Magdalena Tulli's Flaw

Daniel Green’s post on Magdalena Tulli’s Flaw makes this book sound incredibly intriguing:

Flaw relates what happens on this square over the course of a single day. And it is an eventful day. Most dramatically, a large group of “refugees” emerges from the streetcar and crowds into the square, to the extreme consternation of the local residents. Eventually the refugees are confined en masse in a cellar, but at the end of the day it is discovered that they have disappeared. An Army general is disconcerted by this turn of events, reflecting that “What he ordered to be locked up should have remained so, period. . .The absence of the crowd is nothing but a special form of presence, and what has changed is in essence of secondary importance. Since the refugees are no longer here, they must be somewhere else, that much is obvious” The refugees seem to be a consequence of a coup that has taken place somewhere amid the “sandy excavations” outside the square but that we know about only through the rumors circulating through the square and that may have been connected to a loud explosion heard earlier in the day. [. . .]

One senses that the next day on this (presumably) East European square would unfold much like the day the novel has related, if not in detail then certainly in essence. That the novel has managed to convey this essence is perhaps a mark of its “success,” but Flaw also seems to suggest that representing a bare essence of human existence is the best that fiction can do. By dramatizing the seat-of-the-pants process by which fiction is composed, highlighting the conventional signals of “setting” or “character” that guide our reading of fiction, disclosing the extent to which fiction is the active struggle to incorporate reality within an aesthetic scheme, not a completed account of reality, Flaw exposes the “flaw” in thinking that fiction can be a seamless represention of the real. It is artifice all the way down, and it does no justice, either to fiction or to the reality it seeks to encompass, to deny that fact.

Ultimately the true success of Flaw is its dynamic—I would even say entertaining—performance of this internal drama about the act of fiction-making.

Green also touches on something that I’ve been on about for a while—the necessary struggle to create a context for international literature:

Archipelago Books has without question become an indispensable source of translated fiction, but I wonder whether it would be possible to include with its volumes a preface or critical introduction, presumably by a scholar or critic familiar with the author’s work and/or with that author’s national literature. Such an introduction might be especially useful for readers curious about a writer like Tulli but who really have no context within which to place her work.