Anca Cristofovici - Thoughtful, inventive, and beautifully lyric, 'Stela' masterfully challenges the obfuscations of state terror and its long rolls of the disappeared with the liberating and illuminating transformations of dreams and art

Anca Cristofovici, Stela, Ninebark Press, 2015.


ancacristofovici.blogspot.hr/


Years after her mother's disappearance from an unnamed city in an unnamed country governed by a repressive regime, a young dancer, Cora, struggles to untangle the knot of half-truths and informational gaps surrounding the official story. Thoughtful, inventive, and beautifully lyric, Anca Cristofovici's novel Stela masterfully challenges the obfuscations of state terror and its long rolls of the disappeared with the liberating and illuminating transformations of dreams and art.


Cristofovici's work comes to us like scraps of paper drifting down from a library whose collection has burned. We must gather all we can, and set about the task of their decipherment and reconstruction. --Ellen Hinsey

Stela is a novel of exception. The writing is magical, inventive, whimsical...funny...sinister and slightly disturbing. --Juliet Bates




photo by Sophie Kandaouroff
Author Anca Cristofovici is hard to typecast, and if there is any easy path for a writer living between cultures, it isn’t the one she has chosen. Born in Romania, where she published at an early age, she defected in 1985 and has since lived in France and, temporarily, in the United States. While pursuing an academic career, Cristofovici has continued to write fiction and reconstruct herself as a writer in two non-native languages. A reflection of her multicultural experience, her publications in Europe and in the United States include essays, fiction, poetry, and translations, written in English, French, and Romanian. She has also contributed to exhibition catalogues and international artists’ projects. Cristofovici has been invited to read at venues in the Unites States and Europe. Among her honors are fellowships from the British Academy, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
A professor of American literature and art at the University of Caen, France, where she directs the Center for Anglophone Cultural Memory, Cristofovici is the author of several books and contributions to collective volumes and anthologies. Her latest novel, Stela, published by cross-culturally committed Ninebark Press in 2015, was launched at the AWP Conference in Minneapolis. It explores the relationship between power, art, and the survival of the self in totalitarian systems, described by her publisher as: “Thoughtful, inventive, and beautifully lyric,” it “masterfully challenges the obfuscations of state terror and its long rolls of the disappeared with the liberating and illuminating transformations of dreams and art.”
This interview was conducted Berlin-Paris by e-mail.
Ellen Hinsey: One aspect of the political upheavals and traumas of the 20th century is that one cannot take one’s native language for granted. How has living in different cultures and writing in three languages affected your perspective as a writer?
Anca Cristofovici: Brutal circumstances affect anyone’s perspective. In radical forms of relocation, one becomes no one. With some luck, that can turn into a fantastic formative experience, should one be ready to embrace it.
Both my native environment, Romania, where I started as a writer in the mid-seventies, and then the places I lived in following my defection in 1985—England (briefly), France, and, the United States (where I studied and worked for some years)—involved finding a space in which to function as a writer, against all odds. Probably, had those things not happened, I would have become another kind of writer. But they did happen: whether it was the relocations, the psychic and physiologic reactions they engendered, or the material conditions that provided (or didn’t) time and space for writing. I’ve never experienced much anxiety of the blank page. I’m five books behind. When I’ve finished one, I don’t have to worry about what’s next!
I published quite early in Romania—short fiction, poetry and plays (I remember the title of one of these long-lost plays: “Columbus, Does America Exist?”!). Early on, too, I realized I wasn’t equipped to work against censorship or other political hindrances creatively, so I preferred not to. Living with only an intermittent public writer persona for a long time has been, I must say, rather beneficial to the creative process, despite bouts of exasperation for being cast in the wrong life and seeking to “outcast” myself. At times this complex trajectory is responsible for my feeling that I need to justify myself as a writer. But I have come to terms with being a clandestine traveler on a night train on some enigmatic venture, which is mine all the same.
In terms of cultural attachment, I’m close to the Mitteleuropa cosmopolitan tradition and think of myself as a European writer. Yet, as American cultural history has been my passion and profession for many decades now, I also feel somehow “transatlantic,” with an interest in how cultures coalesce in both traditions. My new novel, The Long Way to Vienna, explores that paradox. Anyway, as long as I can write, it’s alright, even if, strangely enough, a writer who is independent of national affiliations (or any other affiliations, for that matter) doesn’t fare easily in these global times.
EH: Let’s speak about your novel Stela. The narrative is told from a “free space” (two artists’ residencies, in the north and south of Europe), but, as we just evoked, the past it refers to is visibly that of a repressive system, which in the book is called “the perimeter of fear”—
AC: Well, the novel starts with the story of the loss of a mother and her teenaged daughter’s attempts to come to terms with it. She has missed the funeral, which amplifies the confusion accompanying any process of mourning. In addition, this happens in a context of dubious disappearances and a politics of fear conceived as an instrument of control. Because of this particular context, Cora distrusts what she had been told: that her mother died in a car accident. Her growth into adulthood is inseparable from this enigma she must solve; in this she is partly helped by Luca, a painter and neighbor, with whom she will later cross paths outside the “perimeter of fear.” The narrative blurs distinctions between fact and fantasy, focusing on the narrator’s perceptions. And although there are no explicit references to place, for both the initial setting and for Cora’s and Luca’s subsequent peregrinations, a number of details suggest what part of Europe they are in.
A degree of abstraction from any specific setting seemed necessary in order go to the crux of the matter and grasp patterns, see which parts of totalitarian structures are contextual and which are inherent to human nature. “Systematic and chaotic” emerged as a significant pairing around which the novel revolves. It designates the paradoxical coupling of inflexible rules with random and ludicrous practices. In the course of writing, it appeared to me that this fundamental contradiction in terms—an extravagant one, at that, with regard to human and cultural loss—is responsible for the difficulty in understanding (and accounting for) how communism works. The questions that occupy the characters’ minds evolve into other, more oblique ones: what is the legacy of so much moral and spiritual destruction? How do one’s broken memories intersect with those of others to make sense of what happened? Where can one go with one’s life from there? And how?
The difficulty of such a subject is to find the right tone without verging on victimization or sentimentalism. The book took a long time to write, time to find a perspective not overtly political, folkloric or anecdotic, which are the common ways of looking at Eastern Europe, a geographical and political categorization for an area which is, in fact, at the intersection of very different cultures, religions, and languages.
EH: Let’s talk a bit more in depth about the background for the novel. You have spoken about your use of documentary materials in preparation for the book—
AC: In the late 1990s, when I started writing the novel, testimonies published in Romania after 1989 came to my attention, as well as oral histories and compelling documentary films on the deportation of Romanian populations to Siberia and to camps within Romania in the Baragan area, or on detention in what is thought to have been one of the toughest Eastern Bloc prison systems. That material, with no circulation in an international context, slowly made its way into the novel along with documents from other East European countries, but not only. Once the applause following the fall of the Iron Curtain passed, it seemed necessary to connect those events to current concerns about the dangers threatening democracies everywhere. Few critiques of what has become of societies previously behind the Wall are based on serious analyses of communism’s inner mechanisms and its impact on the most intimate relations of family, language and memory.
Yet, using such material involves an overwhelming responsibility, because you don’t want to (mis)appropriate people’s lives. My deep-rooted aversion to realism prompted me to de-familiarize those experiences, and to attempt to find a conceptual framework that would counterbalance the documentary component. Initially, the fact that the narrator is a dancer and Luca, a visual artist, came from persistent images carrying narrative potential. It turned out that the forms of art they practice reverse the pair “systematic and chaotic”: from random events emerge creative patterns of human experience (what Luca calls “provisional arrangements”) instead of restrictive frames. Readers familiar with Merce Cunningham’s technique will find much of Cora’s bodywork and relation to dance is based on this method, which derives, primarily, from how he looks at all forms of life (I am also reminded here of Merce’s drawings of animals).
EH: Your novel’s characters are rather elusive: “stick figures” is a recurrent image in the book. Their pasts and presents are revealed in many evocative details, but this is done subtly and in “pieces.” While the reader is invited into their inner meditations, we do not have a coherent picture of their lives—
AC: Yes, people who return from captivity are rather sketchy, aren’t they? Physically, I mean. We have seen pictures of them, yet not many from those in Eastern labor camps, psychiatric hospitals, or just of people whose energy has been drained by everyday life’s complicated gestures. They are spectral, to the others, to themselves. In French, les revenants is a term that is used for ghosts, but also for those returning from camps.
However, bringing those characters into visibility beyond the stereotypes of Eastern Europe that circulate in Western visual culture seemed crucial, and I tried to place them on an orbit that goes from darkness to gradations of light (and lightness). Truly, I see the characters of the novel more as forms and substances, misty figures as in, say, some of Bill Viola’s video pieces, “The Veiling” or “Three Women,” works that sustained the energy of the book as I was writing it.
Minimal detail for maximal effect, at least that was my intent. I recently heard about a “writer’s tip” that I unknowingly used in the most literal way: “Every character should want something, even if it’s only a glass of water.” Just after Luca has passed the border with the intention to defect, his first words are: “Ein Glas Wasser, bitte.” At times a drink of water counts a lot. To highlight such details places them into another dimension: magnified, they turn into a vital necessity.
EH: Stylistically, Stela is a complex work. On the surface it might appear experimental—but to see it as such would, I think, be misleading. You have often evoked the “surreal” aspects of Romanian totalitarianism, which have nothing to do with literary “techniques”—
AC: Actually, I’ve spoken about “surreal” aspects with specific reference to perceptions of everyday life in the 1980s. I wouldn’t, however, use that term as a general reference to totalitarianism, in Romania or elsewhere, since its faces are so diverse.
In everything I’ve read, the experiences of people in life-threatening situations struck me as experiments in staying alive. The narrative form of the novel, then, is only an adaptation to the characters’ shattered life course, the imaginative and emotional solutions they come up with. All of them somehow break the unnatural order stifling their lives, crack the system: Stela, in losing her life, Cora and Luca, in transforming theirs, and, in the process, Stela’s. The fragmentary nature of the narrative doesn’t preclude a sense of suspense if the reader embraces the narrator’s hesitations and accepts the fact that finding out the truth in the given circumstances is, simply, impossible. Was the accident provoked? Was Stela abducted? Did she defect? That spectrum of possibilities concerning Stela’s disappearance allowed me to condense the material we just referred to.
EH: At the same time the book is rich in poetic images—
AC: Among the fictional frameworks that hold both documentary fact and fantasies, my choice went naturally for stylization and poetic perspective. It seemed to me that such heavy-duty historical and psychological material might be more effectively channeled into a more evocative (even if allusive) narrative.
In the media, the changes in the world over the past twenty-five years have appeared mostly in scripts of high-pitched rhetoric of suffering and violence. The emotional patterns of the Cold War were subdued, violence imploded, words mimed rather than voiced, gestures amplified, much like in a silent movie. Such patterns create a serial effect, even as the narrative and the images that carry it tend to break them into verbal form, so that selves who were meant to become uniform elements in an unending series surge into significant shapes.
EH: Let’s return to the question of works that inspired you while you were writing the novel—
AC: Certain works gave me a base: those of Claude Simon, in particular, or Joseph Brodsky, for their firm nonalignment, their rigor, and for their fine irony tinged with tenderness, or the work of Elizabeth Bishop—a master in the art of traveling light. Much like the documentary material, echoes of these writers have made their way into the novel, wittingly or not, along with other reminiscences. Here and there, I incorporated short excerpts. I hesitated to provide a list of these appropriations, since they seemed to be poetically more effective under cover, so to say. Still, I found a way to weave into the book’s fabric an allusion to the source of fragments I used deliberately. Documentary or artistic material is part of experience, of another kind, already formalized: what we have read and seen and heard is part of who we are, isn’t it? And so is it part of the characters’ verbal texture.
EH: Who are the other writers you feel close to?
AC: Oh! That list is long! Above all, I’m interested in how an artist puts an obstacle to good use (also, in how one can fail to). I relate to writers who are quite different in form and sensibility—and different from my own approach to writing. I also have strong affinities to the visual arts because of the enhanced perceptions they solicit, which open up extraordinary spaces in the mind: artists such as Thierry Küntzel, Geneviève Cadieux, or Stan Douglas, who deserve to be better known and whose work I have touched upon in my book Touching Surfaces. For what it means to them to be writers, I feel close to Dawn Raffel or Christine Schutt. Diane Williams once told me to give myself permission, as a writer. It’s about the best advice I’ve ever had: whenever I try a dangerous trapeze move, her words are my safety net.
Further back in time, I spent some years on John Hawkes’ fiction, writing a dissertation, then completing a small book (The Child and the Cannibal). His work came to my attention when I was young; I fumbled in the dark at every page, but couldn’t resist the beauty of the flashes I found there, and it occurred to my innocent self that, if I somehow managed to make my way into that tunnel, I’d see the light some day! In 1962, Flannery O’Connor wrote a wonderful blurb for The Lime Twig: “You suffer it like a dream. It seems to be something that’s happening to you. . . . This . . . I might have been dreaming myself.” Looking closely into such a work, living with its sound imprint for so long requires a lot of discipline to distance oneself from it. Writing on photography provided an alternative that involved observing rhythmic patterns other than verbal ones and liberated space for my own cadences. And when I forget all I’ve learned from Hawkes, I’ll always remember “coherence of vision.” He was an extraordinary teacher who knew how to bring to light each young writer’s own gifts. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if, instead of writing my dissertation, I had gone to Brown. But, at the time, that was a technical impossibility. However, I met him and his wife, Sophie, in Paris and in Providence, Rhode Island. We corresponded and did an interview on his mythic horse, Whistlejacket, and his thoughts on the creative process, which was published in Italy. Two weeks after he passed away, there was an envelope in my mailbox with two letters from him. Few people would send that kind of letter!
EH: Did you ever tell him that you wrote fiction?
AC: No! Anyway, writing was bracketed at the time. But a nice compliment for Stela came from a writer who studied with him: “Jack would have loved this!” Who can tell? Maybe the horse!
EH: As we’ve just evoked, the visual arts play an important role in your novel. They appear in a number of forms: dance, film, video art, painting. What is their significance to a subject that is deeply steeped in a history of physical, moral, cultural destruction? What is the meaning of dance, in particular?
AC: Art has been a natural and vital presence in my life. I have known artists struggling to keep at bay the pressure of power on their art. Some lost their lives because they dared to speak out. Others remained hostages to silence. Some of those who escaped have been muted in other ways in their new precarious lives beyond the Wall. I am also interested in individual stories of survival precisely concerning how they resonate with creativity—one needs perseverance, luck, and imagination to carry on under dire circumstances.
Stela revolves around two artists’ destinies and loss turning into a creative force. Art making is central to the plot. The reels (rolls of surveillance film shot by the secret police) are used by Luca as found-footage for a video portrait of Stela. Dance combines rigor with grace; the ephemeral quality of movement bears intimately on loss. Narratively, dance draws events into patterns rather than arranging them in a linear fashion. It focuses on the body as a site of psychic work. Frank Bidart wrote a long poem, “The War of Vaslav Nijinski,” where, as madness was seizing him, Nijinski tried to choreograph a dance about the Great War “which gives us//pattern, process//with the flesh//still stuck to it.” And there are those stories of dancers from Eastern Europe escaping to the West.
Dance lifts weight from the subject of the book. In the end, lightness prevails. Stela’s luminous figure, recreated by Cora’s and Luca’s reminiscences and their art, counterbalances the legacy of darkness (and that of three generations of women facing it).
“Surviving is no virtue. It is an act of love.”
The working title of the novel was Kidnapping—one of Cora’s hypotheses regarding her mother’s disappearance and an allusion to Milan Kundera’s essay “A Kidnapped West.” Towards the end, however, the main character’s name turned out to be a better option: Stela, with that one “l” missing, as it’s spelled in some languages. That particular spelling of the name also evokes the common noun, with its cluster of associations: commemorative inscriptions; a tablet on which the first epics were written; and, of course, the Latin for ‘star’ (as in ‘celestial body,’ and ‘fate’).
EH: We began this interview talking about language and displacement. Why did you choose to write your novel in English, and not in French or Romanian?
AC: That is a long story and part of the subject of a volume of essays on which I am currently working. The short version is that if I want to know the temperature in Bucharest, I get it from CNN or the BBC. For French television, the map of Europe stops in Vienna. There are other reasons—cultural rather than meteorological—but they are too complex to go into here. Linguistically, French is too close to Romanian; in terms of fiction, my affinities are with the more flexible, formally imaginative American tradition—such an eye-opener in my formative years.
I started reading in English as a teenager, then studied English at the Faculty of Philology at the University of Bucharest with some people who managed to save us from brainwashing and lent us books (many of them the only copy in the country, feverishly passed from hand to hand). I owe a lot to their devotion and recall, in particular, my first contact with Wallace Stevens’ poems. The professor typed them in sets of five (the typewriter would fit up to four carbon sheets). Since there were more than that of us in the class, he typed them again. Whenever I read or teach “The Man with A Blue Guitar,” I can’t dissociate the poem from the blurred indigo letter type of the carbon copy.
To the writer a language of adoption provides perspective. That choice originates in cultural inclinations which entail a number of risks. But what an extraordinary experience—a privilege at that—and one that involves a heightened sense of responsibility. My concern has been to choose the language that best suited what I seek to do as a writer. Writing in English is perhaps only an extension of my earlier attempts to discover my own relationship to language away from cultural and political determinations, in a lingua franca—which English basically is today, as Latin was at a certain time—or what Joyce longed for: “a language above languages.”
And then, I always feel at home in an uncanny way as soon as I set foot on American soil, which has to do with language, space, people. On my recent reading tour, for example, I was surprised to meet categories of readers that I hadn’t imagined would take an interest in such an unconventional novel. I am grateful for their generosity and that of my publishers who put their trust in my work.
For the writer crisscrossing cultures, there is also the question of what kind of community you belong to in terms of the circulation of your work. All my books were published by independent presses (literary or academic) and I’m happy to be part of that counter-current in book culture. Belin, a scholarly publishing house that brought out my essays on Hawkes, has had a discrete but persistent presence in France since 1770. May it be the same for independent publishers who courageously promote innovative writing and book forms these days! Recently, I’ve co-edited a volume on artists’ books, The Art of Collaboration, brought out by Cuneiform Press, with wonderful American and European contributions which speak to that effect.
EH: In terms of your writing process, how do you feel about writing fiction versus non-fiction?
AC: Well, in both cases it’s writing—and lots of work! Only how one understands them sometimes differs, but, at heart, there’s no separation between my sensibility as a writer of fiction or essays. In both I engage with experiences of varied natures (geographic, cultural, of artistic media), look at how cultures cross, idioms transform, and how, eventually, their reverberations enhance life.
To me, non-fiction, the probing into the metaphoric potential of theoretical or conceptual notions, has to be creative. It’s a perspective on life. D. W. Winnicott evokes this in his essay, “How to Live Creatively.” Conversely, fiction too involves research. Few readers imagine how many pages it’s necessary to read just to make sure you’ve got the workings of a machine, a dress-cut or who knows what other detail right. And if it isn’t right, you can be sure that the bug in your novelistic device will give you sleepless nights. Non-fiction, too, can prevent you from sleeping. From photography I’ve learned the importance of precision and that there’s no such thing as a photograph in isolation. That’s not far from how, for me, images inform a novel and add up into a story. Even as I find working with “negative capability” compelling, a number of details have to be exact or the picture won’t develop. In the end, fiction writing is much like camera work: a matter of technique and how you look at people, objects, environments.
Questions raised in my essays resonate with my concerns on how the imagination functions. It has happened that a point in an essay will strike me years later as close to some detail in my fiction, or even specific phrasing will unconsciously migrate from one form to another. Dictionary entries or exhibition catalogues require extensive research and a capacity to synthesize and grasp the smaller and the larger picture, which also relate to how I process material for fiction.
EH: Let’s conclude with a final question regarding language—are you contemplating translating your novel, Stela, into French, or, for that matter, into Romanian?
AC: Absolutely not! I am a pretty faithful translator of other writers’ work, but I’d make my novel into another book entirely because of how I relate to each language—and I couldn’t have written the novel, as it is, other than in English.
That said, I am translating a book of short fiction that I wrote in French about ten years ago. It has turned out to be an interesting process: how the English version makes me reconsider the original, triggering, at times, new turns in French. For some arcane reason, I am attached to these vignettes, which I never sent out for publication; I am currently collaborating with the American artist Marsha McDonald to bring them out in a bilingual artist’s book. Marsha created the photographic composition for my novel’s cover and provided a wonderful video piece for the book’s trailer. Working with her is like having someone who sees what’s in- between the lines and turns those blanks into visual language.
The exposure of words to art forms, what passes from one medium into another fascinates me. I contributed to international collaborative art projects in which small fragments of the novel appeared in new configurations, associated with visual material I have chosen or created. Transferring them from the literary to the art context added new dimensions to the story. I am preparing an installment for this year’s edition of the Venice Vending Machine on the theme: “The Sea Has No Boundaries: Stories of Travelers and Dreamers.” And so, Stela will travel further. - Ellen Hinsey

Ctch Bsnss - Every assertion is cast in excruciating doubt. Is it 4 am? Am I able to? What is sacred? What is an act? Whether we know for sure or not, we always will. Knowing while not knowing, that’s the paradox that drives this meditation on dialogue in the digital age

Ctch Bsnss, Able To/Always Will, Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016.


embareaxedx.tumblr.com/


“A tale of elusive revelations is rendered through interruptions and undercuts in Ctch’s Able To/Always Will. Like the thin lines of this snakelike text, meaning bares itself undeniably and a breath later, twists and coils back into the basket of the charmer. Every assertion is cast in excruciating doubt. Is it 4 am? Am I able to? What is sacred? What is an act? Whether we know for sure or not, we always will. Knowing while not knowing, that’s the paradox that drives this meditation on dialogue in the digital age.”–Monica McClure


“Beneath Ctch Bsnss’s yearning is a reminder of the persistence of language at its most magical, and of the consequences of the sometimes crippling burden of society’s claim on women: to be able / to rise to the occasion / to always do what’s best.” –Laura Theobald







Ctch Bsnss, GHOST GFS, Electric Cereal, 2015. 

GHOST GFS is a poetic narrative about a manipulative relationship which is first initiated online. Ctch Bsnss vividly chronicles her emotions through her time as a ghost, a shell of her self, who is never truly known by her partner but remains a haunting presence. In GHOST GFS, Ctch Bsnss creates a document of solidarity for those who have experienced similar pains and hauntings.

Catch Business’ GHOST GFS is luminescent. The velocity of these poems creates the illusion of each line manifesting in real-time, revealing a unique voice that’s both painstakingly deliberate and achingly open. Ethereal yet modern, hopeful yet devastating, GHOST GFS is like reading someone’s gchat conversation with the void.– Sonya Vatomsky

This book feels like solitary confinement, like a fever dream in your childhood bed, like a pool of blood in black & white film, like the way the body stains its own clothes, like a mouth after two cigarettes, like a skinned knee like a badge, like a fucked up palm reading, like seriously alone in the dark, like vomiting on a flowerbed, like your best friend bottoming out, like a t-shirt over a bare chest, like an invisible flag waving, like real bravery, like talking to yourself until you fall asleep, like white noise, like the brain recalling as it loses consciousness: fear, death, sex, screens, loneliness. This book makes me feel like I am not real, & that feels really, really good. – Kelly Schirmann

just like me
loud enough so
you can like me
i ask if you’ve cheated
or if you would
and we decide
if you want her
you will tell me
you don’t have to
i hear her
in your pill-dry voice
fringed elements
of our emotions
you say we need to work on us
that there is no me in me now
so what else can i show you?
other than the limbs bent before you
i believed i would never bend again
not for her not for your love of her
and not for a fantasy of three
as if these possibilities
occurred outside of the we
she defined for you
to use on me
lesson plans to reflect
intrigue with your clumsy tongue
invitations carried thru
the nameless crowd
she asked to sit near you
behind a sequined mask
i could’ve become
a chance for you to feel
what she made you feel


Interview: Catch Business


Interview with Ctch Bsnss


Catch Business is the author of GHOST GFS (Electric Cereal, 2015) and ABLE TO / ALWAYS WILL (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016) as well as the chapbook Bye, Product (Be About It, 2015). She is the Founding Poetry Editor of Witch Craft Magazine and Chapbook Coordinator at Sad Spell Press. Tumblr / Twitter / FB

John A. Scott - a prose epic of an alternative WW2.Reading N is a bit like doing a jigsaw that you think is going to give you a woman of Manet’s and instead yields the dislocations and fetishes of a mature Picasso

John A. Scott, N., Brandl & Schlesinger, 2014.



When this extraordinary novel appeared in Australia last April, one reviewer grouped it with "postmodernist maximalist opuses such as Infinite Jest, The Recognitions, 2666, A Naked Singularity and Gravity's Rainbow." The Pynchon reference is probably the most relevant: The novel takes place during the same World War II period, veers from documentary realism to outlandish fantasy, and indicts industrialists as the real warmongers, putting profits over patriotism. And like Pynchon's V., Scott's N is a quest for the meaning of a mysterious initial by an individual driven to expose the secret history of his country. N is an alternative history along the lines of Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here or Philip Roth's The Plot against America: Scott imagines a rightwing takeover of Australia in 1942 and an invasion by the Japanese, both of which entails persecution of the dissenting artists who dominate the first half of the novel. A civil servant named Telford dominates the second half as he begins to realize the nature of the fascist regime for which he works. Linking the two halves are two redhead women who resemble each other, and uniting the lengthy novel is a web of intertextual references to classic works of fiction like Gulliver's Travels, Great Expectations, "The Purloined Letter," Through the Looking-Glass, and Journey to the Center of the Earth, not to mention a few references to Joyce's Ulysses and a cameo by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, sitting out the war in the wilds of Australia (a comic episode conveyed in the style of Great Expectations). Formally and politically, N resembles Dos Passos' USA, alternating between the personal stories of a dozen or so characters and a variety of documents, each in a different font, privileging heterogeneity over the homogeneity demanded by conservative regimes and aesthetics. This bold, important novel is worth seeking out. - STEVEN MOORE


John Scott’s previous novel, Warra Warra (2003), was a ghost story in which the people of an Australian country town were gradually displaced by the dead from an airliner crash. It was possible to enjoy its suspense and horror without recognising it as an allegory of the displacement of Aboriginal people – David Mesher has explicated the parallels and, indeed, the absence of any Aboriginal characters in the town and the Britishness of the ghosts suggest that he is right. Scott’s new novel, N, is longer and more ambitious than any of his previous works, but it develops the interest in the parallel possibilities of Australian history that is evident in Warra Warra. In this case, it is Australia’s experience of the Second World War.
Many readers will be familiar with M. Barnard Eldershaw’s novel, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1947), written while the Second World War was in progress. There, the book’s co-authors, Marjorie Barnard and Florence Eldershaw, imagine a future Australia defeated by the Japanese, with pioneering patriots heading out into the desert to establish a new society. They were, of course, hoping that Australia might become a better society after the war, and they imagined a ‘utopian’ society of the future looking back on the humble ways of ordinary Australians of the past. In the Notes to N, Scott tells us that he has ‘written over’ Erle Cox’s forgotten novel Fool’s Harvest (1939) to imagine the invasion of Sydney, and that he has treated other fictional imaginings of the invasion of Australia, presumably including Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, as ‘non-fictional (historical) texts’. His novel layers fiction upon fiction, though somewhere, deep below the surface, there is a nugget of historical fact.
From August to October 1941, the Australian government was in crisis, with the Country Party’s Arthur Fadden taking over as Prime Minister after the forced resignation of Robert Menzies from the leadership of the United Australia Party. Two independents, Alex Wilson and Arthur Coles, held the balance of power and, in October, they voted against supply to Fadden’s government. It was only the intervention of the Governor-General, Lord Gowrie, that secured a seamless transfer of power to the Labor Party by convincing the independents to support John Curtin. Curtin was not elected to his legendary position as Australia’s wartime leader.
Scott considers the possibilities of this forgotten constitutional crisis. What if one of the independents had died before the confidence vote in Curtin and an Emergency Government, ready to surrender to the Japanese for commercial advantage, had been set up? What if the Japanese had taken the next step and mounted a full attack on Sydney, so that Sydney experienced the wartime travails of Singapore? It is not so far-fetched, and Scott’s speculations are supported by elements of recent Australian political history – a government relying on independent members to continue in power, a powerful business class willing to risk Australian lives for profit, a public with no sympathy for refugees from wars where Australia is participating.
N draws on a range of accounts and fictions about the War to create its speculative version of the years from September 1941 to May 1945, with a brief afterword from October 2001 that lets us know the kind of government Australians experience in the twenty-first century. The novel shifts from third person narrative to the voices of several characters: principally Missy Cunningham, the de facto wife of the Social Realist artist Roy Cunningham, and Robin Telford, a Public Servant working for the inner circle of the Emergency Government. These two voices represent the two main aspects of Australian society that absorb Scott’s attention – the group of anti-fascist artists living in Melbourne, and the machinations of the Vichy-style government of Warren Mahony, directing events from Mount Macedon. Art and politics are the two focuses of the novel, though there are digressions to observe the front line, the treatment of prisoners of the Japanese, and some strange experiments in the outback.
At the beginning at least, the novel moves at a fast pace, shifting from one character to another and drawing on the reader’s knowledge of some of the models for its fiction. Albie Henningsen, the ghost writer for Frank Clune and an ardent proponent of accommodation of the Japanese, is clearly a version of P. R. Stephensen. The artists, Vic Turner, Leon Mischka and Roy Cunningham,  frequent Nibbi’s Leonardo Art bookshop in Little Collins Street and mix in Melbourne’s Bohemia with real figures such as David Strachan, Sam Atyeo and Gino Nibbi. They are all members of the Contemporary Art Society in the same circle as Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker and Russell Drysdale. Reginald Thomas, a fictional minor novelist and playwright, also figures in the narrative as he begins to experience visions of the future and becomes suspect under the new Emergency laws.
The plausibility of this wartime situation drives the novel in its first sections, as the narrative shifts from scenes among the artists, to the bombing of Darwin, to Missy’s account from the domestic edge of the art world. Her husband develops tuberculosis and is institutionalised; Turner, running from his love for Missy, finds himself with Mischka at Tocumwal army camp as part of the Defence Forces. Henningsen risks all in a public meeting where he declares that Australia should recall the AIF, declare national independence from Britain and conclude a separate peace with Japan. In no time, he is incarcerated.
Scott offers a virtuoso demonstration of different genres – Missy’s first person accounts, Turner’s Tocumwal diaries, excerpts from Hansard, newspaper clippings, intelligence files, Henningsen’s desperate letters from prison, extracts from Thomas’s plays. Each section is brief and often in an appropriate typeface. Yet each is carefully written; Scott clearly loves the precise, controlled English of an earlier generation – even Missy always writes in a formal style, usually referring to her son as ‘the boy’. He gives a succinct account of the panic as the Japanese attack Sydney and the consequent stream of refugees to the south. Mahony, as new wartime leader, announces that 27 July 1942 ‘will surely go down in history as the darkest hour of our great Nation’, telling the people that Curtin, most of the Labor opposition and other politicians have fled to New Zealand.
At this point, the novel moves into dystopian speculation about the Japanese occupation and the treacherous Emergency Government. Turner travels north to find the fighting is at a stalemate, with both sides dug in somewhere in the Riverina. Missy’s brother, the patriotic army officer John Menadue, provides some insight into the overseas war, and eventually deserts to become a guerrilla in the Australian countryside. Turner is captured and forced to endure privations similar to those on the Thai-Burma railway line. Missy, left alone with her son in Melbourne, observes the repression directed at artists – one of the first acts of the government is to wall in the area of Melbourne where the artists hang out, creating a ghetto.

*

N is a sprawling, inventive, engaging novel that draws in a large cast of characters and a major national crisis. But by its mid-point it appears to have left its author’s control. Missy’s position in Melbourne gives her no vantage point to add much to the national narrative, and her menfolk have dispersed to incarcerations of various kinds. All of them – Thomas, Henningsen, Turner, Cunningham, Menadue – have little means of knowing what is going on in their immediate vicinity, let alone the nation or the wider world. A new voice, that of Robin Telford, assistant to the Secretary of the War Cabinet, takes the stage and he increasingly dominates the book. Despite his proximity to power, Telford has little grasp on national events until he is approached by the widow of Norman Cole, the dead independent, to investigate Cole’s death. He spends most of the later part of the novel searching missing files, riffling through documents, and occasionally visiting some of the other characters, such as the visionary Thomas, now kept in appalling deprivation in an institution for the insane.
The novel moves towards the detective or thriller genre. The problem is that, by this point, the Japanese have taken over most of the nation. The disposal of Cole to ensure their easy access to Australia seems a minor issue, given the crisis that ensues. Even after he has the facts, Telford is in no position to bring any justice to bear on the situation – the only resolution can be the defeat of Japan by the United States forces, which duly occurs. So the novel seems to be pursuing a pointless narrative trail.
Scott’s very inventiveness, the way he finds prolific possibilities in every situation, and his love for ‘writing over’ the literature of the past – Swift, Sterne, Joyce and Poe are specifically invoked – means that the novel moves in many directions at once, until it comes to rest on Telford’s rather stilted and silly accounts of his wanderings in a tunnel below the Prime Minister’s house in Mount Macedon. Telford describes it himself: ‘a garish tale limned by a scribbler in pompous style’. Like Telford entering the world behind his mirror, Scott seems to enter a labyrinth of stories, all apparently equally interesting to him, though not equally revealing to readers – and too many of them are dead ends. In one section, Missy’s son Ross speaks for the first time, suddenly taking us into what seems to be a brilliant pastiche of Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850). Ross is never heard from again. The most recent issue of Southerly contains a 45-page story, ‘André Breton in Melbourne (1942)’ which, Scott tells us, was originally part of the manuscript of this novel. This, too, is engaging and witty fiction that demonstrates the author’s ability to imitate other writers and invoke their philosophy. Though it is more playfully surrealist than the published novel, it also includes incarceration and a journey through a labyrinthine underworld. It is a relief that Scott excised it from the novel. There are many more sections that might have gone the same way.
While it is voluminous, N is not encyclopaedic, and the absences in its vision of Australia in surrender become more obvious as the novel progresses. It offers us an exciting glimpse of the attack on Sydney from the perspective of a journalist called Walter Burton, but no other encounter with the battle front, and Burton never appears again in the novel. Its focus on Melbourne means that it can give little account of Australia under occupation, though it summarises horrendous details of rape and murder in the north, based on accounts of the fall of Nanking. Vic Turner and the other captured Australian soldiers suffer the deprivations that Richard Flanagan made the central scenes of his recent The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013), but Scott merely touches on these – perhaps thinking them familiar to most Australians, or a horrific reality too far for a hyperfiction.
Barnard Eldershaw’s interest in the lives of working Australian people is nowhere here: N is about the artistic and the political classes, not the working class. The fascism of the Emergency Government is most evident in its repression of artistic life, beginning with the compiling of a register of artists, poets and writers of fiction, and dissenting intellectuals. There is no hint that the Australians of the suburbs or working city are suffering similar deprivations of liberty and material benefit.
Scott conveys the decadence and cruelty of the Mahony regime through some grotesque ‘national’ spectacles. To entertain his Japanese guests and an apparently blood-hungry Melbourne public, Mahony commissions a re-enactment of the Gallipoli landing to be performed in the Melbourne Cricket Ground before the running of the Melbourne Cup (also at the MCG):
Given the gargantuan task of constructing the battle-site, the fighting was over remarkably quickly. That the Australians were using live ammunition in their rifles proved a decisive factor in the outcome; the Turks, piteously firing off blank after blank, found themselves overrun in little more time than it took to scale the cliff-face. Indeed the scoreboard, which had been given over to record the numbers of the dead on either side, was hard-pressed to keep up its tally of the enemy. ANZAC losses were light, with most casualties resulting from the collapse of part of the papier-maché cliff-top during an impromptu attempt to plant the Australian flag. The success of the Australian attack did guarantee however there would be ample time for lunch before the running of the Cup, at two.
The horse race, though, becomes apocalyptic with four horses taking to the air, and the Prime Minister suffering premonitions of the world’s end. A few pages later, Telford tells us about another symbolic spectacle orchestrated by Mahony – this time a boxing match in the ballroom of his grand Mount Macedon house between an Australian private and a red kangaroo. The kangaroo kills the soldier and, in the second bout, a Japanese soldier kills the kangaroo. These scenes are set-pieces, symbolic tableaux rather than integral parts of a narrative; they have no apparent consequences.
Readers may be familiar with this kind of satirical, speculative, symbolic fiction that claims to offer political insight into actual national experience. The late Gabriel Garcia Marquez set writers on this path and others, such as Salman Rushdie, have demonstrated its application to the madness of repressive regimes across the world.  David Brooks invokes Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) in his back-cover comments on this book. In Australia, Rodney Hall attempted something similar with his novel, Kisses of the Enemy (1987), another bloated dystopian vision of an Australian fascist government. Speculative fictions can be both satirically entertaining and politically insightful, even lethal in their effects on a real world. But the political base for such fantastic treatments needs to be secure before the invention takes off.  Scott offers a narrow political perspective where the greatest crime is the repression of art and artists. In N he proposes that artists are at the frontline of political freedom. Lock them up (even lunatics like Henningsen), and a nation is in trouble.
The conviction that political events exist primarily as material for art is stated blatantly in the first pages of the novel when Vic Turner visits the ship, Ville de Nancy, which is full of refugee children from Europe and has been turned back by Australia. Turner draws the ship and the children peering over its side, aware of their impending fate. But his excitement comes from finding a subject:
He will paint this ragged ship. He will paint the darkened faces. He will paint the rust; and the red of it shall be his never-ending accusation. And he sees that moment how the painting will be the measure of meaning, the act against which his life will be measured, irrational and doubt-ridden though his attempts might appear. Such that, on his very death bed, should he find someone close to him, a voice whispering, What does it mean? What is the answer? his one reply, inescapably, will be that single, fierce imperative—Paint!
Here ‘Paint!’ and Turner’s urgent search for the precise colour of the rust can only appear a self-indulgent and futile response to cruelty and injustice. In a discussion with Mischka, Turner admits that he envies the oppression of others because it gives them the authority to create. Scott, too, may be suffering from oppression-envy – he needs to invent urgent times as the subject for his art. His ‘Artists Against Fascism’ represent an incipient modernism allied with communism that was suppressed in Australia, denounced in the novel by Mahony’s Minister for Culture for ‘degenerate images [that] suggest only weakness and an escape into the world of dreams’, but Scott’s version of them makes them distant from any political solidarity with workers, let alone international justice.
It is obvious that the fate of the Ville de Nancy and Australians’ support for the deportation of refugees also refer to the current attitude of Australians to asylum seekers. In case we miss it, Scott ends his novel with an Afterword recounting a version of the Children Overboard incident of 2001 and the contemporary Prime Minister’s response, including his belief that the alliance with America will mean that ‘Together they will rule for a thousand years’. So the novel ends with a clear political statement about current Australia and its relationship to American imperialism.
Scott, like his Artists Against Fascism, takes a political stand. Yet the priorities of the novel are artistic rather than political. It is a novel about art-making, particularly reading, storytelling and imaginative invention. As well as the artists, the novel is full of writers, some apparently vying with Scott to create the fantastic elements of the narrative: Thomas cannot keep from envisioning events in government; Henningsen imagines an inland sea and a ship, another Nancy, for Burke and Wills to sail on; a character call Wood-Conroy seems to be manipulating political events from deep inside government intelligence; Mahony believes that his autobiography is needed to establish his legend. Then there are the literary models underlying Scott’s narrative: for a while Poe’s ‘Purloined Letter’ takes over Telford’s account. Missy’s voice is refreshingly ordinary and domestic – but she is only a woman and not even an artist, let alone an intellectual. When it is revealed that her name is Hannah, it is difficult not to feel that Scott has diminished her deliberately by giving her a childish pet name.
Perhaps, this is no more than the exasperation of a reader coming to the conclusion of a long novel, full of virtuoso writing and some brilliant ideas, only to find that it ends in obvious, even easy, political comment. Scott writes with a seemingly effortless command of language, and his knowledge of literature and Australian cultural history is immense. His debunking of national mythologies about selfless Australian participation in the two World Wars is an important counter to the current national self-congratulation and complacency about the past. Certainly, his speculation that, if a threat such as the Japanese invasion arose in our present nation, the Australian public and its politicians might well capitulate for commercial advantage gives pause for thought.
Yet Scott’s very inventiveness tempts him away from the issue at hand, so that the layers of literary parody and reference become important for themselves. As Thomas tells Telford: ‘You won’t find the evidence you need in a work of the imagination’. But you can find stimulating ideas that bear on the evidence. N has some marvellous ideas, but too much interest in other literary possibilities to give them a chance. Philip Roth’s more modest speculation about an anti-Semitic Second World War America in The Plot Against America (2004) shows how speculation about just one historical alternative – in his novel, the election of Charles Lindbergh rather than Franklin D. Roosevelt as U.S. President – can be enough to create a frighteningly plausible world. Roth, of course, chooses a more domestic and realist focus for his novel. Scott sees too many alternative possibilities, too many fantasies, too many narrative layers, to keep us convinced. - Susan Lever


Back in the late 1960s when drugs and Vietnam were all the go, when Albert Langer fomented revolution and Elijah Moshinsky directed plays, Monash University sported a young poet called John Scott. It was a good period and a good place for poetry: Scott’s fellow Monash poets included Alan Wearne and Laurie Duggan. But the man who looked and sounded like a poet, the one with the Dylan Thomas gift, was Scott.
He won the Victorian premier’s literary award for poetry with St. Clair and for fiction – though it is at some far dark jangled sado-masochistic edge of poetic form – with What I Have Written.
Since then he has written fiction, some of it ordinary. Now he has produced a huge prose epic in ambitious high gloss often poetical prose, and it is like nothing on earth.
N is a novel of the Second World War set in Australia except that the war it reconstitutes and retrieves has only an incidental relationship to the war of history. Reading N is a bit like doing a jigsaw that you think is going to give you a woman of Manet’s and instead yields the dislocations and fetishes of a mature Picasso.
This is a counter-factual World War II and it is also, to complicate matters, a piece of fiction in which the trappings of realism, often under or overdone, are mere means to some end that defies the imagination.

We seem to be in the company of a group of painters, But then plunged into the mystery of a member of parliament on whom democratic government seems to depend who is mysteriously got rid of – by whom and to what end? – and why is his wife playing her elaborate games of flirtation with a poetical prune of an investigator.
Meanwhile, the painters are being dragged to sanatoria, whether to be treated for TB or be exterminated remains a question. One of them ends up in the army, then, in the hands of the Japanese. Oh yes, and the big surprise is that a hubristic madman seizes power, having arrested Curtin and Menzies and co. And he is a looming fascist as well as a loon and he is into the business of collaborating with the Japanese invader.N is a wildly original, deeply odd attempt at large-scale, free-wheeling narrative – and anti-narrative – form by a writer who defies the conventions of traditional exposition and narrative clarity and is forever disappearing down byways of his own invention. So it is impossible to read the narrative slowly for its poetic savour without feeling you are falling into the dark and backwards abysm of time but if you read it on fast forward you get confused about what’s happening to whom when. What’s not in doubt is that we are in the presence of a literary power.
What does have plenty of salt and savour is the detail of the unfolding: Ivan Menzies can play KoKo in The Mikado because the Japs have departed, the black GIs have scars on their bodies from whippings. The sadism of the Japanese camps is a thing of ghastly wonder but the evocation of life in Australian detention is mindless, bludgeoning, awful beyond belief – and all the more so for the complacent, conformist grin that goes along with it.
N is a large format book, beautifully designed in constructivist fashion, its single black consonant on a sea of dark blue. It is a byzantine monstrosity of a book, with no space for conventional readability or a story that’s transparent or clear.
It stands in a tradition that includes Martin Johnston’s 1983 novel Cicada Gambit and it dissipates any easy narrative flow in the all but universal realist mode while presenting like a youthful frailty.
This is a large-scale work in something with a family resemblance to prose that arrests its readership but swoops and staggers under the burden of a formal waywardness, a wilful formlessness that can make the reader gasp as she does with Pale Fire or Gravity’s Rainbow though the overall effect is more suburbanised, lamer and more Australian than either of those parallels would suggest.
N is discernibly a shaggy dog story about the war and the memory of war that also points to the fate of every asylum seeker of the soul. It seems affected by the French new novel of 50 years ago but it also seems to have something of the cracked quality of those old Australian windbags Xavier Herbert and David Ireland.
In any case it is something and no one is likely to forget its interminable nightmare articulation. - Peter Craven


arketed as a “speculative historical thriller”, N is unashamedly ambitious: it’s a brick at 600 pages, and it grapples with those grand themes of war, love, art and death.
Set in an alternative Australia during the wartime years of 1942-45, the northernmost states quickly become occupied by the Japanese army, and dual giant trenches horizontally bisect the continent (some documentary painting by a war artist takes place in the no man’s land between).
The suspicious death of a politician results in a hung national parliament, and the right-wing opposition stages a coup, else “Democracy may well be lost forever”. New South Wales has been decimated by bombings, and the country’s administration falls to Melbourne (though it’s not long before politicians hurriedly abscond to nearby Mount Macedon). This corrupt new government spends the vast majority of its energy attempting to convince the public that the previous government was corrupt. As far as plot goes, all the necessary elements are present, snicking into place.
The characters of N fit just as neatly: politicians, artists, public servants, activists and soldiers, all interacting and playing at being at least semi-believable humans. Some of them fall in love and some don’t, some keep making art and some stop, some fight the system and some acquiesce.
Things happen to these characters – a polite amount of narrative unscrambling as pages are turned – and then it all stops at the last, leaving the reader with the right to ask the author, Why? Regrettably, the answer seems to be never much more than, Because I can. John A. Scott has invested his very considerable writerly energies in the “work” of this work of art, but between the flashes of potential we are left wondering what could have been.
N is clearly in thrall to postmodernist maximalist opuses such as Infinite Jest, The Recognitions, 2666, A Naked Singularity and Gravity’s Rainbow. You can tick off the elements: the irony and dark humour, the abundance of characters, the intertwining narrative threads, the temporal nonlinearity, the unexpected spurts of magic realism, and the employment of both real and imitation documentary materials. Structurally and stylistically, N has it all. But unlike all those works mentioned, it lacks impact. Label the absence what you will – substance, weight, heart, et cetera – but ultimately, here in this book are hundreds of pages of not much more than words. Rarely does a passage accelerate the breathing, or tense the neck muscles, or cause the curling of toes.
Not even the love stories cause anything to quicken (except perhaps the skimming of paragraphs). Missy Cunningham and Vic Turner’s overwrought affair is not much more than romance pulp, while widow Esther Cole and Robin Telford’s relationship is sedate, no matter its eventual twist.
The shortfall is a shame, because the setting of an imagined Australia has plenty of possibility. Gerald Murnane, Peter Carey and Wayne Macauley have postulated subtle “what if” scenarios that invoke a response, and there’s no time like the present for some more of this, please. Scott does endeavour to draw lines between history and the current day, especially with his clunky concluding few pages directly likening the migrant situation of World War II to the John Howard era (and in particular the “children overboard” affair, with the only illustration coming five pages from the end – a grainy photograph of the MV Tampa with souls in water surrounding).
But reality tweaked in fiction is a kind of legerdemain: it must be executed with great skill. What’s missing in N is the sensation of truth, the feeling in the reader that, even if completely farcical, the proposed events and settings are real.
Scott is an accomplished writer: he’s won Premier’s awards and has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin twice. Here again, his sentences are on the whole pristine, with clever metaphors, bold imagery and heterogeneous vocabulary. But really, who wants pristine to the utter exclusion of grime? Immaculate literature is forgettable, while grime sticks and riles. The reader of N yearns for some blemishes, some maniacal exuberance, some unorthodoxy, to grab them and drag them down into the muck.
Problems also abide above the sentence level. Many of the characters sound implausibly similar and they speak with clean poeticism, no matter their station or situation. (“I’ll leave direct from there,” says Roy, the social realist artist. “How it still raced, my loud-beating heart,” thinks Telford.)
Yet perhaps some of the staidness could have been avoided – without wanting to resort to that ill-advised catchcry of “This book needs an edit!” – if N was about half the length. The bigness of a book has nothing to do with the amount of paper on which it is printed.
It’s prudent to compare N to another recent Australian novel set in the same period, Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Flanagan’s work, while attempting absolutely nothing new or even modern in terms of style or form, also draws on historical events to inform its narrative of loss and love. Because of its unflinching approach, it is brutal, forthright and, most importantly, deeply affecting. N, with its tricks and winks, forgets that lasting ideas need to be embedded deep in the reader’s emotional core.
As a long work of historiographic metafiction, N could be admired as a decent attempt to force entry of an unmistakably Australian book into the Big Postmodernist Novel Club. But because it doesn’t even try to bring something new to postmodernist storytelling, and because it is unnecessarily bloated, N disappoints overall. - www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/2014/04/30/john-scotts-n/1397829600


I remember that when I finished reading War and Peace, I didn’t really want to read anything else for a while because of the sheer big-ness of Tolstoy. I felt somewhat the same way after finishing John A. Scott’s big 600 page book N. It’s not War and Peace to be sure (although that certainly sums up the content), but both books are large in their scope, long in their pages, and peopled with memorable characters. And for me, I just wanted to luxuriate in their big vision for a while, before turning again to the small-canvas books that seem to fill the shelves today.
N. opens in war-time, amongst a bohemian group of artists and writers who gather in the coffee shops and studios of inner-city Melbourne. There are multiple narrators and at first I found myself wondering how I was going to keep them all straight, having forgotten completely that there was a Dramatis Personae at the front! But the book settles into the stories of four or five main characters who each bring in a constellation of smaller characters. One of these is Missy Cunningham, disillusioned and unhappy wife of Roy Cunningham the Social Realist painter; there is Reginald Thomas, clairvoyant writer and latter-day Tiresias who writes up his visions into radio plays; Albie Henningson, a writer of far-right political persuasion; another is Robin Telford, public servant in the Parliamentary Secretary’s office.
War-time politics are on a knife-edge. The balance of power is held by two independents, and when one of them is found dead in a public toilet-block, Sir Warren Mahony, already a member of Fadden’s War Council, takes up his position as Prime Minister of the Emergency Cabinet. The widow of the murdered independent politicial, Norman Cole, approaches the public servant Robin Telford, asking him to dig deeper into the death of her husband. Britain and the United States withdraw their attention and military support to the northern hemisphere; the AIF returns home but is no match for the Japanese, who quickly spread down from the north. The Mahony government sues for a truce with the Japanese, and becomes a Vichy-like government operating out of a large house at Mount Macedon. Critics of the government, activists and members of the intelligentsia are silenced or disappear completely, and out of the direct sight of the Mahony government, the Japanese inflict cruelties on soldiers and citizens alike.
The book combines real life characters with fictional ones. The writer Frank Clune is there, but his ghost writer, the real-life P. R. ‘Inky’ Stephenson is rendered through the fictional Albie Henningsen. There are real artists combined with fictional ones, and the Social Realist art show that brings the wrath of the Mahony Government to bear against the artists has resonances with the activities of the real-life Anti-Fascist Art Exhibition in Melbourne. Even the whole political scenario of two independents in a war-time cabinet echoes the real-life Arthur Coles (of G.J.Coles fame- and a name very similar to Scott’s fictional Norman Cole) and Alexander Wilson who voted in 1941 to bring down Fadden’s government.
The narrative voices and genres that mark the different characters are playful and well-rendered. Missy Cunningham’s sections evoked for me the writing of M. Barnard Eldershaw and even reminded me a little of Neville Shute’s On the Beach.   Robin Telford, the public servant, speaks in careful bureaucratese, while Albie Henningsen is fervent, passionate and driven. The whole thing is a pastiche, and a baggy pastiche at that, but I loved it for its sweep and noisiness.
It is appallingly violent in places, and I recognized situations from Iris Chang’s horrific Rape of Nanking. At times the disappearances and conspiracies stretched credulity, but they shouldn’t in these days of disappeared boats and the ‘you don’t need to know about that’ of our refugee policy.   It was no surprise to me at all when Scott breaks out of historical fiction mode at the end of the book to comment on such things and remind us that this ‘what-if’ scenario is not so absolutely far-fetched.
I’m a fan of John Scott, and I’ve read most of his books over the years: the erotic narrative trickiness of What I Have Written; the bleak flatness of The Architect; the carefully rendered setting of Warra Warra. I can’t say that I’ve always felt that I understood the book at the end, and must admit to sometimes being bemused by the digressions and spin-offs.   But I don’t know why he’s not numbered up there with the Flanagans and Careys, because, like them, he writes across a number of genres and takes risks. And like them, he keeps me coming back for more. - The Resident Judge of Port Phillip


John A. Scott’s long-awaited novel, his first in over a decade, is set in an imagined, though frighteningly familiar, Australia. It is the early 1940s and Melbourne is a fractious city. A corrupt right-wing government has recently seized a balance of power and the country is at war against a southward-moving Japanese army.
N is both a brilliant political thriller and the telling of two different, but equally affecting, love stories. The alternating narratives – of modern artists, implicated public servants and defective soldiers – spread and intersect like secret underground tunnels, carefully mapped by Scott. Navigating these, it’s impossible to ignore Scott’s contemporary subtext. In this, N compares to the work of Alexis Wright, for its play with genre and strange, folkloric landscapes, and also to Peter Carey, with its mischievous narrative underpinning. Scott writes from a multitude of characters’ perspectives and in changing narrative styles, adopting the techniques of documentary realism through to prose poetry. The novel is richer, and clearer, for these shifts.
N is particularly animated by its surreal moments; for one example, the hallucinations of war artist, Vic Turner, are visceral and unsettling in their force. Though, equally elegant are Scott’s descriptions of the every day – the changing weather, a child playing with his toy soldiers as his mother watches on.
Scott has crafted a book of grand scope and meticulous intricacies, a weighty, significant contribution to the catalogue of Australian literature. Simply put, this novel is a tour de force. The work commands a careful reading – those who ride with the twisting furrows will find that N is nothing short of superb. -  Belle Place


John A. Scott chats to David Brooks about N

Robert Lowry - The anarchy and boredom American soldiers experience in overseas army camps are brought to sharp focus in this tense, powerful novel about a photo reconnaissance wing in Italy

Robert Lowry, Casualty, New Directions, 1946.


The anarchy and boredom American soldiers experience in overseas army camps are brought to sharp focus in this tense, powerful novel about a photo reconnaissance wing in Italy. With the coming of the first snowfall to San Cialo, the war stops as far as the wing is concerned and the grievances and discontent of American GIs precipitate the action of a story tough, exciting, and new.


James Reidel: Robert Lowry (in Review of Contemporary Fiction)











In 1942 Lowry was drafted, and served three years in the US military during World War II, during which he saw combat in North Africa and Italy. After his discharge, he divorced his first wife, wrote critically acclaimed fiction (his fans included Ernest Hemingway), and penned an autobiographical novel (The Big Cage). Lowry was hired by James Laughlin as office manager at New Directions Publishing in September 1945. Leaving in Fall 1946 to concentrate on writing full-time, Lowry came under the influence of the editor George Davis and, for a time, flourished as rising new voice in American fiction. His books and short stories in the late 1940s and 1950s recounted his wartime experiences. He also wrote colorfully about life in New York's Greenwich Village during the emergence of the beatnik scene.
His published works included Casualty (1946), Find Me in Fire (1948; cover teaser: "She Was Young But Ripe For Love"), and The Violent Wedding (1953). His short stories appeared in Mademoiselle, New Directions, Collier's, Horizon, The American Mercury, and other periodicals. His short fiction was collected in three volumes, The Wolf That Fed Us (Doubleday, 1949), Happy New Year, Kamerades! (Doubleday, 1954), and Party of Dreamers (Fleet Publishing Corp., 1962).
During the 1950s Lowry penned book reviews for Time magazine and the Saturday Review of Literature. In 1950, he won the O. Henry Award for his short story "Be Nice to Mr. Campbell."^[1] Another Lowry story, "Layover in El Paso," was adapted for a 1959 feature film entitled That Kind of Woman, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Sophia Loren.^[2]
Lowry also wrote screenplays for such dramatic TV series as Schlitz Playhouse, G.E. True Theater, Starlight Theater, and Actor's Studio.^[3]

Lowry had two short stories published in Mademoiselle magazine that were illustrated by his former Little Man Press partner, James Flora: "Little Baseball World" (September 1946) and "The Mammoth Molar" (September 1951).

- wikipedia.org

John Douglas Millar examines writing in the context of contemporary art, and its ability to respond to our most pressing issues: the debt economy, global violence, and a redefinition of identity politics, among them. In this important volume, Millar considers how to proceed after a paradigm shift away from the dusty halls of October-generation critique

John Douglas Millar, Brutalist Readings: Essays on Literature, Sternberg Press, 2016.
johndouglasmillar.blogspot.hr/



John Douglas Millar’s Brutalist Readings: Essays on Literature is a significant intervention into recent debates on the place of literature and writing in the context of contemporary art. Featuring essays on the highs and lows of the conceptual turn in poetics, avant-garde literary genealogies, and monographic pieces on Paul B. Preciado, Chris Kraus, and Pierre Guyotat, among others, Brutalist Readings explores the radical histories of writing, as well as its potential now.




In collaboration with Sternberg Press, e-flux conversations is pleased to excerpt "Cages in Search of Birds," the introduction to the second part of Millar's "Brutalist Readings," with responses from Kathryn Elkin, Nick Thurston, and McKenzie Wark.

Ananda Devi - Set in a poor section of Port-Louis, Mauritius, this prize-winning novel is a poetic and intense exploration of young lives thrown away by society. Told in four different voices and haunted by the specter of Rimbaud, Devi explores, the violence, identity, and dreams of young people living discarded lives

Ananda Devi, Eve Out of Her Ruins, Trans. by Jeffrey Zuckermann, Deep Vellum, 2016.
excerpt


A harrowing account of the hidden violent reality of life in her native country by the figurehead of Mauritian literature.


With brutal honesty and poetic urgency, Ananda Devi relates the tale of four young Mauritians trapped in their country’s endless cycle of fear and violence: Eve, whose body is her only weapon and source of power; Savita, Eve’s best friend, the only one who loves Eve without self-interest, who has plans to leave but will not go alone; Saadiq, gifted would-be poet, inspired by Rimbaud, in love with Eve; Clélio, belligerent rebel, waiting without hope for his brother to send for him from France.
Eve Out of Her Ruins is a heartbreaking look at the dark corners of the island nation of Mauritius that tourists never see, and a poignant exploration of the construction of personhood at the margins of society. Awarded the prestigious Prix des cinq continents upon publication as the best book written in French outside of France, Eve Out of Her Ruins is a harrowing account of the violent reality of life in her native country by the figurehead of Mauritian literature.
The book features an original introduction by Nobel Prize winner J.M.G. Le Clézio, who declares Devi “a truly great writer.”


“Set in a poor section of Port-Louis, Mauritius, this prize-winning novel is a poetic and intense exploration of young lives thrown away by society. Told in four different voices and haunted by the specter of Rimbaud, Devi explores, the violence, identity, and dreams of young people living discarded lives. For fans of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing and Jean Genet.” — Josh Cook


“The emblematic figurehead of Mauritian literature.” — Le Monde


“Turning her back on the illusion of eternal youth, Devi focuses unflinchingly on that tipping point in life that only women can understand, since where sex is concerned men and women must forever remain “mutually unintelligible.” Yes, here is a truly great writer, since when we finish Devi’s book we are unlikely to know what has motivated her to write such a story, such a cry of protest. But its music, its powerful grip on the reader…give us a glimpse inside the cave where once a love-struck monk, under the spell of the dark angel of the imagination, succeeded in creating the miracle all artists dream of, reshaping reality according to his desires.” — J.M.G. Le Clézio


“Devi writes about terrible and bitter events with a soft, delicate voice.” — Le Figaro


“One of the major literary voices of the Indian Ocean.” — PEN American Centre


“The work of Ananda Devi is both tragic and poetic. Haunted by the issues of exclusion, of otherness, deviance and suffering, it denounces the stifling climate of a society…it stands against any form of rejection and offers a genuine commitment…for the recognition of otherness.” — Véronique Bragard

Eve walks by, her hair like foamy night, in her skin-tight jeans, and the others snigger and suck in their teeth in lust, but I – I just want to kneel down. She doesn’t look at us. She isn’t afraid of us. She has her solitude for armor.

Saad is one of the four teen-aged narrators who take turns telling us about their lives and interconnected friendships in the poor, gang-ridden Troumaron neighborhood of Port Louis, the capital of Mauritius. In Troumaron, “one day we wake up and the future has disappeared.” Saad, who worships Eve, has also fallen under the spell of Rimbaud and writes poetry on the walls of his room at home. Ananda Devi’s Eve Out of Her Ruins is a novel of conversations, emotions, aspirations, and setbacks. Forget where it takes place or the nationality of the author. This is a novel of haunting language with a powerful message about gender and violence.
Eve is the remarkable character at the center of Eve Out of Her Ruins. She is constructed from the different perspectives of Devi’s four narrators – the poet Saad, Clélio, who has already been to prison for his misdeeds, Savika, a young woman who is determined to give Eve her unquestioning love, and Eve herself. Eve is a student by day and prostitute by night. At home her father upbraids and beats her while her mother (“a small pile of shame”) weakly sits by. For years, boys and men have had their way with Eve. But Eve thinks she has found a way to avoid the fate that seems to await her and her friends. She has developed a kind of mind/body separation that allows her to think she is using the men who use her body.
I am in permanent negotiation. My body is a stop-over. Entire sections have been explored. Over time, they blossom with burns and cracks. Everyone leaves some trace, marks his territory.
I am seventeen years old and I don’t give a fuck. I’m buying my future.
I am transparent. The boys look at me like they can see me inside out. The girls avoid me like a sickness. My reputation’s been sealed.
I’m alone. But I’ve known for a long time the value of solitude. I walk straight ahead, untouchable. Nobody can read anything on my blank face, except what I choose to show. I’m not like the others. I don’t belong to Troumaron. The neighborhood didn’t steal my soul like the other drones that live there. This skeleton has a secret life sealed in its belly. It’s carved by the sharp edge of refusal. Neither the past nor the future matter; they don’t exist. And the present doesn’t either.…
I protect myself. I know how to protect myself from men. I’m the predator here.
They take me. They bring me back. Sometimes, they rough me up. No matter. It’s juts a body. It can be fixed. That’s what it’s for.
But Saad, Clélio, and Savika see a different Eve. As Savika puts it, “It hurts me to see her so fragile when she thinks she’s so strong.” When Savika meets Eve at school, she knows instantly what she must do.
I went weak. I was riveted by her sadness. Through the open doors of her sides, her life was escaping. I had to console her, take her in my arms like a mother or a lover, and make her forget, however briefly, why she was shaking.
Savika and Eve build a bond that is safe, loving, and beyond men. Here is Eve on their first kiss:
The taste of her mouth wasn’t at all like those of men. It was so gentle that I closed my eyes and savored it like candied papaya.
Outside the purview of men, we became happy, playful, for a few minutes.
Eve Out of Her Ruins delves into the seemingly innate differences between the sexes. As Eve puts it, “The two sexes don’t have the same heritage. We’re not born with the same burdens.”
What do men give in exchange for a body? They don’t give their own body; a man has to take. They protect themselves. They watch their shadows. We’re butterflies caught in a net, even at our most exultant, even at our most resistant. We’re stolen bodies.
Eve knows that the danger men pose to women arises from man’s need to possess. “Men’s hands take hold of you before even having touched you. Once their thoughts turn toward you, they’ve already possessed you.”
But Eve’s attempt to carefully control her life spins out of control when Savita is brutally murdered, her body dumped into a trash bin.
Saad, the poet, even though he, too, belongs to a gang out of self-preservation, can step out of his gender and see the ugly tendencies that men can have. He realizes that some men “are monsters hidden behind ordinary appearances.” And, looking at Eve, he “can understand why she couldn’t say I love you to a man.” In the end, it is only Saad who seems to have a path out of the ruins through his poetry. “I write in order to not go crazy.”
Eve Out of Her Ruins is yet another impressive book from Deep Vellum Publishing. Jeffrey Zuckermann did the translation from the 2006 French original Éve des ses décombres. Devi’s book was made into a French-language film titled Les Enfants de Troumaron in 2012. Two different versions of the trailer can be seen on YouTube and on Vimeo. - sebald.wordpress.com/2016/08/22/eve-out-of-her-ruins/

Currently & Emotion: Translations - both a collection of striking original work and an insightful and provocative reflection on contemporary practices of translation

Currently & Emotion: Translations, Sophie Collins, ed., Test Centre, 2016.

The anthology presents a varied and carefully curated selection of works which foreground the translator, and, by showcasing a broad range of approaches, seeks to challenge dominant perceptions of translation as an uncomplicated literary service that simply facilitates access to foreign and/or historical texts.

Currently & Emotion is comprised of 29 extended excerpts from book- or pamphlet-length translation projects (rather than one-off translations of individual poems), either unpublished or published since 2010. The selection leans towards translations by and from female translators and authors, and towards work that shows awareness of, and that negotiates in interesting ways, the complex power dynamics inherent to every act of translation.

Currently & Emotion is both a collection of striking original work and an insightful and provocative reflection on contemporary practices of translation. The anthology aims not to provide a definitive thesis on what the process and function of translation should be, but to encourage discussion about its challenges and possibilities, and the complex political and emotional issues with which it unavoidably engages.

In addition to the poems, the anthology includes extended introductory material by Sophie Collins, a preface by Erín Moure and an afterword by Zoë Skoulding. The excerpts are accompanied by short contextualising notes based on discussions with the translators and (where possible) the authors of the source texts.

The book is intricately designed by Traven T. Croves, printed in three spot colours which distinguish between the different layers of text – all translations in bronze, source texts in red, and secondary material in black. The cover artwork is by Stephanie Hier.

Contributors: Sophie Collins (ed.), Christian Hawkey, Georg Trakl, Don Mee Choi, Caroline Bergvall, Lisa Robertson, Sawako Nakayasu, Sagawa Chika, Erín Moure, Chus Pato, Molly Weigel, Jorge Santiago Perednik, Holly Pester, Sonja Kravanja, Tomaž Šalamun, Rosmarie Waldrop, Elfriede Czurda, Chantal Wright, Yōko Tawada, Zoë Skoulding, Rachael Allen, Linh Dinh, Mien Dang, Nguyen Quoc Chanh, Sandra Doller, Eric Suchère, Khairani Barokka, Brian Henry, Catherine Petit & Paul Buck, Colette Thomas, Anne Carson, Tara Bergin, Lawrence Venuti, J. V. Foix, Oli Hazzard, Vahni Capildeo, Hilary Kaplan, Angélica Freitas, Eliza Griswold, Karen Van Dyck, Uljana Wolf and Sophie Seita.

Eeva-Liisa Manner - Like a spruce cone, a child falls into a world where logical disorder replaces magical order, and there you are―in trouble, we’ll agree

Eeva-Liisa Manner, Girl on Heaven’s Pier, Translated by Terhi Kuusisto, Dalkey Archive Press, 2016.

Originally published in 1951, this novel tells of a young girl living with her deeply religious grandparents in pre-war Vyborg―before it became part of the Soviet Union. Leena hates school, loves music and rain, and wanders through the town in a state of childish enchantment. “Like a spruce cone, a child falls into a world where logical disorder replaces magical order, and there you are―in trouble, we’ll agree.” The world she inhabits features multiple layers of reality, and this is reflected in the novel’s artful narrative: life and death are reflections of each other, and reality is merely a map of the individual’s inner world. Through the naive perspective of a young girl, the book addresses deep philosophical concerns in simple, lucid prose.




Eeva-Liisa Manner (1921–1995) is one of the most celebrated postwar Finnish poets. In addition to fifteen volumes of poetry, she published several volumes of prose and wrote plays for radio and the theater. Her collection Tämä matka (This Journey, 1956) is considered a landmark work of Finnish modernism. She was also a translator of English and German literature. Manner received numerous national prizes and awards for her work, including the Aleksis Kivi Prize (1967) and the Finnish State Award for Literature (1961).