Identity Theft: Frayn’s Skios

Michael Frayn’s Skios is both fun and funny, an entertaining farce about mistaken identity at a Fred Toppler Foundation conference—“Innovation and Governance: The Promise of Scientometrics”—for a bunch of schmoozing jetsetters and would-be intellectuals who gather on a fictional Greek island. Skios tells the story of two Dr. Norman Wilfreds and the silly havoc they wreak on themselves and the people around them.

The passport-proven Norman Wilfred is scheduled to lecture at the conference about the management of science… but ends up at a distant house on Skios instead of the lavish conference site after being mistaken for one Oliver Fox. The ersatz Norman Wilfred, whose real name is, yes, Oliver Fox, is coming to Skios for a fling but decides to become Dr. Wilfred when he sees a woman holding a Norman Wilfred sign at the airport and decides “that would have been a good name to have.” Fox-Wilfred also sees that Nikki Hook, the woman greeting him, “plainly wanted him to be Dr. Wilfred.” Fox-Wilfred isn’t one to disappoint.

There are many layers of humor lurking in Skios, from the repetition of identity-based gags—like Spiros and Stavros, brothers and taxi drivers, who think real-Wilfred must be “Phoksoliva,” which real-Wilfred thinks must be a Greek expression—to a receptionist answering the phone by saying “How my dreck your call?” And then there’s satire involving empty-headed conference attendees, who are all too eager to believe that Fox-Wilfred is real-Wilfred. Even if they’ve met him in the past.

Identity in Skios is all about belief and labels, that people fit the labels they present; this plays nicely on contemporary thought that something will happen if you believe in it enough. Perhaps what’s most telling on Skios is that the person at the conference who most pesters Fox-Wilfred, asking him real scientific questions, is shunted aside over and over because he’s inconvenient: maintaining the illusion of Fox-Wilfred is more comfortable. Of course the illusion is also entertaining and suspenseful for the reader, as when Fox-Wilfred comes up with an absurd and messy magician-like act with coffee cups in an attempt to evade answering the questions.

There is plenty more illusion, fake, ersatz, and faux in Skios, from Nikki’s blond hair to a Russian woman’s apparent lack of English: Mrs. Toppler, the former Vegas dancer who heads the foundation, tells Fox-Wilfred to entertain one Mrs. Skorbatova at dinner by just talking, telling him, “A mouth opening and shutting. That’s all most people here want, when you come right down to it. Plus one of your nice smiles.”

Frayn ends the novel with far more of a semiotic bang than I’d expected. He sets it off with a careless action (involving sweets) that spurs an utterance—an English word that has multiple meanings—that prompts an inappropriate reaction. This misunderstanding has much, much worse consequences than the Fox-Wilfred matter but Frayn still manages to end the book on a humorous note, with Mrs. Toppler thanking her conference guests. Everything is only what you say it is.

Skios, by the way, was long-listed for the Booker Prize last week. Skios is listed on the Macmillan Web site here, with a brief excerpt.

Up Next: Andreï Makine’s The Life of an Unknown Man. Then G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen.

Disclaimers: I received a review copy of Skios from the publisher, Henry Holt. Thank you!

Riikka Pulkkinen’s True

Riikka Pulkkinen’s True, which I read in Lola M. Roger’s translation from the Finnish original Totta, is a novel about family, death, and dying that tells the story of three generations. Though it’s the grandmother, Elsa, who is dying in the present day, Pulkkinen tells much of the family’s collective story through an affair in the 1960s between Martti, Elsa’s husband, and Eeva, the nanny for their daughter Eleonoora.

The situations in True—a torrid affair with the nanny while Elsa is away on business—sound trite and soap opera-ish, but Pulkkinen offers a new angle by letting Martti and Elsa’s granddaughter, Anna, imagine the affair. This isn’t a stretch for Anna: she and Martti have a long-standing habit of looking at strangers and inventing life stories for them. Anna combines imagination with her own life, projecting her own pain, left over from her relationship with a past boyfriend’s young daughter, onto Martti and Eeva’s story, thinking Eeva would also suffer from being separated from Eleonoora.

Interpretations of reality and relationships float through True. Martti, a prominent painter, tells stories, too, through his art, including portraits of the women in his life, and Elsa is a well-known psychologist. Pulkkinen also weaves in the social changes of the 1960s, referencing protests about the Vietnam War and sending Eeva to Paris. Eeva is no activist, though, and Pulkkinen contrasts the personal and the social. Here’s a paragraph from one of Anna’s chapters imagining Eeva’s voice:

No one will admit it but all of us are actually more interested in the lake and the sauna and the half of a blueberry pie on the table than we are in the fact that reality is being created at this very moment in offices and meeting rooms and on speakers’ platforms and who knows maybe underground in the kinds of groups whose names have only just been thought up.

Pulkkinen refers to other Finnish sweets, including some of my favorites: breads with cardamom, which my mother used to bake using my Finnish grandmother’s recipe, get several mentions as do candies from Fazer, which I used to buy in airports on my way to and from Moscow. I suspect they draw on Finnish readers’ senses and—more importantly—memories even more than they draw on mine.

In Rogers’s translation, the narrative voices of True feel neutral and, considering the emotional subject matter, almost flat, as they describe landscapes, family relationships, and even Elsa’s death, which the reader knows must come. But Rogers’s tone felt true to me: it prevented the novel from becoming maudlin, and it fit nicely with True’s Finnish settings, where characters endure, with stoicism, hot saunas, cold swimming, and all sorts of emotional pain and distance.

I think it’s the combination of stylistics, Finnish motifs, and, of course, stereotypical elements of stories about family—meaning everything from the book’s narrative tone to the birds, the sweets, the lake, the rotting boards in the sauna, the love of ice cream, and even the closet holding Eeva’s old dress—that hold True together, making an old story feel worthy of retelling, with, of course, variations.

Disclaimers: I received a review copy of True at BookExpoAmerica from Other Press, thank you! I enjoyed speaking about Russian literature in translation with Other Press during BEA. More on disclosures: here.

Up Next: Michael Frayn’s Skios, which I enjoyed very much.

Image credit: Photo of Finnish breads from Mikalaari, via Wikipedia. 

What Are the Odds? Ben H. Winters’s The Last Policeman

The Last Policeman is a new type of mashup novel for writer Ben H. Winters, co-author of such titles as Android Karenina and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters: in The Last Policeman, Winters sets a murder mystery in pre-apocalyptic Concord, New Hampshire, creating a suspenseful and thoughtful combination of crime and natural disaster that asks refreshingly everyday existential questions of everyday people.

Winters’s narrator is Hank Palace, a police detective who insists on investigating an apparent suicide—the dead man is a “hanger” whose body is found in a McDonald’s men’s room—because his instincts tell him something isn’t right. “A man is dead,” he says. Of course people die all the time, hangers are common in Concord, and everybody in The Last Policeman is going to die in fairly short order. They’re counting down the months until an asteroid known as Maia will hit. For me, the acceleration of everyone’s demise—and the reactions it produces—is the source of the appeal of a full-on literary natural disaster like Maia. An asteroid is the ultimate unexpected guest who walks in on a static dinner party (or state capital) and changes everything.

It’s Palace’s practical, calm, and consistent voice that makes The Last Policeman work. Palace is a relatively softboiled guy in a pretty hardboiled world, though he began experiencing the trauma of unlikely events as a child, he lives alone, and he loves being a cop. Given the importance of the asteroid, unlikely events and long odds are a big theme in the book. Here’s Palace on the odds: 

But that’s how it works: no matter what the odds of a given event, that one-in-whatever-it-is has to come in at some point or it wouldn’t be a one-in-whatever chance. It would be zero.

The dead man, by the way, worked in insurance, an odds-based industry that’s not a great line of work when the world’s about to end. Of course much more than the insurance industry has collapsed in The Last Policeman: people go “bucket list” to fulfill their worldly dreams, ignite themselves, perpetuate conspiracy theories, take to drugs, stockpile weapons, and slack off at work. But not Palace:

Still, the conscientious detective is obliged to examine the question of motive in a new light, to place it within the matrix of our present unusual circumstance. The end of the world changes everything, from a law-enforcement perspective.

A little later, Palace, an observer of the social contract, notes the continuing responsibilities of cops, saying the public relies on them. And he laments later that the asteroid becomes “an excuse for poor conduct.”

Winters shows us plenty of poor conduct but he also shows us people like Palace who keep on with their lives, solving crimes, serving up eggs, and making espresso. Winters has a light hand in The Last Policeman, balancing humor, darkness, and pathos, offering up lines that made me laugh then sigh. Here’s a female cop telling Palace about chasing someone: “…you know, Palace, this is it. This is the last chance I get to run after a perp yelling, “Stop, motherfucker.”

The Last Policeman, which will be released July 10, 2012, is the first novel in a planned trilogy.

Disclaimers & disclosures: I received a review copy of The Last Policeman from Quirk Books, from Eric Smith, whom I’ve enjoyed seeing at BookExpo America, and who’s a friend on Facebook. Thank you!

Up Next: Riikka Pulkkinen’s True... I’m glad to be back to my usual reading routine after a busy spring!

Herta Müller’s Hunger Angel

Herta Müller’s The Hunger Angel, which I read in Philip Boehm’s translation of the original German Atemschaukel, is a painful but frighteningly lovely account of a young man’s internment in a Soviet labor camp after World War 2. Leo Auberg, who calls himself a Transylvanian Saxon, tells the story of his travel to the camp, his years spent there with coal, and his return to his family in Romania, to, among people, the grandmother who’d said “I KNOW YOU’LL BE BACK” and the “ersatz-brother Robert,” born while Leo was away. I think the term “ersatz-brother” gives a nice feel for the sort of dark humor Müller brings to the book, with, of course, crucial help from Boehm.

As a veteran of Russian camp fiction, the book took me back to Varlam Shalamov (for Müller’s brief, stabbing vignettes) and Solzhenitsyn (for Leo’s ability to find moments of relative happiness and his fear of freedom “outside”). But what struck me most about the book—probably largely because of my own interests—was Müller’s conscious use of language, both as a creative tool for herself as a writer and as a theme for Leo. Though her hunger angels, who hover over each prisoner, are strong, her use of language is even stronger as she creates ways to write about horrible experiences. Here are a few examples, plus some commentary from Boehm:

The Sound of Russian!: Early in the book, Leo says that “The Russian commands sound like the name of the camp commandant, Shishtvanyonov: a gnashing and sputtering collection of ch, sh, tch, shch… After a while the commands just sounds like a constant clearing of the throat—coughing, sneezing, nose blowing, hacking up mucus.”

As a Russian teacher who often tells her students not to make the sound kh so gutturally that they sound as if they’re trying to cough something up, this passage, well, struck me as a wonderful combination of finding a way to describe a language’s sound while finding a way to express the newness and unusualness of the sounds for Leo’s group. I even brought the book in to read the paragraph to my first-year Russian students, who’d commented on Russian’s harsher qualities.

A Mix of Languages/Hunger Words: A single word can generate a lot of thought for Leo: in “the skinandbones time,” Leo says the prisoners are given “kapusta,” cabbage, though “cabbage soup in Russian means soup that often has no cabbage at all,” a subversion of language. Leo then goes on to explain that “cap” in Romanian is “head” and “pusta” is the Great Hungarian Plain. “The camp is as Russian as the cabbage soup, but we think these things up in German,” he tells us. Leo then goes on to say that “kapusta” isn’t a hunger word… so he lists hunger words, words like mincemeat, hasenpfeffer, and haunch of venison, that inspire tastes in the mouth and “feed the imagination… Each person thinks a different word tastes best.” There’s also an episode a couple pages later where Leo is caught, by the afore-mentioned Shishtvanyonov, carrying cabbage [sic?] soup in bottles. Leo says he wants to bring the soup home. Though he’s not sure why he saved the soup, Leo reinvents the soup as a medicine, saving himself from punishment. Conclusion: the word “kapusta” can signify many things.

Homesickness & Parasites: For me, one of the saddest uses of language involved “homesickness” (mentioned as “heimweh”) as a euphemism for problems like lice, bedbugs, and hunger. A few pages later, Leo notes his personal uses of words and the separation of the words from what they signify, offering the example of the Russian “vosh’,” which he uses for bedbugs and lice, not remembering the meaning of “vosh’”to Russians. “Maybe the word can’t tell one from the other. But I can,” he says.

Also: The Cuckoo Clock: I have to mention that I thought Müller did nicely bringing clocks and the passage of time into the book, too. A chapter in the first half of the book is called “On the phantom pain of the cuckoo clock.” In it, Leo wonders, “Why did we need a cuckoo clock here. Not to measure the time.” Leo concludes that the barracks clock belongs to the hunger angel, saying a certain question [which invokes superstition] is most important, “Cuckoo, how much longer will I live.” When Leo returns home, alive, though many of his campmates have died, “The clock ticked away beside the wardrobe.”

To Summarize: The Hunger Angel felt especially successful to me because Müller balances the harshness of reality—camp deaths, camp privations, camp parasites—with a linguistic playfulness that simultaneously reflects and rejects that same reality. Episodes of absurdity mix with harshness, simultaneously giving the novel an air of reality and abstraction, as well as some wonderfully dark humor.

Finally, I want to say that I think Boehm’s translation finds a consistent voice, both fluid and linguistically marked, for Leo. Boehm quotes Leo in his Translator’s Note, “I carry silent baggage. I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words.” Boehm then writes of Müller, “In one novel after the other, it has been Herta Müller’s special calling to find words for the displacement of the soul among victims of totalitarianism.”

Disclaimers: I received a review copy of The Hunger Angel from publisher HenryHolt. Thank you very much!

Up Next: I’ve had a hard time finding something to follow The Hunger Angel… so settled on something predictable, another Swedish murder mystery. My next post won’t appear until mid-June, after BookExpo America.

The Journey of James Vance Marshall’s Walkabout

Walkabout, a short novel by James Vance Marshall (pseudonym for Donald Payne), is a peculiar trip through the outback with two children from a “comfortable home in Charleston, South Carolina” who are stranded after a plane crash. They set off on foot for Adelaide, meeting a lone Aborigine boy as they walk. I saw Nicolas Roeg’s film version of Walkabout in a sociology course in college so knew the basics—the trio of kids and the outback—but was surprised (though why!?) at how much tones differed, with the film stranding the kids through an episode of violence rather than a plane crash.

What I remember best about the film, which I saw, oh, about thirty years ago, is the contrast between meat for sale in an Australian city—prekilled, pretrimmed, for sale in bulk—and do-it-yourself meat in the outback. I don’t know if my memories are correct but that’s what stuck with me: urban life that’s far removed from nature, food sources, and metaphorically, a knowledge of self. Little of the “civilized” side of the food aspect of the contrast is contained in the book beyond a stick of candy that the girl, Mary, carries in her dress pocket. Once it’s gone, she and her brother, Peter, starve until they meet the boy on walkabout.

Marshall emphasizes differences in culture and behavior codes—or “sacred orders,” as we called them in my sociology course—with passages like this one about Mary, who’s rather inhibited:

The things that she’d been told way back in Charleston were somehow not applicable any more. The values she’d been taught to cherish became suddenly meaningless. A little guilty, a little resentful, and more than a little bewildered, she waited passively for what might happen next.

Beyond being embarrassed by nudity, Mary’s internal crisis has a racial element:

It was wrong, cruelly wrong, that she and her brother should be forced to run for help to a Negro; and a naked Negro at that.

But here’s Peter, who is younger and more able to adapt than his sister:

Peter watched him. Inquisitive. Imitative. Soon he too started to brush away the leaves and pluck out the blades of grass.

Marshall uses such obvious language often in Walkabout, occasionally taking an anthropological tone to tell us, for example, “Physically, the Australian Aboriginal is tough,” and describing walkabout in terms of tribal traditions.

The Biblical overtones in the book felt obvious, too, with the Aborigine boy taking a Christ-like role—he even teaches Peter to fish—and sacrificing his life. There’s also this line about a billabong, “The river that ran out of Eden couldn’t have been more beautiful.” And that brings me to the book’s biggest strength: descriptions of the landscape and its birds, plants, and non-human mammals, and observing how the children learn to use and respect nature so they can survive. Walkabout felt most successful when Marshall stepped back and let his characters be characters. I didn’t need him to tell me about their differing value systems, particularly given all he’s able to show through their differences in language, (in)abilities to find food, and comfort wearing clothing.

Up next: Herta Müller’s The Hunger Angel, which has a strong Russian theme.

Disclosures: I read the New York Review Books edition of Walkabout, which I bought myself. I always enjoy speaking with NYRB about translated fiction.