Today’s #WITMonth post is an except from

Here’s the jacket copy:

Subtly in the vein ofÌęDogvilleÌęor Coetzee’sÌęDisgrace, and invoking the works of Agota Kristof,ÌęUn AmorÌęprobes ideas of language, alienation, and community through the eyes of a woman who, when brought into conflict, finds herself on the potential brink of deeper awareness of herself and her place in the world.

On the heels of a cryptic mistake, Nat arrives in La Escapa, an arid rural village in Spain’s interior. She settles into a small, shabby house with cheap rent to begin work on her first literary translation, with a skittish and ill-tempered dog—a gift from the boorish landlord—her only company.

Burdened with assumptions about country life, Nat will enter into relationships with the handful of local inhabitants—her negligent landlord, Píter the hippie, the dementia-afflicted Roberta, the young city family who comes on weekends, the unsociable man they call “The German”—from whom she appears to receive a customary welcome.

Mutual misunderstanding and a persistent sense of alienation, however, thrum below the surface. And when conflicts arise over repairs to the house, Nat receives an offer and makes a crucial decision.

In prose as taut and oppressive as the atmosphere in La Escapa,ÌęUn AmorÌęextends Mesa’s exploration of language and power, confronting readers with the limits of their own morality as tensions mount and the community’s most unexpected impulses emerge.

This book—like so many of Mesa’s—is a slow burn, with tension increasing with every event, every turn of the page. The except below is from the first section of the book, setting the scene, introducing a few key characters, and creating the atmosphere of this part of rural Spain. Enjoy!

Un Amor is available for preorder from better bookstores everywhere, our , , or

She’d be hard pressed to come up with a convincing answer if asked to explain what she was doing there. That’s why she hedges when the time comes, babbling about a change of scenery.

“People must think you’re crazy, right?”

The cashier smacks gum as she piles Nat’s shopping on the counter. It’s the only store in a few-mile radius, an unmarked establishment where foodstuffs and hygiene products accumulate in a jumble. Shopping there is expensive and the pickings are slim, but Nat is reluctant to take the car to Petacas. She rummages in her wallet and counts out the bills she needs.

The girl from the shop is in a chatty mood. Brazen, she asks Nat all about her life, flustering her. The girl wishes she could do what Nat’s done, but the opposite, she says. Move to Cárdenas, where stuff actually happens.

“Living here sucks. There aren’t even any guys!”

She tells Nat that she used to go to high school in Petacas, but she dropped out. She doesn’t like studying, she’s crap at every subject. Now she helps out in the shop. Her mom gets chronic migraines, and her dad also does some farming, so she lends a hand at the store. But as soon as she turns eighteen, she’s out of there. She could be a cashier in Cárdenas, or a nanny. She’s good with kids. The few kids who ever make it to La Escapa, she smiles.

“This place sucks,” she repeats.

It’s the girl who tells Nat about the people living in the surrounding houses and farms. She tells her about the gypsy family squatting in a dilapidated farmhouse, right near the ramp for the highway. A bus picks up the kids every morning; they’re the only kids who live in La Escapa year-round. And there’s the old couple in the yellow house. The woman is some kind of witch, the girl claims. She can predict the future and read your mind.

“She’s a little crazy, so it’s creepy,” the girl laughs.

She tells Nat about the hippie in the wooden house, and the guy they call “The German” even though he Ÿ±ČőČÔ’t from Germany, and Gordo’s bar—though to call the storehouse where they serve up bottles of beer a bar is, she admits, a bit of an exaggeration. There are other people who come and go according to the rhythms of the countryside, dayworkers hired for two-week stints or just the day, but also whole families who have inherited houses they can’t manage to sell and who live somewhere else half the year. But you never see women on their own. Not women Nat’s age, she specifies.

“Old ladies don’t count.”

During the first days, Nat gets confused and mixes up all that information, partly because she’d listened absently, partly because she’s in unfamiliar territory. La Escapa’s borders are blurry, and even though there is a relatively compact cluster of small houses—where hers is located—other buildings are scattered farther off, some inhabited and others not. From the outside, Nat can’t tell whether they’re homes or barns, if there are people inside or just livestock. She loses her bearings on the dirt roads and if it weren’t for the shop—which sometimes feels more familiar to her than the house she’s rented and slept in for a week—as a point of reference, she’d feel lost. The area Ÿ±ČőČÔ’t even very pretty, although at sunset, when the edges soften and the light turns golden, she finds a kind of beauty she can cling to.

Nat takes her grocery bags and says goodbye to the girl. But before she exits the shop, she turns back and asks about the landlord. Does the girl know him? The girl purses her lips, shakes her head slowly. No, not really, she says. He’s lived in Petacas for a long time.

“But I do remember seeing him around here when I was little. He always had a pack of dogs and a really bad temper. Then he got married, or got together with someone, and left. I guess his wife didn’t want to live in La Escapa—can’t blame her. This place is worse for girls. Even though Petacas is nothing special—I wouldn’t want to live there either, no way.”

*

Sara Mesa

She tries to play with the dog, tossing him an old ball she found in the woodpile. But instead of catching it and bringing it back, the dog limps away. When she crouches down next to him, putting herself on his level so he won’t be afraid, he skulks off with his tail between his legs. The dog is a piece of work, she thinks, a real rotter. Sieso, they’d call him in the part of Spain she comes from. It seems a good a name as any—after all, she has to call him something. It certainly describes his surly nature. But Sieso is as inscrutable as he is unsociable. He hangs around, but it’s like he wasn’t there at all. Why should she have to settle for a dog like that? Even the little dog in the shop, an extremely anxious Chihuahua mix, is much nicer. All the dogs she meets on the roads—and there are tons of them—run over when she calls. A lot of them are looking to be fed, of course, but also to be pet; they are nosy and curious, wanting to know who this new girl in the neighborhood is. Sieso doesn’t even seem interested in eating. If she feeds him, great, and if not, that’s fine too. The landlord wasn’t kidding: the animal’s upkeep is cheap. Sometimes Nat is ashamed of the aversion she feels toward the animal. She asked for a dog and here he is. Now she cannot—must not—say—or even think—that she doesn’t want him.

One morning at the shop, she meets the hippie, as the girl called him. Now she languidly waits on them both, smoking a cigarette with no sense of urgency. The hippie is a little older than Nat, though he can’t be more than forty. Tall and strong, his skin is weathered by the sun, his hands broad and cracked, his eyes hard but placid. He wears his hair long in a terrible cut and his beard is on the reddish side. Why the girl calls him “hippie” is something Nat can only guess. Maybe it’s his long hair or because he is someone who, like Nat, comes from the city, a stranger, something incomprehensible for anyone who has lived in La Escapa since childhood and can only think of getting away. The truth is, the hippie has lived there a long time. He is, therefore, nothing novel, not like Nat. She observes him from the corner of her eye, his efficient movements, concise and confident. As she waits her turn, she pats the back of the dog he has brought with him. She’s a chocolate Labrador, old but undeniably elegant. The dog wags her tail and noses Nat’s crotch. The three of them laugh.

“What a good girl,” Nat says.

The hippie nods and holds out his hand. Then he changes his mind, withdraws it and moves in to kiss her. Just one kiss on the cheek, which causes Nat to remain with her face tilted, waiting for the second kiss that doesn’t come. He tells her his name: Píter. With an i, he specifies: P-í-t-e-r. At least that’s how he likes to spell it, except when he’s forced to write it officially. The less one writes one’s real name, the better, he jokes. It’s only good for signing checks at the bank, for those thieves.

“Natalia,” she introduces herself.

Then comes the obligatory question: what is she doing in La Escapa? He’s seen her out on the trails and also saw her tidying up the area around the house. Is she going to live there? Alone? Nat feels awkward. She would prefer that nobody watch her while she works, especially without her knowledge, which is inevitable because the boundaries of the property are marked only by fine wire mesh, denuded of vegetation. She tells him she’s only staying a couple of months.

“I’ve seen the dog, too. You got him here, right?”

“How do you know?”

Píter confesses that he knows the animal. One of the landlord’s many. That dog, in fact, is probably the worst of the lot. Her landlord will pick them up wherever, doesn’t train them, doesn’t vaccinate them, doesn’t care for them in the slightest. He uses, then abandons, them. Did she ask for the dog? She can be sure the landlord has given her the most useless one he had.

Nat considers this and the man suggests she give the dog back. There’s no reason to settle if he Ÿ±ČőČÔ’t what she wanted. The landlord Ÿ±ČőČÔ’t a good guy, he says, she’s better off keeping her distance. He doesn’t like to speak badly of anyone, he insists, but the landlord is another matter. Always thinking about how to scam people.

“I can get you a dog if you want.”

The conversation leaves Nat uneasy. Sitting on her doorstep with a lukewarm bottle of beer—the fridge, too, is on the fritz—she watches Sieso sleeping beside the fence, stretched out in the sunshine. The flies loiter on his slightly swollen belly, where the marks of old wounds are visible.

The thought of returning him is deeply unsettling.

*

Katie Whittemore

She is surprised by the activity in Petacas. It takes her a while to find parking; the layout of the roads is so chaotic and the signage so contradictory that once you enter the town, an unexpected detour can easily take you right out of it again. The houses are modest, their façades worse for the wear and mostly plain, but there are brick buildings, too, up to six stories tall, distributed arbitrarily here and there. The businesses are clustered around the main square; the town hall—an ostentatious building with large eaves and stained-glass windows—is surrounded by small bars and Chinese-owned bazaars. Nat buys a small fan at one of them. Then she wanders in search of a hardware store, reluctant to ask for directions. She is struck by the neglected appearance of the women, who have left the house with unkempt hair and slip-on sandals. Many of the men—even the old ones—are in sleeveless shirts. The few children she sees are unsupervised, licking popsicles, scampering, rolling on the ground. The people—men, women, kids—all of whom are loud and sloppy, look strangely alike. Inbreeding, Nat thinks. Her landlord is a perfect fit.

She worries about running into him, but it’s Píter, not the landlord, whom she meets in the hardware store. She is happy to see him: someone she knows, someone friendly, someone smiling at her at last, coming over, what are you doing here, he asks. Nat shows him the box with the fan and he scowls. Why didn’t she ask the landlord? It’s his responsibility to keep the property in habitable condition. Not air conditioning, obviously, but a fan at least.

“Or you could have asked me. That’s what neighbors are for.”

Nat looks for an excuse. She’s happy to buy one, she says. She’ll take it with her when she leaves La Escape. Píter looks at her askance, pretending not to believe her.

“And what are you buying here? Tools to fix everything he left broken?”

Nat shakes her head.

“No. Stuff for the garden.”

“You’re planting a garden?”

“Well, just something basic . . . Peppers and eggplants, they’re easy, I guess. I want to try, at least.”

PĂ­ter takes her by the arm, steps closer.

“Don’t buy anything,” he whispers.

He tells her that he can lend her all the tools she needs. He says, too, that she might as well forget about a garden. Nothing’s grown on her land in years; the soil is totally depleted; it would take days and days of hard work to get it into shape. If she insists—Nat hangs on that word, insists—he could lend her a hand, but he absolutely advises against it. Although he speaks smoothly, Píter’s voice contains indisputable sureness, an expert’s confidence. Nat nods, waits for him to finish his shopping. Cables, adaptors, screws, a pair of pliers: all very professional, very specific, nothing at all like the indefiniteness in which she operates.

Outside, PĂ­ter walks beside her at an athletic pace, straight but flexible. His way of moving is so elegant, so different from the people around them, that Nat is proud to be walking next to him, the sort of pride associated with feeling legitimate. The spell breaks when he points to the windows at the town hall.

“Pretty, aren’t they? I made them.”

Nat thinks the windows clash terribly with the building’s exposed brick, but she is all praise: they suit it perfectly, she says. Píter looks at her appreciatively. Precisely, he says, that’s what he seeks, for his work to befit its context.

“Petacas Ÿ±ČőČÔ’t the nicest place in the world, but—to the extent possible—one should strive to beautify one’s surroundings, don’t you think?”

“So, you’re a . . .” Nat doesn’t know what you call a person who makes stained-glass windows.

“A glazier? Yes. Well, more than a glazier. A glass and color artisan, you might say. Like, I don’t just cover windows.”

“Of course.” Nat smiles.

They have a beer in one of the bars on the square. The beer is ice-cold and goes down easy. Píter observes her closely—too closely, she thinks—but his eyes are sweet and that softens her discomfort. The conversation returns to the landlord—that cheeky bastard, he repeats—the tools and her barren plot. He insists on lending her what she needs. Just a matter of tidying the yard, clearing space for a table and some lawn chairs, then planting a few oleander and yucca, or some succulents suitable for the harsh climate. There’s a huge nursery near Petacas, very cheap. If she wants, one day they can go together. It seems her plans for a vegetable garden have been scrapped. She doesn’t mention them again.

Again Un Amor is available for preorder from better bookstores everywhere, our , , or

Today’s #WITMonth post is a preview for an Open Letter title coming out next summer, which isn’t even available for sale anywhere yet. It’sÌę

“Sis, I want to tell you about the river. ÄąčœŽ«Ăœ me in the river. It makes me shiver, tremble. It makes me laugh. It’s been so long since I’ve felt this alive . . .”

Rute is no stranger to displacement and loss. As a child she and her older sister, Dina, were subject to their mother’s romantic whims, moving from house to house, boyfriend to boyfriend. Then, when the sisters were in their late twenties, Dina disappeared. In the decade that has since passed, Rute has become a husk of her former self, going through the motions in work, life, and love, composing daily letters to Dina in the hopes they’ll one day see each other again.Ìę

When the sisters’ biological father, JĆ«le, dies, Rute unexpectedly inherits his country property. Curious about this man she’s never really known, she takes the opportunity to flee the city, the people, herself. But once in the countryside she meets Matilde, the young, single mother from next door who (along with her brother Kristof) was practically raised by JĆ«le. Rute learns about JĆ«le, a generous soul whose door and heart were always open to those less fortunate.Ìę

Haunting, sparse, and echoing Scandinavian greats like Kjersti Skomsvold, Laura Vinogradova’sÌęžéŸ±±č±đ°ùÌęis a tightly crafted work that defies resolutions and endings, instead hailing the importance and beauty of the personal journey to one’s internal truths and external freedoms.

ÌęThe book isn’t quite available for preorder yet, but stay tuned, and we’ll let you know when it is!

Before

Dina likes Rute’s place. There’s a warmth to it. The kind of warmth that is oblivious to the weather outside. As soon as she steps into her sister’s apartment, Dina takes off her boots and socks and stands for some time, barefoot, soaking up the warmth. Rute has heated floors; Rute has everything.

—What are you doing? Rute laughs.

—Have you been outside?

—No, I’ve been working. What is it?

—The wind, little sister, the wind.

—There’s wind in here, too, Rute laughs again and blows into Dina’s face.

Laura Vinogradova

Then they drink coffee. Rute orders a pizza. Dina’s eyes wander around the kitchen; they hungrily take in every beautiful detail, because Rute’s place is beautiful. Warm and beautiful. Sometimes Dina wants to call her out on it. Tell her she’s spoiled. Tell her Stefans has spoiled her. Because Dina can’t escape. She can’t escape the cold, the loneliness. And sometimes she feels like she can’t even try. Can’t be free, doesn’t deserve to be free. And then she gets angry at Rute. Because Rute shouldn’t be living in an apartment like this. Shouldn’t have heated floors or love, shouldn’t be stringing fairy lights from all the shelves.

Rute has a jar of kombucha fermenting on the windowsill. When Dina sees it, she chokes on her coffee and laughs while wheezing.

—What’s that? she points to the jar.

—Kombucha, Rute says.

—Why is there lace over the top of it? Dina laughs again.

Rute pouts and says nothing.

—It reminds me of something. Dina grows thoughtful and stops laughing.

—Kombucha? Rute’s voice drips with sarcasm.

But Dina shakes her head. The pizza is delivered. The sisters eat, their fingers greasy, and forget about the kombucha.

—Walk me out? Dina asks, but Rute shakes her head.

—I want to get a bit more translating done.

They hug each other tightly; Rute blows Dina a kiss, and the door closes behind her.

After that, everything happens too fast to make sense of it. Too fast to scream, too forceful to fight back. Dina gets off the No. 6 tram at the Mārkalne stop and heads for home. The street she’s walking down is quiet and empty, with a few cold cars and a red minivan parked along the side of the street. It’s a snowless, windy January, and Dina retreats deeper into her scarf. It happens in a second: three men jump out of the van, grab her, and pull a bag over her head. They lift her like a rag doll and toss her into the back of the van. No screams. No movement. Dina freezes and gives in having, at some point in her life, stopped fighting back.

She lies silent in the back of the van and tries to think. Is she hurt? Will she survive this? Will it happen quickly? But she can’t think clearly. Her goddamn mind is trapped in this bag. Everything is trapped, even her fear. She doesn’t feel afraid. What she feels are her pants, wet, cold, plastered to her skin. She’s pissed herself. They seem to have left Riga because the van is driving straight, smooth, and fast. Dina is curled up into a ball, lying in her own urine, with a bag over her head. Suddenly, she realizes what Rute’s kombucha reminded her of.

*

At the time, Dina would have been around ten years old. One day their mother, without a word, had taken her and Rute to live with Aigars. No, we’re not going back home, their mother had told the girls, and they never brought it up again. Their mother loved Aigars just as much as she’d loved Vladimir before him, and Igor before him, and Jānis somewhere in between. Aigars wasn’t bad, he left the girls alone. He never spoke to them, and the girls quickly learned to remain silent. If they talked or laughed, it meant a black eye for their mother. Their mother loved Aigars even with her black eye, so the girls weren’t worried.

Kaija Straumanis

The sisters didn’t have their own room at first, instead sharing one with their mother and Aigars. They were set up on the floor behind the wardrobe, with a quilt to sleep on and a small night light. But it was still dark. Each night, Dina had to listen to their mother’s panting and snoring, and Aigars’s moaning. Dina and Rute wet their “bed” on the very first night. Dina had been embarrassed to tell their mother, but she worked up the courage and finally did. The girls were given a clean sheet, but the same thing happened the next night and the night after that. Dina woke up on a quilt that was wet and a sheet with a large yellow stain on it. She pulled on her jeans and went to school, but she could feel that damp cold on her legs the entire day. She didn’t say anything to their mother again—they didn’t have that many clean sheets, and their mother was busy. Aigars wanted to spend every second with her. He didn’t like it when she wanted to play with Dina and Rute.

The girls spent several months sleeping behind the wardrobe. They wet the bed every night. Sometimes they couldn’t tell if it had been only Dina, or only Rute, or both of them. They’d study the stains on the sheets, trying to make sense of it, but what did it matter? Either way, the bed was wet. Either way, it stank. Either way, they had to sleep there again. Every morning Dina would pull back the sheet and hope it would be the last time, that everything would dry out and she wouldn’t wet the bed anymore. But she did. And so did Rute.

Then they got their own room, and in the process of moving them their mother saw their sleeping space for the first time. She saw the piss-stained sheets. The cotton quilt they used as a mattress had started to mold. Their mother said nothing; neither did the girls. Urine Ÿ±ČőČÔ’t something you talk about.

Having their own room was better. They had their own beds and were given special mattress covers to go under the sheets. Dina’s bed stayed dry the first few days, and she was happy because she thought she’d conquered bed-wetting. There was one morning when Rute’s bed was wet, but she was still little. She couldn’t hold it in.

One night, Dina woke up needing to pee. But the toilet was outside, and to get to it, she’d have to go by Aigars’s room. What if she woke him and he got angry? What if he took it out on their mother? Because he did that when he got angry. The times he got angry like that it seemed that their mother didn’t love him after all, but that wasn’t true. She did love him. She’d cry, rub ointment on her bruises, and go on loving him.

Dina got an idea. On the table was a jar of water used for rinsing paint brushes. She’d pee in there. She squatted, positioned the jar under herself, and tried to aim in the dark. She filled it completely, a bit of warm urine dripping onto her hands. But Dina was pleased with her solution. Her bed would stay dry, and she wouldn’t reek at school. She found a few more jars in the courtyard and secretly stashed them in their room. She filled those, too. When she ran out of jars, she peed into a vase that was in the girls’ room because Aigars didn’t like vases. And when she ran out of vases, she peed in the bowl that sat under the flowerpot.

On rare occasions she would take the jars out to empty them. Very rarely. And so, the urine-filled jars would turn dark, cloudy. They looked like jars of kombucha. Now she remembers.

*

The van stops. Dina is dragged outside and through the bag she can feel the damp sea air. She recognizes it because Vladimir, whom her mother had loved, had lived by the sea. The sea air makes up a bit of her childhood air. We all start at childhood. She takes a deep breath of the damp air and savors it. And there’s a sharp pain on the back of her head. Then darkness.

River by Laura Vinogradova, translated from the Latvian by Kaija Straumanis, will be available from Open Letter Books in the summer of 2024.

Today’s #WITMonth post is an excerpt fromÌę

is available from better bookstores everywhere, , , or you get your books.

Take a French dinner party. In Paris. Chez Armand. A chic dinner. The kind I don’t go to. Pearls, crystal, the works.

Observe the guests. Scientifically. They turn to the left and right. Shake their heads. Gesture repeatedly with their right arms in a manner known as pronation. Devote themselves to mastication, mouths closed, I should add. And between two tiny mouthfuls, I should add, they move their lips constantly. Like this.

Because for them, ladies and gentlemen, conversation has replaced everything else. They neither laugh nor belch. Belching went out of fashion with regicide. That’s the remark my brother-in-law made just to mortify me. At the table. In front of everyone. The day of the funeral. As I was choking back a hiccup between two sobs.

In the time of the Bourbon Louis, he announced with ludicrous pedantry, there was an official called the hastener who was in charge of the king’s belches. Sometimes the king’s belch was slow in coming, and all the courtiers would wring their hands, quiver with impatience, and turn sorrowful countenances toward the royal valve: But let him hasten, then, let this hastener hasten the sacred belch of the king! The hastener and his king have been done away with. And belchery with them. Those are great losses indeed.

Still, I thought, not so great as Lucienne’s death. Forgive me, but my grief is as fresh, if I may say so, as a vegetable. I said vegetable. I really shouldn’t have. That’s the word I often use to evoke her, so calm, so—how shall I put it—so superbly lumpish. But let us stifle our grief. And let us return to that dinner party with which I opened my lecture. We may conclude, from our thorough investigation, that while it is generally admitted that speech is the achievement of all mankind, conversation is a specialty that is eminently French.

*

conversation is a specialty that is eminently French.

*

That is our first and most heartening axiom. A specialty, I emphasize this, that is not exportable. Because it is not merchandise. It is even quite the opposite. I shall come back to this essential point. At the proper time. With the methodical turn of mind that is my wont.

We French, I was saying, are champions at conversation. This distinguishing trait, long elevated to the status of a national virtue, made the reputation of France and secured its reign.

Well, that art at which we excel is today in peril. I am sounding the alarm in our little town in hopes of alerting the highest authorities. Mediocrity, ladies and gentlemen, is going international. The fear of offending prevails more and more over the taste for talking. A generous spirit is discredited, if not condemned outright. It is taken for weakness of intellect. From one end of the planet to the other, conversations are all the same. Their poverty of ideas is now in fashion. And their insipidness is sickening.

*

Conversation is going downhill.

*

That will be our second and most distressing axiom. We live, increasingly, without talking to one another. Is no life, then, worth the telling? We live without talking to one another and soon we will live without living, which gives me the shivers.

Conversation is going downhill and the country with it, they go hand in hand. And it is greatly to be feared, if nothing is done, that they will both wind up in the garbage. The vultures will finish the job. You can count on them.

So here, dear ladies and gentlemen of Cintegabelle, is my rescue plan, conceived in the utmost urgency and which I unhesitatingly declare to be of national utility, since by proposing to restore the luster of speech in the eyes of a world that has forgotten how to speak, it aims at nothing less than the civic renewal of our country and the polishing of its image so that, I’m catching my breath, so that, strong in its recovered prestige, the France of tomorrow may assure throughout the world the civilizing mission that has fallen to her from time immemorial. Might I ask you, children, to please stop snickering. And to stop moving your chairs around. It’s irritating.

The subtle art of conversation, however—to which, I venture to say, I have devoted my genius—offers, aside from that patriotic virtue I have just mentioned, other advantages no less excellent albeit less directly civic. And which to my astonishment have not yet been the object of any detailed study.

The first of these advantages is that conversation is very useful for seducing women.

The second is that it’s even handier for succeeding in society.

The third and most surprising is that in bringing joy to mankind, it contributes appreciably to reducing the deficit of the National Health Service. A subject of satisfaction for our government.

Lydie Salvayre

In the interest of clarity, my lecture will scrupulously observe each step of the following outline, which I ask you to please keep in mind.

Part One: The advantages of conversation, already noted, and upon which we will elaborate with a most mathematical rigor.

Part Two: Those conditions favorable to the flowering of conversation, which are ten in number:

—the presence of at least two persons;

—the comfort of the derriùre;

—the ability to keep silent;

—cŽÇłÜ°ùłÙ±đČőČâ;

—c±ôČč°ùŸ±łÙČâ;

—jŽÇłŠłÜ±ôČč°ùŸ±łÙČâ;

—the principle of equality;

—a sense of proportion;

—an insouciant disregard for time;

â€Äì°ù±đ±đ»ćŽÇłŸ.

Part Three: Five examples of conversation selected from among the most common categories:

—amorous conversation;

—literary conversation;

—political conversation;

—patriotic conversation;

—conversation with the dead.

The whole thing enlivened by a number of axioms with which I am not at all displeased. I’m rather fond of axions.

*

So, Part One: The advantages of conversation.

The first of the advantages of conversation, as I was saying, and not the least of them, is that conversation always finds remarkable favor with women. Every last one of them goes into raptures before a clever conversationalist, be he cross-eyed, pot-bellied, warty, a journalist, or deformed. Take me: noticeably ill-favored, with big ears, and a cowlick I spend hours plastering down, I was an immediate hit with Lucienne (a woman impervious to poetry and little given to linguistic acrobatics) the second I began to babble. And I must confess that my verbal vivacity and florid declarations (I commanded, at the time, a whole battery of tricks, classified by genre) did more to lift up her redoubtable skirt than any fumbling gesture I’d never have dared make anyway. I wasn’t that stupid. And kew for a fact that

*

women’s genitals communicate with their ears.

*

If, gentlemen—for it is to you, men of Cintegabelle, that I speak—if nevertheless you prove unable to resist the summons of the flesh, if you are seized with the desire to place your hand on the knee of an altogether too concupiscible woman, I urge you most emphatically: under no circumstances interrupt your harangue. Without ceasing to chatter, keep gaining ground. Advance stealthily and with ingratiating ploys. Like the sinuous serpent of desire. Pursue your reputation garlanded with pretty turns of phrase. In perfect synchrony, lay compliments at her feet and hands on her modesty. From poems to promises, from promises to prattle, you will proceed without mishap to the inevitable place. Once there, stop talking! Pounce!

The second advantage of conversation concerns in particular those scheming, bloodthirsty youths who crave a brilliant career in the Arts and Letters. You will find such young men everywhere, and our town is no exception.

That’s right, my little wolf cubs in the first row, I’ll have you know that you will achieve more through a funny remark, a turn of phrase, or a flash of wit than through your girlfriend’s sex appeal, a complete familiarity with the twelve volumes of Quintilian’s De Institutione Oratoria, and even the outstanding dishonesty that in France ranks demonstrably among the most important factors of success.

You see, I have a friend (who shall remain nameless), a regional writer, an expert on the arts and crafts of Languedoc, who, whenever he goes out in society, flounders, stammers, stares like an idiot at his perfectly ordinary shoes, and can only bleat “Ah” and “Oh” and “Uh” and sometimes “Hee-hee.” Now, although each of these onomatopoeias contains a world of perplexity and terrifying apprehension, they do absolutely nothing to fuel the fires of literate conversation. As for the few times when this friend is invited to appear on a television program, it’s just pitiful to hear him sputter away! Result: he gets no name recognition, as the rabble say.

*

Lousy conversation is social suicide.

*

Through a quite common misunderstanding, his poor speaking skills make a poor impression on people, whose low opinion of him we find most unfair. But the world is made in such a way that

*

it is not enough to be talented,

one must also look the part.

*

This will be our inevitable axiom. The corollary to which is equally inevitable:

*

To appear to be what one is not is ridiculous,

like dressing up a monkey in a three-piece suit.

*

Linda Coverdale

Or wearing one myself. The results are guaranteed!! am grotesque. Lucienne always told me so. She preferred me in a track suit. To my great sorrow. So is better, it seems, to suit one’s style to oneself. And what’s more, one must know one’s own style. And oneself. And how to make them work together. All that isn’t easy. I feel I’m getting bogged down. Which happens whenever I try to think. I see no other way to land on my feet again (one couldn’t dream up a more appropriate expression), no other way than to quote Baltasar GraciĂĄn, a philosopher whom I’ve discovered since my Lulu left me (mourning has its good points, you must admit).

When the bottom has fallen out of everything, this thinker wrote, nothing can replace it. And although you can spruce up what the English refer to as the “packaging” (it’s me speaking now), try as you may to decorate the emptiness with ruffles, doll it up, swathe it in tissue paper, beribbon it with fancy words and frills, the emptiness stubbornly, imperturbably, remains. I will let you meditate a moment on what I’ve just said, before issuing the following warning.

Warning:

Whoever considers the subtle art of conversation simply a useful skill for social climbing is a fool and a cipher. For conversation presupposes, ladies and gentlemen (before swelling into chamber music, or jazz, or rock, depending), an incubation period when the riches of the mind ferment, I don’t like that image because it reminds me of cheese, whereas, we’ll get back to this, conversation is not a cheese, another French specialty along with champagne and the famous spirit of collaboration, and if we absolutely had to find a metaphor here, I’d propose that

*

conversation is a wine that improves with age.

*

Which means that in my eyes, it possesses every virtue.And not only does it not preclude either thought or culture. Which are not acquired in one day. Or a hundred. Or a thousand. Lucienne, for example, barely attained their outer edges. And died as lightweight as the day she was born. I’m not speaking of her body, that poor shell, but of her soul, which had the thickness of a blotter. And not only, as I was saying, does conversation not preclude either thought or culture. It positively requires them. Sanctifies them. And celebrates them. Just listen to me, for instance.

The preceding assertion might seem like a perfidious attack against certain modern writers whose profundity of thought and cultural capital—I love that last expression, simply saying it makes me feel rich, but not for long—whose cultural and more particularly syntactic capital is limited to pocket change. But God forbid we should wish them harm! Every poor man is our friend!

Anatomy. Monotony.

Edy Poppy

Original Publication: 2005

Original Publication in English Translation: 2018

Original Publisher in English: Dalkey Archive Press

Although I’m filing this as a “Reading the Dalkey Archive” post, it’s actually about two books: by Norwegian author Edy Poppy, translated by May-Brit Akerholt, and by Norwegian author Nina Lykke, translated by B. L. Crook.

And no, I’m not putting these two books together simply because they’re both by female Norwegian authors; I’m putting them in conversation because they’re both about extramarital affairs, the quest for romantic freedom and satisfaction, and jealousy. The two novels explore two different approaches—an open marriage, a secret affair—to the dissatisfaction, or incompleteness, so often found in traditional relationships.

They also present two different types of monotony. In Poppy’s book, the repetitive nature of the couple’s open relationship—taking a lover, returning to one’s “primary” partner, cutting things off, starting again—becomes repetitive. Poppy states this much more eloquently in her conversation with Siri Hustvedt (read the whole conversation ):

I had sent them an early version of the novel, then called:ÌęSpeculations ÄąčœŽ«Ăœ What Once Was, But That I Can Now Only Remember. In return I got a big analysis of my work and a refusal. One criticism was regarding the marriage of my main protagonists, a Norwegian wannabe writer called VĂ„r and her French husband and mentor Lou. It was that the couple’s constant love experimentation was resulting in an unexpected form of monotony. Of repetition. And even though it was meant negatively, I thought, well, that’s very interesting; I want to explore that more, not less! I understood many things about my writing through this rejection.

In Natural Causes, the monotony is of the narrator ·Ą±ôŸ±ČÔ’s life and marriage. She’s a general practitioner whose patients tend do the same things over and over again. (Sometimes dangerous, such as continuing to smoke and drink, never to diet. Other times not so dangerous, but just as annoying, such as the hypochondriac who never stops coming in hoping for a diagnosis.) And her relationship with her husband, who is obsessed only with participating in skiing competitions, is a total monotonous drag.

There’s an affinity between these two books, a shared urge between the two female protagonists to find the best way to keep going, to live a life that’s fulfilling in a way that feels deserved and right.

*

But let’s back up and take these one at a time.

Anatomy. Monotony. is the story of VĂ„r who, like any good protagonist in a Dalkey book, is struggling to write a book about her relationship with her husband. She’s married to Lou, but early on in their marriage was encouraged by him to maintain an incredibly passionate, almost obsessive relationship with a painter. (He’s referred to as “The Painter” in the excerpts from the novel she’s writing, and referred to as “The Lover” in the “real life” sections of the novel. I’ll use “The Lover” from here on out.)

A thruple, in modern parlance, and one that works . . . sort of . . . for a time. Lou encourages her to pose for, be painted by, and make love to The Lover; and VĂ„r is caught between the love and desire she has for her husband and the freedom he allows, and the near animalistic passion she experiences only with The Lover.

But then, jealousy. And things end with The Lover.

“The Lover and I . . . We could never get enough. It was on the border of cannibalism . . . I really loved him, I truly did, I almost sacrificed Lou. But then it turned out to be wrong after all. Because now it’s over. Now I feel something else, less painful, safer . . . Friendship.”

The Lover remains a constant in the background, throughout the rest of the novel, sometimes as the friend VĂ„r wants to talk with late at night, the love she hasn’t really “gotten over” (one of the best lines in the book is “nostalgia doesn’t mean anything other than what used to be is over, and now you wish it could be again”), and as an experiment that maybe went too far—at least for Lou. Which is why he proposes a sort of game, a chance to do it all over again, to find a similar type of freedom, but that this time he’ll be able to handle himself, to deal with the jealousy, to do things right.

Of course, in the present time in the book, Lou has gotten quite involved with Sidney, a young girl who resembles Jane Birkin (R.I.P.), and with whom he takes lots of long walks, pines over, randomly spends nights with, so on and so forth. Which makes VĂ„r jealous.

In her words: “Jealousy is something I have nothing but contempt for, but it still gnaws away inside me. I refuse to be broken.”

So Lou makes a proposal. With a sort of Nietzschean logic he tells VĂ„r that if she falls in love with someone again, like she did with The Lover, he’ll leave Sidney for good.

Enter The American. A cello player (his cello being the “only woman I’ve never left, and who has never left me,” a line so cheesy that Lou’s mocking groan slightly vindicates him) who lives in Amsterdam, has written a composition called “The Sexual Life of Plants” (another groan) that he’s about to debut, and with whom VĂ„r has an instant, intense connection.

I don’t want to recount this book beat for beat—and to be honest, I’m cherry-picking moments here to try and logically build a sordid situation, whereas the book itself is muddier in a delightful, emotional way with semi-erotic digressions and meditations, and lots of other details rounding out these characters and their love affairs—but I wanted to get to this point, because this is where the masculine jealousy really starts to kick in.

Jealousy is always bad. And masculine jealousy is toxic and frequently dangerous.

Edy Poppy

If what I’ve written so far has you at all interested, you really should read this book for yourself. If you’ve ever felt love for multiple people at once, regret a relationship from the past that went sour or ended, or simply entertained the possibility of a nontraditional arrangement (“I never dreamed of finding the man of my life. I wanted to be independent. Free. Feminist. Lou, on the other hand, always dreamed about finding the woman of his life, even if he didn’t dream that this woman would be me. He wanted to be dependent. Macho. But it didn’t turn out like that.”), this book will raise a lot of questions and bring to light a lot of complicated feelings.

There’s also a pervasive sense of male creep throughout this novel, which the book undermines without being didactic or strident. Occasionally Poppy will be direct and on point, like in this passage:

“I mean that you should go to Amsterdam, VĂ„r, that you should see, smell, feel, and let yourself be ‘fertilized’ . . .” says Lou and mocks me with the American’s clichĂ©. “That you should take a chance. And if it goes to hell, if it goes the way I want it to . . . then I’ll take you back.” [Emphasis mine.]

But oftentimes the creep is just lurking, there in the background, in the form of phone calls and questions, and a latent desire to control the narrative . . . which all leads to a surprise (in part because it is not physically violent) resolution.

*

By contrast with VĂ„r, Elin in has always lived within the bounds of what’s deemed “acceptable.” From the way she deals with her patients (who all test the bounds of her patience in different ways, each expecting the world, a quick and easy solution, without consideration for anyone or anything else), to her cozy life with her husband in a totally pleasant suburban community.

It’s not that she’s “buttoned down,” rather that that’s just the way things are. You work hard, earn a decent salary, live a comfortable life, and enjoy (maybe too much) drinking wine.

And then, almost by accident, she messages her former boyfriend—the one before her husband, the one with jealousy issues—and her life swerves.

At the start of Lykke’s novel, a year has passed since Elin sent that initial message, and a lot has happened. Most notably, ·Ą±ôŸ±ČÔ’s been having an affair with BjĂžrn, and more notably, her husband just found out. And unlike Lou from Anatomy. Monotony., he’s not about to entertain the possibility of any sort of “open” relationship.

What follows are essentially two plotlines: one recounting the development of the affair with BjĂžrn, the joy and freedom and hope and peace it brings to ·Ą±ôŸ±ČÔ’s life, the other a micro-analysis of her day at the clinic and all the stresses and impossible requests the average person makes of doctors and science in today’s day and age.

These intersect and bounce off one another, and equally held my interest, but for the sake of this particular piece, the affair is the only one I really want to write about.

In this instance, the jealousy displayed Ÿ±ČőČÔ’t necessarily as tinged with destructiveness—or at least that Ÿ±ČőČÔ’t the primary focus when it comes to Aksel, ·Ą±ôŸ±ČÔ’s husband—instead it plays as a sort of selfish narcissism, an inability on her husband’s part to understand ·Ą±ôŸ±ČÔ’s needs and desires. (“Aksel might have wanted the same thing that I did, that we would get over this crisis and grow from it and keep the home fire and the hearth fire and the daily fire burning, but none of that helped as long as other parts of him did not agree. And since these other parts of him were the parts that determined the basic functions, he was unable to sleep as long as I was next to him in the bed.”) And that’s just as hurtful, and just as disappointing. Especially since Elin sees the vibrancy gained through her relationship with BjĂžrn as a potential positiveÌęfor her relationship with her husband.

And yet, quite clearly, and with my full consciousness, I noticed how quickly the normal, ordinary version of myself was replaced by this being who must have been asleep inside of me, and who behaved contrary to all of the things I’d said and believed up to that point.

Early on I began thinking in this way: What if I can take this energy and joy which I’ve found, all of this secretiveness and excitement, everything that’s welling up inside me, and which makes me have less desire for drinking wine and watching TV and everything else that I used to chew and drink and swallow in order to soothe and calm myself—what if this could give me and Aksel a new life?

By applying a kind of controlled and intelligently designed alchemy, the illegal would become legal, the dirty would become pure, and the painful would transform into something edifying. The end would sanctify the means, and all of this goodness, this wonderfulness, the delectable, the forbidden, would be permitted to go on and on and on, for eternity.

Nina Lykke

I’m not going to use this (very small) platform to promote cheating on your spouse, or necessarily embracing an open relationship—which Ÿ±ČőČÔ’t for everyone, and can be tricky even for those who are into it—but it’s not unusual to reach a certain age and, despite the quality of your relationships, feel like there might be something more. Not necessarily a Grand Love Affair, or a Passion for the Ages, but a connection that is invigorating. Life is simultaneously very short and very long, and confining a person’s ability to love and experience—especially the way men have traditionally restricted their wives—feels so small and petty and limited.

And although neither of these books offer any direct solution to this age-old issue, they both wrestle with the complexities and paradoxes of love and freedom in ways that will definitely resonate with a wide swathe of readers—male and female, jealous or supportive.

*

To return to Anatomy. Monotony. for one second, with that idea of complexity and paradox in mind, it’s worth thinking about the way in which VĂ„r is writing what is essentially autofiction inside of Poppy’s novel that, well, reads like autofiction.

The book is dedicated to: “my husband, who has given me everything, even what I didn’t want. (He is now my ex-husband).”

And ends with the Fresán-esque disclaimer: “P.S.: Everything I’ve written is true apart from what I’ve invented.”

Finally, there’s this quote from VĂ„r that’s right at the heart of desire’s contradictions: “I answer that to miss me is wrong. That to miss me is the same as wasting time. A lot. If he can’t forget me. I close my eyes and I suppose that deep down, that’s what I hope. That I’m unforgettable.”

Mulligan Stew

Gilbert Sorrentino

Original Publication: 1979

Original Publisher: Grove Press

First Dalkey Archive Edition: 1996

“Cheers!” So this may be the first—but definitely not the last—entry in this series that is kind of weird.

First off, unlike the earlier posts, which try to say something semi-comprehensive about the book in question, this one is more of an invitation: I want everyone who reads this to join along with the landmark 20^th Season of the Two Month Review podcast and read with us throughout September and October. (And maybe a bit into November. Our idea of “months” and “time” is a bit slippery.)

Additionally, as TMR progresses, I’m going to be adding to this post every week. This may take the form of quotes, short analysis, info from outside sources, whatever. But in the end, it will be a chronicle of reading Mulligan Stew, rather than a static, singular post.

Anyway! Let’s dig in! Five reasons to read Mulligan Stew:

1) Sorrentino’s Reputation.

Gilbert Sorrentino is a foundational Dalkey Archive author. Actually, more than that, he’s like the literary father figure that the press’s catalog aspires to impress. He was one of John O’Brien’s aesthetic mentors, and a very close friend who was instrumental in the foundation of the Review of Contemporary Fiction and the press as a whole. (I think they came up with the name “Dalkey Archive Press” together.) The number of stories I heard about “Gil”—even though Gil was no longer speaking to John at the time, which, gulp, yeah, I totally get—could fill volumes. I heard about how Gil didn’t have any depth perception, thus fuck metaphor. I heard about the people who lived in the apartment complex that was the setting for Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, which was the Novel of Dismissive Mean-spiritedness that John latched onto.

Sorrentino’s career was long and varied, seeing that he experimented with form and the possibilities for fiction with each and every book. There may well be a “Sorrentino Voice”—a bit sardonic, sharp observations, exacting in terms of how language and fiction function—but I’m hard pressed to think of a particular style or approach that would define his career. If you talk to a half-dozen Sorrentino fans—all of whom would be more qualified than I am to write this—you’ll end up with an array of both “best” Sorrentino books and suggestions of “where to start” with his oeuvre. —a remarkable meditation of sorts, akin to Gass’s —is a great starting point, although might be the most emotional, and most straightforward in terms of the formal experimentation. might be the funniest—and filled with the most daggers—and is the book everyone should read when they’re preparing for a divorce. is unparalleled in how it captures the ins and outs of a particular Brooklyn neighborhood, and does something similar, but using the tarot as its framework. is a novel in all questions, and, well, Mulligan Stew (my personal favorite and the only of his books with its own Wikipedia entry) is a complete blast from start to finish.

2) It’s a Book about Writing a Book.

The most Dalkey of all Dalkey tropes! But in this case, rather than focusing on the difficulties of figuring out how to write a book, Mulligan Stew revels in the generative nature of creation, spilling forth list after list, joke after joke, opinion after opinion. It’s like Flann O’Brien on crack, with a touch of the movies covered on the How Did This Get Made? podcast.

Here’s the set-up, as simply as I can put it: Antony Lamont is an experimental writer who has never really received the attention he (thinks) he deserves for his novels. But this new book he’s working on? This is going to be the one. A “new wave murder mystery” narrated by the killer, that merges detective fiction and high literature. And is populated by characters he’s borrowed from James Joyce, Dashiell Hammett, etc., etc. (Antony Lamont is a reference to Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds)—characters who, when Lamont Ÿ±ČőČÔ’t paying attention (aka, actively writing about them), they’re exploring the half-written house they live in and the nearby town, seeking a way out of this horribly written book. In addition to excerpts from the “novel in progress” and the characters inside, we get to read Lamont’s increasingly unhinged correspondence with his sister (especially about her husband, his literary nemesis), a professor who maybe wants to teach one of his books, a poet he’s trying to get into bed, and so so much more.

3) Myriad Forms That Dissect the Nature of Writing.

Although there are certain recurring bits, a big appeal of this book—for me at least—is its diversity of forms, aping everything from detective novels to erotica to epistolary novels to surreal plays to . . . And in each instance, Sorrentino via Lamont manages to expose the quirks and flaws and oddnesses at the limits of fiction. Things that conventional novels coax us into ignoring are presented so baldly in this novel in a way that’s funny and aesthetically captivating.

This will become more and more apparent over the course of this season of TMR, but here are a few fun little quotes to whet your appetite.

First, this is from the front matter, which is a series of rejections of the novel Mulligan Stew:

Dear Gilbert Sorrentino:

It’s wonderful of you to think of us here at New Views Press as possible publishers for your new novel, MULLIGAN STEW. Wow! as my seven-year-old says, all too often, six hundred pages sounds like something! When you say you worked on it almost four years, I can well believe you!

I’m afraid my “batting average” at second-guessing “the Boss” is somewhat less than 1.000 right now, but I’ll go “out on a limb” and risk telling you that it seems very doubtful that we can even consider taking it on, “alas”!

I’m sure you’ve read the newspaper “stories”—albeit many of them were predictably exaggerated—on the dolphin-training project that L was deeply involved in and that came, unfortunately, “a-cropper.” L was rather upset, partly because of the money loss involved, but more importantly, because he hoped to publish an anthology of “Dolphin Poems,” translated by Dr. Mullion Blasto. You can imagine what a “blow” it was to L when Blasto went with Disney. But enough of our troubles!

At the moment, as above noted, I would venture a tentative guess that L simply could not think of publishing such a work as yours. We are still “picking up the pieces” here. I take the liberty of wishing you and yours well, and of extending L’s good wishes to you.

To “good letters,”

John Cates

Managing Editor

Next up, a poem from Lorna Flambeaux’s The Sweat of Love:

“Hot Bodies”

 

Hot bodies entwined together

stuck with sweat, the gorgeous guck of love.

We fuck . . .

—all unashamed!

Proud of our . . .

Hot bodies!

In my laughing flesh lies hidden

that dark inferno, Life’s secret Word.

It yearns to reach out and whisper

to your smold’ring core. It CANNOT! It CANNOT!

So you, beloved, in my widespread loins must find

the entrance to this deep and tender Word.

YES!!! YES!!!

Only the dead

say “No” to love. Our hot bodies—are aflame

with Life! And now your Life plunges

to my thrilling deeps . . . OH!!!

. . . I swiftly swoon . . .

And here are some of the clichés a group of cowboy characters have been subjected to by hack writers over all the books they appeared in;

In one job I threw my clothes on at least twenty times.

My interest slackens when I’m forced to watch the smoke from my cigarette curl lazily in the air.

Especially when it’s blue smoke . . . and it’s always blue smoke!

But how often have you thoughtfully knocked out your pipe? Or filled it?

If I stretch luxuriously one more time . . .

Right! But how do you feel about your eyes scanning the horizon?

That’s as bad as not liking it because it’s too quiet.

How many times, I pray you, have you emerged into the sunlight blinking?

Not as many times as I’ve grabbed for the phone.

I once had a position where I wheedled every third page.

I was once dazzlingly insouciant to the point of nausea.

I’m damn sick of getting home and going straight to bed without washing.

I’m just as tired of the sun in my eyes always waking me up.

How do you like the wet streets that shimmer in the fog? I’m up to here with them.

I don’t mind the women whose bosoms heave—unless they crack their gum. Or chew it furiously. Or simper.

I was in a scene once with a woman who primped and simpered. As a matter of fact, I think she also whimpered.

As long as she didn’t whine . . .

 

4) Incredibly Funny.

I think this is obvious by now, but damn, this book is just delightful. Sure, it’s about a writer’s mental breakdown and mental illness is no joke, but holy shit, I dare you to read this book and not laugh. Even the mathematical paper that’s inserted in here (what Ÿ±ČőČÔ’t included?) is funny in a certain light.

But truly, this is a masterpiece of comedic literature. Again, it’s like Extreme Flann O’Brien, or maybe a bit like a contemporary Tristram Shandy. It’s a giant book, and one that does raise—and answer—certain questions about fiction and the craft of writing (this is one of Sorrentino’s “writer’s writer” sort of books), but it’s a book that truly entertains on every page. There are bits—often crass or crude—that function more like traditional jokes, but most of the humor arises from the voices—also frequently crass and crude—found throughout, especially Antony Lamont’s which is soooooo self-serious at times, frequently cringey, and increasingly more and more batshit.

5) Bad Writing Is So Good.

It’s really hard to pull off, but intentionally bad writing is so rewarding to read. Just like really bad movies can be so fun. I used to spout off about—at every logical opportunity—a “theory” I had about art that ~95% of it is devoutly mediocre: technically competent, fine enough, but basically just average. And instead of wasting time on those sort of middling movies or books, I only wanted to read the truly amazing, and the absolutely awful.

And in Mulligan Stew, you get both!

Bonus: There’s Baseball In It.

Just a moment to insert the scorecard of the baseball game Sollis took me to. Whatever it means! It has a certain arcane beauty to it, though. A conversation piece if I work at a decent job soon? I showed it to Ned just before he left and he glanced at it and laughed long and loud.

*

Again, this book is a one-of-a-kind tour de force that is very re-readable, and a great entryway to the Sorrentino world—I’m looking forward to rereading, and writing about, so many of his books over the next couple years—and I can’t wait to dig into this with my TMR cohost, Brian Wood (author of Joytime Killbox and a forthcoming novel featuring a character whose persona and writing would be right at home in Mulligan Stew), a number of guests, and, hopefully, all of you.

Buy a copy of the book, follow along with the reading schedule, and enjoy this season!

Forthcoming in a new “Dalkey Essentials” edition,Ìę

It’s also one of George Saunders’s favorite books! He plugged the opening line (“The Americans who fell in Normandy in 1944 were tall men measuring 173 centimeters on average, and if they were laid head to foot they would measure 38 kilometers.”) in Elle,Ìęand the book as a whole inÌęBOMB:

It’s an alternate history of the twentieth century, all true, but arranged in a weird way. For example, he starts the fascist era by concentrating on American nationalist groups like the ones Charles Lindbergh was involved with. It throws your whole sense of history off, and yet every word in it is true.

The section below is in honor ofÌęBarbieÌęandÌęOppenheimer.ÌęIt’s long. It’s worth it. Enjoy.

Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century

by Patrik OurednĂ­k

translated from the Czech by Gerald Turner

With the emancipation of women and the invention of contraception and tampons and disposable diapers there were fewer children in Europe but more toys and kindergartens and slides and climbing frames and dogs and hamsters, etc. Sociologists said that the child had become the center of attention in the family and gradually its most influential component also. And children wanted to be independent and have their own identity and did not want to wear their older siblings’ hand-me-down caps or shoes and they always wanted new caps and shoes and colored pencils and construction sets and teddy bears and dolls. In the European countries twelve-and-a-half thousand times more dolls were manufactured in the twentieth century than in the nineteenth century and instead of wood and sawdust they were made of plastics and in the course of time they learnt to whimper and talk and were more and more independent, and they would say good morning and enjoy your meal, for instance, and some of them could weep and burp after eating or sing part of an aria. The best-known doll was called Barbie and was first manufactured in 1959. It was 30 centimeters tall and had big breasts and hips and a slim waist and was the first doll to behave like an adult. Soon it started to talk too and said i’ve got a date with my boyfriend this evening and what will i wear to the dance? and would you like to go clothes shopping with me? At first she was dressed like a ballerina or an actress or a model, then later as a stewardess, a teacher, a veterinarian, a businesswoman, an astronaut, or a presidential candidate. And in 1986, a Barbie doll appeared dressed in a striped concentration-camp uniform and a striped cap too. Various ex-prisoners associations protested and said it made a mockery of the suffering and the memory of the victims, and the manufacturers answered back and said that, on the contrary, it was an appropriate way of acquainting the younger generation with the suffering in the concentration camps, and that little girls who bought the doll in the striped uniform would identify with it and later, when they were grown up, they would more easily comprehend what sort of suffering there was. And in 1998 the Germans came up with the idea of erecting in Berlin a large monument to the victims of the Holocaust, which was to be visible from afar, because, in addition to celebrating some positive historical event, the function of a monument is also to be a warning to future generations. Some people thought that an art object was not the proper way of expressing the Holocaust, which defies all aesthetic rules, and others concluded that the ideal project would be one that expressed the fact that the Holocaust defied expression. And four hundred and ninety-five artists sent various proposals for expressing a warning to future generations and one proposed manufacturing a large, eight-colored, six-pointed star turning on its own axis, and others proposed constructing an enormous Ferris wheel, on which concentration-camp wagons would be hung in place of the usual fair-ground cars, and others proposed constructing a large bus station with red buses and timetables on which the terminal stations would be the names of concentration camps, and others proposed erecting thirty-nine steel posts on which why? would be written in various languages, warum?, waarom?, varfĂžr?, proč?, pourquoi?, perchĂ©?, dlaczego?, cĆ«r?, kuida?, miksi?, miĂ©rt?, zakaj?, kodĂȘl?, hvorfor?, jiatĂ­?, pse?, niçin?, etc. Some people were of the opinion that it ought to be a monument to the victims not only of the Holocaust, but of all possible genocides, because only in that way would it contain the living historical memory, otherwise it would be simply a heap of steel or iron that would say nothing to anyone within twenty or so years. And some historians said that building monuments was problematic in all events, because preserving the memory of some event did not of itself guarantee that it would not be repeated, and they provided instances of preserving memory that had led to fresh conflicts and wars.

The Jews who survived the Holocaust said that monuments and museums, etc., were important, but that best of all were direct testimonies, and they would visit schools to tell the pupils what they had gone through. And they wondered how to preserve the memory of the Holocaust after their deaths, and the Swedish association of former Jewish prisoners recommended passing on their testimony to some young person, who would learn it by heart and visit schools and tell the pupils that they had known someone who had experienced such and such. And before they died they would pass the testimony on to another young person, etc. And in 1945, the Jews issued an appeal to public opinion, requesting the establishment of an Israeli state in Palestine, where the Jews could be among their own and would not have to fear any more holocausts. And they fought against the Arabs and the English, who were occupying Palestine at the time, and organized assassinations and illicit immigration operations. And in 1939, the English decreed immigration quotas that reduced the number of Jewish immigrants by 75% and enacted a law prohibiting Jews from buying land. And in 1947, a ship docked in Palestine with illegal Jewish immigrants from Germany and the English sent it back again. And in 1938, the Swedish government requested the German authorities to insert a capital J in passports for Jews, so that the Swedish frontier police could recognize a Jew who did not look like one. The ship that docked in Palestine was called exodus after a book of the Old Testament and 4,500 Jews were sailing in her, having survived the concentration camps and wanting to return to the Promised Land. And in November, the United Nations voted in favor of the creation of the State of Israel. And lots of people in Europe traveled to Israel to see the new state in creation. And young people from Europe went to work in Jewish agricultural communes known as kibbutzim, where everyone worked for the good of all. And everything was shared and everyone sang songs together. And the Israeli travel agencies issued posters on which young people with serious expressions observed the sun rising over Jerusalem, and underneath was written our suffering was not in vain and take advantage of low prices.

Sexologists said that the Barbie doll was the first tool for inculcating a feminine identity in young girls, and the doll’s successful reception proved that child sexuality existed. Child sexuality was much spoken about in the twentieth century after it was discovered that little girls would like to have a child with their father, which was actually a substitute penis because little girls would like a penis too, and the doll was a child from their father and a penis at the same time. For a long time only little girl dolls were made but then they started to manufacture little boy dolls, and little girl dolls had a groove between their legs and little boy dolls had a little penis. And in the seventies, they started to manufacture black or brown dolls, although they were mostly bought by white parents who wanted to show their children they were not racists. Racism was a theory from the nineteenth century that said that the human races have immutable characteristics, and they were at different levels of development and the most developed were the white race which had an innate sense of social organization and abstract thought and convivial entertainment, and a racist was someone who feared that mixing between races jeopardized the specific characteristics of the white race and eroded the genetic potential that enabled the whites to continue advancing in the forefront of mankind. People who did not like Jews were not racists but anti-Semites, because the Jews were not strictly regarded as inferior, like Negroes, Indians, Gypsies, etc., but more of a natural aberration. The word anti-Semite appeared at the end of the nineteenth century and denoted a person who did not want the Jews to rule the world and called on their fellow citizens to resist. Racism became a major social problem after the Second World War because large ethnic minorities settled in the rich European countries, and society had to absorb them. There existed two models for absorbing ethnic minorities—integration and assimilation, and integration was adopted by countries that believed that various cultural models could coexist within civil society and that it was better not to mix one with another and for each of them to preserve its specific character, and assimilation was implemented by countries that believed in universalism and were of the opinion that there existed a higher social interest that took precedence over specific ethnic and cultural characteristics. For a long while it looked as if the assimilation model was more successful, because in the countries that implemented it there were no race riots such as there were in England, America, etc., but at the end of the century, when people started to talk about globalism, universalism went out of fashion and everybody wanted to have their own identity and be proud of their race, but not in the sense of race, but civilization and live in accordance with traditions and return to their roots, etc.

Sex became very important in Europe in the twentieth century, more important than religion and almost as important as money, and everyone wanted to have sexual intercourse in different ways and some men rubbed their sexual organ with cocaine to prolong their erection even though cocaine was banned in all circumstances. And after the Second World War films started to include scenes in which the leading characters had sexual intercourse, which was previously considered improper because lots of people still believed in God and sexual intercourse was generally only hinted at by a shot of a bed or a clock or the sky, or it suddenly went dark. And women wanted to have orgasms all the time and that made men nervous and they had problems with erections and tried various aphrodisiacs and attended psychoanalysis to discover where the problem lay, such as whether they might have suffered some childhood trauma that they were unaware of. Psychoanalysis was invented in 1900 by a Viennese neurologist who wanted to study mental processes and evaluate subjects by means of the unconscious, and he came to the conclusion that neurosis, hysteria, etc., were symptoms of sexual traumas in childhood, and he devised for this purpose new methods and concepts such as repetitive compulsion, regression, repression, ego, superego, libido and complexes, which could be either Oedipal or castration complexes. And in 1938 he fled from the Nazis to London and four of his sisters died in concentration camps. And when patients knew why they were depressed and neurotic they immediately felt better because it was normal. Communists said that people who lived in a Communist society had no need for sex because people’s greatest happiness should be from work well done, whereas in capitalism people did not get enjoyment from their work because they were exploited and therefore resorted to various surrogates. And they said that without class consciousness sex could not bring satisfaction even it were repeated endlessly and they were afraid that if people were to attend psychoanalysis and resort to surrogates it would threaten the cohesion of the socialist camp. And they did not want people to read decadent books or wear garish clothes, have eccentric hairstyles, chew gum, etc. Chewing-gum was invented by an American pharmacist and was first sold in Europe in 1903, although its use spread mainly in the fifties and sixties. It was mostly chewed by young people, who thereby expressed their attitude towards society and didn’t have fillings in their mouths yet.

In the fifties film heroes usually had sexual intercourse in cornfields because cornfields were associated with youth and the new life awaiting the young heroes, and wind ruffled the ears of corn as the sun sank on the horizon and women’s bosoms heaved, and in the sixties film heroes had sexual intercourse in the surf on the ocean shore because it was romantic and sand clung to their skin, and their bottoms could be seen, and mist hung over the water. [. . .]

The Book of Jokes

Momus

Original publication: 2009

Original publisher: Dalkey Archive

is first original Dalkey ArchiveÌę title to be part of this series, and woo-boy is it a doozy. If you’re playing “Offensive Dalkey Archive Content Bingo,” you’re all set! There are jokes about incest, religion, women, pedophilia, murder, shit, penises, farmyard animals . . . and probably a dozen other potentially offensive bits, all wrapped up in a semi-metafictional story that eschews realism in favor of something much more unhinged and provocative.

In other words, it’s your average Dalkey title: a NSFW that values form over content, exploring the idea of what a novel can be rather than producing a straightforward depiction of “life.”

It’s also very entertaining and a delightful (yes, I’m going with “delightful”) representation of three key elements of joke telling that left me literally (yes, literally) laughing out loud, receiving deservedly strange looks from everyone on the bus, in the bar, at the library. (All places I would not recommend reading this filthy book.)

(Also: probably not a great idea to read from over Zoom, at a staff meeting. Just saying.)

But before we get to the meat of the matter, what is this book and who is Momus?

Last things first: Momus is Nick Currie, a Scottish musician and rabble rouser, whose songs include “” (for which he was sued by Michelin Tire Company for using their mascot as a metaphor for “hypersexualized rubber fetishism”[1]), “” (for which he was sued by Wendy Carlos, since the song “postulated that after post-sexual reassignment surgery, Wendy could travel back in time to marry her pre-surgery self”[2]), but also “,” and “.” Not to mention, he was an influence on Jarvis Cocker and Pulp and Suede—and was friends with Justine Frischmann of Elastic (1990s Chad just )—and worked with Cornelius. (If you want a fast introduction to his music,Ìęis a great place to start.)

So yeah, controversial, but also quite influential and a serious, respected musician and artist.

And is the first of six novels (The Book of Scotlands, The Book of Japans, UnAmerica) along with a memoir from FSG entitled Niche: A Memoir in Pastiche.Ìę(I don’t know the backstory for how Dalkey came to do this book, nor whyÌęNicheÌęappears to only be available as an audiobook only . . . )

So, although it’s fun to play up the controversial, enfant terrible aspects of his life and art, that’s not entirely fair. Controversy sells—and invites cancellation—but being an artist across decades, across media is such a curious challenge. (Both David Bowie and Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X come to mind.) When you’re a true working artist, there’s so much more at play—so many songs, so many books, so many performances. And sticking just his writing for now, The Book of Jokes is an absolute blast that’s hard to put down—except to laugh—and, to continue proving Momus’s credentials to an imagined audience unaware of his work, this books was favorably reviewed by the , who compared him to John Barth and Robert Coover. (Two other Dalkey authors.)

So what is The Book of Jokes actually about? Well, being trapped in a narrative determined by dirty jokes—what else?

Call it “joke dharma,” if you like. Bad jokes, dirty jokes are, to my world, what the force of gravity is to yours. They shape every event in my life, and in the life of my family. I am not sure why it is so, but that it is, I cannot doubt. As a result, I live in a grim mirror world. I am a character trapped in a book of jokes—jokes, furthermore, which are in very poor taste.

Our narrator, trapped in this bizarro world in which life is like a blue Cinemax stand-up special, is in jail, where he has two companions: a molester and a murderer. The triad (back to this idea in a minute) decide to escape and, since obviously none of them have committed the crimes for which they were imprisoned, agree to commit the exact crimes they were convicted of, so that, in a weird, karmic way, they make up for the time they’ve already spent behind bars.

That storyline runs throughout the novel, serving as a clothesline off of which to hang one offensive story from Sebastian Skeleton’s life and childhood after another. It’s not entirely satisfying in terms of a “plot,” but it functions the way it should, starting from a conversation about whether someone could “have an uncle who was also his nephew” and ending with a quite satisfying twist: “We weren’t speaking to you,” we say, speaking to you.

But for me—someone who pretends, too frequently, especially when intoxicated, to have aspirations of doing stand-up comedy, one-time, some day—this novel is primary a taxonomy of joke structures. (Or at least three particular structures.)

Joke Structure #1: The Unexpected Ending

One theory of what makes funny things funny is the way in a joke’s set-up takes you right up to the edge of a relatively reasonable explanation, but then veers. The unexpected is what catches you off guard and, especially when it transgresses certain taboos, allows a momentary catharsis in the form of laughter.

Momus takes this to the extreme, sure, and, in that extreme, pulls out a few different laughs.

“Okay, Dad, here’s another. One dark, stormy night a couple are in a car driving fast through a foreign city. The car breaks down and the husband has to go and get help from someone who can speak his language. He’s afraid to leave his wife alone in the car, so he winds up the windows and locks the car before leaving. When he returns the car is in the same state he left it in, but his wife is dead, there’s blood on the floor and there’s a stranger in the car. Explain what happened.”

“Well,” explained Dad, “the car broke down because the husband crashed it, killing his wife. The stranger was a policeman, investigating the crash. The man had been afraid to leave his dead wife alone because the area was a notorious necrophilia black spot.”

“A necrophilia black spot?” asked Luisa. “What does that mean?”

“It means a place where there are a lot of people living who like to fuck dead people,” explained my father.

“Are they marked with traffic signs?” asked Luisa. [. . .]

“No,” I said, “no, top marks for imagination, Dad, but that’s not right. The wife was about to give birth. They were on their way to a hospital. While the man was fetching help the baby was born, but the wife died in childbirth.”

“You’re an incredibly boring person,” said my father.

The real joke in there is the “traffic signs,” but you can only get there via the absurdity of the father’s “guess,” which is its own sort of set-up.

Joke Structure #2: And and and and and and and and

Here’s where I attempt to tie this post into the one on Djuna Barnes’s Ryder . . .

So, as I was reading this book—and trying to explain to friends and family why I liked it so much—and what kept coming to mind was . Not only for the filth baked into every telling of that joke ( and Sarah Silverman’s are still legendary), but for the overstuffing, the endlessly adding to the jokes, the improv that never stops . . . because whatever you add in there only makes the joke even funnier.

It’s not as dirty, but in college I would love to get really stoned and tell the “horse’s ass” joke. The one in which a young kid, let’s call him Jimmy, goes to the circus, and gets called out of the audience by a clown so that he, Jimmy, can be part of a joke—THE GREATEST MOMENT OF HIS LIFE—and the clown says, “are you a horse’s head?” “No . . .” “Well then, you must be a horse’s ass!” Massive laughter erupts from throughout the big top, and the kid, poor little Jimmy, who’s friendless and saw this chance, him, in the spotlight with a clown!, to be his one shining moment after which, duh and or obviously, Bethany would totally read all his love notes (reminder: never write love notes), pisses his pants so gushingly that everyone—even in the nosebleed section—can see the stream pouring down his bare legs, darkening the sawdust at his feet. More laughter. It’s fucking hysterical. More embarrassment for Jimmy. And a sudden, lifelong, Captain Ahab level quest for revenge.

That set-up—which is fine in its own right, premised upon a bit that, if we’re being honest, isn’t really all that funny—functions as the launchpad for the (stoned) joke-teller to just start riffing. Sure, there are beats that must be hit—Jimmy prepares and prepares, has a second meeting with the clown, fails, regathers his strength, trains again, finds the clown a third time—but the joy is in the details.

LIKE WITH RYDER the information, the message is not the point: it’s how you get there.

Where do you take Jimmy? Exactly what sort of preparation does he go through before the ultimate confrontation with clown? As the (stoned) joke-teller, you can send him to Comeback University. Or to Mars. Maybe the Amazon to spend a decade gathering wisdom from a tribe that specializes in getting verbal revenge. Whatever you want to do, (stoned) joke-teller, go for it! The more ludicrous the better. Go all out, make the joke lasts 30 minutes (or, well, ten? stoned joke-tellers are prone to exaggerate), add as many detours as you want, then land it with the extremely simple punchline.

And, of course, about three-quarters of the way through The Book of Jokes, after several other examples of the “and and and and and and and” joke structure, we finally get the aristocrats joke.

“. . . When he comes, a huge bucket of sperm is tipped over us from above and the curtains swing shut as we writhe about in it.”

Farquar looked thunderstruck. “And what do you call this act?” he asked.

“I can’t think of a name,” said my father.

Joke Structure #3: The second time is annoying, the fifth time is golden

I am so guilty of this! (And NOT just when I’m a stoned joke-teller!)

Trebling is one thing—the threes that pervade folklore, joke telling (“a molester, a murderer, and a narrator meet in prison”)—but when you take a particular line, a short bit and turn it into a motif that recurs and morphs and structures a comedy set, a night, a novel . . . that’s so much funnier. Instead of playing it twice for tragedy, and thrice for comedy, play it ten times and make it more and more outrageous.

I absolutely can not give away what the running gag is in The Book of Jokes, which is killing me and, I swar, if you get me on the phone, I’ll tell you the joke AND make it extra dirty! For now though, trust me, it’s good. (And I’m neither stoned, nor telling the joke!) The original joke is great, and every single iteration got me—even when I could see it coming a mile off—and the final variation brings the whole thing home.

*

Anyway, since it’s “Dalkey Music Week” on Three Percent, I’m going to leave you with these lyrics from Momus’s “”:

I like you, and I’d like you to like me to like you
But I don’t need you
Don’t need you to want me to like you
Because if you didn’t like me
I would still like you, you see
La la la
La la la

I lick you, I like you to like me to lick you
But I don’t need you
Don’t need you to like me to lick you
If your pleasure turned into pain
I would still lick for my personal gain
La la la
La la la

I fuck you, and I love you to love me to fuck you
But I don’t fucking need you
Don’t need you to need me to fuck you
If you need me to need you to fuck
That fucks everything up
La la la
La la la

*

[1] From Wikipedia

[2] Again, Wikipedia

Ryder

Djuna Barnes

Original Publication: 1928

Original Publisher: Boni & Liveright

First Dalkey Archive Edition: 1990

This is a baggy novel of excess, and as someone who finds it nearly impossible to keep the thread—or develop a coherent thesis (any and all AI grading systems would plant my writings firmly in the C to C+ range)—and who, by natural gift, or curse, likes to overstuff every post with footnotes and asides and self-references, I’m willing to bet that this appreciation of Barnes’s playfully polyamorous novel of Wendall Ryder, his mother Sophia, his wife Amelia, his lover Kate (aka Kate-Careless), and all their myriad kids, Ÿ±ČőČÔ’t going to follow from point A to Z, but instead follow a more natural path of observation and exclamation, admiration and exhalation, repetition and repetition, all with the singular (maybe I can stick to something?) goal of convincing anyone who braves these paragraphs to read this book, or, if nothing else, at least skip-around in it.[1]

I’m convinced that Djuna Barnes is about to have her (overdue and deserved) renaissance.

By sheer coincidence (and laws about public domain), not only is Dalkey reissuing Ryder in a splashy new “Essentials Edition” this summer—with a new printing of Ladies Almanack coming early next year—but New York Review Books Classics is bringing out a Collected Stories in 2024 (?—as I write this, I can’t find a proper listing), with an introduction by MervĂ© Emre.[2]

And thus, the pieces are in place and the stage is set. But Barnes’s lasting appeal goes far beyond business machinations of the marketplace. She was a singular writer, with an approach and style so many readers of today will likely delight in discovering. The Lispector rediscovery comes to mind, although, on a stylistic level, Barnes is frequently compared to Nathalie Sarraute, another author ripe for rediscovery—and another Dalkey author.

Barnes is primarily known for her 1936 masterpiece, Nightwood, which is published in paperback by New Directions, and in a different, hardcover, version by Dalkey Archive, and is probably the only one of her books regularly taught in college classes across the U.S. And yet! She was a pioneer, perfect for the academy. A Rabelaisian writer, who, in the words of Paul West—whose afterword deserves to be read by all and sundry—“wanted to undo all readers, to deflower them in one way or another, to stop them from expecting fiction to behave like some well-bred social organism.” He goes on in that same afterword to state:

Early, she discovered the principle of addictiveness, meaning that she could always add something to something else, not because the first something was inadequate but because the observing or defining mind required such elbowroom. Her writing delineates, often with mordant accuracy, but she bloats it too, just to tell us she is there, serving the cause of plenty. She is among those rare souls, the phrase-makers, to whom a phrase no one else could have dreamed up is more precious than whole sequences of action or talk. Her work is there to evince her own mind, and to overface ours. Sometimes you have to read her with tweezers, other times with a trowel and a scoop, especially when she has let someone loose in a soliloquy. I think she sometimes thought of the novel as the supremist form of soliloquy, which is to say the novel at its closest to poetry. She has a superb sense of rhythm, so much so that she hears the rhythm long before the words arrive and the rhythm brings the combinations into being. Her prose evokes Wendell’s longing for “an extra large English pudding with whacking diamond-shaped goblets of suet shot through.” Above all, she is the virtuoso of the sentence, the ability to make which kept her going to the age of ninety. She built with bricks when others trifled with straw. She remained intense. She attuned herself to the constant ambience of heroic voice. She was serious, critical, and terminal, like an illness.

*

Djuna Barnes was born in 1892, and was a highly sought after journalist and illustrator—the Dalkey edition of Ryder includes almost two-dozen of these illustrations—who moved to Paris at the start of the 1920s (like some other American authors you may have heard of, who are taught in an array of English classes), and had a run of consecutive works—The Book of Repulsive Women (1915), A Book (1923), Ryder (1928), Ladies Almanack (1928), Nightwood (1936—the year of grand literary works), and The Antiphon (1958)—that’s almost unprecedented. (And, like West alludes to in his afterword, Ÿ±ČőČÔ’t everything she left behind: she died at 90 and wrote for her whole life.)

The “plot” of Ryder—so much as there is one—is basically what I put in my opening ramble of a paragraph: It’s set around the turn of the nineteenth century, and features Sophia Grieve Ryder, a scandalous character who marries over and again, and breeds like her fore-mother (who had fourteen kids of her own), including by giving birth to one Wendall, the second of her sons, who, in England with his mother, meets Amelia, and eventually brings her back to America to be his wife. They wed. They start procreating. He immediately gets involved with Kate—who has her own non-traditional past of lovers and whatnot—and the three (four, counting Sophia) live together as separate from society as they can be (for not only is their bigamist/poly-situation a thing with the locals, but they don’t believe in sending their kids to school, which, again, pisses off the law-abiders), raising their eight (I believe that’s right) kids, having philosophical (and comic) conversations about love and life, squabbling with one another, roaming and repenting, and just making do.

It’s a great fable—a playbook if you will—for our troubled times. For the freedom-seekers looking for liberation and to transcend traditionally imposed, and most definitely male-centric, models of being.[3] Although incredibly complicated—no one’s relationship in this book is clean or “chill”—there’s a thread of outlaw joy from the deconstruction of societal assumptions that is both logical and a potential pathway to more open, human-to-human, relationships.

But putting aside the sociological import of the book and its desire to break free from everything—including expectations of what constitutes a “novel”—I want to focus on the fun, free-flowing frolic of Barnes’s prose, which, in every way, on every page, throws itself to the front of the stage, taking precedent over plot and “moral messages.”

*

This book cycles through styles like a postmodern Dreamachine, entrancing and dazzling the reader in a way that—maybe it’s our age, our attention spans, or maybe it always was this way—forces one to read and reread, to figure out how to parse the sentences, or, more accurately, how to hang on to the paragraph’s momentum, and, to throw out a reference point, although it predates Miss MacIntosh, My Darling by decades, there’s an affinity, a sort of roller-coaster vibe that rewards with every swerve, with every loop, every phrasing that feels anachronistic, or maybe stodgy? on the surface, but is just evidence of a high-wire act that’s almost inconceivable if you’re wedded (poly reference totally intended) to today’s dominant form or American neo-realism.

Let me try to explain.

But first, let me try and scare you off.

Or, rather, let me let Barnes simply show off. Here’s the opening of Chapter 1, “Jesus Mundane,” subtitled “By Way of Introduction,” which is wonderfully not for those who blush at unbridled ambitiouslyÌęBiblicalÌęprose:

Go not with fanatics who see beyond thee and thine, and beyond the coming and the going of thee and thine, and yet beyond the ending thereof,—thy life and the lives that thou begettest, and the lives that shall spring from them, world without end,—for such need thee not, nor see thee, nor know thy lamenting, so confounded are they with thy damnation and the damnation of thy offspring, and the multiple damnation of those multitudes that shall be of thy race begotten, unto the number of fishes in thin waters, and unto the number of fishes in great waters. Alike are they distracted with thy salvation and the salvation of thy people. Go thou, then, to lesser men, who have for all things unfinished and uncertain, a great capacity, for these shall not repulse thee, thy physical body and thy temporal agony, thy weeping and thy laughing and thy lamenting. Thy rendezvous is not with the Last Station, but with small comforts, like to apples in the hand, and small cups quenching, and words that go neither here nor there, but traffic with the outer ear, and gossip at the gates of thy insufficient agony. [Boldface mine.]

First time through, that can be daunting. A clause-heavy opening sentence coming in at 102 words, which include three thee’s, two thy’s, and a begettest (!). Also, a lot of damnation. So much damnation. And a phrase set off by em-dashes that sounds like it’s coming right out of the mouth of a preacher: “Thy life and the lives that thou begettest, and the lives that shall spring from them, world without end” . . . You can almost hear the unwritten “Amen!”)

But, like every great book, it’s demonstrating how you can learn to read it, letting you in on what this book is all about.

Go not with fanatics who see beyond thee and thine, for such need thee not, confounded as they are with thy damnation and the damnation of thy offspring.

In short:

Hey, Wendall? Tell all those moralizing townies hating on your life, your wife, your mistress, and your kids to go fuck themselves! And don’t worry: those shit sippers aren’t actually paying attention to you: they’re all about ‘salvation.’ Hang out with the riffraff.

Again, this is the backbone of the “plot” that a reader might like to know up front; off this clothesline hang tons of asides, set pieces, and musings that aren’t always “functional” in a strict “advance the plot” sense, but instead tend to be where the fun and frolicking is at.[4]

*

I’ll admit: Returning toÌęRyderÌęalmost a quarter decade after the first (and only) time I read it, one of my initial thoughts was, “oh, shit, this book is going to beÌędifficult.”

Ryder is a novel that can be “difficult” to read because of the conflict between current patterns of speech and communicative gestures (texts, Instagram reels, emoji, directness), and the more baroque, labyrinthine way of articulating a journey instead of a message evidenced in every paragraph of the book, a style which tends to require such patient parsing. The reader has to attune themselves. And, frequently, be willing to release their grip on rules of concision and grammar (Struck & White can fuck themselves with those shit sipping townfolk of above) to allow a voice to lead them.

And sometimes, a literal voice helps.

(Recording done by Kaija Straumanis.)

It’s easy to read right past the pauses and emphases when you first visually encounter the opening paragraphs of this section:

It was a sweet spring morning, once upon a time, many, many, many years ago, when the two women, Amelia de Grier and Kate-Careless, went, as nature would have it (there being nothing new under the sun), upon their four feet to do up the dirty mess, and damn their infinitesimal-lime-squirting-never-stop-for-consideration-of-a woman cloacae (and she with the backache and the varicose veins climbing her legs), or whatever-you-call-the-backsides-of-a-pigeon, and to look into the matter of the eggs and casualties.

Up the dusty stairs they went, besoms in hand, a flower between Amelia’s teeth, and with stomachs crawling (for alas! there’s nothing new under the sun), into the thraldom of feathers, and there, strutting and cooing and bill-begging, round and round in a dance of death, went Blue-Wing and Sweet-Tuft, the metal rings on their twiggy ankles knocking out a convict’s tune against the imbrication of their feet, round and round in a merry pigeon lust, squirting trouble as they went, and smelling most hideous insufficient, as is the way with a bird.

Unlike the previous example, in which snapping off the grammatically key packets of information and lining them up eases a sense of understanding, this section works better if it’s performed. Read aloud, time distends in the paragraph, slowing down to allow the asides to land—asides that function almost like the motifs of a good stand-up comedy performance, something we’ll see a lot more of in a future installment in this series of posts when we get to Momus’s and Ben Slotky’s —letting the reader/listener fall into the rhythms, finding an understanding of the paragraph’s intent in its delivery rather than its strict meaning.

For me, the irony comes through better when I hear it read than when I see it on the page.

*

I love this book. Every chapter, a journey. (Stay tuned to this spa

ce for a couple of longer excerpts closer to the time that this will be reissued.[5]) And more than the specific ideas, the

dismantling of traditional partnerships and expressions of sexuality (quick note: the book was censored when initially published in America[6]), it’s the way in which each chapter of Ryder asks new things of the reader—to cotton onto what style is being invoked, to enter into the jazz of the text—reading like a game in which all sides can win.

Again, and circling back to the beginning, it’s time for the Barnes-assance.

*

Oh! There are also drawings:

Which is as good a place to wrap this up as any given the images and design-heavy elements of Ladies Almanack that will inevitably be part of a future post. Till then, I’ll leave with one final line: “And whom should he disappoint?”

*

[1] In Macedonio Fernandez’s Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel), he writes about the “skip-around reader” who follows whims instead of page numbers, driving Macedonio to put his book together all out of order—so that the “skip-around reader” would chance into reading it in the order Macedonio actually intended.

[2] It should go without saying, but if you want actual insight and literary analysis into Barnes’s work, read Emre’s intro! (And/or the issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction on her.) Not necessarily this piece.

[3] Although in our topsy-turvy world, this same basic situation could be, maybe, and I’m just riffing here, adopted by the libertarian right, those who want to live in partnerships (with both guns and the right to fiscally deceive other people) without too much local (government) oversight,Ìę “parents’ rights” when it comes to education?

This may be a book about the paradoxes of morality and the people who attempt to enforce it, but this probably Ÿ±ČőČÔ’t the place to point out that the “hands off my ____” thread of extreme conservatism should really, more than almost any other object or idea, be applied to books, words, and their general access. This also isn’t the time or space to mention the obvious dissonance between wanting to use all the so called “non-Woke,” “offensive” words, yet not want the opposite—the “Woke,” and to-a-fault “non-offensive” ones to exist alongside. These are not brilliant observations, just expressing a desire for honest shithousery in modern discourse: If you’re gonna be shitty, at least be honest about being shitty.

[4] “‘Nicknames,’ said Wendell, ‘give away the whole drama of man. They fall into many classes; the three most current are: those we invent to make a person what he should be—or names of persuasion; those we invent to make him appear as he is not—or names of cunning, and those we invent to more tightly wrap him in that which he is, and these are as various as our opinion of the person involved. Let us call them nicknames o f opinion. Take my own case,’ he continued, ‘for philosophy, like charity, should begin at home. Let us tell then, the story of your mother’s first reactions to your humble servant, and we shall have a case in hand. It will instruct you in the nicest turns and twists of such games, for and against, that you can think of, to say nothing of the abundant humours therein involved. It will be more to the point,’ he added, ‘than whole dissertations on nature, and will round out the inevitable end as you know it.

‘During this soliloquy, heed well what she does, and what she does not call me, for therein lies the whole mad obscurity of the female heart. Observe where she might have mocked and did not, where again she might have placated and forbore, how, again, she might have had me swollen with pride, and spake not the word. Indeed, she might have said a number of things—but, enough!’

[5] I have at least two chapters that I’m dying to share. Hang tight.

[6] From Barnes’s foreword: “This book, owing to censorship, which has a vogue in America as indiscriminate as all such enforcements of law must be, has been expurgated. [. . .] Hithertofore the public has been offered literature only after it was no longer literature. Or so murdered and so discreetly bound in linens that those regarding it have seldom, if ever, been aware, or discovered, that that which they took for an original was indeed a reconstruction.”

Ìęby Mati Unt

translated from Estonian by Ants Eert (Dalkey Archive Press)

AN UNEXPECTED INVITATION

A crow was riding the wind that came in low over the beach. Sand blew through the window, landed on my papers, entered my mouth. A yellowish light tainted the room, even my fingers. I carefully reread the letter from this morning’s mail, but it remained impenetrable. A complete stranger, writing in Russian, wanted me to meet him next Sunday in Leningrad where the cruiser Aurora was docked.

Next Sunday, Leningrad, Aurora?

A week from no, hundreds of kilometers from Tallinn?

What’s going on?

Having explained nothing, the letter’s last line threatened: This meeting in vital.

It was unsigned.

The kind of letter that should go right into the garbage. Except . . .

Except:

Vital for whom? For me? Him?

Is it an emergency?

Have I inherited a fortune?

Am I dealing with a spy?

A seductive woman?

A wealthy foreign publisher?

What have I overlooked?

Are they luring me away to be murdered?

Is it an admirer of my novels?

Or some poor bastard about to die?

Army counterespionage?

I put the letter away again, and for the third time decided not ot go anywhere. Am I a marionette to be yanked around on a string? An anonymous letter arrives and immediately I get ready to run off on a fool’s errand.

Who’s the fool?

Apparently it’s me.

As an obscure writer, freedom fighters and spies tend to ignore me. It’s true that once in a while letters come to enlighten me on some brand-new world order or synergy, with copious details appended. But the cruiser Aurora, the cradle of revolution, the ship that fired the shot on October 25, 1917, signaling the beginning of the assault on the Winter Palace—what’s it got to do with me? Sure, my life has been affected by that infamous shot, but so have the lives of the thousands of people around me. Will all of us now be called to the Aurora? Perhaps it’s only those who approve of the revolution? Or only those who disapprove? If I alone was invited, how was I selected?

No, this is just a silly joke. Or maybe revenge? But for what?

What have I done?

Everyone’s guilty of something—am I any guiltier than anyone else?

That’s it: I’m going to ignore the letter.

Using the last packet my Finnish publisher had sent me, I brewed some coffee, added sugar I had obtained with my ration card, and to steady my shaky nerves, invented all sorts of excuses for doing nothing: gas stations are out of gas, trains are overbooked, buses are overcrowded—I can’t travel at all, our Great State is in a lot of trouble. Gas has all but disappeared because the rail services that bring it in have been almost completely shut down. Public transportation is bone dry too. Am I supposed to walk to Leningrad? I do have some bread left; no point in going to the grocery, since there’s also a sausage shortage on. Shortages promote self-reliance. At least something good has come out of this mess, thank God: There’s nothing to be gained by going out. Let them write and invite. I’ll withdraw, learn to know myself, tell the world to go to hell; I can’t be bothered watching the end of the world, won’t cry at its grave. Far better to stay on the sofa with its springs poling me in the ass—there are no upholsterers available, and anyway no sofa covers. I do have some soap saved up, a whole cake; I’ve even hoarded a tube of toothpaste. There’s no way I’m going down to the cruiser Aurora. I’ll ignore everyone and everything. Of course, poverty and lack of means shouldn’t really be an excuse for turning one’s back on adventure. A colleague of mine recently visited North Korea, and another one went to Mongolia. Far away corners of the world, where the sun is hot and the people and their habits are inscrutable. Going to the cruiser would be a new experience, no? I might get a short story out of it, or the beginning of a novel? The last living member the Czar’s family wants to reveal everything to me, yet here I sit, stretched out on a shabby sofa, protecting my ivory tower.

What if terrorists are planning to blow up the cruiser, and I’d have a front-row seat for the event? Front-row seat? Or maybe I’d be blown up with the ship?

I’m not sticking my neck out.

Still, I guess the ship could sail and take me along. I’ve written about the ships and the sea. I did write a commemorative article on Lennart Meri, but that hardly qualifies me as a naval historian.

Am I being accosted by a radical organization getting ready to set off another revolution and planning to blow up the Aurora in order to publicize their cause? And afterwards they’ll supervise a ceremonial casting of flowers onto the waves? And make endless, boring speeches? But in that case the letter would have had a declaration in it, a slogan or two. If I was being courted by revolutionaries, I would’ve been invited to a bar in some dank cellar, not a pier. So, could it be a woman who adores me? But in that case the letter would have had at least a few loving words in it—especially since I’m known to be such a sucker for sentimentality. A homosexual, perhaps? I’ve never been mistaken for one, and in any case, the symbolism here—a long ship with big guns and a proud prow splitting the waves—is just too obvious.

Could it be something to do with the subconscious? The Flying Dutchman? Long John Silver? Moby Dick? The ship of transcendence, its mast pointing up at the North star, following the axis of the Earth? Could it be I’ve been invited to the White Ship that everyone is waiting for, the ship that never comes to our shores except to bring us across the Styx?

But the letter is matter of fact. Fine sand settles on my papers. I stand by the window.

A PICTURE FROM MY YOUTH

The cruiser Aurora fired her gun on the night of October 25, 1917, and after that she toured Helsinki and Kronstadt. In 1946 she became an icon on the Neva River.

Many old ships have earned their retirements.

The “Oseberg” Viking ship near Oslo.

Fitzcarraldo’s ship in the rain forest.

The following happened in a youth camp at VĂ€rska in 1964.

I’ve forgotten the names of the camp commandant and his staff, but I do remember that the project was progressive. None of us were there looking for glory or an easy way up the bureaucratic ladder by supporting the prevailing ideology. A few of us were in our twenties, but most were still in middle school, barely fifteen years old. I do remember Mark Soosaar—now a film director—who at that time was a MC on the radio. I remember Mati Polder and Aare TĂŒsvĂ€lja too—they were television personalities. But things were different in those days. At night we caught crawdads, which may or may not have been a prohibited activity. We had lively discussions by the campfire, but the gist of our arguments, unfortunately, has escaped me. But I repeat: we were certainly progressive.

VĂ€rska, in the extreme Southeast of Estonia, is in a province of Setumaa. No wonder then that the wasteland there, where practically nothing grows, is called the Setumaa Sahara.

One day we took a walk in that desert. To avoid the heat we set out at dawn, but when the sun came up, the cooling wind disappeared. Scraggy bushes offered no shade. We walked for a long time. Sweat poured off us, and the water cans were empty. Exactly where we went I have no idea. No one wanted to be the first one to quit. On the contrary, the stronger people in the group seemed to be enjoying the misery of the weaker. We did pass a couple of farmsteads, where no one was to be seen. Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” sounded from one of their windows. It suited th occasion. We kept on going through the parched vegetation. Far away we heard some explosions—probably the Russian Air Force conducting exercises on the lake. Why a lake? Explosions over water sound different. Then, the figure of a fleshy, sun-baked, half-naked man appeared out of nowhere. He spoke gibberish, vaguely like our own language, but we didn’t understand a single word. Had his tongue been cut out? Lonely places guard many secrets, and witnessing something illegal can be dangerous. Perhaps his attacker was humane. Instead of killing him, he just made sure the witness couldn’t tell tales. How much can one reveal by waving one’s arm? Had we accidentally stumbled on some high political conspiracy? Or perhaps the man was drunk? Was there another possibility? The bravest among us indicated that we were thirsty. The man made agreeable noises, beckoned. After some hesitation we followed him. Surprise! Behind a bush was a boat half buried in sand. Two of the side planks were broken, and on the board where the rower would normally sit, a lizard lazed in the sun—it quickly escaped. Our guide sat in the boat and took to rowing with imaginary oars. Was he acting out how he, in some gray time, arrived here, or would in some golden time depart? The man muttered something, as if inviting us to board the boat. We raised a cloud of dust getting away from him. Soon we were on our own again. It was possible that a long time ago this had been the shore of the lake. Maybe the boat had belonged to the grandfather of the tongueless man, a guerrilla in the last war, who had needed to hide his boat from the enemy?

Somehow we made it back to the camp. In the cool of the evening, we rowed across the river to a nearby camp of university students. We lit a fire on the bank of the river with two friendly young women and tried to get kissed—but nothing; I think they were each keeping an eye on the other. When it began to rain, we rowed back to our won camp. By this time the eastern sky was blushing red. On the way I quoted Ristikivi: After you left, you became a dream, but in my bed, my suffering continued. The morning brought on more philosophical discussions; we all voted for increased middle-school and university-student autonomy. That day was just as hot.

Having fashioned a grave

From the sea, darkness exudes

Terror where a whale-like

Aurora haunts the night

—Vladimir Mayakovsky

Mati Unt was born in Estonia and lived there all his life. He spent his early years in the village of LinnamÀe near the university town of Tartu. His life, like that of so many Estonians, was rooted in the countryside and nature, something evident in all of his works. Unt doubled as one of the most influential modernist, and latterly postmodernist, authors in Estonia, as well as being a playwright, director, and producer, staging plays at several theaters in the Estonian capital, Tallinn.

* * *

Unt made his breakthrough as an author early in life, publishing his first prose in the early 1960s while still at school, and later while studying literature and journalism at Tartu University, near the village where he was born. He belonged to the Sixties Generation, which denotes a number of Estonian writers born in the 1940s and who emerged as writers and intellectuals some twenty years later. During the years leading up to the Prague Spring of 1968, Estonian intellectuals had high hopes of a Dubãek-style “socialism with a human face.” Their hopes were soon dashed. Nevertheless, Estonia had always managed to evade the full brunt of Soviet repression and censorship.

In the 1960s and ’70s, when Stalinism had waned, key works of international literature were made available in translation to the citizens of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic by such authors as Whitman, Faulkner, Salinger, Scott Fitzgerald, Wilder, Malamud, Baldwin, Capote, Updike, Oates, Bellow, Golding, Bergman (film scripts), Kafka, Borges, Butor, and Camus. This was thanks to an unusual initiative, a weekly addition to one of the cultural monthlies where many shorter works of international literature managed to appear. In 1964, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir made a brief visit to Estonia, and even works that were frowned upon by the central Soviet authorities—such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita—were published in the Estonian language. Presumably the Soviet authorities thought that the translation of controversial works into a language used by no more than one million people could do little or no harm to the predominantly Russian-speaking USSR.

* * *

For much of his working life, Mati Unt was involved with the theater, staging plays regularly from 1981, when he became the director and scriptwriter for the Youth Theater in Tallinn. It is often thought that the Soviet Union was entirely cut off from Western theatrical trends, but this is not entirely true. During the 1960s thaw, new ideas in the theater seeped in through the Iron Curtain and from the more liberal satellite states to the Soviet Union itself. In time, names such as Artaud, Grotowski, and Peter Brook became familiar to Estonians.

Over the past decades, Unt staged many plays of international renown by dramatists such as Sophocles, Corneille, Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, Strindberg, Ibsen, Chekhov, Gombrowicz, Genet, Weiss, Havel, and Beckett, plus adaptations of Euripides and Bulgakov, many of these at the Vanemuine Theater in Tartu. One of the last plays he staged was Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker, in the provincial town of Rakvere, and before his death Unt was working on a stage adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

Mati Unt also wrote several plays of his own. As early as 1967, Unt was experimenting with the introduction of Brechtiantechniques to Ancient Greek material in his play Phaethon, Son of the Sun. Perhaps Unt’s most complex stage play was Dress Rehearsal (1977) where in Pirandellian fashion he examined the life of a Soviet revolutionary through actors on a film set performing in and discussing what is in fact a rather hackneyed adaptation. The real revolutionary, now an old man, stands around the set giving monosyllabic advice, and seems rather indifferent to the myth his life is being turned into.

* * *

Still, it is as a renewer of Estonian prose that Unt will be best remembered, at home and especially abroad. The leitmotifs and style of Mati Unt’s fiction changed little from when he first began publishing in the 1960s and was regarded as something of a Wunderkind. Unt’s prose is rooted in the mythology of everyday life, personal relationships, sexuality, and especially that of modern urban living—although the national trauma of the Soviet occupation always lurks under the surface. To this he added the deadpan humor of the eternal observer, someone who never quite succeeds in getting fully involved with other people, and yet is always present amongst them.

Unt was always interested in popular science; the most unexpected associations and references appear in his works. He was also keen on examining paranormal, esoteric, and pathological phenomena, like vampires, werewolves, cannibals, sex criminals, and those driven by obsessions and idĂ©es fixes. One critic says: “Unt’s interest in everything . . . was phenomenal. He read rapidly and much, his memory was first class and concrete, and he synthesized what he read. You could always ask him about things in many fields.”

Unt’s early novels clearly show the direction he was moving in. His first novel, Farewell, Yellow Cat!, appeared in his school annual in 1963. Here the protagonist is in an ideological battle with his aunt, a homeowner—something that was rather politically incorrect in the Soviet days. Anything harking back to bourgeois times (i.e. the 1930s of independence and the authoritarian rule of President PĂ€ts) had to be painted in a negative light. But by mentioning them at all, Unt was taking a stand.

Then came the novella The Debt (1964), which caused a literary storm. Under the edicts of Socialist Realism, Soviet literature was in those days supposed to provide models for how people should conduct their lives. Instead, Unt chose a protagonist who was having sex while still at school, and who gets a girl pregnant, something which was shocking to the hypocritically puritan Soviet society. Critic Tiit Hennoste regards this novella as Unt’s key work: “It was the first work of Estonian literature in Soviet times that caused a real scandal, and endless disputes about the behavior of the young.”

In 1970, Unt produced a Kafkaesque murder-mystery parody called Murder at the Hotel, and two years later wrote a love-triangle novella called An Empty Beach, where a young married writer has to contend with the advances made to his wife by a violinist—and which, he claimed, contains elements of self-mockery. A film version of this novella was scheduled to start shooting in late August 2005, and will continue despite the author’s death.

Under the same cover was Mattias and Kristiina, which is again about a young couple struggling against society, and who endup in a kind of Tristan-and-Isolde tragedy.

This was followed in 1975 by the novella And If We Are Not Dead, Then We Are Alive Right Now. This deals with werewolves and contains numerous references to literature on the same subject, a stylistic trait that remained constant in the rest of Unt’s oeuvre.

Unt’s most famous novel, Autumn Ball (1979), was translated into English—as well as Russian, Finnish, Swedish, and other languages—back in the Soviet era, and tells the story of six people living in apartments in the Tallinn high-rise suburb of MustamĂ€e, and who are destined to meet at the end of the novel: a poet, an architect who is a technocrat and futurist, a misanthropic barber, and a TV-addicted woman and her young son. Here, Unt’s coolly objective yet tongue-in-cheek style and interest in popular science came into their own. Apart from Things in the Night, this is the only novel by Unt made available in English. [Ed Note: At the time of writing, these were the only Unt titles in English. See below for a complete, current list.]

Unt’s novels and stories, as well as a few plays, were collected in two volumes in 1985, totaling some 650 pages. But Unt was not finished as an author. Some of his most significant work was still to come.

The following year, Unt published a volume of novellas and other short texts entitled They Speak and Keep Silent. Critics talkhere of polyphony in the Bakhtinian sense, claiming that while there was the germ of this already in Autumn Ball, by now Unthad abandoned the traditional role of a narrator. These texts include the semi-theatrical dialogue of a woman and a taxi-driver; a short play about the nineteenth-century poet Lydia Koidula (see below) and the twentieth-century author of folk tales Aino Kallas; diary entries by a woman whose husband disappears without trace; and a postmodern text that comments on the translation of a poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

, Unt’s second-longest novel, and second to be translated into English, appeared as Öös on asju in 1990, and deals with electricity in all its forms: a source of urban heating and lighting, but also a dangerous and untamed force. Unt also incorporates other devices from his stock of trivia: pigs, cacti, holography, urban cannibalism, and the ever-present blocks of high-rise apartments found throughout the former Soviet Union. Things in the Night continues in the postmodern vein of They Speak and Keep Silent, being full of game playing, anarchic behavior, absence, schizophrenia, and irony. Nevertheless, there is, as in similar works from the former Soviet Bloc, a touch of light moralism in the novel. The Estonian critic Kalev KeskĂŒla sums the work up as follows:

The novel consists of the author’s confessions, novel fragments, snatches of plays, comments on how to write a novel, poems, minutes of interrogations, letters, and quite a few quotes from popular classics. There are amusing adventures and pointless ratiocinations. From time to time, the writer-protagonist personifies the compulsive scribbler who is unable to curb his urge to write when attempting to describe electricity, who tells yarns about accidents and shops. The characters in the novel have strayed into a world where other people’s words, clichĂ©d behavior, and serious scientific literature are jumbled up together. In its artistic radicalism, the novel is very modernist, while very postmodern in its zest for irony. The ideas that bear the novel along appear to be a fear of people and an underlying misanthropy, themes familiar from Unt’s earlier works. Here again we have the criminals, farmers who set their dogs on those wandering through the night, arctic hysteria, and cannibalism.

In 1990, the same year as Things in the Night, Unt published a second novel, . This is the usual Untian mixture of fact and fiction, and takes one of the most sacred names in Estonian literature in vain. Lydia Koidula (1843-1886) is regarded as the first Estonian woman poet of significance, and also the first poet to express an Estonian longing for independence and freedom. But Unt rather blasphemously weaves this national icon and her Latvian doctor and husband into a postmodern tale of vampires and a mysterious trip to Leningrad. While the leitmotif of Things in the Night is electricity, that of Diary of a Blood Donor is, predictably, blood.

After 1990, Unt published only one major work of fiction, but one with special international resonance. This was a documentary novel about Bertolt Brecht’s meeting with the Estonian-born Hella Wuolijoki, who later became a Communist and broadcaster in neighboring Finland, and is entitled . (The night was clearly something with which Unt had affinities.) In true Untian style, the author mixes episodes from the history of Estonia and Finland in a tale centered around World War II, including historical documents and a rather playful description of the very bourgeois and somewhat fastidiousBrecht, who would like to feel at home with the workers, but is too busy with his “alienation effect” and mistresses.

* * *

In one of a series of articles written to mark Unt’s sixtieth birthday—January 1, 2004—Ms. Marju Lauristin, who remembered him from his early days as a writer, wrote an appreciation entitled “Mati Unt’s Blogosphere.” In it she examines Unt’s last literary guise—that of a columnist in the cultural press, where he wrote short pieces that almost resembled “blog” entries, recording his comments on life on a weekly basis. Lauristin, now a professor of media studies, remembers Unt as someoneÌę Ìęthe world was “very text-centered, sound-centered, centered on the life of the mind.”

* * *

Mati Unt lies buried in the writer’s corner of the Metsakalmistu cemetery in Tallinn, where he rubs shoulders in death with many of the key figures of nineteenth- and especially twentieth-century Estonian literature, their graves all grouped together rather like those in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey—but in a more modest, truly Estonian manner. The vaults of the abbey are here replaced by the branches of trees.

Come back on Wednesday to read an excerpt from Diary of a Blood Donor.

Selected Works by Mati Unt in Translation:

Autumn Ball. Trans. Mart Aru. Out of Print.

. Trans. Eric Dickens. Dalkey Archive Press, $13.95.

. Trans. Ants Eert. Dalkey ArchivePress, $12.95.

. Trans. Eric Dickens.

Selected Untranslated Works:

HĂŒvasti, kollane kass! [Farewell, Yellow Cat!]. Keskkooli almanahh.

MÔrv hotellis [Murder at the Hotel]. Periodika.