Beginning Our Year of Reading at the Irreal Cafe: New York Hotel by Ian Seed

[posted by Alice]

I admit that I’m a restless reader and one who is attracted to the irreal. If a writer doesn’t undermine reality at least a little and doesn’t challenge or startle me at least once within the first few pages of a novel or volume of stories, I usually don’t read on. During my Year of Reading at the Irreal Cafe (see previous post), I decided to start with New York Hotel by Ian Seed and I readily finished this latest collection of Seed’s prose poems.

The cover of New York Hotel is nicely designed but features a fairly realistic if slightly off-kilter photo of an old brick hotel. We can see architectural details, such as wrought-iron railings, ornate architraves and a neon sign that reads HOTEL, and according to the acknowledgement on the back cover, the photo does depict an “Old hotel in New York City.” But though I was concerned that the concrete image on the cover meant that Seed was going to present us with a more concrete fictional depiction of reality than he has done previously (Kafka, after all, didn’t want an insect to be portrayed, even from a distance, on the cover of Metamorphosis), this did not turn out to be the case. In this slim volume I found Seed’s usual rich mixture of the real and the irreal, which makes reading it a compelling yet unsettling experience.

Or maybe I should say that reading these short pieces one after another is rather like having a series of small, restless dreams while napping on a train. In these dreams we might encounter people from the past, have anxiety-producing experiences, find ourselves in unusual places, or encounter the fantastic. And when we awake, we are discomfited by the intensity of the remembered dream and also by the disorienting effect of not being in our own beds and possibly not even in our home city or country. The unfamiliar permeates our most ordinary experiences, as is the case in New York Hotel (and other collections of Seed’s work) when believably realistic descriptions are enriched by the presence of the irreal.

As I noted in an earlier essay, I believe writers have personal symbols that they use over and over again — Leonora Carrington’s horses and Borges’ labyrinths come to mind. From among Seed’s apparent personal symbols, I am especially intrigued by how often he has made reference to male American singers who were popular during the mid-twentieth century. Mind you, this is not his most frequently used symbolic reference, but it’s one I have especially enjoyed and which has been used in a surprisingly irreal way.

In an earlier collection, Makers of Empty Dreams, Elvis and Elvis impersonators appeared in “In the Anniversary TV Special, the Real” and “In the Empty Church.” Both prose pieces touched on the wishful thinking of ardent fans who believe that Elvis is still alive. But in the former this possibility is considered against the background of an Elvis impersonator contest, while in the latter Elvis makes an appearance after his death, singing in a voice that is “more powerful than it had ever been.” These very short pieces portray Elvis fans, impersonators, and the singer himself in a way that succeeds in undermining all our expectations.

Elvis makes an appearance in New York Hotel as well, though he is implied and not named in “Loved” in which a woman named Priscilla weeps over the fact that “our adoration had killed her loved one.” In two other pieces, “Festival” and “American in Rome,” the narrator sings Elvis songs in situations that undermine reality as we know it. In the former prose piece, the venue is a park that “stretched away as far as the eye can see”; in the latter, the narrator sings “All Shook Up” to an enthusiastic Pope, who claps and sways to the music. An attentive crowd, and finally the narrator’s ex-wife, are equally moved by his performance.

In this volume an aging Jerry Lee Lewis also makes an appearance in “The Killer,” playing his boogie-woogie from a wheelchair, “the music as beautiful as ever.” This piece doesn’t strike me as irreal (Lewis was known as The Killer and is still alive and performing), but my reading of the story is enriched by the Elvis references in the above-mentioned prose pieces. And in “New York Hotel,” a Gene Kelly impersonator, who has crooned “Singing in the Rain” through an underpaid lifetime, is given a chance to tell his story and is portrayed in a sympathetic and offbeat way that is also gently irreal. Seed inserts these formerly popular American singers into places and situations that undermine our expectations, leading to effects that are sometimes comic, sometimes poignant, and often irreal.

If you read our guidelines, you will see that The Cafe Irreal is entirely devoted to irreal short fiction under 2,000 words. We don’t publish poetry at all. Having said that, I acknowledge that we do sometimes publish prose poems that display elements of a story — character, plot, setting – and which also show reality being undermined as an irreal story does. This quality is notable in Seed’s work, and his prose pieces (often called prose poems) have appeared in Issues 23, 42, 47, 55, 59, and 63 of our web publication. In fact, “Generation Gap,” “Free Will” and “Loved,” which you will find in Issue #63, also appear in New York Hotel.

You can buy New York Hotel by Ian Seed at Shearsman Books.

Reader Expresses Assessment Directly: Miéville Is Effective Vanguard In Livening Literary Evolution

[posted by Alice]

“As is the case with the rest of his books, the reader already has the sense in the first pages that there is something else in the narrative than what should be there according to his/her expectations, the sense of a perpetual disquiet which doesn’t disappear and even at the end does not bring us a catharsis but only further questions.” from Matous Hrdina, “The Language of the Fantastic, the Politics of Language: the Permanent Literary Revolution of China Mieville” in Issue #16 2016, A2. (translated by G.S. Evans)

The reader finished reading the novel and was puzzled. The reader was I. She tipped her head to one side as though she had just been swimming and there might be water in her ears, but what was actually inside her head was a complicated reaction. She was thinking deeply about this novel, and she had a lot to mull over.

She was accustomed to reading unusual fiction, I think, such as weird fiction and irreal fiction, but Miéville’s short novel defied classification and, especially in the beginning, the sometimes mannered prose was hard to like; she continued to hold her head to one side and thought about the books by China Miéville that she had read before. She liked Embassytown and The City and the City but had always hesitated to call this writer irreal, especially since he so often insists that his fiction is New Weird.

OK, I’ll stop. But rest assured that I am not parodying This Census-Taker. The novel has affected me, making me feel as though Miéville’s purposeful obfuscation, his prose that switches from first to third person and back again from the very first paragraph, his tendency to hint rather than explain, his use of steganography (meaning that a message is concealed within other text as in the title of this blog post) – all these devices lead the reader to stumble along sometimes, wondering where I am being led, but in the end I don’t want to give up. In other words, This Census-Taker is a compelling read in spite of its complex and purposeful opacity. The reader is asked to pay careful attention, to work for meaning, yet (as Matous Hrdina noted in the above quote) meaning is often withheld. Even when the reader solves the simple steganographic puzzles, the meanings of those solutions are obscure.

I don’t know whether or not this is a secret Bas-Lag story, as Christina Schulz at Strange Horizons claims (http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2016/03/this_censustake.shtml). I’m not sure if it’s true, as Francis Spufford at The Guardian has it, that “Repeatedly, as a writer of the fantastic, [Miéville] forces a redefinition of what fantasy can be.” (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/02/the-census-taker-china-mieville-review-novella) I don’t claim to know precisely what Miéville is doing, but I do know about the effect his work has on me as a reader.

It certainly undermines my expectations about genre. The story itself, which begins with a boy running down a hill, screaming, frantic to tell others that his mother has killed his father (or the other way around) at first seems more like a murder mystery than anything. But I usually read a murder mystery to find out who murdered whom and why, and there’s so much sleight-of-hand misdirection going on in this novel that solutions are hard to come by. There are fantasy elements (those keys the narrator’s father makes and what people do with them seems a lot like magic) and there are science fiction elements (the lives of those children who live on a bridge and “fish” for bats remind us of other dystopian stories), but This Census-Taker revels too much in its own obfuscations to be easily categorized.

But despite its tendency toward opacity, This Census-Taker is quite certainly about an outsider and an immigrant who may also be a killer. It also remains resolutely and purposefully a story about a child who feels unsafe in his own home and community. And there are plenty of the strange and disturbing images we might expect to find in New Weird fiction. In the end, though I’m not inclined to call it irreal, I am inclined to say that you should read it for the practice it will give you in reading a narrative that compels you to turn the pages as much as any thriller does, eager to reach the explanation at the end, and more than anything else, when that explanation does not entirely satisfy, leaves you eager to see what this writer will have to say next.

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More Serendipity

[posted by Alice]

A few years ago I posted “Reading, Serendipity, and a Little Synchronicity” on this blog. Since then, I have written some essays at my Digital Gloss blog about finding books serendipitously. Because irrealists might be interested in some of these books, here are links to a few of the posts:

Unbalancing Act: Helen Oyeyemi’s what is not yours is not yours

Is Tom McCarthy ‘a Kafka for the Google Age’?

“The Food of Angels” and “A Hunger Artist”

Curtains by John Briggs

[posted by Alice]

When I first looked at the photographs in John Briggs’ Curtains, the phrase “glimmers of irreality” came to mind immediately. Each of the photos in this book is a small introduction to the mysteries that we may find when we look carefully at the material world. The book also contains Briggs’ short essay on how he came to take the photos and then manipulate them so that they became “windows on the unreality we live in.”

In October of 2013 Briggs and his wife were walking near Westminster in London, and the curtains hanging in the windows of the Old British Admiralty building caught his eye. For him the cascading and rippling folds of these curtains exuded a “sumptuous, classically sensual feel.” He photographed them until a policeman asked him to stop taking pictures of a government building.

When he got the photos home and examined them on his computer, Briggs was disappointed that the “glowing, gauzy folds” he had seen in the man-made fabric of the curtains now seemed more harsh than sensuous. He tried some digital techniques to draw out the curtains’ sumptuous appearance once again, but it was not until 2015 when he experimented with solarization, inversion, and other techniques that he was able to find ways to reveal to us what he had seen on that October day. In this slim volume we are shown both the “normal views” of the curtains and the images in which the application of these techniques brought out true complexity and strangeness.

John Briggs is a Café Irreal contributor and author of Fractals: The Patterns of Chaos among other works, so we share with him an appreciation of the times our normal concept of reality is undermined. Impressed with the strangeness these photos convey, I carried Curtains with me to Prague and spent some time looking at it. Then last week while in London on our way back home, Greg and I made a special detour to the Old British Admiralty to see for ourselves the “puddled” curtains Briggs photographed.

After our visit to the Admiralty, I appreciated the images in Curtains even more. Though I often photograph architectural details and rich textures and I seek to convey in my own images the above-mentioned “glimmers of irreality,” I wouldn’t really have given the Admiralty curtains a second glance. The fact that Briggs chose to photograph them and then made his photos yield two dozen mysterious and complex images is a project that impresses me with its deceptive simplicity.

In Being and Nothingness Sartre described being-in-itself – the objects we encounter in the external world – as a plenitude of being, full of itself, and manifesting itself in an infinite number of aspects. When we really look at a physical object and are able to see, in Briggs’ words, “what’s hidden in plain sight all around us,” we begin to appreciate the true complexity of the in-itself. Briggs’ photos are beautiful works in their own right, but they also teach us how to stumble into strangeness and to find the “whimsical and profound” in the everyday.

Addiction to the God Drug: an Irreal Notion in China Miéville’s Embassytown

[posted by Alice]

China Miéville is a science fiction writer who frequently describes his own work as “weird fiction.” His 2011 novel Embassytown is a complex and unusual psychological science fiction novel that focuses on linguistics, and though it is not as irreal as his 2009 effort The City and the City, there is an irreal notion at Embassytown’s core. I’ll try not to include too many spoilers in this post, though you can find a full synopsis of the novel here, and there’s a thoughtful and well-written review of the whole book here. But I intend to limit myself to describing the particularly irreal notion that is at the heart of the novel, the idea that extraterrestrial beings become addicted to a type of speech, which is referred to at times as the God drug. To describe it, I will use Shimon Sandbank’s idea that some fictional notions, such as those in Franz Kafka’s work, present us with “so many pointers to an unknown meaning.” But first, though Embassytown is mostly (good) science fiction and not irreal fiction, I need to describe briefly the events that take place in the novel.

In the far future time that is the novel’s setting, humans have travelled out into the galaxy in a diaspora that has taken them to the edge of known space. The novel’s narrator, Avice Benner Cho, is a woman who was born and raised in Embassytown, a human colony on a farflung world called Arieka that is inhabited by an intelligent and unique species. Avice earlier left Arieka to became an Immerser (which means she has the skill to pilot starships as they pass through the Immer, which seems to refer to travel though hyperspace), and after a number of years of living as an Immerser she returned to Arieka with her linguist husband in time to experience the events depicted in the novel.

Embassytown is a place designed to give humans an appropriate environment (such as air to breathe) on an otherwise inhospitable planet, and it is the home of Ambassadors who can speak with the Ariekei in their own language. As a result of the Ambassadors’ efforts, humans can exchange technology and goods with the Ariekei, who are mostly treated respectfully by the colonists and referred to as the Hosts. The Hosts are never completely described, but they are large creatures with chitonous shells who have two wings, a number of legs, and multiple eyes. Their speech is referred to as Language, and Avice tells us that in her wide travels throughout the galaxy Language seems to be unique. It is especially difficult to speak because it requires the expression of two separate sounds or words from separate mouths at the same time. Because the Ariekei can only comprehend these sounds if they are emitted by a conscious being and not if they come from a recording, human Ambassadors are actually a pair of cloned humans who have a special empathic link that allows them to learn to speak two separate but necessary parts of Language simultaneously. In this way they can be understood (though imperfectly) by the Hosts.

Avice has a special relationship to Language in that she was made a simile by the Ariekei when she was a child. The Ariekei are fascinated by the human ability to speak something different from the realities they think and see, and unlike humans they find it nearly impossible to lie. After they come into contact with humans they periodically hold Festivals of Lies at which they make feeble attempts at lying and seem to find the experience oddly stimulating. The Ariekei also create similes to enable them to speak in ways that are not strictly true, and they sometimes recruit humans to undergo various experiences which are then used in a type of figurative speech. Among segments of the community of humans in Embassytown there is a cult of celebrity honoring those who have been made similes — these include “the boy who swims with the fishes” and “the girl who was hurt in the dark and ate what she was given.” The latter is the simile Avice has helped to make possible.

When the Bremen authorities send a new Ambassador, Ez/Ra, who is unusual in that the two humans involved are not clones of each other, the Hosts are so overwhelmingly affected by Ez/Ra’s speech that they become addicted to it. This addiction leads to violence and conflicts that have never before been experienced on Arieka, but it’s not necessary to talk any more about the novel’s plot (which would frankly involve a number of spoilers) in order to say that it is the nature of addiction to Ez/Ra and their way of speaking Language that gives us the irreal element in this novel. This addictive speech is sometimes referred to in the novel as “the God drug.”

When the Hosts hear Ez/Ra speak, they are thrilled and overwhelmed, and after a short time they so desperately need to hear more that they are unable to carry on the normal business of their lives. And so of course the first notion that the idea of Ez/Ra and addictive speech points to is an obvious meaning related to the consequences of addiction in the lives of the addicts. Because Embassytown is a colony this addiction can be seen as part of a manipulative ploy on the part of the colonial administrators to get what they want on Arieka. Despite the frequency of German references and words (for example, Bremen is the name of the administrative center to which the Ambassadors and their staffs must answer; the word immer, which refers to space travel that collapses distances the way wormholes do, is the German word for always), the story implies the kinds of colonial relations that sprung up during the British Empire. (Miéville is British after all, and the colonists in Embassytown do speak Anglo-Ubiq.) The addiction to Ez/Ra and subsequent warfare therefore remind me of the Opium Wars, during which Britain and China fought over the fact that the British were illegally importing and selling opium and wanted to force China to open its markets to foreign goods. Ez/Ra’s speech and the notion of the God drug can be seen as an unethical way for colonizers to manipulate the indigenous inhabitants of an important colony, but many other concepts are implied. I can think of at least five other meanings that Ez/Ra’s speech or the God drug points toward, without actually being fully explained by any of them:

The two voices needed to speak Language and the almost supernatural power of Ez/Ra’s speech bring to mind Julian Jaynes’ book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. In this book Jaynes put forth the notion that ancient peoples, the Greeks among others, experienced a divided consciousness in which one of the “voices” that seemed to speak to them inside their own minds was interpreted as the voice of the gods. (Note that the name Ezra is Biblical in origin, and the Ra half of the name makes reference to the ancient Egyptian god of the sun.)
The two voices needed to speak Language and the addictive nature of Ez/Ra’s speech also remind us that the voice of the writer is speaking inside the reader’s head. Depending on the reader’s opinion of the writer, this can sometimes become nearly addictive. Perhaps Miéville himself has experienced irrational loyalty and a clamoring for more output from his fans (remember that the word fan is a shortened version of fanatic).
The language of the novel itself is compelling and propels us forward because we want to find out what will happen. Such is the nature of storytelling, which is a kind of lie. When the Ariekei learn to lie and use figurative speech, they also become capable of telling stories. Which reminds us in turn that Embassytown itself is a story.
The hints of German language in the novel make us think about the effect that Adolf Hitler’s speech had on the German people — a kind of hypnotic and extremely enthralling influence that is part of the reason why people followed his lead into the unspeakable horrors of World War II.
Language is inevitably spoken by all Ariekei before the events described in the novel, but after Ez/Ra comes some Ariekei mutilate themselves so they cannot hear and cannot be addicted to Ez/Ra’s speech. Yet these mutilated Ariekei are able to communicate with each other, which leads to the realization that Language is not the only language.

The notion of two humans known as Ez/Ra speaking an extraterrestrial language in such a way that addiction and chaos result is truly a weird notion, and it gives Embassytown glimmers of irreality. However, in my opinion, the Ariekei themselves are not actually irreal. They are speakers of a language that can be spoken by and understood by humans. Much more alien are the aliens created by Stanislaw Lem in Fiasco or the Strugatsky brothers in Roadside Picnic, who are so different from and/or advanced beyond humans that they can scarcely be comprehended.

Quirky Narrators and Occasional Irrealism in George Saunders’ Tenth of December

[posted by Alice]

At the Café Irreal we often receive stories which the author considers to be irreal because they feature a strange or unexpected narrative style. Sometimes the narrator of these stories uses unusual language or the narrator may have a psychiatric problem or is delusional because of illness. But the story itself depicts events that can actually be explained by the narrator’s mental or physical state (or unusual manner of speaking). To us these stories, though they might be entertaining and well written, are not irreal at all — we want to see reality itself, not an individual’s consciousness, being undermined in some way.

As I read George Saunders’ most recent short story collection, Tenth of December, I couldn’t help but notice that almost every story in the collection features a first person or third person subjective narrative style. In most cases the narrator also uses odd colloquial language and may also be mentally or physically impaired. Many writers in the United States — from Mark Twain onward — have shown a strong preference for quirky and colloquial narration. Examples would include Alice Walker in The Color Purple and J. D. Salinger in The Catcher in the Rye. Like both Walker and Salinger, Saunders crafts memorable narrators and often makes serious points about the nature of our society, how it is going awry, and how social problems affect the lives of ordinary people. But even when he is writing stories that could clearly be called science fiction, Saunders’ stories are not particularly irreal.

Tenth of December gives us quite a range of quirky narrators, and Saunders uses their narrative quirks to show us, in the space of a short story, what their lives are like and how they relate to others. In “Puppy” we feel a sense of revulsion toward both the woman taking her children to look at a puppy and the woman whose puppy is at the center of the story. We see into these women’s lives, know their thoughts, and are given their rationalizations even as they do ugly things. This is not always pleasant, but despite an odd incident in the puppy owner’s yard, the story is not irreal. In the science-fiction-inspired “Escape from the Spiderhead” we come to see the narrator from a more sympathetic point of view, despite what we know to be true about him. This story takes Stanley Milgram’s experiments to a new level, as managers psyche themselves and others up to do unspeakable things. (Milgram’s 1965 study on obedient behavior saw “teachers” giving electrical shocks to “learners” despite the pain the learners seemed to endure.) But though the setting of this story is near future and the narrator’s language and explanations are constantly altered by the administration of drugs, the story is sadly plausible and again is not irreal.

In my opinion the only story in the collection that has a truly irreal aspect is “The Semplica Girl Diaries.” This is not because of the narrative style, which reminds me of Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole books, nor because of the near future or alternative universe setting in which most things are very much like our own world. It is instead because of the existence of an irreal phenomenon that is never fully explained, in much the same way that Kafka never tells us why Gregor Samsa turns into a very large insect. In this story the narrator is a father trying to keep a daily diary for benefit of future readers (a nice device that lets the reader know why he explains things so completely) and worrying that his family is not able to enjoy a high enough standard of living. He describes his life in a frequently annoying yet likeable way and says, for example, that he doesn’t like rich people because they make poor people feel “dopey and inadequate,” but he also wants what rich people have. We know that he is not well off — his bumper falls off at the beginning of the story, he says that people at work only ever see him wearing a a blue shirt or a yellow shirt, and his credit cards are nearly maxed out. When he comes into a small windfall in the form of a $10,000 “Scratch-Off win,” he consults with his wife and they decide to upgrade their landscaping so their daughter can have a birthday party at home and feel comfortable inviting her better-off friends to her house. The investment works well, the party is a success, but one of the upgrades the family has made — the installation of four SGs — upsets the family’s other daughter, a sensitive girl who worries about the pain and suffering SGs might experience.

We don’t learn very much about these SGs (Semplica Girls), but we are told that they are women from economically and politically challenged societies. They are brought to people’s homes by a landscaping company that also sees to their physical needs while they are engaged in the service they are being paid to perform. This involves dressing in white smocks and being hoisted into the air, attached to each other by “microfilament” that joins them brain-to-brain, so that they float above people’s backyards. And because of interviews done by one of the daughters, we even learn some “fun facts” about the narrator’s SGs, including their names and that they hail from the Philippines, Somalia, Moldava, and Laos. But I think that this odd notion of the SGs, which is at the heart of an otherwise only slightly nonrealistic story, has more depth and resonance than the illustration at the New Yorker site implies when it shows the white skirt hems of four brown-skinned women float-flying above a koi pond. Nor do I think it is accurate to describe them as “third-world women strung up as bourgeois lawn ornaments” as Gregory Cowles did in his February 1, 2013 review of Tenth of December in the New York Times. I think that the SGs are truly an irreal notion, every bit as much as Gregor Samsa waking up to find he’s been turned into a very large insect. The idea that young, mostly dark-skinned and dark-haired women would be hung so thoughtlessly in people’s backyards calls to mind the wide range of suffering inflicted on dark-skinned people, such as lynching and the mistreatment of undocumented workers. The surgeries they must undergo also call to mind the surgeries women endure to participate in the sex trade (breast enhancement, etc.). SGs wear white, float above the ground and are often described as singing, bringing to mind an image of angels; yet, several times in the story we see a tethered dog suffer at the end of its chain so we can also see SGs in terms of the sad life of a yard dog. In many ways the SGs point to an unknown meaning, even as they also more obviously show us the irrational spending that fads can induce and the suffering of deprived and impoverished humans in our world. And finally, as the diary ends abruptly, we are also left feeling that the fate of the SGs will affect the lives of the narrator’s family who are running the race to the bottom themselves, their two daughters perhaps more vulnerable than they know. The irreal plight of the SGs is inexplicable yet surprisingly meaningful.

An Irrealist Perspective on God Help the Child

[posted by Alice]

Toni Morrison’s latest novel, God Help the Child, was published in April of this year. Though Morrison has chosen an uncharacteristically modern setting for the work, God Help the Child treats themes familiar to readers of her other novels. In particular it focuses on the notion that, “What you do to children matters. And they might never forget.” These are the words of Sweetness, mother of Bride, the beautiful young woman at the novel’s core. And though the book is about a mother’s failures in the care of her children, it is also about the failures of our society to provide children and their families the support they need – and the ways that racism worsens those failures.

John Gardner said that in all of the forms of non-realistic literature authors tend to translate “details of psychological reality into physical reality,” as happens in our dreams. And though Toni Morrison creates realistic stories with believable characters as she depicts African-American life in the United States, she sometimes brings one or more nonrealistic elements to bear as the story unfolds.

In God Help the Child a nonrealistic trend develops after Bride’s lover Booker misunderstands something she plans to do and walks out on her, saying “You not the woman…” This half-uttered statement, unclear in its implications, not only sets in motion Bride’s journey to the small town of Whiskey in search of Booker, it also seems to trigger her transformation from an exceptionally beautiful mature woman to a prepubescent child. Booker impugns Bride’s womanhood and leaves her without another word of explanation, after which she begins to lose her most womanly attributes, thereby becoming more like the child who experienced the events Booker fails to understand in the first place. And what Bride hasn’t told him is that, in order to win her mother’s approval, when she was a little girl she testified in court that a teacher had sexually molested other children, something she knew to be false.

Earlier in the novel Bride’s mother Sweetness describes her young daughter as “so black she scared me” and herself as “light-skinned, with good hair.” Bride’s dark skin was taken as a sign of Sweetness’ infidelity by Bride’s biological father, who left the family shortly after she was born. Sweetness also says, “Her color is a cross she will always carry. But it’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not.” Sweetness’ negative view of Bride leads her to be a cold and demanding mother who only gives her daughter affection and approval after Bride testifies in court according to Sweetness’ expectations and sends an innocent woman to jail.

To her mother’s surprise, Bride grows up to become a successful businesswoman (with her own cosmetics line, YOU, GIRL), and she is able to use her striking looks to her advantage. But when the woman she falsely accused is released from prison, Bride tries to make amends and is beaten up for her trouble. When Booker, confused about why she would try to make up with a child molester, reacts in the way that he does, Bride begins to experience physical regression to childhood. Her pubic hair disappears, the piercings in her ears close up, she loses her womanly curves, and Bride’s panic and despair as her physical allure is undermined provides at least some of the energy that helps her to come to terms with her past.

Of all Morrison’s novels, God Help the Child reminds me most of Sula, which takes place in an earlier era, mostly prior to World War II. Sula also deals with the hurtful ways parents fail their children, and it contains a scattering of events that seem to represent psychological realities translated into physical ones. As a result the novel shifts between realistic depictions of people’s lives and irreal events that undermine reality. These less realistic aspects include the scene in which Sula slings a child into the lake and leaves him to drown, as well as the presence of a trio of motherless boys named dewey who, despite their differences in appearance and family origin, all answer to the same name and become indistinguishable from one another. A major way in which Sula differs from God Help the Child, however, is in its treatment of community. In Sula the people who live in the African-American section of Medallion, known as the Bottom, are able to function as a community, albeit a sometimes claustrophobic one, whereas God Help the Child implies that our narcissistic individualized contemporary world tends to undermine all human relationships.

Shortly after God Help the Child was released, Toni Morrison gave a reading at the 92nd St. Y in New York. During a discussion about a turn toward the self in the 21^st century and how it affects personal development, Morrison says, “And one of the ways you get to be a whole person is you stop thinking about your little self. Am I pretty? Am I not pretty? … And start doing something serious for somebody else.” Though some movement toward community takes place in God Help the Child as Bride tries to understand what happened to her and begins to help others — including another abused child named Rain and Booker’s elderly aunt, Queen — the novel uses the stunting of Bride’s developed womanhood to show how hard developing as a whole human can truly be – especially when family and community fail us.

Annotated Michal Ajvaz Bibliography Now Online

[posted by Greg]

We just wanted to draw attention here to an annotated bibliography (of sorts) of the Czech writer Michal Ajvaz that we recently published in our literary supplement, irreal (re)views. Ajvaz has appeared several times — and in various contexts — in our journal, and we felt that such a bibliography was necessary to help show the depth and scope of his writing and thinking as little of it has been translated into English.

A Review of The Conductor and Other Tales by Jean Ferry

[posted by Greg]

We want here to make note of an important book published late last year, The Conductor and Other Tales by Jean Ferry. A copy was kindly sent to us by its publisher, Wakefield Press, upon the request of the work’s distinguished translator, Edward Gauvin (we’ve previously published his translations of The Pavilion and the Lime Tree by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, The Wrinkle Maker by Marcel Béalu and, indeed, one of the stories that appears in this volume, Kafka, or the Secret Society.

The book immediately stands out because of its elegant appearance. It is printed in a format I’m mainly familiar with in Europe – a matte (not glossy) paperback cover with a folded over leaf – that is largely reserved for literary works with a smallish print run. This sense of the literary was reinforced by the abundance of compelling black and white collages by Claude Bellaré. Indeed, seeing a small literary work so distinctively and lovingly put together in an American context served as a reminder of how rare that experience is here, and for reasons that are not entirely clear: the graphic work done on our mass produced trade paperbacks can certainly be of high quality, but the graphics and illustrations are generally limited to the front and back covers, leaving the rest of the book almost indistinguishable from any other book of its type, while the small press literary works also generally fall into the same standard trade paperback format with the disadvantage that they do not have such a large budget for the cover art. As every single story in this volume is illustrated by one of Bellaré’s surrealistic collages, that is not a problem here.

And the stories themselves are quite brilliant. As this is but a short review, I will attempt to describe Ferry’s stories succinctly but imperfectly by stating that they present a reality being pushed by the circumstances described in the story and the narrator’s reflections on those circumstances to the breaking point and then, inevitably, past it. As in the story “Rapa Nui,” in which the narrator finds himself at long last on Easter Island after 30 years of literally dreaming, time and again, that he was finally on Easter Island except that, at the end of the story’s two pages, we learn that “not a line of the above is true, except that for 30 years I’ve wanted to go to Easter Island, where something awaits me…” The same is true in the story of Ferry’s that we published, “Kafka, or the Secret Society,” in regard to the the mysterious, but flexible and expansive (perhaps endlessly expansive) membership parameters of the society mentioned in the title. Indeed, the stories generally share the quality of the island on which the narrator is stranded in “Letter to a Stranger,” whose reality causes him to ask the reader, “Haven’t you, in the dark, ever reached out with your foot for the final step of a staircase, only to find there wasn’t one? Do you remember the utter disarray you felt for a moment? … Well, this land is always like that.”

Indeed, this work reinforces for me the sense that we in the English-speaking world are not sufficiently familiar with the strong, and unique, tradition of the fantastic that exists in the Francophone world. Like many, I’ve been aware of and even read occasional works by such authors as Alfred Jarry and iconic names such as Baudleaire and Rimbaud. But that these are only the most famous names of what is a very deep tradition has been brought home to me from three sources in the course of my work with The Cafe Irreal: the translations that Mr. Gauvin has sent us (see above), the translations that Michael Shreve has sent us (Morphiel the Demiurge by Marcel Schwob, Hell by Remy de Gourmont, and Where Are the Plans? by Jean-Marc Agrati) and, in the course of my own translating and reading of the work of the Czech writer Michal Ajvaz, his mention in an essay (which I read several years ago) that the author who has had the greatest influence on him was Raymond Roussel.

This was a surprise to me as I didn’t have at that time the slightest idea who Raymond Roussel was. I have since corrected this by reading Roussel’s Impressions of Africa. It is true that it is not at all my favorite work from amongst what I have read of this group of authors, but perhaps to correct this I need to read a bit more of Ferry’s work. For it turns out that Ferry wrote no less than three works about Roussel. Indeed, André Breton, who called Roussel the “greatest mesmerizer of our times,” admitted in a letter to Ferry that “without you, I would probably still not see anything in him.”

But here we have entered the realm of the translator’s excellent introduction, and these and other aspects of Ferry, Jarry, Roussel, the Collège de ‘Pataphysique (of which Ferry was a leading member — “pataphysique” is “the science of imaginary solutions”), the Oulipo (a subcommittee of the Collège de ‘Pataphysique) and other such matters are concisely and nicely explicated by Gauvin. Which is yet another reason to purchase this book, and/or recommend that your local library does the same.

Partisan politics and The Irreal Reader: A note regarding the title of our anthology

[by Greg]

The title “The Irreal Reader: Fiction & Essays from The Cafe Irreal” — and to an extent the anthology itself — was inspired by a 1946 anthology I found in a library several years ago. I was drawn to the anthology in question, “The Partisan Reader: Ten Years of Partisan Review, 1934-1944,” because of a particular, and peculiar, connection I had with the Partisan Review that dated back to 2002 and 2003. At that time I was actively translating work by the Czech author Arnošt Lustig, and among the works I’d translated was a lengthy story of some 16,000 words titled “Enzo – A Jewish Story.” It was a compelling piece, in which the story’s narrator, a Czech Jew who’d been sent first to Terezín and then to Auschwitz-Birkenau (like Arnost himself) and an Italian Jew, Enzo, who’d been active in the anti-fascist resistance, compare their war-time experiences while eating an ironically sumptuous meal prepared by Enzo’s wife, Concetta, in the couple’s Rome apartment. But it was also a piece in which the protagonists discussed politics at length, and for this reason it was difficult to place the story in the mainstream American literary press. At the time there was, however, a notable exception to this tendency toward the apolitical in American letters: the Partisan Review. As I’d hoped, they accepted the story with great enthusiasm. But, to Arnošt’s and my chagrin, this exception, in spite of its long and distinguished history, wasn’t long for the world.

The dominant American literary magazine of the 1940s and 1950s, the traditionally left-leaning Partisan Review was now a part of Boston University which, around that time, was headed by a president who was moving (from what I understand) in a neo-conservative direction. This president, John Silbr, took advantage of the death of the PR’s cofounder William Phillips in September of 2002 to move against the publication, and announced that its funding would cease at the end of 2003. Since my translation was scheduled to be published in the next issue, this needn’t have affected Arnošt’s and my contribution. However the editor, Edith Kurzweil, the one who had accepted “Enzo,” decided to terminate the publication after one final issue that was to be dedicated to the memory of Phillips. Her concern was that that there might be an attempt by the neo-conservatives to take over the good name of the PR and use it for their own purposes, so she felt that by ending it then and there this would both be less likely to happen and there would, in any case, be a distinct break between the old publication and any new use of the title that might be attempted.

And so that was that: due to a complicated play of politics, Arnošt and I were wouldn’t be getting our story published in one of America’s most venerable and prestigious publications, not to mention being out of a few thousand dollars. (Instead we got a $100 kill fee from the university.)

But this (I hope) interesting story of literary and political intrigue begs the question as to why, having been drawn to the anthology, we went ahead and modeled The Irreal Reader after this rather ancient anthology of a deceased publication. First off, the title had a certain attraction, as the concept of a “reader” seemed a bit eye catching and unusual and the word itself goes well with “irreal.” Just as important, however, was the overtly intellectual quality of the anthology. Instead of just collecting the stories together, as most literary anthologies culled from publications do, it featured a lengthy introduction by Lional Trilling and a “Retrospect” by the editors, Phillips and Philip Rahv. Together these pieces vigorously described the publication’s goals and helped to situate it historically. Though our preface and afterward are not nearly as ambitious as those which Trilling, Phillips and Rahv undertook, they serve something of the same purpose. In addition, the Partisan anthology also gave us a precedent (there are others, though they too are more from the middle of last century, and are from Europe at that) for mixing fiction and literary theory in a collection such as the The Irreal Reader.

So at least, then, some good came out of my Partisan Review experience beyond that small kill fee. Sad to say, however, “Enzo—A Jewish Story” never did find another home and remains, to this day, unpublished in English.