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?

Further Links and Resources:

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.

Further Links and Resources:

The French words we used were foreign to both of us, from now on it was a language we had to bend to what was in our own minds, to what we wanted to say, no longer, as at school, simply decoding and repeating. We were both making the same effort to communicate and we were doing it slowly, patiently, which may be why we were very quickly able to say important things to one another, such as I’m all alone. Me too.

So begins the short friendship of Raj and David, two young boys in Nathacha Appanah’s novel The Last Brother, whose names both mean “the king.” Both boys are also malnourished and suffering from traumatic losses: Raj has recently lost two brothers in a catastrophic storm that devastated a large portion of the island of Mauritius, where he and his family live, and David, a ten-year-old Jewish Czech boy orphaned by the death of his parents in the concentration camps, has been sent into prison exile on the island with a small number of other European Jews. David also suffers from malaria, and then becomes sick with dysentery, which ultimately leads to his death.

I should say that it is giving nothing away to mention that David dies late in the novel; the reader learns this in the first chapter when Raj describes the sharpness and immediacy of his grief as he stands before his friend’s grave some sixty years later. In fact, this graveside remembrance is the narrative occasion for this novel. For it is the older Raj who relates the story of their friendship and who, to the day of the story’s telling, still does not know how David managed to escape the camps and be exiled to the Beau-Bassin prison camp in Mauritius, where Raj’s tyrannical father once worked as a guard.

As readers we are meant to presume that Raj, the narrator sixty years hence, is relating the story to us in French. What is shared and communicated to the reader has been, for the most part, related in one language: French in the original, and English in the translation. But The Last Brother is polyphonic in two senses of the term. First, a number of languages are spoken throughout the novel, even if they are rendered almost entirely in one language in both the translated and original text. Raj refers to the language he spoke with his family as his mother or native tongue without ever explicitly naming that other language. Second, the narration and dialogue suggest amongst the characters a range of voices and moods, which change depending on who they are speaking to, in what language, and why. The major example of this second point is the fact that French is the only common language between the boys, and they both learned the language in school rather than at home. So there is a hesitancy and deliberation to the boys’ conversations as a result: they are able to adequately articulate themselves in French, but neither is fluent. The deliberateness with which the boys communicate feeds the motif of linguistic difference in Appanah’s novel, and their deliberateness in speaking to one another propels the story emotionally as well.

Appanah’s rendering of language issues and translation strategies in the original work also seems to have influenced award-winning translator Geoffrey Strachan’s translation of the novel. In translating Appanah’s words, Strachan had to do more than find a way of rendering the author’s lyrical prose in English. He also had to preserve the moments when the language the characters are using shifts from one to another. How to do this while preserving the lyrical, poetic, dreamlike quality of Raj’s recollections is the trick to a successful communication scheme.

As I read The Last Brother with an eye toward the polyphony of both the novel and the translation process, several questions and insights were sparked for me as a fiction writer, a translator, and a literary critic. Although I have yet to translate a work that requires translation communication schemes, in the novel I’m writing, which is set in the immigrant neighborhoods of contemporary Paris, several of the characters are fluent in English and French, and a few of them are fluent in Kabyle (the language of indigenous Algerian Berbers). Arabic peppers the linguistic landscape of the city as well. I write with the presumption that my readership will be primarily Anglophones with little to no background in French or Arabic, and no background in Kabyle. So, I face several tasks in constructing polyphonic dialogue for readers. For instance, if I include a line or two of dialogue in the “original” French, how can I seamlessly convey the meaning of these lines through the narrator’s or other characters’ reactions? If I include lines of dialogue in English that were spoken in French or Kabyle, what strategies can I use to make it clear that the conversation is either taking place in a language other than English? What does it mean to write “Sofiane replied in French,” rather than to include his words in French? In both the original and the translation, The Last Brother offers several strategies that respond to these sorts of questions.

Here is an early scene in The Last Brother featuring Raj, his mother, and his schoolteacher that sets the terms for the representations of power dynamics through language, and the emotional stakes of speaking French in the novel. This scene offers one example of how Appanah’s original work seems to have informed Strachan’s decisions about translation strategies for language shifts. Shortly after the deaths of his two older brothers, Raj moves across the island with his mother and father for his father’s new job as a guard at Beau-Bassin. There, Raj enrolls at the local school. His teacher, Mademoiselle Elsa, approaches Raj’s mother soon after Raj’s arrival to emphasize the boy’s scholarly promise. She says that Raj is one of the best students in French and English in school, which is impressive, she asserts, given how much catch-up he had to do as a late arrival in the school year. She entices Raj’s mother to support and encourage Raj in his studies in a poignant way that introduces a motif that courses throughout the novel: the connection between language fluency and basic survival. Raj was talented and smart enough that he held great promise to receive a prestigious scholarship, she assures his mother. With this scholarship, Raj would have a place at “the best high school,” and the scholarship would also provide money for books. But more importantly, the teacher emphasizes, some of this money would be left over for food for the family. So Raj’s proficiency in languages offers potential financial remuneration, which could provide nourishment and sustenance for a family who would pick mangoes from trees and “crouch down, eating our mangoes with both hands, with the juice trickling down our forearms, quickly catching it with our tongues… we ate the whole mango, the skin, the little, rather hard tip that had held it to the branch and we sucked the stone for a long, long time until it was rough and insipid, good only to throw on the fire.”  So in this scene with the schoolteacher, language is transformed into manna.

In turn, the French language in particular is marked in The Last Brother, not only as a means to scholarly success and potential sustenance, but also as a language that can offer indicators of and subsequently level unfairly wielded power differentials. At rare but regular intervals, Raj’s father would drink and then return home to beat Raj and his mother so severely that both of them would be left exhausted and unable to function for days. An especially harsh beating lands Raj in the hospital with broken ribs and a fever, among other injuries, and it is in the prison hospital that Raj formally meets David, who has been admitted with malaria. (As the novel progresses it becomes clear that, similar to the potential for Raj’s language abilities to feed the family, the fact that David suffers from malaria and then develops a fatal case of dysentery underscores the silence and mystery surrounding his and the other Jewish prisoners’ experiences of exile and imprisonment on the island of Mauritius).

Raj explains that his father beat him particularly badly on December 26, 1944. In fact, Raj’s injuries from his father’s beating are so severe that he can neither move nor speak. When the father delivers Raj to the hospital for medical attention, the man speaks to one of the prison hospital nurses:

He stopped several times and each time in his womanish voice he said, in French, fell out of the tree. I did not know my father spoke French, enough, at least, to lie and cover up what he had inflicted on his own son. Indeed, maybe he spoke English or Spanish or Chinese as well, nothing would have surprised me, the truth was I did not know him at all.

In a different scene, the father’s boss comes to the house to speak to him. There, we see how his use of French reveals his own precarious position of power at the prison. And in both cases, Raj gleans new perspective on his father as he reflects upon the father’s use of French. The perspective offers Raj some emotional distance in the moment, and in retrospect, Raj can see how powerless his father was.

This passage about the father speaking French gives way to the scene in which Raj and David meet for the first time. This is the passage in which both boys are in the hospital. They are able to speak to one another as Raj recovers from his father’s beating and David nurses his malaria. Their initial communiqués are awkward for Raj, and seemingly for David as well:

I had the impression that he was waiting for me to speak and so I said, speaking in French, as I had learned to in school, separating out the syllables, with a picture in my head of the sentence being written out by an imaginary hand as I spoke it, ‘My name is Raj and I live in Beau-Bassin.’

David looked at me and said to me, just as slowly, ‘My name is David and I live here. But I used to live in Prague.’

As I read this scene the first time, I knew right away that I would use a later part of Raj’s description of their meeting as the epigraph for this essay. I worked through a close reading of the passage I quoted in the epigraph; I was curious to see whether or not I could determine how Strachan’s translation and Appanah’s original intersected and diverged.

I realized that this scene’s emotional impact in fact comes to fruition through the translation communication scheme that Strachan used. It might seem odd that such a strategic and practical concept within the rewriting of a passage from one language to another could lend a scene its emotional power and depth. But it might help to look first at a few examples of how communication schemes are used in other scenes of the novel before returning to the scene of the boys’ first meeting.

Typography—and particularly italics—is a fairly standard way of offsetting the use of foreign words and phrases. In Strachan’s translation of The Last Brother, italics are used first to offset phrases in the original French, which establishes the expectation that when a word or phrase is set in italics, we can understand that it was originally in French. In speaking with Madame Ghislaine, a local aristocrat of sorts for whom Raj’s mother works and for whom Raj has begun working in late 1944, he recounts that “for several weeks I had only opened my mouth to say, as my mother had taught me, Bonjour, Madame. Merci, Madame. À demain, Madame.”  The shift between Raj’s native language and French as he speaks to Madame Ghislaine is represented through this common use of italics. In the English translation, Strachan further underscores this shift by preserving the original French, assuming the reader’s familiarity with basic French salutations.

It’s worth noting that this is a far cry from the use of modern European languages in English-language literary works such as Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1937). In flipping through the first few chapters of Barnes’ novel, the foreign phrases jump out from the page; they, too, are set in italics, for example, “Roba vecchia!”, “Wir seltzen an dieser Stelle über den Fluss—”, “Garde tout!” Nightwood was written during a period when an educated, literary American readership could be assumed to have a more-than-basic handle upon reading several European languages. I bring this up because French serves as the unspoken, universal language in The Last Brother, and the fact that Strachan only left untranslated the most basic communication phrases not only underscores Raj’s hesitancy in the language, but also speaks to how expectations of American readers have changed over the past century, and how cultural context can inform the way in which a translator approaches a communication scheme.

The italics in this passage of The Last Brother, thus, offer a typographical example of how to denote linguistic difference within both the original literary text and its translation. It is a simple and effective means of communicating to the reader of the translation, in turn, that throughout the rest of the novel, when italics are employed, it can be assumed that the original language was French, as is the case later in the novel when Raj describes the blue and white sign that hangs over the prison gate, which reads Welcome to the State Prison of Beau-Bassin.

This is an issue I am considering but have not yet addressed as I work through revising the current draft of my own novel. In the earliest drafts, I tried to avoid italics in order to underscore the fact that the linguistic landscape in contemporary Paris is a polyphonic one, but I decided that making a critical point in such a subtle manner serves the novel neither emotionally nor aesthetically. Another possibility would be to use italics early on in order to suggest how disorienting the range of languages beyond French and English is to the American narrator. Again, this ultimately strikes me as too subtle. At this point, I’m considering italics for the foreign phrases and words that the American narrator does not understand, whether in French, Kabyle, or Arabic. It remains to be seen, but Strachan’s use of italics in his translation here offers another possibility: once it is established that italics connote, say, French, the words and phrases in italics will be understood by the reader to be in French from that point forward.

Another strategy for denoting linguistic difference while maintaining the same language within the text is to simply alert the reader that the dialogue they are about to read was spoken in a particular language. I had been trying to avoid this strategy in my own writing; it struck me as obvious and inelegant reportage. But the ways in which the phrase “in French” is used in The Last Brother serves as both a communication scheme and a means of establishing details about the setting. In the prison hospital, French is the lingua franca between staff and patients. We learn this when “[The nurse] placed her hand on my brow, took out a thermometer from one of her pockets, thrust it under my tongue for a moment, and said, in French, ‘Your fever’s gone. You’ll be able to go home soon.’” The use of this communication scheme at this moment in the story and its translation suggests several things. First, of course, Strachan assumes that his translation’s readership’s knowledge of French is limited to the most common phrases. So his approach in this case could not be to simply leave the French in the original, as he did with the initial italicized phrases spoken to Madame Ghislaine. It for this reason that he directly translated Appanah’s “en français” to indicate to the reader what language the nurse was speaking.

Even more interesting here, however, is the fact that the nurse’s voice is not described: she is quoted directly, where Raj’s father was not. Nor does Raj reflect retrospectively here on what it means for the nurse to speak to him in French. It is a means of offering further details about the atmosphere and culture in the prison hospital, one that sets us up the reason for why David and Raj speak French together without prompting on either of their parts. The “in French” strategy, thus, offers a means of relating to the reader which language will be privileged in a given setting without directly stating it as such.

With this example from The Last Brother in mind, I experimented with revising a scene in my novel in which the narrator, who speaks French quite well, listens to and becomes lost in a conversation that shifts between French and Kabyle. Since she understands and has the context for only snippets of what is being discussed, her reactions are limited to confusion and, in moments, tuning out the conversation in order to pay attention to what’s going on around her otherwise. To address directly the fact that other characters were moving back and forth between French and Kabyle offered me a moment where I could elaborate on the narrator’s fears of appearing to not understand, to be lost. So for my purposes, this strategy opened up the possibility for further character development.

So, then, here is how the translation communication scheme employed by Strachan in the hospital meeting scene between the boys resonated with me. In this scene, Raj’s use of the phrase “speaking in French” suggests a deliberateness, an attempt to make contact with someone unknown and clearly foreign (Raj notes in an early description of David how striking his pale hair and skin were to him). Raj’s deliberation is underscored by the intentionality of his own strategy for parsing through the French: the separation of syllables, the pictures of the sentence in his head, written by an imaginary hand. It is as if, in speaking to David in French, his deliberateness with the language is the medium through which their communication must pass. They cannot establish direct contact.

In this powerful moment in both the novel and the translation, the older narrator Raj explains that the boys “were very quickly able to say important things to one another, such as I’m all alone. Me too.” There is an urgency in their need to communicate the desperation of their respective situations. Raj has lost his older brothers, and is subject to his father’s violent whims, and his family survives on the edge of starvation. David, meanwhile, is sick, malnourished, in exile and imprisoned, and completely alone in the world. The desire to speak to one another becomes a basic need for both characters. The leveling of power dynamics and social and cultural difference is an intrinsic part of the polyphony of The Last Brother, and almost nowhere in the novel does this resonate as deeply as in the passage in which Raj and David first speak. When I arrived at the final lines of this passage, I heard the French in my head, like an echo of the English translation, as if I were there with Raj and David as they said to one another, “Je suis tout seul.” “Moi aussi.” The echo literally sent a shiver through me.

As the novel progresses beyond their early interactions, their common language continues to offer both bridges and barriers to their rapprochement and increasing dependence on one another. For Raj, David becomes a surrogate brother. Raj “others” David, in a sense, referring to him in near angelic terms as pale and ephemeral, and yet his grief over David’s death sixty years later seems to far outweigh any grief he feels—or allows himself to feel—over the death of his brothers. David, meanwhile, escapes from prison with Raj’s help, and so becomes completely dependent on Raj’s assistance to navigate and attempt to flee the island. In the latter third of the story, the boys seek a port in which there is, allegedly, a ship bound for Palestine, which David calls Eretz (presumably short for Eretz Yisrael, a common name for the Jewish promised land before the state of Israel was established). This port is never found. But in the meantime, the boys’ fascination and frustration with one another’s differences are palpable. As Raj recalls:

The words collided with one another in my throat, came tumbling out of my mouth in a chaotic fashion, just as in a dream, when one is desperately trying to speak. I longed for him to understand my mother tongue so that what I was saying might flow more freely, so that I might use just the right word, express my precise feelings to him.

This description of the limitations of Raj’s scholastic proficiency in the French language suggests, wrenchingly, the linguistic scrim that remains between the boys, which also limits their ability to relate to one another the things they have experienced and lived. Of the star of David that he wears around his neck, David explains to Raj that David was the king of his people. Raj is at first annoyed by and skeptical of this assertion, since David cannot conclusively prove it true. Raj is just as frustrated by the fact that his name also means “king,” and he has even less proof than David, since there is no river or symbol named Raj to parallel the star. This passage underscores the importance of objects and symbols in their conversations, and reminds the reader of the scrim of French.

The older Raj who relates the story of his friendship with and the death of David longs for the other boy to be able to tell his story “in his own words and with the things that he alone could see.” Part of what Raj imagines David might relate (the italics are original, and following the communication strategy established by Appanah and maintained in translation by Strachan, they suggest that the older Raj believes that David’s “own words” sixty years later would have been uttered in a language different from Raj’s): “On the other side of the barbed wire I saw a dark boy with black hair…his eyes as black as billiard balls…if he’d not been weeping he would have frightened me with his face like a savage’s.”

The linguistic difference between the two boys remains tangible and painful for the aged Raj who recounts the story, and the fact that he imagines David describing him as a savage underscores two things: first, that the narrator Raj (who lives in Europe and is widely traveled) is now well aware of the social perceptions of him as a man of color; and second, that French as a common language can only take them so far in Raj’s imagination. So painful is this barrier that later in his life, Raj orders a French-Yiddish dictionary, and can only go so far as to look up the words for “hunger,” “brother,” and “mother” before he begins to weep. One of the most intense images in the novel is the dictionary sitting on a kitchen counter, still wrapped in bubble wrap. Raj’s hands are shaking so badly that he asks his wife to open the package for him.

One curiosity remains for me about polyphony in The Last Brother: in the later chapters of the novel, Raj’s linguistic limitations seemingly fall away while David’s remain. When Raj describes the way in which he relates details of his life with his brothers, and his brothers’ subsequent deaths, he seems to leap ahead of David in his ability to communicate in French. Following a full page of specific details and emotional complexities that Raj relates to David about the lives and deaths of his brothers, he tells the reader, “And David’s eyes wet with tears and questions, David did not understand, he got everything mixed up, he said only one body, two brothers… maybe he’s still alive your elder brother.” The rush of emotions that the young Raj experiences upon hearing David’s hope that one of his brothers survived is represented by the subsequent run-on sentence of which his reaction to Raj’s story is a part. The rush of words and suggestions establish yet another facet of the novel’s polyphony. Here, perhaps, we can assume that the narrator Raj, in relating this moment, is overcome with emotion once more. The rushed tone that is suggested by the run-on is altogether distinct from the quiet, sparse, poetic quality of the narrative voice employed throughout much of the novel. Yet what purpose did it serve here for Raj to suddenly recall himself as speaking far more proficiently in French than he had previously been capable? Particularly since David’s response is fairly wooden in the translation, suggested by the construction of the italicized sentence, and possibly the use of the word “elder,” although I don’t claim to know if this word was less anachronistic in early 1945 than when Raj relates the story sixty years later.

In fiction, dialogue often acts as conduit and conductor between characters. But in the case of The Last Brother and its translation, the linguistic choices that characters make go beyond communication and character development. In a kind of narrative alchemy, both the direct and indirect dialogue seems to take on physical properties. Once manipulated in the mouths of the characters, language serves to transform and develop the setting, themes, motifs, and—perhaps most importantly—the act of speaking in and of itself. The Last Brother is as much about the power of language as the ineffability of historical trauma. Yet there were several moments later in the novel, such as the passage in which Raj seems to leap ahead of David linguistically in describing his brothers’ deaths, when I was pulled out of the narrative due to stylistic choices that seemed intended to underscore the balance between what is articulated and what goes unspoken. Was this a deliberate choice on the part of Appanah that was then faithfully conveyed in Strachan’s translation? As deliberate a choice, perhaps, as Raj’s and David’s early moments of French conversation were marked by deliberation out of necessity? Was this choice, then, a means of conveying to the reader how painful the linguistic scrim between the boys remains for Raj, sixty years hence? As a literary critic, I find myself posing these questions, recoiling from them, and then embracing them as unanswerable. The fact that I cannot answer these questions is likely part of the point. And as both critic and fiction writer, coming to this conclusion excites me. I wonder about how my own decisions about communication schemes will be received by my readers, and what they might see in my work that I might not. It also serves as a possible cautionary tale: ought I to be careful with how far I try to take critical points within my fiction writing? I would be interested to hear what other writers think.

Perhaps the seemingly obtuse moments of more eloquent communication in The Last Brother are meant to throw into relief the experience of being unable to fully comprehend what it would be like to live through the experiences that David did. One of the most compelling things about The Last Brother as a novel is its basic premise: nine-year-old Raj has no idea that a war is raging on three continents. It is through knowing David (and David’s recollections of the ghettoization and imprisonment of his family, followed by the death of his parents) that Raj first learns of the Second World War and the Shoah, and he is still grappling with it sixty years later. The novel concludes on what could be dismissed as a contrived or cliché statement, given all that Raj has related to the reader: “I tell myself that in a minute I shall recount David’s story to my son, so that he, too, may remember.” But what can be intuited from this final statement, perhaps, is that such cataclysmic world events exceed language, and can never be fully explained or retold enough times. The words must pour from Raj’s mouth again. Perhaps his assertion that he will repeat his own version of the boys’ story then underscores David’s silence within the story, and the absence of the exiled prisoners at Beau-Bassin from history.

Further Links and Resources

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Born in London and raised in Wales, Van Booy now lives in New York City, where he teaches at the School of Visual Arts and is involved in the Rutgers Early College Humanities program. His work has been translated into thirteen languages.

Earlier this year, as Van Booy was working through the final stages of Everything Beautiful Began After, he conducted an email conversation with FWR Contributing Editor Joshua Bodwell about his work, philosophy, and the literary life. In his introduction to the interview, Bodwell describes the author’s novel, writing:

In the elegant, seemingly Old World prose Van Booy has become revered for, the novel traces three lives set against the Mediterranean heat of Athens: those of the drunken but brilliant American George, the searching French artist Rebecca, and the British archaeologist Henry. New York Times best-selling author and National Book Award-finalist Andre Dubus has called the novel, “A powerful meditation on the undying nature of love and the often cruel beauty of one’s own fate.”

During their conversation, Bodwell and Van Booy touch on everything from morality in fiction to when it’s appropriate to wear a pocket square. On the difference between the story and the novel as forms, Van Booy has this to say:

For me, a novel is like a city coming to life around you—but a world one can never really inhabit. A short story is a late-night conversation with a stranger in the park: very immediate, intimate, fleeting. Writing a novel is different. It’s really all inspired revision. Did you know that the John Harrison clocks from the early 1700s required about eight hours to disassemble and about the same time to reassemble? Sixteen hours of non-stop labor all to make one tiny adjustment. Writing a novel is worse. It has to become an obsession—and where would we be without Harrison’s clocks? “Lost at sea,” I hear you murmur.

Author image credit: Wang Yin

You can also win one of three signed copies of this book, which we’ll be giving away next week to three of our Twitter followers. To be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).

To all of you who are already fans, thank you!

The following interview with Mr. Saeed, who currently teaches Arabic and Arabic Culture at DePaul University in Chicago, was conducted via telephone and email over the course of several weeks in March and April of 2011.

Interview:

Stephen Morison, Jr.: Could you describe where you are from in Iraq and tell us a little bit about your family background?

First of all, I would like to thank you for your interest in me, and I appreciate deeply the interest of Fiction Writers Review and its readers of contemporary novelists, poets and short story writers. This delights me. I wrote a novel about my childhood and my city environment. A novelist friend, Alan Salter translated it into English for me and it won the prize in translation at the University of Arkansas. This novel, entitled The World Through the Eyes of Angels, will be published by the University of Syracuse in the fall. I was born in the city of Mosul, one of the oldest cities in the world, which was built at the same time as the city of Nineveh. Arab writers accurately described Mosul more than 1300 years ago. These writings mention a market that partially remains to this day, and in which my father had a shop. Mosul’s population was comprised entirely of Arabs who practiced different religions such as Islam, Christianity and Judaism. In that time, all religions fraternized as one family, not like today, when everyone wants to kill everyone else. Living in the city depended on agriculture, so the city depended on rainfall. The city became very poor because the rains did not come every year, and when it did rain, it was not enough. In the summer when the harvest ended, people flocked to the city from the surrounding villages. These people included Kurds, Turkmen, Assyrians, Aramaic, Hebron, Shabacs, and Yezidis and they came to sell their crops and shop in the city.

The climate in Mosul is divided into four seasons, each exactly three months. There is a cold winter in which temperatures drop to freezing. The spring is very beautiful and mild. Summer reaches ninety five degrees, followed by a temperate fall. Thus, Mosel is called “the mother of two springs.”

Our ancestors in Mosul engineered a plaster which was stronger than concrete. They used this plaster to build the highest minaret in the world in Mosul, more than nine centuries ago. Seven centuries after the minaret was built, it began to lean to the east, so severely that people thought that it would fall. The minaret has remained leaning this way for over two hundred years, thus the origin of Mosul’s nickname “The Humpback.” Mosul is also the only city in Iraq that used alabaster in its architecture. The city is also famous for its cuisine, including unique types of pickles, sweets and sausages.

The Humbacked Minaret - Mosul, Iraq

Where were you educated?

I attended secondary school in Mosul, then the University of Baghdad, which was a very significant time in my life. I was such an avid reader that by the age of twelve I had read all the novels, collections of stories and history books in Mosul’s public library.

What writers were you exposed to as a young person?

Before completing high school I had read most of the authors whose work had been translated into Arabic including Cervantes, Dickens, Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal, Hermann Hesse, Melville, Poe, Maupassant, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, Turgenev, Chekhov and others. In addition, I read the works of Arab writers including Naguib Mahfouz and Tewfik al-Hakim. I enjoyed reading modern translations as soon as they were published. I often read at least three hours a day, books by both Arab and non-Arab writers.

What motivated you to begin writing? When did you begin writing?

My writings were motivated by conflict in the world, the disparities between wealth and poverty, strength and weaknesses, oppressed people versus an arbitrary system of government, knowledge and ignorance, the old and the new, the constraints of customs and traditions versus liberation. I saw that conflict usually meant that those who are strong are victorious and those who are weak are defeated. I found that it was not always possible to speak your opinion frankly in life, at the risk of severe punishment. I found, however, that in the act of communicating by writing one can be free. If you are unable to resist evil in life, you can resist it through writing. Likewise, if you witness hunger and you cannot help the hungry, your pen can create a perfect world where people do not stay hungry.

Writing is an alternate world trying to solve the puzzle of man and his actions. One can attempt to answer questions through writing which seem intractable in life.

What most motivates me to write is the evil, brutality, and destruction inherent in the human spirit, questions about why we persecute each other, why we wish to control each other, why so many live lives of hunger, war, and injustice. All my writing is around solving this puzzle. This makes me feel weak, sometimes like I am nothing, because I feel that only politicians can answer these questions, not thinkers and philosophers. Politicians have an abundance of tools to help them make decisions and answer questions: money, power, agents, systems, and on and on.

The second part of the question, when I started writing, is delicate. At first I was not familiar with writing essays; I wrote stories and novels only, but I wrote articles after that, I summarized or commented on them. I first began to write in school at the age of thirteen, when my teacher asked us to write about a new topic every week. The subjects were traditional, such as describing a village, a natural sight, specific weather, and I thought these topics boring, so I decided instead to write from my imagination. I would write stories or summaries of books that I had read before. This infuriated my teachers, and they punished me. This is why I failed in my Arabic class as a boy. I did not, however, fail other topics like arithmetic. I was faced with some fortunate circumstances during my last secondary school year when a talented poet named Shathel Taqa came to teach our Arabic class. He chose a topic and asked us to write about it, but I did not adhere to the topic, as usual. Instead I summed up the last novel I had read, and assumed I would be punished, as usual. To my surprise, he gave me the highest grade in the class and told me, don’t adhere to the topics that I give, write what you love. That was the starting point of my writing.

How do you define “success” as a writer? What were your first successes as a writer?

When I write any novel or short story, I feel like a man whose horse is participating in a race with lots of other horses. I always feel very concerned, and often I fear that my horse will fail or fall apart before it reaches the finish line. The comments of some critics make me feel at ease. I feel comfortable with my degree of success as a writer. Serious critics and avid readers lead to success, and it seems those are few in the Arab world. For example, if a writer occupies a senior position, or he oversees a magazine or newspaper, many critics will praise his work regardless of whether his work deserves it or not. In return, he will allow them to publish in his newspaper or magazine. My first success as a writer was winning a short story prize in Mosul when I was eighteen. The newspaper was called Fata al-Iraq.

What was it like to be a writer in Iraq when you began your career? Was there a government-sponsored writers’ union in Iraq? If so, what role did it play? Were you a member? How independent were writers permitted to be in Iraq?

It is a struggle to gain notoriety as an author in Iraq. In the Arab world, if you want to publish a book you have to pay for its publication, or contribute to it. There are few publishing houses that will publish a book at their own expense. Getting your work published in a magazine or newspaper depends greatly on your relationship with the editor or the owner of the magazine. In Iraq, for example, an author was only allowed to publish a book if he or she was affiliated with a government party. This was the case in the era of Saddam and after. I have not been allowed to publish anything in Iraq from 1957 until now. All of my books have been published outside of Iraq in countries such as Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, UAE, and Egypt. I submitted a novel in 1970 entitled Rue Ben Barka, however censorship prevented its publication. I finally published this novel in Egypt in 1984, then twice in Jordan, in 1992 and 1993. A friend of mine submitted my book in a contest at the Ministry of Information in Iraq, and after some months it won the first prize. When the authorities discovered it, however, the book was banned and they canceled the delivery of my prize. I had been prevented from publishing until recently. The Writers Union in Iraq had supported Saddam’s regime and now supports the new authorities.

How has the experience of being a writer in Iraq changed as you have grown older?

My experience has been very painful. The coup authorities destroyed two of my novels, one of which was published, the second of which was a manuscript. Both these novels were lost while I was imprisoned for one year and one day.

I also lost three novels because I was arrested or had run away for fear of arrest. Censorship has prevented all of my novels from being published in Iraq, so far. I must publish my work outside Iraq at my expense. The publishing cost is high, because I have never belonged to a political party in Iraq. The government has made it a point to distort my reputation, which puts me in a state of permanent hostility. What hurts me is my constant feeling that I am in a lasting state of siege, and I feel I will likely die with fear, and that destroys my nerves.

What caused at least two of your novels to be banned in Iraq?

As I said earlier, not two, but all of them. As I mentioned, I was not able to publish any fiction books or short story collections in Iraq, because I did not belong to the party regime. Since the year 2003, I have been prohibited from publishing in Iraq because I announced that I am against the death penalty, ransom killings, and the displacement of innocent people and the stealing of public money.

When and why did you leave Iraq?

I left Iraq in 1985. They wanted me to cooperate with them and forced me to sign papers stating that I would be put to death if I were to ever open my mouth to criticize the regime. I returned in 1991 after the first Gulf War. I was working in Dubai at the time and my work frequently required me to visit Iraq. The government began to harass me in 1994, so in 1995 I moved my family permanently to Dubai. I have not seen Iraq since.

What writers have influenced you in the past?

Books that have impacted me considerably include, A Thousand and One Nights and Tales of Arab Heritage Before Islam. These novels translated life and intellectual depth into Arabic. In my view, the novel is real life, not what we see in reality. Reality without human feeling is dead, but literature brings back life. Look at ancient myths; they turn creation stories into something similar to animals and imaginary objects of light, water, mud, spirit, and devils. Our long journey began with nothing and ended with rockets sailing around the universe.

Who are the other writers you most admire today?

I admire many novels. I think that there are many good novels, but no one writer wrote everything well. I think it is enough for a writer to have one or two good works. Some of the writers I admire include Naguib Mahfouz, Marquez, Kafka, Turgenev, Graham Greene, Herman Hesse, Mishima, Henry Miller, Dostoevsky, Philip Roth, Yasunari Kawabat, Jose Saramago, Mario Vargas Llosa, Hemingway and Steinbeck. I do not enjoy all of what they wrote; very great books are very few.

Can you describe your writing process? For example, when you wrote I Am the One Who Saw (Saddam City) did you begin with an outline? Did you utilize character sketches? Did you incorporate personal experiences or nonfiction stories? How long did it take you to write this book?

Yes, I created the outline or “skeletons” of the novel before I started, and then I wrote point by point. If I encountered an obstacle or difficulty, I stopped and worked on another story, since I’m always working on several novels at the same time. I began writing the novel Daughters of Jacob in the year 1973 and I completed it in 2006. I had been thinking of I Am the One Who Saw since the time when I was arrested, and I started writing it one week after they released me. So as not to forget the details, I completed it in six months, but bad luck struck this novel when censorship in Syria deleted two perfect chapters. I didn’t consider it a healthy novel, it was sick, and when it was selected by Dr. Ahmad Sadri to be translated into English, I told him that this work of fiction is disabled and incomplete. I asked him to choose another of my stories, but he insisted. When the company changed the title I suffered a lot, because I had been inspired to choose the title that I did. I said to myself, it will fail completely, but the readers loved it in English and Arabic, which I didn’t expect.

What is your opinion of the current American involvement in Iraq?

Before the intervention in Iraq began in 2003, a reporter from Chicago’s Channel 11 said to me, “You are opposed to the regime of Saddam Hussein; no doubt you will support the U.S. intervention in Iraq.” I replied, “No. Intervention means warfare, and the war does not worry whether it kills innocents, children, the elderly, the sick or women.” Now you ask me the same question. I would like to tell you, I am a peaceful man, against violence, I want to see all the countries of the world abolish the death penalty, and the whole world live under a democratic system, with philosophers and intellectuals organized and elected by the people instead of corrupt politicians. A wounded child crying is a stab in the heart to everyone who creates war.

What do you think of the protests and uprisings that occur in the various countries of the Middle East today? What do you think the impact of these protests will have on the lives of writers in Iraq and the Middle East?

Perhaps the best news I saw and heard was that they changed the systems of Egypt and Tunisia in a peaceful manner, and this is what pleased me most, but unfortunately things went wrong in Libya. I hope that democracy prevails in Yemen, Algeria, Morocco, the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia, and I hope this also applies to Iraq, but I want from the bottom of my heart to change the situation in Syria, precisely because I know the suffering of the people there, I visited Syria more than twenty times. I described people, who are suffering there and the situation of prisons in my last novel, Ashshahena, or, The Truck, which was published in Cairo in late 2010. The torture of prisoners in Syria is worse than it was in Saddam Hussein’s era.

In your opinion, is it acceptable to speak of Iraqi literature as a national literature (distinct from Jordanian, Syrian and Saudi literature), or should Iraqi literature be taught and discussed as a part of Arabic literature as a whole?

I feel that the literature of each Arab country like Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon should be taught in public schools in all parts of the Arab world. They should be taught as Arabic literature, but they should say this poet is from Iraq, and this novelist is Egyptian, this is how they describe works from the region in all Arab magazines and newspapers. I did not read in the fifties or sixties the so-called literature of Iraq or Egypt, but critics in the seventies and eighties began chanting in newspapers, magazines, and undergraduate studies terms like: Literature of Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, etc… I think that this phenomenon will be reinforced. There is a similar condition to it, in the countries of Latin America. There is Columbia’s distinct literature, Mexico’s literature, and Cuba’s literature, regardless of the language.

How have the political movements and conflicts inside Iraq in the last fifty years affected Iraqi literature?

The political movements have affected literature in Iraq more than any other Arab country. In the forties and fifties literature was affected by left-wing movements: communism, socialism, peace movements, etc. Then it changed. After the sixties, the biggest political influence was the Baath Party, and a large portion of writers repeated what that the Baath government said. The Party would withhold enormous rewards—the equivalent to ten times their salaries—if they did not write what they were told to write. The writers who did not support the Baath party, like me, were prevented from publishing and stayed in the shadows so nobody knows them.

What projects are you currently working on?

I recently finished a novel about the bombing of cities during the Iran-Iraq war. At that time I was in Basra, and the Iranians bombarded Basra every day with dozens of bombs. Iraqis bombed Iranian cities in response. In both countries, civilians were falling dead, and the ones who didn’t die were suffering. Ahmad Sadri, the interpreter of my novel I Am the One Who Saw has read it and has told me he will translate it this summer. I am putting the finishing touches on another work of fiction that occurs in the sixties, which I wrote in 1991.

How do your students at DePaul University compare to the students you knew in Iraq?

Of course, they are different. Here students grew up with freedom and peace, so you see those good, spontaneous, light-hearted, honest, and non-complicated minds. I love them also for being outspoken and innocent. They adopt positions that are anti-war and anti-discrimination between religions and races, and this always pushes me to ask myself: Why did such torture happen at Abu Ghraib? And why do we see the killing of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan?

The students in Iraq live under severe psychological pressure; they are afraid of death, threatened each moment, and so reluctant to express what they feel and afraid to show their opinions openly.

What are your hopes for your former students and friends back in Iraq?

The last time I was teaching in Iraq was in 1981. I had transferred to the main teaching department and was responsible for curriculum and official books. I had to oversee the development of writing of some of my ex-students. Some of them had become famous writers, but they unfortunately were Ba’athists. They had begun writing reports to Security about me and continued to attack me in print after I left Iraq. These attacks continued even until last year. In 2010, one of them attacked me in eight different articles in an Iraqi newspaper. My experience with them was so bad. They never invited me to any of the large number of literary festivals which have been held in Iraq since the sixties. Even now they behave this way because I refused to cooperate with the current Authorities.

What do you hope the future holds for Iraqi writers in the near term?

There will be no change in near term. Current politicians have imposed these classifications on Iraqi writers:

A – Literary collaborators with the former regime, who should be killed or prevented from publishing.
B – Writers who support the current ruling religious parties, and who enjoy tremendous wealth and are permitted to publish anything they’d like, no matter how trivial or superficial.
C – Writers who oppose both of the two regimes, who are mostly outside Iraq, like me.

To illustrate this reality, the writers who support the current ruling religious parties in Iraq issued a list of more than thousand writers who should be killed because they cooperated with Saddam’s regime. As a result of this, some were indeed killed, while others fled.

I have written several articles in Arabic newspapers published in London and websites that reject this bloody and dark trend, but my writing is used against me. My name has been added to other lists of writers who should be killed. Since the occupation began, I have wanted to visit Iraq one last time. However, I’m hesitant to go back there because of these lists. Literature in Iraq will not flourish unless it can be removed from beneath the power and the control of the regime. Even now, writers in Iraq depend on state aid to publish their work. They are poor, and cannot afford publishing’s costs inside Iraq or abroad.

Do you see the circumstances in Iraq changing in the next five years?

I am kind of optimistic, and I would love to see things improve in the future. It does not matter if it takes two years or two decades, but I want to see Iraq be rid of the influence of domination and the behavior of the religious parties and the criminal supervision of their militias.

Religious parties have destroyed Iraq, they’ve looted its wealth and have led the country to the bottom of the corruption in the world. They have stolen by force a fortune of more than 500 billion dollars, while at the same time 42 percent of the Iraqi people live by picking through trash. Still, I have great faith that Iraqi literature can be on an equal level with literature in other countries after Iraq overcomes these criminals and their influence.

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