I’m not sure if these are immutable truths per se, but if you talk to enough people in the book industry, you’re likely to encounter two strains of thought: 1) each segment feels especially essential to the existence of the whole ecosystem (which really only proves that this is truly an ecosystem, and 2) each segments feels like their work is underappreciated (probably since only a handful of any of us make any significant money).

Without booksellers, books wouldn’t get the same attention and readership; without translators, there wouldn’t be any international literature; without authors, there aren’t any books; but then again, without publishers, there’s no product; or maybe the printers are really the most essential—unless you consider ebooks. You can go round and round with this chicken-egg situation, but what I’ve been pondering isn’t who’s mostĚýimportant, but which group would have the most interesting stories.

In other words, if I were hired as some sort of ‘book journalist” and was forced to choose to cover one “beat” and one “beat” only, which one would be the most consistently gratifying?

I’m not sure I have an answer . . . yet . . . although I’ll eliminate authors right here and now. Not that authors aren’t interesting people! The stories I’ve heard from Rodrigo Fresán are incredible, but it’s rare that an author is as interesting as their books. Most interviews aren’t all that unique or unexpected. They can be very smart, sometimes illuminating, but mostly are promotional—if not for their most recent book, for the aesthetic and mindset they embody. Which is totally fine, but if I’m being forced to choose ´Ç˛Ô±đĚýgroup of people to talk to and report on for the indefinite future, I think I’ll pass.

*

After writing my last post on AndrĂ©s Neuman’s , I felt inspired to reallyĚý°ů±đ˛ą»ĺĚýfor the first time since all this shit started. It was like his book woke me up again and gave me the mental space necessary to trulyĚý°ů±đ˛ą»ĺĚýand not just let the words flow by. To engage with texts again. And try and find connections, patterns.

In reading (trans. Will Vanderhyden) for this season of the , I’ve gotten a bit obsessed withĚý. I’ve °ů±đ˛ą»ĺĚýWuthering HeightsĚýexactly once, in high school, and remember only a handful of specifics. As interested as I am in going back to the source and rereading Emily BrontĂ«’s masterpiece, I’m sort of more interested in the adaptations of this seemingly unadaptable novel. Like the Buñuel movie. Or, in this specific instance, Minae Mizumura’s , translated from the Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter, the tagline for which is “a remaking of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights set in postwar Japan.”

My initial plan for this post was to read all 850+ pages and riff on adaptations and the concept of the original as it relates to art and translation.

But then I actually started reading the book.

*

I spend a lot of time talking with translators of all levels. From burgeoning translators (my students), to the mid-career ones who send us submissions, to the masters of the moment (Margaret Jull Costa, Marian Schwartz, etc.). I’m both the chair of the ALTA conference committee AND the only non-translator. I’m talking to translators basically 24/7. Which is why I would never choose to have the “translator beat” for the rest of my life. Again, not because I don’t love translators or anything like that—I truly do—but I think the questions we end up asking translators are endlessly repetitive. It’s a profession that works best when it contains a bit of mystery. I love finding out about linguistic complications that lead to interesting choices that impact the interpretation of a book. (And stem from the translator’s interpretation.) But those are just results, analyzed in reverse. We’ll never fully know what it was inside the translator’s brain that led them to make the creative leap. The explanations are frequently interesting, but I kind of like the magic . . . A translator comes up with something that works because they are a creative artist. Trying to get to the heart of that is like asking an author “how they came up with their book.”

I think I’d shy away from hitching my writing horse to translators solely because I don’t think I have the right questions to cover them for the rest of my life in an entertaining and meaningful way.

*

The prologue of A True Novel is 166 pages long.

The preface—which is only four pages and precedes the prologue—boils down the core plot of the prologue to its essence:

A miracle happened to me two years ago.

It was when I was staying in Palo Alto in northern California, writing my third novel, or, more precisely, trying to write it. I lacked confidence, and progress was slow. Then, out of the blue, I was made a gift of a story, “a story just like a novel.” What is more, the story was meant for me alone. It concerned a man whom I knew, or rather whom my family knew, in New York at one time. This was no ordinary man.

If Mizumura had wanted to, she could’ve started the “true novel” right there, right after that. But instead, she chose to recount her childhood encounters with Taro Azuma, her life in Long Island, the rise and fall of her father’s fortunes, her return to Japan, her struggle to become a writer, and her fortune at being able to teach at Princeton, the University of Michigan, and Stanford—all of which mimics Mizumura’s life.

But Taro Azuma, the man she knew as a child who became a multi-millionaire Heathcliff? The man whose life story she is “gifted” while struggling with her third novel? Well, he’s the one part of the prologue that is invented.

*

Editors? Oh, fuck no. You couldn’t pay me enough to interview and cover editors for the rest of my career. Do you like listening to pretentious boring people who hide their insecurities behind sales numbers and awards? Hearing an editor talk about a book can totally kill your desire to read said book. Art shouldn’t be evaluated in relationship to its total sales, and yet, the most common refrains among this segment of the book industry is “well, it sure did exceed expectations!” and “it’s a great book, but just didn’t get the sales it deserved.” Editors talk about craft like mechanics talk about cars, except that they want to “pimp out” every “ride” to be the thing that will get them reflected glory via sales levels. It’s not about the art itself, it’s about getting the approval of the masses.

I blame agents for this in part, which is why I’m going to toss them out right here as well. The most successful agents are the “best” because they’re always working the angles. They’re like cut throat Wall Street bros, but working in a tiny pond. WithĚý˛ú´Ç´Ç°ě˛ő.ĚýAnd they too try and value books in the weirdest way. A book is “good” based on which high profile editor acquires it. And by “high profile,” I mean “has the biggest checkbook.” Covering agents and their deals? Hard pass.

*

The idea of the “invented part” inĚýA True Novel really resonates with me, thanks to Fresán. He’s constantly fighting against the autofictional trappings in his triptych—the inclination to assume that since The Writer sort of resembles Fresán himself, that itĚýľ±˛őĚýhim. This is generally a garbage sentiment, and bad criticism. But we live in an age awash in the desire to wed the desire to share one’s personal experience with the idea of literature and art. Identity politics are very important; not every novel needs to be speaking your own truth. Fiction should be broad enough to welcome all viewpoints, and neither Twitter nor the marketplace should restrict that.

I setĚýA True NovelĚýaside for a minute after reading the absolutely brilliant “From Story to Novel” section of the prologue. In this bit, Mizumura unveils her game for this novel. She writes about how she wants to tell Taro Azuma’s story because it was so similar toĚýWuthering Heights, that “what I set out to do was thus close to rewriting a Western novel in Japanese.” But she doesn’tĚý˛ął¦łŮłÜ˛ą±ô±ô˛âĚý°ů±đ·É°ůľ±łŮ±đĚýWuthering Heights. She veers. She writes something unique that differentiates itself from BrontĂ«’s novel in part because of the Japanese language. (It’s worth noting that the most recent Mizumura book to come out in translation is [trans. Juliet Winters Carpenter].) This is where things turn very curious.

The problem lay elsewhere.

Taro Azuma’s was a true story. Yet, because it seemed so close to fiction, the more I went on writing, the more uneasy I felt that something important—something I can only call a sense of the real—was slipping through my fingers. [. . .] I was well into the work when I decided that the difficulty I was having probably came from the difficulty of writing a “true novel” in Japanese.

The term “true novel” once played a crucial role in the development of modern Japanese literature. The period when Japan opened its doors to the West, beginning in 1868, coincided with what might be called the golden era of the Western novel. [. . .] It was inevitable that Japanese novelists would also be moved by a desire to reproduce what they perceived to be the most highly evolved form of literature. For them, and perhaps for other non-Western writers, the type of novels written in nineteenth-century Europe, ones where the author sought to create an independent fictional world outside his own life, came to represent the ideal.

This is a bit of a spoiler, but if the Western tradition started with the idea of a “true novel” that is both independent of the author and totally invented (New Criticism really helped push this all along almost a century later, trying to divorce the text from both the author’s intentions and the emotional response of a reader to it), we’ve course-corrected in a severe way in which authors are frequently chided for “writing about what they don’t know.” Meanwhile, in the Japanese tradition, they started with a sort of autofiction, then tried to break out of that.

Half a century later, and after numerous experiments, not all Japanese writers were so sure. Some still claimed that, difficult as it had proved in the past, Japanese novelists should continue to aim for what they staunchly believed was the ideal, a fictional world created by an impersonal author—a transcendent “subject.” Others thought that novelists should basically adhere to writing truthfully about themselves, because being true to oneself, and, ultimately, to life, is what ought to embody the highest aim in literature. Some went further and asserted that such writing was the very soul of Japanese literature, wehre the diary has been an esteemed literary genre for over a thousand years. The controversy led to the emergence of two terms of two different approaches to fiction, one normative and the other descriptive: the “true novel” and the “I-novel.”

*

Do all booksellers have the same basic stories? Right now, they all hate the fact that “selling” books means shipping objects to disembodied customers. That’s a bummer! That’s not what anyone signed up for! If I were asked to cover booksellers only right now, I would likely kill that COVID with a big gulp of bleach. But even during “normal” times? Booksellers aren’t all that more interesting than anyone else in this ecosystem. Having been one for years, I have the same stories about annoying customers, and the same chip on my shoulder about my recommendations not being adopted by the masses. (Even when I know that I was mostly just a megaphone for marketing folk.) Bookselling in the aggregate is less interesting than the individual personalities, but I think I’d rather drink with booksellers than have to interview and write about them.

*

What exactly is an “I-novel”?

In an “I-novel,” readers expect the writer to figure in the work in one way or another. Whether the work is in fact based on the writer’s life or is a contrivance is ultimately irrelevant. The author-protagonist of an “I-novel” is perceived as an actual, specific individual, one whose face may be publicly known in other media. The work is necessarily assumed to be truthful about that individual’s life. Moreover, readers tend to favor works that have no beginning or ending, and are fragmentary, finding them true to life, as life also has no opening or closure as such and is nothing but an accumulation of fragmentary experiences. In other words, what readers look for in this genre is the absence of the authorial will—of the intention to create, through words, an independent universe.

(It would be interesting to bounce this idea off of David Shields’sĚýReality Hunger.)

So, an “I-novel” isn’t exactly an “autofiction,” but.

This is where I paused in my reading of A True Novel. After she mentioned that I-novels are still all the rage in Japan, I decided to test out a hypothesis and picked upĚý.Ěý

*

Sales reps? They’re also great people, and IĚý·É´ÇłÜ±ô»ĺĚýlove to understand the calculus they apply to all the various books from the various publishers and consortiums they represent. Why push Book X over Book Y? Why don’t you ever read titles from Publisher Z? Understanding how reps think might unlock a ton of marketing secrets for small presses everywhere. Or . . . or . . . it’s just about money. If you’re working on commissions, you’re incentivized to push the books with the best chance of selling. That calculus is actually just arithmetic. 15% of $0 is $0. Promote the buzz, follow the trends, keep your family in the black. That’s, well, not that interesting.

I would totally write about reps for the rest of my life if all they talked about was ways in which publishers tried to seduce them. I want to know all about the payola.

*

Full admission! I’m only 40% of the way throughĚýBreasts and EggsĚýby Mieko Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd.

Another admission! Not sure I get the hype.

After reading the first 166 pages of A True Novel, IĚý°ě˛Ô±đ·ÉĚýI was in the hands of a brilliant writer. Having read the first 150 pages ofĚýBreasts and Eggs, I knew I was reading an I-novel that plays to our current market urges.

Because copying passages from my Kindle is painful and stupid (the book didn’t arrive before lockdown), I’m going to use Ěýas the best starting point to talk about this.

Kawakami has since become something of a literary feminist icon in Japan. Although “Breasts and Eggs” riled some traditionalists with its frank portrayal of women’s lives, those detractors are outnumbered by her fans, many of them younger women.

They relate to Kawakami’s sharp identification of society’s expectations for women and the efforts of her characters to upend them. In “Breasts and Eggs,” the narrator, Natsuko Natsume, muses about the tyranny of beauty as she tries to understand her elder sister’s obsession with breast implants. [. . .]

Kawakami gained even more renown as a feminist voice after a 2017 interview she conducted with Haruki Murakami, perhaps Japan’s most celebrated modern novelist.

In that interview, which recently appeared inĚý, Kawakami — whose work Murakami has championed — questioned the “persistent tendency for women to be sacrificed for the sake of the male leads” in his fiction, echoingĚýĚýof other critics. (Murakami responded to Kawakami’s critique by noting that his focus was not on “individualistic characters,” but on how people interact with the world.)

To be described as a feminist writer in Japan “still has to some extent a negative image,” Kawakami said in an interview via Zoom.

When “Breasts and Eggs” won the Akutagawa Prize, Shintaro Ishihara, then Tokyo’s right-wing governor and a member of the prize committee, described the novel’s tone as “selfish” and “unpleasant and hard to listen to.” [. . .]

When she was 14, Kawakami said, she lied about her age to secure a part-time job at a factory that made parts for air-conditioners. To help with the family finances, she worked as a convenience store cashier, a restaurant dishwasher, a dental assistant and a bookstore clerk.

Growing up working class, she learned that “in most cases the rich stay rich and the poor remain poor,” she said. “Even with effort you cannot always change your life, and I had this severe lesson as a child.”

From its opening sentence, “Breasts and Eggs” is forthright about class: “If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had.”

To help support her younger brother when he was in college, Kawakami worked as a bar hostess. She later moved to Tokyo to pursue a music career, but it quickly stalled.

Tim Gutteridge is a Scottish literary translator, working from Spanish into English. His translation of Miserere de cocodrilos(Mercedes Rosende) will be published later this year by Bitter Lemon Press as Crocodile Tears. He is currently working on the translation of ´ł˛ąłÜ°ůĂ­˛ą, a verbatim drama by Jordi Casanovas based on the notorious Manadagang rape case of 2016, in which the dialogue is taken directly from witness statements and court transcripts. He lives in Cadiz (Spain) and blogs about translation at .

Ěýby Burhan Sönmez, translated from the Turkish by Ăśmit Hussein (Other Press)

In Labyrinth by Burhan Sönmez, translated by Ümit Hussein, a Turkish blues musician called Boratin has attempted to commit suicide by jumping off the Bosphorus Bridge, which connects the European and Asian sides of Istanbul. Miraculously, he survives the fall almost unscathed. His only injury is a single broken rib. And the almost but not quite total loss of his memory. He has, crucially, no recall whatsoever of his personal life prior to the fall, no memory of people’s faces and names, of events or feelings. He does recall some historical and political facts but even this is flattened by his simultaneous inability to order them in time, so that when he sees the election poster of a politician he confuses it with a figure from the Ottoman Empire, while his knowledge that the city’s main train station was badly damaged in a fire doesn’t prevent him from going there to catch a train. In his mind, the fire occurred a hundred years ago and the station had subsequently been repaired; in reality, the fire happened only a few years ago and the station has been abandoned ever since.

Bek, a friend and fellow musician, takes it upon himself to look after Boratin, gently but persistently seeking ways to re-establish Boratin’s connection with the past. It is not clear if the failure of these attempts is due to the scope of the challenge itself. Perhaps, once you have been severed from your past no amount of reminiscence can reconnect you. Or the failure could be a result of Boratin’s resistance, his unwillingness to incorporate his friend’s account of the past into his own tightly bounded present. Or it could be because there is something fundamentally unconvincing about Bek’s account. There is, specifically, no clue as to why Boratin might have tried to commit suicide. And, more generally, everything Boratin is told casts him in an unremittingly positive light. He helped everyone and was loved by everyone. Is it simply too good to have been true?

We have, then, a novel that can be read both as a reflection of the role of memory in personal identity and as an allegory for what happens if a society loses its connection with its past—or remembers it only as history (“While everyone is trying to give you a past, what they’re actually giving you is a history. In the former everything is alive, in the latter it’s dead”)—although I suspect that for most readers in English this allegorical aspect will be secondary, hinted at through the Istanbul setting and occasional references throughout the text.

Instead, reading Labyrinth as we entered the fifth week of lockdown (confinamiento) in Spain, I found myself identifying with the sense that Boratin may be at once trapped and freed by his loss of memory, his daily world lived—at least at the beginning—largely within the confines of his apartment, the past suddenly unimaginably distant, the future inconceivable. And yet, this confinement also offers a strange freedom as the present moment becomes everything, no longer reduced to the service of the past and the future.

Finally, a brief comment on Ümit Hussein’s translation. With the caveat that I don’t read Turkish, this feels like a very accomplished piece of work, one that is neither too eager to please nor aggressively foreignizing, creating a distinctive, almost poetic voice that doesn’t shy away from the unusual (“The sound of the clock [. . .] rings out as loud and clear as a grinding stone”) or stumble on the potentially confusing (for example, a narrative that switches between first and third person, often in mid-paragraph).

Despite these unpropitious signs, the two embark on a relationship that is aimless until they turn it into a narrative. “Write a story about me,” Agnes asks the narrator, “so I know what you think of me.” At first both enjoy the challenge she’s set him. But what begins as a flirtatious parlor game soon turns darker. When tragedy strikes, the narrator turns to the story to reverse the past. But eventually he no longer writes their story; the story writes them.

Agnes is most affected by this turn of events. Having already expressed her difficulty with reading—“It feels to me as though I’ve become the character in it, and the character’s life ends when the books does . . . I didn’t want books to have me in their power”—she now becomes one with her character in the fiction within the fiction, leading to an ambiguous ending in which the end of Stamm’s novel mirrors the end of his narrator’s tale.

It’s clear the novel’s most important relationship is not between the characters, but between fiction and reality. But it’s equally unclear what the nature of that relationship is supposed to be, especially because the novel regularly teases us with metaphors that promise but fail to tell us how to understand it.

At one point, for example, Agnes explains her research into the atomic structure of crystals in terms that seem to offer a key to understanding the narrative: “Almost everything is symmetrical at some level,” she tells the narrator, before adding, “it’s asymmetry that makes life possible. The difference between the sexes. The fact that time goes in one direction.” This claim chimes with the narrator’s belief that “life doesn’t go for endings, it goes on.” Does Agnes adhere to these ideas about form? Is the way the story and the story within the story are symmetrical a sign of its impossibility, to use Agnes’s term? In offering an ending that loops around to the beginning, is the novel mimicking the narrator’s idea of life, which doesn’t go for endings, or only emphasizing how different narratives are from life?

Similar questions arise when, in the course of his research, the narrator studies the Pullman Strike of 1894, interpreting it not in political or economic terms, but as a reaction by workers against “the complete control of their lives by their employer,” who “had planned for every contingency, except his workers’ desire for freedom.” We could read the narrator’s criticism of the patriarchal industrialist as an unintentional self-critique of his attitude to Agnes. Or we could understand it as a way to describe the author’s relationship to his characters and his work. But in what way does this carefully controlled novel allow for anything like its characters’ freedom?

The effect of these allegories for our reading—at once so overt and so enigmatic—is destabilizing, as if Stamm were proposing, through the very superfluity of these possible keys to understanding the text, the very failure of interpretation. Just as we are desperate for the control over life’s contingencies promised by narrative, so too, Stamm teasingly suggests, we are similarly insistent, as readers of those narratives, on making sense of them. At its most interesting, Agnes hints that its readers might be as domineering as its narrator. But Stamm never explains what it would mean to let Agnes, or Agnes, be free. How can we read without interpreting? And why must the possibility that a text could exceed interpretation be offered through the clichéd and misogynistic idea of woman as enigma?

Ultimately, Stamm’s metafictional sleights of hand are more tiresome than vertiginous. Agnes has neither the balance between possibility and aimlessness of Stamm’s early short stories about young people adrift, published in English as In Strange Gardens and Other Stories, nor the emotional impact of the two more recent collections combined in We’re Flying. Its concerns are as airless as the narrator’s climate-controlled apartment that Agnes, and ultimately readers, longs to escape. Agnes offers a writer whose cleverness hadn’t yet been enriched by compassion.

Although Gillian survives an auto accident that kills her husband, the crash damages and permanently alters her face. As she convalesces, she recalls the weeks leading up to the accident, in particular her televised interview with Hubert, a local artist, and her post-interview request that he paint her portrait. Gillian shares with Hubert the hope that his painting of her will reveal truths to which she has been blind. All that she understands about herself is derivative of others’ impressions and reactions, and she longs for Hubert to interpret and reveal to her, her true self. Instead, Hubert soon becomes frustrated with his subject. “I don’t see anything in you. I’ll be pleased if I manage the exterior half decently,” he tetchily tells Gillian during a sitting. He accuses her of intentionally concealing her inner self, of “acting,” and of an unwillingness to reveal any vulnerability, an accusation that is not new to her.

With her post-accident convalescence complete, Gillian moves out of the city and relocates to a secluded mountain resort. No longer Gillian, she is simply known now as “Jill.” She seeks to refashion her life, far from the television cameras, cocktail parties, and celebrity status that constituted her existence. Yet in this new world Jill’s authentic self remains elusive. When Hubert re-enters her life, this time as an artist-in-residence at the resort, Gillian again looks to him and his art to “find” her. But now Hubert is undergoing his own crisis. He has lost creative inspiration and self-confidence as an artist, and after succumbing to an emotional collapse finds that he is now able to create art only through the slow work of destruction:

As a boy he had often whiled away the hours like this, had pulled one thread after another from a piece of rough cloth, or picked away at a rope until there were just thin fibers left, broken up a blossom or a fir twig into its constituent parts, hatched and crosshatched a piece of paper with pencil till it made a shiny even surface.

Hubert even negates his many, previous sketches of Gillian through intricate, penciled cross-hatchings that cover his earlier markings, making the underlying picture unrecognizable. And when Jill finds the drawings of her that Hubert has destroyed, she begins to do the same to the ones that Hubert left untouched:

She started covering one of the sketches with her own hatchings, the one of her kneeling on the bed with her hands behind her back, as though chained. The pencil was too hard, so she took another one. She deleted the picture, as though burying her unprotected body under a layer of graphite, making a fossil that no one would ever discover.

This purposeful destruction of the sketches symbolizes Gillian’s and Hubert’s separate, existential battles, and for each it marks a turning point to finally acknowledge the unvarnished, imperfect reality of who they are.

Michael Hoffman’s masterful translation retains the integrity of Stamm’s crystalline prose—precise, clean, and spare. While the writing is strong enough to keep the reader engaged, the novel’s plot, really a pair of character explorations, is not entirely satisfying. It is difficult to empathize with two people so very self-conscious and yet not at all self-aware. And the aimless drift of Gillian’s and Hubert’s lives resounds (perhaps intentionally) in the indecisive meter of the novel as though Stamm himself is unsure how to find a narrative resolution for his two muses—lost souls searching for the means to balance the created and the authentic.

by Kamel Daoud, translated from the French by John Cullen (Algeria, Other Press)

This year’s longlist is very strong, but I have no problem making the claim that The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud deserves to be at the head of the list. No other book on this longlist will force you to reexamine your reading of one of the Western world’s most studied novels like Daoud’s novel will. On top of that, this novel will expose your unconscious reading bias and, if you’re like me, make you feel pretty guilty in the process. If I were an English professor, The Meursault Investigation would go on my syllabus next semester.

In this novel, Daoud takes on Albert Camus’s The Stranger (sometimes translated as The Other or The Outsider) and dares to tell the other side of the story. For those few of you who escaped having The Stranger as assigned reading in school, it is widely regarded as the classic existential (or, some say, absurdist) novel. Camus wrote it in French and first published it in 1942. To summarize, in the first half of the novel, the protagonist Meursault ends up shooting an “Arab” on a hot sunny beach out of either boredom/ennui or heatstroke (the critics disagree) and, in the second half, he languishes in his jail cell waiting for death while questioning the meaning of life. Meursault eventually concludes, “Nothing, nothing mattered . . .” The story is told in the first person in unadorned, almost acetic, prose.

Daoud comes at this same story from a different angle. His protagonist Harun is the surviving brother of Musa, the “Arab” murdered by Meursault in Camus’s novel. In Harun’s world, The Stranger is a kind of memoir by Meursault, describing his crime and its aftermath. The Meursault Investigation is Harun’s first-person response to Meursault’s narrative, albeit fifty years after the crime. For Harun, Meursault murders Musa first by calling him what he is not (Arab), second, by refusing to call him what he is (Musa), and third, by shooting him five times. All three are inexcusable, and as readers of The Stranger, most of us were complicit in the first two murders, only recognizing the five bullets as wrong.

Unlike many readers of The Stranger, Harun refuses to accept the label of “Arab” for his brother:

Arab. I never felt Arab, you know. Arab-ness is like Negro-ness, which only exists in the white man’s eyes. In our neighborhood, in our world, we were Muslims, we had given names, faces, and habits. Period. The others were “the strangers,” the roumis God brought here to put us to the test . . .

Meursault also neglects to give Musa a name or even a body. Without a body, there’s “a weird funeral” and an “empty grave,” and, understandably, Harun is angry about this:

Just think, we’re talking about one of the most-read books in the world. My brother might have been famous if your author had merely deigned to give him a name. H’med or Kaddour or Hammou, just a name, damn it! . . . But no, he didn’t name him, because if he had, my brother would have caused the murderer a problem with his conscience: You can’t easily kill a man when he has a given name.

The brilliance of Daoud’s work here is that many of his readers will be recognizing these gaps in the classic story for the first time. When I read The Stranger in ninth grade (I think), all of the focus was on Meursault’s motivations in shooting “the Arab” and his resulting struggle to define the meaning of his life. I don’t recall thinking much about the Arab whose death animates Meursault’s famous philosophizing. This is where the guilt comes in. Why didn’t we think about the murdered man and his family when we read The Stranger? And when we didn’t, why weren’t we taught that we should?

I don’t have space here to unpack all the masterful ways in which Daoud engages with Camus’s novel except to say that the resonances are multilayered and reward close reading. One point of contrast, however, is notable. Both novels were written originally in French, but where Camus writes with spare efficiency, Daoud employs a lush, descriptive language. John Cullen’s translation of Daoud captures the warmth and sensuousness of the language as well as Harun’s conversational tone. The stark difference in linguistic style between the novels highlights the different worlds inhabited by these two protagonists, even though they walk on the same streets.

The Meursault Investigation is uncomfortably thought-provoking in the best way. It deserves to be read and studied alongside its classic companion. Even with only a passing familiarity with Camus’s The Stranger, Daoud’s novel is a rewarding read. The Meursault Investigation’s brilliance, however, becomes most obvious when read right after reading (or rereading) Camus’s classic. It is then that its complex interactions with the classic are best appreciated.

David Richardson is a writer, editor, and teacher based in New York. Here’s the beginning of his review:

Linn Ullmann’s The Cold Song, her fifth novel, is built much like the house about which its story orbits: Mailund, a stately white mansion set in the Norwegian countryside a few hours drive from Oslo. The house, nestled into the forest and cloaked in mist, belongs to the past; it has been the summer home of the Brodal family for generations, and their annual descent has endowed it with the wonder and deep mythos of childhood and family identity. The structure comes to the reader as familiar—we know it from Nabokov’s childhood summers at Vyra in Speak, Memory, and from the Ramsay’s retreat in Virginia Woolf’s _To the Lighthouse_—and so the beams of Mailund are as laden with our memories as they are with that of Siri, Jenny Brodal’s daughter, now staying at the estate with her husband Jon and their children Alma and Liv.

Milla, the teenaged daughter of an adored Norwegian photographer, joins the Brodal family at Mailund for the summer as an au pair. Siri, busy with her restaurant and frustrated with her marriage, and Jon, desperate to write the final novel of his trilogy and to keep secret his adulterous entanglements, entrust Alma and Liv to Milla. She is adoring and enthusiastic, if a bit young and striving. The arrangement is quaint enough until Siri announces,

Something was wrong . . . It had to do with Milla. Or something else. But Milla definitely had something to do with it.

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Milla, the teenaged daughter of an adored Norwegian photographer, joins the Brodal family at Mailund for the summer as an au pair. Siri, busy with her restaurant and frustrated with her marriage, and Jon, desperate to write the final novel of his trilogy and to keep secret his adulterous entanglements, entrust Alma and Liv to Milla. She is adoring and enthusiastic, if a bit young and striving. The arrangement is quaint enough until Siri announces,

Something was wrong . . . It had to do with Milla. Or something else. But Milla definitely had something to do with it.

With this equivocating shift, the house takes on a discomfiting air, and the reader begins to see the structure—both of the summer home and the book writ large—slightly askew. Mailund, unsettled, takes an uneasy disposition to the forest around it. What was familiar and comforting, so known, is rendered strange, even nefarious—it begins “to shine with an almost uncanny glow.” So too, Ullmann’s plot.

Milla is dead. In fact, we found her body on page one. By page two, we knew her killer. The facts had been cleared, the mystery solved, and the summer at Mailund, it seemed, was set to continue. We quickly understand, however, that these neat solutions only stage a more imperative, central problem. In finding a clear culprit for the violent death of Milla early in the novel, Ullmann subverts the traditional thriller structure, mirroring the uncanny rendering of Mailund, and foregrounds the The Cold Song’s primary mystery: what motivates the cruelties we inflict on each other? The upended organizing principles of the crime drama at the core of Ullmann’s story give us the structure through which to engage a more inscrutable accounting of the self.

The brutal and violent nature of Milla’s suffering puts in relief the more pervasive, malignant suffering that occurs within a familial and marital dynamic grounded in concealment and withholding. An investigation of the first prompts an investigation of the latter as Ullmann’s characters come to terms with Milla’s murder. These interrogations upset the emotional stasis just barely holding the Brodal family together. Their effects are most poignantly and heartbreakingly expressed by an exchange between Jon and Siri. Long sleeping in separate rooms, the husband and wife begin texting each other photos of banal objects, Siri from bed and Jon from the couch. Jon pleads, “Can I come and lie next to you? / I miss you. / I can tell you stories.” Reaching out through a weak and weakening cell signal, Jon is investigating what is left of his marriage to be saved. Alas, Siri has fallen asleep, and his pleas remain unanswered.

Ullmann’s deft and elegant pacing furthers her drive toward an emotional reckoning. Deploying the mechanisms of a whodunit, Ullmann details the marital and familial dysfunction of the Brodal clan as a crime might be plotted. She reveals and withholds, keeping her obscure object in tension throughout. This project is further facilitated by Ullmann’s attentive ministrations on the line. She is both economic and rhythmic, her prose tight but never unnatural as she narrates the interior lives of her characters. Here, Ullmann quietly displays her brooding mastery as Siri navigates her discovery of Jon’s infidelity:

And there was me thinking that we were the exception, that you were my one and only, and I was your one and only, and that the disaster that strikes everyone else, the most embarrassing of all thinkable disasters, the most humiliating and the most banal, the kind of disaster that we laugh about when it strikes others, would never strike us.

Siri confronts the hubris of love and the pain of relationships, cycling through and ultimately transcending cliché under Ullmann’s able hand. Jon’s adultery is the great crime of Siri’s life, more odious even than the cold-blooded murder of Milla. We are directed again from the external action of the novel to the tacit emotional crimes we commit against one another.

In Linn Ullmann’s The Cold Song, the language of love tires of us, and we tire, in turn, of love, bowing like the sinking rafters of Mailund’s great frame. How many petty crimes of deceit before we learn? The mystery, it seems, will continue to evade us.

The Four Corners of Palermo is not a novel but a collection of four episodes. Each chapter takes the hero, a gritty young crime reporter, to a different quarter of the city, where he finds a new noir crime scene and a new Venus-like lover. In the first chapter, he pieces together the family drama behind a shootout in the streets. The second has him investigating car bombings, and the third chasing a father who kidnapped his own children. The fourth has him befriending a daughter whose father is found beheaded in a town square, and ultimately deciding not to publish what he learns.

Di Piazza’s sensational material and nostalgic memory of the 1980s make his stories pleasurable, though vapid. The book suffers for its episodic structure, which leaves little opportunity for the nameless reporter to make much of an impression on the reader, and even less opportunity for him to learn something. A cast of shallow, personality-free female characters surrounds a “Gary Stu” protagonist, who runs from fashion model to murder scene without a misstep. It is a fun noir romp told in cinematic jump-cut scenes, but not a gratifying novel.

A former crime reporter, Di Piazza is clearly writing from experience. His bloody streets and severed heads are raw and vivid. But most disturbing—and, sadly, perhaps most realistic—is his depiction of journalistic ethics in a city under Mafia rule. Di Piazza’s hero lies to sources about his identity, allows a source to retroactively declare an interview off-the-record, and finally decides that keeping the truth buried is the only way to avoid further violence. “Don’t let the press write the whole truth,” he decides. While this may be realistic in a city that lives under constant fear of violence, it makes a disappointing end to the book. And it is surprising for an idealistic reporter who has not backed out of reporting the previous episodes. Anyone looking for a glimpse of gutsy, uncompromised reporting on Italian organized crime would be better off turning to Gomorrah, Roberto Saviano’s 2006 “non-fiction novel” on the brutal Neapolitan mob. But remember that its author will spend the rest of his life under a 24-hour police escort, fearing reprisal. Maybe Di Piazza’s fictional reporter should not be faulted for protecting his safety.

Di Piazza’s book drips with nostalgia. It is peppered with references to Pink Floyd and John Coltrane that admirers of the era will enjoy. His loving details of the city are less successful, however. The author’s Palermo never becomes more than a lifeless backdrop before which his reporter runs. This is despite Di Piazza’s apparent attempts to glorify the city by throwing in landmarks or descriptions of gelato and sfincione pizza that sound as if written by Sicily’s tourism bureau. He may convince you that Sicily has beautiful views and rich food, but will not leave you with vivid images of Palermo nor any burning wanderlust. Given the book’s title and efforts, this is a disappointment.

While I know from experience the challenges of Italian-to-English translation, I find Shugaar’s translation a bit too literal for my taste. This is most jarring in moments when Shugaar retains the Italian fondness for colons and semicolons. It works well in some instances, but can seem quite misplaced in street dialogue (as in, “Don’t talk crap: we tell you to go kill that traitor to his family and when you come back you’ve let him shoot you.”). Fortunately, Shugaar hits his stride in a few of the book’s most exciting scenes, producing some beautiful moments. The strongest passages have the reporter discovering his lover’s addiction, falling in love with a beautiful but tortured fashion model, and sneaking into prison to visit a key witness.

Di Piazza’s book is a loving, though sometimes dull, portrait of a legendary city. Despite a few chilling passages, its noir verve does not come near living up to the author’s hopeful nods to Dashiell Hammett. Four Corners of Palermo makes a fun sensationalist read for lovers of Mafia fiction, but not a literary novel.

So, on Friday night, when I got to in DC for a “Rep Night” organized by Jeff Waxman of Other Press, and noticed that Kramerbooks didn’t stock a single Open Letter title, I was basically ready to just give up. Slinging books that no one in the world seems to care about is as thankless and pathetic as it can get.

(Although I want to make a critical, annoying point right here: No one is outraged that this store didn’t bring in even a single Open Letter title, even though I spent $500 and my weekend flying down, bringing them books, buying them pizza and beer. That’s insulting. And bad business. Yet, according to most everyone, that’s the bookstore’s choice. They don’t have to stock our books. But when Amazon doesn’t stock Hachette? That’s an attack on authors and book culture. It’s an understandable, yet weird double-standard. I wish Amazon didn’t carry Hachette or any of the Big Five. More space for Open Letter titles. Same thing goes for other bookstores. Get rid of the weeds so the good literature can grow!)

Despite all my misanthropic inclinations to skip the rep night and sit in my room drinking myself blind, I powered on, gave a half-entertaining presentation, and had a great time hanging out with a lot of DC booksellers and librarians. (I also found out why our books weren’t in Kramer’s, and I really hope our DC-area sales rep shows up to his next meeting with the store.)

Offsetting my gloom and pessimism—not just at this event, but basically all the time—is Jeff Waxman of Other Press. Jeff used to work at Seminary Co-op and has special ties to booksellers around the country. A major part of his job at Other Press is to serve as a bookstore liaison and get booksellers excited about his books, displaying them, reading them, recommending them, etc. And these “rep nights” are one of the ways that he’s able to mobilize a lot of booksellers (and publishers) to get the word out in a fun, engaging, special way.

I’m not sure how many of these Jeff has done, but I was able to participate in one in Chicago last January that was astronomically effective in getting Open Letter titles into Chicago stores. We already had a lot of fans there—at Unabridged, Seminary, Book Cellar, etc.—but being able to meet with these booksellers face-to-face makes a huge difference.

That’s a cliche of the highest order, but when you live in the sticks of Rochester, NY (the only city more removed from book culture in the U.S. is probably Toronto) and rely almost exclusively on communication through email and social media, talking to a bookseller personally is hugely important.

And for booksellers, this must be thrilling. In addition to beer and pizza, you get individual presentations from New York Review Books, Soho Press, Other Press, Melville House, Grove, Open Letter, and New Directions and copies of their forthcoming books. Even if the usual suspects will still outsell all Open Letter books at these various bookstores, at least now there’s a chance that our books will be stocked, that faces won’t be blank when our rep shows up and talks about this “small indie press specializing in international literature.”

So, thanks to Jeff Waxman for doing these, for helping engage booksellers around the country and for allowing my grumpy ass to participate in a couple of these. I hope that Other Press will continue to set these up throughout the country, and that Open Letter will be invited to participate in at least a few. As retro as it seems, this is the future of publisher-bookseller relations, and getting booksellers excited about a title is definitely worth the price of a few six-packs and a pizza.

Generally, I’m a suspicious reader; big claims scare me off. Having never watched a Fellini film and with only Calvino and Pavese as literary signposts, I entered the novel (guided by veteran translator Michael F. Moore) with a healthy amount of skepticism. Just a few chapters in, however, I knew that even if Genovesi hadn’t managed to overcome cliché, he had indeed created an electric book, a book that stirs, and one that you can’t help living—and living with—along the way. It’s fair to say that Genovesi’s English debut touches all the right spots and echoes back just enough universalized Weltschmerz to leave the reader cringing over mistakes they too once made. And, for that, you’re in it until the end.

Live Bait launches with a memory, as things usually do: a fused snapshot, a spark of what was circling through a narrative live wire. Yet for our antihero Fiorenzo Marelli, it is a recollection that continues on, as some would put it, in phantomlike form; he has already lost part of himself (literally) before he hits that strange, dazed, and oddly jaded limbo called high school. This first brush with emptiness has cleared the way for the Italian metalhead’s Bildungsroman to creep into being, made evident as he so casually philosophizes in the novel’s first episode: “Because real emptiness isn’t finding nothing. It’s finding nothing where there’s supposed to be something.” And not so strangely, it is just this emptiness that continues to occupy his life; it is a nebulous hollow that, like the ditches where he finds respite while fishing for bottom feeders, belies a host of other organisms underneath. Now, maybe I’m mixing my reviewer metaphors here. Even so, I’d also hedge a bet that it is by crafting just this eddy of images floating in and out of view that Genovesi grasps onto our “real” world.

The novel rightly begins with a nineteen-year-old Fiorenzo, handless, rehearsing with his band Metal Devastation. He has recently lost his mother and has become increasingly estranged from his father. Fiorenzo’s a smart kid—just let him tell you—although he refuses to continue on as society expects. School, work, all of it can wait. When his father offers to put up a talented outsider from the bicycling team he coaches, Fiorenzo hastily retreats; sensing the aloof new youngster a threat to his throne, he moves into their family bait shop to live among the worms. Cue the soft shuffling of little grubby insects for some novelistic ambience. We hear him muse in his bed for a while: “And there I was, lying down on sacks of amaretto-and-cherry flavored ground bait, thinking this was the sound you heard in the coffin.” He’ll keep that little tidbit for later to write some awful lyrics about his melancholy experience.

Days go by, but Fiorenzo doesn’t budge. His town, Muglione, seems to be rotting. He is cast into a net of familial and social backwash and, feeling the routine ennui that accompanies small-town life, sets about to become famous—it’s what he deserves of course, having spent years as a social outcast—along with his band mates. This includes one chubby guy who, as Fiorenzo relays, believes that, “T-Shirts are the cages of the system.” Their debut at a local festival is on the horizon. But things don’t go as planned. No one is listening. In fact, they’re booed off stage. He isn’t ready. The world is shit. He is ready. Ready for something. He’s angry. Maybe he has the right to be. There is some really rich teenage angst to be mined here, and Genovesi accomplishes it better than Salinger, in my humble opinion. Fiorenzo may sense that things are “phony,” but at least he knows how to take a cosmic joke.

And the saga wouldn’t be complete without a beautiful woman to set off the story, and it just so happens that this woman, believing Italian men to be little boys gone bald, is just curious enough—and perhaps I’m being generous here—to let Fiorenzo in. Her name is Tiziana Cosci: witty, intelligent, a girl with great tits but still plagued with the same stifling insecurity that so many thirty-somethings in quarter-life crisis have yet to shake off. Those sighs of relief—you survived your teenage years!—that you let out while reading passages fervidly narrated by Fiorenzo now get caught in your throat. The anxiety, the shame, the offhand words imprinted on your tongue all still exist; now you’re just better at hiding it. But that’s where the real story begins, where the two fronts of weakness and doubt and curiosity collide: two bodies, strange, new in that I’d do anything to just touch your skin teenage kind-of-way, enter a half-finished tango to the grunts of old Italian men.

I’m not sure if I’m being nostalgic or not—strangely enough, I too had a 19-year-old metalhead boyfriend who is strikingly like the protagonist—but the only word that I’ll allow myself to describe Fiorenzo is “tender,” perhaps because that word also appears on the back cover. I say tender knowing that tenderness is a condition laced with a smattering of other emotions and conditions that we tend to shed with age: a tender narcissism, a tender cruelty, a tender misfit-hood, a tender awkward few fingers not reaching their mark in bed. And this tenderness is also always physical for Fiorenzo, from his phantom limb to the first amorous caresses that he shares with Tiziana. I closed the book a few times in embarrassment for our man on the ground, who, knowing his limits, spells out the delicate situation quite concretely: “Listen, I don’t know how to put it inside, but I can recognize a carp bite a mile away.”

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention a cluster of minor characters that animate the book, types that all those stuck in a languishing little town might recognize. My favorite is a certain Mazinger, who, outfitted in ridiculous hand-me-ups from a fashion-slave grandson, hangs around every corner speaking “like a Japanese robot.” We first encounter him in the bait shop, telling Fiorenzo, “YOUR—DAD—IS—A—SHIT.” Mazinger is part of an elderly troop calling themselves the “Muglione Guardians.” These old men must fight off the gangs of Romanians and other Eastern Europeans who have found their way into the grand village of Muglione, although these Romanian gangsters are not really gangsters, nor are they Romanian. Then there’s Mirko, the little champ set to win back Muglione’s honor. Gripped by those tender years of adolescence, he’s a kid who just wants to fit in and who winds up carrying Fiorenzo’s biggest secret. Put all of these folks together in Genovesi’s world and you’re stuck to the book like glue.

Underneath the jocular weavings of Fiorenzo and his crew, some real tensions—and by real I aim to underscore the tangible anxieties that inevitably work their way into conversation when speaking about the economic situation in Europe at present—poke through. Muglione comes to represent a fierce attachment to tradition that is quickly dying with its elderly brigades. The only things that seem to be prospering are the shops and other business ventures run by immigrants, and anyone who has spent time in Europe knows that the politics around this new class of workers is on the tip of every tongue.

As for the translation, it hits head on. And it is just this kind of book that demands a kind of lived translation—with all of its dialogue and code-switching between generations and genre—in order to keep up with the curious humor that runs right through. I’m hesitant to mention any points where I stumbled in my own reading, not only because I’m not familiar with the source text, but also because I think that Moore has captured so much of what pulled at my heart in his playful rendering. But perhaps as a note for future readers (of which I hope there will be many), I’ll mention that there are a few points where you’re not sure if it’s a teenager or his father speaking. It’s hard for me at twenty-five to read the word “prick” where the word “dick” seems called for; again, I’m drawing on my ex-metal head’s vocabulary. I also learned a new word—“suck-ass”—that I’ll be employing more often. Friends beware.

En fin, Live Bait won’t change your life. But it will open you up. It will open up that part of you that you’ve been trying to cover with dirt and paper in your attempt at adulthood. It’s not mawkish. There’s no grand plan. And there’s some cliché. But most of all, there is tenderness, and I would read the novel again just to feel that bit of warmth emanating from its pages.