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Review: Karl Ove Knausgaard in Bookforum

Meghan O’Rourke reviews the “master of banality”:

knausgaard bookforum

My Struggle,the celebrated six-volume novel (or memoir) by the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, is—like nearly all grand endeavors—one of those books that shouldn’t work, but somehow does. He finished the project in 2009 in his adopted homeland, Sweden, where it was both a best seller and a lightning rod for literary debate. Three volumes have now been translated in the United States. The novel draws explicitly from Knausgaard’s own life—the narrator is named Karl Ove Knausgaard—and uses the real names of his wife, children, parents, and friends. Nearly four thousand pages, it is packed with the kind of quotidian detail that is hardly the stuff of high drama: some one hundred pages on the teenage narrator trying to buy beer; long descriptions of the mechanics of cleaning house and of a fight with his wife over the dishes. Knausgaard has said he wrote My Struggle fast and without much revision. He is not averse to cliché, his metaphors are mixed (“His fury struck like a wave, it washed through the rooms, lashed at me, lashed and lashed and lashed at me”); he often gets “needlessly” bogged down in exposition about who is walking where and exactly how his mother turns the key in the ignition and backs out of the driveway. Scenes that seem as if they are building to a crescendo, making the reader worry (will his mother get in an accident?), often just stop. On the face of it, Knausgaard seems to be making every mistake a novelist is taught not to make.

Read the full review at Bookforum. 

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Review: Thomas Meaney on Karl Ove Knausgaard

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“Intellect Is Everything”

by Thomas Meaney

Karl Ove Knausgaard
BOYHOOD ISLAND
My struggle: 3
496pp. Harvill Secker. £17.99.
Translated by Don Bartlett
978 1 8465 5722 4

There was a time when artists concealed themselves behind their work. The idea of revealing the trifling incidents of their lives may never have occurred to them. It is difficult to imagine Shakespeare or Racine recording their daily trivia for other people’s interest. Perhaps they even wanted to distort the image of who they were. The art of their time was still filled with the exalted poses of heroes and saints. There was an advantage in this: expectations of authenticity exact a toll on today’s novelists, and those who base books on their own lives sometimes seem unconvinced, or embarrassed, by their search for meaning. They take comfort in psychology, which promises to lend their actions intrinsic value. But only rarely do they treat the fragments of their lives as parts of a greater whole and impose a higher coherence.

In the past half-decade in Norway, a writer has recast the confessional novel in hyperbolic form. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume, 3,600-page My Struggle is a mercilessly quotidian epic of the author’s journey from boyhood to fatherhood. It is not so much original as extremely, almost fanatically, untimely. Knausgaard’s narrator openly longs for the opposite shore of the Enlightenment, when social life, he likes to think, was saturated with purpose and meaning. But he also believes there is no going back; that he must make his home in a disenchanted world. He often rails against the evaluations of psychology, but while doing so gives us a sharp sense of his inward irradiations. His solution is not to ignore or transcend or even aestheticize the indignities of day-to-day living – the pram-pushing, the nappy-changing, the school run – but to linger for a while over every difficult inch.

The opening volume of My Struggle – A Death in the Family – opens with an account of the death of a heart. “For the heart, life is simple”, Knausgaard writes, “it beats for as long as it can.” The author goes on to describe the entry of bacteria into the bloodstream, which seem to abide by a kind of “gentleman’s agreement” with the dying body. When they arrive at the heart, the bacteria find it “strangely desolate”, like “a production plant that workers have been forced to flee in haste, or so it appears, the stationary vehicles shining yellow against the darkness of the forest, the huts deserted, a line of fully loaded cable-buckets stretching up the hillside”. This is very fine writing – how close that “shining yellow” comes to turning the simile rogue with its excessive naturalism – but Knausgaard only keeps it up for a few pages, as if to sharpen the contrast with what follows. His overture signals that he knows “good writing”, that he can perform it, but that his novel will be about things that virtuosic writing cannot get at. Within a few pages, like the bacteria entering the corpse, Knausgaard starts to invite clichés into his work: things start flowing through his hands “like sand” and “falling like the drop of a hat”. What is mysterious is how the gamble pays off: the flattening of the prose only seems to contribute to its magnetism.

Knausgaard’s style in My Struggle marks a break with the flourish-prone prose of his previous novel, A Time to Every Purpose under Heaven (reviewed in the TLS, February 6, 2009), which, among other things, treated the book of Genesis as a mere reduction of a more psychologically complicated and morally ambivalent epic set in Norway. In an interview with the Paris Review last December, the author partly credited his scaling down of tone with his revelation at reading the Swedish playwright Lars Norén, whose 1,680-page diary caused a scandal in the Stockholm theatre world when it was published in 2008. En dramatikers dagbok, which Norén retrospectively called a novel, heaped venom on Norén’s fellow directors and actors, and recounted his life in unsparing detail. Here is a typical entry:

“I was sitting watching a worthless Harrison Ford movie when I suddenly got a bad bout of stomach cramp. Went to the lavatory. Shit on my shorts. Mainly blood. A significant amount. I cleaned up, washed my clothes, hung them up to dry, packed my rucksack, shoved in cigarettes, glasses, book, money. Phoned the emergency room at Danderyds Hospital, but the nurse who answered said she didn’t think I needed to come in. She said the blood might be the result of an inflammation which I’ve got because I frequently need to go to the lavatory. She told me to wait and see. Fell asleep late. Restless. Woke at 7 this morning. Beautiful outside. Calm, minus 14 degrees celsius. Sun. Went shopping at Rimi. Sat and read between cramps. Called Charly and said that unfortunately I couldn’t make it. Went out to buy cigarettes. Slept two hours. Spoke for a while with Masja and Linda. Slept again. I love the current silence. Don’t know if I can travel to Gotland. Will have to see if there is more blood tonight.”

It says something about Knausgaard that he read a grim passage like this and saw possibilities for his art. In My Struggle, the accounting is more solemn, almost Lutheran in its austerity – Knausgaard has opted for an unusually formal variant of Norwegian for this book – but a touch of Norén’s plodding insistence remains:

“Today is the twenty-seventh of February. The time is 11:43 p.m. I, Karl Ove Knausgaard, was born in December 1968, and at the time of writing I am thirty-nine years old. I have three children – Vanja, Heidi, and John – and am in my second marriage, to Linda Bostrom Knausgaard. All four are asleep in the rooms around me, in an apartment in Malmö where we have lived for a year and a half.”

From the outset, we have the uncanny sense that Knausgaard is not writing about himself so much as for himself. The facts laid out by the narrator match the facts of the author’s own life. Whatever else My Struggle is about, Knausgaard makes us feel he has staked his life on it. He is committed to capturing the tedious, repetitive, microscopic mood switches of human consciousness – and the result is paradoxically absorbing.

The formula Knausgaard has devised for the project is simple: “Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance”, he writes in A Death in the Family. My Struggle shifts variously between Knausgaard writing his novel in the present, reflections on his early career as a writer and student, and the time of his childhood in 1970s Norway. Knausgaard was born, just one year before the major discovery of oil in the North Sea promised to make the country’s social democratic dreams something close to a reality. On the island of Tromøy in southern Norway, we observe Knausgaard’s mother committing herself to leftist causes, while his father serves on the town council and teaches at the local elementary school. But at home this “new” Norwegian man is a tyrant, who drills fear into his youngest son and snuffs out his joys one by one. The young Knausgaard comes to nurse a vital hatred for him:

“I hated dad, but I was in his hands, I couldn’t escape his power. It was impossible to exact my revenge on him. Except in the much-acclaimed mind and imagination, there I was able to crush him. Could grow there, outgrow him, place my hands on his cheeks and squeeze until his lips formed the stupid pout he made to imitate me, because of my protruding teeth. There, I could punch him on the nose so hard that it broke and blood streamed from it. Or, even better, so that the bone was forced back into his brain and he died.”

Much of My Struggle is the struggle of Karl Ove against his father. At times this hints at a deep conflict of world views, such as when Karl Ove swears he has witnessed a face in the water of a shipwreck reported on the evening news, which his father takes as a sign of his weak son’s worrisome attachment to Christianity. But for the most part the father’s terrorism is domestic: he forces his son to eat four apples in a row, yells at him for losing his socks, grounds him for breaking the television. The transgressions are banal; the responses are genuinely menacing. As Knausgaard gains more perspective on his father, who dies of alcoholism at the end of A Death in the Family, the struggle becomes to not end up like him, or be dominated by his memory. Karl Ove feels his father’s presence in his own attitude towards alcohol, Christianity, Norwegian social democracy. But he is determined not to repeat the sins of his father on his own children. In the third volume, Boyhood Island, which has now been translated into English, he reports some success:

“When I enter a room, they don’t cringe, they don’t look down at the floor, they don’t dart off as soon as they glimpse an opportunity, no, if they look at me, it is not a look of indifference, and if there is anyone I am happy to be forgotten by it’s them. If there is anyone I am happy to be taken for granted by, it is them. And should they have completely forgotten I was there when they turn forty themselves, I will thank them and take a bow and accept the bouquet.”

But My Struggle contains another struggle as well, the struggle to become an artist, and this is the more complicated one. There is a startling confession that sets Knausgaard’s mind running in Volume One: “When I look at a beautiful painting I have tears in my eyes but not when I look at my children. That does not mean I do not love them, because I do, with all my heart, it simply means that the meaning they produce is not sufficient to fulfill a whole life. Not mine at any rate”. My Struggle is also a struggle to fulfil this need for meaning, which Knausgaard quenches in moments of the sublime, which arrive sporadically amid the overwhelming mundanity of the book. Here, in A Death in the Family, is Knausgaardon the train from Stockholm to Gnesta:

“I wasn’t thinking of anything in particular, just staring at the burning red ball in the sky and the pleasure that suffused me was so sharp and came with such intensity that it was indistinguishable from pain. What I experienced seemed to me to be of enormous significance. Enormous significance. When the moment had passed the feeling of significance did not diminish, but all of a sudden it became hard to place: exactly what was significant? And why? A train, an industrial area, sun, mist?”

There is something extremely humanistic and Romantic about this passage. Knausgaard seems to be able to conjure up his experience of beauty all on his own – with only minimal support from nature. He goes on to say the light he sees from the train reminds him of his favourite painters: “Vermeer evoked the same, a few of Claude’s paintings, some of Ruisdael’s . . . some of J. C. Dahl’s, almost all of Hertervig’s . . . . But none of Rubens’s painting, none of Manet’s, none of the English or French eighteenth-century painting with the exception of Chardin, not Whistler, nor Michelangelo, and only one by Leonardo da Vinci”. The type of devotion exhibited here – “only one by Leonardo” – is arrestingly, amusingly precise; but what links these painters who stir him? Knausgaard cannot say for certain; he hazards it has to do with a “certain objectivity, by which I mean a distance between reality and the portrayal of reality, and it was doubtless in this interlying space where it ‘happened,’ where it appeared, whatever it was I saw, when the world seemed to step forward from the world”. After this clawing towards the sublime, the author unleashes a cascade of thought about contemporary art:

“The situation we have arrived at now whereby the props of art no longer have any significance, all the emphasis is placed on what the art expresses, in other words, not what it is but what it thinks, what ideas it accrues, such that the last demands of objectivity, the final remnants of something outside the human world have been abandoned. Art has come to be an unmade bed, a couple of photocopiers in a room, a motorbike in the attic. And art has come to be a spectator of itself, the way it reacts, what newspapers write about it; the artist is a performer . . . . Those in this situation who call for more intellectual depth, more spiritual depth, have understood nothing, for the problem is that the intellect has taken over everything. Everything has become intellect, even our bodies, they aren’t bodies anymore, but ideas of bodies, something that is situated in our own heaven of images and conceptions within us and above us, where an increasing large part of our lives is lived. The limits of that which cannot speak to us – the unfathomable – no longer exist. We understand everything, and we do so because we have turned everything into ourselves.”

“Everything has become intellect” – it could be Hegel we’re reading. And this diatribe comes close to the view Hegel put forward in his own lectures on aesthetics, in 1828: once upon a time, Hegel argued, art was about saints and heroes. After the Reformation, artists became interested in the fact that most people are not saints and that lives are determined by externally imposed constraints. It is here, under the regime of the market, that, Hegel says, “everything that is called the prose of life belongs”. It is impossible to invest subjects in such an age with the complete harmony of content and form required for beauty because of the finite nature of everyday life. But if the moderns cannot rival the ancients in terms of beauty, Hegel still thought they had “liveliness” and “absorption” on their side. The Dutch masters might no longer be able to paint beatific Madonnas, but they could paint a woman knitting socks or receiving a letter, provided they concentrated sufficient power on heightening her vitality. They could, as it were, force meaning into her features with the sheer virtuosity of their brush.

Knausgaard’s project is similar but also crucially different from the Dutch masters who were among the first to make a home in the disenchanted world. He wants to push his way towards the sublime moments of our earthly existence, but he believes it can be done without virtuosity:

“I sat leafing through a Constable book for almost an hour. I kept flicking back to the picture of the greenish clouds, every time it called for the same emotions in me. It was as if two different forms of reflection rose and fell in my consciousness, one with its thoughts and reasoning, the other with its feeling and impression, which even though they were juxtaposed, expulsed each other’s insights. It was a fantastic picture, it filled me with all the feeling that fantastic pictures do, but when I had to explain why, what constitute the “fantastic,” was at a loss to do so . . . . But the moment I focused my gaze on the painting again all my reasoning vanished in the surge of energy and beauty that arose in me. Yes, yes, yes, I heard. That’s where it is. That’s where I have to go.”

Knausgaard finds the sublime in the everyday; he also finds it in classic pieces of art. He shows us that these realms, as well as the realm of love, cannot be fully intellectualized.But unlike Joyce or Woolf, who required a renovation of language to communicate this, Knausgaard prefers to show his narrator bumping up against his own limits of expression. This may be less satisfying to read on the level of the sentence, but it captures something about our reality, and our relationship with art, which seldom moves us in the ways we expect, and whose effects are no less strong for the clichés we use to describe them, just as our passions are no less genuine for our use of borrowed language. “You cannot chase the Holy Grail with a pram”, said Karen Blixen. But Knausgaard shows that, with enough intensity, you can.

In A Time to Every Purpose under Heaven, Knausgaard dramatized the story of art as described by Hegel, and he took it a step further, by telling the story of angels in Western art: at first the angels were depicted as the rare, austere messengers from God; then they gradually became the pudgy, decadent cherubim of Caravaggio; then they were nearly exiled from our consciousness altogether. In Knausgaard’s telling they became seagulls on the Norwegian coast, where only a few residents dimly remember their former glory. Knausgaard’s project here was to bring the Old Testament back down to earth and treat its parables as pitiless reductions of his much richer tapestry. But in My Struggle, the aim is the reverse: to lay out his whole profane existence for sacred inspection. When the writing is at its most mundane we feel faint biblical echoes in the background.

Simply on the basis of My Struggle’s length, it seems, critics have compared Knausgaard with Proust. There are some similarities between the two: both tell stories of artistic education and taste formation: just as Proust goes through the apprenticeships of Bergotte, Elstir and Berma, so Knausgaard worships at the altars of Queen, The Clash and the poet Olav Hauge. (Unlike nearly every contemporary American novelist, Knausgaard makes his movements between so-called high and low culture appear seamless and natural, not so much a joy ride between registers, strenuously exhibited, as a matter-of-fact reflection of his tastes). But the major difference with Proust is in the way My Struggle is engineered to operate with the reader: Proust carefully curates his moments of revelation; Knausgaard leaves it to the reader to distinguish between the meaningful and meaningless.

Boyhood Island revisits much of the same territory as the previous two volumes but in a much more sustained fashion. Here Knausgaard looks back on his difficult childhood while only very rarely returning to the perspective of the writer and father he has now become. This volume contains the longest stretch of total recall that Knausgaard has yet allowed himself in the course of the work. It opens with the narrator claiming that he can’t remember anything of “this ghetto-like state of incompleteness that is what I call my childhood”. He wishes we could assign different Christian names to ourselves during our different stages in life – to the foetus, the child, the teenager, the young adult, the man, the old man. The idea that all these selves are presumed to form some kind of coherent being is absurd to the author. But then comes the plunge where, after saying he remembers nothing of his childhood, he suddenly remembers everything – how to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child

Boyhood Island reverberates with the joys and anxieties of early youth, and Knausgaard brilliantly recreates their exaggerated feel. Here he is on his boyish fixation with construction workers: “What fascinated us most apart from the change in the landscape they wrought were the manifestations of their private lives that came with them. When they produced a comb from their orange overalls or baggy, almost shapeless, blue trousers and combed their hair”. He communicates everything from the loud sound a toothbrush makes in his head to the minute discoveries of childhood that have the force of major revelations: “I came to the conclusion that cornflakes were best when they were crispy, before the milk had soaked into them”. There are powerfully felt scenes of sexual and intellectual awakening, and if the book has its longeurs it’s mostly because we’ve grown accustomed to Knausgaard switching between time sequences, or following an episode about shopping for groceries with an exegesis on the fate of angels.

It is too early for English readers to tell what the relation of this half of the book will be to the whole. We do now know that they can continue to rely on the deft and sure translations of Don Bartlett, who has recently signed a contract to translate the entire work. And whatever the outcome, there is already the sense that the author’s views going in will not be the same as the ones he comes out with. Knausgaard looks with envy on Rimbaud, whose final act as an artist was to quit art altogether, and we sense that he too is looking for an exit. We already know the final line in the final volume to be: “And I’m so happy that I’m no longer an author”. It would be a mistake to read My Struggle as a struggle away from art. But its extreme artlessness creates a far more intense realism than we might have thought possible – a confessional novel that outdoes most confessions – and that makes us feel that these are things as they really are for a forty-year-old man from Norway.

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Evan Hughes Profiles Karl Ove Knausgaard for The New Republic

kok1Photograph By Felix Odell

Karl Ove Knausgaard, Norwegian author of the My Struggle series, received a large profile by Evan Hughes in The New Republic. Most exciting to our ears are the hints of a new book in the works:

Before I left, Knausgaard told me something unexpected. “I shouldn’t talk about this,” he said, shaking his head and smiling a little. In interviews, Knausgaard has insisted that he meant what he wrote in the last line of his series: that he is through writing novels. But he told me he is working on a new one. Amid all the turmoil over My Struggle, now he can “sit down and be somewhere else, do something else,” and that carries him forward. Influenced by Borges and Calvino, the new book will have elements of the fantastical, the otherworldly. It won’t be about his life at all.

Read the full profile here.

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Elias Khoury interviewed by Haaretz

haaretz2

Elias Khoury interviewed by Hareetz.

Translated from Hebrew by Yehuda Shenhav

 

The novelist Elias Khoury does not believe in the peace process.

 

Religious frenzy dominates the country, peace is still far away, and the Israelis need to experience defeat.

 

In an interview toward the publication of his book “White Faces” in Hebrew, the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury explains why rumors of a Nobel Prize do not occupy his mind, and what he learned from the books of S. Yizhar

 

Elias Khoury knows the Israelis much better than they know him. He knows well the literature and politics in Israel, while most Israelis look at the city of Beirut and the entire region only through the rifle. Although now, when we talk on the phone, he is in the United States, where he teaches a semester each year Arabic literature at New York University, but the rest of the time he spends in his hometown, Beirut.

 

His book “White Faces” is now translated into Hebrew by Yehouda Shenhav – Shrabani published by KM (edited by Hanan Hever). The English translation carries the title “White Masks ” and I asked if he meant to wink to Franz Fanon’s seminal book ” Black Skin , White Masks .” It turns out that the original name in Arabic is indeed “White Faces” and Khoury did not mean to imply Fanon , although he says there is always a conversation with Fanon “he is a character who played a major role in the consciousness of anti – colonial struggle. This was an essential discourse to the liberation of people. Then there is always a dialogue with him and the concept of liberation and how people should free themselves , but mostly it’s a book about the special experience of the Lebanese civil war and the unique experience and special composition of various components of this war. The Palestinians are certainly central, but there were other elements and different perspectives that address the absurdity of this human experience . ”

 

Khoury was born in Beirut in fatal year 1948 to an Orthodox Christian middle class family. In 1967 he traveled to Jordan and joined the Fatah. He left Jordan after “Black September” in 1970. During the Lebanese civil war which broke out in 1975 he was active, was wounded and nearly lost his eyesight. When I ask what exactly happened there, he replies that it does not matter: “Of course it was a difficult experience but there are difficult experiences all the time and they require a price.”

 

Khoury’s name is frequently mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he dismisses the issue: “These are rumors and you should not take them too seriously. This is not an important issue. It can be important to the Lebanese and the Palestinians, perhaps, but it will not change anything and  when you’re writing you do not think about such things. It is unimportant. ”

 

“White Faces” was first published in Beirut in 1981. Khoury wrote it during the war when he was no longer a fighter.” I was working as a cultural editor in the daily newspaper Al Safir”, he says.” Before then I edited “Shuun Palestine”. At that time I was a writer and an intellectual. I think that intellectuals should participate. You can not be an intellectual without taking a stand when there is a national liberation struggle; and I feel all the time that I was part of this struggle. ”

 

In the book Khoury is trying to trace the wake of Khalil Ahmad Jaber , who was murdered and his body was dumped on a pile of garbage in the UNESCO area in Beirut. The novel is written in the form of a collection of testimonies collected by the narrator regarding the murder , and presents several points of view. Along the way it tells us the story of the Lebanese civil war.”

 

“These are strong testimonies about violence” says Shenhav – Sharabani . ” They keep talking about violence but testimonies are incomplete , and stories are non coherent. They resemble the stories of post- traumatic or survivors, survivors of rape, Nakba , or other catastrophes. Usually modern literature suppresses political violence. Violence is always below the surface, and Khoury puts it bluntly in the face.”

 

I ask Khuri how is life today in Beirut. He says that it is tough and very hard, sitting in a small country which is located at an important juncture in the region: “There is a delicate political structure which is very special , although I’m not sure that there is a structure at all, but still, there is. Beirut is a reflection of the area, it reflects the region. Currently living in Beirut means living on the edge of a volcano. You feel that at any moment this volcano may become active, and of course we are at the center of the tragedy in Syria on the one hand; and at the heart of the tragedy of the Palestinian on the other. We are surrounded by tragedies and we have our tragedies. This is a country which was destroyed twice. The city was almost completely destroyed with the Israeli invasion in 1982, and by its aerial bombing. There is still  the feeling that survival is the main issue and survival gives meaning to life itself. ”

 

Khoury says that there is a need to find meaning to life during this survival struggle. You need to adapt to the situation of war and violence: “I’m very pessimistic. War will continue. There is no prospect of peace. Not only the Israeli Palestinians peace process collapsed, as we see, this peace is almost impossible; but peace in the entire region entered a tragic moment. This is an era of revolutions, which, I imagine will prolong. I guess it also disrupts the issue Palestinians, which was the source of this awful situation, at least in the countries surrounding Palestine – Lebanon, Syria and Jordan – that were under the Ottoman Empire and are going through a terrible nightmare since 1948. ”

 

Khoury says that the residents of this region undergo a long process of change and destruction that no one experience like that in the 21st century, “In this place there is so much trouble. I think that it will provide a valuable lesson about the importance of human dignity, peace and justice and we must learn this lesson. Yet, it is an enormously expensive lesson. ”

 

He said that the Israelis are not willing to learn this lesson at the moment “this terrible dialogue, is very problematic.” He argues that during “the peace process” Palestinians surrendered completely. Not only surrendered but rejected: “When you surrender and then rejected, what does that mean?  This means that you do not want the other person around you. And when you push people to feel that their existence is under threat, as well as individuals and as a collective entity, it is a very a dangerous thing that will lead to catastrophe “.

 

Israelis, in his eyes, are not interested in peace and the peace process itself is a mere fiction: “Israeli society is not ready to leave the occupied territories. Israel goes through the same phenomenon which we see in the entire region: of religious madness which believes that the occupied territories are important, Rachel’s Tomb, Jerusalem and all this messianic madness. Actually we are yet at the same moment, when Golda Meir said that there are no Palestinian people. ”

 

He said that the Nakba did not take place in 1948 only, but rather is an ongoing process, “To talk about memories of the Nakba is misleading, since we live the Nakba, we have no time to remember because we live in the tragedy itself. Politicians say other things but I’m not a politician. Historically I do not feel that we can start anything serious unless the Nakba is stopped. That can be seen in Israel itself. With the Palestinians who live in Israel and you call them Israeli Arabs, since you don’t like their name. You did not only take their land but also took away their names.”

 

Does he see solutions in the horizon? He thinks that the Israelis should experience defeat “without an experience of defeat you do not become human. Let’s talk about us as individuals, not nations or peoples. Individually if you do not feel the possibility of a defeat, you loose your sensitivity as a human being.  You have a problem because all of us, as individuals, face the option of defeat at a certain moment. In Israeli society there is a feeling that they will not be defeated and this is megalomania of power. If the Israelis do not realize they can be defeated, they will not change, I’m sorry to say that. I come from a society which was defeated hundreds of times, so I know what I’m talking about. ”

 

And after all that, why did you agree for the translation of your book into Hebrew, and why did you agree to talk to me?

 

“I support the boycott, but I’m not boycotting individuals or newspapers. We boycott institutions, and I believe that it is good for the Israelis; it might make them more sensitive and aware. It is not the first time that a book of mine is translated into Hebrew. My novel, Bab al-Shams, was published in Hebrew in 2002 by Yael Lerer and Andalus which also published ‘Yalu. In literature there are no limits. I also read and teach Israeli literature and it has nothing to do with the fact that I support the  boycotting of Israel. ”

 

Do you think that literature can change?

 

“I really do not know. Personally I think that many books have changed my life. Dostoevsky changed my life, ‘The Stranger ‘ by Albert Camus which I read at the age of 14 completely changed my life. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry changed my life. In this sense, literature has an impact on people. Literature also changes literature. We do not only write literature, we also rewrite it. In every writer you find all the writers in the world and we are rewriting world literature . But as to politics? I do not know . I do not think that you’re reading a book and going immediately to the revolution. But you are reading a book, and it enters your unconscious – then you feel closeness to the characters and then you actually write it again. The reader rewrites the book in his imagination. ”

 

Literature, he says, deals with the great questions of life, death and love. It is also the only place where we can conduct a dialogue with the dead: “This is a very significant experience that when we read a book, and we do not think if the author is alive or dead. He speaks to us and we speak with him. I think that this kind of dialogue is essential to our understanding of life and their meaning . Because life is meaningless, you know that, right? what we try to do with literature is to give meaning to the meaningless. I think that this is a great adventure. ”

 

Unlike many Israelis who do not know Arabic literature at all, Khouri is very familiar with Hebrew literature translated into English. He says that “Khirbet Hizah” by S. Yizhar overwhelmed him: “When I read it I had an incredible insight. Izhar tried to do something very deep. Truly this is the only novel written by an Israeli that does such a thing. Yizhar was a Zionist of course. He was a member of the Knesset, he was a Palmachnik, but as a writer he plunged deep into the tragedy to tell us that the Israelis have created their own Jews. He describes the Palestinians as Jews in a similar way to the descriptions of Jews in Europe. So now the Jews have their own Jews. This is a great insight.

 

This year, when I taught the text in class, we talked about literature as “going beyond”, not in the sense that it can be controversial, but in the deep essence of things. And Izhar gave us this essence. Not because he told the Israeli about their atrocities. Everyone knows about them (at least we that have experienced it), but his concept was to create the Jews of the Jews. And he got into it deeply in the text. It shows us that literature can take us, even without the author’s intention, into deep substantive issues; which political commentary, a sociologist or an anthropologist can not do. This is why literature is important. In this sense it is changing. ”

 

He points out to a big difference between Israeli and Arabic literature regarding mutual representation: ” Palestinian literature includes something that no one notice. Ghassan Kanafani published in 1969 a novel called ‘ The Return to Haifa.’ At that time he belonged to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine by the leadership of George Habash. He was murdered because of it by the Israelis, and now it is clear because the Israelis have admitted it” he says ,noting that Kanafani’s book has a figure of a Jewish woman , a Holocaust survivor named Miriam , and Kanafani delves into it deeply . “In Mahmoud Darwish there is a Jewish character named Rita and she is human. It shows us how the Palestinians tried, even though they are the victims, to open up to their others, and to understand them. Not in order to accept, but in order to understand. They will never accept. They will compromise, but will not accept.

 

“But if you take modern Israeli literature like Amos Oz , AB Yehoshua and even Alon Hilu in his ‘ House of Dajani ‘. How is the Palestinian represented there? Either he does not speak because he is deaf and dumb; or he appears in the dreams of Hannah in My Michael . The Palestinians are only part of the geography, as in Yizhar, or in Oz’s short story ‘ nomads and Viper”. In Yehoshua he is mute or infantile, like Naim in “The Lover”.  Even with David Grossman , who is the most open in the “Smile of the Lamb” , the Palestinian character is crazy.  No Palestinian who speaks the truth. This is a great question, why there are no Palestinians in Israeli literature and if they are, they are very marginal , or appear as shades. Just go read the Kanafani and how he writes about Mirriam , to understand that being defeated makes you more human “.

 

Israelis do not read Arabic literature

 

The translator of the book Shenhav – Sharabani, who is a professor in the Department of Sociology at Tel Aviv university,  say that Israelis do not read Arabic novels. He says he bought the book in London, and felt that he had to translate it right away. At the time he had no publisher in mind, and without even knowing if he’ll get an approval from Khoury in light of the boycott of Israel. Meanwhile, he translated another book by Khoury, “The Journey of Little Gandhi”, to be published next year with the Xargol Publishing House.

 

 

“Since the end of Andalus, founded by by Yael Lerer, who did the largest chunk of translating important Arabic literature, there is no interest in Israel in Arabic literature,” says Shenhav – Sharabani. “You know how many Israeli Jews read Arabic? Only two percent. This is outrageous. And how many Palestinians in Israel speak Hebrew? 92 percent. What does it mean?  that you live in place and you do not learn the language? This means that you are a tourist, visitor or a temporary resident. It shows that the relationship between the two languages ​​are colonial. Otherwise it does not make sense. ”

 

Shenhav- Sharabani, one of the founders of the “Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow” started to translate from Arabic only a few years ago. He says that for him translation from Arabic is one of the main passages to his Arab-Jewish identity. He talks about his conflicted relationship with Arabic: “In my youth I really hated the language spoken in my home.” Only ten years ago I returned to Arabic seriously, and with a high need to learn from scratch, including reading and writing. And now he has six new translations in order: “I love Hebrew even more since. The languages are so close, they are like twins.”

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Review of The Expedition to the Baobab Tree from TLS

A Name for Everything

ELIZABETH LOWRY

Wilma Stockenström
THE EXPEDITION TO THE BAOBAB TREE
Translated by J. M. Coetzee
220pp. Archipelago. Paperback, £12.99 (US $18).
978 1 935744 92 4

Published: 22 April 2015

The South African poet Wilma Stockenström published this powerful, brief narrative about slavery in Afrikaans in 1981. J. M. Coetzee’s tersely brilliant English translation, which first appeared two years later, carries a tremendous lyrical charge.

The story, which is set somewhere in southern Africa at an unspecified date in the past, is vestigial; the impact is all in the telling. Stockenström’s nameless female narrator is a former slave who finds herself alone in the veld, where she seeks refuge from the elements in the hollow of a baobab tree. Her day-to-day struggle to survive is the vehicle for a rich meditation on her past life; on enslavement, freedom and identity. Having been sold into slavery as a young girl, she becomes the sexual companion to a series of wealthy owners in a harbour city on the eastern coast. She is given an education to allow her to converse intelligently with her masters – and her knowledge of poetry lends credibility to the densely patterned texture of her speech – but as a slave she is without a language or purpose of her own: “we were all one woman, interchangeable, exchangeable”. She bears children but they are taken away from her as soon as they are weaned, reinforcing her sense of disconnectedness from her body. When her third owner, an explorer, takes her with him on a journey inland in search of a lost city, then abandons her as the expedition fails, she is at last completely isolated.

Sheltered in the hollow of the baobab, Stockenström’s narrator arrives at a peculiar independence. For the first time in her life, her time and body are her own. Her rhapsodic observations often achieve the heightened quality of poetry, whether she is recalling her years in bondage or noting something as simple as an aloe that “sucks the blood up out of the earth and wears it gaudily in a cluster of red knobs, splendid against the clear blue sky”. This unexpected freedom brings her a new understanding of her own history: “Now I have a name for everything: slave, castration, commerce, coastal city, sea, forced labour. Yes, now I have it all”. The narrator’s self-possession comes too late, however – it will be impossible for her to remain alive for long in the hostile climate of the veld. Coetzee’s tightly paced, restrained rendering of a complex text gives due weight to every word. It should ensure that Stockenström’s compelling picture of suffering and loss becomes a classic in English as well as Afrikaans.

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Sinan Antoon interviewed in The Irish Times

Brought to Book: Sinan Antoon on his literary life

Literature touches the lives of fellow humans in a very visceral way

 

Sinan Antoon is author of The Corpse Washer (Yale University Press), translated from Arabic by the author and recently longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2014
What was the first book to make an impression on you?
A Tale of Two Cities. It was one of the first books I read (in an Arabic translation) when I was still 10.
What was your favourite book as a child?
The Three Musketeers.
And what is your favourite book or books now?
Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life, and Mahmoud Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence. The Mu`allaqat (Ancient Arabian Odes) .

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