Ginger

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Ginger is neither ginger-colored nor the color of an actual piece of ginger. She is gray. “Great Dane” is a misnomer, too, although she is a large dog of I guess Danish descent. What she is is a fucking dinosaur, all muscles and a thin layer of what looks like a Muppet’s felt and a long neck and bright blue eyes that convey deep intelligence and, falsely, empathy. She is about my height when she sits.

“Ginger is an aggressive dog,” Mrs. F — — tells me. “You just have to…” The dog barks so loud it is like it is barking into a microphone. Mrs. F — — is long and beautiful like the dog. She is youthful in demeanor, and blonde. Her husband is an affable and handsome sandy-haired nurse who will have to come rescue me a couple times when I set off their house’s alarm. Dante used to go check on the dog for about an hour every day, for $15 an hour, and now I am taking over. Mrs. F — — gives me an IPA from the fridge and we sit on plastic chairs in the sun in the cedar-chip-covered backyard and she tells me how devastated she was when she visited Dante and saw the state he was in, hooked up to all those tubes. How she can’t sleep. Says to help myself to the beer in the fridge anytime. During the day, when there are no people around, the dog is kept in a big white metal cage at the center of the living room, in front of the hearth, so the layout of the house is kind of like a scene from the Inferno where the Cerberus-like Satan sits in the center of the ninth circle and all around him lie caverns of ice in which are frozen probably Hitler, Pol Pot, John Wayne Gacy, but if all that stuff was instead just nice furniture from Crate and Barrel, books, a chess board, framed diplomas and pictures of the F — —s’ wedding, their blonde kids posing with baseball bats… The dog bites her arm and shakes it around like a branch. “Ginger?” she says authoritatively. “Ginger? No. No. Down. Ginger! Ginger, no! No!” The dog lets go and takes off running across the house. “So you just have to be assertive.”

There are good and bad days with Ginger. Mostly she’s into fetching. Sometimes she gets into a part of the house where she’s not supposed to be and intimidates the shit out of me regarding her right to be there. Frequently her massive gray equine form will startle and she will start trying to communicate something to me urgently, she will put her big tragic mutant paws in my lap and bark in my face and howl.

One day I drink a glass of water in front of their sink and my hand slips and breaks a different glass. I clean up the broken glass and put it in the trash, and drink more water out of the first glass. I drink the whole thing before realizing that there are shards inside the glass I’m drinking out of, and all I can think of is the possibility of glass traveling through my digestive system right now, just fucking shit up left and right, and me dying suddenly and unexpectedly of internal bleeding on this family acquaintance’s kitchen floor, a monster dog lapping up my blood, no goodbye to anybody, no explanation, because all the glass is cleaned up.

Sex, Drugs and Decaying Bodies

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It’s been nearly ten years since Roberto Bolaño’s epic Mexico City novel, The Savage Detectives, was published in English translation. It was a generation defining novel, the story of vagabond poets traversing the great federal city during the tumultuous 1970’s. The novel, translated into English by Natasha Wimmer, became a translation sensation, launching Bolaño into Gabriel Garcia Marquez-like lore.

Bolaño wasn’t Mexican by birth, and lived the latter part of his life in Spain and yet his shadow continues to loom large over Mexican fiction, and depictions of Mexico City. Bolaño and his Mexican contemporaries, who wrote about and lived in D.F. during the post-boom years, (including Carmen Boullosa, Daniel Sada and Juan Villoro) were themselves a bridge from the previous golden generation of Mexico’s Nobel literature laureate, Octavio Paz.

“We tend to see literature as cyclical, generational. And so it is. Like humanity, literature comes and goes in waves.”

Long the center of Latin America’s literature and art, mid to late century Mexico City was a place where writers and intellectuals sought refuge from the violent conflicts that ravaged central and south America — the reverberations of which are still being felt today.

We tend to see literature as cyclical, generational. And so it is. Like humanity, literature comes and goes in waves. Now, a new generation of Mexican novelists born in the 70’s and 80’s, and led by the recent astronomical success of Valeria Luiselli (Sidewalks; Faces in the Crowd; The Story of My Teeth; all published by Coffee House Press) has turned its gaze to the vast metropolis of 20 million people.

In the Transmigration of Bodies by Yuri Herrera (translated by Lisa Dillman) we’re taken into the depths of D.F. during a mysterious pandemic. As a fixer of sorts, the protagonist, known as the Redeemer, ranges back and forth across an unnamed capital city brokering a peace between two rival families, the Castros and Fonsecas — each holding the child of the other hostage. The book is written in the vein of Frank Miller’s tale of crime and underworld, Sin City, and tinged with classic, yet ironic, Shakespearian tragedy (one of the hostages is even called Romeo.

“[W]ritten in the vein of Frank Miller’s tale of crime and underworld, Sin City, and tinged with classic, yet ironic, Shakespearian tragedy.”

The city streets are nearly empty as the story begins. “For the past four days the message had been Stay calm, everybody calm, this is not a big deal.” Of course it is and it isn’t.

The Redeemer lives in the Big House, where he lusts after a neighbor, Three Times Blond, whose boyfriend won’t go outside during the epidemic to visit her. The Redeemer swoops in.

“This might be the last woman I’m ever with in my life, he said to himself. He said that every time because like all men, he couldn’t get enough and because, like all men, he was convinced he deserved to get laid one more time before he died.”

As the story proceeds we are introduced to many other characters — Neeyanderthal, the Unruly, Dolphin — few introduced by their proper name, adding to the dystopian feel of the tale. The Redeemer, with his muscle Neeyanderthal, goes back and forth organizing the exchange of hostages, but ultimately what is exchanged are their corpses. Romeo Fonseca was taken of his own asking, hit by a van and helped by the Castro brothers, out at the same nightclub. But the Fonsecas didn’t know this and kidnapped Baby Girl Castro, who dies from the mysterious epidemic, when they hear from witnesses that the Castros were seen putting Romeo into their car. It was, as the Redeemer says to Mrs. Castro, “A tragedy with no one to blame.”

Above all, Transmigrations is a character examination of the Redeemer, a story of how a man gets caught between two worlds. The Redeemer talks of his “black dog”, a presence he feels, like the hair pricking on the back of one’s neck, when a moral stand, a test occurs. He failed his first test as a kid in the barrio growing up, when a group of thugs beat up and carried off an already destroyed man. And since then, the black dog has haunted him.

“He learned to live with the cur, at times even to conjure him. […]His black dog was a dark mass that allowed him to do certain things, to not feel certain things, he was physical, as real as a bone you don’t know you have until it’s almost jutting through your skin.”

Herrera is best known for his novel Signs Preceding the End of the World a borderland story of going north and the grit of cartel violence. Transmigrations takes a different tack on that modern and yet distinctly Narco theme. Herrera’s Redeemer moves into and out of the drug-laced bordello and night club scene with it’s “juniors”, the sons of Mexico’s business and political elite, who live with the impunity provided by their family names. It is a land where no one is clean, nothing what it appears.

Mexico City has long been a safe zone where the cartel land violence rarely reached. But with the return of the long ruling, autocratic PRI party, under President Enrique Peña Nieto, drug violence has slowly but steadily crept into Mexico City. The recent, excellent Interior Circuits, by the journalist and novelist Francisco Goldman, digs deep into this phenomenon that Transmigrations hints toward.

To walk the long Reforma avenue, tuck into the many bookstores that line Mexico City’s famous Zocalo square, or happen upon a crowded, midday lit reading in the Palacio de Belles Artes — is to realize that Mexican literature is indeed thriving both at home and in translation.

Even more exceptional novels, set in and inspired by Mexico City, like Transmigrations (and the recent, excellent Among Strange Victims by Daniel Saldaña París) are on the horizon: I’ll Sell You a Dog by Juan Pablo Villalobos (And Other Stories) this August and Laia Jufresa’s Umami(Oneworld) this September — and next year Empty Set (Coffee House) by the groundbreaking visual artist Verónica Gerber Bicecci.

Loneliness, Desire, Obsession: Teddy Wayne’s Literary Mixtape

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Loner is about David Federman, a freshman boy at Harvard running away from his suburban New Jersey origins, who becomes infatuated with a charismatic, upper-crust Manhattanite in his dorm, Veronica. His abiding attraction to her is not only about love and sex, but ambition, status, and class, and his belief that, through her, he can elevate his (already elevated) station in life.

Obsession is a popular topic to write about in fiction, in part because it resoundingly answers that most clichéd of MFA-workshop questions, “What does the character want?” (Or the actor’s question of “What’s my motivation?”)

Obsessive desire has a way, too, of isolating the monomaniacal subject, blotting out the rest of the world and ultimately leaving him alone in the grips of his crazed passion. As David’s obsession deepens in Loner, so does his sense of alienation among his classmates.

A great deal of pop songs are also about romantic obsession and loneliness (often in the same breath), and many ostensible love songs, when you examine the lyrics, are really avowals of stalker-like pursuit or thoughts of the object of desire; the British seem to have a particular fondness for this kind of ballad. Here are ten that in some way informed my portrayal of David:

1. “Every Breath You Take” by the Police

This is probably the most famous “stalking” song, with its verse-ending refrain of “I’ll be watching you.” David consistently watches Veronica through the novel — across the cafeteria and campus, in the classroom and her dorm suite, on Facebook. In an academic paper he discusses Laura Mulvey’s landmark essay on the male gaze in cinema, but doesn’t interrogate his own use of it, in either his lived experience or the text of Loner (which he has written, in the first person but addressed to Veronica in the voyeuristic second person).

2. “Always on My Mind” by the Pet Shop Boys

It’s been covered by hundreds of artists, but the Pet Shop Boys version is the first one I heard. David’s roommate listens to the song on repeat after he’s been dumped. The song is about regrets after the severance of a relationship, though, not about obsession, and David, who shows a very limited capacity to feel for others, can’t empathize in the slightest with his heartbroken roommate.

3. “Creep” by Radiohead

Aside from the chorus’s self-loathing assertion of being a creep and a weirdo, a few lines from this resonate for David. “When you were here before / couldn’t look you in the eye,” Thom Yorke sings, and David, too, is unable to sustain eye contact with Veronica despite his constant surveillance of her. Then there’s the lament “I wish I was special,” after detailing the loved one’s own specialness, which speaks to the narcissism behind obsession, that it’s ultimately concerned with the hole-filled identity of the obsessive himself, not the other person.

4. “No Name #1” by Elliott Smith

In an early draft, I had a minor character quote one of the lines from this song. I decided it was too on-the-nose and cut it, but still thought frequently about the lyrics, especially from the opening — “At a party / he was waiting / looking kind of spooky and withdrawn / like he could be underwater” — and then the ending, about the pain of feeling invisible and not fitting in (similar to “Creep”’s “I don’t belong here”): “Leave alone, ’cause you know you don’t belong / you don’t belong here / slip out quiet / nobody’s looking / leave alone / you don’t belong here.”

5. “Alone in My Home” by Jack White

Jack White’s song is about willfully and defensively closing oneself off from the world to ward off hurt. David, on the other hand, spends a lot of the novel in involuntary sequestration, sometimes in public while set apart from others, but often in his bedroom, where he feels the pain of his solitude most acutely.

6. “She Drives Me Crazy” by Fine Young Cannibals

Another British obsession song (“I can’t get any rest / People say I’m obsessed”) that’s sometimes mistaken for a love song thanks to the vernacular connotation of being driven “crazy” by a loved one (“She drives me crazy like no one else”), as well as to the exuberant electric guitar and synthesizer, up-tempo and thumping drumbeat, and falsetto singing. But the title evokes, more literally, being driven insane by one’s love and the desperation that accompanies it: “I won’t make it on my own / no one likes to be alone.”

7. “So Lonely” by the Police

A post-breakup song whose title is conspicuously about loneliness, it also feels of a piece with the Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” while sharing the conviction of obsession ballads (see above, “She drives me crazy like no one else”) that this is the one person who can do it for the speaker: “But I just can’t convince myself / I couldn’t live with no one else.”

8. “Empty Shell” by Cat Power

This is one of Cat Power’s most beautiful songs (again, about heartbreak and missing a former lover), which uses a jaunty fiddle and a few self-affirming lines near the end (“I don’t want you anymore”) to set up the devastating and vulnerable turn of the final couplet: “Every night, every night alone with you / every night, alone now.”

9. “Pictures of You” by the Cure

David snaps a clandestine photo of Veronica and looks repeatedly at her Facebook profile picture (until he later gains access to her complete trove of photos). People can develop compulsive fixations when seeing the same photo over and over of someone, letting it substitute for their conception of the subject — or, as this song goes, “I’ve been looking so long at these pictures of you / that I almost believe that they’re real.”

10. “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)” by Peter Sarstedt

Like David, the singer is enamored of a woman from an elite social circle (“And when the snow falls you’re found in St. Moritz / with the others of the jet set / and you sip your Napoleon brandy / but you never get your lips wet, no you don’t”). And, also like David, what he most craves is access to her inner world, the one her jet set doesn’t know about, in the quiet moments when she, too, is alone: “But where do you go to my lovely / when you’re alone in your bed / tell me the thoughts that surround you / I want to look inside your head, yes I do.”

Ted Wilson Reviews the World: Anxiety

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★☆☆☆☆ (1 out of 5)

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing anxiety.

Anxiety is that crippling emotion you feel when you think horrible things are about to happen. I think Charlie Brown perpetually experienced this state. (He’s dead now, right?) At any rate, he was right to be anxious, because horrible things were always about to happen to him. He probably felt a brief sense of relief after each horrible thing happened, and then that was quickly replaced by more anxiety in anticipation of the next horrible thing.

What gives me the most anxiety is when I have to be somewhere on time in order to get a seat, like the movies or an airplane. That’s why if you ask me to play musical chairs I will slip into a mild catatonic state. I think that’s the worst game ever invented. Second worst is Russian roulette.

Some people have anxiety attacks. Fortunately I don’t suffer from those. Instead, my anxiety manifests itself in shivering, cold sweats, stuttering, and tunnel vision. When this happens my best bet is to go to sleep and hope everything has resolved itself by the time I wake up. If not, I got back to sleep and try again.

If that should fail, another great tactic to quell my anxiety is I make a piñata named Andy Anxiety. He is a manifested realization of my anxiety and I apologize that he’s Mexican. It’s not racist, but there is no such thing as an American piñata. The closest thing is a gumball machine.

I place Andy in the middle of the road and smash into him with my car, immediately getting out to collect all the candy before the neighborhood kids can get it. The revving of my engine is the only sound more intoxicating to the kids than the music of the ice cream truck.

Sleep indulgence and piñata effigies are great methods for treating my anxiety, but not for preventing it. The real trick is to never put yourself into an anxiety inducing position to begin with. For instance, if I want to see a film but I know arriving in time will make me anxious, I choose a different film that I know I don’t want to see and purposely go a day late. Or if I see a cute woman with whom I’d like to be acquainted, rather than walk over to her and ask her out, I’ll make my way toward a different woman for whom I have no interest and then continue right on past her.

My dream is to one day be anxiety-free. That’s how I imagine sloths to be. On the spectrum of anxiety in the animal kingdom, I think sloths are at one end and then hummingbirds are at the other. Their little hearts must race like crazy!

The only reason I am giving anxiety a star is because it makes me feel alive. It reminds me that there are scary things out there, and confronting them can be empowering. Not that I ever confront them, but it’s nice to know I at least have the option to do so if I ever grow emotionally.

BEST FEATURE: If you glance at the word it looks like it says “tiny axe” which sounds very cute. It makes me picture a tiny lumberjack.
WORST FEATURE: Anxiety can turn a pleasant afternoon into a sweat-drenched pair of slacks that are hard to explain.

Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing Botox.

Endangered American Slang Needs Your Help

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Won’t you consider adopting a word or two?

If you’re from Delaware, Maryland, or Virginia and think having shat fall from your pinetrees is abnormal, then we have news for you: you are among the many Americans losing touch with your historical regional dialect. And let’s be frank: can our language, our literature really afford to lose fleech, fogo or goose drownder?

Okay, poop jokes aside, the Dictionary of American Regional English views the potential extinction of 50 American words and phrases as no laughing matter. DARE and the global podcasting platform Acast have joined forces and are starting a campaign to bring these colloquialisms back to “their former glory.” The game plan is for hosts of various programs on Acast’s network to start using these at risk words, in hopes that their millions of listeners will adopt them into their vocabulary.

This is not a bad strategy considering the growing popularity of podcasts in the U.S. The president of Acast, Karl Rosander, believes “learning through audio is a hugely effective educational method,” and “vummed” that there will be a vernacular revival.

And what about the written word? Well, readers, study up, make a point of using a few of these expressions in your own writing. Let’s all of us do Faulkner proud.

Here’s the full DARE list of endangered words and phrases:

Barn burner: a wooden match that can be struck on any surface. Chiefly Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey and Maryland.

Bat hide: a dollar bill. Chiefly south-west.

Be on one’s beanwater: to be in high spirits, feel frisky. Chiefly New England.

Bonnyclabber: thick, sour milk. Chiefly north Atlantic.

Counterpin: a bedspread. Chiefly south and south midland.

Croker sack: a burlap bag. Chiefly Gulf states, south Atlantic.

Cuddy: a small room, closet, or cupboard.

Cup towel: a dish towel. Chiefly Texas, inland south region.

Daddock: rotten wood, a rotten log. Chiefly New England.

Dish wiper: a dish towel. Chiefly New England.

Dozy: of wood, decaying. Chiefly north-east, especially Maine.

Dropped egg: a poached egg. Chiefly New England.

Ear screw: an earring. Chiefly Gulf States, lower Mississippi Valley.

Emptins: homemade yeast used as starter in bread. Chiefly New England, upstate New York.

Farmer match: a wooden match than can be struck on any surface. Chiefly upper midwest, Great Lakes region, New York, West Virginia.

Fleech: to coax, wheedle, flatter. South Atlantic.

Fogo: An offensive smell. Chiefly New England.

Frog strangler: a heavy rain. Chiefly south, south midland.

Goose drownder: a heavy rain. Chiefly midland.

I vum: I swear, I declare. Chiefly New England.

Larbo: a type of candy made of maple syrup on snow. New Hampshire.

Last button on Gabe’s coat: the last bit of food. Chiefly south, south midland.

Leader: a downspout or roof gutter. Chiefly New York, New Jersey.

Nasty-neat: overly tidy. Scattered usage, but especially north-east.

Parrot-toed: pigeon-toed. Chiefly mid-Atlantic, south Atlantic.

Pin-toed: pigeon-toed. Especially Delaware, Maryland, Virginia.

Popskull: cheap or illegal whiskey. Chiefly southern Appalachians.

Pot cheese: cottage cheese. Chiefly New York, New Jersey, northern Pennsylvania, Connecticut.

Racket store: a variety store. Particularly Texas.

Sewing needle: a dragonfly. Especially Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Massachusetts.

Shat: a pine needle. Chiefly Delaware, Maryland, Virginia.

Shivering owl: a screech owl. Chiefly south Atlantic, Gulf states.

Skillpot: a turtle. Chiefly District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia.

Sonsy: cute, charming, lively. Scattered.

Spill: a pine needle. Chiefly Maine.

Spin street yarn: to gossip. Especially New England.

Spouty: of ground: soggy, spongy. Scattered.

Suppawn: corn meal mush. Chiefly New York.

Supple-sawney: a homemade jointed doll that can be made to “dance”. Scattered.

Tacker: a child, especially a little boy. Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania.

Tag: a pine needle. Chiefly Virginia.

To bag school: to play hooky. Chiefly Pennsylvania, New Jersey.

Tow sack: a burlap bag. Chiefly south, south midland, Texas, Oklahoma.

Trash mover: a heavy rain. Chiefly mid-Atlantic, south Atlantic, lower Mississippi Valley.

Tumbleset: a somersault. Chiefly south-east, Gulf states; also north-east.

Wamus: a men’s work jacket. Chiefly north-central, Pennsylvania.

Whistle pig: a groundhog, also known as woodchuck. Chiefly Appalachians.

Winkle-hawk: a three-cornered tear in cloth. Chiefly Hudson Valley, New York.

Work brittle: eager to work. Chiefly midland, especially Indiana.

Zephyr: a light scarf. Scattered.

The Greatest Mexican Experimental Sufi Novelist You’ve Never Heard Of

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Mario Bellatin begins his “autobiography” by talking about his balls.

1 — During the time that I lived with my mother it never occurred to me that adjusting my genitals in her presence could have any serious repercussions.

In the first of three stories contained in The Large Glass, wonderfully translated by David Shook, Bellatin’s mother fashions a string to tie and bind his young testicles into a unique sort of undergarment. She then forces him to exhibit his bulging and enlarged testicles at the public baths in town. The shame and confusion Bellatin feels at this charade is compounded by the fact that the spectators at the baths in turn pay his mother for this shame-filled privilege by giving her some of the small objects she collects, such as tubes of lipstick. He’s an unwilling prostitute.

The routine mortification of the public baths also has the side effect of giving his skin a strange, waxy luminosity. “My Skin, Luminous” is the title of the first of three “autobiographies” in the celebrated Mexican writer’s latest book. The story is one of three that also appeared in Bellatin’s first English book, Chinese Checkers, in a translation by Cooper Renner.

In that tale, Bellatin’s mother forbids anyone from touching his luminous skin; his body is her property, another object in her feverish collection. She, in turn, imprints her lipstick all over him, to mark him as hers. Reflecting retrospectively, Bellatin imagines that he could have applied a sort of diamantine powder to his soften glowing skin — the same sort of white texturing powder used in the shop class at his special school to “give real body to objects.” He must separate from his mother to reclaim his body and his self.

Each paragraph of “My Skin, Luminous” is numbered, from 1 to 363, which gives the story an easily digestible structure, much like a collection of epigraphs, a Buzzfeed listicle or, in Bellatin’s case, a Sufi hadith:

62 — “The rumors are true,” my mother told me one morning when she had woken up to show me her lips covered in an oily patina.

63 — “Many details about genital-displaying women are remembered, but everything about their exhibited sons is forgotten.”

64 — Later I found out that they killed them mercilessly.

Bellatin, or the unnamed narrator, lives in a small room behind his grandfather’s oven and attends a special school. It’s only after his father has abandoned the family that his mother performs a series of “experiments” on his body, ostensibly so that he can gain admission to this special school. One of these “experiments” involves smothering him with a pillow.

Readers of English, unaccustomed to Bellatin’s style or history might be tempted to take his testimony here at face value. Many readers expect a uniformity of experience or authenticity when approaching a book called an “autobiography.” Bellatin explodes that concept fully by his third autobiography in this short book. In “A Character in Modern Appearance,” Bellatin tells us that he is, in fact, a forty-six-year-old woman who speaks Castilian, drives a Renault, and has a German girlfriend. But then he backtracks and admits “I think I’m something of a liar. I repeat that it is not true that I had a German girlfriend.”

Some imperfections eventually disappear. It’s what time does to memory and what flowing water does to old stones. If you have never seen a photo of the man, the defining feature of Mario Bellatin’s body is his missing arm. He types with only one hand. He often uses prosthetic hands that look more like metal sculptures than humanoid body parts. And there is the matter of his bald head and his arresting eyes, all of which might add up to an intimidating figure if it were not for his smirk.

The physical deformities that he refuses to define him, and those which his mother imposes upon him, give him the advantage of being unmistakable outside of the public baths, which represent society. His corporeal body need not be present for him to leave an impression, though.

“A face for radio,” they say. Or “Politics is Hollywood for ugly people.” And so then writing is the ultimate bastion of the ugly, the deformed, the unpleasant — all of whom can transform the images of themselves through language.

In a recent article about his publishing travails, the New Yorker called Bellatin a “prankster” which denotes a lack of seriousness and belies the complexity of his true character. Despite that smirk, there are no laugh-out-loud pranks here. The Large Glass is a vessel containing a serious argument for separating the self from the world — and not just the metaphorical self but the actual, physical self.

Bellatin was raised in Peru, but moved to Cuba, and then Mexico, where he has lived since 1995. His sense of “the world” is expansive and, as a Peruvian Sufi, Bellatin has managed to fashion himself as an outsider in Catholic Mexico and literature in general. The realistic style of fiction, often associated with Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru, is anathema to Bellatin. He prefers the short parable to the multi-generational saga, the short allegory to the plot of a detective novel.

Whether or not these stories are autobiographies containing 100% true events or not seems to miss the point. The setting, the characters, the details of the literature, only serve to reinforce the persona that Bellatin continually disavows and then reinvents. The sheer limitations of his physical body have pushed him into inventing fluid new identities and fictional doppelgangers. Bellatin’s latest work fits with the contemporary trend in literature (c.f. Knausgaard, Ferrante, Heti, etc.) that ignores or dissolves the smooth line between fiction and memoir, the traditional boundary between “material” and fact. The quality of the storytelling intentionally outmaneuvers categorization.

In his interviews, Bellatin is defiantly oblique and contrarian. His indirect method transfers between his fiction and what he considers autobiography. He stubbornly resists easy classification and interpretation. A fiction writer will often withhold vital information to add intrigue or mystery to a story, but for a person to obfuscate their life story seems more hostile to the reader. But with Bellatin, it’s clear that any hostility he harbors is directed against abstract forms and artistic challenges rather than the actual reader. His willingness to flay his inner demons on the page is what gives his writing vitality and verve. Even in translation, writers capable of punching through the barriers of the “self” bring more value to the conversation than the moralists or careerists angling for a way into the zeitgeist.

The second of the three autobiographies, “The Sheikha’s True Illness”, most purely reflects Bellatin’s obsession with Sufism. However, he begins that story by discussing the dog-owning protagonists of his previous book (presumably Hero Dogs), as if he is not sure himself whether or not they are real characters that can be mentioned in this story. The meta-narrative he invents involves a dream-story-within-the-story called “The Sheikha’s Illness” which Bellatin sells to Playboy. In both the story and the dream story, it is while he is at the hospital to treat the unnamed but “incurable illness I suffer from” that he runs into the Sheikha, the matriarch of his religious community. She is seated in a wheelchair pushed by a dervish named Duja. But ultimately Bellatin cannot write about the Sheikha’s illness without confronting his own medical problems and throughout the narrative he returns to his own suffering and “the apparatus that atrophied my shoulder and part of my chest.”

Bellatin is able to hide his body through writing. Meeting him on the page, even in an autobiography, allows us to see past his one-armed body, or not see his body at all. Like a Sufi mystic, he enchants our attention away from his self and even his words, back on to our own selves.

“The eye should be the size of what it perceives,” I heard the sheikha say more than once. I never dared to ask what it was that that meant. What I did understand in a clearer way was when she told us that when the human being loves something he only loves the human being — he loves himself, his own attributes reflected in that which he says he loves.

He also tells us that “Sufism posits that we have completely forgotten the ideal world we come from” and this partly explains Bellatin’s preoccupation with dreams as they constitute a time that truly does not exist. The reality of their unreality leaves his body out of the equation altogether and allows his mind to scatter and roam free.

Without the baggage of emotions, family, nation, or identity. At my age something has happened in my circumstance that makes me feel like this. I think that is the best state in which to practice my work. Without worrying any longer that the strangeness of my body might be exhibited even naked, like a popular attraction.

If literature aims to make us less alone, we need writers like Bellatin who reflect not just a different perspective on life, but can envision something separate and apart, a periscope rising above the self.

Ranking Every John Le Carré Adaptation

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Well before the genre borders gave way––before discerning readers could recommend to their discerning reader friends a Pulitzer-nominated author’s post-apocalyptic zombie horror novel, a sci-fi story that reads like a linguistics lecture, or a telepathic vampire detective story from Knopf (not actually a thing, though you sense it could be)––there was the spy novel. There was Graham Greene, and then a little while later John Le Carré, born David John Moore Cornwell, an Oxford dropout turned intelligence officer (first with MI5, then with MI6), turned perennially bestselling novelist. Le Carré gave readers the spy-versus-spy and inside tradecraft they craved, but with a dose of literary modernism and a disillusioned worldview. It was just the thing for the new Cold War era; the European frontier was opening, motives were blurring, and everyone knew James Bond was a superhero, not a man.

Despite the presence of spies, Le Carré’s work is not a natural fit for the screen. The shifting perspectives, the disorienting time shifts, the coded interactions that require two or three hundred pages of immersion before you can feel confident in even identifying the main characters, or explaining the gist of their basic interactions––how do you put all that into a two-hour visual experience while also staying true to the art, and selling popcorn on top of it?

Regardless, the genre has proved irresistible over the years, and fortunately for us there have been some successes in the bunch. Since the author is now looking back on his career (Le Carré’s excellent memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life, comes out today), we thought that this would be a good opportunity to review in parallel the state of the man’s work on screen.

So here it is, 1–16: The Definitive Ranking of Every John Le Carré Adaptation.

1. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (film, 2011)

The Circus at its dreary, paranoid, internecine best. And all that hallucinatory orange decor… Gary Oldman embodies George Smiley like no other actor (heresy, we know). He’s observant, cynical, so pensive he’s at times almost comatose, and then suddenly that strange brew of cunning and resolve boils over. Tom Hardy steals a few scenes as Ricki Tarr; same goes for Benedict Cumberbatch as Peter Guillam. Mark Strong as Jim Prideaux grabs a few, too. (Come to think of it, this is really one of the best ensemble casts.)

Is the Hungary mission a little convoluted? Do you have to rewatch this movie two or three times before the plot starts to makes sense? Sure, but nobody said espionage was simple. Disinformation is half the game.

2. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965)

The original, and still the model for how to make a successful Le Carré adaptation. So many factors convened to make this movie work. Burton, as Alec Leamas, was at the height of his powers, capable of conveying more emotion, more world-weary ambivalence at a glance than most actors can summon over the span of a career. Director Martin Ritt was back from the blacklist, with a darkening world vision. The Bond series was in full force, ready to be undermined. The film noir tradition was alive and well, and audiences were learning to value atmosphere and ambiguity over plot twists.

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is core Le Carré: a disillusioned spy in Cold War Central Europe, lost in a mire of lies, schemes and betrayals, carrying on in the name of professionalism and gamesmanship, more than love of country or any particular belief in the cause. No film better captured the geo-political moment––or the personal disenchantment––of the supposed détente.

3. The Constant Gardener (2005)

Forget the spooks and spies (well, sort of). This is post-Cold War Le Carré, where aid workers, diplomats, and pharmaceutical reps are the new avatars of the quiet fight for world morality. Directed by Fernando Meirelles (responsible for 2002’s City of God), The Constant Gardener relies on a washed-out palate to establish an eery, starkly beautiful fever dream of East Africa. While Rachel Weisz is the story’s impetus, Ralph Fiennes is its beating heart: he perfectly captures the Le Carré sense of ambiguity, noble intention, and ultimate bewilderment.

4. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (TV series, 1979)

This is a controversial opinion, obviously. The original TTSS adaptations starred Alec Guinness, after all. (Read The Pigeon Tunnel, if for nothing else than Le Carré’s Guinness anecdotes. A taste here, courtesy of The Guardian.)

This is still one of the best-loved BBC productions of all time, and still a high water mark. The performances are subtle, the story compelling, and the atmosphere thick. The cinematography however is more in line with television standards of the day, and doesn’t equal the strange panache of the 2011 film adaptation. By all means though, watch both, on repeat.

5. The Night Manager (2016)

Tom Hiddleston has a real future in Le Carré adaptations. He’s compelling and worldly, if not overly gifted (in spite of prevailing Internet opinion), with an overall Bond-ian charm.

The story, on its own, is a bit far-fetched. A former soldier serving as a hotel employee in Cairo is recruited to track and trap a notorious arms dealer (Hugh Laurie). But the joint BBC/AMC miniseries pulls it off with style, and Le Carré’s world has never looked better. Director Susanne Bier has the eye, wit, and patience to illuminate the author’s scenes, not an easy feat on screen.

6. The Looking Glass War (1969)

There are two things you need to know about The Looking Glass War. Frank Pierson, of Cool Hand Luke and Dog Day Afternoon fame, wrote and directed the adaptation. And it stars a young Anthony Hopkins. If that’s not enough, God help you.

7. Smiley’s People (1982)

Look, these are good adaptations. I’m thrilled they exist and will watch them again every few years. Alec Guinness’ Smiley astounds. Karla comes over. There’s a lot to love here. But a great adaptation requires a visual style to match the author’s prose, okay? BBC workaday filming is fine, but you need a little more to move up in these rankings.

8. A Perfect Spy (1987)

Considered Le Carré’s most personal novel, this one plumbs a father-son relationship and hits hard on the analogy between confidence games (the father’s) and geopolitical betrayal (the son’s). The series gets points for coherence and nuance but a knock against because it doesn’t take on Le Carré’s trademark time shifts, opting instead for a relatively linear telling.

9. The Tailor of Panama (2001)

Pierce Brosnan was born to play Andy Osnard — smug and charming, bullying and considerate, cynical to the bone, and given to doing business while seated on vibrating motel beds. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie isn’t up to his performance. The canal zone, which should be a viper’s nest of shady business and tropical hustlers, is somehow neutered in translation. Geoffrey Rush and Jamie Lee Curtis bring the opposite of charisma to the screen. And the dance scenes… well, nothing can justify them. Still, they are having fun. And the scenes of Rush practicing his tradecraft very nearly make this a good movie.

10. A Most Wanted Man (2014)

This one’s a by-the-numbers Le Carré adaptation, except for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance. Hoffman was nearing the end of his too-short life, and it’s impossible not to watch this movie without noticing his anguish. The accents are distracting — Hoffman, Rachel McAdams and Willem Dafoe all play Germans. The unspooling of the plot is a little ham-handed. Still, this is a solidly middle-class Le Carré movie, and certainly worth watching (now streaming on Amazon Prime), especially if you’re interested in the nuances of asylum applications in contemporary Europe (do go on…)

11. The Deadly Affair (1966)

This one gets even more confusing than your typical adaptation, since a rights dispute between studios required a lot of name-changing. (The movie is based on Le Carré’s first novel, Call for the Dead.) James Mason stars as ‘Charles Dobbs’ — the Smiley avatar. Most significantly, Sidney Lumet directs.

12. Our Kind of Traitor (2016)

The most recent adaptation has a lot going for it: Russian mobsters, Ewan McGregor, Susanna White (an accomplished miniseries director — see Bleak House and Generation Kill) with her flair for portraying corruption, and Stellan Skarsgård, who is legally obligated to appear in every international thriller, but who still manages to bring something to each role. Somehow, though, none of it quite works. It’s a pleasant enough movie to watch, but ultimately not all that gripping.

13. The Russia House (1990)

The luminaries who travel through Le Carré’s orbit never cease to amaze. The screenplay for The Russia House was written by Tom Stoppard. Are you in the mood for a publishing world/espionage thriller? Did you love Sean Connery in The Presidio. (Wait, he was in something else, right?) Is Michelle Pfeiffer your one and only femme fatale? Then, this might be your cup of tea.

14. A Murder of Quality (1991)

This was a TV movie, apparently. Featuring Denholm Elliott, Indiana Jones’ Dr. Marcus Brody, who also starred in the 1953 adaptation of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, and the original TV movie adaptation of The Bourne Identity from 1988.

15. Endstation (1973)

A West German film production. We didn’t see this one. Neither did you. Let’s not pretend.

Couldn’t even find an image, so enjoy more from 2011’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

16. The Little Drummer Girl (1984)

This 1984 release fell prey to a classic Le Carré adaptation trap — trying to fit the entire plot into a single movie. The result? Utter incoherence, followed by boredom. Still, it stars both Diane Keaton and Klaus Kinski, which ought to be a hell of a pairing.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Final Unpublished Collection Set for Spring 2017 Release

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In the years before his tumultuous 1937 Hollywood move, F. Scott Fitzgerald lived at North Carolina’s Grove Park Inn. His wife Zelda was receiving treatment at a nearby sanatorium. Tucked in the mountains, mired in alcoholism, and already careening towards his untimely death, the author wrote many of the stories set to appear in his final unpublished collection: I’d Die for You, due out from Scribner in April, 2017. Said to be a stylistic departure from his better known work, the publisher claims the collection will “provide new insight into the bold and uncompromising arc of Fitzgerald’s career.”

The title story draws from the author’s southern exile, heightening the events of a particularly traumatic interview with The New York Times, which was described by Thomas Wolfe as “a lousy trick, a rotten…piece of journalism.” In the fictionalized account, Fitzgerald is said to have added a full Hollywood film crew to the rural pine forests, foreshadowing his impending departure to the west.

Unlike The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald’s most read posthumous release, I’d Die for You contains finished work presented as the author intended it to be read. He had, in fact, attempted to publish the collection during his lifetime; however, because of content Scribner describes as “controversial [for] depicting young men and women who actually spoke and thought more as young men and women did, without censorship,” it was considered unsellable. Refusing compromising edits, Fitzgerald left the stories unpublished, despite financial struggles and a need for critical attention.

This is not the first unreleased Fitzgerald material to crop up in recent years. Just last August, Strand Magazine published “Temperature,” a story found in his Princeton University archive that follows Emmet Monsen, a hard drinking writer with cardiac disease. For the time being though, it seems like these pieces are the last of their kind. If I’d Die for You actually ends up being the final word from The Great Gatsby author, the collection should be an interesting conclusion to an illustrious and tragic literary legacy.

Leopoldine Core on First Meetings, Fantasies & Getting to Know A Character

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Leopoldine Core’s stories filled a void I didn’t know was there. Selecting a favorite from her debut collection When Watched is an impossible task — each entertains, delights, and impresses. Her plots are meticulous, surprising, and her characters are fascinating: the kind of characters you’d want to get a phone call from, just for the chance to hear them speak. They say the kind of biting things that make you laugh, then cringe. Most of the nineteen stories in When Watched explore the relationships — sexual, friendly, and otherwise — between pairs of characters. Core’s fiction picks away at the vulnerabilities and impulses that incubate in us, both when we’re alone and when we’re stuck with other people.

Core answered my questions about the work of crafting her stories and why she likes to put characters together and see what happens.

Claire Luchette: One of the joys of reading your characters is the attention you give to how they think and feel and act in public, as opposed to when they’re alone. It hints at a self-awareness that is so important to a character’s psychology. Do you think we’re more ourselves around other people, or when we’re alone?

Leopoldine Core: The self isn’t a single entity — it contains so many trembling, conflicting parts. This is why I like to shuttle between the outer and inner worlds of a character, so you can see what they say and are unable to say. I remember a teacher once telling me that I should know my characters entirely — even if I don’t share every detail of who they are in the text — I should know. But I tend to have the opposite experience when I write. There is so much I don’t know about these people — a story is just a glance and that is my attraction to the form, how partial it is. You are thrown into someone’s existence for minute and then they’re gone and maybe the story keeps going in your head. I don’t know exactly who these people are and I write from exactly that point of unknowing — of desire.

Luchette: Many of these stories also focus on partnerships — pairs of people, and the intimacy between them. What interests you about duos?

Core: I find it easier to talk to one person than a group of people and my stories reflect that. Often in a group — though this isn’t always true — the conversation stays a bit lighter, a bit more polite. But when you talk to one person, if you like each other, a lot is revealed very quickly. So when I’m writing, I like to jump right into that intensity, use it.

It’s also spatial — it’s a set up I understand, two heads side by side in a room. I grew up in a narrow, messy apartment in the East Village. There literally wasn’t a lot of room to move around, so at best I would invite one friend over and we would sit on my bed and talk and do our homework and eat. I did everything in bed because it was the one surface that was always clear. And so I guess I grew accustomed to being very close to someone when I spoke with them, and to often being alone. My neighborhood wasn’t very safe, so most of my free time was spent indoors. And somehow I wasn’t bored. I liked being home in bed, talking to someone or myself. I still do.

It’s so revealing, how we behave when encountering each other for the first time.

When I’m staging a story, I like to find ways of putting two people with nothing in common right next to each other, and trapping them in the room or the car, seeing what they say. Like when people are first meeting in a story, how they interview each other — or some people never ask the other a single question, they just talk about themselves. It’s so revealing, how we behave when encountering each other for the first time.

Luchette: “When Watched” delves into the highly imaginative mind of Theo, a young girl who dreams of disappearing. What was challenging in writing her?

Core: “When Watched” was the first story I wrote. I wanted to write a story that emphasized the ways kidnapping is eroticized in the culture and I was struck with the idea that the child in the story would join in the fantasy — staging her own death. I didn’t want to erase her though, that was a fear of mine. I didn’t want to drown the character out with my theories about pop culture, you know? The story is about someone who feels unseen, unloved — indeed, neglected, so as the writer, I wanted to be sure to see her. I wanted the story to live very much in her mind. One feels a moral obligation when writing about children — not to flatten out their humanity, their weirdness. I spent a long time thinking about who Theo was, having conversations with her in my head. Because I knew that once she was real, she would write the story, carry me to the end.

So much of what drives my work is the tension between fantasy and reality — and the fact that you can’t quite separate them, they start to fizzle together in the same pool.

Luchette: These stories are all narrated in the third person — usually close to one character’s thoughts, but in some cases roaming between characters (like in “Historic Tree Nurseries”). What does the close third person offer you, the writer? Is it control, or maybe more objectivity?

Core: I write in the third person because I like hovering over the scene, seeing the surface of everything. I write kind of dull stage directions and then punctuate them with feeling — or that is my goal, anyway, to keep the terrain uneven, pinball between flat and lush language. Really I write in the third and the first person — because I dip into the mind’s of my characters quite often and these thoughts occur in the first person. And dialogue, which accounts for the bulk of most stories, obviously occurs in the first person. I like shuttling between the third and first — I want to have both always. I want to be inside and outside. Because my experience of being alive is exactly that way, these constant shifts in attention to the material world, the world of other people and the world of my own head.

Luchette: In “Orphans,” we follow Miranda as she gets to know Drew, a homeless transgender guy from AA. Drew ends up being so much more compelling than Miranda, though. Is it always clear to you from the beginning which character you’ll follow through a story?

Core: That story was such a surprise. I didn’t know what would happen to Miranda, this character I felt so maddened by. Her behaviors are excruciating to watch, and yet they set the scene for much about the world around her to be revealed. When people say stupid things, ask insensitive questions, make choices based on total delusions, behave greedily — they stand to be corrected by those around them. I like watching that happen in a story. Miranda is a bit demented. She represents a part of the culture that lives in so many of us — the part that fears and mis-sees the exact person it hopes to fuck. Violence against trans people is brought on mainly by desire, I think. Because trans people are so incredibly beautiful, and for many people, they can’t bear this — their desire for a person who challenges, indeed shatters, gender norms. Miranda is violent in her stupidity, mostly, her addiction to the nimbus of her own fantasies. I wanted her to meet someone who would emphasize her hate and fear and desire and total narcissism — point it all out.

Luchette: You also write poetry. How do you navigate the truths you want to explore in poetry versus fiction?

Core: My poetry could be categorized as nonfiction. It is generally drawn directly from experience, written in the first person, and quickly. I think if I spent a lot of time on my poems or made an effort to fictionalize them, I would ruin them. They leap right out of me and I try to preserve them in that state — I have a protective impulse, maybe.

Whereas so much time goes into my stories, so many hours of lying in the dark thinking. All the elements of the plot have to hook together in a particular way, even if it’s a story about a woman who never leaves her bed. And I’m generally writing about at least two people, sometimes more, so their voices need to be distinct. This is why I write the dialogue first, so I can build an intimacy with the characters before I begin describing them in the third person. If I can read ten pages of dialogue without any names indicating who said what and still know exactly who is talking, then I feel ready to start describing the room and the faces in it. But I also sometimes use dialogue in the place of describing the face. I like when the words passing between two people show us what their bodies look like.

I like when the words passing between two people show us what their bodies look like.

I spend hours reading my stories aloud, sometimes tape recording them to see what sounds true and what doesn’t. I write fiction but the work needs to be grounded in a living reality — a world I believe — or I’ll abandon it.