March 23, 2010

Monster task

I am currently dealing with a literary nightmare of epic proportions. The fact that I have to translate it only makes it about one hundred times worse.
Carol Topolski is a psychoanalyst who, I assume, woke up one morning and decided to be a writer. So she came up with a plot that's sick and disgusting in every conceivable way, not to mention far from being well written. Brendan and Sherilyn are madly in love, their visceral attraction quickly transforms into a form of interdependence and they are so wrapped up in each other, that no one and nothing can come between them. Not even little Samantha, their daughter. After the first few pages, we know for sure that Samantha is dead, because her parents locked her in a cage and left her there. That's what Monster Love is all about. Definitely, story-telling is not Topolski's thing, so for the remaining two hundred and something pages, she experiments with all sorts of different voices, all bringing new perspectives upon the young couple. The way I'm writing about this book might actually make it sound ok, experimental, brave, challenging and thought-provoking when in fact it is as lame as can be and there's about as much experiment in it as there was in the rule of the three units back in the 17th century.
Now everyone who knows me - and I don't mean those people who know me really well, it doesn't take years to figure this out, knows I'm not exactly a child-person. I tolerate them because society forces me to be in the same room with a child from time to time, but that's as far as I'll go. Still, locking a baby in a cage and leaving it there to die is where I draw the line.
I want literature to invent worlds, to make me believe in them, to allow me to lose myself in fiction. And I don't even expect a fairy-tale every time. I can deal with really hardcore-mind-blowing-heartbreaking-devastating writings, as long as they're well written, imaginative and powerful. I'll also enjoy writings inspired from true stories and I have nothing against a journalistic approach, however I do have one demand: if you're going to tell me a story about something I read in the newspapers just the other day, you'd better make it a f***ing great story. If you're not going to show me that reality in a brand new light, from a perspective I wouldn't have normally thought of, I'll go back to reading the news. And then back to real literature.
And whatever you do, don't ever say such things in an interview:
Well, I'm not at all mystical when it comes to writing, but having spent much of my professional life rummaging around in the unconscious, I have to say the story - or a character at least - popped up quite unbidden one day when I was writing something else. I can only think she emerged from the dark side of my mind. I was experimenting with a first person voice in another story and suddenly found myself writing two sides of A4 in the primitive voice of a little girl whop appeared to be in a cage.
If there's a heaven for translators, there'd better be a reward waiting for me.

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