History and Story: Madison Smartt Bell and Jane Delury In Conversation

Madison Smartt Bell is the author of twelve novels, including The Washington Square Ensemble (Viking, 1983), Doctor Sleep (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), and Soldier’s Joy (Ticknor & Fields, 1989), which received the Lillian Smith Award. His eighth novel, All Souls’ Rising (Pantheon, 1995), won the 1996 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and is collected with the second and third books of his Haitian Revolutionary trilogy in a uniform edition from Vintage Contemporaries. In 2020 Bell published Child of Light: A Biography of Robert Stone (Doubleday) and The Eye You See With: Selected Nonfiction of Robert Stone (Ecco). His most recent publication is the novel The Witch of Matongé, published by Concord Free Press in 2022; a limited number of free copies are available at www.concordfreepress.com in exchange for generosity to a charity or someone in need. Born and raised in Tennessee, Bell lived in New York, Haiti, Paris, and London before settling in Baltimore, Maryland. Since 1984 he has taught at Goucher College along with his wife, the poet Elizabeth Spires. 

Jane Delury is the author of The Balcony (Little, Brown, 2018), a novel-in-stories that won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; a second novel, Hedge, will be published by Zibby Books in June 2023. Her short stories have been published in Granta, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, Glimmer TrainNarrative, and other journals. Her awards include a PEN/O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Special Mention, and grants from the Maryland State Arts Council. Her essays have appeared in Real Simple, LitHub, and Poets & Writers.  She holds a BA in English and French literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, a maîtrise from the University of Grenoble, and an MA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. A professor at the University of Baltimore, she teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts and directs the BA in English. She lives in Baltimore with her daughters and her husband, the fiction writer Don Lee.

Bell and Delury met in Baltimore at the turn of the century, in an abandoned thread mill on the Jones Falls, then in temporary use as a venue for a literary cabaret fundraiser for the Associated Writing Programs.  Later, Bell read a couple of the stories eventually incorporated into The Balcony, of which he is an ardent admirer, and Jane used his book Narrative Design in her writing classes. They presently discovered that they were both Francophones and to some extent Francophiles, which is one source from which the following conversation flows.


Madison Smartt Bell: I want to ask, do you sometimes have a thought that presents itself in a language other than your firstQuelque chose qui te saut dans l’esprit comme ça? And then, what is your mother tongue?

My own first language is English, or as the French would say, American, in a Southern variation with slightly different manners of speaking used by the gentry, Black folk, and country white people.  And in very early childhood I heard Gullah spoken by Black people in the South Carolina barrier islands, and could speak it a little myself, though presently those people mostly disappeared and the beautiful language with them.

More recently I speak Haitian Kreyol in my sleep (so I’m told) and when feverish (weirdly), Spanish.  Waking, my Kreyol is sharply limited, and I have next to no Spanish at all. Still, I think a mother tongue may sometimes be other than one’s first—something one has a sense of coming home to—unexpectedly, perhaps. Et toi?

Jane Delury: My mother tongue (la langue de ma mère—I love literal translations) is English, flavored by the pronunciation tics passed down to my parents by their Irish parents. We lived in a suburb of Sacramento, California, without much linguistic diversity, but we traveled to Europe quite a bit, and my father spoke and wrote in French and German. He hired a French tutor for me when I was seven. My main memory of those lessons is that my tutor served me madeleines and water with grenadine syrup. I’d say I grew up with the flavor of other languages and cultures. Friday nights, while other kids were watching Gremlins with their families, I was watching The Tin Drum and Picnic at Hanging Rock. And during my teenage years, Les Misérables was my favorite novel. I read it in the original in college and felt as if I were discovering it all over again.

MSB: Were you upset by a bad translation?

JD: The one that comes to mind isn’t literary. It was on a menu in Grenoble, France, where I spent my junior year abroad.  The dish was “salad de crab avec avocat haché” and the English translation was “crab salad with diced lawyer.”

What’s your number one translation trauma?

MSB: Traduire c’est trahir is another French phrase that doesn’t work very well in translation.  Still, I admire translators (and interpreters).  I can’t begin to do what they do and have seldom tried.  There was one occasion soon after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, when I was asked by the New York Times to consult on a sampler of literary writing by Haitians or about Haiti, published as “Haiti in Ink and Tears.”  It was a twenty-four-hour turnaround, and our daughter, then in high school, stayed up late with me picking clips and translating.  I remember she and I were both unhappy with the existing translation of Lyonel Trouillot’s beautiful, poetic, and thus near-impossible-to-translate novel, Rue des Pas Perdus.  I think it was Celia who produced a to-us acceptable version of the passage that was used in the piece.

But you were saying!

JD: I ended up spending almost five years in Grenoble after college, and you might say that during the first year or so, I was living in a state of bad translation, as I tried to interpret day-to-day life in a new culture. But a couple years in, a switch flipped. My thoughts came first in French. My dreams were in French.  In fact, I didn’t feel at home in the US when I visited summers.   Everything was too big and too loud and too colorful.

Have you had that experience of going away and seeing your home differently afterward?

MSB: Most def.  I felt it most sharply the first few times I went to Haiti, where a person can spend all day looking for a box of matches, things like that.  Back in Baltimore I’d go to the grocery and freeze in front of fifteen different kinds of orange juice.  On one such occasion the police came to… assist me.  I learned to wait a few days after a return from Haiti before attempting to shop.

JD:  Yes, we Americans do like our endless choices.

MSB: Under those circumstances I found them fairly terrifying.

JD: Has that experience of alienation and confusion affected your fiction?

MSB: I’m not sure how much I’ve used that dislocation of place in fiction, although I think you have, in The Balcony.  During editorial work on The Witch of Matongé I realized how much that story turns on points of linguistic slash cultural dislocation, which in turn has a bearing on personal identity—thus, in fiction’s craft terms, character.

Certain Paul Bowles stories, “A Distant Episode” in particular, started me thinking that identity is really a linguistic construct, and so more fragile than we are usually inclined to realize.  Later experience has reinforced that idea considerably.

I think we are both interested in different kinds of liminal states, when one is neither here nor there, with respect to language, or place, or any number of other conditions.  Your story/chapter “Between” seems to get into that.

JD: Agreed. In The Witch of Matongé, you narrate from inside the French language, in the heads of Francophones. I do the same in The Balcony for the stories told from the points of view of French characters, who were all were based on people I knew from my life in France. As I drafted their stories, I was often translating unconsciously from French to English, certainly with the dialogue.

When I collected my stories into a novel-in-stories, I had to unify the voice of the book. I hadn’t lived in France for years and no longer spoke French much at home. The narrator of the novel is American and twenty-first century, even if they are comfortable in the head of a Frenchman in 1911, as is the case in one story/chapter. But I don’t know if I’d feel the narrative authority to write that original story now.

As for “Between,” that story/chapter is told from the perspective of an American expatriate. And yes, absolutely, even in its structure of direct address to two different men (you, the husband, and you, the lover), that story hovers in a liminal space. The husband is American, and the lover is French. I think many of the chapter/stories (another liminal space) in The Balcony explore the contrasting charms of exoticism and of familiarity. The familiar becomes exotic again when you’ve been away from it long enough. You yourself become more exotic in my experience. Who is the Jane Delury in English, in Baltimore, versus the Jane Delury in French, in Grenoble? I’m much older now, granted, but I also think there are also cultural differences.  If, as you say, identity is a linguistic construct, how does yours change in French?

MSB:  There were attempts to teach me French in grammar school, and more serious and successful ones in high school.  I came away with an ability to read nineteenth and up to mid twentieth century French literature with reasonable facility, and to write the language poorly.  In college I took French literature courses, but I had no real grasp of the spoken language outside a lecture hall.  After college I made a couple of Francophone friends but was too awkward and shy to make much progress.

In 1995 as All Souls’ Rising was coming out, I made my first trip to Haiti and did my first book tour in France.  In Haiti I traveled with one of my Francophone friends, which was a huge help. I spoke only French with him, and began to pick up some Kreyol. We did not meet many Haitians who spoke American or English, especially outside the capital.  We drove north to Cap Haïtien, and by the time we returned to Port-au-Prince, my Anglophone identity had been pretty well erased. The mental effect was sort of like jet lag but much stronger.  It can be refreshing to inhabit a consciousness that doesn’t have many words in it, right?

JD: Yes! And to feel that other identity expand as you adopt expressions that don’t exist in your own language. My favorite is “On n'a pas gardé les moutons ensemble” (we’ve never kept sheep together) when someone is being too familiar.

MSB: Love that.

JD:  I’m going to Paris this fall for the first time in years, and I wonder if I’ll find my French double waiting for me on a bench in the Jardin des Tuileries.

MSB:  On that first trip to Haiti I had a sort of journalistic cover, writing about a Misik Rasins group, Boukman Eksperyans.  During an intermission in one of their concerts I joined a prayer circle with them, and I was dislocated to the point that when I caught sight of my face in a small mirror that had been propped on the wall, my first thought was, Mais c’est un blanc—qu’est-ce qu’il fabrique ici?

In the beginning I was a much nicer person in French, because I wanted so very much to please.  In the same period, I realized that if I was ever to gain any sort of fluency, I would have to accept looking like a real buffoon a lot of the time.  I don’t think I had what it takes for that part when I was younger.

JD: You fake it well, though. You seem comfortable speaking French. Is that an illusion?

MSB: I am comfortable speaking it, though the truth is je ne sais que jeter des fautes françaises à grande vitesse.  That falls a little short of fluency. But I got through the clown phase eventually.  I do remember that on my first book tour in France, two women from my publisher listened to me for a bit, looked at each other, and said Oui, c’est un espèce de Créole.

More seriously, I think that so much of a culture is embedded in its language that in adopting the language you take on much of the culture as well—your mind has to bend to it (or break, which does sometimes happen).  What you can say controls what you can be, with others, and if you begin to think in the language, it controls what you can say in that interior monologue, which changes who you are with your self.  Oh wait—what self?

JD: Yes, and for me, my main connection to French and to France was through my ex-husband’s family. The France I knew well involved soixante-huitards, jazz, and women who smoked pipes. I had a French editor proofread The Balcony, and she came back with notes about the French not doing this or that. In my ex-husband’s family, for instance, the kids call the parents by their first names, instead of “Maman” et “Papa.” Not typical, but true of the French people I knew best.

MSB: Right.  Not all codes are linguistic codes.  And the French are not entirely a monolith either, despite the best efforts of l’Académie Française and l’Abbé Gregoire.

Losing one’s sense of self between languages can be a trippy sort of thing till you get used to it.  When it first happened, I remembered reading Kipling’s Kim a few times as a boy. I reread it recently and it holds up much better than I expected-- it may be the first English novel entirely about code-switching. Practically the only thing I remembered about it was a moment where Kim thinks in English (actually there are several instances of that), and the reader sees it as part of the process of his becoming a member of the British Raj—a Sahib, as he would put it.  I had recently read Kim when as a boy I noticed myself having some rudimentary thoughts in French, and I thought of that scene in the novel then, and many times after.

From 1995 to around 2007, I went to France for some book junket almost every year and went to Haiti a couple of times a year, researching later volumes of the trilogy and a biography of Toussaint Louverture I wrote after.  I carried a notebook, and at the beginning of my stay, I would write proper notes in American, later in kind of funky French, then Kreyol, and finally there would be no more words, only diagrams.  My Kreyol is still pretty limited so I can’t think very complicated thoughts in that language, which reminds me that the linguistic construction of self is not one’s whole being. I think it is mainly the ego that’s wont to seize language as an instrument of domination and control.

JD: Do you ever wish you could be creatively inspired by the Towson shopping mall or a McDonald’s off I-83? I do. My writing seems to feed off other places, other times. I try to write what I know, but I get quickly bored.

MSB:  Well, there’s this Burger King in the northernmost service area of the Garden State Parkway, on the way to the Tappan Zee bridge.  When I first stopped there, it seemed that everyone working in the place was speaking Haitian Kreyol.  I assumed that was delusional on my part, that I’d slipped into another fugue state, like in front of all that orange juice. I do sometimes have auditory hallucinations, though not so elaborate, more like roosters that aren’t really there, things like that.

So I slunk away without saying anything, but the next year, same place, same phenomenon—I addressed the burger workers a few words in Kreyol and got slightly startled replies in the same language… so yeah, it turned to be part of ordinary reality.

There are writers who specialize in rhetorical savorings of the banal, but I don’t think you and I are them.

JD: You’ve made me think of something else. When I lived in France, I taught English, British English. My students knew apartments as flats and eggplants as aubergines, and to make life easy for them, I adopted their English. My native tongue morphed in those years teaching English. I stopped spelling like an American. Humor was humour. Color was colour. That lingered for years after I’d moved back here.   In my next novel, Hedge, the protagonist is a garden historian who trained in England. Now she’s back in the States, but she still explores otherness by looking back in time. That’s how I most relate to her.

What about the past for you? Your novel is so now, but it also feels haunted.

MSB:  You must know how dangerous it is to ask a Southerner about the past.  I’m a white Southerner, so there are layers.  Stuff that really happened that we remember and the Yankees don’t.  Delusions we fed ourselves, for generations, as truths about the past.  Stuff that we completely repressed for generations, much of which is returning to consciousness only now.  So, you know, we can go on about it all for a very long time.

The first literary fiction I read was from the Southern Renascence: Allen Tate, Andrew Lytle, Flannery O’Connor, Caroline Gordon, Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, of course Faulkner.  This work was entirely by white folks for white folks, although I have always thought that Black writers of the period, like James Baldwin and Ernest Gaines, ought to be included.

Mais pour revenir à nos moutons… The backstory of the Witch has some specialized elements.  A conceit is that the American was with one of the Special Forces A Teams that operated in the North of Haiti during the UN/American “intervasion” of the mid-1990s, hence the knowledge he has of the language and the culture. He also had a Haitian wife and a child with her (nobody in the story knows about them except the American’s erstwhile Special Forces teammate who comes in briefly at the end) who both died in the cholera epidemic following the 2010 earthquake that knocked down much of Port-au-Prince.  The American’s familiarity with Haiti and his ability to speak some Kreyol as well as French gives him a rapport with the Haitian aristocrat Jean-Robert, but there’s an edge there because the American is not only a blan but a blan militaire Americain, which evokes the first American occupation of Haiti beginning back in the First World War, when, not to put too fine a point on it, the Americans usurped Haiti’s sovereignty, introduced Jim Crow social practices, and recreated a form of slavery known as the corvée.

Then there is the witch herself, and her descendants, who are Roma people, who have a long and difficult history which I learned something about through research and stories people told me.

Then there’s Abu, the fatherless Muslim youth who vacillates between the benign (and majoritarian) versions of Islam represented in the story by the Sufi sheik and the violent jihadism of Daech and Al Quaeda, represented by Farouk.

Through a certain lens, my writing those last characters is an act of expropriation that these days would make me eligible to be burned at the stake.  In reply to that point I will quote Charles Johnson, possibly the last real humanist on the planet, who said from a Goucher podium a couple of years back: “If we’re going to have a diverse literature, we have to learn to write the Other.”

But, to return to our metaphorical sheep, my raising taught me that the past can sometimes be experienced as a sort of encysted wound.  That’s true for the American in his personal past, and for Jean-Robert in the relatively recent history of Haiti and Haitians, and in a deeper way for descendants of the long wanderjahr of the Roma people, and the history of clashes between the Islamic and Christian worlds, and in the descendance of African slavery wherever that took place, and so on. 

I’d like for you talk about the ways you deal with deep time in fiction, not only in Hedge, where your heroine shows up with her archeological tools in hand (though layers of time in that book are explored with several other instruments as well) and also in The Balcony, where the depth of the historical dimension comes close to making the place itself a protagonist.

JD: As I mentioned, I grew up on the edge of Sacramento, near the foothills of the Gold Country. The remnants of the nineteenth century were being scraped away during my childhood: subdivisions replacing orchards, shopping malls on the edge of dusty mining towns. That landscape, plus having a father older than all the other fathers and who’d wished to be a historian, colored my view of the world. I played pioneers way past a respectable age, dressing up in petticoats, hunting the cat, rafting over the pool to the other side. I was nostalgic at eight. I grieved the loss of those hills. Strip malls were antagonistic.

MSB:  That all sounds so much like the childhood of Joan Didion, as rendered in Tracy Daughtery’s wonderful biography.

JD:  I love Didion’s work. But she’s less of a romantic than I am. Actually, that’s one of the things I love about her work.  In The Balcony, I faced a double risk of romanticization: writing about the past and writing as an expatriate. Plus, I’m drawn to dramatic plotlines. “Au Pair” and “Plunder” both take potentially melodramatic subjects—a love affair, a death—and, I hope, illuminate them with unfiltered lights.

MSB: I would definitely give you that.

JD: The protagonist in “Au Pair” goes to France starry-eyed, and she grows up over the course of the story. This affects her view of the landscape itself. She also moves from country to the city. My fiction favors the country. I’m most creatively inspired with a view of a mountain or ocean. And, come to think of it, historic places often preserve original landscapes, so that’s another part of the draw in writing about them. As I child, I loved the image of covered wagons rolling over hills, but I loved the hills themselves as well: the endlessness, openness of space. Going back in time is also going back in landscape.

In Hedge, my protagonist uncovers buried gardens, testing the soil to find chemical traces of long-dead plants. I learned about this kind of work at Monticello, the perfect place to think about the problem of romanticizing history. In the end, Hedge didn’t take place at Monticello, but I learned so much there, especially from the archeological work being done on the mountain, away from [ZB1] Thomas Jefferson’s house.  Maud restores gardens in the Hudson Valley and San Francisco’s Presidio, and as she does so, she struggles to be clear eyed in beauty, to be more Didion than Hugo in the way she treats history.

MSB: Hmmm.  You think we can actually do that?  Seems tricky, particularly with the past, which we have to regard through our own eyes, not the eyes of the people who lived in it.  That’s a very different filter factor, I believe.  How fully at home can a twenty-first-century American be in the mind of a Frenchman in 1911?  There’s some interesting friction on that edge.

JD: We can’t. But I wish I could. The heat of that friction creates stories for me.

MSB:  Lately I’ve been thinking that history is just a story after all.  Ideally, it’s a story composed of facts, but nobody tries to use all the facts, because even if you could do that, what it would yield is what Hannah Arendt called “an unbearable sequence of sheer happenings.”  So any coherent version of history leaves most of those happenings out, otherwise it would be shapeless.  That’s true of the conventional history of the U.S. which I imagine you and I both received in high school, and it’s true of Howard Zinn’s correction of that conventional history… and on we go.

JD: How the Word Is Passed by Clint Smith is wonderful on this topic.

MSB: I think you worry about the risks of the romantic gaze more than I do.  I think I never think about that, which probably means I’m unconsciously wallowing in it all the time.  Maybe we are guilty of exoticism of a sort. But I do think that unfamiliar circumstances throw the self into a special sort of relief, and there’s an edge that can make a story interesting.

Certainly The Witch of Matongé is meant, in part, as a kiss blown to Paris: Ville Lumière! Ville de l’amour!  Have I just romanticized the place one more time?  It’s tempered by the American’s having a sort of fisheye on a lot of that stuff, like those troth-plighting padlocks on le Pont des Arts.  Then again, he’s not entirely immune, and the book wouldn’t be much fun if he were.

JD: And it is the Ville Lumière!The Ville de l’amour! As well as all the rest. I plan to see the sewers of Paris on my upcoming trip. I’ve always wanted to go and never have. Apparently, I’m still haunted by Les Misérables, all these years later. I’ll try to remind myself that Jean Valjean was running through shit.

 MSB:  I think the Disneyfication probably turned that into chocolate, right?  Me, I’ve only been in the catacombs.  Bones are remarkably clean.


Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2022-2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

Boulder

Eva Baltasar
Translated by Julia Sanches

And Other Stories ($17.95)

by Abby Walthausen 

New arguments are always popping up these days for the dubious title of the “first globalization”—phenomena as disparate as the spice trade, the crusades, the whaling industry.  Catalan novelist Eva Baltasar (or perhaps the wry galley cook who narrates her newly translated novel) might get a kick out of extending the rebrand to boulders, which were, after all, dragged unwittingly around the globe and deposited haphazardly before the first sea shanty was ever sung. Boulders have a way of making landscapes both formidable and absurd—and Balthasar delves into this uneasy balance in Boulder, her idiosyncratic portrait of displacement across cultures and across dispositions.

The novel’s eponymous narrator, so named by her geologist girlfriend for her alien toughness, starts the book as a galley cook off the coast of Chile and winds up stunned and displaced in Iceland. “For a geologist like Samsa,” Boulder says, “Iceland is a paradise, and she shows me around as if it had come out of her own body.” Boulder is pushed across the world by love and the slow march of age, though nothing about her sharp-tongued, profanity-spouting demeanor is passive. In fact, Boulder sees herself more in the image of the proverbial rolling stone that gathers no moss, professing her discomfort with houses and her love of the “short term.” Like the narrator of Baltasar’s previous book, Permafrost, Boulder is repulsed by domestic life—but in this book she is faced with actually becoming a mother when Samsa insists on having children of their own.

Baltasar, a poet skilled in compression, moves swiftly from the initial heady encounters between Boulder and Samsa, first eliding five years, then another three, to arrive at the moment when Samsa decides that she needs to have a child. In this moment, Samsa is unrecognizable to Boulder, who attributes the unfamiliarity to this decision which “kicks into gear right away, without any warning. . . . razes everything to the ground, like an earthquake. You’d have to be an animal with a tiny brain and impeccable survival instincts to see it coming.”

Boulder is an engaging narrator—funny, tough, and as sympathetic as a line cook out of Anthony Bourdain’s kitchen—but the accumulation of her personality creeps up. About halfway through the book, when arguing against attending a prenatal water aerobics class, Boulder complains, “Samsa spat out her special brand of poison—the kind that doesn’t kill but leaves you blind, that erases your best memories and replaces them with a chasm for you to trip into and leave behind the skin of your knuckles and knees.” At first it feels a blessed reprieve to hear these venomous words described rather than repeated. A moment later, it sinks in that neither Samsa nor any other character had ever uttered any actual dialogue. The Samsa that the narrator’s voice has brought to vivid life has been muted by the same precise and knowing language.

Boulder’s carefully knapped facade is sometimes sharp and self-sufficient, sometimes blunt and desperate, but it engages from every angle. Again drawing on her skills as a poet, Baltasar has her narrator rarely utter an observation, whether cynical or mystical, that isn’t grounded hard in the physical world: “When I undress in the evening, the turtleneck snags at my head and reminds me that birth is nothing at all—the danger lies in being reborn.” She is a poet of the body, telling us, when postpartum Samsa loses interest in sex, that “Desire cannot be killed, it can only be fermented and rocked to sleep.” The link that she draws between physicality and the deep need for love echoes the attention she lavishes on food, which is prepared and described with the nuance she seems unable to deliver to her relationships.

“Blood respects nothing,” Boulder says when reflecting on the testing Samsa receives early in her pregnancy. “It creeps around like a shrewd domestic who has access to every room and knows everything there is to know about you.” On one level, she feels surveilled by medical intervention. On another, these lines hint at the latent anxiety of the gay family unit, in which one party is written out of the bloodline. Blood is indeed unfaithful—or at least, it tends to omit part of the story. The quiet, visceral joys of being are what Boulder discovers in the child, and they are what keep her tethered to her—and in the end, tethered to the long term. Still, she retains an absurd but steadfast resistance against time, trade winds, and small talk that is “more reckless than adopting a pet rat during a plague.” Boulder may have sailed across the world, but something deep in her rails against a life that can be reduced to vector.


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Telluria

Vladimir Sorokin
Translated by Max Lawton

New York Review Books ($18.95)

by Garin Cycholl

They say that those who live by the nail will probably die by the nail—that is, unless the nail is made of tellurium, set by a member of a guild of highly skilled technicians, and driven into one’s skull in a ritual that identifies the exact fold of the brain where the sharp, rare metal can awaken insight. That insight is the rub of Max Lawton’s newly released translation of Vladimir Sorokin’s 2013 novel, Telluria. What rough consciousness is emerging along our frontlines and glowing screens? How do we rescale our existence along these spaces in more human terms? These questions establish Telluria’s time and terrain.

Sorokin’s novel is told in fifty chapters. It explores the speculative, post-holy war geography of a dismembered Europe, in which a range of post-Putin Russian states has emerged on a redrawn map. Among these states, a nostalgia-tinged (i.e., ultra-Stalinist) post-Soviet Republic has reopened, and Telluria itself has developed as a 21st-century narco-state that traffics in rare metal nails that promise sudden revelation. A Great Wall of Russia, “one final imperial illusion,” re-marks the territory.

In this world, enlightenment is a commodity attained by having a nail made from tellurium driven into one’s head by a “carpenter” who uses a clothy, computer-like tablet (translated by Lawton as a “smartypants”) to map the nail’s precise target. The nail releases one from ordinary consciousness, a process that devotees ecstatically describe as having “rent asunder the chains of Time . . . the white-eyed executioner of hopes and expectations.”

The beauty of Telluria rises from the jagged music of our own expectations of this future world. Sorokin’s fifty chapters are widely divergent in tone and focus; they disarrange our dispositions to time. As history roughly unfolds around her, a distraught mother laments, “It’s unbearable . . . insanity growing up all around us like a crust of ice.” The human imagination of time itself is stretched out across this cold reality in Sorokin’s writing. Telluria offers a glimpse through our own moment into a distinctly medieval world that continues to work itself out along a shredded map of city-states and capital-driven fiefdoms.  In doing so, the novel exposes busily disintegrating empires and their attendant exploitation, suffering, and flight.  Against that chaos though, Sorokin pushes his readers to cease looking for signs in everything but themselves.

In an interview about the novel published at The Untranslated, Lawton posits, “Sorokin seems to almost long for the kind of ‘return to human scale’ offered by a collapse into medievaldom…There’s a thread of nostalgia for the long-past that runs through much of Sorokin’s work, always deconstructing itself even as it looks back wistfully.” This “thread of nostalgia” is evident in the translation’s tone; Lawton playfully “sounds” the range of centuries and prose styles in Telluria, whose medieval world unfolds through language. The land is mapped by belief and a new feudalism drawn from the remains of modernity. Simple things call human beings back into presence. Nomadic poets sing to endless steppes and dildoes speak of “peckerish labor.” All these alternative presents exist at once in Telluria.

In what could be an addendum to Brecht’s Mother Courage, two dog-men discuss poetry and the disposition of rational animals while stewing a pot of battlefield corpses.  To eat or not to eat? One laments that “man is losing his nature.” They cannot eat without talk. In Beckett-like stasis, their conversation looks back on their journey as one plucks a bullet from his mouth. They dwell on skulls’ fragility. A tellurium nail boils up from the skull in the pot. One reflects, “Two metals met in the head of this warrior. . . . A sublime tragedy.” Anticipating the road ahead, they feast. One reminds the other, “You shall read your great poems to the Ocean!”

Does Telluria traffic in “hope”? Not really, but perhaps it deals in something equally essential in this historical moment. A military officer longs for psychic transport “back into the blessed and enlightened Middle Ages. The world returned to human scale.” How does one find that scale amidst battlefield corpses and humming smartphones? Maybe not through “hope,” though perhaps through its medieval cousin: a state of mind capable of fusing our present states of persistent dread and wonder. In provoking the reader to consider this possibility, Sorokin’s novel is a nail to the head.


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Metaphysical Animals

How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

Clare Mac Cumhaill & Rachael Wiseman
Doubleday ($32.50)

by Scott F. Parker

Joining the burgeoning genre of collective philosophical biography, Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life, by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, puts Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch at the center of a story of friendship and of analytic philosophy’s renewed interest in metaphysics and morals.

Cumhaill and Wiseman came to their subject thanks to a letter Midgley published “in the Guardian, under the heading ‘The Golden Age of Female Philosophy’” in 2013. Soon after, they visited Midgley to learn the story their book would eventually tell.

Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch converged at Oxford during tumultuous times. Many of the men—professors as well as students—were summoned to World War II; among them was A. J. Ayer, the influential logical positivist and Metaphysical Animals’ bête noire. In his absence, philosophy’s preoccupation with linguistics and its rejection of metaphysics loosened. During the war, the women found themselves at the center of the philosophical scene: “Had it not been for the interruption of war, Mary, Iris, Elizabeth and Philippa may well have joined the men in the effort to usher in the brave new world of a philosophy divested of poetry, mystery, spirit and metaphysics. Or, more likely, they would have finished their degrees and left philosophy behind them, convinced . . . that the subject was not for them.” These were, in other words, bleak philosophical times.

Taking advantage of the opportunity only accidentally available to them, the four were able to pursue philosophy with a more person-centric approach than had been prominent at Oxford. But what the four philosophers had in common beyond their circumstances is where Metaphysical Animals begins to break down. Cumhaill and Wiseman present Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch as members of a movement grounded in gender. Yet, by giving short shrift to the philosophical work in question and opting instead to focus on the day-to-day lives of the philosophers, they fail to draw connections in any but the most general terms—those terms being their opposition to Ayer and logical positivism, which scores of other philosophers shared.

This substantive lightness is only emphasized by the book’s historical frame, which concludes with Anscombe’s opposition to the honorary doctorate Oxford would bestow upon Harry Truman in 1956, thereby relegating all four women’s greatest professional achievements to a brief afterword. This is a missed opportunity to affirm the legacies of four great philosophers, who deserve greater prominence. Consider that the famous Trolley Problem was originated by Philippa Foot. Besides making serious contributions to the philosophy of animals, in her nineties Mary Midgley wrote a defense of philosophy, What Is Philosophy For?, the culmination of a lifetime of thought, that became a surprise mainstream hit. Cumhaill and Wiseman are most thorough in their disquisition of Elizabeth Anscombe, probably the most influential philosopher of the four. They write that “it is thanks to her translation that Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is recognised as a literary, as well as a philosophical, masterpiece” and call her book Intention “the most important treatment of action since Aristotle.” Murdoch is the best known of the four, though primarily for her novels and for having been portrayed by Kate Winslet and Judi Dench in the film Iris, an impression Metaphysical Animals is unlikely to alter.

Cumhaill and Wiseman say they were “bored of listening to men talk about books by men about men” when they set out on their book. Fair enough. But shoehorning four women who happened to be friends into an ill-defined school only serves to obscure each woman’s unique contributions to philosophy.

Still, though, seeing their early shared lives is not without its pleasures. Metaphysical Animals is a period piece, replete with dress codes, cigarettes, and ubiquitous casual misogyny. It is a portrait of four philosophers as young women. Here they are, for example, sitting down together for conversation: “Philippa explained her idea over the clatter of the busy café, the Nippy serving up a pot of hot tea for Mary and Philippa, black coffee for Iris and Elizabeth.” And so, rather than learning what they thought in their maturity, we will settle for what they drank in their youth.


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Transfixed by Prehistory

An Inquiry into Modern Art and Time

Maria Stavrinaki
Translated by Jane Marie Todd

Zone Books ($35)

by W. C. Bamberger

In the first sentence of Transfixed by Prehistory, Maria Stavrinaki declares that prehistory is an invention of the nineteenth century; the subtitle of the book refers to her assertion that early moderns were "transfixed by prehistory, initially in the sense of being petrified by shock." Throughout, she demonstrates how the revelation of the existence of prehistory drastically changed the science, the art, the metaphors, and even the concept of time in the modern world. The invention of prehistory moved outward from geology and paleontology to the arts and sciences that have humankind as their objects, including linguistics, ethnology, psychology, and literature. New metaphors arose; geological erosion came to represent human mortality.

Stavrinaki considers a wide range of prehistory's effects. She looks at the extent of the influence of discoveries by Lascaux on modern art, of geology on Cezanne and Max Ernst, and of prehistory's philosophical implications for Paul Klee, among others. Klee, for example, thought these discoveries revealed "the present state of outward appearances in his own world as accidentally fixed in time and space," "a simple stage in an evolution . . ." Stavrinaki points out prehistory’s influence in more recent art as well, looking at the work of Robert Morris and at Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, for example. While some of these attempts to identify parallels between more recent artists' works and the prehistorical can seem less than convincing, she offers insights from a great variety of sources, ranging from historical records to the science fiction of J. G. Ballard; especially interesting is an excerpt from a letter written by Claude Lévi-Strauss to Georges Bataille, disagreeing with Bataille's view of Lascaux.

As the book proceeds, it becomes clear that Stavrinaki's points could be supported by looking at nearly everything around us—we are, in many ways, a continuation of prehistory. The invention of prehistory affected not only our views of the past and understanding of the present, but also, for some, the conception of the future. That is, "the tendency to improvement" over such spans of time suggested that the process would continue indefinitely: "Assurances about the future were thus to be found, quite simply, in the past: time formed an uninterrupted line." To some, however, the same discoveries suggested the opposite—that there might come an end to human time. The invention of prehistory introduced the idea of that we might one day have successors.

Stavrinaki's reasoning proceeds speedily, and there are places where slow, careful reading is required to follow what is being said. This is partly due to some unfamiliar terms: "mobilary art" for small objects that can be moved from place to place, and "parietal art” for what we usually call cave art—though technical terms are usually introduced smoothly. The larger reason for the need for slow reading is the serious and sober approach Stavrinaki takes to her subject. This flies in the face of the recent leaning of many scholarly books toward popularization; rather than taking time to reassure readers that she likes some of the same rock bands she assumes we must like, Stavrinaki takes up detailed analysis of her subject from page one.

There are metaphysical speculations here, but there are simple human anecdotes, too. Stavrinaki includes the well-known story of the explorer who was so fixated on a cave's floor that he didn't notice the drawings above; his eight-year-old daughter looked up, saw them, and pointed them out to him. Another discoverer she cites wrote that he couldn't really "see" engravings that were visible on the wall until he also traced them with his fingers.

Stavrinaki employs some rhetorical flourishes in the interest of making interesting points; for example, she asserts that explorers' and researchers' presentations of the facts of prehistory meant that "science now ranked alongside fiction, because it proved the reality of the impossible." At another point, she posits that because there are no written records, nor any named individual creators, prehistory can't be "done," can't be tied up neatly, can't be consolidated in the past. Rather, she argues, it remains to be done, inexhaustibly so—it remains "as an enigma from the past to be interpreted in terms of the present's needs." In her concluding paragraph, she writes, "Prehistory is no doubt the only land that remains for us to discover." This thoughtful, no-nonsense book would be a useful guide for anyone setting out on such an ambitious expedition.


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Wind, Trees

John Freeman
Copper Canyon Press ($17)

by Joanna Acevedo

John Freeman’s third collection of poetry, Wind, Trees, has Freeman’s characteristic quietness: an understated, restrained quality which lends itself particularly well to post-pandemic writing. As a follow up to 2017’s Maps and 2020’s The Park, both also from Copper Canyon Press, Wind, Trees has a similarly dedicated focus; it is split into two sections, “Wind” and “Trees,” each of which have their own tone and point of view. Through exploration of form, repetition of ideas, and meandering of thought, the collection quietly stirs up issues of loss, friendship and partnership, and how to coexist in this dark yet brave new world.

Freeman is at his sharpest when he’s working with narrative—like in “Boxing,” one of the earliest poems of the collection, when the speaker tells the story of Carla, his sparring partner in London:

                                               What, I don’t
work you hard enough? she said once,
catching me outside, still sweaty
in my trainers, then ran
me until I puked. What do you
want, she asked. Are you here
to hurt someone? We can do
that.

Many of the poems tell stories, and these are the most successful; they allow a window into the poet’s life and are more engaging than the more abstract poems, which tend to blur together. That’s not to say there aren’t some beautiful lines in the more enigmatic poems—there certainly are, and Freeman has a knack for distilling an observation about life or pain into a pithy one-liner—but the narrative poems have a true sense of grit to them.

As for the collection’s understated title, Wind, Trees does in fact elicit a sense of the wind in the trees—the sonic sense is very strong, and Freeman puts lines together masterfully, playing often with internal rhyme and meter. In “The Heat Is Coming,” he brings this sonic play to a high level, with lines that rhyme and break and rhyme again:

The ocean is dying but we’re dying of
thirst, the power grid over Paris just burst,
they think it’s hackers from Novosibirsk . . .

This has a humorous effect, but the theme of the poem is grave. The juxtaposition of humor and significance is one that appears throughout the collection, and often to great success. At other times, Freeman turns tender; in “Nothing To Declare,” he writes:

What kind of heaven
would it be if I
couldn’t take you

This poem emerges as the heart of the collection: For all the stories told, jokes made, and fears shared and overcome, the answer to all these big questions is love. It is a redemptive mission, and one that has been hard-fought. In this way, Wind, Trees is a meditation on not only loss, but also love, and the way that although love can cause us pain, it can also heal even the deepest of wounds. We are not alone, Freeman argues. And perhaps we never were. Wind, Trees is a fascinating exploration not only of pandemic loneliness, but of the ways we begin to cope with our own isolation and process loss. The collection comes at the perfect time; as a society, we are starting to heal, and poetry such as thismay be able to help those who are looking for ways to face their isolation and get better.


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All the Blood Involved in Love

Maya Marshall
Haymarket Books ($17)

by Rachel Slotnick

Maya Marshall does not mince words in All the Blood Involved in Love, her debut poetry collection. Twitter declares #believewomen and #sayhername, and Marshall claps back, “Down the maternity halls black women are dying.” Reading this book is like looking through a kaleidoscope at a cross section of violence: the violence of motherhood, the violence of race, the violence of illness, and of course, the violence of love.

Marshall begins by calling out lies. Our reality is a fiction, she declares: “The story is that there is so much loss, // so much waste in a woman who does not make // a body with her body // . . . // The story is that the black woman is safe.” In the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson, the news cycles have washed their hands of the residue of intersectional progress, and Marshall leans in: “I have the good fortune to be free: / to choose, / to have part of my cervix intact, // to change the locks after / I’m attacked.” Through the suspense of enjambment, she addresses the horrific historical use of hysterectomy. She also implicates its continued contemporary use with references to Dawn Wooten, the detention center nurse who came forward regarding the forced sterilization of immigrants at the border.

The pain of both having and not having circumvents the collection. In a poem titled, “An Abortion Ban,” Marshall weaves together the inequities of gender, race, and longing: “Semen is an innocent bystander. / Penises are just boys being.” The narrative splinters as the kaleidoscope turns. We move from logic and sequential design to metaphorical and abstract figures: “An embryo is a fingernail. / A fetus is a jail,” followed by “A uterus is a leash. / A stillbirth is a tether.” The synthesis of her words is unavoidable: whether a woman becomes a mother or not, she is imprisoned.

With each new atrocity, Marshall’s words build intimacy. Many stanzas are confessional in nature; they are loveless letters. They were drafted and stamped, but never sent: “He thinks we understand each / other because of his illness / and my blackness, / but my blackness / does not make me sick.” In weighing pain and adversity against heartbreak, the reader feels like a voyeur, spying on a woman who is hemorrhaging words. Marshall laments: “Our two bodies empty / of bodies. A friend and a widow on the shore.” Even before the violence of illness comes to fruition, a loss has taken place, and before that loss another loss, and before that another.

Between personal asides, Marshall ruminates on the implications of choices for women of color. She sometimes speaks with regret: “When I remember the man that I wanted to marry but couldn’t, / I think about the children we didn’t have. // My fibroids would have made room.” Fibroids affect nearly a quarter of young black women, and by mentioning the ailment, Marshall underscores the pain of motherhood with the ache of marginalization. She asks of an unnamed man in the text, “why he doesn’t walk on lit major streets. / He says he is afraid to be outside in his body. // In a museum, a white woman reaches for me // tells me she’s never thought / of black men being afraid.” Marshall seems to be asking, Where do we go from here?

The cumulative effect is that the distinction between forms of violence is narrowed. Moving from same sex desire to childbirth, Marshall writes of “the stretch marks that surround the /exit wound.” In so few words, she likens childbirth to gun violence. Elsewhere she equates queer love and viciousness: “I looked into the open cleft of a lover and watched / the month’s first rivulet descend as she called / on my tongue’s continued praise.” In other words, to love is to bleed and to make bleed.

In this collection, Marshall doesn’t lean on irony or falsehoods; she tells it like it is, unafraid of poetry that doesn’t sound like poetry. Perhaps this is most astutely demonstrated by her shrewd dedication: “To mothers, especially mine. And to those who choose not to.”


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Relativism

Mary Ford Neal
Taproot Press (£9.99)

by Nick Hilbourn                            

The cryptic theme of distance pervades Mary Ford Neal’s second poetry collection, Relativism. Neal’s ethereal, almost anodyne verse masterfully introduces characters and objects that seem to float above the sediment.  At one time, a reader imagines they are witnessing the diatribe of a disillusioned lover, while in almost the same breath that character (often identified by only the pronoun “she”) laments an irreconcilable space within herself or between herself and a deceased (or inaccessible) other.  Neal layers the idea of distance over that of absence, asking how we determine whether something far from us was ever really there in the first place.  In light of this struggle, the collection troubles the binary of exteriority and interiority, often within the process of re-building a sense of self.  The speakers in Neal’s poems are recovering from losses and struggling to identify themselves in the rubble of defunct relationships.

What agonizes many of the narrators in Relativism is the distance between an event and its comprehension in words.  The mouth becomes an important symbol in this regard: “She hasn’t shut her mouth in thirty years. / Was it the shock of the savage afternoon…His mouth gaping, like his body—did hers open in silent answer and forget to close again?... Or is it just that putting lips together after all these years would feel like a denial of the bodies.” The closing of lips finishes a traumatic event that has no natural denouement. 

In “Pentecost,” Neal carries that troubled closure further, writing, “Sometimes when lips are forced apart in grief or fear / a bird flies in and mates with you for life… There is no why nor anything to do but be a gentle host.” The distance is reconciled by an invading guest (“a bird flies in”) and, in reconciling the physical distance between the speaker and the approaching party, Neal recreates that distance inside the speaker.

In “Elegy Before Time,” Neal further plumbs the burgeoning absence between two people: “I think I know the thrust of what the doctor told you /, but the fingers of your silence are on my lips. / If I could speak, the only thing I’d say would be / Don’t forget me.” To attempt to articulate such an event through speech would be to destroy it, or at least to embark on a foolish endeavor, as a speaker notes in “In expectation of disappointment”: “I believed in their permanence, but they slipped through me like ghosts.” In the world of Relativism, the mouth, whether open or closed, doesn’t consume; it is designed to receive, to be a “gentle host.” 

“Care Plan” suggests a starvation of the memory as the ideal mode of reception: “The restaurant was booked for half-past eight. / She said that starving was a gentle death. / Her partner and their friends would have to wait. / She knew that they would summon up the strength.” Don’t attempt to consume the event or process it, the poem implies; people should “have to wait” for the event to find its place naturally within them and form a sense of absence. To Neal, a “gentle death” means refusing to struggle through rationalization of trauma, and instead, allowing the event to disrupt, transform, and fracture one’s ego. The self is a space we walk through and become, not a possession.

Neal dedicates her poem “Apparition” to Mary Oliver and nods specifically to Oliver’s well-known “Wild Geese.”  The particular struggle of the self in Relativism parallels Oliver’s poem. Oliver writes, “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, / the world offers itself to your imagination…”  Neal matches that idea of outside interference, but her poems starve those external objects that we absorb to form a sense of self. 

For Neal, the self is composed of absence: distances within us, between us, and outside of us.  In “Nine colours of my hometown,” she writes, “my sorrow is the shape of his absence…all I know…is that life is a soft, apricot thing / that takes its own duration to ripen, / so that you never enjoy the ripening.” Who we are is formed around a vacuum.  As we distance ourselves to observe and organize what we see and experience, we come to understand ourselves, too. 

Yet, like Mary Oliver’s geese, Neal’s verse explains that life is an ongoing act of ripening, and so we never truly get to step outside of it and observe.  It’s only in the feeling of distance that we gather information about life, and have a chance at comprehending that, in Oliver’s words, we are “heading home again.”


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The Lascaux Notebooks

Jean-Luc Champerret
Edited and translated by Philip Terry

Carcanet Press ($26.99)

by John Bradley

What if the Ice Age markings found on the walls of the famous cave of Lascaux, France, are poems? A Frenchman, Jean-Luc Champerret, while scouting the caves in the Dordogne in 1940 as a possible shelter for the local Resistance during World War II, copied the markings he saw into notebooks, where he then “decoded” them into words, and then into poems. Eventually the notebooks, packed in a wooden crate, were discovered by a friend of Philip Terry who was remodeling a house, and he passed the notebooks on to Terry. Terry saw the uniqueness and merit of Champerret’s work and translated the French into English, giving us this large volume. The hundreds of poems that constitute The Lascaux Notebooks make for fascinating reading.

Champerret had a multi-step process of translation. First, he copied the markings, which he broke into three lines of three marks. He then made a one-word translation for each mark. Here’s an example:

footprints     people                 river
mist             silhouettes            spears
eye               trees                     fire       

Three more expansive translations follow. Here is Champerret’s final translation of these nine words from his initial bare-bones translation:

By the bank of the river
        there are footprints in the mud
                    footprints of tribesmen from beyond the mountains

suddenly we see their forms
        appear out of the grey mist
                    carrying their long bone tipped spears

we crouch behind the cover of the trees
        watching their every step
                    burning inside with fear

The poem has come a long way from those initial nine words! Note how the triad “eye  trees  fire” becomes “burning inside with fear,” a rather audacious transformation—but then, it could be argued that this is exactly what all translators do.

However, there are some red flags in this book that will give pause to the careful reader. First, little is known about Jean-Luc Champerret. Terry says Champerret was born in the village of Le Moustier in 1910 and was the author of the poetry volume Chants de la Dordogne (Songs of the Dordogne), yet no copy of this book can be found. As mentioned above, Champerret allegedly worked with the French Resistance during World War II, and we learn from Champerret’s housemaid that his cell included “a tall wiry Irishman.” Surely Terry wants us to picture Samuel Beckett, who was part of the French Resistance then too. It seems a bit suspicious that this detail remains in the memory of a housemaid who knows so little about Champerret. Secondly, we have no photographs of the wooden crate that Terry was given or of the notebooks themselves, as they “remain fragile.” Instead, charcoal drawings have been reproduced for us in the book. These help our comprehension, but they do not boost confidence in the existence of the notebooks.

Thirdly, Philip Terry has been active in the Oulipo group, the literary group known for their love of linguistic play, puzzles, riddles, and trickery. Terry edited The Penguin Book of Oulipo and published two collections of poetry called Oulipoems. It’s not straining credulity to see The Lascaux Notebooks as an elaborate Oulipo creation. Fourthly, buried in a footnote, the reader learns that some of the marks Champerret recorded in his notebook from the Lascaux cave cannot be found on the cave walls. Terry explains this away by saying that “some of the signs . . . rapidly deteriorated” and that Champerret’s “light source . . . created shadow effects” causing the recorder “to see signs in the cave’s rock surface where they were not” due to his “overactive and overstimulated imagination.” The reader might wonder if Terry is having a good laugh as he composed this footnote. Fifthly, Terry’s introduction concludes with such gushing praise of Champerret’s translations as to raise even more doubts: “Champerret’s work amounts to no less than the greatest modern ‘defense’ of poetry that we have.”

In addition to these lingering issues, one more red flag must be acknowledged. One of the poems, based on these nine words—“tooth     fruit     hut / man     tooth     root / tooth     fruit     happiness”—sounds rather like a poem by William Carlos Williams. Here’s Champerret’s final translation of these nine words:

To say I have eaten
        the fruit that
                    you were keeping in the hut

you will have to
        make do with
                    roots when you break fast

eating the fruit
        I thought
                    how delicious how cold

This reads like an Ice Age parody of Williams’s famed poem “This Is Just to Say”—so much so that it feels like Terry is poking an elbow into the reader’s ribs.

Yet putting these reservations aside, as difficult as that might be for some readers, there’s much to admire in this book, which often feels like a guide on how to compose a poem from the smallest seed. While this book of translations never intends to be such a “how to” poetry handbook, it’s still eye-opening to watch a poem grow from nine words. In fact, some of the poems grow from fewer than nine words, as at times some of the original nine are repeated. Here’s an example of that repetition: “forest     fire     fire / burning     burning     fog / people     river     eyes.” Champerret begins his translation with the flat statement “The forest / has caught / fire,” which becomes the next draft: “The forest of pines / has caught fire / and is blazing.” The line has gained energy and improves even more in the next, and final, draft of the poem:

The dark forest of pines
        has caught fire like dry moss
                    it blazes like the sun

the angry flames
        spit clouds of blackness
                    making the day night

the dark eyed villagers
        stand trembling by the crowded river crossing
                    crying leaping shouting watching

While the word “villagers” may feel a bit out of place for Ice Age cave dwellers, that last line of the poem, with the four gerunds, generates a visceral intensity. Champerret shows the reader how to take the most basic words—in this case, “people     river      eyes”—and make magic with them.

In this same way, the poems could be seen as lessons on how to translate. Each draft of a poem shows how the deeper meanings and nuances of language can be fleshed out with vivid detail if the translator explores the poem with persistence and imagination. Note how “burning     burning     fog” transforms into “angry flames / spit clouds of blackness.” The verb “spit,” conveying moisture, seems out of place at first, but it makes the fire a rather frightening living entity.

The Lascaux Notebooks presents a window on the inner life of our Ice Age ancestors, as mysterious cave markings become poetic testimonials. At the same time, the volume will leave some readers wondering if this is all an elaborate prank engineered by a skilled Oulipo poet. Either way, this provocative book is worthwhile.


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Documenting the Suburban Gothic: An Interview with Ryan Rivas

by Chrissy Kolaya

Writer, publisher, and community builder Ryan Rivas is a familiar face in the Florida literary community. As the founder and publisher of Burrow Press, Rivas has focused not only on developing a press devoted to taking artistic risks, but also on working to cultivate literary community by launching and supporting an impressive number of fun and creative literary events in and around Orlando. As Coordinator of MFA Publishing at Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas creative writing program, Rivas is working to inspire a new generation of students to develop their own literary activism. Rivas’s own writing has appeared in The Believer, The Rumpus, and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012, and has been recognized with a fellowship from the Macondo Writers Workshop, which supports writers engaged in activism.

Rivas’s debut book, Nextdoor in Colonialtown (Autofocus Books, $26), is an innovative pairing of photographs of Orlando’s Colonialtown, the author’s neighborhood for the last decade, juxtaposed with text from the area’s Nextdoor.com posts. The book is at once an exercise in examining one’s home and a powerful commentary of the role attitudes about land, property, race, and fear have played in the development of many of our country’s suburban communities.


Chrissy Kolaya: What can you tell me about where the idea for this book came from?

Ryan Rivas: During the worst of COVID and while I was at work (still am) on what I think of as a “suburban gothic” novel, I started taking pictures of my neighborhood on my phone while I was out running. I am preoccupied with aspects of the gothic in relation to Whiteness, and maybe this led me to stop and document these innocuous and strange things. (Also, as a begrudging runner, I appreciate a good excuse to stop.) I started posting these photos on Instagram as a kind of series, but it was Autofocus Books publisher Michael Wheaton who prompted me to think more conceptually about what I was doing—to think about how the photos were related, and what it might mean to add text and present them as literary nonfiction.

Most of the photos are of houses, and so I began thinking about the people who might be looking back out at this sweaty bearded fellow taking pictures. And of course, it turns out there’s an app for that. I was aware of Nextdoor and the general suburban surveillance state, but I’d until then abstained. I borrowed a neighborhood friend’s account and discovered all the joys and horrors of the app, and I realized these are the people looking out—I’m going to let them speak, in a way, in relation to the photos.

CK: In the Acknowledgments, you mention the paintings of Ericka Sobrack as an inspiration, specifically for helping you “re-vision my residential surroundings.” Are there any particular paintings of hers that especially resonated with you? Which of the photos in the book do you see as most directly influenced by her work?

RR: A long time ago I was in a local café and saw an almost photo-realist painting of a single streetlight illuminating a grassy traffic median, and ever since then I was a fan of Sobrack’s paintings. Many of them are of houses at night. Shadow, light, and subtle details play a primary role in creating what I think of as suburban gothic moods. While much of her work is inspirational, maybe the best examples are clustered in her 2019 paintings: “Beacon,” “Reveal,” “Séance,” “Fortress,” “Threshold.” These are probably why I first stopped to take a photo, because I saw scenes that looked strikingly like her paintings in my own neighborhood. Then I couldn’t stop seeing that way.

You’ll notice there are more day shots than night shots in the book. That was me in part trying to carve out my own space, which (as I eventually realized) was a way of exploring what is gothic and ominous about the daytime. It was important to push against the trope of darkness being negative, scary, a threat.

A couple friends have also pointed out similarities between my photographs and the work of Todd Hido and Gregory Crewdson, who, in addition to Ericka Sobrack, I highly recommend. I’m not a trained visual artist, so there was a lot of anxiety of influence going on! I don’t think I’d have published the photos beyond social media without the addition of the text.

CK: I’d love to hear about your process for arranging the images, for pairing the images with the text, for choosing titles, and for dividing the book into four distinct sections. 

RR: The process was really fun most of the time, very intuitive, which is not the norm when I’m writing straight prose. I started by browsing Nextdoor and snagging posts or comments that stood out. After a while I’d search for certain keywords that had thematic relevance and browse those posts. Over time I started piecing together conversations into a massive Word doc.

A lot of the work was free association, especially pairing the images and the text. I’d look at a photo and see what words or ideas it evoked, and if there was an existing conversation that fit, or if I should search Nextdoor for those evoked words, and so on. The process was circular and self-perpetuating in that way. Sometimes a photo-text pairing would help me revise a given text.

I had a lot of material to work with, so I ultimately limited myself to thirty-four total pieces because that’s the number of neighborhoods Orlando was divided into during the period of “urban renewal” that occurred nationwide in the mid-twentieth century, that phrase being code for the destruction and displacement of thriving, primarily Black urban communities. Structurally, I wanted a certain circularity or repetition to happen in places, so the four parts helped spread out some recurring themes and patterns. The photos also, I hope, have a certain kind of movement and resonance within each section, as well as across the book.

CK: Do you know anything about the people who live in any of the homes you photographed? 

RR: No. Or at least not yet!

CK: I’m curious to know whether anyone ever stopped you to ask what you were doing. Getting into the spirit of Nextdoor here, I’m guessing that during this process you showed up on a lot of Ring cameras! Did you ever find that your photography was the source of conversation on the app?

RR: No one ever stopped me, and I haven’t seen any posts about an ethnically ambiguous bearded guy in running shorts taking pictures in the neighborhood. This says something about my legibility as White, despite also being Latino, and maybe it also says something about White guilt, because much of this photo-taking period overlapped with the murder of Ahmaud Arbery by racist vigilantes and the June 2020 uprisings. I was more aware than usual of my privileged mobility, while also being nervous about a potential confrontation, especially when I was photographing at night. One thing that’s clear from Nextdoor is that a lot of people are armed and perpetually half-cocked.

But if you’ll indulge a tangent here: There was also something gothic about the Black Lives Matter signs that emerged around this time in my mostly White neighborhood. Eight years before Arbery, almost to the day, Trayvon Martin was murdered by a racist vigilante not far from here. Amid the 2020 protests, though under slightly different circumstances, Salaythis Melvin was shot in the back by James Montiel for running away from Orange County sheriff’s deputies. And just last month in Kissimmee, deputies murdered Jayden Baez for shoplifting. And literally as I type this, Titusville police officer Joshua Payne was charged with manslaughter for murdering James Lowery, who had nothing to do with the alleged crime being pursued. The examples are everywhere and ongoing across the U.S.: Police kill roughly 1,110 people a year and injure thousands more! The racist logic and rhetoric around these killings is not much different than it was a hundred years ago. It’s become cliché to cite Emmett Till. And yet here is history repeating itself over and over.

I felt something terribly uncanny about how suburbanites react to these “reckonings” was present in those yard signs. The conditions in this neighborhood have not changed to make a tragedy of racist boundary policing any less likely. Part of the texture of this historical moment I wanted to capture in the book is a sense of slippery time, time overlayed, time collapsing. I nod to this in the short essay at the end of the book about the relationship between suburbia and colonialism. Suffice to say, when I’m out taking photos, I’m just as wary of “good liberals” in my neighborhood as I am about gun-toting nutjobs. Just as I try to be healthily wary of my own thoughts and actions.

CK: In terms of structure, I’m curious about the choice to end each section with Coyote section titles. We move from “Coyotes (Reason)” to “Coyotes (Solutions)” to “Coyotes (Humans)” to “Coyotes (Encounter).” What were you thinking about with this choice?

RR: The coyote pieces are the most explicit recurring structural element. People post about coyotes a lot on Nextdoorand they’ve really turned the animal into a symbol, a projection of their fears—which left room for me to play, with an obvious nod to the trickster Coyote of Native American storytelling. For these neighbors, the coyote is a problem that won’t go away, and a problem that most don’t fully understand as one of their own making—so for me at least, the recurring coyote pieces signal that this neighborhood is stuck in a kind of gothic White time.

This is related to what I was saying about recurrences in history that feel uncanny precisely because they are forms of Whiteness, which is an identity invested in concealing an understanding of its construction and roots in white supremacy. If there were infinite sections to this book, each would end on a coyote piece, again and again, for eternity.

CK: Do you have a favorite photograph or quotations? Mine, for sure, is on page 25: “We cannot let small dogs be virtual prisoners while letting gangster coyotes run the show.” It so perfectly captures the breathless, infuriated tone of the kinds of messages we encounter on this app, while also conjuring this hilariously cartoonish image of a neighborhood being “run” by “gangster coyotes.”

RR: So much of what people post is almost unbelievably, perfectly absurd. I could imagine some of these lines spoken by characters in Kafka or Joy Williams or Percival Everett or Tom Drury. It’s very hard to choose a favorite, but I think I gravitate to the minute quirks. The woman who says she likes to “sit out in her little area” when talking about her porch. Or “My former neighbor just alarmed me with news of . . .” The use of “alarmed” as a verb is perfect.

Then there are the truth bombs that I’m not convinced the poster always understands the implications of. My favorite among those is: “The police cannot be there to protect you, but they can exact revenge after the crime.”

CK: What’s going to be in the supplemental book content?

RR: This is publisher Michael Wheaton’s bright idea, which is to have a QR code at the end of the book that links to a page that is kept updated with author interviews and other supplemental goodies. I plan to include some photo/text “outtakes” there. This interview. Who knows what else!

CK: You end the book with other resources too, including alternatives to calling the police in your community, information on transformative justice, and a brief history of the land that now makes up suburban Orlando. Why were these important to you to include, and how do you see them contributing to the way a reader will encounter this book?

RR: I think some of these pieces can be easy to consume and laugh at. The book can be read and enjoyed uncritically, or even cynically, as in “I’m in on the joke and look how dumb all these Nextdoor people are!” So I felt the Orlando history and resources from transformharm.org were an important acknowledgement of how the city’s (and country’s) white supremacist origins are directly related to where we find ourselves now. There is an extremely unfunny reality behind many of these pieces, particularly some folks’ constant calls for police intervention.

As Aimé Césaire (who I quote in the epigraph) points out about colonialism, we are all being harmed by racist systems. I wanted to present readers with our innate complicity in the systems that are the legacy of colonialism, but also begin to imagine ways out of them. Many people have been doing this work for decades, so in addition to the above link, I’d point people to the work of Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Mariame Kaba, to name only a few.

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