More American literature I read recently - Michael Farris Smith and Sergio de la Pava

I forgot a couple.  Perversely, pathetically, since one of them is The Fighter (2018) by Michael Farris Smith, and I am a quarter way into another of his books, Desperation Road (2017), right now.

Smith is the source of the great line, which I heard him say about one of his own sentences, at a translation joust in Lyon in April, “maybe it’s not perfect but maybe it’s great,” which is useful.  These two novels are about down-and-outers in Mississippi – ex-cons, recovering addicts, aging boxers – who get tangled up in violent disasters but survive them.  What are these called in English?  The French term polar is helpful, since it includes not just mysteries but all kinds of violent crime novels.

What is interesting to me – maybe less so to Smith – is how he is trying to adapt the style of William Faulkner, and Faulkner’s many, endless, descendants, to his stories and characters.  Run-on sentences, sentence fragments, jumps in time, and surprising eruptions of the sublime, that is what I mean.  Smith will write a page or two of gritty plain prose, but once he gets into someone’s head he starts moving around.  Smith points to Larry Brown and Barry Hannah as more directs sources.  Here is how he introduces one of the protagonists:

In the southern Mississippi swamp you can watch the world awaken as the pale yellow sun edges itself between the trees and moss and widewinged cranes.  [Sentence about dragonflies]. [Now some turtles] with murderous patience and skill.  Limbs too old to hold themselves up any longer bend and break like old men accepting their marshy graves.  Reptiles slither and blackbirds cry as the early light slashes and relieves the deep and quiet night.  (Desperation Road, p. 29)

Now that is, I believe, an example of  the genuine Southern Gothic.  The guy thinking about this got out of prison about a week earlier.

Smith is good with plots, and I assume that there is some hope that he will write a book that will turn into a movie that will make some real money.  But meanwhile there are these characters who think plain thoughts in plain prose, but then sometimes think something quite different, maybe something great.

Sergio de la Pava is known for self-publishing his way to prestige with A Naked Singularity (2008), so his new novel, Lost Empress (2018) is on a division of Random House, and I suspect that the commercial interest comes from the possibility that he may someday write a real thriller, which will lead to a movie, and thus real money, since both of these novels contain within them good thrillers.  Unfortunately, in a sense, they are more like William Gaddis than Elmore Leonard, full of digressions, politics, and rhetorical flourishes.  I have stumbled across reviewers suggesting that de la Pava could use an editor.  The evidence suggest to me that he in fact has an editor, a good one, who is sympathetic to what he is doing.

De la Pava is a public defender, a thankless occupation, in New York City; where A Naked Singularity was about the court system, Lost Empress is about prisons.  Both novels are righteously angry, in places.  But then this novel is also about American football, and thus a good counter-argument to the idea that everyone is writing to some generic international audience.  A four page dialogue about the role of the cornerback was the one place I wished de la Pava would have cut, cut, cut.  Otherwise, football, why not.  Football, prison, and Joni Mitchell.  A truly surprising amount of writing about Joni Mitchell.  Please see pp. 421-2, two pages devoted to a track by track appreciation of For the Roses (1972).

Some characters are “real,” rounded and grounded, while others are more like movie characters, fantasy creatures, sometimes even speaking in screenplay form.  This split-level novel is the riskiest thing de la Pava does.  A science fiction conceit explains it, in a way that will make as many readers angry as happy.

What a pleasure it was to sink into a novel that surprised me so often.

Today at the Quais du Polar: French class and translation class - maybe it's not perfect but maybe it's great

A better view of the Quais du Polar bookstore on Sunday morning.  I figured out that I could go upstairs for a picture.  While we were waiting in line for the building to open, employees were hauling in more books.

Today was like a school day for me.  Aural comprehension day.  I went to a discussion of the social noir by my new anti-hero Jean-Bernard Pouy and several other writers, all in French, too fast, too difficult.  Pouy has written, I learned today, a crime novel featuring and partly narrated by a telepathic cow.  Larchmütz 6532 (1999) is the title.  I am learning a lot.

The next panel was about food in mysteries, this time in French and Italian but fortunately much easier to understand, but still exhausting, eventually, and the writer who was hardest to understand – who spoke most rapidly – seemed honestly way more interested in food as a vehicle for the delivery of poison than as an expression of culture.  I know, a mystery writer  who can’t stop talking about poison – a comic figure I have now encountered in so-called real life.

I ended the festival at a Translation Joust, a friendly but rigorous public translation seminar.  Two young French translators independently worked up the first chapter of a novel-in-progress, Blackwood, by Michael Farris Smith, not really a mystery or detective writer at all, but a testament to the expansiveness of the French term polar.  The two translations and the original were projected, side by side, for all to see.

I first thought that this process would be painful for the translators, but at least as much wincing came from the author.  More than once, after the translators went over a difficult phrase, Smith would say a bit about what he had been thinking and finish with “But I think I’m going to cut that.”  Once, we, the audience, or at least some of us, had to overrule him.  “Noooo, noooo!”

Smith is, in this book, this chapter, at least, a blatant Faulknerian.  Light stream of consciousness, long sentences with biblical cadences and surprising intrusions, followed by strings of fragments.  If these translators were expecting a mystery, boy were they surprised.  This text was hard.

There was one relatively simple sentence where the translators made different choices for every possible word.  As one translator noted, they had just three words in common, and those were the equivalents of “he,” “the,” and “of.”  Different nouns, verbs, and adjectives.  For “street lamps,” one “réverbères” and one “lampadaires.”  And – here is the great lesson – both sentences were good translations!

In ten years of reading book blogs, I rarely saw anyone reading William Faulkner, and much of what I did see was in a spirit of fear and loathing.  I don’t, as usual, get it.  But today I saw a real Faulknerian get the same response.

A few older members of the audience seemed genuinely freaked out by the end of the phrase “he walked in the satisfaction of night,” which both translators had as “la satisfaction de la nuit,” just word for word.  An “anglicism,” the protestors said.  A translation error.  But the translators pushed back – “satisfaction” is an ordinary French word; it is the English that is unusual, poeticized.  Over-written, maybe, but truly Smith’s, an example of his style, which has a strong flavor.  It is the common problem, that a reader dislikes an author’s style but blames the translator.

It was to a different example, but this response of Smith's was good: “maybe it's not perfect but maybe it's great.”  I like authors who think like that.

This was an instructive session, an instructive book festival.  Nerve-wracking for the author, in this case, but they usually seemed to be having a good time.  Get your mystery novel written and get invited, that is my advice to you.