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by Diego Marani, translated by Judith Landry

Language: Italian
Country: Italy
Publisher: Dedalus

Why This Book Should Win: Because Marani invented a “mock international auxiliary language.”

Today’s post is written by the amazing Daniel Hahn, who is both a writer and translator AND a program director at the British Centre for Literary Translation. Once upon a time, we spent a week together at a palace in Salzburg, Austria.

It’s September 1943. A man is found close to death on the quayside at Trieste. He’s wearing a sailor’s jacket, tagged with the name Sampo Karjalainen. He is brought on-board a German hospital ship, the Tubingen, and revived by a kindly doctor. Dr Friari is a Finn, and recognises Sampo Karjalainen as a Finnish name; the man he is treating must, he assumes, be a compatriot. But when Sampo wakes up, he remembers nothing of who he is, and not a word of any language. Dr Friari arranges for him to be sent to Helsinki, where immersion in his land and his language might raise some spark that will help him recover whoever he used to be.

Marani’s book paints a picture of one man’s struggle against the isolation that comes from having no past, and having no language. Though he is made quite welcome by the people he meets, the Helsinki that Sampo comes to inhabit is a city in the midst of a war, under increasing attack from the Soviets. He has a few acquaintances but only one real friend, Olof Koskela, a radical, charismatic pastor who helps him learn the language and shares with him great tales from the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic, among them the tale of the creation of the magical artefact called the “Sampo.” But the book’s only warmth comes from Irma, a nurse. She takes him to her “memory tree,” a tree where she takes everyone who’s important to her, so that the place might be infused with happy memories that she can call upon whenever she needs them. Irma believes her friendship can help him; he, meanwhile, is repelled by the very idea of intimacy, and when she is posted away to Viipuri (Vyborg) he receives and studies her letters but never manages a reply.

The heart of Sampo’s experience, and everything that’s distinctive about the book, is found in his attempts to master his (new) native language—or, at least, to develop his own version of it. It’s a language with four infinitive forms, with fifteen cases (including the abessive, a case denoting absence), a language, says the Pastor, “which should only be sung”; which Sampo uses in his own way, with no sense of register, mixing Biblical language with vocabulary he has picked up in the bar. That thread of intense language acquisition, more than anything, is the unlikely genius of this book, and in particular Judith Landry’s translation; in the carefully tidied-up voice of a language-less first-person, it weaves syntactical reflections through one man’s most basic experience of trying to create an identity. The language is his only possibility of establishing connections to the outside world, seen always through a veil of half-understanding, bits of information to be picked at, turned around, examined exhaustingly until they make sense.

From his lessons with Pastor Koskela, his letters from Irma, his exposure to the world around him as he wanders the Helsinki streets in the uneasy daylight of a northern summer night-time, Sampo does in time construct a Finnish that allows him to communicate. Yes, mastery of language is at the root of power, that’s clear, and yet it is not enough, without an identity, without roots, without the certainty even of his own name. There is nothing easy and nothing obvious about New Finnish Grammar, a translated book about language, a story narrated by a man without an identity or a voice—a tremendously difficult thing to achieve, and here pulled off admirably.

In addition to checking our Monica’s review, I’d also recommend checking out her recently redesigned web publication . Included in this redesign—which looks great—is an an online literary journal she’s launching that will include translated works of fiction, poetry, essays, and literary criticism. Click the link above for more details.

Mr Dick is French bookseller Jean-Pierre Ohl’s debut novel and was released by Dedalus Books earlier this year. Translated from the French by Christine Donougher, the book has received some nice attention in the UK, including with the author.

Monica’s review confirms that this is an interesting book worth checking out:

Jean-Pierre Ohl has written a novel that is at once a curious and adept mix of homage to Charles Dickens, send-up of literary scholarship, and mystery. Generally, I’m leery of books based on literary figures or borrowing heavily from a previous book to bolster a premise, but Mr. Ohl, a bookseller from Bordeaux, France, manages to rise above the common pitfalls of not only a first novel, but of other devices used when one exploits a classic text. Mr Dick or the Tenth Book is inspiring and challenging with its eclectic mix of narrators—François Daumal, the down-trodden boy turned seemingly failed scholar who is obsessed with Dickens, Évariste Borel whose journal tells of his time spent with Dickens during his final days, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s account of a séance where Wilkie Collins and Robert Louis Stevenson are present to contact the spirit of Dickens himself—that keep us guessing even when we are not sure what we are guessing about. . . .

Click here for the rest of the review.

As with any novel with several narrators, this book demands the reader play close attention to the potentially convoluted story. Throughout the whole book, I couldn’t help but think of Julie Kristeva and her concept of intertextuality. Granted, the concept has been around and at times, executed brilliantly, as is the case with Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. In books such as this, there is always the danger of the original text overwhelming or discounting the current text, which is something Ohl avoids in his novel. François Daumal is the main narrator and we meet him as a little boy who is being shipped off to live with his hateful grandmother after his mother and father separate. While living a squalid existence with his grandmother, he finds reprieve in the novels he discovers in the attic where his grandfather used to work. This is the origin of his obsession with Charles Dickens and from then on, he consumes every piece of Dickens literature and criticism he can find.

Within a few months my grandfather’s attic had revealed its treasures. A single glance was all it took me now. I could unhesitatingly pick out the tasty ceps from the boring old boletus: Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (in an abridged version, though I did not know this at the time), A Christmas Carol had dropped one by one into my pouch. Scrooge and his miserliness, Jingle and his sentence fragments, Grimwig and his famous ‘I’ll eat my head’ had become more familiar to me than the boys and girls at school, or even my mother: I kept company with them late into the night. They visited me while I slept. And in the morning I was reluctant to leave their three-dimensional world to flatten myself out until evening on the dismal white page of reality.

François manages to rise above his circumstances with the help of Dickens and ends up in a boarding school on the outskirts of Bordeaux. While there, he discovers he has an uncle, Monsieur Krook, who owns a second-hand bookshop. They develop a father-son type of relationship that is also largely based on a love of Dickens. Once François enters University, he meets the cunning Michel Mangematin who is possibly more obsessed with Dickens than François himself. The basis of their relationship begins as a healthy rivalry to finish the allegedly unfinished Dickens novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Because of François’s low self-esteem, Michel seems to have an edge on him, and constantly berates him. As the pressure of the rivalry bears down on François, he decides to move back to the house in which he had lived with his grandmother in the town of Mimizan. He begins teaching and marries a beautiful redhead, Mathilde, whom he believes he met when he was a boy. He manages to escape (for a time) the Mangematin relationship as well as the obsession with Dickens.

Then, three years later, he receives a call from Mangematin:

‘Hello, Pickwickian!’

I was half-asleep when I answered the phone. The simple greeting that came out of the receiver has the same miraculous effect as Aladdin’s cloth.

‘What’s new in the past three years?’

Those three years in Mimizan flashed before my eyes in the form of ludicrous journeys, speeded up as in a slapstick comedy. From the house to Notre-Dame school. From Notre-Dame school to the Plageco supermarket via Bar de la Marine. From Plageco to the house.

I sat on the edge of my bed.

‘Nothing. What about you?’

‘Masses of things. We must meet.’

‘I know. The university job.’

‘Don’t be stupid. I’ve got some real news’

‘Why tell me?’

Michel gave a burst of laughter. ‘Because you’re the only Pickwickian!’

I was beginning to feel a tingling in my extremities, signaling the end of a long, very long, stiffening. It might have been a pleasant sensation but it had taken me years to put to sleep the part of me that was now awakening. I did not want to go back there again.

And this is when the healthy rivalry turns unhealthy. Time goes by and there is an elaborate set-up that plays out at a Dickens museum full of wax characters from his novels. The people attending the gala are dressed as Dickens characters as well to add to the surreal unfolding of the denouement. At this point, François has fallen on hard times—with no job and Michel having manipulated his wife away from him—he shows up at the gala that is celebrating the release of Michel’s book about the solution to The Mystery of Edwin Drood. A macabre scene unfolds between Michel and François, uncovering an elaborate vengeance that ends with a murder. And it is a surprise to the reader who has diligently followed every narrator, invested himself in the conceit of the book.

Mr Dick and The Tenth Book may seem a bit light at the start, with appearances from literary figures ranging from George Sand to Wilkie Collins, but François’s joyless narrative provides a sobering contrast that evolves into intricate work of fiction. Ohl has mastered a blend of parody and vengeance that few writers can do. Except, of course, for Dickens.

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