Did EPIC CEO Judy Faulkner of Epic declare that ‘healthcare IT usability would be part of certification over her dead body?'

At the HisTALK blog 5/31/10 update, a site with thousands of readers involved in all aspects of health IT, the following anonymous (at this point) report appeared:

From Tabula Rosa: “Re: EMR usability. At one of the ONC Policy Committee meetings, [founder and CEO] Judy Faulkner of Epic supposedly declared that ‘usability would be part of certification over her dead body.’ I wonder if she has similar sentiments about making software accessible to people with disabilities?” Unverified. This inspired my new poll question – keep reading below.

Epic Systems Corporation is one of the largest health IT vendors in the U.S.

If this report is true, it would have very, very serious implications towards the healthcare IT industry's attitudes about the usability - and ultimately the safety - of its products.

The essential nature of usability and the relationship to safety is not an issue for debate - period. It was settled long ago in relation not only to IT, but also to devices and machinery that use IT. For instance, see the mid 1980's wisdom written for the U.S. Air Force on user interfaces at my eight part series on mission hostile health IT user experiences at http://tinyurl.com/hostileuserexper. Microsoft and other responsible IT vendors spend billions on usability research.

I think it incumbent of the U.S. Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, and its leader Dr. David Blumenthal, to confirm or deny that such a statement was made, on or off-record, at an ONC policy committee meeting, and if it was made, its exact context.

If it was made, it would raise the following questions:

  • Would its utterer be saying this out of concern that their products have usability deficiencies that competitors do not, and that are not correctable in a short time frame?
  • How much concern would such a statement indicate for the complex jobs of physicians, nurses and other clinicians whose safe conduct of their medical obligations depends on health IT?
  • How much concern would such a statement imply towards the injured and dead bodies of patients affected by health IT of deficient usability?
  • Since the CEO sets the tone for their company and has the ultimate responsibility for its conduct (and its Board of Directors as well), would such a statement reflect willful negligence and perhaps criminal conduct?

The last question is pertinent, for if, say, the CEO of Boeing were to relate that "usability of the control systems of its aircraft would be an FAA certification requirement over his or her dead body", or the CEO of oil drilling companies said same about their instrumentation that helps avoid underwater blowouts, I believe it would rise to the level of criminally negligent conduct.

This is all the more pertinent to me, as my relative was just seriously injured by a medication error that appears to have started with the med list in an EMR.

I am seriously wondering, in fact, if the average hospital has the gravitas and political and technologic maturity to truly implement health IT so that the technology is uniformly beneficial, instead of spontaneously harmful, to meet the needs of the grandiose plans for national health IT.

The lack of seriousness, petty political fights, and technological dyscompetence and incompetence I have noted in my 20 years in this field do not seem surmountable in any time frame I consider "soon."

Here seems to be the health IT industry and hospital MIS department view of healthcare IT, as some sort of game to be played for profit, power and political advantage:




-- SS

David Lalé - Masochistic public spectacles, a doomed affair with the beautiful poetess Mina Loy, and finally vanishing without trace

David Lalé, Last Stop Salina Cruz: A Novel (Alma Books, 2008)


3:AM NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2007

«Fleeing from the tedium of his everyday life and the painful memory of a dying father, the narrator embarks on a long solitary journey retracing the footsteps of real-life malcontent and misanthrope par-excellence Arthur Cravan, the nephew of Oscar Wilde. As a lambasting critic, poet-boxer, and Dadaist anti-hero, Cravan wreaked havoc on himself and three continents during the course of a short and spectacular life, which led him across the world in an escalating frenzy of self-destruction. Along the way, our young protagonist encounters every species of grotesque human character blighting Europe, the U.S., and South America, until he reaches the shores of the desolate oil town of Salina Cruz, the site of Cravan’s mysterious disappearance. Only there does the true purpose of his journey become at last apparent.»

«David Lale on Last Stop Salina Cruz:
On the outbreak of the First World War, the notorious poet-boxer and draft-dodger Arthur Cravan embarked on a mad flight that took him from modernist Paris to revolutionary Mexico and the mysterious fate that awaited him there.
Ninety years later I set out in his footsteps in the hope of recovering what really happened to him. The journey took me first to Paris, where Cravan made a name for himself through masochistic public spectacles; to Barcelona, where he fought the legendary World Heavyweight Champion, Jack Johnson; to New York, where he tangled with Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaists; and then to Mexico, where, after a doomed affair with the beautiful English poetess Mina Loy, he finally vanished without trace.
I hitch-hiked across Europe and America, but for me this wasn’t a holiday so much as a mission. Beyond my fascination with the legend of Cravan there was another, more sinister motive driving me. As the story takes me further and further from my former life, it emerges that, like Cravan, I was running from something dark, dangerous, and more than a little embarrassing.
The shape of this book is a Prozac-fuelled descent into a nightmare world of motorway sidings, hotel kitchens, and backpackers desperate for small talk; it is a one-way ticket to unrestrained misanthropy and terminal neurosis. The story reaches its climax in the desolate oil town of Salina Cruz, the site of Cravan disappearance. Only here does the true purpose of my project at last become apparent.»

«The endlessly self-publicising poet-boxer (rubbish at being both) and nephew of Oscar Wilde was almost too good – or possibly too awful – to be true. His short, erratic life consisted of constant reinvention and a string of outrageous boasts, and ended in mystery, when he disappeared off the coast of Salina Cruz, Mexico, in 1918.
Lalé's equally misanthropic, Prozac-starved and haemorrhoidtormented narrator opts to replicate Cravan's meandering journey in a bid to escape, once and for all, the suffocatingly banal circumstances of his own life: his wickedly comical, modern anti-travel tale is juxtaposed with Cravan's misadventures throughout.
Lalé is a gifted stylist who makes poetry out of beautifully wrought misery. But there are two books fighting inside one cover here and the large slabs of conventional biographical material on Cravan end up detracting somewhat from the force of his fictional character's gleeful hatred of everything and everyone.» - Siobhan Murphy

«Arthur Cravan was a poet, conman and catalyst for Dadaism. A cousin of Oscar Wilde, Cravan, whose real name was Fabian Lloyd, travelled to Paris and Barcelona, to New York, then across to the west coast of America and down into Mexico where he eventually disappeared. Along the way he would achieve notoriety as a boxer; he proved inspirational to key artists of the period, including Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia; women fell for his brute charm, little knowing they were likely to be cruelly manipulated. His was a magnetic, charismatic personality, larger than life, by reputation if not always in the flesh.
If this is beginning to read more like a non-fiction review than a notice for a novel, David Lalé's debut is most unlike a novel. It is, rather, a biography wrapped around a short story. There is certainly a fictional strand to the narrative and it a very interesting one. The narrator is a depressed young man coming to terms with the death of his father and fleeing from a crisis with his partner. A Cravan enthusiast, he sets off in the footsteps of his hero, encountering poverty and deprivation, much as Cravan had.
In a cheap hostel, the narrator meets an "effete" trilby-wearing Englishman called Martin who is obsessively taking notes for a "travel novel". Martin declares, "My gimmick is a kind of ironic gimmick, sort of a post-gimmick gimmick." Last Stop Salina Cruz proceeds like Martin's travel novel, its storyline determined by the wanderings of Cravan, whose journeying was partly inspired by the need for flight – in his case from the draft. Cravan's friend, the writer Blaise Cendrars, "joked that Cravan believed the [First] World War was being waged against him alone, just to spite him".
Lalé writes attractive, readable prose that occasionally possesses a translucent, cinematic beauty. Hitch-hiking from Paris, the narrator is picked up by a North African: "Driving at night felt like being inside a computer game... sliding through the passageways of bright light, the acute geometries". Lalé avoids sentimentality and the narrator never tries to ingratiate himself with the reader: you'll squirm at his graphic descriptions of haemorrhoids. He is also good on the illusions of travel. Ultimately, the novel's gimmick, tilting the balance heavily in favour of biographical material, slightly undermines Lalé's obvious gift for narrative.» - Nicholas Royle


«The NAFTA era has finished off whatever was left of Mexico´s mythical status as a no-man´s-land where troubled foreigners escape to redefine themselves, lose themselves, or die.
You can still die here if you´re so inclined, but the modern transplant in Mexico - artist, journalist, business type or retiree - generally hangs on to her or his lifelong identity and comes to live more, not less.
Still, we tend to remember the ones who don´t make it.
Because he was fictionalized in print and film, the U.S. journalist and wit Ambrose Bierce most often represents the romantic notion of the tired angel who disappears into Mexico´s "good, kind darkness." But another candidate has recently emerged - or rather, re-emerged - to fill the prototype of the mysterious stranger who made Mexico his last address under curious circumstances.
Arthur Cravan, born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd, crossed at Nuevo Laredo three years after Bierce´s 1914 disappearance. But he wasn´t American. Cravan was a Swiss-born, Irish-descended, French-speaking poet.
He was also a boxer and bon vivant who fled Paris for New York to avoid military service in World War I. He then fled the United States at age 30 for the same reason. The New York poet Mina Loy later met up with him in Mexico City, where they were married.
Cravan may indeed have come here to redefine himself, because he had been doing just that all his life.
He claimed to be Oscar Wilde´s nephew, which was only a slight exaggeration since he was indeed the nephew of Oscar Wilde´s wife. His boasts along the Paris café circuit were as legendary as they were unlikely, and once rooted in Mexico City, he would describe himself variously as, among other things, a thief, a muleteer, a chauffeur, and a gold prospector.
As for losing himself, there wasn´t much chance of that. Cravan stood 6 foot 4 inches and weighed about 250 pounds, with short blond hair, big shoulders and a menacingly square jaw. He had, according to his wife´s memoirs, "the air of a Viking."
The dying part came, as far as anybody knows, in October of 1918, less than a year after his arrival. He went to Salina Cruz, the Oaxacan seaport on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, looking to buy a boat. He was never heard from again. What happened to him, and whether he did indeed survive and take up a new identity, is the stuff of legend.
The reason it´s legend is that we don´t have much in the way of written sources on Cravan´s brief, intense life, least of all on the Mexican phase of it. Mina Loy´s remembrances are sketchy and poetic. Most of his poetry was published in France in a short-lived literary magazine called Maintenant. Much of it has been translated into English in a book called 4 Dada Suicides (Cravan´s work is sometimes considered Dada-esque).
There is an obscure 1932 fictionalized memoir by one Bob Brown, apparently based on the "slacker" crowd Cravan and Loy hung out with in Mexico City. A 1993 biography in Spanish by María Lluisa Borrás exists, but I haven´t been able to find it. A docu-drama entitled "Cravan v Cravan," in which that same author appears, came and went several years ago. Also, a biography in English by Roger Lloyd Conover, "the leading Anglophone Cravaniste," is in the works.
In the meantime, we are fortunate to have Charles Nicholl´s account of Cravan´s last year, which appears in the latest issue of the London Review of Books to make it across the pond, dated March 9. Nicholl, a brilliant author and journalist, now mostly writes biographies of big historical figures (his latest subject is Da Vinci). But his 1980s portrait of life in Colombia´s cocaine corridor, the Fruit Palace, still stands out in my mind as a shining example of what non-judgmental, you-are-there reportage can accomplish.
Nicholl´s modus operandi is to explore the locations he writes about, so we get something close to a Cravan Tour of the Historic Center. Cravan had once fought Jack Johnson in Barcelona, and he made his living in Mexico City as a boxing instructor and sometimes prizefighter. (The sweet science seems to be a common cultural causeway linking Mexicans with Americans and Europeans; a certain type of ex-pat reflexively seeks out the Mexican boxing scene).
Cravan´s boxing school, the Escuela de Cultura Física Sandow, stood on Tacuba Street, and is still standing, according to Nicholl, "elegantly refurbished, with tall French windows illuminating the former gym on the first floor." An address would have been helpful here.
Nicholl describes Tacuba as quieter than the nearby and parallel "fashionable shopping streets of Cinco de Mayo and Francisco I. Madero." "Fashionable" isn´t a word I usually associate with either of those streets, but a 1930s description by Graham Greene of Tacuba as a street "where you can buy your clothes cheaper if you don´t care much for appearances" seems current in spirit if not actual reality.
Cravan lived first at the Hotel Juárez, also on Tacuba, but when Loy arrived they set up home on Calle de Soto, which is behind Reforma Avenue near the current Guerrero Metro stop.
Nicholl followed Cravan and Loy's route to Salina Cruz, finding the station their train pulled in at to be deserted, "a bordered up ticket-office in fake red brick, a girdered terminus rampant with shrubbery." It reminds him of some translated lines of Cravan´s poetry, about a train that "whistles infinitely across the valleys, dreaming of the oasis: the station with a sky of glass."
Salina Cruz has turned into a major oil-moving seaport in the nearly 80 years since Cravan, and Nicholl´s found little of the old fishing village that Cravan knew. But as he sat on a hill overlooking the Gulf of Tehuantepec, he became convinced, as others have, that Cravan indeed died on the waters between Salina Cruz and Puerto Angel, either capsized by the notorious tehuantepecanos, as the sometimes hurricane-force autumn winds are called, or was murdered by pirates.
Some like to believe, however, that Cravan survived and changed his name from A. Cravan to B. Traven, thus producing the body of work attributed to the even more mysterious German-American turned Mexican citizen. The idea is absurd on its face, but it gets repeated in every account of Cravan´s Mexican disappearance (including this one) because it´s so much fun.
Others contend that Cravan re-emerged as one Dorian Hope, a vagrant poet who sold forged Oscar Wilde manuscripts in New York and Paris in the early 1920s. That sounds like something Cravan might have done, but Nicholl points out how unlikely it is that nobody in Paris would have recognized the very recognizable former man about town.
A full-length work by Nicholl on Cravan's Mexico finale would be most welcome, but if his research was meant for anything beyond the London Review article, nobody´s telling us about it yet.
Those of us inflicted with curiosity about foreigners´ experiences in Mexico will wait instead for Roger Lloyd Conover´s biography, and keep searching for María Lluisa Borrás´ book.» - Kelly Arthur Garrett

Sara Greenslit - Language is a bird, at times warm, close, pulsing in the hand, at others flying, soaring in the space of the unsayable

Sara Greenslit, The Blue of Her Body (Starcherone, 2007)

«Suffering from depression, a young woman leaves her lover, Kate, and flees the city where they lived, taking a job at an aviary. There, she learns how to handle birds of prey--hawk, kestrel, owl, eagle. Living alone, she dissects the path of her illness and her history with antidepressants. Beauty, wilderness, and danger are intertwined for a woman whose desire is nonetheless identifiably human: "All my life I have wanted my hands on a living thing." Artfully building powerful and poetic scene upon scene, The Blue of Her Body creates a memorable portrait of the human heart and its untamable nature, and the wonders of the activity of the human imagination we call love.»

The Blue of Her Body negotiates the difficulties of the muted raptures of love for a woman who anchors her life with raptors on the one hand and mood elevators on the other. In elliptical and lyrical fragments, Greenslit brings very real daily struggles into the domain of art, rendering them resonant and making them, somehow, all the more real. A powerful first novel." - Brian Evenson

“Experimental in syntax and structure, The Blue of Her Body maps a young woman's love for the natural world and her struggle with familial depression. Greenslit borrows from an array of sources, stalks her subjects with a poet/ documentarian's eye, registers shifts in diction, fractures time. Yoking ornithology and psychology, her achievement is a fictional, postmodern field guide to surviving genetics and making a home in language and world." - Robin Becker

“Language is a bird in this novel - at times warm, close, pulsing in the hand, at others flying, soaring in the space of the unsayable. Like Carole Maso, Sara Greenslit is an artist who makes the muteness of the body, of the world, sing.” - Elizabeth Sheffield

«On the one hand, it is easy enough to see how Sara Greenslit's The Blue of Her Body could be called a "poet's novel." It makes no effort to "tell a story" in the ponderous, pedestrian mode too often adopted by novelists who come to fiction through an interest in narrative (as exemplified either in other fiction they've read or in movies) rather than an engagement with language and the possibilities of language in creating verbal art and exploring fresh ways of representing experience. There's no facile psychologizing of characters portrayed as "real people," no faux-dramatic plot points, no perfunctorily inserted dialogue straining to be "believable." No exposition, rising and falling action, or contrived resolution of the artificially induced "conflict." Instead, The Blue of Her Body is an artfully arranged construction of words, a novel that asks the reader to infer the "story" between the lines of its brief prose passages.
On the other hand, one would not call this novel "poetic" because it indulges in conventional figurative phrasing, lunges after arresting tropes, offers up an ostentatious display of "fine writing." Greenslit's prose is more matter-of-fact, more objectively descriptive:
'Her rented house on the edge of town is small, chipped paint, all her own. She likes the windows, large and filled with trees. The morning light on the wood floor reminds her of her mother's caramel. The dog clatters through the house, pet hair collects in the corners. She no longer needs a vacuum. The broom is easier.
She has chosen birds over the soft other.
A week before her new job at the aviary starts, boxes are left stacked in the living room. She is afraid to put everything away. She fears the open space. She fears the silence she sought, the echoes. She had wanted these things, but now they loom and hover.
She brought only what was hers. But everything reminds her of Kate.'
One chapter consists entirely of mostly one-sentence "paragraphs":
'Whenever it was summer, I fell into a trance watching leaves on windy days
The sky was cloudless and blue like the spaces inside loved ones
Peregrine hacking box, nestling feather fuss down, eyes and beaks
Mother's summer garden: Asiatic lilies, red as a South American carnival, coneflowers about to unfold
When I was in love, I couldn't imagine any hands but yours. I smelled you while I worked, I saw you in our bed.
When I left, you wouldn't look me in the eye.
I was fool, fool to my mood.
I ate my pills day after day, unable to see.'
One could say that the novel unfolds in lines and stanzas, rather than sequential prose paragraphs that disappear in the narrative flow they are meant to serve, although this does not so much make it a kind of prose poem as provoke us into considering the sometimes fine line between prose and verse, fiction and poetry. Why can't a novel proceed via evocative, carefully crafted sentences rather than routine, narrative-bearing paragraphs? At what point does the novelist leave to the poet the care and tending of language at its most fundamental level, the habitation of the word, the phrase, the sentence?
Much of what The Blue of Her Body is "about" is expressed in the first-quoted passage above: "She has chosen birds over the soft other." The novel's unnamed narrator has broken up with her lover in the city and moved into the country to work at an aviary. In her isolation, she considers her own history of depression, broods on her relationship with her mother (also a depressive) and her failed relationship with Kate, and takes the opportunity to further cultivate her love of animals. The novel in effect chronicles the narrator's convalescence, concluding with a variation on Emily Dickinson: "Hope is a damaged bird. She heals and then stays..."
The narrator's dilemma and her attempt to work through it, however, are presented almost entirely through inference and suggestion. The story is purely backstory. In addition to the brief expository passages and the declarative sentences (sometimes stated in the third-person, sometimes in first-person), there are fragmentary accounts of the activity in the aviary, haiku-like descriptions of animals and of nature in general, and cumulative bits of information about the various efforts to treat the narrator's depression. While Greenslit thus avoids converting the narrator's circumstances into narrative melodrama, ultimately her novel does present a coherent and convincing, if oblique, portrait of its protagonist's struggle to gather her life into some semblance of order and purpose.
I believe that the future of prose fiction will only lead it closer to a kind of rapprochement with poetry, where the novel began as a splintering-off of narrative from the storytelling mode of epic poetry (just as drama appropriated the "dramatic" in dramatic poetry). Now that film and television (as well as what is called "creative nonfiction") have in turn taken over the storytelling function, at least for the mass audience, fiction's continued relevance, aside from those novels seemingly written with the film adaptation in mind, will perhaps require that it return to its origins in the poet's attention to language per se. Experimental fiction almost always points us in this direction, as challenges to the hegemony of conventional storytelling usually entail a reinvigoration of the resources of language, highlighting the capacity of prose fiction to do something else. The Blue of Her Body is an admirable addition to this effort.» - The Reading Experience

Excerpts:

"The blue slur of oncoming sleepiness. She wants to shut down and forget all the complications, the rugburn of communication, the loss of words and fighting, the drag and stop of language as she fails Kate again and again. She hates these moments of burn and anger, and bites her nails until they bleed, copper in her mouth."

"The habit of meals and sleep, the patterns of pattern. Hours and streets and seasons. Leaves, new growth, then falling. Failure. Capability and time line. Endpoint and/or circular."

"Humans only use 60% of the oxygen in their lungs; birds 99%."

Isaac Babel - The orange sun is rolling above the sky like a severed head. He who doesn't read Babel is surely doomed

Isaac Babel, The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, Trans. by Peter Constantine (W. W. Norton, 2001)



"Arguably the best book of short stories published in 2001, The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, expertly translated by Peter Constantine, should affirm Babel's place among the top Russian short story writers. Like Chekhov, Isaac Babel primarily wrote odd, tightly wrung little stories in which he displays a variety of convincing styles and tones, with each piece having an immediacy and weight that exceeds its brevity.

Babel's writing life lasted approximately 20 years. (He was executed by Stalin after a few military subjects unflatteringly portrayed in his "Red Cavalry" stories gained positions of influence.) His most notable stories depict the Russian civil war and Jewish soldiers, his childhood, and Jewish thugs in his native Odessa. Often journalistic in style, his stories provided gripping war accounts to Russians eager for news from the front, as in this passage from "The Church in Novograd":

'We drank rum, waiting for the military commissar, but he still hadn't come back from the headquarters. Romuald had collapsed in a corner and fallen asleep. He slept and quivered, while beyond the window an alley seeped into the garden beneath the black passion of the sky. Thirsting roses swayed in the darkness. Green lightning bolts blazed over the cupolas. A naked corpse lay on the embankment. And the rays of the moon streamed through the dead legs that are pointing upward. So this is Poland... '

This collection is a delight for its organization: the stories are grouped by periods, feature introductions, and include helpful maps. The preface and afterward by his daughter and editor, Nathalie Babel, are insightful. Also included are two plays, several screenplays, a chronology, and an introduction by Cynthia Ozick. The Complete Works of Isaac Babel should be a welcome addition to readers of literature everywhere." - Michael Ferch



"One of the great Russian writers of the 20th century, Babel (1894-1941) was arrested in 1939 and later executed by Stalin's regime. In 1954, his work was largely republished, but much of his correspondence, drafts, and manuscripts was confiscated when he was arrested and has never resurfaced. Now, for the first time, all of Babel's surviving work has been assembled into one volume. Readers new to Babel will discover his "Red Cavalry" stories, plays, diaries, screenplays, and short stories. In addition to an introduction by Cynthia Ozick, the book is graced with an excellent preface and afterword by Babel's daughter, who also edited the volume. She provides recently uncovered information about her father's arrest and execution as well as personal remembrances. With the publication of this volume of Babel's work, it is hoped that a full-scale biography will follow. - Ron Ratliff



"Although perhaps not the most well known of the early twentieth century Jewish writers from Russia and Eastern Europe, Isaac Babel's work certainly deserves more attention. I first came across him in a college short fiction textbook which included his story, "My First Goose." This powerful story is about an outsider, the other in current critical parlance—both because he is a Jew and an intellectual—who is assigned to join a new red army unit. He arrives only to be met with abuse: "A young lad with long, flaxen hair and a beautiful Ryazan face walked over to my trunk and hurled it out of the gate. Then he turned his posterior to me and, with a special knack, began to emit some disreputable sounds." Dismayed at the hostility of the Cossacks and unsure of how he will be able to survive among them, he takes out his frustrations by killing an old peasant woman's goose and ordering her to prepare it for his dinner. Almost absurdly, it is this through this act of cruelty, an act that would seem to be quite alien to his character, that he is accepted by the rest of the soldiers. They see in this act of barbarism a kinship. The most senior of the Cossacks approaches him, calls him "Brother," and asks him to join in their supper. He reads to them. He goes to sleep with them. But though he is accepted by them, his acceptance has come at a price: "I had dreams and saw women in my dreams, and only my heart, stained crimson with murder, squeaked and overflowed."

Recently, while browsing through a used book store, I came across the Penguin paperback edition of Babel's Collected Stories. Whatever the great expectations "My First Goose" raised in me, the stories in this collection didn't disappoint. The stories are divided into four groups: "Early Stories," "'Autobiographical' Stories," "Red Cavalry" (the volume which originally contained "My First Goose"), and "Odessa Stories."

The stories, sometimes more like sketches, in "Red Cavalry" describe his experiences when he joined the Red Cossacks in the short 1920 war against Poland. His emphasis is on how the horrors of war effect affect the men who fight—some rising to heroic action, some unable to cope; some unexpectedly rising to leadership, some escaping to brutalism. The stories demonstrate that little has changed in the way men deal with the barbarities of war. A young peasant is elevated to a position of leadership in the field, and he rides away from battle with "the lordly indifference of a Tartar kahn." On the other hand the narrator complains ""The chronicle of our humdrum evil doings constricts me indefatigably, like a heart complaint." A red Cossack takes vicious revenge on white Russian villagers who were complicit in the murder of his parents.

The "Odessa Stories" are a kind of Yiddish version of The Godfather. Benya Krik, the central figure of many of these tales is a Jewish Don Corleone. He rules the town with an iron hand. When the police plan to raid the wedding (there is even a wedding) of his sister, he has the police station burned down. When the richest dairy farmer in the area refuses to pay him protection, he has all his cows killed. When he decides he wants to marry the man's daughter, the farmer has no choice but to agree to the match. Krik is a reminder that Italians don't necessarily have a monopoly on the underworld.

While the "Autobiographical Stories" may not be all that autobiographical, they do seem to depict an authentic moment in the history of the Russian Jewish community through the eyes of what may well be a typical Jewish child. In "The Story of My Dovecote," the young narrator's childhood innocence embodied in his purchase of pet doves is destroyed by a brutal pogrom, which not only kills his birds, but his Grand-uncle as well. "First Love" continues the tale, as the reader is shown the devastating effect of the pogrom on the boy's father. Other stories emphasize the importance of learning and art as a means for the Jewish child to get ahead in the gentile world. It is by their intelligence that the Jews hope to make a better life for themselves. It is ironic, that it is this very intelligence that provokes the animosity of the Cossack soldiers in "My First Goose," that it is the reversion to animalistic brutalism that finds acceptance.

Isaac Babel is a writer whose work deserves to be better known. He gives life to a world long gone, but in many ways not much different from the world today." - Jack Goodstein



"My first reaction to this book was surprise at its size: had Isaac Babel, the meticulous Russian stylist, the man who referred to himself as a master of "the genre of silence", really written so much? The book includes two plays, several screenplays and Babel's diaries from his spell as a war correspondent with the Red cavalry in 1920. It includes vivid sketches of post-Revolutionary Petersburg and Georgia, which prompt the translator, Peter Constantine, to call Babel a "pioneer of investigative journalism".

There is also a memoir by Babel's daughter, Nathalie, who writes of the pain of being exposed, over almost 50 years, to ever-changing revelations about her father's life and death. Only in the early Nineties was it established that he was shot, accused of being a Trotskyist terrorist and foreign spy, on 26 January 1940.

Most important, there are the short stories for which Babel has long been famous. There is a group of semi-autobiographical narratives, mostly set in the Black Sea port of Odessa where Babel was born in 1894. There are the Odessa Tales: a comic, expressionistic celebration of the lives of gangsters and whores in the Jewish quarter of this sun-drenched Russian equivalent to Naples or Palermo. And there is Babel's greatest work, Red Cavalry: the fruit of his months as a war correspondent.

The first stories from this cycle were published in 1924 and brought Babel immediate recognition. With their demotic language and vivid depictions of violence, they seemed a perfect response to demands for a new, truly Soviet prose. The poet Nadezhda Mandelstam has written: "I had the feeling that Babel's main driving force was the unbridled curiosity with which he scrutinised life and people." She has also written that Babel always wanted to surprise. These two qualities are as apparent in his writing as in his behaviour. His style is a constant series of surprises, of leaps between the laconic and the florid, the emotional and the dispassionate, the factual and metaphorical. Babel's curiosity is no less apparent: including his curiosity about matters most of us might prefer not to know about.

It is uncertain whether Babel witnessed pogroms in his youth, but he was clearly fascinated by sadism and violence. Once he boasted to a friend: "I've now learned to watch calmly as people are shot." He was on friendly terms with Yezhov, head of the secret police during the height of the Purges. According to Nadezhda Mandelstam, her husband Osip once asked Babel why he was drawn to such people. Was it a desire to see what it was like in the exclusive store where the merchandise was death? Did he want to touch it with his fingers? No, Babel replied. "I just like to have a sniff and see what it smells like."

However perverted this seems, there is nothing voyeuristic about Babel's art. The greatness of Red Cavalry stems from the depth and clarity of Babel's understanding of the human capacity for violence. Sadism and vengefulness, in Babel's world, come in a variety of guises, and victims and executioners absorb one another's identity.

"My First Goose", for example, begins with Lyutov, the Babel-like figure who narrates many stories, arriving at a divisional HQ. The commander mockingly warns him: "Here you get hacked to pieces just for wearing glasses." Lyutov is duly tormented by the Cossacks with whom he is billeted. Even the mistress of the house refuses to feed him. In his frustration, Lyutov catches a "haughty goose" as it waddles through the yard and finishes it off with a sabre, winning some respect from the Cossacks he so admires. But Lyutov's triumph is incomplete. His heart "screeched and bled" through the night: his inner being, like the goose, has been "hacked to pieces".

In another story, Lyutov (whose name, ironically, means "fierce one") is unable to shoot Dolgushov, a mortally wounded telephonist who fears that, as the cavalry retreat, he will be captured – and tortured – by the Poles. Another Cossack calmly shoots Dolgushov and then turns on Lyutov: "Get lost, or I'll shoot you... You spectacled idiots have as much pity for us as a cat has for a mouse."

Not all of Babel's depth and subtlety is conveyed by these translations. Babel revered Flaubert and Maupassant and is no less fine a stylist. And his deepest insights are often voiced through careful effects of style. In the passage above, the intensity of Lyutov's unconscious identification with wounded Dolgushov is brought out by a simple repetition. Dolgushov's "intestines were slithering on to his knees" and "sweat was slithering down my body". The effect is easy enough to reproduce, but Constantine has the intestines "spilling" and the sweat "slithering".

These translations are the best we have, but Babel is an uncommonly difficult writer to translate. Some pages of this volume read superbly, others are marred by lapses of tone or understanding. Had he been able to devote another year or two to the task, Constantine might well have produced a definitive translation. Not all publishers will accept it can take many times longer to translate a writer of the calibre of Babel than a less subtle writer." - Robert Chandler



"In late May 1920, the First Cavalry of the Soviet Red Army, under the command of General Budyonny, rode into Volhynia, today the border region of western Ukraine and eastern Poland. The Russian-Polish campaign was under way, the new Soviet government's first foreign offensive, which was viewed back in Moscow as the first step toward spreading the doctrine of World Revolution to Poland, then to Europe, then to the world. Babel chronicled this campaign in his Red Cavalry stories",... blending "fiction and fact, creating a powerful effect that is particularly poignant in his rendering of the atrocities of war. The stories were published in magazines and newspapers between 1923 and 1926.... In 1926, thirty-four of the stories were included in the book Konarmia (translated into English as Red Calvary), which quickly went into eight editions and was translated into English, French, Italian, Spanish, and German."- The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, pages 197-200

The short pieces that make up the Red Cavalry stories (and the additional stories in the “Red Cavalry Cycle” section in The Complete Works of Isaac Babel) are brief tales from the author riding with the First Calvary during the Russian-Polish war (see the above excerpt for the stories’ context). The stories may intersect with other stories, continue previous tales, tell the fate of characters introduced earlier, or in a few cases they stand alone. The collection as a whole is greater than the sum of the individual tales, the minor portraits adding up to an expansive canvas. Since Babel is new to me, I found his style quite a pleasure. Or rather his styles, since most of the stories were unique in their approach in narration. Two characteristics, however, are consistent throughout his writing (and not just in these tales)—irony and ambiguity. The sparseness of prose does not lessen the powerful force in the choice of words. The similes and metaphors really stand out in the combination of their economy and descriptiveness (all quotes from the Peter Constantine translation), adding dimensions in the comparison:

•Regarding Eliza, a Jesuit priest’s housekeeper: “Her sponge cakes ad the aroma of crucifixion.” (The Church in Novograd)

•“…(W)ho was living at the time in Radzivillov, a mangled little town that looked like a tattered old whore.” “Both of us looked upon the world as a meadow in May over which women and horses wander.” (The Story of a Horse)

•“The orange sun is rolling above the sky like a severed head…”. (Crossing the River Zbrucz)

As the last simile insinuates, the war and the atrocities it bred are a large focus of these stories. “Crossing the River Zbrucz” starts off as a simple story describing the cavalry entering Polish territory. But the description of nature takes a sinister and ghastly turn, mimicking the carnage that is occurring all around. The violence invades the narrator’s subconscious, directing his dreams as well as his somnambulant actions. “The Letter” highlights violence between family members, and (to me) raises the question of how much brutality was already present but fragilely kept in check. “The Road to Brody” depicts “(t)he chronicle of our everyday crimes”, going beyond the direct brutality of humans but affecting the living world as well as indirectly impacting people (through needlessly destroying their livelihood, for example). A different Coassack narrates the bulk of “Berestechko,” and his ease and casual nature in describing atrocities adds another layer of revulsion for the reader. Several stories in the “Cycle” tales don’t hesitate in describing the uses of rape during war. Sometimes the surreal nature of war and everyday life is highlighted, such as in “Czesniki” where people are concerned about breeding their horses in the middle of a battle. And in “After the Battle” the narrator chillingly asks for what he feels should be a basic right: “I was exhausted, and, crouching beneath the crown of death, walked on, begging fate for the simplest ability—the ability to kill a man.”

“My First Goose” is one of my favorite stories from this collection since it pulls together many of Babel’s themes. The narrator, wearing glasses and thus regarded as an intellectual (and what seems to be code for Jewish), is not accepted with the division to which he was assigned. After his trunk is thrown out in the street by one comrade and another soldier repeatedly farts in his face, the narrator takes his anger out on the (Jewish) family where the division is billeted (or rather the residence they had appropriated). Crushing the neck of what is probably the family’s lasdo t possession, a goose, the narrator skewers it with his sword and demands the old woman of the house to cook it for him. This earns him a new respect with the Cossacks. After reading the news to his comrades, the narrator lays down to sleep: “I dreamed and saw women in my dreams, and only my heart, crimson with murder, screeched and bled.” While this quote references the cost of his acceptance with a murderous horde, the most chilling thing about the story is the title—his first goose. There were more? And were any of those ‘geese’ human?

The irony of a Jew riding with the Cossacks is never directly addressed but is hinted at—Babel seems to assume the reader will understand the incongruity. (Other stories hint at the narrator’s lack of acceptance due to his schooling and Jewish background) Reading the 1920 Diary shows some of the sources for the stories, yet how much is fact and how much is fiction in the stories is still indeterminable. The narrator usually appears as a thinly disguised Babel. One irony in Babel’s blend of fact and fiction is that he was fighting to spread the oppression and violence inherent in Communism under the guise of liberating others. In “Evening”, a soldier chastises Babel for being tired of this life with the Red Cavalry: “We’re cracking the nut for you, and soon enough you will be able to see the meat inside, at which point you’ll take your thumb out of your mouth and sing the glories of the new life in striking prose…”. This echoes Lenin’s justification of breaking a few eggs to make an omelet (appropriated from Robespierre). The party language weaves in and out of the stories, explicit at times like in “Salt”, where what bothers one idealistic soldier is the lie a woman tells in order to ride a train instead of the desperate plight the army causes the civilians (which of course the Soviet army was there to ‘help’). Lies run throughout the stories, from the personal to the state, although it is difficult to differentiate at times the actions of the invading army from the Polish army due to the anti-Semitism present in both. The piercing of the Soviet fiction by the junk dealer “Gedali” causes the Babel character to respond with empty slogans. Both sides steal from Gedali and threaten him with violence, while the narrator replies “The Revolution cannot not shoot, Gedali… because it is the Revolution.” While Gedali claims not to understand the Revolution, he clearly grasps the inherent falsehoods. The liberators from the east offer nothing the oppressed desire. An additional indicator of things to come is the importance of propaganda that the narrator participates in, eagerly devouring what is offered while churning out more to educate the masses. The biggest irony is having a Jew ride with the Cossacks to “liberate” the largely Jewish population of eastern Poland (at that time)—accepted by neither his comrades nor those he oppresses. What makes it compelling is that the narrator has a moral core, yet he refuses to pass judgment on what he sees going on around him. These ambiguities and ironies make it difficult to nail down Babel’s opinion on what he is witnessing, although his language does give definite hints. In the stories, religion plays varying roles of importance but the most humorous case (as well as the most explicit comment) is with “Pan Apolek”. One of the few joyous characters in these tales, Apolek is a wandering artist that inserts citizens’ faces in his religious paintings. After a falling out with the local church regarding his paintings, we hear his price list:

“Fifteen zloty for the Virgin Mary, twenty-five zloty for the Holy Family, and fifty zloty for the Last Supper portraying all the client’s family. The client’s enemy can be portrayed as Judas Iscariot, for which an extra ten zloty will be added to the bill.”

Despite the Catholic Church trying to stop his blasphemous (to them) paintings, “there was no shortage of commissions.” The local peasantry defends Apolek for blurring the everyday with the holy. The church's lack of concern for the mundane life of the peasantry while it focuses solely on the exemplary life of the divine resonates throughout Babel’s work. Yet is this estimation of religion as useless (at best) or tyrannical (at worst) really Babel’s thoughts or simply the Soviet line? Because Apolek is painted in such a flattering light, for one moment you think you know. But the narrator’s reaction to Apolek’s rambling heresies at the end of the story once again leaves you unable to know for certain." - bookcents.blogspot.com



"Babel’s stories of life in Odessa, or more properly in the Moldavanka neighborhood, were published starting in 1921 and continued into the 1930s. Jan Dudas' recent pictures of the district can be found on Flickr here. If possible, these works feel more direct than The Red Cavalry stories, entire tales sometimes couched in single sentences. The repetitive style Babel sometimes employs works to good effect in these tales, creating a rhythm in the reading that matches the rhythm of life he is relaying. And what a life it is—gangsters, brothels, and smuggling all taking place with flamboyance and élan. The Jews portrayed in these stories don't fit any stereotype that Babel uses in some of his other works.

While I’ve seen some reviews of these stories criticizing the romantic nature Babel used, I did not get that feeling at all. Babel’s irony is on full display in these tales. There is not quite as much ambiguity here as in The Red Cavalry stories, although you are still not quite sure how the narrator feels about these characters. At times there is sort of a wistful “they don’t make ‘em like that anymore” air, looking back as if to a sort of golden age. The humor walks a fine line between travesty and farce, or maybe blurs the two together. Yet Babel pulls no punches—as I read more about these characters the less I liked them.

Even with that ultimate dislike, Benya Krik (the embodiment of chutzpah) is an incredible literary creation. If you can read only two of Babel’s stories, I would recommend “How Things Were Done in Odessa” and “The King”, both of which I’ll quote from liberally. I wanted to write a lot in this post since I enjoyed these stories so much, but I’ll let Babel speak for himself. Hopefully these excerpts will spark some interest if you are unfamiliar with his work. In “The King”, the wedding feast of Benya’s sister is described. A new chief of police plans to raid the wedding but Benya’s henchmen set the police station on fire just before the raid can take place. And what a wedding feast they had:

'For the dinner at this wedding, they served turkeys, roasted chicken, geese, gefilte fish, and fish soup in which lakes of lemon shimmered like mother-of-pearl. Above the dead goose heads, flowers swayed like luxuriant plumes. But do the foamy waves of the Odessan Sea throw roasted chickens onto the shore?'

On this blue night, this starry night, the best of our contraband, everything for which our region is celebrated far and wide, plied its seductive, destructive craft. Wine from afar heated stomachs, sweetly numbed legs, dulled brains, and summoned belches as resonant as the call of battle horns. The black cook from the Plutarch, which had pulled in three days before from Port Said, had smuggled in big-bellied bottles of Jamaican rum, oily Madeira, cigars from the plantations of Pierpont Morgan, and oranges from the groves of Jerusalem. This is what the foamy waves of the Odessan Sea throw onto the shore, and this is what Odessan beggars sometimes get at Jewish weddings. They got Jamaican rum at Dvoira Krik’s wedding, and that’s why the Jewish beggars got as drunk as unkosher pigs and began loudly banging their crutches. … But the peak of their [the gangsters] ecstasy came when, in accordance with ancient custom, the guests began bestowing gifts on the newlyweds. The synagogue shamuses jumped onto the tables and sang out, above the din of the seething flourishes, the quantity of rubles and silver spoons that were being presented.

The introduction of Benya Krik comes when you learn of his marriage (an aside: two completely different wedding stories to different women are presented in these stories which I was unable to reconcile). In this instance, Benya is robbing a rich man when he catches sight of his daughter. Two days later Benya returns the money and asks for her hand in marriage, her father understanding the question is a formality since the gangster gets whatever he wants. The story ends the next morning as the guests have left the feast. Dvoria, forty years old and suffering from goiter, is “edging her timid husband toward the door of their nuptial chamber, looking at him lustfully like a cat which, holding a mouse in its jaws, gently probes it with its teeth.” This was one of the rare instances I felt sorry for a literary character.

“How Things Were Done in Odessa” tells of Benya’s entrée into the gangster life and why he rose to the top. The first job Benya was given was to rob Tartakovsky, the richest Jew in Odessa and nicknamed “Yid-and-a-Half”. The robbery goes wrong, one of Benya’s henchmen shooting a clerk of Tartakovsky. Benya not only arranges to have Tartakovsky pay for the funeral of the clerk (also that of the henchman who did the shooting) and provide a stipend to the boy’s mother, Benya gives a speech at the funerals. His apology to the clerk’s mother is what is priceless:

”If you want my life, you can have it, but everyone makes mistakes, even God! This was a giant mistake, Aunt Peysa! But didn’t God Himself make a mistake when he settled the Jews in Russia so they could be tormented as if they were in hell? Wouldn’t it have been better to have the Jews living in Switzerland, where they would’ve been surrounded by first-class lakes, mountain air, and Frenchmen galore? Everyone makes mistakes, even God.”

The problems of the Jews in Odessa compound when the Bolsheviks come to power, poignantly relayed in “The End of the Almshouse”. But the story of “Froim Grach”, one of Benya’s trusted advisers (and his father-in-law in one marriage scenario), compares the gangsters of Odessa with the new Soviet state. Benya Krik misjudged those just rising to power, treating them simply as he would another gang. As Benya's henchmen are killed off by the state, Grach goes to see the local chairman of the Cheka (Vladislav Simen) in order to complain but he is killed as well. The implication is that there is a new sheriff in town, much more ruthless than Benya “the King". While Babel disappears inside his stories so that it is difficult to discern his views with certainty, I have to believe that Borovoi, an investigator from Odessa who knew the exploits of Froim Grach well, speaks for the author regarding the flamboyant characters of his stories:

”I know you’re angry at me, Sasha,” Simen said to him, “but you mustn’t forget that now we are the power, the state power! You must remember that!”

“I’m not angry at you,” Borovoi said, turning away. “It’s just that you’re not an Odessan, you can’t understand what the old man represented.” …

“Tell me one thing as a Chekist, as a revolutionary,” Simen said to him after a moment of silence. “What use would that man have been to the society we are building?”

“I don’t know,” Borovoi said, starting motionlessly in front of him. “I suppose no use at all.”

He pulled himself together and chased away his memories. Then, livening up, he continued telling the Chekists who had come from Moscow about the life of Froim Grach, about his ingenuity, his elusiveness, his contempt for his fellow men, all the amazing tales that were now a thing of the past
." - bookcents.blogspot.com



"The most terrible pogrom in the history of Jewish Odessa took place on October 18-22, 1905, when there were some 175,000 Jews living in the city. It enveloped the entire city and the bloody [activity] spread from the central streets to the outlying districts, primarily Moldovanka, which had a large and impoverished poor Jewish population. For three days and nights the crowds, which included inhabitants of the surrounding villages, robbed shops, destroyed houses, tortured and killed Jews with knives, daggers and firearms. Bursting with rage, and spurred on by the knowledge that they were assured impunity, the thugs did not spare women, the elderly, or children. The pogrom left 299 victims in its wake, from Isser Zeltzer, aged one and a half to 85 year-old Shimon Tsmelzon. Several thousand Jews managed to escaped from the to the huge yard of the city's oldest Jewish hospital, which was surrounded by solid stone buildings. The wounded were also brought to the hospital for treatment.

Fighters from the Jewish self-defense groups displayed great courage in rescuing people often at risk to their own lives. In most cases when the self-defense groups appeared the mob would scatter, but when troops and police arrived they would return and continue with their pillaging. Invaluable assistance in rescuing Jews was provided by voluntary medical groups that included university students and marine college cadets and, it is important to note, often contained non-Jewish citizens of Odessa. Similarly, there were people of various nationalities among the doctors from the ambulance station, who went to the areas affected by the pogroms under rain of fire, giving first aid to the wounded and transporting them to the hospitals. Documents show that among the doctors who helped the wounded was the founder of the ambulance station, Dr. Yakov Bardach, whose fame spread far beyond the city. After the 1905 pogrom, there was a marked increase in the emigration of Jews from Odessa.




The stories covered in this post are from the sections "Stories, 1925 - 1938" and "Early Stories" in The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, edited by Nathalie Babel and translated by Peter Constantine.

Similar to Babel’s “formal” collections of stories, these varied stories paint a broad picture of life in Russia. The easiest way for me to touch on these stories is to address a few of the major themes which show up in much of Babel’s work.

Babel highlights the Jewish/Russian identity question in many of his stories but his usual tone is detachment (similar to the Red Calvary Stories in which his Jewish narrator rides with the Coassacks). When he does appear to lean in one direction, it tends to be toward the Russian identity. The major exceptions are “The Story of My Dovecote” and “First Love”, two of his more powerful stories, which weave factual and shocking events with a semi-fictional first-person account. Compounding the ambiguity is that the family in these stories are named Babel. “The Story of My Dovecote” starts by highlighting the quota system for Jewish students and the bribing that occurred to enroll the wealthier students. Upon achieving a place in the class, the fictional little Babel goes to buy doves for his long-promised dovecote on the day that a new constitution was issued, an excuse for anti-Semitic pogroms to take place. The ten year old narrator does not understand what he sees but relays it in chilling detail. He witnesses his grandfather’s dead body, fish (symbolically) stuffed in his pants fly and his mouth (one of the perches still alive and wiggling). Still in all this Babel adds some humor in the twisted actions of Makarenko, a legless and leprous old man from whom the local boys affectionately bought cigarettes and other treats. Makarenko and his wife are joining the looting going on all around them but he bemoans their meager haul: "'Bonnets!' Makarenko shouted, choked, and made a sound as if he were sobbing. 'Obviously God has chosen me to bear the Cross, Katyusha! People are carting off whole bales of cloth—these people get nice and proper things, and what do we get? Bonnets!'"

After Makarenko kills the little Babel’s doves by smashing them against the boy’s face, the narrator finds the rest of his family hiding at the tax inspector’s house. It is there that the young Babel’s “First Love” lives, and the burgeoning sexuality of the narrator toward his adult protector invokes a parallel to the state of the Jewish citizens during the pogrom—impotent, unknowing, and bitter at second-class citizenship. Worse, however, is his father's humiliation that the young narrator witnesses. His father, dazed and disoriented after the murder of his father and the looting of his store, kneels in the dirt before an apathetic Cossack officer. The soldier, trying to appear helpful, offers no assistance as the nearby family store is being looted. The Jewish/Russian identity is also explored in “Karl-Yankel” in which the role of circumcision becomes a matter of the state instead of a religious matter. In “Odessa” Babel paints the Jews located there with a broad friendly brush:

'Half the population is made up of Jews, and Jews are a people who have learned a few simple truths along the way. Jews get married so as not to be alone, love so as to live through the centuries, hoard money so they can buy houses and give their wives astrakhan jackets, love children because, let’s face it, it is good and important to love one’s children. The poor Odessa Jews get very confused when it comes to officials and regulations, but it isn’t all that easy to get them to budge in their opinions, their very antiquated opinions. You might not be able to budge these Jews, but there’s a whole lot you can learn from them.”

In highlighting the question of Russian vs. Jewish identity, Babel also shows the limited ways Jews had available to succeed in society (which may be one reason critics of his Odessa Stories feels he romanticizes his gangsters since they succeed on their own terms, outside the norms of regular society). The usual portrayed method of escape or success is through education. In “The Public Library” Babel describes “an immutable feature of every public library in the Russian Empire: a sleeping Jew.” The pressure to study and succeed wore him out, as also characterized by the ten-year-old narrator in “The Story of My Dovecote” deliriously shouting lines of Pushkin during his examination. One exception for succeeding used in his stories (which is unique to Odessa) was learning the violin from the teacher who had trained many prominent violinists. The story “The Awakening”, which also includes a humiliation of the father but this time at the hands of the narrator/child, shows the family's attempt at getting the child to succeed with violin lesson. In “At Grandmother’s” the narrator has his grandmother cynically summarize why the boy should study: “Study and you can have everything—wealth and glory. You must know everything. Everyone will fall on their knees before you and bow to you. Let them envy you. Don’t believe in people. Don’t have friends. Don’t give them your money. Don’t give them your heart!”

All these instructions are mocked in another story, “In the Basement”, where the young narrator is an aspiring story teller. Actually he was “a boy who told lies.” Once he has the friendship of the smartest boy in the class, whose family has connections and money, the narrator has to figure out how to mask his family’s poverty and gloss over the lies he has told about them. Everything comically falls apart while the narrator shouts from Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”, his family repeatedly stabbing him in the back.

In one of Babel’s first stories he delves deeply into religion. “Old Shloyme” looks at a family's reaction to the imposed renunciation of their Jewish religion. The son has no problem renouncing, eager to keep what he has amassed and willingly takes the “Russian first and only” mantle. His father, never a religious person, refuses to renounce his faith and hangs himself instead. An exceptional fable, “The Sin of Jesus”, provides a new twist in looking at Babel’s view of religion. The story centers on Arina, a pregnant hotel worker who is at the beck and call of boarders and other employees. After receiving a strong beating, she turns to Jesus to assist her in her desperate situation. Among other questions, Jesus asks “(H)ow about if you led a pure life?” to which Arina replies “Do me a favor and spare me such advice!” Jesus comes up with a compromise, providing Arina with an angel to satisfy her sexually but without the risk of conceiving. But the angel Alfred, whose wings “were made of infants’ sighs”, was crushed by Arina’s swollen belly. An infuriated Jesus swears he will do nothing to help her. Just before Arina is to give birth, she appeals to heaven one more time, holding up her pregnant belly with fresh marks from the beatings she receives. Jesus regrets his earlier action and asks for forgiveness from Arina. “’I will not forgive you, Jesus Christ!’ Arina replied. ‘I will not!’” Just as situations can be inverted in other stories, Babel has humans refusing to grant forgiveness to a deity that causes so much pain and suffering. The humorous tale “Shabos-Nakhamu” provides different sources of man’s suffering—he has no one to blame but himself. The story relays a couple’s superstitious beliefs, which are preyed upon by a crafty Jew who takes advantage of their credulity.

Babel had planned on a novel tentatively titled Velikaya Krinitsa, but only two chapter have survived—“Gapa Guzhva” and “Kolyvushka”. Both detail the cost of collectivization under Stalin. In “Kolyvushka” the farmer, seeing his farm and equipment about to be handed to someone else destroys his own possessions, essentially a criminal act against the state. Gapa Guzhva finds out, much to her chagrin, that whores like her will be put to other (more productive?) use. The political themes in the stories don’t pull any punches against the government. Atrocities abound in “The Road,” from a teacher being shot in the face for having a politically incorrect signature on his papers (additionally being castrated, his severed genitals shoved in his newlywed’s mouth) to the pervasive desperation in “Mama, Rimma, and Alla.” The latter tale is a rather unremarkable story until you get to the (intended) abortion scene. Sometimes it is hard to reconcile Babel’s courtship of Soviet power with his critical stories. Maybe, just like having multiple families in real life, he was caught up in the current moment to the exclusion of everything else. In the story “Inspiration”, one man’s dedicated work inspires depression in the narrator when he sees the unremarkable output. It is difficult not to read this as thinly veiled toward those in power, whose work causes much of the desperation Babel describes in so many of his stories. But maybe that isn’t the intent at all. Babel is such a contradictory character that lurks so far beneath the surface in his stories that it is difficult to discern how deep the meaning is to go. One story not needing interpretation is the blunt “Petroleum”, which documents the unworkable nature of the country’s five-year plans. The implausible goals are made more ironic when the uncontrollable present is poignantly highlighted.

One last topic I’ll mention from these stories is Babel’s description of the writing process. After reviewing a co-worker’s attempt at translating Maupassant in “Guy de Maupassant”, the Babel-like narrator notes: “This work isn’t as bad as it might seem. When a phrase is born, it is both good and bad at the same time. The secret of its success rests in a crux that is barely discernible. One’s fingertips must grasp the key, gently warming it. And then the key must be turned once, not twice.” Upon reading his corrections to the co-worker the next day, she marveled at his improvements. Responding to how he did it, the narrator responds: “I spoke to her of style, of an army of words, and army in which every type of weapon is deployed. No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.” [Aside—this point is emphasized several times in other Babel stories. “Justice in Parentheses” ends with “Then I can say I put the period where it belongs.” The story “Chink”—which could have been renamed “Kink”—ends with the single-word sentence “Period.”] Once again, Babel is full of contradictions. Immediately after this claim, he sensuously describes his co-worker listening to his improved translation… it seems a period in the right places isn’t the only thing to icily pierce the heart (or other body parts) better than an iron spike. But then the end of “Guy de Maupassant” uses four iron spikes to full effect: “I read the book through to the end and got up from my bed. The fog had come to the window, hiding the universe. My heart constricted. I was touched by a premonition of truth."

In “Odessa”, Babel provides a key to his oft-used imagery: “(I)n Russian literature there haven’t been so far any real, clear, cheerful descriptions of the sun”. The imagery of the sun or of sunset fills Babel’s stories, usually clearly but not always cheerful. In conjunction with that imagery, cold and heat often appear in setting the mood or tone. Colors are also used to relay more than imagery: grays usually indicate melancholy or a flatness of spirit, while vibrant colors signify a strong emotion (whether for good or bad). An additional story where Babel uses literature within his stories is in the story “An Evening with the Empress.” Browsing through the books of Empress Maria (wife of Czar Alexander III) chronicled her life in great detail to the narrator, more than any biography possibly could have.

While there is so many possible things to cover in Babel’s work, I’ll close with a source that seems to underlie some of his work. Haim Nahman Bialik’s poem "In the City of Slaughter" was an anguished response to the Kishinev pogrom. While detailing the actions carried out, Bialik also decries the timidity and acquiescence of the Jewish response. Babel doesn't explicitly goes as far as Bialik, but there is a definite undercurrent at times that feels like he is on the same page, describing both atrocities and the meek responses to them. It might help explain or bridge between the two stories on the 1905 pogrom (“The Story of My Dovecote” and “First Love”) with “The Sin of Jesus”. Here is the end of Bialik's poem, something I would not have been surprised to read in Babel's work:

'What is thy business here, O son of man?

Rise, to the desert flee!

The cup of affliction thither bear with thee!

Take thou they soul, rend it in many a shred!

With impotent rage, thy heart deform!

Thy tear upon the barren boulders shed

And send thy bitter cry into the storm
." - bookcents.blogspot.com



"Translating one of Isaac Babel's stories is no easy task. Translating all of them is less a task than a calling. So while neat, two-volume editions of Babel's collected works have circulated in Russia since the waning days of Perestroika, English speakers have had to stitch together more than a dozen translations, some out of print since the 1930s, to get a full sense of his range. The discrepancy between Babel's influence and the availability of his work has always been striking.

Small wonder, then, that the upcoming publication of Norton's single-volume The Complete Works of Isaac Babel should be greeted as a major literary event. Magazine editors assigned their reviews over a year ago. A black market in advance reader's copies sprang up early this summer. A few months later, Norton editor Robert Weil boasted to Publishers Weekly that the book would "sell for a lifetime and make the house a lot of money." This, he said, was "'not a case of charity publishing."

Perhaps not, but it did seem that Norton had done us all a great kindness. No Soviet writer has meant so much to so many Americans: Ernest Hemingway read the first translation of Babel's stories and turned green over his sentences. Raymond Carver cited Babel as a formative influence. Philip Roth's alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, called himself a "New World cousin in the Babel clan"—a sentiment shared by Cynthia Ozick and Saul Bellow. Francine Prose recalls learning the "extraordinary importance of compression, simplicity, bravery, and never underestimating the intelligence of the reader" at Babel's feet. Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, and John Berryman wrote brilliant essays about him.

The son of assimilated Odessa Jews, Babel rose like a rocket and fell almost as fast. Born in 1894, he published his first story in 1913. Ten years later, Red Cavalry—which grew out of Babel's experiences with a Cossack regiment during the Polish-Soviet war—made him a national celebrity. The book was a bombshell, both there and abroad. Trilling recalled reading it in 1929 and recoiling from its threat to his faith in the "Russian Experiment." "It was obviously the most remarkable work of fiction that had yet come out of revolutionary Russia," Trilling wrote. "Yet it was all too heavily charged with the intensity, irony, and ambiguousness from which I wanted to escape." (Babel, who was forced through most of the 1930s to practice what he called the "genre of silence" and died with a desk full of unpublished and unpublishable manuscripts, would later stand as an example to chastened American Stalinists.)

The Russian establishment had a similar reaction, and Babel's survival through the 1930s was something of a miracle. Eager to penetrate to the core of his society, Babel leveraged his fame and courted the monsters of his time, from local NKVD butchers to the heads of the secret police. The widow of doomed poet Osip Mandelstam recalled her husband asking Babel "why he was so drawn to 'militiamen': was it a desire to see what it was like in the exclusive store where the merchandise was death? Did he just want to touch it with his fingers? 'No,' Babel replied. 'I don't want to touch it with my fingers—I just want to have a sniff and see what it smells like.' "

The bloodier his circumstances were (and his stint with the Cossacks was bloody beyond belief), the more unflinching Babel's sentences became. He had an easy way with murderous ambiguities, and extremes of violence only strengthened his grip. Babel revised his stories 20 or 30 times, stripping each one down to its bare essentials. What remains retains its power to shock, and if recent translations of his work have improved upon those made in the 1950s and '60s, it's because the more direct and unaffected our language becomes, the more it approximates Babel's Russian.

And while Peter Constantine's translation for Norton lacks the wit and fluency of Mirra Ginsburg's best work or the authority of Max Hayward's, it is in some ways an improvement over the Penguin Classics anthology stocked by most bookstores. The Edinburgh-educated David McDuff, who also translated Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Leskov, and Bely for Penguin, is eminently competent but a bit too dry for Babel and a bit too British (American readers familiar with Babel's maxim that "no steel can pierce the human heart as icily as a well-placed period" will be amused to learn that a "full stop" also works).

Constantine, who grew up in Athens and worked as a dancer and concierge before trying his hand at translation, is neither too dry nor too British (his first book was a glossary of Japan's sexual idioms). But he, too, is eminently competent—his translation of Thomas Mann's short stories won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize, and the attention given his collection of Chekhov's obscure, absurdist sketches was something of a dry run for the hoopla surrounding the Complete Babel—and astonishingly prolific. According to the New York Times, Constantine takes three months on a 300-page book and is figuring out a way to double his output; his publications already include translations from the Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, French, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish, as well as a few from languages I'd never heard of.

It's strange, then, given the importance of his latest work—the first one-volume edition of Babel's collected writings available in any language, and the only opportunity most of us will have to read his stage works, screenplays, sketches, and reportage—that Constantine falls far short of the mark. For one thing, he takes undue liberties with the text: Take a single line from the (remarkable, and remarkably anti-Soviet) story "Froim Grach," which describes the fate of an Odessa gangster who comes up against the greater gangsterism of the Soviet secret police: "Know who you're killing off, boss?" Grach demands of the Cheka officer who's been arresting and shooting his men. "You're killing off the eagles. Know what you'll be left with? You'll be left with shit!"

Now, Babel doesn't actually say "shit" or even its slang equivalent (Russians have more words for shit than Eskimos have for snow). What he has in mind is more akin to "filth of the lowest common denominator," for which English happens to have a pretty good equivalent—"dreg." The word Babel uses, smit'o, appears elsewhere in his Odessa Tales. It also appears in the Russian translation of Ecclesiastes. It is not a curse. You could argue that the richness of the Russian idiom works very much in Babel's favor here and against the translator's, as do the sharp distinctions between "good" Russian, street Russian, provincial Russian, and the Russian spoken by criminals, which is almost a language unto itself. But if translating smit'o as "shit" when "dregs" will do is simply careless (smit'o is too obscure a word to appear in most Russian dictionaries), another of Constantine's decisions—changing Babel's "eagles" to "lions"—is inexplicable. The words happen to have the same resonance in English and Russian and are interchangeable, in this context, in much the same way. So why the change? These are minor sins, but their cumulative effect is more than negligible

Second, Constantine's liberties sometimes result in garbled, meaningless passages. Babel's "After the Battle" opens with a Cossack's disdain for Babel's bespectacled narrator, Lyutov, who has failed to load his pistol before going into battle. It ends with Lyutov "begging fate for the simplest ability—the ability to kill a man." In between, the Cossack Akinfiev chases Lyutov around a bench, shouting, more or less, "Molokan! The law I've got says Molokans should be wiped out for worshipping God! You didn't put no cartridges in? You worship God, you traitor!" Granted, the passage is inexplicable unless you happen to know that the Molokans were a pacifist sect that had broken off from the Orthodox church. An orthodox translator like Walter Morison is forced to footnote the passage; McDuff translates Molokan literally "as milk-drinker" and lets the context tell you that milk-drinkers are a religious sect. Constantine just cuts to the chase and dubs Lyutov a wimp. "In my books," Constantine's Akinfiev says, "all wimps should be shot dead, they believe in God!" Constantine may well believe there's a logical connection between cowardice and religion, but several passages in Red Cavalry suggest that Babel does not. Nor is much left of the ironies and ambiguities Babel's invested his story with; where Babel sets moral bravery (the Molokans) and physical courage (the Cossaks) in opposition, Constantine equates physical weakness with moral corruption.

Third, for a PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club winner (and poet), Constantine seems to have a tin ear: Did I mention that he actually uses the word "wimp"? Needless to say, it's not a word Babel would use, and finding it here is a bit like coming across a "gnarly" in Dante's description of the Inferno, or seeing Achilles "lose his shit" when news of a lover's death reaches him. It's more than cavalier; it's jarring and, considering how much sweat Babel pours into every word, unpardonable. And when Constantine's not being too cavalier, there's a good chance he's gone in the opposite direction; where Babel writes like a soldier sending telegrams home from the front. Constantine stutters like a drill sergeant on a first date.

This is doubly a shame since the project's size, and the reception it's likely to get, precludes another Babel translation from coming down the pike any time soon. It isn't that the Babel who emerges from Constantine's mill is unrecognizable (it took the entire Stalinist machine to silence Babel the first time around). It's just that other translations give you a much better sense of his abilities.

None of us will know how much was lost—11 notebooks, seven notepads, and 15 folders full of manuscripts were confiscated upon Babel's arrest by the NKVD, in May of 1939, and destroyed after his execution, the following January—but we do know Babel's final words as a free man: "They didn't let me finish." There's a cruel irony, then, in the very idea of a "complete" Works of Isaac Babel. Careless and quick, Constantine's translation is crueler still." - Alex Abramovich





Read more:



Gregory Freidin: "Justifying the Revolution as an Aesthetic Phenomenon"

http://www.stanford.edu/~gfreidin/Publications/babel/babel_nietzsche.pdf




Nicholas Jahr: "The Shattered Faith of Isaac Babel"

http://www.jewishcurrents.org/2007-jan-jahr.htm





Kris Saknussemm - Wanderings of a Zelig-like, mysterious, super-mentally-gifted amnesiac who can defeat his enemies simply by chanting tongue twisters

Kris Saknussemm, Zanesville: A Novel (Villard, 2005)

"WHO IS ELIJAH CLEARFATHER? Futuristic bioweapon or good old-fashioned messiah? Reincarnated ex-porn star or mutant information-age revolutionary? The man who awakens in New York City’s Central Park with no memory of his identity and the enigmatic message FATHER FORGIVE THEM F carved into the flesh of his back may be all of these things and more. Taken in (and then expelled) by a group of freedom fighters battling the soul-deadening Vitessa Cultporation, Clearfather is a stranger in an even stranger land. Following tantalizing clues that point to the gnomic Stinky Wiggler, and pursued by murderous Vitessa agents, Clearfather embarks on a surreal odyssey of self-discovery across an America that resembles a vast amusement park designed by some unholy trinity of Walt Disney, Hunter S. Thompson, and Hieronymus Bosch. Accompanying Clearfather is an unforgettable cast of characters–including Aretha Nightingale, an ex-football-playing drag queen; Dooley Duck and Ubba Dubba, hologram cartoon characters sprung outrageously to life; and the ethereally beautiful Kokomo, whose past is as much a mystery as Clearfather’s own.
By turns hilarious and deeply moving, a savage, fiercely intelligent satire that is also a page-turning adventure and a transcendent love story, Zanesville marks the arrival of a brilliant new voice in fiction."

"Saknussemm's debut novel describes the picaresque wanderings of a Zelig-like character through a post-apocalyptic America where psychotropic drug dependency and bodily mutilation/alteration are the order of the day. The protagonist, Clearfather, awakens as a middle-aged man in a future Central Park, with vague childhood memories and an outsize member. He makes his way through an America in which the divide between public and private is so nonexistent that the U.S. government itself is privatized, outsourced to the monolithic drug manufacturer, Vitessa Cultporation. Searching for his identity and an explanation of the current state of the barely unified union, Clearfather encounters deposed sex-obsessed-drug-addicted corporate scions, lesbian motorcycle gangs, gay heavyweights and possibly the creator of the universe, at least in its current state. Saknussemm creates a self-contained, sci-fi world where celebrity worship is pervasive and holographic mascots, "eidolons," stand in as shills for everything from fast-food haggis to "Childrite nurturing centers." Tedious action sequences between warring factions and an autistic attention to authorial eschatology make this a long trudge. But it is just a slight step into the imaginative ether to see how many of the novel's obsessions are endgame imaginings of current societal problems." - Publishers Weekly

"This sweeping, satirical first novel envisions a not-so-distant future America in which earthquakes and holy wars have wreaked havoc on the national psyche, and the people are either reclusive and superrich or damaged victims of misguided technologies. Into this schizophrenic landscape steps Elijah Clearfather, a mysterious, super-mentally-gifted amnesiac who can bring his enemies to their knees simply by chanting tongue twisters. Found by a clandestine community of rebel hackers living in Central Park, Clearfather bears a striking resemblance to a former porn-star-turned-cult-leader executed, Waco-style, by the FBI. Possessing the ability to infiltrate and unhinge the minds of those around him, Clearfather is ultimately deemed too dangerous for community membership and is ceremoniously packed onto a Greyhound bus with a makeover and a map leading him back through his haunted past. Thus Clearfather is launched on a madcap journey that involves errant 3-D-advertising icon Dooley Duck; an unlikely friendship with a wealthy adolescent drug addict and Warhol, a mutant bull mastiff; and the love of Kokomo, an enigmatic girl whose past may be as mysterious as his own. Part picaresque, part brilliantly inventive black comedy, Zanesville is one of the most creative, edgy, and entertaining novels sf has spawned in a decade." - Carl Hays

"Ever wonder what kind of novels Neal Stephenson and China Mieville might write if they had a little more fun? Enter Zanesville, the genre-bending, metafictional world of first-time novelist Kris Saknussemm. Zanesville riddles as much as it amuses. It starts with a preface, featuring an alternate 19th century American history about an ignored genius named Lloyd Sitturd. Sitturd leaves behind the resonant and cryptic inscription: “The hidden may be seeking and the missing may return.”
Fast-forward to a timeless corporate-controlled future. An amnesiac named Elijah Clearfather wakes up in Central Park with a mysterious phrase carved on his back and apparent mental powers. Is he the key that will end übercorporate reign on America? Or is he a weapon of mass destruction? Clearfather and his gigantic phallus are determined to find out.
Pluck the book’s more capricious imaginings and the plot essentially boils down to this: Clearfather and friends take a cross-country road trip in search of Clearfather’s past. The closer Clearfather gets, the more Sitturd’s history and Clearfather’s origins become intertwined and the more Vitessa Cultporation wants to stop Clearfather.
Not one word is predictable in Saknussemm’s novel and the reader turns each page at his own risk. Witness Clearfather’s stage entrance:
“He crashed back into himself and felt the Easter evening damp. Dolls and chains hung in ritual fashion from the branches surrounding him, and through the knife-hacked oak trees he could make out great luminous spires and domes, and older grim, but luxuriant blocks of apartments sealed with steel-plate louvers as if against attack. Beside these rose skeletal scaffoldings on which, judging from the hives of lights, whole families perched on open-air platforms while resourceful or desperate individuals dangled in slings and sacks suspended from guy wires. Across the sky, as though projected from behind the sulfur-tinged clouds, flashed pictograms and iridescent banks of hypertext. The word Vitessa was repeated often…”
Zanesville is not a novel for the impatient. Saknussemm aims higher, harder, louder, wider, farther, and deeper all at once, skewering, scrambling and satirizing America’s past, present and future. At times, Saknussemm’s sentences read like an explosion of American cultural references that just happen to have a verb. But if you’re tired of all of the fuss over mediocre fiction, Zanesville packs more memorable scenes in 500 pages than some critically acclaimed authors have written in a lifetime." - Leland Cheuk

"Zanesville is a satire of modern day culture, set amidst a future America gone psychedelic. Elijah Clearfather's journey to discover just who and what he is, at times a reincarnation of a religious cult leader or porn star or even a modern day savior, allows Saknussemm to comment on, and take shots at, just about everything in today's culture. From religion, to consumerism, politics, and corporatism, nothing is left out. Saknussemm uses heavy doses of humor to make his points, often times bordering on the bizarre, but almost always very funny. This can either be in word play or just the bizarre settings he's created for the characters to travel through.
In fact, the main attraction to me was the setting. Think of Stephenson's America in Snowcrash, only more fractious, hopped up on LSD, and cranked up to 11. America has been taken over by the Vitessa Corporation, who has a hand in almost everything, especially drugs. In this future America, Saknussemm introduces us to holographic cartoon characters who take on a life of their own, mutilated lesbian biker gangs in the Midwest, seemingly sentient tornados in Central Texas, 50 foot remote controlled celebrity robots engaging in a larger than life Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robot battles, and the new city of Los Vegas, which extends for most of the entire length of The New Left Coast. Most of the old left coast having fallen into the sea after the big one, called Bigfoot. Into this setting comes Elijah Clearfather. A man who has no idea of who or what he is, Elijah travels the breadth of the US, trying to discover why his memory is gone. Along the way, he meets an impressive variety of characters, including an ex-football player turned drag queen now resistance leader, his to be love Kokomo, who has problems of her own but seems to mesh with Clearfather well, and a ton of other interesting characters.
Ultimately, Clearfather does discover who and what he is, and the reveal had that Stephen Baxter feel where, suddenly, the scope of the story broadens enormously, and becomes something completely different from what you thought. But then again, maybe not. There was enough ambiguity at the end to allow the reader to attempt to reach his own conclusion about Clearfather. I will say that I liked Clearfather's meeting with Stinky Wiggler, his possible father, in a valley that reminded me of John Galt's valley in Atlas Shrugged, only not about objectivism. With so much going on, its clear that Saknussemm is layering the story with lots of deeper meaning. Unfortunately, due to my present circumstances, I could not give the book the time or attention it deserves to 'get' all that was going on. That bothered me to a certain degree. Also, the book is non-stop insanity from beginning to end, with few breaks to catch your breath. At times I would become overwhelmed by all that was going on and couldn't remember people's names or the sequence of events leading up to where I was. Again, not necessarily the fault of the book, more a result of my limited reading time. But since we review the reading experience here, I knock a star off.
If you liked Snowcrash for its setting, or you like humorous satire, you'll like Zanesville, a strong debut novel from Kris Saknussemm." - JP Frantz

"A man wakes up in central park with no memory save for a few disjointed images. He is soon found by a group of techno-rebels who seem an odd selection of freaks led by a former linebacker now turned transvestite. The rebels discover that the man is very well endowed, both physically and psychically. In fact, he is deemed too powerful to keep. So, they name him Clearfather, put him on a bus, and give him a map to send him across America on a voyage of discovery, but not before injecting him with...stuff (I wasn't really clear on whether it was drugs or some type of nanotechnology).
The America of today is long gone in this story. The government has been completely privatized and the country is now run through a massive "cultporation", known as Vitessa, which uses psychotropic drugs to control the population. Somehow Vitessa knows of Clearfather and fears him. They pursue him and try to eliminate him.
During his trip across the country, Clearfather discovers his extraordinary powers as he encounters a freakish and dysfunctional aristocrat family, a freakish lesbian biker gang, a freakish truck full of religious refugees, and the freakish mutant remnants of a love cult. Eventually, he ends up in a theme park laden "Los Vegas", which is, of course, full of freakish and bizarre imagery.
You'll notice that I used the word "freakish" a lot. That is because every scene and description is one of abnormality. At first, it's interesting, but after a few chapters these scenes start to lose their effect with nothing "normal" appearing for contrast, and, by halfway through the book, the constant barrage of unusual scenes tends to become a kind of literary white noise. The author seems to be trying too hard to tell the reader what it is like to use hallucinogens.
That's not to say the book was all bad. Saknussemm makes some good satirical jabs at American pop culture. I especially like the shots he takes at celebrity worship with giant celebrity robots marching down streets named for yet other celebrities. He also gets the anticonservative message across loud and clear by showing the nightmare that corporate control can turn America into. The story itself is a somewhat formulaic but still often enjoyable messianic-scifi style story that often reminded me a bit of the Matrix.
All in all though, the freakishness distracted a bit too much from the plot. However, while I've always felt that the works of Hunter S. Thompson were drug induced thought-vomit, hordes of people love his work. So, I guess there is an audience for this type of novel. Those feeling nostalgic for the anti-establishment, stream of consciousness, hallucinogenic writing style of the 1960's and 70's might enjoy this book." - Daniel Eskridge

"He wakes up confused as he is not sure who he is, or why he is in the middle of what he assumes is a distorted Central Park, nor how he became middle-aged. He vaguely recalls some childhood moments though they are not lucid and even his humongous by even Deep Throat standard's maleness seems more like an anime.
Dubbed Clearfather he travels across America seeking to find himself, but receives no assistance as the federal government has been outsourced to the monopoly drug manufacturer, Vitessa Cultporation. Instead he uncovers disposal sex, massive drug-addiction, combative mutilated lesbian motorcycle gangs, organ donors for breakfast, gay heavyweights and the probable creator, but no Clearfather.
ZANESVILLE is an interesting futuristic picture that extrapolates the problems of current day America with two trends losing the drug wars (from within) and outsourcing the entire federal government (Mussolini would enjoy this vision). The panorama is bleak as groups battle one another for a crumb while Big Brother is the future corporation that takes on legendary cult status. The excess battle scenes take away from the prime hyperbole of connecting the dots of the age of Saknussemm with the troubles impacting Americans during the Administration of the first MBA president. Mindful of El Topo, readers of dark gloom and doom allegory thrillers will want to read this cautionary tale." - Harriet Klausner

Read Chapter 1:
http://januarymagazine.com/features/zanesvilleexc.html
Kris Saknussemm, Private Midnight (The Overlook Press, 2009)

"A seductive story of grit, gunplay, vampirism, and a bit of bondage.
Detective Birch Ritter is a man on the edge-of himself. His past is filled with secrets, shadows, guilt, and ghosts. Then a dubious police buddy he hasn't seen in a year introduces him to a mysterious woman who says her business is shadows. What she knows about what lies between the darkness and the light inside men is more than Ritter may want to find out, and much more than he can resist learning. It's said that to try to forget is to try to conceal, and concealing evidence is a crime. But maybe revelation is another kind of crime-against nature.
Kris Saknussemm, the widely acclaimed author of the sci-fi smash Zanesville, now delves into another genre, and another world-a world where even the sunlight is shadowy and where deviancy is the norm. Private Midnight is a journey into the seedy, sexy, underbelly of life-crime noir for a new generation."

"James Ellroy meets David Lynch in this addictive mix of noir and supernatural horror from Saknussemm. Det. Birch Ritter investigates the suspected suicide of California real estate magnate Deems Whitney, who apparently doused his Mercedes with gasoline and died in the resultant explosion a day after changing his will to benefit his trophy wife and disinherit his grown children. Before the cop can interview Whitney's widow, Ritter receives a cryptic message from his ex-partner that steers him to the enigmatic Genevieve Wyvern. Wyvern, who disconcerts Ritter with how well she knows his past, plunges him into a surreal world of bondage, domination and mind games. Despite being humiliated by Wyvern, Ritter finds himself unable to stay away from her lair. An unexpected and bizarre twist well into the novel jolts the fairly standard plot off the rails, but the powerful narrative voice will compel most readers to follow." - Publishers Weekly

"Life is piling up for Det. Birch Ritter. He's a big man loaded down with ugly cases; guilty secrets; a violent, ethically dubious approach to police work; fresh divorce papers; and a personal demon he calls El Miedo. A crooked colleague sends Ritter to Genevieve, a woman who is equal parts psychiatrist, seer, and dominatrix. So begins Ritter's dark spiral downward, a series of strange changes that cannot be explained by the laws of the world as he knows it. Saknussemm (Zanesville) creates an original blend of noir procedural, horror, and dark eroticism but sometimes loses control of his own linguistic dexterity. The result is intriguing but also muddled and awkwardly paced. A great rush of late developments suggests that either a sequel is forthcoming or that the book's most captivating questions will remain partly unanswered. What is the extent of Genevieve's power? What is the truth about Ritter's past? What will become of him? Saknussemm is a writer to watch, but this book is recommended only for large libraries where complex genre-bending works have found readership." - Neil Hollands

"A narrative that moves from a noirish hard-boiled detective novel to a fantasy of sexual transformation, an uncomfortable journey for the first-person narrator and for the reader. Birch Ritter is a detective-cynical and world-weary, of course-whose patter sounds at once fresh and drearily familiar: "It was a hooker, I was pretty sure. It was trouble I was certain"; "She had a laugh like Stevie Nicks on nitrous oxide and a slow burn gotta-get-there bed moan like an ambulance in Friday night rush hour." Ritter gets involved in two puzzling cases: Real-estate mogul Deems Whitney is found dead in his burnt-out Mercedes, and a man named Mervyn Stoakes has engaged in a spasm of self-castration. One of Ritter's old partners then mysteriously puts him onto Genevieve, Whitney's widow, whose grief for her husband's death might be for show. When Ritter goes to meet her in her old house in a rundown section of town, his life literally changes. She takes off her clothes, blindfolds him and tells him his name is going to be "Sunny." Ritter is intrigued, bewildered and ultimately frightened by the charismatic and powerful Genevieve, and he keeps going back for more-not for sex but for the powerful draw of her personality and for what she can reveal to him about his past. Ultimately, Ritter/Sunny notices some changes, not just in his personality (crying, for example, starts to become a more normative experience for him) but also in his body. Genevieve is a shape-changer who's able to reinvent some of the ghostly images from Ritter's past, including his mother. By the end the word "freakish" doesn't even begin to describe the events of the novel, which include Ritter's pet cat being devoured by a giantsnake and Genevieve serving up her consort Sophia as "tender meat" in an entree Ritter unwittingly consumes. Off-the-wall strange and surreal-and definitely not recommended as a Mother's Day gift." - Kirkus Reviews

"How many books are there with a sleazy cop finding some kind of redemption after a redheaded femme fatale walks into his life? In Private Midnight, Birch Ritter is the cop whose self-admitted crimes leave the opening pages soaked in blood and the sweat of illicit sex. Genevieve is the mysterious woman who leaves a trail of suicidal associates behind her. Ritter starts investigating her – an investigation to which she submits willingly. What he unknowingly signs on for is a therapy session with the devil, and there's always that pesky price to pay.
But if you're thinking Kris Saknussemm's follow-up to his critically lauded debut, Zanesville: A Novel, is going to be some kind of watered-down Dashiell Hammett knockoff, you're barking up the wrong hangman's tree. Genre is a term that has no meaning here, and Private Midnight avoids plot twists by vaulting instead from police procedural to erotic thriller to occult horror to philosophical tome.
Ritter's internal monologue starts off sounding like a cop written by someone who knows law enforcement only from reading high-end and pulp detective fiction. When it works, it's witty, culturally rich, and brutal in a seedy way. When it fails, it's like Damon Runyon, James Ellroy, and Dennis Miller dukin' it out for keyboard ownership. But as Ritter changes (or, more accurately, undergoes his own Metamorphosis, courtesy of Genevieve), the book melds the mystic/mythic exploration of The Golden Bough and the easy eroticism of those early porn novels Anne Rice used to put out under a pseudonym. Only, you know, addictively readable. As Ritter transforms from irredeemable gumshoe to something stranger and more willingly perverse, so does his narrative voice become clearer and starker, and the events become weirder, more sordid, and shamanistic.
Private Midnight courts controversy, but that's almost undoubtedly Saknussemm's intention. As Genevieve strips Ritter down physically and spiritually, Saknussemm cracks open a series of modern shibboleths about sexuality and justice and invites the audience to feast on its guts. It's impossible to say whether individual readers will be entranced, appalled, or disgusted by his work. But if this book is Saknussemm's sophomore misfire, then it is at bare minimum bold, intriguing, and disturbing." - Richard Whittaker

All the smells and feels of Wetworld came back. Sailors and cradle robbers—the girls appearing like hastily planted flowers. Runaways from Spokane… rebel daughters from some Main Street in the Midwest. Strippers past their use-by-date trying to hide their wrinkles.
Then out of the blue neon one summer night, there’d suddenly be this lap dance mirage. A new twilight-blonde mink with jackknife legs and marzipan boots—eyes like bits of bashed-in mirror. I slipped the peculiar card in my pocket and turned on the ignition, feeling like I’d been asleep for a hundred years.
Still, some things never change. Mondays are such damn lonely days.”

This is the razor-sharp, world-weary voice of Detective Birch Ritter, the narrator of Kris Saknussemm’s crime-noir thriller Private Midnight. The book is a departure for Saknussemm, whose first novel, Zanesville, was a metafictional amusement park jam packed with would-be Messiahs, omnipotent corporations and lots and lots of explosions. Private Midnight is a character-driven piece of genre fiction that has much more depth than other books in the category, sparked by Saknussemm’s lean sentences and crystalline observations of a debauched Los Angeles.
The novel starts off like many noir thrillers. Ritter investigates the suicide of a real estate magnate, who evidently doused his Mercedes with gasoline and blew himself up after leaving his estate to his trophy wife and disinheriting his grown children. During the investigation, Ritter is introduced to a beautiful and mysterious woman named Genevieve Wyvern who seems to know his past better than she should. All sounds pretty familiar at this point. Could be an episode of CSI or Law and Order. But Saknussemm, true to his genre-subverting reputation, doesn’t let the reader off so easy.
The suicide investigation turns out to be a launching pad into a surreal, sexy, and at times grotesque world of bondage and hyperreality as well as an exploration into Ritter’s shadowy past. Ritter can’t stay away from Wyvern and soon, she is implicated in a larger conspiracy that makes the Los Angeles criminal underworld look like Disneyland.
While the plot never quite takes off, hinting rather than resolving Wyvern’s role in the central premise of the book, it’s Ritter’s rich backstory and character development combined with Saknussemm’s muscular prose that carries Private Midnight, even for readers who can’t quite stomach the kinky sex (ed. warning note: one scene contains an animal torture, which MostlyFiction.com wishes the author had omitted). With his trademark capriciousness restrained and his imagination disciplined and purposeful, Saknussemm has delivered his most mature work of fiction to date." - Leland Cheuk

"Ritter is a police detective who has been through two divorces, lots of death, and plenty of guilt and fear. He is feeling lonely and tired. One day an old cop friend who is nothing but trouble drops off a business card on his desk; which will forever change his life.
Ritter meets a seductive woman who is mysterious and desirable. Now he only has her on his mind and things are starting to become very strange…
When I first started reading this book it felt like a 1920’s detective story – I thought of Dick Tracy: the smoke, the night, the ominous narrator, the dingy bars and the loud precinct. I thought it had the classic comic book detective story feel to it – it didn’t last that way.
Soon I wasn’t sure what to believe; I didn’t know what was really happening and what was being imagined. The story then started to remind me of The Machinist. Ritter seems obsessed, he is quickly losing weight, and odd things are happening. I kept expecting the end to reveal that Ritter was crazy and he was imagining everything.
Ritter becomes increasingly distressed. None of his clothes fit him, he can’t eat, he has no one to talk to, and he has blackouts and disturbing dreams and when he wakes up he is usually covered in an odd substance. All the while, his obsession with the mysterious woman becomes stronger and more dangerous.
I don’t think giving a no spoiler review can give this book justice. It is by far the weirdest book I have ever read. I think I uttered the words “what in the …” several times outloud. Some of the things in this book were absolutely disturbing.
When I got about half-way through the book I really didn’t want to keep reading. About two-thirds through the book I really didn’t like it much. When I finished the last page of the book I was so stunned I couldn’t hate the book and wanted everyone to read it so they could go through the same thing I did.
I don’t usually cuss, but if I had to give a one statement explanation of this book I would have to say it’s a psychological mind !#$%. I had a hard time getting through it, but the end was worth it. The psychological warfare is pretty intense and interesting. And I have never read an ending like this one.
Without knowing anything about the author I figured the writer was male, when I ended the book I thought the writer might be a woman! Which I think is quite genius and fitting. I won’t tell you if Kris is male or female, I think you should read and guess yourself, then read the bio! Primeval and psychological elements of sexuality, manhood, control, violence, fear, and darkness make this book quite fascinating.
I just finished Private Midnight and could go on and on about it, but I don’t want to give anything else away. Let me know if you read this. I would love to have a conversation about it!
Oh, and to address the "vampire" element. I was expecting this book to have the present popular vampire character, which it didn't. I do however, believe that describing a vampire in it's most basic and primeval form is quite fitting. Read it and tell me what you think." - vampirebooks.blogspot.com

"Kris Saknussemm is no stranger to kinky sex. While doing research for his newly released novel Private Midnight, he asked focus groups which, if any, fetishes they engage in on a regular basis. The responses ranged from the harmless (shoes) to the potentially fatal (peanut butter, which can result in hyperventilation and instantaneous, toad-like skin boils if you're allergic, as one orgy participant accidentally discovered). Saknussemm rose to literary acclaim in 2005 for his sci-fi thriller Zanesville, which features a protagonist regenerated from a mutilated penis and a giant Michael Jackson robot that roams the Las Vegas desert. His new novel, Private Midnight, is described as a “psychoerotic fairy tale,” a noirish tale of a cop tracking a shape-shifting temptress through a trail of dingy dive bars.

Your first book, Zanesville, inspired Michael Jackson to want to construct a "Jackobot." What the hell is a "Jackobot?"
- A giant robot of himself to stalk around the desert surrounding Las Vegas—which, in Zanesville, is actually one of many mammoth celebrity robots that are pitted against each other in combat, but which go rogue and rampage through the city causing total devastation.
Private Midnight is touted as a "psychoerotic fairy tale." What do you mean by that?
- By “psychoerotic,” I mean the "mind game" aspect of sex, our private psychologies being where our sense of sexuality lies in both senses of that word. “Fairy tale” is there to distinguish the book from straight-up crime fiction, although it definitely has that noirish feel. But I wanted to create sort of an allegory about the relationship between men and women, in all its violence and weirdness. Society often tries to sanitize—and in some cases, legislate—primal emotions that remain forever resistant to ideology and political correctness, but I think sexually deviant behaviors, like fetishes, are important to examine and talk about.
You reportedly did market research on fetishes to prepare for this book. Was that part of your attempt to access your own “primal emotions?”
- [Laughs.] Fetishes amuse and fascinate me and are one of my chief interests, generally. I think they are a long way from being truly understood, but they're becoming more mainstream as they become more widespread and talked of openly.
What are some of the fetishes that appear in Private Midnight?
- Infantilism, matriphilia, the fixation on ghosts, music, violence.... The whole story is permeated with a fetishistic view of life.
Matriphilia?
- A mother fixation. Not so much sex with one’s mother. More the turning of a partner into a mother figure, while the other partner remains childlike. Think diapers and pacifiers. It’s really about pretending to be a child again. It’s one of a genre of fetishes that emphasizes vulnerability and being in need. Frequently, powerful figures—both male and female, but predominantly male—and people of wealth and authority engage in this fetish. For those types, it’s pleasant to have someone take care of them, since they’re so used to calling the shots. It's the playful “let’s pretend” element of many fetishes, which often signals the absence of a deeper need in real life.
In line with “let’s pretend," what elements of the bloody, sweaty, sex-filled world in Private Midnight are you actually familiar with?
- I do know more than I should. I’ve been busted for drugs. I’ve been beaten up by police. I’ve been with prostitutes. I know what it’s like being falling-down-drunk in the streets, and I’ve been stabbed. I also have friends who are jazz musicians and major crime squad investigators, both of which lurk around the story." - Interview with Tolly Moseley

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