Eastern European Fiction

New Ways of Composing a Novel 

This review orginally appeared in 3:AM Magazine.)

Romanian novelist Dumitru Tsepeneag would seem to be among those post-communist East European writers whose fiction, as if in leaving the legacy of socialist realism as far behind as possible embraces its perceived opposite, could be described  as “postmodern.” Along with such other writers as Magdalena Tulli (Poland) and Georgi Gospidinov (Bulgaria). Tsepeneag, at least in those works of his that have been translated into English, foregrounds the artifice of fiction in a particularly explicit way that is reminiscent of such American metafictionists as John Barth, Robert Coover, and Gilbert Sorrentino. Books like Tulli’s Flaw and Gospidinov’s Natural Novel, and the latest of Tsepeneag’s novels to be translated, The Bulgarian Truck, are overtly self-reflexive works, stories centered on their own creation, unabashedly leaving traditional conceptions of narrative realism far behind.

These Eastern European writers also bypass realism in their relative lack of interest in the specificity of setting. Their fictions are not obviously marked “Polish” or “Bulgarian” in the details of its depicted milieu, and are only just “European” enough to be attached to a particular place at all. Gospidinov’s Natural Novel contains numerous references to American literature and culture, while much of Tsepeneag’s The Bulgarian Truck takes place through email messages, which locates the narrative in a vaguely “global” realm of mass electronic communication. Paradoxically, the postmodernist techniques in the work of these writers make them more accessible to international readers (in the U.S. postmodern fiction is frequently accused of indifference to the needs of readers), even as the texts have a deracinating effect, emptying out the local cultural characteristics that would otherwise make this fiction distinctive for readers drawn to translated fiction precisely to “experience” another culture.

The case of Tsepeneag specifically is a little more complicated, however, as his career began before postmodernism could be called a transnational phenomenon (when, in fact, it was almost exclusively a phenomenon of American fiction), and he was part of an anti-realist group, the Onirists, which was essentially an extension of late modernism. The Onirists were inspired by the Surrealists, but they rejected its Freudian content in favor of pure dreamlike imagery. Tsepeneag has said that his fiction does not imitate or mirror dreams, but creates them, using the dream as a structural principle. His best-known work of this type is no doubt Vain Art of the Fugue, originally appearing in 1973 and published in translation by Dalkey Archive Press in 2007. This novel united Tsepeneag’s interest in dreams as a literary device with his interest in music, both of which as arts of “succession” provide the novel with its metaphorical, rather than narrative, formal scheme.

Vain Art of the Fugue proceeds through repetition and transformation, an initial mundane episode (a man catching a bus) repeated in slightly altered versions, akin to the way a musical fugue repeats and varies an introductory theme. The novel does thus evoke a dreamlike state (a “fugue state”), and the musical analogy gives it coherence while also serving to demonstrate that “telling a story” is not the only way to give fiction coherence—or perhaps that it is possible to tell a story without appearing to do so. One might say that the “story” in Vain Art of the Fugue is the story of the novel’s potentially infinite iterations of image and scene that the act of repetition and variation produces. It might be taken as a novel about its own creation, but not because it directly calls attention to the process of its own fabrication: rather, that process is innovative enough that readers must comprehensively reconsider their assumptions about what the “creation” of a work of fiction entails. Speaking for myself, it is also the most singular and most compelling translated novel I have read in the last decade.

After making Tsepeneag available in English for the first time with Vain Art of the Fugue, Dalkey Archive published more of his works, both among those written in French after Tsepeneag was denounced by the Romanian government and established himself as an exile in Paris (The Necessary Marriage, Pigeon Post) and those written in Romanian (Waiting, Hotel Europa). Waiting and The Necessary Marriage are from Tsepeneag’s earlier, oniric-derived period, while Pigeon Post and Hotel Europa are more straightforwardly metafictional and can be regarded as the most immediate points of departure for The Bulgarian Truck. All three of these novels feature writer protagonists who are literally composing a novel—in each case, the novel we are reading—inventing his characters and their stories as he goes, taking us along with him. The oniric dream-structure isn’t abandoned but instead is re-situated in the circumstances of the novelist “dreaming” his fiction.

The structural assumptions governing The Bulgarian Truck are immediately indicated in the novel’s subtitle, which announces it as “A Building Site Beneath the Open Sky.” Certainly an unorthodox conception of form, this trope explicitly identifies the novel as a construction, the process of which (“beneath the open sky”) will be the focus of the reader’s attention. The strategy allows Tsepeneag to spin off several subplots to accompany the picaresque “main” story of a Bulgarian truck driver (subplots involving the narrator himself), even while presenting them all as parts of the fiction under construction. Every time the reader starts to take one of the narratives as the “real” story or begins to wonder how firm the connections between the episodes related and the author’s own life might be, metafictional reminders that all of these accounts are components of the novel being assembled necessarily intrude.

The narrator transparently declares himself to be Dumitru Tsepeneag, although of course we can’t be sure if this is actually the author or, for the purposes of this novel, just another character. (Ultimately, if we are to accept that The Bulgarian Truck is a novel, we must further accept that the narrator is indeed a character.) In some instances, it seems clear enough that the novel autobiographically alludes to the circumstances of Tsepeneag’s life—e.g., exile in France, his close relationship with the Romanian poet Leonid Dimov—as well as people associated with Tsepeneag—his translators, for example. But we would certainly be misreading The Bulgarian Truck if we regarded its self-reflexive premise as the pretext for tantalizing us with the intimate detail, some potentially scandalous, of the author’s personal life. Similar to the way John Barth uses his own situation as writer and the particularities of his domestic life (suitably disguised) to anchor his own stories about storytelling, Tsepeneag invokes an autobiographical context as the most effective way to develop his vision of novel-writing as dream.

The Bulgarian Truck begins by introducing us to the narrator’s wife, Marianne, who is visiting a friend in New York City and about whom the narrator tells us: “she gets angry quickly, because she loses her temper over about anything. Of course, her temper tantrums are a pose. She’s spoiled and knows she can get her own way. You might even say I’m the one to blame for always having let her get her own way.” When finally we do begin to hear from Marianne herself—the narrator writes her to describe “the new way of composing a novel that I have in mind”—she certainly confirms this description of her, but eventually it becomes clear that Marianne is a device, the means by which the narrator begins to call his novel into being and through which he can consider and refine his “new way of composing a novel,” as she serves as the narrator’s critic—a harsh one indeed.

Your poor unfortunate reader. He’ll get the impression that he’s always reading the same text. That he’s going round in circles… . . .He’ll think that you’ve forgotten what you’ve already written and that’s why you have written it again. Or that you were in a hurry and bungled the job. The reader isn’t going to think of music. . .He bought a novel. He paid money for a book because he likes literature, not music. Understand? Why put him out? If he wants music, he’ll listen to music. . . .

As the narrator’s effort to write his novel expands to include Tsvetan, the Bulgarian truck driver, a stripper named Beatrice who is destined to cross paths with Tsvetan, and Milena, a Slovakian writer with whom the narrator begins an affair, Marianne’s role begins to fade. We are told she has gone to the hospital—possibly a recurrence of a strange chronic disease which causes her to both grow and shrink—and we hear from her no more. At one point, before Marianne’s presence is no longer required, during a phone conversation she reports running into the narrator’s translator, who reminds her of her appearance in a previous book he translated. The narrator further reminds her: “You are in Hotel Europa, I yell into the receiver. He translated that one too.” Marianne is not a character Tsepeneag has drawn from life (certainly not directly) but has recycled from a previous fiction as a foil in the current fiction, with whose assistance the narrator can reinforce his “building site beneath the open sky.”

So too are Tsvetan and Beatrice recycled from other of Tsepeneag’s works, as we are informed by the translator of The Bulgarian Truck in his preface. “Milena” is a not so cryptic allusion to Franz Kafka’s lover of the same name (although the narrator’s “letters to Milena” are delivered via the internet in emails rather than by post). That Milena is also an invented character is further signified when the narrator begins calling her “Mailena,” as if he has forgotten the name he has assigned her. However much Tsepeneag invites us to read his life into his work, he is reading (and writing) his other work into the work, in a way that is again reminiscent of Barth in his novel Letters, an epistolary novel featuring correspondence between “John Barth” and characters from his preceding books. Perhaps it could be said that Barth’s self-reflexive strategy is to “bare the device” in order to rebuild an aesthetic whole from the structural elements thus exposed, while Tsepeneag is satisfied to leave his “building site” incomplete, visible under the “open sky” for the reader’s contemplation. Still, for readers familiar with Barth’s novel, the notion of a kind of self-reflexive intertextuality cannot seem a particularly radical innovation.

Tsepeneag’s metafictional strategy is additionally focused on translation as an always-looming concern for the Eastern European writer, in a way it likely is not for writers in English or one of the more globally-dominant West European languages. Such a writer is less likely to be translated in the first place, making it probable that his work will remain obscure in an otherwise increasingly internationalized literary culture. Even if the work is translated, the unfamiliar cultural context that produced it might be puzzling to some international readers. Tsepeneag surely became even more acutely aware of this dilemma as a Romanian writer who, after being exiled from his country, began writing in French, and then, after the revolution deposing the Ceausescu regime, returned to writing in Romanian. This dilemma is perhaps most poignantly expressed in The Bulgarian Truck in the subplot devoted to the narrator’s French translator, Alain, who is dying from cancer. The narrator witnesses Alain wasting away, as if he is watching his lifeline to readers and publishers wither as well

If postmodernism has become a universally-available alternative to realism (socialist or otherwise), it is not surprising that writers from countries and cultures more removed from the centers of literary culture would find it a strategic literary technique more likely to give them access to that culture (even as a Parisian, the narrator of The Bulgarian Truck feels isolated, excluded from more widespread success). But its postmodern affinities also paradoxically lend a novel like The Bulgarian Truck a somewhat belated quality, potentially prompting the judgment from Western readers, at least, that the “new way of composing a novel” isn’t really so new. While a very good book, although also oddly conventional, it is a skillful assembly of metafictional materials that once were among the most advanced, but which have now have become rather familiar and a little worn.

Waiting for the Final Word 

(This review originally appeared in The Quarterly Conversation.)

Because of the praiseworthy efforts of Archipelago Books, with the publication of In Red, we now have available translations of all four novels Polish writer Magdalena Tulli has written to date. Considering the general lack of attention given to translations by major American publishers, such a happy circumstance provides an opportunity to assess the work of this writer to an extent unfortunately not possible for too many translated writers, who are generally represented in English by at best an incomplete selection that may or may not include their most important work, or through which it is difficult to make a fully informed judgment of the important work because of the absence of needed context. Many writers are arguably subject to a distorted perspective due to the vagaries of translation, resulting no doubt in both the over- and the under-estimation of individual books in what is essentially a state of enforced ignorance for critics and reviewers.

Thus if English language readers had only Tulli’s first novel, Dreams and Stones, we might conclude her work is some hybrid of fiction and philosophical reflection, this novel a kind of poetic meditation in prose on the origins and development of a city. The city itself is really the novel’s only character, its various stages of growth the only plot. If we were further able to read Moving Targets, we might assume Tulli is a radical metafictionist, as it takes the motif of creation and makes it into a tale of specifically literary creation, following the efforts of an ineffectual narrator to invoke his characters and get his story started. This novel would seem to mark Tulli as a “postmodern” writer focused on the implications of storytelling itself. Adding to the mix Flaw (chronologically her most recent book), however, it would seem that Tulli’s novels can also be “about” something other than themselves. Flaw does not abandon the self-reflexive depiction of the dynamics of storytelling and the process of creation; rather it incorporates this concern in a portrayal of a fully made city with characters that do come to life, albeit more as a collective than as individual figures, and a story whose drama goes beyond (or is in addition to) the drama of narrative construction.

In Red is Tulli’s most conventional novel—which is not to say it could finally be described as a conventional work of fiction. Still, to the extent it does offer individuated characters, some degree of plot “movement,” and a strongly delineated setting, readers hesitant to commit to one of the novels that seems formidably experimental might find In Red a more comfortable introduction to Tulli’s fiction. But while the novel does provide somewhat more of the familiar elements of conventional fiction, it nevertheless doesn’t allow the reader to retreat altogether to conventional reading pleasures. If there are identifiable characters who are “developed” over the course of the narrative, there is no one character whom we are invited to regard as a protagonist. Indeed, while a succession of characters are introduced, most of them led to the same fate—early death— none of them are characters with whom we are likely to “identify.” Most of the focus is on figures of prominence and authority, primarily businessmen, and these characters in particular tend to blend together, as if each such character is another version of the previous. The procession of new characters in turn produces the novel’s narrative structure: a chronicle of notable personages and events in Stichings, a (fictional) town in a (fictional) province of northern Poland.

Stichings itself is really the main character in In Red, tracking what happens there through roughly the first half of the 20th century its primary concern. In this way it is perhaps not a radical departure from Dreams and Stones, adding people and their interactions to the portrayal of a city, superimposing their “story” on the story of the city’s growth. Although Stichings regresses as a much as or more than it progresses (at the end of the novel it is consumed by fire), it could be said to serve the same function in this novel, in a less overt, more outwardly disguised way, as the city does in Tulli’s first novel: as the vehicle for an allegorical representation of the act of literary creation. In Red’s enactment of this allegory calls less attention to itself and for the most part remains implicit, but the framing of the novel clearly enough emphasizes the symmetries of commencing and concluding the act of storytelling: “Whoever has been everywhere and seen everything,” the novel begins

last of all should pay a visit to Stichings. Simply take a seat in a sleigh and, before being overcome by sleep, speed across a plain that’s as empty as a blank sheet of paper, boundless as life itself. Sooner or later this someone—perhaps it is a traveling salesman with a valise full of samples—will see great mounds of snow stretching along streets to the four corners of the earth, toward empty, icy expanses.

The novel’s closing lines if anything make the parallel between the story of Stichings and the invocation of fictional worlds through writing even more apparent:

Traveling salesman in search of happiness or deliverance: if you wish to leave Stichings, do not hesitate for a moment: you have to do it between the capital letter and the period, without any broken-off thought, without waiting for the final word.

That the novel focuses on the act of creating a fictional “place” such as Stichings does not mean it fails to maintain the illusion that Stichings is a “real” place. Polish readers would no doubt finds its details and its portrait of the life of the city entirely genuine; for the rest of us, the illusion of reality certainly seems complete. The characters, however much they are deliberately made to echo and repeat, are still credible, recognizable human beings. The stories of success, failure, and misadventure in which they are involved are likewise recognizable and recognizably human. The reader could take the overtures to the “traveling salesman” as invitations to enter into the fictional portrayal of Stichings and its inhabitants, without necessarily reflecting on the process of literary composition or interpreting the mechanisms involved. Readers could certainly enjoy In Red as a lively narrative of the notable events in an out-of-the-way corner of Europe, although not so out-of-the-way that we can’t see ourselves reflected in the people living there.

However, while In Red could be read and appreciated for its more conventional, if at times eccentric, treatment of plot, character, and setting, such an appreciation would remain incomplete without the opportunity to situate this novel in the context of Tulli’s still evolving body of work. The access that Archipelago now gives us to this work in full allows us to see that Tulli is a writer who begins in an awareness of the artificiality of literary creation and the independent logic expressed by stories, but who has also endeavored to embody these concerns in narratives that appeal to familiar expectations of literary narrative. Even if we still cannot say that through these translations we can apprehend Tulli’s most immediate engagement of these concerns with the resources of the Polish language, nor can we experience the historical and cultural resonances of the depiction of this period in Polish history as readily as Polish readers, we can, thanks to the work of both the publisher and translator Bill Johnston, make a more concerted effort to estimate the achievement of this writer than we can with most writers we can know only through translation. My own tentative judgment is that her achievement is considerable, perhaps even singular, in the way it enlists “postmodern” strategies to further traditional goals of storytelling.

Grab-Bag 

In one way or another, the fiction of Orhan Pamuk is usually referred to as “postmodern.” A 2006 New York Times profile of Pamuk, for example describes his novels as including “a grab-bag of postmodern literary devices,” and its author, former Book Review editor Charles McGrath, further identifies the ways in which books like The New Life and The Black Book “empty the whole trunk” of such devices: “narratives within narratives, texts that come alive, labyrinths of signs and symbols . . . doubleness and identity swapping.”

That Pamuk is a writer from a country we hardly think has much relation to “Western literature,” much less to postmodernism, surely does make his work into something of a curiosity, perhaps drawing more attention than might the fiction of Western writers employing the same kinds of “devices” McGrath lists. It might even have contributed to Pamuk’s receiving the Nobel Prize for literature at such a relatively early stage of his career. Combining the postmodern methods of Western novelists with the depiction of a largely non-Western (and often explicitly pre-modern) culture has no doubt brought Pamuk readers he might not otherwise have found simply by establishing himself as a “Turkish novelist” taking a more conventional approach to the writing of fiction.

On the other hand, Pamuk has generally been accorded more critical approbation among “mainstream” reviewers and critics than many of the postmodern writers from whose trunk he is presumably borrowing his panoply of devices. In his very reference to the “grab bag” of postmodern tricks, McGrath himself echoes the implicitly condescending tone with which the American postmodernists are frequently enough discussed in the literary press. (And postmodernism is: a. in its origins primarily an American phenomenon, and b. primarily a development in postwar American fiction before it became an all-purpose term of cultural analysis.) American postmodernists such as John Barth and Robert Coover have never really been accepted as the pathbreaking writers they in fact are; their use of such strategies as “narratives within narratives” and “labyrinths of signs and symbols” is often dismissed as self-indulgence, a kind of literary trifling unworthy of “serious” authors.

I have long suspected that this mainstream antipathy to postmodern fiction—more specifically to any work that can be identified as “metafiction”—comes from an implicit devaluation of comedy in fiction, as, indeed, postmodern fiction is largely comic fiction, even if so many reviewers cannot be presumed to get the joke. It is, I believe, a tacit assumption of middle-brow criticism—and book reviewing, at least in the United States, is mostly a middlebrow endeavor—that comedy is to be taken less seriously as a literary mode, as if the “comic” and the “serious” are per se natural opposites; although ultimately the opposition is not so much between comedy and drama as it is between a comic representation of the world, which requires a stripping-away of conventional appearances, the disruption of our pre-established expectations, and a representation of the world than conforms to one or another accepted version of realism. Finally, only realism (not to be confused with “story,” as deviations from its narrative norms can be tolerated if they eventually bring us back to a “deeper” reality all the more enhanced for the effort) is allowed to redeem fiction from its infuriating refusal to otherwise “say something,” directly and unequivocally. Realism at least allows the critic to seize on what a novel reveals about The Way Things Are.

Postmodern comedy only makes this temptation to dismiss the comic as intellectually frivolous even more acute, since the comic perspective afforded by postmodern fiction is especially . . . comic. That is, the humor evoked in novels like Catch-22 or Gravity’s Rainbow or Mulligan Stew is deliberately very broad, the comic representation so thoroughgoing in its effect that it can’t really be translated into the language of traditional critical discourse. The one recognizable mode of comedy that historically has been accepted as a worthy vehicle of “meaning,” satire, doesn’t very accurately encompass this sort of comedy. Satire uses comedy to “comment” on the behavior it examines and the issues it raises, to indeed “say something” unequivocally if indirectly. Satire is “corrective” in that it holds the depicted actions up to ridicule, in effect calling out for the actions to be changed. But this is not the case with the postmodern comedy to be found in the kinds of novels I’ve mentioned. The laughter in satirical comedy is tinged with moral judgment, but postmodern comedy subjects all “serious” impulses—including the impulse to make moral judgments—to the withering laughter of a radical comedy that is comic all the way down.

In his book Fables of Subversion, Steven Weisenburger tries to make a case for postmodern comedy—among the writers he discusses are Heller, Pynchon, Coover, John Hawkes and William Gaddis—as a form of “degenerative satire,” which goes beyond the kind of corrective laughter typical of traditional literary satire to “subvert hierarchies of values and to reflect suspiciously on all ways of making meaning, including its own.” This is close to what I have in mind in calling postmodern comedy “radical,” but Weisenburger insists on retaining the word “satire” in his survey of postmodern comic fiction, at one point defining “degenerative satire” as “realist narration backlit by fantastic outrage.” To me, outrage is outrage, whether fantastic or realist in its expression, and thus “degenerative satire” seems just another attempt to rescue postmodern comedy from the default assumption that is “merely comic.” “Outrage” again only reduces the use of comedy to a gesture on behalf of this or that point of view, an implicit endorsement of some alternative “value” (if not existing “hierarchies”).

Pamuk’s novels could not easily be described as satirical, degenerative or otherwise, but they are largely allegorical, and perhaps it is the commonality of purpose shared by these modes—to signal “meaning” or “message” in a discernible if roundabout way—that accounts for Pamuk’s more ready acceptance by mainstream criticism. If Pamuk’s books are often intricately designed, self-aware constructions (“clever” is a word often used to damn postmodernists with faint praise), they are so because they seem overtly designed to “signify” in a manner more associated with “fabulation” than metafiction (to use the twinned terms in the title of Robert Scholes’s influential book examining both of these modes of postwar fiction). In this way, Pamuk’s fiction is closer to that of Kafka and Borges than to Barth or Coover, although even in Kafka and Borges there is an element of humor (in the former, deeply dark) in the way they each strain the fable form almost to the breaking point, outrageously testing the form’s ability to be straightforwardly meaningful, offering in The Castle or “The Hunger Artist,” “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” or “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (in my opinion one of the most hilarious stories ever written) meaning of an especially profound sort—or so the reader is tempted to assume—and then withdrawing it in an allegorical sleight-of-hand that leaves the very notion of meaning-making itself in a shambles.

Pamuk, it seems to me, borrows the “grab-bag of postmodern literary devices,” the techniques and strategies associated with Western experimental fiction, but never really possesses them as anything more than available avant-garde flourishes given an extra exotic twist by their use in novels about Muslim culture. Postmodern fiction is self-reflexive because it takes as its most immediate subject the very medium of fiction itself, which it subjects to comic self-scrutiny. That fiction is able to re-create reality and convey meaning of a coherent and stable sort is the first assumption such fiction questions. Pamuk wants to use postmodern strategies precisely in order to create meaning, in effect to graft them on to his representations of Turkey’s past and present as a way of strengthening these representations, or at least of bringing attention to them beyond the critical consideration conventional realism would be capable of attracting.

In his review of The Black Book, Scott McLemee observes that an important difference between the “metafictional hijinks” of Pamuk and Borges is that the latter “knows when to quit.” He asserts further that “what makes The Black Book more than a set of variations of an intertextual theme—with bits of Kafka, Joyce, Proust, Mann, and Calvino joining the collage—is precisely its setting in Istanbul. The detective story is simply an excuse for [the protagonist] to wander around Istanbul, and for Pamuk to explore the byways of huzun [loosely, 'melancholy'].” McLemee’s comments on the relative merits of The Black Book in several ways capture my own reaction to both this very lengthy novel and the much briefer The White Castle. Although the metafictional devices in The Black Book—which mostly reinforce the theme of doubleness, of the merging of identity—are belabored at greater length and do induce a state of prolonged tedium in their humorlessness, they aren’t much more interesting in The White Castle, which focuses on doubling and identity shifts even more intensely. In neither book would I necessarily call these devices “hijinks,” since they are not flaunted in a spirit of exuberance or creative mischief but seem labored and perfunctory; in both of them the metafictional elements serve little purpose aside from heightening the sense of portentousness to a level that can’t finally be sustained.

If the pseudo-detective narrative in The Black Book “is simply an excuse,” despite its postmodern flourishes, for providing a portrait of modern-day Istanbul, The White Castle similarly entices the reader with a tale, in this case a kind of adventure/captivity story, that promises revelation of narrative mystery (are the twin protagonists truly doubles?, is one the figment of the other’s imagination?) but mostly offers “information” about Ottoman history, customs, and culture. Its relative brevity and more concise storytelling make it a much brisker read than The Black Book, but ultimately it is scarcely more satisfying as a work of postmodernism freshly reconceived; neither book could be called innovative or experimental, as neither goes beyond recirculating an already existing collection of “devices.” “Grab bag” is actually not an unfair description of the strategies employed in these books.

My Name is Red is probably the most genuinely “postmodern” of Pamuk’s novels, even if it is most immediately an exploration of Ottoman/Islamic history. With its cast of multiple narrators (including the color red and various dead people) and its thematic focus on art and the nature of artistic creation, it is also the most lively of Pamuk’s books, its kaleidoscopic narration, relatively short chapters, and mystery plot (who killed the master illuminator Elegant Effendi?) at its center keeping the novel moving at an engaging pace. What emerges is less an historical recreation of the Ottoman Empire than a convincing aesthetic creation that allows both author and reader to meditate on the human need to create art in the first place, even in circumstances that put restrictions on the artist’s ability to give full expression to that need and even in the midst of those mundane struggles and squabbles that afflict everyone, including the artist, in our efforts simply to find some sort of happiness in a world that constantly threatens to undermine it.

Certainly those of us who know little to nothing about Ottoman or Islamic art are able to discover a great deal about it from reading My Name is Red. The encroachment of “Western” notions of perspective and individual portraiture on tradition-bound practice of Islamic manuscript illumination is a fascinating subject, and Pamuk handles it very adroitly, allowing us to understand both the strengths of traditional Islamic art and the limitations that make even some of the master practitioners of Istanbul begin to look at Western (“Frankish”) art with some envy. In the process, of course, Pamuk is also inviting us to ponder some of the important, perhaps irreconcilable, conflicts between the civilizations of the West and Islam as a whole. To the extent that My Name is Red might be regarded as Pamuk’s attempt to achieve some modest conciliation of its own, through the application of the modern literary techniques of the west to Islamic history and culture, it is finally relatively satisfying and successful.

As if following a deliberate strategy of alternating novels set in the Turkish past with those set in present-day Turkey, Snow, Pamuk’s most recent novel, switches to a modern setting, its plot chronicling the visit of an exiled Turkish writer to an isolated, turmoil-afflicted city in far eastern Turkey. The authority of the Turkish government seems truly endangered (although its willingness to engage in casual torture has not been affected), and during a massive snowstorm that closes all roads leading in and out of the city of Kars, a coup of sorts (more like a counter-revolution) is staged by a few partisans of the State. Most of the novel takes place over the few days in which this coup takes place, and along the way the poet-protagonist both falls in love and is seized by the inspiration to write nineteen new poems.

Readers unaware of the secular/religious divide in modern Turkey may learn from Snow something about its saliency in Turkish culture and politics, may even learn more about the way in which radical Islam comes to have an attraction for the disgruntled in even such an avowedly secular country as Turkey. But such lessons in history and Muslim politics don’t necessarily make reading this novel an engrossing aesthetic experience. The novel’s prose and narrative energy never dispel the gloom that envelops the characters and their circumstances, and the novel’s central paradox—that the poet Ka finds the happiness he’s always looked for in the midst of such squalor and unrest—seems like an interesting idea, but, for this reader at least, isn’t executed with much vigor. Ka remains a cipher to me, his sense of himself as both a poet and a Turk rather blurry. I can accept the novel’s apparent message, that finally one’s personal relations transcend politics, that only love is really important, but its 425 pages of political intrigue and religious debate seem a very long way to go to receive that message.

Unfortunately, the word I would have to use in describing Pamuk’s fiction as a whole—excluding most of My Name is Red—is “ponderous.” It lacks the comic vitality characterizing the best postmodern fiction, although Pamuk’s intention to inject something of Western postmodernism into Turkish literature still seems a worthy and potentially interesting project. Finally, however, the attempt rarely rises above the lugubrious and heavy-handed. One might hope that Pamuk’s future fiction will show him handling the task of adapting modernist and postmodernist literary strategies to his non-Western subjects with a somewhat lighter touch, but, having been rewarded for his work in its current form with the most prestigious literary prize available, one suspects that Orhan Pamuk will find few reasons to reconsider his approach.

Consulting the Text 

(This review originally appeared in Full Stop.)

It is not uncommon in discussions of Peter Handke’s work for both Handke and literary critics to refer to a “text” of his rather than to a novel, a play, or a memoir, which seems the best way to regard the latest work of Handke’s to be translated, Storm Still. This text first reached audiences as a play (performed in 2011) but is now being published as a book that can just as easily be read as a short novel (although its origins in the theater are apparent enough in the book’s structure as a series of spoken set-pieces). The book’s dual nature as both play and a form of prose fiction (a “read drama”) is its most immediate confirmation of Handke’s status as a formally adventurous writer who doesn’t so much experiment with form or create new forms as disregard the rules and requirements of established forms altogether in favor of a less constrained practice of “writing.”

Readers will readily be able to discern that this text was written to be performed. But a reliance on speech — both monologue and dialogue — has long been a distinctive feature of Handke’s novels so that Storm Still will certainly seem recognizable as Handke’s work to those familiar only with his novels, while at the same time, will exemplify many of Handke’s preoccupations and literary strategies for those readers not much familiar with his previous writings. Its relative brevity aligns it with some of Handke’s best known books such as The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick and Across, both of them novels of fewer than 150 pages, although it is certainly more compact than Handke’s bulkier novels such as My Year in the No-Man’s Bay and Crossing the Sierra de Gredos. Like most of Handke’s work, both plays and novels, this book is essentially plotless, although that doesn’t mean nothing happens, or that what does happen is of minor importance. Indeed, “what happens” in a Handke text often rises to the level of the allegorical, but he does very little to organize his narratives according to the artificial requirements of “plot.”

Another way of describing the allegorical nature of Handke’s stories (which usually do have beginnings, middles, and ends) is to note their dreamlike qualities, the way in which the borders of “reality” are not strictly patrolled. At the beginning of Storm Still, the narrator draws our attention to “A heath, a steppe, or steppe-like heath, or wherever. Now, in the Middle Ages, or whenever.” He recalls images of this scene from his childhood, and then opens his eyes to see that

. . .My forebears are approaching from every side, with the typical Jaunfeld gait, one foot firmly following the other. Each one comes along alone, except my grandparents as a couple, alone the more or less or perhaps not at all deranged sister of my mother, and likewise, walking alone, their three brothers each one on a separate path or not-path. The youngest is doing somersaults, rolling along, as if in high spirits. Each one makes for the place to stand that seems prescribed for them, again apart from my grandparents, who sit on the bench. . . .

Although clearly enough this appearance of his forebears is a phenomenon of the narrator’s own fancy, it is not uncommon in Handke’s other, more obviously “realistic” novels that palpably strange, sometimes surreal or fantastic scenes or events emerge in relation to characters and situations otherwise grounded in recognizable reality. Quite often Handke’s narratives feature a writer character (often exhibiting clear similarities to Peter Handke) whose presence metafictionally reminds us that writing shapes and transforms experience in order to clarify it, even if that means leaving its literal depiction behind. Handke’s work manifests a remarkable freedom of approach, ignoring most formal and narrative conventions, while at the same time always seeming carefully composed.

Thematically, Storm Still also has strong affinities with Handke’s previously translated fiction. The “heath, steppe” or “steppe-like heath” (with its echoes of King Lear, clearly signaled in the book’s title) where the narrator’s forebears manifest themselves is the Jaunfeld Plain, the ethnically Slovenian region of Carinthia in southern Austria. This is a common setting in Handke’s work — Carinthia is Handke’s home region, and he is himself of mixed German and Slovenian descent — and there are enough similarities between the family members invoked in Storm Still and characters featured elsewhere in Handke’s fiction that it would seem justified to conclude that the family represented in this book is a version of his own. Perhaps Handke’s most concentrated previous treatment of the “borderland” of Carinthia and its Slovenian roots is in Repetition, which chronicles the journey of a young man, also from Carinthia and of Slovenian descent, across the Austrian border into Slovenia proper in search of a brother who had himself crossed into Slovenia years earlier and not been heard from again. Most of the narrative is taken up with the ways in which the young man (who narrates the story as an older man) comes to be aware of and appreciate his Slovenian heritage, as well as his brother’s action in deserting from the German army during World War II.

Storm Still is framed even more directly as an attempt to consider this mixed Austrian/Slovenian cultural inheritance. The narrator’s forebears provide accounts of the family’s history, focusing specifically on events before and during World War II. Their testimony concerning their own actions works to portray the Slovenian Austrians as offering resistance to the Nazi occupation of Austria, one of the uncles in particular actually joining a Slovenian-based resistance group “in the mountains” after he too defects from the German army. If Repetition ultimately transcends its travel narrative form to become a powerful rendering of its narrator’s discovery of identity, both familial and existential, Storm Still seems more directly the attempt to recover the Slovenian presence in Austria, the distinct cultural legacy of the Carinthian Slovenes, and especially their defiance of the Nazi-imposed anschluss. It is also a moving meditation on memory and loss, culminating in the final image of the narrator and his vanishing forebears receding from each other, “recognizable at most by the movement of our hands as we still wave to one another.” But certainly the strongest impression the book makes (an impression probably even more pronounced when the work is performed theatrically) is in its invocation of a minority culture that might otherwise remain invisible.

For readers familiar with the controversy in which Handke was embroiled when he seemed to defend the government of Serbia as it was committing atrocities in Bosnia and Kosovo, this work might plausibly help to put Handke’s actions, which might otherwise seem inexplicable, in a more comprehensible context. Handke’s attachment is not to Serbia, but to the former Yugoslavia, as a part of which the Slovenes presumably were best able to express their cultural identity — Handke apparently prizes especially the linguistic diversity within cultural commonality that characterized Yugoslavia, especially as a sign of the South Slavs’ refusal to accede to the domination of Austria and Germany as centers of “European” influence. Whether this quasi-romanticized view of Yugoslavia (according to which all of the South Slavs at one time “just got along”) elevates either Storm Still or Handke’s rhetorical interventions in the Balkan wars to more principled efforts to preserve the dignity of its people is open to dispute, although that Handke sincerely holds such a view seems less so.

The hybrid form of Storm Still, however much it might contribute a kind of dramatic immediacy, also unfortunately affords us much less of the most consistently compelling and satisfying feature of Handke’s works of fiction, his prose style. (The prose of Storm Still is much more purely functional, the non-spoken passages often a more extended form of stage directions.) Even in translation, Handke’s prose has a distinctive quality — it is simultaneously precise and unconstrained, highly attuned to the concrete and the “real,” but also almost mystically reflective. The protagonist of Slow Homecoming (translated by Ralph Manheim) stands on a river bank:

The dried shore mud at his feet had broken up into a far-flung network of almost regular polygons (for the most part six-sided). As he examined the cracks, they began little by little to work on him, but instead of fragmenting him like the ground, they joined all his cells (a void that he hadn’t noticed until then) into a harmonious whole. Something that rose from the split surface of the earth struck his body and made it warm and heavy. Standing there motionless, looking out over the patterns, he saw himself as a receiver, not of news or a message, but of a twofold force received on the two levels of his head. On his forehead, he felt the bone disappearing, simply because he had no other thought than to expose this obstacle to the air. . . .

The mud cracks form a network specifically of polygons, predominantly “six-sided,” at which the character, Sorger, is clearly staring intently, closely attending to the appearance of the mud. But the effect on Sorger, although clearly profound, can only be expressed in the rather vague notion of a “harmonious whole.” “Something” rises from the ground to make Sorger’s body “warm and heavy,” but this thing remains a feeling, not a “message” that can be articulated. If Sorger is the ”receiver” of an intangible communication from his surroundings, it is again manifested in a very tangible way, a “twofold force” to the forehead causing him to feel “the bone disappearing.” Interludes such as this are the real focus of interest in Handke’s fiction. While it may seem that, taken as story, nothing is happening in a Handke novel, much is happening in moments like these. In the interaction between character, world, and the writer’s attempt to reckon with the encounter between self and world through purposeful language (which always might fail), consciousness happens.

Text and Context 

(This essay originally appeared in Full Stop.)

It would seem unambiguously desirable that more, rather than fewer, works of world literature be translated into English. But when the writer translated is largely unknown to most American readers and reviewers, and the literary tradition in which the writer works unfamiliar, how well-situated are we in fact to really appreciate the work in front of us, to feel we can adopt a perspective that allows us to assimilate the work even on a literal, denotative level? To what extent can we indeed plausibly claim to be focusing our attention on the text itself when the context needed to make the text fully intelligible might be missing?

These were questions that persistently arose as I was reading (for the first time) the Slovenian writer Evald Flisar. None of the books I read — including his newly translated novel (by David Limon) A Swarm of Dust and the other two novels in the author’s so-called “village” trilogy, Three Loves, One Death and My Father’s Dreams — could be described as conventional in their themes or their formal structures. But ultimately it would be illuminating to know if the sort of loose sequencing we find in these novels (as well as in Who Can Say Where the Road Goes, which I also read) is a narrative strategy more accepted in the Slovenian literary tradition and thus entirely recognizable to most of the writer’s immediate readership, or if the lack of observable plot would be seen as a challenge to prevailing expectations. Similarly, a greater knowledge of Slovenian history and culture in general might help us better understand the extent to which the themes of alienation, family conflict, divergent sexuality, and nihilistic rebellion would be familiar enough to Slovenian readers in their cultural and political history, or whether they are Flisar’s adaptation of familiar “Western” themes to a society suddenly and rapidly westernized.

It is not that the situations depicted or the strategies used in Flisar’s novels would be unfamiliar to most readers of the English translations, but that often they are indeed familiar enough that it seems merely presumptuous to judge them as derivative, when in fact in their cultural context the novels might be justifiably regarded as more audacious. In addition to the serial structure he employs, which moves forward without necessarily entailing “development,” and that frequently features purposeful gaps in chronology (creating a kind of drama by omission), Flisar’s novels incorporate surreal and absurdist elements — although the ultimate impression they leave is of an embellished realism — as well as Freudian psychology and unreliable narration. In My Father’s Dreams, the line between fantasy and reality, dreams and conscious experience, is blurred by relating the story through the psychologically displaced narration of its youthful protagonist, who may or may not be the victim of a deception contrived by his own father. The novels employ what could be called postmodern devices as well, such as the metafictional appearance in Three Loves, One Death of an “important writer,” who transparently seems to be Evald, and who, we discover, once wrote a story that eerily echoes events in the novel we are reading. A quoted passage from the story reiterates an earlier passage in our present narrative almost verbatim.

The novels in the village trilogy, although not strictly autobiographical, are portrayals of Slovenian rural life (although some of A Swarm of Dust in set in Ljubljana), specifically in Flisar’s native region. A particular focus is put in these novels on the Romany people of Slovenia, especially in A Swarm of Dust, whose protagonist is a young Romany university student. Here again it is difficult to know quite how to respond to Flisar’s portrayal of this character. Are we to regard him as the victim of his troubled childhood, which includes an incestuous relationship with his mother, even when his ultimate downfall is brought about by his own implacable refusal to accede to social and cultural conventions as a way of achieving “success,” a refusal that seems an assertion of personal integrity, not the psychological legacy of abuse? Although most readers are likely aware of the general cultural animus toward the Roma in European history (to some extent in the U.S. as well), the ambiguities in Flisar’s depiction here, and in Three Loves, One Death (in which the gypsy characters are portrayed as much shrewder than the family whose story is the ostensible focus of the novel) make it more difficult for readers outside the specific cultural context the writer has presupposed to feel comfortable with an interpretation.

A Swarm of Dust is certainly a compelling enough chronicle of its protagonist’s life story, however inscrutable at times. It begins rather shockingly with a sexual encounter between the young protagonist, Janek Hudorevec, and his mother, after which he also beats her. (He believes that this is what she wants, we eventually understand, since he had witnessed his father similarly treating her.) Even in a Roma village, Janek’s family is only barely tolerated, so that clearly Janek emerges from his childhood feeling like a misfit, and when the novel takes up in its second half seven years later with the 22 year-old law student Janek, he is involved with a fellow student, Darla, a psychologist in training, who attempts to intervene and assuage his now obviously volatile nature. Her efforts fail (it is unclear how much she is motivated by a professional interest in Janek’s agitated state of mind and how much by an unstated sexual attraction to Janek), and Janek returns to his native village, where his lingering reputation assures that the story will not have a happy ending.

Likewise the other Flisar novels I read feature episodic narratives that capture and maintain the reader’s interest through often extreme or puzzling situations, creating a certain kind of drama even though the episodes are only loosely joined and at times make abrupt chronological leaps, ultimately leaving a lingering impression of irresolution. This strategy seems a consistent and deliberate attempt to provide a comprehensive account of the lives lived by the characters they examine. (A Swarm of Dust and My Father’s Dreams are more centered around an individual protagonist, while Who Can Say Where the Road Goes and Three Loves, One Death incorporate a larger group of characters and their intersecting actions.) Among these novels, perhaps My Father’s Dreams, as a coming-of-age story of sorts (although a perverse one), would be most readily accessible to new readers, but with the other three, most readers should expect a representation of circumstances that are sufficiently different from their own, making an easily “immersive” reading experience problematic.

This might be especially true of A Swarm of Dust and its story of personal and cultural dislocation. Still, more so than, say, Three Loves, One Death, for which the immediate cultural and political context bearing on post-Communist Slovenia is really necessary to fully comprehend the characters and their actions, this novel does offer some more quickly graspable features in its somewhat sensational premise and in the implicit social critique expressed directly in the protagonist’s dialogue with his law school examiner late in the book. But whether Flisar’s performance will strike most readers as familiar enough in its fractured form and Freudian undercurrents to be accepted as recognizable practice in 20^th century fiction, or whether the writer’s strategies seem too familiar, somewhat overwrought in an uncertain context, is a question for each reader to resolve. I finished A Swarm of Dust finally unclear about the scope of the writer’s ambitions: If Flisar is trying to bring Slovenian fiction into the mainstream of modern literature, the result is probably successful but finally unremarkable. If the principal goal is to depict elements of Slovenian society more honestly than was previously possible given the prevailing conditions of Slovenian history and culture during most of the 20^th century, judging success here requires a perspective that literary criticism alone cannot attain.

The Old Empire 

(This review originally appeared in Full Stop.)

According to a reviewer in the Slovenian newspaper Delo, “the most appealing aspect” of Katja Perat’s The Masochist (Mazohistka) “is its infinite power of linguistic invention, one that makes you appreciate the Slovenian language.” To be sure, the translation of the novel by Michael Biggins provides us with a compelling narrative voice (the protagonist’s) that seems authentic enough for the era and social setting (early twentieth century, upper class Vienna) that the novel depicts — compelling at least as such a character might address us in English. Obviously, however, this is quite far from demonstrating the novel’s “linguistic invention,” and of course can tell us nothing about the power of the Slovenian language.

Thus in reading The Masochist in its English translation, we are, at least if we accept that an important — perhaps the most important — feature of The Masochist is its adventurous prose style, missing out on what potentially makes the novel most distinctive. And since prior to the publication of this novel Katja Perat was known primarily as a promising young poet, we have little reason to doubt that her work in the original might indeed prompt readers to “appreciate the Slovenian language” more keenly. Our inability to share this appreciation in a translation is, to be sure, no argument against the efficacy of translation more broadly, but it ought to restrain the critic, at least, from making unsupportable claims about a translated work under review.

What sorts of explications and judgments, then, could credibly be made of The Masochist? While we may not be able to so clearly recognize the poetic effects Perat creates, we can nevertheless examine the virtues of the narrative itself, conveyed by the novel’s protagonist, Nadezhda Moser. The story that she gives of her life is part introspection, part confession, and part careful observation. The narrative relates a story of maturation of sorts. It includes  Nadezhda’s reminiscences of her adopted father, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (we are told that the celebrated author of Venus in Furs found her orphaned in the woods in the Ukraine), whom Nadezhda describes as a self-absorbed and mercurial personality but not really as depraved, which his posthumous reputation might lead us to expect. Ultimately Nadezhda comes to finally escape the formative influence of her father (although these influences are also responsible for those elements of her character that allow her to ultimately claim her independence), as well as her bad judgment in marriage and romance. But the narrative is also something of a picaresque historical procession through the pre-World War I Austro-Hungarian empire, in which Nadezhda encounters many other prominent cultural figures, including Rilke, whom she meets while visiting Duino, and James Joyce, whom she encounters (without knowing who he is) at the novel’s conclusion.

Nadezhda depicts these scenes while also examining and questioning her own actions along the way. Much of the former is done through dialogue, which actually carries most of the novel’s narrative weight and creates interesting character sketches of the historical figures (especially Joyce and Sigmund Freud). The latter at times perhaps slows narrative progress a little too much but does also help elevate Nadezhda to a greater level of complexity as a character, at least as we know her through her retrospective narration, which seems honest and insightful enough, even as she renders scenes that reveal attitudes and behavior that make her seem less self-possessed. Thus the translation does prove effective in establishing a convincing  narrative voice that conveys important elements of character more than reproduces any overt stylistic flourishes that might echo the “linguistic invention” available to Slovene readers. To this extent, readers of The Masochist in translation may be less aware of Perat’s poetic prose, but few are likely to experience this as something that undermines the cogency of Nadezhda Moser’s voice.

Nadezhda, of course, is not just the narrator but the novel’s main character, whose story of a proto-feminist awakening from her loveless marriage and assertion of freedom from the influence of both Sacher-Masoch and her husband provides the novel’s emotional and thematic core. Nadezhda’s story is embedded, however, in a background narrative in which she immediately escapes her father’s environment by marrying the Viennese aristocrat Maximillian Moser, through whom (as well as the reputation of Sacher-Masoch) she becomes acquainted with many celebrated artistic and intellectual figures of Central Europe. She becomes a patient of Freud as her unhappiness in her marriage deepens (eventually leading her to engage in an extended affair, which ends very badly indeed for all parties). As she ponders leaving Maximillian, she goes to stay with a princess in her castle in Duino, where she meets Rilke. What makes these encounters more than just a gimmick to “historicize” Nadezhda’s plight is that many of the “real-life” characters are depicted in ways that don’t merely reinforce stereotyped perceptions of them — Rilke is portrayed as something of a clod, Freud seems surprisingly unstuffy, and James Joyce comes off as friendly but rather forlorn. In this way, these figures become less tied to our preconceptions of them and come to seem more like genuine characters in Nadezhda’s narrative.

Although Nadezhda does not tell her story in straight chronological order, proceeding more associatively both backward and forward, at times with fairly abrupt transitions, the novel still seems very much episodic. The story could be regarded as a kind of delayed coming-of-age narrative whereby Nadezhda matures into not only a more expansive world beyond the insular world in which she has previously moved (mainly through her visits to the more heterogeneous city of Trieste), but also into a firmer commitment to her own integrity and self-reliance as a woman, in a social sphere still regulated by and for the prerogatives of men. But the novel isn’t organized by the dramatic conventions of this sort of narrative. Instead, it has a looser structure, the episodes linked through something like a discursive train of thought rather than a plot per se. But this hybrid structure works effectively to make The Masochist both less formulaic than it might otherwise be and more than the expedient instrument for clever impersonations of cultural luminaries from the past, perhaps conveying an impression of immediacy allowing Nadezhda to act as a witness to a social system in eclipse.

That Nadezhda Moser circulates among such figures also helps make her growth into greater self-confidence and assertion of autonomy all the more impressive, since to assert oneself in such a milieu at all would be intimidating, but the effort to do so as a woman is surely even more fraught. In ultimately deciding she will no longer “live a lie” by pretending to be content with her role as Maximillian’s wife, Nadezhda also finally does escape the legacy of Leopold Sacher-Masoch, at least in relation to his most notorious activity. Nadezhda has herself engaged in a form of masochism, silently experiencing humiliation by her own passivity, her reluctance to challenge the expectations of the part she has been asked to play. She has received little pleasure from performing the role, however, as even her affair was really itself just one of the accepted demands of that role as carried out in the culture she inhabits — and which, of course, shortly will be brought to its end.

The Masochist seems a recognizably “European” novel in its subject and social satire, although it also reminds us of the Slavic presence in the old empire: Nadezhda takes lessons in Cyrillic from her Ruthenian housemaid, who also sings a song from the “homeland” that brings Nadezhda to tears. The city of Trieste, where we find her at the novel’s conclusion, was known for its mixed population of Austrians, Italians, and Slovenes (and more). If Trieste is as close to current-day Slovenia as the novel gets, The Masochist nonetheless summons a persuasive recreation (which Biggins’s translation does indeed admirably evoke) of a foundational period in the region’s history, even if the foundations are in the process of crumbling.

Out of Context 

(This review originally appeared in The Quarterly Conversation.)

American readers should certainly welcome Dalkey Archive’s publication of Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again, by the Lithuanian writer Giedra Radvilaviciute, but many of those readers surely will not entirely know how to take it. This uncertainty originates not from inherent difficulties in Radvilaviciute’s fiction (which in fact is often quite entertaining) but from a lack of context, the absence of which makes it difficult to assess the writer’s work with enough confidence we understand not only her artistic purposes and her success in achieving them, but also how her success or failure might be connected to national or cultural circumstances.

No doubt, most readers curious enough about current writing to pick up a book from Lithuania do so from a state of relative ignorance about that country. Is it not, after all, a primary ambition of translation to introduce uninitiated readers to worthy writers from less familiar countries and cultures? Unfortunately, economic circumstances (translated books have a hard time getting readers) have only reinforced a too-facile assumption that a translated work is, or should be, immediately and fully accessible on its own terms, without the need for the kind of context that might usefully bring us closer to the linguistic, literary, and cultural realities within which the work was written and originally received. Few translated works are accompanied by more than perfunctory information about the writer’s situation and important concerns (thematic or aesthetic), much less a formal introduction or annotations to the book that might remove obstacles to a satisfying reading experience.

Most publishers, especially already translation-friendly publishers such as Dalkey Archive, should of course be praised for bringing translated work to our attention at all, but the context-free publication that is more or less the norm for commercially translated books presumably hopes to avoid suggesting that books already at times perceived as too dauntingly different to be comfortable reading do indeed require the extra effort to assimilate this “outside” information. Better to simply offer the translated text without further marking it as “foreign” to the reader’s usual reading habits by emphasizing an apparent need for supplemental context. This reluctance to alienate potential readers may initially be a commercial decision, but it also does coincide with an otherwise perfectly respectable position that what is most important in our response to any literary work is the integrity of the reading experience itself. I would maintain, however, that with a book like Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again that integrity is actually threatened by the withdrawal of context and a lack of attention to issues outside the text, isolating it from the biographical, historical, and cultural factors influencing its creation (including its publication in the United States), rather than by taking context into account as an aid to understanding the work.

The book appears to be a “best of,” selected from Radvilaviciute’s two books published in Lithuania. This is something we must infer, however, since the only indication of their provenance (on the back cover and in the promotional copy) is that the book contains ten of the author’s “best stories.” Even if we accept that this judgment is correct (and ultimately we have no other choice), uncertainty about how we are to regard the book remains. Is it a book encapsulating the writer’s most characteristic work, or is it essentially just an artifact of translation, giving English-language readers some access to her work, to be read for the quality of individual “stories”? That Radvilaciute appears not to be a particularly prolific writer perhaps makes this problem less acute, although the very question of her seemingly spare productivity also seems one that might helpfully be addressed through some sort of critical commentary.

What is most significant in the publisher’s description of Radvilaviciute’s writing is that it identifies the contents of this book as “stories.” Although these “stories” are further characterized as “combining fiction, memoir, and essay,” this attempted clarification is more confusing that illuminating—to what extent can fiction, memoir, and essay really be “combined”?—and finally doesn’t adequately prepare the reader for the true indeterminacy of genre these stories achieve. Clearly enough the intention is to categorize Radvilaviciute’s work as fiction, and while there are qualities in these pieces that would justify considering them as fiction, this representation of them to American readers is at the least misleading about the way they are received in Lithuania, where Radvilaviciute is more likely to be considered an essayist and where the essay itself has become an increasingly prominent literary form. Such at least is the conclusion I reached about Radvilaviciute’s status in her native country after tracking down available facts about her, but unless readers are willing to similarly search for additional information about the author and the Lithuanian literary scene, they will lack what is surely relevant context about her ambitions as revealed in this book.

The blurring of the lines between “fiction, memoir, and essay” is certainly the most provocative feature of Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again, and is ultimately the reason why it is still very much a book worth reading. The pieces, each narrated by the author, or her fictional stand-in, are mostly plotless reminiscences of the author’s childhood and equally discursive meditations on her present circumstances. As a way of reinforcing the depiction of the latter, as well as strengthening the impression that what we are reading are nonfiction essays, there are frequent references to the narrator’s life as a writer and editor. One of the pieces, “A Long Walk on as Short Pier,” begins with the narrator receiving a call from a publisher inquiring about the novel he believes her to be writing. Although she is not (“I told him he’d caught me during a reading phase”), the publisher’s spiel prompts the narrator’s subsequent ruminations on writing this hypothetical novel, going so far as to compose an ostensible opening paragraph, but otherwise it is clearly suggested that these ruminations will have to substitute for any actual novel the narrator might write.

If we were to regard this work as a short story, we would likely consider it a species of metafiction, although of a somewhat diffuse and loosely organized sort. In this form it would be an interesting enough story (its interest extending beyond its metafictional qualities), but not otherwise remarkable. If, on the other hand, we were to identify it as an essay, it probably seems an effective personal narrative incorporating the author’s anxiety about the status of her writing career, but again not especially groundbreaking in its exploitation of the form. The piece’s singular interest comes from the way in which the distinction between fiction and essay remains indefinite, layered together so that we might even read it first as one and then as the other, superimposed on each other rather than “combined.” Rather than obscure the difference between fiction and nonfiction, such a strategy makes each mode equally salient in the reading experience. This may be the most radical implication of Radvilaviciute’s achievement, making us question whether the customary distinctions of mode and form serve any useful purpose.

Because all of the story-essays offer first-person accounts of the same narrator’s life, the book ultimately has more of the effect of a novel than a collection of either stories or essays. Even though the individual pieces move freely from past to present and setting to setting (one of them being the United States in a few of the pieces, including the first one), they cumulatively present an integrated account of the narrator and her current situation, her memories, and her interactions, some of them with people (such as her daughter, as well as her best friend) who make multiple appearances as “characters” in her story. Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again is thus ultimately an accessible book, both in its parts and as a whole. Finally the provocative tension between taking the pieces in the book as fiction or as essays only adds interest, as inevitably we wonder about the extent to which the book accurately reflects not just the author/narrator’s personal situation but also the cultural and historical conditions in present-day Lithuania, and whether such accuracy matters.

At this point, it might be objected that a critical introduction to this book would be superfluous. If literal fidelity to circumstances of the kind we find in realistic fiction is something Radvilaviciute’s work convinces us is not required, wouldn’t social-cultural-historical “background” only suggest we should judge her book according to its fidelity to existing conditions, the way things “really are” in Lithuania? Still, there are characteristics of the way things are whose full significance probably can’t really be assumed by American readers without some awareness of Lithuania’s status as an only recently liberated “republic” of the U.S.S.R. (The very name already no doubt seems like ancient history to some readers.) The lingering memory and still tangible effects of this reality noticeably inform many of the pieces, such as “My American Biography,” which draws substantially on the narrators memories of events surrounding the Soviet shootdown of the American U-2 spy plane in 1960, as well as the later Soviet invasion of Lithuania. “Essential Changes” is a direct and extended reflection on the changes that have occurred during the narrator’s life, and even the title story, which is accessible enough as a general meditation on “those whom I would like to meet again,” would probably be even more effective if the cultural circumstances attached to the subjects of the narrator’s reminiscences were clearer.

Other of the pieces certainly work perfectly well on their own, their social and cultural circumstances universally recognizable. “Autumnal People,” in its contrasts between people of an “autumnal” and a “sporting” disposition, probably needs no local context. The “native land” contrasted in “The Native Land and Other Connections” with the narrator’s experiences in Chicago upon her return to Lithuania could certainly be anyone’s native country observed in the light of an extended period away. “Required Texts,” another metafictional reflection on the narrator’s circumstances as a writer, could be written by any writer suffering anxiety over “that coveted, extremely well-selling novel” that hasn’t been written. Few if any of the pieces are so tied to specific context that the reader can make nothing of them, but, still, the cultural and historical realities of Lithuania do furnish the pieces with often important concrete details, and it seems only helpful for readers to be reminded of the recent history of Lithuania and the aftermath of independence, to prepare them for the role these realities play in the book they’re reading.

I, for one, found myself as well somewhat taken aback by the narrator’s frequent observations regarding the influence of American literature and culture. Perhaps this derives from the narrator/author’s time spent living in the United States, but it also indicates a larger American influence in contemporary Lithuania, since we must presume that Radvilaviciute’s Lithuanian readers recognize the books, movies, and music to which the narrator so freely refers. While some readers will find these references reassuring in their familiarity, others could consider them equally peculiar. Is American culture indeed so pervasive that it reaches a country that only twenty years ago officially had little access to it? Is that very pervasiveness actually a kind of reaction against those previous restrictions, as well as the remaining Russian cultural legacy? I myself don’t really know the answers to these questions, but I enjoyed Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again so much that, in adding to my ability to understand the writer’s tacit assumptions and the specific milieu in which they arise, some provisional answers to them accompanying the publication of the book would only make it that much more readily enjoyable.

Apocalypse Now 

(This essay originally appeared in Splice.)

In the most immediately apparent qualities shared by his novels, László Krasznahorkai could legitimately be labeled a “difficult” writer. The novels forswear conventional sentence structures and paragraphs in favour of a kind of continuous discourse that makes no distinctions between exposition and dialogue, description and interior monologue (somewhat reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard, but less rhetorical and more expository). They are narratively fragmented, ultimately telling a story of sorts insofar as they do depict a progression in time, and they shift freely from character to character and scene to scene. Although they are in some ways intensely realistic, in the midst of their otherwise quotidian settings absurd and uncanny events frequently erupt — events which essentially remain inscrutable, resisting even allegorical interpretation. Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (trans. Ottilie Mulzet), furthermore, is almost six hundred pages long, so that in this most recently translated novel — ostensibly about the ordinary people of a remote Hungarian village, and their responses to the arrival of the disgraced title character — Krasznahorkai’s destabilising strategies if anything seem even more conspicuous.

The anticipated critical riposte to such a characterisation of Krasznahorkai’s work would likely be that, its apparent difficulties aside, his fiction nevertheless rewards the reader’s attention, offering greater appreciation of the dynamism of language, a deeper immersion in characters’ states of mind, less reliance on superficial plot devices and conventions. But while these postulates would to a degree be true, the appearance of Baron Wenckheim as the self-proclaimed capstone to Krasznahorkai’s career (he has said that Wenckheim is his final novel, and that it belongs with Satantango [1985], The Melancholy of Resistance [1989], and War & War [1999] as his signature work) surely raises appropriate questions about the extent to which the difficulties in his fiction are indeed aesthetically redeemed after all. If reading Krasznahorkai’s fiction can be an arduous task, is it merely the same sort of challenge posed by any writer worth taking seriously?

Perhaps the most salient question, however, is whether the difficulties of this writer’s novels are in fact so severe. To open up one of the books and encounter its dense blocks of unbroken prose seems a daunting enough prospect, although Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming offers more assistance through paragraph breaks (which usually herald a change in point of view) than, say, Satantango, which has no paragraph breaks at all. But this tactic is certainly not so little known as to seem uniquely excessive, with its analogues in Bernhard, Mathias Énard, and, going even farther back, García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975). Sentences in Baron Wenckheim can indeed seem very long, and each section in the book is punctuated as one continuous sentence, but considered closely, these constructions are hardly bewildering:

I don’t even know how I should address you, young lady, said the Mayor, looking around the office to see where he could sit down, in a word, my dear… what was that again?… yes, of course, my dear Dora, but you’ve now reached a day of the utmost importance, of course you must have a thousand things to take care of, but from this point on you must put all this aside, do you understand, and forget about these other tasks, you must simply forget about them — he finally sat down nervously in a yellow, plastic, modern-looking armchair, while adjusting his bowtie, and he continued: whatever work this office has been involved with up ’til this moment, all other business must be halted immediately…

While a passage such as this blends dialogue and exposition without explicitly differentiating between the two, it doesn’t seem especially burdensome for readers to recognise such an implicit distinction, nevertheless. Although Krasznahorkai’s prose is stingy with periods, usually, as in this case, other punctuation and verbal signals (“said the Mayor”), make navigating even the longest sentences less troublesome than first impressions might suggest. (The resulting headlong cadence of the prose may indeed, in fact, create a more ‘immersive’ effect for co-operative readers.) It is possible that this device of eliminating the established markers of ‘prose’ in favour of an uninterrupted flow of ‘writing’ will ultimately come to seem a familiar ploy, less audacious the more it is used, but in Krasznahorkai’s fiction (especially by the time we get to Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming as the final volume of the quartet), it just does not require a radically new relationship between reader and text. His style does not disrupt our understanding of the discursive ‘rules’ in fiction, even if he does wield them in an uncustomary way.

Formally, the novels also do not really exceed the kinds of departures from convention we might attribute to high modernism. The fragmentation of Baron Wenckheim is surely not an unfamiliar practice among modern writers seeking an alternative to strictly linear storytelling, nor is the systematic rotation of multiple points of view. Baron Wenckheim’s large cast of characters lends itself well to this approach. Much of the novel is taken up with the stories of perhaps six to eight major characters (Baron Wenckheim himself being one, but only one), although other more marginal figures make appearances as well, providing a variations in circumstance and perspective that substitute for the artificial expedient of plot. Yet such a strategy is certainly not so unusual among modernist-inspired writers (a prominent example of which I take Krasznahorkai to be). Again, in Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, this if anything produces an engagement with the aggregate story, to which all the various episodes cumulatively contribute, which works to sustain interest in that story almost as transparently as conventional narrative. There is little in this novel that could be called metafictional trickery, and none of Krasznahorkai’s novels (at least those that have been translated) could really be accurately described as postmodern.

The occasional episodes of fantasy or surrealism likewise should not seem to most readers puzzling strictly as literary devices, although their disruptive outbreak in circumstances that otherwise seem static — a world stuck in its own dreary, mundane stasis — does help provide the stories with an additional source of narrative complication. In the case of Baron Wenckheim, they introduce something like a mystery, as we try to determine the identity of the enigmatic figure who several times is seen traveling through town with his motorcade (unseen, however, by the townspeople, who appear to be induced into a kind of trance upon his arrival). Perhaps he is the herald of the town’s destruction at the novel’s conclusion, an event described in quite harrowing detail and the eruption of which is arguably the most perplexing element introduced in the novel, one that might genuinely cause confusion about its intended effect. The novel essentially casts an anathema on the very fictional world it has painstakingly built up for six hundred pages. This does not seem to be a sly metafictional gesture pointing up the unavoidable artifice of fiction-making, so the reader is left to wonder how exactly to take this colossal climactic firestorm.

If nothing else, these plot machinations work uneasily with the novel’s predominant emphasis on character creation through interiority, through what James Wood has lately popularised as “free indirect discourse.” (Not so surprisingly, Wood was one of the first English-language critics to hail Krasznahorkai upon the publication of the initial translations of Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance.) The two primary characters, the Professor and the Baron, are first presented to us, for instance, in moments of prolonged reflection during which we learn not so much about what is happening but their state of mind as things are about to happen. The Professor is introduced inside the makeshift cabin to which he has essentially exiled himself, only to suddenly find his solitude destroyed by local media and a woman who appears to be his daughter:

the spoiled, misbegotten child, whose conception, coming into and then remaining in this world, in addition to being a cheap cruel trick, he could only attribute to his own irresponsibility, carelessness, unforgivable naivete, endless egoism, and boundless vanity, namely his own innate boorishness, the consequence of which he had never seen either in a photograph or with his own eyes…

The Professor is a former scientist who is given to philosophical rumination — including a quite extensive meditation on death and the existence of God as he sits in a train station later in the novel. The Baron, meanwhile, in deciding to return to the city of his birth after living a mostly profligate life in Buenos Aires, provides the novel with its main premise but is revealed to have a much less complicated inner life (his relatives are reputed to consider him simple-minded) — although by the novel’s conclusion the Baron shows himself capable of meaningful reflection on the course his life has taken, culminating in an act that unwittingly may be the origin of his town’s ultimate destruction. Most of the other characters in the novel are also presented through the third-person indirect method: not quite stream of consciousness, but from a perspective close to the character’s perception of the current moment, expressed through the character’s habitual thought patterns.

Thus the characters do vary in their degree of sophistication and self-awareness, but Krasznahorkai’s probes of consciousness maintain the illusion of impartiality, offering us simply the contents of that consciousness without appearing to colour the characters with moral appraisal. This technique inevitably has the effect, however, of making our responses to the characters more ambivalent, as access to their psychological states tempers our judgment — just as does a first-person narrator, albeit even more thoroughly. The “Leader”, a commander of a local fascist motorcycle gang who at first expresses an appreciation for the Professor’s actions (he fires a gun at the crowd gathered outside his shack) but later tries to kill him (after the Professor kills a gang member in what he believes to be self-defence), is surely an unsavoury character, but even he can seem sincere in his malice, and apparently capable of genuine fellow-feeling for his fallen comrade. Certainly the cumulative portrait of life in provincial Hungary is not finally a flattering one: human weakness is allowed to flourish freely, and there are no signs that the society bequeathed to the West by Communism managed to alter human nature.

But, of course, to say that the characters depicted in Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming are imperfect human beings does not condemn them as more worthy of contempt than characters originating in any other parts of the world might be. Krasznahorkai’s use of the free indirect method allows him to sustain a long, multi-stranded novel that doesn’t depend on a singly unifying narrative for its interest, but the cataclysmic conclusion to its intersecting stories does seem both arbitrary and pitiless. Even if we take the writer’s ultimate concerns to be more metaphysical than local, with Baron Wenckheim as a kind of sacrificial, holy fool character, that the reckoning induced is annihilation still seems out of proportion. If Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming is indeed Krasznahorkai’s final novel, perhaps its climactic conflagration is a way for him to bring his oeuvre to an appropriately… fiery conclusion. If this seems more self-mocking than his fiction has previously shown itself to be (it doesn’t lack humour, but certainly takes its acts of representation seriously enough), then the gesture appears to invoke a pronouncement that would appropriately be called nihilistic.

The quartet of novels that now collectively comprise what Krasznahorkai designates as “my one book” certainly do not project a sunny view either of contemporary Hungary or of humankind in general. Baron Wenckheim’s homecoming to a Hungary that has exchanged Communist rule for Viktor Orbán hardly reveals the country to have made ‘progress’ (it largely still resembles the country depicted in Satantango), but it doesn’t seem that Krasznahorkai’s overriding artistic purpose is to specifically provide social or cultural critique — the characters in all of these novels exhibit their fair share of ignorance and venality (although also just fear and confusion), yet surely no more so than the common run of humanity. Krasznahorkai is indeed interested in the more universal corruptions of human behaviour, and Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming seems to declare a sentence of metaphysical doom on human existence.

If this is the final message of Krasznahorkai’s “one” novel, not only is it a surprisingly cynical closing move, it also amounts to a tacit confession that this one novel (Krasznahorkai’s work as a whole) is itself insufficient in its purely aesthetic achievement to serve as a compensatory act of creation that is cogent enough to provide at least a momentary stay against the futility of human effort (the ultimate achievement of all art). It’s as if Krasznahorkai renounces the possibility that we might take solace from his novel — not as the source of ‘saying something’ about life, but of an achieved aesthetic order that itself stands in contrast to the meaninglessness the writer so relentlessly evokes.

Waiting for the Final Word 

(This review originally appeared in The Quarterly Conversation.)

Because of the praiseworthy efforts of Archipelago Books, with the publication of In Red, we now have available translations of all four novels Polish writer Magdalena Tulli has written to date. Considering the general lack of attention given to translations by major American publishers, such a happy circumstance provides an opportunity to assess the work of this writer to an extent unfortunately not possible for too many translated writers, who are generally represented in English by at best an incomplete selection that may or may not include their most important work, or through which it is difficult to make a fully informed judgment of the important work because of the absence of needed context. Many writers are arguably subject to a distorted perspective due to the vagaries of translation, resulting no doubt in both the over- and the under-estimation of individual books in what is essentially a state of enforced ignorance for critics and reviewers.

Thus if English language readers had only Tulli’s first novel, Dreams and Stones, we might conclude her work is some hybrid of fiction and philosophical reflection, this novel a kind of poetic meditation in prose on the origins and development of a city. The city itself is really the novel’s only character, its various stages of growth the only plot. If we were further able to read Moving Targets, we might assume Tulli is a radical metafictionist, as it takes the motif of creation and makes it into a tale of specifically literary creation, following the efforts of an ineffectual narrator to invoke his characters and get his story started. This novel would seem to mark Tulli as a “postmodern” writer focused on the implications of storytelling itself. Adding to the mix Flaw (chronologically her most recent book), however, it would seem that Tulli’s novels can also be “about” something other than themselves. Flaw does not abandon the self-reflexive depiction of the dynamics of storytelling and the process of creation; rather it incorporates this concern in a portrayal of a fully made city with characters that do come to life, albeit more as a collective than as individual figures, and a story whose drama goes beyond (or is in addition to) the drama of narrative construction.

In Red is Tulli’s most conventional novel—which is not to say it could finally be described as a conventional work of fiction. Still, to the extent it does offer individuated characters, some degree of plot “movement,” and a strongly delineated setting, readers hesitant to commit to one of the novels that seems formidably experimental might find In Red a more comfortable introduction to Tulli’s fiction. But while the novel does provide somewhat more of the familiar elements of conventional fiction, it nevertheless doesn’t allow the reader to retreat altogether to conventional reading pleasures. If there are identifiable characters who are “developed” over the course of the narrative, there is no one character whom we are invited to regard as a protagonist. Indeed, while a succession of characters are introduced, most of them led to the same fate—early death— none of them are characters with whom we are likely to “identify.” Most of the focus is on figures of prominence and authority, primarily businessmen, and these characters in particular tend to blend together, as if each such character is another version of the previous. The procession of new characters in turn produces the novel’s narrative structure: a chronicle of notable personages and events in Stichings, a (fictional) town in a (fictional) province of northern Poland.

Stichings itself is really the main character in In Red, tracking what happens there through roughly the first half of the 20th century its primary concern. In this way it is perhaps not a radical departure from Dreams and Stones, adding people and their interactions to the portrayal of a city, superimposing their “story” on the story of the city’s growth. Although Stichings regresses as a much as or more than it progresses (at the end of the novel it is consumed by fire), it could be said to serve the same function in this novel, in a less overt, more outwardly disguised way, as the city does in Tulli’s first novel: as the vehicle for an allegorical representation of the act of literary creation. In Red’s enactment of this allegory calls less attention to itself and for the most part remains implicit, but the framing of the novel clearly enough emphasizes the symmetries of commencing and concluding the act of storytelling: “Whoever has been everywhere and seen everything,” the novel begins

last of all should pay a visit to Stichings. Simply take a seat in a sleigh and, before being overcome by sleep, speed across a plain that’s as empty as a blank sheet of paper, boundless as life itself. Sooner or later this someone—perhaps it is a traveling salesman with a valise full of samples—will see great mounds of snow stretching along streets to the four corners of the earth, toward empty, icy expanses.

The novel’s closing lines if anything make the parallel between the story of Stichings and the invocation of fictional worlds through writing even more apparent:

Traveling salesman in search of happiness or deliverance: if you wish to leave Stichings, do not hesitate for a moment: you have to do it between the capital letter and the period, without any broken-off thought, without waiting for the final word.

That the novel focuses on the act of creating a fictional “place” such as Stichings does not mean it fails to maintain the illusion that Stichings is a “real” place. Polish readers would no doubt finds its details and its portrait of the life of the city entirely genuine; for the rest of us, the illusion of reality certainly seems complete. The characters, however much they are deliberately made to echo and repeat, are still credible, recognizable human beings. The stories of success, failure, and misadventure in which they are involved are likewise recognizable and recognizably human. The reader could take the overtures to the “traveling salesman” as invitations to enter into the fictional portrayal of Stichings and its inhabitants, without necessarily reflecting on the process of literary composition or interpreting the mechanisms involved. Readers could certainly enjoy In Red as a lively narrative of the notable events in an out-of-the-way corner of Europe, although not so out-of-the-way that we can’t see ourselves reflected in the people living there.

However, while In Red could be read and appreciated for its more conventional, if at times eccentric, treatment of plot, character, and setting, such an appreciation would remain incomplete without the opportunity to situate this novel in the context of Tulli’s still evolving body of work. The access that Archipelago now gives us to this work in full allows us to see that Tulli is a writer who begins in an awareness of the artificiality of literary creation and the independent logic expressed by stories, but who has also endeavored to embody these concerns in narratives that appeal to familiar expectations of literary narrative. Even if we still cannot say that through these translations we can apprehend Tulli’s most immediate engagement of these concerns with the resources of the Polish language, nor can we experience the historical and cultural resonances of the depiction of this period in Polish history as readily as Polish readers, we can, thanks to the work of both the publisher and translator Bill Johnston, make a more concerted effort to estimate the achievement of this writer than we can with most writers we can know only through translation. My own tentative judgment is that her achievement is considerable, perhaps even singular, in the way it enlists “postmodern” strategies to further traditional goals of storytelling.

Grab-Bag 

In one way or another, the fiction of Orhan Pamuk is usually referred to as “postmodern.” A 2006 New York Times profile of Pamuk, for example describes his novels as including “a grab-bag of postmodern literary devices,” and its author, former Book Review editor Charles McGrath, further identifies the ways in which books like The New Life and The Black Book “empty the whole trunk” of such devices: “narratives within narratives, texts that come alive, labyrinths of signs and symbols . . . doubleness and identity swapping.”

That Pamuk is a writer from a country we hardly think has much relation to “Western literature,” much less to postmodernism, surely does make his work into something of a curiosity, perhaps drawing more attention than might the fiction of Western writers employing the same kinds of “devices” McGrath lists. It might even have contributed to Pamuk’s receiving the Nobel Prize for literature at such a relatively early stage of his career. Combining the postmodern methods of Western novelists with the depiction of a largely non-Western (and often explicitly pre-modern) culture has no doubt brought Pamuk readers he might not otherwise have found simply by establishing himself as a “Turkish novelist” taking a more conventional approach to the writing of fiction.

On the other hand, Pamuk has generally been accorded more critical approbation among “mainstream” reviewers and critics than many of the postmodern writers from whose trunk he is presumably borrowing his panoply of devices. In his very reference to the “grab bag” of postmodern tricks, McGrath himself echoes the implicitly condescending tone with which the American postmodernists are frequently enough discussed in the literary press. (And postmodernism is: a. in its origins primarily an American phenomenon, and b. primarily a development in postwar American fiction before it became an all-purpose term of cultural analysis.) American postmodernists such as John Barth and Robert Coover have never really been accepted as the pathbreaking writers they in fact are; their use of such strategies as “narratives within narratives” and “labyrinths of signs and symbols” is often dismissed as self-indulgence, a kind of literary trifling unworthy of “serious” authors.

I have long suspected that this mainstream antipathy to postmodern fiction—more specifically to any work that can be identified as “metafiction”—comes from an implicit devaluation of comedy in fiction, as, indeed, postmodern fiction is largely comic fiction, even if so many reviewers cannot be presumed to get the joke. It is, I believe, a tacit assumption of middle-brow criticism—and book reviewing, at least in the United States, is mostly a middlebrow endeavor—that comedy is to be taken less seriously as a literary mode, as if the “comic” and the “serious” are per se natural opposites; although ultimately the opposition is not so much between comedy and drama as it is between a comic representation of the world, which requires a stripping-away of conventional appearances, the disruption of our pre-established expectations, and a representation of the world than conforms to one or another accepted version of realism. Finally, only realism (not to be confused with “story,” as deviations from its narrative norms can be tolerated if they eventually bring us back to a “deeper” reality all the more enhanced for the effort) is allowed to redeem fiction from its infuriating refusal to otherwise “say something,” directly and unequivocally. Realism at least allows the critic to seize on what a novel reveals about The Way Things Are.

Postmodern comedy only makes this temptation to dismiss the comic as intellectually frivolous even more acute, since the comic perspective afforded by postmodern fiction is especially . . . comic. That is, the humor evoked in novels like Catch-22 or Gravity’s Rainbow or Mulligan Stew is deliberately very broad, the comic representation so thoroughgoing in its effect that it can’t really be translated into the language of traditional critical discourse. The one recognizable mode of comedy that historically has been accepted as a worthy vehicle of “meaning,” satire, doesn’t very accurately encompass this sort of comedy. Satire uses comedy to “comment” on the behavior it examines and the issues it raises, to indeed “say something” unequivocally if indirectly. Satire is “corrective” in that it holds the depicted actions up to ridicule, in effect calling out for the actions to be changed. But this is not the case with the postmodern comedy to be found in the kinds of novels I’ve mentioned. The laughter in satirical comedy is tinged with moral judgment, but postmodern comedy subjects all “serious” impulses—including the impulse to make moral judgments—to the withering laughter of a radical comedy that is comic all the way down.

In his book Fables of Subversion, Steven Weisenburger tries to make a case for postmodern comedy—among the writers he discusses are Heller, Pynchon, Coover, John Hawkes and William Gaddis—as a form of “degenerative satire,” which goes beyond the kind of corrective laughter typical of traditional literary satire to “subvert hierarchies of values and to reflect suspiciously on all ways of making meaning, including its own.” This is close to what I have in mind in calling postmodern comedy “radical,” but Weisenburger insists on retaining the word “satire” in his survey of postmodern comic fiction, at one point defining “degenerative satire” as “realist narration backlit by fantastic outrage.” To me, outrage is outrage, whether fantastic or realist in its expression, and thus “degenerative satire” seems just another attempt to rescue postmodern comedy from the default assumption that is “merely comic.” “Outrage” again only reduces the use of comedy to a gesture on behalf of this or that point of view, an implicit endorsement of some alternative “value” (if not existing “hierarchies”).

Pamuk’s novels could not easily be described as satirical, degenerative or otherwise, but they are largely allegorical, and perhaps it is the commonality of purpose shared by these modes—to signal “meaning” or “message” in a discernible if roundabout way—that accounts for Pamuk’s more ready acceptance by mainstream criticism. If Pamuk’s books are often intricately designed, self-aware constructions (“clever” is a word often used to damn postmodernists with faint praise), they are so because they seem overtly designed to “signify” in a manner more associated with “fabulation” than metafiction (to use the twinned terms in the title of Robert Scholes’s influential book examining both of these modes of postwar fiction). In this way, Pamuk’s fiction is closer to that of Kafka and Borges than to Barth or Coover, although even in Kafka and Borges there is an element of humor (in the former, deeply dark) in the way they each strain the fable form almost to the breaking point, outrageously testing the form’s ability to be straightforwardly meaningful, offering in The Castle or “The Hunger Artist,” “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” or “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (in my opinion one of the most hilarious stories ever written) meaning of an especially profound sort—or so the reader is tempted to assume—and then withdrawing it in an allegorical sleight-of-hand that leaves the very notion of meaning-making itself in a shambles.

Pamuk, it seems to me, borrows the “grab-bag of postmodern literary devices,” the techniques and strategies associated with Western experimental fiction, but never really possesses them as anything more than available avant-garde flourishes given an extra exotic twist by their use in novels about Muslim culture. Postmodern fiction is self-reflexive because it takes as its most immediate subject the very medium of fiction itself, which it subjects to comic self-scrutiny. That fiction is able to re-create reality and convey meaning of a coherent and stable sort is the first assumption such fiction questions. Pamuk wants to use postmodern strategies precisely in order to create meaning, in effect to graft them on to his representations of Turkey’s past and present as a way of strengthening these representations, or at least of bringing attention to them beyond the critical consideration conventional realism would be capable of attracting.

In his review of The Black Book, Scott McLemee observes that an important difference between the “metafictional hijinks” of Pamuk and Borges is that the latter “knows when to quit.” He asserts further that “what makes The Black Book more than a set of variations of an intertextual theme—with bits of Kafka, Joyce, Proust, Mann, and Calvino joining the collage—is precisely its setting in Istanbul. The detective story is simply an excuse for [the protagonist] to wander around Istanbul, and for Pamuk to explore the byways of huzun [loosely, 'melancholy'].” McLemee’s comments on the relative merits of The Black Book in several ways capture my own reaction to both this very lengthy novel and the much briefer The White Castle. Although the metafictional devices in The Black Book—which mostly reinforce the theme of doubleness, of the merging of identity—are belabored at greater length and do induce a state of prolonged tedium in their humorlessness, they aren’t much more interesting in The White Castle, which focuses on doubling and identity shifts even more intensely. In neither book would I necessarily call these devices “hijinks,” since they are not flaunted in a spirit of exuberance or creative mischief but seem labored and perfunctory; in both of them the metafictional elements serve little purpose aside from heightening the sense of portentousness to a level that can’t finally be sustained.

If the pseudo-detective narrative in The Black Book “is simply an excuse,” despite its postmodern flourishes, for providing a portrait of modern-day Istanbul, The White Castle similarly entices the reader with a tale, in this case a kind of adventure/captivity story, that promises revelation of narrative mystery (are the twin protagonists truly doubles?, is one the figment of the other’s imagination?) but mostly offers “information” about Ottoman history, customs, and culture. Its relative brevity and more concise storytelling make it a much brisker read than The Black Book, but ultimately it is scarcely more satisfying as a work of postmodernism freshly reconceived; neither book could be called innovative or experimental, as neither goes beyond recirculating an already existing collection of “devices.” “Grab bag” is actually not an unfair description of the strategies employed in these books.

My Name is Red is probably the most genuinely “postmodern” of Pamuk’s novels, even if it is most immediately an exploration of Ottoman/Islamic history. With its cast of multiple narrators (including the color red and various dead people) and its thematic focus on art and the nature of artistic creation, it is also the most lively of Pamuk’s books, its kaleidoscopic narration, relatively short chapters, and mystery plot (who killed the master illuminator Elegant Effendi?) at its center keeping the novel moving at an engaging pace. What emerges is less an historical recreation of the Ottoman Empire than a convincing aesthetic creation that allows both author and reader to meditate on the human need to create art in the first place, even in circumstances that put restrictions on the artist’s ability to give full expression to that need and even in the midst of those mundane struggles and squabbles that afflict everyone, including the artist, in our efforts simply to find some sort of happiness in a world that constantly threatens to undermine it.

Certainly those of us who know little to nothing about Ottoman or Islamic art are able to discover a great deal about it from reading My Name is Red. The encroachment of “Western” notions of perspective and individual portraiture on tradition-bound practice of Islamic manuscript illumination is a fascinating subject, and Pamuk handles it very adroitly, allowing us to understand both the strengths of traditional Islamic art and the limitations that make even some of the master practitioners of Istanbul begin to look at Western (“Frankish”) art with some envy. In the process, of course, Pamuk is also inviting us to ponder some of the important, perhaps irreconcilable, conflicts between the civilizations of the West and Islam as a whole. To the extent that My Name is Red might be regarded as Pamuk’s attempt to achieve some modest conciliation of its own, through the application of the modern literary techniques of the west to Islamic history and culture, it is finally relatively satisfying and successful.

As if following a deliberate strategy of alternating novels set in the Turkish past with those set in present-day Turkey, Snow, Pamuk’s most recent novel, switches to a modern setting, its plot chronicling the visit of an exiled Turkish writer to an isolated, turmoil-afflicted city in far eastern Turkey. The authority of the Turkish government seems truly endangered (although its willingness to engage in casual torture has not been affected), and during a massive snowstorm that closes all roads leading in and out of the city of Kars, a coup of sorts (more like a counter-revolution) is staged by a few partisans of the State. Most of the novel takes place over the few days in which this coup takes place, and along the way the poet-protagonist both falls in love and is seized by the inspiration to write nineteen new poems.

Readers unaware of the secular/religious divide in modern Turkey may learn from Snow something about its saliency in Turkish culture and politics, may even learn more about the way in which radical Islam comes to have an attraction for the disgruntled in even such an avowedly secular country as Turkey. But such lessons in history and Muslim politics don’t necessarily make reading this novel an engrossing aesthetic experience. The novel’s prose and narrative energy never dispel the gloom that envelops the characters and their circumstances, and the novel’s central paradox—that the poet Ka finds the happiness he’s always looked for in the midst of such squalor and unrest—seems like an interesting idea, but, for this reader at least, isn’t executed with much vigor. Ka remains a cipher to me, his sense of himself as both a poet and a Turk rather blurry. I can accept the novel’s apparent message, that finally one’s personal relations transcend politics, that only love is really important, but its 425 pages of political intrigue and religious debate seem a very long way to go to receive that message.

Unfortunately, the word I would have to use in describing Pamuk’s fiction as a whole—excluding most of My Name is Red—is “ponderous.” It lacks the comic vitality characterizing the best postmodern fiction, although Pamuk’s intention to inject something of Western postmodernism into Turkish literature still seems a worthy and potentially interesting project. Finally, however, the attempt rarely rises above the lugubrious and heavy-handed. One might hope that Pamuk’s future fiction will show him handling the task of adapting modernist and postmodernist literary strategies to his non-Western subjects with a somewhat lighter touch, but, having been rewarded for his work in its current form with the most prestigious literary prize available, one suspects that Orhan Pamuk will find few reasons to reconsider his approach.

Consulting the Text 

(This review originally appeared in Full Stop.)

It is not uncommon in discussions of Peter Handke’s work for both Handke and literary critics to refer to a “text” of his rather than to a novel, a play, or a memoir, which seems the best way to regard the latest work of Handke’s to be translated, Storm Still. This text first reached audiences as a play (performed in 2011) but is now being published as a book that can just as easily be read as a short novel (although its origins in the theater are apparent enough in the book’s structure as a series of spoken set-pieces). The book’s dual nature as both play and a form of prose fiction (a “read drama”) is its most immediate confirmation of Handke’s status as a formally adventurous writer who doesn’t so much experiment with form or create new forms as disregard the rules and requirements of established forms altogether in favor of a less constrained practice of “writing.”

Readers will readily be able to discern that this text was written to be performed. But a reliance on speech — both monologue and dialogue — has long been a distinctive feature of Handke’s novels so that Storm Still will certainly seem recognizable as Handke’s work to those familiar only with his novels, while at the same time, will exemplify many of Handke’s preoccupations and literary strategies for those readers not much familiar with his previous writings. Its relative brevity aligns it with some of Handke’s best known books such as The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick and Across, both of them novels of fewer than 150 pages, although it is certainly more compact than Handke’s bulkier novels such as My Year in the No-Man’s Bay and Crossing the Sierra de Gredos. Like most of Handke’s work, both plays and novels, this book is essentially plotless, although that doesn’t mean nothing happens, or that what does happen is of minor importance. Indeed, “what happens” in a Handke text often rises to the level of the allegorical, but he does very little to organize his narratives according to the artificial requirements of “plot.”

Another way of describing the allegorical nature of Handke’s stories (which usually do have beginnings, middles, and ends) is to note their dreamlike qualities, the way in which the borders of “reality” are not strictly patrolled. At the beginning of Storm Still, the narrator draws our attention to “A heath, a steppe, or steppe-like heath, or wherever. Now, in the Middle Ages, or whenever.” He recalls images of this scene from his childhood, and then opens his eyes to see that

. . .My forebears are approaching from every side, with the typical Jaunfeld gait, one foot firmly following the other. Each one comes along alone, except my grandparents as a couple, alone the more or less or perhaps not at all deranged sister of my mother, and likewise, walking alone, their three brothers each one on a separate path or not-path. The youngest is doing somersaults, rolling along, as if in high spirits. Each one makes for the place to stand that seems prescribed for them, again apart from my grandparents, who sit on the bench. . . .

Although clearly enough this appearance of his forebears is a phenomenon of the narrator’s own fancy, it is not uncommon in Handke’s other, more obviously “realistic” novels that palpably strange, sometimes surreal or fantastic scenes or events emerge in relation to characters and situations otherwise grounded in recognizable reality. Quite often Handke’s narratives feature a writer character (often exhibiting clear similarities to Peter Handke) whose presence metafictionally reminds us that writing shapes and transforms experience in order to clarify it, even if that means leaving its literal depiction behind. Handke’s work manifests a remarkable freedom of approach, ignoring most formal and narrative conventions, while at the same time always seeming carefully composed.

Thematically, Storm Still also has strong affinities with Handke’s previously translated fiction. The “heath, steppe” or “steppe-like heath” (with its echoes of King Lear, clearly signaled in the book’s title) where the narrator’s forebears manifest themselves is the Jaunfeld Plain, the ethnically Slovenian region of Carinthia in southern Austria. This is a common setting in Handke’s work — Carinthia is Handke’s home region, and he is himself of mixed German and Slovenian descent — and there are enough similarities between the family members invoked in Storm Still and characters featured elsewhere in Handke’s fiction that it would seem justified to conclude that the family represented in this book is a version of his own. Perhaps Handke’s most concentrated previous treatment of the “borderland” of Carinthia and its Slovenian roots is in Repetition, which chronicles the journey of a young man, also from Carinthia and of Slovenian descent, across the Austrian border into Slovenia proper in search of a brother who had himself crossed into Slovenia years earlier and not been heard from again. Most of the narrative is taken up with the ways in which the young man (who narrates the story as an older man) comes to be aware of and appreciate his Slovenian heritage, as well as his brother’s action in deserting from the German army during World War II.

Storm Still is framed even more directly as an attempt to consider this mixed Austrian/Slovenian cultural inheritance. The narrator’s forebears provide accounts of the family’s history, focusing specifically on events before and during World War II. Their testimony concerning their own actions works to portray the Slovenian Austrians as offering resistance to the Nazi occupation of Austria, one of the uncles in particular actually joining a Slovenian-based resistance group “in the mountains” after he too defects from the German army. If Repetition ultimately transcends its travel narrative form to become a powerful rendering of its narrator’s discovery of identity, both familial and existential, Storm Still seems more directly the attempt to recover the Slovenian presence in Austria, the distinct cultural legacy of the Carinthian Slovenes, and especially their defiance of the Nazi-imposed anschluss. It is also a moving meditation on memory and loss, culminating in the final image of the narrator and his vanishing forebears receding from each other, “recognizable at most by the movement of our hands as we still wave to one another.” But certainly the strongest impression the book makes (an impression probably even more pronounced when the work is performed theatrically) is in its invocation of a minority culture that might otherwise remain invisible.

For readers familiar with the controversy in which Handke was embroiled when he seemed to defend the government of Serbia as it was committing atrocities in Bosnia and Kosovo, this work might plausibly help to put Handke’s actions, which might otherwise seem inexplicable, in a more comprehensible context. Handke’s attachment is not to Serbia, but to the former Yugoslavia, as a part of which the Slovenes presumably were best able to express their cultural identity — Handke apparently prizes especially the linguistic diversity within cultural commonality that characterized Yugoslavia, especially as a sign of the South Slavs’ refusal to accede to the domination of Austria and Germany as centers of “European” influence. Whether this quasi-romanticized view of Yugoslavia (according to which all of the South Slavs at one time “just got along”) elevates either Storm Still or Handke’s rhetorical interventions in the Balkan wars to more principled efforts to preserve the dignity of its people is open to dispute, although that Handke sincerely holds such a view seems less so.

The hybrid form of Storm Still, however much it might contribute a kind of dramatic immediacy, also unfortunately affords us much less of the most consistently compelling and satisfying feature of Handke’s works of fiction, his prose style. (The prose of Storm Still is much more purely functional, the non-spoken passages often a more extended form of stage directions.) Even in translation, Handke’s prose has a distinctive quality — it is simultaneously precise and unconstrained, highly attuned to the concrete and the “real,” but also almost mystically reflective. The protagonist of Slow Homecoming (translated by Ralph Manheim) stands on a river bank:

The dried shore mud at his feet had broken up into a far-flung network of almost regular polygons (for the most part six-sided). As he examined the cracks, they began little by little to work on him, but instead of fragmenting him like the ground, they joined all his cells (a void that he hadn’t noticed until then) into a harmonious whole. Something that rose from the split surface of the earth struck his body and made it warm and heavy. Standing there motionless, looking out over the patterns, he saw himself as a receiver, not of news or a message, but of a twofold force received on the two levels of his head. On his forehead, he felt the bone disappearing, simply because he had no other thought than to expose this obstacle to the air. . . .

The mud cracks form a network specifically of polygons, predominantly “six-sided,” at which the character, Sorger, is clearly staring intently, closely attending to the appearance of the mud. But the effect on Sorger, although clearly profound, can only be expressed in the rather vague notion of a “harmonious whole.” “Something” rises from the ground to make Sorger’s body “warm and heavy,” but this thing remains a feeling, not a “message” that can be articulated. If Sorger is the ”receiver” of an intangible communication from his surroundings, it is again manifested in a very tangible way, a “twofold force” to the forehead causing him to feel “the bone disappearing.” Interludes such as this are the real focus of interest in Handke’s fiction. While it may seem that, taken as story, nothing is happening in a Handke novel, much is happening in moments like these. In the interaction between character, world, and the writer’s attempt to reckon with the encounter between self and world through purposeful language (which always might fail), consciousness happens.

Text and Context 

(This essay originally appeared in Full Stop.)

It would seem unambiguously desirable that more, rather than fewer, works of world literature be translated into English. But when the writer translated is largely unknown to most American readers and reviewers, and the literary tradition in which the writer works unfamiliar, how well-situated are we in fact to really appreciate the work in front of us, to feel we can adopt a perspective that allows us to assimilate the work even on a literal, denotative level? To what extent can we indeed plausibly claim to be focusing our attention on the text itself when the context needed to make the text fully intelligible might be missing?

These were questions that persistently arose as I was reading (for the first time) the Slovenian writer Evald Flisar. None of the books I read — including his newly translated novel (by David Limon) A Swarm of Dust and the other two novels in the author’s so-called “village” trilogy, Three Loves, One Death and My Father’s Dreams — could be described as conventional in their themes or their formal structures. But ultimately it would be illuminating to know if the sort of loose sequencing we find in these novels (as well as in Who Can Say Where the Road Goes, which I also read) is a narrative strategy more accepted in the Slovenian literary tradition and thus entirely recognizable to most of the writer’s immediate readership, or if the lack of observable plot would be seen as a challenge to prevailing expectations. Similarly, a greater knowledge of Slovenian history and culture in general might help us better understand the extent to which the themes of alienation, family conflict, divergent sexuality, and nihilistic rebellion would be familiar enough to Slovenian readers in their cultural and political history, or whether they are Flisar’s adaptation of familiar “Western” themes to a society suddenly and rapidly westernized.

It is not that the situations depicted or the strategies used in Flisar’s novels would be unfamiliar to most readers of the English translations, but that often they are indeed familiar enough that it seems merely presumptuous to judge them as derivative, when in fact in their cultural context the novels might be justifiably regarded as more audacious. In addition to the serial structure he employs, which moves forward without necessarily entailing “development,” and that frequently features purposeful gaps in chronology (creating a kind of drama by omission), Flisar’s novels incorporate surreal and absurdist elements — although the ultimate impression they leave is of an embellished realism — as well as Freudian psychology and unreliable narration. In My Father’s Dreams, the line between fantasy and reality, dreams and conscious experience, is blurred by relating the story through the psychologically displaced narration of its youthful protagonist, who may or may not be the victim of a deception contrived by his own father. The novels employ what could be called postmodern devices as well, such as the metafictional appearance in Three Loves, One Death of an “important writer,” who transparently seems to be Evald, and who, we discover, once wrote a story that eerily echoes events in the novel we are reading. A quoted passage from the story reiterates an earlier passage in our present narrative almost verbatim.

The novels in the village trilogy, although not strictly autobiographical, are portrayals of Slovenian rural life (although some of A Swarm of Dust in set in Ljubljana), specifically in Flisar’s native region. A particular focus is put in these novels on the Romany people of Slovenia, especially in A Swarm of Dust, whose protagonist is a young Romany university student. Here again it is difficult to know quite how to respond to Flisar’s portrayal of this character. Are we to regard him as the victim of his troubled childhood, which includes an incestuous relationship with his mother, even when his ultimate downfall is brought about by his own implacable refusal to accede to social and cultural conventions as a way of achieving “success,” a refusal that seems an assertion of personal integrity, not the psychological legacy of abuse? Although most readers are likely aware of the general cultural animus toward the Roma in European history (to some extent in the U.S. as well), the ambiguities in Flisar’s depiction here, and in Three Loves, One Death (in which the gypsy characters are portrayed as much shrewder than the family whose story is the ostensible focus of the novel) make it more difficult for readers outside the specific cultural context the writer has presupposed to feel comfortable with an interpretation.

A Swarm of Dust is certainly a compelling enough chronicle of its protagonist’s life story, however inscrutable at times. It begins rather shockingly with a sexual encounter between the young protagonist, Janek Hudorevec, and his mother, after which he also beats her. (He believes that this is what she wants, we eventually understand, since he had witnessed his father similarly treating her.) Even in a Roma village, Janek’s family is only barely tolerated, so that clearly Janek emerges from his childhood feeling like a misfit, and when the novel takes up in its second half seven years later with the 22 year-old law student Janek, he is involved with a fellow student, Darla, a psychologist in training, who attempts to intervene and assuage his now obviously volatile nature. Her efforts fail (it is unclear how much she is motivated by a professional interest in Janek’s agitated state of mind and how much by an unstated sexual attraction to Janek), and Janek returns to his native village, where his lingering reputation assures that the story will not have a happy ending.

Likewise the other Flisar novels I read feature episodic narratives that capture and maintain the reader’s interest through often extreme or puzzling situations, creating a certain kind of drama even though the episodes are only loosely joined and at times make abrupt chronological leaps, ultimately leaving a lingering impression of irresolution. This strategy seems a consistent and deliberate attempt to provide a comprehensive account of the lives lived by the characters they examine. (A Swarm of Dust and My Father’s Dreams are more centered around an individual protagonist, while Who Can Say Where the Road Goes and Three Loves, One Death incorporate a larger group of characters and their intersecting actions.) Among these novels, perhaps My Father’s Dreams, as a coming-of-age story of sorts (although a perverse one), would be most readily accessible to new readers, but with the other three, most readers should expect a representation of circumstances that are sufficiently different from their own, making an easily “immersive” reading experience problematic.

This might be especially true of A Swarm of Dust and its story of personal and cultural dislocation. Still, more so than, say, Three Loves, One Death, for which the immediate cultural and political context bearing on post-Communist Slovenia is really necessary to fully comprehend the characters and their actions, this novel does offer some more quickly graspable features in its somewhat sensational premise and in the implicit social critique expressed directly in the protagonist’s dialogue with his law school examiner late in the book. But whether Flisar’s performance will strike most readers as familiar enough in its fractured form and Freudian undercurrents to be accepted as recognizable practice in 20^th century fiction, or whether the writer’s strategies seem too familiar, somewhat overwrought in an uncertain context, is a question for each reader to resolve. I finished A Swarm of Dust finally unclear about the scope of the writer’s ambitions: If Flisar is trying to bring Slovenian fiction into the mainstream of modern literature, the result is probably successful but finally unremarkable. If the principal goal is to depict elements of Slovenian society more honestly than was previously possible given the prevailing conditions of Slovenian history and culture during most of the 20^th century, judging success here requires a perspective that literary criticism alone cannot attain.

The Old Empire 

(This review originally appeared in Full Stop.)

According to a reviewer in the Slovenian newspaper Delo, “the most appealing aspect” of Katja Perat’s The Masochist (Mazohistka) “is its infinite power of linguistic invention, one that makes you appreciate the Slovenian language.” To be sure, the translation of the novel by Michael Biggins provides us with a compelling narrative voice (the protagonist’s) that seems authentic enough for the era and social setting (early twentieth century, upper class Vienna) that the novel depicts — compelling at least as such a character might address us in English. Obviously, however, this is quite far from demonstrating the novel’s “linguistic invention,” and of course can tell us nothing about the power of the Slovenian language.

Thus in reading The Masochist in its English translation, we are, at least if we accept that an important — perhaps the most important — feature of The Masochist is its adventurous prose style, missing out on what potentially makes the novel most distinctive. And since prior to the publication of this novel Katja Perat was known primarily as a promising young poet, we have little reason to doubt that her work in the original might indeed prompt readers to “appreciate the Slovenian language” more keenly. Our inability to share this appreciation in a translation is, to be sure, no argument against the efficacy of translation more broadly, but it ought to restrain the critic, at least, from making unsupportable claims about a translated work under review.

What sorts of explications and judgments, then, could credibly be made of The Masochist? While we may not be able to so clearly recognize the poetic effects Perat creates, we can nevertheless examine the virtues of the narrative itself, conveyed by the novel’s protagonist, Nadezhda Moser. The story that she gives of her life is part introspection, part confession, and part careful observation. The narrative relates a story of maturation of sorts. It includes  Nadezhda’s reminiscences of her adopted father, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (we are told that the celebrated author of Venus in Furs found her orphaned in the woods in the Ukraine), whom Nadezhda describes as a self-absorbed and mercurial personality but not really as depraved, which his posthumous reputation might lead us to expect. Ultimately Nadezhda comes to finally escape the formative influence of her father (although these influences are also responsible for those elements of her character that allow her to ultimately claim her independence), as well as her bad judgment in marriage and romance. But the narrative is also something of a picaresque historical procession through the pre-World War I Austro-Hungarian empire, in which Nadezhda encounters many other prominent cultural figures, including Rilke, whom she meets while visiting Duino, and James Joyce, whom she encounters (without knowing who he is) at the novel’s conclusion.

Nadezhda depicts these scenes while also examining and questioning her own actions along the way. Much of the former is done through dialogue, which actually carries most of the novel’s narrative weight and creates interesting character sketches of the historical figures (especially Joyce and Sigmund Freud). The latter at times perhaps slows narrative progress a little too much but does also help elevate Nadezhda to a greater level of complexity as a character, at least as we know her through her retrospective narration, which seems honest and insightful enough, even as she renders scenes that reveal attitudes and behavior that make her seem less self-possessed. Thus the translation does prove effective in establishing a convincing  narrative voice that conveys important elements of character more than reproduces any overt stylistic flourishes that might echo the “linguistic invention” available to Slovene readers. To this extent, readers of The Masochist in translation may be less aware of Perat’s poetic prose, but few are likely to experience this as something that undermines the cogency of Nadezhda Moser’s voice.

Nadezhda, of course, is not just the narrator but the novel’s main character, whose story of a proto-feminist awakening from her loveless marriage and assertion of freedom from the influence of both Sacher-Masoch and her husband provides the novel’s emotional and thematic core. Nadezhda’s story is embedded, however, in a background narrative in which she immediately escapes her father’s environment by marrying the Viennese aristocrat Maximillian Moser, through whom (as well as the reputation of Sacher-Masoch) she becomes acquainted with many celebrated artistic and intellectual figures of Central Europe. She becomes a patient of Freud as her unhappiness in her marriage deepens (eventually leading her to engage in an extended affair, which ends very badly indeed for all parties). As she ponders leaving Maximillian, she goes to stay with a princess in her castle in Duino, where she meets Rilke. What makes these encounters more than just a gimmick to “historicize” Nadezhda’s plight is that many of the “real-life” characters are depicted in ways that don’t merely reinforce stereotyped perceptions of them — Rilke is portrayed as something of a clod, Freud seems surprisingly unstuffy, and James Joyce comes off as friendly but rather forlorn. In this way, these figures become less tied to our preconceptions of them and come to seem more like genuine characters in Nadezhda’s narrative.

Although Nadezhda does not tell her story in straight chronological order, proceeding more associatively both backward and forward, at times with fairly abrupt transitions, the novel still seems very much episodic. The story could be regarded as a kind of delayed coming-of-age narrative whereby Nadezhda matures into not only a more expansive world beyond the insular world in which she has previously moved (mainly through her visits to the more heterogeneous city of Trieste), but also into a firmer commitment to her own integrity and self-reliance as a woman, in a social sphere still regulated by and for the prerogatives of men. But the novel isn’t organized by the dramatic conventions of this sort of narrative. Instead, it has a looser structure, the episodes linked through something like a discursive train of thought rather than a plot per se. But this hybrid structure works effectively to make The Masochist both less formulaic than it might otherwise be and more than the expedient instrument for clever impersonations of cultural luminaries from the past, perhaps conveying an impression of immediacy allowing Nadezhda to act as a witness to a social system in eclipse.

That Nadezhda Moser circulates among such figures also helps make her growth into greater self-confidence and assertion of autonomy all the more impressive, since to assert oneself in such a milieu at all would be intimidating, but the effort to do so as a woman is surely even more fraught. In ultimately deciding she will no longer “live a lie” by pretending to be content with her role as Maximillian’s wife, Nadezhda also finally does escape the legacy of Leopold Sacher-Masoch, at least in relation to his most notorious activity. Nadezhda has herself engaged in a form of masochism, silently experiencing humiliation by her own passivity, her reluctance to challenge the expectations of the part she has been asked to play. She has received little pleasure from performing the role, however, as even her affair was really itself just one of the accepted demands of that role as carried out in the culture she inhabits — and which, of course, shortly will be brought to its end.

The Masochist seems a recognizably “European” novel in its subject and social satire, although it also reminds us of the Slavic presence in the old empire: Nadezhda takes lessons in Cyrillic from her Ruthenian housemaid, who also sings a song from the “homeland” that brings Nadezhda to tears. The city of Trieste, where we find her at the novel’s conclusion, was known for its mixed population of Austrians, Italians, and Slovenes (and more). If Trieste is as close to current-day Slovenia as the novel gets, The Masochist nonetheless summons a persuasive recreation (which Biggins’s translation does indeed admirably evoke) of a foundational period in the region’s history, even if the foundations are in the process of crumbling.

Out of Context 

(This review originally appeared in The Quarterly Conversation.)

American readers should certainly welcome Dalkey Archive’s publication of Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again, by the Lithuanian writer Giedra Radvilaviciute, but many of those readers surely will not entirely know how to take it. This uncertainty originates not from inherent difficulties in Radvilaviciute’s fiction (which in fact is often quite entertaining) but from a lack of context, the absence of which makes it difficult to assess the writer’s work with enough confidence we understand not only her artistic purposes and her success in achieving them, but also how her success or failure might be connected to national or cultural circumstances.

No doubt, most readers curious enough about current writing to pick up a book from Lithuania do so from a state of relative ignorance about that country. Is it not, after all, a primary ambition of translation to introduce uninitiated readers to worthy writers from less familiar countries and cultures? Unfortunately, economic circumstances (translated books have a hard time getting readers) have only reinforced a too-facile assumption that a translated work is, or should be, immediately and fully accessible on its own terms, without the need for the kind of context that might usefully bring us closer to the linguistic, literary, and cultural realities within which the work was written and originally received. Few translated works are accompanied by more than perfunctory information about the writer’s situation and important concerns (thematic or aesthetic), much less a formal introduction or annotations to the book that might remove obstacles to a satisfying reading experience.

Most publishers, especially already translation-friendly publishers such as Dalkey Archive, should of course be praised for bringing translated work to our attention at all, but the context-free publication that is more or less the norm for commercially translated books presumably hopes to avoid suggesting that books already at times perceived as too dauntingly different to be comfortable reading do indeed require the extra effort to assimilate this “outside” information. Better to simply offer the translated text without further marking it as “foreign” to the reader’s usual reading habits by emphasizing an apparent need for supplemental context. This reluctance to alienate potential readers may initially be a commercial decision, but it also does coincide with an otherwise perfectly respectable position that what is most important in our response to any literary work is the integrity of the reading experience itself. I would maintain, however, that with a book like Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again that integrity is actually threatened by the withdrawal of context and a lack of attention to issues outside the text, isolating it from the biographical, historical, and cultural factors influencing its creation (including its publication in the United States), rather than by taking context into account as an aid to understanding the work.

The book appears to be a “best of,” selected from Radvilaviciute’s two books published in Lithuania. This is something we must infer, however, since the only indication of their provenance (on the back cover and in the promotional copy) is that the book contains ten of the author’s “best stories.” Even if we accept that this judgment is correct (and ultimately we have no other choice), uncertainty about how we are to regard the book remains. Is it a book encapsulating the writer’s most characteristic work, or is it essentially just an artifact of translation, giving English-language readers some access to her work, to be read for the quality of individual “stories”? That Radvilaciute appears not to be a particularly prolific writer perhaps makes this problem less acute, although the very question of her seemingly spare productivity also seems one that might helpfully be addressed through some sort of critical commentary.

What is most significant in the publisher’s description of Radvilaviciute’s writing is that it identifies the contents of this book as “stories.” Although these “stories” are further characterized as “combining fiction, memoir, and essay,” this attempted clarification is more confusing that illuminating—to what extent can fiction, memoir, and essay really be “combined”?—and finally doesn’t adequately prepare the reader for the true indeterminacy of genre these stories achieve. Clearly enough the intention is to categorize Radvilaviciute’s work as fiction, and while there are qualities in these pieces that would justify considering them as fiction, this representation of them to American readers is at the least misleading about the way they are received in Lithuania, where Radvilaviciute is more likely to be considered an essayist and where the essay itself has become an increasingly prominent literary form. Such at least is the conclusion I reached about Radvilaviciute’s status in her native country after tracking down available facts about her, but unless readers are willing to similarly search for additional information about the author and the Lithuanian literary scene, they will lack what is surely relevant context about her ambitions as revealed in this book.

The blurring of the lines between “fiction, memoir, and essay” is certainly the most provocative feature of Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again, and is ultimately the reason why it is still very much a book worth reading. The pieces, each narrated by the author, or her fictional stand-in, are mostly plotless reminiscences of the author’s childhood and equally discursive meditations on her present circumstances. As a way of reinforcing the depiction of the latter, as well as strengthening the impression that what we are reading are nonfiction essays, there are frequent references to the narrator’s life as a writer and editor. One of the pieces, “A Long Walk on as Short Pier,” begins with the narrator receiving a call from a publisher inquiring about the novel he believes her to be writing. Although she is not (“I told him he’d caught me during a reading phase”), the publisher’s spiel prompts the narrator’s subsequent ruminations on writing this hypothetical novel, going so far as to compose an ostensible opening paragraph, but otherwise it is clearly suggested that these ruminations will have to substitute for any actual novel the narrator might write.

If we were to regard this work as a short story, we would likely consider it a species of metafiction, although of a somewhat diffuse and loosely organized sort. In this form it would be an interesting enough story (its interest extending beyond its metafictional qualities), but not otherwise remarkable. If, on the other hand, we were to identify it as an essay, it probably seems an effective personal narrative incorporating the author’s anxiety about the status of her writing career, but again not especially groundbreaking in its exploitation of the form. The piece’s singular interest comes from the way in which the distinction between fiction and essay remains indefinite, layered together so that we might even read it first as one and then as the other, superimposed on each other rather than “combined.” Rather than obscure the difference between fiction and nonfiction, such a strategy makes each mode equally salient in the reading experience. This may be the most radical implication of Radvilaviciute’s achievement, making us question whether the customary distinctions of mode and form serve any useful purpose.

Because all of the story-essays offer first-person accounts of the same narrator’s life, the book ultimately has more of the effect of a novel than a collection of either stories or essays. Even though the individual pieces move freely from past to present and setting to setting (one of them being the United States in a few of the pieces, including the first one), they cumulatively present an integrated account of the narrator and her current situation, her memories, and her interactions, some of them with people (such as her daughter, as well as her best friend) who make multiple appearances as “characters” in her story. Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again is thus ultimately an accessible book, both in its parts and as a whole. Finally the provocative tension between taking the pieces in the book as fiction or as essays only adds interest, as inevitably we wonder about the extent to which the book accurately reflects not just the author/narrator’s personal situation but also the cultural and historical conditions in present-day Lithuania, and whether such accuracy matters.

At this point, it might be objected that a critical introduction to this book would be superfluous. If literal fidelity to circumstances of the kind we find in realistic fiction is something Radvilaviciute’s work convinces us is not required, wouldn’t social-cultural-historical “background” only suggest we should judge her book according to its fidelity to existing conditions, the way things “really are” in Lithuania? Still, there are characteristics of the way things are whose full significance probably can’t really be assumed by American readers without some awareness of Lithuania’s status as an only recently liberated “republic” of the U.S.S.R. (The very name already no doubt seems like ancient history to some readers.) The lingering memory and still tangible effects of this reality noticeably inform many of the pieces, such as “My American Biography,” which draws substantially on the narrators memories of events surrounding the Soviet shootdown of the American U-2 spy plane in 1960, as well as the later Soviet invasion of Lithuania. “Essential Changes” is a direct and extended reflection on the changes that have occurred during the narrator’s life, and even the title story, which is accessible enough as a general meditation on “those whom I would like to meet again,” would probably be even more effective if the cultural circumstances attached to the subjects of the narrator’s reminiscences were clearer.

Other of the pieces certainly work perfectly well on their own, their social and cultural circumstances universally recognizable. “Autumnal People,” in its contrasts between people of an “autumnal” and a “sporting” disposition, probably needs no local context. The “native land” contrasted in “The Native Land and Other Connections” with the narrator’s experiences in Chicago upon her return to Lithuania could certainly be anyone’s native country observed in the light of an extended period away. “Required Texts,” another metafictional reflection on the narrator’s circumstances as a writer, could be written by any writer suffering anxiety over “that coveted, extremely well-selling novel” that hasn’t been written. Few if any of the pieces are so tied to specific context that the reader can make nothing of them, but, still, the cultural and historical realities of Lithuania do furnish the pieces with often important concrete details, and it seems only helpful for readers to be reminded of the recent history of Lithuania and the aftermath of independence, to prepare them for the role these realities play in the book they’re reading.

I, for one, found myself as well somewhat taken aback by the narrator’s frequent observations regarding the influence of American literature and culture. Perhaps this derives from the narrator/author’s time spent living in the United States, but it also indicates a larger American influence in contemporary Lithuania, since we must presume that Radvilaviciute’s Lithuanian readers recognize the books, movies, and music to which the narrator so freely refers. While some readers will find these references reassuring in their familiarity, others could consider them equally peculiar. Is American culture indeed so pervasive that it reaches a country that only twenty years ago officially had little access to it? Is that very pervasiveness actually a kind of reaction against those previous restrictions, as well as the remaining Russian cultural legacy? I myself don’t really know the answers to these questions, but I enjoyed Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again so much that, in adding to my ability to understand the writer’s tacit assumptions and the specific milieu in which they arise, some provisional answers to them accompanying the publication of the book would only make it that much more readily enjoyable.

Apocalypse Now 

(This essay originally appeared in Splice.)

In the most immediately apparent qualities shared by his novels, László Krasznahorkai could legitimately be labeled a “difficult” writer. The novels forswear conventional sentence structures and paragraphs in favour of a kind of continuous discourse that makes no distinctions between exposition and dialogue, description and interior monologue (somewhat reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard, but less rhetorical and more expository). They are narratively fragmented, ultimately telling a story of sorts insofar as they do depict a progression in time, and they shift freely from character to character and scene to scene. Although they are in some ways intensely realistic, in the midst of their otherwise quotidian settings absurd and uncanny events frequently erupt — events which essentially remain inscrutable, resisting even allegorical interpretation. Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (trans. Ottilie Mulzet), furthermore, is almost six hundred pages long, so that in this most recently translated novel — ostensibly about the ordinary people of a remote Hungarian village, and their responses to the arrival of the disgraced title character — Krasznahorkai’s destabilising strategies if anything seem even more conspicuous.

The anticipated critical riposte to such a characterisation of Krasznahorkai’s work would likely be that, its apparent difficulties aside, his fiction nevertheless rewards the reader’s attention, offering greater appreciation of the dynamism of language, a deeper immersion in characters’ states of mind, less reliance on superficial plot devices and conventions. But while these postulates would to a degree be true, the appearance of Baron Wenckheim as the self-proclaimed capstone to Krasznahorkai’s career (he has said that Wenckheim is his final novel, and that it belongs with Satantango [1985], The Melancholy of Resistance [1989], and War & War [1999] as his signature work) surely raises appropriate questions about the extent to which the difficulties in his fiction are indeed aesthetically redeemed after all. If reading Krasznahorkai’s fiction can be an arduous task, is it merely the same sort of challenge posed by any writer worth taking seriously?

Perhaps the most salient question, however, is whether the difficulties of this writer’s novels are in fact so severe. To open up one of the books and encounter its dense blocks of unbroken prose seems a daunting enough prospect, although Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming offers more assistance through paragraph breaks (which usually herald a change in point of view) than, say, Satantango, which has no paragraph breaks at all. But this tactic is certainly not so little known as to seem uniquely excessive, with its analogues in Bernhard, Mathias Énard, and, going even farther back, García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975). Sentences in Baron Wenckheim can indeed seem very long, and each section in the book is punctuated as one continuous sentence, but considered closely, these constructions are hardly bewildering:

I don’t even know how I should address you, young lady, said the Mayor, looking around the office to see where he could sit down, in a word, my dear… what was that again?… yes, of course, my dear Dora, but you’ve now reached a day of the utmost importance, of course you must have a thousand things to take care of, but from this point on you must put all this aside, do you understand, and forget about these other tasks, you must simply forget about them — he finally sat down nervously in a yellow, plastic, modern-looking armchair, while adjusting his bowtie, and he continued: whatever work this office has been involved with up ’til this moment, all other business must be halted immediately…

While a passage such as this blends dialogue and exposition without explicitly differentiating between the two, it doesn’t seem especially burdensome for readers to recognise such an implicit distinction, nevertheless. Although Krasznahorkai’s prose is stingy with periods, usually, as in this case, other punctuation and verbal signals (“said the Mayor”), make navigating even the longest sentences less troublesome than first impressions might suggest. (The resulting headlong cadence of the prose may indeed, in fact, create a more ‘immersive’ effect for co-operative readers.) It is possible that this device of eliminating the established markers of ‘prose’ in favour of an uninterrupted flow of ‘writing’ will ultimately come to seem a familiar ploy, less audacious the more it is used, but in Krasznahorkai’s fiction (especially by the time we get to Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming as the final volume of the quartet), it just does not require a radically new relationship between reader and text. His style does not disrupt our understanding of the discursive ‘rules’ in fiction, even if he does wield them in an uncustomary way.

Formally, the novels also do not really exceed the kinds of departures from convention we might attribute to high modernism. The fragmentation of Baron Wenckheim is surely not an unfamiliar practice among modern writers seeking an alternative to strictly linear storytelling, nor is the systematic rotation of multiple points of view. Baron Wenckheim’s large cast of characters lends itself well to this approach. Much of the novel is taken up with the stories of perhaps six to eight major characters (Baron Wenckheim himself being one, but only one), although other more marginal figures make appearances as well, providing a variations in circumstance and perspective that substitute for the artificial expedient of plot. Yet such a strategy is certainly not so unusual among modernist-inspired writers (a prominent example of which I take Krasznahorkai to be). Again, in Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, this if anything produces an engagement with the aggregate story, to which all the various episodes cumulatively contribute, which works to sustain interest in that story almost as transparently as conventional narrative. There is little in this novel that could be called metafictional trickery, and none of Krasznahorkai’s novels (at least those that have been translated) could really be accurately described as postmodern.

The occasional episodes of fantasy or surrealism likewise should not seem to most readers puzzling strictly as literary devices, although their disruptive outbreak in circumstances that otherwise seem static — a world stuck in its own dreary, mundane stasis — does help provide the stories with an additional source of narrative complication. In the case of Baron Wenckheim, they introduce something like a mystery, as we try to determine the identity of the enigmatic figure who several times is seen traveling through town with his motorcade (unseen, however, by the townspeople, who appear to be induced into a kind of trance upon his arrival). Perhaps he is the herald of the town’s destruction at the novel’s conclusion, an event described in quite harrowing detail and the eruption of which is arguably the most perplexing element introduced in the novel, one that might genuinely cause confusion about its intended effect. The novel essentially casts an anathema on the very fictional world it has painstakingly built up for six hundred pages. This does not seem to be a sly metafictional gesture pointing up the unavoidable artifice of fiction-making, so the reader is left to wonder how exactly to take this colossal climactic firestorm.

If nothing else, these plot machinations work uneasily with the novel’s predominant emphasis on character creation through interiority, through what James Wood has lately popularised as “free indirect discourse.” (Not so surprisingly, Wood was one of the first English-language critics to hail Krasznahorkai upon the publication of the initial translations of Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance.) The two primary characters, the Professor and the Baron, are first presented to us, for instance, in moments of prolonged reflection during which we learn not so much about what is happening but their state of mind as things are about to happen. The Professor is introduced inside the makeshift cabin to which he has essentially exiled himself, only to suddenly find his solitude destroyed by local media and a woman who appears to be his daughter:

the spoiled, misbegotten child, whose conception, coming into and then remaining in this world, in addition to being a cheap cruel trick, he could only attribute to his own irresponsibility, carelessness, unforgivable naivete, endless egoism, and boundless vanity, namely his own innate boorishness, the consequence of which he had never seen either in a photograph or with his own eyes…

The Professor is a former scientist who is given to philosophical rumination — including a quite extensive meditation on death and the existence of God as he sits in a train station later in the novel. The Baron, meanwhile, in deciding to return to the city of his birth after living a mostly profligate life in Buenos Aires, provides the novel with its main premise but is revealed to have a much less complicated inner life (his relatives are reputed to consider him simple-minded) — although by the novel’s conclusion the Baron shows himself capable of meaningful reflection on the course his life has taken, culminating in an act that unwittingly may be the origin of his town’s ultimate destruction. Most of the other characters in the novel are also presented through the third-person indirect method: not quite stream of consciousness, but from a perspective close to the character’s perception of the current moment, expressed through the character’s habitual thought patterns.

Thus the characters do vary in their degree of sophistication and self-awareness, but Krasznahorkai’s probes of consciousness maintain the illusion of impartiality, offering us simply the contents of that consciousness without appearing to colour the characters with moral appraisal. This technique inevitably has the effect, however, of making our responses to the characters more ambivalent, as access to their psychological states tempers our judgment — just as does a first-person narrator, albeit even more thoroughly. The “Leader”, a commander of a local fascist motorcycle gang who at first expresses an appreciation for the Professor’s actions (he fires a gun at the crowd gathered outside his shack) but later tries to kill him (after the Professor kills a gang member in what he believes to be self-defence), is surely an unsavoury character, but even he can seem sincere in his malice, and apparently capable of genuine fellow-feeling for his fallen comrade. Certainly the cumulative portrait of life in provincial Hungary is not finally a flattering one: human weakness is allowed to flourish freely, and there are no signs that the society bequeathed to the West by Communism managed to alter human nature.

But, of course, to say that the characters depicted in Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming are imperfect human beings does not condemn them as more worthy of contempt than characters originating in any other parts of the world might be. Krasznahorkai’s use of the free indirect method allows him to sustain a long, multi-stranded novel that doesn’t depend on a singly unifying narrative for its interest, but the cataclysmic conclusion to its intersecting stories does seem both arbitrary and pitiless. Even if we take the writer’s ultimate concerns to be more metaphysical than local, with Baron Wenckheim as a kind of sacrificial, holy fool character, that the reckoning induced is annihilation still seems out of proportion. If Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming is indeed Krasznahorkai’s final novel, perhaps its climactic conflagration is a way for him to bring his oeuvre to an appropriately… fiery conclusion. If this seems more self-mocking than his fiction has previously shown itself to be (it doesn’t lack humour, but certainly takes its acts of representation seriously enough), then the gesture appears to invoke a pronouncement that would appropriately be called nihilistic.

The quartet of novels that now collectively comprise what Krasznahorkai designates as “my one book” certainly do not project a sunny view either of contemporary Hungary or of humankind in general. Baron Wenckheim’s homecoming to a Hungary that has exchanged Communist rule for Viktor Orbán hardly reveals the country to have made ‘progress’ (it largely still resembles the country depicted in Satantango), but it doesn’t seem that Krasznahorkai’s overriding artistic purpose is to specifically provide social or cultural critique — the characters in all of these novels exhibit their fair share of ignorance and venality (although also just fear and confusion), yet surely no more so than the common run of humanity. Krasznahorkai is indeed interested in the more universal corruptions of human behaviour, and Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming seems to declare a sentence of metaphysical doom on human existence.

If this is the final message of Krasznahorkai’s “one” novel, not only is it a surprisingly cynical closing move, it also amounts to a tacit confession that this one novel (Krasznahorkai’s work as a whole) is itself insufficient in its purely aesthetic achievement to serve as a compensatory act of creation that is cogent enough to provide at least a momentary stay against the futility of human effort (the ultimate achievement of all art). It’s as if Krasznahorkai renounces the possibility that we might take solace from his novel — not as the source of ‘saying something’ about life, but of an achieved aesthetic order that itself stands in contrast to the meaninglessness the writer so relentlessly evokes.