translated from the French by André Naffis-Sahely
220 pgs. | pb |9781935744603 | $17.00 
Archipelago Books
Reviewed by Brendan Riley

For English language readers, like this reviewer, whose literary sense of North Africa is delimited by periodic forays into the stories and essays of Paul Bowles, the horror vacui of a sun-blanched Oran in Camus’s The Stranger and The Plague, Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo, the bygone world of The Travels of Ali Bey, or William S. Burroughs’s cutup interzone skew, then Abdellatif Laâbi’s autobiographical The Bottom of the Jar is an exquisite must-read.

Superbly translated from the French by André Naffis-Sahely, this novel mainly focuses on the seriocomic musings and peregrinations of the author’s alter-ego, Namouss, a young boy of Fez, seven or eight years old, as he starts to become aware of the complexities of life in his family and the surrounding city during Morocco’s struggle for independence from France in the mid-1950s.

If Europeans are obsessed with background music, Moroccans have invented the background image, and without skimping on decibels either. In our home, clamor and din seemed to be inextricably mixed with our joy at coming together as a family.

This, the novel’s second paragraph, indicates one of the operating principles that make The Bottom of the Jar so memorable as it leads readers through the clamor and din and confusion of a Morocco trying to establish a modern, national identity.

The narrative seamlessly blends three areas and levels of concern: the background of 1950s Morocco on the cusp of independence from France; the family’s basic interest and concern in these events––their desire for liberation from the French coupled with disputes and worries about the potential dangers involved in supporting various factions vying for the leadership of a new Morocco; and how these fears are manifest in the misadventures of the eldest son, Namouss’s brother Si Mohammed, a rising star in the family, and a supporter of Moroccan independence.

Employed as a postal clerk––thanks to serious study and good performance on government exams, and thus a step up from his father’s artisanal status but also, because of its governmental and colonial character, a position that brings both admiration and controversy to his family and neighborhood––Si Mohammed ends an altercation with a French lieutenant by punching the man in the face. As a consequence he is imprisoned and Laâbi, setting forth with the color, humor, and arch meditative quality that characterizes the novel, describes the sacrifice of money, time, labor, and reputation which Namouss’s father, Driss, and extended family must endure to save the brother from prison and restore the family’s good name.

Driss is a saddlemaker in Fez’s Sekkatine souk and, as Namouss says, “[my father] was a saint. It took me some time to understand thi��.” Saintly for tolerating his shrill harridan of a wife, Ghita, for providing a humble but stable life for his family, for his good faith, and for his unwillingness to condemn anyone.

The fear and humiliation caused by the oldest son’s brief imprisonment are also echoed later in the novel during an episode in which the family must frantically hide and destroy possessions that might compromise their safety during house-to-house searches amid the country’s turbulent clashes for independence.

Namouss’s reveries include memories of his loving but quarrelsome family, the focal point and highlight being his mother, the salty, thorny, colorful Ghita––the novel’s dramatic anchor and the central presence in Namouss’ his young life––and her endless stream of unsolicited, acid-tongued imprecations as she elbows her way through daily life in a changing Morocco. In stark contrast to the even-tempered Driss, Ghita is a vicious scold, an old-fashioned Moroccan wife; hardworking, demanding, petty, caring, profane, and righteously selfish when the situation warrants it.

The novel’s early chapters also present Si Mohammed’s arranged marriage, Ghita’s pitiless machinations to procure for him the ideal bride (and thus bolster the family’s reputation), and, amusingly, the gathered family’s hushed expectation as the newlyweds retire to their room together for the first time and everyone eavesdrops to hear their cries of consummation.

Atop the richly developed background of social and political turmoil, Laâbi constructs a wonderful human comedy of family life and growing up in and around Fez, and the great, memorable charm of The Bottom of the Jar comes from the minutiae of his richly textured sketches and portraits of daily life in and around the Spring of Horses neighborhood and the Sekkatine souk, presented as Namouss’s memories and what he and his family hear through “Radio Medina” his nickname for the local grapevine of gossip and intrigue.

One of the many memorable sequences follows Namouss’s introduction to a modern, secular French colonial school where he is, much to his astonishment, introduced to the French language and the mysteries of books and handwriting, things he had not been exposed to at his previous Qur’an school; his pride in learning a foreign tongue is a sweet contrast to the political menace overhanging parts of the novel due to the strains of independence and, in some cases outbreaks of violence; thus when Namouss returns home and tries out his new words on his mother:

“Bonjour madame.”

Ghita, who as soon as she steeped on a raisin could promptly feel its sweetness rise up into her mouth, or so she claimed, had understood.

“Is that Freensh or is it Freentasia, as they say?”

And she erupted into a roar of laughter

 

Other episodes include family outings: a colorful, daylong picnic in a beautiful orchard on the edge of Fez, or a short vacation at the Sidi Harazem oasis out in the desert where Namouss learns to swim; Namouss’s first forays to the cinema (learning how to nab the best seats and, no less important, helping the unsophisticated Ghita to not confuse the cinematic illusion with reality) and soccer matches (too poor to get tickets, watching the game through the fence), a visit to the blacksmith in the El Haddadine souk, and getting caught up in a dangerous political demonstration, nearly trampled, and fainting from the crush of the crowd.

Chief among the novel’s many virtues is its wonderful, unflagging good humor. Like the best books rooted in cities, the atmospheric detail, the evocative power of setting is strong, flavorful, sensual. The novel provides many vibrant, interesting vignettes, which variously fade like dreams or linger like the scent or taste of a pungent spice. As he begins to know and understand, and be baffled by his city beyond the familiar confines of the family home, Namouss finds amusement, delight, and amazement scouring the bustling streets, and the narrative moves from the boy’s innocent errands in the marketplace to increasingly far-ranging and even dangerous excursions: “‘tramping and traipsing the streets,’ for which Ghita used to reproach him, or playing with the neighborhood kids right up to nightfall, mixing with the crowds in the Medina and taking in the flow of its sights,” and coming close to getting crushed by a heavily-laden donkey in the nearly deserted souk on one of the sleepy days of fasting during Ramadan. But Namouss’s innocence is also reflected in the pleasure he takes in simply seeing the city laid out before his eyes as he gazes at its panorama:

He loved looking out over the city whenever he climbed up to the rooftop terrace. From his promontory, he could see the minarets of all the important mosques . . . Wholly absorbed, he watched the clouds of steam dancing slowly above the grid of houses, and lent his ears to the noises made by workshops and street-sellers. Crowning this scene, the sky offered him another perspective on visual digressions, a canvas that an inspired hand was painting ceaselessly using colors that Fez held the secret to and had given the original names to: zebti (flesh color), quoqi (artichoke-mauve), fanidi (bubble gum), hammoussi (chickpea), ����â�ڰ����Ծ� (saffron), fakhiti ( azure), zrireq (violet).

 

Moving in closer, down to the ground, Laâbi’s mid-novel tour of the Sekkatine souk is a descriptive marvel that encapsulates the spirit and virtue of this book: “Namouss’s olfactory memory stored a variety of smells: goatskin, calfskin, hemp yarn, wax, natural or colored wool, bits and stirrup irons, wood, some flour-based adhesive, and of course snuff, which Driss, like the majority of the people in the Sekkatine, consumed vast quantities of.” And this fine description serves to set up deeper, more complex and impressive memories of the heart of social life in Fez, challenged by the changing times:

After the woolen carpets, the secondhand saddles, stirrups, and moukhala guns made the rounds. It got to the point that items completely unrelated to saddlery were peddled: samovars, copperware, engraved daggers . . . But eventually business slowed down and the souk would recover a little tranquility. The shopkeepers did their paperwork ad the craftsmen went back to work, albeit less energetically than before. The local café was flooded with orders, people asking Mrimou, the owner, for coffees or mint teas, which were served in chebri glasses. Out came the nuts or the snuffboxes and everyone gave themselves over to pleasure. This was also the time when passing visitors were welcomed and gossip was exchanged: weddings, divorces, deaths, houses that had gone on the market, inflation, new products, and—naturally—the arm wrestling between nationalists and the colonial authorities.

One of the most vivid recollections the reader might take away from The Bottom of the Jar is Laâbi’s cavalcade of portraits of the colorful local characters and relatives who inhabit their own moral and psychological realities, in moments that feel Dickensian, or perhaps, more appropriately, Mahfouzian, authentic pillars of a portrait of Fez in its turbulent fifties. This excellent series of sketches is anchored by Namouss’ eccentric Uncle Abdelkader who arrives from out of town and brings in the modern world with manufactured and imported goods and, after the right amount of kif, regales his relatives and neighbors with tales from the north; through him Laâbi presents Tangiers with its exotic international palette as an almost non-Moroccan sort of city, as opposed to Fez––by contrast a cradle of tensions. There is also Mikou, an itinerant poet who lives off neighborhood charity: “the scion of a large family, which he had left behind in favor of a free, wandering lifestyle that had in turn led to his family disowning him.” Then there’s Chiki Laqraâ, “the bald spook,” a Muslim woman who goes about unveiled, begging and haranguing the locals with her invective: “Who does that son of a bitch take me for? I am a woman, and the daughter of an honorable woman. My head is bare and I have nothing to hide. Let him come near me and I’ll show him which hole the fish piss out of.” We also meet Bou Tsabihate, the “rosary man,” who preaches harsh sermons but not for alms: “Faith and prayer are the only remedy. But what is it that I see? The mosques empty when it’s time to fill your stomachs. You are still snoring when the muezzin calls you to your duty. And what about the orphans, what do you do for them?” But the mosque can also be a perilous place for the boys because it’s there where they are likely to encounter Bou Souita, “Father Whip,” charged with preventing Namouss and the other boys from messing around. His namesake whip is:

A quince handle with a long leather lash attached to one end, which allowed him to strike the fugitives even in the farthest reaches of the square, dealing out blows in a most democratic fashion. Once the delinquents had been beaten and had dispersed, Bou Souita was free to attend to his other tasks, at which point the rabble-rousers would regroup, this time in a slightly more organized way.

Father Whip is offset by the kind Si Abdeltif, “one of the few adults in the neighborhood who didn’t look down on children and was always willing to exchange a few words with them.”

Other equally colorful residents include Bidous, the one legged beggar, Aâssala, the vagabond cat lady, a virtual mute, and Harrba the captivating storyteller who works hard for his money:

Harrba would jump and twirl and about. He would mimic the sound of waves, the wind, thunder, rain, animal calls, evoking sounds as varied as explosive farts to the silent ones weasels make, and would stop – all of a sudden and without warning – to allow the audience to give credit where credit was due.

“Would you like me to carry on?”

“Yes!” they would yell in unison.

“Very well then,” he would say, the show isn’t free. Dig deep into your pockets and let me hear those coin��.”

But of all these characters it is, once again, Ghita who is the narrative touchstone, poison punchline, and earthy, unexpected guide to local custom and occult rituals, best displayed when she allows Namouss to tag along to a meeting of a religious sect to which she’s devoted, a cult dedicated to Lalla Mira, which translator Naffis-Sahely’s helpful endnotes define thus: “The ‘yellow spirit,’ a jinni that loves perfume, music, and dance and leaves laughter and happiness in her wake. When she takes possession of an individual, she sharpens their wit.” Indeed, Ghita seems to be a sort of coarse embodiment of this spirit. And when Namouss confuses his mother’s patron spirit with a demon he’s quickly corrected:

“Who is Lalla Mira? Some sort of ghoul like Aïcha Kandisha?”

“May your lips go numb! I never want to hear you mention that scrap of carrion again, otherwise she will come and eat you and pick her teeth clean with your bones. Lalla Mira is a real Muslim. She is the spirit that dwells within us and who watches over us. Oh Lalla Mira, taslim, I surrender to you. Here I am, just as you like, wearing your color on my head. Keep evil away from me and my children, and may the evil eye go blind before it manages to reach u��.”

The curious boy insists on accompanying his mother but gets more than he bargained for, and Laâbi’s description of the rite, with its clouds of cloying incense, frenzied music and dancing, which overwhelm Namouss and cause him to faint, provides one of the most vivid and intense set pieces in a novel that is rich with them:

[Namouss’s] gaze is then drawn to a group of women dancing in the middle of the room. Dancing is not quite the word for it. Their agitation has nothing to do with swaying arms and hips or quivering bellies and shoulders, movements Namouss associated with dance as he knew it, the sort that women threw themselves into with a coquettish air at fêtes and festivities. Instead, the only movement these women are making is snapping their heads back and forth in an increasingly staccato rhythm the rest of their bodies remain immobile, except for when one of them sinks to her knees and begins shaking her torso back and forth with extraordinary strength. Freed from her head scarf, her hair would fall free and toss back and forth, then it began to fly around like a giant eagle experiencing turbulence in flight. Inspired by this ecstasy, the Gnaoua musicians play faster and faster, shouting hoarse sounds to egg the women on. The women reply by ululating in unison. At its climax, the ceremony takes an unexpected turn: A young female spectator leaps into the middle of the ring, and as if she’s been bitten by a scorpion, collapses on to the ground. Gripped by convulsions, she starts rolling and wriggling every which way on the floor. At this sight, a few dancers who haven’t yet lost all sense of reason run over to her, but instead of calming her down, they merely restrict her freedom of movement by surrounding her in a tighter circle. In doing so, these women look not only delighted but even envious of this ‘poor epileptic.’

 

Finally, beyond its alluring, kaleidoscopic mise en scène, this novel is also about the author’s birth as a writer, evidenced explicitly––by passages about his fascination for and growing love of books which bring foreign lands to his awareness:

Not only could he understand what he was reading but he was even beginning to forge a connection between the written words and the images associated with them: images shrouded in mystery and which seemed to come from another world – houses unlike any he’d ever seen, with plenty of space between them, topped by chimneys where smoke rose like a snake into the air, and surrounded by gardens where blond, chubby-cheeked children played on a seesaw.

 

––and implicitly by the resultant masterly compositions which paint glorious pictures of life in Fez, The Bottom of the Jar itself, replete with comedy and well-timed, properly proportioned injections of pathos, constructed on vivid, detailed, imagistic descriptions festooned with lively similes and finely wrought extended metaphors. It’s a novel that patiently elaborates a fascinating coming of age story, masterfully buffering its more sharp-edged historical concerns with Namouss’s naïveté and Laâbi’s deep love of life.

A classic novel of modern Moroccan literature, The Bottom of the Jar is an endless wellspring, a bottomless jar of riches, humane, hilarious, spicy and ribald, deeply captivating, always charming, never offensive––a serious, meticulously crafted memoir of revelatory erudition that superbly blends and balances the political, philosophical, and picturesque.

“And there’s the switch. The tiniest of switches”

Throughout last week’s Two Month Review blog post (and my raving scribbles through my copy of the book and my personal notebook) I expressed an interest in understanding The Physics of Sorrow as a spiral. I’ve been tempted at times to call the sections circular, or at least calling our experience of going from section to section circular, but it’s not entirely cyclical, where it would run over the same subject matter or stories. The circle doesn’t fit because we aren’t getting the same experiences in each section—we’re not just dealing with a slight variation on the played out Epic of Gilgamesh. The spiral form accounts for the overlapping subject matter—embedding, Minotaur, labyrinth, children, abandonment, etc.—with a developing narrative that lacks narrative repetition. So while we keep encountering these themes, we keep encountering them in different positions, at different times, in different ways, with different people. The spiral form also accounts for the philosophical treatises that we’re met with in each section that further complicate the myths and ideas at the heart of _The Physics of Sorrow. “The Green Box” continues as a testament to the spiral.

The section opens with “The Ear of the Labyrinth,” which beautifully reimagines a tragedy that took place in the town of Tafalla, Spain—an agricultural town known for their meat industry, I’d like to add. Along our spiral, the piece opens with an article describing an incident during 2010, when a bull, during a bullfight, leapt into the audience and injured 40 before it was eventually shot. While the opening is written in a standard journalistic style, Gospodinov embeds into the bull’s memory:

“[. . .] it turned out to be one of those exceptional events that launched me back into that forgotten “embedding” . . . Something I haven’t experienced in years.

As we learned in the previous section, embedding—the condition that escapes me as much as it escaped Gospodinov—became harder to experience with age. But as we learn now, particular things, like this event, drag him into memories again. And there’s more discussion of embedding within this section, but it’s not exactly what we’re used to. Through some of these stories, he performs some proxy embedding, where he deeply imagines the experiences of other creatures.

In “Through a Lamb’s Ear” he speculates about Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea being told from the perspective from a fish, twisting the classic line from the book to:

A marlin can be destroyed but not defeated.

Additionally, he includes a short and sweet snippet of dialog between two unidentified entities, who discuss history through plants:

“The history of the world can be written from the viewpoint of a cat, an orchid, or a pebble. Or lamb’s ear.”
“What’s lamb’s ear?”
“A plant.”
“And do you think we would figure in a history of the world written by lamb’s ear?”
“I don’t know. Do you think lamb’s ear figures in the history of the world written by people?”

This piece introduces us to what embedding could look like to an older Gospodinov reflecting on his lost ability and applying it to new situations. Before we would have gotten an expansive account of the marlin, and its life, and the battle with Santiago. Instead, we have a reserved reflection on speculation on such a possibility. But we do get another clear moment of embedding in “The Green Box,” aside from the bull looking for his ancestral mother.

With “The Minotaur’s Dream” readers experience, well, a first-person account of a Minotaur’s dream. In his dream, the Minotaur has become a fully human child:

I dream that I’m beautiful. Not exactly beautiful, but inconspicuous. That’s what it means to be beautiful, to be like everyone else. My head feels light. My eyes are on the front of my face. I have a nose, rather than nostrils. I have human skin, thin human skin. I walk down the street and no one notices me. Now that’s happiness—no one noticing me. It’s a happy dream.

And the Minotaur spends much of his day going throughout town, interacting delicately with townsfolk, if noticed at all. This all changes as night falls. As darkness consumes the sky, the Minotaur is slowly dragged back to his reality:

I can feel my jaw elongating, my skull growing heavy and hard, but I don’t want to hurt him. Thankfully the dream is coming to an end, since the situation is getting pretty desperate. That’s the moment in which dreams tear apart.

And with that he’s returned to the darkness of his labyrinth. This entire piece was written in the first person, just as previous moments of embedding. Only, here, Gospodinov has left us with no clue to how he was able to enter the dream, as he did in earlier embedding, especially considering the absence of consistent embedding as an adult.

Some Twists on the Labyrinth

Returning to the opening story for a moment takes us, yet again, through the Labyrinth that we’re familiar with from the other sections. As we follow Gospodinov’s embedding into the bull in Tafalla:

An amphitheater, of course, is a labyrinth. One of the most commonly found circular labyrinths, made of concentric circles intersected by transverse corridors.

It’s certainly a space that I wouldn’t consider labyrinthine at first thought, as I’m first dragged back to the intense lighting that floods event spaces like these. But, just as the bull here, my mind recedes for a moment: walking from the parking lot to the amphitheatre (stadium in my particular memory, but I feel the comparison is sustained), or being the sole member of your group that has to use the bathroom or procure concessions in the middle of an important inning, and you’re left to wander the halls alone—lights flickering alongside all other dramatic effects—turning corners that seem like you just passed them, perpetually. And just like that, trained well by the reading, as Tom noted during the podcast, I’m following Gospodinov as he transforms my familiar to his. Through each modification of the myth, we’ve learned to be complicit through each modification, agreeing to suspend our disbelief because everything is written so tightly and we’re inundated with variations to the point of accepting change—and sorrow—as the new normal. So for us, the readers, the amphitheater is now a labyrinth—a prison.

And this space transforms the bull, according to Gospodinov, as:

The bull lifted its gaze and recognized the Labyrinth—the ancestral home of his great-grandfather, the Minotaur. And since animals have no sense of time (just as children do not), the Bull saw his ancestral home and recognized the Minotaur within himself.

But this transformation of a space into a labyrinth occurs, with a twist, later in the section, as Gospodinov and his wife are expecting a child. “The End of the Minotaurs” stands as a beautiful reinterpretation of the myth we’ve gotten so accustomed to as readers:

Someone’s walking around inside me. Someone’s gotten lost in my belly. That’s what she said one winter afternoon, as we were sitting quietly in the room, trying to hear the snow piling up outside. It sounded beautiful and timeless. Lying back in the rocking chair, she had opened up Ancient Greek Myths and Legends and placed the book on top of the protruding oval of her belly, like a roof.

But as Gospodinov starts to ruminate of this reality, something strikes him. He starts to align the elements of his myths onto his life and is startled by the results:

That which was roaming around inside was not the Minotaur, but rather that which would kill him. Let’s call it “Theseus” for the sake of clarity. The umbilical cord is there inside like Ariadne’s thread. So then where is the Minotaur? The answer lay in the anxiousness of the inquiry. The Minotaur was me. Let’s turn that phrase around, so I can’t hide in its tail end. I was the Minotaur. Theseus—he, she, it (the gender doesn’t matter) – was coming to kill me with all the innocence of predestination. There was nowhere to hide, I could only meekly await his arrival.

Of course, Gospodinov, and his family, have all served as the minotaurs at particular points in their history—all trapped in their labyrinths, and subject to their own horrors—but now the labyrinth was a living person, his wife nevertheless, and in a kind of liberation (or new subjugation) his own flesh and blood is to be the hero in this new version of the myth. After all the time that Gospodinov spent locked in various labyrinths as the horrible Minotaur, he was now to face the hero that would slay him.

And it is this point that the bull in Tafalla leaps into the stands, people running in terror as he seeks his mother and his murderer, or at least a variant of him—the same point when Gospodinov looks into his vision of the future, sees the faces, and accepts the terms. But this angle of the myth is not the last that he twists in this section of the spiral.

Death by Another Face

The story in Tafalla hits us with another divergence from the typical narrative of the Minotaur in the Labyrinth. We already have a bull, we have a crowd for an audience, and, in this iteration, we have a faceless killer where there has typically been the blessed, handsome hero Theseus. Gospodinov writes:

But the myth is repeatable and the death of the Minotaur has to happen again. [. . .] Death catches up with him right when he seems to have caught sight of a familiar shoulder and locks of hair hurrying away. It’s the first time they kill him that way. From a distance. Without a sword or a spear. Without seeing his killer’s face.

Gospodinov has taken a myth, made it more tragic by humanizing the ‘monster’ and, now, goes a step further by taking the myth and truly making it modern by having this contemporary Theseus kill the enthralled minotaur at a distance, with a rifle, without the two coming face to face.

But this faceless murder of those deemed animals is the truly modern face of slaughter, and Gospodinov addresses this voraciously. “Without a Face” creates a history to address the transition from face-to-face to faceless murders, starting with several mythic slayings and ending with the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

As an aside—from a craft standpoint—it’s important to note that many of these sections bleed into one another, like we’ve found a corner of the labyrinth that we handed guided our hands over before, or another length of the spiral that veers off at a slightly sharper angle than before—whatever metaphor you prefer. “The Ear of the Amphitheatre” ended, as mentioned above, “Without seeing his killer’s face[,]” while “Without a Face” ends with “No animal would do that[,]” in reference to an animal’s moral inability to commit faceless murder. Often enough, it’s difficult to name pieces, but this process and sequence of titling sections off of pertinent content from a previous section allows Gospodinov freedom to address a myriad of topics while still sustaining the individuality of the sections, and still connecting them beyond their order in the mostly static medium of a physical book. Well done, Georgi.

The next section is aptly titled “No Animal Would Do That” and catalogs, statistically and philosophically, the advent of modern day meat production. This slaughter is further used to introduce the cross-generational vegetarianism is Gospodinov’s family in “A Tale of the Vegetarian Man-Eater” and “On the Eating of Flesh.” This approach to vegetarianism and mass murder is fresh to us at this point in the book, as we’ve only had glancing mentions to either, whether the moment where public defender Gospodinov reminded us that bulls are herbivores or the massive die-offs of birds, bats, and bees, respectively.

So as we make our way through The Physics of Sorrow we continue to see Gospodinov’s plan unfold. We start the see the cohesion with the disjointed pieces, and the ability for an age old myth to continue to be refreshed, and for his skill to re-approach topics from a dizzying amount of angles. At this point, we’re more than halfway through the piece. As much as I want to suggest that we have a sense of what is going to come next, I can only comfortably predict on the direction we’re headed—everything else is up to myth.

More people watched Duke lose to Kansas (prompting some of my favorite tweets of the year, mostly about how Grayson Allen looks like he has a future in sweater vests and cubicles: “Grayson Allen had three good opportunities” “And yet not a single person bought insurance from him. #NotACloser” or “Don’t be sad, Grayson Allen. Nationwide is on your siiiide —And hiring! #NCAA #ncaataunts”) than will read a book in the next month.¹

That said, I feel like I owe it to myself to keep logging these weekly posts about 2018 translations, especially since I took the time to read Domenico Starnone’s Trick this week under what I thought were enough interesting conditions to prompt a fairly decent post. In the end, I’m not sure that’s true, but I’ll give it my best for three-four bits and then go watch the pilot episode of Krypton because it’s Sunday and there’s no baseball on.

by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri (Europa Editions)

Last weekend, when I was working on that frigging post, I alluded to writing about the newest Lispector and Will Self this week. Well. So. That Lispector book? DENSE AS FUCK. I’m still planning on writing something about it, but it’s ten thousand times smarter than I am and I don’t know if I actually like it. So I want to save that for next week, when I’ll write about it and “what we want out of a review of a translation” while watching Opening Day baseball all day.²

When I realized that I had no chance of finishing The Chandelier in time to work on this, I scrambled for for another March translation to read. Michael Orthofer—the most well-read dude in America?—mentioned Starnone in an email this week, so I quickly went on Europa Editions’s site and downloaded the first book of his I saw—Ties.

See, my idea was to read a book with as little background expectations as possible. I knew nothing about Starnone or his books, didn’t read the jacket copy, only glanced at the cover (out of necessity), and skipped the intro. I wanted to replicate the experience of listening to a new album from a band I know nothing about, or watching a new TV show with some innocuous name, like “Animal Kingdom” or “Search Party,” where there aren’t any expectations brought to bear. What is it like to just read a book? Instead of “reading a book” with a critical, ‘I’m gonna write about this’ sort of opening?

Halfway through Ties I realized that this book came out in March 2017. But! Starnone has a new book out this month as well! Trick! Which sounds like Ties and is also translated by Jhumpa Lahiri. (Whom I’ve never read, although I should?³)

So I quickly gave up on Ties (which was fine, 100% a narrative with characters and plot), and downloaded Trick. And read it over two days so that I could keep up my 2018 resolution.

I’m probably a little full of shit, but here are all the prejudices I had before reading this book:

1) Thanks to Lori Feathers’s post on this very site, I became aware that Starnone⁴ is married to Elena Ferrante.

2) Europa Editions is the publisher, and, for me, their books fall into three categories: decent Latin American works (Gamboa), crime novels I would probably like, and book club books.

3) Jhumpa Lahiri translated this after learning Italian and writing her last book in Italian. No judgements associated with that, but it was a fact that was hard to miss when buying this book.

I had no idea what to expect when I started this book—would it be a romance? a thriller?—and just took it all as it came. Which was relieving. It’s gotten to the point in my life where I can barely read a book for enjoyment anymore. Everything’s for class (read to teach), for publication (should we do this?), for these articles (how can I seem smart?), or for the general optics (I need to be seen on social media reading this). It’s so stressful! Books are like pages to get through sometimes and that’s not for the best.

Instead of any of that self-imposed bullshit, I had a really good time reading Trick. I wouldn’t recommend it to my friends because my friends are filled with cynicism and indifference, but it’s the sort of book my mom would read if she read books and wasn’t exactly my mom. It’s a book that makes you feel your age, but in a way that’s not depressing or existential, and I appreciated that. I also appreciated not ever thinking about translation issues while reading it. I just read it, and mostly enjoyed the bits where the grandfather was a dick to his grandson because kids can be annoying and when I’m old I’m not going to want to put up with that shit either and here’s a really bad role model who I can relate to.

This is the sort of book for people who relate to characters in books. This is a neutral statement.

Before I look at the jacket copy for real (I seriously haven’t read it yet), here’s my description:

A famous illustrator is hired to draw some plates for a “deluxe edition” of Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner.”⁵ He does a couple, they suck, he’s old, tired. Such is baseball, such is life. His daughter convinces/forces him come watch his grandson for a few days while she goes to a math conference⁶ with her husband, who is “scrawneebly” and jealous and kind of a penis. Grandfather finds grandson a bit spoiled and annoying—because duh and or obviously, four year olds are—and doesn’t come off looking so good to the maid/neighbors who see him. The climax takes place when his grandson “tricks” him by locking him on the balcony behind a defective door that won’t open. In the rain. At seventy. While he should be working on his plates for the James story about a man who returns home and sees what his life could’ve been . . .

An emotional rollercoaster for anyone who loves Erma Bombeck.⁷

This is not what anyone wants from a review.⁸

Here’s the official copy:

Sharp, succinct storytelling and breathtaking prose combine in this new novel by the author of the New York Times editor’s pick, Ties.

Imagine a duel between an elderly man and a mere boy. The same blood runs through their veins. One, Daniele Mallarico, is a successful illustrator whose reputation is slowly fading. The other, Mario, is his four-year-old grandson. The older combatant has lived for years in solitude, focusing obsessively on his work. The younger one has been left by his querulous parents with his grandfather for a 72-hour stay. Shut inside an apartment in Naples that is filled with the ghosts of Mallarico’s own childhood, grandfather and grandson match wits, while outside lurks Naples, a wily, violent, and passionate city whose influence is not easily shaken.

Trick is a gripping, wry, brilliantly devised drama, “an extremely playful literary composition,” as Jhumpa Lahiri describes it in her introduction, about aging, family, art, and reconciling with one’s past.

Far be it from me to shit on anyone’s copy, but I’m glad I didn’t read that first. Hey, literary hipsters—this book is fine. Sure, it’s no Kobo Abe, but fuck, man, sometimes it’s fun to shut off and read a book that’s just about being alive and knowing that you’re going to be replaced by little shitheads you’re not sure you like.

Three observations, then the fun stuff:

1) The best part of this book is that the story ends, and then there’s an illustrator’s afterword/epilogue (I bought the book and fuck you if you think I’m going to actually play with my Kindle to figure out the real name of this section) in which the grandfather expresses—in first person diary—his creative struggles with the James commission and his thoughts on life, alone, physically removed from his daughter and family. There are actual artworks in this bit. It is not what you’d expect to find in a B&N best-seller.

2) The best part of this book is the idea that Lahiri expresses in which the text swings back and forth from one sort of book to another. The grandfather’s reactions to his grandson are loving one second, then aggressive, then resigned. The book feels like one thing (a story of a domestic falling apart), then another (death is right there and will happen through an accident you won’t be prepared for) line by line. I don’t think I would’ve gotten into this had I picked up this book knowing anything about.

3) The best part of this book is that the main event—the grandfather locked on the balcony—wasn’t treated in expected ways. It could’ve been a joke, a bit of sketch comedy to drive home the overall idea of the book. It could’ve been more heavy handed. It could’ve been dumb. But if you’re a “identify with the character” sort of reader, it was probably just scary. Dying through accident is scary.

Hey look, ambassadors from a bunch of countries They each recommended a book to read before visiting their country and, well, these descriptions don’t make me believe in the future . . .

About Nordic Ways:

“It came out last fall and is representative of all five Nordic countries. It describes life in the North from different perspectives.“—H.E. Björn Lyrvall

If a politician isn’t good at tautologies they’re not much of a politcIan. YOU HAVE MY VOTE, LYRVALL!

About TransAtlantic by Colum McCann, the pick for Ireland. Repeat: Ireland:

H.E. Anne Anderson recommends Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic, which tells the intertwined stories of the first non-stop transatlantic fliers in 1919; the visit of Frederick Douglass to Ireland in 1845/46; and the story of the 1998 Irish peace process.

Uh. Yeah. Like. Wait. So. Wait. I know Colum. We’ve shared Guinness. I love Colum. He’s talented! Incredibly so. But. Ireland. There are options. And if you want to choose this book, then blurb it. (“Chad W. Post, president of nothing, recommends The Crying of Lot 49, a book about mail.”) LAME. NO VOTE FOR YOU, ANDERSON.

Just gonna let this stand on its own:

“The Man Who Spoke Snakish is an exploration of alternative history by a well-loved contemporary author.” —H.E. Eerik Marmei

“Book is book about book and people book love book.” What is this, a promotion for Patterson’s “BookShots”? ALL THE THINGS THAT ARE NOPE. NO VOTE.⁹

One more, one more!

Malta

H.E. Pierre Clive Agius recommends Immanuel Mifsud’s In the Name of the Father (And of the Son), which won the 2011 European Union Prize for Literature and tells the story of a man reading a diary his father kept during his days as a soldier in World War II, which subsequently pushes him to re-examine the personal relationship he had with his father.

BORING. NO VOTE.

This made me so excited! I felt like there might be a date in the future where I would spend more time with my newborn than with printed words. But alas, all Self (a fantastic writer) had to say was this:

You’re not awfully optimistic about the future of the novel, are you?

I think the novel is absolutely doomed to become a marginal cultural form, along with easel painting and the classical symphony. And that’s already happened. I’ve been publishing since 1990, so I’ve seen it happen in my writing lifetime. It’s impossible to think of a novel that’s been a water-cooler moment in England, or in Britain, since Trainspotting, probably.

It’s frequently said that that’s partly because narrative has migrated to box sets. Is there any truth in that?

The relationship between the novel and film in the 20th century was like the relationship between Rome and Greece. Film depended upon the novel, at least in its infancy and youth. The problem is that now that film itself is being Balkanised – carved up, streamed, loaded on to DVDs, watched on people’s phones – it no longer needs its Greece, it no longer needs the novel lying behind it. It’s a disaster for the novel, actually – I think the novel is in freefall.

How many of you have read Will Self? Probably not any of the people who were quoted in this random “it’s not ‘Cat Person,’ but it’s almost a meme”

Self’s comments drew some criticism on Twitter from the literary community. Irish writer [Ian? No, sorry, Colin] Barrett, currently based in the US, tweeted: “As a writer, I’d be embarrassed to ever say there’s been no good contemporary writing/no good books in X number of years etc, because more than anything it just reveals the poverty of your own appetite for engagement.”

[Roxane] Gay, a writer and commentator also based in America, said: “White men love to declare an end to things when they no longer succeed in that arena. The novel is fine.”

The Essex Serpent author Sarah Perry asked: “Also: who cares if the novel is doomed, anyway? Storytelling is as old as time and the novel is revising for its GSCE��.”

My first question is “what are GSCEES?” and my second is “did they read the interview or just the headline?”

Well, CSCEES are a typo but GSCEs are “General Certificates of Secondary Education,” which must be some British in joke. (I just finished reading Troubles today and am not British-sympathetic. At all.)

But did they read the whole statement?

Everyone jumps on me for making fun of Buzzfeed (again, more next week, and you will love it) and clickbait headlines for being “dangerou��.” THIS IS EXACTLY HOW THEY ARE DANGEROUS. Without “The Novel is Absolutely Doomed” this article goes unnoticed. With it? THE WORLD IS ENDING AND WE MUST TAKE DOWN WILL SELF FOR HIS LIES!

Did Self merit this response? According to one friend, “he said dumb shit in the past,” which, fine?, sure?, but doesn’t dumb shit make the world go round? Where would Twitter be without people saying dumb shit and flipping out all the time?

“I think the novel is absolutely doomed to become a marginal cultural form” is, to me, something about culture, not about the novel as a form. “It’s impossible to think of a novel that’s been a water-cooler moment in England, or in Britain, since Trainspotting, probably” because NO ONE GIVES A FUCK ABOUT NOVELS. How is this not a rallying cry? Why are you attacking Will Self for pointing out that 100X more people talk about Game of Titties Thrones than they do about a narrative in a book. (Yes, I know it was a book first, but what do you think the ratio between viewers and readers is? Does 500:1 sound plausible?)

That second statement is hard to puzzle out . . . in some ways. Here’s my attempt at unpacking this: For basically ever, novels were the source for narrative ideas and structures. The medium allows creators so much flexibility, and their exploration—of character-building, of plotting, of narrative structures—served as the building blocks for so many movies, TV shows, etc. Creators in the visual realm looked to novels for ideas of what to explore and how.

But things have advanced. Sure, there are still movies being made that are based on books, but I think Self is getting at something much more fundamental than simply talking about intellectual properties. Entertainment has become so fragmented over the past few years, with kids growing up in an environment in which they rarely—if ever—watch complete TV shows, and instead only want YouTubers and clips. The narrative structure that appeals to a lot of—most?—people today isn’t one based in Victorian principles of the novel, but on ideas that have developed from within the visual medium itself. In this sense, the TV shows/films that everyone talks about aren’t really pinned to the novel per se, but to larger ideas in culture and the art of filmmaking.

Again, I may be misreading this and giving Self more credit than he deserves, but I think this idea is really interesting and posits a sort of challenge to all of us in the book industry—is there a way for novels to regain a central space in the general conversation? If so, then how? If not, does it matter?

I also want to admit that I rarely talk about books I’ve read to people who aren’t already in this world. Like, say, my hairdresser. I’m a million times more likely to talk to her about a podcast or movie or TV show, but never a book. In part because we read very different things (but have both seen Black Panther), but also because the other art forms dominate pop culture. The closest thing books has to a pop culture phenomenon is Elena Ferrante.

¹ Not scientifically valid. But it

About a quarter of American adults (24%) say they haven’t read a book in whole or in part in the past year, whether in print, electronic or audio form.

² More people watch baseball on Opening Day than . . . never mind.

³ I really wonder what professional Italian translators think of her suddenly getting a lot of work. I know that I’m an envious man with a lot of shortcomings and self-esteem problems, so maybe none of them actually care. But, if I were betting, I would put some cash on “probably have mixed feeling��.”

⁴ I always want to type “Starcherone” when writing his last name. In honor of pronounced “starch-yer-own,” one of the wittier small presse out there. And I still can’t remember Ferrante’s “real” last name. Then again, who gives fucks. She’s a really good writer and we can leave it at that.

⁵ This is a real story that I wish wasn’t real. The book is way more interesting if you’re trying to puzzle out the fuck this imaginary ghost story about opportunities pissed away might be.

⁶ Can I have a book of the math conference?

⁷ You have no idea how many misspellings it took to get to that joke.

⁸ See next week’s post.

⁹ This book is AWFUL. Top ten of terrible. Sorry not sorry.

There is an unedited version of this podcast—with maybe eight extra minutes of jokes—that you can watch on And be sure to come by next Monday, March 26th at 9pm to with Chad and Brian. They’ll be talking about Part VI (pages 179-200) and answering any and all of your questions.

As always, The Physics of Sorrow (and all the previous Two Month Review titles) is available for 20% off through our Just use the code 2MONTH at checkout.

Feel free to comment on this episode—or on the book in general—either on this post, or at the official

Follow and for more thoughts and information about upcoming guests. And you can follow for more information about books and upcoming events. (Like the one on April 26th with Two Month Review alum Rodrigo Fresán!)

And you can find all the Two Month Review posts by clicking here. And be sure to

The music for this season of Two Month Review is by Splendor and Misery, featuring Georgi’s translator, Angela Rodel!

by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri (Europa Editions)

The Italian author Domenico Starnone appears to be a guy with a lot going for him, not least the talented women in his life: his purported wife is none other than Anita Raja (aka, Elena Ferrante); and, the versatile author Jhumpa Lahiri is his English translator. Not to mention that Starnone is a smart and entertaining author in his own right. Starnone’s slim novel Ties is a testament to that fact.

Ties is the story of a fifty-two-year-long marriage that sustained the blow of infidelity but decades later still lists sharply to starboard from the impact. The book is divided into three sections with alternating first-person narrators: wife Vanda, husband Aldo, and daughter Anna. Vanda’s section looks back to the time when Aldo confessed his affair with a nineteen-year-old student at the university where he teaches and moved out of their house, leaving Vanda to raise the couple’s two children alone for several years. The action in sections two and three takes place in the present with Vanda and Aldo, now in their seventies, returning after a vacation to find their home ransacked.

Starnone has a masterful way of depicting the fragility of domestic relationships with egos, vulnerabilities, and self-interested bargaining swirling about to create conflict and disappointment. Perhaps most impressive is the way that he builds a quiet but palpable sense of tension in the situation that the family’s dysfunction has created. Ties is a compelling read that takes a rather ordinary extramarital affair as its premise but executes on it to original and extraordinary effect.

Mazes and Spirals

Through these last couple of weeks, through all the wonderful guests and discussions and through the beautifully prose of The Physics of Sorrow, we’ve had the pleasure of unravelling a dark and complex piece. From the second week and onward it feels like each conversation ends with someone saying something along the lines of “we’re returning to so much” and “we’re getting deeper into thi��.”

As much as Gospodinov and his work are involved in the labyrinth as a historic and emotional metaphor, the spiral finds a place in understanding both the work and our discussion of it as readers. I will elaborate on this as the post winds on.

The Core of the Spiral

The first section of the Two Month Review, which included the Epigraphy, Prologue, and “The Bread of Sorrow,” set up the themes that Gospodinov revisits in the subsequent sections—this thought something I’ve already written in previous blog posts. These recurring elements include abandonment, the minotaur, the labyrinth, life in communist Bulgaria, the mythic, fathers, darkness, basements, and the like. Obviously, well-crafted books do this: build and return to themes. But Gospodinov treats his themes like he treats his family, and his imagination: he treats them like characters that are born, develop, and are perpetually at risk of losing everything and dying. These themes are more a part of the cast and less an abstraction that is built by the behavior of his human characters—not excluding Asterius with my use of “human.”

The second section, “Against an Abandonment: The Case of M,” presented us with public defender Gospodinov and his defense for the minotaur. This section developed our understanding of Gospodinov’s obsession with myth, particular the rich history and his own speculations on the myth of the Minotaur and its relationship to his own family and upbringing.

The third section, “The Yellow House,” returned us to stories of Gospodinov and his family in Bulgaria, and, again, routed us through the themes and characters established in the previous two sections. It is important to note that beyond this coiling of each section, Gospodinov adds more events, and friends, and family members but does so, frequently, through the established themes.

This fourth section, “Time Bomb (To be Opened After the End of the World),” has Gospodinov laying his plans bare and creates a confluence between the content of the book, the themes, characters, places, and discussions, with the form that Gospodinov has created, the short and somewhat related pieces within larger sections. We see, again, the themes at play with people and moments in his life. He returns us to his grandfather, introduces us to a school-aged, rebelliously insightful Gospodinov, shows us more facets to his stylistic abilities, and all around the intense discussion of time capsules. And as he works his way from time capsules on fridges, or time capsules launched into space, or buried into the ground, and as he spirals again around the elements that are important to The Physics of Sorrow it starts to become clear that, put simply, this book is a time capsule.

Along the Loops

This week’s section opens with “The Aging of an Empath” where Gospodinov discusses the eventual loss of his ability to embed, a side effect of aging, and, I’d add, an overexposure to humanity. Most importantly, he describes that his habit of hoarding objects is an attempt to counteract the loss of his Obsessive Empathetic-Somatic Syndrome, or “radical empathetic-somatic syndrome” as he (mis)remembers.

And this isn’t the first time that Gospodinov has described collecting objects, but this provides further insight into why he does. Collecting starts in “First Aid Kit for After the End of the World,” which lushly describes a young version of himself slowly preparing a kit, of sorts, to survive a nuclear attack, with goods and kind words included. And this pattern of collecting repeats.

He writes about how he hoards apocalypse-inspired headlines, mentions Mengele’s personal journals, the disks that the Voyager and Pioneer spacecrafts carried to give extraterrestrial life a glimpse into the glory of mankind via a recording of Jimmy Carter’s voice. He also writes about time capsules throughout the world, and a need to map the location of all of them, the need for a literary time capsule of all genres and trends, and the possible dangers of future humanoids stumbling upon our time capsules.

These acts of collecting are rooted in fear, from Gospodinov’s survival kit to NASA’s strange experiment, and are attempts to ameliorate said fears. Beautifully, this section—this entire work, rather, is engaging in this process. Through “First Aid Kit[. . .],” in the light of Gospodinov losing his embedding, we see him fracture his older self from his younger self, writing on his younger self as distinct person—almost writing as though there is a death that has separated these two individuals. And in response to this fear of further loss, Gospodinov has taken to collect and preserve moments. He collects newspaper headlines and discusses massive beehive death, and birds dropping from the sky. And even the popularity of time capsules mirrors fears of nuclear annihilation or apocalypse by another means. The time capsule ameliorates our fears as even if we are wiped from the face of the the earth, the collection of materials sustains our existence deep beneath the earth, or in space, or on the page.

That said, we can read all books as being time capsules of sorts—these obscure collections of thoughts and images that contain an interpretation of a past time for a future time—sure. But from the exchange between Chad, Brian, and Patrick, I’m convinced to separate The Physics of Sorrow from the over encompassing speculation of “books are time capsules” to the more accurate “The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov is a time capsule.” This idea was set up beautifully by a comment from Patrick, when he said, paraphrased, “the brokenness of the form is built for destruction.” Chad followed up by adding that missing a section—I’d argue referring to either the larger section of the books or the smaller units within each section—is ok (obviously read the whole thing, it’s good). The Physics of Sorrow is this greater vessel of smaller fragments, all related in some way yet distinct enough on their own, and—better yet—crafted with this comprehension of a bleak, possibly apocalyptic, future.

The Pioneer and Voyager disks contained fragments of mankind at a certain temporal locus, just as the Westinghouse Time Capsules, and the time capsule from the young Gospodinov’s school in Pleven. And The Physics of Sorrow is doing just what these time capsules are. Each fragment of each section standing on it’s own with its own commentary with its relationship to the characters and themes. The themes are sustained not by just one piece, but by many, just as the many characters come and go through the sections. Hypothetically, should the capsule crack, and most of the contents be destroyed (should you rip out a chunk of the book), the individual fragments elaborate on another so often, that missing one doesn’t destroy a reader’s ability to understand what Gospodinov accomplishes throughout the whole of The Physics of Sorrow. The minotaurs, the labyrinth, Bulgaria, Communism, abandonment, World War—all these elements repeat and deepen from fragment to fragment to create a sustained understanding of the book itself considering the threat of mass destruction.

Gospodinov’s Arc

This confluence of form and content that I’ve been speaking to is the most blunt with the paired sections of “Noah Complex” and “New Realism.” “Noah Complex” suggests that a encyclopedic time capsule of writing should be created including:

[. . .] monologue through Socratic dialogue to epos in hexameter, from fairytales through treatises to lists. From high antiquity to slaughterhouse instructions. Everything can be gathered up and transported in such a book.

This would contain writing from all times, and different styles and authors. And after all his tongue-in-cheek commentary on time capsules, each entry dripping with a quiet criticism of the futility, he writes in this section:

Only the book is eternal, only its covers shall rise above the waves, only the beasts inside, between its pages swarming with life, will survive. And when they see the new land, they will go forth and multiply [. . .] And what is written shall be made flesh and blood and shall be brought to life in all its perfection. And “the lion” shall become a lion, “the horse” will whinny like a horse, “the crow” will fly from the page with an ugly croak . . . And the Minotaur will come out into the light of day.

Adopting a sort of mystic prose, he places his faith in the book to be a suitable vessel for realities, relying on the readers imagination—a proxy for his own experienced embedding—to bring the worlds contained in this Noachian encyclopedia to life (as corny as it sounds), to change the animals, in quotes, into animals in flesh. I even feel a nod to his own work as he imagines the Minotaur out in the light.

Gospodinov gives us just that in this following section “New Realism,” where he drops us into a beautifully written realist narrative. Defined as “a faithful representation of reality” or “verisimilitude,” this section speaks to just that, as Gospodinov shifts styles yet again to make a point. I don’t even really know where to draw from to give the “best” example of his writing—the whole narrative speaks to that. It’s important to note that many of the authors from his Epigraphy were realists in their national literatures, and, relatedly the epigraphs from Flaubert and St. Augustine speak to the ability to embed and being able to suspend the fleeting moment as so that it may be experienced, at the very least, a second time.

This is the moment of union for this work, as a whole, between its form and content. Gospodinov, considering a singular death at one end and apocalypse at the other, collects a series of fragments to hopefully survive and be reopened. With his wit, he might even fear what the results may be, as we see in “Future Number 73,” where future humanoids find his Communist Youth Brigade inductee letter create a yearly bloodletting. I must say, I’m curious what a society of people who worship the ‘doctrine’ of “New Realism” would accomplish.

And Back Again Through the Spiral

This confluence of form and content, while emphasized in this section has been going on the entire time and I believe we can assume it will continue. Obviously, we can look at each section as these collections of ephemera, something to understand Bulgarian history following the death of the 2015 version of Georgi Gospodinov, but, specifically, there are sections throughout the book that mirror his time capsule form.

In the Prologue we saw that collection of entities, all seemingly alone if not interrelated by their isolation. In “The Bread of Sorrow” sections like “Trophy Words,” which documented the Hungarian words that his grandfather kept through national shifts and relocations, “Crumbling Language” and “G,” which both highlighted Gospodinov’s own adventures with language acquisition, and “A Short Catalogue of Abandonments,” which listed cases of abandonment from various myths around the world.

“Against an Abandonment: The Case of M” had the “Dossier” and “Myth and Game,” which were lengthy collections of (mis)representations of the Minotaur, while “Child-Unfriendly” and “Devoured Children in Greek Mythology (An Incomplete Catalogue)” both list injustices against children, in and out of myth.

“The Yellow House” featured a series of these catalogs, from “A Catalogue of Collections,” to “From a Catalogue of Important Erotic Scenes” to the various collections of accounts from the 1980s.

But this most recent section brings all these to the surface and discusses them head-on. And this is where I return to the spiral. A participant in the chat from last week’s podcast, one gabbiano117, wrote:

This really is the perfect book for reading and rereading again and again. The way it retreats and advances and circles and gets lost in itself again and again and again.

Gospodinov is writing something that coils upon itself, but also builds. He started the piece by explaining how his world works, and from that point provided examples that affirm his construction. And as we go onto the next section, I’m excited to see how else the spiral will progress, and how what form the Minotaur takes in another place and time.

by Julián Herbert, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Graywolf Press)

Moment Number One

“Technique, my boy,” says a voice in my head. “Shuffle the technique.”

To hell with it: in her youth, Mamá was a beautiful half-breed Indian who had five husbands: a fabled pimp, a police officer riddled with bullet holes, a splendid goodfella, a suicidal musician, and a pathetic Humphrey Bogart impersonator. PERIOD.

But we’ll start with a bit about Tomb Song, one of the better works of international literature to come out so far in 2018. It’s referred to as “An Incandescent U.S. Debut” on the press release, which normally would land it on my “do not read” list, but I like the cover. And suspect this is a potential finalist for the National Book Award in Translation (more on that below).

Categorized as “fiction,” it’s a book in which Julián Herbert writes about Julián Herbert writing about the death of his mother from leukemia. (And the death of his father as well.) It resides in that Ben Lerner, or Karl Ove Knausgaard, or maybe Geoff Dyer realm of being a “nonfiction novel,” in which truth and literary technique come together and create something else.

From a

To me, this is a novel. A nonfictional novel, most of the time, though there are some fictional elements. But the protagonist—my mother, Guadalupe—was real. She was a prostitute, and she died of leukemia. Why does it matter if the particular events around her happened in this world or not?

I think novels are novels because of technique, not because the content is made up. I wrote Tomb Song using a novelist’s tools—prolepsis and analepsis, digression, a plot twist that lasts three decades, plenty of characters. It’s always been strange to me that some Spanish-language critics insist that Tomb Song is a memoir and that my other book, The House of the Pain of Others, is a novel. To me, that book is a mix of reportage and narrative history. But honestly, I don’t lose sleep over this. I’ve always written between genres.

We’re always hearing about what a headache the frontier is for the United States because of the drug trafficking. No one mentions how dangerous the United States frontier is for Mexicans because of the trafficking of arms. And, when the subject does come up, the neighboring attorney general points out: “It’s not the same thing: the drugs are of illegal origin, the arms aren’t.” As if there was a majestic logic in considering that in comparison with the destructive power of a marijuana joint, an AK-47 is just a child’s toy.

Back when it was announced that the National Book Foundation was bringing this back, I wrote a long post about how great it was that Lisa Lucas (and her predecessor at the foundation, Harold Augenbraum, two of the most energetic, concerned people in the book world) made this happen, while also wringing my hands over what this would do to other existent translation awards (the BTBAs in particular, which will be greatly overshadowed), and who exactly would able to afford to apply. (We also did a podcast that touched on this, which has been getting a lot of downloads.)

My primary concern was about all the backend fees for books that are finalists. From that first article:

All publishers submitting books for the National Book Awards must agree to:

Contribute $3,000 toward a promotional campaign if a submitted book becomes a Finalist ($750 for presses with income of under $10 million).

Inform authors of submitted books that, if selected as Finalists, they must be present at the National Book Awards Ceremony and at related events in New York City.

Inform authors that the Finalists Reading will be held at The New School on Tuesday, November 13, 2018.

Inform authors that the National Book Awards Ceremony will be held at Cipriani Wall Street on Wednesday, November 14, 2018.

Cover all travel and accommodation costs for Finalists and provide them with a seat at the Awards Ceremony.

Purchase from the National Book Foundation, when appropriate, medallions to be affixed to the covers of Longlist, Finalist, and Winning books. The Foundation also will license the medallion image artwork for reproduction on the covers of Finalist and Winning books.

For presses that are doing well for themselves—Graywolf, New Directions, Europa—this is likely to be less of a concern. (And for other nonprofits with functioning boards, they could probably raise the money if it was a big issue.) But for a lot of other presses, these extra thousands could be prohibitive, leading to questions of who this award is really for.

BUT! When the actual details came out, almost all of those extra fees were eliminated for translation presses. From the updated National Book Award website:

Contribute toward a promotional campaign if a submitted book becomes a Finalist. For presses with income of $10 million or above, a contribution of $3,000; under $10 million, a contribution of $750; and for presses with income under $1 million, the fee is waived. (So this went from $750 to $0.)

Inform authors that the National Book Awards Ceremony will be held at Cipriani Wall Street on Wednesday, November 14, 2018. If the publisher attends, it is the expectation that they will provide a seat for their Finalist (discounted tickets are available for small, nonprofit, and/or university presses) (Still not sure what the cost actually is, but the fact that we don’t all have to pay Big Five rates is reassuring.)

Cover all travel and accommodation costs for Finalists (the Foundation will provide travel support for Finalists in the Translated Literature category). (Even if the NBF only covers part of this, it’s still a big help.)

So there you go! Even though a Twitter conversation established that Lisa Lucas never read anything I ever wrote on the subject, and was only aware of the (which is basically a 1:1 rewrite of everything I said), I’d like to think that maybe Three Percent did a bit of good by remarking on all of this and making the economics of translation publishing a bit more transparent.

(Which is bullshit. The only time anyone reads or responds to any of these posts is when they’re offended. A near weekly occurrence, and something that’s really getting me down and making it hard to fully enjoy writing these. This is how self-censorship happens. Although, to be honest, since it seems that no one actually reads these, I should feel way more liberated!)

This last point must refer to me. I prefer to imagine Mamá—drunk and sniveling—singing to the sham lights of La Habana than to see her as I do today: bald, silent, yellow, breathing with greater difficulty than a chick raffled off at a charity event. For over a week now, my mother has been, biochemically speaking, incapable of crying. The ideology of pain is the most fraudulent of all. It would be more honest to say that, since she fell ill with leukemia, my mother’s political thought can be expressed only through a microscope.

“If you want to move in with that frigging bitch, fine: do it. But she’ll make your life hell. And you’re abandoning me, the person who’s taken so much shit to get you this far. If you’ve already made up your mind, go ahead. But you’re not my son anymore, you bastard, you’re nothing but a mad dog.”

In my family, it’s fine to utter any kind of curse (frigging, bastard, screw, idiot), but obscenities (prick, ass, fart, whore-monger) are prohibited. Although it’s a bit late in the day for me to offer a clear explanation of the difference between the two categories, I can easily intuit which new words belong in one hemisphere and which in the other. The universal term my siblings and I employ to substitute impolite expressions is This.

With Among Strange Victims, I started the process in British English and then, when Coffee House Press decided to publish it, I had to rethink certain passages. I remember that the expletive “bloody” (my translation of pinche) was considered too British when it came to editing, and there was a suggestion of replacing it with “damn.” But the problem was, I’d already used “damn” in other contexts, and wanted something more specific for that very Mexican term. Anyway, after a great deal of thought, I decided on “frigging,” which seems to fit neatly between the two cultures: Daniel liked it too.

Really curious to know if that’s the same situation here. I personally have never heard anyone say
“frigging” before, and would never think of it as a substitute for any swear. It does help maintain the confusion between the categories of “curses” and “obscenities” (bastard and screw are allowed but fart isn’t?), but it stands out to me, especially when his mother says it, and against the larger backdrop of characters who say “fucking” and do a lot of cocaine and opioids.

If there really isn’t a satisfactory match for pinche (assuming that’s the original in this book as it was in Among Strange Victims), it would be bold—and cool—to just leave it. I wouldn’t be surprised if a significant number of readers had come across pinche before, or could at least glean it’s swear-status from context. Which brings me to my last translation-related observation/question:

(Scrawneebly is a word Mónica and I invented to refer to cowards: a mixture of scrawny and feeble. We stand facing each other, arms akimbo, in superhero pose, and recite in unison, “And did you really think I was scrawneebly?”)

Again, not that there’s anything wrong with MacSweeney’s solution. It just stood out to me, and I’m again curious about the thought process and other possibilities.

We occasionally had breakfast with other Latin American poets, who seemed deeply self-satisfied with their own genius. [. . .] The best poets were, naturally, from Cuba and Chile. But when it came to conversation, nothing doing: they would have had to send them over with built-in subtitles.

Since it’s never too early to speculate, based on my pre-existing knowledge of these judges and the eligible books, here are five that I expect to see on the longlist:

Emissary by Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani (New Directions) (I’m assuming this is eligible even though Bernofsky translates Tawada’s German works)

Armand V or T Singer by Dag Solstad, translated from the Norwegian by Steven T. Murray and Tiina Nunnally, respectively (New Directions)

My Struggle: Book Six by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett and Martin Aiken (Archipelago Books)

Tomb Song by Julián Herbert, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Graywolf Press)

Blue Self-Portrait by Noemi Lefebvre, translated from the French by Sophie Lewis (Transit Books)

One question: Is it OK to lobby for your own books? Given how small the translation world is, I know four of the five of the people on this committee, which makes me uncomfortable. I’m desperate for our books—and our website, and Open Letter as a whole, and myself personally—to get some national respect, to be considered to be “cool” or “necessary,” but prefer that it happens because people read the work itself and respond to quality. As you surely know, I suck at generating favorable vibes for myself or our press and its programs. It’s a curse I struggle with all the time in ways that I don’t want to share, and that you wouldn’t want to experience. But if I were a good publisher, maybe I could do that extra bit of Oscar-esque soft-diplomacy that creates a warm context within which these judges would more likely appreciate our submissions . . .

There are four books of ours that I think deserve to be longlisted: Fox by Dubravka Ugresic, The Bottom of the Sky by Rodrigo Fresán, Her Mother’s Mother’s Mother and Her Daughters by Maria José Silveira, and The Endless Summer by Madame Nielsen. If one of those makes the longlist, I’ll be ecstatic.

As a child, I wanted to be a scientist or a doctor. A man in a white coat. But all too soon I discovered my lack of aptitude: it took me years to accept the roundness of the earth. In public, I faked it.

(BTW, the review that went along with the Chicago Review of Books headline is totally reasonable, and Empty Set is totally reasonable as a book as well. It’s not Joyce or anything—which that headline implies—but it’s good.)

So what I decided is that I should go back and change all of my previous posts to reflect this sort of “clickbait” mentality. Hell, I wrote an article once about how no one reads articles, they just glance at the headline, who’s tweeting it, and then click “heart” and/or “reshare.” It’s a complete inefficiency to write long, voice-driven posts that shoot for nuance and call-backs and embedded jokes, but I’d get way way more readers if these posts have BuzzFeed-inspired titles like: “9 Moments That Make ‘Tomb Song’ the Frontrunner for the National Book Award in Translation,” or “How ‘Empty Set’ Revolutionized the Marketing of Translations,” or “10 Paths to Obscure Books That Will Make You Say ‘Wow’,” or “Readers Born in the 1970s Will Recognize These Vargas Llosa Classics,” or “15 Ways Books About Chess Can Rewire Your Brain—And Make You Smarter!”

That’s the new Three Percent policy: sell-out when you can. Rochester is lonely enough, there’s no honor in spending four hours a weekend writing shit that no one ever clicks on.

All of a sudden Émil Cioran’s little books on antipersonal development for adolescents come to mind. The one, for example, in which insomnia reveals to him the most profound sense of the trouble with existence: it impelled him toward unlimited spite: walking to the shoreline and throwing stones at some poor seagulls. Jeez, what a punk.

A lot of Book Twitter was talking about in particular, this bit:

You’re not awfully optimistic about the future of the novel, are you?

I think the novel is absolutely doomed to become a marginal cultural form, along with easel painting and the classical symphony. And that’s already happened. I’ve been publishing since 1990, so I’ve seen it happen in my writing lifetime. It’s impossible to think of a novel that’s been a water-cooler moment in England, or in Britain, since Trainspotting, probably.

It’s frequently said that that’s partly because narrative has migrated to box sets. Is there any truth in that?

The relationship between the novel and film in the 20th century was like the relationship between Rome and Greece. Film depended upon the novel, at least in its infancy and youth. The problem is that now that film itself is being Balkanised – carved up, streamed, loaded on to DVDs, watched on people’s phones – it no longer needs its grease, it no longer needs the novel lying behind it. It’s a disaster for the novel, actually – I think the novel is in freefall.

All of the reactions I saw were of the “It’s hypocritical to say the contemporary novel is doomed and not read any contemporary novels!” line. I might be completely off-base, but I thought Self was getting at something different. There are questions about narrative approaches within contemporary novels—and whether good TV is more narratively innovative than, say, a Franzen novel—but I think there’s also the question of the relevance of the novel within culture. It’s really hard to think of a novel that generated the same amount of discussion about non-book industry people as several Netflix shows. And that doesn’t seem to be going away. The centrality of the novel to culture has definitely evolved since 1990—and not in a particularly positive way.

More on that next week . . . Along with some thoughts about Lispector’s The Chandelier.

If you want to see this conversation (instead of listening to the podcast), you can view it all And be sure to come by next Monday, March 19th at 9pm to with Brian, Chad, and special guest Tom Flynn from In addition to talking about Part V (pgs 151-178), they’ll be happy to chat about any section of the book (or anything, really), for those who drop in.

As always, The Physics of Sorrow (and all the previous Two Month Review titles) is available for 20% off through our Just use the code 2MONTH at checkout.

Feel free to comment on this episode—or on the book in general—either on this post, or at the official

Follow and for more thoughts and information about upcoming guests. And you can follow for thoughts about literature, the New England Patriots, and more.

And you can find all the Two Month Review posts by clicking here. And be sure to

The music for this season of Two Month Review is by Splendor and Misery, featuring Georgi’s translator, Angela Rodel!

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. Ye��.”

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 mention��.” “Which ones, specifically?” “Flaubert, Proust, Borges, Hrabal, Gombrowicz, Laurence Sterne, Nabokov, Ulysses . . .” “. . .” “So it was kind of ridiculou��.” “. . . “, 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.

The Craft of Gospodinov

Through “The Yellow House” we’re looking at—well—everything. Each of the short stories within provide flashes at the truth that Gospodinov is writing to unpack. And by the time I reached the end of this section, I felt fully immersed. When the chapter finished, I automatically ventured further as I felt fully prepared by Gospodinov to do so. I mean it when I say that this section left me blank, breathless. The book has done much to cement it’s sense of playfulness and wonder through its unconventional structure and mythic, pseudo-scientific content, and the rules of how this world works. But through this part we now see Gospodinov shine for his prose and its ability to draw a reader into its self-contained world.

The Personal Mythic

It is with this vigorous attention to prose that, throughout “The Yellow House,” Gospodinov returns to what he established in previous sections, such as the powerful orbit of the minotaur, and its relationship to abandonment and his life in Bulgaria. The opening piece is easily one of the strongest. At its most basic, it’s a short work of mystery, with a little bit of Gothic spice here and there with the otherworldly properties and suspense. The second paragraph reads like it could have been pulled from an early American horror serial:

One evening, passing by there, I heard a chilling howl. There was something excessive and inhuman in that howling or bellowing, something from the mazes of the night Ooooooooohhh . . . That endless Oooohh dug tunnels in the silence of the early November evening.

And there we are, drawn in to this strange space where nothing is truly certain, and it’s here that we find our protagonist, the young Gospodinov. This story continues as such, with him traversing the dark countryside outside of this deserted insane asylum, attempting to speculate what—or who— is howling—or possibly mooing—from its depths, and, later, trying to figure out what his father was doing there. This arc continues in “My Brother, the Minotaur,” where the nature of the mystery turns from halls of the asylum with their peeling paint to the halls of his own mind, as he attempts to deduce what—or who—was calling out to him from the center of that labyrinth. And his imagination runs wild. He first speculates that:

That inhuman howl really was inhuman, and it wasn’t Ooooh, but Moooo. And it came from a half-man, half-bull locked up in there. (I’d already seen one such boy in my grandfather’s hidden memory.) [. . .]

And from here he’s left, haunted about his fate and his relationship to the Minotaur (Asterius, is that you?), as he suspects that he and the minotaur are brothers through numerous imaginative acrobatics.

The Diagnosis

In this section we even return to embedding. This time, we have a diagnosis for this bizarre ability: pathological empathy or obsessive empathetic-somatic syndrome (which, as far as we can tell author Gospodinov has created for this piece specifically). This condition is marked, neurologically, by some kind of hyperactivity in the same regions of the brain that allow for empathy, but, for people like Georgi, it becomes too strong of a feeling and places the brain in a trance-like state while the victim fully constructs, or possibly invades, the memory or imagination of another.

There’s even a kind of somatic confirmation of this, which is seen following an MRI:

The picture hadn’t come out. Maybe it was due to the machine, it was old, after all. Actually, this was the first time something like this had happened to them, absolutely nothing could be seen, just a dark-black plate. This didn’t come as a surprise to me. I know nothing can be seen, because inside is darkness, an unilluminable, centuries-deep darkness. My skull is a cave. I didn’t tell them that, of course.

The Myth of the Gospodinovs

We’re also met with numerous short and sweet stories about our young narrator and his family where the mythic is drawn upon to contextualize the experiences of him and his family. In “Nippers,” the theme of abandonment is intersected once again by Greek myths, while in “Mother Bean” the children are told to avoid playing in the gardens or the mothers of vegetables will go after them. It’s here that a young Georgi beautifully remarks, “Everything had a mother, only we didn’t. We had grandmother��.”

A Brief and Wondrous History of Bulgaria

A bulk of “The Yellow House” has Gospodinov recounting life in Communist Bulgaria. We’re given lectures on Bulgaria through sections like “A Private History of the 1980s,” and “An Official History of the 1980s,” which highlight Georgi’s own role in the deaths of numerous Soviet Union leaders (and the relationship of that to his love life). Amongst these are series of catalogs, such as the “Catalog of Collections,” which details Gospodinov’s obsession with collected abandoned things, to the two-part “The Sexual Questions” and “From a Catalog Of Important Erotic Scenes,” which highlight the humor that pervades Gospodinov’s storytelling—no matter how grim the discussion.

All We Are is Dust in the Wind

The section I wanted to focus on the most was “The Metaphysics of Dust,” nestled in the first third of “The Yellow House.” It describes in full beautiful sensory detail—almost spiritually so—a return to a nostalgic place. The piece opens:

I’ve fallen asleep on the windowsill. I wake up from the sun shining through the dirty glass, a warm afternoon sun. Still in that no man’s land between sleep and afternoon, before I return to myself, I sense that soaring and lightness, the whole weightlessness of a child’s body. Waking up, I age within seconds. Crippling pain seizes my lower back, my leg is stiff. The light in early September, the first fallen leaves outside, the worry that someone may have passed by on the street and seen me.

We’re met with lush descriptions that bounce between the senses and accomplish a lot—with very little—to create a sense of immersion. While we’re beautifully drawn into this scene, Gospodinov starts to layer this prosodic depth with some of the ‘physics’ that’s he’s guided us to throughout the piece—in this case the relationship between light and time that he introduced in the previous section, “Against an Abandonment: The Case of M.” He’s already performing routines that we’re familiar with, such as the warping of perception, but as he’s worked so hard for us to understanding how his world works he’s now able to fully engage with more artistic prose. He continues:

I climb down from the window carefully, unfolding my body, instead of simply jumping down. The room, lit up by the autumn sun, has come alive. One ray passes right through the massive glass ashtray on the table, breaking the light down into its constituent colors. Even the long-dead, mummified fly next to it looks exquisite and sparkles like a forgotten earring [. . .] The Brownian motion of the dust specks in the ray of light . . . The first mundane proof of atomism and quantum physics, we are made of specks of dust. And perhaps the whole room, the afternoon and my very self, with my awkward three-dimensionality are being merely projected [. . .]

Just as we were first drawn to his perspective, which seems to be a timeless narrator pulled between his youth and age and he’s filled with both whimsy and stiff joints at the same time, we’re now being dispersed into the universe with the dust and drifts throughout the room and the light that pours in through the windows. And as we’re already familiar with, Gospodinov returns to his own whimsical, emotional physics with more feeling—more depth. The piece moves into a collection of moments, something we see in different forms throughout “The Yellow House,” and the manner in which these moments are built further obstructs our ability to sense time at this moment—as readers—as we almost see the narrator stretch himself across space and time within the confines of this room:

I recalled the darkness, the scent of Pine-Sol, the whirring of the machine. Everything in the movie theater was made from that darkness and a single beam of light. The headless horseman arrived along the beam, as did the great Rocky Mountains, the Grand Canyon; horses and Indians, whooping Sioux tribes, geometrical Roman legions, and ragged Gypsy caravans headed for the heavens kicked up dust along it, Lollobrigida and Loren came down that beam, along with Bardot, Alain Delon and his eternal rival Belmondo [. . .] I would turn my back on the screen and peer into the beam coming from the little window at the back of the theater. It swarmed with chaotically dancing particles. [. . .] I watched the specks of dust and tried to guess which would turn into lips, an eye, a horse’s hoof or Lollobrigida’s breasts, which flashed by for an instant in one scene . . .

Gospodinov pulls the readers across a span of ephemera, as he warned us through his epigraphy, and while the prose here is as beautiful as the rest of the section, he has also given us an outline of what we are to expect throughout the section, right down to the feelings, actors, and archetypes. And, mystically, he tells us that there’s more, more that he can’t tell us directly, through the use of ellipses. We can speculate here, as these could be the lapses in his own memory, or a daring moment where the narrator can’t tell us something that is pulled back to his memory of the movie theatre. While I’m focusing on these opening paragraphs, clumsily pulling the enter short here, I could easily draw from any moment of this short piece, and such a homogeneity of wonder throughout this section attests to Gospodinov’s clear vision that I first wrote two in the introductory post weeks ago.

I return to some of the sentiments that the gentlemen shared during the podcast last week. In “The Yellow House” Gospodinov shows us what he was capable of. During one of the previous discussions, one participant—I believe Brian—noted that there wasn’t necessarily something pulling them through the piece. They were reading it, they were enjoying it, but—to paraphrase—the magic of the piece wasn’t sustaining the reading experience.

And I would agree with that commentary. While the work was interesting, and challenging, it felt like Gospodinov might not have been leading us anywhere concrete. There were so many disparate sections, with loose narration, followed by the formal shifting in Part II, and these changes forced me, as a reader, into anywhere from discomfort—anxiety at worst—to a disinterest towards what would come next. But what arrived through Part III was a strong return to what we know. Instead of shifting expectations once more with formal manipulation, Gospodinov was able strengthen the themes of the previous sections with a stunning attention to prose. And, in retrospect, the structure of the previous sections was needed to draw a reader to enough of a familiarity with the work as to give Gospodinov free reign to give us his best.