Jean-Christophe Valtat’s “03”
In Jean-Christophe Valtat’s dazzling English-language debut, 03, a lyric from The Smiths’ Nowhere Fast sums up the narrator’s attitude toward feelings: “And if the day came when I felt a natural emotion / I’d get such a shock I’d probably lie / in the middle of the street and die.” This belief that emotions, ones worth having anyway, are the result of conscious decisions, “long and involved tactical maneuvers,” underpins his tortured yet exquisitely expressed subjectivity—where the reader is deliciously mired for the brief, spellbinding duration of this single-paragraph novella, in which a man remembers his seventeen-year-old self’s obsession with a developmentally-disabled girl. Read the rest @ Words Without Borders.
The Archaeologist
I can’t recall exactly when “overshare” entered our lexicon. It was voted Webster’s New World Dictionary’s spoken word of the year in 2008, but it was an Urban Dictionary word of the day back in 2005. One thing is obvious: over the past few years, the prevailing usage has narrowed to almost exclusively connote the behavior of a woman writer who, online or in print, exposes details of her personal life deemed by many as inappropriate fodder, either because the experiences described are excruciatingly private and embarrassing or because they’re so mundane that the only reasonable response is an eye-rolling shrug. Or, indeed, both. Read the rest @ The Second Pass.
“The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris” by Leïla Marouane
As first lines go, that of Leïla Marouane’s second novel and debut in English, The Abductor (2000, translated by Felicity McNab), is a masterpiece of concision and intrigue: “My father lay helpless on the sofa while my mother was being joined to Youssef Allouchi in lawful wedlock.” Why, we wonder, is this man helpless while the mother of his children is being joined—the passive construction implying a lack of agency on her part—to another man, especially since “the sofa” conjures a family home? And what’s with the antiquated phrase “lawful wedlock” when “marriage” could presumably suffice? Read the rest @ Words Without Borders
Martin Page’s The Discreet Pleasures of Rejection
“I need a medical certificate saying that I’m alive so that they can turn the electricity back on at my place. It’s a long story.”
So entreats Virgil, the hero of Martin Page’s sweetly amusing novel The Discreet Pleasures of Rejection, of his long-suffering shrink. Virgil is a navel-gazing thirty-one-year-old who lives in Paris, works as an advertising copywriter, and always dresses in corduroys, check shirts and V-necked sweaters. (One vividly pictures a nerdier Louis Garrel.) Read the rest @ Words Without Borders.
Purge by Sofi Oksanen
Aliide Truu, the warped murderess and tragic victim at the center of Sofi Oksansen’s astoundingly ambitious novel Purge, is an elderly woman when we meet her in the opening chapter. Living alone in the Estonian countryside in 1992, she has recently witnessed her nation’s liberation from Soviet rule, and is dealing with the challenges of life in a “dying village,” where everyone is moving away, no one comes to visit, and the day is interrupted only by hooligans throwing stones at the window. But a further repercussion of the USSR’s dramatic collapse—the burgeoning power of the Russian Mafia and its deadly facilitation of sex trafficking—is about to come crashing on her doorstep. Read the rest @ Words Without Borders.
The Patience Stone by Atiq Rahimi
In Afghanistan—where, eight years after the toppling of the Taliban by US and allied troops, women are still routinely arrested and jailed for “running away” or for adultery, where current law does not recognize the crime of rape, and where 70 to 80 per cent of marriages are forced—any woman who dares to speak out or attempts to affect change incurs at best abuse and threats, at worse death. “When you are outspoken and involved in political and social life you are bound to be the victim of attacks,” according to Fauwzia Kufi, a member of parliament quoted in a new report from Human Rights Watch. “Look at the assassinations—a very high proportion are women.” Read the rest @ Words Without Borders.
November 19, 2009 at 12:00pm
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A Future Always Pure and Perfect and Remote
In 1876, a precocious fourteen year old named Edith Newbold Jones read George Eliot’s proto-Zionist masterpiece, Daniel Deronda, and roundly dismissed the character of Mirah Lapidoth, the young singer who defeats her shiksa rival/foil, the tempestuous Gwendolen, to marry the eponymous Daniel: “I don’t care for [those] pieces of faultlessness, like the good girls of such extravagant saintliness in Sunday School books,” Jones complained in a letter to her governess. “Mirah is of that type—like diluted rose water.” Read the rest @ The Rumpus.
October 19, 2009 at 12:48am
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The Goth Side of a Realist Master
In Being Human, the ne plus ultra of the now countless occult-themed TV shows glutting our airwaves, anyone can achieve vampiric immortality by imbibing a vampire’s blood at the precise moment of death. (“Let her drink from you!” one “supernatural” memorably begs of another as they stand over the hemorrhaging near-corpse of a mortal friend.) Read the rest @ The Second Pass.
September 30, 2009 at 3:05pm
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Review of The German Mujahid by Boualem Sansal
It’s common knowledge that, at the end of WWII, many German war criminals fled from justice via “ratlines” to South American countries. Less notorious, though, are the Nazis who, like the title character of Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal’s excoriating new novel, The German Mujahid, found permanent refuge in Arab countries such as Egypt, Syria and Algeria. Read the rest @ Words Without Borders.
Review of The Most Beautiful Book in the World by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt
Contemporary French literature outclasses all other nationalities when it comes to melding the popular and the profound, as epitomized by Annie Ernaux’s addictively cerebral TMI or Amélie Nothomb’s highbrow whimsy. Now Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt—a novelist and playwright best known outside of Europe for his novella Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran, which became a movie starring Omar Sharif—has written an exhilarating short story collection that fits squarely into this tradition. Read the rest @ Words Without Borders.
Little Girls Get Bigger Every Day
Gossip Girl’s running homage to the 1782 masterpiece Les Liaisons Dangereuses — or, more accurately, to the Upper East Side-set movie adaptation Cruel Intentions — is one of the show’s less guilty pleasures. The high school characters’ acumen in the finer points of sexual weaponry puts a genuinely subversive spin on their underage bed-hopping, drug-taking and old-money-fueled decadence. Read the rest @ The Second Pass.
Review of A Girl Made of Dust by Nathalie Abi-Ezi
Writing literary fiction with a child’s point-of-view is not a job for the faint-hearted; to construct a compelling narrative with only a linguistically-limited and innocent voice as a conduit is a daunting challenge, one which few novelists have taken up and still fewer pulled off successfully. Read the rest @ Words Without Borders.
February 19, 2008 at 12:31pm
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Brother’s Keeper
When he was fifteen, Philippe Grimbert was told by a cousin that he was Jewish, not Catholic, that he had a half-brother who died before he was born, and that his parents’ marriage was founded upon tragedy—the burden of which would ultimately lead to their suicide. Forty years later, in 2003, the psychoanalyst, who lives outside Paris, began work on an autobiographical novel about these revelations, hoping to assuage his own grief and pay homage to his half-brother, who he discovered had died at Auschwitz. Read the rest @ Tablet.
Lost Person: Gamel Woolsey
The poet and novelist Gamel Woolsey (1895–1968) was cursed with that shadowy defining quality of the greatest artists: the inability to coax life into satisfying her desires. Her ambitions for creative (to say nothing of romantic) fulfillment were continually, and almost comically, thwarted by fortune, and only through a bit of posthumous luck, and the efforts of friends who outlived her, do we know about the South Carolina-born writer at all. Read the rest @ Lost Magazine.
Great Pretenders
On December 2nd, 1980, Romain Gary lay down in his Paris apartment, a synagogue-size menorah at the foot of the bed, and put a .38 caliber Smith and Wesson in his mouth. Seconds later, the life of one of France’s most celebrated and prolific novelists—a decorated war hero, globe-trotting diplomat, and notorious lothario—was over. But this was more than suicide: It was the final act of mythmaking from a man preoccupied, above all, with manipulating the people and events in his life almost as deftly as those in his books. Read the rest @ Tablet.
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