LETTERS TO KAFKA, introduction to a life unjustly ignored in Anglophone literature

LETTERS TO KAFKA
CHRISTINE ESTIMA
House of Anansi Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$21.99 paperback, available now

Bookends with Mattea Roach interview with Author Estima.

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A sweeping, tragic romance and feminist adventure about translator and resistance fighter Milena Jesenská’s torrid love affair with Franz Kafka.

In 1919, Milena Jesenská, a clever and spirited twenty-three-year-old, is trapped in an unhappy marriage to literary critic Ernst Pollak. Since Pollak is unable to support the pair in Vienna’s post-war economy, Jesenská must supplement their income by working as a translator. Having previously met her compatriot Franz Kafka in the literary salons of Prague, she writes to him to ask for permission to translate his story The Stoker from German to Czech, becoming Kafka’s first translator. The letter launches an intense and increasingly passionate correspondence. Jesenská is captivated by Kafka’s energy, intensity, and burning ambition to write. Kafka is fascinated by Jesenská’s wit, rebellious spirit, and intelligence.

Jesenská and Kafka meet twice for lovers’ trysts, but can such an intense connection endure beyond a fleeting affair? In her remarkable debut novel, Christine Estima weaves little-known facts and fiction into a rich tapestry, powerfully portraying the struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of wife, lover, and intellectual.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Modeling to a world unwilling to see what principled resistance to authoritarianism looks like, Milena Jesenská could be no more perfect a subject to study in 2025. Christine Estima has done it for us, and presented her findings in an involving, intense novel of Milena's life. The incident igniting her rise to resistance is a simple and practical one: she needs income. Her then-husband can't, in 1919 Vienna, provide for them. Having very recently read Kafka's stories and being moved deeply by them, Milena writes to request permission to translate them into Czech. Her aim is to get income...the result is to become utterly, passionately entwined with Kafka. It was not primarily a physical affair, only two known meetings, but a deep and consuming love.

The story here, however, is Jesenská...the woman, the intellectual, the object of desire for many members of the Vienna Secession. Reading this book of her own words, stitched into the author's gap-filling prose, I was unable to conceive of a good reason this vibrant and impassioned liver of life and lover of justice was so unfamiliar to me. I know the reason...she's a woman, misogyny's polarizing lenses filter those people out...but talk about stupid! Writing Milena Jesenská out of History is a wrong I hope we will see righted more and more. A resister of Nazism, not a Jew but friend to Jews and accomplice to their escape from certain death, person whose life trajectory includes Ravensbrück, is someone to be celebrated loudly and often. Never more than now.

The mind that created cultural touchstones Gregor Samsa and K., that saw Reality in place of consensus reality, said to Milena: "Milena, if a million loved you, I am one of them, and if one loved you, it was me, if no one loved you then know that I am dead. - FK". A spirit that can elicit this deep and passionate love from one whose life is known by him to be quite short is one worth knowing and celebrating.

VIVIAN, #WITMonth biographical novel illuminating a complex woman from many angles

VIVIAN
CHRISTINA HESSELHOLDT (tr. Paul Russell Garrett)
Fitzcarraldo Editions (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In her new novel, Christina Hesselholdt delves into the world of the enigmatic American photographer, Vivian Maier (1926-2009), whose unique photographic body of work only reached the public by chance.

On the surface, Vivian Maier lived a quiet life as a loving, firm and feisty nanny for wealthy families in Chicago and New York. But throughout four decades, she took more than 150,000 photos, mainly with Rolleiflex cameras. The pictures were only discovered in an auction shortly before she died, impoverished and feasibly very lonely. In a time when self-obsession and representation are at an all-time high, Vivian Maier holds a particular fascination. Who was this eccentric person? And why did she not try to make a living from her art?

In VIVIAN, a chorus of voices, including Vivian's own, address these questions. We watch Vivian grow up in a severely dysfunctional family in New York and Champsaur in France, and we follow her as a nanny in Chicago and as a photographer on the streets of these American cities and in rural France. The novel comprises multiple voices: Vivian's, her mother's, one of the children she looked after and her parents. And crucially, the voice of the inquisitive narrator, who pulls the threads together and asks Vivian prying questions.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: There's a chorus in this book, all right, one that talks around Vivian Maier's life...because there are so few real reliable sources on the life of this odd, fragmented woman...because the film about her already plowed the factual field of her life...because she was a pretty ordinary person as well as an extraordinary observer.

All of which adds up to a life that doesn't have enough factual meat but has very interesting story-bones to carry a text treatment that adds to the excellent films that center her wonderful visual legacy. A polyphonic novel can stitch together points of view that can't bear non-fiction's scrutiny while making truthful points about how Vivian became the figure, the outsider icon, the feminist parable that she was so perfectly suited to become.

A woman doing childcare as a career while creating hundreds of thousands of photographs, many iconic now they're public, is proof of women's clear statements that The System&8480; is set up to ignore women's creativity. Her life wasn't just odd, though, because she was brought up oddly; I think her personality as it comes through literally everywhere she is discussed is that of an outsider. It makes one a better observer to feel and to be perpetually outside the herd, away from the hearth, looking in at it with removed detached clarity.

This novel, from structure to execution on a sentence level, reinforces that sense. As I read the story, I realized how much it added to my appreciation of Author Hesselholdt's presentation of Vivian to realize that she researched her subject in a foreign language source pool; wrote her story in Danish (to wide praise); and then I read it in English translation.

It is perfection as an origin story; it has some concomitant infelicities on the gestalt. The multiple PoV structure gets wearing because it demands one exercise memory to connect what that character said quite a reading-while ago. It also, while illuminating Vivian in the light she blocked for different people, makes me wish for fewer shifts and a shorter book. At under two hundred pages, I was sure I'd knock out the read in a day and a half; it took over five years because he aforementioned required concentration wasn't always available for me to give leading to five separate re-starts.

While I ended up a true aficionado of the story I was there because I'm really stubborn. Others might not feel like putting in the effort of resolving polyphony into its complex harmony, in focusing the varying wavelengths of light into a very slightly blurry image. I'd recommend you do, but I know it's a style that won't suit all. If possible read the ebook sample available to check how you vibe with the style.

Authors who take unusual approaches to storytelling are to be praised; it's down to your unique taste if they're to be supported. I'm praising, are you supporting?

THE LINDBERGH NANNY, historical fiction about a case we still talk about 90 years on & HESTER, speculation about Hawthorne's THE SCARLET LETTER

HESTER
LAURIE LICO ALBANESE
St. Martin's Press
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A vivid reimagining of the woman who inspired Hester Prynne, the tragic heroine of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and a journey into the enduring legacy of New England's witchcraft trials.

Who is the real Hester Prynne?

Isobel Gamble is a young seamstress carrying generations of secrets when she sets sail from Scotland in the early 1800s with her husband, Edward. An apothecary who has fallen under the spell of opium, his pile of debts have forced them to flee Edinburgh for a fresh start in the New World. But only days after they've arrived in Salem, Edward abruptly joins a departing ship as a medic—leaving Isobel penniless and alone in a strange country, forced to make her way by any means possible.

When she meets a young Nathaniel Hawthorne, the two are instantly drawn to each other: he is a man haunted by his ancestors, who sent innocent women to the gallows—while she is an unusually gifted needleworker, troubled by her own strange talents. As the weeks pass and Edward's safe return grows increasingly unlikely, Nathaniel and Isobel grow closer and closer. Together, they are a muse and a dark storyteller; the enchanter and the enchanted. But which is which?

In this sensuous and hypnotizing tale, a young immigrant woman grapples with our country's complicated past, and learns that America's ideas of freedom and liberty often fall short of their promise. Interwoven with Isobel and Nathaniel's story is a vivid interrogation of who gets to be a "real" American in the first half of the 19th century, a depiction of the early days of the Underground Railroad in New England, and atmospheric interstitials that capture the long history of "unusual" women being accused of witchcraft. Meticulously researched yet evocatively imagined, Laurie Lico Albanese's Hester is a timeless tale of art, ambition, and desire that examines the roots of female creative power and the men who try to shut it down.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A book about passion elicits passionate responses. Thus The Scarlet Letter from its date of publication to the present. What Author Albanese did was meld a fact of Hawthorne's life...all his novels save this one sprang from known biographical incidents..and said, "...except...? Hmmm" and ran with it.

Thus we have this novel, which I stress so loudly because I've seen a lot of responses to the book that take exception to the author's assumption that Hawthorne was always a writer working from his own biography. I fail to understand this. It's a novel, and novels are fiction. The way they get their lives is someone thinking, "hey, what if..." and running with it. "Oh it's unsourced in anything from the time" well now, our little firebug Hawthorne might've hidden many a secret forever in his purgings, mightn't he? What he didn't want us to know, we do not know. ...that sounds weird but I don't know how to fix it.

Anyway, considering the story on its own merits...I like it okay. I don't love it.

Too much, too much, I thought as Isobel synesthesia came to the fore, then as we whizzed back into the seventeenth century again.... It's just another thing to mark her out as weird, this strange sensory disorder. Her life was eventful and her loves bone-rattlingly deep wasn't enough? When I read novels I want to think about how the life unfolding before me is moving, not how it's making me move between emotional registers. That's when I begin to feel a bit like a footstool, moved here, plopped there, and all in service of someone else's visions and needs.

Yes yes, I know, that is what novelists do. But the ones whose work I treasure do it with less grunting and heaving.

Setting the novel in Salem, and with Hawthorne...well, the parallels to his probable state of guilt and discomfort over the history even then looked on as brutal and his treatment of Isobel aren't challenging to form are they. I wasn't particularly enamoured with the author's take on Hawthorne, finding him a dreary sort of navel-gazing git. I'm not all the way sure that he could've been as quivery as a blancmange and still written the work he did. I could, of course, be wrong. After all, I suspect that Melville's obvious tendresse for Hawthorne was not entirely unreciprocated and I am *loudly*assured* this is unthinkable.

Back to Hester. I wish it was less hectic. I would've enjoyed a more uncluttered interior for the novel to present itself to me; one colored less hectically and decorated less thoroughly with lovely bibelots and literary objet d'art. But the read as it was, distractingly stuffed into a space a bit too small for it, was a deeply interesting and quite soundly reasoned story. The passive little Hawthorne falling for the intensely alive Isobel? Yes, I see it. The quivering awakening of the young people to bodily pleasure? It is ever thus, and so always involving to me. The resolution of the matters that, quite inevitably, come from the aforementioned awakening? Fortuitous! And, as the epilogue-y thing at the end makes Ever. So. Clear, it all came good.

Please don't tie bows and smack 'em on the butts of my stories. I'd like some room to put my own thoughts into the story's likely continuation.

These are the things that kept me from warbling my fool lungs out about this read. Others will, I do not doubt, feel differently. I expect so, in fact, and hope I'll be seeing the author's gorgeous cover art in many a gift pile this Yule.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE LINDBERGH NANNY
MARIAH FREDERICKS
Minotaur Books
$27.99 hardcover, available 15 November 2022

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Mariah Fredericks's The Lindbergh Nanny is powerful, propulsive novel about America’s most notorious kidnapping through the eyes of the woman who found herself at the heart of this deadly crime.

When the most famous toddler in America, Charles Lindbergh, Jr., is kidnapped from his family home in New Jersey in 1932, the case makes international headlines. Already celebrated for his flight across the Atlantic, his father, Charles, Sr., is the country’s golden boy, with his wealthy, lovely wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, by his side. But there’s someone else in their household—Betty Gow, a formerly obscure young woman, now known around the world by another name: the Lindbergh Nanny.

A Scottish immigrant deciphering the rules of her new homeland and its East Coast elite, Betty finds Colonel Lindbergh eccentric and often odd, Mrs. Lindbergh kind yet nervous, and Charlie simply a darling. Far from home and bruised from a love affair gone horribly wrong, Betty finds comfort in caring for the child, and warms to the attentions of handsome sailor Henrik, sometimes known as Red. Then, Charlie disappears.

Suddenly a suspect in the eyes of both the media and the public, Betty must find the truth about what really happened that night, in order to clear her own name—and to find justice for the child she loves.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A lot of ink is still spilled about this dreadful criminal act, ninety years on; it has everything we love in a public spectacle: a pretty woman, a handsome hero, a quiet young girl with big dreams. That these won't survive contact with the ever-increasing celebrity culture that mass media, only recently including newsreels and radio broadcasts, with its invasive tentacles shoving into each and every cranny of the principals' lives, thoughts, actions before, during, and after the events described, is the darkest tinge of tragedy.

As part of this non-fiction novel coming this November, Author Fredericks presents her research in epitome..."this is true, this bit's been changed but is mostly true"...which to my mind is the proper way to handle a researched work of fiction that is based on fact. I do not care for the research-paper lists of sources, citations, and so forth, that some authors provide so as to spike the many, many guns aimed at creators in internet culture. "Appropriation! Inaccuracies and falsehoods!" ::eyeroll:: It's called FICTION, people, CTFD.

My personal axe now ground to my own satisfaction, let me tell you what I enjoyed most about the read:

It's not clear where I'll be living. I'm part of the Lindbergh household, but they have no house of their own yet, which is why they're living with her parents. They've not even been married two years and seem to have spent most of that time in the air.

That's Betty's voice from the beginning of chapter three. She's direct. She's concise. She does not shilly-shally, not ever and not once. I like that in a person, I appreciate that in a character, and I am glad to say that Betty was (despite the media circus that she endured without much in the way of role models to guide her) a delightful companion in her own life as well. (The author speaks of her meeting with A. Scott Berg when he was writing his Lindbergh biography, what transpired during that meeting, and this informed her awareness of how she wants Betty's voice to sound. She nailed it.)

This being a factual story, and the author giving no hint that she intended to pull a fast one at the end, I was deeply pleased to feel invested in the unfolding tale. It's really easy, with a story not exactly underreported, and about which there is quite an extensive trove of writing already. (Ye gawds some of what's been said...!) No, the ending hasn't changed; yes, the guilty party's guilt is evident; but there are so many cockroaches scuttling for cover in any person's existence if an arc-lamp like the one aimed at the Lindberghs is trained on it that there's room for a lot of juicy speculation.

How can you not be impressed when someone takes ninety-year-old facts and makes a solid, well-made story out of them?

But...I hear the Gotcha! Gang clearing their throats...this is a four-star review and you're describing a five-star experience. Well, no thing made by human hands is perfect, is it. I rankle mightily at the author's choice to ascribe a certain suspect's furtive, secretive, and frankly unpleasant suspiciousness as down to that suspect's gayness. Yes indeed, the suspect's actual sexuality was not ever even hinted to be "deviant" in the parlance of the day. In the endnotes, the author says she made this deliberate choice to give the character a "need for privacy that would be instantly understandable to the modern reader."

Uh-huh.

That star-losing choice aside...Yes, I'm impressed. Yes, I'd say go pre-order one. I'm so glad I was able to read it as a DRC because the wait for the library's inevitable copy will be long. Get on it soon.

SUITE FOR BARBARA LODEN, a hybrid literary biography/novel that miraculously transports us

SUITE FOR BARBARA LODEN
NATHALIE LÉGER (tr. Nathalie Lehrer and Cécile Menon)
Dorothy, a publishing project
$16.00 trade paperback, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: “I believe there is a miracle in Wanda,” wrote Marguerite Duras of the only film American actress Barbara Loden ever wrote and directed. “Usually, there is a distance between representation and text, subject and action. Here that distance is completely eradicated.” It is perhaps this “miracle”—the seeming collapse of fiction and fact—that has made Wanda (1970) a cult classic, and a fascination of artists from Isabelle Huppert to Rachel Kushner to Kate Zambreno. For acclaimed French writer Nathalie Léger, the mysteries of Wanda launched an obsessive quest across continents, into archives, and through mining towns of Pennsylvania, all to get closer to the film and its maker. Suite for Barbara Loden is the magnificent result.

Moving contrapuntally between biography and autofiction, film criticism and anecdote, fact and speculation, Suite for Barbara Loden is a stunning meditation on knowledge and self-knowledge, on the surfaces of life and art, and how we come to truth—a kind of truth—not through facts alone but through acts of the imagination.

My Review: As Duras says above, “I believe there is a miracle in Wanda,” writing of the only film American actress Barbara Loden ever created. “Usually, there is a distance between representation and text, subject and action. Here that distance is completely eradicated.”

A film more famous in our time than in the year it was released, Barbara Loden’s sole filmed work as writer and director went from an affront to American feminists—how dare a woman filmmaker represent a woman as a passive pawn in her own life!—to a smash reception at the 31st Venice International Film Festival, where it received Best Foreign Film honors—as the only American entrant accepted that year. Honestly, it might as well have been a foreign film right here in the USA for all the attention it received in the 1970s.

Loden was an actress who was famous if you knew who she was. She was the leggy, semi-clothed blonde bombshell sidekick to sophisticated sketch and improvisational comedian Ernie Kovacs on his critical darling of a revue show. She won a Tony Award in 1964 for playing a thinly disguised take on Marilyn Monroe in an Arthur Miller play. She was a featured actress in several of second husband Elia Kazan’s films (eg, Splendor in the Grass). Her Method acting was learned at the Actors’ Studio while she was a teen-aged dancer at the famed Copacabana nightclub. This was a woman of formidable ability and negligible self-confidence who, paradoxically, married two high-powered men (her first husband was film and television project distributor Larry Joachim, a major player in the early years of television) and left each of them yearning for the strength to control her.

French author Nathalie Léger is introduced to this subject of obsessive interest by a writing assignment: Create a composite entry for Loden and her single outing as a writer/director for inclusion in a film encyclopedia. Léger tells us that she got the instruction from said editor, “No need to put your heart and soul into it.” Sounds to me as though this was not the editor’s first go-round with Mme Léger. That was possibly the most wasted breath the editor had ever used to form speech. “I was trying to be as objective and rigorous as possible. To describe and only to describe, in as few words as possible,” says Léger of beginning her research. Instead, this encyclopedia entry blossoms into a combination personal essay, critical assessment of film, director, and star, and miniature biography of a minor player in the film world with a major talent.

At the very most, I’d expect someone charged with writing an encyclopedia entry to visit a film-school library, see if the subject’s only film was available in some format and give it a watch, at the extravagant end spend the money for an international phone call to an easy-to-locate colleague of Loden’s who was still living at the time. Léger flies to Pennsylvania’s coal country, the setting of the film; contacts film scholars in the USA as well as famous French star of the same era as Loden, Isabelle Huppert; haunts the late Loden’s son, who possesses “twenty-five boxes” of material on his mother and (not unreasonably to me) wants to know what specifically or even generally Léger is looking for; and can’t articulate to any of them precisely what it is she is seeking. I have the sense that, even as this beautiful and intimate mixed portrait of Loden, Wanda, and Léger was going to press, she wouldn’t have been able to articulate precisely what the purpose of her journey was except in terms of its result.

Loden and Léger are each on a road trip towards some sort of epiphany. Loden’s, as Wanda, is going to be fraught with the usual sort of misery and pointless, purposeless suffering that is the lot of the intellectually ungifted when they come unmoored from whatever habits and relationships they’ve tangled themselves into. Léger’s road trip is guided by that savior of the directionless, GPS:

Sky. The ocean floor. The earth’s gravity field. Lines, measurements, a shape, a time. What the experts call the figure of the earth. I don’t want to know any more. I allow myself to be guided; I don’t understand the organized collusion of data transformed into electromagnetic waves that come crashing mathematically into the rental car’s black box to dictate my itinerary. I’ve muted the sound; heading into this unknown country I rely only on the image of the infinite ribbon unspooling on the GPS screen. No obstacles, a marvelous, illusory continuity, the perfect representation of stupidity—what others might call an acceptable representation of reality. “The magic box,” the mechanic had said. I have heard that the GPS is altering our perception of our position in space and the way we travel from place to place. The very notion of an itinerary is problematic nowadays; some people go so far as to believe that everything, including time and emotions, can be localized. It seems to be becoming increasingly difficult to accept that we don’t always know exactly where we are, and by extension it is becoming increasingly difficult to know exactly where we are.

Where in the world is Léger? She’s lost; or she’s not found, anyway, not by the spirit she seeks so assiduously that, instead of knocking out two hundred fifty words or so on a minor player in the film world, she knocks on time’s doors and bangs her shins on the invisible furniture in the dark theaters where Wanda isn’t playing.

It is a very good film, if you’d care to watch its 102 minutes. Cinema vérité isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and while the ample-for-its-day budget of $110,000 is spent so that it shows on camera the seedy underbelly of the American Dream is pretty much intact and uncomfortably familiar. The upholstery is different colors and the TVs have flat screens. All of Wanda’s acting is done by Loden and her man, Michael Higgins; as Mr. Dennis, he’s the latest loser to tow her long behind him. He’s enough of an improvement over the husband she didn’t so much leave as simply drop and forget to pick up that Wanda makes every attempt to stay with him as his petty little control tactics become more and more desperate (throwing a new pair of slacks out the car window because “no slacks when you’re with me,” and “no curlers, they make you look cheap; do you wanna look cheap?”) as his unrevealed criminal plan begins to crack open. But for Wanda this is the big time, this is freedom from the hideous coal-mining burgs of her entire life, from kids she doesn’t care about, from people who know her and despise her. Author Léger relates this barren freedom to her own mother’s life, and does so in a way that makes clear what those 1970s American feminists were testy about: At every turn, these women exist, actually exist, only in relation to the plans and persons of their men.

The bleak truth is that many women in 2016 are in the same boat. Wanda’s cult classic status among the most sophisticated cinephiles does not make the subject matter more comfortable for today’s energetic and ever-more-successful activists to watch. And Léger, by writing a beautiful film critique mixed with a biographical sketch and a patch or two of memoir, has used artful image juxtapositions to create the unsettling but unignorable truth behind all of these stories.