Intriguing meditations on translation, writing, and literature

The little art Kate Briggs writes about is translation. She attributes the description to Helen Lowe-Porter, the first translator of Hermann Mann’s Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain. Briggs’s book is an extraordinarily rich series of meditations—I hesitate to call them essays, some are no more than a sentence—on writing, literature, translation.

Briggs herself is a translator and, based on the evidence within This Little Art, was simultaneously translating Ronald Barthes’s The Preparation of the Novel as she wrote the book. Because I’ve never read Barthes, Briggs’s writing about him and her engagement with his lecture notes has piqued my interest; I now have two books of his waiting on my to-read shelf.

Until I began doing it I never gave translation much thought. With my interest in things Japanese, I was aware I could not have read Kawabata, Mishima, or Tanizaki without their translators. I heard the rumor that Kawabata would not have won the Nobel Prize in 1968 (the first Japanese to do so) had the judges not been able to read his works in translation. But what is there to say about it this little art? One so little that publishers occasionally leave the translator’s name off a book’s cover.

As it turns out there’s lots to say. And Briggs says a lot to say and says it well: “When I teach translation (I am a translator and a writer and a tutor), I am often surprised by how often students are surprised to discover that translating involves writing, that its most vital prerequisite is an interest in writing, for the reason that written translations have to be written.”

That made me wonder whether it is possible be a good translator and a poor writer? How do translations fail (other than misunderstanding the original)? My questions provoked a lively discussion among a private translators group on Facebook (and I will post about it). But what does a translator do these days in contrast, apparently, to the time when the goal was replace every word in the original language (then usually Greek or Latin) with an equivalent English word. 

(Do that and you get something like: “The friends him they abandon, the father not approve the his decision, only the mother him is close” from “Gli amici lo abbandonano, il padre non approva la sua decisione, solo la madre gli è vicina.”)

Briggs quotes Douglas Robinson: “Translators are never, and should never be forced to be (or to think of themselves as), neutral, impersonal transferring devices. Translators’ personal experiences—emotions, motivations, attitudes, associations—are not only allowable in the formation of a working [translation], they are indispensable.”

She says that the translator knows that the work “she is translating is not hers: she knows that it didn’t originate with her; it not something that she has already written or said.” Indeed, she may believe she’s not capable of writing something like the original, “and perhaps this is part of its appeal.”

Barthes cites Julio Cortázar, who translated Defoe into Spanish, as writing, “I would advise a young writer who is having difficulty writing—if it’s friendly to offer advice—that he should stop writing for himself for a while and do translation; that he should translate good literature and one day he will discover that he is writing with an ease he didn’t have before.”

This Little Art is not light reading (or not for me). It raises all kinds of interesting questions. What do you do if you are translating from the German (or whatever) and a character speaks briefly in French (or whatever)? Leave the French and trust your English-speaking readers will get the gist? Translate it into English and tag it “she said in French”? 

(To indicate characters were speaking Japanese in one of my novels, I italicized that dialogue rather than tag it. I’m not sure that works either.)

What do you do if you’re translating Barthes (or whoever) into English and he himself translates into French Japanese haiku that have already been translated into English—and he does not cite a source? Briggs managed to identify the source and then struggled to identify the poems Barthes translated. She then apparently went back to the English. Forget the original Japanese.

But while This Little Art may not be light reading, it is certainly worth reading if you have any interest in translation, writing, or literature. Indeed it’s worth reading more than once.  And although it does not have an index or a bibliography, it does have extensive notes with enough citations to keep a diligent student occupied for a good long while.

Go for the great virtues, not the little ones

One of my social media acquaintances noted recently that he was rereading Natalia Ginzburg's slim essay collection The Little Virtues. He reads it once a year, and has done so for twenty years. Wow. I almost never reread something. With an endorsement like that, I thought I ought to look into it.

I've known the Italian author "Natalia Ginzburg" for years, but The Little Virtues is her first work I've read. Her work explored family relationships, politics during and after the Fascist years and World War II, and philosophy. She wrote novels, short stories and essays, for which she received the Strega Prize and Bagutta Prize. An activist, for a time in the 1930s she belonged to the Italian Communist Party. In 1983 she was elected to Parliament from Rome as an Independent. Born in Palermo, Sicily in 1916, Ginzburg spent most of her youth in Turin with her family, as her father in 1919 took a position with the University of Turin. Her father, Giuseppe Levi, a renowned Italian histologist, was born into a Jewish Italian family, and her mother, Lidia Tanzi, was Catholic. Her parents were secular and raised Natalia, her sister Paola (who would marry Adriano Olivetti) and her three brothers as atheists. Their home was a center of cultural life, as her parents invited intellectuals, activists and industrialists. At age 17 in 1933, Ginzburg published her first story, "I bambini," in the magazine Solaria.

In 1938, she married Leone Ginzburg, and they had three children together, Carlo, Andrea, and Alessandra. Their son Carlo Ginzburg became a historian. Although Natalia Ginzburg was able to live relatively free of harassment during World War II, her husband Leone was sent into internal exile because of his anti-Fascist activities, assigned from 1941–1943 to a village in Abruzzo. She and their children lived most of the time with him. Opponents of the Fascist regime, she and her husband secretly went to Rome and edited an anti-Fascist newspaper, until Leone Ginzburg was arrested. He died in 1944 after suffering severe torture, including crucifixion, in jail. In 1950, Ginzburg married again, to Gabriele Baldini, a scholar of English literature. They lived in Rome. He died in 1969; she died in 1991. (Thank you, Wikipedia.)

The Little Virtues was published in 1985 and the eleven essays, fluently translated by Dick Davis, were published in newspapers and magazines between 1944 and 1962. They range from a memoir of the time in Abruzzo to comparing and contrasting herself with her husband ("He always feels hot. I always feel cold . . . He speaks several languages well. I do not speak any well . . . ") to a critique of England and English life ("English shop assistants are the stupidest shop assistants in the world . . . The restaurants are either too crowded or too empty. And they are either stiff and priggish or squalid . . . ") She wrote that last in 1960; England's restaurants have changed.

What makes The Little Virtues worth reading once a year are Ginzburg's essays on her vocation, on human relationships, and on the little virtues. Her vocation, of course, is to write. "When I sit down to write I feel extraordinarily at ease, and I move in an element which, it seems to me,  I know extraordinarily well; I use tools that are familiar to me and they fit snugly in my hands." That, it seems to me, is a good way to tell if what you do is your vocation (I call it my calling) or just a job. It works whether you are a carpenter, plumber, welder, baker, programmer, or poet.

And while it is tempting to quote much more, I will quote only the first paragraph of her title essay:

"As far as the education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but love for one's neighbor and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know."

I wish I'd read this when my children were young.

Three narrators, three stories, one city.

Rupert Thomson’s latest fiction arrived on my desk with high praise from Colm Tóbín, Philip Pullman, and Andrea Wulf. The publisher bills Barcelona Dreaming as a novel, but it is three long stories with several linked characters. Significant characters in one story are minor or peripheral in another.

Barcelona Dreaming is Thomson’s thirteenth work of fiction (he’s also written a well-received memoir, This Party’s Got to Stop). He was born in Eastbourne in 1955, took the Cambridge entrance examination at 16, and studied medieval history and political thought. After college he taught English in Athens, wrote advertising copy in London, and has lived and worked in the U.S., Italy, Japan, Australia, and Spain. His first book, Dreams of Leaving, earned Thomson positive reviews, the sale of film rights, and $50,000 to write a screenplay. “And by the time that money ran out,” he said in an interview, “I had published a second novel and so from very early on I could be a full-time writer.”

I have no idea how long Thomson lived in Barcelona, but Barcelona Dreaming gives the impression that, as Philip Pullman says, Thomson “knows every corner of it and every kind of human being who might live there.” The stories are narrated, in turn, by an English woman who runs a gift shop, an alcohol-dependent jazz pianist, and a translator tormented by unrequited love. 

The English woman, Amy, has lived in Barcelona for twenty years or more is in her late 40s, is long-divorced, has a daughter attending university in England and a settled life until she finds a troubled young Moroccan man sobbing in her building’s parking garage in the middle of the night. She takes him to her apartment, gives him tea and him cab fare home. He returns a few days later with all the fixings to make her a Moroccan dinner to thank her. They become friends. Then lovers. It ends better than I expected as the story was winding up.

The 64-year-old pianist, Nacho, connects with and becomes a friend of Barcelona soccer star Rinaldinho, as much as one can be a friend of someone who is half your age, who is an international celebrity, is awash in admirers and hangers-on, and who earns more in a month than you will in a lifetime. Nacho is divorced, has a long-time live-in girlfriend, and the woman he once loved and performed with has died. This is a marvelous meditation on aging, on missed opportunities and bad decisions, and the corrosive effect of celebrity. By the end of the story one has a feeling that Rinaldinho has passed his athletic peak and has no idea what happened.

Let me quote the first paragraph of the third story to give you a sense of Thomson’s style and command of detail: “The first time I saw Vic Drago, he was on his own. I was waiting at the bus stop outside my building when the glass front door swung open and a stocky man with thinning black hair emerged. He was wearing a maroon jacket, a black shirt, and black trousers with sharp creases. A gold chain bracelet glinted on his left wrist. He stopped to light a cigarette, then strode off along the street, smoke flowing over his shoulder as he exhaled.” 

The translator is working on a French novella; he outlines its story and one of the many pleasures of Barcelona Dreaming is the way Thomson is able to have themes and incidents resonate off one another. Another pleasure is seeing a character in one story appear in another. And third is Thomson’s use of language and his perceptions. Here, taken almost at random, is the jazz pianist describing times with the woman he loved:

“There were moments during live performances—in Paris or Cologne or Amsterdam—when I would chance on harmonic progressions or melodic lines that rode along with her voice, and her eyes would meet mine across the sparkly half-darkness up onstage, amusement on her face, and a gentle pity, and even, sometimes, a glimmer of mockery or malice, at the thought that I might have the nerve to follow her, because she knew she could sing herself right out of where she stood, she could leave me for dust if she wanted to.”

In a March 2013 interview in The Guardian newspaper, Thomson is quoted as saying, “Fiction essentially teaches you to understand and empathize with other people. That's important. I think fiction is related to ethics in that you step out of your skin and become someone else for the period you are reading the book. And it is a short step to extrapolate from that to the teaching of compassion. As Amos Oz said, 'the person who imagines the other is better than the person who does not imagine the other'. For me, that is exactly the strength and raison d'etre of fiction. Film doesn't, and art doesn't, and music doesn't do it in the same way.”

Barcelona Dreaming takes a reader willing to go with it out of her skin and become someone else. 

Enough to make me an LRB subscriber

Hilary Mantel has been reviewing books for and writing essays for the London Review of Books since, I believe, 1987. Her recently-published collection, Mantel Pieces, is subtitled, “Royal Bodies and Other Writings from the London Review of Books.” So in one sense what you’re reading here is pretty thin stuff: a review of a collection of reviews. Worse, Mantel is a better writer than this ink stained-wretch.

Mantel is the author of the Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, both Man Booker Prize-winners, and The Mirror & the Light—The Wolf Hall Trilogy, which The New York Times claimed “is probably the greatest historical fiction accomplishment of the past decade.” They are the story of Thomas Cromwell, who born to a working-class family becomes the right-hand man of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in 1527 and manages to retain Henry VIII’s favor after Wolsey is executed. He assists in the king’s annulment from Catherine of Aragon and marriage to Anne Boleyn and break from Rome and establishment of the Church of England. 

Even people who don’t like historical fiction (we exist) or who don’t like long books or who don’t like long books of historical fiction respond to the trilogy. Mantel Pieces suggests why. She’s a terrific writer, a thorough researcher, and a clear thinker. (Her ability to think clearly may explain why she’s such a clear writer.)

The reviews extend from a 1988 review of Shere Hite’s third book on the sex lives of American women to a 2017 review of a biography of Margaret Pole, who was beheaded in 1541. Review subjects include John Osborne, Madonna, Christopher Marlow, Jane Boleyn (Anne’s sister-in-law), Eunice Williams (a Massachusetts settler taken by Mohawk Indians in 1704), Marie-Antoinette, Robespierre, Danton, and Théroigne de Méricourt (“a woman washed up on the [French] revolution’s inhospitable shore”).

These are not quick summaries that conclude with a couple of judgmental sentences. Mantel brings in research from other books, other reading. She does not give a book a one to five-star rating and move on, but puts it into a context and provides enough information for the reader to draw her own conclusion. For example:

“Susan Higginbotham’s carefully written book [Margaret Pole: The Countess in the Tower] comes with a misleading cover puff: ‘At last, a biography of one of the most fascinating women of the Tudor period’, who has ‘too long been overlooked’. But Margaret Pole, one of the great magnates of Tudor England, is not overlooked. In The King’s Curse (2014) she was ground up by the great fictionalizing machine that is Philippa Gregory, and in 2003 she was the subject of a major biography by Hazel Pierce: Margaret Pole: Loyalty, Lineage and Leadership. Pierce’s book is thorough and scholarly, and her work is acknowledged in Higginbotham’s biography which is less detailed, but serious and judicious. Based in North Carolina, Higginbotham is a lawyer by background and has written several novels, spanning different eras . . . .”

In addition to the reviews, Mantel Pieces includes three interesting essays, an account of first meeting her stepfather as a six-year-old written in the voice of a six-year-old (and worth therefore studying as a piece of writing; it was almost enough to send me to my computer); an account of a medical procedure that sounds as if went wrong and almost killed her; and the piece that apparently provoked a tempest in England, “Royal Bodies: From Anne Boleyn to Kate Middleton” (2013).

Mantel says in her introduction that ten days after the piece appeared in the LRB, reporters were scouring her village looking for comment. Her husband told her “the prime minister and the leader of the opposition were denouncing me. Neither, I believe, had read my lecture. Very few people had read it, but I was still Monster of the Month.”

She reports attending an event at which the Prince of Wales handed out a  literary award. She had never seen him before, “and at once I thought: what a beautiful suit! What sublime tailoring!” A little later she went to a book trade event at Buckingham Palace. As the queen passed, “I stared at her. I am ashamed now to say it but I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner.” 

Her reaction, says Mantel, was not toward a person but to the monarchy, “a thing which only had meaning when it was exposed, a thing that existed only to be looked at.” That began to change in 1980 “with the discovery that Diana, the future Princess of Wales, had legs.” Diana, she says, was more royal than the royal family. “Her funeral was a pagan outpouring, a lawless fiesta of grief” but in the end England did not change.

She writes about Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII’s need for an heir. She reports on a paper that speculates that the king had Kells positive blood. “When a woman who is Kells negative conceives by a man who is Kells positive, she will, if the foetus itself is Kells positive, become sensitized; her immune system will try to reject the foetus.” If so, it makes the history of Henry’s reign a biological rather than a moral tragedy. 

She concludes by asking whether monarchy is a suitable institution for a grown-up nation? She writes that the English are happy “to allow monarchy to be an entertainment, in the same way that we license strip joints and lap-dancing clubs.” No wonder she became Monster of the Month.

The reviews and essays are separated by letters to and from Mantel and her editor at the LRB; these talk about the work at hand and works in progress. In November 2005, Mantel wrote about Thomas Cromwell, “Oh, the joy of having a main character who’s not neurotic! I wish I’d thought of it before.” Mantel Pieces is enough to make me a LBR subscriber. 

Almost too clever by half, but fun

Anthony Horowitz, in addition to writing The Word Is Murder, is the author of more than two dozen books for children, as well as a prolific screenwriter and the author of multiple crime novels, including two Sherlock Holmes novels authorized by the Arthur Conan Doyle estate, plus two James Bond novels authorized by the Ian Fleming estate. 

Recently he adapted his mystery novel Magpie Murders for a TV miniseries. He was the creator and writer of the Foyle’s War mysteries and has written a number of the Misomer Murder scripts. He is an exceptionally productive and creative writer.

The narrator of The Word Is Murder is named Anthony Horowitz who is a London-based mystery writer, creator and writer of a TV series called Foyle’s War, and whose last book was The House of Silk, a Sherlock Holmes novel. The narrator shares a number of other attributes with the author: they are both happily married; they both have a literary agent named Hilda Starke; they both have their books published by HarperCollins in the U.S.  In other words, Horowitz would like readers to think that the story he tells is not fiction but something else. A memoir or true crime story perhaps.

The first chapter reads like the beginning of a conventional mystery. A wealthy woman of a certain age (although apparently healthy) visits a London funeral home in the morning to arrange for her funeral. Nothing particularly mysterious about that; it can be a prudent preparation. But that afternoon she’s murdered. Which, following her morning’s visit, is unusual.

In chapter two, the narrator who I will call Anthony is contacted by a consulting detective named Daniel Hawthorne. Anthony had met Hawthorne a year earlier when the detective helped with the technical details of a TV crime drama Anthony had written. Hawthorne wants Anthony to write a book about him, which I would not be surprised has happened to Horowitz the author more than once. 

The deal is this: Anthony will tag along with Hawthorne as he works to solve the murder of the woman who had made arrangements for her own funeral the morning of her death. The Met has no clue and called Hawthorne in as a consultant. They will split the profits fifty-fifty. 

It sounds like writing true crime and Anthony turn him down. He explains to Hawthorne he’d rather write fiction: “I’m in control of my stories. I like to know what I’m writing about. Creating the crimes and the clues and all the rest of it is half the fun. If I were to follow you around, just writing down what you said, what would that make me? I’m sorry, I’m not interested.”

Still . . . he can see an opening chapter in that woman’s visit to the funeral home and her murder. And after a woman fan asks Anthony why he’s not interested in writing about the real world he decides to team up with Hawthorne.

He writes a first chapter, the one that actually begins The Word Is Murder. Hawthorne rips it apart, starting with the first sentence:

“Just after eleven o’clock on a bright spring morning, the sort of day when the sunshine is almost white and promises a warmth that it doesn’t quite deliver, Diana Cowper crossed the Fulham Road and went into a funeral parlour.” 

Hawthorne’s investigation has established that she didn’t cross the Fulham Road. The bus she must have taken (she’s caught on CCTV) stops on the same side of the street as the undertaker. “So what would you want me to write?” Anthony asks, not unreasonable. Hawthorne has already scribbled something:

“At exactly seventeen minutes past eleven, Diana Jane Cowper exited from the number 14 bus at the Old Church Street (HJ) stop and retraced her steps twenty-five metres along the pavement. She then entered Cornwallis and Sons funeral parlour.”

Anthony says it reads like a police report. “At least it’s accurate.,” says Hawthorne.

It seems to me that Horowitz is doing a number of things in The Word Is Murder. He is playing with reader expectations. What’s real? London is real. (I’ve been there). HarperCollins is real. (They published a couple of my books.) I will accept that Hilda Starke, named in the Acknowledgments is real. (Or did until I Google searched her name and found this in The Los Angeles Review of Books: “I looked up his literary agent and am sad to report that it is not the delightfully no-nonsense Hilda Starke, who steals every scene in which she appears.”)

He is critiquing the mystery genre while simultaneously writing a mystery in the genre. Diana Cowper’s murder is followed on the day of her self-plotted funeral by the exceptionally brutal murder of her son, a movie actor on the brink of stardom. I suspect that one of the differences between writing a murder mystery and researching and writing true crime is that in fiction all the parts have to fit together. There cannot be an effect without a cause. The moment a reader says “That could never happen” within the context of the story, you’ve lost her. So Hawthorne displays remarkable powers of observation and ratiocination but he cannot read minds or time travel.

True crime is often messy, illogical, incomplete. We want the world to make sense, a sense that feels consistent dependable. True crime is filled with ambiguity, accident, coincident, and loose ends. Who wants to read a book in which you don’t know the villain’s punishment—or reward for that matter?

Finally, Horowitz has written a wonderful book about the writing life. I may not believe that there is a London consulting detective named David Hawthorne (I don’t), but I believe absolutely that everything Horowitz writes about being a writer, from Anthony’s meeting with Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg to the discussions of what to call the book. (Hawthorne Investigates loses to The Word Is Murder.)

Nevertheless, for all the cleverness and inside winks, the members of the mystery reading group to which I belong and I almost unanimously enjoyed the book. Horowitz has created an interesting character in Hawthorne and has a three-book contract to fulfill. The second in the series The Sentence Is Death was published in May 2020, and the third, A Line to Kill is due out in the fall of 2021.

How Nebraska became a Republican stronghold

Like many East Coast liberals, I find it hard to understand why Midwesterners—particularly rural Midwesterners—continue to accept the former President's lies, resent and resist any government intrusion in their lives (while accepting farm subsidies), and hate government-mandated health care. Ross Benes has written an outstanding book, Rural Rebellion: How Nebraska Became a Republican Stronghold, to help me understand. 

Benes has written for many media outlets including The American Prospect, Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, The Nation, New York, Rolling Stone, Slate, Vice, and The Wall Street Journal. He’s the author of Sex Weird-o-Pedia and The Sex Effect, which was described as “Freakonomics without pants.” He’s a lively writer, a diligent researcher, and is not afraid to include himself in the story when it helps the reader understand how he’s come to believe what he believes.

He spent his first 19 years in Brainard (pop. 420), a village in eastern Nebraska, and attended the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, which is about 40 miles to the southwest. He had a brief stint in Detroit, moved to New York City where he worked for Esquire magazine. He has stayed in New York, and his book traces how his political views “evolved as I’ve shifted from being a right-wing small-town Nebraskan to a card-carrying member of the East Coast ‘fake news’ media.” The book is about “the dissonance of moving from one of the most rural and conservative regions of America to one of its most liberal and urban centers as the two grow further apart at a critical moment in our country’s history.”

Abortion is evil

Start with abortion. “In Brainard,” says Benes, “we will support anything Republicans do as long as Republicans say that abortion is evil.” The right to life trumps all other issues: income inequality, basic health care, environmental degradation, immigration, and more. What’s more, the issue is non-negotiable. If you believe that a woman’s egg becomes a human being the moment a male sperm enters it the subject is closed and any talk of a woman’s right to control her body, or back-street abortions, or human misery is irrelevant. 

So in Nebraska, Republicans support life while Democrats are baby killers. “Across Nebraska, billboards featuring Jesus and babies decorate cornfields that grow so tall that you can’t see past the country road intersection.” Nebraska school children look for ideas for pro-life poster they draw for school or their Catholic church. “They probably won’t realize that they’re advertising someone else’s politics. When you’re isolated in a depopulated area that consists almost entirely of people who look like you and share your beliefs, you don’t really question these things,” which is a theme that runs through the entire book. 

As a result, state and local Nebraska political candidates must avoid any discussion of abortion, any hint that a woman has the right to decide whether to carry a fetus to term or not. As one state senator told Benes, “If you’re talking about abortion, you’re losing.” And be careful about the way you talk about immigration while you’re at it.

Immigrants go away 

Nebraska actually has a record of accepting record number of refugees. Nevertheless, Benes writes that “city councils push ordinances aimed at making life unlivable for illegals despite their economic dependence on migrant labor. State legislators try to take away government funds for immigrants’ prenatal care even though these lawmakers ostensibly oppose abortion.” 

Growing up in Brainard, Benes says he drank the Kool-Aid (invented in Nebraska): he wanted fewer illegal immigrants in the country; he wanted them deported; he wanted stricter border patrol. “Our safety depended on it. We law-abiding citizens didn’t deserve to be exposed to those who don’t respect the law.” With immigration, however, there may be room for negotiation.

He interviewed the mayor of Schuyler, a town that changed considerably when Cargill expended its beef plant and used migrant laborers to fill low-paying jobs, jobs Cornhuskers did not want to take at the wages offered. “Now Schuyler has the demographics benefitting an international municipality.” Immigrant businesses like The African Store, Chichihualo Supermarket, Novedades La Sorpresa clothing store, and Paleteria Oasis ice-cream stand help keep the town alive. “I’ve been to a lot of withering towns in Nebraska that would kill to have as many operating businesses as Schuyler has.” 

Of course, there have been growing pains. A local man Benes talks with is unhappy that the golf club is the only place in town these days that serves a decent meal. While “an international ag corporation decided to expand its beef operations, now there is nowhere in town to regularly get a good steak because of it.” Blame the immigrants.

Then there’s health care. When you are used to “doing whatever you damn-well please on your own property, forcing people to participate in a massive health-care marketplace feels restrictive of personal liberty.” People in Brainard generally embrace principles like personal responsibility, fiscal restraint, limited government, respect for authority, and individual liberty. 

Republicans are great marketers

Benes writes that the Republican Party “has done an incredible marketing job convincing people in rural areas that it values these ideal and that it’s the only party doing so.” You don’t want the government sticking its nose into your business until there’s a tornado, a flood, or a pandemic—and for many people not even then. Benes has suffered a number of medical calamities, and the benefits he received from Obamacare “made me reconsider other ways the government helped my life.”

So what’s the answer? There is no one answer. Because a single party controls the system, many actions that would make the state less hidebound are impossible: end gerrymandering, reform campaign finance laws, open primaries, ranked voting, improve secondary and higher education. 

At the same time, Benes believes change is possible. With the right messaging, he says, “there’s an opportunity for Democrats to win some rural voters with health care.” And rather attack the immigrants, “redirect their ire at the corporations who, through consolidation and union busting, drove wages down so far that the only people who will take their jobs any more are the people they recruit from other countries eager for a new life.”

Rural Rebellion is an insightful and useful book. Benes is a splendid writer who has added prodigious research to his personal experiences to help readers understand how Nebraska (and by extension other red states) became a Republican stronghold.

A book to read, reread, and read once again

John Keats, born and raised in London, died almost exactly 200 years ago on February 23, 1821; he was twenty-five years old and tuberculosis killed him. He was the son of a London stable-keeper, left school at fifteen to train as an apothecary, and earned his license at age twenty-one. This allowed him to work as a pharmacist, physician, and surgeon, all of which he gave up to write some of the most celebrated poetry in the English language.

Anahid Nersessian was born and raised in New York City. She attended Yale University as an undergraduate and got her Ph.D in English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. After spending three years at Columbia University, she moved to Los Angeles, where she currently teaches in the English Department at UCLA on the unceded territory of the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples. She has published widely in scholarly journals as well as in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Public Books. She also founded and co-edits the Thinking Literature series at the University of Chicago Press. She is the author of The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life, Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment, and Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse.

She warns readers in the first sentence of Keats’s Odes that “If you’ve never read anything on Keats’s odes before, this book should not be your first stop. It is a collection of essays based on intimate, often idiosyncratic responses to the poems. In fact it is probably better to call them meditations instead of essays.”

I had never read anything on Keats’s odes before, so rather than begin with Nersessian’s thin, exquisite offering, I read Aileen Ward’s John Keats: The Making of the Poet, a sturdy biography that Nersessian calls her favorite. But while a biography can give you facts—Keats was short; his father died when he was eight; his mother remarried almost immediately then disappeared; he couldn’t read Greek; he was in love with a girl named Fanny Brawne; he died in Rome—it cannot explain the origin of or justify the power of the poetry. He astonished his friends with one of his first poems, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, with lines like:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken; 

Roughly speaking, says Nersessian, odes are “meant to celebrate something or someone, but because they are written from a place of emotional excess or ferment it’s easy for them to tip over into more private preoccupations.” In 1819, Keats wrote six poems that came to be known as the Great Odes: Ode to a Nightingale; Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Indolence, Ode on Melancholy, Ode to Psyche, and To Autumn.Because I came to Keats’s odes as a poetry lover but having never read them, I cannot, and will not comment on the quality, insights, or depth of Nersessian’s meditations. Rather I tried to hang on as she takes the reader on a personal and scholarly journey through the poems. In addition to the meditations on the poems, her book includes a useful introduction to Keats and his poetry, a useful bibliography at the end of each meditation, an index, and more. 

Which means that readers have not only Nersessian’s exceptionally interesting insights into the odes and personal experiences associated with them, they also have lists of related material (and why it relates to the poems) everything from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Helen Vendler’s The Odes of John Keats, to Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.

In an interview about the book, Nersessian says that “One of the most impressive things about Keats is that his poetry got so good so fast. He started writing when he was about nineteen, and a lot of his early stuff is pretty terrible. When he died six years later, he had written not one, not two, but a solid handful of the most famous poems in the English language, with lines—'A thing of beauty is a joy forever’ or ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’—that millions of people have heard somewhere even if they’ve never read them. The explanation, besides raw talent, is that he worked extremely hard at being a poet. As if he knew his days were limited, he wrote all the time, from short little songs to four-thousand-line epics, and he was always upping the ante, trying to make each poem better than the last one and being careful never to repeat himself or fall into old habits. Of course, if he had lived longer, his poetry could have gotten really bad again. Maybe he only had ten or so great poems in him—which is a lot more than most people.”

Keats’s Odes goes a long way to explain why the six are called the Great Odes and why they are still worth reading and discussing. And even if you have never read the Ode on Indolence or the Ode to Psyche, you will be rewarded by Nersessian’s considered thoughts about them. (I.e., Indolence “is a caricature of detachment, a super-satirical striptease. It tries—not very hard—to contemplate the curious in-between of desire and skepticism, a somewhat disreputable zone that will be more familiar to some of us than others.”) 

A book to keep, to think about, to reread, to use as a guide to an even deeper appreciation of the poems, and to read once again.

You can't leave Tokyo on a slow boat to China

I'm not sure what to make of Hideo Furukawa's short novel Slow Boat. In the last chapter (titled "Liner Notes: Writing about What I'm Writing About") the author says, "This book demands an explanation." The chapter titles are all taken from stories by Haruki Murakami. 

In fact the Japanese title of the book is 中国行きのスローボトRMX or Slow Boat to China Remix. You can find Murakami’s story translated by Alfred Birnbaum in The Elephant Vanishes (1993). In it, the first-person narrator remembers the few Chinese people he has a met: a proctor at a Chinese school where he once took an exam, a female Chinese co-worker he might have had a relationship with but managed to carelessly lose, and a Chinese acquaintance from high school with whom he briefly reconnects. It is a story of memory, missed opportunities or lost connections, and a sense of living the wrong life and aching for another.

The publisher’s bio says that Furukawa was born in 1966 in Fukushima, “and is highly regarded for the richness of his storytelling and his willingness to experiment; he changes his style with every new book. His best-known novel is the 2008 Holy Family, an epic work of alternate history set in northeastern Japan. He has received the Mystery Writers of Japan Award, the Japan SF Grand Prize and the Yukio Mishima award.”

The narrator of Slow Boat states in the book’s first sentence, “I’ve never made it out of Tokyo.” The rest of the book is a chronicle of his three failures to leave Tokyo, seasoned with interesting asides. For example on the first page, “The Japanese language is nothing but lies. Or maybe just chaos.” 

But if the language is nothing but lies (and let’s not be distracted by the fact we’re reading this in English), what is he telling us? Why are we reading him? He’s writing in Japanese because, “It’s the best language I have for writing down my experiences (or the contents of my brain).” That said, he tells us it’s 9:20 in the morning in December and he’s in Hamarikyu, a park where the Sumida River meets Tokyo Bay.

As a fifth-grade student in 1985 he would not leave his bed and was sent to an “alternative school for dropouts” in the mountains, which “kind of felt like summer camp,” but was still in Tokyo. A new student arrives. She’s “not a freak or anything, but stuffed into her tight little bra are the finest, fullest-formed sixth-grade boobs in the Greater Metropolitan Area.” They become friends, but at the end of the summer, he loses her.

When he is nineteen, he begins having sex with a girl who points out that her left areola is “a flawless map of Hokkaido.” Her right areola seems to be the map of another island, and when she identifies it and takes off for it, she leaves the narrator literally stuck in Tokyo. 

He starts a café (Murakami ran a coffee house and jazz bar) and when his chef is unable to work, the guy’s younger sister, a high school girl, fills his place. She is a genius with s knife. “When everyone else my age was holding a milk bottle, I was gripping my boning knife.” Her dream had been to join the family business, but one day her father told her “I know what you’re thinking—but forget it. This business is no place for girls. Believe me, you’ll never make it.” 

She does, in fact make it in the narrator’s café and they become successful associates and all goes well until the shop is smashed. The Suginami police “concluded that a large amount of ice broke loose from the undercarriage of an American fighter jet and fell out of the sky,” destroying the café, which the narrator’s insurance will not cover.

Because Slow Boat is a remix of Haruki Murakami’s structure and themes, the book feels more like an artifact than a story, a work artificially created rather than one that grows out of engagement with the world. It is difficult to suspend disbelief willingly and thereby be engaged knowing from the get go that these characters, these situations are inventions and the author doesn’t expect the reader to believe they are genuine felt experience.

What I do admire immensely about the book is David Boyd’s translation. He manages to maintain the narrator’s voice throughout, and it cannot have been easy. He also had to deal with dialogue and come up with an exchange like this:

“Listen to me, you little shit . . .” He’s looking me right in the eye. “I’m not some grunt making fast food by the fucking manual. Got it?”

“Ye—yeah, I got it . . .”

“Here. Try this, asshole.”

I would like to see the original Japanese if only to broaden my knowledge of the language and the translator’s art, but it does not seem to be available as a standalone book.

If your taste runs to the improbable (an areola in the shape of Hokkaido?) and the artificial, you will probably enjoy Slow Boat. And even if you do enjoy the improbable, I think Murakami does it better.

Positano and a meeting in it is enchanting

This is how Erica,  one of the two main characters in Goliarda Sapienza's novel Meeting in Positano, describes the town:

"Positano can cure you of anything. It opens your eyes to your past suffering and illuminates your present ones, often saving you from making further mistakes. It's strange, but sometimes I get the impression that this cove protected by the bastion of mountains at its back forces you to look at yourself square in the face, like a 'mirror of truth,' while this great sea, usually so calm and clear, similarly inspires self-reflection. That's why for decades now couples have arrived here thinking they're happy, only to break up after a few weeks—they'd been living a lie—or, on the other hand, why perpetually lonely people end up finding a companion here. . . ."

Positano is a town on the Amalfi coast south of Naples. It has existed since Roman times, was an important port during the Amalfi Republic (7th Century-1075), flourished during the middle ages, fell on hard times and was a relatively poor fishing village in the first half of the 20th Century, and began to attract a large number of tourists in the 1950s.

Meeting in Positano is set in the early 1950s and is narrated by a Goliarda who works in the movie business and who has come to Positano to scout locations. She meets Erica Beneventano, a lovely, wealthy widow who lives in a spectacular house and who is called "The Princess" by the positanesi. They become intimate friends, although not erotically intimate, and Erica shares her life story with Goliarda.

She was the middle of three sisters from a wealthy family. When her father loses everything in the 1930s, Erica and her sisters Olivia and Fiore have to go to work.  Erica finds a job in a Milan department store. "Since I was pleasant to look at and know how to pronounce the names of French perfumes, they put me in the cosmetics department." 

Her life unspools. She marries her father's ex-business associate Leopoldo who turns out to be a controlling Italian man. When Erica asks to take part in his affairs the way she had done before the marriage, "he said—not impolitely, but with a tone I had never heard before, decisive and cold like a steel blade: 'It's unseemly for a man to have his wife always in his hair.'" When Erica becomes pregnant, Leopoldo insists she have a Swiss abortion, which goes wrong enough she cannot have more children.

One more example of this family's dynamics. After Erica's father dies and the situation of the girls and their mother is grim, Erica thinks to turn to her uncle Alessandro, her father's brother who has been estranged from the family. A servant reports, "Alessandro was the only one of your relatives who wrote to me offering to help you all. I referred the message to your mother, but she just scolded me: 'Don't you see? That one has only popped up now to steal his brother's daughters. Don't you see that to him, it would represent the ultimate victory over his hated brother?'" 

Because the narrator and the author share the same name, are both in the movie business, and share the same interests, Meeting in Positano could almost be a memoir. The back of the book includes pictures of Positano, a useful afterward by Sapienza's husband, and a chronology of her life. She was born in Catania, Sicily, in 1924, moved to Rome in 1940 where she studied at the Regia Accademia d'Arte Drammatica. In the late 50s she worked with filmmaker Luichino Visconti (a relationship that the novel includes). She began writing in 1963. She finished Appuntamento a Postano in 1984, died in 1986, and the novel remained unpublished until 2015.

Brian Robert Moore's translation is smooth and natural. Here’s a description of a Positano baker/café owner: “I could never describe Giacomino’s voice—a sinuous wisp of smoke mixed with the whiteness of his jasmine flowers and the aroma of orange blossoms at sunset? A sound never heard before, incorporeal but precise. Perhaps it’s nothing more than the timbre that the angels must have had before the advent of the Christian era, in the time of Odysseus, and maybe even before . . . .

Goliarda Sapienza was enchanted by Positano and by whoever Erica Beneventano was in reality. A mark of Sapienza's craft is that she convinces that Erica is no more invented than is Positano. And because Sapienza was enchanted and because she writes so well, we are also captivated.

The premise is fascinating; the execution frustrating

Susan Hill uses an interesting premise in her 2012 mystery A Question of Identity. What if a murderer is caught, tried, and found "not guilty," given a new profession and identity, lives quietly for ten years, and then, driven by some unfathomable urge, begins killing again? Because he now has the experience of strangling three elderly women, he knows how to do it without leaving any clues. 

The killer has a distinctive MO. His victims are all elderly women who live alone. They are all strangled with flex wire, 21 or 49 micro woven stainless steel wires, supple enough it can be knotted. They are all posed seated in front of a vanity mirror. They have all had their toenails clipped. Otherwise, nothing links them. 

Hill, novelist, children's writer, and playwright was born in Scarborough, England, in 1942. She was educated at Scarborough Convent School and at grammar school in Coventry, before reading English at King's College, London, graduating in 1963 and becoming a Fellow in 1978. She published her first novel, The Enclosure, in 1961 when she was still a student. She worked as a freelance journalist between 1963 and 1968, publishing her third novel in 1968. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1972 and was a presenter of BBC Radio 4's "Bookshelf" from 1986 to 1987. In 1996 she started her own publishing company, Long Barn Books, editing and publishing a quarterly literary journal, Books and Company, in 1998. Since then she has written many other novels including The Woman in Black, a Victorian ghost story, that was successfully adapted for stage and television. Her recent novels include the Simon Serrailler crime novels; A Question of Identity (2012) is one of them.

Once again, the book raises the question of how realistic, how plausible should a novel—any novel—be? I think a novel can be plausible without out being realistic. I suspect there are plenty of fantasy and science fiction novels that are not realistic while remaining plausible (the quality of "seeming reasonable or probable"). If the author creates a convincing world—Middle Earth, Narnia, Oz, Wonderland—and does not violate the assumptions of that world, readers willingly suspend disbelief and engage with the characters.

My problem with A Question of Identity is that, for me, it is neither realistic nor fantasy. It is a police procedural filled out with a number of subplots involving almost a dozen characters, all of which are interesting, plausible, and realistic but which have virtually nothing to do with the crimes and their solution.

In contrast, the murderer is—again for me—neither interesting, plausible, nor realistic. Although Hill gives us his extensive italicized thoughts, we cannot even infer his motivation(s). Why elderly ladies? Why pose them? Why trim their toe nails? How is he able to live quietly for ten years? How does he get a personality transplant together with a new name, a new history, colored contact lenses, a new trade? He terrorized his first wife; no indication he abused his second. What triggered another round of slaughter? The answer that he's just a crazy person isn't good enough for a novel.

Also, would the agency of the British government that gave the murderer a new identity not help the local police when it comes to the staff's attention that their guy has begun killing again? Like tell the local cops the guy's new name so they can pick him up before he kills more? Not in this book. You might be able to get away without answering these questions in a true crime account, but fiction readers want, need more. 

I closed A Question of Identity annoyed. I thought the premise fascinating, the execution frustrating.