CHRONICLES
Fiction in Translation: The Scars of the Past

ANDERSON TEPPER The New York Times. New York, United States March 27, 2005, Sunday

For fiction writers, history can be a treacherous, demanding muse; some choose to deny it, others are crushed by its weight. Yet, reading half a dozen recent books in translation, I was struck by the variety of creative responses to it -- from mordant wit and defiance to quiet acceptance and dreamy nostalgia. The authors, with origins in six countries, seem compelled, even condemned, to confront specters of the near and distant past. The results -- intimate, rescued snapshots of lives caught in the grip of history -- make for thought-provoking fiction.

   While some Americans may now look back on the 1990's as an era of comparative innocence -- a decade watched on CNN -- Ma Jian, a former Chinese dissident who lives in England, spent those years trying to make sense of the changing face of post-Tiananmen-Square China. In his wry, biting collection of linked stories, The Noodle Maker, Sheng, a professional writer, and Vlazerim, a professional blood donor, ponder their fates during a drunken evening in the writer's cramped Beijing apartment. Sheng laments his lack of courage as a Party hack while he spins out tales of the ''sad and feeble'' characters he dreams of writing about. (The blood donor says ''I've bled myself dry for this country,'' but it is actually the compromised writer, not the donor, who has done that.) Who are the characters in his unwritten masterpiece? They are the flotsam and jetsam of Chinese society, crippled by memories of Mao's Cultural Revolution, entrapped by the contradictions of Deng's open-door policy: a suicidal actress who lost her heroic roles; a philandering bureaucrat and his social-climbing wife; a petty entrepreneur who offers Western pop music soundtracks at his crematorium. ''We grew up in a spiritual vacuum, cut off from the rest of the world,'' Sheng laments. ''A wasted generation. When the country started to open up we were the first to fall. . . . How can a society numbed by dictatorship ever find its way in the modern world?''

The Cuban writer Pedro Juan Gutiérrez also rails against the spiritual poverty of a closed society, but for him it's a personal battle -- thankfully, one with plenty of sexual outlets. Both Jian and Gutiérrez, in fact, make reference to that literary patron saint of erotic subversion, Milan Kundera; though in Gutiérrez's Tropical Animal, which continues the escapades of the narrator of his ''Dirty Havana Trilogy,'' Pedro Juan, there's less heady eroticism than hard-core horniness. Pushing 50, the bohemian artist and layabout is drifting through the dog days of Cuba's periodo especial of the 1990's, roaming from his rooftop perch in Havana to the cruising strip of the Malecon. Like Jian's writer, Pedro Juan is composing a book in his head -- in between marathon sessions with his street-hustler girlfriend, Gloria; an extended stay in Sweden, where he shacks up with a more repressed European lover, Agneta; and mornings lazing in bed

   Gutiérrez's rage against the repression of Castro's Cuba is thrilling -- raw, shocking, lusty. Roberto Bolaño, in Distant Star, accomplishes something more subtle and terrifying: a nightmarish saga of Chile in the aftermath of Augusto Pinochet's 1973 coup, viewed through the mythic figure of Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, aviator, aerial poet, sadist and Nazi sympathizer. Bolaño, who died in exile in Spain at 50 in 2003, has written an elaborate body of work that is just now coming to our attention -- his ''By Night in Chile'' was published here in 2003. ''Distant Star'' is a twisted, compressed masterpiece: at a feverish pace, we're whisked through recent decades in Chile -- the underground poetry and leftist politics of the Allende era; the Pinochet years of murder and torture, silence and forgetting; the sad and lonely dispersion of Chile's lost generation (people like Bolaño and our narrator) throughout Latin America and Europe. We witness nothing less than ''the story of the Chilean nation. A story of terror.''

   If Bolaño aims to encompass the tragedy of an entire country, Zsuzsa Bank's spare, resonant debut, The Swimmer, confines itself to a more intimate picture. Kata and Isti are young children when news of the 1956 Budapest uprising makes its way to their village. Much more immediately felt is their mother's defection to the West shortly after the Soviet suppression. Taken by their depressive father, Kalman, on a rambling odyssey across the Hungarian countryside, the children learn to create their own sense of time and place. Reports from the rest of the world -- including postcards from their mother in Germany -- make only the slightest impression, like ripples on the lakes they swim in during rare private moments they share with their father. ''Isti and I spent our time outdoors, in the village, in the fields, in the meadows,'' Kata recalls, ''and maybe I still remember these things only because . . . you tend to concentrate on the small things when you can't bear to think of other, larger things that hang over them.''

   The title of Nella Bielski's novel The Year Is '42 takes an understated approach to the ravages of history. The opening line sets the tone: ''The war went on and every day Karl Bazinger took a bath.'' Bielski, a native of Ukraine who lives in Paris and writes in French, carefully constructs an unadorned novel of daily life in wartime, and the bit-by-bit poisoning of a conscience. Karl Bazinger, a liberal Wehrmacht officer ''suffocating in the uniform he wore,'' makes the best of his official routine in occupied Paris, despite lingering doubts. Increasingly, however, Bazinger becomes aware of the insidious campaigns on the Eastern front -- he hears talk of ''liquidation'' and ''cleansings''; when he is transferred to Kiev, he stumbles upon news of the Babi Yar massacre. There too he crosses paths with an enigmatic Russian woman, a doctor who helps heal him of a nagging skin ailment. ''The scabs formed a crust and fell off,'' Bielski writes, in one of the book's few clear instances of symbolism. ''Shreds and scraps of skin. Underneath was a fragile new skin.''

   The ''scars of the past'' are everywhere present in Edgardo Cozarinsky's remarkable, if fleeting, collection of stories, The Bride From Odessa. Cozarinsky -- who writes in Spanish and who divides his time between Buenos Aires, where he was born, and Paris -- is the embodiment of the uprooted émigré. His stories range from turn-of-the-20th-century Kiev and Odessa to the war-enshrouded Mitteleuropean cities of Vienna, Berlin and Budapest, from New York and Lisbon to Buenos Aires and the Argentine Pampas. Told with a nostalgic, wistful air, Cozarinsky's tales are snapshots, allusive and fragmentary portraits of lives in flux and identities in transit. The two world wars figure prominently, as do the Babi Yar massacre and the Jewish migration to Argentina. ''This story has no plot other than that of History itself,'' Cozarinsky insists in ''Christmas '54.'' ''It is barely more than the impression left by an instant, a spark produced by two very different surfaces rubbing together.'' Nevertheless, Cozarinsky offers stirring, impassioned glimpses of lost souls amid the rubble of history -- survivors who, like Ma Jian's mixed bag of characters, have ''seen through the red dust of the world.''

Anderson Tepper has written about books for The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, The Village Voice and other publications.

See another comments by The New York Times
   It's Hard Work Being a Hedonist in Cuba (about Dirty Havana Trilogy)
   Sex and the City (about Dirty Havana Trilogy)