Last Minute Addition: As I went to send this out, I saw that a Dorothy book, The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam by Lana Lim, is longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction!! Congrats to all, and perfect timing for this piece . . .
Below please find a piece that Martin Riker—author of Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return and The Guest Lecture, co-founder and co-publisher of Dorothy, a publishing project, and former Dalkey Archive employee, all around great literary citizen—wrote about Dorothy’s latest publication, The Endless Week by Laura Vazquez, translated from the French by Alex Niemi.
This is a book that I’ve been anticipating ever since it appeared on Dorothy’s website, and this piece only stokes those fires!
If you aren’t already familiar with Dorothy, you may want to spend some time (and money) with their catalog.1 They are truly one of the most elegant publishers out there, doing high-quality books in such a thoughtful, considered way. From the editing to the cover design to the modest way in which they drop these total bangers year in and year out—Dorothy is a testament to what small press publishing can be.
On The Endless Week by Laura Vazquez
by Martin Riker
I’d written to Chad to say how impressed I’ve been with this “Mining the Dalkey Archive” project. It’s one thing to relaunch a book—certainly Dalkey Archive has a long tradition of it—but trying to build a new audience for an entire backlist is a heavy lift, and this particular effort seems a model for how that sort of thing can be done.
So, I’d written to say I thought this series was great, but also to tell him about The Endless Week by Laura Vazquez, translated (very brilliantly) by Alex Niemi, a debut novel coming out from Dorothy, the press my wife Danielle and I run. I thought Chad would be interested because the novel makes me think, for different reasons, of a number of Dalkey books: Ourednik’s Europeana, Levé’s Autoportrait (a little). Also Gerald Murnane, in the sense that both writers seem to reinvent literature from the ground up. So when Chad turned around and asked if I wanted to write something about The Endless Week for “Mining the Dalkey Archive,” even though it is not a book published by Dalkey Archive, that made its own kind of sense.
There is no surprising origin story. The Endless Week was sent to us by the translator during our short submissions period. Other than Laura Vazquez being a celebrated French poet (winner of the Prix Goncourt), there was really just the sample itself. Later, I would come to love many aspects of Alex Niemi’s extraordinary English translation, but the moment I was first won by this book was a sentence halfway through the opening paragraph:
A head doesn’t just fall off, it can’t fall off. It’s connected to a thin string that goes all the way down to a person’s feet, and if the head falls, so does everything else. You should avoid breaking your head, but you can break your limbs. When you break a limb, you remember the limb is there. When a tooth gets infected, it vibrates inside, almost as if it’s speaking. When you pinch your hand, it suddenly appears. If a person puts an eye out, it becomes the main thing about them.
If you are someone for whom that last line seems almost impossibly perfect, then you are likely to share our love of this book and our amazement at Vazquez’s and Niemi’s accomplishment. In some ways, the entire 278-page novel is an extended performance of the balancing act in these fourteen words.
“If a person puts an eye out, it becomes the main thing about them.”
By calling this sentence a balancing act, I’m saying there are forces at work within the sentence itself, a perpetual push and pull that the sentence is trying to hold together. It seems very simple to say what these forces might be: the extreme violence of “puts an eye out” versus the shocking mundanity of “main thing about them,” or how the offered observation is simultaneously over- and underwhelming, and also, notably, true. But diagnosing the sentence’s energy source in this way also feels a little doomed, like trying to anatomize Kafka.
In fact Kafka is a touchstone for Vazquez—there’s an interview where she talks about the importance of Kafka for her work—but the writer who really explores the teeter of a sentence in the way I am describing is not Kafka but Beckett, particularly in his novels and stories. I mean the Beckett of sentences like “Everyone is a parent, that is what keeps you from hoping” and “I like parsnips because they taste like violets and violets because they smell like parsnips,” vaudeville standalones that are funny and/or devastating and are also syntactical riddles in the most enjoyable way.
There’s an element of defamiliarization—defined here as art’s capacity to show the world stripped of the “meanings” that repetition and culture have buried it under—to sentences so normal-seeming yet so new. Perhaps in part because she’s a poet, Vazquez is a consummate defamiliarizer. She comes to prose and paragraphs and to characters and narrative structure so stripped of common assumptions about how they “ought” to operate that nothing she writes reads pre-written or pre-seen. Even the most banal observations are being observed for the first time. And while I don’t think this project of defamiliarization is an accident—that is, I believe Vazquez knows what she’s doing—yet in a kind of wonderful and surprising way, it doesn’t quite feel intentional either. Too smart to be childlike, it’s more like she is aware of how the world is usually seen and thought about and described, she just doesn’t care.
Despite the joy I take in the sentences, the narrative materials of Vazquez’s novel—the characters, the scenes, the stories, for it has those things as well—are often disturbing, or cut quickly between moments that are beautiful or heartbreaking and moments that are harrowing or repulsive, a juxtaposition that can itself be fairly disturbing. A feeling of “distance,” of nothing in this world being nurturing and everything serving as an object of scrutiny, surrounds characters who struggle to meaningfully navigate their mostly mediated realities. The combined result—the tone—is not exactly wonder, nor condemnation, nor is it in any way flat, as alienation is often rendered in literature. It’s estranging, but with electricity in its veins.
A friend recently texted me, after reading The Endless Week: “I mostly had no idea what was going on plotwise and yet her sentences are so freaking good and weird and funny that I cared not at all. Like this actually feels like a new kind of novel.”
Not going to go overboard, but if you need recommendations of some books to check out, here are a few personal favorites: The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington, The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza & Suzanne Jill Levine & Aviva Kana, Vertigo by Joanna Walsh, The Weight of Things by Marianne Fritz & Adrian Nathan West, In the Time of the Blue Ball by Manuela Draeger & Brian Evenson with Valerie Evenson, Fra Keeler by azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, any book by Renee Gladman . . .