Tag: book review

Poets, artists and other lost souls: Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño

A poet can endure anything. Which amounts to saying that a human being can endure anything. But that’s not true: there are obviously limits to what a human being can endure. Really endure. A poet, on the other hand, can endure anything. We grew up with this conviction. The opening assertion is true, but that way lie ruin, madness, and death.

The individuals that populate the stories collected in Roberto Bolaño’s Last Evenings on Earth tend to be poets, writers, artists, and dreamers. Typically they are oddly groundless, restless beings who seem to drift through not only their own lives but through the lives of those they encounter. Most are either exiles or products of the Chilean diaspora, loosely set down or wandering between Mexico or Europe. As a result, their existences carry a ghostly aura, they are haunted by an otherness that is indefinable to themselves and obscures their relationships with others. The narrators or protagonists are unsure of their own memories, sometimes anxious and paranoid, sometimes bored and aloof–unwilling to trust, to fully engage with those around them.

eveningsIn this, my first encounter with Bolaño’s work, I found myself captivated by the misty melancholic mood, the affecting prose, and the characters, who are commonly struggling with the vagaries of what it means to be creative and to find value in life. Yet there is an underlying ambivalence, anxiety, and insecurity that lends the collection an atmosphere that can be unnerving and faintly depressing. And it can also tend to contribute to blurring of the edges of many of the stories so that a reader may, at the end, be left with a sense of appreciating the journey but losing track of the details that set many of the tales apart.

That is not to imply though that there are not stories that stand out. In my reading, my favourites were the ones that happened to strike me as especially sad, but then I read this book at the bedside of a dying parent. Sadness was the order of the day.

The title story follows a young man and his father on an ill fated holiday to Acapulco. Their days pass in relative calm, though a strain can be felt in the relationship between the two. The father wants to go out, have fun, while the son prefers more solitary outings and spends much of his time reading a book about surrealist poets and contemplating the fate of one particular poet, a minor writer who disappeared and was essentially forgotten by his peers. Father and son engage in aimless conversations that highlight their differing temperaments while the latter is haunted by a feeling of impending doom. For a time the imagined threat is held at bay:

Then the lull comes to an end, the forty-eight hours of grace in the course of which B and his father have visited various bars in Acapulco, lain on the beach and slept, eaten, even laughed, and an icy phase begins, a phase that appears to be normal but is ruled by the deities of ice (who do not, however, offer any relief from the heat that reigns in Acapulco), hours of what, in former days, when he was an adolescent perhaps, B would have called boredom, although he certainly would not use that word now, disaster he would say, a private disaster whose main effect is to drive a wedge between B and his father: part of the price they must pay for existing.

As the threat becomes real, the son’s passive reaction to all of the warnings that come his way add to a tension built on the very human ability to fail to act on one’s better instincts. Bolaño is a master at exploiting the ambivalence that erodes relationships. Again and again his characters prefer to observe rather than engage, things are left thought but unsaid until, very often, it is too late.

Another especially poignant story is ‘Mauricio (“The Eye”) Silva’. Here the narrator recounts the experiences of a fellow Chilean exile he meets in Mexico City. The Eye is described as a sensitive man, one who always tried to avoid violence, “even at the risk of being considered a coward.” He eventually finds work as a photographer and as his modest fortunes improve he develops a style of dress that sets him apart from other Chilean exiles and likely leads to the intimation that he is a homosexual–a designation received with considerable derision, even fear, by his fellow countrymen at that time.

One night the narrator encounters The Eye in a cafe. The description of his friend is striking. Bolaño’s characters seem to pay particular attention to the appearances of their friends and acquaintances, almost as if they are looking to read something lurking beneath the surface, an understanding, a message or an ulterior motive:

I sat down next to him and we talked for a while. He seemed translucent. That was the impression I had. The Eye seemed to be made of some vitreous material. His face and the glass of white coffee in front of him seemed to be exchanging signals: two incomprehensible phenomena whose paths had just crossed at that point in the vast universe, making valiant but probably vain attempts to find a common language.

On this evening, The Eye not only confirms his sexuality, but announces that he will be moving to Paris where he can live more openly and pursue the kind of photographic work he has always dreamed of. It will be years before they meet again. The narrator, now married with a child and published books to his credit, crosses paths with The Eye in Berlin and learns of the life altering, disturbing experiences his friend had in India. It seems that the man who had always tried to avoid violence has discovered, like other Latin Americans of his generation born in the 1950’s, that violence would ultimately find him, even on a distant continent.

The fourteen stories that comprise Last Evenings on Earth are imbued with a wistfulness that captures the spirit of dislocation of the exiled. But with his evocative, evenly paced prose Bolaño speaks to a borderlessness that many of us feel when we don’t fit in wherever we happen to be. It is, perhaps, the writer’s soul that responds, I don’t know. I feel at a loss to define it, in this, my first experience with his work, but I do know I will return for more.

Last Evenings on Earth is translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews and published by New Directions.

Life in the Court of Matane by Eric Dupont – My Numéro Cinq review

The publication of my most recent review for Numéro Cinq the other day, was, for me, a welcome opportunity to revisit an intelligent, humourous, bittersweet tale about growing up in Québec during the 1970’s and 80’s. This debut release from QC Fiction, a new imprint from Baraka Books created with the bold ambition to bring a new generation of Québec writers to an international audience through a subscription funded model, is first and foremost a story about family.

I have been thinking a lot about family myself these days as my brothers and I have been shaken and shattered by the critical injury of our father and the sudden passing of our mother within the span of the past week. Like all families, ours has its share of idiosyncratic dysfunction, but in our heartbreak we’ve been remembering the beauty and the humour above all of the difficulties and anxieties that have divided and united us over the years.

The family that Eric Dupont brings to life in Life in the Court of Matane, separated, defined and redefined by divorce and remarriage, shimmers with sparks of love, respect and affection. Even in the court of this latter day Henry VIII and his past and future queens, a sense of humour goes a long way, setting the ground for an unforgettable, original coming of age tale.

Here’s a taste of the review, please click through the link at the end to read the rest. A second link leads to an excerpt:

A Very Funny Novel: Eric Dupont’s Life in the Court of Matane — Joseph Schreiber

CoverLivreMatane_RVB

Growing up in a broken home is rarely easy. Too often children become pawns on the emotional battlefield as their parents face off against one another. This is the atmosphere of uncertainty and insecurity in which the eponymous narrator of Life in the Court of Matane and his sister find themselves at an early age. So it’s little wonder that they would recognize their predicament in the feats of a certain young Romanian gymnast swinging between the uneven parallel bars at 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. But Nadia Comaneci is only one of a number of personalities evoked in this inventive coming-of-age story. She joins the re-imagined court of Henry VIII, key figures in the debate between Québec Separatists and Federalists, and a menagerie of assorted birds and beasts in Eric Dupont’s engaging account of a childhood defined by divorce.

Originally published as Bestiaire in 2008, Peter McCambridge’s translation of this acclaimed novel heralds the debut of QC Fiction, an ambitious publishing initiative dedicated to introducing readers to an new generation of Québec literature. Their goal is to be able to offer “surprising, interesting novels in flawless English translation” to a wide audience through a subscription funded model inspired by publishers such as And Other Stories, Deep Vellum, and Open Letter Books. With this in mind, it is difficult to imagine a more enchanting and original novel to launch this new imprint than Life in the Court of Matane.

Continue reading here:

Read an excerpt here:

Thoughts on writing about The Surrender by Scott Esposito for Minor Literature(s)

The moment I heard that this book was on the horizon last year, I knew it was one that I had to read. But I could never have anticipated how tightly the release of The Surrender would intersect with my own fledgling efforts to put a voice to my own journey. The precipitous timing coloured not only how I read, but how I would go on to write about this book.

surrI entered Scott Esposito’s sensitive and intelligent three part essay into the heart of his own gendered identity armed with two notebooks. In one I catalogued my observations about the essays themselves–the structure, the form, and the content–while the other captured the flow of emotion, the moments of recognition, the ideas that spoke to my soul. One could say that I surrendered to this book. But I could only review it by putting my deepest personal reactions to one side and allowing Scott and his accounting centre stage. To do anything else would have been self indulgent, unprofessional. At the same time I simply wanted to open the work to the point that other readers would be drawn to enter in. One deserves to hear a story like Scott’s directly.

For my part, writing about The Surrender was an absolute joy. Thank you to Tomoé Hill at the wonderful Minor Literature(s) for entertaining my review.

You can read my review and see the original photograph I created to accompany it here.

Haunting fables for a modern world: Ninety-Nine Stories of God by Joy Williams

She was a writer on my radar, Joy Williams, somehow unknown to me until recently, but then, the world of literature is large and sometimes voices pass us by until fate or chance draws them to our attention. Or, if the rather ambivalent and perplexed Lord who appears in so many of the stories in her latest collection has His way, a little divine intervention is exercised. And so it happened that I found myself in the ER earlier this week, an advance reader’s copy of Ninety-Nine Stories of God on my phone. Between the tests and assessments to rule out any heart problems (my own private post cardiac arrest paranoia I’m afraid), I devoured a healthy measure of these bite-sized fictional treats. The true cause of my symptoms laid me under for a good 36 hours, but I emerged today to finish the collection, slowly only for the sake of savouring these deliciously dark, reflective, engagingly original tales.

99storiesA healthy dose of the unique joy of Joy Williams proved the perfect medicine.

The ninety-nine vignettes and mini stories that comprise this precious volume run the range from the brief and aphoristic to “longer” tales that run for a page or two. A cast of literary, philosophical and other assorted personalities make appearances, as characters or subjects. Williams delights in building fables that feature Kafka, Karl Jung, Simone Weil, or Philip K. Dick among others. At times she reduces her musing to the very simplest of terms, as in this one sentence micro-story which receives its context, as most of the stories do, by the title which is always placed at the end:

You should have changed if you wanted to remain yourself but you were afraid to change.

SARTRE TO CAMUS

The Lord Himself is a regular presence, as one might expect. He tends to appear in the most innocuous situations—He waits in a pharmacy line for His shingles shot, dreams of participating in a demolition derby, and expresses horror at the suggestion that He go to Home Depot to purchase supplies for a tortoise He wishes to adopt. Williams’ God is as curious and confused by His creations, especially those of the human form and He seems to have little control over the fate of His charges.

The Lord was asked if He believed in reincarnation.

I do, He said. It explains so much.

What does it explain, Sir? someone asked.

On your last Fourth of July festivities, I was invited to observe an annual hot-dog-eating contest, the Lord said, and it was the stupidest thing I’ve ever witnessed.

NEGLECT

Bemused and caring, lovingly benign, this is a God one can’t help liking. Good thing too, because the world of the ordinary people (and animals, for that matter) who feature in the majority of these stories is often marked by loss, despair and an odd isolation from others.

In his Numéro Cinq review of The Visiting Privilege, a recent compilation of her first three collections of short stories, Jason DeYoung describes her work as:

Strange and dark, her stories and novels make their foundation in realism, but then you never know quite where they will lead to. Most stay firmly planned in the “manifest world,” while others drift off toward the uncanny.

This description holds fast here too, even in abbreviated form. The humour is black, and a disturbing energy courses just below the surface. Nothing is spelled out beyond the most spare, necessary, imagery. So many stories pivot, or pack their punch, not in the ostensible actions recounted but in the reactions of the characters which are often counterintuitive. There is a suggestion that we cling to our dysfunction, our delusions, possibly as a stand in for faith, leaving the poor Lord Himself an awkward outsider in a world He designed.

The style and format of this collection is most strongly reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard’s The Voice Imitator. Of course, it would be remiss if the great writer did not make an appearance as he does in a story about a woman reading book reviews:

She was reading a broadside that reviewed a number of books. The reviews were extremely intelligent and gracefully presented. She read about a cluster of works by Thomas Bernhard, the cranky genius of Austrian literature, works that had been translated into English. She doubted that she would buy these books. She learned that he always referred to his lifelong companion, Hedwig Stavianicek, as his “aunt”. She was thirty-seven years older than Bernhard. She couldn’t imagine she had been his lifelong companion for long.

Given the condition I’ve been in over the last few days that, through a wicked case of the flu, I reveled in these ninety-nine gems. This story goes on in a way that most wonderfully spoke to my state and made me smile:

She had had a fever for several days and she was loafing around, drinking fluids and reading. With her fever, the act of reading became ever stranger to her. First the words were solid, sternly limiting her perception of them to what she already knew. Then they became more frighteningly expansive, tapping into twisting arteries of memory. Then they became transparent, rendering them invisible.

I can assure you this will not be my last encounter with Joy Williams. I would encourage anyone whose interest has been sparked to check the review I’ve linked above which contains a video of Williams reading an essay entitled “Why I Write.” Ninety-Nine Stories of God will be released in July by Tin House.

Goethe Dies by Thomas Bernhard – My Numéro Cinq review

I have written about Thomas Bernhard’s novels before, but faced with prospect of writing a longer critical review of a book containing four short stories I was faced with a dilemma: What does one say about Bernhard?

The question really is: How much familiarity with Bernhard should one assume? He is, most definitely, a singular writer. Those of us who count ourselves among the converted tend to have bulging bookshelves filled with a healthy supply of Bernhard’s novels, memoirs and poetry. Others are uncertain or fail to be immediately captivated. A bit of Bernhard primer is thus in order for those potential new readers, especially in this instance, because Goethe Dies, the collection at hand, offers a perfect opportunity to experience the magic of the master in miniature. A treat I argue for readers no matter their degree of prior acquaintance.

So in the following review published at Numéro Cinq earlier this week I tried to balance my general discussion of Bernhard’s prose style to provide a context for the appreciation of my analysis of the stories that would not be too redundant for the experienced or too vague for the novice.

Here’s a taste of the review, please click through the link at the end to read the rest. And while you’re there have a look around. There is another great issue shaping up at NC.

A Master Set Loose in a Small Space: Review of Thomas Bernhard’s Goethe Dies — Joseph Schreiber

Goethe Dies

Once acquainted with the work of the late Austrian writer, Thomas Bernhard, it is difficult to remain indifferent. One is either put off by his endlessly convoluted sentences, his bitter, misanthropic vision, and his fondness for digressive, contradictory and self-obsessed narratives; or one is swept up in the singular energetic flow of his darkly comic genius and never looks back. For those who find themselves in the latter camp, the announcement of a newly translated collection of four short stories originally published in periodicals in the early 1980’s is good news indeed.

Bernhard in short form may lack the unleashed full force intensity afforded when a single paragraph is allowed to unspool over one or two hundred pages or more; but these minor works, if you like, offer a valuable and entertaining opportunity to observe a master at play in a small, contained space. As with the early stories of Prose and the micro-fiction of The Voice Imitator, the short pieces collected in Goethe Dies, recently released by Seagull Books, highlight many of the essential elements that lend Bernhard’s work such a distinctive, infectious voice. Consequently, they may be best appreciated against a certain familiarity with the author and the idiosyncratic features that characterize his novels.

Continue reading here:

Innocence betrayed: My Father’s Dreams by Evald Flisar

Adolescence is, at the best of times, a period of turbulence. Hormones take over, driving hopes, desires and emotions. For Adam, the fourteen year-old narrator of My Father’s Dreams puberty becomes a twisted, surreal experience as he finds himself swept up in a world in which the line between dreams and reality becomes dangerously blurred. In this dark multi-faceted tale, Slovenian author Evald Flisar sets the stage for a story that is oddly out of time and place—a contemporary novel that evokes, in its backward rural setting and naive tone, a feeling of gothic horror or psychological drama that would be perfectly at home in the literature of the early twentieth century. But themes running through the narrative that are distinctly modern in their context and execution create an atmosphere that is eerily discordant and profoundly disturbing.

fathersdreamsAdam is a loner. He lives with his parents in a small rural village in an unnamed country. He describes his mother as shrill, over emotional and unduly concerned with social appearances. But he adores his father, the local doctor, unreservedly. He is the centre of his universe and he cannot imagine that he would ever cause him any harm. Adam spends his free time devouring books borrowed from his father’s library, a wide range of classic literature that runs the gamut from Zane Grey to Goethe to de Sade and Kafka and more. Not one to make friends easily, his sole confidant is his assumed brother Abortus, a jarred fetus who “lives” in his father’s secret laboratory in the basement of the health centre.

As puberty hits, Adam is increasingly beset by vivid dreams. He is unaware of just how odd and unnerving the content is until he allows it to fuel a school assignment. His teachers and his mother respond with shock. However, his rich dream life quickly becomes an object of fascination—or perhaps manipulation—for his father. Before long Adam finds that he is losing the ability to define the intersection of dreams and ordinary life:

. . . soon I was having too many dreams, and they began to suffocate me. Daily hallucinations merged with nightmares so imperceptibly that I was finding it harder and harder to draw the line between them. Afraid that I would sink in the burgeoning swamp of my own imagination, I began to flee in the direction of hard reality, grasping at anything that could be seen, felt, heard, or smelled. Soon I became so oversensitive that I registered the slightest rustle, the tiniest change in light, the least noticeable smell.

Over the course of the summer, the content of his dreams continue to haunt his days and nights. They regularly feature a familiar theme. Time after time he finds himself observing his father engaged in sexual activity with Eve, an attractive young teenaged girl from the city who is staying with her grandfather for the school holidays.

His father had warned him not to discuss his dreams, but encouraged him to record them. In his journals, Adam documents his thoughts and dreams which, with the blurring of his sense of reality, he has come to understand as being one and the same… the dream context granting immunity from the content of his thoughts which are peppered with images of sexual arousal and a desire for revenge against his parents. He quickly learns that these diaries are better kept hidden. And he has the perfect location—behind his jarred little brother, with whom he shares all of his secrets without reservation. With adults he is cautious to edit his responses to their queries about his dreams which are then subjected to Freudian and Jungian inspired debates. The only adult with whom he dares to approach an honest account is Eve’s kindly grandfather, who listens with a sharp concern that Adam notices but fails to appreciate.

During his strange dreams, Adam sometimes questions his ability to fall in and out of a hallucinatory state as well as his peculiar ability to exercise some agency, but he invariably seems to be able to assure himself that he is dreaming and, as a result, safe from any real danger. He continues to trust his father implicitly even when during an intentional “shared dream” proposed as a potential cure, he finds himself abandoned in a strange town with two young women:

The mist is now all around us, I can feel it on my cheeks; it is cold. The church clock delivers eleven strikes. There is no sign of Father. They are closing the inn, we have to leave. Like shadows we slink off along the the road leading into the centre of the town. It’s a very small town, almost a village. I am tired and sleepy. I am beginning to worry that Father might not return. Where will I sleep? It’s a strange thought, asking oneself where one will sleep in a dream, but the night is cold, and my worry is almost real. We roam around, passing houses, shuttered shops, and silent buildings. The church clock announces the time: half past midnight. And still there is no sign of Father.

Curiously (or not), the dreams involving his father and Eve cease as soon as the latter returns to the city in September. With autumn’s arrival his mother makes increased efforts to salvage the family, while his father’s behaviour becomes more erratic and threatening. Adam’s “dreams” begin to seem more like a protective psychological suggestion or even a defense mechanism evoked to cloud his perception of the events he observes or experiences. But again, he never openly contemplates this. His narrative, offered from a future perspective, looking back, belies a folkloric sense of innocence that cannot entirely be trusted. It casts a strange shadow across the work contributing to the odd tone. Dark topics such as addiction, suicide and pedophilia lurk at the heart of this tale amid the supernatural, surreal and grotesque elements. As a result the reader is left to navigate a slippery substrate that, even as tensions build to to a horrifying conclusion, refuses to yield to clear interpretation. The result is a complex, unnerving, unforgettable novel.

Novelist, playwright, essayist, and world traveler, Evald Flisar is one of Slovenia’s best known writers. Translated from the Slovene by the author and Alan McConnell-Duff, My Father’s Dreams is published by Istros Books. In their new collaboration with Peter Owen Publishers, they will be releasing Flisar’s Three Loves, One Death in November.

The pursuit of happiness: Sergio Y. by Alexandre Vidal Porto

“If happiness is not where we are, we must chase her. She sometimes lives very far away. You must have the courage to be happy.”

When it comes to the depiction of transgender individuals in literary fiction, I will confess that I am a rather cynical customer. Lets just say I know the reality too well. So much of what I have read does not even come close to scratching the surface of what it means to be at odds with one’s own birth-assigned gender. Intentions are good and, of course, the transgender or intersex character always allows for an interesting twist but the results can be misleading, even distressingly off base. That’s why Sergio Y. by Brazilian author Alexandre Vidal Porto is such a refreshing and original read. Here is a novel that treats the subject with intelligence and compassion—quite the feat for a book in which the transgender character meets an untimely and unfortunate end before the story even gets started.

SergioThe title character, Sergio Y. is the son of a wealthy businessman in São Paolo, Brazil, and the great grandson of an Armenian immigrant who escaped the tragic fate of so many of his countrymen, including the rest of his family, when he crossed the ocean in 1915, seeking his happiness in the Americas. The narrator is Armando, a well-respected seventy year-old psychiatrist. Sergio had been referred to him for therapy at the age of seventeen, described simply as “articulate, intelligent and confused.” They meet regularly for several years. This mature young man—so handsome, wealthy and talented—intrigues Armando and yet, in spite of all of these advantages, he professes to be possessed by a deep and abiding unhappiness.

Following a visit to New York City one Christmas, Sergio informs Armando that he wishes to discontinue therapy. He has had a revelation, he says, and he believes he has found a way to be happy. Our narrator is a little disgruntled to be dismissed as such but, as the years pass, Sergio Y. fades from his mind until a chance encounter with his former patient’s mother. She reports that her son has moved to New York where he attended culinary school and is now about to open his own restaurant. Armando is surprised, but pleased by this news and the praise he is afforded for his role in helping Sergio find happiness at last. However, this boost to his ego is short lived. Armando’s world begins to crumble when he learns, quite by chance, that Sergio Y. has been murdered at his home in the West Village.

Obsessive by nature, Armando becomes haunted by the need to know more. What he discovers with the help of a private investigator is completely unexpected and sends him reeling. The murder victim is identified as Sandra Yacoubian, female. Sandra and Sergio he soon learns are, in fact, one and the same person. His young patient had found his happiness as a woman and now she was dead at the age of 23! How could he have failed to recognize that Sergio was transsexual? And, even more serious, was his failure in some way responsible for this tragic outcome?

The main source of my frustration was not having detected any hint of Sergio Y.’s transsexuality. I felt I had been duped solely and exclusively by my own incompetence. I had always though that the secret to transsexuality was not all that deep, that it revealed itself in all of the individual’s attitudes, at all times, in all the decisions he or she took, since early childhood. As far as I was concerned, the pain in the patient’s soul and their inner confusion would be so visible that one did not need to be a Freudian or Jungian psychoanalyst to make the diagnosis.

Armando’s search for answers and his personal quest for understanding lie at the heart of this book. He begins with a handful of stereotyped assumptions. He labels them, admits to them, and lays them out. In the end, as he comes to a clearer,more nuanced appreciation of the decision his patient chose to take to find happiness and the determination with which she pursued it.

The narrative tone is highly idiosyncratic, dictated by the analytical, mildly obsessive-compulsive, immodest character of Armando. Even when he begins to doubt and second-guess himself as the account progresses, he maintains the matter of fact, dry, clinical delivery of a psychiatric report. The attention to detail—his clothing choices, his tendency to note the approximate height and weight of people he encounters, even his reports of his own emotional ups and downs—all create the illusion of a sterile account. But when the careful veneer cracks from time to time, we see a moody, somewhat petulant character, prone to bursts of pride, mixed with episodes of guilt and shame. He is continually measuring himself against his own successes and failures. His internal machinations are fascinating.

Ultimately, Sergio Y. is novel that approaches the transgender experience from the inside and the outside, allowing for the comfort with names and pronouns to vary, over time and from person to person, reflecting the complexities of relationships that others, even loving family members, can have when an accepted and assumed identity is challenged. In his own journey to understand and set his mind at ease, the questions Armando raises and the answers he finds serve to create a moving and compassionate portrait of the transgender person’s conflicted internal experience and the search to find a way to be happy in the world.

Happiness may be an ideal; comfort or contentment might work as well. From my point on this same journey I would hasten to add that it can be a difficult and lonely path, but that does not mean it is not worth following. In fact, if it is the right path, there is no other. Semantics aside, this novel is an important, engaging read. It deserves to be written about and it needs to be discussed.

Sergio Y. is translated from the Portuguese by Alex Ladd and published by Europa Editions.

Quiet Creature on the Corner by João Gilberto Noll–my Numéro Cinq review

There is a most invigorating buzz around this book, Quiet Creature on the Corner, the latest release from Two Lines Press. This slender novel by Brazilian writer João Gilberto Noll is, to put it simply, a surreal, enigmatic tale that defies straightforward interpretation. Every reader and reviewer I have engaged with since my review went live yesterday at Numéro Cinq has had a somewhat different interpretation. And that’s part of the appeal–this book invites conversation.

On my first reading I was underwhelmed and uncertain how I could pull a 1500-2000 word critical review out of such a vague, odd offering. So I put it aside for a week and it started to percolate in my thoughts. Each time I returned and reread the text it grew in power and mystery. Since I finished and submitted this review I have continued to think about the book and aspects I wish I had explored. Here’s a taste, please click through the link at the end for the rest of the review.

Forever an Unknown Country: Review of Quiet Creature on the Corner by João Gilberto Noll—Joseph Schreiber

Quiet-Creature-web-294We humans tend to fancy ourselves rational beings. We hold to the convention of cause and effect. We imagine that if faced with strange and unusual situations, we would respond with curiosity, anxiety, or alarm and make an effort to act appropriately. We are inclined to believe that we need to understand what is happening to us and around us at all times. But, is that truly the way we actually exist in the world?

João Gilberto Noll is an author who dares to challenge that assumption. His novel, Quiet Creature on the Corner is, on the surface, a spare and modestly surreal tale of a young man who surrenders himself to a life that is inexplicably handed to him without seriously questioning his circumstances until he is deeply absorbed in a situation that is rapidly growing stranger and more uncertain. Newly released from Two Lines Press, in a measured, wonderfully restrained translation by Adam Morris, this novel offers an English language audience an absorbing introduction to this esteemed Brazilian author.

Continue reading here.

“A wandering mind is a marvelous sight”: Moods by Yoel Hoffmann

When we, that is to say you, approach a work like Moods, by Yoel Hoffman, you have to be prepared to relinquish everything you expect a novel to be. You will encounter a story, no many stories, and stories within stories, working their way in and out of 191 micro chapters. You also have to be prepared to walk, lockstep, for the most part, with the author who invites you to join him under the umbrella of the third person plural–not the royal “we”–but something much more intimate except, of course, when it makes no sense to speak in the plural and the author has to step aside and admit that, by “we” he means “I”. Confused yet? Don’t be. This has to be one of the most infectiously readable pieces of experimental fiction that you can imagine.

MoodsMoods is, if nothing else, a metafictional playground peopled with characters drawn, for the most part, from the life of the author himself–aunts and uncles, childhood loves, neighbours and assorted professionals. And just when you least expect it, he hits you with an observation that catches you off guard. He weaves you, the reader, into a story that is, in all it’s assorted bits and pieces, about life–the messy business of living of it and the way a writer can or cannot write about it. He moves hypnotically from memories to philosophical musings:

. . . my father (Andreas Avraham) hides from Francesca, my stepmother, records he bought because the money he receives (in transparent bills) isn’t enough for her.

The music he listens to consists of a single sound, like the straight line on the monitor when the hearts stops beating. The scent of eternity is like that of goulash. Everything’s frozen over. Jokes one tells are revealed in full like that famous rainbow arched through a cloud. Each season extends to infinity. You stand there, and the streets run beneath you. Women lie down forever. A faint soft sound like the fur of a foal (of a donkey) wafts through the air, and the colours are all pastel.

It is a book, as the title tells us, of moods. And the mood that permeates this work is one of sadness. It is smelled in stairwells and trapped between the crumpled covers of physics textbooks. It is the sadness of missing loved ones, whether they have gone away or have died. There is a wide arc of time, reaching to eternity in its metaphysics, spanning some seven decades in the real life of the author (and vicariously for his reader companion).

The reader can no doubt guess what sort of music we’re trying to compose. Mostly blues. The sentimental melancholy suits us as a suit fits a tailor’s dummy. If someone asks us to look at something rationally, in a major key–as, for instance, Tellmann did–we get angry.

Hoffmann is an Israeli writer born in Romania in 1937. The history of his people, family members and friends, comes through as he writes about those he has known, but his worldview transcends religion and political boundaries. Hoffmann, a former professor of Japanese Buddhism at the University of Haifa, spent years studying in Japan, living for a time in a Zen monastery. His knowledge of and sensitivity to the Japanese koan, sets the tone for the questions he asks and the observations he makes, whether he is pondering the nature of the universe or the order of names in a phone book.

We can now reveal to the readers of this book a deep secret, but they’re not allowed to reveal it to readers of other books.

Feet follow one another. Hands cut through the air. The mouth opens and closes. The inner organs expand and contract, according to their nature. What’s outside is standing or walking.

Prayers can be heard everywhere, whether a person says them aloud or not. Frogs need only themselves. The marsh reeds know the right direction.

And because these things are set forth here, it’s a wonder this book is sold for so little.

So what to make of Moods? Novel or autobiography? The short chapters, most no longer than a couple of paragraphs, sometimes follow thematically or chronologically. Characters appear and reappear. Anecdotes lead to reflection which in turn to leads to metafictional contemplation about the nature of literature in general and fiction in particular. Hoffmann is skillfully and enthusiastically playing ideas against one another. It is both funny and emotionally engaging. Unlike many postmodern works that are so unabashedly metafictional in nature–that is novels that dissect the novel you are reading as you read it– Moods is infused with warmth and humanness. It pulls a reader in and treats him or her with a respect that is, Hoffmann would argue, with some seriousness, a responsibility for which a writer should be held criminally liable.

And although sadness is the underlying mood, reading this book is, quite simply, a joy.

Moods is translated with poetic sensitivity to the flow of the language and the linguistic playfulness by Peter Cole. Published by New Directions who have, over the years, published most of Hoffmann’s novels, Moods is a shortlisted title for the 2016 Best Translated Book Award.

The melancholy wanderer: War, So Much War by Mercè Rodoreda

Fresh air streamed in through the window. When the dining-room clock struck three, I rose and left without even washing my face and, you might say, with only the clothes on my back. I had taken some fifty steps when something made me turn around and glance back at the house. The moonlight fell full on it. My father stood at the door watching me, holding me–still a little boy–in his arms. It was the first night that I roamed alone through streets outside my neighbourhood. I ran. Goodbye carnations, adéu!

With this ghostly image of his deceased father holding his infant self, Adirà Guinart, the fifteen year-old narrator of Mercè Rodoreda’s poignant novel War, So Much War, turns his back on a fractious relationship with his mother and a life growing and selling carnations. He is seeking a life of adventure. Yet, as one must be careful what one wishes for, he is about embark on a journey that will leave him irrevocably changed, and sadly and wistfully mature for his age.

War_So_Much_War-front_largeAlthough the place and conflict is never explicitly named, it is assumed that the setting is Catalonia, the author’s homeland, during the Spanish Civil War. But in truth the exact details do not matter, this is a novel about the wide sweep of war beyond the front lines, about the damage, destruction and despair that works its way into the landscape, the villages and the lives of the people who are often hard pressed to explain who or why they are fighting. Yet, the bleakness is, in Rodoreda’s hands, filtered through a surrealist lens that renders it at once engaging, wise and profoundly sad.

Idealistic and bored, our young protagonist leaves home to join the war effort, but he is quickly disillusioned with the soldier’s life, and runs away again, falling into a life that suits his temperament, that of the wanderer. Unfolding over the course of a series of short episodic adventures he encounters an array of tragic comic characters–the bereaved, the abandoned and the eccentric–who share their wisdom, offer him lodging or seek his assistance. Classic folkloric elements are present, including a strange castle, an enigmatic young woman, an ugly old hag, a hermit with a tale of hard earned humility and a mysterious benefactor with a haunted mirror.

But War, So Much War is more than an allegory or a fairy tale, there is something profoundly serious and unsettling beneath the surface. The narrative, unadorned and seductive in tone, fuses sensuous evocations of natural beauty with brutal images of suffering and death. The ground is worked to plant crops in one place, only to be dug to bury piles of corpses in another. Our hero approaches each task without question, claiming resistance to the more tangible horrors of death; fearing instead the unseen,  phantasmagorical horrors that pursue him. But is there really a difference? In his world, reality blends with dreams, and the narrator treads a ground that gives away to as readily to natural beauty as to nightmare.

Even in romance, that line is readily crossed. Early on, Adirà falls in love with Eva, a free-spirited young woman. He is drawn to her most critically because she refuses to be held and restrained by anyone. As much as he admires that aspect of her character, a quality he also claims for himself, he begins to long for her as his journey moves, at least in spirit, toward home. Her ultimate fate is perhaps the most melodramatic, yet deeply tragic element of the entire tale.

The constant reminders of war–hunger, fear and confrontations with the stark face of human depravity–do not defeat Adirà, but their presence eventually closes in on him, working its way into his weary bones. At heart this pastoral novel is an existential coming-of-age story that leaves our hero enlightened but aged beyond his tender years. He is both a boy and an old soul at once. With so much disruption and young men lost to war, older men in particular seem drawn to his company. When a fisherman with who he has spent a couple of days invites him to stay on, become as a son to him, he explains:

My life is my own . . . A few months ago, I don’t know how many, I still had a pocket knife with a fork, spoon, corkscrew, and screwdriver that my father had given me, but I gave it away. And now the only thing I have is my own life. If I speak about it, it escapes, I lose it. He gave me a pat on the back, almost laughing as he did so. I know , I added, that all lives are more or less the same in the essentials. He thrust his head back and closed his eyes, leaving just a slit open to spy on whatever it was he wanted to see. Don’t make me laugh. What will you do, restlessly drifting from place to place? Do you want to end up sleeping on the street or in a church portico when you are an old man? I don’t care. I want to roam the world. Be from everywhere and nowhere.

For all its sadness, there is much wisdom in these pages. Rodoreda’s smooth, clean prose with its seamless flow between speakers without breaks or quotation marks, adds to the dreamlike, reflective feel of the narrative. For all the fairy tale elements that feature in Adirà’s wandering, the underlying current of his journey is marked by despair and hope. This is a novel that is not only timeless but, sadly, still very relevant today.

Mercè Rodoreda was born in Catalonia in 1908. Her native language, Catalan, was banned under Franco’s dictatorship, but she continued to write in the language throughout her career, even while living in exile following the Spanish Civil War. Today Catalan is spoken by only about nine million people and translations are critical to help keep the literature alive. Originally published in 1980, War, So Much War is translated by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent, and published by Open Letter.

* War, So Much War has been shortlisted for the 2016 Best Translated Book Award.