The latest addition to our review section is a piece by Phillip Witte (former Open Letter intern, current New Directions intern) on Yoel Hoffmann’s Curriculum Vitae, the sixth of Hoffmann’s books to be published by ND. I think this is the only work of fiction I’ve ever come across with no page numbers . . .

Here’s the opening of Phil’s review:

Imagine the scene we are all familiar with: you are writing up a C.V. to send out to those who might judge your capabilities, your efficacies, and the quality of your existence to date from what you were able to condense onto a single side of a sheet of letter paper. Imagine adding, among sections detailing work experience and education, sections that enumerate your preferred breakfast cereals, your ongoing spiritual conundra, and personal illustrations that are little more than impressionist contour doodles. Imagine allowing yourself a healthy dose of humor; it can’t hurt to make your assessors laugh a little. Now imagine reading such a thing.

I have just opened Yoel Hoffmann’s Curriculum Vitae at random, somewhere in the middle. Having finished the book and wondering where to begin if I am to describe it, this seems an appropriate opening gesture, one I hope to justify as I continue. In any case:

“At night we slept (we and Yolanda) back to back while each one saw, as though in a bubble emerging from the head of a comic-strip character, different dreams.

Yolanda most likely dreamed of great gardens. Clay pots. Dalmations.

We (which is to say, I) saw heavier dreams. Landslides in the mountains and an entire town with its golden church spires buried beneath the dirt. Men spreading newspapers out on the floor and reading things in them that make the heart tremble.

It’s all so self-evident why Joyce wrote, for some twenty years, a book without any real words in it. After all, one could die from the clear-cut borders between one word and another: Pot. Skyscraper. File. Scandal. Dentures. Scabies. Snow. Old age. Flute. Cobalt. Socialism.

Sometimes we made instant coffee with three teaspoons of sugar (as Yolanda liked it) and put it before her.”

Click here for the full review.

Imagine the scene we are all familiar with: you are writing up a C.V. to send out to those who might judge your capabilities, your efficacies, and the quality of your existence to date from what you were able to condense onto a single side of a sheet of letter paper. Imagine adding, among sections detailing work experience and education, sections that enumerate your preferred breakfast cereals, your ongoing spiritual conundra, and personal illustrations that are little more than impressionist contour doodles. Imagine allowing yourself a healthy dose of humor; it can’t hurt to make your assessors laugh a little. Now imagine reading such a thing.

I have just opened Yoel Hoffmann’s Curriculum Vitae at random, somewhere in the middle. Having finished the book and wondering where to begin if I am to describe it, this seems an appropriate opening gesture, one I hope to justify as I continue. In any case:

At night we slept (we and Yolanda) back to back while each one saw, as though in a bubble emerging from the head of a comic-strip character, different dreams.

Yolanda most likely dreamed of great gardens. Clay pots. Dalmations.

We (which is to say, I) saw heavier dreams. Landslides in the mountains and an entire town with its golden church spires buried beneath the dirt. Men spreading newspapers out on the floor and reading things in them that make the heart tremble.

It’s all so self-evident why Joyce wrote, for some twenty years, a book without any real words in it. After all, one could die from the clear-cut borders between one word and another: Pot. Skyscraper. File. Scandal. Dentures. Scabies. Snow. Old age. Flute. Cobalt. Socialism.

Sometimes we made instant coffee with three teaspoons of sugar (as Yolanda liked it) and put it before her.

Note the first two parentheticals, which clarify the two uses of “we.” Early in the book, Hoffmann advises us that he will often be referring to himself in the first person plural. He maintains this distinction vigilantly, on the one hand rendering the “royal we” so humorously, and obviously, obsolete, but also bringing around a fresh aspect of self-scrutiny: the simple, almost constant reminder that he is using the same pronoun for two subjects stresses the importance of his own life in relation to his life together with his family.

Next, note the grandiloquent generality of “reading things in them that make the heart tremble,” against the minute twentieth-century contextual analogy, “as though in a bubble emerging from the head of a comic strip character.” Such range of figuration is characteristic of Hoffmann’s writing in Curriculum Vitae, a sharp specificity as of the latter which justifies the appropriate use of the former. Consider this range of figurative device along with the next point: “One could die from the clear-cut borders between one word and another.” In one sense, it may be Hoffmann’s own solution to Finnegans Wake. In another, this is one among countless aphoristic conclusions about life, about language, spirituality, writing—all of the biggest concerns of this writer’s existence. It is a conclusion that seems more a restatement of the problem, an unsolvable riddle, than an answer: it is like a zen koan, which is a significant point to which I will return. But philosophical bombshells like this one would surely misfire without being carefully juxtaposed against equally weighted statements of utter mundanity and real-world particularity of the final sentence, set off in its own paragraph, about instant coffee with sugar. Because this book is a condensed picture of a life, where the particular way one’s wife takes her coffee carries just as much existential weight as the crises of faith which keep one awake at night.

This is the entirety of section 34 of the book. There are one hundred sections, all of a similar length, and there are no page numbers. The book is thin, the margins wide, and the prose, as is evident in the above passage, exceedingly light. It can be read in a single (perhaps lengthy) sitting, such as a long train ride or an afternoon off in the park. It has the feel, reading it, of a book of aphorisms, or of zen koans, the latter which must be no coincidence because the author, Yoel Hoffmann, is Professor of Japanese Buddhism at Haifa University. His travels and studies in Japan are treated at length in the book, although it may be inaccurate to use the term “at length” at all. Textually speaking, there is nothing “at length” about the book, and yet the material carries the reader into realms far beyond the text: realms of humor, family life, travels, varying religions and peoples, and childhood in a distant past.

I realize that I have described the book above as a condensed picture of a life. According to the back cover blurb, it is “part novel and part memoir.” This is an accurate description: the subject is Hoffmann himself and his memories. But it is also part other things which fall into no easy categories. The book resists my simple description, and Hoffmann himself would surely scoff at it. He writes,

If I were able (by means of a deeper covenant than that which exists between author and reader) to fall on people’s necks and say to them Come, let’s sit while the tea is steeping, then drink, and you’ll tell me about your lives and I will tell of mine, I’d toss this manuscript into the trash and do precisely that. In such a world the law would forbid the making of fiction.

In no way is the novel driven by the usual devices one associates with fiction and novels: there are no motivating conflicts, no themes, and the “characters” do not exactly invoke the sympathies that generate a reader’s interest. It would seem that the book is more the memoir, with its frequent tone of reminiscence and reflection. But then again, having finished it, I cannot say I have a clear picture of the life of Yoel Hoffmann. It is largely autobiographical, but one could hardly call it an autobiography. This, I think, is one of the book’s greatest strengths. A reader may only be interested in an author’s memoiristic novel or novelistic memoir if that reader were already familiar with the author’s other work; I can certainly say that this is my first experience of the work of Yoel Hoffmann and as far as I can tell, it is as good a place to enter this Hebrew writer’s not inconsiderable oeuvre as any other (this being the sixth of his books to be published by New Directions, in English translations by Peter Cole). Indeed, I am eager to dig into some of his other works.

Part novel, part memoir, part neither, Curriculum Vitae is a frolicking dive into the self of the writer, where he finds his life’s collected works in the form of unsolvable riddles that, like a good zen koan, taste like wisdom and provide as much entertainment and satisfaction as the reader cares to draw from them.

Our latest review is of Sjon’s The Blue Fox, which was translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb and published last year by Telegram Books.

Sounds interesting, even if our reviewer Phillip Witte has some mixed feelings:

I picked up The Blue Fox on a continuing kick for Icelandic literature having recently finished Bragi Olafsson’s The Pets (published by Open Letter). I was pleased to see a cover-commendation from Icelandic singer Björk, whose association with the author, Sjón, is through several projects including the 2000 film Dancer in the Dark, in which Björk played the lead role, singing lyrics by Sjón, both of whom received Oscar nominations for their involvement. Sjón has also written the lyrics to a number of Björk’s other songs including several from her greatest album (in my opinion), Homogenic.

Needless to say, the decision to put the word of an international pop celebrity on the cover of The Blue Fox may seem to be a mere publicity ploy—and, at least in my case, without shame I admit it succeeded. Unfortunately, my experience of the book does not live up to Björk’s high commendations. She calls it “a magical novel which presents us with some of old Iceland in an incredibly modern shape.” I do not dispute Björk’s analysis, but I assume that she read it in the original Icelandic, which leads me to believe that the translation is less than outstanding. Indeed I often felt while reading the book that the language was vague or marginal, perhaps sidestepping a difficult turn of phrase here and there. Also it tends to use more clichés than seem to fit the idiosyncratic tone of the work, such as “dead as a doornail.”

And yet, there are moments in which the language seems crisply tuned to an surprising level of clarity and emotion . . . [click here for the rest.]

I picked up The Blue Fox on a continuing kick for Icelandic literature having recently finished Bragi Olafsson’s The Pets (published by Open Letter). I was pleased to see a cover-commendation from Icelandic singer Björk. . .

Bulgarian filmmaker Angel Wagenstein is the author of three novels, the first of which is Isaac’s Torah, originally published in Bulgarian in 2000 and now available for the first time in English from Handsel Books in a brilliant translation by Elizabeth Frank and Deliana Simeonova. A good indicator that a book is a significant achievement is the sheer volume of conversation topics to which it can give rise in literary analysis; that said, it is difficult to know where to begin. So, with shameless unoriginality, I will begin with the cover.

This book features something which was once common (think of the earliest novels: Tom Jones, for instance) but has fallen out of use in novel-writing: a cover-page tagline: “Isaac’s Torah: A novel, concerning the life of Isaac Jacob Blumenfeld through two world wars, three concentration camps and five motherlands.” No more accurate and concise description of the novel can be given. Here we are given the setting in history and the protagonist’s condition, as well as a hint, suggested in that epic-scale term, “five motherlands,” of the turbulent scope of the story within.

To me, concentration camps were the first words to jump out at me and I’ll admit, I had some initial apprehension about tackling a heavy piece of Holocaust literature. But my worry was immediately dissuaded by the narrator Isaac Blumenfeld’s sense of humor; author Angel Wagenstein’s uncanny ability to portray, in vivid prose, the voice of a rambling reminiscent telling his story over a coffee on a Sunday afternoon; and of course, translators Elizabeth Frank and Deliana Simeonova’s success in transferring intact that voice across the language gap. And in book 4, I was relieved of guilt, as the narrator gives a nod to my apprehension:

And now, please, save me from the memory, heavy as a hundred-ton cast-iron mold, and allow me not to describe to you the hell in which we ended up! . . . In short, save me, please, because of the requirement for the completeness of plot . . . from repeating to you things that are already painfully familiar to you, and that you are already maybe even fed up with.

In this way Isaac Blumenfeld excuses his circumvention of the horrible weight of the Holocaust in the awesome, epic narrative of his life. But to return to the tagline, there are two other, equally-weighted subjects to the matter of this book: the two World Wars and the five motherlands. Blumenfeld’s trip and tumble through these wars, camps and countries forms the body of a seamless narrative, laced with humor, tragedy, wit and wisdom.

Of humor, there is no shortage, despite the equal-quantity dosage of tragedy. As Wagenstein notes in his Acknowledgements, “through [Jewish jokes and anecdotes] my people have turned laughter into a defensive shield, and a source of courage and self-esteem through the most tragic moments of their existence!” Blumenfeld himself maintains a sense of humor even in the face of almost certain death, such as in this passage from book 4, in which he is so far avoiding persecution by pretending to be Polish:

The whole business was about some big boss of theirs who’d been shot in the streets of Warsaw, and now they were looking for a hundred Poles as hostages. You know how it goes: if the assassins do not surrender themselves the hundred Poles will be shot in legal and fully understandable retribution. Now, I ask you . . . what was better—to remain a Pole or admit I was a Jew? . . . In the one case, as well as in the other, I’d end up, as the saying goes, pushing up daisies, but I personally preferred to be a Polish Jew—a sweeper in the New York subway.

And throughout the novel, Blumenfeld compares, with ironic wit, real-life atrocities, all-too-human insanities, and plain misfortune, to a wealth of little fables, jokes, and anecdotes.

The thing I find most intriguing about this book is its construction by the author, Wagenstein, as almost the work of another “author,” Blumenfeld. As Wagenstein points out in the passage he has included “Instead of a Foreword,” the work “is nothing more than a conscientious transcription of another’s memories and reflections,” which fact makes him, in a sense, a translator himself, not between languages, but from oral narrative to page. The careful balance of digression, rambling, and non sequitur—the trappings of the oral narrative—against elegant, discursive prose constructions is impressive. While reducing his tangible presence in the overall picture, Wagenstein provides a fine glaze of craft as the vessel in which the narrative is delivered from the storyteller to the reader.

Angel Wagenstein’s novel is an important monument to the lives of those who suffered the horrors of the two World Wars and all those wars’ extenuations, but rather than a lamentation of Blumenfeld’s, and the Jewish people’s, loss, it is a celebration of his and their lives. As uplifting as it is tragic, Isaac’s Torah is a great contribution to the literature of the period, the Wars, and the Holocaust, and to world literature as a whole.

Every so often, a tiny corner of the world, little seen and little heard in recent times by the rest of the globe, produces an artist whose voice speaks out to all of us, whose work displays such competence and quality as demands immediate attention. Lyonel Trouillot of Haiti is a novelist of such caliber. He is also a poet and essayist, and in 2004 his book Street of Lost Footsteps was a finalist for the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation prize (trans. Linda Coverdale).

Coverdale now brings us Trouillot’s 2002 novel, Children of Heroes, a small but powerful showcase of Trouillot’s diverse talent. The author’s uses of style, voice, and plot structure cohere to form a little book that is much more than the space between its covers. A captivating work of art, the book reads as a miniature epic, a tragic journey, and poignant love story.

The novel takes place in Haiti, where an abusive husband and father is murdered by his two children. It follows their subsequent journey through their overcrowded city evading capture, and their final surrender after three days. While it is narrated in the first person by the younger of the children, Colin, the main figure of the story is truly Mariéla, his older sister, for she is the object of all of his affection; he loves and idolizes her. It is in this respect a tragic romance story as well.

The construction of the narrative is inventive and carefully assembled. The events documented spiral out from the murder itself, tracing what happens after it chronologically while simultaneously doubling back further and further into the past before the murder, and occasionally leaping ahead into the future beyond the three days that could be considered the novel’s real time-span. There are several techniques Trouillot uses to make you feel disoriented as you read, and this is foremost among them. This disorientation reflects the emotional state of the characters. This is not to say that the book is confusing: in reading it, I never felt lost or confused, except in the first few pages, where a bombardment of narrative and character information is a bit overwhelming at first:

It must have been noon when we began to run. We could have put up with the smell for a lot longer, but when Mariéla saw the mailman coming, a guy who never failed to have a drink with Corazón and reminisce about the legendary greats of boxing, she dumped our savings out of their jar and, warning me not to lose them, slipped the coins into my pocket, then told me to run without stopping until I was out of the slum.

The relevant information identifying these characters comes gradually, settling the picture and further elaborating it as the novel grows and fleshes out.

The second technique of disorientation is use of chapters unbroken by paragraphs: that is, the text itself is divided into untitled, unnumbered chapters, but there are no paragraph breaks within them. All dialogue is embedded without demarcation, which is less confusing than one would expect, and at times—particularly in the question game scene—incredibly powerful and effective:

Are they going to lock us up? I mean in a prison or a reformatory? I don’t know. Yes, probably. And will we be locked up together? I don’t know. But we’ll always be together. And Joséphine, what will she think? Maybe she won’t see things the way others will, since she’s all alone now? Joséphine, she won’t think anything, she’ll just stick with suffering and let God think for her.

This lack of identifiers allows you to ascribe these questions and answers to any combination of Colin or Mariéla; the narrative present (having never actually occurred, they could be Colin’s addition in recounting the events long afterward) or the narrative past (having actually occurred at the time of the events and recounted verbatim); and actual conversation or introspection.

In refraining from the use of paragraphs, Trouillot strikes a fine balance between rambling and concision. This is the most immediately tangible device of many he uses, the result of which is a small but densely packed narrative, a miniature epic which does not belabor any point, never drags, and is finely orchestrated to travel in two directions at once while these directions remain parallel: one backward, and one forward, in time from the sparking event of the murder.

Finally, Trouillot tells you a great deal simply by the careful development of a very specific narrative voice. The voice is far more mature than the narrator’s character, suggesting either a great passage of time between the events and the narration (the past tense is used throughout); a blending between the character narrator and an outside narrative voice; or both. In a more minute instance, the chapter in which the aftermath of the murder is related to Colin and Mariéla by Colin’s friend Marcel is delivered with greater maturity, omniscience, and immediacy of reflection than expected from the young Marcel:

The mailman had arrived early, because he enjoyed having a little glass with Corazón even though it was against regulations. . . . Such a good-looking man, A little violent, true, but you can’t choose your temperament, and he didn’t deserve to end up like this. It was in the mailman’s interest to appear shaken by his discovery: people expecting letters were pissed off at him for pitching the mailbag into the pond.

Again this suggests a blending with, or perhaps filtering through, an outside (or significantly later, i.e. more mature) narrator.

Children of Heroes is a small epic, a moving journey, a little treasure-trove of captivating and inventive storytelling. Author Lyonel Trouillot has used every tool at his disposal to demonstrate an enormous talent. This is a book to be widely read and enjoyed, and this is an author who deserves greater attention and praise.

In today’s globalizing world, solving international conflicts by violence is becoming increasingly impractical and unpopular. Nonviolent methods must be based on mutual understanding, which is an important part of any relationship. It is primarily in this vein that Contemporary Iraqi Fiction (Syracuse University Press, 2008), edited and translated by Shakir Mustafa, is a worthwhile and valuable read. The book provides an enlightening sample of storytelling from the people of one of the world’s hotbeds of international conflict of the last two or three decades. It provides an intimate introduction to people in and from Iraq.

One aspect in particular that goes a long way towards achieving this intimacy is the inclusion of an essay introducing each author, in which the editor has outlined the author’s work as a whole and briefly described and analyzed the stories selected. These essays are appropriately brief and informative as to familiarize the reader with each of the authors presented. As a whole, the book sheds light on a place that has long been construed as dark and alien, and effectively brings this distant place a little bit closer.

The book would not have this effect if the content were not worthy of literary merit. All of those presented are talented writers; some are not particularly memorable, but several authors in particular stand out as brilliant craftsmen and –women whose ability to breathe life into their prose is truly surprising, and a great pleasure to read. Among these are Mahdi Isa al-Saqr, Mayselun Hadi, Jalil al-Qaisi, and Samuel Shimon.

Al-Saqr is a prolific writer whose work, produced over the course of about fifty years beginning in 1954, has been translated into six languages. His stories have a dreamlike quality; Waiting is the depiction of an old woman’s fantasy come to life. Breaking Away is a subtler meditation on escape from the real into the world of dreams, or the converse, the bringing of dreams into the real world. Both of these, as well as Morning Exercises, are well-constructed, complete fictions. His fourth piece, A Dreamer in Dark Times, is a selection from a novel titled The Witness and the Negro, a selection which inclines the reader to read the novel itself. Al-Saqr has written three volumes of short stories and five novels to date.

Mayselun Hadi is a more recent author, born in 1954. Of her three pieces selected here, Outage is the best, reflecting the state of war which makes up most of Hadi’s subject matter, according to Mustafa. The absence of tangible violence in the story, and the sense of suffocating darkness, truly and effectively convey the debilitating fear of the characters without resorting to overt symbolism or blatant proselytism:

He gave a broken, nasal laugh and put down the lantern next to her. He relaxed in the dark, lying back to watch the pattern that the lantern made on the ceiling. She put out her hand and slowly felt his features. It was late at night, and she wondered why the power cut happened. She touched the rim of his prescription glasses and then his unshaven face. She almost asked him something, but she didn’t. (p.76)
A third war story, and in my opinion one of the best stories in the book overall, is Jalil al-Qaisi’s Zulaikha. The story recalls the horrifying yet poignant war scenes of Hemingway, a touching scene of human bonding in bondage and a microcosm of the struggle of an oppressed people against their oppressors. The feeling of attachment between the two strangers in a cage, attachment simply because of their common predicament, is strongly evoked.

Samuel Shimon’s story, The Street Vendor and the Movies, stands out in several regards. Foremost it is the longest story in the anthology, and as a result it seems that despite its being the only of Shimon’s work in the book, it seems to give the reader a closer familiarity with the author than any other. This may also have to do with the strength of the writing:

That particular picture spurred an argument one day between me and Khajik over silent and sound films. You like silent movies, he said, because you’re the son of a deaf and mute father. That day I found a piece of rope and planned to strangle that mean Armenian boy, but Ibrahim did not think that was a good idea, especially when my dad was trying to get a job at Umm Khajik’s bakery….I also had a pang of guilt because Khajik’s dad used to give me a whole dinar at Christmas. Not last Christmas, though, because he had passed away just the week before. (p.139)

Rare is the writer who can see the world through the eyes of a child and convey it thus on the page, and Shimon’s success in this venture is reminiscent of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close on a much smaller scale.

My one complaint with the book is the editor’s decision to include excerpts from a few novels. I feel that the selections from novels are among the book’s weakest, and this must only be because they are small pieces of a larger whole, pieces which do not stand on their own in the context of short fiction. While I was intrigued by one of these selections (al-Saqr’s A Dreamer in Dark Times) to read the whole work, on the whole I believe that the collection would be stronger if the excerpts had been left out, and perhaps replaced by some more work by those authors who are less represented or some more authors.

On the back cover, the book is described as “the first anthology of its kind in the West.” Specifically referring to Iraqi fiction, this is true (although there are several available volumes of translated Arabic literature such as The Anchor Book of Modern Arabic Fiction, translated and edited by Denys Johnson-Davies). This book’s unique quality of being Iraqi in origin is primarily what makes the book a most worthwhile read. The material is good too; while a few of the authors are not particularly noteworthy, all of the pieces are well written and well translated, and a few stand out as gems to be pursued and appreciated further.

Contemporary Iraqi Fiction: An Anthology
edited and translated by Shakir Mustafa
Syracuse University Press
200 pages, $22.95