by Miljenko Jergović, translated from the Croatian by David Williams and published by Archipelago Books

This piece is by Québec translator Peter McCambridge, who also runs a about translating literature from Québec.

When Mama Leone wins the Best Translated Book Award, it will be a triumph of storytelling and atmosphere-building, a victory for stories well told (and well translated) everywhere. The writing is on the face of it simple at times, but just enough off kilter that it still manages to suck us in and take our breath away.

Take the first few paragraphs of the first story, You’re the angel:

When I was born a dog started barking in the hall of the maternity ward. Dr. Srecko ripped the mask from his face, tore out of the delivery suite, and said to hell with the country where kids are born at the pound! I still didn’t understand at that point, so I filled my lungs with a deep breath and for the first time in my life confronted a paradox: though I didn’t have others to compare it to, the world where I’d appeared was terrifying, but something forced me to breathe, to bind myself to it in a way I never managed to bind myself to any woman.

And breathe. Wow. There we are, sucked right into the story, right into this terrifying new world, bound tightly to it from the get-go, and somehow forced to breathe and accept it, swept along by the narrative. It’s so simple, and yet somehow magnificent.

Mama Leone is a collection of stories in two parts. The first half is about childhood and told in a voice so original and so authentic that it’s hard to resist. Don’t stare, Miljenko is told. Quit eavesdropping. Life’s not a circus. And yet we explore his world with our eyes wide open, with our ears pricked. Everything is huge, larger than life. Sarajevo is “a gigantic city, the most gigantic in the world,” his loneliness is “the biggest in the world,” a character laughs “like a giant out of a fairy tale.” Bedtime, trips to the potty, plans to run away from home, eating sardines, all become dramas of epic proportions (“cities silently crumbled in my pounding heart”).

The effect is grandiose. Scenes from a childhood, more realistic than abstract, but high on poetry all the same, add up to a beautiful tableau that somehow seems all the more real for its helter-skelter, kaleidoscopic vision of the world.

The language is exhilarating. Sentences career along between commas, the vocabulary a tremendous mix of slang, poetry, and more than the odd memorable one-liner.

The result is stunning and beautiful and real, all with an undercurrent of death and war and increasing sadness.

And then suddenly our perspective shifts to the third person. It is a grown-up’s world, the world of Deda, Boris, Marina, Nana, and the others. A world of love, longing, and loss, of darkness and war and damage. There are still angels but now they are drunken. Words that in the first section “flowed in cascades, gushing over the edges of the world being born” now “disappear into dark spaces.” People “become destroyed cities to each other,” although there are still the occasional roses in the sky in place of stars.

The words that so enchanted us in the first part are now “sometimes uglier than what they mean.” But, as with all the best stories, there is beauty in the loss and the missed opportunities. And no end of beauty in the writing.

Miljenko Jergovic’s Mama Leone is a book about loss, and about the hopeless and beautiful attempt to recover what has been lost. It begins in one child’s experience and ends so far away from it that it’s impossible not to see the shift as commentary not only on the fragility of childhood, but on the very act of loving recreation that makes the first half of the book so rich. If this sounds paradoxical, well, it is. It is also in keeping with the paradoxical criticism/embrace the narrator makes a few seconds after being born in a Sarajevo hospital:

I still didn’t understand at that point, so I filled my lungs with a deep breath and for the first time in my life confronted a paradox: though I didn’t have others to compare it to, the world where I’d appeared was terrifying, but something forced me to breathe, to bind myself to it in a way I never managed to bind myself to any woman.

The world called Yugoslavia (over which the memory and premonition of wars past and to-come hover continuously) is terrifying, but the narrator marries himself to it—an act of bone-headed generosity that marks him as one of those ugly ducklings that we have watched grow into a writerly swan over and over again, and yet never grow tired of. Why don’t we grow tired of him? For one, because we recognize his awkward emergence as something we ourselves have gone through. Human experience may be as varied as spots on a rug, but the patterns that our minds make out of these experiences have more in common with one another than you’d expect. Knowing this, Jergovic eschews the hammy over-exaggeration of exotic detail, instead building these stories around moments whose drama might happen just as easily in Detroit, the Urals, Mars. Despite—or maybe because of—their universality, the specific meanings of said moments seem both obvious and mysterious, so that all we can do when faced with them is wait and watch as the situation gets harrier and harrier, until suddenly an invisible line is crossed and it becomes not-hairy at all. The figures that only a moment ago seemed to be physically weighed down by their individual lonelinesses float free, hanging together in space like stars in a constellation. The effect of these breakthroughs is cathartic, sure, but also heartbreaking—for example, when the narrator’s young mother climbs fully-clothed to the top of a high dive as her son and ex-husband (who can’t swim) watch:

Nice diving board, said Mom, and then went and climbed right up to the top. Fully clothed, one step at a time, she walked slowly out along the board, which was trembling and wobbling under her weight. When she got to the end she looked down and spread her arms wide as if she was going to fly away, but then she slowly let them fall. Dad looked up at her, beads of sweat lining his forehead, he opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something, and he did want to say something, but he didn’t know how, or whether to say it to me or to her.

The soft ventriloquism of this scene, in which the narrator seems for a second to be not just himself, or his mother, or father, but all three of them at once, reflects a further paradox of feeling—one so ordinary that I’d bet every kid has experienced it at one time or another. The diving board represents something different to each of the three figures around, under, and on it. And yet, it somehow represents the same thing. The distance from one person to the next is both heartbreaking and reassuring, since it is a distance the three of them experience together. And then, only a few lines later, the miracle is over, Mom steps back from the edge, life goes on.

Coming to terms with this last part is one of the aspects in which language helps the young narrator of Mama Leone do. He is aware of it painfully, curiously—the way other kids become aware of their tongues. This maladjustment brings with it certain benefits. As anyone who has tried to make himself understood in a foreign country will tell you, one of the underrated benefits of language learning is the understanding it gives of one’s native tongues. In a similar way, the developmentally bilingual voice of Mama Leone dabbles in adulthood without really being fluent in it. The particular sound of this flailing can be lyrical, funny, bizarre, naïve, and even, occasionally, wise. It can begin a story by saying that “Only words cause no pain” and then three pages later describe that most mythical of beasts, a grandparent, with casual surrealism:

“When he sweats, I can imagine a whole crowd of people building houses on his face, sitting in the dark and sweating like him; on Grandpa’s face lives another little grandpa, who also sits in the dark, lights a cigarette, rivers run down his face too, and next to them live even smaller people and even smaller grandpas, and they too sit in the dark, in blue and brown light, next to their grandsons, who on their faces see crowds of even smaller people and even smaller grandpas.”

As adults, we can call such Chagallian acrobatics beautiful; but Jergovic is careful to reminds us how pragmatic its wordplay is to the narrator himself. Grandpas are scary; so, like Perseus facing Medusa, the child makes an image, a mirror, replacing the vertiginous Grandpaface with a sort of linguistic Lego village, whose busy cuteness effaces its original’s freakish physicality while still not banishing it completely. The not banishing is especially important—for while words may be powerful tools for domestication, they are also spells, and require familiars. The house demon—that onetime staple of family life—must stay chained to the stove, or else it will wander off to make mischief elsewhere. Better, then, to create a grandpa who is still scary, strange, ugly—and all the more grandpa for it.

Compared to magic like this, the second half of Mama Leone, in which the narrative “I” is abandoned for a shifting third person that takes up a series of “unrelated” characters, is a bit of a letdown—but if anything, this is a testament to Jergovic’s honesty as a chronicler. Not just of childhood, but of memory—specifically, of the bittersweet memory of people who have left (or been thrown out of, or fled) their homes behind them. Sometimes these homes are actual countries, but more often they are states of mind: times before guilt, before heartbreak, before love, times in which everything seemed simpler because we thought it was. Losing is something that can happen to anyone, Mama Leone reminds us, which is one of the things that differentiates it from a book like Speak, Memory. For all its beauty, Nabokov’s tutor-and-truttle idyll emits a hagiographic reek, as if its ultimate meaning as experience was the exclusivity of its author’s suffering, and our necessary “we” before it. Jergovic avoids such grandiosity by breaking his hero’s childhood into shards—each of which nonetheless carries a tiny reflection of its source. We were all children once. Maybe we always will be: after all, if disappointment is all it takes to be an adult, then every one of us is born into it with our first breath.

Josh Billings has reviewed for The Literary Review in the past, and is also a writer and a translator from Russian. His two book-length translations are Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin and Alexander Kuprin’s The Duel, both of which are available from Melville House.

Here’s the opening of his review:

Like Scotts or High Elvish, childhood is simultaneously both a real language and a totally made-up one. We all spoke it once, but in the time since we spoke it last we’ve forgotten enough that our own memories can seem, if not incomprehensible, then at least significantly garbled. Being adults—meaning, being creatures that pride ourselves on having ostensibly figured our shit out in the world—we don’t like to admit any of this. We tour our childhoods with regal condescension; but it only takes a single misstep to start us blustering like tourists in a marketplace, until finally all we can do is stutter here! here! and retreat to the embassy. Later, we blame our confusion on the fact that when we were children we thought like children, but now we have put away childish things—like eating entire jars of marshmallow Fluff. Except that even as we say this, we know it isn’t true and that nothing has changed: that the old hurts still hurt, and the Fluff is still sitting there in the cupboard, drawing us to itself like a rubbery star. All of a sudden we jump out of our chairs—Back! We want to go back! But if the past is really another country, then even the most childish of us must admit that we can no more go back “there” than we can go back to Middle Earth, or Ancient Greece, or any of the other kingdoms of the imagination. For we are not just tourists, but exiles; travelers whose visits to the old country, city, neighborhood, block, or bedroom must inevitably be suffused with the one feeling that we do not want to admit our childhood contained: loss.

Miljenko Jergovic’s Mama Leone is a book about loss, and about the hopeless and beautiful attempt to recover what has been lost. It begins in one child’s experience and ends so far away from it that it’s impossible not to see the shift as commentary not only on the fragility of childhood, but on the very act of loving recreation that makes the first half of the book so rich. If this sounds paradoxical, well, it is. It is also in keeping with the paradoxical criticism/embrace the narrator makes a few seconds after being born in a Sarajevo hospital:

“I still didn’t understand at that point, so I filled my lungs with a deep breath and for the first time in my life confronted a paradox: though I didn’t have others to compare it to, the world where I’d appeared was terrifying, but something forced me to breathe, to bind myself to it in a way I never managed to bind myself to any woman.”

Click here to read the full piece.

“The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don’t wanna blow your wad, so then you got to cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules.”

Pardon the vulgarity, but Mr. Gordon has a point: when making a compilation, you have to start hard and strong, go harder still, then back off for a while. He didn’t say this, but you also need to finish just as well as you started, if not better. If the same rules apply to collections of essays, Ugresic is a triumphant follower of the letter of the law. The opening essay introduces us to what a “karaoke culture” is—and it feels like seeing a liger. That is, it’s just familiar enough that you can follow along and understand, but it’s also got that touch of exotic mystery so everything seems new and intriguing. For example, everyone knows what karaoke is; but in Ugresic’s eyes, it becomes the symbol of our time. Bloggers are karaoke. Asian teenagers writing cell phone novels are karaoke. Men recreating the Hollywood sign in Serbia are karaoke. Minibars are karaoke. Victoria Beckham is karaoke. Even the Yugoslavian political struggles are karaoke. So what, then is karaoke?

Karaoke is the way communication technology has made it harder for us to communicate with each other. Karaoke is celebrating the amateur instead of the auteur. Karaoke is celebrating pop-culture idols and condemning “the classics.” Karaoke is the equality of everyone having a voice, and having everyone’s voice be equally loud. Karaoke is when Joshua Bell, a famous violinist, can make huge amounts of money at a concert in Boston, but isn’t even given the time of day performing solo in a subway station. Karaoke is complicated.

To be honest, I don’t completely understand it yet. To completely understand the concept, you’d have to sit with this collection of essays for some time, first contemplating each one individually and then try to assemble them all into a sort of argument or conclusion. I have been working at this for some weeks and have mostly marveled at the full array of delicious language and interesting assertions. Karaoke culture itself is still mysterious and alluring, and no definite conclusions have been formed; I’ll be pondering this text for some time. Fortunately, that is a pleasurable task.

According to Ugresic, karaoke culture is to be chronicled, celebrated and criticized—often all in the same breath. She writes in a way that meanders while somehow being simple and direct. At times, she comes straight out with her bits of philosophy, as when she asserts that “the absence of dialogue in contemporary films is stark proof of the humiliating absence of the need for dialogue,” because today’s women have nothing of value to say. Other times, Ugresic avoids such straightforward statements, preferring instead to tantalize the reader with beautiful language that is better to let stew in your brain. Sentences like, “Invisible files from my archive would fall on me leaves, and at times I thought I was going to faint, lose control, and be forever submerged beneath that lush and invisible pile” have haunted me for weeks. And in still other moments, the text is terribly funny, as when Ugresic recounts many tragic anecdotes about Croatians dying at sea, and then remarks that “upon hearing these brief statistics, a naïve reader might conclude that Croats in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century used the sea for nothing but drowning.” These essays touch on Tito, “fan ficcers,” literary festivals and her own experience of being censured without losing any coherence, wit or intelligence in the process. It is a book well in control of itself and in control of its reader, utterly convincing and entertaining.

Dubravka Ugresic begins her essay collection with a simple phrase: “It needs to be said upfront: I’m not a karaoke fan.” By the end of these 314 pages, though, you can tell that she confines total ridicule to regurgitated music. Cultural karaoke, on the other hand, is given a far more mixed review. If I were to make a metaphor for the way Ugresic sees our karaoke culture, I picture a city overrun with stray dogs. They can cozy up to your shinbones and give your eager knuckles a lick, or they can rush up snarling and foaming at the mouth. So you treat them with wary reverence, accepting their place in your city, taking the licks with the bites as you can. After all, that’s karaoke. Sometimes you kill a song, and other times you flop. When it comes to Karaoke Culture, however, I can do nothing but tip my hat to a masterful performance.

I’m really excited about this book—in my opinion, it’s one of the best things Dubravka’s ever written, right up there with Thank You for Not Reading and her fiction.

We’ve posted the first four sections of the opening essay—an essay that’s over a 100 pages long and is god damn brilliant—for

It needs to be said upfront: I’m not a karaoke fan. This essay was not only conceived, but also half-finished, when it occurred to me to go and catch a bit of real karaoke. They say Casablanca is the most popular karaoke bar in Amsterdam. My companion and I, both neophytes, arrived at eight on the dot, as if we were going to the theatre and not a bar. Casablanca was empty. We took a walk down Zeedijk, a narrow street packed with bars whose barmen look like they spend all day at the gym and all night in the bar. Muscles and baggy eyelids—that pretty well describes our barman at Casablanca, to which we soon returned. On a little stage, two tall, slender young women were squawking a Dutch pop song into a couple of upright microphones. A concert featuring Dutch pop stars played on the bar’s TV screens but was drowned out by the evening’s young karaoke stars. The girls sang with more heart than the guys, and for a second I thought there must be an invisible policeman standing over them. The whole thing was a deaf collective caterwaul: deaf insofar as nobody actually listened to anyone. Amsterdam is definitely not the place for a karaoke initiation. I’m not sure why I even thought of going to see karaoke in Amsterdam—maybe because of the paradox that sometimes turns out to be true, that worlds open up where we least expect.

What is karaoke in actual fact? Karaoke (Japanese for “empty orchestra”) is entertainment for people who would like to be Madonna or Sinatra. The karaoke machine was invented in the early seventies by the Japanese musician Daisuke Inoue—who forgot to patent his invention, and so others cashed in. A few years ago Inoue apparently won the alternative Nobel Peace Prize (the Ig Nobel), awarded by The Annals of Improbable Research. They praised him for “providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other.”

Cultural critics are people who are prepared to see more in the craze for tattoos than just a passing fashion fad. I’m a member of this dubious guild. In karaoke I’m ready to see more than just desperate squawking to the backing track of “I Will Survive.” Karaoke supports less the democratic idea that everyone can have a shot if they want one and more the democratic practice that everyone wants a shot if there’s one on offer. The inventor of karaoke, Daisuke Inoue, is a humble man, most proud of having helped the Japanese, emotionally reticent as they are said to be, change for the better. As Pico Iyer wrote: “As much as Mao Zedong or Mohandas Gandhi changed Asian days, Inoue transformed its nights.”

In addition to that you can also read a full review of the book by clicking here. And later in the week we’ll be posting an interview with translator David Williams . . .

Also, for anyone in NY, she’s going to be reading at St. Mark’s Bookstore on Tuesday, October 11th at 7pm. And for those of you in Boston, she’ll be at the Brookline Bookstore on Friday the 14th at 7pm.

Enjoy!

For Ugresic, the problem stems from the whole concept of Karaoke. It is not about creating something new, nor even paying homage to the artist whose work you are singing, instead it is about becoming one the artist represents. The act, though, is not transformative , it is submissive. The participant becomes a facile representation of the artist, attempting to become the artist and, worst of all, surrendering to the celebrity culture that has spawned it.

Karaoke-people are everything but revolutionaries, innovators, or people who will change the world. They’re ordinary people, readers of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, consumers and conformists. All the same, the world changes and ordinary people have their part to play.

The very foundation of karaoke culture lies in the parading of the anonymous ego with the help of simulation games. Today people are more interested in flight form themselves than discovering their authentic self. The self has become boring, and belongs to a different culture. The possibilities of transformation, teleportation, and metamorphosis hod for more promise than digging in the dirt of the self. The culture of narcissism has mutated into karaoke culture—or the latter is simply a consequence of the former.

To illustrate this she investigates the sub cultures of sci-fi and fantasy, hardcore gamers and strange creations such as Abba world in London. In each she see people who are escaping from reality into worlds that don’t offer any freedom, but make them docile. Her greatest vitriol, though, is for the inhabitants of the former eastern block. She often sees them as trashy fools who have traded the enforced worship of the state idols, for the unthinking idol worship of all the worst of consumer culture. Creating needle point rugs that show scenes from porn movies is not art, but just loss of any kind of objective standards. But who needs standards when we are all creating culture, our own culture that is just a pale shadow of the original. And it is in that so called freedom that we loose ourselves in our own excitement that we too are stars, and loose our ability to think critically.

For her, fan fiction is the worst of all things. It is indicative of a world in which the writer is not the creator, but at the beck and call of the fan. The writer must please like a trained seal. Writing is no longer about high and low culture, the only thing that is important is “the fact that we’re producing.” She doesn’t see any saviors, either.

Criticism has changed. Today no one dares set out the differences between master and amateur, between good and bad literature. Publishers don’t want to get involved; they are almost guaranteed to lose money on a good writer, and make money on a bad one. Critics hold heir fire, scared of being accused of elitism. Critics have had the rug pulled out from under them in any case. No longer bound by ethics or competence, they don’t even know what they’re supposed to talk about anymore. University literature departments don’t set out the differences–literature has turned into cultural studies in any case

The freedom we thought we gained with the internet and participatory culture has actually destroyed culture.

Those are strong words, but Ugresic has seen the damage that slavish and unthinking adherence to one cultural ideal can do. The rest of the book is filled with short little essays that detail her encounters with such a world. The pieces look as if they were written as newspaper columns, although the book doesn’t say, and have the conversational feel of a newspaper essay. Over and over again she encounters the paradoxes of the west, for example, describing the lives of Filipino maids serving western families in Hong Kong and living in puny little closets. Or she takes aim at the states of the former Yugoslavia, where once the people all proclaimed they were one, but at the first opportunity they turned on each other. Where ever she turns, she sees people proclaiming one thing and living another, and she can’t stand it.

Ugresic, can be funny when she makes these observations. Her experiences in the Balkans are fascinating and the stories are great. In one she describes a Serbian thug who became part of the government and has created his own folk village, one that is run on almost fascistic terms and whose purpose is really to celebrate the thug. At the same time, the man is an environmentalist interested in preserving the forest around his creation. The paradoxes amongst nationalists she describes are disturbing, a bit terrifying, and comic because there is no alternative.

Unfortunately, despite her insights, she can also sound like Andy Rooney. If I have to see another sentence that uses freshman English constructions such as, now days…, I will have to throw the book down. Her criticism is breezy and reads well, but you constantly have the feeling that shes just complaining because the world has passed her by. I don’t think it is necessarily true, but if when you keep up with the “kid these days” type of criticism, you end up sounding that way. Often times you have the idea that she doesn’t really even know the subject that well. It’s as if she heard about it on the news and is now giving her opinion, rather than first hand experience. It might be a little unfair and first had experience is not required for every criticism one makes, but that sense of the detached outsider doesn’t always work. The other draw back of the book is the short pieces that make up at least half of the book. The essay Karaoke Culture is around a hundred pages and sustains an argument, but the occasional pieces are tedious after a while. Fortunately, towards the end of the book she has some longer pieces that make for more compelling reading.

It is too bad the book has these defects because I was looking forward to reading her essays and although I think the essay Karaoke Culture is interesting, the book as a whole suffers. Nonetheless, I look forward to reading more of her work at some point, as I think it is a great lens for looking at Europe and the world, neither left nor certainly right.

This review was reposted with permission from , a book review blog run by Paul Doyle.