Sometimes, book reviewing carries risks. You’ve already seen how one negative review resulted in a threatening email from the author along with a puzzling photo of mating lions. But that’s nothing compared to the next review. After I shared my thoughts about Some Pleasant Daydream: The Stories of Jiri Kajanë, I was contacted by the FBI. Seriously. First, read my original post, and then I’ll explain.
Sometimes my blog is a courtroom. I enter my posts into evidence. Today, the defendant is independent e-publishing. The charge? Producing lame content. As counsel for the defense, my job is to cast doubt on that charge. My strategy? I’ll call to the witness box examples of good, independently produced e-writing that can stand up to anything the big-media publishing houses have on offer. It won’t be an easy job. I’ll be the first to admit that most writing out there is appalling. But that’s not a criticism unique to indy e-publishing. After all, didn’t a Simon & Schuster imprint just publish a novel by Snooki?
My first witness is Some Pleasant Daydream: The Stories of Jiri Kajanë, translated from the Albanian by Kevin Phelan and Bill U’Ren.
Q. Good morning, Mr. Daydream. Is it okay if I call you that?
A. That’s fine.
Q. Mr. Daydream, although you’re an independently produced book, you still have a publisher, don’t you?
A. Yes.
Q. Go on.
A. Oh, I’m sorry. I’m given to understatement. I like to keep my prose spare. I would have said “clean and spare” but that would have cluttered the sentence. You see what I mean?
Q. Perfectly. The publisher?
A. Oh yes, it’s Fiction Attic Press. You can find it online, you know. It’s someone in Northern California, which I find interesting given that I’m a book set in Albania. I mean, what the hell does Northern California have to do with Albania? Anyhoo, I’m supposed to be the first in a series of books called Voices of Eastern Europe. And they’re selling me through Smashwords, Barnes & Noble and Scribd.
Q. So tell us a bit about yourself.
A. I’m a series of interrelated stories all told from the point of view of a minor bureaucrat in Tiranë who used to work for the Ministry of Symbols but has since risen to the rank of Deputy Minister in the Ministry of Slogans. In effect, he sits around all day dreaming up clever catch phrases to make governmental actions more palatable to the general populace. He used to be married to Ana but they have divorced. Even now he sometimes longs for Ana, but is a little bit afraid of her. He had a brother Janos who, along with his nephew, was drowned at sea. He also has an aging father and through his connections at the ministry, has procured for the old man a place at a spa. Most of the action is driven by his friend, Leni, sous chef at the Hotel Dajti who is forever cooking up schemes to make a little money on the side. The Deputy Minister isn’t the type to cook up schemes on his own; he isn’t a rebel or a natural born law breaker. But he doesn’t mind accommodating Leni’s sometimes odd requests because they are a welcome break from the monotony of life as a state-sponsored liar.
Q. Can you offer some examples of Leni’s schemes?
A. Oh sure. Take the first story “Okay, a Cake Then!” (which you can read as a free sample). Okay, so it doesn’t involve a full-blown scheme, but it gives a hint of things to come.
Q. How so?
A. Well, the Deputy Minister is upset at the death of a friend and so visits Leni. They talk, they drink, they reminisce, and then Leni suggests they bake a cake together. We see how Leni’s spontaneity buoys up the Deputy Minister. Always, there is this spontaneity and a willingness to improvise that brings these schemes to fruition. If Leni has a parallel in Western writing, it’s probably Milo Minderbender from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Also, the idea of baking a cake anticipates one of Leni’s more mature schemes.
Q. Which is?
A. Huh?
Q. You were going to tell the court about one of Leni’s more mature schemes.
A. I’m sorry. I got distracted by your blog. How do you keep your background so white?
Q. The scheme?
A. Sorry. It’s another story about baking—sort of—called “Wake up, It’s time to Go to Sleep.” A Party bigwig name Schlobodkin is having a promotion feast at the hotel where Leni works and the food supplies are to be stored beforehand in a warehouse. Leni wants to break into the warehouse, steal all the flour, and sell it on the black market. Things don’t go exactly as planned but the thieves do make off with some inedible biscotti.
There are other schemes too. For example, Leni plays pimp to an Italian woman whose husband is impotent, or at least infertile. The woman desperately wants a child, and because the Deputy Minister is a dead ringer for the husband, Leni has volunteered him for the role of sperm donor.
Perhaps the most complicated scheme is an academic boondoggle. In the book’s most satisfying story, “Weights & Measures”, Leni has received a letter from Ian James, the editor of a prestigious literary journal. Leni had assisted Ian James in assembling an anthology of Indian stories and purportedly enlisted the help of Bhanuprasad Armritraj, the chair of Indian Studies at Tiranë University. Ian James is pleased to announce that he will be visiting Tiranë and wishes to meet with Leni and professor Armritraj. Of course there is no professor Armritraj and there is no department of Indian Studies at Tiranë University. Leni has developed a disguise and wants the Deputy Minister to pose as the professor. If the meeting goes well, he hopes to sell another batch of stories for an Albanian anthology.
At the same time, Leni has agreed to have his cousin Leke, a scale maker from Peshkopia, recalibrate a friend’s broken scale. Again, there is no cousin named Leke and Leni knows nothing about scales. Nevertheless, working with a handbook on scale repair, the Deputy Minister takes apart the friend’s scale, cleans it and reassembles it. Although he can’t figure out how to fix the scale, he does get it to work properly. There follows this exchange:
“Do you remember how the scale has the twenty different internal counterweights?”
“Yes, those green things we took out.”
“Exactly. Well, I made some calculations, and one by one, I shaved off a small amount from each, exponentially increasing the amount. So now, essentially, each measurement the scale gives will be technically wrong, but nonetheless, it will appear to be right.”
A long silence arises as Leni considers this tactic. He fiddles with the scale and then half-heartedly measures two more weights. He seems pleased. “So what you are saying,” he says, “is that the scale is still broken, but now, only the scale knows it.”
“Precisely,” I say.
As Deputy Minister for the Ministry of Slogans, he has a talent for stacking up lies that produce a kind of truth.
Applying a similar logic to the matter of story anthologies that promise local colour, we find ourselves in the literary equivalent of a hall of mirrors. When the Deputy Minister reads the anthology of Indian stories, he discovers “A Bounty in Mumbai,” a tale that “follows the exploits of a young man named Nagar Afroz and his best friend, a local official from Bangalore, as they attempt to hatch a plan that will gain them six hundred pounds of free flour and the unattainable love of an Italian industrialist’s daughter.” In effect, Leni has told their own story, but in such general terms that it could be transplanted into any context. However, when Leni tries to do the same with his Albanian stories, Ian James offers an unexpected response:
“…it’s just that they’re not very Albanian, if you know what I mean. Love and relationships and family concerns, these are all fine, but where is the political strife, the tales of the zealous underground resistance, the humanity in the face of the oppressive dictatorship? Where is the lone hero fighting a struggle against mind-numbing governmental tyranny?”
In a writing frenzy, Leni produces a new set of stories to satisfy a Western editor’s expectations of what an Albanian story ought to look like.
Q. Tell me, Mr. Daydream, what about us? What are we to suppose of the Western editor who claims to have arranged for the translation of an Albanian author’s stories?
A. Sorry?
Q. Is it not also possible that these are Western stories passed off as Albanian stories by trying to satisfy Western expectations of what an Albanian story ought to look like?
A. Oh, I see what you mean. Except that these stories don’t satisfy Western expectations. Sure, there are references to Enver Hoxha, there’s an ice cream vendor who disappears and shows up dead a few days later, there are travel restrictions, food shortages, and pirated TV from Italy. But the stories are told with a deft touch that suggests bittersweet comedy. The communist-era hardships fade into the background as we watch two men struggle with simpler issues like love, the death of loved ones, scarcity and boredom.
After I had posted my “review”, I had to make an adjustment which I posted as follows:
Five months ago I posted a review of Some Pleasant Daydream: The Stories of Jiri Kajane, which has also gone by the title Winter in Tirane. On Friday, Ian Jack of The Guardian revealed that Jiri Kajane was, in fact, two creative writing students from California named Kevin Phelan and Bill U’Ren. To explain the hoax, Jack writes: “As young writers, they’d discovered that their stories, which then had contemporary US settings, attracted little attention; perhaps too playful to fit the fashion for trailer-park realism.” So they made up Jiri Kajane and posed as his translator to sell stories during the 90′s to Glimmer Train, the Chicago Review, and the Michigan Quarterly Review. One of their stories was anthologized alongside the likes of Ian McEwan, Joyce Carol Oates, Patricia Highsmith, Graham Greene and Ernest Hemingway (who are probably also hoaxes). Now, Phelan works for the FBI and U’Ren teaches creative writing.
I suppose I could get myself twisted in a knot the way Oprah did over James Frey, but it’s hard to get self-righteous about this pair. Maybe if I were Albanian I might accuse them of stealing my voice, whatever that means. But I feel more inclined to pour a glass of Scotch and say cheers; if you’re ever in town, drop by for a drink. This (book + hoax) is consummate storytelling.
I also note with some satisfaction the final question I posed in my review: “Is it not also possible that these are Western stories passed off as Albanian stories by trying to satisfy Western expectations of what an Albanian story ought to look like?” Turns out I was closer to the mark than I had suspected.
Shortly after my second post, I received an email from Kevin Phelan whom The Guardian had identified as an employee of the FBI. He thanked me for my posts and said that he would definitely take me up on my offer of a drink the next time he’s up north. He also extended an invitation to join him for drinks the next time I’m in San Francisco. It sounds dramatic to say I was once contacted by the FBI because of a book review, and while being dramatic is not on the same order as perpetrating a literary hoax, it still falls well on this side of the fictional divide.