One of teh finest chapters ever written - in James Agee's A Death in the Family

James Agee gives us the essential plot element in the title: A Death in the Family (1957). And near the outset of the novel the Jay gets a call from his somewhat incompetent brother than their father is on death's doorstep; Jay hurries out on a long drive in poor conditions (it's 1915, the roads are bad and cars are primitive) to see about and attend to his father. But wait: Agee has fooled us w/ a head fake! It turns out that Jay's father really isn't so ill, his brother had over-reacted - and he sets off back for home. Then, oddly, another call in the middle of the night - this time telling Jay's wife, Mary, that her husband has been in a serious accident and to send one of the "menfolk" in her family to come to the scene. So there can be no doubt in our mid that this one is in fact the "death in the family." Agee then gives us truly one of the greatest chapters in a novel I've ever read, as Mary and her sister - while the "menfolk" are heading out to the blacksmith shop where Jay had his "accident" - hope for the best and prepare for the worst: It's possible that he's just injured and may have to come home for recovery, so Mary prepares a first-floor bedroom. But she and her sister go through hours of the agony of waiting for word (communications were primitive in 1915 compared w/ today of course); the chapter almost seems as if it's in "real time," as if it takes us hours to read the chapter, which of course is just an illusion. But I've never read a chapter that so perfectly captures the agony of anticipation - the interior struggle of Mary, a devout Christian who is wrestling w/ her faith, her sister trying to be practical and helpful but feeling in the way, her obtrusive if well-meaning parents - and of course the two children asleep through the whole episode - and we're waiting to see how the death effects them (son Rufus is the central character in the novel, most likely based on Agee's own childhood?).

James Agee's reputation as a novelist

I don't know what's kept me from reading James Agee's novel A Death in the Family (1957 - 2 years posthumous); in fact, I did start to read it about a thousand years ago, as my parents had a copy and I picked it up in h.s or maybe younger and could not make sense of it. I was too young and inexperienced a reader, as it's not the easiest book to read even today, in part because the editors made some weird decisions about unfinished sections that Agee left on the table on his death. The novel begins with a long chapter - from among the unfinished fragments - that paints a picture of the small city - Knoxville, Tenn. - in which and when (1915) the novel is set: a working-class neighborhood, all the dads watering their lawns on a summer evening, etc. It's a nice piece but hard to see where it's headed and I'm not sure it even belongs in the novel except perhaps as a post-script/supplement. After that chapter the novel begins its due course, focusing on a young (6-8 year old) boy (obviously based on Agee) whos father gets a call in the middle of the night and is summoned to what he believes may be the deathbed of his father (the boy's grandfather) in a rural town in north Tennessee. The novel is most effective as a period piece: the description of the town of Knoxville in the days of few automobiles, all-night diners, difficult traveling conditions (the father's crossing a river by one-man ferry is a terrific scene for the deep past and a long-gone way of life), an assumption of racial prejudice and segregation (a subtext, not yet developed in the novel - about 1/3 through). The novel reminds me of other great Southern period pieces: Carson McCullers's most of all, but also William Styron, and perhaps Peter Taylor. With its forays into what was then experimental form, though, it feels a little quaint: the aforementioned opening segment is an homage Thomas Wolfe, a writer whose reputation has steadily declined. Agee was a multi-talented writer, probably best known today as the first great American film critic and as one of the first documentary journalist (for his landmark book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men). Death in the Family remains a remarkable one-off, though we can't help but think he would be better known as a novelist had he lived to write more fiction.

Recognizing that nobody is meant to read all of the Kolyma stories straight through

I've reached the halfway point in book 2 (The Left Bank) of Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Stories (NYRB press, Rayfield ed. and tr.), which is halfway through the volume (the first of 2 projected volumes of his short fiction) and I'm going to stop at this point - not because of anything wrong w/ these stories or with this edition except that it really feels that nobody is meant to read straight through this work. Each piece is powerful both as fiction and as part of the documentary record of the Soviet prison camps in the Stalin era. Reading them in sequences for nearly 400 pages, however, dulls the effect; it's too much for anyone to absorb and it was never meant to be such. Imagine if each of these stories appeared in a weekly journal spread out over one or two years: That would be the best way to read through the material. (I'm reading from a library edition, so I can't stretch out the reading that long.) Not a single story misses a note. I suspect that the 6 books in the projected two-volume edition were arranged by the original Russian editors, in the 1980s or so?, by topic/theme: Book One (clearly the most significant) tells of life in the Siberian mines, a story virtually unknown as so few survived to tell it. The 2nd book, The Left Bank, recounts VS's experience and observations during his stint as an orderly or aid in a hospital for the convicted prisoners - some political prisoners, others gangsters and other ruffians. Obviously there is constant tension between these two groups, and VS also recounts some of the extreme measures that the prisoners took avoid being sent back to the mines; altogether, these stories are longer than the Kolyma stories in book one and involve somewhat more character and plot development. It's amazing that VS survived to write these stories - so many, and over a period of about a decade during which he was clearly in bad health physically and mentally - and all this w/ no likelihood of publication during his lifetime. It's great that we have these volumes - though I do wish that NYRB had issued each book separately for a more reader-friendly 6-volume set (rather than 2 gargantuan editions).

The sorrow and the pity of Shalamov's Kalyma Stories

I'm still not sure how to interpret the organization of the stories in Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Stories, ed. and tr. by Donald Rayfield (NYRB - 2018). The volume contains 3 "books" - the first being Kolyma Stories, the 2nd (which I'm reading now) called. A 2nd volume is forthcoming w/ an additional 3 "books." Rayfield dutifully includes a date at the end of each story - all of which are in the 1950s and 60s. I don't know, however, if these dates are of composition or publication - in fact, I don't know how many of these stories were published in VS's lifetime (he died in about 1970); not sure if he had 6 books of stories published in his lifetime, or posthumously, or in fact ever. I'll look further into this muddle. All that said, in the 1st "book" all of the stories or sketches are set in the region of Kolyma, where VS served 6 horrible years in one of the Arctic mining prisons; the stories from the book are universally powerful and horrifying, excellent as fiction and as testimony, and eachspare, simple, some very short just a page or two; none of the stories involves much human interaction, friendship, love, politics - it's all about survival in the worst of conditions. The 2nd volume is also set in the Kolyma region and involves prisoners and Stalin-era prison camps, but in this section many of the stores involve interactions at a hospital (VS served the remainder of his sentence, about 8 years, in a medical setting - a much better assignment despite its injustice); some of the stories involve geological exploration in the region - not sure if this has anything to do w/ VS's life. We see, however, that every facet of life - the hospital, the geological expeditions (usually in search of potential sites for mines) depend on prison labor. One unusual story in The Left Bank, and one of my favorites so far, The Academician, tells of a journalist - in his 60s or so, beat up and old-fashioned - assigned to interview and hot young Soviet academic involved in the the space race in the early days of satellites. The scientist is haughty and contemptuous toward the elderly journalist, whom VS presents with great feeling and pity - one of the few stories in this collection about an interaction among people outside of a prison setting. The story ends w/ a twist, which somemay see coming and which I won't divulge, that's powerful if a bit old-fashioned - harking back to de Maupassant or O.Henry, and not the kind of ending that, say Chekhov would ever write - but, still, it works, and adds to the sorrow that pervades this entire collection.

A beautiful and complex - and short - story by Lore Segal

Lore Segal is a writer I hadn't heard about in many years and was pleasantly surprised to see her story, Dandelion, in the current New Yorker; I remember when her novel Her First American came out in the 1980s to positive reviews - wanted to read it, should've read it, maybe will read it. In any event, she seemed to vanish into obscurity after that book. A brief look at her info online shows that she across her career has had many teaching gigs and has gone a long time between publications and now - this is why the NYer is on board - is coming out with a final collection of stories - at age 91! These stories probably cover the past 25 yeas or so of her writing. Dandelion is a complex and compact and powerful story. She begins by noting that, like Henry James (I didn't know this) she is revisiting and revising stories from earlier in her career. In this one she is retelling an event from about 1938 (when she was about 10) that she wrote in about 1948 and now looks back on, and her first thought is that her writing in her 20s was florid and overly descriptive and full of fake metaphors and similes that drew too much attention to style and drew readers away from the substance. Pretty harsh! - but she gives some examples and she's right (though he work was probably typical of the era in many ways). So she proceeds - telling the story in a crisp, "modern" manner. The narrative itself involves her as a young girl enjoying a sun-filled morning in the Austria Alps and hoping to preserve this moment forever (which she does, in art); then she sets off w/ her father on a hike to an Alpine meadow. All goes well, but at the meadow the encounter a large group of teenagers; her father engages one young man in conversation, but it's obvious (to the narrator) that the boy does not want to hear her father's rambling anecdote - and that his friends are laughing it her father. What could be worse for a child - her father embarrassing her in front of other children? Simple - but on the broader level we recognize a few things: these teenagers are the foreshadowing of the Hitler youth who will do far more than embarrass her father pretty soon. The climb up the mountain, which totally exhausts the narrator, is a figurative journey for the author, into the difficulties of her life and her youth. We know that the author herself fled German in 1938, lived as an orphan in England, learned the language and the culture; we know her parents joined her during the war and her father died right after the war. So we see that he brief prayer to preserve a day of sunshine was not answered at all - that day from youth was an even long gone, a time she should look back on w/ nostalgia but does so only with pain and shame: She should have "prayed" to preserve and cherish a beautiful memory of her father, not this awkwardness and misplacement. Overall, we get in this story at least 4 levels of time: the present (90-year-old writer) looking back, the life story (father dead in the 1940s), the composition of this story in its original version, and the events themselves.

The literary value of Shalamov's stories

There's no question as the value of Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Stories (from ca 1955-1965, recently published in English by the great NYRB press, ed/tr Rayfield) as historical documents, providing a first-hand account of life in the gulag of Siberia, where Shalamov, accused by the Stalin government of crimes against the Soviet state, spent an incredible 15 years. So few survived the horrors of enforced hard labor in the Siberian gold and coal mines that there are relatively few accounts - most of the prisoners died in incarceration or if they returned were so damaged and traumatized that they were unlikely to describe the conditions and terrors of the camps. That said - these stories and sketches would be worth preserving, publishing, and reading simply as historical documents - but it's also remarkable that these stories are excellent as literature alone (if you could conduct a thought-experiment and try to believe that the Siberian prison camps were completely fictional, how well to these sketches stand up?). What makes these pieces exemplary as literature? First of all, the precision and clarity and verbal economy with which Shalamov sets each scene: each story has a simple point to make, the characters in each story are clearly delineated, the writing is in "plain stye," with a minimum of description and background. Second, Shalamov has an unerring instinct for closing out these stories and sketches with a twist, a revelation, or a striking image. Three example: the story of the pig rustler tells of a plot to break into a food-storage shack and grab some of the frozen mean; the "rustler" grabs a frozen piglet and then makes a dash back toward his dormitory - pursued by men and dogs. He finds temporary refuge in a storage room; when the guards break down the door, he's sitting on the ground, having consumed half of the - frozen! - piglet. Another story - the Dwaf Pine - which was the only one published in VS's lifetime and which translator Rayfield notes is the least "offensive" (politically) of any, is an essay in praise of the tiny scrub pine of Siberia and it sensitivity to changes in climate and weather - and the story ends w/ the kicker that the dwarf pine makes for the best firewood, thus, after all his praise of this remarkable plant, the narrator notes that we chop them down and burn them for warmth - an emblem, which the censors missed of course - for the treatment of prisoners in the Gulag. A third example - Dominoes (one of the first in the collection focusing on the prison hospitals, where VS worked late in his imprisonment) - the protagonist is invited by a doctor to play dominoes, a game that he finds stupid and boring; at the end the doctor reveals that the hates dominoes as well but invited the prisoner to join him in an attempt to cheer him up: an image of two men playing a game that they both hate but assume the other enjoys, again an emblem from thecontradictions and falsehoods, most much more malevolent, of life in prison.

The importance of Shalamov's Kolyma Stories

Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Stories (written ca 1950-60, recently published in English by NYRB, ed and tr. by Donald Rayfield) are a work of witness and testimony; the many short entries are minimalist fiction, each a brief sketch from prison life (Shalamov was in a Siberian labor camp in the 1940s for about 6 years, when he was about 40 years old), stand up well alongside any short fiction of the period - each is clearly written, makes a dramatic point, and moves on - though they break no new ground in fictional technique. As works of art they don't measure up to the standards and classics of the century - from Joyce through Hemingway to Munro and Trevor - but cumulatively they constitutes of work of incredible power, insight, and significance. It's hard to read them one after another - each is so painful, a series of tales of barbarous cruelty and the struggle for survival in the worst of conditions - forced hard labor in freezing conditions, with inadequate food, clothing, and shelter - the men pitched against one another as they fight over the smallest scraps of nourishment and comfort. Shalamov only rarely speaks of the politics and tyranny that sent him and millions of others into these labor camps, but the horrors of the Stalin regime are the constant background music; the political prisoners - sent into exile for the most petty of "crimes" against the state, many betrayed by others looking out for themselves - often are pitted against the professional criminals, far more wary and experienced, in the struggle for survival. So even if these stories or sketches or what you will had no literary merit and collection of memories and testimony would still be a powerful work of witness and indictment. Yet they do stand up well, each on its own; over the course of the book we don't see character development nor do we see a story arc, but we do see dozens, maybe hundreds, of incidents, recounted with cool detachment, that create overall a story of horror and oppression as powerful as any other work from its era, or perhaps any.

Soviet prison literature and Varlam Shalamov

There's probably a whole sub-genre of Soviet-era prison literature, from Solzhenitsyn on down, but the works of Varlam Shalamov deserve a high place of honor in this frightful milieu. His work - mostly very short stories and sketches - collected in the newly issued Kolyma Stories (another great NYRB edition!) - has been little-known to English-language readers until recently. Shalamov, born about 1910, spend a solid 15 years or more in the prison camps and began writing about them on his release in the early 1950s. From what I can see in the edition I started reading yesterday, he completed most of the stories and sketches over about a 10-year span, from roughly 1955-65. (The edition, Kolyma Stories, comes in five sections, of books, with the title section first; not sure yet if all of the stories are about prison life in the far eastern stretch of the USSR, and not sure yet of the chronology - Shalamov died in the 1980s, but not sure if he wrote till the end of his life nor if his works were published in Russian in his lifetime - will read more about that going forward.) The stories at the top of this collection are terrific - most just a page or two, none stores in arising out of any European tradition of modernism; they're more like expert testimony about barbarous and cruel system. The suffering of these men - sentenced to work in the coal or gold mines of the Kalyma region for the most innocuous of "political" crimes, most completely unprepared for the rigors of life in the tundra - temperatures plunging far below zero throughout the winter, never sufficial clothing of food, horrible working conditions and living conditions, constant pressure from the guards and overseers to meet unreachable "quotas," mean turned against one another in struggle for survival, constant death and danger - powerful and upsetting material. Some of the stories are gruesome - e.g., one in which two prisoners unearth a corpse in order to steal the clothing on the the dead body, another in which a man chops off his fingers w/ an axe in hopes of getting off a work detail. A few have that odd Soviet black humor, such as one that appears as a report to authorities on the impossibility of meeting quota because of the failure of a machine called an "injector" and the response in which the officials believe Injector is the name of a recalcitrant prisoner. All powerful stuff - though I'm not sure it's humanly possible to read this (700+-page) collection straight through to the end.

What works and what doesn't in The Pomise of Happiness

It should come as no surprise - given the title of the novel (The Promise of Happiness - why not btw The Pursuit of Happiness, as much of the novel takes place in the U.S.?) and the epigraph from Updike - that this ambitious novel (Justin Cartwright, 2004) ends w/ a wedding celebration, the classic ending for a "comic" (in the broadest sense, not a funny novel by any stretch not is it meant to be) novel. I was only surprised that, given the many amusing passages in the novel where the characters and the author comment on the occasional cliche'd situation - raining outside when the character is sad, e.g. - that Cartwright didn't include some reflection on the conventionality of a novel ending in a wedding. That said, my overall take on this novel, little-known in the U.S., is that Cartwright is really intelligent and he delineates a complex set of family relationships and goes to some depth into the psyche and fears and anguish of some of the lead characters, the father, Charles Judd, in particular, a deeply troubled man who is unwittingly cruel to those closest to him - but that Cartwright never really gets a plot off the ground. Much of the plot centers on the older daughter's (Juliet/Ju-ju) getting spring from prison in NY state, where she'd been held for two years for her role in the sale of a stolen Tiffany stained-glass panel. I don't want to beat a dead horse, as I've mentioned this in a few previous posts, but this plot element never gets off the ground, and in particular the twist near the end, which I won't divulge, is preposterous; the novelist seems to have little knowledge as to how the American judicial system works - it's almost as if Juliet doesn't have a lawyer working for her - and some serious misperceptions about how the media works as well: there would not be hordes or reporters and TV crews to film the release from prison of this complete noncelebrity jailed (itself unlikely) for a single act of aiding an art theft (maybe if she's helped steal a masterpiece, as in the Gardner museum theft); also, the NY Times does not pay for stories, sorry, this is not the Daily Mirror. Perhaps these are just quibbles, as there are some pleasures in reading this novel and I'd probably read another Cartwright novel if recommended, but this one has highs and lows, in other words, it's uneven.

Some strengths and some puzzles in Cartwright's novel

One amusing aspect of Justin Cartwright's novel The Promise of Happiness (2004) comes from his sly, occasional use of postmodern techniques, for ex. at one point, during a rainstorm, one of the characters reflects that he/she hates the pathetic fallacy, that literary device in which the weather matches the mood of the character or the direction of the plot - rainstorms, blizzards, tornadoes etc. At another point in the novel, as one of the young women is struggling through the process of breaking up w/ her boyfriend/lover, a married man about 30 years older than she, the woman reflects that she feels as if she's a character in a chick-lit novel - funny, because she is a character in a novel, though clearly not a novel in that genre. So, as noted in previous posts, there are many things I like about this novel, in particular the delineation of character, and its successful portrayal of a family under great emotional stress, as the characters, each in his or her own way, deals with a complex web of love (and sexual) relationships, though I have trouble w/ certain parts of the narrative, in particular I still don't understand why (or I don't believe that) the older daughter would get involved in an art-theft scheme and would take the fall, allowing her no-good boyfriend to walk away; in particular, I think Cartwright doesn't have a clear understanding of the U.S. system of justice - for ex., why would the judge in a trial be extensively questioning the testifying witness? - and he has a condescending attitude toward Americans in general, for ex., implying that the jury members in the art-theft trial were overweight (so what?) and incompetent, too easily bamboozled by a colorful witness for the prosecution.

Plot, character, and Justin Cartwright's novel

I'm staying with Justin Cartwright's 2004 novel The Promise of Happiness (tho still hating that title!) at just beyond the halfway point, 150+ pp or so, mainly because I'm interested in the characters, in particular the father of the Judd family, Charles, probably because he's closest to my cohort/demographic and partly because he's a complicated guy w/ a lot of mixed feelings and regrets. He's sharp and intelligent and a constant critique of the behavior and manners of the younger gen in contemporary London - to the point where he's often rude and insulting, berating some young women for talking too raucously on the Tube (!) or being downright rude to a waiter trying to take his order for Mexican food. This guy's no saint - and in particular we see this in the scene when he heads off to London ostensibly on business (he retains a seat on a charitable foundation run by his former employer) but w/ the real purpose of an unannounced visit to the woman w/ whom he'd had an office affair some 20 years back. He wants her to assure him that he was not a pig - which she does, and tells him she loved him at the time and was a willing accomplice, so to speak. Obviously, this scene would be written differently today, as we're now much more aware that she was being taken advantage of and that he was abusing his authority in the accounting/management firm where he was a senior officer (and she, a secretary). But we do get a glimpse into his moral anguish. The novel centers on the older daughter's release from a NY prison where she'd served time for art theft; some of this I don't believe at all - in particular, it's hard for me to fathom why this young woman would take the fall and let her no-good boyfriend walk off free, and equally hard to believe that her father, Charles, would not visit her over the 3 years of her imprisonment. Perhaps the 2nd half of the novel will shed light on these matters; in any event Cartwright's strength lies not in design of plot, as the plot in this novel just meanders, but he's especially good at quick delineation of character - even the minor characters, like Charles's golfing buddy Clom, who's an obvious cat and an aging "player," even if Charles and his wife, Daphne, don't - or won't - see this.

Can Cartwright save his novel The Promise of Happiness by getting his plot moving?

Yesteday's post noted that Jaustin Cartwright's 2004 novel, The Promise of Happiness, gets off to a great start and is an excellent novel "so far," thati s, through the first 60 or so pp., but today I have to note that, like so many novels, it seems, this one begins to founder once the write establishes the fundamentals elements: character, place, setting (time), tone. Cartwright began w/ a great premise - a family of 5, based in England, awaits the imminent release of eldest daughter serving a 2-year sentence in a NY state prison. We gradually learn the details of her arrest - it involves the sale of stolen artwork - but now that she's out of prison (her younger brother, Charlie, has traveled to NY to pick her up at the prison and bring her home to England) the novel founders. Charlie and Ju-Ju (Juliet) take a meandering course homeward, visiting Buffalo, the Finger Lakes, Cornell, now heading toward the Hudson River Valley - all of which seems ridiculous and improbable and does not advance the story line in the least, which I could still accept if there were some real insight into the upstate New York setting, which there is not, just a sequence of place names and some condescending descriptions of the working-class people in Buffalo. He's got to get this plot moving! One of the potential strengths of the novel comes from Ju-Ju's (and ultimately Cartwright's) knowledge about art, in particular the stained-glass work of Tiffany (and La Farge), and many of the passages in which Ju-Ju opines about the stained-glass are quite smart, if, in my view, off-base about why these works were so popular in the U.S. ca 1890; less compelling and less credible are Ju-ju's ruminations and discussions about why she took the fall and went to prison while her partner - for whom she seems to have nothing but contempt - took a walk. A lot of things just are not clicking. That said, Cartwright's strongest character is the moody father, Charles, who awaits the return of the Prodigal Daughter (yes, Cartwright makes the connections between the daughter and the parable and the stained-glass representations) Juliet - (while indulging in some infidelities of his own) - he is the lead character and in some ways the heart of the novel and his reconciliation, or not, with his daughter is the scene we're waiting for; if Cartwright can get us there and bring the scene off, all will be redeemed.

An excellent - so far - novel with a terrible title: The Promise of Happiness

Could there be a worse title for Justin Cartwright's 2005 novel, The Promise of Happiness? It sounds as if this is going to be one of those dreary, melodramatic, saccharine novels, indistinguishable from so many others, just begging to become a Lifetime movie (do they still make these?), yet from the first 60 pp or so Cartwright's book - well received in England but barely noted in the U.S. - is a sharp-edged, thoughtful, tense family drama told in an unusual but successful narrative style. In essence, the novel focuses on the members of an English family, roughly speaking Charles, the father, 60+, unwillingly cast into retirement when pushed out from his management job at a London firm and living in a small town on the Cornwall coast; his wife (Daphne?), a comically inept cook and the force that keeps the family going through its adversity; and the children, the eldest of whom, Juliet (Ju-ju) is about the be released from a prison in upstate New York. Cartwright moves easily among the POVs of each of the characters, really drawing us in, as few are able to do, to the interior life of each of these people; there's not exactly an omniscient narrator, but by giving us 5 or 6 close 3rd peson we end up knowing far more than any one of the characters does. He meticulous unspools the plot, so it's not till several chapters in that we know why Juliet was imprisoned, and it's clear there will be more developments, as her brother - Charlie - picks her up at the prison and prepares to travel with her back to a painful family gathering. Cartwright has a pretty good feel for the life and look of the U.S., despite a few missteps (e.g., the quote he extracts from a New Yorker short could never have appeared in that magazine) and a really sure hand at developing character through depicted action (the section with one of the daughters working on the set for the filming of a ridiculously overpriced commercial is excellent) and dialog (Juliet and Charlie conversing about the family is quite revelatory, and credible - though I wish he hadn't given Charlie the repeated inflection "like"). We'll see how this under-recognized novel develops.

Pushkin and translation

Pushkin's last completed prose fiction, The Captain's Daughter, is an adventure story that has it all, at least w/in the scope of the genre: the education and maturation of a young man who starts out as a spendthrift but becomes a military hero, a love story, a story of moral and ethical decisions, battle scenes, executions, a duel (of course!, this is a Russian novel), father-son reconciliation, twists of fate. It's not a great work of literature to rival the short novels of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, or in particular Chekhov - the ending, for example, seems to rush through a ton of exposition and relies too heavily on coincidence - but it's fun to read and was, ahead of its time, cinematic (and it fact it has been adapted for film at least twice - though  don't think either version rose above the level of swashbuckled cliche). Pushkin's greatest works, in the end, are still probably his poetry and novels or dramas in verse, but the pieces, many of them fragmentary, in the Complete Prose Fiction of Alexandr [sic] Pushkin, Aitken ed and tr, show the potential for great short fiction as well, had he lived (he died in his late 30s, ca 1836 in a duel - strangely foreshadowed by the duel in Captain's Daughter). I'm not sure if here are any great translations of Pushkin's verse into English - pace Nabokov whose translation of Eugene Onegin is supposed to be very weird and awkward and literal; Russian doesn't scan as well into English as do the Romance and Germanic languages, of course. The best "translations" of Pushkin are probably the adaptations into opera, notably Tchaikovsky's Onegin and Queen of Spades.

Too bad Pushkin couldn't have written and finished ore novels like The Captain's Daughter

One piece of prose fiction that Alexander Pushkin did complete - The Captain's Daughter - stands as a short novel, about 120 pp., and it makes you wish that AP had been willing or able to finish several other of the promising works of fiction that he began and then for some reason dropped (e.g., The Improvisor, The Emperor's Moor). About half-way through reading this short novel, and, yes, it does not have the breadth of knowledge and ideas and social classes that we see in Tolstoy nor the depth of character that we see in Chekhov nor the drama and inner turmoil that we see in Dostoyevsky - to cite three great Russian writers who lived and wrote in Pushkin's wake, but it's a fine narrative that keeps us fully engaged and treats many themes. Most of all it's "bildungsroman," a "novel of education," about the life and maturation of a young man, the narrator in this case, who is looking back at his youth in the Russian army in the late 18th century (novel written ca 1832). The narrator is pushed by his father to enter military service (rather than university, which his father believes would be a life of dissipation - probably right); he heads off with his servant (who will stay w/ him throughout his service) and immediately gets into trouble, gambling away much of his money. Ultimately, to his chagrin, he's sent to a remote outpost where his life looks to be miserable, but he falls in love w/ the eponymous Captain's Daughter - and fights a duel over her, is wounded, writes home to seek his father's blessing to marry the young woman, is sternly rebuffed and likely to be sent to an even more remote posting when a band of (Kazakh?) rebels threaten to attack the under-manned outpost and the narrator stays and gets ready for battle. (That's where I left off in this forward-rushing plot.) So we can see that the novel encompasses themes of father-son relationships, class relationships, discipline and maturation, love and folly, battles and duels - plus a crew of sharply delineated characters, such as the overly tolerant commanding officer who defers all decisions to his sharp-witted, highly competent wife. I can't say that this novel is on eeryone's reading list; probably more readers would know of it had Pushkin been able to write more works of prose fiction (the Collected Prose Fiction of Pushkin available in a Norton edition, ed. and tr. Aitken, from 1966).

A story that shows why Sally Rooney is an emerging literary star

The story Color and Light in the current New Yorker shows why the author, Sally Rooney, is becoming a significant figure on the international literary scene. As in her most recent (in U.S.) novel, Conversations with Friends, we can see her almost intimidating intelligence and ability to tell a story largely through dialogue (and in the novel, not this story) electronic communications (text and email). He fiction is never warm; in fact, it's emotionally chilly and the characters, sharp witted, accomplished, and edgy, feel unapproachable - but that's her world, and she depicts it accurately and comprehensively. She's also, as I know from reading a magazine profile, a committed Marxist or at least socialist, and surprisingly, from what I've read, class struggle isn't a major theme in he work, and her lead characters are of the upper-class, Irish intelligentsia - but I haven't read all of her work by any means, so that may not apply across the board. This story, in brief, tells of a 20-something man working as a desk clerk in a hotel in a small seaside town in Ireland; through his older brother, he meets an alluring woman who says she's a screenwriter; she's visiting this village to get away from the pressures of work and publicity. The young man (Aidan?) sees the woman having dinner with a large group at the hotel, and she's clearly the center of attention - and she (notably - not all of them and not one of the men at the table) leaves a huge tip. As she continues to run into A around town she drops increasingly alluring hints about having a sexual relationship w/ him; he backs off, naturally shy (and possibly bisexual) and in deference to his older brother, who he thinks has been dating the woman, though she denies that. The woman reminds me of the protagonist in Conversations with Friends, and we have to suspect that she's something like SR herself, whom we imagine to be a bit of a celebrity and usually the center of attention and adulation. In this story, the woman has an evident drinking problem and she remains an enigma; it's odd that A. never asks her anything about her work, not even what films she's written that he might have seen. The story ends abruptly, without a clear resolution, but throughout we're convinced of the veracity of these characters and drawn into the nuances of their inter-relationships and conflicting desires.

Why John Williams was overlooked - and rediscovered

Those who've read John Williams's great novel from ca 1970, Stoner (which has been re-printed twice, most recently by NYRB, which apparently is reprinting the complete line of Williams novels) will want to read Leo Robson's essay on Williams in the current New Yorker. Who is Robson? I have no idea. But his thesis in this piece is that Williams was a devotee of the doctrinaire literary critic from Stanford (was he from England by birth? I think so) Yvor Winters, who was antithetical to any form of experimental or cutting-edge fiction, in particular of literature in "loose" form or that uses any form of stream of consciousness - in particular Joyce, Faulkner, Whitman. He recognized only literature in a strictly detached and realistic mode, never entering the mind of the characters but presenting their world through heightened detail - which led him to like the work, essentially, of her wife, his friends, and Flaubert. Nothing wrong with Flaubert, obviously - but what a constricted way to view the world and in particular the possibilities of literature! The question before Robson and all of us is why did JW's work, esp his masterpiece, Stoner, go absolutely no where and is now recognized as one of the great novels of its time, or any time? The literary world tried and failed to make amends in 1973 by splitting the National Book Award for fiction between another Williams novel (Augustus) and one of Barth's postmodern works. Not that Barth's reputation today is anywhere near where it was in the 1970s, but looking back it's easy to see why Stoner, and JW's career, foundered. First of all, sad to say, JW was a writer "far behind his rightful time" - Stone feels like a novel not from 1970 from 1950 at the latest. By 1970 the world - and the world of the arts - was in turmoil, rejecting old verities and seeking new forms - not just the postmodern of Barth, Coover, Barthelme, Gass, but even in more conventional fiction, breaking grounds re depiction of sex, political, and personal anguish. Robson notes that the same press (Viking?) published at the same time both Bellow's Herzog and JW's Stoner. Herzog was the top best seller plus an award-winner and Stoner sold 2k copies and died. Sure, because it was way out of synch with what and how people were reading at that time plus it was in no way entertaining, witty, tumultuous, even engaging - not in the way that works of Bellow, Roth, Updike, et al. were. But who re-reads Bellow today? And Stoner's reputation has only increased over the years. As Robson correctly notes, were are today in a world of autofiction, and he should have added of multiculturalism and internationalism. Stoner fits none of these modes - but that's not why it's today recognized as a great novel. It's great because of its creation of a character who on some level is an everyman (at least everyone likely to read Stoner will identify with this liver of literature and frustrated academic) whose anguish and suffering are made palpable, whom we care about despite his faults and failings - a novel that is the story of a life, tragic in many ways (we see that hand of Flaubert here, much more than the doctrine of Yvor Winters), clear, and accessible. Williams's reputation has also been hurt by his small output (4 books) and his variety of style: Had he written 4 novels, each about an academic or literary sort, he would have provided a hook for readers (e.g., Roth and Jews, Updike and WASPS) - but as his work stands, it's hard to discern a Williams style, despite Robson's pleading.

A potentially excellent novel by Pushkin that, once again, he never completed

I can't help but think that Alexander Pushkin's novel Dubrovsky would be much more widely read today - if only he'd finished writing it! I embarked on reading it anyway, knowing that in the end I'll be disappointed, because a note in the introduction in the edition I'm reading (Pushkin's Complete Prose Fiction, Norton1966, G. Aitken ed and tr.) cited it as perhaps AP best prose work (along w/ the more famous Queen of Spades) - and, yes, it treads familiar ground - rivalry between two neighboring estates (set in I think late 18th-century Russia, written about 1832) with possible amelioration as their children fall in love. That said, the story contains some unusual plot twists; I'm usually pretty good at seeing these things coming, but I have to admit that one of the twists took me by surprise (I won't give it away). The very basic outline of the novel: two neighboring landowners, friends since youth, one very prosperous and kind of a nasty guy to his servants and to everyone, the other ran through most of his money, lives modestly, well like by all. Strangely, the two have a tremendous falling out and the wealthy landowner goes to court and gets a judgement that he has title to all of the property of his neighbor (this based entirely on facts of a case in Russian law). The dispossessed summons his son, Dubrovsky, who'd been in the Army in St. Petersb., and he arrives to find his father near death. Meanwhile the evil landowner has a change of heart and rides over to his neighbor's to apologize and restore his property, but the son - seeing the evil neighbor approach - and unaware of his intent, sends him away - just as his father dies. Dubrovsky, not wanting to leave anything to the neighbor, sets fire to the entire estate (killing some of the neighbor's servants in the process!) and takes off into the forest. Rumors spread about Dubrovsky - his whereabouts and his evil intents, but strange things begin to happen, and that's where I am now - engaged, but suspecting that the novel will not resolve all of its plot elements and narrative lines. Tant pis.

A story from Pushkin that is well ahead of its time

Reading further in the 1966 collection from Norton (Aitken, ed. and tr.) of Pushkin's complete prose fiction, it becomes clear that in his "comic" stories Pushkin is a sucker for Shakespearean plots, in which feuding families/neighbors find reconciliation when their children fall in love with each other (that's where we seem to be heading in the novel-length yet unfinished work Dubrovsky) or in which one of the young lovers plays a trick and disguises herself as a servant w/ whom the guy falls in love and eventually learns - surprise! - that she's the one the parents had hoped he'd fall in love w/ after all (cf, As you Like It). (These plot elements btw go back to Roman comedy.) In some ways I find the "tragic" stories more intriguing. The Postmaster is one, told by a narrator who encounters the village postmaster a few times over the course of several years. At their first encounter the narrator is smitten w the beauty of the postmaster's 14-year-old daughter; the narrator kisses her, in a moment that he recalls with pleasure for the rest of his life but which seems to us creepy and perhaps even abusive - and that should be a hint about the true character of this seemingly lovely and charming young woman. On a later visit, the much-remembered daughter is absent and the narrator asks the postmaster how she's doing, to which he replies: Who knows? After some drinks he proceeds to tell how the daughter ran away w/ a soldier and despite his visit and entreaties refused to return home. So we get a sense that life with father was maybe not all that pleasant - could he have been abusive? - and that she has a more sinister side to her seemingly youthful and spirited personality - otherwise, her behavior is bizarre even by Russian-fiction standards. In the final visit to the site, the narrator learns that the postmaster has died, and he visits the lonely and dispiriting grave site, learning from the boy who led him there that a woman had recently paid a tearful visit to the site - so there are other, unknown and unexplained elements to the daughter's personality to her story. All told, it's a fine story full of suggestion and innuendo that has the kind of "open" ending - rather than all the knots tied - that was nearly unique in Pushkin's time (the 1820s) and is now - post-Joyce - is a well-established mode for short fiction.

Early Pushkin stories and what they have to say about race and class

Interest piqued by reading a Pushkin story (probably his most famous, Queen of Spades) in an anthology, I've started reading some of the pieces in the Complete Prose Stories ofAlexander Pushkin, an old Norton anthology, edited/translated by Gillad (?) Aitken, and have to admit I was taken aback by the first piece (they're arranged chronologically; all written in the 1820s or early 30s, when AP died), The Moor of Peter the Great; the eponymous Moor is the adopted son of the emperor, and the story follows him from his life at the center of culture and society in the Paris of Louis XIV (a century previous) and his return to Russia, where father/mentor/protector tries to arrange a marriage w/ a daughter of the Russian nobility. What's so striking about this story is the frank examination of racism and prejudice that serve to ostracize this handsome and talented young man - including his feelings of social isolation - and the nobility of Emperor/Czar Peter in recognizing the humanity of his son and rising above prejudice, setting an example. The only problem - the story stops dead at one point with a note from Aitken that Pushkin abandoned the story as incomplete. How frustrating! I wish he'd placed that note at the top of the story. Skipping other incomplete pieces and a famous story, The Shot, about which I have previously posted, I read two more of Pushkin's short pieces - The Blizzard, about a complex courtship and a plot that goes awry, which is a good story of its type, although it's a type long since passed over - relying on the most bizarre twists of fortune and fate and coincidence. Another story, The Undertaker (?), is more in the "modern" mode as a study in character and class, showing the local undertaker and his greed and bias against the German population in his neighborhood and ending in a nightmarish dance of death - a foreshadowing of Poe and Lovecraft, perhaps, but also a shrewd social commentary, as Pushkin really begins to establish his voice and his material.

The importance of Pushkin's Queen of Spades and why it's worth reading

American readers, even those like me who are devotees of Russian literature, don't read Alexander Pushkin much any more, probably because his greatest work, Eugene Onegin, is in verse and not so accessible in translation. Count me among the guilty. Yesterday, for the first time, I read his story The Queen of Spades, from the 1820s or so, which is to say about 50 years ahead of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and about 80 ahead of Chekhov, yet we can see in this short short story the foretelling of so many of the themes and modes in modern Russian literature: gambling of course, but also obsession, monomania, intoxication, duplicity, gentleman's clubs, full-dress fomal "balls," courtships of convenience, unmasking, and fate. In essence, the story begins with an all-night card game for high stakes among fellow club members; one of those present declines to gamble though he studiously observes all the action. One of the gambles, as the men recover at dawn  (over champagne) tells of how his grandmother once gambled her life on three cards - the passed her "secret" onto another who did the same. The man listening becomes obsessed with this idea, takes some risky and amoral actions to try to learn the "secret" of the successful betting on three straight drawn cads, and then risks his entire fortune on the three-in-a-row bet. Spades may not be a great story - it lacks the humanity of Chekhov's greatest, for example - but it's full of high drama and powerful, almost cinematic episodes (sneaking into the mansion at night for a supposed liaison, spying on the aged countess as she takes off gown, wig, and makeup, a murder, all-night cad games, a fantastic dream, a jilted lover...) so it's no surprise that this story is best known for its adaptations: it's the basis for a still-popular opera by Tchaikovsky, and still worth reading as a seminal work in Russian and an ambitious story by all measures.

Langston Hughes - Tambourines to Glory

Langston Hughes noted that his 1958 novel, Tambourines to Glory, was meant to be an expose of the corruption of the many of the storefront churches and street corner preachers in Harlem whose sole purpose is to squeeze money from their followers and memberships for the aggrandizement of the founders - w sizable kickbacks to the police and to the downtown mobsters who control everything in Harlem. (The same kind of expose could have been written of produced about places of supposed worship anywhere - and have bee, see for ex the recent doc wild wild country.) what's so striking about Hughes's version is his great humanitarian sympathy even for the women behind the church, the straight-laced and devout
Essie and the cynical and self-interested Laura as well. The novel takes a turn toward the melodramatic at the end, to say the least, but even at the conclusion Hughes is interested in depicting the minds of the characters, giving them depth and dimension - esp Essie who at the end recognizes that in her silence she has been as guilty as Laura in being willing to rip off the naive and trusting worshippers. Essie vows going forward to use the church money to help the community - well and good, but can we trust her to do so esp as she sets up the church as a family enterprise, rife w nepotism? It seems the Hughes's final message is the it's best for the community to help itself, perhaps w aid from a representative government, rather than to depend on the church or other unregulated enterprises to fulfill the responsibilities that should rest w elected officials and representatives.


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Yiyun Li

American author Yiyun Li has become a New Yorker favorite I suspect in large part because of her frighteningly competent resume - if I remember correctly she is a physician who emigrated to the us as an adult and didn't even speak English until her emigration and who now has written novels and memoirs in beautiful and sometimes delightfully quirky contemporary English(see the titles of any of her works or particularly odd phrasings or word choices such as referring to California as one of the younger states - about 170 years young?) so all other would-be writers what's you excuse?- as much as by the quality of her short fiction, but her piece All Will Be Well, in current NYer is the best I've seen from her by far. This excellent story told by an adult writer looking back on a period in her youth when she was "addicted" to solo she and visits one in a really rough neighborhood mainly to hear from the owner a narrative about a lost love from her native Vietnam. The salon narrative is the heart of this story but Li frames it beautifully by suggesting that this like all stories (like the one we're reading in fact) is a duplicity - we lie to each other all the time for various reasons- yet she also regrets her stubborn inability to lie so as to spare her children from fear (she refused to write down that she would be there for her children in the event of nuclear war - unwilling to state that lie); she looks back at these truths and untruths over a span of suffering, suggesting the death of one of her children (the subject of one of her books) with a certain cold light shed on these reflections when she recalls one of her students who scorned literature because the people in books are not "real" - true of course but the student is balking at Tolstoy and Chekhov- the two worst examples she could have summoned! Another part of the frame is that the salon owner pestered the narrator to see if she could get her story of lost love turned into a movie or into a book - which in a sense she did, it's what we're reading, even as Li undercuts the "reality" of all fiction including this one.

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Langston Hughes - Tambourines to Glory

Langston. Hughes's 1958 novel, Tambourines to Glory, is short, funny, thoughtful, easy to read, and highly provocative - in other words it would be a great choice for a college-level intro to literature, American black literature in particular. The main point of discussion and contention would be how to judge the behavior and accomplishments of the 2 women, Essie and Lauren, who scheme to begin a Harlem street church simply and in order to raise a lot of cash to lift them out of poverty. They succeed, but at what cost? The most sympathetic, to them, interpretation is that even tho they set up the church for cynical reasons they do manage to succeed in bringing peace and a sense of salvation to many of the people who attend. Additionally, they are of course victims of the racism and Jim Crow "laws" in place (setting is late 1940s) and they're no worse in behavior than the mysterious white man from downtown who gets a piece of all of the Harlem action. On the other hand: their scheme is no better than a numbers game or a Ponzi scheme to lift money from those can least afford to give donations. Laura in particular uses the money collected for her own aggrandizement- which in a way makes the devout Essie even worse: tho she purport to wanting to use the $ To help others, including her daughter, she willfully turns a blind eye to the source of her sudden wealth and to the cynicism of those in on the scheme, or scam. Clearly Hughes has much affection for his characters (and his people), but he is neither condescending nor schematic in his depiction of these women and their world

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A Harlem Renaissance novel, today largely forgotten, from Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes is best known for his poetry, and w/ good reason as he was one of the foundational poets of the Harlem Renaissance, but he wrote in many genres, including fiction and nonfiction, though I think his novels are less well known today. Friend Frank P. recommended to me one I'd never even heard of, Tambourines to Glory (1958 - so definitely one of the last pieces Hughes wrote; he died in the early 60s), and I'm finding the novel thoughtful, funny, and with a bit of an edge as well. In essence, the plot of this short novel involves two women, Essie and Laura, both rooming in a Harlem apartment complex known as the Rabbit Warren or just the Rabbit (the apartments have, illegally, been chopped up into a maze of single-room rental units) in what seems to be the late 1940s. Both women are living on welfare. Laura is the younger, and is far more attractive and leads a louche life - with many boyfriends and man-friends in and out of her apartment at all hours and with a serious problem with alcohol and gambling; Essie is older, less attractive, quite overweight, missing her adult daughter who lives in Va., and a devout Christian. Commiserating about their poverty one night, Laura gets the bright idea that they could hold impromptu revival meetings on a Harlem street corner and pass the hat and rake in a lot of $ - Essie has a beautiful voice for gospel songs, and Laura's a born orator. Their church becomes a big success, but it highlights the differences between the two women: Essie argues to put the earnings back into the church; Laura wants to spend it all on drink and on the #s. The novel depends heavily on dialog, and we can see Hughes's dramatic ability there - this novel could easily be adapted for stage; the repartee is at times hilarious and always revealing about the personalities of the women. It's particularly important that Hughes does not condescend to these women, not to his readership: Many will find the two women, especially Laura to be morally repulsive - living off welfare, cynically preying on the faith of others, using the church collections for their own benefit - yet also quite lovable and sympathetic, as they're warm-hearted, loyal to each other, funny, and passionate. Though the novel focuses exclusively on the two protagonists, the first 1/3 of the novel sets up some potential plot developments, including a likely rivalry w/ a much larger and well-established Harlem church, whose pastor has his own ethical baggage to carry.

What works and what doesn't in Jonathan Lethem's NYer story

Over the years Jonathan Lethem has proved to be an accessible author who's really good at establishing a scene and mood (see Motherless Brooklyn) and at drawing on childhood memories and adolescent interests and passions (comic-book heroes, e.g.). I don't know hos work well enough to comment in any detail on his novels, but it does seem to me that he's better at establishing a premise than in building a traditional narrative arc, and that's pretty much what we see in his story in the current (OK, last week's) New Yorker, The Starlet Apartments. the story starts of well: He establishes the two main characters, the narrator (Sandy) and his college (or grad school?) buddy; they're both 3 years out of Yale, and the narrator is foundering, not really able to establish himself as a writer, when his friend invotes him out to LA where they can share an apartment and write scripts (and drink a lot and do lines of cocaine). Over the first part of the story, Lethem gives us a great sense of how these two guys set up meetings with producers and others trying to sell half-baked ideas and meeting w/ lots of encouragement but no $, a highly typical scenario. Eventually, he tells us that his friend will go on to a great career buying cheap and turning profits, and we can't help but think of Weinstein, though Weinstein was always rough around the edges and this guy is more hip and more East Coast establishment (Yale, qv). Setting well established, the plot kicks in when narrator's sister, Maddy, just out of college, flies wet to maybe live w/ these guys while establishing her own career; as we surmise from step one, the friend seduces Maddy and they disappear for a few days, which sends brother Sandy into a tailspin. Is he truly worried about her? Or just jealous? And jealous of whom? Eventually he finds her - they'd been shacked up on a vacant apartment in the same eponymous complex where the guys are renting - and she insists that he take her to LAX so she can fly home. Was she injured, abused, held captive? - she doesn't say, and to me that's the heart of the story and it just doesn't work to have her depart w/out any explanation or confrontation. It's in a sense a darker and displaced version of Jules and Jim, but with too much left unsaid and unexamined. 

Miyazawa

Editor and translator John Bester, in his intro to Kenji Miyazawa's once and forever tales notes that those slight unusual moments of topical detail add to the sense of strangeness that we sense throughout the collection: the voice of a child calling out in the night from a passing train, the straw cape worn by an old man who lives in the forest, the child's bright red blanket that covers him as he's buried in the snow, the rag or towel left on the forest floor that somehow draws the attention of a herd of deer - most of these details have no direct bearing on the plot but their inclusion draws us to the stories and serves as a guidepost if we try to "illustrate" these stories in our minds - a process that they seem to invite. I have no idea what sequence Bester followed in arranging these tales, but it seems to me that a few near the end of the collection are less gruesome and frightening than most of the others,e.g.,Kenju's Woods tells of a young man w some kind of mental retardation who is cruelly teased when he's young in particular for the seeming folly of planting a field w trees - but years later the trees become a park and play area for children and the villagers name the park for Kenju - tho in keeping w KM's strangeness Ken just dies years before this recognition (in almost all contemporary children's stories the narrative would lead to a big celebration for a beaming kenju.) other stories near the end are in the mode of how did birds get their color or why is one of the stars named for the nighthawk sweet pieces but without the originality and ominous notes of the best in the collection.
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Why Miyazawa's tales are literary fiction

At some point the Kenji Miyazawa "tales" blend into one anoher, and this may be because we are not meant to read straight through a collection (Once and Forever, NYRB publisher) as I'm doing; rather, we should maybe take them one at a time over a period of weeks. That said, there's a similarity of tone and ethos across the collection, as you might expect. Two I read last night give a sense of that: one in which a rat is "ungrateful" and asks for, or demands, "reparations" from other animals every time something goes wrong; the rat ends up in a trap, and there's a creepy sense at the end that the person who trapped the rat will keep him enslaved (not as a pet - maybe something worse). In another story, a young rabbit saves a bird from drowning and the birds reward him w/ a valuable "fire stone"; the rabbit becomes ridiculously cocky now that he has the stone and begins ordering other animals around - he's the "general" and he appoints them all to subsidiary military ranks. Graduallly, the stone loses its luster and at the end the young rabbit's eyes have turned stone-like and he's blind. You can see how these stories, miniature moral or ethical lessons (be nice!), are frightening, even ghastly, and not suitable for young children. Which brings up the question: What is Miyazawa's intended readership? The tales may seem a little too simplistic to be recognized as literary fiction (the library copy I have has been labeled "fantasy"), but they're too weird and unsettling for children's literature (and I know that not all children's literature is sunny and optimistic, but these stories are usually ghastly). This lack of clear genre context may in part explain why it took nearly a century for English translations and why Miyazawa is seldom mentioned among the great Japanese writers of the 20th century. To the extent that one of the goals of literature is to "make it new" and to give readers access to the "consciousness of another," these tales should be high on the list - and it's definitely worth anyone's time to read some, if not all, of the stories in this collection.

Closer to Lovecraft than the Doctor Seuss: Miyazawa's tales

Further thoughts as to why Kenji Miyazawa's Once and Forever tales (NYRB press) from the 1920s-30s are a long way from Disney and Doctor Seuss, i.e., not meant for children: One of the tales is about three animals - a slug, a raccoon, and I forget the 3rd, maybe an insect of some sort? - who are in "school" together as youngsters and compete to be the best in the class - so much so that the raccoon even cheats on a test! Is this to be a cautionary tale, encouraging children to help one another rather than compete w/ one another, each of us is "special" in our own way, etc.? Of course not! We watch as the three of them enter adulthood and in each case the animal/insect imbibes something that leads to the complete disintegration of his body (the slug steps on salt, for example). Yech, yikes! Another story, The Red Blanket, is about a young boy who gets lost in a blizzard and gets completely buried in snow; some ghostlike form tells him to just relax, the snow will keep him warm. After the blizzard he wakes up and seems to be OK, but this would be a terrifying story for a child - aside from giving the child bad survival advice. And there are others - but the upshot is that every story here is unsettling and frightening - far closer to Lovecraft, but in a sly way because most begin with a seemingly benevolent and moralistic premise. I don't know if these stories/tales are really great, but they're really unusual and they give us a glimpse into the mind of a writer whose style and sensibility is sui generis.

A look at one of the strange tales by Miyazawa

It's hard to grasp or to give a sense of how odd the stories are in Kwnji Miyazawa's Once and Forever (NYRB 2018, based on 1993 translations - stories written in the 1920s/30s and most of them unpublished in KM's lifetime); many involve the supernatural, most involve communications between humans and animals, none is realistic in any conventional sense. As noted yesterday, many seem to begin as children's stories, involving for example talking birds or bears, but almost all lead to a brutal or gruesome ending, unsuitable for young children to say the least. One example, and one of the more accessible stories in the collection, is the Restaurant of Many Orders, in which two young men are hiking in the mountains, on a hunting expedition, and they get separated from their mountain guide and soon lost - but then surprisingly they come upon a restaurant with the eponymous name. They enter and walk through many corridors to enter the restaurant proper, and each corridor contains a placard with instructions, such as take off your boots and jacket, leave your guns here, etc. - and toward the end, as the men become puzzled, the commands are to rub some cream on all their exposed skin and the next one is to sprinkle yourself with salt and pepper - at which point the two men recognize that they are being prepared as the "order" of the day - so they take off. They find their guide, who leads them back home, where they try to wash off the salt, pepper, and cream (a better translation might be "butter") and forever after their skin is wrinkled. What do we make of this story? In a way, it's the journey of a lifetime; in another way, it's payback for the brutality of hunting for sport; and in another way perhaps it's just creepy and nightmarish tale, intended to upset and disturb. A few of the stories are less horrific, including one in which a local monarch prepares for the visit of the Buddha and in which a child provides the gift that the Buddha would most desire, a spray of flowering lilies - despite the oddness of the king's retainer arguing with the child over the price he's willing to pay for the flowers, this story is probably the least unsettling of the collection. Not all succeed - notably one that ends with the sophomoric trope "it was all a dream" - but most of these tales are captivating in their oddity.

The strange tales of the neglected writer Kenji Miyazawa

Another classic from the great NYRB publishing house brings out from obscurity (to most Western readers, anyway) the work of Kenji Miyazwa, a Japanese writer who died in his 30s and whose work - from roughly 1920-1932 - was for the most part unpublished in his lifetime. The NYRB collection - called Once and Forever - from a 1993 translation by [will look up name] John Bester - brings together about 20 short stories, or tales if you will, and has strangely by my local library been classified as Fantasy. Well, these stories are not in the tradition of realism, by any means, but I don't think we'd call Borges or Kafka writers of " fantasy." Each of the stories, at least through the first 1/3 of the collection, involves communication w/ animals and sometimes w/ spirits, and honestly this type of writing rarely appeals to me - but Miyazawa brings much more to us. First of all, his writing is vivid and sharply depicts the strange landscapes, often forests, in which his tales unfold. They're generally, maybe always, about human interaction with the animals: a hunter confronts a bear in the forest, a man accidentally leaves a sweat rag on the forest floor and returns to the site to find a circle of deer pondering this to them strange relic, a man entices an elephant to perform tasks for him and gradually diminishes the amount of feed he is giving the elephant until the elephant rebels. These short descriptions, though, miss the essence of Miyazawa's work, which always has a creep and threatening tone. As I read each story I tried to picture how the stories might be illustrated, which is not difficult as the writing is quite pictorial (and the brief intro in this edition notes that some of his work has been adapted to anime) - but each time I though the story might make a great illustrated children's book I was brought up short by the conclusion to the stories, often involving gruesome death and despair, so, no, these are not stories for children but they might translate well for adolescents. Overall, to this point, I do not see an overall theme to these collected tales other than that there are perhaps many points of intersection between human and animal life yet to explore these intersections, to cross the boundary and expect animals to behave in a human-like manner will inevitably lead to tragedy or catastrophe. As Wittgenstein famously put it: If lions could speak, we wouldn't understand them.