And this is perhaps my way into Class (that was fun to type). Understanding a neighborhood and its denizens is key to understanding what an author like Pacifico may be up to in a book as odd as Class. Williamsburg in Class is the nexus of Italian hipsters. They meet, take drugs, laugh, fuck, grow weary, leave, return. It’s the sort of place that bohemians with varying degrees of talent flock to, bringing the first wave of gentrification. First wave gentrifiers often bemoan their cherished neighborhoods’ shift into commercial areas where moms push doublewide strollers into Lululemon. While they fail to see their role in the gentrification process, readers of their exploits are, allegedly, in on the secret. Dramatic irony notwithstanding, Class doesn’t seem concerned with judging the hipsters, even when they get up to some questionable activities. The reader is supposed to suspend that sort of moralizing. If that is impossible, the reader is screwed. Abandon the text ye who need redeeming characters.

Recently, Pacifico stated that the “problem with American books is that there must always be something moral and sympathetic happening between characters.” He may be onto something there, and I must admit that it’s refreshing to read a novel where manufactured sympathy is chucked. Nevertheless, Class confirmed my suspicion that the shallowness of hipsters is universal. That the Italians in Class are so informed by American culture, that they travel across the Atlantic to the hipster mecca of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, suggests a larger point about cultural hegemony, though I don’t feel comfortable forcing such an argument on Pacifico’s book.

But let’s look at this for a moment. One of the characters, Lorenzo, is a would-be filmmaker whose sole effort is a pretentious short film that bites off Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, and scores of other hip influences. Another character, Marcello, is an aspiring rapper emulating American MCs. The one American we meet is James Murphy, a novelist in the vein of Franzen and Wallace, though his name is, of course, the same as the frontman of LCD Soundsystem, as hipster a band as one can find. Murphy’s work is criticized by the main narrator (more on that in a minute) and later, when the reader gets a peek into his notes, one gets the impression that Murphy is an aging hipster coasting off marginal talent. Oddly, the superficiality of these characters is what made me want to keep reading Class, even when they infuriated me. If they are products of a self-emulating culture that has now exported its cool shallowness, then great—Pacifico has made a grand statement. If not, if my reading is wrong (likely), then I’ll revert to the old reader-response cop-out and call it a day. In short: looking for one simple moral or overarching argument in Class is probably silly. But, American reader that I am, I looked anyway.

The narrator? For most of the book it’s Daria: Marxist sometime lover of Nicolino, the playboy of the group. Daria oversees events via the time-honored tradition of omniscient narrator, though quite literally: she sees into people’s thoughts. There are times when she can’t and has to make do providing half a conversation, pointing directly to the absurdity of fixed narration in fiction. Shortly after we’re finally introduced to her—well into the book—she leaves us, the narration taken over by another character before shifting again in a sort of montage. All of this occurs without warning and would be baffling were Pacifico not in possession of a deft hand. This unfixed narration is perhaps my favorite aspect of Class. I prefer it to a novel that feels slavishly devoted to presenting a reliable narrator.

Formal ambition helps this book, and the documentary that results is presented without overt sermonizing. Class may be a social commentary, a weirdly funny look at Italian hipsters, or a larger statement on cultural influence. The kaleidoscope of characters, whose actions and drives are never one-dimensional, eludes easy classification, which makes the entire book a joy. I found myself both rooting for these individuals and delighting in their ruin. Few books can get me to do that. But few books dare go where Class goes. The result is a shaggy, far-reaching, occasionally exasperating, consistently engaging book that is happier leaving an impression than making a grand statement. It’s a testimony to the possibilities of the contemporary novel.

The Subsidiary by Matías Celedón
translated from the French by Samuel Rutter
208 pgs. | pb | 9781612195445 | $21.95

Reviewed by Vincent Francone

The biggest issues with books like The Subsidiary often have to do with their underpinnings—when we learn that Georges Perec wrote La Disparition without once using the letter E, we are impressed. Imagine such a task! It takes a high level of commitment and talent to pull that off. But I’m going to be very honest here: I’ve never thought that book was as good as the story of how it was written. No disrespect to Perec; his book is astounding, but I’ll likely remember the craft long after I’ve forgotten the story.

The Subsidiary could have easily become a book where the form is more impressive than the content. The author, Matías Celedón, composed the book using a set of office stamps purchased at a library sale in Santiago, Chile. The stamps allow for moveable type, though restrict the author to only a few lines of text per page. The book, beautifully published by Melville House, reproduces the hand-stamped pages, lending the novella a sort of authenticity, as if the pages are directly taken from an office. And the story Celedón creates is of a nightmare, albeit a fragmentary one, that asks the reader to fill in the blanks. The nightmare is one of senseless oppression married to bureaucracy, which readers may easily see as commentary on Chile’s time under the rule of Pinochet. But these formal concerns—the stamps, the political commentary—do not detract from the effect of the words on paper. The pages are simple and clean, but they communicate a very believable terror.

The story: an everyday office is plunged into a power outage, one initiated by the management itself. Employees are forced to remain at their workstations for hours during the outage. The subsidiary announces that it “TAKES NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR DAMAGE OR THEFT WITHIN THE PREMISES.” The exits are closed. All communication is cut off. From there, the workers wade through tedium that soon leads to brutality. The Subsidiary raises questions, none of which Celedón feels compelled to answer overtly. In this manner, the book is oddly compelling, fusing the text and the reader’s co-creation to bring about a singular reading experience. The limitations of the form give the pages a haunting emptiness and it is in this void that reader may find deeper fears. The bureaucratic reporting on, and filing away of, violence is too great a reality. There may be nothing more chilling than government reports that sap oppression of its blood; The Subsidiary conjures the sort of cold, tight language that has often been employed in documenting subjugation, which is what allows the book to rise from a writing exercise and become something infinitely more substantial. The suggestion of violence may often do a better job of expressing horror than labored descriptions, and in that sense, The Subsidiary uses the perfect form to convey its larger concerns. The constraint succeeds; the work is chilling. This is a book that functions as a more complete work of art: literary and visual at once, sparse and evocative.

It’s been slow on the review and post end this summer, while we’ve been busy around the offices here and elsewhere, but we hope you’ve all been enjoying your summers, and of course enjoying the Copa and Euro Cup games!

But literature in translation is as important as ever—so here’s the beginning of Vince’s review:

It took reading 44 pages of Intervenir/Intervene before I began to get a sense of what Dolores Dorantes and Rodrigo Flores Sánchez were up to. Recurring throughout these 44 pages—throughout the entire book—are shovels, shovel smacks to the face, lobelias—aha! Shovels and lobelias; gardening, violence, flowering plants. Buried secrets and blossoming. There seemed a sense to it all.

Intervenir/Intervene is being sold as a book of poetry. That is true. But then again, this is not poetry that obeys the rules poetry are supposed to follow. I state this in the year 2016, long after free verse and post modernism have done their best to ruin formal poetry. Even in the age of facile “performance art” and hollow “experimentalism,” there is work that reminds jaded readers like myself that there is value in some of what stands under the all too wide umbrella of avant-garde. Intervenir/Intervene is that sort of work.

For the rest of the review, go here.

Intervenir/Intervene is being sold as a book of poetry. That is true. But then again, this is not poetry that obeys the rules poetry are supposed to follow. I state this in the year 2016, long after free verse and post modernism have done their best to ruin formal poetry. Even in the age of facile “performance art” and hollow “experimentalism,” there is work that reminds jaded readers like myself that there is value in some of what stands under the all too wide umbrella of avant-garde. Intervenir/Intervene is that sort of work.

It’s easy to throw words together in an attempt to confound, to shock, or to demonstrate cleverness. Dolores Dorantes and Rodrigo Flores Sánchez are not doing the reader many favors, but they’re not simply engaging in empty experimentation. They have an impossible task: to articulate what often goes unsaid, the brutal, sanctioned violence of their native Mexico. Translator Jen Hofer calls this Mexico’s dirty war. How shocking to see this term applied to what so many of us might dismiss as political corruption, a term that seems insubstantial in comparison to “dirty war,” which is more often applied retroactively. But this is a contemporary, ongoing dirty war whose victims are largely unacknowledged. Since they cannot speak, Dorantes and Flores Sánchez do their utmost to give them voice and to blend those voices with those of the state, the killer, and the reader. Intervenir/Intervene is a polyphony of these voices overlapping, interrupting—intervening. Readers will likely be disoriented by the fragmented presentation, but the elliptical, overwhelming approach culminates in a sense of understanding. This is not an easy book, but neither is the subject matter.

Intervenir/Intervene surprises. There is the before-mentioned merging of voices, the seemingly free form style, but also, actually, structure. From the apparent chaos, a page of rather direct poetry emerges:

To my urn
To my museum
To my barking
To my pain
To my depth

I come

From a country of ash
From an ocean of blood
From another unfinished city
From my deserted head
From the mouth without its teeth

Here we have anaphora and fairly rooted lines and stanzas, a true oddity among passages like:

The effect is to disrupt the expectations of the reader, even after their expectations have been thoroughly disrupted. Anything is possible in this book, as in a country like Mexico, a place of immense beauty and tremendous suffering.

Intervenir/Intervene is a book of poems and a short study of translation. Jen Hofer ends the text with notes on her process, which are often as elusive as the poetry. It is a dual language book that subverts and embraces both languages. It is a political book coming partially from Dolores Dorantes, a writer in exile from Ciudad Juarez who once resisted her poetry being translated into culturally dominant English. It is a statement of the absurdity of communicating violence and the tragedy of keeping silent in its wake. Few works of art are able to succeed on so many levels.

Here’s the beginning of Vince’s review:

It’s a rare and wonderful book that begins and ends with violence and humor. At the start of Etgar Keret’s The Seven Good Years, Keret is in a hospital waiting for the birth of his first child while nurses, in what seems a blasé manner, talk about how much they hate terrorist attacks. “They put a damper on everything.” Keret shares this story—the beginning of his life as a father occurring as the wounded of Tel Aviv surround him— most likely to imply something deep about life and death, but I simply found it funny. Chalk that up to my dark sense of humor, or maybe it’s because Keret manages to wrest more from tragedy than just pathos. Surely he’s trying to communicate what it is like to live in a part of the world where violence is an everyday reality, so much so that emergency personnel shake their heads and rhetorically ask “What can you do?” as they share a piece of gum. Nevertheless, Keret is up to more than a mere account of Middle East life. He’s after bigger fish.

For the rest of the review, go here.

The Seven Good Years is funny, and sad, and even beautiful at times. The closing bookend of this collection of ruminations—which looks at everything from fatherhood to thoughts on being a writer to the psychotic nature of Angry Birds—is a tender recounting of Keret and his wife playing a game with their child to distract him from the sirens alerting them of an impending rocket. The game they play is so sweet that it confronts the old cliché about not wanting to bring new life into an uncertain and ugly world. Of course, bringing a child into a contested landscape wrought with rocket attacks and ongoing military aggression is ultimately irrational, but Keret smartly confronts this without overt political statements, apologies for his country, or condemnations of the Palestinians. He is not concerned with simple accusations or explanations; his focus is on the absurdity and the splendor of seven years’ worth of day-to-day events for which the book is named.

I doubt I’ve laughed harder than when Keret and his wife discuss their fears of the terrifying rhetoric of ex-Iranian President Ahmadinejad. Will he really wipe Israel off the face of the earth? Keret decides that this may come to pass, so why bother fixing up the house? What’s the point? His wife agrees and decides that they now have the freedom to take out loans and max out credit cards until the inevitable comes. The bills, the credit card companies, the debts—all of it will be wiped away along with their country, so why not live it up? And then Keret’s wife has a nightmare of true peace coming to the Middle East, at which time they will have to somehow find the money to pay it all back. “It was just a dream, “ he assures her. “He’s a lunatic, you can see it in his eyes.”

Keret’s ability to drain danger of its power by making it seem ridiculous is a blessing. In his vignettes, he reclaims his country, his family, his life from the outside forces that are forever threatening to blow it all sky high. But he is not being facetious—these are indeed seven good years, even if they occasionally are plagued by terror. That terror almost seems manageable compared to the larger concern of how to be a parent and how to deal with the loss of one. The quotidian is tragic and the bombastic threats can never devastate as effectively. Keret communicates this so lightly that we can’t help but laugh.

Vince has brought up a lot of interesting points in this “review,” and questions the relationship of the reader’s response to a book to the perceived value of a book. I’ve had many similar reading experiences: a book has been, by all logistical elements, a fine book, I can identify it as being well written, can think of a handful of other people who would love it to bits—and yet for me it didn’t quite click. But whether or not that’s reason for me to state that a book is lacking in some way… I’m not so sure that’s always the case.

Anyway, here’s the beginning of Vince’s review!:

Randall Jarrell once argued a point that I will now paraphrase and, in doing so, over-simplify: As a culture, we need book criticism, not book reviews. I sort of agree, but let’s not get into all of that. Having finished Berlin by Aleš Šteger, I am reminded of Jarrell’s idea because I am supposed to be writing a review of Berlin and I realize that I am not Šteger’s ideal reader. I came to the book with expectations and am, to be completely honest, disappointed. But so what? A book didn’t do what I’d hoped it would do. Does that make it a failure?

Of course not. It makes it a book with a specific vision that seemed well suited to my tastes and interests, even if the execution was different than I’d imaged. I love books that make interesting use of cities. I love the way G. Cabrera Infante made Havana such a part of his work; I adore how Ciaran Carson writes about his native Belfast; I’m awed by Faulkner’s ability to spin gold out of rural Mississippi. The list goes on: Bukowski’s L.A.; Auster’s New York; Joyce’s Dublin. As someone who has spent a lot of effort writing stories and poems about a city I both love and hate, I should have been more receptive to Šteger’s book. After all, this is a poet writing in prose about his individual encounters with Berlin. Sounds like my kind of book.

And it is. Sort of. Berlin is a book of quick prose pieces by a Slovenian poet about his time in Berlin. Most of the miniature essays are accompanied by photos, some of which make up the most stunning parts of the book. There are allusions to other great writers who walked the Berlin streets, as well as a humorous exchange with a fellow poet, and tiny details (food, bakeries, the weather) that add up to something indeed, though I will admit that I am not exactly sure what. This is evidence of my response as a reader, not Šteger’s failure as a writer, though it makes an objective review difficult.

For the rest of the review and more deep thoughts, go here.

Of course not. It makes it a book with a specific vision that seemed well suited to my tastes and interests, even if the execution was different than I’d imaged. I love books that make interesting use of cities. I love the way G. Cabrera Infante made Havana such a part of his work; I adore how Ciaran Carson writes about his native Belfast; I’m awed by Faulkner’s ability to spin gold out of rural Mississippi. The list goes on: Bukowski’s L.A.; Auster’s New York; Joyce’s Dublin. As someone who has spent a lot of effort writing stories and poems about a city I both love and hate, I should have been more receptive to Šteger’s book. After all, this is a poet writing in prose about his individual encounters with Berlin. Sounds like my kind of book.

And it is. Sort of. Berlin is a book of quick prose pieces by a Slovenian poet about his time in Berlin. Most of the miniature essays are accompanied by photos, some of which make up the most stunning parts of the book. There are allusions to other great writers who walked the Berlin streets, as well as a humorous exchange with a fellow poet, and tiny details (food, bakeries, the weather) that add up to something indeed, though I will admit that I am not exactly sure what. This is evidence of my response as a reader, not Šteger’s failure as a writer, though it makes an objective review difficult.

I think part of the problem is the way I approached the book. Berlin is best read over the course of a week or two, one vignette lasting the course of days; though, at 131 pages, the book can easily be polished off in a sitting. And that is my problem: I read it quickly and, in doing so, missed the effect. After putting it down for a week, I revisited some of the more memorable bits in preparation for this review and found this:

It seemed that every moment winter would touch its own back. Walking in it nearly all year, the snow melted in the daytime, budded again overnight from sidewalks and car hoods, consuming into March and then into April the deep patience of the most euphoric innkeepers, who at the first rays of better prospects populated the sidewalks with tables and chairs. Winter was so long that even Berlin’s biggest stay-at-homes enjoyed it when spring finally came.

This is delightful to me, though I shared the same passage and it elicited only the sad recognition of a native Midwesterner. This again reminds me of Jarrell’s idea, only inasmuch as I begin to question the purpose of reviews. They are a product of one person’s reading, so, to that end, they are bound to be flawed. But that is fine. My reading is solely my own and if it is my duty to relay what this individual reading yielded, so be it. Take from this the following: Berlin is a fine book of surprising lyricism that did not exactly do what I expected, but wouldn’t it be a dull world if things always went as planned?

The chapbook itself is short—clocking in at 32 pages—and is yet another beautiful work of print done by Ugly Duckling. Here’s the beginning of Vince’s review, which tries to get a grasp on what to expect, or not to expect, from poems labeled as “avant-garde”:

There’s little to say about a series of prose poems that willfully refuse to identify pronoun antecedents. Or perhaps there are a million things. The poems in _Morse, My Deaf Friend_— the chapbook by Miloš Djurdjević published by Ugly Duckling Presse as part of their Eastern European Poets Series— will be confounding to those accustomed to poetry that holds its reader’s hand. These poems do not. They are elliptical and strange and offer very few concrete signifiers.

For the rest of the review, go here.