KJ Hannah Greenberg’s new collection of essays, Word Citizen: Uncommon Thoughts on Motherhood, Writing, and Life in Jerusalem, will launch in September. As our usual Q&A would be redundant with an autobiographical book, it seems only appropriate (if unorthodox) for us to offer a humble appreciation. 

“No matter whether I am occupied reminding my offspring to close the toilet lid, to pick up their socks, or to empty the dishwasher, or obsessing about being liberated among the stars,” Greenberg tells us, “I hustle words.” And does she ever.  Once an academic in America before retiring to raise four children (interspersed with “belly dancing, home birthing, herbal medicine making and occasional basket weaving”) and make aliyah, she now produces from Jerusalem a bewildering abundance of novels, poetry and “slipstream short stories” with fearsome energy. For years, up until 2014, she was a blogger for the Jerusalem Post. Greenberg’s facility with words is matched only by her consummate artistic fruitfulness: “Tomorrow, when I wake, I plan to frolic with gelatinous monsters and with lovers of questionable orientation. I want to paint word pictures about the sound of dumpster cats fighting over neck bones and about the color of African parakeets migrating through the Middle East.” Between 2012 and 2014 alone, she published a staggering nine books. 

Notwithstanding its subtitle, Word Citizen is a book about writing, or a book about parenting, merely in the same sense that Infinite Jest is a book about Quebec. Indeed, any coherent summary of Word Citizen will inevitably make it sound less gloriously weird than it is. It’s pleasurably clear that every endeavor--including seemingly innocuous institutions like G-rated online fiction written by housewives--somehow becomes startlingly complex when Greenberg starts immersing herself in it. Her work addresses “corporate failures alongside of family picnics, lachrymose space beasts in the same breath as the puddles under my sofa, and cheesecake recipes concurrent with cheesy amusement park prizes.” Even as a child, her voracious appetite for learning is evident: “Our deal, at all of those sites, was that if I could carry it, I could read it. Often my stacks, so my parents claimed, were higher than my head.” On entering college at sixteen, “I lacked the resources to face down reinvigorated bullies, frisky youths, and self-serving roommates. I just wanted praise, grades, and money for my writing, not the responsibilities of ‘grownup stuff.’” Her mind-boggling panorama of careers (and identities) includes “a human communications and sociology professor, a science writer and editor, a tone-deaf oboist, an herbalist, a ghost writer of psychology and sociology college texts, a high school chemistry and geometry teacher, a basket weaver, a student of marital arts, an amateur landscape architect, an editor of technical papers (on literal brain science), a budding ceramicist, and an avid avoider of horrors such as PTA meetings and carpool duties.” As a professor of rhetoric in New Jersey, she is disappointed that her tirades on Central Park ponies and RTS games “converted only one would-be financial despot into a philosophy major”; as a stay-at-home back-to-nature mom, she goes through a phase where she takes “to hunting for lunch among friends’ unsprayed turf and to suggesting to my children that we would only dine on what I could glean from lawns, plus or minus a square of tofu or a handful of mochi.”  Then there are the different names: unsurprisingly, Greenberg writes under at least four authorial identities, none of them pseudonyms. 

And as life acquires more layers, language itself becomes complicated. A full-fledged teacher of textual analysis before leaving academia, Greenberg’s flamboyant texts are deliciously textured and full of bombastic furbelows. One of her most shocking openings--and much of Greenberg’s literary output is, on a tonal level, indeed shocking--begins: “We groove fallalery. Our society gets down with junk, with fakes, and with inexpensive simulations.”  Later in the same piece, she continues, “Whereas matchmaking words like ‘twaddle’ and ‘xylophone’ might not suffice for very special word jocks, for most authors, puttering around with caustic fabrications provides enough release for them to return to facing down: real life social problems, constraining publication specifications, rabid remarks from insensible critics, and shrinking openings for career advancement.” Her intricate argot is a distinctive combination of technical jargon, earnest golly-gee and self-conscious formality: Greenberg is a latter-day Gertrude Stein, oozing characteristic fearlessness about the labels that less perceptive readers might slap on her prose. “Whereas I’m not convinced that I’ve evoked writing that reflects all of my bits and pieces or that I’m sagacious in any manner,” Greenberg intones, “it is the case that I can be found churning out pages about addled monsters or chipmunks high on Novocaine as commonly as I can be found writing about communication theory, about the ethics of rhetoric, and about the history of higher education.”

In an era where we fetishize the appearance of indolence and thirst for that laid-back just-rolled-out-of-bed-and-puked-this-out aesthetic, it’s refreshing to find writing that is unabashedly mannered and sprawling, that indulges in an ostentatious display of hard-fought verbal skill. We were taught always to use a short word where a long one would do, to value a pithy stoner’s six-word grunt over a diligent and thoughtful paragraph. Greenberg subverts the paradigm of the relentless drive towards concise, unwordy cool.  And why, when you come right down to it, should we be ashamed of being brilliantly verbose? There’s been a lot of Sheryl Sandburg-generated hype about how we should stop punishing young girls with the word “bossy”; still more insidious is the societal beat-down given to joyously geeky teenaged girls like Greenberg was, who “grew vining peas in Pringles containers and contemplated the relative merit of polyester sweat pants,” “broke countless oboe reeds and fantasized about world travel, and “rubricked boys as ‘interesting commodities’” during debate tournaments. If we think Greenberg’s sentences are needlessly ornate, have too many clauses-within-clauses, then the fault is with us: this is how you speak when the world’s repressive behavioral norms somehow haven’t succeeded in socking you in the face. To write without stinting your words is a feminist act. 

*

The most curiously compelling aspect of Word Citizen is that it sometimes seems written deliberately to obfuscate.  For example, it’s impossible to pin down with absolute certainty whether the essay, “The Matchmaker: A Highbrow Comedy Coupling ‘Brief’ and ‘Straightforward,’” is about an actual matchmaking (shidduch) process or a metaphor about freelance editing. To some degree, Greenberg simply enjoys complexity. After all, this is the same woman who devoted an entire 2007 Jerusalem Post column to distinctions between actualities, theories, metatheories, and meta-metatheories (described as “terministic screens offered, respectively, by rhetoricians, and by Jerusalem taxi drivers, which allow us to talk intelligently about the differences, between New World and Old World explanations, about the utility of our neighbor’s rationale, for why our mirpesset is a hot spot for lizard romance”); it is with an almost audible sigh of regret that Greenberg remarks, “Most people find it impossible to conceptualize a fifth level of abstraction, so common academic parlance stops at the fourth level.” 

Yet one suspects that there is something more. One governing trope of Word Citizen is that of the Victorian-era “writeress”--the woman whose creative life plays out in womanly, harmonious parallel to a domestic role as a daughter or a wife.  Gentle hijinks will invariably ensue when the edges of these two worlds touch ever so lightly; on the whole, however, it’s good clean fun, with a healthy helping of good-humored feminism on the side. The most prominent American “writeress” was probably the incomparable Louisa May Alcott of Little Women fame (ironically, an adventurous and unconventional woman who never married).  Like Jo March, Ms. Greenberg  struggles with the morality of writing “pulp,” with the unresolvable problem of being a professional writer of integrity, and with reconciling these dilemmas with her role as a nurturing female (when deadlines loom, “her kids, her husband, her dog, her lizard, and her emu are all encouraged to wander to her neighborhood’s park” with “their iPods, their PCs, and their cell phones intact and with enough comestibles to feed a reunion of second and third cousins”). A related daily struggle is with the crushing everydayness of everyday life--not just the ongoing round of parenting which “evolved not into unwearied analysis, but into screaming (a little) or into sitting on the sofa and crying (a lot),” but also the humiliation of editor kill fees, publishing scams, and simple rejection. In the 21st century, however, merely to sing the blues is not enough. The true joys and complexities of being a so-called “mommy writer” are expressible only in a roundabout way. To paraphrase grossly the Bulgarian philosopher Julia Kristeva, the “female” storyline is not a blow-by-blow narrative: it’s a cyclical reimagining that transcends the linear, “male” monumental time. Ms. Greenberg’s texts are complex, in part, because they are written in code.

The hard questions posed by Word Citizen--and they can be sensed, if not explicitly set out on paper--have no answer, and do not need one. This is because Word Citizen, despite being completely devoid of religious discussion, is fundamentally a religious book. In an immediate sense, it is a nonlinear, lacunae-ridden narrative of how a communications professor in New Jersey gradually configures and reconfigures her identity until she takes her place among her chosen culture and religion.  On a deeper level, however, it is also a meandering account of how an individual finds a measure of inner self-actualization --even fulfillment, even bliss--within the harsh constrictions of a frequently disappointing and confounding external world. In this context, Greenberg’s quest makes for rewarding and deeply satisfying reading.  

We hope you buy it (which, incidentally, you can on Amazon and on our website page).

After months of anticipation, Laura Marello's sublime and gorgeously evocative collection of short stories, The Gender of Inanimate Objects, is finally here (as well as B&N, Apple iBooks, and Amazon). Whether she's writing about the sun-soaked olive groves of Greece or the intricate social patchwork of 1970s northern California, Marello's profoundly moving prose perfectly captures the process by which individuals find their places within a rich and complicated world.

Q: The sense of a living, breathing place -- whether it be California, Greece, or the eastern seaboard -- is so vivid in your stories, yet much of The Gender of Inanimate Objects depicts the pain of dislocation and non-belonging.  How do these themes connect?  What drives you to write about them?

I write about the places I love, usually coastal towns in California and on Cape Cod, sometimes Europe. My love for these places engenders the pain of being away from them.  I guess that comes out in the stories I invent about imaginary people.

Q: Much of this collection revolves around the subtle complexities that surround categories of gender identity.  Maya, the protagonist of The Gender of Inanimate Objects, is a highly satisfying enigma: she has heteronormative relationships, but there are hints throughout the story of a coded, dynamic sexuality. Tell us more about that.   

Maya seems oblivious to the fact that she’s doing a man’s job, yet she majored in Cultural Anthropology in college, so should be aware of gender roles.  She’s “a mystery wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a conundrum” -- or something like that (Grace Paley deliberately misquoting Churchill).  I like characters who are complex, and interesting, and I hope I have created that in Maya.

Q: Who are your literary influences?

At various times I’ve been influenced by Faulkner, Calvino, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Jane Bowles, H.D., and many others 

Q: Who are your greatest inspirations?

Susan Sontag and Joan Didion inspire me because they are so intelligent and articulate.  Hermann Broch and Robert Musil inspire me because they are such great writers overall. Calvino’s and Herodotus’ imagination inspires me. Faulkner, Marquez, Duras, and Woolf’s lyricism inspire me. The daring of writers like Joyce, Barnes, Bowles, H.D., etc. inspires me.  

Q: What are you reading now?

I am reading Kat Anderson’s Tending the Wild,  a book on how California Indians managed the land they lived on before the Europeans came. The park-like settings the Europeans thought were natural were actually a result of thousands of years of controlled burning, pruning, and weeding,  to keep forests from encroaching, and to encourage certain plants and animals to occupy these settings. This is research for my novel-in-progress about women lighthouse keepers on the coast of California.  I am also reading a book about the Thirteenth Dalai Lama Thubten Gyatso, and his Buryat Monk Tutor, Agvan Dorzhiev, also research for my novel (John Snelling -- Buddhism in Russia).  Finally, I am re-reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for fun, and just finished Anthony Doerr’s All The Light We Cannot See, for my book club.

Q: You’re currently professor of English at Lynchburg College—the latest step in a distinguished three-decade career that has also taken you to Stanford, UC Santa Cruz, the University of Oregon, the University of Colorado-Boulder, and the University of Albany.  How has your academic career influenced your parallel writing career?

I consider it a privilege to work with young people, to talk about literature and writing with them.  I have found that I did not realize what I actually knew about writing, until I had to talk to my students about it. Most of what I do stays internal and intuitive otherwise.  I am also very humbled and grateful for the opportunity to help them. They are very grateful and sweet. People college age (18-22) are very excited, hopeful, energetic.  

Melissa Reddish's brilliant new collection of short stories, My Father is an Angry Storm Cloud, launches tomorrow! Her writing is weird, erudite, and incredibly beautiful. Please go to Amazon, or her Tailwinds author page, and take a look! In the meantime, here's an interview with her. The incomparable Citywide Blackout also did a radio interview with her here.

Q: There’s a striking mixture of the mundane and the weird in your stories that defies categorization. What are your most important influences?

A: I adore writers who explore the weird, like Aimee Bender, Kelly Luce, Matt Bell, Amber Sparks, Sarah Rose Etter, Laura Ellen Scott, and of course, the inimitable Margaret Atwood. Whether it’s speculative, magical realism, or science fiction, I love investigating good world-building techniques, weaving magic into the fabric of reality, and balancing detail with mystery.  I’m also enamored with art that achieves a similar purpose. Recently, I was looking at sculptures by Ellen Jewett that are whimsical, surreal, and completely enthralling.       

Q: Your stories express a profound ambivalence -- not just about sex and parenthood, but also about the fundamental possibility of self-actualization and social belonging. 

A: At the end of Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the grandmother has just experienced a profound religious epiphany, where she tells the Misfit, who has just murdered her entire family, “Why, you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children.” After shooting her, the Misfit famously remarks, “She would of been a good woman if it had been someone there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

This portrayal of transformation, no matter if it is religious or secular, feels right to me.  We all experience epiphanies, sometimes on a weekly basis. We stare at the archaic torso of Apollo and realize we must change our life. It’s time to exercise; it’s time to go back to school; it’s time to find someone who will treat me right. And our culture reinforces this idea of instant transcendence, whether through a pair of shoes or yoga classes or getting an advanced degree. However, like Flannery O’Connor shows us, we have to re-experience these epiphanies again and again. Very rarely do they create actual, lasting change.  If the grandmother had survived that encounter, would she miraculously be a good person? Probably not. 

Plus, what do we do when we are not only told that we can change instantly, but also that we should change? I’m interested in exploring characters as they try to live the best version of themselves while navigating conflicting cultural messages on who and what they should be, from the kind of sex they should be having to the kind of parenting they should do. Staying in that murky gray area often produces the most interesting stories for me.   

Q: Your work depicts problems faced by the 35-and-under crowd: bad employment prospects, relationship disillusionment, and the loss of faith in social structures. Yet it’s never harrowing, self-pitying or self-deprecating: in fact it’s often subtly upbeat, with the characters retaining their inner dignity in surprising ways. Tell us where this optimism comes from.

A: Generally, I’m a pretty optimistic person. My mother has imbued me with inner strength, an insane work ethic, and the belief that people, as a whole, are generally good. We don’t always do good, but when we act in a shitty manner, most of the time we feel badly about it. I’m more interested in figuring out why people do what they do than bemoaning what they did. Whether it’s the former employer who, under the guise of mentorship, told me that my students wouldn’t respect me because of my youthful female appearance or the ex-boyfriend who told me “it takes a village” as justification for his indiscretions, I like to dig deep into the blood and guts and viscera and see what makes people tick. Plus, it gives me a chance to investigate my own shitty behavior, the moments I most feel shame about.       

Q: Your stories cover a wide range of techniques and subjects, but share a common trait—a quietly powerful ending that suddenly calls into question the reader’s preconceived notions of what the story was “about.” Why?

A: In addition to fiction, I read a lot of poetry, and one poetic technique I really admire, besides those effortless associative leaps, is the final moment, the turn, when we end in a place fundamentally different than where we began. In “Cold Glow: Icehouses” by David Wojahn, the speaker describes watching “White Bear Lake freeze over/ twenty years ago in Minnesota, the carp oblivious below,” and in the next stanza, the Ukrainian rabbi Solomon Petrov, “afflicted with total recall,” whose wife’s death was “not remembered, but continually relived.” In the final stanza, we discover what brings these seemingly disparate elements together: “Last night you described for me/ our child pulled dead from your womb.”  This child is the ghost that haunts the speaker, leading to the final lines of the poem:

Or our child whose name is ash,
is only a thought too hurtful to free.
Mornings like these, he floats at the window, waiting
and mouthing his name, there through a tangent of ice,
his face and hands ashimmer.

If I could ever create an ending as powerfully affecting as that one, I could die happy.

Q: Do you consider your writing to be autobiographical in any way?

A: While I’ve sadly never found a baby growing in the ground or watched my father turn into an angry storm cloud, these stories do reflect my own struggles and obsessions. Like most reasonable adults, I’m interested in parenthood while being absolutely terrified of it. Both “Protest” and “A Haunting” reflect that ambivalence. Like every female on the planet, I’ve struggled with issues of self-worth; concurrently, I enjoy Sharon Olds’ unflinching portraits of the body. Those two inclinations influenced “Roadkill” and “Barley.”  And while I may not have the navigational ineptitude of the narrator is “Lost,” I still get turned around fairly often, even in my own hometown. 

Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book Four. Archipelago Books, Brooklyn.

Or you can start by declaring that novels can no longer be written, and then, behind your own back as it were, produce a mighty blockbuster that establishes you as the last of the great novelists.

 - The Tin Drum, Günter Grass.

In the latest installment of My Struggle, Karl Ove -- the hard-drinking Norwegian proto-hipster protagonist of the longest-running Proustian neurotic multiple-volume pseudo-memoir since Proust himself -- wakes up in a remote Norwegian village and has a sudden feeling of displacement: “Where was I? In the house in Tybakken? The house in Tveit? Yngve’s studio? The youth hostel in Tromso?”  Several things have changed since the account of his childhood and adolescence in Book Three: his parents have divorced, his father has remarried and moved north from Trondheim, and Karl Ove is an eighteen-year-old schoolteacher in Hafjord, Norway’s Arctic version of the rural South or an Indian reservation -- a place so devoid of stimulation that even the mountains across the fjord “didn’t care, anything could happen around them, it meant nothing, it was as though they were somewhere else at the same time as being here.”  

Not that teaching school in rural Norway is exactly a Teach for America gig. Karl Ove himself is going through an awkward phase (at one point his six-four frame supports a rock-inspired spiked leather belt, a long overcoat, a black beret, and a crucifix dangling awkwardly from one ear).  His predecessor “turned up drunk for classes, was always taking days off, and finally had just taken off and never returned.” The standard of behavior, which consists of showing up reasonably sober, is mercifully low: Karl Ove himself “would drink several times in the middle of the week…but I always managed to stagger out of bed and get myself to school punctually.” The easygoing locals, happy to have any teachers at all, take it all in stride.  Their rapid acceptance of Karl Ove into the local community is a sharp contrast to the cold and standoffish south.  On the other hand, that’s probably because there’s nothing to do in a ridiculously boring fishing village of 250 (on a busy day), where all the partying has been diverted to the larger towns of Finnsnes and Hellevika. Schoolgirls come by to flirt; fishermen share bottles of vodka. Karl Ove himself, between blackouts, is mostly concerned with losing his virginity.  Even this enterprise is hampered by existential malaise -- specifically, a nagging premature ejaculation problem that is exacerbated by a neurotic psychological inability to masturbate due to path dependency (“And once I hadn’t done it as a twelve- or thirteen-year-old, time passed and it slowly became unthinkable, not in the sense of unheard of, more in the sense of beyond my horizons”).

The very fact that a recent high school graduate who earnestly believed that “occasionally getting so drunk that I couldn’t remember a thing was cool” could walk into a remote Norwegian fishing community in the 1980s and be entrusted immediately with the education of the young demonstrates either a great optimism in the human spirit or an abject inability to cope with life.  My Struggle, mirroring the general trends in postwar Scandinavian society, contains elements of both.  There’s the unspoken, but deep satisfaction of reading -- when a book by Jan Kjaerstad arrives, “the first thing I did when I held it in my hand was smell the fresh paper….The style was so alien, and yet so cool with the short incomplete sentences, all the alliteration and the sprinkling of English words.”  There’s even the innocent excitement of his first literary gig as a record reviewer for the local paper. On the other hand, the pettiness of everyday life invariably triumphs.  For instance, after accidentally forgetting to pass on a 100-kroner Christmas gift to his brother, Karl Ove is banned from his grandparents’ house on the grounds that “you’d never had anything to eat whenever you turned up, you were shabbily dressed, and were always asking them for money.” The social shame that follows a typical bender causes Karl Ove endless torment: “Oh hell, did I do that? the cries resounded inside me the next day as I lay in the darkness.  Oh no, shit, did I say that? And that? And that?” Even in the middle of helping a struggling sixth-grader through a math problem, Karl Ove thinks, “I felt sorry for her, almost every lesson held a humiliation of some kind, but what could I do?”

There’s a frontier aspect to Knausgaard’s account of his youthful time in the wilderness, a sense of a shared cultural touchstone between Norwegians and Americans. Although the year in the sticks was originally intended as a waypoint in Karl Ove’s journey to becoming a great writer in the bohemian/gonzo tradition of Kerouac, Hemingway and Thompson -- the equivalent of working on a fishing vessel, hiking through Afghanistan in the 1970s, or driving a bus at the airport at McMurdo Station in Antarctica -- it turns out to be far more and less than a romantic attempt to “suck the marrow out of life” (and then write about it). The experience of being a stranger in a unforgiving landscape, along with the sudden promotion from high school student to rookie teacher, forms the backdrop to a transition into adulthood. As a teacher, Karl Ove has surprisingly sensitive observations: “They took out their books and started work, I walked around and helped them, I liked the way they went from being a small, chatty, giggly class to falling into step and just being themselves.”  Barely out of childhood himself, he manages to keep some semblance of classroom order because he is able to reduce the visceral experience of school to a child’s perspective -- “What good Martin Luther would ever do them I had no idea.  For them it was probably more about being here and writing in their notebooks with their pencils.”  It’s sort of like Laura Ingalls Wilder when she goes off to teach school in These Happy Golden Years, except that everyone is really drunk.

*

In 2014, around the same time that Book Four was translated into English, a Swedish director named Roy Andersson made a consciously pomo arthouse flick called The Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence. With its loosely-connected, disparate storylines set in a simultaneously hyper-realistic and dreamlike Scandinavian city, the movie is a meaner, tougher, and more deadpan-comic version of Waking Life.  There are some awkward death scenes, including a five-minute opening shot of an elderly man having a fatal heart attack as he tries to open a bottle of wine. Some children with Down Syndrome recite poetry, including the poem from which the film derives its title. Two hapless salesmen try to sell some egregious “novelty items” -- vampire fangs, creepy plastic masks -- to a variety of uninterested customers; Charles XII and his army descend upon a bar in modern-day Gothenburg, only to return defeated and wounded.  An aging officer in the modern Swedish military repeatedly gets stood up for lunch.

As comedy goes, this isn’t Naked Gun. But it takes almost the length of the movie to realize that the cruel, itchy un-funnyness of The Pigeon is in fact the point. In one of the final sequences, one of the travelling salesmen has a terrifying dream in which a group of slaves is forcibly herded into a bright copper vessel studded with trumpet mouths, then roasted alive over a bonfire. Their screams from inside the ark are transmuted, outside, into abstract sounds of heartrending beauty. Transfixed by the sublime music created by suffering, a wealthy audience in full evening dress watches the scene in fascination as they grip glasses of champagne. The salesman wakes up and tells his friend, “I dreamed I was involved in something very horrible.” But he can’t describe the source of his guilt.

To the kind of guy who was actually guffawing at the sight of someone dropping dead in a ferry cafeteria while his fellow passengers discussed the fate of his untasted beer and shrimp-salad sandwich, the movie may seem esoteric.  (At a recent Upper West Side screening, a middle-aged couple actually confronted us as we were exiting the theater and demanded to know “what the meaning of all that was.”)  Yet there is no movie that more heavy-handedly summarizes the dilemma of My Struggle.  Is all art founded on the miseries of others?  Why is it pleasurable to hear the pain of others?  Shouldn’t we want to see other people happy and not sad?  Are we so desperate to break into the neurotic despair of another that we would read a 500-page book that focuses primarily on beer and premature ejaculation? In Against Nature, itself another self-cannibalizing pseudo-memoir written by a Norwegian, Tomas Espedal marvels to his lover at the sheer slash-and-burn nature of Knausgaard’s work: “Did you read that? I’d ask. How does he dare, it’s quite amazing, he’s destroying himself, I’d say.”

It isn’t just the self-torturing navel-gazing that makes My Struggle uncomfortable; it’s also the literary exploitation of people with obvious substance abuse issues.  At one point in Book Four, a middle-aged Karl Ove recalls reading his alcoholic father’s old journals from the mid-1980s, which he inexplicably considers suitable for widespread publication:

“Thursday  8 January. Tried to get up for work. But had to call Haraldsen and throw in the towel. Grinding abstinence -- stayed in bed all day…I made an attempt to read Newsweek. Managed a few TV progs. School tomorrow?

“Friday 9 January. Up at 7:00. Felt lousy at breakfast. Work. Survived the first three lessons. Had terrible diarrhea in lunch break and had to give the HK class a free. Home for repair -- rum and Coke. Incredible how it helps. Quiet afternoon and evening. Fell asleep before TV news.”

Flashing forward in the non-linear style of the series, forty-year-old Karl Ove observes, “I understand why he noted down the names of everyone he met and spoke to in the course of a day, why he registered all the quarrels and all the reconciliations, but I don’t understand why he documented how much he drank. It is as if he was logging his own demise.” Himself a career schoolteacher, Karl Ove’s father is the shadowy foil to Karl Ove himself: he is the one who originally encourages Karl Ove to teach, and both father and son yearn desperately for a more liberated and unrepressed life.  

Yet most of the internal inconsistencies in My Struggle relate, intriguingly, to the aspects of Karl Ove’s life that yield potential comparisons with his father.  In earlier books, Karl Ove portrays himself as someone who does not drink and has never done drugs; in Book Four he’s consistently tanked on alcohol and hash. There’s one spring where he’s “drunk almost all the time” and frequently wakes up in a “russ van,” which is basically a van that facilitates the month-long partying to which all Norwegian high school seniors are entitled.  In an insightful review, Jeffrey Eugenides -- a co-presenter at the recent Knausgaard talk at the New York Public Library -- notes that My Struggle deals with distinctly selective memories. The idea of an analogy between father and son is apparently so painful that it cannot be directly contemplated -- and must, moreover, be repeatedly revisited and revised. 

Graham Allen, The One That Got Away. New Binary Press, Ireland.

Graham Allen is the sort of poet who rewards readers who skip right to the end.  The eponymous poem of The One That Got Away ends with “By the time it was time to reopen doors and windows / his house was a bank with a security system.”  A discourse on reading Shelley and Blake in Italy ends with a meditation on “all the strange hands, in future, / who will open books at cut-price prices / to find well preserved, alien bodies.” One eloquent piece about a poet’s quotidian eating habits, “Indigestion,” ends abruptly with the subject throwing himself off a cliff.  Life, post-Philip Larkin, is hard for Blake specialists; a poem needs to pack a punch.  Or, put another way, in a world where UK tabloids routinely refer to Salman Rushdie as “Padma Lakshmi’s ex,” the serious intellectual life is kind of under siege. People in Mr. Allen’s poems don’t even bother talking to each other; they sit in groups of one and read.  In between lofty doses of Livy and Vico, there’s staring at the lawn furniture, staring at the bugs on the patio, and watching your wife cook lentils for breakfast.

Underlying Mr. Allen’s elegantly dry diction is a bleakly idyllic, richly textured inner world that Harold Bloom considers to be a “throwback to the High Romantics…haunted by Blake, Shelley, and Keats.” Unusual among today’s poets, Mr. Allen’s poetry is only superficially inspired by the real-world experiences of sex, death and real estate.  Several poems about dying relationships are, in fact, thinly-veiled ponderings about a grand classical tradition of philosophical and metaphysical thought--one break-up note (“Unrequited”) contemplates “my dark self simply brought a mirror, she literally divided, unfolded,” while another (“Sortilege”) compares the couple’s communications to the ancient occult practice of Virgilian Lots. Under this regime, the nastiest thing you can say to an ex-lover is that “One day I will look at you / as an illustration in a book / I have no intention of purchasing / let alone desire to read”. A surreal, J.G. Ballard-style description of a “to-die-for house” vividly evokes the interplay between sound and silence, call and response:  “Maybe, in another part of the house, / a woman is quietly singing, / or filling an ostentatiously large crystal bowl with shiny, black stones.”   A meditation on giving up smoking (“The Fags”) quickly spirals into a vision of the speaker’s father, which in turn disintegrates into successive images of disparate texts--crosswords, the Telegraph (or “Torygraph”), Moses, the Promised Land, and the speaker as Telemachus, “an obstacle in [his father’s] singular career.” 

Mr. Allen thus bucks a general trend whereby there is a severe shortage of readers and an equally troubling surplus of writers.  Any half-literate person clutching a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude can (and does) declaim about the process of writing.  It takes significantly more mental overhead to write, as Mr. Allen does, about the process of reading.  Aside from Umberto Eco (who, being a professor of semiotics, clearly has some vested intellectual interest in experiments like The Mysterious Flame of Queen Lloana), it’s not clear if the novelistic form can absorb such an enterprise.  But, as Mr. Allen shows, the window of opportunity is wide open for poetry.

The most complicated and thoughtful poems in the collection, indeed, are those that refer to the great English Romantic tradition upon which Mr. Allen’s academic career is built.  The final section, “Lago Trasimeno,” describes a journey through Umbria, as seen alongside a swirling kaleidoscope of companions: not just Blake, Keats, and Shelley, who were driven by the general English obsession with ancient Rome, but also Dryden, Livy and Vico.   Running throughout the Italian adventure is the relatively standard tension between sublime art and disappointing life: specifically, there are a lot of mosquitoes, it rains a lot, and sometimes you drink too much.  Reading Livy’s account of the battle of Saguntum, with its “pissed-up elephants” and “demotic omens,” leads to contemplation of a more long-running conflict: 

Poetry is at war with history.
It’s sad, but it’s true. It has to be.
. . . .
Knowledge is what gets drunk and eaten. 
Carthaginian, Roman, Celto-Iberian, 
who are these people to you or me?
Life begins and ends as a wave
sucked up and spit out by the trees.

Mr. Allen’s poems are quaint in that they insist, with an almost Victorian hysteria, on the past continuing to walk with us--guiding us to see the magic in Ireland as a “land mist of mist and newly built houses,” advising generals as they plan the Gulf War (“Storming Norman confessed, / though it’s uncertain he was citing / Livy”), and helping us through a morning hangover where even the moon looks like a “huge, yellowish, headache tablet.”  Yet such earnest insistence is tinged with sadness and cynicism, as implied by Mr. Allen’s masterful riffs on the Punic Wars.  When he asks, “What did [Hannibal] drink? What smoke? / What dream? What lago did he despair on?”, the question is rhetorical: it’s important that we don’t know, otherwise we should never feel that we know him.  There is some hint that the narrator of “Beyond Livy” doesn’t even read the Latin original: Dryden’s translation of Livy is sarcastically described as being “assisted / by eminent hands.”  The specter of an unnamed cultural defeat is painfully evident through thirteen iterations on the Rome-Carthage showdown--among them the First Punic War as a precursor to Desert Storm, Hannibal as the “bin Laden of his generation, learning to accept the necessity of love,” Hannibal as the victim of victors writing history, Hannibal as a general almost nonsensically portrayed as a victim of war, Hannibal as the pivotal point in history when war retrospectively ceased to be a sacred fight to the death and became the corporate-technocratic domain of policy wonks and government contractors.  The glorious emo defeat hanging over “Beyond Livy” is not that of the Carthaginians, who by all accounts left most of the fighting to the mercenaries; it is the resistance of history to being made into a decent Lifetime movie.

In one of the collection’s most moving tributes (which starts somewhat drily with “William Blake put his foot on it”), Mr. Allen writes with beautiful affection for the major Romantic poet who has, perhaps, weathered the complexities of postmodernism most gracefully:

He never made it to Italy, 
the sunny home of barbaric art,
never got himself past Sussex,
made the Messiah walk all that long way home.
But I see him here, sometimes, wandering over the soft, green hills, 
talking with angels at Magione,
swimming with children, saving lives,
debating with soldiers on Tuoro’s height,
explaining to Flaminius, in great detail,
why the chickens wouldn’t breakfast that morning,
the reason why the battle was always lost,
lamenting technological inventions:
the chariot, the motorcar, and the shoelace.

A fitting tribute to so many things: to the mythical and sublime lurking alongside the ridiculous, to the (mostly) unsentimental love of Albion, to long walks in the footsteps of your life’s most cherished heroes. Perhaps, however, it’s also a song to how and whom we read, which is in some sense who we truly are.