Review of Interpreters in the Spring 2015 issue of The Fiddlehead

Rebecca Geleyn's review of my collection of stories Interpreters is now out in the Spring 2015 issue (no. 263) of The Fiddlehead. I was a bit nervous when I picked it up in the bookstore (it's the first review of the book I'd come across) and the sense of foreboding I had as I hurriedly thumbed through the pages to find it reminded of those times in high school when you discover people have been talking about you behind your back, a feeling that was emphasized by the equally strange sight of my own words being quoted back at me. I was afraid I was going to find something horribly soul crushing, but, mercifully, it's a generally positive review, at times opening up interpretations (pun intended!) that I hadn't entirely thought of myself. "This collection of stories," Geleyn writes, "shows the most poignancy when zeroing in on nuggets of problematic or untranslatable language. Interpreters moves towards the hermeneutic gap between words of two different languages, incommunicable because of their intrinsic link to lived experience and culture." Hermeneutic! Now that's a word I haven't used since my grad school days.

She does say, however, that at times "some stories ... resort too quickly to summarization, taking readers out of the immediate action," but that overall the book is "a promising first collection." She also adds that "Schafrick's stories are strikingly contemporary, dealing with online dating culture, individuals trying to keep up with an increasingly globalized world, acquaintances that travel and reappear in unexpected places, and challenging job markets."  Phew! Not bad. Thank you! Pick it up at a bookstore near you.

Reading Proust

For a long time, I used to stare up at those thick volumes of Proust's famous Remembrance of Things Past with awe whenever I wandered into a second-hand bookshop.  Sometimes I would see single volumes from a 1970's edition in which the 4000-page novel is broken into many small, bite-size chunks--volume VII, say--orphaned from its siblings, as if that particular book was the very one someone would need to complete his or her collection.  More often, though, I would come across the novel broken into those three encyclopedic volumes with the art nouveau design on its covers. 

What dedication it would take to read that massive novel in its entirety, I would often think.  And what was it about anyway?  I shied away from the novel, too intimidated by it, until recently when I decided to tackle it, at least the first volume, Swann's Way, in its most recent 1992 rendering by DJ Enright, the novel now generally referred to as In Search of Lost Time.

All I knew of Search was that it's one of the longest novels in English, but what I didn't know was that it was also a challenging read, particularly because of those long, winding sentences and their numerous subjunctive clauses, page after page of solid, unbroken paragraphs, that it's easy to stumble and lose sight of what Proust is talking about, often emerging from such paragraphs disoriented and confused.  The novel is very much a meditation on memory, especially memory that comes unbidden or is lodged in taste (the famous madeleine cake episode in which the unnamed narrator dips his cake into a cup of tea and the taste of these combined elements usher back memories of his childhood in Combray) or in objects, smells or even music (Swann's entire relationship with Odette is contained within "the phrase" of a certain sonata) because, like meditation, at least mindfulness meditation, one is required to concentrate solely on one's breath without creating mental to-do lists or following other similar day dreams.  And so Proust, too, is equally demanding and challenging of the reader that, at times, I found myself only grasping snatches of meaning (was it better to back up and constantly reread those long passages, or to read quickly, picking up whatever I could? I was never sure) sometimes finding myself going from one scene to another without entirely knowing how I got there.  Early on in the novel Proust playfully foreshadows this when he describes how he used to read in his childhood and as "the plot began to unfold ... it seemed all the more obscure because in those days ... I used to often to daydream about something quite different for page after page," a passage which made me laugh because that is, at times, the challenge of Proust.  Later on, he ironically (and beautifully) sums up what his own writing is like when he describes the writing style of Bergotte, his favourite author:

What my mother's friend and, it would seem, Dr du Boulbon liked above all in the writings of Bergotte was just what I liked, the same melodic flow, the old-fashioned phrases, and certain others, quite simple and familiar, but so placed by him, so highlighted, as to hint at a particular quality of taste on his part; and also, in the sad parts of his books, a sort of roughness, a tone that was almost harsh.  And he himself, no doubt, realized that these were his principal attractions.  For in his later books, if he had hit upon some great truth, or upon the name of an historic cathedral, he would break off his narrative, and in an invocation, an apostrophe, a long prayer, would give free rein to those exhalations which, in the earlier volumes, had been immanent in his prose, discernible only in a rippling of its surface, and perhaps even more delightful, more harmonious when they were thus veiled, when the reader could give no precise indication of where their murmuring began or where it died away.  These passages in which he delighted were our favourites also.

But when Proust has hooked you in, when he's beguiled you, as the above passage attests, the pay-off is worth it.  Along a similar vein, here is another stunning passage from the end of Swann in Love:

The pianist having finished the Liszt intermezzo and begun a prelude by Chopin, Mme de Cambremer turned to Mme de Franquetot with a fond smile of knowing satisfaction and allusion to the past.  She had learned in her girlhood to fondle and cherish those long sinuous phrases of Chopin, so free, so flexible, so tactile, which begin by reaching out and exploring far outside and away from the direction in which they started, far beyond the point which one might have expected their notes to read, and which divert themselves in those byways of fantasy only to return more deliberately--with a more premeditated reprise, with more precision, as on a crystal bowl that reverberates to the point of making you cry out--to strike at your heart.

Jaw-dropping, isn't it?  In his blurb at the top of my Modern Library Classics edition, David Denby says, "Reading Swann's Way was a rapturous experience," and he's right: that's exactly the word the comes to mind.  At times rapturous and mellifluous, at times, I admit, frustrating and boring (I adored Combray; was not as invested in Swann in Love until the end, regained my love in Place Names / The Name), yet, for me, Proust always seemed elusively just outside  one's grasp, and slippery like water.

As I said in an earlier blog post, when I read, I like to underline passages I like.  Not only was I doing this as I was reading Proust, but also making note of words whose meaning I was unfamiliar with (this happens to me a lot when I read Nabokov), like abjuration, inure, perorate, perspicacious, fulminate, confabulate; and words that I simply like and have found their way (or will find their way) into my own stories, like: mendacious, perfidious, carnal, beholden, ineluctable, and so on.  (Even his style, as you can see here in my parody, has infected my writing.)  But I've only scratched the surface of the novel that is In Search of Lost Time.  Having completed Swann's Way, there are five more 600-plus-page volumes yet to read: an intimidating task, and not one I intend to do back-to-back, yet fearing if I took a few years to read the whole thing I would begin to forget and therefore lose the overall thread of the story, just as we do in life with our own memories, making Proust even more ungraspable.  But I suppose that is the point with Proust.  As he says early on:

And so it is with our own past.  It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile.  The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling.  And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.

Queer Confessions Reading Series

This Thursday, April 2nd, I'll be reading at the Queer Confessions reading series at the 519 (519 Church Street) at 8 pm alongside Peter Knegt, Marcy Rogers, and Jean-Claude Paquette.  You can find more information here .  Hope to see you there!

Denton Welch (March 29, 1915 - December 30, 1948)

Like a lot of people who might be familiar with the work of Denton Welch, my first "encounter" with him was his oft-anthologized story "When I Was Thirteen."  I came across the story in Alberto Manguel and Craig Stephenson's anthology Meanwhile, in Another Part of the Forest: Gay Stories from Alice Munro to Yukio Mishima.  The story is about a thirteen-year-old boy (probably some time in the 1920s) on vacation in a ski resort in Switzerland.  While his older brother goes out to spend the day on the slopes with friends, the narrator is left behind at the hotel and develops something of a hero-worship fantasy for a university student who also happens to be staying at the resort.  I loved the story for evoking such vivid details--the taste of hot chocolate after a day out in the cold, the French pastries, the warmth of a feather bed, getting into the same bath water the university student had just sat in.  I remember thinking how accurately Welch could capture certain images and sensations of early adolescence that I realized I had forgotten, and I loved how homosexual desire is never explicitly stated, but is an undercurrent throughout the story (as it is in much of his fiction).  I made a mental note to further explore his work one day.

A few years passed, and I can't remember what I was working on, but last summer I decided to read what Manguel describes as "one of his best works," In Youth Is Pleasure, and again I was charmed and fascinated by this little-known British writer.  I went on to read I Left My Grandfather's House and The Stories of Denton Welch, a collection of twenty-six of his stories and, more recently, his incomplete (but definitely best) novel, A Voice through a Cloud. 

When I read, I tend to underline passages I like, but with Welch I find it hard to know when to put the pencil down.  Listen to this, for example:

Since his last visit to me, I saw him always as a lost dog, forlorn, harassed, with an unenticing hint of danger that made one wish to get away from him.  What warned one against him before he had opened his mouth?  Was it the eyes staring, then circling?  The badly related hand and leg movements?  The scheming that was so obvious that one had a fancy of steaming, churning thoughts bubbling up against the walls of a glass skull?

Or this:

Soon afterwards Mrs. Talbot struggled up from her low deck chair to say good-bye.  Standing on those fragile black-silk legs she looked very tottery and ancient; but there was a great lump of pride and malevolence behind her pale little eyes, and I thought that it was this lump which was her driving force.  Insolent pride and ill-will carried her through the day, kept her from dying, from melting into nothing.  I thought that each year to come would make the little beady eyes clearer and paler, until they were nothing but two sucked acid drops.  All colour would drain out of her, leaving only the pure venom. 

Wow!  These two passages come from "Brave and Cruel," a story I ironically felt was not among his best (in fact, many of his stories don't always entirely work as stories), yet for me it almost doesn't matter because with Welch the prose is so stellar--and fresh, too, not at all sounding like they were written more than seventy years ago. 

When I was reading A Voice through a Cloud, again and again I kept underlining short passages and phrases, and surprising word choices, so much so that much of my copy is dirtied with pencil markings.  But here's a passage that has long stayed with me for its haunting beauty:

There were some birds at night beyond the garden.  Behind their hard cymbal clashes or sad flute sounds I used to hear the far-away moping of the sea and then the fitful barking of a dog.  I would imagine his cry coming across the fields, the brimming icy ditches and the bare hedges glittering with black drops of water.  Perhaps it came from some lonely farm where he was chained up in a cobbled yard.  The chain would grate and clink like a ghost's as he ran from side to side, barking and waiting for the answer which never came.  At last his tail would curve down through his legs and he would huddle back into the dank straw of his barrel. 
     I wrote about the night bird cries, the sea sounds and the lonely barking, and I liked what I wrote in flashes; but something was wrong with it.  There is always something wrong with writing.  So I tore the paper up at last, liking the untouched memory so much better, not wanting it forced into the insincerity of words.

It really is stunning: the dog's chain clinking like a ghost's, and then the ironic, "There's always something wrong with writing."  The phrase comes to me often as I sit at my desk frustrated.

I can't find the passage right now, but I remember being struck by a simple sentence that went something like this, "I turned away, shirking the difficult task of having to say something about the painting"; and I thought that had I written that I would have said something much more dull, like, "I turned away, not wanting to say anything about the painting."  It's little things like this that make his prose so memorable and beguiling, and layered, containing in that seldom-used word "shirk" a hint of judgment.   

Welch's fiction is very autobiographical, and so as I read through his work, I couldn't help feeling like I got to know someone very closely, not just his thoughts and idiosyncratic worldview, but also his neuroses and obsessions, his desires, his history: there's his childhood in China, his art school years in London, his later years in the British countryside.  In a weird way (and I'm not sure what this says about me) but never have I read a writer with whom I felt such kinship.  Before Welch ventured into fiction writing, he originally wanted to become a painter (his work, which often adorns the covers of his books, is somewhat mediocre), but at the age of twenty, while riding his bike one day in south London, he was struck by a car and spent the rest of his life--the next thirteen years--convalescing.  Unable to paint, he turned to writing and in the remainder of his life produced an amazing volume of work.  The nearly complete A Voice through a Cloud was written at the very end of his life when he was in a great deal of pain and could often work on it for no more than a few minutes at a time.  Welch died in 1948 at the age of 33, a shame that someone with such obvious talent should pass away so early and in such obscurity.  This Sunday, March 29th, marks one hundred years since Welch's birth, and I wonder: will Denton Welch societies (if there is such a thing; there's a Denton Welch website, but it's been under construction for years) commemorate the anniversary with readings and speeches?  Will there be radio documentaries on Welch the way there were for Barbara Pym in 2013 on the 100th anniversary of her birth? Or will I alone sit at my kitchen table with a cupcake and a lit candle stuck in it, reflecting on the work of this most remarkable writer?

March 4 - Words at the Wise Reading Series

I'll be reading at the Words at the Wise reading series with Andrew Simpson and Kerry Cathers.  The event takes place at Wise Bar, which is located at 1007 Bloor St. West.  Event starts at 8 p.m.  You can find more information here.

February 22nd - Junction Reads Reading Series

This Sunday, February 22nd at 4 p.m., I'll be reading at the Junction Reads reading series alongside the very impressive Michael Winter, Aggrey Sambay, Peter Norman, and Nancy Jo Cullen.  The event takes place at 3030 Dundas St. West.  Should be a fun afternoon.  Hope to see you there.  You can find out more here.