A Quick Run Through Running through Beijing

Every now and then I read a book and want to dispense with blogging and write something quick like, “Just read the book, you’ll enjoy it.” That’s how I feel about Xu Zechen’s Running through Beijing, which I read in Eric Abrahamsen’s translation from the Chinese: the novel offers a wonderfully concise portrayal of purveyors of false identities and DVDs, all told with gentle humor and atmospheric details that feel real and precise rather than showoffy or gratuitous.

Running through Beijing begins when a man, Dunhuang, is released from prison into the fine grit of a dust storm. He makes his way back to Beijing after serving three months for selling fake IDs and has little other than his resolve to earn money so he can set his partner, Bao Ding, who took the fall, free from a longer sentence. Soon after arriving in the city, Dunhuang meets a DVD seller, Kuang Xia, and they quickly fall into a romance of sorts—she’s separated (kind of) from her DVD supplier, Kuang Shan—that gets off to an auspicious start when Dunhuang scams the owners of a hotpot restaurant where they go to eat and drink.

On many levels, Running through Beijing doesn’t feel particularly remarkable: it simply tells the story of Dunhuang’s romances and business dealings, describing his trips around town on a bicycle (which is stolen in more ways than one) and, of course, running. What’s interesting is the texture of the novel, by which I mean more than just the elements—the basement bunk and backyard shed Dunhuang rents as housing, or the shadow economy and markets for various types of pirated goods—that are obviously foreign for an American reader like me who has never been to China. There is all that dust and blurriness, there is the feeling of “a year of bad omens” because everyone’s in jail, and there are all the movies Dunhuang sells and even begins to watch. Among them, of course, are The Bicycle Thief and Run, Lola, Run. It’s no wonder Two Lines Press made a movie card to send with the book. The online DVD playlist lacks a Bollywoodesque cover so isn’t as stylish but it does have links to video.

What appealed to me most in Running through Beijing, though, might be its most universal layer: continuums of fake and real. Is the love real or only for convenience? What about the friendships? The IDs are fake, and so are the DVDs, which all contain movies that imitate life (or maybe vice versa?). Then there are the porn DVDs, which show what, exactly? There are also loyalties, particularly Dunhuang’s for Bao Ding, who hardly seems to care. And we have the characters’ identities, too, the stuff not printed on official (or pirated) cards. Here’s a brief passage from when Dunhuang passes himself off as a doctoral student in film while he’s living in the basement. One of his roommates is a philosopher, and Dunhuang gets nervous:

It was all a big lie, for one thing. For another, of all the academic subjects that hinged on the Chinese language, philosophy was the one he respected the most. That instinctual reverence began while he was studying at his miserable vocational school. He had no idea how you did philosophy. It was mystery upon mystery; you couldn’t see it or touch it, and as far as he was concerned it was no different from witchcraft or sorcery.

Finally, I thought Eric Ambrahamsen’s translation read nicely, with crisp, clear dialogue, and that gentle humor I mentioned earlier. Best of all, he finds nice momentum in short sentences to keep the narrative running along, something that’s not always easy.

Disclaimers: I bought Running through Beijing under a Two Lines Press subscription plan. I published one of my first translations (a story by Margarita Khemlin) with Two Lines a few years ago, in the Counterfeits issue of their “World Writing in Translation” series. Two Lines subscriptions, by the way, are very affordable!

Up Next: My trip back to the Middle Ages begins with John L’Heureux’s art-heavy The Medici Boy and then, OMG, there’s Erika Johansen’s schlockily sociological The Queen of the Tearling, which attempts, not very successfully, to give dystopia a medieval feel with contemporary sensibilities.

Winterbach’s Elusive Moth

I loved my sixth-grade lessons in entomology so much—How could I not? We went out on bug-hunting expeditions and collected our insects in cigar boxes!—that I suppose I’m predisposed to love Ingrid Winterbach’s Karolina Ferreira, which I read as The Elusive Moth, Iris Gouws’s and Winterbach’s translation from the Afrikaans.

The Elusive Moth contains lots of elements (beyond the bugs) that I always seem to enjoy. Karolina Ferreira comes to a small town to do moth-related field work, giving us the outside observer; she’s given a ride to an herbalist named, appropriately enough, Basil, on the way, which adds an element of chance meetings. They proceed to watch more than just plants and insects: they see a tryst in a cemetery and the hotel where Karolina stays features a ladies’ bar, which features a singer, plus there’s a snooker room where members of the local police force often hang out. All this gives them plenty of chances to monitor the local human population at least as well as the bugs and herbs. I’m not sure who’s more comprehensible.

It’s heat, drought, and a slow-growing sense of menace that let The Elusive Moth soar, though: there are hints of secrets (the affair) from the very start but underlying hints of racial tensions are a broader concern. Meanwhile, Karolina regularly dances with a “fellow” named Kolyn who has short pants, sneakers, and hairy legs; he’s nothing like Karolona’s new Buddhist boyfriend… Karolina and Kolyn dance together beautifully, she dips so her hair nearly touches the floor, she experiences “a strange, impersonal ecstasy,” and all the drinking, dancing, and game playing starts to take on a carnival feel that reminded me of nothing so much as Dawn Powell’s Dance Night (previous post), another book about a small town, though there’s more of a feel of escape wishes there.

The Elusive Moth felt sneaky and stealthy, though I knew from the start that Karolina (who’s burned most of her possessions) would necessarily be as elusive as her moth, Hebdomophruda crenilinea, which is “a small inconspicuous moth, difficult to find, pale as a shroud.” (This particular moth, BTW, is so elusive that it’s listed on Wikipedia but doesn’t have its own page.) It’s the odd little things I enjoyed so much—the singer Pol, for example, is the first to resemble an amphibian, then others do, too, and so they drink more alcohol to warm their chilling blood. And about halfway through the book, “Every variety of urine intermingled in the toilets” near the bar and snooker room, so Winterbach goes on to describe the colors. Talk about fieldwork on humans! There are also flying ants, thoughts of death and mortality, unraveling psyches, mentions of bad haircuts, a mysterious play, and much, much more, a lovely combination that won Winterbach the M-Net Book Prize and Old Mutual Literary Prize, during the 1990s, when she wrote under the pseudonym Littie Viljoen. Gouws’s and Winterbach’s translation, which includes a few Afrikaans words that made perfect sense to me within context, has a nice matter-of-fact, almost reportorial, feel to it.

Disclaimers: Thank you to Open Letter Books, a press with whom I always enjoy discussing literature in translation, for the review copy of The Elusive Moth. The book won’t be released until July 2014.

Up Next: Roberto Bolaño’s Distant Star, which I liked very much but don’t quite know how to describe, and then Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Light Reading That Wishes It Were a Little Heavier: Three Quick Takes

It’s rare that I read—and actually finish—three books in a row that don’t inspire much reflection, thought, or emotion. Either negative or positive. The three books below are a strange bunch: they all passed the treadmill test, meaning I spent miles plodding along a moving belt, enjoying my reading and, thus, even my walks. For better or worse—worse, I’d guess—all three books felt like they wanted to be, in the words of one of my college housemates, heavy, deep, and real. Meaning serious literature. That’s probably “worse” because all three felt a little lighter, shallower, and more artificial than they might or should have. All three felt a little safer than they might have, too, as if their authors didn’t develop them as much as they could have. Although I’m doubly sorry about that because all three books did keep me reading, the good news is that all three books are debuts: perhaps their authors will take more chances next time.

Albena Stambolova’s Everything Happens as It Does, which I read in Olga Nikolova’s translation of the Bulgarian novel Tova e kakto stava, knits together events in the lives of a family or two. There’s no dialogue to speak of and everything—life, love, death—just happens because it does, no real questions asked. Meaning the book seems to be about fatalism, which feels a little hypnotizing. The reader doesn’t know much about why anything happens in this book—why Margarita suddenly has a laptop, why her twin brother Valentin follows her, why Boris with the bees ends up a father—but not knowing why is apparently the point. Everything Happens as It Does is told in a flat narrative voice that contributes to the hypnotizing effect of the book and the feeling of inevitability. It couldn’t have been easy for Nikolova to translate.

The Book of Jonah, by Joshua Max Feldman, combines two plotlines: Jonah, a youngish Manhattan lawyer, is trying to make partner at his law firm and trying to decide which of two girlfriends to make his partner outside work; and Judith, a youngish woman whose life has seemed nearly perfect until tragedy hits, is trying to figure out where she fits in the world. Both are Jewish, and Feldman includes a mystical Jewish thread in the book that inspires Jonah to reassess his life and failings. The Book of Jonah had the most promise early on, when it read most like social satire set in New York City, post-crash, during the time of smart phones… there were some funny scenes and lines, which made this the most enjoyable of the three books, but location changes to Amsterdam and Las Vegas felt artificial.

The car in which Heydrich was wounded

Finally, there’s Laurent Binet’s HHhH, which I read in Sam Taylor’s smooth translation from the original French. This novel about writing a historical novel about Josef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš and their mission to assassinate Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich in Prague takes hemming and hawing about detail to extremes: the narrator fusses over historical detail in ways that might inspire respect (he wants to get things right) or annoyance (does the color of Heydrich’s car really, truly matter when Nazism is the topic?). Despite winning a Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman, HHhH doesn’t feel original and shapely enough to be great fiction, and that’s largely because the balances of objectivity-subjectivity and narrator-subject felt askew. That’s not just because Heydrich’s doings—like forming the Einsatzgruppen—were so horrifying and the narrator’s decisions about car color feel so trivial by comparison. All the narrator’s hemming and hawing about familiar thoughts on truth, certainty, and writing fiction ended up padding the book so much that it became a little dull, despite my interest in learning more about Heydrich, Gabčík, and Kubiš. I agree with M.A. Orthofer’s Complete Review assessment that HHhH would make a good young adult novel.

Disclaimers: I received Everything Happens as It Does from Open Letter Books and The Book of Jonah from Henry Holt and Company. Thanks to both!

Up Next: It remains to be seen…

Photo: Creative Commons, from Bundesarchiv.

Lost and Found: The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra

Pedro Mairal’s The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra—which I read in Nick Caistor’s translation of a book known in Spanish as simply Salvatierra—is a wonderful sliver of a novel narrated by a man who returns to his hometown after his father’s death. He comes back to sort through his father’s art but the skeleton of the story, which is a mystery of sorts, is fairly (arche)typical—return to childhood places, family secrets, and so on—so it’s Mairal’s details, atmosphere, and vivid description that keep Salvatierra intresting.

Juan Salvatierra loses the ability speak as a child then becomes a postal worker and artist as a man, painting one huge mural a year to depict events in his life. After Salvatierra’s death, a European museum buys the rolls of canvas, which have been stored away in a shed and would measure a total of two miles, unrolled. Everything’s there but one roll, the missing year of the title: 1961, when the narrator was ten.

In Salvatierra, art imitates life, life imitates art, art imitates art, and art helps resurrect lost memories. Through his art, Salvatierra also shows his sons his life before they were born, including his own wedding, where veins—bloodlines—join and even flow into the river. The bloodlines also flow from the past into the present, and the river plays a key part in solving the mystery of the missing mural. It’s not just blood and the river that flow: the whole book flows, flows, flows, through memories and murals and old acquaintances.

Best of all, the flow of Salvatierra is a lot like the flow of Juan Salvatierra’s paintings. It feels silly to write much about Salvatierra when this one line sums up the book’s effect so concisely:

He wanted his painting to encapsulate the fluidity of a river, of dreams, the way in which they can transform things in a completely natural way without the change seeming absurd but entirely inevitable, as if he were revealing the violent metamorphosis hidden within each being, thing, or situation.

Bonus link: An interview with translator Nick Caistor, from World Literature Today.

 

Up Next: Joshua Max Feldman’s The Book of Jonah.

The Banality of Evil, Once More: Monsieur Le Commandant

Romain Slocombe’s Monsieur Le Commandant: A Wartime Confession, which I read in Jesse Browner’s translation from the original French, is one of the more sordid World War 2 novels I’ve read in some time. Most of Monsieur Le Commandant is in letter form: Paul-Jean Husson writes one long letter, dated 4 September 1942, to Herr Sturmbannführer H. Schöllenhammer, “Le Commandant” of the title. The letter was ostensibly found “by the German documentary film-maker Peter Klemm among family papers abandoned in a Leipzig rubbish dump not far from a group of buildings under demolition.”

Pétain and Hitler, 1940. Photo: Das Bundesarchiv, via Wikipedia

Husson—a World War 1 hero, committed Pétain follower, and snooty anti-Semite—writes to Le Commandant to ask a favor. On behalf of his daughter-in-law, for whom he feels [cue “sordid”] forbidden feelings… Since much of Husson’s story is fairly predictable, I don’t think it spoils much [that’s an alert of sorts!] to say his daughter-in-law, Ilse, is German and Jewish, which makes Husson’s ardor all the more forbidden, thanks to his odious beliefs, which he often illustrates using anti-Semitic clichés. Husson is such a charmer that it came as absolutely no surprise when he said he’d cheated on his wife over the years (I even wrote “what a jerk!” in the margin) with hundreds of women, many of whom he claims were attracted to his stump and prosthesis. He thinks his wife “wisely chose to turn a blind eye and not dig too deeply.”

Though Monsieur Le Commandant has a plot that includes travel through occupied France and Husson’s pursuit of Ilse while his son/her husband is at war, what interested me most was Husson as a character and as a writer. In Husson, Slocombe creates a thoroughly unappealing figure who writes things like, “Against my own will, my family and my life were being ‘Judaised’. Little by little, a surreptitious leprosy was eating away the fabric of a good French Christian family.” It’s hard to even decide if Husson is a reliable or unreliable narrator: he’s so openly anti-Semitic that those feelings felt true but he’s also so melodramatic and over-the-top in his passions and, perhaps even more important, his self-expression that I had to wonder how much of what he claimed to feel was genuine and how much he was inventing himself as the (anti-) hero of his own story, for both himself and Le Commandant.

Monsieur Le Commandant works because Browner’s translation makes all Husson’s melodrama and passion seem so surrealistically and paradoxically real. Browner’s Husson feels appropriately and consistently wordy, pompous, and self-absorbed. It feels odd to say I thoroughly enjoyed Monsieur Le Commandant—the book is, of course, uncomfortable, because of Husson’s moral code—but I couldn’t put it down, thanks to the combination of Slocombe’s storytelling, the voice Browner creates for Husson, and my interest in French collaboration during World War 2.

Disclaimers: I received an advance review copy of Monsieur Le Commandant from Meryl Zegarek Public Relations. Thank you very much! The book’s publication date is listed on the book as February 21, 2014.

Up Next: Pedro Mairal’s The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra.

Belated Happy New Year! & Favorites from 2013

Happy New Year, a bit late! Thank you for your visits and may 2014 bring you lots of enjoyable reading!

Last year went by in such a rush that I was surprised to look back on my list of 2013 blog posts and find I’d read so many fun books that it was difficult to pick favorites. Of course that’s partly because I abandon a lot of books I don’t like, skewing my public results, but it’s largely because publishers and publicists have been sending me so many good books. That’s especially nice because many of them are books I’d never hear about otherwise. The only downside is that I rarely seem to get to all the books I buy at the bookstore and the annual library book sale! Anyway, without further fuss, here are some favorites from 2013…

Favorite Lost Classics. I only read a couple in 2013 but I loved them both: Pitigrilli’s 1921 Cocaine, translated by Eric Mosbacher (previous post), and Antal Szerb’s 1937 Journey by Moonlight, translated by Len Rix (previous post). I noted some surface similarities in my post about Cocaine: “decadence between the World Wars… humor, soul searching, friends who become monks, and sad endings.” I’d recommend both.

Favorite Book Written in English. Probably J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country (previous post), another between-the-wars book. This one got short shrift here because of my summer travel; I particularly enjoyed the combination of melancholy and humor. (That seems to be a constant…)

Favorite Book Translated by Someone I Know. Inga Ābele’s High Tide, which I read in Kaija Straumanis’s translation (previous post), was a stealth favorite in 2013: with its backwards chronology and blend of characters, the book couldn’t have been easy to translate but Kaija’s English version reads beautifully.

Overall Favorite. I think my top book for 2013 has to be Arnon Grunberg’s Tirza, translated by Sam Garrett: I called it “a spectacularly compelling portrayal of a spectacularly awful personal breakdown” in my previous post. And the book has stuck with me: thanks to Grunberg’s ability to convey both melancholy and humor (there they are again!), I can still see and hear Jörgen Hofmeester in all his anti-glory. Though Tirza was my clear favorite, I did have to stop and think about two other books (yes, they’re also funny-and-sad), just to be sure I was sure: Zachary Karabashliev’s 18% Gray, translated by Angela Rodel (previous post), and Bragi Ólafsson’s The Pets, translated by Janice Balfour (previous post).

Up Next. Who knows what the rest of 2014 will bring, but it got off to a great start with Pedro Mairal’s The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra, which makes me happy because it’s from a new publisher, New Vessel Press, that specializes in translations. Doubly happy because I seem to read quite a few books from publishers that focus on translations. Two others books are waiting to be written up: Donald Antrim’s The Hundred Brothers, which I also liked quite a bit, and Romain Slocombe’s Monsieur Le Commandant, another one that gets a thumbs up.

Disclosures: The usual. Individual previous posts include individual disclosures about books.

Minding the Animals in Ólafsson’s The Pets

I’m writing about Bragi Ólafsson’s The Pets—which I read in Janice Balfour’s translation of the original Icelandic Gæludýrin—out of turn because I’m pretty sure I want to include it on my list of favorite books I read in 2012. What’s not to love (for a reader like me, anyway) about a book narrated by a guy who spends most of the novel lying under his own bed listening to people gather in his own apartment, wonder where he is, and drink his premium liquor?

The basic story of The Pets is this: Emil, a youngish guy from Reykjavik won the lottery, went to London for some shopping (he likes music and books), and met “a hulk of a linguist” and a lovely youngish woman on the flight home. Even as Emil is winging his way home, Emil’s ex-friend and former petsitting colleague Havard (thought to be institutionalized in Sweden) is drinking his way through Reykjavik and trying to find Emil. Havard comes to Emil’s after Emil arrives home but Emil sees him and dives under the bed before Havard crawls through the window to shut off a tea kettle… a little later Havard starts inviting people over. Including the linguist and the lovely youngish woman.

Again: What’s not to love (again: for a reader like me, anyway) about a wonderfully absurd situation like that? Particularly given Emil’s sense of humor and Havard’s recklessness? Beyond the humor, what struck me most is the hermeticness of it all: first Emil is trapped on a plane, then he’s trapped under his own bed, stuck with other people in enclosed spaces, even if they don’t know he’s there. Hell really can be other people. Particularly when, like Emil, you have a view of the bathroom and can see what people are doing in there. Here’s Emil, near the end of the book, lying under the bed, hearing Elvis Presley (first “Suspicious Minds” then “Don’t Cry Daddy”) play on his own stereo:

For a moment I long to take part, to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in, but the next moment I am really glad that I am alone, all by myself.

There was also this, about flying, toward the beginning of the book:

For three hours (not to mention on longer trips) one is locked in a tight, uncomfortable space, way above any civilization, with unpredictable people, who could drink themselves senseless or spill their food and drink over you—and the only place of salvation is the toilet.

All of which is to say I loved The Pets. It’s wonderfully serious and sad fun. A bonus: the fact that I laughed out loud many times speaks well of Janice Balfour’s translation.

Disclosures: I always enjoy meeting up with Open Letter Books; I purchased a copy of The Pets.

Up Next: Favorites of 2012 2013.  Then the books I bumped for this one: Donald Antrim’s The Hundred Brothers, which I also liked quite a bit, and Romain Slocombe’s Monsieur Le Commandant, another one that gets a thumbs up. Then Pedro Mairal’s The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra, which is off to a good great start.

Pitigrilli’s Addictive Cocaine

The cover of a 1945 Turkish edition.

Pitigrilli’s 1921 Cocaine, which I read in Eric Mosbacher’s translation from the original Italian Cocaina falls into a category of novels I seem to love, books about decadence between the World Wars that combine humor, soul searching, friends who become monks, and sad endings. Like Antal Szerb’s 1937 Journey by Moonlight, Cocaine also focuses on a young European man’s (mis)adventures at home and abroad: in Cocaine, Tito Arnaudi, who’s Italian, goes to Paris, where he gets a job as a journalist, gets involved with multiple women, and gets a cocaine habit.

The trajectory here is tragic—based on my reading, cocaine habits in novels generally do result in trouble—but most of the journey is ridiculously fun and carnivalistic, even with (or perhaps because of?) looming death. There’s even a revolver on page 36. And an orgy in a penguin room, a lover with a coffin, strawberries soaked in Champagne and ether, and a scandal because Tito invents a newspaper article about an execution and the article is published even though the execution is commuted. And there are lines like “Gambling is not the pleasure of winning, but a feeling that you are living intensely.” Which Tito does, with his Italian girlfriend Maud (née Maddalena) and his Armenian girlfriend Kalantan (she of the coffin), and what must amass to kilos of cocaine. I enjoyed Eric Mosbacher’s translation very much for its feel of another time and--perhaps even more important for the translator in me--a sense that he made lots of excellent decisions about how to handle Cocaine’s form, vocabulary (tepidarium, anyone?), and wonderful peculiarities.

For more on Cocaine:

M.A. Orthofer’s review on The Complete Review, which concludes, “Cynical, yes, and arguably offensively amoral, Cocaine is still grand entertainment, exceptionally well done.”

Peter Keough on Artsfuse.org, with this summary at the top: “Cocaine’s bleak and brilliant satire, lush and intoxicating prose, and sadistic playfulness remain as fresh and caustic as they were nine decades ago.”

A version of Alexander Stille’s afterword to Cocaine, from the NYRblog.

Up Next: Catherine O’Flynn’s Mr. Lynch’s Holiday, an interesting counterbalance to Cocaine…

Disclosures: I received a galley copy of Cocaine from my local and very independent bookstore, Longfellow Books, which sells books from New Vessel Press, publisher of Cocaine. A smart move on their part for absolutely all concerned because a) I’d looked at Cocaine but it didn’t strike me at all in the store but b) it definitely struck me when I got home (!?) and c) I loved the book and d) I’m already planning to buy a couple copies for holiday gifts. (BTW: My purchase of a stack of books, many of which were translations, including a copy of Pedro Mairal’s The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra, also published by New Vessel, is what spurred the gift… This, dear people, is only one of many reasons I love my independent book store so much. They know me as a person and a reader not as a user name, password, and credit card history. Plus they host great events!)

Two Quick Words: Police and Theft

It’s rare that I write about a book the week it hits the New York Times bestseller list but here goes… Jo Nesbø’s Police, which I read in Don Bartlett’s translation of the original Norwegian Politi, is described on the title page as “A Harry Hole Novel.” Meaning Police continues a series of novels about Harry Hole, a gruff, hard-boiled Oslo police detective. I’d be hard-boiled, too, if so many of my co-workers were murdered: they get killed off at such a rate in Police it’s a wonder anyone’s left by the end of the book.

Police is my first Nesbø book and it left me pretty indifferent. I enjoy a good detective novel but Police felt a little too twitchy and manic, shifting from plotline to plotline, character to character. I realize the furtiveness felt magnified because I haven’t read any of Nesbø’s previous novels about Harry Hole and his colleagues—always a danger with series novels—but, sorry, I think books ought to stand alone a little better than this if they’re sold alone. When Police finally settled down and began exploring character as the characters continued to explore a series of killings, I enjoyed it more, though the series of plot twists is such that mentioning relevant specifics would pretty much spoil the book for anyone intending to read it… not that those spoilers would really come as much of a surprise. Even at its best, Police still didn’t feel like much more than a typical hard-edged detective novel that could take place just about anywhere in the world. There was even a reference to Breaking Bad. Shrug.

If I were using food metaphors—and why not?—then Police is the Starbucks coffee and institutional-tasting chocolate cupcake I ate a couple weeks ago while traveling, you know, that standard junky snack you can buy anywhere to satisfy a certain craving even if you know you won’t love it. By contrast, Peter Carey’s Theft is a tasty soufflé with a glass of wine and a fun friend: light, laugh-inducing, and atmospherically memorable. Theft is narrated by two Australian brothers, both troubled in their own ways: Michael Boone is an artist who’s done time and Hugh Boone is younger, larger (at 220 pounds), and living in Michael’s care because he’s not, as they say, all there.

The (new) troubles start when Michael (a.k.a. Butcher) meets Marlene Leibovitz, who turns up at his (borrowed) house… it turns out Marlene’s the daughter-in-law of one of Michael’s favorite painters. And then we start in on forgery, thefts (art and even one of Hugh’s folding chairs he uses to sit on the street), other forms of deception, trips to Tokyo and New York, murder, and so on. What makes Theft so much fun is Carey’s combination of undependable narrative voices: Michael, mostly serious and mostly in love with the sneaky Marlene, and Hugh, quirky, perceptive about his brother’s relationship, and often using ALL CAPS to emphasize his points. All this fits together in a way that addresses questions of truth(iness) and its versions, the nature of art, and, of course, all sorts of relationships, many of them triangular. And who gets the last laugh.

Disclaimers and disclosures: I received a copy of Police from publisher Alfred A. Knopf, thank you!

Up next: Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond and MacDonald Harris’s The Carp Castle. And Pitigrilli’s Cocaine.

The Devil & World War 2: Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop

There are lots of reasons I ordered up a copy of Jáchym Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop as soon as I heard about it: the book addresses historical memory and World War 2, I seem to have an affinity for Czech absurdism and humor, I’ve visited all the novel’s main settings (Terezín, Prague, Minsk, and Khatyn), and I was eager to read more of Alex Zucker’s work after enjoying his translation of Patrick Ouředník’s Case Closed. Alex translated The Devil’s Workshop from the Czech book known as Chladnou zemí.

The Devil’s Workshop is a sneakily powerful novel narrated by an unnamed man who came into the world because his father rescued his mother at the liberation of the concentration camp in Terezín, also known as Theresienstadt. As an adult, the narrator works with Lebo, a man who’s everyone’s uncle: Lebo was born in the camp during the war and makes it his mission to preserve everything related to the camp, save the town, and make it a bigger attraction. Lebo and the narrator eventually gather plenty of money and plenty of people in Terezín… but then things fall apart when they become victims of their own success and are accused (among other things) of having a commune. With orgies.

Before too long, the narrator (carrying a thumb drive loaded with contact information for donors) is escaping the Czech Republic, lured to Belarus by Alex and Maruška, who are building their own war-related museum:

The museum we’re building in Khatyn, Alex says. It’s going to be the most famous memorial site in the world. The devil had his workshop here in Belarus. The deepest graves are in Belarus. But nobody knows about them. That’s why you’re here!

About twenty pages later, Alex bemoans the existing “boring, old-style memorial” at Khatyn:

That won’t get the attention of the new Europeans. Look at the Poles and that Katyn of theirs! A step ahead, again! They’re shooting a movie about it! And what about our Khatyn? Nobody’s even heard of it.

Khatyn, Belarus

Alex’s plans for Khatyn include oral history and authenticity in a combination I can only describe as ghoulish. I shuddered (physically!) when I realized the plan for the museum… it’s a logical conclusion for the novel but it’s also a logical extension of real-life issues that generate lots of debate these days, things like the transformation of museums into interactive experiences, monetization of human suffering, and spectacles like Bodies… The Exhibition.

I seem to read a fair bit about historical memory and World War 2—the far more optimistic Here Comes Mrs. Kugelman is another World War 2-related book that comes to mind after a recent reading—but the combination of dark humor, tragedy, imagination, and twists on the realities of Belarus give The Devil’s Workshop a particular relevance that makes me more than willing to forgive the novel’s slightly uneven pacing and characterization. Finally, I’m happy to report that Alex Zucker feels fully in control of his material with this book, too: I barely noticed that the book lacks quotation marks (this is a feat), and he does a beautiful job making choppy and colloquial language wonderfully readable. That’s very difficult, particularly in a book like this, with its humor, remnants of war-time suffering, and strong voices, but he sure makes it look easy.

Disclaimers: I know Alex Zucker through the American Literary Translators Association. I bought the book.

Up Next: Rose Macaulay’s quirky The Towers of Trebizond, MacDonald Harris’s comically metaphysical The Carp Castle, and Niccolo Ammaniti’s gritty As God Commands.

Image: Part of the memorial at Khatyn, photo by Veenix, via Wikipedia, Creative Commons.

Inga Ābele’s High Tide

Inga Ābele’s High Tide, which I read in Kaija Straumanis’s translation from the original Latvian Paisums, is one of those complex-feeling books with a complex-looking structure that turns out to be fairly simple at its core. High Tide is “about” (it feels particularly odd to say that about a book like this) all the big stuff: love, death, family relationships, and societal change… and ways to recover from—or at least deal with—all of the above.

Which isn’t to say I’m exactly sure what I read: the back cover blurb of High Tide tells me it’s written in “more or less reverse chronological order,” which feels about right, but the novel is so poetic and abstract in some ways (especially in the beginning) and so up-closely brutal (at times) in telling stories from the life of its main character, Ieva, that High Tide left me, to borrow more metaphors from the ocean, feeling like I was sitting on a narrow beach with waves encroaching. I do like the beach at high tide even if low tide feels more comfortable. There’s more space. But it’s less interesting.

Some of the waves in High Tide are pretty big: Ieva comes of age in the late eighties, when the Soviet Union was collapsing, and she’s a teenage mother whose husband, Andrejs, doesn’t share her interest in books. He does, though, come to enjoy Greek mythology in prison, preferring it to Christianity because you get to keep your guilt. (I loved this...) That prison term, by the way, is for shooting Ieva’s boyfriend, Aksels, dead. That’s the basic story—well, that along with Ieva’s distant relationships with her daughter, her mother, and, to a lesser degree, her grandmother—so you may be relieved to know Ieva does okay for herself in the end. Which the beginning of the book.

Ābele’s structure for High Tide means the book reads almost like a mystery: thematically, the reader wants to find out what happened to make Ieva who she is, and the structure is mysterious, too, because Ābele works in so many different kinds of chapters, including letters and naked dialogue. Some chapters are closely told, others not so much, but everything falls together to fill in events over the years. To paraphrase what Kaija writes in a Goodreads description, the novel is divided into sections of varying length that are assembled in a “smoothly chaotic (not unlike the tide, hmm?) structure.” In any case, the book is thoroughly absorbing, whether showing Andrejs’s post-prison romance, Ieva traveling to a conference, or terminal illness. There are just enough Latvian details to keep the setting clear but not so many that they become overbearing.

I don’t often comment at length on translations themselves but, after endless (in a good way) conversations and articles this summer about translation, I want to say I think Kaija’s High Tide reads beautifully—it’s smooth in all the right ways—and doesn’t belabor local or post-Soviet details. Sometimes it’s individual words I remember about translations… and one word that stood out for me in High Tide was “pleather,” probably because there are several Russian words for fake leather materials that cover apartment doors, get made into boots, and spawn inordinate amounts of discussion about Russian-English translation. I don’t know what the Latvian is in High Tide but was happy to see Kaija just go for pleather, a fairly new word (1982, per the good people of Merriam-Webster) that would feel too contemporary for lots of books but fits perfectly here and doesn’t break the narrative voice.

Disclaimers: I received a review copy of High Tide from Open Letter Books, thank you! High Tide is due out later this month. I always enjoy speaking with Open Letter, including Kaija, who is editorial director, about books and translations.

Up next: Jáchym Topol’s diabolically ghoulish The Devil’s Workshop, Rose Macaulay’s quirky The Towers of Trebizond, and MacDonald Harris’s comically metaphysical (so far anyway) The Carp Castle.