Benjamin Stein’s The Canvas

Benjamin Stein’s The Canvas, which I read in Brian Zumhagen’s translation of the German novel known as Leinwand, is a book where I literally wasn’t always sure which side was up or down: the book is structured, physically, as two books in one, and each book-side is narrated by a main character. The reader is presented with the choice of either reading each story individually or flipping the book, chapter by chapter, and watching the two stories intersect.

I chose the second option and used a magnetic bookmark. I began—randomly, I think—on the side narrated by Jan Wechsler (Europublisher who receives a mysterious bag of stuff he thinks just can’t possibly be his), then switched over to Amnon Zichroni (an Israel-born psychic of sorts who moves around)… and back again, chapter by chapter, until their stories met in the middle. In Israel.

If I had to summarize the wonderfully complex The Canvas in one awkwardly simplistic phrase, I think I’d say something like “existential confusion, nicely rendered.” The Canvas looks at some of my favorite topics—identity, memory, (ir)reality, and how they all fit together—and makes them exponentially more complicated and relevant by placing them within present-day historical memory of the Holocaust and, in particular detail, Jewish identity. Historical memories float to the surface of The Canvas in the person of a shadowy violin restorer and memoirist named Minsky, a character modeled on Binjamin Wilkomirski, a real-life (our life!) writer who fabricated a Holocaust memoir in the 1990s. Meaning we have fact/fiction and fact/fiction in The Canvas. These lines, from Jan Wechsler, concisely sum up a lot about the book, “Cultivating fables is complicated. You need a good memory. Otherwise, you’re sunk.”

I found Amnon Zichroni’s half of the book more interesting than Wechsler’s, though, and not just because Zichroni lives in Portland, Maine, for a while, where he does a residency in psychiatry at Maine Medical Center, a hospital where I used to work as a medical interpreter. Zichroni’s skills include using touch to read into people’s pasts, and his single-day reading of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita is a touchstone in his half of the book. Zichroni refers to chains of events and determinism in one long paragraph that references M&M. Here’s the second half of the paragraph: 

I knew that Annouchka had already spilled the sunflower oil. And it really almost drove me out of my mind that I didn’t have the slightest idea how to save Berlioz from losing his head when he so persistently refused to at least accept that something else was directing people’s lives—namely, the sometimes grim, poetic hand of Hashem.

That’s particularly lovely stuff—Annouchka and that damn sunflower oil all over again!—if you’ve read M&M, another novel, by the way, that blends distinct story lines and questions of faith.

Oddly, I think the physical layout of the book called The Canvas, with its demand that the reader flip back and forth, is one of the reasons the novel works. Though it would be easy to say the flipping felt like a cheap gimmick and annoyed me a reader, I think the flipping reinforces, through the actual physical action of turning the book, physical aspects of identity, location, and, well, which end is up, all of which are important themes in a novel that I read as an existential thriller. The Canvas read smoothly enough in Zumhagen’s translation that the novel could feel like a thriller with consistent voices. The book contains a glossary of Jewish and Yiddish terms, twice, once at the end of each man’s story. It’s very fitting to offer those words at the heart of the novel, back-to-back, facing two ways.

Disclosures: I received a review copy of The Canvas from Open Letter, a publisher with which I always enjoy discussing literature in translation, including a specific piece I’m translating.

Up Next: Orly Castel Bloom’s horribly, hilariously demented Dolly City.

Where There’s Smoke: Thrown into Nature

I realized last week that I never posted this piece, though I wrote it nearly a year ago…

Milen Ruskov’s Thrown into Nature, a contemporary novel translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel, tells the story of Nicolás Bautista Monardes, a sixteenth-century Spanish physician who advocates the use of tobacco for medicinal purposes. The novel is a picaresque—generally an entertaining one—narrated by Monardes’s assistant, the hapless, unreliable, and Portuguese Guimarães da Silva.

The reader witnesses all sorts of cures and odd episodes in chapters with titles like “For Long Life,” “Intestinal Worms, Enemas,” and “For Protection Against the Plague and All Manner of Contagions,” and Monardes holds forth on matters of religion, nature (the human is “a pipe, through which nature passes”), and politics.

I especially enjoyed a scene based in England, in which King James I holds a debate called “Whether the frequent use of tobacco is good for healthy men?” Says da Silva, “The question mark here is pure hypocrisy and is intended solely to satisfy the formal requirements of debate.” da Silva’s comments about his seatmates at the debate are, like many other passages in the book, funny in a slapstick way. As da Silva takes notes and draws a Star of David, one of his neighbors “stared bug-eyed at the star on my sheet. I quickly crossed it out and grabbed my quill such that I—ostensibly accidentally—showed him my middle finger.”

Of course part of the fun of all this for me, a twenty first-century reader who used to write quite a bit about drug discovery and development, was reading about political debate around a substance used as a medical treatment. And of course our modern-day vilification of tobacco puts loads of irony into watching Monardes and da Silva advocate its use to cure just about everything, puffing away on cigarillas as a preventive measure. da Silva, however, records this:

“I’ve been sustaining myself with tobacco for twenty years longer than you have,” replied the doctor. “There seems to be something in tobacco which causes such a cough. After many, many years. 

Today is a bad day for tobacco, I thought to myself.

Perhaps even more interesting: Monardes was a real person and, according to the Special Collections Department of the library at the University of Glasgow, “Monardes made tobacco a household remedy throughout Western Europe and his gospel was accepted by the majority of European physicians for more than two centuries.” I don’t know if Ruskov smokes but Bulgaria is apparently a big tobacco-using country: according to data on Wikipedia, Bulgaria ranks fourth in the world in number of cigarettes per adult per year, 2,437.

I would be remiss if I didn’t add that I thought Rodel’s translation read nicely, conveying humor and a stylized voice. 

Disclosures: I received a copy of Thrown into Nature from Open Letter Books, a publisher with which I always enjoy discussing literature in translation, including a specific piece I’m translating.

Up Next: The Canvas, by Benjamin Stein, an Open Letter Book that I’m enjoying very much… fitting since I’ll be going to Rochester, NY, home of Open Letter, for the American Literary Translators Association conference next week. I loved last year’s conference in Kansas City so can’t wait!

Image: Portrait of Monardes, from user Valérie75, via Wikipedia. 

Seven Quick Points about Deon Meyer’s Seven Days

I read Seven Days in K.L. Seegers’s translation of the Afrikaans original 7 Dae, written by Deon Meyer. 

Seven Days is part of a series featuring detective captain Benny Griessel but Seven Days reads just fine on its own; I haven’t read the precursors.

Meyers mixes episodes from Griessel’s personal life—counting his days of sobriety and showing his struggle to start a relationship with a lovely singer—with his investigation of the murder of an ambitious and artificially shapely female attorney.

The case is urgent because a sniper is shooting at policemen, promising to shoot one a day until the attorney’s killer is found.

The novel is well-structured and nicely paced, and I thought Meyer did particularly well populating Seven Days with a varied bunch of investigators and the tensions between them.

Bonus for me: I couldn’t help but enjoy the small Russian subplot!

Disclaimer: I received a copy of Seven Days at the Grove/Atlantic booth at BookExpo America, thank you! -- I always enjoy discussing literature in translation with Grove/Atlantic.

More Fiction with Finnish: A Fool’s Paradise and We Sinners

Anita Konkka’s A Fool’s Paradise, which I read in A.D. Haun and Owen Witesman’s translation of the Finnish original Hullun taivaassa, and Hanna Pylväinen’s We Sinners share more than Finnish ancestry: structurally, both books link vignettes or stories into novels, and both books offer straightforward writing and rather bleak, atmospheric pictures of loneliness. 

I read A Fool’s Paradise first, enjoying Konkka’s first-person narrator’s dark humor: her storyteller is an unemployed young woman who’s involved with a married man and enjoys referring to Russian literature and writers. In the first chapter, she has a stone from Pasternak’s grave in her pocket. The woman’s accounts of her life, much of which isn’t particularly interesting in term of activity, read, to me, like a stream of vignettes, often incorporating observations about strangers and descriptions of dreams. “Our life passes in sleeping and waiting,” she says. She also says her only duty in society is to report to the unemployment office.

It’s Konkka’s use of detail—a bird flying into a room, a gypsy on a ferry, childhood memories of learning about Yuri Gagarin—and tone, as conveyed by Haun and Witesman, that made A Fool’s Paradise so strangely engaging for me. Here’s an example:

A young man is distributing leaflets in front of the K-Market and asks whether I believe in Jesus. No woman has ever asked me that. Perhaps they’ve agreed that men will save women and women save men, since people are more responsive to the allure of the opposite sex.

Repentance and sin are, as promised by the title, a crucial element of We Sinners, a novel-in-stories that chronicles the lives of the Rovaniemis, a family of Finnish descent living in the U.S. that has nine children. The Rovaniemis are Laestadian Lutherans who aren’t allowed to watch movies or TV, go to school dances, use makeup, or drink alcohol. Among other things. Of course they break the rules a lot, and several of the Rovaniemi children leave the church during the course of the book. One of the younger Rovaniemis sums up the church this way, “It’s a kind of Lutheranism where everyone is much more hung up on being Lutheran than all the other normal Lutherans. End of story.”

All those rules and alleged deprivations (I love life without a TV!), along with the expected transgressions from all manner of sinners, were less interesting for me than Pylväinen’s grace in structuring the book, her debut novel. She tells the family’s story chronologically, economically covering a couple decades in under 200 pages by carrying threads from one story to another. In the first story, children get chicken pox and their father, Warren, may be offered the job of pastor at their church… Pylväinen starts the second story by letting the reader know what happened for Warren.

Pylväinen also creates an interesting illusion with her story-chapters, many of which focus on a key episode in one character’s life with references to other family members. The characters—from father Warren, who grits his teeth from anger until a crown breaks, to Brita, a daughter whose first press of the keys on her new piano is silent—are members of a crowded family living in a crowded house but they often feel tragically alone in their anger, disappointment, and relative poverty. Much of the siblings’ interaction comes through solidarity in leaving or staying with the church.

Two scenes involving the mother, Pirjo, especially stuck with me. In the first, her discovery (at the movies!) that one of her sons is gay seemed especially alienating for everyone involved, “She felt slapped, she felt rejected, she felt like he had looked at the life she had made for him and he had spit on it.” So much for forgiveness. Toward the end of the book, Pirjo tells one of her daughters over the phone, “We’re here to remind you of what is right. We know you know in your hearts what the right thing is, of course we know you know that—” But then her daughter cuts her off, yelling, “Assholes!”

Up Next: Seven Days by Deon Meyer.

Disclaimers: I received a review copy of We Sinners from publisher Henry Holt, thank you!

A Not-So-Jolly Jester: Makine’s The Life of an Unknown Man

Andreï Makine’s The Life of an Unknown Man, which I read in Geoffrey Strachan’s translation of the original French La vie d’un homme inconnu, is the kind of book that makes me grumpy. The novel details—and I do mean “details”—the emotional and geographical wanderings of a little-known Russian émigré writer living in France who decides to visit the motherland after his much-younger girlfriend dumps him. Shutov, the writer, is a sentimental guy and he wants to visit an old flame.

Peterhof/Petrodvorets at Saint Petersburg's 300th
Anniversary

Shutov’s surname may be rooted in “shut” (sounds like “shoot”), the Russian word for a clown, fool, or jester, but he doesn’t fit in with St. Petersburg’s carnivalesque atmosphere at the city’s anniversary celebration. He says, “Nothing has changed in thirty years. And everything has changed.” Right. A paragraph later, when Shutov tells himself, “I was wrong to come…,” I wrote “Yes, you were!” in the margin. Reason A: As we all know, you can’t step in the same river twice. Reason B: The trip is a colossally awkward plot device designed to give Shutov a chance to observe changes and fail to have a soulful reunion with Yana, the old flame, who is now a busy businesswoman… but miraculously redeem the journey by meeting Volsky, an old man who inhabits a room in a former communal apartment Yana now owns.

It’s Volsky’s last night in his room before moving to a nursing home, and Shutov watches over him, listening to his life story, which includes the blockade of Leningrad, reaching Berlin for the Soviet Army during World War 2, Stalin-era imprisonment, and a love story involving numerous coincidences. Volsky’s life hits on numerous elements of the mythos of Soviet Russia and Leningrad, combining the miracle of survival and the ability to find a certain happiness amidst chaos, arrests, and death. The problem here isn’t the material, which is important, it’s Makine’s treatment, which makes Volsky feel like a clichéd composite of the Soviet period right down to a tear-jerking final trip to an old site before he moves to the nursing home.

Even worse, Volsky is a tool to inspire Shutov to find perspective on his own dull life. If, that is, the reader can believe this self-centered guy is ready for perspective. This element of the novel felt especially literarily cheap and obvious because Makine summarizes the novel’s action and message at the end, lest the reader missed something. An example: “The violent feeling suddenly overcomes Shutov that he will never be a part of the Russian world that is now being reborn within his native land.” But we knew that many pages ago.

The Life of an Unknown Man reminds me of a Soviet-era package tour to Russia: a schedule stuffed with group meals in hotel dining rooms and ideological excursions, but no contact with Russians other than tour guides and food service personnel. Sure, you see the important sites and many of them are lovely. But you feel manipulated, told what to think. There are lots of Russian novels available in translation that address World War 2 in the Soviet Union and/or the Stalinist repression that I’d recommend over Makine’s The Life, everything from I(rina) Grekova’s Ship of Widows to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Two other Soviet-era books that have become classics: Anatolii Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat and Vasilii Grossman’s Life and Fate.

To be fair, I should note that lots of readers enjoyed The Life of an Unknown Man far more than I. Among them: Kirkus, which starred it; Amy Henry on The Black Sheep Dances; Mary Whipple on Seeing the World Through Books; Viv Groskop in The Observer, and M.A. Orthofer on The Complete Review, who links to numerous other reviews.

Notes on two other books: I had so much difficulty with G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen, a clunky and contrived attempt to mix a Persian Gulf cyberthriller with djinns and The Thousand and One Nights that I stopped reading half-way through. Grumpy again! I also read the first hundred or so pages of WiesławMyśliwski’s Stone Upon Stone, in Bill Johnston’s translation. Stone Upon Stone is very good, vignettes of rural Polish life that come close to qualifying as stream-of-consciousness, but it’s the kind of book I’m best reading over time, in chunks, so I don’t lose the nuance. I read wonderful passages about farming, the significance of a new road, and melees at dances. It’s easy to see why Bill Johnston won the Best Translated Book Award for Stone Upon Stone: he creates a memorable English-language voice for Myśliwski’s first-person narrator. It’s a book I’ll study and analyze, too, because its narrative voice feels like a Polish cousin to some of the Russian-language stories I’ve worked on.

Disclaimers: Thanks to Amy Henry who sent me a copy of The Life of an Unknown Man that she received from Graywolf Press, whom I also thank. Amy also facilitated my copy of Stone Upon Stone from Archipelago Books—thanks to both of them! Finally, I picked up a copy of Alif the Unseen from Grove/Atlantic’s booth at BookExpo America; I’ve always enjoyed speaking with Grove/Atlantic about literature in translation.  

Up next: Anita Konkka’s A Fool’s Paradise. Then Hanna Pylväinen’s We Sinners. I think it’s my summer for Finnish-related books… I may have to read Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book next.

Image credit: Saint Petersburg’s 300th Anniversary, from www.Kremlin.ru