Dearest Friends and Enemies,

I’m putting this welcome, best-of-tommywallach.com post up here at the top of the page, where it will live forever, so that I can keep all the other posts beneath it live. Here are links to some of the more interesting posts on this page, to get you started in the magical world of me:

The announcement for my Decca Records/Gather.com contest win, which got me signed to Decca

A review of my Decca EP in Newsday

My piece for The Huffington Post

The first piece I had published in McSweeney’s

One of my weekly webcasts, which have been featured on the front page of YouTube

One of the book reviews I write for Public Radio International’s World Books blog, in this case, of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s “Let The Right One In”

A Feature Article I wrote for ReadyMade Magazine about a little island off the coast of Alaska dealing with climate change

My first byline in Wired, and my first byline in Salon

An article about my awesome mom

This is the blog I publish over at Untitled Books, a literary website based in the UK that you all should check out. I’ll post all the blogs here, just in case you don’t wander that-a-way.

It's a rejection letter. I think.

Submission Guideline Statement: “DailyRejection prefers that you submit only one story at a time, or up to five poems at a time.”

Euphemism category: bid for mercy

Translation: Seriously? You were thinking about sending two stories at once? Aren’t you the least bit grateful that we’re letting you send anything at all? If someone offered to let you urinate in their kitchen sink, would you respond by asking if you could do it twice? Just piss in the sink and go home. As for poems, they’re generally way shorter, so we can stomach two or three. But if you’re more into writing long poems, please just send one. Or better still, none. Or just stop writing them altogether. What about haikus? We love haikus.

Submission Guideline Statement: “DailyRejection responds to all submissions within 1-3 months.”

Euphemism category: creating realistic expectations

Translation: Einstein, the smartest man ever to walk this Earth, was the first to realize that time is relative. Obviously, we at DailyRejection don’t count weekends as “time”, per se. And it isn’t as if we’re going to count the hours we spend sleeping. Likewise, time spent eating, cooking, lovemaking, reading, writing, and voiding waste cannot reasonably be considered “time”. “Time” shall be defined as any hours we spend at our desks, in our offices, actually looking through submissions. If you must have a hard number, you can expect a negative response to your submission in approximately 1-35 years, though keep in mind that the lifespan of the average literary journal in this economic and intellectual climate is far less than that. Similarly, most of our editors are already at death’s door, thanks in large part to having read your submissions.

Submission Guideline Statement: “DailyRejection is happy to accept simultaneous submissions.”

Euphemism category: stroking your ego

Translation: This fantasy you’re entertaining, that more than one literary journal might accept your work, thus initiating some kind of heated bidding war between them, is highly adorable. It makes us want to tousle your hair and buy you a Beanie Baby.

Submission Guideline Statement: “Only previously unpublished works will be considered for publication in DailyRejection.”

Euphemism category: bid for mercy

Translation: Everybody’s band managed to open for Guns n’ Roses once, and odds are if you keep sending these Hail Mary passes to journals, some half-asleep editor will accidentally put the accepted sticker on your Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope. But one concert doesn’t make you Aerosmith, and one story doesn’t make you Fitzgerald. Write something else, you lazy ass. If we Google your submission and it comes up as already published in the Best American Short Fiction On the Subject of Flightless Birds of 1998, we will bring all our considerable influence to bear and ruin your career for ever (possibly by nominating you for a National Book Award).

Submission Guideline Statement: “To get a better grasp of whether or not we might like your work, please read through a few issues of DailyRejection before submitting.”

Euphemism category: shameless request for money

Translation: Nobody reads this magazine. Seriously. The editor hasn’t read it in years. It’s like, twelve people, now. And all of them are only doing it so they can submit something. Please, for the love of God, read a literary journal. Writers don’t matter when nobody’s a reader. Don’t you get that? Stop updating your Twitter and read a goddamn literary journal.

Submission Guideline Statement: “DailyRejection regrets to inform you that we can no longer accept electronic submissions.”

Euphemism category: bid for mercy

Translation: What is wrong with you people? We thought putting that electronic submission page up on the website would make life easier, but as soon as we did it, you started sending us everything you’d ever written down in your entire lives. Grocery lists do not count as stories, nor do Dear John letters or (most) suicide notes. Whether or not the Excel spreadsheets were meant to be experimental or ironic, we found them impossibly dull.

Submission Guideline Statement: “DailyRejection requests a moderate reading fee for your submission.”

Euphemism category: shameless demand for money

Translation: Believe it or not, reading your stories is not a pleasure. The majority of your submissions make us wish that Homo Habilis had not developed the brain lateralization necessary to support a primitive cerebral analogue to Broca’s area, allowing for linguistic development in Homo Erectus and full-blown language in Homo Sapiens. The others make us wish we were dead. Our $50 reading fee ($5 per haiku) will not come anywhere close to paying for the years of therapy that our readers will require in order to recover from your submissions. Have you ever seen a Vietnam veteran who can’t relax, can’t sit still, can hardly stop shaking, because the traumatic events they experienced decades earlier still haunt their every waking moment? That’s what our readers are like. And they don’t get subsidized health care.

Submission Guideline Statement: “For all submissions, please ensure that your name appears on every page. Also, please number your pages.”

Euphemism category: you’re an idiot.

Translation: Please make sure none of your story is written in nonsense words, and that you have printed out the pages, rather than mailed us the computer itself. Stories written onto the surface of your monitor will not be accepted. Remember that the mailing address should go on the outside of the envelope, not the inside, and that when we request a word count, we mean the number of words in your story, not the number of words that you know. Also, it’s also worth noting that socks should be put on before shoes, and food goes in your mouth, not all over the table.

Submission Guideline Statement: “We look forward to reading your story.”

Euphemism category: stroking your ego

Translation: We don’t.

This is the blog I publish over at Untitled Books, a literary website based in the UK that you all should check out. I’ll post all the blogs here, just in case you don’t wander that-a-way.

Me. Posing. Hello poseur. With a "u".

So here’s the kind of thing I think about: if and when I publish my first novel, it will be placed on bookstore shelves between the works of David Foster Wallace and those of Jeanette Walls. Of course, I’m making a couple of assumptions here. First, that my book actually ends up on the shelves, rather than the discount racks or the discount tables or next to Tech Stock Investing for Dummies and that year’s National Book Award semi-finalists in a pulping facility. Second, that neither Mr. Wallace nor Ms. Walls’ undergo some James Frey-like fall from grace, and their books remain in print. But if we take these two tiny details for granted (along with my getting published in the first place) I can count on the two of them serving as my bookends for years to come.

I think this is a pretty lucky break. Jeanette–I’m going to go with first names, seeing as we’re neighbours now–had a massive bestseller with The Glass Castle (technically a memoir, but her newest book is fiction). And David’s Infinite Jest is one of the biggest novels to be found anywhere in the bookstore–a definite eye-catcher. Of course, Walls’ memoir is partially about her father’s alcoholism, and Wallace suffered from a depression so severe he eventually killed himself. What if the dark themes of my shelfmates have some on effect on me? I never stood much of a chance of avoiding an addiction to booze or Zoloft by the time I managed to publish a novel in the first place, but the proximity of David and Jeanette certainly won’t help. Maybe I should change my name.

Tommy Amenorhhea, perfectly positioned between Martin Amis and Jonathan Ames, would be lumped in with them as a brilliant social satirist. Tommy Sondheim would write heavy novels about imprisonment and death and illness (as metaphor) from between the bars of Solzhenitsyn and Sontag. Tommy Bombeolachimbomba would definitely become the next Hispanic superstar author, with his prime location between Bolaño and Borges. A year ago, Tommy Nackered could’ve nabbed a killer spot between Nabokov and Naipaul; then Ralph Nader wrote a novel. (Is there anything that man can’t ruin?). Tommy Coekelicot could put some much deserved distance between the subtle genius of J.M. Coetzee and the hackneyed self-helpiness of Paolo Coelho. Tommy Wolfe would only further confuse fans of Look Homeward, Angel and The Bonfire of the Vanities. Or I could go for broke, change my name to Damien Brontë, and finally get between those smug sisters.

Do other would-be authors think about stuff like this, during those two to three hour lulls in which we sit at the computer doubting we’re any more creative than an ATM (and confident we’re far less useful to the world)? I’ve read enough memoirs to know that envy, self-doubt, narcissism, competitiveness, and hubris are to authors as homosexual impulses are to conservative congressmen. But a preoccupation with one’s possible alphabetical companions on bookstore shelves? Is that just me?

I never attended an MFA program in Creative Writing, which has nothing to do with the fact that many of them rejected me. Seriously. I mean it. Anyway, the point is that I don’t have anybody to ask about stuff like this. Every day, I go out to a coffee shop (Tully’s in San Francisco’s Cole Valley today) and put in my hours. Most mornings, the offer of a free mini-cup of peppermint caramel gingerbread mocha is the most I can hope for in the way of human interaction. I’ve got plenty of friends, and a great part-time job as a GMAT instructor, but I very seldom communicate with other writers, which is a shame, because writing is already one of the most isolating professions out there, short of lighthouse keeping and being Ralph Nader.

I conceived of this blog as a way of reaching out, in the hopes that other people might find some consolation in the similarities between my experience and theirs. I imagine the majority of people that come to book-related sites are would-be writers like myself, well-acquainted with submission guidelines, Glimmer Train contests, query letters, reading fees, agencies, contracts, payment in copies of the magazine, writing workshops, and, of course, rejections. Rejections that come like a slap in the face and rejections that come like a kick in the crotch. Boilerplate rejections and personalized rejections. Rejections with detailed explanations and rejections full of mystery and euphemism. More than anything else, I believe it is rejection that bind us all together. These rejections are the reason we need a community, people willing to listen to what we have to say (even if they won’t pay us for it).

As for my credentials, I’ve yet to publish a novel, though I’ve written five of the damn things. I’ve loved and lost two agents, and my shorter work has appeared in places like McSweeney’s and Tin House. But more important than this, I write every day. I sift through literary magazines and get annoyed at the ubiquity of Joyce Carol Oates. I submit stories and then immediately re-read them, only to realize they needed at least twelve more drafts, and now I’ve alienated the editor with my supreme tectonic badness and she’s going to spend the rest of the day telling all the other editors and publishers she knows what a twat I am. In other words, I’m in the same boat as thousands of other struggling writers–fanatical with self-doubt, fantastically pessimistic, and perpetually polishing my Nobel acceptance speech.

I hope to update this blog every week, with a riff on whatever aspect of the writerly life has struck me with particular force that week. I’ll do my best to keep it up as long as my MacBook can retain a charge, or until I take my place between David and Jeanette on a bookstore shelf near you. If anything I write about in the posts to come strikes a chord with you, please leave a comment. It may be the only communication that I have with the outside world that day.

In closing, thanks so much for your time, and for your submission. Unfortunately, we’re going to pass. This is a tough marketplace, and we can only take on projects that we’re particularly excited about. Writing is a highly subjective field, however, and we feel confident another editor may feel differently. Really. Good luck with that.

Tommy

Summertime, by J.M. Coetzee. Viking, 266 pages $25.95"

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

Upon putting down J.M. Coetzee’s most recent novel, “Summertime,” one can be forgiven for running straight to the computer and calling up the Wikipedia entry on its author. After all, when a novelist as critically successful (two Bookers and a Nobel, for starters) and famously reclusive as Coetzee writes a posthumous “biography” of himself, how can you help but wonder how much of it is true?

Coetzee has written two volumes of lightly-fictionalized autobiography before this, “Boyhood” and “Youth,” each of which is written in a close third person, so “Summertime” isn’t exactly breaking new ground. Yet the primary way in which it differentiates itself from the previous two books (aside from the fact that it actually says “fiction” on the cover)—the fact that the protagonist John Coetzee is dead—makes all the difference.

“Summertime” is a finale, a summing up of a life, and the portrait Coetzee (the author, now, whom I’ll refer to by only his last name) paints of his fictional avatar is so unforgivably cruel and insulting that it borders on the parodic. If this book is to be taken as fact, Coetzee sees himself as a talentless failure who has contributed almost nothing to the world at large. But the very writing of the novel seems to contradict that claim. So how much of it is true?

“Summertime” is comprised primarily of interviews with women who were significant in John Coetzee’s life during the mid-1970s. First we hear from Julia, a married woman with whom John had a brief and unsatisfying affair. Then there is his cousin Margot, with whom he shared an awkward night on the South African Karoo when their car broke down. Next comes Adriana, a Brazilian dance teacher and mother of one of John’s students. Finally, we hear from Sophie, a fellow professor who also was briefly involved with John romantically.

What binds these women together is their unflagging disdain for John Coetzee. Over the course of the novel, he is maligned in every manner possible. Julia, in-between describing John’s shortcomings as a lover, posits that it would’ve been impossible for any woman other than his mother to love him. Margot calls him a “failed runaway, failed car mechanic…Failed son.” Adriana, who rejected John’s obsessive attentions after accusing him of lusting after her teenage daughter, describes him as “a boy as a priest is always a boy until suddenly one day he is an old man.” She also mocks his abilities as a dancer. Sophie dwells less on the person than his work, claiming John Coetzee “had no special sensitivity that I could detect, no original insight into the human condition.”

The overall tone of this roast is aesthetic masochism. One could put a serial killer in a room full of his victims’ parents and expect to hear more empathy and understanding. So what is the point of all this abuse? Obviously, there are plenty of people in the world—including this reader—who have the greatest respect for Coetzee.

This question is part of a more general one, which leads us back to Wikipedia. Unlike “Boyhood” and “Youth,” “Summertime” is heavily fictionalized. For example, during the decade at issue in the book, Coetzee (the character) lives alone with his father in a suburb in Western Cape Town. They are a sad, silent Odd Couple, pitied by pretty much everybody who knows them. But in reality, Coetzee (the real person) spent the 1970s with his wife and two children. What gives?

I don’t know exactly what Coetzee’s game is, but my guess is that “Summertime” lands somewhere between C. G. Jung’s “Red Book” and Bret Easton Ellis’ “American Psycho.” Coetzee is airing his deepest fears—that he has wasted his life, that he has never loved or been loved, that he is delusional about his own abilities—admitting that no number of awards or marriages or friends can ever fully dispel the universal human certitude that one is a talentless fraud and an unlovable misanthrope. At the same time, he is recreating himself as a monster, imagining how the world would respond to his worst vision of himself. John Coetzee is what J.M. Coetzee might have been, or what he might still become.

In this way, like many of Coetzee’s recent novels, “Summertime” is primarily experimental. While it lacks the lecture structure of “Elizabeth Costello” or the entertaining split-screen hijinks of “Diary of a Bad Year” (a humorously dark and portentous sketch of which is described in the John Coetzee-penned notebook entries that bookend “Summertime”), Coetzee’s newest is an exploration of the self as seen through the lens of fiction. He is able to leave behind his true personality, his true history, even his true abilities as a stylist (the book’s interviews are narrated and administered by John’s biographer, Vincent, who has all the poetic sensibility of the DSM-IV). From this null-place, Coetzee imagines an alternate-reality Coetzee, and tears him to shreds.

Perhaps that explains the incongruously sunny title of the book. There’s nothing like a little time with a monster to make you appreciate the human. “Summertime” is an affirmation of Coetzee as he actually is, unsmiling and difficult and dark. For anyone who is interested in the inner-workings of one of literature’s greatest living minds, “Summertime” will prove satisfying. Just don’t confuse the protagonist with the author. They’re like night and day. Or like winter and summer.

The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P, by Rieko Matsuura. Translated by Michael Emmerich, Kodansha International, 447 pages, $24.95

Perils of the Pansexual

This novel about a young woman who wakes up to find that her big toe has become a penis was a major bestseller in Japan, and it’s easy to see why. The book is titillating, disturbing without being disgusting, and reads like a self-help guide on the subjects of sex and love.

“He stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright in complete nakedness before us, and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth! we have no choice left but confess—he was a woman.”

With this short paragraph, Virginia Woolf introduced us to perhaps the most famous transgendered person in all of English literature: Orlando. “Orlando” is a fantastical reinterpretation of the life of Vita-Sackville West, Woolf’s friend and lover, told in the style of a swashbuckling romance. Midway through the book, the lothario Orlando falls into a coma and wakes up as a woman. In spite of the many ordeals she experiences in her reincarnation as a member of the fairer sex (including almost killing a man who is distracted by her shapely ankles), Orlando concludes, like Tiresias before her, that being a woman is a hell of a lot better than being a man.

The protagonist of Rieko Matsuura’s “The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P,” first published in Japan in 1993, comes to much the same conclusion, though by a far more didactic route. Kazumi is an ordinary twenty-two year old girl with a boring boyfriend and a passionate dedication to heterosexuality, until the morning she wakes up to discover the big toe of her right foot has become a penis. Her boyfriend breaks up with her, disgusted, and Kazumi immediately takes up with Shunji, the blind, piano-playing synaesthete next door. Soon after, the two of them join a traveling performance art troupe called The Flower Show.

Oct. 12, 2009 | Once upon a time, the film projector was the teaching tool of the future. Schools all over the country purchased the temperamental, whirring machines, prompting a flood of educational shorts that offered instruction on everything from personal hygiene to sandwich making.

Kino International has just released the best of the bunch on two DVDs, titled “How to Be a Man” (1949-1970) and “How to Be a Woman“ (1948-1982), and many are as cringe-worthy as you might expect. In the hilariously hyperbolic cautionary tale “Car Theft,” two teens go from stealing a hat to stealing a car to running over a toddler in about 11 minutes. In “Girls Are Better Than Ever,” a nutritional video sponsored by the Milk Council, a voice-over describes a young, healthy-looking blond woman who is “worth looking at.” In “Dance, Little Children,” which explores a small Midwestern town’s syphilis outbreak, a narrator whose creepy intensity wouldn’t be out of place in a horror film asks, “Who is to blame if young people respond to what an anxiety-ridden world seems to be telling them?” as the camera zooms in on the posterior of a girl dancing the jitterbug.

But a surprising number of the featured shorts stand the test of time. “Fears of Children,” in which a 5-year-old boy is coddled by his mother and pressured by his father, ought to be required viewing for every parent. “Improve Your Personality,” despite its egregious name, explains how we can change the way people affect us by improving our own understanding and empathy.

As Skip Elsheimer, the man responsible for archiving these films (and whose online collection of vintage television commercials will make your day), explains in a couple of fascinating interviews on the discs, “[These films] seem conservative … but they’re talking about very forward-thinking things. They realized … the parents are not responsibly teaching the kids about these issues.”

Viewed this way, these educational shorts are more than a campy throwback to a time when sex ed videos featured silhouettes of women with bobs and men in fedoras. They are historical documents, insights into the fears and hopes of earlier generations. “Let’s Make a Sandwich” isn’t just a film about how to make an open-faced tuna melt; it’s an illustration of the belief that a woman who couldn’t make a sandwich in 1950 would never find a husband. Now that’s educational.

Read it at Salon!

As God Commands by Niccolò Ammaniti, Translated from the Italian by Jonathan Hunt. Grove Atlantic/Black Cat, 400 pp, $14. 95.

Crime and Punishment

In 2001, Niccoló Ammaniti’s novel Io non ho paura (“I’m Not Scared”) was published to great acclaim in Italy. The novel takes place in Tuscany during the so-called “Years of Lead, ” when both right and left-wing paramilitary groups carried out numerous acts of terrorism across the country. In 1978 alone, more than 600 kidnappings took place in Italy, mostly of Northerners transported and held for ransom in the South. “I’m Not Scared” tells the story of Michele, a nine year-old boy who, while out playing with his friends one afternoon, happens upon one of these kidnapped children in a giant hole dug near an abandoned farmhouse. It isn’t long before Michele realizes that nearly all of the adults in his small town, including his own parents, are in on the crime.

The cinematic adaptation of “I’m Not Scared” was one of my favorite films of 2004, and when I went back to read the novel, it proved equally compelling. Many books take on the disillusioning moment when a young boy first sees his father’s flaws, but Michele’s coming-of-age was particularly poignant. His parents had committed an unforgivable crime, and Michele’s struggle to reconcile his love for them with that fact lent the novel both an exterior and an interior drama.

Michele’s eventual attempt to save the kidnapped boy became at once an act of selfless bravery and of traditional rebellion, and the kidnapping was recast as yet another manifestation of the inscrutability of the actions of adults when one is young. In this way, Ammaniti seemed to me less like another Mario Puzo than an Italian David Mamet, creating a realistic criminal universe without any of the grandstanding or glorifying that gave us Michael Corleone and Tony Soprano.

His new novel, “As God Commands”, revisits much of the territory covered in “I’m Not Scared”. Again, there is a crime at the heart of the book, as well as a young protagonist. Christiano Zena is thirteen, the son of a neo-Nazi skinhead named Rino. The complexity of the father-son relationship emerges slowly and gracefully. In the first scene, Rino, in a drunken rage, wakes his son in the middle of the night and orders him to kill a neighbor’s dog with a handgun. But only a few chapters later, father and son are cleaning the house and baking together in order to convince their social worker of the healthiness of their domestic situation. The lengths to which Christiano eventually goes to protect his father leave no doubt in the reader’s mind that a strong bond of love exists between them.

In addition to Christiano and Rino, “As God Commands” features a sizable ensemble. There’s Beppe Trecca, the social worker mentioned above, who embarks on an affair with his best friend’s wife, Ida. Then there’s Danilo Aprea, whose plan to rob an ATM sets the tragedy of the novel in motion. Most disturbing of all is Quatro Formaggi (meaning “four cheese,” as in pizza, in Italian), the victim of an accidental electrocution that left him physically disabled and mentally deranged, who spends his days building a model village out of action figures and toys from fast food restaurant kids’ meals.

The action of the novel takes place over the course of six days, divided into three sections: Before, The Night, and After. While the middle section is ostensibly dedicated to the night of the heist, it quickly becomes something far more terrible. Just like Michele’s family in “I’m Not Scared,” the characters here are already well on their way to perdition by the time the novel starts, and their punishments come with a Biblical swiftness. While a subplot lifted almost whole cloth from Graham Greene’s “The End of the Affair” unfolds somewhat mechanically, the overall narrative carries the same tragic weight as that author’s best works.

In addition to the expanded cast, “As God Commands” differs from Amminiti’s earlier novel in that it is set in the present day. Though this robs the book of any historical resonance, it gives Ammaniti the opportunity to pepper his prose with pop culture references. Considering the tribulations of his young life, Christiano finds comfort in “the notion that great men have always had to struggle through shit on their own. Just think of Eminem or Hitler or Christian Vieri.” During the funeral of a girl who is raped and murdered sometime during the fateful evening at the center of the book, her schoolfriends can’t help but take photos and video on their phones: “In the dim light of the church the screens of the cell phones lit up like funeral candles.” Far from distracting, Ammaniti’s nods towards youth culture always ring true, deepenning the reality of his world.

“As God Commands” falters only when the plot threatens to overwhelm the subtle development of the characters. In the course of one evening, we get rape, murder, a coma-inducing aneurysm, a billboard somehow cutting a trailer in half as if it were a tin can (and exposing two adulterous lovers into the bargain), a hit and run, and a possibly miraculous recovery from said hit and run. While many novels revolve around a single fraught evening (“The Ice Storm”, “Atonement”, and “Mystic River” come to mind), it’s still a lot to take in at once. If novels had volume knobs, these would be turned up to eleven.

Still, “As God Commands” is far more stimulating than your average page-turner. Once again, Ammaniti has succeeded in telling a captivating story while developing convincing characters and relationships. Though this novel may lack the sharpness of “I’m Not Scared,” it makes up for it in scope. If the older book can be read as Ammaniti’s “American Buffalo,” this one is his “Glengarry Glen Ross.” Would it be crass of me to say I can’t wait for the movie to come out?

Oh, excitement! My name in the lights of Salon!

I’ve included the text of the review below the screenshot, or you can click here to read it on the site proper. Sweet!

Salon Books page with Gourmet Rhapsody...and me!

Sept. 11, 2009 | Muriel Barbery’s last book, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” was a massive bestseller both in France and in America. But while the story of a depressed concierge and an angsty teen girl had moments of lyricism, I found its near-constant literary and philosophical allusions pretentious, and its characters unlikable. Thankfully, Barbery’s new book (or old book, technically, as it was written first), “Gourmet Rhapsody,” manages to transform these weaknesses into strengths.

"Gourmet Rhapsody" by Muriel Barbery

“Rhapsody” is the tale of the masterly food critic Pierre Arthens, who lies on his deathbed struggling to remember the one flavor that he believes has defined his life. Every other chapter is narrated by Arthens and centers around a single food item, such as “Toast” or “Mayonnaise,” moving in the manner of a detective story toward the mystery flavor. The other chapters each feature a different narrator who has known Arthens in some capacity. Everyone from his granddaughter to his cat to the statuette of Venus in his study gets a chance to weigh in.

Barbery is at her best in the Arthens chapters, writing with all the gusto of a true gastronome. A tomato is “crimson in its taut silken finery, undulating with the occasional more tender hollow.” An octopus is “loath to divulge its secret liaisons to one’s bite,” a poeticization of “chewy.” Arthens’ evocative descriptions are balanced with passages of painful pomposity, such as when the act of watching another person eat is described as a moment “exempt from the infinite vanishing line of our own memories and projects.” However, the pretension that was so problematic in “Hedgehog” is forgivable, even enjoyable, here, because we’re allowed to dislike the protagonist.

Arthens is a man who cheats on his wife, describes his children as “monstrous excrescences,” and is effectively blind to everything but food. But it is that very single-mindedness that makes his deathbed confession such a joy to read. As his eventual revelation makes clear, Arthens has lived his life worshiping a false idol. But all monomanias are pure, and so the critic becomes a kind of tragic hero. Barbery’s triumph is in managing to tell his story while simultaneously conveying his passion. Like any good work of food writing, one puts it down a little bit hungry.

The Armies by Evelio Rosero. Translated from Spanish by Anne McLean, 224 pages, New Directions, $14.95

Of Violence and Beauty

Colombian writer Evelio Rosero’s work is notorious for being brutally realistic, even hyperrealistic, and this book, which won 2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, is no exception.

At the beginning of Evelio Rosero’s novel “The Armies”, the protagonist, Ismael, a retired professor in his seventies, spies on his young neighbor Geraldina over the wall between their properties. Geraldina enjoys walking around her yard naked, knowingly teasing Ismael. “I ask nothing more of life than this possibility,” Ismael thinks, “to see this woman without her knowing that I’m looking at her, to see this woman when she knows I’m looking, but to see her: my only explanation for staying alive.”

It’s a typical statement from the typical creation of a typical older male novelist. Perhaps from reading too much Marquez and Roth, I thought I could pretty well predict where the story was going: Ismael would eventually conquer the beautiful woman, body and soul, and there would be an extended (and slightly nauseating) sex scene. That instead the book would end with mass murder and necrophilia never crossed my mind. Disturbing political novels ought to carry a warning label.

Evelio Rosero has been writing about the miseries of his native Colombia for three decades now. His novels, many of which take on the internecine wars, kidnappings, murders, and political upheavals of his country, have won numerous awards (including, humorously enough, the National Literature Prize from the Colombian Ministry of Culture). His work is notorious for being brutally realistic, even hyperrealistic, and “The Armies” is no exception.

To highlight the horror, the novel begins with a brief idyll. The setting is San José, a small town somewhere in Colombia. For a few pages, we enjoy Ismael’s thwarted lust, his wife Otilia’s resigned patience with his wandering eye, and the pleasures of small town life. But darkness quickly seeps in. There is an invasion of soldiers, guerrillas or paramilitaries of some sort, and the police charged with protecting San Jose are no better than the invaders. Soon, Otilia has been kidnapped, along with Geraldina’s husband and children.

What we are given to understand is that this is only the latest in a long string of attacks. Most of San Jose’s residents have lost loved ones, either to violence, or to the threat of violence. There are almost no young people left in San Jose:

“They’ve all gone in this past year.”
“All of them?”
“All the girls and all the boys, Is mael.” She gave me a reproachful look. “The most sensible thing they could do.”
“It won’t be any better elsewhere.”
“They had to leave to find out.”

“The Armies” doesn’t have much by way of a plot; another attack begins soon after the first one, and it is still going on when the novel ends. But in spite of all the terror, Rosero manages to get in some beautiful writing (aided in no small part by his translator from the Spanish, Anne McLean). A grenade is “an animal with jaws of fire that will dissolve me in a breath”. Dawn “descends from the mountaintop like fluttering sheets”. Best of all is the ways in which Rosero connects sex and death, as when Ismael watches Geraldina in her misery:.

“I proceed behind Geraldina, trying in vain not to recognize her besieging scent, my eyes involuntarily exploring her black-clad back, and catching a glimpse, beneath the mourning, of her legs, her sandals, the radiant movement of her body, her whole life diffusing and proclaiming, beneath the veils of fatality she is suffering in this world, the perhaps inclement desire to be possessed as soon as possible, albeit by death (by me?), to forget the world for one moment, albeit for death.”

There is also plenty of time left over to wonder at the inanity of war, and this war in particular. We are told very little about who or what the armies are fighting for, aside from the fact that San José represents a “strategic location”, and is surrounded by thousands of hectares of coca.

Instead of a lot of political explanation and historical background, we get anecdotes. The chief of San José’s police force has a mental breakdown and kills a handful of civilians, then is promoted to work in another city. A bomb-sniffing dog is buried with military honors while men lie rotting in the streets. When Ismael is told that his name is on a list of collaborators to be killed, he laughs, “Why do they ask for names? They kill whoever [sic] they please, no matter what their names might be. I would like to know what is written on the paper with the names, that ‘list’. It is a blank sheet of paper, for God’s sake. A paper where all the names they want can fit.”

The only thing that can really be said against Rosero’s novel is either irrelevant or a deal breaker: it isn’t particularly fun to read. When the darkness falls over Ismael, it is never to rise again. Nothing is so bad that it can’t get worse. The manager of a local café receives the index fingers of his kidnapped wife and daughter in order to extract a higher ransom. The city’s empanada vendor’s severed head is found in his grease boiler. One woman watches her son die, then is killed and raped (in that order) by a group of soldiers.

What we’re supposed to take away from all this brutality is unclear, and the moments of light are so few and far between that they seem almost rote when they arrive. Near the end of the book, Ismael sits with Geraldina, and his trembling hand falls on her knee. Old habits die hard, apparently.

“It is the emotion, Geraldina. Or it is my lechery, as Otilia would say.”
“Don’t worry, profesor. Stick with love. Love conquers lechery.”

That may be so, but the armies in San José are fighting for neither love nor lechery. They are fighting for greed, which it seems nothing can conquer.

Here’s another song in my series of videos on YouTube, some of which have been featured on the front page! This is a cover of one of my favorite standards. Hope you enjoy!