Teffi's Memories

"Teffi, nom de plume of Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, was born in 1872 into a prominent Russian family. Following in the footsteps of her older sister Maria—poet Mirra Lokhvitskaya—Teffi published poetry and prose from the age of 29. She soon rose to fame by practicing a unique brand of self-deprecating humor and topical social satire. In her 1907 hit one-act play The Woman Question, subtitled A Fantasy, Teffi imagined a world in which a women’s revolution against men achieves a full role reversal. Women come to occupy the prominent political, military, academic, professional, and bureaucratic roles, while men are subjugated to the childcare and household management tasks. Though the play’s ending largely dismisses this scenario and trivializes the feminist cause, through humor, the piece makes the point that bad behavior—infidelity, sexual harassment, excessive drinking, pettiness—is a function of social status rather than of biological sex.

By the time of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, Teffi had nearly a dozen books to her name, and new printings of her story collections sold out instantly. With Lenin at the helm of the government, her fame became a liability. Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea opens with Teffi being talked into going on tour to Ukraine (then outside of Lenin’s domain)."

Read the rest of the review in The Common.

A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa

"War. Diamonds and oil and war. If in the United States we’ve heard anything about Angola, it’s likely related to the protracted bloodshed or to the trade in oil and diamonds. The seventh largest country in Africa, situated on the Atlantic coast just north of Namibia, Angola became a Portuguese colony in the 16th century. Fighting for self-government began in 1961 and went on until the 1974 Carnation Revolution and the end of the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal led to the country’s withdrawal and, in 1975, Angolan independence. This did not end war in Angola, however. ...

Ludovica “Ludo” Fernandes Mano—whose true story became the basis for José Eduardo Agualusa’s novel, A General Theory of Oblivion—leaves Portugal and arrives in Luanda, Angola’s capital, months before Independence Day in 1975. She makes the move reluctantly, following her newly married sister, Odete, whose husband, Orlando, an Angolan mining engineer, works for a diamond company. A shut-in since early in her life, Ludo occupies her time cooking for the newlyweds and managing their luxury apartment on the 11th floor of a building in the center of Luanda. Life, even before the narrative turns dramatic, is a little too much for Ludo . . .

My review of José Eduardo Agualusa's novel A General Theory of Oblivion, in full, appears in The Common.

Marie Houzelle's Tita

Occitania, a large region of Southern France that includes parts of Spain and Italy, has been for centuries crisscrossed by traders and traveling folk from the far reaches of Europe and Northern Africa. Its ancient language, Occitan or langue d’oc, a close relative of Catalan, was immortalized as early as the 11th Century by troubadours, the traveling poets, serenading chivalry and courtly love. Though annexed gradually in the early modern era by the French kings, the region has preserved many of its ancient customs, the language, cuisine, the tradition of wine making. Born here in the 1950s, Tita, the heroine of Marie Houzelle’s eponymously titled novel, inherits this rich culture at the moment of crisis.

After World War II, life in a small Occitan community is dominated by the Catholic church and the old class structure separating the landed bourgeoisie from the farmers and day-laborers. But the depressed wine business and the growing trend for the young people to seek opportunities in the cities, outside of traditional occupations, threatens to drain the region of all lifeblood. A daughter of a wine-seller and a self-made woman who before marriage owned a beauty salon in Lyon, Tita sees her father’s business suffering from the lack of demand while her mother enjoys playacting a fashionable lifestyle. She must have a crocodile-skin handbag for her birthday; her daughters must have two first communions, the private and the solemn, each accompanied by new outfits and lavish parties.

Tita’s favorite pastime, besides reading, is making herself an inconspicuous listener in the rooms where adults gossip and talk business. This way, she learns that she was an illegitimate child, born before her parents’ marriage; that to correct the family’s finances, her father is considering taking a teaching post in Mexico. As things stand, her father won’t be able to provide the dowry for his three daughters, a heavy burden of responsibility for a man born in the 19th Century.

From her opening lines, “I’d like to be a nun. Or a saint,” it’s clear that seven-year old Tita has a unique approach to life. She seems to have been born a vegan: all animal-based foods disgust her. She’s willing to eat a bite of cheese if in exchange she might be allowed to go to church early in the morning, enjoying a quarter hour of solitude; but the very smell of veal, popular in local cuisine, is an offense to her senses. Spiritually curious, Tita enjoys attending early mass or participating in the May Day procession, but she strongly rebels against all perceived illogic of the church and her Catholic school. Tita debates, for instance, with her Catholic teacher, mademoiselle Pelican, on the matter of Pope’s infallibility. “[Pelican] had to admit it in the end: if Pius XII himself told me I’d made a spelling mistake and I had the Robert, my favorite dictionary, on my side, Robert would win.” And, yes, the dictionary plays a very important role in Tita’s life: it’s a great source of comfort whenever she encounters an unfamiliar concept or situation in the books she reads or in conversations between adults.

The novel’s short chapters, each introducing its own internal conflict and resolution, and yet firmly linked together into a larger whole, are loosely structured around Tita’s story of origins and her quest for education, her way of breaking from the confines of mademoiselle Pelican’s classroom and into the egalitarian world of the public school. She doesn’t need or want her father’s dowry to secure her future; what she craves is a kind of education that would challenge her intellectual abilities. Neither her Catholic school, nor the Catholic boarding school that’s looming in her future, would be able to provide that environment for her. And the state run school that could set her on the proper path seems off-limits: none of the children of the upper stratum of the local bourgeoisie have ever set foot in a public school.

A good deal of authenticity in Tita’s observations comes from the biographical details that the character shares with her author, Marie Houzelle. Houzelle grew up in a similar small town, speaking Occitan and French at home, learning Latin in school, writing her first journal in Spanish, perfecting English and picking up Swedish at the university, and German when she lived in Berlin. Just like Tita, she put in her dues at a Catholic school and started writing musical plays for her friends as a young adult. And yet, despite these biographical coincidences, conflating Tita with her author would be a mistake. The novel has strong literary routes, clearly influenced by sources as varied as Proust and Comtesse de Segur, a French author of Russian origin who wrote popular children’s novels in the middle of 19th Century. Tita’s personality quirks are very much her own and are described with a good deal of levity and slight ridicule that comes across even through the narrative first person voice.

In the mainstream American publishing marketplace today, a novel with a child protagonist telling her own story typically would be classified as young adult reading. Yet the label is decidedly too narrow for this witty and provocative work, whose seven-year old protagonist is reading Proust and openly discusses pre-teen sexuality. A few early readers of the novel have described Tita as a “precocious young girl,” but this description, too, doesn’t fully capture the character’s uniqueness. The conflict between Tita’s propensities, the local traditions, and her parents’ attitudes about the future animates the story and works its drama in the readers’ hearts, at the same time the novel also works on a deeper level, raising certain philosophical questions that demand careful thought and multiple re-readings.

A child, no matter how eloquent and well-versed in Proust she is, cannot know enough about the world to make completely self-guided choices about her future. A certain amount of luck is needed to set her on her path, and in addition to luck, a kind of obstinacy and stubbornness in pursuing those passions that will become obvious to people in their lives who can facilitate the work of luck. In Tita’s case, her passion for language and literature itself finally works its magic, allowing for an opportune connection to an adult with enough imagination to solve her educational dilemma.

Tita’s predicament is equally meaningful for children at the beginning of their lives as for the adults who find themselves still searching for a way of living a wholly individual life without completely breaking with the traditional values and remaining vocal and beloved members of their community. Tita is a hero in the sense of the classical epics: she is a leader, a pioneer, who can change things not only for herself but for others around her. And she does this not only by rebelling, by going against the norm, but by constantly searching for creative and unexpected compromises.

In the world of contemporary fiction, Tita is a rare joyful presence on the page, whose first person voice is so strong that at times it’s difficult to see through it the pen of a much older and more rounded, more experienced author. Unlike the rebellious children of classic literature who never grow up—Pippi Longstocking, the Little Prince, or Peter Pan—Tita’s future practically leaps from the page. The reader comes away believing Tita’s dreams: she’s going to move to Paris to attend university, she will travel, have at least half a dozen children with men from different countries, pursue her passions (writing fiction? why not!) rather than get stuck in a career—and possibly discover the cheeses to her taste. Nothing and nobody could stop her joyful if not always easy journey through life, not the lack of money or role models within her community, not her mother, for whom Tita’s creativity becomes a burden toward the end of the book, not her love for her father that keeps her connected with the town of her birth.

Houzelle moved away from her hometown as a teenager and eventually trained as a linguist and a chamber music singer. She combined raising three children with holding various jobs, from writing for a travel guide, translating, and editing, to singing with early and classical music choirs. Having worked in a number of languages, Houzelle came to write prose in English after taking creative writing workshops in the expat Parisian community. She lives in Ivry, a proletarian, left-wing suburb of Paris, and has published a number of stories, many set during the 1970s women’s liberation movement and featuring female protagonists with young children and husbands, who experiment with various professions, friends, lovers.

A prominent member of the English-language Paris writers community, Houzelle is finding audience in the greater English-speaking world. Thanks to editor Laurel Zuckerman, in September 2014 Tita became available from Summertime Publications, a Scottsdale, Arizona-based press, specializing in finding unique French voices. Houzelle’s voice is unique indeed: the voice of a worldly and opinionated French woman who employs fluent and animated, if at times characteristically French-inflected English, to write against stereotype of her countrymen and women. It’s a voice that commands our attention and leaves us longing for more.

Info on purchasing the book as a paperback or an ebook.

Karen Bender's Refund

Karen Bender's collection Refund, upon publication in January of this year by Counterpoint Press, received wonderful reviews from a score of highly admired publications, including LA Times and NY Times. I'd had the privilege of working with Karen during my time at Narrative, and so particularly looked forward to reading this collection. Just before Bowie was born, in writing the following, I came to think of Refund through the lens of the title story as a post-9/11 book.

To calculate the financial costs of the September 11 attacks, economists begin with the obvious: $40 billion in claims to insurance companies. This incredible number skyrockets when we add the losses on the stock exchanges, the impact on the travel and entertainment industries, on jobs and business in New York City, the subsequent costs of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the dramatic increase in the military budget. And yet, judging by the prose we’re seeing today, the financial costs are likely minor compared to the long-lasting psychological impact terrorism and the Bush-era recession and fear-mongering have levied on the nation.

In the past decade, several notable works of fiction addressed the events of 9/11, from Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children to novels by Don DeLillio, Jonathan Safran Foer, Francine Prose, short stories by Martin Amis and Deborah Eisenberg. In Karen E. Bender’s collection Refund, only the title story looks directly at the events of 9/11, yet most of the thirteen pieces feel as though they emerge from the wreckage. Bender has a way of focusing her gaze on the periphery of the main event, the view that allows her to capture the nuance of complex and lingering drama. Reflecting on “Refund” in an interview, she said, “I wanted to write about September 11 in a way that wasn’t ‘noble’—there was a lot written about the way people were heroic, which was true and moving, but there was also the fact that people were living by the site and trying to figure out how to live in the face of this surreal and horrible destruction.”

A particular brand of desperate resilience marks the characters of Bender’s third book that follows on the wings of her two novels, A Town of Empty Rooms (Counterpoint Press, 2013) and Like Normal People (Houghton Mifflin, 2000). The adults as well as the children can achieve happiness as long as it’s “weighted by resignation.” The collection opens with the story “Reunion,” in which Anna Green’s twentieth high school reunion is interrupted when one of her former classmates opens fire at the crowd. Anna drives home, unscathed, but has to wait until the morning to share the experience with her husband. More pressing problems demand her attention at home: the two young children constantly bicker, her daughter throws tantrums at bedtime unless Anna’s husband sleeps on the floor of her bedroom. When Anna does tell the husband of the shooting, he seems unsure how to react. “Are you okay?” he asks, and “What did you do?” The conversation—and the brief hug—are quickly interrupted by their children. Her husband, while caring deeply, is overtired and lacks the emotional resources to comfort Anna in any substantial way.

What is a reasonable reaction to intense and, worse, chronic fear? In a more optimistic, forward-looking time of American history, desire for safety might have been seen as a cowardly response. Benjamin Franklin wrote once, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither.” Bender’s characters are not above looking for temporary safety, the problem is that their world, circumscribed by responsibilities to family and children, allows neither safety nor liberty. Looking for bonding with somebody who shared the traumatic experience with her, Anna contemplates an affair with a former classmate but doesn’t go through with it because the man turns out to be a swindler. The protagonist of “Free Lunch,” afraid for her future after getting laid off, does have a brief fling with a former colleague, and she evaluates the affair as “protection against a falling into a chasm that went on and on.” Naturally, this protection is fleeting, and nothing can save her from the future of “numbness and [job] résumés,” moving her family to a smaller city, downsizing.

Another survivor—the teacher protagonist of “The Sea Turtle Hospital,” after the second lockdown at school in a week—escapes by trying to help her charge, an underprivileged student, to fulfill a dream (or a momentary fancy) of seeing a sea turtle. On impulse, after the lockdown is lifted, she takes the student to the hospital where the animals are treated. What they find is a blind turtle, doomed to spend the rest of his long life in a small tub at an underfunded, volunteer-run facility. “This wasn’t in the book,” says Keisha, the student, and demands of the teacher, “Save him.” The best the teacher can do is to offer her a dream of a bigger tub for the turtle, “a mile long even, with . . . special pools with rocks so that he could imagine he was in a tide pool.” The turtle would remember how to swim, and experience the sensation of floating again. Floating—the dream of floating—carries this and other characters in this collection forward.

Popular psychology describes fear as one of humanity’s basic emotions, and in this collection Bender exposes many facets of fear. It not only drives her characters to adultery and rage, toward opportunities for escape, but also illuminates their passions and beliefs, encourages greater empathy, forces them to push through the immediate troubles to desperately “count their riches, over and over.” In one of the most apocryphal stories of the collection, “Anything for Money,” Bender shows fear to be the defining human emotion. Aurora, a preteen granddaughter of a Scrooge-like Hollywood producer, Lenny Weiss, arrives to his mansion after her mother is committed to a rehab facility for alcoholism. Lenny gives her a room in his house and reluctantly begins developing a relationship with the girl. In one of the pivotal moments of their cautious friendship, Aurora asks Lenny, “What are you afraid of?” She deems his first answer, “Nothing,” unsatisfactory. He promises to think of something better, and the rest of the story becomes a kind of cosmic reprisal for his arrogance. By the time Lenny comes up with a good answer, fear has gotten the better of him.

Navigating the dangers of a post-9/11 world is but one of the themes in Bender’s collection. Fear and sadness are alleviated by the inner strengths of her characters and the suspenseful, fable-like plots of several stories. The day she eliminates an unwanted pregnancy, the protagonist of “The Third Child” finds relief in helping her son and a neighbor girl to make a magic potion out of vinegar, mayonnaise, and seltzer water to transform themselves into a cheetah and a princess. In the middle of getting a biopsy, the terrified protagonist of “This Cat” interviews her surgeon about her pet iguana. “There was the needle, and there was pain; I was sweating. . . . ‘What did the iguana do?’ I asked between breaths.” The sublime humor of this passage deftly highlights just how much backbone the woman has.

Humor and the grand sense of cosmic irony drive the plots of several stories. In “Candidate,” we catch Diane Bernstein at a particularly trying moment in her life. A transplant to the Southeast from Seattle, she’s at odds with the politics of most of her neighbors, colleagues, and students at the college where she works. Her son has been diagnosed with autism; her husband left to confront his own fear of mortality; she cannot keep a babysitter because of the boy’s growing rages. But driving the story is a completely off-the-wall incident: a local far-right politician, Woody Wilson, shows up at Diane’s footstep looking for contributions to his campaign, and as soon as she questions his politics, he collapses onto her living room floor. He comes to quickly enough, and assures her the incident is due merely to fatigue. He begs Diane not to tell anyone, for the fear of ruining his chances, and she, afraid to be blamed for causing harm, complies. As he stays in her house to recover with an icepack, their conversation grows unexpectedly intimate and honest, and potentially healing to both parties.

“Refund,” the title piece, is, perhaps, the best example of a story with a profound theme developed in an unorthodox way, through fable-like irony. Josh and Clarissa, both artists, get themselves in financial trouble when they decide to send their three-year-old son to a private school they cannot afford. Luckily, they’re both offered temporary jobs teaching art in Virginia, and for the duration they decide to sublease at market rates their rent-subsidized apartment in Manhattan. At first, the transaction goes smoothly, and then 9/11 happens. The tenant reacts emotionally, demanding all of her money back, and when Clarissa tries to negotiate, the tenant increases her demands. “I am requesting $3,000 plus $1000 for every nightmare I have had since the attack, which currently totally twenty-four. You owe me $27,000 payable now.”

But what sum of money could be sufficient as compensation for 9/11? The ensuing exchange throws light onto the emotional journey that Josh and Clarissa follow as they return to their beloved city to witness the lasting damage, as well as on the tragedy that their tenant has lived through. Through this unlikely negotiation Bender skillfully leads the reader on the journey from frustration and disbelief to horror and pathos, avoiding a shred of sentimentality.

In the interview about the origins of this story, Bender added, “I felt the city was truly starting to heal the moment I heard someone yell, ‘You idiot!’ out of a car.” Kindness and empathy are important responses to tragedy, but in Bender’s world, they’re not sufficient without the open expression of accompanying fear, anger, and pain. Through the stories in Refund, she impressively shows the value that these typically negative emotions play in our lives, the strength, comfort, and beauty we derive from them.

Two stories from this collection appear on the site of Narrative Magazine, where they are accessible for free (registration required). The book is available for purchase in your neighborhood bookstore, on Amazon, and on IndieBound.