Saturday, April 23, 2016

Fractured First Date. A lovely short, funny, sweet story. I wish I had written it. The joys of words and story-telling

I was going out. I deserved it. I’d had lunch — one Diet Coke, two Marlboro Lights and a Chef’s Signature Lean Cuisine. I’d even done two luxurious miles in 24 minutes on the treadmill at the gym down the block. My stomach growled, angry for being empty, but I felt thin and attractive. There’s nothing more dangerous than a girl who feels thin and attractive.

I hailed a cab to Union Hall in south Park Slope. It was warm for late October. I was meeting friends. The top floor of Union Hall has fireplaces, leather couches, an indoor bocce court and a library with actual books, where pseudo intellectuals discussed the same three writers (Hemingway, Kerouac, Salinger) between Jaeger bombs. Wrinkle-free gingham button-downs, Wayfarers even though it was dark, boat shoes because we were close to the Gowanus. These guys all went to honorary Ivies and had entry levels at their dads’ companies. The suit factory can produce a fun night. Just don’t expect them to go Dutch on your Plan B.

The line to the bar was long, so when I arrived I ordered two Jack and Diets for myself. The best investment you’ll ever make is a large tip on your first drink.

I made my way downstairs. My favorite kind of dance floor is so dark and crowded that no one notices that I can’t dance, and this was that. I swayed to the beat without spilling either drink (talent) and scanned the crowd.

Once I had a few (eight) drinks in me I had no use for the friends I came with. I talked to them all the time. I knew their deal. Whiskey made the world a warm hug. Everything and everyone was nice. Addiction, pollution, violence — these were things to worry about tomorrow.

I pushed away some young thugs wearing flat brims who were coming on stronger than my drink. It was clear they were working me together. Two guys? Maybe, but these were not my type. The night was just starting. It was too early to lower my expectations.

I walked back upstairs and outside to the patio and lit up. I saw him. He was standing alone with a beer, smoking. He was looking at his phone, the way you look at your phone when you have no one to talk to. It was easier to pick a guy up when they were separate from their bro herd.
“Hey, I’m Jessica. What’s that monkey doing on your glass?”
He had a little toy monkey hanging off the side of his pint. “It was trivia night,” he smiled.

The next two hours were a blur. So let’s call him Rick. He worked at an app. Everyone worked at an app. Liquor before beer or beer before liquor? I couldn’t remember which one was supposed to come first so I just went back and forth.

We were smoking again, out on the patio. My self-confidence was directly proportionate to my blood-alcohol level. I was Kate Moss. I pulled a bar stool between us. “Let’s arm wrestle,” I said. A command, not a question.
“Uhh, I don’t know. I bench 220. I was a high school quarterback …” he backpedaled.
“Stop making excuses,” I said.

We knelt down on the cement and put up our arms on the small uneven surface of the bar stool. He won the first round. We went left the second round.
“You’re letting me win,” I said. He just laughed. “Come on, arm wrestle me for real. Don’t be a girl!”

We went right again. My arm snapped in half. Rick had broken my humerus in two, a clean fracture. I bent my arm 90 degrees and watched my arm leave my arm. I took my left hand and held the two pieces of my right arm together. “Oh my God,” he said. He was freaking out. “Go close my tab and get us a cab. We’re going to the E.R.,” I said. Cool as a cucumber.

The E.R. at New York Methodist was empty. The doctors on duty could not care less about a drunk girl with a broken arm. The scrubs played Candy Crush below “No Cellphone” signs and passed around a box of Entenmann’s. A nurse with powdered sugar on her lips reluctantly signed me in and ushered me to the waiting room.

Rick filled out my paperwork. We were alone in the waiting room except for a man who looked to be homeless curled up in a chair, sleeping like a baby. Still, it wasn’t the weirdest first date I had ever had.

A doctor finally came over. He had my same last name and first initial. My drunk had unfortunately mellowed but I still found this hilarious and proceeded to act as though we were kin. Blood is thicker than water, which is thinner than whiskey. “I need your urine sample to confirm a negative pregnancy result before we can give you an X-ray. Here’s a cup.”

“Thanks Dr. Caldwell, but I can’t move my arms so I’m not sure how I’ll undo my jeans and aim in that cup. Is there like a nurse on duty? Who can help me?” Dr. Caldwell said “Yeah” and walked back to the front desk with the slowest gait I had ever seen. If he was walking any slower he would have fallen over. A half hour passed and no one came to help me.

Rick and I enjoyed typical first date chatter. What’s your favorite color? Food? College major? If you could bring only three things out of your burning apartment… He stood up. “This is ridiculous, let’s go!” he said, as he led me to the bathroom. Rick proceeded to take my urine sample, which did make this the weirdest first date I’d ever had. He unbuttoned my jeans. “Well this is happening sooner than I thought it would.” “Yeah right!” I said.

I squatted and my cup runneth over: 12 drinks poured out of me. We laughed. God, he was cute. I really liked this guy. We returned to the waiting room. The homeless guy was gone. Where did he go? We were quiet for a minute while we waited to see what would happen next. Anything is possible in the time warp of an emergency room.

“Can I get you anything?” he asked.
“Please just don’t leave me,” I said. I was suddenly serious and worried he would. They always left.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “Let’s go smoke a cigarette.” I was in love.
We left the E.R. at 5 a.m. with a plaster cast and Percocet (guaranteed Sunday Funday). Rick hailed a cab. “What do you wanna do?” he asked.
“Can I go home with you?” I said. “I just don’t want to be alone.” It was impossible to hide my desperation.
“Yeah, of course.”

We went back to his one bedroom in Brooklyn Heights. He had a pet turtle named Biggie Smalls, a fridge stocked with Trader Joe’s, and premium cable. Cozy. We smoked again out the window. He helped me undress in slow motion, like a child. I wrapped my cast in a plastic shopping bag. We took a hot shower and saved the Percs for later. He washed my hair and it felt really, really good.

He gave me a brand new toothbrush. Normally this would be a red flag, a sign of a seasoned player, but he had just been to the dentist, her name was printed in bold. I lay on his bed, on my back, some pillows propped under my head. I clutched my right arm with my left, holding it close as if someone was trying to steal it.

Jessica Caldwell is an independent film producer, and a writers’ room assistant on the Showtime series, “Billions.”

Shakespeare

Lauren Tamaki

1564–1616

William Shakespeare,
Playwright and
Poet, Is Dead at 52

By LOUIS BAYARD

On this date — April 23, 1616 — the creator of “Hamlet,”
“Macbeth” and “Romeo and Juliet” left the beauty of this
world. To us, he bequeathed his tragedies and comedies,
his sonnets and verse, which would survive 400 years.

Notes

“To be or not to be,” said Hamlet, prince of Denmark, “that is the question.” Yesterday, Hamlet’s creator was; today, he is not. Of that there is no question.

Poet, playwright, actor and theatrical-company shareholder, William Shakespeare (sometimes spelled Shakspeare, or Shagspere, or Shaxpere, or Shaxberd,1or any number of blessed ways) died today, April 23, 1616, at his home in Stratford-upon-Avon. He was, more or less, 52. His passing was confirmed by his daughter Judith.2

Over the course of three decades, Mr. Shakespeare rose from working-class obscurity in Warwickshire to become one of England’s foremost playwrights and poets3 — acclaimed for his penetrating insights into the human character, his eloquent, flexible and infinitely expressive verse and his readiness to burst the bounds of the English language (drawing on a vocabulary of more than 25,000 words).

Among the deeply flawed characters who strutted and fretted their hour on Mr. Shakespeare’s stage, perhaps the foremost is Hamlet, who must decide whether to kill the uncle who murdered his father and married his mother. It takes him as much as five hours to decide, depending on the performance, and by then, a good portion of Denmark is dead.

Had Hamlet never existed, playgoers would still speak of Macbeth, an upwardly mobile and downwardly moral Scottish thane who, with the steady prodding of his perhaps-mad wife, lets nothing stand between him and the throne and is defeated only by a combination of traveling trees and a C-section baby.4

Other immortal creations: Julius Caesar, a great Roman leader who gets a whole play named after him but dies in Act III; Romeo and Juliet, two young Veronians from warring families who fall in love the way only teenagers could — for keeps; King Lear, a senescent king who disinherits the one daughter who actually likes him; Othello, a brave Moorish soldier who becomes, after a few well-timed prods and a handkerchief,5 the kind of fellow who requires restraining orders.

Yet, as indelible as Mr. Shakespeare’s tragic creations are, his comedies have proven every bit as enduring. In “The Taming of the Shrew,” a husband uses a variety of psychological torture devices to make his strong-minded wife compliant. (He thinks.)6 In “Much Ado About Nothing,” Benedeck, a confirmed bachelor, meets Beatrice, a confirmed bachelorette, and together they create the world’s first rom-com. In “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” scheming fairies make sport with moonstruck lovers and a queen becomes enamored of an ass, which is not the first time that’s ever happened.

In addition, Mr. Shakespeare devoted nearly a quarter of his dramaturgical output to chronicling his native country’s brawling, bloody past. Though not factual in the most scrupulous sense, his history plays bring to roaring life the full panoply of England’s dynasts and claimants and insurgents, all doing whatever it takes to get or keep a crown.

Who could forget the deposed Richard II? (“For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground/And tell sad stories of the deaths of kings.”) Who could forget the malevolent Richard III? (“Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this sun of York.”) Who could forget that great rabble-rouser, Henry V? (“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;/Or close the wall up with our English dead!”)

Who could forget Henry VI? Well, we have forgotten him, just a little. It was an early play.

Imaginative breadth, rapier wit, profound psychological depth, the commercial instincts of a bear-baiter -- all these qualities descended, Muselike, upon a glover’s son.

William Shakespeare was born on April 23rd-ish, 1564. His mother was Mary Arden.7 His father was John Shakespeare, an aspirational sort who worked his way up the social ladder from glovering and whittawering to constabling, burgessing, chamberlaining and, finally, high bailiffing. (Mayoring, if you like.) Sadly, Shakespeare pere was prosecuted four times for wool trading and usury, which may explain why he retired from public life when Will was just 12.

Of William Shakespeare’s four sisters, only one survived to adulthood.8 Of his three brothers, Mr. Shakespeare was the only one who married. In an age that puts little store in records, this is practically all we know about his brothers and sisters.

Mr. Shakespeare almost certainly received a fine classical education at Stratford’s local grammar school and may have, at some point, acquired French and Italian. His grasp of both geography and history was finite. (No one seems to have informed him that Milan and Verona aren’t seaports. With all due respect to “Julius Caesar,” the ancient Romans didn’t own clocks, and pace “Antony and Cleopatra,” the ancient Egyptians didn’t play billiards. Cato was born roughly three centuries later than “Coriolanus” suggests. Et cetera.)

At the age of 18, Mr. Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway,9 who gets a nod in one of his later sonnets (“’I hate’ from hate away she threw”) but about whom precious little is known except that she was eight years older. The record notes, sans judgment, that she was also several months pregnant when they married.

Nor is anyone entirely sure what Mr. Shakespeare was doing from 1585 to 1592, other than, at some point, making his way to London, where his vaulting ambition manifested itself through acting in and writing plays.

By 1592, he was enough of a Colossus in the theatrical establishment that a dying malcontent named Robert Greene felt the need to drag him to earth, comparing him to “an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers” and “is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in the country.” (Greene’s editor later apologized, which is what powerful friends can do for you.)

According to the images that survive of him, Mr. Shakespeare was on the balding side and looked surprisingly good with an earring.

For most of his career, he wrote for a theater company called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, founded in 1594. As a shareholder, Mr. Shakespeare benefited both from the troupe’s financial successes and from its ability to survive the winds of Elizabethan political change. (The company’s association with the Earl of Essex became briefly problematic when Essex mounted the world’s most ineffectual revolt against the Queen.) With the accession of James I, the players changed their name to the King’s Men and performed before His Majesty on 187 occasions, more than all rival companies put together. The king loved his men.10

Before he died, Mr. Shakespeare would see his plays performed at Blackfriars Theatre, at the Globe (which burned down during a performance of “Henry VIII,” an event perhaps more exciting than anything that happens during “Henry VIII”), at the Inns of Court and at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. His audience extended beyond the bounds of Albion. In 1607, it is reported, the English crew of the Red Dragon merchant ship performed “Hamlet” for local leaders in Sierra Leone. To no small amount of bafflement, one might wager.

In all, Mr. Shakespeare wrote anywhere between 38 and 40 plays, depending on whom you ask. Some he wrote in collaboration. “Pericles, Prince of Tyre,” for instance, does not make sense as the work of a single playwright; in fact, it makes little sense at all. Only 18 of Mr. Shakespeare’s plays were published over the course of his life — in flimsy little quartos that practically dissolve if they’re looked at too closely. “Macbeth” and “Julius Caesar” are still waiting, but sources say that, seven years hence, two of Shakespeare’s acting colleagues will reassemble almost all the plays into a quasi-definitive First Folio. (We are prescient that way.)

Mr. Shakespeare didn’t hesitate to steal plots — from Seneca and Plutarch and Ovid, from Spenser and Chaucer and Holinshed’s Chronicles. Nor did he hesitate to alter those plots. (According to Holinshed, Macbeth’s witches were originally nymphs.)11 Nor did he hesitate to coin new terms. More than 2,000 words received their first recorded use in his work, including “barefaced,” “assassination,” “excellent,” “frugal,” “eyeball,” “auspicious,” “swagger,” “zany,” “summit,” “moonbeam,” “obscene,” “cold-blooded,” “hot-blooded,” “epileptic,” “fashionable,” “gossip,” “lonely,” “grovel,” “torture,” “manager,” “well-read,” “buzzer” and “rant.”

It should be added that Mr. Shakespeare was equally, if not more, revered in his lifetime for his non-theatrical poetry. His “Rape of Lucrece” (not as graphic as it sounds) went into multiple reprints, and “Venus and Adonis”—dedicated to his then-patron, the 3rd Earl of Southampton12—was the greatest publishing coup of his career, far outselling any editions of his plays.

Lovers of verse particularly revere Mr. Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets,13 which include these fragrant lines: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”; “Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds”; “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,/I all alone beweep my outcast state”; “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.”

Mr. Shakespeare never subscribed to the penniless-artist school and hoarded his coins as assiduously as Shylock, twice defaulting on fairly measly tax payments. By the time he reached the age of “the lean and slippered pantaloon,” he had purchased high-end real estate in both London and Stratford, as well as a coat of arms. An aspirer just like his father.

Through it all, he continued, rather surprisingly, to act in plays — including his own and those of his friendly rival Ben Jonson.14 Reached today for comment, Mr. Jonson said Mr. Shakespeare was “a monument without a tomb” and “not of an age but for all time.” After a couple of ales, Mr. Jonson added that his old friend knew “small Latin and less Greek” and, when it was remarked that Mr. Shakespeare never had to blot a paper with edits, Mr. Jonson snapped, “Would he had blotted a thousand!” (Mr. Shakespeare’s other chief rival, Christopher Marlowe,15was unavailable for comment, having been dead 23 years.)

At some point between 1610 and 1613, Mr. Shakespeare retired from the stage and returned to his native Stratford. Did he garden? Did he litigate? Did he bore friends and family with hoary stage anecdotes? The historical record once more falls silent.

He is survived by his wife, Anne, who was bequeathed his second best bed; his aforementioned daughter, Judith; another daughter, Susanna; and a granddaughter, Elizabeth. He is preceded in death by his son Hamnet and by Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who shuffled off this mortal coil well before some of Mr. Shakespeare’s most famous plays were even written. Or did he?16

Mr. Shakespeare will also be survived by: Bardolaters, conspiracy theorists, Freudian theorists, postcolonial theorists, Shakespeare studies minors, readers in at least 80 languages (including Krio, spoken by freed slaves in Sierra Leone), Stratford-on-Avon tourists in open-top double-decker buses (“Mind the branches”), “West Side Story,” T-shirts, coffee mugs, key rings, mints, board games, action figures, college-dorm posters, Christmas tree ornaments, bookmarks, temporary tattoos, magnetic poetry kits, shower curtains, onesies, twosies, inspirational memes and Harold Bloom.17

In addition, Mr. Shakespeare will be survived by Mr. Shakespeare.

As long as we speak of “star-crossed lovers” or “cold comfort” or “a pound of flesh” or “a laughing stock” or “a wild-goose chase”; as long as we call imps “puckish” and morbidly obese people “Falstaffian”18 and refer to jealousy as “the green-eyed monster”;19 as long as we use phrases like “It’s Greek to me” or “To thine own self be true” or “Clothes make the man” or “The lady doth protest too much” or “Give the devil his due,” Mr. Shakespeare will be shaping our everyday speech.

And as long as we wrestle with what it means to be human, Mr. Shakespeare will be our companion and our lodestar. The words of Hamlet serve as fitting epitaph for his creator: “What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!”

Sources: Folger Shakespeare Library; The Oxford Companion to William Shakespeare, edited by Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Shakespeare Documented; “The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works” by William Shakespeare, edited by Ann Thompson, David Scott Kastan, Richard Proudfoot; “Shakespeare: The World as Stage” (Eminent Lives) by Bill Bryson; “Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare” by Jonathan Bate; “Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare" by Stephen Greenblatt.

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Why Write in English?

Tim Parks

Vladimir Nabokov; drawing by David Levine

Why not write in a foreign language? If people feel free to choose their profession, their religion, and even, these days, their sex, why not just decide which language you want to write in and go for it? Ever since Jhumpa Lahiri published In Other Words, her small memoir in Italian, people have been asking me, Why don’t you write in Italian, Tim? You’ve been in the country thirty-five years, after all. What keeps you tied to English? Is it just a question of economic convenience? That the market for books in English is bigger? That the world in general gives more attention to books written in English?

Is that it? Certainly economics can be important. And politics too. Arguably, these were the factors that pushed Conrad and Nabokov to abandon their Polish and Russian mother tongues. If it is not possible to publish at home, or to publish there as one would wish to publish, then one is more or less obliged to go elsewhere if one wants to have a viable career as a writer. And if to publish elsewhere one has to change language, then some authors are willing to take that step.

Something of the same logic no doubt drives the many writers from Africa, Asia, and the sub-continent who have turned to writing in French and English in recent years. The opportunities are larger. There is also the fact that people in Europe and the West are interested in the countries they grew up in. Just as in the nineteenth century, novelists like Thomas Hardy or Giovanni Verga could “sell” their familiarity with peasant, provincial life to a middle-class metropolitan public, so post-colonial writers have fascinated us with stories that might seem unremarkable in their home countries, where the narrative tradition very likely deals with different content and requires a different relationship between writer and reader.

But beyond any understandable opportunism, there is often a genuine idealism and internationalism in the decision to change language. If you have “a message” and if English is the language that offers maximum diffusion, then it would seem appropriate to use it. In the 1950s, the rebellious and free-spirited Dutch novelist Gerard van het Reve felt that the Dutch language and culture was simply not open enough and not big enough for an artist with important things to say. Van het Reve moved to England in 1953, dropped the exotic “van het” from his surname, and set about writing in his adopted language. “Let us no longer express ourselves in a local argot,” he boldly declared. The revolutionary, the preacher, and the megalomaniac will always tend toward the medium that offers the widest possible readership.

For writers from countries that were once colonies, the switch to the language of the colonial power could also be seen as a kind of counterattack. The post-colonial writer appropriates the ex-overlord’s language, subverts it, and adapts it to his or her own purposes, all this to the supposed chagrin of members of the once dominant culture. This is the depressing, confrontational, and, I suspect, flawed logic of Rushdie’s 1982 article “The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance” (it is interesting that references to this famous article tend to omit the last three words).

More simply—more probably—you could say that if a global culture really is developing, and if the lingua franca of that culture is English, then its energy will naturally draw in those from the peripheries, just as the excitement over the formation of the nation-state in a country like Italy in the nineteenth century prompted many writers to switch from writing in the local idioms of Naples and Venice and Milan to address the whole nation in the standard Tuscan Italian that finally became the language of the institutions and the schools.

All this makes sense, yet critics tend to pay attention only to those who have made a success of writing in a new language. In April 2014, a New York Times article about the phenomenon essentially compiled a list of young literary stars who had switched to writing in the main Western languages. The piece, titled “Using the Foreign to Grasp the Familiar,” is full of enthusiasm and positivity. “All interesting literature is born in that moment when you are not sure if you are in one place with one culture,” Yoko Tawada, a Japanese author who writes in German, is quoted as saying.

At this point, the native English speaker almost begins to feel at a disadvantage for having been born into the dominant culture. Should we perhaps head for Paris, like Beckett or Jonathan Littell, just to be between two worlds? Or look for something more exotic and have ourselves translated back into English afterward? Why not Korean, or Swahili? One reason is that changing languages doesn’t always work. Van de Reve, notorious in Holland for his deeply pessimistic postwar novel De Avonden(The Evenings, 1947), was never able to secure a publisher in England, where his style and politics seemed incomprehensible. His talent wouldn’t flower again until he returned to Holland and threw himself back into his country’s national debate, in Dutch of course, with an incendiary mix of Catholicism, homosexuality, and obscenity. His genius needed his mother tongue, his home milieu, and an atmosphere of intense antagonism.

Kundera was already a huge international presence by the time he switched to writing in French in the 1990s, one of those authors who need never fear they might not find a publisher. Yet his work has lost power and intensity with the switch of language. In French, he just doesn’t seem able to produce novels of the quality of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Both Reve’s and Kundera’s moves suggest a certain hubris; they supposed their individual talents were entirely separate from the culture and language in which they had developed. It’s a hubris inherent, perhaps, in the Western obsession with freedom, and the consequent refusal to accept that we are conditioned and limited by circumstances of birth, family, and education.

In this light, Lahiri’s quite unusual decision to move away from global English to write in Italian begins to make a little sense. Growing up in Rhode Island between Bengali and English, triumphing as an author in the latter, while feeling that she had betrayed the former and her parents’ culture with it, one can well imagine the conflicted feelings towards both languages that she describes in one of the later chapters of In Other Words: “I was ashamed,” she writes, “of speaking Bengali and at the same time I was ashamed of feeling ashamed. It was impossible to speak English without feeling detached from my parents…”

Yet these difficult emotions, transmuted into other people’s stories, were recognizably the driving force of Lahiri’s excellent early stories. To imagine they could simply be set aside by moving into a language for which she had a certain affection but no deep knowledge, was perhaps ingenuous. In the event, what Lahiri writes in Italian is little else than an account of her attempt to escape English. At no point does it draw energy from Italian culture, or even transmit a feeling that her life is now firmly based in the world of Italian. There are no Italian characters in the book, indeed, no characters at all aside from Lahiri, as if actually she were writing in a language that was all her own, and that just happened to coincide with the language 60 million Italians use. The decision to publish the American edition of the book as a parallel text, Italian on the left and English on the right, gives the curious impression that, though written in Italian—indeed published first in Italian—the book is somehow not written forItalians; rather, the achievement of Italian becomes a trophy to show off to the American reader. We never believe that Lahiri will really spend her life in Italy, or go on writing in Italian. Reviewers have generally agreed that the book just didn’t work.

Writing in another language is successful when there is a genuine, long-term need to switch languages (often accompanied by serious trauma), and when the new linguistic and social context the author is moving in meshes positively with his or her ambitions and talents. At which point, let me make an admission. After only two years in Italy, long before I had published any fiction in English, I did write a novel in Italian: I nani di domani (literally “Tomorrow’s Dwarves”). It was a comic “thriller” about a Veronese rockband, I nani di domani, who turn out to be a cover for a rather amateur terrorist organization. I had arrived in Verona in 1981, around the time of the Red Brigades’ kidnapping (from an apartment block only a mile from where I was living) of General James Lee Dozier, deputy Chief of Staff at NATO’s Southern European land forces. The novel satirized pretty much everyone and everything I had come across in Verona, the main character being a female version of myself, teaching at a seedy private school run by the father of one of the terrorists.

Having written half the book, I sent it to Italy’s only major literary agent at the time, the popular and immensely respected Erich Linder, an Austrian Jew whose family had brought him to Milan as a child in 1934 to escape persecution. To my amazement—since all my attempts to write in English were collecting regular rejections in London—he liked my Italian book and offered to take it on. But no sooner had I sent him the final pages than Linder died and my chances of becoming an Italian author with him. His successor at the agency, in the more usual Italian style, did not reply to my letters.

Years later, when I had published a number of novels in English, I nani di domani came up in conversation with an Italian publisher. I showed it to him and he offered to publish. But after rereading it, I decided against. Any charm it had was to do with my naïve fun with the language; it was superficial, and playful in a rather facile way and I decided I wouldn’t feel comfortable promoting the book. My real subject matter still had to do with England and English and it was to my home culture that my books were addressed, something that put me in a tradition, I suppose, with any number of other ex-pats—Muriel Spark, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Robert Browning, Lord Byron—who never dreamed of changing language. Not to mention W.G. Sebald, who wrote always wrote in German despite thirty years in England, or the excellent Dubravka Ugrešić, who continues to write in Croatian despite having been forced to leave her homeland for the Netherlands in 1993.

The critic Karen Ryan, who has written a great deal on Russian émigré literature, remarks that “all transnational writers” have “a sense of play and inventiveness.” I think this is true. An acquired language feels like a playground, at least at first. It is easy to have fun and break rules, because they are not internalized, they don’t weigh so heavily in the psyche. In particular, it’s easy to make puns, because the sound of the language still often dominates over the sense. Hence, changing language can benefit the author whose genius lies in that direction. But along with the playfulness comes a loss of pathos. The second language never seems to mean quite as much as the first. Or not for many years. In any event, after my early experiment, I never went back to writing in Italian. Rather I began to see how I could use a life, speaking and reading mainly in Italian, to develop an English that would be very much my own. Changing language is not the only way to bring energy to your writing.

Another Book Review of The Sympathizer"

Books

‘The Sympathizer’: A cerebral thriller about Vietnam and its aftermath

Resize Text

By Ron Charles March 31, 2015

Forty years ago this month, after a long, deadly release of flatulence from American politicians, the United States evacuated its personnel from Saigon in an operation appropriately code-named Frequent Wind. Whether you were alive then or not, the images of those panicked Vietnamese crushing the U.S. Embassy are tattooed on our collective consciousness.

In the opening pages of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s extraordinary first novel, “The Sympathizer,” that terror feels so real that you’ll mistake your beating heart for helicopter blades thumping the air. Nguyen brings us right inside the barbed-wire-encircled home of a South Vietnamese general just waking from his faith in American resilience. Thrashing all around him, officers and cronies are bargaining for survival: Who will get out? Who will be left to the hands of their inexorable enemy?

The General doesn’t know it, but the captain he’s put in charge of those decisions is, in fact, a Viet Cong spy. “Every stroke of my pen through a name felt like a death sentence,” says this unnamed narrator, who has burrowed deep into the General’s confidence. “I could not help but feel moved by the plight of these poor people. Perhaps it was not correct, politically speaking, for me to feel sympathy for them, but my mother would have been one of them if she were alive.”

Over the next 350 pages, that conflicted whisper draws us through what is surely a new classic of war fiction. Nguyen, who was born in Vietnam and raised in the United States, has wrapped a cerebral thriller around a desperate expat story that confronts the existential dilemmas of our age. Startlingly insightful and perilously candid, the narration comes to us as a confession written and rewritten many times in an isolation cell. The imprisoned captain recalls fleeing with the South Vietnamese general and insinuating himself into the refugee community that settles around Los Angeles. There, he continues spying on the restless warriors as they plot a quixotic plan to liberate their homeland from the communists.

Given that explosive opening scene strafed with bullets and punctuated by bombs, the rest of the novel should feel comparatively tepid, but it never does because the captain’s serpentine voice is so hypnotic and the events he relates are so captivating. A careful student of American literature with a well-tuned ear for pathos, irony and the rhythms of English, he’s just as adept with a Roth-inspired comic scene of self-abuse as he is with a gorgeous Whitmanian catalogue of suffering. His captors want a confession written in the well-worn phrases of ideological purity, but he resists on stylistic grounds raised to the level of moral imperative: “It seemed as much of a crime to commit a cliche to paper as to kill a man.”

It’s the captain’s special burden that the quality that makes him such an effective spy — namely, his boundless sympathy — is the same quality that infects him with guilt. As an observer, he’s brilliant; as an assassin, he’s hobbled. “They were my enemies,” he says of the men he is regularly betraying, “and yet they were also brothers in arms.”

Once in California and relieved from the exigencies of war, he turns his incisive wit on American culture and its cheery racism. Sometimes, he poses as an innocent abroad, as when he watches “The Jeffersons,” “a TV comedy about the unacknowledged black descendants of Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president and the author of the Declaration of Independence.” But usually, he’s more direct. “Although every country thought itself superior in its own way,” he asks rhetorically, “was there ever a country that coined so many ‘super’ terms from the federal bank of its narcissism, was not only superconfident but also truly superpowerful, that would not be satisfied until it locked every nation of the world into a full nelson and made it cry Uncle Sam?”

A right-wing congressman courting the exiled South Vietnamese military comes in for some exquisite satire, but the novel’s most complex comedy and cultural criticism stem from the captain’s work on a Hollywood movie called “The Hamlet.” Hired as “the technical consultant in charge of authenticity,” our genial narrator quickly finds himself enslaved in the Philippines on a project you’ll recognize (“Apocalypse Now”). As funny as it is tragic, this section alone could carry the whole novel. (The Thespian — clearly Marlon Brando — makes a hilarious, reeking cameo before his much re-filmed death scene in which he groans, “The whore! The whore!”)

“The Sympathizer” is laced with insight on the ways nonwhite people are rendered invisible in the propaganda that passes for our pop culture. In Nguyen’s version, the Francis Ford Coppola character is not just a monumental ass, he’s also a latent racist determined to make a film that pretends to mourn America’s struggle, but in fact reinscribes its grandiose purity. “The Movie was just a sequel to our war and a prequel to the next one that America was destined to wage,” the captain laments. “Killing the extras was either a reenactment of what had happened to us natives or a dress rehearsal for the next such episode, with the Movie the local anesthetic applied to the American mind, preparing it for any minor irritation before or after such a deed.” With its cinematic explosions, abuses and killings, this deconstructive portrayal of the Academy Award-winning classic provides a bracing dramatization of the way American hegemony and romanticism are encoded in our most popular export.

But then Nguyen turns the screw another rotation, and the grotesque scenes in the Auteur’s movie lead into an extended examination of torture in real life. Yes, there are gang rapes and slow electrocutions and all the other ghastly tools of the trade here, but what’s particularly striking is the way Nguyen concentrates on that species of psychological abuse that our creative lawyers contorted into legal shapes during the Iraq war. I haven’t read anything since Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” that illustrates so palpably how a patient tyrant, unmoored from all humane constraint, can reduce a man’s mind to liquid.

The contemporary relevance of this devastating final section can’t be ignored, but “The Sympathizer” is too great a novel to feel bound to our current soul-searching about the morality of torture. And it’s even more than a thoughtful reflection about our misguided errand in Southeast Asia. Transcending these historical moments, Nguyen plumbs the loneliness of human life, the costs of fraternity and the tragic limits of our sympathy.

Charles is the editor of Book World. You can follow him on Twitter @RonCharles.

On May 6 at 7 p.m., Viet Thanh Nguyen will be at Politics and Prose Bookstore, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW.

THE SYMPATHIZER

By Viet Thanh Nguyen

Grove. 371 pp. $26

Ron Charles is the editor of The Washington Post's Book World. For a dozen years, he enjoyed teaching American literature and critical theory in the Midwest, but finally switched to journalism when he realized that if he graded one more paper, he'd go crazy.

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