Recent reading

My friend Peg Alford Pursell who runs a luminous reading series, Why There Are Words, in Sausalito, has recently started an independent press. She's been reading submissions to find the first two books, to publish in the next year. (For those of you with manuscripts: The submission period closes September 15, 2016.) Whatever she chooses, will have to serve as the face of the new press, will be seen as its representative work. Then, hopefully, the second year follows, and the new selection process, that will give us a more rounded understanding of what kind of publisher WTAW Press is. A great press, I suppose, is like a great character: always surprising, always engaging.

Peg recently asked me to contribute to her newsletter a list of books that I've been reading. Here's the write-up on some of my favorites.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. If you haven’t read it yet, do. It’s a funny and poignant page-turner about a popular blogger, Ifemelu, who decided to return to Nigeria after many years in the United States. Commentary on racism, colonialism and globalism, culture shock, family dynamics is held together by a sweet and ultimately satisfying love story.

Gabriel: A Poem by Edward Hirsch. This is a book-length poem published a few years after the sudden death of the poet’s adopted son, Gabriel. The tercets of this poem lead a reader through the journey of the young man’s last hours, through his life’s story, through the story of the father’s bereavement. No platitudes apply. This book does not uplift the reader and doesn’t leave her enlightened; the poet doesn’t get a break from his grief; the son’s neurological and mental health issues are portrayed in all their messiness. This book doesn’t make grief interesting—it puts into words what grief is.

Fair Play by Tove Jansson. In Europe (she lived in Helsinki, Finland and wrote in Swedish) Jansson is best known for her comic strip about the Moomin family that started out as a political cartoon and after WWII turned into wildly successful books for children. Fair Play was published when Jansson was seventy-five, and is a collection of stories about the relationship between a comic book author and her partner, a visual artist. Though Jansson was never publicly out as a lesbian, this book provides a fascinating glimpse into her intense creative and personal relationship with artist Tuulikki Pietilä.
In The Price of Water in Finistère by Bodil Malmsten, fifty-five year old author moves from her home in Sweden to Brittany, in France, the Finistère département. Her descriptions of settling in the new place, fixing her house, breaking a garden are intertwined with her memories of growing up in a remote northern village in Sweden. I particularly enjoyed reading about a happy moment in a woman’s life: she has come into her own and is ready to stake her claim in the world. She proceeds with humor and poetry.

Here is another shout-out to My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout. I first heard of this book through this newsletter—thank you, Peg. I read it and I loved it. It was recently nominated for the Man Booker Prize, and I’m rooting for it. It’s a powerful novel about the long-term effects of poverty and violence.

The Door by Magda Szabo. This novel comes to us from Hungary, and is also, in part, autofiction. The author’s relationship with her housekeeper reads as a thriller, in one breath, from the beginning to the horrifying and gruesome end. What makes this book really work is the complexity of characterizations Szabo achieves. The two main women love and care for each other, but somehow in the course of the narrative these feelings turn against them.

The latest review I published in The Common was of Memories by the early twentieth century Russian author Teffi. 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 opens with Teffi being talked into going on tour to Ukraine, the trip that became her journey out of Russia.

Last but not least, a shout-out to opera. This September, San Francisco Opera is staging Dream of the Red Chamber—based on the 18th Century Chinese novel by Cao Xueqin, adapted to the stage by Davin Henry Hwang of M. Butterfly fame. The novel is an epic series of tragic love triangles and an education about Chinese culture of the era. In the English translation, it runs 2,339 pages long.That's 2,339 pages of total fascination, people!

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. 

Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods

One great book I read during this trip was Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods. Published by innovative & Other Stories Press in London, UK, this is a wise and humorous send-up of contemporary corporate culture. The plot--the top layer of meaning--has to do with an Encyclopedia Britannica salesman Joe, who, unable to sell a single Encyclopedia, starts a business capitalizing on his erotic fantasy. He imagines having sex with women stuck leaning out of the window and whose upper body is invisible to him. He conceives of "lightning rods," a contraption that he installs in office buildings to provide top salesmen necessary "release"--and hires women to service these contraptions accordingly. It's a naughty book, a book fully aware of the feminist critique of the masculine gaze that disassembles a woman into discrete body parts (breasts, buttocks, legs, vagina), accepts this property of the gaze for granted and pushes it to its practical limits. Men are constantly thinking of sex--why not provide them with a practical option to satisfy their desires, as a part of Sexual Harassment policy, no less? DeWitt pokes fun at the legalese and euphemistic language of corporate America, lightheartedly picks at the commonplace understanding of male sexuality, and touches at issues of power and domination and the nature of personal and professional success.

Lightning Rods was written in the late 1990s and it took more than a decade for it to find the right publisher. Finally, New Directions in the US and & Other Stories in the UK took up the book. & Other Stories is a two-year old innovative press that aims to publish primarily works in translation but also a few English-language originals. I've heard about it for the first time from my friend Yvette, who became a member of their team of readers. The press aims to bring out four books a year and asks readers to subscribe like they would to a magazine. I joined after examining the titles they already brought out--and a couple of weeks after I subscribed one of their books, Deborah Levy's Swimming Home, was longlisted, and then shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. I haven't read this one yet, but I definitely look forward to reading more books from their exciting catalog.

03 and "you are here"

After a long string of event-packed weekends, this Saturday morning I got a few uninterrupted hours of reading. I picked up two short things, two little books I could quickly finish. Feels good to start off the weekend finishing things :)

The first book was a novella by a French writer, Jean-Christophe Valtat, 03, translated by Mitzi Angel. It's 84 pages long, composed in the form of a single, uninterrupted paragraph -- really meant to be read in one sitting, I think. I was reading it for over a month, a few sentences or pages at the time. Sometimes this was because the sentences were interesting and demanded a lot of attention; at other times, I picked the little book up between the multitude of other tasks, and flipped through the pages instead of really reading.

It's a thought-provoking novella -- a portrait of a young adolescent boy, attracted to a mentally disabled girl living in the same neighborhood. The tale is narrated by himself as an adult, from the remove of many years, maybe decades. Power and powerlessness of attraction are a major theme, as well as the binaries of uniqueness vs difference, beauty vs ugliness, suburbia vs city. Because of the way I read it, my impression of the novella falls apart into certain ideas about the quality of its translated sentences. This, for example: "Oddly, though, this made her face more lively -- she seemed really to face the world, and her gaze came at me as if by catapult." Whatever the phrase might read like in French, this noun/verb paring of face and to face works surprisingly well in English.

I related to many observations about adolescence on a very personal level. This, for example, starts with a cliche, and then dives into the depths of it: "The only good thing about childhood is that no one really remembers it, or rather, that's the only thing about it to like: this forgetting. What else could possibly lie beneath that blissful oblivion but shame: a dark knowledge of that terrible badge of weakness, that inescapable servitude (bearable only thanks to the slow revelation that we could inflict cruelty and evil on the weaker kids), a sickening awareness that just about everything there is to understand was beyond us, made even worse by the lies and inaccuracies that adults feel entitled to spread around, deliberately, or because they don't know any better, about themselves or about the nature of reality?" I love that this long sentence is a question.

The other book I read was a literary journal in which one of my own stories has been published. The magazine is called "you are here: the journal of creative geography," and it's published by University of Arizona's School of Geography and Development. (It's a print publication, and I'm waiting for them to update the announcement on their online page, but this hasn't happened yet). Their XIVth issue published over the summer was dedicated to the theme "Dislocation" that happens to define a few of my stories. What I really love about the smaller university magazines is their willingness to experiment with the genre. The editors of this magazine, for example, asked the writers for their permission to excerpt and edit the stories at will, and also to publish them without acknowledgments in the text, so the magazine reads as a work of a collective (if somewhat disturbed) mind. (Actually, it's not as radical as I thought it could've been: there's a table of contents at the back, and all the writers get their proper credits.)

My favorite part of this magazine, I think, is a poem the editors -- Majed Akhter and Tom Nurmi -- published together with a letter from an associate editor that recommended it for publication. "I want to advocate for consideration of this; given that it appears to be written by a non-native English speaker in a forced rhyme scheme. The formal layers sort of peel off from the content, as one is forced to do mundane interpretive work. ... To me, dislocation here would be linguistic, libidinal and unconscious..." I love the framework of this magazine that allows its readers to find meaning in something that's written in substandard language. I wondered if my own story in this magazine could've been interpreted in a similar way -- it's an older story, and rereading it now, I'm very aware of the extra layer of formality in every sentence that came from my lack of linguistic fluency. The story still sort of works because this peculiarity became a character flaw of my first-person narrator. First-person narrators are good souls :)