On the mercilessly relentless marvels of Koji Yamamura's animated shorts, now on DVD

It’s deep winter, and the old doctor’s horse lies dead in the snow. His assistant goes door to door asking neighbours to lend out their horse so that the doctor can make the ten-mile journey to call on a sick child, but it’s only when the doctor decides on a whim to investigate the contents of his own forgotten pig stall that he finds transportation. Led by a mischievous stable hand, two enormous black horses with ivory marbles for eyes squeeze out of the cramped stall like newborns spilling from a womb. You never know what you’ll find on your own property, the assistant, soon to become the stable hand’s potential rape victim, exclaims, and the doctor is on his way to an apparently healthy patient that politely requests that he be allowed to die and a mass of villagers that seem to be conspiring against the doctor for reasons unknown. They take off all his clothes and stuff him into bed with the peculiar boy now in his care.

The titular 20-minute animated film that constitutes the centerpiece of Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor & Other Fantastic Films by Koji Yamamura is an extremely faithful, which is to say oddly literal, adaptation. It diligently realizes each and every event relayed in Kafka’s seven-page story through colour-deprived images of figures whose limbs and heads balloon randomly as they move about and a first-person narration read by not one but two voices, evoking demonic possession. The doctor’s facial expression and body language do little to enhance our understanding of the character however. Yamamura seems content to illustrate Kafka’s strange tale in a distinctively dreamlike, compelling style and leave it at that, which seems perplexing when you compare ‘A Country Doctor’ (2007) to the bulk of the 13 films in Zeitgeist’s collection, which are nothing if not restlessly imaginative, so much so that watching just a few in a row can prove a tiresome experience.

The multiple award-winning, Oscar-nominated ‘Mt. Head’ (2002) is probably the most well known of the films here. It tells the story of an old miser who eats so many cherry pits that a cherry tree sprouts from his head and becomes a beloved gathering place for families and weekend warriors. It’s a clever, enjoyable, slightly spooky piece, though like most of the more recent films seems less characteristic of Yamamura’s work as a whole. The early ‘Aquatic’ (1987) finds a young Narcissus studying his reflection in a river until his reflection reveals a bizarre sea creature to be staring back. The water’s surface and the sky above become interchangeable. Amorphous life forms constantly come into being. The result is an essentially formless mediation in fluidity and visual depth that just sort of grooves along until it doesn’t anymore. In the more urban-themed ‘Perspektivenbox’ (1989) the parade of imagery seems to finally end for no other reason than it eventually gets dark outside.

In ‘Your Choice!’ (1999), made in collaboration with students in the US and Japan, a barber with a half-moon head seeks a light bulb. In ‘Bavel’s Book’ (1996) two kids find a book at a bus stop that transports them to another realm. In ‘Child’s Metaphysics’ (2007) a boy sneezes, blowing out his candle nose, while a literal birdbrain hovers trapped within a skull cage. The author of these works is clearly some kind of a genius. No ten seconds of screen-time in any of Yamamura’s films are anything less than inventive—the only problem is that so little of it adds up to very much, so sometimes ten seconds feels like enough. So in a sense, you might say that A Country Doctor & Other Fantastic Films, or at least the earlier works that constitute the bulk of the collection, makes ideal viewing for people with extreme short-term memory loss. There’s always something new!

"Language is like a drawbridge": A conversation with Joshua Ferris

photo by Nina Subin

Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End chronicled the life and death of a Chicago advertising firm. Relayed in the first-person plural, it was sharp, witty and insightful about how work informs our lives. It was also a hit, and won Ferris the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Novel. Ferris’ follow-up, The Unnamed (Reagan Arthur/Black Bay Books, $15.99), is more harrowing and more moving. It concerns Tim Farnsworth, a successful lawyer stricken with a bizarre ailment that manifests in compulsive, uncontrollable walking. In the midst of whatever activity Tim can suddenly be carried far away by his own legs, trudging through sometimes punishing weather without appropriate clothing or supplies until he collapses into sleep whenever and wherever his body finally gives out. His condition gradually eats away at everything he cherishes, including his job and his marriage to Jane, whose genuine devotion to Tim is pushed to its limits. The Unnamed observes its characters’ trials with tremendous tenderness. Though fascinating, inventive, and at times extremely humorous, it’s uncompromising, even brutal in how it follows its central idea to what ultimately feels like its inevitable conclusion. I spoke with Ferris last week when he was in Toronto attending the International Festival of Authors.


JB: Your first novel took its title from a line in Don DeLillo’s Americana. There’s a certain boldness of language and engagement with vernacular in The Unnamed that occasionally recalls DeLillo as well. Does he remain an important touchstone for you?

Joshua Ferris: DeLillo’s a giant. He’ll forever be incorruptible for me. His books are woven into my reader’s DNA. How that translates into my own writing is very hard for me to say. I think it’s important to try to not sound like DeLillo. I’ll go out of my way to strike sentences that sound too much like DeLillo or Proust or Hemingway. If I can feel the hovering presence of someone I admire within a sentence, I scratch it out.

JB: Because it gives an undesirable sense of assurance, knowing that your writing conforms to a tested model?

JF: No. It just gives me a sense of anxiety. I’d rather write a bad sentence that seems to possess authorial intent from me than write a good sentence whose authorial intent can be ascribed to someone else. That may be pride talking, but I think it’s also something deeper than that, going back to an Emersonian self-reliance that states that to borrow from someone else is to abdicate your originality. There may in fact be nothing new under the sun, but it’s important to try my best to sound like me.

JB: What does it mean to name something? Your novel implies that the difference between having and not having a name is the difference between having a place in the world and being rejected by it.

JF: I think that’s accurate. It’s also about having a set of attributes that adhere to you. There’s a tic you find sometimes in writing. You have a character named John and you’re told something is “a very John-like thing to do.” It’s a shorthand for some writers to convey an entire personality, just using the character’s name as a modifier. When you take that name away, you’re looking nakedly at the object itself—maybe you’re unable to look at it. The specific referent in the title of The Unnamed is the unnamed disease. You can’t make anything of it. Doctors can’t rally around it. There can’t be a 5K run in benefit of it. So the result of this namelessness is a tremendous loneliness. Adam named the animals for a reason—he was lonely. By naming the animals he got closer to them. If he’d kept the animals nameless it would have been a much chillier garden. This goes back to what language can and can’t do, how it bridges certain gaps, how it breaks down. The limits of language are something I wanted to explore in the book, especially with respect to subjective experience, how you can or cannot convey to your most intimate loved ones how you’re actually feeling. To extend the metaphor, language is like a drawbridge. Sooner or later it goes up and you can’t get to the other side.

JB: Do you relate to Tim and Jane’s relationship, to how they attempt to express their feelings to each other?

JF: Yes. I think what they do in a more dramatic way what many married people do, which is come together at a moment in time, find themselves speaking the same language, and then for whatever reason fly apart. Far apart, and for a long time. Then they come back together for inexplicable reasons and do it all over again. My reading of the book is that it’s basically a love story.


JB: Has writing this novel strengthened or weakened your faith in the durability of love?

JF: That’s tough to say. I don’t think that a novel informs or comments upon its writer. The writer had those ideas somewhere in them prior to writing the book. Once written, the book might represent one-tenth of the writer’s understanding of love. There’s still that other 90% of the writer’s psyche that hasn’t been plumbed. The Unnamed is one take regarding one couple. It can’t really teach me anything. All I taught myself in writing it was how to write the book. The finished novel is not a textbook for the future writer.

JB: But are you surprised by what you’re saying about love as you write, what you seem to believe or hold dear?

JF: Yes, quite often. I’m probably being instructed as I write, getting some clarity as to how I see things. It’s like feeling something in the dark and then suddenly shining a light on it. Pretty or not, there it is.

JB: You were saying earlier that you have a poor memory. What makes you say that?

JF: Fiction seems to be made up of three predominant branches, those being memory, imagination and language. I can do language pretty well. I can do imagination well. But memory seems to be my weak branch. I’m sure there are writers who would want more branches or fewer branches or whatever, but that’s how I see it.

JB: The Unnamed lends itself to being read as an allegory, but I’m personally uncomfortable with that term because it seems to imply a one-to-one relationship between the ostensible metaphor and what it represents.

JF: I never in a million years would have written this with the intention of it being seen as allegory. The allegorical readings I’ve come across have surprised me. It’s obviously a metaphor for sickness because I invented the disease. I wanted to explore sickness without the baggage of a known disease. When I read Kafka, I don’t think of Josephine the Mouse as an allegory or metaphor for something else. I don’t read about K.’s travels in the castle as a metaphor for the terrible bureaucracy that overtook the 20th century and led to the systematic decimation of Jews in the Holocaust. I take it all very literally, and only later think about the allegorical possibilities surrounding the story. That eventually gives you a fuller and more interesting reading, but I think the primary work of the reader is to imagine the actual, literal situation described. That’s responsible reading. The rest is 10th grade term papers.

JB: There’s a current running through The Unnamed that concerns religious belief, and it seems that you’ve left the door open in the novel’s final passage, with Tim suspended in this almost metaphysical space of listening and anticipation.

JF: That was always my intention. Dogmatic fiction, fiction that closes doors on possibilities, isn’t exciting for me. To go back to DeLillo, one of the great triumphs of White Noise is that it is excoriating about technology. Technology is something to be dreaded in the book, and there’s a real nostalgia for pre-technological time. But the same sentences that cause me to arrive at those conclusions are the very same sentences that bring a tremendous Romanticism to technology. Throughout The Unnamed there are philosophical ideas presented concerning the existence of God or the difference between the mind and body. For me to have tried to close the book with clear, absolute conclusions to the explorations of those ideas would have taken the book out of the realm of fiction and into that of the essay. I don’t think that’s my job. I was always trying to tell the story, to rely on imagination, and where it landed was where it had to land.

Futbolistas, pornographers, rat detectives, rabid rabbits: Two new volumes of stories by Bolaño

Photo courtesy of New Directions

A story might begin like so: “William Burns, from Ventura, California, told this story to my friend Pancho Monge, a policeman from Santa Teresa, Sonora, who passed it on to me…” There’s the suggestion that what’s about to unfurl was simply transcribed from a friendly conversation, or perhaps a drunken, wee-hour confession. Sometimes the names of the characters are the same as those of real people, such as the late porn actor John Holmes. Sometimes these names read as obvious covers for the author himself. These qualities imbue the stories in Roberto Bolaño’s The Return (New Directions, $30) with a seductive intimacy, the allure of secrets being shared, of something once hiding in the world being excavated. But then we remember that there’s no such place as Santa Teresa in the state of Sonora, that John Holmes died in 1988, not 1990, and that it might be advisable to avoid confusing Arturo Belano with Roberto Bolaño, however compelling the illusion. Bolaño’s best stories often hover in this twilight realm where the conviction of the narrator’s voice, speaking to us softly as though over the airwaves, allows us to lose sight of the frontiers between the factual, the apocryphal, and the dream-drawn invention. A lucid voice speaking to us of obscure and illucid things. If you like spending time in this place, keep reading.

The 13 stories in The Return, translated by Bolaño’s award-winning steady Chris Andrews, are culled from two collections already published in Spanish, 1997’s Llamadas telefónicas and 2001’s Putas asesinas. The selections seem arranged in pairs: two about Russia, two about mentally unstable women, two about the porn industry. These little diptychs make for a pleasing fluidity. They also emphasize the freedom Bolaño might have found in working within diverse milieux, that the author of such ambitious novels as 2666 and The Savage Detectives was having fun sinking his teeth into the microworlds of Russian thugs, the adult film industry, necrophile French clothing designers, and international soccer stars. Yes, death lurks in most every corner, but the titular tale assures us that dying is actually pretty much like it’s depicted in the Patrick Swayze-Demi Moore mega-hit Ghost, and that forging connections with some living person will set us free to leave our shells behind and roam the afterlife.

Dedicated to Mexican author Juan Villoro, ‘Buba,’ the soccer story, recalls a winning streak that may or may not have been the result of magic blood rituals undertaken by an African playing for Spain. It may have also been the result of a peculiar and impermanent sort of friendship between young men with their lives still ahead of them. The narrator of ‘Clara’ attempts to chronicle the life of a girl he dated in his youth. Clara remains a peripheral figure in his life—it’s only when she vanishes that he recognizes his need for her. ‘Prefiguration of Lalo Cura’ concerns the child of a renegade priest and the female star of the Olimpo Movie Production Company, now a confused adult trying to make sense of his mother’s career. Passing through life with a moniker like Lalo Cura—“la locura” means madness in Spanish; Bolaño liked the name so much he recycled it in 2666—our narrator obsesses over how names determine our fate. Lalo was born in a neighbourhood called The Impaled. “The name glows like the moon. The name opens a way through the dream with its horn and man follows that path.” It also reminds him of how many times his mother was impaled by her costars while acting in the bizarre, surrealistic blue movies authored by a mysterious German working in Latin America. Bolaño’s synopses of these movies make for some lively reading.

Coming just a month after The Return, The Insufferable Gaucho (New Directions, $28.50), also translated by Andrews—who even has a story dedicated to him—is a somewhat slimmer collection of short work. There are fewer, longer stories, and a couple of these might just be among the finest writings available in English from Bolaño. The titular story concerns a retired lawyer and judge who, following the departure of his adult children from his Buenos Aires home and the collapse of the Argentine economy, moves to his long-abandoned ranch in las Pampas, where he very gradually sheds an entire way of life and adopts another. Along the way he becomes familiar with the local rabbit population, some of which prove to be shockingly bloodthirsty, their appearances resembling something out of Paul Bowles. Bolaño’s evocation of place is rife with typically odd details and utterly immersive. There’s something almost like optimism here, too, a sense that there are brief windows in our lives that, should we heed their invitation, will offer up the opportunity to change everything.

A sort of homage to Kafka’s final short story, the unambiguously titled ‘Rat Police’ at first glance seems like the least likely Bolaño project yet: a detective fiction set in the sewer-washed world of rats. Rats, we’re told, rarely make art and they rarely murder, so this story is about the exceptions to the rule, narrated by a rat cop whose life brushes against both phenomena. As is often the case in Bolaño’s cosmology, art and murder share something essential that’s never quite articulated but dangles brilliantly in the imagination. The rat authorities lack of interest in what appears to be serial murders could almost read as a dry run for the under-investigated killings in 2666.

The Argentine novelist at the centre of ‘Alvaro Rousselot’s Journey’ discovers he’s plagiarized by a European filmmaker. Still a minor author, perhaps vaguely flattered, he lets it slide. Time passes, Rousselot publishes another novel, the filmmaker makes another movie—and plagiarizes Rousselot again! Not only that, the filmmaker actually kind of improves on the source material. Rousselot still doesn’t take legal action. In fact, he despairs that the filmmaker might have abandoned him, that he might lose his best reader, “the reader for whom he had really been writing, the only one who was capable of fully responding to his work.” The story is very funny, shaped by unexpected encounters, and there is a delicious irony at work here, but there’s also an allusion to the secret destinies that seem to lay waiting for everyone, should they take off the lid and peer into the burbling stew. What you see might make your blood curdle. It might also startle you with the beauty of its design.

Lasting impressions: Robert Walser's The Tanners

portraits of Robert Walser included in W.G. Sebald's essay

Here’s what seized my attention right away. A young man enters a bookstore, asks to be introduced to the proprietor. Upon meeting the old man he begins a rambling, effusive overture detailing his profound desire to enter the world of bookselling. “My love of humankind will be agreeably balanced with mercantile rationality which in fact bears equal weight and appears to me just as necessary for life as a soul filled with love…” The proprietor agrees to hire the young man on the spot, giving him a week’s trial period. A week later, after having made a highly favorable impression, the young man approaches his employer and unexpectedly demands to be let go. “I’ve come to realize that the entire book trade in nothing less than ghastly if it must entail standing at one’s desk from early morning till late at night while out of doors the gentlest winter sun is gleaming, and forces one to scrunch one’s back, since the desk is far too small given my stature…” His resignation speech is as deliciously excessive as his earlier declaration of vocational discovery. The sequence is hilarious, teetering on absurd, yet peppered with almost lyrical observations on the nature of work and youth and spiritual urges that resonate and will continue to resonate throughout this ambulatory, funny, hypnotic, strangely haunting work. It was the first novel from Swiss author Robert Walser, and the last to be translated into English—very beautifully, by Susan Bernofsky—more than a century after its 1906 publication.

Truthfully, it was the accolades alone that sold me on The Tanners (New Directions, $20). Walser was not widely read during his lifetime (1878-1956), but among his readers were Franz Kafka, Herman Hesse and Walter Benjamin. Those who have pledged their admiration for Walser in the decades after his death include Susan Sontag, J.M. Coetzee and W.G. Sebald, who wrote the eloquent essay which functions as an introduction to The Tanners. “The traces Robert Walser left on his path through life were so faint as to have been almost effaced altogether… he was only ever connected to the world in the most fleeting of ways.” Sebald’s evocation of Walser’s ghost-like movement through life, rarely settling anywhere, always walking, owning nothing, not even his own books, being institutionalized in a psychiatric facility in 1933, where he retired from writing, and finally dying of a heart attack on a snowy pathway, is captivating in its mystery, a mystery that extends into Walser’s work. The Tanners is titled after the siblings who inhabit its pages, but its central character, Simon Tanner, seems to have been conceived somewhat autobiographically. Only 20 at the novel’s start, he’s bright, seemingly full of promise, an orator of marvelous talents. “I don’t like to spend too long considering before I speak,” Simon says, yet he speaks always with wit and precision. He’s a hard-worker when employed. He moves from job to menial job, from apartment to spartan apartment, at times from sibling to sibling—his sister is an unmarried schoolteacher, his brothers include an academic and a landscape painter. Each worries over him fruitlessly. Toward the novel’s end Simon offers a typically loquacious confession to one of many strangers drawn to him. “I’m still standing at the door of life, knocking and knocking, though admittedly none too forcefully, and breathlessly listening to see whether someone will decide to open the bolt and let me in.”

The Tanners is both melancholy and relentlessly good-natured. Simon is both fascinated by and removed from the world around him. The book is constructed to an unusually large degree of letters and monologues—open the book at random, you’ll likely find someone writing or talking. Many of the speeches are Simon’s, though in Walser’s universe just about everyone is gifted with the ability to hold forth on whatever passing notion, and Simon’s wandering journey yields countless, arresting portraits of characters, even those glimpsed only briefly. Rosa, who weeps alone for an unrequited love; Klara, who falls wholly under the spell of each member of the Tanner clan she meets; a beguiling dancer; a young, married explorer, home from his travels, who likes to fire guns into the forest in the middle of the night; an old man with a dripping nose; a teacher suffering from domestic abuse; a gay nurse; a reformed pedophile. While never overwrought or imposed upon with psychological dissections, each character drifts vividly in and out of Walser’s vivid scenes, each one a depiction of urban or rural landscapes, a contrast that embodies the divided spirit of the protagonist. Sebald notes how so much of what occurs in Walser’s stories slip quickly and inexplicably out of memory, and I see what he means, Walser’s transitions can be so unassuming as to barely punctuate epiphanies, events, entrances and exits. Yet once you’ve read through The Tanners I think you’ll find that its faces and places and states of mind cascade through your memory. The order is lost, but the impressions remain.

The Tanners was my first experience with Walser’s work and I rushed directly from it to another Walser, Jakob von Gunten (NYRB Classics, $16.50), published in 1909, which I gather is his most famous novel, and which some of you may know as the source material to the 1995 Brothers Quay film Institute Benjamenta, which I haven’t seen. This shorter novel, translated by Christopher Middleton, written in the form of a diary, describes a deeply mysterious school for boys where very little is actually to be learned, so says the titular diarist, who at one point writes, “pupils are slaves, young leaves, torn from branches and trunks, given up to the merciless gale…” Yet Jakob seems to like this very much. He has come here, having ran from an oppressive father—in more ways than one does this novel seem to have had a major impact on Kafka—is eagerly striving to become “a zero” and aspires to a career in servitude. But there is also something very sinister about the Institute Benjamenta, which promises to be revealed to Jakob as he’s gradually embraced by its staff of two, made a favourite, and ushered into secret chambers where he at one point is instructed to “fondle” a “Wall of Worries.” The intrigue is only partly paid off, yet the finale is nonetheless satisfying.

"You'd laugh like it was the end of the world": Daniil Kharms

If we’re to take his testaments at face value, it would seem that the rather strange Russian writer known as Daniil Kharms was born twice. Actually, make that three times. Mmm… okay, maybe four. He emerged from the womb four months ahead of schedule. His father, very concerned that the child should be born precisely on New Year’s Day, was so enraged with this premature arrival that he pushed the boy back in the womb. When next little Daniil entered the world he was immediately placed in an incubator. Was his eventual emergence from the incubator his final, proper birth? Or was it many years later, when, drawing upon with the English words “charms” and “harms,” the adult Daniil adopted the surname by which we refer to him?

The entire notion of face value is questioned tirelessly throughout the work of Daniil Kharms. A literary artist and fixture of the salons aligned with a number of radical movements, he was a devout terrorist in the battle against causality and common sense. In his writings, not even the sequence of prime numbers is to be taken for granted. By the time you’ve read just a handful of his mostly very short, spare, often cruel and poetic texts, his words have so effectively cleansed the imagination’s palate that each new phrase seems to invent the world one object at a time, giving birth to it piece by piece like some baffled, amnesiac God trying to familiarize Himself with each and every tool in his workshop.

Kharms sought not ambiguity but a certain aesthetic “correctness” that could only be achieved through the destructive mastering of language, along with the consistent insertion of some sort of error to set his proposed truths in stark relief. Nevertheless, certainty is indeed a rare thing in Kharms’ worldview. And he did indeed live in particularly uncertain times. The one thing we do know for sure is that Daniil Kharms –or at least the man born as Daniil Yuvachev– starved to death in the psychiatric ward of a Soviet hospital during the siege of Leningrad having only ever seen his children’s prose published in his lifetime. He was 36. And apparently, he hated children.

Frequently, if quite misleadingly, linked to the Absurdists and their ilk, Kharms is very much the sort of writer I should have discovered in my teens, when my appetite for forthright nonsense and heroic madness was probably at its all-time peak. Fortunately, coming to it now, Kharms’ work strikes me as possessing a richness that would have likely gone underappreciated by my younger self. In any case I’m only now aware of him thanks to the recent publication of Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook/Duckworth, $35), a superb introduction to Kharms’ work edited and translated by Matvei Yankelevich.

Chains of destruction proliferate. In ‘Events’ a man dies from gluttony, another from bad news, a woman perishes after falling from a cupboard, children drown in a pond, an old woman takes to drinking and wanders the highways. “All good people,” Kharms laments, “But they don’t know how to hold their ground.” In another piece old women tumble from windows one after the other, until the author tires of witness them. In ‘Lynch Law’ our collective desire for blood is coolly surveyed. In other pieces people disappear into woods or even one body part at a time. Reading these works as having been written in defiance of Stalinist purges is tempting, interesting in its own right, but also limiting. Kharms’ imaginings are too wild and resonant to be contained purely within their political context.

The darkly compelling, very funny, and altogether remarkable story ‘The Old Woman,’ one of the only pieces in Today I Wrote Nothing that exceeds a few pages in length, conveys a strong sense of the diverse forms of dream logic Kharms employs. An old woman –a archetype always to be feared in Kharms– enters the house of the protagonist and dies, or rather seems to die, upsetting his plans to write, to pursue a budding romance, to simply relax in his home. He fears that her death, thought owing nothing to any action of his, will be blamed on him, perhaps because he loathes her so. In this and other works, Kharms shares something with Kafka in his chilling distribution of guilt.

Kafka, and even more so Gogol –who he proudly points to as a major influence– are perhaps the writers most readily comparable to Kharms. Though, in terms of his troubling equations of cause and effect, of things appearing and disappearing, of things living and dying –see ‘Father and Daughter’ for a haunting example– one could argue he outdoes both of them. He reveals both the humour and the wonder in things that fail to fully materialize, in events that disrupt order only to pass by and be shrugged off. There is always this fear of proceeding, of ambition itself –the world is so dangerous, after all. It’s a terrifying perspective that feels more real the more it screws with our agreed upon reality. It’s like what Kharms himself promises at the end of one of the pieces included here: “You’d laugh like it was the end of the world.”