Tag: short stories

“Here, on this mountain, there’s the living and the dead.” The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales by Ferit Edgü

Years later, as I leaf through the notebooks,
I see that these people and I,
who didn’t speak each other’s languages,
had understood one another.
I don’t know what language we had I common,
nor do I want to know.
Our common language didn’t change them
but it changed me. I’m sure of it.
Every passing day returns to me the traces
of our shared life in that mountain village;
I see them. I live them.
And these words I’ve been scrawling through the years
are those traces, words wounded like me.

Hakkâri is a province in the southeast corner of Turkey with an overwhelmingly Kurdish population and a long history of violence and displacement amid the various ethnic and tribal communities that have called the area home over the years, up to the present military subjugation of insurgents fighting for an independent Kurdistan. It is a rugged region comprised of mountains, steppes and deserts drained by the Great Zab River and it is the setting, a character in its own right even, in much of the fiction of Turkish writer Ferit Edgü, including the two texts published together by New York Review of Books Classics as The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales.

In 1963, after graduating with a degree in fine arts and philosophy, the then twenty-four year-old Edgü was assigned, in lieu of military service, to a nine-month teaching post in the village of Pirkanis in an area of Hakkâri so remote it could only be reached on foot or by horseback. The experience would be, by his own frequent admission, the most transformative of his writing life. For a young man raised in Istanbul who went on to study in France, it must have been a shock to arrive in such an isolated location, but, as the quote above, taken from the preface to his 1995 collection of short fiction, Eastern Tales, shows, the differences between himself and a people with a culture and language so foreign to him somehow melted away. He was never able to return in person, but his characters, narrators and stories have continued to find a life there.

Edgü’s narratives are, in manner that seems appropriate to the harshness of the environment and the simplicity of the lives of the people of Hakkâri Province, characteristically stripped to the bare essentials. His language is spare and unadorned, often reading as a kind of prose poem, with each sentence or two appearing on a new line. He is quoted in the translator Aron Aji’s Afterword as follows:

I want nothing superfluous in my writing. Texts cleansed of details; the event giving rise to the story distilled to its concisest form…. I’ve tried to do away with narration, fictionalization, similes and metaphors…. I cannot stand metaphorization… [or] descriptions built with ornate words, long, unbearable sentences that serve as signs of an author’s mastery…. Just as we have freed writing from psychology, we must free it from metaphors and similes (nothing resembles anything else).

He relies rather on voice, perspective, and tone, allowing dialogue—internal or external—to carry the narrative force. Meanwhile, the same words tend to appear again and again—bear, wolves, dog, snow, mountain, people—this repetition or, if you prefer, intentionally limited or controlled vocabulary has an incantatory effect.

The present volume consists of a novella, The Wounded Age (2007) and Eastern Tales (1995), a collection of four short stories and seventeen minimal or micro-fictions. The reverse chronological placement is apparently designed to foreground “the trajectory of stylistic distillation” typical of Edgü’s work. The novella is the account of an unnamed narrator who returns to report on a crisis in the same mountainous region he once visited in his youth. According to an essay in The Nation, the inspiration was the Halabja Massacre on March 16, 1988, when Iraqi troops attacked the Kurdish town of Halabja with mustard gas and nerve agents, killing up to 5000 residents and injuring many thousands more. As survivors tried to flee over the border into Turkey, they were blocked by the army. Edgü had wanted to cover the situation but his editors felt it was too dangerous for him. So he relied on his memories of the place and its people. Thus, the incidents depicted in The Wounded Age do not reference any specific event or location (although the border is a key element), and the horrors captured on the faces of the adults and children the reporter encounters and their accounts of rivers of blood filled with corpses speak volumes.

They come in wave after wave. Down the mountains, down the rocks.
Women, men, children. A human deluge.
Some come carrying saddlebags. Others, rifles. Their women and children on mules. Or their wounded.
Not their dead. Those they’ve buried.

Unfolding in short segments, through conversations he has with survivors, army officers, and his patient guide and translator, Vahap, the reporter gradually pieces together a larger tapestry of loss, dislocation, and destruction. He listens. He photographs. His dreams and nightmares attempt to fill in the gaps.

Where’s my mother? Where’s my father? My brother, my sisters?
Where’s my dog? Where’s my house? Where’s my village?
Where are my mountains? Where am I? Where’s here?
Desolate. Eerie emptiness. But a voice kept screaming these questions.
I wanted to photograph this voice. The one asking the questions. That’s why I was sent here. I could hear the voice but saw no one to whom the voice belonged.
Since I couldn’t photograph the questioner, I’ll photograph the questions, I said to myself. And so I did.

The stories collected in Eastern Tales tell of a proud people, with simple lives shaped by landscape and tradition. Sometimes the narrator is an outsider, a teacher or in one instance an architect, who has come into the community with a particular role to fulfil, but other tales belong solely to the people themselves. The longer pieces tend to contain somewhat more descriptive detail than the spare and poetic novella, but most still rely on dialogues—with the attendant confusions that tend to arise between villagers and anyone from outside, be it a larger town or a distant city—or unaffected monologues to carry the thrust of the narrative. In the ultra-short pieces, this is stripped down further. Life in this corner of the world is hard, but it is met by its inhabitants with a stoic fatalism that is well honoured through the sharp focus and stark beauty of Edgü’s prose.

The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales by Ferit Edgü is translated from the Turkish by Aron Aji and published by NYRB Classics. It has been short listed for the 2024 ERBD Literature Prize.

Snakes and ladders: Traces of Boots on Tongue and Other Stories by Rajkamal Chaudhary

There is a deep darkness in all directions, and we are sitting on the naked floor, awaiting light. When will the light come? Dipu unwraps the sheet from her body and lays it on the ground. She feels along the wall and keeps the bottle and the glass in a corner. Then asks—Who else is here? Chandravati, are you here? Nothing is visible in the dark. Not even one’s limbs. And in this darkness, Dipu’s voice shimmers like a white silver sword—Why don’t you say something? The sounds from here can’t be heard upstairs. And by now the owner must have paid off the police. Now why are you scared? Why not say something? Who else is here?

(from “Some People in a Burning House”)

A police raid has sent an assortment of women and their customers—a salesman, a student, an engineer, an old man—to the cold, bare basement of a brothel. By matchlight they try to sort out their situation. And then they realize, it’s not a raid but a fire. The building is aflame and no one knows what might be happening upstairs.

Welcome to the world of Rajkamal Chaudhary. This world is one that is in transition. The mid-twentieth century is a time of upheaval. The aftermath of World War Two sees the Cold War, and various conflicts and revolutions on the rise. In India, the newly independent nation is trying to define itself after the end of British colonial rule. Following a long struggle for freedom and the disruption of Partition, there is displacement, dissolution, and wide-spread poverty. The future looks less certain and less rosy than that which might have been imagined. Chaudhary, as perhaps the first avant-garde Hindi-language writer, drew inspiration directly from this unstable period, and, eschewing the moralistic literary traditions, painted a vivid, often vulgar, portrait of his time.

Born in northern Bihar in 1929, Chaudhary had strict religious upbringing, but his childhood was marked by the death of his mother when he was young, and his father’s subsequent remarriage to woman close to his own age. After high school he moved to Patna to attend college where he eventually graduated with a degree in Commerce, but by then he was already drawn to literary pursuits. His earliest works, poetry and prose, were published in Maithili, but Hindi soon proved a more productive and lucrative language. Much of his Hindi work was produced during the six years he lived in Calcutta in the late fifties and early sixties where he also came into contact with the young avant-garde poets of the Hungryalist movement. When he died in 1967, at the age of thirty-seven, he had written eleven novels, seven short story collections and hundreds of poems in Hindi and Maithili. Twelve of his Hindi stories are gathered in the collection Traces of Boots on Tongue, published last year by Seagull Books. In her Introduction, translator Saudamini Deo writes of his idiosyncratic style:

The stories in this collection are montages, flashes, almost documentary-like glimpses of the past that no longer feels like the past. Much like the novelle vague cinema that broke down boundaries between realty and fiction, Chaudhary’s stories seem to reject the characteristic formality of earlier Hindi literature and embrace a newer, more modern cadence of a world where there is no longer either god or morality, not even the desire for it. He is a writer writing not in a closed room but on the streets, in plein-air.

These stories are populated with unsettled individuals from all social classes, disillusioned artists and writers, unhappy husbands and wives, angry widows and widowers, lost madmen and madwomen. And a curious abundance of snakes, real and allegorical. As a man whose adult life was characterized by complicated relationships with women—two marriages and multiple affairs—Chaudhary tackled sex and sexuality with an openness that was unconventional for his times, to say the least. Some of that is reflected in the selections here, such as “Sisters-in-law” in which one of two women, widowed young, who support themselves servicing their local community’s healthy supply of “rascals,” has an disturbing experience. In another story, a boy befriends an effeminate classmate and finds himself in the terrifying clutches of his sexually aggressive mother.

Anger, bitterness, and anxiety fuel many of his characters and their interactions. Others are lost and confused, often struggling with reality, be it due to illness or intoxication. In “Veni Sanhar,” a young second wife and new mother, recently recovered from typhoid, suffers from periodic hallucinations. While her older husband attends to his business indoors, the servant and her stepson try to look after her and the baby. “Warriors Don’t Worry About the Right Time,” revolves around a man who insists he sees his dead wife coming to the well. His is a refusal to accept the truth, a refusal to move on:

Uncle spends his time on the veranda, and in the evening, after drinking bhang, reflects on what has and has not happened. There is no worry about the present. There is no hope or wish to turn or shape the present to one’s will. Stories and tales about what has passed please the mind. What has passed was better, appropriate, preferable. And, by thinking about what has not passed, the present remains forgotten and lost.

Some of Chaudhary’s stories are gritty, others melancholy. The shorter tales are more likely to have more internal coherence, but the longer, more intricate ones tend to unfold slowly through film-like scenes and vignettes. What is happening is not always immediately clear, and the endings hang in the air. One of the most intricate stories, “Like a Wall of Glass,” features a commercial artist, Kapoor, who wishes to transcend the constraints of money and produce a true work of art. He has his heart set on painting the wife of a well-known folk-art specialist—a man intent on preserving the past glories of Indian culture—but his inspiration personal is the abstract modernist Henry Moore. Yet, he realizes the absurdity of his ambitions:

Art! Culture! Creation! Expression! Beauty! How pointless and futile these words have become! But then, what possesses meaning after all? Money? An evening with a woman? Falling ill? Going mad? Committing suicide after writing a letter to friends? What is truth? What is sin? What is man himself? Morality? The point of life? The point of creation? What is man himself? Why doesn’t he die? Then, again, Kapoor starts smiling at the emptiness of his questions.

The anxious artist swings from confidence to disappointment and back as he pursues his goal. But even producing a brilliant painting, an ideal work of art, cannot achieve whatever he thinks he might be aiming for.

Chaudhary’s particular vivid, if often uncomfortable, portrayal of mid-twentieth century India in flux had trouble finding an audience outside of the literary journals of his day as it was deemed too indecent and immoral for the literary mainstream. Now that a selection of his stories is finally available in English, his work may well surprise and appeal to contemporary readers comfortable with more unconventional or less structured narratives. His characters and the situations in which they find themselves are troubled with unanswered questions that are still valid in our own volatile world. But understand that his stories, like life itself, offer no easy solutions.

Traces of Boots on Tongue and Other Stories by Rajkamal Chaudhary is translated from the Hindi by Saudamini Deo and published by Seagull Books.

Am I really me? Barcode: Fifteen Stories by Krisztina Tóth

When one speaks of a short story collection as “loosely linked” there is often the implication that some kind of continuous theme, or even set of characters, connecting the individual pieces to a greater or lesser extent. Krisztina Tóth’s debut collection, Barcode, originally published in Hungary in 2006, is a little different in this respect. The narrators or protagonists are all Hungarian, and timewise, their settings are in keeping with the age of the author who was born in 1970, but, even if some stories may contain possible biographical elements, the voices and circumstances do not suggest that all, or even any of the fifteen feature the same character. Rather, what connects the stories of these girls and women is a motif—all contain reference to a “line” or “lines” of some kind as noted in the story’s subtitle. We find borderlines, blood lines, grid lines, baseline, the line’s busy, and so on. It is a interesting way of providing continuity to a varied collection of tales. In fact, in her introduction, Tímea Turi tells us that the first element of the Hungarian word for “barcode” translates as “line.” Thus, each piece has something to say about the lines that define, restrict, or even scar us.

One can also say that the collection of stories in Barcode cross the “line” marking the end of Communism in Eastern Europe and its replacement with democratically elected governments— a line that corresponds with, as it would for Tóth herself, the end of adolescence and the beginning of early adulthood. The harbinger of that transition in Hungary is observed in “Outline Map (Life Line)” as a young university student on a fateful visit to a summer cottage with her first boyfriend remarks:

It was 32 degrees; we slathered each other with suntan lotion as we watched the TV. The General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party János Kádár has died. Actually, I felt rather sorry for him. Sorry that I would no longer be hearing his name in the news bulletins, sorry that the landscape of our childhood would soon disappear, that the crêperie shack on Kálvin Square had been demolished and that entire blocks of houses were disappearing, that the streets twisted and turned in odd directions, that in the sequence of events some kind of curious, unbridgeable gap was being created.

The stories set in childhood reflect Hungary of the 1970s and 80s—contaminated housing estates, a military style summer camp, an idealized fascination with “the West”—whereas the stories with adult protagonists deal with the demands of career, relationships, and motherhood, sometimes even venturing beyond Hungary, to Japan and Paris, for instance, where, if anything, the characters’ Hungarian identities are even more evident in contrast to their foreign surroundings.

The majority of the stories in Barcode are first person monologues with unnamed narrators, who have strong, distinctive voices. They are often seeking to understand and define themselves within their families, their romantic relationships (and infatuations) and within their communities. They may be speaking to immediate events or looking back at their younger, more naïve selves, sometimes with considerable insight. In one of my favourite stories, “The Pencil Case (Guidelines),” a girl recounts her primary school experiences at a time when “the colour both of our gowns and our copy books was indigo.” The narrative cleverly captures a shift in self awareness that occurs when she is wrongly accused of tripping a classmate, but allows herself to take the blame—in her retelling there is suddenly both an “I” and a “she” who becomes separated from her own name and identity and remains that way:

Later, too, the body belonging to the name continued to say nothing, responding with an obstinate silence and a blank, unflinching stare to the teacher’s interrogation, and as for the name, she began to hear it as casually and forgetfully as her cardigan and  the PE kit she invariably left behind somewhere or other. She became an actor in that weird film witnessed in the schoolyard, which the I had seen and in which she had been found guilty and which from this day on I, the name, had consistently to bear through all the indigo days that followed.

Her circumstances so clearly reflect the way many a shy child manages to navigate a system—grade school—in which they are out of place and unable to speak for themselves.

Although the stories are not organized in a strictly chronological fashion in this volume, they generally move from childhood through adolescence to adulthood, the latter stories tending to feature the more mature protagonists. Here strained romances, pregnancy, miscarriage, and self-image  take the place of childhood joys and fears. As in “What’s this Mark Here? (Bikini Line),” where a woman traces the history of her relationship to her body from her first bathing suit through to childbirth via caesarean section. The pictures she draws along the way are vivid:

My first swimsuit isn’t a swimsuit. It’s a pair of trunks. At that age there’s no big difference between boys and girls: it’s just chubby, flat-footed kids’ bodies running about on the sands. The sun shines. I’m crouched down by a wooden tub, blinking into the camera. It must have been lovely in the hot sand. I show the photo to my son. Mum, he says, that isn’t you, that’s a little girl. Indeed: am I really me? In the background a fleshy female leg in slippers consisting of two blue crossed strips of rubber: beach slippers. The legs belong to my grandmother, who would soon take a step or two into the water, pulling a rubber dinghy. We are sailing.

Fifteen stories, fifteen girls and women, each growing up and finding their way. Tóth’s poetic background (she was a well-established poet when this book first came out) serves her well as she crafts memorable portraits of female life in Hungary and beyond. More than a decade and a half after first publication, they speak to timeless aspects of female experience. And, no review would be complete without mentioning the striking presentation of this volume with barcode-like like lines across the top and bottom of each page and unique designs setting off each tale.

Barcode: Fifteen Stories by Krisztina Tóth is translated from the Hungarian by Peter Sherwood and published by Jantar Publishing.

Casting light on a fading world: For Now, It Is Night by Hari Krishna Kaul

It was so cold! I felt as if I were sleeping on ice. It was a large room and there were three of us in it. The windows were shut but they were without panes. Outside, it was raining heavily and the strong winds from the Pir Panjal came in gusts. The wind, this biting cold of Banihal, blew strongly through the room of the tourist hostel. Despite being indoors, it was as if we were sleeping outside.

Thus opens the title story of For Now, It Is Night, a collection of short stories drawn from across the career of Kashmiri writer Hari Krishna Kaul. In less than six pages, this tale of three travellers, strangers before they find themselves sharing a room on a stormy night after their bus driver decided it was too late and, perhaps, too dangerous to attempt to cross the Banipal Pass of the Pir Panjal range of the lower Himalya. One man is decidedly unhappy with the delay, the other almost mystically inured to the biting cold, while the restless protagonist finds himself questioning reality as the night drags on. It is a simple story that deftly conveys the cold, the discomfort, and the loneliness of three stranded souls unable to find even the slightest comfort in one another’s company. It is the perfect distillation of Kaul’s ability to capture the complicated dynamics that bind and divide individuals, on both an intimate and a wider community level.

Born in Kashmir in 1934, Kaul spent most of his life in his homeland where he taught Hindi literature until 1990, when he was forced to join the exodus of Hindu Kashmiris from the region. He settled in Delhi where he lived, in exile, until his death in 2009. His work captures the details of Hindu Kashmiri life in old-town Srinagar during the last decades of the twentieth century, as well as the shifting socio-political tensions of the time. Over his lifetime, he published short stories, a novel and many plays for radio and television. For Now, It Is Night draws from all of his story collections, the first two published in 1972 and 1985, respectively and the latter published in 1996 and 2001, following his relocation to Delhi. However, what makes this selection of his work especially valuable and unique, lies in the combined effort of a team of translators.

As his niece, Kalpana Raina, describes in her Introduction, she had long heard of her uncle’s importance in modern Kashmiri literature, but until she had her father read some his stories to her—she could speak the language but not read it—she did not appreciate his eye for detail or empathy for his characters, their settings and their predicaments:

This was the world he had grown up in and his ambivalent relationship with it is quite clear in the forewords he wrote to his four collections of short stories. The are no grand themes in Kaul’s work, but an exploration and ultimately an acceptance of human limitations. He used his personal experiences to explore universal themes of isolation, individual and collective alienation, and the shifting circumstances of a community that went on to experience a significant loss of homeland, culture, and ultimately language.

Raina hoped that fresh new translations of her uncle’s stories might bring renewed attention to his work, and to that end, she recruited three young scholars and writers who could read Kashmiri and the Nastaliq script to collaborate with her on this project. They encountered unexpected challenges, first tracking down original manuscripts which were often not in the best condition, and then later with the more recent political upheavals in Kashmir and the pandemic. Despite the roadblocks, the final product is the result of a close engagement between four translators, “all native Kashmiri speakers, but representing a diversity of gender, age, experiences, and religious identity,” each bringing an important perspective and background.

The stories gathered in For Now, It Is Night, vary from domestic dramas, to surreal fables, to explorations of the uneasy relationships between Hindus and Muslims and between those of differing social standing. The narrators and protagonists often reveal much through their bluster and denial than what they openly admit to. In the opening story, “Sunshine,” for instance, the only one with a strong female character at its centre, Poshkuj arrives in Delhi to stay with younger son and his wife, certain that she has finally entered warmth and civilization. She has nothing good to say about her other son and “that fishwife,” but her bitter asides also reveal that she is put out and disturbed by her young daughter-in-law’s open-mindedness and rejection of Kashmiri social niceties. She is unable to comprehend the size of the city, its strangely quiet neighbourhoods, or the shocking mention of “Pakistan.” In fact the only thing she fully embraces is the sunshine, the glorious sunshine:

One could die for this sunshine. This is truly the only worthwhile thing in Delhi. She raised her sari slightly and scratched her right leg. She looked at her chapped skin and cursed the cold of Kashmir that was so hard on one’s hands and feet. Reflecting on the weather, she remembered her grandson, Bittĕ. Poor boy! How miserable he is, with his chilblains. How many times I told that monster mother of his that her son’s feet needed attention. Make sure he wears socks and fur-lined shoes, I said. But would that woman listen to me? Of course, fur-lined shoes are expensive and Gasha barely manages to get by. He doesn’t even have an overcoat for himself and shivers in the cold. She sighed. It’s all a matter of one’s fate.

The eighteen stories that comprise this collection demonstrate Kaul’s ability to craft a moving tale with vivid characters, caught up in events or circumstances that continually surprise and engage his reader. Some fall on the side of the fantastic like “Tomorrow—A Never-Ending Story” about two school boys who shirk their commitment to learning their times tables with such determination that they end up trapped in time, endlessly repeating Class IV while the rest of their classmates and peers grow up and move on with their lives, or “The Tongue and the Egg,” a bizarre fable in which two officers are charged with facilitating the collection of six million eggs, searching and even torturing or killing those thought to be hiding eggs, all for a bizarre purpose. Others begin on an eccentric note before taking a sharp emotional turn, such as “The Mourners” wherein two whimsically named young men, Tarzan and Doctor are called to assist with the funeral rites of their friend Pedro whose mother has just died. The subtle dynamics that bind fathers and sons, husbands and wives, and grandmothers and grandsons are teased out in stories that, more often than not, speak to the loneliness and isolation within families, heightened when distance pulls generations apart.

Kalpana Raina tells us that the selection of the stories in this collection was made with input from a small group of Kaul’s contemporaries and some younger students. The stories were then recorded in an effort to engage members of her family and the extended diaspora who could not read the script. That, together with the involvement of four translators, two of whom have contributed additional Notes, gives this volume a range and depth that truly honours Kaul’s contribution to Kashmiri literature and makes it accessible to a new generation of English language readers.

For Now, It Is Night by Hari Krishna Kaul is translated from the Kashmiri by Kalpana Raina, Tanveer Ajsi, Gowhar Fazili, and Gowhar Yaqoob, and published by Archipelago Books.

Fragments of Happiness: What is Saved by Aamer Hussein

I came rather late to the work of Pakistani British author Aamer Hussein, surreptitiously as I’ve said before, through an unsolicited essay I received when I was an editor for an online journal, from a writer who had also encountered him by chance when she found a copy of his collection Insomnia in a “decaying” bookstore. The essay impressed me so much that before I sent a letter of acceptance I had already ordered a copy of Insomnia for myself. This was, I knew, an author I needed to read:

Hussein’s stories display an audacious ability to synthesize complexities of social subjectivity; yet behind this complex surface lies a rich silence. His stories remain porous, marked by gaps and holes—a kind of silence which, rather than a lack, represents a positive capacity, Hussein’s most potent mode. What Aamer Hussein offers us is an invaluable model of resistance in literature: resistance that works through silence, through that which remains unsaid.[1]

Yet, if silence can be such an effective mechanism in a fictional context, would the same author approach autobiographical writing with greater detail or, dare we say, denseness? Not if you’re Aamer Hussein.

What is Saved, released earlier this year as part of the Red River Story Series, is a selection of “Life Stories and Other Tales” gathered, editor Sucharita Dutta-Asane tells us, from two earlier collections, Hermitage and Restless: Instead of an Autobiography. Among these short works are accounts drawn from Hussein’s childhood in Karachi, tales inspired by friends and family members, a variety of true and re-imagined truths set in London where he has lived since the age of fifteen and at various points in his long process of rebuilding his connection to the country of his birth. If the pieces gathered in What is Saved might in some sense speak, as the Urdu subtitle—Batori Hui Khushiyan—implies, to all happiness, anyone familiar with Hussein’s fiction knows that in his work happiness tends to be tinged with melancholy. In this collection, which deals so openly with longing, displacement, illness and mortality, a similar wistfulness again permeates the quiet hopefulness that buoys his prose.

Loosely, the early autobiographical and autofictional pieces highlight Hussein’s early years in Karachi, offering a portrait of the culture of the city in the 1960s. His life is enriched by his mother’s love of music, and a proximity to Urdu literary figures and even a film star who moves into his neighbourhood. These are followed by a selection of stories and fable-like pieces, some no more than a page in length, inspired by friends or family members or traditional tales. But the themes that become prominent through the balance of the collection include literary friendships, the Covid-19 lockdowns, the loss of loved ones, injury and, finally, life with a terminal cancer diagnosis. Whether he is reflecting on life’s rewards and realities directly or through the lens of fiction, birds, gardens, and flowers tend to create a greater sense of continuity than any particular place or time. He is ever a writer who captures the ambiguity of belonging—in a city, in a culture, or in relationship to others.

Two of my favourite pieces in What is Saved fall onto the memoir side of the fiction/nonfiction equation and address elements of the connection between language and identity. In the first, “Teacher,” the only essay in this volume originally composed in Urdu (translated by  Shahbano Alvi), Hussein recalls a man he called Shah sahab, the London based friend of his parents whose private tutelage helped him gain confidence in his mother tongue. With his tutor’s support, the teenaged Hussein was finally able to read, in the original Urdu, a book he’d first encountered in English translation, a text that had already had a profound impact on his understanding of the world he came from:

My eyes opened to the imagery of an intriguing past; the imposition of the British Raj  in the 19th century and the downfall of the Oudh culture of which I’d been only vaguely aware. Brought up in the Westernised circles of Karachi, I had been exposed for the most part to history books written by the Western historians.

Thus, halfway across the world from his homeland, he would become sufficiently proficient to study Urdu prose and poetry at university even if he would go on to dedicate himself to English literature, as a teacher and writer. In a later piece, he talks about returning to Urdu, as he begins to spend more time in Pakistan and learns to trust his ability to creatively express himself in the language.

The second essay, “Suyin: A Friendship,” remembers a teacher of a different kind—a literary mentor. Although her books are now out of print, I remember when Han Suyin’s novels were a popular item in the bookstores I worked at during my university years but I had no idea what had happened to her. In this piece, Hussein reflects on his friendship with the Chinese born author and doctor, nearly forty years his senior, who encouraged him to listen to the music of Urdu, a language she loved without understanding it. Her advice was wise. “Trapped between tongues like her, I did what she couldn’t,” he says, “I reclaimed another self in my forgotten tongue.” In thinking back on their profound and yet ultimately strained relationship—she influenced his career even if she could not remain the writer he wanted her to be—his own journey away from and back to both Pakistan and Urdu is mapped out. It was not a path without its own inherent contradictions, especially at the beginning:

Reclaiming Pakistan had made my fragile anchor slip away and my feet were sliding on slippery sand. My terms of belonging had changed: I was not whole. I wasn’t a Westerner of foreign origin. I was not someone who, to quote Suyin, happened to live abroad and went back for my roots: I was someone who had left behind a homeland and never found anything to replace the empty patch.

There is a restless running through many of the pieces in this collection that echoes Hussein’s movement back and forth between language and place. It finds him, or his fictional alter egos, feeling isolated and confined by the restrictions that a broken leg, pandemic lockdowns or the medical implications of disease impose, but remaining resistant and unwilling to fall into complacency. Between the lines, a vulnerability exists, as it does for any one of us, but Hussein has a way of writing, especially in the memoir/personal essay form, that carries his reader just to edge, revealing only what is needed, more concerned with what is felt and leaving silence to hold what cannot be answered.

What is Saved: Batori Hui Khushiyan (Life Stories and Other Tales) by Aamer Hussein is published by Red River Story.

[1] Ali Raz, “Silence as Resistence in Aamer Hussein’s Stories,” 3:AM Magazine, Published May 15, 2018. https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/silence-as-resistance-in-aamer-husseins-stories/

Making every word count: The Questionable Ones by Judith Keller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ties that bind and confine: Mothers and Truckers by Ivana Dobrakovová

Meet Svetlana, Ivana, Olivia, Lara, and Veronika, the protagonists who carry the five stories that comprise Slovak writer Ivana Dobrakovová’s collection, Mothers and Truckers. They are each, to a greater or lesser extent, caught up in the tangled webs of memories, failures and desires that occupy their thoughts and drive their actions, often to potentially counterproductive ends. Memorable and intense, these stories pull the reader into the interior lives of five very different, complicated, and not always likeable, women trying to navigate the expectations of family and society for better or worse.

Born in Bratislava in 1982, Dobrakovová studied English and French translation at Comenius University before moving to Italy where she works as a freelance translator of Italian into Slovak, notably of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. The present collection, her third, was awarded the 2019 EU Prize for Literature and is her second work to be made available in English (following her novel, Bellevue which was, like this,  also published by Jantar in Julia and Peter Sherwood’s translation). Her stories here tend to be on the longer side—two are about 50 pages in length and one is almost 70—and clear or suggested mental instability is a common theme, one that reflects, she says, an interest arising from the fact that her husband and sister are both psychiatrists. It is a quality that lends the three central, longer stories a particular claustrophobic, compelling power.

“Ivana,” the near-novella length piece, offers the most explicit portrayal of the impact of serious mental illness with its tragic and endearing narrator, a thirty-one year old woman who lives with her mother. Ivana, in a sometimes disjointed and exuberant narrative, recounts her childhood love of horses and the long hours she spent at the stables to the cost of her education, all the while hinting at the horrifying trauma that marked the sharp shift in her personal destiny. In the meantime, she has met R., a journalist and local celebrity, through the one friend who has not long since abandoned her. This has given her a renewed interest in life, even if she risks threatening peace with her overbearing mother, this budding relationship largely bound to fantasy, and her own mental stability which is being carefully contained:

It’s taken my psychiatrist in Tehelná Street years to fine-tune my medication, to find the right level between my mood swings and make sure I was neither too subdued and slowed down or too hyper and upbeat, that I was under control, hers, Mum’s, my own, that I didn’t get so high that I would have to be dragged down to earth, or get so low that I would need to be helped back onto my enfeebled legs, in a word, so that I would be myself again, albeit within some sensible, clearly defined limits, myself but not too much myself.

Ivana has a wonderful sense of self-deprecating humour and, although she is pretending to be working on a novel and hiding the truth of her circumstances from R., she demonstrates a canny ability to vividly unfold what is ultimately a very painful story.

Olivia’s eponymous tale, the first of two stories set in Turin, presents a conflicted narrator obsessed with the news story of a teacher who was seduced by a young student to very unfortunate ends. She is also a teacher, albeit it one who was married and, in her own estimation, still attractive for her age. Surely she would not be so gullible. As her monologue proceeds, she reveals herself to be lonely, bitter and excessively paranoid about germs. As she tries to justify the situation in which she has found herself at the age of thirty-nine, she cannot quite accept the part she has played in her own life. And she prides herself in the fact that, unlike Gloria, the victim in the news reports, she is not living with—heaven forbid—her parents. Like all of the protagonists in Mothers and Truckers, relationships with parents, especially mothers, are fraught. Even though she has long been out of the house, Olivia’s mother still manages to intrude on her life almost daily, by phone, WhatsApp, Facebook, more so now that she is once again “single.”

Because my mother, by contrast, is present. Far too present, in fact. The usual story. She compensates. My mother spreads like mildew around the window. She devours everything that happens to find itself in her way. Overpowers it, supresses it. She’s everywhere. When I’m with her, it’s as if she was twice my size, with me being just a kind of external appendage  to her body that has never managed to cut itself off.

The third longer story, “Lara,” is also set in Turin, but her mother is dead and sorely missed. One has to wonder if her presence might have mediated what this unhappy, brutally self-centred mother of two has become. Lara’s internal monologue is perhaps the most exhausting and disturbing. She’s a complicated, damaged woman who questions her own mental functioning, but seems powerless to stop the very dangerous path she is on.

Together, the three central stories in the collection confirm Dobrakovová’s ability to inhabit distinct, multifaceted women caught in complicated predicaments that offer no easy resolution. The intensity of their internal monologues is fueled by a fluctuating style and form. At times, thoughts unwind in long sentences, strung together with commas while other passages feature short, staccato sentences. She also relies on a strong sense of space, her characters traverse the environments in which they live, in memory or in real time, in Slovakia or Turin, places she knows well. By contrast, “Father,” the opening story is a somewhat simpler tale of a man who largely neglects his family in pursuit of impossible, if relatively humble, dreams until alcohol and madness take a toll, but the final tale, “Veronika,” the only third person narrative, paints the portrait of a student who is embarking on a path that is bound to become difficult, even threatening, as she loses herself in chat room flirtations on the pretext of improving her French. As a whole, this volume is an immersive and intense reading experience.

Mothers and Truckers by Ivana Dobrakovová is translated from the Slovak by Julia and Peter Sherwood and published by Jantar Publishing.

Rain like this doesn’t wash away the filth: Hawa Hawa and Other Stories by Nabarun Bhattacharya

The gleaming wet road, the rusty tin roof of a motorcar repair garage, behind it an old paint-peeling stunned-still old house and a chimney precariously propped up with haphazard wires—the sky can see all this. And, not as clearly, the burnt-black tin-backed shops and buses and the in-between blocks of darkness that were Matador sheds and not the half-rotten bellies of fish but the shells of banged-up taxis. There were crumbling and dead accident cars too, their mouths full of dirt. The sky view mists over every now and then, for it has been raining continuously.

This is the setting of “Last Night,” one of the pieces in Hawa Hawa and Other Stories, the recently released collection of inventive short stories by Bengali writer Nabarun Bhattacharya. As the angry rain beats down on the trash-filled water logged street, two young men are fighting. They are unevenly matched, a condition mediated by sheer intoxication, but they are each intent on doing damage to the other. And in a very unexpected way they are also best friends.

Bhattacharya (1948-2014), the son of writer and activist Mahasweta Devi and actor and playwright Bijon Bhattacharya, worked as a journalist from 1971 to 1993, before turning his attention to writing fulltime. His magic realist tales tend to feature eccentric characters drawn from the shadows—dirty cops, nostalgic former revolutionaries, unsavoury figures and an assortment of anxious souls. His Calcutta is gritty, pungent, dark and unforgiving. The scenes that unfold, on these streets and beyond, range from sharp political and social satire to strange meditations on violence, madness and love. Set primarily in the 1970s and 80s, but reaching back as far as the 1940s, there are stories that play out against the early Communist-led peasant movements in West Bengal, the Naxalite uprising and the 1975 Emergency, as well as more intimate dramas set in family homes, trains and, of course, on the street.

Bhattacharya excels at creating memorable characters, and rapid, witty sequences of dialogue peppered with English words (indicated in the translation with the use of italics) and references to popular Indian films and songs. A number of his stories rely heavily on a steady back and forth between two people who happen to meet up and share some kind of common past or current circumstance. Others unfurl under surreal conditions, influenced by alcohol, madness or some impending fear. There is an immersive quality to these dark tales.

Take, for example, “Mole,” the story of a seemingly unrepentant cop with a patch of skin on his neck that begins to itch and become inflamed just before he murders someone—“murder” being an accepted language for the state-sanctioned killing his investigative role entails. The itch causes his restless right hand to fumble in his pants pocket where his pistol awaits. The sweat, the smells and the agitation grow. We follow him on a mission to a nightclub. Once the job is done he kicks at the corpse bouncing on the floor of the police van and emotionally decompresses as he returns to the station. A bleak and grim premise perhaps but for the banter in the office (with its water tank filled with bombs to be deactivated), the pointed parenthetical commentary on authorized violence, and the insatiable demons that haunt the protagonist:

Back home, he usually takes a bath, uses soap—puts some ointment on the itch—the sweat from his body and the dirty soap-lather swirl into the drain and disappear. He rubs scented oil on his hair. He is very sleepy, but sleep never comes without dreams. Dreams have eyes, they ask questions, they laugh, they beat on drums. Their limbs are ripped and shredded, bits and pieces bloody. His family has told him he sometimes talks in his sleep, groans, slurs out orders. Sometimes he scratches his back so furiously that he wakes up in the morning to find it bleeding.

There is a deeply embedded hallucinatory fear that follows him down the darkened Calcutta streets and adds a spark of troubled humanity to his situation.

Fear and superstition mark several of the tales, most tragically perhaps in “A Piece of Nylon Rope” in which two men meet outside a hospital on a rainy night. The narrator is there to look in on a colleague who had a stroke at the office, while the other is waiting for news of his son who suffered a serious football injury. The latter, Jagadish-babu, has a uncertain confidence despite the poor prognosis. He feels his fate has turned. He explains that he was already inclined to seeking fortune tellers and good luck charms when he learned that what he really needed was to get a piece of a hanging rope:

‘Hanging rope?’

‘Yes. Suppose someone hangs themselves to death. If you can get a piece of that rope and keep it with you, then boom!—whatever you want is yours. All the evil eyes on you, the vexing, the hexing—the whole fucking lot will vanish. Khoka’s injured so badly. But do you see any fear in me?’

Jagadish shows the narrator the length of nylon rope he has acquired and carries with him everywhere, but admits that the good fortune it promises comes with a steep price. He cannot be alone, for fear the suicide victim will return and demand the rope back. For a man with a trusted talisman, he is a nervous wreck.

Several of the stories in Hawa Hawa, including the title tale and “Mole,” highlight the brutality of the West Bengal police, while another demonstrates the inability of a newly elected politician to protect an old friend and revolutionary comrade. Elsewhere we meet a child with a cruel streak, the brother of an accused murderer who holds to his belief in his innocence, a businessman offering the perfect suicide—for a price—and a gangster who prophetically spends the evening with a headless prostitute. Inequality, injustice and the abuse of power are common themes driving the world that Battacharya wanted to bring to the surface through his darkly humorous, weirdly engaging fiction. And if his comfortable contemporary Bengali audience was disturbed by what they found in his work, he was hitting his mark.

Notably, this translation is the work of a young translator, Subha Prasad Sanyal, and his ability to bring Battacharya’s subversive and playful writing to life is impressive. He pays careful attention to rhythm and tone. As mentioned, the English words transliterated in the original Bengali text are italicized, yet many Bangla terms are left intact where context is sufficient to imply meaning, a choice that helps maintain a distinctive narrative feel. Meanwhile, any cultural, political and place references that enhance understanding are explained in the Translator’s Note.

Hawa Hawa by Nabarun Bhattacharya is translated by Subha Prasad Sanyal and published by Seagull Books.

A compilation of shadows: Ninth Building by Zou Jingzhi

From childhood till now, I’ve spoken many bold words. Publicly or in private, I’ve proclaimed the kind of person I wanted to be, though it never happened in the end. I feel like someone has somehow taken my place, leaving me to become the person I am now.

When I’m around too many people, I lose myself. In an unfamiliar city, among crowds of strangers, I keep having to stand still—not to ask directions, but to find myself. Even when I’ve done that, I’m still lonely, so I head back to my hotel and listen to the sound of rain.

These lines, drawn from the melancholy and poetic Introduction to Ninth Building by acclaimed Chinese writer, poet and playwright Zou Jingzhi, speak to a fragmented sense of self, a “compilation of shadows,” that has long accompanied him, appearing unbidden on the street or haunting quiet nights. This book, originally published in Chinese in 2010 and now available in Jeremy Tiang’s excellent English translation, is an attempt to give these shadows some of the depth, context and meaning distorted by the experience of growing up during the years of the Cultural Revolution. As Jingzhi says in an interview on the site of the 2023 International Booker Prize for which his book has been nominated:

 In the early 1990s, my childhood felt like it had been a gust of wind behind the trees. I used to spend my days being lost: What should I write? Whatever I wrote was wrong. It was impossible to get rid of my childhood back then. So I just wrote like that. I wrote for myself. I wrote to let go of my childhood.

Ninth Building is a cohesive work with a common narrator, but it is presented as a series of vignettes or very short stories, set between 1966 and 1977, arranged in a roughly but not strictly chronological order. Time, in its experiencing and remembering, has a somewhat fractured quality. After all, the Cultural Revolution was an unnatural period of disruption and upheaval and, as Jingzhi’s stories so clearly demonstrate, many hours of unstructured tedium. The first section “Ninth Building,” takes its name from the housing complex in Beijing where Zou is living with his family when the Revolution begins. He is about thirteen or fourteen at the time. The first story “Eight Days” is a diary format tale set in November 1966 that describes the eagerness and concern with which a group of boys set out to obtain Red Guard armbands. It is not clear that they understand just what they signify, only that they don’t want to be seen without one. Many of the pieces in this part demonstrate the haphazard way that the adolescents try to make sense the objectives of this movement sweeping the country, rejoicing in the death or humiliation of old women labelled part of the “landlord class,” unaware that many of their own families would soon be suspect. Yet amid the increasing levels of violence among their classmates and peers, there is a lot of idle time to be filled with a variety of friends and neighbours. Boredom had company.

There is a lot of humour in the first part of Ninth Building, some of it rather black, even disturbing, but much also reliant on the innocence of the protagonist and his young buddies (it is the 1960s after all). A wonderful early vignette (“Capturing the Spoon”) describes a night patrol during which the intrepid and enthusiastic guards observe, through a lighted window, a naked couple thrashing around in a bed. Alarmed, they rush to report this obvious, if strange, infraction, but the grown-ups from their compound’s “Attack with Words, Defend with Force” Unit are unmoved by this important information:

Nothing came of our waiting. We’d imagined they’d jump up immediately to stop whatever incorrect action was taking place. This was at the height of the Revolution, and the train we were on had switched to another track. What we’d seem didn’t fit the scenery on this route; red armbands and nakedness didn’t go together. The five of us had three flashlights between us, and for more than half a month now we’d stayed awake night after night, fully alert, wishing something would actually happen. Now something had, but the adults didn’t feel about it the same way we did.

The second and slightly longer part of Ninth Building, “Grains of Sand in the Wind,” opens in 1969 when is Zou sixteen and sent to the Great Northern Waste for “re-education through poverty.” He is one of the millions of “educated youth” sent to work in rural areas and learn from the peasant population. He will not return to the city until after the Revolution comes to an end in 1976. These are years filled with long days of back-breaking labour under harsh conditions, yet no more immune to extended periods of boredom than he knew in Beijing. But here the distractions, apart from the required performances of patriotic operas, were limited to gambling, drinking and practical jokes. Innocence is gone; the underlying tone is now one of resignation. Zou and his peers have come of age in a time when their lives and dreams of the future are suspended:

Youth is a concept whose meaning isn’t easy to grasp. You might as well try to wrap your mind around every era, every event. The word doesn’t really evoke any special memories for me. Perhaps I’ll have to wait till the age when every other sentence begins with “back then” before I truly understand it.

The vignettes set against the vast rural landscape are harsher, with more tragic elements. They are not devoid of humour or eccentric characters, but illness, injury and death feature regularly. Life is cheap. However, poetry and increasingly astute observations are woven into Jingzhi’s anecdotes and tales. As his narrator matures and grows more cynical, he also begins to recognize the seeds of his future as a writer that have been sown during these long years.

The Cultural Revolution was a period of great turmoil during which the power of radicalized youth was harnessed against the Communist Party hierarchy, but as illustrated by Ninth Building, the impact on many young people during this time was marked not by heroism or the glory of conflict, but by years of boredom, dislocation and numbly tedious labour. With its brisk pace and refusal to succumb to despair in spite of the countless temptations, this collection of brief vignettes makes for an entertaining and powerful read.

Ninth Building by Zou Jingzhi is translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang and published by Open Letter in North America and Honford Star in the UK.