Tag: books

To make the invisible visible: Brother in Ice by Alicia Kopf

Brother In Ice is an exercise in trust—a risky venture, not unlike the expeditions  into the  blank canvas of the polar regions that Alicia Kopf traces in the early chapters of her ambitious hybrid novel. There is a distinct sense that the Catalan artist and writer is thinking out loud, mapping her own haphazard journey across the page. She could have lost her way, slipped into a crevasse and disappeared beneath the weight of her own icebound mission. But no. What she has produced, in the end, through an eclectic and inventive blend of autobiographical fiction, arctic-inspired scientific detours, and historical diversions, is a thoughtful meditation about identity, family, and the challenges of trying to explore one’s self through art.

To dissect  Brother In Ice is to risk making it sound strange, possibly unreadable, but Kopf’s balance and restraint hold its often disparate pieces together. The opening section of the book, “Frozen Heroes”, reflects the narrator’s obsession with all things polar: shipwrecks, penguins, the anatomy of snowflakes, and, above all, the heroic, often reckless, rush to explore the furthermost regions of the globe and endure extreme conditions, all with the desire to lay claim to undefined spaces, explain mysteries and achieve impossible goals. To be the first. Grainy black and white archival photographs add to the accounts, but what allows such brief, nonfictional excursions to work is the author’s light hand and thoughtful voice. In these early pages we are also offered our first glimpse into the narrator’s family and personal life. In particular we are introduced to her autistic older brother:

My brother is a man trapped in ice. He looks at us through it; he is there and he is not there. Or more precisely, there is a fissure inside him that periodically freezes over. When he is present, his outline is more clearly defined; other times he’s submerged for a while.

He is interested in planes, trains, cars, cats, dogs and birds, inclined to watch them carefully and intently, but he is consistently unable to carry out ordinary tasks without  being cued or asking what he should do. His presence, in what is ultimately a broken family, is significant.

The scientific diversions continue into the second section, “Library Atop an Iceberg” but gradually the autobiographically toned fiction moves to center stage. After a rather defiant adolescence, complicated by negotiating the rough terrain between her divorced parents, the narrator makes her way to university where she persists in studying art and literature, worrying about the practicality of pursuing endeavours that are likely to be less than self-sustaining. She supports herself, first in retail and then with odd teaching jobs, has her first serious romance, and ultimately, her first art show. She travels, struggles to get along with her mother, and worries about what will become of her brother and her responsibility for him as he ages. The chapters, if you can call them that, are short, vignettes and reflections, played out against glacial motifs.

Finally, in the third section, she visits Iceland.

Throughout this unusual novel, the narrator herself is on a quest. She is not even certain what it is that she is searching for. Like the polar explorers, in pursuit of a shifting point on the ice, in a vast white terrain, she is writing in an effort to render the invisible visible. This is the artist’s quest—one in which the question may be as elusive and ill-defined as the answer. Near the end of the first part, the narrator admits:

I often find myself getting stuck in this project. I see nothing before me, just white. Yet beneath there are many things. The shrieking of seals. Was it the poles I wanted to talk about? Or is it just the image of the snow that fascinates me? Instability, confusion, cold (it’s hot), determination. Sensations that were the constant companions of the polar explorers, as well as those of us who work with the blank white page. Because I’m not interested in the polar explorers in and of themselves, but rather in the idea of investigation, of seeking out something in an unstable space. I’d like to talk about all of that as a metaphor, because what interests me is the possibility of an epic, a new epic, without foes or enemies; an epic involving oneself and an idea. Like the epic that artists and writers undertake.

Hers is a journey that resonated deeply with me. Especially as a writer working in the uneasy territory of memoir, I loved the openness, the questioning, the self-doubt Kopf allows her narrator (and presumably herself) as this odd creation takes shape. As her own questions and explanations start to come into focus, the layers of inspiration that preceded her quest, finally start to make sense. The beauty of this book is not simply that it is an intriguing and original account of one woman’s coming to terms with some of the unresolved fractures in her own history, it is a challenge to other explorers who venture forth with pen or paintbrush in hand to forge their own paths as they seek to tell their stories.

Brother In Ice by Alicia Kopf is translated from Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem, and published by And Other Stories.

A constant procession of ghosts: A reflection

August has passed, it seems, with little to show for itself. Smoky skies and an air quality rivalling that of some of the most polluted cities of the world curtailed much outdoor activity here. Further to the west, where the smoke originated and forests burned, it was worse. Now, as skies clear, temperatures are dropping and summer’s fading fast. Leaves are turning yellow. Autumn nears.

Two years ago today, September 1st 2016, a dear friend took her life. A second attempt after years of trying to fight off crushing bipolar depression. Unable to work and living on savings, treatment often meant driving to a public hospital, an hour each way. She lived in a small village in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. We only met once. I spent a week with her in 2015, but from the moment we first met online, it was as if we had known each other forever. We could joke and riff off each other, falling into a regular routine as a dysfunctional divorced couple that often fooled others. In truth, we were bound by queerness, books, and bipolar disorder. Soul mates shipwrecked in our own lives.

But, of course, I couldn’t save her.

In the months before Ulla died I held a certain distance. I was reeling from the recent death of my mother, followed closely by that of my father. Knowing that she was fragile, and, after three years, still grieving her own mother, I was unable to reach out to her to seek or offer support. We were both drowning, but her sea was darker and more deadly. It had been for a long time.

With my parents’ sudden and tightly timed deaths, I had imagined the possibility of an exercise of writing immediate grief—echoing Barthes and Handke—but the burdens of being an executor distorted and distended the mourning experience and, for the most part, these losses remain unwritten. Then again, my parents were in their eighties with long lives, well-lived, behind them. My friend’s death, at forty-six, was more complex. I knew it had to be addressed, not simply for myself but for a community of followers who responded to her actions intently and personally. It took three months to salvage words and craft a 300-word piece which was published, with my own photographs, in late November of 2016. Each time I come back to this eulogy I realize how much of my immediate grief is contained there, perfected and concise.

Who, and what, in the end, do we write grief for? If we are looking for catharsis, a way to move beyond grief, we may be disappointed. Perhaps grief simply moves with us, evolving and softening over time.

If Ulla’s death sits especially heavily at this time of year, at the moment there is an extra weight. Earlier this month, my son’s best friend lost a difficult battle with opioid addiction. He had been at our house quite a bit in the last weeks, and although clean at the time, he was really struggling. My son is devastated. He’s been seeking refuge in alcohol and routinely breaks down in a flood of tears and despair. His sister and I feel a loss too; Dylan was a common presence in our lives over the past twelve years, but to be honest, in recent times I wasn’t always happy to see him on the doorstep. He and Thomas have both, at twenty-eight, been fighting their own mental health and addiction issues for a long time. And they were not always good for each other. They could be up all night arguing—usually about politics, but sometimes about really “important” matters like the difference between a canon and fugue. Things could get violent. One morning Thomas broke his hand on Dylan’s head (and glasses). But music was their real bond. They wrote and recorded songs together and spent hours busking on street corners over the years. They believed in each other when neither could believe in himself.

As a parent it is agonizing to watch my child in pain and know that his is a mourning song I cannot write.

*

As September begins, I am aware more than ever that we are surrounded by a constant procession of ghosts. I’ve bought a two-bed flat and, at the moment, I’m deeply engaged in the process of emptying out closets, cupboards and rooms of accumulated stuff so that, by October 1st, my house will be empty and I will be settling into a much smaller space. The sheer volume of junk that needs to be dumped, donated, or moved is overwhelming. And with it, reminders of the losses of the last few decades keep resurfacing when I least expect it.

Out in my unfinished garage where I have amassed a mound of old, damaged furniture and broken objects waiting for pick up, I found a windshield propped against the wall. I have no idea what it was for or why it is there, but I know it was something my father must have picked up and forgotten. I’m surprised how much of him I couldn’t part with after his death—his Russian literature, a bust of Beethoven, a grandfather clock—all tangible reminders of a man who was so elusive, so hard to know.

Of my mother, there are few objects I wanted to bring home but her presence permeates so much of my life. Especially the one I tried to live in her image. As a girl and woman. Packing up children’s clothing for donation I find the beautiful outfits she crafted for her precious granddaughter—lined coats, fancy dresses—her attentions to Ginny’s wardrobe becoming ever more feminine as I, her only daughter, transitioned to male. I also unearth all the outfits I myself made for both my children in their early years when I was still determined to play the part birth had granted me. A part that, ultimately, has nothing to do with gender at all. I truly enjoyed creating beautiful things for my children. It just didn’t alter the sense that I wasn’t female.

And so, this house is also haunted by ghosts of myself, the selves I wanted to be, the self I became while living here. The self I still don’t know what to do with. I haven’t even uncovered the boxes filled with all my childhood photographs or angst-ridden adolescent writing. But documents with my old names, once-treasured possessions, and even a wedding dress have been revealed. Some will be retained, others hastily stuffed in bags and carted off to Goodwill.

Then last night, another more recent, unresolved ghost emerged. In a closet I found a manual from a leadership workshop I took a number of years back. At that time I was confident, more secure in my sense of self than I would ever be. My transition, in my mind, was complete and a success. But within a few years, my brief, yet promising, career in not-for-profit management would be destroyed by circumstance and my own mental illness. A loss I still have not come to terms with and yet it seems like something that belonged to another person. As if my life has just been a series of reincarnations that seem to leave me no wiser or further ahead.

And no more certain who I am.

And then there is my own addiction: books. Spread through three rooms, with most shelves double stacked, I shudder to think how many boxes there will be. No mercy for old magazines and outdated textbooks. They are bound for the recycling bin. But every time I scan my bookcases to collect charity sale donations, my decisions about what to hold on to shift. My anthropology and ecology texts are now gone, but my philosophy, classics and ancient Near Eastern history volumes remain. I notice that so many of the books I bought during my years of bookstore employment in the early 80s are still valued, even if I didn’t appreciate some for decades after purchase, whereas the literary bestsellers I devoured in my thirties and forties have been, and are, regularly pruned and sent off to new homes. Some of the obsessive tangents reflected in my collection are held dear, others are an embarrassment.

The books we read, and perhaps even more tellingly, the books we buy with the intention to read them, reveal a lot about who we are, who we want to be, and who we want others to imagine we are. More ghosts in our own lives.

And I suppose moving is one more opportunity to encounter, reshape, and even resolve a few of those ghosts—our own and those of others whom time, distance, or death have taken away.

Maybe even grieve.

Civil war up close: Blood of the Dawn by Claudia Salazar Jiménez

“Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment.”
.                                                                  MARX

 So begins Blood of the Dawn, the devastating debut novel by Peruvian author Claudia Salazar Jiménez. This slender volume that captures, at gut level, the horror of the “Time of Fear”, the years when the Shining Path insurgency was at its most intense is tightly bound to the intimate feminine experience. It is an exercise with little narrative distance—one that takes three women from very different backgrounds, closes in on their unique perspectives, backgrounds, and motivations, and weaves back and forth between their stories. When their disparate trajectories intersect, their individual fates, at least in that time and place, become shockingly similar.

In 1980, a  fringe group of Maoist terrorists stole ballot boxes and burned them in the public square of the town of Chuschi, setting off a time of fear and violence that would, over the next twenty years, leave 70,000 dead. Set primarily during the first decade of this “People’s War,” Salazar Jiménez’s novel is a bold attempt to give voice to those not often heard. On both sides of the conflict.

There is Marcela, a disillusioned, yet idealistic teacher who is seduced by the message of the Shining Path and its charismatic leaders. Abandoning her husband and young daughter, she joins the battle. Her first person account is reported from prison, where she looks back at her childhood, early adulthood and her time with the guerilla group. In the face of regular interrogation she is still defiant, still holding on to a loyalty that cannot quite be dissolved despite the atrocities she has observed, participated in and experienced. Hers is a complicated narrative that takes the reader right into the conflicted reasoning, force of conviction, and group dynamics that shape a terrorist.

The women advance, marching along the gray patio. The first of them holds a banner with the image of Comrade Leader. Honor and glory to the proletariat and the people of Peru. Hair trained under green caps. Red blouses. Aquamarine skirts to the knee. Marching in formation. Educated in the shining trenches of combat. Jail others call it; prison. All at the same pace. Give one’s life for the party and the revolution. Banners of red flags with a yellow star. Torches in hand. Rhythm. Rhythm. Rhythm. Drum one. Drum two. Drum three. The feminine ferment rising. We travel a shining path. We struggle without truce to the end.

The second character is Melanie, a young photojournalist in love with a female artist who has moved to Paris. She imagines that the conflict in the mountains holds the story she is meant to record. A city dweller, she is quite unprepared for the harsh realities she finds. Her story is told in a first person present that highlights both her passions and her naivete. She will discover that her camera is neither welcomed by the villagers she meets, nor does it provide a shield against the sights, sounds and smells that will come to permeate her very being.

The next hamlet is a cloud of smoke. It’s hard to make out anything clearly. My camera feels heavier than usual. That’s fine; its weight anchors me to reality in this spectral place. What’s left when everything is done? Nothing. Where should I go look now? What should my lens focus on?

Finally, the truly innocent victim in the situation is the Indigenous peasant woman Modesta, who will lose everything as insurgents and soldiers repeatedly cross through her village, leaving a trail of rape, torture and murder. Her account is reported in the second person—a startling powerful perspective—until, toward the end when she finds her own voice and picks up her own thread. By then we see her slowly finding a resilience and strength that is fragile and determined at once, caught in war that makes no sense to her.

Every day at exactly four in the afternoon, new words parade into your ears just like the terrorists parade every morning. That if the class, they say, that if the proletariat, they say; that if the revolution, they say, that if the people’s war, they say, are saying, say. You only nod in agreement, already tuning out. They speak of people you don’t know, a certain Marx, a certain Lenin, a certain Mao, and a certain President Leader who is boss of them all. We’re all going to be equal, they say.

The atmosphere is claustrophobic. Wound through the plaited threads of the women’s stories are episodes of unattributed stream of consciousness and short quotes from political and philosophical sources. Repetition is employed to reinforce the relentlessness of the savage violence, and the point at which the narratives of the three protagonists blur in identical experiences of excruciating violation. The anonymity of the moment is in sharp contrast to the differing paths that lead each woman to that point, and the diverging courses their lives follow afterward. In an interesting Translator’s Note, Elizabeth Bryer brings to light some of the challenges of reflecting, in English, the different voices through use of rhythm, ideological focus and cultural references as appropriate to each woman.

In the end, Blood of the Dawn comes very close to risking losing its impact with the bludgeoning effect of the brutal tableau that unfolds. Fortunately this a spare, tightly controlled work and, to its credit, one that raises more questions than it answers, even leaving its own characters uncertain. A brave debut, indeed.

Blood of the Dawn by Claudia Salazar Jiménez is translated by Elizabeth Bryer and published by Deep Vellum.

 

Suburban flaneuse set loose: El Cerrito by Noor Al Samarrai

Sometimes there is a remarkable serendipity in the way books come into our lives, perhaps at the right time, the right place or in the right company. I tucked Noor Al Samarrai’s El Cerrito into my bag as I headed to San Francisco last month. As a rambling poetic odyssey that slips in and out of the Bay Area, especially in its earlier—chapters? poems?—let’s say episodes, there was a certain geographic kismet in this selection. But even more surprising was the way this small, spare experimental volume paired so neatly with my other read throughout the same period—Esther Kinsky’s multi-layered, evocative novel, River.

On the surface, this might seem an unlikely confluence. Kinsky is only a few years older than I am whereas Al Samarrai is my daughter’s age (born in 1992). But I was swept away by both works which, at times, seemed to echo and reverberate against one another. Both women are poets and both gravitate toward a lyrical appreciation of the ordinary, everyday elements of their surroundings, at home and abroad. Both Al Samarrai and Kinsky, via her narrator, are restless wanderers, although the latter is a loner while the former typically travels with friends. They take regular excursions through familiar environments close to home—the suburban fringes of the San Francisco Bay Area and London respectively—and pilgrimages afar. Both take photographs. And both offer a thoughtful, often quirky, take on the world and what it means to be alive in it.

El Cerrito, from the inexhaustibly original indie press Inside the Castle, is a pocket-sized volume, designed with a lot of open space. What began with a couple of shorter, more confined excursions through the town of El Cerrito, California in 2012 and 2013, was expanded, over time, to encompass a broader area, within California and abroad, reaching into Sweden, Lebanon, Bosnia, Turkey and beyond to finally wind to a close in North Berkely. The journey is not exactly chronological, nor is it heavily orchestrated or forced. There is a casual, curious, yet introspective feel to the entries which are themselves generously footnoted with historical, biographical, literary, and linguistic references. Combined with occasional black and white photographs, these poetic musings become geographically defined intertextual weavings with layers of meaning that can be wrapped and unwrapped along the way.

Al Samarrai is a contemporary suburban flaneuse, another commonality she shares with Kinsky’s narrator. Both are drawn to those liminal spaces where the suburban meets natural environments. A series of poems trace repeated visits over several years to an area christened TEPCO beach for the fragments from a long since destroyed porcelain factory littering a stretch of waterfront. Sometimes it appears elusive, impossible to relocate. On the poet’s last visit, in 2016, the romance is gone:

Love wasn’t there.
May as well have been alone.
This place in my language: a kanji symbol
to tell someone you’re special,
dear to me. Meaning instilled
by visits spanning a season.
A season drawn out
into years, coated
in alternate weathers.

Connecting to others turned me inward, ultimately
an appreciation of beauty’s just not enough.

For me, one of the most illuminating qualities of El Cerrito, comes from the insights afforded by Al Samarrai’s Muslim-American background. A US-born child of immigrants who grows up to discover The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in grade school, her assured comfort in the country of her birth is altered at an early age:

One of the first few days of fourth grade was September 11, 2001. Mama touched my elbow before I clambered from her car that morning. Don’t tell anyone you’re Iraqi, okay? I didn’t understand why anyone would ask where I was from. What am I supposed to say? Tell them you’re Lebanese. Nodded empty assent.

that day, green knit jacket,
tag “MADE IN IRAQ”
scratched at my neck.

Sprinkled throughout this book are references to Arabic expressions and traditional foods. Her visits to Bosnia and Turkey in particular are enriched with footnotes that add interesting historical and cultural background. She carries a singular fascination with cemeteries and burial practices on her wanderings at home and abroad, and yet there is a youthful spirit and sense of adventure that speaks to equal measures of innocence and irreverence. Early episodes bring in friends, social gatherings, and love affairs, all tinged with the aroma of late adolescence, spiked with a thoughtful undertone that, at least for me as an older reader, brings back memories of the slow, sobering transition toward adulthood that takes place as you venture further from home in your early twenties. You think you are grown up.

And then you grow up some more.

The night we left there was a pink moon on a dusky turquoise sky, verging into purple (could I carry these colors in a suitcase?). At a Syrian-owned restaurant near the bus station, they gave us free hummus, salad, baklava. We gave our bread to beggars, and were given more. Nalini said it was because I spoke Arabic, but they didn’t seem to recognize me as an Arab. Or maybe true recognition’s casual. I didn’t then recognize the extent of the refugee crisis,* really, though I would come to that little by little, and then in deep gasps.

On the bus we were shushed for speaking loudly, giggled and felt very American.

.                    —“Road to Ephesus”

There is something slightly haphazard to the way El Cerrito unfolds. A series of geographically or thematically linked entries will be set apart by episodes that seem to fit nowhere. Brief reflections, set in a country or location that is never mentioned again, appear like random notes or a postcard tucked in here and there. This creates the effect of a book that happens as you open it. You can read it end to end, but you don’t have to. The empty pages invite a little doodling or random thoughts along the way. Because the greatest gift of a book like this—and this can be said equally of a longer, more complex and yet not entirely dissimilar work like River—is that it invites you to take note of your own environment, the people you meet, and the places you visit, and how they change and change you, over time.

* This was September, 2015. By August, 2015, the number of asylum seeks crossing into Europe illegally through Greece and Turkey had more than quintupled since 2014 according to a study by the European Stability Initiative.

On being male and a link to my review of What Kind of Man Are You by Degan Davis

What does it mean to talk about masculinity today, in the twenty-first century, when serious questions of equality still remain unaddressed, gender identity is increasingly fluid, and there are new expectations of accountability and responsibility in our interactions with one another? It’s a matter I often feel ill-equipped to engage with even though I am well aware of what I appear to be when people see me. A white, middle-aged man.  My hidden past is not seen, a significant disability I live with is not visible, and yet, I am not without privilege. But much of that privilege is not afforded by my gender, in fact there are distinct situations in which my gender presentation has been a marked disadvantage—as a single parent, for instance.  But a recent experience here in my neighbourhood brought home to me a situation in which neither my gender, nor my colour, was an attribute in my favour.

I was walking home from the store when I was approached by a young black man. He was visibly distressed. “There’s a little girl on the street and she’s naked,” he told me. He went on to say he did not have a phone to call the cops, but I knew his reluctance ran deeper than that. The girl, when I reached her, was a child, about four years old, possibly of Indigenous heritage, whom I have often seen unattended on the street or sidewalk, sometimes riding a bicycle, but never with an adult in sight. On this day she was wearing a little shirt and nothing else. Not even underwear. Running up and down along what can be a relatively busy road. Yet at this moment, there was no one around at all. A taxi driver, also a black man, slowed down and called to me from his passenger side window. He was also upset. I told him I would try to do something. And then I’m thinking: a middle-aged white man is also in a precarious situation being seen walking down the street or talking with a half-naked child.

I asked the girl where she lived and told her she could not be on the street like that. She had to go home. She went up to a house but would not go in, instead stood alongside the house, playfully, like this was a game. I moved back several houses to ensure that she didn’t run back onto the road and called the police. I told the officer I did not feel comfortable intervening any further, but how concerned I and the two black men I’d encountered were to see this child, so vulnerable and unattended.

I realized that, but for a decision made in my late thirties, I would, as a middle-aged white woman, have been in a better position to directly ensure the child’s security until the police arrived.

I transitioned to male at forty to ease a longstanding gender disconnect, not because I grew up identifying as or wanting to be a boy or a man and not because I was naturally masculine in my interests or inclinations, but because I could never shake the deep seated feeling I was not female. This was eighteen years ago, long before transgender became a widely acknowledged phenomenon, especially for female-to-male.

When I finally decided to proceed, that second puberty was a shock. It radically upended everything I thought I understood about men. Testosterone is a game changer. Physically, emotionally and sexually. And so now, among a mixed group of friends, when gender debates arise, I am torn—I empathize with men, but I know what it is like to grow up and live as a female person in the world. And I have a son and a daughter. And yet my experience, my being in the world, has always been othered, cross-gendered, transgendered, and it always will be.All of this is a long and roundabout way of getting to What Kind of Man Are You (Brick Books), Toronto-based poet Degan Davis’ debut collection.  Manhood and masculinity—in all its shades of vanity, foolishness, joy and sorrow—are themes that recur throughout his poetry. Davis, a Gestalt therapist by day, draws on his own experiences as a son, a parent and a partner, but also his love of music and, one would imagine, many hours listening to others as they work through the challenges in their own lives. I happened upon this book when I attended a reading here, keen to see another author, local writer Marcello di Cintio who had recently released a book about Palestine, Pay No Heed to the Rockets. Davis, who happened to be out in Banff at the time, came into Calgary for a most unusual and fascinating double bill. But, masculinity dominated the lively discussion that followed. In the audience there was a psychologist concerned with the high suicide rate in middle-aged men, a woman who was writing a novel about war and wanted to understand the male attraction to conflict and violence, and a young transman early in transition. Possibly one of the best book reading events I’ve been to.

However, because it is so easy for poetry books to come and go with little attention, I decided to write a review of  What Kind of Man Are You for the latest edition of the relatively new and quite wonderful Canadian-based journal, The /tƐmz/ Review. You can find my review here (the layout is really nice and clean and suits poetic quotes beautifully, by the way). And while you’re there, have a look at the rest of the issue!

Suggestions for reading women in translation: #WITMonth 2018

One week into Women in Translation Month and I’ve yet to jump into the conversation. I’ve been reading German author Esther Kinsky, her novel River for review and Summer Resort for background. However, since the North American release of River is not until early September, I don’t know if my review will actually run this month. But then, if it isn’t possible to pack August with translations of female writers, it is a consideration that can be worked into one’s reading year round. To that end I thought I’d share some of the posts I’ve written about works by women in translation that I’ve enjoyed since last August:

A Working Woman — Elvira Navarro (Spain, tr. Christina MacSweeney)
The Iliac Crest — Cristina Rivera Garza (Mexico, tr. Sarah Booker)
Malina — Ingeborg Bachmann (Austria/German, tr. Philip Boehm)
Hair Everywhere — Tea Tulić (Croatia, tr. Coral Petkovich)
Endless Summer —Madame Nielsen (Denmark, tr. Gaye Kynoch) – linked to external review
SS Proleterka — Fleur Jaeggy (Italy, tr. Alistair McEwen)

Poetry:
Before Lyricism — Eleni Vakalo (Greece, tr. Karen Emmerich)
Third-Millenium Heart — Ursula Andkjær Olsen (Denmark, tr. Katrine Øgaard Jensen) – linked to an external review

This year I’ve gathered a stack of possibilities—not that I expect to get through even half of them, but I like to have choice. And, because there is a lot going on in my life these days and a handful of other English language titles vying for my attention, I’ve selected relatively slender fare. Finally, because it is still Spanish and Portuguese Literature Months, this collection includes five Spanish, one Portuguese,one Bengali, two French, and three German language books.

And because poetry occupies more of my readerly attention these days, I’ve pulled out two poetic contenders:

Negative Space is translated from Albanian, Hospital Series from Italian. Both titles are from New Directions.

The promise of change: Midsummer update, July 2018

With the end of July approaching, I am at a loss to know where the month has gone. To idle hours glued to my computer screen I’m afraid… it is amazing how the internet manages to suck away productivity when you are looking for something. And before you know it, deadlines loom, books are unread, words unwritten and summer is half over.

Earlier in the month I sold my house, “as is” fortunately, for the soil it stands on is worth more without it than otherwise. I am a little saddened to know the place I lived in for the past 24 years will be demolished, yet relieved that I don’t have to fix it up or worry about the aging furnace or sewer lines. I just have to get out by October 1. I will miss my yard with its defiant horde of Shasta daisies, army of saskatoon berries, gnarled old crab apple tree and row of prickly hawthorns. Not to mention, six towering spruce trees and one mostly dead mountain ash. But in return I am trading it for a two bed flat in a building that backs on to an escarpment lined with Douglas fir trees—a little piece of mountain wilderness cast off from the Rocky Mountains, and nestled here in this city of one million. And I don’t even have to move far; I am staying in the same neighbourhood.

However, in the few weeks between the time I accepted an offer on my house and the removal of conditions, I wasted so much time visiting and re-visiting real estate listings that precious little else got accomplished. I debated neighbourhoods, layouts, square metres  and, of course, price, ad nauseum. Somehow, all the information we now have at our fingertips, when we are planning a trip or a purchase, fuels obsessive behaviour rather than actually saving time. That is, at least until a decision is made and done. By the time I was actually able to start my physical house search, I knew all the listings on my radar by heart. We happened to visit my favourite first and nothing else came close. Offer made, a little back and forth, and it was accepted. Now after reviewing the building documents there is a slight concern about pending remediation work (nothing unexpected in a fifty year-old structure, but the decisions will be made before I myself an owner), so by Monday we should have a finalized sale and I will have seven to nine weeks to radically downsize and relocate.

Although I will have a lot to get rid of—sell, donate, or throw out—the idea of streamlining my life is greatly liberating. (Don’t worry though, I was cognizant of bookshelf-suitable wall space in my apartment search, and even then I’m still guaranteed to have more books than I can possibly accommodate.)

My house hunting helped ease me past the difficult anniversaries that accompany this month and, although it has cut into my reading and writing efforts, an invitation to visit San Francisco this week offered a most wonderful literary opportunity—one I never imagined would come my way in this belated, informal writerly “career” of mine. I had a terrific time stopping by the office of The Center for the Art of Translation and Two Lines Press—it’s always so nice to see where the magic happens—and talking Hilbig with Isabel Fargo Cole at a book launch for The Tidings of the Trees. I have attended many author interview sessions over the years, for better or worse, but to be on the stage at the Goethe Institute with a translator I have so long admired at was a huge thrill. I’ll confess to being a little nervous. I reread the book in advance and made countless notes and outlines. But in the end, I sounded reasonably intelligent and Isabel’s answers were detailed and informative. Even better, the audience had many interesting questions and inquiries, a sure sign of a successful event.

I chose to stay on for an extra day in the city, about all I could afford in a city not light on the wallet, but the extended time allowed me to have coffee with Veronica Scott Esposito and spend time at the MoMA, enjoy dinner with two of my cousins and their spouses—our first get together in thirty-five years—have lots of time to visit with Isabel, and also make my way up through Chinatown for the requisite pilgrimage to City Lights Books. I came home from that excursion with books (go figure) and a gorgeous, sturdy canvas bag.

So, suffice to say, my books-read-and-reviewed account looks a little shallow for July. I have, as usual, a handful of titles in progress including one for a published review to come later and I’ve also been quite busy editing for 3:AM Magazine. I’ve been amazed at the range and quality of submissions recently, so many that I’ve had to turn away otherwise strong work due to limits of time, but the experience of working with interesting material and authors is always rewarding and satisfying. If I do my work right, I am invisible, and I like to remind myself how nice it is to be spared the inevitable panicked staring at the blank page that seems to come with every essay or critical review I write for publication. That’s someone else’s problem when I’m the editor.

It is, as ever, a complex flow of emotions that washes over me with all of the decisions, changes and promises that have come into play over the last month. When I was young, the summer, short as it is in this part of the world, seemed to pass so quickly I could never seem to grasp it, hold on to the moment. Now, many decades later, July has become a month associated with some of the most significant events of my life—marriage in 1983, the beginning of transition and end of the same marriage in 2001, a pulmonary embolism and cardiac arrest that nearly cost my life in 2015, the closely entwined deaths of my parents in 2016, the surprisingly swift sale of their house last year, and now, this year’s exciting events.

There are still many challenges and unknowns, significant ones at that, but such is living.

Voices from the margins: Mundo Cruel by Luis Negrón

There seems to be considerable debate these days about where the line should be drawn between the literary license to imagine and the appropriation of  voices of those of different genders, sexualities, cultures, ethnicities and racial identities. What was once considered acceptable is now questioned. And, although race is often considered a boundary to be respected or only be crossed with exceptional care, in a highly stratified cultures, class or caste or ethnic heritage may also come in to play. The concern is that the dominant voice will not only be given more attention, but that others risk being reduced to stereotypes and caricatures.

I recently abandoned a book that, despite some very witty and engaging writing, seemed to be freely exploiting mental illness, poverty and family dysfunction as justification for a smart-assed narrator with all the warmth of a sociopath. Anyone who has been suicidal or lost a loved one to suicide will know it is no laughing matter. The charm quickly fizzled and turned to distaste for me. Apparently the poor and mentally ill are still fair game for slapstick humour and humiliation.

However, it is entirely different when the humour, social commentary or complex stories are owned from within a community, told by its members. That is, I would argue, the importance of supporting and encouraging contributions to literature, theatre, film and the arts from marginal voices.

Cue Mundo Cruel, a series of short, sharp stories that take you into the heart of a small community peopled with eccentric, mostly queer characters—a world that Puerto Rican writer Luis Negrón knows well. It is his own:

Santurce, Puerto Rico, once known as Cangrejos, meaning Crabs, but no longer. Santurce. Blocks and blocks full of doctor’s offices and temples—Catholic, Evangelical, Mormon, Rosicrucian, Espiritista, Jewish, and yoga-ist, if that’s what you call it. The stench of sewers 24/7. Unbearable heat. Reggaeton, old school salsa, boleros, bachatas, jukeboxes, pool halls, slot machines. Topless bars, Dominican bars, gay bars. Catholic schools, beauty schools, vocational schools, and schools where you can get a professional degree in just one year and without much homework.
.                       —from the “The Vampire of Moca”

A striking array of voices and personalities pass through the stories in this slender collection, and their lives are often disturbing, filled with misfortune, dark humour and an uncanny resilience. Most of the pieces are first person narratives, often presented as monologues or one-sided conversations, and, in one instance, as a series of increasingly desperate notes  without a reply. The opening piece “The Chosen One” will challenge a few readers with its precocious young narrator, gleefully recounting his very early initiation into sexual activity with boys and men, experiences bound, as he sees it, to his “special” role within the church. Crude, unnerving, and funny this is in its way a backhanded satire on the degree of sexual abuse that can and does occur. But our young narrator refuses to see himself as the victim. His story sets the stage for the hustlers and the heartache that re-emerges in later stories, but it is not typical. Truth be told there is no “typical” here at all.

What is remarkable about this collection is the variety—each story is different in style and tone. Negrón channels a wide range of characters with compassion and affection, even those who espouse homophobic and xenophobic views, allowing each to demonstrate his or her own narrowness or generosity. The one-side conversations and observed dialogues are particularly effective in this regard, allowing us to eavesdrop, without further comment. The infectious, campy energy of “La Edwin” offers a perfect example:

Ahá! . . . Listen, changing the subject, did La Edwin call you? . . . Yes, Edwin. The one who thinks she’s a man. Honey, the one from the support group . . . That’s weird because that little queen is calling everybody . . . Yeah, her, that’s the one . . . Oh I didn’t know they called her that. You’re bad, girl, bad, bad . . . Well she called me last night, drr-unk out of her mind . . . Saying that he felt all alone, that for him it was difficult to deal with all this shit, meaning gayness . . . I let her go on . . . So she could get it out of her system. Wait a second, I’m getting another call . . . Aló, aló. Aló, aló. How weird, they hung up . . . The thing is, a man left her . . . Yeah, girl, she got involved with one of those lefty fupistas who plant bombs and want the ROTC out of the university . . . Yeah, girl, since they can’t liberate the motherland, they’re going to liberate themselves sexually.

It’s a fun little romp, but the story it tells about queer identity and sexual insecurity is serious.

Most of the stories in Mundo Cruel are quite short, or rather, as long as they need to be. None feel like they are dragged out too far, preferring to offer snapshots of life in this marginalized community. As is typical, some are stronger than others. Likely each reader will have their own favourites. For me it is the sad, but beautiful, story, “The Garden”. Set in the late 1980s, it is the account of a love affair between a young man and his older lover who is dying of AIDS. Nestito’s boyfriend, Willie, shares a house with his sister Sharon who has a longstanding, secret love affair of her own. Together the three of them make an odd, but happy family. As Willie nears the end of his life they plan a party. Another indication of Negrón’s versatility, this is by far the tenderest, most heart-wrenching piece in the collection:

I lay down next to Willie. He had recently taken a bath. He had changed with me ever since he became bedridden. For months he ignored me as at the party where we had met. I wasn’t me, I was part of a duo with Sharon. “You two this, you guys that.” I looked closely at his body and passed my hand over his chest. His armpits were tender ground for little flowers. I hugged him gently. His bones felt fragile. Body, host. Orchard fed with alien nutrients. I sought his face, kissed the dry sores, brushed away an eyelash that rested on his cheek. I looked into his eyes and found, finally, after eight months and sixteen days, desire.

Only 91 pages long, Mundo Cruel offers a wonderful introduction to a skilled, sensitive storyteller and the strange, sometimes dark little corner of the world he knows and clearly loves.

Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and published by Seven Stories, I read this book as part of the Spanish/Portuguese Literature  Month (and, to be fair, the tail end of Pride as well).

Of secrets and sacrifices: Don’t Let Him Know by Sandip Roy

The end of June is upon us and I have managed to get through Pride month with a minimal amount of stress and anxiety. In my city the official celebrations are not held until late August, but there is plenty of Pride around all the same. I have written before about my general sense of disconnect from the LGBTQ community, and the rejection and isolation I’ve experienced over the years. But to be honest, I look at Pride with some measure of envy. I wonder what it would feel like to be able to celebrate myself for who I am and not wish, after all these years, that my life had been different.

There is, in many a queer life, an inability to negotiate the public and the private, the secret and the shared, in a fluid wholistic way. Sacrifice becomes an element of existence in the world.

Time, place, and cultural considerations have long had an impact on queer lives lived. Set in Calcutta and California, Don’t Let Him Know by Sandip Roy is the kind of LGBTQ story that resonates with me, even if my own experience is very different. A queer life dominated by a need to hide and a failure to find release and connection the way one longs for is not simply a story of the past. This novel speaks to the choices we make in our attempts to salvage some normalcy when what we need or long for is denied or feared to be impossible—a reality that reaches beyond the constraints of culture or questions of sexuality or gender identity.

This warm and richly woven tale examines the shifting dynamics within a traditional Bengali family as values slowly change in response to influences from inside and outside India. Roy, a writer and journalist from Calcutta, who lived in the US for twenty years before returning to his native city, draws on his own experiences growing up in a protected, comfortable family as well as the challenges and freedoms afforded by moving to America, in this multi-faceted exploration of the conflicts between identity, honesty, and obligation.

Central to the story is Romola who, having agreed to a marriage negotiated by eager family members, finds herself in small town Illinois with Avinash Mitra, a quiet young man she hardly knows. When a letter from India arrives one day, the homesick bride tears it open without checking carefully and finds herself holding a letter from her husband’s lover who had hoped that they would be able to build a life for themselves in the US, away from the prohibitions of Indian society. This man, Sumit, wonders why Avinash did not wait. Romola, unable to begin to process the information, tucks the letter away. She does not confront her husband. His secret remains with him, her awareness of his secret remains with her. Years later, after his father’s death, their son, Amit, finds the second page of the letter and assumes he has uncovered a piece of his mother’s hidden past. Secrets multiply.

Moving back and forth in time, this novel traces the childhood and youth of both Avinash and Romola, their years together as a family back in Calcutta where they raise their child in a multi-generational household, and Amit’s eventual settlement in San Francisco where he marries an American woman and becomes a father himself. A fine example of classic, emotionally balanced storytelling, each chapter adds to a network of secrets, large and small, creating a rich and bittersweet tapestry. Roy resists the temptation to break open the fragile restraints that bind his main characters, and although not entirely without hope, there is a deep sadness at the heart of Don’t Let Him Know. For Romola this is often expressed in a degree of repressed bitterness, making her, at times, less than likeable. Avinash, by contrast, withdraws. He often appears to fade into the sidelines, something that anyone who has lived for a significant amount of time closeted or otherwise invisible will recognize. His first attempt, later in life, to connect with other gay men finds him awkwardly out of synch and results in an episode that is by turns humiliating, exciting, and potentially dangerous. As a reader, I longed to know him more, yet I admire Roy’s decision to tell this story, this way.

Many LGBTQ people exist in spaces defined by loss and longing.

There is more at play here, of course. Questions of class, race, tradition, and family honour also arise, but, as with the central conflict, these issues are woven into the texture of the story. Finally, this is a novel rich in sensual detail—light, scents, and sounds. Places, from the streets of Calcutta to suburban America neighbourhoods, are skillfully evoked. My recent stay in Calcutta enhanced my appreciation of that setting in particular, with the many small features I recognized adding an extra dimension to my enjoyment of this book. A more “conventional” read for me, perhaps, it turned out to be a perfect choice for Pride month,

Don’t Let Him Know by Sandip Roy is published by Bloomsbury.

The interconnectedness of being in the world: Nocilla Dream by Agustín Fernández Mallo

One thing that struck me as I threaded my way through Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Dream—the first part of his three-part Nocilla Project—in this second year of the Trump presidency is that a new level of unreality has descended on this sorry globe rendering some elements of this inventive blend of fiction and nonfiction decidedly quaint, like a relic of another time. In this exercise, fragments drawn from literary, scientific and technical sources form the web or framework around which a clutch of stories featuring eccentric characters circulate. The centre point is rooted in a distinctly European-imagined American west. But this web was woven in the early/mid-2000s (the original Spanish language release was published in 2006) and now, in 2018, we’re not in in the same American, let alone global, landscape anymore. Ours is one more bizarre than any Fernández Mallo imagined.

In an interview with 3:AM Magazine, the Spanish writer—and trained physicist—explains the philosophy underlying his approach to his work, something he describes as “complex realism”:

…what I’m suggesting is that the writer must be realist, always realist, but not realist in the sense we have usually used the term in literature. If reality today is different from the reality of 30 years ago, we can’t keep describing reality in the same way as we did 30 years ago. Today we understand that reality corresponds to a model — or, even better, the sum of various models — which in science are termed “complex systems” — not complicated or difficult, that’s a different thing! This complexity is what creates that which we all know — the World — is connected in a system of networks — and I’m not referring only to the internet but also to thousands of analog networks in which we are all immersed at every instant. Until a short time ago, we knew the world in parts, whereas now we know that those parts are all connected through a system of networks with a very concrete topology.

The fundamentals that hold this project together are still every bit as valid, but the consequences of interconnectedness are just that more unnerving in light of the disturbing, current state of the United States.

Nocilla Dream unfolds over a series of 113 segments. One encounters fragments drawn from computer science, physics, literature, filmography, and more woven into a series of stories, character sketches and narratives that diverge and dovetail to form one multifaceted, strangely cohesive whole. Even the most random pieces fit somewhere into a larger zone of interconnection, in time, place, or theme. It is, in a sense, a conceptual novelistic experience. And, rather than being showy and intertexually obscure, it is a highly readable book that becomes even more engaging the further you move into it, as odd connections are made, strange eccentric characters emerge and pass through, and the assorted references and reflections begin to add up to some logic of their own.

While in many respects Nocilla Dream is groundless—that is, it exists beyond the framework of any particular story, location or collection of facts—there are some central motifs and ideas that provide a degree of orientation and link, however loosely, a disparate set of solitary or peculiar souls spread across the globe. The primary one is a desolate stretch of road with a curious attraction:

Indeed, technically its name is US Route 50. It’s in Nevada and it’s the loneliest highway in North America. Passing through semi-mountainous desert, it links Carson City and the town of Ely. A highway in which, it ought to be stressed, there is precisely nothing. Nothing. A 260-mile stretch with a brothel at either end. In conceptual terms, only one thing on this entire route vaguely calls to mind the existence of humanity: a poplar tree, the only one that found water, with hundreds of pairs of trainers hanging from its branches.

The highway with this singular feature becomes the perfect centralizing image. One that could easily fall into cliché, or worse, a nod to magic realism, but it is not. This book is at once too imaginative and too pragmatic for that. Crossing the landscape we have an assortment of characters including a  wandering ex-boxer, lovelorn prostitutes, an Argentinian architect and devotee of Borges who suffers a crisis of faith, the self-proclaimed citizens of several scattered micronations, competitive surfers, expats in China, an elderly American artist who moves to Madrid where she secludes herself in her apartment  and, because the primary locus is America after all, an illegal immigrant who hopes to disappear in a remote place. No character takes on a leading role, if you will, though some have a greater presence than others. All are essentially portraits, photographs fleshed in a little more detail than the images in the suitcase abandoned by a dedicated collector of the photographs of strangers—but not much more. Some narrative pieces are replayed, spread out in fragments and vignettes, while others pass quickly. But in the end they stack up nicely. Meaning filters through.

Reflections, observations and quotes from articles, textbooks and literary works are woven into the flow of micro-narratives, providing a conceptual backdrop against which the novel’s construction can be understood.

If there isn’t any space there isn’t any light. The world is unthinkable without light [Heraclitus said it, Einstein said it, the A-Team in Episode 237 said it, and many others besides]. And yet, inside everyone’s bodies all is darkness, zones in the Universe never touched by light – or, if touched by light, only because of illness or decomposition. It’s unsettling to think you exist because this death exists inside you, this zone of endless night. It’s unsettling to consider that the inside of a PC is more alive than you are, that in there everything’s completely lit up.

Linking and playing with images and ideas like this, Fernández Mallo suggests, arises quite naturally from his background as a poet. He is comfortable with thinking on a symbolic level and yet “these metaphors and connections or modal links must be rich in meaning, rich in symbolism, and they must say things which haven’t been said before, they must truly ‘construct reality’.” This construction is neither forced nor superfluous. There is no obligation to fill in all the missing pieces, draw all the lines. Just the opposite. Nocilla  Dream is a novel which is richer for all its abstracted, empty space.

Of course, against the backdrop of the last few weeks of erratic policy issuing forth from the Twitter account-driven agenda of the US President, this book has an extra surreal tone. Prescient or nostalgic? Only time will tell.

Nocilla Dream by Agustín Fernández Mallo is translated by Thomas Bunstead and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.