Recently, the LA Review of Books set tongues wagging when it published an essay with the beguiling – but unpronounceable – title ‘Against High Brodernism.’ Using the Hungarian maximalist László Krasznahorkai’s new novel Herscht 07769 as a time peg, the writer Federico Perelmuter awkwardly portmanteaued the words bro and modernism to condemn all the bloviating men who currently dominate the world of translated literature for their obsession with a given canon of so-called difficult texts by men: Bernhard, Krasznahorkai, Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era(?).
Perelmuter’s piece went viral – or as viral as literary hit pieces can go in the post-peak-Twitter era. His case against brodernism goes as follows: the reception of translated literature is dominated by overblown, fetishistic praise, mostly by male critics, for how “difficult” it is, which inhibits any real analysis of its historical and contextual nature while also being very annoying.
“To read – and announce oneself as having read – literature in translation is to be tasteful and intelligent, a latter-day cosmopolitan in an age of blighted provincialism,” Perelmuter writes, determined to get credit for reviewing a 512-page book from Hungary while sneering at anyone else who tries. Unfortunately for Perelmuter, there was no media circus around Herscht 07769, much less a fetishistic one, so he gets no credit here for being not like other girls.
Indeed, if Perelmuter’s piece is interesting for anything, it is as a relic of a certain kind of literary criticism designed to go viral. It checks off all of the boxes: “type of guy likes this” as cultural criticism; theorising universal (i.e. American) vibes with no supporting evidence; faux-feminist (but actually super sexist) gender-essentialising between difficult boy things and accessible girl things; generic anti-liberal left politics; easily-screenshotted mic-drop paragraphs; commissioned for clicks not sense; and – above all – obsessed with literature as a cultural signifier rather than an art form.
The piece’s rhetoric also profits from the way social media distorts our impressions of the public – our sense of who has power, what’s in style, and which annoying cultural forms are hegemonic at the moment. Is it really true that fetishistic enthusiasm for difficult translated literature rules the roost? Are Romanian postmodernists overpowered in this economy? The incoherence of Perelmuter’s “brodernist” argument is clear evidence that he is simply shadow-boxing with a vibe on Twitter, a place where the annoying and persistent seem far more influential than they are.
Our culture already offers more than enough excuses not to try difficult literature,
As someone who has hung out in the same online spaces as him, and who has once (sorry!) reviewed a Krasznahorkai book, I suspect I know exactly which four to six Twitter users he’s annoyed at. They are not my cup of tea either. But this is nothing like a dominant movement in anglophone literature, which is almost pathologically committed to producing slim conventional books of emotionally charged internetty realism. Nor is it even hegemonic in the field of translated literature: this year’s International Booker longlist boasted that 11 of its 13 titles were under 250 pages!
If books in translation were riven by a macho-maximalist cult of difficulty, then we would not have seen the likes of Jenny Erpenbeck, Yoko Tawada, Constance Debré, Clarice Lispector, Fleur Jaeggy, and Mieko Kawakami – most of whom write short, interesting, rather accessible books – receive far greater critical and market reception than the brodernists on Perelmuter’s naughty list. That list also includes Michael Lentz’s German über-novel Schattenfroh, due to come out on Deep Vellum later this year. I personally cannot be bothered reading it, and I’m very clearly in the majority there. If Schattenfroh gets even a fraction of the attention that the aforementioned authors do, then I will sew all 1,008 genre-bending pages of Lentz’s novel into a hat and eat it.
Brodernism aside, the question of how we should read and discuss translated literature really is a vital one. It’s one I take seriously as editor of this magazine’s Books section, a space where I and our other contributors – men and women! – regularly comment on books in translation. Some of these books are “difficult”; many are not. Often we give a boost to titles we think are worthy but won’t receive – or haven’t received –their due attention in the anglosphere: Jan Faktor’s Trottel, Cécile Wajsbrot’s Nevermore, Peter Cornell’s The Ways of Paradise, Salim Barakat’s poetry, the work of Slovakian cult author Balla. On some occasions, we are the only publication to cover these books in English at all.
And they’re not actually all that hard to read: much of their so-called difficulty is self-fulfilling, so we present them unpretentiously, at times a little bemusedly. We chose not to review Aber’s Good Girl – a work of stylistically and politically familiar autofiction – because we rightly judged that it would go absolute gangbusters in the US. With limited space, and precious access to a general readership’s eyeballs, you do what you can to point out interesting things.
It is indeed a pity that translated literature is considered a boutique good in English; it is also a pity that today’s mainstream anglophone writing is so unadventurous. For independent venues to cover – and sometimes celebrate the style of – unfamiliar or “difficult” books from abroad seems a natural response to both those phenomena. (It is funny that Perelmuter name-checks David Foster Wallace, considering the fact that performatively hating Wallace without having read him has been a far more influential marker of cultural insiderdom, and for longer, than liking the bloke ever was.)
Perelmuter is right that the English-language reception of translated lit could do with a bit more of a “critical ethos of careful evaluation and contextualisation”. Sadly, his own attempt crumples the moment it needs to model what it prescribes – his reading of Krasznahorkai’s book is comically weak, culminating as it does in an accusation of political “centrism”. (Tellingly, the essay has a correction appended on account of having botched the literary history of the novel’s Thuringian setting.)
What made Perelmuter’s essay go viral was the way it reassured its readers that they need not bother with all those weird dudes’ weird books. But our culture already offers more than enough excuses not to try difficult literature. So let’s let translated books be books. Let’s admit some, but not all, of the hard ones are good. And let’s try approaching the literature of the world with a little more genuine curiosity – we might even, who knows, learn a thing or two.
