on The Coin, a novel by Yasmin Zaher
Yasmin Zaher’s bracing novel The Coin leads me to a provisional assertion that I embrace as my own – some of us need an obsessive, unfulfilled passion to enhance our lives with the unattainable. Why? Because in our social (and often familial) relations, tribal wars and geopolitical gamesmanship played by the world’s Big Swinging Dicks, it is our own nature that defeats us, and that exasperates me.
At the outset of The Coin, a young Palestinian woman, the unnamed narrator, says that she taught for just eight months at Franklin Middle School in Manhattan. “I could have stayed home in Palestine … I didn’t have the courage to go somewhere dire. I wanted a certain life for myself, I wanted to give and to be good, but I also had a certain idea of myself, what my life should look like. Wearing heels was important to me.” And yet, she came to New York City where “I saw the dirtiest people I have ever seen, although I’d never been to a third world country. I came from Palestine, which was neither a country nor the third world, it was its own thing, and the women in my family placed a lot of importance on being clean, perhaps because there was little else they could control in their lives.” In her Fort Greene apartment, she carried out an obsessively meticulous regimen of bathing and exfoliation, now described in detail to her listener who is, perhaps, her analyst or confidante.
The filth/hygienics dichotomy is but one of the irresolvable antitheses that Zaher adroitly manages in The Coin. Some of these opposites enact conflicting desires or forces within her speaker – or rather, all of them do this, but some are triggered by paradoxes and clashes in the city’s culture and beyond. The woman pits her beauty, abetted by the glamour of her wardrobe and accessories, against the voracity of the city to create “a feeling that I was good enough, very good, better than others, the best. I don’t think it’s arrogant to think this. I think it’s natural, a way of being that can guarantee one’s survival in the era of wolves.” She can afford it, too – she has inherited half of her father’s fortune (he was a chemist), nearly $29 million, though she lives on a generous allowance. The father’s will, specifying this arrangement and preventing her from direct access to the riches, may suggest a wariness of her willfully remorseless impulses.
At the Franklin school, she seems to be teaching her Black and immigrant students how to think creatively and act freely. For instance, for one homework task, “I assigned them to clandestinely interview a member of their household, to lead them to some truth that they refuse to acknowledge.” She quickly identifies her “best” student, but she is unprepared for the outcomes unfolding from her sketchy curriculum. The assignment itself is the narrator’s self-applause: she speaks as a master of truth-telling. But is she, like her students, unprepared for the fall-out?
She indulges the attentions of two men. There is Sasha, a Russian real estate investor who lives a few blocks away, “but I had no sexual desire for him. I should have let him go, but I couldn’t, because I would have been left with nothing … I’d rather get the massage from a stranger, and pay for it. As you know, money simplifies everything.” Then there’s Trenchcoat, a fashion scammer who supplies a black market with exclusive designer handbags. But as she says on page 3, “To love is not worth it. The benefits, whatever they are, are mostly a comfort from the relentless emptiness of being human … they are not worth putting yourself at the mercy of others.”
Her language is acidic, her behavior is selfish, her needs are extravagant, her values are dodgy. But she is persistent in asserting her selfhood, and her candor is disarming. She is unreliable — but she isn’t an “unreliable narrator.” And there we come to the artful disturbance of this novel: by luring us into the severities of this character’s psyche, Zaher simply dispenses with our feel-good ethics, not because those ethics are bad but because they are weak. Before coming to the States to earn a B.S. in environmental engineering from Yale and an M.F.A. from the New School, the 32-year old Zaher worked as a newspaper journalist in Jerusalem. She is accustomed to focusing a trained eye on the complexities of motivation and a range of sensibilities and emotions. She knows what violence looks, sounds and smells like. In The Coin, her speaker says, “When Netanyahu and Trump were elected I thought those were good days, because the truth had come to light. But it seemed not only that the truth was ugly, but also that ugly was beautiful. The people adore the monster, the rich want to look poor.” And the monster has the guns and tanks.
This is a novel about style – in both its main character’s selfhood and Zaher’s sonics. For the narrator, style extends beyond her Birkin handbag and Cattier toothpaste – it incorporates her most extreme actions, the last of which in her account functions like an assessment of everything that has preceded it. Zaher’s prosaism relies on tone and attitude, but she doesn’t surrender everything to it. Her attentive speaker, living temporarily in New York City, cares about details in her environs and clarity when it comes to describing her movements to her listener. Nothing is wasted.
Zaher won’t let us walk away with the promise of resolution because it’s all too easy to sing one’s anthem of social justice and let that suffice for the basis of self-regard. Are you angry at the rich? Her narrator is rich. Do you pity the Palestinians? She doesn’t want your pity. Do you demand the end of hostilities? She daydreams of mass murder. Do you sneer at the window displays at Hermès and A.P.C.? OK fine, so how have you designed your life? Do you actually think there’s a way out of our condition? She says, “Maybe pretense was all there was. Fashion is pretense, education is pretense, personality, too, is a form of internalized pretense. I wondered what my true essence would be, if I were solitary, in nature, untamed and unconditioned.” And so, she gives this a try, too.
My hunch is that one of Zaher’s reasons for writing her novel was to stick a finger in the eye of the ever so enlightened American prose fiction narrative. I read The Coin with avidity and I suggest you do, too.
[Published by Catapult on July 9, 2024, 240 pages, $27.00 US/$35.00 CAN/ hardcover/$14.99 ebook]
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on Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, a novel by Yoko Tawada, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky
On May 13, 1960, in a radio-essay on Osip Mandelstam’s Stone, Paul Celan wrote, “There are eyes that go to the bottom of things. They catch sight of a bottom. And there are those that go into the depths of things. These do not catch sight of any bottom. But they see more deeply.” Inspired by Celan’s life and poetry, Yoko Tawada plumbs those depths by regarding language as a pliable medium, readily shaped for the visionary’s work. Her stories are managed by a whimsical meticulousness. In an essay, “Speech Police and Polyglot Play”(2006), she wrote, “Words become countable when they are separated in writing. If they existed without spaces, a text would look like a long piece of spaghetti. The enemies of spaghetti dishes have invented the separation of words.” She isn’t expressing the postmodernist’s suspicion of language; rather, she enjoys an ample latitude and eludes the duress of conventionality. Language is a protean conveyance. Celan once said that the term heimat or hometown “is an untranslatable word. And does the concept even exist? It’s a human fabrication, an illusion.” Tawada herself, born in Tokyo in 1960, left Japan in 1983, now lives in Berlin, and writes in German and Japanese. For her, both language and home are provisory.
In Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, rendered for anglophones by Susan Bernofsky, we encounter “the patient.” Describing the patient’s usual walk down the block from his apartment, the unnamed narrator tells us, “As a citizen, he has the right to leave reality behind at any moment.” A few pages later, the narration suddenly shifts into the first-person – then back to third-person. The patient says, “People say I’m sick because I can simultaneously leave the house and stay home. Memory is its own house. Leaving it means going into a different house. It’s not a contradiction to stay in one world while simultaneously leaving. He can make his entrance by withdrawing. He can be a patient and nonetheless remain a self.” We learn that his name is Patrik (wears his hair long, reads poetry). He may or may not have a research position at an institute. He may or may not have been invited to speak at a Celan conference in North America.
Most impressive to me is how deftly Tawada establishes the antitheses, scope of concerns, and voice of this 1st/3rd person and his jittery world, all of which has the symmetry and clarity of realism. Susan Bernofsky’s acutely attuned translation delivers these qualities. Tawada simultaneously sets out the terms of her vernacular, and draws one into them: “The patient lacks an inner compass. Telling well-calibrated lies is the only way he can draw a map in his head. Lying is useful. Still, it’s no virtue to invent one’s own facts. The patient suffers from a bad conscience. But he does have one consolation: he tells his lies without using his voice, and so this bad habit causes no harm to anyone around him.” Tawada has never indulged the habits and inflections of her own voice in her work. An opera fan, Patrik is infatuated with a diva he sees “every day at the same time” on the street; her voice leads him to speculate: “Celan trained his voice relentlessly, translating songbirds from different regions. With good cheer and confidence, he imitated the songs first of Mandelstam, then of Dickinson … The only voice that seemed strange to him was, increasingly, his own; perhaps he’d taken a breath-turn and left his voice behind so he could plunge deeper and farther, unencumbered by baggage, into a space of art too narrow to admit an I.”
The “Trans-Tibetan Angel” is a man named Leo-Eric Fu who approaches Patrik at his habitual café and asks to share his table. Their dialogue continues through the novel, taking up many aspects of art and living. As a recurring figure, his role is simply to keep the talk going. His fate here is not to emerge as a distinct personality but as a dispenser of turns in conversation, as if they are traveling together in a train coach with no future relationship to consider. (When Tawada visited Germany for the first time in 1979, she traveled through Asia on the Trans-Tibetan railroad, the transit toward her literary studies at the University of Hamburg and the life of writing. This trip is depicted on the slant in her early short story “Where Europe Begins.”)
Somewhere in one of his essays, Adam Phillips says that in psychoanalysis what matters most are the exaggerations. Here in Paul Celan, Patrik says, “Art is always an overreaction.” He had been talking with Leo-Eric Fu about Celan’s infuriation when “Conservative readers wouldn’t permit a ‘real’ German writer to make use of inscrutable metaphors or Eastern [European] melodies.” This foreignness, this eccentricity made acoustical and pictorial, comprise the core and costume of Tawada’s text. Something is being translated here. What is it? And what are these strange and spirited locutions into which it is being translated?
Getting to “the bottom of things,” as in the opening Celan citation, is the work of detectives. Tawada is a kind of private investigator and her readers are her clients. The mystery to be solved is — what crimes were committed when we gave up on thinking of ourselves as the mystery itself? The search becomes our vocation. The bottom of things is littered with confident memoirs.
[Published by New Directions on July 9, 2024, 136 pages, $14.95 paperback]
To read Ron Slate’s reviews of Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary (2018) and Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2017), click here and here.
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on Swimming in Paris: A Life in Three Stories, autofiction by Colombe Schneck, translated from the French by Lauren Elkin and Natasha Lehrer
Colombe Schneck and I have at least one thing in common – both of our Jewish mothers survived the Nazi/Vichy regime during World War II by hiding. Her mother was hidden in a convent. My mother and her large family fled Paris in 1940 to take refuge in a village in La Creuse; with one exception, they all survived. “She couldn’t say anything about what happened to her and her family during the war,” Schneck said in a recent Bomb interview. My mother would wail and spend afternoons in bed. I learned the details of the family’s hardships from my grandparents and my mother’s cousins.
Schneck’s compelling autofictional trilogy, Swimming in Paris, tells mainly of her abortion at age 17, the long friendship with and untimely death of her companion Héloïse, and the rise and demise of a love affair. But within the stories is an exultant impulse – the fulfilling thrill of giving a form to the past – the exclusive form of prose. At age 12, after spending some summer days with her paternal grandmother, the girl came “to understand that there is an absence of place and history in her family.” At 50 age, something unnamable stimulated her capacity for memory – but as with Proust, whose work she loved as a young reader, for Schneck memory isn’t the experience of the past in the present, it is the experience of the past as the present. That is, it is as if through writing she is experiencing those personal events for the first time and relating them to everything else, including her family’s shrouded history. It is spine-stiffening to recognize that everything in one’s memory has been put there and fashioned by oneself. The absence of place and history gets filled in by one’s own body. Thus, the regimen of solitary swimming at the very end of her narrative – the armstrokes striving through water, embodied through the keystrokes of consummate sentences.
Reading Schneck’s prose, I was reminded of Louise Glück’s mode of address and her pre-The Wild Iris poems about her family. The opening lines of Glück’s poem “The Untrustworthy Speaker” begin, “Don’t listen to me; my heart’s been broken. / I don’t see anything objectively. // I know myself: I’ve learned to hear like a psychiatrist. / When I speak passionately, / that’s when I’m least to be trusted.” Schneck’s sonics not only resemble Glück’s trenchant tone, but her prose proceeds with a similar incisiveness. Her translators, Lauren Elkin and Natasha Lehrer, have rendered this attitude with precision. Schneck simply says what happened – but she thinks like an analyst, listening for her own telltale hyperboles. She will say, “I was the girl who remembered how much her father had adored her, and who could not but believe that the same undying love was lodged, somewhere, in the heart of every man who got close to her. That girl tumbled from a great height every time.” This isn’t the usual memoiristic hurt-speak. And she ends this comment with, “So much for supermarket psychology.” The fictional part of her autofiction allows her to circumvent the gaseous by-products of bloated sincerity.
Autofictional writing has been described as, and sometimes indicted for, permitting voice and persona to precede or disregard forms and concepts. Once unleashed, presence creates a blurry surface rather than cultivating depth. The blur comes from the impulse of immediacy. In Swimming in Paris, Schneck’s story moves at a speedy clip, as if she is eager to bring it all to a close and move on. But there is no blur. On the contrary, the contours of her character become more discernible as she proceeds, though it is a procession toward a somewhat quizzical if inquiring freedom. For instance, in “Swimming: A Love Story,” differences between Schneck and Gabriel, her lover of a nine-months-long affair (“that began thirty-five years ago”), lead to their break-up. “We could not have been more different. My phone was always ringing, friends, dinners, parties, drinks, lunches, stories, reminiscences, shared histories.” He was just bored and concluded that “we will never be able to build a life together.” His IKEA couch contrasts with her furnishings. There isn’t much else to indicate why they parted. But strangely, the great pleasure of this text derives from its spirit of relinquishment – and Schneck’s exhilaration upon coming up with a suitably lively style for this surrender to the inevitability of herself.
There are tart assessments throughout the trilogy as one learns, bit by bit, about Schneck’s family (“bourgeois liberals …who think they’re on the right side of history because they are left-wing and that means they can’t be accused of being bourgeois”), her education, and life as a teenager. The stricken mother, withholding herslf from the daughter, drifts in the background. In “Seventeen”: “Yes, I fit into that category denigrated during hours of debate over the law: the abortion of ‘convenience.’ An easy, banal abortion, forgotten as soon as it’s over. My mother saying nothing to her seventeen-year-old daughter who’s just had an abortion. What has just happened has, doubtless, no importance at all, In silence, I hide it away.” In her autofiction, Schneck is a vital, compelling and sometimes harsh persona – but indulging that persona isn’t her motivation for writing. There is something much more generous, illuminating and artful on offer here.
[Published by Penguin Press on May 14, 2024, 240 pages, $$27.00US/$37.00CAN hardcover]