An Interview with Lydia Davis

I am delighted to get to pass on this link to my interview with Lydia Davis for the Writers at Cornell podcast. Davis is in town for a reading, but she was kind enough to talk with me about the complexities of translating Proust and Flaubert, using economic language to convey strong emotion, the evolution of her literary style, and the value of self-limitation.

Davis's Collected Stories has just come out in paperback, and her new translation of Madame Bovary in hardcover; snap them up after you've had a listen. (And thanks to Gallagher for the question about constraints.)

Karin Fossum's "Black Seconds"

I'd really been looking forward to this new Karin Fossum novel, the fifth of her eight books to be translated into English from her native Norwegian, as the last one, Beloved Poona (disappointingly published in the UK as Don't Look Back and here as The Indian Bride) was as satisfying a literary portrait of a small town as I've ever seen, and reminded me at times of, yes, even Alice Munro. So it's a surprise to discover that this book (translated by Charlotte Barslund) is the most traditional police procedural Fossum has produced, residing for much of its length in the mind of its austere protagonist, Inspector Conrad Sejer.

Not that I have a problem with that. I am, after all, a crime buff, and Fossum is quite rightly known as a crime novelist. Still, she had been playing with the bounds of the genre, and it was faintly disappointing to see her pulling back.

That said, the book itself is not remotely disappointing--in fact it's really good. A girl goes missing, inexplicably, in broad daylight, and a week of searching turns up nothing. That's the setup. Unlike most crime novelists, Fossum doesn't play it as a whodunit--we very quickly meet three characters who are certainly involved in the girl's disappearance, and there is never any indication that this is some kind of feint on the author's part. And it isn't. Rather, the novel unfolds as a howdunit--we know more than Sejer, but as we get closer to the end, his knowledge catches up to ours, and we learn the key facts by his side. There are no nasty shocks, only the fascination of watching complex characters admit to themselves at last what they have done.

Fossum does something in her books that I absolutely despise in other writers--she allows us into the minds of the criminals, who just happen not to be thinking of the answer to the mystery when we stop by. This tactic can seem terribly manipulative and opportunistic, but for some reason it doesn't bother me with Fossum. In Beloved Poona this makes a certain kind of sense, as the guilty party is keeping the secret even from him/herself, in a psychologically plausible way. Here, though, the line is a little blurrier, and I felt a few times that she was cheating just a bit.

But perhaps that's merely a byproduct of my intimacy with the traditional police procedural, where the solution to the crime usually is the point, and the psychological depth of the characters of less importance. There, this move really is a cheat. Here, though, I was surprised to find myself happily going along for the ride. Particularly commendable in this book is the way Fossum brings to life one particular man, an introverted and possibly autistic eccentric in his fifties, whose sessions with Sejer are truly exciting and convincing.

So, not what I expected, but I'm very satisfied. Recommended.

Another Swedish Mystery!

OK, you know what? I'm gonna keep on posting about these Swedish crime novels until you commenters start readin' 'em.

The latest one I've discovered is The Princess of Burundi, by Kjell Eriksson, which won the Swedish Crime Academy's best novel award in, apparently, 1992. Why did it take so long to translate this book? I don't know. The translator is the able Ebba Segerberg, who translates the Henning Mankell novels, which I also like, but not as much as this one. The book is a rambling murder mystery; its point of view is roving, sticking mostly with a small cast of detectives, including the brooding Ola Haver and the regretful, obsessive Ann Lindell. It feels very much like it was plucked from the middle of a series, and indeed, there's another one out in English, which I've got on order.

Eriksson's writing is straightforward, dry, and egalitarian; the lives of the criminals and their pursuers are weighted equally, to fine effect. I usually hate the "mind of the killer" nonsense that most crime writers feel obliged to include in their books--it is almost invariably presented opportunistically and in direct violation of the rules of narrative, so that the bad guys just happen not to be thinking of all the vital facts of the case that you're not yet supposed to know--but when Eriksson does it, it's great, and it also isn't quite what you think it is, anyway. Plus it doesn't break the rules.

Henning Mankell has been called the heir to my favorite crime writers, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, but I think Eriksson, at least judging by this book, is closer to their ideal--like them, he is concerned with life as it is actually lived, and the idea that mystery is an inherent part of it, rather than with mystery as an aberration.

Out, Again

I posted a few days ago about Natsuo Kirino's crime novel Out, and while I said I liked it pretty well, I kind of condemned its writing style and plot with faint praise. I hadn't finished it at the time, though, and now I feel bad.

Having read the whole thing now, I have to admit that Out is a really strange, really interesting book. At the halfway point, Kirino appeared to be moving toward a number of familiar tropes of the genre--the women who covered up the murder of their friend's husband had inadvertently let out a few details, several unsavory figures got wind of their deed, and the police seemed to be closing in. I was certain there would be some blackmail, some betrayal, some retribution, in the classic style.

I was completely wrong. The plot takes a weird, surprising, and ultimately quite plausible turn which I won't reveal here. But the story picked up steam so completely at that point that I would later be amazed that I had once considered not bothering to finish.

As for the writing style, I can't decide. It's unadorned, which I usually like. But its character development is very expository--feelings are rather clinically described and explained, instead of being illustrated with action and dialogue. Ordinarily this would bother me, but by the end of Out I wondered if perhaps this is simply part of the character of Japanese fiction. Kirino's the only Japanese novelist I've read (save for Haruki Murakami, who I think of as more of a cross-cultural, "international" writer)...can anyone weigh in on this issue?

Anyway, my apologies--Out is a terrific book, especially the second half!

Bulletin: Crime In Translation

I say "Bulletin," because I'm probably going to be doing this every once in a while. I am big into crime in translation, even above and beyond Crime & Punishment.

This week I finished Åsa Larsson's latest, The Blood Spilt. Larsson is Swedish, and her first book, Sun Storm, was excellent; in it, a young lawyer gets caught up in the aftermath of a ritualistic murder that occurs in a church in her rural home town. This time, however, is totally different--the same lawyer accidentally gets caught up in a completely different ritual murder in a church, this one a few towns down the river from her rural home town.

No, really. Wacky coincidence, huh? Surely the next book won't be...

But to help her friend, and to find the real killer of a man she once adored and is now not sure she ever knew, Rebecka must relive the darkness she left behind in Kiruna, delve into a sordid conspiracy of deceit, and confront a killer whose motives are dark and impossible to guess ...

That's the blurb for Larsson's next book, and I don't know if I'm terribly interested in returning to Kiruna with Rebecka, to be honest. I was certainly happy to be there with her this time, though--The Blood Spilt is a fine book. Larsson is essentially a literary novelist disguised as a crime writer; you should read this book not for the plausibility of its plot but for its small, careful observations of small town life. I wish more American crime writers would take this tack--crime is a social and psychological phenomenon, the result of friction between the individual and the society, not some Lord-Of-The-Rings-style battle between good and evil: literary fiction is the perfect vehicle for it.

The other thing I've been enjoying--I'm about halfway through--is Natsuo Kirino's Out, which Junot Diaz recommended to me a couple of weeks ago when he was in town. It's the story of four women who work together at a boxed-lunch factory in Tokyo; when one of them murders her abusive husband, the others help out by chopping him up and distributing the pieces all over town. It's a hideously gruesome book, and the writing is nothing special...but its portrayal of Japanese working-class life is stunning, and unique among books I've read. These women have to change their mother-in-law's diapers, fend off credit agencies, talk rapists out of attacking them, and endure the demeaning insults of their depressed husbands as they cover up the murder; the shrewdness of their deception is only possible because they've sharpened their chops fending off a society that despises them. Heavy going, but fascinating.

I posted this early by mistake--sorry if you saw it getting cut off in mid-sentence!

More on Translations

In the comments of my last post, reader 5 red brought up one of my favorite writers:

This talk of translation also brings to the fore the nagging question I have when I read Murakami's work. I can't help wondering what his work is like in Japanese. I've convinced myself that it's even better, and I feel like I'm missing out.

I've often wondered the same thing about other writers, but I don't worry too much about it in Haruki Murakami's case. The reason is that he's a very rare beast among writers who don't ordinarily write in English: he is both 1) completely fluent in English, and 2) popular enough so that all his books are translated into English during his lifetime. He also has a couple of translators he knows well and whom he can work with...thus, his translations have a certain "official" status, at least in my mind, as he gets to vet them, and can actually appreciate the way they "feel" in English.

I wish I could remember where I found this, but I remember reading a short essay or interview with Murakami in which discussed his English translations and his feelings toward them. If I remember right, he liked them, but appreciated that they had a different flavor. If anyone knows what I'm talking about, let us know.

On a side note, I got a real laugh when flipping through the Spanish edition of one of my own books...in the English, the character refers to someone having real "cojones," and in the translation there's a footnote reading, "In Spanish in the original."

United Pants of America

I'm re-reading Crime and Punishment right now, but this time I'm trying a new translation with a reading group I'm in--the one by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose Brothers Karamazov is so superb. I originally read this book in the David Magarshack translation, and this is the edition that made it my favorite novel. But I have to admit--though Magarshack still rules the roost when it comes to Chekhov, this Vintage C&P is the new king.

How come? Take a look at this passage, from the Magarshack version. Here, Raskolnikov's friend Razumikhin has brought him some new clothes. He fits a new cap on Raskolnikov's head, and then:

"Well, now, let's address ourselves to the United States of America, as we used to call it at school. A word of warning, though--I am proud of the trousers!" and he spread out before Raskolnikov a pair of grey summer trousers of light woolen material.

All right, then...fair enough, if a little puzzling. Now read the Pevear/Volokhonsky:

"Well, sir, now let's start on the United Pants of America, as we used to call them in school. I warn you, I'm proud of them," and he displayed before Raskolnikov a pair of gray trousers, made of lightweight summer wool.

Now, you see the difference? The second one is freaking hilarious. And I greatly prefer the word "displayed" to Magarshack's "spread out"...the words are of equal utility, but the Vintage translation seems to emphasize the ridiculousness of the moment--as it's Raskolnikov's last thirty-five rubles, we learn, from which the pants money has been drawn.

I recommend either, of course, but if you're trying Dostoyevsky for the first time, go with the new one. It's very natural, nearly as good as the other great new translation I read recently, Lydia Davis's Swann's Way.