Dubravka Ugresic's FOX (Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac and David Williams)

Is Fox a novel? Is The Rings of Saturn? What kind of a book is Landscape and Memory?

Does it matter for anyone who isn't a marketing executive or bookstore clerk? 

Dubravka Ugresic is one of those writers whom I always think was a Nobel laureate but isn't (I even had, always second guessing myself, to double check before posting this). A child of the former Yugoslavia now categorized as Croatian (but who ended her days in the Netherlands because politics), she had the kind of international reputation that leads to enthusiastic promotion by the likes of Open Letter Books (one of my favorite indie publishers and not just because Chad has had me on their podcast, honest!) and to my grabbing all of her works available when they have a sale. But then I get decision paralysis gloating over my hoard and then a library book I'd requested yoinks ago would suddenly come available (but as an interlibrary loan) and then one of my friends would publish something new and then...

So I slept on Ugresic despite my enthusiasm. To my shame! Because Fox is the kind of all-but-uncategorizable opus that is one of my favorite kinds of things to read: a guide through the vast and diverse catalog of the art that has fed the writer's imagination and scholarship through a rich and fascinating career. 

All brought under an inventive rubric to bind it all together: the role of the image of the fox in various cultures of the world. And it's not merely as a generic trickster figure. 

I mean, do you see why I mentioned The Rings of Saturn?

So, just for fun, I tried to keep track of writers and works Ugresic brought under the Fox's sway. And yes, lots of these are new to me and yes, my TBR groans anew under their figurative weight and halfhazard stacking.

§ Mikhail Bulgakov, whose The Master and Margarita I have adored for decades and which Ugresic is reminded of upon her arrival in Moscow for graduate studies in the 1970s.

§ Russian/Early Soviet (as in murdered by Stalin's NKVD early) writer Boris Pilnyak and his great novel, The Naked Year, as well as a piece around which Ugresic based her first chapter, "A Story About How Stories Come to be Written."

§ Japanese author Jun'ichiro Takizaki, a contemporary of Pilnyak, whose novel Naomi Pilnyak likely encountered during a sojourn in Japan and, Ugresic posits borrowed from for a somewhat fictionalized biography of one Sophia Vasilyevna Gnedikh-Tagaki -- who may or may not have existed! The biography might not either. Ugresic is a bit of a trickster herself, maybe?

§ Walter Benjamin, a German philosopher and critic I've always meant to explore but had never determined where to start. I now think I'm going to look for The Arcades Project, which Ugresic discusses in the context of having met a cosmopolitan figure she only designates as "K," whom she met in Japan while touring scenes from Tanizaki's life.

§ Japanese feminist and communist Yuriko Miyamoto, once a friend of Soviet film deity Sergei Eisenstein, whose works like Mileposts/Landmarks/Signposts (Dohyo in Japanese) look like they're going to be hard for me to find. She's sure sounds fascinating, though! And yes, she met Boris Pilnyak and fictionalized their unpleasant encounter.

§ Isaiah Berlin, a Russian-British scholar and professor whom Ugresic imagines having imagined Miyamoto's and Pilnyak's encounter while writing his essay contrasting writerly types, "The Hedgehog and the Fox" which was largely about Leo Tolstoy.

§ Peter Bruegel the Elder, whose painting "The Beggars" features peasants whose ragged clothing is festooned with fox tails; Ugresic thinks of this while contemplating the sight of modern Japanese tweens donning cute fox ears and tails over their clothes in tribute to the good old kitsune of Japanese folk tradition.

And all of this is just from the first chapter. At this point while I was poking around trying to decide what to pursue, I found that somebody has already written a pretty detailed annotation of Fox so I'm not going to reinvent the wheel, here. But there's so very much more; it would take a lifetime (as indeed it did, for Dubravka Ugresic) to properly explore it all and I'm already middle aged. And still haven't tracked down and read everything that W.G. Sebald set me haring after years ago!

I mean, she also describes a visit to the Tokyo train station that the hero of Marshland is accused of bombing, but it looks like that weighty tome was not part of Ugresic's literary universe - or at least she didn't mention it here. A pity if she never got to read it; she'd really have liked it, I think.

Fox is also a travelogue, in which international literary star Dubravka Ugresic explores places like the tourist trap Pompeii has become, her accounts of same frequently reminding me of those of fellow globetrotting scribe Umberto Eco, who left this ancient city out of his Travels in Hyperreality probably out of the same thinking that allowed me to live nearly a decade in Boston without ever once visiting the Bull & Finch.*

As I watched the human circus, the frenzied waiters reeling from the tempo, the countless plates sailing above our heads, the voluntary humiliation to which we acquiesced as if we had paid for the right to be humiliated; as I watched our stampede emptying the lunchroom so the next group could stand paid in, I suddenly longed for great Vesuvius to do it's damndest, spew its lava all over us, carbonize us, and blanket us with 20 tons of volcanic ash...

But what is most on Ugresic's mind as she visits various places, contemplates the real or imagined biographies of real or imagined artists, has a romantic encounter with a noble squatter in a house she inherited from a fan of her work back in her new-old homeland, is the plight of refugees of all sorts. Whether they're arriving, desperate and near-drowning in leaky boats on the shores of Lampedusa while she lunches with a possibly-fictional widow of a possibly-fictional writer of international renown, flees from Stalin's NKVD or later authoritarians to more permissive regimes in the east or west, or are simply a nice little old last ekeing out an existence in South London, all but forgotten but for a handful of people like Ugresic who have read her one book, migrants and refugees, who have to partake of all of the qualities of the fox, peek through at us from every page with gently reproachful eyes. At us and at Ugresic, who does not exempt herself from responsibility from their plights. She may have done things here or there to help, donated to causes, looked the other way on property violations, but she could always have done more, just like all of us. Even though she is, herself, a victim, too, of what happened in the former Yugoslavia, which she describes in unforgettable terms: 

From outside, it all looked as if this were happening inside a glass snow globe with the snow swirling. But, inside, instead of snow they're swirled blood. When somebody picked up the globe and shook it, miniature people inside the globe conducted a miniature war, burned books as big as poppy seeds, erected miniature borders, opened their miniature camps for the ethnically unsuitable, raised fences and barbed wire, revise the school books, erased everything old and established everything new, they died in miniature, we're expelled in miniature, blew up miniature homes, everything went on in miniature - and over it all flurried that soothing artificial snow.

That's certainly how it looked to me as a barely 20-something watching it all on the evening news from halfway around the world. And I still only know it via literature, but, let's be honest: the only way I know anything is either through literature or through a few years working (very badly) as a field entomologist.

Ugresic's books, by the way, were among those deemed unsuitable and removed from school and library shelves, presumably to be burnt, as she learned some 25 years later when she returned to Croatia on a visit. So she was, in a sense, doubly exiled, for all that she was welcomed and, in a small degree, feted in the West as a writer of international reputation. She just wasn't nationalist enough to please her new/old nation. A lot of us may come to know how that feels.

Her accounts are not totally mournful, though, witness a late chapter devoted to famous literary emigré Vladimir Nabokov, his wife Vera, son Dmitri, and the small band of women whom they met in New York City when the women took on Nabokov as a language tutor, in exchange for which they, especially the "human footnote" Dorothy Leuthold, guided the Nabokovs through their early explorations of the United States. As she relates charming anecdotes from this period in the Nabokovs lives, she muses also on how people mentally colonize environments that are new to them, appropriating things and people with whom they are not yet familiar by, for instance, bestowing them with diminutive nicknames such as "Dasha" for Dorothy. After whom, famously, Nabokov dared to name a species of butterfly he discovered in the Grand Canyon with her. He was famously very knowledgeable about butterflies and moths so perhaps he could indeed be sure that he was indeed the discoverer of this variety, but it's still kind of adorably presumptive to not only name it but to bestow it with his chauffeur's name. Though I'm sure she considered it a nice tribute -- what if she didn't want to be so remembered? The right to be forgotten is a right that not a lot of us think enough about, I suspect. Especially since the internet is going to make that close to impossible for a while yet.

Dubravka Ugresic left us mere months after I first discovered her and scooped up all of her then-available English translations at Open Letter. I've still got several more to read, and I'll no doubt tell you all about them right here. I, uh, hope she wasn't one of those who'd rather be forgotten.

But if that was the case, she shouldn't have written such fascinating books.

* Aka the "Cheers" bar.

Olga Tokarczuk's DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD (tr Antonia Lloyd-Jones)

"Nobody takes notice of old women who wander around with their shopping bags."

With a title lifted right out of William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell" and a cranky old Polish woman spinning us a yarn that keeps wanting to devolve into just another cozy mystery except she just won't let it, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead feels like it was written just for me. I know I say that about a lot of books, but I contain multitudes you know?

Yes, I know, that's not from William Blake.

The cranky old Polish woman in question, and our narrator of questionable reliability, is an astrologer-cum-schoolteacher-cum translator-cum property manager named Janina, and she lives in a sparsely populated region of Poland so near the border with the Czech Republic that most of the time, if residents try to call emergency services, their call gets bounced to a cell tower in that other country and gets a recording in the Czech language. This makes said residents both frustrated as hell and very self-reliant, none more so than our Janina. Who hates that name but never really gives us one she'd prefer to be called, so I will christen her Crank.

Hey, it's very in keeping for how she addresses and talks about her neighbors. Very keen on thinking deeply about language, she hates the idea of personal names being meaningless sounds bestowed on a person by their parents before anything is known about us besides how many fingers and toes we have and if we've got a winkle. So her nearest neighbor is called Bigfoot, and her next nearest is Oddball, and her best friend and partner in translating William Blake into Polish is called Dizzy.

Lest I convey the very wrong idea that this is a charming and quirky story, though, well, it isn't. Crank is embittered as hell, embittered as only a passionate defender of animal rights can be when she lives surrounded by poachers, riders of noisy and polluting all terrain vehicles and bands of hunters who stride in formation through her beloved woods shooting in unison at pheasants and ignoring her pleas to stop and listen to her for just a moment.

Then one day, Bigfoot turns up dead, choked on a bone from a deer he'd poached*. And some other deaths occur. All with at least two things in common; proximity to Crank, and the apparent or explicit involvement of animals. Most want to chalk these deaths up as accidental; Crank thinks she's witnessing a string of animal revenge attacks that makes them murders! Who is right?

That's basically the plot of the novel. Interesting enough, but what makes it stand out is, of course, the prose, brought to very vivid but agonizingly slow life in the audio edition by Beata Poźniak**. "Winter mornings are made of steel. They have a metallic taste and sharp edges," Crank observes one morning, for example. There are tons of gorgeous little prose bombs waiting to explode in your head and realize that Tokarczuk and Lloyd-Jones are a hell of a team and Tokarczuk is definitely a Nobel laureate.

For me and my kind there are added bonuses, including a character (and possibly a love interest for Crank; it's nicely ambiguous) who is an entomologist deeply engaged in study of and efforts to conserve a bark beetle (which, yeah, people who know me know that I have a grudge against bark beetles for destroying so much of my beloved Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest, but it's really not their fault so much as human management policy's fault that they've run rampant there for decades, unchecked by the natural fire cycle and whatnot), and not just another character who is a mushroom picker but a whole society of mushroom pickers, so involved with one another and so organized that they throw a costume ball every summer right before the season for serious 'shrooming begins.

Finally, I want so much to gloat over how much I admire the last 20% or so of this book but it's really almost impossible to do without spoilers, which just kills me, but there you go. Drive that plow right over me, I dead.

And yes, I'm going to need to listen to this one again real soon, because it's that kind of book, one of my favorite kinds, that promises to be a very different read the second time around. Hooray!

*Having eaten my share of deer over the years, I cannot figure out what bone in a deer's carcass would be small enough for a man to choke on, but maybe it's a fragment? Either that or Tokarczuk and/or Lloyd-Jones think that deer bones are just like fish bones?

**Seriously. This is the first time I've resorted to bumping up the narration speed as I've listened. I found 1.30x to be adequate, but 1.0 was just too much as Poźniak draaaaaaaaws oooouuuuut allllllmost eeeeeeeveeeeeryyyyyy syyyyyyyyyyllable in her authentically Polish accent.