[3.5] If you are actively interested in the British Empire and current historical approaches to it, this is as good a place as any to start, and it contains a lot of useful information. But if you aren't especially keen on the topic in the first place, the broad, generalised overview of events in the central chapters, with too few specific examples and anecdotes, seems unlikely to spark overwhelming enthusiasm. For something more lively also involving British historians, you could listen to the several In Our Time episodes about empire and its legacy.
I read this book in two halves, more than six months apart. During the first half, it was serving as my introduction to some aspects of the topic; when I read the rest of it today (including restarting chapter 4), there was very little which I hadn't heard before. It is not one of those VSI books that takes an interestingly unconventional approach, and that still has plenty to offer the non-beginner, but it is a useful refresher due to its fairly comprehensive coverage. Nor does it neglect the cultural aspects of imperialism, whether in Britain or its effects on people in colonised areas, for example quoting Nelson Mandela: "The education I received was a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, and British institutions were automatically assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African culture."
The coverage of concepts of empire, both the British Empire and empires in general, in the early chapters, is useful, and introduces ideas that readers new to the subject probably won't have picked up elsewhere, such as classifications of different types of dominions, and the range and percentage of global natural resources in the pre-WWII empire, things more systematically understandable in writing than in a documentary voiceover,
During the 'Rise and Fall' chapter (4), the potted history of events, I craved interesting details, and in their absence found myself understanding why, when I was younger, I considered most history between 1603-1945 (with the possible exception of the English Civil War) to be dull, and ignored it when I could. The chapter's most interesting points were IMO: starting British Imperial history with English medieval incursions to Wales and Ireland; the reminder that Pax Britannica meant peace between the great powers (it's always said these days anyway that it was obviously not peace for those living in colonised areas); the Crimean War as an imperial war, trying to stop Russia gaining a foothold in the Mediterranean, and part of the fighting over the lands of the declining Ottoman Empire (because of Florence Nightingale, the Crimean War has remained famous in Britain among those who were not taught imperial history at school in the 1980s and 90s, with its wider context often unclear - and 19th century Russia is too little thought of as an imperial power because its conquests were contiguous); and the post-WWII idea of Portugal as a particularly backward colonial power, meaning that not being like the Portuguese government was among Britain's many motivations for withdrawing from its colonies in such a hurry in the late 1940s, 50s and 1960s.
I enjoyed the historiography chapter a lot more, because, well, historiography. And also more detail. (Beginners without an academic history background may be less keen of course.) It barely touches on the work of some major historians, but in a general introduction for the public and other beginners, it probably is fair to mention the likes of Niall Ferguson and Linda Colley several times, as they feature in the British media more often than many academic big names - although so does Catherine Hall, who only gets one mention. It could say more about history written outside the UK, although as this book was published in 2013, it pre-dates the splash made by Shashi Tharoor's Inglorious Empire.
The final chapter addresses a thorny question which, as Jackson says, many academics would rather ignore, but one which does interest the public: was the legacy of empire good or bad overall? It's an accomplished piece of writing, addressing many aspects on either side, essentially finding them indivisible, but leaning mildly towards an assertion that the bad aspects should not be forgotten. It's a position which is less radical than plenty of contemporary historians, but which might also be considered too radical and overly PC by staunch fans of Niall Ferguson and other conservatives. It is predicated on norms such as global trade and technological developments being broadly good for humanity - so anti-capitalists may find some aspects do not meet their expectations - and it does not explore the environmental impact of empire on non-human nature (by no means a settled question; for instance Amitav Ghosh suggested in The Great Derangement that it may have even slowed environmental damage and pollution by restricting the development of industry on the Indian subcontinent in the 19th century). It shows how the international world system still uses many concepts originating in 18th-19th century European empires, and very briefly touches on the pervasiveness of the imperial legacy via the popularity of sugar, cotton and chocolate, the question of whether empires may be better for religious freedom and some minorities than nation states (c.f. Romans, Ottomans) and the new colonialism of China via soft power and the purchase of land in Africa and other locations - interesting subjects covered in more depth in other publications. However, its pitch, and its determination to show both sides of the argument seems ideal for a varied general audience, which of course will not only be white British readers and conservative anglophiles, but people with ancestry from colonised areas, and a global readership including countries such as India.
(finished Nov 2018, reviewed Nov 2018. The review on Goodreads.)
21 November 2018
Loitering With Intent by Muriel Spark
A 1981 Booker-shortlisted novella, which I read for the upcoming forum book tournament Mookse Madness 2019, scheduled for March.
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The premise befits a nice Sunday evening TV drama - London, 1949: a young writer takes a job as secretary to an eccentric association of minor aristocrats working on their autobiographies - but it soon becomes apparent that this is more discomfiting than cosy. This happens with Muriel Spark books: I expect and want them to be cosy, and then they're not.
Fleur, the narrator, is very interesting, as are the varied responses to her in other reviews - among them 'likeable', and 'unreliable' (in the literary sense). She's strangely unsettling, and part of that is that she also isn't as unsettling as you sometimes expect she may become. In the first couple of chapters, I had déjà vu - perhaps I had read a few pages of this standing in a library or bookshop in the 90s - and I kept thinking how, as a teenager, I'd might have taken Fleur's opinions as right all round and to be emulated. Now I could see that she coded, sometimes, as intended to be unlikeable - yet she never actually became nefarious. In the end I concluded she was a type of spiky individual I like and when I meet one, I'm so glad to find someone who agrees with me about xyz and who doesn't fit in in certain ways I recognise, and sometimes tries to play the game, sometimes not. (‘You know,’ Dottie said, ‘there’s something a bit harsh about you, Fleur. You’re not really womanly, are you?’ …To show her I was a woman…) But on the other hand it's probably best that with them I never talk about abc, because we'd definitely disagree, and that I don't confide about anything that sounds a bit soft. She was another of these characters, like Gretel in this year's Booker shortlisted Everything Under, whom I'd perhaps prefer to talk to than read about within the confines of the novel. Fleur seems so real in her unstereotypical personality, which itself has twists and turns compared with most literary characters who seem cardboard cutouts by comparison: sometimes she's kind when you hadn't expected it, and just when you figured she's actually really nice after all, she says something catty. This is how people are in real life, not in books, perhaps especially when young and still figuring things out.
Yet she is also a notably unrealistic device of 1980s metafiction - a loud, raucous context (alongside Martin Amis) in which I never would have thought, of my own accord, to place this tale of more-or-less genteel machinations. (It's only a few open references to bodily fuctions and sex that indicate it wasn't written in the 50s or early 60s; otherwise it feels very much of that era.) Understanding, via the introduction by Mark Lawson (in the 2007 Virago edition), that there are 'autobiographical associations' lurking in the novel made me more interested in Muriel Spark as a person. I've never especially liked Lawson on TV and radio, but here, without his broadcast manner or the glibness of newspaper columns, it became apparent that he has some good insights into literature. There is plenty explained here which I wouldn't have spotted otherwise, as I've only read two or three books of Spark's previously and had read very little about the woman herself. If I'd ever known she was Catholic, I'd forgotten, and because I was used to seeing her defined foremost as a Scottish writer, had no idea that back in the 70s she'd been seen as one among Britain's major Catholic novelists of the 20th century, along with Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Anthony Burgess. (I'd tended to bracket Burgess with Ballard instead, as one with an interest in the shock of the new, whilst Waugh and Greene, it's easier to understand grouped together.) David Lodge, too, is mentioned, for metafiction, though Catholics were also a feature of several of his novels.
I love the book's milieu of shabby-genteel bedsit life and full time work with strange characters, which feels far more realistic than most contemporary books about young writers. Regardless of the non-existence of internet, this is still way realler now than Tao Lin or Sheila Heti. (Where are all the great new novels in which authors house-sit and work in temp admin jobs, and pare down that online grocery order to as little as possible over the minimum £40?) Spark's phrase for these circumstances "on the grubby edge of the literary world" also gives me the pithy description I'd been needing for Vernon Subutex - which I've been reading slowly for the last couple of weeks - vis a vis the music world. Fleur has a tacit self-assurance which is unaffected by the differences in wealth and class she encounters at work; there's no reason to believe she isn't English, but this kind of confident semi-detachment from English social structures strikes me as characteristic of educated Scots people, perhaps especially of an older generation. This attitude, and the setting made me want to love the book, although the narrative was too unsettling for that. It was hovering at 3.5 stars a lot of the time - I just don't love 'unsettling' the way some readers do - but the final pages had the warmth I'd been foolishly wanting, and so up it bumps to 4.
This, in its recent Virago edition is my least favourite cover among books I've read this year.
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The premise befits a nice Sunday evening TV drama - London, 1949: a young writer takes a job as secretary to an eccentric association of minor aristocrats working on their autobiographies - but it soon becomes apparent that this is more discomfiting than cosy. This happens with Muriel Spark books: I expect and want them to be cosy, and then they're not.
Fleur, the narrator, is very interesting, as are the varied responses to her in other reviews - among them 'likeable', and 'unreliable' (in the literary sense). She's strangely unsettling, and part of that is that she also isn't as unsettling as you sometimes expect she may become. In the first couple of chapters, I had déjà vu - perhaps I had read a few pages of this standing in a library or bookshop in the 90s - and I kept thinking how, as a teenager, I'd might have taken Fleur's opinions as right all round and to be emulated. Now I could see that she coded, sometimes, as intended to be unlikeable - yet she never actually became nefarious. In the end I concluded she was a type of spiky individual I like and when I meet one, I'm so glad to find someone who agrees with me about xyz and who doesn't fit in in certain ways I recognise, and sometimes tries to play the game, sometimes not. (‘You know,’ Dottie said, ‘there’s something a bit harsh about you, Fleur. You’re not really womanly, are you?’ …To show her I was a woman…) But on the other hand it's probably best that with them I never talk about abc, because we'd definitely disagree, and that I don't confide about anything that sounds a bit soft. She was another of these characters, like Gretel in this year's Booker shortlisted Everything Under, whom I'd perhaps prefer to talk to than read about within the confines of the novel. Fleur seems so real in her unstereotypical personality, which itself has twists and turns compared with most literary characters who seem cardboard cutouts by comparison: sometimes she's kind when you hadn't expected it, and just when you figured she's actually really nice after all, she says something catty. This is how people are in real life, not in books, perhaps especially when young and still figuring things out.
Yet she is also a notably unrealistic device of 1980s metafiction - a loud, raucous context (alongside Martin Amis) in which I never would have thought, of my own accord, to place this tale of more-or-less genteel machinations. (It's only a few open references to bodily fuctions and sex that indicate it wasn't written in the 50s or early 60s; otherwise it feels very much of that era.) Understanding, via the introduction by Mark Lawson (in the 2007 Virago edition), that there are 'autobiographical associations' lurking in the novel made me more interested in Muriel Spark as a person. I've never especially liked Lawson on TV and radio, but here, without his broadcast manner or the glibness of newspaper columns, it became apparent that he has some good insights into literature. There is plenty explained here which I wouldn't have spotted otherwise, as I've only read two or three books of Spark's previously and had read very little about the woman herself. If I'd ever known she was Catholic, I'd forgotten, and because I was used to seeing her defined foremost as a Scottish writer, had no idea that back in the 70s she'd been seen as one among Britain's major Catholic novelists of the 20th century, along with Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Anthony Burgess. (I'd tended to bracket Burgess with Ballard instead, as one with an interest in the shock of the new, whilst Waugh and Greene, it's easier to understand grouped together.) David Lodge, too, is mentioned, for metafiction, though Catholics were also a feature of several of his novels.
I love the book's milieu of shabby-genteel bedsit life and full time work with strange characters, which feels far more realistic than most contemporary books about young writers. Regardless of the non-existence of internet, this is still way realler now than Tao Lin or Sheila Heti. (Where are all the great new novels in which authors house-sit and work in temp admin jobs, and pare down that online grocery order to as little as possible over the minimum £40?) Spark's phrase for these circumstances "on the grubby edge of the literary world" also gives me the pithy description I'd been needing for Vernon Subutex - which I've been reading slowly for the last couple of weeks - vis a vis the music world. Fleur has a tacit self-assurance which is unaffected by the differences in wealth and class she encounters at work; there's no reason to believe she isn't English, but this kind of confident semi-detachment from English social structures strikes me as characteristic of educated Scots people, perhaps especially of an older generation. This attitude, and the setting made me want to love the book, although the narrative was too unsettling for that. It was hovering at 3.5 stars a lot of the time - I just don't love 'unsettling' the way some readers do - but the final pages had the warmth I'd been foolishly wanting, and so up it bumps to 4.
This, in its recent Virago edition is my least favourite cover among books I've read this year.
16 November 2018
1947: When Now Begins by Elisabeth Åsbrink, tr. Fiona Graham
This short popular history book, translated from Swedish, was longlisted for the second (2018) Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. Whilst I'd been quite interested in the book anyway, it was the longlisting that prompted me to take it up at this time. I mostly listened to it as an audiobook, narrated in the UK version by Joan Walker, and I also read some bits of the text while listening. Åsbrink's thesis, as may be guessable from the title, is that 1947 is when the contemporary world 'began',because, during that year, a number of developments which continue to be pertinent today emerged in global politics and culture.
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A mostly enjoyable and interesting light popular history that feels like hearing or reading news from 71 years ago (if it were in the style of contemporary broadsheet news with a culture section).
I haven't read any others of the crop of popular histories named after individual years, but I understand that this one is different from the usual, because it concentrates not on a specific discovery or person, but on news and events from countries around the world during one year. It has month-by-month chapters, with one interlude in the middle about the author's family history. The book's underlying argument is that many aspects of later 20th-century and contemporary western life have their roots in the events and cultural products of 1947. It highlights these items in a news-magazine style, but Åsbrink does not give a counterargument to her thesis: this is history in the style of creative non-fiction rather than academia. There is an extensive bibliography and sources list, but there are no footnotes.
The countries most frequently discussed are Sweden (Åsbrink is Swedish), Britain, Palestine, India, France, the USA, Germany, Hungary (the author's father was Hungarian-Jewish), Poland and Egypt. Several cultural figures recur, and the narrative episodically follows George Orwell (writing 1984 on the isle of Jura) and Simone de Beauvoir (started The Second Sex) throughout the year, as well as making less frequent mentions of many others, such as Tolkien finishing The Lord of the Rings, computer scientist Grace Hopper who coined the term 'bug' (the first bug was a moth that had got into the computer) and was later involved in the development of COBOL, and Christian Dior and the waves made by his New Look. The quotes from Dior have a camp charm which contrasts with the serious topics making up the rest of the book, and give a flavour of the aesthetic relief from wartime austerity his designs brought to the fashion-conscious. I've never been a fan of it as a style, and prefer earlier 1940s looks, but these phrases and his personal frivolities made me grok it more than I ever had before. There is more about women here than one would probably find in an older popular history by a man, and fashion is treated with a cultural seriousness it wouldn't necessarily have been (the book also notes that Hennes, later H&M, was also founded this year), but 1947 remains a general history of predominantly political world events, at a time when the vast majority of politicians were men, rather than a history of women. Eleanor Roosevelt is the most politically powerful woman here, involved in drawing up the UN Declaration of Human Rights - that cornerstone of modern secular morality - with a working-group surveying and quoting philosophy texts from across the world, including Confucian philosopher Mencius and (unspecified) Hindu thinkers.
I'm not rating the book because I haven't checked most of the facts in it which I hadn't heard before, and with this being a translation as well as a popular history by a journalist, there are no English reviews by academics available. I didn't hear anything which I knew to be wrong, and in the one instance I did find online pointing out a mistake (an Amazon review mentioning Operation Black Tulip, in which the Dutch planned to expel German civilians from the Netherlands) it was simply the case that Åsbrink hadn't included the conclusion of the episode via events that happened after 1947, rather than being wrong per se.
The book was at its most engaging when it stuck to month-by-month events, newslike, rather than breaking the spell with accounts of later developments going into the 1950s as it did for a few topics.
Åsbrink devotes too much space to developments in European fascism in the early 1950s - this is the reason for that 'mostly' in the first sentence. It is depressing to hear about, but it is an important part of the post-war story that fascists were still active and internationally networking with one another after 1945 (a lot of people seem to assume that apart from Germany, and the Nazis hiding in South America, they disappeared in a puff of smoke, or were merely isolated figures of ridicule) but the amount of material about them in the book dwarfs the other topics predominantly because of the history of fascism in Europe extending beyond 1947. However, it will be a new idea to readers who've had little contact with history of the period, and who base their assumptions on more recent politics, that these postwar fascists were - at a time when internationalism was the prevailing trend across the political spectrum - in favour of a united Europe.
Among the other biggest international stories here are the partition of India - its borders shockingly delineated by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, considered by the Lord Chancellor a good man for the job due to "his brilliance as a lawyer and his ignorance of India". Gandhi is later quoted decrying violence against women during the aftermath of partition, without reference to his dubious personal behaviour which has become better known in recent years.
Also ongoing throughout 1947 were efforts to address the Holocaust, its survivors and perpetrators. The Nuremberg Trials were initially halted, but restarted as new documentary evidence of Nazi atrocities was uncovered. Public boredom with news of the trials is commonly mentioned, as many people wanted to be able to move on from the war. Raphael Lemkin is here too, a figure who seemed to be rarely mentioned in the past (and a lonely, impoverished crusader at the time, for official recognition of the crime of genocide) but one who seems increasingly well-known recently, perhaps since British barrister and law professor Philippe Sands' award-winning East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity".
The most complex issue of all, and one I'd, rather appalings, barely heard about in reference to this period in history, was Palestine - its difficulties also, in part, a legacy of the Holocaust. Åsbrink implicitly indicates similarities to the current decade's refugee crises, with accounts of the illegal immigration of Jewish survivors from all over Europe, heading to Palestine: waiting in camps for visas or boarding clandestine ships, such as one the the British (in their last days of colonial power in the area) sent back to France, despite disagreement by the US. There is a widespread sense that Jews no longer want to live in the countries where mass crimes against them had been committed, and many wanted to go to Palestine or the US. A UN delegation with members from neutral countries - some of whose levels of competence may have been questionable - was set up to find a solution. It was clear that Britain could no longer hang on to Palestine, so the question was how to find a plan that met the needs of both Zionist Jews and Arab powers in the region.
The background to the tension in Palestine in 1947 is a politically sensitive topic that really needs comment from someone who's studied the history in depth: it is the type of issue where selection of facts may be as significant as the accuracy of what is stated. I will try to delineate what Åsbrink says, or what I picked up from it, although I know it won't be the full story. There had once been a anti-colonial, anti-British, pan-Arab tendency that was inclusive of Jews, but in the 1930s, following the foundation of the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928 - a revival of the idea of jihad after hundreds of years - this shifted. A key figure in the Palestine Region was the Grand Mufti, Amin al-Husseini, who had links to Hitler's regime and who appears to have supported the Holocaust; he later opposed Zionism and Jewish immigration. There were also moderate Arabs who considered that their people should not have to lose land as a knock-on effect of the actions of Hitler, who was nothing to do with them. There was active terrorism from both sides, including an incident in 1947, in which Zionist paramilitaries killed two British soldiers; this was followed by a week of anti-Semitic riots across British cities, with smashing-up of shops that echo East European pogroms. Åsbrink notes, with foreshadowing, that various sources in 1947 predicted a bloodbath in the Palestine region, if a suboptimal plan (was there an optimal one?) were chosen for the area's borders. Åsbrink heavily implies that the roots of ongoing problems in Israel and Palestine lie in the decision-making of 1947. (This has to be a factor, although other causes such as British colonialism itself, or hundreds or thousands of years of religious history, are not thoroughly explored here.)
Although I can't say how exact all of this history is, overall 1947, carrying the perspective of a writer from another European country, seems like an instructive book for the British reader or listener, who is probably unused to hearing about their country's history as just one among several, discussed without any hint of specialness. It does not go out of its way to make Britain seem bad, but it does not try to gloss over negatives as a lot of UK popular historians (even the less conservative ones) seem to do by reflex.
The book has short subchapters, making it an ideal read/listen for commuting, waiting, cooking and so forth. I hadn't really noticed before that Metro - the free newspaper commonly found on buses and in city centres - had 'Books of the Year' but it seems fitting that this would be one of them, as highlighted in one edition's blurb.
This was a lovely audiobook reading - the narrator had a light, airy timbre which worked perfectly for the more literary and descriptive sections as well as for the more news-like episodes; some of the descriptions would not have worked as well read out in a matter-of-fact radio-announcer tone.
I found the first two episodes of this short Radio 4 series, The Death of the Postwar Settlement a great follow-up to 1947: When Now Begins. The first episode discusses the UN and the foundational assumptions, and the programmes then go on to explain how things changed from the fall of Eastern Bloc Communism onwards.
(listened and reviewed Nov 2018; the review on Goodreads.)
-----
A mostly enjoyable and interesting light popular history that feels like hearing or reading news from 71 years ago (if it were in the style of contemporary broadsheet news with a culture section).
I haven't read any others of the crop of popular histories named after individual years, but I understand that this one is different from the usual, because it concentrates not on a specific discovery or person, but on news and events from countries around the world during one year. It has month-by-month chapters, with one interlude in the middle about the author's family history. The book's underlying argument is that many aspects of later 20th-century and contemporary western life have their roots in the events and cultural products of 1947. It highlights these items in a news-magazine style, but Åsbrink does not give a counterargument to her thesis: this is history in the style of creative non-fiction rather than academia. There is an extensive bibliography and sources list, but there are no footnotes.
The countries most frequently discussed are Sweden (Åsbrink is Swedish), Britain, Palestine, India, France, the USA, Germany, Hungary (the author's father was Hungarian-Jewish), Poland and Egypt. Several cultural figures recur, and the narrative episodically follows George Orwell (writing 1984 on the isle of Jura) and Simone de Beauvoir (started The Second Sex) throughout the year, as well as making less frequent mentions of many others, such as Tolkien finishing The Lord of the Rings, computer scientist Grace Hopper who coined the term 'bug' (the first bug was a moth that had got into the computer) and was later involved in the development of COBOL, and Christian Dior and the waves made by his New Look. The quotes from Dior have a camp charm which contrasts with the serious topics making up the rest of the book, and give a flavour of the aesthetic relief from wartime austerity his designs brought to the fashion-conscious. I've never been a fan of it as a style, and prefer earlier 1940s looks, but these phrases and his personal frivolities made me grok it more than I ever had before. There is more about women here than one would probably find in an older popular history by a man, and fashion is treated with a cultural seriousness it wouldn't necessarily have been (the book also notes that Hennes, later H&M, was also founded this year), but 1947 remains a general history of predominantly political world events, at a time when the vast majority of politicians were men, rather than a history of women. Eleanor Roosevelt is the most politically powerful woman here, involved in drawing up the UN Declaration of Human Rights - that cornerstone of modern secular morality - with a working-group surveying and quoting philosophy texts from across the world, including Confucian philosopher Mencius and (unspecified) Hindu thinkers.
I'm not rating the book because I haven't checked most of the facts in it which I hadn't heard before, and with this being a translation as well as a popular history by a journalist, there are no English reviews by academics available. I didn't hear anything which I knew to be wrong, and in the one instance I did find online pointing out a mistake (an Amazon review mentioning Operation Black Tulip, in which the Dutch planned to expel German civilians from the Netherlands) it was simply the case that Åsbrink hadn't included the conclusion of the episode via events that happened after 1947, rather than being wrong per se.
The book was at its most engaging when it stuck to month-by-month events, newslike, rather than breaking the spell with accounts of later developments going into the 1950s as it did for a few topics.
Åsbrink devotes too much space to developments in European fascism in the early 1950s - this is the reason for that 'mostly' in the first sentence. It is depressing to hear about, but it is an important part of the post-war story that fascists were still active and internationally networking with one another after 1945 (a lot of people seem to assume that apart from Germany, and the Nazis hiding in South America, they disappeared in a puff of smoke, or were merely isolated figures of ridicule) but the amount of material about them in the book dwarfs the other topics predominantly because of the history of fascism in Europe extending beyond 1947. However, it will be a new idea to readers who've had little contact with history of the period, and who base their assumptions on more recent politics, that these postwar fascists were - at a time when internationalism was the prevailing trend across the political spectrum - in favour of a united Europe.
Among the other biggest international stories here are the partition of India - its borders shockingly delineated by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, considered by the Lord Chancellor a good man for the job due to "his brilliance as a lawyer and his ignorance of India". Gandhi is later quoted decrying violence against women during the aftermath of partition, without reference to his dubious personal behaviour which has become better known in recent years.
Also ongoing throughout 1947 were efforts to address the Holocaust, its survivors and perpetrators. The Nuremberg Trials were initially halted, but restarted as new documentary evidence of Nazi atrocities was uncovered. Public boredom with news of the trials is commonly mentioned, as many people wanted to be able to move on from the war. Raphael Lemkin is here too, a figure who seemed to be rarely mentioned in the past (and a lonely, impoverished crusader at the time, for official recognition of the crime of genocide) but one who seems increasingly well-known recently, perhaps since British barrister and law professor Philippe Sands' award-winning East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity".
The most complex issue of all, and one I'd, rather appalings, barely heard about in reference to this period in history, was Palestine - its difficulties also, in part, a legacy of the Holocaust. Åsbrink implicitly indicates similarities to the current decade's refugee crises, with accounts of the illegal immigration of Jewish survivors from all over Europe, heading to Palestine: waiting in camps for visas or boarding clandestine ships, such as one the the British (in their last days of colonial power in the area) sent back to France, despite disagreement by the US. There is a widespread sense that Jews no longer want to live in the countries where mass crimes against them had been committed, and many wanted to go to Palestine or the US. A UN delegation with members from neutral countries - some of whose levels of competence may have been questionable - was set up to find a solution. It was clear that Britain could no longer hang on to Palestine, so the question was how to find a plan that met the needs of both Zionist Jews and Arab powers in the region.
The background to the tension in Palestine in 1947 is a politically sensitive topic that really needs comment from someone who's studied the history in depth: it is the type of issue where selection of facts may be as significant as the accuracy of what is stated. I will try to delineate what Åsbrink says, or what I picked up from it, although I know it won't be the full story. There had once been a anti-colonial, anti-British, pan-Arab tendency that was inclusive of Jews, but in the 1930s, following the foundation of the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928 - a revival of the idea of jihad after hundreds of years - this shifted. A key figure in the Palestine Region was the Grand Mufti, Amin al-Husseini, who had links to Hitler's regime and who appears to have supported the Holocaust; he later opposed Zionism and Jewish immigration. There were also moderate Arabs who considered that their people should not have to lose land as a knock-on effect of the actions of Hitler, who was nothing to do with them. There was active terrorism from both sides, including an incident in 1947, in which Zionist paramilitaries killed two British soldiers; this was followed by a week of anti-Semitic riots across British cities, with smashing-up of shops that echo East European pogroms. Åsbrink notes, with foreshadowing, that various sources in 1947 predicted a bloodbath in the Palestine region, if a suboptimal plan (was there an optimal one?) were chosen for the area's borders. Åsbrink heavily implies that the roots of ongoing problems in Israel and Palestine lie in the decision-making of 1947. (This has to be a factor, although other causes such as British colonialism itself, or hundreds or thousands of years of religious history, are not thoroughly explored here.)
Although I can't say how exact all of this history is, overall 1947, carrying the perspective of a writer from another European country, seems like an instructive book for the British reader or listener, who is probably unused to hearing about their country's history as just one among several, discussed without any hint of specialness. It does not go out of its way to make Britain seem bad, but it does not try to gloss over negatives as a lot of UK popular historians (even the less conservative ones) seem to do by reflex.
The book has short subchapters, making it an ideal read/listen for commuting, waiting, cooking and so forth. I hadn't really noticed before that Metro - the free newspaper commonly found on buses and in city centres - had 'Books of the Year' but it seems fitting that this would be one of them, as highlighted in one edition's blurb.
This was a lovely audiobook reading - the narrator had a light, airy timbre which worked perfectly for the more literary and descriptive sections as well as for the more news-like episodes; some of the descriptions would not have worked as well read out in a matter-of-fact radio-announcer tone.
I found the first two episodes of this short Radio 4 series, The Death of the Postwar Settlement a great follow-up to 1947: When Now Begins. The first episode discusses the UN and the foundational assumptions, and the programmes then go on to explain how things changed from the fall of Eastern Bloc Communism onwards.
(listened and reviewed Nov 2018; the review on Goodreads.)
15 November 2018
Nothing More by Krystyna Miłobędzka, tr. Elzbieta Wojcik-Leese
Krystyna Miłobędzka is an eminent Polish poet now in her mid-80s. This short, career-spanning bilingual selection is the only book of her poetry available in English.
The two introductions were helpful in setting context - though I read the first (by translator Elzbieta Wojcik-Leese) 10 days before reading the poems, by which time it had percolated down into the idea of Miłobędzka as a minimalist poet who worked towards increasingly briefer, pared forms over the years. It was an idea I could relate to, as during a brief phase, 5-6 years ago, of feeling I could write poetry (something I've otherwise been unable to do), it was the removal of words, that seemed at least half the essence of the enterprise.
At first, Miłobędzka's poems felt too opaque / oblique, and I missed the background understanding of the poet's life I'd had when reading Wioletta Greg's Finite Formulae and Theories of Chance (also from Arc Publications and read on Scribd), via having previously read Greg's autobiographical novella. I couldn't picture who or where Miłobędzka might be writing about to the same extent.
But they also seem very intuitive poems, and I found that reading them when tired - a kind of hypnagogic insight - at a point of consciousness when I couldn't really construct full sentences myself, but readily visualised dreamlike images, produced a connection with these increasingly short poems that used only the most important words, with very little filler or explanation.
Interpreting them as poems of the domestic sphere: household, children, garden, nearby walks, made them more lucid. But sharp as the legendary Damascus steel, and with experimental skill, the form is far from that commonly associated with domestic fiction, and the honed, orderly feel is different again from the current decade's books of writing fragments and scraps focused on home life by innovative English-language female writers. It gave me the impression of a woman of extraordinary ability who had nonetheless spent much of her time as a housewife - perhaps because she found it inspirational and conducive to her writing. However a look at the Polish Wikipedia entry (via Google translate) indicates she also worked in arts venues. Whether or not the domestic subject matter is a feminist choice by author or by the editors of this selection, or simply incidental, I do not know - but this kind of experimental writing elevates it intellectually and spiritually.
It isn't indicated which poems are from which collections, or where and if they match original, uninterrupted publication order, but several are in in satisfying thematic sequences. The final one focuses on the themes of nothingness, sand, and the transience of all objects, the body and of words, only to be followed by the one-word exhortatory poem "mów! / speak!" (as if realising and concluding that one is still here and should), followed by a somewhat longer piece:
I am. Co-alive, co-active, co-guilty. Co-green, co-tree. I co-exist.
You do not know yet what it means. Gifted with diffusion. I
vanish I am. I co-endure (with You) on this glassy day (with this
glassy day into which I vanish) which vanishes with me so
lightly. I don’t know what it means. Co-open with the window,
co-flowing with the river. I am in order to know I vanish? I van-
ish in order to know I am? All of me but all of me nowhere to
be found. Co-fleeting, co-skyward. Half a century I have lived
for this!
I'd been reading Krasznahorkai, and about him, recently, and was reminded of the Buddhist / yogic aspects in his work.
As the Miłobędzka's poems often use simple words, I could understand, on the most elementary level, parts of the Polish versions of some of the smaller poems. (It would be interesting to know if the description of the poems as 'ungrammatical' means she sometimes uses non-standard noun cases in Polish; if so, extra use of the nominative might have been why I found words easier to recognise.) I was usually pleased and surprised by (as far as I could tell) the fidelity of some translations, although of course it was not always possible to replicate the rhythm of sequences of similar-sounding words. The one of the few mis-steps among these shorter poems I tried to read in original as well as English was, I felt, with jest rosnące drzewem / the is growing into a tree. Polish does not have articles, and in that example, I felt the English would have worked better without them too, letting all the lines begin with "is", not "the is", also reflecting the minimalism of the later poems. "Isness" is an idea already present in earlier in this collection, so it would be apparent to readers that it related to Miłobędzka's previous use of it. Where "the is" did work, like here (it works because of the 'of', I think):
the is of the silence in the room
the is of the walls, each so different
the is of the sunshine on the curtain
the greying is of the dust
through the thin is of the glass
the is of the sparrow outside the window
the is of the child on the grass, chasing a butterfly
the is of the butterfly in the net
the floating is of the cloud
and once again: I am
in this vast
circular spherical nobody’s
agape virulent scorching
grass-strong swift-winged quick-legged
dripping rabid
acute
is
[That is agape as in gaping, not agape, universal love - and in Polish there is an overtly mentioned grasshopper only implied in the English.]
These poems will not be to everyone's taste, and some people would find them pretentious, inaccessible etc. - although these readers aren't likely to pick up small-press translated poetry in the first place.
This is the first year I have personally, inwardly *wanted to* read more books by women (i.e. to read an equal number of books by male and female writers) rather than feeling like I was being harangued to do so by the online literary world. It is a relatively tricky goal when added to that of reading more Polish books. For example the Goodreads list Polish Books Published in English, aiming to cover all books of whatever age, currently has 20%, 45/229 female-authored books on it, and regardless of the additional translation barrier, Polish literary culture has always been more male-dominated than British. This poetry collection was one of a small number of books by Polish women authors I could access inexpensively or free.
I am very glad I ended up reading it: it soon became apparent that it was too interesting to be a 'duty' book, and it left me with a deep sense of awe or reverence, which I had certainly not expected.
It's rare I want to start a book again as soon as I've finished it, so that has to be 5 stars, doesn't it? Yet somehow I'd feel presumptuous giving this 5 stars. The mood of the book itself provoked a sense of modesty or humility (quite different from being down on oneself). And then there was the sense of complexity, and with it the worry that I might not be able to access or interpret the poems in the same way again when feeling less sharp. I can't adequately communicate what it's like to fully inhabit the felt sense and muscle memory of what it was like to ride a bike and to be trying it again and unable to do it and be about to topple because that balance component doesn't work as finely as the average person's any more, and the ability is gone, although you can feel what it was like to have it, right down to the position of that groove you used to find and hit - but like that. "Getting" poems like this (especially without extensive notes) is a mysterious and intuitive and sometimes fleeting process.
Some understandings can be explained confidently, like the "speak!" above; some is more personal and experiential, like reading "a family of tables, a family of doors" as a friendly personification of the household furniture as creatures of their own kind, familiar both to oneself and to each other (perhaps the English 'a nest of tables' helps?) as well as a way of describing how the human family in the house gathers and moves.
On a sentence-by-sentence level this is the most challenging book I've read this year (I'm glad I didn't know that before I started) although that is significantly mitigated by its brevity. These are almost koan-like poems that, where the meaning isn't immediately apparent, may benefit from being looked at for a while, letting ideas and responses emerge. When I'd finished it, I went back to the beginning again to see what else appeared in the early poems after I'd acclimatised to Miłobędzka's approach, and because the feeling brought on by reading the poems was so peaceful, one I wanted to perpetuate.
(read & reviewed Nov 2018; the review on Goodreads.)
The two introductions were helpful in setting context - though I read the first (by translator Elzbieta Wojcik-Leese) 10 days before reading the poems, by which time it had percolated down into the idea of Miłobędzka as a minimalist poet who worked towards increasingly briefer, pared forms over the years. It was an idea I could relate to, as during a brief phase, 5-6 years ago, of feeling I could write poetry (something I've otherwise been unable to do), it was the removal of words, that seemed at least half the essence of the enterprise.
At first, Miłobędzka's poems felt too opaque / oblique, and I missed the background understanding of the poet's life I'd had when reading Wioletta Greg's Finite Formulae and Theories of Chance (also from Arc Publications and read on Scribd), via having previously read Greg's autobiographical novella. I couldn't picture who or where Miłobędzka might be writing about to the same extent.
But they also seem very intuitive poems, and I found that reading them when tired - a kind of hypnagogic insight - at a point of consciousness when I couldn't really construct full sentences myself, but readily visualised dreamlike images, produced a connection with these increasingly short poems that used only the most important words, with very little filler or explanation.
Interpreting them as poems of the domestic sphere: household, children, garden, nearby walks, made them more lucid. But sharp as the legendary Damascus steel, and with experimental skill, the form is far from that commonly associated with domestic fiction, and the honed, orderly feel is different again from the current decade's books of writing fragments and scraps focused on home life by innovative English-language female writers. It gave me the impression of a woman of extraordinary ability who had nonetheless spent much of her time as a housewife - perhaps because she found it inspirational and conducive to her writing. However a look at the Polish Wikipedia entry (via Google translate) indicates she also worked in arts venues. Whether or not the domestic subject matter is a feminist choice by author or by the editors of this selection, or simply incidental, I do not know - but this kind of experimental writing elevates it intellectually and spiritually.
It isn't indicated which poems are from which collections, or where and if they match original, uninterrupted publication order, but several are in in satisfying thematic sequences. The final one focuses on the themes of nothingness, sand, and the transience of all objects, the body and of words, only to be followed by the one-word exhortatory poem "mów! / speak!" (as if realising and concluding that one is still here and should), followed by a somewhat longer piece:
I am. Co-alive, co-active, co-guilty. Co-green, co-tree. I co-exist.
You do not know yet what it means. Gifted with diffusion. I
vanish I am. I co-endure (with You) on this glassy day (with this
glassy day into which I vanish) which vanishes with me so
lightly. I don’t know what it means. Co-open with the window,
co-flowing with the river. I am in order to know I vanish? I van-
ish in order to know I am? All of me but all of me nowhere to
be found. Co-fleeting, co-skyward. Half a century I have lived
for this!
I'd been reading Krasznahorkai, and about him, recently, and was reminded of the Buddhist / yogic aspects in his work.
As the Miłobędzka's poems often use simple words, I could understand, on the most elementary level, parts of the Polish versions of some of the smaller poems. (It would be interesting to know if the description of the poems as 'ungrammatical' means she sometimes uses non-standard noun cases in Polish; if so, extra use of the nominative might have been why I found words easier to recognise.) I was usually pleased and surprised by (as far as I could tell) the fidelity of some translations, although of course it was not always possible to replicate the rhythm of sequences of similar-sounding words. The one of the few mis-steps among these shorter poems I tried to read in original as well as English was, I felt, with jest rosnące drzewem / the is growing into a tree. Polish does not have articles, and in that example, I felt the English would have worked better without them too, letting all the lines begin with "is", not "the is", also reflecting the minimalism of the later poems. "Isness" is an idea already present in earlier in this collection, so it would be apparent to readers that it related to Miłobędzka's previous use of it. Where "the is" did work, like here (it works because of the 'of', I think):
the is of the silence in the room
the is of the walls, each so different
the is of the sunshine on the curtain
the greying is of the dust
through the thin is of the glass
the is of the sparrow outside the window
the is of the child on the grass, chasing a butterfly
the is of the butterfly in the net
the floating is of the cloud
and once again: I am
in this vast
circular spherical nobody’s
agape virulent scorching
grass-strong swift-winged quick-legged
dripping rabid
acute
is
[That is agape as in gaping, not agape, universal love - and in Polish there is an overtly mentioned grasshopper only implied in the English.]
These poems will not be to everyone's taste, and some people would find them pretentious, inaccessible etc. - although these readers aren't likely to pick up small-press translated poetry in the first place.
This is the first year I have personally, inwardly *wanted to* read more books by women (i.e. to read an equal number of books by male and female writers) rather than feeling like I was being harangued to do so by the online literary world. It is a relatively tricky goal when added to that of reading more Polish books. For example the Goodreads list Polish Books Published in English, aiming to cover all books of whatever age, currently has 20%, 45/229 female-authored books on it, and regardless of the additional translation barrier, Polish literary culture has always been more male-dominated than British. This poetry collection was one of a small number of books by Polish women authors I could access inexpensively or free.
I am very glad I ended up reading it: it soon became apparent that it was too interesting to be a 'duty' book, and it left me with a deep sense of awe or reverence, which I had certainly not expected.
It's rare I want to start a book again as soon as I've finished it, so that has to be 5 stars, doesn't it? Yet somehow I'd feel presumptuous giving this 5 stars. The mood of the book itself provoked a sense of modesty or humility (quite different from being down on oneself). And then there was the sense of complexity, and with it the worry that I might not be able to access or interpret the poems in the same way again when feeling less sharp. I can't adequately communicate what it's like to fully inhabit the felt sense and muscle memory of what it was like to ride a bike and to be trying it again and unable to do it and be about to topple because that balance component doesn't work as finely as the average person's any more, and the ability is gone, although you can feel what it was like to have it, right down to the position of that groove you used to find and hit - but like that. "Getting" poems like this (especially without extensive notes) is a mysterious and intuitive and sometimes fleeting process.
Some understandings can be explained confidently, like the "speak!" above; some is more personal and experiential, like reading "a family of tables, a family of doors" as a friendly personification of the household furniture as creatures of their own kind, familiar both to oneself and to each other (perhaps the English 'a nest of tables' helps?) as well as a way of describing how the human family in the house gathers and moves.
On a sentence-by-sentence level this is the most challenging book I've read this year (I'm glad I didn't know that before I started) although that is significantly mitigated by its brevity. These are almost koan-like poems that, where the meaning isn't immediately apparent, may benefit from being looked at for a while, letting ideas and responses emerge. When I'd finished it, I went back to the beginning again to see what else appeared in the early poems after I'd acclimatised to Miłobędzka's approach, and because the feeling brought on by reading the poems was so peaceful, one I wanted to perpetuate.
(read & reviewed Nov 2018; the review on Goodreads.)
13 November 2018
The Bill: For Palma Vecchio, at Venice by László Krasznahorkai, tr. George Szirtes
This Krasznahorkai short story was printed as a standalone work in a collector's limited edition volume by Sylph Editions, illustrated with a number of Palma Vecchio paintings. I read it on Scribd as a short story in the Dalkey Archive Press collection Best European Fiction 2011, and looked at some of Palma Vecchio's art online. This means I looked at it as a story instead of book-as-object.
---
It is about the moment of anticipation as the best illustration of desire (though that is reductive; Krasznahorkai's long sentence explores the byways and corners of thought and feeling involved in that idea); told from the apparent viewpoint of a pimp who provides courtesans to Palma Vecchio, who uses them only as models. (The women's initial mockery and/or bewilderment about that, of the client not wanting sexual services, is something that never seems to be found in recent serious fiction or memoir about prostitution by female authors - instead there is, IIRC, relief at less work - but there is so little historically by women to compare that delves into inner thoughts in that situation to compare with modern writers' attitudes.) The narrator suggests that their figures, in the way Palma Vecchio paints them, evoke the undulations of the landscape of Bergamo where the artist grew up (this has a mocking tone to try and evade pretentiousness and tenuousness). The girls laugh at their colleagues or themselves later appearing as the Virgin Mary and other holy women. "I myself think we're all nothing but bodies" the narrator says, irreligiously.
This small book clearly has its fans: the presentation copy will be part of that, though I think this story would have worked better in a themed collection with other pieces to reflect and refract. It feels especially dense for a work of so few pages, dense in its observation of minutiae, but there is not quite enough, I think, for it to work on its own - if the point of the volume were the paintings, a compendium of most of Palma Vecchio's paintings, and the story an accompaniment to them more unusual than gallery-style labels, then it would seem weightier, if I may speculate on a book I've never seen a copy of. At any rate, what I can say after writing this post is that the style is somewhat infectious.
Historical fiction often isn't involving enough to distract me from wondering about research and evidence, but in the second half, because of the narrative's immersion in thought processes, this managed it.
(read and reviewed Nov 2018; the review on Goodreads. The review has been edited slightly for clarity when I cross-posted to the blog.)
---
It is about the moment of anticipation as the best illustration of desire (though that is reductive; Krasznahorkai's long sentence explores the byways and corners of thought and feeling involved in that idea); told from the apparent viewpoint of a pimp who provides courtesans to Palma Vecchio, who uses them only as models. (The women's initial mockery and/or bewilderment about that, of the client not wanting sexual services, is something that never seems to be found in recent serious fiction or memoir about prostitution by female authors - instead there is, IIRC, relief at less work - but there is so little historically by women to compare that delves into inner thoughts in that situation to compare with modern writers' attitudes.) The narrator suggests that their figures, in the way Palma Vecchio paints them, evoke the undulations of the landscape of Bergamo where the artist grew up (this has a mocking tone to try and evade pretentiousness and tenuousness). The girls laugh at their colleagues or themselves later appearing as the Virgin Mary and other holy women. "I myself think we're all nothing but bodies" the narrator says, irreligiously.
This small book clearly has its fans: the presentation copy will be part of that, though I think this story would have worked better in a themed collection with other pieces to reflect and refract. It feels especially dense for a work of so few pages, dense in its observation of minutiae, but there is not quite enough, I think, for it to work on its own - if the point of the volume were the paintings, a compendium of most of Palma Vecchio's paintings, and the story an accompaniment to them more unusual than gallery-style labels, then it would seem weightier, if I may speculate on a book I've never seen a copy of. At any rate, what I can say after writing this post is that the style is somewhat infectious.
Historical fiction often isn't involving enough to distract me from wondering about research and evidence, but in the second half, because of the narrative's immersion in thought processes, this managed it.
(read and reviewed Nov 2018; the review on Goodreads. The review has been edited slightly for clarity when I cross-posted to the blog.)
Santango by László Krasznahorkai, tr. George Szirtes
One of the monuments of contemporary world literature, awarded the 2013 Best Translated Book Award, and among the works which contributed to Krasznahorkai's win of the last (2015) body-of-work based Booker International Prize. At time of cross-posting this review to the blog, I still haven't seen the Béla Tarr film.
----
The setting was half-familiar to me from reading Polish literature recently, the run-down central European village - most like the one in Andrzej Stasiuk's Tales of Galicia (1995), but ten years earlier, as Eastern Bloc Communism crumbles, (not afterwards, as everyone looks around, bewildered, asking "what now?") As if villages in Olga Tokarczuk had fallen into disrepair, or Wioletta Greg without the Cider With Rosie glow. The German names in Satantango surprised me for a minute, but of course, this was once the Austro-Hungarian Empire too, like some of those in the the old southern partition of Poland.
Everything in Satantango is decaying and, as the autumn rains start, floods with mud. With hindsight it looks like a clear metaphor for the crumbling Communist state.In 1985 did it look in real life as if things were moribund? I don't know enough about Hungarian history to be sure, though it seems not unlikely. It's clear from this old article (old enough that it says "Krasznahorkai is not a fashionable writer") that the book was a major event in intellectual circles in mid-80s Hungary. It was "anything but an unproblematic novel for the Communist system", and published by a strange chance.
The use of the word "estate" instead of "collective farm" in the translation initially threw me. "Estate"? I thought this was under Communism. The first sentence of the plot summary on the film's Wikipedia page reorientated me, and I referred back to this summary on a few other occasions, for a handle on what was happening, making allowances for the order of some scenes being rearranged in the adaptation. (Not a purist approach to reading, to look this up, but the introductions in Penguin Classics often give more away than using Wikipedia in lieu of footnotes.)
There's nary a post about Satantango that doesn't use the word bleak. But there's bleak and there's bleak. On the scale of This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (which I read a couple of weeks earlier) and The Unwomanly Face of War (an audiobook I was in the middle of), most of Satantango is, 'yeah, shit happens'.A bunch of working class people in late middle age lose their savings to a swindler and leave their homes for new jobs with on-site accommodation - with evident parallels to communist collectivisation. But the characters are able to work. And unless the jobs and rooms are a mirage, there are plenty in this country now less fortunate. It is bleaker though, when a child with a learning disability, from a family that would have had social work involvement in a better-organised community, kills the family cat and then herself. That would be hideous stuff for the headlines here too. A local man known as the doctor - a retired academic? he doesn't seem especially medical and displays no characteristics of a Time Lord - and with habits similar to old-school programmers with autistic traits, like Michael in Microserfs, turns out not just to have been observing the villagers, but to have been the writer of most of what we've just been reading, in true 1980s metafiction style. I was hearing echoes of a less sexually voyeuristic Samson Young from Martin Amis' London Fields (1989) - or rather, something earlier that both Amis and Krasznahorkai could have read. So there's bleak and there's bleak. But the book well and truly has a damp problem; I could almost feel it catching and clogging in my lungs; if you put anything down for half a day in Satantango there would be mildew on it, and you'd get mud up to your knees just from going a few steps from the front door.
I was surprised to read somewhere that Krasznahorkai had written his student dissertation on Sándor Márai, although surprised only because I'd read one or two Goodreads reviews by readers who felt Embers was middlebrow or something of that ilk. There isn't much of Márai in English. Among the positives I had heard about Embers was its atmosphere of decay, faded glamour and cobwebbed aristocracy. It hardly seems a stretch to consider that this miasma - perhaps from Márai more generally, not just that one book - probably influenced Krasznahorkai, who, with his youthful interest in "the downstairs of society" transferred it instead to a different social stratum.
It was a relief to find this essay on three of Krasznahorkai's books, including Satantango, by a bilingual critic, which observes that this, George Szirtes' version, one of his early translations of Krasznahorkai, "blur[s] or render[s] inconsistent the distinct voices and linguistic registers" of the characters. I felt a sort of flatness and sameness to many scenes, which evoked a humdrum form of bleakness (a life of boring work and meagre means that has to be got used to, with banter and dancing as periodic escapism) - but it also meant it did not usually feel like a truly spectacular novel, simply a good one. It wasn't meant to be quite like this, then. Characters who had echoes of the larger-than-life should have been bigger, more emphatically individual than I found them to be. The depth is in the occasional paragraphs of philosophical observations; as with Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow, this is said to be one of the author's more accessible works, with a lower density of these than in their heftier books.
Where the narrative did, unquestionably, sing, was in two distinct set-piece chapters.
First, the most horrific episode, little Esti and the cat, and subsequent events. It is impossible to know for sure if it is an entirely accurate evocation of the mindset of a child like her, but it feels utterly true. Half like trying to chase down and kill mosquitoes in a bedroom before going to sleep: the declaration of battle, the dramatic arcs of the focused, sometimes frantic, sometimes exhausted endeavour, every detail of the unpredictable, protracted pursuit of the live thing and times of remorse and times of doggedness. And half like the moment within an almighty, lightheaded temper, in which the tantrum-haver realises with a sinking stomach that they've already made things this bad, very bad, and it feels as if there's no choice but to keep going, so they do, resolutely with further destruction.
The scene with the party clerks could hardly be more different: essentially a comedy sketch, as bureaucrats parse and translate into appropriate official language a report about the villagers for the secret police files - it sends up the bumbling and sinister state structures as well as the characters we've just been hearing about. There's a levity underlying it which seems to indicate these things aren't quite as much of a threat as in works from the 50s and 60s, emerging from the shadows of Stalinism. The decay of the state apparatus appears to make more humour possible, even while living conditions deteriorate.
I'd looked at Satantango a few times in August and September, feeling that I wanted to read it soon. I hadn't consciously remembered it began "One morning near the end of October", but it was just then, around the end of October when I started reading it properly. It was a few days after I finished Anna Burns' Milkman, this year's Booker winner. Previously, I had felt the tension in reading Krasznahorkai's long sentences whenever I opened Satantango. After Milkman, with its also-long sentences and lack of paragraph breaks, but easy conversational rhythm, I hardly even thought about the sentence length in Satantango except once or twice: I was acclimatised.
I was initially amazed how different it was from the only other Krasznahorkai book I'd read, Seiobo There Below (2008). But of course a gap of over 20 years, from age 30 to 50+ is going to mean some differences in a person's, a writer's outlook. Hopefully significant differences, otherwise they'd be stagnating. I was glad of this discussion which prompted me to see the "bleak" and "transcendent" worldviews of the two books (and Krasznahorkai's work generally) as the development, or two sides of, the same idea. Satantango is concerned with pointlessness and nothingness in a melancholy fashion, and with a negative view of these concepts in the European intellectual and religious tradition. It's someone still grappling with these ideas and feelings, who hasn't accepted that's how things are and shifted focus elsewhere. (His European books tend to be 'bleak'.) Seiobo seems to arrive after a process of facing-up-to and positive deployment of nothingness, and meditation on death and decay, part of a road to awakening in Buddhist and yogic traditions; the 2008 book's focus is on a sense of the sacred and beauty predominantly in art. (His Far-Eastern books are interested in the transcendent.)
Understanding this - and also reading several interviews with Krasznahorkai, and the stories in The Last Wolf/ Herman, which I liked very much - meant I started to find Krasznahorkai more intriguing as a person and a writer, that he was a a writer whose work it felt possible to connect with. I felt I could see in the difference between Satantango and Seiobo part of the shift he describes here: When I was young ... I regarded [nature] as hostility itself... Later, when I was influenced by Chinese and Japanese culture, their worldview changed my attitude completely, and I started to reckon nature as the locus of mystery and of epiphany ... And now I tend to think that the only thing that exists is nature, that nothing else is real but nature, and the reality one perceives is similarly nature itself, beyond which only void resides.
He was no longer simply a writer whom I felt I should make more effort to read, and who was vaguely interesting in a detached way. Characters in Satantango sometimes felt like archetypes or symbols more than individuals you might meet, so the underlying ideas became important in animating the narrative.
(read Oct 2018, reviewed Nov 2018; the review on Goodreads.)
----
The setting was half-familiar to me from reading Polish literature recently, the run-down central European village - most like the one in Andrzej Stasiuk's Tales of Galicia (1995), but ten years earlier, as Eastern Bloc Communism crumbles, (not afterwards, as everyone looks around, bewildered, asking "what now?") As if villages in Olga Tokarczuk had fallen into disrepair, or Wioletta Greg without the Cider With Rosie glow. The German names in Satantango surprised me for a minute, but of course, this was once the Austro-Hungarian Empire too, like some of those in the the old southern partition of Poland.
Everything in Satantango is decaying and, as the autumn rains start, floods with mud. With hindsight it looks like a clear metaphor for the crumbling Communist state.In 1985 did it look in real life as if things were moribund? I don't know enough about Hungarian history to be sure, though it seems not unlikely. It's clear from this old article (old enough that it says "Krasznahorkai is not a fashionable writer") that the book was a major event in intellectual circles in mid-80s Hungary. It was "anything but an unproblematic novel for the Communist system", and published by a strange chance.
The use of the word "estate" instead of "collective farm" in the translation initially threw me. "Estate"? I thought this was under Communism. The first sentence of the plot summary on the film's Wikipedia page reorientated me, and I referred back to this summary on a few other occasions, for a handle on what was happening, making allowances for the order of some scenes being rearranged in the adaptation. (Not a purist approach to reading, to look this up, but the introductions in Penguin Classics often give more away than using Wikipedia in lieu of footnotes.)
There's nary a post about Satantango that doesn't use the word bleak. But there's bleak and there's bleak. On the scale of This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (which I read a couple of weeks earlier) and The Unwomanly Face of War (an audiobook I was in the middle of), most of Satantango is, 'yeah, shit happens'.
I was surprised to read somewhere that Krasznahorkai had written his student dissertation on Sándor Márai, although surprised only because I'd read one or two Goodreads reviews by readers who felt Embers was middlebrow or something of that ilk. There isn't much of Márai in English. Among the positives I had heard about Embers was its atmosphere of decay, faded glamour and cobwebbed aristocracy. It hardly seems a stretch to consider that this miasma - perhaps from Márai more generally, not just that one book - probably influenced Krasznahorkai, who, with his youthful interest in "the downstairs of society" transferred it instead to a different social stratum.
It was a relief to find this essay on three of Krasznahorkai's books, including Satantango, by a bilingual critic, which observes that this, George Szirtes' version, one of his early translations of Krasznahorkai, "blur[s] or render[s] inconsistent the distinct voices and linguistic registers" of the characters. I felt a sort of flatness and sameness to many scenes, which evoked a humdrum form of bleakness (a life of boring work and meagre means that has to be got used to, with banter and dancing as periodic escapism) - but it also meant it did not usually feel like a truly spectacular novel, simply a good one. It wasn't meant to be quite like this, then. Characters who had echoes of the larger-than-life should have been bigger, more emphatically individual than I found them to be. The depth is in the occasional paragraphs of philosophical observations; as with Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow, this is said to be one of the author's more accessible works, with a lower density of these than in their heftier books.
Where the narrative did, unquestionably, sing, was in two distinct set-piece chapters.
First, the most horrific episode, little Esti and the cat, and subsequent events. It is impossible to know for sure if it is an entirely accurate evocation of the mindset of a child like her, but it feels utterly true. Half like trying to chase down and kill mosquitoes in a bedroom before going to sleep: the declaration of battle, the dramatic arcs of the focused, sometimes frantic, sometimes exhausted endeavour, every detail of the unpredictable, protracted pursuit of the live thing and times of remorse and times of doggedness. And half like the moment within an almighty, lightheaded temper, in which the tantrum-haver realises with a sinking stomach that they've already made things this bad, very bad, and it feels as if there's no choice but to keep going, so they do, resolutely with further destruction.
The scene with the party clerks could hardly be more different: essentially a comedy sketch, as bureaucrats parse and translate into appropriate official language a report about the villagers for the secret police files - it sends up the bumbling and sinister state structures as well as the characters we've just been hearing about. There's a levity underlying it which seems to indicate these things aren't quite as much of a threat as in works from the 50s and 60s, emerging from the shadows of Stalinism. The decay of the state apparatus appears to make more humour possible, even while living conditions deteriorate.
I'd looked at Satantango a few times in August and September, feeling that I wanted to read it soon. I hadn't consciously remembered it began "One morning near the end of October", but it was just then, around the end of October when I started reading it properly. It was a few days after I finished Anna Burns' Milkman, this year's Booker winner. Previously, I had felt the tension in reading Krasznahorkai's long sentences whenever I opened Satantango. After Milkman, with its also-long sentences and lack of paragraph breaks, but easy conversational rhythm, I hardly even thought about the sentence length in Satantango except once or twice: I was acclimatised.
I was initially amazed how different it was from the only other Krasznahorkai book I'd read, Seiobo There Below (2008). But of course a gap of over 20 years, from age 30 to 50+ is going to mean some differences in a person's, a writer's outlook. Hopefully significant differences, otherwise they'd be stagnating. I was glad of this discussion which prompted me to see the "bleak" and "transcendent" worldviews of the two books (and Krasznahorkai's work generally) as the development, or two sides of, the same idea. Satantango is concerned with pointlessness and nothingness in a melancholy fashion, and with a negative view of these concepts in the European intellectual and religious tradition. It's someone still grappling with these ideas and feelings, who hasn't accepted that's how things are and shifted focus elsewhere. (His European books tend to be 'bleak'.) Seiobo seems to arrive after a process of facing-up-to and positive deployment of nothingness, and meditation on death and decay, part of a road to awakening in Buddhist and yogic traditions; the 2008 book's focus is on a sense of the sacred and beauty predominantly in art. (His Far-Eastern books are interested in the transcendent.)
Understanding this - and also reading several interviews with Krasznahorkai, and the stories in The Last Wolf/ Herman, which I liked very much - meant I started to find Krasznahorkai more intriguing as a person and a writer, that he was a a writer whose work it felt possible to connect with. I felt I could see in the difference between Satantango and Seiobo part of the shift he describes here: When I was young ... I regarded [nature] as hostility itself... Later, when I was influenced by Chinese and Japanese culture, their worldview changed my attitude completely, and I started to reckon nature as the locus of mystery and of epiphany ... And now I tend to think that the only thing that exists is nature, that nothing else is real but nature, and the reality one perceives is similarly nature itself, beyond which only void resides.
He was no longer simply a writer whom I felt I should make more effort to read, and who was vaguely interesting in a detached way. Characters in Satantango sometimes felt like archetypes or symbols more than individuals you might meet, so the underlying ideas became important in animating the narrative.
(read Oct 2018, reviewed Nov 2018; the review on Goodreads.)
10 November 2018
The Last Wolf / Herman by László Krasznahorkai, tr. George Szirtes & John Batki
After finishing Satantango I decided to bag another short Krasznahorkai book. I hadn't expected it to be my favourite of his works I've read.
This short volume of two stories (I can't be the only person who's had more than enough of the phrase 'slim volume', can I?) was published in English in 2016. It was longlisted for the 2017 US Best Translated Book Award. The stories are thematically similar, but separated by 23 years: 'The Last Wolf' appeared in its Hungarian original in 2009, but 'Herman' was in his first short story collection, from 1986. (Thanks to this article in Music & Literature magazine where I checked that info just now.)
-----
At last, a Krasznahorkai work I really connect with. Reading Sátántangó a few days ago, I realised that strength of personal connection was what would make the difference between giving his books 4 stars (as I did Sátántangó and Seiobo There Below) or 5, because I can't seem to find them as utterly singular as many of his English-language worshippers do. (I'm still not sure what they see that I don't; or if I'm arrogant - I probably sound it, because he has been placed on a pedestal as the author who is an epitome of 'difficult' and 'for those in the know', as DFW used to be c.15 years ago - or if I have simply read different things that make his themes seem more familiar, which is what it feels like.)
I loved The Last Wolf for simple thematic reasons. Because the narrator is a washed-up minor academic and writer who seems to have been offered an interesting piece of work by mistake, but he grabs it anyway, in a way I for one found wholly relatable. Because it's set in Extremadura, the only part of Spain I've ever really found fascinating. (When I did Spanish at school, I wasn't that interested in anywhere else, and I've never felt that you hear enough about Extremadura. But you wouldn't because a lot of it is a rural semi-wilderness.) And because it's fiction about the natural world and its destruction - similar to the sort that Amitav Ghosh and Richard Powers have recently exhorted readers and writers of English-language literary fiction towards, trying to mainstream ideas already established in eco-criticism. But written earlier (2009), in a different literary culture and by an author of this calibre, The Last Wolf follows its own path.
I was impressed by the narrator's being so moved, unexpectedly affected, by the demise of the last Spanish wolves - as were some other, but emphatically not all, characters. He's the sort of protagonist who, in many novels, is immersed in the insular concerns of the artist and in bad love-affairs, but here he cares about something beyond himself without its being presented as a cloying life-lesson. It was conveyed so very well that it never risked cheesiness or sentimentality (which, I am realising, Krasznahorkai, is skilled in averting). The narrator's silent annoyance with the interpreter at the height of the story - as she became so involved in the story she no longer interpreted it fully - neutered that possibility, and introduced a marvellous emotional honesty to the moment that so many other authors would have neglected or skimmed over. (A very Buddhist awareness of emotion is one of the unifying points of the 'bleak' and 'transcendent' sides of Krasznahorkai's work.) The Last Wolf is a work about form and style as much as it is about its topic, and so it could never be dismissed as either 'issue fiction' or 'style over substance'. (Setting up ideals of art is not a very good idea, and can be constraining, but I have to admit this is one of mine at the moment: not art versus politics, but both at once in the same work.)
It felt right to be reading this over Hallowe'en and the following days of the dead, and as further statistics on the extent of wildlife extinction hit the news. It would have been too heavy-handed as a deliberate choice, but I'd ended up reading it because it was mentioned in a discussion thread I'd looked at while reading Sátántangó, and I was so interested in the topic of The Last Wolf I had to look at it before I'd finished the previous book.
The complex framing - the narrator is telling much of the story of what happened in Spain to a bartender at his local in Berlin, some time (probably years) later - and the wide ranging across Europe by a depressive character reminded me at times of Sebald's Austerlitz. But the sentence, the whole story being one sentence, was of course far longer than any of Sebald's. The whole story may be one long sentence, but it does not double-back on itself (like late Henry James, or parts of Seiobo): it always moves forward, which means that it is not as complex an experience as some might assumed. Only once ever did I look back, and then only one page, to make sure of what a clause referred to. My gradual steps up in reading narrative styles over a week or so, from Anna Burns' Milkman to Sátántangó to this meant The Last Wolf didn't feel tense, as I often find works in very long sentences do. The single-sentence structure was merely a reminder that within the frame, this was a story being told all in one go; and by the end, it related the story to where the narrator was at, psychologically, at the time of telling the story. (Krasznahorkai has said that he finds short sentences artificial, whilst long ones seem to him to more accurately reflect conversation and thought.)
The frequency of German place-names in Sátántangó were a reminder that the setting was the territory of the old Austro-Hungarian empire, a larger and more mixed territory than the post-war, Communist, mostly-ethnically-Hungarian Hungary. In the firmly post-Communist Last Wolf, the narrator, free to travel as a European intellectual from an EU country, wanders former Hapsburg lands: a Hungarian on his uppers resident in Berlin, he finds himself summoned over to Spain, and then returns to Germany.
The two Herman stories were first published in 1986, a year after Sátántangó: like the novel, they have a dank rural setting, and grapple with characters' dark inner thoughts about their relationship to the world.
Part of me always reads any story about gamekeepers, poachers and their techniques through Danny the Champion of the World (by far my favourite Roald Dahl book as a kid - though no-one else's that I ever met - and one of the few books I read so often that my copy looked worn, whilst back then I could read a book twice and still leave it looking brand new). I wasn't expecting to be made to revisit it and that past self now, remembering creeping through the wood with them (how badly I wanted to do that or to be them; sometimes it was my greatest wish!), hoping bait worked, lost in the process, irrelevant in the moment which side one was on - and having to feel and see that alongside my later, more informed and harder-line opinions about the repeated introduction of an invasive species to just to kill it and generally disrupt the local ecosystem.
Herman part I, 'The Game Warden', the tale of a gamekeeper who changes sides, could have been trite in almost any other hands. I wasn't quite convinced this would be something that could have really happened then and there, or occurred to a similar real man, rather than an artist's idea - but the depth of Krasznahorkai's attention to mental processes, and especially his unsentimental relating of them at junctures where most other writers would concentrate on action or cheap crowd-pleasing emotion, elevates it to a level far above obvious poetic justice. He renders the existential and depressive and grubby into some kind of high Gothic, so that one can marvel at the way he describes it and at the baroque darkness of the atmosphere, rather than being dragged down.
Part II, 'Death of a Craft' is subtitled "contra Yukio Mishima". I haven't read any Mishima; I only know a little about him by reputation, and any parallels I draw between this story and other books here are merely free association, and have a major lacuna. A louche crowd of shaggers, army officers and women from the city, visit the small town where Herman is active (tagging along, in somewhat unlikely, but certainly decadent fashion, because one of their number is visiting her seriously ill mother, who lives in the town). I couldn't help but reflect on how contemporary kink types would (mostly) use very different, rather prosaic terminology. Here, written in Hungary in the mid 80s these people are a little exotic, tinged with the sentiments of notorious transgressive books like The Story of the Eye (although I'm sure what they were up to is actually not shocking at all by contemporary Western standards, unlike the escapades in that book). I liked the way none of their number had obvious views that might be expected from urbanites about Herman (especially enjoyed the giggling at the phrase 'noxious predators', a term frequently repeated in the earlier story), and that their view of him was related rather neutrally - although, in retrospect, it wasn't entirely convincing that none of the party would have divergent opinions about the gamekeeper-gone-wild. (And like Sátántangó and The Last Wolf, the Herman stories are full of names that are both German and Hungarian.)
This whole volume - and Herman I: 'The Game Warden', especially, makes a fantastic companion-piece to Olga Tokarczuk's recently-translated Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which I read a month ago - and which was published in its original Polish in 2009, the same year as The Last Wolf was released in Hungarian. So far as I can tell, the 1986 story collection that originally included Herman has not been translated into Polish, but it was published in German in 1988. 'The Game Warden' and Plow provide two similar critiques of hunting in cultures where it's much more accepted and normal than it is in Britain; the ultimate point of divergence between the two is to be around religion / Christianity. The sense of universal compassion which emerges near the end of 'The Game Warden', whilst couched in the language of Christianity, is syncretic and can also be taken in the context of the Buddhist values and worldviews that become explicit in Seiobo, and quite possibly other works by Krasznahorkai which I have not read or which are unavailable in English. Krasznahorkai aims for the transcendent and spiritual (Herman could be seen to have achieved a stage of enlightenment and/or to have been progressing towards it in a misguided fashion, by acting out what should have remained an inner realisation) whereas Tokarczuk's book makes a critique of the earthly Polish Catholic Church.
(Finished and reviewed Nov 2018; the review on Goodreads.)
This short volume of two stories (I can't be the only person who's had more than enough of the phrase 'slim volume', can I?) was published in English in 2016. It was longlisted for the 2017 US Best Translated Book Award. The stories are thematically similar, but separated by 23 years: 'The Last Wolf' appeared in its Hungarian original in 2009, but 'Herman' was in his first short story collection, from 1986. (Thanks to this article in Music & Literature magazine where I checked that info just now.)
-----
At last, a Krasznahorkai work I really connect with. Reading Sátántangó a few days ago, I realised that strength of personal connection was what would make the difference between giving his books 4 stars (as I did Sátántangó and Seiobo There Below) or 5, because I can't seem to find them as utterly singular as many of his English-language worshippers do. (I'm still not sure what they see that I don't; or if I'm arrogant - I probably sound it, because he has been placed on a pedestal as the author who is an epitome of 'difficult' and 'for those in the know', as DFW used to be c.15 years ago - or if I have simply read different things that make his themes seem more familiar, which is what it feels like.)
I loved The Last Wolf for simple thematic reasons. Because the narrator is a washed-up minor academic and writer who seems to have been offered an interesting piece of work by mistake, but he grabs it anyway, in a way I for one found wholly relatable. Because it's set in Extremadura, the only part of Spain I've ever really found fascinating. (When I did Spanish at school, I wasn't that interested in anywhere else, and I've never felt that you hear enough about Extremadura. But you wouldn't because a lot of it is a rural semi-wilderness.) And because it's fiction about the natural world and its destruction - similar to the sort that Amitav Ghosh and Richard Powers have recently exhorted readers and writers of English-language literary fiction towards, trying to mainstream ideas already established in eco-criticism. But written earlier (2009), in a different literary culture and by an author of this calibre, The Last Wolf follows its own path.
I was impressed by the narrator's being so moved, unexpectedly affected, by the demise of the last Spanish wolves - as were some other, but emphatically not all, characters. He's the sort of protagonist who, in many novels, is immersed in the insular concerns of the artist and in bad love-affairs, but here he cares about something beyond himself without its being presented as a cloying life-lesson. It was conveyed so very well that it never risked cheesiness or sentimentality (which, I am realising, Krasznahorkai, is skilled in averting). The narrator's silent annoyance with the interpreter at the height of the story - as she became so involved in the story she no longer interpreted it fully - neutered that possibility, and introduced a marvellous emotional honesty to the moment that so many other authors would have neglected or skimmed over. (A very Buddhist awareness of emotion is one of the unifying points of the 'bleak' and 'transcendent' sides of Krasznahorkai's work.) The Last Wolf is a work about form and style as much as it is about its topic, and so it could never be dismissed as either 'issue fiction' or 'style over substance'. (Setting up ideals of art is not a very good idea, and can be constraining, but I have to admit this is one of mine at the moment: not art versus politics, but both at once in the same work.)
It felt right to be reading this over Hallowe'en and the following days of the dead, and as further statistics on the extent of wildlife extinction hit the news. It would have been too heavy-handed as a deliberate choice, but I'd ended up reading it because it was mentioned in a discussion thread I'd looked at while reading Sátántangó, and I was so interested in the topic of The Last Wolf I had to look at it before I'd finished the previous book.
The complex framing - the narrator is telling much of the story of what happened in Spain to a bartender at his local in Berlin, some time (probably years) later - and the wide ranging across Europe by a depressive character reminded me at times of Sebald's Austerlitz. But the sentence, the whole story being one sentence, was of course far longer than any of Sebald's. The whole story may be one long sentence, but it does not double-back on itself (like late Henry James, or parts of Seiobo): it always moves forward, which means that it is not as complex an experience as some might assumed. Only once ever did I look back, and then only one page, to make sure of what a clause referred to. My gradual steps up in reading narrative styles over a week or so, from Anna Burns' Milkman to Sátántangó to this meant The Last Wolf didn't feel tense, as I often find works in very long sentences do. The single-sentence structure was merely a reminder that within the frame, this was a story being told all in one go; and by the end, it related the story to where the narrator was at, psychologically, at the time of telling the story. (Krasznahorkai has said that he finds short sentences artificial, whilst long ones seem to him to more accurately reflect conversation and thought.)
The frequency of German place-names in Sátántangó were a reminder that the setting was the territory of the old Austro-Hungarian empire, a larger and more mixed territory than the post-war, Communist, mostly-ethnically-Hungarian Hungary. In the firmly post-Communist Last Wolf, the narrator, free to travel as a European intellectual from an EU country, wanders former Hapsburg lands: a Hungarian on his uppers resident in Berlin, he finds himself summoned over to Spain, and then returns to Germany.
The two Herman stories were first published in 1986, a year after Sátántangó: like the novel, they have a dank rural setting, and grapple with characters' dark inner thoughts about their relationship to the world.
Part of me always reads any story about gamekeepers, poachers and their techniques through Danny the Champion of the World (by far my favourite Roald Dahl book as a kid - though no-one else's that I ever met - and one of the few books I read so often that my copy looked worn, whilst back then I could read a book twice and still leave it looking brand new). I wasn't expecting to be made to revisit it and that past self now, remembering creeping through the wood with them (how badly I wanted to do that or to be them; sometimes it was my greatest wish!), hoping bait worked, lost in the process, irrelevant in the moment which side one was on - and having to feel and see that alongside my later, more informed and harder-line opinions about the repeated introduction of an invasive species to just to kill it and generally disrupt the local ecosystem.
Herman part I, 'The Game Warden', the tale of a gamekeeper who changes sides, could have been trite in almost any other hands. I wasn't quite convinced this would be something that could have really happened then and there, or occurred to a similar real man, rather than an artist's idea - but the depth of Krasznahorkai's attention to mental processes, and especially his unsentimental relating of them at junctures where most other writers would concentrate on action or cheap crowd-pleasing emotion, elevates it to a level far above obvious poetic justice. He renders the existential and depressive and grubby into some kind of high Gothic, so that one can marvel at the way he describes it and at the baroque darkness of the atmosphere, rather than being dragged down.
Part II, 'Death of a Craft' is subtitled "contra Yukio Mishima". I haven't read any Mishima; I only know a little about him by reputation, and any parallels I draw between this story and other books here are merely free association, and have a major lacuna. A louche crowd of shaggers, army officers and women from the city, visit the small town where Herman is active (tagging along, in somewhat unlikely, but certainly decadent fashion, because one of their number is visiting her seriously ill mother, who lives in the town). I couldn't help but reflect on how contemporary kink types would (mostly) use very different, rather prosaic terminology. Here, written in Hungary in the mid 80s these people are a little exotic, tinged with the sentiments of notorious transgressive books like The Story of the Eye (although I'm sure what they were up to is actually not shocking at all by contemporary Western standards, unlike the escapades in that book). I liked the way none of their number had obvious views that might be expected from urbanites about Herman (especially enjoyed the giggling at the phrase 'noxious predators', a term frequently repeated in the earlier story), and that their view of him was related rather neutrally - although, in retrospect, it wasn't entirely convincing that none of the party would have divergent opinions about the gamekeeper-gone-wild. (And like Sátántangó and The Last Wolf, the Herman stories are full of names that are both German and Hungarian.)
This whole volume - and Herman I: 'The Game Warden', especially, makes a fantastic companion-piece to Olga Tokarczuk's recently-translated Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which I read a month ago - and which was published in its original Polish in 2009, the same year as The Last Wolf was released in Hungarian. So far as I can tell, the 1986 story collection that originally included Herman has not been translated into Polish, but it was published in German in 1988. 'The Game Warden' and Plow provide two similar critiques of hunting in cultures where it's much more accepted and normal than it is in Britain; the ultimate point of divergence between the two is to be around religion / Christianity. The sense of universal compassion which emerges near the end of 'The Game Warden', whilst couched in the language of Christianity, is syncretic and can also be taken in the context of the Buddhist values and worldviews that become explicit in Seiobo, and quite possibly other works by Krasznahorkai which I have not read or which are unavailable in English. Krasznahorkai aims for the transcendent and spiritual (Herman could be seen to have achieved a stage of enlightenment and/or to have been progressing towards it in a misguided fashion, by acting out what should have remained an inner realisation) whereas Tokarczuk's book makes a critique of the earthly Polish Catholic Church.
(Finished and reviewed Nov 2018; the review on Goodreads.)
8 November 2018
Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Review revised March 2019, after Drive Your Plow was longlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize.
Celebrated and controversial Polish author Olga Tokarczuk won the Man Booker International Prize in May 2018 for Flights. Drive Your Plow, published in English that September, was the next volume of Tokarczuk's to be released in Britain by Fitzcarraldo Editions. It was first published in Poland in 2009.
It's a literary crime novel, narrated by Janina Duszejko, an eccentric animal-lover in her sixties, who lives alone in a remote village near the Czech border, and it has been described as an ecological thriller with feminist themes. (She hates her name and tries to avoid using it, so I have said "the narrator" and "the protagonist" more often than I usually would in this post.)
I hadn't read any of Tokarczuk's books before autumn 2018, although I'd owned copies of Primeval and House of Day, House of Night for years before that without getting round to reading them - missing out on the hipster opportunity to say I'd read her before she was famous (famous in Britain that is).
I found this a tricky review to write. The novel's protagonist has strong negative views about Christianity. I'm active in a Goodreads discussion group where a handful of the other frequent posters are practising Christians (I'm not), and some of them didn't like Drive Your Plow. I wanted to find a way to stay true to my own views whilst also being diplomatic about religion. In the preceding weeks and months there had been heated discussions (totally unrelated to religion) about some English-language Booker listed titles, and I wanted to continue smoothing things over, not spark a new bout of partisanship over another book. Months later, after talking about it, it turns out that their dislike of the book isn't directly connected with that, as conservative Polish Catholicism is quite different from their churches. But the background reading was still worthwhile, as I'd found it interesting to read about environmental activism by various Christian groups, some of which are mentioned later in the post.
This review does not contain overt spoilers, but does hint at plot developments and twists, in order to discuss whole the novel.
Drive Your Plow has been described as one of Olga Tokarczuk's lighter novels, written between the experimental Flights and The Books of Jacob (as she said in this interview) - but it's still full of ideas.
Some things were easy to say about the book.
It has gorgeous descriptions of nature.
In this it's similar to the writing of Andrzej Stasiuk, another major contemporary Polish author who, like Olga Tokarczuk, left Warsaw to move to the Tatra mountain border regions. (Although Tokarczuk was born near the area where she now lives.) Both writers incorporate the rural landscape and the culture of the border area into their work. If you are an English-language reader with heritage in the hills of southern of Poland, you are rather spoilt for choice - it's not often that there is such an abundance of translated writing from such sparsely populated areas far from major cities.
Parts of Drive Your Plow contain intensely reflective and philosophical insights. Especially near the beginning, there's a paragraph worth highlighting and remembering on every page. These hint at why Tokarczuk's longer and more complex novel Flights won this year's International Booker, and why The Books of Jacob has been so eagerly awaited by English readers of complex fiction.
Some of the novel, especially after the early chapters, is more of a pacy literary-crime story, and less overtly philosophical. Which makes it a faster, lighter read overall than it may seem from the opening pages - however this may disappoint readers hoping for something more structurally experimental all the way through.
I'm grateful to Katia's review on Goodreads, which I read before the novel itself: it was invaluable in explaining that the narrator of Drive Your Plow is a riff on a 1990s East European trend for light, ironic novels featuring female detectives. I couldn't help but see this through the lens of the English cosy-mystery subgenre, as descended from Miss Marple - but undoubtedly there are differences in the Polish equivalent which an English reader is unaware of. (The queen of 20th century Polish crime writing, the late Joanna Chmielewska, has not been translated to English as yet.) Seeing Drive Your Plow as a satire on old-lady cosy-mysteries made me look forward to reading it - it seemed like an easy way into Tokarczuk's work, more so than Flights, which had been talked up as formidable, or the two other books of hers which I'd already owned for years, and which had become "ought to reads" at least as much as "want to reads".
And, as it turned out, I loved what Tokarczuk added to the cosy-mystery concept: twists, politics, and amplification of traits that popular culture associates with older women living alone but which it does not necessarily respect - including a 'mad cat lady' love of all animals, not just cats, (Pani Duszejko is actually a dog-owner) and a belief in superstitions and the supernatural. The narrator is not as safe and sweet as your typical cosy-mystery heroine. (There is also another feminist twist on crime fiction in general: in Drive Your Plow, the murder victims are middle-aged and older men - not the usual young women or children.)
In literary fiction, making astrology prominent in a narrative can get people's backs up, as it did with Eleanor Catton's 2013 Booker Winner The Luminaries. I mean, this isn't romance or commercial women's fiction, is it? On a personal level, I find horoscopes pernicious - they can be an insidious nuisance when combined with a phase of OCD-type issues. But when they are used as complex motifs in a literary novel, I think the snobbery they provoke is excessive. (Some have described this snobbery as sexist, although perhaps it is also sexist to align astrology so strongly with women.) I doubt that heavy use of, for example, Renaissance alchemy and its symbolism, in a work of fiction would irritate the same people to the same extent. Astrology is, similarly, a system of symbols and interactions - one well known in current pop culture. It has a place in fiction just like other features of pop culture disliked by some readers of 'serious' novels. I daresay Olga Tokarczuk thought about all this - as well as hardline Polish Catholic clergy's dislike of astrology - when she decided to put it in Drive Your Plow - although she wouldn't have known that the novel would be translated to English at a time when astrology is gaining in popularity among younger people.
The narrator seemed so similar (although not, I hasten to add, in her most extreme actions) to a couple of women whose posts I'd read years ago in pet forums, that I wondered if the translator had read the same forums and taken inspiration from the writing style of these people. She shares other characteristics with them beyond narrative voice: a level of intelligence and expertise in her chosen interests which a lot of people wouldn't think a "mad cat lady" type would have; and anger and hardcore views about animal rights more usually associated with recently-converted young vegans. It turns out that a linguistic similarity, the capitalisation of certain nouns, such as Animals, was present in the original Polish novel (thank you, Goodreads Agnieszka for the info). Later in the book, extended English prose quotations from William Blake (the narrator's favourite author, of whom she makes unpublished Polish translations as a hobby) indicated that he was actually the inspiration behind her capitalisations. He was writing at a time when this capitalisation was more accepted, and not necessarily an indicator of personal eccentricity, corporate brand-speak, or of a story for children, as it is now. [Since reading Drive Your Plow, and this review, I've also read Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749), in the Penguin edition that preserves the original capitalisation, and where it is used for every Noun. Blake, writing decades later, was more selective about his use of caps.]
For all its positives, I also thought the book might be shooting itself in the foot while trying to do too many clever things in one go. The plot twist seemed to undermine the novel's causes: greater respect for women like the protagonist, for environmental and animal rights activism and opposition to conservative Catholicism.
This comes to an aspect of the book that I found tricky to write about; I revised draft reviews more than once in the hope of being both true to my own views, and more diplomatic about religion. In the end, the latter became easier. I realised that whilst, historically, the Christian doctrine of man's dominion over the animals can be seen as background to the current environmental situation, the exploitation of nature is nowadays criticised by some prominent clergy. Although this varies greatly by country and denomination, in general there are practices various branches of Christianity used to support, and which they no longer condone. Sweeping judgements about the entire religion are one of the ways in which the narrator goes too far. (Although to an anticlerical Pole reading Plow when it was first published ten years ago - and anticlericalism has a long tradition in Polish intellectual life* - these views may not have sounded unfairly sweeping. Many of these ecologically-minded Christian developments happened since the book's first publication, and in other countries. Traditional Polish Catholicism was, and is, very different church from the 2000s Church of England, with its fair-trade craft fairs; Anglicanism is a denomination for which it has been no great leap to speak out about the environment.)
Drive Your Plow is ambiguous about what is heroism and what is villainy. In this it has similarities to the Channel 4 series Utopia (with its plot relating to human overpopulation). By showing a character whom most would consider to be going too far, it prompts its audience, or at any rate those who agree that there is an underlying issue, to consider where they think lines should be drawn, and what might be done in the real world. I felt that Drive Your Plow, through its ambiguous narrative tone, has potential to appeal to readers who disagree with the narrator's views on animal rights as well as those broadly sympathetic to them - although in practice I am not sure if that has been borne out.
One could say that Tokarczuk was using the novel's ambiguity to protect herself given the far greater conservatism on animal rights issues in Poland, as compared with Britain. But in Poland the novel was not received as ambiguous. It apparently led to new debate about hunting, according to an interview with Tokarczuk earlier in 2018:
Hunting has become a hot political issue in Poland since the novel was published, but at the time few were thinking about it. “Some people said that once again Tokarczuk is an old crazy woman doing weird things, but then this big discussion started on the internet about what we can do about this very patriarchal, Catholic tradition.” (Thank you to Neil's review for prompting me to look at this interview.)
The pro-hunting clerical tradition represented by the priest in Drive Your Plow remains alive and well in Poland, and was influencing political policy seven years after the book's publication, in favour of logging at the once-revered ancient Białowieża Forest:
Sections of the Catholic and Orthodox churches have played a partisan role in the debate, with a passage from Genesis - “be fruitful, and multiply, replenish the earth and subdue it” - often used to justify increased logging.
One orthodox priest from Hajnówka, Leonid Szeszko, recently called for scientific, environmental and NGOs which opposed the logging plans to be banned.
Szyszko, who has championed the logging law, is a regular guest on the ultra-conservative Radio Maria, a Catholic radio station, and appears at conferences with a priest garbed in a forester’s green uniform.
Even if one reads with awareness of this, the prevailing attitudes detailed in the book seem old-fashioned and sometimes downright strange from a British perspective. I doubt it would be generally considered extreme or weird to make meticulous reports about infractions of hunting byelaws in the UK, even if some locals in some areas might not be receptive. And in UK cities it is pretty common to be vegetarian, like the narrator, or vegan. Fur-farming (another sub-plot in Drive Your Plow) has been illegal in Britain for about 15 years now, and was already in decline before that. It was quite eye-opening to see how differently these things were evidently regarded by the majority in Poland. The hunt chaplain's sermon seemed almost medieval.
Nor, in contemporary Britain, would the established church be considered the primary upholder of 'man's dominion over the animals', as the Polish Catholic Church is in Drive Your Plow. The CofE is both less influential, and rather different in its prevailing politics. I wrote in a draft a couple of weeks before posting this review that it was inconceivable that former Archbishop of Canterbury and "national treasure" Rowan Williams, would utter anything like Father Rustle's sermon. Then, emphasising this, in the intervening fortnight, Williams spoke out in support of Extinction Rebellion, a new protest movement calling for more government action on climate change.
It wouldn't be correct, either, to take the book's view of the Polish Catholic church as globally characteristic of Catholicism, even if conservative Catholicism is influential in some countries. (Semantically, being against nature conservation always seems a very poor use of the word 'conservative'.) Famously, there was Pope Francis' 2015 encyclical Laudato si' - a follow-up to Polish Pope John Paul II's 1990 message 'The Ecological Crisis'. There are also smaller initiatives including a number of orders of nuns making active efforts to live sustainably.
In Plow, the conservative Catholicism of Father Rustle and the hunters needs to be set against the narrator as a folkloric/pagan symbol herself. While reading the novel, I had passing thoughts of the crone aspect of the Celtic neopagan triple goddess, but this was a Polish book so it didn't seem terribly relevant, and I left it alone. But Mimi's excellent review on Goodreads points out, among other things, that Janina is a Jungian crone, and also makes a highly plausible connection with Baba Yaga. (I was kicking myself for not having thought of Baba Yaga.) Thus the narrator could also be connected tentatively with Slavic neopaganism, a small movement which tends to be more openly critical of Christianity than is contemporary Western paganism.
(Incidentally, this is the first time since veganism became a major social trend that I've encountered a novel with a narrator who might be on the wavelength of hardcore vegans - i.e. the people who post confrontationally under Guardian cookery articles about meat, or who actively campaign. Actually, have I *ever*? There is surprisingly little about vegetarianism and veganism in novels, considering how common they are among urban creative people in the global North. Anyway, it would be interesting to hear what young vegans who were into astrology thought of Drive Your Plow: the narrator is more in tune with their views than most fictional characters of her age - but is her ambiguity too discomfiting?)
In yet another (!) of her interviews for The Guardian during 2018, Olga Tokarczuk mentioned that Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet was one of her favourite books, and an influence on Drive Your Plow. I read it not long before Plow - I'd been thinking of reading The Hearing Trumpet for years, and here was a good reason. The parallels between the two books are more evident now (a month after finishing Plow) than they did in close-up, while I was reading Tokarczuk's book. Transparently, both are about older female protagonists who are not taken seriously by many of the other characters - but they are centred and respected by their respective first-person narratives. They are not the kind of unreliable narrators that seem crafted to show up and trip up the protagonists, even if it is evident that the other characters don't see them as they see themselves. Both books are somewhat ambiguous and/or potentially shooting themselves in the foot: they kind of celebrate their heroines as interesting women who don't follow societal norms and who should be listened to more, alongside indicating why many people, even sympathetic people, might disregard their views to some extent. (Tokarczuk has also used ambiguity, or rather tact and subtlety in the allusive matter of the narrator's ailments.)
But this ambiguity is also what makes these books *art* rather than merely socio-political arguments and campaigns. They don't provide the easy arguments one might like them to. As in The Hearing Trumpet, people with dementia may be imagining fascinating worlds inside their heads and they deserve to live in a friendly environment that meets their needs and to be taken seriously … but the dementia can also make it difficult to keep them anchored in the real world and to be sure what they say is real. Old ladies obsessed with animals may be intelligent people who've had interesting, repsonsible jobs, and be driven campaigners … but they might go too far (and occasionally, in more serious ways than in writing endless complaint letters in the proverbial green ink).
I was impressed by the first Olga Tokarczuk book I read - though given that Plow is one of her lighter efforts, and still contained so much, it did not make me much less daunted by the prospect of reading Flights, which had been steadily sweeping 2018's translation shortlists before it.
*e.g. Czesław Miłosz, History of Polish Literature, p.xiv, "a curious dichotomy ... a more or less permanent trait of Polish letters; namely an emotional moralism obviously nourished by a strong residue of Christian ethics has coexisted with anti-clericalism and an utter skepticism as to any dogmas (religious or political)".
(Book read Sept-Oct 2018; reviewed Nov 2018. Revised March 2019 - mostly for clarity and style, and also to add points about Polish anticlericalism and Janina as crone, which emerged from discussion in Goodreads comments. The review and comment thread on Goodreads.)
5 November 2018
The Iliac Crest by Cristina Rivera Garza, tr. Sarah Booker
This recently-translated Mexican novella from 2002 was first published in English in 2017 by Feminist Press in the USA, and then in Britain in 2018 by And Other Stories, as part of their Year of Publishing Women (a response to Kamila Shamsie's 2015 'provocation' about inequality in literary fiction). The US edition was longlisted for the 2018 Best Translated Book Award for Fiction.
-----
Slippery, literary psychological horror. It addresses current topics: the revival of neglected female authors, and gender boundaries, but was first published in Mexico in 2002.
Some readers will pick up a hint from the introductory Note from the Author, but I'd recommend reading the translator's note first: it explains some important points, and it makes the narrative and its symbolism somewhat less opaque. I read it just under halfway through. Up till that point, merely looking up the writer Amparo Dávila (thank you to other reviews for indicating the character was named after a real person), and assuming that references to 'disappearance' related to political arrests in Latin American countries had left me frustrated. The disappearance is actually that of women authors and Dávila in particular - and the possibility of expression readers are robbed of at the same time - layered with the widespread murders of women in Mexico which would also become the subject of Roberto Bolaño's 2666. The title is a reference to the bones which most easily distinguish a female skeleton from male. Another character, Juan Escutia, is also named after a real person.
Understanding this background meant that I could enjoy the book to an extent from an analytical viewpoint, although the genre and atmosphere isn't one I like much in book form. (I wouldn't have read this novella if I weren't working through a few books eligible for next year's Booker International.) I noticed echoes of Hitchcock films combined with the paranoia engendered by living in a dictatorship - as in some other Latin American, or Eastern Bloc literature and film - but many English-language readers have compared it with David Lynch. I didn't feel a Lynchian atmosphere, but the possibility that facets of the story are not amenable to clear and specific interpretations, and are instead simply eerie and dreamlike and things-in-themselves is very Lynchian. I still craved concrete interpretations of certain points (e.g. the symbolism of the character of the Seducer, and some of the last reactions of the False Amparo when the narrator says he is going to visit True Amparo) but I have not been able to find any so far in other reviews online. If it were a type of book I enjoyed in itself, and wanted to spend more time with, I would probably have spent longer trying to think of my own.
I was impressed by the skill of the translator in dealing with gender ambiguity in the narrative. The Spanish shows some other characters addressing the narrator - who often asserts his own maleness and masculinity - using feminine word forms, which English does not have, a significant linguistic drawback. Frequently, the narrator did not feel convincingly male: like a character an inexperienced woman writer had created by attaching a number of stereotypical chauvinist male behaviours and ideas to a stream of other inner thoughts that (in a way I couldn't quite pinpoint) sounded more likely to be from a woman. He sometimes described and analysed his own actions in ways that sounded a lot like women analysing a man; I thought a few times of the question "Is this a reverse?" (i.e. someone posting a dilemma in a forum as if they were one of the other people involved). Of course one cannot trust such impressions absolutely (and these days gender-based assumptions about narrative styles are discouraged), ergo ambiguity.
I thought that the three characters' talking to the narrator as if he were female could be seen as their assertion of equality: his with them and theirs with him. (He felt this habit to be an affront.) They were making the male female, as opposed to claiming male/masculine characteristics and words for themselves because of male as the default culturally and linguistically, and being more powerful (as they are perhaps implying he has been doing, and as women have done to get ahead in male-dominated spheres. This could be related to the late 20th-century shift from forms of feminism about women being or becoming more like men, to feminism about asserting femaleness in itself - although that may have been a very Global North current, of limited relevance to conditions in Mexico).
[A typo or error that stood out: a doctor, of all people, wouldn't be getting cellulite and cellulitis mixed up.]
As Dávila wrote psychological horror, The Iliac Crest presumably contains references to her stories (which I have not read), and to other Mexican literature I don't know. A couple of journal/blog reviews mention Julio Cortázar.
The ideal reader for this book probably enjoys psychological horror blended with highly literary writing, has a keen eye for feminist interpretations and theory, and a good knowledge of Latin American, in particular Mexican, literature. That isn't me.
The Iliac Crest reminds me, in its claustrophobic twisty-turny atmosphere, of some other books that were listed for the Booker International and its predecessor the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (and which I didn't always want to read in full); I wouldn't be surprised if it were on the longlist next March.
-----
Slippery, literary psychological horror. It addresses current topics: the revival of neglected female authors, and gender boundaries, but was first published in Mexico in 2002.
Some readers will pick up a hint from the introductory Note from the Author, but I'd recommend reading the translator's note first: it explains some important points, and it makes the narrative and its symbolism somewhat less opaque. I read it just under halfway through. Up till that point, merely looking up the writer Amparo Dávila (thank you to other reviews for indicating the character was named after a real person), and assuming that references to 'disappearance' related to political arrests in Latin American countries had left me frustrated. The disappearance is actually that of women authors and Dávila in particular - and the possibility of expression readers are robbed of at the same time - layered with the widespread murders of women in Mexico which would also become the subject of Roberto Bolaño's 2666. The title is a reference to the bones which most easily distinguish a female skeleton from male. Another character, Juan Escutia, is also named after a real person.
Understanding this background meant that I could enjoy the book to an extent from an analytical viewpoint, although the genre and atmosphere isn't one I like much in book form. (I wouldn't have read this novella if I weren't working through a few books eligible for next year's Booker International.) I noticed echoes of Hitchcock films combined with the paranoia engendered by living in a dictatorship - as in some other Latin American, or Eastern Bloc literature and film - but many English-language readers have compared it with David Lynch. I didn't feel a Lynchian atmosphere, but the possibility that facets of the story are not amenable to clear and specific interpretations, and are instead simply eerie and dreamlike and things-in-themselves is very Lynchian. I still craved concrete interpretations of certain points (e.g. the symbolism of the character of the Seducer, and some of the last reactions of the False Amparo when the narrator says he is going to visit True Amparo) but I have not been able to find any so far in other reviews online. If it were a type of book I enjoyed in itself, and wanted to spend more time with, I would probably have spent longer trying to think of my own.
I was impressed by the skill of the translator in dealing with gender ambiguity in the narrative. The Spanish shows some other characters addressing the narrator - who often asserts his own maleness and masculinity - using feminine word forms, which English does not have, a significant linguistic drawback. Frequently, the narrator did not feel convincingly male: like a character an inexperienced woman writer had created by attaching a number of stereotypical chauvinist male behaviours and ideas to a stream of other inner thoughts that (in a way I couldn't quite pinpoint) sounded more likely to be from a woman. He sometimes described and analysed his own actions in ways that sounded a lot like women analysing a man; I thought a few times of the question "Is this a reverse?" (i.e. someone posting a dilemma in a forum as if they were one of the other people involved). Of course one cannot trust such impressions absolutely (and these days gender-based assumptions about narrative styles are discouraged), ergo ambiguity.
I thought that the three characters' talking to the narrator as if he were female could be seen as their assertion of equality: his with them and theirs with him. (He felt this habit to be an affront.) They were making the male female, as opposed to claiming male/masculine characteristics and words for themselves because of male as the default culturally and linguistically, and being more powerful (as they are perhaps implying he has been doing, and as women have done to get ahead in male-dominated spheres. This could be related to the late 20th-century shift from forms of feminism about women being or becoming more like men, to feminism about asserting femaleness in itself - although that may have been a very Global North current, of limited relevance to conditions in Mexico).
[A typo or error that stood out: a doctor, of all people, wouldn't be getting cellulite and cellulitis mixed up.]
As Dávila wrote psychological horror, The Iliac Crest presumably contains references to her stories (which I have not read), and to other Mexican literature I don't know. A couple of journal/blog reviews mention Julio Cortázar.
The ideal reader for this book probably enjoys psychological horror blended with highly literary writing, has a keen eye for feminist interpretations and theory, and a good knowledge of Latin American, in particular Mexican, literature. That isn't me.
The Iliac Crest reminds me, in its claustrophobic twisty-turny atmosphere, of some other books that were listed for the Booker International and its predecessor the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (and which I didn't always want to read in full); I wouldn't be surprised if it were on the longlist next March.
3 November 2018
Finite Formulae & Theories of Chance by Wioletta Greg, tr. Marek Kazmierski
Two thirds poems, one third diary-like prose fragments. The poems are probably best read after Gregorszewska's semi-autobiographical 2017 novella Swallowing Mercury (which was longlisted for the 2017 Booker Intternational Prize. They also focus on her family - spanning the 20th century - and her time growing up in 1980s rural Silesia, with some aspects of everyday technology comparable to the early 20th century in Britain. They have the same enchanting Bruno Schulz-like magic in which eccentricities and sweetness are amplified to create memorable characters. Knowing more about these people's life stories from elaborations in the prose book augments understanding of and connection to the poems, and there are many cross references both to scenes - hunting for scrap metal with teenage classmates, her ageing father feeding bees, making feather bedding - and motifs - especially sweet flags and iris, as well as more generally Polish elements like mushroom-picking, and a great many names of plants. (Plenty to look up here, especially botanical - and fascinating oddments like a bombilla, an early reusable straw.) Again the narrative voice carries a sense of self-assurance, and features like the narrator's relationship with her father, outdoor escapades and an unspoken disregard of the patriarchal culture of the time that makes many pieces seem as if they could have just as easily been by a male writer. A few poems, for which the later book provides no background, felt more opaque in their details, although with equal potential for loveliness if I'd known more. At least one references an earlier bilingual poetry collection Pamięć Smieny / Smena's Memory, which I have not read. For those who need to know about such things, there are none of the brief sexual assault scenes from the novella, although the poems do mention, often in moving tones, some of her relatives' tough experiences during the World Wars.
Crowds rushing the bridge, the boy barely seven
out of breath and running, forced to abandon
his basket of hatchlings…
Before the bombardment
twists the steel bridge into rings of wild fire,
bodies cast like feathers up into flaming air,
you will dive into the water and find breath recovered
in the silt, the sweet flag
and the shore of your bed.
---
One more winter will do me in, he thought,
but he lived on to sing in taverns
his forbidden songs and build his bread ovens.
Nights are his borderlands. Bushes glowing
with the tracking eyes of German shepherds.
The trigger fingers of branches heavy with dew.
----
Her grandmother is folkloric:
Wheat daughter, prisoner of sneaky pigweed, mother
to the five corners of the world and your three hectares,
beak-nosed carpenter’s wife and the potter’s lover,
queen of the aroma of grey soap, head covered
with a gold-trimmed kerchief, the glory of birds at dawn,
tired liege of furrowed fields, midwife to our breads,
magic purveyor of spirit and rye, protector of cabbages,
you who brought ripe Augusts deep into the barn,
warrior woman feared and hated by all local cats,
nurse of the sour leaven in our stone house,
But occasionally, this could only be the 1980s, and a teenage girl:
At night, the Chernobyl cloud fell
across pastures. Thyroids swelled.
The pond glowed with murmuring iodine,
swallows kissing crooked mirrors.
The radio kept playing “Moonlight Shadow”.
In the barn, a girl guide from the city started
a club for virgins. Smoking menthols…
One signposts towards the contemporary immigrant tales to come:
Sleep, for tomorrow you’ll watch Polish satellite TV,
a carton of smuggled fags waiting on your doorstep.
A fairy godmother will also reload your gas meter,
help you find refuge under a warm power-shower.
Sleep! A Breezer trickle runs along the floor.
Tobacco folding into the shape of fern leaves.
Your dreams will be done. You will go home.
Sleep! You’ll stop drinking, abandon the farm
where stalks cut your hard-working hands
and tea time is blessed respite.
Sleep! Night time here, in this promised land, is shorter.
The alarm clock squealing at five in the morning.
The shivering bicycle waiting by the gate.
Off mushroom picking with granddad?
The fragments (can't be sure if they are fully or only partly autobiographical) relate first-person experiences as a Polish immigrant living on the Isle of Wight from 2006-2014, often on a low income. I have never been to the Isle of Wight, nor taken much interest in the place, so in some ways it was more novel than hearing about Poland - but overall less inviting.
They present a major shift in tone, like visiting someone whom you're used to seeing dressed up away from home, and now they are in a bathrobe - but they remain the same interesting person, and each style has its plus points.
My two year old daughter is sitting in the corner of the garden and whispers to a spider, “Don’t be afraid. Don’t be.”
--
I attend English lessons, along with other migrant mothers and their small children. They help us feel more at home in the Islanders’ tongue. One session features John Keats and his poetry. The son of one of the students, evidently bored, writhing in his chair, starts to throw scraps of paper on the floor. His mother, irate, explodes in Polish:
“Put those down, or you’ll grow up to be another poet!”
--
Ten calls since morning about work, and every time I have to spell my name over and over again, letter by tiny letter. With each call, the sound of it becoming ever-more alien to me. Outside the kitchen window, the orange flash of a Royal Mail postman’s jacket flies by. An envelope! I run to the door, hoping it’s news of a job offer, an invite for interview or at least a decision about benefits. I tear it open and out pops a poetry chapbook.
---
I wished this one had been expanded into a full essay, as there's so little English commentary on contemporary Polish literature beyond individual authors:
Polish poetry is starting to make me feel queasy. I hide from it in the prose by Hlasko, Caldwell, Zweig, Dowlatow, Flaubert, Pilch, Kafka. I have had years of reading poetry volumes from Zielona Sowa, Biuro Literackie, anthologies, offerings from the “barbarians” and the “classicists”, niche genres, publications bought in bookshops, blogs, pre- and post-Brulion poets, internet art-zines, reams of verses, e-books, PDFs. I am infected with Polish poetry. I have had my fill of the stuff, chasing files from my inbox onto my desktop or into the trash.
There are other references to other Polish writers and artists almost unknown in English: Halina Poświatowska, Zygmunt Haupt, Ildefons Houwalt - which I gather up and note here for my own reference rather than to give the impression the book is wall-to-wall with this stuff, which it really isn't. Most of it is about daily life and personal events.
I have reservations about this translation, as it might be too anglicised. (I'd love to hear more about the Polish about it from someone who's fluent in both.) One of the poems, about playing in the snow as a child, refers to "moon boots". Did she really have those? The Polish poem contains no references to moon boots, walking as if on the moon or similar. The locals are always "Islanders" never "the English" as the Polish would sometimes translate and which would give a stronger sense of otherness.
(read and reviewed Nov 2018; the review on Goodreads.)
Crowds rushing the bridge, the boy barely seven
out of breath and running, forced to abandon
his basket of hatchlings…
Before the bombardment
twists the steel bridge into rings of wild fire,
bodies cast like feathers up into flaming air,
you will dive into the water and find breath recovered
in the silt, the sweet flag
and the shore of your bed.
---
One more winter will do me in, he thought,
but he lived on to sing in taverns
his forbidden songs and build his bread ovens.
Nights are his borderlands. Bushes glowing
with the tracking eyes of German shepherds.
The trigger fingers of branches heavy with dew.
----
Her grandmother is folkloric:
Wheat daughter, prisoner of sneaky pigweed, mother
to the five corners of the world and your three hectares,
beak-nosed carpenter’s wife and the potter’s lover,
queen of the aroma of grey soap, head covered
with a gold-trimmed kerchief, the glory of birds at dawn,
tired liege of furrowed fields, midwife to our breads,
magic purveyor of spirit and rye, protector of cabbages,
you who brought ripe Augusts deep into the barn,
warrior woman feared and hated by all local cats,
nurse of the sour leaven in our stone house,
But occasionally, this could only be the 1980s, and a teenage girl:
At night, the Chernobyl cloud fell
across pastures. Thyroids swelled.
The pond glowed with murmuring iodine,
swallows kissing crooked mirrors.
The radio kept playing “Moonlight Shadow”.
In the barn, a girl guide from the city started
a club for virgins. Smoking menthols…
One signposts towards the contemporary immigrant tales to come:
Sleep, for tomorrow you’ll watch Polish satellite TV,
a carton of smuggled fags waiting on your doorstep.
A fairy godmother will also reload your gas meter,
help you find refuge under a warm power-shower.
Sleep! A Breezer trickle runs along the floor.
Tobacco folding into the shape of fern leaves.
Your dreams will be done. You will go home.
Sleep! You’ll stop drinking, abandon the farm
where stalks cut your hard-working hands
and tea time is blessed respite.
Sleep! Night time here, in this promised land, is shorter.
The alarm clock squealing at five in the morning.
The shivering bicycle waiting by the gate.
Off mushroom picking with granddad?
The fragments (can't be sure if they are fully or only partly autobiographical) relate first-person experiences as a Polish immigrant living on the Isle of Wight from 2006-2014, often on a low income. I have never been to the Isle of Wight, nor taken much interest in the place, so in some ways it was more novel than hearing about Poland - but overall less inviting.
They present a major shift in tone, like visiting someone whom you're used to seeing dressed up away from home, and now they are in a bathrobe - but they remain the same interesting person, and each style has its plus points.
My two year old daughter is sitting in the corner of the garden and whispers to a spider, “Don’t be afraid. Don’t be.”
--
I attend English lessons, along with other migrant mothers and their small children. They help us feel more at home in the Islanders’ tongue. One session features John Keats and his poetry. The son of one of the students, evidently bored, writhing in his chair, starts to throw scraps of paper on the floor. His mother, irate, explodes in Polish:
“Put those down, or you’ll grow up to be another poet!”
--
Ten calls since morning about work, and every time I have to spell my name over and over again, letter by tiny letter. With each call, the sound of it becoming ever-more alien to me. Outside the kitchen window, the orange flash of a Royal Mail postman’s jacket flies by. An envelope! I run to the door, hoping it’s news of a job offer, an invite for interview or at least a decision about benefits. I tear it open and out pops a poetry chapbook.
---
I wished this one had been expanded into a full essay, as there's so little English commentary on contemporary Polish literature beyond individual authors:
Polish poetry is starting to make me feel queasy. I hide from it in the prose by Hlasko, Caldwell, Zweig, Dowlatow, Flaubert, Pilch, Kafka. I have had years of reading poetry volumes from Zielona Sowa, Biuro Literackie, anthologies, offerings from the “barbarians” and the “classicists”, niche genres, publications bought in bookshops, blogs, pre- and post-Brulion poets, internet art-zines, reams of verses, e-books, PDFs. I am infected with Polish poetry. I have had my fill of the stuff, chasing files from my inbox onto my desktop or into the trash.
There are other references to other Polish writers and artists almost unknown in English: Halina Poświatowska, Zygmunt Haupt, Ildefons Houwalt - which I gather up and note here for my own reference rather than to give the impression the book is wall-to-wall with this stuff, which it really isn't. Most of it is about daily life and personal events.
I have reservations about this translation, as it might be too anglicised. (I'd love to hear more about the Polish about it from someone who's fluent in both.) One of the poems, about playing in the snow as a child, refers to "moon boots". Did she really have those? The Polish poem contains no references to moon boots, walking as if on the moon or similar. The locals are always "Islanders" never "the English" as the Polish would sometimes translate and which would give a stronger sense of otherness.
(read and reviewed Nov 2018; the review on Goodreads.)
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