Une après-midi, 2022 by Xiao Guo Hui (b. 1969)
Penelope, 1923 by Glyn Philpot (1884-1937)
Q. It’s interesting that you say your new book is surreal but not magical realism. You’ve said that you don’t consider your earlier books to be surrealistic. Why not?
A. Surrealism was born out of a preoccupation with the irrationality and illogic of the subconscious, and a view that human relationships are fundamentally absurd. Whatever else my books may be about, they don’t express an absurd view of existence. The form of the books, and the strange juxtapositions of their narratives, may strike people as surreal, but the central concerns that drive the stories are traditional ones. I don’t think any true surrealist would consider me a surrealist, in the same way no hard-core science-fiction fan would consider me a science-fiction writer, since the basic concern of most classic science fiction is the relationship between man and technology. Philip K. Dick and Theodore Sturgeon and a few others are exceptions. Technology is a completely valid and important topic to write about, but it just doesn’t happen to interest me. And my books aren’t “experimental” because my priorities don’t involve reinventing literary forms, and they’re not fantastic because they’re not characterized by the sense of wonder that fantasy evokes. I think it’s been hard for my novels to find a niche.
Q. Do you see your books as being postmodern?
A. You know, I’ve never been entirely clear what “postmodern” means. But to at least some extent postmodernism seems to involve a cultural or aesthetic self-awareness, and an insistence on art recognizing and tweaking its own artifice. My aim isn’t to call attention to the artifice of my books but to make readers forget the artifice, to persuade them to exchange their reality for the one I’ve created. I’m aware that trying to get readers to give themselves over to another reality is always doomed to failure. On the other hand, that’s the job of the novelist, to fail and fail again. The great hope isn’t to succeed-I’m not sure what success would really mean-but to risk everything, and perhaps to fail by narrower margins, until there’s nothing left to fail with.
From a 1997 interview with novelist Steve Erickson. Larry McCaffery and Takayuki Tatsumi conducted the interview, which published in Contemporary Literature, Autumn, 1997, Vol. 38, No. 3.
“Wet”
by
Joy Williams
from 99 Stories of God
The Lord was drinking some water out of a glass. There was nothing wrong with the glass, but the water tasted terrible.
This was in a white building on a vast wasteland. The engineers within wore white uniforms and booties on their shoes and gloves on their hands. The water had traveled many hundreds of miles through wide pipes to be here.
What have you done to my water? the Lord asked. My living water…
Oh, they said, we thought that was just a metaphor.
WET
The War Crime, 2022 by Ben Quilty (b. 1973)
“The Dreadful Has Already Happened”
by
Mark Strand
The relatives are leaning over, staring expectantly.
They moisten their lips with their tongues. I can feel
them urging me on. I hold the baby in the air.
Heaps of broken bottles glitter in the sun.
A small band is playing old fashioned marches.
My mother is keeping time by stamping her foot.
My father is kissing a woman who keeps waving
to somebody else. There are palm trees.
The hills are spotted with orange flamboyants and tall
billowy clouds move behind them. “Go on, Boy,”
I hear somebody say, “Go on.”
I keep wondering if it will rain.
The sky darkens. There is thunder.
“Break his legs,” says one of my aunts,
“Now give him a kiss.” I do what I’m told.
The trees bend in the bleak tropical wind.
The baby did not scream, but I remember that sigh
when I reached inside for his tiny lungs and shook them
out in the air for the flies. The relatives cheered.
It was about that time I gave up.
Now, when I answer the phone, his lips
are in the receiver; when I sleep, his hair is gathered
around a familiar face on the pillow; wherever I search
I find his feet. He is what is left of my life.
One of my oldest friends (by which I mean friend I’ve had for a long time, not, like, old, although we’re both getting up there, although by no means old, but I suppose certainly definitely no longer young, middleaged, I guess, although when we were young we would have thought ourselves now (middleaged) old)
—one of my oldest friends Patrick sent me a mystery box of books earlier this week. Highlights include The Evergreen Review Reader (begins with William S. Burroughs and ends with Kathy Acker, two writers Patrick introduced me to way back in seventh or eighth grade), a graphic history of the Beats by Harvey Pekar et al, and a signed copy of Ronald Sukenick’s Long Talking Bad Condition Blues. Thanks PT!
Morning, 1974 by Norman Stevens (1937-1988)
Nightmare, 2020 by Salman Toor (b. 1983)
Gary Amdahl’s 2014 novel Across My Big Brass Bed is getting a new printing from corona\samizdat. A review copy arrived at Biblioklept World Headquarters a day or two before a short vacation, and I almost tucked it into my backpack for the plane, but I knew that the novel’s paragraphless flow would not work for me if I were around other humans, let alone in a big metal plastic carbon fiber thing forty thousand feet in the etc.
So I set it aside, and then picked it up this afternoon.
The novel (subtitled “An Intellectual Autobiography in Twenty-four Hours”) begins: “I drove, aimlessly but alertly, fighting traffic.” It’s the early 1960s in the Twin Cities, and our narrator seems to be coming into consciousness, by which I might mean earliest memories, or really just new language-and-concept acquisition: “President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had just been—new word—assassinated.” A few sentences later, our narrator cracked me up with this mordant zinger:
“Whatever it meant to be human, President Kennedy could no longer manage it.”
Yikes! The first chapter ends with our hero successfully assisting a group of pedestrians in their crossing of the street in his new professional capacity of an elected Crossing Guard of Madison Elementary. I loved the pages I read today.
Girl Reading, George Clausen (1852 – 1944)
On the Way to the Doctor, 1974 by Charles W. Stewart (1915 – 2001).
Part of a series of unpublished illustrations that were to illustrate Mervyn Peake’s 1950 novel, Gormenghast. (More here.)
Last week or maybe the week before last, I received in the mail a review copy of Henri Bosco’s slim 1945 novel The Child and The River. This new translation by Joyce Zonana is available now from publisher NYRB. I picked up The Child and the River this week twice: once before bed, and then again immediately upon waking the next morning, where I finished it before rising.
Set some years before either of the Big Wars, The River and the Child takes place in the countryside somewhere in the south of France (likely Bosco’s native Provence). Narrator Pascalet, now an older man, looks back on a transformational episode in his youth. He relates how as a young boy, he was free to roam the countryside wherever he pleased, excepting the river, where, according to his parents, “there are black holes where you can drown; there are snakes in the reeds and Gypsies on the banks.”
When his parents go on a trip, leaving him in the care of sweet Tante Martine, young Pascalet makes his way to the forbidden river posthaste, blaming any mischief on newly-arrived Spring:
…one fine April morning, temptation caught me unawares. It knew how to speak to me. It was a springtime temptation, one of the sweetest there is, I think, for anyone who is open to clear skies, tender leaves, and newly-blossomed flowers.
That is why I succumbed.
Pascalet’s adventure quickly goes awry, or improves in intensity, depending on how you like to think of it. He falls asleep in an old rowboat, drifts downriver, and ends up on an island inhabited by Gypsies. Hungry, he spies them from behind the brush. Near their cauldron they keep a dog and a bear—and a bound prisoner: “He was a handsome child, sturdy, taller than me and stronger, most likely a Gypsy.” The men in the group beat the young prisoner with a whip, but he endures it. Late in the night, under cover of darkness, Pascalet frees this boy, Gatzo; they then steal a boat and escape to live out a boyhood fantasy of utter freedom—for a few days, at least.
The Child and the River brims with lovely nostalgic pleasures. The boys playact their boyish fantasies, forging crude bows and arrows of reed and pretending that they might have to fend off monsters or “headhunters, cannibals.” Pascalet describes the wonderful sensation of escalating these fantasies:
Then I would feel a mock terror. I enjoyed it. Because when you scare yourself through make-believe, you know well enough that you are not in any danger, but still you are afraid. It is one of the most delicious pleasures.
And yet the boys are not merely playacting—they are surviving: fishing, foraging, strategically moving and mooring their boat to avoid detection. They make fire; they cook. In a lovely little scene, they dig a spring to enjoy fresh water:
We made a hole near a bulge in the clay. Water was seeping through. We continued to dig and fashioned a little basin. Through a breach in the clay, the water moistened a bed of sand. We flattened one side of our hole and stuck in a hollow reed. At first the reed stayed dry. We were aching with impatience, even more than for the fire. At long last, a droplet formed and grew round; for a long time, it hung, uncertain. Suddenly it fell. Another drop came, and slowly, at the tip of the green reed, the spring was born.
This passage exemplifies the simple precision of Bosco’s prose via Zonana’s clean, clear translation. The joy of The Child and the River comes from Pascalet’s gentle, limpid observations of his time on the river, which are generally free of intrusive, muddy “adult” meditations. Instead, we experience what the boys experience:
Everywhere, plants and waters, shorelines and trees, came alive at nightfall with a confused, mysterious life. A duck would flap its wings in the reeds; an owl would screech on a black poplar; a brutal badger would rummage in a bush; a weasel, gliding from branch to branch, would cause two or three leaves to tremble lightly; a roving fox would yelp in the distance.
“It is a sad animal,” Gatzo told me. “It is thinking
The adventures of Pascalet and Gatzo culminate in a strange, dreamlike encounter with “the Puppeteer of Souls.” I won’t remark on the episode at any length, only add that it provides a nearly-mystical, memorable climax to the book. I’ll also add that the novel’s last two sentences are some of the sweetest I’ve read in a while.
I loved reading The Child and the River; I loved the feeling of reading it. It took me back to books I’d loved as a child: Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, abridged and bowdlerized versions of Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn, and countless Robinsades. In a letter to a friend, Bosco suggested that The Child and the River was “a novel very good, I think, for children, adolescents, and poets.” Is there a better audience?
The Child and the River is one of two Bosco books in publication now from NYRB; they released Zonana’s translation of his 1948 novel Malicroix in early March of 2020. I have it on my shelf, still unread, but not for long. I hope NYRB and Zonana will do a few more Bosco titles. Recommended.
King Cheetah, 2022 by Angela Gram (b. 1985)
Playground No.6, 1968 by Peter Colville Horridge Gardner (b. 1921)
Biblioklept 