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

Review by David DeGusta

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland by Nicolai Houm
Translated from Norwegian by Anna Paterson
228 pgs. | pb | 9781947793064 | $15.95

Review by David DeGusta

Nicolai Houm’s novel “The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland,” translated from the Norwegian by Anna Paterson, opens with the titular protagonist in seemingly dire straits. Jane has been abandoned in a tent in the freezing wilds of Norway, a storm rages, she is out of food, and, perhaps most chilling to the modern reader, her smartphone is dead. What follows is indeed a survival narrative, but not a wilderness one. Jane is trying, though at times not very hard, to find her way after a heartbreaking trauma, the specifics of which are at first hinted at and then, eventually, spelled out. The novel nods in the direction of thriller, but is more a study of tremendous grief. And yet, it’s not a sad book per se. The action is as brisk as the weather, the tone energetic. This is Nordic, but neither noir nor Knausgård.

Jane is an American writer of some accomplishment, a professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin, until in the wake of a trauma she gives up writing (believably) and her faculty position (less so) to seek her family origins in Norway, a country she’s never visited. She stays for a few days with a Norwegian family who may be distant relatives. The family members each have different reactions to Jane, along with their own idiosyncrasies, and Houm exploits the awkwardness of being a houseguest in a foreign culture to good effect without lapsing into sitcom clichés.

After her stay with her relatives comes to an abrupt end, Jane tags along on an expedition to study musk oxen with Ulf, a handsome Norwegian zoologist whose athletic physique seems to owe less to the gym and more to central casting. That said, the interactions between Ulf and Jane do take on a certain energy and mostly avoid the simplistic “me Ulf, you Jane” trope that might be expected here. Throughout, Jane ingests alcohol and pills in amounts that would impress even Wisconsin undergraduates, but their effects lean more toward dark comedy than tragedy.

Interspersed with the present action in Norway are scenes from Jane’s previous life, going back to childhood and including an extended look at her courtship and marriage. The non-linear arrangement of the novel echoes the way Jane’s life has fragmented in the wake of tragedy, and the eventual depiction of that tragedy is handled with restraint, but not avoidance.

Houm is well-positioned to understand Jane’s interaction with Norway and its citizens: while Norwegian himself, he spent a portion of his childhood in Wisconsin. He also seems to rise to the challenge of writing a convincing female protagonist, both in my own (male) opinion and that of several female reviewers. Per an interview with the author on the podcast “Absolutely Novel,” Jane’s character began as a male Norwegian, but Houm felt the need to put more distance between himself and his protagonist, presumably to be less constrained in the directions the novel might go.

Jane also moves between experiencing her life and viewing it at some distance, as if she were a character. While she no longer writes, she still sees the world through the lenses of her craft. Houm thankfully avoids both the snark and the self-seriousness that often accompanies the writer-as-protagonist, and instead uses the occasional bit of metafiction to develop Jane’s character and poke fun at writing, usually his own.

Houm has a sharp eye for observation and description, such as when he says of young rhythmic gymnasts, “some of these girls danced and turned with the bloodless precision of small steel devices covered in stretch lyrca.” And there is humor throughout, though generally understated: “She laces up her boots. They have Vibram soles and a layered construction that provides insulation but is also uniquely breathable. You can’t possibly die if you wear them.”

From the sentences alone, only the very closest of readers might suspect that this is a translation, which is to say that it seems to be a very good translation (I don’t read Norwegian). The prose is smooth, and sparing with its lyricism. For example, “Their daughter was long-limbed and innocent: she made Jane think of perfect, green apples in a new, transparent bag,” and “An electric radiator next to her bed gave off a faint smell of the past being burned.”

The conclusion of this relatively short novel (228 pages) perhaps tilts more toward bleakness than redemption. There are hints of forgiveness, both of self and others, but the book rightly seems unconcerned with a tidy ending. When we leave Jane, she is still engaging with the world, still moving, still thinking as both writer and protagonist, fighting to retain her agency in the face of nature’s merciless contingencies.

This is Houm’s third book, and the first to be translated into English. On present evidence, he is more accessible than many of the better-known Norwegian writers (e.g., Jon Fosse, Dag Solstad, Herbjørg Wassmo), and is perhaps, in broad terms, closer to Per Petterson in style. In one podcast interview, Houm said there were no current plans to translate his two previous books. So, unless readers are willing to go the full Lydia Davis and teach themselves Norwegian, this is it for the time being. One does hope for more.