Forty Years of Dalkey Archive (Part III of V)
Covering 1994–2003
Here we go again . . . You can read a general 40th Anniversary of Dalkey Archive Press post here, and for highlights and statistics (and info on what this list is and isn’t) click here.
Otherwise, on to the mid-90s and early 2000s!
1994: Geometric Regional Novel by Gert Jonke, translated from the German by Johannes Vazulik
Given how much John O’Brien loved this book—and Jonke as a writer and person, as illustrated below—it’s wild to think that after the publication of Geometric Regional Novel, fans had to wait fourteen years for a new Jonke to appear in English. But once John and I traveled to Austria and met Gert at a charming café—where he said that, even if we did publish more of his work he wouldn’t travel to the States to promote them because he “wouldn’t be able to smoke anywhere and wouldn’t be able to find Red Bull” (so funny in retrospect)—the floodgates opened, and between 2008 and 2013, four novels were released (Homage to Czerny, System of Vienna, Distant Sound, and Awakening to the Great Sleep War) along with an issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction that consisted solely of “Gert Jonke's absurd, revealing, and groundbreaking autobiographical essay/novella Individual and Metamorphosis,” and a “Casebook” on Geometric Regional Novel that you can download for free here.
Dalkey’s “Casebooks” were put together by longtime Review of Contemporary Fiction editor Bob McLaughlin (also the editor of Innovations, which is a killer anthology) and sort of grew out of RCF. The idea behind these is at the heart of Dalkey Archive’s reader development activities (and Open Letter’s to be fair, especially the Two Month Review):
Modern and contemporary novels that participate in the tradition of formal and stylistic experimentation seek to challenge readers. But sometimes their challenges can be overwhelming for readers, especially those whose reading experiences have been shaped by the tenets of literary realism. The casebooks here serve as a resource for readers—teachers and students, especially—who desire some guidance in engaging these novels.
I’ll never tire of “literary realism” catching strays in Dalkey copy . . . Nor the fact that this casebook is longer than the actual novel! Which is a fun parody of bureaucracy, conformity, and the rigidity of modern life. Great when paired with Jiří Gruša’s The Questionnaire.
Total Titles Published in 1994: 27
Countries Represented: 10
Translations Published: 5
Other Notable Titles from 1994: Amalgamemnon by Christine Brooke-Rose, But for the Lovers by Wilfrido Nolledo, Here by C. S. Giscombe
1995: The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein
To me, Making of Americans has always been a critical part of the Dalkey Archive aesthetic. It’s a brick of a book (current edition is 925 pages and the forthcoming Essential edition will likely be longer—and more readable), it’s a well-regarded modernist work, and is filled with repetition upon repetition (an aspect of the Dalkey Archive aesthetic that is sure to come up more later). Not to mention, a lot of people love this book . . . or at least have bought it: It’s the 18th best-selling Dalkey Archive title of all time.
All of this is why we’re so excited to be bringing out an Essentials edition next November—alongside As I Was Saying by Cecilia Konchar Farr and Janie Sisson, the first reading guide to Stein’s mammoth novel. A true event!
Back in college, I was a massive Stein fan. I didn’t read everything, but everything I read blew me away. So much so that I owned a framed photograph of Stein—which I actually gifted to John O’Brien for the offices one Christmas. (And saw again when he passed and we started cleaning things up and sorting all the files. But I left it with his son . . . something I now sort of regret.)
Anyway, all of this runs counter to Steven Moore’s comments about this book . . .
Dalkey’s first editorial hire, Steven Moore is a brilliant man of letters, one of the most well-read people in the world, and author of Dalkey Days: A Memoir, a book that anyone interested in the press’s history should check out. It has a bit of gossip, a lot of insight into the early years of the press, and some fun snark. Here’s an excerpt related to Making of Americans [Note: I only have a pre-press version of the book with me, so if any of this has been amended or altered, I apologize]:
Around 1993, Stein scholar Steven Meyer suggested we reprint some of Stein’s novels, and offered to write introductions for them. Though neither O’Brien or I had a particular interest in her, we acknowledged Stein’s importance and figured her name would make a good addition to our list. [. . .] Then we decided to take on the mammoth Making of Americans, for which Meyer wrote another fine introduction, and William Gass a not-so-fine foreword (which, as I mentioned earlier, he came to dislike: I think he felt rushed). I read the first couple hundred pages of it, but was not inspired to read the rest, I’ll confess.
Not exactly what I was expecting! Although I feel like John mentioned on a few occasions that he too had never finished The Making of Americans.
Also of note in terms of Dalkey in 1995 is the switch from black and white to color covers—something Moore didn’t particularly agree with:
O’Brien stuck with black and white covers until 1994—I remember telling him I had a great color image for James Merrill’s The (Diblos) Notebook and asking if it was time to make the jump to color, which he declined—but beginning in 1995 we not only started doing some color covers, but started hiring outsiders to design them, which was largely fine by me because they obviously were better qualified. (Not so fine with me was office-manager/boss’s girlfriend Angela Weaser’s loud, garish transformation of my subdued, elegant cover for Gertrude Stein’s Making of Americans; Steven Meyer, who wrote the introduction, was so disgusted that he didn’t speak to me for a month.) On the other hand, the change to color was a sad concession: when O’Brien began with the black and white covers, he not only wanted to evoke the best independent presses of the past, but to make our books stand out from the colorful mob on bookstore tables. He wanted them to look different. But by 1995, he wanted our books to blend in, to look like everyone else’s. The first Coover image above was identifiably a Dalkey book; second could be from anybody.
The unnecessary slam on Angela Weaser aside, there’s something to be said about the idea of standing out from the crowd—this is something that people like about Fitzcarraldo’s covers, although would loathe if more than three other presses went in the same direction—and yet there is constant pressure from booksellers and sales reps for “salable,” “eye-catching” covers which, for better or worse, start to blend in with everything else. Hoping to write much more about this—and the phases and trends of Dalkey Archive covers—sometime next month, but we should move on for now.
Total Titles Published in 1995: 19
Countries Represented: 7
Translations Published: 5
Other Notable Titles from 1995: Phosphor in Dreamland by Rikki Ducornet, Cobra and Maitreya by Severo Sarduy, Nobodaddy’s Children by Arno Schmidt
1996: Generation of Vipers: In Which the Author Rails Against Congress, the President, Professors, Motherhood, Businessmen, & Other Matters American by Philip Wylie
This is, by far, one of the greatest subtitles of all time. And a book that, although it was written eighty-two years ago, at least sounds like the sort of current affairs book some pundit would come out with today. When is it not a good time to rail against congress and businessmen? (Moms . . . not so sure about. And I’d give poor beleaguered professors a pass—they’ve got enough shit to deal with.)
Wylie, whose novel Finnley Wren is also available from Dalkey Archive, was extremely prolific across several genres (speculative fiction, detective stories, socio-political works like Generation of Vipers, and even an article that helped popularize the hobby of raising orchids.
One of his stories—about the Nazis using atomic weapons, years before the a-bomb was a reality—landed him under house arrest. And his novel Gladiator, which was reviewed by Jerry Siegel, was an influence on the creation of Superman.
What a life.
In terms of Generation of Vipers, Curtis White lays out some of its trickiness in his preface to the second Dalkey Archive edition:
Wylie’s performance in Generation of Vipers has a similarly subtle strategy. Wylie understands that what makes prophecy persuasive is not that it knows the Truth and everybody else has somehow forgotten it. Prophecy doesn’t imagine that it has to inform you that there’s something “stiff-necked” and generally wrong with the people; it assumes you already know that. It doesn’t seek to convince you; it seeks to move you to conviction through the transforming emotional power of its harsh poetry. What makes prophecy persuasive is the music of vituperation. Or, as Wylie puts it simply, “My technique is to invade the reader’s feelings.” [. . .]
Such a way of thinking and such a strategy is alien to the media-mind that is, disgracefully, mostly responsible at present for social commentary in this country. After all, there is no shortage of books critical of American culture. Books of political commentary and current affairs are an important part of what’s left of the book industry. Few of these books, however, are written by people you would mistake for a novelist or poet. By and large, our works of social criticism are by journalists and they’re written to an industry standard. They’re mostly a matter of partisan bickering written in a style that can’t fail to be understood by reading clubs that meet at the Starbucks café in the local Barnes and Noble. Editors, agents, critics, and readers all agree: a book is a failure if it is not understood. Which ends up meaning that it fails if it tries to provide an understanding beyond what is already well understood. Thus, books have become the enemy of understanding.
What to do, then, with a writer who seems eager not to be understood? In fact, Wylie seems to be in a hurry to demonstrate that he is not worth understanding because he is “wrong.” According to editorial assistants, book reviewers, and people who write letters to the editor, to get something wrong—even just one small thing—is to cast doubt on the whole work. Wylie’s purpose, much to the contrary, seems to be to cast doubt on doubt.
It’s not just the subtitle that seems timely . . .
Total Titles Published in 1996: 19
Countries Represented: 6
Translations Published: 4
Other Notable Titles from 1996: Island People by Coleman Dowell, Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino, Palinuro of Mexico by Fernando del Paso
1997: Killoyle by Roger Boylan
It’s quite possible that this is the most obscure, best-selling Dalkey Archive title of all-time. I mentioned above that Making of Americans is Dalkey’s 18th best-selling book, well, Killoyle is 11th. It’s the best-selling Irish book not written by Flann O’Brien. And although it’s slated to be an Essential in the not-too-distant future—at which time we’ll also hopefully bring out some more of Boylan’s work—it doesn’t receive nearly the amount of attention it deserves.
This was slightly before my time, but when I got to Dalkey Archive a few years after this was published, it was held up as a success story of what the chain stores could do for a book. Specifically, Barnes & Noble selected it for a promotion that led to thousands and thousands of sales, setting it up for long term success. (Doesn’t hurt that this is one of the funniest, drunkest books the press ever published. And the way Boylan uses footnotes is legendary and hysterical.)
Related to some earlier posts of mine, this too is an “unfinished trilogy.” The sequel, The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad: A Mostly Irish Farce was published by Grove in 2003, and the third volume, The Maladjusted Terrorist was published in German in 2007 and has been “forthcoming in English” ever since.
I think it’s time to correct all this and get the trilogy all under one roof—alongside The Adorations and some other Boylan books. I swear, if you’re a fan of raucous Irish books and/or Flann O’Brien, you need to pick this one up.
Total Titles Published in 1997: 17
Countries Represented: 6
Translations Published: 4
Other Notable Titles from 1997: Shutter of Snow by Emily Holmes Coleman, Castle to Castle by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, The Journalist by Harry Mathews
1998: Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, edited by Warren Motte
I can’t emphasize enough what an impact this particular book had on my reading life. Freshly out of college and as anti-establishment as ever, I was so thirsty for books and aesthetic approaches that eschewed the conventional, the “literary realism” that pervaded much of my college classes. Authors who broke the rules or invented new ones, who experimented.
And if there’s one group that really “experiments” with literature—in terms of form and structure, with restrictions on how a text can be created, what it can or can’t contain—it’s the Oulipo. Using formal constraints either to force the author into following a, frequently mathematical, pattern (see: the Knight’s Gambit in Life, a User’s Manual by Georges Perec), or to generate works (see: the N+7 technique, or A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems by Raymond Queneau), the works produced by this “workshop” of similarly minded friends was, for lack of any more appropriate term, experimental.
Motte’s book articulated the ins and outs of this group. The philosophies and history of how they came to be and to grow together. What the major works and techniques were. And how to read this sort of literature.
I was already a huge fan of Italo Calvino when I encountered this book, and over the next few years devoured everything I could find—starting with all the Harry Mathews and Raymond Queneau books Dalkey Archive reissued at this same time. Fortuitous, or brilliant marketing, it totally worked.
Furthermore, Warren Motte became a life-long guide to French literature. The scholarly books he wrote for Dalkey—Fables of the Novel, Fiction Now, and French Fiction Today—are the best and more entertaining way to familiarize yourself with contemporary French literature. Motte is brilliant, and one of the best academic writers of our time.
Total Titles Published in 1998: 22
Countries Represented: 4
Translations Published: 1
Other Notable Titles from 1998: Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fiedler, The Sky Changes by Gilbert Sorrentino, Excitability by Diane Williams
1999: The Terrible Twos by Ishmael Reed
First off, it totally sucks that we lost the rights to a number of Reed books, including this one. Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down was one of the very first Dalkey Essentials, and I was hoping we could reissue his full catalog over the years, since he is one of the sharpest, funniest, most sarcastic authors I’ve ever read, in which everyone and everything is a potential target. Alas . . . Fingers crossed another press is able to sign these on and do right by Reed.
Anyway, it’s almost Christmas, so why not highlight a Christmas book? Since repetition is baked into the Dalkey aesthetic, I have to say: This is the first book in a trilogy that Dalkey never finished. We did do The Terrible Threes, but The Terrible Fours is available from Baraka Books.
Everything Reed ever wrote is worth reading, and this book, which is about the “Bosses” buying Christmas, and Santa Claus and Black Peter wreaking havoc, truly is perfect for to read over the holiday season. But I want to tell a different story . . .
At the time this came out, I was working at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, North Carolina. I was ordering, buying, and reading every single Dalkey book that came out. I created an “International Fiction” section that separated translated works into the regions they came from. (Which turned out to be very good for sales, and was cited the following year when Quail Ridge was Publishers Weekly’s Bookstore of the Year.) I was one of the advisors for CONTEXT, and was already on my way to becoming the annoyed, insufferable book person I am today.
It was at this time that the American Booksellers Association launched “Booksense,” a program that would help independent bookstores work together to promote indie bookstore-esque titles, create websites to be able to compete with Amazon and Barnes & Noble, develop a gift card program whereby you could give someone credit to use at any number of bookstores across the country—stuff that more or less came to fruition decades later in the form of IndieBound, Bookshop.org, etc. But at the time was super disorganization and dysfunctional.
But the cornerstone was the bi-monthly “Booksense 76 List,” a promotional tabloid featuring 76 titles across a range of categories recommended by booksellers across the country. (Now known as the Indie Next List.) One, maybe two iterations of this came out before I was ready to tell any and everyone that it was a piece of shit.
Remember, I was pretty fresh out of college, peak rebellion, and wanting to break into the book industry which, given the time (late-90s, when everything was consolidating) and place (I had left Schuler Books & Music in Grand Rapids, MI for the South), seemed both staid and frustratingly lame.
Anyway, my argument was that the Booksense 76 list was just a replication of every book on display at Barnes & Noble, and I even did the research to prove it. The lists were filthy with corporate books that embodied exactly none of the “independent spirit” being touted. (At the time I was still learning the depths of “co-op” and other pay to play systems.) So I wrote Carl Lennertz an email telling him how dumb the publication was and that if they had any balls, they would highlight books like Ishmael Reed’s The Terrible Twos.
Carl responded diplomatically; my “review” of The Terrible Twos appeared in the next issue of the Booksense 76. And I learned the very wrong lesson that righteous bitching gets results.
Total Titles Published in 1999: 23
Countries Represented: 7
Translations Published: 6
Other Notable Titles from 1999: Heartbreak Hotel by Gabrielle Burton, Engineer of Human Souls by Josef Škvorecky, Billy and Girl by Deborah Levy
2000: Imago Bird by Nicholas Mosley
I’m not sure how I held out on writing about Mosley until now . . . Although to be honest, this is the perfect time for him to appear in this series.
Mosley is unquestionably one of the cornerstones of Dalkey Archive Press. Impossible Object, Accident, and most notably, Hopeful Monsters (which won the Whitbread Award, allowing John to sell paperback rights to Peter Dimock of Vintage for a significant sum of money) were all early Dalkey publications. And we now have twenty-four of his works in our catalog along with a scholarly book about him.
But Imago Bird was the first novel of his I ever read. Mostly because it came out at the exact time I was applying for the Apprenticeship Program (whereby you would get paid $12,000 to work for Dalkey Archive and learn everything about nonprofit publishing—a sort of “graduate school for publishing” situation) and devouring every Dalkey book I could get my hands on. (As good interns/apprentices do. I’m not as hard-ass as John was—not by a Texas mile—but I do know that the employees who work out are the ones who dive in and consume as many books and as much history as possible. Those are the ones to feed and cultivate.)
Imago Bird is the second book in the “Catastrophe Practice Series”—a set of five books that we’ll be reissuing in full over the next four years, starting with Hopeful Monsters in February 2026. It’s about Bert and his psychiatrist and trying to muddle one’s way through life and the sway of opposed political viewpoints. It has that hallmark Mosley “tic” in the way dialogue is presented. It’s provocative in terms of philosophical and religious ideas. It’s perfect for post-college book nerds. It was perfect.
There’s a lot to write about Nicholas and his wife Verity, their children, Nicholas’s relationship with his father Sir Oswald Mosley, etc., but for now I want to keep this personal. (Those posts will happen, I’m certain of that.) Namely, the very first reader’s report I ever wrote was for Mosely’s The Hesperides Tree.
John was already going to publish this no matter what some inexperienced kid had to say, but nevertheless, I read that book over the course of a workday and night and wrote my heart into a passionate report urging Dalkey Archive to sign this on.
Having John critique the first thing I wrote post-undergrad was terrifying, and in typical fashion, he didn’t hold back. And through his blunt critiques, I actually learned how to write. But there are two comments that stick with me till this day: 1) “you don’t know how to use ‘however’ correctly,” and 2) “you write with too many commas.”
After that, I was the first reader for and worked on every new Mosley book. I only mention that because, without fail, every new manuscript would be missing one page. (This is pre-PDF, pre-Word file emailed to you. I was reading fully printed and physically mailed manuscripts.) Our theory was that Nicholas and/or his agent was just testing to see if we were actually reading these books before making an offer . . . Solid test, however, it always irritated me to have to stop reading and wait for someone to fax me the missing page.
Total Titles Published in 2000: 29
Countries Represented: 8
Translations Published: 10
Other Notable Titles from 2000: Nothing by Henry Green, Hortense Is Abducted by Jacques Roubaud, The Princess of 72nd Street by Elaine Kraf
2001: Requiem by Curtis White
Without Curtis White, I’m not sure there is a Dalkey Archive Press in 2024.
That might seems like an overreaction, but aside from being the press’s most ardent supporter at Illinois State University, and being the board president for many, many years, overseeing CONTEXT and recruiting people like Thomas Frank and Mark Crispin Miller to write for it, and being one of the most well-regarded American novelists whose original works we were publishing, Curtis was, if not John’s closest friend, one of them. He helped keep John’s worst tendencies in check; he was always ready to rant and complain about culture, publishing, bookselling, whatever.
For me, at the time, meeting Curis White was the equivalent of meeting one of your idols who had previously seemed untouchable, part of another world. This was also true of David Foster Wallace, who was at Illinois State University at the time as well, but since I was so deep into Dalkey’s catalog specifically, I had read all of Curtis’s books: The Idea of Home (a Sun & Moon book at the time), Monstrous Possibility: An Invitation to Literary Politics, Memories of My Father Watching TV, Metaphysics in the Midwest, Anarcho-Hindu . . . And his mixture of stylistic innovation, incredible humor (his essay on attending BEA is amazing), semi-autobiographical elements, non-tradition ways of looking at things, and sharp as nails attacks on mainstream media and thought was right over the middle of the plate for me. (Curtis also loves baseball. But the Giants, so . . .)
And then to just meet him at a casual dinner? As a book-obsessed 24-year-old from a podunk town in the midwest, this was mind-blowing.
And then to help marketing, promote, and provide some feedback on what is, in my opinion, his best book? This was the ultimate achievement for Young Chad. (Even though I’m old and jaded, I still remember that buzz, that excitement.)
Curtis’s work is always concerned with what it means to be human and to be a humanist, and he explores that in full here. It’s a book that’s driven by its structure—very Dalkey Archive—brings together biographies of musicians, philosophy, and a takedown of Terri Gross and the “middle-mind” nature of NPR, and includes a character named Chad—the boyfriend of a online amateur porn star.
I feel like every time Curtis finishes a book, he says that it’s his last one—and thank god he’s always been wrong. His Dalkey titles are awesome, as is The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves (which is sort of If Books Could Kill before If Books Could Kill) and all his Melville House titles.
Sorry, no funny stories here, just a bit of a gush. And I did get to travel with Curtis on a number of occasions, during which we bonded over Olivia Tremor Control. And I once scheduled him to do a reading on Super Bowl Sunday, which, whoops: Do Not Advise.
Oh, and Curtis wrote the opening section to the unpublished novel that John O’Brien spent his last few years writing and rewriting, deconstructing Curtis’s section to create a sort of fugue that is funny and dirty and terribly heart wrenching.
Total Titles Published in 2001: 21
Countries Represented: 6
Translations Published: 4
Other Notable Titles from 2001: Talking by David Antin, Berg by Ann Quin, Zoo, or Letters Not about Love by Viktor Shklovsky
2002: In Transit by Brigid Brophy
Although this was a rather light year in terms of total books, the list was totally loaded. And includes a number of books that were reprinted in large part because John and I would wander around the press’s immense library, picking up various books that he’d gotten over the years—either as submissions to the Review of Contemporary Fiction book reviews section, or because someone told him to check a particular author out, or from back when he wrote more reviews himself—and taking them home to see if maybe they were worthy of rediscovery.
I was in a unique position at this time, doing both marketing and editorial and becoming—along with Martin Riker—John’s right-hand man and sounding board. So, in a way, if I loved a book AND thought I could market it, there was a pretty good chance we would do it. Even if we both knew the sales would be modest at best.
Selling reprints back in 2002 was still novel and hard to get coverage for. But since I was calling every legit independent store—and meeting with Barnes & Noble and Borders, and pitching to every media outlet like the New York Times and Harper’s and The Nation—we were pretty well suited to do as much face-to-face direct marketing as possible. By reducing the number of middlemen (we’re awash in them today thanks to Ingram and Consortium and modern times and it definitely curtails the potential for the majority of books in several ways), we were able to make this work.
We sold more than 1,000 copies of In Transit, a textually experimental book about being stuck in an airport written by an female Irish writer very few Americans had heard of. Same for Nelly’s Version by Eva Figes (a book I adore) and for Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things. Not to mention Iceland by Jim Krusoe, an original novel that did amazingly well before setting me on my current path of hating almost every literary agent. (I’ll never forget leaving Jim’s agent’s office after they tried to fuck us over on his next book and just wanting to take a shower.) I mean, Italian Stories by Joseph Papaleo, a wonderful Italian-American short story writer and Sarah Lawrence prof that very few people knew of sold 4,000 copies.
This might seem small to anyone not in the industry, but as I look into the database for 2001-2006 . . . it was a different time. For me, personally, this was the peak moment of bookstores and book culture.
Total Titles Published in 2002: 18
Countries Represented: 5
Translations Published: 3
Other Notable Titles from 2002: Human Country by Harry Mathews, Flotsam & Jetsam by Aidan Higgins, Magnetic Field(s) by Ron Loewinsohn
2003: The Celebration by Ivan Ângelo, translated from the Brazilian Portuguese by Thomas Colchie
I wonder if twenty-thirty years from now, some young aspiring editor will walk through the halls of a library as their mentor points out various obscure and forgotten authors and books, while praising the editorial vision: “XXXX did such good books, they’re definitely worth looking into.”
That was my experience with John. Learning about Quartet Books (first publishers of Heartsnatcher by Boris Vian, of Palinuro of Mexico by Fernando del Paso, of The Demons by Heimito von Doderer) and Aventura and Avon’s weird mass market line of Latin American titles.
This literary lineage, this passing down from editor to editor, temporary imprint to temporary imprint, is the real history of book culture.
From among those Avon books, it was The Celebration and Zero by Igancio de Loyola Brandão that really spoke to me. The Celebration because of its three part, triptych structure—which was missing its center. For most of the book, we get these vignettes that are moving, funny, incredibly engaging, all “before the celebration.” Then, in the back quarter of the book, where the outer margins of the pages have black edges, we get all the details of what happened to these characters “after the celebration.” By necessity this creates an active reader, and, because it’s so masterfully done, is as emotionally engaging as it is intellectually. (Future Essential??)
Ted McDermott—a former Marketing Assistant for Dalkey Archive—wrote a wonderful piece about this book in CONTEXT No. 19 (will someone please invest in a relaunch of CONTEXT?) that does a much better job of explaining the power of this short novel:
You can see something of Borges in The Celebration: in the way that the central event of the book—the event that gives it its title—is absent from its pages. You can see something of Cortázar in the way the chronology coils around and crosses over itself. You can see something of Nabokov in the fictional annotations that retell the story from an entirely new vantage, implying an endless number of other versions as yet untold. You can see something of Barth in the stylistic variations. You can see something of Machado de Assis, Osman Lins, and Ignacio Loyola Brandao in the peculiarly Brazilian integration of remarkable formal innovation and social and political engagement.
You can see all of this, but what’s most apparent, and most important, is that Ângelo has written a book unlike any other. [. . .]
The novel begins with “A Short Documentary (the city and the interior, 1970).” The city is Belo Horizonte. The interior is the Brazilian Northeast. The documentary is comprised of excerpts from newspapers, leaflets, police testimony, a letter to the editor, books, a birth certificate, “a popular Northeastern ballad of 1952,” speeches, and a report from the “Sugar Refineries Association.”
Some of these are actual historical documents, while others are invented; it’s impossible to distinguish between the two. Together, they describe the riot that exploded on the night of March 30, 1970 and continued into the next morning. There is a “flashback” to documents from earlier moments in Brazilian history, showing us the events that made the riot unavoidable.
Severe drought, government corruption, prolonged disenfranchisement, and poverty have combined with a host of unstated, alluded to, and unparaphrasable events and prejudices to bring Macrionílio de Mattos, a fifty-year-old former outlaw from the Northeast, and Samuel Aparecido Fereszin, a reporter in Belo Horizonte, to the fore of a “highly organized group” of peasants marching toward riot police.
That’s the first chapter. In fourteen pages, we’ve covered 120 years. We’ve been dropped into the midst not only of Brazilian history, but also into a miniature war.
Then we turn the page and read the title of the next chapter: “Thirtieth Anniversary . . . Pearls.” The next page is only occupiedby a single word, “Husband,” down in the lower right corner. We turn again and read:
“—I have so much to do tomorrow.It was some time ago that she began this business of making plans for tomorrow. But tomorrow she’s going to die.”
[. . .]
It’s hard to know what to say about The Celebration, a book that is so clearly a masterpiece, a book that you read with wide, uncritical eyes, a book that strikes you initially as perfect, and only improves after that. An essay in praise of The Celebration is like the hook that hangs a painting: it might help to get it noticed, but won’t add anything to the beauty of the work itself. If you will only notice it, the book will do the rest.
That’s the real goal: find amazing books, and then provide the hook that hangs the painting.
Total Titles Published in 2003: 20
Countries Represented: 8
Translations Published: 10
Other Notable Titles from 2003: Garden, Ashes by Danilo Kiš, The Inquisitory by Robert Pinget, Thank You for Not Reading by Dubravka Ugresic
More on Monday . . . My (first) time at Dalkey wraps up, translations ramp up, and Dalkey continues to produce some of the best literature of the past 40 years. Have a great weekend!