Bison Books

Things Seen

admin — Sat, 15 May 2010 08:00:00 +0000

From the baby carriage to the grave, life unfolds more and more between the shopping center and the television set. – Annie Ernaux

Born in 1940, and a published author since 1974, Annie Ernaux is known for writing in depth about her own life: her parents, her marriage, her abortion, and later, her breast cancer. In Things Seen, Ernaux turns her gaze outward, both to Paris and the world.

Written as a journal, the book feels as though it traveled in a coat pocket, pulled out to pass the time in train stations and grocery stores, riding on the Metro and eavesdropping in cafes. The writer states the journal is a result of the “simple habit of putting life into words.”

Events are recorded through the initial reaction felt by the writer. Refreshingly absent is the expected self-examination and excuses made for the content of the reaction. We hear the writer’s thoughts as she thinks them, without editing. There is no need to place additional weight on any one topic, as one would in conversation; the narrative flows over war, racism, and homelessness as swiftly as it does hair appointments, grocery shopping, and visits to the dentist. This does not render the writer shallow or uninterested; it reminds the reader of all the passing commentary we also make to ourselves in our day-to-day lives. The commentary doesn’t need to make sense to anyone else. In fact, upon reflection it might not make sense at all.

The idea I found most resonant in the book is that while one may feel they are the only true individual in a crowd, to each other person, one is just part of the nameless crowd. The writer’s viewpoint is that of a passive audience, watching other people's lives unfold in front of her with little more emotion than one would actors on a stage. A memorable example is that of the many different beggars encountered on the Metro; the writer finds it easier to give change to someone playing music than to someone who might actually be starving. It is easier to give the same coin for pleasantry than to accept the concept that someone might literally die without that help.

The writer is distanced from actual events, and this makes the book speed along, as we do not stop to analyze the thoughts themselves; we simply follow the words at the pace of life, just as the writer recorded them.

Written by: Melissa Ruiz, May 15th 2010

Love Goes to Press: A Comedy in Three Acts

admin — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 16:28:00 +0000

Edited by Sandra Spanier

Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press

It's impossible to dislike a female protagonist who opines, fifteen miles south of the Italian front in the second-to-last year of World War II, "If there's anything I really loathe, it's a woman protector." Delivered by Annabelle Jones, war correspondent for the San Francisco World, in conversation with Jane Mason, war correspondent for the New York Bulletin, this line refers to one of the many well-meaning men who are the butts of the jokes in the play Love Goes to Press.

Longtime friends as well as colleagues, Jones and Mason are globetrotting journalists chasing after war stories when both improbably show up in the same tiny press camp in Italy. There, amid refrains of, "No, I am not a nurse," any time one of them places an intra-military call, each of the two women pursue dangerously-won exclusive stories and navigate surprise romantic encounters, the latter portrayed as considerably more perilous than the former.

The mostly-journalist ensemble draws an easy comparison to His Girl Friday, released six years before Love Goes to Press first appeared on stage. By contrast, the play's pacing and gender commentary read as tersely contemporary, and its production history as relatively dismal. First performed in the summer of 1946, audiences in London packed theaters to see it, taking advantage of the small luxury of cheap tickets, and in co-author Martha Gellhorn's estimation, eager to laugh amid grief, rationing, wide-spread destruction, and exhaustion in the first year of peace after the war.

American audiences, however, did not crave such levity. After only four performances in New York in the first week of 1947 (where, Gellhorn further recounts, the cast was ecstatic to shop and eat as much as they could), the play folded then disappeared. American reviews from the time reflect a limited range of emotions running from irked boredom to disgust: either the veteran lady war reporters who authored the play couldn't get war quite "right," for all of their experience, or they simply had the bad taste to profane such a sacred subject in a three-act comedy. From the distance of sixty-three years—perhaps as cushy as the distance between New York drama critics of the '40s and the European theatre of war—this self-important response seems a bit comical.

Editor Sandra Spanier does a fine job, in this expanded edition of Love Goes to Press, of providing historical and literary context for the play, which did not see a first printing until 1995. Her biographical focus remains overwhelmingly on Gellhorn, whose sixty-year career was comprised of relentless war correspondence, as well as fiction and travel writing. Co-author Virginia Cowles is comparatively unknown, despite being an experienced war correspondent and prolific nonfiction writer herself. (Gellhorn and Cowles met when both women were reporting on the Spanish Civil War—Annabelle Jones and Jane Mason are based on them, respectively.)

In addition to Spanier's description of rescuing perhaps the only extant copy of the play, and her recovery and reprinting of deleted sections of Gellhorn's war reporting from the Collier's archives, Gellhorn's original introduction to the 1995 edition may be the most enjoyable historical work here. Good-humored but pitiless, Gellhorn's recounting of the more hapless accomplishments of the play's authors, which included fleeing stunned from cries of "Author! Author!" at the close of the play's premier, is like an authorial bow on behalf of both herself and Cowles, albeit regrettably late.

Written by: Kaja Katamay, April 3rd 2010

Nadirs

admin — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 09:01:00 +0000

By Herta Müller, translated by Sieglinde Lug

Bison Books

The first impression upon commencing Herta Müller’s collection of semi-autobiographical short stories Nadirs is one that is characterized by a child’s hybridized view of a world which is intensely real and also hauntingly and disconcertingly surreal. Nadirs illustrates Müller’s perspectives in Banat, her native German-speaking region of Romania. Nadirs was first published in Berlin in 1988. Sieglinde Lug, professor of German at the University of Denver, provides the English translation.

Müller’s transitions or segues between realism and surrealism are so seamless that it is not until you are deep into her stories that you realize some of the most interesting stories in Nadirs deal direct with the family and many times in fantastical language. For example, Mueller describes the preparations of family for the usual Saturday night movie in “The Swabian Bath,” where each family takes a bath in the water of the person preceding them. Another story entitled “The Funeral Sermon” describes the central character attending her father’s funeral where you learn the views of the father from certain members of the community and the child. Was the father a war hero or a rapist? The child is charged with the task of giving a eulogy in the midst of these tales being exchanged, and it is the fear described by Müller and confusion by the prospect of giving the eulogy in front of the townspeople that lends the story its memorable surrealism.

As the two aforementioned stories indicate, within each of Müller’s tales, one progresses from an initial assumption of what to expect and is quickly deposited into unfamiliar territory containing the lucid, vivid and sometimes frightening descriptions of events that you don’t imagine usually reading of, but are still very intrigued. Nadirs, in each of its segments and in its entirety, as one of the first of Müller’s forays into the literary world remains a testament to her current Nobel Laureate status and also to the significant likelihood that her works will endure.

Written by: Brandon Copeland, January 24th 2010