There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby is the title of selected stories by one of Russia’s most outstanding contemporary fiction writers. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is a writer of short stories, novels and plays, winner of prestigious literary prizes. Ludmilla is dear and her stories will leave you with a sense of magic. There is humor as well as the satisfaction that comes when an author can convey all our disappointments and consolations.

Selected and translated by Keith Gessen (author of All The Sad Young Literary Men) and Anna Summers (a Boston scholar of Slavic literature), their introduction provides you with the story of Ludmilla’s struggle to become a writer with critics considering her stories to be too dark and grim. In There Once Lived a Woman almost every story is a form of nekyia: “Characters depart from physical reality under exceptional circumstances: during a heart attack, child birth, a major psychological shock, a suicide attempt, a car accident” (xi).

Liesl Schillinger, writing for The New York Times Book Review, comments:

The stories in this exquisite collection — vital, eerie and freighted with the moral messages that attend all cautionary tales — reflect only one of Petrushevskaya’s many modes of expression. Readers who would like to experience others can turn to another story collection, “Immortal Love,” and her short novel “The Time: Night,” which were both translated into English in the 1990s. In those books, writing expansively, even garrulously, she conveyed the rough texture of life (mostly for women) in Soviet and post-Soviet society, showing the world she observed and overheard in all its unairbrushed detail — the poverty, the alcoholism, the illnesses, the cramped living conditions, the disappointed parents and worthless children, the unreliable suitors and resigned women. Russians long ago put a name to this sort of grim, neorealist writing, which has flourished since glasnost put an end to the enforced optimism of the Soviet period. They call it chernukha — from the word cherny, which means “black” — suggesting a pessimistic sensibility.

Lately, chernukha has fallen out of vogue with Russians who seek escape from reality in their reading. But Gessen and Summers have chosen shrewdly. In these beautifully translated pages, they deliver savory tastes of Petrushevskaya’s dark perspective, but in portions so small and distinct that the chernukha seasons rather than overwhelms them. We are left hungry for more.

Indeed, after reading a few stories last night, I was left hungry. So much that while sleeping my brain entertained me with fantastical dreams that were a little scary, but pleasantly so. I awoke with excitement and remembered that the woman who was following me through the corridors as I frantically locked seven doors–thinking that this divine investment of time would certainly keep this grave woman with a deep voice away–was Ludmilla in her unforgettable hat.

I was just sitting down to write, not quite sure of what I wanted to write about, and in the box of books to be shelved today I see some books wrapped in plastic which can mean it to be something special or simply an annoyance.

Unwrapping it, I see that it is a previously unpublished and unfinished work of Vladimir Nabokov.

From the jacket, I read:

When Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977, he left instructions for his heirs to burn the 138 handwritten index cards that made up the rough draft of his final and unfinished novel, The Original Laura. But Nabokov’s wife, Vera, could not bear to destroy her husband’s last work, and when she died, the fate of the manuscript fell to her son. Dmitri Nabokov, now seventy-five–the Russian novelist’s only surviving heir, and translator of his many books–has wrestled for three decades with the decision of whether to honor his father’s wish or preserve for posterity the last piece of writing of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. His decision finally to allow publication of the fragmented narrative–dark yet playful, preoccupied with mortality–affords us one last experience of Nabokov’s magnificent creativity, the quintessence of his unparalleled body of work.

Opening with an introduction by Vladimir’s son, Dmitri, the book elegantly compiles the 138 reproduced handwritten note cards with a type-written text below. The image above is the hardcover without the jacket.

I’m too curious to resist. I’ll be reading it on this rainy night. I certainly do wonder what Vladimir would think about his note cards now reproduced in a glorious book format designed by Chip Kidd.

I’ll try to get back here after I finish reading . . .

Update: I finished reading The Original of Laura. My recommendation for reading this work is to finish it in a couple of sittings. It is indeed an unfinished work and a little disconcerting at times. But stick with it! There is a conclusion to Laura and the characters will linger in your mind long after you finish it. I thought that the Nabokov’s notes on the hard cover must have to do with his wishes that the unfinished work be destroyed upon his death. However, you will discover the intended meaning of the words once you finish Laura: “efface expunge erase delete . . . ” become a bit haunting. I think it is beneficial to read the introduction prior to Laura as it is a charming and sometimes humorous explanation of why Dimitri decided to publish his father’s work. On a somber note, I also learned of the somewhat sad circumstances under which Vladimir Nabokov passed away. I look forward to sitting down with this beautiful book again sometime, and I recommend it highly.

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (Random House, 2009)

This wonderful book was recommended to me by an avid reader, friend of Lemuria, and a resident of New York City—transplanted from his roots in Mississippi. He never steers me wrong, so once again a great read which I am passing on to all of you.

On August 7, 1974 while Philippe Petit walked (danced, leapt) on a tightrope wire between the World Trade Center towers–called the “artistic crime of the century”–way up there, ¼ mile, if you can imagine, anonymous, ordinary lives were being lived out on the streets below. If you think of it, one can imagine—an angel in the sky looking over the depths of a city.

The story is not about the tightrope walk but what was happening below as he “walked, danced” over the city. A few of these ordinary lives become interwoven as McCann paints in absolutely beautiful language a portrait of a city and its people.

Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk with issues of his own stemming from a troubled childhood, lives among the prostitutes on the streets of the Bronx. He provides a place for these women to come when they must: his apartment, open all of the time. His life is interwoven with Tillie, a thirty-eight year old hooker, her daughter, Jazzlyn–also a hooker, and Jazlyn’s two babies. Tillie loves those babies, even from a jail cell where she finds herself after a “trick” turned bad, and worries over their care.

There is a young artist and her husband who, while driving home, sideswipe a car on the freeway causing it to spin out of control. It is obvious that the passengers are injured, but her husband, having just finished a joint, does not stop to assist and take responsibility. She cannot get the passengers out of her mind, and eventually goes to the hospital where the passengers were taken as her own life spirals out of control.

In 1974 our young soldiers were coming home from Vietnam, some in caskets. In a Park Avenue apartment a group of mothers mourn their sons who have died in this war. These mothers from diverse backgrounds try in vain to find commonality but way too much divides them even in their grief.

And so the walk continues. People notice. One of the grieving mothers thinks he might be an angel, her son—returned. Stories of these seemingly disparate lives become intertwined. As I said, it is written beautifully with McCann using language, sentence structure, repetition, to bring to life this story and its characters. I recommend it to you with enthusiasm!

-Yvonne

I feel like I have just read one of the most scholarly, unique novels in quite some time. Muriel Barbery, a native of Casablanca, who has taught philosophy in France and now lives in Japan, knows how to get raw human emotions on the page in a terse, captivating, and humorous manner. Her popularity with the release of Elegance of the Hedgehog (2008) probably forcasted her success with this new release, Gourmet Rhapsody.

As the novel opens, the reader meets the internationally famous food critic who has been told by his physician that he has only 48 hours to live.

“I am going to die, but that is of no importance. Since yesterday, since Chabrot, only one thing matters. I am going to die and there is a flavor that has been teasing my taste buds and my heart and I simply cannot recall it. I know that this particular flavor is the first and ultimate truth of my entire life, and that it holds the key to a heart that I have since silenced.”

From this point on, the author organizes the novel into small, short and poignant chapters all written from the point of view of the protagonists’ family members, friends, fellow food afficionados, lovers, and even his dog and cat. Clever beyond clever! Additional chapters have titles which reflect food groups, including meat, fish, ice cream and mayonnaise , among others,and what  role they have played in the food critic’s life.

The reader learns that the deathbed quest for the elusive taste takes precedence over the protagonist’s love for his downtrodden, desperate wife, who has received little or rare attention from her husband, as well as his children who have never felt loved, nor wanted.  His has been a life lived selfishly and intellectually with his entire focus on food.  This novel will pique the interest of all chefs, all food lovers, and even those who have  even a vague interest in food.

Being the dog lover that I am, one of my favorite chapters,entitled “The Dog: Rue de Grenelle, the Bedroom” introduced me to “Rhett”. “He was a Dalmatian, and I’d baptized him Rhett, in honor of  ‘Gone with the Wind’, my favorite film, because if I had been a woman, I would have been Scarlett–the one who survives in a world that is dying.” When Rhett grabs and quickly devours the coveted Christmas Yule log exquisitely and laboriously prepared by the grandmother, everyone ( once the immediate disappointment and anger subside of the great loss) become greatly amused at Rhett’s aroma during the rest of the holiday.  The levity and humor with which Barbery writes gives  great delight and joy.

So, does Monsieur Arthens find his nostalgic, long lost flavor before his death? The reader will find out as he voraciously consumes the language of this delectable book as if he were consuming his last feast.  This French translation, a good one, takes the reader on a gastronomic voyage, one which he will not soon forget.

-Nan

This is one of the most refreshing books I have read in a long time. I do not believe the catchy title and charming cover will let you down. I read these stories over a weekend . . . one story after another, one sweet after another. The last story is the title story and it is a true story as I understand it. “The Most Beautiful Book in the World” is the story of a group of women in a Soviet gulag who have been imprisoned for their political beliefs and now have one chance to get their thoughts and feelings sent out to the their husbands and children.

Upon finishing The Most Beautiful Book I immediately looked for more translated work of Schmitt’s. At the moment, his other works have not been translated. However, it seems that The Most Beautiful Book has been a very successful publication of Europa Editions. Perhaps Europa will see to it that others of Schmitt’s work will be translated soon! (Kelly wrote a great entry on translated works not long ago, citing such works as The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo . . . which spawned some interesting comments.)

Read below from the jacket:

One of Europe’s most popular and best-loved authors, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt captivates the reader with his spirited, buoyant style and enchanting stories that move effortlessly from the everyday to the fantastical. The eight stories in this collection, his first to be published in English, represent some of his best writing and most imaginative storylines: from the love story between Balthazar, wealthy and successful author, and Odette, cashier at a supermarket, to the tale of a barefooted princess; from the moving story of a group of female prisoners in a Soviet gulag to the entertaining portrait of a perennially disgruntled perfectionist. Here are eight contemporary fables, populated by a cast of extravagant and affecting characters, about people in search of happiness. Behind each story lies a simple, if elusive, truth: happiness is often right in front of our eyes, though we may frequently be blind to it.

Today the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize 2009 was announced. The panel of five judges originally started out with 132 books, narrowed it down to the longlist of 13 and today the shortlist consists of six novels. The winner will finally be announced October 6, 2009. The Booker Prize also has a great website with author interviews, past prize winner lists, and mention of upcoming novels.

The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt, October 1, 2009

A spellbinding novel, at once sweeping and intimate, from the Booker Prize-winning author of “Possession,” spans the Victorian era through the World War I years, and centers around a famous children’s book author and the passions, betrayals, and secrets that tear apart the people she loves. See my blog for more info. You’ll see that I really love this book.

Summertime by J. M. Coetzee, January 1, 2010

A young English biographer is researching a book about the late South African writer John Coetzee, focusing on Coetzee in his thirties, at a time when he was living in a rundown cottage in the Cape Town suburbs with his widowed father-a time, the biographer is convinced, when Coetzee was finding himself as a writer. Never having met the man himself, the biographer interviews five people who knew Coetzee well, including a married woman with whom he had an affair, his cousin Margot, and a Brazilian dancer whose daughter took English lessons with him. These accounts add up to an image of an awkward, reserved, and bookish young man who finds it hard to make meaningful connections with the people around him.
“Summertime” is an inventive and inspired work of fiction that allows J.M. Coetzee to imagine his own life with a critical and unsparing eye, revealing painful moral struggles and attempts to come to grips with what it means to care for another human being. Incisive, elegant, and often surprisingly funny, “Summertime” is a compelling work by one of today’s most esteemed writers.

The Quickening Maze by Adam Cape Foulds, not yet released in the U.S.

From 1837 to 1841, John Clare, the peasant poet, was a patient in a private asylum in the Epping Forest.  Clare and his wife Patty had six children and life was proving increasingly burdensome to Clare, who began to suffer bouts of severe depression, leading to alarmingly erratic behaviour and serious delusions.  In The Quickening Maze, Adam Foulds has written an imaginative recreation of Clare’s years in the High Beech Asylum, and while the result is firmly fictional, the picture presented is realistic and consistent with the known history.

The book is sparsely written.  Foulds does not write lengthy descriptive or scene-setting passages, but each small vignette contributes to a rich picture of the cloistered life of a 19th century private asylum.

This is no mad-house.  The asylum is run on orderly lines by Dr Matthew Allen, a thoughtful man who likes to get to know his patients.  However, the finances of the asylum are precarious and Foulds describes Allen’s attempts to mix the cure of souls with mechanical invention and patents.  Poor Allen finds his time increasingly spent trying to “diversify his business”, but without success. Click here to read the full review.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, October 13, 2009

In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII’s court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king’s favor and ascend to the heights of political power

England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. The quest for the king’s freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum.

Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his personal losses, implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?

In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel presents a picture of a half-made society on the cusp of change, where individuals fight or embrace their fate with passion and courage. With a vast array of characters, overflowing with incident, the novel re-creates an era when the personal and political are separated by a hairbreadth, where success brings unlimited power but a single failure means death.

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer, not yet released in the U.S.

Simon Mawer’s latest book is a historical novel set in Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s. Historical novels are usually possessed of horrid, obvious and multiple weaknesses and flaws – bogus dialogue, fetishistic images and scenes, ignorant conflations: sinister, ersatz entertainment. And although Mawer is the author of a number of rather fine novels – including The Gospel of Judas and The Fall – he is probably best known for his Peter Mayle-ish A Place in Italy (1992). So the omens are not good. And all the initial signs are unpromising: The Glass Room is a book about a culture slipping from decadence into catastrophic decline. It’s a study of a marriage. It concerns itself with art, music, architecture, indignity, loneliness, terror, betrayal, sex. And the Holocaust. It should, therefore, be pretentious, unbearable schlock of the most appalling kind. But it’s not. It is, unexpectedly, a thing of extraordinary beauty and symmetry . . .

The architect employed by Viktor is a man named Rainer von Abt, a disciple of Adolf Loos. “I wish to take Man out of the cave and float him in the air,” Von Abt proclaims. “I wish to give him a glass space to inhabit.” The house, when it is built, has vast windows, an onyx wall, white ceilings and white floors. It is the definitive modern house, for definitive modern people. Viktor is a great believer in inovace and pokrok – innovation and progress. “Everywhere he takes with him the new creed and proclaims it with all the enthusiasm of a prophet. ‘This is where the world of commerce is leading us,’ he explains. ‘Into a world of peace and trade, where the only battles fought are battles for market share.'” It’s the late 1930s: Viktor is woefully mistaken.

The Glass Room is not merely a piece of architecture within the book: it is the architecture of the book. All the characters interact with and within the house in some way; all plot revelations take place within its shimmering walls; history doesn’t take place outside it, it comes to it. Abandoned by the fleeing Landauers, the Glass Room is taken over by the Nazis for scientific experiments, and then claimed by the communists, before becoming a museum, and the site for a final scene of recognition and redemption. This could easily be over-ingenious or simply absurd, a device ripe for parody. Exactly how Mawer manages to avoid the many potential embarrassments and pitfalls he sets up for himself is worth considering . . .

Click here to read the full review.

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, May 2009

A chilling and vividly rendered ghost story set in postwar Britain, by the bestselling and award-winning author of “The Night Watch” and “Fingersmith.”

Sarah Waters’s trilogy of Victorian novels “Tipping the Velvet,” “Affinity,” and “Fingersmith” earned her legions of fans around the world, a number of awards, and a reputation as one of today’s most gifted historical novelists. With her most recent book, “The Night Watch,” Waters turned to the 1940s and delivered a tender and intricate novel of relationships that brought her the greatest success she has achieved so far. With “The Little Stranger,” Waters revisits the fertile setting of Britain in the 1940s-and gives us a sinister tale of a haunted house, brimming with the rich atmosphere and psychological complexity that have become hallmarks of Waters’s work.
“The Little Stranger” follows the strange adventures of Dr. Faraday, the son of a maid who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country doctor. One dusty postwar summer in his home of rural Warwickshire, he is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for more than two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline-its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more ominous than a dying way of life? Little does Dr. Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his.

Several years ago when The Shadow of the Wind was first published I said it was the best book I had read that year. Well, Carlos Ruiz Zafon has done it again. So far, The Angel’s Game—a prequel to The Shadow of the Wind—is the best book I have read this year. Undeniably!
Its protagonist is David Martin, a young man with a troubled past, who writes sensationalist novels—quite successfully—under a pseudonym. He makes enough from this endeavor to move from a dingy apartment into a home. He finds, however, that his new home is full of shadows and a past—-so much mystery hidden in closets and attic rooms.
He also receives an offer he cannot refuse from a French editor, Andreas Corelli, to write a book like none other—a book that will change hearts and minds. As he proceeds, however, he is riddled with doubt, then fear. So begins a beautifully written story of intrigue, impossible love, and passion, all woven into the fabric of a well-told story.

-Yvonne

by Kelly Pickerill

A customer was in today looking for the second Stieg Larsson mystery, The Girl Who Played With Fire; it will be released at the end of the month, I told her, and lots of us can’t wait. If you happen to understand Swedish, however, you can go ahead and read the entire trilogy. She said her grandfather has done just that. So of course we got to talking about the aspects of translated novels (and especially poetry) that must be altered to retain a semblance of their meaning or are even completely lost during translation.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novels have been praised for, among other things, their beautiful language. But can we really say it’s his language that’s so lovely? Isn’t it more accurate to say that his novel’s translator painstakingly pored over each sentence until it most closely resembled Marquez’s aim and cadence in Spanish?
And were another translator to do her thing, mightn’t she transform Marquez’s work into something more lovely yet less accurate or, vice versa, more pointed but less musical? One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of my favorite novels, but I can’t help wondering if I’m missing something because I can’t read it in Spanish.

I’m a big fan of the Russian novelists, especially Nabokov, who actually did most of his own translating and eventually wrote solely in English. But let’s talk about the big ones, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky– there are more translators for their novels than books to translate. How important is it to read the translations of one of the “chosen,” like Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky? Is it okay if you read another version, or are you missing out?
I’m sure it’s not all hype; I’ve read their translation of Anna Karenina and it is very good, and I’m looking forward to reading their translation of War and Peace (I just wish I hadn’t bought that other edition for fifty dollars before they got around to translating it).

Where the hype fell flat for me, though, is when I jumped on the bandwagon and picked up Robert Fagles’s acclaimed translation of The Aeneid. When I came to one of my favorite parts, the “break-up” scene in book four, at the end of which Dido throws herself on a sword, Fagles’s translation seemed so sterile and overwrought compared to the lines in my dog-eared, beloved copy translated by Allen Mandelbaum:

The supple flame devours her marrow;
Within her breast the silent wound lives on.
Unhappy Dido burns.
(IV 88-90)

This is Fagles’s translation of the same lines:

The flame keeps gnawing into her tender marrow hour by hour
And deep in her heart the silent wound lives on.
Dido burns with love — the tragic queen.

It’s better than some others, like the prose-ified translation by David West (there should be a law against rendering epic poems into prose form), but it’s so modernized that it makes Dido’s feelings seem almost adolescent. The terse line “Unhappy Dido Burns” grabs onto you; I feel it frees the passage, allowing it to echo through St. Augustine, “To Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears,” all the way to T.S. Eliot:

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest

burning

(The Waste Land, lines 307-311)

I am positive that Fagles’s translation is more faithful to the original Latin than Mandelbaum’s, but what I’m wondering is, does it matter?  Which is more important, the accuracy of content or the accuracy of art?

The “newest” classic out right now is Anne Carson’s An Oresteia, three Greek plays about the fall of the house of Atreus.  I have read some of Carson’s poetry and her essays (Eros the Bittersweet is an amazingly readable volume of essays in which she examines the Greek concept of Eros), and I’m excited to dig in to her latest effort.

On a more modern note, our foreign fiction section gets more and more traffic every day.  Carlos Ruiz Zafon‘s prequel to The Shadow of the Wind, The Angel’s Game (signed first ed) was just released in the U.S. I finally got around to reading The Shadow of the Wind recently; it’s unputdownable, and I can’t wait to read Zafon’s latest. There are so many great foreign writers available to read in English, but unfortunately not everything makes it over here.  New York Magazine ran an article, “Lost in Un-Translation,” about some books we English speakers are missing out on.

One heroic effort to make more non-English books available is being undertaken by the publisher Europa Editions.  These paperbacks with stylish covers provide English speakers with some of the best foreign novels, memoirs, and narrative nonfiction.  Hopefully we’ll see some of the books mentioned in the article above soon, published by Europa.  I’ve read Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and her second book, Gourmet Rhapsody, will be out soon. I just picked up a book of novellas by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, The Most Beautiful Book in the World, which Lisa highly recommends.

Take a look at your bookshelves–how many of your favorites were originally written in another language? I’ll bet there’s more than you think, so hopefully we’ll continue to benefit from the tireless efforts of translators to make our literary oeuvre more complete.

My friend, Wickie, found the article below, about Per Petterson, in The Guardian and forwarded it on to me. We both loved his novel, Out Stealing Horses, and the article makes me anxious to read more of his works. Although the article is long, read it if you have a chance to read it I highly suggest that you do. Not only does it give you insight into Petterson’s background, it also gives you a better understanding about what makes him tick as a writer. I’ve heard that his latest novel that has been translated into English, To Siberia, is wonderful as well.

Interview by James Campbell which appeared in The Guardian on January 3, 2009

Per Petterson remembers the last thing his mother said to him. It was in April 1990. She had just finished reading his first novel, Echoland, which had been published in Norway the previous year. “She said: ‘Well, I hope the next one won’t be that childish.’ Which was a blow. And the next weekend she was dead.”

Petterson’s father, brother and nephew died with her, when a ferry caught fire on the overnight sailing from Oslo to Frederikshavn in northern Denmark (159 people lost their lives). “I’ve thought a lot about what she said. I’ve tried to figure out what she meant.

Click here to read the full article.

-Caroline