Álvaro Enrigue, Author of Sudden Death, on Caravaggio’s Tennis Game, Castration & The Birth of The…

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The following is an excerpt provided by our friends at BOMB.
Read Esposito & Enrigue’s full conversation in BOMB’s spring issue.

I first met Álvaro Enrigue at that notoriously inhumane collection of book-people known as BookExpo America. It was 2013. Four years before, I had written a review of the anthology Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction, which included Enrigue’s story “On the Death of the Author,” his debut in English. I daresay I was the first American critic to write about him; if not the first, one of a handful. As this smiling man strode up to me in that clusterfuck of commerce, I barely remembered that review. But no sooner did Álvaro grab my hand and pump it up and down than he sang my praises for the words I had given to his story. As we went on to make awkward small talk, it became clear that this opening gratitude was no calculated act — he was genuinely thankful, and he could think of no other way of beginning our very first interaction than by letting me know.

In the years since that meeting, Enrigue’s profile in English has risen. Hypothermia — an excellent book from which “On the Death of the Author” is drawn — was released that spring and became an underground hit. Later that year, he received the immensely prestigious Herralde Prize for his unpublished novel Muerte súbita, which, before it even had a Spanish-language publisher, was already drawing the attentions of major US presses. That book is now published as Sudden Death in an outstanding translation by Natasha Wimmer. It is a suitably strange, light-footed but historically weighty construction that centers around a fake tennis match between the painter Caravaggio and the poet Francisco de Quevedo. From this central conceit, Enrigue expands the frame to take in the immense canvas of Counter-Reformation Europe and Cortés’s New World. It is a brilliant synthesis of art, history, religion, power politics, and — yes — tennis, a complex study of our world via the world that gave birth to modernity. It is much like an American postmodern book, except it is very different from, say, a Pynchon or a DeLillo since it is carried along by Álvaro’s very Mexican wit and sensibility, as well as his own intuitive logic. His books are at once morbid and celebratory, somber and slapstick, historic and very much about the present. Precisely how Álvaro reconciles these opposites indicates his unique contribution to our world of letters.

Scott Esposito: I want to begin with your novel Sudden Death, your latest book in both Spanish and English, and the one that most people who read this interview will associate you with. It’s very much about the painter Caravaggio and the poet Francisco de Quevedo, but it’s also about their era, an era that transformed Europe and the New World and instigated what we would call the modern world. I see two main threads in this book: the capital H History that is ruled by the elites and shapes the world we live in, and then the lives of artists, who are legislators in their own right. Let’s start with the artists. What about Caravaggio and Quevedo made you want to explore a relationship between them through a tennis match?

Álvaro Enrigue: For years I wanted to write a book not about but with Caravaggio. I thought that the fluidity of his sexuality, his faith in process as an artist, and his incredible ability to get in trouble had something to say about the world we live in, of which he was kind of a pioneer. There are many fascinating things about his life: He was Galileo’s friend, he was a murderer, and he dressed like a charro avant la lettre (that is, a Mexican cowboy). Legend states that his sword said “Without hope” on one side and “Without fear” on the other. When he finally got a commission for a painting for Saint Peter’s Basilica, he used a really vulgar old woman as a model for St. Anne (the painting never did make it to Saint Peter, of course). But I have no interest in historical novels; I didn’t want to represent a period and a character, but rather reflect, in a narrative key, on the first moderns, our true ancestors. So I needed to find a way to talk about Caravaggio — maybe with him — that was not a period portrait in a famous set. While circling these ideas I revisited a biography of his and noted a detail that I had previously missed: before stardom and celebrity, he used to play professional tennis at the Piazza Navona. He actually played pallacorda, an Italian antecedent to the modern game, to earn some extra cash. Showing him as a tennis player, I thought, would let me focus the novel as a study of his figure outside the box of Caravaggio-esque topics.

A novel researches something that was previously not visible. Now we know things about Caravaggio that maybe not even he himself knew — in the period in which he used to hang out with Galileo, the astronomer was just a math professor, no one knew that he would become a radical revolutionary, for example. There were things to say about that, about how liberal the people of the Baroque period were, and so on.

SE: So Caravaggio and Francisco de Quevedo made up this rich binary to investigate the period?

The sensual beast could only show himself honestly if confronting that incendiary brain with legs that was Quevedo.

ÁE: Such a monster as Caravaggio could only play tennis — in a novel, I mean — against another monster, and Francisco de Quevedo had a comparable CV, at least in my heart. He was the most toxic poet to ever exist — the master of the erotic sonnet — the most credible and mean-spirited critic of the Spanish society of his time, a man who defended Catholicism as an ideological tool to keep the empire together when he was obviously an atheist, the translator of Moore’s Utopia, a fearsome swordsman, and, for a time, a pirate of the Adriatic. A moralist with no morals, who could be a better match for Caravaggio? The sensual beast could only show himself honestly if confronting that incendiary brain with legs that was Quevedo. As it must be clear by now, the tennis match is only what holds the book together, a silly anecdote that can be extended in time; it’s there to keep the tempo.

SE: The way you chose to create Caravaggio’s relationship with Quevado is very successful: the men express their differences through a tennis match, with each one’s particular style of play reflecting his unique character traits. The ways they swing their racquets, the ways they try to cheat, their serves, their interactions with the linemen and their paisanos, the shots they attempt, their failures … all slowly coalesce into identities. And as the game is seesawing back and forth, you begin to fill in the story of how the two met the night before, and the resulting combustive encounter that gave rise to this tennis match, which is in fact a duel. This athletic negotiation is very much about power, just as the other relationships in the book — between the kings and conquistadors and popes — are also about battling over power. Do these conflicts have something to say about how these men are modern?

ÁE: It comes down to where you want to draw the line of modernity: the debate is so wide and has existed for so long that it is almost a personal decision. I have a preference for a term used by academics to define those seventeenth-century braves who threw themselves onto the train of obsessive innovation: “early moderns.” It’s lovely, as the idea of modernity involves the faint smell of decadence; the notion of something newly born yet already rotting is elegant — and maybe it’s precise in political terms, since it is in this period that things went wrong forever. But I tend to prefer definitions that are a bit more extreme: Lyotard says that modernity began the moment that Saint Paul projected history as a line and not a circle, as something with a beginning and an end.

There is something “Pauline” and apocalyptic in the way Caravaggio kept moving forward, destroying the tradition of Catholic art and himself in the process. His was a desperate effort to give testimony of a world that, according to the creed of Counter-Reformation, had been misrepresented. My novel, then, begins closed up in the pallacorda match. Quevedo is nineteen years old — or something like that — and he is there, in the service area of the tennis court at the Piazza Navona, trying to understand this creature on the other side of the net, at the same time unbelievably sophisticated and unacceptably vulgar — as are we, keeping our records of Miles Davis and The Clash in the same box. I don’t have to say that Quevedo’s fascination with the monster is mine. The game is told not from his point of view but perhaps from the perspective of someone who is just behind his shoulders, someone who has accepted his poems’ poisonous advice. Then the picture opens, first to Rome, and then to Europe. When the players change courts, the point of view changes. Now the reader looks at Quevedo and his friends, and imperial Spain and the Americas behind them.

We are the children of that generation, chasing again and again the volleys of religious fanatics and the abusive politicians who prosper thanks to them, the bankers and capitalists cashing in on the misery they produce in the rest of the world.

During the hour and a half in which they are playing, the court is the center of the world. A world that had become so big and confusing that it began to demand bigger tools to be understood — Galileo’s theories renewing the way in which reality was organized, and Baroque art too, as a desperate way of representing a universe in perpetual change, or sonnets as the ultimate tools to understand the human soul’s contradictory nature. The modern novel was about to be invented by Cervantes, as a machine to think about what is and what is not moral in a universe that didn’t fit in the Bible anymore. Sudden Death is a novel — we are still there. We are the children of that generation, chasing again and again the volleys of religious fanatics and the abusive politicians who prosper thanks to them, the bankers and capitalists cashing in on the misery they produce in the rest of the world. Sudden Death is not about Caravaggio, Quevedo, and their world, but ours.

SE: Indeed, and it’s fitting that a Mexican and an American are having this conversation, as Sudden Death is very much about what parts of Europe were transported to the New World. Your country and mine are both the products of foundational compromises. In the case of Mexico, the people living there when Cortés arrived were massacred and then forced to assimilate into a facsimile of the European political order circa 1600. But of course this did not happen exactly, and Mexico is now known as a challenging union of the indigenous and the European. Similarly, the US’s founding was an attempt to combine two incompatible systems: a feudal, aristocratic order based on slave labor, and an incipient capitalism that tended toward the opposite of feudalism in nearly all possible ways. In both nations the original questions persist to this day, causing great struggles, but I would say that these contradictions are also the source of a certain dynamism. Do art and literature require these historical conflicts? Is the image of Caravaggio and Quevedo — a lowly painter and a poet on the run from his king — volleying back and forth a tennis ball that is in fact a product of the power struggles between the rulers of two European empires … is this image perhaps a metaphor for the artist’s task?

ÁE: Clever! The structure of the novel is binary, as defense and attack movements. It is a novel about how the classic value of Roman virility ended up fucking up the world when misunderstood by the kings and emperors of the seventeenth century. The Baroque can be seen as a failed attempt to re-Latinize Europe. Quevedo’s writing is absolutely sexy because he achieved that impossible task: to make Castilian sound like Latin again. It’s a novel that should be read moving your head from one side to the other. A book that shows not el gran teatro del mundo, as the passengers of the Baroque used to call it (the world as a great theater), but the world as a great court. So the heart of the novel is not in the stories told but in the way in which pairs of opposites add up over and over, resignifying what was told before. It’s all about the dynamics of confrontation, to reuse your words. England vs. the Vatican, Spain vs. France, the Aztecs vs. the Holy Roman Empire, and of course heterodox vs. conservative sexualities, poets vs. painters, Mannerism vs. Baroque, revolutionary artists vs. the system, etcetera. At the end, because I have the heart where I have the heart, the only unblemished character is the Aztec artist — as he is left without anything, he has to reinvent the world, he is the only one who integrates instead of destroying, the only one who thinks with his “upper head.”

If I remember well, when I was writing about all those balls and beheadings, I was thinking more of the notion of castration than of the artist’s task. Quevedo, Caravaggio, and Cortés will eventually be raped by politicians with power over them, but, at a certain temporal or geographical distance. The rebels are the ones with the power of fertility in their hands. I’m not saying that Cortés was an artist — he was guilty of genocide — but what a world he produced in his short yet brilliant moment, the brief period portrayed in the novel when he was thinking of annexing the Mexican Empire to the Holy Roman one and not erasing it.

Read the rest of Esposito & Enrigue’s conversation at BOMB.

TED WILSON REVIEWS THE WORLD: THE LOLLIPOP I BOUGHT

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★★★☆☆

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

The good thing about lollipops is you can leave one mid-lick and come back to it days later. It’s a lot harder to do with an M&M for instance. Once it starts to melt in your mouth you can’t take it out to save for a better time. Not unless that better time is two seconds after you take it out of your mouth.

It’s this strength of the lollipop that is also a weakness, because it’s almost impossible to tell if someone took a few licks of your lollipop while you weren’t licking it. Sure, you could get a DNA test, but who has time for that? I do.

When I unwrapped a recently purchased lollipop, I had the distinct sense that it had been licked already. Some people will buy things, use them, then return them. I could easily picture some wiseguy buying a case of lollipops, licking each one a few times — essentially getting the equivalent experience of a full lollipop — and then returning them all.

I worried that had happened to me, so I mailed the lollipop to a DNA testing facility who could either quell or confirm my fears for a small fee. In a few weeks, when they mail the test results and my lollipop back, I’ll know whether I can safely continue licking it.

Aside from my doubts about the possibly used nature of the lollipop, it was an otherwise good experience. It was on sale for 39 cents. Not a lot of things cost 39 cents these days. For that price you could only manufacture about 23 pennies. So all in all, 39 cents for a lollipop, licked or otherwise, is a pretty good deal. Especially when you consider that when you’re done with it, you can turn it into a Q-tip by adding some pocket lint to the ends. I’ve done that and can vouch for its effectiveness.

When I was younger I didn’t like to waste things so I always ate the lollipop stick. All kids my age did. That’s what happens when you grow up during a war. I’ve probably eaten several hundred lollipop sticks in my lifetime. They’re not that nutritious but still perfectly digestible.

BEST FEATURE: Kids who see you with candy will be very envious. It’s kind of an ego trip.
WORST FEATURE: There’s a piece of gum in the middle of the lollipop but I’ve never been a fan of fusion foods.

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

Midweek Links: Literary Links from Around the Web (March 10th)

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Looking for some interesting reading to get you through the week? Here are some literary links from around the web to check out:

A Chaucer scholar analyses the poetry of Donald Trump’s Twitter insults

Why does rejection feel so personal when its your art being rejected?

Kids can still love reading in today’s digital age

No, fantasy fans, George R. R. Martin isn’t the George Martin who just died

The Notorious RBG is co-writing a book

Porochista Khakpour on writing about the body

Victor LaValle interviewed about his new Lovecraft homage / rebuttal novel

LGBTQ writers on the books they wish they had read as teens

J.K. Rowling has published a history of magic in North America, but some are accusing her of cultural appropriation

Ta-Nehisi Coates offers readers a sneak peek at his Black Panther comic series

Writers on the High School english teachers who saved their lives

Dana Spiotta, Author of Innocents and Others, on Film, Clarity & What We Find Beautiful

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The seductive promises of the telephone, the possibilities of films imagined, but not yet made, the way a rough demo of a song extends the relationship between musician and fan from fling to full-blown love affair — these are just some of the obsessions that preoccupy Dana Spiotta’s characters, firmly situating her novels in art and the everyday. Innocents and Others, Spiotta’s recently published fourth novel, is about the possibilities of narrative, and the impossibility of controlling the reception of any narrative, whether they are the stories you tell about yourself or others. Spiotta and I conducted this interview through e-mail over the course of a few weeks.

Kavanagh: The first section of Innocents and Others is an essay by one of your protagonists, Meadow Mori, titled “How I Began,” published in a journal Women and Film. With this I was forced to recognize several things. One, a journal titled Men and Film would sound absurdly general, but the fact that there are still so few women directors necessitates a niche journal. Two, the world depicted in the essay is several decades earlier than the world in which the essay is published, the contrast of which is highlighted by the mention of unpublished love letters (written by hand) and the Internet comments you included at the conclusion of Meadow’s essay. Three, the Internet comments planted doubts about Meadow Mori’s reliability as a narrator, even of her own life, which shifted how I read the book — and made clear that unreliability of narrative and its unintended outcomes are central themes of the book itself. So, why begin here? We might guess why Meadow Mori begins here, but why Dana Spiotta?

Spiotta: Writing the novel’s opening was pretty intuitive. I had this voice in my head that came alive as I wrote. I discovered that Meadow was looking back on her beginning for a reason. And that was interesting to me. As for her imaginary affair with Orson Welles — he came into my head along with her. Which made sense because he was a magician, a self-storyteller, and a hugely iconic American filmmaker. If you are going to have an imaginary affair, why not pick the biggest person in every sense of the word? So magic tricks and seduction and passion were all there right from the first sentence.

Kavanagh: Carrie thinks at one point, “…no camera or lens she had ever used was very good at capturing the simultaneous long and short view. Nothing like her eyes.” She’s frustrated with the limitations of her specific artistic medium, film. By writing about music, and film, are you expressing frustration with your chosen medium, prose? Either way, why are you so drawn to other art forms in your writing? What are the limitations of prose?

I love recursive syntax. Repetition of words separated by many pages. I love space breaks, prefaces, codas, lists and set pieces.

Spiotta: On the contrary, I love the sentence and love the novel as a form. There are so many possibilities for creating meaning and resonance. I love paragraphs and chapter headings. I love written dialogue. I love recursive syntax. Repetition of words separated by many pages. I love space breaks, prefaces, codas, lists and set pieces. I love how you can construct a whole world, a real three dimensional shape, out of only language on the page. The limitations of prose are the constraints that make it exciting to me.

Kavanagh: In your last two novels you wrote about a musician and filmmakers. As I read both books I wondered — is their art good? Is the art meant to be good? Does is matter?

Spiotta: In the world of each of the books, that is certainly one of the questions raised. But each book is different. In Stone Arabia, we only see Nik from his sister’s very subjective point of view, but she thinks he’s good. He is devoted, so the work is at least interesting. In Innocents and Others, both filmmakers receive acclaim in the world of the novel. But the book doesn’t dwell on the acclaim too much. It is more interested in the making of the films. What is good does matter, but it isn’t conclusive, the reader has to decide for herself, just as the characters do. At one point Meadow thinks Carrie’s film is not good, but she also concedes that her view is not quite fair. She admits to herself that on a different day or maybe at a different time in her life she might have found the film to be a perfect, playful comedy. The novel tries to ask some questions about what we find beautiful and why.

Kavanagh: There are two strands in Innocents and Others — the story of two filmmakers, Meadow and Carrie, and a woman named Jelly. Which strand came to you first, and how or why did you decide they needed to be braided together?

Spiotta: They came together, right from the start. And I wrote them in the order you read them in the book, so they were always very integrated for me. Writing in this way means that there are a lot of organic connections between the strands long before their narratives meet. I would say that there is a third “Carrie” strand too. We get a number of chapters from her point of view.

Kavanagh: Meadow’s personal essay is an example of the ways in which your characters self-mythologize or read the myths of musicians and other artists for clues beyond what the actual art provides. I’m also thinking of Nik Kranis in Stone Arabia (a musician with a tiny cult following who self-mythologizes because if he doesn’t write his own myth, who will?) and Jason in Eat the Document, who obsesses over The Beach Boys, and the unreleased Bob Dylan film, “Eat the Document.” What do artist’s myths tell us about artists?

Spiotta: Interesting question. You get Nik exactly — he creates a counter-identity through his self-myth making. And you could argue his persona is his art form. Meadow is certainly creating an origin story for herself, and I think it tells us something about what older Meadow sees as her own loss of innocence. Her love for films and filmmaking, at the beginning, was urgent and whole hearted — a love story. As a writer, I am drawn to passion. Extremes.

Kavanagh: As I did research for this interview I read an interview you did with Liza Johnson, who made the film, “Good Sister/ Bad Sister,” about political fugitive Katherine Ann Power (which your Eat the Document protagonist is loosely based on), her psychotherapist, and the psychotherapist’s daughter, Courtney Love. I decided I needed to watch that film to do this interview (others might call this impulse procrastination) but I couldn’t find it online, and the closest library copy was more than 100 miles from my home. I had to give up on watching the film, but it made me wonder what role research has in your writing. How much research do you do?

Spiotta: I always do a lot of research, and maybe some of that is procrastination. I also enjoy it — I like to learn about things and study them. I don’t just read or watch things. I try things out, like an actor. I overdo, and I would say 80% never makes it into the novel. I have an austere prose style, and I like concentrated forms, but I have a kind of maximalist impulse. It is a weird tension.

Kavanagh: When do you know to stop?

Spiotta: I don’t know when to stop. I am still doing research for all my previous novels. Seriously. It is like an affliction.

Kavanagh: What was your most serendipitous research moment?

I am pretty ruthless about leaving things out that aren’t essential.

Spiotta: I was in Gloversville, NY, where part of the story takes place, because I found it mysterious and wanted to write about it. I discovered the Glove Theater, owned by the Schine family. The Schine family had a movie theater empire during the heyday of Hollywood, and it was based in Gloversville. I also discovered that Sam Goldwyn, the famous producer, worked in Gloversville for a while. So there were these strange cinema connections. But those facts didn’t make it into the book! Only the beautiful ruin of a theater. I am pretty ruthless about leaving things out that aren’t essential.

Kavanagh: In Innocents and Others it’s the telephone and film cameras, in Eat the Document it’s vinyl records, in Stone Arabia it’s DIY zines. What, besides nostalgia, is so seductive about analog technology/forms?

…we are estranged from outdated things, so we can see them more clearly.

Spiotta: The recent past and its slightly outdated technology fascinates [should be “fascinate,” technically] me. For one thing, we are estranged from outdated things, so we can see them more clearly. The sound, look, and feel of these machines when you use them shapes how you experience the world. Like Meadow, I am drawn to discarded and obsolete things (and places). Maybe it is an off-kilter way to address the present. But while Jason and Nik have a kind of nostalgia for the analog, Meadow’s interest in early film devices is more about exploring (devouring) the history of filmmaking so she can make her own inventive films. She “steals” from all of the filmmakers she admires, and partly through her remixing of these past innovations, she creates her unique vision. How does this person move from watching films to making her own? Her camera becomes a way to connect with and to distance herself from her subjects, which creates conflicts for her.

Kavanagh: Innocents and Others is about the art women create, and the lives they live while creating it. Whether it’s Meadow and her experiments in upstate New York, or Carrie and the tension between her commercial success and the everyday disappointments in her romantic life, and even Jelly and her performance art as the telephone seductress, you manage to ground their lives in their art. In a recent review Meadow was described as a cold “narcissistic artist, adept at using others,” her character arc as chilling, and the reviewer even goes as far as describing Meadow’s treatment of her boyfriends as cavalier. On the surface this struck me as an accurate, if negative, description of Meadow, but one that isn’t balanced by Meadow’s self-doubt, and her attempt to reconcile the life she lived in pursuit of her art. Criticizing a character strikes me as an odd and uncharitable measure of a novel, reminiscent of the Internet comments we read at the end of Meadow’s personal essay, where her character is objected to and called into question. Why do you think Meadow provokes this reaction in imaginary (your novel’s Internet commenters) and real people? Would Meadow’s character receive this criticism if she was a man? Did you anticipate this reaction?

Spiotta: Since my first novel, some readers have complained that my characters are unlikeable or unsympathetic. (In fact, I was asked to serve on a panel at the Brooklyn Book Festival a few years ago called Enduring Unlikable Women. I wasn’t sure if the title referred to me or my characters. In any case, it was an interesting discussion.) I strive to make my characters interesting and very specific humans, to make them complex and provocative, so I am not surprised when I get a strong response to them. Meadow is a smart, devoted, difficult, and ambitious person. She is what the writer Jenny Offill refers to as an Art Monster in her novel The Department of Speculation. Meadow’s single-mindedness makes her an interesting artist, but it also causes a lot of damage to her and to the people around her. As the book progresses, as she gets older, her awareness of her own mistakes starts to undo her. She worries that she is a bad person, and she tries to have more humility. (Does she succeed? That’s up to the reader to decide. I think the fact that she tries means something about her.) I am fascinated by self-reckonings, by the moments when a person sees herself with startling clarity. And the even more unnerving realization that having that clarity often doesn’t change anything. Middle age is all about learning humility, and I don’t think that is a bad thing. I think it is the essence of wisdom.

Kavanagh: It’s interesting you mention Jenny Offill’s novel, because her novel’s protagonist, the would-be “Art Monster,” was similarly described as narcissistic by a reviewer. (I thought she was funny and relatable!) And you said earlier, about Meadow, “Her camera becomes a way to connect with and to distance herself from her subjects, which creates conflicts for her.” This is clearly necessary for this particular artist, but she eventually pays the price for this distance. I wonder, then, is it possible to be an artist without being perceived as narcissistic? How does an artist like Meadow achieve the humility of middle age without giving up her art? Maybe you can’t answer this, but this is the question I’m left with at the end of Innocents and Others.

Ideally the artistic impulse is to see beyond yourself. It should be an act of generosity and the opposite of narcissism.

Spiotta: I think Jenny Offill’s novel is masterful — the way she uses her wit to disarm you so that the intense (and genuine) emotion she has been building really surprises you. You ask a good question, and one that deliberately is left unresolved. Ideally the artistic impulse is to see beyond yourself. It should be an act of generosity and the opposite of narcissism. Meadow has a reverie at the end of the book in which she starts to imagine a sublime film. It’s a pure glimpse of possibility. It is wild and grand, but then she comes to “something quieter and simpler — a person with an open face…How plain could an image be, how humble?” I think you can take that to mean that she will start making things again. Less carelessly, perhaps. And falling short the way we all do. Maybe it is related to what we see last in the book, Sarah getting on her knees, every day, quietly making herself see what is to be seen. That’s one way to understand the end.

Elena Ferrante and Orhan Pamuk among Man Booker International 2016 Longlist Authors

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The Man Booker International Prize has announced the 13 books on the longlist for this year’s prize. The list of authors include the pseudonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante and Nobel prize winners from Turkey and Japan: Orhan Pamuk and Kenzaburō Ōe respectively. The prize, which has a £50,000 prize attached, has changed formats this year. It used to be awarded to any work published in English or in English translation. Now the prize will be restricted to works in translation, with the prize split between translator and author. (The Man Booker prize used to only be open to authors from the commonwealth, but now is open to any authors writing in English.) The winner will be revealed in April.

The Man Booker International Prize 2016 Longlist

José Eduardo Agualusa (Angola) Daniel Hahn, A General Theory of Oblivion (Harvill Secker)

Elena Ferrante (Italy) Ann Goldstein, The Story of the Lost Child (Europa Editions)

Han Kang (South Korea) Deborah Smith, The Vegetarian (Portobello Books)

Maylis de Kerangal (France) Jessica Moore, Mend the Living (Maclehose Press)

Eka Kurniawan (Indonesia) Labodalih Sembiring, Man Tiger (Verso Books)

Yan Lianke (China) Carlos Rojas, The Four Books (Chatto & Windus)

Fiston Mwanza Mujila (Democratic Republic of Congo/Austria) Roland Glasser, Tram 83 (Jacaranda)

Raduan Nassar (Brazil) Stefan Tobler, A Cup of Rage (Penguin Modern Classics)

Marie NDiaye (France) Jordan Stump, Ladivine (Maclehose Press)

Kenzaburō Ōe (Japan) Deborah Boliner Boem, Death by Water (Atlantic Books)

Aki Ollikainen (Finland) Emily Jeremiah & Fleur Jeremiah, White Hunger (Peirene Press)

Orhan Pamuk (Turkey) Ekin Oklap, A Strangeness in My Mind (Faber & Faber)

Robert Seethaler (Austria) Charlotte Collins, A Whole Life (Picador)

George R. R.

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Legendary music producer George Martin passed away at the age of 90 this week. Martin was most famous for his work as “the fifth Beatle,” signing the band in their early years and introducing many innovative recording techniques to their iconic albums. His impact on pop music will last for generations and his death caused an outpouring of tributes. However, in one corner of the literary world, the news produced panic:

And at least one news outlet made the same mistake:

Fans of George R. R. Martin’s epic fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire, have been waiting for years for him to finish the sixth book, The Winds of Winter. Despite repeated promises and deadlines, Martin still hasn’t finished the book, which means that HBO’s adaptation Game of Thrones will officially surpass the books this season and possibly spoil most of the plot. But Martin is still alive and still working. On his LiveJournal, George R. R. Martin assuaged fans fears:

While it is strangely moving to realize that so many people around the world care so deeply about my life and death, I have to go with Mark Twain and insist that the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

It was Sir George Martin, of Beatles fame, who has passed away. Not me.

He paid tribute to Sir George Martin, “like many millions of others, I loved the Beatles, and Martin’s contribution to their music is worthy of recognition and honor.” He signed off by saying, “But thank you all for caring.”

Magical Realism Goes Modern in Carlos Velázquez’s Latest Collection, The Cowboy Bible and Other…

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With powerful prose, Carlos Velázquez collection, The Cowboy Bible and Other Stories, paints a picture of a place where corruption and violence reign supreme. Largely set in Northern Mexico, the collection is a gritty allegory on power and politics; organized into tongue-in-cheek categories of “Fiction,” “Non-fiction” and “Neither Non-Fiction nor Fiction,” each story carries an undercurrent of brash violence and ugliness.

From a woman who tries to bet against the biggest drug lord in a city to a norteño who moves back to Mexico from New York to get rid of his gun, Velázquez juxtaposes the real and the absurd in a way that brings light to otherwise grim topics. And in many ways, this is the collection’s saving grace. Similar to Dennis Johnson’s Jesus Son, the stories deal with revelatory, intensely human themes. However, thanks to Velázquez’s inventiveness and ability to amend the ordinary, he creates a somewhat lighthearted world where serious topics are tackled with humor.

Throughout the collection, disparate elements mix together to create something larger than each individual part. With caustic lines like, “A caravan sponsored by Coca-Cola led the way, polar bears included,” Velázquez succeeds in a scrutinizing discourse that, with the addition of fantasy, allows readers to blithely follow the author’s polemic without being beaten over it. Call it modern magical realism or call it surrealistic, either way it is a small feat indeed.

Perhaps the best example of Velázquez’s ability to make something both lighthearted and serious is in the collection’s third story, “Reissue of the Original Facsimile of the Remastered Country Bible’s Back Cover.” In this story, the Country Bible is a woman who, thanks to her skills at online piracy, is featured on a reality TV show that pits contestants against each other based on their piracy skills. A communist, she then leads a popular uprising against the government where, in the end, she evades capture and becomes a neighborhood hero.

Many of Velázquez’s transposed circumstances — a journalist visiting a dive bar that leads to an alcohol drinking contest that destroys a town — seem to comment on the impermanence and absurdity of modern life. His collision of a few real concepts like online piracy or reality television become surreal, like a girl named the Cowboy Bible who partakes in a pubic shaving competition.

These strange circumstances are grounded in Velázquez’s straightforward prose. For example, we believe that, in the first story, the Cowboy Bible is used by a wrestler before his match to prepare for the ring. Except that it is not an ordinary typical wrestling match of brute force and strength; instead, it seems that the athletes fight with words.

However, straightforward Velázquez’s prose might be, he peppers his narrative with carefully constructed corporate catchphrases. By reusing words we see all the time in advertisements, he plays with meaningless of modern commercial brand fixation. Some choice examples are a character who bought her ticket into the world on TicketMaster or a person who, at the end of their life, only exists on YouTube. He takes this idea that nothing is sacred and runs with it, showing that even the things we cherish are worthless. These phrases simultaneously cast judgment on 21st Century life while sharing details that stick in your mind.

“The Cowgirl Bible knew that establishing herself in the USA was a task for talking machines. Satan’s powers were like those of Corona beer: It was unfazed by borders. Or perhaps as potent as the services offered by UPS (which was suddenly sit too). Evil depends on express delivery.”

Featuring elements of rock music, fighting, drugs and gangsters, the stories within the collection tend to echo each other. One man is tormented after his wife sleeps with the devil; another character in another story sells his wife to the devil for one night. Stories also echo real events. One story calls to mind William S. Burrough’s murder of his wife, with the roles reversed. Thanks to this clever interplay, the reader is encouraged to complete the whole collection, even if, at first glance, the stories don’t seem to be related.

With lines like, “I was born in a corner,” Velázquez’s prose jumps off the page. Whether he is casting judgment on 21st century ills of corporatism or highlighting the lack of agency of individuals, his writing grabs readers’ attention. The Cowboy Bible and Other Stories is a testament to modern magical realism that will delight the inner skeptic in all of us.

Men Finish Quicker than Women (When it Comes to Putting Down Books)

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Do women on Venus read differently than men on Mars? Researchers from Jellybooks — a somewhat Orwellian start-up that specializes in reader analytics and “data-smart publishing” — decided to find out by analyzing how a reader’s gender influences how quickly they stop reading a book.

Jellybooks found, as The Guardian reports, that men and women are equally likely to finish reading a book once they start it. Both groups charted 27–28% completion rates across a variety of genres, including non-fiction, literary fiction, science fiction, crime, and fantasy. One genre, however, offers an exception: books that “deal with feelings.” Think romance novels, or novels that thematically focus on grief or love. “Not only do fewer men start reading these books,” Jellybooks founder Andrew Rhomberg explains in his Digital Book World article, “but those who do start reading them are more likely to give up on them than women are.” This trend holds true regardless of the gender of the book’s author.

Although men and women are equally likely to finish a book once they begin reading it, the study found that when readers do decide to throw in the towel, men do so much earlier than women. In a claim that sounds like a euphemism, Rhomberg explains that men “decide much faster than women do if they like a book or not.” Men, he ventures, “either have more foresight in this regard or…women continue reading even if they already know that the book is not to their liking. We suspect the latter, but cannot prove it at this point.”

It’s worth noting that more women than men signed up for the ebook trials. The prevalence of women volunteers, as Rhomberg notes, is to be expected, since women “account for more book purchases and books read than men do.”

Overall, these findings suggest that authors have less time — only 20–50 pages by Rhomberg’s count — to “hook” male readers. Authors who hope to appeal to men might consider ditching long-winded introductions or slow opening flashbacks. While Rhomberg told The Guardian that he doesn’t believe authors should change the way they write based on his study’s results, he does conclude that an author “needs to get to the point quickly, build suspense or otherwise capture the male reader, or he is gone, gone, gone.”

Chapter Zero

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Excerpted from The Association of Small Bombs
by Karan Mahajan

The bombing, for which Mr. and Mrs. Khurana were not present, was a flat, percussive event that began under the bonnet of a parked white Maruti 800, though of course that detail, that detail about the car, could only be confirmed later. A good bombing begins everywhere at once.

A crowded market also begins everywhere at once, and Lajpat Nagar exemplified this type of tumult. A formless swamp of shacks, it bubbled here and there with faces and rolling carts and sloping beggars. It probably held four seasons at once in its gigantic span, all of them hot. When you got from one end of the market to the other, the wooden carts with their shiny aluminum wheels had so rearranged themselves that the market you were in was technically no longer the market you had entered: a Heisenbergian nightmare of motion and ambiguity. So the truth of the matter is that no one really saw the parked car till it came apart in a dizzying flock of shards.

Strange sights were reported. A blue fiberglass rooftop came uncorked from a shop and clattered down on a bus a few meters away; the bus braked, the rooftop slid forward, leaked a gorgeous stream of sand, and fell to the ground; the bus proceeded to crack it under its tires and keep going, its passengers dazed, even amused. (In a great city, what happens in one part never perplexes the other parts.) Back in the market, people collapsed, then got up, their hands pressed to their wounds, as if they had smashed eggs against their bodies in hypnotic agreement and were unsure about what to do with the runny, bloody yolk. Most startling of all, for the survivors and rescue workers both, was the realization that the main dusty square was rooted so firmly by half a dozen massive trees, trees that had gone all but unnoticed in all those years, their shadows dingy with commerce, their branches cranked low with hanging wares, their droppings of mulberry collected and sold — until the bomb had loosened the green gums of the trees and sent down a shower of leaves, which Mr. Khurana kicked up on the ground as he tried to uncover the bodies of his two sons.

But the leaves, turned crisp, shards themselves, offered nothing. His sons were dead at a nearby hospital and he had come too late.

The two boys were the sum total of the Khuranas’ children, eleven and thirteen, eager to be sent out on errands; and on this particular day they had gone with a friend in an auto-rickshaw to pick up the Khuranas’ old Onida color TV, consigned to the electrician for perhaps the tenth time. But when Mr. Khurana was asked by friends what the children were doing there (the boy with them having escaped with a fracture), he said, “They’d gone to pick up my watch from the watch man.” His wife didn’t stop him, and in fact colluded in the lie. “All the watches were stopped,” she said. “The way they know the time the bomb went off is by taking the average of all the stopped watches in the watch man’s hut.”

Why lie, why now? Well, because to admit to their high-flying friends that their children had not only died among the poor, but had been sent out on an errand that smacked of poverty — repairing an old TV that should have, by now, been replaced by one of those self-financing foreign brands — would have, in those tragic weeks that followed the bombing, undone the tightly laced nerves that held them together. But of course they were poor, at least compared to their friends, and no amount of suave English, the sort that issued uncontrollably from their mouths, could change that; no amount of sobbing in Victorian sentences or chest beating before the Oxonian anchors on The News Tonight, who interviewed them, who stoked their outrage, could drape them or their dead children in the glow of foregone success: Mr. and Mrs. Khurana were forty and forty, and they had suffered the defining tragedy of their lives, and so all other competing tragedies were relegated to mere facts of existence. For a month afterwards, they made do without the TV, which for all they knew was still sitting in the basement workshop of the electrician, its hidden berths of microchips heavy with dust, its screen screwed off and put facedown on the floor, looking into nothing. They only caught their own mugs on The News Tonight because a neighbor knocked on their door and welcomed them into his house to watch the news. He was friendly with them ever after.

*Now Mr. Khurana, who had been a troubled, twitchy sleeper ever since he’d become a documentary filmmaker years ago, began to suffer from dreams that impressed him deeply, and he never failed to discuss them with his wife or his collaborators. He didn’t mention that he was terrified during their nightly unspooling; that he slept in the crook of his wife’s armpit like a baby, his body greased with sweat, his leg rotating out like the blade of a misfired fan. But the dreams were truly notable, and in the first and most frequent one, he became, for a few minutes, the bomb. The best way to describe what he felt would be to say that first he was blind, then he could see everything. This is what it felt like to be a bomb. You were coiled up, majestic with blackness, unaware that the universe outside you existed, and then a wire snapped and ripped open your eyelids all the way around and you had a vision of the world that was 360 degrees, and everything in your purview was doomed by seeing.

In the dream, the market — where he had been many times, his collar usually popped — was so vivid in his mind, so three-dimensional, that he sometimes lingered on details for hours of dreamtime. A single foot thrust into the dark cube of a shop would become gangrenous and huge with meaning; it would kick right against the inner wall of his temple, and he would wake up just before he could see the children flying through the shop front outside which they’d been found facedown, a sash of blood showing through the blackened cotton on their backs.

In the mornings he’d rouse Mrs. Khurana and they’d make eerily passionate love, using more muscle than necessary, their insides lurid with lactic acid, and then both would stack their slack bodies against each other and cry, so that later in the evening, when Mrs. Khurana returned from her errands and began to unwrap the sheet from its bulge of bed, she’d notice two parallel lines of salt that marked where they had lain in the morning, shoulders soggy with tears.

But both of them were grateful for each other, for how little they reminisced, how they refused to apply the butterfly effect backwards to their lives or ruin themselves with what-ifs; that neither blamed the other for the fact that the children had taken an auto-rickshaw, hotboxed with May pollution, to Lajpat Nagar that evening. Why bother, when the entire circuitry of their brains had been rewired to send up flares of grief? Why bother with talk? You lift a spoon from a claw of thick stew and you weep. You wrap your hand around an armrest on a bus (sometimes Deepa Khurana would ride to school with the children for the PTA) and it is as if the burning steel was riven from the earth only to remind you of the hotness at the core, to which your children will be returned. Under the shower there is the outline of your body for water to fall around, then a sputter and dry-throated silence in which you are sheathed in the same soap that you remember scrubbing off the shoulders of your boys. No action is safe from meaning. The boys had stored, between them, all the world’s possibilities: Nakul had been handsome and sporty; Tushar had been plump and responsible — what does it matter? Who’s to say that this is what they would have remained? Who’s to say, Mr. and Mrs. Khurana, that you lost something you knew?

At the cremation, which occurred on the stepped bank of a Yamuna River canal speckled with a thousand ripply eyes of oil, tendrils of overgrown hypochondriac plants thrust deep into the medicinal murk, Mr. Khurana noticed that outside the ring of burning flesh and wood, little snotty children ran naked playing with upright rubber tires. Behind them a cow was dreadlocked in ropes and eating ash and the wild village children kicked it in the gut. He shouldn’t have, but in the middle of the final prayers Mr. Khurana stepped out and shouted, shooing, the entire funeral party dropping back from the wavy black carpet of fire shadow. The children, not his, just looked at him and with beautiful synchronicity dove headfirst into the water, the rubber tires bobbing behind them, but the cow eyed him with muckraking glee and put its long wet tongue into the earth. The prayers continued but a tremor was evident: if the chanting had sounded before like the low buzzing of bees, the vocal swarm had now cleared and thinned as if to accommodate the linger of a gunshot. The exhilaration of Mr. Khurana’s grief gave way to the simple fact that he was a person, naked in his actions, and that as a person he was condemned to feel shame. He felt eyes rebuking him with sudden blinks between solemn verses. He stopped thinking of his two boys as they burned away before him in a flame that combed the air with its spikes of heat and sudden bone crack of bark. More ash for the cow.