by Edith Bruck (La Nave di Teseo, 2021)

Review by Jeanne Bonner

When Edith Bruck was 12 years old, she was deported to Auschwitz, and was immediately separated from her mother in a brutal scene. In her new memoir, Bruck writes that later, after being yanked away, another prisoner who had been at the camp long enough to become a hated kapo pointed to smoke from the gas chambers and said, “You see that smoke?” When she nodded, he said her mother had been burnt alive, adding, “Your mother has become soap like mine.”

More than 75 years later, the Hungarian-born Bruck remains committed to telling the story of the Holocaust. The 89-year-old transnational Italian writer’s new book, Il Pane Perduto, is one of five finalists for the Strega award, Italy’s highest literary prize, which will be awarded on July 8. For the woman known to some as “Signora Auschwitz,” it’s of a piece with a long body of literature in which she has likened the experience of surviving the Holocaust to being eternally pregnant with a monster she cannot abort. And she has pledged to bear witness until she can’t.

Only a handful of her works have been published in English, most notably (New York: Modern Language Association, 2006). Scholar Gabriella Romani, who co-translated that novel, has called Bruck “the most prolific writer of Holocaust narrative in the Italian language,” and she’s arguably one of the last remaining great Holocaust-era chroniclers in any language.

In Il Pane Perduto (the title means literally “lost bread”; no English translation yet), Bruck can often seem clear-eyed about some of the most horrific moments of her life—and some of the most horrific moments of recent human history. And it’s very possible the Italian language can take some credit. After moving to Rome in the 1950s, Bruck began writing in Italian, instead of Hungarian. As scholar Philip Balma noted in his book, , Bruck adopted the Italian language as a “shield that would allow her to dive back into her painful past without directly reliving the suffering.” In an interview in April broadcast from the Villino Corsini Library in Rome, Bruck said, “Language is my country.”

Her sober approach to recounting the twentieth century’s greatest shame may also stem from the mission she gave herself when she survived: Bruck believes her debt to those who perished—including her parents and a beloved brother—entails bearing witness, until her last day of Earth, if need be. As her friend and peer, Primo Levi, observed in his preface to her book , Bruck was someone who “escaped in order to narrate” the saga of the Holocaust. Levi, who also survived Auschwitz, called her body of work an “unforgettable testimony.”

Bruck expounded upon her mission at length in a 2014 nonfiction book whose title, (which means “Mrs. Auschwitz”), refers to the inadvertent nickname that emerged in her encounters with nervous Italian students who knew little about the Holocaust. In the book (published by Marsilio; no English translation), she writes about struggling to keep up with a grueling schedule of school visits she agreed to make. She ultimately decides to continue, and that resolve makes it unsurprising that she is again in the literary limelight as a finalist for the Strega award, which is an equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize.

What made Bruck keep up her frequent school appearances as a witness is also what makes her work, including the new book that has yet to be translated, essential reading: We still need reminders about the horrors of the Holocaust. The memoir includes a moment when she finds herself briefly at the Bergen Belsen concentration camp, where she is ordered to drag the weak prisoners to the “death tent” where a pile of human skeletons lay (Note: translations are my own). Some detainees managed to say to her, before dying, “Tell what happened. They won’t believe us but tell the story, if you survive, for us, too.”

While Bruck has written novels and other works of literature that are not related to the Holocaust, she is especially masterful at describing the Shoah. She depicts the act of remembering Auschwitz for survivors as the experience of harboring “a rampaging tenant inside of themselves,” one which they cannot “deliver” or evict by talking or writing about it. She knows: in her early career, she thought each time she wrote about the Holocaust in a book, a part of the “monster conceived at Auschwitz” would seep out of her.

That’s an incredibly graphic, extreme way to depict survival. In this new work, she uses subtler methods that nonetheless demonstrate the hold Auschwitz (or any concentration camp) has on survivors. In the early years after the war, she writes that she and fellow survivors wandered about, not just dazed but also sick over not belonging anywhere. Something essential had been severed (“spezzato”); the survivors were ill at ease when they were alone with themselves and also while in the company of others. It’s not surprising then that in the new memoir she writes that her “true brothers and sisters” are the people she met in the Lager.

Bruck has remained remarkably faithful to her teenage pledge to bear witness. But as she might argue, what choice does she have? In Il Pane Perduto, she writes that when she was finally liberated at age 14, “a sad man” approached her and transcribed her information on a piece of paper, including her birthdate, the concentration camps where she had been confined, and her prisoner number. Then he gave her the document. She still has it—a lifetime membership card she can never discard.

One of the most notable aspects of Bruck’s body of work is the innovation she’s employed in recounting the Holocaust, often using unusual or unlikely angles to illuminate her personal experiences as a prisoner of the Nazis and the wider travails of European Jews before, during and after the Holocaust. For example, one short story called “Silvia” is narrated by the young son of a high-level Nazi official in Germany who finds a young Jewish stowaway and brings her home to live with him. Bruck manages to evoke sympathy for the boy while fully enunciating every abhorrent nuance of the anti-Semitism that has infected his parents and his society. Similarly, Bruck employs an approach that’s almost brutal in its honesty in the book, Signora Auschwitz. What’s more, it highlights an aspect of a survivor’s life that may be invisible to many (the work of educating the younger generations), while also immortalizing an unforgettable nickname.

The new book is more straightforward, as memoirs often can be because they trace a part of a person’s actual life. But that’s appropriate at this moment for such a prolific writer. Bruck’s new memoir caps off a career of triumphs and adds to a rich body of work. And she really isn’t finished. While promoting the memoir this year and participating in myriad events connected with the Strega award season, Bruck found time to publish another book of poetry. Because she’s going to tell the story of the Holocaust until she can’t.

(The large image associated with this post is copyrighted by the

by Elena Ferrante
283 pgs. | pb | 9788833571683 | €19,00

Review by Jeanne Bonner

If all had gone as planned—which is to say if a global pandemic hadn’t bulldozed our normal lives—this summer, you might have been reading Ann Goldstein’s English translation of La vita bugiarda degli adulti, the new novel by Elena Ferrante. Instead, we’re still stuck in a viral vortex and the release of the English version, entitled , has been postponed until September.

So while we wait, I’ll give you a review of the Italian original—and as far as plot, pacing and characters are concerned, it really doesn’t make any difference. I’m not employed by Ladbrokes or anything but I would wager there is essentially zero chance that while Ferrante’s Italian original engrossed me, Goldstein’s English version won’t. Goldstein has built a sterling reputation by translating not only all of Ferrante’s works into English but also by overseeing the release of Primo Levi’s Complete Works in English. Primo Levi, folks.

Indeed, Goldstein is positioned well because I see the new novel—about a young girl living in Naples at the dawn of her teenage years who uncovers details about her family history—as a compromise between the sweeping four-book Neapolitan series that began with My Brilliant Friend and Ferrante’s earlier novels. A compromise in terms of length—Bugiarda runs 300 pages—and one in terms of scope and ambition, too.

It’s a distinction worth noting because I consider the earlier novels—The Days of Abandonment and The Lost Daughter, in particular—small literary earthquakes that unleashed something powerful and at times disturbing. (As James Wood said in his famous New Yorker review about Ferrante’s work, “It assails bourgeois niceties and domestic proprieties; it rips the skin off the habitual.”)

In fact, when I recommend Ferrante to readers, I always tell them to read those two early novels. And as far as the depiction of female characters in fiction goes, I think I have good reason. The Days of Abandonment is, after all, where the main character, Olga, who has been cuckolded not only by her husband but by the family’s underage babysitter, viciously attacks the pair on the street in broad daylight, noting as she strides toward them that she “felt no desire to cry or scream or ask for explanations, only a black mania for destruction.” (Translation care of, who else? Ann Goldstein). A black mania for destruction. Like a ferocious Angela Bassett setting fire to the car in that scene from the movie “Waiting to Exhale”!

Ferrante’s female characters are fully-dimensional, nuanced, flawed individuals, like centuries’ worth of male characters. Reading the two earlier novels, I’ve fantasized about a re-boot of The Odyssey, with Penelope as Odysseus—the one who wanders, sometimes recklessly. Perhaps it’s because as Meghan O’Rourke once noted in the Guardian, Ferrante writes about “women’s experience without trying to find anything redemptive in it, and in doing so peels away superficial assumptions.” In other words, we women are crappy, too. And this is especially obvious in spare, concentrated works like The Days of Abandonment.

It’s not that I, too, didn’t ravenously read all four of the books in the Neapolitan series—I did. And certainly, Ferrante continues in the series with the themes from the earlier novels, but I don’t think they had the same literary quality as the shorter works. I think, as some Italian critics pointed out, the writing (in the original Italian) was sloppy in places. There were sections where the prose could have been tighter, improved.

But not the storytelling. Never the storytelling.

All the works—including this new book—showcase Ferrante’s sterling storytelling abilities. In fact, it almost doesn’t make any sense to parse too much or question narrative decisions when, at the end of the day, the new novel is suspenseful—a page-turner.

Ferrante uses a sophisticated form of bait and switch in this new work by training our eyes immediately on one set of ruptures—between Giovanna, the young protagonist, and her parents, and between her parents and her father’s sister—while setting us up to swoon when another, equally devastating schism emerges.

I won’t say any more about that because to do so would require a spoiler alert. But with both of these plot points, she reaches into her novelistic toolbox and pulls out the implements she wields most authoritatively: moments of discomfort, predatory relationships, awkward scenes between loved ones, infidelity, power, not to mention something as fundamental as the nature of evil (and how it manifests itself in our everyday relationships). At one point in the new novel, the narrator reflects on something Ferrante terms ‘un’impressione di malvagità.” Malvagità—there’s a Ferrantian flourish. The word refers to a state of wickedness, of cruelty.

Like in all of her works, she has crafted characters whose desperate longing and insidious desires are—in the language of web analytics—sticky. This is after all the woman who describes in Frantumaglia her tried and true approach to writing as putting her fingers inside wounds of hers that have not completely healed, that are in fact still “infected.”

Such an approach makes us want to know more—to read more. Here, when we see the young narrator’s attraction for the aunt with whom her parents have broken off relations, we get it, even as we can also instantly see the aunt as a predator who won’t be content to simply get to know her estranged niece (single, flashy and childless, Zia Vittoria drives fast, curses and talks about romantic relationships in non-Hallmark Channel tones). Much of the early part of the book depends on building suspense as Giovanna is drawn into her aunt’s confidence and her world. What will happen when Giovanna sees her next?

Ferrante’s writing about friendships, particularly between women, and about relationships between mothers and daughters has been widely covered in previous reviews of the earlier works. Here in the new novel we have a few other relationships to which she turns her unforgiving laser focus: the father-daughter dynamic; the dynamic between a child and her parents’ friends; and as mentioned above, the familial ties between a niece and her aunt, or really any estranged relative.

Ferrante always goes where the emotional fires are raging, whatever their cause or attributes. One fire, in general, is the evolution from our childhood views of our parents in their adult world, and our more mature perspectives. That pivot—which here is buttressed by a short treatise on class relations in Naples—is at the heart of the novel. Early on in the book, Giovanna observes, “Imparai sempre �辱ù a mentire ai miei genitori.” She finds herself lying more and more to her parents—and as the book goes on, she learns just how much her parents have been lying. To her. To each other—and to themselves.

Here to exploit this shift is the aunt. Indeed, Ferrante shines when it comes to fictional villains. In one scene between Giovanna and Zia Vittoria, the young girl seeks comfort by proposing to confide a family secret, evidence of which she has recently witnessed. But the aunt isn’t playing along; when asked that she not tell anyone Giovanna’s secret, she replies acidly that she doesn’t make those kinds of promises, adding, “Fottiti.” Literally: Fuck yourself. Screw you. (I’m holding my breath to see how Ann translates this). The aunt, who never made it out of the old, rough-and-tumble neighborhood and sprinkles her conversation with saucy bits of dialect, goes on to say that the bad thoughts you keep inside become ferocious dogs that bite your head off while you sleep. Oh wait, there’s more! Giovanna is so desperate for some communion, desperate to unload this awful thing she has witnessed that she finally reveals what she knows, begging her aunt not to tell her father. To which Zia Vittoria replies, “You think your father gives a damn about that?”

Boom.

Remember that moment when you realized your parents weren’t saints? That your relatives were maybe all drunks? The time you tried to tell a loved one your deepest fears? Or your closest cousin said the guy you loved was a loser? You’ll be reliving all those salient moments of your maturation while taking in this new Ferrante book.

In this one quick comment from her aunt, the young, fragile narrator is not only deprived of the succor typically afforded by an important adult relationship in her life, but she is told that her father—whom she thinks of as a sensitive intellectual—is so callous as not to care about this particular secret, which will ultimately devastate Giovanna’s household.

It’s a salient, unflinching Ferrantian moment. But one that’s unfortunately dimmed by the nature of the book’s main character, which is to say Giovanna. I don’t find Giovanna quite as sympathetic as Olga, say, or even Elena in the Neapolitan series, though all three are bookish female characters who clash one way or another with men or the world men created. She’s also less sympathetic than another young teenage protagonist in recent Italian fiction: the narrator of Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s A Girl Returned (also translated by Goldstein and also published by Ferrante’s publishing house). This dampened the appeal of the book somewhat for me.

Some of the plot also strains credulity. At the outset, the girl is embarking on her early teenage years and by book’s end, she’s hardly much older. Yet she comes and goes from home as she sees fit, traveling twice from Naples to Milan without her parents and without, say, a school chaperone or trusted relative. I suppose part of this freedom can be chalked up to the turmoil stemming from the book’s second schism.

There’s also a promising but underexploited subplot involving a charismatic man who’s deeply religious. Giovanna swoons over him, and Ferrante effectively conveys a dynamic that isn’t simply that of a young girl meeting an older, alluring man but rather of the frisson new acquaintances can stimulate. Yet I was maybe expecting a bit more from this.

Similarly, the book’s conclusion feels vaguely unsatisfying, perhaps because Ferrante is such a good storyteller and she drills down on themes that are, again, sticky, all of which lead me to expect more. It’s almost as if a final chapter were lopped off during the editing process. The last scene certainly signals Giovanna is growing up, entering the woefully mendacious world of adults. But the conclusion neither ties up narrative strands nor deliberately leaves things unresolved to reflect the sense of flux that permeates adult life.

I say all this full-well knowing that Anglophone Ferrante fans will seek out the new book, come September (and I am recommending as much myself). In fact, I’ll be cheered by any reader who picks up this work of translated Italian fiction. Besides, it’s always entertaining to see what Ferrante will produce when she mixes women, men, love, discomfort and growing pains together.

The Erotics of Restraint: Essays on Literary Form by Douglas Glover
203 pgs. | pb | 9781771962919 | $21.95

Review by Brendan Riley

The Erotics of Restraint is an excellent companion—with a no less provocative title—to Mr. Glover’s previous collection, Attack of the Copula Spiders, published in 2013.

Glover’s essays are models of clarity, each offering a precise, finely articulated exegesis, and highly accessible, practical examinations of structure and rhetorical intention. With robust attention to detail, Glover illuminates how the living structure of powerful, effective writing draws readers to outstanding books and stories and makes other writers, both aspiring and accomplished, strive to compose them.

The title essay, one of nine, examines the dramatic social configurations of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, which Glover declares “a brilliant book, a great book, breathtaking in its invention and orchestration.” In 10 laser-focused sections, this essay explores how the morally steadfast Fanny Price becomes the apophatic pearl of great price by not yielding to the superficial temptations of courtship, young love, and family pressure.

Glover’s admitted obsession with Mansfield Park—an unflagging, and equally steadfast, concern with the structural nuances of literary craft and meaning—also drives the other essays in this collection. These pieces are engineering symposia, and Glover takes stories and sentences down practically to the atomic level, not showing how to write a story, (not, as I mentioned in my review of Attack of the Copula Spiders, any rote, write-by-the-numbers instruction), but rather through careful analysis showing the results of the sometimes slippery, unquantifiable X-factor that imbues carefully composed, deeply accomplished writing. His studies reveal the life of detailed, complex prose and his cogent descriptions of plot mechanics, such as “patterns of inflection by antithesis,” always serve the structural analysis.

In “The Style of Alice Munro,” Glover points out how Munro “forges her style in the furnace of opposition”—showing how statement provokes counter statement or counter construction, subversion or complication; how Munro’s contrarian, counterpunching stories “advance by the accumulation of contravention.” His character study of her story “Lives of Girls and Women” notes the “motivational consistency, expanding symbols, tie backs, and memory rehearsals” of her novels. Examining Munro’s story “Baptizing,” Glover quotes a short sentence and then offers a typically impressive . . . breakdown? Might we call it a translation?

Munro: “Her agnosticism and sociability were often in conflict in Jubilee, where social and religious life were apt to be one and the same.”

 

Glover: “This sentence is constructed with the balanced antithesis of an aphorism (“conflict” vs. “one and the same”; “agnosticism and sociability” v “social and religious life”), and part of the reason for her compositional elegance is Munro’s habit of composing in opposed doubles. But the larger point is that much of any Alice Munro text will be taken up with a precise delineation of differences. Her style is to mark the differences.”

“Anatomy of the Short Story,” the collection’s longest essay, offers deep structural explorations of three stories Glover cites as exemplars of the craft: “Shiloh” by Bobbie Ann Mason; “The Point” by Charles D’Ambrosio, Jr.; and “Brokeback Mountain” by E. Annie Proulx, minutely examining each in terms of plot, image patterns, thematic passages, and backfill.

Glover sees a story as “a composite text orchestrated around a dramatic plot,” and defines plot, which he calls, “the sonogram of the heart,” as “the backbone of a story, the first element of its architecture . . . a desire conflicting with a resistance over and over.” And his explanations blossom into greater complexity and sophistication—“The energy of plot is revelatory, illuminating character like ultrasound waves projected into the human body, exposing the inner workings beneath the surface”—which he renders as this basic formula:

“Plot = (d/r) + (d/r) + (d/r) ^time>>>

and then delineates specific examples of this structural formula as it operates in each of these three echo-logical compositions.

This chapter is an exegetical tour-de-force, and should enhance the way any reader or writer approaches fiction. Without bending any pieces to a single theory or perspective—analysis and theory often carve up stories and novels to oblige certain parameters—Glover’s microscopic analysis reveals fascinating structural undercurrents. Methodical, penetrating, and brilliant, this herculean essay is wonderfully lucid, perfectly poised, sharply focused—a classic.

Another valuable study, “The Art of Necessity: Time Control in Narrative Prose,” focuses on how plot is overwhelmingly time oriented: “narrative is a temporal art; time control is its essence, and good authors spend a surprising portion of their texts watching the clock.” In addition to exploring “Time, Consciousness, and Verisimilitude,” Glover explains time indicators, time shifts, time segments (which he calls “globs”), and “thought points,” and identifies a “short list” of no-less-than eight different “time switches [that] serve as relational and transitional devices.” He shows how narrative time is not chronological time, how authors create focus, emphasis, and transport by rearranging, managing, and curating time in their stories, and offers demonstrative dissections of passages from Proust’s Swann’s Way, and essays by Annie Dillard (“Seeing”) and Ted Kooser (“Small Rooms in Time”).

In “Building Sentences,” Glover offers a personal epiphany experienced when reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay “On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature”:

[Stevenson]was talking about sentences, but instead of repeating the platitudes he showed how to construct sentences on the basis of conflict. Instead of just announcing a single thesis, a sentence begins by setting out two or more contrasting ideas; the sentence develops a conflict, intensifying toward a climax, a “knot” Stevenson calls it, and then, after a moment of suspension, slides easily toward a close. Suddenly, I understood both how to write those lovely, lengthy compound-complex sentences and also how to write paragraphs that had nothing to do with topic sentence-body-conclusion patterns (because I could construct a paragraph the way Stevenson constructs his long sentences).

More than just standard explication, Glover’s close analysis of prose structure is really a kind of translation, laying bare the mechanics in order to show how the direct, denotative meaning of prose is created; again, not as illustrative of theory or school of thought, but how writers shape their illusions, how they successfully transmit stories and ideas.

Regarding translation per se, Glover offers plenty to interest both readers of literature in translation as well as translators themselves, most notably in the essay “Making Friends with a Stranger: Albert Camus’ ����ֳٰ����Բ����.” Glover traces and retranslates his relationship to The Stranger, from what he first recalls of it—a casual impressionistic, attitudinal, hormonal relationship—to a deeper structural one; reading is, intrinsically, an act of translation, and Glover’s concern, as mentioned above, is to read better.

Glover mentions making the novel’s acquaintance in French in 1967 while simultaneously reading an English translation of it—probably Stuart Gilbert’s 1962 translation (The Stranger), the standard English version until Joseph Laredo’s 1982  translation, The Outsider; Glover notes the latter as the one he has most recently revisited. Since then, ����ֳٰ����Բ���� has also been translated into English by Matthew Ward (1989), and Sandra Smith (2012).

Glover discusses how Camus “borrowed”—(translated?)—The Stranger’s elliptical point-of-view structure from the American novel, specifically, and for the sake of practicality not preference, from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and quotes from Camus’ reply to interviewer Jeanine Delpech, who claimed to note a resemblance between The Stranger and “certain works by Faulkner and Steinbeck”: “I would give a hundred Hemingways for one Stendhal or one Benjamin Constant. And I regret the influence of this literature on many young writers.” (from Lyrical and Critical Essays, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy).

Camus was more taken with Melville and Faulkner, whose discursive styles and twilight tones feel palpably present in The Plague, Camus’ longest novel. In his essay on Melville and Moby-Dick, (which, editor Philip Thody notes, Camus probably read in the French translation by Lucien Jacques, Joan Smith, and Jean Giono, published by Gallimard in 1941), Camus has this to say:

“. . . Melville never wrote anything but the same book, which he began again and again. This single book is the story of a voyage, inspired first of all solely by the joyful curiosity of youth (Typee, Omoo, etc.) then later inhabited by an increasingly wild and burning anguish. Mardi is the first magnificent story in which Melville begins the quest that nothing can appease, and in which, finally, “pursuers and pursued fly across a boundless ocean.” It is in this work that Melville becomes aware of the fascinating call that forever echoes in him: “I have undertaken a journey without maps.” And again: “I am the restless hunter, the one who has no home.” Moby-Dick simply carries the great themes of Mardi to perfection. But since artistic perfection is also inadequate to quench the kind of thirst with which we are confronted here, Melville will start once again, in Pierre: or the Ambiguities, that unsuccessful masterpiece, to depict the quest of genius and misfortune whose sneering failure he will consecrate in the course of a long journey on the Mississippi that forms the theme of The Confidence Man. (Camus, “Herman Melville,” Lyrical and Critical Essays, 291)

And in his 1957 “Foreword to Requiem for a Nun,” Camus offers these thoughts on translation:

“The Goal of this foreword is not to present Faulkner to the French public. Malraux undertook that task brilliantly twenty years ago, and thanks to him, Faulkner gained a reputation with us that his own country has not yet accorded him. Nor is it a question of praising Maurice Coindreau’s translation. French readers know that contemporary American literature has no better nor more effective ambassador among us. One need only imagine Faulkner betrayed as Dostoevski was by his first adapter to measure the role Monsieur Coindreau has played. A writer knows what he owes to his translators, when they are of this quality.” Lyrical and Critical Essays, 311).

Glover himself subtly raises the specter of betrayal with this question about Laredo’s translation of ����ֳٰ����Բ����: “Why is the climatic murder scene so gorgeously oneiric with its crescendo of heat and glare as Meursault approaches the spring (la source in French—my goodness, what gets lost in translation)?” A firm nod to the translation blues—familiar imputations of linguistic neglect, betrayal, loss, or debt—in response to a novel deeply concerned with those problems on a social scale.

Some insights from scholar and translator Karen Emmerich may help to gather these seemingly disparate threads:

“A work, once it enters the world, is subject to the textual condition, one of variance, difference, proliferation, and iterative growth, including growth in new linguistic contexts. Negotiating the tension between work and text, in and between languages . . . thus involves the underlying question of the relationship of the one to the many: how different can two texts be before we cease to see them as iterations of the same work? How much of Moby Dick can we sacrifice to the abridger’s scalpel, saw, or scimitar? Is Moby-Dick still Moby-Dick in Urdu?” (Literary Translation and the Making of Originals (Literatures, Cultures, Translation).

Glover’s essays, especially the aforementioned forays into style and structure, may certainly be read as “iterative growths”—translated iterations, iterated translations, of the source texts. Not interlingual translations, of course; the task Glover has undertaken here, is to elucidate, to reveal, to illuminate, and his readings, fired by fascination, render good service to these works, perhaps nowhere better than in his essay on Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos, “Consciousness and Masturbation,” which translates this novel, (whose first English-language translation came from the French and German translations from the original Polish text) into meaning, showing the deep concerns of a work that can seem, upon a first reading, trivial, superficial, or inconclusive, (admittedly, my own experience), revealing the novel’s concern with the dominance of form in human existence, how the inherent limitations of form and structure are overbearing, even monstrous—certainly human structures often approach this reality.

This is one of the major, underlying concerns in Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Immortal,” another work about obsessions with textual variants and iterations. The endlessly symmetrical dungeon and its counterpart, the vast, cataclysmic City of the Immortals, (a mashup of every known architectural form, a sort of demiurgic Winchester Mystery House) through which the narrator wanders for years, are both nearly inescapable perfections of the hideous replication of forms—only through limitless time and chance does one trapped within stumble on a way out. One needs cosmic access to elude form which, as ineluctably as gravity, perpetually defeats us.

Glover also shows how Cosmos, for example, exemplifies the need for translation: “Gombrowicz hates form but loves form; he can’t escape form because that would look mad (schizophrenic), and, besides, he also loves to play with form” (194). So do translators. Gombrowicz’s worrying of form affirms the need for translation, for form to be pitted against form, meaning that translation is neither intrusion, incursion, theft, betrayal, sales ploy, or simply shabby simulacrum; it is an organic response, a psychological need; a reader’s encounter with an incomprehensible text, not a Finnegans Wake but a coherent text, in a language unknown to the reader which stimulates a need to make sense of it, to impose some comprehensible order on it, and that begets itself, iteratively. Thus that desire, the desire to imitate, to replicate is a kind of necessary madness; the urge to translate is a temporary escape, refuge within a simulacra of which the translator momentarily, and only momentarily, senses ownership before the bramble traps them by growing, cascading, whirling into a prison beyond control and overwhelms again. This may or may not be liberation; Glover points out that Gombrowicz does not so much redefine the novel as seek escape from it. Yet it is by means of patterning and pattern recognition that Gombrowicz performs his apophenic legerdemain.

In the essay’s final statement, Glover claims that “In this sense, all beautiful texts, insofar as they practice this kind of elaborated structure of repetition, are uncanny, horrifying; rhyme is mechanical and inhuman, structure destroys reason.” And yet rhythm, as astrophysicists, musicians, physicians, and children alike all know, is organic—it impels us to build sensible empowering structures of sound: drumbeat, dance, melody, nonsense, to and from which we then seek, endlessly, return and flight and return again.

Much of the satisfaction found in Glover’s essays lies within the reader’s encounter with his meticulous, patient demonstration of the results of thoughtful, intelligent writing—not apophenia but his eye for deliberate detail and, especially, a superior ability to explicate its importance.

To wit, the chapter “The Arsonist’s Revenge” provides an alluring structural study of linguistic patterning in David Helwig’s novella The Stand-In, while the “The Literature of Extinction” presents three brief, dizzying sections (“Nostalgia (the Death of God)”; “Cynicism (Lifting the Veil)”; and “The Return of the Repressed, or the Aesthetics of Extinction”) that touch on Cervantes, Kundera, Rabelais, Nietzsche, Saussure, Plato, Kenny Goldsmith, zombies, Heidegger, Surrealism, Duchamp, Oulipo, and Ccru writing.

Among the many approaches and techniques identified in “Building Sentences,” Glover also shows an interest in writing lists, and mentions notable list stories: Steven Millhauser’s “The Barnum Museum” and Leonard Michael’s “In the Fifties.” In terms of lists, this dazzling, kaleidoscopic collection sadly lacks—and fully deserves—a proper index in order to help readers explore its wealth of knowledge. In lieu of one, and in addition to the many authors, stories, and subjects already mentioned, here is a partial list of other subjects mentioned or discussed in The Erotics of Restraint:

• Absurdism
• Christa Wolf’s novel The Quest for Christa T,  and her essay “The Conditions of Narrative”
• Constance Garnett, translator
• Descartes
• Derrida
• �ٴDz��ٴDz�𱹲����’s The Idiot
• E.M. Cioran
• Edmund Husserl
• Edward Topsall’s Historie of Serpents
• Existentialism
• Forrest Gump
• French noir: Francis Carco, Georges Simenon
• Gertrude Stein
• Glover’s own short stories “Fire Drill”; “The Obituary Writer”; “Pender’s Visions”; “Heartsick”; “Tristiana”; “Bad News of the Heart”
• Hans-Georg Gadamer
• James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice
• Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet
• Leon Surmelian’s Techniques of Fiction Writing: Measure and Madness
• Mark Anthony Jarman’s “Burned Man on a Texas Porch”
• Modernism
• Montaigne
• Nietzche
• �������ǰ�DZ�’s Pale Fire
• Pico della Mirandola
• Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
• Sartre’s essay for The Atlantic Monthly – “American Novelists in French Eyes.”
• Spanish novelist Germán Sierra
• Ted Kooser: “Small Rooms in Time”
• The New Yorker
• Theodor Adorno
• The St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V
• Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Loser
• Thomas Wyatt: “They Flee from Me”

In sum, The Erotics of Restraint is a superlative collection—smart, judicious, clear, interesting, sharp, expertly crafted, infectious as the metonymic impulse—an education in and of itself, a brilliant primer on how to understand, and possibly emulate, modern and postmodern literature.

How does one heal after the death of a loved one? How does define oneself again after tragedy? Author and anthropologist Long Litt Woon responds to this question in both a profound and light-hearted way in her memoir, The Way Through the Woods.

Translated into English from the Norwegian by Barbara J. Haveland, The Way Through the Woods (2019) is Long Litt Woon’s first novel. Born in Mongolia, Woon moved to Norway after meeting her late husband, Eiolf, at age eighteen, where she still lives today. By describing her newfound passion for mushroom hunting in Norway after Eiolf’s death with an informal tone, Woon recounts how her love of mushrooms was essential during her grieving process.

The story begins with Woon describing herself as both a newcomer to the world of loss, and to the world fungi. Her husband, Eiolf, has a sudden heart attack at work, leaving her to navigate her bereavement alone, striving to set off in a new direction while creating a new path for herself. Her first few steps on this journey take her to a beginner’s mushrooming course, for it had piqued her interest previously and the class was suggested to her by a friend. The time she spent alone in the woods searching for fungi allowed her to feel at one with nature and was vital to her grieving process. Woon describes this process with simple sentences, crafting a clear visual of her time searching for various types of fungi.

Woon’s fascination with mushrooms is contagious and her adoration of the diversity, misconceptions and uses of mushrooms is easy to follow. Despite the accurate illustrations of the fungi she mentions, her descriptions of her accounts finding the mushrooms are so intriguing that it feels nearly impossible to read the book without looking up photos of the many types of fungi she speaks of throughout the book. While Woon spends many pages explaining what she learned about fungi and mushrooming culture on her road to becoming a certified mushroom inspector in Norway, she also spends precious moments reflecting upon how she healed after the death of her husband.

Her flashbacks to time spent with Eiolf enlighten the reader to the connection she experiences between mushrooming and loss. Her sense of accomplishment that came with her new title of mushroom inspector contrasts with a sense of limbo and lack of definition of being married or widowed. As Woon grows closer to her mushrooming friends, she finally feels that a new chapter of her life is beginning. The tone remains light through her narrative on mushrooming, while some of her depictions of Eiolf have a more somber echo to them.

Many of the descriptions Woon gives of mushrooms also apply to love and grief, solidifying the work as a reflection on mourning, while giving the reader a glimpse into the mushrooming community both in Norway and internationally. Throughout the novel, Woon provides incredible insight into the world of fungi and the outdoors while also commenting on the difficulties and setbacks one may experience while healing after the death of a loved one. The combination of the two gives the mushrooms a profound purpose both to the author and to the narrative structure, putting the death of Eiolf into the context of a great, new adventure.

Although the book may not inspire you to dig out some garden gloves, grab a basket, and search your local park for mushrooms, it will likely spark a heightened interest in both human nature and the outdoors. Whether it is the death of a loved one, or the ending of a relationship, Woon likens the grief she feels to the losses we all will experience at one time or another, offering a kind hand in the darkness.

God’s Wife by
Translated from the Greek by Patricia Felisa Barbeito
144 pgs. | pb | 9781628973372 | $16.95

Review by Soti Triantafyllou

Why do people get married? Maybe because they need a witness to their lives, someone to watch them do whatever it is that they do. In Amanda Michalopoulou’s novel, God’s Wife, the husband is God himself; the wife is a human, an oh so human, narrator. God, in all his magnificence—bathed in light—thinks marriage is the station, the destination; the wife thinks it is the train. And now, after years and years of life together, the thrill is gone: he seems fixed at the initial stage, loving her as much as he always did, exactly like he always did. She asks for something more and for something different. This is the material of any marriage on the rocks, yet, in this case, there is a huge peculiarity. He is God for god’s sake.

Amanda Michalopoulou can give substance and voice to the improbable; she is the kind of writer who makes a black swan look perfectly wonted. In her previous novel Princess Lizard, a few ghosts were fluttering about —and made perfect sense. In this one there is no metaphor: God has proposed to a girl and the girl said, well, yes. The heroine has never spoken to this day; now, she does; and she asks a lot of questions. A lot: about the Creation, about love, sex and the meaning of life. God has no answers; he is appropriately enigmatic and irritatingly unsavory. And sexless to boot.

This is not the only odd notion in Amanda Michalopoulou’s novel, which becomes odder still in the social context of a gender shifting God: is God a he or a she? Not that anybody should care, but, in this story, rest assured he is definitely a he, withdrawn from worldly life and frankly a tad boring. God sits at the center of a dreamy, spotless home, full of non-fiction books: science, philosophy, religion, you name it; he is the ultimate bookworm but doesn’t go near literature—literature reminds him of the screw-up of his creation, οf his aborted attempt to turn chaos into something neat and attractive.

She, the wife, is an unreliable and inquisitive narrator; her curiosity and her intellect are only human; her restricted capacity is a source of agony for her. How can she be happy without knowing the truth? How can anybody be happy? How did a perfect God make all this mess? What was he thinking? And so on. But her imagination is limitless: it can capture everything, even the aforementioned unthinkable. So, God’s wife, overwhelmed by the mental vertigo of doubt, resorts to fiction, to literature: literature becomes her religion. It’s an act of adultery: she pursues her own cosmogony hiding from the omnipresent but not really omnipotent spouse—and in the end she gives birth, with a pencil hidden in her body, to a literary universe.

The theme and the story-line may sound preposterous; it is a fantasy and fantasies tend to borrow from the toolkit of the absurd. However, the technique, the texture so to speak, is totally realistic and the structure down-to-earth (I am not sure if the pun is intended). Amanda Michalopoulou recounts the journey of a woman from an earthly life to the timeless and immaterial realm of God and then from ignorance to knowledge, from unconditional love and devoted witnessing to defiance. As if it were any other journey with trains, stations and destinations.

The novel can be read as a feminist allegory, but I would resist the temptation. I would opt for the quest of meaning through writing, through storytelling; through plots, words, tongues and characters. God’s Wife is a woman who, left to her own devices, becomes a she-God, a Creator, not of a deficient universe but of an alternative world made of pages and pencils and bookends. Writing fiction is not only a salvation through self-fulfillment, it is a faith. That said, the novel is full of cracks, of crannies: a lot is being said (or re-said through Plato, Emerson, Spinoza, Pascal, Lacan, Nietzsche, such and such), a lot more remains unsaid or fleetingly hinted at: writing books is a religious redemption and the worshippers should kneel among them and pray to Holy Literature. Amanda Michalopoulou builds God’s library and puts a ladder next to it. Whoever wants to read must climb the ladder.

Soti Triantafyllou is a writer and scholar based in Paris.

Special bonus! Here’s a video of actress Hanna Schygulla reading from God’s Wife!

Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories ed. Jhumpa Lahiri
Translated from the Italian by Various
528 pgs. | hc | 9780241299838 | $30.00

Review by Jeanne Bonner

Novels and memoirs often become labors of love for the authors who birth them. But what about an anthology? How often do we imagine the editor of a large, door-stopper compilation of, say, short stories, calling the arduous task of sorting and selecting the entries a labor of love? And what if the short stories are in a foreign language and the editing also involved commissioning new translations and tracking down old ones?

Author Jhumpa Lahiri, who edited the new Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, doesn’t use those exact words in the anthology’s introduction, but she comes pretty close as she describes what inspired her to want to curate such a collection. It’s of a piece with what inspired her in 2012 (a dozen years after winning the Pulitzer Prize) to move her family to Rome so she could surround herself with the Italian language: “I surrendered to an inexplicable urge to distance myself, to immerse myself and to acquire a second literary formation.” That second literary formation she mentions (it makes me think of “formazione,” which in Italian means training or education) has been fruitful. In addition to publishing two books in Italian, including In Other Words, based on the Italian diary she kept in Rome, Lahiri has translated Domenico Starnone’s novels Ties and Trick, and now the short stories of underappreciated or overlooked authors such as Corrado Alvaro, Aldo Palazzeschi, and Fabrizia Ramondino—all of which appear in the anthology.

It’s not unprecedented for an author to go abroad and lose her head over a language and a country (James Joyce also decamped to Italy, and would converse with his children in Italian; James Baldwin lived for decades in France, as did Mavis Gallant). But how often does such an author—especially one gifted enough to receive this country’s highest literary honor—master the new language enough to write in it or translate important works, as she has done? Indeed, Lahiri’s role as not only a booster of Italian lit, but also a practitioner arguably transformed the process of editing and curating the Penguin anthology (just as, in her diary, she wrote how Rome had transformed her). The result is a primer on short fiction from Italy that, given its thorough and nuanced selections, will likely be used as a college text. Indeed, Lahiri’s inclusion of a side-by-side chronology of Italian literary and historical events—a copy of which may go up on my wall—is peerless in a general interest book of this kind.

With works by 40 writers whose stories were published over the span of 100 years, the anthology appears at a time when so-called #FerranteFever remains high. Indeed, a new novel by Elena Ferrante, the author of the spectacularly successful Neapolitan Series of novels that begins with My Brilliant Friend, has already been published in Italian and will arrive in American bookstores next year, not a moment too soon for fans of the reclusive writer. It can sometimes seem like everyone in America knows Italy—and everyone knows someone who has just returned from Italy, aglow in Mediterranean reminiscing. But beyond Ferrante and a handful of other authors (Dante? Andrea Camilleri?), what does everyone know about Italian literature? Not a whole lot. And perhaps with good reason: translations of books originally published in Italy continue to trail translations of books from France, for example, according to Three Percent’s Translation Database, now hosted by Publisher’s Weekly.

Lahiri’s anthology will help, with short stories from some of the peninsula’s most important classic writers (Luigi Pirandello, Primo Levi, Antonio Tabucchi, Leonardo Sciascia, Cesare Pavese, Grazia Deledda, Alberto Moravia, et al) as well as a host of lesser-known authors (Anna Banti, Luce D’Eramo, Goffredo Parise, Beppe Fenoglio).

Lahiri uses her learned introduction to trace the trajectory of the Italian short story back to its origins beyond the well-known Boccaccio, namechecking Matteo Bandello and Masuccio Salernitano. Both of these authors (along with Boccaccio) composed what was known as novelle or short tales, stories that often had a moral slant or fable quality to them. They sometimes introduced characters and locales from faraway, and could be quite ribald, as they reveled in deconstructing male-female relationships.

It’s in the introduction that we also learn how Lahiri specifically sought out women writers, lesser-known writers, and overlooked writers in compiling the anthology. She says she selected stories with an eye particularly toward the experiences of women, as written by women or men. It is gratifying to find works in the anthology by Lalla Romano, Anna Maria Ortese, Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg and Fausta Cialente—five writers whom author Dacia Maraini, one of Italy’s greatest living novelists, has identified as so significant as to be her “literary mothers.” (Maraini is not included in the anthology because Lahiri decided to feature only the work of deceased authors). The inclusion of these five writers, as well as other women, is critical because women authors are often passed over for prizes and less appreciated in Italy, and correspondingly less translated than their male counterparts abroad (according to Three Percent’s Translation Database, of the 45 books originally published in Italy that were translated from Italian into English in 2018, only seven were by women authors). Moreover, there are quite a few anthologies of Italian short stories where women writers are given scant attention. But not this anthology.

The Penguin work distinguishes itself in other ways, most notably by including more than a dozen works that have never been translated into English, such as “The Ambitious Ones,” a gem of a story by Elsa Morante, and “Dialogue with a Tortoise” by the much-celebrated Italo Calvino. That’s the power of an anthology like this: not merely compiling in a new place what already existed (which has a value in its own right, particularly here with literature not native to America), but indeed commissioning translations of works that heretofore were unavailable to the vast majority of Anglophone readers, since they do not read Italian.

Also of note among these new translations is “Invitation to Dinner” by Alba de Cespedes, which is narrated by an unnamed woman and which brings us the story of a dinner with an English officer in wartime Italy who helps transport the narrator’s brother back to Rome after the liberation of Northern Italy. The officer smugly tells them the world won’t automatically welcome Italy back into the fold after 20 long years of barbarous Fascism. The narrator seethes in silence, lamenting that:

… it wasn’t enough, as proof of civilization, to have manufactured that porcelain or to have written those books squeezed into the shelves that lined the walls of the library. We had to demonstrate once again, to prove, to pass, all forty-five million of us together, a lengthy exam.

The anthology also includes new, updated translations, and among those stories, Elio Vittorini’s “Name and Tears” feels like a revelation. It’s a fable and a mystery wrapped in one, with an extremely fluid translation by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell. The story is about a man searching for a woman. Is she real? He hears her sobbing, and at the end of the tale is left only with a “handkerchief, damp with her tears.” The book features a new translation of “The Long Voyage” by Leonardo Sciascia, a pivotal twentieth century Sicilian author who was the first to write incisively about the Mafia but whose prose style, as translator and scholar Frederika Randall has remarked, hasn’t always been served well by English translations.

The anthology caps a wave of newly translated works and retranslated works from Italy in recent years, that’s been fueled in part perhaps by interest in Ferrante’s works (and the furor over her identity; Ferrante is a pseudonym). For example, some of the novels of the seminal Ginzburg have been re-translated in recent years, including Jenny McPhee’s wonderful translation of Family Lexicon, published in 2017 by NYRB. Primo Levi’s oeuvre has also received the attention it deserves through the tome The Complete Works of Primo Levi, which was edited and translated by Ann Goldstein—a.k.a. Ferrante’s translator.

It is unsurprising, then, that the anthology reprints excerpts from some of the more notable translations appearing in recent years, including the stunningly good translation of Anna Maria Ortese’s “A Pair of Eyeglasses” by the Italian translation dream-team of McPhee and Goldstein (it appeared in the collection Neapolitan Chronicles, published by New Vessel Press in 2018). Ortese’s influence on her peers and on contemporary writers has been keenly felt, with an echo of her candid descriptions here of an impoverished neighborhood in post-war Naples, and the singular combination of superstition, fate, and politics that reigns over the characters’ lives evident in the works of Ferrante, among others. Ortese’s characters come alive in wonderful and wretched ways, in particular Eugenia, the innocent girl whose family’s poverty deprives her of glasses, leaving her practically in the dark for years, and Nunziata—the nagging, morose, unmarried aunt biding her time until death and who utters the unforgettable line, “My child, it’s better not to see the world than to see it.” The anthology also includes a short story by Levi about a centaur (as Lahiri notes in her preface to the story, Levi defied categories).

Equally as good is a story from Ginzburg called “My Husband,” expertly translated by Paul Lewis. Ginzburg always writes perceptively about family dynamics and here she has applied her skills to exposing some of the less savory aspects of marriage. When she writes about male-female relationships, she often exposes male infidelity or indifference but without any feminist grandstanding or judgement (she was a better person than I ever will be). In this short story, the husband rather boldly confesses that his surprising indiscretions have continued after the birth of the couple’s first child, in a scene that is nothing short of breathtaking:

He knelt down in front of me and kissed my bare arms. ‘Help me, I’m begging you,’ he said. ‘What am I going to do if you won’t help me?’ ‘But how can I possibly help you?’ I screamed, pushing him away and bursting into tears. Then my husband picked up Giorgio, kissed him, gave him to me and said, ‘Everything will be easier now, you’ll see.’

Reader, I will only tell you that “easier” would not be the word I’d have chosen to describe the finale of this stunning short tale of Ginzburg’s.

There are many theories about how translations should sound. Some translators and publishers prefer works that retain a trace of foreignness, while others say the translated works should read no differently than a work by an American author. These stories for the most part, like Lahiri’s translation of the Starnone novels, read so fluidly that you forget they are works in translation. Theory aside, there’s no arguing that these crisp translations will have the reader eagerly turning pages.

Those of us who have immersed ourselves in Italian literature face a particular conundrum: love of Italy and Italian culture seems to be ubiquitous in America these days, but knowledge and appreciation of the peninsula’s literary output is, in reality, quite limited. This is partly because other countries subsidize translations with prizes, grants and fellowships, and Italy does not. This is not a recent problem, and as a result, there’s long been a familiarity with, in particular, French and German authors. Americans know Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Herman Hesse, Bertolt Brecht, W. G. Sebald, Gunter Grass and so on. But do they know Sciascia? Are Morante’s books taught widely in high schools and colleges here?

Here’s to that familiarity extending to Sunny Italy. Indeed, here’s hoping if the anthology is updated in the future, American readers will be arguing over whether it should have included a short story by Maraini or Niccolo Ammaniti or Donatella Di Pietrantonio. As Lahiri notes in her introduction, English-language literature dominates literary discussions far beyond the borders of Anglophone nations—something that “few, on the English-speaking side of the border, stop to question.” Perhaps they should. Lahiri, in her Rome diary, had described the sensation that the Italian language and its literature inspired in her as nothing short of “rapture.” Here’s hoping that rapture is catching. For she’s understood that Italy produces something even more satisfying—far more so, in fact—than a caffelatte or a slice of Neapolitan pizza.

Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag

What purpose does a book serve if its content can be neatly condensed onto, and thereby extracted from, its book jacket? Intentionally or not, author Vivek Shanbhag answers this fundamental question in a surprising way with Ghachar Ghochar.

Translated into English from the Kannada by Srinath Perur, Ghachar Ghochar (2015) is the eighth fictional work published by acclaimed writer Vivek Shanbhag. In its tale of an impoverished Indian family whose lifestyle capsizes after gaining sudden wealth from starting a spice trade company, the novella’s themes touch upon those tackled by such American classics as Death of a Salesman and A Raisin in the Sun.

If its plot is reminiscent of A Raisin in the Sun, its narrator—an unnamed, unassuming young man who kills time by reflecting on day-to-day observations—is reminiscent of The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway. Despite playing no active role in the constant social conflict within which he gets entangled, he finds that his owns world is spinning. So, too, is the coffee he seems to be indefinitely stirring at Coffee House—an old-world café where he seeks comfort in the familiar. The familiar being the old ways of life.

Through the narrator’s flashbacks, readers learn that coffee is not the only thing brewing at Coffee House. A newly rich man with no need to work, it is at this café that he churns through memories, attempting to make sense of his increasingly turbulent domestic affairs by pinpointing the moment they went awry. The narrator recounts how his uncle, the family breadwinner, transformed from washed up salesman to CEO almost overnight. What follows is a disruption of family order that parallels that of larger Indian society during the nation’s recent era of industrialization, feminist enlightenment, and socioeconomic transition.

The flashbacks also tell of old and new generations at war within his family, including battles between his mother and his new wife regarding a woman’s place within the delicate familial dynamic. Feminist undertones fully emerge by story’s end, when the narrator is left sitting alone, wondering if his marriage has permanently collapsed or if his wife will return. Clearly, it is no longer he who is in control of the power struggle that has become of his once happy marriage.

At its heart, Ghachar Ghochar is a book of chaos: the line where modernity and traditional culture clash. Take the case of the narrator’s family gaining unexpected—and ultimately detrimental—prosperity by capitalistic means as they enter the big, bad business world. Here, the old sentiment “be careful what you wish for” does well to describe Ghachar Ghochar’s thematic complexity. For, after careful meditation, the only conclusion the narrator is able to reach is that neither financial prosperity nor feminism immediately translate to social peace; both require hard work to make their unadulterated ideals a lasting success.

All of these flashbacks materialize in the symbolic scene of ants overrunning the narrator’s former home—ants, he observes, that uncharacteristically fall out of line, choosing to march independently rather than in orderly single-file rows. Like the ants, so do the novella’s characters march to the beat of their own drum. With newfound money comes newfound boldness as the younger generations dare to defy expectation by falling outside the lines drawn by the hierarchical conventions of traditional Indian society.

If there is one constant throughout the chaos, it is the narrator’s recurring comments on the difficulty of explaining things—be they events, feelings, actions, or behavioral motives—to people who don’t possess the full contextual background of the circumstance in question. In one scene, the narrator’s wife becomes upset after witnessing her husband kill an ant for (at least to her) no discernible reason. The narrator then laments on the hopelessness of trying to get her to understand his actions without him first explaining their deep-rooted context. He confides to readers: “How was I to explain to her my history with ants? It would make no sense to someone who hadn’t lived through something similar” (p. 76).

And in this way, Vivek Shanbhag masterfully touches upon why we read stories in the first place: books are written because they are the only means we have to thoroughly explain a circumstance by showing audiences the context leading up to that circumstance. In the case of this novella, flashbacks are employed because past and perspective are essential to explaining how and why things are what they are today—be it why the narrator kills ants, or why India is experiencing a socioeconomic reorganization. Context is everything in this story—a story of past, present, and how the two influence the future. It gives words (including the titular “ghachar ghochar,” a made-up phrase whose meaning only exists within the inside joke of the characters who invented it) their very meaning. As Vivek Shanbhag writes in this novella, “Language communicates in terms of what is already known; it chokes up when asked to deal with the entirely unprecedented.” In the end, past, perspective, and context are what book jackets lack in giving a text its meaning.

Seeing People Off by Jana Beňová
Translated from Slovak by Janet Livingstone
126 pgs. | pb | 9781937512590 | $14.99

Review by David DeGusta

Jana Beňová’s novel Seeing People Off, translated from the Slovak by Janet Livingstone, exists between clarity and confusion. Set in the Petržalka district of contemporary Bratislava, many of the elements here are recognizable, quotidian even: four struggling artists drink at the Café Hyena, deal with loud neighbors and local eccentrics, argue about a David Lynch movie, take a brief seaside holiday, and find ways to get by economically and emotionally. Yet the novel slips away from the conventional at every turn. There’s a reality TV show set in a concentration camp with participants divided into guards and Jews, a tennis line judge develops an extremely limited form of telekinesis, Borges makes a cameo appearance as an eccentric neighbor, and still these examples don’t quite capture the sense of strangeness that permeates this slim, intoxicating book.

The narrative centers on two couples—Elza and Ian, Rebeka and Elfman—and the ways in which their lives are embedded in dense blocks of high-rise apartment buildings bounded by the Danube. “In Petržalka apartments all the walls play music and talk. You’ll be reminded here of songs you thought the world had long forgotten. Time stands still. Radios are tuned to the same station for years. The needle showing the stations has sunken into the bowels of the machine.” The main quartet are artists, though their art rarely makes an appearance, and take jobs in turn so that three of them are always free to create or, at least, lounge about. We see the most of Elza and Ian’s relationship, usually from Elza’s perspective. Things happen in this novel—Elza has an affair with an actor, Rebeka is institutionalized, Elfman flees, and Ian’s mother falls ill—but the plot feels incidental to the images and ideas here, perhaps because the tone is generally flat, deadpan even. “Ian remembers that when he was little, on their street a neighbor came back from the nuthouse after having electro-shock therapy. He came back home after two years. In a single night he cut down all the electric power posts on the street.”

The narrative continuity is also disrupted by the book’s structure—much of it is a stream of vignettes and digressions connected more by association, or location, than by plot. That’s not to say that the structure is random. There are refrains that echo throughout—a quote from Pinocchio, skinheads, a pinging sound, a small fast dog—and remix themselves as the book progresses. Janet Livingstone’s translation here is impressive, especially given that the contents of one paragraph are often no guide to what the next might contain. These shifts also create more space for the sentences to wander away from convention, though I’m not sure whether that is a function of the original or the translation or some combination of both (I don’t read Slovak). Take, for example, the sentence quoted in several reviews: “Elfman claims that the genius loci of Petržalka is in the fact that, in time, everyone here starts to feel like an asshole who never amounted to anything in life.” Is the plural “loci” a nod to all the many different apartments in densely populated Petržalka, or should it be, “the genius of Petržalka is located in the fact that . . .”? Seeing People Off greases your hands and everything becomes slippery.

Ideas are at play here, though subtly enough to avoid easy description. The warren-like nature of  Petržalka is used to engage with the labyrinthine nature of modernity, as characters often get lost and the book itself announces several conclusions while still continuing. Endings percolate through the novel as well, of childhood, relationships, and lives, and are presumably what the title references. More concretely, Petržalka witnessed horrors under Nazis and Stalinists, and there are indications (skinheads, a swastika, kids playing at being Hitler) that anti-Semitism is again on the rise.

The final sections of the book settle into relatively extended narratives (a whole three or four pages at a go) involving Elza’s childhood and then the final illness of Ian’s mother. Elza and Ian’s efforts to care for his mother as she succumbs to dementia are wrenching, and somehow more powerful for the matter-of-fact tone. “Elza would run around the apartment after toothless Mama, constantly offering her the teeth. She clutched the teeth tensely in her hand. Mama wept from fear. Ian plugged his ears. Elza ran out into the yard, helplessly clenching her fists, fingers curled over bitten-up palms.”

Jana Beňová (b.1974) has published four novels in Slovak—Parker (2001), Seeing People Off (2008), Away! Away! (2012), Honeymoon (2015)—along with three books of poetry, a volume of short stories, and a collection of her journalism. Seeing People Off, winner of a 2012 EU Literature Prize, was the first to be translated into English, but Away! Away! is now available as well, also translated by Janet Livingstone. The two novels by Beňová are the first works in translation to be published by Two Dollar Radio, and it seems a natural pairing.

The Book of Disappearance: A Novel by Ibtisam Azem
Translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon
256 pgs. | pb | 9780815611110 | $19.95
Syracuse University Press
Review by Grant Barber

This wonderful, important second novel by Ibtisam Azem in English translation came out just in time for the observance of Women in Translation month—a month in which publishers, translators, authors, booksellers highlight English translations of works by women who write in other languages. Azem is a journalist of Palestinian heritage living in NYC. A credit to her imagination and writing is that one of the main characters in her novel, The Book of Disappearance, flips her own biographical matters: Ariel is male and Jewish, also a journalist filing reports in the opposite direction, to his editor in NYC from Jaffa, the town immediately south of Tel Aviv.

Although other characters appear written from a third person perspective—the chapter headings tell the reader whose perspective we are receiving—the other major voice is Alaa’s. He is a second-generation, internally displaced Palestinian who, along with the rest of the Palestinians living within their ancestral borders, vanishes one night. He was born into a family headed by a matriarch, his grandmother, who remained in Palestine after the creation of Israel in 1948—called by Palestinians the Naqba, the disaster, when 700,000 people left or were expelled from their homes.

The novel starts with the frantic search for Alaa’s grandmother, whom he finds upright, seemingly at peace, and dead. She is seated on a bench overlooking the sea in her beloved hometown of Jaffa. The city and the heritage it contains are strong forces of meaning, nostalgia, and character.

This report of the search turns out to be the start of a diary that Alaa kept, a running commentary addressed to his grandmother about memories, family members and events, his grief at her death as well as the losses she endured, reflections on place, history, and what it means to be a people. This diary has been left behind, discovered by Ariel after the vanishing of Palestinians living in the loosely defined (for the world of the novel) area of Palestine overlapping with Israel. Ariel, a liberal, more secular Jew, lives in the same building as Alaa. They were friends of a complicated sort, with keys to each other’s apartments.

Much of these basics are discursively laid out on the back of the book. What I’d claim is that the bare bones description—the characters, the disappearance without explanation or evidence of mass actions—does not capture the seeming light touch of storytelling by effective authorial voice and prose. Even when the thoughts of the characters turn toward some of the most horrific events of the region, the prose does not confront as much as describe and account. One of Azem’s strengths is that essential skill of showing, not telling. More than once after finishing the novel I would open it up to hunt down a character’s name or a sequence of events and be drawn right back into the story, well beyond finding the answer I sought.

An example of showing: after Alaa’s disappearance, Ariel focuses on his journalist duties, and is not getting much sleep. He climbs the stairs down to Alaa’s apartment; he lets himself in, which leads to him nosing around a bit—like checking out what there is to eat—and then falls asleep, exhausted, on Alaa’s bed for the night. He returns to sleep there again for the next several nights. The literary trope one might be looking for is the realization of “we’re all the same in the end,” or the mourning of the absence of a friend with new insight into unappreciated qualities. But, nope, not even a hint of any change in Ariel indicating empathy. The difference of just a flight or two of stairs is not sufficient a reason. Nothing about the apartment is touted as better—size of rooms, morning light, nothing.

In the Middle East Monitor, reviewer Romana Wadi points out the simplest, most logical explanation for Ariel’s behavior: the reflexive impulse to take over Palestinian dwellings and property. Ariel might represent a progressive viewpoint of Jewish Israelis, but he also seems comfortable repeating some of the rationalizations that try to cover the discomfort of knowing that hundreds of thousands of people had been displaced, sometimes with great violence, from homes in which they and generations before them had grown up. Alaa’s diary recounts a few conversations he had with Ariel when the topics turned toward those tensions, the anger just below the surface that can’t be willed away. By the end of the novel Jewish residents nearby have started casing the empty houses left behind, some with a view of the sea…wondering how and when they might lay claim. The Israeli government passes a law naming an arbitrary day and time by when the Palestinians must show up in person to reclaim their property, or it will be forfeit. The country as a whole seems to stay awake until that 3 a.m. deadline, waiting to see if this law was enough to bring the Palestinians back. It doesn’t, and the initial right of return that was established early in Israel’s modern existence but since blocked—echoes again.

For all the inescapable politics inherent here, Azem portrays people with complicated relationships—Alaa’s mother to his grandmother, fathers of both Alaa and Ariel, a former wife and present lovers of the men. The flow of the novel is smooth, an effective, almost-placid surface under which are deep waters, faster currents, dark places. This novel would make an excellent one for a book club interested in fiction as a door into current challenges.

Once again, a side-matter is that of genre. The besetting event seems like science fiction, a fairy tale or a one-trick magical realism move. The rest of the novel has a realist bent. Perhaps this novel is one more artistic work that makes the need for pigeon-holing novels into genres increasingly irrelevant. From Sterne to Stein to Calvino, and the translator’s own fiction—Antoon in his most recent novel veers outside the constraints of genre—the inclusion of the unexplainable seems actually truer to real life than a Sinclair Lewis or Stendhal novel.

Syracuse University Press merits mention and thanks for its dedication to literary works from the Middle East. It is in company with the U of Texas Press and its Latinx fiction series; the University of Nebraska’s series of fiction in translation; Wake Forest and Irish poetry; Yale Margellos; and Ģ����ý’s Open Letter Books. Inherent though is the lower commercial profile all of these great sources of literature in translation into English. One can hope that novels and novelists such as Azem will continue to be supported and promoted on a wider English stage. Some really great work is out there every publishing season.

Beasts Head for Home by Abe Kōbō
Translated from the Japanese by Richard F. Calichman
191 pgs.| pb | 9780231177054 | $25

Review by Brendan Riley

Crisp, stark, pristine scenes of gaunt settlements, vast wilderness, and tense human encounters fill this 1957 novel by Abe Kōbō, the story of Kyūzō, a Japanese youth raised in a nondescript city in the interior of Manchuko during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria.

Japan’s defeat in 1945 finds an orphaned Kyūzō living as a prisoner-servant in a garrison of Soviet soldiers. But Kyūzō manages to escape, hoping to reach the coast and find a boat that will carry him to Japan for the first time, his head filled with idyllic notions from his local Japanese school, textbook scenes of an honorable, cherry-blossom homeland.

Kyūzō stows away on a southbound train but is discovered—before the train rolls out—by his Soviet captors, who have come looking for him; in a touching moment they don’t ask about the supplies he has stolen, including some of their personal possessions, and even give him a generous roll of cash to help him on his way. Beyond that charitable instant, the demons of deceit and treachery hover over every scene as Kyūzō’s journey becomes an agonizing pilgrimage fraught with gruesome suffering and abysmal confusion.

The train crammed with Japanese refugees is sabotaged and waylaid in the frozen winter wilderness by Chinese nationals intent on preventing their escape. When the train tries to ram its way through the blockade, Kyūzō’s hopes of a swift journey home are literally derailed. The ensuing train wreck and its aftermath are intense and startling—a firefight breaks out, and a Soviet fighter swoops down to strafe the scene:

“The battle ceased for some time. The groans of the wounded sounded just like the call of beasts. Although cold dulls the pain, those who cannot move from loss of blood soon freeze if they don’t scream and warm the body. A cry like a large-throated bird rang out two or three times from the passenger car above. Perhaps it was a baby. The wind began to pick up.”

In the fearful chaos that follows, Kyūzō finds himself accepting advice, and then orders, from an older man named Kō, a worldly, dangerous character; alternately brigand and guide, he pressures Kyūzō to throw in his lot with him, claiming to be the young man’s best bet for making it home.

As the two men leave civilization behind, moving through the liminal world of the wilderness in a phantasmagoria of mutation, the novel’s focus on man’s incessant, fruitless struggle with his bestial nature informs nearly every page.

The mark of the beast is almost always in sight. The examples are many, from small details—Kyūzō’s jacket is lined with rabbit fur, Kō’s with dog hair—to weird, nightmarish scenes, such as when the men seek refuge from the chaos and biting cold in the dark forest: “When they struck a match to investigate, a round bird the size of a human child suddenly appeared before them, flying off with a loud squawk like the sound of horse hooves.”

Kyūzō’s fear of wolves in the woods is rebuffed by Kō, who reminds him that the animals will sate themselves on the abundant corpses from the train wreck and battle. Nonetheless, a wolf does come to spy on them: “Hearing a sound, [Kō] pointed beyond the fire. A beast that looked like a filthy dog slowly passed by with slanted, faltering steps, its neck hanging so low that it nearly touched the ground.”

The two men walk, run, stagger, stumble, and crawl their way through a brutal, frightening trek for survival across the frozen wastelands of central Manchuria, heading south toward Liaodong Bay to find a ship out of China. Trying to move through the wilderness undetected by unfriendly Chinese soldiers, the two undergo a memorable epic of real suffering—starvation, frostbite, thirst, injury, amputation—faring worse than animals, at one point stalked by four hungry wild dogs that, given the chance, just might attack and eat them.

The fear and desperation of their increasingly weird nightmare together evoke the frightening journeys found in a variety of stories, such as Edgar Allen Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantuckett, J. M. Coetze’s Waiting for the Barbarians, and more recently Jeff Vandermeer’s bizarre Southern Reach Trilogy, but perhaps the most telling analog is Akira Kurosawa’s great 1975 film Dersu Uzala, the Hunter. Kurosawa’s film is an adaptation of the 1923 memoir Dersu the Trapper by Russian explorer Vladimir Arsenyev, in which he recalls how, as captain of an army troop surveying the western reaches of Siberia, he meets and makes friends with Dersu, a Nanai hunter who has lived his whole life in the wild. However, Kyūzō and Kō’s survival story enjoys none of the noble brotherhood that develops between Vladimir and Dersu; instead, their relationship is lunatic, desperate, and depraved. And while they are driven to avoid detection until they can reach the coast, Kyūzō’s greatest fear, and strangest nemesis, is Kō himself.

Kō is a crafty survivor, a shapeshifter, of no certain nationality—he alternately veers, as it suits him, toward being Japanese, Chinese, or Korean; sometimes he is the wise older guide, at other times he must depend on the younger man, even as Kyūzō, fearing that Kō might murder him for his money, wonders if it’s all an act. Even so, they experience a peculiar inversion of authority. As Kyūzō is forced to take charge of an ill and delirious Kō, the reader is challenged to reconsider Kyūzō’s naiveté, his lack of experience outside his hometown, in the face of Kō’s cynical opportunism.

Their hell, which is each other—the naive Japanese youth who has never known his homeland, and the peripatetic grifter of uncertain, fluid nationality—is bottomless. Even as they traverse the wilderness and make it back to civilization, what seems their creepiest, possibly lowest point— finding in an abandoned farmhouse the old mummies of a family who died on their own pilgrimage to nowhere—is really an antechamber to darker depths.

Using recent twentieth-century tragic history as a backdrop, Abe’s 1957 work posits the protagonists’ antagonism as both a reflection and an inversion of betrayal. The Japanese invasion and colonization of Manchuria was brutal for both the Chinese and, as the novel shows, to the Japanese who perished there for the emperor’s cause. Kyūzō’s parents both die there, his father, for reasons unclear, early in their settlement, his mother from a stray bullet just after the Soviets arrive. Kyūzō’s tragedy thus encompasses a strange land where he does not belong and a homeland he can never reach, one he can only imagine in the most stereotypical notions. Similarly, Kō, a manic two-bit criminal without a nation, fights for neither the Nationalist Army nor the Communists, and despite a formidable will to survive he cannot endure the depredations of those more ruthless than himself.

The novel’s title suggests both a homing instinct—Kyūzō’s drive to find his imaginary homeland—as well as a predator’s fixed gaze as it homes in on its prey. The beasts of this novel are human, rapacious conquerors and ruthless survivors, as well as those degraded, driven, and deranged by usurious circumstances, stripped of, or forced to abandon, their humanity. The greatest mercy Kyūzō receives comes from a street urchin who survives by trapping and slaughtering stray dogs, and selling their meat. Kyūzō even seems in danger of suffering a similar fate, but his own fate might be worse.

Kyūzō’s guileless determination makes him a sympathetic figure, and while every clue points toward disaster, one hopes for the best for him to the very last. But the only Japan Kyūzō reaches is a Japanese merchant marine ship where his hosts offer him a Blackbeard’s bargain: don’t go snooping around and things might turn out alright. Kyūzō doesn’t know that he’s seeking refuge in the arms of the nation that committed the massacres in Nanking, a nation that lost its greatest war and has nothing more to lose; and even when this fact is explained to him bluntly, it cannot, does not, register. He is the unfortunate innocent who has depended on others his whole life; despite remarkable strength and weeks of endurance, his journey seems an inevitable descent into madness that only reduces him to a cypher.

Richard F. Calichman’s smooth, lucid translation offers the reader a dark, memorable flight into increasing claustrophobia, no less grim than plots by Kafka or Beckett, with a palpable share of the latter’s bleak humor. Beckett’s tragicomedies trace absurd closed loops—Abe Kōbō’s choking Möbius strip of disasters and betrayals is as snug as a guillotine yoke, but the urge to test its fit is nearly irresistible.