And I figured I could get a post—and a decent number of responses—to this very simple idea. Which living authors would make a Writers Hall of Fame ?

There are a lot of interesting ways to analyze this, which I will totally do below, including an incredibly well-articulated set of standards from one of the people who responded, but first, some context might be in order.

As you probably know, this is New York Review Books month at Three Percent. Which typically means that every week I read a different book from the featured region/publisher/author/whatever, and write a post that sort of hinges on that book, but mostly goes off the rails.

With NYRB, my initial plan was to write a post this week about all the “original” titles that they’ve done in translation, and then focus on the retranslations next week, after I finish reading the first volume of ���ԲԾ�����������������.��And to supplement those shambolic posts, I’ll be running interviews with Nick During, Edwin Frank, and Damion Searls. (And possibly Sara Kramer? Ambitious month!)

In thinking through how to frame this week’s post—and the upcoming interview with Edwin—I spent some time thinking about how I think about NYRB. Like, what makes a book an NYRB book in my mind?

Three Percent BONUS EPISODE: Interview with Nick During of NYRB

One criteria that came to mind is the one that Dalkey Archive always touted, that Archipelago repeats, and that most presses that value quality over immediate sales success tend to turn to: Books that will still be read and discussed a hundred years from now.

Which, in fairness, is really good grant copy.

But, in not so fairness, is sort of specious.

Given how crap the publishing industry is at predicting successes (if you could control for budget, publisher influence, and other external influences, I’ll bet the randomness of what takes off and what doesn’t would really stand out), how can any of us know what the trends will be like one century from now? (When there are , will books even matter?)

And yet, and yet. I look at NYRB’s list—of books in translation, and ones written in English—and I get the sense that as long as there are English Departments, a certain set of readers will fall in love with some of these books. Because, a lot of the authors they publish (Walser, Adler, Henry Green, Machette, Uwe Johnson, Stoner) are “Hall of Fame” writers.

Yes, there is an (and “writers museums” in other parts of the world), and there are canons (I guess? These are basically the books you read in generic high schools, right? Like the “traditional canon” is the “Replacement Level Classic” that modern and postmodern classics outpace in “Value Above Replacement”? HELLO SABERMETRIC NERDS), but neither of those things are a Hall of Fame in the way that the Baseball Hall of Fame is, or the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame is. (Or the Rochester Music Hall of Fame, which, yes, is a thing, whereas an International Writers Hall of Fame is not.)

What would such a thing look like? NO IDEA. Except that I hope it wouldn’t be in Cleveland.

But can I envision a space populated by plaques and collectables by authors that a board of “experts” helps vote into the Hall of Writers? SURE, WHY NOT.

For all of these HoFs, one of the main criteria is that the player/author/rock band has already made their mark and their career is more or less done. Sure, a baseball player could be inducted, then go on to become an amazing manager; and maybe Pearl Jam will be relevant again? (More of column A than B in this case?) Point being: It’s easy to say that James Baldwin and Virginia Woolf and XYZ deserve to be in the Hall. It’s much, much harder to predict who’s writing �ٴǻ岹����who will finish their career and be “hall-worthy”—on the first ballot.

(Speaking of ballots, if you’re sick of all these words, just go here.)

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I am going to share with you all of the names that were proposed from the one thousand four hundred and seventeen people (approximately) who I messaged last week. But, as interesting as those names might be, I think the process of thinking through what criteria the IWHOF (International Writers Hall of Fame) voters should employ is much more interesting.

First, one more thing: Why only 10 living writers?

Answers: A) Because picking only 10 is HARD; B) Because I sort of think I heard once that there are 10 sure-fire HOFs playing in MLB at any given moment. There may be as many as 40, but the majority of those are building their case, getting in on their last year of eligibility, etc. I wanted to focus on the ���ܲ������Գٱ�����writers who would make it. Could Richard Powers be elected to the IWHOF? FOR SURE. But has he done enough already? Maybe? Maybe he would get in on his third year of eligibility, or on his last. (Assuming the IWHOF ran in a format similar to the Baseball Hall of Fame.)

[Sorry, but one more digression: I have no idea how other Hall of Fames work. I feel like there’s , but you know what? I haven’t read it, so D’Agata is not on my personal IWHOF list. Also, it’s more fun to just speculate about how shit works. If there’s one upside to living in a post-fact world, that’s probably it. Sure, I could look that up, or I could ignorantly make some mostly-believable points, which will be good enough for 55% of readers. SOLD.]

Obviously, this whole post is building up to a through which I can get the temperature of Three Percent readers (THE SMARTEST READERS) and share all the results with all of you. (For those keeping track at home, that’s two posts coming from one question, which is a total win, given that I write all of these late at night when I should be doing that Netflix + chill thing.) But first, I want to pose a few questions and then present you with the most interesting breakdown of criteria that I received.

*

Should the IWHOF be a large hall, or a small hall? 

In other words, how many inductees should there be per year? Let’s say that you elect 10 authors per year. It’ll take 10 years to get to 100 authors. Out of how many thousands of worthy writers?

Would there be a mechanism for inducting obvious, “old,” writers?

AKA, “Do we need to vote in Shakespeare?” Is there a baseline of . . . 100? . . . 50? . . . authors we can just slide in there? That seems like a logical first step, except how it impacts the next point.

Should the voting committee measure the authors they’re voting on to standards of the past, or the trends of today?

This is the fundamental problem with the Baseball HOF. Every position, every era has it’s own set of standards. A catcher in 2019 is not the same as a catcher in 1950. And not ��ܲ�����because we now have the technological resources to evaluate the catcher’s impact on the game via framing. (And someday via pitch calling.) Life was different in 1950. This opens up a PC/Woke quandary of how to treat authors who were racist/misogynistic/classist/etc. and yet were very important, or influential, authors of their time period.

Personally, I’d advocate for a “large” hall that inducted 10 new authors and 20 legacy authors every year, and that included assholes, but made reference to their assholery in some way shape or form, while also articulating the reasons that they advanced the art of the written word. I know it’s controversial to say this, but those who speak the cock’s language can sometimes come up with literary forms/structures/techniques that others can then employ. It’s not all about content; it’s also about craft.

*

The only people I’m going to name publicly here are Rhea Lyons and David Pomerico. Rhea is a former student turned long-time friend, who works at now, and has previously worked at Random House, Rodale, and Franklin and Siegal Associates. Her husband, David, is very into baseball (which, YES, YES, LET’S DO A BILL JAMES BIOGRAPHY), and works at and has shitty ass takes about Twin Peaks. (Sorry. Not actually sorry.)

Since David is baseball nerd cum book nerd, they tried to apply the to writers to determine their ten living shoe-in writers. Here is what they sent me:

• Consistency of Output: every single thing they write is anticipated and a bestseller—we don’t have GRRM [Chad Note: I assume this acronym means “dragons”]  on this list because we think he had an early career ending injury with his writers block;
• Length of Career;
• Peak: at one point they were the #1 but then they never fully dropped off, like we don’t have Erik Larson on this list because we think he had an MVP season with Devil in the White City and never fully recovered like the other writers on this list;
• Sales: “We” hate that we are putting James Patterson on this list and I know it will piss you off but David says he’s Eddie Murray [Chad Note: Well, I would prefer George Carlin];
• Name Recognition;
• Volume AKA Consistent Performance: certain writers like Donna Tartt, Rushdie, Eugenides, didn’t quite make this list because they have only published a few books, even though they may be brilliant, they aren’t as consistent as the ones on our list;
• and to be clear we are naming people who are still at Hall of Fame level right this minute.

Here’s my only complaint about this set of criteria: It values sales above internal impact. If a book changes your life, does it get bonus points in terms of “sales”? A person named Waxman told me “when I think of the books that have changed how I thought, they’re not really by authors I think are the best. Which is weird.”

Which, to make this too complicated, indicates that there are 1) authors who IWHOF because sales; 2) those who change lives; and 3) those who do something that’s neither but who mean a lot in the long run.

*

Let’s share some names!

First off, here are Rhea and David’s nominations—of LIVING WORKING IWHOF WRITERS—using their criteria:

Margaret Atwood

Stephen King

JK Rowling

James Patterson

Nora Roberts

Danielle Steele

Haruki Murakami

Toni Morrison

Michael Lewis

John Grisham

Very Western! Almost totally white!

But if you think they’re alone, here’s a compilation of all the other names that I was sent, which, because there’s a very small percentage of people in the world who would put up with me and be my friend, there was a ���dz���of overlap.

In order of how I’m finding these names in my texts:

Robert Coover

Antonio Lobo Antunes

Laszlo Kraznahorkai

Anne Carson

Gonçalo Tavares

Roberto Calasso

Samuel Delany

Rudolph Wurlitzer

Jon Fosse

Gerald Murnane

William Vollmann

Frederick Seidel

Maggie Nelson

Joan Didion

“Why are you asking me this question?”

Anna Tsing

Charles Mann

Laurent Binet

Adina Hoffman

Gabriel Josipovici

Marshall Berman

Thomas Pynchon

Javier Marias

Zadie Smith

Don DeLillo

Elfride Jelenik

Virginie Despentes

Toni Morrison

J.M. Coetzee

Joy Williams

Cesar Aira

Diamela Eltit

Elena Ferrante

Stephen Millhauser

Dubravka Ugresic

Enrique Vila-Matas

George Saunders

Ben Marcus

Rick Moody

Claudia Rankine

Ta-Nahesi Coates

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Colson Whitehead

Roxane Gay

Susan Howe

Chris Kraus

Jacques Roubaud

Rodrigo Fresan

Peter Nadas

Mike Harrison

Rae Armantrout

John McPhee

Michael McClure

Mavis Gallant

Sylvia Federici

“I am now thinking of others”

Valeria Luiselli

Paul Auster

Eliot Weinberger

Carmen Boullosa

Siri Hustvedt

Mo Yan

“I thought you were asking me a sports question and I was very angry”

Andrés Neuman

Michael Chabon

Cormac McCarthy

Haruki Murakami

Lydia Davis

I’m certain I missed a DM in there but whatever. Here’s a very Western, rather Male list to spark your voting. So go for it! You’re on the inaugural IWHOF committee and need to name ten living authors who should be elected to the first class . . .

In other words, !

Monica Carter is a freelance critic whose nonfiction has appeared in publications including Black Clock, World Literature Today, and Foreword Reviews. She curates which is a virtual journal dedicated to international literature and culture.

by Antonio di Benedetto, translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen (Argentina, New York Review Books)

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 80%

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA: 18%

Primal, erudite, hallucinatory, and brutal, Zama is a novel of disillusionment and desire. Divided into three parts by time, it covers a 9-year period between 1790–1799 in the life of former chief administrator Don Diego de Zama. Posted to Asunción in the Paraguayan hinterlands to serve the Spanish crown, he longs to return to Buenos Aires to his wife and family. Zama is a Creole and because he is not Spanish born, he can no longer hold the position of chief administrator. Originally published in the 1956, this is the first English translation of Zama, an Argentinian masterpiece. Esther Allen inhabits the essence Antonio Di Bendetto that makes this translation feel of its time while simultaneously modern.

Zama opens in 1790 with the Zama waiting for a ship to arrive with news from his wife, Marta. Di Bendetto explains right off who Zama is, “. . . was a fighting cock, or, at the very least, ringmaster of a cockfighting pit.” He is a man stuck in time and place desperately wanting to leave. He is second in command of a small port town with no real prospects of escaping. Women are his distraction and play a heavy part in parts one and two contrasting his base desires with his own high self-regard as a faithful and principled man. His action and thoughts betray his own ego when he spots a naked townswoman bathing and she spots him watching her. An Indian girl chases after him and he beats her:

Naked as she was, I took her by the throat, strangling her cry, and slapped her until my hands were dry of sweat, before sending her sprawling to the ground with a shove. She curled up with her back to me. Delivering a kick to her buttocks, I left.

With me went my anger, already yielding to bitter self-reproach. Character! My character! Ha!

My hand may strike a woman’s cheek but it is I who will endure the blow, for I shall have done violence to my own dignity.

When the violent outburst occur, Zama attempts to revert to the man he thought he was—upstanding, respectable and dignified. These periods send him further into paranoia and isolation. He dreams of a beautiful woman and tries to find her in the limited prospects available to him according to his standards. He argues with an assistant and then blames him knowing that he will be sent away. Zama’s digression into ill-fated trysts, gambling and misguided suspicion creates a vertiginous existence of despair and longing for what he lacks—a woman he dreamed, his family, his dignity.

The second part begins in 1794 when Zama is near the bottom of his descent. Unable to afford the inn where he lives and kicked out by Emilia, a Spanish widow whom bears his child, he takes up residence at a house on the edge of town owned by wizened shadowy figure, Soledo. Zama’s time there is marked by fever dreams and impulsive behavior. Di Bendetto gives this section a phantasmagorical feel, with atmospheric darkness and tone, straddling between reality and the imaginary. There are two women in the house, or maybe one. They might be Soledo’s daughter or his wife. Parts of the house are closed off to Zama and his dreamlike states muddle his perception. He grapples the visions of the two women he sees:

Immediately I was at pains to seize upon their vision, fearing it would flow from my head without leaving any clear or lasting impression. The thing was not palpable or real. It was . . . an absence. Yes. What was missing, behind the glass panes, was a pink dress. The young woman wore pink.

The other woman, who had passed in front of me a moment earlier, was dressed in green.

Therefore it was not the same woman. There had been no time for a change of clothes.”

His position and his private life intersect when his new secretary, Manuel, marries Emilia and becomes the father of Zama’s son as a token of friendship. By the end of this section, Zama is recovering from a sickness under the care of Manuel and Emilia. As he ventures back to Soledo’s, he is presented with the reality that Soledo, the women and servants have all moved to Brazil weeks ago. Without a home, a family or money, he is forced to accept years have passed and his life has only become worse.

The third part opens in 1799 with Zama and Captain Parilla leading men across the flatlands to capture Vicuña Porto, a famed bandit. Zama’s existential crisis is all he has along with his hopes that this capture might award him favor with the king. Zama is the only one who knows what Porto looks like have served with him many years earlier. Eventually Zama ends up the prisoner and is left to meet his fate alone.

Di Bendetto presents a violent, tortured character so flawed and unlikeable yet utterly compelling, it’s difficult to ignore this works brilliance. Di Bendetto, a contemporary of Jorge Luis Borges, is an underserved writer whose own life is novel-worthy as well outlined by Esther Allen in her preface. Under two hundred pages, Zama feels like we have read a colonial epic. In the end a man becomes victim to his own expectations:

As I cursed the havoc within me, I felt its power. My blood’s yearning defied my bridle. I had to contain myself, punish myself.

The entry below is by Jarrod Annis of in Brooklyn, NY.

by Szilárd Borbély, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet (Hungary, New York Review Books)

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 54%

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA: 14%

This was the last collection of poetry completed by Hungarian poet Szilárd Borbély before his untimely death in 2014. Part confession, part correspondence, part phantasmagorical travelogue through scenes of collective cultural trauma, Borbély’s poetry is haunting, melancholic, and tender. These poems reach outward, involving the reader both directly and indirectly in an interior journey that jostles between memory, reflection, correspondence and time.

A sense of ending recurs throughout Berlin – Hamlet—the arrival at an end of all things, the inevitability which pervades Borbély’s poems and lives with the reader long after the book has been closed. It is a space created within the reader that Borbély refers to:

Yes, I could express it simply by saying
that our conversation left in me
a vacant space. Since then, every
day contains this space.

Borbély draws readers through his poems in an unwavering trajectory, yet when we reach the other side, we realize that it was merely a phantom hand guiding us, and we miss it.

Monica Carter is a freelance critic whose nonfiction has appeared in publications including Black Clock, World Literature Today, and Foreword Reviews. She curates which is a virtual journal dedicated to international literature and culture.

by Patrick Modiano, translated from the French by Chris Clarke (France, New York Review Books)

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 32%

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA: 4%

“She was taking refuge here, at the Condé, as if she were running from something, trying to escape some danger. “

Danger hovers in the background of this noir novel, filled with malaise and post-Vichy fatigue, and exemplifies Patrick Modiano’s atmospheric, understated style. Plain and simple prose subverts the hazy nostalgia that infuses the narrative. In the Café of Lost Youth is vintage Modiano, capturing the elusive qualities of memory where time and place are secondary to the feelings they evoke.

Once the longlist is announced, it’s evident that the aspects of a novel are extremely well executed and translated in all the titles. One must recognize the goals of the author and the impact of the work—what lingers in the mind long after it is read. What makes In the Café of Lost Youth and most Modiano titles a cut above is his ability to capture the intangible, to convey the effect memory has on how a life is lived, and to make the reader reflect on what memories prevail in her own mind. As nebulous and ephemeral as this work is, Chris Clarke’s translation is a simpatico translation. Modiano addresses memory and his story without a tremendous number of specifics and also raises more questions about the “story” as it progresses. It’s as if he presents the hallucinatory remembrance without the typical trappings of narrative structure and objectives of a novel. Yet, in all its slim glory, it is complete.

Told in the voices of four different narrators, the novel’s focus is a young woman who suddenly appears at the Condé. Its regular inhabitants are a mix of hard-drinking young and old bohemians with a dash of small-time criminals. Jacqueline Delanque enters the Condé one evening, a book in hand, sits in the back “where no one would notice her.” Soon she joins the group of boisterous regulars, who name her Louki, while “she remained quiet and reserved, and seemed happy just to listen.” The first part is narrated by a young student who is smitten with her.

The second part is narrated by a private detective, Caisley, who was hired by Louki’s older husband whom she has abandoned. Louki narrates the third part and Roland, a fellow student of Guy de Vere (a mystical philosopher), who becomes intimate with Louki but knows no more than anyone else of her, narrates the fourth.

Through the different narrators, details of Louki’s young life unfold to reveal contrasting lifestyles that she seems merely to exist in without any one of these lifestyles being totally possessing her. Her childhood was poor and lonely as she struggled to survive with her single mother. She escapes into the security of marriage only to have a “feeling of emptiness would come over me in the street.” Her adventures with a drug loving girlfriend circle back in and out of the story until Louki ultimately rests among the crowd at the Condé. It’s there that she is bewitching and unknowable, yet a compatriot in existential despair and loneliness.

This book should win because of the melancholy of memory, what once was so present and undeniable becomes sorrowful nostalgia for youth, a yearning to be where we once were. Wistful and haunting, In the Café of Lost Youth a testament to Modiano’s skill at confronting how memory truly imbues our perception of who we are.

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.

by Jakob Wassermann, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann (Germany, New York Review Books)

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 7%

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA: <1%

�²�������������Բ�’s My Marriage is a beautifully complex emotional and intellectual account of a budding relationship that careened into a failed marriage, based, reportedly, a great deal on the author’s own first marriage to Julie Speyer (whom you can see on the NYRB Classics edition cover). How much of the book is actually autobiographical, I don’t know, but perhaps we can take the word of the German literary historian Peter de Mendelssohn, who said it was the “exactest, most scrupulous autobiography,” “the true confession of the death-marked author,” as per translator Michael Hofmann’s Afterword. At the same time, the book is presented as fiction, with names changed and pasts imagined.

The book was originally published posthumously in the autumn of 1934; Wassermann himself had died on New Year’s Day of that year of various troubles, including what Hofmann calls “general exhaustion.” After reading this book, we might extrapolate what Hofmann means.

The book pulled me in immediately. It isn’t happy reading, but it is an exquisite rendering of pain that is brought on by union and separation at once. Wassermann seems to be exploring, trying to comprehend just what happened with this central experience of his life, and I loved the step-by-step exploration of his painful past—not that it was entirely the past.

Let me introduce the characters who stand in for Wassermann and Speyer. The author/narrator is a man named Alexander Herzog. He divides his account into three sections: Mirror of Youth, The Age of Certainties, and The Age of Dissolution. Mirror of Youth begins before he’s ever met the persistent, eccentric Ganna Mevis. Again, it’s like Herzog has to go back that far just to get his footing, just to see where this juggernaut that would run through his life got its beginning.

The youngest of six daughters, Ganna doesn’t fit in. Ganna is fiercely competitive with her sisters. She dreamed of a glorious future. Hers weren’t the usual banal girlish dreams, they were scenarios and imaginings of an usual definition. She felt chosen, even though she couldn’t have said in what way.

Meanwhile, in this early section Herzog is a young author who has published one great book that made him no money. Ganna gets a hold of that book and her imaginings tell her that she must be a part of the author’s life. She knows nothing about him, naturally—she even is afraid that any letter she sent would simply be lost amongst the flood of letters Herzog was definitely not receiving—but she pursues him even when he obviously thinks little of her.

The next day, I got a pneumatique from her. Why the rush, I asked myself. There was nothing pressing in it. The letters were just as urgent as her speech. Big, jagged, impetuous characters that resembled a meeting of conspirators. I can’t remember if I wrote back. It seems to me it was only the third or fourth letter that induced me to give her an answer. Because she wrote to me almost every day. Always pneumatiques. A few lines, with obvious attention to style. I thought sardonically: writing letters to a writer is surely an education in itself. And the content? Atmospherics: happy wonderment at the new turn in her life; a plea to me not to forget her; a friendly greeting because it was a nice day; anxious inquiries about my state, because she’d had a bad dream about me. She wasn’t short of things to say.

Herzog thinks back on this time and tries to understand “what possessed me to answer her?” His answer: “I don’t know.” But he has some ideas and he works through them. For one, “[e]ven the most resolute misanthrope has a spot where he falls prey to vanity. And I was anything but a misanthrope.” Still, the notes are exhausting, and he admits that sometimes, “when I was opening one of her notes, it was as though I had to push away her little hand that reached for me with greedy grasp.”

Money, though . . . he’s honest enough to admit that her money and his lack thereof contributed greatly, even if he did his best to leave the subject under the surface. She’s the one who brings it up, and I love Herzog’s lingering amazement, capable of erasing the years between their courtship and his writing this account, taking him back to the initial confusion as his younger self pondered just what she was thinking:

But patience, Ganna, patience: do you propose to take what you call your wealth, today or tomorrow, and merely drop it at his feet, unconditionally and impulsively and without regard to yourself, and without any reference to any of the usual contracts and obligations? It would be a splendid impulse, whether it were possible or not. Or is some forfeit not required—in fact, wouldn’t the person, the future, the whole man from head to toe have to serve as your collateral? Speak!

We already know where this is heading, despite words of warning from the author himself: “You can find a woman lovable without loving her; that’s a dangerous grey area.”

Marriage, honeymoon, children, pain, a slow—and strange!—separation. Throughout, Herzog—Wassermann—shifts back and forth from a distant perspective, trying to see the forest for the trees, to an impassioned closeness. It was his writing that brought Ganna into his life, and it is with his writing that he attempts to exorcise her. He knows in the end that such an act is impossible: “But in the end it’s just words on paper, which can be turned and twisted and perhaps challenged by a higher instance.” It’s not spoiler to say that he is still struggling even with his last paragraph:

So what do I need? A hand to help me past an obstacle whose nature I cannot ascertain. A human breath to imbue me with the spirit of understanding. Understanding would surely illumine me like a flash of lightning ripping apart the sheet of darkness. And then the devil riding over the wreckage of my life would disappear with a howl into the gulch of his hell. A slightly overdone image. But then I’ve lost all sense of measure.

by Silvina Ocampo, translated from the Spanish by Jason Weiss (Argentina, NYRB)

“There is in Silvina a virtue usually attributed to the Ancients or the people of the Orient and not to our contemporaries: that is clairvoyance.” This high praise of Argentinian Silvina Ocampo’s writing came from Jorge Luis Borges, who also made the distinction that it was her condition as a poet which exalted her prose. To the English-speaking world, Ocampo has become known through her short stories as a writer of the surreal, the fantastic, and the grotesque—while Silvina Ocampo, published by New York Review Books and translated by Jason Weiss, is Ocampo’s first collection of poems to appear in English.

Upon reading this collection—and “discovering” Ocampo’s poetry for the very first time—I was struck by the ease with which Ocampo shifts between the quotidian and the dreamlike. These shifts sometimes occur between poems, sometimes within poems—even within lines—guiding the reader through equal amounts of personal desperation and wild mythology. In “The Infinite Life”, for instance, the poem begins in a seemingly realistic present where the speaker ponders the meaning of life as well as life after death—but soon enough, the reader meets Atropos, the Greek goddess of fate and destiny “with her black butterfly face”; a winged horse which “passes like a beam of light through glass”; the distant empire of China and the monks in Tibet; victims of witchcraft, and the “lustrous Mediterranean.” Then, the reader is suddenly pulled back into a familiar reality:

It will not be the same river over the mud,
the burning of trash nor the cart,
the dogs in the suburban nights that
lose their way beside a cruel blond boy.

Yet just as the reader thinks she’s back on solid ground, Ocampo takes her on a new journey in the very next couplet:

There will be no queens of Egypt, nor coins
preserving their likeness, nor will there be silks.

The poems that enchanted me most, however, were Ocampo’s earlier work from 1942—arranged in the first section of this collection under the title “Enumeration of My Country.” This entire section consists of poems describing Argentina’s vast and stunning landscapes in such rich detail—and with such a powerful, almost forceful, voice—that the reader might be led to believe these poems were, in fact, written by some kind of deity. The result? I am left awestruck by both Ocampo’s Dickensonian authority as a poet (I was pleased and not at all surprised to discover in Weiss’s introduction that Ocampo’s final book of poetry was not her own writing but translations of six hundred poems by Emily Dickinson) as well as Weiss’s capacity to render Ocampo’s utterly unique poetic voice.

Here’s the beginning of Lori’s review:

The prolific Spanish author Benito Pérez Galdós wrote his short novel, Tristana, during the closing years of the nineteenth century, a time when very few options were available to women of limited financial means who did not want a husband. Tristana desires independence and freedom, and she possesses the intelligence and ambition to pursue it were it not for circumstances and misfortunes that conspire in forcing her to bend to the expectations of her time.

The novel is built upon a love triangle—the twenty-one year old Tristana; her lover, the young painter Horacio; and Don Lope, Tristana’s benefactor who takes her in, alone and penniless, following the death of her parents. Although Tristana’s growing self-awareness and consequent actions propel the course of the story Tristana is an exceptional novel because of the enigmatic Don Lope.

For the rest of the review, go here.

The novel is built upon a love triangle—the twenty-one year old Tristana; her lover, the young painter Horacio; and Don Lope, Tristana’s benefactor who takes her in, alone and penniless, following the death of her parents. Although Tristana’s growing self-awareness and consequent actions propel the course of the story Tristana is an exceptional novel because of the enigmatic Don Lope.

Don Lope is fifty-seven years old, a life-long bachelor, and a notorious rake. Gentleman seducers in literature are plentiful, and Don Lope is that but also much more. Galdós’s creation feels original, not simply a typical “Don Juan” to whom virtuous women fall victim. Don Lope is a consummate gentleman who upholds old-world chivalry, honor, and decorum to the highest degree. When it comes to satisfying his sexual appetites, however, a different code of conduct applies, but one that, to Don Lope’s mind, is still wholly appropriate. Don Lope’s conquests are many and famously include nuns and women of otherwise inviolable virtue. The innocent Tristana becomes one more victim, and Don Lope feels no guilt, no discomfort in being both “father” and “husband” to Tristana. Don Lope’s understanding of respectable conduct is not ambiguous, but rather patently contradictory, and in Don Lope these contradictions cohabitate peacefully. While maintaining his chivalrous demeanor he feels justified in considering Tristana his chattel, compensation for his promise to her mother that he will be her guardian.

His extraordinary beliefs extend to behaviors that would seem at cross-purposes: he is jealous of Tristana’s feelings for Horacio and simultaneously develops a true and lasting friendship with Horacio; he is extremely vain but he spends what little money he can gather not on new clothes but on paints, music instruction and other things to facilitate Tristana’s vocations; he admires Tristana’s intelligence and ambition and denigrates her desires as childish. Don Lope is an example of what the twentieth century writer and memoirist Sergio Pitol described as Galdós’s gift for showing that “. . . the quotidian and the delirious, the tragic and the grotesque, do not have to be different sides of a coin, rather they are able to be a single fully integrated entity.” (The Art of Flight, trans. George Henson, Deep Vellum 2015).

Beyond domesticity, Tristana’s choices, so limited at the outset, are further circumscribed by fate. Like Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina before her Tristana gets caught up in the colliding forces of early feminist ambition and old-world strictures. While this conflict is present in many works of nineteenth century literature Galdós looks beyond the opposing forces to reveal the practical, that is the accommodations that disallow the ideal but make space for living the life that you are dealt.

Here’s the beginning of Paul’s review:

One hundred years have passed since the start of World War I and it is difficult to believe that there are still novels, considered classics in their own countries, that have never been published in English. Perhaps it was the overwhelming number of novels in English in the years following the war that prevented their appearance. Just looking at the list of American authors, a country whose contribution was quite short, Wharton, Cather, Cummings, Faulkner, Dos Passos, and of course Hemingway with A Farewell to Arms, makes it obvious that it was a subject that once had to be written about. Still, that doesn’t explain why perhaps the most famous WWI novel is from Germany, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Maybe it was that a second even more devastating war eclipsed the first one, and pushed it into the background. It is a shame, because as Paul Fussell noted, World War I was a literary war and Gabriel Chevallier’s Fear: A Novel of World War I, ably translated by Malcolm Imrie, is a long overdue addition to that literature in English.

Gabriel Chevallier (1895-1969) was called up at the beginning of the war, wounded, and after convalescing returned to the front for the remainder of the war. Fear follows a similar trajectory: call up, wounding and hospitalization, and a return to the front. It follows a typical pattern of novels written by veterans and even echoes that of Remarque. The power that comes in front line narratives is not in the intricacies of plot, but in how they can evoke the experience of war. Chevallier is successful in his descriptions of the front lines, the constant shelling, the gruesome description of the dead, and one will come away with a sense of the terror and fear men faced. At times there is a monotony in this and it seems as if all there is to the book is moving from shell hole to shell hole. Yet it is that repetition without seeming purpose, a drama played out on an isolated stage where little context exists and the characters just survive one shelling after another, that is the real story.

For the rest of the review, go here.

Gabriel Chevallier (1895-1969) was called up at the beginning of the war, wounded, and after convalescing returned to the front for the remainder of the war. Fear follows a similar trajectory: call up, wounding and hospitalization, and a return to the front. It follows a typical pattern of novels written by veterans and even echoes that of Remarque. The power that comes in front line narratives is not in the intricacies of plot, but in how they can evoke the experience of war. Chevallier is successful in his descriptions of the front lines, the constant shelling, the gruesome description of the dead, and one will come away with a sense of the terror and fear men faced. At times there is a monotony in this and it seems as if all there is to the book is moving from shell hole to shell hole. Yet it is that repetition without seeming purpose, a drama played out on an isolated stage where little context exists and the characters just survive one shelling after another, that is the real story.

What sets Chevallier’s work apart from other novels is his narrator, Jean Dartemont. He is a university student who is detached from the world and is not swept up by the crowds of patriotic enthusiasts. On reaching the medical examination he notes,

The war was already a few months old and I was beginning to fear that it might end before I got there. I saw war neither as a career nor an idea, but as a show—in the same category as a motor race, an air display or a sports match. I was full of natural curiosity and, since this war would be the most remarkable spectacle of the age—I would not want to miss it.

This sentiment makes Dartemont aloof, uninterested in military trappings. He is not even disappointed when can’t even make corporal. He is a lazy soldier who never learns how to use a hand grenade properly. He appears sarcastic and doesn’t trust the officers who seem to disappear at the first sign of shelling. His attitudes come from his observational distance, as if he is never quite in the war. At one point he comes across the bodies of two long dead Germans and investigates: “I spent some time in their company, turning them over with a stick, not out of hatred or disrespect but motivated rather by a kind of fraternal pity, as if asking them to deliver up the secret of their death.”

The narrative distance creates a curious phenomenon, especially the first section: there are few other developed characters other than Dartemont. Yes, there are plenty of people around him, but few have names and even fewer get more than a line of description. It’s as if in the first section he is so distant from it all he has no interest in even his companions. It is only when he is wounded by shell fire and spends some time in the hospital that the men around him take shape, gain names, and even converse about the state of the war. The hospital with its slow pace and constant reminders of the savage results of shell fire is when Dartemont loses some of his distance, as if he has now really become a soldier. It is also when he realizes the distance between the civilian and the soldier. He recounts to some young nurses he likes, “Would you like to know the chief occupation in war, the only one that matters: I WAS AFRAID.” They are horrified and run off, thinking he is a coward.

The distance you find in Dartemont makes for wry commentary set against the most extreme elements of the war. It is a refreshing narrative approach, because it limits the artificially clean exploration of the war that comes when trying to capture with dialog the shifting thoughts of soldiers. It also makes Dartemont quite capable of saying, “I understand now how slaves submit so easily, because they have no strength left for revolt, nor imagination to conceive it, nor energy to organize it. [. . .] I sometimes feel I’ve almost reached that state of utter subjection that comes from weariness and monotony, that animal passivity that accepts anything.” In the statement you find an intellectual analysis of the war, not one of emotions, or if they are there it’s not his attempt to render the sensation, but his description of it. This kind of analysis finds its clearest evocation towards the end of the book when he cross the battlefield and sees some ruins.

These particular ruins have their own pathos, and I imagine the destinies of the men who spent time here, many of them now dead. Along with pleasure comes pride in knowing secret places, which become my own domain, on this land that one army observes and another defends.

It is still a game to him. Perhaps it is because there is no other option but to take some sort of power over what he has so little power to control.

In the last part of the book Dartemont spends his time as a runner. It is a dangerous job, but one that keeps him out of attacks. It is a purposeful dodge that shows a cynical self-preservation that few detest. Again, it underlies the futility of the war and what it takes to preserve one’s life. The repetition of his journeys under shell fire and across the cratered landscape all the while finding in himself fear and apprehension create a sense of futility and pointlessness to the war. While Chevallier mentions the geographic areas where Dartemont is, some of them quite famous, Dartemont never engages in much action. Death and wastage are just around, a fact of life, and ultimately the third section which feels as if it is dragging, is actually a good representation of the daily disaster that was the war.

Ultimately, Fear feels more modern than some of its cohorts. While not as shocking as All Quiet on the Western Front, nor as dramatic as A Farwell to Arms, it has a humor and a cynicism that render the war’s indignities in all their mundane horror. Chevallier’s skill is to render the dark humor of phrases like, “Where we’ve been, you only salute the dead!”, against the cold analysis of a soldier in a pointless war. The conflict between the two makes Fear a welcome addition to a sometimes seeming well-trod literature.