Louisa ErmelinoĚýis the author of three novels; Joey Dee Gets Wise; The Black MadonnaĚý(Simon and Schuster); The Sisters Mallone (St. Martin’s Press) and a story collection, Malafemmina (Sarabande). SheĚýwrites a column, Open Book, for Publishers Weekly, about noteworthy forthcoming books, interviewing authors, editors, and agents

by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Riverhead)

I love a long shot, and underdog, but clearly Olga Tokarczuk is no underdog.

Her novel Flights won the International Man Booker International Prize and was a finalist for the National Book award in translation. She’s published in the US by Riverhead/Penguin Random House. You might even call her a literary darling although she’s been a serious, international award-winning, controversial feminist writer in her native Poland and Flights was her tenth book.

But enough about Olga Tokarczuk the celebrity. I want to tell you why her novel, 2019’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead should win the Best Translated Book Award. To start with, it’s pure poetry. I didn’t want to mark up the hardback copy I was reading (Catholic schoolgirl that I am . . . I can make a perfect book jacket from a paper bag) so I decided to mark passages with Post-its. I ran out of Post-its by page 50.

It’s winter in the isolated Polish village where people from Warsaw summer and Janina is the cranky woman who watches their houses, studies astrology, and translates Blake with her former student Dizzy. She also has an affinity for animals and the first murder that takes place is that of Janina’s neighbor, Big Foot, who mistreats his dog and sets cruel snares to trap the deer, hares, badgers and such who live in the forest surrounding the town.

Listen to the opening sentence: “I am already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed by an ambulance in the Night.”

Do you not want to know this woman? You will not be disappointed. Every declaration sets you thinking. Janina is called upon by her neighbor, Oddball—(she ťĺ´Çąđ˛ő˛Ô’t believe in given names and hates her own so she gives people names that suit them, hence, Big Foot and OddBall—to deal with Big Foot’s corpse. In response, she says: “It made me feel sad, horrified, for even someone as foul as he was did not deserve death. Who on earth does?”

The murders continue; Janina is both dismissed and suspected by the local police and the wonderful mystery plot unfolds but it’s Janina who steals the show with her observations. Of one of the houses she watches over she says: “The house itself was old, in bad shape, and looked as if it wanted to be left in peace to carry on decomposing.”

Lloyd-Jones’ translation is pitch perfect, creative and touching. Janina sits in the doctor’s office: “Last year the sun had burned me again.”

And at the police station: “In law-abiding fashion, we presented ourselves for questioning…”

Tokarczuk’s book is original and wise and beautifully written and beautifully translated. It is a quiet wonder. I end with Janina’s comment on The Writer, whose house she watches over: “In a way, people like her, those who wield a pen, can be dangerous. At once a suspicion of fakery springs to mind—that such a Person is not him or herself, but an eye that’s constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences; in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality—its inexpressibility.”

Indeed . . .

Last Thursday, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to two white Europeans: Olga Tokarczuk (one of the odds-on favorites going into the announcement) for 2018 (aka the “Year that the Sexual Abuse Scandal Killed the Nobel”) and Peter Handke for 2019.

I never wanted to write a Nobel Prize post—these posts are meant to be about baseball and the process of reading. Ģš˝´ŤĂ˝ using different outlooks (like Big Data and sabermetrics) to come up with fun, weird ways to provoke people to think about books and publishing in a more nuanced, different way. Do they succeed? Probably not! But I’ll be back soon with a “normal” post about reading Saer’s The Regal Lemon TreeĚý(forthcoming from Open Letter in winter 2020) without any recollection of what the book was about and being totally knocked sideways on several occasions, wishing someone elseĚýwas in charge of writing jacket copy so that I could get a handle on what this book wasĚýabout.Ěý

But for today? Let’s talk about fascism, two moments in history, and whether the Nobel Prize is totally bankrupt or not.

*

Scene: Thursday Morning. 4:30am. I wake up in an excited panic. There was speculation that Can Xue or Dubravka Ugresic could win the Nobel Prize. The committee had stated, publicly—although, as we came to find out, facetiously—that they had been too Eurocentric and would be looking to other parts of the globe for their big honor. So, Can Xue? Or Murakami? Probably Murakami. And probably Olga Tokarczuk—the committee will want to be “of the moment,” and given the way the English-speaking world serves as the de facto force behind what is popular and trendy (both of the recent titles from Tokarczuk to come out in English translation are from 2007 and 2009, but we’ll come back to that in her section), it felt like a foregone conclusion.

Text conversation with Will Evans after his Braves went down 10-0 in the top of the 1st inning.

In the midst of a Cardinals blow out in game 5 of the NLDS (which is pretty much the pinnacle of hope and joy for me) I had a dream moment . . . a second where I thought, “what if?” I mean, a Swedish (!!) press had contacted us about Can Xue’s rights earlier in the week—just as her odds shifted. Is that’s a coincidence? A conspiracy? A reason for hope? A prank??

But deep down, I knew. IĚýknew. Would it be great to sell more copies in a week than we have in all eleven years of our notable, but financially suspect existence? Fuck and yes it would! But, you, know, there are only like 50 other living authors equally deserving of a million dollar literary award and a place in history . . . it all feels like a coin flip, and there are three things I don’t think exist in today’s world: true democracy, anything resembling meritocracy, and good luck for anything Chad W. Post is involved in.

It took until 4:36am to figure out what the time it was in Sweden—not time for the announcement!—and then it took until 6ish to finally fall asleep, cautiously hoping that I’d wake up and the world would be a different place.

Fast-forward to 7:15am. ąá˛š˛Ôťĺ°ěąđ!Ěýąá˛š˛Ôťĺ°ěąđ!ĚýSure, he’s an Important European Author, butĚýąá˛š˛Ôťĺ°ěąđ!ĚýThis guy was friends with Slobodan MiloĹĄević, who, if you’re too young to know the history of the Yugoslav War and his attempts at genocide, well, let’s just say he’s one of history’s greatest monsters. Full stop. Don’t @ me with equivocations. If you encourage people to slaughter others based on their nationality, you are 100% a piece of shit.

Are Handke’s books good? I haven’t read all of the recent ones, but the early ones are, yes. Really good. But ¸éąđąčąđłŮžąłŮžą´Ç˛ÔĚýis boring and solipsistic, and the second-half of his career feels like someone so intent on loving themselves that they don’t realize how far up their own ass they are.

From Wikipedia, which I’m quoting because . . . well, you’ll see:

My Year in the No-Man’s-BayĚý(:ĚýMein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht) is a 1994 novel by the Austrian writerĚý. It follows a writer’s attempt to describe a metamorphosis he went through two decades earlier, when he stopped being confrontative and instead became a passive observer. The task proves to be difficult and most of the book is instead concerned with the lives of the narrator, his family and the people in the Paris suburb where he lives. The book is 1066 pages long in its original German. It was published in English in 1998, translated byĚý.

When the English translation was published in 1998,Ěý‘s critic wrote: “Despite attaining moments of stylistic lucidity worthy ofĚý, the narrator more often comes across as gloomy and hostile. Nonetheless, numerous trenchant moments of insight make this work intriguing and provocative.”ĚýĚýreviewed the book forĚý. He described it as “one carefully observed image after another expanding into a cinematically eternal present tense”, which according to Siegel means that “in a sense, then, Handke’s novel is an argument for the superiority of film to the novel”. The critic continued: “Though at times intellectually bracing, this can make for pretty arid reading. And Handke’s attempts at elevating his epic of self-regarding banality often make matters worse. Rejecting character, plot and psychology as mere fictions, he relies on an ostentatious thematic framework that winds up being more implausible than any old-fashioned novelistic trick.” Publishers WeeklyĚýcalled the English translation “impeccable”, while Siegel called it “clumsy and overliteral”.

Yeah, I’m good. I’ve read this sort of man for many many years. And I really, really liked it. But then again, there are a million dudes writing in this same way, who may not get the international play (why do some writers succeed and not others? definitely not because of talent, I’ll guarantee you that), none of whom told Bosnian Muslims that the was faked and said “You can stick your corpses up your arse!” when called out on his wild claims. Christ. This guy. Really. A łžžąąôąôžą´Ç˛ÔĚýdollars.

And that’s just the start of it! Here are the screen caps I frantically took at a red light, driving my son to school, ˛őłŮłÜ˛Ô˛ÔąđťĺĚýthat anyone who’s openly friends with war criminalsĚýwon the Nobel Prize for Literature:

I know it’s long, butĚýread this. AndĚýread it here.ĚýWhy? Because it’s been completely deleted from Wikipedia. Not bits and pieces—the whole thing. .

The victors write history. Which is why “Never Forget” is not a phrase, but a warning.

*

While at that same red light, I whipped off an ill-conceived tweet (when are my tweetsĚý˛Ô´ÇłŮĚýill-conceived) and gotĚýso worked upĚýabout the podcast Tom Roberge and I were about to record. It’s called “Don’t Give a Million Dollars to a Fascist” and it is FIRE.

It also earned me the designation—on Twitter, the home of all intellectual thought?—as the “most insufferable man in publishing.” Which is AMAZING. I added this to my bio and will be riding it to the grave.

Chad W. Post, the “most insufferable man in publishing” died on XX in the year XXXX. He is known for: a) being blocked by Roxane Gay because of a drunken Super Bowl exchange regarding a half-time show, shitty referees, and nonsense (which he regretted all his years), b) complaining on Three Percent that no one liked his books (making it easier not to like his books), and c) the fact that he was very, very short, with a nasty balding situation.

I get the ire. The backlash to the “Handke doesn’tĚýdeserve it” backlash. I really do. There are authors I/we like that are not good people. And the work and the human who makes the work are two separate things—when you’re talking just about books. When you’re talking about giving someone a million dollars and a permanent spot in history? . . . I’m not so sure that argument holds. Or maybe it would’ve held, if the committee hadn’t had said anything. Instead of expanding their scope to, I don’t know, anyone in Latin America? Asia? Africa? Last I checked, Poland and Austria were very, very European. (And don’t pull this “Eastern Europe” shit. The center of Europe moved East very fast with Brexit.) And very, very, very white.

The thing is, you can claim that the Nobel is only about an author’s work, that the work is not the same as the person, but for an award of this stature that’s given out once a year to an author and their corpus, it comes to function as an award for the author themselves—at least in the minds of tens of thousands of people around the world. So whether you feel like the Nobel Prize for Literature should “only be about the work” or not, it functions as something larger within culture, and as a result, the Swedish Academy needs to keep that in mind.

I think someone subtweeted about me, claiming that my Handke outrage was linked to the fact that Dubravka Ugresic didn’t win. This isn’t entirely true. Am I upset that Dubravka didn’t receive the prize? Not exactly. Once you’ve been a bridesmaid for so long, it’s impossible to get angry when you miss the bouquet once again. But I am irritated on her behalf, since anyone who suffered through the Yugoslav War will 100% have their PTSD triggered when a genocide apologist who supported war criminals is awarded a million dollars. Especially women who suffered horribly through this conflict. It’s really cool that some white Austrian can take a shit on a region, and still be rewarded for it. Bully for him. It’s like telling Trump that “it’s OK, at least you’re trying.”

Dubravka was literally threatened by nationalists of the Handke sort. She was doxed in the national paper. People thought it was their patriotic duty to threaten her physically. Her work is still discriminated against because she’s not on board with ugly nationalist sentiments. She’s written more about border crossings, immigration, the impact of violence in the Balkans, the power of art, creation and the culture industry, than any living writer.

So, sure, Handke is a very talented Classic Male European Writer, but given the Academy’s statements, the scandal last year, the fact that most people think of them as a joke—a group of old white men selecting the buddies and idols they’d like to hang out with—that the impact of their decision far exceeds what it rationally should, that it would’ve been easy to choose anyone else . . . That’s why people say #EatShitHandke and #GivetheNobeltoDubravka. (No one actually says that, but they could and should. Hell, add #BoycottTheNobel to that.)

Again, white middle-aged literary guys—I’m one of you. I’m all about Art First. Ģš˝´ŤĂ˝ complicated prose that’s contemplative and very wedded to History and Ideas. I’m all of those things, and I know why you’re pissed at the backlash against Handke, who embodies this very particular viewpoint more than anyone else I can name. (Just look at his pictures and you know what his books are like.) But you’re wrong this time. This isn’t the moment to try and stand for that argument. We live in the worst possible timeline, with everything completely falling apart—to pour fuel on that fire in order to defend your rights to choose whichever White Euro Male you want to receive Alfred Nobel’s money? That’s just plain irresponsible.

Dubravka and Can Xue and Everyone Else has to wait another year. And next fall, we’ll all be disappointed again. It’s an impossible situation. And, man, if an author Open Letter published won? The “we don’t even know who this is” think-pieces would lead me to suicide or heart attack. (THAT IS NOT A JOKE.) Instead of stumping for Dubravka, I think what we should argue for is the complete dissolution of the Swedish Academy. They’ve outlived their usefulness, are a pathetic group of trolls, and can’t even explain their decisions in English.

Seriously, this is your defense of Handke?

for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.

You know what that sounds like? Senility.

Even a random word generator can do better.

*

On the flip side—and there are think pieces to be written about this, about the two sides to the Nobel coin—Olga Tokarczuk is great! I’ve met her in person, and she’s really fun. Besides, she has dreads, and her books are good. Her first translator, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, is one of my favorite people to see at book parties. Jennifer Croft—who did Flights—and is working on The Books of JacobĚý(which would make a good Two Month Review book?) translates from PolishĚýandĚýSpanish, and received a for her memoir, Homesick.ĚýThese are talented, deserving artists—congrats to all of you! (And all of Olga’s other translators. I don’t know who they are, but it should be noted that these books are available in more languages than just Polish and English.)

Without neglecting any of the current players in Olga Tokarczuk’s current English-language moment—Riverhead, Fitzcarraldo—I want to go back in time. To 2002. To when the world first discovered Olga’s writing.

2002 was the year that Tokarczuk’s fifth book,ĚýHouse of Day, House of NightĚýcame out from Granta UK in Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s translation. One year later, it was available stateside from Northwestern University Press as part of their “” series, which, if you don’t already know and you like Euro-lit, get thee to a library and/or used book store.

I have two personal comments about this series, one that could get me in a lot of trouble if powerful people ever read this blog: 1) This series changed my reading life, and 2) It’s the reason Sessalee Hensley at Barnes & Noble doesn’t really carry our books. (“Translations don’t sell. I carried Northwestern for years.” That’s verbatim.)

šó°ů´ÇłžĚýThe Guardian‘s review ofĚýHouse of Day, House of Night:

Olga Torkarczuk claims her place among the greats of Polish letters with House of Day, House of Night

What other nation can boast two living Nobel laureates – Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz – and, in the late Zbigniew Herbert, a poet at least their equal? Add to these Ryszard Kapuscinski, Slawomir Mrozek and Pawel Huelle and the debt we owe to Polish letters becomes clear. It’s a distinctive list that draws on a powerful collective faith and an irony that often seems the only sane approach to the cruel joke of Polish history.

With House of Day, House of Night, her first full-length work here,ĚýĚýcan rightfully take her place among these writers. It is not so much a novel as a collection of linked short narratives, found stories, hagiography and incidental observations and is a delight to read – wonderfully inventive and by turns comic, tragic and wise.

That’s some strong praise from aĚýąšąđ°ů˛âĚýwell-respected source!

How did the Northwestern edition do?

From the Northwestern book page (which has the same reviews as Amazon.com):

When I whinge and whinge about how American book culture is stupid . . . yes, I’m being a pompous, insufferable dick. But, c’mon. That’s it? Nothing onĚýPublishers Weekly . . .Ěýwho LOVED her new books.

Is History nothing but a Tale of Good Timing? Or something more sinister? A way of making sure power stays in power? Or a cruel joke? It’s easy to lean into any of these interpretations—especially if you read this book (in 2003!) and pursued Olga for years, but have been denied for one person’s opinion or another’s. (What is it like to be self-confident?)

Let’s flash ahead to Olga’s best book:Ěý, which was translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones as well and published by the incomparable Twisted Spoon. (So many good books! So little attention from American booksellers/reviewers/readers. Personal recommendation: Ěýby Hermann Ungar.)

As you can see from ,ĚýPrimevalĚýgotĚýway way wayĚýmore play than House of Day, House of Night. Although, again, noĚýPW, but there isĚýBooklist.ĚýNoĚýNew York Times, but aĚýWords Without Borders review. TheĚýReview of Contemporary Fiction reviewed it (probably why I knew of this particular book) and World Lit Today, but, let’s be honest: today’s tastemakers don’t care about RCF or The Modern Novel, although check this blurb from Malvern Books (!!):

This is Primeval: an enclosed snow globe, a world in itself, which it may or may not be possible to ever leave. Outside, wars rise and then break like waves, disgorging soldiers and refugees through the border of Primeval, whose residents are swept up in the flood without always being entirely certain whether the outside world really exists. [. . .] History, in this novel that spans the bulk of the twentieth century, is a thing that happens elsewhere, a dream that, like Goya’s Sleep of Reason, gives birth to monsters.

No other indie bookstores have mentioned this title to me over the past nine years. But I did buy my copy from City Lights way back when.

*

What is history if not for its forgotten players?

Olga’s Nobel is going to be about Riverhead and Fitzcarraldo because, well, memory is short and immediate. And good for them! That tracks, makes sense, and will keep two admirable publishers publishing good books for decades to come. But if she’s such an obvious Nobel Prize candidate, why do her four English translations have these pub dates: 2002, 2010, 2018, 2019? Four books in 17 years? Here’s her bibliography (arranged as if by a madman on the “infallible” Wikipedia):

What are we even doing here? Is there a meaning or message behind the awarding of the Nobel Prize? Is it just random? Is it about trends and popularity and Man Booker Awards and glorification of those who got there at the right moment? Is History written not by the victors, but by the people with the best timing?

*

This is actually supposed to be a post about Susan Harris, editorial director of Words Without Borders, former editor-in-chief of Northwestern University Press, and publisher of threeĚýNobel Prize winners—all of which came after her tenure at NUP ended.

In addition to doing Olga Tokarczuk in 2003, she publishedĚýtwoĚýHerta Mueller books—Land of Green Plums, which she acquired paperback rights to from a commercial house, and Traveling on One Leg, which was hers alone—and a couple Imre Kertesz titles—FatelessĚýshe inherited, but Kaddish for an Unborn Child, she acquired. And, because she was “let go” in March 2002, just months before Kertesz won the Nobel Prize, her editorial contributions were erased from history. She got none of the profile pieces, none of the glory or recognition.

*

Except among us.

Thank you, Susan, and I can’t imagine how weird it must be to “win” three times, and yet . . . But then again, is there an organization focused on international literature that’s more respected than Words Without Borders? The Grandmother of All Websites, WWB is legit AF. They’re theĚýGrand StreetĚýof post-millennium publishing. Wait, you don’t know ˇÉłó˛šłŮĚýGrand Street is?

Ěýby Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Riverhead)

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead may well be the most anticipated translation of the season. Olga Tokarczuk’s second novel in as many years is a mystery novel that never declares itself as such. Despite all the deaths that litter it—the book starts off with Big Foot’s demise choking on a bone from a deer that he had poached—the novel is more of a character study of its quite quirky narrator, Janina Duszejko, who valiantly tries to convince the police that all four deaths are the result of animals taking revenge against hunters.

The lack of detailed investigations, the absence of a plucky detective putting the pieces together is one of the book’s great charms. It redirects the focus from the typical concern for justice and human lives, and instead allows Janina to unfurl her life story—as an engineer of bridges turned schoolteacher turned caretaker of summer houses, vegetarian, astrologist, co-translator of Blake’s poetry, and devoted animal lover—and her dislike for hunters of all stripe, especially one particular5 group of poachers, whose connections to the local law enforcement and politicians takes on a conspiratorial air.

There are actually two mysteries in the novel, neither of which are hard to solve: the deaths of the four hunters, and the mystery of what happened to Janina’s “Little Girls,” her dogs that are absent for unexplained (although quite easy to surmise) reasons. I don’t want to give away any spoilers (although if there’s a true weak point to this book, it’s that the answers to the mysteries are pretty obvious, right from the start), but these two mysteries are intertwined.

Although the deaths are the engine behind the novel’s plot, the book really runs off of Janina’s voice. The success of this is a true testament to Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s skill as a translator. In one of what could be a half-dozen or more qualifiers, I will admit that I’m friends with Antonia, have known her for years, and am working with her on a few books. I’ve also read a number of her translations, and I was very impressed how this book ťĺ´Çąđ˛ő˛Ô’t sound like Antonia. This is a problem that perceptive readers can pick up on, and something that translators have to grow their way out of as their careers progress. Even if you let the original text guide you, there are turns of phrase, certain rhythms, subtle tics that show up in most renderings. It’s not intentional, it’s not even conscious, but it’s something I see in my students’ work that’s 100% absent here. Which is maybe my way of saying something meaningless like “a smooth translation” but isn’t, really.

*

Plow is a fast read, an enjoyable book, one that has a strong, compelling voice and enough plot points to keep you engaged. (Although I’m not sure about the overall pacing, with the ending revelation feeling both obvious and too abrupt all at once.) But why, exactly, is it the “most anticipated translation of the year” as I postulated above? Did you even pause on that and think, “No way! XXXXXXX is the most anticipated!” I’m willing to bet that most everyone just passed right over that statement, or took it as “Internet Objective.” (Those statements online that are clearly hyperbolic, but an acceptable level of hyperbole because it’s 2019 and we can’t exaggerate enough to get a reaction anymore.)

Given the number of reviews of Plow already up on BookMarks . . . I might actually be right. But why is that the case? Listed below are ## reasons why people are looking forward to this particular book, along with my personal assessment (on a scale of 1 to 10) as to how meaningful these aspects really are:

An Audience That’s Been Reading Olga Since Primeval and Other Times (2/10)

I absolutely loved this book when Twisted Spoon brought it out. (This blog post from 2011 is so lame! And the opening sentence should be “were” not “was.”) At that time (2010), I was reading all of their titles, each one unique, dark, adventurous. But they were based in Prague, with pretty shitty U.S. distribution, so I was probably one of a dozen people who read this. (Although I distinctly remember a very well-respected book critic telling me that this book was not very good and that they couldn’t understand why I liked it. The things the brain remembers—the dramatic, the negative, the moments of self-doubt.) It’s exactly why I got samples of both Flights (called “Runners” at that time) and Drive Your Plow and desperately wanted to publish them. Alas, over the course of many years, multiple authors who were on our editorial board fought against this possibility, so we never even got to the point of making an offer. We could’ve been Fitzcarraldo!

But the point isn’t to lament yet another on the long list of misses that I’ve had in my life (see: The Savage Detectives reader’s report I commissioned in 2001), but to say that not one single review mentioned Primeval or House of Day, House of Night, which was published by Northwestern University Press. There was no long-term growth of Tokarczuk’s English-reading audience; her readership materialized instantly and for other reasons.

The Astrology Parts of Drive Your Plow (3/10)

I read some article recently about how millennials have replaced religion with astrology. Which I have no problem with! I know lots of my friends like to punk on all beliefs (I used to be friends with someone whose whole brand was based around not believing in anything and taking a sarcastic, ironic, caustic approach to everything someone might incorporate into their life), but that sort of “scientific rationality” is not for me. Hidden patterns? Forces that are just beyond our understanding? Things that can’t be explained in school-board approved textbooks? SIGN ME UP.

In a natal Horoscope the date of birth determines the date of death as well. That’s obvious—anyone who has been born is going to die. There are many places in the Horoscope that point us toward the time and nature of death—one simply needs to know how to spot and connect them. For example, one has to check the transitory aspects of Saturn to the hyleg, and what’s going on in the eighth house. Also to cast and eye of the relative position of the Lights—meaning the Sun and Moon.

I’m trying to find out if this sort of approach—“transitory aspects of Saturn to the hyleg” and “eighth house”—is normal astrology speak or nonsense, and hoping that it’s nonsense. Not because I’m anti-astrology (again, hidden patterns, academics being wrong, all that appeals), but because I want to imagine that Janina’s mental instabilities are evident in this—if you know the language.

While trying to find this quote, I found one other paragraph that I love, and that might not deserve its own header, but is why I would recommend you read this book:

I grew up in a beautiful era, now sadly in the past. In it there was great readiness for change, and a talent for creating revolutionary visions. Nowadays no one still has the courage to think up anything new. All they ever talk about, round the clock, is how things already are, they just keep rolling out the same old ideas. Reality has grown old and gone senile; after all, it is definitely subject to the same laws as every living organism—it ages.

Ěý

ĚýThe Controversy over The Books of Jacob (6/10)

Now we’re talking. One of the first times most people heard of Tokarczuk was when this 1,000 page book won the Nike Award and was attacked by Polish nationalists who, because we live in one of the worst possible worlds, are incredibly anti-Semitic and assholes. (Just what the world needs now, more assholes who believe they’re more special than others. Every day it feels like there are more white nationalist and fewer glaciers, which will, literally, be the death of us all.)

Although this book has yet to appear in English translation (Jennifer Croft—read her memoir, Homesick—is working on it), the death threats and controversy registered in the international press and all of a sudden, Olga Tokarczuk was an author “worth looking into” by many editors.

The Movie Version of Drive Your Plow which Is Called Spoor (3/10)

Nah. I’m not even sure most English readers are aware that this exists. (1,377 YouTube views. Or more, depending on how many people are reading these words and clicking this video.) Here’s a trailer in case you’re interested:

It’s from Riverhead (9/10)

So, I’m working on a book about baseball sabermetrics (not the actual sabermetrics, but the ideas that drive how to evaluate talent and success), behavioral economics (mostly decision making and prospect theory), and publishing (because I know nothing else), and am working on a section about whether or not publishing is a zero-sum game. There are elements by which it is (limited shelf space, limited reviews, static amount of money spent on books for a good number of years), and yet, there’re no real limits in which for every book that “wins,” one “loses.”

Maybe.

When you’re Open Letter and not Riverhead, it feels like a zero-sum game. Indie bookstores have a limited amount of money, and have to spend that money on the books that are most likely to sell. And a massive corporate press, with a legit marketing budget and multiple employees pimping a given title (versus a few employees doing multiple jobs) is much more likely to “win.” And if you assume it’s going to win, then you buy more copies of that book and fewer of the one from Open Letter and, well, Drive Your Plow sells better. It’s tautological in a way. It will always sell more because more copies are readily available. Amazon hasn’t altered that dynamic. The most popular books sell via all retailers. Size and power matter.

The Cover (8/10)

Covers are the number one influence on whether or not someone buys a book. But this cover? It’s fine. (ADMISSION: I think most everything is fine. I have a whole post about this pre-written for when I start my “Evaluation of Books with No Metadata” series, but in short, most all of the books I read are between a 5 and a 10. Which is a weird sort of self-involved bragging, but also a way of saying that a book that I think is a 7 is fine to me, but also a really good book! Numbers are relative and shit.) It’s kind of an Open Letter cover (see Landscape in Concrete), and is mod in a way that I like, but that isn’t spectacular. Riverhead’s Flights cover isn’t necessarily my thing either.

But I’m not most people, and I’ll be this stands out really well on a front table at both an indie store and B&N.

The Man Booker International for Flights (10/10)

This is the one, right? If Flights ťĺ´Çąđ˛ő˛Ô’t win the Man Booker . . . Check that: If Flights isn’t longlisted for the Man Booker, no one gives any fucks about Drive Your Plow. Full stop. Even if it is a finalist for the 2019 Man Booker International. (Which it is, and, frankly, biasedly, I hope it wins. Go Antonia!)

Is there any other award in the world that matters as much to translation as this one? No.

That People Decided to Give Olga a Chance (7/10)

This is hard to articulate, but I’m going to try.

For years, the translation community has both acknowledged and fought against the idea that readers are “scared” of translations. When it served our purpose, we were quick to point out that readers tend to choose books by Americans over those by “foreigners.” And at the same time, when we were lobbying publishers to do more international books, we could easily trot out the argument that “readers love good books—translated or not! Just look at Ferrante!”

What if it’s all a lot simpler than that? There are certain books that the community of readers is open to giving a chance, and certain books they aren’t. There’s not necessarily a rhyme or reason to why book X and not book Y, but there are books that everyone’s like, “OK, let’s accept this and read it before we pass judgement” and other times that the reading community is like, “nice that it exists, but not my thing.” The reasons why the masses react the way they do—because it’s never as individual a decision as we wish it were—is the Holy Grail of book marketing. Is Drive Your Plow the best book in translation to come out in 2019? I personally don’t think so, and would be surprised if more than 50% of readers thought it was. But it’s one of a very small handful of titles in translation that a significant audience will give a chance.

I’m not in a mental space—right now—to explain the intricacies of this, I can think of all the books that the public ˇÉ´Ç˛Ô’t give a chance, books by Asian women that haven’t won awards, most everything (well, probably everything) from the Baltics, any translation with a stodgy university press cover, books set in places with too many diacritics. In many ways, Olga is the exception that proves the rule. How many other Polish female authors can you name? (There are fourteen—14?!—in the Translation Database.)

*

I’ve been really struggling with the idea of these posts for the past week or two. I know that I have a fraction of the readership that BookRiot or LitHub has, and that, at the same time, I’m wicked militant about not changing my approach—I don’t want to write fluff, but want to mix together a lot of ideas about math and society and unseen influences in a way that’s both illuminating and (on my best day) entertaining.

The big problem I struggle with is that my analysis of behavior comes off as dismissive or reductive—at least as regards the book in question.

That’s a flaw in my writing ability, not my beliefs. All the books I write about—even if I crap on them partially in jest, partially because I’m a curmudgeon who is about to turn mid-40s, partially because I’m chasing that dragon of unfettered joy that you can experience when you read a masterwork for the first time ever—are good! Buy them. And buy an Open Letter book while you’re at it. We have a ton of books as good as Drive Your Plow. That’s not to dismiss this particular book! It’s just that there are so many great books, but we as readers only give a handful a chance. Which is a missed opportunity. So many missed opportunities.

Will we do a Two Month Review on The Books of Jacob? We will. For sure. We’ll read it, bait Polish nationalists, get death threats. And support Olga—a very talented, uncompromising author. Whose Primeval and Other Tales is also worth getting ahold of.

Next Wednesday, May 25th, as part of the ongoing there will be a discussion of Primeval and Other Times at the New York Institute for the Humanities at Cooper Square. All the details—including how to register—can be found by The Polish Cultural Institute also put together which has more info about the book itself.

Olga Tokarczuk’s novel, Primeval and Other Times, first published in Poland in 1996, now available in an English version after having been translated into several other languages, is already regarded as a classic of East European post-Communist fiction, winning many prizes and becoming required reading for high school students in Poland. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the Polish literary market was flooded with long censored works and translations of formerly forbidden literature from the US and Western Europe, and writers no longer had the Communist regime to push against, Tokarczuk represented a genuinely fresh current in Polish literature, taking a self-consciously woman-centered perspective and moving away from the old politics to consider the relation between cultural archetypes and the events of history. Young Poles in the 1990s read Tokarczuk eagerly in the way that Americans read novelists like Toni Morrison and Gabriel Garcia Márquez during the previous decade.

The novel is set in the mythical village of Primeval in the very heart of Poland, which is populated by eccentric folk characters. The village, a microcosm of Europe, is guarded by four archangels, from whose perspective the novel chronicles the lives of Primeval’s inhabitants over the course of the 20th century. In prose that is forceful and direct, the narrative follows Poland’s tortured political history from 1914 to the contemporary era and the episodic brutality that is visited on ordinary village life.

Yet Primeval and Other Times is a novel of universal dimension that does not dwell on the parochial. A stylized fable as well as epic allegory about the inexorable grind of time, the clash between modernity (the masculine) and nature (the feminine), it has been translated into most European languages.

Tokarczuk has said of the novel: I always wanted to write a book such as this. One that creates and describes a world. It is the story of a world that, like all things living, is born, develops, and then dies. Kitchens, bedrooms, childhood memories, dreams and insomnia, reminiscences, and amnesia – these are part of the existential and acoustic spaces from which the voices of Tokarczuk‘s tale come.

However, the literary mainstream is made up of authors who follow Witold Gombrowicz, who teaches distance from those models of Polish identity. Janusz Rudnicki, Marcin Swietlicki, Michał Witkowski and Jerzy Pilch are writers who find their own ironic ways of dealing with our literary tradition. The most important writer of this group is Pilch – not only because of his novels, but also because of his position as the country’s leading columnist. In view of the vanishing significance of literary criticism, which is now found only in niche magazines, and – I must admit with a heavy heart – the claustrophobia that affects newspapers’ cultural pages, Pilch is considered an authority on literature.

Dorota Masłowska owes him a lot. Her White and Red was the most important debut to appear in the first 20 years after independence. It is seemingly a realist novel about the dregs of society, but in fact the broken language of its heroes, full of references to pop culture and different subcultures, perfectly reflects the chaotic consciousness of all Poles living through those days of political and social transformation. Her second novel, The Queen’s Peacock, won the Nike, Poland’s most important literary award. It’s worth stressing here that awards are another substitute for literary criticism, though this is by no means an exclusively Polish phenomenon. The list of Nike laureates gives quite a reliable insight into the most important trends and names in Polish literature. Take poetry, which competes on equal terms with novels and essays for the title of the best book of the year. It is significant that the last two Nobel prizes for literature won by Poles went to poets: Czesław Miłosz (1981) and Wisława Szymborska (1996).

There’s also a nice bit in here about Reportage:

This genre-busting nature of Polish reportage is also the source of many misunderstandings. When a biography of Poland’s most eminent reporter (and the best-known Polish writer worldwide), Ryszard Kapuscinski, came out last year (Kapuscinski Non-fiction by Artur Domosławski), it provoked many arguments, including about the reporter’s competence. To what degree should a reporter be just a witness, and to what degree an author who includes his or her own outlook, interpretations and literary style? Where does journalism (non-fiction) end, and literary fiction begin? This dispute remains unsettled, just like many other arguments provoked by Domosławski’s book, such as the controversy over the attitudes that journalists and writers adopted during the communist years, or the extent to which a biographer can explore the personal life of his or her subject.

Regardless of the gravity of the charges against the so-called Polish School of Reportage, of which Kapuscinski was the most prominent representative, it is in good condition. Though it is ever rarer in the Polish press, it transfers relatively well to books. Successors of Kapuscinski – Mariusz Szczygieł, Jacek Hugo-Bader, Wojciech Tochman – appear near the top of the bestseller lists, and their works have been translated into all of the major European languages. So reportage is still a Polish speciality, although reporters tend now to wander the world and through history in their search for interesting subjects. Szczygieł devoted his book Gottland (winner of the 2009 European Book prize) to the conflicting attitudes that Czechs adopt towards communism; Hugo-Bader has travelled through a drink-sodden post-Soviet Russia (White Heat); while Tochman has analysed the consequences of the genocide in Rwanda (We Will Portray Death Today). Young writers are following their lead: in Murderer from the Apricot City, Witold Szabłowski reports on the cultural clashes and conflicts that divide contemporary Turkey as it attempts to join the European Union.

It’s interesting and encouraging that a decent number of Polish books are being translated into English and published in the U.S. According to our Translation Database (update coming later this week—promise), 23 works of Polish fiction and poetry have come out here since January 2009. That’s not bad given Poland’s size. And this number doesn’t include all the works of reportage that have come out over that period. (Such as Tochman’s Like Eating a Stone: Surviving the Past in Bosnia.)

Of course, I think Pilch is one of the best. (BTW, we just received the translation of My First Suicide & Other Stories, due out in 2012.) Additionally, I’d personally recommend Olga Tokarczuk’s and Wiesław Myśliwski’s both of which are brilliant and sweepingly ambitious in their own way.

This year’s festival is called “Haunting the Present,” and here’s a brief intro from the site:

Today’s Europe is a fascinating convergence of old and new, with high speed trains roaring past thousand-year-old towns. The past and present are never far away from each other, and this year’s New Literature from Europe festival explores this proximity by presenting some of the most powerful recent works of fiction by eight of the most important contemporary European authors. In Haunting the Present, the festival’s seventh annual series, the overriding theme is the continued sway of history on contemporary life. Readers will witness the changes over a century in one house in Bucharest and in another house on a lake outside Berlin as its residents flee each successive regime. They will be transported from the mythical Polish village of Primeval to a small, bucolic French town shortly after World War II, and beyond.

In this year’s New Literature from Europe, eight cultural institutes have teamed up to present a series of discussions and readings featuring eight critically acclaimed European writers: Philippe Claudel (France), Kirmen Uribe (Spain), Jenny Erpenbeck (Germany), Gerhard Roth (Austria), Radka DenemarkovĂĄ (Czech Republic), Olga Tokarczuk (Poland), Gabriela Adameşteanu (Romania), and Antonia Arslan (Italy). Moderators will include distinguished writer AndrĂŠ Aciman, chair of Comparative Literature and director of the Writers’ Institute at the CUNY Graduate Center and Susan Bernofsky, Guest Professor of Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College (CUNY).

That’s a pretty sweet lineup of authors and translators, and the four events that make up this festival all sound well-crafted and interesting. Here’s a bit of info on all the goings on:

Tuesday, November 16th, 7pm

Wednesday, November 17th, 3-5pm

Wednesday, November 17th, 6:30 pm & 7:45 pm

Thursday, November 18th, 7pm

“Runners” tells the story of people you have met while travelling: in air terminals, stations, in foreign towns. You are like a medium, who brings together these stories in a coherent form.

I often feel like that. The role suits me: an ear and an eye, someone undefined, without gender, without an age. Someone who is not too distinct, and that’s why the world trusts them. When you withdraw from your own “I”, you start to see and hear more. When you are too distinct, you see the world through your own filters, which is not bad either, just different.