Read Julie Orringer's Preface to 'The Boy,' a Novel by Marcus Malte

Marcus Malte’s prize-winning novel The Boy, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan and Tom Roberge, is a story that forces us to consider what it means to be human. Beginning in 1908, the narrative starts, quite simply, with the boy, a wild child from the forests of Southern France who sets out, voiceless and innocent, to discover civilization. As he travels between cities and towns, the boy encounters the best and the worst of the world, from ogres and earthquakes, to love and the joys of music, and finally, to war. Malte’s prose is at once poetic and mysterious, and sometimes harsh as he weaves this poignant tale of the human nature.

In her preface to The Boy, Julie Orringer, bestselling author of How to Breathe Underwater, The Invisible Bridge, and The Flight Portfolio, writes: “As we inhabit [the boy] … there is no way to perceive him as other, only as a version of ourselves, at times compassionate, at times violent, always curious, always seeking comfort and love, a balm for what’s been irrevocably lost.” Read Orringer’s full preface below.

The Boy: A Preface by Julie Orringer

Reading The Swiss Family Robinson recently with my eight-year-old son, I came across a passage—amid the ardent shelter-building, tropical-plant identification, animal-shooting, and campfire cookery of the novel’s first chapters—where our narrator, William, expresses the fear that his family’s new home might be inhabited by savages. The author’s (and translator’s) use of the word seemed to require explanation, or context; I asked my son if he knew what it meant.

“I think he means wild animals,” he said.  “Beasts.”

I explained, with some discomfort, that the author was actually referring to people, indigenous to the island, who likely lived as hunters and gatherers, employing technology that had been used for thousands of years, and practicing forms of religion, storytelling, dance, dress, and music-making that would have been unfamiliar, and perhaps even frightening, to Europeans.  I explained that the word originated with the Latin silva, meaning wood, and silvatica, out of the woods; from this came the French sauvage, and finally our English savage, with its attendant fear of the unknown, of what might lurk in forests, fierce and untameable and possibly intending to do us harm.  But why would a person be called a savage, my son still wanted to know; and what made the Swiss family fear them? Underneath his question I sensed another: What is it that makes us recognize one another as human?  And what does it mean to be human in the first place?

This subject was much on my own mind because I’d been reading the book you now hold in your hands: Marcus Malte’s brilliant and disturbing novel The Boy, which poses the same question in a different way. Using a trope familiar to literature, one that has long fascinated and perplexed us—from Romulus and Remus abandoned by their mother and nursed by a she-wolf, to the tale of Victor of Aveyron, the eighteenth-century French boy who was discovered after more than a decade on his own in the wild—Malte envisions a man-child, newly orphaned at fourteen, who has lived all his life in the isolated wilds of southern France, with only his nonverbal mother for company; the story opens in the first decade of the twentieth century, on the verge of one of the greatest upheavals of Western history.  Notably, the point of view belongs not to some curious observer but—as in T. C. Boyle’s “Wild Child,” or Karen Russell’s “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”—to the feral child himself, nameless and languageless. As we inhabit him, as we experience his journey into the populated world, there is no way to perceive him as other, only as a version of ourselves, at times compassionate, at times violent, always curious, always seeking comfort and love, a balm for what’s been irrevocably lost. Moving from wilderness to village, from village to town, and from town to city, this extraordinary character perceives, and thereby reveals, the strangeness of the twentieth-century world.  

To see every element of our lives (and yes, these are our lives, with only minor differences)—the things we eat, the way we behave towards animals, the way we house and clothe ourselves, the way we worship, speak, make music, treat our children, medicate ourselves, perform the act of love, and wage war—through the eyes of someone to whom all of this is new, constitutes a reevaluation of everything we take for granted.  In what ways are we ridiculous, or compassionate, or divine? In what ways are we beastly? Mona Ozouf, president of the Prix Femina jury that awarded its 2016 honor to The Boy, called it, in my imperfect translation, “a novel about, among other things, the ensavagement of human beings by war, which reminds us that barbarism camps on the borders of the civilized world.”  

Marcus Malte himself, speculating in an interview about his reasons for choosing the book’s historical setting, said this: “Until now, I’d always located my novels in our own time; I’d described the contemporary world exhaustively, especially its faults, so maybe I’d arrived at a time when this world, our world, weighed on me too much—when I needed to get away from it, at least in my fiction.” But isn't the story of human ensavagement the story of every time?  And isn’t the question of what is barbaric or savage in so-called civilization one we have to face in every era? In our own moment, when acts of racial violence and xenophobia have become the stuff of daily news, don’t we need, more than ever, to be reminded of the value of wordless communication, of immersion in nature, of loving touch, of music-making, of empathy, of literature read aloud by one person to another—as well as of the fact that certain wounds, inflicted deeply enough, can never heal?

The book you’re about to read shines a fierce and necessary light on our world.  Read it patiently, if you can—a challenge at times, considering the wild and unexpected turns it takes, and the pleasures that lie around every corner—and discover, or re-discover, what it means to be a member of the human tribe.

Order the Book

About the Introducer

View fullsize

Julie Orringer is the author of the novel The Invisible Bridge and the award-winning short-story collection How to Breathe Underwater, which was a New York Times Notable Book. She is the winner of the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for Fiction and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Stanford University, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn.

Read An Excerpt From The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: The Happy Years by Ricardo Piglia

The second installment of Ricardo Piglia’s acclaimed autobiographical diaries, The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: The Happy Years continues the celebrated Argentine author’s bibliographic and intertextual record of his auto-fictional alter ego, Emilio Renzi. Piglia intimately interrogates the trajectories of Renzi’s literary, professional, and personal spheres against the backdrop of Argentina in the 1970s, rampant with emotional and political turmoil from displacement under the effects of Peronism, guerrilla warfare, and a bloody military coup. As in Formative Years, Piglia deftly weaves literary criticism with fiction in this second volume, taking on the historic traditions of literature within which he has secured a place of his own.

“For the past few years, every Latin American novelist I know has been telling me how lavish, how grand, how transformative was the Argentinian novelist Ricardo Piglia’s final project, a fictional journal in three volumes, Los diarios de Emilio Renzi—Renzi being Piglia’s fictional alter ego. And now here at last is the first volume in English, The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: Formative Years, translated by Robert Croll. It’s something to be celebrated… [It] offer[s] one form of resistance to encroaching fascism: style.” 

—Adam Thirlwell, BookForum, The Best Books of 2017

From The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: The Happy Years

Monday, July 1

Let us begin with the death of Perón. On Monday, after alternate versions, stories, enhancements. A meeting at home in the morning with Rubén and Boccardo, delusions with Sadovsky and other gentlemen who have discovered Lenin (what? Lenin?) because of his “prestigious names.” The melancholy while Perón lay dying, at least while the story of his death was born, which I kept myself away from until after four in the afternoon, when I left home and started to grow concerned about the lines in front of the shops (I thought: “I have oil,” I thought: “The lines are coming, just like in Chile”) and about the Galerna library being closed. In the bar I find out about the death of King Lear: general astonishment at my ignorance of the news that had moved everyone in the world. “Where were you?” etc. Even worse, I heard the news from Saúl Sosnowsky, a depoliticized escapee who lives in the United States, whom I am meeting to give him a chapter of my essay on Arlt for his magazine Hispamérica. The city is quiet, people piled up at Congreso, at nightfall, waiting for the line to begin so they can see the dead man.

I visit David, furious about the telegram from the PCR with condolences for Isabelita.

Tuesday 2

I get up at two in the afternoon. An unexpected appearance from Amanda, who comes with Anita Larronde (Luppi’s wife), bringing me a novel by Pavese that, according to her, I had lent her. Trivial conversation, no great tension, a pleasant ending: I give her a copy of Los Libros magazine. Ana says: “There’s an excellent article in here.” She looks for it, it’s mine, and she is amazed. “I’m going to tell Federico I’ve been around important people.” That’s what we call displacement, saying one thing in place of another.

I move through the rainy city, the endless funeral lines, and no one seems to want the goodbyes to end, no one wants to go home; I remember wakes in my childhood that lasted all night and continued on after noon, but now they are expanded, crowded, with serious gestures that repeat on every street. Some have waited for thirty hours to see the dead man, the venerated man one last time. 

Wednesday 3

I walk through the empty city, street openings blocked off, people wandering with a sorrowful air, and I end up on Carlos Pellegrini, where (without seeing it) I feel the effects of the funeral procession that crosses Avenida de Mayo carrying the corpse. Men cry, I see a policeman with his face damp from weeping, the soldiers in procession cry as well. Sorrow weighs down upon the city like a shadow. The Montoneros sing out their slogans. I lose myself in the multitude and make it to Congreso. On the way back I pass down endless streets, skirting along a persistent row of men and women lined up to see the cadaver. The long procession continues along Carlos Pellegrini until Retiro. The people’s pain.

I return home and observe the city in darkness from high above. The lines go on in spite of the rain.

León R. comes over and makes history personal, saying: “What has this man done to us.” It isn’t a question, it’s a complaint, as though he were referring to the ghost of Hamlet’s father. León’s personal view refers everything to himself and his own feelings. That is his philosophical viewpoint. What does the world mean for me? More deep-seated and extreme than Descartes: the subject is the truth of reality. 

Iris talks about the relationships between life and writing—between living and writing—with the same words I have used for years: “Leave everything behind. Live to write.” 

Thursday

Perón’s death has erased all meaning, the despotic signifier has vanished; the mourning is endless and stories proliferate. I register some of them as I walk through the streets: “A regiment from La Tablada rose up” (they say on the first day). Or rather: Perón is dead, the officers make their return. Cámpora appears to be the only political figure from Peronism who has some backing and support. The right sees him as an enemy and wants him to disappear. And so, news has been circulating all day about an attempt on Cámpora’s life. Balbín is the only one who can unify the dominant classes: he is the lower-ranked, imaginary substitute for Perón. In front of the coffin in the incandescent chapel, the empty speeches went on until the Chinese man with round eyeglasses appeared, standing beside the dead man, and said, inspired with a high Latin rhetoric: “Today, an old adversary comes to say goodbye to a friend.” Everyone cried except for him; proud and serene, he spoke for the first time as an equal l to the Man (as my father and all of the Peronists called him during the Resistance years) who had defeated him and imprisoned him and humiliated him. I remembered the unmatched tone of Quevedo’s prose after the murder of Julius Caesar: “Marcus Brutus was a severe man, a man who reproached other’s vices with his own virtue, not with words. He had an eloquent silence, and his intellect keen.” Epic emotion lies in a man’s praise for the rival who has defeated him, or whom he has conquered. It takes the form of a challenge, transforming anger into admiration. The heartfelt requiem that the defeated man enunciates, now without hatred. All of the politicians and the whole of the public pointed to Balbín as the dead man’s heir.

Friday 5

I am reading Marthe Robert’s book on the Freudian family romance as a fundamental root in the history of the origins of modern storytelling. She studies Robinson Crusoe as the figure who negates his father and invents a lineage and a territory of his own 

Julia calls me on the phone, I meet her at Tolón and immediately my peace leaves me. She has lost her handbag with her glasses in it—now she can’t see (does she know who I am?)—and her documents. She is broke, alone, and lost, and she weighs me down with everything. (She also fantasizes about getting together with David, who will be alone on Wednesday once Beba goes to Europe after a Chilean man.) Of course I have nothing to say to her, and I tell her as much and give her a thousand pesos to get back home… Oh those lost loves. It’s as though a light is going out. The woman we once loved is a stranger, speaking to us and chiding us as though she knew us. She seems crazy, talking nonsense. That is how I see her now; love makes people better and when it ends, oh, it is too late for tears.

Saturday, July 6

On the bus, a chain of associations, the criminal always tells his tale as though it belonged to someone else. He can kill, but he cannot say, “I have killed.” It works the same way as dreaming, where the intensity of the experience cannot be transmitted with words: in order to say it, the killer has to kill again. A grammatical reasoning behind the serial killer: he can only speak through the detached bodies. And who can read his message carved into the corpses, as words written in sand? He cannot say it and so repeats the act. 

I go to dinner with Iris at América. León calls after I come back, a melancholy encounter. He speaks from another planet: he analyzes Perón’s death solely through his perspective, as though Argentine history were part of his life. It is the left’s problem with Perón. He has stayed with the working class as though he had abducted them. That’s the issue with León and David. Peronism is seen as a scheme, a tyrannical means of using the subordinate classes through deceit and lies. The personalization of politics viewed as a psychological trap. What has this man done to me, he who governed the country for years and then died without having been condemned? Everything is experienced in first person. Politics as a private drama. That is the merit of impassioned thought and also its self-referential closure.

Sunday 7

A peaceful and happy day. I watch the World Cup finals on television: Germany-Netherlands. Soccer is like life, as my father would say: the better one never wins. Iris and I walk around the city, marked by the absence of the Man. Iris laughs, “he was always controlled by women. First Eva and then Isabelita. The best thing,” she adds, “is that he always got married to fallen women.” Cuarteleras, barracks girls, as military jargon calls the female soldiers who accompany men to war.

Andrés comes over: his older son is dying of cancer. The whole succession of catastrophes, no work, his ex-wife living with Juan Gelman, his ex-best friend–he needs to move. Weighed down, at his limit, he raves a bit and I follow, raving along with him. “Is it possible to kill and not be caught?” We speak calmly, analyzing several alternatives.

Tuesday 9

One could say I spent the whole day sleeping. I got up at ten, and Carlos came to visit me. I went to lunch at the tavern on Calle Serrano. I went back to sleep until three in the afternoon. Now I imagine I will go out into the street like a sleepwalker, looking for a woman. 

Friday 12

I receive a beautiful letter from Tristana. She announces a delivery of stones for the man with the golden arm. Once more the fantasies are reborn in a corner, what can I say to a woman (married, with two children) in a letter. A Stendhalian theme.

I spend the day at Iris’s house, very good. We go out for dinner in the rain, under the pale lights.

Sunday 14

I listen to Mozart, make myself some tea and prepare to write “Los dos linages” in Borges. I act as copyist, going over and over the initial pages of the essay. Three pages that barely suggest the tone. An essay depends on the conviction transmitted by the prose.

Tuesday 23

What can be said of a man like me? A simple letter from Tristana was enough to cause the dull anxiety that follows me. Uncertainty brought by the flight of birds; I see symbols of fate in the slightest traces of the wind among the trees. Reading those signs takes up all of my time and strength. Her letter, on the other hand, reopened a wound in another part of my body. Everything can form part of the novel that I’m writing. The novel and my life, always the same schism. It would be better to say: “The novel of a life.”

A feeling that I am bound to the barrenness of the times. I see David, who calls me to meet in La Moncloa. A meeting for Los Libros. We have Issue 36 ready. An excellent article on Althusser by Altamirano. Several articles about urbanism. What dangers disquiet me? More than dangers it is a discontentment, facing the inadequacy of my life.

The mistake seems to lie in the delusion of expecting validation in the present. Don’t conjugate verbs in past tenses. Forget about the future. This current vision of the future never seems to have been given except perhaps before, in another time. I tell myself once more: “Do not bind yourself to the good times passed, but to the bad times yet to come.”

The essay could be called “Ideology and Fiction in Borges.” Meaning proliferates, the point is to reconstruct the fiction from the origin. The ways writers imagine the material conditions that make their work possible. Sometimes I can’t stand combinatorial analysis, I need some distance, so I go out to smoke a cigarette.

Meet Priyanka A. Champaneri, Winner of the 2018 Prize for New Immigrant Writing

Today, Literary Hub announced the winner of the 2018 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing for Fiction: Priyanka A. Champaneri, for her novel The City of Good Death. As detailed below in the judges' citation and author's statement about her book, The City of Good Death is an insightful and moving novel about life, death, and the afterlife. The book is scheduled to be published in the Spring of 2020. Read an excerpt here.

Judges’ Citation

The City of Good Death is an expansive novel about the proprietor of a death hostel, Pramesh, in India' s sacred city of Benares, where Hindus come to die a holy death, and the sweeping journey of discovery he embarks upon after finding his cousin and childhood best friend drowned in the Ganges. Priyanka A. Champaneri beautifully explores the sacred and the afterlife in this cinematic and emotionally gripping work about living and dying with dignity.

Champaneri draws on her personal navigation of identity and culture, reconciling her Indian heritage and Hindu religion within a Western construct as a first-generation immigrant who was born and raised in the United States. The City of Good Death confronts family, religion, and belonging in ways that reflect Champaneri’s cultural dualities. It’s a novel full of compassion as Champaneri deftly navigates Pramesh’s relationships with his dying patrons as he himself struggles to understand the ramifications of his cousin’s death. Introducing readers to an unforgettable cast of characters who all cross paths in Pramesh’s hostel on this holy pilgrimage, this ambitious novel offers readers a unique insight into the Hindu concepts of the afterlife and the sacred, and the universally recognizable desire for empathy and understanding.  

—Judges Téa Obreht and Ilan Stavans

Author’s Statement on The City of Good Death

Born to Indian parents hailing from the state of Gujarat, I am a first-generation novelist who has lived my entire life in Virginia. My parents filled my childhood bookshelves with fairy tales and richly-illustrated volumes of Hindu religious myths, and they freely shared their memories of childhood in India. As the years passed, I grew to know these stories until I felt that they lived inside of me. When I finally visited India as an adult for the first time, I had the unique experience of feeling the imagined country in my heart fuse with the very real and tangible land and people before my eyes. That simultaneous overlap and disconnect between reality and myth is something I have both struggled with and enjoyed exploring in my writing.

Set in the holy city of Benares, The City of Good Death follows Pramesh, the manager of a hostel which specifically serves dying pilgrims seeking the ultimate solace of a good end. I have always had a faint knowledge that Benares was an important city, but my interest was not fully piqued until a co-worker sent me an Associated Press article titled ‘Check-in and Die in Two Weeks, or Get Out.’ As I read about the death hostels, I realized that I possessed a unique point of view: as a Hindu, I understood that these places of refuge for the dying were a perfectly practical solution to a goal that many in India have: dying a good death. But as someone raised in a Western society, I also understood how odd this attitude might seem to those unfamiliar with India, and especially Benares, where death is so blatantly placed alongside everyday life. It took me eight years to fully explore and hone the story which burgeoned in my mind, but the end result is a novel and a writing experience which I am grateful for.

Priyanka A. Champaneri Author Bio

Priyanka A. Champaneri was born and raised in Virginia. She received her MFA in creative writing from George Mason University and has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts numerous times. The City of Good Death is her first novel.

Submissions for the 2019 Prize for New Immigrant Writing in Nonfiction Are Now Open

• To be judged by Héctor Tobar, Terry Hong, and Ilan Stavans.

• Submissions can take the form of a memoir, a collection of essays, or a book-length work of narrative nonfiction. We accept complete manuscripts or detailed proposals with a 25k-word sample.

• Submissions are accepted through February 2019.

• Winner receives $10,000 and publication by Restless Books

Read more and find out how to submit on our Prize page.