A Review of Funeral for a Dog by Thomas Pletzinger (translated by Ross Benjamin)

Funeral for a Dog: A Novel

4.5 out of 5: Thomas Pletzinger’s imaginative novel, Funeral for a Dog, proceeds on two parallel planes. One plane is inhabited by the present-day diary entries of German journalist/ethnographer Daniel Mandelkern recording a brief visit to the Italian lakeside home of reclusive children’s book author Dirk Svensson. The other plane consists of Svensson’s previously-written memoir about his travels through New York City at the time of the September 11th terrorist attacks and through remote regions of Brazil. As Mandelkern attempts to draw enough material out of Svensson for a 3000-word profile piece, he gradually loses hold over his original purpose and, further encouraged by his discovery of Svensson’s memoir in a locked suitcase, perseverates on his own personal crisis:

I’m lying between books and people, between words and bodies. My language is of
no use for decisions, each word is only true for a few seconds, then it dries and turns to paper …. Svensson has decided on things: he lives in a ruin, now he chops the old wood, he jumps in the clear, reliable water. Is that how one should live (is that how I should live)?

Funeral for a Dog is many things. It’s a novel about parallel searches for identity and meaning, a recording of the events of a five-day house party, a mystery about the death of a friend, and a chronicle of the slow decline of an elderly, three-legged dog. Scenes peppered with the funhouse imagery of carousels, roller coasters, and cotton candy alternate with those filled with dark foreboding.

In Funeral for a Dog, Pletzinger delivers a challenging and innovative novel that asks more questions than it answers as it wallows in the kind of directionless seeking that has become a hallmark of postmodern fiction. This puzzle of a novel is filled with echoes, repetitions, and reflections, which are carefully preserved by Benjamin’s adept translation. In a Mobius-worthy trick, the last page of the novel loops right back to the first page. Rather than leading towards clarity, Funeral for a Dog proves clarity is an illusion. This high-energy read will frustrate some readers, but those willing to commit to the journey will be rewarded with an intelligent and creative portrayal of the intermingling of love and loss, life and death.

A Review of Agaat by Marlene Van Niekerk (translated by Michiel Heyns)

Agaat

5 out of 5: At the beginning of this epic novel, seventy-year-old Milla de Wet is confined to her bed. Once the strong and competent owner of a successful farm inherited from her mother, Milla suffers from A.L.S. and now is left with only the ability to blink her eyes and, after a while, not even that. Milla is entirely dependent on the ministrations of Agaat, her devoted house servant, who wordlessly promises Milla “the best-managed death in history.” It is 1996 in South Africa, just two years after the demise of apartheid.

From this confined vantage point, Milla narrates her adult life story, beginning with her troubled marriage to the dashing, if agriculturally-challenged, Jak de Wet in 1947. Soon after she and Jak settle on her farm, Milla decides to take in and raise the abused young daughter of a farm laborer, renaming the girl Agaat. Long unable to have a child of her own, Milla eventually gives birth to a son named Jakkie, marginalizing Agaat’s position in the family. Over time, Milla and Agaat develop a complex co-dependency, as do Jakkie and Agaat, while Jak becomes jealous of Agaat’s hold over both his wife and his son. Agaat forms the center of a decades-long, multi-dimensional game of tug-o-war: “a pivot she was, a kingpin, you’d felt for a while now how the parts gyrated around her, faster and faster, even though she was the least.”

Agaat is about many things, including marriage, parenting, friendship, sickness, and death. Politically-minded readers will find plenty of support for interpreting the novel as an allegory for apartheid, while those with more domestic interests will appreciate the details on embroidery, ecologically-sensitive farming practices, and home-based nursing procedures. Perhaps Agaat’s most important lesson concerns the importance of communication to achieving lasting change. The best education and carefully constructed systems cannot bridge the gap between master and servant, between white and black. Rather, true understanding is possible only after years of empathetic communication. As Milla nears death, she and Agaat have finally approached this kind of understanding:

[The doctor’s] face looms above mine. He looks at my eyes as if they were the eyes of an octopus, as if he’s not quite sure where an octopus’s eyes are located, as if he doesn’t know what an octopus sees. He shines a little light into my face, he swings it from side to side. I look at him hard, but seeing, he cannot see.

Agaat catches my eye. Wait, let me see, she says.

[The doctor] stands aside. He shakes his head.

Agaat’s face is above me, her cap shines white, she looks into my eyes. I blink them for her so that she can see what I think. The effrontery! They think that if you don’t stride around on your two legs and make small talk about the weather, then you’re a muscle mass with reflexes and they come and flash lights in your face. Tell the man he must clear out.

A small flicker ripples across Agtaat’s face. Ho now hopalong! it means. Her apron creaks as she straightens up. Her translation is impeccable.

She says thank you doctor. She says doctor is welcome to leave now, she’s feeling better. She says thank you for the help, thank you for the oxygen, we can carry on here by ourselves again now.

I close my eyes. He must think she’s crazy.

Again the fingers snapping in front of my face.

She’s conscious, really, doctor, you can leave her alone now, she’s just tired, when she shuts her eyes like that then I know. Everything’s in order, she says, she just wants to sleep now. I know, I know her ways.

Milla’s disease has the potential to reduce this nearly 600-page novel into an exercise in claustrophobia, but, instead, Van Niekerk has created a work of stunning breadth and emotional potency. Milla’s second-person narration is liberally broken up by her diary entries, which Agaat has decided to read to Milla during her last days, and by italicized paragraphs of Milla’s stream-of-consciousness musings. Van Niekerk is a poet as well as a novelist, and her considerable poetic abilities are on display throughout the novel. Likewise, Michiel Heyns’s masterful work yields an English translation with all the elegant power of the original language. These various elements come together in Agaat to create an unforgettable reading experience that transcends the lives of its four primary characters to implicate the broader world.

This review also appears at Three Percent in a slightly different form. Agaat is longlisted for the 2011 Best Translated Book Award (BTBA), and my review is part of the "Why This Book Should Win the BTBA" series at Three Percent, which covers each of the twenty-five longlisted titles.

2011 Best Translated Book Award

The Best Translated Book Award (BTBA) was founded in 2007 for the purpose of recognizing the very best international works of fiction and poetry published in original English translations (i.e. not retranslations or reprints). The shortlist for this year's award will be announced on March 24th. Go here to see the list of the twenty-five titles on the longlist for this year's award, which covers books published between Dec. 1, 2009 and Nov. 30, 2010.

Much of my reading each year focuses on works in translation, so I have been an avid follower of the BTBA since it's founding. I am thrilled to have the honor of serving on the panel of fiction judges for next year's BTBA, covering books published between Dec. 1, 2010 and Nov. 30, 2011. This means I'll be posting lots of reviews of translated books here at Literary License over the next year. Also, if you come across a new translation you think deserves to be considered for the BTBA, please leave me a comment or send me an e-mail.

A Review of On Elegance While Sleeping by Viscount Lascano Tegui (translated by Idra Novey)

On Elegance While Sleeping

4 out of 5: Emilio Lascano Tegui (1887-1966) was, at various times during his eventful life, an Argentinean, a Parisian, a self-labeled viscount, a translator, a journalist, a curator, a painter, a decorator, a diplomat, a mechanic, an orator, a dentist, and, fortunately for us, a writer. Tegui’s 1925 novel On Elegance While Sleeping, a cult classic in Argentina, Tegui’s home country, is now available for the first time to an English-speaking audience (thanks to Dalkey Archive Press and translator Idra Novey). This genre-defying novel is framed as a four-year series of chronologically-ordered diary entries composed by an unnamed French infantryman in the late 1800s. Like its author, this novel’s narrator concerns himself with a bit of everything, including the proverbial kitchen sink (or, should I say, the cultivation of carrots). The entries touch on the themes of life, illness (specifically, syphilis), death, sex, gender, memory, crime, and literature, to name just a few. Seamlessly shifting among present reflections, past recollections, and stories within stories, the entries examine the mundane (one begins “Cotton mittens bother me when they’re dyed black.”) as well as the sublime (“Nothing spreads sadness like popularity.”) and range in length from just two sentences to almost seven pages. The result is a work of art that’s impossible to categorize. Is it autobiography? Allegory? A crime novel? An experiment in form? In a word, yes.

Just before we lose our bearings wandering among this heady collection of seemingly aimless thoughts—that is, at the perfect moment—On Elegance While Sleeping changes registers. The novel adopts a foreboding tone as the diary entries slowly coalesce into the thoughts of a man intent on committing murder. Driven by a Raskolnikov-like need “[t]o unburden humanity of an imperfect being: a weakness,” the diarist lays out his motivations in chilling and poetic prose:

I’ve sketched out my plans and am ready. I have a new strength in me, taken from the secret core of my life, driving me on, controlling me. It’s health, youth, and optimism combined. Until yesterday, my tentative novel (“The Syphilis of Don Juan”) served as a haven for my imagination. Today, it doesn’t satisfy my thirst—or, better said, can no longer stem the anguish that gnaws at me on the eve of an act that is now quite inevitable. I’m halfway between a comedy and a strange sort of drama, and feel an overbearing need to lower the curtain. No simple curtain: the front curtain of the stage, the grand drape, the great iron and asbestos curtain that drops like a zinc plate from the sixth floor and creaks as it falls. Something like that, flamboyant, coarse, unexpected—something that will impose its tyranny over my life without question. I’m going to kill someone.

Tegui’s prose is a seductive mix of hard edges and soft contours, flowing musings and sharp declarations. Translator Idra Novey maintains this delicate balance, juxtaposing “a haven for my imagination” with “the anguish that gnaws” and following a complex and elegant three-sentence metaphor with the startling declaration, “I’m going to kill someone.” Tegui’s compelling style relies as much on rhythm and sound as it does on content, and Novey masterfully recreates this effect in English.

At its core, On Elegance While Sleeping gives us access to the soul of a man who is desperately seeking. Whether it’s love, sex, happiness, connection with his fellow man, an imaginative outlet, or simply a good story, the problem is the same: to find what he lacks. He asks, “Could it be that the thing I’m missing is courage?” Does our diarist have the fortitude to follow through with his murderous plan? To discover the answer, you’ll have to read the book.

This review also appears at Three Percent in a slightly different form. On Elegance While Sleeping is longlisted for the 2011 Best Translated Book Award (BTBA), and my review is part of the "Why This Book Should Win the BTBA" series at Three Percent, which covers each of the twenty-five longlisted titles.

A Review of Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

Skippy Dies: A Novel

4 out of 5: As might be guessed from its title, one of the primary characters (14-year-old Skippy) dies within this novel’s first few pages. After that unexpected death, which interrupts a doughnut-eating contest between roommates, the narrative jumps backwards in time to cover the events leading up to that fateful event. Along the way, Skippy Dies touches on every imaginable component of adolescent life in the context of a group of young students at Seabrook, a prestigious, all-male Catholic preparatory school located in contemporary Dublin, Ireland. Drugs, alcohol, cliques, girls, sports, video games and cell phones, depression and existential angst, friends and enemies, and even attempted travel through time and space all play a part in this sprawling, messy narrative.

In telling this complex story, Murray skillfully shifts between numerous points of view, including that of both students and teachers, to create a multi-dimensional world in all its disarray. Coming in at well over 600 pages, Skippy Dies is too often weighed down by long expositions—including detailed descriptions of the concepts of m-theory physics and the origins of Irish sidhe (ancient burial mounds)—and tedious descriptions of the boys’ video game and role playing sessions. Perhaps Murray intends for these elements to illustrate the non-linear, rambling adolescent mind, but their effect is to slow down the narrative, which otherwise moves along at a brisk, entertaining clip.

Murray has a great talent for concise and evocative character descriptions like this one of Father Green, one of the most senior teachers at Seabrook: “Rail-thin, a head taller than the tallest of the boys, on his best days the priest looks like the end of the world; his presence itself is like smoldering kindling, or knuckles cracking over and over.” Skippy Dies is liberally sprinkled with such imaginative prose without being overburdened with flourishes. Similarly, in telling the stories of the Seabrook boys and their teachers, Murray masterfully balances the narrative in the space between seriousness and humor, repulsiveness and charm, and despair and hope. Overall, Skippy Dies is an insightful and engaging, if over-long, examination of the adolescent condition.