New York Journal News // Andrew Ervin's This Tangle of Thorns
This Tangle of Thorns
By Andrew Ervin
The latest brave and brilliant voices on small presses
The stories of Karen Brennan's "The Garden in Which I Walk" (FC2, $14.95) run hot and cold. Nothing's lukewarm here. Some are so tedious and predictable that I can't imagine how they ever got into print, but a few brilliant entries depart far enough from mainstream, mass appeal tastes to actively challenge our complacency as readers. Brennan is upfront about the influence of Chekov and Flaubert, which is risky because it forces comparisons that almost no contemporary author can withstand. But some of these - "Famished" and "Paradise" and "Secret Encounters" - certainly live up to that self-imposed hype.
Most feature intellectual women on the verge of middle age, and occasionally nervous breakdowns. Many of them make bad decisions. They meet people less stable than themselves, such as a drunk cop in a movie theater and a blubbering woman in the next airplane seat, and thus judge their own mental balance in relation to others'. The best story here, "Saw," is about what happens "when a beautiful woman gets maimed by a chain saw." Strangely, the bizarre, disfiguring accident may not represent the most violent aspect of this story. Brennan isn't afraid to take on big issues, like violence against women, and at her best she gives us a ton to ponder and to savor.
"Hymns to Millionaires" (Twisted Spoon Press, $13.50) is a debut collection by a young Canadian author living in Poland. His name is Soren A. Gauger, and you'll want to remember it. What a book.
The tone of these 11 stories vaguely resembles that of the very best post-World War II literature out of Central Europe. Gombrowicz's "Bacacay" is a likely influence, as is "Hourglass" or "Garden, Ashes" by Danilo Kis, but Gauger isn't content to mimic those masters. Instead, he mines the wonderful things about that tradition, melts it down, and refashions it into something new using a few contemporary narrative devices and some old-fashioned philosophical firepower.
Nothing exciting or surprising happens in "Green Tea," arguably the most conventional story of the bunch. A married man bumps into a would-be paramour in a teahouse. But Gauger infuses - sorry - the simple premise with an amazingly distinctive voice. "There was that knowing smile again. It occurred to me that it was entirely synthetic, that it did not reflect anything except knowingness, hoping to affect a confirmation of whatever indecencies might be fluttering about in my mind without knowing what they were, or indeed, if they even existed. It seemed to me the height of absurdity, communicating gestures that signaled only themselves.
"The title story and "The Unusual Narrative of the Odessa Conference" and "How I Got Rid of It" are even more innovative and engaging. "Hymns to Millionaires" is a small treasure, and Gauger is an uncompromising author willing to raise some big questions no one has asked in a long time.
Any book is bound to be a letdown after reading something as compelling as Gauger's, but I had the good fortune of picking up "Television" (Dalkey Archive Press, $12.95) by the French author Jean-Philippe Toussaint. In it, an unnamed, 40ish scholar has moved to Berlin to write a monograph on the Italian painter Tiziano Vecellio. He decides to quit watching TV but, still unable to work, finds himself haunted by different kinds of monitors and screens - on a microfiche machine, in a museum's surveillance room. Crudely put, the novel turns into a kind of meditation on how television, even when it's switched off, continues to affect us:
"Sitting on the couch in the living room before the dark TV set, I looked at the screen in front of me and wondered what might be on. For one essential characteristic of television, when you're not watching it, is that it makes you think something might happen if you turned it on, something more powerful and more unexpected than what happens to you in your ordinary life."
Toussaint manages an impressive balancing act between the weighty novel of ideas and Peter Sellars-like slapstick. He shows us an essentially boring, often petty narrator whose inner world is so rich that we find ourselves fascinated by watching him do nothing - by watching him not watching. Reading "Television" is a lot like staring at your own reflection in a darkened set and somehow learning new and not always welcome, things about yourself.
I suspect there exists in Hades a mysteriously warm kiddie pool reserved for ineffectual, lazy translators. And the person who rendered Sándor Márai from the German instead of his native Hungarian, for instance, should start shopping for a Speedo. Jordan Stump on the other hand has absolutely nothing to sweat. We have him to thank for introducing both "Television" and Antoine Volodine's "Minor Angels" (University of Nebraska Press, $25) to English-reading audiences.
"Minor Angels" contains 49 dreamy "narracts," as Volodine calls them, which resemble short, Baudelaire-like prose poems. Each focuses on a particular character, the angels of the title. And Rilke was right: Every angel is terrible. But the language here is intoxicating, and the buzz you get makes even the ugliest stories appear beautiful.
One opens, "Laetitia Scheidmann poured a double goblet of fermented camel's milk into her grandson's mouth, to give him courage as he faced the hail of bullets." Another, "In the westernmost neighborhood beyond the Rue de Praires, there are cellars where men lock themselves up with dogs and eat them."
The formal arrangement is amazing. The first narract directly ties in with the last one, the second with the penultimate, and so on. The book becomes even more impressive as we see each separate narract snowball into a larger story, set in a time when "humanity had now entered upon the more-or-less final stage of its fading." In describing how the residents of a nursing home attempt to undermine a futuristic capitalism system, Volodine presents a version of "1,001 Nights" as retold amid Borges' circular ruins. In the process, he somehow creates something new - and something wholly his own.
Andrew Ervin is a writer and book critic who lives in Champaign, Ill.
By Andrew Ervin
The latest brave and brilliant voices on small presses
The stories of Karen Brennan's "The Garden in Which I Walk" (FC2, $14.95) run hot and cold. Nothing's lukewarm here. Some are so tedious and predictable that I can't imagine how they ever got into print, but a few brilliant entries depart far enough from mainstream, mass appeal tastes to actively challenge our complacency as readers. Brennan is upfront about the influence of Chekov and Flaubert, which is risky because it forces comparisons that almost no contemporary author can withstand. But some of these - "Famished" and "Paradise" and "Secret Encounters" - certainly live up to that self-imposed hype.
Most feature intellectual women on the verge of middle age, and occasionally nervous breakdowns. Many of them make bad decisions. They meet people less stable than themselves, such as a drunk cop in a movie theater and a blubbering woman in the next airplane seat, and thus judge their own mental balance in relation to others'. The best story here, "Saw," is about what happens "when a beautiful woman gets maimed by a chain saw." Strangely, the bizarre, disfiguring accident may not represent the most violent aspect of this story. Brennan isn't afraid to take on big issues, like violence against women, and at her best she gives us a ton to ponder and to savor.
"Hymns to Millionaires" (Twisted Spoon Press, $13.50) is a debut collection by a young Canadian author living in Poland. His name is Soren A. Gauger, and you'll want to remember it. What a book.
The tone of these 11 stories vaguely resembles that of the very best post-World War II literature out of Central Europe. Gombrowicz's "Bacacay" is a likely influence, as is "Hourglass" or "Garden, Ashes" by Danilo Kis, but Gauger isn't content to mimic those masters. Instead, he mines the wonderful things about that tradition, melts it down, and refashions it into something new using a few contemporary narrative devices and some old-fashioned philosophical firepower.
Nothing exciting or surprising happens in "Green Tea," arguably the most conventional story of the bunch. A married man bumps into a would-be paramour in a teahouse. But Gauger infuses - sorry - the simple premise with an amazingly distinctive voice. "There was that knowing smile again. It occurred to me that it was entirely synthetic, that it did not reflect anything except knowingness, hoping to affect a confirmation of whatever indecencies might be fluttering about in my mind without knowing what they were, or indeed, if they even existed. It seemed to me the height of absurdity, communicating gestures that signaled only themselves.
"The title story and "The Unusual Narrative of the Odessa Conference" and "How I Got Rid of It" are even more innovative and engaging. "Hymns to Millionaires" is a small treasure, and Gauger is an uncompromising author willing to raise some big questions no one has asked in a long time.
Any book is bound to be a letdown after reading something as compelling as Gauger's, but I had the good fortune of picking up "Television" (Dalkey Archive Press, $12.95) by the French author Jean-Philippe Toussaint. In it, an unnamed, 40ish scholar has moved to Berlin to write a monograph on the Italian painter Tiziano Vecellio. He decides to quit watching TV but, still unable to work, finds himself haunted by different kinds of monitors and screens - on a microfiche machine, in a museum's surveillance room. Crudely put, the novel turns into a kind of meditation on how television, even when it's switched off, continues to affect us:
"Sitting on the couch in the living room before the dark TV set, I looked at the screen in front of me and wondered what might be on. For one essential characteristic of television, when you're not watching it, is that it makes you think something might happen if you turned it on, something more powerful and more unexpected than what happens to you in your ordinary life."
Toussaint manages an impressive balancing act between the weighty novel of ideas and Peter Sellars-like slapstick. He shows us an essentially boring, often petty narrator whose inner world is so rich that we find ourselves fascinated by watching him do nothing - by watching him not watching. Reading "Television" is a lot like staring at your own reflection in a darkened set and somehow learning new and not always welcome, things about yourself.
I suspect there exists in Hades a mysteriously warm kiddie pool reserved for ineffectual, lazy translators. And the person who rendered Sándor Márai from the German instead of his native Hungarian, for instance, should start shopping for a Speedo. Jordan Stump on the other hand has absolutely nothing to sweat. We have him to thank for introducing both "Television" and Antoine Volodine's "Minor Angels" (University of Nebraska Press, $25) to English-reading audiences.
"Minor Angels" contains 49 dreamy "narracts," as Volodine calls them, which resemble short, Baudelaire-like prose poems. Each focuses on a particular character, the angels of the title. And Rilke was right: Every angel is terrible. But the language here is intoxicating, and the buzz you get makes even the ugliest stories appear beautiful.
One opens, "Laetitia Scheidmann poured a double goblet of fermented camel's milk into her grandson's mouth, to give him courage as he faced the hail of bullets." Another, "In the westernmost neighborhood beyond the Rue de Praires, there are cellars where men lock themselves up with dogs and eat them."
The formal arrangement is amazing. The first narract directly ties in with the last one, the second with the penultimate, and so on. The book becomes even more impressive as we see each separate narract snowball into a larger story, set in a time when "humanity had now entered upon the more-or-less final stage of its fading." In describing how the residents of a nursing home attempt to undermine a futuristic capitalism system, Volodine presents a version of "1,001 Nights" as retold amid Borges' circular ruins. In the process, he somehow creates something new - and something wholly his own.
Andrew Ervin is a writer and book critic who lives in Champaign, Ill.
posted by Andrew Ervin at
2/20/2005
0 Comments
