The Writers Who Tried to Reconstruct the Past

· The Atlantic

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When it comes to reading, I’m not a glutton for punishment—I didn’t get very far into Finnegans Wake—but I am drawn to interesting challenges. Among the most memorably difficult reads I’ve taken on was the 1926 book A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. A cerebral but darkly funny epic poem whose plot is well summarized by its title, it is written in “synthetic Scots,” a language cobbled together from Scottish dialects by its author, Hugh MacDiarmid. (Although Scots survives as a minority language with many regional variations, none of them closely resemble MacDiarmid’s concoction.) I loved the verse for its woozy lyricism and nerded out on the text’s annotations; I was also fascinated by the author’s grand ambitions. MacDiarmid was part of a cultural movement known as the Scottish Renaissance, whose writers sought to revive the once-independent nation’s dialects and traditions. But did he really think he could kick off a national resurgence by inventing a language no reader could easily understand? And what would drive a writer to even try? This week, the Atlantic staff writer Lily Meyer explored a similar question in her article about What Remains, a novel written by Brais Lamela in Galician.

First, here are six new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

Meyer calls Lamela’s choice to write in a language primarily spoken in a single region in the northwest of Spain “an artistic expression of commitment to his particular roots,” and it is—but Lamela also understands the futility of trying to re-create the past. The novel’s narrator is writing a thesis about a widow in Galicia, who resisted the dictator Francisco Franco’s effort to subjugate the area (the government flooded rural villages and banned the Galician language). Yet the narrator’s academic ambitions are as nostalgic as they are political. Feeling rootless and isolated in New York, he hopes, Meyer writes, “to create a home of some sort for the unsettled parts of himself.”

Other authors in minority languages have been vocal about their motivations. Writers in Greenlandic, Basque, Welsh, and the Judeo-Spanish language of Ladino have eschewed dominant languages such as Spanish or English to preserve cultures that have been subsumed by larger nations. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o forsook English to write in Kikuyu, publicly rebelling against England’s rule in Kenya and explaining that he wanted to “reconnect to the patriotic traditions” of a “literature rooted among the people.”

MacDiarmid, too, saw himself as resisting the English and their language; he hated them so much that he once wrote, in private correspondence, that he might prefer a Nazi victory over England. But unlike Ngũgĩ, who wrote in a language spoken by millions, the Scot was trying to build a lexicon that had never really existed. In this sense he is not unlike Lamela’s narrator, a person who finds “re-creation” to be, Meyer writes, “a source of stability as much as it is an escape.” Characters like this, Meyer adds, “aspire to inhabit history so fully that they might create a home, or at least a moment of rest and acknowledgment, for its unsettled ghosts.” Such attempts might be doomed to fail, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t noble, or even beautiful. MacDiarmid didn’t exactly rebuild Scottish literature, but he made a modernist work of art that I’ll never forget.

Illustration by Adam Maida / The Atlantic

A Novel About Obsessively Digging Into the Past

By Lily Meyer

A new book by the Galician writer Brais Lamela chronicles the drive that many have to touch history, no matter how elusive it is.

Read the full article.

What to Read

Dirtbag, Massachusetts, by Isaac Fitzgerald

Though his memoir-in-essays is subtitled A Confessional, and though it opens by revising the story he and his family used to tell about his childhood, Fitzgerald doesn’t immediately lay bare the lingering pain of his tumultuous upbringing. The first 11 essays are plenty vulnerable: Fitzgerald writes that he was born of an affair; spent his early years living in a homeless shelter and then in low-income housing run by the Catholic Worker movement; moved to north-central Massachusetts, where “violence was the solution, problem, and consequence”; and began abusing alcohol and drugs before age 13. But these are mere “flashes of the past,” as Fitzgerald writes in the last essay, “My Story,” where he takes full control of the narrative of his life. As he admits to having avoided the full truth, Fitzgerald becomes his own confessor, the one with the power to forgive.  — Kristen Martin

From our list: Six books you should read twice

Out Next Week

📚 On the Calculation of Volume (Book V), by Solvej Balle

📚 The Imperfect City, by Paul Goldberger

📚 Love the Revolution, by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

Your Weekend Read Illustration by Tina Zhou / The Atlantic

Zelda’s Midlife Crisis

By Ian Bogost

This idea, that a video game could facilitate exploration in a simulated world bigger than the challenges choreographed inside it, is now so familiar that it counts as cliché. But at the time, it was startling. Popular culture—even Star Wars—was not yet understood by its consumers as world building, a now-popular name for constructing a fictional universe and then situating characters and stories inside it. Tolkien had been popular for decades, of course, but high fantasy was still largely considered escapist and—apologies—somewhat cringeworthy. To obsess about a false world real enough to imagine occupying remained strange, a fixation of dweebs unable or unwilling to live in the real one.

Read the full article.

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