Month: August 2024

Suspended between two lives: Specters by Radwa Ashour

To the young, because they are young, everything looks bigger, taking on proportions relative to their age and to the space their bodies occupy, amidst other bodies heavier, taller, and broader than theirs. The tallest person is the oldest, and the uncle or aunt who has reached the age of thirty is of such an advanced age that it is difficult to grasp the concept of this “thirty,” based on the five fingers, or even ten, that the child will hold out to indicate his age. As for the grandfather or grandmother, that’s another story, combining reality and fantasy, the perceptible and the obscure, for the stories they tell of the past place them between two worlds, one foot here and the other there, with this mysterious “there” reaching into a past of which God alone knows the beginning and the end.

Scepters, by Egyptian novelist and academic Radwa Ashour, is a work that is ever seeking to place itself in relation to time and place, history and memoir, fiction and metafiction. Complex, multilayered, and dynamic, it explores the many ways truths can be approached, examined, and understood. This novel opens with the portrait of Shagar, a strong-willed woman, widowed young, who refused to remarry, raised three children on her own and became the matriarch of her community with, later in life, an uncanny ability to hear the voices of ghosts. The story then turns to her great granddaughter, and namesake, whose unusual appellation (meaning “tree”) was given at the insistence of her grandfather despite strong opposition in the family. As such, the name would align her with her paternal grandfather whose “inexhaustible supply of stories” would have a significant and lasting influence on her life.

But then, the narrative voice shifts. Radwa, the author, enters and immediately raises questions:

What happened? Why did I leap so suddenly from Shagar the child to middle-aged Shagar? I reread what I have written, mull it over, stare at the lighted screen, and wonder whether I should continue the story of young Shagar, or return to her great grandmother, or trace the path of her descendants to arrive, once again, at the grandchild. And the ghosts—should I consign them to marginal obscurity, leaving them to hover on the periphery of the text, or admit them fully and elucidate some of their stories?

She considers erasing what she’s written and starting over with her own story. She then debates whether she should keep Shagar and interweave two separate stories into one. “Who is Shagar?” she asks. Before the chapter is out, Shagar, the now fifty year-old professor of history is back. But not for long.

Moving between memoir, novel-in-progress, metafictional asides, and historical research, Scepters tells the story of two women born on the same day, growing up in Cairo on opposite sides of the Nile. One will become a novelist, the other an historian writing a book called The Scepters about the 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin in Palestine. They will attend the same university, and become involved to varying degrees with the student protests of the 1970s and 80s. However, although both author and character share birthdates and professions, if in different disciplines, and are writing books with similar names, this is not autofiction, nor is Shagar an alter ego. Shagar remains single and much of her story reflects her need to find meaning through political action, and through the lives of her students and a young boy who lives next door. There is an inherent emptiness that she will not find an answer to until the close of the novel. Radwa, by contrast, marries Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, exiled from his native country in 1967, and then deported from Egypt ten years later when their son Tamim is an infant. Much of her personal story recounts the complications—emotional, practical, and bureaucratic—of trying to maintain family life divided between countries during the precious time afforded by summer and holiday breaks. As such, it is a vital and deeply personal complement to Barghouti’s own account of the same period in his moving memoir I Saw Ramallah.

Generally, the fictional and nonfiction streams that comprise Specters unfold in alternating chapters, one or two at a time. Shagar’s academic life, as a student and as a professor, is central to her story. As is her often disruptive existence within the academic environment. She is political, active in protests, and will spend time in prison, briefly during her graduate years and again later. It is something that she does not necessarily see as a negative:

In September 1981, when she was dismissed from the university, she didn’t panic; after all, she was no longer under pressure to write a thesis or dissertation. There was nothing in the decision that threatened a transformation in the course of her life.

In prison there was ample time to consider the particulars of a life dispersed randomly in the press of daily concerns. In prison there is time, because the days and the nights as well, take their time: each hour has its own sphere, through which she passes in stoic endurance, and into which the succeeding hour does not crowd. Perseverant, country hours that know none of that feverish haste, the constantly ringing telephone, or the harried pushing and shoving in the city’s streets and its overflowing buses, its chaotic rhythms.

Shagar is determined, self-reliant, but not without doubts. About her students, and about changes she observes in the youth. The motivation to political protest of her own younger years now seems to pull promising young people to more radical and dangerous pursuits. Eventually she will turn her attention fully to her research and the subject she has wanted to explore since she first switched from ancient to modern history in the final year of undergrad studies: the massacre at Deir Yassin.

Shagar’s story naturally contains more direct historical and documentary materials—from the notebook filled with reflection her grandfather leaves her to testimonials of survivors of the massacre. But of course, the research is ultimately Radwa’s, a fact that leads at one point to a discussion of her approach to writing her well-known historical novel set in late fifteenth century Granada. This is but one of many places in which the lines between memoir and fiction are openly crossed. Shagar is someone she sometimes loses track of and she finds herself wondering what Shagar is up to or what she would think about something. The explicit and playful metafictional element of this inventive novel within a memoir (or is it a memoir within a novel?) is not only essential to its coherency, but the key to its richness and depth.  Blurring the boundaries between the personal and the political—witnessed in Shagar’s life as much as in Radwa’s—highlights the inability to separate the creative process from the research involved or the characters created. Yet, set against the backdrop of ongoing protest, conflict, and instability—in Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq—real lives can only find so much anonymity through fiction. The memoirist can chose what and how much she wishes to reveal, whereas for the documentarian, truths, especially the voices of survivors of violence, must be respected and preserved as faithfully as possible. These are the sorts of concerns Radwa Ashour seeks to balance in Specters. Where one life lived ends and another imagined begins cannot be clearly defined with a simple shift from first to third person, for such shifts occur, on occasion, within each thread, but at the end of the day, one is left to wonder if it is ultimately through the lens of fiction that ghosts can ever truly be heard.

Specters by Radwa Ashour is translated from the Arabic by Barbara Romaine and published by Interlink Books.

Seeking release in the séance: The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks by Agnieszka Taborska

Was it something in the air? In the history of the seaside town? Providence, Rhode Island in the mid-nineteenth century was, this curious biography assures us, famous for its abundance of unsettled spirits:

It is true that other towns also have their ghosts — nowhere, however, are they so noisy and restless. So many phantoms live in Providence they fill up every nook and cranny. Saturated with their breath, the air grows oppressive and causes headaches. You don’t so much walk down the streets as fight your way through invisible throngs.
(from “The Female Presence”)

And a plethora of phantoms makes it easier for a medium to conduct a séance that will satisfy the spiritualists gathered in her parlour. For an attentive and innovative medium like Phoebe Hicks, a successful séance was almost guaranteed, night after night.

Her story, and that of the rise of Spiritualism in America, unfolds through a series of episodes recorded by Polish writer Agnieszka Taborska, and paired with stunning collages by Selena Kimball, in The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks, new from the inimitable Twisted Spoon Press. If it seems odd that Taborska, an art historian specializing in French Surrealism has chosen to turn her attention to Rhode Island and placed her fictional heroine there, it shouldn’t be. She divides her time between Warsaw and Providence, and her affection for the town and its ghostly history comes through in this imaginative biographical endeavour.

Phoebe Hicks, medium extraordinaire, stumbled into her unlikely profession through the most peculiar circumstances. On November 1, 1847, she found herself violently ill with a bout of food poisoning triggered by a meal of clam fritters. Were it not for a nosey photographer who happened to peer into her window and catch her vomiting into the bowl on her washstand, the incident would have passed into Phoebe’s feverish memory and stayed there. But instead, the invasive images—coincidentally captured with a recently patented photographic method that allowed for an exposure of only three minutes—would be reproduced and widely interpreted as evidence of ectoplasm spewing from her mouth. Although ectoplasm, the manifestation of spiritual matter, would not be officially described until 1894, Phoebe would prove to be ahead of the curve in so many ways—so far ahead in fact that she would even entertain the ghost of Harry Houdini years before his birth—but for some reason her notable achievements have fallen from the records of the history of Spiritualism.

This book aims to rectify that oversight.

Phoebe’s first séance was awkward, but she quickly learned from her mistakes and as her gatherings grew in sophistication, her fame spread. Of course, as the interest in séances increased, so did the number of practitioners, both sincere and false. Yet, as ever, Phoebe was a class act. Her guests would be greeted by the cook’s son, and then ushered into the parlour by her maid, Miriam, a woman so dignified in manner and appearance that some would mistake her for the mistress. Others, however, mused that she may have been the true secret to Phoebe’s  success.

They accused her of practices employed by accomplices of other mediums to gain information about clients: bribing servants, placing “their people” in noisy inns where alcohol loosened tongues, studying gravestones — the most reliable sources of information about family relationships. They forgot that it sufficed to reside in Providence a little while to know enough about one’s neighbours to imagine the rest. For the inhabitants of the magic town were strangely alike.
(from “The Maid”)

Now, Phoebe was not content to simply summon the spirits of the locally departed, she also welcomed figures from history, and is reported to have performed a number of impressive feats during the course of her gatherings. But more critically, she established standards for the practice of conducting séances, strengthening the acceptance of the role of medium. For not only was Spiritualism a practice that held particular appeal for women, the profession of medium offered some of these same women an opportunity to support themselves outside of the traditional bonds of marriage. And for some that was a very worrying trend:

A few ill-disposed doctors claimed that Spiritualism was no more than a safety valve for madness and old-maidenhood, that participation in séances was conducive to hallucinations, that the fashion for the table turning, spreading at dizzying speeds, was responsible for madhouses bursting at the seams, that instead of a parlour with its round table a more fitting place for mediums was a hospital isolation ward.
(from “Something That Might Be Called Hysteria”)

Behind the accusations of madness, of course, lay the fear that in the communion with spirits might lead to emancipation.

Twisted Spoon publishes some of the most delightfully strange books and The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks is no exception. Presented as a serious account—albeit with a healthy amount of wry humour—of the role of this somewhat mysterious medium in the early years of spiritualist practice, the portrait that emerges is of a woman for whom the boundary between the world of the spirit and the world of the flesh has become somewhat permeable. She ultimately disappears, not only from history, but from the town of Providence itself, her final whereabouts unknown. But the insinuation is that, unlike the many impostors and charlatans who flocked to the profession in its heyday, there was something uncanny about Phoebe. Something wise, practical, and well, just possibly, genuine. . .

The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks by Agnieszka Taborska with illustrations by Selena Kimball is translated from the Polish by Ursula Phillips and published by Twisted Spoon Press. It is available now in the UK and Europe, and will be released in November 2024 in North America.

Each person has their own star: The Fiancée Rode in on a Donkey by Vénus Khoury-Ghata

Deep in the desert, excitement is building. Among the Qurayza, a Jewish nomadic tribe, young girls are being readied for the arrival of a special visitor. An important rabbi is coming to select a bride for the great Algerian military and religious leader Emir Abdelkader. He has wives already, of course, but another, a Jewish girl, is to be offered to secure protection for her people.  For the girls, scrubbed and polished and hennaed, to be chosen would mean a chance to escape a prison of sand for a better life. Or so everyone believes.

Just one look around is enough for the rabbi to find the chosen one. He picks Yudah for her name, a contraction of Yahuda, and for her eyes which she lowers when he looks at her. Every woman is beautiful to the rabbi as long as she isn’t one-armed or one-eyed.

Each one of Khoury-Ghata’s spare novellas is different, exploring a different time and place, and The Fiancée Rode in on a Donkey is no exception. Set in the mid-1800s, this tale follows Yudah, the promised fiancée, from her desert home to the streets of Paris in a year rocked by revolution. Although, if time frames are correct, her journey lasts little more than ten or twelve months at the most, it will test the courage and resolve of this young heroine.

When Yudah arrives on the back of the rabbi’s weary old donkey, she is dismayed to discover that Abdelkader’s entourage is not housed in town, but in an encampment nearby. She realizes that she has traded one kind of tent life for another, but the welcome she might have anticipated is not forthcoming. The Emir is away on campaign, engaged in a battle that he will not win, and no one seems to know what to make of this scrawny teenager who claims she is his bride-to-be, destined for his bed. An outsider trying to find a small corner in the camp or wandering around town alone, she begins to mourn the desert community she has left and the boy, her cousin, to whom she had given her heart. It is but the first of a series of displacements to follow.

Before Yudah has a chance to meet the man she has been led to believe would become her husband, Abdelkader is forced to surrender and exiled to France with his family. Yudah, with no formal connection to him, is taken to Île Sainte-Marguerite with the great man’s followers—hundreds of men, women and children, few of whom will survive the winter on the island. But here, too, the young daughter of the desert is still an outcast. She does find refuge in a convent where she is, for a time, renamed Judith, until her stubborn nature and—at least to the eyes and ears of the nuns—cultural coarseness disrupts the strict order of religious life. She is forced to move on several more times until she eventually finds herself in Paris in the spring of 1848.

Alone and forced to repeatedly adapt to circumstances and customs that her fifteen years of life have in now way prepared her for, Yudah clings to the superstitions of her tribe:

The Qurayzas say that the sound of a badly oiled drum can unleash a war, but who among all these people has ever heard of the Qurayzas? Do they know that the inhabitants of the desert see farther than life? That their gaze goes beyond the horizon that separates the living from the dead? That the parched camel drivers who dream of wells and rain drown in the sand as in the sea? That the palm tree at arm’s length is only a mirage and that what they think is a galloping horse coming to meet them is only the slow steps of the evil spirits crying between the dunes? Female spirits, they point out, the only ones authorized to accompany the lost at the time of their death.

Her conviction that a special destiny awaits her, born less out of any sense of superiority than out of a belief that the well-being and security of her people depend on it, keep her from losing all hope even when she falls into thinking that she is insignificant and could disappear from life without anyone ever noticing. Uneducated and illiterate, Yudah carries a traditional wisdom that belies her age, one that intersects with French society at such a distinctly foreign angle that it allows her to see and measure things differently. This otherworldly charm will lead her into the most unlikely situations, both fortunate and tragic.

What allows this historical, yet slightly magical, tale to work so well is the light touch with which it is told. As a poet, Khoury-Ghata is capable of creating memorable characters, and capturing settings and interactions with a devastating economy of words, whether she is working with well-known figures like Osip Mandelstam or Marina Tsvetaeva, or someone like this young Jewish girl from the Algerian desert. In tracing the fate, not only of Yudah but of the other young men and women she meets, this novella offers an unexpected view of a well-known period of French history, highlighting the challenges endured and the damage that can be done to ordinary people caught up circumstances they cannot control.

The Fiancée Rode in on a Donkey by Vénus Khoury-Ghata is translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan and published by Seagull Books.

We’re too small for the sky to pay attention to us: Great Fear on the Mountain by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz

In this novel, the stage is set quickly with little fuss. The story opens at a village council meeting in an unnamed Swiss alpine community where the members have gathered to discuss the shortage of available grazing land for their cattle. The situation is acute and the answer seems obvious to some and ominous to others. High on the mountain lies the verdant Sasseneire pasture, abandoned for many years after an event so terrifying that the elders dare not speak of it, warning that to go back would be to invite evil to return once more. But the young, who don’t remember that time, put little stock in what seems more folklore than fact. As the Chairman argues:

“Those are just stories. No one ever really found out what happened up there. It’s been twenty years since then, all that’s in the past. To my mind, the long and the short of it is that for twenty years now we’ve been making no use of that fine grass, which could feed seventy animals all summer long; if you think the village can afford to be extravagant, then say it; myself, I don’t think so, and I’m the one who’s responsible . . .”

The debate is short; the younger folk win the vote. And so begins the process of securing the site, repairing the chalet, and, most challenging of all, finding enough men willing to spend the summer up on the mountain with the herd.

Great Fear on the Mountain, the 1926 novel by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, is a bucolic tale that takes place in the looming shadow of mystery and death with a hint of the supernatural. Ramuz (1878 – 1947) was a Swiss-French writer who, although he spent his adult years in Paris where he counted Igor Stravinsky among his close friends, continued to look to Switzerland for his fictional landscapes. He set his stories in rural communities, writing of farmers, villagers, and mountaineers often confronting disaster and tragedy. His distinctive style would later influence Jean Giono and Céline. And, it is this style, with its shifting, almost omnipresent, narrative voice, vivid depictions of nature, and the ominous repetition of key phrases, that manages to build the intensely claustrophobic atmosphere of dread that gives this spare  novel its power.

Seven men ultimately come forward to go up to Sasseneire. They include the leaser of the land, Crittin, generally referred to as the master and his nephew, a young man named Joseph who hopes the extra money earned will allow him to marry his beloved sweetheart, and old Barthélemy, a survivor of the last summer on Sasseneire who wears, as a protective talisman, a bag containing a piece of paper on a rope around his neck. Along with an adolescent and another townsman, the team is rounded out with the strange, physically deformed Clou—an odd man who seems to have his own agenda.

Once they are up on the mountain with the herd, a sense of unease quickly settles over the men, becoming especially palpable once night falls:

Outside, it must have been thoroughly dark, and perhaps there were stars, perhaps there were not; they couldn’t know. Nothing could be heard. Listening did no good, nothing at all could be heard: it was like at the beginning of the world, before there were humans, or, at the end of the world after humans had retreated from the surface of the earth—nothing was moving anymore, anywhere, there was no longer anybody, nothing but air, stone, and water, things that do not smell, things that do not think, things that do not speak.

Before long, disease begins to appear among the animals. Just like the last time. The boy comes home shaking with fear, soon followed by another man. The villagers react to news of the sick cattle with alarm. They establish an armed guard on the access road to prevent anyone else from returning and spreading this mysterious  illness. The remaining men and their slowly diminishing herd are essentially trapped and only Clou, who disappears each day, shows no concern about being unable to return to the village. As the men try to cope with increasingly dire circumstances, various shades of despondency and madness begin to take hold.

As the details of the events that originally led to the abandonment of the Sasseniere pasture are alluded to yet never fleshed out, the happenings this time around are equally ambiguous. And potentially much more devastating. A steady sense of dread builds and spreads, up on the mountain and down below, while around them all nature seems to be at once ambivalent and mildly malevolent. It’s a delicate balance:

It was perhaps midday. The sky was arranging itself, without paying any attention to us. At the chalet, they’d tried once again to look into the mouths of suspected animals, grasping their pink muzzle in one hand, introducing the fingers of the other between their teeth, while the animals lowed; up above them, the sky was arranging itself. It was covering itself, was turning gray, with an array of small clouds, lined up evenly spaced from one another, all around the combe, some of them capping the peaks, at such moments they’re said to be putting their hats on, others lying flat on the ridges. There was no wind.

The omniscient third person narrative occasionally shifts perspective, into second and more commonly first person plural. Bill Johnston’s translation traverses this shifting narrative terrain with ease. Great Fear on the Mountain is presented as an allegorical tale that has become part of a larger consciousness, and one that is made more suspenseful by the intentional, almost jarring, repetition of phrases and images, and the depiction of natural phenomena, such as the light and shadows on mountain peaks, as portents of ill fate. You know it can’t end well, but like all the members of this little community, you cannot see what is coming.

Great Fear on the Mountain by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz is translated from the French by Bill Johnston and published by Archipelago Books

It’s so hard to be a stranger: A Blind Salmon by Julia Wong Kcomt

i looked into his low eyes
black, tired
i looked into his heart
and that splotch of vigor
made me
ephemeral, tardy, rancid, and fleeting

we arrive at the altar
in a state of absorption
i request a living offering
start to cough, phlegmy
till i’ve nearly smashed to pieces
at his feet

– from “opium weddings”

The poetry of Julia Wong Kcomt turns on the unexpected, crosses cultures, languages and borders, reflecting who she is, where she comes from and where she has travelled to and lived. Born into a Chinese-Peruvian (tusán) family in the desert city of Chépen, Peru, in 1965, she was a prolific writer whose work included eighteen books of poetry, along with a number books of fiction and hybrid prose. Questions of identity and belonging are central to her writing, as are themes of migration, motherhood, and the body.

A Blind Salmon, her sixth collection, originally published in 2008, is her first full-length work to be published in English translation. Translator Jennifer Shyue who has a particular interest in Asian-Peruvian writers, has been engaged with her and her poetry for several years making this volume a welcome introduction to an intriguing and important poetic voice. Sadly, however,  Kcomt did not live to see its release; she died in March of this year at the age of 59.

Composed while she was living in Buenos Aries, the poems in this dual-language collection, often involve a shift between languages—Kcomt was multilingual, speaking Spanish, English, German, and Portuguese—creating a challenge of sorts for Shyue, especially when the original contains English. This is handled with the use of an alternate sans serif typeface when appropriate, or by bringing Spanish into her English translation for the words or lines in English in the original, as in the poem “tijuana big margarita.” When German arises, it is left as is. This shifting linguistic terrain, like the sands of the region she comes from, adds texture and variation when they appear.

The poem “on sameness” which is repeated or echoed in the collection, is another wonderful example of the multilingual dynamic at play. The first appearance features Kcomt’s own English version of her poem “sobre la igualdad,” presented in two different typefaces on facing pages (the regular typeface and that which is used to denote English in the original). The wording is, naturally, identical. It opens:

in the circle, sweet circle
of intense immortality

where is my china?
the land with no owners
the face is not repeating itself

Later, when the poem is revisited, Kcomt’s Spanish original faces Shyue’s translation, which she made before reading the poet’s own translation (or at least refreshing her memory of a more distant encounter). The similarities and differences shine a light on the perspective a translator brings to her reading of another’s work—line by line and as a whole:

in the circle, sweet circle
of intense immortality

where my faraway chinese country stayed
the great country of all
where no faces repeat

This collection contains a mix of verse and narrative prose poems, the latter sometimes stretching on for three or more pages and offering a broader canvas for the exploration of identity and belonging, in some instances twice removed when set in Germany where Kcomt studied for a time. They address trying to find a home of some sort, balancing relationships, and finding invisible lines can be crossed in an instant as in “aunt emma doesn’t want to die” where the Asian-Latin American speaker, a foreign student, offends her elderly employer with her attraction to a man in a photo (“no looking, margarita. he’s not for you.”) and is forced to leave her home:

when i was moving out, you wouldn’t look at me. at  the geographic latitudes i’m from, we’re unfamiliar with that feeling, is it called ethnic guilt? perpetuation of folklore.

reiner was the forbidden fruit next to that tiger from kenya and you hated me because I took a bite that full-moon night as the children danced in costumes in the square.

[. . .]

and though i thought reiner would come looking for me or call me, that didn’t happen. not that it would have been necessary. his torso had imprinted on my groin. sometimes skin serves as a sort of reproduction.

in student housing i was once again surrounded by people like me. foreigners. it’s so hard to be stranger, to come from elsewhere, to fight, to steal, to do anything to get inside and the insiders throw you bait only to take it away.

The poems in A Blind Salmon seem to become increasingly charged with life and energy each time they are revisited. Kcomt’s speakers are bold and unapologetic, reaching out with language that is sensual, unexpected, unsettling. Her images are often startlingly corporeal, yet always touching the tender complexities of being in the world, a world that does not always no how to understand you, or you it, but one that is fully alive.

A Blind Salmon by Julia Wong Kcomt is translated from the Spanish by Jennifer Shyue and published by Deep Vellum/Phoneme Media.

“wrestling words, terror at the morning gray”: Territories of the Soul / On Intonation by Wolfgang Hilbig

Ah, yes, to enter Hilbig territory, be rural or urban, is to travel a terrain that is at once suffocating and strangely comforting. With each new work to emerge in English translation it is, for an admirer of his melancholy poetics, like coming home:

—Then comes the city of S., our destination almost, laagered on the valley floor, admitting no beam of spring sunlight; it resembles, in fact, a reservoir for all the wet the clouds cast down when they’ve finally gained the surrounding heights. I would have to continue further southward, continue further southwestward, until the actual sea, I think, if I wanted to breathe a sigh of relief . . . here in this valley you remain imprisoned, unarousable, and held to the earth here by an apparently stronger local gravitation, you walk stooped through the city with its churches, descend even lower, to where the empty markets stand, assembled against a yellow prefab administrative circus, such a scene has a sundial on its dome—, but there is no sun here.
From “Adieu”

No one creates an atmosphere quite Wolfgang Hilbig.

Territories of the Soul / On Intonation, pulls together short works from two collections published in the closing years of the GDR—eight stories and two poems—translated by Matthew Spencer and published by Sublunary Editions. Hilbig was born in Meuselwitz, Thuringia in 1941, and grew up in the industrial wilderness of postwar East Germany. He began writing poetry while working as a stoker, but his literary sensibilities were never going to fit with the socialist realism the GDR wanted its working-class poets to produce. Yet, although he migrated to West Germany in 1985, his spirit and his themes tended to remain anchored in the East.

The stories in this slim volume offer a classic cast of Hilbig characters—tloners, dreamers, misfits at odds with themselves and the world around them. They are also often writers, or aspiring writers, even if their literary endeavours take place after work, or in secret on the job if possible. And the workplaces many of them are bound to, like Hilbig himself in his early adult years in the GDR, are mines and factories in set grim, urban or rural wastelands. His work can evoke an atmosphere so heavy and gritty one can almost taste it; his protagonists wander landscapes marred by sludge, refuse, and discarded armaments, their restlessness fueled by anxiety, remorse, and regret. The narrator of “Adieu,” quoted above, has just walked out on his only child, knowing he is wrong, and wondering “how does love become just a thing I rob from another, become a thing I can feel only by denying it to another.” It’s an uncomfortable monologue, made more so by the weight of the speaker’s tortured conscience.

One  of the strongest pieces here is the second title story, “On Intonation.” It opens with a chilling description of a stormy, wet night, viewed from the cockpit window of the nightwatchman’s station above an open-pit mining operation. The narrator is filling in for a missing watchman, a task he put himself up for thinking it would provide him the necessary space, away from the heat of the boiler room, to address a long pressing concern:

What I needed to work out—I had known this for years—was a kind of self-assessment, which would either certify me as a worker or as a true writer; however, since my presentiment was that I had insufficient reasons to properly continue writing, I had so far neglected this decisive memorandum; and yet I needed to fix these details in written memory, so I could exhibit them as proof against myself. —Meanwhile, I had come to a conclusion: I had to note down some urgent thoughts about the intonation of these modern lyrics . . . so I could implicate myself in evading duty.

And, yet, although he had been thinking about this question for some time, he finds himself, at his little makeshift desk, unable to find a word to replace intonation—his thoughts are frozen, he is unable to write the words he is convinced will prove he cannot write. But through this night, as he makes his rounds and struggles with his creative despair, his monologue turns on its own existential exploration of the lyric. The speaker, fearing that he lacks what he needs to be a writer, finds, in spite of himself, that he does.

This compilation, which includes work originally published in 1986 and 1990, is a particular treat for fans of Old Rendering Plant and The Tidings of the Trees—not only for its misanthropic souls, distinctive landscapes, and the occasional hint of gothic horror, but for those long winding and unwinding sentences that seem to pull the narrative into dark corners, resisting but unable to avoid a splash of milky light now and again. Even better, it may serve as the perfect introduction for those who have not yet encountered the addictive terrain of Wolfgang Hilbig.

Territories of the Soul / On Intonation by Wolfgang Hilbig is translated from the German by Matthew Spencer and published by Sublunary Editions.