This Week in Books: Something Good in the Neighborhood
“The snake speaks of ‘death’ in a human voice… It belongs to one of his neighbors…”
Dear Reader,
I’ve been reading a horror story from Wakefield Press, always a dangerous proposition. It feels like whatever is going on in those books is about to jump right off the page and absolutely try to kill me, you know? The sense of dissociation, of crossing into the other world (or it crossing over to me), begins with the jacket copy, which is always dense with references to people, places, and entire genres I’ve never even heard of, which puts me on strange footing, and gives me that delicious sensation which is essential at the start of any horror story: the feeling that I am about to be tricked. But in this case the reach of the feeling extends into the metatext (aka the real world, insofar as ad copy is “reality”); it’s as though I’m watching a particularly frightening movie trailer, or like I’m seeing the Smile girl at the stadium. I can’t remember the title of the first Wakefield Press book that I flipped open and read the front flap of (all the small format Wakefield books have French flaps, think Archipelago but glossy, tres chic), but I do remember the incredulity with which I reacted to the flap’s matter-of-fact classification of the author as something like “the last of the great Belgian fabulists.” The last of the greats of a genre I’d never heard of! Absolutely riveting stuff. To this day I can’t think of anywhere else I’ve ever even come across unbidden (keep in mind I have not been looking) a reference to such a genre, except perhaps in the jacket copy of other Wakefield Press books. When I’m trying to be funny, I like to spin out for Ben the theory that all the Wakefield Press books are entirely invented by their English language publisher—an entirely made up canon, and the joke is that the English-language audience continues to not notice that none of these people ever existed. There are signs, I say, when I am riffing in this vein. Like a Kubrickologist, I claim there are signs in the text itself of the larger conspiracy at work. (Kubrickologists like to talk about the unusual control that Kubrick had over his movie trailers and posters, hypothesizing that the advertisements were an avenue by which he controlled the audience’s reception of his “message.” Ah, I was just saying the same thing myself the other day to Ben (poor Ben) about Tár, the new movie from Kubrick’s heir apparent Todd Field. Really, think about it! The first trailer does enormous work pre-conditioning the audience’s mind to receive the film. An unusually large amount of the footage does not appear in the film at all, and the face of a very important character is only revealed in the trailer, never in the movie! (I think… I’ve only seen it once… I’ve got Tár fever but not to a multi-ticket pitch.)) The latest riff-able sign, for me, of the Great Wakefield Conspiracy is that in the introduction to Malpertuis, the great master of Belgian horror (but not the last of the great… I don’t think) Jean Ray’s only novel-length frightener, translator Iain White tells us that Jean Ray’s biography was entirely made up by Jean Ray and all his friends. After he went to jail for literary magazine fraud (!), they would riff to journalists about what a dangerous guy he was, an arms dealer and adventurer who had touched madness at the outer reaches of human experience and whatnot. In reality he basically never left his writing desk. Or so we think. It turns out that, in all the fun, everybody forgot to actually write down the real biography of Jean Ray.
I’m reading Malpertuis because last October I read Cruise of Shadows, the terrifying short story collection Ray wrote while serving his jail sentence for literary magazine fraud (!), and I wanted to experience anew the state of absolute terror in which I dwelt while reading it. Unfortunately I must report that Cruise of Shadows was by far the more frightening text. I think the short story form probably lends itself better to Ray’s style, which like so much horror relies on gaps and elisions in the narrative to promote a sensation of confusion and fear of the unknown. At novel-length, he honestly is just telling me too much about Malpertuis and its inhabitants. (Malpertuis is a house, by the way—a “house, placed by the most terrible of wills like a full stop at the end of so many human destinies.”) When it come to Malpertuis, I could know less.
Cruise of Shadows, though! Oh, what a terror. What’s most terrifying, I think, is that the horror, indefinable as it is, feels like it’s moving with you from one story to the next… following you… getting closer!! It’s something about cities. It’s city horror, but also ship horror (but what is a ship if not a small city?). It isn’t lonely horror, not an isolated wealthy mansion-dwelling horror like that of Edith Wharton’s ghost story protagonists who, one after another, are nearly frightened to death when they realize that the help has gone missing. (Not knocking it, I loved that collection too.) The horror in Cruise of Shadows is, to be clear, often connected to people going missing, but likewise connected to the fact that someone, or something else, has arrived in their place… something in the house, something on the block, in the alleys, in the attic!! A fantastic book to read when you’re alone in your Brooklyn apartment, Ben gone away (poor Ben), the roof rats scuttling above you… at least you tell yourself it’s the rats… it does sound really large though, too large… too large by far, to be anything but doom (or a trick). A passage at random:
After the first few days I quit questioning my neighbors about my predecessor. They retained in memory nothing more than the image of a little man, taciturn and hostile, resistant to any overture, who bought nothing in the neighborhood. Their enmity redounded somewhat upon me, and in general they treated me with coldness or indifference. Perhaps in the long run I would have grown to trust that house, but I felt its calm dwelt only on the surface. It held its secrets—I sensed it, like every man senses some presence, biding its time, awaiting its hour. It made its feints.
In vain I stood guard over the immobility of objects. For I assure you, through every keyhole, every crack, I spied upon rooms absent of any living presence; I stared with suspicion at lifeless objects like armoires and chairs.
But they remained wary, these things, each complicit with the rest, communicating between themselves via mysterious means of which we know nothing, but which we obscurely suspect.
—Dana
1. “Against Queer Presentism” by Colton Valentine, The Drift
Colton Valentine writes on my favorite topic, the state of the novel. As part of the wider argument, there’s a great plug here for a first ever complete edition and English-language translation of The Italian Invert (Columbia), an anonymous novel told in letters to Émile Zola.
In either 1888 or 1889, a 23-year-old Italian wrote a series of letters to the renowned French writer Émile Zola. The young man expressed his admiration for Zola’s novels and identification with two characters from The Kill (1872): a butler dismissed for sodomy and his genderqueer employer. But he lamented Zola’s omission of a fully sketched homosexual — an “invert” in the epoch’s terminology — and furnished his own life story for Zola to fictionalize in a future book.
Had he followed that request, Zola wouldn’t have needed to embellish much; the Italian’s letters already feature an exquisite dramatic arc. They begin with his upbringing in an aristocratic Neapolitan family and chart a gradual recognition that he’s attracted to men. (Fantasies about Hector, not Helen, are the giveaway.) An interval of deep shame ensues until his first sexual experience at age fifteen. More involved relationships transpire… The letters end with a would-be cheater’s cliff-hanger: should the Italian sleep with a coy stranger in an inn?...
2. “I’m Getting Out of Here” by Leo Robson, The London Review of Books
Leo Robson writes about Percival Everett.
Towards the end of Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (first published in 2013), a story about storytelling in which nobody is called Percival Everett or Virgil Russell, one of the narrators gives a list of 516 gerunds that encompass the whole of human activity. ‘Naming’ appears first and last – and seventeen times in-between. Everett’s first novel, Suder (1983), ends with the main character, a baseball player in a terminal slump, uttering the words ‘Craig Suder’. The hero of I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009) goes through life being called ‘Not Sidney’, and battles with his resulting inclination towards passivity and victimhood. Everett has expressed opposition to labels, categories and genres. ‘I never think in regions,’ he said, during an interview for a book about writers from the American South. Once something is named, its potential is limited, its freedom compromised. In Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, a father-to-be tries to persuade his wife to leave their son unnamed in order to spare the child ridicule. (‘You can’t mess up ———.’)
3. “Far Away” by Ishion Hutchinson, The New York Review of Books
Ishion Hutchinson writes about the feud between Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul.
…Professor Baugh was not given to biographical anecdotes. When we fell into stitches over Walcott’s couplet from “The Spoiler’s Return”—“I see these islands and I feel to bawl/‘area of darkness’ with V. S. Nightfall”—Professor Baugh pointed out how the interplay of the Antillean inflection of the lines with the iambic pentameter ensures that the pun on Naipaul’s name isn’t just sardonic wordplay. He dwelled on the texture of language and never gave us insider’s knowledge of the decades-long feud between Walcott and Naipaul, about which we had only heard the ghostliest of rumors, although, as a slightly younger contemporary of both writers, Professor Baugh was more privy than most to the internecine crack-up between them…
Professor Baugh mentioned “The Garden Path,” an essay Walcott had written on Naipaul’s ninth novel, The Enigma of Arrival. Then he fell quiet, and his gentle, slightly phlegmatic brown eyes stared over our heads to the wall behind us. He was suddenly a man elsewhere. It was that stare that made me go to the library when class ended to find Walcott’s essay and borrow Naipaul’s novel, which I hadn’t read.
4. “The Hidden Politics of Smell” by Naib Mian, The Nation
Naib Mian reviews Tanaïs’s In Sensorium: Notes for My People (Harper).
Tanaïs’s research ranges across centuries and hemispheres. Early on, they write of coming across reports that the fragrance wafting from transatlantic ships was used to determine if the cargo was spices or bodies—of enslaved people. Small details like these lend themselves to broader explorations of the ways in which fragrance and scent have been political tools throughout history. The groundwork that Tanaïs lays—the lingering base notes upon which the rest of the book builds, which color everything else we are to experience—are what Tanaïs calls foundational “patramyths,” or the lies encoded in history to protect the powerful…
…To this day, the world’s poorest people are constantly exposed to toxic chemicals in human waste and in contaminated land and water and to the noxious aromas in the environment around them. “Even after the day’s work is done, sweeping and cleaning, the nightmare, the sensorium of labor, is inescapable.”
5. “No One Is There Who Has Somewhere Better to Be” by Stephanie Wong, Public Books
Stephanie Wong interviews Levi Vonk about Vonk’s Border Hacker: A Tale of Treachery, Trafficking, and Two Friends on the Run (Bold Type), a personal ethnography that is co-authored with its subject, Axel Kirschner.
I do see prestige journalists parachuting into migrant shelters for a weekend story. I’ve even thought, “That seems like a good gig—could I do that?” But I literally couldn’t write the story that way, even if I wanted to.
I want the drama, I want the messiness. The kinds of stories that you see in prestige outlets too often have neat little bows. They profess that they’re getting into the nitty-gritty, by which they mean they’re talking to someone who’s had a hard life, but it’s never about the uncertainty of truth. It’s never about the multiplicity of “individual” being…
Contemporary nonfiction goes astray when it tries to avoid that messiness. The too-clean prose tricks you into thinking that there is a perfect world out there, and if any messiness or drama or violence or struggle arises, that’s wrong…
6. “Eager or Reluctant? A Translator’s Dilemma” by Lily Meyer, Public Books
Lily Meyer writes about her archival research into the English-language translation history of Marie Ndiaye’s Three Strong Women.
I read the American edition of Three Strong Women first, and, on arriving at UEA, was startled to see how different it was from the British one. I thought the American one was better: more fluid, more natural, less stiffly French in syntax. Fletcher disagreed vehemently. His emails dripped fury that his American editor had pushed him into a “rewrite that bore little resemblance to the French original.” He fought each departure from NDiaye’s phrasing, trying to preserve the content and tenor of her work. In an email to Maclehose’s team, he laments, “I don’t believe in slavishly translating the text word for word—far from it—but where the author has used a particular word the translator should in my view only change it for a good reason; and I fail to see … good reason here.” Fletcher was so reluctant to accept Knopf’s changes that, when compelled to do so, he insisted on adding a note to the American edition’s copyright page, which reads: “John Fletcher asserts his moral right to be identified as the translator of the work. The translation has been adapted by the publisher for the American market.”
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