Tag: literature

People can grow old anywhere: Man in the Holocene by Max Frisch

—only human beings can recognize catastrophe, provided they survive them; Nature recognizes no catastrophes.

—man emerged in the Holocene.

It has been raining for days now, no night passes without thunderstorms and cloudbursts. In fact, Geiser can catalogue more types of thunder than the Encyclopedia which, to be fair, is rather mute on the subject, preferring to describe lightening instead. But, when we meet him, the seventy-four year-old widower is passing yet another stormy night trying to build a pagoda out of crispbread. And worrying the possibility of landslides. The highway through the valley is blocked so the mail bus can’t get through. Periodically the power goes out. To get through, he is intent on keeping his mind active, reading, accumulating facts and endeavouring to remember those details—like mathematical formulas—that have slipped into the dust of his aging memory.

Man in the Holocene by Swiss writer Max Frisch is by turns the funny, unconventional, and bittersweet tale of a man who is waging his own little battle against the dying of the light, and attempting to construct a refuge in a gallery of facts while the storm rages outside his door.

Somewhere a tapping on metal.

He trains his field glasses on the mountainside watching for cracks, and reads up on the meteorological history of the valley he has lived in for the past fourteen years. He  delves into matters of rock formation, studies the measurement of geological time, and records details about dinosaurs. He begins by copying out information, but soon realizes that it is far more efficient to clip out passages of interest from the encyclopedia, the Bible, and other books, and then tape them to the walls of his home. Reproductions of his various cut and paste selections are embedded in the text.

Occasionally Geiser ventures out, umbrella in hand, to examine the state of his garden with its fallen dry stone wall, or once the power goes out for an extended period, to give away all the food in his deepfreeze—“the meat, usually hard as iron, is flabby, and the trout are repulsive to the touch, the sausages soft as slugs.” Only when he returns home, having foisted his thawed goods on his befuddled neighbours, does he remember that he could have at least roasted the meat over the fire in the wood stove.

One is becoming stupid—!

Through a fragmented text, repeated refrains, collected facts, and Geiser’s increasingly muddled meditations, Frisch brings us into the interior world of a truly memorable protagonist. He is a modest, somewhat eccentric figure who, at least since his wife’s death, has tended to keep to himself. Originally from Basel, where his daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren still live, he is an outsider, no matter how long he has lived in the valley. “A valley without through traffic,” as he describes it. A detailed description of the region, its industry, and social history is, if rather nonchalant in tone, not without moments of dry humour:

In the summer there are cranberries, also mushrooms. When it is not raining, the white trails of passenger planes can be seen high in the sky, though one does not hear them. The last murder in the valley—and that only rumored, since it never came to court—happened whole decades ago. Ever since the young men have owned motorcycles, incest has been dying out, and so has sodomy.

Women have had the vote since 1971.

What makes this novella work so well is that it is not simply an assemblage of fragmented passages, repeated refrains, and a collection of assorted facts. It is a well-paced and orchestrated, if crumbling, tragic comedy.  Geiser’s memory may be fading, but the narrative takes us into vivid accounts of the Icelandic landscape he once visited and a youthful attempt to climb the Matterhorn with his brother (a story he’s told so often that even his grandchildren are tired of it). And then there is his possibly ill-advised decision to, due to the blocked highway, head off early one morning with the goal of crossing the mountain pass so he can catch a train to the city. He changes his mind quite late into the adventure and returns home a weakened and diminished soul. A tired, confused man now determined to shut out the world once and for all, but still the reluctant hero of a story that is beautiful, sad, and quite unexpected.

Man in the Holocene by Max Frisch is translated from the German by Geoffrey Skelton and published by Dalkey Archive.

The reversal of the currents: The Lockmaster by Christoph Ransmayr

Five dead. That is the fact the opens and haunts The Lockmaster: A Short Story of Killing by Austrian author Christoph Ransmayr. Five people are killed when a longboat carrying twelve capsized above the Great Falls of the White River when the sluice gates suddenly opened releasing a torrent of water that caused the vessel to lose control and shoot downstream, all while a crowd of festival goers watched from the sidelines. The lockmaster, who had for thirty years, proudly guided boats safely around the falls through a series of locks, made a valiant effort to manually close the gate, and was locally regarded as a hero. But when his son, a hydraulic engineer working on a project in Brazil, receives word of the event, he is not so sure it is an accident.

Set in some indeterminate future time, when sea levels are rising and inland regions are drying out, this novella depicts a world in which water is a precious resource to be defended by force. In many places the tensions over resources have ignited tribal wars or enabled the rise of brutal dictatorships while in Europe the political landscape has been shattered into a vast number of warring microstates each with their own flags, languages, cultures and long list of enemies. The narrator and his sister Mira, as the children of the lockmaster and his foreign wife, grow up in a socially isolated home situated above the falls. The waterways are their playground, but all of their education is conducted over screens, so they rarely engage with other young people. As a result, they develop an intimate relationship, something that is no longer taboo but nonetheless unsettling to imagine, especially because the narrator is still so thoroughly obsessed with Mira who has a rare condition that makes her bones exceptionally fragile.

One year after the incident at the festival, the lockmaster himself disappears. When an angler reports having seen a man in a boat dragged over the crest of the Great Falls, although no remains are found, he assumed to have drowned. At this point, the narrator is still in Brazil, the very tight, globally controlled restrictions surrounding major water projects forbid his departure even for a family emergency. His sister is left to tidy up their father’s affairs (their foreign mother had long since been deported from the small central European microstate in which they lived) and by the time he finally gets home, even his beloved Mira is gone, having married a dyke reeve and moved with him to the rapidly eroding shoreline of the Elbe estuary. Already questioning his father’s innocence in the collapse of the festival longboat, when the narrator reaches his next assignment on the Mekong River, he is certain that his father is both a heartless killer and still alive.

Five or seven or twelve cannot have made any difference to him—after all, the precise number of their victims did not bother the bomb planters and well poisoners who were, in those times, bent on drawing attention to themselves and their grand ideas in countries, tribal areas and microstates. Deaths meant fear; and fear meant open ears and open eyes. No one could fail to hear; no one could fail to see what a murderer did, even if he denied his deed.

With this crime, my father clearly wanted to defy the course of time and take himself back to overweening dreams where a lockmaster had been more, much more and more influential than the curator of an open-air museum on the White River could ever be.

The world of conflict, armies, mercenaries, and rebels within which the narrator moves in his work which has taken him to so many of the earth’s great rivers, colours his understanding of the tragic event at the Great Falls and his father’s presumed role in it. He vows to hunt him down and kill him.

This is a more focused effort than Ransmayr’s more sweeping work like Atlas of an Anxious Man, but it does highlight his broad global perspective and ability to evoke a vivid natural—or unnatural—atmosphere as his protagonist navigates the world of his present and remembered past. But the narrator is not a readily sympathetic character. He continually refers to his father as a “man of the past,” but his own refusal to accept that his fragile sister has had the audacity to marry someone else and not sit at the Great Falls waiting for him while he travelled the world, demonstrates that he too is caught in his own self-centred and, to be honest, somewhat disturbing incestuous longings. This is, of course, a fable. A dark speculative folktale. Neither the characters nor the political and environmental dimensions are fully fleshed out—but in such a fractured and volatile world, the protagonist’s insularity would be an expected coping mechanism. As such, the oddly discomfiting narrator is not only plausible, but he adds a suitably unnerving tone to the gloomy undercurrents already driving his story. And Ransmayr’s trademark spare, poetic prose adds a further chilled quality to the work.

The Lockmaster: A Short Story of Killing by Christoph Ransmayr is translated from the German by Simon Pare and published by Seagull Books.

There be monsters: Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears by László Földényi

Humans have become alienated from their own history, as they are from their own cosmic nature.
– “Mass and Spirit”

The title is irresistible. It is impossible to read it and not wonder: what is this book about? In truth, it is about many things, or rather, many ideas, but in essence they can all be understood as variations on a dichotomous theme: darkness and light. Pivotal to these inquiries is the lasting impact of post-Enlightenment thinking on a traditional understanding of metaphysics, that is, questions of being and the nature of reality. Where once religion, or belief in God, gods, or some transcendent quality of existence could be turned to in times of darkness, the Enlightenment heralded a belief in “the omnipotence of reason that illuminates all phenomena.” Yet, as László Földenyi posits in this wide-ranging collection of essays, adroitly translated by Ottilie Muzlet, darkness and light (or other similar opposites or variants) are inextricably linked—one cannot be imagined or understood without the other—but in our secularized modern age, we, in our restricted, nondivine omnipotence can find ourselves confronting our own fragility in situations where reason alone may not seem like enough to fall back on. What then?

In his explorations of this conundrum, Földenyi, a Hungarian critic, essayist and professor of art based in Budapest, entertains the ideas, experiences and tribulations of a broad cast of thinkers, writers, poets, artists, and literary figures including Elias Canetti, Heinrich von Kleist, Caspar David Friedrich, Nietzsche, Novalis, Marquis de Sade, Antonin Artaud, and many more. And, of course, the protagonists of the evocatively titled eponymous essay: Dostoyevsky and Hegel. As he examines the manner in which rationalism, and within it a constrained idea of freedom and existence, has been met by those who chafed against its confines to a greater or lesser extent, Hegel is often assigned to the role of advocate for the primacy of logic and reason—not necessarily always fairly—so he makes a regular appearance in a number of pieces. But his main starring role is as philosophical foil to a certain Russian writer exiled to Siberia.

“Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts in Tears” is a vivid exercise in imagination which takes us to Semipalatinsk in southern Siberia where Dostoyevsky was sent in 1854, to serve a period of military service following four years of forced labour. In this barren, desert environment, he lived in a sparely furnished room and made friends with the young local prosecutor, Aleksander Yegorovich Vrangel, with whom he recited poetry, discussed religion, most critically, studied the books that Vrangel was able to secure for him. There is some reason to believe that one of the authors they read together was Hegel, possibly his lectures on the philosophy of world history, either ordered from Germany or in the form of the book in which they had been gathered and published. Földényi enthusiastically admits that he is taking liberties with his assumptions, but the notion is too tempting to resist.

Dostoyevsky emerged from his years of imprisonment and exile, as a man and writer whose experience with hardship and isolation had ignited a metaphysical drive that he would go on to channel against nineteenth century Europe’s adherence to utilitarianism and rationality through his protagonists. For Hegel, history, despite its messiness and violence,  could only be properly understood as the logical, progressive march of reason. That which fails to conform—at least in terms a European mind might understand, as such Africa and Siberia—is relegated to stand outside of the historical process and to be worth no further consideration.

If the infinite and the transcendent become lost behind the finite things, then it is no longer possible to speak of freedom. God, subjugated to rationality, is not the God of freedom, but of politics, conquest, and colonization. This is the secular religion of the God of the modern age. And history—looking at it from a Hegelian point of view—is the history of secularization. Dostoyevsky might have justifiably felt that Hegel was not just ushering Siberia (and himself with it) out the door; he was trying to convince, in missionary-like fashion, all humanity to accept as historical only that which the censorship of rationality admitted as such.

In envisioning an intellectual clash between the ideals represented by Hegel, and Dostoyevsky’s own experience of life in a place deemed separate from history, under conditions he would never have known had he not been forced to leave Europe, Földényi sees the ground for the openly acknowledged spiritual transformation that the Russian underwent in Siberia, and the writer he would become.

This may be the most passionate essay in the collection, but many of the smaller, quieter pieces turn on equally intriguing ideas in an open, speculative manner. He writes, for example, about happiness and melancholy, fear and freedom, sleep and dreams. Often his intention is to push beyond a simple dichotomy, at other times he wishes to dig down into an idea through the examination of the lives and ideas of one or more individual who found themselves confronting the limitations imposed by a society dedicated to the furthering of rational ideals. Case in point, in the also cleverly titled “Kleist Dies and Dies and Dies,” Földényi unwinds Kleist’s trajectory from an enthusiastic supporter of Enlightenment ideas through an early “Kantian crisis” which shattered his faith that Truth was knowable, to an act—possibly inspired in part by Goethe’s Werther—that eclipsed any of his writing: his carefully orchestrated double suicide with Henriette Vogel on November 21, 1811.

It bears repeating: the death of Kleist is the most thoroughly documented event of his entire life. The French-Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran justifiably states that it is impossible to read even one line of Kleist without thinking of how he put an end to his own life. His suicide preceded, as it were, his life’s work.

It is tempting to consider, and Földényi obliges, how Kleist’s embrace of death, or the act of dying, might be an answer to the loss he felt in an uncertain world.

The pieces in this collection were published in their original form (some have been substantially revised) between 1990 and 2015. They are not presented chronologically, nor can they be read as one cohesive argument, not least due to the fact that times, and presumably their author’s views, change. But it is telling that the volume opens and closes with essays addressed to Elias Canetti: the first, “Mass and Spirit” written in honour of his ninetieth birth anniversary, the latter, “A Capacity for Amazement,” an examination of his seminal Crowds and Power, fifty years after its original publication in 1960. His examination of Canetti’s exploration of the universal crowd and its ambiguous role in human history is measured, at least for Földényi, against Hegel’s understanding of universal freedom as a rational ideal. For Canetti, the crowd is more than a gathering of humans, it transcends that simple notion to incorporate all natural phenomena, it is cosmic and inherently irrational. Although he may or may not be onside with all the implications of Canetti’s singular arguments, Földényi clearly admires his metaphysical energy and, as the title suggests, his capacity for amazement.

The best essays wrestle with ideas, challenge assumptions, and invite the reader to entertain possibilities, debate with them or, even better, be inspired to read further. Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel is filled with references to so many writers and works that it is impossible not to stop to look someone or something up, or pull a volume off one’s shelves. It encourages side trips down rabbit holes. And that is what is so rewarding about spending time with László Földényi and the fascinating company he keeps.

Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears by László Földényi is translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet and published by Yale University Press.

Who holds the truth? Sister Deborah by Scholastique Mukasonga

The latest work from Rwandan writer Scholastique Mukasonga, to be released in English translation, is a novella that takes us back to 1930s Rwanda when the small, landlocked east African country was under the administrative control of Belgian authorities and the religious influence of the Catholic church. With the arrival of a group of black American evangelists, life in a small community faces unprecedented challenges to both the externally enforced regulations and the traditional norms of social conduct. When the local chief grants them permission to establish their mission on a hillside long associated with pagan rituals of the past, rumours spread and curiosity is aroused by their seemingly strange services and the enigmatic prophetess who dances, babbles in strange tongues, and appears to have miraculous healing powers. Women, in particular, are drawn to her, while the village men tend to regard her and her odd companions with distrust.

Meanwhile, the narrator of this tale, Ikirezi, is a sickly young girl mysteriously prone to endless maladies. Suspicious of the white man’s medicine, her mother applies all of the home remedies she can think—all to no avail. Ikirezi’s illnesses only grow worse. There is, she decides, but one solution:

“Tomorrow we’ll go to see Sister Deborah, she’ll be able to cure you. Tomorrow we’ll go to Niyabikenke, to the mission of the black padri.” If my father noticed our travel preparations, he exploded in fury. “You are not going to that devil’s mission. I forbid it! Didn’t you hear what our real padri said about it? They’re sorcerers from a land called America, a country that might not even exist because it’s the land of the dead, the land of the damned. They have not been baptized with good holy water. And they are black—all the real padri are white. I forbid you to drag my daughter there and offer her to the demon hiding in the head and belly of that witch you call Deborah. You can go to the devil if you like but spare my daughter.”

Ikirezi, we will later learn, is not only strengthened physically and intellectually as result of her encounters with the foreign faith healer, but she goes on to study abroad and become an anthropologist. This accounts, perhaps, for the  tone of the of the extended first section of Sister Deborah which  often relies on varying details, reports, and speculation about what might or might not have happened, resembling at times a sort of gathering and integration of field data. The narrative extends beyond that of a child’s experience, describing the conditions surrounding the settlement of the American missionaries, the black pastor’s talk of the impending return of the Savior to this very location in the heart of Africa, and Sister Deborah’s particular appeal to the womenfolk, some of whom come to understand her to be implying that the Savior will likely be a black woman who will descend from the clouds bearing a special seed that will grow and flourish to feed their families without back breaking labour, thus releasing them from the constraints imposed on them by their husbands and economic traditions. Needless to say, the men of the community, the church, and the administrative powers are unsettled by the disruptions and feminine empowerment that arises in the wake of Sister Deborah’s influence. A series of events that lead to the expulsion of the Americans and the disappearance, or possible death of the prophetess are shrouded in confusion and conflicting accounts.

A brief second part considers the possible fate of Sister Deborah and allows Ikirezi to explain how she came to be a professor based in Washington, DC, dedicated to the study of her people but oddly aware of the hands of Sister Deborah somehow guiding her. She senses she has to follow a path laid out for her. Research leads her to a shantytown in Nairobi where she finds the faith healer, now known as Mama Nganga, and turns the narrative over to her. Now, the woman at the heart of this tale, has an opportunity to tell, on her own terms, the story of her life, reaching back into her own childhood in America and forward, through the formation of the missionary project, the long journey to Rwanda, her mystical awakening, and beyond the turmoil in Niyabikenke, to the life and identity she has created for herself in Kenya.

Her own spiritual evolution, as she describes it, was filled with mystery, even as she reflects on it years later. Early on, for example, when the  mission pastor suggests that the otherworldly sounds she makes when she falls into a trance may come from an African dialect, to be understood as a sign that all the black peoples will be liberated and saved from the coming  biblical Apocalypse, she has her private interpretation:

As for me, I was prey to a strange thought that I didn’t dare confess to Reverend Marcus. It seemed to me that the spirit speaking through my mouth was not the Holy Spirit of the pastors, who was always trailing behind the Father and Son. For one thing, it spoke neither Hebrew nor Greek nor Latin, but perhaps indeed, as Marcus believed, an African tongue. The spirit that had chosen me as medium could only be an African spirit, perhaps the spirit of the black woman who had visited me during my trance. I made prayers to her; I diverted toward her the worship that the pastor celebrated for the Savior. I preciously guarded that secret in the deepest recesses of my heart.

Sister Deborah Nganga’s account is ultimately one without clear resolution. Forces run through it that neither she nor the narrator, who also feels their presence, can fully articulate. Ikirezi’s later return to Nairobi to follow up on the fate of the former faith healer is again, like the opening section, guided by rumour, informants, and speculation. This is a book that continually asks questions about truth and memory, in the context of oral history, recorded biography, and academic research. There are no firm answers: Mukasonga allows uncertainty to linger in this story that explores the challenges and varying fates experienced by African women in times of shifting social and political conditions, yet keeps the spirit—or spirits—alive.

Sister Deborah by Scholastique Mukasonga is translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti and published by Archipelago Books.

On through the dark forest: Celebration by Damir Karakaš

This taut novella opens in 1945. Above a little village, Mijo lies hidden in the woods, looking down at he house where his wife and sons live. In his yellow-brown uniform he must stay out of sight. The war is over and the soldiers of the Nazi-allied Ustaša force are now on the run or in hiding. He hopes against hope that he will someday be able to return to the little family he left behind when he was recruited into what would become an infamously brutal campaign:

He lay on the blanket that had over the last days soaked up the smell of rotten leaves and damp earth: under his thick brows he spent most of his time watching the village, then the mixed canopy above his head, noticing all the while how the colors were fading. Sometimes out of the corner of his eye he’d peek at the gleaming orb of the sun, gauging the time of day; never had time passed more slowly: he kept lying there in that one spot, sensing in his nose the sharp odor of melting resin, and all that was moving around him began to bother him: the sun, the wind, the birds that often flew low with their winged sounds over the forest.

Celebration, set in the mountainous region of Lika in central Croatia, explores the harsh realities that can lead poor, under educated individuals to embrace an ideology that appears to offer something they need and become involved in actions that they do not fully understand. There is no question that Mijo is hardened and isolated by his experiences, but in this, our initial encounter with him in the first chapter of this book, his emotions swing between anger and an idealized hope that he will be able to avoid the fate that seems almost all but inevitable.

Croatian author Damir Karakaš does not provide an elaborate historical context for the events reflected in the four short chapters that comprise Celebration, preferring to allow references to slip in through the thoughts, comments and actions of his characters.   However, in an interview for Center for the Art of Translation, he describes the people of Lika as predominantly peasant farmers and herders who were historically expected to be ready to go to war at a moment’s notice for a series of occupying forces over the years:

Croatia has always been governed by powers who exploited it. In the First World War, Croats from Lika fought, wearing the uniform of the Austro-Hungarian army, on the side of the Central Powers, against the forces of the Entente. Serbia, on the other hand, was part of the Entente, so when the Central Powers lost the war, the Yugoslav peoples were organized in a new country that the Croats were not pleased about. Croats referred to the new country as a “dungeon of peoples.” And I have to say that the Serbs did dominate the new country. Most of the generals in the army were Serbs, the leaders in the cities were also Serbs, and the government treated Croats very poorly, especially in Lika, with constant harassment, steep taxes, villagers were not allowed to keep dogs, there were even times when women were required to pay for the bullet that the constables used to kill their husbands.

This environment proved to be ideal for fertilization of the seeds of the kind of extremism promoted by the ultranationalist organization the Ustaša. With the onset of the Second World War, under the patronage of Hitler, the independent state of Croatia was formed, while the Ustaša leadership embraced Nazi ideology with a murderous enthusiasm that even shocked the German dictator himself. In Lika, recruitment was conducted through celebrations held in rural communities with plenty of free food, a festive atmosphere, and simple promises that young men living in poverty without even a pair of decent shoes would see as a chance to secure a future for their families.

After introducing Mijo, so close but unable to return to the life he longs for, Karakaš takes us back in time to explore how it is that he came to find himself in this uncertain state. He does so in tight chapters that each read like a stand-alone story—intense, densely detailed scenes that follow the characters closely, through rural landscapes of farms, forests, meadows, and mountains, over the course of no more than a day or two. In “Dogs,” dated 1935, Mijo is still living with his parents on their small farm. When a constable is attacked by a dog, the officials announce that no one is allowed to own a dog any longer. It is Mijo’s responsibility to take their poor hound into the woods to meet his fate. “Celebration,” dated 1941, follows Mijo, his girlfriend Drenka, and her brother Rude, as they make their way to the nearest larger town where a celebration is being held. The walk takes hours as they make their way through forests, meadows, and over hills. Rude, already sporting army boots, impatiently hurries them along and fretting that they will be late. The final chapter, “Father,” dated 1928, focuses on Mijo’s impoverished father struggling to imagine how he can possibly provide for his wife, four children and aging father. There is a longstanding tradition that will at least relieve him of one of those mouths to feed. It plays out in this chapter, as Mijo tags along filled with all the joy that only a child can find in the wonders of nature, oblivious to what lies ahead.

This is a small, slender volume, easily read in an afternoon, and inviting a reread to open up the references woven into what is an intensely detailed, yet spare, text. Karakaš evokes a strong sense of place, the harshness of the environment, the vast distances regularly travelled, dense woods, howling wolves, and the grinding poverty of the people. But with his characters, he  zeroes in on gestures, expressions, fragments of conversations. He says: “I am all for editing, I tighten my writing a lot, and maintain Chekhov’s principle that a writer should be frugal with words and generous in thoughts.” The multigenerational portrait he sketches in this powerful novella offers sharp insight into the formation of a soldier like Mijo from the perspective of the poor rural population he comes from—and naively imagines he might return to. It is a story applicable beyond this specific place and time, and one that only further heightens the tragedy of war.

Celebration by Damir Karakaš is translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać and published by Two Lines Press.

Memory is a wound in the soul that never heals: Children of the Ghetto I: My Name is Adam by Elias Khoury

I want to clarify things for myself first. What I write now, and what I shall write, isn’t a novel or an autobiography and it isn’t addressed to anyone. It would be logical not to have it published as a book, but I don’t know. I shall let myself address itself as it desires, without rules, I will not change names to make myself think that I am writing a work of literature, and I shan’t cobble together a framework. I shall tell things as I told them to my young friend.

These are the directives the narrator of the first volume of Elias Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto sets for himself as he abandons his past literary ambitions to dedicate himself to his own story. But as he allows memory, investigation, and reflection to guide his pen, he is inadvertently, and unintentionally, moving toward something much grander even if the result, My Name is Adam is presented as an unedited collection of writings never intended for publication. In a post-dated fictional introduction, Khoury claims that these notebooks were passed on to him after the death of Adam Dannoun, a Palestinian born falafel seller living in New York City, by a mutual acquaintance, Sarang Lee, who was the young friend Adam refers to above and a student of Khoury’s. By his own admission, Adam himself was neither a friend nor an admirer of the famed Lebanese novelist. It was his contention that Khoury had “stolen” the stories of his friends and used them to write his epic novel Gate of the Sun which had then been turned into a movie. When Khoury comes to possess Adam’s texts—which include a series of attempted approaches to a novel he had hoped to write, along with an extended autobiographical effort that combines remembered detail with information gathered from a range of sources—his first inclination is to rework the material into a formal novel and pass it off as his own. At the last minute though, he decides to simply send Adam’s writing, as is, to his publisher in Beirut.

The resulting novel is a masterful, unconventional work, and a complex, multilayered meditation on the nature of memory—individual and collective—truth, and the search for meaning. Adam is a man trying to find himself within the history of his family and his own people. Although he is only in his fifties, he has already decided he wants to die, but first he needs to write his own story, not for posterity but for his own ends. He had long dreamed of writing a novel based on the tragic fate of seventh century Yemini poet Waddah al-Yaman, a man driven to a silent death, buried alive for love—an effort preserved in its formative stages in the earliest sections of My Name is Adam. But this task is set aside for his personally directed endeavour as the result of two events: an unexpected meeting with Blind Ma’moun, an important figure from his childhood who reveals an unsettling truth about his parents, and the screening of the film based on Gate of the Sun in which he sees the story of Dalia, a woman he once loved. He realizes that he must reclaim his story, and that of his friends, from the darkness of the past and the distortions of literary accounts.

I don’t like playing games with life. We aren’t heroes of novels that our fates and stories should be played around with like that. I’m not a child and I hate heroes. I’m just a man who has tried to live and has discovered the impossibility of doing so. I’m not saying life has no meaning, because meaning has no meaning and looking for it seems to be boring and trivial. I’m a man who’s lived all his life in the postponed and the temporary.

Yet, to resolve this suspended state, even if he is only writing toward his own death, the tale he will need to address is one that involves loss, historical tragedy, assumed identity, and ultimately, self-imposed exile from his homeland.

The central focus of Children of the Ghetto I: My Name is Adam is the brutal massacre at the city of Lydda in July 1948 and the trials of the months that followed when the remaining Palestinian survivors were forced to live in an area enclosed within barbed wire fences, described, by the Jewish Israeli soldiers guarding them, as the “ghetto.” Adam, thought to be the first child born within this space—hence his unconventional name—was an infant during this period, but he grew up as the child of a honoured martyr and carried with him a legacy born of the stories told to him by his mother and many others. Blind Ma’moun’s late revelation shatters the foundations of his identity (even if it was something he was never quite at ease with) and drives him to work his way back to lay bare the details of one of the many horrifying and disturbing incidents that accompanied the forced formation of the new Jewish state. When the IDF moved into Lydda—an ancient town recognized as the martyrdom site of a figure revered by Orthodox Christians and Muslims alike, Saint George or Al-Khadr—hundreds of residents were killed and 50,000 were forcibly displaced. But, that is just the beginning, Adam knows, recalling, Blind Ma’moun’s powerful New York University lecture some fifty years or so after the massacre:

“I shall not fall into the trap of saying that the Nakba was a unique historical event. History, ancient and modern, is a series of catastrophes afflicting numerous peoples. I might tell you the story of the corpses we had to collect from the alleyways, fields, and houses of Lydda, or I might tell you about the men who were executed in al-Tantoura and how the soldiers of Israel’s Alexandroni Brigade ordered the Palestinian men of the village to dig their own graves using their hands—but what benefit would there be in that? The issue isn’t just the crime of the expulsion of the Palestinians from their land, because a bigger crime followed—the crime of the imposition of silence on an entire people. . . the silence imposed by the victor on the vanquished through the power of the language of the Jewish victim, which dominated the world, meaning the West, following the crimes of the Second World War and the savagery of the Nazi Holocaust. No one listened to the cries of the Palestinians, who died and were dispossessed in silence. This is why literature came to forge a new language for the victim, or in other words to proclaim a literature of silence, and to take us, with Mahmoud Darwish, to ‘wherever the wind blows.’”

As a child of the Nakba, Adam believes that only by going back to his own origins can he hope to make sense of where he comes from and who he is, and begin to understand the relationships and choices that have shaped his life. His autobiographical journey may have started with a cynical attitude toward the notion of “meaning,” but as he fills the pages of his notebooks with memories and research, the more existential questions he asks, of himself and those he loved. It is not just the unspeakable pains his mother endured or the secrets that may have been kept from him that trouble his inquiry, he is also struck by the resilience and resourcefulness of the inhabitants of the Lydda ghetto who are forced to secure their own food and water, and share limited resources and accommodation. He wonders at the human capacity to keep living against the odds.

Because this a work that evokes the often unstructured gathering and reworking of remembered elements, “derived from the scraps of stories that I patch together with the glue of pain and arrange using the probabilities of memory,” Adam’s narrative is one that tends to circle back on itself, digging deeper, and going farther with each turn, while bringing up references to aspects of his youth and adult life that he continually places aside as “a story for later.” If that sounds frustrating, it is not, for the momentum is maintained as he pushes closer to a fuller picture of the extent of the massacre, the deprivation that ensued, and the deeply buried scars borne by those who survived. And, of course, in light of the current situation in Gaza, the parallels are clear even though, in 1948, the displaced still had a place to go and the escaped had a place to run to.

My Name is Adam is an imaginative, prescient novel that lives within the literary, artistic and historical threads of Palestinian history. Adam is likewise well-versed in Arabic and Israeli literature, while at the same time being aware of himself as both a protagonist and an insecure writer. “Am I merely a story, fashioned out of words?” he asks. He is much more. And his story, beyond his early years in the Lydda ghetto, will cross paths with that of the occupier—he will change his identity and pass as an Israeli Jew (“from the ghetto,” implying Warsaw) for a period of time, revealing his truth only for love. But that is, one would guess, primarily a tale for book two. In the meantime, as he is composing his autobiographical account, in wintery New York City, years after leaving the Middle East, he is writing to reframe a Palestinian identity that goes beyond simply making falafel and other authentic dishes. He is writing, he says, to forget. Perhaps he also is preparing to make peace with the past, but if so, that too awaits the second volume.

Children of the Ghetto I: My Name is Adam by Elias Khoury is translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies and published by Archipelago Books. Children of the Ghetto II: Star of the Sea will be released in November 2024.

Bound by a single image: Canoes by Maylis de Kerangal

I grab the neck of a dinosaur with long lashes and the hand of a small boy with dark-chocolate eyes, put them both in the car, half my body engulfed by the back seat, torso twisted, fingers straining to reach, and then fasten the seatbelt. I put a multicoloured backpack containing a lunch in a plastic box, a bag of chips, a bottle of water, a change of clothes, size 5T, on the seat beside them. Then I walk back around the car, keys bouncing against my palm, sit down behind the wheel, and start the car. First Tuesday in December, mid-1990s, it’s 8:30 a.m., bitterly cold, and blue is the colour of the sky.

This is the opening of the novella “Mustangs,” the centrepiece of Maylis de Kerangal’s collection Canoes. It’s a precise description of a routine series of actions, but then, in the French writer’s fiction, the seemingly ordinary moment can contain multitudes and what begins quiet and lowkey, can turn unexpectedly, toward an ending suspended in possibility. Her ability to balance emotional restraint against an exceptional eye for detail, and a fondness for sweeping sentences and paragraphs that frequently go on for pages, allow her to tell stories that are at once spare and revealing. She knows just where to turn her narrators’ attention as their stories unfold.

The pieces in this volume—seven short stories and one novella—are connected by a common theme and by a singular image. The theme is “voice.” From a story about a woman consciously trying to lower her voice to advance her career in broadcasting, to the tale of a father reluctant to remove his dead wife’s recorded greeting from the family answering machine, voices—changed, analyzed, unleashed, unexpected—feature directly or indirectly throughout. Translator Jessica Moore indicates in her Note that de Kerangal began working on this collection just as mask mandates “caused mouths to disappear,” something that also often altered sound and auditory comprehension, and may have contributed to this thematic link. But the distinct image or motif that recurs in each of these very different stories seems much more random and therefore a is little treat each time it makes an appearance. The “canoe” of the collection’s title only appears in any particular detail in one of the stories, otherwise it might be a pendant, a craft observed in the distance, or mentioned in some other passing context. A nice, fun touch.

As one might expect, the extended piece, “Mustang,” anchors the collection. The unnamed narrator is a French woman who is living with her husband and young son (whom she simply calls Kid) in Golden, Colorado. Sam is taking a course at the School of Mining where he is quickly adapting to American life and language, while she struggles to find her footing in this vast suburban community in the foothills of the Rockies. At first walking suffices, but the lack of the kind of integrated train and transit system of a European city soon leaves her frustrated, as does the lack of purpose and work to fill her now empty days. So her husband, who has actually arranged this short term foreign escape more for her sake than his own, suggests she learn to drive. He buys a used Mustang and she gets her license. Funny, bittersweet, and ultimately terrifying, this is wonderful story of a woman seeking to redefine herself after loss in a mythic Western landscape of cowboys and dinosaurs.

By contrast, each of the other much shorter stories are condensed, finely drawn episodes that reveal something, often unsettling, of their narrator’s life or engagement with others, yet leaving much unsaid or unresolved. One of the best, perhaps, is the final tale, “Arianspace.” The narrator is a ufologist—an investigator of UFO sightings. She has been sent to visit a ninety-two year-old woman living along among mostly abandoned homes in a rural area. From her earliest impressions, the researcher can tell that she facing someone special:

I had imagined her small and wizened, the wrinkled skin of an old fig, hair sparse, body brittle and slow, an apron tied around her waist and black peasant stockings, but she was something else: a tall, regal woman in jeans, a red T-shirt, and boots, and she was thin, long grey hair over her shoulder, cheekbones still high, and beneath ragged eyelids, eyes of a deep black – the kind of black that absorbs nearly all visible light, and which is found in bird of paradise feathers or on the belly of peacock spiders; altogether wizened, dry, and flaking, but conveying a great impression of physical strength and brutality.

Indeed, not only is Ariane a no nonsense woman with a firm commitment to the alien phenomena she observed, she has impressive evidence. . .

With short story collections, especially dedicated volumes like this as opposed to larger compilations, a test of success can lie in the degree to which each entry stands apart from the others. Even though some of these pieces have a very tight focus, the characters and narrative voices (all first person), are distinct, the settings varied, and in some instances I was left with this eerie feeling—a sense that I wanted to know where the characters went after the story closed, a what-happened-next sort of thing. That is for some readers a negative to the shorter forms, but especially with a writer like Maylis de Kerangal, who is unafraid to leave an open door, the extended possibilities only make the situations she depicts seem more real.

Canoes by Maylis de Kerangal is translated from the French by Jessica Moore and published in North America by Archipelago and MacLehose Press in the UK.

“I don’t know what I’m doing”: Do Not Send Me Out Among Strangers by Joshua Segun-Lean

Having never tried journaling until now, I can’t say if I’m doing a good job. Of all the activities people recommend for ‘staying positive’ through the pandemic, journaling seemed the most obvious choice for me. Though I have set no grand expectations for myself, I’m afraid I will be unable to keep from filling each page, eventually, with minutiae. With the flatness of time as it passes here. An instinct, I think, from an earlier, truncated life in the sciences. Or perhaps like the voice in Sans Solei, ‘I have been around the world several times, and now only banality interests me.’

I am not that far gone, I don’t think.

Some books are best measured not by the number of pages they hold between their covers, or the number of words they carry. Do Not Send Me Out Among Strangers by Nigerian writer, essayist and photographer Joshua Segun-Lean tells a deeply personal, vulnerable story in this slender volume that, at first blush, appears deceptively sparse and quiet, not unlike the pandemic-sheltering world in which it was conceived. But at its heart lies a raw testament to loss, distilled into a spare collection of images and words that is no less powerful than the too-much-information memoir that has become so ubiquitous.

Less is more.

Do Not Send Me Out Among Strangers is a collection of brief journal entries—observations, accounts, and recollections—nested among a series of harsh black and white photographs of soil, rock, and debris, marked with occasional tufts of vegetation. Numbered and time stamped, these images are titled “Field Notes.” This is the visual record of the search that occupies Segun-Lean’s lockdown days: he has been tasked with the dispersal of his father’s ashes. He thinks back on their strained relationship and his insecurity about the responsibility he has been given. Meanwhile, friends are falling sick with Covid; some are even dying. A journey of grief lies in the stillness of this book.

A couple of colour “Interior” photographs, also numbered and time stamped, appear along the way, echoed by a few Edward Hopper paintings. The explicit theme connecting these illustrations is the colour red. The inherent loneliness of the artwork perhaps, the author admits, “too obvious,” given the circumstances. There are also a handful of sketches, abstracted, and, finally, a number of short excerpts dealing with ancient burial practices from various archaeological and historical texts.

Taken together, this collection of thoughts and images, speak of the complicated relationship we have to life, death, and disability—to the body in sickness and health, whole or incomplete. At a time of isolation and uncertainty, as Segun-Lean is searching for the right place to scatter his father’s ashes, he is quietly exploring, as the book description says, “the strange terrain where private and public grief meet.” He is carrying both, as he will reveal.

Do Not Send Me Out Among Strangers by Joshua Segun-Lean is a haunting little book, the kind of small, unclassifiable work that UK publisher CB Editions specializes in.

The secrets that define us: What I Know About You by Éric Chacour

Stories of queer love—hidden, unrequited, or impossible—tend to take on a special dimension when the temporal or cultural setting is one that outright forbids the expression of same sex attraction (and often even discourages public displays of opposite sex affection). A further challenge when bringing such a stories to life though, is the question of approach: can this tale be told in a manner that sets it apart from the burgeoning LGBTQ romance genre? Narrative is key, a metafictional twist perhaps, a less than reliable narrator, or an indirect angle through a spouse who never reveals what he or she knows. What I Know About You, by Québécois writer Éric Chacour, employs an inventive and surprisingly effective method to expose a story that spans forty years, from 1961 to 2001, and moves between Egypt and Montreal.

The novel opens in Cairo, or rather the narrative begins there, when the protagonist, Tarek Seidah, is twelve years old. He is out in the city with his father and his younger sister Nesrine. Their playful banter reveals that a certain order reigns. Even at this point, Tarek already senses that his life is set to follow an inevitable course laid out by fate and circumstance. As a member of a respected Levantine Christian family, there could be little debate. His father was doctor. He would be one too. In time he would marry and have a family, continue the family lineage, and the family practice.

It’s not hard to imagine that something or someone will threaten the ideal realization of this destiny, but what immediately sets this account apart is the perspective. It is a second person narrative, directed to Tarek, by a narrator whose identity will not be revealed until midway through the book, and at that point only to the reader, as the now-first person narration continues to be addressed to Tarek who has no idea it is even taking shape. It is a story—his own—that he wants to believe he has put far behind him.

As expected, Tarek does become a doctor and, by the age of twenty-five, he has taken over the family clinic after his father’s sudden death. The responsibilities to his legacy, his patients, and his mother weigh heavily, but he has his own project on the side that gives his life and career personal value away from home. He has established a weekly clinic in Cairo’s Mokattam slum area where he brings care attention to those who have little. It provides him with a great deal of satisfaction, but it also where Ali comes into his life.

By the time he meets the young man, Tarek is in his early thirties and has been married to Mira for less than a year. At first Ali approaches the doctor to ask if he will come see his mother who is ill but refuses to come to the clinic. These “house calls” soon become a regular practice, and, in time, Tarek invites Ali to come assist him on clinic days. For someone with little formal education, the boy is quick to learn and becomes a reliable assistant. As to how he earns money otherwise, Tarek does not ask, but there are insinuations that it is less than reputable employment. By the time he finds out, he has already started to become aware of his own feelings—attractions that defy the norms of age, sex and class. Their affair will threaten to destroy everything and everyone he cares for. His solution will be to escape, to emigrate to Canada, and leave his family behind. Even if it might have been possible to salvage his marriage:

What did you have to offer her in return? No real apology or explanation. A collection of monosyllables, I don’t knows and What can I says. You had long ago relinquished your duties as a husband. She wanted to know where you stood – as if the two of you were plotting geographical coordinates. Did you even know where you stood? Were there even answers to these questions? You observed her pain without trying to meet it halfway; your suffering and hers had grown so far apart they would never again meet. She didn’t mention Ali’s name, perhaps hoping you might broach the subject. The subject was never broached.

Once he is settled in Montreal, after retraining to meet Canadian standards, Tarek’s life continues with quiet dedication to medicine, alone and with little contact with his Egyptian past. Until it comes to confront him.

The second person narrative of the first section “You,” affords a certain spareness to the account of Tarek’s life in Cairo, events move swiftly and, at moments, possible details are surmised where the narrator does not dare to guess what might have done or felt. In fact, there is little direct insight into Tarek’s thoughts throughout the entire text. This is someone else’s version of the story, sometimes empathetic, sometimes tinged with bitterness. There’s also a peculiar sentimental note that slips in here and there, the echo of a piece of cliched wisdom perhaps. All of this will begin to make sense in the section, “Me,” wherein the narrator reveals their connection and motivation for the story they are telling. This is where the tension starts to build, as the long term implications of an attempt to bury the past are explored. Of course, given the clever way it unfolds, this is a book best not spoiled with too much advance detail.

Chacour was born in Montreal to parents who emigrated from Egypt, his family background likely allowing him to recreate the social and political mood of Cairo in the 60s, 70s and early 80s so seamlessly. This debut novel has won or was shortlisted for a large number of French language prizes, and now, in Pablo Strauss’s attentive English translation, it is again garnering attention. But, like many other queer novels that have ventured to entertain the possibilities for love when all the cards are stacked against it, a sadness and loneliness lingers.

What I Know About You by Éric Chacour is translated from the French by Pablo Strauss and published by Coach House Books.

God is in the details: Among the Almond Trees – A Palestinian Memoir by Hussein Barghouthi

Nothing comes to the surface in solitude except that which is already deep within us. I suddenly became aware of many fears. In front of me was a meadow, ploughed and moonlit, reaching all the way to the wall of the Monastery. And a human being, any human being, is afraid of emptiness. I was afraid to enter the meadow that was exposed from every direction. There were some olive saplings that looked like faint shadows, like ancient monks in their dark habits…

In his mid-forties, with the bittersweet weight of a cancer diagnosis on his heart and mind, Palestinian poet, writer, and philosopher Hussein Barghouthi made the decision to return to the village near Ramallah where he was born after what he describes as thirty years of self-imposed exile. If “bittersweet” seems an unlikely adjective for such a serious circumstance, it is appropriate only because Barghouthi was initially led to believe his symptoms might be indicative of AIDS—a condition he feared he would have most certainly passed on to his wife and young son. So when news that he was, in fact, dealing with cancer came, he greeted it with joy. At least at first. But as someone who had, by his own admission, “perfected ‘beginnings,’” his journey home would be an “imperfect ending.” Among the Almond Trees, his meditation on life, death and rebirth, captures his thoughts and experiences as this ending nears.

Barghouthi’s only other work currently available in English translation is The Blue Light, a weird and wild account of his years as a graduate student in Seattle in the late 80s and early 90s, interspersed with recollections from his childhood and earlier adult years. But with the off-beat urban terrain he frequents, the eccentric, marginalized characters he befriends, and the exploration of mysticism and madness that he pursues, it can best be described, as I noted in my review, as a memoir with hallucinations.  By contrast, Among the Almond Trees, composed around the same time, has a much more contemplative, grounded tone. This is still a work with strong spiritual, mystical and philosophical elements, but here he is focused on memory, family mythology, and the longing to understand himself within the cycles of life and death. All of this is deeply rooted in the land.

Having intentionally kept himself apart from the village of his birth for so many years, Braghouthi’s return inspires him to embrace his ancestral connection this location, with its mountains, valleys and trees. He is seeking to reinforce a spiritual connection to his family history, a line which reaches into the past and will extend into the future. Central to this exploration is Qaddura, an uncle of his family’s, who had adopted his mother when she was orphaned. Qaddura is a near mythical character, an imposing figure, known to have been a robber, who lived, it was said, with his brother in an abandoned Byzantine monastery on the mountain above the village. The stories of Qaddura and Snuffie, the woman who was married to both brothers in succession, run through this meditation, and the Monastery itself, as an actual ruin and as an inner mystical space, is an important image. The other key figure is the almond tree, notably the orchard outside his mother’s house.

This is, then, a lyrical monologue steeped in memory and emotion (including the occasional exclamation mark), woven with the history and folktales of his family and his people, insights drawn from Sufism, Buddhism, Egyptian mysticism and Western literature, and threaded with lines of poetry and song—especially that of Mahmoud Darwish and the Lebanese singer Feiruz. Much of the “action,” such as it is, takes place on moonlit nights, like the account of a nighttime pilgrimage Barghouthi makes to the Monastery during which he reflects not only on the importance of this site in his family lore, but on his childhood memories of the mountain, its promises and legends. Yet there are also the realities of the present day—the settlements ever expanding in the valley, the ongoing second intifada, and the disease spreading through his body that often keeps his moonlit wanderings closer to home:

As for why I am now recalling these tales of the Mountain while walking, as always, among the moonlit almond orchards around our house, barely breathing and facing the spectre of death because of a new swelling in my lungs—that is another matter. Perhaps with these tales I can breathe the air of other places and other times in order to sense another moonlit space inside my being and return to whatever inner monastery there was in my spirit that would grant me the strength of beginnings so as to face the cruelty of endings. For imagination is power.

Subtitled A Palestinian Memoir, Among the Almond Trees is, of course, more than one man’s search to come to terms with his “beginnings” to prepare for what is coming, it is the story of a husband and father thinking beyond his death, no matter how painful the idea may be. As someone with a longstanding interest in Buddhism and Sufism and ideas of reincarnation, Barghouthi looks to his young son Áthar, as a guide, so that he may “return to the dormant child” within, “so as to walk the earth as a child-prophet, if not in this life then in the next one.” He marvels at the enchanted eyes through which a child sees the world, and the ability to ask, as Áthar does, magical questions even when an Israeli warplane is passing overhead. Peace is, he knows, elusive, but when he decides he wants to build a house for his wife and son to live in, below the Mountain, he has come full circle and will be leaving them in the best place he knows of. Rather, he won’t be leaving them at all, he will be resting nearby, among the almond trees

As a poetic text rich with literary and traditional allusions, Among the Almond Trees benefits from (but does not strictly require) a detailed translator’s introduction and extensive footnotes. Ibrahim Muhawi, as a Mahmoud Darwish scholar and a folklorist, is perfectly suited to bring to the reader’s attention some of the finer details of the material Barghouthi is referencing. This is a short work—the text is only about 80 pages long—but filled with so much wisdom and beauty, even with the shadow of cancer looming over it, that it welcomes and rewards rereading on its own and alongside The Blue Light.

Among the Almond Trees: A Palestinian Memoir by Hussein Barghouthi is translated from the Arabic by Ibrahim Muhawi and published by Seagull Books.