Storybook ND, by various authors and translators, New Directions, 2022
In autumn, literary publishers New Directions released a new compilation, corralled under a dreamy concept: Storybook ND offers fiction “to be seen and read for an hour or two . . . [Books] to fall into for a spell, in the space of an afternoon, or early evening, or on waking.” Curated by writer and translator Gini Alhadeff, the series introduces six “long stories or short novels” that can be read as parables, travelogues, or auto-fiction. While startlingly diverse in narrative approach, the common thread among these works seems to be the writer’s classic zeal to bridge a gulf—between life and art, flawed reality and transcendent fiction.
With each book ranging anywhere from sixty to ninety-six pages, Storybook ND currently features one original English-language story—Helen DeWitt’s The English Understand Wool—and five translated works: The Woman Who Killed The Fish by Clarice Lispector, translated from the Portuguese by Benjamin Moser; Three Streets by Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani; Early Light by Osamu Dazai, translated from the Japanese by Ralph McCarthy and Donald Keene; Spadework for a Palace by László Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by John Batki; and The Famous Magician by César Aira, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. While DeWitt’s The English Understand Wool is not a translated work, it can be read as a virtuosic reflection on aesthetic representation and translation; specifically, DeWitt illustrates how both fiction and translation, in transforming reality or a foreign context into something intelligible, can also reflect the writer/translator’s inherent bias and their latent wish to control content.
In this story, Marguerite, the story’s seventeen-year-old heroine, has been trained from infancy by seemingly well-off parents to avoid all instances of mauvais ton—or “bad form” in dress and deportment. Her mother, a French woman, financially supports tweed weavers from the Outer Hebrides but has her fabric designed by London tailors—since in her opinion the Scottish make good wool but have “atrocious taste.” With strict adherence to good manners, generous pay to her servants, and steady patronage of artisans, Marguerite’s family ensures that grace and order prevail.
But when a grave misfortune befalls Marguerite, she must rely on both breeding and instinct to repel predatory strangers. To illustrate Marguerite’s predicament and to convey the cultural bias embedded in every literary context and social transaction—as well as the meta challenge of telling a good story without boring the reader—DeWitt cites four different English translations of the same Stendhal’s excerpt from The Red and the Black as examples of both showing and not showing (but telling):
Mais, quoique je veuille vous parler de la province pendant deux cents pages, je n’aurai pas la barbarie de vous faire subir la longueur et les ménagements savants d’un dialogue de province.
In the novel, Stendhal’s omnipresent narrator shows his contempt for provincial life by indicating that he would rather translate its essence than engage in the “barbarous” process of subjecting the reader to its actual drabness. By choosing to censor the tedium and “clever turns” (les ménagements savants) of provincial dialogue, this narrator conveys his subjective view, rather than the objective reality, of that life. Similarly, Marguerite, by mastering her mother’s art of misdirection, can manipulate others to her advantage. Thus, The English Understand Wool refers to both the story’s prop—a bolt of Scottish tweed—and the various forms of creative camouflage, i.e., the act of pulling wool over someone’s eyes, to create an illusion of grace and magic.
In contrast, while César Aira’s blocked writer from The Famous Magician desires magic’s instant gratification to help him skip the “dull, gray time spent laboriously writing” required to create transcendent fiction, he also intuits that the paradox of magic—as a form of systemic control—is anathema to adventure. In this novella, the devil, in the guise of a magician, offers our writer absolute power if he would simply give up reading and writing. Tempted by the promise of omnipotence, our writer nevertheless wonders whether magic would render literature—produced by struggle and desire—pointless. His inquiry, however, is a tautological joke. As a fictional character in Aira’s illusory universe, he is completely under the author’s control. His hypothetical predicament is reminiscent of Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream; whether he attains divine power or remains a sweaty wordsmith, he does not have the agency to negate Aira’s literary construct.
While both DeWitt and Aira equate good fiction with graceful deportment or a well-executed magic trick built on practice, pacing, and control, Laszló Krasznahorkai approaches narrative from the vantage of chaos, depicting his characters as uncouth pilgrims and madmen exiled by space and time. In Spadework for a Palace, his protagonist, herman melvill, is convinced the truth of the universe embodies Melville’s white whale: full of “danger, hazard, stress and destruction.” Roaming New York City’s Lower East Side, melvill evokes Melville’s banal existence after the critical failure of Moby Dick; Malcolm Lowry’s harrowing experience of psychiatric hospitalization—which became the basis for his Lunar Caustic; and the Blakean, seemingly nonfunctional designs of architect Lebbeus Woods. By linking melvill’s Orphic wanderings with those of his predecessors, Krasznahorkai invites us to “innovate” Melville, Lowry, and Woods in the context of their challenging works and tumultuous lives.
Like Krasznahorkai, Osamu Dazai’s creative process explores alienation, chaos, and destruction. His collection consists of three stories: “Early Light,” “One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji” (both translated by Ralph McCarthy), and “Villon’s Wife” (translated by Donald Keene). Born in 1909 to an upper middle class Japanese family, Dazai’s exposure to European literature made him question both his Western influences as well as certain “givens” in Japanese culture—the inescapable symbol of Mt. Fuji or Hokusai’s iconic woodblock prints. His stories capture his characters’ visceral and contemporaneous struggles against inexorable forces: war, the environment, poverty, and tradition. Such fierce resistance often renders his protagonists literally and metaphorically homeless.
“Early Light” and “One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji” are autobiographical. In the first story, Dazai’s creative process suffers from actual displacement, in the destruction of his home by Allied bombing during WWII. In the second instance, Dazai suffers from aesthetic displacement—he can’t find new ways to express himself because the view outside his hotel room happens to be Mt. Fuji, whose beauty—in its omnipresent “vulgarity”—relentlessly threatens to erode his individual vision. Dazai thus acknowledges that an artist’s life and his work are inextricably bound; the challenge is to maintain creative agency in the face of seemingly glacial tradition and social instability. On the other hand, “Villon’s Wife,” told from a female character’s point-of-view, deftly transforms displacement into survival. The narrator is saddled with a sick child and jilted by a feckless husband, but still ingeniously manages to secure rent-free shelter at a restaurant, where she impulsively volunteers as a hostess.
Countering Dazai’s oppressive notion of displacement, Yoko Tawada—a Japanese writer residing in Germany—revels in her outsider status. Merging intricate narrative structure with a destabilizing first-person point of view, Tawada wields her dislocation as a liberating force: “An afternoon stroll [in a foreign city] is never quite so luxurious as when you’re totally unnecessary to your surroundings.” Assuming invisibility equates omnipresence, Tawada investigates the fluid notions of identity, language, and history. Metaphysically meandering through three Berlin streets, Kollwitzstrasse, Majakowskiring, and Puschkin Allee, she highlights the unreliability of both collective and personal memories. Kollwitzstrasse—named after artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945), a socialist champion of workers’ rights—has morphed into a gentrified neighborhood full of expensive gourmet shops and trendy restaurants. Majakowskiring, named for Russian futurist/anarchist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930), was a bastion of East German totalitarianism during the Cold War. And Puschkin Allee, a massive Soviet-era war memorial, perpetuates Russian imperialism. Tawada’s skeptical approach to the official view of history seems to echo Krasznahorkai and Dazai: that monolithic order is false and vulgar, whereas fragmented reality, or chaos, represents true beauty.
Similarly, Clarice Lispector’s The Women Who Killed The Fish deftly shows that an unreliable narrator can nevertheless speak the truth; in this compact anthology of zoological stories, the truth means human compassion is too limited to prevent people from eating or exploiting animals. According to Lispector, animals must either conform to our anthropomorphic lens as purchased pets, or, conversely, as “uninvited natural creatures” too repellent to merit our sympathy. Additionally, a pet’s value in an owner’s eyes is dependent on its usefulness, or its ability to reveal a glimpse of its inner life. As the eponymous story’s narrator says in justifying the fatal neglect of her son’s fish: “People too want to live, but they also want to use life to do something good.”
Like Aira, who implicitly acknowledges that his metaphysical inquiry on life and literature is a fictional construct, Lispector’s view seems to be that any sympathetic narrative about animals is a subjective readjustment of reality; an animal’s self-determination therefore remains a fantastical element in her stories. For instance, in “The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit,” a rabbit named Joãozinho inexplicably escapes his cage like Houdini, and in “Laura’s Intimate Life,” a “dumb” hen finds miraculous ways to avoid slaughter, among which is a warranty of lifetime protection from an extraterrestrial cyclops.
The diversity and cohesiveness of the Storybook ND Series are further accentuated by its elegant covers, featuring artworks chosen by Peter Mendelsund—who defines a successful cover as maintaining “a delicate balance between word and image, author’s vision and designer’s skill, through a process of reverse ekphrasis.” Accordingly, Wayne Thiebaud’s Boston Cremes (1962), with its sensual and ritualistic display of color and form, seems especially fitting for DeWitt’s trenchant parable on cultural bias, social conduct, and creative performance. The tension between form and narrative content as explored by Aira and Lispector also manifests in their respective pairings with David Salle’s Blue Quilt (2007), and Francisco Clemente’s Story (1994). Philip Taafe’s Necromancer (1990), like Tawada’s reimaginings of excavated history, is built upon “investigated remains of lost cultures.” Takuji Hamanaka, whose Sliced Petal (2020) graces Dazai’s cover, maintains a dynamic visual dialogue between tradition and innovation, as if to illuminate Dazai’s ambivalent relationship with Mt. Fuji. Architect Lebbeus Woods’s apocalyptic structure—a hybrid drawing of pen, rocket and tower—fittingly illustrates Krasznahorkai’s book.
The containment of space and time, shaped by the books themselves and the brief hours spent in reading, brings to mind Eve’s quick bite of the apple or a crack in Pandora’s box—dangerous temptations yet with the promise of long-term, transformative effects. On the other hand, the series’ humor, experimental spirit, and eye-catching design serve as the literary equivalent of an invigorating rollercoaster ride.
Thuy Dinh is coeditor of Da Màu and editor-at-large at Asymptote Journal. Her works have appeared in Asymptote, NPR Books, NBCThink, Prairie Schooner, Rain Taxi Review of Books, and Manoa, among others. She tweets @ThuyTBDinh.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: