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.

Melville by Jean Giono
Translated from the French by Paul Eprile
108 pgs. | pb | 9781681371375 | $14.00

Review by Brendan Riley

In The Books in My Life (1952), Henry Miller, devoting an entire chapter to French writer Jean Giono (1895-1970), boasts about spending “several years. . . . preaching the gospel––of Jean Giono. I do not say that my words have fallen upon deaf ears, I merely complain that I have made myself a nuisance at the Viking Press in New York, for I keep pestering them intermittently to speed up the translations of �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s works.”^[i]

Indefatigable gusher, self-mythologizer, and, among many other things, enthusiast of whatever struck his fancy at the moment, (including, in Black Spring, the joy of open-air urination behind the blind of a Parisian pissoir) Miller tenders this lugubrious caveat:

“Fortunately I am able to read Giono in his own tongue and, at the risk of sounding immodest, in his own idiom. But . . . I continue to think of the countless thousands in England and America who must wait until his books are translated. I feel that I could convey to the ranks of his ever-growing admirers innumerable readers whom his American publishers despair of reaching. I think I could even sway the hearts of those who have never heard of him––in England, Australia, New Zealand and other places where the English language is spoke. But I seem incapable of moving those few pivotal beings who hold . . . his destiny in their hands. Neither with logic nor passion, neither with statistics nor examples, can I budge the position of editors and publishers in this, my native land. I shall probably succeed in getting Giono translated into Arabic, Turkish and Chinese before I convince his American publishers to go forward with the task they so sincerely began.” (Miller 100).

Whether or not Miller’s translation mission prodded Viking into action, a search of various online publication sources shows that some 16 of �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s 33 finished novels have, so far, been translated into English. Some notable examples include Hill (trans. Paul Eprile, NYRB, 2016), the third English-language translation of �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s Colline, which has also appeared in English as Hill of Destiny (translated by Jacques Le Clercq, published by Brentano’s 1929), and again, in 1986, translated by Brian Nelson, bearing the French title Colline. �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s adventure novel The Horseman on the Roof was translated by Jonathan Griffin in 1982—many people have seen the well-regarded 1995 film adaptation starring Juliette Binoche and Oliver Martinez—and a collection of essays, The Battle of Pavia, was translated by A. E. Merch in 1985. In 2017, nearly half a century since Miller’s effusion, and 76 years after its initial publication in 1941, NYRB issued the first English translation of �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s Melville, a splendid read, also translated by Paul Eprile. Henry Miller singled out Melville for high praise:

“When [Giono] touches a man like our own Herman Melville, in the book called Pour Saluer Melville (which the Viking Press refuses to bring out, though it was translated for them), we come very close to the real Giono––and, what is even more important, close to the real Melville. This Giono is a poet. His poetry is of the imagination and reveals itself just as forcibly in his prose. It is through this function that Giono reveals his power to captivate men and women everywhere, regardless of rank, class, status or pursuit.” (Miller 102)

Miller also confesses that Herman Melville “is not one of my favorites. Moby-Dick has always been a sort of bête noir for me,” but says that “After reading Pour Saluer Melville, which is a poet’s interpretation of a poet,––‘a pure invention,’ as Giono himself says in a letter––I was literally beside myself. How often it is the ‘foreigner’ who teaches us to appreciate our own authors!” (Miller 110-111).

In his introduction to this NYRB edition, Edmund White offers a different sort of appreciation: “[Pour Saluer Melville] began as the introduction to [�Ҿ��DzԴ�’s] translation of Moby-Dick (the first in French)” and “still the standard translation into French.” The short novel that evolved from that introduction, says White “must be one of the strangest homages from one major author to another.”^[ii]

A slender, captivating work, barely 100 pages, �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s Melville, is clear, colorful, lyrical, and light on its feet. A really fine short novel whose limpid concision feels instructional, and whose chromatic emotional depth feels inspirational. �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s propulsive story of a middle-aged Melville falling in love far from home is consistently lively, interesting, pleasant, surprising, and memorable. Strange, yes, but also beautiful, gentle, and humane.

�Ҿ��DzԴ�’s luminous, finely crafted prose, via Paul Eprile’s meticulous, elegant translation, has depth and affective resonance, whispering repeated invitations to revisit its simple, wonderfully human scenes.

Wrapping himself in a fictive nineteenth century Melvillian cocoon in which the famous writer connects with, captivates, and is captivated by all sorts of people, Giono frames his fantasia in broad swaths of biography: Melville’s early life in New England, then as an apprentice seaman and mate, his voyages inspiring his early bestsellers: Typee, Omoo, Mardi, and Redburn.

�Ҿ��DzԴ�’s memorable portrait of Melville’s mother—foreshadowing Melville’s later meeting with the fictional Adelina White, an Irish Nationalist who becomes his muse for Moby-Dick—mixes precise and varied detail, stinging satire, bookish allusions, and wry humor, attributes with which the novel as a whole is strongly and effectively imbued:

Now, in 1814, Herman’s father — or, shall we say, in order to become Herman’s father — Allan took Maria Gansevoort as his wife. Poor, dear Mama! To be able to think about her now, Herman would be forced to flush the sweet balm out of his head. The loveliest month of May could never have borne any sort of perfume for poor Maria. She was cold, thin, materialistic, dry, methodical, angular, and arrogant. This truly unique specimen, a perfect combination of these various emotional and physical elements, clothed in austere, two-bit fustian and fortified with whalebone stays, became Mistress Melville. She made immoderate use of these womanly restraints, which her son would later mention with such innocent humor. God might have intended her to use them to drape voluptuous fabric around her body! But since her — one couldn’t really say tender — youth, she’d torn all the love poems out of her Bible and, though already a mother many times over, she still blushed at the sight of the names of Ruth, Esther, Judith . . . those women who, when you came down to it, had put their unmentionable female parts at the service of the glory of the Lord. (Giono 8-9)

Giono also creates effective, sometimes captivating working-class characters including a stable boy, a second-hand goods shopkeeper, and Captain Pearse, commander of the whaler Acushnet, where the young adventurous Melville signs on and becomes a man of the sea. Giono crafts some heady reminiscences about Melville cutting his sailor’s teeth under the rough command of Pearse, a model for Melville’s own “grand, ungodly, god-like” Ahab^[iii]: “Has he ever lashed you? Yes, I mean with a whiplash, on your bare skin? Has he ever stuffed you down in the hold, bound hand and foot, with only a drop of water to drink? . . . I tell you, he does do all these things!” (Giono 18)

And on the hunt for whales, Pearse “doles out slaps and kicks in the rear. Thousands of times, in a sort of perfect, gigantic, arithmetical progression, he’ll blaspheme the name of God with curses that become more and more outrageous and original” (Giono 20). This abuse and blasphemy effect Herman’s own spiritual struggle:

“For fifteen months since he went to sea, he’s been wrestling with an angel. Like Jacob, he’s plunged in darkness, and now dawn comes. Wings—unbearably rigid—beat him, raise him up above the earth, hurl him back down, snatch him up again, and smother him. He hasn’t had a moment’s respite from the fight. No matter if he’s reached his limit; no matter if he’s completely worn out; no matter if he sinks like a stone into his berth: He wrestles with the angel. If he’s leaping into the whaleboat; if he’s riding out an iron-gray tempest; if he’s staring into the sickening maw of one of the giant creatures of the abyss. At the very same time he wrestles with the angel.” (Giono 21).

This wrestling becomes an extended metaphor throughout the novel, which is concerned naturally enough as much with Melville the sailor as Melville the writer—without the former there would have been no latter. When we see Melville sail to England to deliver his manuscript of White Jacket, Giono skips the voyage itself because Melville goes as a passenger, not a sailor, it would have been nothing like his Acushnet experiences.

In London, Herman’s publishers surprise him by immediately agreeing to all of his contractual requests and conditions, leaving the handsome, robust adventurer flush with money and satisfaction and with two weeks to kill in England before his return ship sails. In a perfectly American impulse prescient of his restless, peripatetic Ishmael in Moby-Dick, Melville, who cannot abide a fortnight’s layover in London, and feels driven, wing-beaten, to seek some new adventure, follows his wanderlust and decides to quit the big city (Giono emphasizes Herman’s Yankee pride amid stodgy, smoggy London) and light out for the West—of England. He reaches this decision by asking a stable hand what he would do if he had five pounds and “ten days of freedom to do whatever you liked.” The answer is he’d go to Woodcut, “a little hamlet . . . out Berkeley way, over there above Bristol,” adding “if you do go there, drop by Joshua’s place—-that dirty swine—at the Sign of the Old Sea-Fish. Tell him to do you a rum the way he does one for Dick. The way he does one for Dick. You tell him that.

“Now this is just the kind of adventure Herman likes best.” (Giono 31)

The Melville whose course we then follow is a funny, resourceful, gregarious, and vulnerable confection. Before undertaking his land voyage by mail coach, Herman first decides to outfit himself in secondhand sailor’s clothes. There follows an excellent scene of him haggling for items in a shop in Limehouse, in East London: “fine, blue homespun pants . . . a bargain for a striped sweater . . . made from the best quality Scottish wool . . . a splendid old pea coat: roomy, cozy, genuine, worn by rain, wind, and work, the color of night at sea, something worthy of veneration. A true shelter from the storm, a real ‘sailor’s house,’” along with “Chinese shoes made from elephant hide, as supple as gloves, the toes turned slightly upward in the Tibetan style; a greenish hide––never polished, never greased––with all of its grain; an item both artistic and practical, something absolutely unusual, yet useful everywhere, a true piece of maritime equipment.” (Giono 32-33).

Some of those phrases (supple as gloves; artistic and practical, absolutely unusual, yet useful everywhere) seem indicative of the overall quality of this resonant work whose perfect sentences and water-smooth transitions feel seamless as the segues in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The usefulness, the practicality lie within the novel’s combination of smart storytelling, arresting imagery, and wise, spirited reflections on the human condition.

Melville meets a mysterious woman, Adelina White—a very far cry from Mistress Melville—lawyer’s wife, mother, and Irish nationalist secretly fighting to save the starving Irish by using her social status, beauty, and style to help smuggle contraband wheat into famished Ireland. The passages devoted to Melville’s shy fascination with, and bumbling introduction to her are comical and tender. �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s homage is also an exploration of inspiration: Herman’s attraction to and pursuit of her establish the novel’s dramatic wellspring, while the development and revelation of her character form the story’s moral nexus.

�Ҿ��DzԴ�’s The Solitude of Compassion, translated by Edward Ford (2002) carried Miller’s chapter from The Books in My Life as a foreword. Miller noted that in “In �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s works we have the somberness of Hardy’s moors” (Miller, 103); true enough, some moments during Herman’s mad dash across England with Adelina are suffused with a gloom reminiscent of Hardy, Dickens, or Charlotte Bronte, especially when she asks the driver to make a stop so she can comfort some friends in need but the novel’s thrilling power comes from something else Miller noticed: “We no longer know, in reading his books, whether we are listening to Giono or to ourselves. We are not even aware that we are listening. We live through his words and in them, as naturally as if we were respiring at a comfortable altitude or floating on the bosom of the deep or swooping like a hawk with the downdraught of a canyon. The actions of his narratives are cushioned in the terrestrial effluvium; the machinery never grinds because it is perpetually laved by cosmic lubricants. Giono gives us men, beasts and gods––in their molecular constituency.” (Miller 109)

A gorgeous scene of Herman and Adelina riding atop the coach, exemplary of numerous pastoral moments in the novel, offers a fine illustration of the sort of things Miller was seeing in the novel:

“Morning was brushing the land the way green willow boughs brush the water’s surface. Ripples of liquid light were spreading out across the meadows and the woods, and splashing back as gold dust against the grass stems and the branches. Because of the noise of the wheels, it wasn’t possible to talk. But from time to time, when a new range of sunlit hills emerged from the mist, the two of then looked at each other.” (Giono 69)

Lyrical Giono becomes poet-magus Melville who imparts mystical Blakean visions to Adelina’s eyes and mind. Herman “started to talk about the world that lay before them,” then in a series of power verbs, he “rolled up the sky . . . rolled [it] open again.” He places the forms of nature into her hand and eye, makes “the woods come closer”; he names, fuses, summons, revolves, takes hold of, makes the world rise up, sustains it, turns it upside down and inside out, all to make “her come to life,” imagining “a world––unlike the real one––where he wouldn’t lose her.” (Giono 75)

If Melville’s powers of sight offer the aesthetic locus, Adelina’s story of her early family life, marriage, and commitment to social justice offer Herman a moral lens. Their final moments together, a noble scene upon the broad rolling sweep of the downs overlooking the River Severn estuary and Bristol Bay, the places from which departing boats will smuggle food to Ireland, are the moral and intellectual apogee of the novel. Melville’s boast that “To be a poet is to stay a step ahead of human destiny. The poet doesn’t follow; he isn’t against anything; he’s a step ahead. And he doesn’t serve” (Giono, 98) is countered and tempered by the fact that Adelina has chosen, precisely, to serve those in need, to struggle against inhuman political degradation, risking prison or worse for defying British law. Thus, Herman finally admits to her that his wrestling angel is both “guardian” and “prison guard” (Giono, 98). Indeed, the novel’s message is that we must elevate one another, as Melville and Adelina White do for each other during their brief platonic romance. The lovers’ spirits merge just as their paths diverge.

Melville, a novel about remaining true to one’s own character amid the gnawing squall of mundanities, is a sleek, sometimes uncanny, amalgamation of biography and fantasy, a pared-down modernist echo and distillation of Melville’s best compositional traits: deep learning, a brilliant, droll, insouciant voice—lusty adventurous narrator at odds with the world—breezy, stichomythic conversations, and an enthusiasm for nature, and an ability to render it in broad, luminous strokes and fine details that are inspirational, celebratory, and sacred, for one of Melville’s achievements (like Shakespeare’s Lear on the Heath, Joseph Conrad’s Marlowe and Kurtz in the Congolese rain forest, and, more recently, Peter Matthiessen’s Edgar Watson in the Florida everglades) is to test man on nature’s sacred stage.

Many of these traits that make Melville excellent and invigorating can also be found in Melville’s 1853 story “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo! or The Crowing of the Noble Cock Beneventano.”

In addition to his many novels, Giono, as mentioned, was also the first translator into French of Moby-Dick, which he dubbed his “foreign companion.” It’s interesting to read “Cock-A-Doodle Doo!” as a potent and conspicuous influence on Melville, and the latter as an inspired response to the former, a deliberate chromatic riff on the Melvillian satirical paradox. Melville wrote the story within the lengthening shadow of diminishing reputation and growing financial strain, after Moby-Dick, after Pierre; or The Ambiguities, in the same year that he composed the bleak, utterly pessimistic, gallows humor of “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” a satire on transcendental solipsism, but also, probably, on his own absorption in composing his masterpiece; as Melville scholar David Dowling notes:

“There are many histories to this fine book, and Melville’s herculean effort to write Moby-Dick is certainly one of them. Like the whaling history that undergirds the tale, Melville’s personal history does not bespeak the ordinary. He often locked himself in his room without food, writing in a creative white heat until evening, when his wife and daughters would admonish him to return to the land of the living . . .”
^[iv]

In an excellent 1948 essay, Egbert S. Oliver analyzed “Cock-A-Doodle Doo!” as “a satire on the buoyant transcendental principles which Melville heard echoing and reechoing in the New England hills . . . particularly, a passage from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers by Henry David Thoreau,” calling it “a reductio ad absurdum of the transcendental disregard of materialism.” ^[v] In a complementary analysis from 1970, Harold Beaver, (reader of American literature at the University of Warwick), deemed Melville’s story to be a satire of Wordsworth’s poem Resolution and Independence: “The whole of ‘Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!’ is, in effect, a parody, or paradoxical commentary on Wordsworth’s poem: both open in the ‘plashy’ or ‘squitchy’ damp, but whereas in Wordsworth a bright sun is already rising, in Melville the air is raw, misty and disagreeable;”^[vi] That bright sun portends Wordsworth’s concluding revelation when he is able to behold, within the old leech gatherer’s “shape, and speech,” a spirit his younger self does not possess:

And soon with this he other matter blended,
Cheerfully uttered, with demeanour kind,
But stately in the main; and, when he ended,
I could have laughed myself to scorn to find
In that decrepit Man so firm a mind.
“God,” said I, “be my help and stay secure;
I’ll think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!”^[vii]

 

Beaver continues: “Wordsworth’s opening mood is of joy, Melville’s of cynical depression; in Wordsworth joy turns to dejection, in Melville hypochondria to defiant bravado; Wordsworth ends with stoic resolution, Melville with a continual crow.” (Melville 425) Continual, indeed; throughout the story, Beneventano’s crowing is at first bracing and inspiring but then becomes incessant, absurdly irrepressible, oppressive, and deadly.

It’s also possible to read Melville as a paradoxical parable about the spiritual richness of radical optimism—certainly appealing to an exuberant bon vivant like Henry Miller—and its practical danger in the face of illness and death. Though Wordsworth could, in his famous sonnet composed on Westminster Bridge, celebrate a quiet Friday dawn in London 1802 (significantly not a Sunday but one of the busiest days of the work week) he also, in “Tintern Abbey,” famously despaired of the city

how oft—
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart)^[viii]

In “Cock-A-Doodle-Do!” Melville’s narrator also rants against mid-nineteenth-century social conditions and ills: poverty, disease, financial worries, “rascally despotisms,” and “many dreadful casualties, by locomotive and steamer” (Melville 103). His avowed elixir is Beneventano’s crowing, “equal to hearing the great bell of St. Paul’s rung at a coronation! In fact, that bell ought to be taken down, and this Shanghai put in its place. Such a crow would jollify all London, from Mile-End (which is no end) to Primrose Hill (where there ain’t any primroses), and scatter the fog.”^[ix] And Herman’s excursion in Melville is an extended and (temporarily) successful attempt to do just that, to quit the funk of London and head west. Giono has Melville, antsy as his Ishmael who wants to step into the street and knock mens’ hats off their heads, flee London and travel West across all of southern England, from the Thames to the Bay of Bristol, but in a sly undercutting of Melville’s disdain for trains and those who stoke them, celebrates his overland trip in rapid, rattling mail coach. Along the way, there is a thrilling and delightful near miss between the hurtling Bristol Mail and a farm cart bound for market; the scene brings to mind the wonderfully dramatic coach driving scenes in Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities.

And it’s significant that the west, overlooking Bristol Channel is where Giono leaves Melville in England. Once that scene there is concluded, we are suddenly back in New England, and newly inspired Herman is flush with the frenetic concatenative energy that he will channel into writing Moby-Dick.

If, as Beaver claims, “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” is a satirical inversion of Resolution and Independence, we see this when Melville’s narrator describes himself as “as good a fellow as ever lived – hospitable – open-hearted – generous to a fault: and the Fates forbid that I should possess the fortune to bless the country with my bounteousness” (Melville 117). For him, Beneventano is a sort of celestial lightning rod, a vivifying clarion in effulgent plumage as Merrymusk, the rooster’s owner, confirms when asking the narrator about the cock’s majestic crowing:

“Ain’t it inspiring? Don’t it impart pluck? give stuff against despair?” (Melville 124)

And the message he interprets from Beneventano’s lusting crowing, described variously as “cheerful,” “magic,” “extraordinary,” “noble,” “a jolly bolt of thunder with bells,” “all glorious and defiant,” “a perfect paean and laudamus,” and “a trumpet blast of triumph” is “Be jolly!”

Melville is an empathetic amplification and tempered refinement of “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!”—instead of moping Melville hating the railroad and fearing his creditors who dog him even to church and tavern, �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s Melville, just as Henry Miller loved to be, is free and easy, away from wife and home responsibilities, flush with money, and in his independence, riding across the land (replicating American flight from London, later from New England and the East Coast), meets a woman of steadfast resolution.

Melville is about chaste, ideal, unobtainable, ultimately vanished love. Adelina enjoys Melville’s company, briefly sees the poetical wonders he conjures but the vision he receives from her is greater because he is young, flush with success, yet to be tried fully in social matters. Her craft is evading unjust laws, helping the oppressed which makes Herman’s concerns, by comparison, seem solipsistic, the very solipsism he satirizes in “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” because Melville’s strange story is also a satirical parable of sexual fancy: man’s urgent need and desire to remain hard, upright, and ejaculatory right up to the moment of death—Merrymusk and his family, and trumpeting cock Beneventano smile and crow through their misfortunes, and all perish; the blithely, blindly optimistic narrator wants to believe that their spirits defy death: he pays for their burial, family and cock together all in the same plot, headstone inscribed with the immortal rhetorical questions from Corinthians: “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” Death’s victory is self-evident: the family dies of poverty, disease, and hunger, the very maladies Adelina pretends to fight against. But wagonloads of contraband wheat did not solve the Potato Famine, save millions, prevent mass exodus, or change English law. Adelina asks Herman:

“Do you remember the famine of ’46?”
“Very well. I saw the boats loaded with emigrants arriving in our country, and I brought them a good many kettles of soup myself.”
“Nothing has changed.”
“I assumed so. An entire population doesn’t stop dying of hunger all at once.”
“No, but it stops faster if you think about the starving bellies and work to fill them, instead of spending your time philosophizing about the doctrines of Adam Smith and Ricardo. I know that thousands of English men and women were in agony because they knew what was happening in the Irish cottages. You saw the boatloads of emigrants; we saw the cartloads of corpses thrown into the pits” (Giono 86-87).

Melville’s revelations with Adelina, Giono fancies, inspire a new kind of hallucinatory and amalgamative energy for him to compose Moby-Dick. Of course the novel’s epic genius and some strong reviews did not sustain Melville’s good fortunes or keep the hellhounds (literary and otherwise) off his trail. From there, Giono hastens Melville to his final end—somberly, soberly, but gently, too, and no less reflective. Melville keeps writing after Moby-Dick to ever-diminishing enthusiasm, including close friend Nathaniel Hawthorne’s embarrassment about Pierre. And though Harold Beaver affirms that “Moby-Dick marks not the end but the middle of Melville’s miraculous span” and “astonishing creative outpouring,” he also notes that the novel’s reception was “disheartening”: “Two years after the publication of Moby-Dick, he was still in debt to Harpers for 700 dollars advance royalties,” and that in 1855 “after the failure of Israel Potter, �ʳܳٲԲ���’s associate editor, G.W. Curtis had advised [�Ჹ������’s] new publisher, J. A. Dix ‘to decline any novel from Melville which is not extremely good’” (Melville 10-12).

Ultimately, though, �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s Melville is fantasia, a confection, not biography. And perhaps what really elevated the novel for the supremely solipsistic Henry Miller, paradoxical misogynistic woman(izer) worshipper so anxious to get Giono into readers’ hands, perhaps what taught him to appreciate Melville was that the imaginary Herman’s final concern is not so much his writing or his general reputation but whether ardent Adelina White—who writes him a few precious letters from England, and then no more—ever read and was ever captivated by Moby-Dick the way that he was captivated by her.

*

Works Cited

^[i] Miller, Henry. The Books in My Life. New Directions Publishing, 1952, via Internet Archive PDF (Digitized 2008).

^[ii] Giono, Jean. Melville – A Novel (Introduction by Edmund White), trans. Paul Eprile. New York Review Book, 2017.

^[iii] Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. W. W. Norton & Company, 1967, p.76

^[iv] Dowling, David. Chasing the White Whale – The Moby-Dick Marathon; or, What Melville Means Today. University of Iowa Press, 2010.

^[v] Oliver, Egbert S. “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” and Transcendental Hocus-Pocus, The New England Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Jun., 1948), pp. 204-216

^[vi]Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories. Edited and with an introduction by Harold Beaver, Penguin English Library, 1970, p. 425.

^[vii] Wordsworth, William. “Resolution and Independence.” English Romantic Writers, edited by David Perkins. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1967, pp. 284-85.

^[viii] Wordsworth, William. “Lines: Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.” English Romantic Writers, edited by David Perkins. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1967, p. 209-211.

^[ix] Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories. Edited and with an introduction by Harold Beaver, Penguin English Library, 1970.

translated from the French by André Naffis-Sahely
220 pgs. | pb |9781935744603 | $17.00 
Archipelago Books
Reviewed by Brendan Riley

For English language readers, like this reviewer, whose literary sense of North Africa is delimited by periodic forays into the stories and essays of Paul Bowles, the horror vacui of a sun-blanched Oran in Camus’s The Stranger and The Plague, Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo, the bygone world of The Travels of Ali Bey, or William S. Burroughs’s cutup interzone skew, then Abdellatif Laâbi’s autobiographical The Bottom of the Jar is an exquisite must-read.

Superbly translated from the French by André Naffis-Sahely, this novel mainly focuses on the seriocomic musings and peregrinations of the author’s alter-ego, Namouss, a young boy of Fez, seven or eight years old, as he starts to become aware of the complexities of life in his family and the surrounding city during Morocco’s struggle for independence from France in the mid-1950s.

If Europeans are obsessed with background music, Moroccans have invented the background image, and without skimping on decibels either. In our home, clamor and din seemed to be inextricably mixed with our joy at coming together as a family.

This, the novel’s second paragraph, indicates one of the operating principles that make The Bottom of the Jar so memorable as it leads readers through the clamor and din and confusion of a Morocco trying to establish a modern, national identity.

The narrative seamlessly blends three areas and levels of concern: the background of 1950s Morocco on the cusp of independence from France; the family’s basic interest and concern in these events––their desire for liberation from the French coupled with disputes and worries about the potential dangers involved in supporting various factions vying for the leadership of a new Morocco; and how these fears are manifest in the misadventures of the eldest son, Namouss’s brother Si Mohammed, a rising star in the family, and a supporter of Moroccan independence.

Employed as a postal clerk––thanks to serious study and good performance on government exams, and thus a step up from his father’s artisanal status but also, because of its governmental and colonial character, a position that brings both admiration and controversy to his family and neighborhood––Si Mohammed ends an altercation with a French lieutenant by punching the man in the face. As a consequence he is imprisoned and Laâbi, setting forth with the color, humor, and arch meditative quality that characterizes the novel, describes the sacrifice of money, time, labor, and reputation which Namouss’s father, Driss, and extended family must endure to save the brother from prison and restore the family’s good name.

Driss is a saddlemaker in Fez’s Sekkatine souk and, as Namouss says, “[my father] was a saint. It took me some time to understand this.” Saintly for tolerating his shrill harridan of a wife, Ghita, for providing a humble but stable life for his family, for his good faith, and for his unwillingness to condemn anyone.

The fear and humiliation caused by the oldest son’s brief imprisonment are also echoed later in the novel during an episode in which the family must frantically hide and destroy possessions that might compromise their safety during house-to-house searches amid the country’s turbulent clashes for independence.

Namouss’s reveries include memories of his loving but quarrelsome family, the focal point and highlight being his mother, the salty, thorny, colorful Ghita––the novel’s dramatic anchor and the central presence in Namouss’ his young life––and her endless stream of unsolicited, acid-tongued imprecations as she elbows her way through daily life in a changing Morocco. In stark contrast to the even-tempered Driss, Ghita is a vicious scold, an old-fashioned Moroccan wife; hardworking, demanding, petty, caring, profane, and righteously selfish when the situation warrants it.

The novel’s early chapters also present Si Mohammed’s arranged marriage, Ghita’s pitiless machinations to procure for him the ideal bride (and thus bolster the family’s reputation), and, amusingly, the gathered family’s hushed expectation as the newlyweds retire to their room together for the first time and everyone eavesdrops to hear their cries of consummation.

Atop the richly developed background of social and political turmoil, Laâbi constructs a wonderful human comedy of family life and growing up in and around Fez, and the great, memorable charm of The Bottom of the Jar comes from the minutiae of his richly textured sketches and portraits of daily life in and around the Spring of Horses neighborhood and the Sekkatine souk, presented as Namouss’s memories and what he and his family hear through “Radio Medina” his nickname for the local grapevine of gossip and intrigue.

One of the many memorable sequences follows Namouss’s introduction to a modern, secular French colonial school where he is, much to his astonishment, introduced to the French language and the mysteries of books and handwriting, things he had not been exposed to at his previous Qur’an school; his pride in learning a foreign tongue is a sweet contrast to the political menace overhanging parts of the novel due to the strains of independence and, in some cases outbreaks of violence; thus when Namouss returns home and tries out his new words on his mother:

“Bonjour madame.”

Ghita, who as soon as she steeped on a raisin could promptly feel its sweetness rise up into her mouth, or so she claimed, had understood.

“Is that Freensh or is it Freentasia, as they say?”

And she erupted into a roar of laughter

 

Other episodes include family outings: a colorful, daylong picnic in a beautiful orchard on the edge of Fez, or a short vacation at the Sidi Harazem oasis out in the desert where Namouss learns to swim; Namouss’s first forays to the cinema (learning how to nab the best seats and, no less important, helping the unsophisticated Ghita to not confuse the cinematic illusion with reality) and soccer matches (too poor to get tickets, watching the game through the fence), a visit to the blacksmith in the El Haddadine souk, and getting caught up in a dangerous political demonstration, nearly trampled, and fainting from the crush of the crowd.

Chief among the novel’s many virtues is its wonderful, unflagging good humor. Like the best books rooted in cities, the atmospheric detail, the evocative power of setting is strong, flavorful, sensual. The novel provides many vibrant, interesting vignettes, which variously fade like dreams or linger like the scent or taste of a pungent spice. As he begins to know and understand, and be baffled by his city beyond the familiar confines of the family home, Namouss finds amusement, delight, and amazement scouring the bustling streets, and the narrative moves from the boy’s innocent errands in the marketplace to increasingly far-ranging and even dangerous excursions: “‘tramping and traipsing the streets,’ for which Ghita used to reproach him, or playing with the neighborhood kids right up to nightfall, mixing with the crowds in the Medina and taking in the flow of its sights,” and coming close to getting crushed by a heavily-laden donkey in the nearly deserted souk on one of the sleepy days of fasting during Ramadan. But Namouss’s innocence is also reflected in the pleasure he takes in simply seeing the city laid out before his eyes as he gazes at its panorama:

He loved looking out over the city whenever he climbed up to the rooftop terrace. From his promontory, he could see the minarets of all the important mosques . . . Wholly absorbed, he watched the clouds of steam dancing slowly above the grid of houses, and lent his ears to the noises made by workshops and street-sellers. Crowning this scene, the sky offered him another perspective on visual digressions, a canvas that an inspired hand was painting ceaselessly using colors that Fez held the secret to and had given the original names to: zebti (flesh color), quoqi (artichoke-mauve), fanidi (bubble gum), hammoussi (chickpea), ����â�ڰ����Ծ� (saffron), fakhiti ( azure), zrireq (violet).

 

Moving in closer, down to the ground, Laâbi’s mid-novel tour of the Sekkatine souk is a descriptive marvel that encapsulates the spirit and virtue of this book: “Namouss’s olfactory memory stored a variety of smells: goatskin, calfskin, hemp yarn, wax, natural or colored wool, bits and stirrup irons, wood, some flour-based adhesive, and of course snuff, which Driss, like the majority of the people in the Sekkatine, consumed vast quantities of.” And this fine description serves to set up deeper, more complex and impressive memories of the heart of social life in Fez, challenged by the changing times:

After the woolen carpets, the secondhand saddles, stirrups, and moukhala guns made the rounds. It got to the point that items completely unrelated to saddlery were peddled: samovars, copperware, engraved daggers . . . But eventually business slowed down and the souk would recover a little tranquility. The shopkeepers did their paperwork ad the craftsmen went back to work, albeit less energetically than before. The local café was flooded with orders, people asking Mrimou, the owner, for coffees or mint teas, which were served in chebri glasses. Out came the nuts or the snuffboxes and everyone gave themselves over to pleasure. This was also the time when passing visitors were welcomed and gossip was exchanged: weddings, divorces, deaths, houses that had gone on the market, inflation, new products, and—naturally—the arm wrestling between nationalists and the colonial authorities.

One of the most vivid recollections the reader might take away from The Bottom of the Jar is Laâbi’s cavalcade of portraits of the colorful local characters and relatives who inhabit their own moral and psychological realities, in moments that feel Dickensian, or perhaps, more appropriately, Mahfouzian, authentic pillars of a portrait of Fez in its turbulent fifties. This excellent series of sketches is anchored by Namouss’ eccentric Uncle Abdelkader who arrives from out of town and brings in the modern world with manufactured and imported goods and, after the right amount of kif, regales his relatives and neighbors with tales from the north; through him Laâbi presents Tangiers with its exotic international palette as an almost non-Moroccan sort of city, as opposed to Fez––by contrast a cradle of tensions. There is also Mikou, an itinerant poet who lives off neighborhood charity: “the scion of a large family, which he had left behind in favor of a free, wandering lifestyle that had in turn led to his family disowning him.” Then there’s Chiki Laqraâ, “the bald spook,” a Muslim woman who goes about unveiled, begging and haranguing the locals with her invective: “Who does that son of a bitch take me for? I am a woman, and the daughter of an honorable woman. My head is bare and I have nothing to hide. Let him come near me and I’ll show him which hole the fish piss out of.” We also meet Bou Tsabihate, the “rosary man,” who preaches harsh sermons but not for alms: “Faith and prayer are the only remedy. But what is it that I see? The mosques empty when it’s time to fill your stomachs. You are still snoring when the muezzin calls you to your duty. And what about the orphans, what do you do for them?” But the mosque can also be a perilous place for the boys because it’s there where they are likely to encounter Bou Souita, “Father Whip,” charged with preventing Namouss and the other boys from messing around. His namesake whip is:

A quince handle with a long leather lash attached to one end, which allowed him to strike the fugitives even in the farthest reaches of the square, dealing out blows in a most democratic fashion. Once the delinquents had been beaten and had dispersed, Bou Souita was free to attend to his other tasks, at which point the rabble-rousers would regroup, this time in a slightly more organized way.

Father Whip is offset by the kind Si Abdeltif, “one of the few adults in the neighborhood who didn’t look down on children and was always willing to exchange a few words with them.”

Other equally colorful residents include Bidous, the one legged beggar, Aâssala, the vagabond cat lady, a virtual mute, and Harrba the captivating storyteller who works hard for his money:

Harrba would jump and twirl and about. He would mimic the sound of waves, the wind, thunder, rain, animal calls, evoking sounds as varied as explosive farts to the silent ones weasels make, and would stop – all of a sudden and without warning – to allow the audience to give credit where credit was due.

“Would you like me to carry on?”

“Yes!” they would yell in unison.

“Very well then,” he would say, the show isn’t free. Dig deep into your pockets and let me hear those coins.”

But of all these characters it is, once again, Ghita who is the narrative touchstone, poison punchline, and earthy, unexpected guide to local custom and occult rituals, best displayed when she allows Namouss to tag along to a meeting of a religious sect to which she’s devoted, a cult dedicated to Lalla Mira, which translator Naffis-Sahely’s helpful endnotes define thus: “The ‘yellow spirit,’ a jinni that loves perfume, music, and dance and leaves laughter and happiness in her wake. When she takes possession of an individual, she sharpens their wit.” Indeed, Ghita seems to be a sort of coarse embodiment of this spirit. And when Namouss confuses his mother’s patron spirit with a demon he’s quickly corrected:

“Who is Lalla Mira? Some sort of ghoul like Aïcha Kandisha?”

“May your lips go numb! I never want to hear you mention that scrap of carrion again, otherwise she will come and eat you and pick her teeth clean with your bones. Lalla Mira is a real Muslim. She is the spirit that dwells within us and who watches over us. Oh Lalla Mira, taslim, I surrender to you. Here I am, just as you like, wearing your color on my head. Keep evil away from me and my children, and may the evil eye go blind before it manages to reach us.”

The curious boy insists on accompanying his mother but gets more than he bargained for, and Laâbi’s description of the rite, with its clouds of cloying incense, frenzied music and dancing, which overwhelm Namouss and cause him to faint, provides one of the most vivid and intense set pieces in a novel that is rich with them:

[Namouss’s] gaze is then drawn to a group of women dancing in the middle of the room. Dancing is not quite the word for it. Their agitation has nothing to do with swaying arms and hips or quivering bellies and shoulders, movements Namouss associated with dance as he knew it, the sort that women threw themselves into with a coquettish air at fêtes and festivities. Instead, the only movement these women are making is snapping their heads back and forth in an increasingly staccato rhythm the rest of their bodies remain immobile, except for when one of them sinks to her knees and begins shaking her torso back and forth with extraordinary strength. Freed from her head scarf, her hair would fall free and toss back and forth, then it began to fly around like a giant eagle experiencing turbulence in flight. Inspired by this ecstasy, the Gnaoua musicians play faster and faster, shouting hoarse sounds to egg the women on. The women reply by ululating in unison. At its climax, the ceremony takes an unexpected turn: A young female spectator leaps into the middle of the ring, and as if she’s been bitten by a scorpion, collapses on to the ground. Gripped by convulsions, she starts rolling and wriggling every which way on the floor. At this sight, a few dancers who haven’t yet lost all sense of reason run over to her, but instead of calming her down, they merely restrict her freedom of movement by surrounding her in a tighter circle. In doing so, these women look not only delighted but even envious of this ‘poor epileptic.’

 

Finally, beyond its alluring, kaleidoscopic mise en scène, this novel is also about the author’s birth as a writer, evidenced explicitly––by passages about his fascination for and growing love of books which bring foreign lands to his awareness:

Not only could he understand what he was reading but he was even beginning to forge a connection between the written words and the images associated with them: images shrouded in mystery and which seemed to come from another world – houses unlike any he’d ever seen, with plenty of space between them, topped by chimneys where smoke rose like a snake into the air, and surrounded by gardens where blond, chubby-cheeked children played on a seesaw.

 

––and implicitly by the resultant masterly compositions which paint glorious pictures of life in Fez, The Bottom of the Jar itself, replete with comedy and well-timed, properly proportioned injections of pathos, constructed on vivid, detailed, imagistic descriptions festooned with lively similes and finely wrought extended metaphors. It’s a novel that patiently elaborates a fascinating coming of age story, masterfully buffering its more sharp-edged historical concerns with Namouss’s naïveté and Laâbi’s deep love of life.

A classic novel of modern Moroccan literature, The Bottom of the Jar is an endless wellspring, a bottomless jar of riches, humane, hilarious, spicy and ribald, deeply captivating, always charming, never offensive––a serious, meticulously crafted memoir of revelatory erudition that superbly blends and balances the political, philosophical, and picturesque.

Joyce y las gallinas by Anna Ballbona
200 pgs. | pb | 9788433937261 | €17.90 
Anagrama
Reviewed by Brendan Riley

This review was originally published as a report on the book at and has been reprinted here with permission of the reviewer. The book was originally published in the Catalan by Anagrama as Joyce i las gallinas.

Anna Ballbona’s recent, highly praised, debut novel Joyce y las gallinas follows the misadventures of Dora, a young, disillusioned Catalan journalist who commutes to Barcelona by day from the rather hermetic and lifeless suburbs around the small industrial city of Granollers. Dora’s uninspiring assignments, anodyne reporting on inconsequential city hall press conferences and–for the fourth consecutive year–Epiphany parades for children, leave her hungry for more vital literary and artistic experiences. A weekend holiday to Ireland and an unexpected invitation to a Finnegans Wake reading introduce her to Murphy, a Dubliner whose two passions in life are studying James Joyce and raising chickens—not for eggs or meat, but as pets–hence the novel’s title Joyce y las gallinas [Joyce and the Hens]. Sensing in Murphy’s obsession something stranger and more authentic than her workaday life of commuting, reporting on non-news, and playing half-heartedly at the singles game, Dora finds a catalyst (or is it a siren song?) in the Banksy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop. Under the conceptual spells of mimesis, replication, and transgression, determined to make her own original statement, Dora’s double dose of aesthetic override drives her to adopt an alter ego (Banx) and pursue a new, double life of artistic vandalism—or is it “Banxism”?

The ensuing comedy of errors reveals Ballbona’s novel to be a clever, tightly-stitched contemporary Catalan Dubliners, a sheaf of echoing episodes exploring problems of identity, self-worth, family ties, technology, sterile voyeurism, the perennial anxiety of influence, and the desire to escape from the endless looping subroutines of social conformity. Dora’s odyssey courses our queasy fear that in a biological world of despoiled wilderness and landscapes, our only escape from the social mandate is an ever-circling flight within our own manias. This includes how Murphy’s hen obsession echoes through Dora’s story in a variety of gallina permutations both silly and serious, as she associates freely and comically about hen-based memories from her past, and begins seeing, with ever-greater significance, new and different ones in the strangest of places.

Ballbona’s multifaceted central metaphor, “gallinas,” certainly stands for the traditional Spanish mother, domineering and devoted, the mother hen who keeps family and society meaningfully intact, but also, in our early twenty-first century, stranded in an increasingly anachronistic past. Of course, in English, “gallina” also means “chicken”—both as the helpless candidate for the stewpot and as a blinking, clucking coward. So in Anna Ballbona’s satire, seemingly as familiar and innocuous as a hen’s white egg, we all turn out to be chickens. This is a novel about deception (legal, illegal, and extra-legal), self-delusion, people (all of us?) who hide in plain sight and live in perennial desire for, and fear of, self-exposure, insisting on false appearances even as we (pretend to) revile them. It’s a satire on the cloistered voyeurism that results from our inability to relate to family and society as traditional life is erased, and replaced, dualistically, by an implacable technology and a fractured aesthetic to which we find ourselves beholden, whose implications we cannot understand, but to whose chimes we pirouette, enthralled and in thrall.

Seeking to enact a masterful Joycean-Banksyan performance (one that seems patently ridiculous until we see that it’s really something else), Dora appropriately plays a strange and elaborate game of chicken with her community, right up until the very suspenseful climax, perhaps achieving what she intended, and perhaps achieving something worse, perhaps inevitably so. Dora wants to rouse the world from its somnolence, but is she really the blind sleepwalker, oblivious to the absurdity of her mimesis?

In addition to clear, measured and subtly wry prose, engagingly cerebral with a light touch, Joyce y las gallinas also sports a fine and effective cast of secondary characters. Most notably we meet–following a strange encounter between a tennis aficionado and a Rottweiler–the noxious Alfred—a sleazy, henpecked forty-something dysfunctionally devoted to his mother, Engracieta—who provides sinister comic menace and vital suspense.

It’s a happy fact of geography for Ballbona that one of the familiar train depots heading out of Barcelona to Granollers, a busy stop on Dora’s daily commute, is Montcada Bifurcació. In a book about double lives and alter egos (Jekyll and Hyde is/are name-checked early on) this is a resonant binomial. Montcada is a small mountain at the north end of the Collserola massif; conspicuously quarried away for generations, it is gradually being flattened to nothing—a mountain ceasing to be a mountain, a name without a place, a place without its namesake. It is not unlike the questing Dora—a young Catalan woman at odds with her people, place, and tradition; a journalist who finds little meaning in daily life, who feels herself a very bland sort of belle du jour, a woman who finds a kind of cowardly courage to become, by night, a headless chicken on the run that really wants to be a crowing rooster. Birfurcació means, of course, bifurcation, and as Dora dwells on that train stop, (and given the novel’s wild, peculiar climax that feels rather more Flann O’Brien than strictly Joyce), bifurcation brings to mind Jorge Luis Borges’ signature story “The Garden of Forking Paths” (in Spanish, El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan). And just as Borges’s koan-like fiction of forking fortune leaves the reader reverberating with wonder and doubt, Ballbona’s slender, artful dodger of a novel plays its black box finale with a very deft sleight-of-hand.

In a series of moving, artfully crafted entries that impressively synthesize the emotional spontaneity of self-reflection and metatextual associations, the narrator explores his life, friendships, and love affairs past and present. Benavides’s limpid narration smoothly fuses memories, hopes, and the familiar anguish of the lovelorn bachelor with keen, critical observations––alternately piercing, touching, scathing, hilarious, and mordant––of contemporary life, and the perennial struggle involved in retaining one’s dignity while trying to remain true to intellectual attitudes and artistic aspirations. Like the narration, the dialogue––either reported or quoted––is also clear, straightforward, and plausible, never feeling contrived or artificial.

The novel is intriguing from start to finish, skillfully braiding numerous storylines into a satisfying, surprising, open-ended finish. The narrator focuses on a range of relationships that seem familiar but not predictable: his ex-girlfriend Carolina; his old friend Arturo from Lima, who fled to London after his parents’ assassination; a local couple: Enzo and Elena; the brilliant but seemingly washed-up novelist Capote; and a retired professor who tutors students at a local bar. His passing friendship with the professor, and his brief, melancholy interaction with a pretty young woman whose mother has a gambling problem, are also memorably touching. Sometimes the reader suspects, or hopes for, some particular outcome but each situation is resolved in an unexpected, realistic, and gratifying way through Benavides’ expert plotting and lovely, thoughtful turns of phrase; and all of them purposefully contribute, to a greater or lesser degree, to the narrator’s concluding sentiments and actions.

In some ways, Benavides’ novel echoes the leaner, meaner moments of Hopscotch––smart, touching, and funny without Cortázar’s voluminous obscurities. From all external appearances, and often by his own account, the lonely narrator seems merely a glib loser as he smokes, drinks whiskey (often a lot of it), contemplates women, and floats away on jazz, but through his clever, artful, perfectly paced diary he manages to be more immediately and artistically successful than Capote, who dreams of a prestigious Canary Islands literary prize, and Enzo whose jazz piano playing portends neither fame or fortune.

La paz de los vencidos combines the hook of popular novels and the robust intellectual reflection of the best literature; it’s sad, funny, and moving, never flat or monotonous––a territorial risk with diary narration. The story is urban, intellectual, and emotional, the humanity abundant and universal. Thanks to the narrator’s deft, amusing, and trenchant thoughts and speculations about his circle of friends, lovers, and acquaintances, the reader is likely to sustain an authentic interest in the whole lot of them.

Jorge Eduardo Benavides has published nine novels or short story collections to date. He has received widespread recognition, and some literary prizes, for his work, including the XII Premio de Novela Julio Ramón Ribeyro for La paz de los vencidos. This is an excellent, memorable post-modern novel laced with an inviting dose of wry skepticism. Reminiscent of some famous examples of diary fiction such as �ٴDz��ٴDz�𱹲����’s Notes from Underground and, for its humorous twists, V.S.Naipaul’s story “The Nightwatchman’s Occurrence Book,” Benavide’s writing displays a high level of literary craftsmanship comparable to the work of contemporary Latin American authors like Álvaro Enrigue, Ana María Shúa, Guadalupe Nettel, Juan Villoro, and Benavides’ own compatriot Santiago Roncagliolo. .

A good literary translator will find this novel a satisfying challenge but no headache: the prose is clear, smooth, and flowing, not overly Latinate; it is highly translatable and deserves to appear in English. If done well it will make a superb literary experience for many more readers, and add Beniavides’ name to the brief list of Peruvian writers known in the U.S.A.

Here’s the beginning of Brendan’s review—which is long overdue in being posted, for which I apologize—and which can be seen over at with other similar reader’s reports on Spanish titles. It’s a great and informative source; if you haven’t already checked it out—and in particular if you have an interest in Spanish-language literature (or the possibility of translating it!):

Jorge Eduardo Benavides’ novel La paz de los vencidos (The Peace of the Defeated) takes the form of a diary written by a nameless Peruvian thirty-something intellectual slumming it in Santa Cruz de Tenerife in Spain’s Canary Islands. Recently relocated to Santa Cruz from La Laguna, our lonely diarist supports his frugal existence by reporting to a dead-end job at a slot machine parlor. The diary’s dates span October 5 to May 2 of the following spring of a nameless year(s) that seems to be the late 1990s near the end of the Fujimori presidency.

In a series of moving, artfully crafted entries that impressively synthesize the emotional spontaneity of self-reflection and metatextual associations, the narrator explores his life, friendships, and love affairs past and present. Benavides’s limpid narration smoothly fuses memories, hopes, and the familiar anguish of the lovelorn bachelor with keen, critical observations––alternately piercing, touching, scathing, hilarious, and mordant––of contemporary life, and the perennial struggle involved in retaining one’s dignity while trying to remain true to intellectual attitudes and artistic aspirations. Like the narration, the dialogue––either reported or quoted––is also clear, straightforward, and plausible, never feeling contrived or artificial.

For the rest of the review, go here.

Brendan has written reviews for Three Percent in the past, and has worked for many years as a teacher, translator, editor, and writer. Brendan’s translations include works by Juan Velasco, Álvaro Enrigue, Juan Filloy, and Carlos Fuentes.

Petrushevskaya’s published in English, There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby (Penguin Books), came out in 2009 and was on NPR’s/Jessa Crispin’s . Here’s a bit of Brendan’s review:

This slender, uncanny volume—the second, best-selling collection of stories by Russian author Ludmilla Petrushevskaya to appear in the U.S.—has already received considerable, well-deserved praise from many critics and high profile publications. Its seventeen short tales, averaging ten pages each, are grouped into four sections: “A Murky Fate”; “Hallelujah, Family!”; “My Little One”; and “A Happy Ending.” But there is little in them that readers might associate with true love or happy endings. Instead, Petrushevskaya delivers a smoking, cast-iron skillet upside the head: promiscuity, serial mendacity, domestic violence, dangerous liaisons, ineptitude, ignorance, geriatric romance, and cringing fear. Love stories? Seamy debacles. Hookup sagas set in a grim Moscow and environs. Coupling stories fraught with meanness, misery, and egregious misunderstanding. Workaday women sharing sour, collective apartments and tawdry, loveless lives. Young women who flower, suffer abuse, and wither. Collision stories: hapless women, old before their time, thwarted by brutal men. Though the men hardly fare better.

In “A Murky Fate,” an unmarried thirty-something living with her mother engineers a drab tryst with a man who services her with perfunctory courtesy and patronizing affection. But in her sterile office-life world, this confers a blissful memory: “There was nothing but pain in store for her, yet she cried with happiness and couldn’t stop.”

“The Fall” offers a dry comedy of manners at a state-run seaside resort where vacationers escaping the rainy north come together only to multiply one another’s misery. A gaudy temptress attracts a mooning pack of suitors before efficiently selecting her tall, confident “Number One.” They find the sex lovelorn travelers yearn for, only to fall prisoner to their coveted exclusion and inevitable teary separation: “Our golden couple has departed. The delicate Carmen and her faithful husband, Number One, are jetting through the frozen air away from each other, back to their children and spouses, back to the cold, and to hard, grim work.”

For the rest of the review, go here.

In “A Murky Fate,” an unmarried thirty-something living with her mother engineers a drab tryst with a man who services her with perfunctory courtesy and patronizing affection. But in her sterile office-life world, this confers a blissful memory: “There was nothing but pain in store for her, yet she cried with happiness and couldn’t stop.”

“The Fall” offers a dry comedy of manners at a state-run seaside resort where vacationers escaping the rainy north come together only to multiply one another’s misery. A gaudy temptress attracts a mooning pack of suitors before efficiently selecting her tall, confident “Number One.” They find the sex lovelorn travelers yearn for, only to fall prisoner to their coveted exclusion and inevitable teary separation: “Our golden couple has departed. The delicate Carmen and her faithful husband, Number One, are jetting through the frozen air away from each other, back to their children and spouses, back to the cold, and to hard, grim work.”

In “The Goddess Parka” a schoolteacher called A.A. goes to summer in the country, rents a porch on a cabin, and falls sway to old Aunt Alevtina who plays Yentl to his bachelor, setting him up with young Nina, but it’s a hard sell: “Nina didn’t impress A.A. She was heavy, very shy, with large pale eyes. But he did notice her casual, almost indifferent manner when she was examining some old prescriptions of Alevtina’s—the manner of a true expert.” Only Alevtina’s funeral provides the maudlin catalyst the shy couple requires to find one another and fall into what promises to be a mechanically indifferent relationship.

Alcoholism, an exposed nerve throughout the collection, drives the story of Ali-Baba, a scheming addict who hocks her mother’s first edition volumes of Russian symbolist poet Alexander Blok for drink and drug money. One of Blok’s own poems speaks perfectly to Ali-Baba’s dead-end existence:

Night, street and streetlight, drugstore,
The purposeless, half-dim, drab light.
For all the use live on a quarter century—
Nothing will change. There’s no way out.

You’ll die—and start all over, live twice,
Everything repeats itself, just as it was:
Night, the canal’s rippled icy surface,
The drugstore, the street, and streetlight.¹

-10 October, 1912

It’s a tale of misery masquerading as self-preservation, as Ali-Baba attempts to escape from her so-called “life partner”: “[He] had tossed her over the railing of his balcony for stealing his booze. She hung four floors above the ground, clutching at the railing, until two truck drivers forced their way into the apartment and rescued her.” Ali-Baba’s own weird magic is that of a strange survivor; her Cave of Sesame is state-mandated rehab to which she gravitates, but only on her own sick terms. This involves a tryst with the drunken Victor, who is as crocked as �ٴDz��ٴDz�𱹲����’s Marmeladov from Crime and Punishment. When Victor pisses the bed, she ODs on sleeping pills and wakes up in the psychiatric hospital to fresh sheets and three squares a day.

“Two Deities” offers the awkward mismatch between thirty-five-year-old senior editor Genya and Dima, a simple, office courier of twenty. A single drunken encounter—on her mother’s sofa—after an office party, produces a child, and they become reluctant, embarrassed parents: ordinary failures in the public eye, but gods to the child who has, unlike so many, a reliable mother and father.

Sweet, virtuous Oksana in “Like Penélope” (as in Cruz) faces the common, nearly impossible challenge of finding love while trying to eke out some kind of modern life: “Oksana studied forestry in a third-tier college—the only one she could attend for free. Upon graduation she could expect to get a clerical job in a state agency tallying birches and firs on paper. She and her mother shared a two-room apartment in a standard concrete building.” Their drab, nondescript warren of misery is a standard location for these tales:

“In one respect their housing situation stood out: right below them, on the third floor, lived an incredibly noisy family of violent alcoholics. Every night the floor shook with screams, banging, and knocking; the lady of the house regularly interrupted her partying to stumble outside and yell “Murder!” and “Help!” Oksana tiptoed past their ravaged door; outside she dressed in dark clothing and wore her hat low over her face.”

Her mother, Nina, holds a thankless job editing textbooks, but she is a charitable soul. She takes in Klava, an old Ukranian friend hiding from “shakers”—violent loan sharks pursuing her son, Misha. Nina’s charity, vexing to her daughter, eventually brings Oksana face to face with Misha, and the hint of a dangerous, derailing passion.

“Father and Mother” is a short study in Dostoyevskian madness wherein young Tanya longs to escape from her endlessly warring parents; the father a carefree soldier, the mother a negligent harridan with an unwashed brood:

“The squalor of that household was beyond description, because the mother did her housework sloppily, saving her energy for the high point of her day: for eleven at night, which bled into midnight and later, so the children got no sleep and couldn’t get up in the morning for school. The mother went further in her sacred rage, appearing at the officers’ mess with the little one and kicking her husband as he walked out the door, as if to disprove the conventional wisdom that such methods never brought anyone’s husband back (quite the opposite). Leaving behind her children unfed, she’d chase her husband through town, screaming the most horrible things—that, say, she had found bloody rags tucked in a hole in the wall and that Tanya had had a miscarriage by her father.”

This passage eerily echoes the wrenching battles between Crime and Punishment’s Marmeladov and Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladova:

“Ah!” she cried out in a frenzy, “he has come back! The criminal! the monster! … And where is the money? What’s in your pocket, show me! And your clothes are all different! Where are your clothes? Where is the money! Speak!”

And she fell to searching him. Marmeladov submissively and obediently held up both arms to facilitate the search. Not a farthing was there.

“Where is the money?” she cried—“Mercy on us, can he have drunk it all? There were twelve silver rubles left in the chest!” and in a fury she seized him by the hair and dragged him into the room. Marmeladov seconded her efforts by meekly crawling along on his knees.

“And this is a consolation to me! This does not hurt me, but is a positive con-so-la-tion, ho-nou-red sir,” he called out, shaken to and fro by his hair and even once striking the ground with his forehead. The child asleep on the floor woke up, and began to cry. The boy in the corner losing all control began trembling and screaming and rushed to his sister in violent terror, almost in a fit. The eldest girl was shaking like a leaf.

“He’s drunk it! He’s drunk it all,” the poor woman screamed in despair —“and his clothes are gone! And they are hungry, hungry!”—and wringing her hands she pointed to the children. “Oh, accursed life!”²

The most experimental tale of the bunch—inspiration for the collection’s macabre title—is “Hallelujah, Family!,” a complicated, multi-generational, matriarchal tangle of several daughters born out of wedlock, written as a chain of 45 numbered paragraphs, confusing enough to sometimes require embedded reference numbers:

36. [Victor had] accumulated several notes from Zhanna as well as a number of letters from Alla with pictures of little Nadya, who was a replica of Victor plus dimples and curls. His mother also wrote—that Alla’s life with her mentally ill mother (2–5) was becoming unbearable, that the crazy woman had put washing detergent in Nadya’s cereal and wouldn’t let Nina Petrovna see her own granddaughter.”

All this collective madness finds balance in Petrushevskaya’s superb narration: clever, sardonic and maternal, a terse, almost breezy, delivery with spare, tasteful description, and an economy reminiscent of other masterful meditations on troubled relationships: Raymond Carver’s What We Talk Ģ����ý When We Talk Ģ����ý Love, and Thomas Farber’s Who Wrote the Book of Love? Praise, too, for translator Anna Summers who renders these blunt tragicomedies with crisp phrasing and textured color appropriate to their wretched situations: “The baby was covered with a septic rash—his whole little head felt like a cactus due to the tiny bumps.”

These unsparing, unbearably human stories would kick their way through a Las Vegas wedding chapel like a regiment of angry Spetsnaz, their ethos being that the brutal disappointments of modern life are simply unexceptional; shreds of love and companionship are small triumphs; a squalid affair is better than a spiteful marriage. But a few of these tales, at least, harbor shades of love, tenderness, affection, resolution, and forgiveness, the nitty gritty workaday side of living together that is part and parcel of redemption. I had to read the book twice to zero in on this fact because the first pass, despite Petrushevskaya’s sardonic flair, brought only a wave of depression, an impression of wicked, gleeful anti-love stories with unbelievable twists of suffering no one should have to live through. One especial example is the tale of “Milgrom”:

“Her husband dumped her, literally kicked her out of the house, and took away her child, a little boy. First he took Milgrom out of her Lithuanian village—she was a rare beauty, sixteen years old, but she didn’t speak any Russian, just Yiddish and Polish—and then he divorced her; you could do that then—with total freedom he went and divorced her. And he brought another woman to live with him and told Milgrom to leave. So she left. She was eighteen years old. She nearly went crazy; she spent all her days and nights on the street across from her old window so she could see her child.”

Yet Milgrom—years later an old crone and expert seamstress—is able to bring happiness to a clumsy, unskilled girl who is starting to feel her own beauty for the first time. Milgrom sews her a garment worthy of her young spirit:

“The girl puts on her dress; looks in the mirror; escapes from that sweet-musty smell, out into the street, the sunset; and walks by countless doors and windows, behind each of which, she thinks, live only Milgroms, Milgroms, Milgroms. She walks in her cool new black dress, and she is seized with happiness, filled with joy.”

It’s those rare gems of happiness that illuminate, and sometimes ennoble, these mad stories, the silver linings to their gray, leering cloudscapes.

¹ Translation from Russian by Alex Cigale (as published by Offcourse at http://www.albany.edu/offcourse)

² from Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Pocket Books, 2004; trans. Constance Garnett).

This is Yan Lianke’s third book to come out in English translation, the first two being Serve the People! and Dream of Ding Village. (Interestingly, this is his third translator, with Julia Lovell having done Serve the People! and Cindy Carter having translated Ding Village.)

In terms of Brendan Riley, he was born in Dunkirk, New York in the Year of the Fire Horse. He holds degrees in English literature from Santa Clara University and Rutgers University. He has worked for many years as a teacher, translator, editor, and writer. An ATA Certified Translator of Spanish to English, he also holds certificates in translation studies from U.C. Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His translations include works by Juan Velasco, Álvaro Enrigue, Juan Filloy, and Carlos Fuentes.

Here’s the opening of his very positive review:

A rich, beautifully written, consistently surprising satire, Yan Lianke’s Lenin’s Kisses boasts an elaborate, engrossing plot with disarming twists and compelling characters both challenged and challenging. It leads the reader on a strange pilgrimage—often melancholy but certainly rewarding—through a China by turns traditional, modern, and fantastical.

The novel centers on the history and destiny of Liven, a remote village in northern China populated by invalids. To be a citizen of Liven, one must be disabled in some way great or small. But so sweetly harmonious is the bucolic life there, some even maim themselves to be allowed to take up residency. Liven’s origins lie in a mythical past of heavenly days before the fall of the Qing Dynasty and the convulsions of the twentieth century, including the Communist Revolution and Mao Tse Tung’s Great Leap Forward. Despite being a village of cripples, Liven is not a crippled village: symbiotic hard work ensures its people a life of plenty. As the shadow of modern times falls on China, Liven finds itself at odds with the world at large, populated by able-bodied “wholers.” From the first page, its fortunes take an especially strange turn with the onset of some paradoxical weather: “Look, in the middle of a sweltering summer, when people couldn’t liven, it suddenly started snowing. This was hot snow.”

High praise for translator Carlos Rojas’s discovery of the ideal English name for Lianke’s mythical Chinese village. In his concise, enlivening preface Professor Rojas explains that the Chinese verb shouhuo, which he translates as “to liven . . . is composed of two Chinese characters that literally mean ‘to receive life’, but in the novel’s regional dialect are used to refer to enjoyment, pleasure, or even sexual intercourse.” This pitch-perfect target-language key at the heart of Rojas’s translation—an impressive feat of lucid, flowing prose—provides an effective comic touchstone; the novel’s exegesis begins and ends with the village’s axiomatic name. It also raises the possibility for Liven, and its unforgettable story, to assume a permanent place in the popular literary imagination.

The novel centers on the history and destiny of Liven, a remote village in northern China populated by invalids. To be a citizen of Liven, one must be disabled in some way great or small. But so sweetly harmonious is the bucolic life there, some even maim themselves to be allowed to take up residency. Liven’s origins lie in a mythical past of heavenly days before the fall of the Qing Dynasty and the convulsions of the twentieth century, including the Communist Revolution and Mao Tse Tung’s Great Leap Forward. Despite being a village of cripples, Liven is not a crippled village: symbiotic hard work ensures its people a life of plenty. As the shadow of modern times falls on China, Liven finds itself at odds with the world at large, populated by able-bodied “wholers.” From the first page, its fortunes take an especially strange turn with the onset of some paradoxical weather: “Look, in the middle of a sweltering summer, when people couldn’t liven, it suddenly started snowing. This was hot snow.”

High praise for translator Carlos Rojas’s discovery of the ideal English name for Lianke’s mythical Chinese village. In his concise, enlivening preface Professor Rojas explains that the Chinese verb shouhuo, which he translates as “to liven . . . is composed of two Chinese characters that literally mean ‘to receive life’, but in the novel’s regional dialect are used to refer to enjoyment, pleasure, or even sexual intercourse.” This pitch-perfect target-language key at the heart of Rojas’s translation—an impressive feat of lucid, flowing prose—provides an effective comic touchstone; the novel’s exegesis begins and ends with the village’s axiomatic name. It also raises the possibility for Liven, and its unforgettable story, to assume a permanent place in the popular literary imagination.

Lenin’s Kisses divides its narrative into three essential areas of focus. The two main protagonists are Grandma Mao Zhi, matriarch of Liven, and County Chief Liu, a government functionary who presides like a minor deity over his district of Shuanghuai. Between them they represent the dangerous, unrelenting tension between traditional ways and modern bureaucracy. Caught within their powerful yin-yang vortex is the wonderful, absurd, and utterly hapless Liven Special Skills Performance Troupe.

A devoted revolutionary who sees her dreams turn to nightmares, Mao Zhi symbolizes the sufferings and endurance of twentieth century China. When communism arrives she discovers that her village is neither recognized by the government nor shown on any map; she petitions that it be allowed to join the world and, after grueling pilgrimages to various seats of government, Liven is welcomed into the new China.

But when Mao Zhi tries to govern Liven through common sense and traditional wisdom, especially when it comes to helping the village endure China’s cataclysmic famine which followed Mao Tse Tung’s Great Leap Forward, all of Liven is denounced for counterrevolutionary activity, simply because they sensibly stored up their harvest against impending starvation. Nevertheless, the villagers are accused of greed, and the rest of the country comes calling to appropriate all their grain, tools, and livestock. Ironies abound: to save her people, Mao Zhi, ardent daughter of the revolution, must accept the charges of her accusers in the new Maoist cadres.

As I write this I’m examining a grim black and white photograph from the Cultural Revolution: two suspected counter-revolutionaries are pinioned atop a farm truck packed with loyal Maoists; placards hanging round their necks declare their anti-revolutionary crimes; the truck is surrounded by a teeming crowd, all “struggling against” the offensive criminals. This picture is nearly identical to one of the more harrowing scenes of tribulation which Lianke describes, when Mao Zhi is forced to answer for the crimes of Liven. Summoned to the district capital, Mao Zhi prudently confesses to being a counter-revolutionary, and is spared, while the other “criminal” by her side has his brains blown out. Thus, despite the multiple positive implications of its name, Liven becomes a fallen Shangri-La, and Mao Zhi will spend the rest of her life trying to redeem it and restore its happy past.

Grandma Mao Zhi’s counterpart is County Chief Liu, who concocts an improbable scheme to purchase Vladimir Lenin’s embalmed corpse from a cash-strapped Moscow. His chuckleheaded assumption is that, once installed in a gleaming new mausoleum atop Spirit Mountain, the corpse will attract endless hordes of paying tourists, thus ensuring the district a livening mountain of money, more than it can ever spend.

This feckless communist-cum-capitalist party cog who, despite delusions of grandeur, is doomed to failure, provides the satirical alloy to the sombre tale of Grandma Mao and Liven. When Liu visits Liven during its annual livening festival, some of the disabled villagers honor him with a performance of their many unusual skills. Paraplegic Woman can embroider a butterfly on a poplar leaf with astonishing dexterity. Blind Tonghua can hear a feather land anywhere on the stage. One-Legged Monkey can outrun an able-bodied man and perform an amazing long jump. In their quaint freak show Chief Liu spies his golden goose: a special skills performance troupe to tour China and raise the millions needed to purchase Lenin’s corpse. Granda Mao Zhi bitterly agrees to his mad scheme with an equally quixotic proposal; in exchange for granting the troupe permission to tour China, she secures Chief Liu’s promise to allow Liven to once more withdraw from society in order to rediscover its heavenly days of livening.

The novel’s structure offers only odd numbered chapters which are meant, according to Professor Rojas, to signify Liven’s (and China’s) off-kilter progress through modernity. Most are followed by a variety of endnotes for “Further Reading”: some, with blunt-toothed sarcasm, constitute a simple, obvious gloss, while others go much further field, flowering out into complex, full-fledged chapters.

Liven’s saga is both moving and gut-wrenching as well as mordantly, brutally, bitterly funny; it spares neither its characters nor its readers the multitudinous disasters of human folly. The novel is a veritable Chinese Box of absurd tribulations, each one containing its own Russian matryoshka doll. But the figurine’s faces are painted in outrage, mirroring the reader’s disbelief at Liven’s seemingly endless misfortunes.

Sometimes the plot’s style reads like a modern fable of the kind found in Hesse’s Siddhartha or Flaubert’s Legend of St. Julian Hospitaler with its flat recounting of grief and endurance in the face of impossible suffering. During one particularly grueling episode, the special skills performance troupe finds itself held prisoner inside the splendid new Lenin Mausoleum, built with the profits from its hundreds of high-priced, sold-out shows. Their jailers are none other than the band of “wholer” roadies who’ve shepherded them around China for the past year. Jealous of the cripples’s vast earnings, they hold them ransom against themselves, extracting their every last yuan by selling them food and water at outrageous prices. And when the suffering cripples of Liven have, once again, given their all, the demands only become more outrageous.

Betrayed by every other social arrangement–feudalism, Marxism, communism, Maoism, bureaucracy, capitalism, show business, and the tenuous honor among thieves–Liven finally has nothing but itself, alone among the remote mountains of Balou with the blossoms floating on the spring breeze as in the famous 5th century poem “Peach Blossom Land” by Tao Yuan Ming. For a moment, the message seems to be that compassionate solidarity with our lowest common denominator might be the true path, but in the end Liven is no staging ground for revolution, simply a threshing floor, a harsh oasis, a lonely last resort. Lenin’s Kisses, however, offers an irresistible attraction for readers of powerful, uncompromising satire. So pucker up, buttercup.