released in hardcover by Noonday Press in 1952 and in paperback four years later; the translator is William L. Grossman. The paperback cover shown above, which I rather like, is uncredited. (It doesn't look like the work of Shari Frisch, who provided a couple of dispensable line drawings to the interior of the book.) Later reprints of the same translation have different cover art and include a Foreword by Susan Sontag.

There have been at least four subsequent English versions, one of them published fairly obscurely in Brazil, and all of which make use of the book's actual Portuguese title, which translates as The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. Recent editions contain annotations and have been reviewed favorably, but the Grossman translation is perfectly adequate for most purposes. Why one short book, however enjoyable, would need five translations in sixty-eight years is a bit puzzling, given that there are comparable books that been translated only once (sometimes badly) or not at all, but the more the merrier.

Words Without Borders has a recent overview by Charles A. Perrone: "Machado de Assis Gains Different Voices in New Translations of Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas."

Berlin (Jason Lutes)

Two brilliant pages from Jason Lutes's mammoth graphic novel set in the waning years of the Weimar Republic.

Berlin is published by Drawn & Quarterly.

Black Wall of Certainty

Amar, a Moroccan adolescent, hides out on the roof while the house he has been staying in is raided by the French, who are looking for members of the Istiqlal, an underground independence movement:

He listened: they were going back down the stairs, back along the galleries, back through the house, and away. They had parked their jeeps somewhere far out in the fields, for he waited an interminable time before he heard the faint sound of doors being shut and motors starting up. When they were gone he turned over and sobbed a few times, whether with relief or loneliness he did not know. Lying up here on the cold concrete roof he felt supremely deserted, exquisitely conscious of his own weakness and insignificance. His gift meant nothing; he was not even sure that he had any gift, or ever had had one. The world was something different from what he had thought it. It had come nearer, but in coming nearer it had grown smaller. As if an enormous piece of the great puzzle had fallen unexpectedly into place, blocking the view of distant, beautiful countrysides which had been there until now, dimly he was aware that when everything had been understood, there would be only the solved puzzle before him, a black wall of certainty. He would know, but nothing would have meaning, because the knowing was itself the meaning; beyond that there was nothing to know.

Probably my favorite of Paul Bowles's novels, The Spider's House, which was published in 1955, represents its author's most sustained attempt to depict the interior lives of Moroccans, even if the passage above seems to borrow as much from twentieth-century existentialism as it does from cultural anthropology. Other sections of the book deal, more conventionally, with an expatriate American novelist named John Stenham and a wayward young American woman named Lee Veyron. As the narratives converge, the mutual failure of understanding across cultures comes to the fore. The French colonizers, in the meantime, are depicted as cloddish torturers, while the members of the Istiqlal, who drink alcohol and sport Western clothing, are regarded by Amar (and presumably by Bowles) as corrupt and un-Islamic. Stenham, who speaks Maghrebi Arabic, deplores the encroachments of the modern world into traditional Morocco; Veyron welcomes them.

All of this no doubt reads very differently now than it did when the book was first published; the attempt of an outsider to depict (and thereby define) the consciousness of an inhabitant of a third-world country would probably be regarded as presumptuous if not downright offensive, and Bowles's pessimism about decolonization, like Naipaul's, would be seen as serving the interests of imperialism. But though Stenham seems, on the surface, an obvious stand-in and mouthpiece for Bowles, the writing of fiction exacts its toll on the characters. Stenham is a nostalgist for the primitive, but he is also an insensitive boor who ends by availing himself of his privilege as a Westerner to flee a situation that Amar has no escape from. Bowles the novelist is already a step ahead of his potential critics.

News

Thomas Pynchon:

Rachel and Roony sat on a bench in Sheridan Square, talking about Mafia and Paola. It was one in the morning, a wind had risen and something curious too had happened; as if everyone in the city, simultaneously, had become sick of news of any kind; for thousands of newspaper pages blew through the small park on the way crosstown, blundered like pale bats against the trees, tangled themselves around the feet of Roony and Rachel, and of a bum sleeping across the way. Millions of unread and useless words had come to a kind of life in Sheridan Square; while the two on the bench wove cross-talk of their own, oblivious, among them.

V.

On Rayuela

Every novel is philosophical, in that it consciously or (more usually) unconsciously embodies a theory of being. We know that this is true because novels are, by definition, fictive, that is, false. The rules by which a novel elaborates its false world (the "true" one being, in all likelihood, unknowable in any case) constitute its theory of how things are.

Interesting novels embody interesting theories of being, banal ones banal theories. Rayuela, as an antinovel, is antiphilosophical; it questions (by first thoroughly exploring) the very possibility of understanding, the possibility that any theory of being capable of expression in words (and how would it be a theory if it were not?), could ever be valid or even meaningful. Language is seen as self-refuting by nature. The real nature of being — if such a thing even exists — is irredeemably contaminated by the act of referring to it. A lemon may be adequately named by the word "lemon," at least for utilitarian purposes, but "love" (to choose just one example) is an idea whose referent is fatally entangled with its linguistic sign. To grasp what love is without taking into account how it has been named would require us to revert to a prelinguistic state. Such a project would, naturally, be self-defeating.

The Poison of the Age

"Novel reading has been fearfully on the increase during the last fifteen or twenty years, and especially in the last ten years; and may we not say that the increase of suicides is due, in a considerable measure, to such reading? May we not also say that it has had a baneful effect, also, on the spirituality of many professing Christians? Will anyone deny that the practice of reading the cheap, sensational novels of the day does not naturally lessen one's taste and desire for frequent and devout reading of the Bible? — No. The truth is, no one can pursue the habit of reading the trashy novels of the day without having his moral taste and tone ruinously debilitated and damaged.

"Read what a discerning and judicious writer says on the subject: 'Novels are the poison of the age. The best of them tend to produce a baneful effeminacy of mind, and many of them are calculated to advance the base designs of the licentious and abandoned on the young and unsuspecting. But were they free from every other charge of evil, it is a most heavy one that they occasion a dreadful waste of that time which must be accounted for before the God of heaven. Let their deluded admirers plead the advantages of novel reading, if they will venture to plead the same, before the great Judge eternal. If you are a novel reader, think, the next time you take a novel into your hands, How shall I answer to my tremendous Judge for the time occupied by this? When he shall say to me: "I gave you so many years in yonder world to fit you for eternity; did you converse with your God in devotion? Did you study his word? Did you attend to the duties of life, and strive to improve, to some good end, even your leisure hours?" then shall I be willing to reply, "Lord, my time was otherwise employed! Novels and romances occupied the leisure of my days, when, alas! my Bible, my God, and my soul were neglected"?' O novel reader, think on these things!" — C. H. Wetherbee

(From Pacific Health Journal and Temperance Advocate, 1891.)

Charles Simmons (1924-2017)

The novelist Charles Simmons has died. I have fond memories of two of his books (there were several others I never got around to): the fairly conventional coming-of-age novel Salt Water and a brilliant little tour-de-force entitled Wrinkles, which narrated the outlines of a man's life (someone presumably much like Simmons himself) through a series of brief thematic chapters, each of which began in the present tense with the man's childhood and gradually shifted to the present and finally the future tense with the man's final years. A few of its concerns now seem dated, but the book's approach and Simmons's assured prose have stuck with me. I'll read it again one of these days. The Neglected Books Page has an excerpt and an appreciation.

Notes for a commonplace book (18)

Milan Kundera:

Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished, for he has an innate and irrepressible desire to judge before he understands. Religions and ideologies are founded on this desire. They can cope with the novel only by translating its language of relativity and ambiguity into their own apodictic and dogmatic discourse. They require that someone be right: either Anna Karenina is the victim of a narrow-minded tyrant, or Karenin is the victim of an immoral woman; either K. is an innocent man crushed by an unjust Court, or the Court represents divine justice and K. is guilty.

This "either-or" encapsulates an inability to tolerate the essential relativity of things human, an inability to look squarely at the absence of the Supreme Judge. This inability makes the novel's wisdom (the wisdom of uncertainty) hard to accept and understand.

— From "The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes"

On Novels (Austin Reed)

"I despise the looks of a novel. The cursed infernal things, I can't bear the sight of one. They are a curse to every one that reads them. I never could bear the looks of them. They are pack full of lies. They are a store House of lies. I never could take any comfort in reading them. Give me the history of some great and good man who is laboring for the welfare of his country, like Wm. H. Seward, who is fighting against the world of enemies every day for the promotion and benefit of his country, and laboring with a strong arm for to crush vice and crime and morality under the feet of the world. That is such a book which I love to read. Novels are books that will bring many a young man to a gloomy cell, and many a weeping mothers to their graves."

— Austin Reed, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, edited by Caleb Smith.

Neapolitan Lives

After having read a couple of reviews raving about Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels I decided to try the first volume, and quickly became hooked. A few weeks and some 1,700 pages later I've come to the end. Are they all they're cracked up to be? Close enough.

"Elena Ferrante" is the pseudonym of an Italian writer whose true identity is apparently known to only a handful of people. She has written a few other books, was born in Naples, and is probably in her sixties or thereabouts; she doesn't grant many interviews, although there is one in the Paris Review. There seems to be no particular reason why we need to know more than that, and she herself has bluntly declared "I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors."

The narrator of these novels, who must be at least roughly contemporary with their author, is named Elena Greco, but no one ever calls her that. She is known as Lenuccia or Lenù, just as her closest friend, who is named Raffaella, is always referred to as Lina or (by the narrator) as Lila. The two grow up in an inward-looking, tightly-knit, and often violent neighborhood in Naples. Lila, depicted as the more charismatic and gifted of the two, leaves school at a young age and enters into a disastrous marriage (few if any of the relationships in the book bring enduring joy to the participants). Lenù, on the other hand, applies herself to her studies, attends a university, marries a professor, and becomes a successful author, becomes, in fact, the notional "author" of the narrative we read. Through the course of the books, which span roughly fifty years or a bit more, the two women orbit each other like twin suns, often at a distance but never entirely escaping each other's gravitational fields.

The story the books relate is too complex to try to summarize here (William Deresiewicz's longer consideration in the Nation is worth seeking out); there is an Index of Characters at the beginning of each novel and if you are anything like me you will refer to it regularly. The books are not flawless (and see the pointed demurral from the Ferrante admiration society by Tim Parks). The narrative could have been tightened and several hundred pages cut without sacrifice, the prose occasionally resorts to summary instead of description, and much of the third book, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, parts of which are set in a sausage factory, struck me as, well, a bit of a sausage factory itself. But in the end, these are quibbles. The books manage to maintain an intensity and integrity that are rare in the contemporary novel, while creating both a vivid (and uniformly dark) portrait of Neapolitan society and a meticulous delineation of a not untroubled friendship between two women.

All four books have been translated by Ann Goldstein. I don't read Italian well and didn't have access to the originals in any case, but the translations struck me as thoughtful and workmanlike despite the very occasional turn of phrase where the English and Italian languages seemed to have battled to a draw. The handsome, sturdy paperback editions shown here are published by Europa Editions. My only complaint with them is that the cover art lends the books a more burnished, lyrical tone than suits Ferrante's narrative. These are not comforting books.

Notes for a commonplace book (13)

Charles Shirō Inouye:

"The fixed point of view of the realistic painter finds its analogue in the omniscient perspective of the authoritative author. More than merely a scribbler, the modern novelist tells true stories from a privileged point of view, and from a similarly fixed point in time (usually the present as explained by the past). An author’s claims to truthfulness rest largely on such a consistent, objective point of view, as if that view were an integral, ordering part of the reproducible world that flows from it. Its very stability generates robustness as a true and principled source of truth; and its generality produces realism’s utility as a nondistorting understanding of reality that allows us to describe the world as similarly recognizable and understandable to everyone…

"Such a perspectival system includes both the objectively true exterior (realism) and the subjectively true interior (psychology) because everything, including the invisible realm, must be accounted for… In the modern period, history becomes the acceptable and plausible truth, while fiction, with its ability to delve impossibly into the emotions and thoughts of people, becomes the acceptable and plausible lie (or the imagined that is nevertheless true).

"In other words, realistic truth makes fiction necessary… Fiction derives compellingly from a central contradiction of modernity … that only by surrendering oneself to a rational and atomizing system does one gain individual identity and the ability to think and act for (and by) oneself. Paradoxically, in order to be an individuated member of such a society, we must assume a point of view that everyone shares; thus, the fundamental irony implied in the notion of subjectivity, where the subject is supposedly both a follower (a loyal subject) and an acting agent (someone with subjectivity or the will to act independently) and where the status of subjectivity is, on the one hand, praised as being emotionally true and, on the other, degraded as a lack of (objective) truth. The modern novel attempts to make sense of this paradox — this surrendering as empowerment — by raising the possibility of a true subjectivity, that is, fiction, within a larger context of objective truth."

From an essay on Izumi Kyōka's "A Quiet Obsession," from In Light of Shadows: More Gothic Tales by Izumi Kyōka, University of Hawai'i Press.

A death remembered

This short novel, published in 1981, is based on an incident that had taken place some 30 years earlier, when a young man named Cayetano Gentile Chimento, a friend of the author, was murdered in the town of Sucre, Colombia by two brothers of a woman he had allegedly "deflowered" in advance of her wedding to another man. The narrative apparently follows the outlines of the actual event fairly closely, even to the extent that relatives of the narrator (who is never himself named) bear the same names as Gabriel García Márquez's own family members, at least one of whom witnessed the killing. (Gerald Martin's fine biography of the author has the full background.)

Still, Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a work of fiction, not reportage, and one that remains tense and compelling throughout even though we know the outcome from the very first sentence (not to mention from the title). As the book progresses we learn the reasons behind the killing (although some important things are never explained), and we follow the fatal chain of events that, far from being inexorable, could have been interrupted at any number of points. In fact, the killers, reluctant to carry out an act that "honor" compels them to perform, seem to go out of their way to make the final result preventable. The death is not just "foretold" in the sense of being predicted; it's announced (anunciada) in advance to virtually everyone the killers come across. The victim is one of the few people not to get the message.

For a book that runs to only 193 generously spaced pages in its Spanish text (120 in Gregory Rabassa's translation), there are an astounding number of named characters. That's a key to the nature of the book, which is not simply about a tragic series of events involving a few key participants, but about how an entire community witnessed, participated in, and remembered those events, which the narrator reconstructs years later. Here, from my notes, is a by no means complete dramatis personae:

Santiago Nasar; the victim
Plácida Linero; his mother
Victoria Guzmán; their cook
Divina Flor; her daughter

Angela Vicario; the bride
Pablo Vicario; her brother
Pedro Vicario; Pablo's twin, six minutes his junior
Pura (Purísima) Vicario; their mother
Poncio Vicario; their father
Prudencia Cotes; Pablo's girlfriend

Bayardo San Román; the groom
Gen. Petronio San Román; his father
Alberta Simonds; his mother

María Alejandrina Cervantes; a prostitute
Clotilde Armenta; the proprietress of a grocery store
Rogelio de la Flor; her husband
Flora Miguel; the victim's fiancée
Nahir Miguel; her father
Cristo Bedoya; a friend of the victim
Carmen Amador; a priest
Lázaro Aponte; the mayor of the town
Dionisio Iguarón; a physician
Leandro Pornoy; a policeman
"the widower Xius"; the former owner of a house purchased by the groom

The narrator
Luis Enrique; his brother
Margot; his sister
Another sister; a nun
Jaime; another brother
Wenefrida Márquez; the narrator's aunt (who makes an appearance even though her namesake was already dead at the time of the events)
Mercedes Barcha; the narrator's future wife (and the author's wife's real name)

And on and on through to the very last pages; various townspeople:

Yamil Shaium
Indalecio Pardo
Sara Noriega
Celeste Dangond
Meme Loiza
Polo Carillo
Fausto López
Hortensia Baute
Faustino Santos
Aura Villeros
Próspera Arango
Poncho Lanao
Argénida Lanao

Plus a bishop, an unnamed judge, and present only by allusion, the ghosts of Col. Aureliano Buendía and Gerineldo Martínez.

The delight that García Márquez felt in inventing names is evident. It will be noted that several of them, including that of the victim, are Arabic in origin; these are members of the town's population of second- or third-generation Arab immigrants, sometimes referred to as "the Turks," a reminder of Latin America's complex ethnic heritage.

Bonfires

At first glance, Ana María Matute's 1960 novel Primera memoria seems much of a piece with the narratives with which she ended her career some five decades later, Paraíso inhabitado and the unfinished Demonios familiares. Like the later books, it takes place during the first months of the Spanish Civil War and centers around an adolescent girl in a conservative Catholic family divided by death, separation, or emotional remoteness. There are even some common allusions: Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen," a toy theatre, and so on. But though there's a bittersweet, autumnal sorrow even in Matute's last books, Primera memoria, written and published in the dead years of the Franco era, is a very different, much more troubling tale.

The heroine, Matia, fourteen years old, has lost her mother years before; her subsequent caretaker, a family retainer, has taken ill shortly before the novel begins. With her father absent (and regarded as a black sheep due to his allegiance to the Republic), she is packed off to her grandmother's home on an island that is unnamed but presumably Majorca or one of its neighbors. The forbidding figure of her grandmother reigns over the house and much of the vicinity, but Matia and her male cousin, Borja, who is a year older, regularly escape to drink and smoke on the shore, out of sight of the family and the slightly older tutor who is supposed to be keeping tabs on them. Borja also steals money, weapons, and other contraband from his grandmother and elsewhere, and caches them in a stranded boat. Inevitably, the two lonely adolescents form close, but deceptive, bonds.

Nothing on the island is above board, and nothing is what it seems. Smuggling is rampant, adultery widespread, and with the outbreak of the war old scores begin to be settled. Some of the scores are ancient: on the outskirts of town there is a ruined district — the plaza de los judíos — where, centuries earlier, the Inquisition had burnt the island's unconverted Jews. The descendents of the conversos, the Jews who chose to adopt Christianity in order to save their lives, are taunted as chuetas, the worst imaginable insult; nevertheless their bloodlines, like subterranean streams, in fact appear to be everywhere on the island. A rival gang of teenagers, armed with meat hooks, sets bonfires and immolates straw men dressed up to resemble Borja, in order to draw him into battle. But in the end, they all fear Borja, and with good reason; he is charming, but as Matia delares, he also has "an absolute absence of pity." His streak of ruthlessness will do terrible damage by the novel's end, and he will not pay be the one to pay for it.

Though she had a long and successful career, Ana María Matute reportedly ran afoul of Franco-era censorship at times. Primera memoria, which won the Premio Nadal and is the first part of a loosely linked trilogy, may simply have been too subtle and ingeniously crafted to set off the censor's alarm bells. It is no less subversive for all that. It has been translated into English twice, once as Awakening and once as School of the Sun.