Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces, by Jenny Erpenbeck

Not a Novel was another New Directions book I got from my dad by an author I'd never heard of. Jenny Erpenbeck grew up in East Berlin and was 22 years old in 1989 when the wall came down. This book is a collection of essays and talks from her writing career over the last two decades, which come together to create a sort of memoir. It's divided into three sections: Life, Literature & Music, and Society, the middle section being the longest. (In addition to being a writer, Erpenbeck studied to be a director of opera and music plays a big role alongside literature in her work and life.) It is, perhaps, an odd way to start reading Erpenbeck, as she references her own work throughout – particularly in two long essays about two of her books – and I was unfamiliar with all of it. However, Not a Novel left me eager to read Erpenbeck's novels. I loved it. 

There are some themes (and even entire passages, as these writings were prepared for various purposes, rather than for inclusion in the book) that come up repeatedly in the book. In particular, the idea of boundaries in time come up again and again in her description of her experience of the end of the GDR. None of us can go back in time, of course, but Erpenbeck watched the entire world she knew growing up disappear in the space of six months when she was a young adult. This would be a defining experience for anyone, but the way that Erpenbeck explains it and the perspective it gives her on things that are going on in the modern world is profound. The last two essays in the book – those comprising the Society section – address the contemporary refugee situation in Europe, and the empathy she brings to that discussion, drawing parallels with her own experience, was truly moving. 

I've read very little German literature and the section on literature was full of references to works by authors I've heard of but never read, and some I'd never heard of at all. I'm wondering, now, if I should go read Thomas Mann and Goethe. Erpenbeck is also interested in fairy tales and in Ovid. Her entire literary experience is one that's almost completely unfamiliar to me, but the way she writes about it made me want to know it. The comparisons she draws between literature and music were also incredible, especially in one of the longer essays in the book called "Speech and Silence." In it, she says that music is made up of time and air. I'm paraphrasing badly, but the idea is that music (and speech) cannot exist without time, and that time includes both the time when there is music – when notes are being produced (or when words are being said), as well as the time when there is silence. The silence is as powerful as the sound. In another essay, about her book The Book of Words, Erpenbeck writes, "That which is kept silent takes up just as much space as that which is spoken of openly—and it claims that space, one way or another." She goes on to explore how keeping something hidden creates different realities for those who are hiding and those who are left unaware. Again, paraphrasing poorly, the difference between these realities is the space taken up by the concealment.

In any case, this book was incredible. I can't wait to read more of Erpenbeck, and I expect I'll come back to this one again and again as I do.

The Emissary, by Yōko Tawada

Continuing my reading for Women in Translation month, I read The Emissary. My father gave me this and another Yōko Tawada book – Memoirs of a Polar Bear – when I visited him in June. I had not heard of her previously, but the two books were published by New Directions which, as I've written before, is enough of a selling point for me (and for my dad, apparently).

This book bears a certain resemblance to The Memory Police, which I read for my Women in Translation book club earlier this year. It's set in a sort of post-apocalyptic indefinite future, a time when the natural world has become contaminated with poisons and children are sickly and weak. Meanwhile, for reasons that are not fully understood, the elderly have just kept on living. The young are so malnourished and ill-developed, that those who are over 70 (and well into their 100s) must take care of them and perform all physical labor. The book is set in a Japan where cities have been abandoned due to toxicity and where the country has completely cut itself off from the outside world (as have most other countries as far as anyone in the book seems to know). In this isolationist future, foreign words are banned – this is where the similarities to The Memory Police were strongest. The book revolves around 108-year-old Yoshiro and his great-grandson Mumei, whom he cares for. Yoshiro – like the narrator of The Memory Police – is a novelist. At one point Mumei observes (to himself without voicing it) how Yoshiro has saved up all these words that are no longer allowed or that represent things that no longer exist and he wonders why. The book was published a few years after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, and one senses that this recent event must have been the backdrop for readers when it was new, but it also broadly implicates climate change and human impacts on the environment for the disastrous future. It felt very timely.

The Body Snatcher, by Patricia Melo; and Poetics of Work, by Noémie Lefebvre

As I mentioned in my last post, the remainder of the month of August, I am only reading books by women in translation. This morning, because I could think of nothing better to do with my time, I created a new bookshelf for Women in Translation on Goodreads. I went through my whole read list (608 books) and only 30 were books by women in translation. That didn't seem very good. How many books by men in translation had I read, I wondered? So I created another bookshelf for all books in translation, which ended up with 187 books on it, meaning women authors only account for about 15% of all the books I've read in translation. Well, of course, then I had to know how women compared to men in my overall reading, so I created a third new shelf for women writers and went through my whole read list again to populate it. This shelf had 211 books, meaning women writers account for about a third of the books I've read (better than I feared tbh!), so I clearly do have a women in translation problem. Unfortunately, these calculations already included the two books I'm going to write about here, but I have another three I'm hoping to get to before the month is up. 

I selected The Body Snatcher to read last Sunday after I finished The Barefoot Woman because I was planning, this past week, to participate in Jami Attenberg's Mini 1000 Words of Summer writing challenge and I suspected this might limit my mid-week reading time. (It did: on top of the 1000, I did morning pages every day. I saved my evenings for proper writing, and with working, preparing meals, and trying to do yoga now and then, it left not a lot of time for daily reading.) The Body Snatcher is a Brazilian crime novel, of which one blurb said, "You won't put it down until the very last page." Somehow I thought that was the kind of book I needed to be reading while I was also trying to write. I'm pretty sure I was wrong. The book is set in Corumbá, in the interior of Brazil – practically in Bolivia. The narrator is a scumbag who's relocated there to get his life together after things fell apart for him in São Paolo. This starts off as one of those stories where the central character makes one bad decision after another and you just know things are going to go from bad to worse. The narrator, as I said, is a scumbag – he deserves all the bad things that come his way, and worse! But he's the one telling you the story and somehow he managed to attract my sympathy. (The best comparison I can think of is Martin Amis's The Information, which I read so long ago I barely remember it, but I loved it and its dirtbag narrator at the time, though I'm not sure I still would today.) As things got darker and darker through the first half of the book, I found myself not wanting to read it because I was sure the bad news would just keep coming. The chapters were very short, but every one seemed to bring a new, worse development. However, the book was divided into two parts, and things took an unexpected turn in part two. Yesterday, I had the afternoon off (summer Fridays!) and I sat down and read the second half straight through. I wouldn't say I loved it, but I think it does benefit from dedicated reading rather than occasional browsing.

Poetics of Work was the last book we selected to read for my Baltimore-based friends' book club before the book club fell apart. So, I had ordered the book thinking I would read it a few months ago, but as our meeting never got scheduled I shelved it. When I was going through my shelves and pulling out all the unread books by women in translation, I decided to add it to my small to-read stack. It's very short – just over 100 pages long – and quick to read, but I don't feel like I absorbed much while reading it. (Maybe "quick to read" is not how it should be read.) The story is narrated by an out-of-work poet who has anxiety about looking for work, but also anxiety about finding it. She is in constant conversation with her absent father, whom she frequently describes as her superego. Her mother is also absent – dead, in fact – but has a more passive role in the book. The narrator writes about the rise in militarism and fascism in the present day, in the wake of terrorist attacks in France. There is some very interesting language play, but not enough story to keep my interest. Reading this made me feel a bit dense. Then again, I have never had much patience for poetry; maybe I shouldn't be surprised. I do wish I had a book club to talk about it with. I might get more out of it in conversation, or I might find out that my lackluster feelings about it weren't just me. 

The Barefoot Woman, by Scholastique Mukasonga

August is Women in Translation Month. I'm a week behind because I got too absorbed in the Broken Earth trilogy to not continue with it after I finished The Fifth Season on August 2. But I'm devoting the rest of August to reading books by women that have been translated into English. I started with The Barefoot Woman, by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated from the French by Jordan Stump. As well as being a book by a woman in translation, this is also the first book I've read from Rwanda so it counts toward my world books project too.

The Barefoot Woman is a beautiful book, a memoir of the author's childhood as a displaced Tutsi in Rwanda of the 1960s, and a tribute to her mother, Stefania, who was killed along with many family members in the genocide of 1994. The book isn't a continuous narrative; rather it's organized into chapters covering different aspects of refugee life. For instance, there's a beautiful chapter on sorghum, how it's grown and harvested, and all the ways it's used. There's a chapter on medicine, traditional and Western. In a chapter on a topic I don't recall, there's a delightful discussion of the introduction of underwear to the refugee community where Mukasonga grew up. 

In one sense, this book goes about describing traditional life in Rwanda, but it does this largely through absence and contrast. The refugees, who have been displaced to a desert region far from their lush, mountainous homeland, try to maintain their way of life without access to the resources they once had, and under constant threat from violent gangs. A cow-herding people, they were stripped of their livestock in the forced relocation and that absence – the missing milk – comes up again and again. Deprived of their traditional family compounds, they must adapt to the rough structures of the refugee camp. 

The surprising thing I found, as I read The Barefoot Woman, was how full of joy it was. The opening and closing address the tragedy that befell Mukasonga's mother – and so many others she knew – in the most wrenching terms. The devastation is there, lying in wait, throughout the book. You know the fates of the refugees, sometimes (heartbreakingly) specifically. And yet the memories – many of them at least – are happy ones. Stefania was clearly a force. Her determination to raise and protect her children and her way of life is incredible. Knowing the territory it covers, I was surprised how many times this book made me laugh. This was a great start to Women in Translation Month. 

The Broken Earth Trilogy, by N.K. Jemisin

I always feel a little out of my depth when I read science fiction. I am very aware (too aware, probably) that there's an entire literary tradition with which I'm only glancingly familiar. It leaves me doubting my ability to understand everything I'm meant to understand. 

It's not that I don't enjoy reading science fiction. Another factor I struggle with is books like this devote time and language world-building, while at the same time having a plot that draws you in. I'm aware that the world-building is necessary, but the detailed descriptions of places – physical spaces, landscapes, environments – sometimes just go right past me (or more accurately I go right past them) as I follow the plot.

The Broken Earth trilogy would probably benefit from a closer, slower reading where I really devoted time to envisioning the places described, but I didn't read it slowly. The first book, The Fifth Season, took me a week to finish; the second book, The Obelisk Gate, four days; and the final book in the trilogy, The Stone Sky, I read in two days. I read the entire series from beginning to end in less than two weeks. I don't know how to make myself slow down. 

I liked these books a lot, but who didn't? I don't feel like I have anything valuable to add to the conversation.