Other Press

James Kelman at PEN World Voices

Join us and Man Booker-winning author James Kelman at the PEN World Voices Festival in New York this week. Kelman’s events are below; see the full festival line-up here.

Opening Night Reading: Bravery

Monday, April 29, 2013, 7:00pm

With A. Igoni Barrett, David Frakt, Darrel Vandeveld, Joy Harjo, Jamaica Kincaid, Ursula Krechel, Earl Lovelace, Vaddey Ratner, Mikhail Shishkin, Najwan Darwish, Baratunde Thurston

Location: The Great Hall: Cooper Union 7 East 7th Street, New York, NY 10003

More info on the PEN World Voices website.

Lunchtime Literary Conversation: James Kelman and Emmelie Prophete

Friday, May 3, 2013, 2:00pm

Location: La Maison Francaise, New York University 16 Washington Mews, New York, NY

More info on the PEN World Voices website.

A Literary Safari

Friday, May 3, 2013, 6:30pm

With Michal Ajvaz, Nadeem Aslam, Loree Burns, Dror Burstein, Gillian Clarke, Mia Couto, Eduardo Halfon, Natalio Hernandez, Nick Holdstock, Randa Jarrar, John Kenney, Tararith Kho, Jaime Manrique, Margie Orford, Jordi Punti, Noemi Szecsi, Padma Venkatraman, Gerbrand Bakker, James Kelman, Téa Obreht, and others

Location: Westbeth Center for the Arts 55 Bethune St, New York, NY 10014

More info on the PEN World Voices website.

On Rimbaud

by George Harrar

Like many fiction writers I have an embarrassing folder buried deep in a basement trunk filled with poems from my overly romanticized college years. Here I share one of the few without arcane classical allusions. The subject is the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, a charismatic draw for a nascent tortured writer, a hoped-for kindred soul. The hallucinating prose of the “boy poet” deranged the senses in a way my far more rigid rational mind can still only dream about. I wrote this paean to him when I was nineteen, the age that Rimbaud gave up writing completely after achieving fame and notoriety with epics such as Une Saison en Enfer. He went to Africa and became an explorer, a trader, and gun-runner. That he ended up in Harar, Ethiopia, the coffee city often spelled Harrar, may have also carried an unconscious appeal to me.

Rimbaud
the young egoist
confident of his genius
reflecting the illumination
the focused illusion of symbols

Rimbaud
the mad wanderer
roaming the countryside
a taste of absinthe
lingering in the mind
seeking life for his poems

Rimbaud
eyes rheumy-red
hair wisped in wild madness
a passion godly lit
in sensuous disorder

Rimbaud
the hands created to disturb life
the body destined to receive strife
the mind never to write of it again

Rimbaud
the tortured soul
dying in the agony of being once beautiful

George Harrar is the author of two novels for adults, including the literary mystery The Spinning Man. Among his dozen published short stories, “The 5:22” won the prestigious Carson McCullers Prize and was selected for The Best American Short Stories 1999. Harrar lives west of Boston with his wife, Linda, a documentary filmmaker. Their son, Tony, was the inspiration for Harrar’s award-winning novel for middle-grade readers titled Parents Wanted, published by Milkweed Editions. His adult novel Reunion at Red Paint Bay was published by Other Press in January 2013.

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This article was originally published in the April 2013 edition of the Other Press newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Our Great Loves: Poetry Recommendations from Other Press

Perhaps it is inopportune to introduce a feature for National Poetry Month by saying that I don’t read as much poetry as I used to. I don’t—and every time I realize it, I hate myself for it. Which is precisely why I love April, when everyone is talking about and sharing poetry. I believe that poetry—reading it and writing it—makes us better, more thoughtful people. We should all do it more often, year-round.

Alas: for me, poetry, like music, has become something that I seldom seek out. Back in my college years, Napster’s heyday, I spent many hours—when I should have been writing papers—trawling the Internet for new music. Now I rely on recommendations, or even (my twenty-year-old self cringes at this) the radio; most often, I find myself making playlists of songs I first fell in love with a decade ago.

It’s much the same with poetry. My college years were filled with poetry: reading it, studying it, scribbling it in notebooks. I think it was less the fact that I was in college than that I was at an age when I was wrestling with language—its possibilities and limitations—as I never had before. I suspect that most current (and former) twenty-something poetry aficionados can relate.

These days, I tend to revisit the poets I’ve read in the past. Every now and then I stumble upon something new, and tape a copy to the wall behind my desk. Part of the pleasure in culling together this collection of notes on poetry from authors and my colleagues is that I have an excuse to solicit new recommendations. I hope you’ll enjoy them as much as I have.

When I asked my colleagues to share their favorite poems, I made it clear that their recommendations need not be limited to poetry that Other Press has published. Their responses were terrifically diverse, the products of a great many admirable poets and presses. Mine, however—without any employee bias—happens to come from a volume we published during my first years at Other Press, back in 2005: Montale in English. It’s a collection of Montale’s work as rendered by some of his best translators; in some cases, multiple translations of the same poem are presented side by side. It’s a wonderful introduction to Montale, and a brilliant illustration of the nuances of the translator’s work. This particular poem has been taped to my wall for nearly a decade now.  –Terrie Akers, Online Publicity and Social Media Manager

“Stanzas”
Eugenio Montale, translated by W.S. Di Piero

I still can’t find the source
of the blood you’re nourished by,
endless rings eddied beyond
this brief arc of human days,
which delivered you to a present
of shrieked agony you’ve never known,
in this stinking bottomless swamp
of a star; now it’s lymph that roughs out
your hands, flutters your pulse and, unseen,
enflames or blanches your image.

Yet the little webbing of your nerves
traces the memory of that journey,
and when I unveil your eyes they burn
with passion veiled by a crest
of restless sea foam that clenches
then shatters, and in your roaring temples
you hear it hiss away into your life,
the way a silent drowsy piazza
wakens with the boomed clap
of doves taking flight.

You’re unaware of the sunburst rays
that converge in you; some appeared, of course,
to others: to the man who shivered one night
jolted by a fugitive white wing;
to the one who saw wandering shades where
others saw swarms of little girls
or who saw in the clear sky
a crack like forked lightning and
the world’s clanging watch works,
revealed where the sky ripped open,
enraptured him, wailing.

In you I see a last corolla
of weightless ash that doesn’t last
but scatters and falls. Willed
unwilled – such is your nature.
You touch the sign then pass over. O
plucked bow thrumming, furrow that rends
the sea swell then seals it up! And now
the last bubble rises high. Maybe
damnation is the bitter raving half-dark
that falls upon the one who stays behind.

Yvonne Cárdenas, Production Editor

The Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén is not a poet to read alone, in silence, but aloud, on the street, and moving your body as you do it. For me, his poems are about the musicality of the human voice, of human life itself. In his work, the rhythm of me meets the rhythm of you, and the neighbor next door, and the guy down the street. So Cuban, so alive, and so lovely. Here is one of his most famous:

“Sóngoro cosongo”

¡Ay, negra,
si tú supiera!
Anoche te vi pasar,
y no quise que me viera.
A él tú le hará como a mí,
que cuando no tuve plata
te corrite de bachata
sin acordarte de mí.

Sóngoro, cosongo,
songo be;
sóngoro, cosongo
de mamey;
sóngoro, la negra
baila bien;
sóngoro de uno,
sóngoro de tré.

Aé,
vengan a ver
aé, vamo pa ver
¡Vengan, sóngoro cosongo,
sóngoro cosongo

de mamey!

Marjorie DeWitt, Associate Editor

The Professor of Truth by James Robertson (on sale in September) opens with an untitled poem by Emily Dickinson known as “The distance that the dead have gone,” a short and moving piece about grief and one’s inability to completely let go of those who have passed away. Every time I crack open the book my eyes always land on that page and I’m reminded of how perfectly Dickinson captures not only the pain, but the matter-of-factness of death in a mere eight lines.

The poem:

THE DISTANCE that the dead have gone
Does not at first appear;
Their coming back seems possible
For many an ardent year.

And then, that we have followed them
We more than half suspect,
So intimate have we become
With their dear retrospect.

Judith Gurewich, Publisher

Charles Baudelaire and Jules Laforgue are two of my favorite poets, and these two poems have stayed with me since childhood. I can recite them on demand! (Michael Greenberg’s recent article on Oliver Sacks explains a certain type of hallucination illustrated by Baudelaire’s poem “Correspondances”…check it out!)

“Correspondances”
Charles Baudelaire

La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.
Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.
II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d’enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
— Et d’autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,
Ayant l’expansion des choses infinies,
Comme l’ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l’encens,
Qui chantent les transports de l’esprit et des sens.

***

“Complainte sur certains ennuis”
Jules Laforgue

Un couchant des Cosmogonies!
Ah! que la Vie est quotidienne…
Et, du plus vrai qu’on se souvienne,
Comme on fut piètre et sans génie…

On voudrait s’avouer des choses,
Dont on s’étonnerait en route,
Qui feraient une fois pour toutes!
Qu’on s’entendrait à travers poses.

On voudrait saigner le Silence,
Secouer l’exil des causeries;
Et non! ces dames sont aigries
Par des questions de préséance.

Elles boudent là, l’air capable.
Et, sous le ciel, plus d’un s’explique,
Par quel gâchis suresthétique
Ces êtres-là sont adorables.

Justement, une nous appelle,
Pour l’aider à chercher sa bague,
Perdue (où dans ce terrain vague?)
Un souvenir d’AMOUR, dit-elle!

Ces êtres-là sont adorables!

Sulay Hernandez, Senior Editor

Hurrah’s Nest by Arisa White

Tynan Kogane, Marketing Associate

A few years ago, after reading Richard Holmes’s exhaustive biography of Shelley, I was set on becoming a Romantic poet, and even considered carrying a pistol under my cloak. Around that time, I memorized “Ozymandias” for a girl, but she moved away before I could recite it to her (the effect is completely lost over the phone).

Paul Kozlowski, Associate Publisher

My favorite this week may be different from my favorite last week. Hard to choose. The other day I read this poem and liked it:

“The Supple Deer”
Jane Hirshfield

The quiet opening
between fence strands
perhaps eighteen inches.

Antlers to hind hooves,
four feet off the ground,
the deer poured through it.

No tuft of the coarse white belly hair left behind.

I don’t know how a stag turns
into a stream, an arc of water.
I have never felt such accurate envy.

Not of the deer—
To be that porous, to have such largeness pass through me.

I have seen Jane Hirshfield read more than once but never this poem. I find I’m far more often a fence with a hole in it than a herd of living beings, yet I haven’t had such a largeness pass through me either, so I feel a similar envy. Here is another one by Tony Hoagland in which the deer never show up:

“Instead”
Tony Hoagland

The deer they said would be there at dawn
never appeared
but the dawn mist instead.

Always something instead
like the little brown pebble on the porch
that turned out to be a frog.

Things that arrive on their own
like the domed Conestogas of afternoon cloud,
fat as senators from Mississippi.

How there is always a truth, and then underneath that
another somehow
more elusive truth —

All before the pell-mell education of dying
when things will be fast but at the same time slow,
like the loud dripping of a clock.

Instead of the quiet you never noticed
hailstones of rain on the roof,
after which you could hear the wind.

So praise instead;
praise the word instead like a treetrunk
that falls across your path.

Like a bridge that leads
away from your destination.

You had expected to be dead by now,
or living in New York.

Mist suspended above the meadow:
pale and gauzy, in rumpled sheets;
where you have come with so much readiness.

Whenever I read the line “You had expected to be dead by now,/or living in New York” I laugh, finding it hard to believe that I’m alive instead of dead.

Libby Riefler, Editorial Assistant

A couple years ago I used to read Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Sonnets to Orpheus to a boy named Henry, 8 months old at the time, whenever I’d babysit him and we were both feeling restless. This isn’t one of those particular poems, but it’s a nice read for awaiting spring and brings me happy memories of Henry falling asleep.

“Before Summer Rain”
Rainer Maria Rilke

Suddenly, from all the green around you,
something-you don’t know what-has disappeared;
you feel it creeping closer to the window,
in total silence. From the nearby wood

you hear the urgent whistling of a plover,
reminding you of someone’s Saint Jerome:
so much solitude and passion come
from that one voice, whose fierce request the downpour

will grant. The walls, with their ancient portraits, glide
away from us, cautiously, as though
they weren’t supposed to hear what we are saying.
And reflected on the faded tapestries now;
the chill, uncertain sunlight of those long
childhood hours when you were so afraid.

Lauren Shekari, Director of Subsidiary Rights

It’s pretty sappy, but my favorite poem has to be “Song of the Open Road” by Walt Whitman. In general I am a fan of Whitman’s writings but the reason this is my favorite, above all the other amazing poems out there, is my husband and I used the last stanza as our wedding vows. It holds a special place in my heart.

Nerdy but true.

Iisha Stevens, Operations Manager

When I first heard this poem I thought it was about romance and sex due to its seductive tone but when I opened my ears, and listened beyond the surface I realized this poem is about the AIDS epidemic in Africa. DEEP!!!

“Last Night”
Saul Williams

Last night I laid within your continent
Sought salvation from frustration
with in your loving nation
found the true meaning of homeland
when you let me inland
Swahili tongue knew I hadn’t been there before
kissed for me to stay awhile
I did you one better and stayed forever, in your country
Then you let me tap your virgin drum
releasing echoes of me being free
Free to run through your countryside
touching jasmine, dropping weed
Free to nibble on your Nigeria
Blow on your Botswana
Eat your Opia til there is no more Opia left
Won’t be any leftovers when I’m done
Won’t be anything when I’m done
Just remembrance of that night when I laid within your continent
seeking salvation from frustration within your loving nation
and that’s all we’ll have
That, and a few thousand orphans to read this poem

One of my favorite poets/writers is Langston Hughes. I remember reading this poem in middle school (6th grade). I believed there was no obstacle I couldn’t overcome with hard work and self-belief, with an understanding there will be bumps along the way, but it’s up to me to achieve my dreams even if the odds seemed stacked against me. I refuse to fail and strive to be the best I can be.

“As I Grew Older”
Langston Hughes

It was a long time ago.
I have almost forgotten my dream.
But it was there then,
In front of me,
Bright like a sun–
My dream.
And then the wall rose,
Rose slowly,
Slowly,
Between me and my dream.
Rose until it touched the sky–
The wall.
Shadow.
I am black.
I lie down in the shadow.
No longer the light of my dream before me,
Above me.
Only the thick wall.
Only the shadow.
My hands!
My dark hands!
Break through the wall!
Find my dream!
Help me to shatter this darkness,
To smash this night,
To break this shadow
Into a thousand lights of sun,
Into a thousand whirling dreams
Of sun!

Bobby Wicks, Associate Publicist

“A Patio”
Jorge Luis Borges

At evening
they grow weary, the patio’s two or three colours.
Tonight, the moon, bright circle,
fails to dominate space.
Patio, channel of sky.
The patio is the slope
down which sky flows into the house.
Serene,
eternity waits at the crossroad of stars.
It’s pleasant to live in the friendly dark
of entrance-way, arbour, and cistern.

***

“The Dinner Party”
Niina Pollari

Since you came over
you should know
I made quinoa
It was healthful and all

I added salt, and butter
I feel like I negated it
I do this a lot, make something
good be weird and awful

Feeling like I should be ashamed
is something I do a lot too
But here we are, having a dinner
You drove and I am feeding you drinks

We can reconcile this can’t we
We can make this an alright picture
We are in a colorful well-deodorized room
We are having a good time

_____________________________

This article originally appeared in the April 2013 edition of the Other Press newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

On Alejandra Pizarnik

by Ronald De Feo

As a fiction writer who was very active for years as a freelance reviewer focusing primarily on innovative European and Latin American literature, I became acquainted with the poetry (and short prose) of Alejandra Pizarnik. A native of Buenos Aires, Pizarnik traveled to Paris—like her great friend and fellow writer Julio Cortázar—and came to admire the work of Georges Bataille and André Pieyre de Mandiargues, both rather provocative, transgressive authors. In fact, The Bloody Countess, Pizarnik’s vividly disturbing prose piece about the infamous, sixteenth-century Countess Báthory, who allegedly murdered hundreds of girls, seems related to Bataille’s obsessive and violently perverse texts.

The edginess and darkness that inform The Bloody Countess are found to varying degrees in much of Pizarnik’s poetry, and is perhaps the chief reason why I am so drawn it—I tend to like unsettling texts. And certainly this is not comfortable work, and it’s sometimes puzzling in its symbolic imagery. Yet it conveys a constant sense of longing that is rendered quite tersely and often beautifully. The poetry is filled with references to silence and death, and it’s perhaps not all that surprising that Pizarnik, who died in 1972 at the age of thirty-six, was an apparent suicide. As with Sylvia Plath, we can’t quite divorce her final act from her poems, as we similarly can’t when we read the work of Sylvia Plath. Plath, of course, is widely known today, but Pizarnik still remains rather obscure, except to fellow Argentines, scholars and devoted readers of Latin American literature. My hope is that this will change. Though there are two volumes of her work available in English, both are quite compressed and published by very small presses. The good news is that the first complete English translation of her 1971 A Musical Hell is soon to appear from New Directions.

In any case, I chose the following poem as representative of her very stark, memorable work:

“The Cage”

It’s sunny outside.
It’s only a sun
Yet men look at it
and sing.

I don’t know about the sun.
I know about the melody of angels
and the heated sermon
of the last wind.
I know how to scream until dawn
when death settles naked
on my shadow.

I cry beneath my name.
I wave handkerchiefs in the night
and boats thirsty for reality
dance with me.
I hide my nails
to mock my sickly dreams.

It’s sunny outside.
I dress in ashes.

(From Alejandra Pizarnik, A Profile, edited with an introduction by Frank Graziano—translated by Maria Rosa Fort, Frank Graziano and Suzanne Jill Levine, pub. Logbridge-Rhodes, 1987)

Ronald De Feo is the author of Solo Pass and Calling Mr. King (Other Press). He has written reviews for the New York Times Book Review, The Nation, the New Republic, and the National Review. His short fiction has been published widely in national magazines including the Hudson Review, Massachusetts Review, and North American Review, and he worked for nine years as senior editor at ARTnews. He now serves on the advisory board of Review Magazine, devoted to Latin American and Canadian literature and the arts.

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This article originally appeared in the April 2013 edition of the Other Press newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

The Silence and the Roar

by Nihad Sirees

Is it possible for the silence and the roar to coexist? The answer is most certainly, yes. In countries ruled by people obsessed with supremacy, authoritarians and those who are crazed by power, the ruler or the leader imposes silence upon all those who dare to think outside the prevailing norm. Silence can be the muffling of one’s voice or the banning of one’s publications, as is the case with Fathi Sheen, the protagonist of this novel. Or it might be the silence of a cell in a political prison or, without trying to unnecessarily frighten anyone, the silence of the grave.

But this silence is also accompanied by an expansive roar, one that renders thought impossible. Thought leads to individualization, which is the most powerful enemy of the dictator. People must not think about the leader and how he runs the country; they must simply adore him, want to die for him in their adoration of him. Therefore, the leader creates a roar all around him, forcing people to celebrate him, to roar.

I had always wanted to explore certain dimensions of dictatorship: the orchestration of such roaring marches and how people are coerced into the streets to chant for the leader under the direction of bullhorns. The leader seeking to cover himself with a roaring halo is not a nice thing to see. Naturally he would only ever do that as a means of covering up and suppressing any other sound.

With this roar he also aims to cover up the violent crimes he unleashes against his rivals in the underground dungeons of the security apparatus, those places located far out of sight but that everyone knows about.

I believe that love and peace are the right way to confront tyranny. Thus I wrote this novel about the dictator whose opponents cannot find any other way to stand up to him but through love and laughter. It is with love that the hero of the story acquires the strength to stand up and confront silence; with laughter that he tears off the frightening halo with which the dictator has surrounded himself, and then subsequently dares to confront his minions.

There is another kind of roar that this author never thought the leader would ever be capable of using: the roar of artillery, tanks and fighter jets that have already opened fire on Syrian cities. The leader is leveling cities and using lethal force against his own people in order to hold on to power. We must ask, alongside the characters in this novel: What kind of Surrealism is this?

As I present my novel to the English-speaking reader, my heart is agonizingly heavy about what is happening in Syria, my homeland.

———-

Nihad Sirees is a civil engineer who was born in the ancient Syrian city of Aleppo in 1950. His other novels include Cancer, The North Winds, and A Case of Passion. He has also written several plays and television dramas, the latest of which, Al Khait Al Abiadh (The First Gleam of Dawn), provides a frank depiction of the country’s government controlled media and has been wildly acclaimed for its boldness and controversial nature. Branded an opponent of the government, publication of several of his works was forbidden by government censors.  His subsequent novels were published abroad. He left Syria in January, 2012, to avoid Syrian security services. Since that time he has lived in self-imposed exile in Cairo, Egypt.

This article originally appeared in the March 2013 edition of the Other Press newsletter. Click here to subscribe and to view the archive.

Les Codes Sociaux

By Cecile David-Weill
Translated by Antony Shugaar

In France, a proposal of marriage consists of nothing more than a man asking a woman a simple question. The man can pop the question whenever he likes, point-blank or after lengthy deliberation, by moonlight or with a towel around his waist as he steps out of the shower. Because this crucial instant, however weighty and emotionally freighted it may be, is governed in France by no special socially codified set of rules.

Such a laissez-faire approach to marriage proposals is unthinkable in the United States. Here men orchestrate this solemn moment as if they were supervising the production of a Hollywood blockbuster.

No American male would dare to propose without a diamond ring in a velvet box, which he will humbly proffer at the chosen moment and in the perfect romantic location, whether that’s a ferryboat under steam or a balloon wafting through the clouds. He’ll make sure to have a photographer lurking in the wings, ready to spring into action and immortalize this magic moment.

The more complicated the logistics involved in staging this romantic tableau, the more stringent the security requirements. It is crucial to an American man, after all, that the girl of his dreams have a specific succession of expressions on her face: delighted surprise, followed by joyful acceptance. The performance anxiety that accompanies the American’s marriage proposal is unlike anything experienced by his French counterpart. The French male cares about one thing only: is the answer oui or non?

But if the pressure is on for American men, the constraints on American women are even more spectacular. The coming-of-age obstacle course begins at a tender age, with such traditions as the sweet sixteen birthday party or prom night, where young women must not only be pretty, innocent, and pure, but also sufficiently cool and popular to be elected prom queen. Frenchwomen experience nothing comparable in France, where a more flexible set of customs allow girls to go through the miseries of puberty in blessed privacy, and then to choose their own time to appear in the spotlight.

But it is unquestionably the American wedding ceremony that literally takes the cake, in terms of getting everything just so. There is a series of highly stylized rituals to be navigated, such as choosing the bridesmaids, assigning them tasks, selecting their outfits. The tension mounts with the money and expectations, ultimately fostering the uniquely American figure of the “bridezilla.” Here, too, the demands placed upon American women are unknown to their French counterparts. A much more flexible set of traditions in France allows them freedom to choose a gala wedding ceremony or a small, intimate service, a march down the aisle of a church or a stroll over to town hall, the participation of all their friends or a small private ceremony restricted to close family.

Some American women have so completely incorporated these rituals into their lives that they would never dream of trying to avoid their requirements or tampering with the details. The environment they live in is so competitive that they see no alternative to succeeding in everything they take on. They do more than just try to fit together family time and professional obligations, the way most women around the world do. They also try to be fashionably dressed, athletically accomplished, perfect hostesses, politically engaged, model citizens in their communities, loyal friends, committed parents, active at their children’s schools, and of course ideal parents, devoted neighbors, and faithful churchgoers. They lavish the same energy on every aspect of their lives, striving for some ideal, unattainable goal of perfection.

A Frenchwoman who has observed this particular type of American women at close range, then, is hardly surprised to see how hard it is for them to free themselves of a certain sternness or rigidity. Those qualities are more hindrance than help in realms that actually demand—first and foremost—a lighthearted, carefree approach, such as fashion, food, and interior decorating.

Perhaps this is an area where Frenchwomen might have some useful advice to offer their American girlfriends. It is their good fortune to be able to restrict their ambitions to certain chosen domains: choosing fashion and turning their back on cooking, for instance, or opting for love over family life. And the fact that Frenchwomen can choose simply not to succeed in certain areas gives them the confidence needed to overcome performance anxiety in their chosen fields of endeavor, giving free rein to their wishes and desires. This can be tremendously seductive, as we have seen in the realm of fashion, where Frenchwomen, in tune with an unpretentious style, dress according to their own personality, ignoring abstract ideals of perfection. Think of Marion Cotillard, Audrey Tautou, or Clemence Poesy.

This ability to have fun, to take pleasure, is a product of the absence of obligations, the feeling that nothing serious is at stake. And that sense of playfulness is the basic building block of French savoir-vivre. We Frenchwomen fail to see the point of wearing ourselves out on things we don’t care about. Why cook a Thanksgiving turkey at all if we hate to cook? Why play party games with our children if what we’d rather do is read them stories? Once we accept that it’s up to us to make the choice, then we can select the things that actually give us pleasure. That pleasure tends to become contagious, and we can spread joy so much more successfully than if we allow ourselves to be plagued with anxiety and a wrongheaded sense of duty.

But creeping globalization, making its way through social networks like Facebook and Twitter or television series like Sex in the City and Girls, is already transforming French society. The French have started to celebrate Halloween, for instance, and in the past ten years we’ve begun to adopt internet dating. This has profoundly shifted the rules of the game for the French approach to seduction. In short order, we can expect Frenchwomen to be challenged by the same pressures that affect their American counterparts. Frenchwomen have no idea what is coming their way. They will need all the advice and encouragement that American women can offer them.

Cécile David-Weill, author of The Suitors, is French and American. She published her first novel, Beguin (Grasset, 1996) under the name of Cécile de la Baume, which was released in an English translation, Crush (Grove, 1997). She is also the author of Femme de (Grasset, 2002). The Suitors is her third novel. Cécile is also a regular contributor to the online French news magazine Le Point, with a column entitled “Letters from New York.” She was born in New York, where she currently lives.

This article originally appeared in the February 2013 edition of the Other Press newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

My Mother’s Fearsome Number: Remembering the Holocaust on January 27

by Leslie Maitland

On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz and its last 7,000 feeble, ill, or dying prisoners. Tens of thousands of others had been forced on death marches in preceding weeks, as the S.S. furiously tried to empty the camp before the Allies discovered the unimaginable cruelty that had reigned within its gates. By then, more than a million captives had been murdered there. Sixty years later, the United Nations would designate January 27 to serve annually as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

In Israel, however, as in most Jewish communities, the memorial occasion is more widely observed on Yom HaShoah, which occurs a week after the end of Passover and is linked to the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Its precise yet variable date each spring falls on the 27^th day of the month of Nissan, as determined by the lunar, Hebrew calendar.

Curiously, these two dates add to a long list of other pivotal events that happened on the 27^th day of different months and attracted my attention as I researched World War II and the dire fate of European Jewry. Having embarked upon these studies for my book – Crossing the Borders of Time – about my mother’s family and their last-minute escape from Nazi-dominated France, I could not help but notice the recurrence of the number 27 throughout the history that was my focus. Why? Because while my mother is in every other respect a person devoid of superstition, a woman with little zeal for anything that smacks of mysticism or occult meanings, she has always harbored a dread fear of the number 27. It has seemed as if she thought that avoiding tragedy on the 27^th might guarantee that every other day would be a good one.

Mom traces her targeted arithmophobia back to childhood. She claims that it was sparked by overhearing her mother denounce the number 27 as inherently ill omened, being the date that my great-grandfather, much beloved and far too young, died in Germany in 1913. In consequence of his early death, my mother never knew him. Yet so pervasive has been her fear that she actually pleaded with me to “hold on until midnight” when, years ago, I went into labor with my own daughter on a blessed July 27^th in the early afternoon.

Given her experience in the Holocaust with the collective threat of lurking danger, my mother seizes on precautionary action to offer her some feeling of control. And so, ever wary of numerically induced disaster, she once fixedly refused to take her seat in a crowded airplane until my father found sympathetic fellow passengers willing to trade their “safer” seats for my parents’ 27A and B.

“You see those people seated in the 27^th row?” Dad the rationalist pointed drily to the other couple, as the plane to California lifted from the runway. “I should warn you – if they go down, we go down also.”

Sensitized by a lifetime of such moments, I was alert to encountering the number as I delved into my mother’s story. The date, for instance, that France became the first European country to offer Jews full citizenship: September 27, 1791. The date the collaborationist Vichy government made it permissible to print racist attacks against Jews in the French press: August 27, 1940. The date that Germany signed a Tripartite Pact with Italy and Japan that aimed to keep America from joining in the war: September 27, 1940. That same day, the Nazis imposed the first anti-Jewish ordinance in the northern two-thirds of defeated France that the armistice permitted them to occupy with iron rule.

It was March 27, 1942, when the first German transport sent more than a thousand Jews from France to death at Auschwitz in Poland. On July 27, 1944, the Germans moved to crush the French Resistance and, gunning down five patriots, left their bloodied corpses as a warning sprawled upon a Lyon sidewalk. Four months later, on November 27, 1944, British bombers leveled the medieval German town of Freiburg, my mother’s birthplace and her home until her family, stripped of valuables and identity, fled across the Rhine to France.

My account of 27s could easily go on, but I do not permit myself to view them as anything but coincidence. All the same, I recognize that the yearning to consecrate events in memory arises naturally from the human heart. There is value in setting aside a day for Holocaust remembrance, be it the 27^th of January or of Nissan: in honoring the millions lost we grant them a measure of immortality and affirm commitment to ensuring that such horrors never occur again. Indeed, as years go by, memorializing must drive action to end mass killings – whether the result of state-sponsored genocide or the carnage wrought by troubled individuals allowed to arm themselves with lethal weapons in their wars against the world.

Only by turning every day into a day of memory can we begin to stem the sort of senseless violence that makes each of us a potential mourner or a victim. Surely, if alerted to the frightful import of a number other than 27, we would find reasons justified by history to record its fatefulness. Twenty blameless children executed in their classrooms in Connecticut. A young woman tortured, raped, and murdered in New Delhi. A man shoved onto the New York City subway tracks to die beneath a speeding train. The randomness of evil supports no explanation.  Our efforts to mark its madness in time underline our yearnings to delimit it. But beyond setting dates apart on calendars, we must use our grief about the past to trigger change.

Leslie Maitland’s World War II family memoir, Crossing the Borders of  Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed, has just been released by Other Press in paperback. Visit her website at www.lesliemaitland.com.

Stalkers, Payback, and Suspense in Literary Fiction

By George Harrar

Aside from a glowing review, there is probably no more satisfying response a writer can get to a story than hearing readers debate what will happen to the characters after the final page has been turned. Mysteries, thrillers and suspense novels tend to wrap up neatly—the protagonist safe, the bad guys dead or in jail. Blame falls on the guilty parties. The innocent are exonerated or redeemed.

In mainstream or literary fiction things often don’t end so tidily, even stories with a dose of suspense to them, as my novel, Reunion at Red Paint Bay. A satisfying conclusion should clear up the various threads of the plot, but the larger questions of blame, innocence and redemption don’t lend themselves to easy resolution.

I didn’t set out to deal with such larger-life issues when I began to write. The basic plot—a man receives an anonymous postcard inviting him to dinner to pay him back for something he did years before—was suggested by an incident a friend recounted to me. He received such a note in the mail, went to the appointed restaurant at the appointed time, and immediately recognized a boyhood friend, someone he hadn’t seen in thirty-five years. A loan from his newspaper delivery earnings had gotten his pal out of a jam, with parents none the wiser. The matter may seem small, but it remained in the friend’s mind as a kindness that should be repaid.

Paying someone back, of course, can have a negative connotation, and that’s the path I chose to explore with Reunion at Red Paint Bay. I began asking myself questions—who would send an anonymous postcard? What might he be after? How will the main character respond? How will the family bear up under the stress of being stalked?

My protagonist, Simon Howe, believes he has lived a moral life. But he is confronted with an action from his past that his wife, a therapist by training, deems about the worst thing a man can do. I developed the story with little consideration of what do I want to say on sensitive cultural issues. I set the characters in motion and then listened to what they said, what explanations and excuses and accusations came from their mouths. From their interactions and behaviors, their conversations and thoughts, the general themes emerged. I followed alongside my characters, learning along with them what was going to happen.

At the end, then, I’m in the same position as my readers. The characters have sorted out the plot—with help from me, of course. We know who did what to whom and why. But I’m left with questions myself: Will Simon’s marriage survive? Will the good citizens of Red Paint, Maine, forgive the editor of their newspaper for the apparent lapses in judgment that are exposed? Are we forever responsible for the changes we set in motion in other people’s lives? I have my strong opinions, as I hope readers will as well.

George Harrar is the author of two novels for adults, including the literary mystery The Spinning Man. Among his dozen published short stories, “The 5:22” won the prestigious Carson McCullers Prize and was selected for The Best American Short Stories 1999. Harrar lives west of Boston with his wife, Linda, a documentary filmmaker. Their son, Tony, was the inspiration for Harrar’s award-winning novel for middle-grade readers titled Parents Wanted, published by Milkweed Editions.

This article originally appeared in the January 2013 issue of the Other Press e-newsletter. Sign up here.

Saving a Forgotten Masterpiece

By Judith Gurewich

Climates by André Maurois is a novel that I loved as a girl, and that I love now even more. Romantic literature has been my home since I was about twelve years old, and it still is. I didn’t consider Balzac, Stendhal, James, Dumas, Austen, and Wharton to be challenging reads for a girl my age, even if I missed in these masterpieces almost everything meaningful, except for the love stories, which fascinated me. Stumbling upon Climates after this intense training was a curious experience. On the one hand, it was a much easier read—riveting even—and a true learning experience for the totally clueless girl I was then. On the other hand, while Climates was closer in time than the other books I had read, it wasn’t more “advanced” when it came to women’s rights, or for that matter the rights of anyone who wasn’t a privileged white male. I remember, as a girl, trying to glaze over the disturbing prejudices that would pop up on the page and thwart my ability to identify with my favorite characters, but now I am no longer at liberty to ignore certain statements—especially since I am otherwise thrilled and proud to re-publish Climates (in a translation by Adriana Hunter that gives the novel the contemporary tone that was missing in the previous translation). So here is one such passage. Am I right to be ashamed, or could it be rather that uncomfortable truths, packaged in the typical French bourgeois lingo of the 1930s, are lurking here?

In this scene, Isabelle (my favorite character) asks her friend Helene what she thinks of Solange, who she fears interests her husband a little too much:

“Do you think her intelligent?”
“Very intelligent for a woman…Yes…Well, there’s nothing she doesn’t know about. Of course, she depends on the man she loves for her topics of interest. In the days when she adored her husband, she was brilliant on colonial and economic issues; when it was Raymond Berger, she was interested in things to do with art. She has a great deal of taste. Her house in Morocco is a marvel, and the one in Fontainebleau very unusual…She’s driven more by love than intellect. But, all the same, she has tremendous judgment when she has a clear head.”
“What would you say it is that’s so attractive about her, Helene?”
“It’s mostly that she is so feminine.”
“What do you call ‘feminine’?”
“Well, a combination of qualities and faults: tenderness, prodigious devotion to the man she loves…for a time, but also a lack of scruples…When Solange wants a new conquest, she’ll overlook everyone else, even her best friend. It’s not nastiness, it’s instinctive.”
“Well, I would call it nastiness. You could just as easily say a tiger isn’t nasty when it eats a man, because it’s instinctive.”
“Exactly,” said Helene. “A tiger isn’t nasty, or at least not consciously so…What you’ve just said is actually very accurate: Solange is a tigress.”
“But she seems so gentle.”
“Do you think? Oh, no! There are flashes of steel; that’s one element of her beauty.”

Is this passage a marvelous outlet for feminist outrage, a convenient channel to malign the French, or an unexpected opportunity to recall someone just like Solange? Is she truly obsolete, or merely a typical femme fatale, irresistible because she can’t really be trusted? She is there one day and gone the next, and to make things worse, she is the last person on earth to understand her own behavior. We would think that nowadays there are men who fit that profile as well…but then we can also argue that for Isabelle, who seems uncannily like us, her husband, Philippe, becomes inscrutable as well when she ponders what the hell he sees in Solange, he so principled and square! So could it be that this passage is a bit too close to home for comfort, and that the more things change, the more they stay the same?*

This is only one of the reasons why Climates is worth not only a close reading, but also a serious discussion in reading groups, dinner parties, or even in the metro. Climates lives within the confines of our lives and speaks more directly to us and our woes than other canonical love stories such as Persuasion, Anna Karenina, The Age of Innocence, The Red and the Black, The Golden Bowl, Romeo and Juliet, or Othello. The obstacles that transform a reasonable attraction between two people into passion or jealousy rarely stem from the vicissitudes of ordinary life.

Here we see relationships as we know them. Love’s first thrills, the narcissism of small differences, familiar tensions with in-laws, being on the rebound, annoyance at our partner’s choice of hobbies, etc. Much of what Maurois describes of his rigid upper-class milieu can easily be translated to middle-class America. The conditions differ, but the emotions are the same. Moreover, the writing is beautiful and spare, the story is tight, the dialogue is always interesting and often witty, and the scrutiny that Philippe bestows upon himself is as implacable as that of Philip Roth. In addition, the love story in Climates is not merely a pretext for tackling other topics that are ultimately more interesting to the author, such as ambition, social conflicts, clan feuds, or man’s cowardliness (a favorite theme of Edith Wharton).

This book is about love for love’s sake. Some would say that you can read Climates almost like a love cookbook—one that offers recipes for disaster: what are the ingredients for jealousy to build, for exasperation to mount, for denial to lose its resolve? For driving a partner mad by being oblivious to the point of being sadistic? For how certain men actually think themselves in love only when they are in the throes of doubt or anxiety? (Or is this true for women too?)

But Climates is ultimately an ode to unconditional love and, in my view, to the inspiring Isabelle. This is a woman who refuses her fate of being dismissed, of being second fiddle, who at the same time disdains those poisonous methods that bring her man crawling back to her. She wins Philippe over again not by making him jealous (too easy and too pathetic) but through her conviction that unconditional love will win in the end. Maybe Isabelle is made of the stuff that accepts that there are certain constraints in life that can’t be overcome, but this doesn’t mean you must accept defeat. Love is always flawed, and the milieu in which we live is never designed to bring unmitigated bliss—neither in the 1930s nor today. But to accept limitations without compromising our convictions, especially when it comes to a love that has become familiar, for better or for worse, perhaps this is the “French lesson” that Isabelle wants to teach us. This may not be our typical American way, as we are prompt to preach revolution over reform, but this story, which is both simple and complex, sad and uplifting, has spoken to me so many times and in so many different places that I want to believe it will reach you as well—whatever you may think of it at the end.

*I asked some friends of a younger generation what they thought. Alex responded to this passage specifically, and Elena reviewed the whole book! Here’s what they have to say:

Elena:

When I found out Climates was about love, I worried. I wrote my college application essay about the 1997 film version of Romeo and Juliet, along with other love stories that I believed had formed my seventeen-year-old “worldview,” but I like to tell myself that with continued experience in love I have become less romantic and sentimental. What this really means is that it has become less pleasurable for me to read about exquisite pain and tragically bad timing in the relationships of fictional people, now that I have some baggage of my own. But Climates reminded me that love is an irresistible topic, gripping at any age. As I found myself falling under this novel’s spell, I felt like Pacino in the last Godfather film: ”Just when I thought I was out”… etc.

Our most beloved love stories are famously either comedies or tragedies, adhering strictly to the rule that love end either in marriage or in death. But for Philippe, Isabelle, and Odile, the three corners of Maurois’s triangle, love doesn’t end at all.  And in its perpetuity it rarely meets their expectations.  Climates is typically French in its obsession with the nature of love between men and women, about which it remains fundamentally cynical. But what its characters lack in hopefulness, they make up for in incisiveness, and the book is a keen reminder that, as Isabelle puts it, “We are always tempted to sentimentalize ourselves and depict ourselves as we would like to be.” It attempts that impossible thing—honesty.

Indeed, what seems striking and brave about Climates is how Maurois tries, with scrutinizing attention to detail and refreshing honesty, to answer questions that many of us (in America, especially) would rather ignore. Why is happiness in love so often overshadowed by doubt?  And why does being with someone you love sometimes feel so lonely? Do men and women want none of the same things?  For easy answers, you could watch Sex and the City. But Climates is much more satisfying.  So satisfying, in fact, that it doesn’t give answers at all—except by way of beautifully rendered moments, those delicate centerpieces of fiction.

Elena Schilder is a writer living in Brooklyn.

Alex:

I guess my reaction is always somehow related to my life (which is why I was not a good student of literature) and timely. I actually speak regularly on the topic of learning through an emotional connection as opposed to via an academic method. I often joke to people that I don’t read.  I just hang out with a lot of well-read people.

I started this habit at a very early age, and most certainly because of boys. I think it began when I pretended to like Pearl Jam to win the heart of a crush (of course now Pearl Jam is a very important band to me and I don’t remember the boy). Over time, my tastes and opinions and politics, and references evolved and I believe I have developed into a well-rounded woman with strong sensibility and opinions. But, in dark times, I think my entire identity and persona is the result of hundreds of flirtations and now my appeal of being versatile and curious and interested and knowledgeable about many things is really just because I am kind of a slut.

But, I have in the past been jealous of other women who are more like this than I—because in the end being ambitious and capable hinges on being able to connect with others. In the past I have also been called opportunistic and had other women jealous of me for carrying such tigress traits.

The feminist tragedy isn’t that this is a distinct quality or a method in contrast to a more pious route. The feminist tragedy (and this is no great revelation if you have ever seen a single episode of Sex in the City) is that women are perceived by one another and men as “tigers” or “witchy” whereas this quality in a man is the basis for their dominance—it’s called being “charismatic” or being a good “networker.”

As far as this book is concerned—the difference between 1930 and 2013 is nothing when it comes to the history of civilization. It doesn’t surprise me that such a passage is still relevant.

Further, I don’t know about this Isabelle chick—but as a Solange (or a Samantha), I find Isabelle’s ability to win by maintaining her conviction towards unconditional love—absolutely pathetic.

Alex Escamillia is a real estate developer working in New York City.

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Judith Gurewich is Publisher of Other Press.

A version of this article ran in the December 14, 2012 issue of Publishers Weekly’s Tip Sheet.

Love and Logic in Mendel's Dwarf

by Marjorie DeWitt

I think it’s safe to assume that if you’re reading this, you’re probably familiar with Other Press author Simon Mawer. We’ve published his two most recent novels—The Glass Room and Trapeze—and both have been New York Times best sellers. My introduction to Mawer’s writing, however, did not come from either of these books, but from Mendel’s Dwarf, originally published in 1998 by Penguin and now out for the first time as an e-book. The story follows Dr. Benedict Lambert, a brilliant geneticist, the great-great-great nephew of Gregor Mendel, and a darkly humorous and warm-hearted man. He also happens to be a dwarf. Let’s just say I was completely smitten and soon found myself banging on all of my coworkers’ doors, desperate to find someone to whom I could declare my love for this beautifully written and imaginative book.

Back when I first started college, I was a biology major. I was drawn to the sciences because they were straightforward and could be conquered with diligent study of formulae and memorization of things such as ADP and cytokinesis. Eventually, however, I decided that I preferred learning about what made a person a person, besides cells, and switched to English. At the time, there seemed to be a clear dichotomy between the two subject areas, but books like Mendel’s Dwarf show that there is no such distinction—that calculations and experiments do not distance us from our sensitivity, but can enhance and even sharpen it.

Ben uses science to find concrete answers to his own genetic problems, attempting to locate the gene that determines achondroplasia. While pursuing this research, he connects with a woman named Jean, a shy librarian. Ben also tells the story of his ancestor, Mendel, thoughtfully extrapolating when history doesn’t fill in the blanks. What appeals to me most about this book are the ways in which Mawer builds walls of logic around his characters, only to find that humanity still seeps through. Ben hides behind his dry wit, his genius, and even his dwarfism. And yet, Mawer has depicted a character that is complex, one who uses his scientific genius not to dissect his experiences, but to inform them. The novel is filled with science, but through Ben’s eyes, science is poetry. Feelings of isolation become evident in rundowns of phenotypic differences in members of his lecture audiences. The mating of Mendel’s pea plants is described in a way that can only be called erotic. Even Ben’s love for Jean must include data collection. She has heterochromatic eyes (two different colors)—an observation, but also a way for Ben to bridge the gap between them, for he believes that “in her own modest manner” she is a “monster” like him.

In response to his headmaster’s claim that dwarfism is a problem Ben must live with, he thinks, “It isn’t a problem I live with, as I might live with a birthmark or a stammer, or flat feet. It is not an addition, like a mole on my face, nor a subtraction, like premature baldness: it is me. There is no other.” Ben’s thought process is logical. If he is not one thing then he is another. He is left, after his deductions, only with what he is. He sees himself as no more and no less than a dwarf, but his reasoning is flawed, for the reader can see that Ben is much more than a logical conclusion.  It is Ben’s habit to break things down, to make them more palatable and easier to understand. And yet, there are always more layers to discover.

Simon Mawer has done a remarkable thing with Mendel’s Dwarf. He has written a well-researched and insightful book about the ethics of genetic engineering, and has also written a passionate and powerful love story. It’s truly inspiring to see how well these two seemingly disparate threads work together. Aside from a riveting plot, well-drawn characters, and absolutely fascinating writing, I really loved the novel for the way it changed my thinking. What could be more comic and tragic than the human genome, after all?

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Marjorie DeWitt is Assistant Editor of Other Press.

This article originally appeared in the December 2012 issue of the Other Press e-newsletter. Sign up here.