Month: April 2013

Basque Literature Profiled at El Pais

~ bythefirelight

El Pais has an excellent overview of Basque literature. Basque literature has undergone a spurt of growth over the last 30 to 40 years, starting almost from nothing at the end of the Franco regime to today with dozens of writers. Because of the small number of readers, 20,000 average and 40,000 for a best seller, the writers look towards translation. Translation is a double edged sword. While it gives them more readers, it also makes them write with some of those readers in mind. There was a special not how English speaking world has affected their writing. The profile also talks about the history of violence and the explosion of creativity.

El compromiso con la literatura que han mostrado los miembros de la generación intermedia, cree el autor de Lo que mueve el mundo, no es suficiente para romper los márgenes de la literatura en euskera. A falta de estudios específicos, se estima, por cruce de datos sobre hábitos culturales y estudios de edición, que tiene entre 15.000 y 20.000 lectores potenciales, que pueden llegar a los 40.000 en casos excepcionales, según los cálculos del sociólogo Harkaitz Zubiri. “Hay que poner algo más que libros de calidad; la historia no está hecha solo de textos sino de la percepción que tenemos de ellos. Hay que tener una presencia y ser traducido”, añade Uribe.

Lourdes Oñederra (San Sebastián, 1958) acaba de publicar Intemperies (babes bila), 14 años después de ganar los premios de la crítica y Euskadi de Literatura con Eta emakumeari sugeak esan zion. Karmele Jaio (Vitoria, 1970) ha sumado a su obra a finales de 2012 los relatos de Ez naiz ni; Zaldua, otra colección de relatos reunida en Idazten ari dela duen idazlea edo literatura gaixotasun gisa. La galería de escritores se ha ampliado en los últimos años con mujeres jóvenes, muchas de ellas residentes en el extranjero, como Garazi Goia (Segura, 1978), ingeniera de telecomunicaciones residente en Londres, o Irati Elorrieta (Algorta, 1979), autora de la colección de relatos Burbuilak, que trabaja en Alemania.

Eider Rodríguez (Errenteria, 1977), con tres libros publicados; Uxue Alberdi (Elgoibar, 1984); Irati Jiménez (Mundaka, 1977), y Katixa Agirre (Vitoria, 1981), entre otras, se han incorporado a la nómina de nuevas voces de mujeres en la literatura vasca. Jaio, con la traducción de su novela Musika airean (Música en el aire) lista para ser publicada en castellano, advierte que parecen más porque buena parte de sus libros se han concentrado en los últimos ocho años. “Las mujeres no somos más del 15% de los escritores en euskera”, puntualiza. “No solo es un derecho que publiquemos sino que es necesario para completar una literatura con el punto de vista de las mujeres. Las experiencias de las mujeres, las relaciones personales están entrando en las historias que cuentan las nuevas autoras”.

Isabel Allende – The Just Hatchet Job

~ bythefirelight

Maggie Shipstead in the New Republic has a long (and accurate) negative review of the new Isabel Allende novel. Unfortunately, Allende’s work just isn’t that good. I say unfortunately because as the most famous Latin American woman writer and given the propensity of critics to treat women authors differently, in other words call a novel by a woman women’s writing, her work is a disservice to the books that are really worth reading.

It has to be said that the fact that Allende’s books are translated from Spanish introduces an element of critical uncertainty. In 1987, reviewing her second novel, Of Love and Shadows, John Updike wrote that “perhaps the translator should share the blame” for the primness of the prose. At this point, 17 books in, I think the time is past for blaming the translator. Take this sentence from Maya’s Notebook: “‘So the fucking slut wants to go back to California!’ he mocked threateningly.” Its bland aggression and adverbial clunkiness would be cringe-worthy in any language. And no translator could have snuck in the cheesiness of Maya’s description of her mixed-race lover’s body: “He looks like Michelangelo’s David, but his coloring is much more attractive.” Or the exposition of the obvious that takes over the dialogue as the plot devolves into a goofy caper: “‘Good thinking, Mike,’ interjected my Nini, whose eyes were starting to twinkle as well. ‘To fly, Maya would need a ticket in her name and some form of ID—that leaves a trail—but we can cross the country by car without anybody finding out.’” Allende has lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years and speaks English fluently. She reads her English translations and offers notes on them. It might be time to accept that this style, with all its limitations, is her style.

A certain overstuffedness, of course, is one attribute of magical realism, an aesthetic that Gabriel García Marquez popularized and Allende embraced.2 Maya’s Notebook, as I read it, is a realist novel with a few fantastical flourishes that seem less about speaking to life’s absurdities and more about indulging in sentimentality. For example, a dog senses a woman is dead in her house and begins howling, which sets off all the other dogs, and the mass howling brings the neighbors running—to the correct house. There is also a ghost who pops up here and there and is treated with a certain earnestness, but there are no grand, obviously magical gestures. No one has the power of telekinesis or naturally green hair, as in The House of the Spirits; and no one ascends to heaven while hanging up the laundry, as in Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. A magical realist novel about contemporary Las Vegas that incorporates the fantastic, the dreamlike, and the mythical sounds like a intriguing idea, but this is not that novel.

Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam – A Review

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam
Nick Turse
Metropolitan Books, 2013, 370 pg

Note to my regular readers: I don’t read as much history as I would like to, but from time to time I will venture away from just literature.

There were more atrocities in Vietnam than Mai Lai is the basic premise of Kill Anything That Moves. It is an important statement because while there have certainly been books that mention various small group actions that could easily be called atrocities (Turse quotes from come of them), there has not been a book to systematically show problematic American behavior in Vietnam was. 370 pages of brutal detail and well documented research, using American documents, contemporary news accounts, and survivor testimony from both American and Vietnamese sources, he shows that American strategy and tactics and general break down of moral conduct of many fighting men lead to countless criminal acts, large and small. It can be tough reading at times, as any book like this can be, but it is a much needed work.

Turse divides up the atrocities in to two general categories: those committed by units or individual soldiers, and those that fall into what one might call industrialized war. It is a good framework for looking at the conduct of the war, because, in Turse’s opinion, the latter led to the former. The chief issue was the term body count. American military planers, prevented from engaging North Vietnamese forces in set piece battles where American arms would prevail, opted for a way of attrition that would bleed the North Vietnamese and lead them to stop the war. The body count statistic was so powerful that units were sent into the field with the expectation that they would return with bodies for the tally board. Unfortunately, that led to commanders who didn’t really care about whether the number of bodies actually had a relation to the captured guns. Too often soldiers would return with disproportionally small number of arms. Moreover, the American military instituted what were called free fire zones in areas of heavy enemy activity. In the zones soldiers had even fewer rules about what they could shoot. A common tactic also was to bring in heavy armaments from fire bases or airplanes to shell and in theory scare the North Vietnamese. Those tactics coupled with the commanders on the ground calling in air and artillery strikes in heavily civilian areas led to massive indiscriminate destruction. This is not to mention defoliation strategies and other industrial methods of clearing the landscape.

Naturally, all these tactics had a heavy toll on the Vietnamese population. Rise fields were damaged, villages destroyed, people killed and wounded, and suffering the effects of toxins. Most villages had bomb shelters or trenches to protect the villagers. Turse doesn’t mention the efficacy of them for safety from shelling, but they became a double edged sword when American troops came saw them. Soldiers took them for something more and did not have patience for villagers who went into them, preferring to kill civilians in them rather than risk a booby trap. The catch 22 nature of the trenches was just one of the ways that the Vietnamese civilians were trapped. An all too common experience was when they ran in fear from soldiers they would be shot because only the enemy runs. That practice often got out of control when a helicopter pilot would hover over a civilian and they would run and be shot.

It is in these encounters with the soldiers in the villages that it is hardest to read. Description after description of one atrocity after the other can make it a little hard to get a little more perspective on what was going on. Turse is aware and points out many times how American soldiers were not well equipped for this kind of counter insurgency, and their frustration could turn into indiscriminate violence. Turse also notes a strain of racism that ran throughout, the most common when describing Asians was “they don’t value life as much as Americans do” and the MGR (mere “gook” rule). The one thing that is missing and probably is impossible to know is just what percentage of patrols were doing these kinds of things. His work is well researched, but when reading it without a sense of where it fits in the overall story it is possible to see every soldier as a killer, which is an overstatement.

Ultimately, we will never know the full scale of these events because many of the court marshals and investigations performed by the military were destroyed or are missing. Turse notes that when he made freedom of information acts he often got empty records. Still, he was able to dig up enough to show there was a pattern of cover ups. Part of the issue was after the soldiers left the army the government no longer wished to prosecute. The other issue was the press was never that interested in writing about war crimes. Before My Lai they didn’t want to do it because of the scandal, after it was as if it was old news. Probably the biggest example of this was the operation in the Mekong delta that two reporters, working from official military press releases, uncovered. They had a story ready to go that showed a very high body count and a very low weapons recover ratio, around 100:1. It might have been a My Lai size story but their editors buried the piece saying the public was tired of the war.

Ultimately, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam describes a war that failed, not as some revisionists might say, because America let down the South Vietnamese, but because the killing was so indiscriminate, at best made the population fear the Americans, at worst supporters of the North. It is a needed book one that adds a fuller dimension to a war that cost so much and did so little.

Airships by Barry Hannah – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Airships
Barry Hannah
Grove Press, (Original publishing date) 1978, pg 209

Barry Hannah was a master of a certain style of American short story, one that prizes a discontinuity of humor and the absurd over more common modes of the perfectly wrought short story as in his contemporaries, such as Carver. Certainly there is an echo of an America that you can find in Carver, but for Hannah every story is an opportunity for a joke or a black humor that is suspicious of everything. In Hannah you seldom find a character that you can, in that most tiresome of literary criteria, relate to, nor do they seem to live in a world that you might recognize. What you see are stories that live at a distance from everyday experience, and form, instead,  fables and allegories of hubris and overreach that collapse in surreal plots and finds characters performing outrageous acts. At times it is funny, but there is also a distance in the stories that once the joke is understood leaves them flat, the reader saying, “oh, I get it.” The danger with absurd humor is that distancing, a phenomenon where there are no stakes left for the reader but a kind of smugness. This is not a case for a moralistic fiction, but the humor in Hannah has an attitude that just laughs without really providing much ambiguity.

Despite these faults, his stories are so well written with their American literary vernacular that passages of his work are a marvel to read. He can capture an image of a life in a brief paragraph that makes the whole story seem alive. Take this example from Deaf and Dumb

She had a certain smile that would have bought her the world had the avenue of regard been wide enough for her. They loved it at the Bargain Barn. But the town was one where beauty walked the walks as a matter of course, and her smile was soon forgotten by clerk and hurried lecher on the oily parking lot. She never had any talent for gay chatter. She could only talk in brief phrases close on the truth. How much is this? Is this washable? This won’t do, it’s ugly.

It perfectly captures a down on her luck woman who doesn’t have much luck with men. I should mention Deaf and Dumb is one of the few stories that doesn’t feel completely jokey. There is a real sense of a human inhabiting that woman. Even when a story fails to be alive, Hannah can still create paragraphs like those that can make one think this story is going to dazzle. Unfortunately, all too often a story will turn into something like Quo Vidas, Smut. For me this was the worst story of the bunch, one that meandered amongst a fugitive tale, then to a kind of rural pastoral, to surreal when a jet takes off from a farm field, ultimately finish with sex. It is here with when his surrealism fails, and his literary jokes, referencing other stories that have touched all these themes seriously, fall flat.

One of Hannah’s preoccupations is the Civil War, and more specifically, Jeb Stuart, the dashing carvery general and martyr to the cause. Something about Stuart didn’t sit right with Hannah and in one story he has a character take credit for killing the General. The irony here is the man who killed him was first a confederate soldier who loved to kill and later, when he joins the Union side, does he kill him, finding as he looks back as an old veteran that the Confederate veterans don’t want to have anything to do with him. It is an interesting story because, one, it deflates one of the sacred generals of the south, and, two, it plays with the idea of legend. As the veteran tries to take claim for the killing it could well have been him, but he finds you can’t be the hero to both sides. And if it was him, that truly was brother on brother in a way that doesn’t fit the sanctified cliches of a hundred year-old war. In Knowing He Was Not My Kind Yet I Followed, a gay soldier relates his encounter with Stuart one night. He tries to proposition him, which the general refuses, but does not otherwise notice. At the same time there is a slave who won’t shake the soldier’s hand, Stuart chastises him then hugs him as if they were lovers. Again, the general, the Christian defender of the Confederacy is satirized by treating a slave as some sort of equal and lover.

One of the better stories is Testimony of Pilot. Testimony of Pilot is a Vietnam era piece that seems cold, narrating the life story of two friends, one who joins the air force and the other, the narrator, who lives his life as an ex drummer gone deaf from too much rock and roll. Between them is a woman Lillian, a stewardess. The pilot is cold and lives his life fr the war participating in mission after mission. He won’t even kiss Lillian when he lands at an airfield just to see her (a scene that is straight out of a movie). None of them come to a good end and there is no reason for it, either. As is common in Hannah, the narrative isn’t the most important element. He works his stories to serve the humor, which often doesn’t leave room for a more character based reason. Character driven stories are not required, but when Lillian dies in a crash it is off handed, as if the fun is showing how pointless these lives have been. In small doses it works to great effect, but in a collection full of these kind of elements, it can get a little off putting.

Barry Hannah was certainly a good writer and I’m curious to see what stories published a decade later, perhaps in the 80s, would be like. The humor, often rooted in a 70s sensibility, is just too unfunny to make this collection a stand out. There are great elements to it, but the flaws just overwhelm them.

Clara Usón and Juan Carlos Mestre Win the premios de la Crítica Prize

~ bythefirelight

Clara Usón and Juan Carlos Mestre have won the premios de la Crítica Prize, she for fiction and he for poetry. This is the first woman to win the prize for fiction in 52 years, which is quite surprising (only 3 women have won the prize at all). These are the Spanish language winners. There are also Catalan, Galician, and Basque winners.

La novela de Usón (Barcelona, 1961) está inspirada en la hija de Ratko Mladic, uno de los criminales más sanguinarios de la guerra de los Balcanes (ordenó ejecutar a 8.000 bosnios tras el cerco de Srebenica)¿Es justo que ella se hubiera suicidado al descubrir los horrores cometidos por su padre? Se preguntó la escritora barcelonesa (1961) para quien, dijo en una entrevista a este diario que “el populismo azuza la xenofobia y el nacionalismo y creen que pueden controlarlo, pero al final no es así”. Usón obtuvo en 2009 el premio Biblioteca Breve por Corazón de Napalm.

La escritora se muestra feliz y sorprendida por el premio. Lo primero que dice es que hace 52 años no lo recibía una mujer, y que además ese último año, 1961, es el de su nacimiento. Solo lo han recibido Ana María Matute en 1959 por Los hijos muertos y Elena Quiroga en 1961 por Tristura. La hija del Este se va a editar próximamente en países como Holanda, Francia e Italia.

The winners from Spain’s other languages:

En las otras lenguas los ganadores fueron: Catalán, Narrativa Jordi Coca por El caure la tarda; y Poesía, Jordi Llavina por Vetlla. En gallego, Narrativa, Begoña Caamaño por Morgana en Esmelle, y Poesía, Manuel Álvarez Torreiro por Os ángulos da brasa. En euskera: Narrativa, Ramón Saizarbitoria por Martutene, y Poesía, Rokardo Arregi por Bitan esan becharra.

April Words Without Borders, Iraq, Ten Years Later Out Now

~ bythefirelight

The ever interesting Words Without Borders has an addition dedicated to Iraq, Ten Years Later

As part of our tenth-anniversary year, we are returning to the “Axis of Evil,” Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, the subjects of our first three issues. We begin with Iraq, which has just passed its own ten-year milestone, one of bloody conflict and deadly political strife rather than fiction and poetry. From the Green Zone to a tiny mountain village, in battlefield chaos and domestic upheaval, Luay Hamza Abbas, Abd al-Khaliq al-Rikabi, Muhsin al-Ramli, Sinan Antoon, Ali Bader, Hassan Blasim, Sargon Boulus, Duna Ghali, Mahmoud Saeed, Salima Saleh, and Najem Wali record not only the decade of war but its effects on the home front. In our special section, we present reportage from Iraq by Algeria’s Mustapha Benfodil and Poland’s Mariusz Zawadzki. This issue is funded in part by a private foundation.