NYRB NEWS
May Classics
We are pleased to announce two new May releases from NYRB Classics: Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, Bohumil Hrabal’s stunning confessional novel and the first work from a Czech writer to be included in the NYRB Classics series; and Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work, a sharp and touching meditation inspired by the beloved author’s confrontation with cancer and the questions of how to overcome despair in the face of loss.
Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age
By Bohumil HrabalIntroduction by Adam Thirlwell
Translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim
Bohumil Hrabal’s Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age is an ebullient, gallivanting novel that encapsulates the world vision of one of the Czech Republic’s best-loved authors.
Rake, drunkard, aesthete, gossip, raconteur extraordinaire: the narrator of Bohumil Hrabal’s rambling, rambunctious masterpiece is all these and more. Speaking one day to a group of sunbathing women who remind him of lovers past, this elderly roué proceeds to tell the story of his life—or at least to unburden himself of a lifetime’s worth of stories. Thus we learn of amatory conquests (and humiliations), of scandals both private and public, of military adventures and domestic feuds, of what things were like “in the days of the monarchy” and how they’ve changed since.
As the book tumbles restlessly forward, and the comic tone takes on darker shadings, we realize we are listening to a man talking as much out of desperation as from exuberance. Part drunken boast, part soul-rending confession, part metaphysical poem on the nature of love and time, Dancing Lessons (which unfolds in a single monumental sentence) shows why Milan Kundera, John Banville, and Louise Erdrich were admirers of Hrabal’s work.
Retail: $14.00
Special Offer: $10.50 (25% off)
Love’s Work
By Gillian RoseIntroduction by Michael Wood
Equal parts memoir and work of philosophy, Love’s Work is a stunning and inspiring book written by the late, beloved professor and philosopher Gillian Rose when she was dying of cancer. Through unforgettable anecdotes and musings, Rose shares her “life affair” with love, and the struggle for love, in all its forms.
In this book, Rose looks back on her childhood, the complications of her parents’ divorce, her dyslexia, and her deep and divided feelings about what it means to be Jewish. She tells the stories of several friends also laboring under the sentence of death. From the sometimes conflicting vantage points of her own and her friends’ tales, she seeks to work out a distinctive outlook on life, one that will do justice to our yearning both for autonomy and for connection to others.
Love’s Work is a beautiful, tender, tough, and intricately wrought survival kit packed with necessary but unanswerable questions.
The NYRB Classics edition includes Geoffrey Hill’s poem, “In Memoriam: Gillian Rose.”
Retail: $14.00
Special Offer: $10.50 (25% off)
The True Deceiver wins 2011 Best Translated Book Award
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Jeff Waxman of the BTBA fiction committee describes Jansson’s most recent English-language publication as “a slender and modern novel about the relationship of two women in a small Scandinavian fishing community: one is cold, practical, and brutally honest; the other is an older, infantile children’s book illustrator. As the story unfolds in Jansson’s simple, understated prose, Katri Kling strives to provide a home and perhaps a livelihood for her younger brother; Anna Aemelin wants only to live life with her eyes closed, insulated by her money and her art. This panel found itself engrossed as their relationship grew tense and aggressive and their fields of battle expanded from Aemelin’s household finances to Katri’s brother and her pet dog. Subtle, engaging and disquieting, The True Deceiver is a masterful study in opposition and confrontation.”
NYRB Classics also publishes Fair Play and The Summer Book by Tove Jansson and translated by Thomas Teal.
April Classics
In the summer of 1959, three paranoid schizophrenics living together at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan had only one thing in common: each believed himself to be Jesus Christ. Milton Rokeach’s stunning psychological narrative, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, is now available to readers again for the first time in over 25 years.
The Three Christs of Ypsilanti
By Milton RokeachIntroduction by Rick Moody Steeped in the words of the three “Messiahs” themselves, Rokeach’s incredible book transforms the ordinarily dry and impenetrable genre of psychological study into an engaging, novelistic account of truly thrilling proportions. As Rick Moody writes in the introduction to the NYRB Classics edition: “The dialogue with literature conducted within The Three Christs of Ypsilanti lofts it into the company of such great psychological and medical case histories as Freud’s Dora: Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, A. R. Luria’s The Man with a Shattered World, Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings, Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of my Nervous Illness.”
Throughout the book, Rokeach layers his unpretentious clinical observations with sharp and compelling recreations of the patients’ daily interactions, arguments, and repeated attempts to prove their delusional identities. Rokeach’s fascinating portrait of the men is sure to stay with readers long after they have left the haunting rooms of the Ypsilanti State Hospital behind.
Retail: $16.95
Special Offer: $13.56 (20% off)
The Pumpkin Eater
By Penelope MortimerIntroduction by Daphne Merkin
Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater explores the interior life of one very unusual woman and, with sharp deadpan humor and unrelentingly honest prose, uncovers a strange and haunting world filled with domestic darkness, celebrity, and madness. Mortimer’s novel approaches the unanswerable questions that surround marriage, sexuality, and reproduction with a striking sensitivity to the absurd and the truly traumatic.
Mrs. Armitage, now in her third marriage, is the mother of many children. Her current husband is a successful and philandering screenwriter and the family has just begun construction on a glass tower in the countryside where they hope to live tolerably, if not happily, ever after. Mrs. Armitage has some stories to tell, and when The Pumpkin Eater opens in a dingy psychiatrist’s office, she unleashes a biting, bizarre, and occasionally hilarious narrative of her incomparable past. Drawing from her own strange and exemplary autobiography, Mortimer’s story combines wit and tragedy, public and private, to yield an exploration of memory and the human psyche unlike any other.
Retail: $14.95
Special Offer: $11.96 (20% off)
Fatale
By Jean-Patrick ManchetteAfterword by Jean Echenoz
A new translation from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Jean-Patrick Manchette’s Fatale embodies all of the qualities that made its author far more than a mere crime novelist. Written with grit and gristle, Fatale breaks the boundaries of the typical roman noir and transforms killers and victims into passionate, compelling, and occasionally farcical pictures of a conflicted, post-war society.
When a beautiful newcomer, Aimée, arrives in the unassuming French burg of Bléville, few suspect that she is anything but a lovely young woman. So, when Aimée, a professional killer, sets her eyes on her next victim, the scene is set for manipulation and murder. But then she falls prey to an unexpected passion, and her identity and characteristic tenacity begin to unravel in a dizzying and delicious descent into mayhem. Bristling with Tarantino-esque thrills and biting satire, Manchette’s masterful story-telling style and unforgettable murderess are sure to transport readers with its heart-stopping energy and inimitable wit. To be sure, Fatale stands among the best and the boldest of the crime genre.
Retail: $12.95
Special Offer: $10.36 (20% off)
A Letter from the Editor
I’m nothing
Says Kabir
I’m not among the living
Or the dead
It is true, in a way—true at least that next to nothing is known about Kabir, a mysterious figure from medieval North India who is one of the world’s great religious poets. During his life, which is said to have extended for well over a hundred years, Kabir was celebrated as a poet and as a sant, or holy man, and many legends, some as unlikely as his reputed lifespan, have grown up around his name. It is generally accepted, however, that he came from a low-caste Hindu family that had recently converted to Islam and that he was a weaver—someone, in other words, very much on the outside of good society. Kabir’s songs have come down to us both through a number of written sources—none, however, that can be traced to Kabir’s hand—as well as through a lively, extensive, and very varied tradition of oral performance, and they continue to be sung in the fields and on the streets of India. Some of the songs are otherworldly, others are biting send-ups of the world and its ways, while Kabir’s God is a shapeshifter whose only true and always unseizable form is the form prepared within the heart of the true devotee. In Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s wonderful new translation, Kabir’s work takes on a startling and unforgettable new shape in the English of our time.
From Dante to Dickinson, from Han Shan to Hopkins, religion and poetry have been close, if often uncomfortable, companions. Why? Religion, like poetry, you could say, is nothing if it is not a form of realism. (No doubt this is why both are so attractive to frauds.) Religion is preoccupied with first and last things, birth and copulation and death, as it is, too, with the ongoing war of hope and despair within the individual and in the world at large. Religion poses questions of good and evil that reason parses with difficulty, if at all. As to poetry, its realism is to pay particular attention to the difficult business that all our meanings and feelings are entangled in words. As Kabir says,
Except that it robs you of who you are,
What can you say about speech?
Inconceivable to live without
And impossible to live with,
Speech diminishes you….
Strike [a pot] that is full,
Says Kabir, and hear the silence.
The lines are as matter-of-fact as mystical, and they go to the heart of Kabir’s riddling genius, invoking silence the better to violate it, so transforming both speech and silence into the uncertain quantity of song.
Paradox is central to Kabir’s vision. Mehrotra’s selection starts out with a series of so-called “upside-down poems”:
What is this untellable tale about?
The ogress and the dog make bedroom eyes;
The big cat prowls the jungle;
In my family of five, all hell breaks loose.
Led by drum-beating rabbits, a herd
Of antelopes mounts an attack….
What indeed is this about? Beginning in a state of bewilderment, Kabir’s work explodes in questions. Negatives abound:
Listen carefully,
Neither the Vedas
Nor the Qur’an
Will teach you this….
Elsewhere he says,
My home…
Is where there’s no day, no night,
And no holy book in sight
To squat on our lives.
He is no less questioning of rites and observances, whether conventional or unconventional:
If going naked
Brought liberation,
The deer of the forest
Would attain it first.
And he dismisses the powerful with withering scorn:
“Me shogun.”
“Me bigwig.”
“Me the chief’s son.
I make the rules here.”
It’s a load of crap.
Laughing, skipping,
Tumbling, they’re all
Headed for Deathville.
There is at times something almost nihilistic about Kabir’s assault on worldly forms. Certainly he is much possessed by death. And yet he never rejects the world itself (presented with the prospect of going to paradise, he responds, “I’m okay where I am…./Spare me the trip.”), and his poems are as full of yearning as they are of savage mockery. Seeking union with the divine, Kabir’s voice attains a wry and poignant intimacy:
If we’re still strangers
To each other, who’s
To blame? Did I
Blunder or did you
Never know
What a heart desired?
One could go on.
Enough, my Lord.
Invite me over, says Kabir,
Or come over yourself.
As I hope my quotations here suggest, Mehrotra has invited Kabir over into a vigorously individual English, bitter and salty and sweet and utterly free of the bland music of so many contemporary versions of “spiritual” texts from the Psalms to Rumi and Rilke. Mehrotra’s Kabir is never ingratiating. His poetry is as starkly convincing as that of his near contemporary, the jailbird Francois Villon. Poet and translator meet across the centuries to call in question the way we live now and to urge us to take the risk of revelation. And then we are left to our own devices. After all,
The yogi’s a solitary
You can’t meet him.
He’s left the country
We’re citizens of
And he’s not coming back
Edwin Frank, Editor
NYRB Classics
Songs of Kabir
Selected and translated from the Hindi by
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Preface by Wendy Doniger
L. J. Davis, 1940–2011
Lettered Lunch at the Swiss Institute
Join NYRB Classics editor Edwin Frank as he moderates a conversation between Robert Walser translators Christopher Middleton and Susan Bernofsky on Wednesday, April 6th at 1PM. $10 includes a bratwrust lunch.
The Swiss Institute
495 Broadway 3rd Floor
New York, NY
The Swiss Institute is an innovative international venue for art that provides a forum for cultural dialogue between Switzerland, Europe, and the United States.
2011 Best Translated Award in Fiction
Two NYRB Classics are finalists for the 2011 Best Translated Award in Fiction: Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal, and Albert Cossery’s The Jokers, translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis.
The Best Translated Book Awards launched in 2007 as a way of bringing attention to great works of international literature. Quality of the original book and the artistry of the English translation are the criteria used in determining the winning titles.
The winners will be announced on Friday, April 29th at 9PM at the Bowery Poetry Club as part of the PEN World Voices Festival.
Congratulations to Thomas Teal and Anna Moschovakis on their well-deserved nominations.
An evening in celebration of Tove Jansson, the novelist
Sophia Jansson, the niece of the late Tove Jansson and the chairman of Oy Moomin Characters, Ltd, will speak about her famous aunt in conversation with Thomas Teal, translator of Jansson’s novels, and Aili Flint, the head of Columbia University’s Finnish Studies Program. Tuomas Hiltunen will moderate the panel and actors Taina Elg and Heli Sirviö will perform short, dramatic readings from the novels. Ambassador Ritva Jolkkonen, Consul General of Finland in New York, will introduce the evening.
Scandinavia House
58 Park Avenue
New York City
Free and Open to the Public
Reception Immediately Following the Program
Reservations recommended.
Call 212.847.9740 or email event_reservation@amscan.org
Friday, April 8, 2011; 3 p.m.
Harvard Bookstore
1256 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
(617) 661–1515
Tove Jansson’s novels, The Summer Book, The True Deceiver, and Fair Play, are published in the NYRB Classics series.