Chekhov’s Mistess

My Wordle

via Steamboats are ruining Everything who has one of Moby Dick

It’s easy to forget that one person’s summer is another’s winter as we hit the June solstice, so today’s links are dedicated to international literature, as though we needed an excuse.

Video: Americans in Paris reading Peruvian poets at Pierre Joris’s Nomadics

Last year, when I saw Eshleman read from his translations of Vallejo alongside the likes of Sam Shepard, I found Eshleman to be the better reader (owing, I suppose to Shepard’s overdramatization and Eshleman’s living with the poems for so long). At any rate, Vallejo’s Complete Poetry is in a bilingual edition, which, I can’t help but to notice is lumped with Zbigniew Herbert’s Collected Poems in the “Readers who bought this also bought” section of the Amazon page, so do yourself a favor and click on the “add both to cart” button.

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In the ‘this is why I love blogging’ department, my book giveway at MetaxuCafé led me to a conversation with Milan Ranisavljevic from Belgrade who blogs at While Sleepwalking. One of my favorite novels is Mesa Selimovic’s Death and the Dervish (thankfully available because of Northwestern University Press’s Unbound Europe series), which Milan also loves and probably most people in the world don’t know about.

I asked Milan about the local lit scene, which seems to be alive and well. Some of the authors he mentioned are better known like Milorad Pavic and Dubravka Ugresic, but even though Vladimir Arsenijevic’s “In the Hold” was written up in the NY Times (over a decade ago), I’d never heard of him before, as well as Zoran Zivkovic who Milan says is in the realm of fantasy but I might like if I like Borges. Another relatively well known author, whom I’ve mentioned here before, is David Albahari. I ran across Albahari’s Words Are Something Else in a used bookstore and bought it solely on the strength of the Unbound Europe cover and I keep coming back to it.

A couple of others Milan mentioned (who I may owe an apology to for quoting from an email without permission):

“I know Goran Petrovic is translated in French, German and Spanish but I’m not sure about English (his books are fantastic!);
Marko Vidojkovic is new wave, for my taste too urban, little too aggressive with quite politicized but his books are bestsellers in the region.”

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When I mentioned Daniil Kharms not long ago (who I thought was getting too much attention, if such a thing is possible) I asked if anyone could suggest some “post-perestroika Bulgakovs.” I didn’t get too many suggestions, but thinking about it led me to the ever excellent and obscure Words Without Borders site, which I discovered allows you to hone in on content based on country or language among other criteria (hats off to their smart Web developer Marc Stein). Here’s the Russian list to mine.

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Via litkicks I see there’s a new online journal Pratilipi which is in English as well as Hindi. It’s also available in print on demand.

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I hope to find 47 minutes on the longest day of the year to watch this film about Borges at UbuWeb. And, speaking of that great site, you may want to read the brief article about UbuWeb’s founder Kenneth Goldsmith at Bookforum

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On my path to being Bolaño literate I just read Amulet. In the beginning I was disappointed in what clearly seems to have been something like a prequel to Savage Detectives, but by the end I was sucked in, as usual. Early on I thought to read one Bolaño is to have read all Bolaño, but I’m beginning to think the opposite, that to read Bolaño is to read his entire work, a path that I am on.

Let me try this unfounded and perhaps even ignorant statement on you: Spanish language literature today is becoming the required reading for the literate class (whatever that is, but you know who you are) as Russian literature might have been in the 20th century, so instead of saying you’ve read your Dostoevsky for credibility (although you will have done that anyway) you will say you’ve read your Bolaño. Any comments?

Gaddis fans know Steven Moore’s work so might be interested in this interview by John Lingan at Splice Today (which I had never heard of before):

ST: Since it’s not yet published, could you summarize the thesis of your work in progress?

SM: It’s that the experimental, artsy novel that [reviewer Dale] Peck and others feel began with Ulysses actually began thousands of years ago, and that today’s experimentalists are continuing in that venerable tradition. The conventional, realistic novel that dominates the best-seller lists today is a very late development in the long history of the novel, not the novel’s default setting. So I begin at the beginning—ancient Egypt, “The Tale of Sinuhe” (c. 1950 BCE)—and show that all early fiction writers were innovative, making up the rules as they went along. At early stages in every culture’s history, literary theorists like Aristotle in Greece (and his counterparts in India and China) established rules and expectations for poetry and drama, but ignored prose fiction. Consequently, novelists were free to do whatever the hell they wanted, so I survey the results from around the world up to the year 1600 (right before Don Quixote, 1605). That’s where my Volume 1 ends, which is circulating among publishers right now. Volume 2 will begin with Cervantes and end with the most interesting novel of 2012.

Having recently read Marguerite Duras’ absolutely gorgeous if it weren’t so ultimately sad Yann Andréa Steiner, Edmund White’s piece in the New York Review of Books comes as an education as to just how dour her life was. Frankly, from what I read in White’s piece her life was so destructive it’s repelling at the same time it’s interesting:

“Before her cure, she was holed up in her château dictating one much-worked-on line a day to Andréa, who would type it up. Then they would start uncorking cheap Bordeaux and she’d drink two glasses, vomit, then continue on till she’d drunk as many as nine liters and would pass out. She could no longer walk, or scarcely. She said she drank because she knew God did not exist. Her very sympathetic doctor would visit her almost daily and offer to take her to the hospital, but only if she wanted to live. She seemed undecided for a long time but at last she opted for life since she was determined to finish a book that she’d already started and was very keen about.”

Roberto Bolaño gave his “Caracas Speech” in 1999 four years before he died in acceptance of the “highly prestigious Rómulo Gallegos prize for his novel The Savage Detectives.” Triple Canopy (as in Canopy Canopy Canopy) has the speech in their latest (2nd) issue. Here’s a choice bit:

“At this point in the speech, I get the feeling that don Rómulo Gallegos must be turning over in his grave. “But to whom have they given my prize?” he must be thinking. Forgive me, don Rómulo. It’s just that even doña Bárbara, with a b, sounds like Venezuela and Bogotá, and Bolivar, also, sounds like Venezuela and doña Bárbara. Bolivar and Bárbara, what a good couple they would have made, although don Rómulo’s other two great novels, Cantaclaro and Canaima, could perfectly well be Colombian novels, which leads me to thinking that maybe they are, and that beneath my dyslexia there might perhaps be a method, a bastard semiotic method or a graphological or metasyntactic or phonemic or simply poetic method, and that the truth of truths is that Caracas is the capital of Colombia, just like Bogotá is the capital of Venezuela, in the same way that Bolivar, who is Venezuelan, dies in Colombia, which is also Venezuela and Mexico and Chile.”

Read it at Triple Canopy.

“They never forget what they are, or all the things they have to do, but for a few minutes, maybe an hour or two, they put themselves between parentheses, and I bear the name of that thing in their lives.”

To choose one word to describe Dominique Fabre’s The Waitress Was New it would have to be “quiet.” A short novel of 117 pages, Fabre’s first translated into English, The Waitress Was New is a peek into the consciousness of a Parisian bartender over three days at the end of his career.

The story begins as Pierre is introduced to a new waitress at La Cercle, a small, non-descript restaurant on the outskirts of Paris:

“What I really wanted to say was ‘Welcome to the Club,’ and then give her some tips on the questions she was probably going to ask. The boss isn’t much of a talker, but he’s him and I’m me. I’m only the oldest employee of Le Cercle, which is the café where I work, across from the Asniéres train station, where there’s nothing to see but people coming and going out…” “She had a firm grip, when she let go I noticed she had a big wedding ring on her left hand, and I wondered if that’s really where it’s supposed to go. That was all too long ago for me, maybe I’d forgotten. Still, I’d stayed married for eight years, I was a young man then. I kept my ring on at first. Then I put it in my nightstand drawer. I lost a lot of illusions, but not her. My ex remarried, lived happily; and had two children. Then unhappily, and still two children. Then we lost touch. Her name was Marie, like my adoptive mother. The boss looked around, he’d picked up his cigarillo again.”

Pierre is matter-of-factly attuned to his environment because he is the one person not passing through. He’s a fixture like the bar itself. He listens more than he talks, he observes more than he listens. But for his attentiveness he doesn’t seem to learn much. He acts as though he understand others’ relationships but his own are withered, distant or shallow. He thinks he gets what’s going on around him but then is sideswiped by the truth. Much of the novel surrounds the disappearance of “the boss” (which in French is, I think, “le boss”) and everyone’s speculation, including the boss’s wife, that he’s having an affair with one of the restaurant’s former waitresses. Pierre stumbles confidently through what seems to him a given only to be met later by the truth and throughout he never truly doubts himself.

In depicting someone on the side of society (not on the margins, just side, if you will) Fabre slips into a barely comfortable pathos. Pierre is neither particularly likable or unlikeable and his existence appears without purpose or meaning. The affect is a lack of tension such that we pity Pierre – the man can’t even bring himself to masturbate – but don’t care about the outcome of the story. This is why I think of The Waitress Was New as quiet. It doesn’t try to draw attention to itself, just like Pierre. If we had any doubts of Pierre as something of an anti-hero, Fabre casts him firmly against Pierre’s own reading material that he, naturally, learns about through a customer at the bar: Primo Levi’s If this is a Man “the story of a Jewish Italian resistance fighter who lived through the concentration camps, he wanted to bear witness.” “Now there’s somebody I’d like to have as a customer,” says Pierre of Levi.

Where Fabre excels is accreting pieces of Pierre’s world into a somewhat whole portrait. While the drama is not exactly intense during our brief time with Pierre and Le Cercle, Fabre wastes not a word, packing in layers of detail in every paragraph. Looking at the quote above (beginning with “What I really wanted to say), Pierre gives us glimpses of the new waitress (married, probably strong-willed), the boss (silent type, which might be odd for a restaurant owner, owns a restaurant on the outskirts of Paris, smokes cigarillos), Pierre’s ex-wife (divorced, happy, two children, unhappy) and himself (long-time employee of Le Cercle with a fondness for his job, older, divorcee, adopted).

Of course, our observations are limited to what goes through Pierre’s mind, leaving sketches of the boss, the new waitress, the bosses wife and other characters merely impressions. We can only come as close to them as Pierre and he is nothing more than an onlooker on these lives, but still the richness lies in what we don’t know about them. I suspect in reading this novel that I’ve come a little closer to a life about which I knew nothing before, the kind of life that I might pass by with little thought. I may not be any closer than Pierre comes to his customers, filling in blanks where needed with imagination, but that is an oddly compelling pastime.

Cambridge University Press’s “Cambridge Companions to Literature” series is always excellent for those of us who are hungry to think more about an author’s works, but are not quite academic (i.e. the books are intelligent, written by academics, but written accessibly and free of maddening obfuscating jargon). They’re a collection of scholarly essays touching on key points of an author’s works and careers. For instance, in the Companion to Cervantes there’s a lot of discussion of his plays and other works that you really won’t find elsewhere, at least not in one accessible source.

While most of the books in the series are on older canonical authors (I have Virgil and Dante up to Yeats, Joyce etc.) I think the series is rounding out in terms of more modern (still canonical) authors as well. So this June, Don DeLillo gets his companion and I think it’ll be interesting to see how an author’s works are treated while they’re still alive and writing.

Here’s an excerpt from the introductory chapter by the volume’s editor, John N. Duvall:

“DeLillo’s final significance may lie in the way that, while he recognizes the power of history, he insists on the novel as a counterforce to the wound of history through the persistence of mystery. Beyond the play of plots and plotlessness, determinism and chance, there lurks in DeLillo’s writing the possibility – never overtly confirmed – of spiritual transcendence. A particular example from Underworld, I believe, is representative. In one of Lenny Bruce’s night-club monologues, DeLillo has the beat comic begin an off-color story about a girl who can blow smoke rings from her vagina, but in mid-story Bruce loses interest and begins instead to tell a decidedly unfunny story that the reader only later recognizes as that of Esmeralda, a girl not yet born when Bruce is speaking but whose tragic death forms part of the Epilogue of the novel. Through a power of his art that exceeds his volition or any possibility of his knowing, then, Bruce begins an uncanny critique of the social forces that enable Esmeralda’s violent end, forces that another of DeLillo’s outsider artists, Ismael Muñoz, must engage later in the novel, again through his art.”

You can read or download the introductory chapter at the Cambridge Website. or order it from the Amazonians

After neglecting DeLillo for years, my friend Tim convinced me to read White Noise and I truly think it’s a masterpiece. Even though it felt dated when I read it, I took that more as being an artifact of the time rather than a weakness of the book. I haven’t gone back to DeLillo, but am open to suggestion from any fans as to what of his to read next.

In honor of the recent release of his collected works (in one volume) Joseph O’Neill considers the life and work of Flann O’Brien, author of At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman among others:

“At Swim-Two-Birds laughingly trashes the assumptions that stabilize the relationship between reader and novel, creator and created, original and derivative, imagined and actual, highbrow and lowbrow, and just about any other binary opposite conventionally applicable to fiction: by any standards, a thorough deconstruction. If you’re considering writing a novel that you think might be clever about novels, read At Swim-Two-Birds and consider how stupid you may look by comparison.”

My friends at Coffee House Press are moving across town (in Minneapolis) into the old Grain Belt beer bottling company. Who benefits? You do if you buy any book off their Website before June 30th; everything is 50% off.

What possibly could I buy there, you ask? Oh, Dedunya, there are so many things! How about Laird Hunt’s The Exquisite that I wrote about here, or the Litblog Co-op’s favorite a while back, Firmin? Can you say Gilbert Sorrentino?. Or how about Ellen Hawley’s Open Line? Ah, that last one’s a plug for me too, you see: I recently built Ellen’s Website. Around here we say every month is Small Press month, so go and do yourself and Coffee House a favor and buy some books. There’s oh so very much more than I mentioned, so start here.

Good piece in Slate called Procrastination Lit: Great Novels about Wasting Time by Jessica Winter who uses the work of Thomas Bernhard and William Gaddis as her subjects:

“But there is also a small and unnerving category of literature that is not only about procrastination but that, in form and style, enacts the frenetic paralysis of irrational delay. The reader who procrastinates may discover the sharpest pleasures and horrors of recognition within the tangled, meandering sentences in these slender volumes—detour-clogged journeys that go around and around in crooked, tortured circles as they strenuously avoid their destinations.”

Concluding:

“Indeed, the most bracing revelation of procrastination lit is the terrible possibility that years of delay and deferral are tantamount to a refusal of life as it is or a self-willed limbo—even a living death.”

This is one of those pieces that opens more questions or possibilities than conclusions. My pick for best “procrastination lit” is Flann O’Brien’s “At Swim-Two-Birds”, which is not only one of my favorite novels, but one of the best comic novels ever written and in that enduring manner of the classic (ala Calvino’s definition) a book which begs re-reading. It begins:

“Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.”

Which vaguely reminds me, speaking of Calvino, of another favorite that could be called “procrastination lit”: If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.

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