Susan Howe, _Debths_

ONE COULD ORGANIZE a great course on American culture and literature around the books of Susan Howe, reading Mary Rowlandson in conjunction with Howe's Singularities, or Emily Dickinson in conjunction with My Emily Dickinson, and wrapping up with a field trip to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in conjunction with this one, Debths.

The tricky part would getting the students to engage with Howe's writing, which makes few concessions to ordinary readerly expectations. Debths, for instance, contains "Tom Tit Tot," a fifty-some-page poem created by collaging photocopied bits of old books (some legible, some not) into spiky clumps of text. 

The relatively more conventional poems would also discourage a reader unprepared to make an effort.

John Chipman Gray and the Rule Against Perpetuities

Something more ancient than what you remember or may not

remember moved me to lean on you. Because of all the dead.

I can't.

            My cry is in the frost.

John Chipman Gray is the Gray of the law firm Ropes and Gray and also a much cited authority on property law. He wrote an influential book about the limits of perpetuities, that is, efforts to legally bind how the people of the future can dispose of property...which is in a way what Isabella Stewart Gardner tried to do in creating her museum with the stipulation that it had to remain exactly as she arranged it...but can one really do that? Does that make the dead more powerful than the living, to the point that life starts shutting down "because of all the dead" hedging us in with their demands that things not change? Does "my cry is in the frost" evoke one of Howe's illustrious predecessors as a poet of New England, someone who might not even recognize Howe's poetry as poetry but is nonetheless part of the tradition that enables her work?

Howe's poetry opens up if you, the reader, work at it. But you do have to work at it.

Howe is someone whose work I respect and admire more than I enjoy, but I do respect and admire it.

César Vallejo, _Trilce_, trans. Rebecca Seiferle

 In January 1994 (if "AI Overview" is to be trusted) I attended a reading by the late Philip Levine at which, briefly interrupting the reading of his poems, he enthusiastically recommended the poetry of César Vallejo. Not long after that, I stumbled upon this volume (Sheep Meadow Press, 1992) in a wonderful local used book store (A Novel Idea, Lincoln, Nebraska) and promptly bought it. 

Then it remained on my shelf for slightly over three decades until I read Michael Hofmann's recent LRB review of Margaret Jull Costa's new translation of Vallejo (The Eternal Dice, New Directions) and thought, "hmm, don't I have a book of his already?" And there it was on the shelf, not far from a few Vargas Llosa novels, a supernova waiting for me to open it up. 

Well, Levine was right. I remember taking his recommendation to mean that Vallejo's poetry must be a bit like his own--straightforward, plain language, socially conscious--so I was taken by surprise by Vallejo's willingness to firebomb each and every convention: not just prosodic, but also syntactic, and even lexical (for instance, he made up the word "trilce," and no one is sure what it means). 

Vallejo is certainly aware of tradition, certainly aware of history, even pulling in some Quechua elements alongside the Spanish ones, but he is less interested in preservation than in recombining the pieces into something transformatively new. As Joyce left Ireland for the continent in order to write Ireland--"to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race"--Vallejo left Peru for Paris in order to write Peru. How Peruvian Vallejo's Peru is I cannot say--maybe the relationship is like that of Blake's "Albion" to England--but it's a lively place to contemplate.

And Trilce was published in 1922, the same year as Ulysses and The Waste Land, two other great examples of the illuminating reconfiguration of a place, a history, and a culture by the writerly imagination.

It must be a good time for Vallejo-in-English, since we have not only the Jull Costa translation but another new one from NYRB Poets by William Rowe and Helen Dimos. It would be worth my while to read another translation, I think; Hofmann notes that translations vary widely, since the poems are very hard to pin down, and that no one translation can be definitive.

And I have reaffirmed respect for the critical judgements of Philip Levine. I should have known from his championing of Larry Levis that he was not the kind of poet who admires only work aesthetically comparable to his own. His celebration of Vallejo confirms it.

László Krasznahorkai, _The Melancholy of Resistance_, trans. George Szirtes

 I HAVE OWNED this for years, maybe ten, but I only started it last August. I was only a hundred pages in or so when I saw the announcement that Krasznahorkai had won the Nobel. The sweet part of that was my being able honestly to answer "yes" when asked whether I had read anything by him.

A magnificent novel, I would say. It took me a few months to read, however.  It is not long (just 314 pages in the New Directions paperback I read), although it is dense (some paragraphs are a few pages long), but I found myself needing to takes some weeks-long breaks from it because it is terrifying. It probably did not help that I tended to be reading it between 11:00 p.m. and one o'clock in the morning.

The Melancholy of Resistance is not a thriller nor a horror novel. The terror lies in the novel's depiction of a crypto-fascist authoritarian seizing control of a modest-sized city in Hungary, and the not-at-all-distant similarities between what is happening in this fictional town and what is happening in the U.S.A. right now.

Krasznahorkai's portrait of the seizure of power does not seem historically specific; no dates are mentioned, nor is the Arrow Cross or Ferenc Szálasi. We are definitely in Hungary and might be in the 1930s or 1940s, although there are no references to historical events that might pin the story down (much as The Trial seems set in Prague before the outbreak of World War I, but we get no certain indications that it is). Krasznahorkai seems to be about drawing archetypes rather than writing historical fiction.

The key archetype is Mrs. Eszter, whose attributes coincide frequently with those of President Trump and his team: a sense that her will is a law unto itself, a willingness to exploit common fears and resentments to gain power, the whipping up of hatred against outsiders, the promptness in erecting Horst Wessel-like "martyrs," a readiness to resort to violence. No armbands, banners, or slogans, but the psychological architecture of right-wing authoritarianism is all there.

The novel takes place over just a couple of days, but in that brief time Mrs. Eszter stages a kind of coup, helped at first by the police chief (who turns out to be an unreliable drunk) then by a state official making a visit, somehow collecting the reins of power into her hands. The opportunity she is looking for arrives in the form of a traveling company with an unusual exhibit, a preserved whale (Leviathan?), a departure from the familiar that she uses to provoke the town's suspicion of outsiders and fear of the unknown to the point of violence.

Can anyone stop her? Perhaps her estranged husband, Mr. Eszter, person of letters and musicologist (he is particularly interested in the keyboard tuning systems of Andreas Werckmeister--as with the possible allusion to Hobbes's Leviathan, there may be thematic implications here). But Mr. Eszter can't get it together, quite, can't protect his eccentric friend Valuska or the town from Mrs. Eszter's machinations. He succumbs to the idea "that there was one law and one law only, that of the strong which dictated that 'the stronger power was absolute'." Shades of Stephen Miller! The town "cannot be governed in the old way anymore!" insists Mrs. Eszter, and it turns out she knows exactly what the new way should like. Shades of Miller again, not to mention the whole administration to which he belongs.

Kim Hyesoon, _Phantom Pain Wings_, trans. Don Mee Choi

 I WAS READING somewhere recently about South Korea's low fertility rate, which has been <1 for a few years now (replacement level is 2.1). The writer's take was that the education level of South Korean women has risen dramatically in recent generations, but the society's patriarchal culture has scarcely budged, with the consequence that younger South Korean women are intentionally avoiding marriage and motherhood, even boyfriends and sex (you can read up on the "4B movement" in a good many places).

Reading Han Kang's novel The Vegetarian and this collection by Korean poet Kim Hyesoon has made me a well-wisher to the 4B movement. The male entitlement on view in both books induces shudders. HUNTR/X wouldn't stand for it, I'm sure (come to think of it, they don't have boyfriends, do they?).

The collection's (English) title refers to the pain someone who has had (for example) a leg amputated can still experience in the now-absent leg, although the missing limbs in this instance are wings, as though Kim were a bird who had lost her wings. The poems seem to be working out this loss or working towards recovering birdness while at the same time grieving another loss, the deaths of her parents. As Kim writes in the essay that New Directions have appended to this translation, "I came to write Phantom Pain Wings after Daddy passed away. I called out for birds endlessly. I wanted to become a translator of bird language."

Being a bird, for Kim, seems to involve getting up and out, leaving the cage, breaking into a new dimension (that I was also reading Cartarescu's Solenoid as I was reading her poems might have reinforced this theme for me). For instance:

I fly then stop

I fly then chirp

Inside my made-up world, I can go very far

Not a song

Not an echo

but a faraway place where there's only freedom

I'm bird, bird flying in that place

That is not exactly a typical passage, though, as Kim is usually wilder, stranger, more surreal. Try this:

You died faraway and returned

Daddy, like an owl,

you perch on the dining table

and see night during the day

night during the night

Daddy, when you're too embarrassed, 

you swear every other word

like I swear at myself in the third person

Everybody says it's my fault

and not my brother's fault

Daddy, your flesh-colored head

spews white hair like a white trumpet

I wondered a bit at translator Don Mee Choi's decision to go with "Daddy" throughout the book, since the word will certainly remind English-speaking readers of Sylvia Plath, but it turned out Kim is conversant with Plath (see p. 127), and the intertextual echo came to seem, as in the quoted passage, uncannily  resonant.

Kim may not attract an audience the size of those for K-Pop, or South Korean film, or even Han Kang's novels, but if you were wondering whether South Korea's cultural explosion is also happening in poetry, the answer is yes.

Mircea Cartarescu, _Solenoid_, trans. Sean Cotter (2 of 2)

SEVERAL CHAPTERS ARE set in the narrator's childhood, and I was taken by surprise by how familiar the world of these chapters seemed. I say "by surprise" because even though Cartarescu and I are in the same age cohort--I am two years older--Romania in the late 1950s and early 1960s must have been a very different place than the American Midwest during the same period. Or so one would think. But the atmosphere of the institutions, the slightly stricken look of the streets, the lingering traces of life as it was before the Second World War, were apparently similar enough that the landscapes of Solenoid, physical and spiritual, seemed eerily recognizable to me.

The young Cartarescu and the young me were growing up under very different kinds of government, of course. Soviet troops only left Romania when Cartarescu was two years old, and Nicolae Ceaușescu came to power when the novelist was nine. The novel only occasionally glances at the political, however, and perhaps the Cold War era as lived in in the lower-profile regions of the East was somehow comparable to the same historical experience in the lower-profile regions of the West.

Ceaușescu is never mentioned by name in the novel, but we still get a sense of a lowering sky, of a grayness, of painfully circumscribed opportunities, of a vaguely oppressive something or other that gets in the way of any kind of flourishing or renewal. All this may be Cartarescu's way of  rendering life in a totalitarian society. And the novel's recurring sense that there is another possibility, a fourth dimension, mysterious but possibly accessible, may have a political aspect: it may represent, among other things, the feeling that there is another way to live, that Communism might come to an end. The tesseracts, Klein bottles, and unreadable manuscripts may all be pointing to the idea that the unrealizable may be realized after all, in some other realm, some other time, some barely imaginable transfigured future.

The end of the book, when Bucharest seems to emerge out of a state of suspended animation into some kind of transformation, both devastated and remade, perhaps renders the cataclysm of 1989. There are no specific references to those events, which in Romania were particularly terrible. But the sense that we have emerged into a different world, unfamiliar but alive with potential, make for a hopeful ending.

Mircea Cartarescu, _Solenoid_, trans. Sean Cotter (1 of 2)

 IT TOOK ME quite a while to finish this, taking a few breaks, but my admiration for it is limitless. Deep thanks to Deep Vellum for bringing it out in the U.S. and to Sean Cotter for a graceful, compelling translation.

My genre designation would be "alternative autofiction." That would be "alternative" as in "alternative history," e.g. Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle or Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, historical fiction that imagines how history might have unfolded had one event or another fallen out differently. Solenoid, I think, is (to some extent) about one of the lives Cartarescu might have led had some episodes in his earl life gone differently. The only comparable novel I have read is Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1, which actually gives four alternative lives to a characters whose starting circumstances closely match Auster's own.

The (unnamed) narrator has literary ambitions as a young man, but a poetry reading that might have been his big breakout moment goes terribly wrong, and he instead becomes a teacher of Romanian at a secondary school in Bucharest. Cartarescu's own youthful literary ambitions bore fruit: he got published, won prizes, became famous. But what if they hadn't? He might easily have ended up teaching Romanian literature in Bucharest, in just such a school as this, with a group of students, administrators, and fellow teachers as idiosyncratic as the cast of a Wes Anderson film.

The building itself has its idiosyncracies, for that matter, subterranean passages and outbuildings that house unlikely objects (e.g., a kind of demonic, David Cronenberg dentist's chair) and contain mysterious portals. The world of Solenoid is somewhat comparable to that in Alasdair Gray's Lanark, a grimy urban setting that somehow exists alongside, or parallel to, or behind a weirder, more fantastical one. A kind of European magical realism, maybe, as in Bruno Schulz or Gunter Grass? 

The novel's mysterious parallel other world may be the one in which Cartarescu is a celebrated novelist. Is that world better? Maybe, maybe not. The crucial notion is that it is there. The novel persuades you that the world you know in its three familiar dimensions is not the only world there is--that fourth and fifth dimensions are out there, to be fleetingly glimpsed in dreams, or in the visionary theories of Nikola Tesla, or the inscrutable language of the Voynich Manuscript, or in the humming power of the giant solenoid buried under the narrator's house, which enable him and his girlfriend Irina to levitate during sex.

Jane DeLynn, _In Thrall_

PUBLISHED IN 1982, but I had never heard/read of it until I saw Malin Hay's London Review of Books piece on the 2024 Semiotexte reprint. Hay explains (as does Colm Tóibín in this volume's introduction) that the novel has long had the standing of a classic among lesbian readers, and it's easy to see why. It's brilliant.

The narrator, Lynn, is a senior in an all-girls high school in New York City, circa the mid-1960s. She is Jewish and middle-class, belongs to a circle of girlfriends who reminded me a bit of the girls in Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye, is dating a handsome, athletic but profoundly uninteresting boy named Wolf, and has fallen helplessly in love with her English teacher, Miss Maxfeld.

Miss Maxfeld notices how seriously smitten Lynn is, starts inviting Lynn to her apartment for tea, and eventually, a sexual affair commences. Miss Maxfeld is taking advantage of the situation, one could say, but it's hard not to sympathize with her. She is lonely, but would never have seduced Lynn, I felt, had Lynn not been wholly receptive to being seduced. Miss Maxfeld is painfully clear-eyed about both Lynn and herself. She never flatters and always tries to be honest with herself and Lynn about how short-lived the affair is likely to be. She entertains no illusions and tries to dispel Lynn's illusions, without much success.

I found myself admiring Miss Maxfeld, actually, while Lynn...well, let's say Jane DeLynn has few rivals in the category of writers making adolescent characters based on the writers themselves seem vain, foolish, and maddeningly self-centered. James Joyce, perhaps. Joyce in the fifth chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man perhaps makes Stephen Dedalus as little likable as DeLynn makes Lynn--a performance of artistic self-abnegation so complete one can only salute and admire.

An early chapter features Lynn's English essay on the tragic hero, in which she argues that she herself is the perfect example of a tragic hero (see above, "maddeningly self-centered").  As the book approached its close, I began to fear that the novel's denouement would turn on the irony that, by getting fired, Miss Maxfeld would be the character with the tragic ending. Inevitably Lynn's parents are going to find out what is going on, and inevitably are going to pursue some form of punishment for Miss Maxfeld, and I was sure Miss Maxfeld was going to be fired if only to fulfill narrative symmetry.  However (spoiler alert), Lynn prevents that outcome in an unexpected flash of quick thinking and unselfish action. Whew. 

In an alternate world, this might be assigned in high school to be read alongside Catcher in the Rye. It would make a nice counterbalance.