The Last Lover – Three Percent

China vs. New Zealand [Women's World Cup of Literature: First Round]

Chad Post — Thu, 11 Jun 2015 14:00:00 +0000

This match was judged by Florian Duijsens, a senior editor at Asymptote, fiction editor at SAND Journal, and teacher at Bard College Berlin. You can follow him on Twitter at @neonres.

For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our and like our And check back here daily!

Today’s match pits two trophy winners against each other; in 2013, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries snagged both the Man Booker Prize and Canada’s Governor General’s Award for English-language fiction. Can Xue’s The Last Lover and its translator Annalise Finnegan Wasmoen, meanwhile, captured the hotly contested Best Translated Book Award Cup just last month. As for your referee today, I read Catton’s book when it came out, eager to lose myself in the brick-sized book after its buzz made it all the way over to Berlin from New Zealand. Before being assigned this match-up, I’d not read Can Xue’s work, though Dylan Suher’s wonderful interview with her (sample quote, from Can Xue herself: “China has more than a few Can Xue fans, but overall, Can Xue’s era still hasn’t arrived, because her works are too ahead of the curve, and don’t conform to commonplace, habitual aesthetics.”), and the recent BTBA honor certainly made me stoked to read her “radiantly original” novel.

The singular voice Can Xue and her translator chose for The Last Lover is radically different from most fiction I encounter: the sentences are pointedly gawky, the dialogue stilted, and emotions change as quickly as chameleons lost in a book of paisley wallpaper samples. This is entirely intentional (and remarkably consistent), as I learned from Daniel Medin’s interview with Annelise Finegan Wasmoen:

Since it was important to follow [Can Xue’s] associative logic that relates certain words or images to each other, I chose a translation style that kept as much consistency as possible, retaining correlations instead of attempting to achieve a natural flow [. . .] translate everything; explain nothing.

All this also means that synopsizing The Last Lover is entirely beside the point: generically named characters live in an unnamed and barely detailed Western country. They obsess over their boss, employee, wife, husband, son, or lover, each of them equally volatile in their emotional and geographical states, popping up now here, then there, now crying, then shouting. The book makes a point of all of them being on a “long march,” a somewhat allegorical reference to the Long March of the 1930s that here seems to translate to our unending journey of self-discovery and, not least, our acceptance of others’ similarly unending travails of the soul.

Joe, the novel’s quasi-protagonist, may work at a clothing manufacturing company, but he really is a professional reader at heart, constantly dipping in and out of books hidden among his papers at work and in the higgledy-piggledy library cum bedroom he keeps for himself at home. Joe’s way of reading is how I can best interpret the way Can Xue would like her books to be read. “Wrongly,” that is: Joe is constantly mixing up the stories in different books (Kafka’s stories seem particularly ripe for his plundering) or performing more radical readings by tackling them in pitch dark or by putting his ear to their covers. Books are as untrustworthy and inconstant as memory, we are told, and we should not expect them to make any more sense.

***

The Luminaries, to address the massive tome on the other side of the field today, is an entirely different kettle of verbs and nouns: a historical murder mystery that would not seem outré to readers of either Henry James or Wilkie Collins. Imagine TV’s Deadwood, but scripted and directed by Jane Campion and her astrologer AD. Over the course of its 800+ pages, Catton slowly reveals how a suicidal prostitute, a dead prospector, a villainous captain, and a fortune sown into a dress are all connected to, and intertwined with, the lives and fates of a varied troupe of characters in a New Zealand town during the 1860s Otago Gold Rush. Precisely plotted and charted to the movement of the stars, each chapter perches on a cliffhanger, with the reader helplessly leaping ever onward until the whole thing comes twisting back together. (I couldn’t help but wonder what the critics’ response would have been had the name on the cover been that of a man—would Catton have been showered in yet more awards, not to mention shouts of “Genius”?)

True, I was exhausted when I was done, and the book is so long and intricately structured that it includes (and practically requires) its own recap in the middle, but the language is enchanting, evocative in its conjuring of time and place, and vivid in its depiction of villains and heroes alike. Although its astronomical underpinnings largely went over my head on my first reading (each of the characters is associated with a heavenly body, coming together and apart with the orbits of the stars; the chapters slowly wane with the moon), it makes for a gripping experience that is as much about plot as it is about who killed the prospecting Crosbie Wells, perhaps more so.

***

Back in 2008, film critic Roger Ebert called out the critics who remained unmoved by Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, noting that having a woman move into a house that is perennially on fire is not “unrealistic” at all: “Don’t unhappy homes always seem like that? Aren’t people always trying to ignore it?” (In fact, Wikipedia tells me Tennessee Williams said something similar: “We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.”)

I wonder if critics would have embraced Kaufman’s masterpiece more had it come from Italy or Iran, as we tend to give outsiders in world cinema (or literature, for that matter) a touch more leeway; if the names are big enough (or the country of origin exotic enough), we are more likely to waive the otherwise required elements of plot, character, and dialogue. Often this is an entirely good thing: how else to first approach the works of Apichatpong Weerasethakul or Tsai Ming-liang? Of Elfriede Jelinek or even James Joyce? Yet this can become a rusty reflex too, recommending books because they won a bunch of awards or because Susan Sontag (no stranger to enjoying difficulty for difficulty’s sake) once said she liked them, so they must be good, right?

In The Last Lover, Joe’s boss, Vincent, at some point ends up at the house of his in-laws, who can’t stop talking to their parrot:

Vincent couldn’t understand their conversation. It seemed they were debating the question of putting power lines on the stone mountains. It also seemed like they were analyzing methods of tracking down criminals on the run. No matter what the old couple said, the old parrot always said, “Very good! Very good! A work of genius! A work of genius!”

In today’s verdict, I cannot parrot the esteemed critics and friends who’ve already praised Can Xue. Reading The Last Lover was non-stop torture for me. Not a page went by that I wasn’t entirely lost at sea, that didn’t make me want to violently toss the book out of whichever room or vehicle I was in, whereas Catton’s was a wonderful slog that I now—almost two years later—fell right back into with equal measures of delight and intrigue.

Of course people flit between emotions like demented hummingbirds, faces can change quicker than a paragraph can break, and places suddenly can feel farther or closer apart. Can Xue is right: life in no way functions like the celestial clockwork of The Luminaries. Yet, to me, the best books do. However precise or pointillist their construction, my favorite books pay tribute to the intricate designs the human mind is capable of, and is capable of conveying to others through the medium of the book. I know reality is a complex muddle of emotion, politics, etc. but I hope books can somehow convince me otherwise, or—in absence of such syntactic solace—comfort me instead: with their skill, their beauty, their truth.

***

We all live in a house on fire, so best buy yourself a stack of the biggest, smartest books you can find and build yourself a bonfire. New Zealand for the win.

New Zealand: 4
China: 1

Next up, New Zealand’s The Luminaries will face off against either Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (Canada) or The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugresic (Netherlands) on Monday, June 22nd.

Tomorrow’s match will be judged by Rachel Crawford, and features Australia’s Burial Rites by Hannah Kent against Sweden’s The Stranger by Camilla Läckberg.

Why This Book Should Win: Q&A with Annelise Finegan Wasmoen about The Last Lover

Monica Carter — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 09:01:00 +0000

Annelise Finegan Wasmoen is an editor and a literary translator. She is pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis.

Daniel Medin teaches at the American University of Paris, where he helps direct the Center for Writers and Translators and is Associate Series Editor of The Cahiers Series.

– Can Xue, Translated from the Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, China
Yale University Press

1. How did you discover Can Xue’s fiction? What led you to want to translate this book?

Prosaically enough, I discovered Can Xue’s writing in the same place that so many others have, in a classroom. I doubt there’s a survey of modern Chinese literature that doesn’t include her short story “Hut on the Mountain.” It was immediately clear she was working at a level of experimentation that was on a different plane than her contemporaries, pushing the boundaries of fiction toward something else entirely.

With The Last Lover, it was less a matter of being led to translate the book than leaping at the opportunity to do so. I met Can Xue through Jonathan Brent, then editorial director of Yale University Press, where I worked as an assistant editor in 2007–08; he shared a sample chapter of my translation with the author and the rest went smoothly enough. What kept me translating was the incredible intricacy of the text: the novel yields new insights even after a dozen readings.

2. Anything that a new reader of Can Xue should know before diving in?

When you asked me to speak with your Contemporary World Literature class earlier this spring, one of the students asked the perfect question: is it better to try to make sense of The Last Lover while reading it, or to wait until the end? Wait to the end, if you can. Can Xue’s style of writing tends to resist immediate attempts at sense-making, but to read her fiction carefully, especially in the longer form of a novel, is to realize that there are intricate patterns and motifs woven through the text.

To the extent that there is an overarching narrative, The Last Lover begins in the West and by its end several characters have journeyed to the East, whether in dreams or in person. The primary setting is an unspecified Country A, which some readers have taken to indicate a generalized Occident, and others to be an image of America. But it’s America in the sense of Kafka’s Amerika, where the Statue of Liberty holds a sword. You can see how this might be a sort of commentary. The characters have names drawn from many different languages and cultures, with reversals of first and last names as well. The novel features three central couples—Joe and Maria (who have a son, Daniel), Vincent and Lisa, Reagan and Ida—with each chapter focusing on one of these figures.

A self-reflexive theme of reading follows the character Joe, who fails to separate the world of fiction from the world that surrounds him. Here’s a passage from the book about Joe’s reading:

The next day Joe took off from work. He began reading a book with only one page. The book was clothbound, with a drawing of a tall pine tree on the cover. Inside there was a single thick sheet of paper. This sheet could be unfolded to the length of the desk. The picture on the cover appeared to be of an anthill. The periphery of the anthill was densely written over with a miniature text, visible only under a magnifying glass. And once Joe looked with the glass, he discovered that he didn’t recognize a single word.

Then the book starts flapping around the room, then the room starts shaking, then there is an invasion of doves, etc.

The theme of love, too, pervades the novel, although in many ways The Last Lover explores how people are constantly moving away from each other through space and time, both real and imagined. As the distance between the book’s central couples increases, their communication deepens. These forms of communication from afar seem to echo the novel’s central parable about reading.

Finally, there is an interpolation of national history, namely the recurring reference to the 1930s Long March. Although technically the Long March was a very long tactical retreat, it allowed for the consolidation of the Communist Party at Yan’an; it began as a historical event and became a myth of national origins. Within the novel, several of the characters undergo an inner long march, which takes place in the middle of the night, in a not-quite-dream-state, and is associated with the characters Lisa and Maria. Luding Bridge, the site of a central battle during the Long March, also appears at several key moments.

Of course it’s up to the reader to parse and process these various elements—the journey from West to East, the theme of love and communication at a distance, the personal long march—but I hope that outlining them in this way might give hope to someone approaching Can Xue’s fiction for the first time.

For a reader who prefers a naturalizing or domesticating style, the translation might be difficult. Can Xue refers to her writing as having an inner mechanism, which sounds mysterious, but there is an associative logic that runs through all of her fiction. Since it was important to follow this associative logic that relates certain words or images to each other, I chose a translation style that kept as much consistency as possible, retaining correlations instead of attempting to achieve a natural flow. This was in the service of leaving the reader in English with the same interpretative leeway as the reader of the original, which is a risky sort of thing. This was the first novel I translated, and in other translations I’ve gone in the other direction, but this specific text seemed to call for an extreme level of fidelity: translate everything; explain nothing.

For example, in the fourth chapter, there is a “so-called greenhouse,” a large empty room with small windows and dim lighting. There are earthen bowls arrayed on the ground with coarse sand and seeds in them. The gardener holds a seed and says, “Look, it’s already burst open, but the shoots inside can’t get out. All the seeds here are in the same condition. The flowers open inside of dreams. … the seeds still keep this shape, neither sprouting nor decaying.” The flowers that bloom from these seeds appear at other places in the novel: the character Lisa looks at a tapestry and “there floated up in her mind the red sun of an early morning in the gambling city, where sprouting seeds, exhausted from a long night of breaking through, struggled out.” There is a family whose rosebushes bloom year-round, become electrified, and are uprooted by the son, whom his father has dreamed of as a body with a rose for its head. These examples are scattered across the book, available for excavation, but might be lost in the translation if any of the individual elements were disrupted: the bowls, the seeds, the flowers.

3. The Last Lover is the second novel by Can Xue to appear in English. Unlike , which appeared in English in 2009 but actually dates to 1988, it’s a fairly recent work (2005). How would you distinguish her recent books from the earlier ones? In what ways has her writing changed over the course of her career?

Can Xue is perhaps best known for her mastery of the short story: condensed meditations on a single theme, an expanded metaphor, an unnerving turn of events, a strange interaction. In recent years she has been undertaking more novel-length projects, which, remarkably, maintain the same sort of intensity but at an exponential degree of complexity. To me, it seems that the experiments with longer forms mark a key development in her approach to writing.

4. Could you point out one of your favorite passages in The Last Lover, and tell us what you like about (translating) it?

Definitely the last chapter. Toward the end of the novel (spoilers), the character Joe disappears into the world of his stories and his wife discovers this world embodied in a forest of books. As I mentioned before, much of the novel treats of separation. Here, there is a moment of joy in rediscovering family bonds, worked across the literalized metaphor of the forest of books.

That night Maria went to the study because she couldn’t sleep. Although she hadn’t turned on the light, she could see that Joe’s bookcases had turned into a dark forest of books. The books had grown large, one book set next to another vertically on the floor, the pages of the books opening and closing.

[…]

Maria touched the enormous book pages with a shaking finger. She touched one after another of the letters protruding from the pages, and those letters jumped slightly, giving off electricity. Suddenly she comprehended the book’s meaning. The book told of an ancient, deserted beach. Someone climbed onto the bank from the sea. Sea birds cried ominously in the air. “That man is Joe,” Maria spoke quietly. Then her finger touched the word “Joe.” “Joe, is it you?” she asked.

[…]

Over several decades of uninterrupted reading, her Joe had created this forest. And he hadn’t removed her from it. Once she entered, she blended into this place. In the su su rustling sound made by the pages, a world of writing appeared in her mind. She realized that for many years everything she’d woven was this writing. So familiar, so pleasing—was this happiness? She began to walk from one book to another. Dry leaves made noise under her feet; her feet touched a few small stones; she even heard the song of a nightingale. It was inside the pages of the largest book, singing and then pausing.

There was a dim light in the forest of books, but when Maria looked up she couldn’t see the sky. Was there even a sky? There were grass, stones, a path, and she heard water flowing from a spring. But the air was filled with the fine smell of old books. This was Joe’s story. This story belonged to her, forever. Maria’s heart was full of gratitude. She pricked her ears, awaiting the nightingale’s singing again.

She waited till it sang, but it wasn’t one call, it was many, many calls. One rising as another fell.

The very close of the novel turns quite dark again, ending on an intensely powerful image.

DANIEL MEDIN’S BTBA FAVORITES: FALL 2014

Monica Carter — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 10:00:00 +0000

Daniel Medin teaches at the , where he helps direct the and is Associate Series Editor of .

Can Xue: , trans. from Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, Yale/Margellos

The strangest and by far most original work I read this summer was Can Xue’s The Last Lover. How refreshing it is to encounter fiction that so resolutely disregards conventions of character and plot! The protagonists of this book do not develop—they transform, as do their relationships to one another, from one scene to the next. And they do so unpredictably, in ways that surprise and delight. As in much of Can Xue’s fiction, the prose is comic and disturbing at one and the same time. John Darnielle had in mind when he pointed to the “grammar of dreams” that underpins that volume of stories: “situations in which a general meowing sound throughout a hospital provokes not the question ‘what’s going on?’ but instead ‘where are the catmen hiding?’” A similar grammar is present in The Last Lover, her most ambitious—and perhaps most radical—novel to date.

Faris al-Shidyaq: , trans. from Arabic by Humphrey Davies, NYU

I wrote about the charms of this novel last winter, when the first two volumes were eligible for the prize. It should come as no surprise that the other two are now contenders as well. This chapter from volume three appeared in the 2014 translation issue of London’s . It’s preceded by a concise introduction by Humphrey Davies, whose translation of Shidyaq remains among the most gymnastic and resourceful amongst this year’s competition.

Elena Ferrante: , trans. from Italian by Ann Goldstein, Europa

There’s no denying the force of Ferrante’s writing. I discovered volume 2 of the Neapolitan Novels last spring when it made our longlist. (Such are the privileges of judging for BTBA; you have to read the 25 titles selected to this list, and thereby profit directly from the enthusiasms of others.) I devoured it whole, then did the same to . Ferrante inspires that rare thing, rarer still among contemporary writers: the compulsion to read everything she’s ever published. Like its predecessors, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay bristles with intelligence and is executed with startling clarity. And like the other books in this series, it is all-absorbing. Here’s Ariel Starling in a recent review for “Subtle as the plot may be, it would do the work a grave disservice not to note that Ferrante is, in her own way, a master of suspense. Reading these novels, one becomes so immersed in the world of the characters that even an offhand comment from a minor acquaintance can (and often does) carry the force of revelation—the books are nearly impossible to put down.”

Hilda Hilst: , trans. from Portuguese by Adam Morris, Melville House

I’ve already posted on Letters from a Seducer which had been scheduled for 2013 release but entered the world on the wrong side of January 1. Goes without saying that this title and its extraordinary translation by John Keene has not weakened in the slightest since my initial encounter. Hilst deserves to be in the mix when winter arrives and we begin to draft lists. The question then is likely to be: which horse to back? The answer’s not immediately obvious, to the great credit of Hilst’s translators and editors. With My Dog Eyes was as exhilarating to read as the Letter and . Hilst has been blessed with a generation of astute translators who are now introducing her work to an Anglophone readership. With My Dog Eyes struck me as the most aphoristic of the three novels. It begins unforgettably: “God? A surface of ice anchored to laughter.” Adam Levy wrote a canny essay for Music & Literature about this year’s eligible Hilst titles; read it .

I’ve little doubt concerning the importance of the above works for their respective languages. Those without Chinese or Italian or Portuguese have Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, Ann Goldstein, and Adam Morris to thank for ensuring that their greatness has been preserved in the face of formidable challenges. I’d like to mention briefly the names of a few more translators whose work has impressed over these first few months of reading. They succeed at communicating the vitality of the voices translated, but also for their accomplished prose in English. They are, in no particular order, Jason Grunebaum from the Hindi of by Uday Prakash; Daniel Hahn from the Portuguese (Brazil) of by Paolo Scott; Chris Andrews from the Spanish (Guatemala) of by Rodrigo Rey Rosa; and Karen Emmerich from the Greek of by Amanda Michalopoulou, whose passages about the bewilderments of adolescent sexuality rank—alongside volume three of by Karl Ove Knausgaard—among the funniest things I’ve encountered so far.