Here’s a message from Monica Carter of Salonica and Skylight Books—our featured indie store of the month—about some interesting upcoming events.

One of the trademarks of Skylight Books is the ability to recognize and promote the literary greats of our time. Ten years ago, Skylight Books not only participated in the Harry Potter phenomenon with a midnight release party, but was the originator of the Thomas Pynchon Against the Day midnight release party. The tradition continues at Skylight Books with our dedication to celebrating the literary talents of today with our second Thomas Pynchon Midnight Release Party for his new novel, Inherent Vice, on August 4. Along with Pynchon, we will be hosting not one but two parties for Infinite Summer (not a footnote of a party, a PARTY!), the effort of bibliophiles from around the world to read Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009. William T. Vollman has been a perennial bestseller at our store and also a staff favorite which is why we are the only independent bookstore in Los Angeles to host an event for his new book of photographs, Imperial. These events are indicative of Skylight Books’ commitment to fostering cultural vivacity in our own community as well as the global literary community.

Today’s Publishing Perspectives includes an editorial that I wrote about the “state of translations” in America attempting to explain the dip in the number of translations coming out this year:

For years, people have speculated that the number of literary works in translation being published in the United States has been in decline. I say “speculate,” because the publishing industry — which is notoriously poor at market research and data gathering — didn’t really keep track of how many translations were being published here, instead relying almost entirely on wistful memories of days gone by and other equally questionable anecdotal evidence. Two years ago, I started a “Translation Database” at the Web site ThreePercent.com to finally quantify what’s going on with literature in translation, and although data for 2009 is still coming in, it looks like there will be a bit of a drop off this year — of as much as 10%.

On one hand, this is pretty easy to explain: it’s because of the economy. But in my opinion, we’re talking about two different economic problems causing this. Book sales are down, which really hurts commercial presses and makes them less likely to publish “expensive” books like translations. And at the same time, nonprofits and university presses (which publish the bulk of translations already), are struggling to find funding, what with foundations losing a lot of their endowments in the stock market, and individual donors struggling as well.

It’s a crappy situation, and unless a few rainmakers appear, 2010 will most likely see a further drop in translations being published in America . . . Just a little happy note to kick off your Friday . . .

Thanks to Bud Parr for posting this amazing video featuring Attila Bartis, whose Tranquility won the 2009 Best Translated Book Award. The footage is mostly taken from a conversation between Brian Evenson and Bartis that took place at Idlewild Books that took a couple months ago.

Very cool. Very, very cool.

Nigel Beale—whose interviews are always really interesting—recently posted a great discussion with Ha Jin about his recent book, The Writer as Migrant, which was recently released by University of Chicago Press and sounds pretty good:

Ha Jin’s journey raises rich and fascinating questions about language, migration, and the place of literature in a rapidly globalizing world—questions that take center stage in “The Writer as Migrant,” his first work of nonfiction. Consisting of three interconnected essays, this book sets Ha Jin’s own work and life alongside those of other literary exiles, creating a conversation across cultures and between eras. He employs the cases of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Chinese novelist Lin Yutang to illustrate the obligation a writer feels to the land of his birth, while Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov—who, like Ha Jin, adopted English for their writing—are enlisted to explore a migrant author’s conscious choice of a literary language. A final essay draws on V. S. Naipaul and Milan Kundera to consider the ways in which our era of perpetual change forces a migrant writer to reconceptualize the very idea of home. Throughout, Jin brings other celebrated writers into the conversation as well, including W. G. Sebald, C. P. Cavafy, and Salman Rushdie—refracting and refining the very idea of a literature of migration.

Oh boy, this should be fun. Over the next 10 days, Green Apple Books will be posting short-format, tongue-in-cheek (and maybe a bit over-the-top) videos pitting the Book against The Kindle. Here’s the first one:

From the Finnish Institute in London (via Nordic Voices):

The Finnish Institute in London and FILI – Finnish Literature Exchange are pleased to announce a translation competition to source new talent in translating fiction from Finnish to English. You do not have to be a language professional; eligible participants include everyone from novices to experienced translators. What you do need is a passion for language, a good understanding of Finnish and a talent for writing in English.

bq.The translation competition is part of the Finnish Institute’s programme of activities aiming at increasing the number of Finnish books entering the British literary market. We invite you to translate, from Finnish to English, Maritta Lintunen’s piece “Piinaviikko” from her collection of short prose entitled Ovisilmä (WSOY, 2006).

Entering the competition is easy. Just download the text and the entry form, translate the text by 31 August 2009, and send both to us (as .doc, .rtf or .pdf). There is no entry fee.

Click here for a pdf of “Piinaviikko” and click here to download the official entry form.

Over at World Books, Bill Marx has a very thoughtful review of two Swiss horror books: The Vampire of Ropraz, by Jacques Chessex, translated by W. Donald Wilson and published by Bitter Lemon (a Best Translated Book nominee) and The Black Spider, by Jeremias Gotthelf, translated by H. M. Waidson and published by Oneworld Classics.

The spanking new The Vampire of Ropraz asserts that, when faced with irrational violence, the forces of ignorance and fear predominate. The classic The Black Spider (which was first published in 1842; this is a reprint of the 1958 English edition) revolves around a reneged deal with the Devil, who wants, but doesn’t get, an unbaptized child as payment for his services. The betrayal unleashes the title monster, who can be stopped by goodness, if it is free of moral corruption and hypocrisy. The latter turns out to be a tall order. But at least there’s some Paradise around to counterbalance Gotthelf’s Hell.

Interestingly, both of these books root their avenging vision of mayhem in the brutal mistreatment of children. Gotthelf appears to wish for a God “Who would avenge Himself terribly for all the injustice that is done to poor children who cannot defend themselves.” In a strange way, the Devil is doing the Lord’s work by punishing the sadists among the low- and upper classes.

I was pleasantly surprised by The Vampire of Ropraz, and although The Black Spider doesn’t sound like my sort of book, it does come with a ringing endorsement by Thomas Mann, who claimed it is “like almost no other piece of world literature.”

The new Murakami book — 1Q84 — is now available in Japan, and this review at Neojaponisme is the first comprehensive take on the book that I’ve come across. Long review for a long book that sounds pretty intriguing (if not in need of a bit of editing):

1Q84 sprawls 1055 pages in the hardback version and chronicles a large portion of Japanese history in passing, but the main narrative concerns just a handful of characters over a six-month period in 1984. Murakami uses his favorite device to frame the novel – alternating storylines with separate protagonists that become more closely linked as the plot thickens. These protagonists are Aomame, a fitness and martial arts instructor in Tokyo who grew up in a fictional missionary group called the Shōninkai (証人会, literally “Association of Witnesses”), and Kawana Tengo, a prep school math instructor and aspiring writer who has never met his mother. [. . .]

First, something is rotten in Tokyo in 1984. Numerous intrigues are described as usankusai (胡散臭い): fishy, shady or suspicious. An editor conspires to ghost-write a novel and have it win the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious award for up and coming writers. A secret religious cult (loosely based on radical movements of the ’60s and religious cults like Aum Shinrikyo) plots some terrible evil in its Yamanashi Prefecture compound. A wealthy, landed woman wages a covert war on misogyny. The world undergoes abrupt, strange, and highly specific changes, and that trip to the dark side of the moon is more literal than you might expect.

These schemes draw in our protagonists like whirlpools, bringing in another key theme: hikareru (惹かれる) (to be drawn in) and related words make frequent appearances. Tengo is convinced to play ghost writer by his editor Komatsu, but he also admits to being equally drawn in by the book itself, which is titled “Kūki sanagi” 『空気さなぎ』(”The Air Chrysalis”) and written by the quiet 17-year-old storyteller Fukada Eriko. Aomame is recruited by the unnamed wealthy lady and drawn into her conspiracy. [. . .]

As Aomame and Tengo get closer and closer, their connection is revealed, and they seem to be fighting for similar objectives. The ending Murakami provides suggests that one of the characters might become “the egg” cracked on “the wall” of the system he referred to in his acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize earlier this year, while the other may battle on and try to recover the past. By no measure is the action complete within the 1055 pages of these two volumes; the way things are resolved points to the final line of Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady With the Little Dog,” a tale of two lovers who finally resolve to elope at the end of the story: “…it was clear to both of them that the end was still far, far off, and that the most complicated and difficult part was just beginning.” [. . .]

Parts of 1Q84 rival Murakami’s best writing. The tale of Tengo’s father, who tried his luck as a settler in Manchuria before returning to Japan to work as a collection man for NHK; Tengo’s married girlfriend’s ominous dream she relates to him in bed at the end of Book 1 (remarkably similar in style and feel to boku’s dream in “The Twins and the Sunken Continent”); and a story within the story about a town run completely by cats from a book that Tengo reads, are three notable examples. But overall, the book feels long, inconsistent, and occasionally repetitive. Over the course of 1,000 pages, characters and themes both float in and out of the narrative, many of them seemingly forgotten by the end of Book 2. Religious cults are discussed in depth in Book 1 only to be left out of Book 2. Tengo’s father is an important part of the whole book, but it is unclear how his past is connected to the rest of the book. Ebisuno-sensei, Fukaeri’s foster father, has most of his action offstage, and we never even meet Azami, Fukaeri’s foster sister. Most of the book is spent going over the past of the characters, so much so that plot discussion more extensive than that given above would start to reveal some of the only development in the novel’s present — plot that Murakami made no secret of trying to keep a secret in the run up to the publishing date.

The new issue of PW, has a lengthy article by Richard Nash about his new venture (in collaboration with Dedi Felman), which is called Cursor:

After months of work, with Dedi’s help I outlined my vision for a new venture at this year’s BookExpo America. Then called Round Table, now tentatively called Cursor, it represents a new, “social” approach to publishing. To call Cursor “niche” or another “independent” publishing enterprise would be a poor approximation, because those terms fail to capture the organic gurgle of culture at the heart of the venture, the exchange of insight and opinion, the flow of memes and the creation of culture in real time that is now enabled by the Internet.

My business plan is now out with investors—I will spare you the P&L numbers and just offer the broad strokes. Cursor will establish a portfolio of self-reinforcing online membership communities. To start, this includes Red Lemonade, a pop-lit-alt-cult operation, and charmQuark, a sci-fi/fantasy community.

The business will focus on developing the value of the reading and writing ecosystem, including the growth of markets for established authors, as well as engaging readers and supporting emerging writers. Each community will have a publishing imprint, which will make money from authors’ books, sold as digital downloads, conventional print and limited artisanal editions—and will offer authors all the benefits of a digital platform: faster time to market, faster accounting cycles, faster payments to authors. But the greatest opportunity is in the community itself. Each will have tiers of membership, including paid memberships that will offer exclusive access to tools and services, such as rich text editors for members to upload their own writing, peer-to-peer writing groups, recommendation engines, access to established authors online and in person, and editorial or marketing assistance. Members can get both peer-based feedback and professional feedback.

Other revenue opportunities include the provision of electronic distribution services to other publishers; fee-based or revenue-share software modules, especially for online writing workshops or seminars for publishers, literary journals, teaching programs; fee-based linking of writers to suppliers of publishing services, including traditional publishers and agents; corporate sponsorships and site advertising; and events and speaking fees. Yes, I envisage Cursor obtaining a larger basket of rights than is the industry standard, but that will be in exchange for shorter exclusive licensing periods. Our contracts will be limited to three-year terms with an option to renew.

The Cursor business model seeks to unite all the various existing revenues in the writing-reading ecosystem, from offering services to aspiring writers far more cheaply than most vendors to finding more ways to get more money to authors faster. It also will create highly sensitive feedback loops that will tell each community’s staff what tools and features users want, what books users think the imprint should be publishing, how the imprint could publish better.

It’ll be interesting to see what this looks like once it launches, and how it evolves. And I’m sure we’ll be writing more about the implications of this business model in the future. One thing that strikes me about Richard’s idea—and this definitely comes through in talking to him about publishing and the future of the book business—is that he has a strong interest in the social aspect of reading and believes that the primary value of publishing houses is their ability to connect writers and readers (through marketing, through distribution chains).

That’s not to undervalue the editorial knowledge present in publishing houses, but he tends to shy away from a publisher as a creator of a particular editorial vision. Or at least as the only player creating a particular editorial vision:

An indie press’s distinctive voice is a profoundly collective thing, set by its authors, its fans, its casual readers. The publisher’s role, my role and the role of the staff are to be conduits, advocates, enablers, to serve the readers and writers—to be the grease. Toward the end of my Soft Skull tenure, however, it occurred to me that we’ve all—indie and corporate—fallen victim to the notion of ourselves as gatekeepers. Perhaps that is to compensate for, well, the lack of other compensation. But in the past couple of years, sustaining the gatekeeper mentality has been hard as the pressure has grown from within and without.

This does seem to be a new model for publishing—one that might not replace all existing models, but will definitely complement them. As to whether it will “save” publishing, Richard has a nice bit about that idea:

Cursor is not designed to “save publishing,” but simply to offer the kind of services that readers and writers, established and emerging, want and the Internet enables. I believe especially strongly that the model must be viable in a world where the effective price of digital content falls to zero, and paper becomes like vinyl records or fine art prints. After all, the world is littered with things that people won’t buy at the prices their producers want to charge—like, say, the contents of remainder bins.

Over at Salonica, Monica Carter posted a very comprehensive, incredibly useful guide to online resources for information about Eastern European literature. Definitely worth exploring.

The new issue of The New Yorker has a really interesting piece by print-advocate Nicholson Baker about the Kindle. It’s worth reading the whole article—I haven’t read a review of the Kindle quite like this one—but here are a few of the highlights:

It came, via UPS, in a big cardboard box. Inside the box were some puffy clear bladders of plastic, a packing slip with “$359” on it, and another cardboard box. This one said, in spare, lowercase type, “kindle.” On the side of the box was a plastic strip inlaid into the cardboard, which you were meant to pull to tear the package cleanly open. On it were the words “Once upon a time.” I pulled and opened.

Inside was another box, fancier than the first. Black cardboard was printed with a swarm of glossy black letters, and in the middle was, again, the word “kindle.” There was another pull strip on the side, which again said, “Once upon a time.” I’d entered some nesting Italo Calvino folktale world of packaging. (Calvino’s Italian folktales aren’t yet available at the Kindle Store, by the way.) I pulled again and opened. [. . .]

The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray. The resizable typeface, Monotype Caecilia, appeared as a darker gray. Dark gray on paler greenish gray was the palette of the Amazon Kindle.

Baker’s bit about the graphics—both in terms of illustrated books (like cook books) and papers is particularly relevant . . . and funny:

One more expensive example. The Kindle edition of “Selected Nuclear Materials and Engineering Systems,” an e-book for people who design nuclear power plants, sells for more than eight thousand dollars. Figure 2 is an elaborate chart of a reaction scheme, with many call-outs and chemical equations. It’s totally illegible. “You Save: $1,607.80 (20%),” the Kindle page says. “I’m not going to buy this book until the price comes down,” one stern Amazoner wrote.

And the information about Vizplex (“the trade name of the layered substance that makes up the Kindle’s display) is very interesting as well.

I haven’t tried reading a book on a Kindle or iPhone, but Baker seems to prefer the latter, even though it is a high resolution, backlit reading experience (compared to the “reflective” eInk, which apparently has some issues when you read it outside in the sun):

In print, “The Lincoln Lawyer” swept me up. At night, I switched over to the e-book version on the iPod ($7.99 from the Kindle Store), so that I could carry on in the dark. I began swiping the tiny iPod pages faster and faster.

Then, out of a sense of duty, I forced myself to read the book on the physical Kindle 2. It was like going from a Mini Cooper to a white 1982 Impala with blown shocks.

Although at that point the text itself takes over:

But never mind: at that point, I was locked into the plot and it didn’t matter. Poof, the Kindle disappeared, just as Jeff Bezos had promised it would. I began walking up and down the driveway, reading in the sun. Three distant lawnmowers were going. Someone wearing a salmon-colored shirt was spraying a hose across the street. But I was in the courtroom, listening to the murderer testify. I felt the primitive clawing pressure of wanting to know how things turned out.

The twenty-four title longlist for the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize was announced last week and is listed in full below. The press release has bio information for all of the authors, but not a lot of info on their books.

(Just as Michael Orthofer has his bit about how this award isn’t Asian enough I have my standard complaint that the best way of increasing awareness and appreciation for these “unpublished works of Asian fiction in English” is to include excerpts on the website.)

Anyway, here’s the list:

• Gopilal Acharya, With a Stone in My Heart

• Omair Ahmad, Jimmy the Terrorist

• Siddharth Chowdhury, Day Scholar

• Kishwar Desai, Witness the Night

• Samuel Ferrer, The Last Gods of Indochine

• Eric Gamalinda, The Descartes Highlands

• Ram Govardhan, Rough with the Smooth

• Kanishka Gupta, History of Hate

• Kameroon Rasheed Ismeer, Memoirs of a Terrorist

• Ratika Kapur, Overwinter

• Mariam Karim, The Bereavement of Agnes Desmoulins

• Sriram Karri, The Autobiography of a Mad Nation

• Nitasha Kaul, Residue

• R. Zamora Linmark, Leche

• Mario I. Miclat, Secrets of the Eighteen Mansions

• Clarissa V. Militante, Different Countries

• Varuna Mohite, Omigod

• Dipika Mukherjee, Thunder Demons

• Hena Pillai, Blackland

• Roan Ching-Yueh, Lin Xiu-Tzi and her Family

• Edgar Calabia Samar, Eight Muses of the Fall

• K. Srilata, Table for Four

• Su Tong, The Boat to Redemption

• Oyungerel Tsedevdamba, Shadow of the Red Star

The shortlist will be announced in October, and the winner on Monday, November 16th.

Following on last week’s post about the benefits (or in the eyes of Kim Heijdenrijk, the non-benefits) of a Fixed Book Price Agreement, I found this article by Stacy Mitchell about the shift in book sales from B&N and Borders to Costco, Target, Wal-Mart, etc.

It’s a pretty interesting piece about the impact of selling media (books, CDs) as loss-leaders. Not necessarily rocket science: big box stores sell books at a loss, take over huge chunk of the marketplace (they now have a 30% market share—which is as large as B&N/Borders), then, once competition is sufficiently weakened and damaged, they cut the number of books they sell, raise prices, and go on their merry way selling toasters and whatnot. (And returning massive amounts of the books they do carry. I’ve heard from a few sources that Costco’s return rate is in the 60% range. Which means that if you’re lucky enough to have a book that Costco wants to carry, you’re guaranteed to lose a ton of money. Fantastic!)

The section of this essay that I found most interesting—and which relates to the whole FBPA issue—is the bit about predatory pricing:

Selling goods below cost in order to drive competitors out of business — a strategy Wal-Mart first employed against small-town drugstores in the Midwest in the 1980s and now uses for nationwide assaults on entire product categories — is technically illegal. But U.S. antitrust enforcers have taken a very lax attitude toward predatory pricing and other antitrust violations ever since the Reagan Administration.

The consequence is an economy where power is so concentrated that it undermines the free market itself and threatens our individual liberty within it. Bullied and financially squeezed by mega-retailers, manufacturers have little choice but to focus on producing a narrow range of products that suit these companies’ needs, while cutting support for competing retailers and eliminating investment in new products, writers, and artists.

This is the sort of thing that the FBPA is trying to prevent . . . And since we’re pretty far afield here (I swear, the next post will actually be about translation and books), ti seems only fitting to include the video of Douglas Rushkoff’s appearance on the Colbert Report. Douglas’s book — Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back — is a very interesting examination of the role corporations have played in our history and have shaped so much of our world. Very interesting book, and very entertaining interview with Colbert:

The Abu Dhabi-based The National has one of the first reviews of Bolano’s The Skating Rink, which is coming out from New Directions later this year.

Giles Harvey’s raview spends a lot of time on Borges and Poe, detective fiction, and the creation of the reader of detective fiction, which is all quite interesting, and ties in nicely to this particular novel.

Like Death and the Compass, Bolaño’s latest novel to be translated into English (and his first to be published in the Spanish-speaking world, back in 1993), The Skating Rink is, at least in part, a parody of detective fiction – or, strictly speaking, of crime fiction, the meaner, sexier, more violent love child of the detective story and 20th-century America. The Skating Rink lavishes on the reader many of the pleasures typically associated with that genre – suspense, intrigue, the exhilarating spectacle of moral decay – while making it quite clear that such pleasures are by no means the full extent of what it has to offer; it fondles and flaunts its own artifice, using it to explore chaos, reality, experience.

There has been a murder in the small resort town of Z on the Costa Brava. Three men – all ardent, wayward, headstrong, although in other respects quite dissimilar – appear to be implicated in the crime. These men share between themselves the task of telling the book’s story, each narrating brief chapters in turn.

Sounds interesting, and the novel’s meandering opening line (“The first time I saw him, it was int he Calle Bucareli, in Mexico City, that is, back in the vague shifty territory of our adolescence, the province of hardened poets, on a night of heavy fog, which slowed the traffic and prompted conversations about that odd phenomenon, so rare in Mexico City at night, at least as far as I can remember.”) is delicious, but it’s this closing paragraph that sold me:

In Bolaño there is no such poise, burnish or masterful cerebration. Instead people are always flubbing their lines and missing their cues. In fact, there aren’t even any actual detectives in The Skating Rink. Morán, the reader of crime fiction, gets to play at detection: it’s he who finds the body and then, rather inadvertently, discovers who’s responsible. But the revelation reveals hardly anything. It just inaugurates another mystery. And then the book ends, less crime novel than shaggy dog story.

And now I know how I’m spending my weekend.

Generally speaking, I’m a fan of the “fixed book price agreement” that’s in place in a number of countries around the world. (At least 18, according to Wikipedia, aka America’s Best Source of Information.) I’ve mentioned a few times in posts here on Three Percent, always emphasizing the way that it slightly levels the playing field by preventing massive corporations from offering discounts on shitty best-selling books that are so deep that no independent store can possibly compete.

Harry Potter is the ultimate example of this. Several major retailers (ya’ll know who they are, and they know as well) essentially sold Harry Potter at a loss in order to increase the number of sales and customers. (I remember when I was at Quail Ridge Books, it was cheaper for us to buy copies of HP from Costco—god help us all—than it was to purchase them directly from Scholastic.)

One of the main arguments for the fixed book price—which, if I haven’t made this clear, is a law that ensures the same book is sold at the same price at all outlets—is that it allows smaller stores to carry a more diverse stock. It sort of hampers the blockbuster model and, in theory at least, promotes a more healthy book culture in which presses can publish poetry and survive, and bookstores aren’t overrun with stacks of shitty popular books.

All that said, I was pretty surprised to come across this essay by Kim Heijdenrijk about why the fixed book price agreement (of FBPA) is damaging to independent stores.

Living in a country that prides itself on its insane laws protecting free economic principles, I probably shouldn’t comment on how well (or poorly) the FBPA actually works. But wtf, it’s America, I’m writing for a blog, etc. So, here’s Kim’s main arguments, and my socialist cautionary counter-arguments.

It was then that I learned how much is earned on a book. Or better said: how little. And this particular shop got quite a big margin, since it is so large and well known. I was shocked. When speaking to my boss about it, he merely said: “Why do you think we also have a music store, a coffee shop and an office supply store?”. Point taken. It is almost impossible to survive on the sales of books alone. Even with a relatively big margin.

This particular Dutch bookstore is very fortunate. A success story if you will. But only because of the business strategy they chose. Books as a core business, other products to stay afloat. How many independent booksellers are in the position to do this? How do you get people to buy at your shop instead of the big chains that are on every high street? The obvious – if not the only – way is to do what supermarkets do. Have a sale. Lower the prices of particular products, in this case particular books. A very good idea, if the Fixed Book Price Agreement did not forbid it.

OK, yes, price is one factor on which a business traditionally differentiates itself, but really? As stated in paragraph one, the margin for books is pretty much shit. So a sale will only effectively improve your long-term business if the people you attract through temporarily lowering prices are converted into loyal customers. And unfortunately, that’s pretty unlikely. The second an independent store starts offering a discount, a chain store will offer a larger one. And if the tacit assumption is that customers are “rational economic agents” (this is a bullshit pro-capitalist belief, but I’m going to let it ride for now) that make decisions primarily because of price, they’ll end up shopping at the indie store’s competitors.

Now the idea behind the FBPA. The idea is that bookshops make the most money on bestsellers. These books, like Harry Potter or the Da Vinci Code, cost little effort to sell. And hardly any advertising money for the bookseller, because these books get enough exposure. Without the fixed book price, a bookshop could offer these books at competitive prices to lure readers into their shops. With the fixed prices, the booksellers loose [sic] this advantage.

Wait a second here . . . So, you have a handful of mega-bestsellers, books that you don’t have to do much of anything to sell by the gaggle, books that you could sell at regular retail price and no one blinks—these are the books you want to sell at a discount? In an industry in which breaking even is a pretty significant accomplishment, this seems like a bad decision. Bookstore owners cherish the time when they actually made money on books like Harry Potter instead of fighting to breakeven, or having to expend a ton of rhetorical energy to convince customers to pay the extra $2 and buy the book from an independent so that that store can continue to serve its local community. Overall, this point seems massively misguided.

The publishers want the bookstores to promote lesser known – more specialized – books instead of the ‘high flyers’. They want to create ‘bibliodiversity’, as is stated in a paper by the International Publishers Association. To make sure that the shop owners practice this innovative word, the publishers offer a guaranteed/larger margin on the bestsellers. This way everybody wins. The publisher knows that the ‘big’ books will sell anyway and therefore they can give a good profit margin to the bookseller. The bookseller should be able to fund the promotion of the ‘small’ books because of this. And they live happily ever after . . .

Exactly.

The so called ‘benefits’ for these little shops can only be viewed as ludicrous. The fixed book price would protect them from the competition of supermarkets in their area that sell books at bargain prices. For this reason the independent bookseller in less convenient places would have a better chance of survival. I would advise the creator of this benefit to pick up an economy book. [Again, sic] The buyer of books in the supermarket is, of course, an entirely different person than the one purchasing a book in a bookshop. The books available at supermarkets are there for the impulse buyer. A person who does not read a lot and heard from a friend that he should read a certain book.

Veering off for a minute into socio-economics (and a totally different topic), I’m pretty much against books being sold in supermarkets. Not only is the selection totally weak, but Wal*Mart/Sam’s Club/Costco detract from the public perception of the bookstore as a unique, worthwhile business. Books in supermarkets are pure commodities, no different than frozen peas. There will always be a specialized group of bookstore lovers who would rather shop for real literature in a real bookstore, yet there’s a growing number of people who believe literature equals the latest Jodi Picoult book on sale for 25% off right next to the super-sized tub of KitKat bars. (I believe they call themselves “Pi-Cultists.”) Yeah, that’s what the world needs now.

One thing Kim doesn’t bring up are the other ways independent bookstores could differentiate themselves in lieu of discounts. The shopping/browsing experience is influenced by space, by design, by customer service. Independent stores tend to be more community-focused and customer-oriented than their corporate equivalents, and also tend to know a lot about actual books that they can recommend to their clientele. There are many more value-added aspects a store could emphasize than price. Trying to fight Goliath by knocking $1 off the list price is a slippery slope to utter bankruptcy.

Over at the Tin House blog (which is relatively new and very solid), South African author Michiel Heyns has an interesting essay about creativity and translation:

I have just sent off the first draft of a translation of a 130,000-word novel, Etienne van Heerden’s 30 Nagte in Amsterdam (30 Nights in Amsterdam). By chance, on the same day, I receive a Call for Papers from the University of Swansea in the UK for a conference on “The Author-Translator in the European Literary Tradition.” The call for papers kicks off with the following paragraph:

The recent ‘creative turn’ in translation studies has challenged notions of translation as a derivative and uncreative activity which is inferior to ‘original’ writing. Commentators have drawn attention to the creative processes involved in the translation of texts, and suggested a rethinking of translation as a form of creative writing. Hence there is growing critical and theoretical interest in translations undertaken by literary authors.

The topic interests me, because I have published four novels and three literary translations (not counting this latest, as yet unpublished one), and I have from time to time asked myself, in an informal sort of way, about “the creative processes involved in the translation of texts”: is it in fact “a form of creative writing”? And if so, how does it differ from the more traditional kind?

Writing this, it occurs to me that the word “recreate” encapsulates the problem: for if it means simply rendering the work in another language, then it’s more a question of transliteration or transposition than creation; but if it means “re-create” as in creating anew, then one is stressing the creative contribution of the translator: the translation, then, carries the stamp of the translator as unmistakably as the original carries the stamp of the author.

But of course translation is also, inescapably, a second-order activity, derived very directly from the creation of the author. If the translation is a creative act, it is yet unlike the writing of a novel in that it does not require that most difficult of creative feats, which is to create from nothing. A novelist creates and peoples a world; a translator reports back on that world to people who wouldn’t otherwise have access to that world.

I like his take on this (although the bit about author’s craving a “faithful rendering” when their books are translated feels a bit reductive), and his novel, The Children’s Day looks really interesting as well.

Our latest review is of Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit, which was translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy and published by Other Press.

Pretty interesting book (at least for the first two-thirds) about a future Sweden where those who are unwed and childless at the age of 50 have to live the rest of their lives in a Reserve Bank Unit:

Broadly speaking, Ninni Holmqvist’s debut novel fits into the tradition of dystopian literature. In the Sweden she describes, a law has been passed that women at the age of 50 (and men at the age of 60) who have no living children or spouses are deemed “dispensable” and sent to live at a Reserve Bank Unit for the rest of their lives. While in “the Unit,” the “dispensables” participate in experiments (psychological and physical) and donate various organs (kidneys, corneas, etc.) to the “useful” members of society, up until the day that they make their “final donation.” In other words, these freeloaders are essentially harvested for the benefit of those who are contributing more to society.

In depicting a dystopia, Holmqvist faces the almost intractable problem of making sure that this future seems believable, seems connected to our present, yet sets forth a new set of rules for how human behavior is governed. The best books in this tradition are the ones that depict a future that seems so potentially possible that the reader doesn’t ask too many questions. Holmqvist isn’t perfect with this, but she does provide a sort of “live your life alone, spend the end of it giving back to society” mantra that sort of makes sense. (And may make more sense in Scandinavia?) It’s implied on occasion that economics and general consumption are behind the creation of this system — if you’re not breeding and increasing society’s consumption, you’re dispensable — which is uber-creepy.

Aside from the suspension of belief necessary to accept the creation of the Units, this book is actually incredibly straight-forward — essentially just a love story in a weird context.

Click here for the full review.

Broadly speaking, Ninni Holmqvist’s debut novel fits into the tradition of dystopian literature. In the Sweden she describes, a law has been passed that women at the age of 50 (and men at the age of 60) who have no living children or spouses are deemed “dispensable” and sent to live at a Reserve Bank Unit for the rest of their lives. While in “the Unit,” the “dispensables” participate in experiments (psychological and physical) and donate various organs (kidneys, corneas, etc.) to the “useful” members of society, up until the day that they make their “final donation.” In other words, these freeloaders are essentially harvested for the benefit of those who are contributing more to society.

In depicting a dystopia, Holmqvist faces the almost intractable problem of making sure that this future seems believable, seems connected to our present, yet sets forth a new set of rules for how human behavior is governed. The best books in this tradition are the ones that depict a future that seems so potentially possible that the reader doesn’t ask too many questions. Holmqvist isn’t perfect with this, but she does provide a sort of “live your life alone, spend the end of it giving back to society” mantra that sort of makes sense. (And may make more sense in Scandinavia?) It’s implied on occasion that economics and general consumption are behind the creation of this system — if you’re not breeding and increasing society’s consumption, you’re dispensable — which is uber-creepy.

Aside from the suspension of belief necessary to accept the creation of the Units, this book is actually incredibly straight-forward — essentially just a love story in a weird context.

The entire novel is narrated by Dorrit Weger, opening with her arrival at the Second Reserve Bank Unit on her fiftieth birthday and her depiction of a seemingly innocuous, yet invasive world:

It was more comfortable than I could have imagined. A room of my own with a bathroom, or rather an apartment of my own, because there were two rooms: a bedroom and a living room with a kitchenette. It was light and spacious, furnished in a modern style and tastefully decorated in muted colors. True, the tiniest nook or cranny was monitored by cameras, and I would soon realize there were hidden microphones there too. But the cameras weren’t hidden.

Aside from a quick surface tour of the Unit and its enormous Winter Garden, its very popular library (“It’s because there are so many intellectuals here. [. . .] People who read books tend to be dispensable. Extremely.”), the restaurants, the general rules (you don’t have to work, just be ready for organ donation or assignment to an experiment), and a few harrowing stories of experiments gone awry, Holmqvist doesn’t dwell on the inner workings of this creepy institute, instead focusing on the relationships between Dorrit and the other “dispensables.”

Early on in the novel, Dorrit — who was a professional writer before entering the Unit — meets fellow writer Johannes, and the two of them hit it off and become romantically involved. They spend most of their time together, getting into a comfortable routine, and wishing they had met in the “real world” so that they could’ve been spared the Unit.

Along the way, Dorrit becomes pregnant and runs into one of the strict and disturbing aspects of life as a dispensable: since she’s already entered the Unit, she can either have the fetus transferred to a “useful” person, or bring it to term and give it up for adoption. Already pissed that her desire to raise the baby with Johannes is being thwarted, she’s dealt a crushing blow when she finds out that Johannes has just undergone his final donation . . .

Up to this point, the novel works pretty well. It’s not as creepy as it could be, and it’s pretty conventional. Nevertheless, it’s entertaining (great for a plane ride), reads very well (thanks to Marlaine Delargy’s translation), and is pretty compelling. But after Dorrit finds out she’s pregnant and Johannes dies, character motivations get all out of whack and the narrative runs out of steam.

The main turning point is a scene in which a nurse with a birthmark gives Dorrit a key card and the necessary password to allow her to escape. Why?

“I presume that you, like other dispensable individuals, have already lost everything once. And now it’s happening to you again. And I feel . . . well, I can’t just stand and watch. Yes, you are dispensable, and no doubt could have avoided that situation if you had just made enough off an effort. But you’re also a human being.”

In the context of the book — this is the first time the character is introduced, and there are many smaller opportunities for a sympathetic staff member to alleviate some of their guilt and help out a dispensable — this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But what’s kind of cool, is Holmqvist’s attempt to work around the key card question and other problems that this raises . . . By the end of the novel, it’s clear that Dorrit is the supposed author, and that this book will be read by the staff of the Unit. So:

I am not the kind of person who betrays a trust. For example, in this story I have not revealed the true circumstances under which I received the key card. Neither of the two nurses who met me when I raced into the surgical department that day has a birthmark. Nor was it either of those two who gave me the key card, and the conversation with the person who did give me the card did not in fact take place in the break room where I sat and waited as I gazed out at the snow-covered park with the pond and the ducks, but in a completely different room in a completely different part of the unit, and at another time. And the code is actually not 98 44 at all.

By the very end of the novel, Dorrit has used the key card to escape, but the decisions she makes once outside are also a bit perplexing, but are probably supposed to serve as the “big question” that the reader can ponder after closing the book. . . .

Overall, this isn’t a bad novel. It’s quick, entertaining, and enjoyable. But it fails to rise above its common elements to become something truly remarkable.

BBC One’s Art in Troubled Times: A New Deal for Art aired yesterday and sounds pretty fascinating:

The Great Depression and the Second World War changed what was expected of the arts; Alan Yentob asks if this recession could see the next transformation.

Artist Chuck Close talks about the New Deal in America in the 30s, when the government paid artists to work, while actor Simon Callow tells how thrilled actors were to feel their work mattered.

And dealer Kenny Schachter explains how, in a perverse way, he feels this recession is the best thing that has happened to the art world in ten years.

It’s also available online for free . . . as long as you’re in the UK. So everyone overseas—hope you enjoy, and let me know if there’s anything interesting in here. (And by “let me know,” I mean, I wouldn’t be disappointed to suddenly find a torrent for this program . . . )

Our most recent release—which shipped to subscribers last week—is Elsa Morante’s Aracoeli, her last novel, and by far her darkest. Below you’ll find the excellent introduction Robert Boyers wrote for our reissue of this book.

Thirty years ago, Elsa Morante seemed to many American writers and critics a major novelist. She had recently become famous with the publication of History: A Novel, a notoriously vast and tumultuous work, and yet clearly one of the most compelling accounts of the Second World War to come out of Europe. In the New York City of the late 1970s, literary intellectuals frequently debated the virtues of Morante’s overheated prose, and even critics who found her novels eminently resistible conceded that, at her best, she was a writer to be reckoned with. American and British editions of her books came festooned with the praise of her peers, and she was often grouped with other leading Italian writers of the war and post-war period. The recent biography by Lily Tuck—the first devoted to Morante in any language—studies her affiliations and makes clear that she was always, in her own country, an embattled figure, and it comes as little surprise to learn that the writer who could be savage in her responses to the work of her own closest friends might also find her own work subjected to savage attack, even by a confidante and admirer like the writer-filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. A volatile and notoriously unpredictable character, subject to infatuations and bitter resentments of the sort she anatomized in her fiction, Morante produced novels marked by ambivalences fiercely, even desperately evoked.

Well before the appearance of History in 1974, Morante stirred attention with an enormous, badly flawed first novel entitled House of Liars (1951). But she made a much more significant mark with her second novel, Arturo’s Island, which won the 1957 Strega Prize as the best novel of the year in Italy. It is, in its way, a characteristic performance, vehement, implacable, indiscreet in its rage to uncover emotions that are raw and disturbing. Like many American readers, I came to the novel twenty years after its initial appearance, when History: A Novel had made Morante famous, but I heard in it then, and hear in it now, the early expression of a voice at once febrile and unbearably poignant, a voice that would again resonate in Morante’s final novel, Aracoeli (1982), now bravely reissued in a new edition. In both of these novels readers are asked, again and again, to absorb complex shocks of feeling, to attend closely to the painful probing of psychic wounds. These are not, we feel, novels for the faint of heart. The vagrant, occasional evocations of health or joy in such works seem fleeting, often delusional, the stuff of childish infatuation or naïve optimism. Everywhere in these novels we are made to anticipate iniquity and betrayal. Morante was a writer—so we feel— who worked from an intolerable burden of hurt and dispossession, who mistrusted her own inclinations to pleasure and self-approval.

In Arturo’s Island, the note of loss and disillusionment is persistent. Throughout there are references to “my heart’s impossible longings” and “an obscure, violated law.” Arturo himself often feels “like a criminal” who is inexorably “swept along by a terrible cyclone” he is helpless to resist. For all the moments of tenderness or reprieve Morante allows, the coloration of the work is dark, “rage and astonishment” always about to erupt, just as we might well say of Aracoeli, where the accent of self-loathing is even stronger, the sense that nothing can be done to alter anything even more emphatic.

Unlike Arturo’s Island, Aracoeli was not well received in Italy, and most of the reviews in the United States were frankly dismissive and uncomprehending. Perhaps this had much to do with the fact that Aracoeli was a complete departure from History, a work much more varied in its devices and more generous in its sympathies. More probably, Aracoeli was resisted because it opened up a devastated psychological landscape without the slightest intimation of a redemptive prospect. Of course the novel had its loyal adherents, though this reader can only marvel at those—like Stephen Spender—who were pleased to call it “a wonderful book,” or others—like Harold Brodkey—who thought it “fascinating,” hardly the epithets that recommend themselves for a work that is frequently appalling and saturated in self-loathing. The remorseless disinfatuation of the prose in Aracoeli is propelled, sustained, by what can sometimes seem an autonomous dynamism, the rhetoric of “amputation” and “pollution” the essential motor that drives the narrative.

Of course, a work shaped and controlled by an obsessive outlook and a corresponding rhetoric may come to seem monotonous. That is the risk Morante deliberately invites in Aracoeli. Emanuele, its first person narrator, knows that nothing he will tell us can alter or relieve his distress, which can border on the pathological. From the first, what he calls “my little happy life” is consigned, irrevocably, to the past, to a brief, never completely forgotten period of early childhood when things could seem innocent and he could think himself lovable. Almost at once he alludes to the “nameless malady” that would determine the course of his life, and soon the language of the novel is taken over by terms like “irreparable” and “malignancy.” Everything seems determined by a fate that “follows its own logic . . . sure and constant.” “To live,” the narrator contends, “means to experience separation,” where separation entails the loss of love and of a secure identity. Derided—so he believes—by virtually everyone he meets, the narrator of this novel imagines, “when I happen to find myself in a crowd,” that he is “marked out for lynching,” condemned for obscure, inarticulable reasons by the “overwhelming judgment of the Collective,” whatever that may mean.

To be sure, reasons are provided to account for the desperate unhappiness of the 43-year-old narrator, who recounts the trajectory of his life as if it were, in every important respect, at an end. He had been loved by his beautiful, erratic mother Aracoeli, and soon found himself rejected, his mother in the grip of an obscure sexual mania. The father, emotionally distant, reticent, unavailable, could offer nothing in the way of solace. Encouraged by his peers to find refuge in the company of women, Emanuele found himself impotent, inadequate, his consequent compulsive homoerotic excursions similarly dispiriting. Reasons, to be sure. Though Emanuele attempted, without conviction, “to emerge” from the constrictions of his own nature, he labored always in the shadow of “an old fable” in which “an immortal tailor . . . at night goes into the bedrooms of certain mortals he has selected. On them, as they sleep, he sews an invisible shirt, woven with the threads of their destiny.” Emanuele is one of the chosen, who can never tear off the shirt into which he has been sewn.

Can this sense of fatality serve as a sufficient reason to account for the life of such a person? In many ways it is the most compelling of the reasons Morante provides. Throughout the novel the narrator is at pains to insist upon the mystery of things. People are ceaselessly imprisoned by “secrets” they themselves cannot understand. We feel, all of us apparently, or so Morante’s narrator believes, that we are obscurely possessed by a “knowledge” we can never fully fathom. There are powers that enchant us, block our path to change or protest. For each hidden truth we sense but cannot penetrate there is an “ancient law” that decrees the limits of our understanding.

No doubt there are readers who will feel offended by the very suggestion of such a schema. They will say that an adult worthy of our attention over the course of a long novel cannot be made to submit so entirely to anything so nebulous as ancient laws, nor, for that matter, to the unfathomable laws of his own fixed nature. And yet Morante makes her Emanuele an extraordinarily compelling and believable character, whose sense of fatality is oddly suggestive of intimations to which every adult is, in varying degrees, susceptible. Susan Sontag noted, in a late essay, that “characters in a novel have intensely legible fates,” and it is the legible fate of Emanuele to be in the thrall of his own fanatic idea of fatedness, in a way that incapacitates him for healthy development. Is he therefore a one-dimensional figure? Say, rather, as Sontag says of novelists who “perform their necessary ethical work,” that Morante exercises her “right to a stipulated shrinking of the world as it really is” without ever allowing us to forget that the shrinking is the work of a mind, Emanuele’s, that is preternaturally inconsolable. More to the point, perhaps, Morante’s character, though alarmingly single-minded, is yet also open to vagrant impressions he knows not how to harness. There is nothing programmatic in Morante’s novel, no suggestion that the author participates in Emanuele’s fanaticism or offers it as a reliable statement about the laws to which the rest of us are immutably committed.

The ethical vision that underwrites Morante’s novel is discernible—again, in Sontag’s terms—in the “felt intensity” and “completeness” of her portraiture. These qualities demand, so we feel, that we honor her protagonist and care for him, in spite of the appalling, stubborn tenacity of his pessimism. Crucial in making this possible is Morante’s insistence that her Emanuele fitfully regress to dreams and memories of his lost childhood, which are conjured with an affecting immediacy. Just so, a few peripheral characters are permitted to surface and develop without being wholly subordinated to the incessant toils of the narrator’s disposition. Even the mother, Aracoeli herself, though subjected to a merciless dissection and a hideous fate, is permitted now and again to seem irresistibly vital and, for much of the novel, promising. In spite of the dark, downward drift of the narrative, Morante can allow us “a nostalgia of the senses,” in the grip of which the long dead Aracoeli is evoked in “her real, bodily voice, with its tender savor of throat and saliva,” and the son can feel again “on my palate the sensation of her skin, which smelled of fresh plum.”

Such delicacies and transports are, to be sure, rather infrequent in Aracoeli, and yet they do establish a necessary tension that works quietly against the grain of the narrator’s dark fanaticism. In this novel, Morante had the nerve—what George Steiner once called “the indispensable tactlessness”—to immerse her reader in an imagination that would necessarily seem sour and unlovely. But her own inveterate feeling for tenderness and beauty is also unmistakable, as unmistakable as her desire to get to the bottom of something she wishes with all her heart to encompass. There remains, as a residue of our encounter with a novel that is never less than troubling, an impression of a strangeness fully confronted but never fully understood.

—Robert Boyers

Entertainment Weekly just started a book blog entitled Shelf Life. And thank the gods, so far there’s only one post on Twilight.

It would be cool to visually share one’s own recommendations of world literature like Richard Whitehead does in The National.

His recommendations are interesting, but it’s too bad he doesn’t include more books from more places . . .

Yesterday afternoon, Barnes & Noble sent a strong message to Amazon that it’s not about to give up the ghost, no matter how many Kindle accessory ads show up in the New York subway. As reported at Digital Daily, B&N has launched a 700,000 title ebook store (there are only 300,000 titles available for the Kindle, but more on that in a second) that is compatible with the iPhone, Blackberry, PC/Mac desktop, and the much anticipated Plastic Logic eReader.

So now Amazon has the Kindle, Borders has some sort of deal with Sony, and B&N has Plastic Logic . . . things are about to get a lot more interesting in the world of ebooks. Especially in terms of price points for devices and ebooks . . .

There are a few strange things about this announcement by B&N that jumped out at me. First off is this quote from the President of BN.com:

“Today marks the first phase of our digital strategy, which is rooted in the belief that readers should have access to the books in their digital library from any device, from anywhere, at any time,” said William J. Lynch, President of BN.com. “As America’s #1 bookstore and newsstand, our goal at Barnes & Noble is to build a service that revolves around the customer, enabling them to have access to hundreds of thousands of titles and read on their smartphone, PC, and many other existing and future devices. We want to make eBooks simple, accessible, affordable and convenient for everyone.”

As John Paczkowski pointed out in the aforementioned article, by “any device,” he actually means “any device except the Sony eReader, the Kindle, and any soon to be announced Apple device.” What pisses me off about this “business strategy” (don’t even get me started) is how short-sighted all these companies are being. From what I’ve heard in talking to some of the major publishers, ebook sales make up a miniscule portion of overall revenues. Like 3% small. Now rather than try and create a demand in readers for ebooks by working with a universal format (a la mp3s, which play on tons and tons of devices) and then profiting off of the creation of the best ebook store, or best ereader, everyone’s trying to create their own proprietary format to get you, as a customer, locked into their particular system. The existence of its proprietary format is one of the reasons there’s been so many cranky articles about the Kindle and the fact that you don’t really “own” the ebooks you buy, that, like in the case of Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm (irony well noted), they can just vanish from your device . . . But instead of putting the reader’s desires first, corporate bookseller/publishers once again demonstrate their contempt for their customers and their inability to rationally analyze what’s happened in the recent past to the music (not to mention TV and movie) industry . . .

Secondly, this 700,000 title number is pretty sketchy. From the B&N press release:

More than a half-million public domain books from Google, which can be downloaded for free. Readers can discover and explore this rich treasure trove, including everything from classic works by well-known writers to long-forgotten and obscure titles that are historically much harder to access.

So how many titles are actually for sale on the B&N ebook site? Oh, that’s right—approximately 200,000. Which is less than two-thirds of what Amazon has available for the Kindle. But please, don’t let me stand in the way of your “math” and hype—you’re right, your device is bigger, your site is the “World’s Largest eBookstore,” etc. Unfortunately, after downloading the B&N ereading program, I couldn’t find a single book I wanted to buy . . .

(Of course, I probably shouldn’t post this until after my sales call with B&N tomorrow morning . . . )

Over at ZDNet, there’s a really interesting chart at the bottom of their article on this announcement listing all the parts, players, and possible entrants of the “Device Value Chain,” “Platform,” and “Content Value Chain.” Very interesting . . .

That I didn’t realize New Directions has a blog. Not terribly active, but still, today’s post about Borges’s history with ND is pretty interesting. To provide some context for this quote: earlier in the summer ND held a contest to see if anyone could identify the first publication of Borges by ND. Answer: Two stories (“Investigations on the Death of Herbert Quian” and “The Circular Ruins”) appeared in New Directions in Prose and Poetry 11. And here’s a bit more info from translator Donald Yates:

“This early appearance of Borges’s fiction was the result of James Laughlin’s recognition of Borges’s importance, and no doubt influenced his decision to offer a contract when the manuscript of Labyrinths came across his desk — after it had been rejected by other publishers, including Barney Rosset at Grove Press, who immediately rushed ahead with a translation — by Anthony Kerrigan, et al., — of Borges’s Ficciones — immediately after Borges shared with Samuel Beckett the First International Editors in 1961.

“In a sense, I think it helped in Borges’ critical reception here. A lot of reviewers sat up and paid attention when two Borges collections came across their desk and often (New York Times, e.g.) both were reviewed together. If I had it all to do over again, since we had access to all of Borges’s prose published through 1960, I would have also included `El sur,’ `El aleph.’ and as you point out, `Herbert Quain.’”

“I was properly scolded by my friend Anthony Boucher, who reviewed mystery fiction for the NYTBR, for leaving out that story that touched on a subject close to both our hearts — detective literature. He, by the way, did the first translation ever of a Borges tale in English: `The Garden of Forking Paths,’ which appeared in the August, 1948, issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. In early 1963, Time magazine selected Labyrinths as one of the top ten fiction titles published in 1962. And in 2008 The Authors Society of London named Labyrinths as one of 50 outstanding English-language translations of the previous 50 years.” –Donald Yates

Hopefully ND keeps this up. That place must be a treasure trove of interesting literary anecdotes.

I’ve written in the past about the $9.99 ebook and my belief that supply and demand is the most important factor in arriving at this price point. Over in Slate, Jack Schafer argues that a side-effect of publishers trying to increase ebook prices (because they’re afraid that a cheap ebook will cannibalize the expensive hardcover market, cutting into their already diminishing profit margins), will be a huge rise in piracy:

What has kept illegal e-books from taking off? First, all the electronic reading gadgets on the market are subpar, if you ask me, making the reading of books, newspapers, magazines, and even cereal boxes painful. The resolution is poor. The fonts are crap. The navigation is chunky. Not since the eight-track player has modern technology produced such a heap of garbage. If you’re looking for the reason e-books constitute just 1 percent or 2 percent of all book sales, stop the search. Second, the hassle factor is too great. Only a student or a deadbeat with a lot of time on his hands is going to want to search the Web and scour the torrents for, say, a free, bootlegged copy of A.J. Liebling’s The Telephone Booth Indian. It’s as tedious as fishing! Third, not all bootlegged e-books are created equal. On finally finding that free book you so desire, you may find yourself wishing you had purchased the legal edition: Your bootleg may be filled with typographical errors, thanks to the slipshod application of optical character-recognition software. If a nicely produced Kindle version of The Telephone Booth Indian that doesn’t have to be monkeyed around with can be easily nabbed for $9.99, which it can, why bother breaking the law to obtain an inferior edition for display on a rotten device? It’s like using an acetylene torch to loot a kid’s piggy bank. [. . .]

So far, few consumers think books should be free—a fact that I attribute to the klugy Kindle and its affordable Amazon store. I conducted an informal census of friends and associates who read lots of books, and I found none who partake of the bootlegged variety. But that could change in a matter of months if the book industry insists on 1) jacking up the price of e-books and 2) withholding potential best-sellers from the e-book market. Cool devices that make electronic reading painless are just around the corner, and the e-book market is about to explode. If publishers insist on pushing prices too high and curbing availability, consumers could rebel—as they did with the sharing of MP3s—and normalize the trafficking of infringing e-books.

Over the weekend Bob Stein at the Institute for the Future of the Book blogged about the video below, calling it “the most exciting vision of the book of the future since Apple’s Knowledge Navigator in 1987,” and point out that “interestingly, the film also includes an elegant solution to the question of how (at least during this transitional period) bookstores might participate in the sales of ebooks. note this idea is more practical in Europe where Amazon and other online retailers are not allowed to compete on price.”

By the way, the video is entirely in French:

Although I’m personally not a reader of Scandinavian crime fiction (unless you can somehow count Jan Kjaerstad’s trilogy in that group, which is closer to a leap than a stretch), I find the debate between Nathaniel Rich and Larissa Kyzer about why these books are so popular pretty fascinating.

First off, here’s the core of Rich’s explanation, which he articulated in this Slate review of the new Stieg Larsson book:

What distinguishes these books is not some element of Nordic grimness but their evocation of an almost sublime tranquility. When a crime occurs, it is shocking exactly because it disrupts a world that, at least to an American reader, seems utopian in its peacefulness, happiness, and orderliness. There is a good reason why Mankell’s corpses tend to turn up in serene, bucolic settings—on a country farm, on a bobbing raft, in a secluded meadow, or in the middle of a snow-covered field: A dark bloodstain in a field of pure, white snow is far creepier than a body ditched in a trash-littered alley.

Well, Kyzer takes great exception to that in her L Magazine piece:

One need only skim recent headlines from mainland Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) to ascertain that the famed tranquility of the Nordic welfare state has begun to face some dramatic challenges. For instance: each of these countries has seen a marked increase in immigration in the last few decades, an influx which has challenged the homogeneity of the local populations, and more often than not, created quite an existential crisis for societies which have for so long been able to claim a fundamental sameness in traditions, language, and cultural outlook.

She then goes on to offer a different explanation:

It’s then more accurate to say that Scandinavian crime novels are not set apart from similar traditions simply because of the consistent contrast between peaceful settings and “the tawdriness of the crimes,” but rather, that the genre is unique because it tends to hold its society up to itself and take an unflinchingly honest stock of its failures. So often, these are novels of conscience and reflection. Novels which, in their own small way, take responsibility for a social system which makes earnest promises of inclusion and protection, but continues to fail so many of its constituents.

Both are rather interesting articles, and I’m sure many others will weigh in on this as well . . .

A few months ago we posted about the University of Texas Press’s decision to relaunch its Latin American literature in translation series. (And at some point soon we’ll have a full review of the first new title in the series, And Let the Earth Tremble at its Centers by Gonzalo Celorio.)

Well on Friday I found out that Texas Tech University Press is taking over The Americas series, which Irene Vilar launched at the University of Wisconsin some years ago. Irene is a successful author in her own right (The Ladies’ Gallery was translated by Gregory Rabassa to critical acclaim and her new memoir, Impossible Motherhood, will be out from Other Press later this year), and has put together a killer advisory board and is relaunching the series with a number of interesting titles.

Up first is David Toscana’s The Last Reader (translated from the Spanish by Asa Zatz), which releases in October and sounds interesting:

In tiny Icamole, an almost deserted village in Mexico’s desert north, the librarian, Lucio, is also the village’s only reader. Though it has not rained for a year in Icamole, when Lucio’s son Remigio draws the body of a thirteen-year-old girl from his well, floodgates open on dark possibility. Strangely enamored of the dead girl’s beauty and fearing implication, Remigio turns desperately to his father. Persuading his son to bury the body, Lucio baptizes the girl Babette, after the heroine of a favorite novel. Is Lucio the keeper of too many stories? As police begin to investigate, has he lost his footing? Or do revelation and resolution lie with other characters and plots from his library? Toscana displays brilliant mastery of the novel—in all its elements—as Lucio keeps every last reader guessing.

Other forthcoming novels in the series include Breathing, In Dust by Tim Z. Hernandez, Symphony in White by Brazilian author Adriana Lisboa (and translated by Sarah Green), and Chango, the Baddest Dude by Colombian author Manuel Zapata Olivella (and translated by Jonathan Tittler). All of these sound really interesting—especially the Lisboa. She was selected by the organizers of the Bogota World Book Capital as one of the thirty-nine highest-profile Latin American writers under the age of thirty-nine, and she also won the Jose Saramago Fiction Prize for Symphony in White.

More importantly, it’s great to see this series coming back to life, and to see Texas continue to be one of the hotspots for translation.

The first twelve winners of the European Union Prize for Literature were announced earlier this week with the aim of bringing increased attention to the contemporary European literature.

This is a bit of an odd prize—each year an award is given to one author from 11 or 12 of the various EU countries. The list of countries for 2009 are listed below, and 2010 will honor writers from Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Finland, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Romania, Slovenia and Spain, with 2011 featuring Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Greece, Iceland, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Malta, Serbia, The Netherlands, Turkey and United Kingdom.

The winners are selected by qualified juries set up in each of the respective countries, and the winning authors have to have published between 2 and 5 works of fiction, with the winning book coming out within the past five years. (Got it?)

Anyway, thanks to EU funding, these books should be translated into a number of languages . . . maybe even English. Which would be great. There’s not a lot of info about the actual books available on the EU Prize website . . . If anyone out there is interested in reviewing any of these for Three Percent, please let me know (chad.post at rochester dot edu). It would be cool to provide some additional information about each of these books, instead of simply listing them . . . But for now, here are your first twelve recipients of the European Union Prize for Literature:

AUSTRIA
Paulus Hochgatterer for Die Sü be des Lebens (The Sweetness of Life). Published by Paul Zsolnay Verlag and in English by MacLehose Press.

CROATIA
Mila Pavicevic for Djevojčica od leda i druge bajke (Ice Girl and Other Fairy-tales). Published by Naklada Bošković.

FRANCE
Emmanuelle Pagano for Les Adolescents troglodytes. Published by Editions P.O.L.

HUNGARY
Szécsi Noémi for Kommunista Monte Cristo (Communist Monte Cristo). Published by Tericum.

IRELAND
Karen Gillece for Longshore Drift. Published by Hachette.

ITALY
Daniele Del Giudice for Orizzonte mobile (Movable Horizon). Published by Giulio Einaudi.

LITHUANIA
Laura Sintija Černiauskaitė for Kvėpavimas į marmurą (Breathing into Marble). Published by Alma Littera.

NORWAY
Carl Frode Tiller for Innsirkling (Encirclement). Published by Aschehoug. (Funny—here’s a post about Tiller from Frankfurt a few years ago.)

POLAND
Jacek Dukaj for LÓD (ICE). Published by Wydawnictwo Literackie.

PORTUGAL
Dulce Maria Cardoso for Os Meus Sentimentos. Published by Asa Editores.

SLOVAKIA
Pavol Rankov for Stalo sa prvého septembra (alebo inokedy) (It Happened on September the First (or whenever)). Published by Kalligram.

SWEDEN
Helena Henschen for I skuggan av ett brott (The Shadow of a Crime). Published by Brombergs.

Jose Manuel Prieto’s Rex is one of my favorite books so far from 2009, and Esther Allen is one of my favorite translation people. Which is why I’m thrilled that CAT just made available this series of audio clips from a discussion between Prieto and Allen from earlier this year.

From this month’s featured independent bookstore:

Skylight Books turns it up a notch in July and August with Hot Summer Nights extending their hours till Midnight on Fridays and Saturdays for the rest of the summer. Located in a busy, walking-friendly neighborhood of Los Feliz and accentuated beautiful California weather, Hot Summer Nights is definitely the independent bookstore to visit. Skylight is bringing in dj’s, showing movies, featuring live music, and offering discounts on books featured in the weekly theme. Late night Twitter and Facebook contests get everyone involved even if they aren’t there to enjoy the sweet treats and libations!

Which sounds like a great time. And like something other stores could be doing as well . . . When I worked at Schuler Books & Music in Grand Rapids, MI, I was always amazed by how many people would come out on a Friday or Saturday night just to browse, talk, drink coffee, etc. The store really was a destination . . . makes me wish Rochester still had a cool independent . . .

The latest addition to our reviews section is a piece by Timothy Jourdan on Annie Ernaux’s The Possession, which is translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis and recently published by Seven Stories.

Here’s the start of the review:

Over the past decade, Seven Stories has brought out a number of Annie Ernaux titles, including A Man’s Place, A Woman’s Story, and A Simple Passion to great critical acclaim. The Possession, which was originally published in France in 2002, is the most recent title of hers to be beautifully rendered in English by Anna Moschovakis (who also translated Georges Simenon’s _The Engagement).

This is a very slim novel, a precise, almost objective depiction of a woman’s jealousy post-love affair, when after breaking up with her boyfriend of the past six years, she finds out that he’s moving in with another woman.

“This woman filled my head, my chest, and my gut; she was always with me, she took control of my emotions. At the same time, her omnipresence gave my life a new intensity. It produced stirrings that I had never felt before, released a kind of energy, powers of imagination I didn’t know I had; it held me in a state of constant, feverish activity.

“I was, in both senses of the word, possessed.”

Click here for the full review.

Over the past decade, Seven Stories has brought out a number of Annie Ernaux titles, including A Man’s Place, A Woman’s Story, and A Simple Passion to great critical acclaim. The Possession, which was originally published in France in 2002, is the most recent title of hers to be beautifully rendered in English by Anna Moschovakis (who also translated Georges Simenon’s _The Engagement).

This is a very slim novel, a precise, almost objective depiction of a woman’s jealousy post-love affair, when after breaking up with her boyfriend of the past six years, she finds out that he’s moving in with another woman.

This woman filled my head, my chest, and my gut; she was always with me, she took control of my emotions. At the same time, her omnipresence gave my life a new intensity. It produced stirrings that I had never felt before, released a kind of energy, powers of imagination I didn’t know I had; it held me in a state of constant, feverish activity.

I was, in both senses of the word, possessed.

The narrator—whose voice is so clear, so telling, that it’s hard not to believe that this book isn’t based on experiences that Ernaux suffered through—then proceeds to provide a step-by-step depiction of the onset of jealousy and the way it can consume one’s life. One of the most poignant moments—for anyone who’s had a spouse cheat on them—is also quoted on the back of the book:

The strangest thing about jealousy is that it can populate an entire city—the whole world—with a person you may never have met.

Having lived through a similar situation, I can say with certainty that Ernaux nails a lot of the strange, contradictory desires that come up when trying to process this sort of consuming jealous. Such as her quest for knowledge about the “other woman” (“I absolutely had to know her name, her age, her profession, her address. I discovered that these details by which society defines a person’s identity, which we so easily dismiss as irrelevant to truly knowing someone, are in fact essential.”), and the reaction against all that this other person embodies (“I discovered that I hated all female professors—though I myself had been one, and many of my friends still were.”), to a desire to reclaim the past (“When I wasn’t preoccupied with the other woman, I fell prey to the attacks of an outside world bent on reminding me of our common past, which now felt to me like an irremediable loss.”).

The Possession is a very rational portrait of how a person falls prey to the “green-eyed monster” and how jealous can become all-consuming passion (or possession). But it’s also about the end of jealousy. About how life moves on and people—most people—put their lives back together and stop Googling this other woman/man every day.

Although brief, this is a surprisingly complete book. My one reservation is that it can be a bit clinical at times. It’s a retrospective look at jealousy, and as such, loses a bit of its emotional power by too objectively examining the distress and unhinged nature of someone coping with a situation such as this. Nevertheless, it’s definitely worth reading.

OK, I fell a bit behind on updating our Indie Bookstore of the Month. And I wasn’t able to do all that I wanted to do for The Booksmith. But now that things in my life are calming down, I’m ready to get back into this, and as a result, for the rest of July and all of August we will be be featuring Skylight Books in Los Angeles.

Skylight is an interesting store. It’s one of the few independents that recently expanded, it has a cool tree growing inside, Kerry Slattery, Charles Hauther, and Monica Carter are all fantastic booksellers. (As are the rest of the staff, I’m sure—these are just the three I know.)

So barring another catastrophe, there will be several more posts about Skylight over the next six weeks or so.

Yesterday’s Publishing Perspectives (which you should really subscribe to if you haven’t already—it is that consistently good) had an interesting piece about a digital distribution company for ebooks that is being set up by Planeta, Random House Mondadori, and Santillana (the three biggest publishers in Spain). Here’s more from Emily Williams’s article:

This initiative will go hand in hand with a major marketing effort starting with a splashy launch of e-books and e-readers this holiday season through at least one major retailer. They have set a goal of having every frontlist title able to be published simultaneously in both print and ebook form by mid 2011. [. . .]

In negotiations with the Association of Spanish Literary Agencies (ADAL), the publishers have agreed to price ebooks at 80% of a printed books cover price, with a standard 25% royalty rate. Booksellers will be offered a maximum discount of 50%. The two groups hope to sign an agreement soon.

Although the Carmen Balcells Agency isn’t too keen on this 25% royalty rate (they want 40%!! Not sure if they realize yet that although they have a stellar list of authors, this means absolutely nothing if there are no publishers in business to publish said authors’ books. Agents!), this seems pretty civilized and like the Big Three actually thought this all through.

What’s really interesting to me is this 80% of printed retail. In a completely free market, I still believe that supply and demand will bring the amount readers are willing to pay much closer to $9.99 than 80% of a typical hardcover. But, like in a number of countries, Spain operates under a fixed price law that determines what price books are sold to the public. In other words, there is no discounting, which greatly changes the retailing landscape.

This “long tail effect” has not yet had much of an impact on the Spanish book market, which has not embraced online book retailing to the same extent as other countries. Spain reliance on fixed book prices has kept away powerful online discounters like Amazon.com. This gives publishers much more leeway to experiment with pricing on their own terms, and will also determine how Spanish ebooks will be sold internationally. In most cases Spanish publishers control the worldwide Spanish language rights to the books they publish (both native and translated authors) and will be able to sell their ebooks to consumers anywhere in the world. However, because of price controls those purchases will have to go through Spanish booksellers or other sites that respect the terms set by the Spanish market. This would likely exclude Amazon, who will not only be unable to sell books in Spain, but will not have access to the vast majority of Spanish language titles for either the US or Latin American market.

Anne-Solange Noble of Gallimard is a huge proponent of this law, and was asking me at BEA about why we don’t do this in America. (Short answer: propose something anti-free market like this and you’ll be tarred and feathered as a Communist.) Her argument is that the fixed price law has helped keep independent bookstores in business, and allowed publishers to continue to publish poetry and other sorts of books that typically don’t sell all that well.

Personally, I am in favor of something like this, because it would level the playing field in a potentially interesting way. Part of the problem with the book industry is the fact that every outlet has raced toward the middle, and the same books are being promoted at all the stores at the same time. With certain exceptions (the City Lights, McNally Jacksons, Seminary Co-ops of the world), most stores strive to be the same as every other store. You can get the same book anywhere—even online. So for your average reader, price becomes the only distinguishing factor between B&N, Amazon, or Idlewild. If the ability to set your own prices were removed, it would be a lot easier (or tougher, depending on your point of view) to highlight the value-added components of these outlets.

Putting all that rhetoric aside for a second, the other reason I think this is such an important story is the line about Spanish publishers being able to sell their books all over the world. When I was in Buenos Aires last year, this “Spanish world rights” issue really caught my attention. Since the largest Spanish language publishers are in Spain, and since they tend to buy world Spanish rights to the books they publish, a reader in Argentina has to pay an exorbitant amount for a book imported from Spain. Ebooks solve this dilemma, eliminating all of the shipping costs, etc., and, if the device is cheap/good enough, could revolutionize the Spanish market around the world.

CALQUE has an excellent piece by translator Vincent Kling on the recent death of Austrian writer Gert Jonke. Kling’s piece and the five short pieces he translated are all worth reading, but here are a few highlights:

Parody is alive and well: a rough parallel from the 2008 election in the United States is found in the considerable part Tina Fay played on Saturday Night Live in focusing opposition to Sarah Palin – rough because Jonke was a master at making political points without such direct reference. In one of his last plays, for instance, a character laments that the national assembly has sold all the air space over the country to a monopolistic advertising agency, which will erect huge banners to blot out the sun, moon, stars, the birds in flight, and the wind. Too buffoonishly over the top? Not when people in Vienna recall that the tower of the cathedral and other landmarks were long draped by scaffolding over which advertisements for insurance companies were hung and that one firm has in fact recently been granted exclusive legal rights to all the billboards in the city. [. . .]

Ordered perceptions are a sometime thing anyway. “Hyperbole 1,” from a series of snapshots or vignettes in drama form called Insektarium, is one of several studies by Jonke showing the social origins of perception and memory. That process forms the basis of his Geometric Regional Novel. If the difference between how the human eye and the insect eye perceive their surroundings is a marvel of nature, it might be even more miraculous to ponder how different the outside world can appear to any two human observers. The man and the woman are watching the same circus performance but placing opposite meanings on the same phenomena. Even as the show is taking place, not after it, the observers are “distorting” reality by negotiating an understanding of what they’re seeing and then storing those “distortions” in their memory. [. . .]

“The Projector” is thus a shorter, funnier, but not less powerful version of stories like George Perec’s W or The Memory of Childhood, Doron Rabinovici’s The Search for M., or W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, right down to the realization that restoring memory, or being provided one in the first place, starts the process of resolution almost regardless of how dreadful the events were. Not knowing what one intuits is worse, because the horror is present in sublimated but damaging form, unavailable for processing. The spotless mind does not experience eternal sunshine, to cite another film about memory, for it isn’t spotless; its blankness is already a taint. Nor is the conferring or denying of memory unconnected here with rewarding or punishing consumer behavior; the owner of the movie theater reserves the right to make the audience happy or miserable based purely on payment, so the tensions of capitalist structures, always present in Jonke and always reduced to their logical absurdities, make up another theme.

Jonke was an amazing author, and thanks to Dalkey Archive and Ariadne Books, a number of titles are now available (or will be shortly), all of which can be ordered from Skylight Books by clicking here.

Following up on my earlier post about Benjamin Moser’s forthcoming Lispector biography, Why This World, I want to correct some information about her available titles.

In addition to all the New Directions ones I listed on the original post, Family Ties is also available from the University of Texas Press, and this fall, the UK based Haus Publishing will be reissuing The Apple in the Dark with a new introduction by Moser.

(Haus is one of the coolest presses I’ve come across recently. Found out about them at the London Book Fair thanks to their connection with American University of Cairo Press. And the fact that they do amazing work. More on them in a separate post . . .)

(And granted, I’m not very old, but once, one of my interns was reading Family Ties and I made a joke about Michael J. Fox and the TV show. As it turns out, my befuddled intern wasn’t born until after the show had gone off the air.)

Back a few weeks ago when The Guardian was running its series of short stories from Eastern Europe, I mentioned our forthcoming anthology, The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain, which releases on November 9th, marking the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Well, to build up to the launch of this very cool book (just wait until you see the layout and all the images), we’ve set up a special blog that, over the course of the next few months, will feature articles from a variety of translators, authors, and journalists, images both from the book and ones that we couldn’t fit in, maps of the area at the time, and a “this day in 1989” feature.

Here’s a bit from Rohan’s initial post explaining a bit more about the book itself:

The Wall in My Head dwells extensively; humorously, poignantly, quirkily, on different views of the fall of the Iron Curtain—that of the generation of writers that witnessed it and often, had played a role in bringing it down, and more recently, the generation that inherited a memory of the Cold War and who write in the shadow of its monuments of division.

We hope that the publication of this book will prompt discussion about the events of ’89 and their relevance to today’s world, one in which the prospect of change has once again assumed a vital importance. To encourage this exchange of ideas, we have asked a variety of people; writers, translators, scholars, and witnesses to the events of those last years of the Cold War, to blog for us for the next several months. Their dispatches will range from discussions of the contents of the book to observations about current events and important anniversaries, as well as posts on the art, photography and film of the last years of the Cold War. I hope you’ll follow along, and that you’ll join in with your comments, as well as your own recollections, observations and news about this important anniversary.

And seriously, if you have anything you’d like to contribute—be it a personal essay, picture, or whatever—please let me know at chad.post at rochester dot edu.

There’s also a great post by Oana Sanziana Marian about Dan Sociu’s Urbancholia, which is excerpted in the book, and is looking for an American publisher. (Hint, hint.)

In addition to the articles, this is the perfect place to pre-order the book . . . and it is pretty spectacular. Here’s the complete table of contents:

Introduction by Keith Gessen

From The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera (Translated by Linda Asher)

From Paris Lost by Wladimir Kaminer (Translated by Liesl Schillinger)

From Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin (Translated by Andrew Bromfield)

“Petition” by Mihály Kornis (Translated by Ivan Sanders)

From Moving House by Paweł Huelle (Translated by Michael Kandel)

“Nabokov in Brasov” by Mircea Cărtărescu (Translated by Julian Semlian)

From Waltz for K by Dmitri Savitski (Translated by Kingsley Shorter)

“On Eugen Jebeleanu” by Matthew Zapruder

Poems from Secret Weapon by Eugen Jebeleanu (Translated by Matthew Zapruder)

From Imperium by Ryszard Kapuściński (Translated by Klara Glowczewska)

From The Tower by Uwe Tellkamp (Translated by Annie Janusch)

“My Grandmother the Censor” by Masha Gessen

From The Wall Jumper by Peter Schneider (Translated by Leigh Hafrey)

“Farewell to the Queue” by Vladimir Sorokin (Translated by Jamey Gambrell)

“Tower of Song: How the Plastic People of the Universe Helped to Shape the Velvet Revolution” by Paul Wilson

“The Revenge” by Annett Gröschner (Translated by Ingrid Lansford)

“The Souvenirs of Communism” by Dubravka Ugrešić (Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać)

“The Road to Bornholm” by Durs Grünbein (Translated by Ingrid Lansford)

“Regardless of the Cost: Reflections on Péter Esterházy’s Revised Edition“ by Judith Sollosy

“Author’s Preface to Revised Edition“ by Péter Esterházy (Translated by Judith Sollosy)

From Mandarins by Stanislav Komárek (Translated by Melvyn Clarke)

“Brother and Sister” by Christhard Läpple (Translated by Steven Rendall)

“Faraway, So Gross” by Dorota Masłowska (Translated by Benjamin Paloff)

From Urbancholia by Dan Sociu (Translated by Oana Sanziana Marian)

“That Fear” by Andrjez Stasiuk (Translated by Michael Kandel)

“Speech at the Opening Session of the 13th German Bundestag” by Stefan Heym (Translated by John K. Cox)

“The Life and Times of a Soviet Capitalist” by Irakli Iosebashvili

“The War Within” by Maxim Trudolubov (Translated by Alexei Bayer)

“Any Beach But This” by David Zábranský (Translated by Robert Russell)

“The Noble School” by Muharem Bazdulj (Translated by John K. Cox)

You can also pre-order simply by clicking on the image below.

Very interesting interview with Susan Bernofsky (“widely considered to be one of the best English translators of German literature today,” who has translated Robert Walser, Jenny Erpenbeck, and Yoko Tawada, among others) in The Brooklyn Rail.

Theoretically, this interview is supposed to be about her forthcoming translation of The Tanners (releasing from New Directions this fall, and yes, another BTB2010 nominee), but it gets really interesting (it’s always interesting, but you know) when she starts talking more generally about translation, language, and culture:

Rail: In an introductory note to Yoko Tawada’s The Naked Eye, you say that as she wrote the book certain sentences occurred to her in German and others in Japanese, so that she eventually wound up writing two versions of the same book. Do you have a sense of why this happened?

Bernofsky: Yoko Tawada’s very interested in the way our lives look the moment you start talking about them in a foreign language. And she’s right—words and experiences in different cultural contexts tend to have a different weight, different implications, and so walking on the border between two cultures as she does means constantly being confronted with one’s own experience as the experience of an other. I think that’s fascinating, and it’s very true to my own experience of living in Germany and traveling to yet other countries. I wish I could read The Naked Eye in Japanese to see how it differs from the German version I read, but I don’t speak a word of Japanese. I hope someone translates it into English someday.

Rail: You’ve written a lot about translation, often drawing connections between current translation theory and ideas in Romantic philosophy. How are the two related?

Bernofsky: The German Romantic translation theorists—above all Friedrich Schleiermacher, but also Wilhelm von Humboldt and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—were deeply concerned with the connection between a language and a nation or people, and so to them translating in such a way as to respect and preserve the cultural characteristics of the language you’re translating from is an important first step in getting to know another culture and its people in a respectful way. A lot of translation theorists and cultural critics today are interested in the dichotomy between translation as assimilation and as an avenue for approaching the foreign with genuine openness and curiosity.

And for all Walser fans out there who are waiting for a solid biography:

Rail: How difficult has it been to write a biography of Walser, considering not very much is known about his life?

Bernofsky: My book about Walser is a book of gaps, and not only because I still have quite a way to go before arriving at a finished draft. I’ve been thinking about and planning this book for several years now, and it’s getting written in little thematic chunks. The fact remains that there are vast stretches of Walser’s life about which very little is known, periods when we don’t have much of his correspondence and no one else is talking much about what he was up to—particularly in the nineteen-teens. But I’m fascinated by the overlaps between his fiction and his life, the way he actually lived out some of the themes that interested him. He really did attend a training school for servants, for example, though it bears very little resemblance to the school depicted in Jakob von Gunten. And then he went to work as an assistant butler in a castle in Silesia, which he didn’t write about until many years later, in the story “Tobold (II),” which I translated for Masquerade. I don’t think he was doing research for his writing when he took that job. I think he really was interested in the possibility of supporting himself with such a position. He didn’t want anyone at the castle to know he was a published author, either. He had his publisher write to him only using plain envelopes without the firm’s insignia, which would have blown his cover. I’m not sure he was such a good servant either, if the account of this episode he wrote in fictional form years later is any indication.

Very interesting speech from Richard Nash on the future of publishing and the need for publishers and readers to be more connected:

(Some Twitterer mentioned that Richard seemed a bit like Tom Cruise in Magnolia . . . I can see that.)

The second issue of The Critical Flame is now available online, including a review of J.M.G. Le Clezio’s Desert by Scott Esposito:

Desert was acclaimed as Le Clézio’s “breakout” novel by the Swedish Academy, but the book’s mass appeal can be difficult to see at first — it is not the easiest read to get into. It starts with a gathering of thousands of Moroccans around the famous sheik Ma el Aïnine, a man who led an anti-colonial jihad in the first quarter of the 20th century and succeeded in deposing the Sultan before being turned back by the French military. Although we are introduced to certain characters in this opening scene, Le Clézio’s vantage is so wide that we never attain any degree of intimacy with anyone, and it is clear that what most interests Le Clézio is painting a portrait of this incredible accumulation of human beings and the environment in which they wait. Notably, in this opening section Le Clézio never once directly mentions the broader historical forces in which these people are caught up, or even the reason for which they will march. Though Desert is informed by those turn-of-the-century maladies, colonialism and warfare, it is not about either of these topics in the least. Le Clézio only cares for the lived experience of people caught up in these forces, and he does not dilute their lives with recourse to philosophical or historical abstraction. His panorama is powerful for its sense of humanity amassing in religious conviction from out of the wide and empty desert, but those looking to fiction for vivid characters and a strong sense of plot might be put off by these first fifty pages. [. . .]

All that is to say that Desert is not a page-turner, a fact most evident in the Lalla sections. As befits a book attempting to articulate a non-Western sensibility, Desert moves to a rhythm of its own, and those not willing to embrace the book on its own terms will likely find it dull. But those readers who are able to open their mind will find a rich portrayal of a distant way of life and a writer who is working quite hard to find a language with which to convey it.

PW offers up some encouraging news about the book business on Wall St.:

Led by a remarkable rebound by book retailers, the Publishers Weekly Stock Index jumped 23.9% in the first six months of 2009, easily beating the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which declined 3.7% in the January through June period.

That’s great, although also a bit heartbreaking . . . Back at the beginning of the year, shortly after Borders hit its stock low of $.40, I talked a lot of smack about investing a small amount of money, convinced that there was no way this would stay below a $1.00. Well, as of June 30 the price is $3.68 . . . I was one bit of confidence away from making around $8,000 for every $1,000 invested . . . the best laid plans . . .

Not that the meteoric rise in the Borders stock price has to stop there: just wait until they launch a U.S. version of Happily Ever After, their bookish online dating site. . . .

From today’s Publishing Perspectives piece by Moser about the origins of his project (Why This World) and all that he went through to research this elusive figure:

Maybe because the project began with such élan, I found myself undaunted by the many obstacles that were thrown at me. Neither the cuisine of rural Ukraine, where Clarice, the daughter of Jewish refugees was born; nor the rush-hour traffic in Recife, where she grew up; nor the zealous guardians of the archives of Bern, where she lived as the wife of a Brazilian diplomat, could dissuade me from my task.

I pored over thousands of pages of master’s theses from obscure universities; I learned Yiddish in order to read family memoirs. Time and again, I tugged out an abusively overused credit card: to buy books, including, ultimately, more copies of her rare first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, than are in all the libraries in the United States put together; to chase down some elusive materials in a suburban house in Manchester; to pay a visit to a man in Paris who may or may not have been her lover (he wasn’t); to put myself on yet another fourteen-hour economy flight in order to spend long days speaking to often-reluctant witnesses.

I got called an anti-Semite and an Ugly American; I also got to spend afternoons with loving Jewish grandmothers who made me tea and sent their maids to my hotel with homemade soup when I came down with the flu. I got to eat pizza with a woman in Kiev who had just returned from Chernobyl and who casually laid her Geiger counter on the table as she was digging through her purse in search of her cigarettes.

I agree with Michael Orthofer, the interaction between super-agent Andrew Wylie and super-awesome Playboy editor Amy Grace Loyd over the first-serial rights to Nabokov’s The Original of Laura is a bit gross.

From the New York Observer:

It was an inspired method, the flowers serving as a reference to Nabokov’s 1969 novel Ada, or Ardor, which was excerpted in Playboy—thus a reminder for Mr. Wylie of the magazine’s long and treasured association with the author. “It was part of my pitch to Andrew that Nabokov really liked publishing with Playboy, and how devoted Hef is to Nabokov and his legacy,” Ms. Loyd said.

Mr. Wylie was initially unresponsive.

“I would get nice notes back from him, but he really wouldn’t give me anything,” said Ms. Loyd, who’d curated a special feature marking the 50th anniversary of Nabokov’s Lolita as part of her tryout for the job.

Of course, Wylie tried to place this with The New Yorker, which apparently wasn’t all that interested.

So, the super-agent (once referred to as “The Greediest Man at Frankfurt”) came crawling back on his knees with some insane demands.

There were a few sticking points in the negotiation, chiefly the fact that Mr. Wylie wanted Ms. Loyd to give an offer on the book without first reading a page of it.

Who does that? Oh, nevermind, don’t answer that. I’m just glad Amy got her piece . . . and hopefully a long, long shower.

Thanks to everyone who pointed out how I screwed up the links to the latest versions of the 2008 and 2009 translation databases . . . Everything should be fixed now.

And if you don’t feel like revisiting the original post, here are the correct links:

2008 Translations

2009 Translations

Sorry it’s taken so long to correct—been a bit preoccupied of late, but things are quickly getting back to normal around here . . .

One of the fall books that I’m really looking forward to is Benjamin Moser’s biography of Clarice Lispector entitled Why This World, which, according to the back jacket, is “based on previously unknown manuscripts, numerous interviews, and years of research on three continents.”

Moser replaced the late John Leonard as the author of Harper’s “New Books” column, and is also a contributor to New York Review of Books. (And his mom runs Brazos Bookstore—a future featured indie bookstore.)

Lispector was born in the Ukraine, but grew up in Brazil and wrote all of her works in Portuguese. Most of her books are available from New Directions, including The Hour of the Star, Selected Cronicas, and Soulstorm. (University of Texas did Apple in the Dark a number of years ago, but it’s currently out-of-print.)

She was a fascinating writer, and her life sounds equally intriguing. I’m hoping to write a full review of this bio in the not-too-distant future, but here’s a bit from the beginning about the mysterious, beautiful Clarice Lispector:

In this void of information a whole mythology sprang up. Reading accounts of her at different points in her life, one can hardly believe they concern the same person. The points of disagreement were not trivial. “Clarice Lispector” was once thought to be a pseudonym, and her original name was not known until after her death. Where exactly she was born and how old she was were also unclear. Her nationality was questioned and the identity of her native language was obscure. One authority will testify that she was right-wing and another will hint that she was a Communist. One will insist that she was a pious Catholic, though she was actually a Jew. Rumor will sometimes have it that she was a lesbian, though at one point rumor also had it that she was, in fact, a man.

What makes this tangle of contradictions so odd is that Clarice Lispector is not a hazy figure known from shreds of antique papyrus. She has been dead hardly thirty years. Many people survive who knew her well. She was prominent virtually from adolescence, her life was extensively documented in the press, and she left behind an extensive correspondence. Still, few great modern artists are quite as fundamentally unfamiliar. How can a person who lived in a large Western city in the middle of the twentieth century, who gave interviews, lived in high-rise apartments, and traveled by air, remain so enigmatic?

I know things have been pretty quiet around here of late—I’ve been out of the office and am detail with some personal issues, so I might not be posting as much as usual for the next couple weeks—but since July 1st is such a great day for spreadsheets, I thought I’d post updated versions of the 2008 and 2009 translation databases.

As always, these spreadsheets contain info on never-before-translated works of fiction and poetry distributed in the U.S. (I left off anything that’s been published in English translation before, even if the earlier version was censored, corrupt, etc. Just trying to focus on what new titles are being made available to English readers.)

The numbers shift a bit over time, with books being delayed from 2008 to 2009, new titles being uncovered, etc. But although I’m not sure these are 100% accurate, I know we’re damn close. (That said, if you see anything missing, please let me know: chad.post at rochester dot edu.)

So, some comparisons:

In 2008, there were 362 translations published in the States (282 works of fiction, 80 works of poetry). That number is down significantly in 2009 (although the data is incomplete) to 299 total translations (249 works of fiction, 50 poetry collections).

Assuming I have all the books from Jan – June, the numbers are a bit closer: 195 books published in 2008 through June, 173 (down 11%) in 2009. (I have a feeling that I’m missing some poetry and small press titles and will check a lot of websites this month and post another update in the near future.)

In terms of languages translated, the top five for both years are remarkably similar, with only French and Spanish switching places:

2008
French 59 books, 16.30% of total
Spanish 48, 13.26%
German 32, 8.84%
Arabic 28, 7.73%
Japanese 23, 6.35%

2009
Spanish 48 books, 16.05% of total
French 43, 14.38%
German 27, 9.03%
Arabic 17, 5.69%
Japanese 17, 5.69%

In terms of publishers (and this is where I think I need to do additional research), in 2008, 141 different presses did at least one book in translation, and in 2009, I’ve only identified 108 so far.

There’s more that can get teased out of these spreadsheets, and hopefully with the next update 2009 will be much closer to last year . . .

The latest addition to our review section is a piece on Juan Filloy’s Op Oloop, which was translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman and is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press.

Pretty interesting book from a very interesting author:

The first time I heard of Juan Filloy was during an editorial trip to Germany, organized by the German Book Office and including a day of “speed dating” with other publishers. It was at one of my first “dates” that I met the very hip editors from Tropen Verlag who, after finding out that I worked at Dalkey Archive, the publisher of David Markson’s best works, suggested that instead of doing any of the German authors they might recommend, the one author that Dalkey absolutely had to publish was the Argentine writer Juan Filloy, especially his Op Oloop.

Before even getting to his actual novels, there’s a lot Filloy had going for him:

• He lived in three centuries—born in the nineteenth, and passing away in 2000 at the age of 106;

• Julio Cortazar loved him, references his Caterva in chapter 108 of Hopscotch;

• Freud was a fan of Op Oloop, which led to a personal correspondence between the two;

• Filloy was a lover of palindromes and wrote over 6,000;

• and, not to be overlooked, almost all fifty-plus of his novels and collections of poems have seven-letter titles. (Op Oloop, Caterva, Vil y Vil, so on and so forth.)

Who wouldn’t want to publish someone like this? And thankfully, six years later, Op Oloop is finally available to English readers.

Click here for the rest of the review.

The first time I heard of Juan Filloy was during an editorial trip to Germany, organized by the German Book Office and including a day of “speed dating” with other publishers. It was at one of my first “dates” that I met the very hip editors from Tropen Verlag who, after finding out that I worked at Dalkey Archive, the publisher of David Markson’s best works, suggested that instead of doing any of the German authors they might recommend, the one author that Dalkey absolutely had to publish was the Argentine writer Juan Filloy, especially his Op Oloop.

Before even getting to his actual novels, there’s a lot Filloy had going for him:

• He lived in three centuries—born in the nineteenth, and passing away in 2000 at the age of 106;

• Julio Cortazar loved him, and references his Caterva in chapter 108 of Hopscotch;

• Freud was a fan of Op Oloop, which led to a personal correspondence between the two;

• Filloy was a lover of palindromes and wrote over 6,000;

• and, not to be overlooked, almost all fifty-plus of his novels and collections of poems have seven-letter titles. (Op Oloop, Caterva, Vil y Vil, so on and so forth.)

Who wouldn’t want to publish someone like this? And thankfully, six years later, Op Oloop is finally available to English readers. (Hopefully it won’t take another six years for Caterva to come out.)

The plot of Op Oloop is pretty simple: it chronicles the final day and night in the life of its titular character, Op Oloop, a Finnish transplant in Buenos Aires who is recently engaged to Franziska, the Finnish consul’s niece. As he likes to state, Op Oloop is a “man of method,” a statistician who lives his life in a very orderly, pre-arranged way.

Thus, Op Oloop was convinced yet again that it was simply impossible for him to act contrary to his nature. “SUNDAY: WRITING, BETWEEN 7:00 AND 10:00 A.M.” That was the rule. When life is as ordered as a mathematical equation, you can’t just skip a digit whenever you feel like it. Op Oloop was entirely incapable of any impromptu act that might violate the pre-established norms of his routine; even such a trivial, graphical set such as addressing an envelope he’d already begun while still within the allotted time.

It’s clear from the start that Op Oloop isn’t all there—his speech to the employees at his local spa about the need to unite on tipping and form a “Gratuity International” is proof enough—but on this particular day, things go from bad to worse, as Op’s “method” is thwarted and he can’t regain his sense of order.

Filloy’s protagonist is a step beyond eccentric, and Lisa Dillman’s ability to capture his peculiar speech, wordplay, and insanity is quite impressive. This is especially true in the lengthy section detailing Op Oloop’s special dinner with his friends (in preparation for him to sleep with his 1,000th prostitute—a situation that doesn’t go according to plan and is the final nail that breaks Op’s mind). This dinner is the section of the book that seems most Cortazar-like (Hopscotch is filthy with groups of characters bantering and making statements about Argentina and its people), although Filloy’s not quite as tight and witty and fluid as Cortazar (who is?).

“In Hollywood, everyone knows the caloric value of everything. Just as they all aspire unanimously to stardom, they’re all equally fanatical about being tres mince rather than overweight. Truly, there’s a veritable obsession with fat. Dieting forces them all to undertake endless calculations and combinations. All portions are measured on a basis of one-hundred-calorie units. For example, one hundred calories equals: a tablespoon of honey, or two mandarin oranges, or four dates, or twenty asparagus tips, or a quarter-inch thick steak measuring five inches long and two and a half inches wide . . .”

“So you must’ve gone round with tape measures, eyedroppers, and scales . . .”

“It’s not a joke. You know, I’ve noticed that Argentines in general tend to be quite sarcastic, yet they’re entirely lacking in humor deep down. They make fun of everything in particular, and yet as a nation are all unanimously dull. It’s truly incongruous!”

As the novel lurches from scene to scene, Filloy creates an interesting account of one man’s mental breakdown. With the exception of what happens at the whorehouse, most of the underlying motivations for his breakdown are mysterious, summed up by the idea that he’s “method personified.” A more conventional book would delve into this issue, maybe explain how the hell he ended up with Franziska in the first place, etc., etc., but this isn’t a conventional book. It’s a more daring, playful novel, that, while not perfect, is one of the most fun novels I’ve read this year. I only wish the graph of Op Oloop’s day that’s in the Spanish edition was also included in this galley.

The latest addition to our review section is a piece by Lara Ericson (one of our summer interns) on Hans Eichner’s Kahn & Engelmann, which was published earlier this year by Biblioasis in Canada (Windsor to be more specific), and translated from the German by Jean M. Snook.

Biblioasis is one of the most interesting young presses in Canada, and will definitely be getting a lot of great attention this fall when they release Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Dance with Snakes. But they’ve been doing some interesting works in translation for some time now, and this novel, although maybe not perfect, is pretty interesting:

Hans Eichner’s first novel (and last—he passed away earlier this year), originally published in 2000 in Austria, was released in English last month, directly after the eminent German scholar’s death. Kahn & Engelmann opens with a joke: a traveling joke and a Jewish joke.

“In the summer of 1938, a Jewish refugee is going for a walk on Carmel Beach . . . Twenty metres out from shore, a man is fighting against the waves and yelling for help in Hebrew. The refugee stops to listen, takes his jacket off, folds it neatly (one should never act too hastily); and while taking off his tie and shoes as well, before jumping into the sea to help the yelling man, he exclaims indignantly: ‘What a fool! Hebrew he has learned. Swimming he should have learned!’”

Though jokes are used throughout the novel, the placement of this particular joke emphasizes the centrality of travel (often forced travel) to the Jewish identity—a theme expanded throughout the novel, in the story of Peter Engelmann’s own life (he lives, at various times, in Vienna, Hungary, Belgium, England, Australia, Canada, and Israel) and that of the Austro-Hungarian Jews from whom he is descended. The question Peter poses at the beginning of the novel of “How did I get here?” is especially relevant to anyone of Jewish heritage and leads Peter to trace the experiences, and travels, of the Austro-Hungarian Jews through the last hundred years.

In the course of the novel, he tells three basic stories: the first is of his own life and recent experiences living in Haifa, Israel in the late-twentieth century; another starts in 1880 and tells his family story starting with his great-grandmother Sidonie; and the third tells the broader history of Austro-Hungarian Jews.

Click here to read the rest of Lara’s review.

Hans Eichner’s first novel (and last—he passed away earlier this year), originally published in 2000 in Austria, was released in English last month, directly after the eminent German scholar’s death. Kahn & Engelmann opens with a joke: a traveling joke and a Jewish joke.

In the summer of 1938, a Jewish refugee is going for a walk on Carmel Beach . . . Twenty metres out from shore, a man is fighting against the waves and yelling for help in Hebrew. The refugee stops to listen, takes his jacket off, folds it neatly (one should never act too hastily); and while taking off his tie and shoes as well, before jumping into the sea to help the yelling man, he exclaims indignantly: “What a fool! Hebrew he has learned. Swimming he should have learned!”

Though jokes are used throughout the novel, the placement of this particular joke emphasizes the centrality of travel (often forced travel) to the Jewish identity—a theme expanded throughout the novel, in the story of Peter Engelmann’s own life (he lives, at various times, in Vienna, Hungary, Belgium, England, Australia, Canada, and Israel) and that of the Austro-Hungarian Jews from whom he is descended. The question Peter poses at the beginning of the novel of “How did I get here?” is especially relevant to anyone of Jewish heritage and leads Peter to trace the experiences, and travels, of the Austro-Hungarian Jews through the last hundred years.

In the course of the novel, he tells three basic stories: the first is of his own life and recent experiences living in Haifa, Israel in the late-twentieth century; another starts in 1880 and tells his family story starting with his great-grandmother Sidonie; and the third tells the broader history of Austro-Hungarian Jews.

The novel primarily follows Peter’s family as his great-grandparents Sidonie and Josef Kahn move from rural Hungary to Vienna in order to improve their children’s opportunities, but also includes the stories of the Kahn children and grandchildren, their business enterprises and their interactions with one another. One of the central storylines is the series of battles (which end tragically) between Jëno Kahn and Peter’s father, Sándor Engelmann, over their clothing firm Kahn & Engelmann (for which the novel is named).

Peter’s narrative jumps around in time, allowing him to tell whatever story he feels is necessary to explain something, or to move on when he simply gets bored with the current topic. While this stream of consciousness style is very authentic, it makes the reading experience choppy and confusing at times, especially with so many characters, years, and plotlines in the novel.

This novel struggles to be both an accurate, historical account of the Austro-Hungarian Jews and a compelling novel. It succeeds at the former attempt, but isn’t quite as successful in the latter. Eichner paints a clear picture both of the rural Jewish life, and of that in Vienna around the turn of the century. The broad scale on which the story is told, both in terms of time span and quantity of characters, adds to the richness of the novel as a story of Jewish history. In addition to the story of the Kahn family, a great deal of historical explanation is given to the various struggles which befall the Kahn family along with the greater Jewish community. These additions are very informative but occasionally bog down the flow of the novel.

The appeal the novel holds in regards to the Kahns’ specific story is more limited. Partly because of the broad scale of the novel, many of the stories become repetitive or tiresome, such the detailed description of the family’s complicated business dealings. As part of this storyline, Peter copies a large number of letters—and detailed financial transactions—written between his father and Jëno during their long battle. If the intention were to present a complete family history, this kind of detail might be more relevant, but in the context of this particular novel, these prolonged discussions are tiring. Other parts of the novel are frankly, quite bizarre and disposable. In particular, Peter’s stories about his later life and his brief marriage add nothing and seem out of character with the rest of the novel.

This said, some aspects of the family history (such as the family’s arrival to and initial struggle in Vienna) are extremely compelling. Also noteworthy are Peter’s reflections on his involvement in World War II. He is sent to an internment camp in Australia for the majority of the war, where he receives an excellent education. At one point, he is presented with the opportunity to fight in the war on the side of the Allies and declines. This decision haunts him throughout the rest of his life. This apathy is the result of what he describes as his “autism”: his inattentiveness to important issues and current events. He later decides to repent for this apathy by moving to Israel and becoming a part of the Jewish struggle there.

Perhaps the highlight of the novel for me is the many jokes and legends from the Jewish community, which Eichner uses as an introduction to a story about the Kahns or to illustrate an aspect of Jewish culture.

“You all know that ani lo jodea means “I don’t know.” Once upon a time there was a shetl in Russia where the Jews lived well, and one day the governor came and said: “The Tsar has decreed that you all have to leave.” But since the governor was a learned man who also knew a lot about Jewish things and was proud of this knowledge, the rabbi was able to persuade him to let it depend on the outcome of a competition: the governor and a representative of the shetl would ask each other questions. The first who couldn’t answer the question has his head cut off. If it was the Jew, then the Jews had to leave; if it was the governor, he got his head cut off, and the Jews could stay. Fair enough—but who was supposed to risk his life by going up against the learned man? . . . Only the shammes said he was willing to try . . . On the agreed upon day, the governor came to the market square . . . When the governor saw that his opponent was the shammes, he laughed and said: “In that case, you may ask the first question.” “Governor,” said the shammes, “what does ani lo jodea mean?” “I don’t know,” said the governor, and the executioner cut his head off.”

Not only are these jokes entertaining, but they truly do provide a window into the experiences and attitudes of the Jewish people. As the novel demonstrates, these stories are repeated around the dinner table to spread both history and values. Eichner’s novel is particularly successful at collecting a number of these stories and illustrating their centrality in the culture.

Although Kahn & Engelmann is not clearly intended to be autobiographical, a large number of events in Eichner’s early life seem to match up with those of Peter Engelmann, from their birth in Vienna, to their internment in Australia, and finally to their professorship in Canada. Eichner was recognized throughout his life as a prominent German scholar, and the novel confirms that. Kahn & Engelmann is a remarkable achievement in recreating a vibrant Jewish community lost to the past. As someone unfamiliar with the Austro-Hungarian Jews, the perspectives given are fascinating and informative. Unfortunately, Hans Eichner’s ambitions exceed his abilities, resulting in an intriguing, yet flawed, novel.

The past few years has seen a bit of a Witold Gombrowicz renaissance. Yale University Press has published Danuta Borchardt’s retranslations¹ of Cosmos and Ferdydurke, Archipelago published Bill Johnston’s translation of Bacacay, and Dalkey Archive reissued A Kind of Testament. And coming in November from Grove is Danuta Borchardt’s new translation of Pornografia, a Gombrowicz novel I haven’t read, but that sounds pretty damn good:

In the midst of the German occupation, two aging intellectuals travel to a farm in the countryside, looking for a respite from the claustrophobic scene in Warsaw. They quickly grow bored of their bucolic surroundings—that is, until they become hypnotized by a pair of country youths who have grown up alongside each other. The older men are determined to orchestrate a tryst between the two teenagers, but they are soon distracted by a string of violent developments, culminating in an order from the Polish underground movement: the men at the farm must assassinate a rogue resistance captain who has sought refuge there. The erotic games are put on hold—until the two dissolute intellectuals find a way to involve their pawns in the murderous plot.

Gombrowicz was one of the best (Ferdydurke is an absolute must read), and it’s great to see so many of his books available again, especially now that they’re translated from the original Polish . . . Here’s the opening paragraph of Pornografia to get a taste of his style:

I’ll tell you about yet another adventure of mine, probably one of the most disastrous. At the time—the year was 1943—I was living in what was once Poland and what was once Warsaw, at the rock-bottom of an accomplished fact. Silence. The thinned-out bunch of companions and friends from the former cafes—the Zodiac, the Ziemianska, the Ipsu—would gather in an apartment on Krucza Street and there, drinking, we tried hard to go on as artists, writers, and thinkers . . . picking up our old, earlier conversations and disputes about art. . . . Hey, hey, hey, to this day I see us sitting or lying around in thick cigarette smoke, this one somewhat skeleton-like, that one scarred, and all shouting, screaming. So this one was shouting: God, another: art, a third: the nation, a fourth: the proletariat, and so we debated furiously, and it went on and on—God, art, nation, proletariat—but one day a middle-aged guy turned up, dark and lean, with an aquiline nose and, observing all due formality, he introduced himself to everyone individually. After which he hardly spoke.

If you’re intrigued, you can preorder the book from Booksmith by clicking here.

And now I’ll sit back and watch people searching for “polish porno” flock to our site for some serious disappointment . . .

¹ Actually, Danuta Borchardt’s translations are the first from the original Polish edition—earlier editions were translated from the French versions.

Jeff Waxman from The Front Table was kind enough to let me write a pretty long piece on Merce Rodoreda’s Death in Spring, a book that I absolutely love. Rodoreda’s something special, and the book (which is paper-over-board—get it while it’s hot!) has one of the most intricate, fitting, and cool covers we’ve published so far.

Aside from the exposure to excellent works of literature from all over the world, the best thing about my work with literature in translation is the editorial trips to Spain, to France, to Estonia, to German, to Argentina—and I’m surprised more people don’t become translators or publishers for this alone. I first heard of Mercè Rodoreda—arguably the most influential Catalan author of the twentieth century—during such an editorial trip to Barcelona a few years back that was organized by the brilliant and hip Ramon Llull Institut and consisted of four days of meetings with editors, publishers, critics, and Catalan authors.

Catalan culture is in a bit of a tricky position. A completely different language from Castilian (what we commonly refer to as “Spanish”), Catalan was strongly discouraged during the Franco regime, and a number of Catalan artists—Rodoreda included—went into exile during this time. After Franco’s death in 1975, there’s been resurgence in interest in the Catalan language and in Catalan culture as a whole. Catalonia—located in the northeast part of Spain, bordering France and including Barcelona—has taken pride in reclaiming its literary and artistic heritage, and promoting its unique society to the rest of the world. On the literary end of things, the selection of Catalonia as the Guest of Honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2007 (the first region—in contrast to country—to be honored as such), really helped raise the awareness of Catalan literature among editors, writers, and reviewers around the world.

That said, Quim Monzo’s self-referential opening speech at the book fair (Monzo is another Catalan author I learned about during this trip and that Open Letter will be publishing) is honest to a point of self-deprecation about the worldwide interest in Catalan literature:

“Won’t reading the names of all these writers (most of whom are unknown to the literary world that circulates in Frankfurt) just be tedious for the audience at the opening ceremony who will have to listen to so many unfamiliar names? Won’t they be looking at their watches and thinking, “What a bore!”? And so he decides he won’t mention any names (even though, in fact, he has already mentioned them in the very process of describing his doubts as to whether he should mention them or not). What’s more, he’s read that at the Frankfurt Book Fair there will be an exhibition that explains all this. Although—to be frank—how many of the persons who attend this inaugural event will later visit this exhibition with any more interest than a merely official show of etiquette? Let us be frank and optimistic: very few.”

So where does Mercè Rodoreda fit into all this?

Click here for the rest.

As mentioned last week, China is the Guest of Honor at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, and to prepare for this, four journalists from the FBF have headed over to Peking on a “journey of literary discovery.” (Which I believe means listening to a lot of speeches about China’s book industry and traveling around to various stores, publishers, etc.)

Ed Nawotka (of Publishing Perspectives and PW) is one of the journalists, and will be posting a series of stories all week about the literary scene in China.

Not too much online yet, but there is a post about how many Kindles he saw on the plane (and the lack of good travel books available for the Kindle) and one about the Joyful O2Sun Bookstore.

As the week progresses, I’m sure this will get more and more interesting. Definitely worth checking in on, and I’ll be sure to post about any really interesting pieces.

The third part of Jan Kjaerstad’s “Wergeland Trilogy” (The Seducer, The Conqueror and The Discoverer) was recently released in the UK (our edition comes out in September), and Paul Binding wrote a really nice overview of the book for The Independent:

The Discoverer completes the trilogy to which Norwegian writer Jan Kjaerstad’s The Seducer and The Conqueror belong: an enormously ambitious undertaking about an enormously ambitious man – and, beyond him, about ambition itself and humanity’s ambiguous need for it. The matter of all three novels – which contain overlaps, revisitings, and some mind-bending contradictions, with each account plausible – is laid out baldly in the first novel’s first chapter, “The Big Bang”. Jonas Wergeland, who “has risen to heights of fame which very few, if any, Norwegians have ever come close to attaining”, returns from the World’s Fair in Seville (1992), to his house in Grorud, the Oslo borough in which he grew up. And there, on his living-room floor, he finds his wife, Margrete Boeck, venereologist and mother of his daughter, shot dead.

Wergeland is charged with the murder, found guilty, partly through testimony from his own clergyman brother, Daniel, and receives a custodial sentence. None of the novels proceeds linearly, nor is there one consistent narrator. The Conqueror, after the first book’s tributes to his boundless imagination and sexual inventiveness, presents a far more troubled and troubling Jonas. It makes us pretty sure he must have dispatched the woman he so loved. But in The Discoverer we come – via Jonas himself and his devoted daughter, Kristin – to a different conclusion that exonerates this pre-eminent Norwegian, whose main failing may have been precisely that pre-eminence.

But have we reached the truth of the affair? Is this third book the final version? By no means, the author told me recently. Like Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, his trilogy asserts relativity. In one sense only is The Discoverer final: Kjaerstad will write no sequel. [. . .]

The voyage that The Discoverer will impel, thanks to Barbara J Haveland’s lively, fluid and at times sparkling translation, is a return one, to the beginning of the whole trilogy – a work so ample in its riches that further discoveries are inevitable.

My first article for Publishing Perspectives went live this morning and is all about the advantages (and disadvantages) of the paper-over-board format.

I have a visceral hatred for dust jackets – I strip them off, I crinkle them, I lose them. So in 2007, when in the process of launching Open Letter (a new publishing house at the University of Rochester dedicated to international literature), we had to decide whether we wanted to do our books as paperbacks, traditional hardcovers, or some third, more unique design, like “paper-over-board.”

Basically, paper-over-board books are hardcovers without a dust jacket. But not those musty, dowdy books you might find in an abandoned corner of a library . . . Printing technologies have come a long way, and now paper-over-board books can be as vibrant and attractive as any paperback, and printed in the same trade size as well.

This format is pretty common among European presses: Proa Editions in Barcelona produces a gorgeous line of paper-over-board books, as does Wydawnictwo W.A.B. in Warsaw, another Polish publisher, Swiat Ksiazki, and Karolinum Press in Prague (which also uses some of the most buttery paper I’ve ever stroked).

It’s not very common in the United States though. Lemony Snicket’s “A Series of Unfortunate Events” books are paper-over-board, and for adult fiction, HarperCollins USA published both Toby Barlow’s Sharp Teeth and Dubravka Ugresic’s The Ministry of Pain as paper-over-board titles, but those are the rare exceptions. (One independent bookseller who’s a big fan of this format showed a copy of one of Open Letter’s books to sales rep from a major distributor, who then replied, “Well, it looks pretty European” in a way that was probably pejorative.)

Marketing was the primary motivating factor in our decision making process. Our paper-over-board books would definitely stand out in the bookstore and would be very classy (or so we thought). And we also thought (although as you’ll see below this gets a bit complicated) that readers would appreciate being able to get a nice looking, durable hardcover at a very reasonable price.

Unfortunately, as is explained at the end of the piece, this format can be a bit baffling to customers and bookstores alike, falling in between the traditional hardcover market and paperback buyers. And since our mission really is to reach as many readers as possible with our books—and since we think we’ll be able to reach more with paperbacks—we’ve decided to do all paperbacks for the next season. This isn’t saying that we won’t go back to paper-over-board at some point (man, I really do love that format), but for the sake of our authors, we’re at least going to try this out.

Read the entire piece (please—I worked long and hard on this), by clicking here, and while you’re at the site, be sure to sign up to receive the daily articles from Publishing Perspectives.

Infinite Summer officially kicks off this week, with participants reading and discussing the first 63 pages of David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece, Infinite Jest.

Covering approximately 75 pages a week (the entire reading schedule can be found here) , this group will read one of the longest novels of our generation by September 21st. For anyone who hasn’t read this book, this looks to be a fantastic way of experiencing the book, with great commentaries by other interesting writers, and a host of other people enjoying it with you . . .

I’m personally interested in seeing how this plays out. Online reading groups have been a mixed bag, with the Golden Notebook Project getting most everything right and representing the most successful model to date.

Infinite Summer is a bit more traditional, with different commentators leading the group through the reading and trying to encourage comments along the way.

But it’s also one of the first online reading groups I’ve seen that’s incorporating a lot of social media possibilities and allowing for a very de-centered approach to the traditional reading club. For instance, this roundup post links to a separate blog detailing one reader’s reading of IJ, a site where you can download an IJ reading schedule bookmark, a site called Infinite Zombies that is part reading group part Fight Club, a Flickr pool, a Twittered version of IJ, and a site archiving the ongoing conversation of two IJ readers. This is reading group as controlled chaos, or social networking event.

With the popularity of DFW (and his sudden, tragic end), I can imagine that all of these sites will attract a lot of followers, and it will be really interesting to see what sort of long-term effect this has. IJ is one of those books that a lot of people own, but haven’t necessarily read, so who knows if this will be a bigger boost to sales or literary awareness. Regardless, it should be an interesting phenomenon to watch unfold, and short of reading all Open Letter books published to date, this is a damn good way to spend your summer.

From Newsweek:

Among the dozens of people arrested overnight in Tehran was Newsweek reporter Maziar Bahari, who has covered Iran for the magazine for over a decade. Bahari was home asleep at 7 a.m. when several security officers showed up at his Tehran apartment. According to his mother, who lives with the 41-year-old reporter and documentary filmmaker, the men did not identify themselves. They seized Bahari’s laptop and several videotapes. Assuring her that he would be their guest, they then left with Bahari. He has not been heard from since.

In a statement, Newsweek magazine has strongly condemned the detention of Bahari and called for him to be released immediately. Bahari is a dual Canadian-Iranian citizen. According to the statement, “His coverage of Iran, for NEWSWEEK and other outlets, has always been fair and nuanced, and has given full weight to all sides of the issues. He has always worked well with different administrations in Tehran, including the current one.”

Bahari was on The Daily Show last week, and is also the editor of Transit Tehran, (Garnet Publishing) an anthology of essays and picture-stories about Tehran by “city-insiders, rappers, artists, writers and photojournalists.”

Farhad Manjoo’s recent piece in Slate offers a unique take on one of the advantages newspapers have over the Kindle—the ability to convey information through design elements:

Every newspaper you’ve ever read was put together by someone with an opinion about which of the day’s stories was most important. Newspapers convey these opinions through universal, easy-to-understand design conventions—they put important stories on front pages, with the most important ones going higher on the page and getting more space and bigger headlines. You can pick up any page of the paper and—just by reading headlines, subheads, and photo captions—quickly get the gist of several news items. Even when you do choose to read a story, you don’t have to read the whole thing. Since it takes no time to switch from one story to another, you can read just a few paragraphs and then go on to something else.

For instance, look at page A25 of the national edition of Thursday’s Times, which contains four stories: a big piece on the Obama administration’s decision to fire a federal inspector general; a smaller story on the administration’s plan to replace members of the White House bioethics panel; a piece about asbestos contamination in Libby, Mont.; and a small wire-service story about Sen. Roland Burris’ inconsequential meeting with an Illinois state prosecutor. A newspaper skimmer can get through this page in less than two minutes. The IG and bioethics stories are obviously the most important, so you dip into those for about 45 seconds each. Then you spend about 15 seconds on the asbestos story, followed by five seconds on the Burris item, which is just five paragraphs long. Going like this, you can easily get through the whole A section in less than a half hour.

Getting through these same stories on the Kindle is much harder and more tedious. First, they’re out of order. When I scrolled through Thursday’s national section on my Kindle, the shortest and least newsworthy of these pieces—the Burris story—came first. Worse, because the Kindle gives every story the same headline font, the list item doesn’t clue you in to the story’s slightness. The only way to know if a story merits your attention is to click on it. But clicking is time-consuming—the Kindle takes a half-second or so to switch between a section list and a story, and another half-second to switch back. This sounds nearly instant, but it’s not; the delay is just long enough to change the way you read the news. Now, instead of skimming, you find yourself reading the newspaper as you would a book—when you find a story, you stick with it until the end. You trade breadth for depth: In 30 minutes of reading the Kindle, you get further into a lot fewer stories.

Of course, the fact that you can actually subscribe to the paper for $9 to $15 per month through the Kindle DX (in contrast to the $770/year it cost to subscribe to the print version of the Times) is a pretty appealing counterargument . . . Still, this is an interesting moment of interplay between technology, design, and the transmission of information.

The final installment in The Guardian‘s_ Stories from a New Europe series is This Part of Town Is No Place for Old-Timers by Czech author Jachym Topol. David Short translated this piece about a Czech writer remembering life before 1989, his father’s failure as a writer and dissident, and how the post-wall society is filled with crappy chain restaurants and other ways to lure in tourists:

Now don’t start drowning in nostalgia, I tell myself. It must be better here now than it was back then. In those days, the barracks across the street with the red star on the front was where Soviet soldiers used to take their meals. The Soviets with their tanks and rockets held their Czech gubernium on a tight rein, and with it one-sixth of the world, and that was horrendous; while this globalised tat – well, it’s Freedom. The God-awful tackiness of city centres is evidence of the freedom to travel, I reassure myself. It’s the same here as in Florence, Kyoto or Lisbon. People want to be alike, since difference breeds only misunderstanding and violence. And it’s hardly overstating it to say that that year, 1989, when Eastern Europe rose in revolt, we shot straight out of Orwell into Huxley. But which is better?

In the end, this was definitely my favorite of the six stories in the series. And unlike some of the other writers featured by The Guardian, if you’re interested in reading more Topol, his novel City Sister Silver is available from Catbird Press, and Gargling with Tar is currently being translated by David Short.

Probably more than any of the five pieces, this story would fit perfectly in The Wall in My Head an anthology of stories, essays, and images that we’re publishing on November 9th, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Words Without Borders (specifically Rohan Kamicheril and Sal Robinson) put together this fantastic collection, which includes pieces by Peter Schneider, Ryszard Kapuściński, Vladimir Sorokin and Victor Pelevin and new work from Péter Esterházy, Andrzej Stasiuk, Muharem Bazdulj, Maxim Trudolubov, Dorota Masłowska, Uwe Tellkamp, Dan Sociu, David Zábranský, Christhard Läpple, and a host of others.

You can preorder the title directly from us by clicking the link above, or you can order it from The Booksmith, our store of the month, by clicking here. Or, for the biggest savings, you could just take out an Open Letter subscription and receive the next six OL books for $65. (Or the next 12 for $120—just click the image below for more details.)

Our latest review is of The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer, and published earlier this year by Archipelago Books. Larissa Kyzer—who has reviewed a number of books for us—wrote this piece, which makes the book sound both quiet and compelling:

Penetrating, beautifully sparse, and eerie in its stillness, Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin tells the story of Helmer van Wonderen, an aging farmer whose life has been characterized by passivity, inaction, and a profound sense of isolation. Having begrudgingly taken over the family dairy farm after the accidental death of his twin brother Henk, Helmer finds himself, after 55 years, suddenly and unexpectedly the master of his own life—if only he knew what to do with it.

For years, Helmer has been “doing things by halves,” living the life that was intended for his brother, a monotonous existence at the beck and call of his tyrannical father. As the story opens, however, Helmer has moved his father, close to death, to a bedroom upstairs, an act of self-assertion that pushes him to reassess his past and the decisions—or lack thereof—that have left him stagnated and alone. “Why did I let it all happen like this?,” he wonders. “I could have said ‘no’ to Father and ‘do it yourself’ or just ‘sell up.’”

But while Helmer may not be satisfied with the life that he has accepted for himself, it is a routine that if not fulfilling, is at least familiar. “I’ve milked the cows, day after day,” he reflects.

Click here for the entire review.

Penetrating, beautifully sparse, and eerie in its stillness, Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin tells the story of Helmer van Wonderen, an aging farmer whose life has been characterized by passivity, inaction, and a profound sense of isolation. Having begrudgingly taken over the family dairy farm after the accidental death of his twin brother Henk, Helmer finds himself, after 55 years, suddenly and unexpectedly the master of his own life—if only he knew what to do with it.

For years, Helmer has been “doing things by halves,” living the life that was intended for his brother, a monotonous existence at the beck and call of his tyrannical father. As the story opens, however, Helmer has moved his father, close to death, to a bedroom upstairs, an act of self-assertion that pushes him to reassess his past and the decisions—or lack thereof—that have left him stagnated and alone. “Why did I let it all happen like this?,” he wonders. “I could have said ‘no’ to Father and ‘do it yourself’ or just ‘sell up.’”

But while Helmer may not be satisfied with the life that he has accepted for himself, it is a routine that if not fulfilling, is at least familiar. “I’ve milked the cows, day after day,” he reflects.

In a way, I curse them, the cows, but they’re also warm and serene when you lean your forehead on their flanks to attach the teat cups. There is nothing as calming, as protected, as a shed full of cows on a winter’s evening. Day in, day out, summer, autumn, winter, spring.

In the absence of any truly meaningful, reciprocative human relationships, Helmer has forged quiet connections with his animals. He finds solace in the ritual of milking his cows, keeps two identical donkeys as pets, and almost drowns himself trying to save a sheep mired in an irrigation ditch. And it is through natural imagery such as this—swallows sleeping on telephone lines, a hooded crow alighting outside the kitchen window, ducks swimming in a pond—that Bakker (a former linguist who has since become a gardener) is able to not only reveal more of his taciturn protagonist’s interiority, but also bring the narrative to a kind of gentle compromise between what should have been and what simply is.

On an unexpected trip to Denmark—his first holiday “in thirty-seven years of milking day and night“—Helmer walks down to a beach at sunset. “The beach is deserted,” he says.

There are no hooded crows in the sky and even the busy grey sandpipers are missing. . . I am the only one for miles around making any noise . . . I know I have to get up. I know the maze of paths and unpaved roads in the shade of the pines, birches and maples will already be dark. But I stay sitting calmly, I am alone.

By the novel’s close, Helmer has found some measure of peace and acceptance in his quiet life—even in his solitude.

Over the past couple days, I’ve received two interesting press releases from the Frankfurt Book Fair worth sharing.

First off, it was announced earlier this week that Finland will be the 2014 Guest of Honor. From the press release:

Finland is known for its literary export of children’s books – for example, Tove Jansson’s “Finn Family Moomintroll” – and of mystery novels, including authors like Pentti Kirstilä, Matti Y. Joensuu, Outi Pakkanen or Taavi Soininvaara. Authors like Kari Hotakainen, Anja Snellmann or Arto Paasilinna have also managed to make the leap into the international publishing world – their most important works are also available in German translation.

For more information about Finnish literature, I highly recommend checking our the online journal Books from Finland. We’ve written about this before, but honestly, this is the best place to find samples, read reviews of Finnish works, etc. Also, although it’s not exclusively Finnish, the blog Nordic Voices in Translation is a fantastic source for information and sample translations. (Especially sample translations.)

For more information about China, this year’s Guest of Honor, the Frankfurt Book Fair put together this very handy overview of the Chinese book market, which includes a brief survey of the development of Chinese contemporary literature and a review of the development of Chinese literature in 21st century.

*

And on a slightly different note, the application information for the international bookseller’s program is now available. I personally think this sounds really interesting:

The international programme provides foreign booksellers with an insight into the functions and structures of the German book trade, enabling them to efficiently organise their import and sales of German books. The programme promotes dialogue with other booksellers, German publishers and wholesalers and helps participants to create their own network.

In addition to the attendance at the Frankfurt Book Fair and visits to German publishing companies the programme includes an introduction to the German book market, one day of work experience in a bookshop, two visits to wholesalers as well as cultural activities.

All visits will be supported by presentations given during the seminar. Participants will be able to report about their home countries’ book markets. Time is allowed for indepth exchanges of experience between participants, speakers and organisers.

Application deadline is July 15th, and all the necessary info can be found at the link above.

Today’s installment in “The Guardian‘s” week of Eastern European stories is Mustafa by Nikolai Grozni. By far the funniest piece of the week, “Mustafa” centers around a funereal gone awry:

In any event, questioning the authenticity of my grandmother’s body at her funeral was not the proper thing to do. Then again, I had been away from Eastern Europe for ten years. I had a good excuse to act inappropriately. So, I walked over to the two gypsies and asked them where they’d found the body. I thought it a perfect question: I didn’t challenge their right to choose which body we should bury at my grandmother’s funeral, and I certainly didn’t threaten to disrupt the funeral ceremony, already in progress. Just a casual question, an offhand remark, as it were. Nothing serious. Where did you guys find this body?

“You don’t think that’s her nose?” countered the younger one. “Mustafa, you tell him.”

“My friend,” said Mustafa, blinking very slowly, “this is definitely your grandmother’s nose. I’ve been around. I know what a nose looks like.”

“But you don’t even know my grandmother,” I objected, trying not to raise my voice.

“You should listen to what this man says,” the younger gypsy advised me. “He’s been in the piano delivery business for thirty years. He can tell a Zimerman from a Bosendorf from a hundred meters with his eyes closed, and with the wind blowing in the opposite direction.”

“I think I know this guy,” said Mustafa, pointing at me. “Didn’t we deliver a Petroff to your house fifteen years ago? A good lower register, somewhat tinny as the notes get higher?”

“Probably you did,” I conceded. “You must have.”

“What do you know,” said Mustafa, raising his hands toward the sky. “Now I come to deliver your grandmother.”

A River & A Sound is a brand new online magazine published in association with the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University that grew out of a one-of-a-kind, literary entertainment program designed to make literary events more exciting.

You can check out the rest of the magazine at the link above, but the piece that caught my eye was K.E. Semmel’s translation of Phosphorescence by Danish author Simon Fruelund. (I think this is a week of short stories, what with the Guardian pieces and now this . . .)

We have a few Fruelund works on submission, and they’re pretty interesting. Not all are quite as straightforward, almost Hemingway-esque, as this particular story. In fact, the more recent work has a bit more of a David Markson tinge to it . . . Anyway, this piece is worth checking out, and I know that A River & A Sound is planning on running more works in translation in the future, and is looking for submissions . . .

This past weekend, Adam Thirlwell (author of the novel Politics and The Delighted States, which is all about translation) wrote a really nice tribute in The Guardian to late translator Barbara Wright (who would’ve loved to have received a fan letter from Adam—and most likely would’ve sent him a cool postcard in return):

About a month ago, I was in an airport and I picked up a newspaper and discovered an obituary of Barbara Wright, who had died, aged 93. And for a moment, in my displaced state, I remembered a random word – Howcanaystinksotho – and, oddly, felt about to cry.

Maybe this seems strange. It requires some explanation.

I don’t have many heroes. I certainly don’t have many heroes I would ever want to meet. But I had always wanted to meet Barbara Wright. Once, I contemplated the idea of sending her a fan letter. But, I thought, surely Barbara Wright – the translator of Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet, Jarry and, especially, of Raymond Queneau – wouldn’t want to be bothered with fan letters? Or wouldn’t even be still alive? And there, in a random airport, it turned out that I could have done, and therefore should have done. [. . .]

I thought about all this, in my airport, because I was thinking about Wright, and her miraculous translations of the French novelist Raymond Queneau. In an essay on Queneau, she mentions one aspect of his novelistic project, which dated from a holiday he spent in Greece in 1932, where he noted the huge discrepancy between modern spoken Greek and classical Greek, and realised that modern French was hopelessly in thrall to the conventions of the 16th and 17th centuries. His emphasis on language as a game was an attempt, like Joyce’s, to desophisticate language. So that, for instance, there is what Wright called “his logosymphysis” – his depiction of spoken words run together, like the first word of Zazie in the Metro: “Doukipudonktan?” – which stands for: “D’ou qu’ils puent donc tant?”, meaning “How come they stink so, though?” Which she rendered like this: “Howcanaystinksotho”.

Barbara Wright really was one of the best.

The latest entry in The Guardian‘s series of short stories about the transformations of Eastern Europe post-1989 is Stelian Tanase’s Zgaiba, translated from the Romanian by Jean Harris. (Who runs the Observer Translation Project, which is the best source online for information about Romanian literature.)

So far, this is probably my favorite story in The Guardian series. Like the Clemens Meyer piece, it focuses on a dog:

Zgaiba died Wednesday at 17:26 – his head smashed in. A car travelling at a high speed killed him in the middle of the street. The sound of the blow kept ringing in Vivi’s brain. The driver never stopped. He must have heard a thud under the body of the car, there under the right front wheel. He floored the accelerator, and remoteness swallowed him. Vivi lost track of the car at the end of the street. Tsak tsak tsak: He went on shooting the images reflexively. That was the thing. Horrified. Zgaiba. Images on the sidewalk. The dog didn’t drop right away. He was hurled a metre along the curb. He didn’t bark. He didn’t yelp. He didn’t let out a sound. Time stood still. It took Vivi a moment to come back to his senses. Zgaiba: images on the pavement – his eyes fogged over; his big eyes, stunned. In a state of shock. His tail lowered, his ears pricked. Vivi went on looking at the dog’s coffee-coloured spine there among the iron spears of the fence. Tsak, tsak, tsak. Zgaiba had started heading back to the gate that had let him out earlier. He had crossed the street. He had nearly slipped into the courtyard. He gazed into the familiar place without understanding what hit him. From dying to collapse, the whole scene lasted an instant. Right before Vivi’s eyes.

Vivi had been taking a cigarette break. Between smokes, he went on snapping pictures of Zgaiba, who he’d spotted down in the street. His favourite character. He had hundreds of clichéd snaps of the dog. Vivi himself was up in the attic at the time. He was looking at the cold weather, the cornices across the street. He’d been developing yesterday’s pix for an hour. Failures, without éclat, flops, dumb mistakes: he had spoiled ten rolls of film. Irritated, tired, Vivi had picked up the camera and started taking pictures of Zgaiba bumming around the area – it relaxed him, tsak, tsak, tsak – when the car had appeared. A shiny black body. With headlights on. Evening hadn’t fallen yet. There was a dirty ashen light. Overcast sky. It’ll snow, Vivi had told himself earlier, with his elbows on the sill. The blow to the brain flashed into being – unforeseeably – after that.

Stelian Tanase’s Auntie Varvara’s Clients came out from Spuyten Duyvil press a few years back, which sounds interesting, but is retailing on Amazon for $40? Bit cheaper to check out this special issue of the Observer Translation Project that is dedicated to Tanase and contains an except from the novel Dark Bodies.

The National Endowment for the Arts just announced some of the highlights from its 2008 “Survey of Public Participation in the Arts,” and the results, well, aren’t very encouraging. Here are just some of the gloomy findings:

There are persistent patterns of decline in participation for most art forms. Nearly 35 percent of U.S. adults – or an estimated 78 million – attended an art museum or an arts performance in the 2008 survey period, compared with about 40 percent in 1982, 1992, and 2002.

Aging audiences are a long-term trend. Performing arts attendees are increasingly older than the average U.S. adult (45). The aging of the baby boom generation does not appear to account for the overall increase in age.

Audiences for jazz and classical music are substantially older than before. In 1982, jazz concerts drew the youngest adult audience (median age 29). In the 2008 survey, the median age of jazz concert-goers was 46 – a 17-year increase. Since 1982, young adult (18-24) attendance rates for jazz and classical music have declined the most, compared with other art forms.

College-educated audiences (including those with advanced degrees and certifications), have curbed their attendance in nearly all art forms.

The one bright spot (maybe not necessarily for a book publisher, but still, arts participation is arts participation) is the findings about the internet:

About 70 percent of U.S. adults went online for any purpose in 2008 survey, and of those adults, nearly 40 percent used the Internet to view, listen to, download, or post artworks or performances.

Thirty percent of adults who use the Internet, download, watch, or listen to music, theater, or dance performances online at least once a week. More than 20 percent of Internet-using adults view paintings, sculpture, or photography at least once a week.

At least the House Appropriations Subcommittee on the Interior approved a bill setting the FY2010 NEA budget at $170 million—an increase of $15 million over the current budget. Of course, this is still $6 million lower than the 1992 high water mark of $176 million . . . which would actually be $270 million in 2009 dollars.

Today’s installment in The Guardian‘s series of short stories from Eastern Europe is ‘Something Is Burning Outside’ by Laszlo Krasznahorkai.

Krasznahorkai, whose Melancholy of Resistance and War & War are both amazing and both in print from New Directions (with Satan Tango forthcoming . . . sometime), is one of Hungary’s most important, and stylistically interesting, contemporary writers.

This story—which is set at an artists’ retreat—is different in tone than the two translated novels, but is compelling in the way that all of Krasznahorkai’s fiction is compelling. And Ottilie Mulzet’s translation reads well. Here’s the opening:

Saint Anna Lake is a dead lake formed inside a crater, lying at an elevation of around 950 metres, and of a nearly astonishingly regular circular form. It is filled with rainwater: the only fish to live in it is the catfish. The bears, if they come to drink, use different paths from the humans when they saunter down from the pine-clad forests. There is a section on the further side, less frequently visited, which consists of a flat, swampy marshland: today, a path of wooden planks meanders across the marsh. It is called the Moss Lake. As for the water, rumour has it that it never freezes over; in the middle, it is always warm. The crater has been dead for millennia, as have the waters of the lake. For the most part, a great silence weighs upon the land.

It is ideal, as one of the organizers remarked to the first-day arrivals as he showed them around – ideal for reflection, as well as for refreshing strolls, which no one forgot, taking good advantage of the proximity of the camp to the highest mountain, known as the Thousand-Metre Peak; thus in both directions – up to the top of the peak, down from the peak! – the foot traffic was fairly dense: dense, but in no way did that signify that even more feverish efforts were not taking place simultaneously in the camp below; time, as was its wont, wore on, and ever more feverishly, as the creative ideas, originally conceived for this site, took shape and in imagination reached their final form; everyone by then having already settled into their allotted space, subsequently furnished and fixed up by their own hands, most obtaining a private room in the main building, but there were also those who withdrew into a log hut, or a shed long since fallen into disuse; three moved up into the enormous attic of the house that served as the camp’s focal point, each one partitioning off separate spaces for themselves – and this, by the way, was the one great necessity for all: to be alone while working; everyone demanded tranquillity, undisturbed and untroubled, and that was how they set to their work, and that was just how the days passed, largely in work, with a smaller share allotted to walks, a pleasant dip in the lake, the meals and the evening sound of singing around the campfire, accompanied by home-made fruit brandy.

Not sure when the last time the words “good news” and “Detroit” were used in the same sentence, but according to the Detroit Free Press, the Erb Family Foundation of Birmingham has recently announced $1.6 million in grants to 35 local arts organizations, “ranging from $100,000 to the Detroit Institute of Arts to $10,000 to grass-roots groups like the Rackham Symphony Choir.”

The $100-million foundation (with the money coming from the lumber business) is still in its first year, and has already given away $3.5 million to “nurture what its calls environmentally healthy and culturally vibrant communities in metro Detroit.”

This obviously isn’t going to fix Detroit’s woes—what could?—but it is an interesting step in the right direction. And maybe by helping foster a creative community, Detroit can start reshaping itself . . .

And although that sounds super unlikely, Razia Iqbal of the BBC provides a bit of factual hope:

Recent research from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta) suggests that the cultural sector will grow by 4% between 2009 and 2013 – double the estimate for the rest of the economy.

There are parts of this sector which are clearly feeling the effects of the recession, such as architecture and advertising. But others, like the video games industry, are burgeoning. [. . .]

I’ve been talking to Lord Puttnam about this and he is a passionate advocate of investing in the creative industries. He thinks they are where young people want to work and argues that the government dismisses their potential at its peril. This goes to the heart of an argument that historically presents the arts community as whingeing luvvies. In fact, the reality is that the creative industries will by 2013 employ 1.3 million people and the wealth generated by these industries could reach £85 billion. It is the economic case for the arts that those in the creative industries need to make.

This is a couple weeks old now, but star translator Susan Bernofsky wrote an excellent article for the Wall Street Journal about the immense popularity of the German version of the Donald Duck comic book:

Comics featuring Donald are available at most German newsstands and the national weekly “Micky Maus”—which features the titular mouse, Goofy and, most prominently, Donald Duck—sells an average of 250,000 copies each week, outselling even “Superman.” A lavish 8,000-page German Donald Duck collector’s edition has just come out, and despite the nearly $1,900 price tag, the publisher, Egmont Horizont, says the edition of 3,333 copies is almost completely sold out. Last month the fan group D.O.N.A.L.D (the German acronym stands for “German Organization for Non-commercial Followers of Pure Donaldism”), hosted its 32nd annual congress at the Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, with trivia and trinkets galore, along with lectures devoted to “nephew studies” and Duckburg’s solar system.

“Donald is so popular because almost everyone can identify with him,” says Christian Pfeiler, president of D.O.N.A.L.D. “He has strengths and weaknesses, he lacks polish but is also very cultured and well-read.” But much of the appeal of the hapless, happy-go-lucky duck lies in the translations. Donald quotes from German literature, speaks in grammatically complex sentences and is prone to philosophical musings, while the stories often take a more political tone than their American counterparts.

Disney—not necessarily known for allowing much creative freedom with its properties—actually did something right for once, allowing translator Dr. Erika Fuchs to create a version of Donald Duck that’s a bit more complex than the American one, and that has truly become a cult figure in Germany.

Dr. Fuchs’s Donald was no ordinary comic creation. He was a bird of arts and letters, and many Germans credit him with having initiated them into the language of the literary classics. The German comics are peppered with fancy quotations. In one story Donald’s nephews steal famous lines from Friedrich Schiller’s play “William Tell”; Donald garbles a classic Schiller poem, “The Bell,” in another. Other lines are straight out of Goethe, Hölderlin and even Wagner (whose words are put in the mouth of a singing cat). The great books later sounded like old friends when readers encountered them at school. As the German Donald points out, “Reading is educational! We learn so much from the works of our poets and thinkers.”

Bernofsky points out two different ways in which Fuchs has created a radically different version of Donald Ducks: through altered speech patterns (especially alliteration), and by adding more political depth to the stories.

In terms of alliteration, she uses this example from “Lifeguard Daze”:

In the English comic, he says: “I’d do anything to break this monotony!” The über-gloomy German version: “How dull, dismal and deathly sad! I’d do anything to make something happen.”

What’s really interesting though is the difference between the German version of “The Golden Helmet” and the American one:

Take, for example, the classic Duck tale “The Golden Helmet,” a story about the search for a lost Viking helmet that entitles its wearer to claim ownership of America. In Dr. Fuchs’s rendition, Donald, his nephews and a museum curator race against a sinister figure who claims the helmet as his birthright without any proof—but each person who comes into contact with the helmet gets a “cold glitter” in his eyes, infected by the “bacteria of power,” and soon declares his intention to “seize power” and exert his “claim to rule.” Dr. Fuchs uses language that in German (“die Macht ergreifen”; “Herrscheranspruch”) strongly recalls standard phrases used to describe Hitler’s ascent to power.

The original English says nothing about glittering eyes or power but merely notes, “As the minutes drag past, a change comes over the tired curator.” Even the helmet itself, which in German Donald describes as a masterpiece of “Teutonic goldsmithery,” is anything but nationalistic in English: “Boys, isn’t this helmet a beauty?” is all he says. In an interview, Dr. Fuchs said she hoped that a child who “sees what power can do to people and how crazy it makes them” would be less susceptible to its siren song in later life.

This is one of the most direct examples of how much power a translator can have in presenting a text to a new readership. And in this particular case, the effects have been long lasting and dramatic. Right from the start, Donald Duck went from being a comic for kids to something more:

Micky Maus became popular entertainment among a newly politicized generation who saw the comics as illustrations of the classic Marxist class struggle. A nationally distributed newsletter put out by left-leaning high school students in 1969 described Dagobert (Scrooge) as the “prototype of the monocapitalist,” Donald as a member of the proletariat, and Tick, Trick and Track as “socialist youth” well on their way to becoming “proper Communists.” Even Frankfurt School philosopher Max Horkheimer admitted to enjoying reading Donald Duck comics before bed.

Susan Bernofsky was also on the BBC’s World Update the other day to talk about this, but unfortunately the link is no longer working today and I can’t find an archive . . .

The second installment in The Guardian‘s series of short stories from Eastern Europe is ‘Chocolate’ by Michal Olszewski.

Olszewski is a young (b. 1977) Polish writer who works in Krakow for the daily paper, Gazeta Wyborcza. The story—which is wonderfully translated by recent “Found in Translation” award winner Antonia Lloyd-Jones—is about a young man shoplifting in a German supermarket. More contained and stylistically straight that the Clemens Meyer story from yesterday, this story also has a bit of a twist at the end. . .

There are a number of nice things about this Guardian series, but on a very basic level, it’s cool to see a daily newspaper publishing international fiction. I wonder when that last happened in the States . . .

The recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education has a really interesting piece by Peter J. Dougherty—director of Princeton University Press—on the future of academic publishing. Rather than lament the slow, never-ending death of print, he takes a different approach:

And while university presses grapple with the economic and technological challenges now affecting how we publish our books — the subject of a thousand and one AAUP conference sessions, e-mail-list debates, and news articles — discussion of what we publish seems to have taken a back seat. And understandably so. Why obsess about content if books as we know them are about to become obsolete in favor of some yet-to-evolve form? Has creative destruction spelled the end of books?

He argues that scholarly publishing has two distinct advantages over its competitors: 1) “books remain the most effective technology for organizing and presenting sustained arguments” and 2) “university presses specialize in publishing books containing hard ideas.”

From there he proceeds to lay out four components of a “content revolution” that would progress in parallel to the ongoing “delivery revolution”:

First, include on our lists more titles from the burgeoning professional disciplines: engineering, law, medicine, architecture, business, the graphic arts, and the information sciences. Those fields are driving the growth of our host universities while redefining the limits of culture in new and exciting ways.

Second, become much more purposeful and assertive in publishing books that define whole fields, including important advanced textbooks. University-press editors would add depth and ballast to their lists by looking for that next great advanced text in our traditional fields, such as social theory, comparative literature, or art history, as well as in emerging fields. That kind of publishing is often dismissed as cookie cutter, but it’s not.

Third, publish more books for worldwide readerships. As the globalization of knowledge continues apace, American university presses are positioned to engage readers in ways unimagined a generation ago. By infusing our lists with titles of international interest, we can better exploit the technologies that bring the world closer to us.

Fourth, work more closely with departments and centers within our host universities to adapt their work — sponsored lecture series, etc. — into books, monograph series, and other such initiatives. We should be planning our future lists strategically within our host universities in order to maximize the relative strengths of press and campus alike.

It’s a very interesting article that doesn’t necessarily address the larger financial issues that are dragging down university presses, but it is forward-thinking in terms of what sorts of things UPs should/could be publishing. But I can’t imagine many humanities scholars are going to like the suggestion to publish more books on “professional disciplines,” but his attempt to quell potential critics is interesting:

I am not suggesting that university presses should abandon or even reduce our commitment to traditional humanities fields. History, literature, art, politics, and philosophy form the core of university-press publishing, and always will. However, by integrating more technical subject matter into our publishing, we can add color and depth to our lists. The mere introduction of new ideas into the culture of university-press publishing would add vigor to our operations while inspiring in editors in the humanities and social sciences new exciting cross-disciplinary books. Books, better than any other literary form, can speak to the ever-widening chasms that define the modern, intellectually diverse research university. We should embrace the challenge.

Well, at least in relation to Open Letter books . . . The new issue of Harper’s has two pieces on Open Letter titles: a long review by Robert Boyers of Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante by Lily Tuck and a shorter review of Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s Rupert in Benjamin Moser’s New Books column. (Both pieces are accessible online to subscribers only.)

Rupert: A Confession just released this week, but is available at better bookstores everywhere, and through our website. And I think Ben does a better job describing this book that I ever could. After comparing it to Camus’s The Stranger, he brilliantly sums up the novel’s protagonist:

His Rupert is a walker in the city who offers extended thoughts on the proper layout of public squares, methods for downloading and cataloging online pornography, men who wear comfy sweaters (“an arresting demonstration of farmerly freshness of the kind that . . . feels sorry for you because you’re too uptight and inhibited to dress properly”), and the type of woman who “wants to rove around Afghanistan on stolen horses and feel the auras of Tibetan scales with the energy paths of her vulva.”

You can read one of the funniest excerpts from the book here. (Warning: PDF format.) To celebrate the publication of this striking book and our first Harper’s review, we’re going to giveaway 10 copies. To enter into the drawing, simply e-mail me at chad.post at rochester dot edu with your full mailing address.

I’ll write more about Robert Boyers’s piece on Morante later in the month, after the copies of Morante’s Aracoeli are back from the printer. She’s an amazing writer and deserves a post of her own. Not to mention, Robert Boyers wrote the intro for our reissue, so we can include that as well . . . In the meantime though, you can read a sample of Aracoeli by clicking here. (Again, PDF format.)

To mark the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, all this week The Guardian will be running original short stories from a host of Eastern European writers. Up first is East German writer Clemens Meyer with Of Dogs and Horses, a short story from Die Nacht, Die Lichter (published by S. Fisher in German, but is still awaiting an English publisher).

The story itself is well done—especially the dark twist at the end . . . And Katy Derbyshire (of Love German Books) did an excellent job translating this.

Back during this year’s PEN World Voice Festival, I was a last minute moderator substitute for Zaia Alexander and interviewed Clemens Meyer. As part of the discussion, we each read a bit from this particular story. He read the opening in German, and then I read the ending in English—even the racetrack bits in my best horse announcer voices . . . Anyone who was there knows how dismal that was. Clemens, on the other hand, was bad-ass—possibly from his years of attending the races. In fact, he bought the very cool glasses he was wearing after a good day at the track . . .

Richard Lea sent me the complete list of authors/stories that will appear this week, and it’s pretty impressive. I’ll post about each one as it goes live, and although these two things aren’t exactly related, this Guardian project is a great complement to The Wall in My Head, the Words Without Borders anthology of fiction, essays, and images we’re publishing on November 9th to mark the same anniversary. More on that next week . . .

The most recent addition to our review section is a piece by Daniela Hurezanu on Memory Glyphs: 3 Prose Poets from Romania, which was recently released in the U.S. by Twisted Spoon Press and is translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin with Radu Andriescu, Mircea Ivanescu, and Bogdan Stefanescu. Like all TSP books, the book itself is really elegant, and the contents aesthetically interesting.

In his preface, translator Adam Sorkin explains a bit about the collection:

First of all, the title of this anthology was lifted from the Radu Andriescu prose poem that closes the book, “The Aswan High Dam.”’ To me, the image suggests a major preoccupation of the prose poem, an esthetic amalgam as it were carved of blocks of words (as in the root of “glyph,” from the idea of cut or incised grooves or sacred symbols or script). In contrast to verse, the prose poem is a formless form, oxymoronic, with both lightness and heft, a chiseled, lapidary, elliptical poetry I have long admired. Not surprisingly then, the impetus for this anthology was my own, as was the choice of poets.

Daniela Hurezanu—who herself is a translator from both French and Romanian, and has even translated W.S. Merwin into French—wrote a fantastic review of this book that opens:

Of the three authors featured in the prose poem collection Memory Glyphs, beautifully translated from the Romanian by Adam Sorkin with Mircea Ivanescu, Bogdan Stefanescu and one of the poets (Radu Andriescu), only the latter is still alive. From the translator’s preface we find out that Cristian Popescu died when he was not even thirty-six “from a heart attack that was induced by his medication for schizophrenia and depression in potent mixture with vodka drinking.” Iustin Panta (pronounced Pantza) died at the same age as Popescu, in a car accident.

In Cristian Popescu’s prose poems, the author himself becomes a character—or so we assume, since we are dealing with someone called Cristi or Popescu. But he isn’t just any character; he is a figure in a family myth based on his own transfigured biography, in which the idyllic and the grotesque mingle in unexpected ways. I would say that, of the three authors, Popescu is the most untranslatable, not because of his language, but because of a certain Romanian sensibility, which is much harder to “translate” into English than words. For example, in “Advice from my mother,” he describes his mother who, after giving birth, felt crippled, and prepared to suckle her baby by powdering and rouging her breasts. She takes comfort, she says, “thinking that one day, someone will curse him [i.e., the baby] and tell him to stick himself back into his mother.” This is a slightly awkward translation of the most vulgar Romanian curse (“Go back into your mother’s c___!” or, in a more polite version, “Go back into your mother’s thing!”). In other words, Popescu’s image of his sentimental mother is done via the most obscene expression in the Romanian language. This union of some very contrary states—the sentimental and the utterly grotesque—which is natural for a Romanian, may not be for a native English-speaker.

Click here for the complete review.

Of the three authors featured in the prose poem collection Memory Glyphs, beautifully translated from the Romanian by Adam Sorkin with Mircea Ivanescu, Bogdan Stefanescu and one of the poets (Radu Andriescu), only the latter is still alive. From the translator’s preface we find out that Cristian Popescu died when he was not even thirty-six “from a heart attack that was induced by his medication for schizophrenia and depression in potent mixture with vodka drinking.” Iustin Panta (pronounced Pantza) died at the same age as Popescu, in a car accident.

In Cristian Popescu’s prose poems, the author himself becomes a character—or so we assume, since we are dealing with someone called Cristi or Popescu. But he isn’t just any character; he is a figure in a family myth based on his own transfigured biography, in which the idyllic and the grotesque mingle in unexpected ways. I would say that, of the three authors, Popescu is the most untranslatable, not because of his language, but because of a certain Romanian sensibility, which is much harder to “translate” into English than words. For example, in “Advice from my mother,” he describes his mother who, after giving birth, felt crippled, and prepared to suckle her baby by powdering and rouging her breasts. She takes comfort, she says, “thinking that one day, someone will curse him [i.e., the baby] and tell him to stick himself back into his mother.” This is a slightly awkward translation of the most vulgar Romanian curse (“Go back into your mother’s c___!” or, in a more polite version, “Go back into your mother’s thing!”). In other words, Popescu’s image of his sentimental mother is done via the most obscene expression in the Romanian language. This union of some very contrary states—the sentimental and the utterly grotesque—which is natural for a Romanian, may not be for a native English-speaker.

Popescu’s self-mythologizing creates a sort of urban mythology grounded in self-mockery, a paradoxical world of antiheroes and sad clowns. Thus, “Anti-Portrait: A Psalm by Popescu” starts like this: “No, Lord. Neither more nor less, neither too much nor too little. And not quite Popescu.” Or, “Poetry”: “The earliest literary efforts of the poet Popescu date from the tender age of seven.” In the same poem we are told that Popescu wept so much in his youth that “they had to install a miniature urinal to collect the precious stones” that developed at the corners of his eyes.

Iustin Panta’s pieces are structurally unusual in that they combine verse poetry and prose within the space of the same poem. In the literal sense, the space of his poems is often enclosed—a room in which various objects come into focus—though several poems are about waiting for the train or the bus (one could write a treatise about Romanian poems revolving around the thorny topic of “public transportation”). Many of his poems refer to a “she” and are dialogues between “she” and the narrator. Of the three authors, Panta is probably the most cerebral, as his pieces are sometimes paradoxes or conundrums.

In “A Feminine Thought. A Feminine Thought?” pondering the difference between the breasts of a woman suckling a baby and her breasts laid bare otherwise, he concludes that the baby “continues” the breast and thus nullifies its voluptuousness. The woman is thus nullified too, proving to be “a fraud, a plagiarism,” like a fake painting one would examine under a magnifying glass. The infant is compared here to a magnifying glass revealing the breast’s “true nature,” so to speak, or rather the fact that its voluptuousness is really an illusion. But Panta goes on to challenge the true nature of this very thought by saying that this feminine thought, “seen through the magnifying glass! (itself, in turn, fake)” is also a falsehood.

Radu Andriescu’s prose poems are probably the most “poetic” in this collection in the sense that his style is more focused on its literariness and on artifice. Places and household objects are often the subject of his writings—a terrace, a stove, the wrought-iron winding stairs of his house, his neighborhood, whose depiction rivals that of a Turkish bazaar: the streets are crowded

with cardboard Poles and manic writers, with plumbers cloaked in a miasma of mercury vapors, with starched paunchy senators, with mutant garages turned into candy shops or fruit markets, their plaster hanging on spiderwebs . . . with decrepit geezers only thirty years old . . . apartment buildings nearly hidden by weeds and university dorms as dreary as a comb caked with dandruff . . . with stores soaked in cheap draft beer and artificially colored syrup masquerading as wine, both red and white, with Turkish delight and stale pretzels to bite, with nonfat yogurt, cellophane, bottles, foil, paper, with the flight of clouds, heaps of vacant days, whole wastelands of lost hours, a mixture of tar and cola, books and dust . . .

The sentence goes on for two and a half pages, a dazzling stylistic feat against what Andrei Codrescu once called “tight-ass minimalism.” Like Popescu, Andriescu too builds a mythologized universe replicating the real world in which he lives, and appears as a character in one of his poems. As I happened to read at the same time with this collection Peter Altenberg’s Telegrams of the Soul (Archipelago Books, 2005, translated from the German by Peter Wortsman), I realized that this objectification of the author is not infrequent in Eastern Europe. Altenberg too is a character in his own pieces: he is called Peter, he is a writer, and many of his scenes—often entirely in the form of dialogues—are sketches of everyday life.

Altenberg (1859-1919), a Viennese-Jewish writer whose admirers include Kafka, Musil and Mann, calls his pieces—which in this country are referred to as “prose poems”—“sketches.” His sources of inspiration are said to be the “feuilleton,” a lyrical form of journalistic prose that was popular at the turn of the twentieth century, and Baudelaire’s prose poems. “Sketch” was also a term used by Romanian writers (let’s not forget that until 1918, Transylvania, the Western part of Romania, was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire) in the early twentieth century. The master of the sketch was Ion Luca Caragiale (1852-1912) whose pieces were mostly dialogues (incidentally, Caragiale is the most famous Romanian playwright) written in a mood that would fall into the category of the absurd from a Western perspective (It is no accident that the French playwright of Romanian origin, Eugène Ionesco, was strongly influenced by Caragiale).

Paradoxically, although Romania is a very Francophile culture, and Romanian is the only Romance language in that part of the world, what we could call the “Romanian prose poem” is less influenced by the French tradition of the prose poem, its beginnings being closer to various forms of journalism (lyrical or satirical)—still practiced in Romania, where the most common profession among writers is that of journalist.

Going through all my BEA catalogs, Rosa Chacel’s Dream of Reason (University of Nebraska Press, translated from the Spanish by Carol Maier) was one of the books that really caught my eye. And not just because it’s long (like 776-pages long), or because the author is compared to Joyce, Proust, and Woolf (isn’t every modernist writer compared to one of those three or Beckett and Kafka?). The Javier Marias quote on the back is definitely attention grabbing: “Rosa Chacel’s La sinrazon is one of the best, most original, and most daring novels of twentieth-century Spanish literature. . . . It is time that her importance in the history of world literature be recognized.” And based on the bits I’ve read from the galley that arrived this morning, this seems to be the case.

I’m not familiar with Rosa Chacel’s works, although Nebraska has published a couple of her other books—The Maravillas District and Memoirs of Leticia Valle—in the past. Her life sounds pretty interesting as well, but it’s her description of this book—and it’s “embryo” Estacion. Ida y vuelta—that really peaked my interest. (That and the fact that it’s pretty rare to come across a massive modernist text by a Spanish woman writer.)

From the intro she wrote for the third Spanish edition:

I did not, all those years ago, try to create a character who lacked direction or moral consistency—and who might seem quite modern today—I only tried to achieve the mental discourse of a man who sees himself, analyzes himself, and follows himself in his wandering—the subject’s sole characteristic, the urge to wander—through three phases, Estacion. Ida y vuelta.

An ambition or longing for form, then, became my supreme aesthetic motive, also, not separate from form, but also in the enumeration of appurtenances or conditions—also craft, the goal of doing something and doing it well, without taking into account what, at that time, was considered well done: to do this, confident that the work’s veracity, which has nothing to do with its verisimilitude, was solid, a condition that is usually—or was usually—demanded of the novel. Because it was a question of creating a novel, of following a man—not following him as an observer capable of undertaking a story; it had to be the man’s mind itself that followed after him, keeping at just the right distance for being able to judge him, not annexing him but joining him, that is, becoming imbued with the nuances of each phase.

And here are a couple intriguing quotes from the book itself. First, the opening from chapter 1:

A few words, seemingly quite trivial when spoken, over time have become identified with one of the climactic moments in my life. What I’m thinking about occurred during a period so frivolous I’m embarrassed to describe it; nevertheless, I must describe it.

That whole period is very distant now, but I remember it well, well enough to tell about it reliably, which is not at all unusual. People often remember past events in detail; the hard thing is to recall what you were like then while you’re recalling now, to summon, from experience, knowledge, and disillusion, an exact remembrance of not knowing, of innocence. That’s very difficult and that’s what I want to achieve, especially the recollection of innocence, because ignorance actually increases with knowledge—experience and disillusion make it much easier for us to ponder the extent of our ignorance. Innocence is not extensive, though: innocence either is or is not.

And now, skipping to the opening of Part Two:

Cross out, cross out, that was the first thing I thought of when I unearthed these notebooks after six years. Quite cunning, those two words: to cross out you have to pick up your pen again.

I’m rereading everything I wrote, and it seems awkward, inefficient, and positively useless for what I wanted: it clarifies nothing. So if it’s useless, why not toss it into the fireplace? I don’t know why, and I can’t find any reason not to do that; but the thing is, neither do I find enough momentum in myself to do it. I can think I should burn it, but I know my hand won’t move in the right direction; on the contrary, no sooner did the words “cross out” come craftily into my head than my fountain pen began to secrete its spidery web onto the page.

Dream of Reason won’t be available until October, but you can pre-order copies from The Booksmith by clicking here.

Thanks to Literary License for drawing our attention to this piece by Bruce Sterling in Wired detailing eighteen challenges for contemporary literature.

This is a pretty broad set of challenges, ranging from some more content based questions (“Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot,” or “Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency; dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances and teen books”), to challenges of audience development (“Means of book promotion, distribution and retail destabilized,” or “Ink-on-paper manufacturing is an outmoded, toxic industry with steeply rising costs”).

Regardless, it’s a really interesting list that does point to many of the concerns and issues underlying our industry. Here are some of the others I think are most interesting:

Media conglomerates have poor business model; economically rationalized “culture industry” is actively hostile to vital aspects of humane culture.

Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.

Barriers to publication entry have crashed, enabling huge torrent of subliterary and/or nonliterary textual expression.

“Convergence culture” obliterating former distinctions between media; books becoming one minor aspect of huge tweet/ blog/ comics/ games / soundtrack/ television / cinema / ancillary-merchandise pro-fan franchises.

As announced yesterday, Michael Thomas has won this year’s International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his novel Man Gone Down (Grove).

Here’s the description from the Grove website:

A beautifully written, insightful, and devastating first novel, Man Gone Down is about a young black father of three in a biracial marriage trying to claim a piece of the American Dream he has bargained on since youth.

On the eve of the unnamed narrator’s thirty-fifth birthday, he finds himself broke, estranged from his white Boston Brahmin wife and three children, and living in the bedroom of a friend’s six-year-old child. He has four days to come up with the money to keep his family afloat, four days to try to make some sense of his life. He’s been getting by working
construction jobs though he’s known on the streets as “the professor,” as he was expected to make something out of his life.

Alternating between his past—as a child in inner-city Boston, he was bussed to the suburbs as part of the doomed attempts at integration in the 1970s—and the present in New York City where he is trying mightily to keep his children in private schools, we learn of his mother’s abuses, his father’s abandonment, raging alcoholism, and the best and worst intentions of a supposedly integrated America.

This is an extraordinary debut. It is a story of the American Dream gone awry, about what it’s like to feel preprogrammed to fail in life—and the urge to escape that sentence.

And from the jury:

“We never know his name. But the African-American protagonist of Michael Thomas’ masterful debut, Man Gone Down, will stay with readers for a long time. He lingers because this extraordinary novel comes to us from a writer of enthralling voice and startling insight. Tuned urgently to the way we live now, the winner of the International Dublin IMPAC Prize 2009 is a novel brilliant in its scope and energy, and deeply moving in its human warmth.”

The IMPAC is one of the richest literary awards in the world—Thomas will receive €100,000—and has brought a good deal of success and attention to recent winners, which include Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses, Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game, and Colm Tóibín’s The Master.

At least this post isn’t about a bookstore/publisher closing—instead it’s about the absolute grossness of corporations:

On Sunday, a Bookseller story by Victoria Gallagher reported that “sources” were saying “Penguin is believed to have signed an exclusive deal with W H Smith” bookstores to be “the sole supplier of foreign travel guides in its airports, motorway, railway and hospital shops.” The reported one-year contract would begin next week and mean that in the chain’s 450 Travel stores only travel guides from Penguin’s DK and Rough Guides lines would be available — nothing from Lonely Planet, Time Out, Berlitz, Frommer’s, Fodor’s, etc.

It’s not as if the deal wasn’t going to cost Penguin — Gallagher reports the company gave WHS a whopping 72% discount. Still, it’s a devastating blow to the competition, and probably worth it as such to Penguin: WHS is the only bookstore at airports controlled by BAA, the company that controls the UK’s busiest airports, including Heathrow, Gatwick, and Edinburgh. (from Moby Lives)

Thankfully a boycott has started, which is at least, well, something. This sort of anti-choice, anti-reader activity is total bullshit and a scary sign of the times. . . .

I’m just chock full of good news today:

Arcade Publishing, the independent literary house founded by the late publishing legend Richard Seaver, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

A petition for relief was filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York on June 4 by Jeannette Seaver, the publisher’s widow and vice president of the company.

The couple founded Arcade in 1988. Its list of authors includes the renowned Mexican poet Octavio Paz and the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, winner of the Man Booker Prize.

Mr. Seaver, who died in January at the age of 82, began his career at Grove Press, where he championed the work of Samuel Beckett and helped bring books by Henry Miller and Jean Genet to the United States. (Crain’s)

This is a bit unrelated, but Helmut Frielinghaus—Gunter Grass’s editor and the German-language translator of John Updike and others—was at the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Symposium on Tuesday and mentioned that over the past couple months a large number of smaller independent German houses had closed down. This is very distressing, especially since it felt like things had sort of stabilized . . . Scary to think that there could be more bookstore and publishing house closings in the near future . . .

This is already old news, but last week Jessica Stockton Bagnulo announced she had signed the lease and Greenlight Bookstore now has an official address: 86 Fulton Street in Fort Greene. If all goes according to plan, the store will officially open in September.

It’s great to see this finally happen . . . For as long as I’ve known Jessica, she’s been working on her plan to open her own bookstore. She’s worked at a number of indie stores in New York, wrote extensive strategic plans (which even won her some cash), and thought this all through very, very carefully.

I have complete faith that Jessica will do everything right in terms of launching this store (like displaying a lot of Open Letter titles, right Jessica? Right?), and from what I’ve heard she nailed down the perfect location. Congrats to Jessica and be sure to check out the Greenlight Bookstore blog for further updates.

In stark contrast to Jessica’s wonderful news comes this statement from 3P favorite, Karl Pohrt:

On the advice of my accountant and my business manager, I am closing Shaman Drum Bookshop June 30. Despite a first rate staff, a fiercely loyal core of customers, a very decent landlord and my own commitment to the community of arts and letters in Ann Arbor, it is clear to me that the bookshop is not a sustainable business.

In spite of the downturn in the economy, Ann Arbor continues to be an excellent book town. There are wonderful independent stores here (Crazy Wisdom, Nicolas’s Books), fine specialty book stores (Vault of Midnight, Aunt Agatha’s) and great used bookshops (Dawn Treader, West Side Books, Motte & Bailey). They need your support.

Over a year ago we began a process to become a non-profit center for the literary arts. I am decoupling Shaman Drum Bookshop from the Great Lakes Literary Arts Center, which should simplify and streamline our IRS application. I will pursue this new venture after we close the store.

Shaman Drum Bookshop has been here for 29 years. We had 28 good years. Thank you for your support. I’m very grateful for the opportunity to be a bookseller in Ann Arbor.

-Karl Pohrt

We live in a world in which the community of Ann Arbor—Ann freaking Arbor, the home of one of the best universities in the country—can’t support an independent bookstore. As Karl wrote, it seems like a perfect storm of things went wrong to sink Shaman Drum, but still . . . If there’s one city in the Midwest that should have enough intelligent readers to support an indie store, it’s Ann Arbor. My faith has been shaken . . .

Karl’s a close friend, and I know that he’ll come out of this OK. Very interested to see what happens with the Great Lakes Literary Arts Center, but from now on, I know that every trip through Ann Arbor will be incomplete. . .

The Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Symposium (participants pictured above) took place earlier this week, and was one of the most interesting symposiums I’ve ever attended.

The Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize—which goes to the best translation from German published in the past year—was awarded to John Hargraves for his translation of Michael Kruger’s The Executor, and the symposium that took place the next day was very focused, very enlightening, and very exciting.

This year’s topic was “Interpretation and Translation,” and each of the panels addressed the idea of how personal interpretation of a work influences how the translator approaches it. This topic was especially interesting in relation to the panels of poetry translation, especially the opening one on lyric translation, which gave Pierre Joris a chance to talk about his careful—and extremely thoughtful—translation of Paul Celan’s “Todtnauberg.” (Which you can find on Celan’s Wikipedia page.) He claimed that because of the very nature of poetry, a translated poem must be more difficult than the original—to smooth it out and make a poem easier to understand is to fail as a translator.

Nick Hoff’s self-analysis of his decisions regarding his translation of Holderin’s poetry was very astute and fascinating, especially when he compared his translations to Michael Hamburger’s, detailing how Hoff’s interpretative bias towards musicality and emotive force lead to very different translations from Hamburger’s, which favor meter over everything else. Ross Benjamin—who translated Holderin’s Hyperion for Archipelago—also gave a great presentation about his decision-making process, and really made me want to read this novel.

I don’t think I was the only person in attendance who was blown away by Nick’s and Ross’s attention to detail and quality. The perceptiveness of these two young, very talented translators is a great sign for the future of German literature in translation.

The prose side of things was interesting as well. Breon Mitchell talked about the process of retranslating The Tin Drum and Krishna Winston talked about Grass’s translator meetings. In relation to My Century, Michael Henry Heim gave a wonderful speech about how to treat dialect in translation, addressing the many problems, the different traditions present in other cultures (for instance, French translators frequently translate English first names in to their French equivalent), and proposing that translators invent dialects.

All that said, it was a bit of a bittersweet occasion. For the past seven or eight years, Dr. Ruediger van den Boom has done a remarkable job putting on this prize ceremony and symposium. Unfortunately, he’s retiring from the Goethe Institut this summer and returning to Germany, leaving behind some (literally) big shoes to fill. Nevertheless, I believe the symposium will continue—it’s an extremely valuable opportunity for the best German translators in the country to discuss the ins-and-outs of the craft at a very high level. And to be able to hang out with people like Drenka Willen and Helmut Frielinghaus and hear these translators talk shop is something else . . .

We’re a couple days behind, but this month’s featured bookstore is The Booksmith in San Francisco’s historic Haight Ashbury neighborhood. The store opened in 1976 by Gary Frank, who recently sold the store to Christin Evans and Praveen Madan.

The Booksmith has a long history of hosting great events, and looking at the upcoming schedule, this is definitely still the case. Tomorrow Douglas Rushkoff will be speaking about Life Inc., and more relevant to this website, on Thursday, June 25th, the next meeting of “Found in Translation,” The Booksmith’s reading group, will meet to discuss Yoko Tawada’s The Naked Eye.

Later this month we’ll post an interview with Julie Boyer (who is from Italy and started the Found in Translation book club) and some other special Booksmith features . . . But for now, all of the books referenced in our posts will link to The Booksmith’s online catalog, making it easy to purchase titles directy from one of California’s great indie bookstores.

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been gorging myself on Gunter Grass novels in preparation for the panel I’m moderating tomorrow with Krishna Winston (Crabwalk), Breon Mitchell (The Tin Drum), and Michael Henry Heim (My Century, Peeling the Onion)—arguably three of the best German-English translators working today. And Grass, having received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, is arguably Germany’s most important post-War German writer.

(This event is part of the 2009 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Symposium, the subject of which is “Interpretive Perspective and Translation.” The symposium is only open to translators, scholars, and the like, although German lit/translation enthusiasts are encouraged to contact Lisa Lux lux at chicago dot goethe dot org for more information.)

To celebrate the 50th Anniversary of The Tin Drum, the novel—which, to continue the trend started above, is arguably Grass’s greatest achievement—the novel is being published in new translations around the world. Not that the initial translations were always bad, but the book is a bit racy (and difficult), and a number of the original translations omitted lines, paragraphs, etc., or just didn’t quite capture the nuances of Grass’s unique style.

Breon Mitchell puts it best in his afterword to the new translation:

The most common question I was faced while working on this new Tin Drum was, “What was wrong with the old one?” This question reveals a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of literary translation. It is precisely the mark of a great work of art that it demands to be retranslated. What impels us toward new versions is not the weakness of existing translations, but the strength and richness of certain works of literature. The works that are never retranslated are those we only care to read once.

We translate great works because they deserve it—because the power and depth of the text can never be fully revealed by a single translation, however inspired. A translation is a reading, and every reading is necessarily personal, perhaps even idiosyncratic. Each new version offers, not a better reading, but a different one, one that foregrounds new aspects of the text, that sees it through new eyes, that makes it new.

More on Breon’s new translation in a minute. But following on last week’s extremely long series of posts on BEA, and my “confrontation” with Pantheon editor Erroll McDonald, I found this anecdote in Grass’s intro to the new translation a pretty inspiring picture of what publishing used to be like:

In the summer of 1959, I completed my first novel, The Tin Drum, in Paris. I had just corrected proofs and created an image for the dust jacket when a letter arrived from the legendary publisher Kurt Wolff in New York. Wolff, who had left Germany in the thirties, asked me to meet him at a hotel in Zurich. He strode up to me in the hotel lobby, a tall gentleman, with his wife and colleague Helen Wolff beside him.

“I’m thinking of publishing your book in America,” he said. “Do you think the American reader will understand it?” “I don’t think so,” I replied. “The setting is provincial, not even Danzig itself, but a suburb. The novel is filled with German dialect. And it concentrates solely on the provinces—” “Say no more, “ he broke in. “All great literature is rooted in the provincial. I’ll bring it out in America.”

I’ve only just started reading Breon’s new translation (I first read My Century, a brilliant novel of voices with one short chapter for each year of the twentieth century, with some chapters being political, some historical, and some just plain fun, and Crabwalk, which is also quite compelling, although a bit more novelistic in conventional ways), but from the opening statement (which is the same in both translations)—“Granted: I’m an inmate in a mental institution”—it’s a rather brilliant book.

And the translation is pretty dazzling, and does jazz up Ralph Manheim’s—at least in the instances Mitchell quotes in his afterward, such as this:

I also saw that activities such as thumb-twiddling, frowning, looking up and down, handshaking, making babies, counterfeiting, turning out the light, brushing teeth, shooting people, and changing diapers were being practiced all over the world, though not always with the same skill. (Manheim)

And I saw too that activities like thumb-twiddling, brow-wrinkling, head-nodding, hand-shaking, baby-making, coin-faking, light-dousing, tooth-brushing, man-killing, and diaper-changing were being engaged in all over the world, if not always with equal skill. (Mitchell)

Mitchell’s is more in keeping with Grass’s original text in terms of rhythm and “semantic effect.”

This isn’t to say that Manheim’s translation is bad—both Grass and Mitchell go out of their way to say what a great job Manheim did. But he was a young translator under some tight time constraints, and Grass’s novel isn’t easy for anyone.

And he didn’t have the benefit of one of Grass’s translator gatherings. For the past thirty years, every time Grass releases a new book, he arranges a meeting of his translators, spending three or four days going over the new text page by page, talking about major problems, explaining certain lines, answering questions, etc. I’m excited to hear from all three translators about this experience, especially Mitchell, since he recently spent a week with Grass in Gdansk going over The Tin Drum and even visiting places in the novel . . .

I’ll report back later this week about this panel and the symposium as a whole.

Follow these links for Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.

If you’ve read the first four parts of this post (or this piece I wrote a few months ago), you pretty much know where this is headed. After X years of keeping BEA confined to the “trade,” I think things have to open up to the public—whatever that might mean. It’s at times like this, when things are in flux and not necessarily going all that well, that we really need to experiment, to try something new . . .

In talking with Lance Fensterman (who runs BEA), I think we have somewhat similar ideas of what sorts of people should be allowed into the Expo, although we use somewhat different terminology. I love to say that we should open the show up to the public—that it should come to resemble a “Con” in which anyone with enough cash for the entrance fee can come in and mill around. Of course, since we are talking about books and not wildly popular TV shows, I think the group that would come would be pretty self-selecting. The collectors, the voracious readers, the book club members, the people who love literature would come—people who fit a lot of the categories of Lance’s redefined notion of “the trade.”

I think it’s pretty obvious what’s going on behind Lance’s rhetoric . . . the big commercial presses—who tend to spend the most money on the show and make BEA a bigger draw for everyone—ain’t very supportive of the idea of having the public be able to come to BEA. If it’s been written once on this blog, it’s been written a million times—publishers hate readers.

And what a muddy situation! This “public” made up of the same people who blog/tweet/recommend wandering around the halls . . . Where are their credentials?

That’s not to say that this idea doesn’t have it’s problems. One of the big issues is whether or not books would be available for sale. I mean, BEA is the American Booksellers Association’s big show, and I can’t imagine many indie bookstores would like to see the public buying books directly from publishers . . . And if the show did have some “professional” times in addition to “public” times, there would be some sort of switchover costs associated with removing galleys and whatnot and replacing them with books that could be sold. (Which is why redefining the word “trade” is a cleaner approach.)

But maybe there’s a still a way. . . . Hell, it’s been demonstrated (in certain studies) that giving away books actually increases sales. Maybe we don’t have to worry about sales at all—just create buzz with the public the same way we do with booksellers and reviewers.

Besides, it’s not like publishers were all that friendly with their galleys this year. I heard a couple of horror stories from NYC booksellers in which they tried to get a galley and were denied. Or couldn’t even get anyone from a publisher to talk to them. I can’t tell you how many complaints I heard (here we go again . . .) of publishers being extremely insular and only talking to one another.

Before getting more into the potential problems of opening up the show, there are other benefits than simply trying to generate excitement. For one, BEA would become a much better platform for discussing important issues. Booths and panels on the importance of independent bookstores would be really interesting and a great way to raise awareness among individual readers.

Or even better, why couldn’t BEA have a panel about e-books that includes a cultural critic, a publisher, an author, a reader? Create a space for real debate and discussion?

I know I’m repeating myself, but publishing is really, really shitty at doing market research. But what if you had a few thousand (ten thousand?) “regular readers” hanging out in one place where you could potentially interact, ask them questions, engage in some sort of feedback loop that would improve your business practices? This could be revolutionary . . .

Even getting back to the problem of selling (christ, what a phrase), there could be some sort of “bookseller tax” in which 10% of all sales go to the ABA or are redistributed to bookstores, or go to purchasing ads to support book review sections, or whatever. This seems like a problem that can be overcome . . . It’s been solved in Frankfurt. And in Buenos Aires. And Guadalajara. And almost every other country with a large book fair . . . And for everyone looking for ways of quantifying success, cash from sales and foot traffic from the public would definitely suffice.

Speaking of other international book fairs, these frequently seem to be a point of pride, a major event that everyone’s aware of, not just the handful of people in the industry. I mean, how many articles in the major papers were there about BEA this year? I’m willing to bet that there were five times as many in the Buenos Aires papers and magazines back in April during their book fair . . . a fair that’s open till 4am (seriously—4am) on a few nights to accommodate all the people who come and cultivate a true festival experience.

A BookExpo that’s about books, that’s connecting readers to books would seem so much more fulfilling. And I really don’t think I’m the only one who feels this way.

But what will really happen? Well, rumor has it that the university presses are pulling out fast and furious, which is absolutely terrible. Where else do you have the chance to see so many university press books on display? In a local box store? Not a chance . . . And I doubt big publishers would be willing to go for changes like the ones mentioned above. They’re still clinging to the old models and ignoring both common sense and solid theory. So we end with Lance fighting the good fight, trying to improve the space in which publishers can promote their wares, but settling for a much smaller fair that takes place mid-week so that publishing folks can bond with other publishing folks and wonder just what the fuck went wrong.

Follow these links for Part I, Part II, and Part III.

Over the past few years the debate between print and online reviewers has been one of the more contentious in all of the book business. Similar to publishing, this is an area where technology has outstripped the prevailing model, where with a couple bucks, a smart website name, some literary talent, and a bit of ambition, basically anyone can become a reputable commentator on books, participating in—and altering—the ongoing larger conversation about literary culture. (And you can even get Press access to BookExpo!)

Pair this quick, cheap, and easy growth with the precipitous decline in newpaper book reviews (not to mention magazines) and it’s easy to see why so many online vs. print barbs are exchanges on panels across the country every year. Personally, I think this all gets a bit stupid, but there are valid points on both sides. (No one likes losing their job to technological advances—hell, if e-books knell the death toll for print publishers, I’ll be the first to call for Luddites to unite.)

And the argument just won’t go away . . . See this year’s book reviewing panel (thanks again to Gwen at Literary License for a great write-up) that circled around separating “book reviewers” (generally print, representing authority) from “book recommenders” (internet dwellers, representing the pure democratic ideal). Even without having been there, I’m sure I could repeat most of the arguments from both sides (well, more from the one particular site that was more aptly represented), which are actually kind of interesting within the context of BookExpo, where desperate—and I do mean desperate—publishers were trying how to figure out how to mobilize the tweeting universe to promote their titles . . .

That’s really why I find this debate so silly . . . If the industry wasn’t fucked, there would presumably be enough space in the culture for long-form, independently edited print reviews, book news magazines, online literary mags, bloggers, social networking recommenders, etc., all of which would connect readers with books in different ways, with different levels of authority.

What’s really funny is that the most vital section of BEA was the Firebrand/NetGalley “blogger signing” area. No matter when I passed by there was always a small crowd of well read bloggers/readers chatting. And no surprise to anyone paying attention, HarperCollins and other big publishers came over asking bloggers how they could work together . . .

No offense to HC—er, rather, pox on everyone—but haven’t we been talking about figuring out how to work with bloggers to promote literature for the past five-plus years? But that’s the point—publishers and authors are still trying to figure out this landscape where the bastions of book reviewing are only capable of doing so much (even the NY Times is shedding pages), but where people still want to talk about books and are finding new ways of spreading the word.

So, going back to an earlier point, if the overall point of BEA is to “create buzz,” why would we want to keep any of these “book influencers” out? I mean, granted, at some point in time BEA was the perfect meeting ground for the best of the book review editors to wander the floor and find out what they should be reviewing in the floor. No offense to anyone (maybe “no offense” should be the title of Part V . . .), but that’s just not really the case anymore. Most reviewers who do come (unfortunately there’s not many that do—only one or two from the biggest publications) are there only on Friday morning, or come for the panel they’re on and jet. Saturday and Sunday aren’t the best days for getting your hot new galley in the hands of a traditional book reviewer . . . yet, the money for the galleys, booth, trip, etc., has already been spent.

Lance Fensterman (who, if I haven’t said it already, did a kick-ass job with the show, as did the rest of his team . . . none of this is meant to reflect on them . . . they do all that they can to put on the best show they can for the rest of us—it’s the rest of us that sort of screw up their intentions) always uses the example that technically the number one reviewer on Amazon.com isn’t considered part of the “trade” and therefore isn’t allowed into BookExpo. I’d bet my last free PGW drink that dozens upon dozens of presses would love to get their books into the hands of these top Amazon/LibraryThing/GoodReads reviewers . . . But this sort of exclusion is exactly what notions of “authority” tend to lead to—there’s no “authority” without an “in” and an “out.”

OK, so publishers have ceded some control to iUniverse, self-publishers and the like, and reviewers have done the same with bloggers, online magazines, etc. So who really makes up the book “trade”?

Some people will always reject this notion, but the traditional ideas of what constitutes “trade” are totally demolished. . . . But this—I think—is a good thing. Say what you will about book blogs or the like, but there’s a reason HC is trying to figure out how to get books into these people’s hands. In contrast to the often grumpy, Eyeore-like traditional publishing folks (shit, isn’t this series simply four days of complaining?), the blogging, twittering, book loving, word-of-mouth spreading general readers actually get excited about books. About meeting authors and receiving a galley. It’s refreshing to talk to readers who aren’t totally jaded . . .

Tomorrow I’ll get more into what I think BEA could really look like, but my core belief is that BookExpo could—no, should—be an event that generates excitement about all facets of the book industry. That fans of New Directions storm the floor to find out what books are coming out in the next few months. That college kids who are intrigued by the publishing world can start to see what it is, who the players are, how a book gets launched. That readers, regular book buying readers, can get a glimpse behind the curtain and see where the book magic happens.

That’s all a bit over the top, I know, but seriously, book culture (of this sort) in this country needs a real injection of life, and if there was a vibrancy about BEA in the way there is about ComicCon or other fan shows like that, we all might be in a better place. And increased buzz, increased excitement, necessarily leads to increased awareness—of books, publishers, authors, goings on. Even, perhaps, of bookstores and the issues surrounding book culture . . . but more on that tomorrow.

Liao Yiwu is the author of “The Corpse Walkers: Real Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up.” On June 4, 1989, Liao composed a poem, “Massacre,” that condemned the government’s brutal crackdown on the student pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square. He distributed underground and for which he was arrested and sentenced to four years in prison. The following, which profiles one of Liao’s inmates, is taken from his prison memoir, “Testimonial.”

Wei Yang is a native of Dujiangyan in China’s southwestern province of Sichuan. His head looks disproportionately large and he speaks with a thick accent as if he had a disproportionately large tongue. While in jail, he seldom talked and was anti-social. Beneath that loner’s appearance, he possessed the agility of a squirrel, smart and alert. He moved swiftly and mysteriously.

Yang came from a poor family. Before his arrest in 1989, he was in his teens, attending a local vocational school. Like most self-absorbed teenagers, he seldom paid any attention to politics or current affairs. However, the massacre in Tiananmen Square on June 4 outraged him and turned him into an activist. Out of the blue, he fabricated an organization called “The China Democratic Alliance,” claiming that CDA was a longstanding pro-democracy organization overseas. Yang designed and printed a dozen CDA posters, urging people in Sichauan to stand up against the brutal regime, avenge the death of innocent students in Beijing and overthrow the central government. He boldly pasted the posters prominently at public venues. To add authenticity to his creation, he even made up a name at the bottom of the poster—“the Sichuan branch of the China Democratic Alliance.” The sudden appearance of those counterrevolutionary posters with explicit anti-government messages shocked authorities in Sichuan. Local officials escalated the case into a top national emergency and requested assistance from both the provincial and central governments. Top experts gathered in Sichuan to share information and conduct joint investigations. More than one hundred policemen were mobilized and ordered to solve the case quickly before “this counterrevolutionary organization” could create more damage.

Yang was quick on his feet. Upon hearing that police were on his trail, he picked up two big albums of stamps and ran. He remained on the lam for half a year, wandering around in ten different southern metropolises. “I started collecting stamps as a child,” he said to me after he got caught and landed in my cell. “Each time I arrived at a city, I would hang out at the stamp market for a couple of hours. The money I got from stamp transaction would last me for a few days.”

Yang’s case, which alarmed the central government and gained national notoriety, remained unresolved for months. When the real culprit was finally caught, the fatigued police were shocked, disappointed and depressed to see the “menacing” counter-revolutionary that they had pursued for half a year was merely an innocent looking teenager with a pair of big round eyes. What made them feel more insulted was the fact that Yang had no overseas connection, as he had claimed in the poster. He had no clue as to what a democratic alliance meant. When asked to cough up the names of the key members of the CDA in Sichuan, he admitted: “I, myself, hold the titles of chairman, deputy chairman, publicity manager and secretary.”

The public security bureau and the court staff realized that they had been duped. Out of anger, they had him beaten up and thrown into a detention center. Several days later, indictment papers came. Then, they put him on trial. “I took lots of mental notes and was prepared to engage in a debate with the judge about the student movement in Tianamen,” Yang recollected. “They didn’t take me to a courtroom. Instead, I was led into a small office. The paper with the verdict had already been prepared and lay on a desk. Once I walked in, the judge picked up the paper, handed it to me and told me to move my ass out of the way. When I refused to leave, he grabbed a document folder with both hands and began to hit me hard on the head. Then he yelled: ‘Get the hell out of here.’”

The judge charged him with counterrevolutionary demagoguery and sentenced him to three years in jail.

He was barely twenty years old. Initially, the authorities put him in charge of a warehouse for the prison factory. While nobody was looking, he slipped notes into the goat skin gloves that prisoner had produced for export. On the notes, he reminded people that the products were made in prison and urged customers to boycott the manufacturer. As a consequence, the merchandize, valued at about two million yuan (US$300,000), was returned from Hong Kong. The prison authorities launched an investigation and easily uncovered the hidden traitor. In retaliation, the prison guards hung him upside down from the ceiling for several days.

Subsequently, they assigned Yang to clean the factory workshops. He buddied up with a convicted murderer from Henan province, who was over six feet tall. Yang followed him everywhere. The two constantly got into quarrels. When that happened, Yang would tilt his head backward and stare at his companion with anger. He resembled more like a tiny mouse protesting against a big evil cat.

One time, all the political prisoners staged a hunger strike, but the guards enticed the common criminals to sabotage the efforts. The political prisoners found themselves surrounded by a group of hostile convicted criminals, which far outnumbered them. The big cat from Henan spotted Yang, the mouse, swooped on him with his big claws and then grabbed him by the collar of his shirt. Yang was swung high up in the air, his legs kicking like an astronaut inside a space shuttle. The big cat still wouldn’t let him down. People from both camps burst out laughing. For many years, the scene haunted me and kept occurring in my dreams. I would see him being held up in the air by an invisible hand, struggling to get down. When I woke up, I would always find my own legs kicking.

In the spring of 1993, Yang served out his sentence and was allowed to go home. He became a laborer, pedaling a tricycle to transport beer for small restaurants along the Yangtse River. Once he had earned enough money to take care of his basic needs, he became restless. He traversed the country twice. He was a true friend. While in Guizhou, he encountered a former inmate and brought him back to Sichuan. Yang offered his place to that friend for a long time. One day, my phone rang. I picked it up and nobody was there. As I was puzzling over the anonymous phone call, my door bell rang. It was Yang—he had just called me on his cell phone outside.

Yang looked weary and his face was covered with dirt. It turned out that he had just gotten off a long ride on a slow train from the coastal city of Shenzhen. He had come directly from the train station to pay tribute. “I’ve gotten gifts for you. These gifts have been smuggled in from Hong Kong. Two copies of Beijing Spring, a popular magazine published by dissident writers in the West and a book, _The Disasters of China’s Leftists._” Then, Yang flashed a 100 Hong Kong dollar bill with Queen Elizabeth’s head printed on it in front of my eyes: “Have you seen it before?”

My eyes sparkled at the sight of money. I examined and squeezed the one hundred dollar bill, feigning great interest. Then, I complimented him sarcastically: “You are very much in tune with the mood of this country, money, money, money.” His face blushed, looking like a Red Delicious apple.

Later, I was told that Yang had decided to reform himself, shutting himself away and reading banned books on promoting democracy in China. He also developed a passion for Chinese and foreign detective stories. Yang made tremendous progress both in his possession of knowledge and gadgets – he was well versed in Chinese politics and equipped himself with a beeper, a fax machine and cell phone.

Inspired by ideas from the many detective novels he had read, he launched an underground pro-democracy movement and learned how to contend with his enemies. After undertaking hundreds of scientific experiments, he acquired a new skill for writing secret notes with a special ink. The notes will remain invisible until you soak the paper in clear water for a few minutes (This special ink, mentioned in several revolutionary novels, was said to be invented by the subversive underground Chinese Communists who engaged in activities to sabotage the ruling Nationalist government in the 1940s).

Somehow, Yang managed to get connected with a dissident at a human rights organization in the US and communicated with him regularly. He enlisted my help in obtaining letters from imprisoned political dissidents and disseminated their information to the international community. We were both caught and locked behind bars for more than twenty days. The latest arrest made Yang more paranoid. “The police are omnipresent, like the bugs in your stomach. You feel their presence when you eat, and when you fart and shit.”

He further improved his spying techniques and always complained that other dissidents wouldn’t be able to appreciate his efforts. One time, while visiting me at home, he bypassed me to present a pot of flowers to my father, who wasso touched that he carefully tended the flowers, giving it water and fertilizer. Little did I know that a secret note was hidden at the bottom of the pot. It was a letter to warn me of a possible police search. Two months later, after Yang mentioned the letter, I dashed over to the pot and dug up the note. It was mainly decomposed with a couple of worms squirming over it.

If the “Chinese Democratic Alliance” was a mere figment of his imagination in 1989, he made it reality eight years later. When dissident Wang Youcai and his friends established the “China Democratic Party” in the summer of 1998, Yang and his friends responded and formed the Sichuan branch. Police soon got wind of their political endeavors. Two leading members, Liu Xianbin and She Wanbao were arrested and immediately sentenced to ten years behind bars. Yang also found himself surrounded by plainclothes police who were stationed outside his apartment. He felt like a turtle in a vat. Calmly, Yang stepped out of his apartment, carrying a bucket of ashes downstairs and pretended to dump garbage. As police closed in on him, he tossed the bucket in the air. The dust blinded his captors and Yang ran away.

Like a nervous deer chased by a predator, Yang went up north, attempted to cross over to Russia through Jiamusi city, but that failed miserably. He had no alternative but returned to Sichuan, staying at different places and playing hide and seek with police. Not long afterward, he forged an identity card and joined a tour group for Thailand. Immediately upon arriving in Bangkok, he claimed to be horny and insisted on visiting the red light district. He got into a taxi and recklessly directed the driver to the American Embassy in Thailand. Sweaty and stinky, he stepped into the American territory and cried like a baby. He said he had finally tasted freedom.

In the winter of 1998, I received a fax from Yang, saying that he had been kicked out of the American Embassy and found himself on the streets. Since Thailand is well-known for its Buddhist charity, I later heard tales of Yang being picked up by a group of monks. He earned a living as a temple cleaner. Out of sympathy and friendship, I contacted friends in the West, seeking assistance for Yang. Political asylum turned out to be more complicated than I had expected.

Four years later, the dissident friend at the US-based human rights organization informed me that Yang’s political asylum status had been confirmed and he would soon be transferred to a United Nations refugee camp. He would be given US$200 per month to cover his housing and food. “The money can barely feed his stomach,” says the friend. “But it’s better than nothing. I’m trying to locate a country that will accept him, but it’s very difficult. We have to jump all sorts of hurdles. He has to do a lot to prove himself.”

I felt so bad for Yang, but knowing his past ingenuity, I knew that he would somehow survive.

One day in July of 2004, a writer friend invited me out for tea and shared with me the news that Yang had arrived in Canada.

“He has a new phone now and tried to call you many times and said he couldn’t get through?” said my friend.

“Really? I’m sure he will call again,” I said.

(Special thanks to Wen Huang for sending us this translation of Liao Yiwu’s piece. Very appropriate for today, the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, or June Fourth Incident.)

A few weeks back we mentioned the then upcoming symposium at the University of Michigan on the “future of reading.” Well, the amazing Karl Pohrt was able to attend and wrote this comprehensive piece on the somewhat bleak gathering.

Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age is the title of a symposium held today at the University of Michigan.

New Fate of Reading? Uh-oh . . .

The event announcement features an illustration of books rendered as if they are a flock of birds flying above the reach of a group of young people standing in an open field. The image is ambiguous. Are the books flying toward the people or away from them? Are people greeting the arrival of the books or are they ecstatically waving goodbye? In both instances I fear it’s the later. This might be due to my anxiety about the precarious economics of the culture of books these days. Or perhaps it’s just my bad attitude, something that surfaces now and then despite years spent practicing hardcore zazen.

The text accompanying the picture poses some key questions: What new literacies are generated in the digital era? What happens to the cultural practices associated with the traditional book? How are institutions responding to this new situation? Bookstores are specifically mentioned, along with libraries, publishers, and newspapers. And finally, moving from the descriptive to the prescriptive: How ought they _(to) respond?_ This is what I’m really interested in. What is to be done?

The symposium, sponsored by the Michigan Quarterly Review and the Rackham Graduate School, is held in Angell Hall on the U of M’s central campus, and is divided into two sessions. MQR editor Jonathan Freedman tells us the morning panel, New Reading Practices and Literacies in a Digital Age, is devoted to questions of theory and history. The afternoon sessions will examine new institutions.

The program kicks off with a talk entitled “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-first Century Literature.” Jessica Pressman, who teaches at Yale, informs us that the role of the book will change—has changed—from an essential format to one medium among many. She says the recent talk about the death of the book is a literary response to the perceived threats of the digital age. The theme of the death of the book has become a source of inspiration for writers, despite the fact that literature was never about information delivery. Book bound content is now associated with the literary.

She cites The Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall, as an example of a new literary form in which the novel itself exists as a character.

“_Shark Texts_ begins with the main character reading himself back to life from near death,” she says.

Pressman describes an aesthetic of bookishness in which books are viewed as a haven from the increasingly threatening digital age. This position is most certainly retro because “we now live in a world in which the text no longer exists just on the page.”

Within the bookish aesthetic, bookstores (“spaces for bound books”) are like sanctuaries or churches. They provide a safe location from which readers can network with each other and critique the digital culture. For bookish folk, bookstores are “shields against the shark.”

Frankly, I never thought of bookshops as lairs of a bound-book Ancien Regime, but I take her point.

“The book is a reading machine and data mutates across discourse networks,” she tells us, channeling William Gibson or William S. Burroughs.

Obviously the practice of reading and the bookish experience have changed in the digital age. Nostalgia for the world of print doesn’t cut it anymore in our multi-modal world.

Click here for the complete article.

Our latest review is Monica Carter’s piece on Francoise Sagan’s That Mad Ache, recently published by Basic Books and translated from the French by Douglas Hofstadter.

Monica — who works at Skylight Books and runs the excellent Salonica — isn’t especially keen on this novel, or, to be more specific, she’s not too keen on the 100-page essay by Hofstadter — “Translator, Trader” — that’s included in the volume (and although I remember loving Godel, Escher, Bach, this is cringe-worthy):

The essay is divided into small sections with wink, wink headings like, “Poetic Lie-Sense” and “Good Gravy-Americanisms Galore” that cheapen the role of the translator and the reader. There is a distinct feeling that Hofstadter woefully underestimates the intelligence of the reader by delivering abstract ideas of translation and semiotics chopped into bite-size ideas veiled by poorly chosen puns and a cutesy font. Yes, even the font selection gets page time in this essay and after stating that Baskerville is “pedestrian,” the reader is forced to look at headings presented in a gaudy font. And why this essay is divided into so many sections becomes a mystery. Finding a segue between topics would lend much more credibility to the author as well as avoiding breaking the aesthetic flow with a cloyingly scripted heading.

There is a distinct goal on Hofstadter’s part throughout the essay to not be boring – in the writing of the essay, in his choices of translation, and yes, even the font. The reader is given several metaphors to better understand what type of translator Hofstadter is and why he makes the choices he does. The metaphor that Hofstadter relies on the most is “Translator as Dog-on-a-Leash”.

“Whenever I am translating something that someone else carefully wrote, I feel like an unleashed dog taking a walk with its master through a forest or a huge park. It’s a marvelously joyous feeling, a subtle blend of freedom and security. I run around on my own, but despite all my seeming freedom, I am in truth always invisibly tethered to my master and the unpredictable pathways that my master chooses to take.”

He also uses the metaphor of temperature, that translator’s styles fall somewhere on a tic of a thermometer between hot and cold. He considers himself a “hot” translator, meaning that he likes to take quite a few liberties with the original text to make it more interesting. The problem this presents of course is that his idea of what is “hot” is subjective and could be construed as not adhering to the authorial vision. For instance, he makes a comparison between his translation of a passage to Robert Westhoff’s translation (Westhoff was Sagan’s lover):

“In Chapter 13, Lucile is replying with indignation to a question Antoine has asked her. She thinks the answer is self-evident, and where Sagan has her say, “Bien entendu” (meaning literally “of course”), Westhoff has her say, “Of course.” That’s fair enough. My first inclination, however, was to go much further than this—namely, “Well, what do you think—is the Pope Catholic?” Once again, though, some little voice inside me protested, for two reasons. One is that what Lucile actually said in French was much shorter and simpler than this sarcastic retort, and the other is that the rhetorical question “Is the Pope Catholic?” might sound too American. I don’t quite know why that would be, since popes and Catholics are hardly limited to America, but perhaps there’s a down-home American sense of humor lurking inside that remark, and perhaps it’s that hidden flavor that sounds a bit un-French. In any case, none of my friends who read this phrase thought it belonged in Lucile’s mouth, and so I threw it out and settle for just, “Well, what do you think?”, and as I did so, my translation temperature fell from 100° to 75°.”

Click here for the complete review.

Françoise Sagan rocketed to international fame with her debut novel Bonjour, Tristesse. After failing her baccalaureate, she wrote this novel when she was eighteen years old and it became the novel that all her other works would be measured against. It has the trademark French style, lean and sober, with philosophical undertones. The quintessential coming-of-age story focuses on 17-year-old Cécile, a young woman struggling with her need to attract men her father’s age, the relationship with her playboy father and the shallow lifestyle that they both lead. Typical of Sagan’s novels, we are presented with the examined lives of the disenchanted bourgeoisie. In Douglas Hofstadter’s retranslation of Sagan’s That Mad Ache (published as La Chamade in France and the U.S., originally), this theme once again presents itself as an integral part of Sagan’s psychological novel.

Instead of a teenage Cécile, we are introduced to a thirty-year-old Lucile who is living with fifty-year old real estate tycoon, Charles. She meets the young, attractive Antoine, a poor yet principled man working for a French publishing company. Antoine is also thirty and also dating someone older, Diane, a forty-five year old socialite. Lucile and Antoine meet at one of the many dinner parties that both of them are required to go to because of whom they are dating. Of course, there is an immediate attraction between them over a shared joke, but also a kindred sense that they are both interlopers in the rich lives of their partners:

She burst out laughing, and as she did so, both Diane and Charles looked over at the two of them. Diane and Charles had been placed next to each other, at the far end of the table, looking directly towards their protégés —thirty-year old children who refused to act like grown-ups. Lucile cut her laugh short: after all, she was making nothing of her life, and there was no one that she loved. What a joke! If she hadn’t by nature been so full of joie de vivre, she would have killed herself.

That last line is vintage Sagan and, in many cases, her dark humor saves this novel from becoming too frivolous. From the onset, Lucile lives a life of privilege and is able to wake up every morning and do whatever she feels like. Reading about someone who has everything isn’t that intriguing. Luckily, we are introduced to the sacrifice that Lucile must make in order to have this lifestyle. She lives with the truth that her love for Charles is not a passionate love, but is more of a tender fondness for the man he is and what he gives her. He loves her unconditionally, which is how a parent loves a child. With Antoine, there is passion and consequences, there is a risk—it has conditions. As a reader, we need this conflict to keep us engaged. Otherwise, we are left with a sense of vapidity that Sagan exploits in the bourgeoisie. And once Lucile decides to leave Charles and live with Antoine, there is a looming sense of tension between the two:

Sometimes he would cast a furtive, questioning glance at her. Her laziness, her incredible ability to do nothing at all and never to think about her future, her remarkable capacity for finding happiness in a long series of empty, inactive, indistinguishable days—all this struck him at times as outrageous, even verging on the repulsive. He knew very well that she loved him and that, for that reason, she wasn’t going to grow tired of him any sooner than he would of her, but his intuition told him that what he was now seeing of her lifestyle was representative of her deeper essence, and he realized that it was only thanks to their mutual physical passion that he was able to put up with her perpetual stagnation. He often felt as if he had discovered a mysterious beast, an unheard-of plant, a mandrake. But whenever he felt this way, he would draw near to her on the bed, slide in between the sheets, never growing tired of their wild abandon, of their mingled sweat, of their torrid exhaustion, and in this way he would rediscover for himself, and in the clearest possible manner, that she was, after all, not a beast but a woman.

The novel gets really interesting when Lucile succumbs to Antoine’s pressure to get a job. Because of Sagan’s psychological musings through character, Lucile engages us as a three-dimensional character, not simply a base, materialistic woman. In the end, that may be what she decides to be, but not until she goes through some serious self-reflection. Also it is important to consider that this was written in the sixties which puts Lucile in a historical context when feminism was just a groundswell. A woman who was single, unemployed and childless did not have the same stigma that it does today. Lucile realizes during her lunch hour that even though she may be in love, it does not mean she is happy:

That day, she had had it, and when she arrived at her usual brasserie at one o’clock, she ordered a cocktail form the surprised waiter (she never ordered drinks), and then another. She had a dossier to study and she riffled through it for a couple of minutes before closing it with a yawn. She was quite aware that they had suggested that she should write a few lines on the topic and that if they liked what she wrote, it might well be published. All well and good, but today isn’t the day for it. Nor was today the day for obediently trotting back to that gray office right after lunch and returning to the cute little role she had been playing of Active Young Woman in front of other people who would be playing their grandiose little roles of Thinkers, or else Men of Action. They were all lousy roles, or at the very least it was a lousy play. Or then again, if Antoine was right and this play that she was acting in was a perfectly respectable and useful play, well then, her role in it was poorly written, or else it had been written for somebody else. Antoine was simply wrong—this was now crystal-clear to her in the glaring light of her two cocktails, for alcohol at times shines pitiless sharp spotlights on life, and right now it was revealing to her the thousands of little lies that she had been telling herself day after day in effort to convince herself that she was happy. But in fact she was unhappy, and life was unfair.

Funny how a job can make life seem unfair, but such is Lucile. She discovers her limits that we have seen all along. In the end, each character remains who they are—at least more certain of who they are. This novel is not as good as Sagan’s debut, but it does have its charm. Ultimately, it is a romantic novel that seems somewhat dated and trivial at times but it also imparts a sense of nostalgia that carries us through the superficiality.

—

And even though this novel may not be that remarkable on its own, Basic Books came up with the brilliant idea of pairing That Mad Ache with an essay about translation by the translator by Douglas Hofstadter. Translator, Trader is a hundred page account of Hofstadter’s journey through translating Sagan’s novel and frequently comparing his translation with the original that was done by Sagan’s husband, Robert Westhoff. Enamored by this idea as I am, Hofstadter’s essay is a disappointment. Translation is such a complex issue, and an engaging one, that it serves well to have an afterword of this type for those interested in the process of translation. However, those of us who are interested in reading more about the translator’s personal experience with a work from conception to finish won’t find Hofstadter’s oversimplified, folksy approach worthwhile.

The essay is divided into small sections with wink, wink headings like, “Poetic Lie-Sense” and “Good Gravy-Americanisms Galore” that cheapen the role of the translator and the reader. There is a distinct feeling that Hofstadter woefully underestimates the intelligence of the reader by delivering abstract ideas of translation and semiotics chopped into bite-sized ideas that are veiled by poorly chosen puns and a cutesy font. Yes, even the font selection gets page time in this essay and after stating that Baskerville is “pedestrian,” the reader is forced to look at headings presented in a gaudy font. And why this essay is divided into so many sections becomes a mystery. Finding a segué between topics would lend much more credibility to the author, as well as avoiding breaking the aesthetic flow with a cloyingly scripted heading.

There is a distinct goal on Hofstadter’s part throughout the essay to not be boring – in the writing of the essay, in his choices of translation, and yes, even the font. The reader is given several metaphors to better understand what type of translator Hofstadter is and why he makes the choices he does. The metaphor that Hofstadter relies on the most is “Translator as Dog-on-a-Leash”.

Whenever I am translating something that someone else carefully wrote, I feel like an unleashed dog taking a walk with its master through a forest or a huge park. It’s a marvelously joyous feeling, a subtle blend of freedom and security. I run around on my own, but despite all my seeming freedom, I am in truth always invisibly tethered to my master and the unpredictable pathways that my master chooses to take.

He also uses the metaphor of temperature, that translator’s styles fall somewhere on a tic of a thermometer between hot and cold. He considers himself a “hot” translator, meaning that he likes to take quite a few liberties with the original text to make it more interesting. The problem this presents of course is that his idea of what is “hot” is subjective and could be construed as not adhering to the authorial vision. For instance, he makes a comparison between his translation of a passage to Robert Westhoff’s translation (Westhoff was Sagan’s lover):

In Chapter 13, Lucile is replying with indignation to a question Antoine has asked her. She thinks the answer is self-evident, and where Sagan has her say, “Bien entendu” (meaning literally “of course”), Westhoff has her say, “Of course.” That’s fair enough. My first inclination, however, was to go much further than this—namely, “Well, what do you think—is the Pope Catholic?” Once again, though, some little voice inside me protested, for two reasons. One is that what Lucile actually said in French was much shorter and simpler than this sarcastic retort, and the other is that the rhetorical question “Is the Pope Catholic?” might sound too American. I don’t quite know why that would be, since popes and Catholics are hardly limited to America, but perhaps there’s a down-home American sense of humor lurking inside that remark, and perhaps it’s that hidden flavor that sounds a bit un-French. In any case, none of my friends who read this phrase thought it belonged in Lucile’s mouth, and so I threw it out and settle for just, “Well, what do you think?”, and as I did so, my translation temperature fell from 100° to 75°.

Hofstadter relinquishes his degrees to a more appeasing temperature for readers, but it seems evident to me that Lucile would never use that phrase. I am even more confounded that he seems confused as to its American-ness. It’s not a question of him turning the heat down on his translation, but the fact that he thinks that is “hot.” Any novelist tries to avoid clichés, even in dialogue, and imagining that this is even in the realm of liberal translation is befuddling. Sagan didn’t use an equivalent French idiom, so why would Hofstadter? And therein lies the difference in schools of translation and begs the question “How faithful is the translator to the text?”

Then there is the matter of Hofstadter comparing his translation to the original by Robert Westhoff. Hofstadter states in the beginning of the essay that he didn’t want to read the translation until he was finished with his translation because he didn’t want it to “contaminate” his version. I admire this noble tenet of the profession of translation. But in the end, Hofstadter compares his translation to Westhoff’s and comes out with the self-approving conclusion that his is better than the original, or at least “hotter.” Although as a reader, I felt that the more restrained style of Westhoff was closer to Sagan’s style and also closer to the French sensibility in fiction. Even while I was reading the novel, there were phrases that I questioned as because they seemed inordinate in comparison to Sagan’s style. Phrases like “rolling in dough” or “you’re no Rocker-boy” felt jarring and unfaithful to the text.

Although the essay is thought-provoking and interesting to read, it is not completely satisfying and it leaves the reader questioning the translator’s efforts as opposed to regaling them. This is not to say that it not worthwhile either, but one hundred pages given to a translator is unheard of, and Hofstadter could have easily edited to fifty pages to tighten up the message. One last final note about the translation—there are several phrases he chooses to keep in French and this is indicated through italics. In one passage, he italicizes the word “brasserie” which is not only insulting, but also blatant. Although most readers may not speak French, I find it difficult to imagine them not ever encountering the word or at minimum being able to gather that from the context of the sentence.

This is a valiant effort by Sagan and Hofstadter, but ultimately it falls short of its own goal and readers expectations.

Follow these links for Part I and Part II.

Over the past few years, the book industry has become much flatter, allowing many, many more people to enter into the business. For instance, the advent of self-publishing allows almost anyone to become an author and make their book available for sale. Blogs turn your voracious reader into a book reviewer almost overnight. And thanks to print on demand and e-technologies, the bar to entering the publishing market is much lower than it was back a couple decades ago.

Bookstores are one of the few areas of the industry that are still cost-prohibitive. You can’t compete with Amazon by creating an online store, and a physical location and all those physical books requires a huge cash outlay.

This fundamental change has upwrenched the industry in several ways though. The distribution chain for books still heavily favors the corporate publishers with solid nationwide distribution and long-term beneficial arrangements with major review sources and the chain bookstores.

One reason I think the “editors buzz panel” is silly is because it’s simply a chance for a few corporations to present the titles they’re going to be pimping hard over the next few months anyway. It’s not like you’re not already going to be hearing about these books—that decision was made way ahead of time by the marketing staff, or even by the editor who shelled out a million bucks for a particular book. The buzz panel gives the illusion of choice and participation. Booksellers can feel like they were in on the ground floor, but really? A book coming out from one of the big presses with a mammoth marketing budget (including tens of thousands being spent at B&N, the direct physical competitor to the indie booksellers attending this buzz panel) will be given all the necessary backing to take off. Sure, an indie store could decide to not carry it (but again, really? they want to stay in business by stocking books that are selling, and books getting a lot of attention and publishing push, tend to sell) or at least not recommend it, but the forces of publishing buzz are much bigger than a two-hour panel in which a hundred bookstores find out about the fall’s big titles.

That digression aside, BEA is one potentially great opportunity for smaller presses to reach readers they normally wouldn’t reach. This point hearkens back to the attendance criteria, but in a slightly different way. The corporate presses still have the best, biggest, and most noticeable places on the floor (unless HMH and Macmillan, which took out meeting rooms instead), but nevertheless, there is the opportunity at BEA for the indie presses (like those with PGW or Consortium), the micropresses, and the self-published to meet potential readers and promoters. It’s not often that the buyer at a store in Montana will take a call from a tiny press that they’ve never heard of, but at BEA, there is the chance that this same bookseller will wander by the tiny press booth, notice an interesting looking book, strike up a conversation, stock that title, and handsell a few dozen copies.

One of the problems (and oh god, are there a lot of problems) with the current structure of the book industry is the fact that a traditional press can not survive making connections like this that will help sell a few hundred extra copies of a book. It’s one of the reasons that during the Arab-U.S. Editors Panel Erroll McDonald from Pantheon was so adamant about translations failing in the U.S.

As you can see from Gwen’s recap (the above link), during this panel about the obstacles and opportunities in exchanging works between Arab and U.S. publishers, McDonald took the very old corporate view that translations can’t be successful in the U.S. because America is “breathtakingly provincial” and that international lit is ghettoized in the stores, in the media, etc. Therefore, no one buys it, Pantheon doesn’t make enough money to keep the overlords happy, and we ignore the rest of the world to produce and promote our own crappy books.

This is one of those topics that gets me all hyped up and jittery, so I’ll try and save most of my rant for a longer, more complete post, but basically, I think McDonald’s presentation was predicated on two questionable tenets that are worth examining.

First of all, the definition of “success” is, and probably will be for the foreseeable future, based on the mega-sales level that can be achieved by Dan Brown or Stephen King, or whomever. A book isn’t successful unless it’s selling tens of thousands of copies. Sales = success. Or more specifically, sales large enough to sustain an outdated and dying business model = success. Fuck. That. Thanks to changes in the industry, new presses are starting up with sustainable business models premised on sales in the 2,000 – 5,000 range. Of course, these presses aren’t going to make anyone a millionaire, but they are presses that will be successful in creating a diverse, vibrant book culture. You could shun this as “spiritual success,” but going back to the mediocrity point, only a few people are going to get rich in the book world, so you have to do something that will make you feel good about your life.

And besides, coming from a major press like Pantheon, this “translations cost too much to publish” argument is total bullshit. I can’t say for certain, but I suspect that Pantheon offers $100,000 advances on a routine basis. And yet, don’t want to do a translation because they’d have to pay a translator $10,000. . . . Which, yes, it’s an “additional cost,” unless you acknowledge that the rights to the best works of international literature are available for much, much less than $100,000. In any given year, 80% of all translations are published by small presses—none of which offer anywhere near $100,000 for the rights. So Pantheon could do these books and be “successful”—they just don’t want to.

(The moment of the panel that really pissed me off was McDonald’s claim that an editor won’t just read an Arab book and decide to publish it. He/she will only do it once it’s been successfully published in Germany, in France, in Spain, etc., etc. Once it’s a known quantity then you can do it. Of course, he hedged in answering whether an editor does the same thing when evaluating the work of a debut American novelist . . . Dude also insisted there are no presses in America doing only literature in translation, so whatever.)

Secondly, and maybe more importantly, I think he’s conflating the words “isolated” and “provincial” to create a self-fulfilling situation. Americans may or may not be provincial when it comes to reading foreign fiction (recent successes of 2666 and The Elegance of the Hedgehog would argue that they’re not), but they’re definitely isolated from the rest of the world’s book culture. As anyone who’s read this blog more than once knows, there are very few books in translation published in America on a yearly basis. We live in a culturally isolated world. I’m just not willing to believe that this is due to our inherent fear of international literature . . . If I was subjected to as many invasive ads, reviews, interviews, etc., etc., for Munif’s Cities of Salt as I am for Angels and Demons, I might well have read this book. The business model that dominates publishing (although there are things on the edges that successfully run counter to this) is the blockbuster idea that pours immense resources into promoting the most accessible works, shaping public consciousness to make money and then claiming that the books people never even heard about (because the press never spent a second figuring out how to let people know about them) didn’t sell because people don’t like those sorts of books.

This flattening is even more evident when it comes to reviewers and the old print vs. online kerfuffle. But more on that issue—and its relation to voracious readers and readers in general—in part IV.

Part I of this BEA-roundup can be found here.

Attendance (and foot traffic on the floor) tends to become the primary evaluative criteria. And the show was crowded on Friday. (Although Saturday afternoon was a bit bleak, and on Sunday, it was damn near post-apocalyptic.) But one interesting thing—and I’m sure Lance will correct me if I’m wrong—in past years, when you went into the show, your badge was scanned, providing some sort of count of people at the fair. This year? No badge scanning at all . . . as long as your badge was visible, you could walk in. Even if it was an outdated one from BEA 2007 . . .

But yes, OK, the fair was crowded on Friday. But to play the cynic, it seemed to me like the majority of people on the floor on Friday were other publishing people. Assistant publicists, editors, marketing folks, etc. People who a) never come back over the weekend, because that’s their “free time” and b) people who tend not to actually buy books. (It’s absolutely true that in this industry—which is totally filled with examples of financial mediocrity and failure—that one of the great benefits is the free books. This is an industry of passion, with the drug of choice available for free at almost all times . . . ) So next year, when the show is on Wednesday through Friday, the floor will be super-crowded with people who are probably not the best target market.

(There was a rumor—denied by BEA staff—that the aisles were closer together this year, which created the impression that the show was more crowded than it was. Not kidding that several conversations revolved around trying to remember just how far apart the booths used to be . . .)

Historically, the show was good for connecting smaller publishers to booksellers they typically didn’t meet with during the year. But thanks to the success of the Winter Institute and the fact that anyone can reach anyone these days (via phone, fax, e-mail, or tweet), it doesn’t seem like booksellers feel that this is a “necessary” show to attend. And in the future, this number will likely decrease, since it’s hard for most booksellers and librarians to take off three days (or more) during the work week . . .

Big Book(s) are often the one and only aspect of BEA that the mainstream media writes about. What are the big books for the fall? Why aren’t there any big books this year? Why can’t we figure out which books are going to be big? More than any other, this topic emphasizes the “buzz” factor of BEA. The logic goes: if you take out the right size stand, come up with the coolest gimmick, and deliver a great product to the appropriate tastemakers, you can do enough marketing at BEA to ensure a book “takes off” when it “launches” in the fall. (Why are all industry metaphors based on rockets?)

Regardless if whether there’s a clear cut “big book” or not (last year, I claimed that 2666 was the book of BEA), there’s at least a lot of chatter about upcoming titles from established authors. This year I didn’t hear much of that at all. Everyone was too busy talking about foot traffic and the fact that neither the New Yorker nor the New York Review of Books threw parties this year. . .

Complaints really might be the backbone of BEA. I mentioned this in passing earlier, but if you stop to think about it, the book world—from publishers to booksellers to authors to journalists to distributors—is filled with mediocrity and failure. Not in terms of the people or product (although in terms of the 400,000 books published last year, there really is a lot of that), but in terms of financial success. If I told the kids at business school that they could get into an industry where everyone is underpaid and more than 80% of all the businesses are two fuck-ups away from bankruptcy, and that the average profit margin is under 5%, their heads would explode. But that’s what it is. Most people get into this business out of their love for books—definitely not because they think books are the quickest way to living large with lots of bling. Which is actually cool. One could argue that book people are the best people to work/talk/drink with, and that the strength of the book community outweighs all financial opportunities passed up by entering this field.

That said, the fact that the book business is a neverending struggle leads to immense amounts of bitching. And BEA is the ultimate cathartic release that escalate quickly into realms of self-reflexive, meta-bitching. Here’s a typical conversation:

A: So how are you doing?

B: Good. Well, you know, we’re hanging in there.

A: Not out of business yet.

B: Yeah, well, not yet. You know, zero growth is the new OK.

A: Same for us. Just trying to make it by. Times are tough. This industry is totally broken. Just look around . . .

B: And what do you think of the show?

A: Kind of sucks, no? I mean, where are the booksellers and reviewers? This place is a ghost town.

B: Yeah, and our booth placement sucks too. We’re behind f’ing Harlequin.

A: F-that. They need to make this show better. Get more people here.

B: And where are the galleys this year? If there’s no free books, there’s no point to this show.

A: You coming back next year?

B: Of course, of course. Haven’t missed a show in fifteen years . . .

Trust me, we need this. . . . OK, two sections left . . .

If there’s one thing publishing people like more than complaining about how bad business is, it’s analyzing whether or not BookExpo America was successful. Which isn’t easy to determine . . . Lance Fensterman (who runs the show for Reed Exhibitions) has pointed out before how difficult it is to quantify the show’s success, since the goal of the show is to “create buzz.” (If a press hands out 3,000 galleys to booksellers and librarians, and only find 1,200 in the trash bins afterward, was the show a success?)

So how does one evaluate this show? I think this is a pretty important topic, since the show is in flux—next year it’s moving to mid-week (an idea I loathe, but more on that later), you should see the bleak picture I took of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s “meeting room,” which took the place of their normal booth on the floor—and needs to evolve to a) avoid a spectacular collapse similar to BookExpo Canada, and b) provide an experience that obviously impacts future book sales.

But back to evaluating the show. For anyone who hasn’t been there, BEA is a clusterfuck of reasons for attending and things being offered. For the booksellers, there are educational panels, there are author breakfasts and lunches, there are presses out on the floor that your store might not have heard of. There are also other panels for the industry as a whole, like “Twitter for Dummies,” or the Editor’s Buzz Panel. This year there was a “Global Market Focus” on the Arab World, with panels and off-site cultural events.

Then there is the exhibition floor itself, which is really the focal point of the Expo. This is where publishers big and small take out booths of varying sizes, from the mammoth Abu Dhabi International Book Fair palace to Random House’s postage-stamp sized embarrassment. Self-published authors are pushing their titles into the hands of anyone with a press badge (thanks again for that copy of From Veils to Thongs ), gimmicks abound, and everyone gets trained into staring at everyone else’s chests and waists, searching out namebadges instead of making eyecontact with the person you’re speaking to. (It takes days to break oneself of this weird, ADD-inducing habit.)

And at the end of the day, the booksellers go to dinners and bookseller parties, the publishers go to publisher parties, and we all get home much too late, much too drunk.

(Just want to insert here, that this book wonderland is only accessible to “members of the trade.” Reviewers, booksellers, librarians, book manufacturers, authors, etc. Granted this is pretty wide—I’m a reviewer! and who isn’t an author—but still, there are hoops to jump through to prove that you belong.)

This isn’t to say that BEA isn’t fun or useful. Before breaking this down any further, it’s worth pointing out that the show is essentially a platform for book business people to interact with one another in a myriad of ways. And that is always accomplished. There are so many people I see only at BEA, people that I love talking with, catching up with, exchanging ideas with, and if for nothing else, the fair is extremely useful for that. (Thanks to the implosion of BEC, I was able to meet a lot more cool Canadian publishing people, like Daniel from Biblioasis, Alana from Coach House, and Tara from Key Porter. )

But this all costs money. Lots and lots of money. Money to take out a booth, and to pay for each chair in the booth. To pay for a badge (well, for most people—I actually had three waiting for me, including one for Chad Post of Rochester University, Cleveland), and to pay for overpriced bottles of water. And flying, staying, and eating in New York isn’t cheap—especially when you consider that the bulk of publishers and booksellers and librarians populating this show are surviving on 0-1% annual profit margins. (Not exaggerating. The new tagline for the book industry: “Zero growth is the new, ‘We’re doing great!’”) So to justify all this expense, they need to get something out of the show . . . and what that something is, and whether or not BEA is supplying it in the best possible way is at the heart of all the “was the show good for you?” discussions.

Since this is getting Biblically long, I’ll stop here and pick up some of the evaluative measures in part two.

Late last week, Bookforum launched their new website, which has all of the great features of the previous one (the daily round up blog, articles from the print version, etc.), but has also added a couple of cool things, like a daily review section and a syllabi section containing lists of recommendations within a particular category.

I actually have a Beyond Bolano syllabus up there right now featuring Latin American/Spanish writers worth picking up post-2666.

All the syllabi are interesting: Ed Park’s on Comic Novels, Mark Sarvas’s on Literary Losers, David O’Neill’s on Emily Dickinson, Rachel Aviv on Schizophrenic Memoirs, Lisa Darms on Walking, and Devin McKinney on Supernatural Nonfiction.

I’m a sucker for these sorts of lists to begin with (especially from smart, interesting readers like the ones above), and can’t wait to see what else gets added. . .

(I’ll write more about this in a BEA round-up, but I did discover a new genre over the weekend that needs some fleshing out—“historical religious speculative fiction.” Not kidding. I can’t find the promo page at this moment, but it was a self-published title about how a Jewish woman named Esther spreads a new philosophy of life, starting a spiritual revolution that prevents the Holocaust and the ensuing nuclear war . . . which is where this book must be pretty damn daring and complicated to explain how to avoid a nuclear tragedy that never actually happened . . . Ah, BEA!)

In his novel A Mind at Peace, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar asks if it’s possible for a culture that is tied so closely and intimately to its past to survive in a trying time of change. The novel begins in Istanbul the morning of the declaration of World War II and ends with the same announcement, framing the story while we learn about several characters whose lives are marked by events that test their existence and define what it is to be human. A Mind at Peace centers on the life of a man named Mümtaz whose life is surrounded by these characters in a deeply moving portrait as he grows from a child to a young man.

Tanpınar’s novel is set up in four parts, each titled as a character in the novel: İhsan, Nuran, Suad, Mümtaz. The sections of İhsan and Mümtaz act as end plates where the story takes place in the present, holding the past that Nuran and Suad represent.

In Part I, we learn about Mümtaz, the people in his life, and his feelings toward humanity. After the loss of his mother and father when Mümtaz is a child, he goes to live with İhsan, his paternal cousin. İhsan acts as both father and mentor to Mümtaz, sending him to school in France for two years and later on his return, continuing his education under İhsan’s instruction, nurturing his intellectual life in literature, history, and social events. This teaching becomes a backbone for Mümtaz, learning about his self-identity as a Turk in a time when the Ottoman Empire is facing dissolution. The novel continues with historical references and the music and poetry of Turks, which is recited or sung at social gatherings and within the characters, but most significantly within Mümtaz.

A central moment in Mümtaz’s life takes place in Part II when he meets Nuran on a passage over the Bosphorus. In this section, we learn about Nuran and the relationship that ensues between her and Mümtaz. For Mümtaz, this is a moment in his life when “he acknowledged for the first time how sentimental he let himself be.” Mümtaz knew Nuran’s story, her husband’s infidelity, her unhappiness, and Mümtaz, “through a compassion that rose up within him, promised to bring her happiness, for as long as he lived.” Tanpınar’s master storytelling shows two people at the beginning of their relationship, the way they carry themselves physically and emotionally in shyness and in eagerness:

The Music of Silence existed in both, rising to their faces from deep within, and Nuran, frantic to suppress it, appeared more crestfallen than she actually was, while in contrast, Mümtaz, yearning to mask the shyness of his character, forced himself to be bolder and more carefree.

Through this relationship, Mümtaz discovers himself and learns more about his history through the music of Istanbul. A song that plays throughout the novel, “Song in Mahur” is Nuran’s family heirloom. When Mümtaz hears this song from Nuran it is through her singing that Mümtaz feels himself more connected with his past. The relationship between Mümtaz and Nuran becomes one in which their conversation dwells mainly on the current issues of modernization and the importance of keeping their history in mind. Mümtaz believes that to know their history is to know Istanbul, therefore, “if we don’t truly know Istanbul, we can never hope to find ourselves.” As Mümtaz further explains:

Our attachments to the past are also part of these social realities, because those attachments constitute one of the manifest forms our life has taken, and this persists into the present as well as the future.

Their self-identity is tied to the country they are from, but since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, modernization is taking over the country and the natives are trying to adapt to the new. When Mümtaz does a task like furnishing his and Nuran’s apartment, he notices how every sofa shop contains furniture of every “sort and style,” displaying Istanbul’s “changing standards of taste and lifestyle.”

As the music is sung and remembered throughout the novel, it seems it is the only thing that remains within the natives, as a remembrance of their history and their identity. Nuran feels differently, however, “growing tired of Mümtaz’s life and thoughts. The anxiety that he’d been confined to an absolute idea, to an orbit of sterility that took him outside of existence gnawed at him like a worm. It represented a vein of decay that would only grow with time.”

It is expected that this love between Mümtaz and Nuran be put into question: “At times, he attributed their state of satiety and lunacy to the exuberance induced by Ottoman music.” Mümtaz is continually questioning his love with Nuran, and his idea of her is something within his imagination that he ties to their culture. When Mümtaz is faced with reality, he finds himself distraught by humanity. In Part III, Suad enters. A former lover of Nuran’s and ailing from a liver disease, he writes Nuran a letter, expressing his discontent without Nuran in his life. It is Suad’s entrance into the story when Mümtaz feels humanity is harmful. This letter runs through Mümtaz’s memory and leaves him wondering and soon expecting the demise of his relationship with Nuran. Mümtaz sees humankind as “the enemy of contentment [that] struck wherever happiness appeared or made its presence felt.” For Mümtaz, it is hard to be happy in a world that is changing, a world in which the contingencies of life seem to prevent complete happiness. “Humanity couldn’t be fully content; this was impossible. What with thought, settling accounts, and anxiety. Especially anxiety. Humans are creatures of anxiety and fear.” Suad tests Mümtaz, a man of constant worry who lives within his thoughts and his ideas on history and change, and his ability to hold on to Nuran, while the current times move closer to modernization and Mümtaz is forced to question his own life. At one point he comes to this realization, realizing that his loss of his parents at an early age had “instilled the tendency to think and feel this way, to consider everything he cherished as far away,” a distance which makes it impossible for him to hold on to Nuran in the present.

In Part VI, we learn how Mümtaz has slowly been adjusting to several changes, his own belief on humanism changing, but one wonders if this new thought is for the good or better of Mümtaz’s own existence. What we believe about humanism is put into question as we see the change in Mümtaz, and here Tanpınar plucks at our inner selves, expressing what we are either incapable of expressing or are too fearful to admit. Tanpınar’s beautifully descriptive narrative expresses what is at the center of a human being, and what the human spirit strives to attain.

The latest addition to our review section is a piece by Emily Shannon on Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar’s A Mind at Peace, which was translated from the Turkish by Erdag Göknar, published by Archipelago Books late last year, and most famously given as a gift to President Obama by Deniz Baykal, a member of the Turkish parliment.

Emily—a former intern at Open Letter—opens her review:

In his novel A Mind at Peace, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar asks if it’s possible for a culture that is tied so closely and intimately to its past to survive in a trying time of change. The novel begins in Istanbul the morning of the declaration of World War II and ends with the same announcement, framing the story while we learn about several characters whose lives are marked by events that test their existence and define what it is to be human. A Mind at Peace centers on the life of a man named Mümtaz whose life is surrounded by these characters in a deeply moving portrait as he grows from a child to a young man.

Tanpınar’s novel is set up in four parts, each titled as a character in the novel: İhsan, Nuran, Suad, Mümtaz. The sections of İhsan and Mümtaz act as end plates where the story takes place in the present, holding the past that Nuran and Suad represent.

Click here for the complete review.

Announced earlier this week, this year’s Rossica Translation Prize was awarded to Amanda Love Darragh for her translation of Iramifications by Maria Galina.

The prize of £5,000 is split between the translator and publisher—which in this instance is the admirable Glas, one of the finest publishers of contemporary Russian literature—and is given to the finest English translation of a Russian work published within the past two years.

This year Academia Rossica also instituted a Young Translators prize worth £300, and awarded to James Rann . . . for, something. (It’s not listed on the website, and besides, the award is for the translation of “a passage of contemporary Russian literature,” not the complete work. Which is cool—the real point is to encourage younger translators.)

Click here for more information about Academia Rossica, a London-based organization creating a better cultural exchange between Russia and the West.

Last night the French-American Foundation and Gould Foundation held their annual translation prize ceremony, honoring Jody Gladding & Elizabeth Deshays in the fiction category for their translation of Small Lives by Pierre Michon (Archipelago) and Matthew Cobb & Malcolm Debevoise in nonfiction for their translation of Life Explained by Michel Morange (Yale University Press)

As Thomas Bishop pointed out in his opening remarks, it’s interesting that both winners were translated by a pair of translators. Not that this is necessarily good or bad, just interesting. He also gave a shout out to American university presses as one of the admirable publishing segments of the book business trying to do a lot of literature in translation.

Of the finalists for the nonfiction category, four of the five titles were published by university presses (the exception being Camus’s Notebooks that came out from Ivan R. Dee). The fiction category had a different make-up, but three of the six finalists were from independent presses (Archipelago, Europa Editions, and New York Review Books).

The event—which took place at the Century Association—was very well attended (standing room only!), filled with all the editors, agents, translators, and other cultural peoples involved in international lit. (Especially French literature. One of the cool things the FAF did, which I’ve never seen before, is hand out a printed list of all RSVPs, so attendees could see who else was supposedly there and seek them out . . . Actually sort of helpful for a reception of this sort, where you’re only one or two connections away from everyone else . . .

It doesn’t officially launch until June 1st, but Publishing Perspectives the new daily newsletter from the Frankfurt Book Fair, and run by Ed Nawotka and Hannah Johnson is off to a pretty solid start. It’s kind of a “literary VeryShortList,” featuring one interesting, well-developed story each day and some additional bonus information online.

The first week included a piece about Eva Gabrielsson, Stieg Larsson’s long-time partner, who, thanks to Swedish inheritance laws, doesn’t get a dime (er, krona) from Larsson’s sales. (She is writing a book about her experiences though.)

There was also a piece about the Greenest Book Possible, and one about the new Etisalat Award for Arab Children’s Literature, giving $270,000 to the best Arab children’s book of the year.

I can hardly be objective about reviewing this—I’m good friends with both Hannah and Ed, and really like their sensibilities—but I honestly believe that this is a perfect addition to the existing newsletters (like PW Daily, Shelf Awareness, Publishers Lunch) and publishing news sites (like GalleyCat, Literary Saloon) that are out there. It’s a fantastic approach—I’ve written this elsewhere, but one-item newsletters are the thing right now—and provides a great, um, perspective on the publishing industry.

Last night the French-American Foundation and Gould Foundation held their annual translation prize ceremony, honoring Jody Gladding & Elizabeth Deshays in the fiction category for their translation of Small Lives by Pierre Michon (Archipelago) and Matthew Cobb & Malcolm Debevoise in nonfiction for their translation of Life Explained by Michel Morange (Yale University Press)

As Thomas Bishop pointed out in his opening remarks, it’s interesting that both winners were translated by a pair of translators. Not that this is necessarily good or bad, just interesting. He also gave a shout out to American university presses as one of the admirable publishing segments of the book business trying to do a lot of literature in translation.

Of the finalists for the nonfiction category, four of the five titles were published by university presses (the exception being Camus’s Notebooks that came out from Ivan R. Dee). The fiction category had a different make-up, but three of the six finalists were from independent presses (Archipelago, Europa Editions, and New York Review Books).

The event—which took place at the Century Association—was very well attended (standing room only!), filled with all the editors, agents, translators, and other cultural peoples involved in international lit. (Especially French literature. One of the cool things the FAF did, which I’ve never seen before, is hand out a printed list of all RSVPs, so attendees could see who else was supposedly there and seek them out . . . Actually sort of helpful for a reception of this sort, where you’re only one or two connections away from everyone else . . .

I don’t think I received a press release about this, but the 2009 Susan Sontag Prize for Translation has been awarded to Roanne Sharp for her proposed translation of La Mayor by Juan Jose Saer. Which is fantastic—we’re actually publishing three Saer books over the next few years, but not this one. . . . At least not yet.

The award is given to a young (under the age of 30) literary translation for a proposed project. Each year the prize focuses on a different language (last year it was German), and following the announcement, the translator is “employed” for a four-month period to complete the project. (This is one I can’t wait to read . . . )

In addition to Roanne Sharp, there were two honorable mentions this year:

• Rosemary Peele for her proposed translation of Viaje olvidado and Autobiografía de Irene by Silvina Ocampo

and

• Emily Toder for her proposed translation of Tres poemas y una merced (o cuatro poemas desplazados) by Sergio Chejfec. (Another author we’re going to be publishing . . .)

Congrats to Roanne Sharp at the runner-ups, and I’ll be sure to make an announcement about submitting work for the 2010 award as soon as the info is available.

This was a great week for Open Letter books, with three of our recent releases getting some nice coverage:

First up was Hannah Manshel’s review of Death in Spring for The Front Table:

In English for the first time in Martha Tennent’s translation, Death in Spring is about a society that finds highly elaborate ways to elude the inevitable and to conquer time. Its means are slow and insidious, ritualistic and bizarre, always teetering on the line between the real and the magical. Its members, obsessed with imprisoning themselves, pour concrete into the mouths of the dead to keep their souls from escaping. Every spring, they paint the houses pink and it’s unclear whether anyone remembers why. Though the novel is propelled forward by a linear narrative, it is its characters’ evasion of this diachrony that is most captivating. The book is driven by linguistic and thematic repetition, like a prose sestina in which the end words could be symbols or simply icons, aesthetic trends or markers that unfold and elaborate the path of the narrative. We see wisteria and bees, horses and butterflies, souls and prisoners weave in and out of the text, each time reappearing with a new relevance, a new level of meaning.

Christopher Byrd’s review of Jerzy Pilch’s The Mighty Angel in the B&N Review is also pretty fantastic:

From the opening paragraph — in which the protagonist awakens to discover a couple of Mafiosi in his room who have taken it upon themselves to act as literary agents for a female poet — to the closing paragraphs that flick away the tragic arc that’s usually prefabricated for books in the end-of-the-bottle genre, Pilch teases out plenty of LOL moments from desultory situations. All told, The Mighty Angel furnishes enough Schadenfreude to stylishly blacken just about any comedic sensibility.

Becky Ferreira at L Magazine agrees:

Pilch’s prose is masterful, and the bulk of The Mighty Angel evokes the same numb, floating sensation as a bottle of oadkowa Gorzka. But it’s not until Jerzy haphazardly reveals facts of his grandfather’s life that the naked grotesquerie of alcoholism pierces through the book’s often casual and flippant wit. Though the final chapters posit a chance at redemption, it remains unclear whether Jerzy is breaking the cycle, or just trading in one vice for another. To Pilch’s credit, both of Jerzy’s possible paths seem unfortunate and equally likely.

And finally, Michael Orthofer is the first to weigh in on Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s Rupert (he gave it a B+):

What’s riveting about Rupert’s account is his self-assuredness. Yes, he often speaks of ‘Rupert’ in the third person, an abstraction he’s removed from — but then Rupert is, after all, the ultimate ‘I am camera’. It’s a fascinating split-personality on display here — and some . . . perversely fine writing. [. . .] Cleverly, artfully done, Rupert: A Confession is no pleasant read, but an oddly seductive one. Well worthwhile.

Over the next few days, we’re going to highlight a few of the goings on at this year’s BookExpo America, the parties, the panels, etc. I thought I’d start out by highlighting the two events taking place next Friday and Saturday featuring the Arab world, this year’s Global Market Forum focus. Both of these events are open to the public, and are definitely worth checking out.

The Thousand and One Nights
7:00PM, Friday, May 29
Goethe Institute New York Wyoming Building, 5 East 3rd Street

Muhsin Al-Musawi presents his new book, Amal Al-Jubouri reads Arabic and European remixes of “The Thousand and One Nights” (English/German/Arabic) organized by the Berlin-based cultural association west-östlicher diwanh.

New Eyes on the Arab World—Breaking Down Barriers of Fear and Prejudice
7:00PM, Saturday, May 30
The New York Public Library, 42nd Street

Peter Theroux, Raja Alem, Tom McDonough, Muhammed Al Mur & Joe Sacco with Sulaiman Al Hattlan, moderator

Five writers, Arab and American, who have taken innovative approaches to portraying the Arab World to an American audience discuss the challenges they have faced and the successes they have achieved in breaking down the barriers of fear and prejudice through their work. Whether through travelogue, memoir, graphic novel, children’s literature or translation, these writers have widened the lens and sharpened the focus of American readers’ view, setting a new precedent for sensitivity, creativity and insight in literature about the Arab World.

Those of you who subscribe to our newsletter or are members of our Facebook group already received this, but for those who haven’t, here’s this week’s newsletter, which also serves as the kickoff for our first ever fundraising campaign.

Hi—

There was such a great response to last week’s giveaway of Jerzy Pilch’s The Mighty Angel that we’re definitely going to do this on a regular basis . . . Copies of the book (and congratulatory e-mails) went out to the winners yesterday—for everyone else, copies are available at better bookstores everywhere, or via our website. (And yes, the book is even prettier in real life . . .)

This week, we’d like to do two things:

First off, I’d also like to officially kick off our first $10 fundraising campaign. As a nonprofit press (that does a lot of non-revenue generating activity like the Best Translated Book Award, Three Percent, and, well, publishing translations), we have to rely on grants and individual donations to keep doing what we’re doing—making great works of world literature available to readers like you (and me).

Obviously, the more money raised via this campaign, the more we’ll be able to offer, but seeing as this is our first ever online fundraising effort, the real goal is to demonstrate a broad base of support for Open Letter and Three Percent. So, although we’re more than happy to accept gifts of any level, we’re only asking for $10. It’s an affordable amount that adds up to a very significant total, and any show of support for what we do can’t be overestimated.

To contribute—and I really hope you will—simply take two minutes to fill out the online form here.

Second, our new fall/winter 2009 catalog is now available online) with lots of interesting books that I’ll be featuring on Three Percent in the near future and giving away through this newsletter.

Thanks in advance, and next week we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled newsletter. (Unless no one contributes. Kidding, kidding.)

Best,

Chad

Haven’t found the full list online yet, but apparently the longlist for this year’s NIKE Literary Award (the most prestigious literary award in Poland) have been announced. I’ll post an update when I find the full list, but for now, I can say that both Bambino by Inga Iwasiow and Poland Marches On by our own Jerzy Pilch are on the longlist.

And both titles are published by Swiat Ksiazki, who notified me and sent along sample translations . . .

Here’s the info on Jerzy Pilch’s book (which sounds a bit mental, and a bit like The Master and Margarita):

The protagonist – the writer’s alter-ego – has just turned fifty-two. This compulsive seducer decides to find himself a woman on his birthday. She should be different from all his lovers to date. And there have been more than a few … Just when it seems as though his search is all in vain, he gets a text message from the Devil Incarnate himself, inviting him to a ball. Legends are circulating about this party: an out-of-this-world orgy, the Rolling Stones are to be singing, and they’re keeping a zombie in the cellars of the castle… But this is just a small taste of what really is going on there! Our protagonist accidentally finds out that the local residents are planning to attack the estate that day. And this is just the start of a wild, dream-like tale.

And a short excerpt:

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Spirit of Storytelling, Amen. On the eve of my fifty-second birthday I decided that the following day I would meet a new woman. This thought had been rattling around in my brain for a long time, but it had only gradually been assuming its definitive key.

I was not undertaking a frivolity; this was neither a game not a wager. I was not giving myself an easy task—my serious and ambitious intention was, within the next twenty-four hours, to meet, get to know, and seduce an intelligent, slim girl just shy of thirty years old and at least six feet in height.

I wanted to offer myself an intensive birthday present and I wanted to test whether I could afford to offer myself an intensive birthday present. On the surface I was in good shape, but I felt that the monster dwelling inside of me was beginning to die. People still regarded me as a rogue, but in essence I was relying on reputation alone. Appearances to the contrary, cynicism was never my strong suit; the irony and instrumental nature of my stories about women had once served to conceal the wrongs I did them. Now, I used the remnants of cynicism, the remains of irony and a show of instrumentalism to mask my despair and my longing.

And a bit about Iwasiow’s Bambino

Bambino is a story about people and a place, or rather places. One of them is the Bambino snack bar, where the four main characters meet. Another is the whole of Szczecin and the surrounding area, a city that has been badly churned up by history, to which people from various parts of Poland made their way after the war. We follow the fortunes of the four heroes from before the war up to 1980. Marysia was born into a large family in the south-eastern borderlands (now Ukraine). After the war, she and her entire family were repatriated to Poland, where they were given a home in a Pomeranian village. She was the only one who managed to get away to the city, where she became a nurse. There she met Janek (and married him), a bastard from a village near Poznań who was abandoned by his mother and later tried to get his own back for years of humiliation by choosing to work for the security service, which ultimately led to the collapse of their marriage. Anna comes from Gorlice, which she left to escape an overly strict mother and a stepfather who didn’t care about her. She had a hard time finishing her studies, and got married late in life, purely for practical reasons, to a merchant navy captain who is older than her. Ula is a German by origin, and is the only one of the main characters to have been born in Szczecin. Because of the war, she almost entirely lost contact with her family, which meant that she has stayed in the city, trying to live like an ordinary Pole. Her not very ardent relationship with Stefan, a Jew who survived the Holocaust and the only man she has ever wanted to be with, was cut cruelly short by history, as Stefan was forced to leave the country in 1968.

And excerpt:

MARIA, BORN 1940

Maria carries it inside her, I swear. An image of the journey, but not only. Something that happened in the course of it. Something left far behind her. Like all the others, she has this something inside her, the threads run together, the genes, they intersect, various things can arise from this combination, and I want to find out who they are – perhaps it is actually my story, but it could just as well be not mine or anyone else’s. I want to rummage in the pictures, carbon copies and waste paper. There’s nothing to hold on to, no album, no diary, no central concept, apart from need. There are just disconnected stories instead, whatever someone has made up about himself. About the person he is. And a life, quite simply, his or whoever’s, past and continuing. That’s all we have on the subject. Centrifugal motion, stealing up from behind, the same thing but with no prospect of the same thing. The mother of all such lost illusions – that’s Maria.

I’m starting with Maria, because her name attracts me. All women are called EveMaria. This one all the more so, as if she were made out of her name straight off from the start, more than Eve, naturally, less marked out, or chosen from the crowd, but then no one ever promised her that. No one did, in naming the girl, yet that’s just what she longs for, to be designated. Thoughtlessly giving a girl that name is a way of tempting and inviting fate. It means she is marked out for sure, but let us not forget that Maria is a common name in this situation. It is sure to be the name of every third heroine whose life began in the circumstances that interest me, the ones I regard as a part of the image of the journey. Quite simply, our grannies often had that name. I’ve got nothing to be proud of, because we’ll see what happens to those names and to them further on. They were only brought here in 1957. They were brought here. They were brought by train, but first someone gave permission, issued documents and stamped their decision on them. First came their and those people’s hesitation, the decision was just about to be made, but then the hand was withdrawn, the circle turned, and they went on standing by the same fence. Until that final moment. And it wasn’t at all funny or heroic in those – of course, nowadays we say “cattle” trucks.

As you may remember, Hungarian lit dominated last year’s Best Translated Book Award with three titles on the longlist, including Attila Bartis’s Tranquility, the eventual winner.

Not sure that’s ever going to happen again, but the literary buzz around Ferenc Barnas’s The Ninth proves that Hungarian lit really does have a wealth of riches.

Jeff Waxman — managing editor of The Front Table and bookseller at 57th St. — wrote a review of the novel:

Set in Communist Hungary, Barnás’s novel is the story of a nine-year-old child, the ninth child of Hungarian Catholics eking out a miserable living in the small northern town of Pomáz. Bordering on the stream-of-conscious, The Ninth deals with life under the soft Communist rule of the late 1960’s, but from the point of view of a child with no basis for comparison. The picture we gain from our young narrator is uncomplicated by subtlety, politics, morality, and without the self-conscious morbidity and sexuality found in so many adult narrators. He’s an observer.

A lack of morbidity hardly means a lack of misery. Here, it’s unconscious, but this child is also disturbingly, accurately, affectless—too often in literature, we attribute too much to the too young. Our pathetic unnamed protagonist observes the realities of his own family’s survival, of his father’s obsessive small-time industry, his mother’s fervent religiosity, the difficulties of his siblings, and the cruelties and indignities of life in poverty: His mother and oldest siblings go to factory jobs early in the morning and return late at night; his father wakes the “Little Ones” early to do their part in preparing rosaries and other knickknacks for sale to churches; several of them suffer from some inability to speak or read well and some combination of headaches and faintness; and, of course, he’s preoccupied with having that eternal symbol of well-being, the full belly.

Click here for the full piece.

English-language readers have been enthusiastic about the excellent, albeit sinister, works of fiction by Hungarian writers like Nobel-Winner Imre Kertész, Best Translated Book Award Winner Attila Bartis, and the wonderful Péter Esterházy. We’ve been enthusiastic about being disturbed and moved, subjected to nightmare scenes and violent sex, and, ultimately, awed by the mastery these writers—and others—have over language, such mastery that it transcends the language itself and becomes apparent even in translation. Though by most accounts Ferenc Barnás is of the same dark mold, his novel, The Ninth, translated by Paul Olchváry, is a testament to the still-unplumbed depths of contemporary Hungarian literature, and a departure from the alienated fever dreams and horrors to which we’ve grown so accustomed to reading.

Set in Communist Hungary, Barnás’s novel is the story of a nine-year-old child, the ninth child of Hungarian Catholics eking out a miserable living in the small northern town of Pomáz. Bordering on the stream-of-conscious, The Ninth deals with life under the soft Communist rule of the late 1960’s, but from the point of view of a child with no basis for comparison. The picture we gain from our young narrator is uncomplicated by subtlety, politics, morality, and without the self-conscious morbidity and sexuality found in so many adult narrators. He’s an observer.

A lack of morbidity hardly means a lack of misery. Here, it’s unconscious, but this child is also disturbingly, accurately, affectless—too often in literature, we attribute too much to the too young. Our pathetic unnamed protagonist observes the realities of his own family’s survival, of his father’s obsessive small-time industry, his mother’s fervent religiosity, the difficulties of his siblings, and the cruelties and indignities of life in poverty: His mother and oldest siblings go to factory jobs early in the morning and return late at night; his father wakes the “Little Ones” early to do their part in preparing rosaries and other knickknacks for sale to churches; several of them suffer from some inability to speak or read well and some combination of headaches and faintness; and, of course, he’s preoccupied with having that eternal symbol of well-being, the full belly:

During the first break of the day I go to the john out in the schoolyard . . . That’s where I inspect my belly, too, but only if I’m alone. I pull up my shirt, let loose my muscles, and check to see how much my belly sticks out. In the morning it sticks out a lot.

But his lack of affect! This boy has urges—sometimes he steals—and he observes, but he never experiences anger, only a cold acceptance of his lot in life, of the kicks and shoves of his classmates:

. . . Molnár was waiting by the movie theatre. At first I thought he wanted to do the same thing, but I was wrong: he only beat me up . . . I didn’t really feel the blows, maybe because the whole time I was thinking I’d been through this before . . .

At nine years of age, Barnas’s character already knows about survival and necessity. When he and some of his brothers begin working as altar boys during local funerals, he notes, “The more people who die in our village, the better for us.” Though he’s reasonably well cared for, he’s poor and well-informed about the realities of life. His father is instructive and poverty itself teaches lessons that children can learn quickly. This book is not one that will make waves. It doesn’t startle or shock, doesn’t attack the reader or soothe him. This book is notable for the stunning restraint shown, the artfulness with which Barnás and Olchváry approached such a delicate task, the translation of child’s voice. And it’s notable, too, for its quiet success.

The Millions has an interesting post about the forthcoming Haruki Murakami book. Apparently, after details about Kafka on the Shore leaked out, Murakami “insisted that his fans be allowed to approach the new book with no preconceptions,” so info on the new novel is pretty scarce. The title is 1Q84, it will release on May 29th, and it will be published in two volumes. (Murakami has referred to it as “his most ambitious work to date and a ‘real doorstop.’ “)

I’m not as much as a Murakami fanatic as some people (although I really like Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World), but the strange title and complete lack of concrete information has me pretty intrigued about this novel. And I love the speculation—it’s like interpreting clues from Lost!:

One popular theory claims the book is inspired by George Orwell’s dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty-Four (the number nine in Japanese is pronounced like the English letter Q, thus in Japanese 1984 and 1Q84 have the same pronunciation). Another finds inspiration for the title in the novella The True Story of Ah Q, by Chinese novelist Lu Xun, an early 20th century writer and intellectual.

The latter opinion has been fueled by the comments of a prominent Tokyo University professor Shozo Fujii, who argues that Lu Xun is one of Murakami’s primary influences. The 1 in the book’s title, he argues, should be read as the personal pronoun I. In other words, I am Q. What the 84 might stand for is unclear. Fujii’s analysis of Murakami’s work breaks with the commonly held view of Murakami’s influences, primarily Western writers and literary heavyweights like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dostoyevsky (a view confirmed by Murakami himself). Nevertheless, Fujii’s theory about 1Q84‘s meaning has developed a large following online, and has been bolstered by his close readings of Chinese literary themes in Murakami’s early novels, Hear the Wind Sing and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

I’m sure this will be available in English in 2012 or so, although probably in an abridged format . . .

A few of Juan Marse’s books are available in the UK, but all the U.S. versions appear to be out of print. Which is a shame—based on the report below, The Fallen sounds spectacular:

Official Censorship Report of 1973 on Si te dicen que cai (The Fallen)

SECOND REPORT
Author: Juan Marse
Title: Si te dicen que cai [The Fallen]

REPORT
Does it attack the Dogman? YES. Pages 277-27
Franco’s Regime or its institutions? YES. Pages 252-274-291-309
The Catholic Church or its ministers? YES. Pages 17-21-75-155-178-202
The morals? YES. Pages 177-178-225-292-304-305-335
Those who collaborate with or have collaborated with the regime? YES.

REPORT AND OTHER OBSERVATIONS:

We consider this novel to be simply impossible to sanction. We have marked insults to the yoke and arrows [Falangist symbols], which are referred to as “the black spider” on pages 17-21-75-155-178-202-252-274-291-309. Scenes of torture by the Civil Guard or by Falangists on pages 177-178-225-292-304-305-335. Inadmissible allusions to the Civil Guard on pages 277-278. Obscenities and pornographic scenes on pages 19-21-25-26-27-28-29. Political scenes on 29-80 and grave irreverence on 107.

But even once all that is taken out, the novel is still pure garbage. It is the story of some boys in the period after the Civil War who live in deplorable conditions, they end up becoming Commie gunmen, stick-up artists, and then dying . . . all that mixed with whores, faggots, people of ill repute . . . Perhaps it is very realistic but it gives a very distorted, almost calumnious image of post-war Spain. Even if we just blacked out every reference to jerking off and hand-job whores in the movie theaters we’d be left with less than half the novel.

Therefore, we recommend its REJECTION

Madrid, October 20th, 1973

Reader No, 6

The specific reference to “hand-job whores in the movie theaters” is classic—and makes a perfect blurb for the book . . . (Thanks to the Gloria and the Carmen Balcells Agency for letting us run this.)

In the third of today’s three Canadian-centric posts, I thought I’d highlight this interview Nigel Beale did recently with John Metcalf, a Canadian book critic and fiction editor at Biblioasis.

The focus of the interview is on “negative reviewing,” and I have to admit, Metcalf’s defense of critical criticism and his various attacks (especially on M.G. Vassanji — more on him in a minute) are pretty over-the-top and hysterical. Makes me want to read more Canadian book criticism . . .

Vassanji’s writing really pisses Metcalf off . . . especially the fact that Vassanji won the Giller prize twice, and that a “member of the illiterate society” would assume that if he won the Giller and Alice Munro did as well, their books must be of equal value. He goes on to explain that his hatred of Vassanji’s writing isn’t just “his opinion” that if you read one paragraph of Vassanji you can tell that he can’t “handle the English language.”

So, here goes. Here’s the opening of the Giller Prize winning The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (longer sample here):

My name is Vikram Lall. I have the distinction of having been numbered one of Africa’s most corrupt men, a cheat of monstrous and reptilian cunning. To me has been attributed the emptying of a large part of my troubled country’s treasury in recent years. I head my country’s List of Shame. These and other descriptions actually flatter my intelligence, if not my moral sensibility. But I do not intend here to defend myself or even seek redemption through confession; I simply crave to tell my story. In this clement retreat to which I have withdrawn myself, away from the torrid current temper of my country, I find myself with all the time and seclusion I may ever need for my purpose. I have even come upon a small revelation — and as I proceed daily to recall and reflect, and lay out on the page, it is with an increasing conviction of its truth, that if more of us told our stories to each other, where I come from, we would be a far happier and less nervous people.

“I have the the distinction of having” and “to me has been attributed” are both a bit awkward, although it’s possible that this is intentionally stilted, and that it’s only this particular character who speaks in strange ways . . . But I doubt it.

To end on a positive note, Metcalf claims that the only Canadian novel from the past fifteen years that has meant anything to him at all is Mordecai Richler’s St. Urbain’s Horseman, which, well, isn’t available here in America . . . But every single Vassanji book is . . .

To celebrate Gallimard Montreal as our featured bookstore of the month I interviewed both Saskia Deluy and Julien Lefort about the store, Quebec literature and publishers, the future of indie bookselling, etc.

Chad W. Post: Could you tell me a bit about the history of Gallimard Montreal? When it was founded, it’s location in Montreal, etc.

Saskia Deluy: It was founded in Montreal in 1989, that is, the bookstore itself, the office for Gallimard-Distribution already existed in the same building on St. Laurent—one of the oldest and most important streets in Montréal. It was very much the project of the the man who was, and still is, the CEO of Gallimard Limitée in Québec, Rolf Puls. He opened this bookshop and has helped and supported it ever since.

CWP: Does Gallimard Montreal have a specific mission? How would you categorize the selection of books in the store?

SD: In the beginning the bookshop was supposed to keep at least one copy of every available book published by Gallimard (which was quite an impossible mission, and soon forgotten . . .). Besides, it was selling books by French and French Canadian publishers like any other bookstore, with a specialization in social sciences, literature and poetry. The specific mission was and is still to be a display for Gallimard in Québec and to promote their books.

CWP: How did you personally get involved in bookselling?

Julien Lefort: I’m a literature student. I started to work in bookstores to get a discount on books! It’s been 4 years now.

SD:I started at Gallimard almost 15 years ago, with the bit of experience I got by working for my father’s bookstore in Paris in the eighties (I studied Classical Archeology in Amsterdam but couldn’t find a job in Montréal).

CWP: In my short time in Montreal, I didn’t really notice any big box chain stores. Are the chains (like Indigo/Chapters) a huge competitor for independent stores? Is Amazon.ca?

JL: The French-speaking and English-speaking (reading) markets are very different. Indigo and Chapter take a lot of place in the English market. For the French market, two big chains (Renaud-Bray and Archambault) control at least 50% of the market. But a few indie stores are surviving in Montreal and Quebec. Amazon is, like everywhere else in the world, a huge competitor.

CWP: In America, indie booksellers have been dying off for years, and it doesn’t look like this trend is going to reverse anytime soon. Are Canadian stores facing the same problems?

SD: For the moment they survive, although with great difficulties, because they offer different books and the knowledge and competence that are almost totally unavailable in big stores. As long as readers prefer speaking to a human being for advice and sharing we have a small chance to survive, but it is getting more and more difficult, and the e-book will not help of course.

CWP: How would you describe the publishing scene in Quebec?

JL: Mostly one big publishing group (Groupe Ville-Marie) that takes care of mass literature (historic novels, cook books, psycho-pop). There are also a few mid-size non-specialized publishing houses (Boréal, Leméac) with mainstream authors. Finally, there are dozens of small specialized publishing houses (Le Quartanier and Le Noroit for poetry, Liber and Lux for non-fiction). They all receive subsidies from governments (local, provincial, federal). The sales are usually pretty low (around 500), except for a few bestsellers every year.

CWP: For Americans interested in finding out more about Quebecois publishing, which presses should they check out?

Boréal: mainstream novels and classics

Le Quartanier: experimental poetry, poetry, fiction and non-fiction

Héliotrope: young and hip novels and design books

Les Allusifs: foreign literature

Liber: non fiction, philosophy, social sciences.

CWP: This is always a tough question, but what are your top ten Quebecois (or Canadian in general) authors/books?

          Julien:

Hubert Aquin: complete work

Anne Hébert: Les chambres de bois

Paul-Marie Lapointe: Écritures

Réjean Ducharme: L’hiver de force

          Saskia:

Réjean Ducharme: L’hiver de force

Marie-Claire Blais: complete work

Hervé Bouchard: Mailloux, histoires de novembre et de juin

Catherine Mavrikakis: Le ciel de Bay City

CWP: I would suspect that in Quebec, and Canada as a whole, literature in translation is valued more highly than it is in the States. Do you think that’s accurate? Are readers especially interested in buying works in translation from your store?

JL: I don’t think it’s accurate . . . unfortunately. The bestsellers are mostly French-Canadian books (it’s a very “protectionist” market) and American books (Da Vinci Code, etc.. . .). But every year, there are a few foreign books that are selling well (usually, it’s a French best seller, Goncourt Prize . . .) (J.)

SD: As far as English books are concerned, a lot of people read English here, and English books are often cheaper and faster available of course!

CWP: Are e-books becoming popular with Canadian readers?

SD: We talk a lot about it and a few weeks ago I attended a symposium organized by the ALQ (Association des Libraires du Québec) about the future of our profession, where the different speakers all insisted upon a quick reaction from the book world here. For the time being there are no French e-books, but of course they will be here soon, and they improve with great speed. We are still looking for a way to keep bookstores in the market, by selling e-books, by working closer with editors and writers, by developing other partnerships etc. . . . As some French editors like Gallimard are already preparing their e-books, we talked about storage here in Montréal for Canadian e-books and are very much aware that Amazon and Google are moving fast.

CWP: What do you see as the future of the indie bookstore? Will the model have to evolve to be able to compete against other entertainment options (video games, internet, etc.) and/or e-books?

JL: I think that indie bookstores that carry rare books (philosophy, foreign literature) can survive against Amazon more easily.

SD: I am not worried about video-games and the internet as competing entertainment, I believe there will always be readers for good books—it is a different market. But I do worry about the e-book explosion. We will have to adapt to a new market, where a lot of books will be cheaper and easier to purchase as e-books. We will sell fewer books, get more specialized, and count on the specificity of small indie bookstores as mentioned above. I think there always will be a market for paper books (how often were they buried in the past?), but this market is going to get very small and even more competitive than it already is. All in all, I see a black cloud coming . . .

(This post could be subtitled, “The Beginning of a Canadian Bender . . .” but more on that over the next couple days.)

One of the most exciting Canadian presses that I’ve come across in recent times is Biblioasis, in part because of their International Translation series, and in part because of Joshua Glenn and Mark Kingwell’s The Idler’s Glossary.

The third book in the Biblioasis International Translation series is Hans Eichner’s Kahn & Engelmann, which is releasing this week and has been getting some good advance press, including this great review from Library Journal:

Narrated by Peter Engelmann, a middle-aged veterinarian working in Haifa, this work is at once the story of a family and a memorial to Viennese Jews. The narrative, the stream-of-consciousness recollections of a man caught between the need to remember and the desire to forget, opens in both 1980 and 1880 and chronicles the Kahn family’s move from rural Hungary to Vienna, the narrator’s 1938 flight to Belgium and eventual settlement in Israel, and all the family drama in between. The result is a moving book full of humor and humanity.

Eichner led a pretty interesting life, fleeing Austria at the start of WWII, being shipped off to Australia where he studied mathematics, Latin, and English literature, and eventually settling in Canada, where he was the chair of German Studies at the University of Toronto. Unfortunately, he passed away last month at the age of 87. Kahn & Engelmann is his first novel, and it was published in Germany in 2000 and translated into English by Jean M. Snook (who also translated Gert Jonke’s Homage to Czerny: Studies for a Virtuoso Technique).

And the opening of his novel is pretty entertaining:

In the summer of 1938, a Jewish refugee is going for a walk on Carmel Beach (Is he from Cologne? from Berlin? from Vienna? It doesn’t matter). Twenty metres out from shore, a man is fighting against the waves and yelling for help in Hebrew. The refugees stops to listen, takes his jacket off, folds it neatly (one should never act too hastily); and while taking off his tie and shoes as well, before jumping into the sea to help the yelling man, he exclaims indignantly: “What a fool! Hebrew he has learned. Swimming he should have learned!”

That’s a travelling joke. It was told much the same way in 1789 in Mainz, when the first emigres arrived there and went for walks along the Rhine in their elegant clothes. But precisely because it is a travelling joke, it is also a Jewish joke; for who has travelled (or, as is mostly the case, has fled) more often than the Jews?

We’re planning on running a full review of this title in the not-too-distant future, and it might be a German Book Office “book of the month” at some point as well. In the meantime, here’s a longer excerpt from the book and here’s a book trailer.

Like a slew of other litblogs, Three Percent is now available for the Kindle.

Of course, you can still read it for free here (or via your RSS reader), but this is one more option for accessing our site . . .

Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading has a wonderfully detailed write up of the Center for the Art of Translation Event that took place last week where Karen Emmerich read from the work of four of her favorite Greek authors.

You should really read Scott’s complete write-up, but here’s are the brief highlights of the four authors:

Emmerich started the event by reading from the text I’d Like, [by Amanda Michalopoulou] which was awarded the NEA’s International Literature Prize. I have seen I’d Like variously described as a novel in stories, a collection of linked stories, a fictional biography, or the shards of a novel yet to form itself.

I’d Like was one of my favorite books from the 2009 Best Translated Book longlist and hopefully someone (possibly Open Letter) will bring out more of Michalopoulou’s work.

The second writer Emmerich presented was the poet Eleni Vakalo. [. . .] Emmerich read from a book of Vakalo’s that is one of a collection of nine books called The Other Side of Things, written between 1954 and 1994. Emmerich described this work as as one continuous poem with titles interspersed and called these 9 books, which she is currently translating, a 15-year project.

The third of the four authors presented Tuesday afternoon was Ersi Sotiropoulos, an avant-garde Greek writer born in 1953. Emmerich first discussed the odd case of her book Zigzag Through the Bitter-Orange Trees, which was censored as pornographic and removed from school libraries in Greece. Emmerich considered this to be a sexist gesture, as she noted that one of the most celebrated works in the Greek postwar period, Megas Anatolikos (Great Eastern by Andreas Embirikos), is a completely filthy work that consists of the transatlantic journey of what Embirikos calls a “hedonistic vessel.”

The final author that Emmerich read from was the Greek poet Miltos Sachtouris, whose collection Poems (published by Archipelago Books) was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2007.

Might be because it’s Monday, but this event strikes me as a sort of perfect storm of international literature . . . You have a incredibly talented translator giving English readers recommendations of four modern Greek writers that have been published in translation at an event organized by one of the premiere translation organizations in the country and reported on by one of the best international literature blogs . . .

I believe that The Naked Eye (translated by Susan Bernofsky from the German and published by New Directions) is the fourth of Yoko Tawada’s works to make their way into English. Kodandsha did The Bridegroom Was a Dog back in 1998 (this was translated just from the Japanese), and New Directions did Where Europe Begins in 2002 (originally written in both German and Japanese) and also brought out Facing the Bridge in 2007.

Monica Carter—curator of Salonica World Lit and the literary journal E.Lire, and bookseller at Skylight Books in L.A.—wrote this review of her latest book, which is centered around the movies of Catherine Deneuve, and doesn’t sound quite as good as Tawada’s earlier works.

This is how Anh Nguyet the protagonist of The Naked Eye describes her world of escapism through the movies, and only Catherine Deneuve movies to be exact. Although I myself have an affinity for the beautiful icon of French cinema myself, it is nothing compared to our young Vietnamese narrator who seems only to experience and understand life through the world of Deneuve’s oeuvre. Tawada takes us through Anh’s story in thirteen chapters, each titled after a different Deneuve movie. And it’s not just about Deneuve, her movies serve as vehicle for all the other things that seem to be happening in novel—escapism, allegorical references to communism, kidnapping, subjugation, sexual ambiguity and a fair amount of resigned desperation.

All of this seems like the ideal makings for an engaging and original read, and at times, it is. But what plagues this novel from the beginning is the lack of emotional engagement by the narrator. Anh, who is still in high school and the best in her school at speaking Russian, is handpicked to attend the International Youth Conference in Berlin to deliver a paper she wrote in Russian entitled, “Vietnam as a Victim of American Imperialism.” Within the first ten pages she is kidnapped by a German student who plies her with vodka and then takes to his apartment in Bochum, which is six hours away from Berlin. Anh says that she wants to go home, but Jörg, her captor, tells her she is pregnant with his child. They become lovers and she waits in his apartment all day long for him to come home. She writes a letter to her family saying she has been offered a scholarship and that is why she is not coming home. What is strange is that there is no sense of urgency for Anh to get home. Finally, she learns one night on a double date with Jörg that there is a train that stops in Bochum on its way to Moscow. She finds the train and ends up in Paris where she spends the next six years of her life.

For the complete review, click here.

My cinema was a “Ma,” she wrapped me in her mucous membranes. She shielded me from the sun, from the force of visibility. Life was being played out on the screen, a life before death. People fought there, or else slept together. They cried and sweated, and the screen remained dry. The cinema, its stage, had no depth, but it did have its own light source.

This is how Anh Nguyet the protagonist of The Naked Eye describes her world of escapism through the movies, and only Catherine Deneuve movies to be exact. Although I myself have an affinity for the beautiful icon of French cinema myself, it is nothing compared to our young Vietnamese narrator who seems only to experience and understand life through the world of Deneuve’s oeuvre. Tawada takes us through Anh’s story in thirteen chapters, each titled after a different Deneuve movie. And it’s not just about Deneuve, her movies serve as vehicle for all the other things that seem to be happening in novel—escapism, allegorical references to communism, kidnapping, subjugation, sexual ambiguity and a fair amount of resigned desperation.

All of this seems like the ideal makings for an engaging and original read, and at times, it is. But what plagues this novel from the beginning is the lack of emotional engagement by the narrator. Anh, who is still in high school and the best in her school at speaking Russian, is handpicked to attend the International Youth Conference in Berlin to deliver a paper she wrote in Russian entitled, “Vietnam as a Victim of American Imperialism.” Within the first ten pages she is kidnapped by a German student who plies her with vodka and then takes to his apartment in Bochum, which is six hours away from Berlin. Anh says that she wants to go home, but Jörg, her captor, tells her she is pregnant with his child. They become lovers and she waits in his apartment all day long for him to come home. She writes a letter to her family saying she has been offered a scholarship and that is why she is not coming home. What is strange is that there is no sense of urgency for Anh to get home. Finally, she learns one night on a double date with Jörg that there is a train that stops in Bochum on its way to Moscow. She finds the train and ends up in Paris where she spends the next six years of her life.

She meets a blond prostitute, Marie, in the chapter entitled, “Zig Zig.” She has a brief sexual encounter with her but they end up living together. Anh spends her days reading old issues of Ecran magazine looking for anything relating to Catherine Deneuve. She has no job and does not go out in the sunlight. She merely survives with Marie:

Marie was not an abductor, she was my protector. She protected me by ignoring me. She acted as if she were unable to see me, or as if I were a wildflower that just happened to be growing in her garden. If only I’d been able to exchange a few words with her. I couldn’t understand her language, and she even seemed to be withholding it from me.

Clearly, there is desire on Anh’s part to communicate, but she never makes that commitment. She wanders the streets and goes to Catherine Deneuve movies. Once while she is line, a fellow Vietnamese woman that she met on the train to Paris recognizes her. Anh is ‘mesmerized’ by her melodic way of talking and decides to go stay with Ai Van and her French, much older husband, Jean. She leaves Marie without a word and stays on the couch of the couple. She watches them come and go and goes to the movies. Exasperated by Anh’s lack of initiative, Ai Van tells her there is a job available with a Chinese doctor that will use her skin for cosmetic experiments. Anh obliges without a struggle and Tawada compares this to Deneuve’s vampire role in Hunger. Other than the comparison and the synopsis of the plot by Tawada, the parallels of Anh and Deneuve’s movies are not drawn well enough. It becomes merely a plot synopsis of each movie and less and less about Anh. Maybe this is intentional, but it is disturbing as well. I felt, as a reader, that I was waiting for a reaction from Anh—to life, her situation, her loss. But she drifts and the only thing Tawada gives us is a rundown of Deneuve’s movies, as if Anh is struggling with cinematic autism. Although this does add to the power of Anh’s escapism, it doesn’t give us much more. As if we are constantly seeing someone in the throes of addiction, but never seeking help.

Towards the end, we do see Anh show frustration with her inability to live any life outside of Catherine Deneuve’s various screen roles:

“Get out of here!” I say to the cinematographic currents trying to carry me off with it. Leave me alone. I don’t want to be carried off. But it was difficult to maintain a distance from the images. They swept me away with them, wanting to drown me. Why was I, a free human being, not allowed to turn off the images when I wished or a t least correct them? I wished to experience boredom, for this I would at least entail the individual freedom not to take part. If I fell asleep in my seat, the film would have been better for me. I had to remain awake, though, to wait for you.

Anh has the ability to recognize her obsession, but this is towards the end of the novel and the reader gets no hints of her self-awareness before this. Even despite her obsession, she manages to befriend a man, Charles, who introduces her to a Vietnamese emigré, Tuong Linh. Tuong Linh is a surgeon. Anh ends up living with him even though she is in love with Charles. Tuong Linh insists that she go to language school but she avoids his inquiries whenever the topic is mentioned. But in order to do this he decides to marry her so she can get a visa. She obtains a fake passport from one of Tuong Linh’s friends and is arrested. Tuong Linh is well on his way to Thailand, with no idea of Anh’s arrest. When she is released, she ends up at Marie’s apartment and almost doesn’t recognize her because Marie had aged so much in six years. Which brings us to Les voleurs which star Catherine Deneuve as another character named Marie who is now a middle-aged professor having a lesbian affair with one of her students. She stays with Marie, again in poverty, and ends up through circuitous ties, with Jörg. She returns to Bochum and lives with Jörg. But she is back to where she was in the beginning of the novel. The last chapter is entitled, “Dancer in the Dark,” and is a plot synopsis of the movie which leaves the reader wondering too much about what Anh ever really wanted and where if anywhere, she will go to find herself.

One of the things I did find most interesting about Tawada’s novel is the appearance of communism and the sense of government as mother. From the onset, Anh is devoutly Communist. And throughout there are running themes of class division, the cinema being compared to her motherland as protector and a dialogue and metaphors about liberty and freedom. Anh adheres to the concepts of Communism in her beliefs, but becomes totally oblivious to the present day changes that Communism has endured and its weakening grasp on the world.

I wanted very much to love this novel, but ultimately had too many unanswered questions were presented to the reader and like Anh felt like I was watching a narrator act like she was in a book, but never fully present. And one note on the translation—parts of the novel were written in German and parts were written in Japanese and then translated by Tawada into both languages. The extremely capable Susan Bernofsky translated it from the German. When I encountered phrases that seemed out of character for Anh or sudden strong phrases that were an anomaly to her narrative voice, I wasn’t sure whose translation that fell on or if that was an authorial choice. Regardless, it was jarring and it interrupted the generally low key and fluid narrative.

I hope we can read more of Tawada’s work in the future because it is so intriguing—ones without such a narrow conceit. I have watched as many Catherine Deneuve movies as possible and felt that if I hadn’t, I don’t know where I would’ve been as a reader approaching this novel? Too much rests on the magic of Catherine Deneuve and not enough on the author. As the French say, “Quel dommage!”

The latest addition to our review section is Jessica Cobb’s review of Francois Begaudeau’s The Class, which is one of the few examples I can think of where the movie has been getting much more praise than the novel. (See this Complete Review review.)

The Class is a novel about the everyday life of a Paris public school literature teacher who thinks that his current position is a bit useless. The teacher who narrates this book paints not only a picture of his depressing life but of those other educators who are in the same position. Through weighty dialogue, Begaudeau also highlights the struggles that come along with placing a mixture of cultural backgrounds in a single room to learn basic concepts of French literature. The outcome of this situation and overall message of the book seems to be that sometimes teaching can be less than rewarding when you are placed with a rowdy crowd of kids.

The middle-aged narrator comes across as angry, impatient man unwilling to go out of his way to capture the much needed attention of these adolescent teens. His interaction with these ninth graders is less than intolerable and seems more of an obligation than a passion to inspire. At times his behavior even comes into question.

Click here for the full review.

The Class is a novel about the everyday life of a Paris public school literature teacher who thinks that his current position is a bit useless. The teacher who narrates this book paints not only a picture of his depressing life but of those other educators who are in the same position. Through weighty dialogue, Begaudeau also highlights the struggles that come along with placing a mixture of cultural backgrounds in a single room to learn basic concepts of French literature. The outcome of this situation and overall message of the book seems to be that sometimes teaching can be less than rewarding when you are placed with a rowdy crowd of kids.

The middle-aged narrator comes across as angry, impatient man unwilling to go out of his way to capture the much needed attention of these adolescent teens. His interaction with these ninth graders is less than intolerable and seems more of an obligation than a passion to inspire. At times his behavior even comes into question.

“M’sieur you see how he shoved me?”

“I don’t care.”

The novel is one long string of fight after fight from the students and complaint after complaint from the faculty. The chapters are interchangeable, going from classroom scene to faculty lounge and back. This setup flows, but sometimes it can take a few paragraphs to understand what the complaint or complication (because it has to be one of the two) is for a particular chapter.

Begaudeau does a remarkable job getting the point across that the life of a teacher can be very hectic and unruly at times. However, there is a lack of characterization among both the faculty and the students, which causes everyone to blend together into a huge blob of chaos. Begaudeau might have done this on purpose to help further the point that the narrator has no passion for teaching “The Class” and no sympathy for the whiny staff. This lack of character description makes it very difficult to identify with the teacher, who is just a blurred vision of annoyance. And on the other side of the equation, it’s hard to understand the struggles of these teenagers without being able to connect with them in some way. Or even identify them—oftentimes the focus is more on a clothing detail than anything substantive or permanent about the students:

Frida now had long hair and red letters spelling GLAMOUR appliquéd on her black T-shirt.

Which goes to show how little the narrator cares about his students.

The so-named sat down, a glaring welt in the middle of his forehead.

The ending, possibly the most “happening” scene from the book, is a bit confusing for a couple reasons. There is a soccer game going on outside and one of the literature teacher’s “9-A’s” comes to tell him that they have been disqualified from the game. The teacher’s attention automatically zero’s in on the soccer game, with a play by play description, and just when you think that this is the point where he will defend these kids and let down his guard; the end. You leave the novel the same way you entered it; confused¹.

¹ This novel was put on the big screen in 2008 and even played at the opening night of the New York Film Festival. It was the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award nominee and seems to fill the it the gaping holes in the novel. Michael Dargis from the New York Times says that it’s “an artful, intelligent movie about modern French identity and attempts to transform those bodies into citizens . . .” The struggle that comes about when you place so many characters into one book is learning how to express identities and knowing how to connect the reader with the characters. The movie makes those connections and allows the audience to paint the whole picture, furthering their understanding of The Class.

Carrie Olivia Adams just announced a new online tool that could be of great use to authors/publicists/translators interested in finding places to present their work:

I am excited to announce a new updatable, searchable Wiki for curated reading series and independent bookstores eager to host events throughout the country (and hopefully abroad). Myself, as both poet and poetry editor, I have been frustrated with the lack of an electronic resource or directory for finding such series and bookstores, so I decided to take matters into my own hands.

The wiki—which more curators need to add to—can be found here. Although our authors don’t tour that frequently or extensively, this would be a huge help in just being able to identify potential outlets . . .

Every summer, in honor of the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize, the Goethe-Institut in Chicago also hosts the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Symposium. This year’s symposium is Interpretive Perspective and Translation and should be really interesting.

I’m moderating a panel with Krishna Winston, Breon Mitchell, and Michael Henry Heim on Gunther Grass, so I actually have the complete schedule of talks and events (not currently available online).

In addition to the Grass event, there’s a panel on “Lyric Translation,” one on “Letters Translation,” and one with Ross Benjamin and Nick Hoff on Holderlin.

This symposium isn’t open to the public, but translators, scholars, students of literary translation and enthusiasts are encouraged to apply by contacting Lisa Lux at lux at chicago dot goethe dot org.

The finalists for this year’s Caine Prize for African Writing (given to a short story from an African writer published in English) were announced earlier this week. Here are the five shortlisted pieces, with links to pdf versions of some of the stories:

• Mamle Kabu (Ghana) The End of Skill from Dreams, Miracles and Jazz published by Picador Africa, Johannesburg 2008

• Parselelo Kantai (Kenya) “You Wreck Her” from the St Petersburg Review, 2008

• Alistair Morgan (South Africa) Icebergs from The Paris Review no. 183, 2008

• EC Osondu (Nigeria) Waiting from Guernicamag.com, October 2008

• Mukoma wa Ngugi (Kenya) How Kamau wa Mwangi Escaped into Exile from Wasafiri’ no. 54, Summer 2008

For anyone who’s not a subscriber to the Open Letter newsletter, here’s this week’s entry. (You can sign up by entering your e-mail into the box on the upper right hand side of the Open Letter homepage.)

This week’s Open Letter update is pretty simple and straightforward. To celebrate the release of Jerzy Pilch’s The Mighty Angel, we’re giving away ten copies of the finished book to our newsletter subscribers, Three Percent readers, and members for our Facebook group.

You can register for the giveaway by simply e-mailing me at chad.post@rochester.edu with “Pilch” in the subject line and your name and complete mailing address in the body of the e-mail.

The Mighty Angel is a wonderful book about an alcoholic Polish writer named Jerzy who goes in and out of the alco ward over and over, always feeling that some woman will help him clean up his life, but always ending up back at The Mighty Angel in no time. It’s a touching novel, but also one infused with a great sense of humor (i.e., chapter 4the one about plagiarizing alcoholic autobiographies), much like Pilch’s other books. (We’re currently considering another title of his for publication: A Thousand Peaceful Cities, which features Mr. Trabaone of the most brilliant unhinged characters I’ve come across in some time.)

To whet your appetite, attached below is a small sample (a longer, different excerpt is available online).

Enjoy!

Chapter 12: All the Washing Machines in the World

The eternally postponed notion of repairing my old washing machine or buying a new one eventually perished of its own accord, to a large extent independently of my foibles. In my life I’ve drunk away a vast amount of money, I’ve spent a fortune on vodka, but the reprehensible moment of drinking away a sum set aside for the repair of my washing machine has never occurred. I make this confession not with pride in my heart but with a sense of abasement. For the fact that I never drank away a sum of money set aside for the repair of my washing machine arises from the fact that I never set aside any sum of money for the repair of my washing machine in the first place. Before I ever managed to set aside a particular sum for the repair of the washing machine, I drank it away along with all the other sums of money not yet set aside for any special purpose. I drank away the money before I’d had time to set it aside for something else; therefore I can say, seemingly contradicting myself (yet only seemingly, for in the former case there was only a small quantifier, while in this case there is a large one), I can say then that in fact I did drink away the money for the repair of the washing machine. I drank away the money for a whole series of repairs, I drank away the money for all possible repairs. What am I saying, repairs? I drank away the money for an entire new washing machine, I drank away a whole series of new washing machines, I drank away a thousand new washing machines, I drank away a million new automatic washing machines, I drank away a billion state-of-the-art washing machines. I drank away all the washing machines in the world.

What kind of soul does a man have when he knows he has drunk away all the washing machines in the world? My answer is this: He has a winged soul, and his mind spins like the rotating drum in the final stages of the spin cycle. When you sense upon your heart the burden of a thousand drunk-away washing machines, it is unbearable. But when you lift your tormented gaze and see flocks of white-winged washing machines soaring across the watery heavens like squadrons of papal helicopters, you understand that you have been given more than others. You have been given an uncommon gift, and if you manage to survive, if you do not perish beforehand, you can begin a voyage in search of all the lost washing machines, and evenyes indeedin search of all lost objects in general.

Just got word that the winner of this year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize is Evelio Rosero for The Armies, which was translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean.

It’s available in the UK from Quercus (but not in the U.S. . . . or at least not yet) (Correction: It’s coming out from New Directions in September), and here’s all the info from their site about the book, author and translator:

In the village of San José in the remote mountains of Colombia, retired teacher Ismael spends his days gathering oranges in the sunshine and spying on his neighbour as she sunbathes naked in her orchard. It is a languid existence, pierced by his wife’s scolding, which induces in him the furtive guilt of an aging voyeur. Out walking one day, Ismael and his wife lose sight of each other. The old man is fearful, for San José has random kidnappings in its past, but reassured by others who have seen her in the village. Soon, though, more people begin to go missing, and gradually bursts of gunfire can be heard in the distance. As the attacks grow steadily more brutal, Ismael finds himself caught in the crossfire; an old man battered by a reality he no longer understands. This is a novel with no easy solutions, in which no-one is spared, no-one is protected.

Evelio Rosero studied Social Communication in the Externado University of Colombia. In 2006 he was awarded the Tusquets National Prize for Literature in Colombia for his novel The Armies.

Anne McLean has translated the novels of, among others, Javier Cercas, Julio Cortázar, Ignacio Padilla and Tomás Eloy Martínez. Her translation of Javier Cercas’ Soldiers of Salamis won the 2004 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Premio Valle Inclan.

Congrats to Evelio Rosero and Anne McLean!

I’ll highlight all of the books in here one by one over the next week, but for anyone who can’t wait, you’ll find descriptions, author and translator info, and most importantly, samples from each of the books in the pdf version of the catalog.

Obviously biased, but this is a great list, with Jakov Lind’s wondrously bizarre Ergo, Macedonio Fernandez’s The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel), an anthology with Words Without Borders, Jorge Volpi’s Season of Ash, and the first complete translation of Ilf & Petrov’s The Golden Calf.

Enjoy!

As pointed out at Moby Lives yesterday marked the 93rd year after the death of Sholem Aleichem. (No, I don’t think 93 has any real numerological significance, but anniversaries are a nice reason for writing about someone’s work/life. And this does happen to be the 150th year after Aleichem’s birth . . . )

Most well known for his Tevye stories, which served as the basis for the musical The Fiddler on the Roof, Aleichem was one of the great comic Jewish writers of modern times and led an interesting life (from Moby Lives):

Born Solomon Rabinowitz in 1859, the son of a merchant in the Ukrainian village of Pereyaslav, he wrote his first book at fourteen: a dictionary of Yiddish curses overheard at home. Despite jobs teaching Russian and writing for Hebrew newspapers, it was his writings in Yiddish—humorous stories about village life—that brought him fame. Using the Yiddish greeting (“Peace unto you”) as his pseudonym, he published 40 volumes of stories and plays, single-handedly creating a literature for what had been primarily a spoken language. Pogroms forced Aleichem to flee Russia in 1905, eventually landing him in New York City, his fame undiminished. When Aleichem was introduced to Mark Twain as “the Yiddish Mark Twain,” Twain interrupted to call himself the “American Sholom Aleichem.” Upon Aleichem’s death in 1916, 100,000 mourners flooded the streets of Manhattan for his funeral. His will, however, asked friends to remember him by an annual reading of one of his funny stories. “Let my name be recalled in laughter,” Aleichem wrote, “or not at all.”

Recently, Melville House reissued Stempenyu: A Jewish Romance, which was the first of Aleichem’s books to be translated into English, and supposedly it the story that inspired Fiddler on the Roof.

For those interested, Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor’s Son was recently reissued by Penguin Classics in a new translation by Aliza Shevrin.

And Viking also brought out the first complete translation (also by Aliza Shevrin) of Wandering Stars, a late novel of Aleichem’s about the world of Yiddish theater. Tony Kushner wrote an excellent foreword to this book that really makes me want to carve out the time to read it (or at least have someone review it in full for the site . . . if anyone’s interested, e-mail me at chad.post at rochester dot edu).

The reader of Wandering Stars can, if this is the kind of thing the reader likes to do, catalog its imperfections, of which there are enough to keep any literary scorekeeper busy and happy. Time lurches wildly in Aleichem’s novel, and the narrative along with it. The opinionated, distractible narrator, when he’s doing his job, rather than taking a rest while allowing letters written by the characters do the storytelling, seems less interested in his two protagonists than in the fantastical secondary cast that surrounds them. And who can blame him? The secondary characters are magnificent, men and women cooked up out of wit, terror, panic, hunger, chutzpah, pathos, and spleen (especially spleen), effortfully and arduously cooked — peeled, chopped, boiled, or fried — rather than dreamed up or imagined.

That this is a knotty, knobby, odd novel of fits and starts and sudden jolts is possibly due to its serialized newsprint origins and its lateness in Sholem Aleichem’s writing life; or possibly conventional wisdom and Reb Mendalle Mocher Sephorim are right about him, and Aleichem is found at his best in his short stories and occasional pieces. We might thus consign his novel to culture’s remainder table, unless we consider how appropriate its strangeness is to its subject. Though like many other, more perfect novels, Wandering Stars is about love, it’s about love between Jews who work in the theater. So it should be strange and imperfect. Theater is almost never perfect; its imperfections, its incompleteness and its tawdriness, are among the principal sources of its power. And do I need to tell you that life for Jews isn’t perfect? I don’t.

It’s been a while since I last wrote about the Salzburg Global Seminar on Translation, but just today the final summary and recommendations was released and mailed out to a number of “shareholders.”

Click here for a pdf version of the final report, which includes recommendations in four areas:

• How is it possible to influence the publishing world?
• How can we make the case for public and private sector funding?
• What is the role of literary translation in the educational process?
• What can translators and their associations do to promote literary translation?

Susanna Seidl-Fox, Michelle Gross, and Daniel Hahn did a fantastic job putting this all together and distributing it to all the right people. It was a very interesting experience (I’m sure my fellow morons—long story, but you know who you are—would agree) that will hopefully have a lasting impact on the perception, production, and promotion of literature in translations.

The latest addition to our review section is a piece on Gamal al-Ghitani’s The Zafarani Files. Al-Ghitani has a couple other books available in English translation from the American University of Cairo Press, including Pyramid Texts and The Mahfouz Dialogs. Based on the strength of this particular novel, I have the others on order . . .

All these reservations were washed away the second I opened this up on the flight home, and became enthralled in a very modern, very sophisticated story about life in Zafarani Alley, where a mental Sheikh wreaks havoc with the inhabitants in an attempt to better the world . . . by casting a spell of impotence over the alley.

The novel consists of a number of “Files” written by an unknown observer who is chronicling all the goings on in Zafarani. In the opening one, we’re introduced to each of the main characters, one-by-one, slowly knitting together a vision of the neighborhood as a whole.

First up is Usta Abdu Murad, a driver for the Cairo Transit Authority, who is married to a former dancer. Usta’s visit to Sheikh Atiya about a little problem he’s having sets in motion the novel’s primary plot:

“The Usta spoke quickly and, just as his wife had instructed, came straight to the point, saying that his marital life was in jeopardy, that his home was falling apart, and that he didn’t know what to do. He was no longer able to fulfill his conjugal duties, and this had already lasted a week. When he was engaged to be married, but before signing the contract, his fiancee, as she then was, had asked him specifically, “Can you water the soil, daily?” Refusing to believe his nod of affirmation, she had tested him thoroughly. For many years, apart from the days of her period, he had not ceased. She would fall ill and lose weight if he failed to mount her each and every day. This passing of a dry, unproductive week had been terrible, especially since his condition was showing no signs of improvement. He was getting so tense and his nerves were so bad that he now thought twice about going home.”

Click here for the whole review.

I picked this book up at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, the day after attending the Sheikh Zayed Book Awards, where Gamal al-Ghitani (aka Jamal Al Ghitani) won the award for Literature.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, based on the description of al-Ghitani’s work given at the event and on the above linked page:

This year the Literature Prize is awarded for a work that ventures the ancient history of Egypt in effort to revive the myths and stories through the use of sufistic parables. [. . .] The book is the 6th volume of Dafater Al- Tadween, and encompasses the spiritual journey of the writer paralleled with an actual travel he assumes from the Pyramid Plateau to the Southern parts of Egypt.

It doesn’t help—and this is literally my only complaint about the book—that American University of Cairo’s design is what it is. The look of the novel is OK, but just OK—the pages are a bit too white and heavy, the cover image not quite as attractive as it could be, the whole package feeling just a bit out of step with time . . .

All these reservations were washed away the second I opened this up on the flight home, and became enthralled in a very modern, very sophisticated story about life in Zafarani Alley, where a mental Sheikh wreaks havoc with the inhabitants in an attempt to better the world . . . by casting a spell of impotence over the alley.

The novel consists of a number of “Files” written by an unknown observer who is chronicling all the goings on in Zafarani. In the opening one, we’re introduced to each of the main characters, one-by-one, slowly knitting together a vision of the neighborhood as a whole.

First up is Usta Abdu Murad, a driver for the Cairo Transit Authority, who is married to a former dancer. Usta’s visit to Sheikh Atiya about a little problem he’s having sets in motion the novel’s primary plot:

The Usta spoke quickly and, just as his wife had instructed, came straight to the point, saying that his marital life was in jeopardy, that his home was falling apart, and that he didn’t know what to do. He was no longer able to fulfill his conjugal duties, and this had already lasted a week. When he was engaged to be married, but before signing the contract, his fiancee, as she then was, had asked him specifically, “Can you water the soil, daily?” Refusing to believe his nod of affirmation, she had tested him thoroughly. For many years, apart from the days of her period, he had not ceased. She would fall ill and lose weight if he failed to mount her each and every day. This passing of a dry, unproductive week had been terrible, especially since his condition was showing no signs of improvement. He was getting so tense and his nerves were so bad that he now thought twice about going home.

As it turns out, all of the male characters we’re introduced to—with all their vital stats, including “Name,” “Occupation,” “Place of Birth,” “Current Address,” “Distinguishing Marks,” and “Marital Status and Some Relevant Developments”—are impotent. And at a special gathering, the sheikh explains that it’s all due to a curse he’s put on the people of Zafarani that has three parts:

• Any male whose feet touched the ground of Zafarani would be impaired.

• Any child born from now on in Zafarani would be, a priori, a loser.

• Any Zafarani woman who slept with any man, anywhere in the world, would make him impotent, without regard to nationality or religion.

He said that he had excluded one Zafarani man and one Zafarani woman for his own secret reasons, and that he would never reveal their names.

As the novel progresses, the sheikh dictates other rules to follow, including when and what everyone would eat for breakfast, when everyone had to be in bed, etc. And the “Files” that make up the book start becoming more political, incorporating reports from Egyptian authorities about the “Zafarani situation.” Since no one can enter without becoming impotent—and no one wants that—what’s actually going on in the neighborhood is a bit mysterious. The sheikh eventually puts forth some statements about the “situation” and how this is the first step in his plan to better society. And when this curse starts spreading throughout the world . . .

Al-Ghitani (and by extension the translator Farouk Abdel Wahab) strikes a perfect tone in the book, weaving together numerous compelling stories about the inhabitants of Zafarani alley in a often joyful way, creating an overarching narrative about power that can be interpreted in several ways—or simply enjoyed as a great work of literature.

From the Library of Congress (via The Elegant Variation):

On April 23, 2009, a federal district court in the southern Russian province of Dagestan issued an unprecedented ruling, ordering a journalist of a local newspaper to pay compensation in an amount equal to US$1,000 to a writer who did not like a review of his book published in the newspaper. The plaintiff, an author whose work of fiction was reviewed in the publication’s book review section, sued the reviewer, claiming that the author and his family had experienced severe mental suffering and that his professional reputation was damaged as a result of the review. The writer stated that after reading the book review, he experienced chest pains, headache, and elevated blood pressure. He demanded to be compensated in the amount of US$150,000. Both parties were dissatisfied with the court ruling and expressed their intention to appeal.

Maybe publishers can get on this as well. . . . Start suing papers for crappy reviews, or even suing them for not reviewing the book! My health (and our financial stability, I might add) has been severely hampered by all the reviews I’m counting on that have yet to appear . . .

It still has to be approved by Congress, but Rocco Landesman has been appointed to serve as the next chairman of the NEA, a post most recently held by poet Dana Gioia.

I’m not much of a theatre-goer, so Landesman is new to me. Based on the info in the New York Times article, he sounds like a lot of fun:

Mr. Landesman, who would fill the post vacated by Dana Gioia, is expected to lobby hard for more arts money. But he is not famous for his skills as an administrator or diplomat. Rather, he is known for his energy, intellect and irreverent — and occasionally sharp-elbowed — candor.

In 2000, for example, he caused a stir by accusing nonprofit theaters of being too much like their commercial counterparts. And, as a producer of “The Producers,” Mr. Landesman created the controversial $480 premium ticket to combat scalpers.

And I love Tony Kushner’s over the top comment:

“It’s potentially the best news the arts community in the United States has had since the birth of Walt Whitman,” said the playwright Tony Kushner. “He’s an absolutely brilliant and brave and perfect choice for the job.”

Now let’s just hope that he keeps (or increases) the core funding for nonprofit publishing, audience development, and translation in place . . . Gioia created a lot of new literary initiatives that, although most didn’t directly fund publishers or writers, funneled a lot of endowment money into the “literature” category. I have to admit that I’m sort of worried about a discipline backlash, with literature money being redirected towards other arts . . . which is a chairman’s prerogative, but for the sake of nonprofit literature, hopefully the core funding available for presses like Open Letter remains unchanged. (This is probably a needless fear.)

Just when you thought the Times had figured out how to correctly pair writers with appropriate topics . . . Kidding—the Times will never get that straight. Here’s some clips from today’s review of Lost‘s season finale:

[. . .] the producers of “Lost,” who have devoted the show’s fourth and penultimate season (which ends on Wednesday) to the more mind-bendingly nonsensical dimensions of its sci-fi-ness.

Uh, that would be the “fifth and penultimate season.” And a quick trip to Wikipedia or ABC.com could verify that fact. (I’m way more lenient with the Washington Times claiming a book was translated from Syrian than with the NY Times fucking up a simple pop culture reference. When you’re the “paper of