“Unforgiving Years“http://readingtheworld.org/nyrb.html is the second book New York Review Books has published, the first being a reprint of The Case of Comrade Tulayev. Richard Greeman translated this, and wrote a very interesting preface that begins:

Unforgiving Years is at once the most bitter, the most cerebral, and the most poetic of Victor Serge’s seven novels. It was first published in France in 1971—twenty-five years after the author’s death—and has never appeared before in English. The setting is World War II, and Serge pushes realism to the modernist limits of hallucination, presenting extravagant, terrifying, poetic visions of men and women prowling the debris of a self-destructing mechanical civilization.

The novel is broken up into four section or “symphonic ‘movements’” each of which is quite distinct in terms of time and place. The first takes place in Paris, where D has just broken with the Communist Party and is expecting retribution. The second is in Leningrad, where D helps defend the city. Part Three is set in Germany, and the final section takes place in Mexico.

Edwin Frank wrote a nice piece about Serge for the a while back, closing with a few lines that convinced me that I had to read this book:

The book has an epic scope—it is a picture of a planet in convulsion—without foregoing the detail of everyday life or a sense of the moment. It is a spy story and a war story and (several) love stories, gripping and terrifying, passionate and thoughtful, while the men and women in it—they include secret agents, true believers, philosophers, artists, and assassins—are at once larger than life and powerfully alive.

One of the best selling points for Yan Lianke’s is the quote on the back from the Chinese Central Propaganda Bureau:

This novel slanders Mao Zedong, the Army, and is overflowing with sex. . . . Do not distribute, pass around, comment on, excerpt from it, or report on it.

This kind of negative attention is a publisher’s dream . . . As explained in the flap copy, when this book was written in 2005, it was deemed “unpublishable by China’s state-run publishing houses.” Thanks to the interview, this quickly became a cult classic.

Sexual insinuations in the jacket copy doesn’t hurt either:

Serve the People! is a beautifully told, wickedly daring story about the forbidden love affair between Liu Lian, the young, pretty wife of a powerful division commander in Communist China, and her household’s lowly servant, Wu Dawang. Left to idle at home while her husband furthers the revolution, Liu Lian establishes a rule for her orderly: whenever the household’s wooden “Serve the People!” sign is removed from its usual place on the dinner talbe and placed elsewhere, Wu Dawang is to stop what he is doing to attend to her needs upstairs.

E. J. wrote a long review of this back some time ago, ending with:

And much of that first two-thirds feels pretty familiar, which left me wanting Lianke to just get Wu Dawang and Liu Lian together, so he could get on with the rest of his story. Anyone who has seen a romantic comedy and gets to the part when misunderstandings-or-outside-forces-are-temporarily-driving-
the-lovers-apart-which-makes-their-eventual-coupling-more-
satisfying knows what I’m talking about, but in this case with a lot more sex once they get together.

Once he gets them together however, Lianke’s story does take on a more elegiac and, to me at least, far more interesting tone. And the book does have a few powerful moments toward the end, when the current of criticism that runs through the plot—how constricting these communist slogans, once internalized, have become, and how they are used and twisted by all and sundry just to get by—affects the plot and the characters most directly and more deeply.

Following on yesterday’s post about Peter Nadas, comes today’s RTW feature on another Hungarian author worth reading—Peter Esterhazy. Esterhazy is considered to be one of the most influential Hungarian writers of the twentieth century, and one of the more experimental. A number of his books—including A Little Hungarian Pornography and She Loves Me—are available from Northwestern University Press.

(Ecco) is his most recent book to be published in English, and focuses on his family history.

The Esterhazys, one of Europe’s most prominent artistocratic families, are closely linked to the rise and fall of the Hapsburg Empire. Princes, counts, commanders, diplomats, bishops, and patrons of the arts, revered, respected, and occasionally feared by their contemporaries, their story is as complex as the history of Hungary itself.

The book is a massive 846 pages and pulls sentences (or a word or two) from over a hundred different authors. As Judith Sollosy states in her introduction:

Indeed, Celestial Harmonies is monumental in scope. The author pays tribute to his father not by reductionism (“this is what my father was like”) but by expansion (“my father was all fathers and all men whose lives collided with Hungarian history”). He is a monster, and he is an angel, but above all, he is a man wrestling with the meaning of God. At least, this is one of the recurrent themes of Book One, which the father leaves ambling along, bent, like a straightened-out saxophone, his head lowered to prevent him from banging it into the heavenly spheres.

What’s not mentioned in this paperback edition is any mention of Esterhazy’s follow up, Revised Edition, which is an “appendix” to Celestial Harmonies. After writing Celestial Harmonies, Esterhazy found out that his father was an informer for the secret police, causing him to write an entirely new history . . . Unfortunately, Revised Edition hasn’t been translated into English, and I haven’t heard about anyone working on this . . . Which is too bad—taken as a pair, these two books would be fascinating to read one after another.

Although a couple of Elias Khoury’s other books were published in English a number of years ago, it was Archipelago’s edition of Gate of the Sun that really brought him to the attention of American readers. Frequently compared to One Thousand and One Nights, Gate of the Sun is a sprawling, epic novel. (And is now available in paperback from Picador.)

Yalo, on the other hand, is a different sort of book. From Jeff Waxman’s review:

Elias Khoury’s new novel, Yalo—out earlier this month from Archipelago—is a deep examination of truth and memory set against the gritty backdrop of post-war Lebanon. The book’s premise appears to be simple: in the first pages, it becomes apparent that the title character has been arrested for rape. Rape is a simple crime, with simple motives. In this story, however, nothing is as simple as it first appears. Yalo’s greatest crime may not be rape, Yalo may not be guilty, and Yalo may no longer even be Yalo.

Even better than this positive review is the opening of the book itself:

Yalo did not understand what was happening.

The young man stood before the interrogator and closed his eyes. He always closed his eyes when he faced danger, when he was along, and when his mother . . . On that day too, the morning of Thursday, December 22, 1993, he closed his eyes involuntarily.

Yalo did not understand why everything was white.

He saw the white interrogator, sitting behind a white table, the sun refracting on the glass window behind him, and his faced bathed in reflected light. All Yalo saw were hallos of light and a woman walking through the city streets tripping on her shadow.

Yalo closed his eyes for a moment, or so he thought. This young man with his knitted eyebrows and long tan face, his slender height, closed his eyes for a moment before reopening them. But here, in the Jounieh police station, he closed his eyes and saw crossed lines around two lips that moved as if whispering. He looked at his handcuffed wrists and felt that the sun that obscured the face of the interrogator struck him in the eyes, so he closed them.

The young man stood before the interrogator at ten o’clock that cold morning and saw the sun refracted on the window, shining on the white head of the man whose mouth opened with questions. Yalo closed his eyes.

Yalo did not understand what the interrogator was shouting about.

There’s also an interview conducted by Bill Marx with Elias Khoury on the

I’m really not sure how to write a mini-review of I know I’m going out a limb here, but I’m pretty sure most of our readers have heard of this Leo Tolstoy. But in a way, that’s what’s cool about RTW—the mix of contemporary voices and true classics.

What’s amazing to me is how much attention such an enormous, dense retranslation received when it came out last year. Part of the reason was the controversy over the quality of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation, part of it was the (I remember Karl Pohrt of Shaman Drum Bookshop telling me that it was impossible to keep this edition on the shelf during this book club.)

It didn’t hurt that a second edition of “original version” according to the publisher—came out at the same time.

But generally speaking, I think this is a testament to the fact that there is a large group of readers out there who are interested in the classics. They’re interested in reading the “Great Books” regardless of how much they weigh . . .

Richard Pevear puts it best in the opening to his introduction:

War and Peace is the most famous and at the same time the most daunting of Russian novels, as vast as Russia itself and as long to cross from one end to the other. Yet if one makes the journey, the sights seen and the people met on the way mark one’s life forever.

One of the first books to receive a Amanda Michalopoulou’s is also one of the few works of contemporary Greek literature to be published in the States over the past few years. (She’s also one of the few authors I’ve stumbled across with a )

This book—translated by Karen Emmerich—is a collection of 13 stories that interweave and intertwine in a way that’s playfully metafictional and quite intriguing. (None of the descriptions of this book really do it justice, so instead, here’s a bit from the author’s “Clarification of What I’d Like”:

My original objective was to write a few short stories to supplement the twenty of so I’ve published here and there in the past few years. When I started to write, the old stories didn’t fit in anywhere—they scurried back to the anthologies they’d come from. So a new objective took shape: to write stories that would read like versions of an unwritten novel. Or, better, to write the biography of those stories as well as of their fictional writer.

This game is evident in the openings of the first two stories. The first is the title-story, “I’d Like”:

“Now! He’s alone!”

Vandoros is standing across the room from us, scratching his reddish beard. With his leather gloves and penetrating gaze he looks just like a fox.

“What are you waiting for?” I hiss.

My husband loosens his bow tie and crosses the room in his characteristic bouncing gait. He’d come up to me just like that, years ago, at a movie theater in Athens. “Don’t tell me you liked that film,” he’d said then. No, but I had liked his peculiar blend of awkwardness and chivalry.

And then from the second story, “A Slight, Controlled Unease”:

“Now! He’s alone!”

“What are you waiting for?” I hiss.

I’m waiting to see where you’ll take it. The characters don’t convince me, with their gloves and their penetrating gazes. Give me a story. I want to dive in and splash around in the sense of a story. I’d like, as you say. What an idiot: I choose a book by its title.

We will be running a long review of this title in the not-too-distant future, but I definitely think it’s worth checking out. And hopefully one day, Michalopoulou’s other titles will make their way into English as well.

According to

Yoko Ogawa is one of the stars of Japanese literature who is anticipated to be “the next Haruki Murakami.” Of her works, over ten have been translated into French. In France, she is as popular as her predecessors Junichiro Tanizaki, Yasunari Kawabata, and Yukio Mishima.

is her first title to be published in English, and came out from Picador earlier this year. (I reviewed it a few months back.) This is a collection of three novellas, including “Dormitory,” which was my favorite for its creepy, ambiguous quality. (Even the flap copy description for this story is great: “A woman nostalgically visits her old college dormitory on the outskirts of Tokyo, a boarding house run by a mysterious triple amputee with one leg.”)

Stephen Snyder is one of the best Japanese translators working today, and he did a marvelous job with this book. I know that before leaving Picador, Amber Quereshi signed on a few of Ogawa’s titles, all of which Snyder will be translating.

The next one—The Housekeeper and the Professor—is due out in October, which is written up in Contemporary Japanese Writers:

Hakase no aishita sushiki (The Gift of Numbers) marked a transformation within Ogawa. It is a tale about the kind and affectionate relationship between a math professor—whose memory lasts only eighty minutes as a result of injuries he sustained in a car accident—and his housekeeper and her child. A beautifully written masterpiece, it attracted an overwhelming number of readers in Japan. The warmth with which the author runs her eyes over these characters, and the delicacy with which she portrays them, succeeded in making Ogawa’s world into something more expansive and enchanting.

The title of hers that sounds most interesting to me though is Hotel Iris:

Fans were split on the sensual, sadomasochistic world inhabited by an old man and a girl in Hotel Iris. It also proved controversial when it was translated into French; even the well-respected newspaper Le Monde criticized it as being merely erotic. In the story, the girl feels sorry for the old man’s deteriorating body bound for death, and motivated by a certain sense of masochism, she gives herself to him.

Like a number of other online literary commentators, I’ve been blogging the hell out of Bolano’s 2666, talking it up as one of the “Big Books of BEA,” and one of the most anticipated galleys of the year. (Which really does still trip me out. Amid all the talk of how Americans don’t like foreign literature, shy away from dead authors, don’t like tildes, etc., etc., some schlubs at BEA steal the mock-up of the three-volume paperback from the FSG stand, which, granted, was very pretty, but was filled with blank pages.) I’m more than half-way done with this, and yes, it really is amazing.

Nevertheless, it’s a mistake to overlook the fantastic Bolano books New Directions has published in favor of 2666 and The Savage Detectives. All of the ND books—By Night in Chile, Distant Star, Amulet, and especially Last Evenings on Earth—are a testament to Bolano’s range and ability.

is no exception. This is one of my favorite titles from this year’s group of Reading the World books. I still giggle about the idea of recommending this to public radio listeners, since the title is somewhat misleading. Or not really—this is an encyclopedia of fascist writers, magazines, books, publishers, etc. But it’s all invented, and not at all the weighty, serious tome that the title suggests.

I wrote a review of this a few months back, and rather than re-heap the praise, I’d rather just reprint one of my favorite sections:

That was not to be Perez Mason’s last visit to the jails of socialist Cuba. In 1965 he published Poor Man’s Soup, which related—in an irreproachable style, worthy of Sholokov—the hardships of a large family living in Havana in 1950. The novel comprised fourteen chapters. The first began: “Lucia was a black woman from . . .”; the second: “Only after serving her father . . .”; the third: “Nothing had come easily to Juan . . .”; the fourth: “Gradually, tenderly, she drew him towards her . . .” The censor quickly smelled a rat. The first letters of each chapter made up the acrostic LONG LIVE HITLER. A major scandal broke out. Perez Mason defended himself haughtily: it was a simple coincidence. The censors set to work in earnest, and made a fresh discovery: the first letters of each chapter’s second paragraph made up another acrostic—THIS PLACE SUCKS. And those of the third paragraph spelled: USA WHERE ARE YOU. And the fourth paragraph: KISS MY CUBAN ASS. And so, since each chapter, without exception, contained twenty-five paragraphs, the censors and the general public soon discovered twenty-five acrostics. I screwed up, Perez Mason would say later: They were too obvious, but if I’d made it much harder, no one would have realized.

is a perfect example of the type of books Reading the World was created to promote. Over 300 large pages of poetry from more than 45 countries/regions (including Sapmi!) and a few hundred poets. The breadth of this anthology is impressive and admirable, and taken as a whole this is an incredibly valuable resource for anyone interested in reading (or publishing) European poetry.

The introduction by Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer (the two primary editors who were assisted by twenty-three regional editors) is very interesting, especially the explanation they give of the goal of the anthology:

Our goal in putting together this anthology was not to pretend to present a comprehensive view of European poetry today—that would be impossible. Europe has nearly 750 million inhabitants and, depending on how you count, more than forty languages. In organizing an anthology simply of one nation’s poets, it’s difficult enough to determine, without the benefit of hindsight, which writers are important and will one day be influential. An anthology of European poets presents a whole host of additional problems—questions of national representation, translations, intranational languages and identifications, the politics of national boundaries, and so on. Nonetheless, we felt that it was important to bring this wholly imperfect endeavor to an American audience for three primary reasons: (1) the trajectory of European poetry has continued beyond the European poets known to an American audience; (2) culturally and historically Europe is radically differnt than it was just a few decades ago, and thus a reexamination of Europe’s poetry seems due; and (3) American poetry readers and poets seem to be less engaged with European poetry than they once were, which is a shame.

Right on.

At the RTW party at BEA, there were a number of booksellers and reviewers raving about this title. In fact, the fifteen free copies that FSG sent to give away were gone before the second bottle of wine was opened. (OK, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but this really was one of the hottest RTW titles.)

With all the attention being paid to China—the Olympics, human rights abuses, etc.—it seems like there’s been a genuine upswing in interest in reading titles by Chinese writers. Especially dissident Chinese writers such as Ma Jian, whose work was banned by the government following the publication of Stick Out Your Tongue.

Politics and foreign cultures aside for the moment, the plot of this book sounds pretty intriguing:

The novel explores how fear and ignorance generate a lethal amnesia that undercuts individual freedoms and social bonds. The story weaves together a documentary chronicle of the students in [Tiananmen] square with a nightmarish tour through the consciousness of a protester, Dai Wei, who is shot in the head during the crackdown. Throughout the novel he is in a comatose state, trying to make sense of what happened as his mother struggles to keep him alive. (from )

A very interesting and his translator, Flora Drew, can be found on the section of PRI’s “The World” website (a section that is becoming more and more impressive everyday).

Ma Jian’s has a few provocative comments on the Olympics:

I believe that Western leaders should not play into the ruling party’s hands and collaborate in this big propaganda show. If they do, the Olympics will be a true farce because the party will have made Beijing into the cleanest prison in the world. All the undesirables, the mentally unstable people, all the dissident writers will have been detained and arrested before the event, so the atmosphere of openness will just be a charade, a piece of theater in which Western leaders will play their part.

But also has some interesting things to say about his novel:

The World: Your novel “Beijing Coma,” which centers on the 1989 student protest in Tiananmen Square, depicts the rebellion against the government as farcical rather than heroic. By showing how much went wrong with the demonstration, the book appears to undercut the struggle for freedom in China.

Ma Jian: For me, the events in Tiananmen Square are not romantic so I don’t wish to romanticize them. I see them as a tragedy, a tragedy because these young students had no idea of their own history, they had no memory, so when they stood up for what they understood to democracy, human rights and freedom they didn’t know what these terms meant or how to effectively bring them about in reality. And because they had grown up amid political indoctrinization they had no other reference points, no other models to follow, so when they achieved a certain level of power they turned into a miniature Communist party, with all the infighting and bickering that maneuvering for power brings.

I think it’s great that Bill Marx interviews both the author and translator, giving the translator a chance to talk about some of the difficulties/joys of translation. (It was at the Goethe Institut event last week that someone related a Peter Constantine quote that “A translator is someone who is always running into problems.”)

For instance, I find Flora Drew’s comment on the “most difficult challenge of translating Beijing Coma into English” rather illuminating:

The Chinese language doesn’t have tenses, so the past, present, and future intermingle because the language makes it easy to jump about fluidly in time. But capturing that expansive experience of time becomes tricky in the English language, where you also have to maintain a solid backbone of chronology. My goal was to retain Ma Jian’s sense of ambiguity and timelessness while also making the story understandable to an English-speaking reader.