Sister Carrie by Lauren Fairbanks

Would you be willing to give us a profound remark on the concept "LOVE" and what tie-ins that may have to Carrie?

My opinion? It may be a strange concept to you. It doesn't spurn those who abuse it most. I saw a man pick it up in a fistful, so that alone must have hurt. He hurled it against a wall, kicked it when it was down. I didn't see how Love could live. Love got up and begged for more. It got more of the same treatment only worse. Love is Rasputin. Then Love must have tired and, pulling a knife out of its beehive hairdo, slit the guy stomach to neck. Not pretty. But a clean cut. Now Love must be just as much a lonely stinkpig as the next guy. Meaner 'an hell. What happens when love comes to town.

Sister Carrie is about Carrie Meeber, a small-town girl who seeks her fortune in the big city. She falls in love with a rake named Hurstrwood--oh, wait, no. That's Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie. In this one, Carrie is Asian-American, and her American Dream involves getting involved in two of the United States' most sinister industries: advertising and prostitution. She works for a pimp whose name is, you guessed it, Pimpo. The narrator, who reminds us time and again how omniscient he is, seems to seeking out information about Carrie's exploits, having risen from a humble prostitute to something of an underground legend. She may have killed a man, perhaps one named Valmouth, though it's possible that she and Valmouth are actually the same person. She has fallen for, and had a child with, a guy named Chuck, and both, perhaps, are on the lam? I don't know. It's actually really hard to tell what's going on in this book, if anything really can be said to be "going on" at all.

Lauren Fairbanks' avant-garde novel was a little too much for me: a little too avant, a little too garde. when I was able to let the spiky, irreverent language wash over me (check out the passage above), I entered into a state that resembled something like enjoyment. But ultimately I found the discursive, non-sequential nature of the narrative to be a little too much to penetrate. It reminded me of some of the more difficult books by John Hawkes, but I walked away fairly sure that there was nothing much that I had missed, because questions of fact and story really are irrelevant to Sister Carrie. It could be described perhaps as choral, with all the voices of the underground figures, from Pimpo to Carrie's mom Zenobia, layered over each other, but Carrie herself remains truly elusive, even to the book's end. And even now I fear that describing the book has laid a kind of sense or system that the book is trying hard to repel. So I'll stop here.

A Book, Untitled by Shushan Avagyan

This book doesn't contain any novel ideas.

It simple (re)visits the main events of the past, and tries to understand the present, which is incomprehensible.

Yet the brilliant writers (who never did meet each other) were writing about their realities with such clarity and foresight that even after a hundred years their ideas have remained so relevant.

...And when each time my mind wanders back to Yerevan.

Armenian writer Shushan Avagyan's A Book, Untitled imagines a meeting between two forgotten masters of Armenian literature: Shushanik Kurghinian and Zabel Yesayan. Though they came from different centuries, different backgrounds, even different parts of Armenia--the Soviet East and the Turkish West, roughly and respectively, as I understand it--but they are similar insofar as their poetic achievements have been overlooked, either entirely (as is the case with one--I forget which--Yesayan?), or in the sense that their revolutionary work has been ignored in order to portray them as a "domestic," feminine poet. By imagining a meeting between them, Avagyan brings together threads of Armenian literary history that have never been allowed to connect.

Or perhaps the real subject of A Book, Untitled is the creation of the book itself: Avagyan weaves together the story of Khurginian and Yesayan's meeting with bits of research and poetry, as well as conversations between herself and her research partner Lara, as they investigate the poets' archives. Avagyan describes the book she's writing as having "four authors" of which she is only the "typist/writer/translator"; stupid me didn't pick up till the very end that she means herself, Lara, and the two poets, who are cast as equal contributors. Or perhaps Lara is not included, and the fourth is the reader themself, whom Avagyan invites into the process of composition. The novel's many threads--Khurginian and Yesayan, Avagyan and Lara, poetry, research, snippets of the poets' interrogation at the hands of the state, even scraps from postcards written to an anonymous lover--are scattered so freely, often alternating from one line to the next, that the whole thing seems like a kind of puzzle that must be pieced together. Avagyan even invites the reader to give the book, ostensibly untitled, a title of their own satisfaction.

I really hate when people say stuff like, "This book was too hard," or even worse, "It felt like homework." Yet I couldn't help feeling, as I read A Book, Untitled, that I was failing some test the book was putting out for me, or if not a test, then failing to take up some puzzle or game in the spirit it's intended. I wonder if knowing more about Armenian history might have helped here--it wasn't clear to me, even, who the interrogators seeking to censor Khurginian/Yesayan (which was it, again?) were supposed to be--Turks or Soviets? I came to appreciate the motifs of distance and collision, the way in which the distance between the author of the postcards and their recipient mirrors the way in which the poets at the heart of the novel are kept apart, spiritually, socially, culturally, etc. But the metafictional aspects of it felt more alienating and grueling than illuminating, to me. Surely the failure is mostly mine; hopefully there are readers out there more game for the puzzle than I was.

That said, I love this press, Tilted Axis, which is dedicated to English translations of all kinds of world literature. This is the first book I've read by an Armenian writer, which brings my "Countries Read" list up to 91!

Event Factory by Renee Gladman

I had a dilemma about entering.  My accent was pretty good at that point; I knew I would be understood.  But there was a gesture I was to make upon entering a place that was already peopled, something between "hello," "sorry," and "congratulations I'm here," and I could not remember what it was.  As subtly as I could, I bent here and there trying to jog my memory: was I to do a shake, a roundoff?  I kept thinking, "How great it would be to enter."  If only traveling were about showing off your language skills, if only it did not also demand a certain commitment of body communication, of outright singing or dancing--I think I would be absolutely global by now.  In Ravicka, I was barely urban.  A child approached me and asked if I were sleepy.  Why it was this question that recalled the missing gesture, I shall never know.  But there it was: you folded your body as though you were taking a bow with your legs spread far apart, and then, after holding that posture for several seconds (depending on your age) you brought your legs together quickly.  I stepped inside the door; the patrons turned toward me; I performed and was right.

An unnamed narrator arrives by plane in the yellow town of Ravicka.  She's studied the language, she knows about the culture, and yet the city is strange and forbidding: it's difficult to tell what people's intentions are, and every social circumstance demands not just the right word but a complicated gesture, from entering a shop to having sex.  Sorry, I'm not quite making this sound as strange as it really is: the city, and the people in it, are like something out a Fellini film, where human intention and conversation are aestheticized, robbed of sense.  Ravicka is a maze, a yellow--whatever that word means when applied to a whole city--maze, beset by some kind of nameless crisis.  Underground, a group of rebellious dissenters speak a language made only of air.

Renee Gladman's Event Factory is something like a hyperexperimental version of Olga Tokarczuk's Flights, about the satisfactions and bewilderments of travel.  The nameless narrator wants badly to be integrated into the fabric of Ravicka--she even spends a few days working as the concierge in her hotel, when the original concierge disappears--but Ravicka remains essentially unknowable and inaccessible.  The experimental aspects of Event Factory put us in her place; the novel, too is difficult to break into.  The language looks like something familiar, but is unsettlingly strange in ways that are difficult to explain entirely.

I enjoyed the weirdness of Event Factory, but I'm not sure what else there is to say about it.  I get the central idea of it, I think; experimental art is always in some respect about alienation, and this particular alienation is the alienation of being in a new place, or perhaps any kind of place at all.  But taking it apart and trying to put it into regular English words seems beside the point; the words might work, but what's the right gesture to make it communicable?