The Alpine "Trilogy"

The first of three posts about "unfinished trilogies," although it's likely I'll never get around to writing the third.

I have a bit of housekeeping before getting into this installment of “Reading the Dalkey Archive,” which, to pull back the curtain a bit, is on its third complete rewrite, has been driving me insane, and is probably trying to wedge together too many things that don’t fit. But at least it introduces three books that you hopefully haven’t already read?

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Anyway, just wanted to post a reminder that season 23 of the Two Month Review podcast covering Alasdair Gray’s Lanark is going strong, with three episodes left. For anyone unfamiliar with the podcast, each season we take one long, intimidating book and talk about ~65 pages a week, breaking it down, providing entry points to access these modern classics, doing some low level literary analysis, and just having fun. (Stay tuned though: we might be fooling around with the format and doing some one-off “seasons.”)All past episodes—including the first six on Lanark—can be found on the Three Percent website, on YouTube, and on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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As many of you likely know, after a, what, three-year delay?, we finally got the Dalkey Archive Essentials edition of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young printed and out into the world. (I don’t know that I have it in me to write a post about that book—although maybe I will when Angel in the Forest drops—but the process of scanning that book, fixing the OCR version, having approximately 45 different students and volunteers proof it is epic.) 

Anyway, to celebrate the launch, Lori Feathers (writer, podcaster, and bookstore owner) and Anthony Garrett (novelist and editor of atmospheric quarterly) launched “Involutions of the Seashell,” an epistolary conversation about the novel as they both work their way through it. Definitely worth subscribing to—especially if you’re at all Young curious.

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Finally, since this can be a bit tricky to figure out—especially if you’re not in the business—here’s a list of all the new Dalkey Archive publications scheduled for July and August:

Sexology by Alex Kovacs (7/2)

Marshland by Otohiko Kaga (7/9)

Zoo, or Letters Not about Love (Essentials Edition) by Viktor Shklovsky (7/16)

Commission of Tears by António Lobo Antunes (7/30)

The Third Policeman (Essentials Edition) by Flann O’Brien (8/6)

The Mahler Erasures by John Kinsella (8/27)

All of these are wonderful, and in future posts, I’m definitely going to be writing about The Third Policeman on the TV show Lost story, Shklovsky’s influence on Dalkey’s aesthetic, and my multi-decade obsession with António Lobo Antunes. And if I ever get my shit truly together, I’ll have John Kinsella on the Three Percent Podcast to talk about his trilogy. (In a post about unfinished trilogies, it’s a fine irony that I can assure you that the third volume of Kinsella’s IS coming out next year.)

OK, let’s get at it.

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Christian Lorentzen’s recent piece in Granta, “Literature without Literature,” reminded me that I need to finish reading Mark McGurl’s Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon. (Actually, I think I want to go back and read the McGurl Trilogy of Fiction Creation in order: The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction After Henry James, Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, and then Everything and Less.) When it first came out, I was obsessed with this book. Definitely one of the best books about the publishing world to come out in the past few years, and the focus on Amazon’s influence on writing—particularly how Amazon values abundance and uses its “if you like X, you’ll like Y” algorithm to tear down barriers between types of fiction—is right in line with so much of the stuff I’ve written for Three Percent.

In fact, some of the ideas from Everything and Less play into the core concepts of the Dalkey book I’m working on. Mainly, how a collection such as Dalkey’s—one that’s patently non-commerical—can find traction in a world that is totally overwhelmed by product, resulting in titles that sell a ton (which helps land them on lists like the New York Times “100 Best Books of the Century,” which features 100 books that sold quite well), or sell basically nothing. Contrary to the scene twenty years ago, it’s near impossible to thread the needle and “successfully” publish a title with passably modest sales. It’s all or nothing in this world dominated by the “blockbuster model.”

Another aspect of Everything and Less that captivated me (before I set it aside to finish editing one or twelve books, all due ASAP) were all the bits about trilogies and how these were “the most characteristic of contemporary literary forms.” I hadn’t really thought of it before, but there’s an abundance of trilogies out there—especially in genre fiction. Think Fifty Shades of Grey, Twilight, Hunger Games, Lord of the Rings. But there’s Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy (discussed in the book), Jeff VanderMeer’s “The Southern Reach Trilogy,” Jan Kjærstad’s “Wergeland Trilogy," which Open Letter published ages ago (well, volumes two and three), Rodrigo Fresán’s “Part Trilogy” (The Invented Part, The Dreamed Part, The Remembered Part), and Marías’s Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, to name just a few. 

To the best of my memory and knowledge, McGurl approaches this from a structural point of view, of how books are now distributed, and not from a neurological, “what part of our lizard brains is triggered by trilogies?” perspective. But, speaking for myself, there’s something there. 

Which is why, when I was organizing my Dalkey Library, putting together this definitive list of publications (which I’ll update with 2024 and 2025 books soon), and trying to find more obscure Dalkey titles to write about, I immediately set aside all the trilogies I could find. Well, almost trilogies. See, there’s a weird set of trilogies for which Dalkey only ever published the first two volumes. Which is maybe more compelling!

There’s Eimar O’Duffy’s “Cuanduine Trilogy” (which I started reading and god damn this book is funny—expect a post soon), which was originally published back the late 1920s and early 30s (King Goshawk and the Birds in 1926, The Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street in 1928, and Asses in Clover in 1933), and yet, after reissuing the first volumes, Dalkey never got around to Asses. 

And then there’s the S-Trilogy by Stig Sæterbakken, which is particularly strange to me. John O’Brian and Stig were very close, right up until Stig’s suicide, and when John and I reconnected, he went on and on to me about how fantastic—and bleak—Stig’s books were. Truly dedicated to Sæterbakken, John signed on ten of his books, but, in typical Dalkey fashion, only five ever came out. He started with Siamese in 2010—a book we signed on while I was still there that’s wonderfully dark and funny—and which is the first volume of the S-Trilogy. Self-Control, the second, came out in 2012. So far, so good. But then, for reasons unknown to me at this time, John switched gears, and instead of bringing out the final volume of this triptych, Sauermugg, he went on to do three unrelated books: Invisible Hands, Through the Night, and Don’t Leave Me. All of which are incredible, yes, but don’t complete the trilogy! (Spoiler: We’re working on rectifying this. Be on the lookout for reissues of volumes one and two over the next couple years, then we’ll close this out.) 

And then we get to Arno Camenisch’s “Alpine Trilogy.” Once again, rights were acquired to all three books, and the first two—The Alp and Behind the Station, both translated by Donal McLaughlin—came out in 2014, but then . . . nothing. Last Last Orders (the third book) is referenced over and over in the jacket copy, in advertisements, even on Bookshop.org, but it never has materialized. 

All three of these “unfinished trilogies” are intriguing to me, but something about Camenisch has been calling to me for years. And given that I’m working on a section of my book about funding structures and expected sales (xSales should be a new publishing stat), this one jumped to the top of my list.

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Before getting into the books themselves—which are truly lovely and add something to the neverending question of “what makes a Dalkey book a Dalkey book?”—I want to digress and talk about sales, funding, and revenue.

First off, here’s a spoiler: To date, not one of three titles discussed below has sold more than 400 net copies. To steal a bit from Letterkenny, that’s “fucking embarrassing.” Sure poor sales happen, and we should normalize being honest about how unimpressive sales numbers are for most books, but this one stings a bit seeing that these were included in the Swiss Literature Series—a funding and promotion scheme in which Dalkey tried to do everything right. The juicier parts of my book will be about the more unhinged funding schemes John came up with—and the repercussions that arose from his shenanigans—but from what I can find (so far), this particular one seems on the up and up. 

Based on a draft of a “Memorandum of Agreement” that’s edited both by John and Angelika Salvisberg of Pro Helvetia, Pro Helvetia agreed to provide approximately $170,000 for Dalkey to publish 10-12 Swiss books between 2011 and 2014. This would cover editorial, production, design, and promotional expenses. Additionally, there was funding for a year one project in which Dalkey commissioned 40 samples of Swiss books that would also be made available on Pro Helvetia’s website for other publishers to peruse. Additionally additionally, Pro Helvetia would pay the translators separately for the titles they did for Dalkey. (There’s a pretty high percentage of Dalkey translators who would welcome this, since getting money out of Dalkey has always been an issue.)

That’s a solid plan. A year of research that could help lift Swiss Lit with other publishers. Money going into the pockets of translators. All the core publishing expenses paid for. After this, it’s all about execution.

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As referenced above, in terms of actually bringing out the books, Dalkey went above and beyond the 10-12 book commitment. Sure, John grandfathered the two Max Frisch books we reissued way back when (I’m Not Stiller, Man in the Holocene) into the Swiss Literature Series, but still, 17 titles is pretty impressive. I haven’t read many of these, but the ones I have, including the Camenisch titles and Noëlle Revaz’s With the Animals (which was longlisted for the 2013 Best Translated Book Award) are fantastic.

A number of books from this series are on my “to read” shelf, starting with Markus Werner’s Zündel’s Exit and Cold Shoulder (and then the two books of his, one of which is forthcoming, from NYRB), and also including Giovanni Orelli’s Walaschek's Dream, Urs Allemann’s The Old Man and the Bench (I can’t think of a more John-esque title for a book), Zsuzsanna Gahse’s Volatile Texts: Us Two, and Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s Tynset. 

The thing about Dalkey’s backlist is that it seems endless, and there are—no exaggeration—hundreds of titles that are brilliant, yet didn’t get their due. Which is due, at least in part, to how few copies Dalkey was able to get out into the market when these titles first appeared.

John always had a weird relationship to marketing. He admitted over and again that the DNA of Dalkey prioritized editorial over marketing, and even though he made a lot of explicit overtures trying to change this—making sure everyone in the office got the Daily Sales report so that we could know exactly how things were going, posting the chart of Life-to-Date Best-Selling titles in the breakroom, endlessly talking about how to hire the right person for marketing—there was an undercurrent that sales success was sort of dirty. 

Yes, The Third Policeman sold tens of thousands of books thanks to one well-crafted marketing push. And Wittgenstein’s Mistress helped float the press for quite a while. (As Voices from Chernobyl did years later, and as Fosse does now.) But there are only 19 titles in Dalkey’s catalog that have sold over 10,000 net units. Out of almost 1,000 titles. Part of this is a sustained lack of support for marketing and sales, part of it is the shape of the industry and its disinterest in the sort of literature Dalkey publishes, and part of it is because John pursued books that wouldn’t have wide appeal.

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That said, John always took the long view of sales, and this shaped Dalkey’s overall business strategy.

Most presses—especially commercial ones—are focused almost exclusively on a book’s sales in the first eighteen months after it’s published. If it does well enough, it gets a paperback edition, or at least stays in print; if it sells 400 copies, it’s remaindered and lost to history. 

That’s shifted a bit thanks to digital short run printing—why not keep a book locked and loaded in a system like Ingram’s Lightning Source so you don’t need to warehouse extra copies, can print 10-20 copies anytime you need them, and retain rights relatively cheaply?—but still, very few publishers think about sales in terms of decades rather than years. But John believed in the concept that great books would be rediscovered long after their initial foray into the marketplace, that these books were being preserved for future generations who would rejuvenate them every so often.

That’s happened recently with Ron Loewinsohn’s Magnetic Field(s), which I was responsible for reissuing in 2002 to very mediocre sales, but has suddenly become a cult classic.

Sure, a book might sell 400 copies in its first few years of publication, but twenty years down the road—by keeping it in print and giving it a marketing lift every so often—it’ll reach 2-3,000. Theoretically.

And if you’re successful with this strategy for bumping certain backlist titles every so often (or having them randomly become TikTok sensations due to a TV show or a song) then you can create a situation in which a large backlist—say 1,000 titles—could essentially fund every single risk you want to take on new books. 

John was obsessed with this idea. He would generate budget after budget, all in his very janky Excel spreadsheets (people who can’t use Excel correctly drive me totally nuts, but) based on having a backlist that sold an average of 75 copies per title per year. Or 125. What if we could get it to 200 by strategically focusing on the titles selling the best, the stores that loved us, and a handful of hand-selected future classics? 

These numbers were totally aspirational (what in publishing isn’t?), but in terms of the actual numbers, in 2023, the average backlist sales were around 50 net units per title and the Essentials titles plus normal backlist accounted for 86.18% of all sales last year. And 78.36% in 2022. Backlist is King. 

But how do you facilitate the rediscovery of these lost books when there are, literally, a couple million new books available for sale on Amazon every year?

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I suppose this newsletter is one way. To which end: please buy The Alp, Behind the Station, and beheading the virgin mary, and other stories. I’ll give you some good reasons below. But if by gassing these up we were to start selling even 25 copies of each every year, then before I die (fingers crossed), we’ll hit a reasonable number of life-to-date sales for these little gems.

Another way that John envisioned these overlooked gems finding an audience was via CONTEXT magazine. I’ve written about this before, so I won’t belabor its importance here, but shit, if you take Issue No. 24 (PDF is free to download) as an example of the whole enterprise . . . this sort of quixotic, strange publication just doesn’t exist anymore. But we need it now more than ever.

Sure, sure the Arno Camenisch lead article (also translated by Donal McLaughlin) is why I’m including this, but that banner is where the gold is. “Arts Council England Backs Off Supporting Translations: Full Story to Follow in Next Issue of CONTEXT” is 1000% John burning bridges and taking shots. Clearly, the Arts Council never backed off of supporting international literature—they backed off of funding Dalkey. These sort of ad hominem attacks run throughout CONTEXT’s history and, in retrospect, are kind of funny. (Man, it occurs to me now that John would’ve left behind an incredible Twitter timeline, if only.) And, as is only fitting, that “story” following up on this accusation never came into existence. 

Anyway, the Camenisch article! 

In June 2012, Rachel McNicholl moderated a panel at the Dublin Writers Festival that included Swiss novelist Arno Camenisch. She asked the participants what expectations they have of their reader. Camenisch redirected the conversation by saying that, rather than placing an emphasis on either writer or reader, the text itself has expectations. The editors of CONTEXT asked him to expand on his remark.

His response—“the text itself has expectations”—is pitch perfect for a festival. Chef’s kiss on being ever so slightly provocative and vague enough to be captivating. I’m legit jealous. I can imagine so well how the audience reacted. Brilliance. 

Anyway, Camenisch’s explanation of this remark is much more elusive than you might expect. What he wrote is a story about the author and the reader stuck on a chairlift at a ski slope. For hours. The author smokes, the reader shoehorns his ex-wife into the conversation over and over. (“My ex-wife always said: if you drink, you’re also allowed to be drunk” is also killer.) Eventually they talk about books (boldface mine): 

What do you want to do now, asks the author. You’re asking the wrong questions, says the reader. Oh really, asks the author, should I ask how your mother is? No, no, says the reader, think more practically, it’s just like with a text: what’s it about? With a text, asks the author, with respect, do you really want to talk about texts? Naturally, says the reader, we’re stuck here anyhow. Well, if you like, says the author, what the text is about is what the text wants, there’s nothing else to it, says the author, happy now? It’s you that’s saying it, so don’t be asking me what I want, says the reader, it’s not about what the reader wants. And it’s not about what the author wants either, says the author, the only question is: what the text wants. It opens up your brain, as only via this question can you get to the text behind the text.  [. . .]

So you don’t want to say anymore, the reader asks. The author shakes his head. Which would mean: those were your last words, asks the reader. This morning, when I drove up the road to the skiing area, I lost my tailpipe, says the author. That’s interesting, says the reader, I understand, it’s all a question of attitude, you are your text, you wrote that once too. Now stop, says the author. No, no, says the reader, say nothing for once, after all you yourself said that there’s also nothingness. You can’t see the ground even, haven’t you noticed, says the author, looking up again. And nothingness begins where you make the cut, says the reader, it’s not so important where the notes begin, more crucial is where the notes end. Have you quite finished, asks the author. No, not quite, says the reader, you did after all also write that what it’s all about is not what is, but what isn’t, the groove is in the void, now I understand, says the reader. It’s not about understanding everything, mumbles the author. What did you say, asks the reader. Nothing, says the author. 

Camenisch isn’t the first to talk about silences within texts, or self-organizing texts, or books that operate outside of readerly desires and authorial control, but what’s key to me, to this piece, is that this short allegorical piece reinforced my desire to read his novels. What type of silences exist in his text? What demands do the novels have? How does “the groove is in the void” manifest itself?

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Here are the opening paragraphs of The Alp, a novel that consists of standalone paragraphs. Sure, there are consistent characters—the dairyman, farmhand, cowherd, and swineherd—but nothing really happens in this book. Summer happens. Farming shit happens. A world is depicted in all of its diurnal glory. This is a book to live in:

The dairyman’s hanging form a paraglider, in the red first below the hut. He has his back to the mountain, is facing the range across the valley where, shoulder to shoulder, peak after peak rises, Piz Tumpiv at the center, all 3,101 meters of it, that amazing presence it has, outdoing the other—snowless—peaks. He’ll come down when he’s ready, his farmhand says. Let him wriggle for another while. That’ll teach him not to clear the trees.

The cheese is swelling. During the night, the stone weights crash to the floor, wakening everyone. The swineherd and the cowherd carry the over-ripened cheeses through the clear night, across the yard, through the cowshed, to behind the cowshed, and dump them in the slurry. Neither the dairyman nor his farmhand budges to help. They stay where they are in the doorway, their hands in their pockets.

The blend of specificities—the 3,101 meters, the location of the slurry—and vagueries—how did the dairyman end up in a tree? Is this something he does often? Is he safe up there? Why did the cheese go bad? And why isn’t the dairyman helping with the disposal process?—run throughout both of these novels. In place of a traditionally plotted book with a Big Bad and a climax, these books are a collection of little stories, à la Guillermo Saccomanno’s Gesell Dome, although 1/1000000th as violent. 

Both The Alp and Behind the Station benefit from slow reading. Even though each book is just over 80 pages, it took me days to read each one. There’s no need to rush ahead, there’s nothing the books really build toward. And in that way, they’re quite subversive. And slyly funny. Such as in these paragraphs which, in a way, are about the only villains to be found: tourists and relatives. 

Around the corner of the hut comes a man with big hands. He asks for the dairyman. He’s just gone off, and his farmhand, he’s not here. The man waits, walks over to the pigpen before the mountain backdrop, come back after a while. When will the dairyman be back, he’s taking a while, can I try the cheese while I wait, no, the swineherd says. He’s the dairyman’s uncle, you see, the man with the big hands says, and he’d like to try the cheese. The swineherd shakes his head. Could he have a coffee, at least. The swineherd says he’s not allowed to let anyone into the hut. The man gets up from the wooden bench with the engraved plaque outside the hut. He really has to go now, had come over Sez Ner especially to try the cheese. The swineherd sticks to his guns.

The village policeman’s at the door, asking to see the dairyman. The farmhand says me he’s not here. The dairyman, as is well known, broke the finger of a tourist, a highly respectd politician from the lowlands, incidentally, with the skimmer. He needs to take a statement. The village policeman goes over to the pigpen. He takes his hat off, looks across at the mountain panorama and nods. Seeing as he’s here already, and if he has to wait anyhow, could he have a glass of milk and a piece of cheese, he asks the farmhand.

Behind the Station employs the same aesthetic strategy, although instead of following four farmers over the course of a season, this book focuses on two young brothers through whose viewpoint we get a general sense of the very tiny town that they live in.

This book, which was written in a particular dialect, is in keeping with The Alp, but also has a slightly different tone that’s a bit more childish, a bit more loose.

The Rhine gobbles up moles and footballs. The balls get out under the fence and bounce over the stones and into the Rhine. My brother’s up to his navel in the Rhine, trying to get our ball back out with a stick. Do you two want to drown eh, Gionclau shouts. He has an axe in his hand. Heavensake, you going to get out of these eh, he shouts. At the end of every sentence Gionclau says eh. If you’re speaking to Gionclau, you have to say eh at the end of every sentence too. No, we don’t eh, we just need to get our ball out eh. Okay, so get out eh, or do you want a clip round the ear eh. No, Gionclau eh. I hold my hand out ot my brother and whisper, Gionclau’s coming eh. The Rhine has gobbled up lots of children before eh, Gionclau shouts, don’t go thinking eh, you wouldn’t be the first eh. He goes over to his barn. He looks back and shakes his head. We can hear him still grumbling.

It’s impossible to fully analyze the links that bind the three books of the trilogy without being able to read them all, but it seems like Behind the Station provides a physical locale that ties together at least the last two books: namely, the Helvezia, a local bar and gathering space, which celebrates it’s 100^thbirthday in Behind the Station, and permanently closes in Last Last Orders. (Which is apparently written like a play? And involves alcohol that “flows like the Rhine” on the bar’s final day. Again: sign me up! Writing this only makes me want the third volume that much more.)

It’s the Helvezia’s birthday—it’s a hundred years old. My aunt has decorated the Helvezia with garlands; they’re hanging above the door, on the door and round the windows, garlands in all different colors. The celebration will be fabulous, said Giacasep, who helped put up the platform for the politician from the next village who is coming to tell stories about the Helvezia. Straight out of a fairy-tale book he is, with his big shoes and red nose. The Swiss flag is hanging on the platform. When evening comes and all the people from the village arrive, all the food is ready in the Helvezia, and the band lines up in the car park. The conductor moves his hand and his little stick, and the band plays the birthday march. They play three beautiful songs next and the people applaud and they lay their instruments aside and sit down at the tables. It’s time for the politician, Giachen says to Giacasep, let’s see what he’s going to say this time. We’d have more to say about the Helvezia than this guy presumably, he says. That’s prestige for you, at celebrations you have to let the politicus speak. The guy in the tie speaks so helluva long that Nonna shouts out that the people are hungry. At the end, my aunt gets a bouquet of flowers and kisses, puts the bouquet in the kitchen beside the meat grinder, and, ready-steady-go, the guzzling commences.

Sitting somewhere between Beckett and Fosse, Camenisch’s style is understated and remarkable. These books are such a joy to read, quiet and simple and not at all stressful. Even if you might not know anyone else who has read these—or has even heard of them—they are delightful and have an emotional pull that might not completely come through in the above quotes, but hovers over the texts.

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When I first started thinking about writing this post, I assumed that with a little bit of digging, I would find out that the reason Last Last Orders never came into being was because John pissed off the translator, Donal McLaughlin. This would be par for the course and totally believeable.

But that’s not what happened! Instead, McLaughlin—whom I don’t know, so this is a bit of researched speculation—pulled a Bartleby and said “no” to literature. (Hints of Enrique Vila-Matas, whose spirit hovers over so many of these posts.) Instead of finishing Last Last Orders, he went off grid, stopped replying to anyone’s emails, and apparently quit writing. 

Which sucks. Having just finished his collection that Dalkey brought out, I’m aching for more, to see what he’s up to now, a decade later.

Half of the pieces in beheading the virgin mary, and other stories are about Liam, the eldest of seven kids whose family emigrated from Derry in Northern Ireland to Scotland. The stories about Liam show him growing up, starting in 1968 when he’s 7 and ending in 1979 when, at 18, he travels to Knock with his relatives to see the Pope. 

Similar to the Camenisch books he translated, McLaughlin’s stories are also very language-centric, and beg you to read slowly and savor the worlds he creates. A good example of the pyrotechnics McLaughlin employs throughout this book can be found in this paragraph in which Liam is in church and realizes that he stepped in poop. His first attempt to wipe it off doesn’t work so well, but he’s determined:

A friggin disaster, his second go—using the bits that were clean still—was. He should’ve known, should’ve realized, the youngfella: first time trying this or not, ye shouldn’t expect to lift more shit cleanly wi a hankie full of a first lot. Shitty hankie or not, he’d hoped but to cup it round the mush, then fold the second lot in on the first. He hadn’t a hope in hell, needless to say. When it came to the bit, didn’t he miss some of the second lot; some of what he did manage to lift went over his fingers & to top things off, the buckin thing tore. There was shit now on the outside ‘n’ all. Shit all over the crumbled edges.

Every sentence in this paragraph is a joy and all the little flourishes add up to a unique voice that constructs a very specific dialect. Here’s Colum McCann talking about that exact thing:

The language is consistent and wonderful, evoking something I have not yet seen in our literature—the meld of Scottish and Northern Irish. It’s both a chasm and a bridge . . . I feel like I have stepped into a secret, although I’m not entirely sure what secrets I should or should not know.

My favorite story in the collection is actually one of the non-Liam ones, “the way to a man’s heart,” about a guy who drives “the length of Scotland [. . .] to screw a bloody whore.” Instead of “screwing,” he chats with the “whore,” eats her Irish Stew, and leaves with some leftovers after giving her a single hug. It’s a touching, domestic story, with prose that’s incredibly gentle—except when a particular form of sexual jealousy pops up. 

To set this up, Andy is the friend who told Sean about Goldie, the prostitute he’s there to (not) sleep with.

Now they weren’t talking, Andy came back to mind. Sean could easily imagine what he’d go up to here. Imagine wasn’t the word for it. More a case of mind. He’d still not forgiven the cunt for the stunt he’d pulled in Airdrie. Forget the sordid details of the build-up. Forget his running commentary in a Kama Sutra accent. What really took the biscuit was his appearance at Elsie’s shoulder. Way, before you could’ve blinked, the cunt had joined them.

‘When one lane of traffic turns to tow, we call this position—’

Just as fuckin sickening was his gormlessness afterwards. Cunt couldn’t see what the problem was. 

‘You, mate, should’ve left the fuckin room!’ Sean had roared. ‘Should’ve waiting your fuckin turn outside!’

‘You’ve gone very quiet!’ Goldie said, reaching for a dishcloth behind him.

The fact that this scene is never fully explained—is Elsie his ex-wife?—is in keeping with the Camenisch books, which are also filled with allusions to events that happen off-page, and demonstrate the complete control over language that McLaughlin has at his disposal. 

According to the Translation Database (so so woefully out of date, since I quit updating it when Publishers Weekly quit paying me—no shade, just facts), McLaughlin translated ten Swiss books between 2012 and 2015 for Dalkey, And Other Stories, and Seagull Books. Putting those together with beheading the virgin mary, and other stories . . . that’s a helluva contribution to contemporary letters. I don’t know if anyone could keep up that pace, but the literary world is worse off without Donal McLaughlin writing and translating on a regular basis.

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I’m going to stop here, but not before making one little comment about writer-translators. Shouts to my friend, writer, and translator, Kyle Semmel (The Book of Losman, SFWP 2024), who recently wrote a piece for The Millions entitled “Want to Write Better Fiction? Become a Translator” about the importance of translating to one’s own writing:

Though the novel I slowly pieced together in those wee morning hours was never published, nor were two of the manuscripts I wrote after that, the crucible of translation was a vitally important training ground that taught me how to read, and write, better—however much I lamented being pulled away from my own fiction and however many rejections I got. By immersing myself in novels at the most minute level, like a biologist studying spores in a Petri dish, I learned how to develop the backbone of stories, economize, and shape language. You might ask, isn’t that what all novelists do who regularly read and study fiction? To a degree, yes. But there’s a fundamental difference: reading fiction, even close reading, is not the same thing as recreating it via translation. Or, as Jenny Croft puts it, “Translation is the closest and most active form of reading.”

This sentiment can also be found, in brief, in McLaughlin’s acknowledgments in beheading:

My translation work would not exist without my own writing, and vice versa. Since completing work on my first collection of stories, I have become more and more involved in translating contemporary Swiss fiction. Huge thanks [. . .] to writer friends such as Franco Supino, Pedro Lenz, Arno Camenisch, Urs Widmer, & Christoph Simon. [. . .] Grateful thanks also to publishers with a firm commitment to literature in translation, such as Seagull Books, And Other Stories, & Dalkey Archive.

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I never have an ending in mind for my posts—I assume very few people make it this far—but if there’s anything you take away from this, it’s that Dalkey’s catalog is a true treasure trove of overlooked books that, with the slightest bit of attention, could find their audience. And hopefully with this iteration of Dalkey the focus will remain there. It’s better to build success than to chase it.

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The Alp

Arno Camenisch

Translated from the Swiss German by Donal McLaughlin

Original Publication: 2009

Original Publication in English Translation: 2014

Original Publisher in English: Dalkey Archive Press

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Behind the Station

Arno Camenisch

Translated from the Swiss German by Donal McLaughlin

Original Publication: 2010

Original Publication in English Translation: 2014

Original Publisher in English: Dalkey Archive Press

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beheading the virgin mary, and other stories

Donal McLaughlin

Original Publication: 2014

Original Publisher in English: Dalkey Archive Press