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A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk

Adapting Kafka’s The Trial for the Western Stage

April 28, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 6 Comments

When I read that New Century Theatre Company was staging Kenneth Albers’ adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial in the former INS building, I knew I had to go. When I read The Trial, one of the things I loved most about it was how well it captured the arbitrariness of living in a totalitarian society. Despite having lived under a dictatorship, I’m pretty ensconced in this Western world of choice, and when I read the description of the play, I wondered how well things like the pre-play “processing” we were to undergo would go over with a Western audience.

The Processing

Before the play, we lined up in the hall of the INS building. Loudspeakers repeated and repeated a loop of information about the play and one of the actors told us repeatedly how long the play was and how impossible it would be to get out once we were seated (so we should go to the bathroom now). Despite having been to the bathroom twice, I felt antsy. Other patrons began whispering rumors of what it was going to be like inside. I wondered what the processing would entail. I worried I wouldn’t be seated next to my husband. I thought they might take away the water bottle of the man in front of us.

Once we were admitted to the anteroom, it did seem like we might be separated and I was pretty sure this was the last play my husband would ever see with me. The doors to the theater swung open and three impossibly tall girls with plastic smiles and white lab coats led us inside. Disorientation achieved. The seats were steeply stacked like a series of three jury boxes around a red curtain. They were difficult to enter and I couldn’t see the exit. I was starting to worry about the fire code. Immersed in an inescapable system. The one feeling they didn’t achieve was arbitrariness. My husband and I discussed this at length and wondered if this was to avoid setting the audience against the actors to start. Despite the fact that I do prefer to sit with my husband, we both wished they had pushed it further.

Has the Play Already Begun?

As we sat in uncomfortable chairs waiting for the play to begin, we watched those three girls seat other patrons. One was rigidly polite. Another started out instructive and began getting testy. I liked watching her scold people as they failed to follow her instructions. I also liked how easy it was to make eye contact with patrons in other sections. We were complicit in enjoying the disorientation of those who did not yet understand the system. But we were all victims of the syrupy sweet soundtrack on a short repeat cycle. It was maddeningly effective.

Behind the Red Curtain

A man stands stunned in lamplight. Two men stare at him. He cannot understand that he is being arrested or why. Darragh Kennan is believably confounded as Joseph K. And Alex Matthews and Michael Patten are deliciously obtuse as Willem and Franz. So far, we’re pretty faithful to the book. In fact, the adaptation is relatively faithful throughout with only a few changes of note. Joseph’s three secretaries (Sydney Andrews, Sara Mountjoy-Pope, and Greta Wilson) add a conspiratorial note and a lot of sex appeal to the play. I loved watching them cross their legs and rotate their right feet in unison as they watched Joseph suffer.

Amy Thone as Joseph’s lawyer recalled the best of His Girl Friday’s Rosalind Russell and her incessant motoring around the stage (literally) made it feel like she was wrapping Joseph up in the case for easy delivery. Joseph pings back and forth between the gentle solace offered by Aunt Clara (Marty Mukhalian) and the conspiratorial maliciousness of Frau Brubach (Tonya Andrews) and allows himself to get more deeply entrenched as he is seduced by Leni (Hanna Mootz) and Block (David S. Klein). I especially enjoyed Alexandra Tavares as Titorelli. She delivered doublespeak like Big Brother was really watching. Another favorite was MJ Sieber as the Priest who shows Joseph how he orchestrated his own demise.

Can Kafka be Translated for a Western Theater Audience?

Absolutely. Overall the play was amazing. The use of noir-inspired lighting and the way some action was condensed into dance-like interludes were both brilliant choices by director John Langs. I felt Leni’s part was under-written and the scene with the architect went on a few beats too long. I was glad Albers chose to shift a few of the key roles in the novel to be played by women.

Having lived in Eastern Europe where a smile is a commodity not to be wasted, I was surprised at how smiles (menacing though they were) were used throughout this staging. I wonder if that was to make it more relatable to a Western audience. After I got over my own bias, it worked and that fake-happy was carried through in other ways as well. I expected to feel more connection with the INS building, but in the end, the play was strong enough without it.

The show runs through May 5. It’s sold out, but if you show up for the waiting list, you have a decent chance of getting in. Try it. The play lends a whole new angle to Kafkaesque.

Filed Under: Art, Eastern Europe Tagged With: Franz Kafka, Kenneth Albers, Play, The Trial

Re-encountering Foreign Tongues with Ryszard Krynicki

April 7, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 4 Comments

kamien szron - ryszard krynickiAlthough it’s been over a decade since I held a coherent conversation in Polish, I am still drawn to the language. Sometimes I watch dark movies filmed during Communism and sometimes I pick up books in Polish at used bookstores, thinking that I will someday read one. A few months ago, I saw Kamień, szron by Ryszard Krynicki at just such a bookstore and the shortness of the poems made me think this would be the Polish book I would finally read. And I did. Kind of.

Muddling Through

I enjoy reading poetry in languages I only somewhat remember even when the full meaning of the poems is lost on me. But it seemed natural because of National Poetry Month that today would be the day I’d test my Polish skills, so I sat down with the book and two dictionaries and began underlining and looking up words I didn’t understand. I read each poem aloud. I learned the language by ear and although the spelling is phonetic, Polish words contain a lot of consonants. Only by reading some of the words aloud do I realize how many of them I have at least heard. As I gained confidence (and got wrapped up in the book) I stopped looking words up and just enjoyed what I could read and infer.

What is Polish Poetry Like?

I’ve actually read a bit of Polish poetry in translation, including works by Zbigniew Herbert, Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, and Adam Zagajewski. What Krynicki has in common with these poets (besides the fact that he owns a press that has published nearly all of them) is that many of his poems are about travel. Perhaps that’s one of the luxuries of living in Europe where the countries are so close together, but even US poets that I’ve read don’t remark nearly as often about visiting a new city. There is a sense of otherness in these poems as though Krynicki is rediscovering himself in relation to each new geographical location.

Like English-language poetry, however, Krynicki’s work refers often to the work of other poets. In particular, he calls out Paul Celan.

I don’t have enough background in Polish literature to remark on the forms Krynicki uses, but I loved the sound of his poetry. Despite what the plethora of consonants might make you think, Polish is actually a soft and musical language. It’s kind of ornate in its own way and because nouns have cases (as in Latin), there is no need for articles and the arrangement of words is more fluid. I can’t remark on whether Krynicki takes special advantage of these aspects of his language, but the poems flowed naturally.

Different Vantage Points

One of the things I enjoyed most about this book was the chance to see the world through the eyes of a different culture without the filter of a translator. In fact, one of my favorite lines in “Fragmenty z roku 1989” (Fragments from 1989), is radically different in the English translation I found online. The line is, “świta okaleczony świat” and my rough translation is “dawning of a crippled world” which has all kinds of fascinating implications when we think of the jubilation in the West when the Berlin Wall fell and the Iron Curtain was finally pulled back. I don’t think Krynicki was lamenting the downfall of Communism, but he was offering a more nuanced view of what this new world meant. The translation I found online, reads instead “Dawn, the color of the Seine, / color of wormwood and gall” which has a very different meaning.

If you’d like to read some of Krynicki’s poetry in English, I particularly recommend “A stone from the new world.”

I loved this exercise of stretching and remembering by challenging myself to read something I didn’t think I could. How do you stretch your language? Are you ever tempted to try out that high school French or Spanish by reading poems in their native languages?

The full text of Kamień, szron isn’t available in English that I know of, but you can purchase Ryszard Krynicki’s selected poems from Bookshop.org. Your purchase helps support indie bookstores and I receive a commission.

Filed Under: Books, Eastern Europe Tagged With: Polish poetry, Ryszard Krynicki

The Next Big Thing Blog Series: Murmurs of the River

February 10, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 5 Comments

Elissa Washuta, author of the forthcoming My Body Is a Book of Rules, tagged me to respond to ten questions about what I’m working on. Elissa is a memoirist and member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe. Elissa is deeply involved with Seattle’s writing community including Richard Hugo House. She reminds me always of the importance of community and how very welcoming and generous other writers can be.

1. What is your working title of your book?

It was Murmurs of the River, and the final title is Polska, 1994

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

Ideas always come from obsessions, don’t they? Having spent time growing up in Pinochet’s Chile and post-Cold War Poland, I am obsessed with oppression on a personal and a national level. I am interested in the secrets we keep and those we ask others to keep for us.

3. What genre does your book fall under?

Literary fiction.

4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Assuming a production in English, I’d love to see someone young and smartly vulnerable like Elle Fanning play Magda. It would be fun to see Ryan Gosling explore his meaner side as Paweł and Aidan Turner would make a beautiful Jacek. Because many of the main characters are young, it would also be great to see some new talent in the movie. Fionnula Flanagan would make a wonderful Babcia.

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Thirteen years ago, Magda witnessed the arrest of her mother by the Polish secret police; now, as her country emerges from behind the Iron Curtain, a tip from a neighbor starts Magda on her quest to find out what would make a mother sacrifice her family.

See that semicolon? That’s where I cheated.

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Ideally, the book will be represented by an agency. I’m still querying, so if you know someone… let me know.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

The real honest-to-God first draft took me a year and a half. I dinked around with the characters and story in various forms for about two years before that. Polishing the book into its final form only took another 17 or so drafts.

8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I carried The Lover by Marguerite Duras very close to my heart while writing this book, so there are many similarities between the two. Murmurs of the River is also comparable to Chris Abani’s Song for Night (which, not coincidentally, is also inspired by The Lover).

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Skaters in PolandI spent a year in Poland on high school foreign exchange during the 1990s. It was a crazy time after the fall of the Berlin Wall when Poland was trying to become part of the West but was facing some real questions about what that actually meant and if it was a good thing. I fell in love with the people of Poland and wanted to understand what it was like for them to grow up in a closed society. Although my explorations of the Polish experience are fictional, a lot of the peripheral events in the novel are based on conversations I had during the year I spent there.

10. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

The Poland I write about doesn’t exist any longer. I hope this book tells the story of how it was. I structured the narrative around lines from Czesław Miłosz’s poetry and mood in the three sections of the book recalls Chopin’s Murmures de la Seine.

Murmurs of the River is a coming of age novel about love, so although it’s set in a land and time that are unfamiliar to most, Magda’s struggle to define herself inside (and outside) the context of her family is universal.

Next Up on The Next Big Thing

Thanks for your curiosity about Murmurs of the River. Check in with the following writers next week to learn more about their upcoming projects.

Roxana Arama is a novelist, mother, and dedicated member of Louisa’s Writers. Originally from Romania, she earned her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Goddard College and writes in beautiful English. Roxana is one of my favorite people to talk with about editing and how to make the most of the little time we writers have. The spreadsheet she uses to organize her latest novel is legendary.

February 18, 2013 update: Roxana bravely decided her novel isn’t ready for public discussion, so she introduced me to Mindy Halleck, who also writes at Louisa’s. Mindy’s blog, Literary Liaisons, is a great resource for tips about writing and revising. I’m looking forward to getting to know Mindy better through her work and blog and maybe, just maybe, we’ll meet in person someday soon at Louisa’s.

Kim Brown has a Master in Fine Arts in Creative Writing and a Master of Science in Written Communications. She has published with Chicago Tribune, Today’s Chicago Woman, and Contemporary Fashion, among others, and she co-founded Minerva Rising. Someday she will reveal her Jazz Age novel to the world. Kim is like your mom and your best friend all rolled into one and I don’t know what I’d do without her.

You may recognize Ann Hedreen as a contributor to A Geography of Reading. She also uses her Master of Fine Arts and writing talent for commentaries on KBCS radio, making documentary films, and teaching the craft to writers of all ages. Her memoir, Her Beautiful Brain, is a heartbreaking story of how a parent-child relationship changes when Alzheimer’s sets in. I am grateful to Ann for helping me learn that a creative life and a working life do not have to be separate things.

Filed Under: Books, Eastern Europe Tagged With: Murmurs of the River, The Next Big Thing

Tadeusz Borowski and the Gift a Writer Can Give

October 26, 2012 by Karen Hugg, MFA Leave a Comment

this way for the gas ladies and gentlemen tadeusz borowskiIn terms of historical importance, little more can be said of This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. It, like Night, is a testament to the Nazis’ atrocities at Auschwitz. While contemporary novels wink at us with wit and an ironic tone, Tadeusz Borowski’s work floats above like a wise parent whose wrenching past overwhelms the smallness of our daily distractions and grievances. To say it’s one of the most valuable books of the twentieth century is a meager compliment.

How Borowski Came to Write This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

In 1943, Borowski was arrested for participating in the underground education in Poland, a network of students and professors who privately continued university studies despite the Nazis ban on secondary schooling. Education had been outlawed in an effort to dumb down and enslave the Poles. Borowski was taken to Auschwitz where he worked as a laborer, unloading the cattle cars and other tasks assigned to him. He, already a journalism student, documented his experience, but this book isn’t just a memoir of events by a well-meaning but clumsy writer. It’s brilliant for its craft as well.

Discovering the Meaning in the Details

Borowski renders the inhumane events he witnessed with a removed, sometimes cynical, tone. This seems to be an act of self-preservation, compartmentalizing the horror in order to preserve his sanity and therefore his life. And so, his commentary is in how he chooses to portray what he sees. For instance, Tadek, Borowski’s literary self, describes a young German guard as having “corn coloured hair and dreamy blue eyes.” This creates a chilling portrait of the guard when the guard sells Tadek’s co-laborer a drink of water. Borowski notes the railway station is “surrounded by trees” and “a cheerful little station, very much like any other provincial railway stop,” and therefore, contrasts the regular outside world with the unspeakably violent one inside Auschwitz’s gates. By stringing together events like, “They throw her on the truck on top of the corpses. She will burn alive along with them,” and then opening the next paragraph: “The evening has come, cool and clear. The stars are out. We lie against the rails. It is incredibly quiet,” we understand in achingly vivid terms how the only solace these survivors have in the hellish world of Auschwitz are the moments of rest and cool air in between the exterminations.

Similarly in the story, “The People Who Walked On,” we see Tadek playing goalkeeper in a soccer game and how in between two throw-ins, three thousand people are put to death. When he runs to retrieve a ball, he catches sight of the newly arrived train: “People were emerging from the cattle cars … bright splashes of colour. The women were … already wearing summer dresses. The men had taken off their coats, and their white shirts stood out sharply against the green of the trees…” Later, when he runs back to retrieve the ball again, the ramp is empty: “Out of the whole colourful procession, not one person remained.” Borowski’s choice to describe how beautiful the crowd looked in the warm evening starkly lays out for us the price of life that was lost and how, when the train ramp is empty, the sublimity of their humanity has been annihilated by the Nazi’s efficient, organized terror that leaves no one behind.

At the war’s end, the Allies arrive and liberation is clear. But Borowski frames the story as one about revenge, rather than rescue. There are no melodramatic descriptions of the Allies arriving or the Nazis fleeing, only a brief tale about how the prisoners hid “our man,” presumably an S.S. officer or guard, while the American soldiers spoke to him in a larger group about upholding the law, then pulled him out and beat him to death. It’s an exemplary case of how straight depiction is far more powerful than editorializing.

How to Write After Reading Such Strength

Reading Borowski made me question what I write about. Next to This Way for The Gas, my work feels insignificant and erasable. But though my life has been blessed with peace and been free of ongoing oppression, I have faced serious challenges and wrenching, painful moments. Borowski taught me that those experiences may be the most important for me as a writer. They will enlarge and deepen my work. The trick is to keep them in my mind and heart each day that I write.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business.

Filed Under: Books, Eastern Europe Tagged With: contrast, Holocaust, Polish Literature, World War II

The Methods in Jakov Lind’s Madness

October 5, 2012 by Karen Hugg, MFA 1 Comment

lind-soul-of-woodMost stories don’t smash me to bits. As I read them, I’m moved, enchanted, worried, dismayed, relieved, sometimes annoyed. But Jakov Lind’s Soul of Wood and Other Stories just left me flattened, feeling empty, and as if I were stranded in a strange shapeless place. The question “Wow, what was that all about?” kept looping in my head like a song, and I was unable to find an answer.

But I think the answer lies in not only the mad brilliance of the story itself, but more so, for me as a writer, in the craft of how Lind created the story. By story I mean the novella, Soul of Wood, which opens the collection. The later short stories are also impressive in their own way, but Soul of Wood is the masterpiece. It’s set in Austria in the 1940s and follows Wohlbrecht, a crippled Austrian soldier, who works to hide Anton Barth, a mostly paralyzed Jewish boy, in a mountain cabin. He enlists the help of Alois, his brother-in-law, and the first half of the book centers on the two’s endeavors of dragging Barth up through the woods while trying to avoid the Nazis and their random air attacks.

Shot from all Sides by Point of View

Lind’s voice is somehow casual, witty, romantic and brusquely masculine all at once. It doesn’t just blast its way through the narrative, but rather tumbles with a clear urgency. This was probably the first technique that I’d love to emulate (oh, if I could.) But what’s crazier and even more unattainable is how the point of view wanders. It, at times, becomes dreamy and surreal before landing flatly in stark reality. Take, for instance, the following passage occurring early in the story, which by the way could be a spoiler, depending on how you view the narrative. Read at your own risk.

As Wohlbrecht and Alois return from the cabin, they stop at the side of the road. Wohlbrecht lays and dozes in the hay as Alois talks of his post-war plans. Alois plans to visit Rumania in an effort to cure his epilepsy. In one paragraph, Alois talks about a renowned doctor and his treatment that Alois believes will mend all aspects of his life. In another, the grand wealth that he and all of Vienna will enjoy after the war. As readers we are relaxed at this point in the passage, imagining hopeful situations and feeling a tender intimacy with Alois.

Then: “The loud engine sounds woke up Wohlbrecht.” This kicks off a random rotation of omniscient narration, stream of consciousness and Wohlbrecht’s spoken words. There’s little punctuation to help us distinguish between what’s happening, what’s being said and what’s being thought.

“Jumping Jesus, he cried, they’ll fly right up my ass. A burst of machine-gun fire beat down like rain on the tin roof and by the time Wohlbrecht cried ‘Cover!’ Alois was dead. Hit right in the back of the head. The blood gushed like a geyser. Alois, Alois, Wohlbrecht yelled thinking he was still asleep. Alois, where’d it get you? Alois didn’t move. Alois, don’t pretend, say something. Alois said nothing. It was so still he could hear a beetle scratching in the hay.”

Here, this mishmash of point of view hits us in the gut. We’re dealing with the sudden chaos of the moment, which poetically reflects the sudden chaos of the entire war experience. It also shows the contrast between life and death, the potential of the future and the negation of it in how Alois is dreaming of better years to come when he is suddenly killed. By the end of these few paragraphs, we’re jarred, upset, and left processing what just happened – as Wohlbrecht is. Lind doesn’t just describe trauma, he hurls us into it so we experience it first hand. That he does this by manipulating point of view is amazing.

There are other amazing aspects to Soul of Wood as well. The plot of the book later bends back on itself and we discover that much of the seemingly random events, forgotten images and off-hand mentions of names and people actually come together in a larger symbolic coherence. That coherence makes this novella one of the most under-appreciated of our time.

The Shorter Works

The Other Stories in the title are mostly outlandish, grotesque short stories rooted in the trauma of World War II. In one, a piano teacher is haunted by his past as an S.S. officer. A traveler stumbles upon a family of cannibals. A man follows his neighbor to a kind of speakeasy only to find a featureless woman who somehow sets him free. A killer about to be executed dreams of killing his father in revenge. Two men, a Jew and a Catholic-converted-Jew, share a snug hole as they hide from the Nazis. Somehow these shorter pieces unfold with a tongue-in-cheek wit. They’re also somewhat allegorical though what they represent is too complex and hidden to explore here. Suffice to say they embody Lind’s seemingly unstable spirit, macabre wit and clever narrative arcs, which leave writers like me both horrified and smiling.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Soul of Wood from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business.

Filed Under: Books, Eastern Europe Tagged With: Austrian Literature, book review, Point of View, World War II

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Polska, 1994

Polska 1994

Clear Out the Static in Your Attic

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Recent Posts

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What I’m Reading

Isla's bookshelf: currently-reading

Birds of America
Birds of America
by Lorrie Moore
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The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
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The Souls of Black Folk
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Bomb: The Author Interviews
Bomb: The Author Interviews
by BOMB Magazine
On Writing
On Writing
by Jorge Luis Borges

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