Context

We asked editors at various publishing houses to write about forthcoming novels that are of special interest to them.

Cortazar wrote Final Exam in 1950. Until now, it has never been translated into English. Surprising and wonderful, it’s a masterpiece. What’s been challenging (and oftentimes exhausting) about the editing is the book’s experimental nature. The poet and critic Stephen Kessler, who translated Cortazar’s poetry for City Lights, said he’d only take on the project with the assistance of another translator. Luckily, the well-known translator Alfred MacAdam had just been flipping through the Spanish edition of Final Exam the very day he recieved my letter and he called to say: sure, he’d take on the project.

Typographically, the book reaches a zenith of quirkiness. Its peculiarities made it nearly impossible to judge what the text would look like in proof while I was editing the manuscript: paragraphs are set throughout the book with wildly different indentations: spacings occur between words, all varied; snippets of dialogue weave in and out of the narrative, here on the left-hand side of the page, and there on the right-hand side. Stylistically, the book jumps around, mocking and imitating the profundities of intellectual discourse, journalism, film noir, slapstick—the text is so lively, it can barely be contained on a page.

Cortazar concocted this book to be a portent of events to come: the political collapse of the Peron government and the ensuing anarchy. Embroiled in all these prophetic events of Final Exam are five friends—five rootless bohemians—who wander around the city somewhat oblivious to the chaos surrounding them. The novel is hilarious, and at the same time, terribly sad. What’s exciting about this undiscovered Cortazar work is that it truly stands up with his other great books—and lucky for New Directions, and for me as editor, no one had ever really honed in on the fact that it had never been translated into English. I’ve developed a great, bemused love for Final Exam, and I’ll be interested to see the response when it’s published in February. I think it will bewilder many people.

Andrei Platonov, a collection of whose stories entitled The Fierce and Beautiful World we will be reprinting this spring, is a writer quite unlike any other that I know of. How to describe that difference, so extreme that the comparisons (perhaps a little bit like the Beckett of The Lost Ones, or the Stein of Three Lives) by which one points a contrast simply will not help? You could say, generally, that Platonov is a writer for whom the rules of perspective, as they are variously established in fiction, simply don’t figure. Place and person, things and thoughts, heart and head, here and there, now and then, happiness and sadness, violence and tenderness—all these commonly fixed qualities and quantities constantly change places with each other. And yet they do so without ever interrupting the simple progress and plain description of unfolding events.

"Dzahn," the novella that opens the collection and my favorite piece in it, is the story of a young non-Russian economist who is sent back from Moscow to help his people, a nomadic group "made up of different nationalities . . . living in extreme poverty." They are abjectly poor, deprived not only of sustenance, but also of speech, memory, and even the will to live. They are a kind of inhuman essence of humanity, and what is striking is that in their brutalization, their indifference to other and self, they have grown almost ethereal. But one way or another, the hero discovers, they are not to be reformed. If humanity endures, it would seem, it must be as something entirely strange to itself.

Not really a comforting thought. Such a story must of course be seen in part as a response to the terrors of a revolution under whose aegis Platonov spent his entire life as a writer (and to which, it should be said, he was in his own way sympathetic, even if the revolution rejected him: unpublished in his later years, he ended up a janitor). Platonov certainly is a writer caught between worlds, "one dead, the other waiting to be born"—an aspect of his work that also emerges in its language, weirdly compounded of old popular adage and the circumlocutions of Soviet newspeak. He finds, though, in that particular predicament a perennial occasion, not only terrifying but also beautiful.

This book was given to me as a boy, when the USSR was still going strong, by an American spy: "one of the great works of the twentieth century," he inscribed it. I see no reason to stop there.