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.
Author: bythefirelight
After the Boom: New Latin American Writing (sp)
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
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.
Yalo – A Review
Yalo
Elias Khoury
Through torture one can learn—if you are the reader. Elias Khoury’s sometimes tough, sometimes disorienting novel, but always interesting, uses torture as a tool not only to to examine the politics and history of Lebanon, but the lives of Syriac (Maronite) Christians, and more broadly how can one be certain of what one knows in the worst of times.
Daniel Yalo, as we learn, is a veteran and deserter of the civil way who has led a directionless life that has amounted to little. Now imprisoned for planning a bombing the authorities ruthlessly interrogate him for information. Of course, he has little to give and as the sessions continue and become more extreme and degrading, they reduce him physically and mentally to a weakling willing to say or do anything. By novel’s end he barely knows what he has done and hasn’t done. Yalo is a novel where truth shifts and facts are never quite clear. With each torture sessions he finds himself changing his stories to tell the guards what he thinks they want to know. At first he denies he has done anything illegal, but slowly as he is beaten and tortured he begins to admit to things. Most of these crimes, though, don’t have anything to do with the bombing, but instead break apart the self deceit and lies he has told himself over the years. He admits to a series of rapes, not all at once, but in fragments that only make it clear he is not the most redeeming character. He also admits to robberies and affairs. Yet with each admission, with each life story he writes, he contradicts a previous admission so that it is never clear which admission is the truth. By the end of the novel it is obvious that Yalo is anything but a good man, but whether he is a rapist and thief or something lesser it is hard to know.
Along with the admissions of guilt Yalo looks back at his childhood and the war and he tries to explain in his life stories why he is the way he is. It is seldom useful, for the interrogators are seldom interested in the past, but like a fool who never quite understands what is happening to him, he continues to write more and more. Slowly he reveals enough details to piece together a rough, if inaccurate, life story. The illegitimate son of a tailor and the daughter of a Siriac priest, he is raised by his mother and grandfather who he calls his father. The grandfather is a strange man given to going to the seashore to drink sea water in a religious ritual. He is also a servier man incapable of compromise and his harsh character marks the boy.
Now, sir, even as he is suspended between the earth and the sky, the rapture runs through Yalo’s veins when he remembers the difference between a cooked woman and a raw woman. The theory was devised by my grandfather, God rest his soul. No, sir, my grandfather had no women, for he was a man riddled with complexes, but he divided food into two categories: meat and vegetables. After giving up the eating of all variations of meant, he assigned vegetables to three categories: defective, uncertain, and perfect. The defective do not ripen to be fit for consumption until they are cooked over the fire, like zucchini or beans or okra, and so on. The uncertain also ripen by fire even though they can be eaten raw, like eggplant, spinach, fava beans, and chick peas, etc. As to the perfect, they ripen in the sun and need no flame, because they have interior fire. These were all varieties of the finest fruit, grapes, figs, and tomatoes. My grandfather chose the perfect vegetables, and he ended his life eating nothing but raw vegetables. He even gave up eating bread. He began to shrink, he got very thin, his bones grew as porous as clay, and his flesh grew as rough as bone. He died with the intention of becoming a clay figure backed by the sun.
Through the interplay of these memories such as these , Khoury sketches a metaphor for Lebanon where truth is precarious and reflects not only where you come from, but who wants to know and when. Given the precariousness of it all is possible to go forward or they domed to repeat the war where “the Lebanese had dug up the history of all their past wars to justify their madness, which made talking to them impossible.”
Michal Govrin on the Leonard Lopate Show
The Leonard Lopate Show has an interview with Israeli author Michal Govrin. I’ve never read her work but according to the site:
Israeli novelist Michal Govrin talks about her latest, Snapshots. It’s about a woman’s search for fulfillment in the politically and socially complicated setting of modern Israel.
Amitav Ghosh at Elliott Bay Books
Last night I had the opportunity to go to a reading by Amitav Ghosh at Elliot Bay Books where he read from his new book, Sea of Poppies. He read a long and funny passage from the book the that was part political discussion about the rightness of the opium trade and part comedy of manners which ended in a hilarious description of oral sex. It sounds well worth the read.
When he took questions he made a couple of interesting points. One, unlike the maritime history of the United States, Britain, and other western countries, the maritime history of Asia doesn’t exist. Sure there are histories from the western officer class that manned the ships, but there is nothing like Two Years Before the Mast or Red Beard. There is not even an oral tradition. It is a big hole in the history. Second, he compared Indians of the 19th century to the Africans of the 17th and 18th century. Each was taken from their homeland and put into a condition of enslavement or indenturement. But unlike the slave narratives like Olaudah Equiano’s early account to the more famous by Frederick Douglas, there are no narratives of the Asian sailors. Ghosh sees part of what he is doing is to rediscover the missing history, not as a historian who has to focus on one little section, but as a novelist who can create a broader portrait of the time.
You can also hear a interview with him on NPR.
The Cairo of Naguib Mahfouz
The Cairo of Naguib Mahfouz
Gamal Al-ghitani
If your are going to read the Cairo Trilogy, you should have this book in your lap as you read it. The pictures provide a beautiful look at the streets and alleys Mahfouz writes about. What makes the book so invaluable, is each photo is linked to a quote from a specific book and gives you a chance to see the world that so inspired Mahfouz. Unfortunately, the book is out of print. The last time I looked it was $68 on Amazon.
Four Inches of Borges and Bioy Casares
I just got a copy of Borges by Bioy Casares. I’ve been looking forward to this for some time ever since I read the review in Letra Libres a year or so ago. When I read it was 1600 pages I didn’t realize how big that was, but I have a long delightful road ahead of me. It mostly covers the years between 1949 and his death, which I suppose is natural since Bioy Casares was quite a bit younger. I would have liked to know what he was like when he was writing Laberintos.
On first leaf through it is pretty funny often he says, come en casa Borges (ate at Borges’ house).
Beginnings In Chinese Novels
Paper republic has a great post about the beginnings of Chinese novels. According to Howard Goldblat, a thirty year translator of Chinese novels, the Chinese don’t try to open a novel with a catchy first line, instead, they often refer to place. Golblat suggest that since place and history are so important to Chinese culture, references to place are so much more important than they are in western writing. Nothing is a 100% as Golblat points out, but it is an interesting insight. Well worth a read.
Las batallas en el desierto (sp)
Las batallas en el desierto
Jose Emilio Pacheco
Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading turned me on to this book. I have always loved Mexican writing and his reviews of the book were quite intriguing. Although, there is a translation from New Directions, I read the book in Spanish, a Spanish is actually quite easy to understand and any third years Spanish student could read the book with few problems. Yet the simplicity belies an insightful understatement.
Ostensibly, the book tells a coming of age of age story set in Mexico City of the late 40s and early 50s. Carlos, the narrator, is the youngest son of a middle class family that has fallen on hard times. His father owns a soap factory but now that World War II is over the American corporations are beginning to take over the Mexican market. The family is forced to live in a neighborhood inhabited with people who have been left behind in Mexico’s rise in prosperity. Carlos isn’t aware of the socio-economic changes in Mexico, but he notices the influence of American culture everywhere. American culture has become the in thing and those with money want more an more of it.
With Carlos’ new status he finds him self at a school whose kids come from a mix of economic ranges. He becomes best friends with a boy named Jim. Jim is a mystery because he says his father is from the states and he visits him occasionally, yet his father is never seen. He even has an American sandwich maker that takes bread and ham and creates round sandwiches that look like flying saucers. Despite the exotic link to the United States, it seems so strange he is stuck in Mexico. Why isn’t he in the US? To make the mystery stranger, he says his mother is the lover of a Mexican official, a former general, one of those heroes of the revolution that found wealth in power after the war in the government. The general, though, can’t leave his wife, but pays for everything. She spends much of her time looking good for him. The general is never seen; he is always just of screen, as if he is about to arrive or leave.
The friendship falls apart when Carlos decides to tell Jim’s mother that he is in love with her. While she finds it touching, Jim gets mad at him. Soon Carlos’ mother also finds out and decides he is one step away from hell. She takes him out of the school and moves him to another, better one. The next opportunity he has to visit them he finds they have moved and no one in the building seems to know who he is talking about. A few years latter when his father’s fortunes have changed and he is now driven around in a limo, he sees an old classmate who is polishing shoes and he treats him to lunch. He asks about Jim and the friend says something bad had happened to him.
Throughout the story Pacheo plays with the inequalities of a fast changing Mexico and questions the myth of the Mexican Miracle of the 40s and 50s. He describes the meal Carlos eats at a friend’s home as greasy brain tacos, something Carlos, even in his reduced circumstances, is not used to. At the same time there is the interplay of American culture, the round sandwiches, the movies, the magazines with American stars, which gives one a sense of a culture on the move, yet also separating into the foreign and native. Are these changes really a miracle, or are they signaling the beginning of the undoing of Mexico? Moreover, the mystery of Jim and his mother suggest something dark and troubling about the power structures. If the the boyfriend really was part of the government, did he have her taken care of in some way? If so what does that say about the myth of the revolution and those who served in the revolution? Given what came latter in the late 60s and 70s, starting with the Tlatelolco massacre and the dirty war it is not a stretch to think the boyfriend may have done something.
The mysteries are never resolved–that is part of growing up. What is true is the mysteries of the novel make one question the certainties of the time.
Studs Terkel Has Passed Away
Studs Terkel has passed away. The NY Times has an obituary. I always liked the work of Terkel since I first ran across him in college. I thought the Good War was the best of what I’d read. His interview with EB Sledge was impresive. Hard Times, since it was written at the end of the 60’s, has a perhaps unfortunate way of being a comment on the 60’s themselves. I suppose no oral history can not be a reflection of the times it is given in.
New Arabic Literature
Literary Salon has a nice write up of an interesting link to a new book on modern Arabic literature. It sounds interesting and has great promise.
When I was reading the article I went to the publisher’s site and if you are interested in Arabic literature the next year has some promissing offerings. I think the volume on post modern arabic literature looks the most intreging. Give Saqi Books a look if you are interested.
In Search of a Lost Ladino
In Search of a Lost Ladino
Marcel Cohen
I bought this book because I wanted to read the original Ladino which is quite similar to Spanish., and as a Spanish speaker I was quite curious about the structure of the language and its similarity to Spanish. However, there is something else to this book that makes it a fascinating book, a kind of elegy for the language itself.
Ladino as Cohen says is a dead language and when he speaks it he “speaks a dead language”. But it is more than a language he is talking about, but a memory of his family and more: the memories caught up in the history his language and the language caught up in history. To be Ladino, is not only to speak it, but is also to have lived a certain history that is now gone. And in this sense the elegy takes its full strength as it describes the people of the Ladino barrios in Salonika and else where, their trades, their food, their clothing. The structure of the book is in little chapters that are almost prose poems to an idea or a memory of something lost. It gives one a fleeting glimpse, and almost dream like look at what has been lost. Its as if Cohen is remembering not to forget, but can’t leave the labyrinth of sadness that permeates the book and is unable to structure an over arching narrative.
As you read the book you often have a sense of grief, a grief stretches back to Spain and the city of Cuenca when the programs first began some 700 years ago. The grief reemerges in the Ottoman empire when Sultans turn on the Jews or the Malamukes roam through the streets and attack Jews at will. Thus the grief is not only the loss of the language and the community in Salonika during the Holocaust, but a lingering pain of hundreds of years of hope and diaspora. It makes for a beautiful and sad book.
Horacio Castellanos Moya on Bookworm
I haven’t listed to this yet but Horacio Castellanos Moya was on Bookworm recently.
A Spaniard in New York – La ciudad automática
Letras Libres has a review of what looks like a fascinating book. A Spanish reporter, Julio Camba, comes to 1930’s New York and writes his reactions to the the city and the depression. As the review points out, it would make a good contrast to Poet in New York by Lorca. Apparently he didn’t quite like the city nor America, but nerveless his impressions sound worth a read.
Good-Bye
Good-Bye
Yoshihiro Tatsumi
As often as I read graphic novels I often feel there is something lacking, the story perhaps, or maybe the characters, but I think it is the drawings themselves. They draw on traditions or images that once were pulp with little to say and the visual connection between the two weakens the power of the story. I know I had that feeling reading Will Eisner’s Contract with God, another early work in the genre. Tatsumi certainly has moments of visual power as you can see in the first story Hell, which takes place right after the bombing of Hiroshima. His drawings of the city leave a stark power that in later stories seems to more related to romance conics with their simple rendering of faces and expressions that become stand ins for complicated emotions that are difficult to express in 20 word bubbles.
Thematically, though, Tatsumi’s interest range from the complexities of the post war to frustration of everyday loneliness. Taken as a whole it creates a Japan that is not quite the miracle it seemed. Many Japanese have been left out: the veterans who survived the war but are scarred with old memories; old men who seem to be forgotten or lost in the new, hyper modern country; and the women who having ended up as hostesses, prostitutes, or attempted suicides, find themselves unable to break out of the roles thrust on them.
Of particular interest is Hell, a story that questions the sacredness of the victims. An army photographer takes a picture of a carbon shadow, one of those hideous legacies of the Hiroshima bombing. It looks like a son giving his mother a massage. The photographer sells the photo 10 years later and it quickly becomes a national symbol. But the photographer learns that it was really the son’s friend killing his mother for him. The son tries to blackmail him, but the photographer kills him so the image will keep its power. Unfortunately, they find the body of the son and the sweet narrative of a loving son looses its power. The photographer is haunted by the guilt of the crime from then on.
The story according to Tatsumi (in the interview in the back of the book) made a few people uncomfortable. However, it does question how a country creates hits symbols. Are they transitory as the story suggests? No one knew about the murder so the symbol of the mother and son still could have had the same power. It was not just the victim, but the context; or the projection of context, because the shadow only shows two figures. It is up to the reader to determine what they were doing. Tatsumi’s suggestion that not only ate the national symbols constructed, but they are constructions from one’s own perception gives Hell a weight its otherwise Telltale Heart like plot might weaken.
Hell, though, is thematically an exception to most of the stories, which are a mix of loneliness and sexual longing that show a troubled isolated society where sex is easily substituted for relationships. Its a melancholic almost nihilistic view and in Rash and Click Click Click it is taken to its furthest extreme when the protagonists contemplate suicide. Good-Bye, though, might best represent his view of the relations between men, women and families.
Mariko is a prostitute during the American occupation and her clients are all Americans. She has a steady American client who talks about marriage and love and seems to believe him. At the same time her father, a veteran who comes around for handouts, comes into the picture. He councils self control, but she has none and all he can do is slink off to bars and wonder how he ended up the way he has since it wasn’t his fault they lost the war. In the end the American goes home and she decides to get drunk. Her father comes around at the same time and tells her to sober up, but it only enrages her and she grabs him and forces him to receive her sexual motions until he ejaculates. Shamed he walks out of the room. She cries but says it is for the best. The last scenes are of him walking crowded street wondering when it will end, and of Mariko leading an American to her home.
The story creates a world where the traditional has been destroyed and what is left are the power relations: client to prostitute; father to daughter; shame to transgressions. Tatsumi si not only showing the legacy of war, but the movement away from the traditional pre-war Japan to the American influenced culture. At the same time, though, the power relationships have changed: American, youth, tradition, all in that order. While Tatsumi uses prostitutes as his symbol for this a little too often, it illustrates this dynamic quite well, much like Suzuki’s Gates of Flesh.
By The Firelight 