Margarita Liberaki (left) and her daughter, the novelist Margarita Karapanou (right), on the island of Hydra.

“That summer we bought big straw hats. Maria’s had cherries around the rim, Infanta’s had forget-me-nots, and mine had poppies as red as fire. When we lay in the hayfield wearing them, the sky, the wildflowers, and the three of us all melted into one.” The beginning of Margarita Liberaki’s Three Summers, at once vivid and hazy, evokes the season and the story of adolescent girlhood that the book will unfold. The novel tells the story of three sisters living outside Athens: Maria, Infanta, and Katerina, the youngest, who tells the tale. The house where they live with their mother, aunt, and grandfather is in the countryside. Focusing on the sisters’ daily life and first loves, as well as on a secret about their Polish grandmother, the novel is about growing up and how strange and exciting it is to discover the curious moods and desires that constitute you and your difference from other people. It also features a stable cast of friends and neighbors, all with their own unexpected opinions: the self-involved Laura Parigori; the studious astronomer David and his Jewish mother, Ruth, from England; and the carefree Captain Andreas. The book is adventurous, fantastical, romantic, down to earth, earthy, and, above all, warm. Its only season, after all, is summer.

The world inside the book could not be more unlike the world the book came into when it was first published in 1946, immediately after the terrible famine and the Axis occupation of Greece during World War II, and on the brink of the even more devastating civil war, barely a shadow of which can be found in the idyllic world between its covers. In fact, its cover originally featured a garden. In the story we learn that just as each of the three girls wears a suitable hat of her own choosing, so each of them has her own garden patch to tend. In Katerina’s, we learn, the flowers pop up in a crazy, haphazard way. To describe it, Liberaki uses the word pardalo, meaning “splotched with color,” a word derived from the ancient Greek for “leopard” that suggests the wildness in Katerina’s heart. The whole summery world of the book is wildly, sometimes dangerously alive—one year the countryside is swept by a devastating fire—and it is nature, growing plants and growing girls, that makes it so. To its first Greek readers, this novel must have offered an oasis from the unbearable realities of the day, a place to live out the life-and-death implications of war in the smaller details of flowers, birds, and bees. Read More

Elizabeth Hardwick.

Elizabeth Hardwick is one of the world’s most valuable essayists and literary critics. That is to say, her essays are of value to anyone interested in the ways in which women are made present in literature. In Seduction and Betrayal, readers are treated to the full reach of Hardwick’s deep intelligence: a hard, glinting, sophisticated, switched-on female intelligence. She understands what is at stake in literature, especially when talented women write it.

For a female writer, to risk stepping center stage in life and on the page, fully lit, a major player in a script she has written, will always mean she has transgressed from the societally sanctified role of being a minor player, lurking behind the velvet curtains (less exposing) in order to assist, flatter, dedicate her life to the male world and its undermining arrangements. Hardwick has no interest in flattery, nor in faux solidarity with minor writers. She cuts to the chase, offers her grateful readers new dimensions as to how literature is made and what it costs to make it. Hardwick is a shockingly astute reader, yet she never lets literary theory get in the way of the currents of life that blow into the writing itself. Her sentences are subversively beautiful for exactly this reason.

In her Art of Fiction interview, Hardwick is keen to point out that she does not write essays “to give a résumé of the plots.” Of the action of reading itself, she has this to say:

You begin to see all sorts of not quite expressed things, to make connections, sometimes to feel you have discovered or felt certain things the author may not have been entirely conscious of. It’s a sort of creative or “possessed” reading and that is why I think even the most technical of critics do the same thing, by their means making quite mysterious discoveries. But as I said, the text is always the first thing. It has the real claim on you, of course.

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Mughal dynasty, Jahangir and Prince Khurram Entertained by Nur Jahan, ca. 1645, opaque watercolor, ink and gold on paper. Via Wikimedia Commons.

“Look! Look! If you look really hard at things, you’ll forget you’re going to die,” an American actor is supposed to have once said. In a writing class I occasionally teach, this injunction to just look—out of the window or down the street—is sometimes met with boredom, not a seasoned ennui necessarily, just impatience with what one presumably already knows. We are prone to treat the outer world as a source of information, new and old, when it is actually a font of emotion. We describe things not because they are there but because our life depends on it.

Take Raymond Carver’s story “The Cabin.” A man called Mr. Harrold drives to a lodge in winter for a couple of days of river fishing. His wife has recently left him and he is suffering her absence, but this we know only through the occasional flashback. Most of Mr. Harrold’s feelings are expressed subliminally, through the delineation of things—furniture and furnishings in a room, the interplay of clouds and hills on the horizon, what people wear and how they look. Mr. Harrold is intent on enjoying himself, but it’s somewhat hard going, and he tries to keep himself together through acts of exact naming and deliberate doing. He takes a pint of Scotch out from the glove compartment, spreads out his weights and hooks on a table, smokes a cigarette with his tackle box open.

Eventually his grip on this material universe collapses. “He shook his head. Then he went up the steps to his cabin. He stopped on the porch. He didn’t want to go inside. But he understood he had to open the door and enter the room. He didn’t know if he could do that.”

Carver once said that “a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing—a sunset or an old shoe—in absolute and simple amazement.” Everything is grasped with a fine precision in his stories—the ordinary but distinctive texture of the world. Often it is as if things have a life that people draw from, rather than they endowing things with meaning. “Ideally, perhaps, the animate and the inanimate should swap places,” said Joseph Brodsky. Michael Hofmann, who quoted that remark in an essay on the poet, pointed out that this is exactly what happens in Brodsky’s poems. “The person, the poet, is atomized, centrifuged, dispersed, while his inanimate surroundings are spun into an increasingly concrete aura, a genie, that comes to stand in for him.” Read More

Illustration by Kristen Radtke.

Beware, sweet Night and Day reader, of being seduced by the name of Virginia Woolf on the spine of this novel into believing you are about to read a work of high Modernism, a sister to the author’s towering To the Lighthouse and Orlando and The Waves. Along that path lies only bewilderment. This is not to say that you won’t find the Virginia Woolf you know and love in this book, because you certainly will, if mostly after the first half, and in an endearingly tender, nascent form. What I mean is that the conversation Virginia Woolf is conducting in her second novel is not the conversation of her later books, the one with avant-garde authors of the early twentieth century like James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, but rather a shrewd and ultimately subversive discussion with the male writers of the Edwardian age, like Henry James, John Galsworthy, and her friend E. M. Forster. This is a book that gazes backward in time with skepticism and a virago’s impulse to shred into tatters all that it sees.

No book is written in a vacuum, and an author’s sophomore novel is in many respects a product of the trauma caused by writing and publishing her debut. In Virginia Woolf’s case, that trauma was severe. Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915, when the writer was thirty-three years old, after more than seven years of composition, massive revisions to temper the sharper and angrier of her political commentary, a dropped engagement to her friend Lytton Strachey, a marriage to Leonard Woolf, and at least one nervous breakdown and suicide attempt. Woolf’s mental state had never been secure since the sudden death of her mother when she was thirteen, after which, in the severity of her grief, she tried to throw herself out a window. Two years after her mother died, her stepsister, Stella—the de facto mother figure to the four bereaved Stephen siblings, a soft and good-hearted young woman who was able to control the egomaniacal rages of their father—married, moved out, and within two months died of a sudden illness, and the life that Virginia and her siblings had been able to piece together after their mother’s death was totally obliterated. Read More

Wayne Koestenbaum. Photo: Ebru Yildiz.

Wayne Koestenbaum has written many books, and even recorded an album. I’ve seen him psychoanalyzed before a large, rapt audience. He does a lounge act, of spoken word and Scriabin. He paints. Among his glittering and varied oeuvre (and for Koestenbaum, oeuvre can be the only word used here), there is only one novel: Circus, or, as it was previously known, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes.

The first time I met Wayne Koestenbaum was just after this novel initially appeared, almost fifteen years ago. He was reading from it at a bookstore. He wore, for his reading, a white pleather café racer’s jacket. It was raining that night. His jacket looked worthy to repel water but featured no hood, its semi-rain-worthiness a mere symptom of its primary function, which was to throw light. Koestenbaum and this book seemed like vessels containing an unusual combination of erudition, elegance, irreverence, and, in welcome measure, a touch of sleaze.

Later, I recall people comparing Moira Orfei to Nabokov’s Pale Fire and the novels of Genet. I believe that means they approved. I approve, too, but I find those comparisons useless. Koestenbaum’s unique aesthetic orbit, his humor and thematic range, cannot really be understood by such refractions, although if I had to compare it I’d say his humor is like Bataille’s. “Don’t get your hopes up,” Theo Mangrove, the narrator of Circus, implores. “The object in your hands is not a novel.” But don’t believe Theo, either. The object in your hands really is a novel. But it retains the force of its language even when its words are pulled apart, left to sweat, in Mallarméan marmalade:

the flawed
the almost
the
…..not
……..quite

 

…………..No one loves                           Baked Alaska
…………..Heartlessness is a symbol

 

……………..Soiled time
Pink sweater set
…………………………………………………………………..Primary ruin

………………………………………………………Immortality clause

 

 

 

……………………………………………………Jerking off, I canceled reality

                                                                                                                  a) Describe
                                                                                                               ….. b) Disappear

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When we speak of translation in these end-of-days, it is often in the loftiest of tones, as though it were a sacred duty undertaken by devoted adepts prostrating themselves before the altar of language. The self is renounced, the greed for authorship forsworn in service of a greater calling, which is no less than bridging the gaps between the peoples and cultures of the world.

This is certainly true if you’re translating, say, Don Quixote, or Heian-period Japanese poetry, or a new novel by Senegal’s latest rising star. But only a small minority of translators have the skill, opportunity, and financial security required to take on such labors of love. The rest of us, to earn a living wage, will have to make do with whatever garbage we can get. By garbage I mean any or all of the following: corporate-speak, brand manifestos, NGO reports, think tank reports, letters from government agencies replying to American oil companies, letters from government agencies replying to human rights organizations, prose written by self-professed wunderkinds whose trust funds and unearned self-confidence are paying for the translation, and that vilest genre of all, the art text. Read More