Tag: Seagull Books

Whose child are you? Twilight of Torment: Melancholy by Léonora Miano

During the heat of the dry season a storm is brewing. The air is thick, the skies dark and streaked with lightning. Thunder, still distant, is advancing, the prelude of a night that will threaten to open wounds and leave scars, on the parched ground, and in the lives of four women. Twilight of Torment: Melancholy, the first part of a two-volume novel by Cameroonian writer Léonora Miano, unfolds over the course of this one turbulent night and the day that follows. Directed to one man who is not present, the second person narrative is passed, like a torch from his mother to his ex-girlfriend to his fiancé and finally his sister, as each woman speaks to her individual circumstances, history with him and personal dreams for the future. Together their voices weave a complex tale which explores femininity, sexuality and self-identity in contemporary African society, against a backdrop in which the legacy of colonialism, slavery, patriarchy, ancestry, class, family dynamics and domestic violence intersect.

Set in Cameroon, exact place names are never used in this novel, affording a certain ambiguity that implies that it could easily be set in a number of sub-Saharan nations. What applies in the country, applies throughout the “Continent.” By contrast, the “North” refers to France, Paris in particular, but again reflects the double role Western countries play as an educational destination for those who wish to improve their prospects and as a point of origin for the descendants of the African forced dislocation who seek connection with a cultural and spiritual homeland. Mythologies drive movement in both direction. The use of such ambiguous language heightens this reality.

The novel opens with Madame, hotelier and mistress of a large family dwelling in a well-to-do neighbourhood in a coastal city. Her lonely soliloquy begins with a impassioned elegy for the loss of culture and tradition that occurred during the years of colonial control and its impact on women and female society. But it is also apparent that she was aware of the rules of the game that she needed to play if she wanted to achieve her goals. Her ambition was not money—she brought wealth into her marriage—but a level of respect no wealth could buy. She talks of the wound she carries early on, but otherwise addresses her son in guarded terms, she wants to explain herself but refuses to accept that her intentions were nothing but the best:

I can name the thorn that, lodged in me since an early age, is my torture and my compass. My true identity. I know the reasons that drive me and never delude myself in this regard. Let me be clear: everything proceeds from a crack but that does not mean I’m wrong. Our coastal plain, our country, have their ways. Their understanding of things. I make do. It took finesse, skill, and tact to hug the edge of this fissure without falling, and I only slipped once or twice.

Madame’s most valued possession, it becomes clear, is respect. Status matters. So she pursues a husband from a noble line, Amos Mususedi, who bears an patronym of import that she can pass on to her children. However, he also comes from a line of men known for their violent tendencies and the marriage she ultimately submits to is loveless and brutal. She is aware that her son resents her for not leaving, so much so that he is determined to put an to end his patrilineal bloodline. But he is not opposed to allowing the name to carry on.

When her son returns from the North with a woman he intends to marry and the child he wants to adopt, Madame is beside herself. Pride and respect matter above all and now this is the second lineageless woman he has brought home. His first girlfriend was less than ideal, but now, although she is willing to accept an adopted grandson knowing a biological heir is unlikely, young Kabral’s mother is an entirely unsuitable daughter-in-law and, after all, it seems like the proposed marriage is a sham. Madame will not allow it to happen, even if she has to turn to occult connections to ensure her desired outcome is realized. The strange storm brewing gives her pause…

As Amandla, the former girlfriend, picks up the narrative, we learn more about the absent man, her one great impossible love. A native of French Guiana, Amandla met him in the North where she was involved in political pro-African causes. Now resettled on the Continent she is engaged in a spiritual journey of self-discovery through deeper involvement with fellow Kemites, followers of an Egyptian neo-paganism. Her story calls attention to the longing to belong to an idealized ancient tradition and the challenges of finding acceptance in a world that views her as an outsider:

Rumors were running around town about a White Woman who’d rented a carabote house in a populated neighborhood of the district. A White. A Northerner in the minds of the people here. It’s interesting that the terms Black and White are unrelated to race in these parts. They refer to culture. To lifestyle. Racial thinking does not belong to original Kemite conceptions. Racism concerns us only because we deal with it. We’re not the ones who fractured the unity of humankind. We’re not the ones who hierarchized people only to recant when it was no longer useful. We’re not the only ones who are now duty bound to care for their souls. To cleanse their interiors. To make the inside shine until its reflected on the outside. May each know and accomplish his or her duty.

Midway through the book, at the height of the storm, a pivotal act of violence occurs that will bring the four women together, directly or indirectly and shift the balance of the narrative. Here we join Ixora, the questionable would-be fiancé and mother of Kabral as she lies, beaten immobile, on the muddy side of a road with the rain hammering her bruised body. Her spirit, however, is indefatigable. The narrative now takes a near stream of consciousness form, rolling out in breathless, single-sentence paragraphs. The woman so openly disparaged by Madame is revealed anew as she expands our understanding of the troubled man who has just left her for dead and the complicated and surprising circumstances that unite and differentiate the women who have come into his orbit.

Finally Tiki, the sister, takes over. No longer living on the Continent, she addresses her brother, Big Bro, with a directness, affection and understanding that belongs to her alone. Although he has disappeared into the night after attacking Ixora, she anticipates a call from her brother at some point and is preparing to fill him in on what she has learned about the fallout from what has occurred back home. But she also takes time to explain her rebellious youth, her need to fill in some of the pieces of her parents’ lives that have remained mysterious, and the strange process of self-discovery, through questions of sex and gender, that have led her to carve out an independent and idiosyncratic life in the North. Her account, played out against a soundtrack from the 1980s, comes full circle, painting a complex portrait of the lasting impact of life in a dysfunctional family, in a society still struggling to come to terms with its own legacy of complicated alliances and prejudices. But the novel closes waiting for the call which has not yet come. It is to Tiki’s brother’s story, from his perspective, that the companion volume, Heritage, will turn.

I plan to read that soon.

Twilight of Torment: Melancholy is an impressive novel that brings to the forefront the many diverse and conflicting elements that impact and shape the lives of African and African origin individuals in our modern world. It is an undeniably feminine novel, yet one which underlines the damage that patriarchal structures enact on both women and men. And, although I am not typically a fan of multi-voice narratives, this one is very well executed. A central story line is carried through the stormy night and the day that follows; events that occur and information revealed shifts the dynamics between the characters. Each woman, with her own torments of personal and historical origin, brings a distinct voice, complicated life experience and a surprising angle to this ensemble piece. By the time night falls again, Melancholy closes with promise and hope, but leaves many unanswered questions and uncertain outcomes.

Twilight of Torment: Melancholy by Léonora Miano is translated from the French by Gila Walker and published by Seagull Books.

Reading highlights of 2022: A baker’s dozen and then some…

It seems to me that last year I resisted the annual “best of” round-up right through December and then opened the new year with a post about some of my favourite reads of 2021 anyhow. This year I will give in, look back at some of my favourite reading experiences out of a year in which I had a wealth to choose from and aim to get some kind of list posted before friends start hanging up their 2023 calendars around the globe. In a year with war, floods, famine, storms and still no end in sight to Covid infections, books seemed more important than ever, as a respite, a record and a reminder that we, as human beings, have been here before and must learn from the past to face the increasing challenges of the future.

As ever, it is difficult to narrow down twelve months of reading to a few favourites. One’s choices are always personal and subjective, and many excellent books invariably get left out. This year especially—2022 was a productive and satisfying year for me as a reader and as a blogger. Not much for other writing, I’m afraid, but that’s okay.

This year I’m taking a thematic approach to my wrap-up, so here we go.

The most entertaining reading experiences I had this year:

Tomas Espedal’s The Year (translated from the Norwegian by James Anderson) was one of the first books I read in 2022. A novel in verse, it is wise, funny and, nearing the end, surprisingly tense as Espedal’s potentially auto-fictional protagonist careens toward what could be a very reckless act.

International Booker Prize-winning Tomb of Sand  by Geetanjali Shree (translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell) looks like a weighty tome, but blessed with humour, magic and drama—plus a healthy amount of white space—it flies by. An absolute delight and worthy award winner!

Postcard from London, a collection of short stories by Hungarian writer Iván Mándy (translated by John Batki) was a complete surprise for me. In what turned out to be a year in which I read a number of terrific collections of short fiction, I was a little uncertain about this large hardcover volume some 330 pages long, but by the end of the first page I was hooked by the author’s distinct narrative voice and I would have happily read many more pages.

The most absorbing book I read this year (and its companions):

City of Torment – Daniela Hodrová’s monumental trilogy (translated from the Czech by Elena Sokol and others) is a complex, multi-faceted, experimental work that explores a Prague formed and deformed by literary, historical and political forces, haunted by ghosts and the author’s own personal past. After finishing the book, I sensed that I was missing much of the foundational structure—not that it effects the reading in itself—but I wanted to understand more. I read Hodrová’s own companion piece, Prague, I See a City… (translated by David Short) and more recently Karel Hanek Mácha’s epic poem May (translated by Marcela Malek Sulak), but I would love to have access to more of the related literary material, much of which is not yet available in English. I suspect that City of Torment is a text that will keep fueling my own reading for some time.

This year’s poetic treasures:

This is the most challenging category to narrow down. I read many wonderful collections, each so different, but three are particularly special.

Translator John Taylor has introduced me to a number of excellent poets over the years and in 2022, it was his translation of French-language Swiss poet José-Flore Tappy’s Trás-os-Montes. I read this gorgeous book in August and it is still on my bedside table. It’s not likely to leave that space for a long time yet, and that’s all I need to say.  

I first came to know of Alexander Booth as a translator (and read a number of his translations this year) but his collection, Triptych, stands out not only for the delicate beauty of his poetry, but for the care and attention he put into this self-published volume. A joy to look at, to hold and to read.

Finally, My Jewel Box by Danish poet Ursual Andkjær Olsen is the conclusion of an organically evolving trilogy that began with one of my all-time favourite poetry books, Third-Millennium Heart. Not only is this a powerful work on its own, but I had the great pleasure to speak over Zoom with Olsen and her translator, Katrine Øgaard Jensen, for Brazos Bookstore in May. The perfect way to celebrate a reading experience that has meant so much to me.

Books that defied my expectations this year:

Prague-based writer Róbert Gál has produced books of philosophy, experimental fiction and aphorisms—each one taking a fresh and fluid approach to the realm of ideas and experience. His latest, Tractatus (translated from the Slovak by David Short) takes its inspiration from Wittgenstein’s famous tract to explore a series of epistemological and existential questions in a manner that is engaging, entertaining and provocative.

A Certain Logic of Expectations (you see the back cover here) by Mexican photographer and writer Arturo Soto is a look at the Oxford (yes, that Oxford) that exists a world apart from the grounds of the hallowed educational institution. Soto’s outsider’s perspective and appreciation of the ordinary offers a sharp contrast to the famed structures one associates with the city (and where he was a student himself) and what one typically expects from a photobook.

The third unexpected treat this year was The Tomb Guardians by Paul Griffiths. This short novel about the soldiers sent to guard the tomb where Jesus was buried is an inventive work that explores questions of faith, religion, and art history. Truly one of those boundary-defying works to use a term that seems to get used a little too often these days.

The best books I read in 2022:

Again, an entirely personal assessment.

I loved Esther Kinsky’s River, but Grove (translated from the German by Caroline Schmidt), confirmed for me that she is capable of doing something that other writers whose work skirts the territory occupied by memoir and autofiction rarely achieve, and that is to write from the depth of personal experience while maintaining a degree of opaqueness, if that’s the right word. One is not inundated with detail about the life or relationships of her narrators. Rather, she zeros in on select moments and memories, allowing landscape to carry the larger themes she is exploring. So inspiring to the writer in me.

Monsters Like Us, the debut novel by Ulrike Almut Sandig (translated from the German by Karen Leeder) deals with an extraordinarily difficult topic—childhood sexual abuse. It does not shy away from the very real damage inflicted by predatory family members, nor does it offer a magical happy ending, but it does hint at the possibility of rising above a traumatic past. As in her poetry where Sandig often draws on the darkness of traditional European fairy tales, she infuses this novel with elements and characters that embody the innocence, evil and heroic qualities of folktales within an entirely and vividly contemporary story. So much to think about here.

Hanne Ørstavik’s The Pastor (translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken) was my introduction to the work of a Norwegian writer I had a lot about over the years. This slow, melancholy novel set in the far north regions of Norway, beyond the Arctic Circle in the dead of winter, was a perfect fit for me as a reader, in style and subject matter. The story of a female pastor who takes a position in a remote village following a personal loss that she does not fully understand, explores emotional, historical and spiritual questions through a character who is literally stumbling in the dark.

So, what might lie ahead? This past year I embarked on two self-directed reading projects—one to focus on Norwegian literature for two months, the other to read and write about twenty Seagull Books to honour their fortieth anniversary. I found this very rewarding experience. Both projects were flexible enough to allow me freedom, varietyand plenthy of room for off-theme reading, but in each case I encountered authors and read books I might not have prioritized otherwise. For 2023 I would like to turn my attention to another publisher I really admire whose books are steadily piling up in my TBR stack—Archipelago. As with Seagull, they publish a wide range of translated and international literature that meshes well with my own tastes and interests. I don’t have a specific goal in mind, but already have a growing list of Archipelago titles I’d like to read. Other personal projects—public or private—may arise, perhaps more focused toward the personal writing I always promise to get back to, but time will tell. If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that it’s a long uncertain road from January 1st to December 31st and it’s best not to try to outguess what the road might hold. Hope for the best and prepare for the worst once more.

Best wishes for the New Year and thank you for reading!

“You weren’t made for this life” Marina Tsvetaeva: To Die in Yelabuga by Vénus Khoury-Ghata

It begins as it ends. With a beam, a rope, a chair and a window looking out on a hill, a cypress tree and a potato field. With a heart turned to stone through so many trials.

In her stark, poetic elegy The Last Days of Mandelstam, Lebanese-French poet and writer, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, aimed to bear witness to the final days and hours of Osip Mandelstam’s life that had passed unrecorded in a transit camp near Vladivostok, alternating between the dying poet’s feverish thoughts and delusions and delicately sketched moments from his past. With Marina Tsvetaeva: To Die in Yelabuga, she again begins with the final hours of another great Russian poet whose work was supressed during her lifetime, but her approach here is more direct. Woman to woman, poet to poet, Khoury-Ghata wants to trace the long, troubled journey that led Tsvetaeva to take her own life in 1941 at the age of forty-eight:

Hunched over your huge 750-page journal for months, I try to assemble the scattered pieces of your life, understand the reasons for your infatuations and your disappointments, especially your frantic desire to connect with men, women (some loved with words, others with hands) before you ended up alone, destroyed, bitter, unrepentant, ready to begin again.

Addressing her subject directly, Khoury-Ghata paints a spare, unsentimental portrait of a complicated, gifted woman whose creative intensity and constant need to be loved not only attracted but suffocated those around her. It is an effort to understand her demons and her pain.

Born into privilege, the daughter of a friend of the tsar who founded the Moscow Fine Arts Museum, Marina Tsvetaeva was a prodigy, studying music and French as a child, and publishing her first collection of poetry at age seventeen. She was soon drawn into literary circles where, through critic Max Voloshin, she met Sergei Efron whom she would marry in early 1912. Later that year, she gave birth to her first child, Ariandna (called Alya) just before her twentieth birthday. Her fame as a poet grew over the following years with the publication of further collections. Then, with the October Revolution, her fortunes rapidly began to unravel.

You had to learn how to live humbly, become invisible, not attract attention, expect at any moment to be denounced, arrested, deported shot.

As her late father’s connections become a liability and her husband joins the counter-revolutionary White Army, Tsvetaeva is reduced to begging from friends and struggling to get by, now with two children to support. She finds creative expression through writing plays and physical expression with lovers, but she allows her youngest daughter Irina to die of starvation at an orphanage where she had taken her girls in the hope that they would be fed. Her death is one of the many ill-fated decisions and situations that will haunt her.

Khoury-Ghata follows Tsvetaeva’s escape from the USSR to Berlin in 1922 where she plans to meet up with her husband whom she has learned is alive and studying in Prague. She falls in love while waiting, as is her nature, an act that never seems immoral to her, simply an outlet for the many passions that course through her being. When she and Alya, finally reunited with Sergei, settle near Prague, a new lover, her husband’s friend Konstantin Rodzevich, occupies her day, while writing commands the nighttime hours:

In the evening after supper, only the scratching of your pen on paper can be heard. Your fierce writing coupled with the desire to destroy what you have just written. Alya and Sergei, powerless spectators of your self-destruction. They watch you racing to the abyss but do nothing to stop you. The involuntary tear that you believe you wiped from the corner of your eye dilutes a word in passing. No tenderness for yourself. The horror is behind you.

In 1925, her son Gregory (known as Mur), in Tsvetaeva’s imagination the product of three men—her husband, her lover, and her great, impossible love Boris Pasternak—is born. Later that year the family leaves for France where she will live for more than thirteen years before finally returning to the USSR in 1939. New loves, including an passionate correspondence with Rilke, follow along with important literary output, but, over the years, continued economic strife will drive the Efron family into increasingly desperate situations. When she is unable to find a market for her poetry, Tsvetaeva reluctantly turns her hand to prose. Sergei, and ultimately Alya, who is often treated little better than a servant by her mercurial mother, become more politically engaged. It is impossible to feel safe and settled. The poet, so highly lauded in her teens, so desired by countless friends and lovers, finds herself alone and unloved. Most painfully, her long time supporter, yet elusive love object, Pasternak, is now lost in a new life as father and husband and no longer has time for her letters:

Pasternak has taken back the only gift he ever gave you: exaltation.

You blame your despair on everything around you.

The mirror above the sink is responsible for your wrinkles.

Too narrow, the worktable is guilty of drying up your inspiration.

Too noisy, your neighbours prevent you from concentrating.

Volatile, dynamic and passionate, the woman who comes to light in these pages is hopelessly dependent on the praise of others. She knows that she is not well liked among her fellow ex-pats, she has no qualms about engaging in romantic activities outside her marriage but is shocked and unsettled when she learns Sergei is contemplating divorce. Both her children come to lose patience with her; over time others learn to either humour or avoid her. Yet as with similar human emotional whirlpools, the one she ends up hurting the most is herself.

Khoury-Ghata’s Marina Tsvetaeva is not a strictly chronological account. Although she traces the general course of the journey that leads to the chair, rope and attic window in Yelabuga, because she is addressing her subject intimately, like a respected correspondent, a friend even, time is porous. Thus, a circle of Tsvetaeva’s friends, lovers, fellow poets and their assorted, often tragic, fates are recurring ghosts, living and dead, that delight, distract and trouble her throughout her life right up to that key final moment that is always present in the interrogatory second person narrative. Pasternak, Mandelstam, Mayahovsky, Biely, Akhmatova and more. Fragments of poems, letters and diary entries offer brief insight into the heart and mind of a woman who would come to be known as one of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century, whose life sadly coincided with a dramatically turbulent time that was not made for her.

Marina Tsvetaeva: To Die in Yelabuga by Vénus Khoury-Ghata is translated from the French by Teresa Lavender-Fagan and published by Seagull Books.

Twenty Seagull books to mark forty years of publishing magic: A 2022 reading project wrap up

Long-time followers of roughghosts will know that I have a particular fondness for Seagull Books. They continually publish a wide range of interesting international and Indian authors, bring many to English language audiences for the first time and, oh, those covers! Senior Editor and Designer Sunandini Banerjee’s work is instantly recognizable, yet always original. And not only have I amassed a healthy collection of their publications, but I have also visited Calcutta twice, taught classes at their School of Publishing and treasured their friendship and encouragement over the years. I admire the work they produce, their dedication to supporting fellow independent publishers in India and abroad, and their work to further understanding and education through the Seagull Foundation for the Arts. So to mark their fortieth anniversary this year I decided, somewhat late in the game, to embark on a personal reading project. I promised myself that I would read and write about twenty Seagull books by year’s end. Twenty for forty.

And here we are.

To date, I have reviewed all but one of these books—the remaining review of Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s Marina Tsvetaeva will follow in the next few days—but I wanted to stop and celebrate twenty excellent reading experiences before the holiday busyness begins. My reading naturally overlapped with my other 2022 self-directed projected, a focus on Norwegian literature, and the annual months devoted to Women in Translation and German Literature that I try to contribute to each year. Within and beyond that there was still plenty of room for variety. Two of the books I read were English originals—both from India—and the rest were translated: six German, four Norwegian, three French (two of which were by African writers, the third Lebanese-French), two Arabic, one Hungarian, one Dutch and one Bengali. I read five works of poetry/prose poetry, nine novels, three collections of short fiction, one long form essay, one play, and one graphic novel. Had I planned this project a little earlier I might have read more nonfiction, but as the year was rushing to a close book length became a deciding factor—December’s four books were necessarily shorter and that influenced choice!

Among this stack of handsome books are some authors I had already come to know and love through Seagull—Tomas Espedal, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Franz Fühmann, Ulrike Almut Sandig and Friedrike Mayröcker, plus one writer I have long wanted to read: Mahasweta Devi. But, as usual, there were some unexpected surprises among the authors I encountered for the first time, most notably German Jürgen Becker and Hungarian Iván Mándy.

Happy fortieth anniversary, Seagull! Here’s to an ever brighter future.

Books read:
in field latin by Lutz Seiler, (German) translated by Alexander Booth
Requiem for Ernst Jandl by Friedrike Mayröcker (German) translated by Roslyn Theobald
Shadow of Things to Come by Kossi Efoui (Togo/French) translated by Chris Turner
Mother of 1084 by Mahasweta Devi (India/Bengali) translated by Samik Bandyopadhyay
The Beloved of the Dawn by Franz Fühmann (German) translated by Isabelle Fargo Cole
Winter Stories by Ingvild Rishøi (Norwegian) translated by Diane Oakley
Love and Reparation by Danish Sheikh (India)
Ever Since I Did Not Die by Ramy Al-Asheq (Arabic) translated by Isis Nusair
The Second Wave by Rustom Bharucha (India)
Marina Tsvetaeva by Vénus Khoury-Ghata (Lebanese-French) translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan
Leaving by Cees Nooteboom, w/ drawings by Max Neumann (Dutch) translated by David Colmer
Love by Tomas Espedal (Norwegian) translated by James Anderson
Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude by Khal Torabully (Mauritis/French) translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson
The Sea in the Radio by Jürgen Becker (German) translated by Alexander Booth
The Dance of the Deep Blue Scorpion by Akram Musallam (Arabic) translated by Sawad Hussain
Monsters Like Us by Ulrike Almut Sandig (German) translated by Karen Leeder
Postcard from London by Iván Mándy (Hungarian) translated by John Batki
The White Bathing Hut by Thorvald Steen (Norwegian) translated by James Anderson
The Year by Tomas Espedal (Norwegian) translated by James Anderson
Ulysses by Nicolas Mahler, after James Joyce (German) translated by Alexander Booth

“How many lives go into a life?” Leaving by Cees Nooteboom, Drawings by Max Neumann

A man standing in a winter garden becomes aware of something not quite right—a cloud that seems too heavy, bare branches against an ancient wall, the refusal of neighbouring geese—an unspoken uneasiness that carries his thoughts back to the war:

The war that never stopped coming back,
a guest who’s known to all, a toothless
kiss, the language of intimate betrayal
around him now again, remembering a past

he couldn’t share with anyone.

This is how Dutch poet and writer Cees Nooteboom’s Leaving begins, its speaker in his garden thinking about family, war, times past. About those images that fail to fade. But as this three-part sequence of poems was coming into being, another guest, unexpected and uncertain, arrived and shifted the focus. His work would, in the end, acquire a subtitle: A Poem from the Time of the Virus. Without ever mentioning the virus itself outside of his Afterword, the shifting currents of the early months of its spread cannot be ignored even within the poet’s green refuge, for “Whimpering at the garden gate is the world, the / fuss of a newspaper.”

Heads and faces—remembered, imagined, dreamed—form a key motif throughout these poems, complemented by German artist Max Neuman’s series of drawings of abstract figures with spare features, completed in advance of news of the pandemic, for this, their second collaboration. The man in his garden is haunted by heads:

I saw heads, countless heads,
field marshals, lovers, travellers
from star to star. Each head its
own story, hidden in the folds

of the brain, alongside narrow streams
of blood, reeds on the banks, secret
landscapes no one can reach,
except for a lonely traveller

This leads into the second sequence, where the poet, the lonely traveller, wants to make sense of the darkness and strangeness of his visions  that surface from memory. All these heads. Who are these people, he asks, these creatures, these voices? As spartan as Neumann’s drawings, these poems propose questions that the poet cannot or does not want to answer. Can one look for meaning in life if, when looking back, one is confronted with forms, shadows, faces without mouths? The past seems intent on revisiting the man who knows that the end is nearing:

Life, the song of songs? Sure,
but underneath there is that other truth,
the truth of night and fog,
the test that lasts

until the end.

The third and final sequence, or movement if one wishes to read this poem as a musical composition, moves into a space of quiet and melancholy. Others—friends, brothers, lovers—have left the path once shared, one by one, “disappearing like ghosts.” The silence descending on the world is like a nothingness the poet has never heard before: “contradiction / surrounds me, an organ, / no keys, a song // whose sound has been sealed.” Yet, where the poet is troubled by the images that confront him in the second sequence, he is now coming to a place of peace with himself and others in the silence and isolation, and finds he is ready to take the road ahead and let the past be:

Now my feet are counting the road, I know,
looking back is not allowed. My steps measure time,
a dark and peerless poem, a beat
that can’t be slowed.

In the Afterword, Nooteboom who is not a writer to shy away from contemporary issues,  talks about how a poem comes to be, how influences enter and make themselves known, changing the direction in which the poet thought he was headed. It would be strange, he says, if the arrival of a mysterious virus were to be completely ignored; sometimes reality intervenes to help one write. And so we have this thoughtful, timely work, one that invites rereading and lingering on the words and the drawings.

Leaving: A Poem from the Time of the Virus by Cees Nooteboom with drawing by Max Neumann is translated by David Colmer and published by Seagull Books.

No one accepts an honest mirror: Ever Since I Did Not Die by Ramy Al-Asheq

Minutes before the Resurrection, the dead-alive walked across the crooked path towards a lesser death. The soldiers shoved them, drove them, robbed them. ‘Who is you God?’ they asked each one, ‘What is your religion? What is your book?’ Rifle butts struck him. He screamed a scream the whole universe heard, except for three: God; the international community; and his people. The wounded rise up like waves before they fall again. They are resurrected, only to be thrown again into the hell that is the tent for seventy more years. There is no power for them, surrounded by nothing but desert and their own skin. (“Escaping from Paradise”)

It is, sadly, easy to turn away from the horror of war when it happens “over there” or occurred “long ago,” to turn a deaf ear to the flood of testimonies that continue to flow out of embattled zones and occupied territories; time and again immediate concern and outrage becomes just more white noise in a world thrumming with a continuous level of sustained violence too uncomfortable to acknowledge. That is why the voices of the people must be reported, shared and amplified not only by journalists, but by writers and poets—those who can deftly wield words sharpened like knives. Like Ramy Al-Asheq.

Ever Since I Did Not Die is a collection of seventeen short prose pieces that bear witness to the unspeakable experiences of war, escape and migration. A Palestinian poet raised in the Yarmouk Refugee Camp in Damascus, Syria, Al-Asheq was jailed during the Syrian uprisings that followed the Arab Spring, escaped to live under an assumed name in Amman, Jordan, and finally migrated to Berlin where he now lives in exile. The pieces in this slim volume, which were written between 2014 and 2016 for an Arabic series called Syrian Testimonies, intentionally stand in a space between poetry and prose, intended by their author, to be “saved from classification.” The first lines of his Preface set the tone for the works that follow:

I gathered these texts like someone collecting body parts. Here are the pieces of my body, haphazardly brought together in a paper bag. This randomness of body parts is real in its destruction. Bloody at times, violent, honest, imaginary, personal. It looks like me with all my madness and sickness, how the revolution made me grow, what the war broke inside me and what exile chipped away.

Breathless in its brutality, its despair and longing, this collection bears witness to an array of experiences, some recounted in heartbreaking detail, some depicted allegorically, others arising out of dreams and nightmares. The pieces are no more than three or four pages long, each maintaining a steady rhythmic pace that pulls the reader through from beginning to end with little respite, but the language is so vivid, so shocking in its poetic intensity, that it is best to read one or two at a time and pause to let them settle in.

The refugee is a central figure here, doubly displaced, identity fractured, longing for a permanent home. For some, the tent they know is preferable to the unknown, but it is impossible to set down roots. Women’s bodies are often associated with notions of homeland and freedom, sexual imagery often representing the battles and struggles over the “body” of a nation, and Al-Asheq embraces and challenges that convention while questioning and rejecting traditional ideas of masculinity and heroism. This is not to say that there is not the desire for love and belonging to be found in a relationship and family. Meanwhile, the continual pressures of living under siege exacts a harsh toll. Moments of unthinkable cruelty arise without notice, bullets pierce fleeing bodies, bombs rain down from above and in a particularly horrific scene, a bomb decorated like gift explodes blowing three of four children to pieces, leaving the survivor mute.

Mercifully, these pieces are varied and very short. The blow is swift and efficiently delivered, the language is startling, even beautiful at times. That terrible beauty only poetry or poetic prose can achieve. The title piece which closes out the collection, is Al-Asheq’s dynamic testament to his survival, his rejection of totalitarian, patriarchal countries and the necessity of redefining his place in the world in his own terms:

Ever since I did not die, I started to taste beauty. I open war’s door, the chapter of fear, and sink further into the hatred of heroism. I shed all I thought was right for love. There is no reality in believing. Believing is the enemy of reality. Identity is everything except for place, flag, race, religion and gender. Ever since I did not die, I have lost my identity. I do not care much if I carry one or it carries me!

Translator Isis Nusair conveys the emotional energy that charges these poetic prose pieces while her Introduction and Notes provide a framework for appreciating many of the elements at play. Editor Levi Thompson’s Afterword captures the spirit of Al-Asheq’s work which, as he claims, crosses borders in form and content echoing the troubled journey of its author. This powerful collection is a testimony to war and dislocation that does not easily fade into the background.

Ever Since I Did Not Die by Ramy Al-Asheq is translated from the Arabic by Isis Nusair, edited by Levi Thompson and published by Seagull Books.

Death with romantic complications: Love by Tomas Espedal

Each and every leaf is unique. And yet not, the leaves grow together and clothe the tree like a unifying thought: we are the tree. The tree is us. We are spring, summer and autumn. In the winter we’re gone, laid beneath the soil. Dead and overgrown. In the winter we dissolve. The winter is when we die.

Love, the eternal flame that has sparked many a tale of passion, loss, betrayal. So often two essential human experiences, love and death, are bound in life and literature, but leave it to Norwegian writer Tomas Espedal to turn the classic love story on its head with his tale of a protagonist who is committed to keeping a self-imposed date with death—decided a year in advance without any idea of how or where he will meet it—a commitment that is challenged when he unexpectedly falls in love and his new girlfriend becomes pregnant with his child.

As ever, the Espedal hero/anti-hero is a complicated and conflicted character. His narrators are often outsiders, lonely and lovelorn. His last two books, Bergeners and The Year, feature a writer named Tomas whose wife has left and daughter moved away. His latest to be published in English, again translated by James Anderson, is Love, a slender novella centred around “I,” that is, a person referred to as I—a name rather than a pronoun, but clearly a choice that blurs the distinction—who has abandoned love. After the death of his first wife and six years after the end of a second long-term relationship, he is living alone in his childhood home. A writer who has enjoyed some success and experimented with living for better or worse, now that I has made “the exquisite decision to die,” he is filled with a fresh new purpose. He wants a good death, a beautiful death, and he has granted himself one last year to live his best possible life in anticipation of that final moment. Go out on a high, he might say.

Love is a most unusual novella. With a protagonist called “I,” the third person narrative has an initially jarring feeling. Once one gets used to the oddness, the occasional sentence that naturally reads as a first person statement reminds you of the internal otherness of the character whose thoughts and feelings you are following so closely. Not long after his springtime commitment to one final year of life, I is invited to join some friends for a week in Loire where they have rented a large house. He purchases a one-way ticket to Paris and makes his way by train to where they are staying. He knows everyone there except two women, Rie and Aka. He keeps his distance from them, in fact he prefers to enjoy all his friends from afar. Yet when the week is over, he announces that he is planning to walk to Paris and wonders if anyone would care to join him. To his surprise, Aka offers. She is young—thirty-two years-old to his fifty-six—carefree, confident and creative. I is smitten, but he’s careful to maintain his space. By the time they reach Paris he is in love. At an exhibition of the work of Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken it happens:

I had lost faith in a new love, nor did he want one; but here in the gallery amongst the van der Elsken photographs, standing behind Aka, who suddenly turned and kissed him, he was struck by something unexpected, like a bolt of lightning, or a shaft of light, as if the light from the photographs flashed into his eyes and exposed an inner picture, a picture of Aka and himself as lovers, as a couple; he was filled with a yearning for love.

The advent of a passionate love affair gives I the desire to live, but also causes him to wonder if this is not the perfect time to die, right at the height of happiness? A romantic death. And as the seasons pass, these paradoxical desires will intrigue and trouble him.

Naturally he tells Aka nothing of the pledge he has made. When she discovers she is pregnant and wonders if she is ready to become a mother he insists he does want to have a child with her. Yet he remains torn between the longing to live and the notion that it is the knowledge that he intends to die that heightens the exhilaration he feels in his relationship with Aka. He cannot stop thinking about where and how he will come to take his last breath even as doubts about his decision and the desire to live both continue to plague him. What unfolds is an existential exploration of the tensions tearing I apart inside. As he reveals more of his past experiences with difficult, painful deaths, one can imagine what he might be hoping to avoid, but it seems I is as afraid of life as he is afraid of dying. Or of simply growing old. The past holds a series of lives of loves and losses and the future holds, what, more of the same?

The drinker empties his life of content, fills his life with meaning. The drinker fills his life with death. Those who have been close to death know how beautiful life is. And life is beautiful and precious because death has set its mark upon it. The sick will be cured. The dying will live. But I wanted to die. It was this resolution that made his life beautiful. Which filled his last year with meaning.

Spare and poetic, this slender volume raises infinitely more questions—ethical and existential—than it answers, its weight and intensity resting in the strange contrary emotions of a man who is possibly happier than he has ever been, steadily making his way through a year of doubt, delight  and determinedness toward a destination at once individual and universal.

Love by Tomas Espedal is translated from the Norwegian by James Anderson and published by Seagull Books.

A Viennese Odyssey: Ulysses by Nicolas Mahler after James Joyce

James Joyce’s Ulysses is a monumental work of Modernist literature, dense with detail and interior narrative,  so when an illustrator and author known for a characteristically minimalist style of graphic storytelling decides to reimagine this classic what could possibly go wrong? Nothing if it’s Austrian illustrator and author Nicolas Mahler holding the pen.

This ambitious volume is my second encounter with Mahler’s ebullient art and wit. The first was his delightful take on fellow Austrian Thomas Bernhard’s Old Masters, a work that didn’t have to break with location or language in its reincarnation. However, this time he is transporting another equally idiosyncratic writer from Dublin to Vienna and from English to German (translated back into English in this edition by Alexander Booth). This is a retelling “after Joyce” as liberally inventive as the original. As one can imagine, the medium necessitates some streamlining of the story, so Stephen Dedalus is left out (although there is a nod to his tower abode) and some key scenes in which he appears are reimagined in a wild exposition of our German Bloom, Leopold Wurmb’s sexually frustrated, guilt-ridden fears and obsessions. But the parallels with Joyce’s masterpiece are wonderfully realized; after all, the visual medium can reproduce the overlay of experience and internal monologue in a remarkably efficient manner. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

So we find ourselves tailing along after Wurmb (who unfortunately resembles his implied namesake  Wurm” or worm) as he makes his way around Vienna on June 16, 1904. While Bloom was an advertising canvasser with the Freeman’s Journal in Dublin, Wurmb is similarly employed by the Viennese Neuigkeits-Welt-Blatt. Headlines, excerpts and image offsets from the June 16, 1904 edition of this paper are used to great effect in the chapter where our hero goes to the office. Mahler also draws on images and advertisements from some other Vienna publications from the same day and finds German names for key characters from the same archival sources. But he also adds a really special touch to his Ulysses. Joyce’s novel was first published in 1922, at a high point in the history of newspaper comics, so we find in the pages of this graphic variation many of the cartoon characters who were popular at the same time. Most notably, Olive Oyl stars as his secret romantic pen pal, while Popeye takes on the role of the garrulous sailor W. B. Murphy who regales Wurmb with unlikely tales of adventure in the bar.

If some of the fun of reading Joyce’s novel is looking for the echoes of Odysseus’ journey in the narrative, some of the fun here is marveling at how cleverly Mahler manages to echo key features of Bloom’s journey in his Austrian themed tribute. Wurmb, like Bloom, is trying to avoid going home, knowing that his wife Molly, a singer, will be having sex with her manager Berlyak that afternoon. The impresario’s posters haunt him on his wanderings and reminding him he’s a cuckold, while recurring thoughts of sexual frustration, bitterness and depression mark his day. He mourns his infant son, dead now eleven years, attends a friend’s funeral, takes care of bodily functions and finally, after a day of work, social engagements and some wild, guilt driven fantasy, returns home without his key and is forced to break into his own home. From her bed Molly then takes the stage, so to speak, with a version of her infamous soliloquy which, if necessarily abbreviated, is not devoid of much of the key imagery and sentiment.

Of course, Ulysses is a novel famous for the use of stream of consciousness. Bloom’s inner thoughts are injected into the events of the day (or vice versa). One might wonder if a graphic novel, and one that leans toward a relatively spare open form, can reproduce this effect. Mahler’s solution is to project Wurmb’s thoughts in large, bold letters, across sparsely illustrated pages and over cartoon-strip style interactions when his thoughts wander. Obsessions are illustrated boldly. Thus his inner world takes precedence, as it should, if you want to do justice to Joyce’s masterpiece. Mahler’s variation on this classic is inventive and funny without undermining the sadness and ordinariness of the Everyman at its heart and might even inspire a few readers who have not yet read (or, ahem, finished) the Irish original to pick it up.

Ulysses by Nicolas Mahler, after James Joyce, is translated from the German by Alexander Booth and published by Seagull Books.

“Quiet the evening through till dawn.” The Sea in the Radio: Journal Sentences by Jürgen Becker

Whenever a story began, he never quite understood where it was supposed to go.

After my father died I found, in his office, a journal he kept for the last full year of his life. He recorded each day’s trips, chores and purchases with occasional comments about my mother’s health, the quality of a restaurant meal, or some other personal detail like a book he was reading. He also tracked the weather and key stock market statistics. It demonstrates just how unwilling he was to let a day pass without a set of accomplishments, but captures none of his opinions, worries or hopes. However, it is one of my most precious possessions, a diary I read as a man in his eighty-eighth year trying to hold on to the passage of time.

There is an element of this kind of reporting the mundane ordinariness of the everyday in Jürgen Becker’s The Sea in the Radio: Journal Sentences, a fragmentary novel stripped to its most essential elements. Within the series of isolated sentences, phrases and brief passages that comprise this work, a regular report of the day to day flow of weeks, seasonal tasks, and observations of nature not only contribute to an atmosphere of place but speak to the desire to believe that some things stay the same, hoping that as long as this flow continues, the story will not end and one can defy death a little longer. But this novel does not recreate a diary as such, rather it constructs a picture of a village or community, past and present, as its residents age and face the end of life, as memories and images surface from a dark history that has left its mark on a generation that spent their childhood and youth during the war.

A train station appears in the course of everyone’s life.

Poet, writer and radio dramatist, Becker was born in Cologne but spent the war years in Thuringia. He was a participant in Gruppe 47, a collection of important German writers, from 1960 until their dissolution in 1967 and has long been involved with PEN Centre Germany and the German Academy for Language and Poetry. He is known for an open form of experimental literature set in opposition to narrative conventions. The Sea in the Radio (2009), perhaps the first of his prose works to be translated into English, reflects the importance of landscape seen in his later works as well as the tendency to cast side-long glances at the experience of growing up during the Second World War that drives so much of his prolific literary output.

This spare, evocative novel speaks, without a direct narrative voice, from the shadows and the corners of a world drawn with sharp, poetic precision. Unnamed characters, recurring motifs and locations and wisdoms build a tale that captures the ordinary business of every day against the long shadows history casts. It begins with bucolic imagery—snow in the winter woods, owls that call at night, the glow of the light—but an ominous tone appears early: the trains off behind the woods that one never saw, the off-road vehicle that is always moving from place to place, photographs showing people or houses that are gone, allusions to secrets lurking. Grammatical tense can be misleading. Is this a statement about the present or the past? Outside the odd quoted statement there is no “I,”, the closest one gets is with the indefinite, gender neutral pronoun “one,” otherwise we move between second, third, and first-person plural perspectives. Wordplay and aphoristic observations also appear, contributing to the overall poetic feel of the text. As we move through the three parts—three orchestral movements that each end with the acknowledgement of the relevant conductor—the story that emerges is dramatic and vivid, despite the fact that so much of it lurks in the silences and spaces between the sentences.

Fine, if you know everything already.

When it is hot and dry, you don’t see any snails in the garden.

What should one do? One does what one can. One does what one can’t.

Motorcycles whining through the village. It’s Sunday.

Watching TV for hours. And then what?

After the storm the sun, immediately humid again, the next storm.

A hissing. Gravel sliding of the loading bed.

He says, Night’s shorter when you can sleep.

The pace is not slow, but charged with a kind of quiet restlessness. This is a novel that invites you to listen closely. An acute awareness of the passage of time and circumstances permeates the work, seeding it not with nostalgia but melancholy. Motifs recur and sentences play off one another, often contradicting what has recently been said, small themes build across a page or two then fade into the background, and there is a knowing humour to some of the observations: “In the waiting room there are magazines that one would never read otherwise.” There is, decades after the years that haunt the aging children that people this landscape, no closure, only increasing decline, illness and loss. And a little wisdom.

When you are old yourself, you treat the old people who are already dead in a friendlier fashion.

Translated by Alexander Booth with an ear to maintaining the rhythm and flow of this fragmentary work, The Sea in the Radio is presented with a design of subtle beauty that features detail from Hokusai’s iconic print The Great Wave off Kanagawa and a pattern simulating water that runs across the lower edge of every page.

The Sea in the Radio: Journal Sentences by Jürgen Becker is translated by Alexander Booth and published by Seagull Books.

Is he really gone: Requiem for Ernst Jandl by Friederike Mayröcker

The loss, he says, the loss of someone so
close, the loss of a HAND and HEART
PARTNER is something so completely and
utterly devastating, yet it may be, we may be
able to keep right on speaking with this HEART and
LOVE PARTNER continue conversing and may
even expect a response from this person.

I’ve long had an interest in literary expressions of immediate grief, a much more elusive task than one might imagine until actually faced with the intensity of loss and the longing to express that experience at its most raw. Then it seems almost impossible, yet Friederike Mayröcker’s Requiem for Ernst Jandl may be one of the most successful unmediated responses to the loss of a loved one that I have encountered.

Paperback edition, German List

Mayröcker met fellow Austrian poet and writer Ernst Jandl in 1954. They both left marriages to be together, but did not marry or share a home. Theirs was a deeply creative lifelong partnership, they supported one another’s work and collaborated on radio plays and other projects over the next forty-six years. When Jandl died on June 9, 2000, she was devastated by the loss yet miraculously she was able to channel it into a series of poems composed within the first months after his death. The rawness and confusion of grief is evident. Her characteristic, experimental style which employs capitalization, italics and numerals, and often incorporates fragments of private conversations and excerpts from letters and diaries, serves to heighten the anxiety, confusion and emotion of this period of early grief. Also woven into the series of poems that comprise this requiem is an earlier piece that captures the nature of the interplay of the their creative energies.

There is a sense throughout this slender collection of words and emotion spilling out on the page, gathered up and coming loose again. The great love, the completeness of the loss, and the exhaustion of caring for a weak and dying man all have to be released, repeatedly, in the tumult of grief and guilt that colours these early months. Each poem approaches these conflicts, but the final long piece in the book, the prose poem “’the days of wine and roses’, for Ernst Jandl,” reflects this emotional urgency with particular power. Here Mayröcker seems to be sorting out a flux of memories, thoughts and feelings as expressed to a friend, Leo N.

And what about the pencil, I say to B., why
on the morning of his death did he draw a
pencil on a piece of note paper, I say to B.,
why did he ask for a pencil, there were
plenty of pens on the little table next to his
bed, the quill of the Holy Ghost lingered
longer on Job’s sorrows than it did on the
delights of Solomon, B. says, I tell Leo N.,
is he really gone, is he really in heaven now,
a heaven you yourself believe in, the
passageway into the other world, says Leo
N., is described as stepping through a
waterfall, and the vulture flies through the
sun, I went up to his room, up to a bed that is
empty and say to him I feel better today, but
I am thinking: I NO LONGER have any hope
for this life, at 3 o’clock in the morning…

In the crush of the weeks and months following Jandl’s death the voices of some friends and phone calls from others rise and fall. This is a loss both deeply personal and shared with a community of artists, and at times a tension is evident, one senses that the poet both welcomes the company and wants to be alone. Needs the comfort and doesn’t know what to do with it.

Of course, the death of her companion and creative partner did not silence Mayröcker. She continued to write startling, challenging and innovative poetry and prose right up until her death last year at the age of ninety-six. Jandl continues to appear and inspire along the way but never in such an open, unabashed lament as in this Requiem—one that fittingly closes with one of his best known poems, the humorous sound poem ottos mops complete with Mayröcker’s original reflection on the composition written in 1976, long ago she admits, adding that if she could have one single year from that now distant time back, “how intensively I would live it, how tenderly and how happily.”

Requiem for Ernst Jandl by Friederike Mayröcker is translated from the German by Roslyn Theobald and published by Seagull Books.