Are you looking for something to fill the gap between trick-or-treaters this evening? Here’s a little something you might enjoy: “Among the Moabites,” a story that was originally published in the Cherry Bleeds journal and featured on the Pseudopod podcast, available free from Gumroad in PDF, ePUB, and MOBI formats.
A bit more about this story here.
Of course they get context; of course they get history. Give them Huck Finn, give them Mockingbird, and treat them like the young adults they are. That’s how you get kids to like reading, not by telling them they’re too young and naïve to appreciate the literature that is their cultural birthright.
Michael Schaub, Bookslut
Some days on his walk Harold Keehn thought about his wives. Some days it was caskets. Others it was the heartbreaking beauty of the natural world such as he had come to know it.
Apparition and Late Fictions by Thomas Lynch
These four elegiacal stories and one novella are about death, regret, death, loneliness, and death. Set largely in rural Michigan, and peopled by characters who have suffered loss or care for those who have, they have a slow and solemn pace. Lynch tends toward the long line, the slow and stately sentence, amplifying the adagio tempo.
Thomas Lynch is, not surprisingly, a funeral director by day; two of the stories–”Hunter’s Moon” and “Bloodsport”–are very explicitly about the business of burying, with much rumination about the changes in casket design over the last quarter century and the work of laying out a body for viewing and burial. And the stories that aren’t about funeral directors or casket salesmen have the disposition of remains as a key touchstone: a son takes his father’s ashes on a fishing trip, and a poet’s widow reflects on a stillbirth and how to care for her husband’s literary reputation. Though the novella, “Apparition,” isn’t so clearly about death, it is very much about loss, following a young pastoral assistant’s transformation from minister to self-help guru by way of infidelity and the collapse of his marriage.
Lynch works very successfully with time in these stories, moving deftly between the present and the past. The present action is largely within the characters’ heads; the real action occurs in the past, and in the way the past becomes reshaped in reflection. The stories unfold slowly and gracefully, and resolve with a sense of acceptance, if sometimes tinged with resignation. These are very grown-up stories, not unlike Thomas Williams’ Leah New Hampshire or William Kittredge’s collections, and put the reader in a reflective mood.
I placed the book on a table and opened it and then leaned down into the splayed pages, reading and breathing. We seemed to assimilate each other, the characters and I, and when I raised my head I had to tell myself where I was.
Don DeLillo’s Midnight in Dostoevsky is a nervous parable of obsession, more Kafka than Dostoevsky in its unease. It follows two college students in their efforts to construct a narrative around Ilgauskus, their mysterious Logic professor, and a nameless old man they’ve seen on winter walks around town. They are interested in building a consistent story, filled with details, that links the old man and the professor, and are resistent to outside details that threaten their crystalline tale. The world and its facts are a threat to their constructed system of context and meaning.
Jill Lepore’s essay on the politics of death, and the unfortunate convergence of medical technology, overheated rhetoric about Nazis, and the medicalization of life’s inevitable end, was also a highlight of the November 30 2009 New Yorker. But DeLillo’s anxious fable is the piece that sticks with me.
le Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
Id ghéaga daingne
ní bhfaighfidh mé bás choiche
ní thiocfaidh orm aon sceimhle,
ní líonfaidh orm anbhá.
Ní chloisfidh mé
ag gíoscán ins an oíche
fearsad na cairte fuafaire
a ghluaiseann trí pháirc an áir.
Is dún nó daingean iad
do ghéaga i mo thimpeall
do ghuailne leathana
am chosaint ar a lán.
Ag cuardach fothaine dom
ó gharbhshíon na cinniúna
tá gairdín foscaidh le fáilt
idir do dhá shlinneán.
Is sa ghairdín sin
tá beacha is ológa
ta mil ar luachair ann
is na crainn go léir faoi bhláth
i dtús an fhomhair
mar ní thagann aon gheimhridh
is gaoth an tseaca
ní luíonn air anáil.
Is lasmuigh dínn
tá críocha is ciníocha
ag bruíon is ag bunú sibhialtachta
ag puililiú ar an gclár.
Dá mbeadh ceithre creasa
na cruinne in aon chaor lasrach
dá n-imeodih an cosmos
in aon mheall craorag amháin.
Ba chuma liom, do ghéaga
a bheith im thimpeall
níorbh ann do scáth nó eagla
níorbh ann don ocras riamh.
Nuair a fhilleann tú mé
go cneasta isteach id bhaclainn
táim chomh slán sábháilte
leis an gcathair ard úd ar shliabh.
Coinnigh go daingean mé
laistigh den gciorcal draíochta
le teas do cholainne
le teasargan do chabhaile.
Do chneas lem chneas
do bhéal go dlúth lem béalaibh
ní chluinfead na madraí allta
ag uallfairt ar an má.
Ach níl in aon ní ach seal:
i gcionn leathuaire
pógfaidhh tú mé ar bharr m’éadain
is casfaidh tú orm do dhrom
is fágfar mé ar mo thaobh féin
don leaba dhúbailte
ag cuimhneamh faoi scáth do ghuailne
ná tiocfaidh orm bás riamh roimh am.
by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
In your arms’ fortress
I will face neither eternal death
nor terror,
panic will not fill me.
I will not hear
the grinding in the night
of the war carriages’ axles
rolling through the battlefields.
You arms are a fortress
around me,
your broad shoulders
completely protecting me.
I seek my shelter
from fate’s storm
in the shaded garden ring
between your shoulder blades.
And in that garden
are bees and olives
with honey on the rushes there,
the trees in full bloom
even at the start of Autumn;
winter never comes there,
the frosty winds
never blow there.
Beyond the fortress
walls are people
struggling and building civilizations,
a mad hullabaloo.
If the four corners of the globe
were one flaming berry
if the cosmos were rolled
into one crimson ball
It wouldn’t matter to me, your limbs
still around me;
no room for shadow or fear,
no room there for hunger.
When you fold me
gently inside the bend of your arm
I am safer than
the city high on a mountain.
The fortress keeps me
within the magic circle
with the body’s heat
with the body’s deliverance
skin on skin
mouth on mouth
I will not hear the wild beasts
howling on the plain.
But nothing outlasts its time:
in a half an hour
you will kiss the top of my forehead
and turn from me on your back
in the double bed
and I will think about your shoulders’ shadow
and not that death is always approaching me.
Last month, a reader wrote to request some help with this poem; they were dissatisfied with the translation by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, which appears in Pharaoh's Daughter, and had some questions about a few of the trickier lines.
I’ve noted before that I consider Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill far beyond my translation skills, in either Irish or English, but I decided to give it a shot. I don’t think my translation is as good as Ní Chuilleanáin’s (an accomplished poet in her own right; here’s an example); it’s a bit more literal, though, which is what I think my reader was looking for in the kinds of questions in the e-mail.
Any translation is an interpretation; some things are harder to write in English than in Irish, and vice versa, and some things that make perfect sense in one language are pure nonsense in another. Ní Chuilleanáin’s translation of this poem is certainly more interpretive than mine, and takes some liberties that I, surely far less familiar than Ní Chuilleanáin with Irish idiom, dare not take.
This poem is a good companion piece to the other Ní Dhomhnaill poem, “Oileán”, that I’ve tried to translate. Like “Oileán,” “Dún” is a sensuous poem, but the sensuousness is undercut by some of its recurring images. “Oileán” posits love in the midst of loneliness; “Dún” places love in a bleak landscape of destruction. Safety, protection, and certainty are contrasted with images of war and tumult and wild beasts; but at the same time, the safety is represented by a fortress, a martial image that echoes the war carriages and battlefield of the first stanza.
My favorite word in this poem is “puililiú”; my dictionary sent me to “fuilibiliú”, which gave me “hullabaloo; halloo, yell.” Ní Chuilleanáin doesn’t translate this line directly–she gives “multiplying on the globe” for what the people beyond the stronghold’s charmed circle are up to–but I simply had to use it, even if it clashes a bit with the rest of the poem.
I also love the internal echoes of “le teas do cholainne / le teasargan do chabhaile.” I can’t render it very well in English. “Teas” is “heat”; “teasargan” is “deliverance” or “rescue”. Both “colainn” and “cabhail” are words for “body”; I’m sure there are subtle distinctions between them of which I’m not aware, and that further enhance that lovely balance between “teas” and “teasargan.”
“Dún” should probably be translated as “Fortress”–it appears in many Irish place names associated with ancient forts–but I like the title Ní Chuilleanáin chose because it echoes the holding arms and strong back that are the poem’s central images.
Of course, Quangel, it would have been a hundred times better if we’d had someone who could have told us. Such and such is what you have to do; our plan is this and this. But if there had been such a man in Germany, then Hitler would never have come to power in 1933. As it was, we all acted alone, we were caught alone, and every one of us will have to die alone. But that doesn’t mean that we are alone, Quangel, or that our deaths will be in vain. Nothing in this world is done in vain, and since we are fighting for justice against brutality, we are bound to prevail in the end.
Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada, translated by Michael Hofmann
More than 70 years on, there are still great gaps in our collective understanding of the Second World War, at least in the United States: we can easily conjure up D-Day, the Battle of Britain, and the liberation of the Nazi death camps; we can imagine the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Bataan Death March, and the mushroom clouds over Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But there are huge gaps: the Eastern Front is a mystery to most in the West, not just Americans, as are Manchuria, the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia, even the war in the Balkans.
Even more so than the military events of the war, our knowledge of life and death on the home front is spotty at best. Through The Diary of a Young Girl and The Moon Is Down, we’ve learned a little about life in occupied Europe, but we generally know almost nothing about life in Nazi Germany itself. Every Man Dies Alone is, if nothing else, a valuable contribution to our understanding of history, with its densely drawn scenes of a working class neighborhood in Berlin during the Second World War and its sharp but humane view of daily life under the Nazis.
While reading Every Man Dies Alone, I was frequently reminded of George Orwell’s 1984. The Nazis maintain their power not only through brutality (and there is shocking brutality in this novel), but through paranoia: people are systematically divided from each other, made to fear that anyone–not only strangers and neighbors, but lovers and family members–could be a secret informer. Organized resistance to the regime seems almost impossible, and individual resistance both ineffectual and foolhardy. An atomized society, where people don’t dare reach out to each other or speak their minds, is both the ends and the means of the Nazi Party. There are also echoes of Kafka’s The Trial, where Nazi “justice” is presented as capricious and cruel, and the Gestapo as psychological manipulators who can twist the most innocent person into confessing impossible crimes.
What makes Every Man Dies Alone more terrible than Orwell and Kafka, though, is that it isn’t wholly a work of fiction. The novel is based on the case of a German couple, Otto and Elise Hampel, who dropped anti-Nazi postcards around Berlin for two years and were executed in 1943. Hans Fallada survived internment in a Nazi asylum, and the novel demonstrates his intimate knowledge of Nazi police and prisons, as well as the network of petty informants and tattlers who helped keep the regime in power. It’s a surprisingly non-ideological novel: the Quangels, who lost their son in the war and are driven to their desperate act of resistance by grief, are not motivated by political or social goals loftier than common decency. And few of the Nazis they encounter and evade are true believers, either: they tend to be thugs or petty potentates driven by power, or decent men who have made painful compromises from which they cannot now escape. Fallada brings the broad sweep of history down to an intimate scale, and offers complex characters who are making their way in brutal circumstances.
As a novel, Every Man Dies Alone suffers a few flaws. It relies on some Dickensian coincidences that stretch the suspension of disbelief, and drops a few story threads just as they’re getting interesting. But these flaws are more than balanced by the richness of the characters. Fallada manages to make even the would-be informant Enno Kluge, and the Gestapo Inspector Escherich (who, in a different time and place, would have made a fine police-procedural hero), into sympathetic characters. The heroes themselves are not perfect–Otto Quangel is emotionally cold and domineering, retired judge Fromm is in retreat from the world–which makes their ability to stand up to the Nazis, however fruitlessly, that much more admirable. It’s also a fast-moving novel, paced like a thriller even when the end is a foregone conclusion (hinted at from the start), told mostly in the present tense with the focus moving nimbly from character to character.
Fallada died in 1947, before Every Man Dies Alone was published. It would be interesting to have had Fallada’s views on the next chapter of Berlin’s history: the Quangels’ apartment block on Jablonskistrasse ended up on the east side of Wall, and the neighborhood had a respite of only a few years before paranoia, fear, and suspicion flooded back, with the Stasi replacing the Gestapo. Knowing how the next forty years would go makes reading Fallada’s novel especially poignant.
As oracular devices go, Internet search engines are a little better than reading sheep entrails and a little worse than the I Ching. The Internet is so full of bad and misleading information, that unless you already know what you’re looking for you’ll be easily duped. And because most search engines add a little “wisdom of the crowds” (or the “none of us is as dumb as all of us” principal) to their algorithms, bad information tends to reinforce more bad information. In most cases, you’re better off asking a person–your father (who might lie to you), the guy at the end of the bar (who will definitely lie to you), or a librarian (who will certainly not lie to you, but might giggle when you’re not looking)–or trying to find the answer in a book.
Case in point: this site should be flooded with searches for things like heartbreakingly beautiful short stories and incredibly astute political commentary. Alas, such is not the case. Indeed, some of the searches that have landed people here are a little puzzling indeed.
So, in the spirit of public service, here’s a little help for people who’ve wandered here and have probably not found the answers they wanted.
As noted earlier, the L.A. Times crossword from last weekend has puzzled a lot of people. I thought the traffic from this search would die down quickly, but it’s been steady. I find myself equally bemused and peeved to see it in the analytics logs.
The answer is Byzantium. But you get extra points if you thought the answer might be Innisfree.
Yup, there are different kinds, some more so than others.
Simple, really. Key definitions to learn would be “oxymoron,” “irony,” “sardonicism,” and “mordancy.”
All novels are stories, but not all stories are novels.
Refer to the answer above. “Oxymoron” applies here as well.
Much preferred to anything “healthy.”
Close! Please try again.
It all depends on when you go. Go to the DJ show tonight, and it will set you back £5. Saturday night, £7.50. New Year’s Eve will cost £60. But Sunday afternoon is only £3 if you bring your own horn. This is the site you’re really looking for.
Don’t we all? Yet somehow I’ve never felt moved to vocalize my adoration of WebSphere and Lotus Notes. But, of course, IBM’s praises have indeed been sung:
our reputation sparkles like a gem.
we’ve fought our way through
and new fields we’re sure to conquer, too,
for thee ever onward IBM!
I think that’s a great idea!
Close again! I think you’re looking for Jason Brown, though.
Remember, your homework is due at the beginning of class. More info here.
I do hope this has been helpful!
[W]ho but a fictional character could be better qualified to review … well, new fiction? Isn’t that the very essence of peer reviewing?
- Lawrence S. Rainey and Nicole Devarenne, Modernism/Modernity
The story of a literary hoax/inside joke in Modernism/Modernity suggests some tantalizing possibilities for a new literary (meta)genre: critical essays by fictional characters.
In 2004, Modernism/Modernity ran a review of David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion written by Jay Murray Siskind. Jay Murray Siskind is not, however, an associate professor at the (equally fictional) Blacksmith College: he’s a character in Don DeLillo’s White Noise. The essay is very much in character, with musings about “what fun it is to talk to an intelligent woman wearing nylon stockings as she crosses her legs.” It took five years for the whistle to be blown on this review, at Mark Sample’s blog; whether the delay was due to the deftness of the hoax or the fact that no one reads reviews in critical journals is an open question.
If Siskind can review Wallace, what other missives from across the fictional divide might be possible? I can imagine a whole unread journal dedicated to the genre.
The inside joke possibilities are just endless! There’s nothing quite so fun as literary types laughing up their sleeves.
I worry about when the day comes for Gabrielle the Third to learn to fly. One missed step, and all of their work is for nothing.
Gabrielle Bell’s Cecil and Jordan in New York pulls together several stories told in comic book format that are held together by themes of social awkwardness, nostalgia, and the search for personal meaning in an all-too-meaningless world. Their settings range from the mundane to the fantastical, with the two often bleeding into each other: an independent filmmaker’s girlfriend turns into a chair, an unlikely meeting with a Latin American novelist causes worlds to collide uncomfortably, a woman who falls upward travels fugue-like through bizarre and disjointed adventures.
In a recent review of another graphic novel, C. Max Magee identifies the “mope” factor that mars the genre:
Too often, no matter how visually accomplished and how intricately plotted, the characters (paradoxically perhaps) are too one-dimensional. To put it simply, they are mopes.
And to be sure, there’s a good deal of mopiness in “Cecil and Jordan in New York.” A “woe-is-me” miasma hangs over many of the stories (“I Feel Nothing” and “Hit Me” stand out as examples): the characters don’t drive the action, are indeed inactive and at the mercy of external forces and the insights they reach aren’t terribly enlightening.
But some of the stories stand out in their exuberant use of the visual form, or because their characters are in fact well-rounded and real. “Felix,” a strange love story of an art student, a famous artist, and the artist’s young son, is as affecting as any story by Miranda July or Mary Gaitskill. “One Afternoon” hinges on an O. Henry gimmick, but it’s well-told and affecting. And the last story in the collection, “Hopeless,” is so full of piss and vinegar and wild play that I felt the need to go back and read it again, just to revel in the characters’ small transgressions.
Graphic novels aren’t really my thing–I was a big fan of “Ernie Pook’s Comeek” back in the day, but I’m certainly not well-versed in the contemporary genre–but approached as a collection of stories, “Cecil and Jordan in New York” is as strong as most that are told without benefit of illustrations. These stories have many beautiful and haunting moments, even if they mope on occasion.
My short story Peer Review appears this month in issue #1 of the new literary journal Media Virus. (Issue #1 is really the second issue of the journal; my inner Java programmer likes that the numbering system indicates a zero-based index.)
Though blatantly inspired by Kafka–Joseph K. is a main character, and much of the “action” is set in The Castle–this is actually a true story.
A long time ago, I was one of the editors of my undergraduate literary magazine. We had a circulation of a couple hundred, maybe, and twice a year we slogged through a big pile of bad break-up poetry, pompous efforts in surrealism, and juvenilia of all sorts. It was a somewhat depressing chore. Every now and then, though, something really good showed up. One year, the really good thing was a poem, attached to a name we didn’t recognize but in a style we thought we could identify as belonging to a good friend of mine (who never owned up to it, but I’m still suspicious). Our hearts were gladdened, we rejoiced, and we three editors unanimously voted it in.
Unfortunately, the poem had some salty language and disturbing content. This was a small Catholic liberal arts college, and salty disturbances were not welcome. Our advisor didn’t stop us, but someone in the college copy center (the journal had zine-like production values) did. They refused to continue printing it unless we took the poem out.
Maybe we should have made a bigger stink about it, turned it into a local cause celebre and stood our ground: legally, the college was well within its rights to stop the publication (a private institution has a lot of leeway), but you only get to be young and idealistic once. We held up for a couple weeks, with a little faculty sympathy, but in the end we buckled under and pulled the poem. I’m still a little disappointed we didn’t try harder.
But during the brief controversy, the poem made the rounds through the faculty and administration, attached to various memos and letters. I heard that it even got discussed at the president’s Christmas party. Given the success of the journal itself, it was probably read by more people than would have seen it if it had just been tucked in amongst the better bad break-up poems and audacious second-person stories casting the reader into the consciousness of a plastic bottle.
All of this was in the Dark Ages, around 1989, before e-mail and the Internet changed a whole lot of things. The story would probably have played out very differently today, now that Joseph K. has traded in his bank of manual typewriters and stacks of carbon paper for a cheap Linux server on a wireless network.
Or perhaps not. The Internet has increased the noise, but not necessarily improved the signal; it’s easier to publish, but harder to build mindshare. It may still be a valid strategy to address your manila envelope to Mr. N., clerk of Section S, and hope for the best.
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