Reality makes little sense to the protagonist of Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, but not knowing is an important factor in her life. Macabéa has instinctual desires. Like a child knows how to be hungry, she knows many things without knowing. Macabéa feels more at ease in the unreality of everyday life, living in “slo-o-ow motion […] obscurity was her earth, obscurity was the inner core of nature.” She is only certain of one thing: she’s never had much to offer.

A reader of Lispector’s final novel might do well to adopt Macabéa’s perspective, or lack thereof, for this text investigates the knowledge of not knowing and the rich poverty of the inner void with stratagems of obfuscation, leaps of language, and suspensions of syntax and form that are perhaps best received by the gut. Lispector reminds us in the author’s dedication: “One cannot prove the existence of what is most real […]”—a sentiment echoed a few pages later by the narrator: “The truth is always an inexplicable and interior contact. My truest life is unrecognizable, extremely interior and there is not a single word that defines it.”

After the dedication and a title page containing 14 possible titles (15 if you count the author’s signature), the text proper begins through a proxy, Rodrigo S.M. His mandate is to relate everything about a nobody, “so as to confront her with her own existence […] for one has a right to shout.” Rodrigo starts in mystic fits and stops, with an existential toothache, and the life of the typist Macabéa is always about to unfurl. So impoverished, she blows her nose on the hem of her undies and scarcely has a body to sell, Macabéa looks into the mirror, but her reflection is Rodrigo staring back at Rodrigo, who needs a shave.

As Hélène Cixous wrote in Reading with Clarice Lispector, “The text The Hour of the Star does not begin.” Instead, Rodrigo’s reluctant beginning is an opening and re-opening of an act that fully admits it’s an act—complete with an incessant drumroll to heighten expectation. It is also the setting and re-setting of a stage for a text in which identities conflate and the inside and outside of narrative blur. Lispector-as-Rodrigo writes: “It’s my obsession to become the other man. In this case, the other woman. Pale and feeling weak, I tremble just like her.”

Here is a text of a woman writing as a man who is confronting himself through a poor ugly girl. The narrative is explicit: Macabéa is a typist who cannot type and who lives life as it comes. She goes to work, walks in the rain, tells a lie, meets a boy, is happy because she is unaware of her misery, gets dumped, visits a doctor, consults a fortune teller, discovers she has a destiny, gets hit by a Mercedes, and yes, Macabéa dies. All the while, Rodrigo suffers to find the words, to find a beginning, a point of contact. He too is explicit, if maudlin: “Through her [Macabéa] I utter my cry of horror to existence. To this existence I love so deeply.” And through Rodrigo, Lispector utters her cry as well. “Amen for all of us,” she writes.

The text proceeds as an aphorismic weave of Rodrigo’s (often contradictory and ever-transforming) revelations and Macabéa’s intuitions. Lispector announces her authorial presence, then points to her disappearance, reminding us of her presence throughout. The narrator posits this story as the “unremarkable adventures of a girl living in a hostile city”—but her story is riddled with parenthesis, interruptions, and sentences left hanging despite terminal punctuation. A haze of human emotion envelopes the whole mass—another trick of obfuscation—a play on the tradition of the Cordel: melodramatic tales-in-verse recited by street vendors in northeastern Brazil to entice passersby (“I gave you fair warning that this is what is known as popular literature,” Rodrigo writes). However, Lispector’s singsong is purposely discordant, her sentimental ballad self-consciously contorts.

Cordel literature is also a tricky reference in this text for reasons beyond Lispector’s hand. The above paragraphs quote the first English translation of The Hour of The Star by Giovanni Pontiero (Carcarnet Press, 1986, released in the US by New Directions, 1992). In this edition, Pontiero translates one of the novel’s 15 original titles, História Lacrimogenica de Cordel, as A Tearful Tale. A new translation of the novel by Benjamin Moser (New Directions, 2011) presents a copy of the original, un-translated title page, but only after proffering A Cheap Tearjerker instead.

~

“How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite,” wrote the poet Jack Gilbert in “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart.” Lispector’s prose in The Hour of the Star is saturated with this almost of language and constantly points to its not quite. For the English-speaking reader, the prose is also bound by the almost and not quite of translation. Consider one of Rodrigo’s revelations toward the end of the book:

“Macabéa is dead. The bells were ringing without any sound. I now understand this story. She is the imminence in those bells, pealing so softly.”

This is Giovanni Pontiero’s translation. The original text (A hora da estrela, 1977) reads:

“Morta, os sinos badalavam mas sem que seus bronzes lhes dessem som. Agora entendo esta história. Ela é a iminência que há nos sinos que quase-quase badalam.”

Even to a reader ignorant of Portuguese, the disparity of punctuation and proper nouns between these two renditions appears questionable. This brings us to Benjamin Moser’s new translation in which the paradox of the bells and their quase-quase, Moser’s “almost-almost”, gives the English reader a different taste.

“With her dead, the bells were ringing but without their bronzes giving them sound. Now I understand this story. It is the imminence in those bells that almost-almost ring.”

In Moser’s afterword to The Hour of the Star, he calls attention to the foreignness of Lispector’s Portuguese in Portuguese: her bizarre diction, odd syntax, and unconventional grammar, “that veers toward abstraction without ever quite reaching it.” He claims translators tend to smooth and flatten her prose, often correcting the punctuation as they see fit, and one of Moser’s tasks in this new translation is to restore the jagged bits. When we place Moser’s translation side-by-side with Pontiero’s, Moser’s reads as more raw, a bit jumpy or crass, with a syntax that starts to unhinge. Pontiero’s in comparison is gracious and almost-almost manneristic, his syntax leaning toward logic and proper sentences.

For example, consider Pontiero’s insertion of an ellipsis:

Pontiero’s tendency to translate toward convention and meaning is even more visible here:

And here, Pontiero drops the verbal force:

Even in this minimal sampling one begins to see how Moser amends the semantics and intentionality of sentence where Pontiero fails—and yet (as is particularly visible in the case of the mushroom, even for the non-Portuguese reader who can at least notice the comparative brevity of the original passage) Moser does not reach the distinctive rhythm(s) of Lispector’s sometimes errant, sometimes terse, sometimes popular Portuguese.

~

If in The Hour of the Star Lispector has achieved what Deleuze claimed a great writer does—that is, cause language to take flight by carving out a nonpreexistent foreign language within her native or operative tongue—how then does the English reader experience Lispector’s text? When reading in translation, is it better to be like Macabéa, the girl who never considered the existence of a foreign language at all? Or is it useful for an English reader to somehow position herself between variant translations and grope with instinct, not intellect, toward the untranslatable essence of the Portuguese original (located where)? Is a reader of translation simply condemned to an always-approximate and inessential experience at best?

“What, in fact, does a piece of fine writing ‘say’? What does it communicate? Very little to the person who understands it,” wrote Walter Benjamin in “The Task of the Translator.” Perhaps this can point us toward a more optimistic route. Our Macabéa did not have the means to express herself, but “what was there to confide? The atmosphere? One doesn’t confide everything, for everything is a hollow void.”

The post Story on a String: The TFT Review of ‘The Hour of the Star’ by Clarice Lispector appeared first on The Faster Times.

When author, blogger, and therapist Claire Bidwell Smith was eighteen years old, her mother died of colon cancer. At twenty-five, Smith lost her father to prostate cancer that spread through his body: “He was forced to choose radiation over the more successful prostatectomy since my mother was the one who needed immediate surgery.” The book that results from this early experience with two fatally ill parents and coping with loss, is, perhaps surprisingly, neither a heavy nor depressing read. Smith handles the difficult material with detailed, concrete prose that reads as having been distilled to its essence.

Joan Didion, another notable author of grief memoir, has said that “the details give us the scene.” Smith’s eye for precisely the right detail to convey a character, experience, or emotion resonates whether she is describing helping her mother with a bedpan or traveling to a far-off locale while essentially searching for her parents after their deaths: “Malapascua,” she writes of a trip to a remote island in the Philippines, “looks bigger than I imagined…I hold my sandals and wade through the warm waves…my backpack hooked over one shoulder and my flip-flops in my hand. The sand is warm between my toes and the only sound comes from the waves breaking on the shore. I’ve done it, I think. I’ve unmoored myself.”

The sensation of unmooring permeates Smith’s memoir. It encompasses growing from young adulthood to actual-adulthood without parents. It articulates the feeling of having lost them both in what, in the course of a lifetime, could be called rapid succession.

Smith’s choice of present tense and non-chronological order adds to this effect. The reader does not become confused, as the thematic organization is well-handled, but we are deftly able to sense the lost young woman behind the carefully controlled prose of the wiser writer who is weaving the narrative. As Smith undertakes her search for meaning after her parents’ deaths—her search for her own place in the world and where she should go from grief—she travels to Europe, California, and New York, poignantly encountering, on occasion, moments when she opens up to a stranger, and vice-versa. Unmooring leads to unlocking. Though the two sensations seem on the surface to stand in opposition, their unity results in moments of centeredness: when people come to new understandings. When, after loss, they begin to heal.

This thread of unlocking and being unlocked begins early in the book, when Smith, then a college student about to lose her mother, meets with a French-Canadian writing tutor named Michel about a paper she can’t seem to write. When she starts to cry during the session, she explains that her mother is dying and Michel responds that his father committed suicide a year before, also breaking down. He says it is the first time he cried over his loss. “I am silent,” Smith writes of that moment, “marveling at the power we have to unlock a person.”

When Smith is eighteen and working in a café in Atlanta, her coworkers gossip about the bartender, Colin’s, sister’s murder. Smith is immediately drawn to Colin. “So what is it that we have in common?” he asks her. They are united in their common grief and loss, and begin a new chapter in their lives together, in New York and L.A., before the relationship crashes and burns, what drew them together ultimately driving them apart. Yet both are changed.

The most resonant moment of unlocking happens with a Swiss stranger, Patric, on a train in Europe, after somebody jumped in front of the train Smith was riding on, committing suicide, a subtextual reminder of Michel and of her own chronic experience with death and loss. “It’s a simple thing, meeting a stranger and opening yourself up…” It is one of those simple things, though, that helps Smith find connection in her suddenly parent-less world in which she is, she writes, “nobody’s most important person.”

The instance where one of these unlocking connections fails to happen is an interesting and surprising one: after reading A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and coming to revere its author as a kindred spirit, Smith meets Dave Eggers while she is painting a room in the future home of 826LA alongside him. She finds herself awkwardly confessing that her parents died, too. Silence hangs in the air between them and she realizes he must hear these kinds of stories from strangers all the time. “That must have been hard for you,” he finally says. Then he is called from the room to attend to another matter. Only later, while Smith is surrounded by the kids she tutors at 826LA, working in her sunny office as the volunteer coordinator, does it strike her that “he did have an answer for me after all:” transforming grieving to giving.

The ultimate way that Smith, who is now a grief counselor in Los Angeles and a mother herself, accomplishes this, is through the writing of this memoir, a book that the reader walks away from contemplating his or her personal experiences with loss, the quality perhaps most indicative of the work’s success. With The Rules of Inheritance, Smith demonstrates her own power to unlock all of us, for grief and loss are inevitable in the course of a life. By sharing these stories, putting them to words, and remembering, we can not only move forward but also honor the lives of those we have lost.

The post The Rules of Inheritance by Claire Bidwell Smith – Review appeared first on The Faster Times.

The Misfit

A rad new Tumblr, The Composites, has been making the rounds the last few days that uses police software to create sketches of famous literary characters, such as The Misfit from Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” to the left. The site’s creator, Brian Joseph Davis, plugs in information from passages in novels or stories to create the images. For example, the following bits from Dashiell Hammett:

Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The V motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down—from high flat temples—in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.

So far the site has sketches of characters from Charlotte Brontë, Graham Greene, Patricia Highsmith, Gustave Flaubert, Flannery O’Connor, JG Ballard, Vladimir Nabokov, Martin Amis, Colson Whitehead, and Dashiell Hammett. Davis is openly looking for more suggestions, so email yours in!

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Over at Luna Park review, Travis Kurowski takes Bill Henderson, editor of the Pushcart Prize anthology, to task over his dismissal of online publication. Like Kurowski I really love the Pushcart Prize–it is probably my favorite yearly anthology–but it is hard to disagree that Henderson’s stance seems at best a little silly and at worst absurd. Henderson:

I have long railed against the e-book and instant Internet publication as damaging to writers. Instant anything is dangerous—great writing takes time. You should long to be as good as John Milton and Reynolds Price, not just barf into the electronic void.

The Pushcart Prize anthology is always gigantic and features a wide variety of work, but the current edition only has one piece from an online publication. A few years ago, Henderson’s stance might have been somewhat understandable. But in 2012, even the biggest print magazines have an online component. Conjunctions has had Web Conjunctions for years, The Paris Review and Tin House have both recently been publishing fantastic work on their blogs, TriQuarterly moved entirely online, etc. And that is to say nothing of the many excellent online-only publications like elimae or The Rumpus.

In addition, Henderson’s comment about “instant anything is dangerous—great writing takes time” makes little sense. It is true that one can self-publish anything instantly, and it is probably true that most online literary magazines are more hastily edited and published than most print magazines. Both of those things can be dangerous for writers. But the best online literary magazines are as carefully edited as anything in print and the wait time for slush submissions is equally long.

I do enjoy the phrase “barf into the electronic void,” but most writers will tell you that online publication brings more notice most of the time. The largest print markets, such as the New Yorker, will garner you more readers and attention. However, the vast majority of magazine editors will tell you that their online traffic far exceeds their print issue sales (that certainly holds true for the magazine I co-edit, Gigantic).

(I also feel that I should point out that I go to plenty of literary parties including “Paris Review revels and FSG launches” and there is always booze and rarely talk of Kindles. Not sure what Reynolds is talking about there.)

So, Henderson’s stance seems quite outdated for a lot of reasons. While I am on the subject though, I will say that there probably are some downsides to online publication that the online lit proselytizers overlook. And the proselytizers do exist, I know plenty of writers who claim they want to only publish online and that print magazines are irrelevant dinosaurs.

One interesting thing about online publication is that is simultaneously more ephemeral and more permanent. This weekend I was thinning the bookshelf in my childhood bedroom. One thing that I refused to part with was my McSweeney’s and NOON collections. Not all literary magazines are as beautiful as objects as those, to be sure, but I’m never going to treasure a Tumblr like I do a beautiful print magazine. The web is an unending stream that you dip your toes into and then forget. It can also be easily altered. Recently I noticed that a large literary website had shifted their content to a new system and somehow one of the pieces that they had published of mine vanished in the move. I’m not complaining about this—the other pieces of mine remain and I’m not going to bother them about one old piece—but work can be unpublished or lost online in a way that it can’t in print.

On the other hand, there is a level that the web is more permanent. When I was in undergrad, I began publishing fiction and poetry in both print and online journals. In the print journals, my pieces were read or not read and then forgotten. Someone could theoretically track them in library archive, but the pieces have been put behind me. This is not a bad thing, especially for a young writer. On the other hand, most of the online publications are still online where anyone can find them in a few seconds Googling. Indeed, many of these publications from seven or so years ago come up before more recent pieces in more popular publications. I cringe every time I meet a new person who informs me they searched for me online and “read that story of yours about the [stupid dumb thing I thought was clever a decade ago].”

Compounding this is the fact that the internet tends to exist in a kind of perpetual present. If you Google one piece from 2002 and one from 2012, there is little indication that the former was written long ago. It appears to the reader as instant in a way that tracking down a back issue of a journal does not. Is this a big problem? Probably not, but it is something to consider for emerging writers deciding where to publish.

A related question involves the publication of online work in a collection. Many writers these days seem to have their entire collection’s work available online and easily linked on their website. Does this hurt the value of a collection? Will readers be less likely to buy book X, easily read online in magazine form, over book Y that isn’t? I don’t think that this is an issue yet, but it might be in the near future.

Lastly, it is probably fair for us to acknowledge that web magazines are not necessarily as great for all types of writing. Poems, short prose, and current events/culture commentary all work great online and perhaps even have unique advantages. The web is not as good at cultivating long form work though. For one thing, it can’t pay for it. For another, it is simply a pain for many to read that much text on a computer screen and the distractions of email, Facebook, and everything else really do make it hard to stick with.

So what does all this mean? I guess that I think both print magazines and online magazines provide a lot of value for both readers and writers. They, currently at least, work well to complement each other. Writers, readers, and anthology editors shouldn’t snub either one.

The post More Barf for the Void: Some Thoughts on Online Lit appeared first on The Faster Times.

There is no such thing as a “correct” weight for any particular height—they are only averages. And moi, who has a perfect figure, can tell you that the idea of going on a diet is not to become so thin that when you are at a party and turn sideways, people think you left early.

- The Paris Review also has a great interview with Gary Lutz, one of America’s premiere sentence artists.

When I’m at work on a story, I never compose paragraphically. I write stand-alone sentences. I might fixate on three or four sentences a day. I’ll enlarge them to at least twenty-six-point type on the screen. I’ll futz around in their vitals, recontour their casings, and work a kind of reverse cosmetology on them to bring out any defining defects or birthmarks or swoonworthy uglinesses and whatnot. Only much later will one such sentence overcome its aloofness or diffidence and begin to make overtures to another sentence, which might be pages and pages away in the draft. The sentences eventually band together into paragraphs.

- The Millions’s great Year in Reading series continues.

- As does the htmlgiant Tournament of Bookshit.

- Electric Literature is throwing a holiday fiction contest with an interesting constraint: “A short short of 30 to 300 words, that uses each word only once. (Do not repeat any words! Not even pronouns or indefinite/definite articles.)”

- The Guardian wonders whatever happened to book illustrations:

I say surprising because very few works of fiction have any sort of graphic element at all. This has always seemed strange to me, especially considering the great effort publishers put into designing covers, choosing fonts, and so on. Illustrated fiction enjoyed a surge in popularity during the 19th century, but nowadays? I can count on two hands the books I’ve read that incorporate some design into their pages.

It is an interesting question, although the rise of literary comic books and graphic novels in recent history might have taken over most of that space, and there are probably more illustrations in recent texts than the article implies. Still, I would not be surprised to see more art get incorporated into novels as publishers look for ways to enhance the appeal of print books.

- Largehearted Boy compiles a massive list of year end book lists.

- Everyone is already talking about this article, but if you haven’t read it here is Richard Russo taking Amazon to task.

Statements like this will no doubt make us all seem, to Amazon devotees, like a bunch of privileged, holier-than-thou ingrates. Privileged I’ll grant them. But as we swapped e-mails it quickly became clear that the real source of our collective dismay was actually gratitude, not ingratitude. On my first book tour I was invited to Barbara’s Bookstore in Chicago. The employees optimistically set up seven folding chairs, then occupied those chairs themselves when nobody showed up for the reading.

- Lastly, Laura Miller on the trend of TV shows adapted from novels.

The post Literary Muppets, Amazon’s Issues, Year End Lists, and More Lit Links appeared first on The Faster Times.

One thing that stories in Belgian cartoonist Olivier Schrauwen’s The Man Who Grew His Beard share is that they question their own form-and they usually feature bearded men who draw-but otherwise resist association. This is, after all, Schrauwen’s first collection of stories, and much like those first collections of his fiction writing counterparts, this book contains the enthralling inconsistencies and volatility that result from an artist experimenting with and discovering a form. Like American artists Robert Goodin and Dash Shaw, Schrauwen reaches into the toolbox of the animator to reinvent the print comic. He employs the more technologically dictated concepts of animation, in which he is trained, to innovate the older form of comics, the medium which he has come to practice. His feeling for immediately sequenced moments and relationships within varying depths of field serve to create comics pages that interrogate their own form, creating a real sense of newness in his stories.

Schrauwen’s stories are not animated films on paper. Anything but. They are comics that could only exist on the page. His layouts are driven by the relation of one panel to another, existing as a unified whole rather than a sequence. Schrauwen eschews panel gutters, making his pages into single compositions, highlighting relationships of lines and colors and repetitions from one panel to the next. In his story “I Am a Handsome Man with a Broad Forehead and a Beautiful Beard,” Schrauwen’s painted pages are created to reflect the structure of a stained glass window, or even a complex family crest. Moments are found within single panels, but the pages are composed to ask the reader to look at them as a whole. Even more compelling are instances, such as in “Hair Styles,” when adjacent panels echo each other with slight variation, reminding us of the animator’s storyboard, or a film strip, but, at the same time, creating a regularity that sets a narrative rhythm only achieved by those cartoonists who are most naturally inclined to employ the basics of deconstructed comics grammar (think Ernie Bushmiller, or Ivan Brunetti’s recent work).

The variation of line, color, and graphic archetype throughout the book unsettles the reader, demanding close attention. The grasp that Schrauwen, and therefore the reader, has on any particular visual paradigm is tenuous at best, at any given moment. It’s as if his people, and places, and his very lines may slip away at any point. And the instability is not only a function of the collection as a whole, but occurs even within particular stories, or on a single page, or even within a panel. In the book’s first story, “Congo Chromo,” an absurdist episode of Belgian colonialism, the three principals, a group of white-man hunter/explorers in Africa, have body parts, heads, legs, torsos (especially torsos) that continually changes size from panel to panel, sometimes with logistical explanation, other times not. This makes their age, and visual personality, which is usually so easily established with highly abstracted cartoons, tough to identify. Our idea of these men change as the story itself is changed. This story is an appropriate pace setter for a collection that—if it suggests any thematic unity at all—is driven by the idea that not only is the creator questioning his form as he creates (as cartoonists, like the OUBAPO group, who work with constraints, do so effectively), but that each story that Schrauwen has discovered and the characters within are questioning the narrative as they experience it.

Many of Schrauwen’s featured characters either carry pens, pencils, or brushes, or they are a product of another character’s drawing tool. Formally, this approach is not unlike the meta-fictional conceits of William H. Gass and John Barth. (Don’t fear: there are no characters in this book named ‘Olivier Schrauwen,’ though the author did point out in an interview that he had a beard the entire time he was drawing these stories.) But, the meta-narrative effects on a visually concrete medium such as comics are much different than their role in prose fiction. Fiction writers use this method to reveal to us “the author’s hand,” to make us consider the story as an authored construct. Comics, as a medium, usually do that without any overt meta-narrative techniques, because artists’ drawings styles are constantly obvious and more particularly nuanced. We are much more often more actively aware and attuned to a comic artist’s style than that of a creator who works exclusively in text. We think about more about how the thing is made when we read comics. Schrauwen invites us into the process of making comics, particularly the idea of conceiving of and making images, and calling into question these processes as separate undertakings, suggesting that thinking and making are the same process. “The Imaginist,” a story in which the comics page predicts, sometimes incorrectly, the conceptions of a particular bearded man, and then corrects those ideas to suit his whims is the most obvious example of this. Most compelling, this story then goes on to address this man’s limits when he loses the power of formal invention, in his “waking life” as a quadriplegic. Another story, “The Grotto,” looks at cult who reveres a flawed “creator” who quite literally draws things that come to life, things which ultimately disappoint the creator himself, although these creations still delight his followers (perhaps, audience—or readers).

So many storytellers are lauded for creating worlds so believable that they cause readers to forget. Presumably, readers forget their own realities, and become absorbed in the author’s imagined product. Schrauwen creates new worlds in every story, and these worlds envelope us, but he never allows us to forget. He doesn’t let us forget that he’s an artist, and that we are readers, and that those are his pencil lines and paint strokes on the page we’re reading. And this reminder of the form and experience is exactly what makes his stories seem so real. They refuse to deny the process with which we all struggle if rarely acknowledge, and that is the process of continually framing and creating the world in which we live.

The post Worlds Without Forgetting: TFT Review of Olivier Schrauwen’s The Man Who Grew His Beard appeared first on The Faster Times.

- Speaking of year end features, HTMLGIANT has launched a pretty hilarious “tournament of bookshit” pitting the most annoying aspects of the literary world against each other. Early rounds include “Calling yrself editor-in-chief of online jrnl vs. posting pics of other people’s books on facebook” and “flarf vs. AWP“. It is too late to enter, but you can still watch. I have “nationwide Facebook invite to local event” going all the way.

- Daniel Clowes illustrated the new New Yorker cover and it is equal parts hilarious and probably depressingly accurate.

- Flavorwire on great books to give non-reading friends this X-mas.

- Have you been checking out the awesome flash fiction series that Tin House is running on their blog? Great work from Diane Williams, Michael Kimball, Seth Fried, and many others. Today’s story is by Gwenaelle Aubry and begins:

The apartment was full of balloons, garlands and children. One last little boy was still waiting for his parents, a little boy with long, curly, very dark hair. The telephone rang. I think it was already nightfall. The police were waiting for us outside my father’s building. They didn’t leave me alone with him. One of them preceded me into the room where he lay. He never took his eyes off me, told me not to touch a thing.

- The Rumpus interviews Rumpus Book Club author Laurie Weeks.

- New Directions unearths a great author photo of Clarice Lispector, whose The Hour of the Star was just published in a new translation.

- TFT editor Adam Wilson has a story in the new Paris Review. You can read an excerpt here:

“What is this cockshit?” someone behind me said.

I turned. Felix wore camo pants and a sleeveless tee. Hair long and greasy, facial features exaggerated: comically oversize mouth and nose. Like late-career Bogart: rheumy-eyed, beyond saving.

“It’s raining,” I said.

- The most depressing book ever?

- Lastly, did you know that Salvador Dalí illustrated Alice in Wonderland in the 1960s? Check out the gorgeous and surreal images at Brain Pickings.

The post Books for Non-Readers, the Most Depressing Book, Dali’s Wonderland, and More Lit Links appeared first on The Faster Times.

If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.

- The Awl takes a look at some secondary literary characters who almost met untimely deaths, such as Ron Weasley, who Rowling almost killed “out of spite.” Sadly, he lived.

- Bookforum talks to Colson Whitehead about his latest zombie novel, Zone One:

BOOKFORUM: Ok, tell me how your zombies really work in your mind. How were they created? How do they survive? And where are they all walking to?

COLSON WHITEHEAD: Starbucks? What I wanted to explain, I did. What I left out was irrelevant to my project. There’s no one zombie. Writers manipulate the creatures for their own purposes. The shambling hordes in World War Z do not serve the same end as those in Zombieland, the creatures of the original Dawn of the Dead are no real kin to those in the remake. They are vehicles of pathos, terror, social commentary, humor, or slippery metaphor, depending on who is at the wheel. Our monsters are multivalent and ever-changing. Like us.

- The Atlantic, via Flavorwire, has a kind of weird article about The Greatest Literary Figures With Literally the Greatest Figures. Do we really need to speculate about the hot bods of Victorian authors?

-A rad blog post on book jacket designing and Lolita from Jacket Mechanical.

- Online self-publishing is taking over China:

The ingenious part of this publishing model comes in when an individual author’s serial gathers a critical mass of readers. At this point the self-publishing site invites the author to become a VIP, and their serial moves to a different section of the site where readers can sample some chapters of their work for free, but have to pay if they want to read the latest installments.

- Lastly, if you live in NYC check out “the nerdiest protest ever” as writers read Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener in support of Occupy Wall Street.

The post Vonnegut-isms, Variety of Zombies, Nerdiest Protest, and More Lit Links appeared first on The Faster Times.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkxdYEeFY-k&feature=player_embedded

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Aliette de Bodard, a 2009 finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, wraps up her Obsidian and Blood trilogy this November with Master of the House of Darts. The series is a “cross between a historical Aztec fantasy and a murder-mystery, featuring ghostly jaguars, bloodthirsty gods and fingernail-eating monsters.”

In all three installments, de Bodard masters the atmospherics needed to pull readers into this dark and magical world. The protagonist, Acatl, the High Priest of the Dead in charge of the Sacred Precinct, a position that can be thought of as a mix between priest and coroner, is a sympathetic character with personality flaws that transcend time and culture. Time and again he finds himself unwillingly dragged into impossible investigations and forced to confront both internal struggles and external demons.

Vivid imagery, flowing prose, and natural dialogue are at the heart of de Bodard’s writing. One of the most original storytellers out there, Aliette merges her love of mythology and her desire to bring more non-Western influences to the science fiction and fantasy realm.

Aliette and I talked about the days of the Aztec Empire, the trouble with mainstream narratives, and how to pitch a book idea on the fly.

The Obsidian and Blood series takes place during the time of the Aztec Empire. This civilization was wiped out in the early 1500s by Spanish colonizers and what’s known about them is largely taken from archaeological digs. You’ve mentioned in previous interviews that part of your motivation in writing this series was to repair the damage done to their legacy. I hope I’m being accurate, feel free to correct me. What was most important to you when you sat down to recreate this world?

What was most important to me was to present the world in a fair way: as you mention, a lot of the narratives we have around the Mexica/Aztecs are Spanish ones, and the surface ones are deeply biased. I’ve mentioned it in other interviews, but I was always struck by how often narratives reach for the Mexica when they need a bloodthirsty, evil culture. And it seems… wrong. I have issues with caricatures; and I don’t believe every single aspect of a culture can be irredeemably evil. Plus, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the conquistadors were hardly saints or trustworthy witnesses, and when I set out to tell stories set in the heyday of the Mexica Empire, what I wanted was to avoid falling into the same clichéd depiction of the culture. I’m no Nahuatl, but I did try my best to research the culture and bring to light its achievements.

What achievements did you unearth during your research?

Once you get past the stumbling block of human sacrifices, you realize that the Mexica civilization was a very advanced one in many respects–that they had fantastic astronomy and medicine, that their women had vast amounts of rights compared to most medieval civilizations, and that their justice system was harsh, but much fairer than its English or French equivalent, putting the onus of responsibility on noblemen (who could afford to respect the prohibitions) rather than on commoners (who couldn’t).

And what about the notion that we only have archaeological digs to go on?

Archaeological digs aren’t the only source. We have at least three major sources for the Mexica civilization: the remaining Nahuatl people in Mexico, though they did not fare well under Spanish rule; the accounts of the Spaniards such as the Codex Florentine, who attempt to account for the civilization they destroyed, but which are–naturally–hardly free of bias; and finally, the archaeological digs themselves, though those are made difficult because the Spanish were thorough in destroying anything Mexica they could find, and also because Tenochtitlan itself is under Mexico City, not the most propitious of places to dig.

Have you always been sensitive to marginalized cultures?

That’s a tricky one… I’m not exactly sure what we mean by marginalized culture–I’m choosing to interpret this as “not mainstream where you and I hail from”, but I’m aware there are degrees of marginalization, and that things can vary across the globe (you can argue, for instance, that Thai culture is marginalized in the US, but you can certainly not say the same about Thai culture within Thailand, or even within the Indochinese peninsula). If we go by this definition of marginalization, I’m not exactly in the dominant cultural ballpark. I live in France, but I don’t fully hail from a Western country, and there are bits and pieces of my cultural bedrock that are, not standard, for want of a better word?

Do you have any examples from your personal life?

I remember growing up on a mixture of French and Vietnamese fairy tales, and not realizing until fairly late that the things which seemed normal to me were, in fact, far from the norm in society (ranging from something as simple as rice cooking to deeper ideological divergences, such as the Confucianism I picked up from my mother and grandmother). I think my interest in non-mainstream culture comes from this; and from the fact that I’ve always been a cynic and a contrarian, pretty much disinclined to believe in the standardized versions of history, science, social interactions.

What bothers you the most about them — those standard versions that many of us learn in school and find reinforced in mainstream culture?

The narratives are my biggest pet peeve. I’ve always been mildly annoyed by the exclusive nature of the mainstream narratives–which are all or almost all Western-centered and Christian-centered. I’m not only talking about novels and short stories; but also about the more insidious stuff: the stories we use to shape our everyday lives; the way the newspapers structure and present facts, even the way science is framed (I’ll come back to that later); the sentiments around which our worldviews end up centering (because, no matter what you do, it’s hard to avoid internalizing stuff if you’re breathing it in every day). I try to present other options in my writing, though I’m unsure how successful I am at all!

You have this amazing ability to bring characters and their surroundings to life. When I read your books, I can feel the darkness of the world — it’s kind of like being wrapped in a heavy velvet blanket — but it’s never oppressive or claustrophobic. You’ve now written three books inside this atmosphere — and feel free to correct me here as well — what drew you to it and how does it compare to your personality?

I think the main reason it’s not oppressive or claustrophobic is that neither I nor my characters view it as claustrophobic–it’s a violent world, one that I’m not sure I would want to live in; but at the same time it’s also a world that was home to millions of people, and they didn’t think of it as unbearably gloomy. For them, it was all perfectly natural, and I think that if I can manage to make this come across in my writing, then the readers will put themselves in the main characters’ shoes, and see it as perfectly natural.

Though I will note that I’m not the world’s foremost optimist, which might have helped when putting myself inside Acatl’s mind (who isn’t particularly noted for his positive outlook on things either).

The story behind how you came to be a published author is well documented. It’s a great story: your flight back from the World Fantasy Convention in Canada was delayed and you were stuck in the same hotel as literary agent John Berlyne and Marc Gascoigne who, at the time, was about to start up Angry Robot, a science fiction and fantasy imprint, then under HarperCollins.

While this was part luck, the fact is you were at the fantasy convention in the first place and outgoing enough to have a conversation with strangers — not to mention able to pitch your ideas without warning.

Were you at all prepared to pitch an agent and publisher?

It does make for a great story… I think of myself as fairly shy, so it was a surprise to find out, when I started going to cons, that I could actually be sociable enough to engage strangers in conversation without warning. Having shared interests in the field of SF actually helped a lot when it comes to engaging conversations–I could hold my own in a discussion, and didn’t feel utterly lost. The other thing that helped me was, perversely, my being shy: I was far more interested in making people talk about themselves than talking about myself, which doesn’t make for great self-promotion, but does make for great conversations. Most people will willingly talk about themselves and their projects, and I learnt tons of great things that way. Now I’m more experienced at this, and I can usually have a two-way conversation, but back in 2008, I couldn’t manage it all at the same time.

Coming back to World Fantasy, I was prepared to pitch to an agent or a publisher; though, if I remember correctly, I didn’t manage much pitching during the convention itself. As I said, I’m shy; so when I met both Marc and John I mostly engaged them in conversations about who they were and what they were doing; even after I found out who they were I was reluctant to pitch, as I was afraid this would be perceived as too forward. As I recall, the original pitch offer came from Marc, who basically said “well, we’re here, we’re bored, why don’t you pitch to us” (and sent my heart racing at 100 mph). That was when I fell back on the only thing I had, which was the original pitch. So, yes, definitely a lot of luck, but without that preparation I would have been lost.

What lessons are there in this story for aspiring writers?

To an aspiring writer, I’d say that the most important thing is the writing. Once you get past that, the last 10% is the presentation: you need to be able to talk about what you’re writing with enough clarity and passion; and it’s not only for agents and publishers, it’s also for everyone who will ask you the dreaded, “Ah, you’re a writer. So, what do you write?” question at parties, at work, in your family… I don’t think it’s indispensable, but it’s certainly helped me a lot to be able to condense books into fast pitches; to write clear and legible synopses; and to prepare query letters. But it’s the sort of thing that only comes with a lot of practice: I was writing for ten years before I finally became able to write a decent query.

And now back to your books: how has writing about an ancient world steeped in magic changed the way you view modernity around you?

Ha. I think again, that it’s the reverse. As I’ve said above, I’ve always had a healthy scepticism about modernity. I’m not saying the past was a golden age (it certainly was not, and when I see, for instance, the status of women even forty years ago, I’m very glad I’m not living in those times); but I don’t think today’s world is better, either. The rise of individualism, the way our society over-values youth at the expense of old age, our blind worship of science… I don’t think any of those are healthy developments, and I definitely hope that we come to realize that those, too, could bear questioning.

Out of all the modern developments, which one do you find the most disconcerting?

Probably the one that has me most worried is the worship of science. I suppose it’s because I’m a scientist and I can see the seams (and, as someone interested in history, I can also see the way our science framework evolved from Western ideology, which says to me that either there is a startling coincidence and the way we view reality coincides with our way of thinking; or this is an indication that the framework itself is flawed, in that it might give good results, but starts from false or simplified premises–it wouldn’t be the first time this had happened).

I’m also more than a little disturbed by the way some people decry blind faith in God, and proceed to believe in scientific results with the same blind faith. To be sure, there are conceptual differences between religion and science (though I think their “incompatibility” is largely end-of-19th century anti-clerical propaganda that we’ve never quite shaken off), but you can’t just blindly believe in something no matter how sound it might seem when seen from afar. Every system of thought has its limits, and for me one of the great things about science is when we’re conscious of said limits, and ever open to changing our minds and making things evolve.

What’s next for you?

Well, Master of the House of Darts will be released at the beginning of November, and should wrap up the Obsidian and Blood trilogy: all the books are standalones, but as this was the last one I wrapped up as many of the dangling plot arcs as I could–and gave the trilogy an ending I hope will satisfy readers. Also, I put my main character Acatl through the wringer; but that’s only to be expected in book 3 of a trilogy!

Next, my agent is shopping around Foreign Ghosts, a novel set in an alternate history universe where China discovered America before Europe, and radically changed the history of the world (the setting for my Nebula and Hugo nominated “The Jaguar House, in Shadow”. And I’m putting what I hope will be the finishing touches on a novella set on a Vietnamese space station, which should read a bit like Dreams of Red Mansions in space (complete with AIs, genetic modifications, and robots).

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Master of the House of Darts is now available from Angry Robot books. You can find it on Indiebound.

The post Magical Mysteries in the Time of the Aztec Empire: TFT Interview with Aliette de Bodard appeared first on The Faster Times.