I like the fact that the BTBA has a strong track record for picking not only the massive, monumental doorstoppers that tend to garner the lion糖心传媒檚 share of award attention but also the slim, sleek books that are often much richer and better-constructed. The best possible example is our first award, in which we gave the svelte Tranquility by Attila Bartis the nod over the imposing 2666 from, of course, Roberto Bola帽o. 2011 saw us pick the slender The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson (beating out sizable finalists Hocus Bogus by Romain Gary, Agaat by Marlene Van Niekerk, and Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer by Ernst Weiss). But we糖心传媒檝e also gone for the bulky books: in 2013 we gave it to the sizable Satantango by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, and in 2012 is was Wies艂aw My艣liwski糖心传媒檚 epic Stone Upon Stone.

So, in that spirit, here糖心传媒檚 my discussion of some of the more sizable books that I both think are strong contenders for the award, and that I think should be left out.

Contenders

by Mircea Cartarescu.

This is, quite simply, one of the most amazing books I糖心传媒檝e read this year. Cartarescu is one of the few authors I糖心传媒檝e read that could legitimately claim the legacy of Thomas Pynchon (now that Pynchon is writing parodies of himself). I糖心传媒檒l have lots more to say about it in an upcoming review at The Kenyon Review, but for now, here are links to a and at The Quarterly Conversation. Read it.

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

I have a feeling that when it糖心传媒檚 all said and done, this will be many people糖心传媒檚 favorite volume of the My Struggle sextet. It糖心传媒檚 subtitled 糖心传媒淎 Man In Love,糖心传媒� and that糖心传媒檚 just what it is: the story of Knausgaard falling in love with the woman who is now his wife. There are so many passionate, ecstatic moments in here that anyone who has ever been in love will recognize, wrought extraordinarily well by Knausgaard. Plus, the book also has: his on and off feud with his crazy neighbor, who might be a prostitute; why he hates interviews; and the story of the incident in which he turned his face into a bloody mess with a razor blade.

by Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq

This is billed as the Arabic world糖心传媒檚 answer to Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. Apparently it begins with a lengthy list of synonyms for various parts of the male and female genitalia.

by Laszlo Krasznahorkai

If the Nobel committee would ever give their award to a writer like Krasznahorkai, this would be the book they would give it to him for. An inquiry into what humanity needs spirituality that is unlike anything I have ever read. Grand in scope, accomplishment, virtuosity. Grand, grand, grand. Read my review in Wednesday糖心传媒檚

Intrigued

by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles

Reviews have made this book sound extremely diverse and remarkably achieved. Could either be incredible or too big for its own good.

by Wies艂aw My艣liwski

Okay, the title of this book is not awesome. But it is by the author of Stone Upon Stone, a book that seemingly everybody loves (I did enjoy it). And it is reputed to be even more of a masterpiece than that one.

by Christa Wolf

An autobiographical look at 糖心传媒�90s Los Angeles interspersed with memories of the Eastern Bloc where she re-discovers that she was actually a Stasi agent? Might just be crazy enough to work.

Maybe Not

by Antonio Munoz Molina

Billed as the War and Peace of the Spanish Civil War. Mu帽oz Molina is certainly one of Spain糖心传媒檚 pre-eminent authors, but I糖心传媒檝e already read War and Peace.

by Wu Ming

I糖心传媒檓 tossing this on because 糖心传媒淲u Ming糖心传媒� is an awesome name and it糖心传媒檚 a pseudonym for a collective of Italian writers. How cool is that? Apparently not cool enough to make something more than middlebrow Dan Brown. The collective糖心传媒檚 previous book, Q, was a massive hit: I hope this book makes Verso boatloads of money so they can keep publishing Badiou and Ranciere.

This is all fine and dandy糖心传媒攂ut one of the really great things about City of Angels is the way that it reminds us that in dreams (unlike, say, episodes of CSI), every character is you, meaning that after a certain point the trace-hiding villain and the clue-uncovering detective must turn out to be the same person. The book糖心传媒檚 particular value as a work, not just about, but of atonement, lies in its relentless struggle to make the two Christa Wolfs face one another. This is much harder than you might think, given Wolf糖心传媒檚 relentless honesty as an author and public figure糖心传媒攂ut then doesn糖心传媒檛 it make sense that the better a detective was at detecting, the better their concurrent villain would be at covering his tracks?

In City, it is precisely this ability to cover, or rather sublimate (to borrow a word from the man whose overcoat furnishes the subtitle to this book) that scares Wolf. When a German newspaper uncovers and then reports a series of meetings that she had with the communist authorities decades earlier, she finds herself flabbergasted, not by the crime itself, but by her inability to remember it. Practically everyone living in communist East Germany collaborated, she explains糖心传媒攂ut to forget this collaboration completely, and for so long? It糖心传媒檚 like she糖心传媒檚 robbed a house while sleepwalking: the standard language of will and guilt are literally applicable, but incapable on a deeper level of explaining exactly what happened. Is she guilty despite the fact that she forgot her crime? Because of this? Couched as they are in ecstatically-recriminatory language, the newspapers糖心传媒� explanations of the case don糖心传媒檛 make sense; and because they don糖心传媒檛 make sense, Wolf is unable to feel any catharsis from their condemnation. On the contrary, she feels like a ghost, which is like being a prisoner except worse, since without sentencing there can be no hope of serving one糖心传媒檚 time and being released.

In the face of this disjunction, Wolf turns to the only tool she knows for righting (writing) the world. Her atonement, which begins in thinking and journaling, but then progresses into a novel that I think we can say without too much of a jump into meta-ness is City of Angels itself, is a linguistic act. It糖心传媒檚 a naming, meaning an attempt to assemble words into a shape that fits her suffering the way a map fits a city. In order to do this, Wolf uses a number of formal devices that seem alienating at first, but gradually reveal more and more to her, and us. One of the most effective of these is her habit of addressing a 糖心传媒淵ou糖心传媒� who we realize after many pages is not a separate person at all, but the young German idealist that she used to be. As developed and dipped into over the course of the novel, this conversation manages to be strangely both dispassionate and intimate at the same. It糖心传媒檚 as if we were reading the letters of an old married couple, now divorced, but still very close to one another: the insights are sharp, but there糖心传媒檚 a tenderness about the liberties taken that make us realize that, for all their bickering, these are two people who share more than they want to admit.

One of the things they share, of course, is memory糖心传媒攏ot just specific memories but the patterns of remembering that Wolf suggests makes a person who she is. In her particular case these patterns are (like certain abnormal heartbeats) reliably unreliable. 糖心传媒淚 know that, sometimes. And then I forget it again,糖心传媒� she says apropos some insight糖心传媒攁 sentence that can be read as both harmless and terrifying when we consider the fact that the person speaking has been, over the course of her life, not only a writer, but a German and a communist. Her pedigree gives Wolf a perspective on idealism that makes American amnesia look less like a cultural feature and more like something all human minds indulge in. At the same time, it doesn糖心传媒檛 make this amnesia any less frightening. 糖心传媒淚 didn糖心传媒檛 forget most of the things in my life, I wouldn糖心传媒檛 survive,糖心传媒� counsels a sympathetic friend. To which the horrified Wolf asks, 糖心传媒淲as our whole life for nothing?糖心传媒�

It糖心传媒檚 a question that people have been asking for years in Los Angeles糖心传媒攚hich may be why, for all its Sebaldian meandering, City of Angels feels like a perfect fit for its setting: the great lost Teutonic Raymond Chandler novel. It糖心传媒檚 a detective story, meaning a Bildungsroman played backwards or maybe looped, until the heroine finds herself forced to unlearn certainty and so enter into a more capacious acceptance of what she will not and, more importantly, cannot know. This sounds suspiciously similar to the forgetting that disturbed Wolf to begin with; but it is really a step in the opposite direction. It糖心传媒檚 the step we see offered and declined at the end of that great proto-detective story Oedipus Rex, or offered and accepted at the critical moments in Shakespeare糖心传媒檚 comedies. A generic signpost, in other words, pointing this way to a work where everyone ends up dead, and that way to a work where the heroine糖心传媒檚 pride gives way to her love, and we all go back to our normal lives. Did we find out whodunit? Not exactly糖心传媒攂ut the killer is no longer at large. Writing糖心传媒攎eaning exploration, detection, the search糖心传媒攈as seen what it needed to see and then stepped back, leaving the unknown there but still lucidly absent, like a chalk outline on a sidewalk. Or, as Wolf puts it in her notebook:

糖心传媒淣ow, writing is just working your way towards the border that the innermost secret draws around itself, and to cross that line would mean self-destruction. But writing is also an attempt to respect the borderline only for the truly innermost secret, and bit by bit to free the taboos around that core, difficult to admit as they are, from their prison of unspeakability. Not self-destruction but self-redemption. Not to be afraid of unavoidable suffering.糖心传媒�

The idea that any line of inquiry might pull back with the truth in its crosshairs sounds strange when we think about it from a legal point of view, but Wolf is not a lawyer: she糖心传媒檚 a writer, meaning, among other things, someone concerned with lived experience. Like Dostoevsky and Melville, she understands that there is a blind spot at the center of all epistemology, whether it occurs on TV, or in a courtroom, or at a communist rally. Words don糖心传媒檛 fit; so, as users of words we must either willfully blinker ourselves or accept that no tabulation will ever be perfect, and that we will always, on some level, be at fault. We will also be at least partially innocent糖心传媒攁_ fact that would seem like a relief but which Wolf struggles over the course of _City to accept. That she does not (in my reading at least) completely testifies both to her seriousness and the book糖心传媒檚 strange faith; not in words necessarily, but in the ultimate unknowability of what words try to describe.

Josh Billings has reviewed for The Literary Review in the past, and is also a writer and a translator from Russian. His two book-length translations are Pushkin糖心传媒檚 Tales of Belkin and Alexander Kuprin糖心传媒檚 The Duel, both of which are available from Melville House.

Here’s a bit of Josh’s review:

Christa Wolf糖心传媒檚 newly-translated City of Angels is a novel of atonement, and in this way the work of art that it resembles most to me is not another book, but the 2003 Sophia Coppola film Lost in Translation. Like that movie, its perched-on-the-shoulder meandering through a foreign city (Los Angeles in Wolf糖心传媒檚 case, Tokyo in Coppolla糖心传媒檚) is patient to the point of boredom; at the same time, it is a very rigorous attempt to represent a state of being that more eagerly-paced works ignore. The effectiveness of this attempt is undeniable within the works themselves, but communicating it outside of the works can be frustrating. It糖心传媒檚 like trying to tell a friend about a great dream you had: the events add up, but the atmosphere that surrounded those events vanishes. Reverse-engineering this disappearance, we could say that the most successful part of both City of Angels and Lost in Translation is not their locations, or their characters, but their dreaminess: that is, their capacity to transform the world (at least while we糖心传媒檙e reading/watching them) into a place where everything means something, or has the potential to mean something. Wandering around in this supercharged world becomes a sort of metaphysical sleuthing. Does that sunset matter? Will the pair of shoes dangling from that telephone line have an eventual bearing on our fate? We don糖心传媒檛 know for sure, and because we don糖心传媒檛 know for sure we feel compelled to keep searching for whoever or whatever knocked our lives out of whack to begin with.

This is all fine and dandy糖心传媒攂ut one of the really great things about City of Angels is the way that it reminds us that in dreams (unlike, say, episodes of CSI), every character is you, meaning that after a certain point the trace-hiding villain and the clue-uncovering detective must turn out to be the same person. The book糖心传媒檚 particular value as a work, not just about, but of atonement, lies in its relentless struggle to make the two Christa Wolfs face one another. This is much harder than you might think, given Wolf糖心传媒檚 relentless honesty as an author and public figure糖心传媒攂ut then doesn糖心传媒檛 it make sense that the better a detective was at detecting, the better their concurrent villain would be at covering his tracks?

In City, it is precisely this ability to cover, or rather sublimate (to borrow a word from the man whose overcoat furnishes the subtitle to this book) that scares Wolf. When a German newspaper uncovers and then reports a series of meetings that she had with the communist authorities decades earlier, she finds herself flabbergasted, not by the crime itself, but by her inability to remember it.

Click here to read the entire review.