"Victory"

By Yu Hua
Translated from the Chinese by Allan Barr
~5400 words

A woman craves a confrontation with her cheating husband.

After discovering a key hidden in her husband's dresser while he is away traveling, Lin Hong snoops out the lock it opens, in Li Hanlin's desk at work, where she finds two pictures of a woman she assumes he's having an affair with. When he returns home she confronts him about it, but he insists the relationship never went beyond a kiss. Unsatisfied, Lin Hong desires to humiliate Li Hanlin until he begs forgiveness, but he responds in such a passive way that it stymies all her efforts. Finally the couple decides to divorce, and on the way to the registry office they enter a coffee shop for a last drink together, where the husband's mistress is seated, providing Lin Hong with the opportunity for vengeance she has been craving.

The story starts off well. The discovery of the key, wrapped inside three envelopes, sets up a bit of mystery, and Lin Hong's emotions are well portrayed. But ultimately I did not find her to be a sympathetic character, which is key for me in a good story. I also thought the perspective was muddled. The story is clearly about Lin Hong, so why let the POV drift so frequently — and to no apparent purpose — into that of her husband? There are also a few logistical details that just don't make sense. For example, Lin Hong sees two pictures of her husband's mistress, but when she finds her in person the coffee shop in the final scene, it seems that she recognizes her more through a process of deduction ("put two and two together").

Yu's language feels week, almost voiceless, which may have something to do with the translation. I wonder, too, about the sentence "She was making inroads into their savings." It's clearly meant in a negative way, as in "She was eating up their savings," but doesn't the phrase "to make inroads" normally have a positive connotation?

Finally, if you're going to base a story on a cliché like "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," it seems like you'd want to find some original ways to tell it. Unfortunately Yu Hua doesn't show us many, with the possible exception of the ending, which at any rate comes too late to redeem this piece.

Weak.

"Mexican Manifesto"

By Roberto Bolaño
Translated from the Spanish by Laura Healy

~4600 words

The narrator and his female companion tour bathhouses in Mexico City, leading to a steamy, unsettling encounter with two youths and an old man.

OK, I’m not always a fan of the New Yorker’s fiction illustrations, but this time they got it right. Through the dark mouth of a grotto, we peer into a bluish haze through which the sprawled, naked body of a young man appears. As our eyes focus—or the fog clears—we realize that the mouth of the grotto is formed by the arms of a person looming above us. Entangled with the body on the floor are other limbs. Deeper in the mist is another naked form. And that blob, off to the left, looks to be more curves and skin.

Just what the heck’s going on here?

That’s the question I asked myself again and again while reading “Mexican Manifesto.” But I’m not the only one who was confused. The narrator was a bit shaky on the details, too. This is how the story opens:

Laura and I did not make love that afternoon. In truth, we gave it a shot, but it just didn’t happen. Or, at least, that’s what I thought at the time. Now I’m not so sure. We probably did make love.

Well, yeah, I bet we’ve all had lapses like this. Did we just make love or didn’t we? I forget. (Try asking your partner that question. Get back to me about how it goes.)

In short, the story opens in a haze. After making love (or maybe not), the narrator and Laura start experimenting with public baths. Usually they’d take private rooms, steeping themselves lengthily in the sauna before exiting: “Then we would open the door and head into the chamber with the divan, where everything was clear, and behind us, like the filaments of a dream, clouds of steam slipped by and quickly disappeared.” But the rooms are not so private as you might think: people knock at the doors, and Laura lets them in. There’s some sharing of weed and steam, some possibilities of promiscuity. Then the visit of the old man with the adolescent boys trained to give a sex show. In the fog of the sauna, bodies overlap, voices call out, something almost happens. And then they leave and it’s over.

It doesn’t take long to figure out that the whole story is a sauna. And a dream. Not quite a wet dream, but a moist one. We follow the slack thread of motivations from one scene to the next, unsure where (or if) it leads anywhere, emerging at the end with our pores cleared but our minds still fogged.

I don’t know. If I agree to traipse through someone’s dreamscape, they could at least reward me with powerful prose. But sometimes Bolaño just slips on the tiles. Declaring that “Laura seemed so sweet at that moment” doesn’t convey sweetness any more than “I felt a kind of detached terror” sends a chill down my spine. On the other hand, the more vigorous images have their own problems. What does it mean to “laugh like a housewife”? In what way are beauty and misery “paradoxical dwarves, travelling and inapprehensible dwarves”?

I don’t know. It all left me feeling thick-headed. I think I’ll go take a shower. A long one. Hot and steamy.

Satisfactory (but just barely).

Reader poll: I found "Mexican Manifesto" to be ___.

"Bull"

By Mo Yan
Translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt
~6500 words

At a negotiation between butchers and cattle merchants, a boy witnesses his father's humiliation and unexpected redemption.

The story takes place during the childhood of the unnamed narrator, who sets about recounting it "years later." The events center on the narrator's father, Luo Tong, and his remarkable ability to estimate the weight of livestock to within a kilo. The talent, combined with Luo Tong's apparent imperviousness to corruption, makes him a trusted arbiter in negotiations between cattle merchants and butchers, and he is able to earn a meager living off the commissions. But his popularity runs him afoul of a corrupt local official, Lao Lan, who shows up at one of the negotiations and urinates on the cigarettes that the merchants and butchers have offered Luo Tong as a preliminary gift. Only when he saves Lao Lan from a castrated bull run amok is Luo Tong able to redeem himself in his son's eyes.

The story's strength is the flawed nature of Luo Tong as seen through the eyes of the son. Comparing his father to a tiger, the narrator notes that he "spent most of this time holed up, eating, drinking, and having a good time, coming out only when hunger pangs sent him looking for income." He blames him for the family's life of extremes, "with potfuls of meat on the stove during the good times and empty pots during the bad." And yet when he witnesses the esteem in which his father is held, "my heart would swell with pride and I'd vow that this was how I would do things, that he was the kind of man I wanted to be." The narrator's conflicted feelings play out perfectly in the scene of the father's humiliation: he initially disowns him as a result of the disgrace but is moved to tears by the way he "washed away the humiliation." To top it off the narrator discovers—though he doesn't understand the significance until later—that the antagonism between Lao Tan and his father is at least partially based on their rivalry over a woman named Wild Mule.

The story's weakness is that it feels like more a condensed novel extract, containing threads that lead far beyond the horizon of a short story. The pace in the first half is slow and meandering, with references to characters and situations that seem to have already been established. The rage of the narrator's mother, as she brandishes a meat cleaver and spews expletives, is presented so matter-of-factly that it seems almost comical.

Part of the problem may be Howard Goldblatt's translation, which often seems a bit tin-eared. Is "dark tool" really the best way to describe Lao Lan's penis in the urination scene? Is there no sense of irony whatsoever as the narrator remembers his father's "wise and courageous action" in the redemption scene? And what to make of the mangled syntax in the following passage:

With a sense of desperation, Father grabbed me by the neck with one hand and the seat of my pants with the other, and flung me up onto the wall only seconds before that damned Lao Lan took refuge behind him, grabbing his clothes so that he couldn't break free, and would screen him from the charging bull.

I generally avoid speculation about editorial motives, but given the author's recent Nobel Prize, it seems clear that this "story" is the result of a hasty effort to introduce TNY readers to a representative sample of Mo Yan's work. Despite the novelistic density and questionable translation, however, "Bull" redeems itself with complex characters, a quirky plot, and a poignant final scene.

Satisfactory.

Reader poll: I found "Bull" to be ___.

"The Last Few Kilometres"

By Leonid Tsypkin
Translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell
~1600 words

In the former Soviet Union, a man returns home on the train after a ponderous encounter with his mistress.

Written in 1972, the story does a superb job of capturing the dreary Soviet cityscape, from "clusters of identical white high-rises" to abandoned lots filled with "car bodies, stacks of logs, or rusted constructions of unknown purpose" to "puffs of bluish-gray smoke" suspended above factories.

The two main characters, who remain unnamed throughout the narrative, are part and parcel of the cheerless world they inhabit, and it is fitting that the images of the blighted landscape that roll past the train windows mingle and merge in the man's mind (the perspective is his throughout) with the memories of his visit to his mistress:

"Oy, don't look, please, the place is so awful," she said, setting a dish of steaming chicken and rice on the table; it was more or less the same thing she said when he undressed her.

And:

The blini were tasty—best of all, you didn't have to chew them much. He'd left his removable denture at home so that it wouldn't interfere with the moment of pleasure.

And:

She pulled on her black slip, her whole body writhing like a snake, as though she were performing some Indian dance—she always put it on that way. He had finally lit a cigarette, and, watching her, was trying to figure out whether he'd make the train.

The other passengers on the train are "dark, immobile figures" more akin to "symbols of people." The only joy seems to come from the western-style rock music that emanates from a portable tape recorder on the lap of young male passenger. In the midst of the bleakness, however, the musical ecstasy seems "fake, deliberately put on."

The story has virtually no narrative tension or character development, but there is something appropriate about that lack. It is a static portrayal of a static society that stops rather than ends, just as the train on which the main character is traveling appears to run out of steam. If the piece went on past this point it would be problematic, but Tsypkin is clearly a master in full control of his form.

More tableau than story, "The Last Few Kilometres" is a brilliant portrait of a walking corpse of a nation. Jamey Gambrell's translation does a fine job of polishing this little gem.

Outstanding. Strong (modified 24 December 2012, explanation here).

Reader poll: I found "The Last Few Kilometres" to be ___.

"Sweet Dreams"

By Peter Stamm

Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann
~5800 words

A young couple's routine in the first months of living together.

The third-person perspective cleaves to the main character, Lara, who comes across as a touch insecure in her relationship with her boyfriend:

Sometimes she asked herself if Simon had the sort of dreams that she had. It made her suspicious when he said, "Let's just wait and see—que sera sera. We're still young." In fact, he still felt as strange to her as this apartment, which was only slowly turning into home. She never knew exactly what he wanted; he didn't talk about himself much. It was only when he was with his friends that he seemed perfectly natural and relaxed.

At the beginning of the story we find Lara debating whether to buy Simon a corkscrew in the shape of a girl. Later she can't sit still when he leaves to buy a bottle of wine to inaugurate the corkscrew, and she goes searching for him in the pub on the ground floor of their apartment building. When they return to the apartment she pulls his clothes off and makes love to him on the kitchen floor.

Unfortunately, these details are pretty much the highlight of this story. The rest is filled with mind-numbing banalities including shopping trips to IKEA, sensationalistic headlines from the free newspaper, the geography of the Black Sea, and the content of late-night phone sex ads. Perhaps the point is to show the triviality of Lara's daily routine and consequently of her relationship with Simon—in ironic contrast to the title (?)—but the result is that a story about insignificance becomes insignificant in the mind of the reader.

The biggest disappointment, however, is the ending, which attempts to pull a rabbit out of a hat in the form of a hackneyed metafictional conceit: it turns out that the story is being written, or will be written, by a character in the story, a mysterious man Lara spies on a bus as she is talking to Simon. The man turns out to be a writer who, coincidentally, appears on a late-night talk show as Lara is channel surfing and explains that he has been inspired to write his story by his fleeting encounter with Lara and Simon on the bus. Except not really, apparently:

The writer shook his head. He wouldn't be painting a portrait of these two individuals. They had given him an idea for something, but they had nothing to do with the people he'd write about in his story. In actual fact, they weren't a couple at all, he said. They'd got off a two different stops and kissed goodbye on the cheek.

Or something.

Finally, and to make matters worse, Michael Hofmann's translation does Peter Stamm no favors. Since when does one unpick a price tag or dry oneself off on (rather than with) a towel? Are Lara's knees really scraped open after kneeling on the kitchen floor, or just scraped up? And then there are sentences such as this one, which seems to forget that German has a fondness for commas and coordinating conjunctions where English might prefer a period or semicolon:

"I wish you'd gone already," Lara said, and she poked her head around the door, and he kissed her and tried to push the door open, but she held it steady.

It's nice to see new blood in TNY's pages, but "Sweet Dreams" has very little to recommend it.

Weak.

Reader poll: I found "Sweet Dreams" to be ___.

"Labyrinth"

By Roberto Bolaño
Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews
~6500 words

A fictitious exploration of the private lives of eight individuals associated with the now-defunct French literary magazine Tel Quel. Central to the narrative is a black and white photograph, purportedly shot in a Paris café around 1977, that shows all eight seated around a table. The photo accompanies the story.

The anonymous narrator occasionally refers to himself in the first person: "as I said," "I know nothing," "I find it hard," etc. While he demonstrates plenty of interest in the events he narrates, he has no discernible role in them. Another way to say it is that the first-person voice in the story is rhetorical in function and limited in scope. On balance, the narrative is best classified as third-person.

"Labyrinth" is Exhibit A in the dangers of multiple-perspective short stories: a veritable character soup that drowns the reader in minute physical and emotional details of each of the eight primary subjects of the photograph. Speculation also runs high about three potted plants, six background figures, and two unseen individuals whose presence is extrapolated from expressions on the faces of others. Bolaño's powers of observation and description are impressive, but does anyone doubt that it would be nearly impossible to follow these sketches without the photograph? Once that point is conceded, a follow-up question emerges: is it wise for a story to rely so heavily on an external image—and an extremely unfamiliar one at that? Wouldn't it have been more effective to limit the perspective to one of the individuals and gradually introduce the others, perhaps concluding with a scaled-down ekphrasis of the photograph? As it is, the reader never knows which character to identify with and ends up indifferent to all of them.

The narrative voice has some interesting idiosyncrasies—its morbid obsession with the subjects of the photo, its internal contradictions and obfuscations, etc.—and the language shines in Chris Andrews's excellent translation. But these positive qualities are insufficient to redeem the story's utter failure in the basics of plot (nonexistent) and character (revealed only in unsatisfying glimpses). Some might cite the title and say, "Yes, but that's the point!" Perhaps, but just because a writer proves his point doesn't mean it was a point worth proving.

If you're writing your PhD thesis on Bolaño and need to read every scrap he wrote, or if you enjoy turgid fantasies about obscure coteries of Parisian intellectuals, you might appreciate "Labyrinth." Otherwise, it's a maze not worth entering.

Weak.

"Creative Writing"

By Etgar Keret
Translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston
~1700 words

A third-person narrative told from the perspective of a husband, Aviad, whose wife Maya signs up for a creative-writing class several months after a miscarriage. Aviad observes her progress and eventually enrolls in a similar class.

Most of the narrative focuses on the quirky content of Maya's writings, which offer intriguing parallels to the trauma she has experienced: people who reproduce by splitting in half, a woman who can't see the husband she has stopped loving, another woman who gives birth to a cat. Perhaps more meaningful than the content of the stories is the way in which the creative act is shown to expose—and to some extent to perpetuate—a relationship in crisis. At the end of the frame narrative, when Aviad confesses that he doesn't have an ending to the tale he has just written—about a fish transformed into a man and back into a fish—the parallel with his marriage is corroborated.

This brief story offers much to admire. Some readers will enjoy it for the fanciful quality of the inner narratives; others will appreciate coming to know characters through their literary creations; still others will revel in the metafictional conceit of a story about storytelling. Sharp quotidian details include a male creative-writing instructor who reeks of body lotion and a female one who wears a head scarf and, according to rumor, "lived in a settlement in the occupied territories and had cancer." Though Keret's language is not always as crisp as one might hope, that may have something to do with the translation. In any case, "Creative Writing" is a compelling read.

Satisfactory.