So you find yourself wanting to discover works in translation...

Perhaps you came here from Twitter, where shortly after the last word is typed, a link will be posted there.  Perhaps you arrived via a Google search for an author.  Maybe you are reading this blog on an RSS feed.  Regardless of how you arrived, perhaps there will be some intriguing recent releases that will appeal to you, as I am one of those readers who believe that it is of paramount importance that cultures thrive best when they are in constant dialogue with one another and that no singular voice drowns out another.  Therefore, I am going to list below a few works that have recently been translated into English that I think readers should consider picking up.  These are in no particular order other than what I see on my e-book readers or shelves:

Alain Mabanckou, Black Bazaar – Congolese writer.  Translated from French in 2012 (2009 original).  Here is an excerpt.  Made the 2013 International Foreign Fiction Prize longlist.  Among many other things it is a satirical look at how outsiders view African societies.

Laurent Binet, HHhH – French writer.  Translated from French in 2012.  Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.  Review here.

Sjón, From the Mouth of the Whale – Icelandic writer.  Translated from Icelandic in 2011.  Finalist for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize.  Review here.

Diego Marani, New Finnish Grammar – Italian writer.  Translated from Italian in 2011.  Finalist for 2012 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.  I discussed it briefly in a post that also lists other outstanding translated fictions near the end of the post.

Liliana Bodoc, The Days of the Deer – Argentine writer.  Translated from Spanish in August 2013 (originally published in 2000).  I enjoyed her Spanish-language epic fantasy when I read it several years ago and I perhaps might write a review after judging the translation against the original.

Shani Boianjiu, The People of Forever are Not Afraid – Israeli writer.  Originally written in English and published in 2012.  Including this because Boianjiu is a non-native English speaker and her story is a wonderful look into contemporary Israeli society, particularly in regards to young Israeli women and the effects of continual guardedness have on their outlooks on life.

Inga Ābele, High Tide – Latvian writer.  Translated from Latvian in September 2013.  Open Letter, the translator, claims this might be the first Latvian novel translated into English and if this is indeed the case, then Ābele's twisted mystery narrative is an excellent choice.  Wish I could read more of her works.

Juli Zeh, The Method – German writer.  Translated from German in 2012.  One of the better dystopian novels that I've read and one that comments more forcefully on women's issues in particular than most other such dystopian fictions.

Jean-Marie Blas de Robles, Where Tigers are at Home – French writer.  Translated from French in 2011.  This book is one of the best I've read in years in any language (also read it in French).  A must-read for most readers.

Zoran Živković, Find Me – Serbian writer.  Translated from Serbian, but not yet available from US or UK publishers.  Sequel to his excellent literary mystery, The Last Book.  Lives up to the standards of that book.  Will attempt to write a review before the year is out.

Yuri Andrukhovych, Perverzion – Ukrainian writer.  Translated from Ukrainian in 2005.  Older translation than others listed here, but when I was thumbing through my books to come up with a short starter list of translated fictions that I enjoyed, I just had to include this one.


I could easily spend several more hours writing a very exhaustive (and exhausting!) list of other translated works that I think deserve greater consideration.  But these should make for an excellent beginning.  Feel free to suggest other recent translations of literary and/or genre fictions.  Doubtless I'm overlooking several, perhaps because I didn't read them in translation and thus cannot comment on the quality of the translations.

A rabid squirrel reviews Terry Goodkind's The Third Kingdom

After learning that he had been assigned the arduous task of reading Terry Goodkind's recently-released The Third Kingdom, the leader of the highly-trained and vicious Serbian reading squirrels, Stefan Veverica, sighed.  Ever since the calamitous attempt by his lost love, Marija, to read Robert Stanek's Keeper Martin's Tale for Larry had resulted in her full-on descent into rabidness, there had been limits placed on what the reading squirrels would have to endure.  Larry himself had to agree to read Dahlia Lu's The Dark God's Bride alone, as the squirrels were too busy licking their metaphorical and all-too-physical wounds to spare time for reading such dreck.

But Goodkind?  Really?  Why, oh rabid squirrel gods, why must this bitter cup be passed to me, Stefan thought.  If I make it out alive, some one is going to be eviscerated for this outrage.  Well, perhaps it won't be so bad if it's read really fast...

And so hundreds of pages were read in a near blur.  Not because much of anything was happening, the squirrel mused, but rather because everything was explained in such a redundant fashion that he, despite having not read any Goodkind in years, could fill in all of the backstory.  Richard was being Richard, spending dozens of chapters chit-chatting with a talented yet naive young sorceress about things which he could learn in a minute.  Such as how to read this oh-so-mystical thing called "the language of Creation," which due to this super-duper, hidden away for over a dozen books until the previous book, the eponymous "omen machine" could do this neat trick of "issuing prophecy by using focused beams of light to burn the symbols composing the language of Creation onto metal strips." (p. 159)  It was like the 1980s had reached Dick and K'lan Land and CDs of Hal Lindsey prophecies were now being mass-produced!

As the squirrel read on, it began to twitch.  Gah!  Why is Kahlan yet again separated from her dear beloved Dick and why oh why is she without powers and at the mercy of henchmen who probably failed the admission exam for Villain U and instead had to settle for an Associate's Degree in Criminalology?  Why does Dick ejaculate for page after page about the discoveries he makes from reading a language that he only discovered a few weeks ago?  Does he have some sort of special Rosetta Stone that teaches him these things or is he a mannikin from which plot information is yanked out of his ass like you might yank a series of knotted handkerchiefs from a magician's hat?  And for the love of juicy, succulent human flesh are there zombies in this book that have less mental capability than a spastic night crawler who had ingested 'shrooms?

Grr!  Gah!  Killkillkillkillkillbitedestroyevisceratemaimshatnerbonaduceattackchitterchitterchitter!

And with that, Stefan Veverica began running wildly around his tree, barking madly and baring his fangs at any who approached.  Looks like this review will have to be finished by Larry after all.  Damn, Stefan was such a good, devoted, discerning reading squirrel...

As you might already guess from reading the paragraphs above, The Third Kingdom is a very poorly-written novel by an author renowned for his clunky prose, paper-thin characterizations, and odious political philosophy.  It is a novel that tries to create suspense from yet another separation of the two main protagonists, Richard Rahl and his wife Kahlan, yet such suspense fails because the author has utilized this tired, exhausted plot device so frequently that one might be pardoned if he took the wrong inspiration from watching the movie Groundhog Day.  But, as I can hear Goodkind's most rabid fans cry, it is different this time because the two have been infected with death and their precarious balance between the unnatural combination of life-and-death in a body has to be redressed quickly, lest they die!  To which I merely note that the laborious effort Goodkind makes into trying to make a state of being, death, into a concrete, reified entity ultimately serves to make the entire concept rather ridiculous even for a literary subgenre, secondary world fantasy, that contains a plethora of asinine plot devices.  It's one thing to just say "hey, they're like uh...*in a Butt-head-like voice* huh-huh-huh poisoned."  At least then the urgency can be sensed and (mostly) accepted.  But the notion that a state of being, death, is a poisonous entity that affects Dick's powers is risible.  Trying to even explain this shoddy attempt at creating an obstacle for our heroes makes me feel as though I were trying to explain the concept of water to fish.

It doesn't get much better when the enemies are concerned.  Apparently the old, old, old bad guys from centuries before created soulless people, now gifted with the inventive name of "half people."  Yes, these soul-bereft people want a soul to replace their stolen ones, so they think, hey, I bet cannibalism is the answer, as life is in the blood!  Or is it the heart?  Maybe it's in the anus?  Who cares, let's munch!  And so most of these baddies devolve into mindless flesh eaters that barely display even a modicum of humanity.  This is not as much an oversight on Goodkind's part as it is an intentional feature. 

Goodkind has long been criticized for the flimsiness of his themes.  Yet here the hollowness of his argument that "reason must rule" is displayed.  The cannibals have to be reduced to such an abject, passion-ruled state in order to create an easy dichotomy, but when the situation is even considered for a moment, it all collapses like a deck of cards.  How can people, even extremely long-lived yet ultimately mortal soulless cannibals, possess even the rudiments of clothing or even subsistence if their minds are focused solely on eating the flesh of the souled?  Why are there literally thousands of these witless bodies being slaughtered as the hero allows his rage to fuel his deadly magic sword?  If anything, it is the passion behind Richard's actions, not the lip-service to ideals that he voices in a redundant fashion for long stretches in the first half of the novel, that is to be the appeal of the story.  If the quasi-zombies aren't being slaughtered en masse, then the story would be reduced even further to diabolical laughter®, maniacal scheming, and mustache-twirling, followed by heroic declaration, improbably escape from predicament and rushed conclusion that leaves the villains free to plot poorly for another day. 

The Third Kingdom is like the anti-apotheosis of Goodkind's prose, characterization, and theme development.  Virtually everything he has tried (and failed) to develop in his previous novels is present here (OK, there are no barbed Namble cocks, but there are flesh eaters and nearly toothless wannabe almost-rapists!); these elements, somehow, are presented in an even worse fashion than before.  The writing is atrocious.  Goodkind's repetitive descriptions, written in short, declarative sentences that feel too simple to belong even in a children's lit book, make The Third Kingdom perhaps an even worse reading experience than Robert Stanek.  It is that poor.  There is nothing redeeming about this story, this overarching plot, these characters, themes, etc.  The book is perhaps the epitome of what the late David Foster Wallace noted in an essay, "Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama," that touches upon the issue of reviewing (poor) genre fiction:

This sort of oddity is, in fact, a frequent problem in reviewing or assessing "genre fiction," which is a type of narrative it's usually fair to call "the sort of thing someone who likes this sort of thing is apt to like."  The evaluative criteria tend to be rather special for genre fiction.  Instead of the basically aesthetic assay the reviewer gets to make of most literary fiction – "Is this piece of fiction good?" – criticism of genre fiction is ultimately more rhetorical – "To whom will this piece of fiction appeal?" (Both Flesh and Not, p. 212)

As a reviewer of literary fiction, I can easily say that The Third Kingdom is as far from good as Shatner is to being an excellent singer.  But in regards to the criteria for assaying this book as genre fiction, it is the sort that will appeal only to those who like to read poorly-written works, who found Goodkind to be empty entertainment, and to those who partake of mind-altering substances on a regular basis and who thus want pablum in order to create a shifted perspective.  For everyone else, I think it is pretty safe to say The Third Kingdom will have no appeal.

Now pardon me while I go check on Stefan...

And as the human approached, Stefan began sniffing the air.  Yes, Las Vegas shall be a nice place to visit.  Come, Marija, we have an author evisceration to do.  And then it will be onto Washington state, where we can inflict revenge for you as well, my dear....

And with a tail twitch and a few body tics, the two now-rabid squirrels venture out to gain their revenge on the authors that had made them suffer so...

So I was challenged recently to read "a more recent SF/F book"

Last week I posted an interview I conducted with Mihir Wanchoo of Fantasy Book Critic.  In it, he (very politely) challenged me to read/review "a more recent SFF book," a challenge I agreed to undertake.  I decided that I would read and then review the next fantasy book sent my way, no matter who it was or what volume in a series it might be.

Well, I received such a book yesterday in the mail.

It was the latest Terry Goodkind book, The Third Kingdom.

I guess, despite my antipathy for his socio-political views and having read only one book of his in the past decade, I will drain this cup set before me to its bitterest dregs.  May the squirrels have mercy on me, because I think I'm going to have one of them not only read this book but also review it.  Hopefully, I will not be punished too severely for this.  Wish me (and the unlucky squirrel) luck.

List of Premio Alfaguara winners

Unlike most other lists of literary prize winners, there will be little need for me to acquire the books, as with the exception of the winners during the first iteration (1965-1972), I have already bought and read each winner since the Premio Alfaguara was revived in 1998.  I consider the Premio Alfaguara to be one the best Spanish-language literary awards, not just for the high quality of the winners, but also because the revolving jury of prominent writers (Carlos Fuentes was once a jurist) and critics read over 600 submissions yearly that are submitted under pseudonyms (the winner gets $175,000 and the book published; it is a manuscript prize, basically).  I do plan on re-reading and writing at least short reviews in coming months/years of the winners of the revived prize (and perhaps I'll track down copies of the 1965-1972 winners as well), so in the interests of having a centralized article in which I can link reviews (three were written some years ago), here is the list (many have since been translated into English and other languages, so feel free to search out these titles, each of which I would recommend)  Note that for the first iteration of the award, the award was given near the end of the year listed, with the actual publication date often being early in the following year.

1965 Jesús Torbado, Las corrupciones

1966 Manuel Vicent, Pascua y naranjas

1967 Héctor Vazquez-Azpiri, Fauna

1968 Daniel Sueiro, Corte de corteza

1969/70 No Award
1971 Carlos Droguett, Todas esas muertes
1972 Luis Berenguer, Leña verde
1973 Alfonso Grosso, Florido mayo

  
1973/4-1997  No Award  

1998 Eliseo Alberto, Caracol Beach
         Sergio Ramírez, Margarita, está linda la mar 

1999 Manuel Vicent, Son de mar

2000 Clara Sánchez, Últimas noticias del paraíso
2001 Elena Poniatowska, La piel del cielo
2002 Tomás Eloy Martínez , El vuelo de la reina
2003 Xavier Velasco, Diablo guardián
2004 Laura Restrepo, Delirio
2005 Graciela Montes & Ema Wolf, El turno del escriba
2006 Santiago Roncagliolo, Abril Rojo
2007 Luis Leante, Mira si yo te querré
2008 Antonio Orlando Rodríguez, Chiquita
2009 Andrés Neuman, El viajero del siglo
2010 Hernán Rivera Letelier, El arte de la resurrección
2011 Juan Gabriel Vásquez, El ruido de la cosas al caer
2012 Leopoldo Brizuela, Una misma noche
2013 José Ovejero, La invención del amor 
2014 Jorge Franco, El mundo de afuera 2015 Carla Guelfenbein, Contigo en la distancia

The Premio Strega

Last week or so, I had an email conversation with the squirrel mistress about Elsa Morante.  She asked me if I had read her Premio Strega-winning 1957 novel, L'isola di Arturo.  I said no, although I did search my Italian books and saw that I had a copy of her famous 1974 novel, La Storia (History).  Then that lead to me being me and deciding that I would have to try harder to read Italian books, so I have embarked on another Quixotic journey and am going to try to read (in Italian, whenever possible) as many of the Premio Strega (Italy's most prestigious literary prize) winners as I can over the next few years.  Below is the list of the winners since the award's inception in 1947.  I have read a grand total of one (in both Italian and English) and have purchased another four (including three e-books).  No promises on reviews, but I will update this list with books that I will purchase/read as I acquire more of these books:

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    1947 – Ennio Flaiano, Tempo di uccidere

    1948 – Vincenzo Cardarelli, Villa Tarantola

    1949 – Giambattista Angioletti, La memoria

    1950 – Cesare Pavese, La bella estate

    1951 – Corrado Alvaro, Quasi una vita

    1952 – Alberto Moravia, I racconti

    1953 – Massimo Bontempelli, L'amante fedele

    1954 – Mario Soldati, Lettere da Capri

    1955 – Giovanni Comisso, Un gatto attraversa la strada

    1956 – Giorgio Bassani, Cinque storie ferraresi

    1957 – Elsa Morante, L'isola di Arturo

    1958 – Dino Buzzati, Sessanta racconti

    1959 – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Il gattopardo

    1960 – Carlo Cassola, La ragazza di Bube

    1961 – Raffaele La Capria, Ferito a morte

    1962 – Mario Tobino, Il clandestino

    1963 – Natalia Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare

    1964 – Giovanni Arpino, L'ombra delle colline

    1965 – Paolo Volponi, La macchina mondiale

    1966 – Michele Prisco, Una spirale di nebbia

    1967 – Anna Maria Ortese, Poveri e semplici

    1968 – Alberto Bevilacqua, L'occhio del gatto

    1969 – Lalla Romano, Le parole tra noi leggere

    1970 – Guido Piovene, Le stelle fredde

    1971 – Raffaello Brignetti, La spiaggia d'oro

    1972 – Giuseppe Dessì, Paese d'ombre

    1973 – Manlio Cancogni, Allegri, gioventù

    1974 – Guglielmo Petroni, La morte del fiume

    1975 – Tommaso Landolfi, A caso

    1976 – Fausta Cialente, Le quattro ragazze Wieselberger

    1977 – Fulvio Tomizza, La miglior vita

    1978 – Ferdinando Camon, Un altare per la madre

    1979 – Primo Levi, La chiave a stella

    1980 – Vittorio Gorresio, La vita ingenua

    1981 – Umberto Eco, Il nome della rosa

    1982 – Goffredo Parise, Il sillabario n.2

    1983 – Mario Pomilio, Il Natale del 1833

    1984 – Pietro Citati, Tolstoj

    1985 – Carlo Sgorlon, L'armata dei fiumi perduti

    1986 – Maria Bellonci, Rinascimento privato

    1987 – Stanislao Nievo, Le isole del paradiso

    1988 – Gesualdo Bufalino, Le menzogne della notte

    1989 – Giuseppe Pontiggia, La grande sera

    1990 – Sebastiano Vassalli, La chimera

    1991 – Paolo Volponi, La strada per Roma

    1992 – Vincenzo Consolo, Nottetempo, casa per casa

    1993 – Domenico Rea, Ninfa plebea

    1994 – Giorgio Montefoschi, La casa del padre

    1995 – Maria Teresa Di Lascia, Passaggio in ombra

    1996 – Alessandro Barbero, Bella vita e guerre altrui di Mr. Pyle, 'gentiluomo'

    1997 – Claudio Magris, Microcosmi

    1998 – Enzo Siciliano, I bei momenti

    1999 – Dacia Maraini, Buio

    2000 – Ernesto Ferrero, N.

    2001 – Domenico Starnone, Via Gemito

    2002 – Margaret Mazzantini, Non ti muovere

    2003 – Melania G. Mazzucco, Vita

    2004 – Ugo Riccarelli, Il dolore perfetto

    2005 – Maurizio Maggiani, Il viaggiatore notturno

    2006 – Sandro Veronesi, Caos calmo

    2007 – Niccolò Ammaniti, Come Dio comanda

    2008 – Paolo Giordano, La solitudine dei numeri primi

    2009 – Tiziano Scarpa, Stabat mater

    2010 – Antonio Pennacchi, Canale Mussolini

    2011 – Edoardo Nesi, Storia della mia gente

    2012 – Alessandro Piperno, Inseparabili

    2013 – Walter Siti, Resistere non serve a niente 
    2014 –  Francesco Piccolo, Il desiderio di essere come tutti 

Philipp Meyer, The Son

It was prophesied I would live to see one hundred and having achieved that age I see no reason to doubt it.  I am not dying a Christian though my scalp is intact and if there is an eternal hunting ground, that is where I am headed.  That or the river Styx.  My opinion at this moment is my life has been far too short:  the good I could do if given another year on my feet.  Instead I am strapped to this bed, fouling myself like an infant.

Should the Creator see fit to give me strength I will make my way to the waters that run through the pasture.  The Nueces River at its eastern bend.  I have always preferred the Devil's.  In my dreams I have reached it three times and it is known that Alexander the Great, on his last night of mortal life, crawled from his palace and tried to slip into the Euphrates, knowing that if his body disappeared, his people would assume he had ascended to heaven as a god.  His wife stopped him at the water's edge.  She dragged him home to die mortal.  And people ask me why I did not remarry. (p. 1)

Today, it is almost quaint to say that a writer has attempted to write "the great American novel."  A glance at the bestseller lists and heavily-promoted books reveal book after book devoted to the picayune features of our lives:  reflections on mortality, sexual desire, the seeking of something that is beyond our grasp or our ken.  Writing something of a "national" or even regional nature is to try to write something that fell out of vogue decades ago.  Yet occasionally there appear novels so powerful in their characterizations and their portrayal of themes that simultaneously are universal and seemingly unique to a nation that grandiose terms such as "great American novel" do not feel out of place when describing the narrative at hand.  Philipp Meyer's second novel, The Son, just very well may be one of those rare contemporary novels that manage to capture an essence larger than that of a singular person or group of persons.

The Son covers a span of nearly two hundred years, from the founding of the Republic of Texas in 1836 to the present day.  Six generations of a fictitious Texan aristocratic family, the McCulloughs, are seen through the eyes of three key members:  Eli, the titular son (and the first male child born after the establishment of the Republic of Texas) whose story encompasses the mid-to-late 19th century and beyond; his disgraced son, Peter, whose diaries from the 1910s narrate a tumultuous time along the US-Mexico border; and Peter's grand-daughter, Jeanne Anne, who has established a different sort of empire from that of her great-grandfather.  Each of these narrators captures within their accounts segments of a grand sweeping narrative that encompasses decadence and renewal, of empires rising and falling.

Of the three narrators, Eli's most immediately grabs the reader's attention.  Readers familiar with Western narratives (especially Cormac McCarthy's The Border trilogy) will find certain elements of Eli's narrative familiar to them.  Captured as a teen by a marauding Comanche band, Eli's description of his three years with the Comanches is eloquent in its contrasts between nature and civilization, between the values of community and solitude, between a code of honor and a code of commerce.  Here is an example of the cultural clash that the teenaged Eli (or Tiehteti, as he was known among the Comanches) observed:

To white ears, the names of the Indians lacked any sort of dignity or sense and made it that much harder to figure why they ought to be treated as humans rather than prairie niggers.  The reason for this was that the Comanches considered the use of a dead person's name taboo.  Unlike the whites, billions of whom shared the same handful of names, all interchangeable in the end, a Comanche name lived and died with a single person.

A child was not named by his parents, but by a relative or a famous person in the tribe; maybe for a deed that person had done, maybe for an object that struck their fancy.  If a particular name was not serving well, the child might be renamed; for instance, Charges the Enemy had been a small and timid child and it was thought that giving him a braver name might cure these problems, which it had.  Some people in the tribe were renamed a second or third time in adult life, if their friends and family found something more interesting to call them.  The owner of the German captive Yellow Hair, whose birth name was Six Deer, was renamed Lazy Feet as a teenager, which stuck to him the rest of his life.  Toshaway's son Fat Wolf was so named because his namer has seen a very fat wolf the previous night, and being an interesting sight and not a bad name it had stuck. (p. 232)

 Meyer fills his narrative with these asides, virtually all of which serve to reinforce the themes of cultural clashes and decadence/renewal.  There is a subtle economy of images here, as Meyer uses these little details to compress his narrative, allowing him to skip months, if not years, in the narration of Eli and his progeny's lives by relating important events and self-discoveries in short, incisive passages.  Here the Comanches are seen less as an "other" and more as people who follow an alternate, perhaps more honest path than those of the white settlers.  This contrast of beliefs appears again and again in the three narratives, with subtle changes occurring within each of the three that lead to surprising twists near the end of the novel.

Meyer's characters frequently face moral dilemmas, such as how to make one's way in a hostile world without falling too much into the trap of operating purely on expediency.  Eli's decisions, hinted at in the narratives of Peter and Jeanne Anne, are often brutal, at least for those of us who have grown up in more "civilized" times.  Yet as these events unfold, the consequences are shown in no lesser detail.  As Eli bitterly notes in the first chapter, his disgraced son Peter is "[s]eed of my destruction."  How this comes to be, how Peter's actions contain the seeds for the destruction of Eli's land/cattle (and later oil) empire of 250,000 acres, occupies most of this 561 page novel.  It is a testimony to Meyer's skills as a writer that a novel of this size does not feel bloated but instead seems to be brimming with energy.

Beyond the three McCullough narrators (to describe in detail Peter or Jeanne Anne's subplots would give away too much), Meyer adroitly connects their decisions and actions to greater, more American issues.  Although Eli is the titular "son" of this novel, it could be argued with some supporting evidence that the "son" could also be expanded to include those "sons" of the pioneers, those children who took the wilderness that their forebears knew and who corralled it, tamed it, and broke it in the profane name of "prosperity."  This certainly would be a view that Eli himself would have supported and it most definitely would be a concern of his son, who walked away from the blood-soaked empire bequeathed to him.  This is perhaps as "American" of a theme, the subjugation of nature and the twisting of human ideals to support avarice, as any of the previous four centuries.  That Meyer is able to argue this within a clear, flowing novel is a testimony to his strength as a writer.  The characterizations are never shallow, even when some (such as Peter) seem to be overwhelmed at times by the beguiling power of Eli.  The Son may perhaps be one of those rare novels that will capture readers' attentions decades removed from its initial publication.  It certainly has the feel of a novel that will be lauded for years to come (and rightfully so) for its treatment of theme and character.  Very highly recommended.

Matt Bell, In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

Beneath the unscrolling of the new sun and stars and then-lonely moon, she began to sing some new possessions into the interior of our house, and between the lake and the woods I heard her songs become something stronger than ever before.  I returned to the woods to cut more lumber, so that I too might add to our household, might craft for her a crib and a bassinet, a table for changing diapers, all the other furnishings she desired.  We labored together, and soon our task seemed complete, our house readied for what dreams we shared – the dream I had given her, of family, of husband and wife, father and mother, child and child – and when the earliest signs of my wife's first pregnancy came they were attended with joy and celebration. (p. 3)

For a single person such as myself, the tugs and pulls of marriage is something that is barely grasped in a second-hand fashion.  The competition of wills trying to forge a melding of personalities into a harmonious relationship can threaten to rift any partnership, no matter how strong the couple may believe their bonds to be.  Who dominates?  Who submits?  Who blazes paths and who smooths them?  Mix in various levels of desire for offspring and the complicated chemistry becomes even more fragile and liable to be dissolved into acrimony.  Or so it seems to some who have not yet succeeded in discovering the magic formula that will weather these assaults on companionship.

Matt Bell tackles this complex, complicated issue in his third book (and debut novel), In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods.  Bell easily could have chosen to cast this story of a newly-married couple and their pitfalls and (little) triumphs in a more traditional narrative in which the interior monologues, peppered with brief yet incisive dialogue, could convey to readers the stresses of this marriage.  Yet Bell eschews this, instead choosing to create a narrative that feels fabulistic in tone and universal in its theme.  This is a riskier approach to take, as readers accustomed to strict realism may find the imagery to be too unsettling for their tastes.  However, for the most part Bell manages to achieve most of his literary ambitions here.

In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods frequently employs metaphors to convey the emotional divide between the husband and the wife.  In the paragraph quoted above (taken from the first page), Bell connects song (and through it, communication/language) to creation of new, wondrous things within the new household.  He later reinforces this with the previously-alluded to creation of a new moon:

There my wife again began to sing, and with some new song – on more powerful than any other I had yet heard or imagined – she took something from me, and also a similar portion from herself, and into the sky she lifted what she had taken until it took on some enlarged shape, until it became a heavenly body with its own weight and rotation and orbit:  At the request of her melody, our flesh became a new moon, a twin to the one already hung.

Beneath the new light, my wife explained that her moon was a shape meant not to reveal the sky but perhaps to split the dirt, to destroy what house I had built, its shifting walls.  Not a memorial to her sorrow, but at last a way to end it:  With the crashing shatter of the moon, the lake would empty its waters, and the woods would burst into flame and even the cities across the far mountains might shake with the horror of our divorce.  The moon would someday fall – this she promised, regardless of her pregnancy's outcome, for the sky was not made to hold its weight – but with song she could delay its plummet into the far future, for the sake of this new joy in her belly. (p. 22)

There are many conceptions embedded within this moon metaphor.  Where the reader might at first be tempted to connect the moon to femininity, Bell seems to be striving to create new associations.  The taking from each partner implies a creation that is akin to but separate from its progenitors, but with the threat of this new creation, this new light reflector, being torn asunder.  The wife's song moreover serves as a connector.  It is through her voice, her communication of desires and wants, that this "moon" is able to sustain itself.  In this sense, it is her singing (which occurs repeatedly throughout the narrative) that embodies the central conflict of this novel:  the voicing of different aims and desires.

Granted, Bell's extensive use of allusion and metaphor makes it more difficult for readers to wrest meaning from the narrative.  This, however, is not a condemnation nor a criticism; it merely notes that the narrative does not easily yield its riches.  If the reader is diligent and considers not just the imagery but also the emotions that exist around the symbolic speech and action, then she will discover a wealth of poignant scenes and powerful moments.  However, there are times where the metaphors fail to convey suitable nuances of intention.  Although relatively small in number, there are occasions where Bell's metaphors fall flat, as though he tried too hard to infuse his narrative with symbolic portents, leading to scenes that feel depressed, crushed under the weight of their metaphors.  Furthermore, rich as most of his images are, there are occasions that it seems that a more direct, less allusive approach might have yielded even greater emotional impact.

These, however, are issues that only dampen slightly the impact of Bell's narrative.  The conclusion is rendered near pitch-perfectly, leaving readers believing that the effort that they put into processing and deciphering Bell's symbolism-laden text was more than worth the effort.  In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods is a debut novel that shows that its writer is beginning to realize the promise shown in his previous shorter fiction.  Looking forward to seeing what Bell produces in the future, as this is one of my favorite debut novels released so far this year.