{"id":70785,"date":"2021-12-17T10:50:22","date_gmt":"2021-12-17T15:50:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=70785"},"modified":"2021-12-17T11:19:29","modified_gmt":"2021-12-17T16:19:29","slug":"toms-top-ten-2021","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2021\/12\/17\/toms-top-ten-2021\/","title":{"rendered":"Tom Bowden’s Top Ten, 2021"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tom Bowden is a local reviewer, educator of the Chinese language, and cultural mavin, who has been reviewing eclectic and important small press books and works in translation for the Book Beat newsletter since the pandemic. Bowden’s regular monthly column “i arrogantly recommend…” has been a work of love we greatly appreciate. We link his reviewed books to our affiliate shop on Bookshop.org\/<\/a> a service that benefits independent bookstores from around the country. Books can also be ordered directly from us at BookBeatOrders@gmail.com<\/a> or by calling us at (248) 968-1190 or visiting our shop at 26010 Greenfield in Oak Park. <\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Stalingrad<\/a><\/strong>
\nBy Vasily Grossman [Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler, translators]
\nNYRB Classics<\/p>\n

Vasily Grossman\u2014who witnessed Stalingrad\u2019s devastation during WWII and talked to its citizens and soldiers\u2014wanted to create a panoramic epic of the war equal to Tolstoy\u2019s War and Peace<\/strong> with a theme equal to that of War and Peace<\/strong>. The scale is large\u2014multigenerational, multi-ethnic\u2014though occurring over the space of a single summer, encompassing social rank as well as moral, ethical, and political duties at the risk of life. Heroes walk here, as do cads. Love is known, kept, and lost. Being an admired character does nothing to sustain a character\u2019s life\u2014we, too, lose what matters to us.<\/p>\n

Stalingrad <\/strong>begins after the start of WWII and Hitler’s assault on the USSR, Germany troops quickly and easily slicing through Russian territory, with little significant resistance. Before the siege of Stalingrad, we are introduced to characters from various parts of the union\u2014returning home from the front, leaving home for the front, staying behind to help the war effort, and so on\u2014from cities to countryside, from farms to high-ranking military offices. Sons, daughters, grandparents, grandchildren all strive to exist under extreme conditions, as do factory workers, farmers, soldiers, nurses, and doctors\u2014male and female alike.<\/p>\n

Actual fighting takes up a smaller portion of this 900-page brick (closer to 1,100 pages with notes and afterword), and the novel ends before the siege. (Part 2, Life and Fate<\/strong>, another 1,000-pager, picks up with the same (remaining) characters of Part 1 after the siege.) Despite Grossman offering this tome as an homage to Russian bravery, Soviet censors managed to be offended by the original manuscript, which underwent revisions before it was able to be published\u2014after<\/strong> Part 2. Stalingrad\u2019s translators, the Chandlers, have done their best to re-create the ur-text submitted by Grossman. Since I am not a student of Russian language, literature, or publishing practices, I cannot measure their achievement in those regards.<\/p>\n

However, as a novel in the Russian capacious tradition of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (authors of differing temperaments) and the 19th<\/sup>-century Western European practice of cranking out 700-900-page books, Stalingrad<\/strong> fits well while also extending the tradition. Although I\u2019m tempted to now pick up the copy of Life and Fate<\/strong> that has sat unread on my shelves for decades, Robert Chandler, in his afterword, says that he is contemplating re-translating it, since he now has available manuscript pages that were inaccessible before the fall of the Soviet Union. An excellent companion to this novel would be Svetlana Alexievich\u2019s non-fictional Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Peach Blossom Paradise<\/a><\/strong>
\nGe Fei [Canaan Morse, trans.]
\nNYRB Classics<\/p>\n

\u201cLet a thousand flowers bloom.\u201d \u2014Mao<\/p>\n

Magpie brought the cicada to the pawnshop, but the pawnbroker wouldn\u2019t take it. In fact, he wouldn\u2019t even look at it twice. He stuffed his hands in his sleeves and said dully, \u201cI know it\u2019s gold. But gold isn\u2019t worth anything when people are starving.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cA single death is a tragedy; a million deaths are statistic.\u201d \u2014Joseph Stalin<\/p>\n

The hermit\u2019s hedgerow is like the Peach Blossom Paradise:
\nAfter these flowers blossom, no others will bloom.<\/p>\n

An old Chinese tale describes a remote spot stumbled upon by an outsider, who discovers a perfect place where all people and creatures are in harmony with each other, Peach Blossom Paradise. After his stay, he returns home, describing the paradise he discovered. Some dismiss his stories; others try but cannot again find the place described. Ge Fei weaves this tale with another search for Paradise on Earth, a pre-Maoist Communist Revolution that in part promises to liberate women from the tyranny of arranged marriages\u2014so that any man can fuck any woman he wants at any time.<\/p>\n

Xiumi, the novel\u2019s protagonist, is around 12 years old when the book starts. Her father is a government functionary, and thus part of the upper class\u2014an estate with land plowed by others and a house with live-in maids. He apparently goes mad, and just walks away from home one day, never to return. One doesn\u2019t need to know about the violent tumult across China resulting from the late-19th century Hundred Days\u2019 Reform to appreciate the shock and confusion among isolated rural communities far from any hub of reactionary or revolutionary turmoil about what is going on.<\/p>\n

By age 15, Xiumi\u2019s mother is almost out of money to run the household and sells her daughter into an arranged marriage. En route<\/em> to her fianc\u00e9\u2019s estate for the marriage, Xiumi is kidnapped and taken to an island while awaiting ransom. But neither Xiumi\u2019s mother nor her fianc\u00e9 is willing to pay her ransom, and thus the kidnappers rape and sell her off to another man. Passed among government officials and criminal kingpins, Xiumi learns ruthlessness and gains revenge. Perhaps worse, she also gains an ideology. Talk of revolution permeates the air, but when the characters in this novel ask each other what \u201crevolution\u201d means, the only working definition that they can guess at is \u201cthe ability to do whatever I want.\u201d<\/p>\n

While I was reading Xiumi\u2019s transformation into a nightmare, and understanding the forces that shaped her, I came across a review of Alex Kotlowitz’s An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago<\/strong> (“How Can We Stop Gun Violence?” by Francesca Mari (NYRB, June 10 2021)), that focused on Kotlowitz\u2019s descriptions of a young man, Thomas, with post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by the many murders Thomas had witnessed since he was 11 years old\u2014friends, family, strangers. He is in a constant state of high-tension anger and anxiety. The only thing that quells it is violent release, which allows him to finally sleep.<\/p>\n

Xiumi\u2019s ideological vengeance\u2014her violent release\u2014ends with the death of her six-year-old son, whom she had never even bothered to name, consumed as she was by her revolutionary furor. The last quarter of the book regards Xiumi\u2019s atonement and repentance, largely by heeding Voltaire\u2019s advice to tend her own garden. A sense of redemption and grace concludes the book.<\/p>\n

Ge Fei is an excellent writer, with a talent for empathy, depth, and subtlety. This is only the second book by him recently translated into English, and it\u2019s the best novel I\u2019ve read so far this year. Translator Canaan Morse has a keen eye for key words and phrases deployed and developed throughout the novel, echoing its themes: the dangers of ideologies, the fact that ideologies are rarely women-friendly (even in the hands of women), and the need and ability to recover from ideological delusions\u2014\u201crecovery\u201d including humility and selflessness.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>A Man\u2019s Place<\/a><\/strong>
\nAnnie Ernaux [Tanya Leslie, trans.]
\nSeven Stories Press<\/p>\n

A memoir, biography, and homage to her father, Ernaux explores her upbringing in rural France by a man\u2014the main motivating force of the family\u2014who rose from poverty to the American equivalent of lower-middle class stability.<\/p>\n

Without romanticizing any of his past, Ernaux describes her father\u2019s birth into the French equivalent of sharecroppers: Workers of other peoples\u2019 land for poverty wages and little respect. Her father, she points out, was pulled out of school just days short of obtaining his elementary school certification. The family\u2019s reason was based on necessity: Now that he was 12, the landowners would not allow him to sleep in the house or feed him without pay. Ernaux\u2019s grandfather could not afford his son\u2019s room and board, and so it was off to the barn loft with him, with nothing but hard life ahead.<\/p>\n

Ernaux implies that she was on the outs with her father during her teen years, as she grew closer to her mother and he grew impatient with her teenage behavior. Typical of Ernaux\u2019s essays is an attempt to look as issues with eyes as cold as possible\u2014a French Didion, though of a different temperament and outlook. As a result, Ernaux focuses on her father\u2019s actions and their outcomes rather than the emotions they evoke; she recalls the phrases her father and mother emphasized time and again, drawing attention to how much she has internalized them in her own way of thinking and writing, even if just ironically; his commitment to modesty even when, well into middle age, he becomes the first person in his family to own property\u2014a small shop and house that he and her mother ran for many years.<\/p>\n

Despite his gruff exterior, he made sure his daughter got as much education as she qualified for, and never at his or his wife\u2019s insistence. Ernaux went to college to become a teacher, and two months after she passed her qualification exam, her father died.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Can the Monster Speak?<\/a><\/strong>
\nPaul B. Preciado
\nSemiotext(e)<\/p>\n

[G]ender transition . . . entails activating those genes whose expression had been thwarted by the presence of estrogens, by connecting them via testosterone and triggering a parallel evolution of my own life, by giving free expression to the phenotype that would otherwise have remained silent. To be trans, one must accept the triumphant irruption of another future in oneself, in every cell of one\u2019s body. To transition comes down to understanding that the cultural codes of masculinity and femininity are anecdotal compared to the infinite variety of modalities of existence.<\/p>\n

In 2019, Paul B. Preciado was invited to give a talk to a convention of 3,500 Freudian psychoanalysts in Paris\u2014a talk that was jeered at by the Freudians, denounced, and shouted down before Preciado was even half-through. Not a single member of that group from Ecole de la Cause Freudienne would even admit to, for instance, being gay, when asked, a way of being the group asserts is pathological.<\/p>\n

The entirety of Preciado\u2019s speech has now been translated and published. Preciado, a trans man, has studied the history of psychology and legislation as it relates to defining \u201cnormality,\u201d and finds it still primarily based on masculine identity and genitalia. Even women, according to these Freudians and Lacanians, are a sub-species or lesser example of the male ideal.<\/p>\n

Gore Vidal in an essay once alluded to Freud as a Viennese novelist\u2014no science, no research, just unexamined assumptions, and a hostility toward evidence (richly abundant from his own patients) at odds with his unsupported assertions. Lacan was even less of a scientist than Freud, even less of a writer, but couched his prose in dense absurdities difficult to unravel. (For those who made the effort to unravel his essays, the hard work revealed only unsubstantiated nonsense at its core.)<\/p>\n

By defining what characterizes \u201cmale\u201d and \u201cfemale\u201d and positing heterosexuality as the only nonpathological way of living and loving in the world, Freudians helped shape and determine the legal context in which people may be arrested, jailed, forcibly medicated, raped, operated upon, kept from employment, and so forth.<\/p>\n

Just as Ptolemy and Galileo helped decenter the Sun, Earth, and humanity from Center of the Universe to small corner of an unremarkable galaxy among trillions of others, the notion of what it means to be human is undergoing a profound shift in understanding what is at the core of our being, no matter our genitalia, reproductive capacity, or preferences in intimacy. Living in a small corner of an unremarkable galaxy makes us no less human than before (or any less the children of God to theists)\u2014any more than existing on a continuum of physiology and desires does.<\/p>\n

William Burroughs, in The Book of Breeething<\/strong> [sic], argues for using the \u201cas\u201d of identity rather than the \u201cis,\u201d as shown in Egyptian hieroglyphs. In these hieroglyphs, the \u201cas\u201d of identity describes people according to functions they perform: X as uncle, as brickmaker, as citizen, etc. \u201cIs\u201d labels, however, are prone to limiting bigotries. The \u201cis\u201d of identity assumes that everything significant about that person is revealed by biological descriptors. For instance, \u201cX is<\/strong> gay\u201d (or Black or Jewish, etc.): \u201cThat\u2019s all I need to know about him!\u201d Preciado convincingly argues along similar lines for a human emancipation that frees us from destructive, limiting notions of what it means to be fully human to productive, varied, and affirming notions of existence, unshackled from genital obsession.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>I Wish<\/a><\/strong>
\nIngrid Godon (picture) and Toon Tellegen (words), David Colmer (trans.)
\nElsewhere Editions<\/p>\n

Ingrid Godon and Toon Tellegen have separately won many awards in their respective fields. For I Wish<\/strong>, Tellegen added brief thoughts for each of the characters depicted in a series of portraits by Tellegen. (It isn\u2019t clear to me whether Tellegen or Godon named the portraits.) The match is excellent, and the pairings of text and image often devastate with their ingenuous simplicity, especially since most of the portraits seem to be of children, whose wide-set eyes and closed lips suggest mild unhappiness or befuddlement.
\nAlmost every pairing begins with the words \u201cI wish,\u201d such as these, from \u201cSusanne\u201d:<\/p>\n

I wish I wasn\u2019t scared of dying.
\nThere are people who aren\u2019t scared of death.
\nWhen they see him coming they just stand there
\ncalmy and call out, \u201cHey, Death!
\nIt\u2019 so nice to see you!\u201d
\nBut those same people hide in the basement during
\nthunderstorms or scream and climb up on tables
\nwhen they see a mouse.
\nI like mice and thunderstorms.
\nMaybe everyone needs to be scared of something,
\nit doesn\u2019t matter what, just like everyone needs
\nto breathe and eat and drink.
\nOtherwise you die.<\/p>\n

And from \u201cCarl\u201d:<\/p>\n

I wish happiness was a thing and I
\nfound it somewhere and took it home with me.
\nI wouldn\u2019t tell anyone I\u2019d found it.
\nI\u2019d hide it and only get it out
\nwhen I was sure I was completely alone.
\nThen I\u2019d buff it up.
\nHappiness needs to shine, even if it\u2019s secret.
\nIf I felt down and nothing I wanted was working out,
\nif everyone hated me and I was in the hospital with two
\nbroken legs, boils, toothache, conjunctivitis,
\nchicken pox, and scarlet fever, I could tell
\nmyself: but I still have my happiness,
\nit\u2019s still there where I put it!<\/p>\n

Each vignette represents a way of looking and understanding the world and one\u2019s place in it\u2014or being at a total loss to figure out what that place might be.<\/p>\n

While I defer to the expertise of those who target the book to 8\u201312-year-olds, I suspect that I Wish <\/strong>is a type of book adults tell themselves they wish they had at that age for its examples of other kids who were dealing with the same doubts and hopes. But the likelihood is that, when these same romanticizing adults were kids, I Wish <\/strong>is exactly the type of book they would have ignored since its coolness is not immediately obvious. I Wish<\/strong> seems pitched to an emotional level I don\u2019t recall myself having from 8-12, nor is it one I see among the few 8\u201312-year-olds I do encounter. Fourteen- to sixteen-year-olds, yes\u2014but this isn\u2019t a graphic novel or manga, so the kids interested in this book\u2014for all its qualities\u2014would likely be among the 10% whose emotional maturity is ahead of their peers. That said, I think adults rueful of their past will be those who appreciate this book most. If 8\u201312-year-olds would appreciate it, too, all the better!<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Chartwell Manor: A Memoir<\/a><\/strong>
\nGlenn Head
\nFantagraphics<\/p>\n

When Glenn Head was 13, his parents decided to send him to a small, private school to repeat the 7th<\/sup> grade. Over the years, Head had become increasingly distractable from school tasks and he was just eking by scholastically. Discipline was needed, and his parents chose to send Glenn to a boarding school for \u201ctroubled boys\u201d (mostly), ages 5 to 15\u2014usually boys from wealthy families, since tuition was $10K\u2014a hefty sum in the early 1970s.<\/p>\n

Every boy\u2019s nightmare comes true in this book: The headmaster (who demands to be addressed as \u201cSir\u201d) spanks, paddles, canes, beats, molests, and fellates the boys. (Who gets what is, as is usually the case in these situations, purely arbitrary.) The boys are trapped in a molester\u2019s dream scenario: youth\u2014troubled, confused, rejected at home\u2014given unstinting attention and emotional manipulation that combines the shock of violence with the comfort of hugs and loving coos. This, at age 13.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the first part of the book. The second part deals with the after-effects of those years. The after-effects, until age 30, include seemingly non-stop drinking binges, porn\/sexshop\/strip club binges, and\u2014surprise!\u2014difficulty maintaining relationships. Bonus points: Semi-estrangement from his parents, who turn a deaf ear to their responsibility for submitting their son to the abuses of the school. (The parents already seem to know or intuit that \u201cSir,\u201d a tawny ex-Brit in his 40s, is abusive, and it\u2019s nothing they care to give much thought to.) Head and I are, I would guess, within a year of each other\u2019s age. Our parents are of a generation that says, \u201cDeal with it. It happened; you can\u2019t change anything. Move on,\u201d while remaining blinkered to what that mindset has done to themselves, let alone to their children and grandchildren, while the effects of their decisions ripple on throughout the generations.<\/p>\n

The indifference and willful obliviousness to molestation and other forms of abuse of one\u2019s own child<\/em> and of one\u2019s own friend<\/em> only worsen the emotional realm of the abused: To hear laughter as response to physical violation is a second violation of a child\u2019s fundamental trust in the world. Head, in later years, meets up with some of his old school pals from Chatwell Manor, after Lynch, the headmaster, has been thrown in jail for pedophilia. Head gives up drinking at age 30, joining AA, but certain unhealthy sexual obsessions remain. Knowing how fucked-up he is as a direct result of that one year, he\u2019s curious to see what\u2019s happened to them.<\/p>\n

None of the other three seemed to have made much of their lives: drunk, in jail, unemployed, etc. One is an especial car-wreck: drunk, missing a front tooth, part-time carpenter. That\u2019s the first part. Part two: admits to enjoying Sir\u2019s spankings and blow jobs. Part three: Hints that he\u2019s seriously looked into the cost of having Sir killed by professionals. This is the notion of \u201cresilience\u201d of our parents\u2019 generation.<\/p>\n

Throughout Head\u2019s memoir, at different years in his adult life, we see an image of Lynch on his drawing board, representing Head\u2019s different attempts over the decades to confront his fears and their source. Each time results in emotional tailspin, almost always self-destructive. In Chartwell Manor<\/strong>, Head seems to have finally purged himself of the evil spirit that plagued him for 50 years.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Batlava Lake<\/a><\/strong>
\nAdam Mars-Jones
\nFitzcarraldo Editions<\/p>\n

Barry Ashton is a civil engineer deployed to Kosovo with the British Army after the civil war there in the 1990s. He\u2019s a bit of an ass\u2014a dull-minded bureaucrat who imagines himself as rational, ticking off boxes on administrative forms, taking special pride in being \u201c[q]ualified under the Safety Rules Procedures to inspect premises and equipment and to give the go-ahead for service personnel to undertake their duties.\u201d A strictly-by-the-rules type as unimaginative and unreflective as you might expect\u2014a casual bigot, indifferent to and\/or confused by duties of marriage and fatherhood, a man of principle unless those principles put personal life at stake.<\/p>\n

An unsurprising result of this set of traits is the disdain by which he is held by the army men forced to salute him and follow his orders, and by his wife back home who divorces him midway through his appointment in Kosovo. Oblique spoiler alert: Hints are dropped throughout the story about how well Barry performs his job, details I didn\u2019t recognize were clues until the end, and then I thought of Raymond Carver\u2019s story \u201cSo Much Water So Close to Home\u201d (1981).<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve known and worked with people like Barry Ashton, people who valiantly attempt to become two-dimensional examples of humanity via a steady application of \u201crationality\u201d\u2014itself a concept too many people base upon wholly unexamined assumptions, allowing for evading personal responsibility. It is to Mars-Jones\u2019s credit that he is able to restore Barry\u2019s tragic third-dimension and by so doing highlight Barry\u2019s significant moral failings.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Ennemonde <\/a><\/strong>
\nJean Giono (Bill Johnston, trans.)
\nArchipelago Books<\/p>\n

Although originally published in France in 1968, set in France\u2019s rural \u201cHigh Country,\u201d and beginning roughly World War I, much of Jean Giono\u2019s Ennemonde<\/strong> sounds like present-day U.S.: a mash-up between Faulkner\u2019s Yoknapatawpha County and the average Trump supporter.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe tool that people around here have most often in their hand is a shotgun, whether it\u2019s for hunting or for, let\u2019s say, philosophical reflection; in either case, there\u2019s no solution without<\/em> a shot being fired. . . Monsieur Sartre would not be of much use here; a shotgun, on the other hand, comes in handy in many situations.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not that these folks are worse than others; it\u2019s that, individualists to an extreme and incurably solitary, they\u2019re constantly afraid of being duped. And if love does that often (makes you a dupe), hatred never does; there you\u2019re on solid ground. I love you: that\u2019s never sure; proof is needed. I hate you: that\u2019s solid as gold bullion.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Protestants of these parts had since time immemorial protested against Protestantism. They\u2019d ended up worshipping anything at all, so long as the anything at all demanded intolerance. Crown of thorns were consumed in every household, at every meal. Religion was a sort of commerce in which discomfort was always preferred to joy, scorn to pleasure, and ultimately vice to virtue.\u201d<\/p>\n

Violence, hatred, and discomfort are forces of nature entwined with nature\u2014animal, vegetable, and weather-driven\u2014red in claw and tooth and the ultimate arbiter of truth, unforgivingly so.<\/p>\n

Ennemonde is the story\u2019s titular heroine, a toothless obese woman (280 lbs.), honest but otherwise amoral. She struggles for and wins unstinting respect from the folks in her area, buying, selling, and raising sheep. Giono clearly respects and admires Ennemonde, too, for all her amorality. Her fight for respect in a male-dominated patriarchal world is not a feminist battle\u2014Ennemonde would destroy any woman who stood in her way, as well. Giono\u2019s argument is that anybody who wanted to achieve Ennemonde\u2019s modicum of material comfort would have been required to do the same.<\/p>\n

Ennedmonde\u2019s way\u2014nature\u2019s way\u2014is not to ostentatiously shove others aside. That sort of arrogance, coming from either men or women, will be met by the community with resistance and will be shortly put down, one way or the other. Instead, the way to success is through silence and cunning, as Joyce\u2019s Stephen Dedalus would have it (exile is to be avoided). The High Country consists of subsistence-level shepherds, either with small families or living by themselves in one-room huts, hidden in dales beneath trees. Reputation matters more than money, and everybody knows each other\u2019s business by what they hear, see, and smell in the wind. Revenge may take decades to arrive and appear in the form of the natural consequences of farm life.<\/p>\n

In the second part of the book, an addendum of sorts, Giono seems to build a case for Ennemonde being a natural conclusion from the environment of the High Country, not a one-off. Thus, Ennemonde\u2019s decisions to disrupt legal, ethical, and cultural traditions make sense in a world that never even pretended to uphold notions of Christian morality.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Mrs. Murakami\u2019s Garden<\/a><\/strong>
\nBy Mario Bellatin (Healther Cleary, translator)
\nDeep Vellum Publishing<\/p>\n

\u201c[On their wedding] day, Izu and Mr. Murakami ate alone in a restaurant on the outskirts of the city. It was the only time they would do this after Izu left home. The menu included a dish of flesh sliced from a live fish. The meal was served beside a glass dish containing the fish, and lasted exactly as long as it took the poor creature to die.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mario Bellatin is an author new to me but one who apparently has a least six previous books available in English translation. I\u2019ll now make a point of tracking them down. Mrs. Murakami\u2019s Garden<\/strong> exemplifies understated narration that allows the rhetorical effect of implication to knead each reader\u2019s imagination into picturing the emotional ugliness implied. This restrained narration is a trait of much Japanese literature I\u2019ve read. Thus, in terms of simulating the rhetorical tone of (some) Japanese literature, Garden<\/strong> is a stunning success, especially in terms of (a) a Mexican writer imitating (b) a trait of Japanese literature that is (c) successfully conveyed from Japanese via Spanish into English.<\/p>\n

In addition to that rhetorical nicety is the subtle twist that turns the protagonist, Izu, from liberal to conservative, yet pariah to all. The transformation is morally horrifying, even though nobody fundamentally changes\u2014only our perceptions of them change because of where the logical conclusions of their worldviews lead them. Playing the long game is Mr Murakami\u2019s standpoint, with sadistic humiliation as its goal.<\/p>\n

In weird contrast to the cruelty of the end narrative are the author\u2019s \u201cAddenda\u201d and the translator\u2019s \u201cNote,\u201d which are brief exercises in absurdity. Together they seem to annul the slow-burn seriousness of the story; but I suspect there are dots I\u2019m failing to connect.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Little Snow Landscape<\/strong>
\nRobert Walser [Tom Whalen, translator]
\nNYRB Classics<\/p>\n

\u201cThe desire and passion for sketching life with words stems finally only from a certain precision and beautiful pedantry of the soul that suffers when it has to witness so many lovely, vibrant, urgent, transitory things flying off into the world without having been able to capture them in a notebook. What endless worries!\u201d<\/p>\n

As with Bola\u00f1o\u2014but for more years now\u2014Robert Walser is a writer with a higher rate of post-mortem publishing than lifetime publishing. In Walser\u2019s case, it\u2019s not just a matter of making available in English his previously published works, it\u2019s also a matter of publishing newly discovered manuscripts and manuscripts that could not be read until the \u201ccode\u201d Walser employed could be cracked. (The code turned out to be an old German letter script written at a \u201cmicroscript\u201d scale small enough to write an entire novel on a single sheet of paper that was (as I recall) similar in size to a sheet of legal paper. There are 570+ plus sheets of various sizes in the Walser Archive.)<\/p>\n

While at least 3,700 pages of published Walser exist (in the 1985 version of the complete works), the translation tap is set to about 150-180 pages a year in English. And the pages continue to impress, especially in the capable hands of a good translator, as we have here with Tom Whalen, who\u2014like Susan Bernofsky and Christopher Middleton\u2014are aces at replicating the nuances in Walser\u2019s prose, which often have the feel of forced cheerfulness, of someone battling between optimism and resignation, elation and offense.<\/p>\n

The stories gathered in Little Snow Landscape<\/strong>, arranged chronologically, follow Walser from 1905 to 1933, four years into the institutional living in which he would remain until his death in 1956. Let a couple of lines stand for some of Walser\u2019s tics, one of them being to comment on the quality of his writing while he\u2019s writing: \u201cThe sky had the deep, blushing-with-joy blue of a little frock fluttering around pretty legs, which without doubt constitutes a rather serious contemplation of nature\u201d (from \u201cFragment\u201d).<\/p>\n

In \u201cWenzel,\u201d Walser describes a person of a (self-defeating) mercurial temperament, another Walserian tic (cf. Jakob von Gunten<\/strong>). In this case, Wenzel is someone whose sudden ardor for acting is challenged when he receives his first role. \u201cWenzel is to play a prince\u2019s lackey who, among other things, has to take a slap in the face. No, that he cannot play, that\u2019s too deplorable. . . He absents himself from the performance, it\u2019s too stupid.\u201d But finally, Wenzel tells himself, \u201c\u2018Love and ardor endure everything, even a slap in the face.\u2019\u201d And that\u2019s pretty much how Walser lived his life: talking himself into love, becoming suddenly offended by the love, leaving the scene, and regretting his behavior with the ambivalence with which he fell in love.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tom Bowden is a local reviewer, educator of the Chinese language, and cultural mavin, who has been reviewing eclectic and important small press books and works in translation for the Book Beat newsletter since the pandemic. Bowden’s regular monthly column “i arrogantly recommend…” has been a work of love we greatly appreciate. We link his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":70789,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[466,461],"class_list":["post-70785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-i-arrogantly-recommend","tag-tom-bowden"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70785\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}