1. A Goofy State of Mind.

Dear Peggy: The letter I am about to write you is a monstrous impertinence. This is fair warning; you should now tear it up. It is, I think, insolent enough to give an opinion when asked for it; it is the outside limit to render judgments when no one desired them, and as a result of reading a letter not addressed to you… So. You better tear it up.

If you are still with me, I wish to tell you that, from the absorbing letter you wrote Mother (and which she showed me because you mentioned my book: always encourage authors) I have decided you are in a goofy state of mind.

Sometime around the year 1949, the eminent war correspondent and novelist Martha Gellhorn wrote the above letter from her home in Cuernavaca, Mexico to an Episcopalian clergyman’s wife living in the small town of Alma, Michigan.

Both women were devoted writers of vivid missives. Gellhorn’s pen pals included Eleanor Roosevelt, the editor Maxwell Perkins, H.G. Wells, her husband (later, ex-) Ernest Hemingway, and other luminaries. The housewife whom she was addressing, Peggy Schutze, nee Harvey, a native Kansan of pioneer stock, wrote mostly to her mother and sister. They came to know one another because Peggy (a.k.a. Nani Peg, my maternal grandmother) was a member of the St Louis League of Women Voters, which was run by Martha’s mother Edna. Both Martha and Peggy were imaginatively terrible cooks and tore through stacks of paperback thrillers like addicts, but other than that they seemed to have little in common.

My Uncle Jim found the stack of Gellhorn letters – typewritten on paper translucent as skin shards – when my grandmother died ten years ago. I was interested in them then (like everyone, awfully: “Hemingway’s wife?!”), but I only became truly obsessed with them recently. My first novel had just come out to very little fanfare, I was pregnant with my first child, and part of me was worried I had seen the beginning and end of my writing life. I hoped that if I studied Martha, the writer who wanted to be a mother, and Peggy, the mother who wanted to be a writer, some golden mean would eventually present itself.

2. A Monstrous Impertinence.

This state of mind might be desirable if you were a novelist, dreaming up the characters and plot for a new novel. This novel would be written from the point of view of the woman: the woman would describe herself for the reader, declaring her character as subservient and uncertain, wedded to a man (seen through her eyes) who combined the outstanding features of Rudolph Valentino – irresistible to all women – with the personal complexes of Don Juan Tenorio – to whom all woman were irresistible – with the moral passions and mental fierceness of Martin Luther. Our heroine, a mouse in her own eyes, is married to this paragon, which is somewhat like being married to Vesuvius in eruption, and she is at once awed, adoring, and terrified. She is never certain for a moment of this amazing figure, her husband; by contamination, she attributes the most exotic talents and knowledges to her children, since they have inherited the father’s magic. And she counts herself for nothing…

Martha Gellhorn spent the early 1930s in Paris, cutting her teeth as a foreign correspondent, having a torrid affair with the married French journalist Bertrand de Jouvenel, and generally courting scandal and adventure. From there she’d gone on to cover the Spanish Civil War, marry Ernest Hemingway, live in Cuba, and become one of the few female journalists to report on WWII. (She covered D Day by sneaking on to a hospital ship and illicitly crossing over to France, losing her military credentials as a result.) Her journalism tended towards a particularly empathetic form of reportage; her pieces describe the lives of ordinary people affected by war, often ending on an editorial moment of strong anti-war sentiment. By the late forties she’d published six books and divorced Hemingway.

Following the publication of her well-received (and totally heartbreaking) war novel, The Wine of Astonishment (later republished as Point of No Return), and a brief, frustrating period of time spent in Washington DC during the height of McCarthyism, Gellhorn fled to Mexico. She described her home in the mountain resort of Cuernavaca as “a small white house in a small walled garden, set among high soft trees. Beyond the trees is a circle of blue mountains, the loveliest I know. This is a valley where nothing happens, where people simply live, where there is sun, and the slow peacefulness of day following day.” She often said that Cuernavaca was the place she spent the happiest four years of her life; she was in love with the landscape and the locals, she felt happy and strong living alone after her difficult marriage to Hemingway. She was supporting herself by selling what she termed “bilgers,” popular stories about titled English ladies and Italian gigolos, or naïve young American women visiting Europe, to Good Housekeeping and the Saturday Evening Post. In a letter to a friend, she wrote, “I’m all right again. I know who I am… Here, where I am really alone, I am not lonely. Whereas in the US, I feel the whole time that something is desperately the matter with me.”

She was also forty, single, and had decided she wanted a child. She wrote, “It’s what one needs: someone, or several, who can take all the love one is able to give, as a natural and untroublesome gift.” A few years earlier she had written an ex-lover, “I want a child. I will carry it on my back in a sealskin papoose and feed it chocolate milkshakes and tell it fine jokes and work for it and in the end give it a hunk of money, like a bouquet of autumn leaves, and set it free. I have to have something, being still (I presume) human…”

In February of 1949, she wrote to my grandmother. Martha mentions in one of the letters that she hasn’t been to Europe in two years, and that she is “completely hag ridden” preparing to leave her house in order to go “gallivanting around [Italy] in search of an idea or two, and the chance for making an honest dime.” What she doesn’t say is that the main purpose of her trip to Italy was to adopt a war orphan.  As my grandmother squirmed under her mantle of domesticity, Martha was seeking a child of her own.

I don’t have any copies of my grandmother’s responses to Gellhorn or the “absorbing letter” that started it all, but my uncles and mother remember her letters as well-written fits of whimsy. My Uncle Bill emails me, “Her Christmas letters were in an ‘Erma Bombeck’ vein which I found highly inappropriate,” especially, he notes, when he was a teenager. As my mother puts it, “she used to take incidents from life and theorize about them and slightly fictionalize them to coax out entertaining tales.” Great for a novelist, but a liability in a letter-writer, particularly when the letter-writer is your mother, and the letter-subject, you.

My grandmother was, as Gellhorn immediately nosed out, a repressed writer. When my grandparents met in 1935 they were both journalism students at the University of Kansas. My grandmother seems to have had lots of dates, and no wonder. Peggy Harvey was charming, bright, and lovely (in a well-coiffed college-era photograph she recalls Judy Garland in Meet Me in St Louis), though in a letter to her mother and sister she attributes her success with the college boys entirely to a new girdle. She soon settled on the tall, good-looking, serious Bill Schutze, and in 1936 they eloped. When Peggy and Bill were first married, they lived in a New Deal housing project in St. Louis, spending heady nights drinking cheap wine with other idealistic young Democrats, including the drama critic and playwright William Inge. Peggy worked for a radio station, writing radio plays and fiction on the side. It might not have been Gellhorn’s glamorous Parisian romp, but it was its own kind of urban excitement.

By the time of the Gellhorn letters, Peggy was in her mid-thirties, with three small boys (my mother would come along later). Five or six years after they’d married, my grandfather had found religion and decided to become an Episcopalian minister, which is how they’d ended up in Alma. From my journalist Uncle Jim: “I have to imagine their sojourn in boondocks Michigan was a tough price for their religious convictions. I think it was an especially tough price for my mother to pay for my father’s convictions.”

Fast-forward to the late forties. More from Uncle Jim:

My father was in his mid-30s, a tall rail-thin cleric with a hawk’s beak and a smile never quite certain, rector of the only Episcopal church in Alma… My mother was sort of the local mad woman of Chaillot, locked away in a tower in the tottering castle next to the church banging away at an ancient portable typewriter and emitting blood-curdling whoops and hollers whenever she thought she had written something especially funny or blood-curdling. She was very bright, truly eccentric and certainly had never bargained for the life of a middle western small town preacher’s wife loaded up with brats, scoured by the shrewdly appraising eyes of parishioners whenever she left the house.

I’ve always loved my uncles’ descriptions of their childhood. They claim to have been deposited outside on the stoop every morning like “empty milk bottles” and allowed to roam free all day while my grandmother wrote. (Things were, I gather, a little less loosey-goosey by the time my mother came along.) Peggy worked on letters and journals and scraps of fiction; as a college student in Kansas she had written a breezy gossip column for the LaBette County newspaper under the name “Betty LaBette.”  Jim reports that when he was young she presented book reviews to local clubs and wrote for an Episcopalian newspaper: “I only remember that when we were small, the penalty for interrupting her at her writing was often a wildly unsettling outburst, even if one were bleeding, especially if one were bleeding.”

Meanwhile, Martha Gellhorn was clattering away at her own portable typewriter in her paradise of Mexico, uninterrupted unless she wanted to be.

3. Pull Your Socks Up.

You and I, let us assume, are neither one of us complete dopes: we therefore know that even in a joke your husband [doesn’t] give a damn about pictures on dust jackets; that women do not crowd the “confessional” for love of the confessor; that, even as metaphor, “patting fannies” won’t do. But these themes recur, in the extremely witty and well-written letter of an extremely witty and intelligent woman. And they give me, an old hand at peering at people, pause… I like you. I think you have a great deal of stuff. I think you are being a fool, to the point of goofiness. I think you better pull up your socks and stop inventing things. Life is bad enough without invention of any sort. You’ve got a good young man who loves you, and three children. Leave those complications to novelists, who take their whole lives out in invention, because they haven’t much real life to handle… I can only plead affection for you, and a sort of anxiety. As if I saw someone trying to fly, without adequate training hours, on the grounds that it would be interesting to see what happened.

In an undated excerpt of my grandmother’s writing, she is renumerating what she loved about “keen old” St. Louis when they lived there in the early days of their marriage, and describes a visit – perhaps their first meeting – with Martha. At this point they had only one child, my Uncle Bill (“Billy”), and my grandfather (“Bill”) had not yet gone to seminary.
My grandmother writes:

One of my favorite activities has been politics and League of Women Voter stuff, this past year, and Bill greatly disliked both… His particular gripe was against Mrs. George Gellhorn [Edna, Martha’s mother], a perfectly swell woman who was president of the League, and despite being the usual clubwomanly matron type, had a healthy and youthful interest in honest-to-goodness down-to-earth politics in our precinct and helped us beat the local gang boss. Mrs. G. gave rather sumptuous old fashioned dinners for greatly mixed up groups of people and sometimes included us. Bill said all the other others were out-of-the-world college professors and theorists, and felt a trifle overwhelmed by Mrs. G because she was such a dominatin’ woman. So the other day, when her daughter was coming to call, Bill made elaborate arrangements to duck out and go swimming at the Y. He planned to take Billy with him, taking for granted that no Schutze man would wish to spend Saturday afternoon with a member of that rampant feminist family… just as the two boys were ready to make their getaway, there was a knock at the door and Bill, being nearest, answered. He opened the door and discovered on the threshold, a very tall and good looking blonde, about our age, with flashing eyes and instant appreciation of meeting a man in St. Louis in these manless times. Miss G. was here to discover what people in neighborhoods like ours felt about international affairs, to include in an article her boss was making her write for Colliers on middlewestern viewpoint in general. Bill suddenly discovered that he had a great of knowledge about all our neighbors, about politics, international affairs, and just anything this gal wanted to know. He seated himself in the master-chair and did not stir therefrom all afternoon.

I’d assume Martha didn’t find her occasional visits to St Louis quite as enthralling as my grandmother did. Gellhorn biographer Caroline Moorehead describes one such visit thus: “Edna’s many friends and acquaintances dropped in, and Martha sat watching their ‘round shapeless pudgy non faces’ with disdain, observing that these ‘nice’ people were made of ‘Wilton carpeting, cold cream, ice cream, cotton wool, everything bland and soft.’” It’s not as if she came to Missouri to steal any ministers’ hearts.

And yet, as Martha points out, Peggy seemed to assign to her husband “the outstanding features of Rudolph Valentino” and “the personal complexes of Don Juan Tenorio.” It’s an attitude that baffled even Peggy’s own family. Uncle Jim recalls her saying that, “Of course, all clergymen were attractive to women in the church, and of course, all clergy wives have to take precautions for that reason. I was probably 10 or 11. I remember chalking that remark up to my mother being nuts. I always saw my father pretty much as a walking icicle. I didn’t want to hear about my parents’ sex lives. And you could never tell which part of what my mother said was some strange refraction of reality or simple delusion. But they were in their mid-30s in a place and climate where repression was almost a sport. Who the hell knows?”

Or it could be that Peggy was, as Martha assumed, “terrifyingly busy at invention.” Somehow she ended up as one of those people who never quite lived in her own proper context, among people who might have appreciated her zany wit, and instead found herself in a life were she was perpetually out-of-step with what was expected of her as a small-town clergy wife. Martha wrote that when living in the US she had the feeling that something was “desperately the matter” with her – so she took off and lived abroad. Peggy didn’t have this option. She had to make life interesting somehow.

Martha writes:

Personally, I get bored spitless as soon as folks cause me trouble (trouble being, in this instance, doubt.) I was made jealous once in my life and it was a jealousy to end all jealousies and the whole performance was done with drums and cymbals and enough to make the roof fall in. A really competent professional did the job, Miss Dietrich to wit, and I had cause as few women ever do. All that was lacking were neon lights to blazon the cause over the sky of Berlin. My immediate reaction, after the first shock of knowing I was jealous, was black rage. I got in a broken down airplane and left, like that, fast as winking. I also told the guy to pick up his chips and shove, as far as I was concerned: it didn’t make me feel more loving to have uncertainty introduced. It made me sore as hell, and secondly it made me think he wasn’t worth my time, and thirdly it bored me, oh but bored me in a very big way. Finally, no doubt as revenge, I took him back and treated him carefully to such a dose of indifference as would equal the score (in heaven) between my jealousy and his damaged vanity. But you see, I do not operate on a basis of doubt. I hate it… What interests me is how much one can give, how much one can get; but on the foundation of the idea that no one will ever tire of this pursuit and that one is utterly safe, in the heart.

The incident to which she refers happened in late 1945 or early 1946. She had just divorced Hemingway. (Tellingly, she wrote to my grandmother, “If marriage were usually as enthralling as you find it, more people would stick to it. My own experience with said state was comparable to living in Sing-Sing, which a touch of the Iron Maiden of Nurnberg thrown it.” Um, ouch.) Shaken from the marriage’s messy end and fresh from covering the disturbing Nuremberg trial, Gellhorn went to Berlin where her new lover, the handsome young Commander James Gavin, was stationed. According to biographer Caroline Moorehead, “Marlene Dietrich, who had apparently long had her eye on [Gavin], arrived in Berlin [as a USO performer] and was ‘sick with rage’ to find Martha installed as his mistress.” Martha spent her days palling around with other foreign correspondents, including CBS correspondent Charles Collingwood, and Dietrich told Gavin that Martha and Collingwood were in love. As revenge, Gavin told Martha he was going out for a walk and disappeared, spending the night with Dietrich. “Jealousy was not an emotion Martha had experienced before. But, recognizing the ‘disgusting, cheap, ugly’ sensation that now overcame her, she left Berlin for Paris, declaring that no relationship with a man was ever going to work for her and that henceforth she would stick to friendship.”

Martha described her reaction when she realized her lover had gone to bed with Dietrich: “I stayed in that room weeping as I really did not believe I ever could or would again… and every night since it has come back to me the same way, like a pain that hurts too much.” As she intimated in the letter to my grandmother, she took off for England. When Gavin followed her, she relented and took him briefly back, but their lives were headed in separate directions and they soon split for good.

In March of 1946, Martha was covering the Japanese surrender in Indonesia, but she was already writing to a friend that what she really wanted “was a little white house, with a picket fence around it and some toddlers.” While my grandmother was imagining inklings of drama, her accomplished epistler was weaving her own rosy-viewed, fiction-tinged story about what life as a mother would be like. They were both, I suspect, fairly busy at invention.

4. A Fine Cast of Characters.

See? If you want to write a book, you have started a fine cast of characters. But, presumably, you are not writing books, and are living. And on that basis, your cast of characters won’t stand; and to a novelist, you are (terrifyingly) busy at inventing complication…

Anyhow, you’re not average (since we take “average” to be an ugly word) and you’ve nothing to worry about (and certainly you know it) and if you like to keep life intense by believing it to be uncertain, go ahead. It all ends up the same. The point is to be alive, any way you know how. You are. You know.

And here it is, the assumption that we all secretly share (or maybe by “we” I mean only “me”) that there are two paths – writing books, or living; wife/mother, or novelist – and never the twain shall meet.  I always feel like I’ve swallowed a dull coin of dread when I read those lines, but perhaps this is only how things were at that time, or maybe only how they seemed to Gellhorn.

When she was in her twenties, Martha wrote to her French lover Bertrand de Jouvenel: “I know there are two people in me. But the least strong, the least demanding, is the one that attaches itself to another human being. And the part of me which all my life I have shaped and sculpted and trained is the part that can bear no attachment, which has a ruling need of eloignement, which is, really, untamed, undomesticated, unhuman… Since I was a child people have wanted to possess me. No one has.” She was proud of the untamed part of her, but it also caused her pain. Never to sustain a relationship, her greatest successes came from that other life path – the daring war correspondent, the brazen world traveler, the independent-minded novelist.

Even when Gellhorn was married to Hemingway, writing and relationship didn’t quite mesh. Early in their courtship they supported each other while covering the Spanish Civil War and then at home in Cuba, where Hemingway encouraged her to be a more disciplined writer and they spent every morning working on their novels. But once they married her work became a point of contention with Hemingway, who resented her going away to cover World War II while he enjoyed the success of For Whom The Bell Tolls (and spent a lot of time drinking and fishing) back in Cuba. Martha wrote to her mother about the difficulty of being a journalist while still being “a good woman for a man;” meanwhile, Hemingway wrote to his son that Martha was “selfish and ambitious.” By the time he joined her in Europe to cover the war they had engaged in a kind of journalistic competition for the best reporting jobs, and unsurprisingly the much more well-known Hemingway won out. At this point, their marriage was all but over.

Which was essentially fine by her. She later wrote travel essays dismissively casting Hemingway as “the Unwilling Companion,” but for the most part refused to talk about her time with him. Maybe Martha foretold her own future when, 24 years-old and living in Paris, she wrote a letter to her mother saying that only in work “can one have a real sense of life, of the wonder and surprise and joy of being alive.” She was most happy when alone and traveling and writing. In the end, as she wrote, “I want life to be like the movies, brilliant and swift and successful.”

It’s remarkable that this eminent woman took such time and effort to reach out to my grandmother, this “mouse in her mind.” It’s maybe more remarkable that this relative stranger is able to see right to Peggy’s spine. In one of her letters she must have referred to her plan to start a career of her own once her children were in school, because Martha writes in response, “Okay. But I think you better write books instead of doing social service, when the time comes. You’d be wasted on social service.” That young idealist from the St. Louis projects hadn’t entirely disappeared, however, and social service it was. Once my mother was in kindergarten my grandmother went back to college and became a teacher, teaching English at a predominately black school in Pontiac, Michigan where she was the only white person in either the staff or student body – this was in the 1960s. I like this part of her biography. I like the blithe way she is said to have dealt with complicated race relations at a tempestuous time. But still I wonder where that urge to write books went. In Gellhorn’s novella “The Fall and Rise of Mrs. Hapgood” Mrs. Hapgood muses:

Did people ever give up what they really wanted? Those numberless women who had rejected careers as concert pianists in favor of wifehood and never forgot their sacrifice were more apt to be cowards than concert pianists. When you set out, alone, you were up against competition and doubt; you might turn out to be nobody, not a wife nor a concert pianist. You threw away security for hope; but those who were driven by hope did not stop to add and subtract; they could not help themselves; they did what they had to do, undaunted by final results.

You do what you have to do. Peggy always wrote, even when the work went unpublished, even when it would seem impossible that she would have any time for it. She wrote because she wanted to. Did it count as “giving it up” because the writing never led to commercial success or financial gain? Because she didn’t “throw away security for hope?” She might not have had a career as a writer, but she was always a writer.

An undated letter from my grandfather. This must have been in the mid-forties, when he had gone to seminary in Virginia and my grandmother and my Uncle Bill were living with her mother in Wichita. She was pregnant with my Uncle Jim at the time, and they were planning on moving to be with my grandfather soon — so it would have been after the visit from Martha in St Louis, but before the letters.

My grandfather writes, “I found myself telling somebody that [Gellhorn] isn’t the type of person you would think… When you get right down to the facts I don’t know of any reason for defending her gadding about, getting married, and unmarried. There is that which can’t be explained away. I’m not passing judgment but believe this might be explained by her lack of religion. It is true that such people scurry about seeking something but don’t know what it is so they try marriage, Europe, cars, etc.”

There is something telling about his pat explanation of this complicated woman. It’s all so simple in my grandfather’s estimation – Gellhorn’s unsettled life was result of lack of religion – a conclusion which would have probably made Martha laugh. And yet, she was seeking something, some nebulous thing that she herself might have been hard-pressed to define. She wrote in one of the letters to Peggy, after describing some upcoming travels, “This is a way of life too. But, honestly, I believe the sons and husbands are a better way of life.”

Who can say how much she meant this? And can’t there be a way of life that encompasses both?

Neither Martha nor my grandmother was ever able to reach a satisfying conclusion. Martha did adopt her Italian orphan, and wrote about the experience in a 1950 piece for the Saturday Evening Post that my grandmother clipped and kept among her letters. She writes, “the miracle had happened; I was struck by love as if by lightning.” The essay concludes on an uplifting, undeniably rosy note: “I found the little boy, all right, but in the end, the way I see it, he has adopted me.” In the end, however, she did not find that motherhood came naturally to her, and her relationship with her adopted son was always strained. He developed into a troubled adult, a drug addict who floated in and out of jail. From a particularly brutal letter she wrote him when he was a young man: “I have no respect for you, and at present little affection… And I’ve never been able to go on loving people I don’t respect… Honey, you are neither a job nor obligation: you’re a selfish, lazy, pointless young man.” Clearly motherhood was not the unconditional love affair Martha had been expecting.

Peggy Schutze was an adoring and adored wife, mother, and grandmother, and she enjoyed (despite her doubts) a long and happy marriage. When she had a stroke towards the end of her life, my grandfather’s fierce devotion to taking care of her impressed even the nursing home staff. A few months after she died, he followed. At his funeral, my Uncle Jim delivered a eulogy that was a tribute to their enduring love, faithfulness, and loyalty to one another.

As for her writing ambitions, despite the encouragement from Gellhorn, she never produced much more than Christmas letters and stories for us grandchildren. And yet, as Martha wrote, “It all ends up the same.” It is good advice for any writer, I think (or for that matter, any mother):  The point is to be alive.

You are.

You know.

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Could geeking out over a mutually beloved novel surpass even alcohol as the ultimate social ice-breaker? In my three months of solo travel in India, shared literary interests have opened the doors to several new friendships. Quite like the bond formed between travelers on similar journeys, the bond formed around a favorite novel is one of shared immersive experience, usually open to impossibly wide interpretations. When we meet someone else who’s “been there,” there’s a biting urge to know exactly what the other person saw, what scenes remain strongest in her memory, what crucial knowledge or insight was retrieved, and what her experience reveals or changes about our own?

If we try to extend this “traveler’s comparison” to other narrative mediums — television programs, movies, plays — it can often lose some of its steam. Why is this? Relative limitlessness in physical and emotional sensory potential is the privilege and burden of the reader. The book, more so than any other form of narrative media, rings true, more synonymous, with the limitlessness and loneliness to be found while facing the open road or holding a one-way airline ticket to Azerbaijan. In my hypotheses, it is the loneliness quality in particular, physically and intellectually inherent to the act of reading, that lays the bedrock for the powerful social bonding achieved through literature. The limitlessness is critical too, as it promises a bounty of fertile avenues for conversation, but it’s the loneliness of the reader — or, as Rainer Maria Rilke might say, it’s how “two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other” — that assigns to a very special category those friendships formed over books.

Enjoying a good work of literature entails getting lost. Vast and foreign is the journey, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. If the book is good, then the intelligence that guides us through the story will appear many degrees superior to our own. Even in the case of a child narrator like Harper Lee’s Scout Finch, or an impaired one, like Christopher John Francis Boone — the autistic 15-year-old narrator of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident Of the Dog in the Night-Time — the narrative intelligences of our books should leave us feeling a bit pressed intellectually, a bit outmatched, amazed ultimately by the talent of the author who brought such an exquisite intelligence to life. It should be our expectation as readers to be transported into a compellingly drawn, but very foreign and unique reality. Our guide, the local aficionado, attempts to help us understand everything we’re taking in, though we’ll inevitably overlook and misunderstand things from time to time, sometimes big, important things. Reading Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, for me, was an experience similar to that of using one’s brain; I was able to intellectually command perhaps 10 percent of the content at hand. If this was part of Pynchon’s intent for his novel, I commend him for crafting an impressive and very odd reflection of the human condition. Yes, reading is both a richly gratifying and lonely act, at both intellectual and sensory levels, which is why meeting someone with whom we share a favorite book has a way of jump-starting our social batteries, even on our more quiet nights.

Maya Dorn, a 41-year-old copywriter, musician, and avid reader from San Francisco, uses shared literary interests as a litmus test for social compatibility. “Liking the same books is like having the same sense of humor — if you don’t have it in common, it’s going to be hard to bond with someone. You risk ending up with nothing to talk about.” Maya specifically cites Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, as popping up again and again on the fringes of her social circles. Funny she mentioned that title; though I’ve not read The Master and Margarita, it was recommended to me a month prior to meeting Maya, at a café in Goa, where a vacationing Russian day-spa owner — stoned to a point of spare, clear English and silky slow hand gestures — explained to me the premise of Bulgakov’s post-modern “Silver Age” classic. “It’s about different type of prison, a prison of the mind!” The Russian pointed meaningfully at his own head. Sharing such intensely themed, café-table book-talk with a strange Russian proved quite an adventure in itself, with our caffeine jitters occasionally morphing into anachronistic, Cold War-era paranoias of Pynchonesque mirth. He was the first Russian I’d met abroad.

Currently I’m 100 pages out from finishing Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, quite a relevant book for this topic, as so many of Eugenides’ principal characters’ social lives are influenced by literature. Clearly Eugenides sees the unique social potency of books as a given fact, something that can be leveraged as a plausible plot-building tool. College seniors, Madeleine Hanna and Leonard Bankhead, sow the early seeds of the novel’s epic romance while discussing various books in a Semiotics 211 seminar. The two of them quietly ally with one other, colluding intellectually against the opinions of the cerebral and pretentious Thurston Meems. Madeleine and Leonard criticize the gratuitous morbidity of Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, while Thurston extols the text for its originality. A bit later on in the story (spoiler alert) it is nothing other than a brief, semi-drunken bout of book chatter that opens the door for Madeleine’s unlikely one night stand with the villainous Thurston:

‘Which book?’
‘A Lover’s Discourse.’
Thurston squeezed his eyes shut, nodding with pleasure. ‘That’s a great book.’
‘You like it?’ Madeleine said.
‘The thing about that book,’ Thurston said. ‘Is that, ostensibly, it’s a deconstruction of love. It’s supposed to cast a cold eye on the whole romantic enterprise, right? But it reads like a diary.’
‘That’s what my paper’s on!’ Madeleine cried. ‘I deconstructed Barthes’ deconstruction of love.’

In the story-world of The Marriage Plot, literature maintains a power to broker alliances and define enemies. Books are also cited in the mediations of religious and political debate. Books influence career paths, and weigh in profoundly on other critical, life-defining decisions faced by Eugenides’ characters. At one point in the novel, Eugenides finds it perfectly reasonable that nothing other than a positive social experience — three young women bonding at a conference on Victorian literature — would be enough to inspire his protagonist, Madeleine, to pursue a career as a Victorian scholar.

The Marriage Plot isn’t really about books so to speak — I say this despite the title itself being an allusion to the standard plots that recurred throughout the great Victorian-era novels — nevertheless, Eugenides is most comfortable and successful in using the phenomenon of literary community to facilitate settings and move his plots. The success of The Marriage Plot may help illustrate and confirm that the social utility of literature may be by its own right capable of assuring literature’s imminent survival.

As Eugenides’ novel illustrates, the social reach of literature doesn’t end with discussions of stories and novels. Academic texts and non-fiction contribute peripheral influence to communities of all kinds, even those not squarely centered around literature. Avid reader and rock climber, Joe White, of Leeds, England cites Joe Simpson’s Touching the Void as indispensable to his adventurous social circle. “Though I can’t recall ever forming a particular personal bond over just one book,” Joe says, “being heavily involved in climbing and mountaineering fraternities has led me to form many friendships based around that specific activity, and the literature that surrounds the activity often provides talking points or focal points for the community. Pretty much everyone’s read Touching the Void, I mean, it’s not only relevant to climbing, but it’s an amazing story in its own right.”

I recently happened into a brief but enjoyable encounter with the esteemed Joyce Carol Oates. She was promoting her memoir, A Widow’s Story, and was fielding questions from her audience. Amid the 100-plus crowd, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to ask her one:

Ms. Oates, in a recent interview you spoke of the unique type of distress that comes from having one’s work rebuked in a public forum. You cited the experience of your contemporary, Norman Mailer, after having his second novel, Barbary Shore, denounced by the literary critics of the day, making, as Mailer put it, “an outlaw out of him.” But could you speak to the opposite side of this dichotomy — what might you share with us concerning that unique thrill and gratification that comes from producing a superior work of art, a work you know to be beloved by people all over the world. Do those who love your work weigh as heavy on the writer’s mind as those who detract from it?

Oates, took some time in silence to prepare her response.

“Art is a communal experience,” she replied.

As far as directly quoting the writing legend, the exact integrity of my recollections end with that phrase, but I can attest that she expounded for some time on the personal connections to be achieved through these special artifacts, books, these “communal experiences.” But does the act of reading, at a glance, feel in any way communal? Or does it feel, in fact, quite the opposite? Even members of the most ambitious and tightly-knit book clubs tend to do their actual reading in solitude. As such, when the noise of the world becomes occluded by the bestseller between your hands, it’s easy (and perhaps optimal?) to forget that so many others are journeying across this exact same text. You can’t see your companions now, your fellow patrons. They’re nowhere on your radar. You have no idea who they are or that they exist at all. Nevertheless, as you read, your fellow adventurers are out there waiting to meet you, biding their time behind a chance encounter, a well-fated introduction, a tweet, or a blog post, or an otherwise interesting article of prose. You didn’t realize it, but so much mystery, so much anticipation has amassed behind your new friendship, a cosmos-load of potential energy. You didn’t know it — you were too engaged with the mind behind the words — but through all the sentences, the pages, the lovely, lonely hours past, a part of you secretly longed for a flesh-and-blood friend with whom you could share your experience. When you meet your friend, you’ve met an instant confidant. You unburden yourselves on one another, reliving the adventures, revisiting those daunting and glorious experiences you dearly miss, refining and refreshing your perspective in the silver gazing pool of another soul, one that’s triumphed through similar loneliness. Book-bonding is soul-mating, pre-arranged through art, fun-filled and beautiful as a wedding.

Image Credit: Flickr/nSeika

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It was a strange night. The Village Voice reporter likened the Kronos Quartet to the band on the sinking Titanic, but it wasn’t as bad as all that — and he admitted as much, too. It was definitely an experiment, interesting at times, nerve-wracking at others, but the thing that struck me was the conversational clash that followed, like when Jabreal asked Satrapi what she thought the 2012 election looked like outside the United States, as the quartet plowed on in the background, and a clearly frustrated Satrapi said that she was elated by the music — and really wasn’t interested in talking about Mitt Romney. The declaration earned her the biggest applause of the night.

They both had fair points: the event was ostensibly about music; the program didn’t promise a dissection of American politics. But it was an opportunity for two Middle Eastern women to talk about their vantages from abroad, specifically from such cosseted places as Iran and Palestine — views that are a fair bit harder to find than most in the American literary landscape. This was the seventh annual PEN World Voices Festival, which brings together writers from around the world to, according to this year’s introduction, “celebrate the power of the written word in action.” It purports the values of PEN itself, whose charter states that: “Literature knows no frontiers and must remain common currency among people in spite of political or international upheavals.”

PEN World Voices is one of the foremost international literary events in New York City, a place that, as the center of American publishing and home to a basically alarming number of writers, looks inward — celebrates the local, perhaps — more often than not. I’m as guilty as any of literary jingoism: I attend maybe one reading per week in Brooklyn or Manhattan, and it may be partly my own fault, but the writers I encounter nearly always hail from the Anglophone world, whether they’re native-born or have emigrated here or to the UK. Most of the authors I read fall into the same category. The topics I’m interested in, the regions in which I’d like to see a story set — all of these fall within the confines of English-speaking lands. And I think this is probably a personal failing. Maybe I don’t need to know how Mitt Romney comes off in Iran. But so little writing from the vast majority of the world penetrates the American literary scene, and my own personal literary scene. It’s an age-old complaint, but things don’t really seem to be changing. You can seek out literature from just about anywhere — and now it’s easier than any previous point in history — but it’s a hell of a lot harder to bring it into the conversation.

There’s that famous and damning statistic: translated works make up just three percent of the American book market (and, in contrast, sixty percent of all the translated literature in the world comes from English). The University of Rochester, who named their translated literature site, Three Percent, after the fact, suggests that when narrowed down to literary fiction and poetry, the number drops to a paltry 0.7 percent. There contemporary notable exceptions, from genre (Stieg Larsson and the European crime-novelist wave that has sprung up in his stead) to mega-bestsellers (Paulo Coelho, Umberto Eco) to the literary masters (Gabriel García Márquez, Orhan Pamuk, José Saramago, and a handful of others) that have become permanent fixtures in our canon. And of course there are the hippest of the modern-day literary heavyweights, Haruki Murakami and Roberto Bolaño. But the majority of translated literature remains largely obscure, lauded in niches within the publishing and reading worlds but failing to impact the broader public.

The translation question is an old and thorny one. Foreign books, anecdotal wisdom suggests, are a big gamble: “There’s a general perception in the trade that these books can be difficult to sell,” one publisher told the Guardian. “As long as that persists it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.” Reading in translation is often a tricky prospect: the conflict between readability and remaining faithful to the original language lies at the heart of the ethics of translation. Look at the line-by-line differences between Murakami’s translators, Jay Rubin, Alfred Birnbaum, and Phillip Gabriel. Some passages are wildly different, clunky with too-literal translations, or, on the other end of the spectrum, full of Western idioms and surprisingly liberal interpretations of Murakami’s words. It leaves the reader in translation feeling a little distrustful, and inadequate. I can’t imagine learning Japanese — I only got past high-school level French!

And perhaps part of the trouble is that translation means more than replacing a word with its foreign equivalent: there’s a broader cultural undercurrent at work when we talk about Americans and international literature, a question of how a book will read on this side of the Atlantic. Take, for example, Tim Parks’ diatribe against Jonathan Franzen and Freedom, from the New York Review of Books about a year ago. He begins with an absurd press release from the American publisher of Thomas Pletzinger, a German novelist: “Pletzinger is German, but you wouldn’t know it from his debut, which is both wise and worldly.” Parks is incredulous:

What a wonderful insight this careless moment of blurb-talk gives us into the contemporary American mindset! We want something worldly, but if it seems too German, or perhaps just too foreign, we become wary. As my mailbag indicates, the literary community is very much an international phenomenon, but not, it would seem, a level playing field. To make it in America Pletzinger must shed his German-ness as if he were an immigrant with an embarrassing accent.

Parks quickly moves on to Franzen, whom he accuses of aggressive, list-heavy American-ness: he takes fault with the European fascination with Freedom, saying that there are no Italian words for half of Franzen’s lists, from foosball table to “mechanized recliner.” The Italian translator chimed in, indignant, in the comments, giving exact translations for foosball and La-Z-Boy and insisting that, despite Parks’ claim, the Italian for “mechanized recliner” is just as ugly as the English. But I think that the broader point still stands. Reading The Corrections last year — that’s a solid decade after everyone else read it, which I quickly learned when I tried to discuss it with people — I couldn’t help but feel like all those cultural references were incredibly dated, a lot of otherwise engaging prose weighed down by Y2K-era jargon. Cultural references are tricky, whether they’re traveling across geographical or temporal borders. But is something substantial lost with their removal?

Three Percent is trying to revive May as “World in Translation Month,” and it’s an obviously laudable goal. But it remains to be seen how they — or anyone — can effectively market an entire world of literature that’s still failed to catch on amongst the majority of the American reading public. I’ve seen the attempts: articles, blogs, word-of-mouth from friends or booksellers, offering up blind recommendations, the author’s name, title, and original language, and I don’t know how to parse it. I’m guilty myself: just the other day, halfway through Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure, the first book in translation I’ve read in a long while, I found myself trying to talk about it with a few friends. “He’s Senegalese,” I said. They looked at me expectantly, waiting for something more helpful than nationality. “It’s about colonialism.” They nodded. “It was translated by the woman who did The Little Prince,” I tossed in. “Ah!” one said. A relief: a cultural frame of reference. I give most books a hard sell, but I had so few tools at my disposal, reading a Senegalese book translated from French half a century ago, and fault here lies with me, not with Kane, whose book is extraordinary and subtle and philosophical and unlike anything else I’ve read about the colonial experience, which, coming from a person who essentially majored in postcolonialism, is saying something.

Ambiguous Adventure is part of a Melville House series called the Neversink Library, which “champions books from around the world that have been overlooked, underappreciated, looked askance at, or foolishly ignored.” I’m taking that last designation to heart. There’s a danger in become too prescriptive with foreign literature: we should be reading it, that it’s good for us, that it’s our duty as citizens of the world to read books from every corner of it. The Neversink project seems to offer an antidote to that: titles carefully chosen and offered up with the simple explanation that these books are so good they never should have slipped past or from the public consciousness. All good books transcend the place and time in which they were written: the whole point is to write something specific that becomes universal, after all. So perhaps the best way to transcend the barriers of international literature is to no longer market it as such. A good book is a good book. We need to read more in translation — and we simply need to read more. Maybe dropping all of these labels is a good place to start.

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We are poor passing facts

warned by that to give

each figure in the photograph

his living name.

—Robert Lowell, “Epilogue”

1.
Next year marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Roberto Bolaño, the prolific genre-bender whose narratives and exile from Chile began seriously enchanting the literary world in 2005, the year The New Yorker began publishing his short stories. Altogether, nine stories have appeared in the magazine, including January’s “Labyrinth,” which accompanied a curious photograph. But I’ll get to that in a moment. First, a bit about Bolaño’s following, which may be credited in part to his early exit from said world at the age of 50, by way of liver failure. For the uninitiated, “Gomez Palacio,” his posthumous New Yorker debut about a tormented writer interviewing for a teaching post in a remote Mexican town, tends to work a kind of magic. A ragged copy of the issue in which “Gomez Palacio” appeared caught critic Francine Prose in a waiting room: “I was glad the doctor was running late,” she wrote later in reviewing Last Evenings on Earth, “so I could read the story twice, and still have a few minutes left over to consider the fact that I had just encountered something extraordinarily beautiful and (at least to me) entirely new.”

Francisco Goldman, who likened “The Great Bolaño” to Borges in a profile for The New York Review of Books, dates the ex-Chilean’s rise to 1999, the year The Savage Detectives won a coveted Venezuelan prize for the best Spanish-language novel. “The inseparable dangers of life and literature, and the relationship of life to literature, were the constant themes of Bolaño’s writings,” reads Goldman’s summary of his subject’s legacy, which at the time spanned ten novels and three story collections. (Bolaño’s drive to finish his 900-page masterwork, 2666, a far-flung novel involving the murders of women in the Sonora desert, is thought to have exacerbated his liver condition.) “It’s as if Bolaño is satirizing the routine self-pity of exile,” adds Goldman, in turning to one of his short fictions (“Mauricio ‘The Eye’ Silva”). “Yet the story’s mood of nearly inexpressible and lonely grief leaves you an intuitive sense of its truthfulness, which seems something other than a literal truthfulness.”

Separating facts from other kinds of “truthfulness” in Bolaño’s oeuvre becomes a difficult task, to say nothing of counting up the author’s works themselves. The Millions began keeping “A Bolaño Syllabus” in 2009 and has updated that list since. “Oh!” an anxious reader posted the following year. “But what about all the new and recent translations out from New Directions? What of them?” What indeed; let’s recap. With the help of American translator Natasha Wimmer and Melbourne-based Chris Andrews, who first brought Bolaño to English and continues to handle his shorter works, New Directions has published more than a dozen posthumous volumes ranging from poetry to newspaper columns. In an interview that coincided with “Labyrinth,” Barbara Epler, president of New Directions and a longtime editor, relates the story of her house’s 2006 windfall to The New Yorker:

Bolaño’s rights were represented by Agencia Literaria Carmen Balcells, and I was asking and asking them about the offer we’d made for The Savage Detectives and getting no reply. My heart sank when they e-mailed to say, “We’re coming to New York and want to take you out to dinner.” I knew they must be shopping The Savage Detectives. I went to supper, and considerably (by our standards) improved my offer. Finally one of the Balcells ladies put her hand on my arm and said, “The Estate wants a larger house for the big books.” I was about to cry, and they knew we’d done everything we could for the author here, so they offered, if we were willing to take all the “small” books on, that we could. So we took everything we could get, everything that at that point we knew existed.

With the close of the post-Bolaño decade, it seems that the tide of the author’s original works is finally ebbing. New Directions’ latest release, much to my delight and that of other genre boundary-watchers, is The Secret of Evil, a thin collection of fictions that occasionally read as essays. Or is it the other way around? At times, we’re not sure. In turning the title page, explains the book’s jacket, we open a certain computer file: “BAIRES,” Bolaño called it — a nickname for Argentina’s metropolis. “There are multiple indications that Bolaño was working on this file in the months immediately preceding his death,” writes Ignacio Echeverría, the author’s executor, in his prologue. But the task of gleaning 19 semi-finished works from BAIRES, STORIX (another riddle), and about 50 other files was not without complications — namely Bolaño’s “poetics of inconclusiveness,” which Echeverría compares to Kafka’s abruptness. “Decisions as to the wholeness and self-sufficiency of particular pieces,” he warns the critic, became inevitably subjective. Thus, along with a couple of previously-published lectures (“Vagaries of the Literature of Doom” and “Sevilla Kills Me”) as well as the story of a Spanish family’s decimation in a bus accident (“Muscles,” likely an unfinished novel), the bulk of The Secret borders on flash fiction — two, four, and six-page sketches ranging from the swimming pools and watering holes of Mexico City, Guatemala, Santiago, and Buenos Aires, to Madrid, Berlin, and most luminously, Paris.

As with The Insufferable Gaucho and Last Evenings before it, The New Yorker had the honor in January of cherry-picking from The Secret. Unlike the task of compiling this year’s collection, the choice was obvious: at 18 pages, “Labyrinth” stands apart. It narrates the comings and goings of a cadre of European intellectuals, including a brush with “Z,” a foreigner who ambushes the offices of Tel Quel, the Paris journal of the avant-garde whose disappearance in 1982 roughly mirrored the waning of structuralism. “Who else knows Z?” Our narrator — presumably Bolaño — poses the question, which gradually nags at the reader. “No one, or at least there is nothing to suggest that his presence is of any concern to the others.” But then a few clues: “Maybe he’s a young writer who at some stage tried to get his work published in Tel Quel; maybe he’s a young journalist from South America, no, from Central America, who at some point tried to write an article about the group.”

2.
The startling thing about “Labyrinth,” beyond Z’s ghostly presence on the page, is the way the story unfolds, almost by way of evasion. (A footnote: Bolaño quit the Americas in 1977 after being imprisoned and nearly tortured by Pinochet’s forces in 1973; Barbara Epler vouched for this sometimes disputed fact in her January remarks.) For an illustration, try picturing the opening scene:

They’re seated. They’re looking at the camera. They are captioned, from left to right: J. Henric, J.-J. Goux, Ph. Sollers, J. Kristeva, M.-Th. Réveillé, P. Guyotat, C. Devade, and M. Devade.

There’s no photo credit.

They’re sitting around a table. It’s an ordinary table, made of wood, perhaps, or plastic, it could even be a marble table on metal legs, but nothing could be less germane to my purpose than to give an exhaustive description of it.

What Bolaño’s last masterpiece does proceed to describe, with East Germanic voyeurism, is the web of relationships on display. Why? Because (1) unlike many tableside portraits in Paris, this image was not intended for a magazine spread; and (2) because, importantly, not everyone is paying attention to the photographer. Two of the women pictured gaze off-camera, in the same direction. They might be preoccupied with an object of affection and it’s precisely this quality of deduction that fuels Bolaño’s narrative.

What of the photo itself? Unfortunately for readers, it can’t be found in The Secret of Evil. But it did appear in The New Yorker’s publication of “Labyrinth,” spread right across the opening pages. What more can be said of the seated figures, we begin to wonder? This Henric, Goux, Sollers, Kristeva, Réveillé, whose gaze might betray surprise, her companion, Guyotat, and Mr. and Ms. Devade, one of whom wears a half-smile? Quite a lot, we discover, as the story wanders away from the table, into streets and garages and bedrooms, and back again in the evening, when “night falls over the photograph.” Yet these figures — their vigorous couplings and jealousies — are not at all figments of Bolaño’s imagination. A peculiar hint of this reality can be found in a credit omitted from print but included in the story’s online publication, just below the magazine’s end sign: “PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY JACQUES HENRIC.”

There are other signs, amid his wanderings, that our narrator is employing a fact pattern that Bolaño found more intriguing than outright fiction: “The photo was probably taken in 1977 or thereabouts”; “The photo was taken in winter or autumn, or maybe at the beginning of spring, but certainly not in summer”; “Let’s suppose, for the moment, that it’s in a café.” By the story’s midpoint, first names have emerged, via conjecture and supposition, along with a few biographical details. Jacques Henric is a broad-shouldered French novelist, born in 1938. Philippe Sollers, editor in chief of Tel Quel, has the look of a man who enjoys a good meal. Julia Kristeva, the Bulgarian seminologist at Sollers’s elbow? His wife. And Pierre Guyotat, author of Prostitution, among other works? A balding pervert whose temples resemble “nothing so much as the bay leaves that used to wreathe the heads of victorious Roman generals.” Réveillé and the Devades come into focus, too, but Bolaño’s chess game is already a thing to behold. He’s built for himself not just a labyrinth of the houseplants that obscure our view of the table (“there are three plants — a rhododendron, a ficus, and an everlasting”), but a living-breathing, true-to-life mystery with so many shades of exposure, the story’s inconclusiveness seems preordained, exquisitely inevitable.

3.
In Reality Hunger, David Shields’ manifesto on society’s latter-day enthusiasm for art rooted in fact (and often troubled by genre), some 600 hastily-sourced meditations, including this essay’s epigraph, narrate the author’s own evolution as a consumer of literature, in a sort of collage. “I’m interested in the generic edge, the boundary between what are roughly called nonfiction and fiction,” reads an from entry from Jonathan Raban (no. 191). But in the end Shields, like Bolaño, crosses over the border, leaving behind the dusty Republic of the Make-Believe. Take the following passage, one of the few in Reality Hunger that doesn’t need sourcing: “I find it very nearly impossible to read a contemporary novel that presents itself unself-consciously as a novel, since it’s not clear to me how such a book could convey what it feels like to be alive right now” (Shields, no. 212). Plotlines, for this kind of writer, begin to feel like artifice — something to be stripped away and replaced by shape-shifting narratives “open for business way past closing time.” Photographs, it just so happens, do just that. Why take them so constantly, so obsessively? “So that I’ll see what I’ve seen” (Janette Turner Hospital, no. 137). “It’s just this breathtaking world — that’s the point. The story’s not important; what’s important is the way the world looks. That’s what makes you feel stuff. That’s what puts you there” (Frederick Barthelme, no. 142).

Bolaño goes missing from Shields’ collage, but I imagine Bolaño would have enjoyed following its leads in the manner of a good detective or a wayward journalist. “I would have liked to be a homicide detective, much more than a writer,” Bolaño told the Mexican edition of Playboy, in his last interview. “Of that I’m absolutely sure. A string of homicides. Someone who could go back alone, at night, to the scene of the crime, and not be afraid of ghosts.” That fondness for investigation and self-projection becomes recognizable throughout Bolaño’s fiction, but especially in later stories such as The Insufferable Gaucho’s “Police Rat,” about four-legged Pepe, a rodent cop assigned to a vacant sewer. The Secret of Evil’s title story, a three-page sketch of Joe A. Kelso, an American journalist in Paris stalked by a pale man, “a watcher with no one to watch him in turn, someone it’s going to be hard to get rid of,” carries a similar paranoia. And the same holds true for “Labyrinth,” whose shadowy, off-camera Z seems not a stand-in for Bolaño but a kind of alter ego: the handsome-but-nervous sort of exile desperate to join a circle of writers sitting just beyond his reach.

I’ve said enough about the above gathering already, but there is one further mystery worth noting. The photo that appeared this past January — the same arrangement of eight figures from “1977 or thereabouts,” courtesy of Henric — can be found published 14 years earlier, in a French history of Tel Quel by Philippe Forest (Histoire de Tel Quel, Seuil, 1998). In translation, Forest’s caption reads “Party of L’Humanité, 1970. From left to right: Jacques Henric, Jean-Joseph Goux, Phillip Sollers, Julia Kristeva, Thérèse Réveillé, Pierre Guyotat, Catherine and Marc Devade (photo D. R.).” L’Humanité, the Internet tells us, is a Paris daily still in print today, although its circulation rose and fell with the French Communist Party, which began a slow decline that same decade. Where was Roberto Bolaño in 1970? Not, as the overexcited reader might assume, leaning against the bar, drawing stares from the table, but working as a journalist in Mexico City, already involved with liberal causes and preparing to return, three years later, to socialist Chile.

4.
We could go on in this vein, asking questions about Henric and “D. R.” and wondering whether Bolaño happened on Forest’s book late in life. Perhaps he recalled reading Tel Quel during his first days in Paris, still shaking from what he’d escaped, and decided to change a few details in service of a last, great story. But we should, in fairness, allow Bolaño a few secrets, and instead pause to marvel at the whole collection. In some respects, The Secret of Evil fails to cohere: two brilliantly speculative shorts about a roving V. S. Naipul vexed by the origins of sodomy end in confusion; another promising piece about Bolaño and his son playing a game of turning invisible turns into a rant. Still, the range and “reality” of the writing left behind in cryptic BAIRES and STORIX, from an artist whose days were numbered, will enchant even the uninitiated Bolañonista. And taxonomists, myself included, should praise New Directions for a small thing that happened somewhere between the uncorrected proof and the finished hardback that arrived at my door the other day: “FICTION,” on the book’s jacket, now reads “LITERATURE.”

Image: Jean Silver/Flickr

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When author Pauls Toutonghi set out to write his first book, he made himself a promise: he would not be another stereotype of “the debut novelist writing about his life.” So Toutonghi penned a “really terrible” World War Two novel followed by a cringe-worthy attempt at experimental fiction — a choose-your-own-adventure rip off. He never wrote in the first person, lest readers assume he was writing about himself. He didn’t sell either book; his career — or lack thereof — was a disaster.

Eventually, Toutonghi gave up on his rigid strategy of avoidance and did what any smart writer does: he let the story and characters lead him, instead of the other way around. Toutonghi is half Latvian, half Egyptian and was raised in the U.S. He sold Red Weather, a coming-of-age story about a 15-year-old Latvian-American boy, followed by Evel Knievel Days, about a young Egyptian-American man in search of his father. Toutonghi wrote both books in the first person. And yet, he considers this less than a complete success: “I was reading Dickens,” he wrote in a recent essay for Salon, “who kept himself away from the page…and I can’t help wondering if anything is lost in the frank disclosures of our modern, first-person, memoir-driven fiction.”

This is perhaps the greatest hang-up of the modern novelist — that fiction is somehow unsophisticated or inherently cliché if it is rooted in the writer’s own life, and that writers should be creative enough to invent entirely new worlds and find drama only in the unfamiliar. None of that is true, of course: Bookstores are full of beautiful novels like Toutonghi’s, and reviewers often celebrate autobiographical debuts. And yet this fear of self-reliance can be limiting, almost crippling.

But if you talk to writers who have taken the autobiographical plunge, you’ll hear an almost universal relief — that writing about yourself allows you to follow your best instincts. Patrick DeWitt, author of The Sisters Brothers, spent a long time writing books that even his wife was unimpressed by. His problem, he decided: He was too afraid of seeming like “the white guy feeling sorry for himself.” But hey: in some way, that’s what he was. “I needed subject matter that was familiar to me if I wanted to go the distance.”

So where does this fear come from? Today’s literary criticism, for one. Laura Miller, who reviews books for Salon, is often turned off by coming-of-age debuts, particularly from writers who have just come of age themselves. She has some words for, say, white girls from Connecticut: “Your book could be really well written,” she says. But “you feel like you’ve read a million of them. It’s the story about this person growing up and learning to live and to love and whose parents get divorced and the mom dies of cancer. It feels like watching an episode of Law and Order — but that’s not really fair, because Law and Order is reliably entertaining.”

Even the New York Times can be dismissive like this. In 2005, when Deborah Solomon wrote about Jonathan Safran Foer, she praised him for avoiding “the usual rites of first-noveldom. He never wrote a tremblingly sensitive account of his adolescence, a novel featuring toxic mothers and passive, gone-to-sleep fathers, a novel abounding with malls and S.U.V.’s, and suburban anomie. Instead, he found his inspiration in the darkly fragmented masterworks of European modernism (Kafka, Joyce, Bruno Schulz)…”

But do not be fooled: Everything Is Illuminated is a wonderful book, both highly innovative and emotionally powerful, but it is also a coming-of-age, semi-autobiographical story about a young white man coming to understand himself. Solomon would never belittle Foer’s book by writing in these exact terms, but when she speaks of “the usual rites of first-noveldom,” she’s not making a neutral statement. She’s making a derogatory one. She’s throwing all of these other books — and which books, by the way? — into the dustbin, castigating them all as navel-gazing and small-minded.

And you wonder what kept Toutonghi and DeWitt from writing about their own lives.

Some writers were fortunate enough to begin writing before reading much literary criticism. “I felt free to take from personal experience,” says Justin Torres, author of the critically acclaimed and heavily autobiographical debut novel We The Animals. After the book, he says, he’d often meet writers who came out of MFA programs and seemed to believe he’s navel-gazing. “You’re mind-gazing,” he corrects. “You’re turning yourself outward, challenging your own assumptions and trying to make meaning out of life. I love Dickens, but thank god not everyone tries to write like him.” (In fact, Laura Miller cuts Torres a break here because We The Animals is based on Torres’ experience growing up gay and underprivileged in upstate New York. “To be crass,” she says, “his book was unusual in the type of people it was about. That was refreshing.”)

When writers ask Torres, “Why write fiction if you want to write about yourself?”, he tells them there’s a magic in translating personal experience into make-believe: “The composites become characters, and the scraps of lived experience morph, so that what you end up with is wholly transformed.”

And the transformation is key. There are a finite number of experiences in the world and the trick is how to present them in a way that is both relatable and unique. It would be idiotic for a young author not to write a book based on her adolescence in Connecticut, if that’s what she’s compelled to write. And if her protagonist has a toxic mother or hangs out at the mall, it would be disingenuous not to include those details. But including them doesn’t necessarily mean you’re painting by numbers or writing a story that is narcissistic. “You just have to ask yourself, ‘What can I bring to literature by writing about this?’” Torres says. To him, authors who write outside their own experience have the exact same challenge as those writing close to the bone: how best to say something valuable. “There’s a lot of people writing formulaic gunslinger Cormac McCarthy fiction,” he says.

The literary world didn’t always dismiss autobiography. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man by James Joyce, The Lover by Marguerite Duras, and The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway are all rooted in their authors’ lives. It’s impossible to trace this hang-up back to its origin, but Toutonghi has a suspicion of what triggered it: a resistance, especially prevalent in the MFA world, to the commoditization of fiction.

Literature is an art, of course — though like in any art, there are those who hate to also think of it as a business. Writers who are overwhelmingly focused on craft and style might believe that writing the story of one’s young life is too crass, too obvious, and, god-forbid, too sellable. “Writers see that autobiographical work is more marketable, so many move in that direction,” Toutonghi says. And the purists do the opposite.

Whether the market is really dictating authors’ subject matter is debatable, but it’s certainly true that right now mainstream publishing will unabashedly use an author’s back story to sell his or her book. Two recent debut novels that share similarities with Everything is Illuminated — The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht and There is No One Here Except For All of Us by Ramona Ausubel — have been marketed with the author’s life as a selling point, as if biography is the ultimate “truth” of their stories.

That’s certainly news to emerging authors. “I didn’t realize my life would be the thing I’d be talking about in the interviews,” Torres said. Patrick DeWitt told me that most interviews about his novel Ablutions revolved around parsing the imaginary parts of the book from the real ones. “It became sort of a drag,” he said.

But there’s an upside to this marketing hook, at least for me, as I shopped around my own debut: a semi-autobiographical, prep school novel called The Year of the Gadfly. Editors clearly saw the autobiographical material as a positive thing, and a potential way to market the book. Until then, I’d been so embarrassed about writing from my life that throughout my three-year MFA, I never told anybody where the story originated. I was just another white girl from Connecticut after all (well, actually, Washington DC, but same difference), writing about a young woman coming of age. I spent years feeling like a failure before I’d even started writing, all because I was terrified of producing a cliché. If only I could have written a World War II epic with a chose your own adventure twist.

But I never would have finished writing that sort of book. The Year of the Gadfly took me seven years from conception to publication. And my personal connection to the story was a key part of my stamina. It’s what fueled me to work so tirelessly in pursuit of truly unique characters and a compelling plot. My editor bought my book because the manuscript kept her reading all night. To her, to me, and hopefully to my readers, that’s all that really matters.

Image: Streveo/flickr

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1.
Not quite a month before my 13th birthday, my father gave me a gift, a mass-market paperback edition of The Universal Encyclopedia of Mathematics. The 715-page book, which cost him one dollar and 50 cents, is, the cover proclaims, “The only reference book of its kind ever published.” (For my actual birthday, he gave me Cassell’s New Latin Dictionary, with an inscription in Latin.)

He bought me the encyclopedia, I see now, to encourage me: while he was a cardiologist who worked calculus problems to relax, I had a perplexing, to him at least, inability to do any better than a C in any arithmetic course I took. His idea was that giving me a book with entries on “perspective transformation” and the formula for figuring the surface of an elliptical paraboloid would help me learn to divide fractions.

Clearly filled with hope for his floundering son, he wrote an inscription on the flyleaf: “For Joe. Toward an ∞ of knowledge. Dad.”

2.
My father, who died in 1984 at 60, did not live long enough to see the Internet as it is today, our connection, if not to his wish for infinite knowledge, then at least to something in the same area code as infinite information, and so, to bring the world in, he filled our house with reference books — The Encyclopedia Britannica, Compton’s Encyclopedia (for his younger children), Will and Ariel Durant’s 11-volume The Story of Civilization, the Concise Dictionary of American History and so many others whose titles I can no longer recall, bookcases of them in the family room and in his den.

While it’s not strictly a reference set, he enshrined the Great Books of the Western World on shelves in our family room and offered rewards of a dollar if I could recite, from memory, passages he assigned me, and if I succeeded, he sometimes had me do it to for the guests when he and my mother entertained, a nine- or 10-year-old me in pajamas standing in a room of adults who were drinking highballs as I stumbled through “Once more unto the breach, dear friends . . .”

A devout Roman Catholic, when he decided to buy the books in the early 1960s, he wrote a letter to the Archdiocese of Cincinnati for permission because certain of the works were on the Church’s Index Liborum Prohibitum — a list of writings the Church felt threatened the faith and morals of those who read them. A monsignor from the Archdiocesan office responded that my father could buy them but that he should read them with care. For a long while, he kept the letter folded in thirds and tucked into one of the volumes but, when I went to look for it after he left the books to me when he died, opening every volume, holding them upside down and shaking each one, the letter was no longer there.

3.
Almost three decades after his death, I remember my father as shy and uncomfortable socially. Perhaps a decade before he died, my mother showed me a group photograph of him and perhaps 18 or 20 other doctors, my father in the back row, half his face obscured by the head of one of the men in front of him. She was using the photograph to tell me something about how my father was as a person, that he was always standing in a back row, hiding from a camera, metaphorically if not actually, not wanting anyone to notice him.

Given that, I’m not surprised that I can never remember having a heart-to-heart talk with him about anything. I don’t think he ever asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, don’t think he ever asked about any of the girls I went out with nor talked to me about what colleges I wanted to attend. I chose the colleges, filled out the applications, left them on his desk and then found them on the kitchen table, a check for the application fee paper clipped to each of them.

I also don’t recall him being openly affectionate with my mother or any of my seven siblings. More than once, when my mother was going somewhere with my father, she came downstairs in a dress, perfumed and wearing pearls, and said to me, “Tell me I look nice,” because my father seemed never to tell her so. This trait was, in fact, the point of a story she told me often about my father’s father, a severe German immigrant who came to America early in the 20th century when he was 13. In the story, my grandparents are having dinner and my grandmother says to him, “You never tell me you like my cooking.”

“I’m eatin’ it, ain’t I?” my grandfather responds.

Whenever my mother told the story, she paused when she came to the end of it then repeated: “I’m eatin’ it, ain’t I?”

When I got older, I realized the story was actually about my own father, that my mother could never say directly that he was not warm, could not complain openly to me that he did not compliment her, and so she told the story about my grandfather over and over, letting it hang in the air until I might understand its meaning.

4.
It’s possible, I suspect, to read these accounts of my father and think him cold and even unkind: he couldn’t tell his wife she looked attractive, he was aloof for his children, disconnected (I wanted Rubber Soul for my birthday and he gave me a Latin dictionary); he embarrassed his oldest son by using him to perform parlor tricks dressed in stretch pajamas: Look at the little boy trying to recite Shakespeare! How cute!

But part of maturing is coming to the point at which you can see your parents as not just your mother and your father but as human beings, imperfect, who just happened to be the people who raised you.

I could, therefore, explain my father’s reticence to express affection by his own father’s resistance to it.

I could talk about how one of the choices my father made for the direction of his life — to pursue college — disappointed his father who had no patience for the life of the mind, despite the fact that my father eventually became a doctor. My grandfather, who worked in a sewing machine factory until he retired, thought a man should work with his hands and clearly favored his other son, my uncle, who worked in an automobile plant and who could fix things — do carpentry, repair a television set. That my uncle, who had no children, was more affluent than my father, the doctor with eight children whom he sent to prep schools and college, seemed to my grandfather evidence that he was correct: books and college were a waste of time.

Given that, is it any wonder that my father was so shy about overt expressions of affection?

And so if he could not directly invite me to connect with him, he could find more oblique ways to bring the two of us together: he could give me reference books as gifts, bribe me to open the books he collected.

In his own way, he was opening a door for me to a world he loved and saying, “I can’t show you my self but I can show you this.”

5.
And so I became a collector of reference books, filling shelves with them in my own home the way my father did in ours when I was growing up. I became a forager in them often for no purpose except to see what was there.

Paging, as I did just now, through Patrick Robertson’s Robertson’s Book of Firsts, published last year, I learn that the first life insurance policy was written in 1583, and would pay out £383 and change, as long as the insured died within a year. When he died 11 months later, the “underwriters sought to evade payment by the dubious argument that he had not died within ‘the full twelve months,’ arguing that a month was only 28 days and therefore the insured had died beyond twelve months’ time. The court found for the beneficiary, saying, “[The] month is to be accounted according to the Kalendar.”

Browsing in The Baseball Necrology by Bill Lee, I learn that there was once a player named Bad News Galloway who appeared for one season in the major leagues and then worked as a bedding inspector during World War II, that Mox McQuery, who lasted for five seasons in the majors during the 19th century, died when he was shot in the line of duty while he was a policeman, and that Kite Thomas, who was a major league outfielder for two seasons, operated a tavern in Kansas in the 1950s that “was said to dispense more beer than any other tavern in Kansas.”

From The Best Books of Our Time 1901-1925, published in 1928 by Asa Don Dickinson, “Librarian of the University of Pennsylvania,” I learn that, according to a meticulous study he devised to analyze critical responses to what was then contemporary literature, the most highly regarded book of the first quarter of the 20th century was Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale, which had “25 endorsements” by critics and was therefore, according to Dickinson’s system, superior to Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth (23 endorsements), Willa Cather’s My Antonia (18) or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (13).

On the surface, this may all seem trivial, but I contend it’s not — is any time that brings us knowledge ever really wasted?

Without meaning to look for it, for example, I know something about the trend of insurance companies contesting the claims of their customers, something specific about the economics of major league baseball players before the current era of six- to eight-figure annual salaries, something about the way taste in literature changes over a period of decades.

See, I hear my father saying. Exactly.

6.
Sometimes, browsing in junk shops and antique malls, I buy reference books that make little sense for me to own — a 75-year-old one-volume encyclopedia, a half-century old book on baton twirling, a dog-eared guide for collecting baseball players’ autographs. Yet, as ridiculous a purchase as they might seem, they open up the world for me as much as did the books on my father’s shelves or the newer books on my own shelves, but in different ways.

Everybody’s Complete Encyclopedia, which the Whitman Publishing Company of Racine, Wis., issued in 1937, for example, freezes the world for me in a manner a more contemporary reference work doesn’t; it gives me a world in which Pearl Harbor can be dismissed with a sentence, describing it as “an inlet not far from Honolulu, Hawaii, with pearl fisheries and a U.S. naval base,” and gives me the Ardennes in even fewer words, as only a sentence fragment, “Range of hills in France and Belgium extending into Luxembourg.” It gives me a world that had no notion of the meaning those places would carry less than a decade later.

The 1962 Who’s Who in Baton Twirling, which contains 500-plus pages of photographs and brief resumes of baton twirlers from around the United States, and a supplement on the Baton Twirling Hall of Fame, illuminates a subculture I hadn’t known was as large as it was, showing me something of the center of the lives of roughly 1,500 people from half a century ago. In one entry, I learn that Marla Miller of Columbia City, Ind., was once featured twirling fire batons at a district competition and that Hall of Fame member Paul Olin had traveled over 7,000 miles to teach twirling at summer camps across the Midwest and South.

As much as that allows me a glimpse at a subculture, the reason I bought the book was that it once belonged to one of the people who has an entry in it, Paula Rondeau of Florida. A half a century ago, the then 10-year-old Rondeau (who started twirling when she was five, had won tournaments in Florida and Virginia and performed on television during the 1961 Junior Miss America Pageant) scrawled her name and address in the front of the book in a careful cursive.

In somewhat the same way, the 1939 Allegheny (Pennsylvania) High School Yearbook opens another flap on the world for me: it was owned at one time by Ellen (Elsie) Tuomela, whom the yearbook describes as “sweet and shy” with “hopes to be a secretary” and who had “a unique hobby . . . working crossword puzzles.” If Elsie is alive still, she would around 90 but her yearbook — with the entries about her and her classmates and the editor’s sad recollection that the construction of a new school building that year meant the loss of “the balcony, long a lovers’ meeting place” –connects me to the teenager Elsie was nearly three-quarters of a century ago, makes the lives of all teenagers then more vivid to me than any general discussion of the youth of America in the 1930s ever could.

As for the slightly water-logged, dog-eared copy of the 1986 edition of Sports Americana Baseball Address List, a guide published for autograph seekers for which I paid 50 cents two weeks ago at a junk shop I passed on a Sunday afternoon: the information in it is, I assume, worthless. How many of the men whose names and addresses are listed are still living where they were more than a quarter century ago? What drew me to it were the almost obsessive annotations by the anonymous person who owned it before it ended up in a pile of books in a battered orange crate on a shelf with old VHS movies and mismatched glassware: whose autographs he had, who was dead or “too old or ill to sign,” and whom he classed as an “SOB,” presumably because they refused his request for a signature. The introduction to the book boasts that 10,000 current and former players were included and the previous owner had a note for well more than half of them. For me, the book reveals a fellow human being who gave himself passionately to something.

I’m certain that when my father extended perhaps the only sort of invitation he could to me, into the world as it lay out before him, and me, in reference books, he was not thinking of baton twirlers, high school seniors from 73 years ago, or autograph collectors, but my interest in them is connected to that same impulse he woke in me when I was roughly the same age as Paula Rondeau when she was ordering the copy of the Who’s Who with her name and photograph in it — the impulse to be curious about the world outside the room where I’m paging through the slightly mildewed book that bears a photograph of her in a costume, standing beside three of her trophies.

7.
Not long after my father died, I found a package he’d received but never opened: the 1984 Britannica Book of the Year, part of the series of annuals the publishers offered to him as someone who had once bought a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica and which he ordered each year, lining them chronologically on the shelves beneath the encyclopedia. (He also just as faithfully ordered the annual supplement to the Great Books, The Great Ideas Today.) In the last months of his life, weakened by congestive heart failure and diabetes, on most days he only had strength enough to move the few feet from his bed to a chair in his room and then, later, with the help of a day nurse, back to his bed. But at some point in those months — did he know how many he had left? — he’d marked a box on a reply card, written a check, mailed it off, then waited for the world to come back to him in 766 pages.

If he’d lived long enough to open the package, he could have flipped through those pages and read that health care costs in the U.S. for the previous year were more than 340 percent what they were in 1967, the year after he gave me the mathematics encyclopedia and Latin dictionary. He could have read that Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings was “one of the major literary events of the year,” but that critical response ranged from “uncertain, almost embarrassed enthusiasm to exasperated boredom.” He could have learned that a 29-year-old mathematician had made a discovery that “was the first major step in more than a century in the struggle to verify Pierre de Fermat’s” famous claim, scribbled in the margin of a book, that he had discovered a “truly marvelous [algebraic] proof.” (And my father could have winced realizing that the mathematician was younger than his son who still had difficulty dividing fractions.)

When my mother gave me the set of Britannica and the Great Books after he died, she said, “I don’t care what you do with the encyclopedias, but please don’t get rid of the Great Books. Your father went through so much to get them.”

By then, the encyclopedia, published during Richard Nixon’s first term of office, was dated and while I kept it for a long while, when I moved six years ago, I donated it to Goodwill. However, I held onto the 1984 Book of the Year, the volume my father had never read, had never opened, and it sits on a shelf with the Latin dictionary and the Encyclopedia of Mathematics that he gave me with such hope when I was a boy.

Image courtesy of the author.

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In the lead story of Rajesh Parameswaran’s acclaimed first collection, I Am An Executioner, a Bengal tiger escapes from an American zoo and runs amuck. “The Infamous Bengal Ming” is hair-raising, but all I could think of while reading it was: Not one more tiger-escaping-from-zoo story?

Tiger Lit has never been so popular. Look at the number of award-winning fictions in the last decade in which tigers escape from zoos. There’s Rajesh Parameswaran’s story (the collection may well win a prize); Téa Obreht’s Orange Prize-winning The Tiger’s Wife; Rajiv Joseph’s Pulitzer-finalist play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo; Carol Birch’s Booker-shortlisted Jamrach’s Menagerie; Aravind Adiga’s Booker-winner The White Tiger, in which the tiger’s escape is a metaphor for breaking out of the cage of poverty; and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, which also bagged a Booker. And we’re just talking tigers here, not animals-escaping-from-zoo fictions, which would give us Salman Rushdie’s Luka and the Fire of Life, Diane Ackerman’s The Zookeeper’s Wife, and no doubt several others.

All kinds of besotted, bombed-out, starving, mangy, metaphoric and misunderstood man-eaters are now on the loose. Not since Humbert Humbert got into his car with a different sort of lust have our literary highways been more unsafe — or more exhilarating. From the roars of approval that have greeted each new work, it would appear that critics and jurors, having tasted blood, can’t get enough of this killer app generously spattered with words like rippling, rolling, muscular, tawny, fiery, flaming, red, pink, orange, carrot, golden, amber, yellow, black, musky, sour, and, of course, stripe-lashed.

The grandfather of modern escapee Tiger Lit is probably the noted Indian writer R. K. Narayan, whose A Tiger for Malgudi, published in 1983, ends with a former circus tiger and a yogi wandering companionably into the hills. Ironically, very few contemporary Indian writers in English would dare to write about tigers today (except metaphorically like Adiga did) for fear of being pummeled for peddling exotica — Adiga got pummeled anyway for peddling poverty — even though the tiger, widely worshiped for its unlimited power and fertility, is about as exotic to India as poverty is. All the fictions mentioned above are essentially Western (Adiga’s apart), despite a dander of Indianness, in that either the writer or the tiger is a person of Indian origin (except for Téa Obreht who is Serbian-American and her tiger Siberian, but whose novel evokes India through its frequent invocations of Kipling’s The Jungle Book). Both Rajesh Parameswaran and Rajiv Joseph are Indian-American, and all the cats are Bengal tigers  – Joseph even specifies, with what one hopes is parochial satire, that his cat is from the Sunderbans in “West Bengal”, thereby ruling out any chance of it being Bangladeshi.

The tigers are a mixed bunch ranging from the mangy to the magnificent. Some of them are regular chaps with a healthy disdain for man, others are Blakesian creatures tormented by their dietary preference for juicy children. Indeed, a spiritual subtext runs like spoor through these works, deepening the roots of textual kinship beyond that of a common plot line. Perhaps this braiding of reality and fable into a meaty mysticism is inevitable in stories where tigers are orphans, atheists, metaphors, stowaways and ghosts; where they fall in love with their zoo keeper and are petted by little boys, deaf-mutes and derelicts; flee German, American and NATO bombs; catch flying fish alongside a young boy on a lifeboat; bite the hand that feeds them and, in an aching passage on what war does to caged animals, chomp on their own legs to assuage their hunger.

At the raw, red heart of this literature beats the central question: where do animals fit in the social contract? Do they fit in the deadening comfort of the zoo, where they are fed pounds and pounds of glistening red meat and organs without having to raise a whisker? How do displacement and captivity deform their souls? What happens during war? In every story, the wild and jagged chiaroscuro of the tiger’s stripes is offset against the leaden symmetry of its cage. “Captivity and freedom,” says Parameswaran in an interview to Granta, “are fundamental themes in American history and in literature broadly. Vladimir Nabokov says that Lolita was inspired by the story of an ape in a zoo ‘who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing every charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.” Obreht says that she felt a sneaking sympathy for Kipling’s universally reviled Shere Khan, and that her own tiger was a kind of corrective to that mean, buffoon image. Clearly, she speaks for her pack. When the various tigers break free, and the killings begin, authorial awe is palpable in the treatment of the way this endangered predator discovers its primitive natural instinct, its livid sense of smell, and the unbelievably sweet taste of freshly killed meat.

Despite occasional lapses into sentimentalism and garrulity — tiger spiritualism can get tricky — these imaginative and empathetic fictions go a long way to deepening our understanding of the shared mammalian impulses of love, violence, freedom, and above all, a lust for life.

“The Infamous Bengal Ming” by Rajesh Parameswaran
This story could easily be called “Lost in Translation.” Ming the tiger is in love with his bald, chubby zoo keeper Kitch. But then Kitch mistakes Ming’s love for aggression and smacks him on the nose with a thin, long stick that he always carries but has never ever used before. Hell hath no fury like a tiger scorned. Ming pounces on Kitch, and love bites him like a vampire, “just once, hard and quick” in the neck. But never having hurt a man in his life, Ming is clueless about his own strength and is aghast at what he has done. He tries desperately to lap at Kitch’s neck to stanch the flow, and then, in a spine-tingling introduction of menace, realizes that he can’t stop licking because “Kitch’s blood was delicious.” In that one line, a killer is born. Ming breaks free, and feels a “strange and terrifying euphoria.” The story continues in this darkly comic vein with the bungling, well-meaning tiger trying to help a human cub (even though it smells terrible) by using his giant mouth to provide “a warm, comforting womb for it,” only to be filled with self-loathing when he realizes that he has “stupidly, inadvertently, recklessly suffocated it.” He even roars encouragingly at it from his “hot and humid lungs” but it refuses to stir. Parameswaran’s prose has the tender-savage texture of a rare steak veined with blood, and even though one feels a juddering revulsion when Ming the merciless chomps blissfully on fresh viscera and declares, “I have never felt so much love in all my life,” it also feels utterly and helplessly right.

Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol Birch
Jamrach’s tiger is trigger rather than theme of Birch’s Victorian-era novel. He stars only in the first few pages of the story, when he breaks out of his cage and meets dreamy, young Jaffy Brown. That brief encounter in a filthy London market, during which Jaffy strokes the tiger on the nose and is gently picked up by the scruff of his neck, radically changes his fortunes. By the time Jaffy is carried home to his mother, his head, which a few minutes ago, was smaller than the tiger’s paw, now feels larger that “St. Paul’s dome” and is bursting with tiger love. Not only is this regal tiger-man cub encounter (based on a true event) an inversion of the Shere Khan-Mowgli hate-fest, but Birch gives us with what is easily one of the most eloquent descriptions of a tiger’s face as seen through a boy’s wonder-struck eyes. Her calm, Zen-like paean has resonances of Blake’s “fearful symmetry”, but instead of the dread hand of fear, an intense stirring of awe is what one feels.

Here’s Jaffy talking about his tiger:

The Sun himself came down and walked on earth…This cat was the size of a small horse, solid, massively chested, rippling powerfully about the shoulders. He was gold, and the pattern painted so carefully all over him, so utterly perfect, was the blackest black in the world. His paws were the size of footstools, his chest snow white…He drew me like honey draws a wasp. I had no fear. I came before the godly indifference of his face and looked into his clear yellow eyes. His nose was a slope of downy gold, his nostrils pink and moist as a pup’s. He raised his thick, white dotted lips and smiled, and his whiskers bloomed…Nothing in the world could have prevented me from lifting my hand and stroking the broad warm nap of his nose. Even now I feel how beautiful that touch was. Nothing had ever been so soft and clean…he raised his paw—bigger than my head—and lazily knocked me off my feet. It was like being felled by a cushion.

Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo by Rajiv Joseph
Rajiv Joseph’s brutal play was inspired by a bizarre but true news report of a tiger in a bombed-out Baghdad zoo biting off the hand of an American soldier. This scathing critique of the Iraq war uses grotesque comedy and magic realism to devastating effect. Joseph’s tiger chomps the right hand of a soldier who is sweetly but stupidly trying to feed it a Slim Jim. The tiger is then shot dead with Uday Hussein’s gold gun which the solider has looted along with a gold toilet seat he plans to flog on eBay. Tiger becomes a mangy, ghetto-mouthed ghost who stalks through the city saying “motherfucker” and gets completely spooked by the “burned and skeletal” animal topiary in Uday Hussein’s private garden, an eerie stand-in for a perverted Eden. “I mean, what the fuck is this supposed to be?…Vegetative beasts?…People. First they throw all the animals in a zoo and then they carve up the bushes to make it look like we never left.”

The tiger hates the fact that his ghost has been condemned to wander this burning city, and thinks of himself as Dante in Hades. In a broader examination of war and man’s affinity for violence, he recalls how he had once devoured a girl and a boy, and wonders if that makes him evil, only to solemnly conclude: “It wasn’t cruel, it was lunch.”

The only reason this damning play managed to be staged on Broadway – which loves bombshells but hates bombs – was because it had the crowd-pulling cat on its cast. Unfortunately, the tiger’s precious monologues are the one off-key note in this otherwise pitch-perfect play. Like the one-handed solider who pays a young Iraqi prostitute to stand behind him and help him jerk off because his new robotic right hand can’t do it and his left hand  can’t get the angle right, the tiger’s belabored intellectual masturbation has the same cack-handed feel.

The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht
Obreht’s novel has one main tiger (the titular husband) and two in walk-on roles, though walk-on is a cruel term for Zbogom (Freedom) who, crazed with fear and hunger during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, begins to “eat his own legs, first one then another,” in a bloody metaphor for the fragmentation of the country.

The main tiger is another war victim, but of the German bombs that pounded Belgrade in 1941. By the time he breaks free, he is mangy, missing teeth and a “host for leeches.” The streets are littered with corpses, so he feasts on “the dense watery taste of the bloated dead” until he makes his first kill, a juicy young calf, and is sent into an ecstasy of longing for fresh meat, bovine or human. He begins to haunt a mountain village, and the villagers, who have never seen a tiger before, are convinced that a yellow-eyed devil has descended. The only two who are unafraid are the narrator’s grandfather, then a young boy addicted to Jungle Book, and the butcher’s wife, a teenage, deaf-mute Muslim girl with large eyes and a runny nose, whom the butcher calls bitch and beats to a pulp.

Obreht’s novel is deeply political but curiously nameless — there are no Serbians, Bosnians or Allied Forces, and the country is not identified. The only two outsider-enemies who are identified are the tiger and the Muslim girl. A brief and wondrous kinship ignites between these two outcasts. She steals out at night to feed him meat from the smoke house, and when the butcher mysteriously dies and she turns out to be pregnant, the village is convinced that she has become the tiger’s wife. This fable was inspired by Beauty and the Beast, and Obreht is on the mark when she says that the tiger’s voice “came very naturally to her and felt right.” With crafted, velveteen prose, she evokes the tiger’s mythic presence, his warm, sour smell and “big red, heart clenching and unclenching under the ribs.”

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Balram Halwai, a desperately poor man from rural India, and the titular character of this unsparingly harsh novel, is employed as the chauffeur of a corrupt feudal family in Delhi. Servant and master represent the two Indias — the India of darkness and the India of light, and Balram is consumed by an almost deranged desire to escape his India, haunted as he is by the memory of his tubercular rickshaw-puller father. Nor is he satisfied with the bones that have been thrown him — a new uniform and regular meals. “In the old days,” he says, “there were one thousand castes and destinies in India. These days there are just two castes: men with big bellies and men with small bellies and only two destinies: eat or get eaten up.”

The predatory analogy recurs when he compares the plight of the poor to hens in a chicken coop. “Hundreds of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages…They see the organs of their brothers lying around them. They know they’re next. Yet they do not rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop. The very same thing is done with human beings in this country.”

Balram doesn’t want to be eaten. The law of the jungle says that the only way not to be eaten is to become the eater, the tiger. But not any tiger. He realizes this when he visits the National Zoo in Delhi, where he sees that rare and special beast, a white tiger, pacing restlessly in his pen like “the slowed-down reels of an old black-and-white film.” The tiger, he says, was “hypnotizing himself by walking like this — it was the only way he could tolerate his cage.” Suddenly, the tiger stops, turns and looks him in the eye. In that piercing, epiphanic moment, so potent that he faints with rapture, Balram realizes that he “can’t live the rest of his life in a cage.” If he has to kill to break free, well, the India of Light has gotten away with murder.

The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
A garrulous, funny, and moving fable of faith and survival, which Barack Obama called “an elegant proof of God and the power of storytelling.” But first things first. Martel’s talkative narrator, the Hindu-Muslim-Christian Pi Patel, should get a gold medal for coming up with the most extravagant analogies ever used to describe a tiger’s bits and pieces — including its feces.

Pi’s heightened observations are the result of him being shipwrecked on a lifeboat with a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger called Richard Parker for company. So here goes. The “flame-colored carnivore” has paws larger than “volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica” and a round head larger than the “planet Jupiter;” his mouth is “an enormous pink cave” with teeth like “long yellow stalactites and stalagmites” and a tongue “the size and color of a rubber hot-water bottle;” his ears are “perfect arches;” his feces (which hungry Pi tries to eat and spits out) “a big ball of gulab jamun but with none of the softness;” his mating cry “as rich as gold or honey and as spine-tingling as the depth of an unsafe mine or a thousand angry bees;” and his leaping body “a fleeting, furred rainbow.” Want more? Pi is positively rapturous on his first-mate’s “carrot-orange face:” “The patches of white above the eyes, on the cheeks and around the mouth came off as finishing touches worthy of a Kathakali dancer. The result was a face that looked like the wings of a butterfly and bore an expression vaguely old and Chinese.”

For 227 days, during which he swings between boredom and terror, Pi and the Kathakali-Chinese butterfly coexist. They make it because Pi manages to cow the horribly seasick tiger with shrill blasts from an orange whistle and keep them both alive by catching turtles and flying fish, having cannily divined that the zoo tiger looks upon him as a food provider and will spare him if he continues to provide. As his salt-encrusted body blisters and burns and his clothes fray to shreds, the vegetarian Pi discovers the joy of drinking “the fresh-tasting fluid from the eyes of large fish.” He goes from being sick with fear of Richard Parker to the realization that without him for company, he will lose the will to survive. Eventually, his prayers to Jesus, Mary, Muhammad, and Vishnu are answered and the two mammals are saved. But Pi is devastated, when, without so much as a backward glance Richard Parker slinks into the Mexican jungle. For the rest of his life he is haunted by this cold-hearted desertion, the lack of a proper goodbye. Perhaps Pi might derive some consolation from what the Indian poet Eunice de Souza has to say about Richard Parker’s haughty species in a poem called “Advice to Women:”

 Keep cats
 if you want to learn to cope with
 the otherness of lovers.
 Otherness is not always neglect –
 Cats return to their litter trays
 when they need to.
 Don’t cuss out of the window
 at their enemies.
 That stare of perpetual surprise
 in those great green eyes
 will teach you
 to die alone.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

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Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Trishna is not Winterbottom’s first foray into Hardy’s fiction, nor the first time he has lifted Hardy’s characters from fictional Wessex and plunked them down in a faraway place. Winterbottom adapted Hardy’s most controversial novel, Jude the Obscure, in 1996, and followed it four years later with The Claim, a retelling of The Mayor of Casterbridge set in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains during the gold rush.

But Trishna, set in contemporary India, is by far Winterbottom’s most daring – and successful – adaptation of Hardy. The conventional reading of Hardy is that he was a forward-thinker who railed against the two most confining straitjackets of life in Victorian England: the pressure to conform to social conventions and the stark boundaries imposed by class and gender. Winterbottom offers a much subtler reading. As he told The Guardian recently by way of explaining his decision to set Trishna (and, he might have added, The Claim) far from England: “Hardy’s novels are often about modernity and speed and energy. But it’s hard to get that sense of a dynamically changing world if you set one in this country [England]. Here the problems are more to do with a lack of mobility rather than an excess of it.”

That’s smart, but it carries a risk. While contemporary India offers an abundance of photogenic modernity, speed, and energy, it is also a gargantuan cliche: the gaudy colors, the cows, the slums and traffic and noise and dirt, those nearly visible smells. It’s worth remembering that two of the biggest international hits to come out of India recently, Slumdog Millionaire and Darjeeling Limited, were avalanches of these very cliches.

Winterbottom, who also wrote the screenplay, avoids this trap by streamlining Hardy’s story and using the frenzied urbanization and changing class structure of contemporary India as tools to tell his story, never as mere eye candy. The title character is played by Freida Pinto (who had her breakout in Slumdog Millionaire), a poor girl in the rural northwestern state of Rajasthan who catches the eye of a wealthy hotel owner named Jay (Riz Ahmed) when he passes through her town with a freewheeling gang of rich tourists. Smitten, Jay offers Trishna a job at his hotel in the capital city of Jaipur, which her family pushes her to accept. Inevitably, a romance will bloom.

A composite of the novel’s two love interests, Alec d’Urberville and Angel Clare, Jay spirals from seduction to genuine love to fatal cruelty after the lovers move to Mumbai. There are other deft echoes of the novel. Instead of giving birth to her illegitimate child and losing it to illness, as happened to Tess, Trishna deals with an unwanted pregnancy by having an abortion. And in a moment of extreme need, Trishna goes to work in a dehumanizing food-packaging factory, just as Tess was nearly crushed by a ravenous new invention called the threshing machine. Hardy’s fiction, as Winterbottom noted, was suffused with the tension in an urbanizing society – the seduction of modern inventions even as they brutally obliterate old ways. A rural English train depot perfectly captures this tension. It is, Hardy writes, a place where “a fitful white streak of steam at intervals upon the dark-green background denoted intermittent moments of contact between their secluded world and modern life. Modern life stretched out its steam feeler to this point three or four times a day, touched the native existences, and quickly withdrew its feeler again, as if what it touched had been uncongenial.”

By bringing this tension to life in contemporary India, Winterbottom has captured the spirit of Hardy’s novel without being slavish to its letter. As a result, the movie manages the difficult trick of being both faithful and new, less a reproduction than a rich act of re-imagining.

Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy
If ever a work of literature deserved to be called “unfilmable,” The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is surely it. Laurence Sterne’s great bawdy romp of a novel – a man named Tristram Shandy is talking to the reader about the story of his life he is trying to write as he writes it – is so disheveled, so plotless, so self-referential, so sprawling and messy and repetitive and hilarious that it almost dares a filmmaker to take a whack at it.

For his 2005 adaptation, which he called Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, Winterbottom worked from a screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce, who also wrote the scripts for Winterbottom’s The Claim, 24 Hour Party People, and Code 46. This time out, Boyce cleverly solves the conundrum of the source material by turning it on its head: if Sterne wrote a book about writing a book, then let’s make a movie about making a movie about that book. The cast is led by two more Winterbottom regulars – Steve Coogan playing himself playing Tristram Shandy and Rob Brydon playing himself playing Tristram’s uncle Toby.

The movie they’re fitfully making is at times surprisingly faithful to Sterne’s novel. We get Tristram’s botched conception, his botched birth, his botched nose, his botched, nearly disastrous circumcision. Also, as in the novel, we get countless throwaway lines, such as when Coogan tries to gently fend off the advances of a horny crew member with this left-handed compliment: “Your knowledge of German cinema is second to none.” There are snide swipes at Kevin Costner’s interpretation of Robin Hood and a moment when Coogan looks at a copy of Sterne’s novel and marvels, “Can you believe that a book as thick as that doesn’t have an index?” But the best of the lot is when Coogan, who knows how movie stars act and who obviously hasn’t read the novel, describes it to an interviewer as “a post-modern classic written way before there was any modern to be ‘post’ about.” Sterne surely would have approved. After all, he offers this defense of his tendency to digress, to talk to the reader, to leave pages blank, to write chapters out of chronological order and otherwise break every rule of conventional novel-writing: “All I wish is, that it may be a lesson to the world, ‘to let people tell their stories their own way.’”

While spoken in jest, Coogan’s remark about “post-modern classic” backs up my beliefs that this 18th-century novel is indeed one of the earliest exercises in post-modernism, that Don Quixote was the first, and that Flann O’Brien, not Joyce or Beckett, was the 20th century’s first practitioner of the form. In other words, the novelist’s willingness to expose the creative process, play structural tricks and be shamelessly self-aware was not an invention of the 20th century. Virginia Woolf believed Sterne “is singularly of our own age” and “the forerunner of the moderns,” while Italo Calvino anointed Tristram Shandy as “undoubtedly the progenitor of all avant-garde novels of our century.”

Along with the David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Naked Lunch and Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I say Winterbottom’s brilliant Tristram Shandy is final proof that the overused word “unfilmable” should be banished from the lexicon.

Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me
Jim Thompson’s noir novels and stories have been turned into more than a dozen movies. Most filmmakers have latched onto the obvious cinematic allures of Thompson’s fiction – the intricate plots, the stunning double-crosses, the lavish violence – while shying away from what goes on in the dark recesses of the human mind, which is where Thompson did his real work. Maybe this is to be expected since fiction has an unfair advantage over film in this regard. It isn’t forced to rely so heavily on images; it’s freer to explore interiority; it is, in a word, more psychological. Just the sort of material for a filmmaker as smart and literary as Michael Winterbottom. And yet, this time he stumbles.

In 2010 Winterbottom directed a second version of Thompson’s breakthrough 1952 novel, The Killer Inside Me. The first version, a half-baked disaster directed by Burt Kennedy and starring Stacey Keach, came out in 1976. While Kennedy and his screenwriters, Edward Mann and Robert Chamblee, blithely butchered Thompson’s novel, Winterbottom and his screenwriter, John Curran, remain almost slavishly faithful to the text. It’s a lesser sin, but still a sin and not at all characteristic of Winterbottom, as we have seen. It’s hard to tell if he was suffering from a surfeit of reverence or a rare failure of imagination and will. But what’s on the screen is far too literal – more transcript than interpretation, more homage than distinctive work of art. As a result, the movie feels frozen in amber, oddly lifeless considering what the characters are doing to each other on the screen.

As the story unfolds, we learn that a small-town Texas deputy sheriff named Lou Ford is fighting not to have a relapse of “the sickness,” an adolescent sexual fascination with little girls that morphed into a scandalous, violent liaison with a much older woman. Lou’s step-brother took the fall for Lou years ago and ended up getting murdered for it. Lou has waited six years to get back at the killer, the construction tycoon Chester Conway, because he understands that revenge is a dish best served cold. He’ll exact his by murdering his prostitute lover, then luring Conway’s son to the scene and shooting him, making the mess look like a double murder between illicit lovers. The Conway family name will be ruined. We’re deep in Jim Thompson country here: the novel is less a straight crime yarn than an unflinching tour of a sick mind.

Lou Ford himself serves as tour guide, speaking in the first person to the reader in a voice that gives new meaning to the word unreliable. Sometimes he stands in for Thompson, who enjoyed his first big success with this novel but never apologized for his lack of highbrow aspirations. Here’s Lou Ford delivering a very Thompson-esque piece of literary theory:

In a lot of books I read, the writer seems to go haywire every time he reaches a high point. He’ll start leaving out punctuation and running his words together and babble about stars flashing and sinking into a deep dreamless sea. And you can’t figure out whether the hero’s laying his girl or a cornerstone. I guess that kind of crap is supposed to be pretty deep stuff – a lot of book reviewers eat it up, I notice. But the way I see it, the writer is just too goddam lazy to do his job. And I’m not lazy, whatever else I am. I’ll tell you everything.

Atmosphere is critical in any noir, and Winterbottom tries to capture the novel’s moral aridity through verbatim dialog and voice-overs from the novel, but it never quite gels. Much more successful at capturing atmosphere is the movie’s cinematography – those bleached colors, stark stretches of desert, and brooding mountains. It’s an extreme place where extreme things seem almost destined to happen. Another strong point is a killer soundtrack that includes works ranging from Enrico Caruso and Gustav Mahler to Hank Williams, Charlie Feathers, and the Western swing fiddler Spade Cooley. (Cooley, in an apt twist for these surroundings, was convicted of beating his wife to death in 1961.)

Best of all is the cast. Elias Koteas, who always looks like he was just dipped in dirty motor oil, plays a deliciously smarmy union boss. Ned Beatty is serviceable as the porcine tycoon. Bill Pullman has a nice little cameo as an unhinged defense attorney. Jessica Alba as the doomed hooker and Kate Hudson as Lou’s doomed fiancee both do fine jobs of living hot and dying (or appearing to die) hard. But the key gear in the works is Casey Affleck’s deadpan portrayal of Lou Ford. His smooth cheeks, lidded eyes, monotone drawl. and correct manners are a mask, his way of convincing the world he’s decent and a little slow, no threat to anyone. Affleck is not capturing the banality of evil; he’s uncovering the evil that can hide behind blandness. He did the same thing in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. This is true creepiness, and true art.

So creepy that Lou is capable of beating two women to death with his bare hands while murmuring, “I’m real sorry…I love you…goodbye.” Many viewers and critics had a hard time watching this graphic violence, which begs the question: Is domestic violence supposed to look pretty? Only if you’re in the fetishistically stylized world of a Guy Ritchie or Quentin Tarantino movie, where getting your head blown off can look so cool. Thompson – and Winterbottom – are making the point that such violence is both horrible and horrible to look at, and, what’s way worse and way more important, there’s a bit of Lou Ford inside every one of us. The only person who doesn’t get this is Lou Ford. He believes, rightly, that he’s sick, but he also believes, wrongly, that this sets him apart from the rest of humanity, that he’s one of the evil “us” who live in the midst of the sane and good “them.” As Lou puts it, “If the Good Lord made a mistake in us people it was in making us want to live when we’ve got the least excuse for it.” Later he adds, “Our kind. Us people. All of us that started the game with a crooked cue, that wanted so much and got so little, that meant so good and did so bad.”

Winterbottom’s portrayals of violence in this movie have been called everything from “misogynistic” to “feminist.” They’re neither. They’re valid artistic representations of an abiding fact of human life, especially when the humans are damaged goods. Thompson and Winterbottom never exalt Lou Ford or other monstrous characters, the way, say, Oliver Stone did in the execrable Natural Born Killers. I watched The Killer Inside Me with a friend who is a staunch opponent of the Guantanamo Bay prison and the death penalty. Unable to watch Lou Ford beat a second woman’s face into hamburger, my friend muttered, “I’d like to torture that sonofabitch to a slow death.” Then she stormed out, halfway through the movie. I took her revulsion to be a barometer of Thompson’s and Winterbottom’s success. They loosed my friend’s monstrous yearning to torture and kill the monstrous Lou Ford. In doing so they proved that there is, indeed, a bit of Lou Ford in all of us.

It wasn’t until I’d re-read all three novels and watched Winterbottom’s adaptations that I came to understand what ties these three movies together and what sets them apart. First, of course, they were all directed by a man with a high literary sensibility who is a master at casting actors and drawing quality performances out of them. Production values are uniformly high. Marcel Zyskind served as cinematographer on all three films, giving each a look appropriate to the story’s mood and message.

Then came the realization why these movies are so uneven: each had a different screenwriter. In Trishna, Winterbottom’s script shrewdly updates a story about a rural society’s traumatic urbanization; Boyce’s script of Tristram Shandy perfectly captures the antic, self-referential spirit of its source material; and The Killer Inside Me falls flat because Curran’s script treats Thompson’s novel as a blueprint rather than a springboard.

In other words, the hardware of a movie – its direction, acting, cinematography, editing, makeup, music. and wardrobe – can carry it only so far. It turns out that in movies just as much as in books, the writing is, always and forever, the thing.

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1.
There are two stories to explain my name. The more light-hearted option is that I was named after my father’s best man, an “Uncle” Nick, who was fully Sicilian, and supposedly fully “connected.” The less enjoyable story, though, is likely the correct one: I was named after Gordon Nicholas Ripatranzone, a 19 year-old United States Army Corporal. Service number ER12338939. K Company, 9th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Infantry Division. Missing in Action on February 12, 1951, near Chowon-ri. The same brand of legend that ties me to Cosa Nostra yielded an apocryphal story about this particular Nick, or Gordo: he was shot in the back of the head while on his knees, hands tied behind his spine. He went, the story said, from MIA to POW to KIA in the span of a day.

Gordo’s parents wouldn’t hear that version of his death until years later, passed third-hand from returned Korean War veterans. Nobody has been able to verify its truth, but such legend does not require evidence. After hundreds of photocopied flyers were distributed with three photographs and the lament that Gordo was “Not on Official POW list,” his parents were emotionally exhausted. Gordo was my second cousin, but his death predated my birth by nearly 30 years. Yet it is still difficult for me to read the questions that his parents typed on the flyer: “Did you know our son?” “Which camp was he in?” “How was he treated?” “Do you know if our son received any of our mail?”

The flyer concludes with a capitalized sentence: “THANKS EVER SO MUCH AND GOD BLESS YOU.” I heard they lost their faith soon afterward. For years that was the core of the story that lived in me: how faith could be lost. I hold on to mine, but I have never experienced such pain. Can faith bring back a son?

2.
War raises the emotional stakes and breadth of narratives. In 1942, Ernest Hemingway selected and arranged representative stories in the anthology Men At War. Although my current high school students idolize writers such as David Foster Wallace and Blake Butler, I was still a Hemingway disciple at their age, and had bought a paperback copy of the anthology at a garage sale. On the cover, shadowed soldiers battle against a red, barbed-wire backdrop. At 16, with two Marine-uncles and aspirations of attending West Point, I was Hemingway’s ideal reader. That past summer the local American Legion had selected me to attend Boys State, where military drills were followed by civic lessons. I idolized the veterans who volunteered there: somehow their formality complimented the progressiveness of the group leaders, who wore sandals with their khakis and played the theme of St. Elmo’s Fire during our last day.

Few writers have been oversimplified as much as Hemingway, but he explained the complexities of war in that anthology. He dedicated the book to his sons, and offered a lengthy introduction that began bluntly: “This book will not tell you how to die.” His intentions become even clearer:

The editor of this anthology, who took part and was wounded in the last war to end war, hates war and hates all the politicians whose mismanagement, gullibility, cupidity, selfishness and ambition brought on this present war and made it inevitable. But once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in a war.

War is Hell, but it must be won. He continues: “when you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you.” Hemingway considered his anthology an antidote to such ignorance. He selected stories that revealed truths, not “bravado writing,” which would have resulted in a “propaganda book.” After all, the anthology “has been edited in order that those three boys… can have the book that will contain truth about war as near as we can come by it, which was lacking to me when I needed it most.” I certainly needed it.

3.
At 19, the age of Gordo’s death, I became obsessed with his memory. I sketched genealogies on graph paper, contacted the Repatriation and Family Affairs Division of the Army. I received a loss incident summary report that mentioned Field Search Case 262F, which concluded that Gordo not only disappeared that February, but that none of the “more than 4,000 American POWs” who returned to the states ever mentioned seeing or hearing Gordo. Also enclosed was a map of Korea with four salient points marked: “Chosin Reservoir,” “Unsan County,” “Demilitarized Zone,” and “Area where CPL Ripatranzone became MIA.” I still receive annual invitations to conferences for the families of POWs, but I am nervous to attend. I did not, could not know Gordo. I never touched him, never heard his voice. We shared a name, and perhaps blood, but I have never served in the military or been to Korea.

The incident summary report mentioned one other thing. Gordo’s body was never discovered, so a “Presumptive Finding of Death” was placed on January 18, 1954. The last moment of his existence was presumed, not definite.

Ten years later I discovered American Pow’s Calling From Korea, a 112 page bound booklet with hazy printing on cloth paper. I thought I had heard the last of Gordo, but this book complicated everything, especially my comprehension of his final days. Clunky idiom dominates the prose, along with British spelling and misusages of punctuation throughout (the faulty possessive in the title is only a start). The text is clearly against American involvement in Korea, with the preface by the unnamed “Publishers,” noting that “these statements and messages were entrusted to correspondents of the Hsinhua (New China) News Agency serving with the Chinese people’s volunteers in Korea, who forwarded them to Peking where they were broadcast by ‘Radio Peking.’”

Litanies of soldiers complete with rank and number follow supposed cease-fire declarations. Truncated dramatic narratives are often addressed to “mothers” and contain similar refrains: the kindness of the Chinese and the aggression of the Americans. The book concludes with an account of the death of nineteen American POWs when “for 20 minutes the [American] planes fiercely bombed and strafed the camp.”

Tucked pages before that declaration, though, are the only words I have ever read “written” by Gordo Ripatranzone: “We are supposed to be here freeing the people and all we are doing is killing them and destroying them. The only way this war can be stopped is by you at home. Put this in the paper. Unite and get the people in the U. S. A. to have the Government withdraw. Let the North and South Koreans settle this war by themselves.” I doubt a single letter came from Gordo’s own hand: the diction, even the cadence of the message is a nearly mechanic repetition of other supposed communications of American POWs. It bothers me now, 60 years later. I wonder how much it bothered his parents back then, their every breath resting on the hope of his real voice.

4.
A few months ago I received a cryptic message from Fort Hood. I called back, hoping for some great revelation, but instead learned that the Repatriation and Family Affairs Division was seeking DNA samples from relatives of missing soldiers. Of the 8,177 American soldiers killed during the Korean War, 800 are interred in the Military Cemetery of the Pacific at the Punchbowl in Honolulu, Hawaii. These remains “are to date largely unidentified.”

I was ready to provide my DNA, but not ready for the response: they didn’t need my sample. They’d called me in error; someone else had already provided a sample. They couldn’t tell me who. My family doesn’t talk of Gordo much — that wound seems best considered in silence — but someone else is looking for him, pursuing his memory. Now, I feel even more distant from him. The odds that Gordo’s remains are at Punchbowl are slim, but it felt like the one act I could take that mattered. Was it selfish to think in such a way? Is that a form of grieving, or of pride? I had turned his death into legend; his life folklore I could control.

One of my professors at Rutgers-Newark, the historian H. Bruce Franklin, authored M.I.A., or Mythmaking in America in 1993. While I won’t say that I entered his course a hawk and left a dove, Franklin absolutely refigured my perception of American participation in war. Franklin, a former navigator and intelligence officer in the Strategic Air Command of the US Air Force, has dissected the American personal and cultural perpetuation of the POW mythos. Franklin’s focus was on the potential for American soldiers remaining as POWs beyond the end of the Vietnam conflict:

…the supposed fate of this conjectural small group therefore might seem to be almost incidental to the catastrophic effects of the war on the ruined nation of Vietnam, whose casualties ran into the millions and whose own MIAs still number over two hundred thousand, as well as to the devastating effects of the war on the United States itself, including the known fate of many tens of thousands of veterans.

Belief in surviving POWs “could be regarded as the closest thing we have to a national religion.” Hollywood has sent “saviors such as Gene Hackman, Chuck Norris, Sylvester Stallone, and David Carradine… on quests to rescue imprisoned Vietnam veterans” though they “would have a more realistic chance of success in the United States, where hundreds of thousands are or have been incarcerated in jails and prisons.” Personal grief becomes political polemic: the reality of POWs and MIAs is less useful, and more disturbing, than the reminders of black-and-white flags. Franklin quotes Emma Hagerman, whose husband became MIA in 1967, that “‘the MIA disease’ turns families into ‘emotional cripples’ who ‘no longer look for an accounting, but are waiting for a resurrection.’”

Gordo’s resurrection was, and is, a perpetual possibility. Even if his remains are someday found, my belief in his mythology is greater than any tangible conclusion. I still read Hemingway. I regularly have talented writing students join the Marines or the Army, and I want to ask them why, even if I already know the answer. I’ve known it since I first saw Gordo’s photograph. The fiction we create for the men at war will always carry more truth than the reality. A foolish sentiment, but one that brings me comfort.

Image courtesy the author

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Meanwhile, a young Frenchman named Laurent Binet was tearing his hair out. Binet had been toiling away on a work-in-progress that turned out to have striking similarities with Littell’s succès de scandale. Where The Kindly Ones featured cameos from Adolf Eichmann, Heinrich Himmler, and Reinhard Heydrich and concluded with a physical assault on the person of the Führer, Binet’s novel-in-progress focused on many of the same characters, and culminated in Heydrich’s assassination. These resemblances were superficial, of course. Littell’s nervy postmodern update on the historical novel had affinities with William T. Vollmann’s blend of research, pastiche, and hallucination. Binet’s owed more to W.G. Sebald…and maybe Jacques Roubaud, insofar as he had already taken the step of writing himself into the book. Still, he seemed to have landed in a writer’s nightmare, akin to that of the studio exec who realizes in postproduction that a version his movie Armageddon has just appeared under the title Deep Impact. What’s a good postmodern to do? Well, write that into the novel, too.

Among chapters devoted to the plot against Heydrich and chapters devoted to his own research and aesthetic anxieties, Binet began to interpolate passages covering, in real-time, his reading of The Kindly Ones and his fears about what it meant for his book. These fears would prove unjustified; in 2010 his novel was published under the title HHhH (an acronym for “Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich” – “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich”). But his French publisher, Grasset, redacted all passages concerning The Kindly Ones, apparently for fear of offending Littell’s admirers in the public, the press, and the académie Goncourt – which awarded HHhH its prize for first novels.

This month, an English translation of HHhH arrives in U.S. bookstores, trailing blurbs by the likes of Martin Amis, Bret Easton Ellis, and Wells Tower. This edition, too, is missing the Littell material. But Binet and his translator Sam Taylor have graciously allowed The Millions to publish the lost pages of HHhH for the first time anywhere. Their tone of comical anxiety and competitive ardor – of wishing at once for a colleague to succeed and to fail – will be familiar to many writers. Unsurprisingly, Binet ends up judging Littell harshly, as did many American critics, including this one (although I should confess that I still think about The Kindly Ones often). More important than their literary judgments, though, or their portrait of the artist as a young man, are the still controversial questions about representation and the Holocaust these pages candidly take up. Even relegated, as it were, to the margins of the published work, these questions transform the historical thriller at the heart of HHhH into a powerful meditation on the ethics of storytelling. – Garth Risk Hallberg

The Kindly Ones

Next to me on the sofa is Jonathan Littell’s weighty tome The Kindly Ones, which has just been published by Gallimard. The (false) memoirs of an old SS veteran, it is nine hundred pages long. Having created a massive buzz in the press, and sold out in most bookstores, this novel is crushing all its competitors on the bestseller list. Not only that, but its success is apparently causing problems for the entire publishing industry, as it is so long that it is lasting readers from September to Christmas, so they aren’t buying any other books.

There is a savage review of the book in Libération, with the headline “Night and Mud.” But even this review hails the author’s depth of research simply because Jon Littell uses SS ranks. Apparently, if one writes “I caught a Scharführer by the sleeve: ‘What’s happening?’ — ‘I don’t know, Obersturmführer. I think there’s a problem with the Standartenführer ,’” that is enough to produce a “heady feeling of realism.” I’m not sure if the journalist who wrote this is being ironic or not, but I’m afraid he isn’t. I remember having made a joke on this subject in one (invented) line during one of my chapters on the Night of the Long Knives. But anyway…

One of the book’s severest critics is Claude Lanzmann (although he also recognizes its good qualities), but according to his detractors, that’s because he believes himself to be the only person in the world (along with Raoul Hilberg) with the right to talk about the Holocaust. I met Lanzmann once: he is, in the flesh, a courteous man with an impressive presence. If you judge him solely on his public statements, though, you might easily regard him as narrow-minded. In this case, however, I think he shows great judgment when he criticizes Littell for his character’s “invasive psychology.” Not a good sign. But he, too, acclaims the author’s research: “Not one error; flawless erudition.” Well, all right, if you say so.

Apart from these examples, everything else is ecstatic. In Le Nouvel Observateur: “A new War and Peace”; in Le Monde: “one of the most impressive books ever written about Nazism.” And so on.

But the highest praise comes on the back cover of the book, where Gallimard has not skimped on the name-dropping: Eschyle, Visconti, even Grossman’s Life and Fate. Talk about bringing out the big guns.

Obviously, the book is up for every literary prize in the galaxy.

So I begin to read it, feeling simultaneously suspicious and excited. After three pages, my feelings have turned to puzzlement. It is quite badly written, and yet at the same time it is so very literary. This is not at all how I imagined an eighty-year-old SS veteran speaking or thinking. And, of course, I am allergic to interior monologues, at least when we are supposedly talking about history.

I am saying all this now, before continuing with my reading, because I am sure that, when it comes down to it, I am going to devour this book.

Human Brothers

Let’s begin with the first line of Jonathan Littell’s novel: “Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened.”

I don’t like this line. But the point here is not, for once, my personal tastes. Let’s look more closely at that opening: “Oh my human brothers.” With these first four words, we already know the book’s thesis. By beginning in this way, Littell deliberately places his novel in the lineage of Hannah Arendt. He is proposing the idea that evil is not the prerogative of monsters, but that it emanates from people like you and me. I subscribe to this thesis, of course, but I fail to see how its validity can be demonstrated in a novel. Even a nine-hundred-page novel.

From the moment when you create an imaginary character — a character who belongs to you, whom you can make say anything you want (“Oh my human brothers,” for instance), a puppet whom you are able to manipulate in any way you wish — it is easy and all too artificial to use this character to illustrate whatever theory you have in mind. A character may illustrate, certainly, but it cannot demonstrate anything. If you wish to suggest that the SS were sickened by the horrors they committed, you make your protagonist vomit at inconvenient moments. If you wish to suggest that the SS loved animals, you give him a dog. And then, to make it more real, you give the dog a name. Fritz?

But what interests me about the SS — if I wish to understand something about that troubled era, if I wish to extract something from all of that which can help me understand man and the world — is what they did, not what Jonathan Littell thinks they might have done.

The problem with this type of historical novel is that it shamelessly mixes the true with the plausible. That’s fine if I know about the episode in question. But if I don’t, I am left in limbo: perhaps this is true, or perhaps it’s not.

I wonder how Jonathan Littell knows that Blobel, the alcoholic head of Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C in Ukraine, had an Opel. And I wonder whether Lanzmann, before deciding that The Kindly Ones did not contain “a single error, a single flaw,” checked this detail. If Blobel really drove an Opel, then I bow before Littell’s superior research. But if it’s a bluff, it weakens the whole book. Of course it does! It’s true that the Nazis were supplied in bulk by Opel, and so it’s perfectly plausible that Blobel possessed, or used, a vehicle of that make. But plausible is not the same as known. I’m talking rot, aren’t I? When I tell people that, they think I’m mental. They don’t see the problem.

Perhaps Blobel had an Opel, or perhaps he had a BMW. And if Littell has invented the make of Blobel’s car, perhaps he has invented all the rest. The dialogue, for example. I find it surprising that an SS officer could exclaim: “Il a pété les plombs!” ["He's blown a gasket!"] Littell’s entire book can teach me only one thing: how this writer imagines Nazism. And I am not really interested in that, particularly when the depiction is so dubious. I want to know how things really happened, so I expect him to tell me — at the very least — when an episode is true and when it is his invention. Otherwise, reality is reduced to the level of fiction. I think that is wrong.

So, irrespective of the Opel question, Jonathan Littell’s novel — as compelling as it may be (I am still at the beginning) — lost all credibility as a reflection on history from the moment its author chose to use a fictional protagonist. Which is a shame because, after all, it does seem quite well-researched.

I will, of course, apologize if it turns out that Blobel really did drive an Opel. But fundamentally, it wouldn’t change a thing.

Littell’s Portrait of Heydrich, p. 58

You might have guessed that I was a bit disturbed by the publication of Jonathan Littell’s novel, and by its success. And even if I can comfort myself by saying that our projects are not the same, I am forced to admit that the subject matter is fairly similar. I’m reading his book at the moment, and each page gives me the urge to write something. I have to suppress this urge. All I will say is that there’s a description of Heydrich at the beginning of the book, from which I will quote only one line: “His hands seemed too long, like nervous algae attached to his arms.” I don’t know why, but I like that image.

More on The Kindly Ones

Just a few more words. Let’s agree on this: an interior monologue, if designed to reveal to us the psychology of an imaginary character, is at best an amusing farce. If it is supposed to allow the reader access to someone’s thoughts, it becomes downright risible. An interior monologue can only ever reveal the psychology of two people: the author and the reader. And that is already quite a lot, let me tell you!

Having said that, I must admit something: I did not know that most of the cars used by the SS were Opels. Did they sign a contract with the firm? That is what I would like to ask Jonathan Littell. Or Lanzmann.

But, to return to the interior monologue, there is a real problem with The Kindly Ones: the tone of the imaginary SS veteran’s supposed confession is unbelievably neutral, almost like a history book. It is the kind of tone I myself try to adopt when I describe horrors, in order to avoid the twin traps of pathos and grandiloquence (not that I always succeed). But what is the point of writing in the first person if you are going to erase practically all trace of subjectivity? From time to time, it’s true, the narrator reminds us of his existence with little, discreetly ironic remarks. These don’t seem very plausible to me, but still. Interior monologues are everywhere! But it is not even the psychological implausibility that bothers me; it is just the pointlessness of the procedure. Putting an idea, no matter how interesting, in the head of an invented character… I cannot bring myself to do it; I find it completely puerile, even if it is a dramatic convention.

One Last Word?

All right, this is my last word on this, I promise. I have just read my chapters about The Kindly Ones to my half brother. He pointed out that many historical novels use fictional inventions, sometimes with interesting results. Of course, I cannot deny that. For Alexandre Dumas to use historical material for its novelistic possibilities, and for him to mix it with his own invented stories, does not shock me at all. Everything depends on the author’s intention. If it is to tell a beautiful and exciting story, without any other pretention, then that is perfectly fine; I would happily surrender to the pleasure of the novel. But I heard Jonathan Littell speaking on the radio, and apparently this was not his intention: he really did want, as I’d suspected, to understand evil. As Alexandre (my brother, not Dumas) put it, tackling a speculative question with a supposedly historical angle by way of an invented character (and, I repeat, even with solid research as backup) is “entropic.” I don’t really understand that word, but I know I agree with him. In fact, I think that what he means by “entropic” is something between “centripetal” and “tautological.” So, upon closer examination, the term is inappropriate, which is a shame because it struck me as quite eloquent. But never mind, the idea remains the same. What I am saying is that inventing a character in order to understand historical facts is like fabricating evidence. Or rather, as my brother says, It’s like planting false proof at a crime scene where the floor is already strewn with incriminating evidence.

I am not saying that all invented characters are worthless. I would happily swap Napoleon, Kutuzov, Julius Caesar, or Heydrich for Josef K. Or even the real Mark Antony for Shakespeare’s Mark Antony. As soon as fictional characters are loosened from their historical roots, they are able to become universal — even if (and perhaps because) they differ from their historical models: Richard III, Rameau’s nephew, Zaitsev in Life and Fate, Edison in Tomorrow’s Eve, and so on. But in all these cases, we are not interested in what kind of car they drive.

A Littell Mistake, p. 209

Despite all this, I did end up getting into The Kindly Ones. In other words, I finally managed to abandon myself to the innocent pleasures of reading, except for my brain’s never-ending production of critical and metacritical thoughts.

But, while lazing in the bath, book in hand, feeling vaguely guilty about the idea of spending my weekend in this way when I have a thousand things to do, what should I read, on page 209? In the course of his story, Littell writes that Heydrich “was wounded in Prague on May 29”! I cannot believe my eyes. Okay, okay, it’s only a date. But for me, it’s a bit like being told that the Bastille was stormed on July 12, or that the United States declared its independence on July 6.

I had been so close to trusting Littell that, when I saw this, I even came up with an excuse for him: it is possible, after all, that news of the assassination attempt was not divulged until two days afterward, and that even members of the SD, such as the narrator, were not informed immediately. But that doesn’t make sense, because the story is supposedly being told by an SS veteran, years later, when the facts and dates are well known.

Of course, this doesn’t discredit all of Littell’s work. In the context of his book, it is a small and inconsequential error, probably nothing more than a simple typo. But I think again of Lanzmann: “Not a single error,” he said! And I had believed him. This makes me think about the way we accept — daily, constantly, unthinkingly — the arguments of authority. I truly have a great deal of respect for Lanzmann, but the moral of this story is that everyone — even the world’s most authoritative specialist — can make a mistake.

This makes me think of a specialist on the life and works of Saint-John Perse (the most famous specialist in France and, I imagine, in the world) who declared on the radio, with the learned assurance typical of French universities, that the poet was a “hardline” anti-Munich campaigner in 1938 when he was working at the Quai d’Orsay. This seems somewhat surprising, given that he was one of the two diplomats who had accompanied Daladier at the agreement’s signing! Open any history book that mentions Munich, and you can check just how deeply Alexis Léger, the Foreign Office’s general secretary, was implicated in this infamous agreement. But evidently this great specialist did not consider it useful to consult even one book, preferring to rely on a biographical note written by . . . the subject himself! According to Saint-John Perse / Alexis Léger,

In spite of his personal opposition to the so-called policy of ‘appeasement’ and to Hitler’s well-known hostility towards him, the general secretary [talking about himself in the third person!] reluctantly agreed to attend the Conference as the Quai d’Orsay’s representative, as the Foreign Secretary had not been summoned to this meeting of government heads.

Apparently, our specialist did not wonder what Saint-John Perse / Alexis Léger meant by “reluctantly.” Was he dragged to Munich against his will, surrounded by policemen? Was his family threatened? Was it really impossible to contemplate resigning in protest of a policy that went so strongly against his personal beliefs? Was there really no choice, once the agreement had been signed, than to adopt that contemptuous, arrogant attitude toward the Czechs? Did he at least have the decency to resign after the agreement was signed in order to register his disapproval? Clearly, French literature specialists do not feel any great obligation to study history in much depth. But this does not prevent them sounding categorical. The end result is that this myth is taken up and spread by all the country’s literary authorities. And the students swallow it. In any case, literary types rarely differentiate between fable and reality, so when it comes down to it, they couldn’t care less about Alexis Léger’s diplomatic career. But this does not prevent them from repeating, with the perfect assurance of those in the know, that Saint-John Perse, this great Nobel Prize winner, was a “hardline” anti-Munich campaigner. If he was anti-Munich, you have to wonder what a pro-Munich campaigner would look like. A German.

So anyway, Saint-John Perse, Littell . . . you must always be suspicious, of everybody! Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Littell Again

It’s not my fault, but well-intentioned friends send me everything they can find about Jonathan Littell, and I am yet again forced to return to the subject. Things are not going well at all. I have just read the account of a speech he gave at a Normale Supérieure school, where he said: “Evil is committed by people like us, people who sleep, who shit, who fuck, and who have the same relationship as we do to the body and to the fear of death, with thought coming afterwards. All killers are like us.”

Fair enough. In fact, I agree completely. Here again is Hannah Arendt’s thesis, and here, again, I cannot deny its truth. But it is a very strange speech to justify his book, precisely because Littell seems to have done his utmost to invent the most singular character possible. Let us recall, for those few unfortunates who have not been able to read The Kindly Ones, that the SS veteran Aue is an intellectual who sleeps with his sister, kills his parents, actively participates in genocide, sucks off Robert Brasillach, survives a bullet in the head, is never separated from his Flaubert, and enjoys rolling in his shit from time to time. For a guy who is just like you and me, that is quite a list!

Do you often carry your Flaubert around with you?

Benamou

The vise is tightening around my book. The warning shot was in fact a nuclear attack. The atomic bomb was Littell, his Prix Goncourt, his million copies sold, and all the newsprint he’s generated in reviews and exegeses. (Only this week, a reading guide called The Kindly Ones Decoded has come out.) What publisher of any kind of renown would want to publish a book on roughly the same theme in the decade to come? What publisher would be prepared to look like a follower, while taking the risk of publishing someone who is more or less unknown? There is more to lose than to gain: unsold copies if the book is a failure, being accused of opportunism or even cynicism if it’s a success. And that’s without even considering that the horde of critics who’d decreed that The Kindly Ones was the novel of the century will not want to go back on their decision (although, knowing them, this problem is surmountable).

My editorial problems don’t end there. For years, I have been writing to the tranquil rhythm of my own erratic inspiration, but no one warned me that I was in a race against the clock. The longer I wait to finish my book, the greater the risk that I will arrive after the battle has ended. Someone told me on the phone the day before yesterday that a biography of Heydrich has just come out, written by a German whose name I have never heard, Mario Dederichs. It is translated into French and is already on the bookshelves at Gibert. I felt both excited and slightly ill. I was thrilled at the chance to learn new anecdotes and facts about Heydrich, but at the same time, I have to admit, it gets on my nerves a bit. And today, in a bookshop in Normandy, I discover a novel by Georges-Marc Benamou, entitled The Ghost of Munich, featuring frequent appearances by Alexis Léger / Saint-John Perse. If this continues, everything I have to say will already have been said! I am avidly reading Benamou’s book: in literary terms, it has no merit, but it is pleasant to read all the same, and I am learning new things. At least, I think I am. No matter what, I know I have to stop reading. I need to hurry up and finish telling my story because I am convinced, probably irrationally, that I am the only person capable of writing it. This could seem pretentious, obviously. But I do not want my story to be wasted — it’s as simple as that.

Littell Epilogue

A poster on an Internet forum expresses the opinion that Max Aue “rings true because he is the mirror of his age.” What? No! He rings true (for certain, easily duped readers) because he is the mirror of our age: a postmodern nihilist, essentially. At no moment in the novel is it suggested that this character believes in Nazism. On the contrary, he is often critically detached from National Socialist doctrine — and in that sense, he can hardly be said to reflect the delirious fanaticism prevalent in his time. On the other hand, this detachment, this blasé attitude toward everything, this permanent malaise, this taste for philosophizing, this unspoken amorality, this morose sadism, and this terrible sexual frustration that constantly twists his guts… but of course! How did I not see it before? Suddenly, everything is clear. The Kindly Ones is simply “Houellebecq does Nazism.”

Elise

Yesterday, I met a young woman who works in a library. She told me about an old lady, a former Resistance fighter, who regularly borrows books. One day, the old lady took home Littell’s The Kindly Ones. Soon afterwards, she brought it back, exclaiming: “What is this shit?” When I heard this, I thought straightaway that it would require a great deal of willpower not to put this anecdote in my book.

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