On crafting, drafting, carving, editing and polishing

This article is for people who write and face all the challenges of this profession: drafting a chapter and then going back to it to edit and revise it. This often means to 'kill our darlings', cutting parts of it that seemed to us so well written, such an important and definitive part of the story. Instead, just when everything seems to be ready for publication, there are still steps to take. It still needs polishing. The whole exercise becomes a never-ending and often frustrating process. But from it, we can really learn so much, about writing and about ourselves.

In my article, written towards the end of my MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Hong Kong, I analyse my personal struggles as a writer, but also the famous and complex relationship between the writer Raymond Carver and his editor, Gordon Lish.

As I’m approaching the end of an incredible adventure – the MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Hong Kong – my last efforts are now focussed on a specific task: editing my innumerable drafts. ‘Drafts’—immediately my good friend’s words come to my mind: ‘Every chapter, especially the first one, has to undergo at least 16 drafts.’ I laughed at his preposterous advice, but here I am, with about 20 drafts (scrapped, re-written and edited until the very last one) for Chapter 1.

Now, as we polish our thesis, our thoughts go to all the many workshops we attended, in which our work has been sometimes slashed and cut, at times butchered to the very bone. We students have seen chapters of fifteen-twenty pages being reduced by a half, when in reality we thought that the other half was not that bad, and it was at least partly needed too. Weren’t we told, in the first place, to define characters and setting, to use descriptions to let the reader immerse in our work, not to tell but show? Therefore, settings became luscious; characters rich in attributes or faults; and the showing would go on and on…

I am sure that after the completion of our MFA we will come out as better writers, aware of the golden rules of writing, and with more acquired skills in the construction of plot, characters, settings and dialogues. But we will always feel at times confused, in particular about the content of our pieces. We will endlessly question the ‘substance’ of our work and the need for certain information, wondering if that beautiful description of a place is really necessary, or if the dialogue between those particular two characters has any key function at all.

So, shall we, as Michelangelo did, carve perfectly refined sculptures from blocks of raw marble? Michelangelo also created fascinating but unfinished works though, and yet Giorgio Vasari referred to these incomplete creations saying “Rough as it is, this is a perfect work of art which serves to teach other sculptors how to carve a statue out of marble without making any mistakes, perfecting the figure gradually by removing the stone judiciously and being able to alter what has been done as and when necessary.”

Remove judiciously: this is the hardest task during the final leg of our journey and for our future endeavours as writers too. We should be able to carve the best and most polished work out of the many thousands of words we’ve written, judiciously.

Maxwell Perkins

Recently, I had the occasion to watch the movie ‘Genius’, based on the 1978 National Book Award-winner ‘Max Perkins: Editor of Genius’ by A. Scott Berg and interpreted by Colin Firth and Jude Law.

The protagonist of this movie is Maxwell Perkins, an editor from Scribner in search of new literary talents who signed Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and who here takes on Thomas Wolfe’s work, red-penciling Wolfe’s lengthy, opulent and often rejected first manuscript ‘O Lost’, an autobiographical story. During a long and painful process, since Wolfe didn’t want to give up any of the sentences he had written, the novel gets edited and cut, until it becomes ‘Look Homeward, Angel’: it had to be revised and downsized, and about 90,000 words were trimmed before publication. Wolfe obviously felt that he had lost the gist of his work, which was now no longer his only, but Perkins’ too.

The same happened to Wolfe’s second book, ‘Of Time and The River’, for which Wolfe kept writing pages over pages before giving up and agreeing on Perkin’s requests about the maximum size of this novel.

Despite Perkins worked as a mentor for Wolfe and was the man who discovered him, during this collaboration Wolfe was often in a quandary about his own success: did he owe it to his editor? Due to this growing tension, the two men drifted apart and Wolfe eventually left Scribner.

Back to the classroom and during one of our MFA lessons, we discussed the original and edited version of a short story: ‘Beginners’, by Raymond Carver, edited by Gordon Lish and retitled ‘What we talk about when we talk about love.’ The short story appeared on ‘The New Yorker’ in 2007 with additions, deletions, and insertions of paragraph breaks. It has been absolutely fascinating to read these two versions. The story is a conversation ‘about love’ between two couples (Doctor Mel and Terri, Nick and Laura), over gin and tonic at Mel and Terri’s home. During the gathering, intimate details and past stories pop up and, through them, the reader acquaints the characters and their contrasting perspectives when defining ‘love’.

The difference between the two stories is striking. The original version has been heavily cut and the main character, Mel, has been roughened up. Even his language has become more and more vulgar as he gets drunk. I agree with most of the deletions, since the writer should not ‘lead the reader by the hand’, but when three entire pages, in sequence (and then another two and a half at the end), were stricken-through, I wondered if it was necessary to be so drastic.

I was dubious, at first. But then, as I re-read the story, I came to the conclusion that it was needed, because Mel had to be a different man in that context. In the final draft, he comes out as an assertive, at times cynical guy, who tells stories ‘about real love’ devoid of any distracting romantic details that could make them sound too cheesy (as in the three deleted pages). We also find out Terri’s point of view when she talks about her affection for her violent ex-lover, who threatened to kill her after she left him, and who then committed suicide, because ‘he loved her so much’.

In the end, as we get to know the characters better, with all their problems and idiosyncrasies, further details get again deleted, because it comes quite clear now how ‘talking about love’ has become a disheartening experience too.

This is the link of the draft/final version of the story:

http://public.wsu.edu/~bryanfry/Beginners Edited.pdf

Needless to say, Lish’s editorial relationship with Carver ceased after three books.

After experiencing all this crafting, drafting, carving, editing and polishing, I still believe writers should be definitely guided by all they have read, learnt and listened to, but also by their own ultimate inspiration and by what drives their story, so that it becomes hopefully easier to find a compromise between keeping unnecessarily vast, superfluous writing and apply radical changes or deleting. As we learn from Michelangelo’s technique, the biggest challenge is to use our chisel to perfect our final product with cautious alterations, when needed.

Paola Caronni

Hopscotching Through the Giants of Latin American Literature: Julio Cortázar’s ‘Rayuela’

We’ve been recently ‘travelling’ through some areas of Latin America during our literary journey, thanks to the three book-club sessions held by Ciriaco Offeddu in March. The experience took us first to Argentina with Cortázar(‘Rayuela’/Hopscotch, 1963), then Peru with Vargas Llosa (‘La casa verde’/ The Green House, 1966) and Colombia with Márquez (‘Cien Años de Soledad’/ One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967).

The different Latin American literatures (we should use the plural, as there is not only one) saw a flourishing period in the Sixties: the authors experimented in terms of genres, language and form, also influenced by great writers like Faulkner, Joyce and Woolf. Regarding the themes – despite the economic expansion – injustice, political turmoil, dictatorships, poverty, disillusion towards the ruling class and the subsequent alienation were often and unavoidably part of these writers’ works. Thanks to the richness of these new and powerful literary expressions, Latin-American literature crossed its boundaries and became well-known worldwide.

Our first encounter during this recent book-club journey – as I like to call it, being an exploration into quite unknown territory that left us richer and wiser, as any journey should be – started with probably the most complex novel of the three: ‘Rayuela’ (1963), known in English as ‘Hoptscotch’, and written by the Argentinian author Julio Cortázar.

I have reflected quite a lot upon this book, coming back to it only when I felt fully ready to appreciate what this reading experience had left me.

‘Hopscotch’ is a demanding and technically refined work, written with a great care for language and without an apparent regular structure. It can be read in different ways, either progressively or ‘hopscotching’ through the 56 chapters and the following third section, according to the instructions given by the author who, in any case, lets the reader decide and therefore ‘react’ to it. Cortazar believes, in the words of Morelli (an important character in the novel, a writer and literary critic that can be seen as the author’s alter ego), that the reader could become an ‘accomplice’ and a ‘travel companion, ‘…able to become a co-participant and co-sufferer of the experience through which the novelist is passing, at the same moment and in the same form.’

Regardless of the way one decides to approach the novel, the plot in itself is not complicated and the episodes are ultimately intertwined and connected. But this experimental work breaks any rules and provokes our thought, leaving us often perplexed while facing not only the lack of a set structure, but also the numerous academic quotations and references, the protagonist’s philosophical reflections, and his convoluted reasoning.

The novel revolves around the life experiences of Horacio Olivera, an Argentinian intellectual. We follow him to Paris in the 1950s, where he is an active member of a group of Bohemian intellectuals, ‘The Serpent Club’, and has a love story with La Maga. Once the couple split, he goes back to Buenos Aires, where he meets his old friend Traveler and Talita, Traveler’s wife. With them, he works first at a circus and then at a mental asylum. In this period of his life in Buenos Aires, during some moments of confusion, Horacio mistakes Talita for La Maga, the woman he would like to find again. The relationship between the three becomes tense due to Horacio’s sentimental confusion and mental instability. Horacio, conscious of his failures, threatens to kill himself.

We can read many themes in this novel that in itself can be seen as a great metaphor of life: chaos and order, the social role of art, human dissatisfaction and failure, individual versus society, and ultimately, solitude. In Horacio’s life, intellectual ruminations are more important than real actions: he is nostalgic of something that he cannot define. He would like to see a kind of unifying concept of life, but he knows that it is not possible and he himself is not able to create anything of real value. He also struggles to build relationships, feels isolated and cannot relate with people around him.

‘How we hate each other, without being aware that endearment is the current form of that hatred, and how the reason behind profound hatred is this excentration, the unbridgeable space between me and you, between this and that. All endearment is ontological clawing, yes, an attempt to seize the unseizable…’.

Like in the hopscotch game, Horacio moves from one square to another, alone, in search for the unattainable ‘Centre’.

This novel, in all its complexity, leaves us with some striking memories of its most beautiful passages. The ‘snapshot’ depicting the way in which la Maga finds out that her young child, Rocamadour, has passed away in his sleep has the stillness of a painting from Mannerism. It made me think of Pontormo’s ‘Deposition from the Cross’. The lack of perspective in this work makes the scene look unreal; desperation can be read in the faces of people surrounding Christ’s dead body and yet there is stillness, and the unnatural colours transport us in a dimension that is outside time and space, suspended, exactly like in this chapter. Horacio is the first one to discover the child’s death, and yet he cannot react or communicate with his lover. Instead, in the house that is slowly filling up with the friends of the Serpent Club, distracted in their inconsistent talking and heavy drinking Horacio, in turn, whispers to each of them what has happened. The conversation goes on while everyone, besides La Maga, is aware of the tragedy until – in a quiet dance of melancholy and silent mourning – we reach the climax when La Maga finally discovers the child’s motionless body in the bed. This chapter is so intense to make tragedy, paradoxically, almost look normal.

There are other passages of high lyricism and beautiful descriptions, especially when Horacio analyses the meaning of love. Here we find Cortázar’s romanticism, often enriched with words of sensuous imagery that are yet infused with irony:

‘I do not love you for you or for me or for the two of us together, I do not love you because my blood tells me to love you, I love you because you are not mine, because you are from the other side, from there where you invite me to jump and I cannot make the jump… So sad to  listen to Horacio the cynic who wants a passport-love, a mountain pass-love, a key-love, a revolver-love, a love that will give him the thousand eyes of Argos, ubiquity, the silence out of which music is possible, the root of which a language can be woven… All you would have to do is submerge yourself in a glass of water like a Japanese flower and little by little coloured petals would begin to bloom, the bent forms would puff up, beauty would grow. Infinite giver, I do not know how to take, forgive me. You’re offering me an apple and I’ve left my teeth on  the night-table.’

What also stroke me were the bizarre, unreal situations the protagonist find himself entangled in. Cortázar manages to push them to the extreme, so that the resulting image becomes surreal. There are cameos that are brief but strong presences in Horacio’s life, like the clocharde Emmanuèle, with whom – reaching the bottom of his desperation – he has a brief sexual experience; or Berthe Trépat and her disastrous piano concert after which, moved by a strange sense of human compassion, Horacio offers to take her home having to bear with her manic desperation.

In all these elaborate sketches of Horacio’s life, Cortázar never doubts his reader’s power of imagination, never says more than what it’s needed. Through his writing, he leaves behind signs that help us decode the underlying reality of events. Writing has a healing effect and the reader, together with the writer, uses its charms to interpret its spiritual power, like a shaman.

‘Writing is my mandala and at the same time going through it, inventing purification by purifying one’s self; the task of a poor white shaman in nylon socks.’

Paola Caronni

Is all the hype about Leïla Slimani’s novel ‘Chanson Douce’ (‘Lullaby’) justifiable?

“Le bébé est mort. Il a suffi de quelques seconds. Le médecin a assure qu’il n’avait pas souffert….La petite, elle, etait encore vivante quand les secours son arrivés. Elle s’est battu comme un fauve. On a retrouvé des traces de lutte, des morceaux de peau sous ses ongles mous…Dans l’ambulance qui la trasportait à l’hôpital, elle était agitée, secouée de convulsions…Ses poumons étaient perforés et sat ête avait violemment heurté la commode bleue.”

“The baby is dead. It took only a few seconds. The doctor said he didn’t suffer… The little girl was still alive when the ambulance arrived. She fought like a wild animal. Traces of a fight have been found, pieces of skin under her soft nails . . . On the way to the hospital, she was agitated, her body shaken by convulsions. . . Her lungs had been punctured, her head smashed violently against the blue chest of drawers.” 

This strong and revealing incipit belongs to Leïla Slimani’s novel ‘Chanson Douce’, released not long ago in England with the title ‘Lullaby’, and in America under the less appealing – but for sure more effective in terms of marketing purposes – ‘The Perfect Nanny’. The title of the Italian version is ‘Ninna Nanna’. I read the novel in its original language, French, to have a first-hand experience of Slimani’s essential, neat and sharp prose, which – some critics said – had partly suffered with the English/American renditions of the book.

For this novel, Slimani, 36, a Franco-Maroccan writer and journalist, was awarded the ‘Prix Goncourt 2016’, which in France is given to ‘the best and most imaginative prose work of the year’. Ever since its release, the book has taken France by storm. And it has subsequently received rave reviews from various English and American magazines.

Allow me now a brief digression, before returning to Slimani’s work.

Remember one of the most famous novel openings “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte” (‘Maman died today’) by Albert Camus, ‘L’étranger’ (The Stranger)? I wonder if in Slimani’s “Le bébé est mort”– a statement that immediately places death as something hanging over everything else in the novel –  there was a wish to reconnect with Camus. In ‘The Stranger’, Camus’ main character, Meursault, is an outsider who lives for the moment. And yet, even after his detached acknowledgement of his mother’s death, there is a yearning for her love, a feeling that he was unable to express when she was alive. His mother’s death marks a passage: there will be a time with no more ‘today’. A killing takes place, and death comes back, closing the circle.

In ‘Chanson Douce’ Louise, the killer nanny, is also a solitary and – as it turns out –mentally disturbed character, whose only meaning of existence is her daily job, or namely the selfish possession of love dispensed by the children she is taking care of. It is a love she is afraid to lose, together with her job, as the children grow up. This fear will drive her to commit the most atrocious action. Both writers deal with tragedy (mother’s and children’s death) as something the reader has to reckon with immediately, deeply questioning the meaning of life.

Slimani’s book does not want to be a thriller, but rather a psychological novel that touches inconvenient but universal themes, like the difficulty for women to balance child rearing and career; the subsequent uneasy relationship of dependance between the mother and the child carer; class inequality; the desperation of poverty; repressed rage, and the unpredictable twists of the human mind.

What is told here is the simple ‘banality of evil’, as Slimani called it. This is an ‘unexceptional story’, inspired by a similar murder that took place in the USA in 2012. Even if, from the first lines, we become aware of what has happened, we immediately want to know ‘what’ has driven the nanny to kill the children she has so affectionately taken care of, what horrors lie hidden underneath her confident demeanour. Slimani’s novel is worth reading not only for her beautiful and concise prose, but also for the way in which the author is able, by using a third-person omniscient narrator, to slowly drop hints about the heart of darkness hidden behind Louise’ imperturbable behaviour. Slimani crafts Louise, and all the characters, through showing rather than telling. And we find ourselves glued to the page.

Louise is hired by Paul (a music producer) and Myriam, so that Myriam can resume her work as a lawyer after a few years spent as a full-time mum. Myriam, of north-African heritage, specifically chooses to hire a French woman, and this ‘inverted’ relationship does create tensions and a social divide. Nonetheless, Louise is very respected by her employers and loved by the children, cooks perfectly and cleans and scratches surfaces to the point, even, that her nails break and become bloody. Most importantly, she reaches maximum satisfaction in her job when she sees the others thrive.

Myriam is obviously very tense at the thought of leaving the kids in the hands of a nanny, even if she cannot bear with the routine of a stay-at-home mum anymore. After the family interviews Louise, the narrator tells us that “Elle a le regarde d’un femme qui peut tout entendre et tout pardoner. Son visage est comme une mer paisible, don’t personne ne pourrait soupçonner les abysses” (“She has the look of a woman who can understand everything and forgive anything. Her face is like a peaceful sea, of which no one could suspect the abyss”).

Very soon, we witness how the whole family fully depends on Louise. She is just too good to be true. Louise gains more space in the running of the family routine and even starts to sleep, from time to time, at her employers’ home. This matter is avoided during conversations, never clearly approved, but accepted. Myriam, while observing her children playing joyfully with Louise, has moments of reflections about the price to pay to gain her own personal freedom. She is aware of the fact that the moment we depend on the others, and we lead a life that does not belong to us, we’re no longer free.

More clues are added to the plot and one day, while playing hide and seek with the children, Louise decides not to come out of her hiding place. The children become distressed and desperate while “elle les regarde comme o étudie l’agonie du poisson au peine pêché, les ouïes en sang, le corps secoué de convulsions” (“she watches them as if she’s studying the death throes of a fish she’s just caught, its gills bleeding, its body shaken by spasms”).

As we get to know more about Louise’s personal life and her past, we witness anger, rage and repression, a failed relationship with her own daughter Stephanie, who “pourrait être morte” (“could be dead”), the debts left by her dead husband, the rent to pay, her desire for a life where she can have “les moyens de tout avoir” (“The means for owning anything”), her loneliness and subsequent dependence on Myriam’s family as the most attainable source that gives a meaning to her life. Despite that, she feels hatred, a hatred that absorbs and destroys all. She’s haunted “par l’impression d’avoir trop vu, trop entendu de l’intimité des autres, d’une intimité à laquelle elle n’a jamais eu droit.” (“by the impression of having seen too much, of knowing other people’s intimacy, an intimacy to which she has never been entitled”).

There is an episode that – in all its morbidity – took me back to the strong imagery of Han Kang’s ‘The Vegetarian’ when all the meat, taken out of the freezer by Yeong-Hye, the main character, is scattered on the kitchen floor. One night, Myriam comes back from work. Louise greets her in a rush and dashes out of the house, an uncommon behaviour. Once in the kitchen, Myriam notices a chicken carcass on a chopping board, in the middle of the table. The carcass is shiny, with no trace of meat on it. “Il n’y a plus de viande, plus d’organes, rien de putrescible sur ce squelette, et pourtant, il semble à Myriam que c’est une charogne, un immonde cadaver qui continue de pourrir sous ses yeaux, là, dans sa cuisine.” (“There is no more meat, no more organs, nothing putrescible on this skeleton, and yet, it seems to Myriam that it is a carrion, a filthy cadaver that continues to rot under her eyes, there, in her kitchen”). Myriam had thrown away that chicken the same morning,because it had a bad smell,and it lay at the bottom of the garbage bin. And now the carcass is there, smelling of almond soap, instead. “Louise l’a lavée à grand eau, elle l’a nettoyée et elle l’a posée là comme une vengeance, comme un totem maléfique.” (“Louise washed it with a lot of water, cleaned it up and put it there like a sign of vengeance, like an evil totem”). Mila, Myriam’s daughter, excitedly tells the story to her mum, and laughs: with her brother, she has eaten the cooked chicken with her fingers, drinking lots of Fanta with it – as suggested by Louise – because the meat was too dry.

At this point,  any parent should become absolutely vexed with the nanny, and kick her away. In fact, Myriam and Paul are making plans in this regard, but they always hesitate, never addressing any thorny matters with her. Sometimes it’s easier not to disturb the order of things just for sake of enjoying the privilege that comes with it.

Louise has one last obsession that will further push her to commit the heinous act even if, in my opinion, it is not that convincing as the main cause of the killing. Clearly, what has changed Louise from the perfect nanny to a horrible murderer is a build up of different situations and events.

As Slimani says in an interview with ‘The Newyorker’, “That animal part of us, it’s the most interesting part. It’s everything that has to do with drives, with things we can’t stop ourselves from doing, with all the spaces where we’re unable to reason with ourselves. It has its dark side, but there’s a luminous side, too, which is the fact that we’re just another species of animal.”

Paola Caronni

‘Beauty is a Wound’, by Eka Kurniawan: A Memorable Epic that Tells the Story of a Wounded Country

An incredible amount of fairy-tale elements, grotesque, satire, violence…and beauty – as a sign of disgrace, as a wound that can never be healed – are all part of the rich and intense novel, ‘Beauty is a Wound’, by Eka Kurniawan, a great promise of Indonesian literature. His second novel translated in English, ‘Man Tiger’, has been longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2016.

In ‘Beauty is a Wound’, the references to ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ by Gabriel García Márquez and to the so-called magical realism become already evident in the opening of the book:

“One afternoon on a weekend in March, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years. A shepherd boy, awakened from his nap under a frangipani tree, peed in his shorts and screamed, and his four sheep ran off haphazardly in between stones and wooden grave markers as if a tiger had been thrown into their midst…”

Dewi Ayu, the main protagonist, comes back from the grave after 21 years and, with her, we travel back and forth in time. Dewi Ayu is a determined half-Dutch half-Indonesian woman, destined to become a prostitute and be violated by men, like all her stunning daughters, excluding Beauty. Beauty is Dewi Ayu’s last hideous and ugly daughter, born twelve days before Dewi Ayu’s death, and cursed by her mother while still in the womb so that she would be ugly, because “There’s no curse more terrible than to give birth to a pretty female in a world of men as nasty as dogs in heat.” Despite that, once Dewi Ayu comes back from the dead, she will find out that Beauty has a mysterious lover, even if

“She was a hideous girl with nostrils that looked like and electrical outlet, with skin like jet-black soot. She was a frightening girl who made people feel nauseous and puke all over, faint from terror, piss in their pants, and run away as if possessed, but didn’t make people fall in love.”

Dewi Ayu lives in an imaginary ‘Indonesian Macondo’, Halimunda, and experiences Indonesia’s tormented past of colonialism and conflicts, from the final years of the Dutch occupation, to the Japanese invasion, post-war revolution, Suharto’s dictatorship and his subsequent fall. It is when Indonesia is under Japanese rule that the woman becomes a prostitute. Even before understanding that her amazing beauty is an asset, and that she will have to sell her body, Dewi Ayu appears to be a very pragmatic woman – immediately from the moment she is forced into the whorehouse:

‘Their annoyance only grew when they returned to the house and found their  friend Dewi Ayu sitting in a rocking chair humming softly, still eating her apples. She looked in their direction, and smiled to see their faces holding back rage.

“You look funny,” she said, “like rag dolls.” 

They stood surrounding her, but Dewi Ayu stayed silent, until one of them finally said:

“Don’t you feel like something strange is going on?” she asked.  “Aren’t you worried about anything?”

“Worry comes from ignorance,” said Dewi Ayu.

“You think you know what is going to happen to us?” asked Ola.

“Yes,” she said, “We are going to become prostitutes.”

They all knew it, but only Dewi Ayu was brave enough to say it.’

Dewi Ayu will continue with her profession even after the war, becoming a sort of entrepreneur of herself, deciding to only sleep with one man a night, despite the fact that every fellow in town would gladly queue outside her door.

Notwithstanding the many humoristic parts, the dominating theme is the lust for revenge and the violation of Dewi Ayu and her even more beautiful daughters (all born from a different father) by bloodthirsty and ruthless men. In this novel, women are vividly depicted and they are the strongest force, but they cannot battle the brutality of men – mostly violent thugs imprisoned by sexual desire – not even when wearing an iron underwear. Furthermore, Dewi Ayu’s family, including her grandchildren, is continuously going through all sorts of misfortunes. Dewi Ayu is aware that her dynasty has been targeted by the evil spirit of a local fisherman, as revenge towards her Dutch grandfather for an injustice he committed long time before. And there seems to be no escape:

‘For almost her entire adult life she had been thinking about this, thinking about how to save her daughters and guard their happiness, keep them free from the resentful curse of the evil ghost who would be her companion and her adversary for the rest of her life and beyond.’

Therefore, her coming back to life is to avenge this curse.

The doomed family can be seen as a metaphor of Indonesia, a country despoiled – to begin with – by the greed of Dutch colonialism. Afterwards, political conflicts and bloodshed continue to plague the city of Halimunda over the course of the years and under different rulers and, even after the massacre of communists and leftists, the town  “…Was now filled with corpses sprawled out in the irrigation channels…”

Besides the realistic depictions, supernatural forces and restless spirits animate the book and haunt its protagonists, showing Kurniawan’s predilection for Indonesian pulp fiction and the gothic romance novels. The author also drew his inspiration from the Indonesian puppet theatre, the ‘wayang’ and the serious messages it conveys, albeit in an amusing way. In an interview at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival in 2015, Kurniawan said that “In wayang the theme is always serious. The scale of the stories – the Mahabharata the Ramayana – is always epic. There is a moral message to the work but the puppeteer always tells the story with humour, with joy. This really influenced me, and I tried to adopt this technique in writing my novel. I wanted to tell a story that is dark, that is epic, that raises lots of ethical questions, but tell it in a way that is light, and full of humour.”

Despite these colourful and gory depictions, and the insistence on portraying violence and brutality, the winning forces of the novel are resilience and grit, embodied by the women of the story. The male characters spend their incredible lives planning to plot, kill and foment the revolution in a continuous fight between Good and Evil, exactly like in the Ramayana epic tales. But, deep down, they also chase romantic love, without obtaining it because – despite possessing the women they so much desire – love cannot be easily won or taken for granted.

Kurniawan never loses the thread when inside the labyrinth of his complicated epic, despite all its continuous twists and backstories. He gives us, instead, reading material rich in decadence but also grace and beauty. It’s has been surely a challenge to blend realism, fantastic elements, folklore and violence within an array of well written intertwining episodes and still keep everything in place, still hold on to the strong characters and their development. The reader follows the protagonists’ lives with curiosity, eager to read what else could happen to them after all the impossible has already happened, and aware to be witnessing the making of modern Indonesia.

It is refreshing to witness how, finally, international voice is given to emerging Indonesian authors, and how a writer like Kurniawan managed to blossom after Suharto’s fall. Not knowing Bahasa Indonesia, I’m grateful to Annie Tucker, the novel’s translator, who approached the author after reading the book in the original language during her PhD thesis, confident to have found a treasure to be shared.

I have been enthralled by ‘Beauty is a Wound’, as it opened up a world unknown to me in the same way in which Gabriel García Márquez did with his masterpiece ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’. Both novels have been for me the revelation of a new ‘dimension’ that I could finally approach, enjoy and learn from for its literary and cultural value.

Paola Caronni

‘La vita è rara’. Michel Houellebecq’s poetry collection: suffering, solitude and advices for poets

It was too beautiful a night, in mid-June: cicadas singing love songs in the dark, frogs chanting at unison, trees standing silent and motionless in the dark patch of the nearby forest, and the first summer heat that didn’t relent, not even at 11:00 pm. I sat alone in the living room, with the only company of Tigre, my cat, and Ella Fitzgerald’s ‘I got a kick out of you’. Yes, summer had arrived, and it was no time for sad or depressing readings.

I had just emerged from ‘Runaway’, a collection of short stories by Alice Munro, and despite the author’s amazing skills as a writer of ‘stories within the stories’ and her capability of depicting characters in all their idiosyncrasies, strange connections and reconnections, after I closed the book I felt some kind of anxiety, probably exactly because the stories were compelling and powerful, although their sadness left me with anguish and a sense of hopelessness.

What I felt for Munro’s book made me reflect on the process of writing, in particular short stories. Was it necessary to add tragedy to the plot to have something interesting to tell? Was it only in pain and loss that we could find the inspiration for some truly great stories? Was great poetry especially inspired by human despair too?

With this in mind, in search for confirmation and despite the warm and promising summer night, I reluctantly took out the first book of the new poetry collection by Michel Houellebecq, in Italian and French, ‘La vita è rara’ (‘Life is rare’, as I would translate it – there is no English version of this work yet). It was a gift from a good friend, who highly admired this author and knew well that I did not, at all. It was a provocation, I would say, and I was ready to accept it. Therefore, I was biased – I admit it – and didn’t expect much more from this collection than depressing and sad poems, and hopeless ranting from the author (something his main characters can do so well in his novels). I must admit that I was wrong. Or better, partly wrong.

It is true that this work is a concentration of desperation and hopelessness for the human condition, because ‘the world is a prolonged suffering’ (as the author says in the opening of the first book), and the tone doesn’t get any better even in the four sections of ‘La Rinascita’ (‘Rebirth’) in Part Three, despite the promising title. Nonetheless, we recognize something familiar, something we all know in what Houellebecq writes here in the form of free verse, octosyllable, alexandrine and prose. Even if we’d like to take a more optimistic approach to life – abandonment, loneliness and ineptitude are common feelings and part of the human condition. Therefore, the author’s experience and personal fight acquire a universal tone. His message, albeit blunt, is for everyone: we should stay alive, in this world, without expecting to feel ‘whole’ thanks to the connection with other human beings, because –fundamentally – we are and we will always be alone. And by the way, life is rare and happiness doesn’t exist.

Il lungo filo dell’oblio si svolge e si tesse

Ineluttabilmente. Grida, pianti e lamenti,

Rifiutando di dormire, sento la vita che scivola via

Come un grande battello bianco, tranquillo e irraggiungibile.

The long thread of oblivion unwinds and weaves

Unavoidably. Screams, cries and laments,

Refusing to sleep, I feel life sliding away

Like a big white boat, quiet and unreachable.

The author is, as always, honest and direct. I must admit that, in this work, Houellebecq has the ability to turn into poetry even the most insignificant details. He’s a keen observer of whatever passes under his tired eyes, of every man or woman whom he has the chance to encounter or simply observe from a distance, and of the entire reality that surrounds him. Despite the negative tone, we cannot help but acknowledge that he is able to surprise us with a poetic depiction of what humans go through every day in their often repetitive routine. Rarely, but strikingly, there are glimmers of hope (and love):

Come una pianta di mais sradicata dalla sua terra,

Una vecchia conchiglia dimenticata dal mare,

Accanto alla vita 

Mi volto verso di te che hai osato amarmi

Vieni con me, partiamo, vorrei ritrovare

Le tracce della notte.

Like a corn plant eradicated from its soil,

An old shell forgotten by the sea,

Next to life

I turn towards you who dared to love me

Come with me, let’s leave, I would like to find again

The traces of the night.

Soon, disappointment for himself and for his life comes back. Once again, the night seems to be the only safe haven, a place where dreams are allowed to break into his lonely existence, compared with everyone else’s existence:

Sono come un bambino che non ha più diritto alle lacrime,

Conducimi nel paese dove vivono le brave persone

Conducimi nella notte, circondami di un incantesimo,

Vorrei incontrare esseri diversi.

 

Porto nel mio intimo un’antica speranza

Come quei vecchi neri, principi nei loro paesi,

Che spazzano il metró con indifferenza;

Come me sono soli, come me sorridono.

 

I am like a child who has no right to cry anymore,

Lead me to the country where good people live

Lead me through the night, surround me with a spell,

I would like to meet different beings.

 

Deep down I carry an ancient hope

Like those old black men, princes in their countries,

Who are sweeping the underground with indifference;

Like me they are alone, like me they smile.

Very often, during interviews, Houellebecq has talked about his solitary nature, something that for him is a necessity. This is surely also due to the fact that his parents abandoned him at the age of six and he grew up with his grandmother (whose surname the poet made his own), and always kept a distance with the others. Solitude has been permeating his life and it should be a necessary condition for any poet, who should see poetry as a way to go on with life, but not to fight the unavoidability of decay and death.

The key to all this human suffering is clearly explained in the opening of the poetry collection, named ‘Restare vivi’ (‘Remaining alive’), which I found as the highlight of this work. It is like an essay where Houellebecq gives us some enlightening, albeit sometimes queer, advices on how to write poetry and on the work of a poet. Here below, in brief, are some of the thoughts – at times not devoid of irony – that the author expresses in ‘Restare vivi’:

Each kind of suffering is good and useful and bears its fruits. But suffering cannot become an ‘aim’, because ‘la sofferenza è, e perciò non può diventare uno scopo’ (‘Suffering is, and therefore it cannot become an aim’). Learning to become a poet is to unlearn to live. The poet should develop a sense of grudge towards life. This is necessary for each true artistic creation: it should ultimately go back to suffering as the origin of life. The poet should be able to channel his suffering into a structure though, to prevent to be consumed by it and, as a consequence, stop writing.

The poet should believe in verses, even if these are the expression of unarticulated screams, which are the natural steps to poetry. Writing is not a job, and it should not be considered as such. Writing poems is a duty, not work, and it allows the poet to escape apathy.

Disillusionment will soon come, due to lack of recognition, and it may lead the poet to alcohol abuse. This is fine, as long as there is a remission period, necessary to write. It’s important to avoid the psychiatric hospital, but visits to the psychiatrists could be helpful for taking a break from writing.

The poet is a ‘sacred parasite’, and therefore he should make full use of any social aid or help from richer friends, without feeling guilty. He should still aim at getting published though, even if in some minor publication, so that he can be posthumously recognized.

Emotion is the only thing that makes us perceive things as they are, and transmitting this perception is the objective of poetry. Even if the result is anguish or apathy, there is no other way out. Every passion culminates with the infinite.

The poet has to tell the truth, whatever it means. The closer the poet gets to truth, the lonelier he will be. This can be a cruel process and it might lead to the desire to get back to ignorance. However, it is too late. The poet should continue writing, without feeling scared. Life will still be hard, but the poet has nothing to do with it anymore.

‘Ricordatevene: fondamentalmente, siete già morti. Adesso siete faccia a faccia con l’eternità.’

(‘Remember: fundamentally, you are already dead. Now you are face to face with eternity.’)

Well, this collection was not exactly a joyous start of summer readings, but food for thought – for sure. So, I should be grateful to my friend for the gift. I still hope to be able to write poems (and prose) without resorting to alcohol, seeing the psychiatrist or reaching epic levels of desperation, but should I ever experience these conditions, I might know for sure that they are part of the process.

Paola Caronni

Travelling through the land and pages of Sri Lanka: Michael Ondaatje’s ‘Anil’s Ghost’

There is without any doubt great truth in a sentence, which is very dear to me, from William Somerset Maugham’s ‘The Gentleman in The Parlour’

‘I am often tired of myself and I have a notion that by travel I can add to my personality and so change myself a little. I do not bring back from a journey quite the same self that I took.’

Maugham’s ‘The Gentleman in The Parlour’ is a brilliant non-fictional account of the author’s travels in Indochina, from Rangoon to Haiphong in the 1920s.

Maugham’s words took me back to my very first trip to Asia and to my amazement for the discovery of a land that – to my eyes – appeared as exotic as it could only be in my dreams: Sri Lanka. I still believe that my fascination for this place was also due to the fact that I had never experienced Asia before. But even now, after years of extensive exploration of this part of the world that ultimately became my home, Sri Lanka still holds a special place in my heart. This journey did change myself a little indeed.

The very first impressions of the island, still so lush and untamed thirty years ago, unveiled a palette made of the green tea plantation of the central region, the tea-pickers’ red turbans and yellow tops against the bluest sky. But many more unforgettable sights were awaiting me: the fifth century B.C. frescoes at Sigiriya, depicting celestial apsaras; the ancient city of Polonnaruwa with its stone carvings; the Dambulla cave temple with its majestic Buddha statues and Galle Fort, built by the Portuguese and fortified by the Dutch. In the city of Kandy, I visited the temple of the Sacred Buddha’s Tooth, right when a religious ceremony was taking place, and the Royal Botanical Garden, an extensive park with more than 4,000 species of plants.

Not all my memories of the country are still as vivid though: I have no digital pictures to reawaken my lost reminiscences and the photographs I took during the trip are cluttered in some drawers of my Italian home.

But there is something I still remember very well: the incessant rain on the second week of my journey, when I was supposed to spend part of my time relaxing at the beach, in Bentota. The stubborn cloudy sky would not give me any respite from the rain but I refused to let the weather control my day. I took my beach towel and sat under the thatched umbrella and immersed myself in reading and occasionally in the rough ocean, where I swam under a ticklish drizzle. The wet sand was dark and solid, and some creeper plants were travelling from the nearby forest to the middle of the beach. An elephant made its regular appearance wagging its tail, guided by a mahout, a young man with the same broad smile typical of all the Sri Lankans I had the chance to acquaint during my trip (including a boy who became my pen-friend). I felt like being part of the same dream that accompanied my nights before I left home to reach the island.

Unfortunately, dreams do not last and sometimes we wake up to harsh reality. Not long after my trip, Sri Lanka was at war, a bloody civil conflict that lasted more than 25 years. The Temple of the Sacred Buddha’s Tooth I had stepped in years before was bombed in 1998 by the Tamil separatist. Thankfully, it was then fully restored.

I read Michael Ondaatje ‘Anil’s Ghost’ only recently and I could not find much of the Sri Lanka I had preserved in my mind for over 30 years. This reading was totally another journey.

Michael Ondaatje is known for the Booker Prize-winning novel ‘The English Patient’, which follows four characters brought together at an Italian villa during the Italian North African Campaign of World War II. This book was successfully adapted into a film.

Ondaatje, born in Colombo of Burgher ancestry, does not see this ‘teardrop of India’ as an idyllic place even in his other work ‘Running in The Family’, written in a style that mixes memoir account with prose and poetry. In this work, the return to his native island is an occasion for the author to explore different topics through a recollection of fictionalized memories – in particular related to some eccentric family members – and to fulfil the wish to rediscover his father, a dipsomaniac.

In ‘Anil’s Ghost’, Ondaatje explores completely different themes. Anil Tessera, the main protagonist of the novel, is raised in Sri Lanka but educated in England and USA and works as a forensic anthropologist on different projects around the world. In her first visit to her country in many years, she will have to investigate violations by the Sri Lankan Government against its citizens, during the civil war. Anil works on this task with Sarath, an archaeologist employed by the Government whom she will never completely trust because of his connection with the authorities. Together, they discover different grave sites and focus their work, in particular, on a skeleton that they name ‘Sailor’. Anil’s main task during the development of the novel is to determine the identity of the skeleton and to present it to the Government officials as a crushing evidence of the brutal violence that stands to witness the involvement of the Government in the war. But Anil’s plans go awry.

Ondaatje explores a war that is not only a conflict between Sinhalese and Tamil, as its brutality affects everyone and becomes a ghost hanging over people’s conscience, the scariest ghost in Anil’s life. The author deals with themes like war, identity and religion through symbolic references that make of this work an outstanding novel. War acquires universal meaning: in Sri Lanka, like in any other conflict area, it is a tragedy whose real motivations cannot be deciphered. Everyone becomes guilty, the perpetrators and the powerless witnesses. Identity is Anil’s main struggle: she is not only torn between the East and the West, but still tries to find her own self after deciding, as a teenager, to bear her brother’s name and refuse her own. Finally, not even faith can save the world, but Buddha acknowledges the conflict and stoutly stands as a guidance to man. Ananda, a skilled craftsman, reconstructs the eyes of a Buddha’s damaged statue, in a highly symbolic passage of the book.

This novel does not develop in a linear way and occasionally I felt puzzled, due to the sudden change of time and settings and the appearance of seemingly unrelated stories, flashbacks, allusions and religious references. But all clues ultimately lead to a clearer progression of the story that shows the precise logic behind Ondaatje’s narration.

Ondaatje is also a poet, and this is quite visible in some of his very lyrical descriptions.

In this extract from the closing passage, my favourite one, the craftsman Ananda – after the completion of his work on the Buddha’s statue – oversees the pain and the sorrow that each man carries within himself. The war is still ravaging the country, but hope should never be abandoned.

‘And now with human sight he was seeing all the fibres of natural history around him. He could witness the smallest approach of a bird, every flick of its wings, or a hundred mile storm coming down off the mountain near Gonagola and skirting the plains. He could feel each current of wind, every lattice-like green shadow created by cloud. There was a girl moving in the forest. The rain miles away rolling like blue dust towards him. Grasses being burned, bamboo, the smell of petrol and grenade. The crack of noise as a layer of rock on his arm exfoliated in heat. The face open-eyed in the great rainstorms of May and June. The weather formed in the temperate forests and sea, in the thorn scrub behind him in the southeast, in the deciduous hills, and moving towards the burning savanna near Badulla, and then the coast of mangroves, lagoons and river deltas. The great churning of weather above the earth…He felt the boy’s concerned hand on his. This sweet touch from the world.’

Reality and symbolism find in ‘Anil’s Ghost’ their highest expression and took me on a second, very different and ultimate journey through beautiful and multifaceted Sri Lanka. I can only agree with Maugham: travelling across this island, and Ondaatje’s pages, allowed me to bring back quite a different self.

Paola Caronni

The Vegetarian, by Han Kang: The Anguished Wait for Nature’s Embrace

It

I approached ‘The Vegetarian’ by Han Kang for two main reasons. The first because the author, winner of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, is South Korean and I had interest in reading a contemporary novel from this particular Asian country. The second one, because the cowinner of this prize was Han Kang’s English language translator, a 28-year-old American woman, Deborah Smith, who picked up Korean only seven years ago. It intrigued me how Smith had gone trough a learning process – as she called it with modesty – while translating this work, and how this allowed her to better her skills in the foreign language. Despite not knowing Korean, I found Han Kang’s novel beautifully written and skillfully translated by Smith, as the tone of the prose is conveyed in a very intimate way, and the diction and syntax are sharp.

‘The Vegetarian’ is a book that, in my opinion, stays with the reader for a long while and – using a simile from the vegetable world – acquires more taste with time, like a jar of homemade kimchi left to stand for a few days for fermentation. The fact that ‘The Vegetarian’ has been written by a Korean may make it more specifically related to its country of origin, as in general Korean people are meat-lovers. It is not so, as vegetarianism transcends its implications here to become a profound personal choice that leads to starvation, subversion, but also submission and abuse, as the main character, Yeong-hye, is all the while yearning for rebirth and salvation from her haunting thoughts.

‘The Vegetarian’ shows how Yeong-hye’s personal choices and extreme behaviour are seen and interpreted by the other family members as catastrophic and how the reaction to these triggers a series of events that lead to the destruction of all relationships. This unavoidably also unveils the hypocrisy of the same people who not only should know each other well, but who are supposed to be closer to the woman.

The story is divided into three parts and told from the point of view of Yeong-hye’s insignificant husband (Mr. Cheung), of her obsessive brother-in-law – a failed artist – and of her overburdened older sister, In-hye.

In the first part, the way in which Mr. Cheung considers his wife says all about him.

‘The passive personality of this woman in whom I could detect neither freshness nor charm, or anything especially refined, suited me down to the ground.’

The longer his wife persists to stick to vegetarianism, acting oddly, the more he admits the failure of their relationship ‘I just couldn’t understand her. Only then did I realize: I really didn’t have a clue when it came to this woman.’

On the other hand, Yeong-hye’s routine gets weirder. She admits that she refuses to eat meat due to a dream that she had, but her way of dealing with this new choice leaves the reader aghast: the kitchen floor is covered with frozen meat, scattered allover as she tries to get rid of it; she almost stops eating and sleeping altogether; she peels potatoes with her upper body bare to the waist.

In between her husband’s considerations, which show his inadequacy and inability to even try to take her to see a doctor as she get thinner and weaker, we read what happens in Yeong-hye’s mind: dreams of murder, knives, dripping blood, meat, confusion, darkness, and a newly developed trust in her breasts only:

‘Can only trust my breasts now. I like my breasts, nothing can be killed by them. Hand, foot, tongue, gaze, all weapons from which nothing is safe. But not my breasts. With my round breasts, I’m okay. Still okay. So why do they keep on shrinking? Not even round anymore. Why? Why am I changing like this? Why are my edges all sharpening – what I am going to gouge?’

As Yeong-hye is being forced sweet and sour pork into her mouth during a family dinner, she slashes her wrists and is taken to the hospital.

The second part of the novel is seen from the point of view of her artistic brother-in-law. Despite Yeong-hye’s skeletal look, the man becomes obsessed with her Mongolian mark and asks her if she is willing to be part of one of his artistic projects, as a naked model. Yeong-hye agrees with it and finds herself in his studio, where the man paints flowers and leaves on her body and has the chance to admire her Mongolian mark that ‘…called to mind something ancient, something pre-evolutionary, or else perhaps a mark of photosynthesis, and he realized to his surprise that there was nothing at all sexual about it; it was more vegetal than sexual.’

He decorates her body with ‘…half-opened buds, red and orange, bloomed splendidly on her shoulders and back, and slender stems twined down her side. When he reached the hump of her right buttock he painted an orange flower in full bloom, with a thick, vivid yellow pistil protruding from its centre.’

He then continues to paint flowers in yellow and white, from her collarbone to her breasts. Yeong-hye accepts everything with calm, unperturbed. She loves having the body painted with flowers and refuses to wash off the colours later on.

The story takes a sharp turn and we are then drawn into the third part of the novel, where Yeong-hye’s hardworking and responsible sister, In-hye – the breadwinner of her family – tries to come to terms with Yeong-hye’s physical weakness. At first we feel pity for the sister who, for fraternal duty, is trying her best to save the ailing woman. But we soon understand that the task In-hye forces herself to accomplish becomes a way to explore her own frailty ‘Time was a wave, almost cruel in its relentlessness as it whisked her life downstream, a life which she had to constantly strain to keep from breaking apart.’

As Yeong-hye becomes more and more – in her own way – part of the vegetal world, and dreams that ‘I was standing on my head…leaves were growing from my body, and roots were sprouting from my hands…so I dug down into the earth. On and on…I wanted flowers to bloom from my crotch so I spread my legs; I spread them wide…’, In-hye’s fears reawaken and she realizes how her devotion, her goodness and humanity had most of the time been driven by cowardice. This gives her ‘…The feeling that she had never lived in this world…Her devotion to doing things the right way had been unflagging, all her success had depended on it, and she would have gone on like that indefinitely.’

‘The Vegetarian’ is a powerful novel, in all its cruelty. With remarkable skills, Han Kang manages to transport us from one character to the other, even when the focus of the story is Yeong-hye’s transformation: from Yeong-hye’s lousy and insignificant husband, to her brother-in-law’s obsession; from the protagonist’s cool and algid, determined passivity (and note the oxymoron) to In-hye’s perception of her wasted past life and her struggle with the present one.

Despite much agonizing and alienation, vegetarianism, the vegetal life, the painted flowers and the numerous trees that appear in the novel represent an ideal dimension, in which both Yeong-hye and her sister could feel free and reborn, while at the same time stay rooted to Mother Earth. In In-hye’s vision ‘The innumerable trees she’s seen over the course of all her life, the ondulating forest which blanket the continents like a heartless sea, envelop her exhausted body and lift her up…’

But is it just a vision? We ask ourselves, as we think about Kafka.

Paola Caronni

I recommend this interesting article, appeared on ‘The Guardian’, where the author and her translator ponder upon their writing relationship and daily routine

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/21/my-writing-day-han-kang-deborah-smith