As Richard’s car plunged toward the green hillside of the Chapultepec, a dark figure holding a sub-machine gun leaned out of the back window.  There were three flashes and the sound of three short bursts of gunfire.

Car chases and gunfights and demons and roadside motels are the stuff of the novel and to the noses of the educated such genre trappings are as odious as the sea-slime that the words once hooked.  Like hermeneutists they stood ready to receive the message and enlighten the myopic masses as to its meaning, but the message was not one they had prepared for.

The relationship between power and literature is one Ajvaz returns to time and again in his fiction, a theme generously furnished with example after example throughout history.  Since before Moses descended from Mt. Sinai with the Decalogue, writing has held great – and to the illiterate often magical – power: to write something is enough to make it true.  Blasphemy and treason are the two sides of the coin with which the unwary pays with his life: church and state, from Akhenaten’s monotheism to the socialist realist literature of the Soviet Union, have long held power by controlling society’s mouthpieces.

Since it was learned that Ernesto Vieta’s so had died a martyr in the previous government’s detention camps, President Vieta’s cult of personality has grown.  An unassuming professor, Vieta was little know before coming to power, and his leadership, backed by no strong figure, was uncertain.  Appealing to popular sentimentality, Vieta won the support of his people when they heard the story of Fernando who fought and died for their freedom from an oppressive regime.  With news of the discovery of the wire book came a fresh wind of optimism.  What treasures of wisdom would Fernando’s final work give to the world?  What maxims and buoyant aphorisms, what phrases of hope to be clung to in times of unrest and upheaval?  Well, none initially.  Even the polemicists gentled their words with laments at the writer’s premature death and unrealised potential.  But the apologists, sympathisers and sycophants ignored the levity and ostensible superficiality of what was ostensibly a science-fiction romp.  Instead they smuggled in their own irony and pointed to their hero’s original genius.  This government could not afford to lose such a propagandistic tool as the wire book, after all, and just as “any phrase chiselled into marble will take on the meaning we require of it,” so too will words bent into wire take on any meaning we bend them to.  The “book,” not long raised from the sea, is soon submerged again beneath the waves of critics and opportunistic ideologues.

In times of revolution universities are often loci of radical activism.  Fearing the muzzle of a new master the intelligentsia fight to keep free of the censor whom they are convinced (and often rightly so) is perched to swoop down on them.  As a student in Prague during the Soviet invasion of 1968, and later in the Velvet Revolution, Ajvaz has seen first hand the ways in which literature of any merit, political or no, can be turned out of its covers and chained to the party line.  Communism so saturated every level of society that any artist wanting to write a work free from politics and not beholden to conventions of socialist realism was almost always defeated, and where he succeeded he was ignored.

Ajvaz demonstrates this in his story.  Although the government who would use it for propaganda purposes appear to be benign (they allow free speech, a fundamental human right) their hands are not without blood on them.  Lacking any overtly political theme the government twisted the words of the wire novel into their own, and though they spared the actual physical “book” itself, their touch was no less damaging or violent.  But isn’t this just what any of us do when we read? you say.  Don’t we interpret a writer’s work in our own way, getting it more or less wrong in the process?  Certainly, I reply, but the ignominy here is in its presentation as an “official” reading.  Reading and, more so, writing is an explicit act of freedom, Ajvaz knows.  That act of freedom attains a greater significance when the writing is produced from a place of detention where the only pen is a stick or a finger and the only paper a shifting, wind-swept sheet of sand, or the wind itself.  When there is an officially sanctioned, correct way of reading something there is no reading at all.  The irony at the core of Ajvaz’s piece is that in turning the wire book to their own purposes, the government has become the very regime they would claim it vilifies.

‘The Wire Book’ is translated from Czech by Andrew Oakland.

This is a review of a story from Best European Fiction 2011, an anthology edited by Aleksandar Hemon and published by Dalkey Archive Press.  There will appear on this website just such a review until the entire book is done.

The piece titled ‘Fourteen Small Stories’ is just what it claims to be: fourteen short works (none longer than two pages) taken from Danish writer Adolphsen’s Small Stories (1996) and Small Stories 2 (2000).  The stories vary widely in subject but rarely stray far from the absurd.  Among them is the tale of a language constituted entirely of verbs, a book that fatally ensnares its readers in its perfect pages, the gradual gathering of the collective consciousness of an entire alien race in a “bristly haired dachshund in Lower Saxony.”  With their brevity and whimsicality many of the stories resemble parables sans moral message, or jokes assembled by a being armed with a definition of comedy but no natural conception of it.  They are quick to read, but their parade as they are presented here works against them.  The novelty of each piece is too quickly subsumed beneath the next story that follows hard on its heels.  Like literary hors d’oeuvres I consumed them almost absent-mindedly, as an accompaniment to a conversation that was beyond them, rather than as an extract from a speech that is of them, as is a piece of sponge to the whole cake.

These mini fictions are from the debut works of a young writer whose vigour and fecund imagination boils over its container.  One imagines Adolphsen like a man inspired, scratching out his words in a frenzy afraid the stream should stop.  But there is a searching here, too.  He is, one feels, trawling through his ideas in search of one to form the core of a larger work, rich enough to exhaust in deep thought, but never finding it.  The energy of a young man, then, but the impatience of one also.  This follows naturally from the way the stories are presented – give each one their own page and they have time to graciously bow out before the next asks its due.  They jostle each other for space on the page and in the mind of the reader and some of their individual drollness is lost, but taken singly they amuse.

‘Fourteen Small Stories’ is translated from Danish by K. E. Semmel and Peter Adolphsen.

This is a review of a story from Best European Fiction 2011, an anthology edited by Aleksandar Hemon and published by Dalkey Archive Press.  There will appear on this website just such a review until the entire book is done.

My review of Andrzej Stasiuk’s (trans. Bill Johnston) book Dukla is up on the M/C Reviews website.  You can read it here.

Vilmer is not long separated from his wife and the breakup of their marriage and his relationship with women in general is much on his mind.  More, they seem to be the only thing on his mind.  Women are the cause of Vilmer’s ills, the boot that has kicked him too many times.

For some years now, Vilmer hadn’t been thinking of women as women.  His body was no longer in the habit of prompting him to indulge in wild fantasies.  His fellow citizens had been retired to their assigned places, all taking on the same sane and balanced proportions.  Women were women, they did their work and that was that.  Women weren’t special anymore.  This was important for Vilmer’s peace of mind.

Vilmer’s world is shrinking.  His grandchildren live in Canada and his poor English distances them from him a little more each year.  His relationship with his daughter is not without its barbs.  He tries to convince himself that he can start again, live the life of a bachelor, at his leisure, with his wine collection in his park-side apartment, never to be stung by a woman again.  (Where is his date?  She’s been in that bathroom half an hour!  Hasn’t she?)  He need not commit himself to anything more than a movie and dinner once a month, say, or the occasional seaside sojourn.  But before long his thoughts dive and dip back into their misogynistic font the source of which lies in the cracked bedrock of his broken marriage.

“Nothing I can do about it,” said Kristi, and it seemed that at that moment she was sincere and just a little bit unhappy – as if a cheap cup had fallen from her fingers and shattered into pieces.

“Kristi’s breaking up their marriage was nothing more than an offense to his pride,” Vilmer thinks.  ”It didn’t mean anything more.  And the wound would heal soon enough.”  But it wouldn’t heal.  He couldn’t let it heal, for what would he have left?  He is like a dog worrying at a wounded leg – his constant gnawing is preventing the flesh from knitting and becoming whole again.  He is a broken cup, yes, but the shards are all he has left and he can’t bear to sweep them into the rubbish.  What does he do with nothing?  Where does one go from nowhere?  It is the bruising welter of choices that he fears, the flood that comes with the end of a life structured around the rules of a relationship.

There was very little left to keep Vilmer clinging to life.  He had, without noticing it, played everything out – drawn a metaphorical curtain between himself and the world, just as he had done at his unmetaphorical window a short while before.

“But I have a visitor today, thought Vilmer.  Who knows, she might just be the beginning of something good.  The end need not be the end.”  (Yes, you have a visitor.  Where is she?  Perhaps you should check on her…)  Yes, I should check on her.  He moves to the bathroom and calls through the door but gets no answer.  There is blood on the floor, he notices.  But he doesn’t panic.  Though he has seen no body, Vilmer is convinced that the woman has killed herself in his bathroom.  Unperturbed, he returns to his living room and retrieves a remote control from amongst the shards of a glass bottle and resumes watching television.  Was there an accident or is this a sign of something more sinister?  The reader by now has realised that Vilmer’s is a mind with deeper problems than the bitter recollection of a failed marriage.  But it takes Vilmer a little longer to realise that, “in his confusion,” he may have done something “insane, irreparable.”  He finds the bathroom empty, no body in the tub.  There is something terrible, though, waiting for him in there.

Greasy, messy hair, a weak’s growth of beard, and a giant, obscene, yellowish-violet bruise under one eye.  He was wearing a torn, wine-flecked shirt, and below it a filthy, stained pair of underpants.  It was a horrible picture.  The mirror wouldn’t let him wish it away.

So it seems there was some kind of struggle.  Black-eyed, torn shirt and half-naked.  Did he have a date?  Vilmer casually reflected earlier that he had assumed he and his date would sleep together that night.  Could he have tried to rape her?  None of these questions are answered, nor need they be.  It’s Vilmer’s confusion and his sudden awareness of it that is important here.  Toomas Vint was careful not to play his hand too early.  We see that Vilmer is an angry man, touched by bitterness but not, it seemed, dispossessed of his wits.  He is lucid and detached enough to suggest he is not lost in his thoughts.  When it comes, his shock is our shock.  And now we recoil.  Earlier we followed his thoughts, moving inward with him as he succumbed to them, and outward again when he reflected upon them.  But the late revelation casts everything in doubt.  His sanity is questioned, but ours remains sound.  We recede to watch Vilmer wrestle with his thoughts and try to find his footing.  But it is all a bit much and instead of facing it he finds comfort in wine and television.  For this night at least he can keep reality at bay, but when the bottle is empty he will have to deal with the “feeling that he’d gotten stuck on the wrong side of the glass.”

‘Beyond the Window a Park is Dimming’ is translated from Estonian by Christopher Moseley

This is a review of a story from Best European Fiction 2011, an anthology edited by Aleksandar Hemon and published by Dalkey Archive Press.  There will appear on this website just such a review until the entire book is done.

That and many more such jokes came from a time and place in which one might expect laughter to be a forgotten human reaction, just another victim to the engineers of utopia.  Censored press, an omnipresent and seemingly omniscient police, a brutal intolerance of the smallest sign of dissidence: such an environment leads one to imagine a cruel and cold world of hushed words and smothered joy.  But with even a rudimentary knowledge of Communist Russia one knows this is simply not the case – the arts, such as they were under the Bolsheviks, were too valuable a tool to be suppressed altogether.  Instead, they would be controlled.  Like rivers that threaten to flood, the arts (in particular the nascent cinematic arts) are dammed, their flow carefully checked and guided, their force used to propel the Communist cause; as with all other social phenomena they are institutionalised and subordinated to an insatiable ideology.

Finnish writer Anita Konkka’s story ‘The Clown’ is the story of just such a red-nosed entertainer, red-nosed but white-hearted, who, years after her retirement has been asked to writer her memoirs.  The subject of this story – humour in Soviet Russia (and, more broadly, the intersection of politics and comedy) – is a broad and complicated one the full and deserved treatment of which lies beyond the purview of this critic and the scope of his article.  I hope that you will permit me to continue, however, to make a few general observations and do me the courtesy, though I have no right to ask it, of remaining for the entirety of the act.

Albertina Vinniyeva recounts her start in the clowning business:

I was the only woman in the clown course and probably the worst student in the history of the school, but because of my father’s position, I wasn’t kicked out.  For my graduate thesis, I only barely managed to throw together the required Marxist study on how class distinctions are enacted in the art of clowning.  I didn’t mind the subject matter: clowning has always been a proletariat art, by and for the oppressed.

She is sent to the Murmansk area as a “third-class circus clown,” but soon chafes at the leash the circus director ties to her.

I had to be a red-nosed, stupid, fat clown, which wasn’t really my style, because I was more the small, thin, sad Pierrot type.  The director of the circus said that the people didn’t understand elitist French-type comedy, however.

In Moscow the circus patron’s tastes ran true to Albetina’s dictum of clowning as a proletariat art.

…I was playing the part of a workman who’s afraid of his boss, so afraid he ends up doing everything backwards…The audience laughed until their sides ached, not only the children, but also the adults, when they saw me making all of the same mistakes they themselves were afraid to be caught making at work.

This is insidious and menacing satire delivered with all of the force and subtlety of a wounded bear, it is agitprop under the big top.  Albertina soon tires of this and defects to Italy where she can be the clown she always wanted to be, the “sad Pierrot type,” and where she is received well.

As a man who remembers going to the circus as a child and seeing nothing more in the lion-taming than courage, buffoonery in the clowning, benevolent (if a little mysterious) guidance from the ringmaster, a circus with ideological motives seems more than passing sad.  Were they not doing these things simply because they could? because they delighted? because they thrilled?  What ideals does the trapeze arc shape if not the feeling of flying like a bird?  Circus tents are traditionally striped pavilions which unmistakably convey to a child the wonders of what must go on inside.  Remove the white naivete of such a view and you are left with the red wash of Communist theatres in which the audience is themselves the spectacle at which they laugh.

Iain Lauchlan has suggested in his paper ‘Laughter in the Dark: Humour under Stalin‘ that unlike Nazi Fascism – which, due to its tight organization and control was supremely capable and operated with a machine-like efficiency – Soviet Communism stumbled and fumbled and groped its blind way forward, a fact that, wildly devastating as it was, rendered the regime embarrassingly inept and a target for ridicule.  Bumbling it may have been, but it was thorough: the irony of Marxist-inspired clowning is in its absurdity and its inevitability.  Konkka’s story, for aught little else, has shown me that.  Fascism aestheticizes politics, writes Walter Benjamin in his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ and Communism politicizes art.

‘The Clown’ is translated from Finnish by A. D. Haun

This is a review of a story from Best European Fiction 2011, an anthology edited by Aleksandar Hemon and published by Dalkey Archive Press.  There will appear on this website just such a review until the entire book is done.

Despite his statement that we are more perceptive when traveling due to the “hypersensitivity into which out constant attentiveness plunges us,” Laurrent’s observations on la vie des Americains range from trite to almost piquant.  From the sights that come his way our flâneur cobbles together a record of American excess: the gigantic pornography industry, roadside diners inhabited by the obese, love of litigation, ubiquitous advertising.  In his entry dated “Los Angeles. Thursday, April 2,” Laurrent writes,

On Wiltshire Boulevard there’s a monument commemorating the conquest of the West: it’s an equestrian statue depicting the actor John Wayne, whose pedestal is sculpted with bas-reliefs featuring battle scenes with cowboys and Indians.  Can you imagine, in France, a monument commemorating World War I being adorned with an effigy of Jean Gabin, on the grounds that he starred in Grand Illusion?

There is a statement to be made here about the aestheticization and interpenetration of history and pop culture, but which Laurrent ignores in favour of another similarly fertile but tossed aside observation:

Los Angeles abounds in places of worship to such an extent that it’s not impossible that everything on this planet which might be considered a religion, from the most ancient to the most recent, the most widespread to the least known, the most serious to the most harebrained, has a home here.  There’s no one building manifesting any sort of spiritual heritage, like Notre Dame in Paris.  They all seem to be equal.

These two extracts are the kernels of greater works than the soil that surrounds them.  Either observation, interesting in itself, could have furnished sustained contemplation of the cross-pollination of American entertainment and history, or the architectural paucity of her spiritual heritage.  Instead they serve as eccentricities to be simply logged and not investigated; the quick snapshot is favoured over deeper thought and meaningful analysis.

I admit to some confusion over Laurrent’s aim here.  Is ‘American Diary’ nothing more than his turn at the piñata of American insularity on which it has become so fashionable to flail?  Is he confident that the work, appearing as it does in an anthology of European fiction, won’t find a sizeable audience in the United States?  It is unclear that Laurrent has anything more in mind than a broad caricature of American life, dutifully taking note of its weighty excess and emptiness in sex, entertainment, religion, architecture, gastronomy, going no deeper than does a spinning stone of the surface of a lake.

An expected defence against such a charge might be the claim that Laurrent was being ironic and that he meant something entirely other.  But any meaning beyond the comment that, as outsiders, we are seeing only the surface of American and ignoring its cultural depths (a comment made by giving us nothing but more of the same surface) is difficult to imagine.  Furthermore, Laurrent treads almost on the tail of sincerity when he admits at the end of the piece to liking (not quite genuflecting) and purchasing a song by Madonna; a conciliatory gesture that might be intended to soften what came before it but comes rather as a noncommittal shrug.

Ultimately, ‘American Diary’ is a patchwork of cheap and empty cynicisms and, aside from a few remarks (see above), there is nothing of interest here.

‘American Diary’ is translated from French by Ursula Meany Scott.

This is a review of a story from Best European Fiction 2011, an anthology edited by Aleksandar Hemon and published by Dalkey Archive Press.  There will appear on this website each Friday just such a review until the entire book is done.

If some women who offer their bodies as tender are bullion and jewels, Zhuzhuna is a tough old sack of dirty coins.

Albert didn’t like the sight of naked Zhuzhuna.  When dressed, she had seemed tall, plump, somehow appetizing.  When she removed her clothes, she just sagged.  He also caught sight of a big sanitary pad when she undressed.  Yes, this woman was large and very unhealthy…there was a strong smell of feet.

After they have done their business, in one of the funnier moments of the piece, Zhuzhuna “stroke[s] his head, not caressing him so much as consoling him.”  As well she should, for their romp was an awful, onanistic ordeal, an amorous wrestling in which Albert was at every moment dominated by Zhuzhuna.

Zhuzhuna kissed Albert vigorously.  There was no emotion in her kissing – she was simply wiping his face with her wet lips while brushing his hand against her body as if reapplying soap after rinsing.  Thus did Albert reach what would have to be defined, in medical terms, as orgasm.

Author Zurab Lezhava makes all the right moves, and a few mistakes besides.  He handles a weak physical comedy, particularly in the contrasting conflicting physiques of Albert and Zhuzhuna, the one with “frankfurter-like fingers, large feet, skinny legs,” and the other a “tall, hefty, red-cheeked woman with a big head.”  The image we have of the pair naked in bed together is grotesque and pathetic enough to be comical, but revealing that Zhuzhuna is menstruating submerges the comedy of their intimacy beneath a swell of revulsion.  Furthermore, Zhuzhuna’s manipulation of Albert into sleeping with her as payment for the fridge should have been the spring on which the comedy relied.  Lezhava is careful in maintaining an ironic distance between the reader and Albert – Albert believes it is he himself who suggest that they sleep together – but Albert’s motivation is not convincingly real.  Rather than rely on her looks (she is often likened to a horse) Zhuzhuna takes a moral approach and convinces him that her scoundrel of a husband needs to be punished for his gambling and philandering.  Albert’s suggestion results in the disaster described above.  That the lash reserved for the husband flogs instead the lover is a source of comedy, yes, but it doesn’t vindicate Lezhava’s failure to lay the groundwork to make Albert’s choice appear as one guided by his own morality.  The adoption of his plan is too sudden to look like anything but the clumsy and sudden appearance of the author.  And so the spring is never compressed, and when released the joke falls flat.

‘Sex for Fridge’ desperately wants to be funnier than it actually is.  To be sure, it provides some laughs, but not enough to fill its sails with wind and it coasts along on too even a keel, making not splash nor ripple on the smooth waters of mediocrity.

‘Sex for Fridge’ is translated from Georgian by Victoria Field and Natalia Bukia Peters.

This is a review of a story from Best European Fiction 2011, an anthology edited by Aleksandar Hemon and published by Dalkey Archive Press.  There will appear on this website each Friday just such a review until the entire book is done.

My review of Hans Keilson’s Comedy in a Minor Key (trans. Damion Searls) has been posted on the M/C Reviews magazine website.  M/C Reviews is a publication of the Queensland University of Technology focusing on contemporary cultural and media studies.

The structure of his work rests on a thematic interplay of movement and immobility, a vibration and stasis, carried in the forms, respectively, of the character Ralf and the narrator.  The narrator, who, given the autobiographical elements of the work, may or may not be Schulze, travels to Naples with his family and Ralf, an old acquaintance.  While there, the narrator and his family play the good tourists and visit art galleries and aquariums, take a trip to Pompeii.  Ralf, however, is unleashed, disappearing without warning, attendant to the Neapolitan underside, irreverent to the gods of Art.

This city has its own peculiar density – I know no other word for it than density.  The volume of its squares, streets, alleys, courtyards is so supercharged that Neapolitans seem to me more mature than other city-dwellers.

Ralf, in contrast, is immature.  He gorges himself on oranges and gets drunk on red wine.  He chases after prostitutes.  If we retain an doubt about his Dionysian aspect after all of this, his behaviour at Pompeii destroys it.

Tanya said that it would be charming to go on a trip that left out all the major sights…I said that I couldn’t see anything charming about that, really couldn’t.  Ralf was evidently trying to decide which side to take.  But suddenly, for no obvious reason, he spread his arms wide, traced circles with his hands, and began to dance in small steps across the stone floor in front of the barrier.  With eyes closed, he slowly raised his arms, his fingers intertwined, his head nestled first against one bicep, then the other.  Then he snapped his fingers and did a couple of spins, arms outstretched at his side and making snaky motions.

This calls to mind nothing so much as the dancing of a Maenad, those acolytes of Dionysus (admittedly women only, but let’s not cloud the issue).  This is Ralf’s answer to Tanya’s imagined sight-less trip; he is declaring, there amidst the still forms of lifeless Pompeiians, for movement – movement for movement’s sake, as an end in itself.

Ralf’s dance is reprised toward the end of the Neapolitan holiday by an obliging octopus at the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn.  In the octopus can be seen the synthesis of Apollonian reason and Dionysian abandon, of the narrator and Ralf.

It was a creature of nobility, since if you compared its brain mass to its body weight, it was more highly developed than Homo Sapiens.  ”And in terms of elegance,” [the guide] added with a twitch of one corner of her mouth, “it was in any case an evolutionary mistake for life ever to have left the water.”

The octopus displays a “polymorphic and yet unified animation”:

The entire octopus was not caught up in the motions of its arms.  It had raised itself from the stones, and now swam headfirst to the right, dived, swam back, tugging its arms like a bundle of garlands along with it, rose up again, and repeated the process.

In fact, the entire aquarium seems a house of revelation for the narrator.  In addition to making friends with the octopus, he marvels at the frescoes of seascape panoramas and orange groves on the interior walls of the building.  Earlier in the story, the narrator attends an exhibition of paintings by Lawrence Alma-Tadema at the National Museum, commenting that, given Tadema’s historical context in the late nineteenth-century, his art betrays an “attempt to flee the ever-accelerating world of modernity into one of ostensibly eternal classicism.”  His figures all share the same stylized features.  In comparison, Hans von Marees’ frescoes show “faces [that] are a blend of the individual and the abstract;” whose figures are related but form no narrative; whose subject was not the celebratory processional, but the “everyday”.

Schulze’s prose is relaxed and he proves himself adept at creating wonderful images.  The story ends in Rome where there is

still just enough daylight to see the starlings, hundreds maybe even thousands of starlings above Rome.  Swarms of them in flight are beautiful, but eerie too, as if they’re tracing some message of doom in the sky.  One theory says that, instead of flying south, these birds perform dances, metamorphosing into indecipherable shapes, now a dance of seven veils, now spirals and banners of smoke, comparable in elegance only to the movements of tentacles.

In our rapid progress, in our “ever-accelerating world,” Schulze suggests, we are paying a high price.  Above the frenzied rush of roads and freeways and above the clamour of the marketplace the birds still wheel and play as if to remind is what it feels like to move without going anywhere; in the ocean there are creatures that still remember those who went ashore ages ago and forgot what it was to let go and drift in the current.  We are outrunning our humanity.  Perhaps Tadema was right after all.

‘Oranges and Angel’ is translated from German by John E. Woods

This is a review of a story from Best European Fiction 2011, an anthology edited by Aleksandar Hemon and published by Dalkey Archive Press.  There will appear on this website each Friday just such a review until the entire book is done.