Michael Coffey - In this book, part memoir, part criticism, and part poetry, Coffey deftly weaves multiple voices into a fractured but unified whole that strongly resonates with the digital age. Highly addictive, fiercely challenging, and lusciously readable—if you ever wondered what Beckett might sound like in the twenty-first century, this is it

 

Michael Coffey, Samuel Beckett Is Closed, OR

Books, 2018.

http://michaelcoffeyauthor.com/

excerpt: http://michaelcoffeyauthor.com/excerpt/

A powerful, genre-defying meditation, with Beckett at its origin, that touches on mysteries as varied as literary celebrity, baseball, and why we feel the need to be cruel to one another

Like a Picasso or Einstein, Samuel Beckett is one of those few paradigm-shifting figures who reshaped how we think and create.

Following the schema of Beckett’s unpublished “Long Observation of the Ray,” of which only six manuscript pages exist, Michael Coffey here interleaves multiple narratives, and does so in sentence units of increasing and diminishing quantities, according to an arithmetic sequence laid out by Beckett in his notes. This rhythmic interpenetration of themes and genres—personal memoir, literary criticism, Beckett studies, accounts of state-sponsored torture, plus an Arabian Tale and even baseball play-by-play—produces a construct at once sculptural and theatrical, and by turns mathematical, lyrical, and brutally artless, a new form of creative narrative answering to a freshened rule set.

In executing Beckett’s most radical undertaking—one scholar referred to “Long Observation of the Ray” as a “monument to extinction”—Coffey salvages a Beckett project from a half-century ago and brings it to the surface, with the contemporary markings of its hauling. Although Beckett, like any writer, had his share of abandoned works, he was in the habit of “unabandoning,” on occasion. Coffey’s concluding Part Three gives the complicated proceedings over to what seems to be a single voice, one distilled from all the others, speaking in an empty theater of the need, the wish, to keep speaking. In the long battle that is the book, a settlement is reached between Being and form, a kind of mutual foreclosing, like a curtain dropping.

“Coffey joins Beckett in a ghostly collaboration . . . a rewarding challenge. . . . Coffey takes 'a colossal figure' whose 'form-shattering masterpieces' can seem hermetic and obscure, deliberately closed off, and opens him up in a way we haven’t seen.” - The New York Times

In his new book–part memoir, part criticism, and part poetry–Michael Coffey deftly weaves multiple voices into a fractured but unified whole that strongly resonates with the digital age. Highly addictive, fiercely challenging, and lusciously readable—if you ever wondered what Beckett might sound like in the twenty-first century, this is it.— Kenneth Goldsmith

“Samuel Beckett Is Closed makes us experience simultaneously several narratives deployed in subtle counterpoint. These varied voices show the relevance of Beckett’s oeuvre in a world dominated by exploitation, torture, state violence and unbridled capitalism. Such a polyphonic mode of engagement with literature and history. . . opens all the doors at once, turning Beckett’s alleged minimalism into a vibrantly maximalist Irish critique.”— Jean-Michel Rabaté

Ashape-shifting fictional tribute to the novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett (1906-89), borrowing its structure from one of his works.

In 1976, the elliptical, Nobel-winning writer started an unfinished piece, “Long Observation of the Ray,” that proposed a method of writing around nine “themes” in a highly precise way, prescribing the number of sentences in recurring sections. Like Oulipo and other fussy literary organizational schemes, the end product risks becoming cold and abstruse, but Coffey (The Business of Naming Things, 2015, etc.) generates a decent amount of warmth adapting the concept and weaving alternating Beckett-themed story threads, distinguishable by different fonts. Among the strands: a critical essay on Beckett’s work; an unnamed narrator trying to imagine a story that’ll help his lover fall sleep; a fictionalized story of Beckett bemusedly attending a 1964 Mets double-header at Shea Stadium (“There’s a lot of futility in this game,” Beckett notes); and narratives of post–9/11 terrorism, from reports on treatment of Gitmo prisoners to recollections of the 2015 Paris attacks. Coffey doesn’t labor to make each section connect in obvious ways, but over the course of the book the fragmentary pieces help construct an overall defense of Beckett as more of a moral author than he’s given credit for. The abstract fatalism that defined works like Waiting for Godot was shaped by Beckett’s experience of World War II, Coffey argues, pushing him to contemplate both a sense of defeat and the need to press on after catastrophe, “an aesthetic credo that secured the moral ground enabling art to continue after Auschwitz.” Deep familiarity with Beckett's work isn’t essential to appreciate Coffey’s, but an affinity for Beckett’s worldview and gamesmanship helps; Coffey sustains a dark, contemplative mood but leaves a few cracks for humor and optimism to enter.

A complex but emotionally effective tribute to the Irish author. - Kirkus Reviews

Coffey (The Business of Naming Things), former co-editorial director of Publishers Weekly, blurs genre and form in a clever exploration of the ways in which art gives life meaning. He pulls inspiration from Samuel Beckett, framing the book with a sequence detailed in Beckett’s notes and utilizing some of Beckett’s “failed” work, including an unpublished manuscript called “Long Observation of the Ray.” Braiding criticism, biography, memoir, literary excerpts, global terrorism reports, and other appropriated texts, the independent narratives begin to evince similar themes. As one of the book’s unnamed narrators resolves to better understand the obsession with Samuel Beckett—“Why Beckett?”—moments arise in which the multiple narratives fit together. These intersections act as a reminder that, while searching for purpose, “even if you think you are caught going nowhere, you are going somewhere.” The book demands active reading and participation in its abstractions. Ultimately, readers must make the connections between Coffey’s personal reflections, the texts he has culled, and Beckett’s abandoned projects. The poetic deconstruction of language is shrewd and prompts consideration of how a given story is interpreted, resulting in a stimulating and singular work. - Publishers Weekly

ONE REASON FOR WRITING is to transmute suffering, to tame it, cauterize it with words. Naming things gives us power, reassurance. So does form. As Hannah Arendt puts it: “The story reveals the meaning of what would otherwise remain an intolerable sequence of events.” Joan Didion expresses a similar idea — paradoxically, in an essay that dramatizes the breakdown of narrative form: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Samuel Beckett’s work is unique in part because it refuses to manacle what he calls “being” into standard narrative forms. “If anything new and exciting is going on today, it is the attempt to let Being into art,” Beckett said, “to let in chaos and what is not ordered.”

Michael Coffey finds evidence of Beckett’s anti-narrative streak in a little-known text written and abandoned in the mid-1970s, “Long Observation of the Ray.” In it, Beckett meditates on the difficulty of objective observation, attempting to document a ray of light passing through a closed cube (in later drafts a sphere). For Coffey, the closed space of the sphere evokes the interior of the body or mind, a dark chamber through which light and images from the outside flicker. By choosing to model his fictional tribute to Beckett on “Ray,” Coffey foregrounds one of the most important, if uncomfortable, characteristics of Beckett’s work: its rejection of whatever salvific, soporific, or anesthetizing pleasures narrative offers. Beckett’s mode of writing drives us deeper into the restless rhythms of living, rather than whisking us off to a chaos-free world like Yeats’s Byzantium. This isn’t to say that Beckett’s work is devoid of beauty. It isn’t. But it refuses to make sense — I mean syntactical, semantic sense — of human suffering. Comedy, yes — for comedy allows us to face what is, not bury our heads in the sand — but sense, no.

Coffey opens Samuel Beckett Is Closed (OR Books, 2018) with an epigraph from Beckett: “Being is constantly putting form in danger.” The sentiment finds ample resonance in a hybrid work that blends literary criticism, personal narrative, prose poetry, and reportage. Coffey is no stranger to literary experimentation, and here he picks up Beckett’s own experimental thread and continues to spin it.

But perhaps “thread” is not the best metaphor for anti-narrative. Instead of one thread — a unified, linear story line — Samuel Beckett Is Closed features contrapuntal voices, differentiated by subject matter, style, and (thankfully) typeface. The book is delightfully aware of its metaphors — “‘Fugue in E Minor,’ please,” requests Samuel Beckett’s character. The voices in Coffey’s book are independent yet speak across to each other, creating thematic, rhythmic, and phonic areas of overlap. The book’s conceit is complicated enough to drive a reader to frustration, but Coffey is solicitous, teaching the reader his form. The book opens with an introduction to the four voices that make up its first section:

Four scenarios: 1) Samuel Beckett attends a baseball game in New York City. The Mets are playing. It is 1964. 2) A Coffey-like writer spends three years reading Beckett. 3) An unnamed narrator is asked to devise tales to put his beloved to sleep. 4) An interrogation is launched into interview tactics at Guantanamo Bay. Samuel Beckett, mentioned explicitly in two of the four sections, serves as a fil conducteur through the work as a whole. Once initiated, a reader can relish clever “cuts” between sections, humorous transitions, and returns to favorite scenes. An example:

The most congenial of the voices is also the most patently autobiographical. At the age of 62, with a limited number of reading years left — he estimates 20, if all goes well — Coffey describes his decision to spend three years reading Beckett. What the reader wants to know is also what Coffey’s narrator wants to know: why Beckett? So we’re launched on a literary quest with the affable narrator through the evolution of Beckett’s oeuvre: World War II, the postwar years, the tortuous deviations of his style, and Beckett’s troubled engagement with literary form. We encounter red herrings, critical watersheds, and academic conferences where Beckett’s works are enacted by literature professors in fugue (yes, it happens). This literary-critical journey is also an investigation into the heart of the self, as questions of identity and filiation emerge for Coffey (an adoptee) as they do in Beckett: “Yes, I was my father and I was my son, I asked myself questions and answered as best I could.” Coffey’s reading project takes him not only through the poetry, plays, and prose, but also into the voluminous “gray canon” of unpublished writings: notebooks, diaries Beckett kept during a trip to Germany in the 1930s, love affairs recorded in personal letters, self-translations, and abandoned works (including “Long Observation of the Ray,” which Coffey finds in the University of Reading’s Beckett archive).

Counter to this genial, autobiographical narrator runs a shadow voice, which, like a Shakespearean fool, inserts itself at intervals, thwarting the quest with whispers of doubt. We’re privy to the meta-monologue of a storyteller who invents tales to help his beloved sleep. In a self-consciously Beckettian style — the dangers of imitating Beckett for young and seasoned writers alike are discussed in a different section — the voice draws upon events from childhood, such as discovering the stiffened corpse of the neighbor’s cat under a porch: “Tom was dusty, yes. Hard as a suitcase, yes. Use the language, go ahead, use it all up.” With charming humor (“Love is an auditor, but not much of an editor”), the voice touches on the weather, the art of reading homes — spitiromancing, from the Greek spiti — and, predictably, The Arabian Nights, all the while probing what a story is and does: Does it put us to sleep? Stave off our execution? Perhaps in an effort to make sense of this, the narrator recounts one of Scheherazade’s tales, “The City of Brass,” in which the khalif’s explorers visit a splendid city deep in the desert. The city is full of riches, but its inhabitants are corpses, bearing signs of their destruction. Coffey’s narrator asks: “Will fiction keep the truth at bay or usher it forth? Does truth usher forth fiction or keep it at bay?”

The two remaining voices seem to be in a similar relationship of opposition, foils to each other. A dialogue between Beckett and his friend Richard Seaver at a Mets game is undercut by accounts of prison interrogations and terrorist attacks. Here, Coffey blends fact with imagination. In the summer of 1964, Beckett flew to New York to help with the shooting of Film. He didn’t particularly like the United States: “This is somehow not the right country for me,” he said. “The people are too strange.” But by all accounts he enjoyed his afternoon with Seaver at Shea Stadium watching the Mets, and he asked to stay through the whole doubleheader.

Coffey balances this scene of leisure and humor with descriptions of threats to culture and civilization, threats perpetrated by military personnel and by terrorist cells. Accounts of political violence in a book about Beckett and storytelling feel like reminders of our duty to remain awake to our political reality. Such an idea is in tune with Beckett’s political conscientiousness; he wrote Catastrophe (1982) to show support for Václav Havel, then in prison for his political activities. Coffey draws on the story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian man cleared of terrorism charges but imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay for 14 years. He follows this with survivors’ accounts of the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, then tells the story of 9/11 from the perspective of a 10-year-old. The tone of this section is factual, much like a news article, yet its unflinching treatment of its subject matter points to literature’s power to excavate terror: violence, persecution, and the universal predicament of living with numbered days — in other words, what many stories shield us from.

Aside from Beckett, Coffey’s most important interlocutor is Proust. Part two of Samuel Beckett Is Closed includes animated pastiches of the Recherche, including a drawing room scene with an artist named Peter Swan. Coffey playfully creates and dismantles literary characters, evoking the work of Beckett’s Malone (in Malone Dies), who tells himself stories as he waits for death, changing his protagonist’s name from Sapo to Macmann according to his whim. Imagining a heat blast incinerating his Proustian drawing room, Coffey asks what will accompany us “at that last instant, as we know it, when the dust and nonsense hardens into glass?” Coffey’s final section is a short play, featuring a character modeled on David Warrilow, the Beckett actor best known for his innovative staging of The Lost Ones. Throughout the book, Coffey compensates for what is lacking in his story line by focusing intensely on that one question: why Beckett?

Like any good quest, Coffey’s includes red herrings. As an adoptee curious about his parentage, Coffey follows with interest the rumors surrounding an avant-garde American poet whose mother had an affair with Beckett. But DNA tests indicate that Beckett is not the father, and Coffey wisely drops the inquiry: “[I]t is her story,” he writes, “not mine.” But filiation is an interesting topic to encounter in a book so hell-bent on reinventing narrative. Narrative demands continuity and requires the passing down of tradition. Beckett’s work, on the other hand, resists futurity. What to make of this? Inspired by the French critic Pascale Casanova (author of Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution), Coffey imagines Beckett to be a paragon of literary abstraction. Yet he finds irreducibly human components even in Beckett’s most abstract work, Worstward Ho. And so he settles on a middle course, reading Beckett neither in terms of a search for origins nor in terms of austere literary abstraction. He reads Beckett in terms of a search for the self.

Indeed, the most compelling answer to the question “Why Beckett?” has to do with Beckett’s way of writing about the self, what H. Porter Abbott calls autography — self-writing as opposed to life-writing, or autobiography. In 1945, on Dublin’s Dún Laoghaire pier (Beckett later changed this location to his mother’s room), Beckett had an epiphany about the role the self would play in his work: “[I]t was his self that would be his topic or at least the occasion for his explorations of the conditions and the impulse for expression.” But what Beckett does with this impulse is different, more radical than autobiography (I did this, I went there, this happened to me). Instead, his writing grapples with the act of living itself: what does it mean to be an I, to have a self, to look from the perspective of the self onto the world, to train one’s gaze on the within or the without, to inhabit cells that are decaying, dying, showing their age and their fragility as matter? Consider the opening of Beckett’s Texts for Nothing 4: “Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say, if I had a voice, who says this, saying it’s me?”

¤

What is it that makes Beckett an important figure for our time? Dirk Van Hulle asks this question in his introduction to The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett (Cambridge, 2015). He speculates that it is the “unsentimentalized, humorous persistence of [Beckett’s] characters,” characters who go on “in spite of themselves, in spite of the world, in spite of death.” Thinking about Beckett’s “Long Observation of the Ray,” Coffey asks whether the work’s too-perfect form led Beckett to abandon it. For how could the “high priest of failure” create a “machine […] set in such a way as to pertain forever, defeating entropy”? This leads Coffey to identify Beckett’s “key philosophical, biological, and literary insight”: “Sustaining failure is the art of living […] facing failure and not surrendering to its darkness.”

A paean to the art of failure may seem grim, but there is a silver lining to Coffey’s work, which stems from his reading of Proust and from the title of Beckett’s late novella, Company. Citing the “‘company’ of which Proust wrote, the company of art that makes death ‘less bitter, less inglorious, and perhaps less certain,’” Coffey implies that what began for him as an interest in filiation has transformed into a discovery not of lineage but of company, of a fellow poet’s inspirational willingness to confront what is terrifying and vital.

Coffey’s book also speaks to how contemporary writers might stage an unmaking and remaking of form — one that serves as an ethical reminder of authorial limitations and of the porousness between the worlds we create and the political reality in which we live. By breaking rules of genre and narrative, by embracing experimental form, Coffey’s work raises questions about how contemporary artists might work to resist the status quo through a subversive, fragmentary style that makes it impossible for us to look away from our political reality. Now, more than ever, we have much to learn from Beckett. - Amanda Dennis

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/life-writing-samuel-becketts-literature-of-disorder/

You ask several times in the book, ‘Why Beckett.” So, why Beckett?

You could ask not only why Beckett but why mention it. I mention it because I think that being transparent about the genesis of such a project is important. It is being honest. Not everyone cares to see process in a work of art, but there you have it. And in Beckett’s work itself, the mechanics of things are stripped down, laid bare. There is very little artifice. But plenty of invention. A principle interest of mine was really “What Beckett?” That is, what would such an innovator be doing today, given today’s technologies and global politics. Whatever I have learned thus far is in this book, to a point. I am still at it.

What are you learning?

For one thing, I’m learning about what’s not possible and how that can be an assertion. And how to go forward from there. Beckett makes camp in negation, and builds a fire there. He looks out from there into a dark. The famous end toThe Unnamable—“You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”—is no joke. Go to those places in those many dark weird texts where identity comes apart and realize what going on means.

And in any attempt to get a handle on Beckett takes you to into interesting territory—to classical music, Irish history, Continental philosophy, World War II, abstract painting, the French language. For a quiet man his interests were voracious. Beckett scholarship has ranged far beyond those seminal early essays by Maurice Blanchot and Theodor Adorno and the studies by Ruby Cohn and Lawrence Harvey. Now, with James Knowlson’s authorized biography, the recently released four volumes of letters, and the digital manuscript project going on in Antwerp, the study of his works is vibrant all around the world.

How does this book relate to your other works?

Since my first book of poems, Elemenopy in 1996, I have been interested in influences, looking for my own voice through that of others. In that book, Jackson Mac Low and Gertrude Stein held enormous sway, and I now realize that I was appropriating texts (Stein’s “Portraits and Repetition”) back then. In subsequent books, the influences of Ron Silliman, Steve McCaffery, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, James Joyce, and some lesser writers like Harold Brodkey and J.F. Powers are rather clear.

What inspired you to import a formal organizational scheme from an abandoned Beckett work and then transform by both extension and contraction?

When I ran across Steven Connor’s essay on Beckett’s abandoned work, “Long Observation of the Ray,” I was thrilled to realize that Beckett clearly played with systems. Having read a lot of Mac Low, and John Cage and several of the Fluxus and Language poets, I liked systems. I felt there was virtue in some compositional restraints, but I had never thought Beckett would agree. Yet in his scheme for “Long Observation,” he appeared to explore an interior space—an absolutely closed space—by mechanically visiting nine themes about that place and doing so in orderly waves of prose. At this time, I was working on eight or nine ideas all having to do with Beckett. After reading Connor’s essay, I thought of interleaving my ideas per the Beckett plan. I thought—impossible! But one night, I dreamt that my job was to make large towers out of layers of felt and stones, one upon the other upon the other, and so I got up and cut-and-pasted four themes, one upon the other and so on. I could see that it was working, that the rhythmic delays and resumptions of themes was both exciting and agitating. Its disruption of normative narrative allowed light and silence to splash through.

Although you have used found texts in the past—or as we now say, appropriated content—you have deployed it here, it seems, in large scale—torture diaries, military interrogation manuals, newspapers reports of terrorist attacks, a tale of Scheherazade’s. What does this bring to the book?

I thought a lot about what Beckett might be doing today as an artist. He died in 1989, before email, before the Internet. But is his career he reacted quickly to new technological developments. When it became possible to write for radio, he did; when it became possible to write and design for television, he did; when it became possible to make a movie, he did. What would Beckett do today? I cannot help but think that the dispersion of self in social media would have interested him and he might just have thought text and image in some cloud were themselves material to be worked with, places to explore. Would he appropriate? Would he be organizing appropriations? All I can say is that my deep immersion in the Beckett aesthetic emboldened me to do so. That’s one reason for the appropriations.

The second reason is less about the justification for such a formal intervention than the specificity of what I chose to appropriate, and why. I wanted my book to be true to something that is true of a typical Beckett work. My decision to appropriate the Guantanamo diaries of Mohamedou Ould Slahi seemed the best way to honor true suffering, and also was another way to convey a central experience of several Beckett works–What Where, How It Is, Endgame, Happy Days, Not I. They depict forms of torture, some stylized, some direct. I guess there is another reason as well, not for appropriation as such but for the terror themes, and this is simply the times we live in. Sometimes historicizing is inevitable.

I must ask you about one of the story lines in your book that is abruptly dropped, that of the rumor that Beckett fathered a child.

I heard that rumor at a dinner party some years ago. It was stated as fact. Of course, I knew different! I had read three biographies of Beckett: he was childless. I had even read essays about his anti-natalism. But I did my own research and it was tantalizingly plausible that he had had a child in the late 1930s, but it has never been proven. It seems to have been disproved. Yet it persists as a kind of myth in certain quarters.

But why is it in the book, and in the book only to be dropped?

Well, the book’s first spark was the Beckett quote, “Being is constantly putting form in danger.” This statement can resonate in countless ways—philosophically, aesthetically, politically, socially– but for me it had a personal resonance. Much of my life has been marked by a formal mystery—who I was spilled beyond what I knew of my origins. It was the mystery of who my parents were and where I was from. Until I was 50, I did not know. The issue of inheritances has always preoccupied me, and as a writer, literary inheritances even more. In that “Beckett’s daughter” is a writer, I was fascinated by that dynamic, that is, an aesthetic developing in the presence of gaps and silences. In that this preoccupation was an important engine in the book’s early going, I was unwilling to erase or suppress it–to quote from my epigraph, it is part of the “context of the continuum it nourished.”

What about the baseball game chatter between “Sam” and “Dick?”

Beckett and Richard Seaver—during Beckett’s only trip to America, in the summer of 1964, to make Film starring Buster Keaton—went to a Mets game at Shea Stadium. Seaver tells the story in his memoir. Seaver worked at Grove Press, but had known Beckett since his days in Paris. The two of them sat through a doubleheader featuring the two worst teams in baseball, by far. And since Beckett is, soi-disant, a connoisseur of failure, Sam’s witnessing of such futility on the baseball field seemed too good a thing to pass up. And the nine innings—I cover each inning—helps orient the reader through the first nine sections of the book.

Lastly, tell us about the title.

I went through a few working titles–Why Beckett? Sam Beckett’s Blues, Statement—until I saw a photo of a traffic sign on the approach to the Samuel Beckett Bridge in Dublin: “Samuel Beckett Closed.” It was exactly right, as by that time I had come to understand that Beckett’s late work was all about closed spaces. No more wandering the countryside, or living in London, or running around within big houses with surrounding parkland, as in Watt. Even the language, never mind the scenery, begins to foreclose on itself via subtraction in the very last works.

Is Beckett now closed for you?

Yes, but there’s no getting out.

http://michaelcoffeyauthor.com/interview/

Michael Coffey, The Business of Naming Things, 

Bellevue Literary Press, 2015.

excerpt: https://bombmagazine.org/articles/moon-over-quabbin/

 Among these eight stories, a fan of writer (and fellow adoptee) Harold Brodkey gains an audience with him at his life’s end, two pals take a Joycean sojourn, a man whose business is naming things meets a woman who may not be what she seems, and a father discovers his son is a suspect in an assassination attempt on the president. In each tale, Michael Coffey’s exquisite attention to character underlies the brutally honest perspectives of his disenchanted fathers, damaged sons, and orphans left feeling perpetually disconnected.

 “Once I started reading these stories, I couldn’t stop. They absorbed me thoroughly, with their taut narratives and evocative language—the language of a poet.” —JAY PARINI

“Sherwood Anderson would recognize this world of lonely, longing characters, whose surface lives Coffey tenderly plumbs. These beautiful stories—spare, rich, wise and compelling—go to the heart.” —FREDERIC TUTEN

“Whether [Coffey is] writing about a sinning priest or a man who’s made a career out of branding or about himself, we can smell Coffey’s protagonists and feel their breath on our cheek. Like Chekhov, he must be a notebook writer; how else to explain the strange quirks and the perfect but unaccountable details that animate these intimate portraits?” —EDMUND WHITE

 “Coffey name-drops some serious literary heavyweights in the pages of his stories. Harold Brodkey, J.F. Powers, Henrik Ibsen and James Joyce all make an appearance. But that doesn’t mean that these stories are only for ‘pointy-headed’ literary types. Coffey’s writing hearkens back to stylists of 40 or 50 years ago and his subject matter is ‘meat and potatoes’ basic: the relationships between men and women and fathers and sons.” ―WAYNE ROYLANCE

The riveting prose in Coffey’s first collection of stories leaves the reader feeling unsettled and unmoored. In “Sunlight,” a man named Michael who works for Publishers Weekly (where Coffey was co-editorial director before retiring earlier this year) visits Harold Brodkey as he’s dying of AIDS. Michael believes that being an adoptee is the “source of all his problems” and asks Brodkey, who’s also an adoptee, whether being adopted prevented him from writing a “conventional narrative.” This sense of unrest and disquiet adds depth to the eight stories, which are varied but share certain themes, returning repeatedly to relationships between fathers and son and husbands and wives. There is no conventional narrative here. Coffey brilliantly examines the efforts of a mother to cope with her son’s death in “Moon Over Quabbin”; he uses the J.F.K. assassination as a backdrop to a tale about a sinful priest in “Inn of the Nations”; and, in “Sons,” he explores a difficult father-son relationship in the context of a possible Obama assassination attempt. This collection, which features first-, second-, and third-person narration, is vibrant and unsparing. - Publishers Weekly

A clutch of well-crafted stories, thick with literary references, that turn on busted relationships between men and women and fathers and sons.

Harold Brodkey, James Joyce, J.F. Powers, Henrik Ibsen—each of these writers finds his way into the eight stories in this first work of fiction by Coffey (Days of Infamy, 1999, etc.). The name-checked authors hint at some of Coffey’s chief concerns—masculinity and faith most prominently—as well as his approach to style. “Inn of the Nations” centers on a priest who’s lost his passion for his calling and pursues an affair with a nun; set shortly after the JFK assassination, the brief story describes how “he’d become hardened to his own sin” but is without religious sanctimony. The broader “Sons” pursues a similar theme, following an alcoholic poet as he worries that his son is complicit in a calamity that makes national news; in Coffey’s hands, the man’s drunken fog reveals his self-loathing even while he busily labors to obscure it. This collection's stories are carefully chiseled, and the prose is sometimes stiff, but Coffey will occasionally cut loose, as in the closing “Finishing Ulysses,” which follows a professor eager to teach Joyce’s classic who’s out on the town in Philadelphia. Though short, the story has an appealingly jazzy, impressionistic, stream-of-consciousness rhythm. (“Smokes you need and why not the bennies. Some jump. Setting sun crashing into the façade of the church over there.”) Most of these stories capture men in decline, but one of the collection’s best is more tender: In “The Newman Boys,” the narrator recalls his brief childhood acquaintance with a neighbor boy diagnosed with hydrocephaly; the story captures the narrator’s narcissism, fears, confusions about adulthood—and, in its closing pages, a sense of how small kindnesses can resonate across decades.

Sober and smart writing that evokes the more mannered American stylists of the 1960s and '70s. - Kirkus Reviews

Michael Coffey, Blue Moon

Blue Moon: The First Collection Of Short Stories by Michael Coffey is an original work of fiction.Inside you will find thrilling stories crossing a variety of genres: adventure, crime, mystery, sci-fi, horror, and even some dark comedy. A must read for all those that enjoy strange tales and are intrigued by the unknown.

Michael Coffey, CMYK, O Books, 2005.

"Michael Coffey's CMYK is a sort of domino theory or primary-color Braille using word replacement for sounds--that is, his words are as if movable spaces, it being possible for these word-spaces like open, brilliant blanks or Guston blocks to be plugged in elsewhere in space. In that sense the text 'adds to' reality"--Leslie Scalapino. "Check out CMYK. It is odd in a strange way, and that's something hard to come by these days. A very particularizing and kind collaboration with it all--a roving, roaming, & re-reading risk--multicolored 'like' words. It says here: 'we belong to the page or the wall.'"--Rod Smith

Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black—with forms that mimic the basic tones from which all colors are blended and printed, this third outing from New York poet and PW executive managing editor Coffey returns to the experimental, procedure-oriented methods of his first, Elemenopy , and synthesizes them beautifully with the autobiographical modes of his second, 87 North . Much of the volume adapts or radically abbreviates preexisting texts: "Verbum" arranges verbs (just the verbs) from the Biblical creation story ("said Let be was saw was/ divided called called was was"). "Irish Love Poem" and "Imagisme" replace poems by (respectively) Mebdh McGuckian and Ezra Pound with (respectively) black and white squares and sets of ones and zeros—the binary code that is the foundation of word processing. The book's second half, if less cerebral, is just as rigorous and materials-oriented: "Holiday à la Carte" uses a dining journal from a European vacation to reflect on adult development: "When/ will I be/ what I've become? Ham,/ bleu cheese, baguette,/ Leffe Blonde and straw-/ berries." The longer "Datebook 2002" takes on the contemporary art scene and the legacy of Andy Warhol along with daily life in post-9/11 New York, achieving a low-key insouciance reminiscent of James Schuyler. With apparent self-revelations that turn out to be quotations, and jigsaw-like verbal constructions that depict pathos almost despite themselves, Coffey finds "what's in the brain that ink may character." - Publishers Weekly

Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint - History, like light, is porous, multitudinous, endlessly haunted. Names of Light gives form to the unresolved and inaccessible remnants of the past, all of the ghosts that are proliferated just by our moving. We are constantly ghastly and ghostly

 

Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint, Names for Light, Graywolf Press, 2021.

Names for Light traverses time and memory to weigh three generations of a family’s history against a painful inheritance of postcolonial violence and racism. In spare, lyric paragraphs framed by white space, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint explores home, belonging, and identity by revisiting the cities in which her parents and grandparents lived. As she makes inquiries into their stories, she intertwines oral narratives with the official and mythic histories of Myanmar. But while her family’s stories move into the present, her own story―that of a writer seeking to understand who she is―moves into the past, until both converge at the end of the book.

Born in Myanmar and raised in Bangkok and San Jose, Myint finds that she does not have typical memories of arriving in the United States; instead, she is haunted by what she cannot remember. By the silences lingering around what is spoken. By a chain of deaths in her family line, especially that of her older brother as a child. For Myint, absence is felt as strongly as presence. And, as she comes to understand, naming those absences, finding words for the unsaid, means discovering how those who have come before have shaped her life. Names for Light is a moving chronicle of the passage of time, of the long shadow of colonialism, and of a writer coming into her own as she reckons with her family’s legacy.

“Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint’s acute language casts a constellation of birth-charts, which in turn broadcasts light through the generations of a remarkable family story. Names for light celebrates storytelling’s role in survival without excluding the animating presences of absence and silence. Here, past and present converge, creating a brilliance that lights up the limits of what can be known. A guidebook for every world – above, below, between – Names for light is a stunning achievement.”— SELAH SATERSTROM

“History, like light, is porous, multitudinous, endlessly haunted. Names of Light gives form to the unresolved and inaccessible remnants of the past, all of the ghosts that are proliferated just by our moving. We are constantly ghastly and ghostly, the text reminds us, and the indeterminacy of flesh is the indeterminacy of family and legacy. Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint is one of the most remarkable writers of our time, and Names of Light is a piercing and heartbreaking revelation.”— JANICE LEE

“Thirii Myint’s Names for Light is a reincarnation of Thirii Myint, who is a reincarnation of her great-grandfather, the son of a princess, each version of self a sly haunting. A fairy tale of displacement, this book cradles imagined homes and remapped homelands—unmappable and pure. Myint’s geographies and her syntax will echo inside you like luminous ghosts: opulent and ruthless and profound, like drowned sapphires waiting to be reunited with the wind.”— LILY HOANG

“In sharp, clear-cut prose, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint refracts the structural violence and long reach of colonialism through the prism of her family’s history. Each page is a lens held up to light and rotated, inspected, and held in mind. A gorgeous book.”— SARAH GERARD

“Thirii is driving an important autobiographical rickshaw into the 21st century. Her task with Names for Light is to be alternative, to use ghosts and reincarnations and Spanish-speaking-Asians as vehicles that hope to break the barrier and drive beyond the grammar of immigrant porn. Her work is obediently exploratory and layered, rich in research and imagination. Thirii’s zany and inventive Names for Light is also designed to challenge one’s concept of immigrant privation: how to make its nuance absence visible and social-emotionally available without succumbing to cliché and memoiristic predictability. Painted not in ash and alternating between first person and third narration, there is so much here Thirii is willing to make visible: emotional ethnic intelligence, Bamar consciousness, high child mortality rates, infidelity that behaves more closely to death, Sittwe, 8888 ayekhin, love missives delivered in a borrowed book, matriarchal sacrifices, Spanish speaking Asians, vomiting ghosts that live in mirrors, weaponized eating disorders, gambling, migraines, maybe Boston, maybe Madrid, maybe South Bend, maybe Providence, a place where no chickens are left behind, a place where imagination and memory get reborn, reincarnated, reenacted, a place where ghosts can pretend to be photographs. As you can see so clearly for all double immigrants: her ambition is snow, snow falling. Let her lead the way. Into the light that is her brother and beyond. ”— VI KHI NAO

 In this hypnotic memoir, Burmese-American novelist Myint (The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven) looks to myth and folklore to explore her family’s legacy. Ghosts, reincarnated relatives, dark omens, and imagined scenes populate a timeline that oscillates between the author’s forbears’ past and present day, stretching from Myanmar, where she was born in 1989, to Thailand, California, Spain, and Colorado. In lyrical prose, Myint straddles dream and reality beginning with a mythic take on her great-grandfather, who “died a man but was reborn as me.” Lived experience is overlaid with speculative history, as Myint, who moved to the U.S. as a child, mines the alienation—sowed by the colonialism and racism endured by generations of her family—that has rendered her “a ghost” throughout her life. To fill the void of loneliness surrounding her, she pieces together her family’s past, from her mother’s “cursed” home in Yangon and her parents’ marriage on a lake that was “constructed by the British” to her older brother’s illness and death (“I also believed he had drowned in the lake”). While her poetic narration is indisputably alluring, the nonlinear story line can sometimes become taxing. For those willing to put in the work, this serpentine narrative is a thing of beauty. - Publishers Weekly

A writer born in Myanmar and raised in Thailand and the U.S. traces how her family history has haunted her personal journey.

In this uniquely structured memoir—sleek, poetic paragraphs surrounded by plenty of white space on each page—Myint introduces herself as the reincarnation of her great-grandfather, a relative of the royal family in Myanmar, where the author was born. She lived in Bangkok from the ages of 1 to 7, after which she and her family immigrated to California. Myint later lived in Colorado, Rhode Island, and Spain, but no matter where she traveled, she was never able to escape her ancestral history. Some of this is a matter of reincarnation: “When my great-grandmother finally died, she was reborn as my middle sister. My sister was my wife in our past life. My mother says I followed her into this life.” But some of it, Myint writes, has been a product of dissociation associated with inherited trauma. Many of her personal memories, she notes, came to her in the third person, meaning that she pictured herself as a character in the scene rather than an inhabitant of her body. Due to this disconnection, Myint tells her own story in the third person while narrating her family history—much of which she did not personally witness—in the first person. Additionally, she tells her ancestors’ story from past to present, but her own from present to past. Braiding these opposing timelines and narrative perspectives creates an innovative structure that effectively contrasts the author’s deep enmeshment with her family history with her distance from reality. On a line-by-line level, the book is spectacularly lyrical, and each word feels perfectly chosen. Some readers may struggle with the chronology and unnamed characters, but the text is undeniably powerful.

An imaginative and compelling memoir about what we inherit and what we pass on. - Kirkus Reviews

Blank space is difficult to employ in a book. It can be read as emptiness or it can offer a reader breath, pause, reflection, meaning. “Names for Light,” a memoir by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint, makes ample use of blank space, between paragraphs, strings of thought, scenes and events. When not used, what’s there is jumbled and scattered.

A writer need not be concerned with where she comes from, but for memoir this is its core project. For Myint, who was born in Myanmar before moving to Thailand, the United States and Spain, it is a painful and intrusive question. A question that, by its very asking, suggests she does not belong, a question that displaces her. She balks. Beyond the naming of places (Leymyethna, Gayan, Denver, Sittwe, Yangon, Minbu, South Bend, Hinthada, Madrid), she doesn’t get to the difficulty of the question as a writer — and by this, I don’t mean a place on a map. I mean the stink and cringe and failure and noise and laughter that make a life feel real and lived, the thing that makes a person tick.

We are told that one “can be a ghost while one is still alive … if one carries what one cannot remember. Empty memories, blank memories, absent memories.” This thinking allows the author to get away with being vacuous. When we encounter the “I” in this story, it is often at a distance, “the observer, the outsider, always in the middle of a story but never at the center of it.” She sometimes switches to the third person to refer to herself, as if afraid to speak from the first, to own the voice and power that could be. She tells us, “I do not like to make decisions, to take risks, to assert or involve myself. … I prefer to … keep myself to myself.” And this is what she achieves in her writing — she keeps herself to herself. In doing so, she makes the question of where she comes from illumined and voluminous.

Myint’s narrative shape is barely there. We get blips and cracks, “a trace, a strip, or a corner of the memories,” a “memory of a memory.” This family history is often recounted through others, like this: “My father said my grandmother said” and “My other grandmother, my mother’s mother” and “My mother said my great-grandmother and great-grandfather.” This makes the prose clunky and cluttered, and the people difficult to feel and see and hear and remember.

The language is so concerned with and looking pretty that what the story is about — political upheaval, death, heartbreak, violence, discrimination, the immigrant experience — is barely noticeable. The parents, particularly, don’t feel like real people, since we never get them in their adult mess. She takes at face value the story of her mother “discovering love letter after love letter” from her father with the unquestioning trust of a child. So often, Myint approximates with “I do not know if,” “I wonder,” “I imagine.” This is a writer who does not know and is comfortable in not knowing. The gaze flinches.

It is one thing to be able to put feelings on paper and another to make a reader feel what we write. The narrow line between being a note taker and being a writer is worth discerning. We are told:

“This place repeated enough times begins to sound like displaced.”

“Because the verbs are left un-conjugated in Burmese, left untouched, the same word describes the past, present and future.”

“Island. In English, the two-syllable word is paradisal. … In Bamar, the one-syllable kyun, with its elongated vowel, is dismal, claustrophobic.”

These are wonderful observations of language, but the writing does not move them beyond being duly noted. It certainly sounds like poetry, but it is not poetry.

The material Myint has before her is compelling, but they are memories and stories that are not hers. This is the problem for the children of immigrants and refugees when we set out to write memoirs. However special we think our lives are or however much we accomplish, our stories always pale in comparison — even more so when we lean on others’ to write our own. We, whom “nothing has ever happened to,” are never as compelling as our parents. - Souvankham Thammavongsa

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/books/review/names-for-light-thirii-myo-kyaw-myint.html

The 32-year-old writer Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint was born in Burma, now Myanmar. She lived briefly in Bangkok before emigrating to San Jose, California with her family before she turned eight. Myint has no solid memories of Burma other than what has been dutifully told to her by older sisters and parents. Her family fled the country shortly after pro-democracy protestors were crushed in 1988 by the military junta that still wields absolute power. Myint’s father, an educator, managed to secure a teaching job in Thailand which became their escape route to America. During the past decade, Myanmar has drawn the world’s ire for the government’s ferociously vile ethnic cleansing of the Rohingyas, a Muslim minority, who have been fleeing in massive numbers to Bangladesh.

Myint is struck by the violent history and current upheavals in Myanmar. But this knowledge does not preclude her rising irritation with Americans who, after finding out where she is from, annoy her with intimidating questions about her homeland, and wait for her to express gratitude for being in America (which she intentionally withholds). She is thankful for her new opportunities that have taken her to a teaching career at Amherst College. But she doesn’t identify as American. The concept of “place” remains opaque for her. She is inextricably caught up in the turbulent stories of her family’s past and has grown weary of answering questions about her ethnicity and skin color. She writes, “Whiteness is not a color or a race or an ethnicity but a construct of power, the power to speak, to tell stories, not only about oneself, but about other people.” Yet questions linger over her narrative. Whom is she writing for? Is she trying to reveal or conceal? Is she deceiving herself or trying to deceive others? Is this an attempt to reconnect with a family that obsesses her, but from whom she seems estranged? The mystical beauty of her prose, which seems to speak to us in intermittent revelations, transports us elsewhere, but it is an unnamable place, a territory of lostness.

In Names for Light, she anoints herself as the family chronicler, and speaks of the elaborate preparation ritual she has undertaken to begin her task. She writes:

“There are no marks on my body from a previous life. Unlike my eldest sister, I was born perfectly blank, perfectly bare. For years, I waited for a mark to appear, a sign of who I was or had been or would become. I searched my body, read and reread it carefully. The sharp point of a tooth, the shape of my hands, the places where I could not bear to be touched: my back, my pelvis, under my chin. I was afraid to change my body in any way, to leave my own mark upon it. I got no tattoos, no piercings. I never dyed my hair, and the one time I had it chemically straightened, I shaved it off afterwards. I believed I had to keep my body plain and pristine if I was to receive a sign.”

Myint floats backwards in time and tells us of her paternal great-grandmother who was left widowed with many children. She wonders how her great-grandmother handled the distress. Most of her children got into serious trouble. One became a gangster, another was imprisoned, still another died in a street fight. Only her paternal grandfather seemed sturdy enough to withstand the turbulence and he would become the father of her father. She admires her great-grandfather and father’s centeredness but there is a part of her that fantasizes about her great-uncles and their unrestrained wildness thinking “If I had a thousand lives, I might have been more like my great-uncles: braver, bolder, and wilder. But I have only one life, at least one life at a time, and in this life, I am my father’s daughter and my grandfather’s granddaughter. Like them, I am the observer, I am the outsider, always in the middle of the story but never at the center of it.” But we hear the irony in her proclamation. After all, she is the writer; and thus has supreme power to embellish or omit whatever she chooses to, without asking anyone’s permission. Thus, she becomes the center, and all others rest beneath her.

A few stories recur throughout her narrative. One involves a brother who was born to her parents first, and who died shortly afterwards because he could not hold down his nourishment. She believes that years later, when her sister began putting her finger down her throat to induce vomiting, she was perhaps mourning the death of the brother she never knew. The brother that still haunts their mother’s dreams. Myint writes “Vomiting was the activities of ghosts … ghosts could not speak or touch or bleed, but they could vomit. Vomit or ghosts, the ultimate others, the abject, that which can be rejected from the body, in death or in times of distress when reality is rejected …” Myint frequently refers to her mother’s thwarted ambitions and an uncomfortable competitiveness between them. Yet in another way, Myint’s family remain muffled by her separation from them. She never mentions any demonstrations of love or tenderness between any of them. Nor are there any remembrances of her mother or father comforting her when she was sick or distressed.

Myint occasionally disrupts her rhythm and speaks to us in a plainer, more brittle voice. She admits to an inclination to keep her suffering from others. She tells of her gratefulness in having found an affectionate white man whom she plans to marry. She marvels at his ability to grasp the freely associational nature of her writing. She talks about her student’s difficulties when writing about love. She writes about her mother’s depression when they first came to California. When she was young and would misbehave, her mother would say “Do you want something bad to happen? Do you want your mother or father to die?”

At its simmering core, Names For Light is itself the “place” where the family’s past – and Myint’s dynamically evolving present — approach each other. The tug and pull of these forces, and the broader awareness of tyranny in the world, comprise an environment for the reader that is both demanding in its multiple vectors and gratifying in its patterning and acute intelligence. - Elaine Margolin

https://www.ronslate.com/on-names-for-light-a-family-history-by-thirii-myo-kyaw-myint/

Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint’s Names for Light, winner of the 2018 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, questions the meaning of home. The memoir gathers interwoven vignettes of past and present, examining themes of genealogy and displacement. Myint confronts the ambivalence of belonging and alienation, discussing colonial and post-colonial violence, racism, micro-aggressions, and othering, as well as her painful experience of marginalization in the United States, where she grew up, and abroad. From the unwanted touch of her skin to the inquisitorial curiosity of strangers over where she “really” comes from, she expresses her tiredness and understandable rage. In a climate of rising anti-Asian hate crimes, this book is an urgent call for change.

What immediately stands out in the urgent call is Myint’s clear voice, as she explores personal and historical issues through lyrical evocations of cities and town such as Yangon, Madrid, South Bend, Sittwe, and Hinthada. At first, the locations overlay in a dizzying recollection, each chapter taking place in a different setting, conveying the author’s sense of inherited and acquired displacement. But the varied geography is an invitation to remember lived experience despite uprootedness and, perhaps most importantly for Myint, provides a canvas on which to appose orally-transmitted heritage to re-center among constant movement.

To recreate this oral heritage, Myint creates dialogues with family and the ghosts of family no longer with her. She believes to have embodied the reincarnation of her great-grandfather. The memory of her elder brother, who died as a newborn, also never leaves her. Her elder sister, she believes, is the transmigrated soul of their great-grandmother. The evocation of her ancestors nods to the belief in the interconnectedness of all things and the difficulty of escaping one’s fate. Referring to an old photograph hung in the room which she used to share with her two sisters, Myint notes: “For many years, I looked at it as if looking into a mirror, as if by my looking I could conjure the ghosts of my great-grandfather and my great-grandmother. I looked and looked at this photograph until I felt as if we were the ghosts, my middle sister and I, we, the remnants of these people.”

Myint seeks to populate missing pieces of a family story, one which links her both to the intimacy of her great-grandfather and a sense of safety. Memory merges the emotional and physical when she recalls, like him, similar health woes, serving to carry a form of identification and projection, crucial to Myint’s own reconstructed narrative:

I do not know how much ash is produced when a body is burned. Ash is the remainder, the residue, the remnant or trace, the vestige of a body after it has burned. Ash is what could not burn, or what had to be created so something else could be destroyed. In this way, we are all each other’s ashes. I am my great-grandfather’s ash. I am the story that was told about his death, or the story that was created from his death, though many years later.

Here, Myint embraces a world of haunting recollections, omens, and traditions—including Buddhist teachings on the transience and non-binary nature of our existence and what to call home. Her family story is reclaimed and is revived through her.

Myint also shows that home is expressed not only in herself and her immediate family but also in geography—in land. Mynit intertwines the personal and the historical, writing about Myanmar’s own troubled history. Myint’s reflections on Myanmar and nationalism are timely and illuminating, given the military’s takeover earlier this year and continued brutalization of protesters. She remembers the politics of the country’s independence, the 8888 strike during summer 1988 which saw the eruption of mass protests, explaining that ayekhin or “protest” contains the word “write” in the national Bamar language. “An ayekhin was an effort to write history, with one’s body, with one’s life,” she adds, positing the body as a fragment but also a tool which can be directed towards justice and a larger purpose.

At times, Myint struggles to claim an “I” commonly attached to an ipseity. The shadow of her family seems to consume her. When narrating her memories, she prefers an illeism, a third-person singular narrative, to perhaps help with a perceived loss of agency, dissociation, and to regulate her own story. “People without a home are ghosts,” she writes. By the end of the memoir, Myint comes to see that memories can be “inexact,” and she ruminates what she remembers as much as what she doesn’t. Names for Light is a poetic love letter to the people who make us who we are, and a reminder of the difficulty some face to find one’s way home. - Farah Abdessamad

https://blog.pshares.org/finding-home-in-thirii-myo-kyaw-myints-names-for-light/

Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint, The End of Peril, The

End of Enmity, The End of Strife, A Haven,

Noemi Press, 2018.

An unnamed narrator returns to her ancestral home in an environmentally depleted harbor city with a baby in her care. She has escaped from what she calls "the breach"--the collapse of the climate-controlled domed city where she grew up. From a thread about the narrator's childhood, we learn that the breach was caused by the hysterical growth of the genetically-modified trees in the domed city, a growth which is spreading over the earth. From a thread about the history of the harbor city, we learn of an ancient war that was fought there. In the thread which follows the narrative present, there is a storm which floods the harbor city. The narrator's mother disappears and the baby falls ill. The narrator then journeys to city's river to preform the funeral rites for her mother and cure the baby. At the river, the three narrative threads come together.

In The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint explores the beauty and the pain of constructed realities—the stories we tell and the worlds we build for ourselves. This debut book curves in on itself, doubling back and retracing its steps to create an ever-more intimate portrait of a woman between two cities: the domed city of her youth, which was built by her grandfather, and the titular harbor city, which once acted as haven for an ancient king under attack. Though long past, the history of this harbor city is very much alive in the narrator, as she is a descendant of both the city’s king and those who attacked him. “The city fell and the two peoples are one people now,” she tells us. “In my body, I am one person.” This comingling of attacker and attacked sets the stage for what might be called a book of blurring. Pressing reality mingles with myth and the spectral dead exist among the living. So, too, are lines blurred between human and animal, corporeal and natural: blooming trees swell and curl tendrils round a dying father; a sleepless princess carves the moon with her sharpened hair.

Perhaps the most significant blurring is the one between the narrator and her mother: “My mother,” she says, “…did not want to be reminded of the permeability of the body, of my body, which had invaded and opened hers.” There is also the narrator’s concern for her own baby, a child she winds close like a spool of thread and worries over. “I want it [the child],” she says, “to better understand what it is like to be a woman, for the baby may one day become a woman…The choice of gender the baby will one day make is heavy.” Musings like this one call us to reexamine motherhood—what does it mean? What does it require? And where—if ever—does it end? - https://www.arkint.org/reviews-1#the-end-of-peril-capsule-review

A good example of what independent presses have to offer is Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint’s The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, A Haven. No formulaic pap, no ‘been there, done that.’ Just fine, original storytelling. At first I tried to pin down a genre for Myint’s book. Then I relaxed and let her story take me to a horrific ecological event that ruins a city and upends the lives of its people, all who are unnamed. We have the narrator, her family, and “the baby.” There is also a friend called “the girl” and assorted others, including a king and his family and numerous enemies.

The book takes place in two cities: One is the large harbor city, the other is a manmade domed city that protects its inhabitants from what’s going on outside the dome. The domed city is never given a formal name, but we learn that the king’s men retreated into it “when they could no longer hold back the enemy. The end of peril, they called the city. The end of enmity. The end of strife. It meant all of those things. The city was their haven.”

At some point the protective dome is compromised by what Myint terms a breach, and it has everything to do with trees. Our narrator is very attentive to the baby and explains what the harbor city used to be like:

did you know once there were trees? [ . . . ] I try to describe the sound of wind rustling through leaves, the way the leaves would flutter, and how the sunlight was tinged green inside the woods, how clear that light was.

The book takes on a mythical quality as Myint writes, “I hold the baby close to me again, and I say very softly that the women were blamed for the sky flying away, because women are usually blamed . . . .”

Okay, but then, “The choice of gender the baby will one day make is heavy. [ . . . ] Is the baby my daughter? I wonder, as I look upon its sleeping face. Is it my son? Will it resent me for this gift I am giving it now, this life?”

Another time, she tells baby details about the breach: “I heard the sound of wings beating against glass [ . . . ] The sound was coming from the leaves. Green leaves budding and growing and pushing against the glass.”

Because of our narrator’s mixed origins—she descends from ancestors of the king and also the enemy—she’s not looked upon kindly by what’s left of the harbor city dwellers. When she wanders outside the dome, the people are thin and kind of scary. But here’s how the narrator describes herself: “I was fed by the wealth of the domed city, its green woods and added vitamins. [ . . . ] I am a big girl. Many people had to die so that I could live.”

The story loops back and forth between her father who designed the domed city, her forays into the harbor city to the home of her grandfather, her love-hate relationship with her mother, and the doings of the king’s family and its enemies.

We learn more about that mother, who apparently is gorgeous. She browbeats her daughter by saying the girl is not beautiful, is possessed and should have been a boy, and Mom tries to reshape her daughter’s face. That’s not all, as shown in this passage that says so much: “My mother used to hit me for chewing with my mouth open or sitting with my knees apart. [ . . . ] My mother did not hit hard, but I always cried. She made my father watch, which is what I could not stand.” Though the mother is an integral part of the tale, I’m wondering if there are any good mothers in literary fiction today.

At times The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, A Haven reads like a fairy tale, though resembling those original Grimm Brothers’ works, not the milder children’s versions. That’s the entertainment value of Myint’s book. More importantly, though, it reads like a warning against the environmental shenanigans taking place in our world today. It is both beautifully written and relevant. - Valerie Wieland

https://www.newpages.com/book-reviews/end-of-peril-end-of-enmity-end-of-strife-haven

In an interview with Entropy for her debut novel The End of Peril, The End of Enmity, The End of Strife, A Haven, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint explains how one of the nigh-parallel worlds occurring throughout is influenced by “my father’s retellings of U Kala’s Maha Yazawin or Great Chronicle, an early 18th-century canonical Burmese text.” Unfortunately for those who can’t read Burmese (including myself), it remains untranslated. Yet it also remains the scholarly trend to see the Maha Yazawin, in the words of historian Victor Lieberman in his 1986 essay “How Reliable is U Kala,” as “a pastiche of legends, local histories, biographies, and detailed court records” (Lieberman 247). To say The End of Peril is seeded with this composite character would be to walk in the forest of truth. This is not to say the novel is historical, intent on historicity, or can be relegated to a genre. In fact, what Myint understands about these labels—historicity, facticity, genre—is how they accrete to form lived experience. Myint understands the overflowing of the present.

Overflowing is the operative word here, as the story of The End of Peril centers around floods. There are two cities: the titular harbor city and a nameless domed city. The former was founded during what reads as both an ageless and ancient war between a kingdom and “raiders from the north” (Myint 8). They named their refuge hoping the symbolism of its name would echo throughout history. It did: it was the last place the raiders flooded into before the war ended. The survivors of the harbor city would go on to build the domed city, achieving in practice what the harbor city tried in name. The architect of this temple to endurance would steal away with “the daughter of a clan leader, an heiress to a conquered land, a descendant of the northern invaders” (Myint 8) and would eventually be grandfather of the nameless narrator. What prompts the telling of this story is her departure from her childhood home, child in tow, after the dome bursts and water floods in. In that formerly conquered land, The End of Peril, she recalls and lives these layers of historical ironies and symmetries that will continue to lurk in the novel.

That the novel is front-loaded with this genealogy might lead one to plant the flag of Genesis inside. That the novel explicitly mentions the first and second precepts of a Buddhist layperson might lead one to see the other three interlaced within. One could even see Baudrillard’s hyperreality where the Domed City “displayed the moon phases recorded in an old almanac” (Myint 30) and how the narrator, like an automaton, learned the harbor city’s script through a textbook of which “I write in that same font” (Myint 39). And, while all these are evocative, it’s a case of not seeing the trees for the forest. The End of Peril is a death struggle with Susan Sontag’s famous dictum, “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art” (Sontag 10). It is a novel about bodies—politic and individual—being interpreted through their ephemeral “legends, local histories, biographies, and detailed court records” (Lieberman 247). It’s about those same bodies’ struggle to experience this “feel[ing] like young animals” (Myint 17) in a world where both seem to remain endlessly at a distance. It is, like many great novels, a cipher. It is a hermeneutics of an erotics of art. - Justin Goodman

read more here: https://www.neworleansreview.org/the-end-of-peril-the-end-of-enmity-the-end-of-strife-a-haven/

There are no names in Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint's new novel, The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven. By forgoing names, the novel resists an easy grafting of a migrant story, an exile's story—it exists outside of context. This quality contrasts the book's characters, who, lacking names, must define themselves by their context: societal roles (mother, daughter, king's men), history (a war, an evacuation), and place.

The novel's narrator is poised between such markers, hesitating to make a decision for fear it will preclude other possibilities. "There is so much to choose, to give, and by giving, to take away," she says. She's in limbo between two cities, the harbor city of the present and the domed city of her past. She's between her roles as a daughter and a mother, and between the side of the enemy and the side of the king's men in a war that drove her family to the harbor city, the name of which means the end of peril, the end of enmity, the end of strife. The city's a haven, we're told, but not for her. She's been stranded there by history, and is, as her mother accuses her, "restless, a hungry ghost."

At the center of her current restlessness is a baby. It's not the narrator's baby, but it is in her care. The baby, too, is waiting between defined states. "I have not yet chosen a name for the baby. I have not yet chosen a gender," the narrator says. If decisions preclude some endings, we expect them to also result in others. The story therefore remains stalled in the purgatory of the harbor city until final decisions are made. Myint skillfully maneuvers the reader into a state of anticipation. We anticipate, as the narrator does, the mother's death or the baby's definition.

The narrator's own transience is something we get through memory: she shuttles us between the present and an alluring past. The past is also another place, the domed city, which we learn is an artificially controlled society, designed by the narrator's "father's father." In the domed city, people don't seem to die and the trees have been biochemically engineered to grow faster, stranger. The baby comes from the domed city. The baby's a seed of what that domed society wanted, some utopian vision, and it survived that city's breach and ruin. It becomes the narrator's mission to find a new place for the baby. If the baby can survive, her thinking goes, perhaps the old vision can too.

Part of the characters' inabilities to settle into the present is due to the fact that each one of them is haunted by the past. The mother is haunted by her younger self, which is stunningly captured in a description of her earlier, photographed version looking "radiant, glowing like an apparition, for the beauty of the dead is always eternal and transcendent, while the living decompose." The narrator is haunted by another, a girl she's left behind. The novel deftly stretches the mother and daughter between the places, a tension heightened in the narrator's case because her father's side is descended from the enemy. "In the domed city," she tells us, "my body was the spoils of war and in the harbor city, my body is the shame of war. I am a child of violence."

When the present tension rises, the narrator deviates into reverie, the surreal and enchanting story of a locked-away princess that the narrator's father, who died back in the domed city, told her when she was young. As the novel's pressure continues to build, the prose stretches its realist confines and scenes begin to stray into the surreal territory of these legends. Myint's language does this too, struggling as if it is under pressure to contain itself. It accumulates, brims, and finally spills into extravagant and beautiful passages, only to recede and begin accumulating again.

It's appropriate then, that when change comes, it comes as a flood. The world comes undone. The narrator is forced to flee the surges with the baby. The novel's end leaves the reader tethered, circling back on its invented folklore, the image of a collapsed dome, one city in ruins, another in decay, everywhere "wild grass dancing over the sand. Grass flickering like fire," and surging through it the purging waters.

"The renewal has finally come," the narrator tells us. The cleansing makes the ground fertile for the baby, perhaps, but it remains unresolved whether the change can save the narrator, who's also tethered, in her case by a lifeline traced out on her palm by her mother, a line that coils back to an abandoned city, and a girl left behind. - Mai Nardone

https://www.therupturemag.com/the-collagist/2018/5/16/the-end-of-peril-the-end-of-enmity-the-end.html

Interviews

Maudlin House— “Writer of the Week,” a column by Benjamin Lee, January 2019

Lighthouse Writers Workshop—"Catching Up With Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint" by Sophie Grossman, July 2018

The Rumpus—"Mini-Interview Project #145: Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint" by Joe Scapellato, July 2018

Electric Literature—"Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint's Surreal, Haunting Post-Apocalypse" by Tillman Miller, July 2018

• featured in Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Entropy—"Until the Deep Past and the Present Are Able to Touch: A Conversation with Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint" by Joe Milazzo, March 2018.

The New Delta Review—"Contributor Interview with Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint," January 2018. 

The Collagist—"We Are the Privileged Ones Who Can," September 2016.

Federigo Tozzi - His work is at once a mixture of subtlety and melodrama, of psychological perception, primitive emotion, and raw physical need, as his plain subjects, yearning for connection and love, forever grasp at the unattainable

Federigo Tozzi, Love in Vain: Selected Stories, Trans. by Minna Proctor, New Directions, 2001

read it at Google Books

Love in Vain: Selected Stories of Federigo Tozzi is the debut short-story collection in English of one of Italy's most distinguished early modern writers. The twenty stories of Love in Vain were selected and translated by Minna Proctor, who received the 1998 PEN/Renato Poggioli Award for her then unpublished renderings of Tozzi's fiction. "The investigation of naturalism, of truth," writes Proctor in her biographical introduction, "defined Tozzi's poetics. Impassioned by literature, yet isolated from the mainstream, Tozzi found nothing so fascinating as the unfettered expression of the inner lives of normal people." His work is at once a mixture of subtlety and melodrama, of psychological perception, primitive emotion, and raw physical need, as his plain subjects, yearning for connection and love, forever grasp at the unattainable.

PEN award-winner Minna Proctor translated the 20 pieces by prolific Italian realist Federigo Tozzi (1883-1920) that make up Love in Vain: Selected Stories, in which the young characters' search for the romantic ideal often leads only to misery. Jealousy, obsession and betrayal are brought to the fore in these stories of smalltown lovers driven by their passions, trying desperately to connect usually without success. "What good does love do me?" one anguished character asks. Through the arranged marriages, secret trysts and unfulfilled desires, disappointment and frustration are never far off. - Publishers Weekly

"Federigo Tozzi, Italy's forgotten master of the short story, is a real discovery. I was delighted by the compassion and insight of Love in Vain, by its unflinching and subtle dissection of humankind's most private moments. How can such a powerful writer have slipped through the net and for so long? Now, thanks to Minna Proctor's elegant and equally subtle translations, it is unlikely that Tozzi will be forgotten again."― Jim Crace

"Federigo Tozzi's beautiful, strange love stories hover at the abyss, where reason meets unreason and loses. Tozzi must be the poet of abjection, a poet of the unconscious. His perplexing tales reflect on self-conscious characters caught in love's, and their own, absurdly needy net. They comment, too, on the moment when ideas were changing, sensibilities shifting, and his characters move, resistant and confused, from the Victorian into the modern. Translator Minna Proctor has done a wonderful job of realizing these startling stories in English and bringing them to us for the first time."― Lynne Tillman

"Ardent, impetuous, crackling with nerve-energies, Federigo Tozzi insists on his uniqueness. Minna Proctor has brought this full-throttle sensibility into English without a flinch or a fidget."― Sven Birkerts

We're living in the Golden Age of the Rediscovered Writer. Never before have so many worked so hard to republish the works of authors known to so few. From Dawn Powell to Paula Fox, from Charles Portis to Richard Yates, there's an inspiring -- or, depending on your point of view, sobering -- list of writers unjustly neglected in their own times and now enjoying a belated heyday.

Add to that number Federigo Tozzi, an Italian writer who died suddenly in 1920 at age 37, leaving behind five novels and 120 short stories. The stories collected here show off Tozzi's irresistible blend of stark realism and wild passion. His lovers love so hard it hurts; they wring every ounce of pleasure they can out of their simple lives, but they're also never far from a reckoning with disappointment, loss and other ugly realities.

These stories were written in the early 20th century, but their sexual frankness, along with a sort of adorable self-conscious neuroticism that afflicts many of the characters, make them seem strangely modern. - Maria Russo

https://www.salon.com/2001/06/11/recs_33/

A first English-language collection of 20 stories by an almost forgotten Italian writer (1883–1920), malcontent, fervent socialist, and effervescent romantic libertine. Translator Proctor’s illuminating introduction recounts the known facts of Tozzi’s checkered literary and sexual adventures, and links his “provincial realism” convincingly with the work of his contemporaries Italo Svevo and Luigi Pirandello and also (an obvious influence) Sicily’s Giovanni Verga. The stories themselves—simultaneously anecdotal, earthy, and psychologically astute—include such gems as two knowing depictions (in “First Love” and “The Lovers,” respectively) of the intricacies and absurdities of both adolescent and adult passion; a compact rustic tragedy precipitated by jealousy (“Assunta”); tales of marital mistrust, violence, and vengeance (“L’Amore,” “Poverty”) that might have come out of Boccaccio’s Decameron; and a masterly study of obsession (“The Clocks”). Best of all perhaps is “The Idiot”: here, the mind and heart of the emotionally helpless man-child Fiocco are portrayed with remarkable ingenuity—and compassion.

A first-class introduction to a wonderful writer. - Kirkus Reviews

Love in Vain is the belated introduction of Federigo Tozzi to the English-speaking world, one of the first translations of any of the works by this prolific and fairly well-known Italian author. The twenty stories collected here, spanning Tozzi's entire active writing life (1908 to 1920), are only a smattering of his output: there are a hundred more stories, as well as several novels, poetry, essays, plays, and a voluminous correspondence. This collection does, however, offer a good introduction to an author whose work has previously been inaccessible.

Tozzi's career was cut short by his early death (at age thirty-seven), but he had already written a great deal. He had had some success, publishing numerous stories, poetry, the collection of prose-miniatures, Bestie, and the novel Con gli occhi chiusi, and was an author clearly coming into his own, finally able to live off of his writing and devote himself completely to it. At the time of his death his novel, Tre croci, had just appeared, and he was correcting the proofs of his next novel, Il podere. Most of Tozzi's work was then published posthumously (though some, like the companion volumes to Bestie, the prose miniature collections Cose and Persone only some six decades after they were written), and the reception of it was probably cooler than had the promising author been alive and active. Still, he achieved some renown and, at least in Italy, is recognized as a leading literary figure of that time.

Minna Proctor's introduction offers a useful overview of Tozzi's life and career, as well as describing his unusual relationship with his wife, Emma (they "were more perfect epistolary lovers than they ever were married lovers"). Proctor notes "there is so much to explain about his artistic itinerary", but fortunately doesn't try to explain overmuch. She suggests the points of importance, and then lets the work speak for itself.

The stories are short (in this collection only the title story is longer than ten pages) and deceptively simple in appearance -- many short paragraphs (often only a single line) and a good deal of conversation. Exclamation and question marks are found all over. Lives are quickly sketched, their essence revealed in a few episodes.

The notion of "love in vain" is a central one: there are few happy loves or lives here. "But what is love ?" characters wonder, in these or other words. They look for it, and yet when they seem to have found it find less than the hoped for satisfaction in it. It isn't what they had imagined, and some want to be rid of it almost as soon as they find it. "But he wasn't in love with his wife anymore, and he wanted to leave" is a typical scenario in these stories.

The characters are often afraid of happiness, warily approaching it when it seems within grasp, handling it uneasily. "I love you. But we must never see each other again", seems a typical solution. Many of his characters have a great deal of difficulty in living at all (and death ends a number of these stories). Loneliness is pervasive -- "Franco Appesi was feeling more and more alone", begins The Miracle. Even where the opportunity to share one's loneliness is given, the characters are unable to take the necessary steps: the two women live in adjoining apartments in The Boardinghouse, for example, remain frustratingly unable to truly reach out to one another.

There are other miseries as well. A weak man, telling his own story in House for Sale allows himself to be taken advantage of and bullied, forsaking his past and everything that he has and wanting to be grateful for it: "I was sad", he says, as if unable to explain to himself why that should be. "I wanted to be happy." But Tozzi's characters rarely find happiness.

Despite the titles of some of the other stories -- Dead Man in the Oven, To Dream of Death, Vile Creatures, Poverty -- it is not simply a dark collection. There is poignancy here, throughout, with Tozzi baring these souls in simple, well-sketched, revealing scenes.

The incidents in these stories are often truly incidental -- and yet shattering in their consequences. A simple action, a few words -- but then nothing is the way it was before. A typical example is Tozzi's story Marito e moglie (not included in this collection), in which Enrica Landi goes shopping -- when she returns her husband, Vittorino, doesn't recognize her. It is a brief episode, a momentary lapse or feeling of madness that shook him to the quick; he regains his senses -- but can no longer love his wife. "It seems that only a few minutes were enough to alter their years of married life". It only seems that way -- here and in most of his stories Tozzi makes clear how much there is behind such seemingly sudden reversals and changes. He is particularly good at capturing and expressing that moment when these small and large worlds are turned upside down -- and the character's flailing recognition, trying to make sense of their own feelings and the worlds around them.

Tozzi presents his stories well, offering a variety of approaches and different tales. There are tales from the Italian countryside as well as more mystically inclined stories (including the quite remarkable story The Crucifix). They read well -- quick, moving, quite powerful. Stylistically they are accomplished (though he is too fond of the exclamation mark !). The unexpected twists and observations are very effective; only occasionally does he go too far.

One hopes that this is only the first of sliver of Tozzi to be presented in English, and that much more will follow. He is an author worth knowing and reading, and Love in Vain is a good introduction to his work.

https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/italia/tozzif.htm

Federigo Tozzi, Three Crosses, Forgotten Books, 2017

read it here

Excerpt from Three Crosses:

The latter gave a grunt, swore, pulled down the brim of his hat and closed his eyes again. He was squatting in a chair, with his hands in his trouser-pockets and his head leaning against one of the shelves of the bookcase; near by was an antique wooden chest, covered with vases, china plates and paintings, kept there on view for strangers.

Federigo Tozzi (1883-1920) was a unique and isolated writer in turn of the century Italy. Born in Siena, he was the oldest of eight children, of whom only he and his sister lived to adulthood. The mother was afflicted with epilepsy, and the illness was passed on to most of the children. The dominant figure in the family was the father, also Federigo, who owned farm property but put all his efforts into running a trattoria, or restaurant. Young Federigo felt oppressed by his bossy father, and as a result played Bad Boy in school--aside from suffering periods of ill health. His turn to literature was almost an act of defiance, for the father wanted his son to take over the management of the trattoria not write books.

Seeking to escape from this trap he managed to get work with the railroad as a clerk--which resulted in one of his most famous novels, "Diary of a Clerk," 1910. But his first publications were of poetry, and made little impression. It was his novels that were considered more important. His late novel, "Three Crosses,' (in Italian, "Tre Croce") is somewhat of a melodrama about three brothers who try to run an antique shop, but are hopelessly incompetent at handling money. The portraits of the brothers are unforgettable, as well as the descriptions of Siena itself., It is a most unusual novel when compared to other works written at the same time, such as those of Pirandello and Palazzeschi. It is a great achievement for a writer whose life was so short, and who had such promise. - Philip Brantingham