That politics and the conscience often share unlikely and often deeply conflicting space is a wider theme both within Abdellatif Laâbi’s literary work and his personal life. Laâbi is well-known as a poet, novelist, and playwright in France, to which he emigrated in the mid-1980s after political persecution in his native Morocco left him imprisoned for eight years, his use of far-left rhetoric during his editorship of the once prominent Moroccan arts and politics journal Souffle having led to his arrest and denunciation. He has received numerous awards in his adopted country, including the Prix Goncourt in 2009 for his poetry.

The Bottom of the Jar is a beautiful roman à clef written about the experiences of a young boy, Namouss, who makes the transition from childhood innocence to adulthood, with attendant experiences that begin to weigh heavily on his soul. The backdrop of the novel predates and prefigures the author’s emergence as both a cultural and political critic of conscience. It might be said that this is not a portrait of the writer’s youth, but a political analysis of our age. The narrative is set in the city of Fez when Morocco stands at the apex of a political cataclysm that began to boil over in the mid-20^th Century – in which France’s power struggle for colonization of the country erupted into mass conflict and terrorism, leading to Morocco’s independence from France in the next year, and foreshadowing tension in another French stronghold in North Africa that would, only months later, become the infamous Battle of Algiers.

The novel takes form through a series of vignettes of family life that are alternately sad and comical, reminiscent of the structure of Federico Fellini’s great semi-autobiographical film Amarcord, which, like The Bottom of the Jar dealt with memories of a life whose slow pace is punctuated only by religious ceremony and the imagination of children rooted in the dullness and anxiety of poverty. Similarly, the innocence of the children in both works is contrasted against the social revolutions that occur around them in the times in which they grow up: for Fellini, this involved the downfall of Mussolini as World War II loomed ahead for Italy, and for Laâbi it is the failure of the French government to address the desire for independence on the part of the Moroccan people and misjudging their capacity for revolution.

There is a local saying mentioned in the novel: “Fez is a mirror.” What kind of mirror Fez is, however – personal, political, or universal – is what forms the philosophical core of the story. Indeed, the cataclysm that Morocco “slouches towards” in The Bottom of the Jar is one which hangs dimly along the horizon of our time, in the Arab Spring uprisings, in the United States’ invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the conflict between Israel and Palestine; it is found in the shadows of policy made by governments threatened by forces from within and without. In linking the uprisings of the middle 20^th Century and today, Laâbi places himself at the genuine vanguard of artistic inquiry. This is because generations of artists are often defined by cultural pivot points. For our generation it is undoubtedly 9/11. For many modernists, such an axis point is commonly thought to be an impact of the First World War, which called into question popular concepts of duty, religion, and progress, and destroyed assumptions about the value of culture and thus the literal form of art, which is only the reflection of the philosophy of a given culture.

In an epilogue to the novel, Laâbi notes: “I have tried to give a simple answer to the voice that claims to speak for memory, that pesters me and asks: Who is Namouss? The answer that rises in reply is happily unforeseen: Namouss is my ancestor and my child.” That is, the author deals with the question of how terrorism has shaped world culture, its values, our future behavior as human beings, and, on a much more personal level, how our world is defined by our capacity for memory. Indeed, our culture’s relationship to time is like a person standing alone in an empty room, convinced that there is someone else there, changing us through some force; that absent person is what we call time, and its absence and illusion of presence is what we call memory. Perhaps this is our generation’s myth of the fountain of youth: for us the future symbolizes hope and progress, but on a deeper level it also represents death, which we fear more than anything else. In this way the past becomes symbolic of life, or its beginning, thus taking on the quality of myth.

That Laâbi recognizes the link between understanding our time and understanding memory is profound, and should serve as an example to other authors. We have entered an age in which art will shift into new forms, and it will be fascinating to see which creative minds rise to those new formal qualities. Let us hope that Abdellatif Laâbi is among them.

The Exxon Valdez oil spill of March 1989 was one of the worst environmental disasters caused by mankind. Mei Mei Evans, author of Oil and Water, was a public information officer for Homer, Alaska during the devastating event. Using these events and her personal experience as influence for the novel, Evans has attempted to display the complexities of enduring an enormous environmental catastrophe.

Oil and Water explores the how various local, government, and corporate decisions impact the community of Selby, Alaska and other, more rural, parts of the state. Evans asks the reader to confront the role of big corporations in our everyday existence, how we do and do not hold them accountable for their actions. The novel excels at communicating the many complicated facets of disaster response in a remote area while creating a strong sense of place in poetic descriptions that bring the reader deeply into the world of an event that every North American should read about:

[Lee] imagines the spill washing ashore in Rugged Bay in a matter of days, fouling near-shore waters. A pod of glistening black-and-white orcas breaching in its toxic shadow. A pride of sea lions surging through the crude, their stiff whiskers blackened, faces filmed with grease. A siege of herring floating dead atop petroleum-laden seas.

Lee pictures the neon-green beach vegetation–the new shoots of goosetounge and sandwort and lovage that at this time of year, unfurling from winter dormancy, always seem lit from within. Obliterated by a single black tide. The dense, stinking ooze filling once-crystalline tidepools, suffocating delicately tendriled anemones and so many other forms of intricate sea life.

The novel raises awareness about some of the negative consequences of America’s dependence on fossil fuels, making the message, rather than the story, its priority.  It is clear that Evans has a take on the disaster and its aftermath. Her characters question the “maleness and whiteness” of a panel arranged to talk to the community about the corporation’s response to the spill. Instead of allowing the story to cause the readers to question how “sexism and racism might relate to the fact of the oil spill itself,” or how “Big Business and government collude in jeopardizing the safety and sanctity of all the astonishing creatures who depend on the ocean for life,” Evans is careful to make those statements outright. It seems as though Evans wants her readers to come to a specific conclusion about an event that negatively impacted a significant portion of America, not leaving much room for other interpretations.

Oil and Water was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize, which is awarded to “the author of a previously unpublished novel of high literary caliber that promotes fiction that addresses issues of social justice and the impact of culture and politics on human relationships.”  This is what Evans’ novel clearly does as the reader is left questioning how anyone might have a hard time making a decision between “economic survival and environmental safety.”

Frank Bidart’s newest book of poems, Metaphysical Dog, reads precisely in that way: a book, rather than a collection of disparate pieces. The bewitching coherence of these poems—in philosophy, and, in many cases, phrases—shapes Bidart’s latest into what feels more like a lyrical essay with obsessive thoughts.

In his first two books, Bidart established himself as a master of the dramatic monologue. Golden State (1973) ended with a serial killer’s real-time rationale, and The Book of the Body (1977) used the persona of Ellen West to explore the voice of a woman with anorexia. Both haunting characters—and Bidart-the-poet’s relationship to these haunting figures remained unsaid, at least within the poems. It is difficult, in Bidart’s conversational tone, to resist reading these poems as somehow confessional, which, of course, they are not.

But Metaphysical Dog addresses this meeting of poet and subject head-on, speaking in the language of poetic surrogates. In “Like,” Bidart writes that “We live by symbolic / substitution,” a phrase that, though speaking in the poem for the death of a friend, applies to Bidart’s thinking throughout the book. Ava Gardner is substituted for a lover (with the speaker as The Flying Dutchman). A locket represents Janáček. An actress portrays Shakespeare’s Juliet. A dog imitates its owners. Tattoos “written in flesh to remind / the flesh what flesh has forgotten.” And, in “Writing ‘Ellen West,’” the persona poem itself becomes an “exorcism. / Exorcism of that thing within Frank that wanted, after his mother’s death, to die.” For Bidart, Ellen West guided him through the emotional corridors of his mother’s death.  In a deft maneuver that avoids flatlining the poem into a footnote, he shepherds the discussion into the metaphysics of substitution—as an everyday practice for both reader and artist: “This. REMAKE ME in the image of this.”

The language of theology flows throughout these poems as well. Bidart flogs the reader with ecstasy—the religious kind—and “absolute hunger”:

Ecstasy in your surrender to adolescent

God-hunger, ecstasy

promised by obliterated sex, ecstasy

in which you are free because bound —

in which you call the God who made

what must be obliterated in you love

Here, in “History,” ecstasy and hunger form a kind of perpetual dynamo of desire, each fueling the other. Bidart’s syntax reflects the continual switch from saturation to emptiness, and back again. Inevitably, all thoughts lead back to substitution: “When I met him, I knew I had / weaned myself from God, not / hunger for the absolute.”

“Dream of the Book” mixes modern and medieval, with Dinah Washington appearing just lines above Thomas Aquinas, and both belong. Both, in Bidart’s rendering, are voices of asceticism. Thomas Aquinas’s unfinished Summa volumes let the poet explore how a writer both is and is not his books, both written and unwritten, “As if there were a book inside which you can / breathe.”

If the poems of Metaphysical Dog wander too deeply into thinking out of time, “Inauguration Day” anchors the reader in specificity. Lines of abstract hope shift into Obama’s America and the White House which “is still / Whitman’s White House, its / gorgeous front / full of reality, full of illusion.”

Bidart does not abandon the flexibility of his diction and inspiration, but instead turns it to reflect on himself, creating a book that speaks to his own personal experience, the characters he projects, and the journey of the poet. A characteristic attention to the line while maintaining a sense of accessibility, Bidart’s new poems move swiftly and provocatively, yet pull together enough layers for slow, meditative reading. The final lines of a poem become the title of the next. Metaphysical Dog begins with the phrase “Magpie beauty.” And the last stanza of the book:

As in Mozart song remains no matter how

ordinary, how flawed the personae. For us poor

mortals: private accommodations. Magpie beauty.

For us poor mortals: magpie beauty.

Despite having a title that will send most readers to the nearest dictionary or medical journal, Sam Byers’ debut novel Idiopathy is composed mostly of familiar things like humor, sadness, and the alchemy of the two that is at the heart of so much good fiction.

Idiopathy, “a disease or condition which arises spontaneously or for which the cause is unknown,” describes not only a mysterious cattle epidemic featured in the book, but also the deep-seated solipsism that prevents any of the book’s characters from finding relief from their suffering.

Though the nature of the project renders plot somewhat inert, readers follow Katherine, Daniel and Nathan—the three self-involved Generation Y-ers who find themselves neatly skewered by Byers’ words—as they plan to reunite. Beleaguered by countless problems in both her personal and professional life, Katherine reconnects with her ex-boyfriend Daniel, a PR agent for a biochemical crop research company, who has since started dating a woman who is everything Katherine is not—kind, considerate and understanding to the point of mawkishness. The reconnection is prompted by the return of their mutual friend and former drug supplier Nathan, who returns home from rehab after a failed suicide attempt. Throughout the novel, readers observe the three idiosyncratic, yet familiar characters as they struggle to understand how they feel about each other and the world around them.

With surgical precision, Byers peels back the artifice that decorates our daily experience. Dialogue resonates, every twitch of a character’s face has purpose, and action and inaction alike are boiled down to requisite and discrete motivations. “He played the message again, trying to read Katherine’s voice, flat-toned, business-like—her voice for getting things done. Was that a flutter he could detect? A tension? Did it fall a little at the end? Did her message seem hurried, as if she just wanted to get through it?” At his best, Byers’ powers of observation verge on telescopic. And despite the savagery with which he skewers, Byers prose is nothing if not controlled.

Much like Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom or The Corrections, Idiopathy paints a picture of contemporary America in which nobody gets a pass. Upon coming home from rehab, Nathan is given a lift by his father, whom he introduces as “a man who wore a year-round yachting jacket despite never having set foot on a yacht,” and his mother, whom we’re told has “a child’s sense of solipsism” and struggles with “the concept of other minds.”

Though the book does not make any overtures at metafiction or postmodernism, there’s a self-consciousness and earnestness, as well as a playfulness, at work that is reminiscent of David Foster Wallace:

He had reverted to his given name, enrolled on a distance-learning doctorate in behavioural psychology and, as he was at great pains to point out, taken a vow of chastity that foreswore not only sex but all contact with women which might in any way be taken as flirtatious, including warm smiles, charming comments and any even remotely sexual or intimate conversations, unless of course it was within a recognized therapeutic context, in which case all bets were off. 

There is something both therapeutic and heartbreaking about the savagery of Idiopathy, as Byers makes plain in just a sentence or two the complicated and oftentimes embarrassing thoughts that guide us through each and every day. Idiopathy follows the same convention of Seinfeld—a microcosm of insular characters, verging on narcissistic, that you love to observe, but would not necessarily want to have over for dinner. During their reunion, Daniel clears the air with Katherine while Nathan, whose return home was the occasion for the get-together, sits idly by:

‘But you do see,’ he said, ‘why I was angry?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course.’

‘I mean, you agree it was serious.’

‘I recognize that it was serious to you, yes.’

‘But do you think it was serious?’

‘What, my answering your phone?’

‘Yes. Answering my phone. Do you think that was serious?’

‘Not really, no.’

‘Right,’ said Daniel. ‘This is what I’m talking about.’

In Idiopathy, plot is largely subverted in favor of interesting ideas and iconograph— stricken cows that stare off into space, a mom whose media persona “Mother Courage” has earned her “nearly four thousand followers on Twitter” and a flawlessly engineered cornfield, to name a few. The majority of the novel’s action, however, takes place in the space between the folds of character’s brains.

Not without sympathy, Byers invites readers to watch as characters self-justify, self-inflate, self-motivate, self-undermine and behave primarily in service of self. A smart novel with tremendous feeling, Idiopathy exists in the grey area, both savage and tender, hilarious and tremendously sad, and reminds us all the ways that literature can define, articulate and give voice to that which is often kept silent.

The word “Buddhism” did not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1801, and it was not until 1844, when Eugéne Burnouf published his Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism, that Westerners finally had a cohesive and decently accurate understanding of Gotoma Buddha and Buddhism. For over four hundred years prior to Burnouf’s landmark work, which was a result of the first translations of the Pali and Sanskrit Buddhist texts, Europeans were engaged in a pathetically failing effort to understand the religion they encountered in Asia. Renowned Buddhist scholar Donald S. Lopez’s From Stone to Flesh traces the development of the West’s uncovering of who Buddha actually was, and what Buddhism is actually about. It is a story of confusions, misinterpretations, mistaken identities, and ignorance, and it is unique in that it ends where most accounts of Buddhism begin.

Starting with Marco Polo, Christian Europeans dismissed all Buddhists as idolaters worshipping a false god. Understandably, they also did not recognize that the statue worshipped in Japan was the same “god” worshipped in Sri Lanka; thus they believed Buddha to be several different gods and called him by many names, each based on the particular name the region had for Buddha, such as Fo, Borcan, and Xaca. Once the Missionaries arrived in Asia, Buddha was described as “a Monster,” an “Imposter,” who taught idolatry and atheism, two of Christianity’s biggest historical enemies. Buddha was interpreted as a demon, an imitator of Christ, was thought to be African (due to his tightly coiled hair), and believed to have murdered his mother. It was only in the eighteenth century when Europeans finally began to understand that Buddha was not an idol nor a god but a man, that this historical figure founded the same morality-based religion practiced all over Asia, and that this religion originated in India, where it became extinct long ago.

Lopez writes that those who have studied Buddhism naturally feel a “righteous indignation at the distortions” and severe misconceptions that plague early Buddhist scholarship. While true, one also feels pity; more than anything else, this story reveals how deeply ignorant Western Civilization was due to its chauvinistic prejudice. It also arouses a lament for the fact that most people around the world still remain under a great delusion regarding who Gotoma Buddha was and what he taught. There surely would be a lot less suffering if we did.

Schroder is love letter written by the imprisoned Erik Schroder to his estranged wife Laura explaining why he kidnapped their daughter. It is a manuscript he believes could someday help him in court, but he “would probably just call this document an apology.” That statement illuminates that kind of character that Schroder is—not an evil, malevolent kidnapper, but a caring father with his own reasons for doing wrong, a tone and rationalization reminiscent of Humbert Humbert.

In this novel, Amity Gaige delivers a compelling and detailed portrait of a loving father who was once a young boy in divided Germany. After moving to America with his father, Erik applied to a summer camp and signed the materials with the name Eric Kennedy. He wanted “a hero’s name” and the benign lie about his identity began to take root in his consciousness, so much so that the history and stories he’d developed began to feel true: a past in Twelve Hills, summers on the beach, the connection to a legendary family. Erik became Eric.

But Schroder feels guilty for his lies, his actions, and for taking his daughter on an unsanctioned road trip, taking 269 pages to fully explain this to Laura, a character almost entirely missing from the narrative.  He repeats “I let you down” for nearly four pages of the novel, most likely speaking to his wife, his daughter and, possibly, his own parents. He explains his choice to take on a different identity by saying:

I guess I needed a life that I could revise. If I had just accepted the one life, my first life, I would have honored its limits. I would have tried to convince myself that a sad and quiet life is adequate. Instead, I dreamt. I decorated entire rooms of my past with pleasures I savaged elsewhere. Even falling in love with you, Laura—especially falling in love with you, and feeling so changed…Love was my counterargument. Suddenly there were Christmas parties all over Twelve Hills, and well-loved women in silk dresses, and boys nursing crushes on other boys’ mothers, and soft rugs for the babies, and brotherhood for men. My God it sounds sentimental when I put it that way, but that’s what my second life did for me.

Erik is introspective and thoughtful and although the reader knows from the beginning how the novel will end, it is the journey through his contemplations and reflections that make the novel worth reading.

The premise is loosely based on the real-life events of Christian Gerhartsreiter, also known as Clark Rockefeller, and Gaige explains her choice to explore the story by saying, “This con man was by many accounts a loving father, and he called the days with his daughter ‘the best days’ of his life. The story echoed what I was already wondering about parenthood: can a deeply flawed person be a good (or good enough) parent? What does it take? How would we define that?”

A homage to the challenges of parenthood and the eternal questions of identity, Gaige’s novel is engaging and lyrical.

After a story collection notable for its range and originality (How They Were Found), and a novella that somehow made the post-apocalypse beautiful (Cataclysm Baby), In The House Upon The Dirt Between The Lake And The Woods has a lot to live up to. But like his book’s title, Bell’s abilities seem to be forever expanding. On the first page, he builds us a house. But then there’s dirt and a lake. Then a bear. Then a family. Then a baby. And then and then and then and then, and you can’t stop reading, and you’re terrified and overwhelmed, but even so you’re still reading.

With a pervasive social media presence that’s equal parts wishing his wife a happy day and complimenting writerly friends on well-wrought sentences, Bell has become not only one of the most well-respected writers out there, but maybe the most liked. So it’s no surprise he happily accepted our request for an interview within three minutes of my sending.

We spoke this spring, in different houses upon different shores.

-Joseph Riippi 

Joseph Riippi:  First off, congratulations! The house and dirt and lake are finally here, upon the shelf, between our hands. It’s got to be a good feeling.

Matt Bell: As I’m sure you know from your own books, it’s always humbling and exciting and more than a little surreal to have a new one finally out in the world—but it’s a hard feeling to get a handle on sometimes. Honestly, at this point, it feels a bit out of my hands, in part because there’s nothing more for me to do: Right before we sat down to talk, I sent in my final, final edits, and from here on out it’s between the reader and what’s printed on the pages. Mostly, I’m just very thankful to everyone at Soho for all their hard work—they’ve been incredible to work with—and I hope the readers who pick up the book enjoy what they find.

Joseph Riippi:  The novel is told in the first-person, by a new husband/father trying to make his way in the world. Perhaps that’s oversimplification, but as I read, I came to regard the “world” of this book to be the main character; the husband seemed less a character acting in the world than an element being acted upon. Did the first-person make it easier to gradually reveal a fantastical world—full of fantastic squid and bears and children—or was the world more a product of the voice?

Matt Bell:  It’s a paradox of this novel—or perhaps just the difference between process and product—that even though it’s the wife who sings so much of their world into being, it was the voice of the husband that created the world for me. I didn’t have a plan or outline for the book—and every time I thought I knew where I was headed, that destination turned out different than I’d expected: I’d exhaust a storyline until it was broken, and then there’d be another one inside the fracture. So I was discovering the world along with the husband, encountering each new element as he did. The first time the bear appeared in the draft, for instance, I had no more idea what the bear wanted or why it was there than the husband did. But I’m not sure this is an effect of the first-person as much as it is an effect of working sentence-to-sentence within a scene, and of planting the voice within a character, something I try to do in both first and third. No omniscient narrators for me, at least not so far. I like to write close to the ground, from inside the tunnel vision of a sensibility, accepting all the blinders and mistakes that sensibility suggests, even as it relates to my own understanding of the unfolding first draft.

Joseph Riippi:  The wife in the book can “sing” things into existence. Her voice is described as “more powerful than any other I had yet heard or imagined.”  In terms of the relationship between voice and world in the novel, how much changed during the writing? How much of the “fantastic” in this book was a product of your own singing voice, and how much of your singing was a product of the world you set out to convey?

Matt Bell:  Regarding my singing voice, the less heard, the better. There are a lot of elements in this book that required me to stretch my imagination, but summoning a rude-voiced, pitchless husband wasn’t one of them. But just because we can’t sing doesn’t mean there aren’t other ways to make music—the sentence, obviously, is a tool you and I have chosen. It’s not so different from my absolute inability as a visual artist; that doesn’t mean I don’t get to traffic in images. I just won’t be making them with pencil and pen, brush and paint. Instead I’ve got syntax, diction, punctuation, the sentence and the paragraph. It’s not such a bad set of tools.

Joseph Riippi: It’s hard not to read of the husband/father’s search for the giant bear—“the only animal I dare not trap”—without also thinking of Faulkner’s bear in Go Down, Moses. When you look back at your book, what influences do you see that would maybe not be so obvious to a casual reader?

Matt Bell:  I’ve never read Go Down, Moses—although now I’ll have to. I’m sure some of the book’s influences are fairly obvious, but maybe a few couldn’t be guessed as easily. There’s a book called The King’s Mirror, written in Old Norwegian, that provided some early ideas for the book—I found it while researching a technical question I had within the first few days of work—and then in revision I went back and read more widely inside that book, which helped provide an additional gloss or layer of language that fit in among the other influences on the voice, like the Greek myths and European fairy tales and the King James Bible and so on. I also went to a couple of older dictionaries, which I mined occasionally for what would have been the right word in a different time, rather than the right word in our time. All of which served just to slip a little difference in between the speech of my narrator and our time.

Joseph Riippi: This distinction you make between your narrator’s speech and “our time” is interesting. I suppose I was imagining the world of the book as outside any of “our” times, rather than of a “different time.” But you do have me recalling certain words, “kitchenry,” for example, that seemed almost medieval. Was your thought that this house is built in a different century than ours? And if so, before our current one, or after?

Matt Bell:  I hope there’s some useful ambiguity in the time period of the book, even though I definitely have a way I read it. There are some references to the place the husband and wife came from, and there are some technological markers like photographs in the early part of the book, and watches and clocks later. But once they arrive at the dirt—and after the bear destroys most of their possessions—they are inhabiting a different space, as far as the technology available to them, and there’s something interesting in the distance they’ve come, and where spatially they might be. And maybe all of that inflects their language too. But in the end, I’m much more interested in why they came to this place, instead of when.

Joseph Riippi: Our hero speaks of the “elements” that make up his and his wife’s world, the first four of course being dirt and house and lake and woods, but then including father and mother, ghost and family, moon and others. If these are the elements that make the world of the novel, what are the elements that make language?

Matt Bell:  What came first, the noun or the verb? I like the idea of a completely inert noun-only language, waiting for the first verb to set it into motion—and then shortly after, here come the conjunctions, the prepositions, the first rules of poetics and acoustics and rhetoric…

Joseph Riippi: I guess I was asking particular to the language of this novel. I like your idea of the world of nouns awaiting a verb. Like billiard balls awaiting a break. And maybe I’m steering us into nerdy language conversation now (all roads lead home), but if we have these elemental nouns of your novel, what are the verbs?

Matt Bell:  The most elemental verb of the novel almost has to be sing, as it’s the wife’s singing that is central to the husband’s affection for her, and that creates so much of the verb. But your question makes me think of how many of the nouns at the heart of the book can also be verbs. For instance: father, mother. I like that: how the titles we have for these characters aren’t just who they are, but also what they are trying desperately to do.

Joseph Riippi: How close is the novel you ended up writing to the novel you set out to write?

Matt Bell:  I didn’t really know what I was doing when I started, so it’s hard to say. But if I remember right, all of the book’s characters had made an appearance within the first day’s work on the novel, but I had no idea how they fit together, what they felt about each other, what they would do when put into conflict. I wrote a sentence about the bear and I wrote a sentence about the squid, I named the fingerling and the foundling, the husband and the wife, and as I wrote about them I found the house and the dirt and the woods and the lake. I had no idea what I meant, what they meant. And then I spent almost a year unpacking these elements into a first draft, trying to keep extending those initial bits of power. Everything else that’s in the book came from that process. But one of the tasks then was also to make sure that I didn’t kill the mystery—there needed to be a way to keep opening up the mystery again, to keep renewing its capacity right at the moment of its exhaustion.

Joseph Riippi is author of A Cloth House and the forthcoming Research: A Novel for Performance. His other books include The Orange Suitcase and Treesisters. Visit josephriippi.com.

Matt Bell’s In The House Upon The Dirt Between The Lake And The Woods is available through Soho Press.

Elfriede Jelinek’s monologue for the stage, Her Not All Her, is quite possibly the most intricate, integrated book that I have read in the last few years. For reasons that will shortly become clear, the cahier’s production and design comprise an integral part of the reader’s experience. They magnify the central questions posed by Jelinek’s text, questions which address the identity of Robert Walser.

The cover is composed of three layers: the first is a thin paper strip, or belly band, that surrounds the dust jacket upon which appears a pair of eyes, taken from the last of the Heads paintings by Thomas Newbolt; the second is a white dust jacket with a green stripe bearing the title and author of the work; beneath the dust jacket is a plain light green which opens onto a darker title page where Her Not All Her is printed in white. The pages are a heavy, smooth ivory, bound with a green thread. The text of the play occupies the left leaves, a different Newbolt painting (all of haunting, haunted female heads) the right. The play is followed by an afterward by Reto Song, and a brief note on the images.

Her Not All Her was written for the Swiss author Robert Walser, a modernist author of prodigious scope who, until recent decades, was underappreciated by the global community and under-translated into English. Jelinek’s text interrogates the presence of Walser’s biography in his prose, as well as the myths that have grown around both. She draws from all aspects of his life in order to render a portrait of an author who is, at bottom, unsure of his own identity beyond the invented “I” of his narratives. Whether this mind is in fact Walser’s or Jelinek’s is never entirely certain, since the speaker narrates in the first-person, yet insistently evades identification (as suggested by the work’s subtitle, “on/with Robert Walser”).

Jelinek depicts her protagonist as an individual obsessed by his art, even as he denies responsibility for the sentences he has created: “And the words that do come to me like foundlings,” she writes—presumably in Walser’s voice but just as possibly in her own—“are ones I found somewhere else. They insisted they all went together.” The author’s focus is obsessive, but it is the focus of a black hole’s event horizon–a lot of light, a surfeit of creative energy, circling an unidentifiable core. Jelinek’s speaker is fully conscious of this mysterious absence: “Are you looking for me? You won’t find me in me but if you go down on one knee you’re welcome to look me over!” Throughout the cahier, she reiterates Walser’s advocacy of smallness to the point non-being.

As in the above example, much of her text is inspired by Walser’s biography— particularly the last two decades of his life at an asylum in Herisau. This is already evident in the stage directions, which specify that the play is to be delivered by: “A number of people to each other, by all means kind-hearted (maybe lying in bathtubs, as used to be the custom in mental hospitals).”

Some of the lines in this edition are overlaid with the original German, a further variation on the notion of writing on as a kind of writing with or alongside another author. This has the effect of further absorbing the historical Walser into words.

And now the borders blur even further. The making of this chapbook adds so much to the meaning of it, beyond the undeniable power of the words – so much that it ceases to be the work of Jelinek alone. Like so many of her other works for the stage, Her Not All Her proves to be a genuine collaboration between the author and her producers. In this case, the latter consists of editors, designer, painter, and translator. There are as many layers of authorship as there are of text.

Thomas Newbolt’s contribution is a considerable one. His arresting portraits of women are not painted from models, but from the imagination. These images draw the eye of the reader, and never allow her to lose sight of the question of identity: on every turned page, a nameless woman seems to pose it. Moreover, the frontispiece and concluding image reproduce the back of the canvas—a powerful visual complement of the German subscripts distributed throughout the text.

The cahier concludes with an informative afterword by Reto Sorg, Director of the Robert Walser Center in Bern. In addition to providing helpful context concerning the play (along with a consideration of why Walser’s life and work has proven so attractive to successive generations of artists and writers), he reveals another essential contribution to this monologue for multiple voices, namely by the translator, Damion Searls. “The title…in German,” Sorg explains, “is literally ‘He Not As He.’” Searls’s rendering of it as Her Not All Her thus makes Jelinek’s presence as a character manifest. The seemingly superficial detail of title has, in a stroke, become a manifesto for the play itself.

One last note: a sylph is a mythological spirit—invisible, slight, but possessing great force. The series is appropriately named. Like many of the numbers that precede it, this cahier’s size belies its substance, resonance, and weight. This book has resonance, a power generated and magnified by every layer of its substance. It deserves a very wide readership and it is worth owning as a work of art in itself.

Nora Eldridge has always been a good girl. She’s followed the rules, did what others wanted of her, and never stepped on anyone’s toes. She’s compromised her dreams and restrained her desires, like all good girls do. Now that she’s approaching middle age, she understands that her life is mediocre. Like a good WASP, she has always lived “as if”—as if she enjoyed things she didn’t enjoy, as if she was fulfilled, as if she was happy. Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs is the story of Nora’s rebellion against living “as if.” It’s about not accepting mediocrity. It’s about saying a big FUCK YOU to everything ordinary. And it’s written by an author on top of her game.

Nora once wanted to be an artist. She has a talent for making miniature dioramas of female artists’ rooms, down to the last historical detail. After letting her passion lapse and fall behind more practical concerns—like being a good teacher, a good daughter, and a good friend—Nora is inspired and awakened by the Shahid family, who live in Paris and are staying a year in Cambridge. Shy and curly haired Reza is Nora’s third grade student. His Italian mother Sirena is one of those people who “emanate intensity,” one whom others bend toward “like a plant to the sun.” Sirena is a successful installation artist, and she offers to share studio space with Nora. Sirena’s husband Skandar is Lebanese and a professor of History. After crossing several boundaries of convention, Nora falls in love with each of them.

She feels affection for Reza, the child she realizes she’s always wanted. She’s fascinated with Skandar’s knowledge and experience, and loves how he makes her feel as if she’s fascinating too. She’s turned on by Sirena, the ideal female artist that Nora always wanted to be. Without necessarily meaning to, or being aware of her influence, Sirena inspires Nora to exorcize the “woman upstairs” that she had become, and banish the “doormat Miss Eldridge, the Miss Nobody Nothing that everyone smiles at so cheerfully and immediately forgets.” Soon Nora is sipping wine from chipped coffee cups, making a diorama of Emily Dickenson’s room, and dressing up like Edie Sedgwick and taking photos of herself.

Part of Messud’s mastery is her subtle creation of misconceptions; Nora wants the Shahids’ glamorous, cosmopolitan life, while the Shahid’s misperceive her life as being in “enviable order” and crave her supposed independence. The Shahids are the most important thing to happen to Nora, and while they surely think fondly of her, Nora is inevitably only a small, almost insignificant part of the Shahid’s life. She is their summer fling, while they are her soul mate.

The idea of the book—personal evolution—is perennial, but what makes The Woman Upstairs particularly masterful is Messud’s exceptionally strong writing. Her voice maintains a tone of engaging vitality throughout the book. One must wonder the perks of having New Yorker critic James Wood for a spouse; if the words pass his scrutiny, then they’re basically as good as it gets:

I’m over forty fucking years old, and I’m good at my job and I’m great with kids and I held my mother’s hand when she died, after four years of holding her hand while she was dying, and I speak to my father every day on the telephone—every day, mind you, and what kind of weather do you have on your side of the river, because here it’s pretty gray and a bit muggy too? It was supposed to say “Great Artist” on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say “such a good teacher/daughter/friend” instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL.

That’s from the opening paragraph, and the following two hundred a fifty pages keep it up to tell the story of a woman’s awakening, of her attempt at liberation, the fulfillment of her desires—those desires she’s always denied herself. Yet it is also about the disillusionment with the very same inspiration, the come down after the high, the insight into the mind’s projections, the understanding that fulfilled desires will always be replaced by new desires, that conquered fears will be replaced by new fears, that happiness must be renewed, and fulfillment continuously achieved. And this is what makes Nora’s story universal, not simply a story only intelligent women over thirty can relate to. Because no matter how many epiphanies we have or what revelation we experience, there’s always an after; there’s always more life, because there’s never a finish line.

Life is simultaneously extraordinary and ordinary, and even though Messud doesn’t directly address this issue in the book, what I found most intriguing about The Woman Upstairs is the question of what happens after one awakens? What does one do, practically? Quit their job, follow their dreams, travel through Europe and try to be some sort of artist? Because what happens if that person isn’t talented enough, or simply doesn’t make the “right” (i.e. marketable) kind of art, or if they never find that right person, if they run out of money and have to return to their career—that is to say, what if one really is mediocre? Then the awakening could seem to have been for naught, and the rebellion could turn into bitterness. And, unfortunately, this seems where Nora might be heading.

In My Father’s Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain, Patricio Pron’s Argentine narrator isn’t initially interested in the Leftist struggle that his parents devoted their lives to fighting in the 1970s. For the past eight years, he has lived abroad in Germany and has taken so much medication that he has lost much of his memory, particularly memories of his childhood and his parents. After finding that his father has been hospitalized, he returns to Argentina. These early sections are Bolañoesque in that some chapters summarize the plot of bad movies, while others are mere lists of the names of authors and books. The narrator keeps a list of what he likes and doesn’t like so as not to forget who he is. At first it seems like Pron’s novel will be similar to those being written by his Latin American contemporaries—sparse, fragmented, and propelled by an honest voice grasping into the blank spaces of his own past.

Then, Pron’s narrator goes into his father’s office and discovers that his father has collected a massive file that follows the case of a man who disappeared from their town, which the narrator previously considered idyllic and prosaic. Much of the story is told in the form of successive newspaper articles that put the case together piece by piece. But why was his father so obsessed with the disappearance of this man? What was once simple becomes complex; through the case of the disappeared man, the narrator discovers his parents’ connection to the Marxist struggle in the seventies. He learns that many of their comrades disappeared, and that they have been silently carrying a legacy of a defeated generation throughout his life.

He comes to realize that every Argentine born in 1975 “are the consolation prizes our parents gave themselves after failing to pull off the revolution.” Children provide a revolutionary with the cover of a conventional life, serving as protection at checkpoints. Pron’s idea is that those very children ironically inherited a mandate to continue the struggle, but have realized, either consciously or not, that the mandate of social transformation “turned out to be unsuited to the times we grew up in, times of pride and frivolousness and defeat.” This is a sentiment universally relatable for everyone in their thirties or fortes, no matter if your parents fought for Peron in Argentina, Allende in Chile, May ’68 in Paris, or took part in the Hippie generation’s revolution of Love in the U.S. All of us belong to a generation that was defeated before it had a chance to fight, and thus turned to drinking or drugs or a million ways to waste time instead of fighting for social justice, for what is important.

Somewhere along his investigation of the disappeared man, the narrator learns that his father intended to write a book. He imagines that the book his father wrote would have been “brief, composed of fragments, with holes where my father couldn’t or didn’t want to remember something, filled with symmetries—stories duplicating themselves over and over again as if they were an ink stain on an assiduously folded piece of paper, a simple theme repeated.” This is the book that Pron has written. My Father’s Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain is Pron’s way of carrying out the mandate he inherited from his parents, and his hope is that it inspires others to make similar investigations.

Leonid Tsypkin’s collection, The Bridge Over the Neroch, is the final publication of an unarguably fluent thinker and writer, but is likely not what you should read next. Born in 1926, Tsypkin was a Russian Jew who survived the anti-Semitic programs of both Hitler and Stalin and wrote the acclaimed novel Summer in Baden-Baden, which is a fictional account of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s honeymoon in Germany. Tsypkin graduated medical school in Minsk, moved to Moscow, and was twice denied the right to leave the Soviet Union to be with his children, who had emigrated to America several years before his death in 1982. In other words, he was buried in Russia before he was ever born to Russia.

However, between his ability to act as historian, and the precision with which he accounts for the Russian landscape and manner—no doubt fueled by the needful exactness of his career as a medical researcher—the reader will have to question why to keep reading. Tsypkin’s prose, while thoroughly tuned and crafted, is often dispensable. His mind hinges on ideas that no doubt floated across his mind’s eye, but weren’t in need of translating to the page. For instance, in Norartakir, a story that carries through several converging histories, which surround a married couple on vacation in Armenia, we find a description of a plane ride over the Caucasus Mountains:

. . . the passengers dozed placidly in their seats, sometimes glancing distractedly out the window, or, just as distractedly, leafing through a magazine as though they were riding to work on the commuter train . . . On the right, as far as the eye could see, unpopulated hills spread out—they were probably mountains too, although not as high as those on the left, to the east, but from that height they looked like hills . . .

The writing is always intact, yet it exists in the voice of a chronicler, where one feels aloft, looking down upon the ridges and patchwork as if from an airplane. The namesake of the collection, The Bridge Over the Neroch, is a thoughtfully handled telling of a Russian-Jewish family, not unlike the design of Tsypkin’s, and so not outside the likes of what he could have observed. Yet, he observes with such exceptional, unwavering vision:

They came and went every day, several times a day—morning, daytime, evening, changing shifts—in their light, semi-transparent bags, which they set carelessly on the floor, under their coats, you could see textbooks, pussy willows, various colors of knitting yarn, and some unnecessary female things whose purpose he couldn’t understand; rolling up fur coats and fur hats or fluffy head scarves, they pulled white robes out of their bags and put them on, glancing in the mirror as they passed—a farewell glance before entering the room where the patients lay—birds with clipped wings . . .

This is the Tsypkin who will keep you treading.

As for the remainder of the stories, such as Ten Minutes of Waiting and Fellow Traveller, they’re best served with one understanding: that the title is exactly what lay ahead. In the former, Tsypkin vacillates between the pros and cons of catching a bus over a train; in the latter, he examines a man with whom he takes a brief, misled taxi ride. The final of the collection, The Cockroaches, is perhaps the most action-driven of all, though it doesn’t have the gravity of the others, which ultimately makes it feel incomplete, or more of a practice of writing, a leftover.

Again, though, we must understand Leonid Tsypkin’s sheer fever to write, and the intelligence with which he did. His novel Summer in Baden-Baden remains on the shelves with some of the finest pieces of Russian literature, and rightly so. After all, this was a writer who could not publish the statement of his work, at brevity or length, in the time and place in which it was produced. It captures a Soviet proletariat with dedication like none other, and while it can harken comparisons to the concentration needed for Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit, or even Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, it never tempts the Soviet Union with outrage the way those men did. Rather, Tsypkin gives us the far less aggrandized portrait of a bleak, censorious era, and he does so with a calm and stationed commitment.

“Mother,” she says, the sirens of a distant city blaring in the background, “you really shouldn’t fish by yourself anymore.  Especially at your age.  It’s dangerous.”

She forces herself to laugh when Sarah tells her this, to show there was never an admonishment so absurd.  How could she tell the girl, 1,500 miles away, that she has no choice?  That without Sarah there is no one?  And anyway, Sarah hated fishing.

She cannot adjust to this role reversal, to being chastised by her child, and so—childishly—she wants to defend herself.  She wants to say she has to challenge herself in this way because she is losing that other challenge, the one Sarah doesn’t even know about.  But then, right there for her daughter to hear on the line, she would come unreeled all the way to the final inch of backing; thin and exposed, with everything floating away around her, so instead she asks how Sarah is liking medical school and Sarah jokes about the cadavers. On the phone with her daughter, she laughs because she cannot cry, and these seem to be her only choices. Weep and go slowly mad like the woman in the attic, or laugh and go fishing.

The path along the riverbank is not well-worn and yet, save for a few spots barred by heavily-limbed snags and dense stands of lodge pole pine, it is at least discernible.  She has trod along it for years, but this trail has been here since the last glaciers dug a trough for the river and retreated to let succession have its way. She cannot know this, of course, but she feels it in her bones as she walks.  It is possible that the path is maintained by the traffic of a few other intrepid anglers, but she has never encountered any along this stretch of water, amazingly.  Blessedly.

If you look at a map of Montana, blue scrawls etch across this corner of the state like veins, webbing and pulsing with life just under the skin, where you can’t quite see clearly enough to know what’s happening. Despite all the rivers, it still seems like there are more anglers than fishable waters, even in Montana.

Ultimately, her path is probably kept clear by the deer, whose droppings are scattered about the ground with the pine needles and dead aspen leaves, and the elk, who come to browse the riparian vegetation when the hunters drive them out of the mountains with their horses and rifles, or when the snow begins to fly.  This year the snow has arrived early, even before the hunters.

She traces elk tracks along the trail, the snow making the bottoms of her feet tingle inside her boots. This kind of cold comes only from fishing, traversing frozen ground on the thin soles of uninsulated wading boots, and it is an uneasy cold, an invasive cold.  A feeling to which she should be accustomed.

To the west the clouds sit low, the wounded sky a deep purple bruise, swelling as she watches the tall blue sky diminish eastward sliver by sliver.  She does not turn back, nor does she quicken her pace.  The air smells damp, but also sweet with the tang of the pines.  The weather bothers neither her nor the fish, so long as the temperature hovers just here.  It is probably a little too warm for more snow, and what is the sense of fretting over rain while standing in water?

A raven soars overhead, circling with the underside of its broad wingspan exposed to her.   The mountains rising up along either side of the river valley create thermals, and she wonders if it is playing on these currents.  Or maybe it waits for death to visit the canyon.

She begins to hear the huff of her breath.  Her heart picks up, slaps like a trout on the line, and beads of water gather on her temples, matting her graying hair onto her face.   When she first learned to fish—30 years ago now—a walk this far wouldn’t have winded her.  Of course, everything was different then.

The strip of trees between the river and the narrow stretch of valley breaks for a few paces, and she sees the inglorious houses lined up along the pastureland.  When she first discovered these pools, she only needed to pull over past the cow gate and traipse directly across the rangeland, the cattle pausing from their grazing to raise their heads and watch.  A whole herd of longhorns, speckled brown and white—she still remembers them—used to live here, meander down to the river just like she did.  Once they were used to her, a few curious ones would try to follow her down to the river, to drink from the cool water, but she would shoo them away with her fly rod.  The cattle scared the fish.

There are too many houses now, just as there are too many anglers, and each seems intent to push out the native populations.  Only the wisest and wariest remain, so that the fish are harder to catch and a heavy-set, middle-aged Montanan must struggle along the snarled riverbank, wading against the current when the growth is too thick, so as not to trespass on posted land.

The cows were eventually sold and then the ranch, too, and the land yielded its final crop, plowed under and sprouting foundations.  The houses grew almost as tall and broad as the mountains around them. Against such a striking backdrop they looked like sickness.  An incurable disease that mimics itself over and over, whispers cruelly, hello, we are here for your lifestyle.  If you cannot defeat it, you might as well ignore it, she thinks.  She looks down at the water swirling around her boots and resumes her slow, cautious steps up the slick river bottom.  Swallows away the urge to look back out across the valley until the trees begin again.

When she finally reaches the pool the water is howling, butting up against the exposed rocks and rolling over to show its white belly in spurts and caps, now and then leaping up and over the rocks with a plunk so loud it startles her even on the shore.  She completes her rigging: strike indicator, split shot, girdle bug, tippet, and, finally, a blaze orange egg at the end of the line.  It is a frigid autumn, this egg will work.  The browns should be eating the eggs they have laid below the surface.

She hasn’t always been a good mother, and some part of her still wonders whether she is—the part in constant battle with that other part of her, who gets on the phone on Sundays and tells Sarah that nothing has changed back home.  Says that she didn’t answer her phone on Tuesday because she was at the library.  Tells her everything is fine.  Still, she reasons, all judgments about her parenting aside, she never feasted on her young come hard times.  What a bizarre existence, being a fish.  What a blissful one, too.  One day when you strike at your meal you get a painful surprise, and you are either the sorer and smarter for it or you are breaded in the skillet.  In either case it has all come and gone so quickly, and she envies this of the fish.

The fish, who are not biting.  As her line drifts downstream she squints at the water.  A seam creases the broad river, further out where the fast waters on her side merge with the stiller pool by the far bank.  She wades out a few more paces.  She hates the feel of the current against her legs, and she suddenly realizes that she does not hate it because it is tiring to wade through or difficult to cast into, as she had told herself all along.  She hates the current because it is terrifying.  She cannot overpower it, she can only try to outsmart it. So far she has succeeded, moving her upstream leg first and then drawing her downstream one only even with it, never ahead.  Waiting to lift one foot until the other is firmly planted.

She has never lost her balance in the river.  So far, her cunning has kept her upright.  But always there is the current, a ferocious rage tearing at the fabric of her waders and her legs within them.  Lately, she wonders if it is best to resign herself to its bidding.

She casts into the seam and a big brown—20 inches at least—rises a few feet from her fly rigging.  Her casts are not for distance, so she takes another step nearer to the seam, hoping to fool the brown with the nymph and egg swirling past under the water.  Each time she raises a foot off the bottom the river clutches at it, desperate to tug it downstream, and she must trust in the other one, still adhered to the rocky floor.

The water is up over her hips now.  She wishes she hadn’t lost her wading belt.  Her legs feel slow in the cold water.  The dark wound of the sky finally seeps, then opens altogether in a steadily icy rain.  She ignores it and casts again, letting the line drift as naturally as possible.  All things under the surface must move with the will of the current.

She looks up to the opposite bank and notices something brown below one of the stout pines.  It is a cow elk, bedded down beneath the boughs of the lodge pole.  Instinctively, she scans the tree line for others. They are herd animals, it cannot be alone.  Yet she sees none.  She wonders how long the elk has been there without her notice.  Their eyes meet and its brown ears perk.  The elk gathers its legs beneath it, sluggishly, and she wonders if perhaps the elk has not seen her until now, either.  It rises unsteadily and runs in a crooked pattern until it hits a low-hanging branch on another tree several feet away.  It falls in a heap—at least it looks like a fall, although she cannot be certain because once on the ground it remains there for several minutes, resting.  She can see its flank heaving in what looks like distress.  Where is the rest of its herd?  It should not be alone.

It looks back at her, rises again and pitches forward, finally settling into a crouch beneath the tree. Several more minutes go by, quietly somehow.  Then, slowly, the elk’s legs buckle and fold again beneath it, and its black nose sinks onto the snowy ground.  Has it removed itself from the herd on purpose?  The image of the circling raven, wings outstretched high above, returns to her, and she wonders what sort of pact they have made.

Suddenly, her reel groans and spins to life.  Line strips off with a squeal.  She has forgotten about the fly rod in her right hand.  She looks down at it and sees the rod tip arcing just above the water, and she knows she has entered that brief yet timeless instant where you hold your breath and wait for the surface to break, even as your body—automatically—begins the business of pulling in the fish.

Just as quickly as it comes, that stillness is gone and the fish rises and fights. It is the brown she saw before, the one she was after.  But now she is unprepared.

The fish makes another crescent above the rushing water and then disappears, line tearing off the reel faster than her cold, thick fingers can grasp at it.  The elk is still atop the bank, lying in the snow.  The fish is disappearing downstream and she realizes her line is drawn out.  Afraid she will lose the whole thing, fish, flies, line and all, she gives up trying to grab the line at the reel and lunges instead for where it streams out of the end of the rod.

The quick motion of her upper body throws her out of balance.  One of her feet begins to slide across the layer of slime between boot and rock.  She pitches forward, then leans back to recover.  But she has done so too jerkily and now the other foot is sliding.  The rod shoots out as she throws her hands back to catch herself.  But there is nothing to hold on to.  She grasps at the air around her and then at the water when she hits it.  She floats weightlessly for an instant, but the moment is brief as her waders suck thirstily at the water around her.  Her legs kick, her arms flail, brush against rock too slick to grab hold of.  Her heart races, but her body seems clumsy, detached.

She finds she is amazed at how something—how she—can drift on a current so rapidly, when the very act of drifting always seemed to convey something idle, comfortable.  Then again, she finds herself wondering in the midst of the current, isn’t this the best parting she could have asked for?  The most natural?  You are either the sorer and smarter or you are breaded in the skillet.

Would a good mother have told her daughter the truth?  She wonders for a moment.  That her body has betrayed her?  But no, let Sarah think the river has taken her prematurely.  Her hands still dumbly claw at intangibles, but in her mind she moves past.  Past the weary elk, past the browns no doubt waiting for food to drift by below and seeking out their own eggs.  Past the houses dividing and reproducing at such an abnormal rate down here in the canyon.  Past the raven, circling above.

The emergence of a new writer is something of a compelling magic, where as readers, we’re trying to understand when else we’ve heard such an enrapturing voice, pulling referentially for the sound, the imagination, the cadence of already beloved writers. However, the most definitive writers—the kind that tear the fabric of literature at the seam—stitch us inside a pocket all their own. Anthony Marra is the infinite pressure we’ve been waiting to be sewn into, and, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, is the debut of the year.

A Constellation swings across a ten-year period following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, surveying the direct and indirect effects of the First and Second Chechen Wars from 1994 to 2004. The setting in which our characters are fixed then, are the scaffolds of a country rebuilding, in hiding, in wintry depression, but each one carries his or her daring possibility against these breaking rifts of history and landscape.

Though it remains tethered to its present day era of 2004, the story revisits the enlacing lives of several characters in the region of Volchansk. It is in this small village that we are introduced to Akhmed, the town’s only, yet heavily incompetent, physician/portraitist, as he rescues the precocity that dwells inside his neighbor’s daughter, Havaa. After Havaa’s father is taken by Russian aggressors who were tipped off by another neighbor turned informant, Akhmed rescues the girl, and flees through the broken escarpments of the Chechen mine fields. Lacking options, Akhmed resolves to take the girl to the only hospital in the area to meet a surgeon, Sonja, who he’s long revered, but has never met. It is on the arrival to the hospital that Marra begins to course the inevitably painful circumstances that bound his characters heart to hand.

Of course, this is only the frontward facade of A Constellation; the navigable arcades are where the contents of the novel glisten painfully into an oil you can’t wash away. Marra writes with exceptional presence, using every character he invents, tying off even the ones that appear for only a few sentences:

            Natasha held back her hair as she lit a cigarette from the hot plate her father had, twelve years earlier, purchased secondhand from a woman who would never find a flame that cooked an egg quite as well . . . The driver had grown up in a mountain hamlet where more people believed in trolls than in automobiles. The first war had catapulted him from the back of a mule to the inside of a Mercedes, and he would look back at that war as the one stroke of good fortune in a life otherwise riddled with disappointments.

The needlecraft of these intermittent characters remind the reader of the simultaneity of time, how eras, bad and good, still scrawl onward in every direction, and this method enlivens us with the present moment as we transition between the decade the book expresses; moreover, these subsets are condensed jack-in-a-boxes of imagination.

Here’s another example:

When asked she couldn’t provide a coherent description of her pain. It was like a loose marble tumbling around her insides, migrating from her ankle to her knee to her hip, and back down . . . her heart, as if drawn on a piece of paper in her chest, crumpled every time . . . He had memorized the entire Qur’an and lectured on the nature of evil, which, like a shadow, cannot exist independently of the good it silhouettes . . . the circumference of the world tightened to what their arms encompassed.

Of course, Marra’s prose is less the arrangement or prowess of imagination, and far more the echoes of an era and place where there has been little recognition, and far less understanding. Marra ruminates upon the historic record of elaborately savage torture, castration, amputation, rape eased through heroin addiction, and he employs these accounts with the same emotional onus he offers to state censorship, to the bedridden, to even the efforts of the torturers, all the while pursuing the reader with dizzying humor. If any discredit can come to A Constellation, it’s that we can only receive it with our eyes, and not in another expression:

            At the kitchen table she examined the glass of ice. Each cube was rounded by room temperature, dissolving in its own remains, and belatedly she understood that this was how a loved one disappeared. Despite the shock of walking into an empty flat, the absence isn’t immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the past, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched now runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in the memory, but your fingers cannot hold it.

One of the most expected yet interesting aspects of an interview is when an artist is asked to describe their work habits. In Daily Rituals, Mason Currey has ingeniously collected anecdotes about the daily routines of our civilization’s greatest minds, revealing how they were able to create their masterpieces. It what began as a blog, Currey includes writers, painters, dancers, composers, and while the artists unfortunately seem to appear in no organized manner, neither alphabetically or chronologically, the book is a must have for any creative mind, or for those interested in them.

Currey stresses that his book merely describes the working schedules of artists, the circumstances in which their creativity thrives, not the creation of the product itself. And while the routines are as diverse as the artists, there appears to be some similarities. Though there are several who fit the stereotype, drinking their nights away and somehow finding sober bursts in which to write, the overwhelming majority of these artists wake up early. Very early, in fact. Many by five a.m., and most by six. They go to bed early, and live a straight life, without indulgences or excess, save for a steady supply of caffeinated beverages.

One of the most peculiar habits belongs to Ludwig van Beethoven, who counted precisely sixty coffee beans per cup. Or to Friedrich Shiller, who needed to keep a drawer full of rotting apples in his workroom, because he required their decaying smell in order to write. Some kind of award must go to Georges Simenon who published over 400 novels and estimated he slept with ten thousand women. Almost all artists take long walks, and while some do write twelve or even sixteen hours a day, most spend what could be a surprisingly large amount of time not working. As Anthony Trollope claims, “three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.”

On one hand, it is consoling to read about so many people who are obsessed with their creative work—because that’s what unites them, and if you are similarly obsessed, you’ll surely feel camaraderie. But on the other hand, few of these artists can be considered happy people, and so the book is a bit depressing. “Writing isn’t hard work,” Philip Roth said, “it’s a nightmare.” While these artists surely wouldn’t choose to live a different life, almost all live one that’s tortured. Indeed, Currey includes the dates of births and deaths, and most of these artists die before they reach the age of sixty. Sure, there’s alcoholism and pill addictions and suicides, but the creative obsession itself seems to be the stress that ends life; at the same time, it makes life worth living. It’s quite a quagmire to be an artist.

At the start of the new year, The Coffin Factory made a pilgrimage to Dublin in order to meet a guru of literature, John Banville. In his apartment on the Liffey, we discussed spirituality, the differences between literary and popular fiction, and the craft of writing.

The Coffin Factory: You’ve moved in several directions throughout your career. First you were known as an Irish writer, and then you wanted to be a European novelist of ideas. Later, you went into the domain of thrillers, and now you’ve circled back toward literary art. Can you talk about these shifts in motivation and what you’ve been moving toward?

John Banville: The trouble is you speak as if I know what I’m doing. I don’t. I have no idea until afterwards. This is why it’s always so deceptive when artists give interviews. Because when we’re talking about the past, it’s always with hindsight. So, if I put a shape on my so-called career, it’s an imposed shape. As Henry James says, “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” And Kafka said we work in deepest darkness, and I think that’s true. One stumbles along, not really knowing what one is doing. It’s only afterwards that you impose a form. There’s no point in my trying to answer your question. I’m not evading it, I’m simply saying it’s unanswerable for me because I could give you an answer now, but that would be a synthetic answer to a perfectly reasonable question. Certainly when I did Copernicus and Kepler, I made a conscious effort to get away from being just an Irish writer. I was going to give up fiction after Birchwood. I couldn’t see what there was to do in it. I was going to write some kind of history. In fact, Doctor Copernicus started out as a novel about the Norman conquest of Ireland in the twelfth century, some kind of big European novel of ideas. I was going to change myself into that kind of writer, but I didn’t really have the talent for it, the education for it. But one does what one does. I wouldn’t be the writer I am now if I hadn’t done that. It’s foolish to try to say I shouldn’t have done this or that. But I do feel that with Copernicus and Kepler, I had wasted too much time doing so-called research. Trying to get the historical detail right was a great waste of time. Artists should work from the imagination, not from books. My wife always used to say to me, “They’re just facts, John! They’re just facts. They’re not truth. Truth is something else.” She was quite right.

The Coffin Factory: What motivates your writing now?

John Banville: I have no idea. I’ve been writing since I was about twelve. That’s a long time ago. It’s like breathing now; I can’t do anything else. The world is only real when I filter it through a mesh of words. I think that all writers are hopeless creatures who are trying desperately to find a way of humanizing themselves, explain the world to themselves, account for the world to themselves, put a system on the world. That’s what fascinated me with Copernicus and Kepler—they really weren’t interested in the sky. What they were interested in was finding a system to account for what they saw in the sky, which is a nice distinction. They weren’t after the facts, they were after a system that ties truth. I think that’s what artists do as well. To me, art is a way of systemizing the world, of trying to put some kind of system on an incoherent reality. It can’t be done, but it’s the attempt that’s interesting. The work of art is nothing like life. A novel can seem terribly life-like—there’s a beginning, middle, and an end—but it’s nothing like life. We have no beginning. We can’t remember our birth. We will not experience our death. As Lichtenstein says, “Death is not an event in life.” All we have is this messy middle. And this is why we go to art, because we want that finished, varnished object that will have a sense of beginning, sense of ending, sense of completion. It’s not to be found elsewhere in life. That’s why art is so fascinating.

The Coffin Factory:  Many of your books revolve around memories of childhood. What is the importance of memory and imagination in art?

John Banville:  Well, I think the two are one. Memory is imagination, and imagination is memory. I don’t think we remember the past, we imagine it. We take a few props with us into the future, and out of those props we make a model, some stage set, and that’s our version of the past. Of course models decay, and they change. And so we’re constantly reshaping the past. Because the past is us. The past is our foundation. It’s very strange to be alive because we’re resting on an ever-increasing foundation. I’ve accumulated a great deal of past now. I feel that I’m a tiny statue standing on an enormous plinth, and that plinth is the past, but I’m standing firmly on it, and without it, I wouldn’t be able to exist. The past is where the strongest model of reality is. The present doesn’t exist. The present is an impossible concept. It’s water; it’s constantly gone. The future is completely implausible. So the past is what we are. Baudelaire said that one’s own genius depends on our ability to summon up childhood. Every artist works out of childhood, even if he doesn’t write about childhood, or about the past. If you look at Picasso, it’s all childhood. It’s all an effort to get back to being able to paint as he would have as a child.

I’m always fascinated by when the past becomes the past. Old movies are laughable because people are wearing odd clothes and strange hairstyles, but then a moment comes and they become classics. You don’t notice. You don’t notice Humphrey Bogart wearing trousers that come up to here, and those ridiculous hats that the women used to wear in those movies, because they’re classics. But at what point does a thing stop being silly and become a classic? When does the past become the past? When does it become this legendary thing that sustains us? Why does the past seem so vivid and so significant? Because after all, the past was just the boring old present at one point. But the further back it goes, the more luminous it becomes. And the more numinous it becomes, it seems to carry a metaphysical weight that is inexplicable in terms of it being just ordinary experience. When you get into your forties and your fifties and your sixties, the past takes on a luminosity that’s very strange. One can be moved to tears by a sudden memory of something. I was writing a piece of journalism today, about my parents and aging, and how my father had a particular walk, and how one day I was watching my sixteen-year-old daughter walk, and I thought, What is it about that—My God, it’s my father’s walk! And even writing it down, I was quite moved by this. The last sentence in the piece is: “The dead haunt us in the forms of the living.” That can be terribly, terribly affecting. But why? Why should the past have this weight and significance? I’m never going to answer that question, but asking it over and over is very productive.

To read the rest of this interview, purchase Issue Five.

Imre Kertész, the Hungarian 2002 Nobel Prize winner, prefaces his memoir Dossier K. by saying that it is the only one of his books that was not written out of an inner compulsion. To be more accurate, Dossier K. was not “written” at all; it is a two hundred page interview that editor Zolatán Hafner conducted with the author during 2003 and 2004. Kertész further preambles with Nietzsche’s proposition that the prototype of the art form known as the novel originated in Plato’s dialogues, and therefore suggests that Dossier K. can be considered a novel. Though highly unorthodox, this notion could be true, for the memoir does indeed tell the story of Kertész’s life, and since much of the conversation explores the difference between memoir and autobiographical fiction, this story is essentially constructed from snatches of reality, just like fiction.

As a teenager, Kertész was arrested for being Jewish, and sent first to Auschwitz and then Buchenwald. He lived only because anonymous people forged documents saying he was already dead. Kertész survived to live under successive totalitarian communist regimes, making a living as a heavily censored journalist. It takes him thirty years to write his first novel, Fatelessness, which is considered a masterpiece. This was quickly followed by a succession of other novels, including Liquidation, Fiasco, and Kaddish for an Unborn Child, all of which deal with the legacy of the Holocaust—the “greatest trauma for the people of Europe since the Crucifixion”—and brought Kertész the Nobel Prize and international fame.

Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with Kertész’s work, because Hafner certainly is, and he quotes at length from passages that appear to mirror Kertész’s true biography. In addition to being a passionate fan, Hafner is also a persistent interviewer, calling Kertész out when he tries to evade difficult questions with an anecdote, or pushing him to continue a line of thought when the author dismisses his answers as anecdotes that would not be of interest to anybody else. The result is a lively, highly dynamic conversation that abounds with quotable gems of wisdom and pries into the post-modern human condition.

For hundreds of years, Kertész argues, humanity has contrived an illusion that the world order is rational; this belief in rationality is what is our undoing. He states that, “Since Auschwitz, it has become redundant to make any judgment about human nature.” In other words, we now know what we are, and anyone who thinks otherwise is only deceiving themselves. According to Kertész, the world order is “the banal spell of evil.” Art is neither a means of escape nor does it provide answers to the perennial question of why humans commit evil against one another. Yet Kertész’s personal solution seems to be found in writing literature. “Literature,” he says, “is a bottomless turmoil, a blow to the heart from which there is no recovery, an elemental courage and encouragement, and at the same time something like a fatal disease.”

While his books appear to be pessimistic and tragic, he feels relieved by writing them and explains that “writing can only come from an abundance of energies, from pleasure; writing—and this is not my invention—is heightened life.” Indeed, reading Dossier K. is not only pleasurable, but like all great literature, it heightens the experience of living.

There are one or two murderers in any crowd. They do not suspect their destinies yet.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

Uzma Aslam Khan’s most recent novel, Thinner Than Skin, resonates with all the ominous eloquence those opening quotes suggest (the former from Charles Simic’s Memories of the Future, and the latter, from Virginia Woolf’s The Death of the Moth and Other Essays)—the fear, the anticipation, the sense of an other-worldly reality, the mystery that is human behavior, the sheer vulnerability of a life: “In later years, she would ask Maryam if her skin was as thin as a goat’s. And Maryam would tell her the truth. It was thinner. Which meant, of course, that if a goat could be shred that easily, so could a woman.”

Unfolding in the icy climes and unfriendly peaks of the glaciers of north Pakistan, the novel is narrated by Nadir, a Pakistani photographer living in San Francisco, and Maryam, a gypsy lady from a nomadic tribe in north Pakistan (one informed by an external vision that seeks the internal, and the other blessed with an innate vision that can perhaps alter the external).

Khan, who chooses to live in Pakistan and dust the experience of it through the sieve of fiction, addressing, in her novels, the politics of a nation in perpetual strife (“If not floods, raids… In Pakistan, it was hard to know which tragedy to dwell on most”), has a style unlike any other; this is not the world of Mohammed Hanif’s hard-as-nails clever prose, or Nadeem Aslam’s romantic, neo-magic realism. Uzma’s Pakistan always comes alive via the characters peopling her books, through classic storytelling. This is the place where each is determined not to be outstoried. The characters are all written into being with an intensity and care such that each of them tugs at the reader’s sympathy and sensibilities (such that that basic instinct to choose a favorite, is rendered almost meaningless), each of them positing a different aspect to the same argument, in a way. The argument of Pakistan’s place in the world. The argument of America’s problematic international politics. The argument of relationships between men and women, as uncharted and impossible and natural, as ancient glacier peaks: Sometimes it was desirable to put a mountain between yourself and someone else.

Mimicking the slow movement that the novel’s gaze rests on—the glaciers—Thinner Than Skin throbs with the urgent question of movement in the human world. In a book that gets together nomads and expats and shape-shifters of all sorts, the big issue treads the territory of ‘home’; concerning itself with the age-old motifs of coming back and going away, wondering where you belong. Akin to the ginger plant: Always on the move, in the middle, between things, between being. Leave the vertical world to trees and mountains. Everything else with any sense at all—including gods and jinns—moved like the ginger plant…

You don’t just read Thinner Than Skin, you enter it and inhabit it in order to comprehend it.