28 CHICAGO READER | AUGUST 5, 2005 | SECTION ONE

Books

By Ryan Brooks

The decline and fall of com-munism is a distant memo-ry in Dorota Maslowska’s

first novel, Snow White andRussian Red, published inPoland in 2002. The same goesfor Irina Denezhkina’s shortstory collection Give Me (Songsfor Lovers), published in Russiathe same year, while the teens inHitomi Kanehara’s Snakes andEarrings, published in 2003,came of age after Japan’s eco-nomic bubble burst in the early90s. Maslowska was 19 andDenezhkina and Kanehara were20 when they made their respec-tive literary debuts. All threebooks were best sellers in theirnative countries; all won or werenominated for major literaryprizes; and all are now beingreleased stateside to heaps ofhype, touted as portraits of thetormented generations that cameof age after the collapse of theirnation’s 20th-century identities.But not all precocious literary phe-noms are created equal: all threebuild their tales from the rawmaterials of youthful alienation—sex, drugs, extreme fashion,nihilism—but with vastly differentdegrees of self-consciousness andtoward very different ends.

Snow White and Russian Redwas published in Poland by anarts collective called Lampa andin the U.S. by Grove/Atlantic’snewly resuscitated Black Catimprint, the same paperback linethat produced Naked Lunch andTropic of Cancer. It’s narrated byspeed freak Andrzej “Nails”Robakoski, who wraps a two-daybender around an escalatingfeud with his girlfriend, Magda,and the similarly escalating anti-Russian tension whipped up by

the burghers of the unnamed citywhere he lives. Nails is pissedabout the “Americanization” ofPoland’s economy, butMaslowska plays the politicalposturing and xenophobia asblack comedy—at one pointNails and his buddy “Lefty” stealheadsets and a soda fromMcDonald’s, screaming at thecashier, “Osama’s going to fuckyou up for sucking off thoseEurococks!” Meanwhile, all thegirls in the novel—even Angela, acheerful satanist/animal-rightsactivist—are desperate for thekind of money and celebrity thatonly a capitalist consumer cul-ture can provide. Nails takesAngela’s virginity on his mother’spullout bed, and he spends alarge part of the rest of book withwhat’s probably her blood cakedon his crotch. The image sug-gests a violent blurring of gender,one of Maslowska’s countlessexperiments in boundary smudg-ing; later, she imagines the whiteand red of the Polish flag bleed-ing together into the “flags of apink state, the kingdom of col-ored pencils.”

The book doesn’t hit its strideuntil the beginning of its secondsection, when Nails wakes upbeside a possibly dead Magdaand things start to become a lit-tle unhinged; Maslowska’s speedjive works better for gonzo mis-adventure than romantic disillu-sionment. The language, inBenjamin Paloff ’s translation, isexhilarating—idiosyncratic like afolk idiom, like a burnout’s pri-vate conversation with himself.Nails is on one long bad trip, andtoward the end of the novel allsemblance of realism melts away,leaving only his hallucinatory

visions. Maslowska herselfappears as a character, first as aflunky of the state, expected totype out a scripted confession of“pro-Russki orientation” for theembattled Nails to sign. LaterNails drives his head through awall and imagines he sees hergiving a lecture on animal-rightsabuses at the “emblem factory”where workers gut the eaglesthat adorn Poland’s diplomaticflag. These metafictional ges-tures are messy and a littlehokey, but it’s still neat to seeMaslowska pop up—looking “atmost 13 years old”—in Nails’sfevered mind, not to mention inone of the black-and-white illus-trations that dot the text.

These kinds of gestures makeit clear that Maslowska is grap-pling with the politics of playinggenerational weatherwoman.She obviously thinks Nails andhis ilk are assholes, but so iseveryone else in the story, and hemay well be redeemable. And she

may be an asshole too. In onescene in which Nails is pinned tohospital sheets after a suicideattempt, Maslowska seems to besimultaneously talking aboutherself, her book, her main char-acter, and Polish youth in gener-al: “Maybe what’s lying here inthe bed is just my representativefor Poland, maybe it’s only mydemo tape?”

In a coda Maslowska smudgesher biggest boundary yet andswitches to the first-person plu-ral. Feminist in the most inclu-sive sense, nihilistic in the mostlife-affirming, this generational“we” yearns for a pink, laughingGod, scrawls “Satan” where thegrown-ups can see, and dodgesthe world’s border wars by goingunderground. “Meanwhile, we’replotting, on the walls we scratchout a great escape plan to theinterior of the earth,” she writes.“Everything such that on theworld’s hand there will grow asixth, dead finger, so that it’ll getit wrong, get lost in the accounts,so that it’ll seem that we werenever here.”

There aren’t any such exhila-rating fuck-yous in IrenaDenezhkina’s Give Me (Songs forLovers), just the kind of vapidmaterialism and shoddy Russianworkmanship, decked out inbunting and streamers, thatwould make Nails Robakoskifoam at the mouth. First pub-lished on the Internet, her storiesof Russian adolescence were dis-covered by a critic who nominat-ed them for the country’sNational Bestseller Prize, thenpublished to big sales andacclaim by a Saint Petersburgpress (under, tellingly, their “easyreading” line). Denezhkina, a

journalism student, has an eyefor the rush of teenage romance,but her world barely containsany conflict deeper than thwart-ed puppy love. She provides peri-odic hints of an adult life beyondschool—Denya, a spooky youngveteran of the fighting inChechnya, vents his disillusion-ment in the title story “GiveMe!,” the best of the lot—butthey’re crammed between bits ofham-handed internal mono-logue, annoying rhetorical ques-tions, faux insights, and forcedmetaphors. One story is namedafter a Richard Ashcroft videothat sounds way more interestingthan the story itself, which inter-minably channel surfs from oneboring teen crush to another. Interms of literary tourism, it’s likenever leaving the bar at theyouth hostel.

Denezhkina includes a lot ofcasual references to sex and vio-lence, but they don’t have anyaesthetic effect—she’s either justcasual about sex and violence orcasual about the way she uses

Nubile NihilistsThree newly translated books by barely legal authors—one Polish, one Russian, one Japanese—question the point of coming of age at all.

SNOW WHITE AND RUSSIAN RED DOROTA MASLOWSKA, TRANSLATED BY BENJAMIN PALOFF (GROVE/ATLANTIC/BLACK CAT)GIVE ME (SONGS FOR LOVERS) IRINA DENEZHKINA, TRANSLATED BY ANDREW BROMFIELD (SIMON & SCHUSTER)SNAKES AND EARRINGS HITOMI KANEHARA, TRANSLATED BY DAVID KARASHIMA (DUTTON)

continued on page 30

CHICAGO READER | AUGUST 5, 2005 | SECTION ONE 29

30 CHICAGO READER | AUGUST 5, 2005 | SECTION ONE

Books

them in her work. There’s nothing casual, howev-

er, about the masochism ofHitomi Kanehara’s narrator. Lui,the antihero of Snakes andEarrings, is addicted to “stretch-ing”—to violent sex, to piercingbigger and bigger holes in herbody—because pain is the onlything that penetrates her depres-sion. Two beguiling images areall that keep her going: her rage-prone boyfriend’s (literally)forked tongue and her sadisticlover’s ornate tattoo of a kirin, amythical Japanese creature. Theengine of the plot is admirably

simple, progressing over 120pages toward the day when Luigets her own forked tongue,

when her own tattoo is complete,and when, she predicts, one ofthe two men either kills her orwinds up in jail.

Hiding her real name andbackground, consciously cuttingherself off from the realms ofbusiness and family, Lui—“forLouis Vuitton”—goes frombleached-blond “Barbie-girl,”occasionally able to play the roleof “a pleasant, polite Japanesegirl,” to an emaciated, alcoholic,unrepentant punk. Whethershe’s actually creating somethingnew or just being self-destruc-tive, Lui’s a perfect demographicspokesmodel, her actions in line

with Japanese trends like thesudden popularity of body-mod-ification and the growing num-ber of “freeters,” young peoplewho take unskilled part-timejobs instead of seeking the tradi-tional “lifetime employment”after college.

Snakes and Earrings succeedsas a coming-of-age storybecause, until its facile ending,the narrative stays focused onLui’s still-developing conscious-ness, totally engaged with youth-ful emotional conflict.(Kanehara herself left schoolwhen she was 11 and left homein her teens.) Still, that the book

is a “radical depiction of ourtime” is why Kanehara won theprestigious Akutagawa Prize(awarded to a promising newauthor) in 2004, why it sold overa million copies in Japan, andwhy it just doesn’t seem quite asessential here in the West. Itlacks the splashy irony or sar-donic attitude that Westerncoming-of-age novels, from TheCatcher in the Rye to Less ThanZero (both duly referenced in thereviews and marketing copy forall three books), depend on—which might be why Snow Whiteand Russian Red feels morepotent.

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In the recent anthologyJapan’s Changing Generations, agroup of academics includingLoyola’s Laura Miller (coeditorof an upcoming collection calledBad Girls of Japan) set out toguess whether the generationgap outlined in Snakes andEarrings is a matter of “life-course”—meaning that today’smalcontents will mature intofully socialized adults—orgroundwork for a radically dif-ferent society. Their answer wasbasically: “We’re not sure.” Youcould ask the same question ofthese three authors, but clues totheir future might be found inthe way each has responded tothe creeping fingers of fame:Denezhkina has continued onat J-school; Kanehara has writ-ten a second best-selling book,Ash Baby, about the relation-ship between a girl and apedophile; and Maslowska hascome out with a 150-pageprose-poem, written in a hip-hop style and probably untrans-latable, that apparently mocksthe media and her own success.It’s called Paw krolowej—a double-entendre suggestingboth “queen’s peacock” and“queen’s puke.” v

The book that “shines a blazing new light on America’s criminal justice system,”says ROBERT A. CARO. “An important and illuminating work…

Bogira shows that he is a masterful reporter.”

STEVE BOGIRA

SCOTT TUROW hails“A wonderfully vivid portrait

of a criminal courtroom in thenation’s busiest courthouse.”

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Bogira offers the real thing”—BALTIMORE SUN

Published by KNOPFwww.aaknopf.com

Ink Well by Ben Tausig

Wait There’sMore

ACROSS 1. Argentine prairie6. “The Biggest Little City in the

World”10. Road trip game14. Attach with string15. Part of GRE, briefly16. Type of string or horn17. About 1% of earth’s atmosphere18. Dealer’s quantity19. Landlocked Asian nation20. First down need?23. Cry from Scrooge25. “Fantastic!”26. Abundant27. Good’s opponent29. Soprano daughter33. His, in Paris34. 64-Across position36. Emptied bottles at the Empty

Bottle, say38. Around the clock and then some?44. Boston or Chicago, to a DJ45. Dork

46. “Oops” button on a PC49. Em, to Dorothy52. Road trip stops53. Babushka55. Org. that drafted its last high

schooler in 200557. Medium’s claim58. Mutant Ebert's high praise?63. Primo64. Popular discipline65. Move over68. “Wind in the Willows” character69. Throw things at70. Get hitched quick71. Bracket shapes72. Jon’s dog73. Chip dip

DOWN 1. Bake sale grp.2. Tire filler3. Drummer/divorcee in a noted duo4. Honey eater of literature5. Bother6. Pillow flight?7. Off-ramp8. Dakota, Virginia, or Georgia, e.g.9. Harbinger

10. Belief in Allah11. # # #12. “Toy” dog13. Some proposal responses21. On the ___ (fleeing)22. Betrayed boredom23. Karate division24. Declare28. Air organ?30. Become a parent, in a way31. R & B’s __ Hill32. Crew stick

LAST WEEK: WHODUNIT?

50. Pen dweller51. Flow away54. Marsh grasses56. Moon units?59. Tihs clue has one60. Made a row on the ground61. Wrinkly fruit62. Home of the Bruins66. Photo-___67. Leaves in a bag

35. Attack from the sky37. Fuzzy fruit39. Reader reader, apparently40. Something to have on vacation?41. Inheritance source42. Coop moms43. Cookbook amt.46. Graceland, e.g.47. The Frankfurt ___48. Of the flesh

CHICAGO READER | AUGUST 5, 2005 | SECTION ONE 31