ATBTM makes the grade for Kansan librarian

A shout-out to the librarian at the Johnson County Library in Overland Park, Kansas, who chose All This Belongs to Me as her or his staff pick this month.

The anonymous bibliognost, who goes by the handle "bornm," is apparently a native Czech, as s/he states that s/he actually read the book twice: "Once in my native language Czech to keep up with the contemporary Czech authors and also my native language, and the second time in English to compare the precision and style of the translation."

Inquiring minds would love to know bornm's thoughts on the translation's precision and style, but alas, we are left unsated.

Florida prof first to make ATBTM required reading

I'm proud to announce that Dr. Eva Wampuszyc, of the University of Florida, in Gainesville, has become the first university professor to place All This Belongs to Me on her required reading list! It's for a spring 2010 course titled "Women from the 'Other' Europe: Femininity and Fiction in Central and Eastern Europe."

Looks like a great course, by the way, and I've written Dr. Wampuszyc an e-mail to thank her. The other required books are How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (Slavenka Drakulić), Snow White and Russian Red (Dorota Masłowska), and The Appointment (recent Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller).

Not to mention, Wampuszyc's students will get to watch Daisies, by Věra Chytilová, and Andrzej Wajda's Man of Marble and Man of Iron. Good times! This is the kind of course that I ate up when I was in grad school!

All This Belongs to Me reviewed in TLS!

Here it is — from the most prestigious literary review in the English language, published in the edition of January 8, 2010, on page 21, under the title "What belongs," by Madeline Clements:

Petra Hůlová's first novel, which tells the imaginary life stories of three generations of twentieth-century Mongolian women, caused a sensation when it was first published in the Czech Republic in 2002. The author, then a twenty-three-year-old student of Mongolian Studies, attributed the book's popularity partly to her youth and good looks, but also, more interestingly, to its unusual setting within a Euro-Asian culture, poised between Russia and the East.

The novel's appeal does not lie in Hůlová's provision of colourful snapshots of a remote foreign landscape. Her bleak depictions of life spent on Mongolia's rural steppe in the longed-for capital, Ulan Bator, are far from picturesque. Even the moments when the book briefly lightens are grounded in a gritty realism: the yielding of a love-starved kitchen girl in a cheap city guanz to the touch of a greasy maternal hand in her hair; an ostracized old lady's proud self-enthroning "like a khan princess" outside her yurt, where she may finally find rest. These five bitter narratives of female abuse, exploitation and loss — often enacted by women on women — are, like the lives of the novel's protagonists, monotonous, and at times hard to endure.

Alex Zucker's English title draws attention to the Mongolian characters' need to belong to — and be able to claim ownership of — a home place, powerfully symbolized here by the family yurt or ger. It also highlights one of the novel's central ironies: that while the story may take the reader into the heart of the traditional Mongolian home, the tale that is told is one of estrangement from that sheltering centre. Hůlová's main narrator, Zaya, and her younger sister, Nara, are the illegitimate products of their mother's sexual encounters with Chinese and Russian men, and are rejected as erliz or half-breeds by their clan. Sent to the city by their mother, the two girls are recruited as prostitutes in their aunt's brothel, thus losing ownership of their bodies. Both bear illegitimate children. Zaya keeps her baby and becomes a single mother; Nara gives hers up, and remains childless. As a result they are further isolated from their pure-blooded Mongol sister and excluded by their xenophobic tribe.

The poetic passages which frame the novel's start and close, lyrically translated by Zucker, offer a poignant illustration of Zaya's status as "other" in her society. We are aware of this throughout the narrative, but she and her sister barely acknowledge it, either to themselves or to one another. We first meet Zaya as a stolid little girl, seated "at home" in front of her parents' ger in a dust storm, childishly confident in spite of growing doubts about her Khalkha purity. At the end of the novel, having returned to her home town of Bashkgan somon, she takes up her stance as an old woman before the dilapidated ger she has on temporary loan from her sister. When her fantasies of ownership and citizenship are stripped away, what "belongs" to Zaya is immaterial: her knowledge of the harsh landscape she surveys, and the colour and scent of old memories.

The novel may leave the reader with a feeling of emptiness, but All This Belongs to Me is an acutely observed account — compelling despite its grimness — of the lives of its semi-nomadic subjects. Yet, while this European author's novel may seem to reinforce Western assumptions about the oppressed lives of women in developing countries, the representations here are not straightforward. Hůlová has said that her characters and the realities they face were modelled on Czech subjects, transported in fiction to a distant setting, where their emotions and relationships might be pursued in a purer form uncluttered by European ephemera. The seemingly authentic Mongolian characters, European projections onto an Asian landscape, are in fact ambiguous cultural hybrids. Their experiences of racism and sexism reflect not only on the Mongolian society Hůlová appears to scrutinize, but also on the Czech one that informs her subject matter. While the original Czech title, Paměť mojí babičce or "Memory for My Grandmother," hints at an intimate relationship between the author and the women of the novel, the connection is severed in the English version. One hopes that the complex dual perspectives such contemporary "writings from an unbound Europe" can offer are not overlooked as a result.

ATBTM Review in TLS?

A friend texted Petra this morning that a review of All This Belongs to Me appeared in the Times Literary Supplement. A quick online search revealed that it was in last week's issue, dated 8 January 2010, so I haven't got my hands on it yet, and it isn't available online anywhere that I can find, but as soon as I see it, I'll post what it says.

Kind words from a blogger in Prague

"If you think life is hard, give Mongolia a try!" (Thanks, Terry. Glad you liked it.)

Petra's first post v překladu

My rough translation of Petra's first post, banged out last night and this morning:

"First of all I'm enormously happy it worked out. Now it's up to the book. The umbilical cord is severed. Now the only question is whether or not anyone in faraway America will notice you, dear book . . . Alex said that they don't have any novels from contemporary Mongolia yet, so that sounds hopeful . . .

"When Alex and I were in Chicago two weeks ago to promote the book, Andrew Wachtel from Northwestern University Press said: Americans can talk on and on about things they don't know about at all, while Europeans can't talk about anything even when they know a lot about it. He was referring to academics but I have a hunch it's the same way with writers. Or at least with me. What could I say about my own book? That it’s a piece of my life? Not interesting. An attempt at a portrait of the Mongol mentality? Written by a Czech? Hmm. But don’t Americans write about other countries, too? That it’s a portrait of a post-communist country wrestling with the challenges of newly gotten freedom like the Czechs in the 1990s? In one review in a German newspaper they wrote that the book was a metaphor for post-revolution Eastern Europe. That it isn’t actually about Mongolia. Sometimes that’s what I tell people — the ones who are afraid of Mongolia and who are interested more in good old Europe than in Central Asia — to try to appeal to them.

"Luckily, at the readings in New York and Chicago, the audience had enough questions that I didn’t have to babble on in desperation.

"It was my first time in Chicago. I lived more than a year in New York at one point, and there was a time when I wanted to stay there for good. Until I started to panic that I was losing my Czech and I was talking to myself in Czech so I wouldn’t get out of practice. Without Czech is like having one leg for me. So I live in Prague. My books travel. I wave across the ocean at them from my windowless room that I climb up a ladder to reach, the former darkroom where I’m now at work on my next novel."

Petra's first post! (in Czech, of course)

Především mám pořád ohromnou radost, že se to povedlo. Teď už je to na knize. Pupeční šňůra je přestřižená. Teď jen: zdalipak si tě v té daleké Americe někdo všimne, milá kniho . . . Alex říkal, že tam ještě žádný román ze současného Mongolska nemají, tak to zní nadějně . . .

Když jsme byli s Alexem před dvěma týdny propagovat knihu v Chicagu, prohlásil tam na univerzitě Andrew Wachtel z NWP: Američané, ti se dokáží namluvit o něčem, o čem ani nic pořádně nevědí, zatímco Evropané nedokážou pořádně hovořit ani o něčem, co velmi dobře znají. Řeč šla o akademicích, ale se spisovateli je to tuším podobné. Nebo alespoň se mnou. Co bych tak o téhle vlastní knize řekla? Že je to kus mého života? Nezajímavé. Pokus o portrét mongolské mentality? Hmm. Ale psaný Češkou? A Američané snad o jiných krajích nepíší? Že je to obraz postkomunistické země potýkající se s nešvary nově nabyté svobody podobně jako Česko devadesátých let? V jakési recenzi v německých novinách psali, že kniha je metaforou porevoluční východní Evropy. Že o Mongolsko v ní vlastně až tolik nejde. Občas to takhle lidem říkám - těm, co mají strach z Mongolska a víc než Střední Asie je zajímá stará dobrá Evropa a já se je snažím zlákat.

Ještě štěstí, že na čteních v New Yorku a Chicagu mělo tolik posluchačů připravené otázky a tak jsem nemusela z bezradnosti mlít páté přes deváté.

V Chicagu jsem byla poprvé. V New Yorku jsem žila déle než rok a kdysi jsem tam snad toužila zůstat napořád. Než jsem zjistila, že panikařím, když se mi čeština začíná ztrácet a já si sama pro sebe melu česky, abych nevyšla ze cviku. Bez češtiny jsem jako bez nohy. Takže žiji v Praze. Cestují moje knihy. Mávám jim přes oceán z komůrky bez oken, do níž se leze po žebříku, z bývalé fotokomory, kde právě pracuji na dalším románu.