Words Are My Matter

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  César Vallejo, considered by some the greatest South American poet, an active Communist persecuted by the government of his native Peru, lived the latter half of his life in exile; he died in Paris in 1938 of an undiagnosed illness. His wife brought in “alternative” practitioners to try to save him.

  Roberto Bolaño, now often spoken of as the successor to Borges and García Márquez, left his native Chile when the dictator Pinochet took power, and lived most of the rest of his life in exile. He wrote Monsieur Pain in 1983, when he was thirty. He died in 2003.

  From the seed of fact grows the great vine of imagination, twining and intertwining, casting shadow, bearing fruit sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter.

  T. C. Boyle: When the Killing’s Done

  2011

  California was an island in the earliest, fanciful maps. Ecologically, the maps were right. Isolated by the ocean, the Sierra, and the great deserts, dozens of species unknown elsewhere flourished in the benign climate, until the white men came. Then, under the impact of a thousand imported exotics, native species began to decline or perish.

  There are Californians today who, far from planting lawns around their desert condos, would like to uproot all the golden Spanish wild oats to let the bunch grasses of Indian days cover the hillsides again. The Forest Service, though not so purist as that, keeps up a fierce and unremitting resistance to many invasive species, not only plants but animals.

  T. C. Boyle is well aware that Americans like to see everything as a war against something. Even the lonely fogbound Channel Islands off Santa Barbara can be a battlefield. And it’s civil war, the worst kind, because the opponents are close kin: they both want passionately to save the island’s wild creatures.

  Government agents believe salvation lies in control, in careful scientific stewardship. Animal rights advocates believe human interference does more harm than good and is morally wrong. The arguments on both sides are passionate and cogent.

  A typical dilemma: The Forest Service must trap or kill eagles on one of the islands. Why persecute these magnificent birds? Well, when DDT finished off the native bald eagle, which isn’t much of a hunter, the carnivorous golden eagles moved out from the mainland to prey on the wild pigs thriving in the great stands of fennel that sprang up after the island was closed to sheep ranching (pigs, fennel, and sheep all, of course, destructive species introduced by the whites—themselves an invasive race). As the hordes of pigs are eliminated by shooting them, the golden eagles have nothing to eat but the one remaining native species, a charming dwarf fox. How to save the fox? Get rid of the golden eagles so the bald eagle can be reintroduced.

  Animal rights activists reject such painful, partial, meddlesome solutions. It’s simple: just keep hands off, stop interfering, don’t kill anything. We’ve done enough damage. Let the animals have it their way.

  And let the foxes go extinct, leave the island to the pigs? Deny our responsibility and let the harm we’ve done be our total legacy on earth?

  This dire complexity, these insoluble questions are of course not limited to California. This is the dilemma our species faces all over the earth. It is a tremendous subject for a novel. And a tremendously dramatic one.

  T. C. Boyle is not one to scant the drama. Beginning with a splendidly described shipwreck-and-castaway-survival scene, his story weaves among several generations and on both sides of the environmental issues, always clear, crisply written, fast-paced, most of it in the perpetual-motion presto of the present tense. No need to cut to the chase—it’s all chase. After a while I found that the unremitting tension and stress, the rush from one nerve-wracking, painful, or gruesome scene to the next, began to cancel itself out, even to drift from tragic drama into melodrama. For readers accustomed to taking their adrenaline straight, it will no doubt be more effective.

  Most of the characters we get to know are women, hard-edged, tough, and more or less sympathetic. Dave, the leader of the local animal rights activists, is a man whose rage, impatience, and contempt for human beings are the reverse side of his identification with animal freedom. Overconfident, fatally inept, intending harm to those he sees as his enemies, he brings disaster and death to his allies and even the animals he thinks he alone can save. Alma, the protagonist on the Forest Service side, is intelligent, conscientious, and likable, but so neurotic, so endlessly driven, so self-tormenting, that her stream-of-consciousness becomes almost as exhausting to read as her baneful opponent’s.

  There is no rest in the book, no peace. Every breakfast in the sweet California morning sunlight, every visit to the lovely, lonesome coasts and hillslopes of the Channel Islands, is weighed down with foreboding, marginalised by the threat of impending disaster. Any happiness is illusory, too brief to be meaningful. For all its energy and urgency, its historical accuracy and sweep, its excellent action writing and faultless reproduction of contemporary speech and life, the novel is heart-chillingly bleak. In that, it is an honest reflection of the mood of most people who look at what we have done to our world and seek to take responsibility for it. A story that begins with a shipwreck and ends with a rattlesnake in the dark does not leave much room for hope.

  Geraldine Brooks: People of the Book

  2008

  Not long after the United States invaded Iraq, our local newspaper printed a photograph I cannot forget. It showed an Iraqi man hurrying away from the library of Baghdad through a smoky, chaotic street, his arms filled, overfilled, burdened down, with books. The books—some of them large and heavy, like art books or old records of some kind—may have been rare treasures, or they may have been merely whatever he could gather up in the confusion of the burning building. He may have been a librarian, or he may have been only a reader. I know he was not a looter, because his face showed not only distress and fear, but passionate grief.

  As soon as I knew it was the story of a book saved from the destruction of a library, I wanted to read Geraldine Brooks’s People of the Book. An irresistible subject, given urgency by its timeliness and poignance by its paradoxicality: for the novel is based on the true story of an ancient Jewish codex saved from the fire by a Muslim librarian.

  The Sarajevo Haggadah, pride and glory of the Bosnian collection, was spirited out of the library and hidden in a bank vault when the Serbs began to target the libraries and museums of Sarajevo in their shelling. But that was its second rescue: a half-century earlier, it had been slipped out from under the noses of the Nazis and hidden in a village mosque for the duration. In 1941 it was saved by an Islamic scholar, Dervis Korkut; in 1992, by a Muslim librarian, Enver Imamovic. A little later, one of Imamovic’s colleagues, trying to carry books away from the burning library (like the Iraqi in the photograph I cannot forget), was killed by a sniper. Her name was Aida Buturovic.

  The Sarajevo Haggadah is very unusual among Jewish holy books in having illustrations, like a Christian Book of Hours; these are of great delicacy and beauty. It was written and illuminated in Spain, in the mid-fourteenth century, but nothing of its early history is known. A priest spared it from the book burnings of the Inquisition in Venice in 1609 by writing in it “revisto per mi”—“I have reviewed/approved this”—and signing his name. Apparently we know little or nothing of how it got from Venice to Bosnia, to undergo its two hairbreadth rescues in the twentieth century.

  There is certainly a story there. And Geraldine Brooks, with her background covering wars and troubles in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East for the Wall Street Journal, her penchant for a broad historical canvas, and her Pulitzer Prize, would seem the right novelist for the job. Her performance will satisfy many readers. The tale is full of complex twists and turns, with even a bit of mystery plot towards the end; there’s sex, a rather tenuous love story, and the obligatory descriptions of acts of violence. Proceeding ever farther back through the centuries, following the codex through real and imagined vicissitudes to its origin, the alternate chapters bring in a large cast of historical characters. The central story, however, moves for
ward in time, and concerns a contemporary Australian expert in rare books, a smart sophisticate named Hanna Heath. She is brought over to Sarajevo to analyze the (fictional) Haggadah, and falls for the (fictional) librarian who rescued it. We follow the adventures of the book back through five centuries, alternately with pursuing Hanna’s professional duties, her difficulties with an unloving mother, her discovery of her own unexpected ethnic heritage. The story sprawls, but it is all firmly planned and plotted—possibly too firmly.

  Hanna’s chapters, told in the first person, are full of dialogue and written in a sprightly, crisp, journalistic style, thoroughly readable and serviceable, if without distinction or aesthetic quality as prose. Unfortunately this self-confident sureness of touch vanishes with the first step back in time, to Yugoslavia in 1940, where the protagonist is a Jewish girl who joins the Partisans. The style gets clunkier. The grinding of axes can be heard. By the time we are in Barcelona in 1492, dialogue has descended to the level of Bulwer-Lytton—“I know not what it is you imagine that I have done!”—and narration has become that heavy mixture of useful information with predictable behavior and generalised description which weighs down so many historical novels like stones in the pocket of a coat.

  Full of action but with no leavening of humor, no psychological revelations, no vivid language to focus description, the chapters grind on. Most unhappily for an historical novel, there is little sensitivity to the local color of thought and emotion, not enough of the openness to human difference that brings the past alive.

  Brooks expends a good deal of anxious effort trying to bring a modern sense of justice and ethical judgment into places and ages where it is an anachronism. People call such anxiety “political correctness,” a term that once had meaning but now usually reflects only a reactionary sneer. Brooks’s earnest good will deserves respect, but the fact is, a novel can get away with anachronism only when it is completely invisible, and her efforts to right old wrongs are only too visible. In the same way, a kindly feminism informs her efforts to invent women who were important to the creation and existence of the precious book. That’s a tall order, among the old rabbis, but she persists; and so we find that the artist of the lovely illuminations was a woman, and a black one at that. This is not in itself impossible; the explanations are plausible; I’d like to believe it—but I can’t. The person, the artist, the world of the artist, have not been made real enough to allow me to believe it. It’s just wishful thinking. It has not taken on the fierce reality of true fiction.

  So in the end I wonder whether this might not have been a better book if, foreswearing invention, the author, an experienced journalist, had simply followed the true and amazing story of the Sarajevo Haggadah. I wish someone could make a story or a poem of Aida Buturovic’s life and death, for I know I will never know the story of the Iraqi with his arms full of books and his face full of anguish.

  Italo Calvino: The Complete Cosmicomics

  2009

  The summer reading I like best is either a lovely long fat novel to lie down with and get lost in, or a lovely lot of short stories, like a basket of summer fruit, to come back to and eat one or two at a time, savoring fully. Here, from Italo Calvino, is a great big basket of stories—nectarines, apricots, peaches, figs, everything.

  It’s a compendium of the volume Cosmicomics (published in English in 1968), seven newly translated stories from La Memoria del mondo (1968), all the stories from Time and the Hunter (1969), four from Numbers in the Dark (1995), and a couple of uncollected pieces. It’s a joy to have all the Cosmicomics within one cover, and a handsome cover it is, and a well-made book. More than a third of the stories were entirely new to me, and will be to most readers in English; some of them are jewels. The translations, by William Weaver, Tim Parks, and Martin McLaughlin, are entirely satisfactory, and Mr. McLaughlin’s introduction couldn’t be better as a guide to these dazzlingly idiosyncratic tales.

  What was Italo Calvino? A prepostmodernist? Maybe it’s time to dispense with modernism and all its prefixes. A young Resistance fighter for the Communists during the Nazi occupation of Italy, Calvino became and remained a consistently original writer of intellectual fantasy. And what is a cosmicomic, this form he invented midway in his career? Clearly a subspecies of science fiction, it consists typically in the statement of a scientific hypothesis (usually genuine, though sometimes not currently accepted) which sets the stage for a narrative, of which the narrator is usually a person called Qfwfq. Thus “All at One Point” begins:

  Through the calculations begun by Edwin P. Hubble on the galaxies’ velocity of recession, we can establish the moment when all the universe’s matter was concentrated in a single point, before it began to expand in space. . . .

  Naturally, we were all there—old Qfwfq said—where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?

  Observe, please, the sardines. They are characteristic of and essential to Calvino’s method and style. The story unfolds from this opening perfectly logically, at least if your definition of logic includes, as surely it should, not only modern astrophysics but Xeno’s paradox, Borges’s Aleph, and the Mad Hatter’s tea party.

  Calvino’s later works may well be considered not as stories in the conventional sense but as contes: narrative illustrations of an intellectual apperception, an idea or theory, even a conceit. A favorite Enlightenment vehicle, the conte lends itself to satire and comedy; Voltaire’s Candide is a masterpiece of the type. It presents caricatures rather than characters, irony rather than empathy. Personality and emotion may creep quietly in and exert their power, but the form can also be bloodlessly cerebral. Calvino’s contes play word games with science, with time, space, and number; and in some of them the game is all there is. A game-loving reader, one perhaps fascinated by Wittgenstein or Eco, will find the pieces from Time and the Hunter especially satisfying; those of us more clogged by mortality may find their radical abstraction sterile. And Calvino’s imagination is nothing if not radical. In “The Chase,” he cuts to the chase so literally that the pursuit isn’t the climax of a thriller movie, but is the whole story—the world reduced to a highway, emotion reduced to suspense, so completely without context or personality as to suggest (the pun is inevitable) a kind of autism.

  Calvino’s Invisible Cities derives in this same way from an idea, a notion; but the notion of old Marco Polo going back to China to tell the old Khan about the cities he did not see on his journeys is so inherently comic and poetic, so infinite in suggestion, that it guided the author into perhaps his most beautiful book. And if some of the Cosmicomics are a bit geeky, most are thoroughly entertaining, and some attain the true Calvinic sublime: intelligence, humor, poignancy, irony distilled to the purely luminous.

  Their topics are exhilaratingly immense, the uttermost reaches of space and time, into which warmth and humor enter through all kinds of gaps, quirks, and tricks. Calvino’s airy, dry, clear prose dances over the light-years, bringing forth homely and vivid images everywhere. Such are the sardines; such is the stone sky above those who dwell inside earth, through which “sometimes a fiery streak zigzags through the dark: it’s not lightning, but an incandescent metal snaking down through a vein.”

  To me the one fault in this prose is its joky or satirical convention of unpronounceable names. If I can’t say or hear “Qfwfq” (kefoofek?), how can I hear the cadence of the sentence it occurs in? Here Calvino’s abstracting bent threatens language itself, reducing it to the literally unspeakable symbology of mathematics. That game gets chancy. But we breeze on, borne by the good humor and aplomb of the narrator, especially the ubiquitous, unquenchable Qfwfq, and enchanted by his friends and relations—all the people who were all there at the beginning, because where else could they have been, such as his grandfather, old Colonel Eggg, who moved into our solar system with his wife just as it was forming. “In the four billion years they’ve been here, they’ve alr
eady settled in more or less, got to know a few people,” but their neighbors the Cavicchias are leaving, going back to the Abruzzi, and Grandmother would like to move about a bit too, go see her mother in the Andromeda Galaxy, maybe, but it’s not the same thing, Grandfather protests, and they bicker about it, they bicker forever, on to the end of time they go, with “‘you always think you’re right’ and ‘it’s because you never listen to me’ without which the history of the universe would not have for him any name or memory or flavor, that eternal conjugal bickering: if ever it should one day come to an end, what a feeling of desolation, what emptiness!”

  Calvino’s take on duality, the existence of opposites, is almost entirely sexual. It does not result in a synthesis but an eternal process, like the yin-yang figure, represented quite well by conjugal bickering. Qfwfq is male, whatever form he happens to be in at the moment, a falling atom, a cosmic voyager, or (in the beautiful story “The Spiral”) a tiny mollusc. As a rule there is also a female entity, whose essence is not only difference but disagreement, resistance, escape: the unpossessable, unloving beloved. Because we are never in her point of view, the Calvinic cosmos is skewed to the masculine principle. For me his ongoing metaphor of the everlasting and limitlessly extended Italian family is more endearing and more useful. But he develops his gendered dualism richly and with powerful feeling in such stories as “The Stone Sky” and its rewrite “The Other Euridice.” Where there’s authentic desire the male sees rivalry; and so the duality expands to the eternal triangle—here truly eternal.

  Calvino was ahead of his time in so many ways that only now, twenty-five years after his death, is his work widely perceived not as marginal because it is fantasy but as a landmark in fiction, the work of a master. When he was writing, science fiction was not to be spoken of in the presence of the literary, and comic books were if possible even less acceptable. Few literary critics could imagine discussing them seriously until the late nineties. If they paid any attention to the name Calvino gave these stories, it was to emphasize one implication, the cosmic comedy. But he unmistakably meant us also to think of the lightning approaches, the leaps and vast simplifications, of graphic narrative drawn in frames, cartoons, the comics. And one story, “The Origin of the Birds,” plays directly with this image, directing the reader in a very characteristic fashion: “It’s best for you to try on your own to imagine the series of cartoons with all the little figures of the characters in their places, against an effectively outlined background, but you must try at the same time not to imagine the figures, or the background either.”