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.

Miljenko Jergovic糖心传媒檚 Mama Leone is a book about loss, and about the hopeless and beautiful attempt to recover what has been lost. It begins in one child糖心传媒檚 experience and ends so far away from it that it糖心传媒檚 impossible not to see the shift as commentary not only on the fragility of childhood, but on the very act of loving recreation that makes the first half of the book so rich. If this sounds paradoxical, well, it is. It is also in keeping with the paradoxical criticism/embrace the narrator makes a few seconds after being born in a Sarajevo hospital:

I still didn糖心传媒檛 understand at that point, so I filled my lungs with a deep breath and for the first time in my life confronted a paradox: though I didn糖心传媒檛 have others to compare it to, the world where I糖心传媒檇 appeared was terrifying, but something forced me to breathe, to bind myself to it in a way I never managed to bind myself to any woman.

The world called Yugoslavia (over which the memory and premonition of wars past and to-come hover continuously) is terrifying, but the narrator marries himself to it糖心传媒攁n act of bone-headed generosity that marks him as one of those ugly ducklings that we have watched grow into a writerly swan over and over again, and yet never grow tired of. Why don糖心传媒檛 we grow tired of him? For one, because we recognize his awkward emergence as something we ourselves have gone through. Human experience may be as varied as spots on a rug, but the patterns that our minds make out of these experiences have more in common with one another than you糖心传媒檇 expect. Knowing this, Jergovic eschews the hammy over-exaggeration of exotic detail, instead building these stories around moments whose drama might happen just as easily in Detroit, the Urals, Mars. Despite糖心传媒攐r maybe because of糖心传媒攖heir universality, the specific meanings of said moments seem both obvious and mysterious, so that all we can do when faced with them is wait and watch as the situation gets harrier and harrier, until suddenly an invisible line is crossed and it becomes not-hairy at all. The figures that only a moment ago seemed to be physically weighed down by their individual lonelinesses float free, hanging together in space like stars in a constellation. The effect of these breakthroughs is cathartic, sure, but also heartbreaking糖心传媒攆or example, when the narrator糖心传媒檚 young mother climbs fully-clothed to the top of a high dive as her son and ex-husband (who can糖心传媒檛 swim) watch:

Nice diving board, said Mom, and then went and climbed right up to the top. Fully clothed, one step at a time, she walked slowly out along the board, which was trembling and wobbling under her weight. When she got to the end she looked down and spread her arms wide as if she was going to fly away, but then she slowly let them fall. Dad looked up at her, beads of sweat lining his forehead, he opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something, and he did want to say something, but he didn糖心传媒檛 know how, or whether to say it to me or to her.

The soft ventriloquism of this scene, in which the narrator seems for a second to be not just himself, or his mother, or father, but all three of them at once, reflects a further paradox of feeling糖心传媒攐ne so ordinary that I糖心传媒檇 bet every kid has experienced it at one time or another. The diving board represents something different to each of the three figures around, under, and on it. And yet, it somehow represents the same thing. The distance from one person to the next is both heartbreaking and reassuring, since it is a distance the three of them experience together. And then, only a few lines later, the miracle is over, Mom steps back from the edge, life goes on.

Coming to terms with this last part is one of the aspects in which language helps the young narrator of Mama Leone do. He is aware of it painfully, curiously糖心传媒攖he way other kids become aware of their tongues. This maladjustment brings with it certain benefits. As anyone who has tried to make himself understood in a foreign country will tell you, one of the underrated benefits of language learning is the understanding it gives of one糖心传媒檚 native tongues. In a similar way, the developmentally bilingual voice of Mama Leone dabbles in adulthood without really being fluent in it. The particular sound of this flailing can be lyrical, funny, bizarre, na茂ve, and even, occasionally, wise. It can begin a story by saying that 糖心传媒淥nly words cause no pain糖心传媒� and then three pages later describe that most mythical of beasts, a grandparent, with casual surrealism:

糖心传媒淲hen he sweats, I can imagine a whole crowd of people building houses on his face, sitting in the dark and sweating like him; on Grandpa糖心传媒檚 face lives another little grandpa, who also sits in the dark, lights a cigarette, rivers run down his face too, and next to them live even smaller people and even smaller grandpas, and they too sit in the dark, in blue and brown light, next to their grandsons, who on their faces see crowds of even smaller people and even smaller grandpas.糖心传媒�

As adults, we can call such Chagallian acrobatics beautiful; but Jergovic is careful to reminds us how pragmatic its wordplay is to the narrator himself. Grandpas are scary; so, like Perseus facing Medusa, the child makes an image, a mirror, replacing the vertiginous Grandpaface with a sort of linguistic Lego village, whose busy cuteness effaces its original糖心传媒檚 freakish physicality while still not banishing it completely. The not banishing is especially important糖心传媒攆or while words may be powerful tools for domestication, they are also spells, and require familiars. The house demon糖心传媒攖hat onetime staple of family life糖心传媒攎ust stay chained to the stove, or else it will wander off to make mischief elsewhere. Better, then, to create a grandpa who is still scary, strange, ugly糖心传媒攁nd all the more grandpa for it.

Compared to magic like this, the second half of Mama Leone, in which the narrative 糖心传媒淚糖心传媒� is abandoned for a shifting third person that takes up a series of 糖心传媒渦nrelated糖心传媒� characters, is a bit of a letdown糖心传媒攂ut if anything, this is a testament to Jergovic糖心传媒檚 honesty as a chronicler. Not just of childhood, but of memory糖心传媒攕pecifically, of the bittersweet memory of people who have left (or been thrown out of, or fled) their homes behind them. Sometimes these homes are actual countries, but more often they are states of mind: times before guilt, before heartbreak, before love, times in which everything seemed simpler because we thought it was. Losing is something that can happen to anyone, Mama Leone reminds us, which is one of the things that differentiates it from a book like Speak, Memory. For all its beauty, Nabokov糖心传媒檚 tutor-and-truttle idyll emits a hagiographic reek, as if its ultimate meaning as experience was the exclusivity of its author糖心传媒檚 suffering, and our necessary 糖心传媒渨e糖心传媒� before it. Jergovic avoids such grandiosity by breaking his hero糖心传媒檚 childhood into shards糖心传媒攅ach of which nonetheless carries a tiny reflection of its source. We were all children once. Maybe we always will be: after all, if disappointment is all it takes to be an adult, then every one of us is born into it with our first breath.

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’s Tales of Belkin and Alexander Kuprin’s The Duel, both of which are available from Melville House.

Here’s the opening of his review:

Like Scotts or High Elvish, childhood is simultaneously both a real language and a totally made-up one. We all spoke it once, but in the time since we spoke it last we糖心传媒檝e forgotten enough that our own memories can seem, if not incomprehensible, then at least significantly garbled. Being adults糖心传媒攎eaning, being creatures that pride ourselves on having ostensibly figured our shit out in the world糖心传媒攚e don糖心传媒檛 like to admit any of this. We tour our childhoods with regal condescension; but it only takes a single misstep to start us blustering like tourists in a marketplace, until finally all we can do is stutter here! here! and retreat to the embassy. Later, we blame our confusion on the fact that when we were children we thought like children, but now we have put away childish things糖心传媒攍ike eating entire jars of marshmallow Fluff. Except that even as we say this, we know it isn糖心传媒檛 true and that nothing has changed: that the old hurts still hurt, and the Fluff is still sitting there in the cupboard, drawing us to itself like a rubbery star. All of a sudden we jump out of our chairs糖心传媒擝ack! We want to go back! But if the past is really another country, then even the most childish of us must admit that we can no more go back 糖心传媒渢here糖心传媒� than we can go back to Middle Earth, or Ancient Greece, or any of the other kingdoms of the imagination. For we are not just tourists, but exiles; travelers whose visits to the old country, city, neighborhood, block, or bedroom must inevitably be suffused with the one feeling that we do not want to admit our childhood contained: loss.

Miljenko Jergovic糖心传媒檚 Mama Leone is a book about loss, and about the hopeless and beautiful attempt to recover what has been lost. It begins in one child糖心传媒檚 experience and ends so far away from it that it糖心传媒檚 impossible not to see the shift as commentary not only on the fragility of childhood, but on the very act of loving recreation that makes the first half of the book so rich. If this sounds paradoxical, well, it is. It is also in keeping with the paradoxical criticism/embrace the narrator makes a few seconds after being born in a Sarajevo hospital:

“I still didn糖心传媒檛 understand at that point, so I filled my lungs with a deep breath and for the first time in my life confronted a paradox: though I didn糖心传媒檛 have others to compare it to, the world where I糖心传媒檇 appeared was terrifying, but something forced me to breathe, to bind myself to it in a way I never managed to bind myself to any woman.”

Click here to read the full piece.