In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Katy Simpson Smith’s novel The Maltese Version is a compelling literary thriller immersed in the worlds of love and language.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
“Philosophical and disarmingly dishy . . . It’s a book that―for both its inventiveness and its many linguistic sleights of hand―can renew our faith in the playful joys and critical capacity of fiction.”
In her own words, here is Katy Simpson Smith’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Maltese Version:
Music, like literature, is a form of translation – it takes the roiling surge of feeling in the human breast and converts it into sound. I’m not a writer who listens to music as I contemplate the blank page, but I do think a great deal about form, which means music and art are often in the back of my mind as I move characters through space, first with a blind instinct and then, in revision, with calculation and curiosity. Why is this person expressing themselves in a confused jumble of words, rather than a caress? What other modes are available? How might a painting unlock something otherwise unspoken? Can an electric guitar say something the voice can’t? Why am I writing a novel?
The Maltese Version looks at relationships as yet another form, a way to communicate and – more realistically – to miscommunicate. Oh, poor us in love, trying to convey to the beloved the essence of who we are; if they just understood, then surely some higher plane of harmony would be reached. Surely two people can share a language. How different is this from the act of literary translation, when a translator promises the audience that this new text is essentially the same text as the original?
If we step back from the expectation of alignment, if we accept that one experience can never be translated with perfect accuracy, then a new possibility arises: that a translation can add to the resonance of a thing in the world.
And so we come to Max and Leonie: two lovers floundering. He’s a translator, she’s a travel writer, and an assignment in Malta takes him away from their shared reality into a Mediterranean fantasy: a secluded villa, a seductive poet named Ana, a mass of words to be untangled. A forking of realities. These songs shine a sideways light on their predicaments…
Beatles, “Hello Goodbye”
The ultimate anthem of relational miscommunication. And yet the frustration of not understanding is wrapped up in a commitment to figuring it out; the Beatles are still rocking, reaching. By the end of the song, just when you think they might be throwing in the towel – geez, she’ll never get me – there’s a pregnant pause and then an explosion of sound; now they’re just making new words up. Why not?
Joni Mitchell, “Yvette in English”
Max and Leonie’s song. Or rather, Max’s version of their song. They met in a Sicilian bar rather than a French cafe, but the delicacy of their early relationship is mirrored here – Yvette like a stray cat, “First she flusters, then she frays.” What Max fails to realize is that Leonie’s feline qualities don’t make her a pushover, someone to be tended to or left behind without consequence. Inside, she holds a burning feral fire.
Talking Heads, “Once In a Lifetime”
Max’s song. This oft-soundtracked tune speaks to life’s multiplicities and the unknowability of the future. I play with a branching plot structure in this novel – versions in which characters live, versions in which they don’t; who among us can explain why we end up in a shotgun shack versus a beautiful house? (“And you may ask yourself / ‘Am I right? Am I wrong?’ / And you may say to yourself / ‘My God! What have I done?!’”) Max finds himself in this same maze.
The Bee Gees, “Words”
The chorus in this remarkably sappy song (“You think that I don’t even mean / A single word I say. / It’s only words, and words are all I have / To take your heart away”) gets at the role of language within romance – its inherent untrustworthiness (of course the woman doesn’t believe Barry Gibb’s schmaltz) and the fact that, for better or worse, it’s one of our primary tools for seduction.
The Who, “The Quiet One”
Leonie’s song. Other characters may think of her as “the quiet one,” the one who’s aimless, searching for a voice, but “I ain’t quiet – everybody else is too loud.” Isn’t everything relative? Part of her mission, along with the other women in the book, is figuring out how to project her particular timbre so that a male-centric world can hear it.
Ella Fitzgerald, “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off”
This Gershwin ditty is a classic of agreeing to disagree, since so much of difference is trivial: “If you go for oysters and I go for ersters / I’ll order oysters and cancel the ersters.” Isn’t language just a veneer over a more fundamental desire? (Or – as I began to wonder in the process of writing – does desire only persist because we made the language to express it?)
Adriano Celentano, “Prisencolinensinainclusol”
Perhaps as a middle finger to the rash of English-language songs borrowing from and bastardizing Romance languages, the Italian singer Celentano recorded this gibberish song to show what English sounds like to non-speakers. As Max moves into Ana’s orbit, she holds up a mirror to his little linguistic chauvinisms, and as Leonie begins experimenting with translation, she discovers that sound might be more important than meaning.
Oh Land, “Kiss in Songs”
And then the two foreign bodies on this Mediterranean island come crashing into each other. The poems become, briefly, secondary. This lovely tune throws literature under the bus (“It’s all gibberish and bleak”) and proclaims that the only connection comes in music, in colors, in shapes. This one’s for the synesthetes.
New Cuorey, “L-Aħħar Bidwi f’Wied il-Għasel”
Ana’s song. In this melancholic old Maltese melody, a hermit patiently tends his fields while his descendants move off in waves to the cities, until he’s the last farmer in the valley. Like the hermit, Ana begins retreating to the land as she searches for some primal attachment amid all the accumulations of civilized life.
Seu Jorge, “Life on Mars?”
This Portuguese cover of David Bowie led Bowie to claim, “Had Seu Jorge not recorded my songs in Portuguese I would never have heard this new level of beauty.” Should translation take the original to new places? What’s the relative value of faithfulness versus interpretation? Max and Ana – and eventually Leonie – can debate this until they drop.
Johnny Hallyday & Emmylou Harris, “If I Were A Carpenter”
Singing in French and English, Hallyday and Harris perform one of the loveliest counterfactuals, embracing the likelihood of each other across both language and temporal reality. This is the question the lover is always implicitly asking: “If…? If…?” As the novel splits and splits again, the only truths remaining are the unsteadiness of both love and language, and how both are all we have.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Katy Simpson Smith’s playlist for her novel The Weeds
Katy Simpson Smith is the author of the novels The Story of Land and Sea, Free Men, The Everlasting, and The Weeds, as well as the monograph We Have Raised All of You. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Paris Review, the Oxford American, and Granta, among other publications. Born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, she teaches in the Bennington Writing Seminars and lives in New Orleans.