November 16, 2018 At Work Between Two Languages: An Interview with Yoko Tawada By Alexandra Pereira Yoko Tawada (b. 1960), who writes in Japanese and German and has been translated around the world, studied Russian literature in Tokyo before hotfooting it to Hamburg: “Russian writing was just the greatest, but I couldn’t study in the Soviet Union for political reasons, so I got a job in Hamburg.” She settled in Berlin, and has now published numerous novels, plays, poems, and essays. Her latest novel, The Emissary (translated by Margaret Mitsutani), won the inaugural National Book Award for translated literature this week. Among the finest of Tawada’s works are short stories about adapting to new cultures, both physically and linguistically. The daughter of a nonfiction translator and academic bookseller, Tawada learned to read in over five languages; she speaks English, but doesn’t write it. “I feel in between two languages, and that’s big enough,” she told me. Her stories often turn on feeling outside the culture, as an immigrant, as a citizen witnessing great national change, or even as a tourist. In between collecting several other prizes, including the Akutagawa Prize, the Kleist Prize, and the Goethe Medal, Tawada has fashioned the dream bohemian existence for herself in Berlin, writing forewords and books and collaborating with the likes of Wim Wenders and Ulrike Ottinger. When we met at Denmark’s Louisiana Literature Festival this past summer, I made it a personal mission to ask Tawada polar bear questions she hadn’t heard before. Tawada, who has a long-standing interest in the Cold War and socialism, based the protagonist of her best-selling Memoirs of a Polar Bear on the Berlin Zoo’s star resident, Knut, who was born and raised in captivity, and died in captivity as well. “Danish sounds quite polar-bear-ish,” the author said. Tawada peppers her speech with German phrases and portmanteaus. She is cheeky, full of light, and modestly, sagaciously witty. INTERVIEWER When do you write? TAWADA I look like a person who cannot think when I wake up, because I’m still quite between the sleep and the dream and the waking, and that’s the best time for business. Read More
November 16, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Bohumil Hrabal By Valerie Stivers Ditie, the hero of Bohumil Hrabal’s (1914–1997) I Served the King of England, begins his adventures as a “tiny busboy” under the chapter heading “A Glass of Grenadine.” He is a small man, common, filled with naive enthusiasms, a stealer of change who falls in love with prostitutes and decorates their bodies with flowers. The term picaresque seems made for him. His adventures start outside Prague in the early part of the twentieth century and, over their course, he becomes a waiter, then the owner of a hotel, somehow growing up without denting his innocence. What he does learn, with trademark exuberance, is the ways of the wealthy and powerful people who come through his doors. He watches a boss knock the chef down for putting caraway seeds in the médaillon de veau aux champignons. He waits on a general who drinks Germany’s Henkell Trocken sparkling wine and eats “oysters and dishes of shrimp and lobster,” simultaneously stuffing himself and “sputter[ing] in disgust.” The president of the country displays equally inexplicable behavior, hiding in a children’s playhouse in the hotel’s yard with a Frenchwoman. The couple have sex on a “mound of hay” and order a twee faux-pastoral snack—“a crystal jug full of cool cream, a loaf of fresh bread, and a small lump of butter wrapped in vine leaves.” Ditie observes, “I had always thought that a President didn’t do things like this, and that it wasn’t right for a President to do things like this, and yet here he was just like the other rich people.” Ditie doesn’t serve the titular king of England (the highest possible honor, which befalls a waiter friend of his), but in a scene of culminating absurdity, he waits on a table while local officials fete the king of Ethiopia with a grotesque turducken made of a camel, two antelopes, twenty turkeys, fish, and “hundreds of hard-boiled eggs to fill in the empty spaces.” The meal is consumed with Zernoseky riesling, to moans of pleasure from the guests. Read More
November 15, 2018 At Work Building a Monument: An Interview with Natasha Trethewey By Lauren LeBlanc Natasha Trethewey (photo: Nancy Crampton) Two-term national Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winner Natasha Trethewey was born in her mother’s hometown, Gulfport, Mississippi, on April 26, 1966. The daughter of Eric Trethewey and Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, an interracial couple who traveled from Kentucky to Ohio in order to be legally married, Trethewey shares her birthday with Confederate Memorial Day. I was previously unaware of the holiday, which is still celebrated across the South to commemorate the deaths of Confederate soldiers. Upon the inauguration of Barack Obama, pundits announced we had entered a postracial era. Roughly a decade later, it is easy to say that white supremacy is stronger than it’s been since the civil rights movement. Talking with Trethewey on the phone, we noted the different ways that signals and symbols of white supremacy—beyond the obvious statues and memorials—continue to stand in plain sight. We are both daughters of the Deep South, and we discussed the old department stores that once lined Canal Street in New Orleans, such as Maison Blanche. Remarking on a Washington Post review of a John Grisham novel, Trethewey said, “One thing he mentions is a dismissal that I hear, too. You write about race. Aren’t there larger or more important subjects to write about? But this reviewer said that Mississippi writers in different genres all write about race because not writing about race in Mississippi is like writers from Arizona not writing about the desert. How can I not?” Trethewey stands witness. It would be impossible for her not to. In 1985, her stepfather murdered her mother, and she traces her desire to become a poet to her grief. This dedication to survival and memory have informed her five poetry collections, as well as her nonfiction book, Beyond Katrina, a book that should be read in conversation with Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones and Men We Reaped. Trethewey’s Pulitzer Prize–winning collection Native Guard confirmed her as the guardian of the histories that must be retold. This collection chronicled one of the first African American regiments during the Civil War. Her exquisite and brutal lyricism as well as her commitment to truth makes Trethewey one of the most important American poets of our time. Her new book, Monument, is a collection of both new and selected works. It’s a vibrant and timely book, deeply aware of our nation’s chaotic moment and its historical resonances. The most recent poems ripple with questions that have always informed her work: “Why is everything I see the past / I’ve tried to forget? … Do you know what it means / to have a wound that never heals?” and “How, then, could I not answer her life / with mine, she who saved me with hers?/ And how could I not—bathed in the light / of her wound—find my calling there?” She interrogates the black experience in America, the trauma of domestic violence and murder, and the destruction of the Gulf Coast. Trethewey is a tremendously empathic and enthusiastic force in our nation’s bleak period. Her words settle with profound gravity, yet her laughter is quick and comfortable. Read More
November 15, 2018 Arts & Culture In Defense of Puns By James Geary Once upon a time—in 382 C.E., to be exact—Eve bit into an apple. Seeing it was good, she offered the apple to Adam, and he also took a bite. Whereupon Adam and Eve’s eyes were opened, and they realized they were naked. Ashamed at having broken God’s sole commandment not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve hid themselves when He came walking in the garden. And the rest, of course, is history. God in His wrath decreed that henceforth man must earn his daily bread by working the earth and woman must suffer agony in childbirth. As a final punishment, He cast Eve and Adam forever out of Eden. Prior to the fourth century, however, no one knew exactly which forbidden fruit Eve and Adam ate. Genesis records only that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was off limits; it does not specify what edible flower that tree produced. Apples appeared in 382 because that’s when Pope Damasus I asked Saint Jerome to translate the Old Latin Bible into the simpler Latin Vulgate, which became the definitive edition of the text for the next thousand years. In the Vulgate, the adjectival form of evil, malus, is malum, which also happens to be the word for “apple.” The similarity between malum (“evil”) and malum (“apple”) prompted Saint Jerome to pick that word to describe what Eve and Adam ate, thereby ushering sin into the world. The truth is, though, the apple is innocent, and this unjustly maligned fruit’s association with original sin comes down to nothing more than a pun. Puns straddle that happy fault where sound and sense collide, where surface similarities of spelling or pronunciation meet above conflicting seams of meaning. By grafting the idea of evil onto the word for apple, Saint Jerome ensured that every time we recall Adam and Eve’s fateful disobedience in the garden we are reminded of the fruit of a deciduous tree of the rose family. Read More
November 15, 2018 Arts & Culture The Shocking, Subversive Endings of Taeko Kōno’s Stories By Gabe Habash The fiery, beguiling stories in Taeko Kōno’s collection Toddler Hunting and Other Stories, translated by Lucy North, are vertiginous tightrope walks between two planes of reality. Kōno (1926–2015) wrote these stories between 1961 and 1969, when several Japanese women writers were poking holes in the long-held idea that a wife is defined in relation to her husband and is submissive to him. (See also, for instance, the stories “Lingering Affection,” by Jakucho Setouchi, and “Luminous Watch,” by Setsuko Tsumura, both of them excellent.) It wasn’t until 1945 that women in Japan had been granted the right to vote, and not until the new constitution of 1946 that women had been allowed to ask for a divorce and public schools made coeducational. To illustrate what makes Kōno’s stories unforgettable, it’s useful to think about how a story can potentially end. Imagine, for example, a story about a married, childless couple driving across the state for a short weekend vacation in the seaside town where they met. The wife is trying to work up the resolve to tell the husband she doesn’t want to be married anymore; the husband has no idea. The wife knows that the further they get into the trip, the more difficult the situation becomes. In one potential ending, the wife waits until they’re walking on the beach to tell him, and he drives off without her. In another, she doesn’t tell him at all, and they drive home, the husband content and oblivious, listening to classical music on the radio. Both endings are narratively definitive—readers know all they need to know for the story to end (the wife either chooses to voice her feelings or she doesn’t). The first ending is also factually definitive—readers know exactly what’s going to happen plot-wise after the final period (the husband has left her and she must make her way back home). But the second ending isn’t factually definitive: the wife hasn’t articulated how she feels, and the thing is still silently between them, maybe growing, maybe not. Still, in both endings, readers know what the finale means for the reality of the wife. Toddler Hunting, on the other hand, doesn’t let us off this easy. These stories have no interest in closure, not even oblique closure. Like those of many other good short stories, the ending of a Kōno story is narratively definitive. (A story can be ruined by stopping too early or too late; good stories have a sense of exactly when they become narratively definitive.) But somewhere right before the end, the story has taken a sharp, dizzying turn, so that when it finally lands, it is in a place that is not merely surprising and inevitable but on a different plane entirely, one removed from the established reality. The effect is profoundly unsettling. Read More
November 14, 2018 At Work Falling in Love with the Straight Guy: An Interview with Dan Callahan By Ben Shields Dan Callahan Dan Callahan lives in a two-story brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He and his partner, Keith Uhlich, write about films, and their home is a museum of the moving image. Pictures of Liv Ullmann, Ingrid Bergman, and countless others adorn the walls, and film history books cram the bookshelves. Callahan himself has written biographies of Vanessa Redgrave and Barbara Stanwyck, as well as The Art of American Screen Acting, 1912-1960. This October, Squares & Rebels released his debut novel, That Was Something. There’s a great deal of Callahan in the novel. The protagonist, Bobby, is an NYU undergraduate cinephile, as was Callahan himself. But the star of the book is Monika Lilac, a glamorous woman he meets at a screening of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Cronaca di un amore. Everything about Monika is stylized, including her name, taken from her favorite silent picture, Lilac Time (1928). She holds legendary silent film parties in her apartment (talking prohibited), and encourages everyone to talk less generally, especially in love. Every outfit and utterance from Monika is memorable, even when she misfires; she embodies Oscar Wilde’s aphorism: “The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible.” Bobby’s best friend, Ben Morrissey, is a photographer, a Don Juan charmer, and a heterosexual. He’s also the love of Bobby’s life. The problem of sexual orientation complicates a painful romance that is both reciprocal and unrequited. Their friendship takes detours into places of euphoria and heartbreak, and the only thing that never changes in the book is the cinema. Films populate That Was Something the way that characters might another novel. Even the towering persona of Monika Lilac pales in the light of the silver screen. The novel begins: “I was looking for the keys to the kingdom, and I found them or thought I did in Manhattan screening rooms, in the half-light and the welcoming dark.” After a walk through of his home, Dan and I spent a rainy Sunday afternoon in his dining room talking movies, literature, and his foray into fiction. A photo of Marlene Dietrich, signed in silver, presided over the conversation. Callahan imbibed a lot of coffee and spoke rapidly, as though always on the verge of an insight. His eyes are wide, as if the theater lights have just gone down. Read More