Posts filed under 'suicide'

Uncertainty, Improbability, and Hope: An Interview with Ariel Dorfman

. . . how can we tell the truth about the terrors and oppression we are witnessing, and not become agents of despair?

In September, Argentine-Chilean novelist Ariel Dorfman released his latest novel, The Suicide Museum (Other Press)—one that has been fifty years in the making. In the narrative, we follow the author’s eponymous alter ego, who is sent by a man named Joseph Hortha to uncover the truth behind the death of socialist president Salvador Allende. Was it murder or suicide?

Fifty years ago, on September 11, 1973, the Chilean Armed Forces, led by Augusto Pinochet and with the support of Richard Nixon, the US government, and the CIA, launched a military coup against the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. The coup targeted Palacio La Moneda, resulting in the death of President Allende and the dawn of a military dictatorship led by Pinochet, which lasted until 1990; during Pinochet’s rule, approximately three thousand people were killed, and one thousand more are still missing. Dorfman offers a unique perspective to these events; in 1973, he (and “Ariel”) served as cultural advisor to Allende. He was supposed to be with Allende in La Moneda on September 11, 1973, but switched places with a colleague at the last minute. So, the author survived—unlike many of his friends and colleagues.

Set in 1990, “Ariel’s” search occurs twenty-one years before Allende’s body was exhumed a second time, and a judge “with impeccable credentials,” according to Dorfman, finally determined his cause of death. Juxtaposed by this reality, The Suicide Museum is a political thriller, a historical fiction novel, and a murder mystery.

In the fallout of this turmoil, Dorfman has spent most of his life living in exile. Even after democracy returned to Chile, he’s remained abroad, returning only occasionally. We see and feel that distance and familiarity in The Suicide Museum; we feel “Ariel’s” nostalgia and survivor’s guilt, his shame and regrets, his courage and his dreams, and through that emotional journey, we also see Allende’s first exhumation, we feel the effects of the dictatorship, we see the end of that dictatorship, we get a glimpse of “Ariel’s” creative process, and we see how life rapidly changed for Chileans after the coup, through flashbacks.

“Ariel” and Joseph Hortha ruminate on life, death, suicide, socialism, capitalism, climate change, Latin America. Like a pair of boxers, these two friends, allies, adversaries, confidants, challenge each other, interject each other, insult, comfort, and—sometimes—agree. After claiming that Allende saved his life, Hortha now wants to know if Allende committed suicide. “Ariel,” then, must go to New York, London, Chile.  He must talk to the people, to Allende’s gravedigger, to rivals and sympathizers. He must talk to Patricio Guijón, Allende’s doctor, who was next door at the time of Allende’s death. He must talk to Adrián Balmaceda, Allende’s bodyguard, and the last person to see him alive, to determine the presidente’s cause of death.

Ariel Dorfman remains a towering figure in Latin American and World literature. He’s the author of books such as How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, Death and The Maiden, and Heading South, Looking North. In this interview, we talked about his latest novel, but also about autofiction, inspiration, survivor’s guilt, his relationship with English and Spanish, living in exile, how Latin America is brothered through exile, the future of Chile, and what he remembers of that September 11, fifty years ago.  

José García Escobar (JGE): I wanted to talk first about the blend between fact and fiction in The Suicide Museum. In Michael Chabon’s Moonglow, we can find a type of disclaimer at the beginning of the novel: “In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to facts except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it.” The book is marketed as a “novel,” and that word appears on the cover, but much like Chabon, the characters in this “novel”—particularly Ariel—call it a “memoir.” How did you handle this distinction?

Ariel Dorfman (AD): When I first realized that the only way—at least for me—to narrate this quest (the search for the truth about Salvador Allende’s death on September 11, 1973), was to send my own self—really, an alter ego—to Chile, I did so with both joy and trepidation. Trepidation, because it was risky to use my own life, sticking to as many details of that life as possible (my wife, my children, my friends, my return to my country in 1990), and to simultaneously treat all of it fictionally and invent many scenes and characters (including how I present myself) within the straitjacket of a pre-existent chronological order. And joy because I was able to explode the limits of the genre, particularly what is called “autofiction.”

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What’s New in Translation: March 2023

New translations from the Yiddish, Japanese, and Esperanto!

In this month’s round up of the latest releases, we’re thrilled to introduce three singular works from rulebreakers, free thinkers, and true originals. From Japan, an early novella from the nation’s renowned enfant terrible, Osamu Dazai, gives a telling look at the writer’s internal monologue. From the Nobel laureate Issac Bashevis Singer, a bilingual edition of the Yiddish author’s story—in multiple translations—opens up an inquest into the translator’s pivotal role. And from the Ukrainian émigré Vasili Eroshenko, a collection of the author’s fairy tales, translated from the Japanese and Esperanto, presents a well-rounded selection of the transnational author’s politically charged work. Read on to find out more!

gimpl

Simple Gimpl by Isaac Bashevis Singer, a definitive bilingual edition with translations from the Yiddish by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, and David Stromberg, and Illustrations by Liana Finck, Restless Books, 2023

Review by Rachel Landau, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

Whether you choose to know him as “Simple Gimpl” or “Gimpel the Fool,” the main character of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novella is a likable, rambling man who finds himself in an unfortunate situation. His wife, Elka, is frequently using their shared home for affairs with other men, and all of Gimpl’s attempts to come to terms with the situation are complicated by his deep love for her. Even when the pair are forbidden by the town rabbi from seeing each other, Gimpl works tirelessly to provide for the children and for Elka. He feels betrayed to learn, at the end of Elka’s life, that the children were not really his—and his reaction to this deception is a surprising one.

The narrative in Simple Gimpl is slow-moving, reflective, and witty. It is an undeniable pleasure to read—and certainly not difficult to read multiple times in a row, as this edition of the book incites the reader to do. This “definitive bilingual edition,” released by Restless Books, includes back-to-back translations of the Yiddish work; first is Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Simple Gimpl,” which is followed immediately by Saul Bellow’s “Gimpel the Fool,” and this compendium of translations is decidedly about translation itself. Over the course of more than one hundred pages, one must realize that this is not a book about Gimpl, and not even about the differences between Saul Bellow’s Gimpel and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Gimpl. It is about the role of the translator; it is about the strange impossibility of rendering a story. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

Dispatches from Central America, Sweden, and Hong Kong!

This week at Asymptote, our Editors at Large report on the use of artificial intelligence in publishing, the return of in-person events in Hong Kong’s literary scene, and exciting award announcements! From a new book of poetry to multi-disiplinary festivals, read on to learn more!

José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America

In February, Guatemalan poet Eduardo Villalobos published his latest book of poems entitled Ixtab (Catafixia Editorial), which draws inspiration from the Mesoamerican deity of suicide. Ixtab is Eduardo’s fourth book of poems, and he remains one of Guatemala’s most celebrated poets today. He has been invited to renowned festivals in Guatemala and around the world, such as the Copenhagen Literature Festival and the Festival Internacional de Poesía de Quetzaltenango.

Also in February, Slash and Burn by El Salvadorean writer Claudia Hernández and translated by Julia Sanches, was announced as the runner-up of the Premio Valle Iclán, awarded each year by the UK’s The Society of Authors. Hernández is the author of four novels and several short story collections and in 2004, she earned the prestigious Anna Seghers Prize. Slash and Burn was also shortlisted for the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize.

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Translation Tuesday: “The Physiology of Memory” by Ricardo Lísias

The most torturing memories aren’t necessarily images, frozen, but films of about three minutes each.

In this haunting short story by Ricardo Lísias, the narrator contends with multiple stubborn memories, around which his narrative revolves. From an injured taxi driver in Buenos Aires, to overwhelming loneliness in Krakow, these memories are strung together to create a potent, overwhelming mixture.

I

I have determined why I am so upset by writers of clear sentences: they don’t struggle with memory. Their transparency denounces a simplistic intelligence. If someone cries because they are not able to render trauma into words then that person is a deep person.

I identified the root of my issue with clear-writing writers when I was in Poland. It is a very stark memory. I felt, standing more or less five hundred metres away from a small bus terminal in Krakow, the most intense loneliness I have ever experienced.

A year later, when I decided to dig up the loneliest moment in my life, I realized that it is not a bad feeling. It doesn’t hurt me or make me suffer.

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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2019

Our blog editors provide a tasting menu of the literary feast that is Asymptote's Winter 2019 issue

Featuring work from twenty-three languages and a record-breaking thirty-five countries, there’s plenty to choose from in Asymptote’s Winter 2019 issue! Today, our three blog editors share their favorite pieces, from Icelandic, Slovak and Latvian poetry to Brazilian Portuguese social commentary and Bengali short stories.

From the Fiction section, the ever-intensifying “The Meat Market,” translated from the Bengali, takes one unexpected turn after another in a thrilling prose adventure. Set a week before Eid, what should be a celebratory, communal affair quickly turns sour in East Rajabazar. This is a city where transactions are tainted by the potential for danger, just as the meat sold is tainted by false advertising. Aminul Islam faces the full consequences of these circumstances that he fails to fully understand, culminating in a shocking conclusion carefully set up by Mashiul Alam’s artful prose, switching deftly between first- and third-person at crucial moments in the narrative.

If you are looking for exciting poetry freshly translated into English, don’t miss out on Steinn Steinarr’s “Time and Water.” Hailed as Iceland’s greatest modernist poet, Steinarr’s ethereal poetry combines Icelandic poetics with modernist free verse and imagism to create gems like:

And the sorrow I hid
nearly found your own,
like a fjord-blue sea.

In this sequence on a failed and flawed relationship, the distance between the speaker and the other is quite nearly but not quite ever bridged. Equally impressive are the complex rhythms of Monta Kroma’s extract from Lips. You. Lips. Me., a larger collection of experimental modernist poems. The Latvian poet plays on the use of refrains and repetition to create a circular, almost obsessive monologue. These poems are ones that I’ve been returning to, and ones you might love too! READ MORE…

Sex, Drugs, and Identity :Virginie Despentes’ Pretty Things in Review

This is a novel of the street, the bedroom, the metro, the sex-club, and the recording studio. Of weed, whisky, and cocaine.

Pretty Things by Virginie Despentes, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan, The Feminist Press, 2018. 

Anglophone fans of Virginie Despentes are celebrating the release of Pretty Things, the fourth of her novels to be published by The Feminist Press, but the first translated from the French by Emma Ramadan. Ramadan, a long-time fan of Despentes, says in an interview we conducted with her this summer, that she accessed her raw vernacular parlance by speaking sentences out loud, watching French soap operas, and simply being a young, ambitious 20-something-year-old woman (much like many Despentes protagonists). It worked. This is a novel of the street, the bedroom, the metro, the sex-club, and the recording studio. Of weed, whisky, and cocaine. Where public and private, self and sister, butt heads. It’s a novel of desire and fear, love and insecurity, a woman trying not to allow other people’s expectations to mire her in the muck of society’s ugliest pathologies.

Pauline and Claudine are twins. They’re identical, but there’s no way to mistake one for the other. They have the type of beauty that’s fashionable at the moment, and Claudine learned as soon as she hit puberty to harness her beauty’s enormous power through her own objectification. Pauline finds it disgusting, this shallow game of power and submission, and makes a surly public display of her dissent. They don’t get along. Claudine, having recently moved to Paris to try to make it big, ropes Pauline into making a record with her. Pauline’s voice and Claudine’s personality are meant to equal one perfect pop star. The night of their first concert, while Pauline is on stage, Claudine jumps out her apartment window. Pauline, arriving at the scene after an evening of impersonating her sister, simply continues to do so, thus committing her own sort of suicide. Both sort of dead and in one living body, they start to suture the split that occurred between them in the womb.

While Pauline started with a plan to be half a woman, she spends the rest of the novel integrating two halves into a stronger whole. “Equilibrium needs to be restored. It was constructed opposite her sister, a force exerted on another. She has a clear image in her mind: two little women in a bubble, each pushing with her forehead against the other’s. If one of the two little women is removed, the other immediately topples over, falls into the other’s domain.” She learns to convincingly pass as Claudine. For two weeks, with the help of their friend and manager Nicolas, she locks herself in the apartment and learns to apply makeup, shave her legs, and walk in heels. When she finally emerges, she’s shocked to realize not only how people treated her sister, but also what it feels like to be treated that way. Simply presenting herself differently makes her vulnerable to scrutiny, jealousy, greed, and desire. She can empathize with Claudine for the first time—the whiff of sexual power also tempts her to sacrifice things like genuine human connection and self-respect, even as loneliness and self-disgust take their place. She doesn’t exactly miss her sister, but perhaps instead mourns a life spent too isolated to truly know except by inhabiting it.

The text yields dramatically different readings if one considers Pauline and Claudine to be more one or more two; autonomous individuals influenced by their relationship to each other, or solely a set of relations to each other—neither character whole unto herself. And yet both readings are not just valid, the ambiguity is crucial. On one hand, if both sisters are fully realized individuals, Pauline’s nonconformity is the stronger, more successful choice. It indicates her inherent intelligence and builds in her the strength to withstand the same conditions that wore away at Claudine until she jumped out her window. Claudine ends up dead and Pauline ends up… well, I won’t spoil the ending. But just as the music industry feels entitled to her body, she feels entitled to their money. On the other hand, Pauline and Claudine are the thesis and antithesis of a dialectical concerning femininity in society. Two sides of one coin. In this scenario, Pauline killed a part of herself the same night that Claudine did—and kept a part of both of them alive. By the end of the novel she represents the resolution of the two not into some transcendent, separate, enlightened woman, but a sort of balance of the two pre-existing options. There is no right way for a woman to behave in the face of social expectations, but each mini personal revolution yields a bit of progress. The reader is left with simultaneous, contradictory truths.

Even the text’s imagery is ambiguous on the extent to which they are one or two. For example, the novel describes the gender dynamic between the girls’ parents. Their father is aggressive and self-centered. Their mother exists only as an auxiliary appendage. Until their mother gets a job that she’s good at and begins to gain confidence and independence. The twins were conceived in response to his fury: “From that day on, he started fucking her like he was nailing something into the ground, all the way inside so she would get a fat stomach and stay put.” Two twins from one “nail.” But then, while their mother is pregnant, the parents argue about names. They decide to each choose one. “And so it was done, her stomach ripped in two.” Separate. We don’t learn much more on the topic until Pauline begins to take over Claudine’s life. In some ways she seems truly alien, trying to comprehend a way of being entirely foreign. For example, during a phone conversation with one Claudine’s lover/colleagues:

“She [Pauline] listens to him a little distantly, makes little agreeable sounds, trying to get it through her skull that he’s talking to a girl [Claudine] that he watches on all fours, and filmed from behind doing things like pretending to be a cat, whenever he wants.”

But when her guard is down, she’s simply existing, their mutual friend observes, “Familiar silhouette, he likes to watch it move. Intact shreds of a lost being, obsolete traces that he finds bewitching.”

Two of the novel’s male figures in particular further nuance the portrait of gender dynamics at the heart of this novel. The twins’ father pits them against each other from childhood, ensuring their dependence on his affection by bestowing it upon only one of them at a time—and subjecting the other to repulsive cruelty. During a flashback, Pauline watches their father beat Claudine. Afterward, she reaches out:

“When he hits you I swear I feel it too.” Claudine stood up, turned to face her, grabbed her by the hair. Pauline didn’t scream so that her parents wouldn’t come. Claudine dragged her down onto the bed. “You’re sure you feel it?”  . . .  To really hurt her, she had taken the pillow and held it down against her sister’s face with both hands. To be absolutely sure she heard, she started to scream, “That’s weird because, when he kisses you, I feel nothing.”

The violence of a man ensures enmity between two women who (as young Pauline demonstrates) could instead have loved and supported each other. The second is Pauline’s boyfriend Sébastien, the only man to ever choose her over Claudine. They’ve built a loving, trusting relationship exactly on her refusal to look and act “feminine.” But a series of events calls into question the extent to which opposing the status quo really separates them from it. Having witnessed her transformation, he leaves her with these words:

“You never treated me disrespectfully, you never demeaned yourself. I was proud of you, as soon as I saw some bitch on the street I thought of you, I was so fucking proud. But now, look at yourself, look at how you’re dressed, look at how you walk… And who’s boning you, over there? Is it a bunch of guys? . . . Is it good, do they screw you how you like? I respect you too much, you don’t respect yourself at all anymore.”

We discover that his love and respect for her was never unconditional, but was just as possessive and ugly as her father’s and just as informed by social expectation as any other man’s.

The characters in the novel are both vivid and allegorical (as perhaps are people). In this way, the post-mortem reconciliation of the sisters demonstrates, however imperfectly, a way out of the dialectical thesis/antithesis model of femininity. The status quo and what’s against the status quo validate and perpetuate each other. Just as a woman degrading herself for a man gives her power over him. But discovering empathy for her sister at least gives Pauline enough distance to learn to use the system for her own benefit, rather than letting it destroy her. It’s far from a utopic path, but I suppose this is the same world in which little girls defend themselves from abusive fathers by crossing their frail little arms over their heads. It was never going to be perfect.

Lindsay Semel is an Assistant Editor for Asymptote. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature and works as a freelance editor from her home on a farm in Northern Portugal.

*****

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Asymptote Podcast: #30Issues30Days Edition

Dig through our archive with Dominick Boyle, who unearths gems from South India, Chile, Sweden and more!

In celebration of Asymptote’s milestone 30th issue, Podcast Editor Dominick Boyle dives into the archives to uncover some of his favorite recordings from the archive. In this episode, he revisits poetry set to music in Tamil and Spanish from Aandaal and Enrique Winter, and snarky telephone conversations with a whole city by way of voice-mail from Jonas Hassen Khemiri. He also spotlights: the touching suicide notes left by Jean Améry, which reveal 3 different sides of a man in his death; experimental Vietnamese poetry by Bùi Chát, which comes to life read by translator Jack J. Huynh; and Owen Good’s translations of Hungarian poet Krisztina Tóth, which Eliot Weinberger awarded first prize in our inaugural Close Approximations contest. Take a walk down memory lane—this time with your headphones on!

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