The Winter 2014 The Quarterly Conversation is out now. Here are somethings that caught my eye. (Via)

The Art of Disturbance: On the Novels of James Purdy

By Daniel Green

Indeed, those of us who have read deeply into Purdy’s fiction quickly enough realize that what could be called its idiosyncrasies are in fact its greatest strengths and that Purdy didn’t merely write one or two individually adventurous, original stories or novels but instead created a comprehensively original body of work, each separate work providing a variation on Purdy’s themes and methods but also exemplifying his larger achievement. Purdy wrote few, if any, really weak books.

The Uses of Uncertainty: Dalkey Archive’s “Library of Korea” series

By Deborah Smith

With any luck, 2013 should mark a watershed moment for Korean literature in English translation, thanks to the ten volumes being released by Dalkey Archive. They arrive with the support of the indefatigable LTI Korea, an institution whose existence—and budget—is frequently the cause of teeth-gnashing envy on the part of translators from less well-supported languages. All told, these ten—to be followed by ten more, currently scheduled for release in spring 2014—do an admirable job of showcasing the great range of talent to be found among modern Korean literature, which, in its contemporary iteration, seems to me to be one of the world’s most exciting, dynamic, and consistently impressive.

The Mircea Cărtărescu Interview

Interview by Audun Lindholm, translated by Thilo Reinhard
Kafka has written a parable in which he describes a long and arduous journey. At one point he stops because he sees a high wall in front of him. Realizing that the wall is his own forehead, he has moved to the limits of his own thought. My own artistic and intellectual ambition is to blast my way through this wall, the front of my skull. I feel humiliated by the limitations imposed by my own cranium.

The Christine Schutt Interview

Interview by David Winters
I do not want an impenetrable style but prize compression and music. I abhor quotidian easy speak, psychobabble, brands, news and slogans—a “writer’s prose” as Gordon Lish once described it. Mine calls for close, hard readers of fiction. This year in reviews of Prosperous Friends, I was bumped up from being a writer’s writer to being a writer’s writer’s writer; either way, it cautions challenging prose ahead. A lot is left unsaid and must be inferred simply because I want to avoid the dulling effect of belated language.

The Wayne Rebhorn Interview

Interview by Steve Donoghue
Some 12 years ago I was teaching this book on September 11, and was preparing to go to class when I learned of what had happened in New York City and Washington and Pennsylvania. Should I cancel class? Should I devote the class to talking with my students about the tragedy? Should I just teach it as though nothing had happened? And then it struck me: this is the perfect text for this day, a text about how people can turn to stories to help them cope with horror. Of course, I did talk with my class about 9/11, but we then moved on to Boccaccio with a renewed sense of just how important literature can be at such moments.

From Navidad & Matanza by Carlos Labbé

Translated by Will Vanderhyden

My name is Domingo. Actually, Domingo is my password here in the laboratory. Just by uttering this name—which I chose—I can enter bedrooms and bathrooms, I can make phone calls, obtain food and drink, access the temperature, hygiene, and communication systems, send and receive email, carry out Internet transactions to purchase any supplies we need. Without it, I’d be trapped in my room. If I were to suffer a psycholinguistic disruption, or if the effect of some microorganism rendered me voiceless, I’d just die of starvation.

The African Shore by Rodrigo Rey Rosa

Review by Christopher Schaefer
Guatemalan author Rodrigo Rey Rosa opens his 1998 novel The African Shore with a Moroccan shepherd boy obliviously meandering by reminders of Tangier’s history. First, he passes by a ruined Spanish boating club and then the large abandoned Perdicaris house—the one-time home of the unofficial head of the international community in Tangier, and the site of his kidnapping in 1904 by a local tribal sheik that almost provoked war. Set against this backdrop, The African Shore presents the story of another encounter between a foreigner and a local in Tangier.

The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio

Review by Steve Donoghue
It’s a polite commonplace among scholars to assert, as G. H. McWilliam does in the introduction to his 1972 translation of The Decameron for Penguin Classics, that the work’s 14th-century author, Giovanni Boccaccio, would be immortal even if he’d never written it. Since McWilliam’s translation—solid as a block of Carrara marble—had an enormous distribution in schools throughout the Western hemisphere, it’s likely true that countless students came away from their one exposure to The Decameron thinking it’s somehow comparable to such of the author’s other works as Il Filostrato, or On the Genealogy of the Pagan Gods. Such a notion is ridiculous, of course.

Forest of a Thousand Daemons by D.O. Fagunwa

Review by Geoff Wisner
From 1930 to 1939, a young man named Daniel Fagunwa worked as a teacher at the St. Andrew’s school in the town of Oyo in western Nigeria. When the education ministry of the British colony announced a literary contest, he entered a short novel called Ogboju Ode ninu Igbo Irunmale, literally “The Brave Hunter in the Forest of Four Hundred Spirits.” The first novel to be written in the Yoruba language, the book was published by The Church Missionary Society Press in 1938, when Fagunwa was around thirty-five. One of its early readers was a schoolboy who encountered it in class before his six years of formal education came to end in 1939. His name was Amos Tutuola.

Blinding Volume I: The Left Wing by Mircea Cărtărescu

Review by Kristine Rabberman
Cărtărescu’s first volume, built around childhood memories and family stories of his protagonist, Mircea, provides vivid descriptions of Bucharest, a beloved city that emerges from a surreal landscape, whose future is uncertain. Yet it also weaves in dreams and memories, obscuring the lines between hallucinations and reality throughout. His prose reflects his work as a poet—his eye for color and texture, his predilection for striking imagery. At length, The Left Wing becomes a wildly imaginative, detailed cosmology, a search for metaphysical truth, an attempt at a religious doctrine that privileges creation and connection among beings and planes of existence.

The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Review by Adam Morris
Whereas Vásquez’s previous books probed the lesser-known dramas of in Colombia’s past, The Sound of Things Falling takes interest in a notorious and relatively recent period in the country’s history: the mayhem of the cartel years of the 1980s and 1990s, a period most Bogotanos would be happy to forget. In those decades, the country was in the grip of Pablo Escobar, whose power was matched by his flamboyant extravagance: the novel opens with the assassination, in 2009, of a hippopotamus, “a male the color of black pearls” that had escaped from the drug kingpin’s defunct private zoo, itself an otherworldly attraction frequented by teenagers playing hooky from school.

Cannonball by Joseph McElroy

Review by Trey Strecker
With Cannonball, McElroy returns to familiar themes of family relations and criminal/political intrigue, this time in the setting of the Iraq War. As in most McElroy novels, the story begins in the middle, a space between, the still moment at the top of a dive’s arc, “a slowness so divided it might never finish in your mind.” The narrator, Zach, a “slow on the uptake” Army photographer, is dispatched to a basement pool beneath one of Saddam’s liberated palaces in Baghdad.

Life and Times of Mr. S by Vivek Narayanan

Review by Eleanor Goodman
What does it mean to be an Indian writer? Does it mean you’re writing in Hindi? Or Tamil? Or Bengali? Or any of the many dozens of languages that have produced high literary achievement? Does it mean you’ve grown up in India (like Rushdie, or Kipling), or live in India (like Arundhati Roy, or Ruth Prawar Jhabvala), or are of Indian descent (like Naipaul or Jhumpala Lahiri)? The question gets complicated very quickly, and fraught with competing interests. More to the point here, how does one identify oneself as an Indian writer, and then negotiate those choppy waters? Identity figures large in Life and Times of Mr. S, Narayanan’s second collection of poetry, after Universal Beach in 2006—but here the issue is less of a single identity than of shifting identities and of what is encountered in the sometimes numinous, sometimes agonizing spaces between selves.

The Quarterly Conversation – Issue 33 – Fall 2013 is out now with an always interesting mix of articles. These are the ones that caught my eye:

A Library of Unlimited English Books

By Morten Høi Jensen

A groundbreaking new volume published by New Directions, Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature, offers unprecedented insight into the writer’s lifelong relationship to the English language, as well as an affecting portrait of the Argentine master as lecturer. These twenty-five classes on English literature were recorded by a small group of students in 1966 and later edited by two leading Borges scholars, Martín Arias and Martín Hadis. They have now finally been rendered into English by the incomparable Katherine Silver.

The Jáchym Topol Interview

Interview by Alex Zucker

But back to Belarus and how I wrote The Devil’s Workshop. So at about four in the morning, a taxi driver was taking me from my hotel to the airport in Minsk. Unfortunately he was pretty drunk, so as soon as we got out of the city he asked me to take over. I refused, since due to my psychopathic history I still don’t have a driver’s license. He didn’t understand, so we got into this huge argument, and by the time I finally convinced him to keep going—I said if he wouldn’t drive, we might as well just go lie down in a snow-filled ditch by the side of the road—I saw my plane lifting off into the clouds over the little airport out on the tundra.

From Three White Coffins by Antonio Ungar

Translated by Katherine Silver

One thing led to another, and that was just the beginning. I’m talking about the head resting in the plate of cannelloni. Heavy, still, and deaf, and attached to Pedro Akira’s compact body by a strong and manly neck. Oblivious to all the consequences this stillness began to unleash outside the Italian restaurant, in other heads and along other streets, more primary than secondary. Consequences transformed into actions that now, seen from here, from this requisite distance, seem like terrified ants running away from each other, ants fleeing from their own shadows. But that came later, five hours after the first memorable event of the day already briefly described—the breaking of the string on my double bass—which doesn’t seem worth mentioning but really is, and the reason shall soon be seen by those who are listening to this.

The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell by Carlos Rojas

Review by Scott Esposito

Most visions of the afterlife entail some kind of deliverance from the burdens imposed by memory—after all, what heaven could be more fitting than one where we transcend our Earthly failures? Spanish author Carlos Rojas ingeniously shows us the arch obverse of that in The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell: the inferno as an eternity with our regrets. Here, the titular poet is found in a hell that resembles an infinitely long spiral where each soul exists in a sort of solitary confinement with his or her own memories projected onto a personal stage, complete with rows of seats for the lonely spectator.

The No World Concerto by A.G. Porta

Review by Eric Lundgren

The No World Concerto, Spanish novelist A.G. Porta’s first novel to be translated into English, is a complex fictional riff on games, possible worlds, and the art of fiction itself. Porta is best known among English-language readers as an early collaborator with Roberto Bolaño, and, like Bolaño, he pays tribute to the innovations of the high modernists without exactly emulating them. The No World Concerto is structured as a Matryoshka doll, or as a hall of mirrors, fuguing seamlessly between authorial narration, third-person reportage, and inner monologue, a structure that becomes head-clutchingly complex when you consider that its two protagonists are writers with fictions in progress. The novel is set in Paris, but a Paris that resembles a half-constructed film set, referred to throughout as “the neighboring country’s capital,” with even the tactile pleasures of the place-names stripped away. Getting lost in this novel is a more dire possibility than the phrase usually implies.

Quarterly Conversation #26 is out now and always it has some fine things in it. Just about everything was interesting so hopefully these will wet your appetite:

(from Conversational Reading)

The Moving Tide of Abundance: Petersburg by Andrei Bely

By Malcolm Forbes

It is Petersburg for which Andrei Bely is best remembered. It appeared in English in 1959 and has stayed in print ever since. This Penguin reissue features David McDuff’s masterful 1995 translation and a new introduction by Adam Thirlwell. Both offer loving praise for their subject, praise which has been slow in coming in Bely’s native land. Considered decadent by the Soviets, the novel first appeared with major cuts and was later banned for being incommensurate to the idealised standards of Socialist Realism. Bely suffered at the hands of the critics, too; the Russian Formalists, though grudgingly commending his inventiveness, essentially deemed the Symbolists en masse irrelevant to the study and advancement of literature. Bely was only properly rehabilitated in the ‘80s and is now rightly lauded as one of the last century’s great literary talents.

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Mapping Michel Houellebecq: A Retrospective

By Michelle Bailat-Jones

Controversial authors are more interesting when the source of their controversy does not simply rest on the outer surfaces of their art but lies within its very structure. The French author Michel Houellebecq is not controversial because of what he writes or says—dozens of writers have said many of the same things about women, people of other cultures and religions, and contemporary society. Houellebecq creates debate because it is difficult to settle upon an ultimate interpretation of his work. Looking over his five novels in succession reveals a real movement toward resolving this metafictional ambiguity and goes far to explain the near unequivocal critical praise he is now receiving for The Map and the Territory.

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In Translation

From Fiona and Ferdinand by Josef Haslinger

Translated by Eugene Sampson

On the day of Bachmaier’s funeral there were two messages from my mother waiting for me on the answering machine. In the first one she asked me to call her back, in the second she said that the village was in an uproar: I was to come at once. Calls from my mother were rare.

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Reviews

The Iliad translated by Stephen Mitchell

Review by Steve Donoghue
Poet and translator Stephen Mitchell, whose reconstructed Gilgamesh and elegantly translated Tao de Ching routinely out-sell all competing versions, and whose Duino Elegies did about as much to bring Rilke into the general awareness of the non-German populace as it’s possible to do, has now given readers a 21st century English-language translation of Homer’s Iliad, in a solid and aesthetically pleasing new hardcover from Free Press.

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Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life by Lev Loseff

Review by Cynthia L. Haven

A martyr is not necessarily a saint, in any case, and those who knew him didn’t turn to him for saintliness. He was spellbinding, an electrical jolt for the psyche. An encounter with him, as a colleague or as a mentor, could be life-changing and endlessly rewarding. Warts and all, the real man carries far more interest than the photoshopped one Loseff gives us. The portrait that emerges on these pages has lost its sizzle. One does not taste a single spoonful of borscht, or feel the nip of a single Russian snowfall.

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Varamo by César Aira

Review by Paul Kerschen
The sixth of César Aira’s eighty-odd brief books to appear in English translation, Varamo takes the form of a parable, or an extended joke, on the nature of writing. The setup is a riddle: one night in 1923 the title character, a Panamanian civil servant, conceives and writes what will become a canonical poem of the Latin American avant-garde, though he has never before shown any literary inclination or talent. The narrative purports to give a historical account of the hours leading up to the poem’s creation. No particular attempt is made to maintain the historical disguise, which by the middle of the book has warped into the deadpan assertion that every detail of the narrative, “down to the subatomic level and beyond,” has been rigorously deduced from the text of the poem alone. The result is a novel that, despite its own claims to avant-gardism, goes after familiar game: the relations between art and artist, production and reception, the made or found artifact and the attendant circumstances of life.

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In Red by Magdalena Tulli

Review by Daniel Green
In Red is Tulli’s most conventional novel—which is not to say it could finally be described as a conventional work of fiction. Still, to the extent it does offer individuated characters, some degree of plot “movement,” and a strongly delineated setting, readers hesitant to commit to one of the novels that seems formidably experimental might find In Red a more comfortable introduction to Tulli’s fiction. But while the novel does provide somewhat more of the familiar elements of conventional fiction, it nevertheless doesn’t allow the reader to retreat altogether to conventional reading pleasures.

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The Dandelion Clock by Daniel Tiffany

Review by Andrew Wessels
Daniel Tiffany’s The Dandelion Clock is a poetic-punk fusion of Middle English, contemporary spoken English, and lyric meditation in the form of six short lines set near the center of each page. The poems blend fragments of Middle English into Tiffany’s own lyric mode, using the fragments to serve, as Tiffany explains in a prefatory note, “as a kind of grace note for the poem it summons, calling forth and harmonizing with other idioms and dialects.”

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Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

Review by Chris Fletcher

For the duration of Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner’s protagonist, Adam Gordon, is in Spain on a fellowship. If anyone asks, he is writing poetry about the Spanish Civil War. A non-experience of art is the first of Adam’s disconnections in the book. Disconnect is the wrong word, even though Adam and I use it, because we never see Adam disconnect from anyone or anything. Unconnected is more like it. As in the passage with the crying man, throughout Leaving the Atocha Station Adam feels like a perceptive viewer annotating a screenplay.

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1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

Review by Scott Esposito

The publication of 1Q84, Haruki Murakami’s biggest, most ambitious novel to date, seems to have brought his career full-circle. This is not simply because the book has widely been posited as Murakami’s Brothers Karamazov—that is, an attempt to write a meganovel summing up his life’s writing—but even more because of the trajectory Murakami has taken as a writer. Now that we may read Murakami’s serious follow-up to Wind-Up Bird, the question is whether or not it is a worthy successor.

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Assumption and Erasure By Percival Everett

Review by Rone Shavers

The author of 18 previous works of fiction, Percival Everett is perhaps best known as a writer of highly ironic novels which address such topical landmines as American race and class relations (Erasure), celebrity culture (I Am Not Sidney Poitier), and even the role of critical theory in American arts and letters (Glyph). However, in his newest work, Assumption, he writes about something completely different. Though the book is listed as a novel, Assumption actually consists of three linked novellas, each a separate mystery (and mysterious) in its own right; so yes, trite as it sounds, nothing here is as it seems. In fact, Assumption is not so much a satirical takedown of a large, American bugbear as much as it is a literal exploration, a meditation on the nature of truth, violence, and the human propensity for denial and deception, self-inflicted and otherwise.

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The Truth About Marie by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

Review by Jeff Bursey

What we have in this attractive novella, then, is a picture of two essentially uninteresting people; but fortunately Toussaint has given the narrator the gift of thinking in delicious prose, describing, in detail: what first responders do; what the narrator believes happened the night of Jean-Christophe’s incident; what a scared horse running around an airport does as men struggle to capture him; and the sight and effects of a forest fire. Toussaint keeps well away from the parsimonious dictates of realist fiction, despite the detailed how-ness of certain activities, and appeals to us, through his exquisite breath control, on the level of the long, sinuous sentences that at times transform into grand passages. What’s attractive here is the solo performance of the narrator’s thoughts, and the easy control Toussaint exhibits.

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Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique by Gonçalo M. Tavares

Review by Gregory McCormick
Someone once noted that it’s easy to have virtue when facing adversity but the real test of character comes when one is given power. To test this aphorism, one need look no further than Gonçalo M. Tavares’ novel Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique for evidence of how power corrupts and attracts the corrupt. Tavares is a prolific writer from Portugal who at age 41 has won many prestigious European writing and book awards and has been published in several languages, including French, Hebrew, German, and Spanish.

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Vertical Motion by Can Xue

Review by Natasha Soobramanien
The writer and translator Lydia Davis, in a preface to her story sequence, Swimming in Egypt: Dreams While Awake and Asleep, explains how she reprised a project undertaken by the Surrealist Michel Leiris in his Night as Day, Days as Night. Davis too decided to record her dreams and her dreamlike waking experiences, but unlike Leiris, did not identify which were which. Vertical Motion reads like a similar project, with the stories subject to an esoteric categorization withheld from the reader. Some read like accounts of dreams, others replicate the chaos and bizarreness of the dream state, while others, which feature characters having actual dreams, stray so far from logic and narrative coherence in their waking action that they require the accession of the dream to root the reader in the story’s surreal reality.

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Selected Poems by Jaan Kaplinski

Review by Nicole Zdeb

Though sometimes referred to as a Modernist, Kaplinski’s poetry often has the feel of a classical, and older, poetics. The poems have a gravitas; they do not mock, toy, or play with the reader. They invite the reader to eavesdrop on the thoughts, remembrances, and philosophy of a person as they flicker and flow. This contemplative, philosophic strain is present in much of the work, but not all. History and politics appear and punctuate the air. This is not surprising since Kaplinski was a member of the post-Revolution Estonian parliament (Riigikogu) from 1992-1995, and has written extensively on politics and society. What is mildly surprising, perhaps, is how infrequently the poems turn outward and invite the world onto the page. When they do, the effect is often illuminating and vaguely threatening.

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The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George by Denise Gigante

Review by Patrick Kurp
Most of the poems for which John Keats is remembered were composed in a single volcanic year—we know it familiarly as “The Great Year”—starting in late 1818, a little more than two years before his death. Nearly all of his incomparable letters, surely the finest in the language, were written within a four-year span amounting to not quite one-sixth of his truncated life, which ended less than four months after his twenty-fifth birthday. We can usefully gloss Keats’s life and death with numbers because they are so mournfully modest and impressive. Keats makes Rimbaud, another famed early starter, look like an underachieving slacker. The Frenchman, at least, didn’t die until thirty-seven. Early death has conferred on Keats a sentimental martyrdom to art and sensitivity.

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Self-Portrait of an Other by Cees Nooteboom and Max Neumann

Review by Colin Marshall
As hard as you look at it, Max Neumann’s paintings don’t reveal much about his method, but two recent English-language publications imply that he must enjoy collaborating with luminaries of world literature. AnimalInside, reviewed in The Quarterly Conversation’s issue 25 by Christiane Craig, brought Neumann together with László Krasznahorkai, the prestigious Hungarian novelist only now building up a substantial reputation in the Anglosphere. In that book, Neumann’s images, a series built around the silhouette of a jumping dog, entered into a sort of conversation with short pieces by Krasznahorkai. They tag-teamed it, with the artist’s work inspiring the novelist’s work, which would in turn shape the next stage of the artist’s, and so on.

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Ordinary Sun by Matthew Henriksen

Review by Ellen Welcker

Ordinary Sun at times feels like listening to confession in a parallel universe, a world with all the guts displayed on the outside, and the underworld on top. Make no mistake though: there is no otherworld. Henriksen’s world is this world. Who doesn’t recognize her own kind in lines like these, from “Corolla in the Midden”: “I do not dream. I just watch / fields burn, or ride // in cars that won’t get anywhere.”

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Is That a Fish In Your Ear? by David Bellos

Review by Susan Harris
As director of Princeton’s Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication and a brilliant translator from the French, David Bellos has shaped and inspired a generation of literary translators. With his new book on translation, he now opens class to the nonspecialists. Grounded in a lifetime of teaching, thinking about, and creating translations, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything is that marvelous rarity, a book by a specialist that can be enjoyed by general readers.

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An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor von Rezzori

Review by Joshua Lustig

Gregor von Rezzori’s fictitious city Czernopol exists at the edge of civilization, on the border of memory and invention, lying “somewhere in the godforsaken southeastern part of Europe.” In reality it is Czernowitz, in the region known as the Bukovina, ceded by the Ottoman Empire to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1775, then after World War I part of Romania, annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, and now within the borders of Ukraine. Von Rezzori spent his childhood there, as readers of his other autobiographical volumes, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and The Snows of Yesteryear, will know. An Ermine in Czernopol is the only volume of the trilogy that’s an old-fashioned novel, rather than a set of connected novellas or portraits. It transfigures Czernowitz into Czernopol, seen from a child’s perspective with elements of fairy tale exaggeration.

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Show Up, Look Good by Mark Wisniewski

Review by Nick Ripatrazone

Early in Show Up, Look Good, Mark Wisniewski’s second novel, newly single Michelle meets up with an old friend, Barb, from the Midwest. Michelle has already been portrayed as a woman who attracts all variations of awkwardness and bad luck: she’s awakened to find her ex, Thom, “having his way, well, with a marital aid,” agreed to bathe an old woman as part of her rental contract, and experienced a blown transmission on her way to sell her Plymouth Reliant. Barb’s statement feels both prescient and prophetic: “Everyone in Kankakee . . . knows you won’t last in this city. In fact, quite a few of us are making bets about when you’ll be back.”

Adventures in modern fiction: The Quarterly Conversation editor Scott Esposito