David Albahari’s Leeches

I’m back at last, albeit with a book—David Albahari’s Leeches, in Ellen Elias-Bursac’s translation from the Serbian Pijavice—that I find rather confounding, with a diabolical combination of minutiae and whatever you call the accumulation of all the minutiae. Leeches is one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read but didn’t particularly like... One of my difficulties is that Leeches is written as one 300-page stream-of-consciousness paragraph. But I admit it’s not Albahari’s fault that I couldn’t give Leeches the attention and concentration it deserved because cold viruses were replicating in my respiratory system, much like the obsessive thoughts about a plot that plague the book’s narrator, a Belgrade newspaper columnist who witnesses a man slap a woman down by the Danube on March 8, 1998. (I can’t help but notice that March 8 is International Women’s Day...)

Our hero, who never seems to record his name in his manuscript, finds, all over, clues to the meaning of the slap that lead him to seek out clues for understanding the clues, which lead him to corners of mathematics and the Kabbalah a bit esoteric for my head, virus-infected or not. Meanwhile, of course, the conflict over Kosovo is heating up in Serbia, something our unnamed hero notes regularly; chaos is personal, political, and literary in Leeches. The narrator mentions the strangeness of the political aspect of life, writing, “The encounters with the unbridled nationalists were so surreal that I didn’t even feel them to be a part of that reality.” The absurd and surreal aspects of the book—and the accompanying humor—were highlights of Leeches, particularly after my experiences living in post-Soviet Russia.

That’s probably why one of my favorite passages in the book describes a visit to a room where a portrait of Tito used to hang: “It felt as if that portrait had had its day a century ago, though only fifteen years has passed since then, and now it seems, maybe because I no longer live there, that its day never happened.” Questioning reality and history—particularly given nameless hero’s frequent pot smoking in the first half of the book—may not be the freshest theme in Leeches but it certainly feels right in this novel… and in many other books I’ve read about places, like the Former Soviet Union, where the countries and people caught up in geopolitical breakups seem to sense something akin to phantom limbs.

My very favorite passage in the book, though, is a favorite because of a personal connection. Our hero’s friend Marko, who disappears during the course of the novel, had a poet girlfriend who, during “a sudden and extremely unpleasant breakup… hit him on the head with a Benson English-Serbo-Croatian dictionary, until streams of blood were coursing down his forehead and neck…” This personal scene, I should note, takes place during a theatrical performance, in front of an audience, though it’s not scripted as part of the show: art, life, and imitation are all on display, with the audience “convinced it was part of the performance.”

Of course this mention of the Benson dictionary, written by the late Morton Benson, who attempted to teach me about the history of the Russian language when I was in grad school, gladdened me by reminding me of a professor who seemed to find it curious that his dictionary had made him a minor celebrity in what used to be known as Yugoslavia. Focusing on the Benson dictionary also gave me a framework for understanding one thin layer of Leeches: we have a breakup, bloodshed inflicted by a book of words from multiple languages, and even a language with two alphabets. Plus, of course, the meaning, significance, and impact (ouch!) of words, which our narrator tells us, later, “don’t count; they’re something else, as someone wrote recently, they never say what the speaker means for them to say, but what the listener wants to hear.”

That thought doesn’t feel particularly fresh, either, even within the context of the narrator writing his crazy account of crazy happenings, hoping to finish before his pen runs out of ink. He also tells us he won’t write “burn after my death” on the first page of his manuscript… there’s no guarantee, he says, that anyone would heed the command and he could burn the damn thing himself anyway. His exchange with himself reminds me, by the way, of Master and Margarita: both books take up the topic of (un)burning manuscripts and both feature heroines named Margarita/Margareta.

I could go on and on, just like Leeches itself, but let’s just say Albahari offers lots of chaos and humor in a long, long stream of words that talks about Jewish history, World War 2, manuscripts, math, violence, and trying to figure out how everything all fits together. Plus a few assorted mentions of leeches, which are cited as something to be gathered in swamps during the nineteenth century and compared with guns (both are “bloodletting”) a bit later. I’m not sure I have the patience to read Leeches again to get a better grasp of its mathematical and Kabbalistic corners, though I recommend it highly (no pun intended) to readers who enjoy novels where curious souls try to understand their broken-down societies on micro, macro, and mystical levels. Leeches was quite enjoyable. Even if I didn’t particularly like it.

I should also note that I thought Ellen Elias-Bursac, whom I enjoyed meeting at a literary translator conference last November, did a nice job translating what must have been a difficult text. Slavic tones came through the translation in good ways, and the text itself is very clear and readable.

For more: I’ve only touched on a few aspects of Leeches. For a deeper look at the story and its various histories:

Nina Herzog on Words Without Borders

Amy Henry on The Black Sheep Dances

Disclosures: Amy Henry gave me a review copy of Leeches that she received from publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. And I’ve met translator Ellen Elias-Bursac, as noted above. Thanks to all!

Up Next: Walkabout, by James Vance Marshall.

Absent/Present: The Truth about Marie

Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s The Truth about Marie, which I read in Matthew B. Smith’s translation of the French original La Vérité sur Marie, is a wonderfully elemental metaphysical romp. I’m not sure what that means, either, just as I’m not sure how to describe the book itself: it’s three connected chunks of text that verge on stream-of-consciousness, all narrated by a Nameless Guy who tells stories about his sort-of-ex-girlfriend, the Marie in the title, a fashion designer.

It was a dark and stormy night—a very hot summer night with thunder and lightning—in Chunk One, when I found Marie in her Paris apartment with a man who has a heart attack. Chunk Two, set in Tokyo before Chunk One, also involves a storm, plus the soon-to-be-dead-man’s racehorse, who doesn’t want to get in a carrier so he can fly. In Chunk Three, Marie is at a house on Elba, where Nameless Guy joins her; horses have a role in this piece, too, and there’s a big fire. All this makes for lots of furious air, water, and fire, plus some earth. The elements.

What’s most interesting about The Truth about Marie is that I didn’t feel like I learned much about Marie: Nameless Guy narrates all sorts of stories about what she does when he’s not around, inventing, but claiming,

“…I knew Marie’s every move, I knew how she would have reacted in every circumstance, I knew her instinctively, my knowledge of her was innate, natural, I possessed absolute intelligence regarding the details of her life: I knew the truth about Marie.”

He tells us what she does and wears when she gardens on Elba (apparently) he gets there: “rather kitschy flip-flops, with a plastic daisy in bloom in between her two big toes.” He tells us how Marie and the soon-to-be-dead-man riding in a cargo plane with the racehorse (Zahir, who is named for a Borges story) after the horse bolts and shuts down Narita airport. And we know that Marie loves chaos and leaves things open: luggage, drawers, and so on. But I didn’t feel like I learned many heavy, deep, or real truths about the ethereal Marie.

That’s not a complaint. It’s good because Nameless Guy offers plenty of scenes with situations that present universal truths that go far deeper than describing only Marie. These truths that relate to Marie are truths about all of us:  sudden death and changes of fate, the evocation of a summer storm that feels “tropical and pernicious,” and (ouch, ouch, ouch!) emptiness and absence. In reminiscing about Marie, the narrator mentions watching the bank across the street from Marie’s apartment, at night, saying,

“…all of this taking place in what seemed like a suspended moment in time, dynamic and intense, a moment of pure nothing, an emptiness charged with an invisible energy ready to explode at any instant, a gap continually animated by little events, unrelated, trivial, small in scale, occurring at regular intervals so that right when we’d be ready to go back to bed the tension would flare up again and put us back on guard…”

That piece of a sentence (it’s not even half) is a nice splinter of the book, which is composed of moments that Toussaint, too, makes feel unreal, suspended, empty yet concrete, immediate, and blaring with drama. That sort of paradox fits something Nameless Guy says about Marie, as well, “I loved her, yes. It may be very imprecise to say I loved her, but nothing could be more precise.”

My own truth is that I enjoyed The Truth about Marie very, very much, particularly its end, which is something resembling sunny, warm, and happy, where absence turns into presence—that’s what people need after all—at least for a time, and the narrator shifts to the second person [edit: oops, sorry, this sentence includes an example of direct address, which feels just as significant (if not more significant?) than using the second person] in the final sentence, after having already used the first and third persons. I thought Smith’s translation read very nicely, creating a voice that offers a welcoming balance of humor, melancholy, and sincerity. The writing had a nice rhythm, long sentences and all. I’m looking forward to reading more of Toussaint, including his previous books about Marie, one of which Smith translated.

Disclosure: I bought my copy of The Truth about Marie… but should note that I’ve enjoyed speaking with Dalkey about literature in translation.

Up Next: David Albahari’s Leeches, another book on the longlist for the Best Translated Book Awards. Others that I’ve read, in addition to The Truth about Marie, are, with links to past posts: My Two Worlds (Sergio Chejfec, tr. Margaret B. Carson), Zone (Mathias Énard, tr. Charlotte Mandell), and Funeral for a Dog (Thomas Pletzinger, tr. Ross Benjamin). I have two others on the shelf that I plan to read soon: Scars (Juan José Saer, tr. Steve Dolph) and Stone Upon Stone (Wiesław Myśliwski, tr. Bill Johnston).

Cause & Effect: César Aira’s Varamo

César Aira’s Varamo is a wonderful Rube Goldbergesque novella, an elegant and humorous conglomeration of seemingly incongruous actions, consequences, and objects that combine to show the reader how a third-class clerk in Panama named Varamo receives his pay in counterfeit money and comes to write a “masterpiece of modern Central American poetry, The Song of the Virgin Child” by the next dawn. I read Varamo in Chris Andrews’s translation.

Colón, Panama, in 1910. Varamo takes
place in 1923.

Aira’s story examines creativity and representation, following Varamo, a civil servant lacking special job skills, as he goes home after receiving the fake money: at home he works on a taxidermy project involving a fish and, eventually, uses his notes about the fish as a basis for his poem. (Original title: How to Embalm Small Animals.) At the end of the book, we find truth as the “raw material” for fantasy plus some peculiar observations on permanence. Varamo’s city, Colón, for example, remains as long as he does, and Varamo discovers that a die-shaped piece of candy he had stuck to a branch hours before remains stuck, despite having been pecked, daintily, by birds.

The fish has a stranger fate, and it’s interesting to see the poor thing as the object of two creative projects. The first is an attempt to make the fish appear, in death, as something more than it had been in life: a piano-playing fish. Then, if I understand this correctly, the chronicle of Varamo’s work on the fish becomes, through transformations involving random papers and a Rosetta Stone-like document that Varamo obtains through a chance meeting, the famous poem.

I found Varamo particularly fun because Aira suffuses his story with mentions of chance, accidents, improvisation, anarchists, literary genre, and cause and effect. Two examples:

The poem’s capacity to integrate all the circumstantial details associated with its genesis is a feature that situates it historically.

and 

Like all adults, he was afraid of accidents. What dismayed him most about them was the temporal constant between the instant, or fraction of an instant, in which an accident could occur, and the long months or years required to repair its effects, if indeed they were reparable and didn’t last a lifetime.

I enjoyed Varamo very, very much, perhaps most for the lovely absurdities of its portrayal of the (or maybe “a”?) so-called writing process, a term I fought when I attended workshops at writing conferences years ago. For me, writing—and now translating—has never felt like an explainable process, other than certain mechanical actions, like sitting in a chair and applying fingers to a keyboard. I don’t believe in ethereal muses, either, but I do believe in cause and effect in the form of a myriad of mental processes, most of which occur rather randomly and quickly, (only, alas, to be forgotten, making me wonder how I (I?!) came up with my final drafts) that lead me to choose words that come together to create seemingly reasonable English-language versions of Russian texts. I don’t know Chris Andrews’s stance on any of this but I thought his Varamo established a voice that meshed nicely with the novella’s content, a voice that I looked forward to reading.

Disclosures: I picked up a copy of Varamo from publisher New Directions at BookExpo America in 2011. Thank you! I always enjoy speaking with New Directions about literature in translation.

Up Next: Anna Funder’s All that I Am. (My time for English-language reading has been at a new low in recent months because I’m teaching a college course this semester… but spring break is on the way!)

Photo Credit: Library of Congress, via Wikipedia. 

Joseph Roth’s Miraculous Job

Joseph Roth’s Job, translated from the original German Hiob, Roman eines einfachen Mannes by Ross Benjamin, is a dark but lovely short novel about one Jewish man’s tribulations, the power of questioning and patience, and the potential for miracles. (Yes, this post contains spoilers.)

Roth’s Mendel Singer, whose friends compare him to (the Biblical) Job in the second half of the book, is a poor Torah teacher in a small village in the borderlands of the waning Russian Empire. Mendel and his wife Deborah have four children: three sons, one of whom is disabled, one of whom leaves for the U.S., and a third who joins the Russian Army, plus a daughter whose dallying with Cossacks in the fields prompts the family to follow their son to America. Life in America isn’t always easy, either. Somehow New York’s bedbugs and other parasites, and Deborah’s undying habit of hiding money under floorboards, stuck with me most.

What struck me about the novel, though, wasn’t the plot, which contains elements I’ve seen before, but Roth’s storytelling, which, in Benjamin’s spare translation, offers a matter-of-fact account of intense emotional suffering. Most wrenching: the Singers leave their youngest child, Menuchim, in the village when they leave for America, sad that a rabbi’s promise of a miracle hasn’t transformed Menuchim. Further family tragedies, in America, are difficult for Mendel, too, causing him to question his faith and choice of residence. Though the Singers travel from what they believe to be necessity and Roth includes references to wandering Jews, Mendel wonders where he is in a taut piece of geographical and psychological ostranenie/defamiliarization that falls in the middle of the book, just after the Singers arrive in New York:

What do these people have to do with me? thought Mendel. What does all of America have to do with me? My son, my wife, my daughter, this Mac? Am I still Mendel Singer? Is this still my family? Am I still Mendel Singer? Where is my son Menuchim? He felt as if he had been cast out of himself, he would have to live separated from himself from now on. He felt as if he had left himself behind in Zuchnow, near Menuchim. And as his lips smiled and his head nodded, his heart began slowly to freeze, it pounded like a metal drumstick against cold glass. Already he was lonely, Mendel Singer: already he was in America…

Part of the appeal of Job is that Roth juxtaposes what I labeled “cosmic stuff” in a margin note—“…he believed he felt distinctly for the first time in his life the soundless and wily creeping of the days, the deceptive treachery of the eternal alteration of day and night and summer and winter, and the stream of life, steady, despite all anticipated and unexpected terrors.”—with earthy material like the peasant cart driver Sameshkin propositioning Deborah.

There is also a wonderful scene where Sameshkin and Mendel have a cart accident and must spend the night together beside the road. Mendel sobs and Sameshkin comforts him:

Then he put his arm around Mendel’s thin shoulders and said softly: 

“Sleep, dear Jew, sleep well.” 

He stayed awake for a long time. Mendel Singer slept and snored. The frogs croaked in the morning.

The end of Job brings Mendel an out-of-the-blue miracle that seems to reward his suffering and refusal to completely abandon God. Benjamin writes, in an afterword, that Roth “once confessed he could not have written [the ending] had he not been drunk.” Though the scene is one of book’s most emotional, Roth maintains his composure, even at the most crucial moment, writing: “All rise suddenly from their seats, the children, who were already asleep, awake and burst into tears. Mendel himself stands up so violently that behind him the chair falls down with a loud crash.”

I found Roth’s blend of miracle and matter-of-factness especially interesting because it seems to place the book in the middle of a continuum of novels about Jewish life in the borderlands and the United States that I’ve read over the last several years. On one end, Steve Stern’s The Frozen Rabbi contains lush language, magical miracles, and the slapstick effect of a Polish rabbi thawing out after a freezer loses its power decades after the man froze. But in Margarita Khemlin’s stories and novels of the everyday life of Jewish people in Soviet Ukraine, the language, humor, and authorial emotions are tamped down—as they are in Job—and the primary miracle is surviving World War 2, which hovers over her characters’ lives for decades. I’ve translated a bit of Khemlin’s work, which I love for its loaded concision and suspect Roth’s German in Job has a similar feel. I look forward to reading more of Roth’s fiction. 

Disclosures: A big thank you to Archipelago Books for a review copy of Job and to my friend and fellow blogger Amy Henry, an Archipelago Ambassador, for introducing me to Archipelago.

Up Next: Probably César Aira’s Varamo. 

Cold Blood: Nesser’s Woman with Birthmark

I’ve never hidden that I’m a moody reader, so I’m more than happy to explain my choice of Håkan Nesser’s Woman with Birthmark, which I read in Laurie Thompson’s translation from the original Swedish: On the morning of January 16, I posted to both my blogs then found that a technical problem prevented comments from appearing on Lizok’s Bookshelf. By the time I solved the problem, two hours later, I was cranky and hungry but ready for a stroll on the treadmill. And starting a new book. It was also very cold, which drew my eye to the Swedish detective novel corner of my bookcase. The first line of Woman with Birthmark—“She felt cold.”—felt right.

Of course I didn’t identify with that “she” for very long—we learn early on that “she” is up to something rotten—but I was happy to commiserate, mentally, about nasty wintry weather along with police inspector Van Veeteren, for a few hundred pages. Here’s what Van Veeteren thinks upon waking up at 7.55 on a Saturday morning:

If there was a month he hated, it was January—it went on forever with rain or snow all day long, and a grand total of half an hour’s sunshine. 

There was only one sane way of occupying oneself at this lugubrious time of year: sleeping. Period.

A serial killer brings Van Veeteren and his colleagues out of hibernation in Woman with Birthmark: someone is killing men who went to school together, shooting them in a distinctive way. The whodunit aspect of the book is clear from nearly the start because we know the cold woman has revenge on her mind but Nesser links her motive with a social message tied to her past. I figured that out before the end of the book, too, but was still more than happy to see how the police would solve the murders.

That’s my favorite kind of detective novel, particularly when northern temperaments and bleak weather patterns are involved. (I love bleak northern weather as long as I don’t have to leave the house.) I also enjoyed Nesser’s quiet humor, which gives us moments like these: the first victim’s wife is out of the house when her husband is shot because she is at the theater seeing A Doll’s House (their marriage doesn’t sound especially happy), a detective named Jung, and the bath-taking habits of police inspectors. An example: “It could be a coincidence, of course, Van Veeteren thought as he settled down in the bath with a burning candle on the lavatory seat and a beer within easy reach.”

Woman with Birthmark was a nice distraction during a mid-winter cold snap, particularly because I enjoyed reading Laurie Thompson’s clean and clear translation.

Up next: Joseph Roth’s Job. I think.