"Prelude to Foundation": For dated science fiction

I'm afraid I have to admit that I've never read one of the classics of science fiction, Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy (Foundation, 1951; Foundation and Empire, 1952; Second Foundation, 1952). Therefore when we were able to borrow Prelude to Foundation from the library without actually going inside the building, I read it.

Asimov published Prelude to Foundation in 1988, thirty-seven years after the first Foundation novel. As the flap copy says, "It is the year 12,020 C.E. and Emperor Cleon, First of the Name sits uneasily on the Imperial throne. Here on Trantor, the great multi-domed capital of the Galactic Empire, forty billion people have created a civilization of unimaginable technological and cultural complexity. It is a world so intricately woven that pulling one thread would unravel it all. Cleon I is unnerved by this . . . " When 32-year-old Outerworld mathematician Hari Seldon presents a paper on psychohistory, "little does Hari realize that he has sealed his fate and determined the destiny of humanity. For Hari Seldon possesses the prophetic power that is so desired by the Emperor. And now suddenly, this naïve and little-known Heliconian has become the most wanted man in the empire . . . ."

In some ways the book is a kind of Gulliver's Travels as Hari travels from area to area on Trantor, each with unique modes of dress, individual taboos, and concerns. He travels with a female historian who reveals almost superhuman skills as a knife fighter, and is rescued from one area after another by a character with the superhuman ability to show up when Hari needs help. Presumably Hari is assimilating the information he needs to perfect his formula for predicting the future, a future that I assume the later novels describe.

Asimov says there is unimaginable technological advances 10,000 years in the future, including cold fusion, faster-than-light space travel, books with paper on which the type advances automatically, a neuronic whip, and blasters that "mangled the organs inside the sergeant's chest" so that "without a change in expression, without a wince of pain, the sergeant crumbled and fell, dead beyond any doubt or hope." Trantor somehow is able to feed forty billion people with the entire land area covered by computer-controlled domes of various sizes and vast underground factories, stores, residences, and more. There is even the beginnings of anti-gravity, but it's expensive and limited.

Nevertheless, there's an old-fashioned feel to the technology. Trantor does have (primitive) computers, but there's no internet and no cell phone. Medicine does not seem to have advanced much, let along genetic engineering. When the character wants to buy a knife, she has to do so in an appliance store, and she recognizes the store for what it sells by a washing machine in the window. 

Even the description of the Galactic Empire sounds more like the Byzantine Empire than something 10,000 years in the future, although I'm willing to give Asimov a pass on this. I am willing to believe that, given humanity,  there are only a limited number of political arrangements possible, and people will not fundamentally change. There will always be anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, surprise, and contempt. 

My biggest difficulty with Prelude to Foundation, which is a key to the entire novel, is the unquestioned assumption that humanity would give up an advanced technology without something better to replace it. That's not the way I understand science and technology works. We give up an early technology for a more advanced technology. We gave up 78-rpm records for LPs, LPs for compact disks, CDs for downloads. I am not aware of an example in the history of technology were a device was perfected and then abandoned except in cases where it was a component of another primitive technology that itself was outmoded. 

In Prelude, humanity had apparently perfected a technology and then gave it up and never produced more of the item. (I'm being coy here because I don't want to spoil the surprise for readers who have not read the book.) I simply don't believe it, and because I don't, the novel fails for me except as a kind of old-fashioned boy's adventure story. I plan to read Foundation, however, to see what exactly this was a prelude to. 

My life as a Moroccan prostitute

Jmiaa is a thirty-four-year old Casablanca prostitute. She lives in one room with her daughter Samia who is young enough that, when Jmiaa brings a john back to the room, Samia accepts the story that they are repairmen. "It's very rare that she's there when I bring men home—" Says Jmiaa who hires an old lady to take care of the girl. "—but when she is, I tell her that they're repairmen . . . I don't know what she thinks, but what's certain is that she's growing up and if this continues, it might start to cause some problems." What's certain is that Jmiaa, divorced, uneducated, alcohol dependent if not an alcoholic has very few options.

So in the first third or so of Meryem Alaoui's debut novel, Straight from the Horse's Mouth (translated from French by Emma Ramadan), Jmiaa tells an identified listener about her life as a whore; the challenge of tolerating the men she services; the circle of girls and regulars in which she travels; her marriage, separation, and divorce (she should have listened to her mother). She has a filthy mouth and her room and neighborhood sound squalid and dangerous. It's not a picture of city that the Moroccan National Tourist Board wants publicized.

Jmiaa's aimless life changes when she is connected with a Moroccan filmmaker, "a skinny stick with long disheveled hair at the end. Hamid told me she was the neighbor's niece but I hadn't imagined she would be so young. She's standing in front of the door, and she's looking at us and smiling. Toothy grin. Horse's mouth!" And from then on Jmiaa refers to her as Horse's Mouth.

Horse's Mouth is writing a screenplay about a prostitute who robs a jewelry store in Casablanca. She wants local color, local mores to improve her script. Jmiaa fills her in. The writer writes her script and raises enough money to produce it, but cannot cast a leading lady. Desperate, she auditions Jmiaa who is a natural.

Jmiaa's life changes dramatically. The movie company puts her up in a luxury hotel in which the bed alone is as big as her former room. A car picks her up in the morning and brings her back to the hotel at night. Not only does the role fit Jmiaa as a comfortably as a djellaba*, the film is an international hit. By the novel's end, Jmiaa has a sustaining role in a Mexican TV series.

The book's jacket says that Alaoui "creates a vibrant picture of the day-to-day challenges faced by working people in Morocco, which they meet head-on with resourcefulness and resilience." Because I know nothing about working-class life in Morocco nor do I know what it would be like to be a prostitute in such an environment, I accepted and was entertained by Jmiaa's story.

On the other hand, I think the translator made a mistake by noting foreign terms with an asterisk and sending the reader to a glossary in the back. For example, " . . . he adds as if he were Imad Ntifi*." The glossary says Imad Ntifi is (was?): "Famous presenter of musical and other entertainment shows." Why not make it, " . . . he adds as if he were the famous presenter of musical shows, Imad Ntifi"? Why make the reader work?

Another example: "The bnader* started up." Bnader we learn is the plural of "bendir: a drum traditionally fashioned from goatskin." Surely there's a way to avoid the asterisk. Maybe, "The goatskin drums started up"?

And at the other extreme, there are glosses we don't need. Jmiaa says about her ex-husband in Spain, "The only effort he makes is walking the two hundred yards between him and the grocery store* where I send the money." Does the reader need the following: "Berber grocery stores are often used as informal networks for transferring funds across the Mediterranean. The sender gives dirhams to a grocer in Morocco, and the recipient gets the equivalent in euros (minus a commission) at the cousin's grocery store in Europe—and vice versa." I figured out from the text that there was an informal transfer system; I didn't need the details of who does what minus a commission.

I suspect the translator (and her editor) wanted to give native English speakers a sense of Moroccan life and culture by retaining these linguistic markers, words like caid, chaabi, Cheikb Yassine, chemkara, chikbate, choumicba, Cimi . . . But rather than enhance the book's pleasure, they are constant interruptions. I could have done without.

*By the way, "djellaba" is not defined. Wikipedia tells me it's a long, loose-fitting unisex outer robe with full sleeves.

What is the translator's obligation?

The New York Times published a review of a French novel, And Their Children After Them, the novel I just reviewed. In it the Times reviewer complains, "But it is a flawed artwork all the same — a somewhat ineptly translated narrative (“you guys give me a pain,” one native-born character declares) . . . Its descriptive language can be comically bad, with phrases any creative writing instructor would banish from her class: A heart is “as heavy as an anvil”; the day is “as hot as a frying pan”; expressions flit across faces “like clouds”; a mixed-race girl is “a knockout”; a MAC 50 pistol is “super beautiful.”

Without defending (or attacking) this reviewer, it this raises a question: What is the translator's obligation here? To reflect the author's work as written or to improve it? To use the author's images and metaphors or invent her own?

It provoked a number of responses from the Literary Translation Facebook group, which I have edited and copied below:

SP: I'd say the translator should reflect the author's work as is. It's more complicated when it comes to idioms and metaphor or similes, though. In Catalan, we say 'anar amb peus de plom' (walk with feet of lead) whereas in English, we 'walk/tread on eggshells'. The Catalan is nice and paints a good picture, but -- unless my aim were to maintain a strongly Catalan flavour -- I'd go for eggshells rather than leaden feet in a translation. Also, some metaphors and similes can be fresh and original in one language, but hackneyed and clichéd in another. It's all a question of balance and the effect, firstly, that the author was creating, and secondly, that the translator wants to create or reproduce.

BH: But walking on eggshells is the opposite of walking with feet of lead.

SP:Not really. In either case you have to tread very very gently so as not to break what's underfoot.

LL: Hm, I understand walking with feet of lead to mean (metaphorically) clomping about clumsily, while walking on eggshells implies an effort to tread very delicately and not break them?

SP: Not in Catalan.This is, of course, another reason why it's important to translate the intention of the author and not, when it comes to idiomatic use, go for a more literal approach.

GT: I think your example of peus de plom demonstrates very well why it is usually better to use an equivalent idiom in English rather than sticking to the original image - at least when the original image gives a very different impression. If the author didn't mean something to sound different or awkward, then it is not really a good idea to come up with a translation that is. Of course, sometimes authors deliberately play with language to give weird images or ways of expressing themselves (one of my authors does this), in which case you have to come up with something that reflects that intent and has a similar effect in English, but otherwise I think you are doing the original text/author a disservice.

EB: “Ineptly translated” seems like inflammatory language rather than from a place of knowledge or authority. Unless the reviewer was remotely as qualified as the translator themself, I wouldn’t give this much attention.

NL: He lives in Paris and is married to a Frenchwoman, so I think it's pretty likely he's come across it in French.

JK: Some translations are inept. If the reviewer can make the case with the original text, s/he should. But general accusations don't help.

CH: Translators shouldn't be editors - so even though I agree with the reviewer that "hot as a frying pan" is a dull turn of phrase (in English just as in French), that's the fault of the writer, not the translator. (I'm not sure if the reviewer was implying otherwise; it doesn't sound like it.) What does sound like a translation flaw is the "you guys give me a pain" line - if it wasn't intended to be grammatically incorrect, then yes, this was a bit of a cock-up on the translator's part.

AH: It all depends on the original work. A cliché for a cliché. As the poet J. H. Prynne says, 'don't solve the problem - translate it!'

AG: Japanese as a language has a high tolerance for mixed metaphors. I think this is because character combinations create independent visual worlds that can sit comfortably next to each other without much commingling. A straight translation of such a sentence into English can be risible gibberish.

RS: Well said. The challenge of striking a balance between explaining and exposing to another language.

MM: I wonder of any of these are attempts to render youth speak or non native speakers of French? Just a thought. FWIW, I like a heart as heavy as an anvil. And give me a pain isn't impossible in BE.

CC: I have German friends with excellent English who choose to say “he’s falling on my nerves” because they find it expresses what they want to say better than “getting”. I wouldn’t put it in a translation, though. Ditto my Israeli friend’s preferred “It does me nothing” - though I do use it with her.

LL: From the examples given, I wondered if it was intended to suggest a young person's speech (not sure how authentic the result is tbh)? It sounds as if the review transfers blame for aspects of the original book and its writing, to the translation. Makes no effort to see if the frying pan and anvil similes are there in the FR, for eg. (and if the reviewer did check, and they are, doesn't want to blame the author?) Sloppy.

SP: How do you know they didn’t check the original French?

DC: Isn't the problem in the example the whole construction ("you guys give me a pain")? (Rather than "you guys are a pain [in the neck]")

DD: I just read the entire review and wondered myself what is the original French for "you guys give me a pain"? This was the reviewer's only example of "somewhat inept" translation and I wish he'd expanded on why. I think either "give me" or "are a" pain is standard American conversational usage (at least for my generation). As to where the pain's located, it can be idiomatically either "in the ass" or "the neck". But "neck" feels definitely more dated and leaving out "the ass" softens the complaint. A diplomatic omission when, say, expressing the complaint to one's partner? Similarly isn't "give me" a little milder that "are"?

JZ: That's a calque of the French phrase "vous me faites de la peine." It's often translated as "you're hurting my feelings." NOT "you're a pain in the neck."

DD: So what's going on in the passage is "hurt", not "annoyance"? But would the character say "you guys are hurtful" to his buddies? Or would something closer to "you're killing me" or "breaking my..." be more in character. I haven't read the book, just saying the rendering may be not all that simple and the foreignization of dialogue here maybe not all that awful an alternative.

VJ: It's a question for everyone, really. Where does your loyalty lie? Your publisher, your wallet, your target language, your author? From readers' perspective, it's quite clear: they don't know about our deadlines. They just want the text in the best shape possible.

DM: I'm no judge of English prose, but "phrases any creative writing instructor would banish from her class" gives me a pause. That should not be a criterion outside a creative writing class. A lot of great literature in any language would be banned wholesale by a run-of-the-mill creative writing instructor.

MS: The reviewer's overall impression was that the text used clichéd language, but also clichéd narratives and structures. These things seem, to the reviewer, to be connected and I would generally agree. The writer who says that an expression flitted across someone's face like a passing cloud is putting you on notice that he (in this case) is not taking every precaution to avoid mental ruts. And that's a serious criticism, not just in a writing class. The book is trying to depict a world that is often overlooked, or whose complexities are flattened. If he does the same thing, it should be noted.

LC: I'm working on an MFA in Literary Translation and this is a question we grapple with a lot. Translating is certainly a delicate balancing act and there might be times when the translator improves the text's clarity but if the text has a unique tone, that needs to be preserved in the translation. Without reading the full article I don't want to judge this reviewer but I do wonder what he/she considers the role of the translator to be.

CC: As others have pointed out: an editor was also involved in this process, and should definitely have pounced on some of the examples given.

My opinion: I believe the translator's obligation is to the reader. The first challenge is to convey the author's meaning even if, as sometimes happens in Japanese, the meaning is between the lines, not in the text. The second challenge I believe is to preserve as much as possible the author's tone, style, cast of mind. If  it comes down to a question of clarity versus style, however, I would in most cases go for clarity.

Small lives in a small town, and fascinating

And Their Children After Them, Nicolas Mathieu's second novel (translated from the French by William Rodamor), won France's prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt. That's one reason to read it.

Another, of course, is that it's an engaging and absorbing portrayal of a slice of French life with which most of us are entirely unfamiliar.

The title comes from the Wisdom of Sirach (also known as the Book of Ecclesiasticus): "There are others who are not remembered, as if they had never lived, who died and were forgotten, they, and their children after them." Those are the lives Mathieu evokes: small lives in a small town who die and are forgotten.

The novel begins in the summer of 1992, jumps to 1994, to 1996, and finally to 1998. It follows a group of teenagers in the imaginary French town of Heillange, a formerly prosperous (if noisy and polluted) steel-making town. Now the blast furnaces are derelict, the workers unemployed, underemployed, or pensioned off, and their children are pretty much on their own.

In 1992, a heatwave is broiling Heillange, weed is in sort supply, and a song by Nirvana "that usually made you want to smash a guitar or set fire to your school" is spreading like a virus. Fourteen-year-old Andrew Casati is bored out of his skull. Lazing around the dull side of the local lake, Anthony and his cousin decide to steal a canoe to find out what it's like on the other side, at the famous nudist beach. The choices Anthony makes that day shape everything that happens in the rest of the novel, from an enduring crush to a collision with a boy named Hacine, son of Moroccan parents, who lives in a decaying housing project.

Children is a picaresque novel that follows Andrew, his parents, his friends, his enemies, and their parents. The book is stuffed with characters, but Mathieu moves easily from the point of view to another, from Andrew's alcoholic father as his marriage collapses to Hacine who deals drugs. These are working-class teens who smoke dope, drink far too much, and, in the heat of the moment, engage in unprotected sex.

The book, however, is more than the comings and goings of the characters, interesting as those are; Mathieu wants more; he wants to show the effects of immigration and globalization without preaching. For example, here's Hacine's father:

He "had emigrated from a poor country and found something of a refuge in Heillange. At the steel mill, he had taken orders for forty years, while being punctual, falsely docile, and an Arab, always. He very quickly understood that the hierarchy at work was determined by more than skills, seniority, or diplomas. Among the workers there were three classes. The lowest was reserved for blacks and North Africans like himself. Above him were the Poles, Yugoslavs, Italians, and the least competent French. To get any job higher than that, you had to be born in France; that was all there was to it."

While the novel tells a number of stories, it has no neat plot, no inciting incident, rising tension, climax, and resolution. It does have fascinating snapshots of French life, conventions, and expectations. Anthony, for example, sees no future in Heillange. He "passed the technological baccalauiréat without having to take the orals, and also without any illusions about what would happen next." He joins the Army, injures a knee playing soccer, the Army washes him out, and he returns to Heillange. So much for escaping your fate.

Mathieu was born in Épinal, France, in 1978. His first novel, Aux animaux in la guerre, was published in 2014. He says he was visiting an old postindustrial site to get some documentation in a small town call Uckange. It was late and the place was deserted. He knew he wanted to write about teenagers and deindustrialization, about a small town and youth. He was listening to music when suddenly a live version of Bruce Springsteen's The River came on. Springsteen speaks about his youth, relationships with his father, etc., and then the song begins. It inspired Mathieu to tell the same story, one of father and son dynamics, of appetites, and of limits.

The antidote for everything is . . . ?

How's this for a novel's first sentence: "Most women did not begin their days by stabbing a man in the scrotum, but Georgia Brown was not most women"? Thus begins Kimmery Martin's second novel The Antidote for Everything, and continues in the operating room as Georgia operates an a patient's infected scrotum.

Georgia is a 36-year-old, single urologist who works in a Charleston, SC, clinic that is attached to a church-owned hospital. (This is significant.) Her very best friend is Jonah Tsukada, a 32-year-old primary care physician who works at the same clinic and who happens to be gay.

In the opening chapter, Georgia's cell phone receives a text as she's operating. The circulating nurse asks Georgia if wants to hear the messages. Georgia's beloved dog is at the vet's being operated on; of course she wants to hear. The circulator reads silently, then suggests Georgia look at the message privately. Georgia orders her to read it, so she reads:

"Dear Georgia, Don't take this the wrong way, but it's over. I'm guessing you don't want to see me, so I'll stop by for my board if you leave it on the porch. If you want my advice, in the future you might try to pretend you don't know more than everybody else. One more thing. You might also want to consider waxing. Or at least trimming." 

"Ouch," says someone in the operating room.

Kimmery Martin is an emergency medicine doctor-turned novelist. She grew up in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains of Eastern Kentucky, outside a small town called Berea. She completed her medical training at the University of Louisville School of Medicine and the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. When she started writing her first novel, The Queen of Hearts, she worked in the emergency room full-time. She now lives with her husband and three children in Charlotte, and has a job that allows her more time to write.

As an emergency medicine doctor, Martin brings authority and conviction to her medical scenes. She's (as we say) writing from the inside. And the issue that Georgia and Jonah have to confront is both true and troubling. Jonah's patients have been leaving him, which is disturbing both because they need his care and there is no convenient—or in some cases possible—alternative and because Jonah needs money. He's staggering under hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loans, costly in-home medical assistance for his grandmother, and "a self-inflicted credit card issue stemming from his days as an under financed medical student."

Jonah's patients are leaving him because the clinic has sent them letters it will no longer provide them medical services. And they turn out to be his transgender, nonbinary and gay patients. The clinic's director of HR tells Jonah "they'd been getting complaints about 'him' [one of Jonah's more flamboyant trans patients], that some of the other patients were finding the waiting room to be an uncomfortable environment when 'he' was there. He also said some of the clinic employees felt they were compromising their beliefs by taking care of 'him.'" And, "They're talking about a clinic policy allowing providers to stop providing birth control to female patients, because that also compromises the beliefs of these same employees."

Can this be legal? (Forget moral or the Hippocratic oath.) Apparently it is "perfectly legal in our state to refuse medical care to someone because they're transgender or gay. For that matter, it is perfectly legal to fire someone because they're gay." Because the hospital is owned by a church and does not receive federal money, it can do what it believes is Christian. So Jonah has to watch himself or he'll be out of a job.

The Antidote for Everything is wonderfully well-written. The banter between Georgia and Jonah early in the book made me laugh out loud. (The dialogue later in the book is not so jolly.) After being dumped, Georgia begins an affair with a man who seems almost too good to be true (tall, handsome, single, with.a hedge-fund expense account, and great in bed), but given everything else that happens in the novel, spending more time on Mark probably would not have added much. As it is Martin writes five chapters from Mark's point of view; the rest from Georgia's.

I'm not sure there is a single antidote for everything, but I agree with Martin that friendship is the antidote for a much of the world's pain. Reading her novel can be an antidote to the blahs; it was for me.

If we can't trust our memories, then what?

I had to read Peter Stamm's slim new novel The Sweet Indifference of the World twice to feel confident enough write about it cogently.

It starts straightforwardly enough: After an introductory chapter in which the narrator describes visits from a woman who may—or may not—be an old girlfriend (and may—or may not—be real), he tells us that he has arranged a meeting with a Magdalena (Lena) in Stockholm's Skogskyrkogården cemetery. Lena is in her late twenties; he is at least fifty, although in the first chapter he seems much older: "My wheezing alarms me, it's an old man's voice, a voice that's just as alien to me as the frail body that imprisons me . .  . In my haste I've forgotten my cane, and I'm torn between my fear of slipping on the ice and falling and my other fear of losing Magdalena from view . . ." But Lena he's meeting in Stockholm is not the one who visits him in chapter one (I don't think); it's another Magdalena.

In Stockholm the narrator introduces himself to Lena as Christopher. Lena tells him that coincidentally her boyfriend's name is Chris, and he would like to be a writer. Both Lena and Magdalena are actresses. In the cemetery Christopher tells Lena that he used to be a writer; he wrote a novel about a disillusioned author: "The book was a love story, it was supposed to be a portrait of my girlfriend, but while I was writing it, we broke up, and so it turned into an account of our breakup and the impossibility of love. For the first time in my writing, I had the feeling I was creating a living world. At the same time, I could feel reality slipping through my fingers, daily life was getting boring and shallow to me."

So we have Christopher and Magdalena (Christ and Mary Magdalen?) interacting the past and Chris and Lena interacting in the present as the narrator tells his story. His novel's sales had provided a respectable income but more importantly justified the narrator's efforts to write it. He never admitting at readings or in interviews how much of the story was about himself. Asked about that, "I dismissed the idea, and insisted on the separation between author and narrator."

Which of course immediately makes the reader wonder how much of The Sweet Indifference of the World is about Peter Stamm. According to Wikipedia, Stamm books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013 for his entire body of work and his accomplishments in fiction. Stamm grew up in Weinfelden in the canton of Thurgau, the son of an accountant. He spent three years as an apprentice accountant and then five as an accountant. He then went to the University of Zurich, taking courses in English studies, business informatics, psychology, and psychopathology while he also worked as an intern at a psychiatric clinic. After living for a time in New York, Paris, and Scandinavia he settled down as a writer and freelance journalist in Zurich in 1990. He's written prose, radio drama, and plays. I was impressed by his last novel To the Back of Beyond, which I reviewed in 2017. He's known for his cool and sparse writing style, all of which are represented in The Sweet Indifference of the World.

Which grows more murky. At the end of Chapter Three, the narrator is late returning to the hotel in the Swiss village in which he grew up. For a time he'd been the hotel's night porter himself. Because it's late he has to wait to be admitted. "Finally, I heard a door bang, and shortly afterwards saw movement in the corridor, the inner glass door opened, and a young man approached me. While he fiddled around with the lock, I saw his face next to the reflection of my own, but not until he held the door open for me did I realize that he was me."

When Lena in Stockholm questions the narrator, he says that looking at the night porter was like looking into a mirror. "Amazingly, he seemed to have no sense of the resemblance, of the identity. He gave me a perfectly ordinary greeting, and walked ahead of me to the reception desk, handed me my key, and said good night." The narrator sees his doppelgänger—who says his name is Chris—at least twice more over the years. Indeed, several years after the hotel meeting they visit the beach together in Barcelona where Christopher has been teaching German.

Stamm is playing with memory, reader expectations, and ideas about reality. In Barcelona doppelgänger Chris searches for Christopher's novel on his cell phone; it does not exist. Chris does a Google search for Magdalena's name and "actor." There is one entry on a drama school home page; nothing to confirm Christopher's memory of  Magdalena's successful career in a variety of productions. "Suddenly I felt an indescribable fury . . . There he was, imagining a quick Internet search was enough to rub out the whole of my life, as if only what was online existed."

As I said at the beginning, this is a slim novel, almost a novella (and when does a novella cross the line and become a novel? that's the kind of question reading Stamm provokes). It's not a difficult read; as Wikipedia says and as my quotations indicate the prose is cool and sparse  (the Michael Hofmann translation is impeccable). It evokes a profound question: If we can't trust our memories, what can we trust? Perhaps, as the publisher's promotional material says, Stamm is suggesting that our stories are not only already planned out, but wholly unoriginal as well, endlessly repeating themselves through different people. The Sweet Indifference of the World is a novel to read more than once for the pleasure it offers and the thought it stimulates.

Tragedy, love, family in a small Southern town

We meet Adeline (Delia) Green in August 1975 as she visits the Green Branch Town Cemetery where she meets the town historian who is leading a group of DAR ladies. Delia's family were founding members of Green Branch, the small South Carolina town in which Delia, 19, grew up. She is seven months older than her first cousin Ellison (Eli) Winfield who lives right across the street. Bells for Eli is the story of Delia and Eli's childhood and youth in Green Branch.

The author, Susan Beckham Zurenda, taught literature, composition, and creative writing to high school students for 33 years, which may explain the polish and authority of her first novel. During her years of teaching at Spartanburg Community College and then as an AP English teacher at Spartanburg High School, Susan published short stories and won numerous regional awards such as the South Carolina Fiction Prize (twice), the Porter Fleming Competition, The Southern Writers Symposium Emerging Writers Fiction Contest, The Hub City Hardegree Contest in Fiction, Alabama Conclave First Novel Chapter Contest, and The Jubilee Writing Competition (twice). She received her undergraduate and graduate degrees in English from Converse College and now works as a book publicist managing media relations for Magic Time Literary Publicity.

Bells for Eli really begins when three-year-old Eli spots a Coke bottle in which his father has stored Red Devil Liquid Lye and drinks from it. The family's black gardener saves Eli's life, but Eli's throat and esophagus are horribly burned. He spends six months in a Boston hospital and when he comes home he has a hole in his neck so he can breath and a port to his stomach so he can be fed pureed mush.

Delia tells the story of growing up with Eli who, though terribly scarred internally, is eventually able to breath and eat normally. The author conveys what it was like to grow up in small town South Carolina during the 1960s and early 1970s given the the characters and their situation: Delia's uncle Gene, Eli's father, a Southern good-old-boy who wants a manly son . . . her aunt Mary Lily, who comes from the side of the family that kept their money . . . Eli's grandmother Mary Margaret who lives in a mansion Sherman's troops tried to burn down but was saved . . . plus Delia's parents, neighborhood bullies, boy friends, and more.

And running through the book is the love between Delia and Eli, an attraction that evolves from childhood playmate to something more adult. As first cousins, however, they know they cannot marry, and the author convincingly relates how the tension between desire and inhibition affects (distorts?) the decisions—choices—Delia and Eli make.

I was struck by how well Zurenda writes without drawing attention to the language. Here's Delia watching Eli being dragged into the house by his father after sassing his mother: "I had no concept of the beating that awaited Eli. the most I ever got was a couple of pops on the bottom with Mama's green hairbrush. My father's hand had spanked me only once. When I lied to him about emptying green peas from my plate—I detested them—being the kitchen door next to my seat at the dining table. I insisted Helen had pitched the peas. I was spanked for lying, for blaming my sister, not for hating peas." Five sentences that say volumes about the family dynamics.

And here is Delia's description of Mary Margaret's pre-war (pre-Civil War) house: "We stepped inside the entry hall, wider than any room in my house. I inhaled the rich, sweet, old wood smell. A leaded glass fixture overhead dimly illuminated dark furniture: the mahogany table, its ever-present candy dish filled to the top, the Regency side chairs and the hall tree. People long dead inside golden frames peered out straight-faced from the right wall—flanking the family shield and crossed swords—following us with their eyes. The stairs rose along the other side."

Bells for Eli is indeed, as one early reader says, "a memorable, atmospheric novel of love, friendship, and bonds that surpass all reason." I couldn't have said it better myself, so I won't.

The contemporary West: It's not John Wayne country

We are in eastern Montana: "As the neighbor girl's SUV disappeared down the road, Wendell watched the tire-kicked dust bloom and sift through shades of gold, ochre, and high in the evening sky a pearling blue. Harvest light, late-August light—thin, slanted, granular. At his back the mountains already bruised and dark."

A social worker has dropped seven-year-old Rowdy Burns on twenty-one-year-old Wendell, the boy's only relative. Wendell is living in a trailer on what's left of the family's ranch land (the house remains, but it's unlivable), an orphan after his mother died a year earlier. Rowdy is "developmentally delayed," "variously involved," and, "hadn't said so much as a word since they'd found him" locked alone in an apartment on the south side of Billings for more than a week. His mother is Wendell's cousin on her way into prison for a drug bust.

Joe Wilkin's first novel, Fall Back Down When I Die, is told from three points of view: Wendell's; Gillian's, a forty-nine assistant school principal, single mother, whose ranger husband had been murdered ten years earlier; and Verl's, who writes a writing a fragmentary diary/letter to his son as he evades federal marshals while he hides out in the Bull Mountains.

This is Cliven Bundy country rather than John Wayne's, where this land is my land; it's not your land; and it's sure as heck not the government's land, which can go stuff itself. A land where a pickup truck will proudly wear a "Global Warming: Another Liberal Tax Scam" bumper sticker. This is Bureau of Land Management land "that had once belonged to the Crow, to the grizzly bears and buffalo. A land homesteaded less than a hundred years ago and abandoned not long after, a wilderness now of collapsed coal mines and yawing shacks, ghost towns not even old-timers could recall the names of, where the dry arteries of forsaken train lines bled into cactus and grass. A land leased and grazed and logged every so often but in large part empty, home to elk and antelope and mule deer, bobcat and cougar and coyote, and, for the past dozen years, a seldom-seen pack of wolves."

This is a novel rich in description, character, and incident. We learn how to prepare traps and set them. We see Gillian doing her best to bring education (civilization?) to her public school, one with so few students that to lose one is to threaten its existence. Both Wendell, as his guardian, and Gillian, as his teacher, want the best for Rowdy. But what is the best? What is the best for the land? To cut all the BLM fence wire and let cattle roam where they will? To exterminate the wolves before they can kill any lambs?

Wilkins was born and raised north of the Bull Mountains, out on the Big Dry of eastern Montana. His The Mountain and the Fathers, "captures the lives of boys and men in that desolate country, a place that shapes the people who live there and rarely lets them go." He is also the author of three poetry collections, most recently When We Were Birds, winner of the 2017 Oregon Book Award in Poetry. His work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Harvard Review, Orion, TriQuarterly, Ecotone, The Sun, and High Country News.

According to his website, Wilkins spent two years teaching ninth grade pre-algebra in the Mississippi Delta with Teach For America after graduating from Gonzaga University with a degree in computer engineering, an experience on which he draws in Fall Back Down When I Die. He then went on to earn his MFA in creative writing from the University of Idaho. He now lives with his family in the foothills of the Coast Range of western Oregon, where he directs the creative program at Linfield College.

With his background as a teacher, memoirist, and poet, Wilkins has written an exceptional first novel. It deserves to be read by anyone who is interested in the modern West, outstanding writing, and other lives.

How do you survive pain?

Ten years before Zeruna Shalev's novel Pain begins, Iris, the book's central character, was driving around stopped a bus in Jerusalem when a suicide bomber inside the bus set himself off. The blast literally blew Iris out of her car, and she spent months in hospital being stitched back together.

Today, inexplicably, pain has returned, first knocking her to the floor of the family apartment, then sending her to a pain clinic where a specialist alleviates her agony.

Iris is astounded to realize the specialist is Eitan, the boy—now a bearded man—who unceremoniously dumped her almost thirty years earlier when they were both seventeen. Does he recognize her as well? He makes no sign, but he must recall the two beauty marks on the left side of her navel. One kind of pain has been replaced by another.

I suspect many of us never recover entirely from our first love, the one we didn't marry. What would life had been like if we hadn't broken up? If she hadn't married someone else? If he hadn't been killed? Iris was devastated when Eitan dropped her; she spent two months in bed, virtually catatonic. Now forty-five, long recovered from the break-up trauma and the terrorist bomb, the wife of stolid, reliable Mickey, the mother of 21-year-old Alma and 17-year-old Omer, Iris is a school principal and a solid citizen. Or is until the brief meeting with Eitan in the pain clinic.

Eitan has retained his dead mother's apartment, a sanctuary in which to live after his second divorce. Because it was his mother's, Iris is able to track him to it. He is unencumbered; she is susceptible. Despite working exhaustively to rebuild her life and create a fulfilling and successful career, Iris's existence has been devoid of joy or passion since Eitan left her. Despite her guilt, they begin an affair.

One of Pain's many pleasures is Shalev's ability to convey Iris's physical ecstasy and her emotional joy in rediscovering Eitan's lovemaking. "There is no end to the words she yearns to say to him, and each word yearns to be said endlessly in a single sentence that is as long as her life. To her surprise he suddenly answers her, brings to speak as his body intertwines with hers, telling her of the first years after their parting, his voice growing hoarse, and she listens intently, devouring every whispered word until he can no longer speak."

It begins to appear that Iris will leave good old unexciting Mickey (who's more interested in playing computer chess than his wife anyway) for Eitan when she learns that Alma, who is living in Tel Aviv, has become a questionable guru's disciple. As Alma explains one of the man's teachings: "sex is a tool and you have to practice using it just like you practice using any tool, with no connection to love or physical need. For instance, last week, my exercise was to sleep with a different man every night in order to reach me." More pain for Iris.

That Shalev herself was wounded ten years ago in a terrorist bombing and is a talented writer gives Pain, her fifth novel, a certain authority. Shalev says about the apolitical themes she explores in the contemporary Israeli setting, "All the stories told in my books could have happened in other places too. They deal with universal themes of relations between parents and children, husbands and wives. My challenge is precisely to maintain sensitivity in a rough place, to depict nuance within an extroverted, aggressive situation, to describe the shadows rather than the glaring sunlight."

Because I do not read Hebrew, I cannot judge Sondra Silverston's translation other to say that it is smooth and convincing. I would not title a novel Pain for fear of putting off potential readers. The title is apt, however, and one can only hope that readers who are interested in a complex family tale of love, redemption, and disillusion are able to not put off. They will find pleasure in Pain.

Where is home when no one understands you?

Chia-Chia Lin, a graduate of Harvard College, has an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where she received the Henfield Prize, an annual award of $10,000 to a graduate fiction writing student. Her short stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Glimmer Train, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. 

Her novel, The Unpassing, published in May 2019, is up for a First Novel Prize at the Center for Fiction in New York City. It is so superior it raises in my mind an impossible question: How will she be able to write a second novel of equal—or higher—quality? Rather than fret over the unanswerable, however, we can take pleasure in The Unpassing we have in hand.

Lin's first-person narrator is ten-year-old Gavin, the child of immigrant parents from Taiwan who speak Chinese and Taiwanese at home. He has an older sister Pei-Pei, a younger sister Ruby, and a younger brother Natty. They live thirty miles outside Anchorage, Alaska, in a decaying house that stands by itself at the end of a gravel drive. "We had lived briefly in Michigan," says Gavin, "but my father had lost his job as a wastewater engineer. He mistimed our move to Southcentral Alaska; we could prove only five months of residence instead of six, and so we missed the first and largest payout from the Permanent Fund . . . which would have meant five thousand dollars." 

The mistimed move is just one of their father's problematic decisions. The five thousand dollars would have been manna to the family which, in the course of the novel, is evicted from their house. (Two weeks later they return to squat in it). When the book begins, Gavin and his classmates have been following the goings-on of Christa McAuliffe. The Challenger launch would be broadcast in class, but the day before Gavin comes home from school feeling sick. At home he roughhouses with Ruby and Natty . . . and falls asleep. He wakes up a week later. He has recovered from meningitis; Ruby has not.

"What happens when young children grieve a sibling?" writes Ruth Lefave in a Rumpus blog. "How do bereaved parents nurture their surviving children? Where is home when no one understands you? Even as Lin’s book explores these devastating questions, her magnificent prose builds an unflinching and ultimately endearing portrait of each character."

Lin does it by showing the characters interacting with each other and with outsiders and with the landscape. It is clear from the first page Gavin is writing as an adult: "During an uneventful part of my childhood, my mother walked into the room with a plate of loose, washed grapes. She collapsed." Gavin and his sister Pei-Pei who watch the grapes roll across the floor do nothing. When a minute later their mother sits up, she says angrily, "I was testing you. Why were you just sitting there? Why didn't you call for the ambulance? What kind of children have I raised? Tell me, do you want to be orphans?" It sets a tone for the entire book.

Gavin is trying to make sense of the world. Adults do things he does not understand although readers do. He makes the mistakes a ten-year-old would make. He loves his mother and father, Pei-Pei, Ruby, and Natty, even when he can be oblivious and when, to me at least, they are not lovable. The Unpassing's story at heart is simple: Ruby dies, the family struggles to stay afloat economically, the parents separate,  Gavin, Pei-Pei, Natty, and their mother leave Alaska. Lin, however, somehow manages to make this story engaging, dramatic, and compelling. 

She does this, of course, is through incident. detail, and language: "Ruby never stayed in her own bed; there was movement in these deep nigh hours. She drifted between our bed like a vagrant, favoring my parents' and Natty's. But once in a while she crawled under the covers with me. In the dark, she rooted in the folds of fabric; her fingers whittled upward. We held hands under my pillow, and within seconds we were out."

Here is Gavin holding Natty, "His fingers would not curl around mine, but he allowed me to hold his fist. For a long time I clutched it, the end of a livelier, the last tangible evidence I was not alone. I wiped my palms one at a time, transferring his fits between my hands. I felt like I was cradling a peeled egg. In the dark the stairs seemed steep, a tremendous way to fall."

When the Rumpus interviewer asked Lin what she's working on now, she said, "I can tell you what it’s not: narrated by a child, set in or near wilderness, a story about immigrants. I hope it will be funny. I’m also thinking about plot, for once. Basically, I want it to be as different from this book as possible." I look forward to it.