Currently reading Miklós Szentkuthy's Towards the One & Only Metaphor

Below is a quote from an early part of Miklós Szentkuthy's 1935 novel, Towards the One & Only Metaphor, published in English translation in 2013 and translated by Tim Wilkinson:

Yesterday a friend of mine, who for me will be a permanent symbol of a non-lyrical, 'objective' person (an absolute musician and absolute mathematician temperament, with heaps of ethical 'douceur') took me into the observatory and, among the other things, pointed out a ball-shaped star cluster (Messier 13) on the telescope; on his table I found masses of mathematical books (afterwards I bought Eddington's New Pathways in Science).  Nowadays I do not perceive nil in love and a mathematizing scientific realism as being an antithesis:  these scientific truths can lead 'out of' life just as much as poetic lyricism.  Life is:  comble d'imprécision.  What do I mean by life, I ask myself?  In what way do I arbitrarily narrow down and broaden out the word, the elastic boundaries of which everyone has already exceeded with the most comical irresponsibility, whether they be a buffoon politician or a dogmatic religious nut.  By life I mean the life of an average man on the street, an ordinary Joe, but at the same time also of a few sober 'heroes.'  For him poetry is not infralife, science not ultralife. (pp. 24-25)

Very promising Modernist work so far...

Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

"Okay, then.  Tell me about the thistles."

"The thistles?"  Her expressive eyebrows told him what she thought of the question.

"Yes.  You were quite specific about the thistles.  Why?"  It still perplexed him, the amount of detail there about thistles, in an interview from the prior week, when she'd arrived at the Southern Reach.  It made him think again of hypnotic cues.  It made him think of words being used as a protective thicket.

The biologist shrugged.  "I don't know."

He read from the transcript:  "'The thistles there have a lavender bloom and grow in the transitional space between the forest and the swamp.  You cannot avoid them.  They attract a variety of insects and the buzzing and the brightness that surrounds them suffuses Area X with a sense of industry, almost like a human city.'  And it goes on, although I won't." (galley pages 22-23)

When I wrote my review of Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation, the first volume in The Southern Reach trilogy, back in February, I used the descriptor "transitional" to describe the events and themes of that volume.  "Transitional," albeit in a different sense, also can be employed to describe the middle volume, Authority, as the events within are shown in a state of flux that harkens back to the first volume while adding layers of depth to it.  Yet despite these similarities, Authority is a different beast from Annihilation, a story that contains its own mysteries and weirdness.

Authority is set a few months after the few days' events of Annihilation.  The new director of the Southern Reach, John Rodriguez or "Control," as he prefers to be called, finds himself at the heart of a new mystery as the "survivors" of the "twelfth" expedition have recently recrossed the border of the mysterious, vaguely nefariously Area X and have been held the past couple of weeks in isolation.  He spends the next few weeks reviewing the data collected on that expedition as well as those taken from previous experiments and expeditions and what he discovers begins to unsettle him.  Near the heart of it lies the returned members of the most recent expedition and what one of them says, or rather avoids saying, drives him to investigate further, uncovering certain truths that had been buried for three decades.

The premise, when stated in those terms, might seem to be familiar to those well-read in thrillers and espionage stories, but VanderMeer's intricate plot, buttressed by its economical and yet evocative prose, confounds those expectations.  What Control discovers is not so much new revelations but instead new, haunting mysteries; the picture becomes murkier instead of clearer, yet not quite without a sense that resolution may lie around the corner.  Each little piece of data contained in the Southern Reach file, each little oddity (such as an old, apparently failed experiment with white rabbits), they all somehow connect with each other, creating a complex ecosystem of creatures and creators, of words and images, that transition from one to the other, thus constructing a whole that is more varied than any of its constituent parts.

Whereas Annihilation focuses primarily on an external human vs. (weird) nature, Authority internalizes that conflict, expressing it as much through the mass of conflicting data and bureaucratic infighting as through the unnatural flora and fauna detailed within those reports.  In this sense, Authority is a complement to Annihilation while also simultaneously serving as a contrast in characters and situations.  The ecosystem interactions of Annihilation are furthered with that ultimate invasive species, humanity, is factored in.  The very title, Authority, in this regard is almost ironic, a statement of sorts regarding the illusory sense of possession of a nature that shows its threatening, incomprehensible elements in shorter yet perhaps even more impactful ways than its predecessor.

Authority's plot is more expansive than the narrower, more confined action of Annihilation and its action is expressed in a different fashion, yet it is no less exciting.  I found myself reading each paragraph slower than is my wont, savoring the connections that I perceived between certain events and characters.  By novel's end, the action had risen to a fitting and yet frustrating conclusion.  Frustrating not because it ended abruptly, but because of a natural desire to know more about the mysteries that Control had become to unravel.  There are very few flaws here.  If anything, perhaps Control's character could have been explored in even more detail, as this could have made the "control" aspect even more fitting, but for the most part, the characterizations were well-done and their motivations fit nicely with the narrative.  The themes in particular here, continuations of those from Annihilation, were explored excellently.  The end result was a very good novel that builds upon the strengths of its predecessor and leaves the reader excited about the upcoming September release of the concluding volume, Acceptance.  Highly recommended.

Things I'd like to write/cover this week

Now that it seems that I have a bit more free time than I expected coming up starting this week, I think it is time to write a few more reviews and perhaps a few other pieces.  Here are a few things that I do plan on doing this week:

Monday, I plan on writing a review of Jeff VanderMeer's Authority, which is officially released in the US on Tuesday.  Might end up being one of my longer reviews so far this year.

Tuesday or Wednesday, I also plan on reviewing Karen Russell's e-book novella/short novel, Sleep Donation.

Might also write a couple of pieces on translated fictions, as I do plan on resuming two translation projects, Roberto Arlt's El jorobadito and Vergil's Aeneid, over the summer break.

Perhaps there'll also be something on whatever teacup tempest of the day/week happens to be, provided that there is a snarky angle that I can exploit...err, explore...

And maybe there will be more videos of squirrels attacking dumb humans who attempt to take selfies with them.

A brief reminder why re-reads can be so important for a reader to do

I frequently re-read, or perhaps read again is a more apt descriptor, as no two reads are ever really the same for me.  Sometimes, especially after a couple of years or more has passed, the stories may gain new depths or lose whatever pretensions to depth that they might have once possessed.  Or perhaps certain elements just end up meaning more than before.

This certainly was the case this past week when I re-read (and read for the first time in its original Serbian) Danilo Kiš's  Early Sorrows, which I first read and reviewed briefly in 2012.  I noted then some of the poignant stories, but this time around, having to read much more slowly than usual in order to compare the translation to the original (I am surprised by how much of the language I have retained over the years).  The stories that moved me then still move me, perhaps even more so than before.  Yet there were tales that I had given short shrift to two years ago which meant more to me now, stories like "A Story That Will Make You Blush" and "Engaged to be Married."  I also noticed how intricately Kiš connected these tales, as certain motifs from one appear in another, yet it isn't until toward the end that the commonalities can really be seen.

Perhaps I will have more to say on this in the future.  For right now, I find myself thinking in a haze, the past and the present commingling, creating something different and strange to behold...

The vanishing simile

Today, I was a bad teacher:  I read a novel (which I may review in the next 1-3 days) while my students were taking one of their state exams.  Shameful behavior, I know, written with an expression like that of a dog caught grabbing a morsel from a dinner plate.  Similes, along with metaphors, are some of the hardest grammatical points for me to explain to my students.  Figurative language is difficult for those who do not grow up speaking that particular idiom and it often leaves my students as wide-eyed as flopping fish suffocating on air.  It is increasingly difficult to explain to native English speakers as well, at least if one wants to treat similes beyond the level of how to identify them (looking for "as" and "like" between image words).

Much of the blame, if blame must be doled out, I attribute to contemporary literature, which strives to be "clear" by being as general as possible in terminology and expressive speech.  Short, declarative sentences may have been the rage since Hemingway, but they also limit the writer (and by extension, the participatory reader)'s ability to express herself and to draw new and potentially deeper connections between the written and imagined worlds.

Similes serve to make seemingly disparate images similar, to create associations that the reader might otherwise never have made.  Yet in hindsight, such comparisons, that of the sheepish grin of the (slightly) naughty teacher and the hungry dog caught in the act of stealing, make things easier for readers to relate with and to.  More so than even metaphors, similes enrich our expressed language, making even the most prosaic statements more vivid.

Yet for some reason, similes are often frowned upon in narrative fictions.  In English, it has become harder and harder to spot good simile usage in dialogue or even in the main narrative framework.  Therefore, when I encountered a recent work where expressions such as the one quoted below are more commonplace, it was a thrillingly pleasant surprise (bold my addition):

A plant grew in the drawer, had been growing there in the dark this whole time, crimson roots attached to a nodule of dirt.  As if the director had pulled it out of the ground and then, for whatever reason, placed it in the drawer.  The slender leaves were almost a neon green, the branching stems ridged like segments of tiny pipe with eye-shaped whorls of raised black or dark blue.  It had the look of a creature trying to escape, with a couple of limbs, finally freed, reflexively curled over the edge of the drawer.

This image of a mysterious plant is made more memorable for me by the simile of a tiny pipe, of something metallic, industrial, and constructed in the midst of the organic, natural, living.  Here, connections, seemingly opposite in nature, were made by the judicious use of a simile to create a point of comparison.  Yet too frequently, writers either do not elect to employ them frequently enough to create a particularly allusive atmosphere or they misunderstand and misuse them, leaving the work feeling as limp as an oversoaked boiled celery, lacking that semantic firmness that would make the scene/action being described through figurative comparison something greater and more nuanced than what it actually is.  It is sad to see this vanishing use of similes, but it is not all that surprising, alas.

My current reading list in light of a recent social media campaign for more diversity in reading

For the past few days, I've noticed during my all-too-brief forays on Twitter a hashtag on my timeline called #weneeddiversebooks.  It certainly is a nice goal to have, but as is frequently the case for such discussions, it is limited in scope.  While I am far from downplaying the importance of reading stories written by and from the viewpoints of peoples of color and of diverse socio-religious backgrounds, the main language of discourse here is still English and due to that oft-cited "three percent" proportion of translated fictions to native English publications in the Anglo-American publishing sphere of influence, wide swaths of global literature in all the commonly-defined genres pass under the radars of those who might otherwise be potential target audiences. 

In thinking about this issue, I recalled another hashtag discussion group, #translationthurs, devoted to covering the diverse works of those translators across the globe to translate excellent fictions and non-fictions from various languages into other languages.  I also noticed today I was mentioned in a tweet about a new project, Women in Translation Month, set for this August.  This especially interests me, concerning my years-long desire to read more from other countries and to discover more women writers from those countries.  If I have the time in three months, I'll try to participate in this, if not on an exclusive-read basis.

Finally, I was curious to see from the books read so far this year how many came from certain countries.  Below is the tally by country (translated works are counted by country of origin and in some cases, decisions on authors' nationalities were made based on setting/story concerns):

Italy - 15

United States - 14

France - 10

Spain - 9

Portugal - 9

Colombia - 6

Argentina - 5

UK - 3

Serbia - 3

Nigeria - 2

Brazil - 2

Greece - 1

Iran - 1

Costa Rica - 1

South Korea - 1

Sierra Leone - 1

Japan - 1

Angola - 1

Germany - 1

Hungary - 1

Chile - 1

Poland - 1


In addition, 29 of these 89 books are by women and 5 are by writers of Jewish or Muslim faith.  It is so tricky in dealing with ethnicity when it comes to Latinos that it could be as low as 8 or as many as 13.  Yes, pretty low in percentage terms, but if I were to re-read several of the Latin American classics/modern novels I already own, I could easily see this number increase significantly.  Still, it is interesting to see that I've already read works this year by writers born in 22 different countries/influenced by their parents' place of birth.  I know there will be more shortly, as there is a Guatemalan writer, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, whose works I plan on reading once La orilla africana arrives in the mail from Spain.

All and all, interesting snapshot.

April 2014 Reads

Things were a bit better reading-wise in April, as I completed 28 (edit:  27, as I accidentally listed a book I re-read from January) books, but I still often went days, even a week or so at one point, between reading more than a handful of pages.  Job shifts (which unfortunately are still taking place, but that's a matter for another time) and extra responsibilities have left me many nights struggling just to write a little bit here before crashing for a new hours.  But with the tardy arrival of warm weather, I feel my energy and my desire to read increasing again, so May may be another story.

Made some progress in my 50x4 language/reading challenge, as roughly 75% of the books read this month were published in languages other than English, with a few others being translations into English.  Still more male than female writers read in those languages, but greater efforts have been made to locate good stories from divers backgrounds.  25% of the reads were re-reads; the rest are first-time reads.  Mixture of poetry and short story collections here, some by fairly well-known writers.  And with all this blathering, time to list the books themselves:

63  Nicole Krauss, The History of Love (good, but tried a bit too hard to make the narrative stretch into something that it couldn't quite support)

64  Mario Rigoni Stern, Storia di Tönle/L'anno della vittoria (Italian; World War I-set collection of two novellas that will be discussed at some future point on World War I Literature, Art, and Cinema)

65  Joca Reiners Terron, Não há nada lá (re-read; Portuguese; very good)

66  Claudio Magris, Microcosmi (Italian; Premio Strega winner; very good)

67  Sibila Aleramo, Una donna (Italian; good)

68  João Negreiros, O Mar que a Gente Faz (re-read; Portuguese; very good)

69  Alessandro Piperno, Inseparabili (Italian; Premio Strega winner; good but slightly uneven for me)

70  Giorgio Montefoschi, La casa del padre (Italian; Premio Strega winner; good)

71  J.R.R. Tolkien, Bilbo's Last Song (Illustrated short poem; slight but good)

72  Karen Russell, Sleep Donation (review in near future; novella)

73  José Ovejero, La invención del amor (re-read; Spanish; Premio Alfaguara winner; review forthcoming)

74  Gabriel García Márquez, Yo no vengo a decir un discurso (re-read; Spanish; non-fiction; good collection of short speeches over his lifetime)

75  Ugo Riccarelli, Il dolore perfetto (Italian; Premio Strega winner; very good)

76  Guillaume Apollinaire, Alcools (French; poetry; very good)

77  Albert Camus, L'étranger (re-read; French; excellent)

78  Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad (re-read; Spanish; already reviewed)

79  Vizconde de Lascano Tegui, De la elegancia mientras se duerme (re-read; Spanish; previously reviewed)

80  Susan Stinson, Spider in a Tree (very good take on the weirdness of Jonathan Edwards and the energy of the First Great Awakening)

81  Comte de Lautréamont, Poésies (French; poetry; very good)

82  George Seferis, Collected Poems (translated from Greek; excellent collection from a Nobel Prize-winning poet)

83  Sohrab Seferis, The Oasis of Now (translated from Persian; poetry; 2014 Best Translated Book Awards finalist; very good)

84  Elisa Biagini, L'ospite (Italian; poetry; this collection in translation formed half of the 2014 BTBA-winning poetry collection The Guest in the Wood; very good)

85  Marguerite Duras, Dix heures et demie du soir en été (re-read; French; very good) (forgot I had this back in early January)

85  Luisa González, A ras del suelo (Spanish; short fiction collection; good)

86  José Sobral de Almada Negreiros, A Engomadeira:  Novela Vulgar Lisboeta (Portuguese; novella; good)

87  Marie Ndiaye, Trois femmes puissantes (French; Prix Goncourt winner; will review after I finish the translation - and current IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize nominee Three Strong Women)

88  Françoise Sagan, Des bleus à l'âme (French; good)

89  Gabriel García Márquez, Olhos de Cão Azul (re-read; Portuguese translation; short fiction collection; very good)



Updated Yearly Goals:

Spanish:  25/50 (ahead of pace by 8; 5 read this month)

Portuguese:  11/50 (behind pace by 6; 4 read this month)

French:  12/50 (behind pace by 5; 5 read this month)

Italian:  16/50 (roughly on pace; 7 read this month)

Women writers:  29/90 (behind goal by 3%; 8/27 read this month, or 30% for the month)