Best Translated Book Nominees: Ma Jian's CHINA DREAM (Translated by Flora Drew)

I never could have imagined Billy Pilgrim* as a moderately powerful bureaucrat in 21st Century People's Republic of China, but Ma Jian sure did. And why do we read international fiction if not to be surprised once in a while by weirdness like that?

But our hero, Ma Daode, is not unstuck in time because of aliens from outer space, but because his own greatest task is bringing about the state of affairs he is experiencing for everyone! As head of the China Dream bureau, he is tasked with a combination of propaganda and technological compulsion that will bring all of Chinese society (and eventually all of humanity) into a state of literally all dreaming current leader Xi Xinping's dream of harmony and homogeneity for China, both in daily life and during actual REM sleep. It's a terrifying idea that Ma Jing confronts here, and he does so bravely and with that most potent of dissident defenses, ridicule. 

China Dream does not concern itself with how a chip implanted into people's brains to over-write their dreams and memories with a collective one might work or be developed -- indeed, our hero eventually resorts to a decidedly non-technological means to his end -- but instead focuses on Director Ma, the deeply flawed and barely competent man saddled with overseeing this dystopian project. Ma was a young Red Guard during the cultural revolution, who turned in his own parents as Rightists for very slight thoughtcrimes but is haunted more by memories of bloody factional violence within the Red Guard than by guilt over an action that led to his parents' suicide. He copes with those memories, into which the reader is drawn repeatedly without warning, through debauchery described with enough sickening detail to make China Dream a fairly unpleasant listen for people who don't appreciate sex scenes (yo!) but at least narrator David Shih didn't get too lip-smacky about it, and translator Flora Drew struck a decent balance between writing erotica and clinically descriptive porn, so while I wanted a shower after each of these scenes I didn't also wish for some kind of memory educating soup to scrub them out of my brain.

But boy, do I wish Drew, who is Ma Jian's partner in life, could have worked on him about how he wrote his female barely-characters, most of whom are Director Ma's mistresses. As depicted here, they are uniformly two-dimensional and single-minded in their pursuit of this gross old man's affections. I'm sure this is at least partly meant as a commentary on power dynamics, but such a commentary would be even more effective if the women in the story got to be people, and got to talk about something besides their moistness. Especially since narrator Shih gave them uniformly artificial and breathy Female Speech Patterns. Yuck.

The scenes from Director Ma's memories are, however, uniformly brilliant, harrowing and nightmarish and vivid; Ma is a fully realized character whose story is compelling and serves as a scathing indictment of totalitarianism and its ultimate logical ends, of the cost in ordinary lives and ordinary dreams the pursuit of this exacts, and the ridiculousness of the equally ordinary humans who claim to be willing to pay those costs in the pursuit of a bad dream. 

This will not be my last Ma Jia read, though likely my last audio book of his work. It's a lot harder to skip icky sex scenes in the audio medium than in text, I've found. 

*The unstuck-in-time boob-hero of Kurt Vonnegut's SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE

Best Translated Book Nominees : Sinan Antoon's THE BOOK OF COLLATERAL DAMAGE (translated by Jonathan Wright)

Bearing the title that it does, The Book of Collateral Damage cannot be expected to be a lighthearted and cheery read, but let's take a moment to contemplate a list of the things author Sinan Antoon and translator Jonathan Wright will make you feel like crying about over its relatively short length: a fledgling bird, a carpet, a tree, a stamp album, a racehorse, a bedroom wall, an oud (an Arabian stringed instrument kind of like a lute), a cassette tape (oh my god did I blubber at The Colloquy of the Tape), a roll of film... plus, you know, various people, including a woman whose poetry survived thousands of years on a Mesopotamian tablet only to disappear in 2003 (probably ending up in Hobby Lobby's stolen hoard)...  I mean, there's evoking empathy and then there's whatever these guys do, and I'm a complete mess and unfit for company right now and I just want them to do it to me again.

The novel, written in such a profusion of incredible poetic imagery and language that I wish my Arabic was better so I could enjoy the original*, concerns two men: an academic, Nameer, who emigrated from Iraq to the United States, and Wadood, a bookseller he met on a trip back to Baghdad. Nameer's story of academic life in an adopted country is interesting enough, if kind of just a slight variant on the male narcissist writer narrative we're sick of from the likes of Updike and Irving, but is quickly and rightly subsumed by his obsession with Wadood's life's work: a catalog of person, animal and "inanimate" (I'll explain the scare quotes in a moment) object destroyed, minute by minute, in the Iraq War.** Wadood presented Nameer with a draft of this work on their first meeting, and Nameer, blown away by its beauty, tragedy and importance, wants more than anything that it be published in Arabic for the home crowd and then that he be allowed to translate it into English for a wider audience. 

Destruction also has a tablet preserved, somewhere in the netherworld. On it are written the names of everything that will be obliterated and everyone who will die. Every night I see myself flying and I read what's written and I come back to write it in my catalog.

It's not 100% clear whether this passage, like many in the book, is meant to be understood as Nameer's or Wadood's writing, but ultimately it doesn't matter; Gene Wolfe fans like me are quite accustomed to blurred narrator identities, but unlike in a Gene Wolfe book, I don't feel like the question of who is writing what is meant to be a puzzle for me to solve; the blurring is the point; the two men's experiences dovetail. One could almost see them as one man split in two by, say, a quantum event, whether or not a family home was destroyed by a bomb in war-torn Baghdad in their youth. The man who came upon the rubble as a boy became Wadood; the one who didn't escaped Iraq and became Nameer. Who didn't really escape at all, as his fixation on Wadood and his work and his encounters with a therapist make readily apparent.

Of course it's Wadood's "Colloquies" which really set this work apart. Antoon-as-Wadood does a heartbreakingly perfect job of imbuing things like walls and rolls of film with personality, memory and emotional resonance. Hints throughout point to everything named in these Colloquies having been within or at least associated with the aforementioned destroyed home, but they could just as easily have been things all over Baghdad that were destroyed in the same attack.

Anyway, like I said, I'm a wreck now, and I've got to take a break from this project (especially since the next few of the books from the Best Translated Book Award long list that I've got, I've got as audio books, and I don't consume those as rapidly as I did back when I was stuck half-blind in the attic last year). But I've still got several to go before I read the one that actually won, so keep watching this space, friends.

And give this one a look. Just have some tissues handy. And be prepared to apologize to the ones you use and throw away.

*I loved Urdu poetry the most when I was studying that language! Which I've forgotten most of in the 20-some years since I blew off my grad school research to do that! So I know I could improve my Arabic enough to open up this pleasure to me as well, but... which flavor of Arabic? 

**Peter Greenaway fans take note: if you love Greenaway's mania for lists and catalogs, this is your novel. 

Rosemary Sullivan's STALIN'S DAUGHTER: THE EXTRAORDINARY AND TUMULTUOUS LIFE OF SVETLANA ALLELUYEVA

Some people have unbelievably strange lives, and then there's Svetlana Alleluyeva, aka Svetlana Dzhukashvilli, aka Lana Peters, aka... but better known as

Her real life, even in a bare bones outline, is weirder than any novel or movie could convey, which is to say that author Rosemary Sullivan had something of an unfair advantage as far as writing a book which would absolutely rivet its audience. As a young girl, Svetlana watched* her family disappear like characters in an Agatha Christie novel, but only later on in life learned that this was usually because they'd either angered her father or in some way posed a threat to or just annoyed one of his advisors. Usually a combination of those. When her father died his weird lingering death surrounded by people who weren't sure if they should help him, she got to watch the bizarre power struggles to succeed him and got treated as a pawn in them. She had been forbidden to marry her first love, a screenwriter who had rather glowing biopics of V.I. Lenin on his resume, because whoops, he was Jewish, but then was later allowed to marry a Jewish man (the first of many husbands; how many depends on how you count them, because some marriages were more official than others because totalitarianism). She finally got out of the U.S.S.R. only to scatter the ashes of an Indian citizen (whom she considered her fourth (?) husband but wasn't allowed to actually marry) on India's Ganges River and managed to slip her minders and sneak over to the U.S. Embassy to defect. She became a successful author and earned a lot of money with sensational but honest books but lost a lot of it in, for example, another ill-advised marriage to a member of Frank Lloyd Wright's posthumous cult. She met everyone from Isaiah Berlin to Terry Waite. She defected back to the U.S.S.R. at one point, teenaged half-American daughter in tow, because she missed the children she'd left behind in her first defection. And so on.

Sullivan gives all of this an immediacy and a felt impact largely through intimate interviews and hard-won access to enough of Svetlana's private (?) papers to be able to share Svetlana's perspective on matters in her own voice. Wisely, Sullivan foreshadows very little; if we don't already know what Stalin and his cohort were really up to from sources other than this book, we are not enlightened, in the course of the narrative, until Svetlana is. So at first Joseph Stalin is just a weirdly distant daddy whose children enjoy (?) considerable privilege but don't understand that they do because they're so insulated from the rest of society and aren't even told the truth about why certain family members (including Svetlana's own mother) aren't around anymore, and only later do we come to see him in anything like the way the rest of the world does -- and we get to share Svetlana's whiplash as her home country goes through crazed cycles of revering and reviling her father's memory, sentiments that she bears the brunt of once her father is dead, both in the U.S.S.R. and in her other homes of India, the United States and the United Kingdom. As she observes of the cult of personality around Stalin even decades after his death, "Tragically, many, even in the Gulag, continued to insist that Stalin knew nothing. It was evil advisers who were responsible.."

In the process, we get a timely reminder, as the present moment has brought many socialist ideas back to the fore, that we can't blindly trust people who espouse them to stick to them or the credo behind them. Once upon a time, Stalin and Beria and Khruschev would have agreed that eating the rich and defunding the police are good ideas, but not for the reasons that most of those now proclaiming them (myself included) generally mean them. The price of freedom is vigilance, and if a second socialist revolution ever occurs here in the West, the revolutionaries will do well to keep each other in check and remain vigilant against power grabs, ideological purity tests, authoritarianism in the guise of fairness, and any notion that ends justify means. It's really, really hard work, and I hope that we are smarter than the poor, starved, hidebound Russian populace of 1917 were and can learn from their experience. Sharing this book widely can only help.

*Ok, "watched" isn't quite so much the word as something like "noticed week's later that it had been a weirdly long time since she'd seen a person", but hey. We don't have a word for that, do we?

Best Translated Book Nominees: Burhan Sönmez' LABYRINTH: A NOVEL (Translated by Ummit Hussein)

I've never been less certain that the people who wrote the jacket copy for a novel read the same book that I did than in the case of Labyrinth: A Novel, my latest read from the long list for the Best Translated Book Award.*

The marketing for Labyrinth describes it variously as a crime novel and a heady political tale, but I see neither in this rather nice and moving story of a young semi-famous blues singer/songwriter/guitarist in Istanbul, Turkey who wakes up from an apparent suicide attempt with a wicked case of amnesia. Intriguing premise for a crime or political novel, right? I mean, was it a for- real suicide attempt or attempted murder? If it was really a suicide attempt, what brought this young, well off, good looking young musician to such a pass? Something terrible on his conscience to do with crime or politics because this is, you know, a crime novel? If it was a murder attempt made to look like suicide, who wanted him dead and why? Did he witness something he shouldn't? Was he a bad guy himself? Or a political dissenter the current regime in Turkey wanted quashed?

But, uh, nope. None of this really gets asked or, really, even answered in the text of the novel (and I'm a Gene Wolfe fan, so I'm used to really really having to pay attention when mysterious things get mysterious in fiction). Well, maybe a little bit about why our man, Boratin, would suddenly decide one night to exit his taxi while it was stuck in a traffic jam on the Bosphorus Bridge and jump right off said bridge to his suddenly intended death, but only a little bit. Like, nobody he asks has any idea, his therapist isn't much help, and then Boratin is more interested in figuring out what to do with his life moving forward than in solving this mystery of his past. 

The only clue we're given is that two of Boratin's favorite musicians, pre-swan dive,were Kurt Cobain (who committed suicide at age 27) and a Turkish guitar god named Yavus Çetin (who committed suicide at age 30). And yes, I looked up Yavuz Çetin and wow is he a revelation. See below where I'll link to a playlist I made for this novel.

Anyway, so unless I really, really read this one wrong (not impossible!) this is neither a heady political nor a crime story, but that's fine, you guys. Because it's a good book, a fine story, and worth reading on its own merits and not only because it will lead you to the discovery of some kickass Turkish pop music. 

Boratin as we get to know him (and he gets to know himself) via his friends and family, emerges as a very kind and generous young man who inspires considerable loyalty in his friends and bandmates and whose widowed sister really misses him and loves him devotedly even though he's not been to visit her and her son in years. There might well be something to this last bit -- why has he avoided his family for so long? -- and maybe his friends are lying to him about what he was like before the Bridge, but what about the neighborhood people who fall all over themselves to extend affection and gratitude to him when he happens by? Was he like, actually some kind of gangster or police informer or something and they're actually all scared of them?

That question, that idea, only occurs to me because of the jacket copy, I must emphasize. There is no textual evidence to support or even suggest it, no furtive glances, no signs of fear on the part of other characters, no unexplained suggestive imagery bubbling up from Boratin's subconscious... Without this crime/political designation I would have read Labyrinth as an elegant and moving account of an amnesiac coming to terms with his condition, deciding whom to trust with the truth of it, choosing how much effort he wants to put into recovering his memory, and determining his best course forward. That's more than enough for a good novel right there, and this is a good novel, especially since it also vividly depicts a place not a lot of us are ever going to experience any other way. Even if we get to 21st century Istanbul or have already been many times, we're not going to experience it the way a hot young Turkish musician is going to.

And that, my friends, is what I read for. And listen for: here's the promised playlist. Yavuz, man. Dayum.

*The winners have been announced for this, so now I know what to save for last!