the letter, a laugh of bemused appreci-
ation that accompanies much of what
he has to say about Zink. "It was so
emphatic, so presumptuous, in a good
way," he says. "There was a feisty tone
to it, not quite as strong as 'You don't
really know anything about birds,' but
something like 'They call you a New
Yorker reporter and you didn't even write
about the Balkans?' " He wrote back to
thank her, "and the next thing I knew,"
he says, "I was getting, like, five e-mails
a day."
Five e-mails a day is a Zink spe-
cialty; since meeting her, I have rou-
tinely woken up to that many, a sub-
ject heading several lines down in my
inbox serving as the ground floor to a
little apartment building of postscripts,
post-postscripts, corrections, emenda-
tions, and elaborations. Franzen, who
is not normally in the market for pen
pals, says that volume of correspon-
dence would usually set o his crazy-
person radar. But Zink's e-mails were
exceptional. For one thing, her erudi-
tion was startling. "She constantly re-
ferred to things that I not only hadn't
read but hadn't even heard of," he says.
"If she made a list of her hundred fa-
vorite books and we compared it to
mine, there might be four titles in com-
mon."I understood what he meant when
Zink told me she considers Yaakov
Shabtai's "Past Continuous" to be "one
of the best books ever written in the
history of the world." She also praised
the eighteenth-century Austrian writer
Adalbert Stifter. (With some excep-
tions, the other authors Zink most ad-
mires also hail from east of the Rhine:
Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Andrei Platonov,
Bruno Schulz.) Meanwhile, her own
writing was equally startling. "Every
e-mail was so vivid," Franzen says. "She
is somebody who could make a three-
hundred-word account of going to the
grocery store for milk an interesting
story. It was just evident that she was
this naturally fantastic writer." Simul-
taneously alarmed by the e-mail del-
uge and impressed by the prose, he en-
couraged Zink to find a wider audience.
"I said, 'Maybe you should try writing
fiction,' " Franzen said. "And she said,
'Oh, I've done that.' "
In 1997, not long after Zink moved
to Israel, Eitan took her to Haifa to in-
troduce her to a friend of his, a writer
named Avner Shats. By the end of the
evening, Shats and Zink had launched
an extraordinary friendship. The two
lived some sixty miles apart and did
not see each other often, but they began
corresponding nearly every day. Zink
also set about trying to read his first
book, "Sailing Toward the Sunset," but
Shats regarded that as "an impossible
task": it was a di cult postmodern novel
written in Hebrew, a language that Zink
had barely begun learning. Either in
defiance or in accord, Zink gave up try-
ing to read it and started rewriting it
in English instead.
Zink wrote "Sailing Toward the Sun-
set by Avner Shats" in three weeks.The
novel has, Shats clarifies, "absolutely no
similarities to my story"---or, for that
matter, to any other story ever written.
In addition to the seal-woman (a figure
from Celtic mythology called a silkie)
and the Mossad agent with the prepos-
terous mission, the book features Zink
herself, Eitan, and a mysterious sub-
marine powered by a slip of paper on
which is written the name of Moshe
Dayan. Toward the end of the novel,
that paper is transferred to and ani-
mates, with arresting results, the agent's
childhood Teddy bear.
Plenty weird, and plenty plenty,
but that is not the sixteenth of it. "Sail-
ing Toward the Sunset" also contains,
among other things, an inquiry into
the nature of translation; a translation
proper, by Zink, of Robert Walser's
"The Job Application"; a lovely, con-
trolled short story based on a diary entry
by Kafka; a lot of incisive, o -the-cu
literary criticism (of Proust, Richard-
son, Faulkner, Eliot, Melville, Sterne,
Solzhenitsyn); and a short work of sci-
ence fiction, set in Long Island City, in
a future where the global population
has shrunk radically and those who re-
main in the planet's skeletal, sky-high
cities are "doomed, like the great whales:
so few were left, in so large a space."
Avner Shats, the first and for many
years the only reader of "Sailing To-
ward the Sunset by Avner Shats," was,
he says, "overwhelmed by her ability to
write such excellent stu so fast." He
liked it so much that he translated it
into Hebrew.
"Sailing Toward the Sunset" is rep-
resentative: until last year, all of Zink's
work was written for a tiny audience---
generally as tiny as one or zero. While
working as a bricklayer, she wrote a
series of stories about a construction
worker, then threw them all away. In
Germany, she made friends with a
Russian composer, and wrote, for his
amusement only, a libretto for an op-
eretta---in rhymed couplets, in Ger-
man. In 2005, she wrote another novel
for Shats, "European Story." Set at an
artists' retreat in Florence, it is slightly
less madcap than "Sunset," but no less
funny and smart. I know that only be-
cause Shats held onto his copy; Zink
deleted hers. Later, she wrote another
novel, "The Baron of Orschel-Hagen,"
about a patron of the arts obsessed
with commissioning a very particular
work. Afterward, Zink decided she
didn't like it, and erased the original
and all the backups.
Burck, her first husband, attributes
the clandestine nature and short half-
life of Zink's writing to the Brontë-
or-bust standard of her childhood.
"The thought that she might write
something that wasn't good was ter-
rifying," he said, "so it's safer to not
write or not show anybody what you
write." Zink herself often speaks of
writing for the love of writing, and
that must be partly true, too. Certainly
she was not reaping any reward, be-
yond the pleasure of amusing herself
and maybe one other person. Still, she
recognizes that directing her work to
one heterosexual man who wasn't her
partner was a way of protecting her-
self: her writing could be interpreted
as flirting, rather than as writing in
earnest. "It's nice to have the excuse
of heteronormativity," she says. "You
can explain it away, you can say, 'Well,
she has a crush on him.' It lowers the
risks for me."
Zink also recognizes that, although
she was writing to men, she wrote in
a way that men seldom do. "The stan-
dard male version of what I was doing,"
she says, "is to have this unbelievably
endless thing you've been working
on since you were seventeen. I wasn't
like that at all. I was always trying to
create some little thing, then find-
ing it wanting and throwing it away."
After deleting "The Baron of Orschel-
Hagen," she decided to give up fiction
altogether and pursue journalism, in
German, on behalf of birds---a plan
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 18, 2015
43