by Matei Calinescu, translated from the Romanian by Adriana Calinescu and Breon Mitchell (New York Review Books)

When I first started reading The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter by Matei Calinescu, translated from the Romanian by Adriana Calinescu and Breon Mitchell (published by New York Review Books), I had the sense that I had read this book before. Or not this book exactly, but a different novel, or novels, that employed a similar technique of letting an idiosyncratic character’s bizarre—yet compelling and logical in their quirks—ideas run free in a way in which an overarching plot is tossed aside in favor of a series of semi-philosophical sketches.

From “On the Realm of Stupidity”:

No wonder then that Lichter sees modern civilization as a vast extension of the Realm of Stupidity. Intelligence is obsessed with that which is fundamental, original, structural, essential. One recognizes intelligent individuals by their fascination with the elementary and the simple. Their efforts within the spiritual order are integrative: they seek the basic principle, or—to put it metaphorically—the ideal key to all the mysteries of the world. Aspiring towards totality and uniqueness is not stupidity’s ambitions. Its strength lies in its ability to placidly accept any theory, even an erroneous one, as long as it offers a viable starting point towards the practical results. A parasite plagiarizing the pure core of intelligence, sapping its vigor, stupidity forever fortifies and perfects itself, sprawling like a vast and dangerous stain on the consciousness of humanity. For stupidity is vain (the vanity of “efficiency”), sure of itself, economical, has wide-spreading technological tentacles and is shrewdly and ferociously aggressive. Stupidity wills itself to be “universally human.” Since the domain of stupidity is progress itself, Zacharias Lichter naturally concludes that true intelligence evolves within a vicious circle, forever fantasizing escape yet forever falling back into the realization that all efforts at escape are futile.

I still can’t quite put my finger on the other book(s) I’ve read like this. Cortázar’s Cronopios and Famas comes to mind, but that’s not focused on a single individual. There’s something of Stefan Themerson here as well, maybe Tom Harris? Or part of Ergo by Jakov Lind? I feel like there’s a voice just outside of my active memory that is just like this book . . . The best I can come up with right now is Mahu, or, The Material by Robert Pinget. Here’s a bit from “Stilts”:

Supposing I wore stilts? It would change everything. When you went out for your coffee in the morning you’d put on your coat or something longer to hide your feet, and the pieces of wood would show underneath. The grocer’s wife would say, “There goes spindleshanks for his morning drink, it must be nine o’clock.” I’d cross the road without waiting for the green light, the cars would stop at the sight of a man on stilts and you might get your newspaper for nothing, at first anyway.

Anyway, The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter is a great bathroom book. Most of the chapters are 3-4 pages long, and require a burst of concentration to immerse oneself in the particulars of this prose style and really tease out the humor and linguistic calisthenics. Don’t read this in one long sitting—it’s a book that’s best enjoyed as little bites, almost like a short story collection, but with a singular mindset, the madness of which takes over the whole book and infuses it with an off-kilter joy accessible to the patient . . . and the clued-in.

What I’m curious about is which books prepare you to like a book like this. If you are what you read, and the books you imprinted on are Twilight, Slaughterhouse-Five, and The Lime Works, is that enough? Or will this book seem utterly incomprehensible, or, maybe not incomprehensible, but a waste of time? This book nagged at me because my shitty memory wouldn’t call forth all the books I’ve read in this general tradition. That’s a totally different experience than for someone who has never seen writing like this in their life and struggles to understand how exactly this fits within the category of “novel” that they’ve built up inside of their mind.

The opposite formulation of the “not for everyone” statement is to clearly define who would be into a particular book: “This novel is for fans of Pinget, Themerson, and Jouet.” Which circumscribes a readership of approximately fourteen people.

On the other hand, if you name-check the authors everyone has heard of—“this is for those readers interested in Cortázar, Kundera, and Rushdie”—you’re not only full of shit, but you’re about as useful as an Amazon algorithm.

That’s a lie. Amazon’s algorithmic recommendations can be damn interesting. Like with this book, which, I’ll look up right now on Amazon and . . . uh. That’s not what I expected. I should’ve done that search before starting this paragraph and finding out that, aside from other NYRB titles, the “Customers Also Bought” listings include Jenny Erpenbeck, Mathias Énard, and Lúcio Cardoso—all really good authors!, none of which really relate to this book. (Unless you’re looking for titles that fit into the category of “literary,” which is almost as bad as the category I’m going to discuss below.)

I used to think a lot about “discoverability” and recommendation algorithms. If you find the tag “future of reading” on this blog, you’ll hit upon a treasure trove of detailed breakdowns of “new” book recommendation sites, like BookLamp, Small Demons, Bookish 1.0 (or 2.0? Does it even matter?), GoodReads, etc. I still spend at least one class period every semester going over all of these mostly defunct sites, digging into the rationale for why everyone wanted to create online recommendation sites (it’s crucial to get the right book to people at the right time and we all live online, so that’s where you can make the connections) and the variety of theoretical ways by which these sites created their recommendation algorithms (by starting with the book and matching elements in the text to preferences; by starting with groups of readers and assuming similiar readers like similar books).

Nowadays, I’m not sure that I care all that much. I don’t feel like these sites are a viable strategy for publishers to connect their books with potential readers because a) they don’t exist anymore and b) no one cares. Aside from GoodReads users, I’m not sure there’s a significant subset of readers who use a particular algorithm-driven website to figure out what book to read next.

(A site I never use.)

Last week in my “World Literature & Translation” class, I had a couple grad students give presentations on Adam Thirlwell’s The Delighted States: A Book of Novels, Romances, & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, & Accompanied by . . . Illustrations, & a Variety of Helpful Indexes, a book that I unabashedly love. Adam usually gets an email from me every spring about how much god damn fun it is talking about his book in class. He’s in that relatively small group of authors who I would love to get wasted with and shoot the shit about books. To be honest, I think of The Delighted States and It’s Long Subtitle less as a book and more as a textual eavesdropping in on the smartest guy you know drinking Guinness at a dive bar and getting way too into literary ideas. “The whole of literature can be explained through a tricycle.” (An hour of stories about Proust falling down, the three-wheel theory of literature, triangles and linguistics in translation, and how cool is Hrabal?) “And then when the tricycle appears in [insert obscure work by Eastern European writers] you can see the whole of history of writing as play. You know?” “Fuck yes, Adam. Fuck. Yes.”

The joy I had reading this book for the first time—and reading various sections over and again—wasn’t exactly the same as what my students experienced. Here were their general reactions: 1) this book is all over the place and hard to follow, 2) “I’ve never read the authors Thirlwell mentions.” “Which ones, specifically?” “Flaubert, Proust, Borges, Hrabal, Gombrowicz, Laurence Sterne, Nabokov, Ulysses . . .” “. . .” “So it was kind of ridiculous.” “. . . “, and 3) how does any of this relate to the books we’re reading for class?¹

I’ve gone through a variety of emotions as I worked my way through these responses, but the main one I keep coming back to is the one that would get the most “thumbs up” on Facebook: why would anyone admit, in a literature class, to not knowing some of the most influential writers of the past hundred-plus years?

Stepping back from my existential dismay, I can cycle through some of the more legitimate reasons: there’s not much value in knowing about books that the masses don’t talk about, no one has read much at nineteen, the Canon is thankfully now canons, and it’s not like they’re aware of classic films, TV shows, albums, or other art works either. These are kids!

At the end of every semester I take myself to task for all of my fuck-ups. I read the student evaluations and get neurotic thinking about the ways in which Open Letter stress bled into my teaching. I replay too many class conversations in which I wish I was just smarter. I obsess over my shortcomings as a hopefully decent (question mark?) publisher and reader who generally functions outside of academia and teaches from particular world experiences—those of bookselling, publishing, and reading, not deep academic research. From September to May, I actively try and teach students how to write for readers who aren’t PhD holders or candidates, from May to September, I question myself and think I’m just stupid. Then I remember that there are very few people in the world—in academia and outside of it—who have read so broadly and voraciously in world literature. And I think that’s valuable? At least for making connections and recommendations?

As an outsider, I need to focus more on the positives that I can bring to these classes, on how every session is another chance to turn young readers on to particular authors and literary traditions (and the field of nonprofit publishing as a whole). Instead of assuming that they’ve read Flaubert and Sterne and Hrabal in other classes I should use the contemporary books that we read as ways to hook them on those writers from the past who bent and expanded ideas of the novel. Authors whose works I assumed would be passed down generation to generation, but might not.²

All these anxieties lead me to one central question: how do young readers find out about world literature? And not just the most established authors—Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Cervantes, etc.—but the second, or third level of interesting international authors. Those like Bernhard, Sarraute, Céline, even. Authors who PhD candidates might end up reading, but that the general public rarely comes in contact with.

If you study English, with rare exception, your literature classes tend to focus on writers who write in English. I can’t remember reading many translated texts in my undergrad studies. At least not in class. I read Madame Bovary and The Counterfeiters and Death on the Installment Plan over summer break.

There’s a similar situation if you’re studying a given language. The vast majority of classes in the Modern Languages & Cultures department at the U of R are about a particular aspect of a particular culture. “The Invention of Spanish America: From Colonial Subjects to Global Citizens” or “The Films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder.” They look back to the established (or newly established) creators with a lot of academic clout and secondary materials. This is super valuable, and helps illuminate how to read, how to think, how to process. But, for someone interested in International Literature as a grand sweeping idea, each of these classes provides only a part of the picture.

I used to assume that the best opportunity for students to be introduced to world literature and all its various threads—like the Oulipo or Nouveau Roman—from all over the world—when else will you have the time to read a few books from Korea, India, Argentina, and the Czech Republic?—would be through the classroom. But I’m not sure that’s the case. For a reader to truly immerse themselves in the traditions and voices of the world, they need some other sources of recommendations. And not the online algorithms that feel both incomplete and tilted to a certain group of titles. Or literary listicles that might provide a path for looking into a particular topic or grouping of authors, but tend to be too thin to prove valuable.

This is where we tend to look toward booksellers. If a typical academic reads deeply on a focused group of authors or topics, booksellers read (or are at least aware of) a huge swath of what’s being written. They have to in order to be successful at their jobs, even if your average book buyer doesn’t care about personal recommendations and is content browsing in solitude and interacting with employees only when they need to be clerked.

There is a constraint on booksellers as well: for the most part they have to promote recently published books or ones about to come out. Going hard on a handsell of a book that came out fifteen years ago and sold modestly is a losing bet. (Books are both products of capitalist and aesthetic economies.) So, you go sideways. If someone likes Ben Lerner and Knausgaard, you stretch to Ali Smith and Dubravka Ugresic. All those authors have newly shelved titles. As a result, a curious young reader will get another view into the literary scene for world literature from good indie stories, but it’s still just another piece of the picture.

And on the flipside, how many bookstores in the U.S. stock Pinget’s titles? Ten? It’s hard to imagine the precursors to The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter being discoverable at all. That’s odd. We have two very different systems: “Commerce” that loves sales, critical accolades, and popular appeal, and “Academia” that loves critical acceptance, secondary material, and teachability. Given this, what do you think the results are for “Roberto Bolaño Syllabus”? A million?

Alas, it’s 8,900. Lots of bookseller love; not encough critical material.

There’s something to be said about publisher branding and the online literary communities that help to keep conversations about these authors and books going. Just this past week, I saw a string of tweets from someone at AWP who bounced from Dorothy Publications to Coffee House, who recommended they go check out Archipelago, which ended up leading them to Open Letter. A wonderful world of literature is out there, if you get put on the path to find it. But there’s a larger question that’s nagging at me: Without having discovered this larger literary context, what would you possibly make of a book like The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter? And what should we be doing to make sure that these gems from the past keep finding new audiences? Those books that may not sell enough to keep a Big Five publisher interested enough to keep them in print, but are valuable contributions to literary thought and culture?

I have no good answers, but hopefully that’s a direction that this series can pick up again in the future. For now: Go read this book. And Mahu. And other weird shit that isn’t readily available or necessarily discussed in the classroom. Find your own reading path to the more obscure. Just because something isn’t the most popular doesn’t mean that it won’t blow your mind.

¹ I’m exaggerating for effect, but not really. A few students had heard of some of the authors mentioned, but they hadn’t read any of the titles. And these are really bright students! All great readers with very interesting viewpoints. But they’ve never come across these literary figures or their writings.

² Granted, there’s no way Flaubert is going to fade from public—or academic—consciousness, but it’s weird/disconcerting when none of the students in a class have ever read Madame Bovary.

by Verónica Gerber Bicecci, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Coffee House)

Although five books is most definitely a small sample size of throwaway proportions, out of the books that I’ve written about for this weekly “column,” Empty Set by Verónica Gerber Bicecci and translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney is my favorite. I don’t know where it will stack up by the end of the year—there are a number of titles coming out this summer that I’m looking forward to, and as a gesture toward impartiality, I’ll should really leave Fox, The Bottom of the Sky, The Endless Summer, and other Open Letter titles out of these evaluations—but for now I’d put it ahead of The Perfect Nanny, In Black and White, Frankenstein in Baghdad, and Theory of Shadows. (And that is how I would rank them, one to five.)

As you can probably predict, I’m not going to write a full, well thought out review for this book. If that’s what you want, I’d highly recommend checking out Lisa Fetchko’s review over at the She breaks the book down really well, and even gets into a particular translation issue about the use of _ in place of _Yo(Y), which is also discussed in an afterword that will be of particular interest to translators or those interested in the translation—or editing of translations—process.

I’m going to use this book as an opportunity to write about something entirely different, but before I do that, I have two or three quick points.

1) I like the use of the charts in this book. I’ll come back to this in a few different ways down below, but drawings such as this one—which is preceded by, “Here’s where this story ends,” a statement that means more once you have reached the end—is what makes this book unique.

And obviously, all the Venn Diagram charts are why I initially chose to read this book. Who doesn’t like a Venn Diagram?! This is one statement about math and statistics that everyone can agree on.

2) In a way, this is The Perfect Nanny for an entirely different set of readers. Written to be a blockbuster, The Perfect Nanny includes a lot of techniques and tropes and literary moments designed to make a certain set of readers feel comfortably stimulated. The set of readers (R-1) who prefer linear plots, heavy character development, detailed settings, psychological tension.

Empty Set generates an equal amount of reading comfort in a different set of readers (R-2) who feel more at ease in a text of evocative fragments, acrostics, plots like puzzles, and characters whom you don’t feel obligated to relate to.

For both R-1 and R-2 these books are equally successful in their approaches. And R-1 probably doesn’t care for Empty Set (“too confusing!” “I couldn’t relate to anyone!”), and vice-versa (“I’d rather see the movie”).

You could, I don’t know, draw a Venn Diagram of these two subsets of readers . . .

3) Not to take anything away from this novel, but wow have January and February been slow months for international literature. There doesn’t seem to have been anything buzzing on Book Twitter or Book Marks or in the blogosphere (doesn’t anyone say that anymore?) or at Winter Institute. I’ve written about the drop in translations both of the past two months, but that was just focused on pure numbers, not quality or sales or impact or anything else. But looking back at what I have read, and forward to what’s on my docket, it feels like pretty quiet year so far.

Although I’m personally hoping this review of Madame Nielsen’s The Endless Summer changes that, this still feels a lot like the current situation in Major League Baseball—the slowest in all of history—in which no free agents are being signed and nothing at all is happening. There are so many interesting explanations for this situation in which several of the game’s best players are currently unemployed: it could be collusion, it could be that clubs have more advanced understanding of the value available in the free agent market, it could be due to the fact that 1/3 of the teams are tanking in 2018 and another 1/2 aren’t really in a position to do anything but tread water, it could be because of the new collective bargaining agreement and traditional big spenders (LA Dodgers, NY Yankees) trying to reset their competitive balance assessments by getting under the spending threshold for one year, or it could have God bless Scott Boras!¹

Anyway, this combination of thinking about baseball (how to best build a team, player valuations, etc.) + reading a novel centered around set theory² + a stray comment I made in an earlier post —> an idea to try and create some core concepts for a sabermetric approach to the book industry.

This is an obvious building block. People usually value books based on how many copies they sold. “We sold 10,000 copies!” Or, “It was a best-seller in Mexico!”

(Not to be confused with “Print Run(PR),” which is a number based in hope that signifies nothing more than the publisher’s wish to sneakily manipulate the bookseller market. Print Run(PR) is equivalent to Scott Boras’s bullshit stats packages for players like Eric Hosmer who are hoping to receive contracts that are far larger than the value they’ll generate for their team. Print Runs(PR) are generally lies.)

Are sales really all that useful of a statistic though?

First off, the latter statement up there—repeated way too frequently in meetings with foreign agents—is crap. It’s descriptive, not objective, and lacks any and all context. How many books did this title beat out to become a best-seller? For how long was it a best-seller? How predictive is the Mexican best-seller list for a book entering other markets? Are the coefficients mapping it onto the French and U.S. markets radically different?

Another criticism: Sales in a vacuum takes into account none of the expenses involved with generating those sales. A book with a million dollar marketing budget that sells 100,000 copies is vastly different from a book that sells 100,000 based on a viral video that cost $.49 to make.

It also doesn’t take into account the list price of the book itself. It’s obviously way easier to sell 10,000 ebooks at $.99 than 10,000 hardcovers of a scholarly investigation into the sexual life of mollusks that lists for $149.

Sales is like batting average. A nice metric the average citizen can understand, but really not all that valuable.

Actually, that’s kind of a lie. Batting Average has values that most people can recognize as “good,” (.280) “amazing,” (.320) and “hall of fame.” (.340+). What are the equivalents for books? If I tell the people sitting next to me at the bar that we sold 3,000 copies of a book, will they think that’s great? Or pathetic? Without a commonly accepted baseline—among the larger audience, not just book nerds—this doesn’t mean a whole lot.

And it doesn’t take into account the idea that a book is more than its purchases. Thought experiment: Which is better? A book that sells 10,000 copies, 2,000 of which are read, with 10 readers capable of recalling the book one year later, or a book that sells 1,500 copies, 1,000 of which are read, with 200 readers taking this to the grave? (A: If you’re Big Five it’s the former, if you’re nonprofit the latter. There is no unified theory of sales.)

(Sales(S) x List Price(P)) x Readership® – Fixed Operating Expenses(FOE) – Printing(PR) – Author Payment(AP) – Translator Payment(TP) – Marketing Costs(MC) = True Profit(RP)

OK, so this is two steps in one: I’ve added in all the variables mentioned above (costs, list price), but then thrown in the idea of “Readership®” to try and point at the fact that overall impact of a single printed book isn’t a one-to-one ratio with copies sold. On the most basic level, there are used copies. How many students a year buy used copies of The Great Gatsby for class? Or check it out from a library? A book’s true value, or “Profit” (capitalist term, I know), is always and forever greater than the number of printed copies.

We’re still missing a few things though: What about people who know about a book, yet don’t buy it? And what about the longevity of readership? It’s one thing to read Gone Girl and then keep on living, another to read Ulysses and have your life perspective changed. That Cultural Value(CV) isn’t captured here, and I’m not sure it ever can be quantified in this way. So let’s change tactics a bit.

((Expected Sales(ES) x List Price (P)) – ((Publishing Interest(PI) + Agent Status(AS)) – Total Expenses(TE))) ) = Cash Profit(CP) + Cultural Capital(CC)

If we really want to create a sabermetric approach to books, we have to look for exploitable inefficiencies in the marketplace. And my first inclination is that these inefficiencies come in two flavors: leveraging reputations against author advances and finding a way to decrease artist payments.

That’s not quite right though. Let me back up a bit and math this out.

In the early 2000s, there were no translations³ and there was a major gap between the best /most expensive translators (Margaret Jull Costa, Edith Grossman, Richard Howard, Gregory Rabassa) and everyone else. Without a middle class—and without competition—certain publishers saw an exploitable inefficiency. How much can you make when you pay $1,000 as an author advance, $1,000 to a grad student translator (“Hey, yo, we’re gonna like, launch your career!”), and can get $3,000+ from foreign agencies desperate for American publishers to acknowledge that their literature even existed? In that situation, you can flip 2,500 sales into a decent amount of money. That is the dirty truth of translation publishing in the early part of this century.

Then things changed! International lit got more popular. Translators got organized. Now, the idea of going overseas to find the best books that no one knows or cares about is complicated by the two dozen new presses trying to beat you there, and the combination of ethical obligations in relation to translator payments and agent involvement in raising author advances (good in the short term, maybe, and probably not in the long term, but that’s its own metric), raised Total Expenses(TE) in an astronomical fashion. As well as altering the Agent Status(AS) (“I have the next Ferrante on my list . . . “) and the Publishing Interest(PI) (“We’re starting a new press and want in on the hot trends, so which book is the one that’s going to get us critical attention AND be most readable by the (R1) readers of The Perfect Nanny?”). Increase the second half of the equation above while not changing the overall sales, and you’re going to kill your margins.

That doesn’t mean that publishers will stop pursuing books that are unlikely to earn back expenses. Look at Penguin paying a million dollars for a Knausgaard novel. There’s basically no way that he’ll earn that back in straight sales. Same with Knopf and Javier Marías. PRH can definitely expand the audiences for these authors, but there’s a ceiling. Even knowing that, they’re willing to go ahead because there’s a value just to having these names on your list. Reputation, cultural capital, whatever you want to call it, it’s part of this equation as well.

Expected Sales(ES) = Author Fans(AF) x Purchasing Coefficient(PC)

If someone were able to come up with an algorithm that was even 90% accurate in predicting sales, they would be in a position to basically print money. Long time readers—or anyone involved in the book word—know that publishers don’t really do any market research. Unlike movies, there is no pre-release tracking figures for blockbuster titles. Sure, you can “have a pretty good sense” about how well a book is or isn’t going to sell, but outside of Harry Potter, James Patterson, and a handful of other brands, the error bars on predicted sales are really wide.

Past performance by the author and publisher are major indicators of how a particular title will sell, so maybe this is something that could be calculated . . . Throw in a few sensible metrics about the author—Twitter Followers(TF), Reviewing Connections(RC), etc.—along with some sort of figures about the publisher—Sales Reps(REP), Average Reach(REA), Influencer Access(IA), etc.—and maybe you can come up with some sort of prediction.

(Pace of Reading(PAC) x Length(LEN)) x (Character Connections(CC) x Plot Points(PP)) x Buzz(BUZZ) = Reading Desirability(DES)

Amazon’s metrics about how fast people read various books, where they tend to stop, which titles are most/least likely to be read in their entirety, etc., totally freak literary people out. There are a ton of Silicon Valley people who would love to create a program that would use some complex algorithm to churn out best-selling book after best-selling book without any author’s involvement whatsoever. They would flood the market with exactly what most people want, all more or less for free, and utilizing some sort of textual analysis that combines all the typical plot elements of popular books (hero’s quest, typical plot structure of rising action, climax, denouement) with other quantifiable elements (language level, sentence and chapter length, number of chapters) that have been found to keep readers engaged and flipping pages.

Take all that, mix in some BUZZ (readers want to feel like they have to read a book so as to not be left out) and you can figure out how likely a book is to appeal to a wide audience.

Turnover(TO) x Cash Profit(CP) x Hipster Quotient(HQ) = Indie Stock(IND)

Bookstores actually have the ability to come up with a ton of different measurements, depending on what they want to track or evaluate. Sales per linear foot in given sections. How fast different subjects turn over. Average amount spent by a customer. Frequency of returning customers. There’s tons of data sitting right there that could be analyzed in a totally straightforward fashion.

But indie stores aren’t necessarily about efficiency in the way Barnes & Noble or Amazon would like to be. Part of their reason for being is tied to having the books that you don’t always find at the big box stores, at pushing a sort of aesthetic agenda that sets them apart. If, as a store owner, you could always know which books will both increase your coolness factor with your clientele and sell with the necessary velocity to keep you paying your rent, you’d be in the best spot possible. This might seem intuitive, but I think it can be a bit more complicated depending on how you value your reputation. For example, you may not want to carry Fifty Shades of Gray because you have standards, but that means you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. And carrying too many different titles that sell one time a year, yet make you seem like the smartest bookstore around, is a recipe for closure. Figuring out that balance—and which books maximize Cash Profit(CP) and Reputation(REP)—would be ideal.

Besides, a lot of this calculus is already done on a daily basis by most everyone. Even though it’s not quantified in a sortable, sharable way, people are constantly making these sorts of decisions. They may not think about them quite as honestly as they should though, and maybe something like a set of publishing sabermetric ideas could help publishers and stores be all that they could be. It’s fun to come up with various calculations, mostly because it makes you think about what you’re actually trying to measure, and why the measurements you might already have fall short. It can help define your mission, and by working in various intangible benefits, you can better justify various investments or decisions.

¹ For anyone not willing to click through (and good on you!), here’s the amazing quote from super-agent Scott Boras:

The off-season is like the America’s Cup. We have 30 boats in the water. They take off and eventually they get to the free-agent docks. Normally, there are trade winds, and there are economic investments in the capacity of the boat, which allow those boats to get to the appropriate free-agent docks.

This year, there was a detour to Japan, where there was a $250 million asset available for $3 million (Ohtani). All boats went to Japan. Then they sailed back a good distance. They came to Florida and found a sinking ship and all of its cargo was in the water (Dee Gordon, Giancarlo Stanton, Marcell Ozuna, Christian Yelich). All teams tried to load it on their boats.

That took additional time. Then, as they moved forward to the free-agent docks, they found other ships dumping cargo—Pittsburgh and Tampa Bay and a few others—which then slowed their arrivals to the free-agent docks. So, trade winds, Japan, shipwreck in Florida, more cargo-spewing, all those things artificially delayed the arrivals to the free-agent docks.

Sorry, I have no idea—but I love it! More literary agents need to go off the rails when making random comments about the books they’re trying to auction. That would liven up book journalism!

² Representative bit from Bicecci and MacSweeney’s Empty Set:

There isn’t much documented evidence of this, but during the military dictatorship in Argentina, teaching basic set theory was prohibited in schools. We know, for example, that a tomato belongs to the tomato(TO) set and not to onion(ON) or chilies(CH) or coriander(CO). Where’s the threat in reasoning like that? In set theory, tomatoes, onions, and chilies might realize they are different foodstuffs, but also that they have things in common, like the fact that they can all belong to the fresh hot salsa(FHS) set and, at the same time, to the Universe(U) of cultivated plants(CP), and might perhaps unite against some other set or Universe(U); for example, that of canned hot salsa(CAHS). In short, a community of vegetables. Venn diagrams are tools of the logic of sets. And from the perspective of sets, dictatorship makes no sense, because its aim is, for the most part, dispersal: separation, scattering, disunity, disappearance.

³ My sabermetric principles apply to BOOKS in general, not just translations, but I want to focus on exploiting this market since it might explain what’s going on in 2018 with the weird decrease in translation publications.

Although! Let me promise the four of you reading this that next month I’ll run some three- and five-year rolling average stats to avoid comparing 2018 to the Best Year Ever. I’ve been statistically irresponsible and I know it. Sorry.

Joyce y las gallinas by Anna Ballbona
200 pgs. | pb | 9788433937261 | €17.90 
Anagrama
Reviewed by Brendan Riley

This review was originally published as a report on the book at and has been reprinted here with permission of the reviewer. The book was originally published in the Catalan by Anagrama as Joyce i las gallinas.

Anna Ballbona’s recent, highly praised, debut novel Joyce y las gallinas follows the misadventures of Dora, a young, disillusioned Catalan journalist who commutes to Barcelona by day from the rather hermetic and lifeless suburbs around the small industrial city of Granollers. Dora’s uninspiring assignments, anodyne reporting on inconsequential city hall press conferences and–for the fourth consecutive year–Epiphany parades for children, leave her hungry for more vital literary and artistic experiences. A weekend holiday to Ireland and an unexpected invitation to a Finnegans Wake reading introduce her to Murphy, a Dubliner whose two passions in life are studying James Joyce and raising chickens—not for eggs or meat, but as pets–hence the novel’s title Joyce y las gallinas [Joyce and the Hens]. Sensing in Murphy’s obsession something stranger and more authentic than her workaday life of commuting, reporting on non-news, and playing half-heartedly at the singles game, Dora finds a catalyst (or is it a siren song?) in the Banksy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop. Under the conceptual spells of mimesis, replication, and transgression, determined to make her own original statement, Dora’s double dose of aesthetic override drives her to adopt an alter ego (Banx) and pursue a new, double life of artistic vandalism—or is it “Banxism”?

The ensuing comedy of errors reveals Ballbona’s novel to be a clever, tightly-stitched contemporary Catalan Dubliners, a sheaf of echoing episodes exploring problems of identity, self-worth, family ties, technology, sterile voyeurism, the perennial anxiety of influence, and the desire to escape from the endless looping subroutines of social conformity. Dora’s odyssey courses our queasy fear that in a biological world of despoiled wilderness and landscapes, our only escape from the social mandate is an ever-circling flight within our own manias. This includes how Murphy’s hen obsession echoes through Dora’s story in a variety of gallina permutations both silly and serious, as she associates freely and comically about hen-based memories from her past, and begins seeing, with ever-greater significance, new and different ones in the strangest of places.

Ballbona’s multifaceted central metaphor, “gallinas,” certainly stands for the traditional Spanish mother, domineering and devoted, the mother hen who keeps family and society meaningfully intact, but also, in our early twenty-first century, stranded in an increasingly anachronistic past. Of course, in English, “gallina” also means “chicken”—both as the helpless candidate for the stewpot and as a blinking, clucking coward. So in Anna Ballbona’s satire, seemingly as familiar and innocuous as a hen’s white egg, we all turn out to be chickens. This is a novel about deception (legal, illegal, and extra-legal), self-delusion, people (all of us?) who hide in plain sight and live in perennial desire for, and fear of, self-exposure, insisting on false appearances even as we (pretend to) revile them. It’s a satire on the cloistered voyeurism that results from our inability to relate to family and society as traditional life is erased, and replaced, dualistically, by an implacable technology and a fractured aesthetic to which we find ourselves beholden, whose implications we cannot understand, but to whose chimes we pirouette, enthralled and in thrall.

Seeking to enact a masterful Joycean-Banksyan performance (one that seems patently ridiculous until we see that it’s really something else), Dora appropriately plays a strange and elaborate game of chicken with her community, right up until the very suspenseful climax, perhaps achieving what she intended, and perhaps achieving something worse, perhaps inevitably so. Dora wants to rouse the world from its somnolence, but is she really the blind sleepwalker, oblivious to the absurdity of her mimesis?

In addition to clear, measured and subtly wry prose, engagingly cerebral with a light touch, Joyce y las gallinas also sports a fine and effective cast of secondary characters. Most notably we meet–following a strange encounter between a tennis aficionado and a Rottweiler–the noxious Alfred—a sleazy, henpecked forty-something dysfunctionally devoted to his mother, Engracieta—who provides sinister comic menace and vital suspense.

It’s a happy fact of geography for Ballbona that one of the familiar train depots heading out of Barcelona to Granollers, a busy stop on Dora’s daily commute, is Montcada Bifurcació. In a book about double lives and alter egos (Jekyll and Hyde is/are name-checked early on) this is a resonant binomial. Montcada is a small mountain at the north end of the Collserola massif; conspicuously quarried away for generations, it is gradually being flattened to nothing—a mountain ceasing to be a mountain, a name without a place, a place without its namesake. It is not unlike the questing Dora—a young Catalan woman at odds with her people, place, and tradition; a journalist who finds little meaning in daily life, who feels herself a very bland sort of belle du jour, a woman who finds a kind of cowardly courage to become, by night, a headless chicken on the run that really wants to be a crowing rooster. Birfurcació means, of course, bifurcation, and as Dora dwells on that train stop, (and given the novel’s wild, peculiar climax that feels rather more Flann O’Brien than strictly Joyce), bifurcation brings to mind Jorge Luis Borges’ signature story “The Garden of Forking Paths” (in Spanish, El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan). And just as Borges’s koan-like fiction of forking fortune leaves the reader reverberating with wonder and doubt, Ballbona’s slender, artful dodger of a novel plays its black box finale with a very deft sleight-of-hand.

by Leila Slimani, translated from the French by Sam Taylor (Penguin)

This novel first came to my attention on Twitter when someone (Jeffrey Zuckerman?) was complaining that the translator, Sam Taylor, wasn’t even referenced in this profile that the ran. The author of the piece had responded, half-defending herself (she had read the book in French, so the translation sort of slipped her mind), and saying they’d add Sam to the online version. (Spoiler: They haven’t.)

It’s always nice when a publication with a massive readership covers international literature, but the fact that they wrote about Slimani’s novel—winner of the Goncourt, a “#1 International Bestseller,” a book about nannies and mothering fears that probably hit a lot closer to home for the New Yorker’s readership—is in no way surprising. This is a book designed to start conversations and garner praise. Like an Imagine Dragons song, it feels at times as if it was crafted by algorithm, perfectly designed to press all the right buttons in a general reader.

That said, it’s a pretty good book. If you haven’t read the jacket copy (or the aforementioned New Yorker article), this is a novel about a “perfect” nanny who loses her shit and murders the two kids in her care and herself. All of that is explained in the opening pages (“The baby is dead.” is the first line), and then we go back in time to see how the nanny came to work in this household, what sort of anxiety cracks were drawn on her psyche, the increasingly complicated relationship between Louise and her employers, before returning to that first scene in which there is blood, screaming, and dead babies.

I suspect that description is intriguing enough to hook a lot of readers, but “a lot” isn’t necessarily the sort of explosive hit that Penguin is hoping for.

Chanson Douce has been translated into eighteen languages, with seventeen more to come. The title means “sweet song,” which was rendered Lullaby for the British edition. The American one, which comes out in January, will be called The Perfect Nanny. John Siciliano, Slimani’s editor at Penguin, told me, “I didn’t want to call it Lullaby, because that sounds sleepily forgettable, and my goal is to reach a big commercial readership.” He name-checked Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train and said, “We’re getting this book into places like Walmart and Target.”

Although there’s no way to know for sure if a book is going to take off or not, there are certain criteria that give a title a leg up. is an attempt to figure out some of the “subtle cues” that make certain books appeal to the masses while leaving others destined for the Great Remainder Pile in the Sky. I haven’t read this book (sounds sort of interesting to me, but only in a version), and have no experience working on a best-seller, which is the perfect backdrop for some wild, unlearned speculation about why The Perfect Nanny is going to take off.

1) It’s short and breezy. This book hardly fills its 220 pages. The chapters are short, there are a ton of blank pages, the leading is sizeable, the whole novel is readable in around four hours. This is good! Who wants to read a brick that they’ll have to carry around for weeks and weeks? Something with a lot of words on the page? NERDS. That’s who.

2) The style is from the Hemingway school of writing—short, direct, concise, with little abstraction. People love this shit. For a book to be a best-seller, it has to be an entertainment first. And what’s entertaining to the widest range of readers is a book that is solid, something you can easily envision, with sentences you never get lost in. (Having to reread a sentence or a paragraph would negate the gains found in point number one.) Here’s a totally random example of Slimani’s writing:

The children come out of the water and run, naked, into their mother’s arms. Louise starts cleaning up the bathroom. She wipes the tub with a sponge and Myriam tells her: “Don’t bother, there’s no need. It’s late already. You can go home. You must have had a tough day.” Louise pretends not to hear. Squatting down, she continues scrubbing the edge of the bath and tidying up the toys that the children have tossed around.

The whole novel is unchallenging in that way. It’s the kind of writing that you can sort of relax into, the type of writing that lets you forget that your life is stressful and a struggle. I can see why this appeals to a lot of people—it’s the sort of writing that uncomplicates your consciousness as you read it.

3) Ambiguous character motivations. Although people love prose that’s concrete and unambiguous, they don’t want the characters to be that simple. You’re a fool if you think that this book is going to clearly, in logical, indisputable fashion, explain exactly what went wrong for Louise and what led her to kill Mila and Adam. What would be the fun in that? How can you even have a book-club discussion if you can’t argue about the core part of the book. (“Was she always dangerous and the stress put her over the edge?” “Was it because of her money problems?” “Was she resentful of Myriam and Paul’s success and seeming disinterest in having more kids?” “Did Paul and Myriam force her into this situation?”) If a book doesn’t have that sort of ambiguity at its core, lots of readers will simply forget it.

4) Going one step further, all the main characters should be both inherently sympathetic and, at the same time, somewhat evil. The scene when Paul blows up at Louise about putting makeup on Mila is a good example of this. Paul’s a decent enough guy—contrary to cliche, there’s no sexual tension between him and his perfect nanny—but not always. He loses his temper. He’s not always in tune with his wife. He’s loud when he’s drunk. We don’t always like him. And for most of the book, Louise is incredibly sympathetic, especially as you find out about her estranged daughter’s behavioral issues, the financial disarray her husband left her in when he died (thanks to his kooky belief that the best job in the world was firing off questionable lawsuit after questionable lawsuit), etc., even though, all along, from moment number one, you know that she’s brutally murdered two kids.

5) The fact that Penguin wants this book to be successful. If you throw enough money at it—and stock it in Walmart and Costco and Wegmans—you will be able to sell a boatload of copies. (And you’ll be able to get it into the right hands so that it’s “Named One of 2018’s Most Anticipated Books by NPR’s Weekend Edition, Real Simple, The Millions, The Guardian, Bustle, and Book Riot.) Sure, some books are flops, but when a corporate publisher puts their might behind something like this, a flop means they only sold 25,000 copies instead of 200,000. Sure, this isn’t financially successful for them, but getting that many people to read a given book seems pretty damn good to, I don’t know, 99% of all writers? Success is relative.

6) Also doesn’t hurt that this book is available in 35 languages. On the surface, that wouldn’t really seem to matter that much for readers here in the States, but at the same time, just think about the cumulative marketing efforts (money + manpower) taking place all over the globe for this book. There’s some sort of publishing alchemy that takes place when so many partners around the globe are all focused on the same book.

7) Disagreement about whether the book is good or not. Sure, this seems like a crazy statement, since word-of-mouth is generally predicated on the idea that people who love the book foist it on their friends and family, who also love it, tell their Twitter followers, and so on and forth. But a book that’s universally liked is boring. When The DaVinci Code first broke, I knew just as many people who hate-read it as those who read it because they actually thought it was a fun story. Dissention breeds interest.

But would anyone really dislike The Perfect Nanny? Sure, if you’re a soon-to-be parent, you might be a bit wary about reading a book about dead babies (although people love books with dead babies? because it’s shocking and disturbing?), but this book isn’t really offensive. At worst it’s just a novel. Nothing mindblowing, nothing crappy. Just a book for the sake of book.

At this moment, there are 39 reviews of this Here’s the breakdown by percentage: 5 Stars 23%, 4 Stars 18%, 3 Stars 10%, 2 Stars 28%, and 1 Star 21%. That’s remarkably flat! All combining to give the book a very middling 3 stars.

In the end, this might be a great thing for this book. It’s not hard to envision a narrative about how the book is divisive, that there’s no consensus on this “shocking,” “thrilling” novel that’s become the “most talked about book of 2018.” Cool. But whatever. I want to see what these 1-star reviews are all about!

To be honest, I have not and will not read this book. I am disgusted that anyone would be inspired to profit from the real life murder of two beautiful children.

I wouldn’t read this evil drivel if Shakespeare had come back from the dead to co-author it. Judging from the other reviews, it’s dull and poorly written on top of being evil. It’s popularity in France just makes me think less of the French.

Evil! That’s a pretty intense claim! And “profit from the real life murder of two beautiful children”? I know the book was inspired by a nanny murder that took place in NYC in 2012, but c’mon. Not only is this book wildly different in terms of setting and situation, but Penguin didn’t even use “Ripped from the Headlines” on the cover. Does this reviewer hate all true-crime books as well? What is her motivation here?

Shallow. Not well written. If I knew how shallow the book is I wouldn’t have wasted $10+ to buy it.

That’s what I say about local craft cocktails. “This Sazerac is shallow! If I knew how shallow it would be, I would’ve saved my $10 for some Genny Light!”

Did not like it at all.

Cool. That’s some high quality critical work.

Copied a real life tragedy without the family’s permission. Very disheartening.

Now I’m curious—was there some scandal surrounding this book related to the real-life crime? The only thing I could find in a cursory Google search was this bit from Marie Claire:

The devastating opening scene of the book is strikingly similar to the case of Manhattan nanny Yoselyn Ortega, who murdered two children under her watch—Lucia and Leo Krim—before attempting suicide by stabbing herself in the neck, though Slimani told The Telegraph the plot of Lullaby is entirely fictional.

I must be missing something . . . If this book were about a normal murder (like, a dude killing another dude because dude stuff) and based on an episode of Law & Order, would people be upset? I kind of doubt it?

The characters were never fully developed, and I cannot comprehend how The Nanny was able (allowed) to ingratiate herself so thoroughly
into the lives and home of her employers. And what was the incident(s) that led her to ultimately kill the two children in her care? And on and on,
Not the best book I have read recently.

“Reader”‘s idiosyncratic approach to line breaks worries me.

Before I read a book, I generally check the number of pages. It has been my experience that books with 300 plus pages have better developed characters. I should have applied my quirky rule to this book, a 236 page novel translated into English from a best-selling, award winning French author. [. . .] just as quickly as it began, I found myself at 96% complete not knowing enough about Louise to fathom why she killed the children. In fact, I thought the last few chapters about the police detective and recreation of the crime were just “fill-in” words but perhaps much of the meaning was lost in translation.

There are a few reviews that imply that the translation is to blame for Louise’s motives never becoming completely clear. That clearly makes no sense. The whole point of the book is to raise questions and depict a horrible situation with no clear cause and effect that forces you to sort of examine your own beliefs and ideas. It’s amazing that readers would assume that the French version has some magic paragraph that, when you read it, suddenly illuminates every little mad crevice of Louise’s mind.

The beginning of this book was promising. But as I read on, chapter after chapter, the storyline took on a very dark, depressing, sinister quality. [. . .]
The author takes you down a path of deepening quicksand….and you feel heavier & heavier until you are completely submerged, and leaves you hanging.
Do not reccomend!!!!

Fucccck booooks that are daaark.

If I had only known it was “The French Gone Girl” I wouldn’t have bought it.

Interesting. And probably not a useful comment to most readers?

And, finally, because why not:

bq.SO DISAPPOINTED – MORE LIKE TRASH
CHARACTERS NOT DEVELOPED
TRANSLATION “WANTING”
POOR ENDING AND SO ON
SORRY I CHOOSE TO PAY FOR IT.

From: Editors at ForeWord Reviews <editors@forewordreviews.com>
Subject: You’ve Been Approved for a Digital Review!
Date: May 9, 2011 3:03:21 PM EDT
To: Chad W Post <chad.post@rochester.edu>
Reply-To: Editors at ForeWord Reviews <editors@forewordreviews.com>

Dear Chad Post,

Thank you for sending us your book for consideration. We love seeing new books.

I’m writing to let you know that The Book of Happenstance was approved for a ForeWord Digital Review.

Digital Reviews is our new review service for books that meet our standards for worthy books, but which we can’t cover in our print magazine. Each issue of ForeWord only allows us to cover a few great pre-publication books, and many books come to us that we’d love to review if we had the space. Our Web site has lots of space!

Digital Reviews are the same as print ForeWord reviews in many respects: the books must meet our quality standards; we use the same proficient reviewers; and the reviews are featured on our Web site and iPhone app and licensed for publication in the top title information databases used by booksellers and librarians: Baker & Taylor’s TitleSource III, Ingram’s iPage, Bowker’s Books in Print, and Gale’s licensed databases.

Digital Reviews are different from ForeWord reviews in that they are a fee-for-service review. A $99 fee covers the expense of writing and posting the review.

Please understand that sometimes a reviewer, who spends more time with each book than we can at the ForeWord offices, finds that a book is not completely up to ForeWord’s review standards. When that happens, the reviewer will decline to review the book, and I get in touch with the author or publisher, and we refund the review fee. I appreciate your understanding in this matter.

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ForeWord Reviews

editors@forewordreviews.com

I mean, I can understand the need to commodify one’s business and website, but, well, this just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I think mainly because it really cheapens the product. Obviously some reviews that are paid for will be negative ones, but nevertheless, the only reviews on the site are ones that are bought. That makes for a very skewed representation of what the new books are . . .

And as Nate quipped, “We should ask if we can pay them $500 and have them review it 5 different times.”

Finally, new policy: With every book, I’m going to email ForeWord that we’ve “selected them as worthy of receiving a review copy” and that we’ll send this along once we receive the requisite $15 to cover the cost of the book and shipping & handling. Thankyouverymuch.

San Francisco Chronicle books editor Oscar Villalon is leaving the paper, having taken a buyout. Buyouts have been looming at the paper, which has been suffering from worsening financial woes along with other major dailies throughout the country. Villalon’s last day will be Friday, and it is expected that deputy book editor Regan McMahon will now oversee the section, one of only a handful of print standalone book review sections still running. Villalon’s departure leaves McMahon as the only full-time staffer handling books. (from )

I really like Oscar—he’s an incredibly funny and sincere guy—and it sucks to see this happen. More true than ever thought that the days of extensive (and non-wire) book coverage in local newspapers are quickly becoming a thing of the past . . .

Michael Orthofer—who both questioned the veracity of this statement and the idea that a review of a translation a week was a success—compiled some stats on the last three issues:

Of the 62 books reviewed in all a mere two — Ogawa Yoko’s The Diving Pool and Michael Krüger’s The Executor — were originally written in a foreign language (and they only received the ‘books-in-brief’-treatment).

I have a complicated relationship to all of this, in part because I feel that Kibbee’s kind of right—things are getting better for translations, he just chose an odd way of “proving” it—and that it’s not necessarily the mandate/responsibility of the NYTBR to cover a certain number of literary translations. True, it’s unfortunate that so few foreign voices make their way into the Book Review, and as a publisher who is always scrapping for any review coverage we can get, I wish the Times reviewed only literary translations, but I don’t feel like the Times is unilaterally hostile towards all books in translations.

(I’m sure many bloggers will disagree with me about this, but I really believe that what gets reviewed is tied up in a more complicated dynamic including who the publishers are, what’s hot, how publishers publicize, etc., etc. It’s just not as simple as translation vs. English . . . It may fall more into the realm of large publisher—with all the clout and organizational resources associated with that—versus small—and often disorganized or too busy to focus—and since large publishers have the means to really promote their books, and since so few are works in translation, these statistics turn out the way they do. I’d be interested in seeing what the percentages are for coverage of translated books from commercial presses versus translated books from indie presses. I suspect that a healthy percentage of books reviewed in the NYTBR from independent presses are literature in translation—but that the number of reviews of books from independent, or university, presses is rather modest. In shorthand, it’s complicated . . . )

One thing that came up at the Translation Conference panel was the relative lack of translator-reviewers. At a panel that took place a few weeks ago, representatives from the New York Times and The New Republic commented on how it can be difficult to find a good reviewer familiar enough with the context and tradition surrounding a particular work of international literature to be capable of writing a really thoughtful, interesting review.

That may be a bit of a cop-out, but it is absolutely true that there are far more American writers reviewing these days than there are translators . . . Not sure in the end if this would make a difference, but if there were a couple dozen very active translator-reviewers out there pitching books, capable of writing about a work from Brazil without relying solely on the English version and flap-copy bio of the author, maybe there would be an overall increase in the amount of general coverage of translations. . . .