Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (audiobook)

[4.5] I listened to the UK audiobook read by Jeremy Northam.

How else could this have been written? The central narrative of Homage to Catalonia was like glimpsing a platonic ideal of non-fiction reportage: the definitive, the default - which must be because Orwell has become an (the?) exemplar of good English style, filtered into countless other things I've read, from books to below-the-line newspaper comments. (Sometimes I can see the lineage: a friend whose writing sometimes sounds like Hitchens, and Hitchens was inspired by Orwell - but mostly it's just everywhere.) I hadn't read a full book of Orwell's since my teens, either, so in that way too, it was revisiting something so familiar it must have been resident, quiescent in my subconscious.

It seemed to have the perfect balance between being about the writer, and about the 'important things' the book is supposed to be about. And of course he is a first-hand participant, by actually fighting in the war, in a way that few modern non-fiction writers are - and he was an experienced writer before he set out, unlike most memoirists. He mucks in, yet mentions human frailties: a dislike of mountains and a sensitivity to cold (linked?), and a loathing of rats that grows and, as millions will have realised before me, must have inspired Room 101. (A term which unfortunately makes me think of Paul Merton and the TV series first, and 1984 second.) He is sometimes very thoughtful - making an apology to readers who'd written to him about his last book, and whose letters had been taken during a raid on his hotel in Spain before he could reply - yet no paragon. He occasionally enjoys writing graffiti like a teenager, not a man of 33. His account of being hospitalised with a 'poisoned hand' is intriguing in its reflection of another time's attitudes and processes, in the way he doesn't consider it terribly serious, although it does require hospital, and is in outcome, a correction to those who assume that the death toll before antibiotics was 100%.

Political analysis is mostly in the long appendices at the end, about 25% of the book, which even Orwell advises skipping if you are not interested. These appendices have not stood the test of time, as explained here by a contemporary historian - and the level of detail is beyond what most readers will need now if they are not taking a course about the historiography of the Spanish Civil War. Nevertheless, I found it impossible not to respect Orwell's intention to explain, and to be loyal to the group he had fought with. (And his negative experiences of the Spanish communist party also help make sense of his writing Animal Farm at a time when many British socialists were still enamoured of the Soviets.) Even if the analysis of the Barcelona fighting has its problems, his intimations of international war turned out to be right. His sense that Spain could only have a dictatorship after the civil war, even if the republicans won, cannot be tested, but it’s eerie to read now.

The main book was more of a narrative memoir than I had assumed, with most analysis left to the end. And there was unexpected dry humour - although such may be the way of war stories, humour as coping mechanism - and Northam's reading brought this out without ever overplaying it.
They impounded all papers, including the contents of the waste-paper basket, and all our books into the bargain. They were thrown into ecstasies of suspicion by finding that we possessed a French translation of Hitler's Mein Kampf. If that had been the only book they found our doom would have been sealed. It is obvious that a person who reads Mein Kampf must be a Fascist. The next moment, however, they came upon a copy of Stalin's pamphlet, Ways of Liquidating Trotskyists and other Double Dealers, which reassured them somewhat.
During the same episode, among the driest, darkest sentences of humour I've ever encountered: This was not a round-up of criminals; it was merely a reign of terror.
Another favourite subtly gave a fascinating picture of British political alignments of 1936:
the News Chronicle-New Statesman version of the war as the defence of civilization against a maniacal outbreak by an army of Colonel Blimps in the pay of Hitler.
That harks back to a time when appeasement policy was forseeable (and in effect was already being used towards Spain, under the guise of neutrality) - but less so Winston Churchill as PM and war leader, and Powell & Pressburger's refashioning of the Colonel Blimp stereotype into a patriotic wartime drama, no longer just the military Gammon of his day.

Orwell’s first-hand experience gives the potential for humour alongside serious coverage in a way that a political book of the day, or a history book, would not. And it also means more emotional involvement. His accounts of life in the trenches were occasionally harrowing to an extent for which I was not prepared. For the first time I understood what this - admittedly sponsored – study about audiobooks and emotion was getting at. I’ve also been listening to long audiobooks about Russians under Stalin, and British women in the Second World War, both of which quote individual testimonies, but here the duration of involvement with one account gave it a different dimension. (It was good to have experienced this, but I am not looking for such an emotive experience with audiobooks, so I will be careful about whole-book first-person narratives in future.) His bursts of anger, about men he knew who had died, didn’t always flow perfectly with the rest of the narrative, but they made it all the more human, and even better for it.

Being there on the ground, and writing in book form months later rather than a news reporter’s regular dispatches, meant he could give a medium-term overview of a type rarely heard by the general public about events this long ago. Of, for instance, the changes in manners and atmosphere in Barcelona in the months either side of his frontline service: he arrives to a remarkable experiment in socialism in which formal forms of address have been dropped and the attitudes of waiters are not deferential; and only months later, in a city that had been surprisingly comfortable and insulated away from the front, more traditional ways have begun to reassert themselves. Six months earlier, looking like a proletarian was what made you respectable and kept you safe; later it could be a risk.

The contrast between England and Spain - and especially that between the life a ‘lower upper-middle class’ Englishman (as Orwell elsewhere described his social standing) had been prepared for, and the conditions of the Spanish Civil War – is a recurring theme explored with a greater self-awareness and openness than plenty of contemporary popular travel writers would manage, who wouldn’t explicitly warn: beware of my partisanship, ... and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events. I wondered if to some foreign readers he seemed to go on about England and Englishness too much, but to me it seems a necessary part of his exploration of why he finds things different, and of how he works out how to behave and survive under these conditions. He refers more than once to grappling with, and learning to disregard, an underlying belief that “they couldn’t arrest you unless you broke the law”, as happened in England. (Or perhaps as applied to men like him in England. It reminded me a little of a sheltered posh student discovering that drunk and disorderly was something that could actually apply to him too – although Orwell, being rather older and wiser, twigs well before it’s too late.) This being the 1930s, one can’t entirely escape essentialism and the idea of national characteristics, but what there is of it is based on real experience and observation, explained in detail. And any disgust at ‘backwardness’ is about the conditions people have to endure, for example in jails whose conditions were, he considers, last seen in Britain in the 18th century, or for peasants having to make do with a harrow made of wooden boards and flint, like something out of the later stone age, and which makes him look more kindly on industrialism.

Something in Homage to Catalonia, perhaps this observation of conditions and necessary behaviour, and awareness of one’s own position without spending excess time on deprecating it, gave me the sense that this would have been a good book to have absorbed before going on a student gap year to some troubled part of the world. (Perhaps more so before the social media boom where one hears about everything anyway.) There is some deep sense of how to cope and how to think in here, and immersion in a book narrating thought processes can inculcate them in a way a couple of sentences of direct advice can’t - a book about things that are almost certainly far worse than what you’d ever encounter, but which, similar to Ivan Denisovich could seem like a sort of toolkit for surviving things that seem difficult after a sheltered early life. I suppose the way I keep referring to students reflect my feelings that this is a book that should have been read earlier in life. Not that it doesn’t still have a lot to interest someone older as a memoir of immersion in historic events, and of another time, 80 years ago, when it was even more the case that “You could not, as before, 'agree to differ' and have drinks with a man who was supposedly your political opponent”, but the adventure and bravado, and realism and dumb luck of it all seem not merely interesting, but actually potentially illustrative and useful for teenagers and twentysomethings.

But what a thing this is to read in autumn 2018:
And then England - southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass that way… to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don’t worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday. The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth’s surface … all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by…
There are different concerns now about what is looming, but loom it does, and the safe, ensconced plushness, the feeling it's impossible bad things could happen, is part of why.


The reading, too, worked excellently. Northam was a recognisable name, an actor whom, in my teens, I saw in a stage play and, to stave off potential boredom rather because of any overwhelming interest, decided to fancy for the duration and a few weeks afterwards. In the past ten years or so, I'd noticed that he had been in various things on TV, but I was never interested enough to watch them. Here, like, or perhaps because of, Orwell's words, he seemed to be nothing at all to do with that actor from my teens, but a definitive/default male Radio 4 voice. (An anonymous one, rather than a recognisable classic like Brian Perkins.) A voice that could have been on there 20 or 30 years ago announcing the time and imminent programming, rather than someone you'd notice for their accent and as a mark of modernisation. It is an RP accent which does not tend towards the distractingly old-fashioned (now heard as affected) Mr Cholmondley-Warner type (which the real Orwell, for all I know, may have had, what with being born in colonial India in 1903) but which is classic and un-modern enough that it fused with the narrative until I felt I was hearing a story told by an Englishman who'd actually been in Spain the 1930s. (Really, though a voice of an actor who, when I was growing up, might have played a young man in some drama set in the 1930s.) The reading was practically faultless and strangely believeable as the voice of someone who'd written the words; the only slip I noticed was one of emphasis in mentioning Penguin Library books: the stress fell as if they had been borrowed library books, rather than purchased paperbacks, published by a particular imprint. I only really remembered I was listening to an actor when the Irish accent put on for brief conversation with a comrade was better than I think the average author would have done, and in the highly entertaining shifts of tone and volume in one scene in which a succession of people whisper to, and outright tell, Orwell that he must "get out" of a hotel where he has been staying, due to a raid. I must try and listen to Northam's reading of The Road to Wigan Pier as this is now what George Orwell sounds like in my head, and there is no good reason I never finished that book.


(listened and reviewed Sept 2018; the review on Goodreads.)

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington

A book I've been circling for years, even before I joined Goodreads: depending what I heard about it, sometimes it sounded enticing and light (a charming, funny, Alice-like fantasy with intellectual depth) sometimes depressing (about an old lady in an oppressive nursing home). I was finally induced to read it by this recent interview with Olga Tokarczuk, in which she says it influenced her newly-translated Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead.

Some editions of The Hearing Trumpet, including the Virago Modern Classic, include a 1991 introduction by Helen Byatt. This contains material about crones and witches in surrealism and feminism, madness, boarding schools, occultism including Gurdjieff, the Grail and Robert Graves' [book:The White Goddess|820465] (a book I'm glad I read when I was younger, before I knew people rarely bother with it these days, as it's referenced in a surprising number of things) and vaguely Margaret-Murrayish ideas of wild pre-Christian matriarchal religion, equating maleness with Christianity and authoritarian sky-gods generally. This did not make me look forward to The Hearing Trumpet itself - it made me glad the book was short - but it was interesting to have my attention drawn to the ideas about modernity and religion while in the middle of Sarah Moss' Ghost Wall, which includes the idea that modernity is better for women, and soon after reading a friend's review - of yet another book - which pointed out the contradictions between feminisms.) By the end of the book, I thought there were topics the introduction had unjustly neglected, but more of that later. If I have read the newer introduction in the Penguin edition, by Ali Smith, it would have been years ago in a bookshop and I can't remember anything about it - I'd like to read it (again?) now.

In the novel, I was surprised how good, and how instantly likeable, the narrative voice is. Marian, 92, absolutely sounds like an old lady. (And like the author, she is an English expat in Mexico.) In the early part of the novel, it reads like a really good children's book, with delightful lines like "people under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats" on nearly every page. Her existence seems idyllic, and so one inevitably feels it is unjust that her callous, image-obsessed son and daughter-in-law decide to put her in a home. (Even if one is an age at which peers consider homes for aged parents.) Although the home turns out to be architecturally adorable (and worthy of a surrealist art exhibition) and to have intriguing fellow-residents, the management are a new-age cult who continually invalidate and refuse to listen to the people in their care. Carrington portrays them with sufficient lightness of touch that they are ridiculous caricatures at least as much as monsters. Rather than making a big deal out of the 'reality' or otherwise of what Marian says - as many contemporary authors would, creating an unreliable narrator who may have dementia, or in children's fiction, in which a child hero needs to persuade at least one adult that something is real - she is a reliable narrator of her own reality, a reality which makes up pretty much all the book and which reads as a slipstream fantastical narrative. (She is always clear other than one passage near the beginning, in a stream of consciousness mode like disjointed thoughts from the edge of sleep). Even if a reader were to bring a cold and clinical attitude that most of what happens is in Marian's imagination, it would surely make one think about the amazing worlds that a person may contain.

The humour tapers off in the second half (or perhaps becomes darker and more subtle) as the narrative approaches the story-within-a-story, an account of a covertly occult 18th-century Spanish saint and abbess. It reads, minor historical inaccuracies and all, like an early-20th century horror tale. I think it was at the end of the story of Abbess Rosalinda, when Marian remarks "I had become affectionately attached to the intrepid and energetic Abbess. The fact that the snooping priest... had done his best to portray her in a pernicious light, hardly distorted the purity of her original image. She must have been a most remarkable woman" that I first thought 'what a twentieth-century book'. Perhaps it's because of a comment I read somewhere online recently that only from a century's 20s does the character of a century start to emerge (there are counter-arguments, but in English history, the late 30s of the 16th and 19th centuries fit) and sufficient distance is established to characterise the earlier century as a whole. Approbation of the Abbess disregards her own crimes and her disregard of those committed by others. I've seen it said elsewhere, with disgust, that sexual abuse, especially of boys, by male clergy was such an open secret that it had become a running joke in 20th century British literature, and one that should no longer be funny. Perhaps that's an especially 2010s sentiment - it's far too early to tell. But in the context of fantasy literature, it feels like this is another way in which this isn't just a very 1960s-1970s book, but encompasses ideas that ran through more decades either side: the lineage from the Golden Dawn through Gardnerian Wicca to the New Age; from Kellogg's sanatorium to dodgy hippie cults; elderly people talk of the First World War and have peculiar deference to aristocracy in a world of plastic wallpaper and electric fires with glowing fake logs, and on one level it's about social liberalisation and increased human rights, and the throwing off of a stuffy old order, the big Western narrative of the whole second half. (It still seems remarkable that Carrington apparently wrote this in the early 60s - if only she'd published it then, she'd have been so ahead of her time, and I suspect the book would have been better known. It's full of stuff which feels like end-60s burnout: indictment of cults and their leaders, jumping off tall buildings and dying under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs; apocalyptic tabloid scare of the time, a new ice age, also fictionalised with flair by Anna Kavan, as well as the playful, psychedelic exuberance of a couple of years earlier, and the principles of Szasz and Laing.)

There's quite a lot of upper-middle-class Englishness here (though Leonora, is rather remarkably, nothing at all to do with Dora Carrington of the Bloomsburies) but I'd love to hear more, well, anything, about The Hearing Trumpet in the context of Latin American art & lit. (Byatt describes Carmella's repeated mentions of firearms as masculine, but I thought them more likely to relate to the prevalence of revolutions, coups and armed rebels in the region.) I haven't read enough Latin American myself to say exactly what's relevant, but it does feel like there's something connectable in The Hearing Trumpet to the magic realism and tricksiness of the Boom.

The line-drawn illustrations in this edition, by the author's son, are in a style quite different from the cover painting (hers) and are not my sort of thing, but may appeal to fans of David Shrigley and Allie Brosh.

I've rated it 4 stars rather than 5, unlike many GR friends, because I didn't find the joy in it that makes a 5-star read (due to the setting) but it is absolutely a wonderful little book that deserves to be more widely read.

(read and reviewed September 2018; the review on Goodreads.)

Pan Tadeusz: The Last Foray in Lithuania by Adam Mickiewicz, tr. Bill Johnston

The new translation published in 2018 by Archipelago Books. I received a free Advance Review Copy ebook via Edelweiss.

Pan Tadeusz is the Polish classic, the ‘national epic’. In English, there isn’t a sole work with comparable stature and ubiquity.

Given my heritage, the way I'd felt about not having read Pan Tadeusz was much as if I hadn't read - or even really known the stories of - Pride and Prejudice, or Jane Eyre, or Oliver Twist as soon as I could.

But I’m also particular about translations: I didn’t want to read Tadeusz in an old translation with poor style. It was easy not even to try, given the disgraceful lack of Polish classics in UK bookshops and from major British publishers. Pre-internet, I didn’t even know of English translations, and I’ve certainly never seen one to browse in a shop or library, whereas I stumbled on the Oxford edition of the Finnish national epic The Kalevala in a bookshop round about 2002. The sing-song style of Kenneth Mackenzie’s 1964 translation - Amazon preview here, if you scroll past the introduction – was one I knew I could not enjoy, nevermind love, or recommend without apology. Long sequences of obvious line-end rhymes don’t sound good in contemporary English - worse than in some other languages. Mickiewicz’s hero and near-contemporary Byron may have used them in English, but a) twentieth-century translators aren’t Byron and b) I don’t really like the sound of them in Byron anyway.

The lack of a great new translation of Pan Tadeusz in the late 00s - 2010s had puzzled me, given the current enthusiasm for translated books in the English-speaking literary world, and the visibility of Poles in Britain (by the biggest foreign-born minority, and for some years before that, the second). It had been so long that I’d become resigned to never reading it my whole life, and just watching the Andrzej Wajda film instead. (I watched a few of his in the spring but - now, it seems, luckily - hadn’t got round to his Pan Tadeusz.)


So I don’t think I’ve ever been as delighted to see a book appear in my Goodreads feed as I was to sight this, Bill Johnston’s new translation of Pan Tadeusz, just over a week ago. Bill Johnston, who translated my favourite contemporary Polish book, Dukla by Andrzej Stasiuk, a thing of intoxicating atmosphere and exquisite descriptions. Thank you very much to Goodreads friend Lee Klein for posting about the advance review copy he’d received from Archipelago, and thereby alerting me to this translation's existence. I went straight over to Edelweiss, which I hadn’t been on for about 18 months, and was able to get an e-ARC there. Reading it has been accompanied by strange synergies: learning of a direct ancestor named Tadeusz whose lifetime overlapped the fictional one, and this morning finding the Windows Spotlight random lockscreen picture was of another, entirely different, ancestral area.

Once or twice, as I started the book, I felt foolish for not having read an earlier translation cover to cover, that I wouldn’t be writing a full-scale comparison in a review. But a quick look back at the beginning of the Mackenzie, and the Project-Gutenberg-age Noyes prose translation, made me glad - as first impressions have a stronger effect on me than they ought - that I was reading it for the first time in a version which I could love in the way that I love a few great English classics.


This is a seriously impressive feat of translation. (Johnston’s webpage indicates he’s been working on it since 2013.) I think I’ve only read two other volumes of translated poetry I found as good in themselves, Edna St Vincent Millay’s version of Baudelaire (in a class apart, and a reworking as much as a translation) and the [book:New Collected Poems|305941] of Tomas Transtromer, translated by Robin Fulton. I also loved Keith Bosley’s translation of the Kalevala – which I now hanker to re-read – but much of that was for the story and atmosphere, and I more often wondered how lines would have sounded in the original, than marvelled at the construction in English.

Mickiewicz wrote Pan Tadeusz in a characteristic Polish meter, thirteen-syllable alexandrines. Johnston has transposed it into the classic English iambic pentameter, and made wonderful use of enjambment, half-rhymes and similar devices that feel like real poetry which has stood the test of time and sound right to the contemporary reader. (The meter also augmented the quality of the multiple-wedding ending, by association with Shakespearean comedy.) The rhyming couplets do not weigh down the ends of lines as they would from a lesser pen. Johnston states in his introduction that this is also a line-by-line translation. As someone who has never been able to write so much as a decent limerick, I find that phenomenal. There is the occasional line or word that doesn’t quite work on more than a scansion level, but in such a long poem, that is only to be expected, and the great stuff by far outweighs the misfires.



I didn’t realise how little I knew (or maybe how much I’d forgotten) about Pan Tadeusz before I read it. Tadeusz himself is only nineteen. (He first appears in a wonderful scene of returning home after finishing university, one which in some respects could only have occurred so far in the past, and in a large country - he didn’t visit during his studies, nor hear much news from relatives - but which is also beautifully familiar in its evocation of how a place once known has changed, and seeing one’s old room repurposed.) He is present in many scenes, but is by no means at the centre of all the action - I can see why the poem has an alternative subtitle. It is contemporaneous with parts of War and Peace, and is another of the 19th century great works springing from the Napoleonic Wars – and of course the ominous Great Comet of 1811 is sighted:

Then hauling them north, toward the polar star.
All Lithuania, filled with dread untold,
Nightly would watch this spectacle unfold—
An evil sign, with other auguries:
Birds of ill omen gave portentous cries
And gathered in empty fields, bills sharpened, massed
As though expecting corpses for a feast.
Dogs, rooting obstinately in the earth,
Howled and howled shrilly, as if smelling death—
Betokening war or famine; foresters
Saw the Plague Maiden in the graveyard firs,
Head higher yet than where the treetops stand,
A bloodied scarf aflap in her left hand.

The portent is left hanging in the air, because, as Johnston explains in the introduction, the text largely conveys a sense of hope, by ending before battle, when the Napoleonic army might still help Poland-Lithuania free itself from the Russians. Even snapshots of historical defeat can sound victorious to the uninitiated:

Next comes Jasiński, handsome, young, unbending,
Alongside Korsak, his bosom companion, standing
On Praga’s ramparts on heaped Russian dead,
Hacking down more as Praga blazes red.

Old Maciej, one of my favourite characters, is more circumspect about the forthcoming battle, but is finally shifted aside for this opinion. Emotionally, the story’s ending feels happy, even if you know it’s not actually going to be later. It’s evident why Pan Tadeusz endured, and sustained Poles through partition and the Soviet bloc years.

A lot of the poem is made up of two types of scene. There's pastoral description, which I love - I’m one of the few people who would have liked Anna Karenina better if there were more of it – but the sheer quantity of scenery probably has a lot to do with the low rating of the book by Poles, for whom it is a permanent, national fixture on their equivalent of the A-level syllabus. And secondly, large-scale, largely drunken fighting. Most of the conflict is related in a detailed and exciting way which worked brilliantly for me as a fan of action films. I liked hearing about the characters (lots of the ‘retired badass’ trope, a favourite of mine) and their histories and weapons, and there was just the right number of them – enough to give a feeling of scale, but not so many it was confusing or that they were reduced to the sort of brief mentions that, IMO, made parts of the Iliad little more than a casualty list. A ‘foray’ here is a kind of armed raid by neighbours that took place to enforce a court decision in an area without police, and there seems to have been something of a raiding culture – although not as lawless as the Scots/English Border Reivers – which had declined through the later 18th century and which by the time Pan Tadeusz is set, had pretty much disappeared under Russian rule.

For those who love to absorb social history through fiction and poetry, especially this kind of rural setting found in Tolstoy, and as Johnston points out, Thomas Hardy (now I want to read more Hardy!), Pan Tadeusz is a feast. And boy are there feasts in this book...


Some readers may wish to be forewarned that there are hunting scenes; these occur in much the same way you’d find in Tolstoy, couched in descriptions of nature and landscape. The age of one of the female love interests may bother some English-speaking readers, although from the perspective of historical understanding, I found the way she was presented interesting. When Zosia first appeared, I read her as 16, 17 or 18 (and with her peasanty clothes and habit of using windows as doors, I imagined her looking like a slightly younger version of Malina in Wajda’s Brzezina). Throughout the story - if it hadn’t been for the one scene in which Zosia’s aunt mentions that she is 13 and now of age - I would have assumed that she was in her mid to late teens. She simply seems to be regarded by society in a way that, in an English novel of the same period, reflected a girl a few years older. (I have seen a few genealogical records of 15 year olds married in late 18th-19th century Poland, and this was a region in which the West European Marriage Pattern did not apply.)

The aunt, Telimena (probably in her 30s) may not always be so flatteringly portrayed later in the poem as she is at first, but what stuck with me most strongly was the first scene in which she appears:
So she asked about new books, and how he rated
Their authors (she spoke in French), while his replies
Led to more questions touching on his views.
And then—well, then she turned to music, dance,
Art, sculpture too. Her knowledge was immense,
Whether of canvas, score, or printed word.
Her learning left Tadeusz stunned, and scared
That he’d end up exposed to ridicule;
He stammered like a pupil quizzed in school.

This is a work that has a place for an intelligent woman, in a way that by no means all 19th century literature does, even if, it’s later indicated, she might be a bit too much of a pretentious hipster and too modern. She doesn’t meet a bad end, either, it’s a pragmatic one, even if she doesn’t remain on a pedestal.


I’m pretty sure no-one had ever told me before that Pan Tadeusz is humorous. It gives it whole layers of enjoyment I never expected. (What did I used to think it was? Probably something about a 60-year old man reminiscing about his life and travels.) This is the Romantic movement partly being itself, and partly laughing at itself. Perfect for my sensibilities. It’s epic poetry… but it also mentions things like swatting flies while preparing to cook; the epic form is sometimes mocked, sometimes used in earnest. It struck me that another classic Polish poet, Juliusz Słowacki, criticised it as 'piggish' for its low rural comedy and domesticity - this is the stuff for which I like it so much. Even calling it Pan Tadeusz after a character who isn't the centre of the action and who is neither hugely heroic nor anti-heroic, seems part of the semi-satire. Older characters and customs reflect Sarmatianism, essentially an earlier, institutionalised form of Romanticism particular to Poland-Lithuania, Hungary and some neighbouring countries. The foray happens basically because a young nobleman who’s been on the Grand Tour thinks ancient family feuds are really cool.


Pan Tadeusz was written in Polish, is seen as a Polish work, and several characters are described as ‘good Poles’ – but the action takes place in what is now Belarus, where Mickiewicz was born, and the narrative frequently hails Lithuania. This is the legacy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of the greatest powers of early modern Europe (Russia’s incipient colonial expansion had not yet made it the looming great bear) but barely known to many Westerners who don’t read East European history or play historical strategy games. As Johnston relates in his introduction, its apparently progressive system of elected monarchs also led to its weakening and demise, and to the partition of Poland among neighbouring powers in the late 18th century. Pan Tadeusz is the story of Polish-speaking gentry, szlachta (some Polish by ancestry, some Lithuanian, many mixed) and their rivalry with local aristocrats – the former had some differences of status from English gentry – but it doesn’t relate what local Lithuanian-speaking peasantry (serfs) thought of all this. This mélange of nationalities spilling across borders doesn’t, again, have direct equivalents in the contemporary English speaking West, and it reflects the multicultural pre-Second World War Central and Eastern Europe, before many of those identifying as Poles, Germans etc were resettled within the current borders of those countries, and of course before the Jewish communities were destroyed. (Through the whole poem, there are 3 or 4 lines that read as antisemitic or negative stereotypes of Jews – in 2018, the notes’ description of the blood libel as a canard doesn’t look a strong enough word ... even 3 years ago these things seemed more of the past. But there are a lot more lines representing Jewishness positively, via the innkeeper Jankiel, who is shown as very popular and an all-round top bloke.)

Pan Tadeusz is a text haunted by a future its author could never have known. Look up character surnames online and there are famous people born long after Mickiewicz died, who must spring to mind for many modern Polish readers. Look up place names online and it’s massacre after hideous massacre, the repetition reinforcing horrific statistic that over 95% of Jews in Lithuania were killed, by Nazis and locals from 1941-44, to the point that I started wondering how on earth anyone descended from Lithuanian Jews made it – although of course, like Bob Dylan’s grandparents, most of their forebears would have left quite some time earlier.

This edition has good notes which stick to the directly relevant 18th-19th century history – Mickiewicz’s original notes, which he wrote because he was writing about an area and mostly-vanished customs unfamiliar even to many Polish readers of the 1830s, and more by Bill Johnston. (Johnston’s introduction is also great for historical context. One small point I’d like to respond to: he says that the only gratuitous glorification of anything Polish is of coffee; I think I noticed one more: frogs.)

It was because I was reading on desktop that I looked so much on Wikpedia and elsewhere, and took so long to read the book. (It is quite a short text, with a Kindle count of 3600.) I don’t mind the layout issues of PDF ARCs converted to Kindle when a book is in prose, but for poetry, I want to read the words on the right lines. Reading on desktop did mean, though, that I got a fuller cultural picture of references in the book when I looked things up online – which is what I wanted for such a momentous read in personal terms. It was also interesting to follow tangents such as photos of ethnographic folk museums, the disagreements between the pre-war Litvak and Galician Jewish communities and the Gefilte fish line, and the mostly-complimentary Chicago Polish stereotype, Grabowski and associated, less flattering, comedy sketches. If you don’t feel compelled to read all the history you will be fine with the endnotes in the book – only snag is they are not linked in the text, at least in the e-ARC.


If you are going to read Pan Tadeusz in English, you should read this translation, which deserves to become the definitive modern one. If you’ve read it previously in another version and didn’t like it much, but the work is important to you, re-read it in this one. I hope Johnston’s version ends up as a Penguin or Oxford Classic, because it bloody well should - though one of them bloody well should have done Pan Tadeusz a long time ago. (Random House’s buying up of Knausgård from Archipelago leads me to hope that this edition might get the distribution it deserves by a similar route.)

Sometimes it seems a shame that the best-known translation prizes, like the Booker International and the BTBA don’t accept re-translations. It's obvious why they don't, as a rule: a Pevear & Volokhonsky rendition of a popular Russian novel that’s already been translated fifteen times doesn’t need the publicity, but lesser-known classics may – and when a translation of one of those is superlatively good, as this one is, it deserves acclaim and attention.

This is a bit like when I finished War and Peace, except that then, there had been longer to get used to it: I still can’t quite believe I’ve actually read Pan Tadeusz. And I really can't believe that it was this enjoyable.

(read and reviewed September 2018; the review and comment thread on Goodreads.)

A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov, tr. Natasha Randall

[4.5] Each time I've started reading A Hero of Our Time - and there have been three or four - it's been tremendous fun. This is partly due to the playful self-awareness and utterly modern attitude of the second and third sentences, which shine through in every translation I've tried, and in this version mention:
one valise of average size, half-filled with my travel notes about Georgia. The majority of these luckily for you, were lost; but the valise with the rest of my things, luckily for me, remained intact.

I know these days that 'postmodernity' is about as old as the novel itself (a look at reviews of [author:Steven Moore|16001]'s histories of the novel will help), but meeting phrases like these, sparkling out from the dust of 200 years, still brings nearly the same surprise and delight as I got twenty years ago from discovering [book:The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner|87580].

Despite my enthusiasm, each previous time I began to read A Hero of Our Time, I was waylaid by things I can no longer remember, and got nowhere near finishing the book. But now I have finished it, and straight away went back to re-read various bits and pieces. (There are few books I like enough to bother doing this. It's also a testament to it that I started again from the beginning so many times. I usually avoid doing this when picking up a book after a gap, so I don't have to read the same chapters again and can get to the end more quickly.)

Hero isn't like the typical Anglophone idea of a Russian classic: a giant, complex opera or symphony (i.e. a Tolstoy doorstopper). It's short, immediate, and full of escapades and scrapes: an old-fashioned boys' own adventure. (Neil LaBute's foreword to this Penguin Classics edition rightly compares Pechorin to Flashman, and dreams up a meeting for the two characters during the Crimean War, which I, for one, would really like to read.) Bring the expectations you'd bring to Verne or Conan Doyle, rather than those for high literature, and you'll get more out of it.

The British boys' own adventure isn't just an adventure story, though, it's a document of Empire, colonialism and imperialist attitudes, and the same goes for A Hero of Our Time in the Russian context. For some reason, it's very unusual in mass media to hear Russia (or the Soviets) described as a colonial and imperial power in the same way that Western European countries are - this understanding of the country seems mostly confined to academic works. Perhaps, because Russia was appropriating territories contiguous to its own borders - many of which it still rules - while Britain was spreading pink over the global map to the Americas, Asia and Africa, it just isn't as obvious to the general public. A few months ago, I was browsing [book:Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy|1181367]; I thought reading fiction would be an enjoyable and inexpensive way to learn a bit more about Imperial Russian colonialism - and there among the most significant works was Lermontov and A Hero of Our Time, so I picked up the book again, and found myself noticing sentences I would once not have looked at so intently: all these characterisations of 'Asiatics', Cossacks, warlords and their families. I might otherwise have read them with the same well-it's-not-great-but-it's-old resignation as I'd have brought to a 19th-century Londoner's stereotyping of locals during his journey to the north of England, and not filed alongside British Empire-builders' depictions of India with the Said-Orientalism toolkit etc. (Not that one couldn't also apply that to regional and class snobbery, actually.) My desire to hear more about the place and time, and the relative unfamiliarity (only, for comparison, having the memory of a few documentaries and newspaper articles from and about the 1990s-present) meant it was fascinating to an extent that similar stuff about the British Raj - a backdrop to dozens of novels, films and TV series since childhood - wouldn't be now.
(An interesting-looking book of stories about Russian colonialism from the Georgian side: [book:The Prose of the Mountains|28089291] )

As in British Imperialist literature, there are colonising protagonists who partly identify themselves with the colonised region and go native when it suits them (of course Pechorin can be mistaken for a Circassian), and there is a great aesthetic love of the landscape they've been sent to tame. Lermontov was also a painter, and it shows in the gorgeous extended descriptions of scenery. Natasha Randall's introduction says these can occasionally be repetitive, but I was enjoying wandering around in them way too much to notice.

In the last few years, I've read too many articles by women who identify with female supporting characters in fiction that has sexist male protagonists, and it's too current a subject to ignore in 2018 - so I should mention that the reader who identifies primarily with them here is unlikely to enjoy A Hero of Our Time so much. I'm not sure it would even be possible to identify with them in the first half - they are not so much characters as dolls or pets exemplifying desirable qualities of the era (there's also a Bond Girl), and the average contemporary Western reader has such a different background and emotional history that they are unlikely to truly fathom Bela, the kidnapped daughter of a Circassian warlord, and who has lived all her life in a culture in which such snatchings are commonplace, any more than Lermontov/Pechorin did. In the second half of the book (about social intrigue rather than derring-do), aristocratic Russian ladies from Moscow and St. Petersburg get more page time, and are evidently trying to negotiate their own emotions, and the double standards and conflicting expectations of their milieu and the Romantic period, where medieval courtly love style tendencies and expectations of respectable marriage coexist with a fashion for Byronic bad boys, and behaviours like pickup-artist style negging. I would guess that much ink has been spilled already on the similarities between Vera, Pechorin's former lover, and Anna Karenina.

LaBute - famous in the late 90s for his films about what's now called toxic masculinity - considers Pechorin to be a sociopath. And I have to say that certain of Pechorin's social manipulations, his nerve, and his occasional moments of introspection and doubt, closely resemble someone I used to know who described himself as a sociopath. I'm not talking serial killer bad (nor gloating at length over destroying people in the manner of Valmont in [book:Les Liaisons Dangereuses|49540], another character LaBute mentions) - more like Tony in Skins: an arrogant, clever, socially connected, player of games, sometimes very hurtful, and sometimes also useful and supportive when it suits. Given Pechorin's level of reflectiveness, you wonder how much of this arsery he might grow out of: possibly some, but not 100%. The energy and likeability with which Pechorin is presented shows realistically how such a person seems to acquaintances (of which they have a great many) until they do something too awful - and how they get on in life, in a way that the later tendency to present such personalities as sinister unreliable narrators really doesn't. (LaBute also does that thing, pretty much universal in New Lad-era media and later 20th century litfic, of presenting highly egotistical and difficult characters as universally, typically male, as if men's personalities did not, in fact, vary as much as women's.)

Randall, drawing attention to the psychological realism rather than to labels, compares A Hero of Our Time with [book:The Confession of a Child of the Century|16282313], another personal favourite of mine - although very different in its emotional intensity and not such an easy read - which is again remarkable in presenting the inner world of a difficult character without judgement, to an extent that modern works rarely do. The period when both books were written, the cusp between Romanticism and the fashion for realist fiction (a time also, importantly, before the codification of psychology and the rise of psychology-as-morality) seems to have been especially productive for this.

The lightness with which Pechorin's games are presented makes it clearer how he experiences them - they are not related with that heavy-handed insinuation that characterises later fiction about questionable individuals - and the narrative sometimes bestowed strange flashes of insight beyond the words on the page. I suddenly understood how hunting would be exciting because it would be different every time, moving through the landscape on different routes decided by another creature, different weather and sounds, not knowing where the quarry would go, different from the relatively fixed possibilities in, for example, gaming. Passages which could have been commonplace are elevated: something that in the hands of many later writers would have been a dyspeptic, predictable rant against astrology is here a poetic consideration of how 'we' see ourselves compared with how our ancestors saw themselves and their lives.

The structure is odd - the book ends abruptly, inside a framed narrative, and it's understandable that some readers would knock a star off for this, but the aytypicality of this in a 19th century novel felt interesting in itself. It helped to understand that this is actually a collection of short stories about one character and his world, previously published separately - it was even suggested that Lermontov might have written more about Pechorin had he lived longer - and the introduction's listing of the sequence in which the episodes happen prompted me to look over them again in that order for an altered perspective.

Even the title has more to give than I expected. A hero as in a (potential) war hero; a hero as in a Byronic hero (not necessarily approved of by those in the 19th century establishment who esteemed of the former), the implied question mark at the end - these could be obvious from reading the blurb. A facet added by contemporary Western life (especially outside the US) where warfare has not been part of most people's lives for a couple of generations, is the suspicion in some quarters of those who have killed or are prepared to kill repeatedly in the armed services: might it actually require a dark-triad sort of antisocial personality? Is that what a lot of 'heroes', especially old-fashioned heroes, really are?

A Hero of Our Time is a classic partly because of its place in the history of the Russian novel, as a bridge from Pushkin to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the Golden Age - and I admit that a bit of my enjoyment was from seeing it in this light (it was probably good to read it after W&P, AK, C&P and EO) and in relation to English literature (having seen it argued that Constance Garnett's translations of later Russian greats effectively prompted the incorporation of the country's major writers into the English canon). But mostly I found it to be something which, having read most of the 'easy' English classics a long time ago, I don't really expect any more from books of this age: an enjoyable, light adventure story with intriguing character portrait.

(finished & reviewed Sept 2018; the review on Goodreads.)