Tag: literature

A wanderer between two worlds: The Postman of Abruzzo by Vénus Khoury-Ghata

“Rifling through the papers of a dead man isn’t enough to bring him back to life.”

Ten years after her geneticist husband died following his return from a village in a mountainous part of southern Italy, Laure leaves her home in Paris in search of something—she’s not sure exactly what—that will help her understand why he kept returning to this isolated community of displaced Albanians again and again. As Luc travelled to collect samples from populations scattered across the globe, being left behind became such a constant condition of their marriage that Laure can’t quite accept that he is really gone for good. The only way to come to terms with this unsettled absence, she is certain, is to visit the one place he had returned to fifteen times and where, on his last trip, his “heart had broken down.” Armed with a folder of his final notes on the Albanians and her portable typewriter, she arrives in Malaterra in the region of Abruzzo, and rents a house.

This is the set-up of Lebanese-French writer Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s 2012 novella, The Postman of Abruzzo, the latest of her works to be released by Seagull Books in Teresa Lavender-Fagan’s English translation. But, if Laure embarks on her journey under the illusion that she will somehow be able to put names to the anonymous donors of blood, urine and saliva recorded in her husband’s files, as if some code rests in the notes she has yet to transcribe, she soon recognizes the foolishness of that idea. What she encounters instead is an eccentric collection of characters who hold fast to beliefs and traditions long since forgotten back in their homeland, preserved in Abruzzo like a fly in amber, and she discovers she is not the only one mourning an unresolved past.

The first and most essential villager Laure meets is Yussuf, the postman of the title. On her first day, he arrives on the doorstep of her cave-like temporary residence high on the exposed mountainside above the valley where the villagers are spending the hot summer months. He has come, he tells her, to feed a litter of kittens, and promises to return every day regardless of whether or not he has any mail to deliver. As one of the only people in town who can read, having learned in prison, he knows everyone’s secrets and has an opinion on everything, sharing his knowledge and uncanny insights with the newcomer as he see fit. Yet, although he can read, the postman has no time for writing:

Putting words on top of words doesn’t construct a house, doesn’t make a child or a tree grow, doesn’t plough a field or prevent locusts from devouring an entire crop of corn. The pages one writes on a table don’t change the shape of the table but make the brain of the one writing explode. Too many word’s crack one’s skull and shorten one’s life.

With his mailbag and his tendency to hold fast to the letters that he feels are too painful to deliver or too important to release to the vagaries of the postal system, Yussuf plays a critical role linking the residents of Malaterra to one another, and Laure, as an outsider, to the community where she hopes the answers to the questions Luc has bequeathed her lie.

The only person in the village who professes to have a true respect for words is the Kosovar, the sole Muslim in a community of Catholics, who has, over the years, bitterly retreated into the confines of his dusty bookshop. In Laure he hopes he has found a kindred spirit, but his desperation and general state of deterioration unnerve her. The other residents are of a much earthier stock, including Mourad, the lusty baker, who proposes marriage despite the fact that he already has a wife and household full of children and the local women who, guided by superstitions, eye the skinny, short-skirted foreigner with distrust. Most are widows, by fact or fate, as economics have driven husbands and sons away to seek work in cities from which they rarely return. And they all seem to remember a Luc very different from the one his wife thought she knew. But the one person who interests and terrifies Laure most is Helena, the woman who cared for Luc in his illness and sent his washed and ironed shirts to Paris after his evacuation to a hospital in Rome. Helena has been waiting thirty years, rusty rifle at hand, to avenge the deflowering and subsequent death of her daughter—by hanging from a fig tree with her mother’s assistance.

Even the mountains mourned the girl, only the mother’s eyes were dry. She cried inside. Condolences poured in from every direction: plastic buckets of every colour, aluminum pans, wicker baskets, even a nightingale in a cage, but nothing consoled her. The priest who refused to give her absolution because of suicide was immediately replaced with another priest. No people are more solidary than Albanians. It makes sense! The same blood flows in their veins . . .

This blood, O negative, not only binds this community and attracted the interest of the foreign medico, but nurtures a deep-seated tradition of blood tax and blood debt imported and preserved through generations of migrants. Laure’s agitation is heightened when Yussuf reveals that a letter sitting undelivered in his bag indicates that the “boy” Helena has been waiting for, known as the Australian because he was rushed off to an uncle in Sydney for his safety, is finally on his way back to Malaterra. His arrival will affect the entire village, Laure included.

The Postman of Abruzzo reads a little like a fable set in a place caught between the modern world and a past that is filled with a complicated network of ancient traditions and carefully maintained prejudices. Laure is also caught between two worlds, half-underground and half-aboveground as the Kosovar keenly observes. Khoury-Ghata’s prose, characteristically poetic, spare, and unsentimental, is perfectly suited for the telling. Sometimes it is simply breathtaking to experience the way she can conjure a vivid and moving image with just a few well-placed words. With this work she uses this gift for precision to craft a story of loyalty, love and loss that is both tender and gently absurd.

The Postman of Abruzzo by Vénus Khoury-Ghata is translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan and published by Seagull Books.

In a hidden corner of the world: In Red by Magdalena Tulli

Whoever has been everywhere and seen everything, last of all should pay a visit to Stitchings. Simply take a seat in a sleigh and, before being overcome by sleep, speed across a plain that’s as empty as a bank sheet of paper, boundless as life itself. Sooner or later this someone—perhaps it is a traveling salesman with a valise full of samples—will see great mounds of snow stretching along streets to the four corners of the earth, toward empty, icy expanses.

It begins like this, with the sketch of a town isolated against a fanciful landscape of an unending winter, each gloomy day broken only for a moment at lunchtime between soup and the main course. It is sometime after the turn of the twentieth century, when Poland was divided among three empires—Austria-Hungary, Russia and Prussia—but Stitchings exists in an imaginary fourth partition under the control of a Swedish garrison, a condition the residents consider most favourable. As the years pass, however, conflict and commerce from the outside world will exert influence on the community of Stitchings for better or worse.

In Red, the 1998 novella by Polish writer Magdalena Tulli is a celebration of the power of stories to create a world that is at once magical and a microcosm of the early decades of the twentieth century in her native country. Echoes of Calvino and Saramago can be heard in her portrait of Stitchings and the many eccentric characters who pass through it and strange circumstances that arise in its streets, structures and public places. Defined by its industry and modes of approach—or exit—the town is, when we first arrive, home to three factories and a salt mine and, should one not approach by sleigh, a railway station to welcome newcomers. The primary businesses, all longstanding family concerns, are Strobbel’s porcelain works, Neumann’s phonograph record factory and Loom & Son who manage the flow of money and goods, and manufacture fine ladies’ corsets for the local and international market. Meanwhile, the salt mine and its miners hold an economic role that is essential to the very lifeblood of the town:

But it was to them alone that the factories, stores, banking houses, and law firms owed their prosperity. Any kind of enterprise would have run aground in a heartbeat if there’d been a lack of salt, which, as everyone knows, is the essence of tears. For along with riches, success in industry and commerce brings weeping. A boom requires weeping if it is to last. Otherwise it will dry up. A certain number of tears are needed to fill the channels of trade and allow the expeditious flow of assets and liabilities, just as water under the keel is essential for ships with holds full of cargo.

This town is no stranger to weeping. As war brings destruction its commercial strongholds, and death and injury to a generation of young men, the function of the various business and the visions of their new owners and managers evolve. Cycles of poverty and prosperity follow and the seasonal nature of the environment around Stitchings grows warmer. Eventually the snow is but a distant memory, a port is open to ships ferrying goods and visitors, and the daylight hours begin to expand until night is reduced to a brief daily moment of dimness. In the sweltering heat, sailors roam the streets and frequent the brothel. Life in Stitchings goes on. And, sometimes, it does not, as charcters fall prey to injury, illness and despair.

For a reader accustomed to following the path of an individual protagonist or collection of individuals, In Red might feel underdeveloped. But the primary character is the place, Stitchings. It evolves, with changes in development, climate and atmosphere rising and falling over the course of this short novella. People, as the framing reinforces—regularly describing how prospective visitors can approach or exit this mythical space—are transient figures whether they are born and die there or brought by commerce, external factors or familial obligation. They fall into routines, often emotionally destructive for themselves and those around them. There is, it seems, little true happiness in the streets and hallways of Stitchings. For that a person really needs to escape.

This fantastic fable moves forward with the inexorable pressure of forces that come from outside and from within. With a tumultuous flow of images, Tulli’s narrative never stops to take stock. It is up to the reader to catch references and pick up on the wry commentary woven into the account. Following the detail is less important than riding the flow, and appreciating the wisdom and humour woven into this dark tale. In the end we are reminded that the story is an entity with its own ontological motivation, but formed as it is on a community caught in the ebb and flow of larger world currents, it carries the best and worst of human nature in its wake.

In Red by Magdalena Tulli is translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston and published by Archipelago Books.

Days and hours, light and darkness: South by Babak Lakghomi

The sun setting. Quiet sea. The rig looked like a chandelier made of wire. The cranes slanted like seabirds waiting for prey.

This is not a book that eases you in gently, slowly constructing a framework and political context for the events to follow. We are offered no false assurance of safety and normal, only glances into the narrator’s past that indicate that at one time he might have harboured hope for the future, no matter how illusory. When we meet B in the opening passages, he is already off the map, so to speak, and heading for something much larger and darker than he can possibly imagine. But, as he makes his way to the South through a bleak, drought-ravaged landscape inhabited by a sparse impoverished, superstitious population with strange beliefs, he already has serious doubts about the wisdom of his mission:

As a journalist, I tried not to go after topics that the state was sensitive to. My father’s history and my mother’s continuous discouragement had made me conservative. I was diverging from that path now by taking this assignment.

South by Babak Lakghomi, a writer born in Tehran, currently living in Canada, is a desolate, dystopic fable unfolding in an undefined time and place where environmental devastation, political unrest and totalitarian control have distorted the rules that once governed human engagement. That is, a future that seems less distant, less improbable by the day. In Lakghomi’s vision, the increasingly dire economic and ecological circumstances that have plagued an unnamed country have forced men south to work in oil refineries and on off-shore oil rigs, but as the profitability of this industry also starts to decline, labour unrest has started to spread. This is the phenomenon his protagonist B has been sent to report on.

Having just secured a contract to publish a book about his father, a former union leader who mysteriously disappeared when he was a boy, B feels a certain obligation to take the assignment when it is offered to him by his editor. Perhaps it’s for the best. Back home his marriage is faltering and his recent sobriety is shaky. However, when he finally reaches his destination, it soon becomes clear that his presence on the rig will be tolerated, but not welcomed. Finding people willing to talk to him is difficult and, before long, dangerous. His past experiences researching and writing articles, such as an investigation into the extinction of the painted stork, have taught him that much of what is uncovered about the deep layers of corruption running through so much of what is happening in his country cannot be included in a final draft. This time he is even more restricted. He had been required to leave his cellphone and laptop before flying out to the rig. All communications with his editor and publisher, and even his wife, have to pass through administrative staff who can read every word, blocking, altering and fabricating his messages at will.

With a narrative style that is tight, almost skeletal in nature, South moves at a steady pace, growing increasingly distorted and claustrophobic. We gradually learn more about the protagonist, haunted as he is by the unexplained absence of his father, the crumbling state of his marriage, and a recent encounter with a strange woman back in the city, but much of what he is enduring as his circumstances and condition deteriorate, first on the rig and, later, captive on a cargo ship, remain shrouded by mystery. What is clear is that B has found himself caught in a net that reaches into his immediate past and perhaps further, back to whatever took his father away. The helplessness of being in a situation where you don’t even know what kind of a game you’re playing is chilling, a sensation that is heightened by the exceptionally spare prose. Every word counts.

Dystopic fiction can sometimes get bogged down in explanatory detail. In that regard South is stripped to its essentials. Acute attention is given to settings and sensations, but the only named characters are B and his wife Tara. Everyone else is referenced in simple terms—the Editor, the Assistant Cook, the girl with the lighter and so on—preserving an anonymity that reflects how precarious and unreliable every relationship is. And yet against this uncertainty, we have in B a compelling and empathetic narrative voice, continually questioning, struggling as his ordeal weighs on him physically and mentally. The horrific scenario he encounters in the South, one that is closely tied to the all-too-recognizable reality he observes back in the city, make this a novel that sits uncomfortably with a reader—as it should.

South by Babak Lakghomi is published by Rare Machines, an imprint of Dundurn Press.

Making every word count: The Questionable Ones by Judith Keller

A police car drives slowly along the streetcar tracks in front of the central station. The officers scrutinize the waiting pedestrians through the window. Most of those waiting here are out of the question. But some do come into question. These are the questionable ones.

This simple story, “Casting,” not only provides the title for Judith Keller’s collection of micro fictions, now available in English translation by Tess Lewis, but is a perfect representation of what this young Swiss writer is able to achieve with an economy words and a sensitivity to the multiple meanings that potentially blossom from familiar expressions. A quick glance at this book of short (sometimes very short) stories can be misleading. Some pieces are barely two sentences, a number extend for a page or two, while a few stretch to seven or more pages. One might then wonder how much a of story such an abbreviated form can contain, but as Keller knows well, the careful choice of words and the confidence to leave open space for the reader is key.

Arranged into sections named after stops on the Zurich tram line, the stories in The Questionable Ones offer snapshots into the lives, passions and idiosyncrasies of a variety of characters. Absurd, often humorous, sometimes reaching toward the political, Keller’s micro fictions reflect recognizable human emotions and actions, frequently relying on common expressions taken to their literal extreme, or language that is inherently ambiguous. Of course, this reliance on meaning, especially in such a confined literary space, presents a particular challenge for a translator.

The publisher’s webpage for this book features links to a published interview and a video conversation between the author and her translator, both recorded in April 2020 when the pandemic had intervened in Keller’s plans to attend a festival and a residency in New York City. Although both cover her literary influences—including Robert Walser and Ilse Aichinger—and the reasoning behind her unusual decision to study German as a foreign language in Bogota, Colombia, the video is particularly enlightening. It not only offers anyone interested a taste of Keller’s mini fictions, read by the author herself, but zeroes in on some of the difficult decisions her translator faced when the choice of an appropriate word to convey the nuances implicit in the original was not obvious. At this point, the translations were not necessarily fixed in their final form, so several times, Lewis and Keller discuss possible options for critical words in particular pieces. After all, if every word counts in the initial composition, the same is true for the translation. Further, the opportunity to witness the writer and translator openly examining the subtleties of meaning together is inspiring.

Keller’s playfulness with words and capacity to see things from a slightly odd angle allows her to pack more into a few sentences or a few pages in ways that longer, more conventional fiction might not. Less is more. Each piece is left open for interpretation, encouraging the reader to imagine a larger tale. They are at once sketches and revealing portraits of ordinary people trying to make sense of life, one way or another. As well, the spare prose, focused on the most essential, if unusual, qualities of  character and setting leads to some wonderful images. Take for example, the opening of the two-page story “In a House”:

A band of light lay on a hillside as if a glance from half-closed eyes had fallen from above. On the hill stood a house and in it lived a man whose movements were slow. He slowly raked the leaves. He had a wife and two sons. His wife looked like an owl with her brown and golden eyes. She had taken to standing behind herself and sending her body on ahead and calmly watching what happened to it. Their marriage was a muted one.

The only obvious connection between the stories that comprise The Questionable Ones and the tram stations that denote each section—Bucheggplatz, Schwert, Micafil and so on—is the recurring piece, always called “High Time” that closes out each sequence. The circumstances change, but each instance, begins with a “far-fetched woman” making her way through the city, by day or by night, often reaching the relevant tram station and, ends with the acknowledgement that she, or someone else, has been “waiting for it to be high time for a good while now.” This variation on a theme within which what “high time” is meant to refer to is never revealed, adds an intriguing continuity to this irresistible collection of microfictions.

The Questionable Ones by Judith Keller is translated from the German by Tess Lewis and published by Seagull Books.

“I’m afraid of myself.” Down with the Poor! By Shumona Sinha

In my half-sleep I saw faces and bodies emerge out of the floor tiles. Blissful, intrigued, tormented people. They appeared when I blinked my eyes. Disappeared when I blinked my eyes. Like this night, in this police cell. To tell the truth, I am still not rid of that shouting and whispering.

Opening with an epilogue from Pascal Quignard about the implication inherent in ancient Greek notions of liberty and freedom of movement that those who defy borders and fences are akin to wild beasts rather than obedient animals, and taking its title from Baudelaire’s narrative prose poem “Assommons les pauvres!” in which a self-enlightened man inadvertently rebalances inequality by violently attacking an elderly beggar, unleashing an equally violent response from his victim, Shumona Sinha’s novella Down with the Poor! is a relentless meditation on the complicated and corrupted system that drives desperate migrants to seek fairer shores, only to find themselves mired in equally, if not worse, circumstances and threatens to destroy the spirits of those who attempt to help them. As she lies in a cell in a Paris police station, a young woman endeavours to untangle the forces that conspired to drive her, an Indian immigrant working as a translator for asylum claimants, to assault a migrant on the metro by smashing a bottle over his head.

Born and raised in Calcutta, Sinha started studying French at the age of twenty-two and moved to Paris a couple of years later. In this award winning novel, her second, originally published in 2011, her unnamed narrator is also from Calcutta. She is a woman who has tried to separate herself from her parents and her hometown, but finds the shadows of Kali, the city’s dark, powerful and protective deity, and Mother Teresa, its symbol of charity, haunt the life she had imagined she had earned, far from memories of poverty, in France, the adopted country she loves. Everything starts to unravel when a series of personal and professional endings lead her to accept employment as an interpreter—a “language gymnast”—in an office on the edge of Paris where ragged petitioners are called to appear before an officer and make their case, or more typically repeat the story they’ve been forced to purchase, in the hope that they might be allowed to stay in a new hostile, unwelcoming land and make some kind of better life.

Unfolding as an intense monologue, poetic and compulsive, the narrator, in light of her arrest and recent interrogation, navigates a flood of feverish thoughts and memories in attempt to figure out how and where things started to fall apart in her world. From early on it is apparent that her role as the conveyor of meaning, from her first language to her second, is more than a simple act of rewording. For her, it is an act of verbal alchemy that carries an emotional cost.

The officer spoke her language, the language of the host country, the language of glass-walled offices. The petitioner spoke his supplicant’s language, the language of the hidden, the language of the ghetto. And I repeated what he said, translated it and served it up piping hot. The foreign language melted in my mouth, leaving its aroma. When I said the words, those of my native language, they turned awkwardly in my mouth, paralyzed my tongue, echoed in my head, hammered my brain like the wrong notes on a wobbly piano. It was a rope bridge, thin, quivering, between the petitioners and me. I had to lean toward each one of them to hold out my hand, lean into their dismembered, chopped-up sentences, fish for their disjointed words and reassemble them, weave them together, make them sound coherent.

The stories she hears, the horrors, real and embellished alike, start to seep into her being. She finds herself carrying their pain. Their desperation. The knowledge that many, if not most, have paid smugglers dearly, become slaves consigned to a poverty much more wretched and inhumane that anything they left behind, builds up inside her. She seeks to shake it in meaningless sexual encounters, while secretly harbouring an attraction for a female officer that she cannot quite articulate.

Over time, her work takes her into other overlooked corners of the city’s margins, while the in the offices of her primary employment, she finds it increasingly difficult to hold herself apart from the stories she hears. Questions of class, colour, gender are never far from her mind, knowing that her own skin, sex and status bind her to and irrevocably separate her from the masses of refugees, while also keeping her apart from those who are driven into work with these populations by charitable passions. She cannot help but absorb the fear she encounters in others. Eventually that fear is transformed into anger and in turn her anger frightens her. She finds she is afraid of herself.

Holding its intensity for a little over one hundred pages, Down with the Poor! is a poetic novella that addresses some of the most pressing and difficult questions we face today in a manner that is shocking, brutal and lonely. This is a very powerful little book.

Down with the Poor! by Shumona Sinha is translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan and published by Deep Vellum in North America and Les Fugitives in the UK.

“Ask the light to be clement”: Portrait Tales by Jean Frémon

This book arrived unannounced. An author unfamiliar to me, but on the very first page ten previous titles are listed, complete with translator and publisher. Then, on the title page, a personalized salutation from the author himself and the explanation of how this lovely little book found its way to me—the name of the translator: John Taylor. Over the years, through John’s translations, I have come to know of a number of writers and poets who have quickly become indispensable additions to my library. And now, another.

Jean Frémon is French author who, in the words of the publisher of this volume, Les Fugitives, “has been contributing to a trans-genre tendency in contemporary French letters since 1969.” By day, he is the president of Galerie Lelong, by night a prolific writer of poetry, fiction and essays on art, or, quite often, work that blends all three forms. He has published over twenty books in France and the present text, Portrait Tales is a selection of narratives on portraiture originally published in his 2020 book Le miroir magique. His tales explore well-known and little-known works and artists alike, and demonstrate Frémon’s extensive knowledge and deep appreciation of art whether he is playfully fictionalizing his subject or examining artistic techniques or revealing the historical consequences faced by those who allowed their likenesses to be captured against religious or cultural mores.

These short narratives cover a wide range of subjects. He begins with Lucian Freud’s singular, and less than flattering, portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, travels back in time and across the world to close with a remembered conversation with Louise Bourgeois, the only artist to appear twice and someone he worked closely with as a gallerist. In between—although reading the pieces in order is not prescribed, freedom of movement as in an actual gallery is encouraged—we are invited to learn about an Indian ambassador who paid the ultimate price for allowing Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun to paint his portrait in defiance of Koranic law and entertain a meditation on the legendary impossibility of rendering a likeness of a young Jewish prophet named Jesus.

We travel back to Imperial China and Japan, to trace changes to ideas and styles of portraiture and conventions about what can or cannot be captured.  Meanwhile in Europe, a number of factual or elaborated tales unfold. Frémon details, for example, the obsessiveness of Maurice Quentin de la Tour who worried his pastel portraits into being and the revenge of a young sculptor who becomes enamoured with the woman he is commissioned to portray.  One of the shortest and most charming essays, is a sketch of the life and remarkable art of seventeenth-century Italian painter Sofonisba Anguissola:

Having withdrawn to Palermo, Sofonisba continued to paint. There is a self-portrait of her at age seventy-five. She is sitting in an armchair, in a three-quarter profile, her arms on the armrests. A large white ruff surrounds her oval face, which she has not tried to make look younger; her cheeks are hollow, her lips thin and tight; two large folds surround her mouth; but the pose is dignified and her bearing is not without nobility.

Ever confident in her ability to capture life in her many noble subjects and in herself, Frémon closes his sketch with an account of her submission to another artist’s pencil, the young Van Dyk, when he visits her at the age of eighty-nine. Her only instruction to him: “Ask the light to be clement.” It almost feels like each of the artists, or artistic moments  Frémon considers here, is presented in a clement light. It is an intrinsic element of his tone.

Varied in spirit and style, every piece in this slim volume is a gem, enlightening and entertaining. As I was reading, I frequently found myself stopping to search the internet to find the portrait or artist in question, if such a record was available. That is a compliment, of course, not a criticism. A sign of a good book is, for me, one that sends a reader down the odd rabbit hole or two, expanding the experience of reading beyond the pages of the text.

Portrait Tales by Jean Frémon is translated from the French by John Taylor and published by Les Fugitives.

Holding the fort: The Stronghold by Dino Buzzati

Fortezza Bastiani was neither imposing with its low walls nor beautiful in any way. Its towers and ramparts weren’t picturesque. Absolutely nothing alleviated its starkness or recalled the sweet things of life. Yet Drogo gazed at it, hypnotized as on the previous night from the base of the gorge. And an inexplicable ardor penetrated his heart.

As newly commissioned officer Giovani Drogo makes his way to the mysterious fortress on the mountainous northern border of his homeland, he is unable to imagine what lies ahead. When he chances upon Captain Ortiz who is heading in the same direction, he is surprised to hear that the older man has already spent eighteen years at the Fortezza, and speaks of it in less than glowing terms. And yet, as the structure finally comes into view, the young lieutenant is struck by a strange attraction. He also notices, in the captain’s face, a curious mix of joy and sadness. The complicated motion he observes on this day, is one he too will succumb to.

The Stronghold, the best known work by Italian journalist and writer Dino Buzzati (1906–1972), is a tragic tale of how easily youthful ambition and dreams of glory can be lost to the slow erosion of time. Travelling a fine line between the realistic and the fantastic, this novel is a slow, steady march toward an ending as inevitable as it is unexpectedly unkind. When Drogo first arrives, he quickly learns that Fortezza Bastiani’s glory days are long gone. Young soldiers tend to volunteer simply because two years at this bleak outpost count for four, effectively jumpstarting their military careers. But something’s wrong. Drogo did not volunteer, he was assigned. He argues that a mistake has been made, he requests a release from his commitment. His superior responds with apparent empathy, encouraging him to stay for a mere four months for appearances’ sake. Then something can be arranged, a visit to the fort’s doctor to receive a diagnosis that will assure his reassignment. Four months in, however, he will decide to stay. He will have fallen under the spell of the fortress, the towering mountain range that cradles it and its proximity to that vast unknown desert where an enemy may well lurk, preparing to strike. The possibility of glory is a powerful drug.

Through Drogo’s mind passed the memory of his city, an indistinct image—streets thunderous under the rain, plaster statues, dampness in barracks, dreary bells, faces weary and haggard, endless afternoons, attics dirty with dust.

Here, however, the vast mountain night was advancing, clouds in flight over the Fortezza, miraculous omens. From the north, from the invisible north behind the walls, Drogo felt that his own destiny was pressing.

Buzzati skillfully balances finely drawn scenes—Drogo’s first return to the city, the excitement and speculation when figures are perceived moving out of the distant mists of the frontier, or an ill-fated expedition to mark the boundary—against the passage of months and years and decades. An aching, sorrowful mood rests over the stark beauty of the harsh landscape that so captivates the men who dedicate their careers to this mostly forgotten frontier. And, as much as we know his fate is sealed, it is difficult not to feel for the young man with the confidence of a whole life ahead of him as he ultimately finds himself following the pattern of the other officers who spend their entire careers walking the halls and ramparts of the isolated fort, caught up in the swell of self-importance, routine, and vague purpose.

Originally published in 1940 as Il deserto dei Tartari, the novel was widely praised, relieving the doubts and insecurities that had dogged its author throughout the creative process. Although Buzzati was drawing on some of his own experiences covering conflict and inspired in part by his appreciation for Kafka’s The Castle, this work is not an explicitly political. The country is never named, nor is the neighboring land of desert. The enemy exists primarily in the minds of the soldiers. The questions it raises, the author suggests, about “hope and the life that passes fruitlessly” are existential in nature. Yet, when the first English translation by Stuart Hood appeared in 1952, the chosen title, The Tartar Steppe, encouraged readers to understand it in relation the Cold War and fear of the USSR. Meanwhile, in Italy, it would come to be seen as a critique of fascism. The novel’s openness to interpretation is indicative of its strength as a timeless and recognizable fable, one that can apply to both the personal and political.

This new translation by Lawrence Venuti—now with a title reflecting the original title the author wanted—attempts to allow for the historical interpretations without losing the humanist qualities earlier readers connected with. It also leaves intact some Italian greetings and terms, to situate the narrative in a particular culture and add a “political edge” in certain scenes. Otherwise, Venuti aims to adopt an English that would be accessible to a broad anglophone audience. His Afterword is quite illuminating, deepening an appreciation of Buzzati’s aims, this fine novel’s reception over the years and his approach to translation. It is one of two works by Buzzati recently added the New York Review of Books Classics catalogue.

The Stronghold by Dino Buzzati is translated from the Italian by Lawrence Venuti and published by NYRB Classics.

Remembering prewar Prague: House of the Nine Devils: Selected Bohemian Tales by Johannes Urzidil

This fine collection of stories by Prague native Johannes Urzidil, recently published in English translation by David Burnett, House of the Nine Devils, opens with—and takes its title from— a fantastic tale of a haunted house in the city’s Lesser Town that hides a dark mysterious past going back centuries. Although most of the stories that follow move away from this more explicitly gothic energy, they are filled with strange coincidences and unlikely adventures that lead their protagonists, all echoes of the author himself, into encounters that are coloured with the unique atmosphere of the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia in the early twentieth century. As the narrator’s father story tells his son in the opening story:

“But this Prague, where you too were born, is an old city of magic. This is where the rabbis had their sorcerer’s apprentices and where the emperors kept their alchemists. Many things come together here — East and West, Jew and Christian, Czech and German, North and South — and where many essences converge, many wondrous, inconceivable things come to pass: things, words, characters and occurrences  that have never been seen before. It’s a breeding ground for spells and magic powers.”

And so it is. In the hands of a master storyteller, even a young boy can find himself encountering all kinds of unusual people and mysteries in this charmed city.

Johannes Urzidil (1896–1970) was the son of German nationalist and “passionate” railway official born in a rural part of western Bohemia, and a Jewish woman from Prague who died when he was just four years old. His father was a Catholic who never practiced his faith and believed in taking his son to various houses of worship to demonstrate that all religions were equal. Nonetheless, he insisted his boy practice Catholicism. His second wife, Johannes’ stepmother, was a staunch Czech nationalist, and their volatile marriage together Urzidil’s own fraught relationship with the woman he refers to as “ his step” adds much colour and humour to many of the stories collected here.

Urzidil published his first poems at age seventeen and began to associate with members of the so-called Prague Circle where he became friends with Kafka, Franz Werfel, Max Brod and others. In his Afterword, translator David Burnett, reports that he “had the honor of holding one of three funeral orations for Kafka in 1924, predicting his future fame.” Through the 1920s and early 30s, he worked as a translator and press attaché for the German Embassy while continuing to publish poetry, essays and criticism. He co-founded and managed the German Writers Union of Czechoslovakia until political tensions led to his resignation in 1933. By this time, despite his German background, his mother’s Jewish heritage and his marriage to the daughter of a rabbi, made it difficult for him to find work and, eventually, unsafe to remain in the city of his birth. He and his wife escaped in 1939, first to England, then to the US where they settled in New York City.

For Urzidil, fiction writing did not become a serious pursuit until later in life. His breakthrough work, The Last Beloved, a collection of autobiographical stories, was published in Munich in 1956 when he was sixty years-old.  His final decade of life, the 1960s, were very prolific. Of his seventy-odd stories, many blending elements of fiction, biography and essay, about a quarter were set in America, a handful in assorted European settings, but the majority of his best loved works take place in prewar Prague and Bohemia. It is from these stories across five German publications that the pieces in House of the Nine Devils are drawn. They are arranged in a roughly chronological order—by setting, not publication date—in an attempt to create a “more coherent whole” or a kind of fictional memoir, reflecting the degree to which Urzidil’s family and life experiences fed his writing.

Perhaps because he came to storytelling so late in life, Urzidil’s stories have the warmth and wry-humour of an older relative recounting tales of his youth, playing up the unexpected twists and turns. His narrators’ seemingly innocuous adventures—looking for a lost wallet, delivering messages, dropping in to visit with friends—put them in the paths of bored police officers late on New Year’s Eve, a fated opera singer, a suicidal railroad inspector, or a murderous fugitive. As he tells us in “The Last Tombola”:

People were always using me to drop things off. I was always running through streets and from floor to floor with notes, letters, and messages for other people. That’s pretty much my life. And whenever you have to drop something off, awful things always seem to happen.

This longer story begins with its young protagonist being charged to deliver a report to his father’s visiting superior with whom his family had dined the night before. He will soon learn that Herr Pernold has hung himself from his Grüss Gott suspenders, an event that sets off a richly complicated (and funny) tale of mystery, morality, concerns about renumeration, and ripe opportunities for humour at the boy’s step mother’s expense, something that first arises in the opening paragraph as the narrator notes that his delivery assignment will take him to The Imperial Hotel on Na Poříčí:

Na Poříčí is Czech for “on the riverbank,” which is fair enough for the Moldau flows nearby. Still, I had an instinctive aversion to this Prague street, its two chafing affricates reminding me of the sand-yellow paletot that hugged the hips of my stepmother around the time my father was courting her. I had witnessed this courtship and once heard her say, “It chafes me; I bought it on Na Poříčí.” “Good,” I remarked, because I felt this lady couldn’t be chafed enough. “Who asked you?” asked my father. “I asked me,” I answered. He was about to give me a royal smack in the face, which usually accompanied by the words, “When duty calls, feelings must be silent.” Yet this time he abstained from getting violent, not wanting to appear ungallant in front of the lady. He looked at me instead like Cronus before he ate his children.

This kind of sly, smart humour is one of the most wonderful features of Urzidil’s stories. And indicative of the relationship he, or rather his protagonist, has with his father with whom, for the cost of a slap in the face, he is allowed to voice what they both often think about his step’s moaning and complaining which only increase after the marriage. It is a recurring motif in many tales, one grounded in the author’s real life, as he reveals in the two, biographical essay-like pieces that round out the collection wherein he talks honestly about his beloved father and the difficult woman who became his second wife.

Prague in the first decade of the twentieth century is vividly evoked in so many of the tales in this collection, as are the social dynamics of the life of a lower middle-class family, the tensions that exist between Germans and Czechs, and the sense (at least to a young boy) that the Austro-Hungarian Empire is eternal. Then there are stories set during the First World War and, notably, “One Last Deed,” which depicts the dangerous environment in the city for men like Urzidil during Nazi occupation through an account that finds the protagonist taking refuge in the hovel of an eccentric former schoolmate.

The particular charm of Urzidil’s fiction lies in the warmth and charisma of his narrators, effortlessly spinning entertaining tales. Gathered together, the stories collected here do, as intended, read like a loose memoir recounted with a healthy measure of creative license. The boy, his railway official father, and his cantankerous stepmother provide the continuity. Like other natural story-tellers who regularly dip into the same well—perhaps a fictional community, or the life of a recurring alter ego—Urzidil has the ability to make each story feel fresh and unexpected. Hopefully more of his fiction will be translated in the future.

House of the Nine Devils: Selected Bohemian Tales by Johannes Urzidil is translated from the German by David Burnett and published in a handsome hardcover edition by Twisted Spoon Press.

Grief-tinted memories: Reflections on Mother Muse Quintet by Naveen Kishore

The loss of a beloved parent inspires a tumult of emotion and weaves complex webs of images that fragment and coalesce over time. It is, I have learned, a living grief, something that ties us to our own past in ways that shift and change in a manner that cannot be mapped or predicted.

Today, as I gather my thoughts about the latest poetry collection by my friend Naveen Kishore, my own mother has been gone for exactly seven years. On July 9th, 2016, my daughter and I sat at her bedside waiting for my brothers to make it to the city. When they arrived, we knew her respirator would be removed and we would say good-bye. She had been plagued by an increasing frailty for many years, but had remained mentally sharp until her final month which was marked by a rapid decline. Meanwhile, in another local hospital, my father lay unconscious following a stroke and head-on collision and, within a few days, a similar, if more prolonged vigil would commence at his bedside. But on this day, what I remember most vividly is my daughter gently tickling her grandmother’s arms as she had once done for her when she was a little girl. Her presence was a comfort to myself and my mother that day.

Over the five sections of Mother Muse Quintet, Naveen Kishore, the highly respected publisher of Seagull Books, honours his own mother, moving through the varying shapes and forms that memories take, and the way they continue to embrace and comfort us as we ourselves age. It is both a tender, personal tribute and a gentle lesson about opening ourselves up to capture our own memories on the page.

The first part evokes a son’s tribute to a mother who offered security and continuity to a young child, filling him with the stories and songs of her own childhood and family history and now, as the fog closes in around her, looks to him for guidance and assurance.

Build me a self. She pleaded. A whole one? I asked. One
I can call my own. Self. Again. She said. I looked at her.
Swiftly. Almost surreptitiously. My gaze. First taking in the
dignity. The earnestness. Hers. And of the request. The
controlled undertone. Not quite panic. Yet. And trust. The
faith. That I could. And would. Help rebuild. Not just her
self. But also her sense of being. Hers. No room for doubt.

In verse and in measured prose, this sequence introduces us to Prem (her son always called her by her first name) as a young girl in Lahore, as a confident woman, and as someone drifting away from the familiarity of her own reflection. And to giving up her ashes “to the care of the river.” But that is only the beginning. As the progression through the following parts of this quintet demonstrate, grief, which may begin long before death, unfolds as an ebb and flow of memories that are sometimes fragmentary or fleeting, other times taking shape in the imagining of one’s earliest years. Time loses its chronological dominion over our hearts as the beloved parent’s presence takes on a new form. They are deeply missed, but somehow always close by.

This is what I draw from Mother Muse Quintet. There are poems that often call to mind very detailed circumstances, as in the piece that records the poet’s grandmother’s prolonged illness and death and the strain it placed on his mother as she cared for her mother-in-law. Those are the moments we experience, even assist with as children, that take on a new poignancy after we have become the caregiver in turn. There are other open poems, words scattered across the page that reflect the way that the memories that stay with us down the years often become moods, qualities of light, seasons and colours. What arises can be an emotion without specific image or form, but you know who it is.

endings
endings unending
night      how you grow pale

breathe into         this parting
punctuated
by urgency

I would if I could night              sing you awake
among the          birdcall
the         barking of dogs

Not all of this volume is completely new to me. I have been privileged to receive a passage or two, shared, in earlier form, when it seemed appropriate. I treasure these in my “grief folder,” created after my parents’ deaths. There is so much of the mother connection/memory in this collection that I recognize, that triggers my own equally personal response. The final poems imply that Naveen also wishes to inspire others to write—to record their own memories, so we too may hold our loved ones as ever present as daylight and pale moons, as that essence we are forever aware of, lingering.

Mother Muse Quintet by Naveen Kishore is published by Speaking Tiger.

“Things are always ever only about to happen”: Falling Hour by Geoffrey D. Morrison

We all know the Sebaldian trope—man/woman goes for a walk and thinks about “stuff.” In Canadian poet Geoffrey D. Morrison’s debut novel, Falling Hour, a man takes a picture frame to a park on a summer day, the outside world mysteriously recedes, and he spends the rest of the day thinking about “stuff”—or so it seems. Over the course of this oddly distended day, the narrator who introduces himself gradually as Hugh Dalgarno will reflect on, among other things, his life, his criticisms of Canadian political history and the audacity of colonial ventures in the Americas in general, his thoughts on literature, and a series of tales of less than illustrious (in his mind) historical figures, most of them Scotsmen as, for his sins, is he. Hugh is, by his own admission, an odd fellow, isolated and adrift within the murky reaches of his own existence:

The dark sea of myself existed in unclear relation to my brain and its brokenness: was my brain the sea, or a vessel on this sea, or the navigator in the cabin, or her instruments? Or was my brain the wind and rain and bitter crosscurrents that churned the sea’s surface like a fearsome avenging hand? I did not know then, in the park. Wherever it is I am now I continue not to know.

Did I mention that his brain is broken? It is, or was, or perhaps may still be, but he reminds us, his listener/reader/audience, of this fact on a regular basis.

The story begins with a rather mundane premise. Hugh has come to the park on a hot summer day to meet a stranger who has, through emails, agreed to purchase a picture frame that he found hanging off a fire hydrant. While he waits, his mind begins to wander and, when the stranger fails to materialize, he begins to wander as well, making his way across the eerily empty park, into the forest on one side and back again. As the hours stretch on, uncounted because his cellphone has died, Hugh becomes aware that he has seen or heard no signs of human or domestic animal life for hours; his only company are birds, insects and amphibians. He also comes to realize that he is unable to leave. He is, in essence trapped within the rectangular frame of a large park in a “suffering inland industrial town” in Ontario that he never directly names, but only barely disguises.

Hugh’s personal history is a curious one. He was born in Scotland but his parents, about whom he knows little, apparently struggled with addiction so, at the age of four, it is deemed best that he be shipped off to Canada to be raised on the west coast by his great aunt and uncle. Although they were in their sixties when he came into their lives, theirs is a loving home within which he is steeped in socialist values. Meanwhile, in the outside world, he is a bit of a outsider, not quite fitting in with his peers. That misfit nature seems to accompany him, to a greater or lesser degree, until, at the age of thirty-one, he finds himself lingering on in the city he moved to for grad school, a loner content to work from home, missing the seaside of his youth but unable or unwilling to return.

For someone so socially isolated with a brain he describes as “broken” without ever making it explicit whether that brokenness has a psychiatric basis of some sort, Hugh’s endlessly divergent account of his day in the park reveals a man with a wide range of interests, questions, doubts and opinions. He dissects the opening scene of the movie The Conversation, takes Keats to task for any number of shortcomings as expressed his letters, examines the impact of Calvinism on the Scottish working class and Methodism on Canadian history, and marvels at the unique appearance of the arbutus tree and the seductive call of the red-winged blackbird. His discourses fall in and out of rants, and branch off into fascinating historical asides that somehow link back to earlier themes and obsessions. He quotes poetry and song, and philosophizes about the nature of reality—a reality that becomes more slippery as the day goes on:

But without waiting to resolve the metaphysics, I passed under the door shape in the leaves anyway and out into the open space of the park. The forms and shapes I had passed on my way to the forest were present as before: the toilets, the benches, the baseball diamond. Only they weren’t those things now. They too were in some sense visible but not real.

The game of baseball had never been played. There were no games. There were arbitrary geometric dances across temporary lines in the sand. Nothing on earth was truly the name we called it by. Nothing. So I felt in that moment, and which second that passed, the workings of a certain familiar mind virus grew stronger inside of me. It often came to me after I reached the heights of an enthusiasm and my enthusiasm crested and I was left panting and ragged like a defeated army on a plain. Enthusiasm, that nineteenth-century word. The virus was a strange hypercorrection to enthusiasm, a dousing in the coldest and deepest waters of the inner sea the former flames of my broken belief.

Oh yes, Morrison is fashioning anew the mechanics of the man/woman-walking-and-thinking internal monologue by giving it to a mildly absurd narrator who is intelligent, sensitive, opinionated and somewhat paranoid. And one who is not entirely in control of his own story, even in the telling. We see this in the measure of uncertainty running through Hugh’s narrative—it’s a double stranded quality, one strand tied to the ongoing strangeness of the day he is describing, the other stemming from his attempts to place himself “wherever it is that I am now” against the “now” of the story unfolding in a past, be it near or far. He loses his place, retraces his steps, and acknowledges that he is holding off on particular subjects for a time, yet it’s unclear whether the digressions that arise belong to his thoughts on the day in question, or to his effort to reconstruct it, or a little of each. When he reaches a discussion of “stream of consciousness,” assuming his listener/reader has likely wondered why it has not already emerged, he details his attraction to and skepticism of the concept while the text itself takes on the form of chapter-long unbroken paragraphs until, several chapters later, a pattern of paragraph breaks resumes as Hugh once again attempts to step outside himself to assess his progress and circumstances. It is probably fair to view the entire novel as a “stream of self-consciousness” but, no matter how one wishes to imagine it, Hugh’s strange day in the park with an empty frame packs a wealth of interesting and entertaining  “stuff” into one rectangular space—this book, that is.

Falling Hour by Geoffrey D. Morrison is published by Coach House Books.