Marcel Inhoff is completing a doctoral dissertation at the University of Bonn. He is the author of the collection Prosopopeia (Editions Mantel, 2015), and Our Church Is Here (Pen and Anvil, 2018) as well as numerous poems and essays in German and English. He is currently working on his first novel.

by Marie NDiaye, translated from the French by Jordan Stump (Knopf) 

Marie NDiaye’s gifts as a psychologically acute observer, a novelist with exceptional skill in depicting characters at an extraordinary depth and vividness have been well observed and described. The Cheffe: A Cook’s Novel is one more in a row of widely acclaimed novels about all kinds of characters. This one is about a cook who rose from rags to riches, not without being profoundly uncomfortable about the whole affair. The descriptions of her tumult, her growth, of the way she came to become a cook, through an accident, the sumptuous descriptions of her delight in the art of cooking, of her shame of her upbringing, all of this is masterfully evoked. Except—we see it all indirectly. The Cheffe does not speak with us—we hear the voice of a seemingly devoted narrator who works with and admires her, a factotum, almost.

It is tempting to read this novel entirely as a biography of the titular cook. After all, NDiaye fills her novel with extraordinary elements. There is the sense of class—the shame of one’s roots, and the quiet, but conflicting pride in having elevated one’s craftsmanship to such a prominent level as the Cheffe has. Cooking is, like writing, a craft that best works with an audience: readers, eaters. And the moment of reading, eating, is central to the book’s most pivotal moments. She finds herself a cook because she works in the kitchen of a rich, strange family, and is suddenly afforded the opportunity to take over duties as head chef. So she, already dissatisfied with the previous cook’s work, works out her own dishes and impresses her employers, the strange Clapeau family. Another such moment presents itself when she cooks refined dishes for her parents, who do not like their daughter’s vaunted cooking skills. At this point, we know that “refined” doesn’t mean “pretentious” in the dismissive sense of the word. The Cheffe has genuinely elevated her craft—and her palette in a way that shifts her sense of place and class so much it creates a rupture with her origins. As Pierre Bourdieu noted about himself: a second habitus has developed, and a shift has taken place, which the Cheffe finds disturbing.

Without unnecessarily going into details, this is the rift that motivated the self-examination at the heart of some of Didier Eribon’s recent work, most famously the Return to Reims, and it is not overall uncommon in literature. What is different here is the way NDiaye presents her female protagonist at the levels of the process—she is the head chef, a position unusual enough and important enough for the book that Jordan Stump’s translation has preserved it as the book’s title. It is an unusual choice—the Grand Robert, the Merriam-Webster of the French language, recommends turning the customary “le chef” into “la chef”—but that is not an option here. What’s more, the mastery of cooking—and the concept of mastery per se—is still understood as inherently male. 77% of professional chefs in the US are male, while home cooks are majority female. The difference here is written into the title of the book and its protagonist. She is one of modern cooking’s auteur chefs—with specific, painstakingly created, unique signature dishes, and the kitchen doubling as a “room of her own.”

One has to admire the book’s style, well translated by Jordan Stump, of what could maybe be called exact sumptuousness—a style that perfectly conveys the seductiveness of cooking, the richness of flavors and scents, the attraction of each individual element that composes a great dish, without decomposing into faux-baroque mush, a danger in books about the senses. This skill is heightened by the fact that all this description is wrapped around the simpler, sometimes strangely whiny discursive language of the narrator, a former cook in the Cheffe’s restaurant, hopelessly infatuated with his boss, and still writing, from his elegant retirement home, with a gesture of longing and admiration. His language is halting, self-correcting, searching, and contra many reviews of the novel, it is this narrator that elevates NDiaye’s novel above many of its contemporaries.

NDiaye has long been suspicious of autofiction and autobiography. Not belonging to the community Léonora Miano’s Afropeans, or at least not overtly identifying with them, she has often described herself as French, her Senegalese roots not as central to her identity as her interlocutors and reviewers like to make them, at least, not explicitly. In her work, her heritage and background shines through in much of her best work—but how does it relate to the “Cheffe” at the center of the work? In what I think is her most underappreciated work, the Autoportrait en Vert, NDiaye offers a strange hallucinatory search for a self, an apparition. The book is a challenge to readers, a book at odds with some fashionable assessments of what autofictional literature can, and maybe should, do. It is literally an evasive book—a chase for a phantom.

In The Cheffe, Marie NDiaye writes about a woman who does not want to be defined by her biography, who does not want pictures taken of her face to overshadow the work she produces. The Cheffe wants her work to speak for itself, her dishes to be tasted without being seen as reflections of any specific person. This fact is so central to the book that the narrator begins by explaining it to us before pushing aside any such concerns, before digging up and uncovering the biography of someone who hated being so uncovered. His doubts and thoughts are constantly with us. It is a mistake to read Marie NDiaye’s novel as a psychological portrait of the cook alone or even primarily. It is a portrait of the act of biography, the epistemological violence of dragging an author into a spotlight not sought by them. It is by no means an accident that this factotum, this insistent biographer is male—and that he pushes himself to the front of the picture, so that we never see the Cheffe without also seeing him, and his woeful inner torment. In French literature, this ponderous male voice is common—for example, it is all over Laurent Binet’s HHhH, a biography of Reinhard Heydrich and his two assassins. Not content to write the story of the assassination, Binet also writes the story of writing the story—including a discussion of other books being written about the topic and why his project is superior, more truthful, better.

It is difficult not to read The Cheffe as a novel not just about female ambition and success, not just about class and power, but a book about how interwoven our knowledge of the world is with the masculine push to dominate narrative. As in Autoportrait en Vert, here, too, Marie NDiaye offers us a chase—and a trap. The Cheffe’s psychology is given to us by the narrator, and the narrator alone. This is not about him being reliable or unreliable—it is about him being a central character of the story. Patriarchal constructions of narrative history as well as masculine dominance of literature mean that we must always be careful around these tales of female lives told to us by men. And where we must be most on our toes is about stories about female relationships with other women, in stories written by men. And so NDiaye includes a difficult relationship, between the Cheffe and her daughter, but makes sure we understand the extent to which this relationship is refracted through the eyes of the narrator.

And yet, despite all this metafictional finesse, this cleverness, this, even, bitterness of Marie NDiaye, a cheffe herself struggling with the narratives draped upon her shoulders, the book is never bogged down. Often, you have to choose—some of the clever books praised by reviewers and readers for their intelligence offer little in the way of story and characters, falling back on the bare bones of cleverness and conceit. This is not the case here. The book is never less than richly readable, engaging, a brilliant book by a great storyteller and a sharp thinker.

The entry below is by Trevor Berrett of He also moderates a dedicated to the BTBA. Feel free to join and post your opinions and rants and raves.

Ladivine”:http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/234541/ladivine-by-marie-ndiaye/ by Marie NDiaye, translated from the French by Jordan Stump (France, Knopf)

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 85%

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA: 17%

NDiaye’s books are illuminating while retaining so much mystery, or, rather, they are illuminating because they retain so much mystery. For example, the lines between characters often feel blurry to the point I sometimes don’t quite know who’s on the page anymore, and yet this confusion is the very moment I see light. NDiaye plays with this mixture of illumination and mystery particularly well in the seemingly straight-forward Ladivine, a worthy inclusion to this years Best Translated Book Award longlist, and, for my money, a worthy winner.

As the book begins, we meet a woman named Clarisse Rivière, but from the first sentence her identity is in flux:

She was Malinka again the moment she got on the train, and she found it neither a pleasure nor a burden, having long since stopped noticing.

When I first read this, I smiled and settled back in my chair, excited to again be in such capable hands. The next paragraph keeps the mystery alive, as we learn this is a woman who has somehow split her identity:

But it happened, she could tell, for no more could she answer without a second thought to “Clarisse” when, rarely, someone she knew took that same train and called to or greeted her as “Clarisse,” only to see her stare back in puzzled surprise, a hesitant smile on her lips, creating a mutual discomfort that the slightly flustered Clarisse never thought to dispel by simply echoing that “Hello,” that “How are you,” as offhandedly as she could.

Clarisse is on the train to Bordeaux, to visit her mother, as she does once every month, and we soon find out that her mother knows her as Malinka. Naturally; it was her mother who named her Malinka, and her mother has no idea of any other name. Clarisse has, but for these monthly ventures to a forsaken existence, completely repudiated her past and, with it, her mother. When she leaves Bordeaux, she sheds the skin of Malinka and finds no difficulty answering to Clarisse.

The book continues for some time to tell us about Clarisse by telling us about the people in her life: her mother, a black seamstress with no money, whom Clarisse refers to (and, thus, keeps distant) as “the servant”; her husband, who eventually leaves her, in part because Clarisse “couldn’t hold back the numbness gradually overtaking her household, the cold torpor exuded in spite of her by her artificial, oblique self”; and her daughter, whom she has named Ladivine, Ladivine being the name of her repudiated mother in Bordeaux and therefore a conscious tie to that past. Clarisse’s mother Ladivine knows nothing about her granddaughter Ladivine, though she suspects. After all, because visits from her daughter are so scarce she has watched her daughter with that much more attention. And she can fill in the blanks: those months when Malinka did not visit were because she was pregnant. Her mother loves her enough, perhaps even sympathizes with her motives to shun her, that she doesn’t rock the boat by asking questions. Which is not to suggest that NDiaye wants us to feel any of the same sympathy.

Throughout this section—it’s just the first—NDiaye manages a beautiful ambivalence, just as Clarisse manages her tragic ambivalence. Clarisse repudiates her past but she visits her mother every month, thereby retaining this past. We come to understand that she loves her mother; she’s just ashamed of “the servant.” Clarisse’s hope to become the person she envisions in her mind is felt on each page, though we also feel the melancholy of a half soul. Such nuance imbues the books with its mysterious power, though the story, as it explores the gulfs between people, gulfs they create while apparently seeking something, is fascinating as well.

This first section comes to a conclusion with surprising violence, and NDiaye destabilizes the entire narrative as our attention is directed primarily at Clarisse’s daughter Ladivine who begins to sense, without fully understanding, her mother’s hidden half. With Ladivine, we descend into a horrific labyrinth.

Making the labyrinth a psychological nightmare are all of the doubling and transformations throughout: obviously we have the two women named Ladivine, their disconnection/connection, and what all of that says about Clarisse, but we also have Clarisse’s husband Richard who, after he has abandoned her, marries another woman named Clarisse. The novel’s strangest bits suggest a transformation in to a protective dog. The transgression of these boundaries, though, are based in psychological realism, leading to the novel’s fascinating conclusion.

Thus Bad Begins by Javier Marías
translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa
464 pgs. | pb |9781101911914 | $16.95

Reviewed by Kristel Thornell

Following The Infatuations, Javier Marías’s latest novel seems, like those that have preceded it, an experiment to test fiction’s capacity to mesmerize with sombre-sexy atmospheres and ruminative elongated sentences stretched across windowless walls of paragraphs. Thus Bad Begins offers his customary ethical tangles and astute mulling over human behavior. At its most fluid, the reader drifts through the familiar density and detours in something like an intrigued torpor.

The focal point is the uneasy marriage of Eduardo Muriel and Beatriz Noguera. Juan de Vere, the narrator, is looking back on the period when, in his first job as an assistant to Eduardo, a well-known film director, he lived in the former maid’s quarters of the couple’s apartment. He was drawn to them, they relied on him, and this configuration made him a privileged voyeur. Provoked by rambling conversations with Eduardo and the titillating episodes of spying and eavesdropping Marías luxuriates in, de Vere wrestled to understand their union that was marred by unkindness and physical rejection on the part of Eduardo. This puzzling lack of intimacy appeared to stem from a perceived betrayal. Furthermore, Eduardo had entrusted de Vere with the mission of getting close to the shady, lecherous Van Vechten, family doctor and friend, to evaluate whether he could have behaved in an “indecent manner” toward women. To say more of the plot might spoil its teasingly deferred revelations, and in Marías seductive teasing is much of the point.

This is one of his most overtly “Spanish” books, its “tenuous . . . story” of a marriage set insistently within the frame of Madrid circa 1980. This was the time of the Movida, a countercultural movement and scene that emerged energetically in the capital in the wake of Franco’s rule of almost forty years—though it had been brewing and starting to manifest even before the dictator’s death in 1975. The city was heady with “permissiveness and freedoms,” vigorous nightlife (“no one slept in those years,” an impression you might still have there today), supposed sexual liberation, and the playful anarchic energy of artists such as Pedro Almodóvar. However, as Marías emphasizes, shadows lingered. Crimes and suspicions were being silenced, personal histories rewritten, cleansed of collusion with the old repressive regime. The new democracy was accompanied by a political decision (“the pact of forgetting”) reflecting a controversial but broadly upheld general conviction that it was better to avoid seeking retribution for wrongs perpetrated under the regime, as this would have caused chaos. Legal divorce was impending but not yet an option, and this is stressed, with the implications for both genders empathically considered. The novel feels both soaked with patriarchy and—at least intermittently—concerned with its particular oppression of women.

Marías’s fiction has invoked Shakespeare on several occasions and Thus Bad Begins lifts its title from Hamlet. The extended quote from Act III, scene iv, “Thus bad begins and worse remains behind” is interpreted for de Vere by Muriel as describing the need to renounce at knowing what cannot really be known and thereby move on. (He seems to take the line against the common reading, to mean that the worst is in the past—rather than yet in store.) We are left wondering about the implications of Muriel’s philosophy both for history and personal relationships. Marías returns repeatedly to the phrase, a technique he favors for building cumulative resonance and suggesting shifting shades of meaning. He is engagingly preoccupied with the rhythmic and chameleonic properties of language.

Musing on Hitchcock’s films, de Vere reflects that only a gaze is required to produce suspense; watching itself is dramatic. Perhaps, but especially when the watching is piquantly colored with mystery, desire and death. Marías is as exquisitely conscious of this as Hitchcock was, yet plentiful doses of all three don’t prove as consistently absorbing here as they did in novels such as Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. Marías’s prose often has a hypothetical aura, a sense of the exercise of modeling a possible reality. This is of course inherent to fiction, and can effectively be latent or more explicit. While in Thus Bad Begins Marías brings his usual virtuosic meticulousness to the exercise, I found my awareness of it a little distancing, the protracted conjecture and penchant for aphorisms sometimes cumbersome and emotionally flat. The use of _Hamlet_—though the works do both brood on hard-to-credit mortality via characters enmeshed in their own psychological webs—seemed a somewhat mechanical device for injecting passion.

This said, emotional distance or a certain flatness of affect is frequently apposite and subtly explored in Marías’s novels, which are very impressively substantial with ideas and moody mood. Alienation snakes through them, accompaniment to the recurring perception that reality is unreal. More broadly, he is fascinated by the potential for art and life to intersect, and the impossible task of cleanly demarcating the two. And always emerging persuasively from his prose is the haunting notion that consciousness is a roundabout, cryptic story we tell ourselves.

But anyone attempting to play Murakami Bingo with his latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, is going to lose. There are no parallel worlds, talking animals, or mysterious women. There’s only one passing reference each to wells and cats, both only as metaphors, and there’s really only one piece of music that’s talked about at any length. And it’s not even jazz.

This is Murakami at his most straightforward and subdued, the likes of which we’ve really only seen—in novels, at least—in Norwegian Wood and South of the Border, West of the Sun. It is a relatively straightforward tale of friendship, depression, and memory. As such, it sheds a beacon on both Murakami’s core strengths and weaknesses as a writer, some thirty odd years into his career.

In this latest novel, the eponymous Tsukuru, a middle-aged train station engineer, reflects on his high school days, when he belonged to a group of friends so close that its importance to his life has become essentially mythic. Each of their names even contain a color—Aka (red), the temperamental brainiac; Ao (blue), the cool people-person; Kuro (black), the sarcastic comedian; and Shiro (white), the quiet beauty—except for Tsukuru, who they joked was “colorless.” This moniker takes on a whole new meaning for Tsukuru when the group unceremoniously and without explanation excise him from their circle after he leaves their hometown for Tokyo and college. Tsukuru’s sudden exile sends him into a wretched depression, from which he clearly did not come out entirely intact. Sixteen years later, in the present day, a casual girlfriend prompts Tsukuru to try and figure out just what exactly happened, in the hopes that he might be able to finally heal, and perhaps commit more fully to his present relationship with her.

Peel away the usual pseudo-magical realist trappings, and this is the template for the über-Murakami story: an average, lonely man embarks on a quest. But time changes both the man and the world around him. An adventure like this, thirty years ago, involved research and a cross-country trek into parts unknown, á la A Wild Sheep Chase. In Colorless, his girlfriend suggests he checks Facebook.

This epitomizes what makes Colorless both compelling and frustrating in equal measure: it is, essentially, drama-free. The conflict, such as it is, takes place entirely in the past, waiting quietly to be unearthed. Tsukuru systematically contacts each friend, one by one, and slowly comes to learn the truth. And while there is a conspiracy of a sort, and twists and turns along the way, the universe does not fracture in two in response; there is no McGuffin to set it all right. The only thing Tsukuru can do is to push forward and engage with his old friends, and finally be able to come to terms with the contents of his present existence. It is perhaps the best novel I have read where nothing actually happens.

If that sounds like damning with faint praise, well, it is and it isn’t. The novels that Murakami is best known for—The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, 1Q84—are bombastic in their everything and the kitchen sink approach to writing. They’re weird, messy, digressive, splashy, about seemingly everything and nothing at the same time. They succeed and suffer in their attempts at a fractured 21st century “total novel,” the kind that Doestoevsky and Victor Hugo used to write. Stripped down to just an emotional core, Colorless is outwardly less ambitious, but a lot more personal. Without the distraction of the typical Murakami weird, however, it is a lot easier to spot Murakami’s weaknesses.

For one, Tsukuru is boring. Like every Murakami protagonist, Tsukuru is the consummate everyman. He is average in just about every way, as we’ve been told over and over in one story or another. In other novels, it is pretty easy to get past this—the narrator is a cipher, our surrogate, the straight man in a cast of weirdos, holding our hand as we bemusedly come to terms with a strange new reality. Colorless has no such distractions, and there are no other characters that stick around long enough for us to get interested in, like the vivacious Midori in the similarly somber Norwegian Wood. Tsukuru trots from one friend to the next, knowing that despite the amicable, nostalgic peace that comes with reconnecting with an old friend, things will never be the same, and it’s time to be moving on.

Murakami has always had a straightforward yet quietly elegant way with words, but the language in Colorless is so undemanding it frequently comes across as repetitive. (Translator Philip Gabriel has always been more than up to the task in previous translations; it seems unfair to throw him under the bus now.) When tasked with illustrating a character’s feelings, Murakami generally has no qualms with telling instead of showing—a big no-no any Intro-level creative writing class will teach you—but in Colorless it feels like this has become a bigger problem than ever before. While reading I even came up with a drinking game: a shot for every time you read some variation of Tsukuru wanting or needing something “more than anything.” Spoiler alert: you’re going to blackout.

So, to tally up so far: a boring narrator, facile language, clichéd characters, and a conflict-free narrative. Sounds pretty dismal.

And yet, there’s something about Colorless that works despite all these obvious flaws, something that makes all these seemingly egregious sins click into place. It is still just so damn readable. And while this subtle propulsion certainly doesn’t make the work transcendent, it makes it a far cry from the mess that I make it sound to be. Murakami is a workman, a writer in some tangibly fundamental way—in short, a professional. He can’t help but get a few things right.

One of the ways in which Colorless is much cleverer than at first glance is the way Murakami so deftly and subtly illustrates the fallibility of memory. Tsukuru is reflecting on events that happened sixteen years ago, the aftermath of which has colored his perspective of himself and the world around him. He frequently remarks that nothing is interesting or remarkable about him because that’s fundamentally how he sees himself. He has carried the feeling of being “colorless” for years; he is someone who seems himself, essentially, as someone who is very easily abandoned. His friends are described practically with only one characteristic each, as if stock characters right out of the Breakfast Club. But memory orders our lives by both exaggerating and obliterating the truth. Each friend had their role to play, as we all do during those formative years, and the distance of time amplifies those impressions even more. It’s telling that with every friend Tsukuru reconnects with, Tsukuru can’t help but notice how they seem both exactly the same and inexplicably different.

So while the language itself is perhaps shallow, its simplicity belies a complex and satisfying narrative thread of a man who is taking his first steps toward self-actualization. A man who learns he has self-worth, and value, and that his friends, his history, his fundamental self, are not what he assumed they were. They are simple but powerful truths about what it means to grow older and wiser, and to be able to look back at the past without letting it define you. Anyone who has suffered, and survived, episodes of depression or trauma will easily relate.

Murakami moves deftly back and forth between past and present in the beginning of the novel, so while it takes nearly a hundred pages for the “plot” to begin, in the meantime we get to enjoy another common but more welcome Murakami-ism: the story within the story. Here, it comes courtesy of a friend named Haida (another colorful name, this time gray), whom Tsukuru meets in his traumatic college years. The tale concerns Haida’s father, who, after suddenly dropping out of college, meets a pianist at a secluded hotel who claims to be able to predict his own imminent death. Haida similarly drops out of college soon after, another colorful friend who suddenly abandons the colorless Tsukuru.

The reader will have to decide whether the sum of the novel is equal to more or less than its parts. At times it feels both simultaneous too long, with a hundred-odd pages just to feel like something is happening, and too short, with that niggling sense that characters aren’t as fleshed out as they could be. On this issue I might perhaps place blame on the presentation of the book itself. Chip Kidd has designed the book beautifully, as he always does, but the font and margins are absolutely gigantic, making what should be a relatively concise 200-odd page character study feel like a sloppy mess at 400. Perhaps Knopf wanted to hedge their bets and make readers feel like they are getting “their money’s worth” or, “a real page-turner”; I hope the paperback will adjust the layout so I won’t feel like I’m reading a large-print young adult book.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage will not go down as Murakami’s masterpiece, but it certainly won’t go down as his worst either. I absolutely cannot imagine it will change the minds of Murakami detractors, and even amongst his fans it will be a pleasurable read that might leave some feeling hollow by the end. But, as perhaps befitting of the old saw, still waters run deep. Strip all the metaphysical nonsense away, and Colorless is Murakami to the very core, fault lines and all.

Pron was one of łŇ°ů˛ą˛ÔłŮ˛ąâ€™s Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists, and has already made an impression with this, his American debut. And thus we move quickly back into the review world, back in the zone of being on-schedule. So enjoy the review, it’s good to be back in the swing of things, and the apostrophe in the title is not misplaced: the line is from the “I Fellowed Sleep.” So there.

Here’s the beginning of Patrick’s review:

Though far from the most convincing reason to read literature in translation, one common side effect is learning of another culture, of its history. Within that, and a stronger motivation to read, is the discovery of stories not possible within your own culture, or that live in a certain parallel universe version of a familiar story (yet another reason to read stories that follow common tropes, but come from a different culture or gender perspective). Nearly midway through his My Fathers’ Ghost is Climbing in the Rain (lengthy, obscure-poetic-sounding titles being a cross-cultural habit, apparently), Patricio Pron writes what could be found only in rare, specific cases in the US: “At this point, to put it another way, the inevitable shift occurred from individual victim to collective victim.” This idea comes to life in the US in social justice cases, in calls for a victimized group to speak together, to be heard, but in Argentina, for those living or raised in the 1970s, Pron sees an entire country as collective victim, an entire country that endured dictatorship, kidnappings, murders, executions—all falling under the catch-all “disappeared.” None of this is to say that this is a novel to read to learn a clear history of the Argentinean dictatorship and its aftermath; in fact, Pron makes no effort to over-explain references, and in her clear translation, Mara Faye Lethem makes no moves to insert awkward clarifications. Instead, knowledge is deployed as if we already understand, or are willing to do the extra work.

Structured into four sections, each broken down into micro-chapters (another cross-cultural, increasingly common, habit—one hopes for reasons other than making it easier to read), Pron sets out to understand how this collective victimhood works, how the silences of history, failures of memory, and personal losses, all become disappearances. The narrator is a drug-addled young man who has lived eight years out of his home country before returning to Argentina to be with his family during his father’s seemingly impending death, which suddenly, strangely, doesn’t happen. Once there, he begins the process of uncovering and recovery: of his self, the why of his memory loss that precedes the drugs; of his father; of the country’s victims, and how that victimhood infects everything it contacts. The heart and bulk—but unfortunately for the success of the book, not the soul—of this investigation lies in a collection of news reports and photos he finds in his father’s study, all pertaining to a man’s disappearance. Reading through, analyzing, the narrator wants to solve both the mystery of the disappearance and of his father’s obsession with it. Though it occurred after Argentina’s dictatorship, and so does not belong to the vast numbers of “the disappeared,” he becomes another victim because of that haunting past. This is that infection of collective victimhood, and what Pron wants to brave against.

For the rest of the review, go here.

Structured into four sections, each broken down into micro-chapters (another cross-cultural, increasingly common, habit—one hopes for reasons other than making it easier to read), Pron sets out to understand how this collective victimhood works, how the silences of history, failures of memory, and personal losses, all become disappearances. The narrator is a drug-addled young man who has lived eight years out of his home country before returning to Argentina to be with his family during his father’s seemingly impending death, which suddenly, strangely, doesn’t happen. Once there, he begins the process of uncovering and recovery: of his self, the why of his memory loss that precedes the drugs; of his father; of the country’s victims, and how that victimhood infects everything it contacts. The heart and bulk—but unfortunately for the success of the book, not the soul—of this investigation lies in a collection of news reports and photos he finds in his father’s study, all pertaining to a man’s disappearance. Reading through, analyzing, the narrator wants to solve both the mystery of the disappearance and of his father’s obsession with it. Though it occurred after Argentina’s dictatorship, and so does not belong to the vast numbers of “the disappeared,” he becomes another victim because of that haunting past. This is that infection of collective victimhood, and what Pron wants to brave against.

The narrator eventually uncovers that the man’s sister was not only one of the disappeared, but was led by his father into political activism. The attempt to recover her by recovering her brother, this transference, has moved onto the narrator himself, now trying to prevent his own and his father’s disappearances. We see again that collective victimhood, swallowing anyone it can. The way this ghost of history and violence stalks through the novel is compelling, and at Pron’s most convicted and skillful, you can feel its encroachment. It is unfortunate that Pron suffers from uncertainty about how to move with a project he is obviously deeply invested in. Because he is dealing with history, both of the country and of his family, with the blend of fiction and non-fiction, there is uncertainty. It is not the uncertainty of the reader, or of a writer questioning how to blend the two, but the uncertainty of a writer unsure if he should. It’s one thing to blend fact and fiction to stare down a culture’s identity, and another to devote a work to questioning the morality of blending the two—but to be unable to choose and not center the complication itself, to want both, weakens to the work.

The collection of newspaper scraps, indented as long quotations and written in reportage style in a claim to non-fiction, make up the significant portion of the My Fathers’ Ghost and this too is unfortunate. They are not only less interesting to read—in fact boring, repetitive, at times—they don’t cut to the quick of Pron’s themes and concerns, precisely because verisimilitude lurks over them. Though they are a necessary core for the novel’s structure, Pron thrives, both in style and substance, in the rest of the book, where fiction takes over.

This structure, of a confused young writer obsessed with a crime and pouring over the evidence, any detail—the number of inhabitants of a town, latitude and longitude coordinates, etc.—possibly mattering, the failure of police, a haunting sense of lurking violence, all point to influences, most pointedly detective novels, and, endorsed by Pron himself, Bolaño. The influence of Bolaño is strong, but Pron is talented enough not to let it dominate. There is no singular moment that is a recognizably specific Bolaño moment or a sense of mimicry, and it is likely the honest comfort with this influence that allows it to work naturally, and for differences, even responses, to spring up. For all of the ways that Bolaño’s characters swing between obsession and detachment, they aren’t usually detached from their obsessions. Pron’s narrator is and moves his investigation through a near fugue state, his obsession separate from him. He only follows, hoping the fugue will clear.
On the other hand, the connection with crime stories is, surprisingly, given Bolaño’s openness to the genre, one the narrator, and seemingly Pron, rejects, even as it swallows him and the novel: “the resolution of most detective stories is condescending, no matter how ruthless the plotting, so that the reader, once the loose ends are tied up and the guilty finally punished, can return to the real world with the convictions that crimes get solved and remain locked between the covers of a book.” This of course is true not of most crime stories, but only of the simplest, the laziest—the type seen in television procedurals. Not only that, but the fight against this mode of the genre, the celebration of the lost detective with no answers, has been ongoing for decades at least, so there is nothing interesting in openly acknowledging it as if it were new and it becomes a claim to complications that aren’t there.

In the end, the novel becomes, for a large middle section, too dependent on a strategy that is neither interesting, nor something that Pron or the narrator seem to believe in. As much as there is little belief in the form, Pron shows a lack of trust in his own clarity, or in the reader. The numbered micro-chapters are not fully sequential. In the first of the novel’s four parts, numerous numbers are skipped, to show the narrator’s fractured memory, but we see this already, and are told it. Later, in the throes of his investigation, the narrator falls ill, and feverish, the numbers skip again, or repeat or backtrack, but again, we know he is losing clarity, and there is no specific reason for each interruption of order.
Yet it should again be emphasized, clarified, anticipated in future books, that when Pron moves away from blocking out his narrative around these newspaper clippings, when he focuses on fiction that’s based on non-fiction rather than non-fiction playing itself off as fiction, My Fathers’ Ghost is Climbing in the Rain gets deepest into its own questions, and finds multitudes. Pron’s narrator wonders how to take on the national identity of Argentine when he has seen the symbols of that identity abused, used “so many times in circumstances beyond our control, circumstances that we didn’t have anything to do with and didn’t want to have anything to do with.” This feeling is so overwhelming that he includes a World Cup¹ victory in the same sentence as a war. He wants to be able to embrace an Argentinean identity at the same time as a writer’s identity, while “That a writer could be Argentine and living is a fairly recent discovery.”

The explorations of such questions, some of which fall away as the focus tightens on the newspaper clippings, are more crafted, more affecting when Pron gives his writing free reign, unburdened by the sense of obligation to the idea of “how it actually happened.” In an early passage, Pron’s narrator ponders his relationship with his parents, trying to find how to compare, describe it, and comes to: “Children are policemen of their parents, but I don’t like policemen. They’ve never gotten along well with my family.” In one moment, the focus is his direct relationship with his parents, in the next a simile goes awry and takes him in a dangerous, fearful direction, plunging to the past. The obliqueness, the potential strangeness of fiction, gives reason both to read deeply, and to invest in Pron’s mission of uncovering Argentinean history—personal, familial, and political: a childhood game of killing frogs becomes both the child’s version of unknowingly participating in the violence of his country and the adult’s attempt to reconcile; the fever dreams give us images such as a transparent fish, with a “fistful of autonomous organs with no center of command,” which we cannot do anything but associate with our narrator.

My Fathers’ Ghost is an effort to tell a story that has previously been passed over in silence, while knowing that this secret knowledge is not one of power or liberation, but one that comes with danger and suffering: “You don’t ever want to know certain things, because what you know belongs to you, and there are certain things you never want to own.” Pron’s desire is to fill the silence, not with noise but with clarity and truths. Near the end, the narrator reminds of us inheritance, “My father had started to search for his lost friend and I, without meaning to, had also started shortly afterward to search for my father.”

This inheritance is not only of a search for what has been lost, but also a complicated relationship between the lost, what happens when the lost is found, and the consequences of expression. When talking with his sister, the narrator attempts to gently mock their father for always going out to start the car alone instead of waiting for the kids. The mocking ends when his sister reveals the truth, and the debt that the son owes the father: “journalists were getting killed by car bombs; he went out alone every day to start the car to protect us.” Added to this debt, which came into existence only with revelation, is the narrator’s belief that his choice must be “the truth” or “a compassionate lie,” with the latter being one of escapism and blindness. There is also, and it is glimpsed at times here, a form of lie, fiction, that can stand shoulder to shoulder with the truth. That power is compromised in My Father’s Ghost, a compromise established in Pron’s decision to give his parents veto power over his book. Those glimpses into a deeper soul for the book give one hope that Pron’s next work will be more decisive, expand on seedlings planted here, and for an American reader, give hope that a young American writer can speak to the silences that have overlaid the American atrocities of the last decade.

¹ The appearance of an unnamed Maradona, an “obese caricature of a soccer player,” in an airport, wearing a T-shirt with himself on it, is a nice moment of literature and soccer overlapping, a call to Three Percent’s upcoming “World Cup of Literature”.

Why translators should give Dr Alaa Al Aswany and Knopf Doubleday a wide berth

For the sake of fellow translators who might find themselves caught up in similar circumstances and because I do not think that abuses should go unnoticed, I would like to lay out the facts surrounding the project to produce an English version of The Automobile Club of Egypt, the latest novel by well-known Egyptian writer Alaa el-Aswany. Firstly, I should say that I am not of an argumentative or litigious nature and have never before had any dispute with any of the authors or publishers of the eight of so books I have translated over the last few years. On the contrary, my experience of life is that, if you have a strong case and are willing to press it, your opponent usually gives way. That’s because, to paraphrase Descartes, a sense of justice is the most fairly distributed thing in the world, since no one ever desired more of it than they already have.

So when Aswany unilaterally and whimsically withdrew from an agreement arranged between me and his publishers, I assumed he would offer his apologies, honor his obligations and make speedy and generous compensation for the time and effort I had expended on his behalf. The more so since Dr Aswany and I are hardly strangers. I have met him many times, interviewed him on two occasions for television and he and his wife have visited me for lunches and dinners at home in Cairo and at my country house in Fayoum on two or three occasions. We had worked together since 2009 on his political writings, specifically the weekly columns he wrote for Egyptian newspapers, the English version of which I prepared for international syndication. He was always pleased with my work and I had great respect for the brave position he took against police brutality in the last years of the Mubarak regime, against plans to install Mubarak’s son Gamal as his successor and then against the military rulers who ruled Egypt up to June 2012. I remember meeting him in Tahrir Square in February 2011 as he shouted in outrage that police snipers were shooting at the crowd from somewhere near the Interior Ministry. After the revolution, I worked on a volume of his articles, The State of Egypt, which won good reviews and sold well in the English-speaking world. When the literary elite belittled Aswany’s novels, I always stood up for him, arguing that Egypt and the Arab world in general needed good story-tellers who put plot and character ahead of literary ostentation and obsessive self-analysis. I said there was room for everyone, and that Aswany filled a gaping hole.

I can no longer feel the same way about Dr Aswany, especially in his private capacity as an individual with social obligations towards those around him. The least I can say is that he is not an honorable man. But let others be the judge, as I explain the origins of our dispute:

In August 2012, I was approached by the American University in Cairo (AUC) Press, with whom I have an amicable working relationship dating back some years, to see if I would be interested in handling the English version of Aswany’s novel, The Automobile Club of Egypt, which he was then planning to finish by the end of November. I said I would be pleased to take it on.

I communicated with Dr Aswany about the book on and off between September 2012 and February 2013, mainly to get a clearer idea of when it would be ready. This was against the background of AUC Press telling me that they intended to recommend me as the translator, with Dr Aswany’s knowledge and approval.

On February 15, I sent Dr Aswany an email, saying, “Do let me know how you are progressing with The Automobile Club. I’m looking forward to seeing a copy and starting work on it.” He replied, “I finished already the novel I will send the Arabic version next week to my agent Andrew Wylie. He asked me to have the text first and then he will send it to the publishers. I think you will have the text through Wylie very soon.”

On February 20, AUC Press sent me the complete Arabic text of the novel and asked me to prepare a 15 to 20-page sample for submission to the New York-based publishers Knopf Doubleday, saying they would need to approve the sample before we went ahead with the project.

On February 27, I submitted an 8,600-word sample to AUC Press.

On March 14, AUC Press sent me an email, saying that Knopf has studied the sample and had agreed to go ahead with the translation. It then laid out the basics of what would become our contract—payment, deadlines etc.

On March 27, George Andreou, an editor at Knopf, sent me an email, saying, “I am writing to introduce myself as Dr Alaa’s editor at Knopf and to say how pleased I am that you have accepted the commission to translate his new book. I look forward to working with you on the editing of the English version. In the meanwhile, if I can answer any questions, please don’t hesitate to be in touch.” I said he could help by expediting the contract process.

On April 11, I reminded Mr Andreou of the contract and he replied, “It has been ordered. Sorry for the delay. We’ll be back in touch shortly as to when you might expect it.” The same day Jahua Kim of Knopf emailed me, saying, “There is a backlog in the contracts department at the moment, but we should have your contract ready in about a week. Please feel free to reach me if you have further questions.”

On April 25, Dr Aswany sent me a message, saying he thanked me for my “efforts translating The Automobile Club” and asked if I had any questions. I replied that I was making good progress but I would prefer to ask my questions all at once at a later stage. His assistant replied, “Dr. Alaa is glad you are working on it currently . . . and he will be very willing to help anytime.”

On May 1, William Shannon of Knopf finally sent me a contract (for text, ), with a cover note saying, “If the agreement looks in order please print out and sign three copies and return signed copies to Juhea Kim in George Andreou’s office.” I returned the copies as requested, both as signed and scanned JPEGs by email and as hard copy by mail.

On May 11, I received an email from Dr Aswany’s agent, Andrew Wylie, saying, “On further reflection . . . and in consultation with Dr Alaa and with Knopf, we are obliged to withdraw the request for you to translate the novel.” The message gave no substantial explanation. I replied that I had already signed a contract and done a large several months of work on the project. I said Dr Aswany was free to choose another translator but Knopf and/or Dr Aswany had an obligation to pay me for the work I had done and for the time I would have wasted.

On May 12, Dr Aswany sent me an email, his only message ever on this matter, despite he long acquaintance and amicable relations. He said he wanted Mr X (his identity is irrelevant) to work on The Automobile Club. The explanation he offered for his decision was “I think you could understand that I feel comfortable to work with him.” He blamed AUC Press for what he called a misunderstanding and said he wasn’t aware I was working on it (although we had in fact discussed it openly several times). At this stage Aswany had not seen the sample submitted to Knopf in February. But he now asked for a sample translation and, strangely, also proposed giving Mr X a role editing my translation. I sent him the 8,600-word sample that Knopf had approved.

The next day, on May 13, Charles Buchan of the Wylie Agency sent me a message dictated by Andrew Wylie, saying, “Alaa Al Aswany has reviewed the opening pages of your translation of The Automobile Club, and he has found the translation unsatisfactory . . . The book will be translated by Mr X. I have notified AUC and Knopf accordingly.” Dr Aswany and his assistant had spent several hours overnight poring over the sample text, trying to identify aspects that they thought they might plausibly present as ‘mistakes’, apparently to justify retroactively their decision to withdraw from the contract. They were a little overenthusiastic and their efforts are risible. If anyone is interested in the details, the whole document is available ] The relevant Arabic text and the relevant part of the English version are available and

The document, which was circulated to several people, contains remarks that would be defamatory under British law. One of the most outrageous is Aswany’s objection to the spelling Fatiha for the first chapter of the Quran. Fatiha is of course the standard transliteration favoured by most academics and publishers. He writes: “Mr.Wright wrote ‘Fatiha’ instead of ‘Fatha’. The ‘Fatha’ is the most famous Muslim prayer and the only explanation of this mistake is that Mr. Wright is not able to read this very famous word correctly in Arabic.” The document continues in similar vein. I particularly admired Aswany’s ingenuity when he objected to ‘I felt lonely’ for the Arabic ‘aHsastu bil-wiHsha’. He would prefer ‘I felt solitude’. He insists on placing chalets rather than beach houses on the Mediterranean coast. No big deal, but it might give readers the impression they are in the Swiss Alps. The list goes on. But the bigger picture is that Aswany and his assistant appear to think that a translation must match the original word by word, with nouns replacing nouns and so on. Or perhaps they don’t really think that: maybe they just thought it would be a good wheeze to avoid their financial obligations under an inconvenient agreement. If Hell exists, I assume it has a special corner for those who bear false witness against their colleagues for the sake of financial gain.

To continue the story: on May 21, Mr Andreou, in a rare moment of honesty from Knopf in the course of various exchanges, wrote to me saying, “As you know, I was content with your sample. It is simply not feasible, however, for us, as Dr Aswany’s publisher, to proceed with an arrangement that displeases him: author’s (sic) have their prerogatives.” In other words, his justification for withdrawing from the agreement was based on the decision of the author, which itself appears to have been based on a whim. He offered me a small amount in compensation, and I said his offer was inadequate.

After a series of exchanges over the proportion of the work completed, Knopf has ignored my proposal, now about one month old, that we choose an independent arbiter to make an assessment—an idea that strikes me as eminently reasonable.²

Knopf has argued that we never had an agreement because I do not have a contract signed by them (they never sent me a signed copy), and that therefore their offer is ex gratia. My legal advice is that this argument is baseless and that all the elements of an agreement exist. The contract makes no provision for unilateral withdrawal and the only quality provision refers to a final text to be submitted in September 2013, which will never be completed. On October 15, Knopf tried a new approach, alleging that it never even approved the sample translation submitted in February. This is what in plain English we call a lie and, as I noted above, Mr Andreou said the opposite on May 21.

I did have one further exchange with Dr Aswany, when I informed him on May 22 that until our dispute was resolved I could no longer translate his political articles. His response illustrates his attitude to those he deals with. His only concern that my ‘unprofessional’ decision, which he didn’t appear to expect, had disrupted the worldwide distribution of one short article. Under ordinary circumstances, he said, he would have withheld the money I was owed for previous articles—a total of about $600. “Despite all this, I will arrange to give you your money, because I believe I should behave well to the end,” he added.

Thank you, Dr Aswany, you are very gracious, but you have not behaved well. In fact, your behavior has been despicable.

Aswany can be contacted at dralaa57@yahoo.com

The editor-in-chief at Knopf is Sonny Mehta, contactable at smehta@randomhouse.com

I can be contacted at jnthnwrght@gmail.com or in London on +447586244484

Jonathan Wright
Oct 23, 2013

¹ Holy shitsnacks is all of this document insane. It’s the worst sort of authorial interference in a translator’s work, and is both rude and pretty lame.

One example: From the column entitled, “Mr. Wright’s wrong translation” (wow. WOW.), “My wife realized I needed some time alone.”

In the “The Correct accurate meaning of the word” column: “My wife understood my need for the solitude.”

The fuck? Seriously? Not only is the “Wright’s wrong” a terrible pun and really over-the-top, but “Correct accurate meaning” is redundant and sounds like someone who doesn’t understand English. That and “my need for the solitude.” Oh boy, oh boy.

And it goes on and on and on. “Like a bewitched city” to be replaced by “as if.” “I had a good look” versus “I had a look.” This reads like a hack job done by someone who wanted to create cause to get rid of Jonathan Wright as the translator.

² This is a clause included in every single Open Letter contract. If we think a translation is awful, there is a system for sending it to three outside judges who evaluate it. No matter what, the translator gets 2/3 of the agreed to payment.

I could take a year off of work just to read, and at the end of that year, my “to read” bookshelves would still be overflowing and I’d still feel like I didn’t get to all the things that I wanted.

I only mention this because my copy of MarĂ­as’s The Infatuations arrived yesterday and made me want to set aside everything else. (Except for the fact that that “everything else” is editing Juan JosĂ© Saer’s La Grande, which may very well be the best book I’ve read since reading Saer’s Scars.) But, I also still have the MarĂ­as trilogy to get to. And a stack of 12-14 books that I want to review for Three Percent. And I now have cable and all of the La Liga, Premiere League, Serie A, and Ligue 1 games to watch. And.

Anyway, Jeremy Garber — who is a used book buyer for a large independent bookstore and has written for The Oregonian, the Oregon Historical Quarterly, and on Powells.com—wrote this fantastic review of The Infatuations. Jeremy’s reviews are always really fantastic, and I love his technique of inserting a ton of quotes from the book itself.

Here’s the opening:

“What happened is the least of it. It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.”

Being that there are so many ways in which one might consider a book’s overall effect (to say nothing of how certain elements may appeal to one reader over another), it can be rather arduous to convey what it is about a particular work that makes it resonate as it does. To some, prose is paramount. to others, believable characters and their development, with whom a reader can identify or at least empathize. Faithful dialogue, compelling plot, philosophical asides, broad scope, cross-cultural relevance, clever construction, unique narrative stylings, memorable voice, a timeless quality—all these and more are reasons often given when discussing what it is about a work of fiction that makes it so distinguished or outstanding. The one commonality shared by all the world’s great novels, however, be they past or present, is their remarkable ability to stay with us long after we’ve set the story aside. So it is with Javier MarĂ­as’s latest novel, The Infatuations (Los enamoramientos).

Published to wide acclaim in his native spain in 2011, the disputed king of Redonda’s most recent offering is a murder mystery par excellence. no mere formulaic thriller, MarĂ­as’s tale is one of perception, memory, grief, love, death, complicity, circumstance, doubt, chance, delusion, the multiplicity of motivation, and, of course, the nature of infatuation. Set within the capital city of Madrid and using a violent (and seemingly senseless) murder as its catalyst, the story follows MarĂ­a Dolz, a publishing house employee who entangles herself, however inadvertently at the onset, in the heinous crime’s aftermath.

Click here to read the entire review.

“What happened is the least of it. It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.”

Being that there are so many ways in which one might consider a book’s overall effect (to say nothing of how certain elements may appeal to one reader over another), it can be rather arduous to convey what it is about a particular work that makes it resonate as it does. To some, prose is paramount. to others, believable characters and their development, with whom a reader can identify or at least empathize. Faithful dialogue, compelling plot, philosophical asides, broad scope, cross-cultural relevance, clever construction, unique narrative stylings, memorable voice, a timeless quality—all these and more are reasons often given when discussing what it is about a work of fiction that makes it so distinguished or outstanding. The one commonality shared by all the world’s great novels, however, be they past or present, is their remarkable ability to stay with us long after we’ve set the story aside. So it is with Javier MarĂ­as’s latest novel, The Infatuations (Los enamoramientos).

Published to wide acclaim in his native spain in 2011, the disputed king of Redonda’s most recent offering is a murder mystery par excellence. no mere formulaic thriller, MarĂ­as’s tale is one of perception, memory, grief, love, death, complicity, circumstance, doubt, chance, delusion, the multiplicity of motivation, and, of course, the nature of infatuation. Set within the capital city of Madrid and using a violent (and seemingly senseless) murder as its catalyst, the story follows MarĂ­a Dolz, a publishing house employee who entangles herself, however inadvertently at the onset, in the heinous crime’s aftermath.

All this information was published over a period of two days, the two days following the murder. Then the item vanished from the press completely, as tends to happen with all news nowadays: people don’t want to know why something happened, only what happened, and to know that the world is full of reckless acts, of dangers, threats and bad luck that only brush past us, but touch and kill our careless fellow human beings, or perhaps they were simply not among the chosen. We live quite happily with a thousand unresolved mysteries that occupy our minds for ten minutes in the morning and are then forgotten without leaving so much as a tremor of grief, not a trace. We don’t want to go too deeply into anything or linger too long over any event or story, we need to have our attention shifted from one thing to another, to be given a constantly renewed supply of other people’s misfortunes, as if, after each one, we thought: “How dreadful. But what’s next? What other horrors have we avoided? We need to feel that we, by contrast, are survivors, immortals, so feed us some new atrocities, we’ve worn out yesterday’s already.

Once morbid curiosity, fascination, and, perhaps, schadenfreude no longer fuel our fertile imaginations, a murder (nothing more) becomes as disposable as any of the myriad news stories that we’ve somehow indulged as being momentarily relevant to our lives. MarĂ­as works this pervasive and perverse social peculiarity to great effect—intriguing us enough to concern ourselves with the fate of his characters (with ever the freedom to simply turn or walk away), yet forever eroding the space around them from which we can watch safely from the periphery. It’s a deliriously intoxicating technique, one evinced by our daily obsession with celebrity scandal, political malfeasance, far-off disaster, or nearby crimes of passion. These truncated news stories and soundbites, in reality, often have not the slightest thing to do with our own lives, but end up somehow consuming us (however briefly) all the same—as if they were somehow vested with the weight of our own personal stake. MarĂ­a is unable to turn away and neither are we.

Whereas so many whodunnits content themselves with little more than revealing the perpetrator and their hackneyed impulses, The Infatuations seeks to explore and confront a much broader purview. with perceptive observations and often tender insights into thought, reason, emotion, judgment, and the murky fringes of reality, MarĂ­as draws us into an almost inescapable role of accomplice and witness. He is able to do this so effectively by extracting the reader from the mystery of the murder itself (with which so few of us can identify) and repositioning one within the more familiar confines of love lost, relationships torn asunder, and the inevitable self-doubt which follows.

We tend to hope that, of the people and habits we cherish, no one will die and none will end, not realizing that the only thing that maintains those habits intact is their sudden withdrawal, with no possible alteration or evolution, before they can can abandon us or we abandon them. Anything that lasts goes bad and putrefies, it bores us, turns against us, saturates and wearies us. How many people who once seemed vital to us are left by the wayside, how many relationships wear thin, become diluted for no apparent reason or certainly none of any weight. The only people who do not fail or let us down are those who are snatched from us, the only ones we don’t drop are those who abruptly disappear and so have no time to cause us pain or disappointment. When that happens, we despair momentarily, because we believe we could have continued with them for much longer, with no foreseeable expiry date. That’s a mistake, albeit understandable. continuity changes everything, and something we thought wonderful yesterday would have become a torment tomorrow.

Is the author manipulating us? Are we willing participants? Are we rendered prostrate simply because the story evokes the universal feeling of unrequited desire and heartbreak? What about the abhorrent murder? Is all grief transmutable and therefore inexorable? Are we failing to see beyond all that is shown?

I would never know more than what he told me, and so i would never know anything for sure; yes, it’s ridiculous, isn’t it, that after all these centuries of practice, after so many incredible advances and inventions, we still have no way of knowing when someone is lying; naturally, this both benefits and prejudices all of us equally, and may be our one remaining redoubt of freedom.

MarĂ­as’s thirteenth novel (and the tenth to be translated into english), achingly beautiful and seemingly effortless like so much of his writing, could only have been carefully constructed by one possessed of a compassion and discernment alien to lesser writers. The Infatuations is not a flawless outing, but a remarkable and impressive one nonetheless. MarĂ­as’s exploration of doubt, truth, life, love, and violence does not answer any of the age-old questions of morality and mortality, but leaves us with the sense that there is much veracity and wisdom to be found within the shadows and gradations. A master of contemporary fiction (and regularly mentioned as a perennial candidate for world literature’s highest honor), MarĂ­as is among the finest european writers at work today.

The passing of time exacerbates and intensifies any storm, even though there wasn’t the tiniest cloud on the horizon at the beginning. We cannot know what time will do to us with its fine, indistinguishable layers upon layers, we cannot know what it might make of us. it advances stealthily, day by day and hour by hour and step by poisoned step, never drawing attention to its surreptitious labors, so respectful and considerate that it never once gives us a sudden prod or a nasty fright. Each morning, it turns up with its soothing, invariable face and tells us exactly the opposite of what is actually happening: that everything is fine and nothing has changed, that everything is just as it was yesterday—the balance of power—that nothing has been gained and nothing lost, that our face is the same, as is our hair and our shape, that the person who hated us continues to hate us and the person who loved us continues to love us. And yet quite the opposite is true, but time conceals this from us with is treacherous minutes and sly seconds, until a strange, unthinkable day arrives, when nothing is as it always was . . .

by Michel Houellebecq, translated from the French by Gavin Bowd and published by Knopf

This piece is by New Directions publicity and Three Percent podcaster, Tom Roberge.

When dealing with any book by French author Michel Houellebecq, it’s almost impossible to discuss the book itself, by itself, so we might as well address this whole thing right now. Yes, he seems (how can we really know, after all; his writerly persona might be precisely that: a persona) to be a bit of a, to put it nicely, antisocial curmudgeon. He seems to have little patience for the literary world and the window-dressing sort of appearances and interviews that coincide with the publication of any novel by a well-known (if not exact well-loved) author. This is, after all, a man whose mother wrote some rather disparaging things about him in her own memoir. And these are all frequent topics of discussion because his narrators, too, possess many of these characteristics. They’re often selfish, apathetic, skeptical, and downright miserable. But, and I’ve been pleading this case for years now, I believe that underneath the surface-level nihilism and general ennui of his novels is an author who truly believes in love, in human beings’ ability to make each other profoundly happy. The ability, he suggests, is within all of us, if only we’d stop worrying about the rest of the crap that defines our modern world.

Which brings us to The Map and the Territory. I’ve read and reread all of Houellebecq’s novels, and though I think The Elementary Particles is brilliant and that Platform is insanely fun, I also think this is his best book, the most accomplished in terms of pacing and plotting, the most stylistically riveting on a page-by-page basis, and the most sophisticated in terms of its themes. And boy oh boy are there a lot of them packed in here, twisted into each other, fighting for control and attacking the reader with their combined power.

Artist Jed Martin is the novel’s central conduit for Houellebecq’s exploration of these themes, and the first section of the book focuses on a series of Martin’s digital prints that are fantastic enlargements of Michelin road maps, with quite a few creative embellishments. The prints critique something that a lot of Americans living in big cities will also recognize: the middle and upper-class romanticization of rural life, of farming, of living off the land, of what they imagine is “a simpler life.” All bullshit, obviously, and not exactly news, but Houellebecq dissects the trend beautifully, mimicking and mocking the obtuse language of the art world at the same time.

But then Martin stops working. Altogether. For years. And when he re-emerges, he decides to become a portrait painter, and yet again he takes dead aim at the prevailing trends of the middle- and upper-class consumers of “intellectual” products, be they works of art or gadgets or something in between. By which I mean he paints portraits of people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, but puts them in an imaginary scene in which they “Discuss the Future of Information Technology,” their expressions greedy and all-knowing, larger-than-life, terrifying. He also—and this brings me back to the opening paragraph, to the notion of Houellebecq as the antisocial curmudgeon—travels to Ireland to paint a novelist, Michel Houellebecq, who has agreed, after much trepidation, to write the catalog copy for an exhibition of the portraits in exchange for a portrait of himself. This is, and excuse the pun, a stroke of genius. It allows Houellebecq (the writer of the book, as opposed to the writer/character in the book) to confront the personal attacks on his character head-on, to bring the discussion of the prevailing themes that recur in his books into this book, to offer a subtle rebuttal to everything that’s been said about him and his work in the book, rather than having to appear on television to be mocked by a pretentious journalist, or having to endure an endless interview session. “Here,” he seems to be saying, “you want to know what I think about everything that’s been said about me? This is what I think, and this is why I’ve fled to Ireland, to get the hell away from your miserable games.”

There’s also one more theme and plot element that’s thoroughly amazing, but I really don’t want to spoil anything about this book for anyone who might be compelled to read it. Let me just say that it’s both typically Houellebecq-esque and wholly surprising and, of course, provocative. And who doesn’t love being provoked?