This project has bittersweet roots.
First, a celebration of process. As metaphor or fact, process reveals something fundamental about what it means to be human.
The other, a funny contradiction that makes publishing an oddly appropriate symbol for a current state of affairs: how so many progressive politicians, activists, &c end up signing book deals with the publishing arms of corporations, when in another context, in another arena, the two would be at each other’s throats . . .
But as things stand, the publisher or imprint is dissociated from the corporation: a system where cause and effect are alienated from each other, roots foreign to their leaves. This is not to say that any single individual shouldn’t have signed some contract or work with whichever publisher but more that there is something missing in the public discourse to reveal the whole, illuminating who is publishing books, what they publish and why, what is the current value of publication, and (beyond the individuals in the field) what is the value of having one publisher over another.
Here, I am talking less about money + quantities and more about methods + community, or the identity of publishers across media.
—Nicholas Grosso
New York
March 2019
AUTHOR: TAMARA FAITH BERGER
Beneath the explosive scenes and subjects that fill Queen Solomon is a delicate process that tiptoes across so many hot button issues: from the role of Israel in the Middle East to sexual consent and religious awakening. Almost too careful a process, Tamara Faith Berger’s novel typifies that line from Oscar Wilde: Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power. She is the author of Lie With Me, The Way of the Whore, (republished together by Coach House Books as Little Cat), Maidenhead, and Kuntalini. Queen Solomon was released by Coach House Books in Fall 2018.
How do you approach the art and craft of literature? And how do you see yourself juxtaposed within literature, historical and contemporary? And in particular with writers you return to again and again, is it competitive, familial, a lively conversation, no influence, a mixture, or something else entirely?
I came to literature from a visual arts background. The work of making paintings, drawings and sculptures has influenced my practice of writing in that I use the techniques of art like sketching, erasing, and layering to write. It is a process of visual thinking to carve out meaning. I find that things on the page either work or they don’t. Stuff looks bad and sounds bad and means nothing—just the way things always did when I was trying to make art—and then somehow, in the process of just being with a piece and trying to stay with it and make sense of a scene, for instance, things ineffably, eventually change and get more pleasing. Writing takes a lot of time. I always imagine a kind of 3-D space in my mind for a text to play itself out in. I look for and long for the moments when words together accumulate substance and power, even though these moments can be few and far between.
I see myself as coming out of a feminist writing practice with a particular affinity for the tradition of literary experimentation by women that emerged throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s in both North America and Europe. I am thinking of writers like Gail Scott and Kathy Acker, Luce Irigaray, Dubravka Ugresic, Elfriede Jelinek, Toni Morrison. It’s a ‘messing with the pipes’ kind of practice, one that wants to fuck up thought and language from the inside. It’s also, sometimes, about having one’s female eye in sacred male spaces. In my case, it’s an urge to participate in traditional male spaces like pornography, like religion. I know that the tables have turned in many formerly exclusively male fields and women absolutely dominate contemporary literature in my mind, but it is the past that still needs a kind of rehabilitation and feminist assessment and sometimes the only way to do that is to mess things up. Lately I have been researching the history of smut in The Invention of Pornography (Zone Books, 2002) which tracks the historical shift of pornographic materials from private realms into a more mass forms of consumption alongside Bookleggers and Smuthounds (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002) which details the history of Jewish immigrants who ran the erotica trade in early 20th century New York. I want to know why so much literature, pornographic and otherwise, has been discarded. In Queen Solomon, this issue of which books get forgotten is important in terms of my narrator’s interest in ‘unacceptable’ books about the Holocaust. I too want to know why the work of writer Ka-Tzetnik 135633 (1909-2001) has been excluded from the canon. Why has his Holocaust ‘pulp’ been thrown away, in contrast to the survivor’s memoir which has been elevated? I think there is a slipperiness in fiction, especially in texts written through trauma (of which I think there is a huge amount of stifled female voices from the past) that play with the fiction/non-fiction boundary in order to tell the truth. Issues of trauma and truth multiply themselves in a book like Ka-Tzetnik 135633’s House of Dolls (1947), about forced prostitution in Auschwitz, because it is written by a survivor and uses tragic real-life material about the Holocaust while it slides into titillation, fantasy, and pulp. It bothers me that Ka-Tzetnik’s work has been thrown away for these slippages, these cross-genre offenses. I place my book Queen Solomon right here, alongside House of Dolls, in the grey slippery space of trauma and imagination, in a kind of solidarity.
Lately I have been returning to manifesto-like non-fiction that I read a long time ago in order to help me continue to refine and rethink my theoretical parameters as an artist. I like to re-read the polemical preface of The Sadeian Woman (1979) by Angela Carter about women potentially being liberated by pornography and more recently the essay “Porno Witches” in Virginie Despentes’ King Kong Theory (2006) which lays down wisdom like: “Porn is the method men use to imagine what they would do if they were women, how they would apply themselves to satisfying other men, what good sluts they’d be, what prick-devourers.” I also sometimes like to revisit Andrea Dworkin’s epic refusal Pornography: Men Possessing Women from 1981: skewed feminist disruption at its finest.
I’d like to return to “pulp,” the role of religion and pornography, and “rehabilitating” historical injustice, but first let’s talk about the canon. In Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, I found one of the most succinct approaches for judging a piece of literature: “One breaks into the canon only by aesthetic strength, which is constituted primarily of an amalgam: mastery of figurative language, originality, cognitive power, knowledge, exuberance of diction.” How do you determine what should be canonical?
Instinctively, I find Bloom’s definition problematic from where I stand. It’s missing some primary considerations: variations in dialect, form, and region; the inclusion of writers from countries that have had stricter routes to publication. And what about class, gender, and race, in general? All these things and more seem like necessary considerations in tandem with aesthetics. There is no such thing as an even playing field for getting into the canon and there never was. It takes time to write. There is so much trial and error and failure in order to arrive at “exuberance of diction.” I like that! I feel that women, in particular, have not been afforded this time to make literature in a historical sense, never mind men and women of lower wealth. I really feel that there is a huge amount of text out there—whether real or projected—by people that wanted to contribute to the world’s body of literature but could not. Don’t know if this is a moot point or not. To me, it feels significant.
What do you think is the cause of so much literature being “forgotten” or “thrown away” throughout history? Today, we could point to the inundation of stuff being produced from seemingly every corner of society (content seemingly meant to pacify more than anything else) and allows so much to be devalued or otherwise forgotten, but what do you think were the factors in the case of Ka-Tzetnik 135633, in particular? Though isn’t the survival of House of Dolls to this day a testament to its recognized value, which in the end is what makes a work canonical?
House of Dolls hasn’t survived heartily. I found my beat-up copy at a garage sale and I’d never heard of Ka-Tzetnik 135633 before. Most Jewish people I know have never heard of Ka-Tzetnik. He remains in the margins in both the Jewish literary canon and wider literary canon. Recent Holocaust scholarship has mostly discounted Ka-Tzetnik’s work as trivial, kitschy and full of untruths. Yes, there was a heyday for his work in the 1950s and 60s because in the early days after the war, Ka-Tzetnik’s books were believed to be insider testimony about the concentration camps —plus, the sex helped! Now, we don’t want to read anything consciously titillating about the Holocaust—for reasons of taste, in my opinion. Yet the fact that Ka-Tzetnik 135633 has a body of work that straddles the lines between fiction and non-fiction and religion and atheism and that revolves around issues of the sexual abuse of both males and females during the Holocaust, as well touching on mental illness and healing is wholly unique. What’s most known about Ka-Tzetnik 135633 is that he was a witness at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, had a seizure during his testimony and had to be taken off the stand. Ka-Tzetnik 135633 was not an acceptable witness. What was needed at that moment was a lucid survivor, a so-called perfect, lucid survivor. Ka-Tzetnik, ultimately, had no ‘exuberance.’ He was tired, mentally ill, and traumatised. He was a bad husband and father, he could barely be a citizen of the Jewish state. He was an artist who wrote this wholly unique oeuvre about the Holocaust, which is not easy to read, in fact it’s unreadable at times both in content and form. It definitely does not meet Bloom’s criterion of literary excellence! There is a new book of scholarship that just came out, Holocaust History and the Readings of Ka-Tzetnik, (Bloomsbury, 2018) which I am really looking forward to getting my hands on. So maybe Ka-Tzetnik’s work due to its uniqueness is in the process of being admitted to the canon—but it would have to be on the basis of its weirdnesses and weaknesses, I would think, not its strengths.
Having not read Ka-Tzetnik’s body of work, what you describe seems to speak to an originality and nuance of experience not thoroughly explored elsewhere. And while I don’t know how Bloom would judge the work, for what it’s worth, he does write in the Preface to The Western Canon: “to ask what makes the author and the works canonical. The answer, more often than not, has turned out to be strangeness, a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange.”
Thanks for sharing that!
And to reflect on this as it relates to your own writing and being in traditional male spaces, this is very much what is at play in Queen Solomon. It calls to mind a Baffler article by Soraya Roberts:
When bad art is still heralded as good—or “necessary” —because it represents the sort of diversity we currently crave and so rarely find, that is cultural tokenism. And cultural tokenism is the enemy of criticism. As Baffler contributor Lauren Oyler recently wrote in The New York Times Magazine, “When applied to bad art with good politics, ‘necessary’ allows the audience to avoid engaging with a work in aesthetic terms, which tend to be more ambiguous and difficult.”
On the other hand, in Queen Solomon, you are “messing with the pipes” and playing in spaces like religion and pornography, forcing readers to engage with realities that do not have easy answers. This is one of the things that makes the novel so potent. Queen Solomon walks this tenuous line, surrounded by pitfalls aplenty, raising the stakes the more it subverts expectations, avoiding on one side two-dimensional characters that become stand-ins for sloganeering; and on the other sacrificing all structural tension to fully develop the field of opposing ideas. How conscious were you of this balance?
Thanks for your way of describing the book. I was conscious of the extreme trickiness of representing Israel and the Holocaust in my book, for instance, in both didactic and experiential ways, because it came out of a conscious and possibly ambivalent desire to enter the minefield of it all without getting blown away. Writing is the way I take risks, stand my ground. Like Lauren Oyler, like Soraya Roberts, I am probably also against the idea that art should be ‘good for you.’ As Jerry Saltz writes in a piece for Vulture that I just read this morning: “for almost its entire history, art has been a verb, something that does things to you or for you, that makes things happen.” I see my fiction in this mode of trying to make something happen. A text is a place for mind-altering thought.
How/does pornography and pulp provide you with the tools to create that thinking space and a space that can elicit action?
The genre of pornography, both visual and written, does super-sensory very well! I like to use porn’s sensorial, auditory, unmasking techniques, e.g., going in close-up on genitalia and other parts like hair, skin and pits; also, using repetition, noting and returning to smell, fluids, moans, etc., and most important: no cut to black! Porn always stays for the climax. Porn likes to stay after the climax. Anyway, all these techniques of arousal that are features of that form are totally applicable to literature. When the body is aroused, the mind is more suggestible. You can slip in radical thoughts when one has an ‘easy’ erection. I’m not so experienced with modes of pulp that I can use them, but I admire how pulp has had accessibility cross class. I don’t think literature should be a high art, or maybe it’s just that I think cheap thrills should not be discarded. Cheap thrills arrest the unconscious. I like to tickle the reader; I like to be tickled as a reader. Once you’re tickled open, things happen.
COVER DESIGN: INGRID PAULSON
For the past decade, Ingrid Paulson has been working as an editorial designer for publishers (and select self-publishers) of all sizes, providing art direction, cover design, interior design, and layout for all types of editorial projects, from large coffee table art books to small topical essay-style non-fiction books. She has designed all three book covers of Tamara Faith Berger’s publications with Coach House Books.
How important was it for you to connect the three covers?
Little Cat was basically a reissue of two of Berger’s previously-published stories and was published soon after Maidenhead, so, at that time it seemed right to complement the look and feel of Maidenhead.
When it came to Queen Solomon, Alana Wilcox suggested we move away from using paper in a suggestive way. And I tried! I was researching any objects that could be visual substitutes (flowers! fruit! landscapes!) . . . but I ended up thinking about the part of the novel where we find out Barbra was circumcised as a child—a barbaric practice done on young girls. And then the knife play during sex using an Xacto blade.
I could see ‘cutting’ as a theme throughout the book, so I started to play with some paper and my own Xacto, and tried simple cuts, something a bit more labial (too much), straight slits, that kind of thing. It wasn’t quite working—I knew I was on to something, but I wasn’t seeing it. Then as I was angling one of the pieces of paper to get a better light on the blade, it appeared: if I cut an arc and bent the paper just so, and kept the knife blade in the shot, I could form a Q. (Of course, one’s mind tries to find other meanings, especially considering the subject matter . . . ) In the end, it worked best to keep with the techniques I explored with her previous book covers.
Does your approach change when working with the same author on multiple projects?
Well, I’m very aware of their previous work, and what their own preferences are in terms of design and imagery. So that informs some of my design process. It does work to an author’s advantage to allow for some consistency from book to book, because it helps build a readership: the bookbuyer can quickly recognize the author’s next book in a store or online. But if it isn’t a series, it is best to try to find a balance between similar and unique looks, and allow the book itself to stand alone.
And how did your understanding of Berger’s work change or stay the same (i.e. confirm or deepen your initial perception) from project to project?
There’s another reason I keep using paper: Berger’s work is highly sexual, but I see it as an invitation to explore other topics. In the case of Queen Solomon, that would be the status of Ethiopian Jews in Israel and the racism they live with, how that shapes their lives. It took me awhile to realize I was using paper to conceal and reveal—to create a deeper image out of the book cover or the pages themselves. It seems fitting.
I was struck by your association of paper and paper imagery with sexuality and the sexual nature of Berger’s work (and the societal power dynamics that often mirror sexual encounters), particularly as more and more of daily lives are being digitized. Is it important to your process to work with physical materials when designing covers? And how do you avoid fetishizing?
Well, I have used paper shapes to realize design ideas for other books. Perhaps it’s a meta response to digitization, as you suggest?
For a number of years, book designers (and the publishers who love them) have been making conscious decisions to promote the tactile quality of print, from special printing techniques to real handlettering (vs a ‘handletter’ typeface) for covers. It is a response to digitization, and a way to compete against digital—only entertainment and information sources. And readers have responded positively to that shift.
When I started designing back in the 90s, computers were almost too-new, and I’d still be cutting rubylith to correct film for the printer. When I went freelance as a book designer in 2003, all I needed was a computer. Nowadays I have a studio space where I can draw, letter, and photograph as I need, then digitize it (so, best of both worlds!). Using paper as a visual is a tool in my box, and considering the whole book is made from the stuff, it allows for a lot of subliminal comfort (ooh, paper is good, paper feels nice).
And really, it’s fun to go to work and muck around with ink or doodle for an hour.
I don’t specifically relate paper sculptures or cutouts to sex or fetish, but in this case, it was a tool for me to find a balance between the corporeal and cerebral elements in Berger’s writing. So paper comes in handy that way, seeing as it is so mute, devoid of intrinsic meaning.
And then there’s how the human mind will always try to find a familiar shape in an abstract image. I call it the Elbow Rule: I can use an image of a bare arm on a cover, but if it’s bent at the elbow certain way and other defining characteristics (such as a torso or hands) aren’t visible, one’s mind is going to start ‘seeing’ other, um, body areas. Coming up in the industry, I’d hear this saying used by some Canadian publishers: ‘will it sell in Moose Jaw?’ (You can sub in whatever town you want here. I just like we have a community named Moose Jaw.) With sexualized content, it’s important to make sure that the cover looks just innocent enough not to upset customers in bookstores, regardless of the community’s size and makeup. Some more conservative communities might balk, and the bookstore won’t stock the title, and then the book has a harder time finding its audience. But a cover image should also be suggestive enough that customers will grin and say ‘aha.’ This is pretty standard: for years, Simon & Schuster used photos of fruit for their Best American Erotica series, and Granta’s 2010 issue on sex used an open coin purse. All innocent enough, until they are positioned and photographed a certain way.
MARKETING: EMILY COOK
Emily Cook was named one of Publishers Weekly “Top 40 Under 40.” She combines a passion for indie press publishing and literary fiction with innovative strategy, on a book-by-book basis. She has most recently teamed up with Richard Nash to launch Cursor, a marketing service offering a curated list of international publishers to readers in the United States.
On Cursor’s website, it creates two groups: “Publishers” and “Those Who Don’t {Yet} Know They’re Publishers,” how widely or specifically do you define the term “publisher,” both personally and as a company?
In terms of the publishers we work with—all international, all distributing here in the U.S.—we are basically their umbrella U.S. publishing office. So all things publicity, marketing—also list building, trade shows, the Brooklyn Book Fair, etc.
How do you select the international publishers you work with? Is there any guiding philosophy?
We want to make sure they all fit together, puzzle pieces of a whole—and that we are passionate about and in love with their books. Really, in some ways it is no different from building a list by season, or building a lit mag’s next issue: hard to define, but you have to know when all the bits (or, all the publishers) will compliment each other, bounce off of each other—even help each other. All this, without competing. I’d say the thing I am personally the most cautious about is not having literary fiction that competes per season, as it’s definitely hard to get attention for fine literary fiction for American writers, let alone international ones.
EDITOR: ALANA WILCOX
Alana Wilcox is the Editorial Director of Coach House Books, an independent literary publisher of poetry, fiction, and select non-fiction. Passionate about the art and craft of publishing, she is also the co-founding editor of the uTOpia book series about Toronto and the author of the novel A Grammar of Endings.
You manage a few different facets of Coach House Books, perhaps the best place to start is to get a better sense of your position, what do you do at Coach House? Or if it really varies from project to project, what was your role in Queen Solomon? And do you have a personal approach to art and literature more generally (for example, your opinion of the function or value of art in society)?
I’m the Editorial Director of Coach House Books, but as with many smaller presses, editing is just a small part of my job: I also handle the finances, staffing, planning, etc., as well as acquiring and editing our fiction list. I acquired Queen Solomon and edited it, and I also did the interior layout. I handle liaison with the cover designer, the proofreader, in-house marketing and publicity, and our US publicity and marketing people.
This list of tasks is pretty much the same for all of the fiction list. With poetry and non-fiction titles, I have a say in the acquisitions, but I don’t take care of the editing directly, though I still do copyediting and sometimes layout.
Your question about the role of literature in society is an enormous one, and I could go on for days about it. It’s an interesting moment for literature: we read more and more (on Facebook, basically) but fewer and fewer books. We fetishize the idea of a book—everyone wants to have written and published one, for instance—but we don’t value the book itself; we’re willing to spend, say, $6 on a totally ephemeral latte but complain about $15 for a beautiful book you can keep forever that someone spent years writing. Publishing has to exist somewhere in this contradiction.
I think books have a multiple of purposes: some entertain, some challenge, but all ask you to exercise some kind of empathy or openness or imagination. It’s not like the screen arts, where everything is right there for you; reading a book means you have to provide the picture, or put the pieces together, or consider an opinion that might differ from yours. That sounds idealistic, but I do think it’s true.
As a publisher in this particular moment, it feels more important than ever to continue providing books, especially books that are unexpected, that push against the mainstream, that have as their intention not only financial gain but also a contribution to a cultural conversation—a reminder that books are powerful. Queen Solomon considers very difficult questions and provides no clear answers, and it does so in a way that is provocative, beautiful, and complex.
This goes to your point about the “fetishization of the book,” where the ends seem to have forgotten about the means, the very important processes that are in place to bring about that end-product. I think in the almost 600 years since the invention of the printing press and Aldo Manuzio with his Aldine Press (the first publisher, as we know them today), literary publishing has developed a curatorial model, a way of finding, assessing, refining, and introducing into the public sphere voices that engage or illuminate something vital to that public. Now in the age of mass media and the internet, that curatorial model has been blown to pieces. And on one side, I had thought good, let the public be free to share thoughts to all. Let more voices into the conversation that would otherwise be shut out or ignored. But, of course, that isn’t what’s happened really and it couldn’t be. By nullifying curation, individual insights have been devalued. Facebook and other social media outlets have refused to take on the true role of publisher and instead settled for mob control (though I think this model was first established by television with their commercial/advertisement models and has just been exacerbated by the internet). In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman offers some useful insight to this point:
What is information? Or more precisely, what are information? What are its various forms? What conceptions of intelligence, wisdom and learning does each form insist upon? What conceptions does each form neglect or mock? What are the main psychic effects of each form? What is the kind of information that best facilitates thinking? Is there a moral bias to each information form? What does it mean to say that there is too much information? How would one know? What redefinitions of important cultural meanings do new sources, speeds, contexts and forms of information require? Does television, for example, give a new meaning to “piety,” to “patriotism,” to “privacy”? Does television give a new meaning to “judgment” or to “understanding”? How do different forms of information persuade? Is a newspaper’s “public” different from television’s “public”? How do different information forms dictate the type of content that is expressed?
So I guess my question is how do you as a publisher reframe the conversation? Is this on your mind when considering marketing strategy, publicity, and cover design? And I wonder if it is something that must be confronted collectively with other publishers (versus individually focusing solely on one’s list and the numerous factors that go into a single publication)?
That is the question, isn’t it? How DO we reframe the conversation? It’s always on my mind, but it’s also endlessly frustrating. As a smaller publisher, we have to work so hard to get attention for our books, to keep fighting the fight, that there’s not much time or space left for reimagining how publishing works. I’m frustrated, for example, that as an industry we decided it would be a good idea to give free books or ARCs to anyone interested in them (bloggers, potential reviewers, etc.) with the hopes that those people might spread the word. But now anyone remotely connected to the industry expects free books. We give away our ‘product’ to the very market that used to buy them. Now, I’d love to be able to give all our books away, but the fact remains that this is a business, and this development, where now no one expects to pay for anything—not just books, also newspapers, magazines, music, etc.—makes staying in business much more difficult.
My problem with this, aside from the business challenges it poses, is that it devalues what we make. People still place immense value in the IDEA of a book—which is why everyone wants to have published one—but they are less and less willing to pay money for it. The price of books has been relatively stagnant for decades. Movie tickets have gone up, but we fear that consumers won’t pay more than the equivalent of three lattes for a book, and so, despite the cost of paper increasing exponentially and large retailers taking a bigger and bigger cut, we have barely raised prices. And even then, people want them for free.
And it’s a vicious circle. As publishers have less and less cushion, we have less and less ability to take chances, either on books or on bold new strategies for keeping our industry viable. We’ve always been a self-effacing industry in many ways: we promote our books and authors and not ourselves, and so the public doesn’t understand or value what we do. We need to change that, if we want readers to be willing to support us.
ALICIA KENNEDY ON THE METAMORPHOSIS BY FRANZ KAFKA
In an aphorism, Kafka wrote “Believing means liberating the indestructible element in oneself, or more accurately, being indestructible, or more accurately, being”—an idea that takes many forms in Queen Solomon, from Barbra’s search for enlightenment to the narrator’s attempts at re-contextualizing the concentration camp writings of Ka-Tzetnik 135633.
It is in this way (and others) that the shadow of Kafka looms. But with a patriarchal gaze or with the eye of God? Hardly. Sigmund Freud once described Kafka as “the Rashi of contemporary Jewish Anxiety” but his touch is always more ambiguous. In The Metamorphosis, readers find the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, transformed. By what? Work? Familial expectations? The mechanization of the world? Whether ultimately done in by one or by some cocktail of the lot, tensions and anxieties all, he remains Gregor Samsa.
Generalizations are an invitation to argument, but the common beloved of every writer is Franz Kafka. I don’t remember where I had heard of The Metamorphosis or Kafka. What I do remember is the title calling to me at age 12 from the shelf of my local suburban Borders, where my mom took me on Fridays for new books or British music magazines. His name was just in my brain somewhere, learned from the ether. I was in homeroom 7A that year, according to my Sharpie inscription on the inside cover of that Bantam Classics edition, translated by Stanley Corngold. My tween mind was blown; the value of a big opening line learned.
As I grew and read more, Kafka left the ether and was revealed to me as an icon, important not just to me but to absolutely everyone who decides to write. In 2008, Zadie Smith wrote of the myth that shrouds the man in “F. Kafka, Everyman.” She writes, “It is crucial to know the facts of Kafka’s emotional life when reading his fiction. In some sense, all his stories are autobiographical. He is a genius, outside ordinary limits of literature, and a saint, outside ordinary limits of human behaviour. All of these truths, all of them, are wrong.”
Sheila Heti, talking to The Guardian in 2018, gives The Metamorphosis as the book that changed her life. “I read it when I was 15 and it made me realise that you could do anything you wanted in literature—that there were absolutely no rules,” she says. “It made writing seem like a true place of freedom. Not a wastrel freedom, but a meaningful freedom.”
When asked for his top ten books, Jonathan Franzen mentions The Trial, noting “Kafka is not just a writer but a mindset.”
All of this significance has led to there being an incredible number of translations and editions of The Metamorphosis, but perhaps none embodied the book so well as the 2014 W.W. Norton release, with an extravagant cover design by Keenan, creating a regal, black beetle figure out of the title. An introduction written by the filmmaker David Cronenberg, maker of The Fly, sets up a translation by queen of German, translator of Robert Walser, Susan Bernofsky. Finally, here, a slim edition not bulked up with critical essays or selections from Kafka’s letters and diaries.
Cronenberg begins his introduction with “I woke up one morning recently to discover that I was a seventy-year-old man. Is this different from what happens to Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis?” We are all, at times, forced to awaken into the truth of who we are—perhaps that’s a vermin, or maybe we’ve just grown old. Life turns us all into monstrous bugs of some sort.
But does Samsa turn into a bug, as he himself referred to it casually, or a vermin, as my original edition, or an insect, as Bernofsky chooses? The more I’ve read the novella in various incarnations, the less I’ve believed it matters. When I read Bernofsky’s translation now, I’m struck more by how it unfolds, how she builds an unsettled atmosphere through her translation of, as she explains in her afterword, the theme of “ruhig/unruhig.” The former suggests every synonym for “calm”; the latter, its opposite. She explains that she uses variations throughout in order to unfold this wavering between tranquility and trouble. As an adult, this motif heightened the sense that it was work itself causing Samsa to be unrecognizable to himself and his family. Like Cronenberg waking up one morning to find himself old, most of us also wake up one day to find ourselves drained of life by the demands of capitalism.
That first edition my mom bought me when I was just a child maintains a precious spot in my heart and history, but when I reread, I go to Bernofsky’s masterful and playful translation with the gorgeous cover, slim enough to slip into any bag I am carrying. Each reading, excuse me, metamorphosizes. As my life circumstances change, I wake up to be someone new and to read Gregor in new lights. Bernofsky’s provides that room, where no reader can get stuck.
NOAM CHOMSKY ON GAZA BY NORMAN FINKELSTEIN
So much of what happens in Queen Solomon is sparked by the activities of the state of Israel, from the covert military action, Operation Solomon, that airlifted thousands of Ethiopian Jews into Israel to the ongoing tensions in the Middle East. In Gaza: An Inquest into its Martyrdom, Norman Finkelstein takes a deep dive into one such aspect: the Israeli sea and air blockades of Gaza. Steeped in a wealth of research and reporting, the author reveals the humanitarian crisis with investigative rigor and verve, never allowing readers to dissociate from the truth.
To plumb the depths of human savagery is a formidable task, and not a pleasant one. The task is undertaken with rigorous argument and scrupulous scholarship in Norman Finkelstein’s monumental “inquest into Gaza’s martyrdom.” And with undisguised passion. As he writes, “this book rises to a crescendo of anger and indignation.” It is hard to see how anyone with a shred of humanity could react differently to the bitter record unraveled here.
There have been evocative, often shattering, accounts of the tragedy of Gaza. Some of the most infuriating are live testimony from the scene during the periodic escalations of the crimes: among them the reports by the remarkable Norwegian surgeon Mads Gilbert from the trauma wards of al-Shifa hospital and the painful daily reports by the courageous Palestinian journalist Mohammed Omer. There have also been studies by prestigious commissions of inquiry and by the major international human-rights groups, all mined in Finkelstein’s inquest. Understanding has also been enriched by work of fine journalists and scholars. But in its comprehensive sweep, deep probing and acute critical analysis, Finkelstein’s study stands alone. [. . .]
The truly crushing blow against Gazans, as Finkelstein emphasizes, is the protracted siege, designed to prevent any normal life or recovery from the repeated episodes of mowing the lawn. There have been courageous and honorable attempts to bring desperately needed aid to the victims by sea; another flotilla is on the way in summer 2018. Each is blocked by Israeli violence. Finkelstein devotes a long section to the most disgraceful case, the attack on the Mavi Marmara, a particularly ugly display of brutality and cowardice, followed by cover-up and whitewash under U.S.-Israeli pressure.
In an appendix, Finkelstein carefully reviews the record of legal precedents, particularly concerning South Africa, to establish his conclusion that the occupation itself, not merely its implementation, “has become illegal under international law,” an original and substantive contribution on its own.
Concluding his inquest, Finkelstein recalls Helen Hunt Jackson’s remarkable 1881 chronicle of “the destruction of the Native American population by conscious, willful government policy,” dismissed and forgotten, rediscovered almost a century later under the civilizing impact of popular activism. “The present volume was modeled after her searing requiem,” Finkelstein writes. He anticipates that, like Jackson’s requiem, his own searing inquest will be dismissed and perhaps rediscovered someday, inspiring outrage at the fate of people “betrayed by the cupidity and corruption, careerism and cynicism, cravenness and cowardice of mortal man.”
There still is time to act, but if his prognosis is correct, “the black record of Gaza’s martyrdom” may soon be beyond repair.
© 2018, The Authors Middle East Policy © 2018, Middle East Policy Council
READING CONSTELLATIONS
Apocalypse Baby (Virginie Despentes, Feminist Press)
King Kong Theory (Virginie Despentes, Feminist Press)
Gaza (Norman Finkelstein, University of California Press)
Tree of Codes (Jonathan Safran Foer, Visual Editions)
Bookleggers and Smuthounds (Jay A. Gertzman, University of Pennsylvania Press)
The Invention of Pornography (Edited by Lynn Hunt, Zone Books)
The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.)
Hyena People (Hagar Salamon, University of California Press)
Holocaust History and the Readings of Ka-Tzetnik (Edited by Annette F. Timm, Bloomsbury)
Additional Reading:
The Western Canon (Harold Bloom, Penguin Random House / parent company Bertelsmann)
The Sadeian Woman (Angela Carter, Little, Brown Book
Group / parent company Lagardère)
First Love (Joyce Carol Oates, Ecco Books / parent company News Corp)
The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories (Bruno Schulz, Penguin Random House / parent company Bertelsmann)
