Month: December 2008

Amanda Michalopoulou in Context

~ bythefirelight

Dalkey Archive’s magazine Context has a good interview with Amanda Michalopoulou. She talks about I’d Like and it sounds as interesting as I have heard. I can’t wait to read it, although I have a couple more books lined up before it.  She said a couple of interesting things.

Characters are the vehicles of ideas, but they have to work as characters. If not, you’re writing theory, not literature. The idea behind the characters in this book is that family can be a mechanism of oppression. I guess all my characters feel very clearly that they are obeying other people’s wishes. Writing can be a true act of disobedience, so the desire the younger sister has to write these stories down is a step towards salvation. I believe that writing can and should do that: save characters who are suffering, and, possibly, their author as well.

And later

Helping people to be alone in a room, alone in the world, and yet surrounded by so many human beings inside their head. This is one of the greatest joys in life. And I say this as a reader now, not as a writer.

Bolanomania

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

El País has a proud review of Bolanomania, or as they say is should be written, Bolañomanía. Mostly it marvels at not only the breadth of great reviews in traditional press, including Oparah, but at the cultish praise and excitement in the blogosphere.

[…] la novela de Bolaño está beneficiándose de un insólito “boca a oreja” promovido desde medios muy diferentes. Las cinco estrellas que le han concedido los lectores de Amazon son el trasunto más comercial de la avalancha de opiniones favorables en la blogosfera, un hecho sin precedentes para un libro en español, aunque Bolaño ya fuera considerado un “autor de culto” en círculos minoritarios desde la publicación de Los detectives salvajes. Y es en esos ámbitos donde es mayor el poder de atracción y la influencia del escritor chileno, cuya literatura, como ha afirmado Rodrigo Fresán, posee un extraño efecto movilizador entre los jóvenes, que es con quienes mejor conecta. A ellos se dirigen los apresurados apuntes que, desde diversos medios, lo presentan perfunctoriamente como “un rebelde literario ejemplar”, una “respuesta posmoderna a García Márquez”, o resumen apresuradamente de sus años de formación como los de un “vagabundo, trabajador manual y drogadicto que trabajó intermitentemente en Chile, México y España”.

[…] Bolaño’s novel es benifiting from word to mouth promotion in different media. The five star reviews that the Amazon readers have given the book is just a the most commercial image of the avalanche of favorable opinions in the blogosphere, something without precedence for a Spanish language book even though Bolaño was already considered a cult author since the publication of the Savage Detectives. It is in this sphere where the attraction and influence of the Chilean, whose work, as Rodrigo Fresán has stated, possesses a strange power to mobilize the young who he has   connected with the strongest.They write the hurried notes that, through different media, present him as “a model literary rebel,” a postmodern answer to García Márquez,” o a hurried summary of his formative years as a “vagabond, manual laborer and drug addict that worked intermittently en Chile, Mexico, and Spain.

It is obvious that there is a desire to have English speakers read a little more than the boom, as great as it was. And I concur.

Khirbet Khizeh

~ bythefirelight

Khirbet Khizeh
S. Yizhar

Khirbet Khizeh has a controversial reputation in Israel and when reading it you can understand why: it questions the legitimacy of pushing Palestinians out of their homes during the 1948-49 war. Even to use the word push suggests I have taken sides, but it is Yizhar’s position and his moral stance, one who’s ambiguity is not in the actions of the participants, but in its oppositional position to the many histories that suggest Palestinians fled without any provocation, that make the book complex criticism.

The novella follows an Israeli army unit at the end of the war as they remove civilians from Palestinian villages. There are no grand battles, no moments of heroism, it is just the tired slog of at the end of a war. The unit comes upon one village; they shoot at it for awhile to chase of the inhabitants; then they enter it and round them up to put them on trucks to send them away. At another not one bullet is shot at the unit, instead the villagers leave peacefully, expecting, as the narrator says, to return home. Yet it is obvious that the unit is clearing the village so that the Israeli’s can have it and populate it in the future. The action is not for survival—it is a land grab. Even the most common place desires are a chance to show how the war has ceased to be about survival and instead of altruism each time the soldiers come upon something of value, an horse, a hoe, a shovel, he suggest that they would like to send these items home, except now that the war has gone on so long it doesn’t seem that important anymore.

Yizhar captures the tension between what the villagers have lost, not only in physical terms, but spiritual, and how the weight of the destruction, fatigue, and tired greed has now become a sense of resignation among the troops.

Walls that had been attentively decorated with whatever was at hand; a home lined with plaster and a molding painted blue and red; little ornaments that hung on the walls, testifying to a loving care whose foundations had now been eradicated; traces of female-wisdom-hath-builded-her-house, paying close attention to myriad details whose time now had passed; an order intelligible to someone and a disorder i which somebody at his convenience had found his way; remnants of pots and pans that had been collected in a haphazard fashion, as need arose, touched by very private joys and woes that a stranger could not understand; tatters that made sense to someone who was used to them—a way of life whose meaning was lost, diligence that had reached its negation, and a great, very deep muteness had settled upon the love, the bustle, the bother, the hopes, and the good and less-good times, so many unburied corpses.

But we were already tired of seeing things like this, we had no more interest in such things. One glance, a step or two were enough for the courtyard, the house, the well, the past and the present, and their attentive silence. And although there might be an abandoned pitchfork or a fine-looking hoe, or a good, and valuable, pipe wrench, momentarily enticing your to pick it up and weigh it in your hand, as one might in a market or a farmyard, and things that ought to be in their place, and even stirring and urge, incidentally, to take the motor from the well and the pipes, five inch, and the beams from above, and the bricks from below, and the wooden boards (we could always find a use for them in our yard) and send them home, there was such a tickling pleasure in getting such easy benefit, in getting rich quick, in picking up ownerless property and making it your own, and conquering it for yourself, and plans were already being made, right away, and it was already decided what was going to be done with almost all of these things at home, and how it would be done—except that we had been in so many villages already, and picked things up and thrown them away, taken them and destroyed them, and we were too used to it—so we picked up the fine looking ownerless hoe, or pitchfork, and hurled it down to the ground, if possible aiming it at something that would shatter at once, so as to relieve it of the shame of not being of use—with real destruction, once and for all, putting an end to its silence.

Khirbet Khizeh is not about heroism, it is about the mechanical grinding of war, not in the sense of front line action, but its uncontrollable nature once it has been set loose. The soldiers are not particularlly cruel, although they often say things such as, “they don’t even have blood in their veins, these Arabs,” and brag they could hit running villagers with the machine gun if only given the chance. The soldiers often speak of who started the war, which wasn’t them, and the expulsion is deserved and that certainty gives them license to steal. Throughout the novella, you have the understanding that no matter how right the war was, the war has become corrupted. They have become inured to the war and if they had away to differentiate between theft and combat at the start of the war (although it doesn’t seem so) they have long since lost it.

The narrative voice adds to the ambiguity and conflict between the defensive war and what the soldiers have become. Most of the novella is written in first person plural and gives one the sense of unit cohesion, of a an army united. Not until the last quarter of the book does the narrator become an I. The switch from we to I signals the arrival of not a moral actor, but the conscience who until now has reflected the fatigue of the soldiers and has not separated himself from them either. Now, though, the the narrator begins to wonder if what they are doing is justified and the change in tense is jarring. But it is a conscience that comes from a unit, a conscience that is enmeshed in a war. The narrator raises the question—do we have to do this—with his unit and Moshce, the leader. No one has a solution and so Mosche says get moving on to the next job, and the conscience that has just appeared is again subsumed back into the war. It is too much to expect the narrator to become a rebel, because he is part of the unit. War may allow one to question, but the imperatives of war are hard to escape.

When writing about war it is easy to over indulge in metaphors that put a barrier between the actual and the figurative. What exactly is hell? I don’t know, but if anyone but Sherman says war is hell, I’ve learned nothing. Khirbet Khizeh, though, takes a different approach. It is impressionistic and figurative, but never in describing combat (there is almost none). Instead, it describes the natural in terms of the beautiful fatigue: a tired mind’s memory of boredom and fatigue. The passages render the boredom into something physical and it give it a visual strength.

Now that we were going down the slope again into the body of the village along one of the lanes, wondering if it were wide enough for the jeep to pass through, and prepared for any kind of surprise that might come our way, as the stillness of the village closed in around the last house in the row, and the houses, still pent up within the walls of their courtyards, apparently breathed as they always had, only with a new astonishment, with the same woven tapestry of generations line by line and thread by thread, with an abundance of fine detail, the reason for each one of which may have been forgotten long ago and dissolved into the general appearance of a structure fixed in its form, like the bustle of ants to raise up something, grain upon gain, which, the larger and more complete it grew, the more shamefully its lack of purpose was laid bare, gradually exposed, and the disgrace of its end, weeping for the oblivion because of what had happened to it: instantly its condemnation was decreed, and very soon, here and there, the first curls of smoke would hesitantly rise, accompanied by curses because everything here was so wet and nothing would catch fire.

Khirbet Khizeh is one of those unique war novels (although it has the same feel as the movie Kippur ) where the absence of actual combat can still raise still deep and troubling issues that, in what seems cliché to say, still haunt us.

Slumdog Millionaire

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

Slumdog Millionaire

In a cliché filled movie, what is the cliché that finally makes you realize you’ve just wasted your $10? For me it was when the three orphans were working the trash pits of Mumbai and a stranger in his VW bus gives the kids Cokes and takes them to his orphanage. Oh, no, its Dickens, I thought, and here comes Fagan. Until that moment the movie was moving along just fine, maybe a little scatological for me, but it had an interesting visual style. Now, I’ve got nothing against rewrites of Dickens, and since the world stills has more than a few Dickensian cities a reworking of Dickens is to be expected. And I was willing to give it another chance, but as the movie went on, it only got worse. The most peblen of the clichés, of course, was the lovers (two of the three former orphans) running to each other through traffic choked streets. The stupidest was the final embrace in the train station. Not only a cliché, but it made no sense since the slumdog had just won who wants to be a millionaire. I think the love of his life could have found him at the TV station. The best cliché, though, was the third orphan’s end. In a fit of remorse the third orphan, a hit man, fills a bath tube full of money in the his boss’s house. When the boss, a cartoonish supervillain, and his henchmen break in to kill him, he shoots his boss while the others kill him. It was something straight out of John Woo but sillier. So much for Dickens 2008.

The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War
David Halberstram

I have often found that popular writing about war falls into two broad types, each with its own constituents who want to see something of themselves reflected in it. On is the soldier’s history, the history of a unit, or even an army, but emphasizing the experience of the soldier, what the combat, food and weather were like, all the while describing the individual acts of soldiering, some pure survival, some that are called bravery in retrospect, but were just one soldier looking to protect the rest of the unit. The soldier’s war is the easiest one to turn into silly heroics, done right, though, it can describe not only the actual experience but what it is that binds soldiers together long after the war and gives them an unchangeable loyalty to the unit they belonged to (I think EB Sledge’s With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa is the best example). Often at the end, though, you have a sense that if it weren’t for this one private, or this one company, the whole war would have been lost.

The other I often see is the strategic or political history of a war: who were the generals, what political constraints did they have. While these can have elements of the soldier’s war, more often the books seem to be interested in finding what made the subjects so good, or so bad, or so something that one can understand how the war was one or lost. Of course, the better books will paint a much more complex picture where you may wonder how anything was accomplished (David Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, can easily give one that impression). So many times, though, I’ve come away from a history of a way and thought, that general was some genius, even though not everyone can be a genius.

I mention these two broad types, because The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War has both of these elements and it makes for an excellent history which outlines some of the more salient moments. Yet is far from a complete history of the war. While no book can be the complete history, there are large gaps that made me wish he had stuck to either the political side of the story or the soldier’s. Each one part he relates is excellent and the detail he goes into on some encounters is impressive, but at other times, such as the Marine evacuation from the Chosin Reservoir, some incidents receive just a paragraph.

Halberstram had a particular story he wanted to relate about the Korean war and the gaps point as much to his focus as much as the parts he relates. It is not so much the war he wanted to document, but the transition from the victor of World War II and reluctant super power to an anti-communist state willing to pour billions of dollars and thousands of lives into preventing the expansion of communism. Korea forced the United States to modernize the Army, develop new strategies, and break with the World War II notion of unconditional surrender and settle for stalemates and containment. Moreover, it was the beginning of the rightward turn within the country and the rise of virulent anti-communism with the likes of McCarthy that was not only an ideological position, but a political tool to differentiate Republicans from Democrats and the New Deal.

With the change in political circumstances and the bad generalship due in large part to generals more interested in politics than sound strategy, particularly MacArthur and Almond, the war became the harbinger of all that was to go wrong in Vietnam. For Halberstram the war may have resulted in the development of South Korea and helped put together a sound defense establishment, but it also helped create the environment where no leader dare appear weak on communism. No leader would be able to analyze communism in subtle terms as George Kennan had and see the Vietnam War as an anti-colonial war , instead of the steady march of a monolithic communism. For this folly, for this inability to separate foreign policy from internal politics, the United States would suffer the Vietnam War, the policy making origins rooted deeply in the political battles of the Korean War.

Halberstram makes a compelling case and as I think about the political histories of war it is amazing that anything ever turns out even remotely like the participants planned.

Translation as Nationalism

~ bythefirelight

Eurozine has an article called re-transnationalization of literary criticism. It is not a new article (although the danish translation is), but it is interesting especially in the American context. The article laments the passing of an age when major newspapers in Europe would publish reviews of books that had just been published in a different countries and in a different languages. The golden age of this nationalism free reviewing was the 50s. Now, some 50 years later the major papers only review translations of books written in other languages. Considering how few fiction titles are translated into English, less than 3% this year according to Three Percent, it seems like not just a lost age, but an age that never existed. It also seems the perfect reflection of the differences between the United States and Europe: one a large geographically isolated country for much of its history; the other, a group of states whose histories and geography are intertwined even if at times some states have not wanted to believe it.

After the Boom: New Latin American Writing (sp)

~ bythefirelight

Although these articles were published in El País 6 months ago they are still very interesting. They are only in Spanish, but if you read Spanish you can get a good and quick overview of writing and writers since the boom, which sometimes feels like the only writing that makes in to translation.

The first article lists young writers (those born during the boom), a representative work, and their interests.

The second article is more a history of the trends in new writing. It includes an attack on the plague of magical realism that appeared after the House of Spirits was published, and an overview of newer trends in writing. Well worth the read if you are interested in Latin American fiction.

The Mahfouz Dialogs

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The Mahfouz Dialogs
Gamal Al-ghitani

Sometime ago I made it my mission to read everything in English written by Gamal Al-ghitani who some commentators have suggested is Naguib Mahfouz’s literary heir. Why I seized on this I don’t quite know, but it has led me to this interesting book, which gives a few insights into Al-ghitani as it examines the life of Mahfouz.

Structurally, it is the compendium of conversations and sayings Mahfouz had given over the last 30 years of his life, roughly from the early 70s when Al-ghitani met him to when he died in 2006. The short first and third sections read like compendiums of fragmentary texts, as if we were reading the remaining 50 pages of dozens of lost works from centuries past. Often phrased “then master said…”, they provide some insights into his views, often more liberal than those of his friends. The second section, though, is a collection of interviews between Mahfouz and Al-ghitani that Al-ghitani shaped into an autobiography, one that relived Mahfouz of the task of writing. The richness of the interviews produced an interesting work, not only an examination of the life and works of Mahfouz, but a examination of how Al-ghitani fits within the Egyptian literary world.

The interviews cover three general subjects: his life, his writing, and the Cairo Trilogy. Reading about his life, I was struck just how dedicated to writing. He never made much money from writing until he won the Nobel, but he continued on. It was something he had to do, made even more impressive since he stopped writing every summer because of an eye allergy. He typically plotted out his ideas before writing and only wrote when he had a story worked out. He was, though, influenced by European writers and read as many novels as he could. For years he was a poor civil servant and did his daily work in obscurity. His literary world, though, was quite rich and the book is filled with descriptions of the weekly meetings he had with his friends, many who were famous Egyptian thinkers and writers. Honestly, I was a little envious of the café culture that existed. When he grew older he became the sage of conversations and would often make the final pronouncement on a topic. The book makes quite clear how much Mahfouz was respected by all those he met with, even if he didn’t share the same political views.

For someone like myself who is not familiar with Cairo and Egyptian writing, The dialogs provide invaluable insight into the Cairo Trilogy and his other works. His descriptions of the alleys and streets in his novels are taken directly from the real places. Over time the alleys have changed (something Mahfouz was quite saddened by), but they still look the way he described in the books. For Mahfouz the parts of Cairo were more than just settings, but his home, the manifestation of everything he was.

As you get older, you both feel and comprehend that the place where your life started will also be your final refuge. As though recapitulating the cycle of life, your encounter a new world that seems, at first blush, not to be your world. It is not enough to understand any given word for it to become your won private world. Feeling truly at home in that world demands something deeper then that. We are heading toward a new world, but that world is assuredly not one in which I shall feel completely at home. I am at the end of a stage, of a life, let me say. What is the total life experience that I have undergone? You will find it incarnated in the old, by which I do not mean a return to the latter’s values, or a rejection of the new. I mean it in the sense of its being your own private refuge, because you have been at home in it and have understood it.

Finally, Al-ghitani reveals details about himself quite freely but often en contrast to Mahfouz. Al-ghitani, one gathers, is more conservative, or at least less western that Mahfouz. When talking about the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York, Mahfouz looked negatively at them, but Al-ghitani, one suspects, is in the camp of those say the US deserved it. I’m not 100% sure of this, but it is obvious from reading the book, and Al-ghitani’s comments, that they disagreed about the Egypt and its relations to the west. To his credit, Al-ghitani’s love for Mahfouz prevents him from trying rewrite those ideas.