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as Chad and Brian cover up to page 148 (new edition; 124 in the older ones).

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Today’s #WITMonth post is an excerpt fromĚý

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 derrière;

—the ability to keep silent;

—c´ÇłÜ°ůłŮ±đ˛ő˛â;

—c±ô˛ą°ůľ±łŮ˛â;

—j´Çł¦łÜ±ô˛ą°ůľ±łŮ˛â;

—the principle of equality;

—a sense of proportion;

—an insouciant disregard for time;

â€Äě°ů±đ±đ»ĺ´Çłľ.

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 Gracián, 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!

For anyone new to this podcast, episodes drop weekly—recorded , then disseminated as a traditional podcast through , , etc.—and feature Chad W. Post (founder and publisher of Open Letter Books, editorial director of Dalkey Archive Press) and Brian Wood (author ofĚýJoytime Killbox), with occasional guests, breaking down a long book section by section, reading slowly to be able to unpack these so-called “difficult” books, providing entryways into these texts—all while trying to make each other laugh and demonstrate that books, that reading complicated fiction, can be quite pleasurable.

So, if this is your first time joining along, all you need to do is subscribe to the and/or the podcast feed (, ), read along, sit back, and enjoy. If you want to participate, you can share your thoughts, comments, and questions during the live YouTube recording, or email us directly at chad.post [at] rochester edu.

Again, here’s a personal explanation of why you should readĚýMulligan Stew, but if that’s not convincing—or concrete enough, plot-wise—here’s the jacket copy:

Widely regarded as Sorrentino’s finest achievement,ĚýĚýtakes as its subject the comic possibilities of the modern literary imagination. As avant-garde novelist Antony Lamont struggles to write a “new wave murder mystery,” his frustrating emotional and sexual life wreaks havoc on his work-in-progress. As a result, his narrative (the very book we are reading) turns into a literary “stew” an uproariously funny melange of journal entries, erotic poetry, parodies of all kinds, love letters, interviews, and lists—as Hugh Kenner in “Harper’s” wrote, “for another such virtuoso of the List you’d have to resurrect Joyce.” Soon, Lamont’s characters (on loan from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flann O’Brien, James Joyce, and Dashiell Hammet) take on lives of their own, completely sabotaging his narrative. Sorrentino has vastly extended the possibilities of what a novel can be in this extraordinary work, which both parodies and pays homage to the art of fiction.

On the schedule below, you’ll find the page numbers for the NEW edition, and for the OLD Dalkey Archive/Grove Press printings. It’s not important which one you use, but the page numbers are slightly different for the two editions, so if you’re reading along, you’ll want to pay attention. (Pages from the new, Dalkey Essentials edition, are listed first, page numbers from the earlier editions are in parentheses.)

September 7: Front Matter-66 (Front Matter-55):

September 21: 67-148 (56-124)

September 28: 149-196 (125-164)

October 5: 197-261 (164-221)

October 12: 262-327 (222-277)

October 26: 328-395 (278-336)

November 2: 396-455 (337-388)

November 9: 456-End (389-End)

The dates above are the expectedĚýdates for the live YouTube recording (the podcast version comes out a day later), but we sometimes have to shift the date based on the schedules of the hosts and guests. So follow , , and on Twitter/X for additional information.

Mulligan StewĚýis available at better bookstores everywhere, from , from , and from you get your books.

Dear Editor: I had a very disturbing experience recently. For at least three generations, my family has gone to the Dixie Truck Stop on Christmas Eve for dinner. No one remembers how this tradition started, but like with all traditions, you just keep carrying them on. In case you don’t know what the Dixie Truck Stop is, it is pretty much what its name says it is, a place along Route 66 where truckers stop. A big buffet for $4.99, all you can eat. The food of course is awful, and the waitresses are brain-damaged, but that’s not the point. We all know the food is awful, and we also all know it’s a strange place to be on Christmas Eve. We spend half the dinner talking about how in the hell this tradition got started, and our best guess is that years ago some grandfather or other took his kids there and they loved it and wanted to do it the next year, and so there we are. This past Christmas Eve, though, I saw a guy sitting by himself in a booth looking around and taking notes, as though he was doing research of some kind for a travel magazine or writing a story. The thing about him is that heĚýlookedĚýlike a writer who was trying to look like “one of us.” But you couldn’t confuse him with one of us, or one of the truckers, or anyone else who wanders in here from Interstate 55. This guy was a fucking wise-guy writer, smug as can be. As I observed him, while trying to get down some tough roast beef (“Just like Mom’s!”), I knew what this asshole was doing. He was writing about all of the losers who show up at the Dixie Truck Stop on Christmas Eve and how they are all going to go back to their trailer park homes and open up their presents from K-Mart. And then he would publish this piece of crap in theĚýNew Yorker or some fucking place that thinks this is “real life.” In other words, he would picture all these people being at Dixie without having any consciousness of being there, as though they weren’t aware of the irony of it and though it was just the best goddamn restaurant they had ever eaten in. And that’s the problem with that kind of crappy fiction. The characters are just these fucking pawns who have no awareness of anything beyond the story that this hack writer puts them in. I mean what he should be writing about is a crappy writer who is at the Dixie Truck Stop on Christmas Eve writing a crappy story about people being at the Dixie Truck Stop on Christmas Eve. Now that would be a story! I wanted to go over and tell the guy to meet me in the parking lot, but my wife Gladys (just the kind of name this crappy writer would give her in his crappy story) told me to forget about it. That’s all I have to say on the subject. Any response?

Editor: I am not sure whether you want a response concerning “true-to-life fiction” or the Dixie Truck Stop. If the former, the I generally share your concerns. Despite what reviewers for theĚýNew York TimesĚýmay say, these are not “realistic” stories (see on this subject); further, as you suggest, the characters in this fiction are puppets and perhaps have reason to be upset at their authors (see on this subject). As to the Dixie Truck Stop, I also share your concerns about the quality of the food, and would add that the service leaves something to be desired.

That said, this isn’t necessarily the place for a long political rant—especially since I’m gleefully unaware of what it might mean that this is hosted on the Ģą˝´«Ă˝ server—so I’ll just plant this powerful protest video here and move on to the ideas (not entirely unrelated?) that I’ve been working on for the past few weeks. (And since the rest of Open Letter is on furlough and can’t edit this: ACAB.)

*

The original idea for this post came from a line I can half-sort-of-maybe remember from Michel Butor’s Passing Time, which was translated from the French by Jean Stewart back in 1961. (By Simon & Schuster of all presses.) The book is way way out of print, and for the life of me, I can’t remember why we didn’t reissue this at Dalkey Archive when we didĚýĚýandĚý. I like all of his books, but there’s something about the tone and “detective story” aspect ofĚýPassing TimeĚýthat comes back to me time and again.

“” by Kathleen O’Neill is both very interesting, and an incredible way of jogging my memory, even if the quote I initially was structuring this post around, well, probably doesn’t exist.

The novel is written as a journal—starting in May, but recounting the events from the past October—by Jacques Revel about the year he spends in Bleston (a sort of stand-in for Manchester, England). While he’s in the dark, wet, cold, bleak industrial town, he meets a couple sisters, a potential arsonist, and the author behind the pseudonymously writtenĚýThe Bleston Murder, who survives an attempt on his life. What makes this book really work is that, as Revel rereads his own diary, he sees inaccuracies in his own account of events and essentially becomes a detective in which he discovers that he himself was the criminal (and kind of the victim). It’s a fascinating book that really melds together form and content, and is essentially, a meditation on the relationship between the writer and the reader—or the criminal and the detective.

What I thought I remembered from this book was a quote about how there’s a contract between the writer of a detective novel and the audience in which the author is responsible for creating a world in which all the clues fit together and the audience receives a “satisfactory” resolution in which the criminal is exposed and justice is served.

Although this isn’t quite the same (at all), here’s what I think the actual quote fromĚýPassing TimeĚýis;

Any detective story, is constructed on two murders of which the first, committed by the criminal, is only the occasion of the second, in which he is the victim of the pure, unpunishable murderer, the detective, who kills him . . . by the explosion of truth.

Both of these quotes (the real and imagined) play nicely off of bits from Franco Moretti’s “Clues” (collected inĚý) and his analysis of Sherlock Holmes mysteries.

And detective fiction’s characters are inert indeed: they do not grow. In this way, detective fiction is radically anti-novelistic: the aim of the narration is no longer the character’s development into autonomy, or a change from the initial situation, or the presentation of plot as a conflict and an evolutionary spiral, image of a developing world that it is difficult to draw to a close. On the contrary: detective fiction’s object is toĚýreturn to the beginning. [. . . ] So it is too with the reader who, attractedĚýpreciselyĚýby the obsessively repetitive scheme, is “unable’ to stop until the cycle has closed and he has returned to the starting point.

He develops this idea in much greater depth—part of which we’ll come back to later—but this got me thinking about the “detective” books I like the most: ones in which the reader has to sort clue from noise, in which the center doesn’t necessarily hold, and the plot never quite congeals in a reassuring, satisfactory, or, in Moretti terms, bourgeoisie fashion. Books likeĚýĚýby Patrik Ourednik.

*

Originally written in 2006 and translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker in 2010,Ěý is, ostensibly, a detective novel. But one in which the clues don’t seem to add up, the resolution is unsatisfying by typical standards, and one of the crimes being investigated is never clearly articulated.

We know from the jump that we’re in for some sort of game, given that chapter 1 is a notated chess game:

1 e4 e5 2. f4 exf4 3. Bc4 d6 4. nf3 Bg4 5. O-O Qd7 6. d4 g5 7. c3 Nc6 [. . .] 27. hxg3 hxg3+ 28. Kg1 rgh8 29. Bf3 Qxg4

(I assume this is all accurate and playable, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was at least partially nonsense.)

Then, in chapter 2, we have two major events that more or less drive the book itself. First off, Viktor Dyk (winning dick as in detective?), a retiree and main player in this novel, gives a young woman inaccurate directions to the Academy of Fine Arts (we find out later that she’s raped as a result) and then we hear about Mrs. Horak’s death. Or at least part of it.

“Have you heard? Mrs. Horak was hit by a car.”

“No! Is it serious?”

“Serious or not, she’s dead from it, dead as a doornail. Supposedly she staggered home, opened the door, and bang! She was gone. She couldn’t breathe, poor thing, and her eyes were wide open.”

To give you a real sense of the whiplash-inducing, playful tone of this book, here’s a bit from the same chapter about Viktor Dyk:

Dyk had a habit of pulling pronouncements out of his noggin and dressing them up with fraudulent, usually biblical, sources. Long ago he had come to realize that repeating what someone else had once said was considered the utmost expression of intelligence in his country. At one time, in the days when he still collected beetles, he used to declare ownership of his pronouncements (“as I always say”), but he never got any response except an awkward smile. Until one day it occurred to him to add “Book of Ruth 6:4″—and lo and behold, eyes lighted up all around, women’s in appreciation, men’s in envy. Since then, he had done so every time.

Fast-forward to chapter 6, and weĚýmaybeĚýget introduced to the mystery that Inspector Lebeda (introduced in chapter 8) is going to be investigating.

Mrs. Horak’s death wasn’t a result of the accident. The car was innocent. It barely grazed her. Mrs. Horak fell down, banged her knee, tore her stocking. Ranting and limping, she made her way home. Once there, she turned on the gas, opened the oven, and stuck her head in. They say that women, particularly in old age, rarely resort to suicide, and when they do, they think long and hard about their decision and as a rule they choose less radical means than men do. But statistics provide only an imperfect picture of an individual’s life: in this respect Mrs. Horak defied sexual categorization. She’d had enough, she’d had it up to here. [. . .]

We shall see later whether and to what extent these statistical incongruities influence the course of our story and the fates of our other protagonists. In any case it spurred the firemen to call the police without delay. Which they would have done regardless; this, however, enables us to evoke a promising atmosphere of tension, thereby strengthening the dramatic line. The firemen may not give a damn, but our readers certainly do.

One of the difficulties in describing this incredibly fun, somewhat enigmatic book is that it isĚýlike a chess game. There are so many people, so many moves, so many positions on the board. For instance, Lebeda’s main case at the start of the book is called “Damage of Advertising Surfaces in Public Spaces,” in which he’s trying to figure out which groups are defiling the “city’s metro and streetside postering surfaces [. . .] with signs of an active anticapitalist, anti-advertising campaign—whole posters x’d out in black, as well as graffiti both general (Down with advertising, Ads lie, Citizen, don’t be an ass, Pay the unemployed) and specific (Women are not goods, This washer will wash your brain, Bud won’t make you wiser) [. . .]” The interpretation of these “defacings” (and, given the current situation, livI’m ALL FOR some anti-capitalist, anti-racist graffiti) is either a key to untangling the mysteries of this book, or a total red herring.

And suddenly, I’ve returned to the beginning of my take on this book: Detective novels in which the clues are misleading, maybe not actually clues at all, contradictory, and filled with digressions areĚýexactlyĚýthe sort of detective novels I am drawn to. Post-modern puzzle books are totally my jam. But what is the function of these sorts of books versus “traditional” (Sherlock Holmes era) detective novels?

*

I feel like I should be more embarrassed about this next statement than I actually am: I LOVE Riverdale. Especially season four. The show runs at 150% crazy at all moments in time, but season four is the most Lynchian—by way ofĚýThe Secret History—show I’ve ever seen. It’s a masterclass in how you’reĚýnotĚýsupposed to write television. Instead of an A-plot that lasts for a few episodes with B-plots moving along secondary characters, every episode ofĚýRiverdaleĚýhas A through Z plots for EVERY character, and moves at breakneck speed, changing the overall “game” of the show CONSTANTLY. Every scene either kicks off a whole new plot that would constitute a season on a “normal” show, or ends the plot that was just kicked off. I can only assume that watching RiverdaleĚýis like snorting LSD off of a tab of meth.

Anyway, by the middle of season four, at least half of the characters on this show—and yes, this features all the Archie-Betty-Veronica comic book characters—have either murdered someone or disposed of someone who has been murdered. It’s insane how many crimes go unpunished in this town. A character gets out of jail and is, instantly—in the same episode—elected mayor. The police chiefĚýrehides a body he buried in season 2 (?) with the help of an FBI agent (?). I want to say that this show is off the rails, but it’s a show in which the original “rails” look like a Jackson Pollack painting.

Every season of this show is centered around one mystery (or one hundred), but the resolution of that mystery is irrelevant from the start. ForĚýRiverdaleĚýto work, we have to suspect everyone—easy to do since they’ve all either taken a life or disposed of a dead body or done a shitton of jingle jangle—and know that nothing is permanent. Nothing is off the board.

*

The Moretti idea that this entire post is based around is that the function of detective fiction is to “return to the beginning” in order to ensure that the values of society at large are reconfirmed at the expense of individuality.

The difference between innocence and guilt returns as the opposition between stereotype and individual. Innocence is conformity; individuality, guilt. It is, in fact, something irreducibly personal that betrays the individual: traces, signs that only he could have left behind. The perfect crime—the nightmare of detective fiction—is the featureless, deindividualized crime that anyone could have committed because at this point everyone is the same.

A criminal transgresses, affirming their individuality by violating a social norm; a detective uncovers their identity; they are brought to justice for said transgression. (Unless you’re an American cop . . .) A detective novel, in its purest sense, is a confirmation that what we “all” believe in is preferred with the detective capable of reaffirming the status quo. The core of Moretti’s idea is that by transgressing, you become an individual, and it’s the detective’s purpose to reestablish the order of society as a whole. It’s not OK to murder your co-worker, and by being found out and jailed, we all are reminded what is acceptable.Ěý

Neither Case Closed, nor Riverdale entertain this ideaĚýfor a second. InĚýCase Closed, it’s all about providing too many clues, too many crimes, too many iterations to establish a single, widely accepted, “wrong” thing that deserves to be put back in line. Was the transgression Mrs. Horak’s suicide and what went on in that building? What societal norms need to be restored? The disdain Viktor Dyk has for his countrymen? If anything, this is a detective novel about violence against women, but even that’s not addressed in a satisfactory manner. Case Closed is an incredibly fun book that points out how non-totalizing detective narratives are in real life. There’s no single, simple solution. Such is baseball, such is life.

RiverdaleĚýcan’t have agreed upon societal norms. Full stop. If everyone in Riverdale agreed on the same set of principles the world would fall apart. That show only works by knowing that it’s all subjective and wild AF. Instead of sending one character off the edge and exploring that, break the town. Totally. There’s never a resolution to anything because any resolution would kill the very engine of this show, which is the wild individuality each character asserts over and over again. Sure, Archie is always dumb and making the wrong choices, but his bad decisions are what make him a unique character. All resolutions in Riverdale (the arrest of the Black Hood, the discovery of who killed Jason Blossom, Jughead’s death)Ěýis erased immediately in order to allow for the character to transgress again and set off a new storyline. It’s totally daytime soap opera shit run through the mind of David Lynch and Michael Bay.

*

Immediately after reading Moretti’s “Clues,” I picked up Ěýby Dag Solstad, translated from the Norwegian by Agnes Scott Langeland and published by New Directions. Been meaning to read this for a while, but, given just how perfectly it fit in with Moretti’s ideas, I’m really glad I waited.

This is billed as an “existential mystery” centering around PĂĄl Andersen’s decisionĚýnotĚýto report a murder he thinks he’s witnessed. It’s a novel of inaction and indecision, one that directly responds to Moretti’s ideas about the sociology of detective novels.

Everything’s set in motion on Christmas Eve, when Professor Andersen sees a man strangle a woman in the apartment building directly across from his:

[. . .] he reared back in horror as the man whom he had declared with such immediate certainty to be young put his hands around the woman’s neck and squeezed. She flailed her arms about, Professor Andersen noticed, her body jerked, he observed, before she all at once became completely still beneath the man’s hands and went limp. [. . .]

“I must call the police,” he thought. He went over to the telephone, but did not lift the receiver. “It was murder. I must call the police,” he thought, but still did not lift the receiver. Instead he went back to the window.

Days pass, and he doesĚýnothing until he shows up an hour early for a dinner party with the plan of filling the host in on what he saw and asking his advice. But he doesn’t do that, either. Instead, over the course of the dinner, he thinks about how they all used to be at the cutting edge, the rebellious youth who opposed the system and loved avant-garde poetry, but that now, well, they were the establishment.

They were strongly disinclined to regard themselves as pillars of society. Because they didn’t feel they conformed: not to the authority, or rather duties, which they enacted, nor to the social group to which they belonged. They denied being what they were. [. . .] They continued to be against authority, deep inside they were in opposition, even though they were now, in fact, pillars of society who carried out the State’s orders, and no one besides themselves (and old photographs from the year 2020) could perceive that they were anything other than State officials, part of the State fabric, and the fact that most of them voted in elections for the ruling party would hardly surprise anyone other than themselves, but they, on the other hand, would argue that they didn’t want to throw away their own vote and by so doing bring the right-wingers into power.

His desire to return to some earlier place, where his beliefs and actions were more radical, more “meaningful” actions is the engine of the rest of this book. Through the lens of Moretti, he asserts his individuality byĚýnotĚýserving the role of the detective, refusing to allow society to reassert its moral viewpoint.

This isn’t to say that what he did was right. I mean, I hope I don’t have to say this, but please report any and all acts of domestic violence (and police violence). And believe women. But, in the context of this novel—in which there are many hints that this “murder” might not have actually taken place—the crime serves as the catalyst to allow PĂĄl to explore the relationship of the individual to society, especially a society that’s built on historical beliefs or rituals that modern people don’t necessarily connect with. This is also reflected in his ambivalence over teaching Ibsen, since he doesn’t feel the same jolt reading him nowadays, and the vast majority of his students don’t feel it either.

His sin of omission couldn’t be defended. Every civilization is built on such actions being indefensible. That goes without saying. In all circumstances. When he didn’t report it, he had become and outcast, along with the murderer. An outcast in his own eyes, along with the murderer. And he deserved this. And behind it all was God. As the ultimate reason why breaking this natural order was a taboo which no living person can explain, touch, or wipe from their memory.

The idea of detective fiction as a conflict between the individual and a monolithic society is fascinating to me in part because I don’t think it holds anymore. It made sense back in Sherlock Holmes times, and into the 1930s, but post-WWII, the idea of a “monolithic set of societal mores” feels . . . naive? We don’t agree on anything anymore. We have a president who won’t protect his citizens, ennobles fascists to be more fascist, and plays a victim role like a sniveling punk in hopes of further fracturing the American people. So, again, please report domestic abuse, but maybe assert your individuality by not reporting fellow protestors and standing up for the values that we shouldĚýall agree on. Like justice. And defunding the police.

THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD

The future isn’t what it used to be. You must have noticed this yourself: the future isn’t what it used to be.

In the past, the future mainly unfolded in one of the following ways:

(1) The world would end, and everything would start again from scratch, with the creation of an identical world—the pessimistic version of most belief systems.

(2) The world would end in a horrifying and final bloodbath, from which would arise a world of bliss—the optimistic version of some religions.

(3) The world would never end, and bliss, which acted as the leavening agent, would continue to increase until the end of days, which were themselves infinitely extendable—the foolhardy version of the ends of History.

But by the beginning of the twenty-first century such theories had run their course. Forecasts had changed. All people endowed with a certain understanding of the facts on the ground agreed on one point: no matter how you imagine it, it’s going to end badly. Either in a horrible bloodbath followed by nothing at all—the optimistic hypothesis. Or by bloodbaths here and there, followed by further bloodbaths here and there, without end, until the universe expands to the point that its density reaches an infinite value, which would in turn precipitate the destruction of the galaxies and the poor miserable wretches who live there. Some observers added a supplementary aspect: a concomitant and heretofore inconceivable dulling of humanity.

*

MY PROJECTS

Writing a book about the end of the world was a longstanding project. I’d already written a play on the same subject. It was called Yesterday and the Day After Tomorrow. But you’re obsessed, my wife said when I mentioned the idea of taking another crack at it.

I don’t think so. But I might be wrong. According to psychologists, the idea of the end of the world allows people to accept their own mortality. What’s more, the world doesn’t even have to end. They say the death of others in and of itself is soothing. To be on your deathbed and to be able to say, In any case, this is going to happen to all those stupid bastards, would bring peace to the soul.

Just as long as you don’t believe in the afterlife. Imagine! Just imagine! To run into all of them again!

*

ON HUMANITY

Would it be so bad if humanity were to disappear? Some would be delighted. They’ve been clamoring for its disappearance for many a moon. It would lead to the liberation of other species, and the Earth would finally be able to breathe after the catastrophes brought about by the thoughtless and murderous parasites that we are.

But the subject of this book is the world.

*

CATASTROPHIES

The end of the world had been predicted numerous times over the course of human history. During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries it ought to have occurred forty-two times.

That each of these times didn’t come to pass, or at least not completely, by no means obviates the next. Quite the opposite: statistically speaking, with each failure the odds increase considerably. Ends of the world are like human births. A woman’s gestative capacity is only one in four. The three prior copulations are both necessary and fruitless.

The reasons for the end of the world were varied. The fury of a disappointed God raining down on humanity and exterminating it once and for all. The planet colliding with a near-Earth asteroid. A meteorite shower falling on Earth and causing a deadly tsunami. Asteroid collisions leading to melting polar caps. A mysterious event causing the South Pole to shift from its axis. The end of the calendar cycle leading to something terrible. Extraterrestrials armed with sophisticated weapons invading the Earth. An inversion of energy currents making the Earth pass into the fourth dimension. The Earth disappearing into a black hole created by the Large Hadron Collider. A sudden end to the magnetic field allowing solar winds to penetrate the atmosphere. The Earth’s atmosphere suddenly blowing into space, and the oceans drying up. Have you had your breakfast yet?

According to an American think tank, there was only, both presently and symbolically, one minute until the end of the world. The organization brought together researchers who year after year entertained themselves by evaluating the more or less negligible chances of humanity’s survival. When it was looking its best, at the beginning of the 1990s, humanity had seventeen minutes to live.

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The researchers justified their prediction of “extraordinary and undeniable threats” stating it was due to “unchecked climate change, global nuclear weapons modernizations, and outsized nuclear weapons arsenals.”

They forgot, please see above, the wrath of God, who is always liable to try out new methods.

*

PurchaseĚýThe End of the World Might Not Have Taken Place from your , or via Bookshop.org, where proceeds from the sale via will go to the .Ěý

—William Poundstone,

It probably goes without saying, but publishing international literature is a precarious business in the best of times. On average, sales for translated works of fiction tend to be about one-third of the average sales for a mid-list author writing in English. There are additional costs—not just in terms of paying the translator, which is baked into the idea of publishing books from around the world and shouldn’t be something publishers complain about—such as increased expenses to tour an author, the mental stress of having to work approximately ten times as hard to get the same level of attention given to books written by Americans, the fact that most translation-centric presses are non-profits, which means that in addition to all the normal publishing tasks, you also have to spend a significant amount of time filling out grant applications and final reports, running fundraising campaigns, cultivating major donors, and working with a board of directors.

Richard Nash used to say that all indie press publishing is two fuck-ups away from collapse. Presses specializing in international lit? We might only be one fuck-up away. Or one COVID-19.

Just because I have the tendency to ramble, I’m going to drop the lede right here, then circle back: Open Letter needs your support more than ever before. Everyone’s struggling, there are hundreds of worthy causes and orgs to donate to, but if you like our books, our free content, our role in the translation-ecosystem, please consider to us. I don’t want to sound alarmist—or at least not more than is warranted—but we need a lot of things to break our way to continue operating like we have for the past thirteen years.

Last post, I shared a graph of how our sales fell off the ledge in April, seriously jeopardizing our chances of having our best year ever. (Which we were on pace for through March!) But, in a way, that chart is misleading. The numbers are all accurate, it’s just that this chart is basically everyone’s chart. (Unless you work in the booze industry! According to an ad on Instagram, liquor sales go up 243% during quarantine. Which, well, um, that data hasĚýto be a sample size of one, so . . .)

The long-term consequences of lockdown, of having 20% unemployment, of dealing with uncertainty and fear of a future outbreak will be screwing things up for the foreseeable future, no matter how much Trump and protestors want to wish that away.

Which brings me to my actual point: Open Letter isn’t just suffering because it’s hard to sell a lot of books right now, but because more than a third of our revenue comes from the URochester. The education crisis is so pervasive and terrifying—and impossible to address as a whole—but thanks to sending students home, refunding room & board fees, having worries about fall enrollment, and employing large numbers of people whose jobs don’tĚýdirectlyĚýgenerate revenue, higher ed is in some massive trouble.

I don’t have/won’t share the specifics about the URochester, but I was forced to furlough Kaija for two months and Anthony for three weeks, and every division on campus is taking a hit to their budget. It doesn’t help that the UR Medical Center is and is furloughing 20% of its staff.

All of this is to say that things might be evolving at Open Letter over the next months and years. In the current environment, the model we’ve been operating under doesn’t seem sustainable. What will this mean? Nothing drastic right now, but we’re going to have to reassess how we allocate our resources. Which may include having to cut back on the altruistic things we do for the larger community (from posts about other press’s books, to podcasts, to running weekly translation workshops, to speaking with whomever asks for advice), since these are all unfunded.

Again, if Open Letter is at all a meaningful part of your literary life, I hope you’ll consider to us. The U of R’s donation site is a bit clunky, since you have to “select a designation” choose “other-write in” and then write in “Open Letter,” but it can be done. Or you could mail us a check directly if that’s easier. For worse, these appeals from us are going to become much more commonplace—even after “all this.”

*

OK, now that that’s out of the way—sorry, but if you knew the level of anxiety and uncertainty I’m dealing with in regard to the press you would know just how restrained those above paragraphs really are—let’s get to the fun stuff!

So, this week’s post is actually three posts, a triptych of posts. (If you’ll forgive a bit of pretentiousness.) There are linkages between the three, and I’m actually experimenting with writing all three simultaneously, but, to be honest, they’re each pretty separate from one another.

I want to start this one by recommendingĚýĚýby MĂłnica RamĂłn RĂ­os, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers. This was our April publication, officially releasing on April 14th, which isn’t great for a book that was positioned to take off thanks to bookseller love and recommendations . . . Just check out this quote from a *starred review* inĚý: “RĂ­os’s themes are unwaveringly contemporary—LGBTQ and feminist issues; immigrant life; politics—but it is artistry, not dogma, that guides her prose. This is art house literature at its best: provocative, alluring, and uncompromising.”

These stories areĚýfierce. As mentioned above, they’re uncompromising in both their stylistic approach and political aims. They’re fun, yet unnerving. They’re playful in form, without fear of experimenting. (“Invocation” is told in two voices running in parallel down the pages.) They are, in short, fire.

This is going to be the next Two Month Review book (official schedule to come, but we’ll be talking about it live on June 3, 10, and 17, and both MĂłnica and Robin will be honored guests), so I’d highly recommend ordering it so that you’ll have it in time.

To celebrate the release ofĚýCOF, theĚýSouthwest ReviewĚýran this incredible conversation between RĂ­os and Myers, which I wholeheartedly recommend . But here are a few fantastic bits:

Robin Myers: I’d like to ask you instead: how did the collection come to be structured for you? And in what ways did you feel, as you wrote the stories, that they were speaking to each other? As I translated, I sometimes imagined them as a kind of song series: one completely different musical experience after another, jarring and thrilling in their contrasts, their color-scapes. But sometimes I thought of them more as a chorus: all speaking up at the same time, all claiming their place in a kind of riotous multiplicity. I’d love to have you discuss the relationships among the stories as they revealed themselves to you.

MĂłnica RamĂłn RĂ­os: The urge to write these stories emerged, among other things, from a localized, experiential, desire-based knowledge/belief that the self is a perilous fiction that has been imposed on us both by very good literature and by very poor books. And I say this not because I read all the poststructuralists (which I did) or the postmodernists (which I ditched), but because I rebel against the idea of fixity, of borders, walls, names, or any supplementary tools to define being, voice, or even our work as anything more than fiction­­. I learned to write at a time when Chile was plagued by very bad neoliberal realism, which coincided with the most treacherous moments of Chilean politics: when the left sold the country and settled with the dictatorial right to create a new transactional structure of power—this is the order we are trying so hard to remove right now in Chile. In terms of literature, the transparency and immediacy of neoliberal realism was not only trying to oppose the literature of the ’80s (a dense oppositional, feminist, queering, literature of protest against univocal dictatorial violence, but also of military stupidity, embodied by the Ministry of Censorship). At the same time, in fact, neoliberal realism was trying to hide those power transactions. And it meant wanting to write like theĚýgringoĚýliterature exported to ChileĚýbecause the whole country wanted to enjoy their fucking McDonald’s. What came out of that was not literature, but a new writer who was a vendor, a new literature that was a product. It wasn’t even entertaining, because it made you lethargic, like the joints mixed with glue we’d buy on the cheap as teenagers to pass days that felt eternal and useless. This was a literature without consequences. But even back then, we still craved those moments of intense understanding that made us becomeĚýtrabajadores de la letra,Ěýwriter-workers.

So, yes, the voice ofĚýCars on FireĚýis a riot. I wrote all of the short stories, except one, after moving to the United States. And in many ways their voice also riots against the inherent racism in this country, especially the one concealed behind niceness. I aim my pen at those people who abuse us saying they are helping us, saying they are our friends.

RM: It seems to me that two of the central forces at work in the book are, on the one hand, the human thirst for revenge (explored especially in part one, “Obituary”), and, on the other, the exhilarating multiplicity of love and desire (which particularly characterizes part two, “Invocation”). Part of what fascinates me about the book is how your ventures into the intentionally exaggerated or even the fantastical—I’m thinking of the comical distortedness of the academic administrator in “The Head,” the amorphous creature in “Extermination,” or the sinuous human-animal metamorphoses in “Invocation”—affects the dynamic between your characters and their environments, or with each other. Or would you object to my use of the word “fantastical” here? Maybe what I’m really asking is how you see, and like to channel, the slipperiness of place, time, and form in your work.

MRR:ĚýI would rephrase it as MĂłnica RamĂłn’s thirst for revenge and their desire for the exhilarating multiplicity of love. I see the stories you’ve mentioned as pure realism. I say this with a mischievous intent to contend the possibilities of the real and to subvert the straitjacket that has constricted our experiences.

Again, read the whole thing .

Also, check out this that’s part of Caroline Alberoni’s “” series;

CA: Besides being a translator you are also a poet. Does being a poet help as translator and vice-versa? If so, how?

RM: It absolutely helps. Both poetry and translation (and by this I mean the translation of anything, not just poetry) are practices rooted in the materiality of language. If you write poetry or translate anything, you are in the business of dealing with words as stuff, as resources, as concrete elements you shape and combine to form certain structures and spark particular effects in the reader. Of course, in translation, you’re using language in response to—in relation to—language that already exists in the world. You’re writing (because translating is also writing) in the service of and in complicity with that language. In this sense, too, translation demands both that you saturate yourself with the original text and that you distance yourself from it. That doubleness has helped me write my own poetry, I think, at least in the sense that it’s made the experience of writing poetry much more interesting. For one thing, it’s made me more conscious of the artifice of whatever I’m doing (and I mean “artifice” not as an insult but as a fact). For the same reason, it’s also made me feel freer to experiment: to think with more curiosity and more gratitude about language as “tools” and how I might try them out. I do feel that writing poetry affects my translations as well, or my approach to translating. For example, I care a great deal about sound when I write poetry, about what happens to words when we string them together and speak them aloud, and I feel a similar need to “hear” what language does in translating both poetry and prose. That said, I don’t mean to talk about this obsession with sound as if it were strictly the domain of poetry, much less of poets, because that’s not the case at all! I’m just musing about what itĚýfeelsĚýlike for me in going about things as I go about them.

Also, you can purchase Robin’s most recent poetry collection, , in a beautiful bilingual edition from AntĂ­lope Press in Mexico.

Final thing! On Wednesday, May 13th at 7pm eastern, you can see MĂłnica RamĂłn RĂ­os in conversation with Carmen Boullosa via .

*

Sticking with the idea of these biweekly posts being some sort of quarantine reading diary, I have to take a paragraph to praise Zulfikar Ghose’s . This isn’t coming out until September, but it’s a truly beautiful book. I mostly know of Ghose from the issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction that featured him (together with Milan Kundera), but his life and career are fascinating.

Born in Pakistan, he lived in London in the 1950s and 60s, then moved to Texas in 1969. He’s written a dozen novels,Ěýand an equal number of poetry collections and works on nonfiction. He even co-authored a book of short stories with personal favorite B. S. Johnson. ( sounds particularly interesting to me. Especially in combination with Patrik OuĹ™ednĂ­k’s (trans. Alex Zucker), which is near the top of my to-read pile.) He’s been praised by T. S. Eliot!

For whatever reason, the books that have worked best for me in quarantine have been British. Or at least set in London. Escapism + mid-50s British charm works for me. Which is why I plowed throughĚýKensington QuartetĚýin just a couple days.

It’s a tricky book, a book of memories and nostalgia in which the narrator is wandering around London, remembering earlier versions of himself as if they still physically exist. It’s a short novel of memory and landscape, an ode to London that will appeal to lovers of Esther Kinsky or other meditative, geography of memory type, flaneur writers.

It also opens in Kensington Gardens following almost theĚýexact same pathĚýI walked when I was there on March 10th, before the world completely fell apart.

I am here now, just inside Kensington Gardens.

To the north the pebbled concrete expanse of the Broad Walk slopes up towards a pale blue sky above Bayswater. Two women with bundled-up toddlers and another pushing a pram, and farther up shadowy figures of three men in charcoal-grey coats, there is a scattering of ghostly bodies on the Broad Walk, the light so unusual, almost too bright, aglow in my mind, a surprisingly illuminated London. Glancing back in the direction of Palace Gate, I observe that you are striding up in that jaunty walk of yours, always so enthusiastically eager for the grass under the elms and a view of the Long Water. There are no shops to distract you, only consulates of foreign lands across the road you have no interest in, one displaying a flag, green and white, of indistinguishable nationality, hanging too limply. Your step always quickens in Palace Gate when the distant green blur of Kensington Gardens first catches your eye and even when the day is overcast and grey you see a sudden green shiver in the sky, for you it’s the pulse of London, throbbing, as if it were your blood that surged with a sudden passion and made your breath come hard and loud—as that first time, that April, which then became the loveliest of months, when the first of English green you saw was here—all those prints of Constable’s landscapes in the Blackie readers coming alive in the grass at your feet—and your blood bounded in amazement. Another three minutes and you will be coming into the Gardens, inflating your chest when you enter, as is your habit, taking a deep breath and holding it a long moment as when the doctor, his stethoscope’s cold disc on your chest, says, Breathe in and hold, listening to your heart.

Ghose’s writing is simply delicious. The more grounded moments—of the narrator’s first experiences in school, when he nearly has a fling with a gay friend of his teacher’s, when things don’t work out with his various girlfriends—are conventionally compelling and well-crafted, but it’s in the long descriptions, the meanderings, the way that he constructs a palpable sense of London that the prose excels. In a way, this book is a throwback. The narrator’s life resembles Ghose’s in some superficial ways, but it doesn’t feel like the “I” fiction so predominant these days. It’s an attempt to create something beautiful and heartfelt, an archeology of emotional memories tied to a very specific place.

*

Last bit of self-promotional stuff . . .

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve participated in two virtual events to support Ěýby Sara Mesa, translated from the Spanish by Katie Whittemore.ĚýSince neither space nor time really make sense anymore, I thought I’d share both of them here.

First up was the Wordplay event with both Sara and Katie. This one is bilingual in a fun way, mostly about the book and Sara, and features one of the funniest event moments I’ve seen, when Katie flees her daughter and her daughter’s “Let it Go”-playing birthday card.

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Designed to be a complement to that event, the one Katie and I did for the Transnational Series at Brookline Booksmith is all about translation, crafting voice, interesting challenges Katie had to deal with, and a fun “mercenaries vs. soldiers” bit.

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I hope you enjoy both, and please buy a copy of the book from one of the two organizations that hosted us!

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

Review by Soti Triantafyllou

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soti Triantafyllou is a writer and scholar based in Paris.

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

by Jung Young Moon, translated from the Korean by Mah Eunji and Jeffrey Karvonen (Dalkey Archive Press)

I’ve been reading Jung Young Moon’s A Contrived World in preparation for an upcoming class (we’ll be talking about his Vaseline Buddha) and god damn do I love this book. Why, you ask? Here are three quotes, starting with the longest one, the one mentioned on the forthcoming Three Percent Podcast:

Before I begin to list the things that I think are fun, I would like to take a moment to list the things that I do not consider fun: noises of all kinds, nearly every kind of music, violent things, depression, conventional works of fiction, fiction that reflects the times, novels that discuss scars, consolation and healing, novels in which characters’ actions weigh more than their thoughts, grandiose novels, touching novels (perhaps speaking of the dull nature of the critics who fawn over such novels could be somewhat fun, but not really, so let us just say that the reason for their behavior is that they either have no talent as critics or have no self-esteem as human beings, or both), growth novels, all-too-serious novels, novels that don’t exude an excess of self-consciousness, proverbial poems, things explained by common sense, obvious ploys (and those responsible for them), flawless people, people with nothing peculiar about them, people whose entire being exudes authority, people who are diligent and eager, people who want to contribute to society, people who have no interest in clouds, simple folk, talkative people, overly greedy people, people who know jokes but are without humor, unspeakably dull people who make me speechless (they are really dull), racial chauvinists, self-conscious women who act coy while pretending to be nonchalant (such women can be found everywhere in the world, but more so in Korea than anywhere else; since there has never been formal research, their exact number is unknown, but it is certainly more than the number of a certain species of near-extinct penguins in the South Pole), men who show off their strength and manliness (such men also exist in large numbers in South Korea; among them are those who tense up and crack their bulked-up necks noisily and walk with an exaggerated swagger; such a man might be a good match for a self-conscious woman who acts coy while pretending to be nonchalant), conservatives, and economic issues. I could probably add to this list endlessly. (Adding endlessly to this list is sometimes fun and sometimes dull.)

This sort of list-making gets me right away, especially when I a) generally agree with the observations, and b) these observations are entertaining without becoming too cutesy. Another thing that sucks me in? Talk about hobos.

He told me this and that about hobos. The world has its share of people who talk without being asked, and he seemed to be one of them. He told me that drifters are people who roam from one place to the next, and that drifters can be divided into tramps, who only work when absolutely necessary; bums, who never work and are not so different from beggars; and hobos, who find work as they roam. He said that hobos have held an annual American hobo convention since 1900, and that hobos have their own code of ethics, which prescribes that they must help other hobos in difficult situations, and have control over their own lives. Hobo culture is a weighty subject matter in American literature. Many authors, including Jack Kerouac, Jack London, Eugene O’Neill, and John Steinbeck, lived as hobos and wrote about hobos, coining numerous new terms, such as possum belly, a term that describes free-riders lying flat on their bellies on the roof of a train car so as not to be swept away by the wind. The hobo added that San Francisco is like a holy ground for hobos. These were all things I’d read about hobos. I listened carefully and quietly to catch inaccurate information, but everything he said checked out. It was as if he had memorized the content of some hobo manual.

These two quotes pretty much capture the tone and nature of this book. The narrator/author is in America, things happen around him, he reflects on them in an entertaining, occasionally insightful way, and the narrative follows his eccentric train of thought. It’s a real joy to read—exactly what I’ve been looking for. And since I’m sort of childish, I’ll close with a quote that’s a bit sillier and more juvenile than the ones above.

I would have liked to put my underwear back on and move on to something normal, but it suddenly occurred to me that I must not have let out a respectable fart since my buttock had become so unsightly. It seemed only logical that a person with a nice-looking butt would fart respectably. In order to test this theory, I tried solemnly to fart, to see what sort of unrespectable fart would come out, but I couldn’t break wind. I wished to release several farts in a row, rather than letting out one lousy fart, but there was nothing. I was angry at the gas that would not be released. My failed attempt reaffirmed the fact that trying to fart on purpose for whatever reason doesn’t work. This fact, too, seemed logical. I was not at all proud that I’d become aware of two very useless logical facts in a short time. I’m making this up, actually. From the get-go, I didn’t believe I’d be able to far, so I did not try.

Buy this book!