New Directions’ Secret to Success

New literary magazine The Coffin Factory printed an inspiring interview with Barbara Epler and Tom Roberge of New Directions. In case you haven’t heard of them, for the last 75 years, New Directions has been publishing some of the most influential voices in fiction, and their back list reads like a roll call of literary legends: Bolaño, Borges, Céline, Nabokov, Neruda, Pound, Sebald…

Although these names are all recognizable now, New Directions took a risk when they first published them. “Really new kinds of writing can take twenty years to catch on, and the people [founder James Laughlin] published were considered very far out. Then, not too long afterwards, they became the canon,” says Epler, President and Publisher. New Directions’ strong back list has sustained the publishing house for years, allowing them to continue to introduce readers to exciting and diverse literature.

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REVIEW: The Seamstress and the Wind by César Aira

The Seamstress and the WInd

by César Aira (translated by Rosalie Knecht)

New Directions

144pp/$12.95

Reading The Seamstress and the Wind is like reading a story written by a five-year-old. It’s delightful and hilarious, it’s divorced from reality, and at the end you pretend like you understand. But here’s the great thing about Aira: You don’t have to try to understand. You can just lean back and enjoy.

Part of the delight of experiencing a child’s story — like Axe Cop, or the short film made by the child actors of Super 8 — comes from how children parrot the rules of storytelling imperfectly, remaking them in the process. They’ve absorbed all of our cultural clichés and conventions in a very short time, but haven’t limited their imaginations to them; their stories make the clichés and conventions fresh and new.

Aira does this, but on a sophisticated level; what is delightful in Axe Cop is pure joy in The Seamstress and the Wind. There are a lot of cool things going on that deserve careful literary criticism, but what’s most interesting is how well the book functions as a story while breaking all the basic rules of storytelling. Aira’s central experiment in Seamstress is to wrest the craft of storytelling from its moorings to see if it floats. And, like the shape-shifting “local candy” of the book’s setting, it does.

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THE NOVELLAIST: Patriotism By Mishima Yukio

Editor’s Note: This is the next installment of The Novellaist. See the column note here.

Patriotism
By Mishima Yukio
Translated by Geoffrey W. Sargent
New Directions Pearls, 2010

Mishima Yukio is not simply an incandescently poetic, unswervingly empathetic prose stylist and a professional weirdo—he famously committed seppuku in 1970 after his personal Rightist army failed to take over the Japanese military and arm it with nuclear weapons—he is also a logician not to be fucked with.

From Kinjiro (Forbidden Colours) onward, Mishima lays out stories that, however wild, are nothing if not logical.  He is the E. A. Poe of the secret-to-itself modern human heart.  When the sailor’s lover’s son kills the sailor in the very-short-novel The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, for example, our anticipation, our terror, is all the stronger for our knowing it all along—that the boy will not, cannot be turned from his course, because if he is truly a post-War nihilist with no faith in adults, he cannot make exceptions, even for the charming, down-to-earth father-figure of a sailor.

Kinjiro is even more tightly and quietly logical.  An ahead-of-its-time-then, still-ahead-of-its-time-today novel, Kinjiro details a handsome young husband’s secret gay romances, which are somehow both maudlin and ordinary—both “epically epic,” to borrow a Scott Pilgrim-ism, and all-too-familiar—what could be the individuated products of any modern human’s struggles with the same societal and biological pressures (make money; make babies).

Patriotism is more dour, a logical meditation on its title, a true novella.  The meditation is on a theme so alien to me—love of the Emperor, lust for an “honorable death”—that I expected it to read slowly.  But it is a one-train-ride read.  The whole plot is captured in précis on the back cover and the first two pages of the book; we can readily predict what will happen, thanks to our collective understanding of Japanese culture, the sister of American culture (make the robots bigger, add more flashing lights…).

But the logic of Patriotism is not without struggle and swelling, near-breaking, almost-giving-up.  The novella would not be the focused movement-towards-death—the must-see ballet of death itself, death present, becoming-death—without some flinching, however slight, on the part of the young soldier, Takeyama Shinji, and his months-married beautiful wife Reiko, with whom he finds himself in his last moments increasingly, perhaps understandably, in love.

Their gift will be the gift of death, to their Emperor and to each other, and finally to a world beyond their limited understanding. This type of death is not meant, I think, to move us to tears (or to perverse laughter), but to capture our gaze for a few dozen pages, and then leave us as it found us, alive and unsure.

Takeyama and Reiko feel the need to remove themselves from the embarrassment of a mutiny on the part of Takeyama’s fellows—a mutiny they did not ask him to participate in because of his recent marriage—a mutiny that so eerily echoes the writer’s later failed coup that I can’t help but wonder if Patriotism is not, in the end, addressed at anyone but Mishima himself.  This meditation on future-action, is not animated by its alien focus and unhappy theme, but by its very human center—Mishima’s feelings, unspoken, performed as puppet-act—which produce flawless, unhurried, unclever sentences.

Ben Franklin said, “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.”  Mishima is very reasonable.  Lucky for his readers, he is also an enduring and, for better of for worse, honest artist.

* * *

-Wythe Marschall can be found here. Previously on The Novellaist: The Murderess by Alexadros Papadiamantis.


REVIEW: Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico by Javier Marías


Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico

Javier Marías

Translated by Esther Allen

New Directions, 2010

According to Deleuze and Guattari, the art of the novella is very different from the art of the novel or the short story. The novel keeps you in the moment and develops a character, merging your psyche with that of another real-feeling person as she struggles through ups and downs. The short story unfolds into the future rhythmically, forever eliding psychology in favor of narrative. D&G sum it up this way: The story asks, “What’s going to happen next?” The novel shows you what is happening, as it happens.

The novella, perpendicular to both, tells you right away what already happened, then asks, “What happened?”—meaning how exactly did these events come to pass, what did they mean at the time, to whom, and what do we take from them now? If a novel is a life and a story a cinematic progression of moments, a novella is only a single moment, seen a la Rashōmon through many lenses.

This tends to make the novella blur into philosophy. A novella is, in some respects, a meditation, and—as much as it sucks us in and delivers a satisfying plot or examination of a theme—it leaves us dazed, our thoughts half-formed, our gushy parts only half-enlightened. We wonder if we’ve missed something. If we’re holding one of the great novellas, we dive right back in.

Javier Marías’s novella Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico is worth the second dive, and maybe many more. A 56-page work of alternating gravid humor and steak-thick terror, Bad Nature begins with a pages-long digression about what it means to be hunted down and killed, what it means to want to hunt someone down and kill him—propositions turned over carefully, almost religiously, as if we had specifically asked a good friend to explain to us why anyone would ever hunt another human, what the hunted would feel, and why.

[Being hunted down] isn’t knowing that you could be hunted down… it isn’t knowing with absolute certainty that someone would stamp on your hand if it were clutching the edge of a cliff (a thing we don’t usually risk, not in the presence of heartless people)…

The digression—preceding any plot beyond Elvis’s name in the subtitle—is not only tolerable but highly enjoyable, because it springs not from distracting cleverness or the need to delay, but from a typical and remarkable precision on the behalf of its cosmopolitan and prolific author, who is increasingly hailed as the greatest living Spanish novelist. (He’s “the most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature,” The Boston Globe, and “probably the greatest living and widely known writer in the world,” n+1.)

Marías—slyly political, laconically forceful—wastes not a word in seamlessly transitioning from the abstract to the real, and the really funny. Five pages in, Elvis has left the building, has left the United States, in fact, and is in Acapulco with the narrator, Ruibérriz or “Roy Berry,” a Spanish-born translator hired to coach the King into sounding more refined than the Mexicans he’ll be presumably upstaging in his latest plotless sojourn into film.

Roy is always quick to defend the King, who is so earnest and powerful and happy that you barely notice him amid his admirers. When’s he’s around, he’s a city unto himself:

…he traveled—well, “travel” may be an exaggeration: he moved—with a legion at his back, a battalion of more or less indispensable parasites, each with his own function or without any very precise function at all, lawyers, managers, make-up artists, musicians, hairstylists, vocal accompanists…

Here comes the “What happened?” A holiday goes wrong. After a scuffle at a bar with some small-time gangsters, Roy translates what a cool-furious Elvis spits out. And yet Elvis is allowed to go home… Roy is not. And when Elvis is gone, he’s gone, and Roy is left to drunkenly fend off the creatures of the Mexico City night on his own.

So, what happened?

Is Elvis to blame for the violence that ensues? Is no one to blame—is the outcome expected? Preordained? Absurd? Everything in the well-paced back-fifth of the book hangs on what happened when Elvis was in the room, and so—though he’s never really real, never really present or deep or transparent—the King is also never really gone.

Elvis provides, it turns out, half of a frame. The other half—the hunt—returns in the novella’s sewn-tight final lines, thematically landing back on page 1. Without trickery, Marías accomplishes the nigh-impossible. He infuses a meditation with all the life of a story, and he yanks up from the story a fully engaging character.

But, by the end, we realize that the character isn’t Elvis or even Roy: It’s the narrator’s voice, the man behind the curtain, the producer and cameraman and especially the director—maybe Almodóvar meets the restrained–manic Kurosawa of High and Low. Who is this guy, so funny and so hounded? Masculine in tone and childlike in observation?

The guessing game is all part of the happy itch with which Marías and writers of his caliber curse us. And so we read again. Somewhere, it’s always the 60s in Mexico, and Elvis is always at the bar, ordering another finger of rotgut mescal just as the fat gangster snatches back from the newspaperman his crumpled lucky hat…

-Wythe Marschall can be found here.