Monthly Archives: June 2018

Staff Picks: Seiobo There Below

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Celia recommends Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai:

It’s difficult to find a quotable sentence from László Krasznahorkai’s Seiobo There Below. Which is a shame, because I would like to open this review not as a review, but simply by throwing you, the reader, into the deep end of this book. To read it is a lot like swimming, actually—you hold your breath. You ask yourself if you can get to the end of the next sentence without coming up for air. And they are long sentences, baroque and difficult and careening, propulsive sentences that you feel against your eyes like pressure deep underwater. Eventually you find a rhythm, like an underwater swimmer.

Or, if you don’t like that metaphor, here is another, from László Krasznahorkai himself: “who could believe it, that it would be possible to come down from there, from the bridge over the creek to the city—completely freely, without breaking—impossible, he would say, the path is so steep, there are so many turns, and the bicycle would accelerate so much, that in seconds the whole thing would be a labyrinth of speed.” Far from ending there, that sentence goes on for several more pages, like the headlong bicycle rushing down the hill, without brakes, about to overturn at every moment, and yet never overturning. A labyrinth of speed!

At first glance, you might call Seiobo There Below a book of short stories, but in truth it’s a novel. What binds the chapters together is not a shared plot or characters, but a tightly cohesive set of concerns about art and its power to cause awe, passion, terror, hope and despair. The chapters move fluidly through space and time—a Noh actor momentarily embodies the goddess of beauty, a destitute immigrant in Spain finds himself confronted by a pair of too-real angels in a medieval painting, a tourist in Greece tries to visit the Acropolis, a Renaissance artist suffers from uncontrollable rages. Each chapter visits and re-visions the possibility of salvation and destruction through beauty. The unruliness of the text itself, the way it demands your full attention, making no concessions to ease of reading, makes it at once immersive and unapproachable, a book that you have to read with your entire body—like swimming, like riding a bicycle—as much as your eyes. In the second chapter, there is an untranslated crossword in Italian, whose clue for number 54 across includes the name of the ancient queen whom the following chapter is about. 

When I gave the book to a friend, she got to this chapter and then texted me and said, “Did I mistakenly tell you that I wanted to read 500 pages by a Hungarian madman?” Then she read the rest of it, found the translator, and interviewed her for the Paris Review. It’s a novel that works that kind of alchemy—disbelief, then fascination. One thinks, at first, that it is a merciless book, but then there are moments of close attention that become a kind of compassion. Take, for instance, a Buddhist monk watching an ant cross a temple step: “lifting up its little ball of head… it stops, turns around, and just as sprightly as it can, goes again backward in the crack, and all the while the early spring sun shines on it, at times a draft of the wind strikes it, you can see the ant struggling not to be carried off by the wind, little ant, says the abbot, shaking his head, little ant in the deep crack of the step, forever.”

Or take this sentence: “Because not to know something is a complicated process, the story of which takes place beneath the shadow of the truth.”

Staff Picks: Before Lyricism

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Stephanie recommends Before Lyricism by Eleni Vakalo:

Before Lyricism by Eleni Vakalo—via translator Karen Emmerich and publisher Ugly Duckling Presse—is perhaps my favorite poetry book published in English last year, despite the book’s explicit discussion of poetry itself, which I confess is something I tend to loathe (and of course also something I hypocritically do myself as a poet). I mention this (and mention it early) only to encourage readers who might be quickly turned off by Poetry Talk in Poems to stick with Before Lyricism because the book is a beautiful and strange trek through entrancing turns of phrase and image.

Turns of phrase as in lyrical expressions, yes. Also turns of phrase as in a series of words folding in on itself before expanding into additional meanings. And also turns of phrase as in a dance, the phrase a unit composed of bodily gestures, the dancer moving, turning. The poems in this book first and foremost are “about” no first and foremost, the text being concerned with the sort of ambiguity generated by turns of phrase.

While Vakalo is fond of introductory textual notes like “Poetic Fiction (in the style of an expressive ballet)” and “From the diary of the poem,” Before Lyricism embraces so many readings of the text, often line by line, that a reader uninterested in the Poetry Talk can quite easily just ignore it. The pleasure I first took (and ultimately return to) with this book is the pleasure I draw from its images and sounds. I see the word “poem” in the text and kind of skip it; I’d rather think of a bird as a bird than as a poem, you know? So if you feel similarly, it’s important to me that you know this gorgeous book is still for you.

The poems in Before Lyricism—the first Vakalo book in English translation, courtesy a decade of dedication from Emmerich, recently awarded the Best Translated Book Award of 2018 for the work—are interested in composition (of art, of a body, of meaning, of image, of ourselves) as expressed through language/image/movement. Vakalo, a Greek art critic and art historian who lived from 1921 to 2001, writes in wild lines—wild in the sense that they seem to express freedom of movement, with no poem in the book adhering to a single visual form throughout its pages.

Or as Emmerich puts it in her translator’s note: “the six book-poems I present here are what Andreas Karandonis described as ‘experiment-objects,’ which treat the book as a tactile object with features to be explored as elements of poetic composition. Her pages and spreads often display sprawling yet deliberate assortments of prose, free verse, and even rhymed and metered lines, a mixture of styles and registers that can be both heard and seen.”

(Or as Vakalo herself writes in one of the poems: “hugging the wall touching the objects one by one adjusting their positions I come to know them.”)

Vakalo saw the six book-length poems collected here as parts of a larger whole. In addition to an interest in composition, each poem (“The Forest,” “Plant Upbringing,” “Diary of Age,” “Description of the Body,” “The Meaning of the Blind,” and “Our Way of Being in Danger”) interrogates pleasure and fear, which the speaker(s) might say are what exists before lyricism, before sense, before the sensory, before song.

And of course after, too.

“How we exist is governed by how we take pleasure,” Vakalo writes. Take pleasure as in how do we receive it? Take pleasure as in from what/where do we remove it? To where do we carry it? How do our bodies transport it? What changes to it or the landscape it came from or the body that receives it then occur? Anyone with an interest in not answering those questions will take pleasure in Before Lyricism, as I do each time I reread it.

Staff Picks: Magic for Beginners

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Mtn recommends Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link:

So, these stories are weird. But none of the people in them think they’re weird. A witch dies and comes back in the form of a cat to help guide her son into claiming her vengeance. An aimless youth lives and works at the roadside convenience store serving strange drifters and zombies that wander in late. A medium reflects on the many differences between ghosts and people as she assists a living man through the process of getting a divorce from his dead wife, who is still there with him. Nothing is out of the ordinary here, in these worlds, for these characters. To them, this is just normal. Just work. Just life.

This is a book for fans of works that use the surreal and absurd to explore the blessings and hardships of the mundane everyday, which I most definitely am. Link is driving back and forth down the expressway of what it is to be human. The pride of a first love and the fear of losing it. The monotony of workday after endless workday, broken only by sharp little jabs of uncertain future. Holding a family together through all of its flaws. The premise of each story is completely ridiculous (in the best way possible), yet you the reader feel right at home. Life is, after all, quite ridiculous.

And there’s a tension to it. A constant flutter of static electricity. At any moment, you feel as if something might change. That anything is possible. A “no-rules” sensation. It’s like being on vacation somewhere you’ve never been before with no plan and no tour guide. But with zombies and stuff. It’s an energizing feeling that keeps you eagerly turning each page. You’re drawn into these characters and all of their uncertainty, instilled with a fitful hope that everything will be ok, and a gentle trepidation that it very well might not be. And then you look up and realize that you feel that same sensation every day, waking up in the morning and laying in bed, silent and free to do nothing but wonder and worry, or staring out of a window during an idle moment at work, or waiting to meet someone who might not show up.

Although, if all my daily worries also included haunted houses and rabbit armies and meeting the Devil at a party, my life would be much more exciting. But Magic For Beginners at least lets you slip into that world for a time, with the realization that life in this world is strange and surreal enough as it is, magic or no magic, but (unsurprisingly) magic is at least much more interesting.