Fungible Convictions

Robin D. G. Kelley’s new book Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original is just plain awesome.

The first jazz album I ever bought—I would have been sixteen or so—was Thelonious Himself, a late-career solo album Monk recorded after a more than a decade of low-wage gigs, stolen compositions, and magazine writers’ lazy caricatures.

Kelley, to whom I just wrote a blathering email because I’m so in awe of his work here, writes a new, accurate narrative, using his prodigious skills as musicologist and music describer, as well as his Herculean scholarshipping to fully cover Monk’s life. (The appendix features 3,027 endnotes.)

I’ll quote one paragraph from the book because it’s the one that got me out of bed to email Kelley and write this post. I quote it because, as a non-musicologist, it’s the single best description of Monk’s musical style I’ve ever read (and granted, this is just page 141; there’s 310 pages, plus acknowledgments, to go; it could get even better):

All the songs on the date [a Blue Note recording session in 1948], particularly Monk’s musical dialogues with [vibraphonist] Milton Jackson, exemplify Monk’s characteristic parallel voices, collective improvisations, and layering of melodic lines and countermelodies. In these and other recordings, he invents countermelodies, incorporates arpeggios (outlining chords in single notes, often emphasizing the most dissonant tonalities), and plays many different “runs” down the piano—particularly runs built on whole-tone scales. Monk, in other words, conceived of the piano as an orchestral instrument. He thought in multiple lines—two, three, even four—an played independent rhythmic lines with his left and right hands. It was a key to Monk as a composer, improviser, and arranger—three components of making music that he treated as inseparable. For Monk, the composition was not just the melody but the entire performance. He had little interest in “blowing sessions.” Even when musicians were improvising together, he expected a level of orchestration that would sustain the essential elements of the piece.

I tried KGB for the first time tonight, and it looks like the whole thing is automated using a semantic language program (similar to how Ask.com worked).

Here in Boston there’s an commercial running where an auto dealer will pay the first year of a lease if the temperature at Logan Airport reaches 96 degrees this Labor Day. I wanted to see what the chances of that happening are, so I texted KGB “What’s the hottest Labor Day on record at Boston’s Logan Airport?” KGB’s reply was, “The highest temperature ever recorded in Boston, MA was 107 degrees Fahrenheit on Aug 2 1975.”

So KGB ignored two key parts of the question that a human would see—that I’m asking specifically about Logan Airport and specifically about Labor Day—leaving me to think a computer is doing the answering, at least initially. (There’s a third part, “on record,” that’s more or less redundant.)

When I replied that they didn’t answer the question, they followed up with an acknowledgment that they couldn’t find the answer and they were issuing me a credit for the $0.99 charge per answer. It’s a little disappointing overall, because there is an answer—KGB staff would simply have to click 122 times (the first official Labor Day in Boston was in 1887) through a page like this one at Weather Undergound. KGB just wasn’t interested in spending the time it takes to look it up.

I went ahead and did it. The answer to “What’s the hottest Labor Day on record at Boston’s Logan Airport?” is 94 degrees in 1928*. So if you’re thinking of leasing a car with Pride Motors of Lynn, Massachusetts, don’t do it just because you think you might get a year free.

* Temperature records at Logan go back to 1920, and the airport itself opened in 1923, making ’23 the latest possible year applicable to the question.

Reading Comics by Douglas Wolk

Pitched as a primer on comics but one that doesn’t follow through, Reading Comics suffers from the same insularity-of-subject that the author himself identifies as a problem in the comics world. While it offers a decent jumping-off point for a newbie who wants to know more about what’s good to read, only about a third of the book is dedicated to the meaning and history of comics. The rest is a compilation of Wolk’s essays on specific authors, series, and books, which means someone who expected a thorough background on how one might read different comics is left adrift, most of all because the majority of Reading Comics–despite the aims stated in the introduction–can be appreciated only by those familiar with the publications being referenced. Wolk and his publisher go to great lengths to secure reprint rights for many, many individual cells or pages of comics, but ultimately, out of context, these reproductions are only meaningful to those who have read the references works in full themselves.

So basically: use Reading Comics to select a handful of comics you would read yourself but only dive into the full book after having an idea of what Wolk is writing about.

I’m going to be the jerk who doesn’t jump on the Heath Ledger bandwagon.

There’s a simple reason: for a movie touted as the one that gets contemporary comics’ depth, the Joker is a flat character. He is a nihilist. He’s a terrorist without an ideology.

Story-wise, it’s a decent conceit. How does Batman defeat, or at least outsmart, an enemy for whom chaos is an end in itself? But for an character, this nihilism flattened the Joker.

It even made his repeated attempts to tell the story of abuse at his father’s hand a throwaway, as if there was a conversation during the writing of the script where someone said, “The audience is going to want to know why the Joker is the way he is, why he likes knives, etcetera. We need to add some backstory, maybe just a line to head off that critique.” [Edit: My friend Jason, far more attentive to detail and better versed in comics than I, points out that the Joker provides multiple biographies, none of which would be considered true. So by definition it can't be a throwaway. My apologies.]

The late Ledger is getting rave reviews for his performance, but it doesn’t nearly approach the menace of a character with actual motives, with weaknesses to exploit, with obsessions beyond blowing things up. The Joker is a whack job. A petit Goebbels. He’s an entertaining villain, yes, and he’s fun to watch as the bad guy, but he’s too pure a villain. This isn’t what we’ve come to expect anymore in this genre—comics characters were invented when people still believed in unadulterated evil, but we’re past that, we live in a time when the phrase “the axis of evil” sounds pedantic.

The simple way to put it: the Joker is no Hannibal Lecter. He’s not a character as much as a plot device.

…must have been psychologically exhausting. Kudos, then, to VQR copyeditor David Caligiuri. It’s not that the text presented unusual challenges—there were no side-by-side poetry translations, no essays about Finnish bodies of water—but that the Winter 2007 VQR, section for section, was one of the most intense periodicals I’ve ever read.

I’ve had my copy since Christmastime, but the image of a Nigerian burned by the oilfield flame behind him, well, it was intimidating. I finally sucked it up today and read the issue. I can’t imagine being Caligiuri and not having the luxury of skimming or altogether skipping passages that got to be too much.

The issue’s feature was Oil in Africa. It opened with four essays—two on the Nigerian Delta, one on new-to-oil Equatorial Guinea, and the last on Chad. By the end of the first, your own anger and pity is laid bare. By the end of the Chad piece, you’re ready to set fire to every drop of oil in the world, if even that were an option.

Then—THEN!—you’re launched into David J. Morris’s exemplary essay on Marines in Iraq (full-text available on the VQR site). While it ends with a rehashing of the obsessions of reporting on war, the intimacy Morris communicates, the images of Ramadi he is able to evoke, make you almost heartsick.

So I am in awe of copyeditor Caligiuri for having to read three hundred pages of passages like this:

Sometime in the early morning of April 17, 2006, local al Qaeda-affiliated insurgents attacked it in a style that had never been seen before in Iraq but that clearly harkened back to the 1983 Hezbollah attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut—an assault that had precipitated the US withdrawal from Lebanon and was later cited by Osama bin Laden as one of the primary examples of American impotence. This assault began when a yellow dump truck filled with an estimated 1,000 pounds of plastic explosives crashed into the earthen barrier surrounding the Marine position and detonated. Dozens of explosives-laden suicide vehicles had been staged along the highway, waiting for the inevitable American reaction forces that would be dispatched to reinforce the post. The force of the blast at OP VA was so great that everyone who heard the explosion assumed that all the men who were there had been killed instantly. I was told by several marines who were in western Ramadi at the time, “There was no way anyone could have survived that blast.” They inevitably paused for dramatic effect, “No fucking way.”

In quick order, teams of insurgents with RPGs and machine guns moved on the American post, engulfing the building in a hail of fire. For a period of time that no one can pinpoint exactly—time becomes a staggeringly malleable commodity in combat—there was no return fire, and the absence of any radio traffic from the marines there led many to conclude that the position had been lost. What no one in authority knew at the time was that almost every man at OP VA had been knocked unconscious by the raw concussive force of the dump truck explosion. Survivors spoke later of waking up to a desolate, last-man-on-Earth feeling that gripped them as they looked around and saw dozens of their comrades lying immobile and presumably dead. Many veterans of the battle whom I spoke with claim to have no memory of the blast whatever and simply recall waking up to the gut-clenching whoosh! sound of RPGs impacting into the sides of the building. Visibility inside the OP was down to two feet. Most of the men made their way around by touch.

One by one, the marines at OP VA stirred from their involuntary slumbers and took up positions around the building. The outgoing fire, which had at first been a goose egg, then a trickle, within an hour had turned into a hailstorm, and it wasn’t long before the marines had suppressed the various teams of insurgents who had besieged the compound.

As the battle turned, Marine noncoms began taking a head count, trying to get a sense of the casualties they were looking at, and were flabbergasted to discover that no one had been killed or seriously wounded. It was beyond miraculous. The barrier system, created with an ample stand-off range, had saved them. Like most firefights in Iraq, the battle for OP VA ended with an ever-increasing volume of fire emerging from the American position followed by the insurgents fading back to their urban hideouts. In terms of ground held, nothing had changed in Ramadi.

Still, no one who was there and who repeated the story of the attack had outlived the mystery of his own survival or found a way to express his dark fascination, bordering on nostalgia for it. Each acknowledged the sheer horror of it and the fact that had the attack enjoyed even slightly better luck or a few more elements in its favor, it would have proven disastrous to the marines. At times in the retelling, the story seemed to possess these men and they struggled with the impossibility of conveying the intensity of the experience to others who had not been there. It was, as with so many things in Iraq, lost to the vapors and the shadows beyond human knowledge and yet inescapably central to the experience itself.

Author Mohsin Hamid has written an extraordinary story, “Focus on the Fundamentals,” that leads off the fall issue of the Paris Review. The story’s broad scope and intimate voice—and its tackling of themes related to immigration, assimilation, and 9/11—not only got me to add Hamid’s upcoming novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist to my wishlist but also convinced me, after some time of resisting, to consider the Paris Review the best literary magazine around.

Others would make the same case, certainly. It’s like saying the New Yorker publishes good profiles or that bears crap in the woods. I had wanted to avoid, though, opening the door to pharisaism or self-serving praise of insiders to the detriment of new or different talent.

But now that I’ve been doing some fiction editing, I’ve started to take measurable editorial success more seriously. But then, what in the very small, very squishy literary field is measurable? To what should an editor or a literary magazine staff in general aspire, particularly in considering the health of the field as a whole?

Here are the measurable attributes, then, as I’ve come to see them. Note that they exclude traditional but misleading descriptors of magazine success, such as circulation or geographic base:

• Age (<5/>5/>15): The years a publication has been publishing regularly.
• Independence (no/partial/full): Is the publication independent? What percentage of its operating costs are paid directly by subscribers? By advertisers? By donors? By how many different donors? By a single patron, such as the university on whose campus the publication operates? This is the hardest to measure but can be done with some research skills.
• Compensation (yes/no): does the publication pay its authors and staff? Find out by reading submission guidelines and analyzing the masthead. Do staff members work elsewhere (almost always yes).
• Timeliness (yes/no): The flexibility or anticipatory talents of a publication’s editors, including the ability to solicit work appropriate to a particular event, anniversary, etc. Does each issue feature something related to the season or month in which it was published?
• Nurturing (yes/partial/no): The prioritizing and active promotion of the literary field through readings, festivals, workshops, scholarships, and outreach.

In finding measurable attributes, I’ve identified four levels of literary magazine success that can be fairly evenly applied across geography, genre, and even size. They should be useful to readers, writers, editors, and donors alike when deciding whom to support or evaluating the growing or waning influence of a publication.

The four levels, from least to most successful:

1. Vanity
2. Immature
3. Established
4. Institution

1. Vanity

A vanity publication may feature two kinds of vanity—and often features both: an editor who is the publication and/or, more commonly, a mission that in effect reads, “We started this magazine because we thought everything else sucked.”

• Age: <5 years old.
• Independence: No. Has 1-5 sponsors, who are often also editors, but no subscribers.
• Compensation: No. Does not compensate its writers.
• Timeliness: No. Irregular publishing schedule makes timeliness difficult.
• Nurturing: No. Does not have the ability to nurture their mission or field outside of their publication.

2. Immature

Immature publications are not necessarily bad publications. They print the bulk of literary writing, if not by totally circulation then by manuscript pages. They are college student literary magazines, most online-only magazines, a large number of niche publications, and even a handful of magazines published by well-respected personalities. A respected example would be the new magazine A Public Space. While edited by a former Paris Review editor and featuring very high-end writing, it still struggles with the business side of magazine publishing, such as when it ran into subscriber fulfillment problems with its second issue. In the immature category would also be a publication like N+1, which publishes excellent political and creative writing from established authors but which recently—and kudos to them for being able to laugh at themselves—lost $3,000 cash to a thief at a fundraiser.

• Age: <5 years old or still/regularly have fulfillment problems.
• Independence: No. Still depend greatly on single-copy sales, rather than subscriber sales. May have a few benefactors.
• Compensation: No. Do not compensate their writers but may hold fee-funded contests. Are volunteer run.
• Timeliness: No. Are usually inflexible, but better run publications can plan ahead well and solicit appropriate pieces.
• Nurturing: No. Consider it an important part of their mission to participate in literary field events but do not yet have the resources (especially time) to manage something themselves.

3. Established

Established publications, such as Tin House, the Missouri Review, the Gettysburg Review, Conjunctions, and McSweeney’s, are where the average reader is most likely to find new, good writing; where the average writer is to find the most competition; and where the average editor and donor are to find the most gratification.

• Age: >5 years old.
• Independence: Partial. Large subscriber base, often a board of trustees, staff member dedicated to fundraising. Breakeven budgets and university sponsorship is common; both make for little peace of mind.
• Compensation: Yes. Compensates writers but may still be all-volunteer run.
• Timeliness: Yes. Tradition of regular publishing cycles allows for advance planning. Strong, long-term relationships with individual writers allows for timely solicitation of needed pieces.
• Nurturing: Partial. Can and does hold readings and release parties in home city and region. Staff runs workshops at parent institutions, with the editor-in-chief often holding a full-time faculty position. No money, however, for festivals or scholarships, unless, in the latter case, a donor provides specific funds.

4. Institution

Institutional publications are very few in the literary field. Granta, the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, the Paris Review . . . are there many others? These are the kinds of publications that, were they to stop publishing tomorrow, would leave a distinct gap in the way the literary world understands itself. Were Ploughshares to move from Boston to Washington, Boston would feel a small twinge of pain; when the Atlantic announced just that, Boston felt punched in the gut, losing an institution with which it had shared so much history.

• Age: >15 years old.
• Independence: Full. Very large subscriber base; a board of active, devoted trustees; full-time professional staff; diverse pool of donors. Financially independent.
• Compensation: Yes. Compensates writers well. Staff compensation rates vary but exists.
• Timeliness: Yes. Planning happens months, sometimes a year or more, in advance. Highly professionalized staff means quick adjustments to events and fast turnaround of everything except fiction submissions, which number in the thousands.
• Nurturing: Yes. Is the beacon to which the literary world looks for worldwide sustenance. Especially with festivals, institutional sponsorship allows people from around the world to share in common literary values. Size sometimes gets in the way of more personal ventures, but institution-publication events are affirmations of the literary life and of the institution itself.

I call these “rankings,” but really they are steps, rather like how athletes play their sport in high school, in college, and professionally, with only a small percentage making it from one level to another. For the here-and-now, it’s useful to know which publication falls where. But let no one forget that there’s another George Plimpton out there somewhere, just waiting to turn his “vanity” publication into the next Paris Review.

On the heels of the new issue of the Paris Review comes the summer reading edition of the country’s best-designed (for reading) literary journal, Tin House.

This edition features fiction from Stephen King and Antonya Nelson, poetry by Ben Doyle and Grace Paley, interviews with Roddy Doyle and Will Self, and culinary-literary thoughts and advice from the likes of Iowa’s Lan Samantha Chang.

When I say best-designed for reading, I mean it. Journals like AGNI, as good as they are, feel good to be done with. Not Tin House. The last word brings disappointment. It’s the only journal I leaf back through like certain people re-view fashion magazines.

Meanwhile, don’t miss the June/July music issue of the Believer. Because if you do, you’ll never know the true history of the Numa Numa Song.

[Tin House]
[Paris Review]
[The Believer]

Another great issue of The Paris Review is out. Worth the read just for Christopher Stewart’s interview with the seventy-three-year-old Serbian assassin who, in 1979, if it weren’t for his partner chickening out, would have been the first person to use a commercial jet as a missile in a terrorist act. (He hijacked the plane in Chicago in order to fly it to Belgrade and destroy the Communist headquarters there. But it was his partner who could tell from the air which building was HQ. He gave up, but only after refueling in New York and taking off towards Europe.)

Director Richard Linklater’s trippy adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s story “A Scanner Darkly” debuted Friday, after many delays, many doubts about the animation-from-live-action process, and many pessimistic articles about both. Critics claimed Dick’s near-future story of addiction and duplicity (both personal and corporate) couldn’t even be rendered on film.

Fortunately, the director, his crew, and his cast—Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder, Woody Harrelson—haven’t reason to worry. They’ve produced an amazing product, the first narratively successful reimagining of the medium since Jurassic Park introduced the public at large to CGI.

Much film technology has changed in the last two decades. But little has changed in how directors using that technology tell their stories in pictures. Shots from The Matrix were hailed as technological achievements, and they were—yet, narratively, they contributed little, nothing more than eye-candy. Despite the power of computer-aided filmmaking, since that technology’s introduction, visual storytelling still hasn’t been revolutionized, neither with the immediate impact of Citizen Kane nor with the slowly blossoming influence of John Ford’s The Searchers. In fact, cinematographic advancement in the last twenty years has largely come in the form of reaction to the power of computers: handheld cameras gave Saving Private Ryan its terrifying presence, and a camera strapped to Sean Gullette captured his character Max’s instability in the film Pi.

Linklater, whose previous credits include Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, and The School of Rock, has provided in A Scanner Darkly our contemporary visual-narrative breakthrough. And he did it with an old—but previously too-overwhelming-to-accomplish—trick: rotoscoping.

Rotoscoping, a “tracing” process Linklater used to animate his actors, allows filmmakers to capture, in motion, a level of physical detail not quite available to animators otherwise. Even stick figures can take on an astonishing level of motion-naturalism, like in this rotoscoping of a soccer player:

Now see what rotoscoping can do in a feature film like A Scanner Darkly:

Rotoscoping isn’t new. Betty Boop, Snow White, and Yellow Submarine used versions of it. Rotoscoping doesn’t even have its conceptual roots in movies—photographers, before and even after the French invented color film, would paint black-and-white photographs by hand.

But the scale and centrality of rotoscoping in A Scanner Darkly is unprecedented—and it’s utterly essential to the story. An example: the Dick short story tells of “scramble suits” worn by the police that display sections (hair, half a face, a chest) of a million different people to disguise officers’ identities (you can see a scramble suit in the trailer above). Theoretically this could have been accomplished with CGI—but it never could have captured the drug-induced fissure in visual perception as Linklater’s rotoscoped suits do. But, moreover, the animation of real actors, objects, and backgrounds gets a viewer to question what it is really real and what is rotoscoped. It’s subtle. It’s frustrating as a viewer. And it communicates perfectly the characters’ states of mind.

Much is made in film literature of contemporaries from different media borrowing from one another. European surrealist painters, for example, traded much with their surrealist friends in film, resulting in classics like L’Age d’Or with Salvador Dali. Yet what is more significant is how filmmakers will use old artistic solutions to address new problems. Linklater has a relationship with the Cubists of a century ago. The filmmaking problem for A Scanner Darkly: How does one film a science-fiction story that asks you to doubt reality, not in a whole-hog Matrix way but in a nagging, sometimes-certain, sometimes bewildered way, the way associated with drug addiction? How does one capture the feeling of not knowing whether you’re in too deep or not deep enough? It’s a description of the problems faced by Cubists, which they solved much the same way as Linklater. They all succeeded in using a two-dimensional medium not to mimic the three-dimensional world but to layer sets of three-dimensional worlds, even some that don’t go well together at all.

It’s too early to say if the rotoscoping of A Scanner Darkly will find a home in other films; few screenplays would be well suited. However, Linklater’s movie has accomplished what a hundred cool movies from The Matrix to The Incredibles weren’t able to: using new technology to tell stories in a brand new way.

Terribly sorry for not posting over the last two weeks. There have been a lot of changes offline—accepting a new job, wrapping up the old job, the good news of having my girlfriend back in town for the summer, the bad news of dealing with what I guess are unbelievably bad spring allergies.

I was able last week, though, to get a look at a few pieces in the latest Tin House. And I’m really upset about one of them, “Srebrenica” by Edmundo Paz-Soldan.

In the story, a fiction piece, Paz-Soldan describes a lonely Kansan who has volunteered to exhume mass graves at Srebrenica. She, the Kansan, empathizes with the victims’ families, experiences disgust, and finds comfort in sleeping with another woman working on the exhumation. To be frank, it’s not much of a story; the familiarity of its plot and its emotional simplicity make it look like a workshop first draft, though it comes from a distinguished writer. The story is dedicated to the late Elizabeth Neuffer, the finest war correspondent the Boston Globe ever had, but Paz-Soldan has hardly burnished Neuffer’s memory with a story so short on insight.

It is awkward to write in the voice of a second culture viewing a third culture, as Paz-Soldan does—and in translation, at that. And it’s just as awkward, in my case, to feel indignation on behalf of another culture, as I did while reading “Srebrenica.” My connections to the Balkans are deep, but they come by choice, not birth. So I don’t know if my disappointment in “Srebrenica” is more valid because I’m not a Serb, or less valid for the same reason, for being an outsider. My disappointment has its source in the author’s apparent disregard of—or inability to understand—the depth of Serbian and Albanian culture and how that depth relates—and doesn’t relate—to modern war crimes and the atrocity at Srebrenica, where in 1995 state forces systematically gathered thousands of Mulsim men and boys and murdered them.

Paz-Soldan buys into the unhelpful notion of “ancestral hatreds”:

I wanted to talk to the girls about Marcos, but I was left no choice but to keep reading Balkan Ghosts, the book I had started on the plane and that was helping me to comprehend the ancestral hatreds of the region.

It’s very believable that a character new to the Balkans would read Balkan Ghosts, a popular but poor introduction to the former Yugoslavia. But Paz-Soldan makes no indication that he’s highlighting his character’s naivete. The author makes himself look terribly underinformed. There’s no hint in the story that he has internalized the good introductions to the Balkans, books like the famed Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric or almost anything by Ismail Kadare (ironic, because Kadare has a story in this same issue of Tin House).

Anyone who takes the Balkans seriously—in its geographic, historical, religious, or artistic forms—knows that the “ancestral hatreds” thing is a lazy explanation. The historic Serbian, Albanian, Macedonian, Jewish, Greek, and Turkish populations of the southern Balkans—they each have long memories. But their memories largely concern themselves, that is, stories about themselves. Memories of heroes and martyrs are passed down. Enemies are interchangeable—for Serbs, for example, sometimes enemies are Muslims, sometimes they’re Communists, and sometimes they’re simply each other.

When conflict breaks out in the Balkans, enemies are almost always enemies of convenience or victims of circumstance. Or, really, victims of a group’s reaction to its own weakness and fear. When war broke out in 1993 over the partition of Bosnia, it wasn’t because Croats, Bosniaks, and Serbs suddenly remembered they were supposed to hate each other. War happened because national leaders were afraid of losing their priviledge as Yugoslavia dramatically changed. To maintain their power at all costs, they impoverished certain populations, shifted others, and made it generally impossible not to have differences with those who were different from you. The lowest example was Slobodan Milosevic’s calculated efforts to drive Muslim populations into sensitive places like Kosovo, the essential territory in the Serbian narrative, in order to further agitate his own citizens for prolonged war.

In short, the hatreds were real, the atrocities were real, with real victims and real individual guilt, but repeated conflicts in the Balkans are indicative of political patterns, not cultural ones. Thus, Paz-Soldan’s story perpetuates a common but unreal version of events.

The irony, as noted previously, is that Tin House also published a mind-blowing story called “Hagia Sophia, a Wall Painting” by a Nobel short-lister, the Albanian Ismail Kadare. It’s terribly unfair to compare the under-40 Paz-Soldan to the venerable Kadare. But, boy, if you want a story about the nature of the Balkans, starting where all Balkan histories start—with the fall of Constantinople—you have to read “Hagia Sophia.” Kadare has perfected the character of the divine-minded but practical artist in the employ of a king, emperor, pharoah, etc., and “Hagia Sophia” features the same, namely, an architect ordered by the conquering Ottoman Sultan to convert the Hagia Sophia from church to mosque. Kadare’s story is a vivid, layered, and moving imagining. The coexistence of reverence and profanity, the love of paradox, and the grand history told in very fictional, very personal terms—of all it is very Kadare, and very Balkan.

Anyway, enough of that. Pick up the new Tin House and judge for yourself.