The Return by Roberto Bolaño. Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. New Directions, 224 pages, $23.95

Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 was one of the most critically acclaimed novels of the past few years, yet I’ve met few people who could honestly admit to enjoying it. This is no doubt partially due to the book’s length, which is artistically unjustifiable except in the way it creates a kind of “literature of cruelty,” punishing the reader page by page.

It’s not that I mind long books; I recently finished Javier Marías’ stunning Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, a single story split up into three volumes whose combined page count exceeds that of Bolaño’s epic. The problem was more the unremitting squalid repetitiveness of it all. After the hundredth or so description of a prostitute’s brutalized corpse (the book concerns itself with a murder spree on the Mexican border), the book began teetering on the edge of self-parody.

This was always Bolaño’s greatest weakness (if the past tense can be justified; the late Chilean has managed to publish half a dozen books in the past three years, a fecundity matched only by the pulpiest of genre writers): a predilection for litany. Much of 2666 bored me, and I barely managed to get through his novel Nazi Literature in the Americas, a fictionalized encyclopaedia of Nazi novelists.

Yet it is this very tendency that makes Bolaño’s short stories so powerful. Without the dangerous freeedom granted by 1000 blank pages, he manages to create dense catalogs of misery and revelation, and packs more punch into fifteen pages than he managed in all of the second volume of 2666. To complete the metaphor, his recently published collection, The Return, is nothing short of a knockout.

What impressed me most about the thirteen stories in The Return was the coherence of Bolaño’s vision. Though the stories take place in different countries (The United States, Chile, Mexico, Russia) and different time periods, though some are straight fiction, some are vaguely autobiographical, and some even drift towards magical realism (such as the compelling, Borgesian yarn “Buba,” in which three players on a soccer team perform an African blood ritual that seems to bring them success on the pitch), each new tale feels like a chapter in a continuous narrative.

The aimless lovers and murderous lowlifes of 2666 and The Savage Detectives are back, only compressed and concentrated by the word limit. Four stories revolve around murder, and the title story concerns a man who dies and then watches, as a ghost, while a famous fashion designer molests his corpse.

Two of the best stories take place in the world of pornography. In one of these, “Joanna Silvestri,” a famous pornographic actress visits Los Angeles and rekindles a romance with one of her old co-stars, who is dying. The scene where she finally leaves him is devastatingly sad: “I turned and Jack was there, standing by the gate, watching me, and then I knew that everything was all right and I could go. That everything was all wrong, and I could go. That everything was sorry, and I could go.”

Bolaño’s trademark nods towards metafiction are also alive and well, both in the character of his alter-ego Arturo Belano, and in such stories as “Another Russian Tale,” in which a German SS officer’s accidental mishearing of the Spanish epithet “coño” as the German word “kunst,” meaning art, ends up saving a man’s life.

Perhaps the most powerful stories are the ones that concern the ongoing mythology of Bolaño himself. In “Detectives,” two men discuss Arturo Belano, the young author and political agitator they found in the Chilean prison where they both worked during the Pinochet coup. Recognizing him as an old friend from high school, the men decide to set him free. This is an oft-repeated true tale from Bolaño’s life (and one he told before, from his own perspective, in the short story “Dance Card”), but here it is imbued with metaphorical force. When the detectives take Belano to be cleaned up, he fails to recognize himself in a mirror, even though the fact that others have recognized him was the key to his salvation. The mirror may be something of a cliché, but Bolaño is able to make it feel reflective.

In another story, “Photos,” we watch Belano look through the author photos in an omnibus of French poetry circa 1973, falling in love with the various poets, mourning their passing and, through them, the passage of time:

‘…then Belano thinks about his own youth, when he used to churn it out like Tron [one of the poets], and was perhaps even better looking than Tron, he thinks, squinting at the photo, but to publish a poem, in Mexico, all those years ago when he lived in Mexico City, he’d had to sweat blood, because Mexico is Mexico, he reflects, and France is France, and then he shuts his eyes and sees a torrent of ghostly, emblematic Mexicans flowing like a grey breath of air along a dry river bed…’

Having read two of the stories in this collection in The New Yorker earlier this year, I can attest to the value of a second look. Bolaño, presented through the medium of veteran translator Chris Andrews, is revealed clearly as both a master storyteller and a subtle stylist. I feel newly confident in recommending the great Chilean to friends, though I plan to put new emphasis on his short work. These stories do more than serve as an entrée to his novels. They manage to surpass them.

Beside the Sea, by Véronique Olmi. Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter. Peirene Press, 121 pages

Beside the Sea, by Véronique Olmi. Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter. Peirene Press, 121 pages

Rien Ne Va Plus, by Margarita Karapanou. Translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich. Clockroot Books/Interlink Publishing Group, 184 pages, $15.

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

While it is both reductive and unjust to attempt to characterize the literature of a nation (though not quite as idiotic as trying to delineate the ‘currents’ of today’s fiction), if someone demanded that I describe modern French literature in one phrase, I would go with, ‘seemingly normal people doing awful things to each other for inexplicable reasons.’

In Véronique Olmi’s French bestseller, Beside the Sea, a mother brings her two children to a beachside hotel, then smothers them to death with a pillow. In Margarita Karapanou’s Rien Ne Va Plus, a married couple torture each other while the author punishes the reader with a series of contradictory plot lines. It might be worth adding here that only the former novel is French, while the second merely has a French title. And yet the difference in intention between the two novels perfectly points out why my generalization holds. Olmi is cruel to no conceivable end, but Karapanou uses pain to make a point.

The protagonist of Beside the Sea, we quickly realize, is deeply disturbed. She has removed her kids from school and taken them on vacation, but from the first page there’s no mystery about what’s going to happen; these kids have slightly worse odds than the campers of Crystal Lake in Friday the 13th, or the CIA officers hunted by Predator. A considerable (and surprising) number of critics have lauded Olmi’s special insight into the broken mind of her protagonist, but I’m not convinced of the depth of the book’s exploration of extreme mental illness. The mother certainly sounds deranged — “didn’t I use to long to be knocked down by a car and break my leg so I’d finally have a good enough reason to be left in peace?”—but not exactly smother-your-children damaged.

The sense Olmi is skimming the surface isn’t helped by her refusal to give us any of the mother’s back story. Clearly she’s reached a breaking point, but exactly how has she raised her boys to their present age? And if she’s run out of money, how did she have enough before?

I can’t help but think of Laurent Cantet’s film Time Out (L’emploi du Temps), loosely based on the story of Jean-Claude Romand, the man who pretended to be a doctor for 18 years, then killed his entire family when it seemed the truth was about to come out. In his interpretation of domestic genocide, Cantet chose to leave out the murders, most likely for reasons of dramatic plausibility. For me, Olmi’s decision to provide violence without context is doubly flawed: horror-film shocking and intellectually disappointing. And while there’s no lack of good writing, the implication that someone capable of killing her children would also be capable of “narrating” a grammatical and correctly-punctuated story in the first person is suspect. And there’s nothing crazy about stream of consciousness; as Joyce taught us in the final chapter of Ulysses, that’s how every mind works.

Rien Ne Va Plus starts us off in a similar vein of inexplicable cruelty. The narrator, a female novelist named Louisa, has just married the beautiful and debonair Alkiviadis. And the first stop after the wedding? A gay bar, where Alkiviadis invites a fifteen year-old boy back to the house. There, Lousia is made to watch while Alkiviadis and the boy make love. The marriage ends in divorce and, finally, Alkiviadis’ suicide.

After a poetic interlude (“The end has arrived. But not even that can release me. Because there is no End. Amen.”), the book begins once more to describe the courtship and marriage of Louisa and Alkiviadis. For the first few chapters, the two seem terribly in love, but then everything shifts: “—Every time I want to write,” Louisa warns Alkiviadis, “I want to write love stories. But as soon as I pick up the pen I’m overcome by horror.”

By the next page, Louisa has become a monster.

Rien Ne Va Plus, by Margarita Karapanou. Translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich. Clockroot Books/Interlink Publishing Group, 184 pages, $15.

She moves to America to have an affair with a painter (who fell in love with her through her novels). Next, after returning to Alkividias and marrying him, she runs off to Italy with an obese lesbian named Vanessa. Both of these partners are eventually rebuffed, violently, by Louisa. When she returns to her husband and ends up pregnant, she waits a few months before deciding to have it aborted. The reason she gives the doctor?

“Because I hate my husband, and I want to deny him the joy of having this baby.”

She eventually leaves him for good, going off on her own, and the book ends with Louisa asleep and peaceful. “At last! She is alone!” we are told, in a third-person narration that began only a few pages before.

So what differentiates the cruelty of Olmi from that of Karapanou? What justification could there be (assuming one believes that horror demands justification) for such inhumanity?

After their divorce, Louisa tells Alkiviadis that she lied to him constantly throughout their marriage, not only about big things, such as her many lovers, but also small things, such as going out to the movies when she really just sat in a café drinking espresso:

Perhaps it was because those lies gave life a phantasmagorical glow. I could turn each day into fireworks, shape it however I wanted, as if I were God. And the strange thing is that you actually liked it, you knew I was lying to you…

The reader has become Louisa’s lover, a feeling only deepened when we learn that the novel’s opening portion, in which Alkiviadis was the monster, is actually the novel-within-a-novel written by Louisa. Just like her ex-husband, we have been unable to leave Louisa, in spite of the many ways in which we’ve been manipulated, betrayed, and tortured. Karapanou points out the perverse paradox of fiction, that we seek truth in lies. This is a desire that is taken advantage of by works like Olmi’s, which are intended to disturb: the most horrifying lies are not necessarily the most illuminating, but they are invariably the most riveting.

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.

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!

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.

(This post was originally written for my arts and culture blog on Salon, Buzzkiller. All postings from that blog will also be reposted here.)

Today, the NYTimes, my go-to source for rant-inspiring material, ran an article entitled “Country’s New Face: It’s Young and Blonde”. Hearkening back to sometime in the early 18^th century, the piece expresses surprise that a female country musician might have gotten her start on the mysterious new interweb. Ignoring the fact that country’s new face sounds a lot like its old face (were not Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton, and Tanya Tucker once every bit as young and blonde as Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood, and LeAnn Rimes)?), the article found another way to piss me off. Allow me to quote at length:

“In a video posted to YouTube in January 2008, Veronica Ballestrini — then 16, blond, precocious — sits on a wrinkled couch wearing a pink Abercrombie & Fitch zip-up hoodie and clutching a guitar…

…A year and a half later, all the screen time has begun to pay off. Last spring [Ballestrini] recorded a proper video for “Amazing,” a single of her own, and uploaded it. After a couple of weeks it was picked up by CMT.com, the digital arm of Country Music Television, and shown on CMT Pure Country, the network’s all-video digital channel.

A young female country singer savvily using online media to construct a career built on largely self-written songs about teenage experiences? The Taylor Swift Playbook is making the rounds.”

Why does this piss me off so much? Because this article, like so many describing the amazing promotional power of the internet, ignores the fact that the vast majority of musicians who have managed to transmute online fame into tangible success in the real world have been attractive young females. In other words, it is the male tendency to click on every image of a sexy teenager, whether the underlying link is hawking emoticons or offering the opportunity to reconnect with that slutty redhead from high school, that has made these women famous. How revolutionary.

The evidence is overwhelming. There’s Julia Nunes, the babyish blonde ukelele sensation who parlayed her YouTube videos into an opening slot on Ben Folds’ 2008 tour. Or what about Lily Allen, the multi-platinum singer/songwriter who become a poster child for MySpace (even though she was already signed to a record label when she started posting videos there). Then there’s Lily Allen redux, Kate Nash, the more talented (and less born into fame) of the two, who also credits MySpace with her success. Most egregious are YouTube’s five breakout musicians of 2008— Marié Digby (currently signed to Disney’s Hollywood Records), Mia Rose (Cherry Entertainment), Dondria Nicole (Jermaine Dupri’s So So Def/Island Urban), Esmée Denters (Justin Timberlake’s label, Tenman Records), and Lisa Lavie (who has chosen to release her albums independently).

Each of these five women, as well as another few dozen I’m too demoralised to list, started out singing covers of pop songs on YouTube, either while accompanying herself on a guitar strummed with a coma-inducing rhythmic regularity, or else a capella, utilizing her free hand as a baton with which to conduct her Fantasy-era-Mariah-Carey-style coloratura. Then some record exec found himself carrying underwood (file under: jokes that never get old) while watching her video, and made a call. Consider Mia Rose, who is an absolutely gorgeous Portuguese girl and shares her name with a prominent porn star. Both of these facts go further to explain her YouTube channel’s 204,000 subscribers than her voice, which is seldom even in key. Esmée Denters’ medley of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” and Aretha Franklin’s “Respect”, performed during her opening for Timberlake in London, is truly painful. Try not to cringe when the back-up singers arrive and pretend to rock out to this skinny white girl’s half-assed attempts to dance.

I realize this may sound like over the top rage, but there is so much talent out there on the web, it hurts to see all the attention go to cute eighteen year-old girls singing covers. Just to prove I know how to be positive, here’s an example of a musician I love, Jack Conte. He’s using the medium of YouTube not just to put himself out there, but to produce interesting original music and creative videos. He has 1/200^th the fanbase that Esmée has, and 500 times the talent. But that’s how the web goes. My advice to Jack? I think it’s time to consider a dye job. And a sex change.

Start Making Sense

In Yoko Tawada’s latest novel alienation becomes downright alienating.

A reviewer courts considerable danger when he or she condemns a book that is densely surreal or murkily allegorical. Complaining that the story’s symbols are foggy may invite charges that subtleties in the plot were missed; objections to the lack of a clear narrative will lead some to think that the book’s deeper political or moral themes were ignored. But promises of profundity are no defense for rampant obscurity; I read Yoko Tawada’s “The Naked Eye” in constant suspense, convinced that at any moment it must start making sense. It never did.

This may be a matter of taste, or a lack of patience with arty difficulty for its own sake. The prolific Tawada has a considerable reputation in Europe: her writing — novels, plays, poems, essays, and short stories — has garnered a number of awards, including the Akutagawa Prize and the Goethe Medal.

As far as I can discern, her latest novel revolves around a Vietnamese teenager (known sometimes as Anh Nguyet, or “the pupil with the Iron Blouse”; for clarity’s sake, I’ll just refer to her as “the girl”) who is invited to give a speech on Communism at an International Youth Conference in East Berlin. The time period is unclear, as is the duration of the novel (trying to parse the passage of time in the book turns out to be as frustrating as trying to locate the hour on a Dalí wristwatch). Once in Berlin, the girl meets Jörg, a German radical who is either her boyfriend or her kidnapper. She fails to show up for her speech and then decides to go back to Vietnam by way of Moscow. Unfortunately, when a stranger lies down in front of a train to stop it, the girl gets on and ends up in Paris. Here, she takes up with a French prostitute named Marie, and becomes obsessed with the films of Catherine Deneuve.

This is where the novel really starts to get weird.

Each chapter in “The Naked Eye” is titled after a different Catherine Deneuve movie, from Repulsion to Dancer in the Dark. The girl spends her days watching the same films over and over again: “…the silver screen was the bedsheet upon which I did all my living and sleeping.”

As the book progresses, the content of the chapters becomes more and more related to the chapter’s title film, until we are left reading what feel like essays written for an undergraduate cinema studies class. The girl’s philosophy, a childlike regurgitation of Ho Chih Minh’s propaganda, proffers the only readerly fun in these long and tortuous critiques. Upon meeting a prostitute for the first time, the girl isn’t scandalized by the thought of sex being sold for money, but by the fact that rooms are rented out to facilitate the sex. Renting rooms, after all, is a capitalist crime.

Describing a scene from Les Voleurs, the girl narrates, “Juliette is surrounded by many male eyes. The eyes of the policeman Alex are windowpanes made of frozen tears; the eyes of his brother are glasses filled with golden whiskey.” It’s a beautiful image, and there are more than a few of them served up in Tawada’s descriptions, but a couple of trenchant or evocative takes on obscure French cinema does not a satisfying novel make.

“There was no longer any woman whose name was ‘I,’” the girl gushes to the imaginary Deneuve in her head. “As far as I was concerned, the only woman in the world was you, and so I did not exist.”

This points out one of the major flaws in the book. The nameless protagonist really doesn’t exist. She has no agency, and is content to wander the streets of Paris watching films and suffering. She takes a job as a test subject for beauty products, but the position’s dramatic potential is wasted. She nurses certain homosexual fantasies, but never acts on them. When we find out at the end of the book that she has gone blind, though still goes to the movies just to experience the sounds (“In a film without images, most people are merely footsteps.”) the irony is supposed to be affecting. But we have learned nothing about her, really, and so can’t summon up any empathy.

Tawada asserts in the forward of the novel that she wrote the book simultaneously in Japanese and German (her two native tongues), and then translated backwards to produce two full texts, one in each language. She explains that she began in German, but then “certain parts of the story began occurring to her in Japanese.” This is unconvincing as well as pretentious. A story is a story, and language is language. A story never arrives in words; it must be translated. Perhaps if Tawada had been more concerned with creating a narrative, rather than deconstructing one, the language wouldn’t come off as so forced. Whatever the explanation, Tawada is every bit as culpable as translator Susan Bernofsky for sentences such as this one, to be found three lines into the first chapter: “The gaze of the nameless lens licks the floor like a detective without grammar.” Come again, please?

Fallout Girl

Another take on the post-apocalyptic novel proves that this venerable genre is anything but a wasteland.

“Every day I buckle on my guns and go out to patrol the dingy city. I’ve been doing it so long that I’m shaped to it, like a hand that’s been carrying buckets in the cold.”

So begins author Marcel Theroux’s “Far North,” a novel of post-apocalypse set in Siberia. It’s an interesting geographic choice for this kind of story, as Siberia is one of the few places in the world that already looks as desolate and ravaged as a post-apocalyptic landscape. Theroux, who has both spent time on the Great Steppe, and also filmed a documentary on settlers who have chosen to move back to Chernobyl, does a remarkable job evoking the breath-freezing cold of that world, giving even the novel’s most implausible ideas the ring of truth.

In “Far North,” climate change, along with the attempts to delay climate change, has led to world war, which may or may not have resulted in the end of human civilization (it’s never made entirely clear what has happened to the world outside of Siberia). The protagonist of the novel, Makepeace, is the sole remaining citizen of the town of Evangeline. Early in the book, we learn that this noir-ish, hard-nosed character is not at all what we expect: “Killing always sits heavy with me,” Makepeace muses after taking the life of a violent thief, “Whether that’s because of my being a woman, or because my disposition is naturally softhearted for another reason, I don’t know.”

Far from seeming gimmicky, Makepeace’s gender lends a tension to Far North that most examples of the genre lack. Post-apocalyptic novels tend to center around a taciturn male unafraid of kicking some ass (“I Am Legend,” “The Road,” “Dhalgren”), or if the author does choose a woman for a protagonist, she is invariably described as a passive sufferer (“The Handmaid’s Tale,” “The Unit”) or a maternal wise-woman (“The Stand”). I can’t think of another example of a character like Makepeace, who acts as any woman would if she wanted to survive in a post-apocalyptic world—in short, like a man.

Makepeace’s parents had moved to Siberia before the apocalypse, as part of a social movement aimed at escaping the twisted values and moral decadence of modern life. When survivors of the war arrived in Evangeline, they came into conflict with the settlers already living there. “It was like two different species colliding: the world that had a choice, and the world that had none. The strains between us were ratcheting up in secret. And even those who noticed it didn’t like to admit to it. The trouble lit slow, like one of those lazy damp leaf fires in autumn.”

When the story begins, Makepeace’s position as sheriff of Evangeline has become something of a sinecure, as she’s the only person still living there. So when a plane crashes right before her eyes, the time seems ripe for adventure. Makepeace leaves Evangeline behind and heads off in search of whatever new civilization has re-conquered the skies. What follows is a vaguely episodic account of her travels through the North. Everywhere she turns, Makepeace finds corruption and lawlessness. She is accused of being a spy, starved, beaten, and enslaved. And whenever you think things are about to take a turn for the better, they just get worse.

For example, Makepeace spends several years working as a slave at a place called “the base”. After years of service, she is promoted and made a guard. Her responsibilities in this position including choosing prisoners to work in “The Zone”, a derelict city once known as Polyn, where the most advanced technologies of the old world were collected just before the apocalypse. Makepeace chooses her only two friends to do salvage work in Polyn, thinking it a favor, but it turns out that an anthrax attack during the war has made the place poisonous. All those who enter the city are killed afterwards, just to recover a few batteries or bits of circuitry.

Theroux posits that the wide distribution of knowledge and skills would prove the greatest impediment to rebuilding civilization after a worldwide catastrophe:

“We had been so prodigal with our race’s hard-won knowledge. All those tiny facts inched up from the dirt. The names of plants and metals, stones, animals, and birds; the motion of the planets and the waves. All of it fading to nothing, like the words of a vital message some fool had laundered with his pants and brought all garbled.”

Both the world and the characters of Far North are immaculately designed, so it’s a shame that the plot sometimes comes up short. A short love interest for Makepeace results in an unsatisfying coda to the primary action of the novel, and a tricky reveal in the final chapters seems similarly contrived. Theroux’s decision to make his protagonist a slave removes some of her agency, and slows down the middle of the book. That said, I felt a similar lack of action in Cormack McCarthy’s recent apocalyptic novel, “The Road,” and that book won the Pulitzer, so I suppose it’s not really much of a complaint.

In Makepeace, Theroux has given us a protagonist at once recognizeable and original, struggling to survive as a woman in a world that no longer has much need for the feminine. Her struggle finds a counterpart in the struggle of her world, a wounded creature itself on the brink of barrenness and death. In this way, Makepeace becomes a metaphor, both for the physical degradation of the planet, and the human impulse to survive. As she describes herself, “I thought that whatever hopes and convictions she had cherished, Makepeace was just another mask that life wore as it fought to renew itself, unsentimental, unsparing, fighting ugly.”