In “Russian Doll,” Neglecting Your Neighbors Could Kill You

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The dead don’t stick around in New York. The rapidly-changing city is so aggressively unfriendly to ghosts, that there is a popular movie from the ’80s whose premise is that a couple of nerd bros create a tech start-up to eradicate the city’s spirits — a particularly offensive move in the midst of an epidemic. When I think of New York’s dead, I can only think of the versions of ourselves that rattle around like spare change in our ribcage. I imagine they go about their business with the same disregard to the world’s tumult as they did when we lived them, like the dead in Rilke’s First Elegy, who go on without hearing us. This is to say: I do not think there are ghosts in New York. I think they have been Busted, and that they live in the only rent-free residence in the city — our own heads.

A real New York ghost story, then, is one in which we’re haunted by our own pasts. Instead of possession, we have self-obsession, which is arguably more deadly. And a real New York exorcism, ironically, is one in which we let in other spirits: the people around us and their own restless dead. In Natasha Lyonne’s new show Russian Doll, her character, Nadia, is in the grip of her past selves, leading her again and again to her own death, until she accepts help in acknowledging her ghosts and helps someone else do the same.

A real New York exorcism, ironically, is one in which we let in other spirits: the people around us and their own restless dead.

The show begins in an old East Village Yeshiva which has been, like the Jewish Daily Forward building before it, converted to luxury condos. It is there that Nadia, finds herself reliving the night of her 36th birthday — and dying every time. (And then waking up, alive again, in the same damn bathroom with the same damn song playing.) Her first assumption is that the building is haunted, but when she recruits her ex to speak with a rabbi who might know more about the history of the building, the rabbi tells him, “Buildings aren’t haunted. People are.”

Cut to Nadia, receiving a prayer of protection from Shiphrah, the rabbi’s assistant. Nadia doesn’t know her prayers, of course, so she asks what they mean. Shiphrah smiles: “Angels are all around us.”

Both bits of wisdom imply that it isn’t that places retain vestiges of the dead and that if people are haunted, the only way to give up the ghost is by letting in other spirits. If spirits enter the plane of the living, it is because we ask them to show up for us, either in the form of unconscious ruminating or conscious plea. Russian Doll, however, suggests that we don’t need the intervention of celestial bodies to save us — we can do the work ourselves.

In this same episode, Nadia does her first bit of angel work herself. She trusts Horse, a homeless man in Tompkins Square Park, to cut her hair before curling up beside him, two warm bodies for the night, only to freeze to death. It is also in this episode that Nadia, after coming to life in the bathroom again, makes her first order of business guarding Horse’s shoes for the night so he doesn’t leave the shelter. Angels are all around us; Nadia sits a vigil to keep him safe as he sleeps.

But then, twist: there’s another looper, Alan, with whom Nadia has not so much a meet-cute as a meet-grim in a plummeting elevator. She’s able to find him in the next loop only because she notices people and her surroundings. In the elevator, she picks up on his tick of fiddling with a box that we later learn contains an ill-fated engagement ring. She also notices the logo from the box on the window of the store that sold the ring, and after the salesperson won’t tell her his name, she notices the store’s fake-Yelp review icon and scrolls to find his name and his haunts. Tracking him down doesn’t depend on fortuitous coincidence — she just needs to pay attention to others and what’s going on around her.

Nadia and Alan come to realize that they are looping back through time together and dying at the same time, and must work with each other to address and survive the traumas of their pasts. Along the way, they discover how their looping timelines result in a deteriorating world: fruit rotting from the outside, vanishing fish, vanishing people. But even for those of us who live life linearly, our world also deteriorates. The city itself suffers through crumbling infrastructure that makes getting through the day that much more difficult for everyone, and people do vanish. The plagues of the city appear like Easter Eggs throughout the show: HIV-AIDS and the apartments the dead left behind to be snatched up by the wealthy; the neglect of the elderly; the neglect of gig workers; the Tompkins Square Riots and displaced squatters; displaced Holocaust survivors and Jews in general.

As the episodes wear on, it becomes apparent that the show asks us to not only care about the protagonists, but also the residents of the city they live in, and by extension, the city itself. If others vanish every time they loop, then the lives of others are implicated in their actions. You could say New York is a “character” in the show, as the cliché goes, in the sense that New York is not merely a setting, but a personality with agency that can be affected by others, and that suffers or thrives accordingly.

Nadia and Alan’s deaths become more gruesome and more alarming the closer they get to the heart of their trauma, and the closer they get to each other. No longer do they cooly reboot after a slapstick demise — they have twin heart attacks. Nadia coughs up bloody glass, and Alan keeps killing himself. But when they finally confront their own traumas and heal enough to survive one last death, they wind up in opposing timelines, tasked with saving the other from the deaths that started the loops. They don’t “fall in love” at the end, and the show isn’t a zany rom-com where the time loop is merely an impediment to a heterosexual success story. Instead, the time loop forces them out from their deepest layers of isolation and sadness and gives them an opportunity to rely on people other than themselves, or even their lovers, to heal trauma.

Russian Doll stages a paradox that is true for lovers as it is for any residents of a city in struggle: we need one another to heal, but we need to be working on healing ourselves in order to show up for one another. It’s that first step that is so hard — being well enough to let others in — especially in a city as notoriously individualistic as New York.

‘Russian Doll’ stages a paradox: we need one another to heal, but we need to be working on healing ourselves in order to show up for one another.

In a city that doesn’t always change so much as it metastasizes, the cost of living is as high as our worries, making it harder to be responsible for one another and easier to feel like the only person in the world, out only for survival. “What I do is my business,” Nadia tells Alan. “My body, my choice,” she jokes, before leaving to go have unprotected sex with a professor who, in a previous loop, opined on how we lost a generation of artists to AIDS, a trauma that he can only experience as a thought experiment. HIV would not be a death sentence for either affluent, insured character, but it was and remains a public health crisis for those left behind. Non-looping Nadia does not realize, third wave feminism aside, that what she does with her body is not only her business.

“Buildings aren’t haunted. People are.” The show itself is haunted by gentrification, as the characters themselves haunt a neighborhood where the homeless were violently evicted from the park and squatters from their residences. The characters in the show talk around gentrification (the Yeshiva condos, the AirBnB value of Maxine’s apartment, “Remember littering? Remember Dinkins”) in the way real life participants in gentrification often do, as a regrettable yet unavoidable occurrence. But as the show points out, feeling guilty does nothing to help anyone. Material support and embodied presence do.

Russian Doll isn’t a didactic show, nor does it make directly political statements. John Maus’ cover of “Cop Killer” may drone in the background of one scene, but in another, the dialogue drags through the flat delivery of an actress who is the real life daughter of a famous artist. In other words, the show doesn’t pretend to be immune to the charms of wealth and power even as it wears its anti-establishment references as a badge of cool. Then again, how many of us know our bodega guy’s name, let alone have his number saved in our phone, as Nadia does? The way the show proposes we care for one another — by turning our attention outward, beyond the couple and into the community — does have political implications, especially in a city as densely thrown together as New York. Russian Doll argues that we are implicated in each other’s lives, and that to avoid that responsibility is a kind of death. If you go down, we go down.

‘Russian Doll’ argues that we are implicated in each other’s lives, and that to avoid that responsibility is a kind of death.

Paying attention to what really grieves us, paying attention to lovers and strangers alike, is a form of care that asks us to take responsibility for others. “Take care of yourself,” Alan’s elderly neighbor asks of Nadia. The word “care” shares an etymological root with “curiosity,” suggesting that to care for something or someone is to have an openness towards difference. The danger of gentrification, as Sarah Schulman laments in her book, The Gentrification of the Mind, is not merely in how it displaces people and homogenizes cities. Gentrification eliminates the possibility for “the daily affirmation that people from other experiences are real.” Nadia walks by Alan in the park for several loops before they notice one another, unaware of the city’s warning to ignore others at your own risk.

The New York that Russian Doll imagines is, in the end, a city of people who recognize one another and promise to keep showing up for each other. It’s the only promise that can mitigate the displacement and poverty gentrification leaves in its wake. This message is more leftist than liberal: we must care for one another, but that means there is work to be done and there are reparations to be paid, not merely feelings to be resolved.

In their final loop, Nadia and Alan pay kindnesses towards the strangers who have become familiar and pay their dues to the homeless who are at risk of slipping away from life, as they themselves once were. Alan’s suicidal gift to Horse of the wedding ring and wallet is a proposal of care, of mutual aid. The show ends with a parade of the park squatters and various past Nadias, because in real New York, no one is the center of the universe, not even the people time traveling. In the end, Nadia cannot promise Alan happiness, as he asks her. She can only promise her presence, that he will not be alone.

You don’t have to know a person or even love them to invest a moment of care in their well-being. Even if it isn’t a political show, Russian Doll makes a political ask: be aware of your surroundings, your city, your own ghosts and the ghosts of others, so you can be available in some way to those around you.

Kayla Rae Whitaker Thinks You Should Turn Off Your Phone to Write

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I n our monthly series Can Writing Be Taught? we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This month we’re talking to Kayla Rae Whitaker, author of the prizewinning novel The Animators, who’s teaching an upcoming fiction workshop that focuses on the importance of tension. Students of all levels can take the class to work on creating, sustaining, and perfecting tension in their own writing.

What’s the best thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?

This advice: be patient with your work. It takes a long time to write a novel. Writing, editing, editing again — this is the process, and it requires time. It was the best advice I’ve ever gotten, and it’s been the hardest advice to process and to accept. I’ve found it is best executed with faith in the idea that you are your own shrewdest narrative expert. Accompanying advice I received: make this sense of faith in your own work active. Take small, daily steps toward your goal. Acts of faith can range from gestures as small as filing ongoing projects into binders, to as large as taking a class, or joining a workshop. Folding that sense of faith into your actual practice better prepares you for playing what can be a very long game.

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?

This did not occur in a workshop, but when I was 20 or so, I was in consultation with an older writer, and I was trying my best to get him to take my writing seriously. I told him how hard I worked — how much I read, wrote. How badly I wanted my writing to be good, and how I was willing to work, to get there. His response was to chuckle, say, “It takes more than that,” and turn his face away from me, effectively ending the conversation.

It took me years to realize how wrong this guy had been, and it galvanized me to take the compassion of teaching seriously. If you teach writing, your job is to teach writers to become better. I am here to meet you where you are. Your job is not to adjudicate who has “inherent talent,” and who does not. Doing so is a waste of time. Craft, process, and commitment to vision are at the center of our classroom concerns. And if you tell a student, “It takes more than that,” then you damn well better have an answer at the ready as to what “that” is.

If you teach writing, your job is to teach writers to become better. I am here to meet you where you are.

What is the lesson or piece of writing advice you return to most as an instructor?

Constancy. It sounds simplistic, but it’s the key to everything. Sitting down to write every day is a sort of conditioning. There’s a certain private space you are required to access before you can make creative work, and distraction makes this space elusive. Make an effort to slip into this space, as regularly as you brush your teeth, or exercise. Habit is the best way by which to become truly limber, creatively.

Get to know that productive space, for yourself. Know your sweet spots, and what makes your brain and gut churn. Pursue that space relentlessly. Try to make it a place you love. That’s the only element that will drag you back to your desk when things become difficult.

Also — increasingly — shut your phone off, when you write. Don’t just silence it. Turn it off.

Does everyone “have a novel in them”?

I’m inclined to say yes — people are such weird, wonderfully secretive creatures — but those with the patience to actually write those novels are few.

Would you ever encourage a student to give up writing? Under what circumstances?

Just one — if the writing itself was making the student so miserable, the rest of their life was untenable. Only then would I advise shelving their practice (and perhaps temporarily).

What’s more valuable in a workshop, praise or criticism?

An honest combination of both. Many beginning writers have no idea where their strengths or weaknesses are located, and that’s where the work of that lovely community, the workshop, comes into play. Under the group’s advisement, you begin to know your work at a distance, its bright spots, its frailties. You can begin to see what your work can be, with revision, and that realization gives criticism valuable heft. It becomes something you can use, something you are grateful for knowing, as opposed to something that just stings.

Should students write with publication in mind? Why or why not?

In some part, in that writing, and reading, are communicative acts. Good writing is, chiefly, an artfully arranged, and wonderfully deep, conversation between reader and writer. Holding that potential conversation in mind while writing is paramount.

However, thoughts of selling what you make, or worries of how what you make might stack up to the work of others, or anxieties over whether it will be reviewed well, should be held at as much of a remove as possible. Those anxieties just gum up the works. Craft comes first.

Good writing is, chiefly, an artfully arranged, and wonderfully deep, conversation between reader and writer.

In one or two sentences, what’s your opinion of these writing maxims?

  • Kill your darlings — Let’s find another way of saying this. I push a similar mantra, but phrased as: practice being your own best editor. Take steps to ensure that you will not be gentle.
  • Show don’t tell — All of these rules are fine, until that great, nose-thumbing story that just decimates that rule thunders to the fore. A more inclusive rule might be to balance your information — test out what can be offered in scene, in dialogue, and what is best delivered as a shot of well-executed exposition (and yes, such a thing exists).
  • Write what you know — This maxim can so easily become a chokehold. Don’t ever bar yourself from writing the unknown. Accordingly: do your research.
  • Character is plot — A character should always absorb their world, and respond to what their world throws at them, as themselves. But I love a narrative that keeps in mind how horribly malleable characters can be, when the world flings out its monkey wrenches.

What’s the best hobby for writers?

Something that has absolutely nothing to do with writing, and preferably something physical. This is why so many writers gravitate toward running, which is a personal passion of mine — it’s nice to simply be in the body, after spending so many hours of the day in that purely mental space.

What’s the best workshop snack?

Something dry and without smell or sound. Candy works well — it’s portable, and shareable, and it makes minimal noise. Just don’t bring in a ribeye.

If You Love Roberto Bolaño’s Work, You Love Natasha Wimmer

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Natasha Wimmer has worked on numerous books by the late, great Roberto Bolaño, including The Savage Detectives and 2666 (for which she won the PEN Translation Prize in 2009). She took Bolaño dazzling prose and gave it new life to millions of readers who would never have had a chance to read his masterpieces.

Wimmer’s most recent translation is of Bolaño’s latest posthumous release, The Spirit of Science Fiction. Written by the Chilean novelist in the 1980s, the novel was first published in 2016 by the Spanish publishing house Alfaguara. The novel follows two young poets in Mexico City trying to keep their friendship alive while forging a future for themselves.

I corresponded with Wimmer via email about the challenges of translation, translating the literary works of Bolaño, and the translated books that she’s most excited to read.

Adam Vitcavage: It’s easy to understand an author’s path to publishing, but I am not sure the path to becoming a translator. How did you become a Spanish literary translator?

Natasha Wimmer: I spent four formative years in Madrid, Spain (from 10 to 14) and then another year in college. I always knew that I wanted to be involved with books in some way, and my first job in New York was at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which had (and has) a very strong list of literature in translation. After a few years there, FSG was kind enough to let me take a stab at the Cuban novel Dirty Havana Trilogy by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez and I haven’t stopped translating since.

AV: What is your approach to translating? Very literal or do you try to capture the essence?

NW: That’s the great toggle of translation: back and forth from the closest possible translation of a sequence of words to a more idiomatic or loose rendition. There is no such thing as a literal translation, as any translator will tell you. Every translation is an interpretation. I fall on the looser end of the spectrum (I think), but I question every choice, debating whether I’ve stretched too far.

Every translation is an interpretation.

AV: What is your normal translation process? Is there a lot of back and forth with the author?

NW: It depends on the writer. In the case of Bolaño, of course, I worked on my own since he died a year or two before I started to translate him. With other writers, I try to gauge how much they want to be involved. In most cases, I come up with a list of questions once I’ve finished the translation and we spend a few hours or a few days going back and forth. Some writers relish the process: Álvaro Enrigue went so far as to add new material to the translation of his novel Sudden Death, and in general dealt with my annoying questions and misreadings with humor and patience.

AV: Roberto Bolaño is a revered writer, but a lot of his works have published posthumously. How do you tackle translating for someone who has passed?

NW: It really isn’t much different from translating anyone else, except that I have to make more independent choices about what an enigmatic word or sentence might mean. In the case of Bolaño, I’ve been translating him for so long that I feel at home with his rhythms. I’m also conscious of the repetition from book to book of certain words or motifs. For example, in The Spirit of Science Fiction, the word simonel (an ambiguous slang term that means yes/no) crops up, and I decided to leave it untranslated, just as I had in The Savage Detectives.

AV: In what other ways is Bolaño different than other writer you’ve translated?

NW: In the most basic sense, Bolaño is different for me because I’ve spent so much time on him. I’ve been translating him for fifteen years, on and off (mostly on). I’ve translated long novels, short novels, short stories (not many of those), and essays. I’ve also translated him in many different registers: the deadpan novel, The Third Reich; the prose poem, Antwerp; the playful essay collection, Between Parentheses, among other books. I have a better sense of his range than I have yet of any other writer I’ve translated.

AV: What was your initial reaction to when you read The Spirit of Science Fiction?

NW: It reminded me of falling in love with The Savage Detectives, which was the first Bolaño book I read. There’s a sunniness to the sections about Jan and Remo (the protagonists of Spirit of Science Fiction) that reminds me of the young poets of The Savage Detectives and the delight they take in each other’s company, in exploring Mexico City, in the pursuit of literature.

AV: Do you read a lot of international books? Are there any you’re dying to sink your teeth in to?

NW: Sure — though lately I’m on a history kick, and I’ve been making my way through Jill Lepore’s These Truths and Tom Reiss’s The Black Count, with Masha Gessen’s The Future is History and David Blights’s Frederick Douglass biography also on my shelf. On my to-read list of books in translation are Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear and The Emissary (trans. Susan Bernofsky), Javier Marias’s Thus Bad Begins (trans. Margaret Jull Costa), Emily Wilson’s Odyssey. I highly recommend Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream and Mouthful of Birds (trans. Megan McDowell), and also Antonio di Benedetto’s Zama (trans. Esther Allen)

AV: What upcoming projects do you have lined up?

NW: I’m working on two books by the Chilean writer Nona Fernández, Space Invaders and The Twilight Zone. They’re novels that explore the legacy of Pinochet in Chile in a hybrid way that is personal and essayistic. After that, I’ll be translating a new novel by Álvaro Enrigue, which is an adventure set in the wild country on the US/Mexican border once known as Apacheria, and is also a fairly uncategorizable book.

I urge readers to get to know translators and follow their work — it’s a great way to approach literature in translation.

AV: What other translators’ work do you admire?

NW: So many! I’m probably most familiar with other translators from Spanish, and I love so much of their work. I’ve long admired Edith Grossman and Esther Allen and Katherine Silver, for example, and then there are younger translators like Megan McDowell and Heather Cleary. I urge readers to get to know translators and follow their work — it’s a great way to approach literature in translation and to learn about new writers.

“A Tiger Fighter Is Hard To Find” by Ha Jin

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We were overwhelmed by a letter from the Provincial Governor’s Office. It praised our T’V series Wu Song Fought the Tiger. The governor was impressed by the hero, who fought the tiger single-handedly and punched it to death. The letter read: “We ought to create more heroic characters of this kind as role models for the revolutionary masses to follow. You, writers and artists, are the engineers of the human soul. You have a noble job in your hands, which is to strengthen peoples’ hearts and instill in them the spirit that fears neither heaven nor earth.” But the last paragraph of the letter pointed out a weakness in the key episode, which was that the tiger looked fake, and didn’t present an authentic challenge to the hero. The governor wondered if we could improve this section, so that our province might send the series to Beijing before the end of the year. That evening we had a meeting and decided to reshoot the tiger-fighting scene. Everybody was excited, because if the series were sent to the capital, it would mean we’d compete for a national prize. We decided to let Huping Wang take the part of the hero again, since the governor had been impressed by him in the first version. He was more than happy to do it. The problem was the tiger. First, a real animal would cost a fortune. Second, how could we shoot a scene with such a dangerous animal?

With the governor’s letter in hand, we obtained a grant from the Municipal Administration without difficulty. Four men were dispatched to Jilin Province to ship back a tiger just caught on Ever White Mountain. By law we were not allowed to acquire a protected animal, but we got papers that said we needed it for our city’s zoo. A week later the four men returned with a gorgeous Siberian tiger.

We all went to see the animal, which had been put in a cage in the backyard of our building. It was a male, weighing more than six hundred pounds. Its eyes glowed with a cold, brown light, and its scarlet tongue seemed wet with blood. What a thick coat it had, golden and glossy! Its stripes would ripple whenever it shook its head or stretched its neck. I was amazed at how small its ears were, not much larger than a dog’s. But it smelled awful, like ammonia.

We were told to feed it ten pounds of mutton a day. This was expensive, but if we wanted to keep the animal in good shape, we had no choice.

Huping Wang seemed a little unnerved by the tiger. Who wouldn’t? But Huping was a grand fellow: tall, muscular, straight-shouldered, and with dreamy eyes that would sparkle when he smiled. I would say he was the most handsome young man in our Muji City, just as his nickname, Prince, suggested. One girl told me that whenever he was nearby, her eyes would turn watery. Another girl said that whenever he spoke to her, her heart would pound and her face would burn with a tickle. I don’t know if that was true.

A few days before the shooting, Director Yu, who used to be a lecturer at a cinema school in Shanghai, gave Huping a small book to read. It was The Old Man and the Sea, by an American author whose name has just escaped me.

The director told Huping, “A man’s not born to be defeated, not by a shark or a tiger.”

“I understand,” said Huping.

That was what I liked most about him. He wasn’t just handsome, not like a flowered pillowcase without solid stuff in it. He studied serious books and was learned, different from most of us, who merely read picture books and comics. If he didn’t like a novel, he would say, “Well, this isn’t literature.” What’s more, he was skilled in kung fu, particularly mantis boxing. One night last winter, he was on his way back to his dorm when four thugs stopped him and demanded he give them his wallet. He gave them a fight instead. He felled them with his bare hands and then dragged the ringleader to a nearby militia headquarters. For that, he got written about in newspapers. Later, he was elected an outstanding actor.

The morning of the shooting was a little windy and overcast. Two trucks took us four miles out of the city to the edge of an oak wood. We unloaded the tiger cage, mounted the camera on the tripod, and set up the scene by placing a few large rocks here and there and pulling out some tall grass to make the flattish ground more visible. A few people gathered around Huping and helped him with his outfit and makeup. Near the cage stood two men, each holding a tranquilizer gun.

Director Yu was pacing back and forth behind the camera. A scene like this couldn’t be repeated; we had to get everything right on the first take.

The medic took out a stout jar of White Flame and poured a full bowl of it. Without a word, Huping raised the liquor with both hands and drank it up in a long swallow. People watched him silently. He looked radiant in the passing sunlight. A black mosquito landed on his jaw, but he didn’t bother to slap at it.

When everything was ready, one of the men shot a tranquilizer dart into the tiger’s rump. Holding his forefinger before Huping’s face, Director Yu said in a high-pitched voice, “Try to get into the character. Remember, once you are in the scene, you are no longer Huping Wang. You are the hero, a tiger fighter, a true killer!”

“I’ll remember that,” Huping said, hitting his left palm with his right fist. He wore high leather boots and a cudgel across his back.

Director Yu’s gaze swept through the crowd, and he asked loudly if everyone was ready. A few people nodded.

“Action!” he cried.

The door of the cage was lifted up. The tiger rushed out, vigorously shaking its body. It opened its mouth and four long canine teeth glinted. It began walking in circles and sniffing at the ground while Huping, with firm steps, began to approach it. The animal roared and pranced, but our hero took the cudgel from his back and went forward resolutely. When he was within ten feet of the tiger, the snarling beast suddenly sprang at him, but with all his might Huping struck it on the head with his cudgel. The blow staggered the tiger a little, but it came back and lunged at him again. Huping leapt aside and hit its flank. This blow sent the animal a few feet away. Huping followed it, striking its back and head. The tiger turned around with a menacing look. Then they were in a real melee.

With a crack, the front half of the cudgel flew away. Huping dropped the remaining half, just as Wu Song does in the story. The beast lunged forward, reached for Huping’s leg, and ripped his pants, then jumped up, snapping at Huping’s throat. Our hero knocked the animal aside with his fist, but its attack threw him off balance — he tottered and almost fell.

“Keep engaging it!” Director Yu shouted at him.

I stood behind a large elm, hugging my ribs.

“Closer, closer!” the director ordered the cameraman.

Huping kicked the tiger in the side. The animal reeled around and sprang at him again. Huping dodged the attack and punched the tiger’s neck. Now the drug began taking effect; the tiger wobbled a little and fell to its haunches. It lurched to its feet again, but after a few steps collapsed. Our hero jumped on its back, punching its head with all his strength. The tiger, as if dead, no longer reacted to the beating. Still, Huping pulled and pushed its huge head, forcing its lips and teeth to scrape the dirt. The tiger remained motionless, only its tail lashing the grass now and again. “Cut!” Director Yu called, and walked over to Huping as two men helped him up from the unconscious animal, The director said, “I guess we didn’t time it well. The tiger passed out too soon.”

“I killed him! I’m the number-one tiger fighter!” Huping shouted, With his fists balled at his flanks, he began laughing huskily and stamping his feet.

People ran up to him and tried to calm him down. He wouldn’t stop laughing.

“I killed him! I killed him!” he yelled, his eyes ablaze.

The medic poured some boiled water into a bowl and took out a sedative tablet. He made Huping take the medicine.

“Good wine, good wine!” Huping said after drinking the water. He wiped his lips with his forearm.

Then, to our astonishment, he burst out singing like a hero in a revolutionary opera:

My spirit rushing toward the Milky Way

With my determination and bravery

I shall eradicate every vermin from earth… .

A young woman snickered. Two men clutched Huping’s arms and dragged him away while he was babbling about plucking out the tiger’s heart, liver, and lungs. They put him into the back of a truck.

“He’s punch-drunk,” said our Party Secretary, Shanlong Feng. “Tough job — I don’t blame him.”

The tiger was lifted back into the cage. Director Yu wasn’t happy about the botched scene. According to the classic story, which our audience would know well, the hero is supposed to ride the tiger for a while, bring it down, and punch its head hundreds of times until it breathes its last. The scene we had just shot missed the final struggle, so we would have to try again.

But Huping was in no condition to work. For the rest of the day he laughed or giggled at random. Whenever he saw someone coming into sight he’d shout, “Hey, I killed the tiger!” We worried about him, so we called in a pedicab and sent him to the hospital for a checkup.

The diagnosis was mild schizophrenia, and the doctor insisted that Huping be hospitalized.

What should we do about the fight scene? Get another tiger fighter? Not so easy. Where on earth could we find a fellow as handsome and strapping as our Prince? We looked through a pile of movie and TV magazines in the hopes of finding someone who resembled him, but most young actors were pale-faced boys; few had the stature and spirit of a hero.

Somehow the prefecture’s Propaganda Department heard about the governor’s interest in our TV series. Its deputy director phoned, saying we should complete the revision as early as possible. Ir was already mid-September, and trees were dropping leaves. Soon, frost and snow would change the color of the landscape and make it impossible to duplicate the setting.

Because it was unlikely we would find a substitute for Huping, some people suggested using him again. Quite a few of us opposed this idea; those who supported it didn’t seem to care about a man’s life. In private, some of us — clerks, assistants, actors — complained about the classic novel that contains the tiger-fighting episode. Why did the author write such a difficult scene? It’s impossible for any man to ride a tiger and then beat it to death bare-handed. The story is a pure fabrication that has misled readers for hundreds of years. It may have been easy for the writer to describe it on paper, but in reality, how could we create such a hero?

Full of anxiety, Director Yu suffered from inflamed eyes, which turned into curved slits between red, doughy lids. He’d wear sunglasses whenever he went out of the office building. He told us, “We must finish the scene! It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!”

One night he even dreamed he himself wrestled the tiger to the ground, and his elbow inflicted a bruise on his wife’s chest.

We were worried, too. Our company couldn’t afford to feed the tiger for long; besides, we had no place to shelter it for the coming winter.

The next week Secretary Feng held a staff meeting with us. We discussed the predicament at some length. Gradually it became clear that if we couldn’t find a substitute, we would have to use Huping again. The proponents of this idea argued logically and convinced us, its opponents, that this was the only way to get the job done.

At the end of the meeting, Director Yu stressed that this time everything had to be accurately designed and calculated. The tranquilizer dart should carry a smaller dose so that the tiger would remain on its feet long enough for our hero to ride it awhile. Also, we would have to be more careful not to let the beast hurt him.

To our relief, when the leaders broached the decision with Huping, he eagerly agreed to fight the tiger again. He said that he’d live up to their expectations and that he felt fine now, ready for work. “I’m a tiger fighter,” he declared. His voice was quite hoarse, and his eyes glittered.

“Yes, you are,” agreed Secretary Feng. “All the provincial leaders are watching you, Huping. Try to do a good job this time.”

“I shall.”

So we trucked the tiger to the site the next morning. The weather happened to be similar to that of the previous time: a little overcast, the sun peeking through the gray clouds now and then. I identified the elm and the spot where the fight had taken place before. Huping sat on a boulder, with a cudgel across his naked back, while the medic massaged his shoulders. After a tranquilizer dart was shot into the tiger’s thigh, Huping rose to his feet and downed a bowl of White Flame in two gulps.

Director Yu went over to give him instructions, saying, “Don’t lose your head. When I shout, ‘On the tiger!’ you get on its back, ride it for a while, then bring it down. Before it stops moving, keep punching its head.”

“All right,” Huping nodded, his gaze fixed on the caged animal.

In the distance, on the hill slope, a few cows were grazing, and occasionally the west wind blew their voices to us.

The tiger was let out. It pranced around, bursting with life. It opened its mouth threateningly. It began eyeing the distant cows.

“Roll the camera!” shouted Director Yu.

As Huping approached the tiger, it growled and rushed toward him. Our hero seemed stunned. He stopped and raised the cudgel, but the beast pounced on him and pawed at his shoulder. With a heartrending cry, Huping dropped his weapon and ran toward us. The tiger followed, but having been caged for weeks it couldn’t run fast. We scattered in every direction, and even the camera crew deserted their equipment. Huping jumped, caught a limb of the elm, and climbed up the tree. The animal leaped and ripped off Huping’s left boot. Instantly, a patch of blood appeared on his white sock. “Save my life!” he yelled, climbing higher. The beast was pacing below the tree, snarling and roaring.

“Give it another shot!” Director Yu cried.

Another dart hit the tiger’s shoulder. In no time it started tottering, moving zigzag under the elm. We watched fearfully while Huping continued yelling for help. He was so piteous.

The tiger fell. Director Yu was outraged and couldn’t help calling Huping names. Two men quietly carried the cage toward the motionless animal.

“Idiot!” Director Yu cursed.

The medic wiggled his fingers at Huping. “Come down now, let me dress your foot.”

“No.”

“The tiger’s gone,” a woman said to him.

“Help me!” he yelled.

No matter how many sweet words we used, he wouldn’t come down from the tree. He squatted up there, weeping like a small boy. The crotch of his pants was wet.

We couldn’t wait for him like this forever, so Secretary Feng, his face puffy and glum, said to a man, “Give him a shot, not too strong.”

From a range of five feet a dart was fired at Huping’s right buttock.

“Ow!” he cried.

A few men went under the elm to catch him, but he didn’t fall. As the drug began affecting him, he turned to embrace the tree trunk and began descending slowly. A moment later the men grabbed his arms and legs and carried him away. One of them said, “He’s so hot. Must be running a fever.” “Phew! Smelly!” said another.

Now that our hero was gone, what could we do? At last it began to sink in that the tiger was too fierce for any man to tackle. Somebody suggested having the beast gelded so as to bring the animal closer to the human level. We gave a thought to that and even talked to a pig castrator who didn’t trust tranquilizers and wouldn’t do the job unless the tiger was tied up. Somehow, Choice Herb Store heard about the suggestion and sent an old pharmacist over to buy the tiger’s testicles, which the man said were a much sought-after remedy for impotency and premature ejaculation. In his words, “They give you a tiger’s spirit and energy.”

But having realized that the crux of our problem was the hero, not the tiger, we decided not to castrate the animal. Without a man who physically resembled Huping, we could get nowhere even with a tamed tiger. Then someone advised us to find a tiger skin and have it worn by a man. In other words, shoot the last part of the scene with a fake animal. This seemed feasible, but I had my doubts. As the set clerk whose job it is to make sure that all the details match those in the previous shooting, I thought that we couldn’t possibly get a skin identical to the real tiger’s. When I expressed my misgivings, people became silent for a long time.

Finally, Director Yu said, “Why don’t we have the tiger put down and use its skin?”

“Maybe we should do that,” agreed Old Min, who was in the series, too, playing a bad official.

Secretary Feng was uncertain whether Huping could still fill his role. Director Yu assured him, saying, “That shouldn’t be a problem. Is he still a man if he can’t even fight a dead tiger?”

People cracked up.

Then it occurred to us that the tiger was a protected animal and that we might get into trouble with the law if we had it killed. Director Yu told us not to worry. He was going to talk with a friend of his in the Municipal Administration.

Old Min agreed to wear the tiger’s skin and fight with Huping. He was good at this kind of horseplay.

Two days later our plan was approved. We had the tiger shot by a militiaman with a semiautomatic rifle. The man had been instructed not to damage the animal’s head, so he aimed at its chest. He fired six shots into the tiger, but it simply refused to die — it sat on its haunches, panting, its tongue hanging out of the corner of its mouth while blood streamed down its front legs. Its eyes were half-closed as though it were sleepy. Even when it had finally fallen down, people waited awhile before opening the cage.

‘To stay clear of the people who might be involved with the black market, we sold the whole carcass to the state-owned Red Arrow Pharmaceutical Factory for forty-eight hundred yuan, a little more than what we had paid for the tiger. But that same evening we got a call from the manager of the factory, who complained that one of the tiger’s hind legs was missing. We assured him that when the carcass left our company, it was intact. Apparently en route someone had hacked off the leg to get a piece of tiger bone, which is a kind of treasure in Chinese medicine, often used to strengthen the physique, relieve rheumatic pain, and ease heart palpitation caused by fright. The factory refused to pay the full price unless we delivered the missing leg. How on earth could we recover it? Secretary Feng haggled in vain, and they docked five hundred yuan from the original figure.

This time there was no need to persuade our hero. Just at the mention of beating a fake tiger Huping got excited, itching to have a go. “I’m still a tiger fighter. I’ll whip him!” he declared.

Because the shooting could be repeated from now on, there wasn’t much preparation. We set out for the woods in just one truck, Old Min sat in the cab with a young actress who was allergic to the smog and wore a large gauze mask. On the way Huping grinned at us, gnashed his teeth, and made hisses through his nose. His eyes radiated a hard light. That spooked me, and I avoided looking at him.

When we arrived at the place and got out of the vehicle, Huping began glaring at Old Min. The look on his face suggested intense malice. It made me feel awful, because he used to be a good-hearted man, gentle and sweet. That was another reason why the girls had called him Prince.

Old Min changed his mind and refused to play the tiger. Director Yu and Secretary Feng tried to persuade him, but he simply wouldn’t do it, saying, “He thinks he’s a real tiger killer and can have his way with me. No, I won’t give him a chance.”

“Please,” begged Director Yu, “he won’t hurt you.”

“Look at his eyes — they give me goosebumps. No, I won’t have anything to do with him.”

Desperate, Secretary Feng shouted at us, “Who’d like to play the tiger?”

There was no response, only a grasshopper snapping its whitish wings in the air. Then an explosion came from the distant mountain where granite was being quarried.

Director Yu added, “Come on, it will be fun, a good experience.” Seeing that no one was stepping forward, he went on, “I’ll treat whoever takes the part to an eight-course dinner.”

“Where will you take him?” asked the young truck driver, Little Dou.

“Four Seas Garden.”

“You really mean it?”

“Of course — on my word of honor.”

“Then I’ll try. I’ve never been in a movie, though.”

“You know the story Wu Song Fought the Tiger, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Just imagine yourself as the tiger being beaten by the hero. Crawl and roll about, keep shaking your head until I say, ‘Die.’ Then you fall down and begin to die slowly.”

“All right, I can give it a shot.”

Huping was already in his outfit but was not wearing a cudgel this time.

They wrapped the small driver in the tiger’s skin and tied the strings around his belly. Director Yu said to him, “Don’t be scared, Try to be natural. He’ll wrestle with you bare-handed. That tiger skin is so thick that nobody can hurt you.”

“No problem.” The driver spat to the ground, then put on the tiger’s head.

The director raised his hand, an unlit cigarette between his index and middle fingers. “Action!” he called. The tiger crawled into the grass, wandering with ease. Its rump wobbled a little. Huping leaped on its back and began riding it around, shouting, “Kill! Gripping its forelock with his left hand, Huping hit the tiger hard on its head with his right fist.

“Oh, Mama!” the tiger squealed. “He’s killing me!”

Huping kept punching until the tiger staggered, then collapsed. Just as we were about to intervene, Director Yu motioned us not to move. Old Min laughed boisterously, bending forward and holding the swell of his belly with both hands. “Oh my! Oh my!” he kept saying.

Meanwhile, Huping was slapping the tiger’s face and spitting on it as well.

The animal screamed, “Spare my life! Spare my life, Grandpa!”

“He’s hurting him,” said Secretary Feng.

“It’s all right,” Director Yu assured him. “Keep the camera rolling.”

I said, “If he cripples the guy, we’ll have to pay lots of money.”

“Don’t put such a jinx on us!” Director Yu snapped at me.

I held my tongue. Finally, Huping got off the tiger, which lay still. He started ferociously kicking its flank, head, neck, face. While his boots produced muffled thuds, he cursed, “Kill this paper tiger! I’m finishing him off!” How frightened we were! The driver made no noise.

Huping stepped aside, picked up a rock as large as a melon, and muttered, “Let me smash this fake.”

We ran over and grabbed him.

“Stop it!” the medic yelled at the hero. “You already beat the crap out of Little Dou!”

Huping wouldn’t listen and struggled to reach the motionless tiger. It took five men to restrain him, wrench the rock from his hands, and haul him away. He shouted, “I killed another tiger! I’m a real tiger fighter!”

“Shut up!” Director Yu said. “You couldn’t handle a tiger, so you turned on a man.”

Hurriedly, we removed the animal skin from Little Dou, who was unconscious. His lips were cut open; his mouth and eyes were bleeding.

Old Min, still unable to stop chuckling, poured some cold water on Little Dou’s face. A moment later Little Dou came to, moaning, “Help. . .save my life . . .”

The medic began bandaging him, saying we would have to send him to the hospital without delay. But who could drive the truck? Secretary Feng rubbed his hands and said, “Damn, look at this mess!”

A young man was dispatched to look for a phone in order to call our company and send for the other driver. Meanwhile, Little Dou’s wounds had stopped bleeding, and he could answer some questions, but he couldn’t help groaning once in a while. Old Min waved a leafy twig over Little Dou’s face to keep mosquitoes and flies away. Tired and bored, Huping was napping in the cab alone. Except for the two leaders who were in the bushes talking, we all lounged on the grass, drinking soda and smoking cigarettes.

Not until an hour later did the other driver arrive by bicycle. At the sight of him some of us shouted, “Long live Chairman Mao!” even though the great leader had passed away eight years earlier.

The moment we arrived at the hospital, we rushed Little Dou to the emergency room. While the doctor was giving him stitches, the medic and I took Huping back to the mental ward. On the way Huping said tearfully, “I swear I didn’t know Little Dou was in the tiger.”

After a good deal of editing, the fake-tiger part matched the rest of the scene, more or less. Many leaders of our prefecture saw the new part and praised it, even though the camera shakes like crazy. Several TV stations in the Northeast have begun rebroadcasting the series. We’re told that it will be shown in Beijing soon, and we’re hopeful it will win a prize. Director Yu has promised to throw a seafood party if our series makes the finals and to ask the Municipal Administration to give us all a raise if it receives an award.

Both the driver and Huping are still in the hospital. I was assigned to visit them once a week on behalf of our company. The doctor said that Little Dou, afflicted with a concussion, would recuperate soon, but that Huping wasn’t doing so well. The hospital plans to have him transferred to a mental home when a bed became available there.

Yesterday, after lunch, I went to see our patients with a string bag of Red Jade apples. I found the driver in the ward’s recreation room, sitting alone over a chessboard. He looked fine, although the scars left by stitches on his upper lip still seemed to bother him, especially when he opened his mouth.

“How are you today, Little Dou?” I asked.

“I’m all right. Thanks for coming.” His voice was smoother, as though it belonged to another man.

“Does your head still hurt?”

“Sometimes it rings like a beehive. My temples ache at night.”

“The doc said you could leave the hospital soon.”

“Hope they’ll let me drive the truck again.”

His words filled me with pity because the other driver had just taken an apprentice who might replace Little Dou eventually. So I gave him all the apples, even though he was supposed to get only half of them. He’s a bachelor without any family here, whereas Huping has two older sisters who live in town. I found Huping in his room. He looked fine, but no longer possessed any princely charm. He had just returned from kung fu exercises and was panting a little. He wiped his face with a grimy white towel. The backs of his hands were flecked with tiny scars, scabs, and cracks, which must have resulted from hitting sandbags. I told him that we had received more than three hundred fan letters addressed to him. I didn’t reveal that more than 90 percent of them were from young women and girls, some of whom had mailed him sweetmeats, chocolates, raisins, books, fountain pens, fancy diaries, and even photos of themselves. How come when a man becomes a poor wretch he’s all the more splendid to the public?

Huping grinned like an imbecile. “So people still think I’m a tiger fighter?”

“Yes, they do,” I said and turned my head away. Beyond the double-paned window the yard was clear and white. A group of children were building a snowman whose neck was encircled by an orange scarf. Their mouths puffed out warm air, and their shouts rose like sparrows’ twitterings. They wore their coats unbuttoned. They looked happy.

Huping stroked his stubbled chin and grinned again. “Well,” he said, “I am a tiger killer.”

7 Books About the War on Terror

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M y novel 99 Nights in Logar — about a small group of young boys searching for a ferocious guard dog in a small village in Logar, Afghanistan — primarily stems from a series of events I recall quite often (and quite nostalgically) from a three-month trip I took to Afghanistan in 2005 when I was twelve years old. Though I’ve lived in the shadow of the “War on Terror” since 2001, this trip to Afghanistan was the first time I really came face to face with the surreal nature of America’s war in Afghanistan.

Purchase the book

I watched the machinations of the “War on Terror” (its surveillance, its checkpoints, its weaponry, its barricaded semi-colonies where foreigners are safely separated from the native population, its behemoth Humvees, its reports, its stories, its legends) in awe and in horror, and in many ways, I wrote my novel 99 Nights in response to this odd sense of being both constantly overwhelmed by joy (joking and running and swimming and laughing and skipping stones) and by fear.

Approximately eighteen years after the US began its “War on Terror”, the world (especially the Islamic world) has only been made more violent and more chaotic as a result. Nonetheless, out of this absurd carnage has appeared some incredible, heartrending, and oftentimes surreal books. Here are just a few:

Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi

In Guantánamo Diary, Mohamedou Ould Slahi gives a harrowing account of the fourteen years he was held without charge or trial at Guantanamo Bay. He wrote his memoir in captivity. Thus, large portions of the text were censored and omitted by the U.S. government in a very Orwellian fashion, giving the text this almost unintentionally (horrifically) postmodern aesthetic. In this way, the book becomes a chilling testament to America’s state of censorship, Islamaphobia, historical erasure, torture, and our very understanding of how, and to whom, violence should be inflicted.

The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq by Hassan Blasim

If you’re tired of reading American perspectives on the War in Iraq, take a look at The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq by Hassan Blasim, an Iraqi-born writer. His collection of short stories The Corpse Exhibition is probably the most soul shattering book on war I’ve read since Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry. Blasim takes on the atrocity of the American War in Iraq with a horrifying (and awe inspiring) sense of absurdism and unflinching realism.

The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan

Written from multiple perspectives (bombers and victims and everyone in between), Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs weaves an incredible tapestry of stories and lives in the wake of a “small” bombing in Lajpat Nagar, Delhi. Terror, in Mahajan’s novel, never exists in some sort of an ideological vacuum, rather Mahajan demonstrates how violence and terrorism (both of the militant and the state sponsored variety) are produced and reproduced from a complex set of material and political circumstances. As much as The Association should be lauded for its impeccable prose and complex characters (as it has been), the novel should also be recognized for its aversion to a reoccurring simplification of how and why “terror” occurs.

Karan Mahajan on the Inner Lives of Terrorists & Victims in Today’s India

Look by Solmaz Sharif

I read Solmaz Sharif’s poem “Reaching Guantanamo” in my office at UC Davis, around noon, on a sunny day sometime toward the end of spring. I can recall, vividly, almost every detail from the moment of my reading because this poem has left such an indelible mark on my sense of seeing and being seen. Much of Sharif’s work focuses on the violence of language (and the language of war), so it seems fitting that this poem would have such a visceral and devastating effect upon my body (my skin, my heart rate). I shook. I shuddered. I nearly wept. Kafka once said “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Look is one of these books.

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi

A drunken junk seller collects the abandoned body parts of bombing victims and begins to stitch together a Frankenstein-type-monster in Baghdad, Iraq during the early years of the American occupation. Somehow Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad only gets wilder from there as the Frankenstein creature begins to take vengeance upon the killers of the victims from which he was created. Darkly comic and beautifully written, Saadawi’s Frankenstein becomes a surreal depiction of the monstrosity of the American War in Iraq itself.

Radical Skin, Moderate Masks by Yassir Morsi

A lecturer in politics at La Trobe University, Yassir Morsi draws upon Frantz Fanon’s classic text Black Skin, White Masks to explore questions of how, and if, Muslims are able to represent themselves politically. What does it mean to “de-radicalize”? Or to become “liberal” within the context of the “War on Terror”? Unafraid to delve into experiences from his own life, Morsi writes a brilliantly theorized text, without falling into the pit of Academic jargon. Especially for young Muslim writers, Morsi’s Radical Skin, Moderate Masks is a must read.

A Virtue of Disobedience by Asim Qureshi

In a time when Muslims across the globe are being pressured (by Imams and Feds alike) to submit to the will of oppressive states and regimes for the sake of peace and obedience, Dr. Asim Qureshi, Research Director at the advocacy organization CAGE (more on them later), has written a philosophical treatise extolling the virtue of disobedience.

Drawing upon his own experience working for CAGE — which campaigns against state policies targeting Muslim communities and advocates for the rights of Muslim political prisoners held without trial — Islamic scholarship, and histories of civil disobedience in the US and South Africa, Qureshi argues that resistance to systemic oppression is not only universally virtuous but is an essential character of Islam itself. A brilliant, sensitive, and necessary text. Please consider donating to CAGE.

About the Author

Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar. He was born in Pakistan and grew up in the United States. His story “Nights in Logar,” upon which this debut novel is based, won the 2018 O. Henry Prize. He currently attends the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

“The Cassandra” Is a Novel about Toxic Masculinity and Cursed Women

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Summoning references to classic Greek myth, The Cassandra, set in the 1940s, focuses on the life of Mildred Groves, a young, unusual woman who sees visions of the future. When an opportunity for employment at the secretive Hanford research center presents itself, Mildred leaves home and enters a totally new world — one she sees as a hopeful land of possibilities. But there’s much more than possibility lurking in the dark corners at Hanford.

Dissecting humanity’s cravings for power and our fascination with destruction, Sharma Shields’ The Cassandra is a call for us all to truly think about who we are — and who we are becoming.

Bradley Sides: In your latest novel, The Cassandra, you mix magical realism with myth. You present a young woman named Mildred Groves, who very much reflects Cassandra from mythology. Mildred, like Cassandra, sees horribly bleak visions of the future that no one believes. What was the genesis of your novel?

Sharma Shields: The setting of Hanford came first, before I considered Mildred or Cassandra. When I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis five years ago, a couple of people mentioned the high incidence of MS in the Inland Northwest, where I grew up and live now, and someone said to me, “It’s because we’re downwind of Hanford.”

I’d been thinking of writing a gloomy Northwest version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and it occurred to me after I heard this that Hanford was the perfect setting.

Early on in my research about Hanford, I was surprised to read that virtually no one working there in 1944 had any idea what they were manufacturing. There was even a rumor floating around that they were producing toilet paper for the troops overseas. When I took a tour of Reactor B in the summer of 2015, I marveled at the irony of the vintage signage everywhere, “Loose lips sink ships,” “Safety first,” etc. Secrecy and safety were the paramount messages, but of course this is a place that contributed to more than 100,000 deaths in Nagasaki; a place that has poisoned our local environment and caused numerous thyroid cancers, birth defects, and polluted crops and water. The irony there is remarkable.

As I mused on all of this violent secrecy, I thought of Cassandra and the Trojan war, “the shambles for men’s butchery, the dripping floor.” And from Cassandra sprang Mildred Groves, who hails from Omak, a small town near where my mom grew up (Okanogan) in arid central Washington State.

BS: From the start, Mildred is such a complicated character. She’s driven. She’s strong. She’s loyal. I was rooting for her all the way, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I also found her to be frustrating, especially after she gets settled in at Hanford. What do you hope readers take away from her after reading her story?

SS: Mildred is frustrating, probably in a lot of the same ways I frustrate myself. She’s eager to please (to a fault), she’s naïve, she internalizes the behavior of others, she’s willing to put herself down to make someone feel better. The way she accepts and makes excuses for the verbal battery of her mother and sister is alarming.

Mildred does what a lot of us do, suppresses herself until that negative energy bursts out of her, and the wrong people get hurt. She does awful, incalculable harm. It parallels the harm our country has done to others; the harm humanity does to itself. By the end of the book, she is utterly changed, physically, mentally. I hope readers find something relatable in her struggle and in her complicity and fallibility and regrets, but also in her power and her attempt to enact change. I wanted her to be both: powerless, powerful, like we all are. I’m hoping Mildred expresses a sharp warning about how we treat ourselves and treat others on both an individual and global scale.

BS: Men certainly aren’t the only ones who mistreat Mildred (her mother who continually calls her a “ferret face” has to be mentioned), but they are the most consistent in doing so. They are truly awful to her — even from the first chapter when she has her interview at Hanford. They harass, abuse, and devalue her. Nevertheless, she persists. The Cassandra feels timely.

SS: Both women and men in this novel are capable of cruelties large and small. Many of the characters turn violent and commit horrific acts, including Mildred, but you’re right, this is a novel about the prison of militant nationalism and toxic masculinity, and how those confines really in the end harm us all, regardless of gender.

Many of the interactions between men and women in the book are taken directly from my own life: critical comments issued about female bodies, unwanted attention, a sense of never truly being safe, patronizing treatment, and even assault and rape. Someone very close to me in my own family, a woman I love and admire and look up to as being one of the hardest-working and strongest humans I know, was put in the ER by her own husband. He dangled one of her sons over a balcony in their large house, he beat her senseless. I remember keenly when my parents received the phone call about her hospitalization. I was in grade school. I remember listening to their hushed, upset voices, and how endlessly dark the night sky seemed through their bedroom window. How could someone do this to another human being? That man was a radiologist; he ended up losing his Washington State medical license for abusing patients, but he’s practicing again in Idaho.

I was working on a new draft of this book when Trump said his “grab them by the pussy” comment, and what I felt — what a lot of women felt — was actual physical pain. It was hard to breath, my lower body ached, and a hurtful memory from when I was 14 began to plague me. For years I’d told myself that what had happened was my own fault, but I was approaching 40 now, and it was ridiculous to keep deceiving myself in this way. My mom arrived one day when I was working on one of the most violent scenes in the novel, and she could see I was agitated, depressed. I told her I didn’t know what I was doing to myself, writing in these dark places, and pulling from events I’d never let myself fully articulate to anyone, let alone myself. My mom suspected what was happening to me at 14 with this older boy, and we’ve now had open discussions about it. At the time I assumed it was all my fault, but it was not. It’s also bigger than being just that boy’s fault (he, like Kavanaugh, was 17 at the time): Something societal needs to change. I poured a lot of these emotions and memories into the book. 1944 really isn’t that far away. A lot has changed, and very little has changed, too.

Trump’s presidency has not caused more misogyny or racism or ignorance, the way some people think. It’s a product of it. This has been in our country for a long time, this white nationalism and misogyny. He is the poster child for it now (and he’s a child in so many ways, behaviorally); he represents a staunch portion of the population unwilling to open their minds and evolve. My own personal belief is that the humanities can teach us how to become better people. But I also see the naiveté in such a statement. Are we broken beyond fixing? I’m not sure. I hope not.

The Cassandra also became unexpectedly timely when Hanford started popping up in the national news again, this time for leaking nuclear waste tanks and, most recently, for attempted shut downs of Hanford watchdog groups. Now that I’ve researched Hanford, I’m not surprised by any of this. We’ll be feeling the direct repercussions of Hanford’s creation in our region and country for a long time, environmentally and ethically. When the administration gloats about funding nuclear programs and major defense/weapons programs, I cringe. We are setting ourselves up to destroy more, when what we need is repair.

This is a novel about the prison of militant nationalism and toxic masculinity, and how those confines in the end harm us all, regardless of gender.

BS: It’s early in the year, but these lines have to be some of the most sobering I’ll encounter throughout 2019:

“The things we’ve done to the children of this world — slavery, brainwashing, exile, genocide — do any other creatures harm their children this way? These deviances built our own nation, they’ve built all of the civilizations of men. I awoke with the certainty that none of us deserved to be alive, myself least of all.”

I know we’re technically dealing with fiction here, but this feels as real as it gets. How difficult was it to admit something so haunting about our species — and ourselves?

Sharma Shields: I grew up very sheltered from the truth of our history, regional and otherwise. In school, we learned the Whitman Massacre in Walla Walla was a “thoughtless tragedy,” rather than a retaliation of the Cayuse for being systematically murdered by the Whitmans and other settlers. Hitler was talked about as an anomaly, as if genocide wasn’t occurring here, or wasn’t occurring worldwide at that very moment. Slavery was also a thing of the past, not to concern ourselves with, and when I asked someone in my family about it, they said we shouldn’t beat ourselves up for what our ancestors did.

I’m of the other mindset: We should beat ourselves up for what we’ve done. What we should not do is draw a line between our present selves and our history; the two are inextricable. It is easy to be lazy, complicit. So easy. I’m guilty of it even as we speak. But we are educated humans, capable of imagination and empathy and hopefully social evolution. By acknowledging our darkness, our propensity for violence and greed and cruelty, maybe we can begin to imagine shedding it for something less harmful. Is such evolution possible? I really don’t know.

It’s been upsetting for me to see the ways in which children, especially, are harmed in this world. Having children now, I read the news and I’m gripped by a profound sadness for the joy and love we are shuttering. Native girls and women are missing and/or dead, children are separated from their parents on the border, a girl on the Pakistan/Indian border is tortured to death because her religion is not the same as someone else’s, children in the public school where my husband teaches are homeless, maybe to avoid being abused again, or because their own parents are in jail, or have abandoned them for drugs. Near and far there is failure. And it’s our failure, collectively.

It may be true that it makes me critical of myself, these thoughts, that I’m always pressing myself to do better, and I’m always examining my own failures of kindness and fairness and compassion (of which there are many, so many). But I’m sick of individualism, of this country with its pull-yourself-up-by-your-boot-straps mentality, a mentality that has never and does not apply to marginalized groups. There was a great article in the New York Times recently about women in politics, about how they must rise as a group effort and not individually. At first I was annoyed that we as women can’t go it alone, but then I realized: Going it alone might be the whole problem. There is hope in unification, in coming together rather than tearing apart.

Now we just need all of us to unify somehow. I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know if I believe we can do it, but I hope so. My novel is intended to be a warning about what will happen if we don’t.

By acknowledging our darkness, our propensity for violence and greed and cruelty, maybe we can begin to imagine shedding it for something less harmful.

BS: You, I believe, are one of our great writers working within magical realism and weird fiction. Whether I’m reading one of your stories from Favorite Monster or exploring the worlds and situations you’ve crafted in your two novels, The Sasquatch Hunter’s Almanac and The Cassandra, you are someone who boldly embraces the fantastic. What is it that attracts you to this genre of writing?

SS: I’ve always felt there was truth in our nightmares and in the unknowable. There is so much we don’t understand about our universe, about our own existence, and crossing into the abstract forces us to confront uncomfortable questions.

I think quite a lot about Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, which describes how we spend much of our lives distracting ourselves with Apollonian rationality — materialism, schedules, religion, our jobs — but how art and the imaginative can pull back that velvet curtain and reveal the chaos beyond, or what Nietzsche calls the Dionysian spirit. I’m curious about this chaos, about the unexplained, and I’m always startled by the lengths we go as humans to avoid considering chaos and our smallness and mortality. I’ve sort of made it my life’s goal to be comfortable with these uncertainties, and our potential insignificance is comforting to me, how we are no more than this tiny infinitesimal heartbeat in a vast incomprehensible universe. To realize my own smallness shrinks the ego, and along with it shrinks my many anxieties (and being an anxious person, this is a much-appreciated consequence). I can’t help feeling that there is compassion to be found in this acceptance, that if we understood how small our lives truly are, we would be kinder to ourselves and to our fellow humans. It seems that so many problems in our world come from people’s grandiosity and self-righteousness.

I become most enthralled in the writing process when I surprise myself, when I wind up somewhere I least expect. Sometimes this occurs through a character behaving in a way I hadn’t thought they would (a kind person, for example, committing a heinous act), and sometimes this occurs with the arrival of a mythological creature, an enchanted heron or a witch, say, or maybe a fantastical event such as a baby snatched up by an eagle or a bottomless pit opening up in a forest. The last two events take place in my novel The Sasquatch Hunter’s Almanac, and the metaphors they carry with them are incredibly personal to me, as wacky as the plots are: the former a metaphor for postpartum depression and parental anxiety, the latter a reflection on the endless depths of loss and guilt. I love the metaphorical wiggle-room the fantastic allows us. Metaphor is my jam, both writing and reading-wise.

In The Cassandra, compared to my first novel, I wanted the focus to be less on the fantastic and more on the historical, given the absolutely alarming research I uncovered about Hanford. A lot of that shit was weird enough. But drawing the parallel between Mildred Groves and her powerful visions, and Cassandra and her visions from the Orestian trilogy became important to me: These are two women mired in times of war, at the mercy of those more powerful than they are, and their very lives are at stake. They are powerful seers, but cursed to be ignored. The strangeness of her visions served a few purposes for me: It heightens the metaphorical and the emotional in the book; it creates an interesting tension between the very real events at Hanford and the fantastical, a push and pull of reality and nightmare; and it hopefully entertains by discussing history in a way that might be more memorable than reading a dry text book.

BS: There’s an actual Cassandra from mythology, obviously. But you have other elements from history that you channel, too. Hanford research center, the place where Mildred works, was a real place. There are several historical references from World War II. I mean, there’s a lot of real-world connections going on. Were having these historical elements limiting, or did you find them helpful?

SS: I’ve surprised myself by finding a lot of inspiration in real historical events — I never before considered myself a historical writer. I’ve always loved researching, whether for college essays or for my reference job at the Spokane County Library District, so I suppose in a way it was inevitable that research would become a focus in my fiction. In this book, I feel (perhaps erroneously) like almost every detail, down to every line, is connected to something researched. The actress mentioned throughout, for example, Susan Peters: Mildred Groves adores her from afar and talks about her throughout the book, at first in a star-struck way, and then by the novel’s end, more mournfully. Peters was a real star in Hollywood in the 1940s. I found her on a website about the “100 Most Beautiful Women of All Time,” and was surprised to see someone from Spokane (my hometown) listed there. The story I uncovered about her was remarkable: she was injured in a hunting accident and left paralyzed, and she attempted (and failed) to reintegrate into a very ableist Hollywood. Without meaning to, I’d found an interesting parallel to Mildred’s uphill battle against the militant forces at Hanford.

It was one of my favorite aspects of writing this novel, finding historical puzzle pieces like this and arranging them within the plot. It gives the work these interesting layers to peel open, and it helped me draw out Mildred’s character. It was also my way of tipping my hat to Peters, this historical figure who tried to upset the norm in a place devoted to surface-level beauty. For me it was not at all limiting but rather a tantalizing challenge, another way of finding inspiration in the unexpected.

Trump’s presidency has not caused more misogyny or racism or ignorance, the way some people think. It’s a product of it.

BS: I’d like to wrap up by going back to our first topic: speculative literature. What have you read recently that you’d recommend for lovers of all that is magical and weird?

SS: My favorite recent reads include: Wayétu Moore’s She Would Be King, a breathtaking blend of history and magic involving the origins of Liberia; Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream, a surreal eco-nightmare; Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, a story collection about women’s autonomy/agency and lack of it. I’m very excited to start Marlon James’s new trilogy. I love what he said in a recent New York Times interview, “Genre is such a ridiculous convention, as ridiculous as the idea of the Great American Novel.” He points out as a kid that he was never required to cleave works of literature into separate categories and how weird it is we force people to do that now.

“Faust” Was the Original Viral Content, and It’s Still Relevant Today

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I f the legend of Faust — the old man who sells his soul to the devil himself in exchange for youth, power, and glory — originated with the Germans in the 16th Century, it’s been perfected by the Americans in the 21st Century. Not the actual Americans (though there’s an argument to be made for that), but The Americans. When the FX series debuted in January, 2013, just ten days after Barack Obama was sworn in for his second term, its showrunners couldn’t have predicted how relevant the story of two Soviet spies embedded in the D.C. metro area in the 1980s would be by the time The Americans wrapped on May 30, 2018. In the wake of Donald Trump, travel bans, border walls, and Russia probes, a series finale that ended with KGB operatives Philip and Elizabeth Jennings sacrificing everything for the deal they made with their country felt uncomfortably resonant.

Despite the FBI’s pursuit, the Jenningses make it back to Moscow. But after 20 years in the United States, they’re now in a Soviet Union that is completely foreign, and one that they sense has an uncertain political future. Philip’s best (and only) friend, the Bureau agent leading their pursuit, will have hell to pay for letting the family escape, both personally and professionally. The cost for eluding capture also means that Philip and Elizabeth are forced to to abandon their son and are in turn abandoned by their daughter along the way.

The Faustian exchange is manifold and multilayered in The Americans: Philip and Elizabeth give up their futures of certainty in a country that, while mired in Soviet sameness, also sold its citizens on a sense of security. The decades they spent building their lives in the U.S. meant decades of decisions — from having kids to buying a Camaro — that would all come in second (at best) to whatever needed to be sacrificed for the USSR. And, in the end, it all gets sacrificed, including much of the faith they had in their government when their exposure is wrapped up in a plot by their own handler to discredit Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. They bargain away their sense of belonging in order to serve their country, and in the end, the devil comes to collect.

Making it back to Moscow, the Jenningses still have a ways to fall: The Americans wraps in 1987, two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and four years before the collapse of the USSR turned Russia into a kleptocracy. Even if their American-born children are deported to the USSR and reunited with their parents (as was the case with the children of Russian spies living in the United States in the 2010s), it’s likely that the family would be even more miserable and fractured. Hell is other people.

The U.S., as we came to realize over the six years that The Americans ran, is no better off. To add insult to injury, this revelation is due in part to a presidential election currently under investigation for potential ties to the Russian government. The lines between who is Faust and who is the Devil in that dichotomy are as skewed as a state-run newspaper.

The lines between who is Faust and who is the Devil in that dichotomy are as skewed as a state-run newspaper.

How we view history depends largely on how we frame it. Faust entered into legend in 1587 with the German chapbook, The Historia von D. Johann Fausten, published by Johann Spies and presumably based on the real-life alchemist Johann Georg Faust. Faust conjures Mephistopheles in the woods and makes him an offer: his soul in exchange for 24 years of absolute power and knowledge. With the devil at his side (and, improbably, a poodle), Faust rubs elbows with sultans, popes, and Helen of Troy. Two dozen years later, Mephistopheles demands payment in full. The morning after the final day of the bargain, Faust’s innards are discovered scattered around his bedroom — the rest of his body is found in his courtyard.

The Spies chapbook traveled with the velocity of a Tomahawk missile, resonating with audiences for both its fantastic episodes and gory end. Scholar Gerald Strauss describes the pamphlet as “the very paradigm of a late medieval… user-friendly article, attractively packaged, designed to grab and hold attention, and capable of leaving some sort of enduring mark on the mind of the targeted reader.” In other words, it was the 16th-century equivalent of BuzzFeed clickbait, presented as a dichotomy of virtue versus damnation with clear heroes and villains. It’s the cautionary tale of what happens when we eradicate our deepest fears and satisfy our highest goals.

Faust was the 16th-century equivalent of BuzzFeed clickbait, presented as a dichotomy of virtue versus damnation with clear heroes and villains.

It didn’t take long for English translations to take hold, including Christopher Marlowe’s dramatization, Doctor Faustus, which premiered in 1592. In Puritan New England, its popularity was comparable to the Bible, the occasional hymnal, and a few schoolbooks. Even as the “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” aesthetic of the 17th and early 18th Centuries faded away, Faust (much like history) repeated itself.

Goethe became the grandmaster of the legend between 1806 and 1831, when Parts I and II of his Faust were published. Instead of being a black-and-white story of one man’s willing descent into damnation, however, Goethe painted his version with shades of 19th-century grey. His Faust bemoans in Part I, “Two souls are locked in conflict in my heart/They fight to separate and pull apart.” This chronic dissatisfaction, rather than the specifics of his contract, becomes Faust’s downfall — as well as the downfall of Marguerite, a love interest he seduces once he regains his youth, but is incapable of fully loving. His bargain with Mephistopheles becomes a bet: He’ll serve the Dark Lord if and when he finds pure, unadulterated happiness within the totality of the human experience.

Until then, he’ll take a particularly Romantic reward: “a frenzied round of agonizing joy,/Of loving hate, of stimulating discontent,” and “The whole experience of humankind,/To seek its heights, its depths.” There could hardly be a more 19th-century request.

Goethe’s Faust is one of the first to become relatable rather than revilable. In him, we can see our own desires and dissatisfaction, as opposed to a cautionary tale that reminds us to suppress those same desires. Indeed, after being originated by Spies, cemented by Marlowe, and given new life by Goethe, Faust has continually been reinvented as a metaphor for whatever we desire and fear most. The nature of the bargain, and the actual deliverables, are details to be dictated by the times. In the 16th century, Faust bartered mortality for knowledge; in the 19th, he made a gentleman’s wager to achieve Romantic transcendence.

Across the 20th century, Faust continued to flourish as a tabula rasa for many of humanity’s greatest atrocities, the desire being godlike glory. Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita placed the devil in Stalinist Moscow, where he exposed the USSR’s culture of greed, excess, and sycophancy. Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus chronicled the story of a composer who barters with Mephistopheles in the shadow of Hitler’s Germany, unaware of the ramifications of this deal until there’s no escape (in its 1948 review, the New York Times didn’t miss the opportunity to call out Mann’s home country for having “sold its soul to the Nazi demon for transitory worldly glory”).

Across the 20th century, Faust continued to flourish as a tabula rasa for many of humanity’s greatest atrocities.

Historical figures themselves started to become implicated in the meme, even to the point of backlash. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, was so associated with the trope that, writing for Dissent magazine in 1956, Günther Anders declared Faust dead. “Since we are in a position to inflict absolute destruction on each other,” he argued, “we have apocalyptic powers. It is we who are the infinite.” Faust’s fatal flaw, Anders argued, was the “inability to transcend his finitude” — something we as a society with the power of nuclear destruction can even begin to understand.

But have we really transcended?

On a Saturday night in Berlin just before Halloween, I exit the U-Bahn at the Deutsche Oper station, just before a performance of Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust. This means passing a large slab of a monument by Alfred Hrdlicka, titled Der Tod des Demonstranten (“The Death of the Demonstrator”). Hrdlicka depicts a man suspended upside down by two police officers in full riot gear. The demonstrator, his back turned towards the viewer, is held by the legs, his wrists pinned together, his back bared. He looks vaguely Christlike, or like an Icarus who has flown too close to the sun and is now being dragged back down towards his doom. It’s an apt visual to encounter before seeing Berlioz’s date with the devil.

But Benno Ohnesorg, the subject of the memorial who was killed outside of the Deutsche Oper in 1967, isn’t another Faustian avatar, rather he represents the price of power. At just 26, the classics student was attending his first demonstration, opposing the Shah of Iran’s visit to Berlin and the German government’s welcoming of an authoritarian leader with a heinous human rights record. Iranian agents and German police began to attack the peaceful demonstrators, and in the chaos that ensued, Sergeant Karl-Heinz Kurras shot Ohnesorg in the back of the head. He died en route to the hospital, leaving behind a wife who was pregnant with their first child.

Sergeant Kurras was exonerated officially, but damned by left-wing student groups. These events contributed to the radicalization of the Red Army Faction, which terrorized West Germany throughout the 1970s. Adding insult to injury, in 2009 Kurras was revealed to have been a Stasi operative for East Germany.

Looking now at The Death of the Demonstrator, I’m reminded of why Alexandra Richie dubbed Berlin “Faust’s metropolis.” It’s a city that’s both terrible and wonderful, a city that has both created and destroyed, and “above all, a place where history could not and still cannot be hidden away.” Even in plain sight, history has a knack for repeating itself. The Deutsche Oper’s Damnation de Faust presents the story in a Weimar-esque black-and-white staging, hinting at Thomas Mann and the price of transitory worldly glory.

But that’s what we need most in 2019: In an era of American politics in which the rhetoric and actions of the current administration are being compared to Nazi Germany by Holocaust survivors and scholars alike, the Dante-like idea of Hell being circular takes on new meaning. The more fully we pursue the peak of our desires, the more reason Mephistopheles has to circle back and collect. Most striking about the Ohnesorg memorial, seeing it again just a few months after national debates in the US surrounded the fate of so many Confederate memorials, is that it calls upon us to remember the true cost of power is chaos.

In the United States, we hide this damage behind our own monuments to Faust, because we’re not ready to acknowledge the bargains we’ve cut over the years in the name of hubris. We’re not ready to settle those debts. We’re still stymied by our finitude. Here, in Faust’s metropolis, history is unable to hide behind metaphor.

The more we spin metaphor, the more likely we are to overcomplicate it, which can be either to our advantage or to our detriment. The more Faust continues to repeat itself, the harder it becomes to discern the doctor from the devil — much like a copy of a copy, the lines become blurred. We’ve gone around this loop too many times for it to still be a straightforward cycle of deals made and honored (come hell or high water). We’ve surpassed the Puritanical, black-and-white binary of good and evil. The more we spin metaphor, the more likely it is that a kink will be introduced into the system, turning that straightforward circle into a Möbius strip. If a character goes in as Faust, he comes out the other side as the Devil himself. There’s no longer a clear beginning or end, no distinction between terror and wonder. Our Faust retellings in 2019 have spun into finer shades of grey. The days of simply wanting a “frenzied round of agonizing joy” were simpler times.

The more Faust continues to repeat itself, the harder it becomes to discern the doctor from the devil.

Even in the era that The Americans takes place, we were beginning to realize the contours of this grey area. Playwright-dissident Václav Havel began toying with the idea of adapting Faust for his era. During his second round of incarceration between 1979 and 1983, he began working on what would become Temptation.

Prison served as the crucible for Havel’s interpretation, which transitioned from a straightforward resetting to a metaphor for imprisonment — and, by extension as he wrote to his wife Olga, “a metaphor of the general human condition (the state of ‘thrownness’ into the world; the existential significance of the past, of recollection, and of the future, the spinning of hopes; the theme of isolation and pseudohope, the discovery of ‘naked values,’ etc.).”

In Havel’s reworking of Faustian metaphor in the shadow of Stalinism, morality became one vast grey area. His avatar for Mephistopheles professes to be “only a catalyst” who helps humans tap into their own innate potential for good or evil. “Do you know why you called me a devil?” he demands of Havel’s Faust. “In order to shift your own responsibility.” Later on, he tells Faust, “It would be enough if you mobilized, in the name of a good cause, at least one thousandth of the cunning that your director mobilizes from morning till night in the name of a bad one.”

Havel exposes the underlying fallacy of the original Faust: Evil is subjective, so to align with a perceived evil is simply aligning with a perception. It may, in fact, be the morally right thing to do. Given that this was written during a prison stint for subversion, however, there’s still no happy ending for Havel’s Faust, evil or not; in the end, he comes to realize that he sold himself for enlightenment and knowledge, but only received a thinly-veiled self-deception in exchange.

Still, the blurred vision between “good” and “bad” set the stage for our own takes on the legend between the end of the USSR to today. Also working in the theatrical vein, Randy Newman’s musical adaptation of the work made swift use of the songwriter’s acerbic flair for lyrical editorial, even when it came to God. “In all my life, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard such bullshit,” sings Lucifer in the opening number (evocative of mega-church gospel services). “Even from you,” he adds to God, “a master of bullshit.” God (sung on the concept album by James Taylor to Newman’s own Lucifer), to return to Havel, “behaves too much like a person.” Newman’s Gen-X slacker version of Faust — who, incidentally, is only in this for the girls and the entourage — doesn’t stand a chance in this divine pissing contest.

Which only serves to reaffirm that we aren’t done with our open market on Faust. Consider even the past few weeks, which have seen further revelations of privacy being sold for as little as $20 a week to Facebook, our lust for knowledge sated by WikiLeaks (which in turn only aided our current state of political dysfunction), the hubris of this week’s State of the Union, or the fact that Roger Stone’s single-minded lust for attention may lead to a prison sentence — but one that will guarantee him even more attention. (Stone has a tattoo of Nixon on his back, I have a tattoo from Gounod’s Faust on mine: We all have our own priorities for what remains indelible.)

Even if we do come to know the whole experience of humankind, successfully seeking out its heights, we also have to contend with its depths. This means coming to learn that we’re all poor devils. It means acknowledging that our actions have consequences, whether we have the supernatural behind us or not. Either we persist in our willful disregard of these points, or we keep making these deals on a “buy now, pay later” mentality, up to the point where we lose sight of what it is we’re actually selling ourselves for. Faust has yet to die, because in the end, history has robbed us of our capacity for the infinite, and we’ve yet to reconcile our finitude. Faust, meanwhile, will stick around until we do.

That’s our end of the deal.

How Do You Translate a Book About Translating a Book?

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Emma Ramadan is one of the new generation of translators helping spotlight the most exciting works from around the world. Never one to shy away from a challenge, Ramadan’s first translation was Sphinx by Anne F. Garréta, a love story with no gender, which presents an interesting challenge when moving from French into English. Her translations focus on the writing of women, but her latest work, The Revenge of the Translator by Brice Matthieussent, examines the dynamic between translator and translated. As the idea that Americans do not read works in translation breaks down, the National Book Awards have brought back the award for Translated Literature and Amazon’s publishing wing leans into its imprint dedicated to works in translation. Emma Ramadan sat down with Parrish Turner to discuss the challenges of translation and how it can offer fascinating new perspectives on culture and place.

Parrish Turner: How does Revenge of the Translator fit in with some of the other books you have translated? What was the process of choosing this project?

Emma Ramadan: Up until this year pretty much, I was always pitching things. I heard about it when I was in my Master’s [of Translation] program at the University of Paris. At the end of the course, someone said to me “Oh you should really read this book,” and I loved it.

In terms of how it fits in with everything else, on the plot level, it is very different than the things I usually do. I am drawn to work more focused on women, non-white male authors generally speaking. I’m also very drawn to books that kind of allow translation to be shown in a different way. With Sphinx, the act of translating that book was very different than translating your typical novel. It was the kind of novel that required some finagling on my part to make sure the constraint came through the same way it did in the French. I am very drawn to the kind of project that takes translation to the next level. Although [this book] is very different in terms of content for what I usually translate, it does kind of bring up that same thing of the process of translation and the act of translation being a part of the reading experience. Because it is framed as this book translated from English into French and because of the end it is being translated back into English, I had to put my name at the end. It is an odd thing that pushed translation and the translator’s path into being something more evolved than the average book.

PT: Did the act of translating about translation affect your approach?

ER: Probably on some kind of subconscious level. I think it’s funny in the sense that this book is clearly poking fun at the idea that translators take over books and make these changes and then I had to literally change one of the character’s names in the book to be me. That feels like this kind of ironic turn at the end.

PT: Do French readers get a slightly different ending?

ER: I don’t think in terms of the way I was translating the book. I don’t think I was purposefully trying to stay super close to the French because I was trying to counteract the role of what Trad was doing and all his interventions. Matthieussent himself is a translator and it was important to me that he read the translation and that he was comfortable with it. He was sent the whole translation and shockingly, he intervened far less than other authors I have worked with. He literally just sent back “oh, you have Doris instead of dDeloris and you have this typo here” and that was it. It was like three comments. He didn’t say “oh, maybe this adjective would have been a better fit here than the adjective you chose,” which I have gotten before. He was very hands-off and went through my translation and [said] “cool, I think you got it.” It was really surprising for me, but also not surprising, because he is clearly of the mind that translators know what they are doing, because he is himself a translator and I am sure he doesn’t appreciate when authors try to give him really insane notes on his work. In terms of that, meeting with the author… was really important to me for this book.

PT: Do you usually meet with your authors?

ER: For me, the biggest benefit of being a translator and motivator as a translator is making those connections and new friends. And even if they don’t end up being my friend, having those new encounters with people whose work I really admire is hugely important. Being able to meet an author I admire and working with them on getting their book into English. That back and forth is hugely valuable and I really love that.

Unless there is an author who is not alive, then I always try and reach out and meet with them. Some of the authors I have translated I have become really close to. Anne Garréta was in Providence a few months back for a conference and she made a point of coming to the bookstore that I run, Riff Raff. That really touched me that she really wanted to see the space I was in and hear more about my life and see what my life was like. I think there is a lot of stuff that goes along with translation, but having connections with authors or with my co-translators is a huge pro. Even if they don’t speak English and can’t read my translation or give me feedback, just meeting them that feels really special. There is an immediate warmth to that relationship and it is very special.

PT: I find it interesting that you describe that relationship as warm because I think that part of what the book is talking about is the intimacy. It seems like you are describing a different sort of relationship than the narrator or the translator of this book.

ER: You mean me as opposed to Trad who is antagonistic with his author and David who is extremely antagonistic with his author. I have never had an openly antagonistic relationship with any of the authors I have worked with. I definitely have had little arguments here and there. If there is an author who also speaks English who also feels very strongly that a certain phrase should be translated a certain way I don’t necessarily agree with that. It can get a little heated, but I have never planted a bomb in an author’s home or stolen an author’s girlfriend.

It can get a little heated, but I have never planted a bomb in an author’s home or stolen an author’s girlfriend.

PT: I mean, there is still time…

ER: There is always still time. I imagine there probably exist in the world translators who really don’t get along with the authors they work with. To me, all the magic of the act of translating would go out the window if I didn’t feel a connection or bond or feel just neutral toward the author. I feel like if I really openly was not getting along with the author, it would make translating their work more difficult and it would make me trying to make the beauty of every sentence wouldn’t make this beautiful moment it would be an ugh experience. Maybe that is why Trad is interfering so much in the author’s text, because he has such disdain for the author. Every now and then there is going to be a sentence or metaphor where you are going to think: “Oh, I wish that sentence wasn’t in here, it is so cringe worthy.” But if every sentence was like that, why would you take on that project?

PT: I read in an interview that you learned French later in life, even though your parents spoke French and didn’t teach it to you. What did learning French, especially through a translation lens, teach you about French culture? What is the relationship there?

ER: Yeah, I started learning French in high school, continued in college, and did a Masters in Paris and then went to study abroad in Morocco. I think you learn so much through translating. If I am translating a book about Paris then I am learning about Paris. I just translated a book by Virginie Despentes called Pretty Things that takes place in Paris and people are walking in the streets. You are describing different neighborhoods and learning different things from the authors that you aren’t necessarily going to learn from speaking it in the classroom. Even being there, ’cause if I go to Paris or another part of France as a tourist, I’m not going to be able to access the same things that an author would. The way that people use language; the way the dialogue is written; the slang that characters use depending on their place in society. These are things you really have to pay attention to as a translator so you can replicate it in English, which means you have to have a deeper understanding of what is going on and why an author is using certain words for this character. And why they are using slang in this instance.

I remember when I was translating Sphinx, I met with Anne Garréta for the first time. There is this scene right at the beginning of the book and you don’t know the gender or sexes of either character. The narrator is in this seedy bar in this kind of sketchy neighborhood in Paris and is described as feeling nervous. Garréta said to me, you have to understand in this neighborhood in Paris, this is the kind of people that go there and who the narrator is encountering. So if the narrator is a gay man, then they would be nervous to be beaten up by these people. You have to understand this context of Paris in order to translate it accurately to understand why the narrator is nervous. I was like, oh, that makes a lot of sense. There are certain things you have to force yourself to learn to make sure your translation makes sense. Just by translating a certain book or a certain city, you are doing a lot of research. Especially the Moroccan stuff I have translated, I don’t know that I would have been able to do it anywhere near as accurately if I had not been to Morocco. There are so many descriptions of so many kinds of places and the odor of so many different things. You might not have as good a grasp on things if you haven’t been there, but you can teach yourself if you need to from a distance.

PT: What are you working on next? What are you keeping an eye out for?

ER: I am finishing up a book for Restless Books called The Boy, in French it was La Garçon, by Marcus Malte and it won the Prix Femina in 2017. It’s about a boy whose mother raises him completely isolated from society, in the French countryside. He has never talked to anyone, never seen anyone else. And she suddenly dies and he has to figure his way out into society, if he can survive and he ends up getting enlisted in the war and all this stuff happens to him. It is, on the sentence level, probably my favorite thing I have ever translated. The sentence and the writing; I am just totally in love with it. For Dorothy Publishing Project, they are a really great small press and I am really fortunate to be doing this Marguerite Duras collection of nonfiction and newspaper writing for them. I am co-translating that with a woman from my Masters program and that has been super fun for me. Marguerite Duras is my favorite writer of all time. I don’t know how to describe it except that it is an honor. That has been really special for me. I am always looking for writing. I will never say no to translating queer Moroccan authors or authors from parts of the world people aren’t paying [enough] attention to. I have a special place in my heart for Middle Eastern [areas] and Morocco, Nagrani, Tunisian, that kind of writing, because I’m Middle Eastern and I spent time in Morocco and that is just a place in the world where my heart is. Right now I am really looking for project that on the sentence level just blows me away. The act of translating a book that is stunningly beautiful, nothing really compares to that. It just makes every minute I spend on those books enjoyable and interesting.

7 Books About Worlds Within Worlds

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Rabbit holes, magic wardrobes, subtle knives — my favorite moments in my favorite books were always when we got to step out from one world into another one, the hidden world that had been here adjoining ours all along. Whatever wackiness or magic waited inside Oz or the Chocolate Factory, it would be hard to find anything more wonderful than that threshold between worlds. The sensation of the mothballs transforming into snow as they crunch underfoot at the back of the wardrobe — that was what I wanted when I wanted a story.

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A world within the world is what all fiction offers, and in such looking-glass moments, we catch a reflection of ourselves, readers, with our heads in one world and our chairs in another. In Julio Cortázar’s tiny, perfect thriller “Continuity of Parks,” it’s the reader’s green armchair that becomes a dangerous portal, the real place toward which an imaginary killer comes tiptoeing, knife in hand. In the One Thousand and One Nights, the happy vertigo of stories within stories within stories quakes the ground of each new world we enter: we’re never certain when a new rabbit hole will open beneath our feet — an effect W. G. Sebald, Jesse Ball, and Rachel Cusk all exploit in novels that, in their own brilliant ways, thread hidden passages among stories and worlds. Even when we put down books like theirs with stories within stories and worlds within worlds, we can’t shake the feeling that there must be new worlds hidden everywhere. “Behind every word a whole world is hidden that must be imagined,” Heinrich Böll says. Seems true to me: every person, place, thing, and word — a chamber of secreted histories.

When I was working on the stories in Aerialists, I started thinking of them as realisms with holes in them. No matter the premise I started from, each story soon enough revealed another reality that peered into it. One character imagined finding a pattern in the kitchen linoleum that would unlock a world he calls The There. Another character created a virtual replica of his lost neighborhood world. Another imagined a portal into her disabled friend’s mind. I’m not sure why my stories kept opening into such alternate worlds — maybe a reality, in order to feel real, requires some vantage outside of itself, just as waking consciousness requires dreams. The list here assembles some of my favorite literary works of worlds within worlds, some of the post-YA portals I’ve loved.

The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish

In 1666, Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, published The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World, a bizarre and delightful work of feminist science fiction and utopian experiment. A young woman kidnapped by a seafaring merchant is shipwrecked at the North Pole. Merchant and crew freeze to death but the young lady, kept alive by “the light of her Beauty, the heat of her Youth,” slips through into another world, ablaze with vibrant stars, that is conjoined to hers pole to pole. There she’s greeted by Bear-men, Fox-men, and Geese-men and made the empress of this new world. As empress, she’s mostly concerned with questions of natural philosophy, which she debates with the Magpie-men and Jackdaw-men, but she also organizes an invasion of her home world, deploying “Fire-stone” to burn down her countrymen’s wooden ships. To be read alongside Daniel Dutton’s brilliant novel about Margaret Cavendish, Margaret the First.

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is a marvelously surreal and linguistically brilliant novel by Yoruban Nigerian author Amos Tutuola. The narrator, a seven-year-old boy fleeing a slave war, runs into the bush not knowing that this bush is the Bush of Ghosts, “banned to be entered by any earthly person.” He lives there among the ghosts, moving from ghost village to ghost village, befriending burglar-ghosts, having ghost weddings. My favorite ghost is the “flash-eyed mother” of “fearful, dreadful, terrible, curious, wonderful and dirty appearance.” Large as a “vast round hill,” with a mouth that can “swallow an elephant uncut” and eyes that are always “bringing out splashes of fire,” she rules the 13th ghost town where baby-sized ghosts feed her bush animals all day. The bush world is a chaotic mix of Christian and Yoruban imagination, violent, comic, and vibrant.

Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute

The most bewildering world within the world, strangely and obviously, is one’s own black-box interior. Before it gets refined into conscious thought and emotion, inner life is a weird world of unnamable churning sensations. One of the strangest and subtlest attempts to represent the alien inner world is Nathalie Sarraute’s first book, Tropisms, a beautiful series of spare prose experiments in which she attempts to show the “movements” of our inner weather, movements “hidden under the commonplace, harmless appearance of every instant of our lives.” “These movements,” she explains in a foreword, “slip through us on the frontiers of consciousness in the form of undefinable, extremely rapid sensations. They hide behind our gestures, beneath the words we speak, the feelings we manifest, are aware of experiencing, and able to define. They seemed, and still seem to me to constitute the secret source of our existence, in what might be called its nascent state.” As if this weren’t strange enough, Sarraute then relates these “movements” via scenes of people calling upstairs at dinnertime or window shopping or passing their shabby neighbors on the stairs, using such everyday scenes to evoke the inner world. Sarraute went on to write novels and a bestselling childhood memoir, but she claimed these inner movements were what united all her work.

So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell

So Long, See You Tomorrow is a perfect “realism with a hole in it.” The realism is an autofiction about a boy in 1920s Illinois mourning his mother and snubbing a friend whose father has committed suicide (and murder). But in his mourning and regret, the narrator seeks some passage back to the world and life he’d known when his mother was still alive. “The idea that kept recurring to me…was that I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn’t have gone through and couldn’t get back to the place I hadn’t meant to leave.” His reality is a bad Narnia he’s stuck in.

Maxwell’s novel is full of invisible doorways of this kind, between tangent worlds. When the narrator’s father remarries and buys a new house still under construction, the narrator visits the new house after school and plays on the framing, balancing on the beams and passing between the wall studs, performing something metaphysical or counterfactual as he crosses through his future walls: “I had the agreeable feeling, as I went from one room to the next by walking through the wall instead of a doorway, or looked up and saw blue sky through the rafters, that I had found a way to get around the way things were.” As an adult, the narrator connects that magic scaffolding with Giacometti’s delicate sculpture the Palace at 4 A.M., a spare half-built architecture where, he imagines, “What is done can be undone.”

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

Le Guin’s hero George Orr has a strange condition: what he dreams becomes reality. If he dreams of peace or drought or alien invasion, the world will have it. Le Guin’s novel tracks his increasingly disastrous sessions with a hypnotherapist who wants to use Orr to cure the world’s ails and raise his own star. People say the novel is a pessimistic meditation on the utopian imagination, but there’s such liveliness in how the novel, chapter by chapter, reassembles its world from new dream materials, it seems like a celebration of imagination, even when the aliens invade. There’s also a beautiful romantic plotline, the lovers finding each other in spite of their deleting worlds, that must have been an inspiration for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Here “reality” is the world within, the fragile thing encased in capricious human imagination and ambition.

The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges

An Aleph, in the world of Borges’s masterful, bitter short story of that name, “is one of the points in space that contain all points.” So here, the world within the world is the world itself, which reveals itself, every detail, from every angle, to anyone who looks into an Aleph. A literary rival of the narrator happens to have an Aleph in his cellar in Buenos Aires. When the narrator finally peeks in the Aleph, “a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brightness,” he’s dizzied by the sight of a whole contained in one of its parts. “I saw…a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the color of a rose in Bengal, saw my bedroom (with no one in it), saw in a study in Alkmaar a globe of the terraqueous world placed between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly…saw the Aleph from everywhere at once, saw the earth in the Aleph, and the Aleph once more in the earth and the earth in the Aleph….” If literature’s aim is to show the universal in the particular, it would be hard to do better than this — the whole world in a bright marble — which may be why “The Aleph” is a story of literary competition as much as magic artifacts. “Aleph,” Borges reminds us in a Borgesian note at the end of the story, is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet — ℵ — said in the Kabbalah to have the shape of “a man pointing to the sky and the earth, to indicate that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher.”

Arcadia by Tom Stoppard

Arcadia is a bewilderingly smart play about, well, entropy and English gardens and academic rivalry and “carnal embrace,” which, as one of the principals explains, is “the practice of throwing one’s arms around a side of beef.” I’ve never seen it staged, but it’s as readable as a novel — a delicious, bawdy, nerdy mystery thriller. The play’s scenes all take place at Sidley Park, an English country estate, but they alternate between the early 19th century and the present. While they conduct their love affairs and tutoring lessons, the Romantic era characters — Lord Byron somewhere off stage among them — speculate about entropy, the world’s inevitable progression into disorder. Meanwhile (whatever that means across centuries), present-day academics vie to reassemble what happened in 1812 at Sidley Park. Though staged as worlds beside worlds, with the two eras alternating scene by scene, Arcadia is fascinated with what time conceals and destroys for good, fascinated with how — and whether — the past is contained in the present. In the final scene, both sets of characters join on stage together, oblivious to each other, yet waltzing the same magical, dizzying waltz together.

I Keep a Stack of Kraft Singles in the Fridge

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American Rarebit

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About the Artist

John Leavitt is a writer and artist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vice, The Awl, The Toast, and more. He can be found at Leavittalone.com and @LeavittAlone.

“American Rarebit” is published here by permission of the artist, John Leavitt. Copyright © John Leavitt 2019. All rights reserved.