Emma Jacobs (assistant editor): I’ve been reading really haphazardly this month, dipping in and out of essays, short stories, and poetry. I tend to think of this as a bad habit, a symptom of my cyber-skewed hyper-active millennial-generation attention span, yadayadayada, but actually there’s something so rich about this chaotic way of reading and the unexpected connections that it sparks between very different books. Looking over some of my favourite reads from November, I notice that each one meditates in some way on the lightness of the ephemeral moment.
This is particularly prominent in Photographs Not Taken, a collection of essays by photographers reflecting on the most memorable images they never captured. These scenes went unphotographed for a variety of reasons, but most often it was because an elusive and overpowering feeling made the photographer hesitate just a second too long. What’s left is a collage of imaginary negatives, moments that are tangible only in their absence. But rather than reading like a catalogue of regrets, the book chips away at the mythology that surrounds the act of “taking” a photo in the first place. As each photographer considers the images that passed them by, they tackle questions of where the documentarian impulse comes from and how the existence of a photo changes our memory of the event itself. The quality of the writing is a little up and down, but there are many pockets of prose that crystallise the moment of perception in surprising ways.
Another of my November reads also zooms in on the minutia of instantaneous perceptions: Fullblood Arabian by the exiled Syrian writer Osama Alomar. This is a pamphlet of strange, darkly comic, super-short fiction that the author himself translated with C. J. Collins (whilst they sat side-by-side in Alomar’s Chicago taxicab between shifts, apparently—too vivid of a backstory not to share!). For me the stories’ distinctive flavour comes from Alomar’s masterful shifts of character perspective within extremely tight parameters. In one story, for example, a man picks up a seashell and puts it to his ear, marvelling at the beauty of the ocean-sounds within. “As for the seashell,” Alomar interjects, “she was writhing in pain, listening against her will to the torments and the struggles of the human soul.” The book is full of these moments which trip you up, swing bluntly from one psyche to another, rapidly decelerate time and play with scale, all of it exposing the delicate balance of our presumptions and allegiances; the small dictatorships that we foster second by second.
Careening back a few thousand years, I’ve also been reading the Metamorphoses in Ted Hughes’ collection Tales from Ovid. Whether you’d call this a translation, an adaptation, or just a plain rip-off depends on how you answer that age-old translation conundrum: is the primary aim to render the original’s literal sense or atmospheric sense? Hughes flagrantly disregards any strict adherence to Ovid’s text (just as Ovid did with the myths that he based his work on) and carves a crisp-edged, bracingly modern version of the tales. All I know is I’m completely entranced by Hughes’ poetry; he moulds words into sharp yet voluptuous phrases that you can roll and roll around your tongue, language that’s all “pinpoint-pupilled eyes” and “skyfuls of fist.” And the moments of metamorphosis themselves rush like liquid through your fingers, charged with gravity but strangely weightless—instants that are over before they’ve begun.
Maybe it’s right that I’ve been reading these books only in snapshot form myself, dropping at random into the most transient of moments and watching these diverse writers’ words collide together and transform each other.
Erin Gilbert (assistant editor): One of Sadie Stein’s recent blog posts for the Paris Review quotes a letter Emily Dickinson wrote in 1864 that names November “the Norway of the year.” After crossing the calendrical border into cold November, I find myself turning inward, and I’m delighted to discover a similar process in what I’m reading. Benito Pérez Galdós’s Tristana, Sait Faik Abasıyanık’s Selected Stories, and Bohumil Hrabal’s Harlequin’s Millions all contain characters who withdraw from conventional society.
Chronologically and thematically, Tristana falls neatly between Dickens’s Bleak House, and Nabokov’s Lolita. When her mother dies Tristana Reluz goes to live with her parents’ friend and benefactor, Don Lope Garrido. He seduces the young woman, and although life with him is “boring and repugnant,” she has no husband, parents, or practical skills, and therefore no other options. Nonetheless, Tristana finds a boyfriend and tries to figure out how to support herself until a sudden sickness overtakes her. Like Dickens’s Esther Summerson, Tristana’s appearance is dramatically altered by illness. Many 19th century novels end with a woman’s fall, others end with her tragic illness, but Tristana perseveres. And if Tristana is no mere victim, Don Lope is no mere villain either; Galdós has conjured up a blood-and-marrow humanist where cardboard lechers usually suffice. Neither Tristana nor Don Lope is willing to submit to a conventional life, and Galdós doesn’t punish them for that. Instead he permits them each a measure of peace more satisfying than happier endings.
Sometimes called “the Turkish Chekhov” Abasıyanık’s stories are expansively compassionate and exquisitely compressed. “The Silk Handkerchief,” which begins with workers hurrying out of a moonlit silk factory on their way to see an acrobat and ends with a boy-thief’s downfall, is the closest to a perfect short story I’ve come across in years. With a watchmaker’s ear for calibration, Abasıyanık attends to the quiet mechanics of self-betrayal, the tiny gestures that bely internal struggle. In “On Spoon Island” a group of boys rows to a nearby island to play in the ruins of a Portuguese pirate’s fortress. One night on the island, Odisya, the heroic Greek son of a humble gardener, lies down next to the narrator underneath a pomegranate tree and longingly confides, “If I knew how to read I’d keep reading and never sleep.” But Odisya does fall asleep, and the narrator kisses him tenderly “with a desire that is as pure as it is secret.” Such fleeting sweetness, too ephemeral to savor, made me long to “keep reading and never sleep” too.
Harlequin’s Millions, by Bohumil Hrabal, contains such a surreal atmosphere and such long and waltz-like sentences, that the boundary between reading and dreaming became blurred. Outside of town, a dark road lined with aging chestnut trees leads to a retirement home in a derelict castle. The narrator, an elderly woman, approaches by this route, noting the iron gate’s angel wing pattern and a stopped clock on the castle’s crumbling façade. As her husband slips easily into the torpor of their new life, the narrator wanders the grounds, discovering abandoned statuary and befriending a trio of old men who regale each other with dramatic monologues about the past. The title alludes to a real ballet that I easily found, so I listened to the soporific music broadcast throughout the castle and surrounding forest while I read, further blurring the line between my outward reality and what I was reading. Everyone is so accustomed to the music that no one notices until a power outage stops it “the way everything stops as if by magic in the tale of Sleeping Beauty, all the pensioners glance up, they look at the speakers”—like readers whose reading is interrupted. In this analogy, continuous music corresponds to waking reality, as does reading, while real life without music, outside of books, is the enchanted sleep.
And then the music resumes.
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Above, a still from Luis Buñuel’s adaptation of Benito Pérez Galdós’s Tristana.
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