The full schedule is below, but in short, the first live episode will be on (available as a podcast the next morning), and we’ll wrap things up on February 24th. This works out to approximately 66-70 pages a week, depending on which volume you’re using. (More on that below.)

For anyone unfamiliar with William Gaddis, he was one of the titans of twentieth-century literature. He wrote five novels, of which, The Recognitions ���Ի���J R are the most widely discussed, although his fourth novel, A Frolic of His Own, earned him his second National Book Award. (J R also won the NBA.) His works are complex, filled with allusions, and, especially in the case of J R, incredible in terms of capturing the chaos and frenetic buzz of conventional speech. He’s also the subject of Jonathan Franzen’s “” essay from the New Yorker.��

Since Franzen sucks and doesn’t like J R, I’m not going to quote from that article, although I will ���ܲ������Գٱ����that it will be discussed on numerous occasions this season.

And yes, All of his works are heady, but I’m willing to bet that if you give J R a chance, you’ll quickly fall into the patter, the chaos, the jokes, and the plot (such as it is). Here’s the copy from the :

At the center of J R is J R Vansant, a very average sixth grader from Long Island with torn sneakers, a runny nose, and a juvenile fascination with junk-mail get-rich-quick offers. Responding to one, he sees a small return; soon, he is running a paper empire out of a phone booth in the school hallway. Everyone from the school staff to the municipal government to the squabbling heirs of a player-piano company to the titans of Wall Street and the politicians in Washington will be caught up in the endlessly ballooning bubble of the J R Family of Companies.

First published in 1975 and winner of the National Book Award in 1976, J R is an appallingly funny and all-too-prophetic depiction of America’s romance with finance. It is also a book about suburban development and urban decay, divorce proceedings and disputed wills, the crumbling facade of Western civilization and the impossible demands of love and art, with characters ranging from the earnest young composer Edward Bast to the berserk publicist Davidoff. Told almost entirely through dialogue, William Gaddis’s novel is both a literary tour de force and an unsurpassed reckoning with the way we live now.

Speaking of that National Book Award win, back in 2009, the National Book Foundation published a series of posts (and maybe a physical booklet?) with . Harold Augenbraum gave me the honor at that time of writing both about Gravity’s Rainbow (another foundational book for me) ���Ի���J R.��Here’s what I had to say way back then:

J R is the perfect novel for our new recession-driven world. Similar to Gravity’s Rainbow (which I wrote about earlier), this is another encyclopedic novel with dozens of characters, subplot upon subplot, quite literally overflowing with ideas, conversations, and detritus. And money. It’s all about money.

At the heart of this comic masterpiece is an eleven-year-old boy named J R, who, with a bit of capitalist ingenuity and the help of his music teacher Edward Bast, builds a paper fortune out of surplus goods, common stock, and an unerring ability to game the system. It’s a coming-of-age tale for the late-capitalist period of irrational exuberance.

Of course, things fall apart in the end. Bast—who dreams of becoming a composer—loses his artistic mojo, and J R’s paper empire is just that, and implodes like a house of cards. (Sound familiar?)

It’s not like we weren’t warned though—entropy always wins. It’s just like science teacher Jack Gibbs says early on in the novel:

In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of the knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos . . .

There is tons of chaos in J R.��Everywhere you turn in this book you find another mess. The amount of clutter Gaddis was able to work into a book that’s narrated almost entirely through dialogue is amazing.

And that’s probably the most amazing thing about J R.��Although some early critics were flummoxed by this method of unattributed dialogue, after 50 pages a half-way perceptive reader picks up the rhythms and phrases and can jump ahead a few hundred pages and immediately identify which character is speaking.

J R is America. It’s a loud, raucous book of voices, messes, and money. It’s a book with a solid cult pedigree that should be read, and read again, for pure pleasure and great insight into the insanely frantic world we inhabit.

It’s been probably fifteen years since I last read this book, and I really hope that you’ll join us in the fun, frenetic chaos that’s sure to be the fourteenth season of the Two Month Review.��We have a lot of guests lined up—some first time readers, some Gaddis experts—who will help Brian and I to contextualize and dig into this modern masterpiece.

Few notes on the schedule: I broke up this season by “” based on Steve Moore’s incredibly helpful . His page numbers are based on the original Knopf version, the layout for which was retained by both Penguin Classics and Dalkey Archive Press when they reprinted it. NYRB has reformatted the book slightly, making it a few dozen pages longer. Given the popularity of the book and previous editions, I’m including all the page numbers below so that everyone knows how to follow along. And once again, you can watch the first episode live on 12/16 .

 

December 16: Scenes 1-11 (pgs 1-72 NYRB, 1-68 others)
December 23: Scenes 12-18 (pgs 73-145 NYRB, 68-137 others)
December 30: Scenes 19-31 (pgs 146-209 NYRB, 137-197 others)
January 6: Scenes 23-42 (pgs 210-289 NYRB, 197-272 others)
January 13: Scenes 43-47 (pgs 290-353 NYRB, 272-332 others)
January 20: Scenes 48-56 (pgs 354-424 NYRB, 332-400 others)
January 27: Scenes 57-61 (pgs 425-491 NYRB, 400-463 others)
February 3: Scenes 62-67 (pgs 492-572 NYRB, 463-543 others)
February 10; Scenes 68-71(pgs 573-647 NYRB, 543-610 others)
February 17: Scenes 72-75 (pgs 648-703 NYRB, 610-663 others)
February 24: Scenes 76-83 (pgs 704-770 NYRB, 663-726 others)

See you next week for scenes 1-11!

Melville by Jean Giono
Translated from the French by Paul Eprile
108 pgs. | pb | 9781681371375 | $14.00

Review by Brendan Riley

In The Books in My Life (1952), Henry Miller, devoting an entire chapter to French writer Jean Giono (1895-1970), boasts about spending “several years. . . . preaching the gospel––of Jean Giono. I do not say that my words have fallen upon deaf ears, I merely complain that I have made myself a nuisance at the Viking Press in New York, for I keep pestering them intermittently to speed up the translations of �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s works.”^[i]

Indefatigable gusher, self-mythologizer, and, among many other things, enthusiast of whatever struck his fancy at the moment, (including, in Black Spring, the joy of open-air urination behind the blind of a Parisian pissoir) Miller tenders this lugubrious caveat:

“Fortunately I am able to read Giono in his own tongue and, at the risk of sounding immodest, in his own idiom. But . . . I continue to think of the countless thousands in England and America who must wait until his books are translated. I feel that I could convey to the ranks of his ever-growing admirers innumerable readers whom his American publishers despair of reaching. I think I could even sway the hearts of those who have never heard of him––in England, Australia, New Zealand and other places where the English language is spoke. But I seem incapable of moving those few pivotal beings who hold . . . his destiny in their hands. Neither with logic nor passion, neither with statistics nor examples, can I budge the position of editors and publishers in this, my native land. I shall probably succeed in getting Giono translated into Arabic, Turkish and Chinese before I convince his American publishers to go forward with the task they so sincerely began.” (Miller 100).

Whether or not Miller’s translation mission prodded Viking into action, a search of various online publication sources shows that some 16 of �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s 33 finished novels have, so far, been translated into English. Some notable examples include Hill (trans. Paul Eprile, NYRB, 2016), the third English-language translation of �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s Colline, which has also appeared in English as Hill of Destiny (translated by Jacques Le Clercq, published by Brentano’s 1929), and again, in 1986, translated by Brian Nelson, bearing the French title Colline. �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s adventure novel The Horseman on the Roof was translated by Jonathan Griffin in 1982—many people have seen the well-regarded 1995 film adaptation starring Juliette Binoche and Oliver Martinez—and a collection of essays, The Battle of Pavia, was translated by A.��E. Merch in 1985. In 2017, nearly half a century since Miller’s effusion, and 76 years after its initial publication in 1941, NYRB issued the first English translation of �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s Melville, a splendid read, also translated by Paul Eprile. Henry Miller singled out Melville for high praise:

“When [Giono] touches a man like our own Herman Melville, in the book called Pour Saluer Melville (which the Viking Press refuses to bring out, though it was translated for them), we come very close to the real Giono––and, what is even more important, close to the real Melville. This Giono is a poet. His poetry is of the imagination and reveals itself just as forcibly in his prose. It is through this function that Giono reveals his power to captivate men and women everywhere, regardless of rank, class, status or pursuit.” (Miller 102)

Miller also confesses that Herman Melville “is not one of my favorites. Moby-Dick has always been a sort of bête noir for me,” but says that “After reading Pour Saluer Melville, which is a poet’s interpretation of a poet,––‘a pure invention,’ as Giono himself says in a letter––I was literally beside myself. How often it is the ‘foreigner’ who teaches us to appreciate our own authors!” (Miller 110-111).

In his introduction to this NYRB edition, Edmund White offers a different sort of appreciation: “[Pour Saluer Melville] began as the introduction to [�Ҿ��DzԴ�’s] translation of Moby-Dick (the first in French)” and “still the standard translation into French.” The short novel that evolved from that introduction, says White “must be one of the strangest homages from one major author to another.”^[ii]

A slender, captivating work, barely 100 pages, �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s Melville, is clear, colorful, lyrical, and light on its feet. A really fine short novel whose limpid concision feels instructional, and whose chromatic emotional depth feels inspirational. �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s propulsive story of a middle-aged Melville falling in love far from home is consistently lively, interesting, pleasant, surprising, and memorable. Strange, yes, but also beautiful, gentle, and humane.

�Ҿ��DzԴ�’s luminous, finely crafted prose, via Paul Eprile’s meticulous, elegant translation, has depth and affective resonance, whispering repeated invitations to revisit its simple, wonderfully human scenes.

Wrapping himself in a fictive nineteenth century Melvillian cocoon in which the famous writer connects with, captivates, and is captivated by all sorts of people, Giono frames his fantasia in broad swaths of biography: Melville’s early life in New England, then as an apprentice seaman and mate, his voyages inspiring his early bestsellers: Typee, Omoo, Mardi, and Redburn.

�Ҿ��DzԴ�’s memorable portrait of Melville’s mother—foreshadowing Melville’s later meeting with the fictional Adelina White, an Irish Nationalist who becomes his muse for Moby-Dick—mixes precise and varied detail, stinging satire, bookish allusions, and wry humor, attributes with which the novel as a whole is strongly and effectively imbued:

Now, in 1814, Herman’s father — or, shall we say, in order to become Herman’s father — Allan took Maria Gansevoort as his wife. Poor, dear Mama! To be able to think about her now, Herman would be forced to flush the sweet balm out of his head. The loveliest month of May could never have borne any sort of perfume for poor Maria. She was cold, thin, materialistic, dry, methodical, angular, and arrogant. This truly unique specimen, a perfect combination of these various emotional and physical elements, clothed in austere, two-bit fustian and fortified with whalebone stays, became Mistress Melville. She made immoderate use of these womanly restraints, which her son would later mention with such innocent humor. God might have intended her to use them to drape voluptuous fabric around her body! But since her — one couldn’t really say tender — youth, she’d torn all the love poems out of her Bible and, though already a mother many times over, she still blushed at the sight of the names of Ruth, Esther, Judith . . . those women who, when you came down to it, had put their unmentionable female parts at the service of the glory of the Lord. (Giono 8-9)

Giono also creates effective, sometimes captivating working-class characters including a stable boy, a second-hand goods shopkeeper, and Captain Pearse, commander of the whaler Acushnet, where the young adventurous Melville signs on and becomes a man of the sea. Giono crafts some heady reminiscences about Melville cutting his sailor’s teeth under the rough command of Pearse, a model for Melville’s own “grand, ungodly, god-like” Ahab^[iii]: “Has he ever lashed you? Yes, I mean with a whiplash, on your bare skin? Has he ever stuffed you down in the hold, bound hand and foot, with only a drop of water to drink? . . . I tell you, he does do all these things!” (Giono 18)

And on the hunt for whales, Pearse “doles out slaps and kicks in the rear. Thousands of times, in a sort of perfect, gigantic, arithmetical progression, he’ll blaspheme the name of God with curses that become more and more outrageous and original” (Giono 20). This abuse and blasphemy effect Herman’s own spiritual struggle:

“For fifteen months since he went to sea, he’s been wrestling with an angel. Like Jacob, he’s plunged in darkness, and now dawn comes. Wings—unbearably rigid—beat him, raise him up above the earth, hurl him back down, snatch him up again, and smother him. He hasn’t had a moment’s respite from the fight. No matter if he’s reached his limit; no matter if he’s completely worn out; no matter if he sinks like a stone into his berth: He wrestles with the angel. If he’s leaping into the whaleboat; if he’s riding out an iron-gray tempest; if he’s staring into the sickening maw of one of the giant creatures of the abyss. At the very same time he wrestles with the angel.” (Giono 21).

This wrestling becomes an extended metaphor throughout the novel, which is concerned naturally enough as much with Melville the sailor as Melville the writer—without the former there would have been no latter. When we see Melville sail to England to deliver his manuscript of White Jacket, Giono skips the voyage itself because Melville goes as a passenger, not a sailor, it would have been nothing like his Acushnet experiences.

In London, Herman’s publishers surprise him by immediately agreeing to all of his contractual requests and conditions, leaving the handsome, robust adventurer flush with money and satisfaction and with two weeks to kill in England before his return ship sails. In a perfectly American impulse prescient of his restless, peripatetic Ishmael in Moby-Dick, Melville, who cannot abide a fortnight’s layover in London, and feels driven, wing-beaten, to seek some new adventure, follows his wanderlust and decides to quit the big city (Giono emphasizes Herman’s Yankee pride amid stodgy, smoggy London) and light out for the West—of England. He reaches this decision by asking a stable hand what he would do if he had five pounds and “ten days of freedom to do whatever you liked.” The answer is he’d go to Woodcut, “a little hamlet . . . out Berkeley way, over there above Bristol,” adding “if you do go there, drop by Joshua’s place—-that dirty swine—at the Sign of the Old Sea-Fish. Tell him to do you a rum the way he does one for Dick. The way he does one for Dick. You tell him that.

“Now this is just the kind of adventure Herman likes best.” (Giono 31)

The Melville whose course we then follow is a funny, resourceful, gregarious, and vulnerable confection. Before undertaking his land voyage by mail coach, Herman first decides to outfit himself in secondhand sailor’s clothes. There follows an excellent scene of him haggling for items in a shop in Limehouse, in East London: “fine, blue homespun pants . . . a bargain for a striped sweater . . . made from the best quality Scottish wool . . . a splendid old pea coat: roomy, cozy, genuine, worn by rain, wind, and work, the color of night at sea, something worthy of veneration. A true shelter from the storm, a real ‘sailor’s house,’” along with “Chinese shoes made from elephant hide, as supple as gloves, the toes turned slightly upward in the Tibetan style; a greenish hide––never polished, never greased––with all of its grain; an item both artistic and practical, something absolutely unusual, yet useful everywhere, a true piece of maritime equipment.” (Giono 32-33).

Some of those phrases (supple as gloves; artistic and practical, absolutely unusual, yet useful everywhere) seem indicative of the overall quality of this resonant work whose perfect sentences and water-smooth transitions feel seamless as the segues in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The usefulness, the practicality lie within the novel’s combination of smart storytelling, arresting imagery, and wise, spirited reflections on the human condition.

Melville meets a mysterious woman, Adelina White—a very far cry from Mistress Melville—lawyer’s wife, mother, and Irish nationalist secretly fighting to save the starving Irish by using her social status, beauty, and style to help smuggle contraband wheat into famished Ireland. The passages devoted to Melville’s shy fascination with, and bumbling introduction to her are comical and tender. �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s homage is also an exploration of inspiration: Herman’s attraction to and pursuit of her establish the novel’s dramatic wellspring, while the development and revelation of her character form the story’s moral nexus.

�Ҿ��DzԴ�’s The Solitude of Compassion, translated by Edward Ford (2002) carried Miller’s chapter from The Books in My Life as a foreword. Miller noted that in “In �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s works we have the somberness of Hardy’s moors” (Miller, 103); true enough, some moments during Herman’s mad dash across England with Adelina are suffused with a gloom reminiscent of Hardy, Dickens, or Charlotte Bronte, especially when she asks the driver to make a stop so she can comfort some friends in need but the novel’s thrilling power comes from something else Miller noticed: “We no longer know, in reading his books, whether we are listening to Giono or to ourselves. We are not even aware that we are listening. We live through his words and in them, as naturally as if we were respiring at a comfortable altitude or floating on the bosom of the deep or swooping like a hawk with the downdraught of a canyon. The actions of his narratives are cushioned in the terrestrial effluvium; the machinery never grinds because it is perpetually laved by cosmic lubricants. Giono gives us men, beasts and gods––in their molecular constituency.” (Miller 109)

A gorgeous scene of Herman and Adelina riding atop the coach, exemplary of numerous pastoral moments in the novel, offers a fine illustration of the sort of things Miller was seeing in the novel:

“Morning was brushing the land the way green willow boughs brush the water’s surface. Ripples of liquid light were spreading out across the meadows and the woods, and splashing back as gold dust against the grass stems and the branches. Because of the noise of the wheels, it wasn’t possible to talk. But from time to time, when a new range of sunlit hills emerged from the mist, the two of then looked at each other.” (Giono 69)

Lyrical Giono becomes poet-magus Melville who imparts mystical Blakean visions to Adelina’s eyes and mind. Herman “started to talk about the world that lay before them,” then in a series of power verbs, he “rolled up the sky . . . rolled [it] open again.” He places the forms of nature into her hand and eye, makes “the woods come closer”; he names, fuses, summons, revolves, takes hold of, makes the world rise up, sustains it, turns it upside down and inside out, all to make “her come to life,” imagining “a world––unlike the real one––where he wouldn’t lose her.” (Giono 75)

If Melville’s powers of sight offer the aesthetic locus, Adelina’s story of her early family life, marriage, and commitment to social justice offer Herman a moral lens. Their final moments together, a noble scene upon the broad rolling sweep of the downs overlooking the River Severn estuary and Bristol Bay, the places from which departing boats will smuggle food to Ireland, are the moral and intellectual apogee of the novel. Melville’s boast that “To be a poet is to stay a step ahead of human destiny. The poet doesn’t follow; he isn’t against anything; he’s a step ahead. And he doesn’t serve” (Giono, 98) is countered and tempered by the fact that Adelina has chosen, precisely, to serve those in need, to struggle against inhuman political degradation, risking prison or worse for defying British law. Thus, Herman finally admits to her that his wrestling angel is both “guardian” and “prison guard” (Giono, 98). Indeed, the novel’s message is that we must elevate one another, as Melville and Adelina White do for each other during their brief platonic romance. The lovers’ spirits merge just as their paths diverge.

Melville, a novel about remaining true to one’s own character amid the gnawing squall of mundanities, is a sleek, sometimes uncanny, amalgamation of biography and fantasy, a pared-down modernist echo and distillation of Melville’s best compositional traits: deep learning, a brilliant, droll, insouciant voice—lusty adventurous narrator at odds with the world—breezy, stichomythic conversations, and an enthusiasm for nature, and an ability to render it in broad, luminous strokes and fine details that are inspirational, celebratory, and sacred, for one of Melville’s achievements (like Shakespeare’s Lear on the Heath, Joseph Conrad’s Marlowe and Kurtz in the Congolese rain forest, and, more recently, Peter Matthiessen’s Edgar Watson in the Florida everglades) is to test man on nature’s sacred stage.

Many of these traits that make Melville excellent and invigorating can also be found in Melville’s 1853 story “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo! or The Crowing of the Noble Cock Beneventano.”

In addition to his many novels, Giono, as mentioned, was also the first translator into French of Moby-Dick, which he dubbed his “foreign companion.” It’s interesting to read “Cock-A-Doodle Doo!” as a potent and conspicuous influence on Melville, and the latter as an inspired response to the former, a deliberate chromatic riff on the Melvillian satirical paradox. Melville wrote the story within the lengthening shadow of diminishing reputation and growing financial strain, after Moby-Dick, after Pierre; or The Ambiguities, in the same year that he composed the bleak, utterly pessimistic, gallows humor of “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” a satire on transcendental solipsism, but also, probably, on his own absorption in composing his masterpiece; as Melville scholar David Dowling notes:

“There are many histories to this fine book, and Melville’s herculean effort to write Moby-Dick is certainly one of them. Like the whaling history that undergirds the tale, Melville’s personal history does not bespeak the ordinary. He often locked himself in his room without food, writing in a creative white heat until evening, when his wife and daughters would admonish him to return to the land of the living . . .”
^[iv]

In an excellent 1948 essay, Egbert S. Oliver analyzed “Cock-A-Doodle Doo!” as “a satire on the buoyant transcendental principles which Melville heard echoing and reechoing in the New England hills . . . particularly, a passage from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers by Henry David Thoreau,” calling it “a reductio ad absurdum of the transcendental disregard of materialism.” ^[v] In a complementary analysis from 1970, Harold Beaver, (reader of American literature at the University of Warwick), deemed Melville’s story to be a satire of Wordsworth’s poem Resolution and Independence: “The whole of ‘Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!’ is, in effect, a parody, or paradoxical commentary on Wordsworth’s poem: both open in the ‘plashy’ or ‘squitchy’ damp, but whereas in Wordsworth a bright sun is already rising, in Melville the air is raw, misty and disagreeable;”^[vi] That bright sun portends Wordsworth’s concluding revelation when he is able to behold, within the old leech gatherer’s “shape, and speech,” a spirit his younger self does not possess:

And soon with this he other matter blended,
Cheerfully uttered, with demeanour kind,
But stately in the main; and, when he ended,
I could have laughed myself to scorn to find
In that decrepit Man so firm a mind.
“God,” said I, “be my help and stay secure;
I’ll think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!”^[vii]

 

Beaver continues: “Wordsworth’s opening mood is of joy, Melville’s of cynical depression; in Wordsworth joy turns to dejection, in Melville hypochondria to defiant bravado; Wordsworth ends with stoic resolution, Melville with a continual crow.” (Melville 425) Continual, indeed; throughout the story, Beneventano’s crowing is at first bracing and inspiring but then becomes incessant, absurdly irrepressible, oppressive, and deadly.

It’s also possible to read Melville as a paradoxical parable about the spiritual richness of radical optimism—certainly appealing to an exuberant bon vivant like Henry Miller—and its practical danger in the face of illness and death. Though Wordsworth could, in his famous sonnet composed on Westminster Bridge, celebrate a quiet Friday dawn in London 1802 (significantly not a Sunday but one of the busiest days of the work week) he also, in “Tintern Abbey,” famously despaired of the city

how oft—
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart)^[viii]

In “Cock-A-Doodle-Do!” Melville’s narrator also rants against mid-nineteenth-century social conditions and ills: poverty, disease, financial worries, “rascally despotisms,” and “many dreadful casualties, by locomotive and steamer” (Melville 103). His avowed elixir is Beneventano’s crowing, “equal to hearing the great bell of St. Paul’s rung at a coronation! In fact, that bell ought to be taken down, and this Shanghai put in its place. Such a crow would jollify all London, from Mile-End (which is no end) to Primrose Hill (where there ain’t any primroses), and scatter the fog.”^[ix] And Herman’s excursion in Melville is an extended and (temporarily) successful attempt to do just that, to quit the funk of London and head west. Giono has Melville, antsy as his Ishmael who wants to step into the street and knock mens’ hats off their heads, flee London and travel West across all of southern England, from the Thames to the Bay of Bristol, but in a sly undercutting of Melville’s disdain for trains and those who stoke them, celebrates his overland trip in rapid, rattling mail coach. Along the way, there is a thrilling and delightful near miss between the hurtling Bristol Mail and a farm cart bound for market; the scene brings to mind the wonderfully dramatic coach driving scenes in Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities.

And it’s significant that the west, overlooking Bristol Channel is where Giono leaves Melville in England. Once that scene there is concluded, we are suddenly back in New England, and newly inspired Herman is flush with the frenetic concatenative energy that he will channel into writing Moby-Dick.

If, as Beaver claims, “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” is a satirical inversion of Resolution and Independence, we see this when Melville’s narrator describes himself as “as good a fellow as ever lived – hospitable – open-hearted – generous to a fault: and the Fates forbid that I should possess the fortune to bless the country with my bounteousness” (Melville 117). For him, Beneventano is a sort of celestial lightning rod, a vivifying clarion in effulgent plumage as Merrymusk, the rooster’s owner, confirms when asking the narrator about the cock’s majestic crowing:

“Ain’t it inspiring? Don’t it impart pluck? give stuff against despair?” (Melville 124)

And the message he interprets from Beneventano’s lusting crowing, described variously as “cheerful,” “magic,” “extraordinary,” “noble,” “a jolly bolt of thunder with bells,” “all glorious and defiant,” “a perfect paean and laudamus,” and “a trumpet blast of triumph” is “Be jolly!”

Melville is an empathetic amplification and tempered refinement of “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!”—instead of moping Melville hating the railroad and fearing his creditors who dog him even to church and tavern, �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s Melville, just as Henry Miller loved to be, is free and easy, away from wife and home responsibilities, flush with money, and in his independence, riding across the land (replicating American flight from London, later from New England and the East Coast), meets a woman of steadfast resolution.

Melville is about chaste, ideal, unobtainable, ultimately vanished love. Adelina enjoys Melville’s company, briefly sees the poetical wonders he conjures but the vision he receives from her is greater because he is young, flush with success, yet to be tried fully in social matters. Her craft is evading unjust laws, helping the oppressed which makes Herman’s concerns, by comparison, seem solipsistic, the very solipsism he satirizes in “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” because Melville’s strange story is also a satirical parable of sexual fancy: man’s urgent need and desire to remain hard, upright, and ejaculatory right up to the moment of death—Merrymusk and his family, and trumpeting cock Beneventano smile and crow through their misfortunes, and all perish; the blithely, blindly optimistic narrator wants to believe that their spirits defy death: he pays for their burial, family and cock together all in the same plot, headstone inscribed with the immortal rhetorical questions from Corinthians: “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” Death’s victory is self-evident: the family dies of poverty, disease, and hunger, the very maladies Adelina pretends to fight against. But wagonloads of contraband wheat did not solve the Potato Famine, save millions, prevent mass exodus, or change English law. Adelina asks Herman:

“Do you remember the famine of ’46?”
“Very well. I saw the boats loaded with emigrants arriving in our country, and I brought them a good many kettles of soup myself.”
“Nothing has changed.”
“I assumed so. An entire population doesn’t stop dying of hunger all at once.”
“No, but it stops faster if you think about the starving bellies and work to fill them, instead of spending your time philosophizing about the doctrines of Adam Smith and Ricardo. I know that thousands of English men and women were in agony because they knew what was happening in the Irish cottages. You saw the boatloads of emigrants; we saw the cartloads of corpses thrown into the pits” (Giono 86-87).

Melville’s revelations with Adelina, Giono fancies, inspire a new kind of hallucinatory and amalgamative energy for him to compose Moby-Dick. Of course the novel’s epic genius and some strong reviews did not sustain Melville’s good fortunes or keep the hellhounds (literary and otherwise) off his trail. From there, Giono hastens Melville to his final end—somberly, soberly, but gently, too, and no less reflective. Melville keeps writing after Moby-Dick to ever-diminishing enthusiasm, including close friend Nathaniel Hawthorne’s embarrassment about Pierre. And though Harold Beaver affirms that “Moby-Dick marks not the end but the middle of Melville’s miraculous span” and “astonishing creative outpouring,” he also notes that the novel’s reception was “disheartening”: “Two years after the publication of Moby-Dick, he was still in debt to Harpers for 700 dollars advance royalties,” and that in 1855 “after the failure of Israel Potter, �ʳܳٲԲ���’s associate editor, G.W. Curtis had advised [�Ჹ������’s] new publisher, J.��A. Dix ‘to decline any novel from Melville which is not extremely good’” (Melville 10-12).

Ultimately, though, �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s Melville is fantasia, a confection, not biography. And perhaps what really elevated the novel for the supremely solipsistic Henry Miller, paradoxical misogynistic woman(izer) worshipper so anxious to get Giono into readers’ hands, perhaps what taught him to appreciate Melville was that the imaginary Herman’s final concern is not so much his writing or his general reputation but whether ardent Adelina White—who writes him a few precious letters from England, and then no more—ever read and was ever captivated by Moby-Dick the way that he was captivated by her.

*

Works Cited

^[i] Miller, Henry. The Books in My Life. New Directions Publishing, 1952, via Internet Archive PDF (Digitized 2008).

^[ii] Giono, Jean. Melville – A Novel (Introduction by Edmund White), trans. Paul Eprile. New York Review Book, 2017.

^[iii] Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. W. W. Norton & Company, 1967, p.76

^[iv] Dowling, David. Chasing the White Whale – The Moby-Dick Marathon; or, What Melville Means Today. University of Iowa Press, 2010.

^[v] Oliver, Egbert S. “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” and Transcendental Hocus-Pocus, The New England Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Jun., 1948), pp. 204-216

^[vi]Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories. Edited and with an introduction by Harold Beaver, Penguin English Library, 1970, p. 425.

^[vii] Wordsworth, William. “Resolution and Independence.” English Romantic Writers, edited by David Perkins. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1967, pp. 284-85.

^[viii] Wordsworth, William. “Lines: Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.” English Romantic Writers, edited by David Perkins. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1967, p. 209-211.

^[ix] Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories. Edited and with an introduction by Harold Beaver, Penguin English Library, 1970.

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.

Catherine is an avid reader with interests in French and Francophone literature, modernism, and critical theory, and is soon to graduate with an MA in Culture and Difference from Durham University. Here’s the beginning of her review:

To read a poem by Pierre Reverdy is to enter a world of dreamlike contradictions, surreal metaphors, and jarring juxtapositions. Marked by recurring themes of consciousness, time, distance, and memory, Reverdy’s work inhabits an otherworldly realm. As when viewing a cubist painting, it’s hard to maintain a sense of orientation—follow along a line toward its expected end and, surprise! the work takes an unexpected turn. In Pierre Reverdy, the New York Review Books presents an exemplary collection of Reverdy’s poems in new English translations. Translated by an impressive roster of respected Anglophone poets, among them Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Rexroth, and a dozen others, the works selected here are nevertheless unified by Reverdy’s distinct poetic voice and a propensity for jarring juxtaposition, creating dreamlike imagery painted with lucidity and yet tinged with the surreal.

Known for his associations with such figures as Guillaume Apollinaire, Tristan Tzara, and Andre Breton, Reverdy’s close ties to these and other founding members of the early twentieth-century avant-garde are not to be underestimated. Their influences upon Reverdy’s work, most notably manifest in his surreal imagery and unconventional form, are perhaps best illustrated by the book’s opening selection from Prose Poems. These works, square chunks of text consisting of syntactically normal sentences that nevertheless retain a semantic opacity and make for difficult, if not intriguing reading, doubtless contributing to Reverdy’s reputation as the quintessential cubist poet.

For the rest of the review, go here.

Known for his associations with such figures as Guillaume Apollinaire, Tristan Tzara, and Andre Breton, Reverdy’s close ties to these and other founding members of the early twentieth-century avant-garde are not to be underestimated. Their influences upon Reverdy’s work, most notably manifest in his surreal imagery and unconventional form, are perhaps best illustrated by the book’s opening selection from Prose Poems. These works, square chunks of text consisting of syntactically normal sentences that nevertheless retain a semantic opacity and make for difficult, if not intriguing reading, doubtless contributing to Reverdy’s reputation as the quintessential cubist poet. Apart from their experimental form and use of language, two pieces drawn from this collection published in 1915, “The Intruder” and “The Spirit Goes Out,” particularly resonate with the modern sense of rupture, disorientation, and loss of an old world order, precipitated by what was then known only as the Great War. “The Intruder” begins with the intrusion of a human figure “leading behind him a caravan in chaos” into a world of silence and shadow, sparking a pandemonium heralded by “songs and shrieks” of the new:

A most ancient world was whirling through our heads and we were awaiting the moment when everything would collapse . . . the skies were grey and filled with the howls of machines that cut through our malaise. Once out in the street, we regained our century . . . But that other night, from what era did they all descend upon us, those spirits . . . ?

Similarly, in “The Spirit Goes Out,” Reverdy captures, with striking symbolism, the death of grand narratives simultaneously dealt with by many of his contemporaries. Prefiguring Paul Valéry’s 1919 philosophical essay, “La Crise de l’esprit” on the decay of Western intellectual tradition, Reverdy’s poem paints a scenario in which one might read the speaker’s turning away from lifeless ancient texts toward the piercing light of the present as a nod to Plato’s allegory of the cave,

So many books! A temple whose thick walls were built with books. And inside, where I had entered, who knows how, I don’t know where, I was suffocating. The ceilings were gray with dust. Not a sound. And all these great ideas no longer move, they sleep, or are dead . . . With my fingernail, I clawed at the partition and, bit by bit, I made a hole in the wall on the right. It was a window and the sun that tried to blind me couldn’t keep me from looking out

The poem’s final lines suggest liberation from the symbolic and a return to the real signified by the juxtaposition of darkness and light, a frequently recurring theme throughout the works selected in this volume. From burning lamps to brilliant stars, clouds of dust and pitch-black nights, these of Reverdy’s works are replete with symbols of illumination as well as elements of obscurity. While the two are often paired to create a stark contrast, many of Reverdy’s poems share characteristics of a world dulled by impenetrable clouds. “A Lot of People,” (translated by John Ashbery) offers a characteristic glimpse into this shadowy realm:

Over there is only a black hole
      Beyond the gate a laughing head
And in dust the noise died away
      Cloud
      Chiaroscuro
          Stop breathing
All the birds are dead
          The sun has burst
Blood flows
In the water where his eyes were drowning

Building upon themes of darkness and light, Reverdy’s work is replete with eyes, windows, and mirrors—symbols associated with the Lacanian concept of the gaze. Many of Reverdy’s poems examine the act of looking itself, as if describing the experience of visual perception from a detached and objective viewpoint. For the speaker in “Nothing”:

The world is erased
    At the point where I will disappear
Everything is snuffed out

There is no longer even a place
For the words I will leave

Much of Reverdy’s work is permeated by a sense of self-observation reminiscent of lucid dreaming, as if the anonymous subject in poems including “That”, “False Portal or Portrait,” and “Inner Motion” is in fact the poetic persona speaking from beyond immediate experience. The mirror figures as a prominent symbol in many poems, offering a fixed portrait of perceived reality, “the oval holding my whole countenance frozen,” or, alternatively, appearing as a gaping portal to the unknown, “[sending] back no images” while “[n]ight lurk[s] in the background.” In “Body and Soul Superimposed,” it is “that icy black abyss ruled by a threatening void and an equally threatening silence: the likelihood of every possible laceration,”—a line that perfectly captures the overwhelming tone of Reverdy’s poetry, which would arguably make for interesting examination under a psychoanalytic lens.

The poems’ recurring references to light, gaze, and mirrors—as emblematic of the confrontational encounter leading to self-recognition—reveals the readily apparent influences of Cubism upon Reverdy’s work in ways that extend beyond stylistic considerations and touch upon contemporaneous issues of philosophy. Judging by the content as well as the formal structure of his writing, Reverdy clearly contributes to and shares in the avant-garde fascination with unconscious dream-states and unknown aspects of the human mind. By exploring the surface of objects and reflected images, Reverdy undermines the illusion of a cohesive self, revealing the fracturing and fluidity of identity. Yet Reverdy also transforms the “void” or “black abyss,”—always just on the verge of experience, hidden behind the glint of a mirror or below the surface of unfathomable depths—from a threatening state of breakdown, and into a promise of unveiled reality. In “Secret,” Reverdy writes, “after the anxiety of the tightest, straightest passage, we always find an oasis of calm and repose in the whiteness of the expanse, the silence.” The ambiguity with which Reverdy’s poems refer to emptiness and lack is perhaps best expressed by “Fate Founders,” which deals with themes of absence and presence, ultimately suggestive of the trace inscribed in and by writing:

And if everything I’ve seen has deceived me of reality
If there was nothing behind the canvas
but an empty hole
What reassures me a bit is that I can always stay on
       the sidelines
Hang on
And leave a faint memory on earth
A gesture of regret
A sour expression
       What I did best

What Reverdy himself did best is amply demonstrated by the translations contained in this book, which brilliantly convey the linguistic meaning and artistic spirit of the original texts. In accordance with the Cubist goal of restructuring experience at the surface level to express or gain insights into reality from multiple perspectives, Reverdy’s poetic language is both compellingly evocative and yet nonetheless oblique. Although most of the works presented in Pierre Reverdy are treated by a single Anglophone translator, three renditions of “Live Flesh” by Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Rexroth, and Lydia Davis offer brilliantly nuanced versions of the poem, each maintaining the integrity of Reverdy’s artistic vision while exposing the play of language and subtle variants in meaning that allow for slight divergences in translation. Unfortunately, “Live Flesh” is one of only a few to be featured in so many versions, and this is a shame, as it provides a fascinating example of the subjective nature of translation and interpretation of work as richly symbolic as Reverdy’s.
While the works collected in Pierre Reverdy show off the poet’s skill to its best and most characteristically modern effect, it comes as no surprise that the poems exhibited are dazzling, dreamlike, and surprisingly contemporary in feel. With these excellent translations now making Reverdy’s work accessible to an Anglophone audience, this book deserves attention from not only students and readers of French literature, but anyone with an interest in early twentieth-century avant-garde poetry.

Hannah is one of two Hannahs interning at Open Letter this summer. We’re still working on a good nickname for her—for now, depending on the situation, we (read: I) have been referring to the Hannahs as “Hannah” and “Other Hannah.” (If yet another of our interns, Reagan, was also a Hannah, things would get messy. Other Other Hannah?)

Anyway, this relatively small volume of stories by Nescio sounds pretty cool, particularly the chronology of style behind it, and falls into the category of compact volumes from NYRB that I personally can’t wait to dive into—a fairly long list that (in no particular order) includes .

Here’s the beginning of Hannah’s review:

Nescio, Koekebakker, J.H.F. Grönloh. Writing only in his spare time, he was known to most of the world as a respectable and prominent businessman, the director of the Holland-Bombay Trading Company: exactly the kind of man whom his early protagonists would scorn, and at whom his later protagonists would smile grimly, knowing that “respectability” is society’s code-word for “half-stifled misery.” Producing only a few short stories, he went largely unnoticed during his lifetime, only posthumously gaining a place in the canon of Dutch literature. Now, his poignant and subtly humorous Amsterdam Stories have finally been brought to an English-speaking audience by Damion Searls, an award-winning translator who works with German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch texts.

The nine stories and novellas of this collection, arranged in chronological order of their writing, come together to form a composite portrait of a single life — quite transparently a version of Nescio’s own. In his early stories, such as “The Freeloader” and “Young Titans,” the narrator is Koekebakker, who is idealistic, poor, and (mostly) happy, confident as he is “going to do _something_” with his life. A vague, beautiful something that animates him and his group of four like-minded friends. The narrator looks back on this youth with jaded wistfulness: “We were kids — but good kids . . . We’re much smarter now, so smart it’s pathetic.” But in spite of this cynicism, it is surprisingly easy to get caught up in the half-baked ideas and humorous antics of Koekebakker & Co. . . .

For the rest of the review, go here.

The nine stories and novellas of this collection, arranged in chronological order of their writing, come together to form a composite portrait of a single life — quite transparently a version of Nescio’s own. In his early stories, such as “The Freeloader” and “Young Titans,” the narrator is Koekebakker, who is idealistic, poor, and (mostly) happy, confident as he is “going to do something_” with his life. A vague, beautiful something that animates him and his group of four like-minded friends. The narrator looks back on this youth with jaded wistfulness: “We were kids — but good kids . . . We’re much smarter now, so smart it’s pathetic.” But in spite of this cynicism, it is surprisingly easy to get caught up in the half-baked ideas and humorous antics of Koekebakker & Co. They are a bit ridiculous, especially seen from the narrator’s half-bitter, half-indulgent viewpoint, but they are sincere, delightful, and recognizably _real. The exception of course is Japi, the exasperating but fascinating “freeloader” of the collection’s first story, who is more allegory than man. He observes, he sits, he walks. He borrows money, smokes other people’s cigars, and takes his friend’s cloak when they are walking in the rain. And, when the world catches up with him and tries to pin him down into a job, he quietly and almost cheerfully steps off a bridge. A simple (even silly) story, but Nescio pulls it off with grace and warmth.

By “Little Poet,” written when Nescio was thirty-five, the narrator begins to lose his wistful nature and takes a more openly mocking stance toward his protagonist, and possibly against poetry in general. He leaves Koekebakker and his group behind, moving on to a nameless, doomed young poet, whom he pokes fun at mercilessly. One of the conduits of this fun-poking is the God of the Netherlands, who can’t seem to understand why he bothers to keep creating poets, particularly the meek, boyish breed like the Little Poet in question:

Twice the God of the Netherlands shook his venerable head and twice his long venerable muttonchops slid back and forth across his vest.
bq. It didn’t add up. There must be a mistake somewhere. A poet with no hair, that was very strange. The God of the Netherlands hadn’t cared much for poets for thirty years. You could no longer tell what to make of them. Respectable or disrespectable? Impossible to say . . .

God sighed. He’d have to talk it over with a real poet tomorrow. Maybe Potgieter . . .

Look, there goes the little poet. A handsome young man, you have to admit: thin, with a nicely shaved boyish face except for a pair of flying buttresses in front of his years, and so suntanned. He greets someone, tilting his straw hat a fraction about his close-cut hair.

Bizarre—so little hair—but it definitely was a little poet because God couldn’t figure him out, or Potgieter either. And Professor Volmer wanted nothing to do with him.

At one point, the Little Poet is walking down the street when he sees a group of women sitting outside a cafe and prays silently, “Oh God . . . what if you performed a miracle now, what if all their clothes suddenly fell off?” The narrator hedges this oh-so-scandalous thought playfully, writing in an aside: “You and I, dear reader, never think such things. And my dear lady readers . . . Mercy me, perish the thought.”
In his later stories, his writing begins to take on a different character. By “Insula Dei,” written twenty-five years and two World Wars later, his tone is bitter, though not unsentimental: Nescio has become an old man who cannot understand how his life — the shining promise he saw in his youth — has blinked past him. His nostalgia is more morbid now, colored as it is by war, hunger, and age. Reminiscing with the narrator about their youth, his friend Flip laments: “Back then we died of consumption, not tuberculosis.” Nescio’s skill lies in his ability to make even this macabre thought a thing of beauty.

As the title suggests, this is, in a sense, also a “city book” after the fashion of Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale (New York) and Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (St. Petersburg). These authors live and breathe their cities, and these works draw their readers onto the streets, into their cafes and parks and back alleys. Nescio accomplishes this with beautiful subtleness; Amsterdam is never the focus of his tales, but remains an unobtrusive but constant and compelling presence.

All in all, Nescio’s stories — often tragic but always beautiful — linger in the mind. They do not seem to have been composed; rather, they unfold with the grace of inevitability. Their melancholy weight means that they are best consumed slowly, leaving time between the stories to allow them to settle and be absorbed. At only 155 pages, this slim volume has a quiet power to match that of the most sweeping of Great Novels.

Anyway, at that last Extravaganza, Susan Bernofsky was telling me that she was translating the creepiest book that she’d ever worked on—something called The Black Spider. I suspect that most everyone reading this (not including Michael Orthofer, because Michael knows about everything) is unfamiliar with this classic of world literature, about which Thomas Mann claimed, “there is scarcely a work in world literature that I admire more.” That won’t be the case this fall.

Here’s the description from NYRB:

It is a sunny summer Sunday in a remote Swiss village, and a christening is being celebrated at a lovely old farmhouse. One of the guests notes an anomaly in the fabric of the venerable edifice: a blackened post that has been carefully built into a trim new window frame. Thereby hangs a tale, one that, as the wise old grandfather who has lived all his life in the house proceeds to tell it, takes one chilling turn after another, while his audience listens in appalled silence. Featuring a cruelly overbearing lord of the manor and the oppressed villagers who must render him service, an irreverent young woman who will stop at nothing, a mysterious stranger with a red beard and a green hat, and, last but not least, the black spider, the tale is as riveting and appalling today as when Jeremias Gotthelf set it down more than a hundred years ago. The Black Spider can be seen as a parable of evil in the heart or of evil at large in society (Thomas Mann saw it as foretelling the advent of Nazism), or as a vision, anticipating H. P. Lovecraft, of cosmic horror. There’s no question, in any case, that it is unforgettably creepy.

And although this has been translated into English in the past, it’s never been translated by Susan Bernofsky. So even if you are familiar with it, I’d still recommend checking out this version, since, Susan Bernofsky.

Each semester, Chad has students in both his Introduction to Publishing course and the World Literature in Translation course write book reviews as part of an assignment—we’ll be running these over the next weeks.

Rachael Daum (who is an accomplisher and recipient of all the things/fellowships, speaker of several languages, translator-in-training, and hails from England/Germany) was part of the internship and Intro to Publishing course this semester. Here’s a bit of her review:

The Urdu word “_basti_” refers to any space, intimate to worldly, and is often translated as “common place” or “a gathering place.” This book by Intizar Husain, who is widely regarded as one of the most important living Pakistani writers, traverses a number of cities, the connections between them, and the people who live in them. Within this slender book are a great number of dichotomous themes, most of them facing off with each other: tradition and innovation, Hinduism and Islam, India and Pakistan. But all of these revolve around a greater theme of change, mostly that which comes with war, and how the people involved must react to it—and possibly lose their humanity in doing so.

The book opens with Zakir as a child in India, which, at the time includes what would soon be Pakistan. He recalls growing up as a small Muslim boy alongside Hindu boys and girls. The calm of his childhood, however, is upset by an explanation of how Cain murders and buries of his brother Abel, with Zakir’s mother calling a curse on Cain’s blood, for “it was thinner than water!,” and a further discussion that Doomsday will come “when those who can speak fall silent, and shoelaces speak.” This particularly gloomy talk soon becomes appropriate in this context, however, as it clearly foreshadows the war that will rend India and Pakistan apart, and separate families and friends.

To read the rest of the review, go here.

The book opens with Zakir as a child in India, which, at the time includes what would soon be Pakistan. He recalls growing up as a small Muslim boy alongside Hindu boys and girls. The calm of his childhood, however, is upset by an explanation of how Cain murders and buries of his brother Abel, with Zakir’s mother cursing Cain’s blood, for “it was thinner than water!,” and a discussion that Doomsday will come “when those who can speak fall silent, and shoelaces speak.” This particularly gloomy talk soon becomes appropriate in this context, however, as it clearly foreshadows the war that will rend India and Pakistan apart, and separate families and friends.

It is interesting, and then sad, to observe how the role of religious conflict between Hindus and Muslims in India changes throughout Zakir’s life. This conflict is a common fact of life at the beginning of the novel—it’s a point of exasperation more than it is one of violence. For example, when the rainy season comes and soaks everything, the Hindu women sing night and day for the god Krishna to come and end the rainy season. Zakir’s mother, a Muslim woman, sighs over this, saying:

“Oh, these Hindu women won’t let us get a wink of sleep tonight! And on top of it the rain keeps coming down.”
“Bi Amma, this is the Janamashtami rain!” Auntie Sharifan elaborated: “Krishan-ji’s diapers are being washed.”
“Well, by now Krishan-ji’s diapers have been washed quite enough! The water is overflowing.”

The Hindu explanations of nature in terms of gods, and their terms of respect, “-ji,” and the like, flow easily from the Muslim women’s tongues. However, after the split of India and Pakistan, and the wars that follow, these cease, and the language in the text seems less colorful for it. The vibrancy of the references to Krishna and Vishnu seem dulled when replaced with the uniform allusions to Qu’ranic verses and the disciples Ali and Muhammed.

The majority of the novel concerns itself with Zakir’s position as a professor, caught in the war in Pakistan, while the woman he loved when they were children, Sabirah, is stuck in India. He escapes the war by losing himself in memory, and these passages are some of the most beautiful, particularly when he starts keeping a diary of the events of the war. In these entries, he remembers the plague that swept his town as a child, thus associating for the reader war with plague; he also tracks the confusion that comes with war. One of the most beautiful passages is Zakir realising that home, in war, means everything and nothing as the concept becomes more confused: “I can do nothing else for this city, but I can pray, and I do pray. In my mind is a prayer for Rupnagar, and its people as well, for I can no longer imagine Rupnagar apart from this city. Rupnagar and this city have merged together inside me, and become one town.” Here, the reader sees how in the desperation that comes with war, one must cope by surrendering what one knows as home and allow it to blend, pulling it closer, for the sake of being able to hope and pray for it. Zakir defies the inevitability of the destruction of Rupnagar, by stating, “No, the bomb shouldn’t fall on that neighbourhood. The house ought to stay safe, the whole house and the room which holds in trust the tears of my first night in Pakistan.” By blending the two places he regards as home, he can keep the former in some semblance of safety and wholeness in his mind.

The story of the novel—the chronicle of a Muslim man dealing with the loss of war-torn India and Pakistan—is good on its own, and the language is occasionally very beautiful, especially when the text loses itself in the storytelling of Muslim and Hindu myths, and as Zakir loses himself in them. However, for all the times that the language is elegant, there are instances of where wording seems awkward and there is a literalness that at times is detracting from the story. In her forward, translator Frances W. Pritchett explains that she has “not ‘transcreated’ the text or smoothed out its stylistic idiosyncrasies.” Spelling this out does not necessarily make the text easier for a non-Urdu speaker to read. One example hinges on the use of formality in spoken Urdu. Pritchett explains,

“. . . traditional Urdu is notable for its love of direct address and direct discourse. Speeches often begin with a form of address—sometimes a name or kinship term, or very commonly a vocative particle of some sort; while omitting or translating most, [Pritchett has] retained a few of the more vivid . . .”

The Urdu-speaking young man is very fond of addressing his fellow as “Yar!” This word is a term of comradeship, which is all well in itself, but, for the English-speaker, it calls to mind the cry of a bloodthirsty one-eyed pirate. Thus, the pages where the address is sprinkled throughout the text is almost comical. It’s possible to become quickly disenchanted with this frequency and form of address; in one two-page span, the term “yar” was used fourteen times. Here is a small sampling:

“Yar, that man seems a very suspicious character to me.”
“You’ve said something like this before.”
“But today I’m convinced of it.”
“W���?”
“Yar, anybody who makes a show of national feeling, I’ve begun to have doubts about.”
“Oh, let’s drop the subject, yar. I’ll tell you some news.”
“Really? All right.”
“Yar, today a letter came,” he said confidentially.

While this is the most extreme example of the proximity of the placement of this form of address, it can at times be distracting to an English reader. While Urdu is a more formalized language in which these forms of address and telling of proverbs is common, English is not—though that’s not to say there is anything wrong with presenting some foreignness in the translated text, There are schools of thought in translation theory stating that it is advantageous—if not beneficial—to have the reader work a little to understand a text.

Overall, this is a beautiful book that introduces the uninformed reader to a conflict that shook a whole subcontinent. It is strewn with beautiful language and references to cultures and religions the reader may be ignorant of. The novel is one for people who are interested in leaving their comfort zones and entering into a warzone, a place that was once a home, and learning what happens to those who stay, those who struggle with change. One can enjoy the lands traversed, be pulled in by the political struggle that is reminiscent, in some ways, of what the Western reader might associate with East and West Germany. And, in doing so, we can come to understand the meaning of basti, knowing, finally, that it is an international concept.