Marketing the Bolano
Graphs, Maps, Trees
With the James Wood review in this week’s New Yorker, it’s official: everyone has reviewed HHhH by Lauren Binet. And, well, the critics that I trust haven’t thought too much of it. Wood gives it a very mediocre review, pointing out sloppy prose and a facile meta-narrative structure.
Sam Sacks in the Wall Street Journal writes,
The Heydrich story is one of the war’s darkest, his murder a sensational coup; it would be hard not to turn the tale into an exciting book. Mr. Binet has tried. His rendering (translated from the French by Sam Taylor) is less an imaginative narrative of the historical event than a rambling meditation on the morality of “novelistic invention.” He gives readers behind-the-scenes looks at his research process, and he is constantly interrupting the action to fret about whether it’s ethical to say, for example, that Himmler wore a blue shirt one day if there is no documentation to support the detail. Mr. Binet is passionate about his subject, but his moaning about the challenges of writing historical fiction diminishes the horror and courage at the heart of the story. “I keep banging my head up against the wall of history,” Mr. Binet writes—it isn’t clear why the reader should have to suffer with him.
Michael Orthofer calls it a YA novel, which seems about right.
I could go on. Since so few translations get any coverage whatsoever, it’s always a question when one manages to get attention virtually anywhere. Is it because HHhH was an international bestseller? Was it because it received the Prix Goncourt for a first book (not to be confused with the Prix Goncourt)? Because it’s yet another book about the Holocaust? Because FSG is pushing it hard?
All of those critics that rushed out to cover HHhH for whatever reason should smack themselves on the forehead and take a look at Mathematics: by Jacques Roubaud. Released on March 15 by the Dalkey Archive, it is the most criminally under-appreciated translation to have crossed my desk this year. The third book to be translated in his Great Fire of London “project,” Mathematics: is everything HHhH is not: charmingly bizarre, quietly but powerfully innovative in structure, and possessed of a truly strong, interesting literary voice.
Here are Ryan Ruby’s apt words in Bookforum:
As with Infinite Jest—a work by another author interested in the intersection between philosophy, mathematics, and literature—reading Mathematics: requires the use of multiple bookmarks: one for the main story of the “branch”; one for the extended “interpolations” that are placed at the end of each chapter; and one for the alternative narratives (or “bifurcations”) at the end of chapters two and three. As Roubaud piles tangent upon tangent and traces parallel lines of story, the reader is forced to switch back and forth across the pages until he is quite literally lost in the book. With this structure, which mimics the way our minds are invaded by memories and distractions, he crosses what may be the printed book’s final frontier—the linear progression of pagination.
While all books teach us how they are meant to be read, few do so as explicitly as the “Great Fire” series. A great deal of Mathematics: concerns itself with explaining how its narrative was constructed. There are accounts of the genesis of book’s particular architecture; the constraints under which it was composed; and an elucidation of everything from the interlocking parentheses to the multiple font sizes and typefaces down to the colon at the end of the word mathematics in the title (according to what Roubaud calls the “Gertrude Stein Axiom,” “A title is a proper noun describing a book “—or, to put it another way, “a book is an autobiography of its title.”)
All of this makes for highly self-conscious writing. But Mathematics: avoids the pitfalls of most metafiction: preciousness, smugness, self-indulgence. Though the melancholy tone of the first two branches is largely absent from this one, Mathematics: manages to retain a sense of gravity.
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I am halfway through HHhH right now and I don’t think it is as bad as all that. It is not conventional historical fiction, which I hate, so maybe that is coloring my view of it. Still, while there are criminally under represented works in translation, I would not be so quick to dismiss this book without reading it first. Just as I will ignore the hype in my evaluation, I will ignore the sour grapes that seems to be attached to discussions of this (I admit) slight but nonetheless charming book.
I was interested in HHhH until I noticed it was being reviewed everywhere. To me that screams heavy marketing and fad reviewing. If people are still talking about it in ten years, maybe I’ll read it then.
Not only do I not think HHhH is bad, I think it’s pretty damn good, Scott.
Is it a perfectly constructed little clockwork toy? Not at all, nor is it big or sprawling or aggressively serious. But it is fun, damnit, and more fun than I’ve had with a book in weeks. And if folks at the WSJ are reading it as a historical novel, the problem is theirs because it’s not one, just like it’s not really a novel, or even a book about Nazis.
It’s a game. A literary exercise in which the author stretches–apparently to breaking–his own credibility as an author and as a researcher.
And if Michael wants to call it a YA novel, I can think of far worse things than this for kids to be reading.
On the novel’s prose, I think the English translation invites scrutiny not only for its cuts and slips but also for its style.
In English, section two reads:
*
I don’t remember exactly when my father first told me this story, but I can see him now, in my public-housing bedroom, pronouncing the words “partisans,” “Czechoslovaks,” perhaps “operation,” certainly “assassinate,” and then this date: “1942.” I’d found /History of the Gestapo/ by Jacques Delarue on his bookshelves, and started to read it. Seeing me with this book in my hands, my father had made some passing remarks: he’d mentioned Himmler, the leader of the SS, and then his right-hand man, Heydrich, the Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. And he’d told me of a Czechoslovak commando sent by London, and an assassination attempt. He didn’t know the details—and I had no reason to ask for them at the time, as this historic event hadn’t yet taken hold of my imagination. But I had sensed in him that slight excitement he always gets when recounting something he finds striking. I don’t think he was really aware of the importance he gave this anecdote. When I told him recently of my intention to write a book on the subject, all I sensed was polite curiosity without a trace of any particular emotion. But I know that this story has always fascinated him, even if it never made as strong an impression on him as it did on me. So one of the reasons I am embarking on this book is to reciprocate his gift—those few words spoken to an adolescent boy by a father who, at the time, was not yet a history teacher. But who, in a few awkward phrases, knew how to tell it.
The story, I mean. History.
*
Here’s the same passage in French (fingers crossed the accents work). It gets interesting from the fifth sentence on, with “Il n’en connaissait pas les details…”/”He didn’t know the details…”:
*
Je ne me souviens pas exactement quand mon père m’a parlé pour la première fois de cette histoire, mais je le revois, dans ma chambre de HLM, prononcer les mots de <>, <>, peut-être <>, très certainement <>, et puis cette date: <>. J’avais trouvé dans sa bibliothèque une /Histoire de la Gestapo/, écrite par Jacques Delarue, et commencé à en lire quelques pages. Mon père, me voyant ce livre à la main, m’avait fait quelques commentaires en passant : il avait mentionné Himmler, le chef de la SS, et puis son bras droit, Heydrich, protecteur de Bohême-Moravie. Et il m’avait parlé d’un commando tchécoslovaque envoyé par Londres, et de cet attentat. Il n’en connaissait pas les détails (et je n’avais de toute façon guère de raisons de lui en demander, à l’époque, cet évênement historique n’ayant pas encore pris la place qu’il a maintenant dans mon imaginaire) mais j’avais senti chez lui cette légère excitation qui le caractérise lorsqu’il raconte (en général pour la centième fois, car, déformation professionelle ou bien simple tendance naturelle, il aime à se répéter) quelque chose qui l’a frappé d’une façon ou d’une autre. Je ne crois pas que lui-même ait jamais eu conscience de l’importance qu’il accordait à cette anecdote car lorsque je lui ai parlé, récemment, de mon intention de faire un livre sur le sujet, je n’ai senti chez lui qu’une curiosité polie, sans trace d’émotion particulière. Mais je sais que cette histoire l’a toujours fasciné, quand bien même elle n’a pas produit sur lui une impression aussi forte que sur moi. C’est aussi pour lui rendre cela que j’entreprends ce livre : les fruits de quelques mots dispensés à un adolescent par ce père qui, à l’époque, n’était pas encore prof d’histoire mais qui, en quelques phrases mal tournées, savait bien la raconter.
L’Histoire.
*
This isn’t an isolated example, and my feeling is that to streamline Binet’s conversational syntax thus (thereby eliding detail) is to diminish the charm and particularity on which his novel’s vital honesty-effect depends.
I think this is worth raising not to undermine any English-speaking critical consensus, and still less to criticise the individual translator — far from it — but rather to note a central assumption made by the English text: that American and British readers can no more cope with syntactical complexity than they can handle information that isn’t straightaway explicit.
(For an example of the latter, look at the cut to the part about ‘deformation professionelle’, which happens to be Binet’s first reference to what his father did for a living.)
The bits between quotes in the first sentence didn’t come through, but fwiw: partisans, tchécoslovaques, attentat, liquider, 1942!