Prague / photo credit: Pablo Sanchez

What is it about the European cultures, tucked like bats into their tiny cubbies, that seems so much more specific than our own? How do Belgium or Luxembourg achieve “culture” in little more space we might use to construct a Wal-Mart megastore? What is it about confinement that breeds a more tribal than national, identity? What are we doing when we sit down to read a collection of fiction culled from a continent? What to make of the contiguities of the stories, that seem at times to overlap the national boundaries so as to “say something about that place”? The very assemblage of stories is frustrating, and self-confounding. What you could comfortably say about “Europe” after a summer abroad and a few hostels in Prague sounds positively Mrs. Mortimer-ian after the reflexivity (On se voit) and pure strangeness of these narratives (?): even naming them calls for fresh punctuation and some superior method of notation, a more fertile subjunctive.

Olympic Rings in Berlin / photo credit: Will Palmer

How to avoid taking roll? Three collections of unrelated vignettes, present. Three stories tangent upon a famous person and his or her actions as reflected upon the world stage, present.

Zinedine Zidane, in a Camus-worthy cameo penned by Bruxellois Jean-Philippe Toussaint, is gripped by nausea as he feels his presence–in the existential sense–at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium on July 9, 2006. Toussaint, a cinematographer as well as an author, cites Freud among his influences, but it is a stunt double of Camus’s “dark wind” that seems to draw Zidane from the future that has become the present, and to the absurd act that will become immortal: the headbutt to Marco Materazzi’s chest. Like Meursault, ennui and pure fatigue lead him to the “unscripted action,” the endpoint that his entire career has determined for him. Everyone and no one has seen the action: there is only the “Italian player” on the ground, and Zidane’s own head, forever covering half the distance to his opponent’s chest, without ever arriving. What better characterization of the action shots, the contortions of perpetrator and victim immortalized on Google? How much of what we claim to know is based on circumstantial evidence about what we’ve missed?

Suspended almost dead center of the volume, Giedra Radvilavičiūtė lays out a handful of answers in her five criteria for evaluating texts. In a collection like this, the gesture is reminiscent of a primary-school exercise book: tear out this ruler, and use it to solve the problems on the other pages. The tenets–in short, memorability, connection to lived experience, immersibility for the reader, revelation of the banal, and the impossibility of formulating any assertion without doubt–hover over the rest of the stories, inducing the reader to flip back, like a dutiful student to the endnotes, even after moving on to a new region. Connection to lived experience? Check. Revelation of the banal? Half a check. Immersibility? Perhaps not; here we are, flipping around, taking measure.

Back to the roll call for a moment. (What is about this collection that calls forth the spirit of the schoolroom? Do we, with an anthology, become students again? Do we read it because we assume it’s good for us, because there is some moral good in having read it, in the plus-que-parfait, like “the classics” our Brit-Lit teachers upheld?) A pair of stories about futuristic death-obsessed bureaucracies, present. Now this is the sort of gritty, dubbed stuff we expect to tune into when we delve into the European humanities scene. Flamand Peter Terrin tracks pro-/ant-agonist Ferdinand, noir-style, through his unauthorized murder of a loud and boorish neighbor. Haunted by some indistinct memories that he may have already drilled through more than his allotted share of murders (two per citizen, thanks), Ferdinand has some “Tell-Tale Heart”-ish moments as he attempts to sneak out of his victim’s house. His reasoning, though, about his neighbors, about others in general, is purely modern: “They’d rather see me dead than alive.” We all sort of feel this way about each other, in a way, which makes the two-murder ration seem at once gratuitous and not quite enough. If “L’enfer, c’est les autres,” then “le ciel, c’est la solitude.” It is in this solitary utopia that Ferdinand lurks farther and farther afield, into les quartiers difficiles, waiting for the sound of the punitive shot, knowing that the actual bullet to the brain will have preceded it. It’s a dim and sardonic story, one where you wonder more about what it’s like to off someone than get off with them, and where the two-murder-per-person method of population control is considered kinder than asking people to cut back on their childbearing.

Over in futuristic Bulgaria, Georgi Gospodinov reports on the anesthetic–literally, flowers no longer have scents and the sky gapes at the seams like an old baseball–conditions that follow our depredations upon genetics and the ozone layer. Castor P., an elderly astronomer who still remembers real bees and who, way back in 2011, discovered the universe’s smallest black hole, is about to sign over the last several decades of his allotted twelve and a half. He’s only waiting for the arrival of his son, on some other star; the silent recipient of his brief telegrams. As he waits, Castor arrives at the conclusion that loneliness has become the only organic substance, having escaped from its container like a gas and filling the vacuum where air used to be. His son never does arrive, and Castor is extinguished, mortal as his namesake. We’re left to wonder: who is his twin? Is the reader meant to be his double? There’s an Oedipal universality to this narrative: we can picture our old fathers, in their felt shirts, sending us voice mails and shakily lettered cards from our old ZIP codes. We only respond ceremonially, when we have to go back because they are sick, or dying or, finally, when we have to sort through their crumbled old papers and photographs of a world where they were at ease. He’s touching, this untwinned Geminorum, because he doesn’t want to make a fuss; he doesn’t tear up in front of the young woman clerking at the death office, still hoping his son will take a shining to her when he gets there.

Not everyone is so moving: in the other corners of Europe, a john runs off from a bust in a public pay toilet, leaving his homeless young servicer unpaid and beaten by cops; children kill a dolphin in a salt-water novelty tank during a dinner party, and the adults laugh it off; a girl rejects a boy during a secluded picnic and makes him drive her back to town; and a couple, lost on an idyllic bike ride, tie their dog to a tree and abandon it just before the husband proclaims his affair with his wife’s half-sister. But what’s the difference, anyway? In the first collection of vignettes, Austrian Antonio Fian’s narrator confesses to an eerily similar act with a friend of his wife’s sister who, surreally, turns out to be his wife–and every other woman in the world–after all. “So, all the women in the world know about us?” asks the adulterer, unsettled. They might as well–as in Gregory Corso’s poem, “Marriage,” we’re all alike–”All streaming into the same cozy hotels/All going to do the same thing tonight.” The only rebellion we might possibly enjoy is to remove ourselves from the honeymoon suite altogether: “Stay up all night! Stare that hotel clerk in the eye!” Sexuality, so fascinating and individual to the self is, in reality, one of our most banal habits.

Another of humanity’s more banal projects, pop culture, finds an apt definition in Victor Pelevin’s description of “the merely comfortable selling the poor fantasies about the lives of the rich, the very rich, and the fabulously rich.” One immediately visualizes the same photos duplicated and recaptioned in the high-budget celebrity mags down to the press-release reprints in the low: if magazine layout was still analog, these images would be peeled bare by masking tape. From Professor Potashinsky, pioneering theorist of “Friedmann Space,” we learn that there is a whole field of quantum mechanics specific to wealth; apparently, the wealth-traveler, or “lucrenaut” (take that, Laika) ceases to perceive time and cannot recall any lucreventures if he or she is once again separated from the critical mass of wealth. Not for lack of trying, though–lucrenauts live it up, eating and drinking and–here is Pelevin’s most brilliant line, at least in translation–”transferring their genetic material to gentle creatures who sold themselves so expensively that the transactions already resembled love.” At the end of the experiment, the brain images of the lucrenauts’ perceptions during these brave ventures are uniform: a green corridor. The proletariat struggle, the rise and fall of communism, the corruption and trafficking, and drug-cartel stabbings for wealth, and what does it feel like? A waiting room in a third-rate clinic.

It would be a Short-Story-210, too-clever-by-half reader who would state that the motifs of overmanaged, generic nation-states and transactional, interchangeable relationships–and the substitution of celebrity gossip for village tongue-wagging–directly correspond to anxieties about the European Union and any amalgamating tendencies it might have on the cultures within its borders. Without putting words in anyone’s mouth, it’s fair to assume that no one wants the mother country to turn into the Epcot version of itself: a souvenir stand with a few snack specialties–extra points for chocolate, fried stuff in cones, and sausage. It’s limiting, though, not to mention a little boring, to read literature symptomatically, and we’re often so immersed in our era that we tend to overdesignate themes as specific to our own time. Reading with an inflection is one thing; “getting the news through poems,” or short stories, for that matter, is another.

Europe isn’t the only continent where people are overwhelmed by market psychology and looking around at each other to define themselves. The laments that nothing is genuine anymore, that style is winning over substance, that there’s nothing original left to do or say, are almost as old as recorded history–or, cynics might say, as old people themselves. Somehow, there have been new utterances and new pastimes and, much as the new is always indebted to its antecedents, the breath hasn’t been entirely snatched from us yet. In fact, if anything, there’s a little too much breath–together with text and bandwith and airtime and any of the other major transmitters. Of course, surplus doesn’t equal substance, and language doesn’t equal an utterance. We’re watching the same shows, in different languages: celebrities are whittling their faces and bodies down to the same androgyn; music is so produced it’s hard to name the instrument; and food–at least the affordable, available stuff–is so processed you can’t name the food animal or the preservative. The vacuum-inflating loneliness and ersatz bees may not be far behind.

Further Reading and Links

Aleksandar Hemon

- In this interview, World Books talks to series editor Aleksandar Hemon about the challenges of promoting first-rate European fiction to American readers.

- Here on Fiction Writers Review, read a review of Hemon’s most recent story collection, Love and Obstacles.

- Read interviews with some of the anthology’s contributors: The Quarterly Conversation talks to Jean-Philippe Toussaint; Dalkey Archive Press talks to Georgi Gospodinov (Bulgaria), to Antonio Fian (Austria), to Peter Stamm (Switzerland), to Naja Marie Aidt (Denmark), and to many others.

- Via BookBrowse, read an excerpt from Best European Fiction’s preface (by Zadie Smith).

- If you’re shopping for a copy of this book, support indie bookstores by ordering it from Powell’s.

Helen Oyeyemi / photo by Kate Eshelby

To say Helen Oyeyemi’s latest novel, White is for Witching (Nan A. Talese / Doubleday), reinvents the Haunted House story would be a vast understatement. Oyeyemi manages to dismantle and rebuild the haunted house narrative brick by brick, creating a book filled to the rafters with innovation. The novel attempts to unravel the mysterious disappearance of Miranda Silver, a young woman in Dover, England who is afflicted with a rare eating disorder that compels her to eat only inedible substances, and with living in a house that has a mind of its own. But for all its terrors – there are scenes that will make your skin crawl with fearful delight – Witching is also a book about the weight of ancestry, the nature of xenophobia and the impossibility of saving the ones we love.

At 25, Oyeyemi has established herself as a writer in control of both the supernatural realm and stories of young British women dealing with the often upside-down real world. Her first novel, The Icarus Girl (Doubleday), was published to great acclaim during her first year at Cambridge University. The Icarus Girl tells the story of Jessamy, a bi-racial Nigerian and British girl who meets a magical friend named Tilly Tilly on a visit to her grandfather’s compound in Nigeria. Jessamy invites her new friend home to London, where things go terribly wrong. Her next book was The Opposite House (Anchor Books), about a young Cuban woman, Maja, living in London and trying to negotiate her past and her future, and the intersection of her story with that of Yemaya – a Santeria emissary living in a parallel spirtual world.

I met Oyeyemi when we were both in residence at Hedgebrook Writing Retreat on Whidbey Island in Washington, where she won me over with a short story about a girl in a wedding dress and a probably-dead boy. We conversed across many time zones (she in Cambridge, myself in San Francisco) on the magically real wonder of Skype.

Interview

NEELANJANA BANERJEE:When I first met you, I was prepared to dislike you (and your writing) for being a child prodigy. Do you ever feel like you have to defend yourself as a young writer in the publishing world? Does it affect the way you have to present yourself?

HELEN OYEYEMI:No. I think it affects the way I’m reviewed. I’ll read reviews and I’ll know they’re coming at it from a sort of: “Oh, well done, you can write,” kind of thing. Or there are people that just evaluate [me] on the whole youth thing, and hopefully that’s going to go away because I’m actually quite old now.

The story of your first book is somewhat legendary: You were 18 years old, secretly writing the novel that would become The Icarus Girl and when you had some 20 pages, you sent them to an agent you found in the phone book. Is all that true?

It was really to get advice and was just curiosity to see whether, I don’t know, if [the writing] was going to turn into something eventually, because I only did just have those first 20 pages … so it just wasn’t a serious inquiry. I thought: “Well, if he tells me I can write, then I can sit on it and do something later,” but he was quite urgent about it in an exciting way and I guess that’s why all this happened.

Had you written a novel before that?

I had lots of short stories about [the character] Tily Tily. They were really quite short and quite bad. Tily Tily would just show up and ruin someone’s life and then leave pretty quickly. The beginning of The Icarus Girl was the best shot I’d had at the whole Tily Tily thing.

I think your work is fascinating. As a person of color and an immigrant, your books really speak to me because of the fresh ways you tackle issues of being bi-cultural. Where do you think the origin of your style came from?

I’m not quite sure. It’s not really what I want to write about. I’d rather write a heart-warming tear-jerker or romance or something just nice, but it doesn’t work. These two things just keep coming out, the immigrant thing and the supernatural thing. But I don’t process consciously. I do like reading [supernatural narratives]. I like imagining that sort of stuff. I find ordinary realist narratives just lacking in something, like realist narratives just aren’t real for me. They don’t make that much sense. Whereas reading stories in which the world suddenly changes, I’m like: “Yeah … that makes sense.” Strange mental states, all that stuff, just seems to be a more – not an honest way – but a more interesting way of describing the world.

I recently saw the writer Dan Chaon (Await Your Reply) at a reading and he told a story about a creative writing class in college where he turned in a “genre” story and was told: “This kind of writing is not accepted here.” Have you ever felt that people take your writing less seriously because it is not a “realist narrative”?

I don’t really think of it as speculative or genre writing, and I think I’ve been quite lucky that people haven’t labeled it that way either, but maybe it is just because it is because of being black and being an immigrant to be honest, so that they’ll just go: ‘Oh, it’s just magical realism,” and just try and maneuver around the fact that a lot of crazy stuff happens. They’ll be like: “She’s talking about something else, a whole nother experience.” When really I’m saying, there actually is this racist house. It can be more easily read as a metaphor when you’re talking from the standpoint of an “other,” so it’s probably easy to get away with it if you have another identity issue going on.

Reviews of White is for Witching especially [in England] have been kind of wishing that it would not be about the supernatural and that I would just get down to the nitty gritty of immigrant life. While reviews in America and Canada have been like “Yeah, the supernatural bit is great, but maybe there is too much of a political agenda.” I can’t win. (Laughs.)

Speaking of magical realism, would you ever use that term to describe your work?

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

No, I wouldn’t. I think there are so few books that it actually even applies to. I’m starting to think it’s actually only [Gabriel Garcia] Marquez that it applies to. Even Isabelle Allende doesn’t really write that, whatever that is. I don’t write [magical realism]. I just call what I do … stories.

In all of your books, there are some really scary parts and horrific moments. I was surprised because I feel like I haven’t experienced that frightened feeling while reading since I used to read Stephen King when I was in middle school. It made me realize I miss the sensation. Is there a special process to writing frightening narratives?

Edgar Allan Poe

It’s hard to say … but when writing it, I am conscious of wanting to be affecting in that way. So there are points of the story when I’m like “Ha! Ha! Ha!” (sinister laugh), when I was writing and feeling really good about it, because I was freaking myself out, so I hope I’d be freaking other people out as well. Just like you with Stephen King, I remember reading him and being like: “Oh my god. I can’t believe what is being done to me.” And that was fascinating that there was like a whole technology to it. He handled the story that well that he could suddenly cut you, and then withdraw and keep going. I’d come to Stephen King after reading some heavy existential texts and it was just a whole other way of seeing what a book could do. And Poe as well, another great master.

Another of my favorite parts of your writing is your ability to explore reality on all these different levels. The characters are dealing with certain supernatural occurrences, but then also dealing with being young people in 21st Century Britain. For example, Maja’s younger brother Tomas in The Opposite House, is dealing with racism in a very real and sometimes hilarious way. At one point, when describing a fight at school to Maja, he says of his classmates: “[B]ut they were all on my side, because we’d watched Roots in history last week.” In White is for Witching, Miranda is dealing with some powerful supernatural events, but still ends up at the local pub where the girls are described as “all strawberry lip-gloss, halter-neck tops and bare legs.”

It was something I hesitated about at the editing stage [of White is for Witching], but it made the characters that much more real to me. If you’re going to have things swing into strange territory you’ve got to have some sort of foundation that’s at least familiar and “real” – otherwise, everything’s at a certain pitch, which is like “Ahhhhh!”

In White is for Witching, and all your books for that matter, there is a really interesting range of characters when it comes to ethnicity. The main characters in Witching are white British, but there are Kosovans, Azerbaijanis and Africans. Why did you chose to write the novel from the point of view of Miranda and her family?

Initially, I wanted to write the book about this black family moving into this racist house but it just seemed far too obvious. I could just see how it was going to go and you don’t want to write when you already know all about it. I thought it would much more interesting to have a girl living in this house that’s essentially poisoning her and for her to not understand fully what is happening. It seemed a lot more insidious. [This story] says a lot more about the race situation and the whole immigrant situation than just having a black family move in and be instantly repelled – because that’s just not how it is. It’s much more all these little hints and unsaid things, that’s how racism works these days. It just ran alongside my whole idea I’ve been developing about vampires and how vampire stories are really about race. Well, I thought, I’ve got to have somebody who’s part of the dominant group – I could tell it from that perspective. It was a fun, interesting experiment as well, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to do it. Because there were all those times growing up when I was like: “Ahhh, white girls … I don’t know! I don’t understand them. We’re so different.” Then it turned out that Miranda is the character I’ve most related to, because she’s having a crack up, and I’ve had one of those. It was easier to come from that perspective.

What are you reading right now?

I’m reading Hedda Gabbler. I just read A Doll’s House.

Do you read when you write?

I do tend to read after I’ve got the quota done for the day, otherwise life just seems really bleak.

Sometimes I think that being a writer means you never really get to go on vacation. When you finish a book, do you not write for a long time, or do you start on the next one immediately?

After I finished White is for Witching sometime last year, I did take two months during which I was just reading lots and thinking lots, but it was in preparation for the next book. I do think you have to just keep doing it or suddenly it just becomes really hard to get started again.

White Cliffs of Dover, by Diamond Geezer

Further Resources:

– Visit the book’s official website, and, watch the very cool book trailer for White is for Witching:

– Check out Juniper’s Whitening and Victimese, two short plays by Helen Oyeyemi.

– Listen to Helen Oyeyemi’s 2007 conversation with NPR’s Michel Martin about The Opposite House.

– Order a copy of White is for Witching from an independent bookstore.

When we read novels, particularly from such a national icon as Pamuk, it’s common to expect the country and culture to express their conflict in the individual characters. Kemal, while embodied–and embroiled–within the double standards and hypocrisies of a semi-Westernized Turkey, is engaging enough to avoid the status of a ’70s-era Turkish Everyman. There’s something eccentric about him from the beginning: even while speaking of his youth, he has the quality of an old man who wants to show you the odds and ends he carries in his pockets. Kemal may just be the moodiest, most depressed young playboy in all of Istanbul’s ruling class.

Given the affluence he’s born into, it’s fitting that Kemal finds consolation in the material; from the very beginning, his life is choked with things. From the spare apartment, home to his affair with the younger Füsun, and used by Kemal’s mother as a storage unit, to Kemal’s opulent engagement party at the Istanbul Hilton, to the designer boutiques–real and counterfeit–the characters define themselves through what they wear, what they drink, and what they scorn. Full of skirts and earrings and champagne and scent, the book is a veritable bazaar of women and their possessions. The only exhaustible commodity seems to be virginity, and Kemal has disburdened two women of that weighty possession: on one hand, his fiancee, Sibel’s, and on the other, eighteen-year-old Füsun’s.

Orhan Pamuk / Photo from http://www.orhanpamuk.net/ Iletisim Publishing

Kemal escalates the affair while drifting along in his public obligations toward Sibel, his approved match and his equal in social stature. At this point in Turkish history, upper-class women can call themselves “modern” for sleeping with their fiances once the men have been sufficiently cornered into making a public engagement. Sibel has been openly “living together” with Kemal, and he’s all but bought the cow when his affair with his distant relation Füsun begins. Füsun gives up her virginity to him with little fanfare, so much so that Kemal is incredulous that she was a virgin at all. Her enjoyment of their shared sexuality is unselfconscious and full-bodied but, hidden as their affair is, Kemal has no means or intention of repaying her “gift” to him. The socially endorsed Sibel, like a Western woman, sleeps with him out of love; Füsun is “modern and courageous,” a daredevil whom he promises nothing but the adventure of the affair.

We’re never quite sure what it is about Füsun that makes her so unforgettable–yes, she’s young and beautiful, but she flatters aging socialites all day at the Sanzelize boutique, fails her university entrance exams, and ultimately becomes a chain-smoking, though still beautiful, housewife. A potential answer might be found in an anecdote Kemal shares with us about himself as a youth with his distant cousin Füsun, twelve years younger, when they go out together, by chance, on an errand. They watch a lamb being sacrificed, and Kemal engages his driver in a discussion of Abraham’s sacrifice of his son. On the way back, the three find their discussion interrupted by a grisly car accident. Amid the blood and entrails of this scene, perhaps we are to understand that “little Füsun” internalized something of sacrifice and its workings: the yielding of something dear to a beloved, simply because he or she wishes it.

In tracing Füsun from her earliest appearance as a bump on her seamstress mother’s stomach, Kemal seems almost to be reproaching himself for the faint imprint she has had on his life to date. Once their affair begins, he focuses on her to the exclusion of almost all else, even at his own engagement party. Füsun eventually gives up and goes missing and, deprived of his honest, uncomplicated love, Kemal falls into a depression and loses Sibel and, ultimately, many of his friends. Bereft of its object, his obsession intensifies, and Kemal recedes from his visible, mappable life in Nisantasi to track Füsun, with some difficulty, to her family’s ramshackle, serpentine street in Çukurcuma.

Here, we are reminded of another anecdote: this time Kemal’s father’s. Having described his very young, very beautiful mistress, the older man describes how he “kept her dangling for years” only to find, after she broke off the affair, that she had died of cancer. He presents Kemal with a pair of pearl earrings that he had intended to give his mistress, urging him to give them to Sibel. He presents them to Füsun instead, who refuses them. In this action, we see her unknowing attempt to reject the fate of the kept woman before her. Throughout the novel, there are several such anecdotes of “kept” women: from Belkis, the notorious mistress-to-the-wealthy who dies alone, to the Turkish film stars who are “ruined” in the course of their work. We aren’t privy to much of Füsun’s inner life, but these stories must have been very much a part of her consciousness.

As Çukurcuma sweeps like a beaded curtain over his old life, Kemal finds that the real business of living occurs far from Istanbul’s landmarks and brand name-stamped thoroughfares. From Füsun’s family, he learns the homely pleasure of “sitting together” after dinner, allowing the television to wash over them and bond them with its flickering glow. Ironically, as Kemal retreats from the glitzy materialism of his own class, he becomes ever more attached to objects embodying the guileless love he shared with Füsun. From under her parents’–and philistine husband’s–noses, he filches lipstick kisses on tissues, almanac pages, hairpins, and cigarette butts, all with the fanaticism of the fetishist or frotteur.

When rekindling the affair becomes impossible, Kemal travels to Paris, which he had dreamed of visiting with Füsun. He loses himself “not in the Louvre or the Beaubourg, or the other crowded, ostentatious museums of that ilk,” but in the small, eclectic museums off the beaten path, on streets similar, perhaps, to the ones he traveled to get to Füsun’s family home. Perhaps finding a quiet community in the obsessions of other collectors, he visits private museums throughout the world, and is inspired to create his own monument to the love he shared with Füsun. As he supplements his collection with the objects that surrounded the brief era of their affair, he meets ever-more-introverted collectors devoted slavishly to one object or another. It is a testament to the souls of objects how ticket stubs, tin cans, restaurant menus, and ad circulars can resurrect for Kemal this lost era. Items that Kemal never noticed during the affair take on a deep significance for composing the background of his weeks of happiness–and for their encoding of the cultural referents that contained and shaped the affair itself. What better object than a Meltem soda ad featuring the German model Inge to illustrate Turkey’s attitude toward its own women?

Füsun is not a feminist icon, but she is a casualty of the Turkish femininity of her era. Seeking the fabled “loose women” who sleep with men for fun, Kemal’s friends visit brothels, while lower-class scoundrels cruise the streets harassing young girls. Some married upper-class men lose respect for their wives for “giving in” during the engagement. Kemal himself, presented with two deflowered women, chooses the one to whom he is publicly obligated and spends a lifetime regretting his choice. Ironically, his “Museum of Innocence” is a monument to his own culpability: the objects, so copious in number and so meticulously arranged, don’t add up to what he has lost through his own passivity.

More linear than Pamuk’s novels My Name Is Red or Snow, The Museum of Innocence is more personal, as well as more lyrical. Perhaps because the plot engages in fewer gymnastics, the characters’ feelings of entrapment and loss are more potent. Though the sheer amount of research that must have gone into a book of this depth deserves respect in itself, this volume is not merely interesting as a relic of a bygone Turkey. In fact, it is Pamuk’s historic and cultural specificity that demonstrates to us that, whatever our historical moment, there will always be circumstances that make one choice easier than another. Just as Kemal both follows the path of least resistance in proceeding with his engagement to Sibel while continuing his affair with Füsun, we resent the forked path, sometimes denying that any action is necessary at all.

Despite the sea of botched affairs and ruined women, Pamuk displays no contempt for his subjects. It’s human, after all, to want to preserve our options for as long as possible: perhaps Kemal imagined a future where Füsun would somehow content herself with meeting him on the sly while he went through the motions in his marriage to Sibel. For as long as both possibilities existed, Kemal remained committed to inertia, more than to either woman. Like Schrodinger’s cat, he hoped to keep all of his potential futures alive for as long as he could maintain his uncertainty. We can’t admire Kemal for choosing inertia over action, but we can relate: who isn’t seduced by the untouched, open-ended future? Who wants to open the box and find that the cat is dead?

Extras

- Via UC Television/YouTube, An Evening with Orhan Pamuk at UC-Santa Barbara:

- At BarnesandNoble.com, read an excerpt from The Museum of Innocence. Here’s another excerpt via Magnificent Octopus.

- If you’re shopping for a copy of The Museum of Innocence, click here to buy from your favorite indie bookstore.

- In 2006, Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Learn more about his other books at Pamuk’s website, which also features a gallery of terrific author photos and links to many interviews with him and reviews of his work.

- The Museum of Innocence was translated into English by Maureen Freely, whose own impressive debut novel, Enlightenment, was previously reviewed by Natalie on FWR. In this Washington Post article and audio interview, Freely discusses the art of translating and interpreting Pamuk’s fiction.

So, too, are the stories in this plump new anthology: Arkady Babchenko’s beleaguered soldier returns to Chechnya a page away from German Sadulaev’s lyrical descriptions of Chechnya’s devastated countryside. The binding is a veritable trench, across which both narrators peek at each other warily.

A less tangible illness-at-ease pervades the stories of Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia (Tin House, 2009), and it does so in a fashion atypical of characters firmly rooted in their homeland. We expect this discomfort in immigrant characters—their awkwardness, their failed mimicry of the natives’ dress and habits, their attempts to pass the time or get laid. The poignancy and entertainment value of the immigrants’ shortcomings are, in part, derived from the fact that we know where to point the finger: things are not happening for this character because his clothes are all wrong and his English is terrible. But what to make of a baseline discomfort within the boundaries of one’s own country?

A post-Soviet antiseptic wafts into these stories just a bit too far upwind to identify. Editors Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker, also employ the olfactory metaphor: they explain that the writers in this volume are too young to remember much of Soviet rule, but some vestigial memories return to them like “air they’ve never breathed before.” They are no strangers to bureaucracy: a portly passport clerk takes tea breaks in front of a swollen line; Soviet-era clerical errors leave two Chechen villages named after the wrong river; and an obsessive-compulsive young boy creates his own system of rules governing his footfalls on the sidewalk and the bric-a-brac in his home. In the latter, bureaucracy and its highly variable rewards system reaches its most profound fulfillment: regimentation is literally bred in the bone, organic.

Relationships seem unattainable, but the ones we do see aren’t particularly desirable. Most people are locked away in their own apartment units, nursing their quirks. Permutations of fundamental twitchiness of self, the inability to get find a cool spot on the pillow, to keep from fidgeting, recur in the narrative voices. For “It All Depends on Who You Believe,” Maria Boteva employs barely punctuated run-ons with all the hedges and afterthoughts of a one-sided phone conversation; in this process of extracting the story from the narrator, one is tempted to hang up. Equally challenging is Ekaterina Taratura’s “Seventh Toast to Snails,” a numbered series of fifty vignettes wherein characters of narrator and listener are suggested but never defined. We are frustrated, but never bored, in our efforts to mold what we are given into the familiar Freytag’s pyramid. Our precarious position as readers is similar to that of a novice at a modern art gallery: we’re not sure what we’re looking at, but we don’t want to be the last to get it.

In any collection, there is a natural tendency to seek the common thread through which the disparate pieces are united. We think we know something about Russia—whether it be from grainy films, an undergraduate affair with Dostoevsky, or a leggy Muscovite ex-padruga—and we are looking for confirmation of whatever we have glimpsed. With a territory so large you have to turn the globe twice to see all of it, it’s silly to think that we’ll close the book having learned anything fundamental about Russia or Russianness. If we collected twenty-two stories from all over America, would we expect them to say something cohesive about “our people”?

Another anthology from the same editors (Dalkey Archive Press)

But, like any fetish, the specifics are only an entry point to substance, not a prerequisite: Russophilia, whether ancestral or assumed, is just one vehicle for the discussions of the self and its messy intersections.

Further Resources

- Hear Rasskazy’s editors’ thoughts on the anthology–and contemporary Russian literature–in this interview with both Parker and Iossel at Bomblog, and in this Q&A with Parker in The Afterword.

- The same editors also collaborated on this anthology: Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States (Dalkey Archive Press).

- Find out more about Jeff Parker’s novel, Ovenman (Tin House), and his story collection, The Back of the Line (DECODE).

- If you’re shopping for any of these titles, click here to buy from your local indie bookseller.

Set in modern-day Morocco, the novel concerns the coming-of-age of Youssef el-Mekki, a young man struggling to establish his identity and livelihood in the slum of Hay An Najat while seeking the father he long thought deceased. What he finds is more than a genealogical chart and what readers find is more than just a compelling story: Secret Son is a mirror in which our own modern age is reflected.

In the nascent years of the 21st century, in a neighborhood full of “merchants peddling their wares from rickety bicycles” and the “stink of old, refried sardines,” Youssef and his friends face the usual array of nineteen-year-old anxieties. They hang out nervously on street corners, smoke cigarettes, seek the attention of young women, and fret about admission to the university, which everyone — especially Youssef’s mother — believes is the ticket to success and freedom from their lot in the slums. Youssef escapes the pressures and grime of the neighborhood in the local movie theater until he must return to his own world “where heroes and villains could not be told apart by their looks or their accents.”

Much of the rest of his world, however, he finds easily distinguishable: the Mercedes-and-Marlboro crowd; the headscarf-and-beard faction; the Marx-and-Lenin group; the Berbers and Saharawi. Youssef watches the different cliques at school wondering how he could “know, as easily as everyone else did, which group was his.” The cliques and clans all seem a common part of youthful angst, akin to America’s Freaks and Geeks. But this is not Middle America: The challenges of youthful self-identification and justice in Morocco don’t play out at the local mall or in suburban basements. And to choose one side or the other results in far more than mere temporary gain or loss of social status.

Laila Lalami / photo copyright: Laila Lalami

In addition to these universal anxieties of looming adulthood, the boys of Hay An Najat — and elsewhere in the Islamic world, the author seems to suggest — face the compounded pressures of class and poverty, conditions from which escape is as much a dream as Brad Pitt’s pretty face projected in 10-foot scale. Enter the Party, an Islamic fringe group that soon takes over the Star Cinema as its “Oasis” headquarters in Hay An Najat, and begins handing out “tents, blankets, [and] sacks of flour” and building a soccer field where once there was trash. As in other parts of the Arab world, the local “Party” serves a civic purpose, closing the gap between the people and their needs by offering extensive social and community services that the official government does not. Like Hamas in Palestine or the Taliban in Afghanistan, the organization makes their presence indispensable to the neighborhood residents, providing a stabilizing infrastructure that over time may result in loyalty to the Party.

Hatim, the leader of the Party, and its followers, the Partisans, begin to quietly woo Youssef and his friends with the kind of power and recognition they cannot attain elsewhere in society. When Youssef is injured in a university protest, he finds himself the lead story in a Party-published paper, the story told slant despite Hatim’s comforting reassurances. “Don’t worry, my son,” he says, an endearment bestowed upon all the young men of Hay An Najat, the secret sons of the Party.

Lalami’s authorial position on the role of the Party is subtle and sympathetic, neither demonizing Hatim nor patronizing Maati and the other young followers he inculcates with his anti-government diatribes. Lalami’s ability to walk this line is made easier because she paints the neighborhood’s desperation so clearly, beginning with the flood that opens the novel, forcing people into the street to save their meager belongings and introducing the empty promises of government officials. She shows that the government is negligent and there are real needs to be met, needs that in reality may be met by the Party. Couple this with the impressionable young male characters, who dart after power like fish after a flashing lure, and we begin to understand the allure of the Party despite our better instincts, as do many of the characters themselves. Lalami wants readers to understand how forces like the Party take hold within a community and how seeming altruism turns to ideological vengeance and violence.

Against this backdrop, Youssef seeks out his biological father, whom his mother has kept secret. Through a chance encounter, Youssef discovers that his father is a wealthy business leader in Casablanca with roots in left-leaning politics. Nabil Amrani at first embraces Youssef as the son he never had and installs him in a posh apartment, grants him a job at one of his hotels, and promises Youssef a future he thought he would never have. Amal, Nabil’s daughter only 6 months older than Youssef, is a secondary character with immense narrative clout. She serves as a provoking counterpart to Youssef, equally torn between an indescribable loyalty to her privileged past and family and a yearning to craft a future on her terms — not those of her father or her country. Youssef’s loyalty and yearning for independence takes on a wholly different form.

Youssef abandons his home in Hay An Najat and lives the high life for months, dreaming of a boundless future and watching his father. In a lovely, long passage, we see Nabil through the eyes of Youssef, examining him as one would examine a stranger from another world. Youssef observes “ . . . He never took a nap after lunch. The cigarettes he smoked were red Dunhills. Whenever he commented on an article in the newspaper, which was often, he used words like déontologiquement. . .he stared at beautiful women . . .he never went to mosque . . . ” We learn as much about Nabil as Youssef does, but begin to suspect what Youssef does not. Blinded by his father’s luxurious lifestyle — to which Youssef now has access — and mesmerized by the habits, mannerisms, and convictions of his newly-found father as only a son can be, Youssef cannot see his father’s essential and deeply flawed character. As Youssef fully embraces his flashy new lifestyle, we begin to more closely watch the narrative unfold, looking for what feels like inevitable disappointment.

After a series of life-changing rejections, Youssef is forced back to Hay An Najat. Bitter rejection soon turns to angry revenge for Youssef and his friends, left behind in the slums while he flourished, and Lalami’s plot and complex characters ripen into something more powerful than one might first imagine. Through Lalami’s restrained but powerful description, we gain an almost palpable knowledge of Youssef’s burgeoning anger, knowledge essential to understanding the future events of the novel. By stepping beyond even the third person and adopting a more universal authorial voice in the following passage, Lalami offers a clearer sense of Youssef’s emotional trajectory. She writes:

His anger took many shapes: sometimes it was soft and familiar, like a round stone that he had caressed for so long that it was perfectly smooth and polished; sometimes it was thin and sharp, like a blade that could slice through anything; sometimes it had the form of a star, radiating his hatred in all directions, leaving him numb and empty inside.

Lalami vacillates between a third person omniscient narrator and this even more expansive narrative voice to offer a greater perspective on her characters and the societal positions they maintain. In another example of her narrative ventriloquism, Lalami deliberately retells several scenes from different perspectives. Although it sounds like a trick plucked from Fiction 101, in her narrative, the effect is not heavy-handed or amateurish. She gets away with what could be a gimmick in part because the narrative does not depend on the technique to reveal essential information about plot and because she does not rely on obvious duplications of scene or dialogue. Furthermore, the scenes do not appear in back-to back chapters or side-by-side in some hackneyed attempt at technique, but rather are spaced unexpectedly between other scenes with up to 30 pages between them.

In one of several such scenes, we witness the initial dinner between Nabil and Youssef, first from the perspective of Nabil and then from Youssef. The third person point of view is still distant enough to allow a reader to enter the scene and sympathize with the character, as well.

From Nabil’s perspective:

Youssef cut a small piece of crayfish and examined it carefully before placing it in his mouth.

“Do you like seafood?”

“I’m not sure,” Youssef said looking up, his eyebrows knitted in a quizzical frown.

Nabil’s thoughts wondered helplessly to Amal.

And then pages later from Youssef’s point of view:

When his plate of crayfish arrived, he stared at it, unsure where to start. He managed to slice off an edible piece; he made a mess of it.

“Do you like seafood?” Nabil asked.

Perhaps I cut the crayfish the wrong way, Youssef thought. He felt his cheeks redden. “I’m not sure, “ he said frowning.

We see Nabil, selfishly distracted by thoughts of his daughter, while Youssef wants only to please him and to fit in to this foreign society. In another key scene, Nabil’s daughter Amal visits Rachida, Nabil’s former lover and Youseff’s mother. The scene is played first through the eyes of Rachida and then, in what seems to be weeks later, the scene appears again through the perspective of Amal. The effects of these alternating points of view illustrate not only the individual character’s unique perspective but also the comparable perspectives from both sides of the class divide. The result is an empathetic position most fiction writers seek but fewer attain.

Through Lalami’s subtle execution, we see each character struggling with similar questions of identity, justice, and loyalty, whether in a mansion or a whitewashed shack: Nabil, longing for his estranged daughter while talking to his heretofore unknown son, and Rachida, mourning her own lost innocence through Amal’s own blamelessness. By crafting such parallels within her narrative, Lalami encourages readers’ compassion while illuminating the complex roles each character plays in society and, even more pointedly, in Muslim society. Each is, in some way, a victim or a pawn, an actor or a liar, a son or a daughter, a mother or a father.

In Secret Son, Lalami slips behind the headlines of terrorism into a real world occupied by men and women of all social strata who have sought their dreams and no matter their income or stature, have found those dreams unattainable and beyond reach.

The story of Secret Son is ultimately, too, the bold articulation of something that most readers will have heard over and over since Sept. 11 — how young men in far-off places are being lured into a life of Islamic fundamentalism, for whom jihad and the dismantling of Western culture is believed to be the key to freedom. Secret Son shows readers the path a young man can follow to an inadvertent life in the world of terror, in which joining the Party and sipping tea in the Headquarters is only the first of many initiations for a young man such as Youssef. Through Lalami’s story, readers tread in the footsteps of a young man on that path, see the turns and the crossroads, and feel the weight of his changing world as he moves along the course.

Further Resources

- Via the New York Times, here is the first chapter of Secret Son.

- On the author’s website, you can read an excerpt from Lalami’s debut novel, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits.

- Lalami’s website also includes links to her essays, short stories, book reviews, and other writings.

- Here is a Powell’s interview with Lalami (conducted by Dave Weich).

- Read “Inventing the Past,” which was adapted from a conversation moderated by Colum McCann and featuring Arthur Japin, Laila Lalami, Imma Monsó, and 2007 PEN World Voices Festival.

- Listen to Laila Lalami talk about her new book on The Bat Segundo Show.

- Here is a link to two videos featured on Laila Lalami’s website. In the first one she reads from her first novel, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, as part of the Authors@Google series, in Santa Monica, CA, on March 19, 2008. The second shows Lalami discussing what makes good writing, in a short video produced by the University of California Riverside, where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing.

- In this video (via YouTube), Lalami discusses Secret Son:

- And here, also via YouTube, is the book preview for Secret Son:

If we are writing, it means that we are not acting. That we find ourselves in difficulty when we are faced with reality, and so we have chosen another way to react, another way to communicate, a certain distance, a time for reflection.

The writer, the poet, the novelist, are all creators. This does not mean that they invent language, it means that they use language to create beauty, ideas, images. This is why we cannot do without them. Language is the most extraordinary invention in the history of humanity, the one which came before everything, and which makes it possible to share everything. Without language there would be no science, no technology, no law, no art, no love. But without another person with whom to interact, the invention becomes virtual. It may atrophy, diminish, disappear. Writers, to a certain degree, are the guardians of language. When they write their novels, their poetry, their plays, they keep language alive. They are not merely using words—on the contrary, they are at the service of language. They celebrate it, hone it, transform it, because language lives through them and because of them, and it accompanies all the social and economic transformations of their era.

[...]Stig Dagerman’s phrase about the fundamental paradox of the writer, unsatisfied because he cannot communicate with those who are hungry—whether for nourishment or for knowledge—touches on the greatest truth. Literacy and the struggle against hunger are connected, closely interdependent. One cannot succeed without the other. Both of them require, indeed urge, us to act. So that in this third millennium, which has only just begun, no child on our shared planet, regardless of gender or language or religion, shall be abandoned to hunger or ignorance, or turned away from the feast. This child carries within him the future of our human race.

Thanks to Natalie for sharing the link.