Next, early June will bring the U.S. release of another debut novel: Francesca Segal’s The Innocents. Billed as a recasting of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence—but set within a modern-day London Jewish community—this one hits many of my readerly and writerly interests: reworkings of classics I’ve loved, Jewish literature, and the international accent.

P.S. In keeping with the internationalist focus: If you missed my recent reviewlet covering Anne Korkeakivi’s debut novel The Unexpected Guest (set mainly in Paris), now is a perfectly fine moment to read it.

• Watch and listen: Patrick McGuinness recently visited Villanova University and read from his work there.
• Courtesy of The Man Booker Prize: a Reader’s Guide (PDF) for The Last Hundred Days.
• Listen to Francesca Segal read from The Innocents.
• Read Francesca Segal’s Granta essay, “In My Father’s Footsteps,” about her father, author Erich Segal.

Little Star of Bela Lua is Luana Monteiro’s debut short story collection. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she completed her MFA at the University of Wisconsin, and she is currently at work on a novel. We corresponded via email about writing, nirvana and the evil eye.

Interview

Melissa Scholes Young: I lived in Brasilia for years, and I rarely came across Brazilian literature in English. You root Little Star of Bela Lua firmly in Brazilian culture. Why write in English, and not Portuguese?

Luana Monteiro: My literary awakening happened in my late teens and early twenties when I was already living in the U.S. I mostly read books written in or translated into English. It was the language of my surroundings, and it was the one that offered itself when I sat down to write my first short story. The English I use, however, is not divorced completely from the influence of Portuguese; my mother tongue asserts itself in the rhythms, the intonations, and the mistakes I repeatedly make.

In the subtitle of your collection — “Stories from Brazil” — I was struck by the “from.” These stories have traveled to get to their audience. Did you consider audience while writing? Did you see the readers as mostly American?

Yes, I did see them as mostly American; well, they were mostly American because many of those stories were written while I was in college, and were read in creative writing classes. The book has been translated into Portuguese and French. So when I visited Brazil in 2011, I was surprised and a little dismayed when my half-sister asked me, “Is that character in that story named Carolina supposed to be me?” [I thought] Uh… no, Carolina, of course not.

Many of your female characters struggle against cultural norms. Valquira, the rhymester, enters an entirely male-dominated music scene and holds her own against the machismo. Cloé wrestles with sexual desires that women are expected to suppress, especially as Christians. What interests you about these struggles?

The influence of religion on a character’s search for authenticity and transcendence is a recurring theme in my writing. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to escape Christianity while growing up in Brazil; it penetrates every aspect of society, from public observances to one’s intimate life. The Christian ideology of the feminine ends up affecting the sexual attitudes of the country, particularly women’s sexuality: on one hand there is the image of the virgin, pure, modest, delicate, on the other, the sexual goddess, carefree and licentious, created by the consumer market. The relationships between the spiritual and the commercial, Sunday Mass and carnaval, prudishness and sensuality; those interest me very much.

This is a more traditional Brazil than I experienced. When most people think of Brazil, a glamorous Carnaval image is evoked, yet Carnaval isn’t even explored until the second half of the book. I taught at the Escola Americana de Brasilia, and Carnaval seemed to dominate more than half of each school year for my students and most conversations. Yet your portrait of Carnaval on the streets of Pernambuco isn’t flattering. You mention the underbelly of the celebration: the excess, the stink, and the vomit. You describe in detail men and women passed out on the streets “like dead cattle.” What led to your decision to write Carnaval so raw?

Well, the glamor of carnaval works better in marketing pamphlets than stories. Yes, carnaval can be glamorous, but it’s not only glamorous.  I could write an entire book on unflattering carnaval images! I love the idea of carnaval: four days of abandon, music, jubilance and friendship, where strict class and gender divides melt and the hierarchies of society are turned upside down. But there is also the underbelly, the grime and violence, the turning away from all that is ugly and sad, a denial of those who are so marginalized that they can’t even participate.

Elizabeth Bishop, who lived in Brazil for fifteen years, beautifully (and painfully) illustrates this intolerance for the destitute in her poem “Pink Dog.”

Ah, “Dress up! Dress up and dance at Carnival!” That poem communicates so much about the dual nature of the celebration. Did you find yourself wrestling with how to write about those marginalized?

You’ve lived in Brazil, I’m sure you’re familiar with the ways domestic maids, for instance, are treated. They raise their employers’ children, cook their meals, clean their houses, wash their clothes, but aren’t welcome at the table with the family, and in many households they’re not even allowed to use the same set of dishes and silverware as their employers.  In light of these hierarchical relationships, it’s tempting to write characters one-dimensionally on both ends of the social spectrum, but I try not to fall into that trap.

I appreciate what you said about the possible melting of gender divides, at least temporarily. In “The Whirling Dove” Mãe Joana tells Cloé “This is a man’s world, my girl. They run the nations and the corporations—but in their shadows, almost always stands a strong woman.” Is that a commentary on Brazilian society in particular, or the status quo more broadly?

The commentary has more to do with how they are recognized in relation to how men’s accomplishments are celebrated. Brazil has particularly rigid expectations tied to gender, despite choosing a woman as president.  This gets highlighted in the media these days. Peruse Brazilian periodicals and you’ll come across an inordinate number of articles devoted not to [President Dilma Vana Rousseff’s] policies and initiatives, but her clothing, the shaping of her eyebrows, her make-up, her weight. By the way, the general opinion is that she will never belong in the ranks of the world’s best-dressed. If only I’d known that before I voted for her.

Exactly! You make political statements throughout the stories. You mock the PT [Lula’s Worker’s Party] in “Antonio de Juvita.” His speeches, which the people applaud, are almost nonsensical. Do you think literature can be an effective path for political change or is it just good fodder for humor?

I didn’t set out to mock the PT. Antonio de Juvita is almost a mythical character in the Brazilian Northeast, the bohemian, unemployed, coddled bon-vivant who takes a shot at local politics out of boredom and a desire for popularity. All he knows about political discourse is to employ the words “honesty” and “work,” and to do it often. The self-aggrandizing in small town politics is the subject of thousands of poems and songs; people have learned to see the humor in it, and to regard the words “work” and “honesty” from the mouth of any politician with suspicion. It was in that spirit that I wrote the character of Antonio de Juvita.

As for political change, yes, I am an optimist and still believe that works of prose and poetry can be an effective path for political change, insofar as it changes the predisposed reader. But I’d say music is a better medium for affecting change, because it’s immediately accessible and can carry a distilled message.

Like Caetano Veloso? Who else?

Chico Buarque. (Did you know he is my real father? I grew up wishing he were.) Milton Nascimento, Gilberto Gil. I love the traditional music of Pernambuco; maracatu, frevo, côco, ciranda. Lately I’ve been enjoying a lot of the younger female singers, Céu, Cibelle, Renata Rosa, Ana Paula da Silva.

Let’s chat more about Antonio. The story foreshadows Brazil’s evolution into a first world economy. Does the past have to be discarded in the name of progress? During his campaign, Antonio cheers “Out with the old!” Ironically, his family’s fortune comes from liquor recipes from the “Old World.” His mother disapproves of his lack of respect for his elders. How do you see the struggle between growth and tradition?

This is a very complicated issue, but two things stand out to me: economic growth has eased the suffering of many in Brazil, and that has to be applauded. At the same time, the commercialization of a culture brings its own set of problems, including the loss of authenticity of traditions and serious threats to the country’s environmental health.  Traffic in Recife, a byproduct of growth, is an absolute nightmare!

Change seems inevitable. Your stories preserve the culture, while the humor makes the struggle more digestible and accessible. What other writers influence your work?

Lately, I’ve been enjoying the work of J.M. Coetzee. He is fearless in his explorations of the dark, even monstrous, chambers of the self, the “rictus of the imagination,” to borrow one of his phrases from The Master of Petersburg. I admire him immensely for that, even though that very courage causes me to cringe my way through many of his passages.

I loved Coetzee’s Disgrace. His portrait of misery in post-apartheid South Africa was painful and important.

It’s so true. Also, [when I was] an impressionable young writer, Paul Bowles inspired me for many of the same reasons. I love Juan Rulfo’s stories, Clarice Lispector’s. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s stories were a big influence early on. So was the poetry of Octavio Paz, Florbela Espanca, Elisa Lucinda.

The collection has magic, too. One can see the influence of Marquez. The surreal isn’t even questioned. Of course a fish can miraculously appear in your toilet and then change the course of most of the town. Of course a priest can become smitten with a river spirit.  Was it a leap to write the bizarre in such a real way? Or has the mystery and superstitions of Brazil always infused your stories?

It wasn’t a leap at all. For a huge segment of society, the supernatural is commonly employed in the interpretation of daily occurrences.  Christianity, with its focus on faith and miracles, has played a significant role in this familiarity with the surreal. The nightwatchman of the building in which I lived as a child often told me biblical stories. He was a subversive proselytizer, no doubt, but I didn’t even realize they were biblical stories until much later. It didn’t matter, the man was a natural storyteller, and his unwavering belief in the stories he told, coupled with the deadpan delivery style that did not distinguish the supernatural from the mundane, left little room for doubt or questioning. The stories stuck. His tales of the apocalypse terrified me then.

A lot of what would be considered bizarre in the U.S. is simply accepted by the Brazilian majority. Many routinely blame illnesses on evil looks from a stranger. Here’s a little anecdotal evidence of this phenomenon: recently a close friend, a musician, a college graduate — and I add this because there are those who insist these “superstitions” only exist among the uneducated masses – came down with a cold after a performance. Without hesitation, she blamed it on a particular member of the audience, specifically, his or her olho gordo, fat eye, also known as the evil eye. Fortunately, she knew how to prevent future attacks and was able to purchase the correct amulet (a figa) at any one of a dozen stands in the market that very day.

That reminds me of my students who gave me crystals for every holiday. They were terrified of my vulnerability.

Yes, you need a crystal figa. I’ll get you one next time I visit Recife’s Mercado de São José.

Perfect! We all need protection from the evil eye.

Can we chat about structure? Almost every story is revealed in the first few paragraphs. You seem to subscribe to Vonnegut’s theory that a story should begin as close to the ending as possible. We’re told the fish will change Otalia’s life immediately in “Bela Lua”; Valquira says she’ll never leave music for a man; Padre claims you can’t tempt fate; Antonio will join the National Armed Forces. Yet we don’t know how the conflicts will actually be resolved. And the conflicts still seem fresh as they twist and turn. How do you see the structure of the story contributing to the storytelling?

Many of my stories are structured that way because often all I know at first is the beginning circumstance of a character, the ending circumstance, and how the character is ultimately affected by whatever happens. The path that takes me from one point to another is usually a mystery that reveals itself incrementally in the act of the writing. It takes time to know a character, to separate him or her from the writer. That promise of intimacy through time is what attracts me to the novel form.  But to answer your question, structure allows for an organized telling of a story. Sometimes I think I have the best structure and it’s not until the end that I realize the story would be better told if I move things around.

I’m wondering about process. How far into the writing of each story do you [figure out] what it’s about?

At the outset, I’m aware of at least one dimension of what a story is about, even if it’s the most superficial one – say, a relationship between a mother and daughter. The deeper layers tend to reveal themselves much later, as the characters develop.

Did these stories come out whole or was revision a major factor?

Revision is always a major factor for me. There are infinite ways to write the same story; I would consider myself very fortunate to choose the best one first. Are there writers out there whose stories come out whole?  Who are these creatures?

I don’t know them either. Only rumors. I definitely wouldn’t want to interview them.

It may be awkward and a bit spooky; you may need to employ the services of an exorcist when you’re finished.

I’ll have my crystal figa to keep me safe. And speaking of safety, many of your stories begin with a detailed introduction of the setting. The reader is firmly planted on comfortable ground before the plot begins. Not just the name of the town but the region, its history, its role in modern development, its pride, etc. What role does setting have in the story telling itself?

Immediacy.  If I’m going to write about a place, real or imagined, I have to make it as inhabitable as possible and, for my own sake, do it as early on as possible. Firmness in place helps me find my way through the intricate pathways of a story. The characters demand it; if the setting is not detailed enough, they cross their arms and roll their eyes at me as if to say, “Are you kidding? What are we supposed to do with this?”

You are a hard woman to find on the Internet. Is that intentional? It seems such a race in the literary world these days to “market” and “brand” an author. Are you avoiding the limelight or just focused on the writing?

I find marketing my own writing embarrassing. My natural inclination is to avoid it. For me, ultimate success means having the ability to decline any interviews, readings, public signings, without a second thought to its impact on book sales or career. I’m not intentionally hiding, but I am not making an effort to be found either.

What are you writing now?

I’m working on a novel that explores the enormous universe of the religious and the ritualistic in Brazil. In a sense, it’s a coming-of-age story, where the protagonist is forced to negotiate the influences of Christianity and Candomblé, personified in her paternal and maternal grandmothers.

I can’t wait to read it. I saw a Candomblé ceremony in Salvador and it was intoxicating. Touristy and probably inauthentic but intoxicating nonetheless.

I, too, had the good fortune of witnessing a ceremony in Recife. Luckily for me, I was the closest thing to a tourist in the place. It was beautiful, complex, edifying. I grew up with so many prejudices against Candomblé and its practitioners; it’s been an immense joy to dispel these prejudices and learn about a culture that is so essential to Brazilian identity.

Candomblé ceremony, photo credit Luana Monteiro

A writer balances many roles — you happen to be a mother, too. In the interview at the back of Bela Lua, you said you meditate and write every morning. How do you find your process evolving now?

Funny you should ask! As I’m sure you can imagine, I’ve been too sleep-deprived to keep up my meditation routine. I tend to fall asleep the minute I sit up and close my eyes. My daughter is almost two; it took a year to work out a sustainable writing routine. Meditation will come next.

Um passo de cada vez, sim? [One step at a time, yes?] Muito obrigada, Luana.

Yes, um passo de cada vez. Maybe nirvana will visit me while I sleep, like a thief in the night. Is it too much to ask?

Further Links and Resources

• Watch a video of “Writers in the Round: Latino Voices,” an event featuring three Wisconsin Latino writers including Luana Monteiro.
• Read about Granta’s selection of “The Best Young Brazilian Novelists” and the issues to be published in Portuguese in July 2012 and in English in Fall 2012.

The first sensation when reading the Damion Searls translation of Nescio is distance—of form, not content. Even though the stories are told with perfect simplicity and lucidity, one’s reading is troubled by a difficulty in comprehending their structure, in catching hold of some central action or event being portrayed, or who the main character might be. The first four stories in the collection describe the same group of characters, a circle of would-be bohemians, and we watch them in each story struggle for money, labour at art, suffer through penniless winters, while around them bourgeois society goes on bustling and preening, never becoming aware of this powerless rebellion in its midst.

The friends always fail. They are only (as the title of one story suggests) “Little Titans,” and they will either surrender to society or die. The narrator seems himself confused by these tales, as no solution is found, yet he knows that the experiences themselves were meaningful, even if youth did not last. The stories wail again and again against the failure of the rebellion they describe, until, in Nescio’s last story, “Isola Dei,” written during the Nazi occupation, the loss of the narrator’s youth is mirrored by the loss of the country itself, and the self he laments is only a miniature of the world that economic progress and war have destroyed.

Yet these stories are also very funny. His story “The Freeloader” describes the narrator’s memories of Japi, a vagabond and scrounger, a man who continuously attempts to avoid all effort. “I am nothing and I do nothing,” Japi explains, and he disrupts these bohemians’ lives by revealing just how much stress and responsibility they have accepted. Japi has a Whitman-esque pleasure in observing the multiplicities of the world, without Whitman’s desire to subsume these into himself. Japi simply observes, and enjoys.

He knew everything along the railroad line from Middleburg to Amsterdam: every field, every ditch, every house, every road, every stand of trees, every patch of heather in Brabant, every switch in the tracks… And he’d nod and laugh whenever he saw something he knew especially well. Or else he would say, “Look, the tree is gone,” or “Hey, there are new apples on it now, I didn’t see any last time.”

Japi’s inability to understand normal people’s demands reminded me of the brightly innocent Sylvie, in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping: Japi remains jovial as the people around him grow enraged. Japi explains his failure to keep an office job by saying:

I was always late, I really tried to get there on time but it never happened, it had been going on too long. And so boring. They said I did everything wrong and I’m sure they were right about that. I wanted to but I couldn’t do it, I’m not the kind of person who is cut out for work. Then they said I was distracting the others. They were probably right about that too… I could tell a good joke, and they liked that, but it wasn’t enough for them.

Japi’s radical strangeness cannot last—he becomes serious, gets real work, and his life only worsens. Yet for a while he seems outside of the weight of the world, in contrast to the story’s narrator, Koekebakker, an aspiring writer, who is constantly short of food and warmth.

All day long it had been raining hard, almost without a break. The water ran in streams down my window-pane. It felt cozy inside. I liked it. I had no stove and my summer coat was still at the pawnshop. I had never owned a winter coat. The frost was a problem: you had to stay in bed out of poverty, it was the only way to stay warm.

Koekebakker admires something in Japi, some greater resilience, just as he admires the talent of his painter friend Bavink, who is able to sell his work, to keep painting—although we eventually learn that neither man’s defence against the world holds for long. For there is a further darkness to these tales. Although the friends disdain middle-class respectability, it is not their deepest enemy. On the edges of society, they confront the inevitable passing of time, and the vast size of the universe that seems to rob any one existence of meaning. What does a moment of wonder matter when time is always rushing on, and human beings are merely blips in the vast silence of non-existence? The narrator grows more and more aware that the death of desire in one person is not simply one man or woman’s loss, but a sign and portent of the doom we all carry. We all struggle in a universe that does not recognise the validity of desire, and we do not belong here, because our desires are constantly seeking a fulfilment they can never have. What sense can we make of this universe of death?

I thought about when these two gentlemen would die, and stand naked at the Last Judgement, and be forgotten down here. And about terribly important gentlemen coming and taking their place… And how many idealistic young people down here would have written essays by then, and written little poems and painted little pictures, and gotten angry and gotten excited about things. And kissed. And then grown important too, perhaps, and been forgotten as well.

And in this sense, the stance of these “little titans” is not just against modern capitalism, but also against time. If time will grind us all to dust, one protest is to refuse to compromise on desire, to love and adore all that one can. And among those adorations, these characters’ one true beloved is nature. They trek around the Dutch countryside, letting beauty work on them, hoping to catch it unawares.

I looked out to the east along the dike, at the couple of scrawny, windswept trees at the water’s edge, at the water, and the sky turning darker. And then Hoyer, sitting across from me, said, “Look at that sky.”

To the southwest the whole sky was yellow. And I turned to sit sideways on my chair and look, and I saw that it was good, everything was good as it was and there was nothing left to conquer, and I was alive.

This passage comes from my favourite story in the collection, “Out Along the IJ,” a very short tale of a trip along a river that leads two of the friends to rent a tiny cottage there, staying until their money (and credit) runs out. They become strange holy figures to the narrator, every day painting and observing, and there is a wonderful scene where an old flame comes to visit Bavink: annoyed by his slovenly ways, she takes off her dress to wash the stack of dirty dishes, and as she scrubs the crockery clean, the village’s schoolchildren crowd at the cottage’s window to watch, pressing “their little farm noses against the window so that all you could see were little white triangles all over and they wouldn’t leave.”

The beauty of nature, and its survival in memory, along with art’s fitful attempts to preserve and communicate it, are the only tools that Nescio’s characters have to fight off the rule of death. If there are other methods, he does not know what they are, and his characters all grow old and sad. Yet his narrator clings to his memories, and in them finds more than just consolation: he finds moments of vision, where a different universe is found. In Nescio’s last story, “Isola Dei,” while cycling alone to Eindhoven, the narrator experiences the rising beauty of the natural world, and announces with total confidence,

The day has become mine once more and mine the enchanted world. The sun stands still, there will be no night.

Further Links and Resources

• Surprisingly for a man who lived in a pre-digital age, Nescio has his own Facebook page.
• Put your Dutch to use (or the limits of online translators) with this comprehensive site dedicated to Nescio: nescio.info
• Interested in further expanding your knowledge of Holland’s writers? Visit The Foundation for the Foundation and Production of Dutch Literature online.

The novel’s protagonist, Benjamín Chaparro, is essentially a bureaucrat in the Argentine judiciary: a deputy clerk and chief administrator of its investigative court in Buenos Aires. The novel opens sometime in the early nineties. Chaparro is about to retire and begin writing a manuscript of his own. Ostensibly it’s about a man named Ricardo Morales, whose young wife was the victim of a horrific rape and murder twenty-five years before.

Sacheri has said that “writing is a special way to read,” and here Chaparro’s writing constitutes a close reading of—even as it’s mixed with the feeling he’s tampering with—the experiences implicating a group of characters. Included in his account are his alcoholic but cunning assistant and best friend Pablo Sandoval; Irene Hornos, a court judge and the woman Chaparro has secretly loved for nearly thirty years; the crime victim, Liliana Colotto, and her widower, Ricardo Morales; and Isidoro Gómez, Liliana’s attacker turned henchman for the Argentine government. Chaparro’s tone is by turns ironic, self-deprecating, questioning, and sincere.

Through both chance and disposition, the crime makes Chaparro a sort of unwilling detective. The Secret’s plot employs the familiar patterns of a mystery or detective novel. Sacheri, who also teaches high school and university-level history and economics, is interested in literature that is preoccupied with ordinary lives but also grapples with socio-political, historical, and philosophical questions. In a recent interview, he articulated a belief that literature’s complexity should emanate from the multiplicity of contacts it allows the reader—with other reading, with his or her own interiority, with that of other people:

At times I’ve seemed to notice that for some, the most laudable form of complexity is opacity… An author who contemplates his navel and a reader condemned to the contemplation of some other person’s navel. I’ll sound unforgivably profane, but that concept doesn’t satisfy me. Not as an author and not as a reader.

The detective/mystery plot serves Sacheri’s position well. I think of Roberto Bolaño, Julio Cortázar (Sacheri cites his earlier work as a major influence), and even Alice Munro as other writers who have used the popular form masterfully as a way to engage with rigorous ideas and create rich, complex experiences in the mind of the reader. Sacheri’s novel experiments in this way with tone rather than form. Some scenes have a madcap, schmaltzy quality—as when Chaparro and Sandoval collaborate to trick an uppity judge into signing off on some court documents—reminiscent of the most satisfying TV comedy writing. These moments are entertaining to read, and they also serve to fully render character and illuminate the weaknesses of the court system through humor. In this way, the novel indeed plays with form differently than both traditional detective novels and its film adaptation.

The book’s complex structures are a strength, serving its particular themes. In an author’s note, the mention of “the bloody Argentina of the 1970s, which occasionally appears as the background of the story narrated here” strikes me as a sardonic understatement. Chaparro picks up on a photographic clue that helps identify Isidoro Gómez as a suspect, and his comment that “…I’ve always liked looking at things a little sidelong, focusing on the background instead of the foreground,” points us to a way of looking at the novel as a whole; its historical “background” is equally significant.

In the film adaptation, the period surrounding Argentina’s Cámpora government and its Dirty War indeed functions as a menacing, all-pervasive backdrop. In the novel, John Cullen’s translator’s note provides critical information for readers who come to the book without knowledge of this time period, providing explanations like the following:

[A] time of great turbulence in Argentina culminated in the so-called Guerra Sucia, the Dirty War, which lasted from 1976 to 1983. During these years, Argentina was the chief sponsor of massive and systematic political violence, whose victims included…students, activists, trade unionists, teachers, journalists, and leftists in general. In such an unstable and dangerous environment, even the basically apolitical Chaparro is at risk.

The "grandmothers" protesting the lost generation from the dirty war

This environment transcends setting to become both structural enclosure and subject matter. It has a direct impact on the court system where Chapparo works as well as the crime’s ultimate consequences for Morales, Gómez, and Chapparo himself.

The complex hierarchies of the court judicial system and the labyrinthine vault where cold case files are archived are Borgesian labyrinths where power, guilt, and accountability are distributed and refracted between people and the systems that bind them together. Indeed, Chaparro often struggles with the shady boundary between the implicit and the complicit. He frequently calls attention to the way personal attitudes and actions—often his own—can incriminate individuals. “We’re all cowards, it’s just a question of who frightens us enough,” he reflects after finding a colleague with military connections has secured an order to suspend Liliana Colotto’s murder investigation indefinitely. Chaparro wishes that the judge in charge of the case had held his corrupt colleague accountable: “My stomach turned at the thought of that son of a bitch getting away with such rank malfeasance,” he says, but then admits, “but after all, I was idle and pusillanimous too, in my way…The interview with Batista left a bitter taste in my mouth. I felt somehow implicated in this injustice done to some and the sinister impunity granted to others.” How are individuals implicated when systems are corrupt? What is the mechanism by which those implicated become complicit? Who is responsible for justice and punishment in the absence of a trustworthy state? How does violence at the state level breed violence between individuals?

Because Sacheri was integral to the writing of the film adapation, it’s interesting to consider the two works as companion texts with differing strengths. Sacheri says that his characters became more complex under the gaze of director Juan José Campanella. I agree. One example is the scene in which Chaparro interrogates murder suspect Isidoro Gómez, attempting to extract a confession. In the novel, Sandoval appears at work still drunk after a night of carousing. At first it seems that he threatens to derail Chaparro’s interrogation. He throws both characters off guard when he begins a line of half-joking questioning that ends with Gómez blurting out—in pride and self-defense—that he indeed was responsible for Colotto’s rape and murder. In the novel, this moment is both a repugnant and triumphant one, revealing Sandoval’s brilliance (and Chaparro’s doubt of him) at the same time as it reveals Gómez’s insecurity.

In the film, Irene is the pivotal character in this interrogation—gorgeous, self-possessed, and very pregnant. Until this point, we’re not entirely sure Isidoro Gómez is capable of the crime he’s suspected of committing. His claims of innocence seem convincing. He comes off scared and timid and somewhat bewildered. But Irene surmises correctly that if he’s the right one, hitting him where it hurts will cause a certain effect. She dismisses him as a viable suspect based on his lack of masculinity and strength, speculating aloud in blunt terms why surely he can’t be the one. And this is finally what makes him lose it: he punches her in the face and defiantly screams his confession in the most vile and violent detail.

This use of her character and the issue of her pregnancy resonates on several levels. It creates a parallel with Liliana Colotto, who was two months pregnant at the time of her rape and murder. We rarely ever see this variant on justice: a young pregnant woman ingeniously provoking a man into an indignant declaration of guilt for a violent crime against another young pregnant woman. It’s both Irene’s sexuality and vulnerability in this moment that allow her to wield power—she secures the confession they need to send Gómez to jail—and modulate the accumulation and release of tension in the scene. The film’s somewhat richer development of character (and by extension, plot and parallels between characters) ratchets up the emotional stakes and rings on a deeper psychological register than the novel.

But what’s less visible in the film is one of the book’s great strengths: the trope of the novel within the novel. Chaparro is uncertain about the whole enterprise—why he wants to tell this story, if he should be writing it, and what it’s really about: “…[I]t’s not my story I want to tell,” he writes by way of introduction, “it’s Morales’s story, or Isidoro Gomez’s, which is the same story but seen from the other side, or seen upside down, or something like that.” His uncertainty allows readers to witness his writing as a process, and, as a result, this foregrounds the construction of the story as a whole. The novel alternates between third-person chapters narrated through Chaparro’s consciousness, titled with words and phrases like “Retirement Party,” “Cinema,” and “Coffee;” and Chaparro’s numbered, first-person-narrated manuscript chapters. These chapters are even typeset in different fonts. In “Cinema,” we read that “[Chaparro]’s anxious about how to continue, how to recount what happened to those people. He wonders if that’s the feeling writers have when they tell a story, a certain sense of omnipotence as they play with their characters’ lives.” Later:

Chaparro rereads the opening sentences of his new chapter and hesitates. Is that a good way to start this part of the story? he wonders…Can a single human action—in this case, a monumental drinking binge—be the cause that changes another’s destiny, assuming that such a thing as destiny exists?

The crime that ties Chaparro to Liliana Cotorro, Ricardo Morales, and Isidro Gómez is a bloody and visceral metaphor for Sacheri’s exploration of the relationship between a single human action and its consequences. The Secret of Their Eyes (originally La pregunta de sus ojos, or The Question of Their Eyes) is a supremely accessible novel and a thrilling page-turner whose most nuanced tensions lie in the relationships between its structures and characters and the questions that these pose. Sacheri says that the book is “a reflection on punishment.” Readers are invited to ask, who is responsible? How are we all implicated? And how is the longing for love like the longing for justice?

Further Links and Resources

It feels like the prerogative of an author with a career as long as Desai’s to take up the bureaucrat’s lament or the translator’s brief flowering. The novellas take place in the India of our time. The first story, “The Museum of Final Journeys,” has a whiff of Lovecraft; one keeps waiting for eerie tone to resolve into fleshly monster as a lonely bureaucrat wanders the rooms of an abandoned private museum, led by a caretaker as cryptic as any Poe imagined.

All three novellas contain these spidery characters, spinning webs from the slender stuff of lonely lives. The middle story features a translator plucked from obscurity, only to overstep her lucky break. Desai feels keenly aware of the Millennial generation’s yen for greatness, something to set the individual apart from the muddied masses. Of course, such longings are as common and ancient as the species.

In the title story, a hermit builds a secret bower, a beauty meant for himself alone. When strangers stumble upon it, he feels “Their gaze alone was a desecration.” Herein lies the tension of The Artist of Disappearance: does something only exist with an audience? Or does a witness spoil something noble? Desai plays coy; her most powerful moments are the hidden, unseen graces of her misfits, but here we are–reading a book that lays them bare.

Extra:

Saint Alexander Nevski Cathedral in Sofia / credit Jeremiah Chamberlin

Editor’s Note: We continue this year’s Sozopol Fiction Seminar retrospective with work by Molly Antopol and Lee Romer Kaplan. Read Part I here, featuring writing by John Struloeff, Jane E. Martin, and Michael Hinken.

The Messiness of Translation: A Conversation with Miroslav Penkov

by Molly Antopol

Molly Antopol / credit Jeremiah Chamberlin

During our time together on the Black Sea, in the gorgeous seaside town of Sozopol we spent a good deal of time discussing issues of translation. Because of Bulgaria’s relatively small market, and tiny percentage of their writers being published in English, it’s a topic that resonates for Bulgarian writers on a very practical level. The subject really came to a head for me when the group returned from Sozopol to Sofia. It was there, during a roundtable discussion about “The Future of Translation,” that I encountered Miroslav Penkov, whose stories I had already enjoyed in a number of American journals.

Penkov was born in 1982 in Gabrovo, Bulgaria, and arrived in America in 2001, where he entered the University of Arkansas, earning a BA in Psychology, followed by an MFA in fiction. His debut story collection, East of the West: A Country in Stories, has recently been published in the U.S.US by FSG, as well as in translation in ten other countries. In Bulgaria, his own translation of the stories will soon be published by Ciela, under the title “На изток от запада.”

After spending a week in Sozopol thinking and talking so much about Bulgarian literature and translation, Penkov put flesh on the bones by describing what it was like to write a book about Bulgaria in English—and then to translate it into his native language himself.

"Future of Translation" panel, Sofia. From left: Kapka Kassabova, Jeremiah Chamberlin, Rana Dasgupta, Miroslav Penkov. Not featured: John Freeman. / CR: Simona Ilieva

Back home in San Francisco and missing my new friends and Bulgaria, I read Penkov’s collection and fell in love with the book. These stories give much to admire: they’re ambitious in terms of structure and scope, beautifully written but never showy, and the global forces that shape the characters are as much a part of the narrative as their inner lives. Penkov writes directly about history and politics, but somehow maintains a lightness to his prose—indeed, these stories are both emotionally fraught and laugh-out-loud funny.

The Sozopol Fiction Seminars provided me with a much more complex way of seeing Bulgarian literature, and translation more generally. I left Bulgaria challenged by a host of new questions that I hadn’t even known how to ask before visiting. Shortly after I returned home, Penkov was kind enough to answer some of these questions. Excerpts from our exchange are below.

Interview:

Molly Antopol: One of the things I admire most about these stories is how big they feel—larger political and historical issues seem to extend so naturally from your characters’ everyday lives. Were you purposeful with this during the writing? Did it emerge naturally? Or would it simply feel impossible to write about Bulgaria without social and political concerns making their way into the stories?

Miroslav Penkov: I wouldn’t say it’s impossible to write Bulgarian stories without considering history and politics. Some of the finest examples of Bulgarian short fiction concern themselves with the everyday life of ordinary people—say, peasants in the countryside—and turn a deaf ear to the politics of the day. But I would say that for me, at this time in my life, it is impossible to write about Bulgaria without getting the past involved. At this time in my life, I cannot help but feel, much like some of the great writers of the American South – Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter – that to understand the present, we need to first make sense of the past; that the two are linked inseparably.

We all know that in writing fiction following a line of cause and effect is paramount. One thing occurs and leads to another. A character interacts with his surrounding world and out of this interaction the story’s plot is generated and the story moves along. But I believe that when it comes to history, this cause and effect connection can be reversed, that the present can not only influence our understanding of the past, but can also shape this past. I believe that out of our present we can invent and create personal versions of a past that, in reality, might never have existed. I don’t mean this in some scary Orwellian way, of course. I’m talking merely about discovering personal truths in history, achieving a personal understanding of the past that might not be applicable to someone else.

Some really great advice for writing short stories is to get in, get out, and not linger. But I wanted to linger. I wanted these stories to flow really large across land and time, to gain momentum, feed off past and present and future, and move not only forward like rivers, but rather backward and forward simultaneously like whirlpools. As you can guess, in short fiction this is often a recipe for disaster. Consider for example the title story, “East of the West.” It’s a story that takes up more than thirty years of the narrator’s life, that concerns itself with a million wars, with communism and its fall, with the narrator’s love for his cousin, with the tragic death of the narrator’s sister and her fiancé, with the death of everyone close to the main hero, and on and on and on. A good workshop might tell you that all this is more than the story can handle, that all this makes the story lose focus. But I don’t think of the short story only as a fragile thing, as something only glimpsed in passing.

How long after living in the states did you begin to write fiction in English?

Miroslav Penkov / CR: Simona Ilieva

I arrived in the U.S. in 2001 and there was this schizoid fragmentation in my mind when it came to my writing. On one hand, I wanted to be a writer. On the other, I couldn’t quite understand how I would start writing in English. On one hand I gave myself an impossible deadline – to get a story published by Christmas of my first year; on the other – I was sincerely convinced it would take me ten years before I could start writing in English. In reality, I started writing in English immediately. Within the first month of my arrival, I had translated a story I’d published in Bulgaria and sent it out to a sci-fi contest. The story was returned to me with a kind instruction that I should double-space it, print it on one side of the page only, and resubmit.

There are things about writing that transcend language and culture. Creating convincing characters is one such thing. And writing in English has been a good thing for me.  Because my “command” of English doesn’t come close to my “command” of Bulgarian, I’m less likely to make pompous moves in my English prose, less likely to try to be too cute and smart, to try to dazzle the reader with a spectacular turn of phrase. Writing in English has made me pay closer attention to individual words (something that was not so obvious when I first started), it’s taught me to choose only the right ones, to check my ego at the door and surrender myself to what is often the simplest, most elegant way of unfolding a sentence in service of character (something that was even less obvious back in the day).

While working on the collection, did you feel like you were translating these stories from the Bulgarian in your head into English?

John Freeman, Editor of Granta, Future of Translation panel, Sofia / CR: Simona Ilieva

No. Such translation used to happen in my head early on, when I was just beginning to learn English in high school. You babble like a baby and search for the right word in your head. You feel stupid, because you can’t express yourself, and the scary thing is that your interlocutors too often perceive you as stupid, which is, often, a mistake. It’s this feeling of stupidity and embarrassment that prevents me from ever wanting to learn another language. And, of course, laziness.

But after a few years of studying, I started thinking in English and such word-for-word translation was no longer necessary. And yet, in writing I wanted my prose to have a distinct Bulgarian feel (which, in all honestly, it will have regardless of whether I want it to or not). I like, for example, how Hemingway can make his foreigners speak an English that on the page sounds like Italian, or Spanish, distinct, foreign. And I wanted to invest my prose with such oddity, especially because seven of the eight stories in the book are first person narratives. I wanted to come up with as many distinct Bulgarian voices as I could, strong enough to cross an ocean of language and speak to the American reader convincingly of this distant and unfamiliar world.

Living in the U.S. and writing about your native country, did you have specific (real or imaginary) readers in your mind? For example, did you find that you had to explain certain parts of Bulgarian life to readers who had never been?

Audience Members at the Future of Translation Panel in Sofia / CR: Simona Ilieva

I think it’s dangerous to write toward satisfying a particular reader, but I also think it’s silly not to consider who you might be writing for. Over the years friends would ask me about Bulgarian literature and I would say – yes, yes in Bulgaria we have divine poetry, and some really great prose. Would I recommend an author or a book then? I sure could. But you’d have to learn Bulgarian first. Why? Because nothing has been translated, or if it has a) the translation might be poor and b) the book is most certainly out of print. So I wanted to write such a book that would show Bulgaria—its history, people—a book which, when someone asks, “Hey, how about that country of yours?” you would say (if you’re Bulgarian in the U.S.), I have a book for you. Of course I realize how pretentious I’m sounding. But the sad truth is that until you come up with good translations of Bulgarian books that stay in print, until more Bulgarian writers start writing in English, this book will be one of very few books in English about Bulgaria by a Bulgarian.

Were there particular challenges, technical or otherwise, that you struggled with when writing these stories? And are there parts of writing that come easily to you?

Challenges? How much time do you have? First of all, there was the question of self-belief. I always knew that I would be a writer, but I didn’t always believe it. When I first started writing in English, because I was so poorly read, I was aware of only two other writers who’d written in a tongue that was not their mothers’: Conrad and Nabokov. This was a big psychological weight, but luckily I was younger, very naïve, clueless, stupid, and because of this courageous; and—because of this—I didn’t pay much attention to this weight; I simply wrote. Then, there is the challenge of people telling me that no one in America would read anything about Bulgaria. Many friends and teachers have genuinely supported and encouraged me while I wrote the stories. But plenty others, and I have no idea why they wouldn’t just keep this opinion to themselves, would come to me and say, flatly—no one will read about Bulgaria here, no American will care. I still don’t know how true this is. Sometimes, like when you sent me the questions for this interview, I feel hopeful. Other times, I feel very low.

And then—and this would be the final challenge I’ll mention for lack of time—there comes the writing itself. I had a really, really difficult time getting the majority of these stories to a place that made both me and my editor happy. I don’t presume to give aspiring authors any advice, but I’ll say this—don’t expect to get a story done on a first draft, don’t feel discouraged when you don’t get it right on a first draft and try to find joy in rewriting, because writing truly is rewriting. Amen.

Your collection is coming out in eleven countries—congratulations! What was it like to translate these stories yourself for the Bulgarian edition?

Boris Deliradev + Angela Rodel, Translators and Interpreters at the Future of Translation / CR: Simona Ilieva

Absolute agony. And I’m still working, I have two more stories to translate. I’m pleased with the results. I think that certain parts sound more alive in Bulgarian, more colorful, messier in a good way. For reasons that I mentioned above, I tried to make my English prose economical and elegant. But I cannot employ such economy in Bulgarian. In Bulgarian these first person narratives are somewhat messier, somewhat more deeply rooted in dialect, and that’s the only way they could work. Had I chosen to strive for elegance and economy in Bulgarian, I would not have been able to create convincing Bulgarian voices. So, reinventing these voices has been a really agonizing experience, because I also don’t want to rewrite the stories and get away from the original. The whole endeavor has been torturously slow. I wrote them faster than I’m translating them. But then, what’s the rush (other than a deadline from a publisher, that is)?

And as far as the eleven countries… It all happened so unexpectedly, so fast. I think it caught everyone by surprise. But these wonderful publishers across Western Europe (and Israel, I should not exclude them) seem to have really liked the stories. As far as my Slavic brothers… no interest so far. So, Slavic brothers of Russia, Poland, Serbia etc. – why you no want my book?

Who are some of your favorite Bulgarian writers—and are there particular writers who haven’t yet been translated into English, but who you wish would be?

See? The inevitable question. There are two Bulgarian writers that I like who write in English. I recommend Kapka Kassabova and her memoir Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria. I also recommend Nikolai Grozni’s memoir Turtle Feet, which is not about Bulgaria, but about his days as a Buddhist monk in India. He also has a novel coming out, Wunderkind, which I’m excited about. That one, it seems, will be all about Bulgaria. Years ago, in the university library in Arkansas, I found Anton Donchev’s now classic novel Time of Parting. I recommend that one, as well. I also recommend what I consider to be the greatest short story collection in the known universe: Wild Tales by one of my all-time favorite writers, Nikolai Haitov. These are stories written in such peculiar dialect that even translating them into conventional Bulgarian would kill most of their beauty. But there is a translation out there (Unesco Collection of Representative Works. European Series) and the translator, Peter Owen, has done a really good job, considering he was attempting the impossible. Kapka Kassabova, whom I mentioned earlier, has recently translated short stories by Deyan Enev, a Bulgarian writer I really like. The book, Circus Bulgaria, was published in the UK.

What I wish for is that someone would publish an anthology of Bulgarian short fiction, starting with the classics and moving forward in time. I was able to find one such anthology in the library, but the translations were pretty stiff and unconvincing. We need a duo like the terrific Pevear-Volokhonsky to do for Bulgarian literature what they’re doing for Russian.

What are you working on now?

I’m fighting with the Bulgarian translation of the stories. I’m at the end of the rope, I’ve hit a massive wall, and somehow I have to make myself go on. Thank you for lending me a compassionate ear. Then I’d like to write a novel. I really like short stories, but for me the novel is what writing is really all about.

2011 Fellows at Red House Cultural Center, Sofia. From left: Rayko Baychev (BG) Michael Hinken (US) Paullina Petrova (BG) Yana Punkina (BG) Jane Martin (CA) Molly Antopol (US) Petja Heinrich (BG). Not pictured: Ivan Landzhev (BG) John Struloeff (US) Lee Kaplan (US)

Stealing Poetry

by Lee Romer Kaplan

Lee Kaplan

I’m a fiction writer for a reason: there’s safety in imagined worlds. I’ve chosen two professions—acting and writing—in part because they make use of my own stories without exposing them. In fiction, you can speak your truth without telling your personal truth.

In Sozopol, however, I ended up sharing a hotel room and my own stories with my Bulgarian counterpart, the lovely and brave Paullina Petrova. Despite our very different histories, Paullina and I connected because we’re both rewriting ourselves, as women and as artists, after years spent trying to be anything but fiction writers. My avoidance of the writing life led me first to theater, then to law school, and more recently to education. This past year, I taught composition, creative writing, and literature to community college students in Manhattan while my behemoth of a novel sat in the proverbial drawer, awaiting revision. Paullina’s avoidance tactics seem less obvious, if equally effective: she runs a business and a household, and cares for two young children.

The first time I saw Paullina—a petite woman with a dark blond ponytail and covetable baby-blue platform sandals edged with metal studs—we were waiting to load our suitcases onto the bus from Sofia to Sozopol. That first morning, unsure how profound the language barrier might be, we didn’t speak. A few hours later, the bus stopped for lunch at a roadside restaurant, and I noted the “Nationalization” of the Fellows’ seating arrangements that soon unfolded: Americans at one table, Bulgarians at another. Not unexpected on the first day, of course—and by the end of the seminar we would all be sitting together—but at that moment, there were still borders between us.

Paullina on the Bus / CR: Jeremiah Chamberlin

Happily, literary translator Angela Rodel—an American linguist who came to Bulgaria on a Fulbright seventeen years ago and has lived and worked in the country since 2004— offered to make the introductions. The Bulgarians, who’d been having an animated discussion in their native tongue, fell silent as she and I approached. Ivan and Yana, the two most fluent in English, engaged me in conversation, but Paullina just said her name, which I didn’t quite catch, and smiled. We didn’t yet know we’d be paired as roommates, and so after a few pleasantries we said goodbye and once again boarded the bus.

In fact, I didn’t learn that Paullina would be my roommate until she was—that is, until Elizabeth Kostova noted the two of us standing next to each other in the lobby of the Hotel Diamanti, gestured first at me and then at Paullina, smiled, and asked if we’d like to room together. I think we both nodded assent, blushed, and looked at our feet. We stumbled upstairs to the room together, lugging our bags, both trying to be polite, engaging in unintentional slapstick, each of us saying, “After you,” and the other replying, “No. Please, after you.”

During my adolescence and young adulthood, I moved house constantly, shuttling between Israel and the US, and for a time, Europe. I rarely stayed in one place long enough to call it home. This constant uprooting forged an urgent need to claim new spaces as my own; in Sozopol, as soon as we entered our room, I began to unpack, careful to take exactly half the space in our shared armoire and bureau. Paullina dropped her bags by the sliding glass door to our patio with a view of the Black Sea, mumbled something I didn’t understand, and when I wasn’t looking, quietly left the room.

View of Black Sea from Balcony / CR: Lee Kaplan

I didn’t know what to make of my new roommate’s abrupt departure, and so continued putting my things away, wondering whether she felt as awkward as I did about sharing a room with a stranger. Fifteen minutes later, just as I finished unpacking, my roommate returned, holding aloft a plastic bag filled with beautiful, fresh red and yellow cherries.

“Wherever did you find such lovely cherries?” I asked. In answer, Paullina held out her hands, full of fruit. “Duvduvanim,” I said. “That’s cherries in Hebrew.” Paullina repeated the word and laughed, a mischievous, knowing laugh that’s impossible to describe, but which once heard, cannot be forgotten. She told me the word in Bulgarian, and we sat in companionable silence for a while, absorbed by the pleasure of eating perfectly ripe cherries.

Paullina then insisted I take the double bed. For herself, she chose the daybed, a single. Later, she told me that she preferred having a small bed all to herself, a luxury for a mother of two, who’d been sharing a bed with her children’s father, her first and only sweetheart, since she was a teenager. Later that night, we lay in our respective beds, listening to the sea, and eventually, despite the considerable language barrier, began to tell our stories. We discovered commonalities. Not only do we wear the same size shoe, we are the same age. The people who love us call us by similar nicknames: her “Polly” to my “Lili.” We’re both aspiring novelists who don’t (Polly) and cannot (me) write short stories. The novel excerpts we submitted for translation into each other’s languages both feature young boys who embark upon magical journeys and have complicated relationships with their fathers.

Dinner on the Terrace of the Diamanti Hotel / CR: Jeremiah Chamberlin

We also discovered difference: Polly studied mathematics and I can hardly balance my checkbook. She’s the mother of two gymnastics-loving little girls, whose father’s been her partner, in work and love, for twenty years. Previously engaged but never married, for now, I’m single in New York City. Paullina’s lived only in Bulgaria; I came of age in Northern Israel and Berkeley, California, and have lived in the Middle East, Europe, Mexico, the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, Los Angeles, and New York.

And then there’s this: for both of us, adolescence marked the turning point in our sense of ourselves as writers, but in entirely different ways. My adolescence sparked my writing life, but for Paullina, her teen years marked the end of her life as a poet, and initiated a twenty-year moratorium on writing until she discovered prose, and, very recently, began the first of two novels-in-progress.

My seventeenth year was spent during the Lebanon War on Israel’s northern border. By that age, I’d lost friends in the war, and I’d begun to question long-held beliefs, asking whether it was indeed tov lamoot b’ad artzeinu—good to die for one’s country—as I’d been taught in school, a question that haunts my writing still. I wrote earnest, and sometimes awful political poetry and songs about the impossibility of peace in a world so bound by history and violence. Paullina, living in what, for a little longer, would still be Communist Bulgaria, was writing love poems, two of which were published in a children’s literary journal, despite her lack of “connections,” which means that the work itself must have been very good.

Not long after the first of the two poems was published, late on a weekend afternoon, Paullina received a call summoning her to the office of the editor-in-chief. Upon arrival, she was handed an anonymous letter addressed “Dear Comrade Editor,” which accused Paullina of plagiarism, an act she explained to me by using the phrase “stealing poetry.” When she got to this point in the story, I laughed, because it struck me as absurd. Accused of stealing poetry? It sounded like a Kafka story.  But Paullina assured me she’d been threatened with “consequences” if she did not confess to having copied a famous poet’s work and submitted it as her own.

She refused, courageous child, insisting the poems were hers. The editor then asked if he should call the now doddering poet’s wife, and appeared surprised when Paullina said yes. The poet’s wife responded that the poems, though good, were not in fact her husband’s. Despite this, the editor, who did not apologize, informed Paullina that her work would never again be published in the journal’s pages. “Cut down,” as she put it, Paullina resolved to stop writing, and for twenty years, she did just that—not writing a verse, except in the invitations to her children’s birthday parties.

After Paullina fell asleep, that first night in Sozopol, I thought about my favorite Yehuda Amichai poem, which speaks to those moments when “the waters are pressing mightily.” I thought about Paullina at seventeen, and how writing—giving words to our beliefs and imaginings, our secrets and truths—represents what Amichai calls “daring”: “how much daring is needed to love on the exposed plain when the great dangers are arched above.”

Sunset Over the Black Sea / CR: Jeremiah Chamberlin

And I thought about the fact that though I consider myself a secular Jew, I come from a tribe that traces everything—light, the separation of sea and sky, the names we call ourselves, all varieties of human suffering—back to “the word,” or perhaps more accurately, the written word. I thought about how writing fiction keeps me safe, allows me access to other lives, and sometimes, how scary writing feels, especially when I think about finishing my novel, the fear that the book will not be good enough, or attract intense scrutiny of my life and my character, or anger people I love. These thoughts stayed with me for the remainder of our time at the seminar.

After Bulgaria, I returned to New York for just three days before leaving for the first of two artists’ residencies that would take up the remaining three months of the summer. When I applied for those residencies, I said that 2011 would be the summer of my novel revision. But even as I typed those words, I was afraid they might not be true. My dear friend and mentor, the only person who’d read the book and knew where I was heading, had died before being able to provide feedback on the manuscript. I had no idea where to start, how to impose structure on what felt like an unwieldy, too long and mostly non-linear manuscript. Now at Ragdale, the second residency, which will end in three short weeks, I’m writing this essay as a way to stave off returning to the novel. And so, I am thinking about Polly, and about her courage, imagining her at seventeen, and the fierce grace with which she told her story of being accused of stealing poetry, and about the way her poetry was stolen from her. I am thinking about why we write, and why sometimes we’re afraid to write, and who Paullina and I would be if we weren’t writers.

Lee and Paullina read on the last night in Sozopol / CR: Jeremiah Chamberlin

Since our talk that first night in Sozopol, Polly and I’ve begun a longer conversation about being women who write, and how the energy for writing often gets channeled into care taking, and making a living, and loving the people in our lives. We’ve each expressed just how joyful and terrifying and magical it is to allow ourselves time and space to write. I wrote myself into adulthood, even though I stopped for many years, too. Now, I’m channeling Paullina at seventeen, taking strength from her courage, and facing my manuscript. Maybe the key is feeling the fear and doing it anyway. Maybe the way in is just making my way in.

Molly Antopol is a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow and current Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in One Story, American Short Fiction, The Mississippi Review Prize Stories, Nimrod’s Prize Stories, Croatia’s Zarez, and on New York Public Radio and NPR’s This American Life. She lives in San Francisco, where she’s finishing up a collection of stories and beginning work on a novel.

Lee Romer Kaplan spent her early years in Berkeley, California and Northern Israel. While studying at Haifa University, she taught theater and literary arts as conflict mediation tools in a program for Muslim, Jewish and Christian youth. She’s performed, written and directed shows with theater companies in the US, Israel, and Europe. In addition to an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College, Lee holds a law degree from University of California at Berkeley, and practiced as a civil rights and poverty lawyer for five years before returning to the arts. For now, she lives in New York City, teaches writing at Borough of Manhattan Community College and is on the teaching artist roster at Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Her upcoming debut novel, The Flight of the Lesser Kestrel, takes place primarily in Jerusalem during the first Lebanon War.

The 2012 Sozopol Fiction Seminar: May 24 – 27

Ten scholarships, valued at approximately $1,600 each, will be available to attend the 2012 Sozopol Fiction Seminars in Sozopol, Bulgaria. Funding will support five fiction writers working in English and five fiction writers working in Bulgarian. Scholarships will cover tuition fees, room and board, in-country transportation, and 50% of international travel expenses. Writers of any nationality are eligible to apply.

• Application deadline is March 7, 2012.

• For more information, or to apply, please visit the EKF Website.

• 2012  faculty members: Elizabeth Kostova (US), Barry Lopez (US), Deyan Enev (BG), and Krassimir Damianov (BG/ES).

Along the Black Sea in Sozopol / credit Jeremiah Chamberlin

Each spring the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation selects five English speaking writers and five Bulgarian writers to participate in the Sozopol Fiction Seminar, which takes places in the tiny, historic town of Sozopol, Bulgaria, on the Black Sea. In 2009 I was lucky enough to be chosen as one of the fellows, along with now Contributing Editor Steven Wingate. That journey was chronicled in an essay entitled “Literary Life on the Black Sea,” which FWR published later that summer. The following year, we asked the English speaking fellows if they would be willing to compile a similar essay reflecting on their trip to Bulgaria to participate in 2010 seminar. Those individuals were Kelly Luce, Carin Clevidence, Charles Conley, and Paul Vidich. You can read about their experiences here.

In what has now become an annual tradition, FWR is happy to present the literary contribution’s from this year’s English speaking fellows, which we’ll publish in two parts this week:

Part One:
• “Meeting the Ambassador,” by John Struloeff
• “Embroidery and Home,” by Jane E. Martin
• “The Walk,” by Michael Hinken

Part Two:

• “Some Thoughts on Translation: A Conversation with Miroslav Penkov,” by Molly Antopol
• “Stealing Poetry: Why We Write and, Sometimes, Why We Don’t,” by Lee Romer Kaplan

I was also lucky enough to have been invited back to the 2011 seminar as a guest and panelist, for which I am grateful. We hope you enjoy this year’s retrospective!

Meeting the Ambassador:

by John Struloeff

John Struloeff / credit Jeremiah Chamberlin

After more than twenty-four hours of travel from my home near Los Angeles, a wild taxi ride from the airport (what’s the word for ‘turbocharged’ in Bulgarian?), and only minutes after checking in to the Diter Hotel in Sofia, Simona Ilieva, the Assistant Director of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, which sponsors the Sozopol Fiction Seminars each year, called my room to say it was time to meet the U.S. Ambassador to Bulgaria. This was our first official event for the 2011 Seminar. I was honored by the invitation, of course, but I still hadn’t determined why an ambassador would want to meet me and a small group of emerging writers. So, red-eyed but exhilarated, I packed my satchel and met the early arrivals in the lobby.

In my delirium I only recall hazy images from that first walk through the capital city to the ambassador’s residence: cobblestone streets, intersections that angle oddly in the Old Europe style so that you’re always rounding a building’s corner, people crossing streets and brushing past my shoulder, gray stone and old trees, the whir and bell of a trolley passing behind, a large park with an enormous Soviet Army monument darkly splitting the sky between trees. It was a rejuvenating walk, the weather warm, a nice breeze, blue sky.

We eventually stopped in front of two men wearing black suits and sunglasses. The embassy security detail. Beside them, an iron gate led through a high cement wall into a courtyard. Inside was what seemed like a small park, with a manicured lawn, a scattering of shade trees, a few benches and small tables. Facing the yard was a large manor house, shades drawn from the long span of windows to show artwork hanging on the walls inside.

James Warlick, the ambassador, greeted us right away with a smile and a handshake, followed by a woman with a tray of cold water and cola. Mr. Warlick was a pleasant man in his fifties who had served as Principal Advisor to Paul Bremer in Baghdad, as well as the Counsel General in Moscow. He was well dressed in a pressed white shirt, a tie, and slacks, and he seemed very interested in what we wrote, what the life of a writer was like, what brought writers together in the U.S. He talked about how his own writing was storytelling, but in a different way, and he was curious about how we looked at story writing. I began to see how an ambassador worked – listening and connecting.

The conversations in the courtyard grew, with laughter and the greeting of old and new friends. Soon there were more than a dozen of us, and so Mr. Warlick suggested we gather in a circle to introduce ourselves. Elizabeth Kostova, fresh from a television interview and dressed smartly in a skirt and jacket, welcomed us all and said how much she was looking forward to the workshops and discussions in the week to come, and the rest of us followed: Angela Rodel from Southern California who had married a Bulgarian and has been translating Bulgarian to English for over fifteen years; Svetlozar Zhelev, the publisher of the biggest publishing house in Bulgaria; Ivan Landzhev, a screenwriter for Bulgaria’s top TV show; Jane E. Martin from Montreal who wrote tech manuals and short stories; Ivan Dimitrov, a Bulgarian Fellow from last year who just wanted to continue the discussion; Jeremiah Chamberlin, the head of the English Department Writing Program at University of Michigan; me, the director of creative writing at Pepperdine University in California.

As the introductions continued, I began to recognize the experience and breadth of professional talent that had been gathered here. I had come to Bulgaria to continue my work on a biographical novel about the spiritual transformation of Leo Tolstoy, with the hope of receiving insights from others who cared about the literature of this part of the world. I wanted to hear what my work sounded like from a person in another culture and language, to hear from people as serious about this pursuit as I was. More than anything, I think, I wanted to see if my work could engage writers and publishers in another part of the world. With the conclusion of the introductions, I was excited to begin this conversation – to be heard as an artist, but also to listen.

Ivan Landzhev Reading / credit Jeremiah Chamberlin

Three days later, when workshops began at the seaside town of Sozopol, where we’d spend a week immersed in sharing our work and listening to lectures and attending readings, I’d find those other readers. Not just in the English-speaking fellows who had come from the US and Canada to attend the seminar, but also during our first of two public readings, when a selection of the novel, which had been translated by Angela Rodel, would be read in Bulgarian by my roommate, Ivan Landzhev. Each of us was paired – one English-speaking fellow with one Bulgarian fellow – so that all of us had the chance to read our own work, and then to hear that same work in the other language. I had never had that experience before – not only to have a professional translator carefully translate my writing, but then to have another person read it just as carefully. My novel opens with a very intense and graphic scene about the death of one of Tolstoy’s neighbors, and it was fascinating to hear Ivan’s Bulgarian intonations and to see the rapt attention of the audience. In that moment, the writing was my own, but curiously not my own. I know very little Bulgarian, yet I could see the connection that was growing between the audience and my work as Ivan read. And the other short stories and novel excerpts were all vivid and so well written – I really didn’t expect how memorable and meaningful this part of our stay would be.

But back at the ambassador’s house, this was still to come. And when we were then invited into the ambassador’s home, where there was an array of paintings and sculptures from around Bulgaria, we started the first of many conversations that would take place over the next week. Within an hour I had gone from weary and feeling very much on the other side of the Earth, to feeling the openness and friendship growing in this circle, set by Elizabeth’s incredibly warm presence. We began to joke and tell our stories and open our lives and art to one another. Within a week, this group would become a close-knit and beautifully complex mix of artists and publishers and translators from a variety of different cultures, and I would learn from them more than I expected – about the art of translation, about the complicated forces in the international publishing world – and I would find true friends. By the end of my stay, it was clear why an ambassador would want us to visit his home, and also why Elizabeth had created her foundation: because of the power of art to connect us.

2011 Sozopol Fiction Seminar Fellows. In back, from left: Ivan Landzhev (BG), Molly Antopol (US), Lee Romer Kaplan (US), Jane E. Martin (CA), Rayko Baychev (BG). Front row, from left: Michael Hinken (US), Yana Punkina (BG), John Struloeff (US), Petja Heinrich (BG). Not pictured: Paullina Petrova (BG). Photo credit Jeremiah Chamberlin

Embroidery and Home:

by Jane E. Martin

Jane E. Martin / credit Jeremiah Chamberlin

Each day during the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, after our morning fiction workshop and before the afternoon lecture, I visited a woman selling traditional Bulgarian embroideries in Old Town. I nearly walked past her the first day. I was headed toward the docks and she was the last artisan before the pathway to the water. Her work stood out—the embroideries hung on clotheslines and blew in the breeze. As well, they were beautiful. I paused briefly, only for a beat or two, because I was determined to get to the water. But that was enough. The old woman rose from her chair and crossed the walkway. She moved easily, lightly—though, I wouldn’t have guessed that she could when she’d been sitting.

Over the next ten minutes, she watched me examine her work more closely. I touched one piece, admired the stitching and patterning of another. She had a lot to say about each, in Bulgarian, a language I don’t understand, and I had many words of praise —“So beautiful”; “I love this one”—which, though she spoke no English, she did seem to understand. She folded one of the embroideries I’d been looking at and put it in a plastic bag for me, as though I’d agreed to buy it. I laughed. She pulled out a weathered piece of cardboard on which the numbers 1 to 100 were handwritten. She pointed to a number, a price, and I pointed to a smaller number. She then referred me to the elaborate lacing on her work. I felt like an ass. I’d also felt like an ass a few days before, when I’d learned that a taxi driver had charged me twice the normal rate for a ride from the airport to downtown (“the English speaker’s tax,” a new Bulgarian friend suggested). And, in the end, decisions make me nervous, so I couldn’t buy an embroidery without thinking more about whether I should. “I’ll come back,” I said to the old woman. “I’ll come back.”

Woman selling embroideries in old town of Sozopol / Photo credit Jane E. Martin

Later that day, as we gathered inside an old school that had been converted into an art gallery, where our afternoon lectures took place, my Bulgarian friends told me that the price the woman had requested was reasonable. They also told me that in the past, many such women sold embroideries on clotheslines in Old Town. Now that Sozopol was becoming increasingly developed, these women were scarce. They had been replaced by shops and cafés, by street vendors selling crafts one might find in any city of the world. I wanted to run to the old woman right then. I wanted to give her the price she’d asked for, to show her, through decisiveness and lack of protest, that her work was worth this amount, worth much much more. I hoped she would be in her spot the following day. “She will be,” my friends told me.

The lecturer that afternoon was the Bulgarian-born German author Ilya Troyanov. He told us about Sir Richard Burton, a British explorer he had always admired, who had once taken a particularly momentous journey. Troyanov had retraced his hero’s steps so that he could write about the journey in his novel The Collector of Worlds. Back in Montréal, where I’ve lived for nearly two years now, I’d been doing my own retracing. My grandmother lived in a small farming village before she and her family—along with a million other Québécois—left Canada for the United States for a better life. My six other great-grandparents had done the same, years earlier. I hadn’t known much about French-Canadian history until recently—or that marveling openly over its more polarizing or debated events, at parties, on the metro, at work, was not always a popular thing to do in Canada. As a French-Canadian whose first language was English, I hadn’t yet figured out how to integrate comfortably into any particular community in my new home.

Shopping for embroidery in old town of Sozopol / Photo credit Michael Hinken

The next day, I bought an embroidery from the old woman. The piece I’d really had my eye on during my previous visit, however, was gone. I tried to ask—through histrionic gestures—whether it had been sold. “Come back,” she said to me, remembering my words from the day before. “Come back.”

I did return again, the next day, with two other American fellows. The old woman sat in the shade of a building, working on an embroidery as we approached. She looked up and in an instant was beside us. “Zdrasty,” I said to her. “Hello.” From a box that lay before the clothesline, she removed the piece that I’d been especially drawn to the first day. I bought it, and another. My friends bought embroideries, too. The woman clasped her hands together and laughed. I held a hand out to her and she pressed it between her two. “I’m going to teach you Bulgarian,” she told me. (My friends, Russian speakers, were able to translate for me.) We stood there, the old woman and I, my hand between hers, as I repeated the Bulgarian words she wanted me to know: sutrin, vecher, nosht, dovizhdane—morning, evening, night, goodbye.

I didn’t want to leave her. I loved that she understood a different time and life and that for hours each day, she sat alone and quietly reconstructed part of that world in her work. I loved that she persisted amidst unexpected shifts—even though occasionally, perhaps, she felt like an outsider. And that despite this, she was warm, and seemed happy. This old woman made me feel welcomed.

Selecting embroidery in old town of Sozopol / Photo credit Michael Hinken

And so I was sad to leave her company, but comforted that I would bring an embroidery or two—some representation of her vision—back home with me to Québec.

The Walk:

by Michael Hinken

Michael Hinken / credit Jeremiah Chamberlin

I had been in Sozopol for three days, in Bulgaria for four, and my sleeping habits had yet to normalize. On the morning of that fourth day, I awoke early, listening to the odd, pained cries of the seagulls outside the balcony, their calls sounding vaguely feline at times, sometimes vaguely human. Realizing I was wide awake, I decided to get up and walk into the city to mail some postcards and stick my feet in the Black Sea before embarking on a day of workshops, roundtables and seminars.

This morning, with the early sunlight on the tops of buildings and nobody about, it’s pretty quiet. A long, short-legged red dog pauses in the middle of the sidewalk to sniff something, then moves on. I think I’ve seen that dog every day since I’ve been here, definitely the day before, when one of the writing fellows, John, and I made our way down to the beach. In the plaza past the post office, women in orange reflective vests sweep the cobblestones with half brooms. The souvenir stands are setting up. In the plaza, under a façade with the city’s name and some lines—probably historical—engraved below in Cyrillic, there’s a bench built into the wall. Yesterday a dozen or so men sat in row, talking or just sitting in the afternoon sun with their canes and hats and slacks rising above their old shins. “There’s the city council,” John said. “The old guard.” I added. Now the bench is empty.

Approaching the Beach in Sozopol / credit Jeremiah Chamberlin

I walk through the park, past the ancient church, past the fountain of many small brown smooth stones the size of golf balls, down the steps and to the sea. There’s that crystalline light that you get by the water, that tang on the breeze. And below, on the beach, rows of metal contraptions like skeletons of beach umbrellas, waiting, I suppose, for some canvas to be thrown over them and make them umbrellas. I walk between the rows down to the water, take off my shoes, and wade in. Not bad. I thought it would be colder. I walk along where the water joins the shore. I meet a jogger coming the other way, an old man with ruffled, swept-back hair. He’s stringy and tanned and wearing the smallest yet somehow the saggiest bathing suit I have ever seen. He jogs past, a gold disc on a chain bouncing in his sparse, fluffy gray chest hair. I nod at him as he passes, and think, here’s a guy who runs on the beach every day.

Farther on, I sit on a sofa pushed against the concrete wall of an empty concession stand and make some notes on the past few days, the discussion of translation from the day before, ideas from my workshop, things I want to remember. After a few minutes, I look up and there’s the old guy. He’s standing on a rock in the shallow surf doing these stretches, or maybe poses, some improvised personal version of Tai chi. This goes on for a while—this little bronzed guy doing exercises in the sea. I have one of those telescoping moments: I am sitting on a red sofa, on this beach, near the Black Sea, in Sozopol, in Bulgaria, in Europe. I am watching a guy on a rock. Then he jumps. But it’s not some ordinary, point-A-to-point-B jump. Not at all. It’s something graceful, suspended. He catches some air. The act seems both spontaneous and performed—as if it was supposed to look like something, but only he knew what. And then he’s on the ground running again.

Overlooking the Sea in Sozopol / credit Jeremiah Chamberlin

As I walk back from the beach, past an open-air bar called Captain Jack’s where “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” blares from the speakers, I am thinking of something one of my professors said years ago. It was a simple line and it has stuck with me; it explains travel and probably the impulse to the travel narrative: We travel to see things we can’t see at home. Home for me is Peoria, Illinois, where men grow old in the air-conditioned cabs of farm machinery or behind desks at Caterpillar, Inc., and where there are no beaches to run on, just flat miles of soybeans and corn. The small odd moment of the old guy on the rock is something I had to leave home to see, which may explain why I keep thinking about it. I have no idea why the guy made that little leap, or why it made an impression on me.

Later that day, at his reading and craft talk, the writer Rana Dasgupta would speak about “writing from ignorance.” This impulse was, in part, what led him to write his second novel, Solo, which is set in Bulgaria. “Aside from Albania,” he said, “Bulgaria is the least known country in the European Union. And not only is it the least known, but you are told by inference through a general lack of its coverage in the global media, that there is nothing there worth knowing about.”

In his discussion, Dasgupta went on to draw a distinction between a culture of experts and a culture of ignorance, suggesting that writers ought to question established knowledge, the knowledge of the experts. “Established knowledge builds and supports institutions. To challenge established knowledge is to be ignorant, and this position of ignorance about the world is a much more interesting place from which to write.”

Rana Dasgupta (left) with translator Boris Deliradev / credit Jeremiah Chamberlin

That a writer should write from ignorance rather than authority is a claim that may be hard to accept at first. In fact, a murmur rose from the writers and translators and editors in the room that evening when Dasgupta made his assertion, and one person, during the Q&A that followed, even pressed him further on this point. As much as the idea seems counterintuitive, something about it resonated with my thoughts about writing and on traveling.

I thought first of advice from Anne Lamott’s fun and wise book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. In it, she says that somewhere along the line we adults lose the capacity to inhabit that worldview most of us have as children, which amounts to, essentially, “Wow, look at that crazy bird” and “check out that humongous tree.” Being young, lacking experience with birds and trees and the world, we were constantly in wonder at the most ordinary things—pigeons and cranes and seagulls, ginkgos and cedars and huge spreading oaks. Lamott suggests that writers try to recapture that child’s-eye view, to push through the dulling of the senses that comes with encountering your nine hundredth pigeon and really see that iridescent rat-with-wings.

Lamott’s idea of recovering the child’s eye links up with the concept of defamiliarization put forth by twentieth century Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky in the essay “Art as Technique.” In it, he asserts: “Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. ‘If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been’ (Tolstoy). And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.”

To make that stone stony, writers must set aside the abstractions of repetition and experience and see it anew, make it new. In essence, as Dasgupta suggested, writers need to be willfully ignorant of not only the established knowledge of institutions—media, governments, history—but also that established, accumulated knowledge stored in oneself.

And what better way to do this than travel? As an American in Bulgaria, largely ignorant of the culture, the language, I came into contact with defamiliarized moments constantly, moments when the familiar became strange, whether it was hearing Pink Floyd outside Captain Jack’s or watching the Tai chi guy leaping into the surf. To be abroad is to be surrounded by the strange, to be a stranger. This ignorance and strangeness comprise that which is so fundamental to art, to writing, and that is the ability to cut through the tyranny of the everyday, the blunting of our world rendered by familiarity, and to see as if for the first time.

2011 Sozopol Fiction Seminar Participants / credit Jeremiah Chamberlin

John Struloeff grew up in the mountainous rainforests of northwestern Oregon. His debut poetry collection, The Man I Was Supposed to Be, was published by Loom Press in 2008, with individual poems in The Atlantic Monthly, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, ZYZZYVA, PN Review, and elsewhere. His awards include a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, an NEA Literature Fellowship, and both the Weldon Kees and Tennessee Williams Scholarships. He has taught at Stanford University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he received both his MA and PhD in English. Currently he directs the creative writing program at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California.

Jane E. Martin earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan, and before that, an MA in Drama from Tufts University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, and Prairie Fire (Canada). She was recently a Fulbright Scholar at McGill University and currently lives and works in Montréal.

Michael Hinken has taught English in the Russian Far East, covered municipal news in central Illinois, and now teaches composition and creative writing at the University of Michigan, where he received an MFA in Creative Writing in 2004. He was a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown during 2007-08. His short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in the Tampa Review, River City, West Branch and Third Coast, and his essays have appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Elysian Fields Quarterly, and the Peoria Journal Star. He is working on a short story collection and a novel. He is also a contributor to Fiction Writers Review.

The 2012 Sozopol Fiction Seminar: May 24 – 27

Ten scholarships, valued at approximately $1,600 each, will be available to attend the 2012 Sozopol Fiction Seminars in Sozopol, Bulgaria. Funding will support five fiction writers working in English and five fiction writers working in Bulgarian. Scholarships will cover tuition fees, room and board, in-country transportation, and 50% of international travel expenses. Writers of any nationality are eligible to apply.

• Application deadline is March 7, 2012.

• For more information, or to apply, please visit the EKF Website.

• 2012 faculty members: Elizabeth Kostova (US), Barry Lopez (US), Deyan Enev (BG), and Krassimir Damianov (BG/ES).

In this auspicious moment, Penkov delivers a heck of a book. Its bold subtitle promises us broad cross-sections of Bulgarian society, and he resists commonplace post-Communist sentimentality to show us a broad range of Bulgarian society—older generations who leave themselves behind in the face of change, younger generations that lose their way, people who leave home and come back changed, people who leave home and never come back at all. Penkov gives us specific, intimately drawn glimpses into the various Bulgarian species of this thing we call the human condition, and he does it with a well-honed style that is not merely ornamental.

Since the book’s subtitle invokes a nation and its history, it’s fitting that history plays a key supporting role in Penkov’s dramas, and he finds a variety of ways to invoke that history. The title story, about a man’s failed attempt to reach out to a beloved cousin, unfolds around the Serbian-Croatian conflict at the turn of the millennium. “The Night Horizon” conjures up the ghost of hostility between Bulgaria and Turkey, the nation that occupied it for centuries. “Buying Lenin,” which appeared in The Southern Review and Best American Short Stories 2008, gives us a Bulgarian émigré to America who buys Lenin’s preserved body on eBay for his grandfather back home. “A Picture with Yuki” wades into the problematic relationship between Bulgarians and gypsies.

This variety helps keep East of the West from covering the same ground over and over. Sometimes history remains silent and inscrutable, sometimes it’s an ever-present roadblock that must be danced around, and sometimes it weighs so heavily on people that they significantly limit their life choices. The seventy-one-year-old narrator of “Makedonija,” who has the broadest perspective on Bulgarian history of all the characters in the book, becomes as haunted by old letters from his dying wife’s long-ago first love as he is by his own memories of war.

I’ve seen men with their eyes gouged out. Men close to me, barefooted, with wrists tied together behind their backs. Hanged on the village square for everyone to see. As I lie in bed, eyes shut tightly, I still hear the rope creaking when the bodies sway, and I can hear the sound the bodies make swaying.

Image courtesy Paul Eliasberg

History, invoked in this way, metes out ancestral punishment on those who get caught beneath its steamroller by circumstance. In “The Night Horizon,” an obsessive Turkish-bagpipe maker foists a male name (Kemal) onto his daughter so that she can “properly” carry on his family craft. After all Turks are ordered to take Bulgarian names, he is taken away from his home (whether to imprisonment or death we never know) and his daughter takes up his ethno-historical conflict:

Sometimes Kemal took her bagpipe above the village to play with the echo. Once, she saw cars on the road below her, bumper to bumper, with mattresses, chairs, wooden cribs roped to the tops—blue, green, yellow, red cars, blood flowing away from the mountain…. Down the slope she watched people from the upper hamlets haul their households on their backs like camels…. Pots and pans and spoons and ladles and metal plates jumping wildly and catching the sun like gold coins. So Kemal struck her song with the bagpipe…

The characters in East of the West each have their own historical burdens to bear, and individuals—or families, like the one in the title story that gets torn apart because of a daughter’s love for a man across the river in Serbia—can’t carry them for very long. In “Cross Thieves,” which unfolds in 1997 as “once again the government has fallen,” Bulgarian history becomes a kind of currency in itself:

Gogo and I steal things and sell them, mostly to Gramps. We snuck into the biology classroom and took the skull our teacher used for an ashtray. Later Gramps claimed he resold it as an authentic skull from the 1944 Communist uprising…. We’ve stolen coils of copper wire from the physics lab (a Soviet leftover from the ’68 Prague spring), a map of the Balkan Wars (vintage, first edition!) a globe (with the USSR still whole and strong). In Bulgaria today there is a black market for everything, it seems.

In this collection we also see—no surprise for a formerly Marxist country—history manifesting itself as class conflict. In “The Letter,” a girl steals from an older compatriot woman who has learned English and, after marrying a British businessman, basks in relative luxury in a small village. The people identify Missis, as she is called, as being “British” because she has taken on a new identity. “This is how you learn your English,” she tells the young thief. “This is how you marry Mister and live rich.” Class conflict also shows up in “A Picture with Yuki,” in which the phrase “class enemy” is used the traditional Marxist way, as well as in “Devshirmeh,” where a down-and-out emigre to Texas watches his daughter disappear into a higher social class because his ex-wife marries an expat Bulgarian doctor.

In Penkov’s work we see class and history affecting the lives of almost everyone, and the English language often appears, like it does in “The Letter,” as a dividing line. It is part of the complex negotiation with Bulgarian-ness, foreign-ness, and the ever-present issue of social class. The elderly protagonist of “Makedonija” tells us, “I listen to the English and all the words sound like a single word to me, a word devoid of history and meaning, completely free.” The émigré narrator of “Buying Lenin” “memorized words and grammar rules and practiced tongue twisters, specifically designed for Eastern Europeans…. Remember the money, remember the money, remember the money. Phrases like this, I’d heard, helped to break your tongue.”

Perhaps Penkov’s best and most crystalline expression of Bulgarian-ness comes in “Devshiermeh,” the final story in the collection (and, as is often the case with first books, the longest). Émigré narrator Mihail (Americanized, to his annoyance, as Michael even by his Bulgarian ex-wife) takes his daughter Elli for the weekend and goes fishing with a fellow ne’er-do-well friend named John Martin:

“Yad, John Martin,” I explain, “is what lines the insides of every Bulgarian soul. It’s yad that propels us, like a motor, onward. Yad is like envy, but it’s not simply that. It’s like spite, rage, anger, but more elegant, more complicated. It’s like pity for someone, regret for something you did or did not do, for a chance you missed, for an opportunity you squandered. All those feelings in one word. Yad….”

Though yad might not line every Bulgarian soul, it aptly describes the free-floating tension that filters through the psyches of Penkov’s characters. Yad accounts for their endless wrestling with their national identity, so strong that it survives crossing borders and cutting off ties to the past. A great quality of Penkov’s stories is the sudden—but, in retrospect, inevitable—emergence of his characters’ destinies. At their halfway or two-thirds points the stories turn, and around that corner its people fall inextricably into the nest they have made.

This is expressed most beautifully in “A Picture with Yuki,” in which a Bulgarian/Japanese couple living in Chicago travel to Bulgaria to seek fertility treatments—a return, for the husband, fraught with all the wrestling over foreign-ness and Bulgarian-ness that his yad can handle. During a drive to the country, they may or may not hit a gypsy boy on a bicycle, who later falls into a coma and dies. The boy’s father, not knowing their possible role in this death, asks the couple to take a picture of the dead child for his nekrolog—a death announcement to be posted at the cemetery gates.

The gypsies bring the boy outside and prop him up on pillows to take his picture, then invite the couple to stay for dinner. The couple never mentions the bicycle accident, and afterwards the weight of their uncertain guilt threatens to demolish their relationship and rebuild it around what is unspoken. In moments like this, Penkov’s work supersedes the confines of any national literature and presents us as we are—with our worries, with our yad, with our furtive gropings toward meaning—no matter how much we may wish to be some other way.

Further Links & Resources

• Check out other FWR pieces on Bulgarian literature.
• Here’s an interview with Penkov in The Dallas Observer’s book blog.
• Read an archive of Penkov’s work on Blackbird.
• Penkov offers a list of how to write about Bulgaria in GRANTA.

Grass opens with a seemingly straightforward scene – his eight grown children, gathered at his request around the kitchen table of his home near Lübeck. There’s a tape recorder, and the idea is for his children to talk about their father, who has just turned eighty. But things begin to shift and slide when the narrator, Grass, admits that his children will be using “words he has put into their mouths.” And few pages later, he introduces Maria and her magic camera, which  “takes pictures of things that aren’t there.”

With these conceits, Grass ostensibly records his children’s version of his story over numerous recording sessions, each of which is a different chapter. These take place at different homes of Grass and his children, in assorted parts of Germany, with various permutations of his children present. The chapters are bookended with brief comments from Grass (rather, Grass writing the character Grass). The story is presented in vérité style, without quotation marks or any formal indication of who is saying what. It reads like an unedited oral history transcript.

Grass’ children, several of whom are well past middle age themselves, reminisce about their childhoods, meandering through their father’s post-war years, forming a composite of his life as he achieved literary superstardom in Germany and beyond. As his children recount, their childhoods weren’t particularly tragic or abusive; they were mostly dysfunctional, with lots of longing for their father’s interest and attention. As they grow up, some of the children are unaware of the existence of their half brothers and sisters. At one point, they recall Grass moving back in with his first wife, sharing a home with two of their children and his wife’s Romanian lover; they eventually divide the house like the nearby Berlin Wall. For the most part, Grass is absent, distracted, or otherwise engaged. “He wasn’t a play-father,” says one of his children.

Marie is introduced early on, nonchalantly, as the children pass around family photos at one of their recording sessions. She’s based on a real person – a family friend who was a photographer – and The Box is dedicated to her. As the children meander and reminisce their way through Grass’ post-war years, Marie and her magic camera are omnipresent and omniscient. She sees much of the confusion and turmoil firsthand, but her camera penetrates deeper. It produces prints that see the past, the future, alternate versions of the present, and the deepest wishes of its subjects. Its unique powers, along with Marie’s ubiquity, allow her to see the confusion and turmoil caused by Grass’ mental and physical restlessness.  “My box is like the good lord: It sees all that was, that is, and that will be.”

As the children describe them, Marie’s photographs depict innocent fantasies, latent desires, melancholy wishes, and stark alternate realities. There are shots of Joggi, the dog, expertly navigating the Berlin U-Bahn. There are shots of Grass’ daughter Lara and her friends, naked, walking the Kudamm in Berlin. There are shots of a family trip to Brittany that depict the children as young soldiers wearing steel helmets and gas masks among the ruined, long-abandoned battlements, looking not unlike Grass did during the war.

Marie has a different relationship with Grass, and the prints from her magic camera often supply the raw materials for his writing, especially his work after debut novel and international sensation The Tin Drum (1959). The children remember the Stone Age pictures the camera produced that formed the basis of Grass’ 1977 novel The Flounder. They recall it supplying research for The Meeting at Telgte (1979), set during the 30 Years War.

For Telgte, Grass takes the pictures himself, shooting a concrete parking lot. “Because, he said, in this very spot a good three hundred years ago stood the Brückenhof, which will be the scene of the action.”  The prints depict outbuildings and barns with thatched roofs, portrait photos of historical figures at the real Telgte meeting.  “He wanted the box to help him rewind,” one of Grass’ children says. “Historical snapshots,” says another.

Günter Grass is obsessed with the past and has spent a lifetime attempting to come to terms with it. There’s a German word for this: Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which literally translated means “managing the past,” and usually refers specifically to the Holocaust. This fuels his compulsion to write. It’s the desire to understand the role his friends, his family, his fellow citizens – and Grass himself – played in this crime. It’s the desire to make a new German society. This isn’t unique to Grass – many post-Nazi German writers fall into this category – but he is easily the most famous.

The Box was preceded by Peeling the Onion (2006), which offered a linear – though lyrical – account of his childhood, war years, and early literary success. In it, Grass revealed that he was drafted into the Waffen SS and saw limited action in a tank unit at the end of the Second World War. Long a critic of ex-Nazi participation in German politics, and perhaps the leading cultural voice calling for Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the book prompted a firestorm of controversy that tainted Grass’ reputation. Mild critics called him a hypocrite, while others called for the Nobel laureate to return his prize. Grass kept his prize and continued to work.

Peeling the Onion is what one might call a typical memoir. There are times when you think Grass might be spinning a yarn: Was the Joseph he met in a POW camp, the Joseph who Grass said sounded like a “grand inquisitor” and quoted Saint Augustine when he beat him at dice, was this really Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict? Still, in relation to other memoirs, it’s not off the charts. In fact, as a reader, you’re always waiting for Grass to…well, be Grass. But he earns and keeps your trust. Perhaps he chose strategy this because of the book’s dynamite revelations. If you’ve positioned yourself as the moral compass of post-war Germany, and you’re going to disclose that you were part of the Waffen SS, Marie and her magic camera aren’t going to help you. This was one case where Grass wasn’t going to play around with the past.

In The Box, I first thought that Grass was being diabolical, using Marie as an elaborate joke that his children play on him as they reminisce, telling him a tall tale as revenge for him making a career of it. One of the children says: “It’s possible even we, sitting here and talking, are just figments of his imagination – what do you think?” Of course, this is Grass writing in his children’s voice, so this is actually true.

Grass – well, the character of Grass – adds fuel to the fire in one of the chapter bookends,  cryptically stating: “Yes, children, I know: being a father is only an assertion, one that has to be constantly corroborated. That is why, to make you believe me, I must lie.”

But Grass is also a writer who once said, “If I say potato, I mean potato.” It’s hard to take him seriously on this point, given his oeuvre is peppered with talking animals; a child who wills himself to stop growing and possesses the superpower-like ability to use his voice as a weapon; and the aforementioned magic camera.

But permit me to twist the phrase a bit: “If I say talking dog, I mean talking dog.” “If I say self-created little person with super powers, I mean self-created little person with super powers.” “If I say magic camera, I mean magic camera.”

Maybe there’s something to this. Let’s apply it to The Tin Drum, Grass’ first novel. He claimed that the only way he would really convey the story of the rise of Nazism and its wake of destruction was to do it from the point of view as a child; this necessitated one that never aged, had the faculties of an adult, and while a little crazy and unreliable, provided an utterly unique perspective.

Marie’s camera is a device that allows Grass to explore the issues of past, present, and future that have always confounded him. Think of it this way: Grass was largely an absent father, but here he is writing about Marie and her nearly omniscient knowledge of his children. He must know something about his children to write a character who knows nearly all this is to know about them:

But you, Nanette, she managed to capture with her box even when I could not be with you, but in my thoughts was right there, holding your little hand that completely disappeared into mine. Mariechen knew our wishes, after all. That made it possible for me to be near you when you had dropped your house key or your pocket money again. I helped you look; it was a long way between home and school. Cold, I would say, warm, warmer, warmer, hot … And sometimes more turn up than had been lost. The pleasure we both took in found objects.

So, the father knows his children after all. The Box is how Grass sees his children (via Marie and her magic camera, Grass’ creation) and it’s Grass imagining how his kids see him (via Grass writing in their voices). He’s a fair and often critical assessor of his behaviors and their impact. The children try to work out what drives him, and it’s clear early on that they’re aware of his preternatural drive, one that’s more powerful than any other force in his life: the pursuit of truth, the reconciliation of past, present, and future. “That’s just how he is. Always was. I have to work through it, he said.”

In the end, I came to believe just about everything in The Box except for Marie’s magic camera. I suppose I could attempt to corroborate the real biographies of his eight children with those that are recounted here. But those are the details that he had no need to make up. As for the magic camera, it’s incidental as well. The point of The Box, at least to me, is that the octogenarian Grass needs to believe that despite all of the family turmoil he’s caused, that his children understand that he was compelled by a greater power – namely, the quest for truth. By writing in a realistic way (despite the magic camera) how his children could come to this understanding and acceptance about their father, perhaps he’s really giving them a blueprint to follow in real life. Or, at the very least, he’s making his case.

According to The Box, Grass’s children, by and large, turned out fine. Professionally, they are successful. Personally, they seem happy. Their childhoods were, like other childhoods, bittersweet, though certainly more tumultuous than most. The world is richer for Grass’ work, but there was a cost. The Box is tragic in this respect, because for a man obsessed with making sense of the past, he now has to account for his own, and there’s more than a tinge of regret. It’s not an apology to his children – as far as Grass is concerned, there’s nothing to apologize for – but it does offer an explanation:  Sure, I could have been around more, but the time we spent, wasn’t it magical?

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The gradual accumulation of detail and story is Ondaatje’s preferred narrative structure; the effect of the jumps from scene to scene and the uneven length of these snapshots of life during the voyage fragment the story even as glimpses of conversation, of interactions first half-described and later completed, tie it together. One effect of this technique is to reveal the characters as mutable figures—just when you think you know who someone is, they may act in a way that’s surprising. And because The Cat’s Table is narrated in the first person from the boy Michael’s perspective, when characters surprise us they often surprise him, and we feel the inherent unreliability of anyone’s understanding of anyone else.

I didn’t even know to expect a new novel from Ondaatje until the galley was in my hands. The best kind of surprise—unlooked for, and so all the more valuable. And as I prepared to write this review, something about The Cat’s Table tugged at me. I flipped through some of his other books. It seemed like the right time to re-read Anil’s Ghost, given recent events in Sri Lanka. And there it was: Anil, a forensic pathologist, works with the archaeologist Sarath on a ship in the Colombo harbor. Once a luxury liner, it is now overflow office space. The name of the ship is the Oronsay. As Ondaatje’s writing combines and repeats images, themes, and references, it makes sense to discuss The Cat’s Table in the context of his greater body of work.

2.
I have always loved Ondaatje’s writing for his beautiful sentences and his indelible images, but also for his huge imagination. Larger-than-life plots abound in Ondaatje novels, and even if a reader balks at accepting their plausibility, the descriptions of the events are so entrancing, so bizarre and wonderful, that they have a kind of metaphorical truth. For example, the thief Caravaggio’s escape from prison in In the Skin of Lion by painting himself blue and blending into the prison roof:  “They daubed his clothes and then, laying a strip of handkerchief over his eyes, painted his face blue, so he was gone—to the guards who looked up and saw nothing there.” Or the Bedouin rescuing the burned man in the desert in The English Patient, an “archangel” with a yoke of hundreds of glass bottles hanging from his neck rubs a tincture of ground peacock bones into the patient’s skin to help him heal. I think this is what people mean when they describe Ondaatje’s work as “haunting” in blurbs: the images resist evaporation. In The Cat’s Table, a fabulously wealthy passenger is traveling to England hoping to find a cure for rabies, which he got from a mad dog after a priest he had insulted cursed him. Another passenger keeps a collection of plants, many of them poisonous, under lamps in a hidden garden in the bowels of the ship. Perhaps none of Ondaatje’s inventions are really all that outlandish—in a world where giant squid, and the Lascaux caves, and the brutality of tens of thousands of murders in Sri Lanka actually exist, why should anything else seem surreal?

Over the breadth of Ondaatje’s work, there are two aspects of his narrative style that I love. The first is his juxtaposition of the large gesture with the small, everyday one. In The English Patient, the burned patient was once a man hopelessly in love who crashed his plane in the desert. But when the novel opens, his nurse, Hana, is simply feeding him. She “unskins the plum with her teeth, withdraws the stone and passes the flesh of the fruit into his mouth.”

In the Skin of a Lion, which may be my favorite of Ondaatje’s novels, follows Patrick Lewis, the future nurse Hana’s father, and his love affairs with two actresses, but the novel is as much about work, the hard, brutal work of the immigrant, as it is about love. Consider this scene when a nun falls off a half-built bridge:

The man in mid-air under the central arch saw the shape fall towards him, in that second knowing his rope would not hold them both. He reached to catch the figure while his other hand grabbed the metal pipe edge above him to lessen the sudden jerk on the rope. The new weight ripped the arm that held the pipe out of its socket and he screamed, so whoever might have heard him up there would have thought the scream was from the falling figure. The halter thulked, jerking his chest up to his throat. The right arm was all agony now—but his hand’s timing had been immaculate, the grace of the habit, and he found himself a moment later holding the figure against him dearly.

Contrast the drama of the nun’s fall with this passage:

Patrick did not speak. The light moved down her arm to the bowl, illuminated her hand which wet the cloth, squeezed it, and moved forward to give it to him. She saw his right hand reach to take it from her. His hand began to wipe her neck. He removed the brown paint, turned her around and slowly wiped the vermilion frown-mark by her mouth, the light close on her face. He rinsed out the cloth again and holding her forehead steady wiped the targets off her eyes, cloth over one finger for precision, the blue left iris wavering at the closeness…so that it was not Alice Gull but something more intimate—an eye muscle having to trust a fingertip to remove that quarter-inch of bright yellow around her sight.

The language, pacing, and tone that describe the nun’s fall and the makeup removal are so similar that they give both events a similar importance—and that’s the point. Critiques of Ondaatje maintain that this drama is all a little much. Although Ondaatje’s writing is somehow never truly sensational, neither is it the quiet revelation of William Trevor, or Alice Munro. As I was working on this essay I found it difficult to re-read Ondaatje’s works one after the other. The level of intensity so rarely drops, and the images ought to be savored, not inhaled, otherwise they subsume and overwhelm each other—taken all at once the work can seem like some kind of faintly lurid carnival show of wonders; read at a slower pace Ondaatje’s inventions and historical re-imaginings seem individually more wonderful.

To find the wonderful aspects, the beauty, in both history and work, is one of Ondaatje’s main undertakings.  In the Skin of a Lion follows characters through pushing logs downriver to a sawmill. When the logs jam the boy Patrick greases himself and dives into the water to places dynamite charges that will free them (“A river exploded behind him, the crows leafing up.”). The immigrant Nicholas Temelcoff swings from girders to build the Prince Edward Bridge in Toronto, (“He knows his position in the air as if he is mercury slipping across a map”), an earlier echo of Kip and Hana swinging in front of the Italian frescoes in that beautiful scene from The English Patient that made it into Anthony Minghella’s film adaption. Later, Patrick works as a leather-dyer: “men leapt waist-deep within the reds and ochres and greens, leapt in embracing the skins of recently slaughtered animals…And the men stepped out in colours up to their necks, pulling wet hides out after them so it appeared they had removed the skin from their own bodies.” In The English Patient, Count Almasy turns again and again to Herodotus, as if that text and its stories are the key to understanding his own life.

The second thing I love is Ondaatje’s willingness to leap, from scene to scene, moment to moment. This includes his jumpy, minimalist conversations. If you don’t know someone well, you may be a little uncomfortable around them, so you speak only briefly. If you know someone well, you don’t have to explain yourself, so you also speak briefly. Ondaatje’s characters often inhabit these two spaces. His leaps in point of view, time, image, and place are, of course, poetic. Ondaatje discusses this tendency in his own work in a new afterword to The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: “One could leap from terror to a close-up of a moth in a bowl, but there had to be some unspoken or hidden link between the two moments—to do with language perhaps or some small spark in a lyric that would lead to conflagration in the prose sequence that followed.”¹

Because of the commercial success of The English Patient, Ondaatje has avoided being labeled an “experimental” writer, yet his earlier books are relentlessly restless in the ways they combine images, their intertextuality, their fragmented narratives and sentences. Two books are especially jumpy and interwoven: The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) and Coming Through Slaughter (1976).

Of Billy, Ondaatje writes, “What if I tried to write a book that allowed all these angles and subjects and emotions, but they all came from one person? As far as I could see, one voice never really spoke only in one way: it contained multitudes.” The structure of these two books is like a camera panning in a circle. It moves around the main characters slowly, looking at them from all those different angles, occasionally darting away to interview a friend or a lover, a talking head in a documentary. We get glimpses of letters, interviews. Sometimes you can believe what the friends and lovers say, and sometimes you can’t. Slaughter is set in turn-of-the-century New Orleans, and follows cornet player Buddy Bolden’s rise and fall. Both books crash over the reader in waves. There is a willingness to loosen the threads of the narrative so much that the fabric is more transparent than opaque. Instead of reading for the resolution of the story, you’re reading for the scene, the moment. The story pauses, but only barely, pulled along by the shifts between those multitudes. And Ondaatje preserves aspects of this structure—its reliance on short scenes and shifts in points of view—in his later work. Both books also display Ondaatje’s interest, at times frightening even to him, in violence.

3.
Billy the Kid is, of course, one of the most violent figures in the early American imagination, and part of Ondaatje’s treatment of Billy is to rewrite the cartoonish figure he has become and to restore the horror of the actual shooting of other people. From there, the violence of the mind and of music, in Coming Through Slaughter, and the violence of love as well. In Ondaatje’s memoir, Running in the Family, he describes the violence of his father’s dipsomania,² and in The English Patient, the violence of love, the intimacy of wounding someone is a counterpoint to or expression of the guilt the characters both feel. In that book, only Kip and Hana escape violence in their relationship; perhaps it is displaced into the dangerous sapper’s work.

Anil’s Ghost, set in the early 1990s in Sri Lanka and published in 2000, is a litany, a report of violence. The civil war in Sri Lanka between the Sinhalese-controlled government and the Tamil minority, eventually represented by the Tamil Tigers, ended last year with the government’s massacre of tens of thousands of Tamil civilians. It began in the mid 1980s, and also involved a third group of antigovernment insurgents in the south of the country. The character Anil, a forensic pathologist who was born in Sri Lanka but who left to go to school in England and the US when she was fifteen, returns to the country on a human rights mission. There she becomes obsessed with discovering the identity of a single murder victim, a body she calls “Sailor” who was found in a government-restricted area. All around Anil are people who have survived the war so far physically but perhaps not otherwise. Ondaatje describes:

Street bombs, usually containing nails or ball bearings, could cut open an abdomen fifty yards from the explosion. Shock waves travelled past someone and the suction could rupture the stomach. ‘Something happened to my stomach,’ a woman would say, fearing she had been cut open by bomb metal, while in fact her stomach had flipped over from the force of passing air. Everyone was emotionally shattered by a public bomb. Months later survivors would come into the ward saying they feared they might still die…

Thousands of people were murdered, publicly and privately, over the decades of the Sri Lankan conflict. People disappeared. The book opens with a scene of Anil in similarly afflicted Guatemala, her forensic team shadowed by the families of the missing. “There was always the fear, double-edged that it was their son in the pit, or that it was not their son—which meant there would be further searching…The possibility of their lost son was everywhere.”

To move through Ondaatje’s work is to follow the thread of his interests, his themes, or obsessions, or beliefs. To examine Billy the Kid by imagining his violence is to solve his disappearance, the vanishing of the actual gunslinger in the American imagination, to be replaced by a merely rakish outlaw. Anil’s Ghost, the story of events a Sri Lankan-born writer must at some point contend with, is an extension of the ways Ondaatje’s work circles around violence and death. In The Cat’s Table, there is less violence, although there is the metaphorical violence of travel, and the violence of exile. This is exemplified by a storm which Cassius and Michael want to experience firsthand. They convince their friend Ramadhin to tie them to the deck:

We’d imagined lying there conversing in wonder about the lights of the storm at some great height above us but we were now almost drowning from the water in the air—the rain, and the sea that was leaping over the railings and swirling across the deck. Lightning lit the rain in the air above us, and then it was dark once more. A loose rope was slapping at my throat. There was only noise. We could not tell if we were screaming or only trying to.

Michael remembers this moment vividly years later. As he reaches middle age looks back on his life, he circles around such moments. The novel gives us the boy’s point of view on the scenes, but then some reflection from the older character, making sense of his journey piece by piece. In Divisadero, Ondaatje writes, from the point of view of Anna, one of the characters:

All my life I have loved traveling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behavior of the other. It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in the past, the way the villanelle’s form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion…For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered piece of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, make up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.

In a book on poetic forms, The Making of a Poem, poets Eavan Boland and Mark Strand write, “While the subject of most lyric poems is loss, the formal properties of the villanelle address the idea of loss directly. Its repeated lines, the circularity of its stanzas, become, as the reader listens, a repudiation of forward motion, of temporality and therefore, of dissolution. Each stanza of a villanelle, with its refrains, becomes a series of retrievals.”

Between them, these two quotations seem to explain a great deal of how Ondaatje makes use of his poet’s sensibilities in the service of fiction. They also address the doubling of narrative, the circling back to conversations, images, themes, that runs through his books. In the Skin of a Lion ends with Patrick and Hana driving together into the night. Patrick is searching for Clara. Anil is searching for Sailor. Anna is searching for Lucien Segura. Michael, in The Cat’s Table, is searching the past. And they may help explain the violence in his work. Sometimes it seems as if there is a cruel balance: to find something, you have to give something up in return.

4.
As useful as the above quotations are when thinking about his work, I will admit to at times being annoyed by Ondaatje’s explanations, especially in Divisadero. The intrusions of what seems more like the author’s voice than the character’s into the text remove me from the novel’s setting. For example,

“The skill of writing offers little to a viewer. There is only this five-centimeter relationship between your eyes and the pen. Any skill in diving or dreaming is invisible, whereas the clockmaker visiting Auch removed his dark cotton jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt….”

Divisadero is partly about two writers, Anna and the French writer of an earlier time, Lucien Segura, whom Anna is researching while she lives in his house. But because of the tone of the passage, I can’t separate Anna from Ondaatje himself, and to be reminded of the creator of this complicated narrative in this way is disrupting. The same paragraph, however, contains one of my favorite Ondaatje sentences: “Soon I was almost within the pleasure of his serious demeanor.” And for this, I can forgive him anything else.

Another critique of Ondaatje’s novels might be that they have, more or less, one tone: serious, dramatic, and often-awed. I can’t argue with this, but I would refer such readers to Ondaatje’s slightest but in some ways most kick-ass book, the poem Elimination Dance (La danse éliminatoire), which is a political, hilarious, weird take on a called dance (e.g. Anyone with a red hat on the floor, except here it is “Any dinner guest who has consumed the host’s missing contact lens along with the dessert”). The “Study Questions” at the back of the book include: “Does the author’s fuck-you tone contribute to the theme of the poem as a whole?” and “Compare Elimination Dance with ‘The Rape of the Lock’—with special emphasis on the use of zeugma.”³ Ondaatje’s poetry is generally more humorous than his prose. “Sweet Like a Crow” proceeds:

Your voice sounds like a scorpion being pushed

through a glass tube

like someone has just trod on a peacock

like wind howling in a coconut

like a rusty bible, like someone pulling barbed wire

across a stone courtyard, like a pig drowning,

a vattacka being fried

a bone shaking hands

a frog singing at Carnegie Hall….

But the poems I love most share the tone of his novels. Maybe this only says something about my own value for sincerity. Or maybe I more easily recognize, in his poetry as well, the same circling back to his central concerns. In “The Hour of Cowdust” Ondaatje describes “the hour we move small / in the last possibilities of light…/ Everything is reducing itself to shape…

The boat turns languid

under the hunched passenger

sails

ready for the moon

fill like a lung

there is no longer

depth of perception

it is now possible

for the outline of two boats

to collide silently

It is this collision, of lives and stories, that keeps me returning to Ondaatje’s books, along with the continual surprise, as a result of these collisions, of moving from one narrative to another. Ondaatje insists on a willingness to admit that our own story (or the story of the original main character) may not be the most interesting one, and that when that story reaches a pausing place, we can continue to find meaning in other people, other characters, whose lives branch off from and continue without us. So Caravaggio becomes, three-quarters of the way through The English Patient, the narrative’s focus. So, in Divisadero we leave the cowboy Coop behind to follow the French writer, Lucien Segura. In The Cat’s Table we leave Michael several times to follow other characters. The last chapters of Anil’s Ghost don’t belong to Anil, but to Ananda, a sculptor who helped her by crafting a possible model of Sailor’s head. He is now reconstructing a statue of the Buddha that was destroyed. His final act is to paint the eyes that will give the statue life, but he must do it backwards, as Ondaatje explains:

Without the eyes there is not just blindness, there is nothing. There is no existence. The artificer brings to life sight and truth and presence…He climbs a ladder in front of the statue…The painter dips a brush into the paint and turns his back to the statue, so it looks as if he is about to be enfolded in the great arms. The paint is wet on the brush. The other man, facing him, holds up the mirror, and the artificer puts the brush over his shoulder and paints in the eyes without looking directly at the face. He uses just the reflection to guide him—so only the mirror receives the direct image of the glance being created. No human eye can meet the Buddha’s during the process of creation….

Is this just more fascinating research, or a metaphor for writing as well? The idea that we could not bear the true power of looking directly at someone else, that we are revealed by the stories that circle around us, as well as by our own, is one of the best lessons of Ondaatje’s work.

5.
The more relaxed pace, the slightly less dramatic stakes, and the continuation of the themes of the collisions of lives, and of disappearance and searching combine to make The Cat’s Table enormously satisfying. It seems, in many ways, the best possible next novel Ondaatje could have written: a little gentler than Anil’s Ghost, a little less difficult than Divisadero. Here are more eccentric, fascinating characters: Miss Lasqueti, who keeps pigeons in the pockets of her specially-sewn coat and who may or may not be involved with Whitehall—she periodically throws dissatisfying crime novels overboard in a fit of rage; Mr. Fonseka, the traveling teacher of literature and history who can as easily recite a song from the Azores as lines from an Irish play; Asuntha, an abandoned child who learns to become an acrobat and then is deafened in a fall, and whose father is a prisoner on the Oronsay; Emily, Michael’s beautiful cousin who is being sent to finishing school in England but who seem determined to make her life her own. Watching all these characters, and reporting on them, is Michael, brave and wild and occasionally very homesick. With two other boys on the ship, Cassius and Ramadhin, Michael explores every part of the Oronsay, small boys being endlessly curious and no one’s first priority.

Here, too, represented in Michael and the boys who explore every inch of the ship, is Ondaatje’s own boundless curiosity. The conversation about what amount of research belongs in a novel, and when an author’s enthusiasm for research can overwhelm the narrative is an important one, but often Ondaatje’s research is so interesting that I don’t care how it relates to the narrative. One of my favorite bits of research, from Divisadero: “Gotraskhalana is a term in Sanskrit poetics for calling a loved one by a wrong name, and means, literally, ‘stumbling on the name.’” The title of his book of selected poems, The Cinnamon Peeler, informs you that someone somewhere works for his living by peeling cinnamon. Knowing this is enough: I don’t need the story to contain it.

While The Cat’s Table has a more circumscribed roaming space than some of Ondaatje’s other books, it includes issues of class and race, and the painful, thrilling transition from East to West. The ship stops in the exotic ports of Aden and Port Said, and these images stay with the boys. The three-week journey seems etched in many of the passengers’ memories. The liminal space of the ship allows for confidences and friendships that are still vivid years later. Yet after the voyage, in living their own lives the passengers on the ship lose touch with one another. Cassius slips from his friends’ grasp. Ramadhin also has his own secrets from Michael. In the end, they are unknowable.

The Oronsay will become a haunted hulk of a ship in the Colombo harbor, but in The Cat’s Table it is a vital, floating world, and there is a nostalgia here for the loss of childhood, and for that slightly simpler time in which an eleven-year-old boy would be put aboard a ship more or less alone, for a lightly-supervised three week trip.

The book begins with the ship’s disappearance into the night as it leaves Sri Lanka. It ends with Emily, Michael’s cousin and pseudo-guardian, disappearing “into the world” on the dock in England. But on the pier Michael finds his mother, although he hasn’t seen her in four or five years, and “there no longer remained any sure memory of what she looked like.” Her story is outside the bounds of the novel—it will continue, without us. We the readers, along with Michael, had not realized that he had been searching for her for quite some time.

Published in 1982, before more recent discussions of whether fictionalized memoirs were less truthful or not, the book is not labeled a novel or a memoir. I have no idea where it would be shelved in a bookstore today, partly because there are no bookstores left in my Philadelphia neighborhood where I could check (a long-shuttered Borders dominates one corner). In Running, Ondaatje recreates conversations between dead family members. Did the contents of these conversations come from interviews or journals? Ondaatje writes in the acknowledgments, “…if those listed above disapprove of the fictional air I apologize and can only say that in Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.”

A zeugma is “a figure of speech describing the joining of two or more parts of a sentence with a single common verb or noun.” –Wikipedia

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**Special thanks to Preeta Samarasan for her help with this essay.

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