Isak

So That's Why the Isak Review of a William Styron Novel is Getting 8x as Many Hits as Usual

They are making a movie adaptation of William Styron's first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951), and it will be directed by Scott Cooper. (Here's my review of the dark, strange, humid story.) But be ware of news reports like this one, about the actresses vying for the role of Peyton Loftis, that describe Peyton as the main character of the book. That. Is. Not. True. The protagonist would be Milton Loftis, Peyton's father.

Orlando Figes Still Making Things Up, This Time Concerning Real-Life Victims of Stalin

Of course, we've long known that University of London historian Orlando Figes is, shall we say, slippery with the facts. His history of appropriation and sketchy sourcing in his books about Russia became particularly well known in 2010, when Figes was called out for systematically leaving anonymous bad reviews on the Amazon pages of his authorial rivals, as well as -- wouldn't you know it! -- glowing anonymous reviews on the pages of his own books. The Amazon story might have just been a hilarious anecdote if Figes first hadn't loudly disavowed the charges, and then threateningly set a lawyer upon the writers who discovered his tactics, and then tried to pin the whole affair on his wife.

So. Orlando Figes has a new book out.

It's called Just Send Me Word. But let's take a moment and look back at The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, a Figes book from 2007. When publication of the book was canceled in Russia, Figes suggested his book was too "politically inconvenient" to Valdimir Putin's regime to appear in Russian bookstores.

But two intrepid professors-turned-investigative journalists were skeptical. And what they uncovered is just an awful exploitation of the stories of real-life victims of Stalin's cruelty. They tell the whole story in an article for The Nation. Here is the part where Memorial, a human rights organization dedicated to the histories of Stalin's victims, uncovered dasterdly tactics when it fact-checked the Russian manuscript against Memorial's own interviews, which Figes used as a source.

Indeed, after looking at only a few chapters of The Whisperers, Memorial found so many misrepresentations of the life stories of Stalin’s victims that its chief researcher, a woman with extensive experience working on such materials, said, “I simply wept as I read it and tried to make corrections.” Here are just three examples, which we have also examined, whose gravity readers can decide for themselves:

§ To begin with an example that blends mistakes with invention, consider Figes’s treatment of Natalia Danilova (p. 253), whose father had been arrested. After misrepresenting her family history, Figes puts words in her mouth, evidently to help justify the title of his book: Except for an aunt, “the rest of us could only whisper in dissent.” The “quotation” does not appear in Memorial’s meticulous transcription of its recorded interview with Danilova.

§ Figes invents “facts” in other cases, apparently also for dramatic purpose. According to The Whisperers (pp. 215-17, 292-93), “it is inconceivable” that Mikhail Stroikov could have completed his dissertation while in prison “without the support of the political police. He had two uncles in the OGPU” (the political police). However, there is no evidence that Stroikov had any uncles, nor is there any reason to allege that he had the support of the secret police. Figes also claims that for helping Stroikov’s family, a friend then in exile was “rearrested, imprisoned and later shot.” In reality, this friend was not rearrested, imprisoned or executed, but lived almost to the age of 90.

§ Figes’s distortion of the fate of Dina Ielson-Grodzianskaia (pp. 361-62), who survived eight years in the Gulag, is grievous in a different respect. After placing her in the wrong concentration camp, he alleges that she was “one of the many ‘trusties’” whose collaboration earned them “those small advantages which…could make the difference between life and death.” There is no evidence in the interviews used by Figes that Ielson-Grodzianskaia was ever a “trusty” or received any special privileges. As a leading Memorial researcher commented, Figes’s account is “a direct insult to the memory of a prisoner.”

The thing about Figes: what a wasted talent. As I've written before about another talented fellow who bent facts to make a "better" story, I just have no patience for writers who either don't trust their audience, or don't trust the wonders of the real world, or don't trust the potency of art enough to tell stories honestly. These are our lives and hearts we're talking about. Accept no substitutes.

More from Stephen F. Cohen and Peter Reddaway in The Nation:

The Whisperers may be consistent with Figes’s other practices, but for us, longtime students (and friends) of victims of Stalinist and other Soviet-era repressions, the book’s defects are especially grave. For many Russians, particularly surviving family members, Stalin’s millions of victims are a “sacred memory.” Figes has not, to say the least, been faithful to that memory—nor to the truth-telling mission of the often politically embattled Memorial, which, despite the effort expended, honorably agreed with the decision against publishing the Russian edition. Still more, a great many Russians have suffered, even died, for, as Service put it, the “freedom to speak the truth.” Figes has not honored that martyrdom either.

And Then There Was This One Kid ...

 

Two different writing residencies at two different high schools in Detroit (via the InsideOut Literary Arts Project) has assured that I am unable to hook into any one narrative about what these urban public high schools under emergency management are like, or what Teenagers These Days are like, or what poetry has to do with any of it. I've spent the school year thinking about voice, and why the students struggle with open-ended questions ("What do you think?"). I wonder about how my Hmong students come from a culture without a written language. I wonder why the students were never so rapt as when I told stories about Houdini.

I think of about the intensity of that time in life when you simply haven't lived long enough to see yourself change: you really believe you'll never love again, because you've never known yourself to love again. And the vulnerability of caring about an idea -- to be out loud about what you don't like and, most especially, what you love: I've thought about that too as I came into these schools.

One of my residencies in particular has been an extreme challenge. But at both schools, I found spaces of connection. I'm fond of the ninth-grade girl with dimples that was startled by how much her poem about her grandmother dying influenced us (her teacher cried), and now she wants to be a poet. I'm fond of the short girl with glasses, a sophomore, who is loud, doesn't like to write, and walks in and out of the room all during class, but who once paged through a book of Ai's poems and liked them. She remembered them months later. There is the tall girl who dramatically wails "I don't know what to write! Tell me what to write!," and then writes. One boy, an eleventh-grader who twice beat me at chess, is quiet and presses his pencil so deep into his paper, it is as if he is cutting it. Another boy (tenth grade) moves to a desk in the corner of the room, away from us all, and bows his head in concentration as he makes letters that are really hard for him to make.

I want to tell you all their stories, but really, they can tell their own stories.

We've been having open mics on Wednesday afternoons at one of my schools, Southeastern (pictured above). Yesterday, I was happy to see a solid set of students from my classes come, including four ninth-grade boys. (The ninth grade at this school has classes separated by gender.) One of the boys signed up to perform without a second's hesitation. I'll call him Cyrus.

Now, here's the thing about Cyrus: he is fourteen, but it looks as if he is nine. He is a light-skinned boy with freckles and closely shaven hair. He had glasses at the beginning of the year, but does not anymore. One of the very interesting dynamics to observe in Cyrus's class is how power dynamics play out according to puberty. Cyrus is approached as if he were a toy. The other boys like to pick him up and pass him around.

Cyrus hardly shirks. He'll loudly (if ineffectively) yell for the boys to leave him alone. He is confident, nervy, spastic, utterly off-the-wall with energy: you can see that nine-year-old in him very clearly. He loves comics and adores the "Avengers" movie. He'll volunteer to read aloud just about anything. He fidgets and is noisy and likes to say something -- often nonsense -- in any gap of quiet he finds. Cyrus is also immensely smart: just very sharp, particularly with language, and he has a wealth of knowledge already pocketed inside him. I know this, but the truth is that most of what Cyrus wrote this year is goofy stuff. It's lines he'd run off quickly and play for maximum laughs and showmanship. His favorite lately has been a rap about bacon. Yes, bacon. He'd keep sneaking up behind me and launching in, rhyming "bacon" with "taken," and "hot" with "a lot."

I'm all about funny and silly poems. I love that Cyrus is playful with his words. But I also suspect that Cyrus uses humor as a deflection device. For a person who has more than his share of vulnerabilities in a very tough school, silliness seems to be his safest space.

He signed up for the open mic, and I was sure he was going to do his bacon rap. His turn comes up and he walks on that stage and, oh look ...

... Cyrus has memorized his poem (!). It is called "How to be a Man." I've never heard or read it before. He performed it a little anxiously, his hands in his pockets, fidgeting, and he stopped once when he stumbled: "I'm nervous." But Cyrus spoke loudly, with conviction and directness before rows of people who were almost universally older and larger than him. (One guy was carrying around a shot put, as part of training.)

And his poem was wonderful! Images, a litany of them: a poem full of rhetorical questions! A thoughtful articulation of what we load on to the idea of "manhood." But here's the thing that moves me most: Cyrus meant it.

It's brave enough to get up there for the first time and perform your own work. It's quite another thing to risk meaning what you say.

 

Image Credit: Cash & Associates

Orange Is Not The Only Fruit: Sponsor Pulls Support for Literary Prize

 

Deeply disappointing news: Orange, the mobile services company, has pulled its sponsorship for the Orange Prize, which is the prestigious award that has elevated and supported excellent literary fiction for seventeen years. With an explicit intention of elevating fiction written by women -- which, as the VIDA numbers persistently point out, is still quite necessary -- the Orange Prize has brought worldwide attention to the extraordinary fiction of Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (that's her, pictured above), Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Rose Tremain, Lionel Shriver, Téa Obreht, Carol Shields, Anne Michaels (for Fugitive Pieces, which is so, so good), and many others.

From the report in The Guardian:

The prize, which was set up to "celebrate excellence, originality and accessibility in women's writing from around the world", is given annually to the best book by a woman written in English. Winners ... are presented with a cheque for £30,000 and a bronze figurine known as "the Bessie".

The prize money itself is supplied through the endowment of a private donor, but the remainder of the award's expenses have been met by Orange's sponsorship since the prize was launched in January 1996. After this year's award is presented on 30 May, Orange ... will withdraw its support of the prize in order to focus on film industry sponsorship.

Then there's some blah-blah-blah statement from Orange about how they're pleased with the impact of their support over the years, and how literary fiction by women is worthy of support (albeit not by them anymore), etc.

Kate Mosse, the author and co-founder of the award, tells The Guardian that the Orange Prize organization is actively looking for a new sponsor that will carry the award into its next seventeen years. She adds:

"It's very rare for a sponsorship like this to come onto the market - the investment generates something in the region of £17.5m a year in advertising, and the cultural capital of the women's prise for fiction is practically second to none. The potential is very exciting."

The shortlist for this years prize are:

• Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan
• The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright
• Painter of Silence by Georgina Harding
• The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
• Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick
• State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

The winner will be crowned next week in what is expected to be the most downbeat awards ceremony ever.

Literary & Media Indulgences - 5/20/2012

-- In defense of the New York Public Library. The Rose Main Reading Room is pictured above. See also how hundreds of writers and scholars are rallying to save what matters most in the NYPL.

-- As part of its new 'Britain' issue, Granta recruits Gillian Clarke on poetry in the United Kingdom.

-- "The Lonely Ones:" On Susan Sontag.

-- Shooting is underway for Half of a Yellow Sun, the novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and it looks like the cast includes top names in both Nigerian and American cinema. Isak has two review of the novel: this one, by Monet Moutrie, and this brief take, by me.

-- What does Jeannette Winterson think about teaching creative writing? Wonder no more.

-- Here is why Charles Simic still writes poetry.

-- This week in Roxane Gay brilliance: "The Trouble with Prince Charming or He Who Trespassed Against Us."

-- Africa is a Country wonders why nine award-winning African books -- written in French -- are not translated into English. It cites a great Los Angeles Times profile of French-Congolese novelist Alain Mabanckou that suggests that "parochial tastes and pinched profit margins" have reduced Mabanckou's visibility among readers who might otherwise love his work.

-- "Writing in Uganda is not an easy venture. People do not understand if you say that you're a writer; they will immediately ask what newspaper you write for." From a missive from Kampala in Foreign Policy.

-- "What We Look Like." A comic from the excellent Anne Elizabeth Moore and Robyn Chapman on women in media.

-- The Millions looks at the inaugeration of Womanthology: Heroic, a new comics series.

-- The Broad Experience is a new podcast about women and the workplace.

-- Author Randa Jarrar, who is Palestinian-American, writes in Guernica about the debacle of trying to visit her sister in Israel.

-- E.J. Graff, who has done phenomenal investigative work on international adoption, says that you should not adopt from Ethiopia.

-- Garry Wills on the "blood feud" between Lyndon Johnson and Robert F. Kennedy. The tip-off, of course, is the latest in Robert A. Caro's Johnson biography, which Wills considers more of a biography of power than anything else. Bill Clinton -- that's right -- reviews the book in the New York Times.

-- "This is my paper. This is my town." A year after a devastating tornado, The Joplin Times has rediscovered its purpose.

-- "The Death and Life of Detroit." The American Prospect has a big feature on how change is and is not happening in the city.

-- Next American City's experiment in investigative journalism, Forefront, turns one month old.

-- Create / Connect / Transform. All makers, dreamers, and storytellers: you should come to the Allied Media Conference in Detroit next month.

-- Pawa254 is a new collaborative space in Nairobi for artists, journalists, and community organizers.

-- "Type Rider: Cycline the Great American Poem."

-- To PEN World Voices, the international literature summit in New York which just ended and which I continue to covet a ticket, Chad W. Post says, "make it new, make it international (dammit!)"

-- This poem by Sherman Alexie is extraordinary. It begins: "1. Sheldon decided he was an elephant."

-- Take a peek at Frida Kahlo's personal photographs.

-- Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer writes in the New York Review of Books on the new threat to freedom in South Africa.

-- "The spy who came in from the code." An alarming story of how Syria's strongmen got ahold of a documentary filmmaker's sources, putting lives at serious risk.

-- At PBS NewsHour, teachers share their stories of trying to bring climate change into their science classrooms. Meanwhile, MotherJones reports (unsurprisngly) that species extinctions are just as damaging as climate change.-- I wish I'd been there: David Graeber and Rebecca Solnit in conversation about solving problems, debtors' prisons, anarchy, obligation, and utopias.

-- "The Last Tower: The Decline and Fall of Public Housing." From the May issue of Harper's (which, seriously, you should waste no more time in subscribing to: it's affordable, outstanding, and utterly worthwhile).

-- On the creation and cultivation of "Toni Morrison" by the writer from Lorain, Ohio born as Chloe Wofford.

-- Not long after Carlos Fuentes made waves among American readers, NPR's Fresh Air interviewed the Mexican writer. Fuentes died this week at age 83.

Translation and Biography and Magic

The New Yorker's new Page-Turner section quickens my heart with another brilliant look at the purpose and possibilities of literary translation, this time featuring Judith Thurman's thinking. I knew Thurman from her famous biography of Isak Dinesen ("the life of a storyteller"), which won a National Book Award; I had no idea that she is a translator from Spanish and French as well. She's magicked her way through the poems of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Louise Labé; she saw her biography of Dinesen translated into languages she cannot read; she is reading Lydia Davis's rendition of Madame Bovary in English for the first time.

She has things to say. And she offers asides about Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, and second-wave feminism along the way. She pairs a close reading of a a few lines from Davis's Madame Bovary with a panoramic look at the art of twinning a writer.

Translation is a mysterious process, and just as the noun “mystery” is religious in origin, so is the verb “to translate.” Its first meaning is “to remove the body or relics of a saint or hero from one place of internment or repose to another.” Its second meaning is “to carry or convey to heaven without death.” That, of course, is what one aspires to do when one translates a work of literature: to convey a vital essence, which has been buried in the crypt (encrypted) of an alien lexicon, to a place in the light where it can endure.

Biography and translation are related enterprises. In neither case does a literal transcription produce the most desirable result: it refuses the risks—the deep adventure—of the poetry. The transcription school sticks timidly to the shore of fact, accounting for every petty quarrel, doctor’s appointment, cup of coffee, thank-you note, orgasm, and pair of gloves. Such biographies may be useful to the scholar, but they cheat a lay reader of something more vibrant and sensuous, which only comes through an imaginative connection. When one translates the story of another life—an epic with many ellipses, lost passages, and obscure references—it is always into one’s own sentences, and if the essential question of biography is Who are you?, the only way to hold a steady course toward the answer is to keep asking, at frequent intervals, Who am I?

The First Line of The Stranger

Albert Camus's strange little novel bears an evocative and famous first line: "Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.” Ryan Bloom takes a look at how various translators have rendered the sentence into English in The New Yorker, with particular attention two the two decisions that they seem to keep getting wrong. One of them stretches back to the original English translation:

Stuart Gilbert, a British scholar and a friend of James Joyce, was the first person to attempt Camus’s “L’Étranger” in English. In 1946, Gilbert translated the book’s title as “The Outsider” and rendered the first line as “Mother died today.” Simple, succinct, and incorrect.

In 1982, both Joseph Laredo and Kate Griffith produced new translations of “L’Étranger,” each opting for Gilbert’s revised title, “The Stranger,” but preserving his first line. “Mother died today” remained, and it wasn’t until 1988 that the line saw a single word changed. It was then that American translator and poet Matthew Ward reverted “Mother” back to Maman. One word? What’s the big deal? A large part of how we view and—alongside the novel’s court—ultimately judge Meursault lies in our perception of his relationship with his mother. We condemn or set him free based not on the crime he commits but on our assessment of him as a person. Does he love his mother? Or is he cold toward her, uncaring, even?

First impressions matter, and, for forty-two years, the way that American readers were introduced to Meursault was through the detached formality of his statement: “Mother died today.” There is little warmth, little bond or closeness or love in “Mother,” which is a static, archetypal term, not the sort of thing we use for a living, breathing being with whom we have close relations. To do so would be like calling the family dog “Dog” or a husband “Husband.” The word forces us to see Meursault as distant from the woman who bore him.

Collecting Our Thoughts on Carlos Fuentes

Mexico's great literary legend, Carlos Fuentes, died today at age 83. The prolific author and winner of the Cervantes Prize published his first novel at age 29; his final book will come out next year. His imaginative life was twinned with his political one: he was a sharp critic of corruption, censorship, and policies that perpetuate and criminalize poverty. He wrote nonfiction and journalism, but his critique of Mexico's drug wars came in the form of the novel Destiny and Desire, which is narrated by a severed head (and translated into English by Edith Grossman). Fuentes is also a former ambassador in France -- a position he resigned in protest of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz being named ambassador to Spain; Díaz Ordaz had been Mexico's president in 1968 when national troops opened fire on student protesters. In Fuentes's double life as a diplomat and fierce writer, he reminds me of Pablo Neruda, and makes me think of "Politics and the English Language" a touch differently: holding in my mind these men who danced with language wearing very different gowns.

From Anthony DePalma's remembrance of Fuentes in the New York Times:

Mr. Fuentes was one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world, a catalyst, along with Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortázar, of the explosion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and ’70s, known as El Boom. He wrote plays, short stories, political nonfiction and novels, many of them chronicles of tangled love.

And this is fascinating (emphasis mine):

Mr. Fuentes received wide recognition in the United States in 1985 with his novel “The Old Gringo,” a convoluted tale about the American writer Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared during the Mexican Revolution. It was the first book by a Mexican novelist to become a best seller north of the border ...

El Universal in Mexico has an enormous banner retrospective on Fuentes, which includes gathering the reflections of other writers. Jorge Volpi named him "el mayor novelista de México." Xavier Velasco said this:

Es un golpe muy fuerte, no creo que estemos a tiempo de hacer la mínima reflexión que nos acerque a aquilatar lo que acabamos de perder ... Es el novelista más grande que ha dado México, es el hombre que nos puso en el mapa, sin Carlos Fuentes no se donde estaría"

We can thank Dalkey Archive Press for being one of the publishers who has been key to bringing Fuentes' books into English, including Terra Nostra (reissue edition), Christopher Unborn, Where the Air is Clear, and Distant Relations. Dalkey will publish a Vlad, a novella, this summer ("Where, Carlos Fuentes asks, is a modern-day vampire to roost?") and Adam in Eden, another novella, in autumn. Next year -- and I cannot wait for this -- it will have for us "Fuentes's ambitious survey of Latin American fiction," called, of course, The Great Latin American Novel.

Weetzie Bat Wonders

I remember the first time I uncovered Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat books: it was sometime in the early 1990s, it was an old worn paperback on a friend's shelf that I began paging through while said friend was off doing something else. (Aside: this kind of chance wonder is one of the unique purposes of print books.) Brief and strange, brimming with leaps and language that dances as language, this kind of writing is hard to shake off. And while the books are intended for young adult audiences, they seem to sit on rare air that we all would do well to breathe. Lesser known than Block's Weetzie Bat is The Rose and the Beast, her "fairy tales retold." The one called "Snow" begins like this:

When she was born her mother was so young, still a girl herself, didn't know what to do with her. She screamed and screamed -- the child. Her mother sat crying in the garden. The gardener came by to dig up the soil. It was winter. The child was frost-colored. The gardener stood before the cold winter sun, blocking the light with his broad shoulders. The mother looked like a broken rose bush.

The Los Angeles Review of Books has an audio interview with Block, complete with Iggy Pop music. And Bennett Madison has an accompanying essay on "Weetzie Bat Meets the Genie," in which he celebrates the breathless stories set squarely in "Los Angeles Rococo."

Russian Writers in Evolution

Too often, people seem to associate the phrase "Russian writers" with the past tense, a conflation that boils down the literary lights of the great north country with heavyweights like Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Pushkin, and Tolstoy, or brilliant Soviet-era satirists like Ilf/Petrov and Bulgakov. But today's Russian writers made themselves very much part of the present -- nay, the future -- in yesterday's peaceful protest to Vladimir Putin's policies in Moscow's Pushkin Square (natch).Twelve writers -- ranging from a poet to a detective novelist to a literary celebrity -- organized a “test stroll" to, according to the New York Times, "determine whether it was possible to spend an afternoon walking en masse from one city park to another “without being blocked, beaten, poisoned with gas, detained, arrested or at least subjected to stupid molestation with questions.”

Ten thousand people joined them. They did not have a permit. The police allowed them to pass by.

More reporting from the streets:

"We see by the number of people that literature still has authority in our society because no one called these people — they came themselves,” said Lev Rubinstein, 65, a poet and one of the organizers. “We thought this would be a modest stroll of several literary colleagues, and this is what happened. You can see it yourself.”

“I don’t know how this will all end, but I can say that no one will forget it,” he said.

Russian history is full of confrontations between leaders and writers, whom Stalin once described as the “engineers of the human soul.” Sunday’s march alluded to this, beginning at a statue of the poet Aleksandr S. Pushkin — who was sent into exile by Czar Alexander I — and ending at a statue of Aleksandr S. Griboyedov, a playwright whose sendup of the Moscow aristocracy was not released by czarist censors until after his death.

Among the other Russian writers affirming themselves and their people to be creators of their future as well as of their literature are Dmitri L. Bykov, a poet, critic, and novelist; Irina Yasina, a journalist; Lyudmila Ulitskaya, a novelist; and Boris Akunin, that writer of detective novels.

Poem: "The Trees"

The Trees
By Philip Larkin

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

 

"The Trees" was written in 1967, published in 1968, and collected in Philip Larkin's High Windows (1974), as well as in Collected Poems. Larkin was born in Warwickshire, England, and graduated from Oxford during the war. He became the longtime librarian and the University of Hull, working there and writing poems until his death in 1985.

 

About the Image: Off Brookside Lane in Nairobi.