“Even Stranger”: Two Serious Ladies

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Dorian Stuber under Uncategorized

Mr. and Mrs. Copperfield had gone over to Panama City for two days. The first day after lunch Mr. Copperfield proposed a walk towards the outskirts of the city. It was the first thing he always did when he arrived in a new place. Mrs. Copperfield hated to know what was around her, because it always turned out to be even stranger than she had feared.

Coming to Jane Bowles’s only novel, Two Serious Ladies, I didn’t fear it would be strange. But I certainly found it to be strange. I don’t think Bowles intended this passage, which for me centers on that comparative adjective “even stranger,” as a description of her novel, any more than Mrs. Copperfield is an advertisement for ignorance. It doesn’t take us long, after all, to see that Mr, Copperfield, like all the men in this novel, is caught up in his own brutish self-righteousness. His spirit of adventure is a lot less interesting than he thinks it is. It’s not that the novel is advocating being afraid, only that it admits that for women, even wealthy and eccentric women like the ladies of the title, there’s quite a lot to be afraid of, mostly men and their violence and neediness. Mrs. Copperfield, in other words, is much shrewder than almost anyone gives her credit for.

The Serious Ladies of the title are Christina Goering—impossible, in a novel published in 1943, not to hear an ominous echo of fanaticism in that name—and Frieda Copperfield. They know each other slightly, and near the beginning of the novel even meet at a party in New York. Mrs. Copperfield is about to leave on the trip to Panama referenced in the passage I’ve quoted above. Miss Goering has just taken on a female companion, a Miss Gamelon, who she will eventually be quite mean to. Goering and Copperfield run into each other again at the end of the book, but one of the things I liked about it is that it doesn’t spend much time making parallels between them, beginning with its narrative structure, which quite favours Goering’s story over Copperfield’s. I found that a pity, since I much preferred Mrs. Copperfield to Miss Goering, but I appreciated the (at least apparent but actually I think quite sincere) casualness, even haphazardness of the book’s structure.

I confess I’ve never actually understood what a picaresque novel (technically a solecism, I suppose—a picaresque isn’t a novel, it’s another literary form altogether, right?) but I think the term applies here. It really was never clear to me why characters did the things they did, this despite but perhaps ultimately in keeping with Miss Goering’s claim that something she is about to do “is against my code, but then, I have never even begun to use my code, although I judge everything by it.” There’s the sense here of a moral imperative, however inchoate, a desire to push established ways of behaving to a limit. Taken out of context, Goering’s comment about the code she never uses but judges everything by sounds a little arch, like something from Wilde. But the book isn’t arch at all. In fact, I’m not quite sure how to get a handle on its tone., and in the end that might be the thing that bothers me the most about it.

Miss Goering takes up with one man after another, each worse to her than the last, and leaves the city for increasingly precarious and transitory living situations. Mrs. Copperfield abandons her husband to live in a Panamanian brothel, befriending its alcoholic owner, Mrs. Quill, and one of the prostitutes who live there, Pacifica. In the loveliest scene in the book, Pacifica takes Mrs. Copperfield to an isolated beach where she tries to teach the terrified older woman how to swim. It’s an idyll of sorts in a book that doesn’t hold much truck with anything that gentle, though it’s also a sad scene, foreshadowing the falling out between the two women by the end of the book.

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Two Serious Ladies quite bedeviled me. I’ve written before about the risks of thinking of books as sui generis. What that often means is that we haven’t valued their context highly enough. But even though neglected Anglophone women writers of the 20^th Century are my bread and butter, as it were, nothing I knew helped me to categorize Bowles’s novel. So many of the writers I love—Jean Rhys, Barbara Comyns, Rebecca West, Penelope Fitzgerald—would seem to be close kin to Bowles. But I didn’t find that to be the case. Maybe it matters that Bowles was American and the others weren’t. I did compare her fleetingly to Kay Boyle, but the comparison is mostly to Bowles’s credit. She seems both more viscerally clear about the dangers of authoritarianism than Boyle (it took her a while to come around) and less obviously in thrall to an aesthetic of high modernist seriousness. As I think about it now, Bowles strikes me as much less invested in a tradition of literary realism than those other writers, even though they all, in their different ways, contested it, mostly by having recourse to the Gothic tradition that has always been the doppelganger of English-language realism. Bowles is doing something else, but I can’t figure out what. It matters a lot, I think, that unlike the women in Rhys and Comyns’s novels, especially, money insulates them from the patriarchy’s harshest depredations. Goering and Copperfield can be more overtly in control over their own lives than the protagonists of those other writers’ books. But just because they’re financially independent doesn’t mean they know who they are.

The longer I blog—and WordPress tells me it is exactly two years ago today, in fact—the more I’m convinced that I only really care to write about things I really like. And so I’m a bit hamstrung by Two Serious Ladies. If I hadn’t agreed to participate in Dolce Bellezza’s readalong I probably wouldn’t have written about it. And even then I don’t know if I would have had I not read Seraillon’s wonderful & intelligent piece.

It’s always a pleasure to read criticism where the subject clearly resonates with the critic. Although Scott’s post confirmed for me that Two Serious Ladies didn’t speak to me in that way, it also opened up the possibility that I might change my mind. Frankly, it’s unlikely I’ll read this book again anytime soon, but because of the carefulness of his reading I can imagine wanting to do so. All of which is to say, read his post, and those of the others taking part in the group. If you’re like me, you’ll be amazed and grateful that thanks to the glorious strangeness of the Internet you can always find someone out there who has understood something more richly than you have.

A Pattern of Magical Balances: Doris Lessing’s In Pursuit of the English

Posted on January 6, 2016 by Dorian Stuber under Uncategorized

I just read In Pursuit of the English, a wonderful memoir-of-sorts by Doris Lessing. I think I liked it more than almost any of her books (and I’ve read quite a few, though by no means all, even most). I wonder why it’s not better known.

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It’s about Lessing’s first year or so in England, where she arrived in 1950 with her little boy Peter from her home in Rhodesia. The English, we soon learn, are a fantasy or mirage that differs depending on one’s perspective. The English in Africa are one thing entirely—a unified presence with mores that puzzle Lessing even before she arrives—but the English in England are something else altogether. Especially since Lessing arrives in London, and Londoners, she learns, at least the East End Londoners she lives among, don’t consider themselves English.

Most of the book is about the boarding house she finds a room in. Which isn’t an easy to do in bombed-out London—even some of the floors in the place she ends up in are closed off and filled with rubble. Lessing becomes involved with the people who live in the house, especially the couple who own it. Although the welcome is for the most part warm, she finds she has to learn what the English novelist Henry Green once called “the half-tones of class.” As a colonial subject, she doesn’t quite know how to navigate in this new world

Throughout I kept thinking about the Maison Vauquer from Balzac’s Le Pere Goriot. Especially because perhaps even more than in Balzac the physical qualities of the building itself are important to Lessing—almost as much as the people who live in it.

All of which made me think about what kind of a book this is. For the most part it’s written in a realist mode, almost ethnographic. Calling it a memoir doesn’t really seem right, since Lessing is so reticent about herself. But at times it slips into a different mode, something more fantastic or magical. Here’s a passage that really struck me. Lessing has taken a cramped room in the attic—only later does she realize it’s really a garret—and she has her eye on a much better room three floors below. She enters into a tense war of nerves with the landlady. In the midst of these negotiations comes this surprising and beautiful description:

Under the roof it was like sitting on top of an anthill, a tall sharp peak of baked earth that seems abandoned, but which sounds, when one puts one’s ear to it, with a continuous vibrant humming. Even with the door shut, it was not long before the silence grew into an orchestra of sound. Beneath my floor a tap dripped softly all day, in a blithe duet with the dripping of the tap on the landing. Two floors down, there the Skeffingtons lived, was a radio. Sometimes she forgot it when she went to work, and, as the hours passed, the wavelength slipped, so that melodies and voices flowed upwards, blurring and mingling. This sound had for accompaniment the splashing water, like conversation heard through music and dripping rain. In the darkening afternoons I was taken back to a time when I lay alone at night and listened to people talking through several walls, while the rain streamed from the eaves. Sometimes it was as if the walls had dissolved, and I was left sitting under a tree, listening to birds talking from branch to branch, while the last fat drops of a shower spattered on the leaves, and a ploughman yelled encouragement to his beasts in the field over the hill. Sometimes I put my ear to the wall and heard how, as the trains went past and the buses rocked their weight along the street, shock after shock came up through brick and plaster, so that the solid wall had the fluidity of dancing atoms, and I felt the house, the street, the pavement, and all the miles and miles of houses and streets as a pattern of magical balances, a weight-less structure, as if this city hung on water, or on sound. Being alone in that little box of ceiling board and laths frightened me.

I love the way this passage slips between dream and reality, between present and past, between Africa and London, between gentleness and fear. Sometimes Lessing is a gruff writer, so matter of fact that her prose can be boring. But she’s so smart and sometimes that acuity is transferred to her prose. Everybody in London at this time knew only too well how solid building could dissolve, become as fluid as dancing atoms. The sociological despair of a very slowly rebuilding London is here transmuted into a psychological or private fear. I don’t know if that’s progress, but I like the way Lessing keeps things unsettled in this book. Houses, places to live in, are important in many of works, now that I think about it: The Fifth Child, The Good Terrorist, even her wonderful first novel, The Grass is Singing.

2015 Year in Reading

Posted on December 31, 2015 by Dorian Stuber under Uncategorized, year in review

2015 was a good year in reading. Better than 2014, though nowhere near the annus mirabilis of 2013 (pre-blog, alas). I read 80+ books. Here are the ones that most stayed with me:

A Little Life—Hanya Yanigahara

The reading event of the year for me. Everyone has an opinion about it, and they’re mostly strong opinions. I understand the main objections—it’s too long, it’s indulgent, it gets off on abusing its main character and even maybe its readers, its prose is sometimes clunky, even embarrassing—but I don’t feel them. These days I struggle to keep my attention away from my phone, social media, hockey scores, you name it. Sometimes I worry I don’t have the reading stamina I used to. In this regard, A Little Life was a gift: an intense, immersive reading experience that captivated me not just for the week of the reading but throughout the whole year. I wrote about it here.

Married Life—David Vogel

Written in Hebrew and published in Vienna in 1930, this is an extraordinary book that expands our sense of what European modernism was all about.

If I read Hebrew, I would write Vogel’s biography. Born in the Pale of Settlement, Vogel made his way via Vilnius and a brief stint as a yeshiva student to Vienna just in time to be interned as a Russian citizen during WWI. After the war he loafed, nearly penniless, in Vienna’s cafes, finding a little translation work and writing his first poems and novellas. He immigrated briefly to Palestine in the late 20s but Zionism never held much appeal for him and he returned to Europe, eventually finding his way to Paris in the early 30s. Tragically he was interned in the next war, this time as an Austrian citizen, and was deported via the infamous transit camp at Drancy to Auschwitz where he was murdered in 1944.

In Married Life the poor but promising writer Rudolph Gurweil meets the impoverished and rapacious aristocrat Thea von Takov and falls immediately under her spell even though he’s not sure he likes her very much. The two marry after only kowing each other for a few weeks and things go badly from the start. Thea converts to Judaism to marry Gurweil but among other things she’s a terrible anti-Semite. The novel is a drawn-out depiction of a disastrous marriage, but it’s also a glorious depiction of shabby Jewish Vienna.

I started a review and got sidetracked. I’d really like to finish it. If it got this book even one more reader it would be worth it.

Heartfelt thanks to heroic translator Dalya Bilu and to Australian-based Scribe for publishing this masterpiece, not least in such a gorgeous edition.

The Vet’s Daughter—Barbara Comyns

Wonderful, heartbreaking novel about a young woman who levitates. I wrote about it at length here and my appreciation only increased when I taught it this fall. Happily, my students loved it too; I received several excellent papers about it. I’m about to write more about Comyns myself. More on that soon, I hope.

The Heat of the Day—Elizabeth Bowen

The same students who enjoyed Comyns did magnificently with this marvelous novel of the Blitz and its aftermath. The course is on Experimental 20^th-Century British Fiction, and I hadn’t taught Bowen for a while (six years, in fact), after my previous attempt at teaching her failed spectacularly. I finally worked up the courage to try Heat again, and am so glad I did. It helped, of course, that this was a particularly strong group of students. It was really fun helping them work through Bowen’s famously thorny sentences. To the North might still be my favourite Bowen, but this novel about lying to one’s self and to others is one of her best. I often grumble about how teaching gets in the way of reading. But sometimes the chance to return to the same set of books is a joy. As Roland Barthes once said, those who don’t re-read are doomed to read the same text over and over again.

Bernard Malamud

Another one from the teaching files, at least in part. I taught an introductory level course on short fiction this fall. (For a while I blogged about it regularly—the first installment is here, if you’re interested—but eventually I capitulated to the semester’s demands and gave up.) The touchstone text was Malamud’s first collection, The Magic Barrel. I’d taught these marvelous stories before but it had been a while and found I liked them even more this time.

I’ve always loved their enigmatic qualities, and had long been curious whether his novels were like that too. So I read The Assistant over Thanksgiving (I started a post on that too which I also failed to complete). It tells the story of Morris Bober’s struggle to eke out a living from his small grocery store in a poor part of New York, a struggle that only deepens when he takes on a drifter as a de facto assistant. It is also one of the most depressing books I’ve ever read, with a scene that genuinely shocked me. Malamud’s stories are hardly heartwarming, but they have a lightness missing from this novel. Absolutely worth reading, though.

Various short stories

The Penguin Book of the British Short Story—Philip Hensher, Ed.

As I said, I taught a lot of short stories this fall, and in the process I remembered how much I love the form. Edith Pearlman, Katherine Mansfield, and D. H. Lawrence were particular favourites. I also want to tip my hat to this wonderful two-volume edition of short stories edited by Philip Hensher. I’ve got volume 2 (they’re only available in the UK and a bit pricey but the production values are amazing) and I’ve only read a handful of the stories. But the roster is exciting; not just the usual suspects. Hensher plowed through a ton of late-19^th and early-20^th century magazines and has found some amazing stuff. I especially like one by “Malachi” (Marjorie) Whitaker, called “Courage”: it’s going straight on to the Spring syllabus. Hensher’s introduction makes a fascinating case for why Britain produced such good short fiction in the years 1890-1940 and why economic and structural conditions make it unlikely for the form to flourish in the same way again (which isn’t the same as saying there are no good instances of the form today: volume 2 goes from P. G. Wodehouse to Zadie Smith). Please Penguin, bring this out in the US.

The Book of Aron—Jim Shepard
A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz—Göran Rosenberg

Holocaust literature is central to my teaching, and so also to my reading. These two books impressed me this year, the first a novel of the Warsaw Ghetto that I wrote about at Open Letters Monthly and the second a second-generation memoir that I reviewed at Words without Borders.

Death of a Man—Kay Boyle

Thanks to Tyler Malone of The Scofield I learned a lot about Kay Boyle this year. The best thing I read by her was a heartbreaking early story about failed pedagogy called “Life Being the Best” (read it!), but the book I spent the most time with was this 1936 novel about an American heiress who falls in with fascist sympathizers in pre-Anschluss Austria. I can’t say I liked the book all that much, but I was utterly fascinated by it and I enjoyed wrestling with its slippery politics. You can read my essay, along with many other wonderful pieces, here.

A Wreath of Roses and Blaming—Elizabeth Taylor

These are two of the best books I read this year, but they’re wrapped up in guilt for me because I promised someone a piece about them and never delivered. (Not yet, anyway…. I still want to, though!) I’ve loved everything I’ve read by Taylor, but these are the best of the bunch. Blaming (1976), her last book, is about what happens to a middle-aged woman after the unexpected death of her husband. It manages to be both rueful and acerbic. A Wreath of Roses (1949) is a masterpiece and if it were in print in the US I would have taught it this semester for sure. Less histrionic than Bowen’s Heat of the Day but similarly a novel of what the war did to England, it’s also a story of female friendship that earns its epigraph from Woolf’s The Waves. Genuinely haunting: I read it in June and still think about it regularly.

The Secret Place—Tana French

French doesn’t need me to sing her praises. Everyone already knows she’s the best crime writer today. Some thought this latest book—for some unaccountable reason I held off reading it for almost a year—in the Dublin Murder Squad series a falling off, but I adored it. I especially loved the echoes of Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes. French is such a genius because she writes super suspenseful books that are ultimately about something quite different: they are fascinated to the point of obsession with the idea of friendship—interestingly, romance or sex features hardly at all—especially how friendship intersects with the partnership between detectives. Yet again French proves she writes vulnerable men better than anyone.

Other good things: Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City is a brilliant essay-memoir and I would have written more about it here but it’s late and I’m tired (the Open Letters piece is good, though); The Hare with Amber Eyes (again, everyone already knows it’s amazing—I most liked a surprising Arkansas connection!); Emma (enjoyed re-reading this and wrote about the experience here and here); bits of Balzac (the last 100 pp of Pere Goriot, which practically had me in tears; the scene in Eugenie Grandet when Eugenie wakes at night to see her father and his servant taking his gold downstairs: hallucinatory); Wilkie Collins (I liked both The Dead Secret and The Law and the Lady). Also, good light reading: Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London (urban fantasy—smart and funny: read the first two this year and mean to finish the series in 2016); Hans Olav Lahlum’s K2 books (engaging Norwegian homage to Golden Age crimes, locked room mysteries and the like); Ellis Peter’s Cadfael books (read the first: surely the beginning of a beautiful friendship).

Reading is a passionately solitary experience, but also a joyously communal one. That’s true (mostly) in my classroom and, increasingly, on social media and the Internet more generally. Sometimes I find the constant stream of books to read that come through my Twitter feed a little daunting, but mostly I’m thrilled to know that so much reading is going on, so vigorously and passionately.

Thanks to everyone who read this blog in 2015, especially those who encouraged me and prompted me to think harder or differently about the books. It is wonderfully strange for me to speak so much with people I haven’t for the most part even met about something so important to me.

Thanks too to those who published me this year, especially the wonderful people at Open Letters Monthly. Here’s to more writing next year, and of course to more reading.

Blunders: Emma, Volume II & III

Posted on December 27, 2015 by Dorian Stuber under Emma200, Uncategorized

More Emma. After stalling out for a few days in Book II—distracted mostly by Vivian Gornick: excellent, you should read her—I read the last 250 odd pages in two long sessions. Here are some thoughts on Volumes II & III, in unorganized sections since it’s late in the day, late in the year.

Something I noticed the first time I read Emma and which I’ve not seen elsewhere is the use of quotation marks around reported speech. I’m sure this simply betrays my lack of familiarity with 18^th & early 19^th Century literature. Here’s an example of what I mean:

“He [Frank Churchill] had seen a group of old acquaintance in the street as he passed—he had not stopped, he would not stop for more than a word—but he had the vanity to think they would be disappointed if he did not call, and much as he wished to stay longer at Hartfield, he must hurry off.”

I noted at least three instances of this quoted indirect speech, and I probably missed others. Is this technique specific to Austen (though I don’t remember it in any text except this one)? Or is it common to the period? If the latter, as I suspect, when did it go away? Does anyone know? Jenny? Rohan?

Frank Churchill is an interesting variant of a type we see elsewhere in Austen: the gallant charmer who turns out to be a cad. I’m thinking of Willoughby in Sense & Sensibility and Wickham in Pride & Prejudice. He’s not as bad as those two, he has more redeeming qualities, but he likes to talk, he’s vain (he goes to London to get his hair cut), he’s frivolous. Worst of all, he puts Jane Fairfax in the position of having to remain silent about their engagement and it’s hard to see how that marriage can succeed, despite various characters’ claims that Jane’s deep (and fairly annoying) goodness will leaven his lack of seriousness.

Churchill is good to Mrs. Weston, and I think we’re meant to take that as a mark in his favour. But Mrs. Weston’s discrimination is shown at times to be wanting. In that sense, she’s a good match for her husband, who I find an intriguingly ambiguous character. He’s a gossip, though not in a mean-spirited way, he just can’t keep anything to himself. He’s a little hasty when it comes to considering the consequences of actions or outcomes. (His wish that Frank and Emma get together is unable to come to terms with what the lovers would do with Mr. Woodhouse—his airy dismissal that young love will find a way isn’t very helpful.) But he dotes on his wife, and he seems to have earned his position in the world through hard work.

What I most wonder about Mr. Weston is why he’s so willing to let the Churchills take his son, to the point of letting them give the boy their name. I’m sure I’m being anachronistic in being a little shocked by this—what was the young widower to do with the boy? Yet of course the novel offers us a direct contrast in the figure of Mr. Woodhouse. He didn’t farm his children out when his wife died, though of course there is no family as rich as the Churchills in the picture. I suppose what I wonder is whether we ought to judge Mr. Weston for his decision—to see it as intimating his fecklessness—or to praise him for his practicality.

Emma wants us to think a lot about visibility and legibility. The two seldom map on to each other. Everyone sees everything, but they can’t read or make sense of what they see. Or, more accurately perhaps, they think they see everything, and this self-assurance is the reason they are often so blind. “Misunderstood,” “duped,” “mistaken”: these words and their variants reappear regularly. As does the word “blunder,” which, in a line I cannot find just now, Emma explicitly links to blindness—indeed, these words are apparently etymologically related.

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“Blunder” of course appears in the anagram scene, a private message Churchill sends Jane. But that isn’t it first appearance: we had already been introduced to it in a passage from Volume I I quoted last time, describing Emma’s dismissal of John Knightley’s suggestion that Elton is about to propose to her: “the blunders which often arise from a partial knowledge of circumstances.” By now we can see this phrase as something like the book’s motto.

I’m trying to get a handle on what blundering means for the novel. A blunder is a stupid mistake—and it’s the stupid part I’m wondering about. The coarseness or gaucherie that blunder connotes seems pretty judgmental. What sense of decorum, what ideal of grace and order is transgressed in a blunder? No doubt people have made something of the relationship between the highly structured dancing of the period and the social order or behavioural conventions that get trampled when someone makes a blunder. It’s probably important that a sure sign of Knightley’s decency is his willingness to dance with Harriet when Elton won’t.

I wondered last time whether our feelings about Emma would change as the book went on. And they do. We see Emma chastened. But do we see her subdued? She gets the man that long experience of reading novels, especially Jane Austen’s novels, will have prepared us to see is the right one for her. Our doubts about this May-December romance are in part alleviated when we see Knightley himself admitting to Emma that she could easily and rightly been put off by his lecturing her on how to behave. But only in part. There’s a disquieting sense, for me at least, no matter how much I like Knightley, and I like him a lot, we’re meant to after all, that he is there to school Emma. I think the novel manages to avoid this outcome, though only just.

As I said last time, Emma’s love for her father, whom it would have been so easy to dislike or leave behind, is always a clue to us that there is more to Emma than her self-regard and love of ordering others’ lives might suggest. I’m glad Emma isn’t totally redeemed, either. Austen handles the growing distance between her and Harriet brilliantly. Even when amends are made, wrongs redressed, there are some things that can’t be undone or made good. Whether Emma herself sees this is less clear. We’re left with a few suggestions that she doesn’t have full self-knowledge (though of course, she’s only 20): she manages to clear the air for her cruel behaviour to Miss Bates without ever directly apologizing. (We see the difference between Austen and Dickens in a character like Miss Bates: whereas Dickens would caricature her, Austen makes us sympathize with her even if we agree with Emma’s intemperate description of her on the ill-fated Box Hill excursion.) And she maintains a perhaps surprising degree of conservatism about class distinctions, though surprising perhaps only to us and not to Austen’s first readers. Here is Emma reflecting on what she calls Harriet’s “presumption” in thinking Knightley might be interested in her:

Who had been at pains to give Harriet notions of self-consequence but herself?—Who but herself had taught her, that she was to elevate herself if possible, and that her claims were great to a high worldly establishment?—If Harriet, from being humble, were grown vain, it was her doing too.

This criticism is supposedly directed at Emma herself but in actuality seems mostly directed at Harriet. (In a similar vein, I think Knightley gets off a little easy for not having to acknowledge that he might have encouraged Harriet, or, at least, that he might need to respond to or even acknowledge her misreading of his interactions with him. Harriet, in the end, simply doesn’t matter to Knightley, and the novel has no problem with that.) I don’t mean to suggest that Austen succeeded—if it ever was her aim—in giving us a heroine that nobody could like. But not liking Emma, or not liking her all the way, is one of the interesting results of the novel.

According to Juliette Wells in her uninspiring introduction—I really don’t think much of this edition, beyond the lovely cover—Austen advised her niece Anna on the latter’s own attempts at novel writing. Among other things, she encouraged Anna to restrict her focus: “3 or 4 families in a Country village is the very thing to work on.” On the face of it this seems a good description of Austen’s own work, Emma included. Highbury seems a closed society. Recall that isolation and insularity is what Emma fears at the beginning of the novel when her former governess leaves her. But it isn’t long before this self-contained community is breached by a number of outsiders: Jane, Frank, Mrs. Elton.

I want to end these overlong reflections with another breach, because it’s the hardest for me to get my head around. I refer to Harriet’s encounter with a group of gypsies as she and a friend walk home from the ball.

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Emma’s not present: the first she knows anything about it is when Frank carries a nearly insensible Harriet into the grounds of Hartfield. We hear the story indirectly, how the girls came across the gypsies on an isolated stretch of roadway, how a child came out to beg, how the friend screamed and ran away but how Harriet could not because of a cramp in her leg from all the dancing, how Harriet was soon “assailed” by half a dozen children and how her decision to take out her purse and give them a shilling proved “too tempting”: soon “she was followed, or rather surrounded, by the whole gang, demanding more.” We hear too that just then Frank happened upon the scene; he terrorized the gypsies just as much as they had her. The outsiders run away and Frank brings her to safety.

Having only just appeared, and only indirectly at that, the gypsies disappear for good. Their only function is to provoke more of Emma’s misreadings: she is convinced that the encounter is a sign that Harriet ought to get together with Frank. But he is only on the scene because he is making his way to Miss Bates’s to return a pair of scissors he had borrowed the night before, a surprising suggestion even on a first reading, the full spuriousness of which we don’t realize until later, when we understand that he must have been trying to see that lady’s niece, his secret fiancée Jane Fairfax.

Noodling around online about this scene I came across this reading by Miriam Mandel, which emphasizes what Emma makes of the scene she didn’t experience. Emma announces that its meaning would be plain even to someone as imaginatively insensitive as a linguist, a grammarian, or a mathematician. And since she is herself a self-described “imaginist” she believes herself that much more likely to read the scene correctly, as foretelling a romance between Frank and Harriet:

It was a very extraordinary thing! Nothing of the sort had ever occurred before to any young ladies in the place, within her memory; no rencontre, no alarm of the kind;–and now it had happened to the very person, and at the very hour, when the other very person was chancing to pass by to rescue her!—It certainly was very extraordinary!

Mandel nicely points out the shifting referent of “it” in this passage. The first “it” is the encounter with the gypsies. The second is a more generalized “alarm.” The last exclamation might be the same as the first but the third “it,” Mandel plausibly suggests, refers to “the fortuitous conjunction of events and persons,” that is, to Emma’s own plotting.

But what, I wonder, does it mean for the story-teller, for the one who arranges events into an order that reveals a meaning imposed by the teller herself, to think so insistently about her own story? What does it mean that she arranges events so falsely? What does it mean for a story (Emma) to feature a story-teller (Emma) who keeps getting things wrong? And what does it mean for the audience to be complicit in these blunders? Everyone in the neighbourhood soon forgets about the gypsies—everyone except Emma and her little nephews: “Henry and John were still asking every day for the story of Harriet and the gipsies, and still tenaciously setting her right if she varied in the slightest particular from the original recital.”

The suggestion seems to be that as readers we are implicated in Emma’s failures. Does that mean we too mature by the novel’s end? And what, most importantly, about the gypsies themselves? They “did not wait for the operations of justice; they took themselves off in a hurry.” Just one of many instances in 19^th Century British literature when gypsies are summarily dispatched after serving a narrative function—Maggie Tuller’s encounter in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss comes immediately to mind, but I bet there are plenty of others. I can’t help but feel, though, that the gypsies have been wronged in this story-telling. Unlike in other instances, the true story of the gypsies is never revealed. By which I mean, their side of the story goes untold. Here is another instance of a wrong that can’t be made right—but unlike Emma’s inability to apologize to Miss Bates or to Harriet, this time the book itself doesn’t see it as such, doesn’t even see it as a wrong at all.

A melancholy note on which to end. But fitting, maybe. Emma is delightful at times, and sprightly, and droll, and very smart. But it’s also melancholic and its happy ending feels quite muted to me.

Thanks to Dolce Bellazza for organizing this readalong.

Kevin Barry-Beatlebone (2015)

Posted on December 20, 2015 by Dorian Stuber under Uncategorized

Do you hear whispers from back there, Cornelius?

Ah I would do. Yes.

You mean from an old life?

Back arse of time, he says, and gestures grandly with a sweep of imperious paw.

For a long time, like many people, I was obsessed with The Beatles. I don’t think I listened to anything else between the ages of 12-15 or so. Although I always knew which album was my favourite (Rubber Soul, natch), I wasn’t so sure about my favourite Beatle. Ringo was impossible, Paul sympathetic but in the end too sweet, George the one I eventually decided upon but only because it seemed a more recherché choice than the one who was from the beginning my actual favourite, John. He was the smartest, the funniest, the prickliest, the most sarcastic, the one who deadpanned his responses to the press: “How do you find America?” “Turn left at Greenland.” I loved him because he wasn’t easy to love.

Thinking back on it now, I wonder if the reason he would come to have a hold on me was that the announcement of his death was one of the first world-historical, if I can put it that way, events I remember. I was eight, and a friend of our family, the father of my best friend in my young childhood, the girl who taught me English, in fact, or so goes the family lore anyway, came to our house, presumably to pick her up but oddly I have no memory of her being there. Instead I remember him coming solemnly into our kitchen with his omnipresent cigarette and telling us Lennon had been shot and my mother giving a gasp and even—could this be right, it seems a bit melodramatic—crying a little.

I’m telling you all this because I’m wondering if any of it unconsciously prompted my decision to read Beatlebone, the new novel from Irish writer Kevin Barry. It’s about a visit Lennon took in 1978 to the small Irish island he had bought on a whim in the 60s. The island, Dorinish, is real. And Lennon really bought it, in 1967 for £1550. Lennon visited the island a handful of times before turning it over to a group of hippies who lived on it in the early 70s.

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The trip described in the novel is fictional, but the story is based on aspects of Lennon’s life from that time. Barry imagines that Lennon has slipped away from his new family and life in New York to visit the island and have a scream (Lennon & Yoko Ono had undergone primal therapy with its founder, Arthur Janov, in 1970) in the hopes of getting through a fallow creative period.

I still like the Beatles well enough, though I hardly ever listen to them anymore. It’s enough that they inspired so much of the pop music I came to love later in life. Maybe I’ll come back to them if my daughter discovers them for herself one day. I used to know a lot about them, as much as one could pre-internet. But I’m no Beatles expert and in general I’m turned off by intense fandom.

I think that made me an ideal reader of Beatlebone. The novel has a pleasingly oblique relationship to its protagonist. It’s sympathetic but not hagiographic. Barry’s Lennon seems plausible. I can imagine this Lennon as the real John Lennon, and for some reason that matters though I don’t know why. There’s something interesting about what Barry does that I can’t quite put my finger on. I was always shuttling back and forth between things I knew about Lennon and this character. On the one hand, this Lennon was simply the novel’s John and I took him on his own terms. But on the other I could never forget the historical John Lennon. I don’t do this with other historical novels, maybe because I don’t know anything about Henry VIII or Thomas Cromwell, say, other than what I know from Hilary Mantel.

Something about this book is licensed—though how I couldn’t say—by our sense of the historical John Lennon. Certainly the knowledge of his death hangs over the book, not least because Lennon feels himself, at 37, as old and maybe even a bit finished, although Barry fortunately does not have him imagining or foreshadowing his own death. Maybe the reason for the uncertainty I’m feeling but struggling with naming is that Barry’s Lennon is always so unsure about his own identity.

The novel is mostly composed in dialogue, with some interior monologue and almost no narrative exposition. Much of its success comes from this structure, since it avoids the clunky integration of facts that bogs down most historical fiction. John’s life as a Beatle is rarely referenced. A brief reference to the Cavern Club in Liverpool aside, John doesn’t flash back to some moment with the band in the studio or on tour. What matters is his present life—he’s become a New Yorker, a stay-at-home dad, a man unsure whether he has any music left in him—and the distant past: his childhood and adolescence in Liverpool, and, perhaps most importantly, the time before his birth when his parents first met.

In other words, Barry manages to keep the Beatles (almost) out of his book. And when they do appear it’s as a joke: at the end of his Irish sojourn, on a country road in County Mayo, John meets a 112-year-old woman. He’s introduced to her as Kenneth, the alias he’s been traveling under, but she sees through him:

Have you been on the television?

Maybe I have.

When you were younger, she says.

Well this is it.

I’d recognise the nose, she says. You’ve a bit of weight gone off you since?

I’ve gone macrobiotic now.

There were four of ye, she says.

There were.

The leader was a beautiful-looking boy, she says. The big eyes like saucers and the song about the blackbird.

As this passage suggests, the glory of this novel is its dialogue. I kept hearing bits of Beckett, which is perhaps just to say that I kept hearing Irishness. Indeed, the novel cares a lot about what the Situationists called psychogeography, the effect of geography on our emotions and behaviour. In the first scene, Lennon abandons his chauffeured car in the middle of the countryside and lies face down in the soft rich dirt before turning to watch the coming of dawn: “John lies saddled on the warm earth and he listens to its bones.” Bones are important to the novel. Bones are a source of meaning; in fact, they are a synonym for source, for ancestry. But bones are also remnants, signs of death and loss. Lennon’s father was Irish and Barry argues that Lennon was preoccupied with his Irish roots. But what John keeps thinking about while actually in Ireland is the way it calls up his hometown across the Irish Sea. He tastes the foods of his childhood—things he’s given up now that he’s “gone macrobiotic”—and hears hints of Scouse in the Irish accent.

The novel’s deepest and weirdest belief is that there are certain places where people can slip through time and enter the past. Lennon finds himself not just imagining but actually attending the scene of his parents’ courtship. Most startling is an admission Barry himself makes. About three-quarters of the way through the book he breaks from the story, incorporating a section about his process of writing of the book, which was premised on his desire “to spring a story from its places… from Dorinish itself—if I could figure out how to get there—and to be guided as purely as possible by the feelings that are trapped within these places, and by the feelings trapped within.” Places are like psyches—intense feelings are locked within each.

After a description of a notorious “time slip” on Bold Street in Liverpool—apparently dozens of people have reported being transported back to the street as it was in the 1950s—Barrry describes his own otherwordly vision in the near-deserted villages along the Irish coast. He saw a coven of women dressed in black materialize from thin air and wade through the waves, the mirror of a vision he has John remember having with Yoko the first time they visited Dorinish together.

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I’m not sure this section is entirely successful: it has a whiff of the sub-Sebaldian, complete with studiously artless black and white photographs. But I do think the book’s commitment to irrational, out-of-body experiences is fascinating. One scene is representative of this tendency: on the way to Dorinish, John’s handler, Cornelius O’Grady, deposits him on Achill Island to wait out a storm. The island is deserted except for an ancient hotel named the Amethyst now inhabited only by a Svengali-like guru and an impressionable young couple who are careering through a perverse (aka satanic) version of something like Janov’s primal therapy. In the book’s most amazing scene the trio seeks to convince Lennon to take part in their ritual. They alternate between seduction and menace: the whole thing is hair-raisingly ominous, like something from some of the stranger sections of Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.

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The guru and his followers are a more compelling but dangerous version of the journalists who have got wind of Lennon’s presence and are hunting him down. To escape these predators, Lennon strikes out alone on the island and ends up in a cave where he has a vision of all the creatures whose bones he imagines are buried in the sand—“Elkbone Wolfbone Sealbone.” Suddenly he has a vision of a new album, Beatlebone, nine perfect songs that will put his musical past to rest. We later get a glimpse of the recording sessions for this imagined album: nothing good seems to be coming from them, which is an odd note for the novel to strike, given how much it otherwise upholds the value of visionary experience. What would it mean for the product of Lennon’s ultimate artistic vision to be nothing but dull screeching?

This bathos is of a piece with the self-deprecation and irony that characterizes so much of the novel.

Take this conversation between Cornelius and John. Cornelius is describing a period in his life when he was addicted to cough syrup:

Jesus Christ. What does six cough bottles down the hatch feel like?

Like an eiderdown wrapped around yourself. It feels like goose feathers. It feels like mother’s love. No matter how hard or cruel the world or the night might be you’re… like a baby… kind of… What’s the word I’m after, John?

Swaddled?

Is right. Against all the harshness of the world.

Were there hallucinations, Cornelius?

Were there fucken what. I had a firm belief—this went on for months unending that a particular gap in the hill on the road towards the Highwood was a kind of wink at me. In the night, as I drove through. As if the mountain was marking the passage of time for me in a sort of cheeky way.

The gap in the hill was a wink?

Just so. In the headlights as I drove though

Cornelius?

John?

Oh nothing.

John’s inability to tell Cornelius about the extraordinary things he’s been experiencing—the landscape similarly alive and seeming to signal to him, the revelations about his distant past, his conviction that he is on the way to artistic renewal—fits with the book’s appealing modesty. Irrational power is everywhere, but it’s nothing to make a fuss about. We see Lennon scorn the idea that coming to terms with the death of his mother and the abuse from his father will help him to live as an adult in the present. But we also see Lennon turn again and again, and at the very end of the novel, too, to his parents, especially his love for his mother. We see any number of mystic or non-rational occurrences, but we also see a casualness about them, even a dismissal of them.

In the end, Beatlebone convinces readers that John’s time in Ireland, though hardly idyllic, is genuinely restorative. It is for readers, at any rate. This has everything to do with Cornelius, one of the most compelling characters I’ve come across in a while. Sometimes the novel hints that Cornelius is a figment of Lennon’s imagination, another part of him, maybe a better part, something like the nurturing parent to his vulnerable inner child. But happily the hints stay that way. Mostly we’re to believe in his reality, even if he is larger than life. He’s funny:

Could you handle a shave yourself, maybe?

I think maybe I could.

I see you go reddish in the beard?

When it comes through, yeah. I’m a gingerbeard.

I’m sorry for your troubles, John.

And he’s poignant. Here he is describing his father’s death:

How did it happen, Cornelius?

Well. In the same way that an old dog gets to a certain age and a level of disregard for itself and it just takes off some night into the bushes. My father heard what was coming for him. And we didn’t find him after, in the way you wouldn’t find an old dog—you just wouldn’t—because my father, I have no doubt, put himself in the sea. It was all his life nearby and it would have been an idea always of a way out. He would not have been the type to string himself from the rafter of a barn. He was considerate. There was no show in the man.

There was no show in the man. Beatlebone gives us one of the twentieth century’s greatest showmen—great because he was so ambivalent about the show, seeming to disdain it. Barry’s John is at times as unshow-y as Cornelius’s father, with whom he is associated because he’s forced to wear the dead man’s suit when his other clothes are ruined. At other times he is the petulant star, spoiled, frightened, at an impasse in his life, resentful of the Kate Bush hit that’s always on the radio and wondering if The Muppet Show will ever come calling again.

I don’t know what to say about this novel, exactly. I’m not sure it will stay with me for the ages, but I was absolutely absorbed in it while reading. I will say, though, that something of its belief in psychogeography worked its magic on me. In the past days I’ve returned again and again to our old kitchen, with its brown stools and ochre tile, and me sitting there watching my mother cook dinner and Ronnie, my friend’s dad, coming in and saying, with a kind of grim paranoiac fatalism that seems now as much a part of the 70s as the kitchen’s drab hues, “They shot John. They shot John too.”

One of Our Small Eggs Will Not Hurt You: Emma, Volume I

Posted on December 17, 2015 by Dorian Stuber under Emma200, Uncategorized

Dolce Belezza has organized a readalong of Emma to celebrate the 200^th anniversary of its publication on December 23, 1815.

I’m a notorious bailer on readalongs: they always sound so exciting, especially as they often legitimate my buying yet another book. Then the demands of life and my seemingly constitutive inability to follow a reading plan—which is pretty rich coming from someone who designs syllabi for a living—get in the way. But this one coincides with the end of the semester, so I’m crossing my fingers I’ll actually keep up with it.

Emma is divided into three volumes. Here are a few thoughts on the first.

I’ve read Emma before, quite a while ago now, thirteen years ago in fact. I know exactly because I read it in the weeks before I married my wife in August 2002. I don’t ever remember thinking it directly at the time, but now I fancy I must have made some unconscious connection between the weddings in Austen’s novels and my own. At any rate, I remember spending several pleasurable lazy days—of the kind available only to grad students, when you have almost nothing to do for years except of course for one big thing, a thing so terrifying it makes almost anything else seem a much better idea that must be pursued immediately—I remember several hot sticky air-conditioner-less days reading this novel on an old couch in the apartment that was about to become our apartment.

My memory of reading Emma is vivid. But my memory of Emma itself is not.

Maybe that’s because, as is clear to me now, Emma is a story about the failure of interpretation. It’s about missed clues and mistaken impressions. Which means it is made to be re-read even more than it is to be read.

It’s possible, of course, to see already on a first reading how closely the novel hews to its heroine’s point of view and that this point of view is dangerously misguided. It’s possible, in other words, already on a first go round to read against Emma rather than with her. But it’s impossible not to do so on a second.

That might seem a weird thing to say, since it’s not as though Austen is shy about Emma’s faults. Already on the first page, we read:

The real evils indeed of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself; these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived, that they did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her.

Here the narrative voice is unusually distinct from Emma’s. It practically promises a comeuppance. We feel the full force of that famous Austen wit, gentle and forbearing but with a sting to it. “Real evils” isn’t just the pleasant exaggeration it might first seem. Emma has the power to do real harm, as we see takes on as a kind of protégé the young and naïve Harriet Smith and urges her to turn down a proposal from one Robert Martin, a man Emma deems beneath Harriet. For someone like Harriet, an illegitimate child of unknown parents, the loss of such a match, not least to someone as seemingly good-natured and besotted with her as Martin, is a serious loss. I say “seemingly’ not because I suspect he is in fact a bad guy but because I can’t remember the novel well enough to know if our opinion of him is going to change—and I’m always wary with Austen because our opinions of her characters are often forced to change. First impressions are usually wrong in Austen.

Emma has someone else in mind for Harriet, Mr. Elton, the unctuous and prepossessing local vicar. Emma is emboldened in her matchmaking by what she takes to have been her success at marrying her former governess, Miss Taylor, to a kindly, middle-aged widower, Mr. Weston. (Their marriage, and her leaving the Woodhouse establishment, much to Emma’s father’s mournful chagrin, is the book’s precipitating event.) It’s unclear whether Emma really had much to do with the success of the match, and so we should be suspicious of her efforts this time around. She’s easily able to get Harriet to fall for Elton, but it doesn’t take too long for us to realize—at least it didn’t take me long, this time around—that Elton cares for Emma herself, not Harriet. She devises all sorts of ploys to get the two of them together and never realizes they aren’t working.

For example, she allows herself to be persuaded to take up drawing again, in order to make a portrait of Harriet while Elton watches. She’d given up drawing, she says, when her attempt to draw her brother-in-law failed, before adding: “But for Harriet’s sake, or rather for my own, and as there are no husbands and wives in the case at present, I will break my resolution now.”

What follows is a classic instance of Austen’s irony:

Mr. Elton seemed very properly struck and delighted by the idea, and was repeating, “No husbands and wives in the case at present indeed, as you observe. Exactly so. No husbands and wives,” with so interesting a consciousness, that Emma began to consider whether she had not better leave them together at once. But as she wanted to be drawing, the declaration must wait a little longer.

I can’t decide whether the last line makes me like Emma more, or less. On the one hand, her selfishness—she wants to be drawing—is such that it gets in the way even of her plan. But on the other, her interest in the match isn’t purely mercenary, hasn’t consumed her entirely. What begins as mere stratagem becomes something she loses herself in. Here as elsewhere we see that figuring out how to understand Emma is our main task as readers.

If we don’t see these critiques of Emma the first time around—and maybe we do, they seem so obvious to me now, but I fear I missed them the first time—we are eventually helped by the novel to see that Emma is, in fact, misled about Elton. Her brother-in-law, the one who fussed about having his portrait done, tells her that Elton is behaving as though he is love with her. Emma brushes off the suggestion:

she walked on, amusing herself in the consideration of the blunders which often arise from a partial knowledge of circumstances, of the mistakes which people of high pretensions to judgment [her brother-in-law is a lawyer] are for ever falling into; and not very well pleased with her brother[-in-law] for imagining her blind and ignorant, and in want of counsel.

The joke of course is on Emma and Volume I ends with a lovely set piece at Christmastime, when the characters spend the evening with the Westons. It begins to snow and in all the haste of a hurried departure—everyone wanting to get home before the weather gets bad—Emma and Elton find themselves alone in a carriage. He wastes no time in proposing and each is equally amazed and hurt to find how the other has understood matters.

Austen is not always so overt in her narrative irony—and part of me wonders whether the passage about “the blunders which arise from a partial knowledge of circumstances” won’t later be subjected to further revision. That is, will we be led to read this passage in yet another way, in light of events yet to come? Will Emma prove to be a better interpreter of the world than this initial interpretation suggests? How subtly Austen’s works open up to reveal a vertiginous landscape of dizzying epistemological uncertainty!

I’ll offer just one more example of how destabilizing her prose can be. In the early scene in which Emma talks Harriet out of accepting Martin’s proposal, we read this heartbreaking response to the scorn Emma heaps on the young farmer (“I had no idea he could be so very clownish”):

“To be sure,” said Harriet, in a mortified voice, “he is not so genteel as a real gentleman.”

It’s that “mortified” that gets me. Mostly this is the so-called omniscient narrator, gently but devastatingly pointing out how terribly Emma is behaving. (Famously, Austen said of the book, “I am going to take a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like.”) But it’s also possible that we’re still getting Emma’s perspective here: that Emma recognizes—and, presumably, approves of—Harriet’s mortification. It might be nice to take our distance from a character who is behaving badly. But are we allowed to?

I’m looking forward to seeing how the novel answers this question.

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Next time I’ll say more about some of the other characters, especially Emma’s father, Mr. Woodhouse, who is one of the most delightful characters in English fiction and, I increasingly suspect, central to making this novel work. Tom wrote some wonderful stuff about him here.

Mr. Woodhouse is a hypochondriac, a fussbudget, a man so thoroughly convinced of the rightness of his way of living that he could be a monster if he weren’t so gentle, or so gently portrayed. His constitution is so delicate that he’s frightened to eat almost everything, and he fears for the constitutions of others. Here he is advising an old acquaintance what she should take for tea:

Mrs. Bates, let me propose your venturing on one of these eggs. An egg boiled very soft is not unwholesome. Serle [their cook] understands boiling an egg better than any body. I would not recommend an egg boiled by any body else—but you need not be afraid—they are very small, you see—one of our small eggs will not hurt you.

I’ll have more to say about how the novel portrays Woodhouse. But for now the important thing to note is his relationship to Emma. She dotes on him—but also disparages him a little, makes a little fun of him, all while humouring him or seeming to. She quietly makes sure her guests get proper-sized portions of grown-up food. This is important because it makes us see Emma as shrewd and, more importantly, kind. Emma’s kindness opens up the possibility that we might follow Austen in liking her.

Boy, Interrupted

Posted on September 1, 2015 by Dorian Stuber under Uncategorized

My review of The Book of Aron, Jim Shepard’s novel of the Warsaw Ghetto, is up at Open Letters Monthly.

How Danish is It? Naja Marie Aidt’s Baboon

Posted on August 21, 2015 by Dorian Stuber under Uncategorized

Baboon–Naja Marie Aidt (2006)

Translated from the Danish by Denise Newman (2014)

Baboon, the debut collection in English by the Danish writer Naja Marie Aidt, has been getting a lot of buzz among bookish types. That was enough to get me to buy it, but not of course to read it. It had to compete for my attention with all the other books on my bedside table: books I had to read for work, books I had to read because they were coming due at the library, books I had to read so as not to face the books I had to read for work, books I had to read to satisfy obscure readerly projects of the sort I’m always setting for myself.

But Baboon spent only a short time in the purgatory of the TBR pile (most books sit there for years). I read it in two or three short sessions last weekend, impelled by the now inescapable fact that school is about to start up again. This year I am teaching a course on short fiction each semester and I always like to include a couple of recently published stories to help me decide what I really think about them. In this way I decided that I didn’t like Haruki Murakami or Etgar Keret as much as I thought I did, but that I liked Rachel Seiffert even more than at first. Although I’ve a few reservations about Aidt’s work, the collection impressed me enough that I’ve assigned the first story in the collection, “Bulbjerg,” for the first week of class.

“Bulbjerg,” named after a prominent limestone cliff in Jutland, reminded me a bit of a Margaret Atwood story. There’s the same sense that however threatening the natural world might seem it isn’t nearly as hostile as the people lost in it. And a similar tone: Aidt has Atwood’s asperity and intelligence. “Bulbjerg” opens with an expression of wonder—“Suddenly we found ourselves in the middle of an astonishing landscape: luminous, white sand dunes on all sides, wind swept, small trees twisting under the vast open sky”—but its dominant emotion is in fact fear. It’s fitting that “suddenly” is the story’s first word. A lot of dramatic things happen in its ten pages, just as they do in the other concise stories in the collection. But as PT Smith points out in an excellent review, eventfulness plus concision doesn’t equal clarity. As the story begins, the narrator, his wife, their six-year-old son, and their dog are lost in a forest. In the opening sentence they come up for air, but only by happenstance—note the passive construction “we found ourselves”—and not for long. They must plunge back into the forest to get where they are going. But where is that? And who are these people?

Aidt is good at menace, as in this scene from early in the story. The boy is tired, the family collapses to the ground. But time is passing. They need to get moving:

“Shouldn’t we get going?” you ask. I get up and suddenly notice how tired I am. My arms are completely limp and there’s an overwhelming feeling of weakness throughout my entire body. The water bottle is empty. The dog pants with its tongue hanging out of its mouth. You lift it into the cardboard box on the bike rack. Sebastian bravely picks up his bike and rides ahead of us. His bell rings with every bump on the road, and the flag he was so proud of when I mounted it on the rear mudguard looks cheap and shabby now. We ride on in silence.

The first time I read this, I was sure something terrible had happened, a catastrophe of some kind. A war, maybe, or a natural disaster. Maybe it was that cardboard box for the dog that got me thinking this way. Who takes their dog on a bicycle trip in a box? It seemed so desperate. Are they escaping something? Or maybe it was that bell, ringing its feeble warning, its futility only exacerbated by the cheap and shabby flag. What could have pushed this family to this point? They’ve run out of water, they’re tired, vacillating between barely restrained anger (“Shouldn’t we get going?) and silence.

But it’s not a catastrophe, at least not in the apocalyptic sense. It turns out that this is just a family outing gone awry, not life threatening, but dangerous nonetheless. Aidt captures perfectly that knife-edge between panic and exhaustion that sets upon you when you’ve lost your way in the woods. But she isn’t just describing that sensation—she’s also inciting it in us. In this story and in the others, readers are as lost as these characters. That’s because Aidt is always dropping us in the middle of things, leaving us to sort out who the characters are, how they’re related to each other, where they are and what they’re doing. And when we do figure these things out, we often have to wrestle with our feelings about them. There are not many likable characters in this collection, some are downright unpleasant, even disgusting. That’s true even in a story like “Interruption,” a kind of absurd experiment in the mode of Kafka or Gogol, when a middle-aged woman—a fugitive, it would seem, though this too is never made clear, from a newly opened “massage parlor” which is really nothing more than a brothel—bursts into the apartment of a graduate student, installs herself there (cooking and cleaning and offering other services besides) and refuses to leave. Our feelings towards the woman—the narrator thinks she is Thai or Filipino but can’t be bothered to find out for sure—remain unclear because we never get any access to her consciousness, and the narrator’s indignant and slightly revolted response to her is hard to get past. We know it tells us more about him than her, but she remains a cipher to us. I admire the way Aidt suggests the precariousness, even the danger of the woman’s life without using it to build sympathy. Similarly, I appreciate the way she makes the student, who in another story might seem sympathetically put upon, as much cold and calculating as bewildered and frustrated.

If I say these are confusing stories, then, I’m referring not to their style—Aidt’s sentences are straightforward, even plain—but to their emotional force. They refuse to offer us the consolations of protagonists that we can identify with and situations that we can embrace. Even when the characters threaten to become caricatures the stories wrong-foot us, as in the case of the self-satisfied hedonist of “Wounds,” whose life falls apart when an innocuous boil on his ass becomes a horrifying, life threatening, baffling disease. We can’t enjoy disparaging him, yet we don’t quite ever come to sympathize with him either.

So when I say these stories left a bad taste in my mouth you shouldn’t take that as criticism, exactly, but rather as recognition that they’ve done the work they set out to do. These stories don’t ask to be loved—they’re the opposite of ingratiating—so what’s left might be admiration. And I do admire them, certainly enough that I want to read Aidt’s first novel, also just out in English translation. And I’m curious how I’ll feel about “Bjulberg,” at least, after I’ve taught it next week.

Baboon is translated by Denise Newman. As always when I read translations from a language I don’t know, I’m at a loss as to what to say about her efforts, beyond expressing deep gratitude for giving me access to books I’d never otherwise be able to read. I could say the translation seems fluent and skillful, which it does, but in the absence of the original I’ve no idea. I do wonder, however, and this doesn’t have to do with the specifics of this translation but of its very existence in English translation (and thanks are due to Two Lines Press for publishing these stories, and in such a handsome edition). As I read the book, I thought about what Tim Parks has been saying repeatedly over the past few years—that “international” or “world” literature is increasingly governed by the unstated, free-floating, but no less powerful desire to be translated into English, such that a straightforward style (more Raymond Carver than Henry James, say) and a lack of cultural specificity have come, however unconsciously, to govern the production of literature already in their original form, let alone in the decision (always as much economic as aesthetic) to translate that literature into English. If I understand him right, Parks thinks there is a whole canon of world literature that is being written in ways that make it amenable to being translated into English.

Whatever one thinks of Parks’s claims—I like him because he’s kind of cranky and intemperate, our own D. H.Lawrence, even though I think he might be exaggerating the case—I think there’s a useful question to be asked about what we want from literature in translation. Another way to say what I mean is that I found myself wondering as I read this collection whether there was anything particularly Danish about it. Which in turn made me wonder, what the hell would that even mean and why would I want it? Was I expecting a landscape tastefully littered with Arne Jacobsen chairs? It’s condescending to expect the foreign to be exotic, or to correspond to one’s received idea of a place (these things usually mean the same thing). And yet the suggestion, made in a blurb on the back cover, that these stories are “universal” (which I take to mean, “could be American!”) seems similarly condescending and disrespectful. Maybe it’s knowing so little about Denmark other than a few television shows and crime novels (as well as an abiding conviction that it must be the loveliest place on earth) that makes me feel this way.

But I did decide, as I always do, not to include Babel on my short fiction syllabus, even though those stories are wonderful, because they strike me as likely to seem foreign to my students in ways my course doesn’t have the time to explicate. Aidt, on the other hand, will I suspect resonate strongly with students. The comparison could be better, I know: anything written a century ago needs context in a way something written today doesn’t (though I do teach plenty of early twentieth century texts in this course). But I can’t help thinking that the ready amenability of these stories to being translated into English is a kind of fault. And yet as soon as I do I remember the disreputable narrator of “Bulbjerg” and his desperate family, as lost to each other as they are in the woods, and unsettling to us. Perhaps I’ve been fooled in my thinking. Perhaps these are uniquely Danish stories. Perhaps there is no such thing as a Danish story. Perhaps the apparently assimilable style of Baboon is a false friend, only an apparent cognate. Perhaps I’m not giving these surprising and sly stories their full due.

A Summer’s Worth of Crime Fiction

Posted on August 5, 2015 by Dorian Stuber under Uncategorized

Summer isn’t over yet, of course, especially not in Arkansas. But my summer almost is. Administrative duties begin this week, and the first day of classes is only three weeks away. I’m sure I’ll dispose of a few more crime novels before the semester really starts to pinch, but for now here are a few thoughts about some I’ve read lately:

Gallows View—Peter Robinson (1987)

The first in the long-running Inspector Banks series, and a pretty good debut. For a while there I read the new installments of this series religiously. I’m a few behind now, not sure why, they’re always solid, often much better than that, and Banks is likeable enough, a kinder, less tormented Rebus. I don’t always need to know so much about the music he’s listening to, though. I’d never read the first five or six, though, and it’s interesting to compare the later installments to the first one. Robinson has become a better writer, but already here he shows a light touch in explaining the story of Banks’s move from London to Yorkshire. And his pacing is good, too. At 250 pages this book is the right length. I’ve bemoaned many times the bloat in crime fiction, with novels regularly topping 400 pages. In fact, Robinson himself has since succumbed to this tendency. Still, meeting Inspector Banks has reignited my interest in the series and I plan to read the next few.

The Strangler Vine—M . J. Carter (2014)

This first time novel by a historian begins what promises to be a very good series. Someone recommended this in the TLS Summer Reading series, and I’m glad I followed up on it. William Avery is a young soldier recently arrived in India in the 1830s. Languishing in Calcutta before joining his regiment, he is charged with accompanying Jeremiah Blake to find a well-known poet, the Walter Scott of Anglo-India, who has gone missing. Blake is a shadowy figure who is employed by the East India Company but lives in disrepute in the “native” part of the city, and in fact seems to have repudiated the Company altogether. Avery is naïve, a bit complacent and blustery, though a good sort. Blake is mercurial, expert in a dozen Eastern languages, an expert at tracking people who don’t want to be found. There’s an extended “meet cute” in which Blake is contemptuous of Avery and Avery horrified by Bake before each comes to appreciate the other, work as a team, etc. Avery is disabused of his faith in the Company; Blake regains some of his faith in the human race. So far, so conventional. Fortunately, Carter doesn’t push the Holmes/Watson comparison too hard. And her knowledge of the period is impressive. She describes the 1830s as a time when an earlier openness on the part of Company officials for India’s cultural traditions was hardening into something more dogmatic and oppressive, an incipient White Man’s Burden. The book drags a little at times, especially in the middle third, usually when Carter tries to burden her story with too much information. But the ending is genuinely moving and I look forward to the next installment, which, it seems, will be set somewhere quite different. (Already out in the UK—Book Depository order necessary? Hmm…)

Invisible City—Julia Dahl (2014)

I read this because it’s ostensibly about the Hasidic community in New York. But it’s actually about the newspaper business in the era of social media, which interests me a lot less. Dahl’s portrayal of an insular world in which wrongdoings are overlooked in a tacit understanding between community leaders and secular officials is fine as far as it goes. But Rachel Aviv’s New Yorker piece from last year explores the same topic much more probingly. It tells you something that a few later I can’t even remember the protagonist’s name, but she has a complicated back-story that allows her access to this relatively closed world. I didn’t find that story interesting enough to want to read the just-released follow-up.

Oblivion—Arnaldur Indridason (2014/2015 English translation Victoria Cribb)

Indridason is one of my absolute favourites and I always order his books from the UK since they come out a year earlier there. Some are stronger than others, of course, but this one is particularly good. A couple of years ago, Indridason concluded his series centered on his melancholy detective, Erlendur. But then he had the idea of writing about Erlendur’s early days. Last year’s Reykjavik Nights showed us Erlendur’s life as a traffic cop in the early 70s. In this follow-up, set a few years later, Erlendur has become a detective. He investigates two unrelated crimes, one recent and one from twenty years earlier. The resonances between them—they are linked only thematically, in relation to the American military presence in Iceland after the war—are intriguing but not hammered home. I’ve written before about my love of Iceland, so maybe this stuff interests me more than most people. But everyone ought to appreciate how almost insistently low-key these books are. Indridason is especially good at showing how awkward it can be to investigate crimes in a small country, where everybody almost knows everybody else.

Dissolution—C. J. Sansom (2003)

I’m not much of one for classical/medieval/Renaissance-era historical mysteries, but I quite liked this first installment of a series centered on Matthew Shardlake, a hunchbacked lawyer working for Thomas Cromwell in the 1530s who increasingly finds himself torn over his master’s methods. At least I liked it until I read Jenny’s damning but compelling complaint about the implausibility of importing what are essentially 19^th/20^th century narrative protocols on to the Early Modern period. After that I liked it less. I might continue with the series anyway, though: the first one was definitely readable, and I enjoyed the counter-perspective on Cromwell, who I only know from Hilary Mantel. This book is fine, but it’s no Wolf Hall! Think Sansom is tired of hearing that yet?

The Red Moth—Sam Eastlake (2013)

Found this while in Canada and it seemed like the kind of thing that might be hard to get in the US, plus I’m a total sucker for WWII crime/espionage fiction. The inspector is a Finn who once worked for the Tsar and then was recalled from Siberian exile and put to work for Stalin. It’s all most implausible—Stalin is even a character, which doesn’t work out too well: I get that the point is that he’s not a frothing madman, but the picture of him as simply a malign functionary is fairly preposterous. A perfectly adequate vacation read, but I doubt I’ll be getting to the rest of the series anytime soon.

Ngaio Marsh—A Man Lay Dead (1934)

Marsh is one of the most famous Golden Age British crime writers along with Christie, Allingham, and the utterly glorious Tey. This is the first of her Inspector Alleyn series. It’s not perfect—Marsh can’t quite seem to figure out what she wants Alleyn to be like: is he nice, is he brooding, is he a bit callous?—but it’s thoroughly enjoyable, a classic country house murder with a hint of espionage. Read it—it absolutely stands the test of time. Looking forward to reading more of her work.

One Night, Markovitch–Ayelet Gundar-Goshen (2012)

Posted on July 28, 2015 by Dorian Stuber under Uncategorized

Translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston

As part of my ongoing but not particularly diligently executed plan to get a handle on contemporary Israeli writing by authors not named Oz, Grossman, or Appelfeld, I was pleased to find Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s debut novel on my recent trip to Canada. (It’s published there by Anansi and in the UK by Pushkin, but not in the US, at least so far.)

One Night, Markovitch, which won a big Israeli prize, begins with twenty men boarding a ship in Mandate-era Palestine on their way to a clandestine mission in Europe. But why would Jews be going to Europe just when so many were trying desperately to get out?

The answer is as fantastic as many of the events in this fanciful novel: in order to circumvent British restrictions on Jewish immigration, each man has agreed to marry a woman active in the Zionist movement and then divorce her once the ship has arrived safely back in Palestine. I’m pretty sure nothing like this ever really happened—though the more I learn about the events of that period the more extraordinary things I learn, so who knows—but historical accuracy isn’t Gundar-Goshen’s concern. Nor is it even the mission itself, which is easily accomplished and cursorily described. Her concern is instead for the metaphor the conceit enables.

One of the men, the Yaakov Markovitch of the title, thoroughly plain if not exactly ugly, is paired up with the most beautiful woman in the group, named (not particularly imaginatively) Bella. For reasons that are never quite clear, Markovitch decides that he won’t divorce Bella. What to him is devotion is to her, not surprisingly, intransigence. Bella has no interest in or desire for Markovitch, yet even though the two live separate lives, sometimes in the same house and sometimes not, he continues to refuse her a divorce, a state of affairs that persists for years.

The novel explores the consequences of this refusal, not just on Bella and Yaakov but also on a handful of others associated with the voyage. This group, most of whom end up on a moshav (I think maybe in the Jezreel Valley, though I can’t be sure: Gundar-Goshen never tells us where it is though maybe it’s obvious to Israeli readers), is clearly intended to represent the generation that founded the state of Israel. Some reviewers—especially those in the German-language press—read the novel as an attempt by a member of the younger generation (Gundar-Goshen was born in 1982) to debunk the myths of tenacity and sacrifice that have long been used to characterize the pioneers who forged a Jewish homeland by making the desert bloom and by defeating a sea of implacable enemies.

I don’t think this reading is quite right, though. It’s not so much that Gundar-Goshen wants to disparage her forbearers or show them as less than heroic. If she did, she would surely have written her book in a less mythologizing style. I’ve always been suspicious of the term “magic realism” because I’ve never understood it. But I think it might be the right term to describe Gundar-Goshen’s book. Consider some of its events: a house become literally frigid as a result of the hostility between its inhabitants; a woman smells of oranges so strongly that the man who loves her unrequitedly banishes the fruit from his surroundings for the rest of his life; and a man willfully blinds himself by staring into the sun after receiving admittedly terrible news. Emotions are literalized in the world of the novel; feelings are so powerful they work on things in extraordinary ways. Here, for example, is Markovitch’s friend extolling the virtues of his soon-to-be wife: “At that point Zeev Feinberg burst into such roaring laughter that the train accelerated, and he finally sighed and said, ‘When we go back, I’ll marry her. Really and truly.’”

The language here—of admiration so strong it can make a train speed up—seems to support the mythology of the virile pioneer. It’s possible, of course, that the novel’s marvelous events are meant ironically. But I think we’re meant to sympathize with these characters, not disparage them.

It’s true that the magic realism of Garcia Marquez and Carpentier and others was developed as a response to the overwhelming vicissitudes of colonial experience, of a way of life so confounding that “mere” realism couldn’t make sense of it. As such magic realism isn’t quiescent or naïve but rather politically subversive. But Gundar-Goshen always subordinates public politics to private emotions, as her opening paragraph makes clear:

Yaacov Markoviotch wasn’t ugly. Which is not to say he was handsome. Little girls didn’t burst into tears at the sight of him, but neither did they smile when they saw his face. He was, you might say, gloriously average. Moreover, Yaacov Markovitch’s face was remarkably free of distinguishing features. So much so that your eyes could not linger on him, but slipped onward to other objects. A tree on the street. A cat in the corner. It required an enormous effort to keep looking at the barrenness of Yaacov Markovitch’s face. People do not enjoy making enormous effort, and so they only rarely looked at his face for any length of time. This had its advantages, and the unit commander was aware of them. He looked at Yaacov Markovitch’s face for exactly the amount of time he needed, then dropped his gaze. You will smuggle weapons, the unit commander said. With that face, no one will notice. And he was right. Yaacov Markovitch probably smuggled more weapons than any other member of the Irgun, and never came close to being caught. The British soldiers’ gaze slid over his face like oil on a gun.

Reading this paragraph in the bookstore I thought I was going to get a novel about the struggle to establish a Jewish state and I was intrigued enough to overlook those irritating sentence fragments and the repeated use of Yaacov Markovitch’s full name (a tic I still cannot explain charitably). But that’s not the book I got. The dangerous missions alluded to by the narrator are never described, the investigation of the terrorism at the heart of the founding of the state is never pursued. What is developed instead is the effect of Markovitch’s face on women, not just the little girls referred to here. But even the physical and emotional responses of distaste, even repulsion, that become so important to the book are confusingly presented. It’s not clear why the “gloriously average” face becomes, in the space of a sentence or two, an almost pathological “barrenness.”

One Night, Markovitch might not put politics at its center, but it doesn’t ignore the political events of the period entirely. Feinberg—the one whose laugh sped up the train—fights in the 1948 war and is psychologically traumatized when he accidentally kills an Arab woman and child. The novel doesn’t have much to say about Jewish-Arab relations, even in moments like this one where it directly references them. Instead, Feinberg’s guilt is depicted through the freezing of his relationship with his wife and child, an emotional disassociation only broken by the melodramatic series of events that follow from his decision to become a Nazi hunter in postwar Europe. One of his victims has an infant child, which he takes as his own, returning with her to Israel.

All of which might simply mean that Gundar-Goshen is more comfortable talking about the nascent Israel’s relationship to Europe than to the Arab-Israeli conflict. (Is the only way for Gentiles to overcome their enmity to Jews to become them, the only way for Jews to overcome their enmity to Gentiles to make them Jews?) But I think that the central tragedy of the Zionist enterprise—its willingness to repeatedly indulge its central fiction: that the land it bent to its will was empty—is never far from her thoughts.

In that sense, then, the split between politics and emotions I’ve been ascribing to the novel isn’t really there. Instead, the emotional warfare practiced by the characters on each other becomes an allegory for Israel’s political situation. This possibility is made clear in two extended meditations on Markovitch’s refusal to divorce Bella.

In the first, Feinberg has learned that Markovitch sleeps every night with Bella’s nightdress and upbraids him for thinking that eventually the nightdress will turn into a woman. “ ‘It’ll never happen, not in a year, not in twenty.’” Markovitch angrily responds:

‘So in another thirty, or forty. You know what, Feinberg, maybe never. But I hope, and that’s something too. And maybe if I hope enough, if I hope really hard, that hope will turn into something real. Look at us, look at this country. Two thousand years we’ve been hoping for her, waiting for her, sleeping at might with our arms around the sleeves of her nightdress, because what is history if not the sleeves of a nightdress that has no smell? And you think she wants us? You think this country returns our love? Nonsense! She vomits us up time and time again, sends us to hell, beats us down without mercy. With the Romans and the Greeks and the Arabs and the mosquitoes. So you think that someone here says, ‘If she doesn’t want me, I should go?’ Someone here says, ‘There’s no point in holding a country by force if she’s been trying to get rid of you from the minute you came to her.’ No. You hold on to her as hard as you can and you hope.’

History might be a lot of things, it might be a nightmare from which we are trying to escape, but nothing here convinces me that it’s the sleeves of a nightdress that has no smell. But just where is the narrator in relation to Markovitch’s outburst? How are we to take his claims? The hoary conflation of land and woman suggests that the answer is, skeptically, a reading supported by the second passage, in which even Markovitch himself comes to see that the rhetoric of oppression, coercion and domination does more harm than good. Feinberg and his wife have suffered a terrible loss; Markovitch catches them comforting each other:

[Markovitch] looked at Zeev Feinberg with wide-open eyes. Only a moment ago he was roaring outside the hospital, gripping his pain and anger with clenched teeth. Now he had let it all go at once, leaving the rotting carcass behind, and had returned to comfort his wife. And he, Markovitch, had been wallowing in his own pain for so many years, holding on to his protesting wife, refusing to let go…. Yaacov Markovitch had been holding on to Bella for so long, and she did not want him. He held her dress in his clenched fist and refused to let go. When he looked at Zeev Feinberg’s open hand on Sonya’s shoulder, he suddenly remembered the blessing of fingers spread wide. And he wondered if he could still open his hand. But the thought terrified him. Let go? Of Bella? How could he? His fist had been clenched for so many years that his hand was no longer suited to any other work. Refusal had been a way of life for him.

The description of the fingers spread wide refers to a line from the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai that stands as the novel’s epigraph: “Even a fist was once an open palm with fingers.” In her riff on Amichai’s image, Gundar-Goshen reveals Feinberg as the closest thing the book has to a hero because of his willingness to forgive, forget, let go, change.

The passage never makes it obvious but it’s hard for me to read Markovitch’s epiphany and not think about the Arab-Israeli conflict. What it might mean to fully unfold the metaphor—to imagine what it might mean for Israelis to unclench the fist against those they’ve refused to let go (which in turn would mean thinking that the Israelis at least believe they love the Arabs, a strange idea perhaps but one that would make sense in the Freudian theory that there is no opposition between love and hate)—is unclear. Perhaps the allegory is really about the Israelis themselves, and a part of themselves they’ve held hostage or forgotten in their decades of being clenched. I don’t know—the book doesn’t tell us. Maybe not surprisingly, it is better at diagnosing the perils of refusal than the implications of acceptance.

But a book premised on the comparability of politics and emotions that cannot articulate what that comparison might enable or require is in bad faith. Gundar-Goshen’s revision of the narratives that have dominated Israeli history is based on the idea that our intimate, emotional relationships ought to predispose our political ones. But she seems unable to tell us how or to what end. And that makes the book more muddleheaded than anything else.

In the end, I just don’t know what to do with One Night, Markovitch. I didn’t read it with particular pleasure, found many of its characters irritatingly portentous and moony, grew exasperated with its magical events and histrionic prose—“Because Sonya’s eyes were identical to Bella’s and, from now on, one would not be able to cry without the other crying along with her.”

I was frustrated not because I disdain the thing that might go under the term “magic’ but because I believe in them so much. Gundar-Goshen’s magic of potent laughter, sentient houses, and inescapable odours is thin gruel compared to the real work that fantasy performs in our affective and social-political lives. Ultimately it’s the domestication of magic that bothers me about One Night, Markovitch.

Yet I can’t entirely dismiss it, either. I’m drawn to its belief that anyone who expects to be able to force another person to recognize their desires, even from what might seem good or noble motives, misunderstands the idea of what it means to enter into a relationship. And the reminder that a fist was always—and so might become again—an open palm and five dexterous, supple fingers resonates powerfully and beautifully for me. Still, when the bit that lingers most from an almost 400 page novel is its epigraph, maybe it’s time to search out the inspiration rather than invest more energy teasing out the contradictions of the work it inspired.

You can read the first installment of my encounter with contemporary Israeli writing here. I’m going to have to pick up the pace if I want to be able to come to any meaningful conclusions…

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