I arrive at Lydd airport. At passport control, I present my passport through a small opening in the glass panel to the officer sitting behind it. We wait a little until first three security personnel arrive, then four others—two policemen and a policewoman, and an interrogator from the Israeli intelligence services accompanied by a young woman who remains with us during questioning, most likely for the same reason that male doctors summon a female nurse to remain in the room when a woman’s reproductive organs are examined. The intelligence services want to examine my private world, in an interview that will not take long, the interrogator assures me, if I “cooperate” with them. I have just arrived from Berlin. I stayed there approximately two months, participating in a project called the “West–Eastern Divan” that aims to foster dialogue between the East and the West. Why should the subject of East and West concern me? I let my thoughts flow like water over sand, spontaneously sneaking between the grains, so they may find an answer to the question.

…. In the end, I resort to science instead of nature. I recall what my nephew told me several years ago. In one of the medicine classes he was attending at university, the lecturer asked the students what they thought was the primary cause of lung cancer. Smoking, replied one of the students. The lecturer commented that that was the correct answer, then asked, what was the second most common cause of lung cancer? No one answered. “Smoking,” he responded. What was the third? Smoking. The fourth? Smoking. The fifth? Smoking. The sixth? Smoking. The seventh? Smoking. The eighth? Smoking. The ninth? Smoking. The top nine causes of lung cancer are smoking. It may be said that at least the top four causes of my participation in any activity whose subject is East–West dialogue are money. And if the amount were doubled, it could then be said that the top nine causes of my participation in activities of this kind are money.

But that’s just the beginning. Read the rest here!

This is also a good time to note that Karapanou’s Rien ne va plus is currently a staff pick at the great indy Green Apple Books in San Francisco. Thank you to independent bookstores worldwide!

And The Sleepwalker also appeared on Scott Esposito’s list of “Favorite Reads of 2011“: “[A]n amazing little book, certainly one of the leanest, most interesting pieces of writing you will have the pleasure of reading.”

Wow.

And for those of you who don’t read Hebrew, you’re still in luck: read Alex’s work in Becka McKay’s stunning translations in Blue Has No South and Lunar Savings Time.

To find herself in a space like this, who would have thought it? Walls newly plastered and the wind sweeping through, when a rare wind there was, and otherwise the stillness, the sullen heat of the afternoon, and the tap-tapping of the builders, two floors below, putting in the kitchen – ripping out what had been installed there in the 1970′s and replacing it with gleaming steel and marble that harmonised strangely with the yellow arches – in a way that she would never have been able herself to conceive of, and yet was so easy for her daughter to see.

Her daughter’s house this, a narrow mountain village house recently purchased in this remote corner of Italy, where she had agreed – nay begged – to be installed to oversee the building work that had to be done to make it habitable.

Are you sure you want to do this? Anamika had asked her.

Well, why not?

You do not have to do this, her daughter had said.

But it is what I want, she had assured her.

Anything but to have to return to the flat in Calcutta where there was nothing more to do now but to tell the servants what to cook for lunch and dinner, and then to sit and read, perhaps make a few telephone calls, and receive those that came, and then the stillness of the afternoon with nothing else to do but read again, and finally the world coming life again and a semblance of duties emerging from such necessary events as the re-opening of shutters, children’s voices in the communal garden, footsteps outside of people once again starting to come and go, nothing to do with her at all, but dragging her in nonetheless into a sort of ceremony of living, nothing more than that. And how was it different when he was alive? Her husband, the renowned brain surgeon, with whom she had so little in common, and yet whose habits had girdled and protected her to an extent that she had never supposed until his sudden death had pressed it upon her that she had nothing to do, no-one to be, otherwise.

Read the rest here.

Several writers I have long admired impressed me anew with their latest books — among them Kate Bernheimer, Peter S. Beagle, Goncalo Tavares, Cesar Aira, and Karen Russell — but let me concentrate on two authors whose names I had never heard before this year:

First is the Israeli writer Alex Epstein, two of whose collections were recently translated into English by the poet Becka Mara McKay and published by Clockroot Press: Blue Has No South and Lunar Savings Time. If you took the short forms and odd structural techniques of Lydia Davis and wedded them to the fantastic impulses of Ray Bradbury, you would get something like these books, which together contain some two hundred strange, pliant, elliptical, yet surprisingly tender treatments of angels, rain, lullabies, minotaurs, moons, zen masters, literature, and time travel. A glimpse at the titles should be enough to tell you whether they are the kind of stories you would enjoy: “On the Mourning Customs of Elephants,” “The Number of Steps on the Moon,” “An Instruction Manual for a Rented Time Machine,” “The Angel Who Photographed God.”

Read the rest here!

Yesterday, while it was still fine and hadn’t yet started to rain, I went with the neighbors’ children to a local park to play. The four of us ran around, hiding here and there, and there were lots of butterflies that looked as if they were playing with us. Afterwards we sat on a large rock, and it was then that I discovered I was seeing everything in order to write about it to him. More than that, I discovered that I had forgotten how to live without his letters. It made me afraid of finding myself one day without them.

A few hours later, when I arrived home, I found a short letter from him.

Read the rest here.

This novel, or anti-novel, or collection of linked tours de force, opens with a bored and adolescent God vomiting a new savior onto an unnamed Greek island. Although in due time we discover that this new Christ is a bizarrely murderous, androgynous, sexually rabid police officer, this is only after Margarita Karapanou has abandoned her strange opening to introduce us to an assortment of blocked artists, homosexuals, and numerous other island dwellers. These characters resemble protagonists, but are more like fellow observers, albeit ones caught up in an increasingly lurid pageant that draws in everyone with the fascination of catastrophe. Karapanou’s book feels like a naïve form of modernism, each of the text’s short, storylike chapters a work of bricolage built from the diverse materials circulating in her cluttered mind. Like the best art, her plots unfold without self-consciousness or apparent purpose, yet they resist simple interpretations and have an impressive structural solidity. Her extremely muscular, tight prose makes a fine medium for the book’s relentlessly surreal, breathtakingly complex happenings, reminiscent of a Latin-inflected Pynchon. Though the book thus described may sound like a mess, The Sleepwalker in fact exudes a sense of strong thematic unity in its slow, relentless progress toward apocalypse—which, when it does arrive, is just as rich, satisfying, and inevitable as everything that has led up to it. If The Sleepwalker is any indication, Karapanou was a major voice whose books demand to be read.

And thank you as well to the RCF!

The Life and Memoirs of Dr. Pi and Other Stories is a fantastic translation and a rollicking good read… Bayley is a master of word economy and concision, and it is breathtaking to watch him establish scene and advance plot in so little space. … Like the best cowboys from American westerns, Pi is taciturn but not smug, a confident and unhesitating man of action… Even Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s down-on-his-luck detective, whom Bayley pulls unceremoniously from some dusty noir pantry shelf and re-bakes into Pi in equal parts homage and spoof, seems hesitant and verbose by comparison. …

To follow the adventures of Dr. Pi is to imagine a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle/Jules Verne hero facing Raymond Chandler goons for quick bouts in an arena designed by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Bayley’s wit is a gleaming razor; his masterful command of language betrays his career as poet and a playwright. Even as the stories parody various literary genres (noir, magical realism, classic mystery), they follow Max Beerbohm’s advice regarding caricature—that all elements “be melted down, as in a crucible, from the solution, be fashioned anew.”

And as a bonus, here are some amazing Bayley poems, just translated by Emily Toder, from the latest issue of Gulf Coast.

As I write this, Borders is closing its doors for good, while The Onion has composed a mock obituary for the “Last Literate Person on Earth,” dead at ninety-eight. Literary writers, it seems, no longer fret over how to capture the kaleidoscopic reality of the new century, but instead wonder why they should bother trying in the first place. In his latest collection, Lunar Savings Time, Israeli author Alex Epstein has, if not answered these questions, at least illuminated a new path toward the literary amid the detritus of print and digital culture. The picture that emerges from this mosaic of narrative—many not more than a page in lengthy—is by no means bleak. Epstein’s very short fictions delineate the enormous imaginative space that is contained within the book—a virtual reality that encompasses past and present, the obscure and the viral simultaneously within its modest pages. The result is alchemy rather than entropy: “And it was winter. The Zen monk updated his Facebook status: ‘In the evening it snowed. In the night I dreamed it was snowing.’ And finally, spring: the ghost’s water broke.” Epstein doesn’t bemoan the ephemeral excess of the digital age; his poetic narratives invite the reader to be more attentive for its plentiful (and inevitable) moments of unexpected beauty, as in “On the Writer’s Conference”: “The writer from the moon has a British accent. He reads a novella set in India. Every time he pronounces the word elephant, the refined audience blushes with pleasure. After him, A Brazilian writer lectures on ‘The Nightlife of the Short Story.’ In a plaza outside the auditorium, a young woman plump from love is smoking the last cigarette of the evening. In [a] moment she will throw the butt into the sky.”

—Pedro Ponce, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Dalkey Archive Press, Fall 2011 (Vol. XXXI, No. 3)

HP: Your work moves not only geographically through India, the United Kingdom, and the US, but also linguistically. You’ve written in and translate from Bengali, and of course write both creative and scientific work in English, and, I imagine, in an English that encompasses something of the breadth of these locations and dialects. Can you talk about the different languages, including the different “Englishes,” that you have access to as a reader and writer, and how they interact or are given voice in your work?

SG: I had no acquaintance with the English language until I was four and a half years old which, of course, is still very early in life so I had no trouble picking it up. We had just moved to Zambia after living for three years in Ethiopia, where I spoke Bengali with my parents and Amharic with my nanny (the one friend I had then was also a little Bengali boy) and I had no idea that it was possible for people to converse in a language I might not understand. As a result, I was absolutely infuriated that the little English girls to came to welcome me to our new home spoke in such a way that I could make no sense of what they were saying. I learnt to read and write in English at school, but was also instructed in Bengali at home as it was always my parents’ intention to return to Calcutta. When we finally did go back in 1976 (I was then eleven), I was at first enrolled in a missionary school by the name of La Martiniere with a long and distinguished tradition of offering young ladies an excellent and exclusive private education in English, which meant that while I still had a lot of catching up to do, I was still studying Bengali as a second language. But after two years there, encouraged by my father, I made a very conscious decision to switch to an experimental school by the name of Patha Bhavan which had been founded in the ’60s by a group of intellectuals, many of whom he knew very well. I put myself through a course of rigorous immersion in Bengali, devouring the  literature—and also starting to write in Bengali—I did in fact manage to publish a few science fiction short stories in little magazines, but I was always attracted to the novel as a form and there are several unfinished Bengali manuscripts gathering dust somewhere in my mother’s flat in Calcutta. These were my formative years, and so I owe as much to the writings of Bengali moderns like Premen Mitra and Jibananda Das as I do to TS Eliot and Virginia Woolf in the construction of my literary sensibilities. Bengali humour—not just humorist tradition, but the use of irony in everyday life—was an important ingredient of my life in Calcutta—whatever ludic qualities there are in my prose derive from this as much as my later exposure to writers like Nabokov, Borges, Calvino. Rather by chance, I ended up in 1984 as an undergraduate at Princeton University, but was still writing in Bengali in my summer vacations back home. In my senior year, however, I decided to attend a Creative Writing workshop with Joyce Carol Oates, and that was when I began write in English.

I think English is a wonderful language, and it is possible that it has a unique degree of malleability—it’s hard for me to say, as I do not know any other language as well other than Bengali. Would Bengali, if it had been disseminated as widely as English, mutated into different forms in the same way? I really do not know. The Bengali language itself has a very recent history of evolution connected to the 19th-century phenomenon of the Bengali Renaissance, so it is certainly capable of adapting itself to new circumstances. My general feeling about all languages is that they are all unique and unpredictable, and it is possible to find your own voice within any of them. Naturally, the language itself will condition the voice that you find within it, and the way you think in general. But I do not think that it is useful to have any particular political allegiances with language. Many of us who write in English, even though it is not our mother tongue, have been called upon repeatedly to justify this action, as if it were an obvious disloyalty. I have never been much exercised by this—as far as I am concerned, the only option available to me when it comes to languages is serial monogamy, and I know within myself that the only reason I “abandoned” Bengali was because it was difficult for me to remain immersed in it while living away from Calcutta. Recently, though, I’ve revised my position somewhat upon reading Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s thoughts on this subject. To quote from one of his poems, rather than essays: “Insomnia brings lucidity,  And a borrowed voice sets the true one, Free.” We are permanently in search of our true voice, and this has to be mediated through a borrowed voice—to imagine that our mother tongue is less of a borrowed voice than any other is perhaps a mistake.

Read in full here.

And also check out this interview with Sunetra on narrative in literature and science at London’s the Royal Society blog, as part of the One Culture Festival in which she just participated.