Tag: literature

Dreams, phantoms, and beautiful horror: Visions & Apparitions by Ladisav Klíma

On a spring evening, in a quiet side room of a busy tavern in a mountain town, the hero of “Delend, or the Phantom of Fantasy,” notices a strange shift in two stars in the still light sky and senses an inexplicable change in the atmosphere:

Delend suddenly gave a start — and timidly, almost fearfully, he looked around the room — just like when a sudden onset of vertigo throws off your balance . . . What was that? Something had surged deep inside him, something — but what, impossible to grasp, even though powerful. A strange terror remained in its wake — chasmic, magical, seductive, a pleasurable terror, followed by something so strange, so delightfully, intoxicatingly other . . .

In no time, he will experience a vision, as a woman’s face materializes between the two stars. It is as alluring as it is terrifying. The ghostly woman brings to mind someone he once loved dearly. Is it fantasy, a memory, or a spirit of the dead returned. He tries to walk off the experience, alternately berating himself for his cowardice and questioning his sanity, and as the night goes on, he is increasingly unable to distinguish hallucination from reality. He wonders if there is any difference between the two after all.

His creator, Czech author and philosopher Ladislav Klíma, would insist there isn’t.

Visions & Apparitions, recently released from the inimitable Twisted Spoon Press in Jed Slast’s translation with collages by Alexander Booth, gathers together  a selection of Klíma’s  “tales of the uncanny.” This collection of stories in the horror and ghost story vein is reminiscent of the work of Poe, for Klíma was a radical subjective idealist who believed that an absolute subject creates all of his or her own reality. Born in Domažlice in western Bohemia in 1878, Klíma lived a life not too different from that of many of his protagonists. His father was a fairly wealthy lawyer, for a time he was a promising student, but things soon became unstable. To be fair, Klíma lost two brothers, both sisters, his mother and grandmother when he was still young and that may have contributed to his unwillingness to engage in society as expected. He was expelled from one school after another for criticizing the ruling monarchy and left the only placement his father managed to secure for him after half a year. Normal life was not to be his style. He moved around a lot, burned through any money he came by, and likely tested the generosity of his friends. He ultimately settled in Prague where he published his first philosophical treatise, The World as Consciousness and Nothing, in 1904. In this anonymous, self-published work he argued, inspired by Berkeley, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and the symbolist poet Otokar Březina, that the world is a fiction. His own fiction reinforced this view, especially the fantastic tales which he apparently enjoyed writing “to pass the time.”

Unsurprisingly, his characters typically find themselves struggling against distortions fueled by dreams, hallucinations, and madness whether they are pining after a distant duchess or lost in the middle of a dense forest. They often find themselves in predicaments as a result of an unfortunate combination of insecurity and hubris, but the suspicion that the ghosts, monsters, and plain evil human beings they encounter may not in fact be “really real” is of little comfort. Their thought processes frequently fall into fractured internal self-debates. Nor is there necessarily an easy way out even if they are, in theory, “divine” architects of their own destinies—many of the stories simply break off mid-sentence or were published with endings of uncertain origin. Detailed bibliographical notes at the end discuss each tale’s publishing history and questions about what may or may not be additions to the original.

Painstakingly drawn from Klíma’s literary corpus, most of the stories in this collection are entertaining in the spirit of classic ghost stories, but a couple are somewhat more disturbing, as one might expect. Others offer a sense of his absurdist humour. Most interesting perhaps is his unwillingness to give up even when he was too sick to hold a pen. “Edgar: A One-Act Horror” was dictated to his life companion, Kamila Lososová, as he was dying of tuberculosis in 1928. This melodramatic vampire drama about a man confronting his cruel, criminal undead grandfather on the anniversary of the latter’s demise carries an intensity that may well be heightened by the feverish context of its genesis. But then, a similar feverish energy, appears on and off throughout this “phantastic” collection. It’s part of its charm.

For a taste of Klíma’s fiction, you can find “Me and My Uncle” from this volume, reproduced complete with notes, on Minor Literature[s].

Visons & Apparitions: Selected Tales of the Uncanny by Ladislav Klíma is translated from the Czech by Jed Slast with collages by Alexander Booth and published by Twisted Spoon Press.

Poetry as a journey: What Lies Ahead by Caroline Clark

The epigraph at the very beginning of Caroline Clark’s new collection of essays, What Lies Ahead, reads simply:

Can I be with you
while you read this?
Don’t look up or
say anything.

And, as you read the pieces that follow you will be aware of the author’s presence—not as an eerie feeling of someone looking over your shoulder—but in the companionable atmosphere of Clark’s calm and thoughtful engagement with the poetic ideas of others and her own lived experience to make some sense of where she has come from and where she is going. It is not a journey with rigid parameters and a fixed destination. Rather, these essays, she tells us in the introduction to this slender compilation, are “the trail of someone who doesn’t know but wants to know.” She reaches, reconsiders, questions. As such, there is a deep reflective quality that flows through in this short collection of essays written over the past two decades. One that richly rewards the reader fortunate enough to meet it.

In a mix of literary and personal pieces, Clark writes about poetry, language, writing, translation, and memory, drawing on the work of the many and varied writers who have inspired her, and her own experiences living in Russia and Canada, as a parent, and working as an interpreter. Her approach is internally driven, exploratory, and respectful of others in her life. This is not a confessional of the too-much-information variety, it is, rather, an examination of the shifting balance in the relationship between heart and intellect, ideas and creativity, that moves from early academic passions, through to an increasingly mature and individual engagement with literature, tempered by the stuff of life. Her personal journey takes her away from her native England in early adulthood—far away, first to Moscow, then to Montreal—before eventually leading her back to her hometown of Lewes. Along the way: falling in love, marriage, the birth of two daughters, and a diagnosis of cancer mark the passage of time.

Presented more or chronologically (as written) and intended for standalone publication, there is no single theme uniting the essays gathered here, but Clark’s longstanding desire to write (to be a poet), and her open dialogue with the words and ideas of other poets and writers features throughout, whether the piece leans toward the literary or the personal, or somewhere in between. The collection opens with the title essay “What Lies Ahead,” directed to her twenty-five-year-old self from a vantage point some half a dozen years later, looking back at what she learned, and what she wished she had known, when she was writing her MA thesis. Her greatest teachers at the time were her subjects—Osip Mandelstam and Paul Celan—and together they informed much of what she came to understand about reading and writing poetry. In simple terms, she advises: “Mandelstam taught me the importance of drafting and Celan taught me the importance of going deeper, the need to step beyond.” The essay goes on to explore what she took from their work and their approaches to writing, and how it has formed her personal experience of poetry outside the academic framework and how she finds herself, with a little distance, focusing less on the new readerly possibilities that lie ahead, and more on returning to the books of her studies armed with new sources and experiences to deepen her reading and understanding.

This ability to read deeply, to circle back again so as to move forward with a clearer vision, is a quality that shapes her essay writing, whether she is reflecting on her first reading of the work of Russian poet Leonid Aronzon, or encountering Gerald Murnane’s Inland, or starting with a simple memory just to see where it carries her. She begins “What’s Going to Happen?” with a recollection from childhood—watching The Big Breakfast before school with her younger brother—as a prompt to inform an essay without any preconceived direction:

I accept the challenge my mind has dredged up: to see where this banal memory might lead. My tools shall be the things that surround me: the books I’m reading, the words of my two-year-old. Here the essay will be simply a look around: a camera panning, a single shot mapping a field of vision, and with that movement the mind and senses must move too. And just by chance something might jump out from this field. A discovery might be made.

The show she had been watching, with its manufactured sense of “real life,” inspired questions about the nature of reality in her fourteen-year-old imagination. This quickly leads her, the adult essayist, to think about the existential musings of Clarice Lispector’s A Breath of Life and memory, be it neurobiological or digital. Which leads to Cloud storage and the anonymous 14th century text The Cloud of Unknowing, because, well, of course it does. But Clark charts this meandering exercise so beautifully it is difficult not to be charmed. Each of the essays in What Lies Ahead in takes the reader somewhere not entirely expected, as a good essay should. To enter into this selection of attentive, intelligent meditations to be willing to emerge richer for the experience.

What Lies Ahead and other essays by Caroline Clark is published by Black Herald Press.

Surely somebody knows something: Sarajevo Saga by Stefan Çapaliku

When noted Albanian author Lekë Cukali arrives in Sarajevo for a writer’s residency, he is met by an elegant but odd woman, his programme contact, who accompanies him to the flat where he is to stay for the next month. It is a little dated, but serviceable if they can find him a proper desk and chair. However, when he wakes up the next morning he discovers that there is no heat, no hot water, and no wi-fi. And although it is April, 2024, spring has not yet made itself known. Not exactly an auspicious start to his brief sojourn in the city.

Sarajevo Saga by Stefan Çapaliku, the third Albanian translation to be published by Istros Books, is a clever, briskly-paced story that combines mystery and history with just enough unresolved danger to make for a thoroughly entertaining adventure. Capaliku, a versatile writer known especially as a playwright and theatre director, draws on his dramatic skills to craft a tale that makes the most of its 133 pages to trace a fascinating line of connection between two Balkan countries that stretches back over a century.

While Lekë waits for his hosts to sort out the necessities of a comfortable and functional space in which to live and work, it occurs to him that he really has no idea what he hopes to accomplish with his time in Sarajevo:

I have in fact come here to write, though even if I did not write no one would reproach me for it. But I do want to write. I cannot trample on this opportunity, which lifts me out of my daily routine. I am at an age when I can no longer afford to squander my days, moments, least of all occasions such as this.

In other residencies I have always arrived with clear ideas in my head. I do not know why, this time, I have allowed myself to drift into free fall.

But if his professional ambitions are less clear, he does have a personal mission—to see if he can find any trace of members of his family, distant cousins, a widowed woman who, with her four children, left Albania presumably with the retreating Austrian army following the end of WWI. These relatives, captured in an old photograph in a family book back home in Shkodër, had fascinated him as a child, but little was known of their fate beyond the fact that they had ended up in Sarajevo. Contact had long been lost, and during the long years of communist rule, such matters were better left forgotten. However, when Lekë’s ninety-one year-old father learned that his son would be going to Sarajevo,  he insisted that he see what he might find out.

Meanwhile, within the first few chapters of the book, a second thread born of Lekë’s childhood imagination—or so it seems—takes us back to late October, 1918, as Mikel Cukali begins his account of the events leading up to his sudden departure from Shkodër with his mother, older sister and twin brothers. This second historical thread detailing the family’s journey to Sarajevo, their arrival, and the life they settled into there, will continue to alternate with Lekë’s present day story. This twinned narrative advances swiftly, in short, 3-page chapters  that nod back and forth one another. The continual switching creates a tension which builds and crosses between the threads.

As he explores the city, acquainting himself with its sights and coffee shops, Lekë is inclined to inquire whenever the opportunity arises, if anyone remembers or knows of someone with the surname Cukali. At first his search leads nowhere. And then, one day at his favoured café, the curiously named Amarcord—evoking thoughts of Fellini’s film and the notion of nostalgic remembrances, in name if not décor—his inquiry seems to raise the ire of the establishment’s owner. It’s the first clue that will ultimately lead to a connection with a possible descendant of his distant relatives. But the more he learns, the more he risks putting his own life in danger.

For a novella with two distinct threads separated by the better part of a century (or are they?), Çapaliku manages to weave a fair amount of societal, cultural, and historical detail into both. The language is unadorned, the accounts necessarily spare, and though one spans thirty  years and the other just a few weeks, there is a nice balance between the interwar environment of the imagined historical thread and the very contemporary, technology-dependent atmosphere of the present day strand. The two narrative voices complement one another well but, at the end of the day, it is the conversational-styled account of the rather neurotic writer-in-residence who in his efforts to connect with the past inadvertently stumbles upon ghosts better left undisturbed, that makes this sojourn in Sarajevo most memorable.

Sarajevo Saga by Stefan Çapliku is translated from Albanian by Vlora Konushevci and published by Istros Books.

“I write in circles”: Beauty Burning: The Condition of Music by Daniela Cascella

Burn. The sight of beauty sets me on fire. I once read of the burning tremor of fear which the lover will suffer when the eye perceives a likeness of eternal beauty. Burn.

To read Daniela Cascella is to be swept into an ongoing conversation within a maze of words, of voices, of images, of moments that catch one off guard, inspire, alarm. Her writing is energetic, continually in motion, seeking, questioning, listening for echoes in time and space.

I have been reading her work for more than a decade now, but have only written about one of her books on this site. Even now, fear of stumbling over my own words, has me wondering if justice can be done. Back in 2017, I responded to Singed with a personal reflection on  her influence on my own attention to the words I read and write and returning to that post I am struck by my opening paragraph:

Daniela Cascella is a literary ecstatic. She engages with the word—written, spoken, sung, depicted—at an essential point of being, at that place where the spirit, soul, or daimon resides.

A literary ecstatic. That description was valid then, and even more so vividly now three books later.

Her most recent work, Beauty Burning: The Condition of Music, which is itself in conversation with her previous three volume, is an infectious essay that asks What is beauty? A burning question but one that seeks not an examination of that which may be defined as beautiful. Rather, it creates, in its rhythms and rhymes, the sensations, the tensions, the intensities that make the existence of beauty possible. The answer then, she tells us on the very first page, is “the condition of music.” But this book does not write about beauty or music. It does, however, begin with music:

The condition of music is a phrase written in 1923 by Mary Butts in her journals, as she yearned for being beyond and before words, yet wrote nonetheless: a condition haunted by, and longing to find words as forms in circular motion and cyclical transformation. Likewise these pages are written in circular ways which sometimes may evoke or hold a rhyme, sometimes a psychic rhyme, sometimes a repetition, in a prose that goes astray only to return to its beating core.

Cascella’s writing has an almost alchemical quality. As an Italian-British writer working in her nonnative language, she has an open, playful approach to words. She has an acute ear for sounds and takes advantage of homonyms, heteronyms, and neologisms to finetune the multifaceted meanings and musicality of her prose. Repetition and the recurrence of quotes and imagery create a choral effect, building an increasing strength and coherence to the disparate references she pulls together as her text progresses. That progression, though, is very organic, halting, inquisitive, and keenly felt.

Her touchstones, that chorus of voices and inspirations that echo throughout Beauty Burning are many and varied. Some she has engaged with at length in earlier texts,  others arise briefly but in passing leave their mark. Quotes from Osip Mandel’stam are important, but she also interacts with the words Clarise Lispector, Christina Campo, Marlene van Niekerk, Maria Gabriela Llansol, Dante, Lászlo Krasznahorkai, Roberto Calasso, and many more. (And, as many of these encounters are made possible through the invaluable work of translators, she thanks them all by name in her acknowledgements.) But in this book, three individuals were essential, as she describes it in her dedication, in setting the tone. They are avant-garde American fashion designer Rick Owens, and two Canadians, philosopher and visual artist Vivian Darroch-Lovowski, and poet and philosopher Tim Lilburn. Three diverse creative souls with whom she feels a special spiritual connection.

This is the kind of chemistry that fuels Cascella’s writing, perhaps more passionately and explicitly here than in her previous books. And I’m sure you know the experience. She is referring to daemonic encounters, those intense sparks of recognition that fire an aesthetic energy and conversations in the aether may be ignited. “Conversations in the aether are heard in reading and formed with the distant, with the dead.” That is, that sensation that the words you are reading you have heard, known, before you meet them. And it need not be confined to writing, perhaps it’s a moment in a film, or a piece of art, that ignites that spark. And sometimes it burns.

In the beauty of the encounter that burns, wounds, and prompts, at first I am speechless, so to articulate words here means learning to know the wound those same words pierced in my throat, the wound which first muffled my voice then made me regain it in the impetus of desire, stitched and broken, difficult, present, necessary. On encountering (on hearing) Vivian’s Voice of Hearing I learned my wound, my burning, my centre, my circle. From the very first page a sense of recognition, as if the future had come to greet me carrying the weight of a deep past.

One can feel the intensity of Cascella’s connection to Darroch-Lovowski’s writing which in turn, opens an avenue for me to again approach Voice of Hearing with a fresh appreciation for what is happening in a work that I may not have been prepared for on my own first encounter (which is, in itself, the beauty of discovering or rediscovering writers and artists through the appreciation of others—and how that same spark of recognition can send us down endless rabbit holes).

In Tim Lilburn, a very different type of writer, a poet and essayist deeply inspired by nature, the Desert Fathers and early thinkers and mystics of the Church, Cascella finds “the voice of reading, re-reading, repeating, in kinship.” Again the connection is immediate:

It was as if we often had underlined the same phrases in the same books, had been drawn to the same thinkers and writers who constantly questioned the borders of language, although we had done so under different timelines and circumstances, coming from different places, going in different directions. 

In writing, writing in circles, in listening, reading, communicating, engaging, Cascella winds her way toward a fuller sense of understanding what is burning at the heart of the questions that haunt her. It is a journey, no perhaps wandering is a better word, driven by desire, pain, and guided by a whisper that she suspects was born before her lips. And one that inspires me to be more attentive to the voices I hear, and return to writing, even if in circles, because certain words do not take leave from me, not I from them.

Beauty Burning: The Condition of Music by Daniela Cascella is published by Erratum Press.

An excerpt from the opening passages of this book can be found at Minor Literature[s].

“We laugh, and I truly believe that we genuinely like each other.”: Jérôme Lindon by Jean Echenoz

Jean Echenoz opens his tribute to his longtime editor and publisher, with an account that many other hopeful, and perhaps naïve, would-be authors might know well.  It is 1979, he has just turned thirty-one, and he has finished writing a novel—his first:

I don’t know if it’s my first; I don’t know if I’ll write another. All I know is that I’ve written one, and if I could find a publisher for it, that would be good. If that publisher could be Jérôme Lindon of Éditions de Minuit, it would of course be even better, but let’s not get greedy. Too serious a house, too austere and rigorous, the epitome of literary virtue, too good for me, not even worth trying. I therefore mail the manuscript to several publishers, all of whom send it back.

He continues to send his prospective novel out until he amasses a “near-exhaustive collection of rejection letters” and if for no other reason than to complete the set he takes a copy to the offices of the illustrious Éditions de Minuit, home to writers like Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. He expects nothing, so he is stunned when, on the way to a job interview, he learns that Jéróme Lindon has called his house and wants him to return the call as soon as possible. He phones the publishing house to explain that he has an interview and is invited to come by as soon as he is finished.

That initial meeting ends with a signed contract  and marks the beginning of a productive working relationship, if not exactly a firm friendship, that will continue until Lindon’s death in 2001 (and beyond that, of course, with his successor, his daughter Irène Lindon). The present text, Jérôme Lindon, is a slender volume written shortly after Lindon’s death in which Echenoz reflects on his own growth as an author under the guidance and encouragement—or when he was not impressed a glaring absence of either—of this legendary publisher. It is a warm, funny, and often gently self-deprecating reflection on both a singular man of vision, and a world of book publishing that sadly belongs to another era.

Jérôme Lindon was born into a Jewish family in Paris in 1925. During the war he went into hiding outside the city, and joined the Combat resistance as a teenager. In 1946 he went to work at Éditions de Minuit and two years later with support from his family he took over as director at the age of twenty-three, a position he would hold for over fifty years. If the early post-war years were difficult for the small publishing house, things began to turn around in 1951 when he accepted a novel rejected by other publisher—Samuel Beckett’s Molloy. Lindon would go to publish the central figures of the Nouveau Roman, expand Éditions de Minuit’s catalogue to include important French Philosophers and social theorists, and, from the 1970s to the mid- 80s, take on a number of fresh young French writers, of which Echenoz was one. He was, as Echenoz demonstrates in his affection tribute, a man with a keen, and typically immediate sense of what he liked without any reservation about making it equally clear when he felt a manuscript fell short of the mark. During their twenty year association, Echenoz experienced his effusive warmth and enthusiasm when he impressed his publisher, punctuated by lengthy stretches of icy distance when he did not.

Echenoz’s debut novel, in spite of Lindon’s eager embrace, failed to sell, something the novice author hadn’t even taken into account, being thrilled just to know it was out in the world. Then, one day, he receives a call informing him that he has won the Fénéon Prize. Still, the book does not sell, but Echenoz is unphased, reasoning: “I have a publisher and it’s Jérôme Lindon. The rest is unimportant.” And so, a year or two later, he delivers a second novel. It’s a disaster. Lindon is not impressed. In fact, he is at pains to describe in detail exactly what is bad about the book. They will not see each other for two and a half years.

But his next effort, awkwardly delivered, is met with unexpected enthusiasm and they’re back in business again. As time goes on, more books will be published, more prizes will be awarded, and Echenoz will learn to ride the waves of his publisher’s responses to what he writes and, as he becomes a more publicly known and admired writer, his engagements the wider literary world. Lindon has strong views about how his authors should conduct certain aspects of their careers, but as an editor, if he likes a work, he exercises a very light hand. Nonetheless, Echenoz recalls debates over book titles and long, surprisingly fun-filled, sessions spent haggling over commas.

Only 59 pages long, Jérôme Lindon, is a spare meditation on a  special working relationship that is infused with fondness for its subject, amid Echenoz’s humorous confessions of his own, often stumbling, growth as an author—his shyness, his missteps, and his inability to say no. And he shows a genuine appreciation of his  brilliant, if mercurial, publisher’s nature:

 Still, you shouldn’t think that the man is cold, brusque, authoritarian, unemotional, and who knows what else—quite the contrary. In fact, he’s passionate, he can be moved, he laughs, he lights up, he rejoices just as easily as he gets indignant or up in arms. Nor should you conclude that he’s unfriendly, that’s not the issue: he can be utterly pleasant. The issue is that he has other things on his mind than being likeable; likeability is not his concern. And besides, there’s also the fact that he simply has no time to waste, and he can be vigorously up-front about that. One day when I call him about who knows what, first apologizing if I’m disturbing him: Yes, he cuts me off, you are very definitely disturbing me—before hanging up without another word.

Beautifully presented with Echenoz’s own handwritten notes lining the inside of the covers and running across the centre spread, this touching little memorial work is an honest and unvarnished a portrait of an important figure in the world of post-war twentieth century French literature. It strikes just the right note and is guaranteed to make you smile, maybe even laugh out loud.

Jérôme Lindon by Jean Echenoz is translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti and published by Archipelago Books.

To each time its people: On the Other Side is March by Sólrún Michelsen

What is a mother?

A mother is someone who puts plasters on knees and hearts. Your first cradle. Your confessional. Your ally against the world. A warm embrace. Someone who sings away trolls. Someone who possesses neither gender nor looks, but who just is.

That is, until she is no longer what she once was. . . but then who do you become? This is the existential question resting at the heart of Sólrún Michelsen’s novel On the Other Side is March. Set in the rugged, windswept landscape of the Faroe Islands, nestled between mountains and the sea, a woman in her early sixties is navigating the uncertain terrain between being a wife, mother, grandmother, and daughter as her own mother is slowly and steadily slipping away. And, as she seeks to balance the emotional demands of this generational crossroads, she examines what it means to be facing the final and shortest leg of her own life’s journey.

Unfolding in a fragmentary, meditative fashion, the narrative tends to be guided by the strange suspension of time that settles in when one is caring for an aging loved one with dementia. A growing sense of loss, a longing to hold on to what is gradually disintegrating guides logic and emotion. The protagonist is haunted by memories of earlier times when she was a young girl and her mother a beautiful, capable woman. She is nostalgic for a simpler time and  the world of imagination within which a creative young girl could escape the harsh circumstances of Faroese life. In the present day, she finds that childhood magic lingers on in her grandchildren who delight in making snowmen or find an imaginary friend in a sock  stretched over a hand, while at the same time reminding her that growing up somehow reduces our capacity to delight in the wonders in our immediate vicinity.

We grow. And shrink. The distance between head and feet determine whether we see what is right before our eyes. We become half blind. Stop marveling, relishing.

I used to see better. I knew them all. Every single house had its special people with their own particular behavior. Nobody was the same. Not even the ones who always wore black were the same. I knew their names and their appearances, but not only that. I also knew what they were like as people. Whether they had warm or cold eyes. Whether they would give you a penny to run an errand. What their gait was like. Whether to clear off or wait for a slice of cake. Whether they were fond of animals. Whether they told the truth or lied. Every single house in the village had its own household scent.

If the narrator’s world has become more ordered and pragmatic with the demands of adulthood, her mother’s world, once so full of friends and activities, is now on another plane altogether. One that is shrinking to the confines of her house. Increasingly filled with holes. Each visit finds a changed and changing woman. Sometimes disoriented, sometimes absent, and sometimes, for a few precious moments, once again the friend and confidante her daughter longs for. But it never lasts for long, suddenly evaporating into strange comments and irrational demands. As her mother’s health, mental and physical, continues to decline, their roles have shifted completely:

Somehow I feel pushed along. Shunted further and further onto a sidetrack, though I try to muster as much resistance as possible. Try to pretend that everything is the way it used to be. But being mother to my mother makes me feel older. I constantly have to remind myself not to treat her like a child. To show her the dignity she deserves. But she behaves like a child. Comes to me like a child. Obeys me, the way I once obeyed her. 

Although there is a thread of sadness and grief running through this novel, it is so much more. As a meditation on aging, caregiving between generations—a primarily female task to look after both the youngest and the oldest family members—memory, and, above all, the intricacies of loving, it is charged with quiet emotion and dark humour. The narrative moves with a gentle rhythm of its own. The past continually reflects and enhances the present, seasons fall out of order, and fragments of traditional Faroese hymns and ballads are woven in along the way. As well, there are no proper names in the narrator’s account; rather, translator Marita Thomsen has maintained family titles (mama, pápi, omma, langomma) and terms of endearment in the original Faroese without translation. The result is a deeply moving evocation what it means to be alive and what it means to lose a beloved parent. It is also the perfect introduction for Sólrún Michelsen, the highly respected Faroese writer and poet, to an English audience.

On the Other Side is March by Sólrún Michelsen is translated from the Faroese by Marita Thomsen and published by Transit Books.

All kinds of people, all kinds of lives, and all equally lonely: The Umbrella by Tove Ditlevsen

Sharp and unsentimental, the prose of Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen crackles across the page, exposing the painful insecurities of ordinary people as they navigate the often messy experiences of life—housewives who question their marriages, children who worry that they don’t belong, families falling apart, and a potential daughter-in-law who suddenly sees the charms of her beloved in a different light after meeting his mother. She excels at capturing domestic discomfort at all its varying levels of tension. The ten stories comprising her 1952 collection The Umbrella, each one short and neatly contained, demonstrate this ability clearly.

Ditlevsen’s stories reflect the time in which they were written, especially with respect to the restricted housebound roles women were often expected to accept once they were married, but her ability to dissect the strained dynamics between spouses, and between parents and children, is timeless, universal. The title story is a pitch-perfect example. Ditlevsen portrays Helga, the protagonist, in a cool, detached tone, as a woman with clear physical and emotional shortcomings—or as she puts it “only averagely equipped”—who had always expected more from life than it could deliver. In her case, she dreamed of owning an umbrella, but that was considered vain and frivolous. Yet, it is difficult not to empathize with her in the stifling conditions imposed on her by the social conventions of her time. Hopelessly attached to her mother and schooled to channel all her energies into keeping house and home for her husband, she is caught in a scheme so rigid and lifeless that it traps both her and Egon, driving him to drinking and her to withdraw. However, her much more proactive mother is concerned by the situation and insists that she sit down with her husband to “talk it out”:

But Helga had never tried to put herself in another person’s shoes; it had never been necessary. Her entire character consisted of a pile of memories without a pattern or plan. There were a number of pairs of brown eyes, a twilight mood, an immense, undefined expectation, a yellow dress, and an umbrella.

When the possibility of finally realizing her dream arises, something explodes in Helga—at least for a moment.

The couples in Ditlevsen’s stories struggle with real or imagined fears and desires, but when there are children involved, it often becomes even more complicated. Painful truths surface when marriages break up, families are torn apart, or new a baby threatens the fragile security of an adopted child. In “A Nice Boy,” seven year-old John was “the nicest boy in the whole area when it came to running errands, chopping wood, washing diapers, and whatever else a person has to do to get ahead in the world.” He was kind and gentle and terrified of doing anything that might cause his parents to regret “taking him in.” Especially now that they had a little boy of their own.

He raced ahead at the thought. He knew he was in debt to humanity because he wasn’t born properly to his mother and father like his little brother, but had ended up with them, by an improbable stroke of luck. He was adopted, and his real parents were horrible people from Copenhagen, who weren’t even married. ‘God forbid you ever meet them,’ his mother had said when she told him that. For a while afterward he would stare at the outsiders who visited his town, imagining they had come from Copenhagen to take him away.

Elsewhere, “One Morning in a Residential Neighbourhood” sees a little girl who is excited to be going on “a trip” with her father, unaware that she is leaving her mother and brother behind for good because her mother has fallen in love with another man. She cannot understand the sorrow and simmering anger of those around her.  In “Evening,” another girl whose parents have already parted, feels torn between her affection for her real mother and her real father, both of whom have remarried, and her uncertainty about how she feels about the new “mommy” and “daddy” who have come into her life. In the opening lines, she is introduced in manner that captures her state instantly:

Hanne was only seven, but she already possessed a great deal of formless anxiety. She always wanted to be somewhere other than where she was at the moment.

In this, as in the other stories in this collection, Ditlevsen so keenly captures her protagonist’s—and, to be honest, our—deepest desires, griefs, and apprehensions in precise poetic prose that is both clear-eyed and compassionate.

Published as part of the Penguin Archive collection of extracts from larger works, it must be noted that this same collection has also been published together with another of Ditlevsen’s collections as The Trouble with Happiness. Nonetheless, there is something quite irresistible about these red and white pocket-sized volumes that offer an excellent taste of an author’s work. The only shortcoming is the omission of a bio for the author and translator.

Umbrella by Tove Ditlevsen is translated from the Danish by Michael Favala Goldman and published by Penguin Random House.

In response to a broken world: Intelligence Is the Art of Remaining Faithful under Shifting Circumstances by Alexander Kluge and Anselm Kiefer

The striking title of this far-ranging intellectual and artistic collaboration between Alexander Kluge and Anselm Kiefer comes from Hölderlin’s unconventional translations of the Pindar Fragments:

The lonely school’s capacity for the world. The innocence of pure knowledge as the soul of intelligence. For intelligence is the art of remaining faithful in changing circumstances, and knowledge the art of being sure in one’s understanding in the midst of positive errors. If our understanding has been exercised intensely, it retains its strength even in diffusion; inasmuch as it easily recognizes alien things by its own honed sharpness, and so is not easily confused in uncertain situations.

Although the full passage does not appear until the final section—or Station— of this richly illustrated, interactive volume, the titular statement, that intelligence is the art of remaining faithful under shifting circumstances, clearly reflects the spirit guiding the discussions, observations, and speculations that shape this work. It is set out on the opening pages in an extract from a conversation between Kluge and Kiefer held on July 5, 2023, at the French Cathedral in Berlin, the day before Kiefer was awarded the German National Prize. It is a concept to be understood as realism. The artist insists that intelligence isn’t a skill:

Like all art, it doesn’t arise in your head, but in your fingertips. Intelligence feels things out, makes attempts, has character, it observes, it’s awake and constant, it takes decisions quickly, yet it knows how to wait patiently.

Like a physician, an architect building a cathedral, a mathematician or physicist. Kluge and Kiefer trade ideas and illustrations back and forth as they seek to interrogate what it means to remain true to oneself in a broken world.

Over the following ten “Stations”—one might describe them as points of intersection of ideas and images—that comprise this volume, Kluge, the writer and filmmaker, and Kiefer, the artist, explore how they and others have endeavoured to exercise their intelligence. Themes and subjects are drawn from Kiefer’s artwork. The inspiration he derives from history, literature, poetry, science, and mysticism is reflected in Kluge’s companion commentaries and experimental short films (accessed via QR codes), and expanded upon in excerpts from the above noted July 2023 discussion between these two important German artists. The result is a dynamic, multi-faceted enterprise.

Kluge and Kiefer each operate in different mediums that combine the ancient, even prehistoric (writing and painting) with the modern (photography and film), and exercise their own distinct understanding of the world with openness, curiosity, and conviction born of experience and experimentation, but their work, in their respective mediums and spaces, meets, as Kluge describes it, tangentially. This is an ideal plane for their collaboration. They discuss, they debate, they agree, they agree to disagree, but throughout it is clear they hold each other in the greatest esteem. Into their collaboration they welcome the contributions and voices of many others, including Hölderlin, Rimbaud, Celan, Joyce, Robert Fludd, and Johannes Kepler. Kluge’s characteristic observations, anecdotal in tone with a tendency to walk a very fine line between the factual and the fantastic, bring in classical mythology, military history, Kabbalistic wisdom, mathematics, and music to provide context and counterpoint for Kiefer’s paintings and sculptures which are reproduced, in detail and in whole (especially meaningful for anyone who has seen Kiefer’s  textured wall-sized paintings in person and knows just how difficult it is to capture the experience in any meaningful way with the camera on your phone).

Each Station has one or more themes, for example, “Tractate on Money, Love, Power and Truth / Four Currencies that Rule Our Lifespans,” “Stories of Exodus,” and  “Finnegan’s Wake and the Construction Site of Words,” just to name a few. There is natural flow and balance between discussion and direct commentary about Kiefer’s displayed artworks and Kluge’s embedded films, and the wide-ranging reflections and observations that surround them and at times veer off in unexpected angles. As Kluge notes:

One of the most surprising effects of great art is its ability to open up new directions. Emblems, perspectives, groundwater of experience emerge, no matter how old, how lost the underlying basis of experience may be. The panel pictures cannot be large enough. They are works of art, but they are also ‘the street signs of experience.’  

If you have not yet encountered one of Alexander Kluge’s books, collaborative or otherwise, especially the latter volumes with integrated multi-media, they can be difficult to contain or adequately describe in a review. There is a sense that they are larger on the inside than one at first suspects. They must be experienced. This particular work, translated by Alexander Booth who has ushered into English a good number of Kluge’s recent publications, is the latest to appear (although Kluge sadly passed away earlier this year at the age of 94, there may be more to come) and the perfectly-matched and well-timed collaboration with Anselm Kiefer makes it especially powerful. And intelligent.

Intelligence Is the Art of Remaining Faithful under Shifting Circumstances by Alexander Kluge and Anselm Kiefer is translated from the German by Alexander Booth and published by Seagull Books.

“I fall awake and think, I want to go home”: Is Beauty Good by Rosalind Belben

I think, it doesn’t matter where I am, whether calm or with nerves shot to pieces, in the mountains, in towns, sleeping well or sleeping badly, it doesn’t matter, I am quite lost, wherever I am. I want to surrender. I wish to retire. I am tired. I’m not disappointed, but I can’t cast my mind any farther, I’d prefer to draw it in and keep it in a bag. (from “Exile”)

Rosalind Belben is not a writer who is inclined to make it easy for her readers or, rather, she does not entertain characters or narrators who are easily accessed, nor does she shy away from indirect, deliberately obtuse sentences that disregard grammatical niceties. Her protagonists can be blunt and unsparing in their observations, especially of themselves or other people, while at the same time possessing an uncanny eye for the intricacies of the natural world and an uncommon compassion for nonhuman life. But they often seem to become distracted on their way from one thought to another, making  it difficult to follow exactly where they are going, understand where they coming from, and figure out where the lines between memories, dreams, and ordinary experience intersect.

This is especially true with the latest of her books to be given a new lease on life, her 1989 novel, Is Beauty Good. Note the absence of a question mark. For a writer who, with her 1974 novel, The Limit, graphically explored the physical deterioration and decay of the body of a woman dying of cancer, “beauty” may seem an unlikely subject for her to centre. But, even in that work, a beautiful, if unconventional, love affair lay at the heart of the story. In Dreaming of Dead People (1979), her complicated narrator’s often bitter journey to embrace a self-styled spinsterhood, includes a vividly recounted idyllic detour. And, at the end of the day, beauty is a relative quality. Its potential goodness even more so.

For some of the characters who appear in the thirty-one short pieces that comprise this unconventional work of fiction—neither a typical collection of short stories nor a multi-voiced narrative revolving around a sequence of inter-related events—whether beauty is good does arise as a question or consideration, but more often the matter is less obvious, it may lurk around the edges or be conspicuous in its absence. The protagonist of the first entry, “The Nightmare” addresses the question most explicitly. Fritz is a guard at the Berlin Wall who wonders, in conversation with a friend, “what use is a sense of beauty, if it brings also a sense of ugliness and repulsion and distress when we’re faced with things which offend it?” Do we overlook the beauty inherent in that which repulses us? If that which is ugly or painful serves a warning, can beauty thought to be morally good? The ugliness of the environment he lives and works in exhausts him; would it not be better to be unburdened, free of notions of beauty, like the dreaming horse?

Each of the chapters opens cleanly, without introduction, and ends on a poetic note of some sort. Settings range from Berlin, to English gardens, to alpine landscapes, and most of the accounts that unfold are self-contained, if often fragmentary in nature, though a few will later resurface to be seen from another angle. Narrative form is varied as Belben employs both direct and indirect monologue to pull her characters’ thoughts and voices to the surface. Some passages unfold in a single, flowing sentence or unbroken paragraph, while others tend to the conversational, or feature choppy, short phrases as memories and observations tumble out atop one another. German words and expressions arise from time to time, without translation. And, in the third section of the book—“The Great White Worm: from the deaf man’s conversation book”—grammatical structure starts to break down altogether, with the increasing appearance of random capitalization and the frequent contraction of words to just few letters. The shifting style and form can require some concentration to follow the intended meaning, but it makes for a more dynamic and immersive reading experience.

If there is a quality that seems to unite the many characters we meet, the many minds we pass through in this polyphonic, multifaceted novel, it is one of longing tinged with melancholy. As if beauty, intangible and elusive, is an emotion. One that defies any concept of universality. Belben’s protagonists often seek some kind of release in nature, looking for solitude, escape or, like the three year-old hero of “The Insatiable Wheel” furiously peddling, alone on his tricycle, day after day, a mountain that will ever remain out of reach. There’s Olive in “Shooting the Bolt,” who can’t abide other women, who finds their understanding of what it means to be a woman somehow alien and distasteful. She forges her own natural company among berries and currants, tending them with care and ushering them toward their natural destinies in jams and puddings.

Olive is attached to the fruit cage, she spends hours on her hands and knees, weeding, or wading up to her armpits in the raspberry canes, rasp berries remind her of horses’ lips, soft fruit, apparently, is fierce and brave and stands up, she had only to wriggle her fingers through the wire of the old door, to reach the bolt, one isn’t truly locked in the fruit cage, but how, she thought, do I get out of being a woman, it is repugnant, she lay down in the last of the dew, the currants slowly subsided in the colander.

Elsewhere, there’s an outing with a ghostly Hölderlin, and several encounters with horse-angels. And dogs. Dogs appear frequently in the waking and dreaming lives of  more than a few protagonists, and feature in their ethical and aesthetic reflections. “Florus” is a love letter to a beloved pet, now gone; the aging narrator of “Pfaueninsel” tells of caring for an equally aged boxer when its owners are away; and the ornery bedridden character gathering her thoughts in “The Shy Elt” reports regular dreams about dogs that she struggles to make sense of:

I drm! every knight.       of dogs, puppies. Of doing sthing wrong with thm, I carry armfls of pups swhere & I have WORRY over thm. I have to carry armfls back, I wake before I cn, I’m not so clevr cn you explain tht, it wld be nice to have an inklg bec. I drm it too reg. for comfort, we’ve nevr had dgs. 0 to do with thm. Pups. I’d be happ. to drm of cats. And 3 nights ex 5 I have thm myself! Or I guess thats how they must be born, they have no othr mothr you see, it embarrsss me, in the drm. Your not squeamish are you

Is Beauty Good with its brief, mostly unrelated chapters, few extending beyond four or five pages, highlights Belben’s propensity to inhabit the more uninhibited thoughts of ordinary people without the runway a longer work of fiction affords. It can feel exhilarating and unnerving to move from one scenario or account to the next. One is encouraged to listen closely, invited to reread. For the strangeness. For the familiarity. For the poetry. In her Introduction, Esther Kinsky describes the appeal perfectly:

The voices and visions play tricks and offer surprises, and there’s a sense of humour even when tragedy is lurking in the wings. But they also expose fundamental problems of communication, the vulnerability and inconsistency of our common currency of language, its helplessness. Belben’s writing catches something at the root of human existence, a state between dream and reason where all sense of belonging is suspended, making way for longing to define the self. It is also a state between words, concerned with the tiny stillnesses, the white spaces harbouring endless possibilities without which language couldn’t exist.

It is, perhaps, within these tiny stillnesses that notions like “beauty” and “goodness” can be hinted at, even if explication remains just out of reach, just on the tip of the tongue, or as is too often the case, in the emptiness left when only their opposites remain.

Is Beauty Good by Rosalind Belben with an Introduction by Esther Kinsky is published by New York Review Books Classics in North America (August 2026) and by And Other Stories in the UK (July 2026).

A walk on the wild side: The Pure and the Impure by Colette

Colette’s The Pure and the Impure opens in an opium den in Paris sometime during what would come to be known, looking back through the veils of nostalgia, as the Belle Époque. Our narrator, also named Colette, arrives, not as a participant but as a writer intent on conducting a little research. Perhaps, it is implied, for novel.

Fully prepared to be bored, I settled down on my own little mattress, lamenting the fact that the squandered opium smoke rose thickly to the skylights. There it reluctantly came to rest, and its dark, appetizing fragrance of fresh truffles and burnt cocoa gave me patience, a vague hunger, optimism. The muted red color of the veiled lights pleased me, as did the white, almond-shaped flames of the opium lamps, one close by, the other two disappearing like will-o’-the-wisps, far off, in a sort of alcove tucked under the balustraded gallery.

She describes the night as it passes, with a careful attention to the sights, sounds and scents, but all the while she holds herself apart from those indulging directly in the smoke. Her words carry the promise that all manner of decadent secrets may be revealed in the pages to come and, as the narrative progresses, she does go on to discuss sexuality, gender, and the dynamics at play between men and women, speaking through her alter ego with a frankness that is fresh and at times startling. But, as in the opium den, an element of her own experience is always held apart, even contradicted by the attitudes she later expresses. And that complicated dance that both reveals and conceals is one of the reasons that this novel-that-is-not-quite-a-novel is so very engaging, as Rachel Careau’s carefully referenced and sensitively rendered retranslation demonstrates so clearly.

Originally published in French as Ces plaisirs in 1932, and then, after considerable revision, in 1941 under the author’s preferred title, Le pur et I’impur, Colette’s unconventional text was met with mixed responses. Its subject matter was salacious, no doubt upsetting some, but its structure—a series of portraits of people she has known, or known of, sometimes identified directly and sometimes referred to by pseudonyms or initials—lacked the typical narrative flow of a novel. Was it a memoir? Or a collection of gossipy accounts of past friends and lovers? Opinions diverge. However, for Colette herself, and for many of her readers, it may be her finest literary achievement. By turns oblique and unguarded in its revelations, it perhaps comes closer to an autobiography than the memoirs she would write, but it reads as something slightly different. Autofiction disguised as commentary? Whatever you call it, The Pure and the Impure pulls back the curtains on an unspoken world of sexual adventure as it existed more than a century ago. Colette introduces us to several self-styled, yet bitter, Don Juans, speaks of the companionship she found among a group of gay men, examines the nature of lesbian desire, and explores transmasculine cross gender expression in a manner that feels strikingly contemporary today.

Bisexual herself, Colette had many lovers, both male and female, during and between the first two of her three marriages, and was surrounded by a number of extravagant lesbian and gay personalities. She also appears in photographs wearing men’s clothing and confesses to having, at least in her younger years, an internal masculinity, a “mental hermaphroditism” that she wished she could escape. She speaks about how tipping the balance between a woman’s public sex and her concealed sex makes her so masculine that she unnerves a man. Such a woman’s domain, then, is that of other women:

How timorous I was, how womanly beneath my shorn hair, when I was pretending to be boy! . . . “Who will consider us women? Well, women.” They were the only ones who weren’t taken in. Under the cover of such insignia as a pleated shirtfront, a stiff collar, sometimes a vest, always a silk pocket square, I frequented a vanishing world, on the margins of all worlds. If mores, bad and good, haven’t changed in twenty-five or thirty years, class consciousness, by its suppression, has gradually undermined the demoralized sect I am speaking of, which tried, trembling with fear, to exist beyond the reach of hypocrisy, its breathable air.

In this short passage, Colette moves from describing her ability to pass within this community of women who enjoy masculine attire and activities, to what turns into a rather sad portrait of an individual she calls “La Chevalière.” She describes her as a woman with “the strange appearance of a handsome man” who so deftly and stubbornly straddles the gender line that she is unable to form lasting relationships with women and ultimately fits in nowhere. Colette based this character on a well-known real woman, Mathilde de Morny, a former lover of hers, but it is apparent here and later in the novel, that she questions if two women can ever truly be very happy in a loving intimate relationship if “one of the women shifts toward being what I call a pretend man.” Thus, if “La Chevalière” can be seen as an early depiction of what we now refer to as a transgender man (and as a trans man myself, I would accept that perspective), it is not an entirely positive one. Clearly Colette is still nursing some baggage from her five year relationship with the inspiration for her character who, to no surprise, did not receive the depiction well. Such is the contradictory tendency that runs through this book.

For a writer who tackles sexuality in an open and seemingly unapologetic manner, the attitudes Colette expresses towards lesbians, and feminist ideas, is not as progressive as one might expect. In The Pure and the Impure, she looks back to the turn of the nineteenth century to find her ideal image of love between two women. Her portrait of the “Ladies of Llangollen,” Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, who escaped the expectations of their aristocratic upbringings and retreated to the Welsh countryside where they lived together as a couple for fifty-one years is detailed. Colette carefully pores through the journals of Miss Butler, the older of the two women (unaware that Sarah also left writings), delighting in the bucolic pleasures of their days, and zeroing in on indications of their physical intimacy, such as the mention of “our bedside”:

English readers, more severe and more depraved than I, may consider this proof, but proof of what? Envious of so unshakable an affection, they assume that these two loyal maiden failed to remain pure—but what do they mean by pure? I have a bone to pick with those who believe that people aren’t being indecent when they stroke a young cheek, as warm and fresh as a velvet-skinned peach; but I their palm cups, squeezes, and weighs the pink breast as it would the peach, like it umbilicate, we must blush, cry out in alarm, sully the assailant . . . How hard virtuous people find it to believe in innocence!

Of course, as one reads this chapter, with its extensive quotes from Miss Butler’s diary, and Colette’s admitted obsession with certain passages filled with tender expressions of love and affection, it is easy to question whether her nostalgia for a time of a simpler, less flamboyant expression of love—lasting love—between two women says more about her own conflicted notion of purity than anything.

That is, perhaps, the real question at the heart of The Pure and the Impure. As a novel, it unfolds as a series of reflections that Colette is directing at her audience—that is, her reader. There is a conversational tone to her prose, the frequent use of ellipses creating a sense that she is almost feeling her way through her narrative, as, in manner, she is. There is a sensuous physicality to her writing. As Careau says in her Translator’s Note:

[. . .] Colette’s work, rarely cerebral, constantly foregrounds the body, whose intelligence she recognizes through her own experience: “It is my body that thinks,” she writes in La retraite sentimentale. “It’s more intelligent than my brain. It feels more subtly, more completely than my brain. When my body thinks . . . everything else falls silent.”

Yet her language is, in fact, controlled and precise, even—perhaps especially—when she is being pointed in her observations and recollections. She tends toward a certain economy of words, but her images can be very intense and she delights in rare and scientific words. And, of course, because most of her work has autobiographical underpinnings, it is always tempting to seek  the true Colette out in her novels and stories.

With this new edition of The Pure and The Impure we have a welcome  opportunity to experience (or re-experience) Colette’s fascinating meditation on the nature of men and women, sex and sexuality, through Careau’s attentive and sensitive translation, supplemented by extensive and detailed, yet unobtrusive, endnotes. Drawing on her own experience as a dancer, Careau describes how the musicality and discipline of ballet helped prepare her for a writer like Colette, even if she might not have realized it when she first encountered her work (her translation of Cheri and The End of Cheri was published in 2022). In her Note, she makes a very powerful statement about the role of discipline in translation:

Translation demands the dual discipline of close reading and careful writing: an attentiveness to the nuances of meaning of individual words (and to the nuances of their meaning for a particular author), to the repetition of words across a text, and to the order of words and phrases and how it causes meaning to unfold in a sentence; an alertness to tone, and its slightest shifts; a sensitivity to the sound, the music of the language. Translating Colette also requires the discipline of a researcher, in order to track down the rare words that she delights in: classical and literary usages, technical and scientific terms, contemporary slang and argot, obscure regionalisms, neologisms.

Her discipline is well rewarded in bringing all the unique qualities of Colette’s prose into focus. This is an endlessly intriguing work containing complex layers of fact, fiction, and even a little fancy. But, to read The Pure and the Impure today, from the perspective of present (and increasingly politically volatile) attitudes toward the LGBTQ community, we can appreciate how groundbreaking the book was—and how the kinds of contradictions Colette ultimately expresses about sexuality, her own and that of others, still complicate our attitudes today. Plus ça change. . .

The Pure and the Impure by Colette is translated from the French by Rachel Careau and published by W.W. Norton.