NEW NOVELS
Jerome at work
BARRY COLE
The Face of Another Kobo Abe translated by E. Dale Saunders (Weidenfeld and Nicol- son 32s 6d) Terra Arnow J. M. G. Le Clezio translated by Barbara Bray (Hamish Hamilton 35s) Dying in the Sun Peter K. Palangyo (Heine- mann I8s) The Insurrection of Hippolytus Brandenberg Roy Friedman (Macmillan 30s) Heaven Help Us! Herbert Tarr (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 30s) The Glasshouse Allan Campbell McLean (Calder and Boyars 30s) Translations, obviously, are made because one language differs from another. Less obviously, they are also made necessary by the 'distance in space and time within a single language,' as Professor Brower puts it. Distance in physical 'space,' plus the common sense of translation, is what gives unwonted but vague unity to most of this week's novels, which come from Japan, France, Tanzania, the us (two—one American Jewish) and Britain. Let me try to interpret them for you.
'The work of art is a mask. It hides the real face of the creator at the same time as it shows something of him that is not visible to the everyday observer,' wrote Martin Dods- worth in 1963. The narrator of Kobo Abe's remarkable The Face of Another extends this observation into real terms. He loses his face in an accident but uses his medical and scien- tific knowledge to construct a new one, one that will be unrecognisable by his colleagues —and by his wife. The book deals for the most part with the question : `How important is a man's face to his existence?' It provides some disturbing answers.
First, the new face carries its own charac- ter, one that conflicts with the hitherto gentle possessor. He plans the seduction of his wife (aware that he is, in effect, cuckolding him- self) as a way of hitting out at her apparent indifference to his suffering. Throughout the book he ponders the values of his face/mask and its meanings. Some of the speculations are tedious--masks within masks; if the man is his face, what is beneath it? But the novel as an entity is almost perfect and the narrative is very well translated. The dialogue, however, is wooden and artificial, almost as if St Jerome, the supposed patron saint of translators, had deserted Mr Dale Saunders. The book's end is plottish but clever. Dodsworth's statement is echoed in the following, after the scientist has reconciled our hero's different faces: 'Didn't all this reasoning mean, perhaps, that while I pretended to submit reluctantly to the forceful persuasions of the mask, I was cover- ing up to myself the fact that the mask's wish was my own.' Inscrutable with a vengeance. Terra Anzata's author is described as 'one of the most promising French writers of fiction to emerge since Camus,' and his earlier novels have been enthusiastically praised. Le Clezio's new novel, however, seems more like a product of despair, a sort of 'where do I go from here? Can I go from here?' Chancelade is a small boy apparently deter- mined to take from life all he can. His author uses the boy's projected life as a peg to which be can attach his own games and experiments. What we get, unfortunately, are incidents with- out purpose or sense—his father's death and funeral, his first (inevitable) sexual experience, dreams, endless lists, the detritus of an imagina- tive mind. In an attempt to fill the pages, Le Clezio ranges from chapters of sign language, Morse and straight incomprehensibility to theology, and questions (arbitrary and un- original): `Do you like money? What will it be like a million years from now? Where is God? How will it all end?' He lists the human contents of a beach (twenty-nine names). Science fiction interrupts and we are treated to variations on a theme by Asimov and Clarke which evolve into mathematics. Then, as in Abe's novel, come the mirrors, reflections and the unanswerable questions.
Again like Abe's book, we get a wooden dialogue. The narrative includes such felicities as butterflies which 'dart madly,' centipedes which have 'a thousand feet,' trees which stand 'peacefully,' nightingales with 'artificial cries' and potato bugs which make 'vain' excursions. And,
despite his SF interest, Le Clezio can still write of the 'four corners of the sky.' Or was St
Jerome playing tricks again? The book as a whole seems to be the work of a fine and talented writer desperately trying to make up for a false start. Unfortunately, he rarely gets beyond second gear. It is the commonplace and the cliche which get translated (in the 'from earth to heaven' sense) in Dying in the Sun. Peter K. Palangyo is a Tanzanian and his tale is about Ntanya, his hatred for his peasant father, his return home and his progression from poverty to sub- sistence and marriage. It also deals with other problems. His girl-friend and eventual wife neatly describes the rapid piecemeal changes that come with self-government when she re- marks, after lamenting the clear-cut good and bad of the old days: that today 'even new- born babies are government officers.' There is bad writing: 'Something had attracted her in Ntanya, something both sensual and deeper.
Maybe it was his eyes constantly surveying the room with an understanding, almost vicarious suffering.' But the story is good and strong and there are some neat phrases: 'sus- pended like a word at the beginning of an unknown sentence.' Sixteen of the pages (printed in Malta) are physically unreadable:
Three good yarns to end with. The Insur- rection of Hippolytus Branden berg updates Richardson and gives us a series of letters and similar communications addressed by the hero to almost anyone in power—whether his own insurance company boss or the leaders of the world. A large number of these letters must have needed translating. His persistence in eccentric epistolisations gains him the atten- tions of the FBI, the cm, the KGB and the government agencies of most East European countriei. A near-genius according to his IQ, he talks cogently on subjects ranging from nuclear physics to monograms on the Han Dynasty. The commonsense view has it that he is 'a naive and inexperienced individual to be regarded as more of a talker and letter- writer than a doer.' Eventually arraigned by the us government, he decides to turn his trial into the world's first litigation against the human race. This we are spared, but the book is funny and sometimes uncomfortably con- vincing.
I should have liked more space for Heaven Help Us!, a sort of metropolitan Miss Read book, and The Glasshouse. Herbert Tarr's novel should appeal if you are religious, American and interested in the state of Jewish synagogues in New York. Or if you like an amusing, sometimes didactic, tale of a small but enduring aspect of the American way of life. The Glasshouse has no artlessness and less art. A hard army prison tale of violence, privation and sex, it would sit well on the pages of Reveille. And that is not a necessarily bad translation (see OED).
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