This Week in Books: “Creating scenes that longed to be bowers of enchantment.”
“If you are not fully in command of your material in some of its parts, the whole thing will be unsatisfactory in places, and the critics will take you to task.”
Dear Reader,
Let’s start with the dirt—all the things I didn’t include in my list, in a misguided effort to keep it nice and inspiring and important. This morning I woke up with the devil in me; I want to show you all the gossip. “The book weighs 1.25 kilograms, making it heavier than a bag of sugar and just as unpleasant to consume at speed,” writes Imogen West-Knights in a glorious trashing of J.K. Rowling’s latest.
Reading The Ink Black Heart feels like reading an SOS from Strike and Ellacourt themselves, held hostage in this sprawling labyrinth of Rowling’s own recent obsession with social media wars. Write what you know, they say, and what Rowling unfortunately knows is what it’s like to have your brain pickled by spending too much time online.
Dwight Garner came out swinging at Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel The Marriage Portrait (Knopf)—although he pays kind respects to her Instructions for a Heatwave along the way:
“The tigress didn’t so much pace as pour herself,” O’Farrell writes, “as if her very essence was molten, simmering, like the ooze from a volcano.” Ooze is the right word.
She continues: “The animal was orange, burnished gold, fire made flesh; she was power and anger, she was vicious and exquisite.” The tiger’s cry is a “yearning, desperate rasp.”
…Hamnet wasn’t ridiculous in the way that The Marriage Portrait is ridiculous; at its best it was an affecting portrait of grief. But it too went in for lush atmospherics, for a lot of rustling leaves, for creating scenes that longed to be bowers of enchantment.
Lucy Sante writes about Emmanuel Carrère’s oeuvre on the occasion of the publication of his most recent book, Yoga (FSG), in English:
…Carrère has enough best-seller chops to remember that he has to supply a redemptive arc. Accordingly… he goes to the Greek island of Leros, where there is a large reception center for migrants, and he settles down for a few months to teach English to four boys from Afghanistan and Pakistan. At this point in my reading I spread-eagled the book facedown on my nightstand and had to make an effort of will to pick it up again weeks later. The chapter is generic treacle, as if it had been plucked from the fundraising site of an NGO. Devynck, in her rebuttal piece on the French Vanity Fair website, says that Carrère spent only a few days on Leros, partly in her company, and before his breakdown. She alleges that he stirred fictional elements into the book so that it would qualify for a Prix Goncourt, awarded only to novels…
Of all of them I feel the most for O’Farrell. I admire her gambit: a second novel about a famous suffering historical child? It’s so weird. We must respect it. Indeed, in the (nice and inspiring and important) list that I’ve actually curated, Natasha Wimmer writes about Sergio Pitol’s fondness for writers overtaken by the weird:
As a translator and a reader, he took a special interest in those he called “the eccentrics,” among them Firbank and Gombrowicz, as well as Laurence Sterne, Nikolai Gogol, Bruno Schulz, César Aira, Augusto Monterroso, Flann O’Brien, and others. He drew a sharp distinction between avant-gardists and eccentrics: the former cluster in groups and expel outsiders, while the latter are dispersed and solitary, detached from their surroundings, “a group without a group.” Pitol himself, of course, was a classic eccentric: a Mexican at the wrong end of Europe (far from the Paris of his expat compatriots), a writer on the fringe championing other writers on the fringe.
Now that I’ve built this frame, everything feels gossipy this week—an elder Goethe trash talking young writers; Helen DeWitt’s eternal critique of how the sausage gets made in the American book industry reworked yet again for yet another great work; Toni Morrison’s professional counter-offensives against the (mis)biographizing of Angela Davis (which is just a small side-plot of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s essay that I hyper-fixated on, because I guess I stick to my theme). Morrison fought the war on two fronts: as a critical reviewer of all the bad biographies, and as the editor of Davis’s An Autobiography:
The autobiography gave Davis an opportunity to reclaim her life story, which mainstream outlets had grossly distorted during her incarceration. These pop-psychology assessments of Davis carried over to the original reviews of the book. “If there is an Angela Davis separate from the Communist woman,” the Black writer Julius Lester wrote, “Davis does not know her and has little desire to do so…. Her will is so strong that, at times, it is frightening.” The reviewers’ search for the “real” or “other” Angela Davis reeks of sexism, as does the assumption that her life was not fully consumed by politics—that there must be some interior built around other desires.
It is hard to imagine such a question being asked of Malcolm X. “If this book were about a man,” Morrison wrote in response to a reader’s report expressing concern about the lack of “humanness” in the manuscript, “certain problems of credibility would never arise. The real question you know is why doesn’t she think and behave like a female?… How nice it would be if Angela were really Jane Fonda and not Jean d’Arc.”
And then there’s that other type of gossip. I’m seeing now, looking over what I’ve put together, that it’s here as well: the whisper networks and warnings. Disappeared people, whom we don’t talk about: for our safety, or for theirs. There’s Carrère’s grandfather, who, according to Sante, was “a French laborer of Georgian origin who collaborated with the Germans during the war, and who after the Liberation was seized by partisans and never seen again. Giving this tale additional bite is the fact that Carrère was explicitly ordered never to talk about it by his formidable mother, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, a Russian-history scholar who is among other things the Perpetual Secretary of the Académie Française, and something of a celebrity in France.”
There’s the film critic Serge Daney’s father, of whom, according to reviewer Beatrice Loayza, “it was unspoken knowledge that he had likely perished in a concentration camp.”
And there’s Perhat Tursun and A., the author and co-translator of the novel The Backstreets, who were both taken. Who maybe won’t return. Writes Darren Byler, the other co-translator:
When I left the region in 2015, I promised Perhat Tursun and A. that I would find a publisher for the novel. But instead, I waited. I wanted to make sure that the media attention that publication would bring wouldn’t cause undue harm to either of them. In 2017, A. reached out to tell me he couldn’t remain in direct contact with me and other foreigners as he had before. Several months later, another friend from his village told me he had been taken to a camp near his home village in Southern Xinjiang, far from the city. Around the same time, I heard the news that Perhat Tursun had disappeared as well.
When I went to the region for the last time in 2018, I asked all the booksellers and neighbors I could find if they had any news about Perhat. Nothing. Then, around a year later, I learned from Perhat’s friends that he had been sentenced to sixteen years in prison. A.’s friends still didn’t know where exactly he was or why he was taken.
—Dana
1. “Goethe’s Advice for Young Writers” by Johann Peter Eckermann, The Paris Review
An excerpt from a new edition of Johann Peter Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe (Penguin Classics), translated by Allan Blunden.
The present demands its due; the thoughts and feelings that crowd in upon the poet every day need to be put into words, and so they should be. But if your mind is taken up with some great work, nothing else can get a look in; all other thoughts are pushed aside, and you cannot even enjoy the ordinary pleasures of life. It requires a vast amount of exertion and mental effort just to shape and organize a great whole, and a vast amount of energy, plus a period of uninterrupted peace and quiet in one’s life, to get it all down on paper in one continuous draft. But if you have picked the wrong subject to start with, then all your efforts are wasted; and if, furthermore, having undertaken something so large, you are not fully in command of your material in some of its parts, the whole thing will be unsatisfactory in places, and the critics will take you to task. So what the poet gets for so much effort and sacrifice is not reward and pleasure, but only stress and the undermining of his confidence. But if, on the other hand, the poet attends to the present moment each day, and writes with freshness and spontaneity about whatever comes his way, he is sure to produce something of value; and if, once in a while, something doesn’t work out, then nothing is lost.
2. “Translation as Transgression: Bringing the Uyghur Novel The Backstreets into English” by Darren Byler, Words Without Borders
In an adaptation of an essay that appears in Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (Duke), Darren Byler writes about his relationship with A., his co-translator of Perhat Tursun's novel The Backstreets (Columbia). A. has been missing since 2017 and is presumed to be in a re-education camp; Perhat Tursun was recently sentenced to sixteen years in prison.
We met in the tea shop to do the translation because an American anthropologist like me meeting an underemployed Uyghur with fidgety hands like A. in either of our apartments might raise suspicion with the Civil Affairs Ministry personnel who had installed QR codes on every apartment door. They scanned the codes, which pulled up high-resolution images and digital records of registered inhabitants, with their smartphones and conducted surprise inspections of Muslim homes every few days, looking for unregistered people. So it was better to do the translation out in the open, taking advantage of the vibrant tea culture that Uyghurs share with peoples throughout Western and South Asia. We tried to reassure ourselves that we did not have anything to hide.
3. “‘Hell, Yes, We Are Subversive’” by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, The New York Review of Books
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes about the reissue of Angela Davis’s An Autobiography (Haymarket).
…A spate of critical biographies that appeared shortly after Davis’s arrest did little to capture her belief that her political radicalization was the typical experience of other young Black people. Toni Morrison called one of these dime-a-dozen portraits “a Cyclopean view of Angela Davis that leaves the reader with a wholly useless biography, somehow offensive in its one-eyed stare.”
…An Autobiography was written at the prodding of Davis’s editor at Random House, Toni Morrison. Davis was concerned that, at twenty-eight, she was too young to write a memoir, but Morrison encouraged her to write a “political autobiography.”
…Her reluctance to focus on herself in her own autobiography has not gone away. “I am more convinced than ever that we need to engage in relentless critique of our centering of the individual,” Davis warns in her new preface.
4. “At the Center of the Fringe” by Natasha Wimmer, The New York Review of Books
Natasha Wimmer writes about recent translations of Sergio Pitol’s novels from Deep Vellum. The most recent is The Love Parade; but Wimmer calls The Journey “perhaps the best introduction to Pitol for newcomers”—both are translated by George Henson.
The chronology of Pitol’s life is rehearsed over and over again in the trilogy. [The Trilogy of Memory: The Art of Flight, The Journey, and The Magician of Vienna.] Sometimes starting from the beginning and other times from an episode along the way, Pitol traces and retraces his literary development (which for him is synonymous with his life story). Dreams, diary entries, lists of readings, accounts of writing processes, random encounters, appreciations of writers and theater productions, travel stories: these are the elements in play. It’s nearly impossible to make an outline of even just the first section of The Art of Flight, because Pitol is constantly interrupting himself, adopting and abandoning one organizing principle after another. The effect is a kind of erudite dizziness…
5. “The Difficulties of Helen DeWitt” by Jared Marcel Pollen, Gawker
Jared Marcel Pollen reviews Helen DeWitt’s novelette The English Understand Wool (New Directions).
The opening pages of the story, narrated by Marguerite… is then interrupted with a note from the editor — why all this stuff about fabrics and French and dinner etiquette? “This seems like a lot of backstory, making the reader wait for the main event,” she tells her. The editor also insists that Marguerite talk about her “feelings” (was she hurt, traumatized, victimized?). Otherwise, “there is nothing to engage the reader and keep them turning the pages”...
This no doubt speaks to DeWitt’s own difficulties dealing with the infuriating norms of corporate publishing. The Last Samurai (2000), her debut, which took nearly a decade to publish, was subjected to a ream of “unsolicited advice,” as editors urged her to remove from the novel all the parts concerning algebra, Greek and Japanese language. Instead of rejecting the book outright, DeWitt recalls, they would simply ask her to change the bits they didn’t like…
DeWitt has described this as “the disempowerment of the author.” It is also the subject of Lee Konstantinou’s forthcoming The Last Samurai Reread (2022), which looks at the novel as an example of the creative and intellectual constraints that exist under capitalism…
6. “Of Dharma and Doom” by Sunil Iyengar, The American Scholar
Sunil Iyenga reviews After the War (Oxford), Wendy Doniger’s new translation of the last books of the Mahabharata.
…Consider the final quest of the Pandavas. Disillusioned after the war, especially by Krishna’s death, they climb Mount Meru, the symbolic center of the Hindu universe, leading to the kingdom of the gods. Along the way, four of the five brothers—and the brothers’ single wife, Draupadi—fall one by one, punished because of prior misdeeds, as karma would dictate. Only Yudhishthira, the oldest, makes it to the top, followed by a dog. Scorning the rule that dogs are banned from heaven, he refuses to enter until his lone companion is admitted. The dog then is revealed to be a form of Dharma, Yudhishthira’s father—the god of duty and death alike …
Doniger hails this ambiguity as an enduring charm of the text. It “is precisely the uncompromising and unresolved nature of their ethics,” she writes, “that makes these books particularly useful to us in this age of doubt and confusion.” Or, as the Mahabharata’s final book instructs, “Whatever there is here about dharma, politics, pleasure, and freedom, you can also find elsewhere but what is not here is nowhere.”
7. “To Sleep before Evening (from This Short Day of Frost and Sun)” by Samuel R. Delany, The Georgia Review
This is the first installment in a serialized novel that Samuel Delany is writing for The Georgia Review. (!)
In April ’92, the third time he went from my place into St. Luke’s, Hardy Frodoushky died. I ’d been visiting him every other day. He ’d developed toxoplasmosis. (Only a year later, the first thing they told you was, Stay away from cats!
(Margaret downstairs had cats.
(She and Hardy had taken an immediate liking to one another; but back then what did any of us know . . . ?
(They were finding new opportunistics every month.) But though he was always glad to see me, because of the disease’s neural damage more and more he wasn’t sure who I was. Still, I ’d promised him I ’d be with him in his hospital room when he went—only he stopped breathing the afternoon I was doing a Fujifilm commercial on the Brooklyn Bridge.
8. “Cinema Is Never on Time” by A. S. Hamrah, The Baffler
&
9. “Cinema Was Everything” by Beatrice Loayza, Bookforum
An excerpt of A. S. Hamrah’s introduction to the collected work of Serge Daney, The Cinema House and the World: The Cahiers du Cinéma Years, 1962-1981 (Semiotext(e)), first published in France in 2001 and now translated by Christine Pichini. Plus, a review by Beatrice Loayza, who calls Daney “the most significant writer to emerge from the generational milieu that gave rise to the French New Wave.” Writes Hamrah:
Serge Daney has existed in English mostly in a kind of samizdat, translated and published online by dedicated cinephiles with blogs, whose valiant work for two decades has tried to remedy this essential critic’s absence. While a short hybrid interview book, Postcards from the Cinema, did appear in 2007, in Paul Douglas Grant’s excellent translation, the majority of Daney’s writing has been unavailable in English in book form.
As Grant points out in his introduction to Postcards from the Cinema, by that year a “proper introduction” to Daney was already “so overdue that the very mention of this deficiency is itself becoming something of a cliché.” That was and is the case, that it is long overdue. It had been the case since before Daney’s death in 1992, from complications resulting from AIDS…
Writes Loayza:
“It took me a while to develop this idea that ‘modern’ cinema, born the same time as I was, was the cinema of a kind of knowledge of the camps, a knowledge that changed the ways of making cinema,” wrote Daney in “The Tracking Shot in Kapo.” The essay was first published in Trafic—Daney founded the cinema journal—in 1992, the same year that he died of AIDS at the age of forty-eight. Cinema, and its orchestration of desire, had its origins in spectacle. But after the war, a new kind of relationship between spectator and screen emerged. Daney entered a world in which the most seemingly distant and alien events—and the most heinous crimes—could be touched with the gaze and felt in the viewer’s bones. This revelation was central to Daney’s lifelong critical project: articulating an ethics of the image rooted in our responses to it.
10. “Ling Ma Transcends the Gimmick” by Bindu Bansinath, The Cut
Bindu Bansinath interviews Ling Ma about her short story collection Bliss Montage (FSG).
“Many of the stories did come from dreams, at least the initial premise. You can’t just transcribe a dream; they tend not to follow narrative logic. So I’d take an element from my dreams, usually the element that caused me the most anxiety, and inhabited it. With many of these stories, I had scraps or scenes down that languished for years, and I needed some critical distance to understand how to write the stories or what they even were…”
11. “A Formal Feeling: Inside the world of Louise Bourgeois” by Claire-Louise Bennett, Harper’s
In the guise of reviewing two Louise Bourgeois exhibits, Claire-Louise Bennett writes about pain. And pain, and more pain. The exhibition catalogs are Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child (Hatje Cantz), edited by Ralph Rugoff; and The Artist’s Studio: A Century of the Artist’s Studio 1920–2020 (Whitechapel Gallery), edited by Iwona Blazwick.
Louise Bourgeois once said: “What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems; that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach.” Once the writer has established for the reader that she is suffering she might feel obliged to delineate the cause of her pain in heart-wrenching terms, so that, bit by bit, the reader is gratified with a story, a terribly sad tale that flings itself around the pain, as if to claim it, as if to say, “This is all my doing, so look at me.” But this way of going about things is not gratifying for the writer, in fact it adds to her torment. Because she knows, really, that pain has a life of its own, quite unrelated to any story that might zealously and impressively envelop it. Indeed its life began long before the events the story is intent upon conveying in all their pathos took place. The story cannot account for the pain because the story is new and ongoing and the pain is nothing new. It goes way back, way back; though it is, I grant you, redoubled by this sudden collapsing of time. There is so much more of it now, spent time. Time folds and all my selves, one for each year, spill out like playing cards upon a small round table. There are all my years, and all my symbols. Go ahead, pick a card, any card, look once then return it and watch me, watch me shuffle the double-faced souvenir back in with all the rest. The rest of the pack. The whirligig of getting close and never again and promise me and I couldn’t give a damn.
▼ ▼ ▼