This Latvian autofiction from 2015 was widely acclaimed in its homeland, and its English translation was published by the London-based specialists in translated European novellas Peirene Press in March 2018. I read it at this time because it was longlisted in January 2019 for two awards, the Republic of Consciousness Prize (a UK award for small-press literature) - which has a bit of discussion on the Goodreads group I'm active in, The Mookse and the Gripes - and the EBRD (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) Literature Prize.
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⭐⭐⭐½
This seems like a good novella to read if you're interested in exploring the history of the Baltic States through literature. It's about lives lived, a daughter and mother, under the final 20 years of Soviet communism, a period not covered so often in other recently translated novels I've encountered, and it's one of the too-small number of Latvian books translated to English.
But if you are already familiar with the history, and/or were alive, even in the West, to see it on the news, the book (or perhaps this English translation) over-explains the basics of events and general tendencies, and avoids some specific vocabulary; for example samizdats aren't called samizdats, but "photocopies of smuggled books". It still includes some beautiful descriptions of local scenery and everyday items, but it feels like a novel written with an eye to a mainstream foreign market, or for young people in its home region. Maybe these explanations were added in the translation, but I'd have expected Peirene Press to assume a greater level of knowledge than this in their audience - perhaps the translation was done this way to make it palatable for sale to less boutique-y publishers outside the UK.
That would be understandable, as novels about difficult mother-daughter relationships - a small subset of those also with references to milk in the title (e.g. Deborah Levy's Hot Milk) - have been a recent publishing trend. I'm not sure that Soviet Milk stands out enough from these - although perhaps the mother having a serious full-time professional job (a gynaecologist) helps it to differ from all the books about mothers who were housewives, who were unable to work, or who did not identify themselves with a career. There are, though, some experiences in Soviet Milk which don't get a lot of coverage in fiction and drama, especially being a young carer, and being in a lone parent family which has a decent income.
I didn't especially like the way that the story was presented, and from a more objective standpoint this is, frankly, petty. I'd noticed Soviet Milk described as "autofiction" shortly before I read it, and I would rather have read this story presented as a memoir, with the adult daughter's understanding and analysis sitting alongside events rather seeing things presented from the child point of view, including incidents where a lack of wider knowledge and context underlay the apparent negative feeling, e.g. Hamsters do sometimes eat their young - this was well known at my primary school. Latchkey kids were a common phenomenon in Western countries in the 1970s too, and under Russian communism from its earliest days. The lack of childcare whilst the mother worked was systemic rather than a personal failing. A child doesn't experience such things in the aggregate, yes, but these understandings are part of the process of mature, informed adult making-sense of the past. (I often asked myself, especially in the early part of the book, whether it was framed the way it was as a literary device, or because it reflected where the writer was at psychologically. If the latter, my criticism was particularly unfair.) Sometimes understandings emerged as the narrator grew up, but I had already felt frustrated and irritable too often while reading the book, and I would rather have read this material in a different narrative framework.
I usually find it contrived when characters in novels are very passionate readers and find books a means of survival - it seems like a cheap tactic designed to get a certain type of reader on side, when a lot of real people get solace in other ways: however it also makes sense in the family context, as the mother's obsession with literature probably contributed to her daughter becoming a writer; and besides literature feels more valuable when it is something genuinely difficult to obtain, as it was under Soviet Communism, than when there is a surfeit.
And, whilst it isn't an issue that affects me personally, there are some women readers who would find it a problem that the book symbolically equates breastfeeding with being a good mother.
There were a lot of moments, especially in the first two thirds of the book, when I felt the book could have done a better job of explaining why characters felt as they did. It was just assumed the reader would get things. It seemed to be on an oddly surface level for a psychological novel. About many of the situations and sentences, there were questions a counsellor would ask to probe further. I want a memoir or autofiction to answer more of those. Although this silence could also be an effect of the setting, of living under the Soviet system: one had to keep some doors closed in one's head (about Latvian independence, personal feelings or their intertwining) and the type of self-reflection now encouraged by Western psychology was not a readily available tool - so why would narratives about c.1969-89 use it? Perhaps it is also a question of the ultimate unfathomability of chronic severe depression to a person who only gets reactively depressed: regardless of whether you grok it, it simply has to be accepted that it exists and some people experience it; and a child or teenager witnessing it may not understand it that way, and also has plenty of other problems to deal with.
I wasn't totally convinced by the mother's first person narrative. The voices were too similar, especially given their differences in age in the daughter's earlier years, and, although asterisks always marked a change of narrator, I sometimes forgot and would only realise a few paragraphs in that it was now someone different telling the story, and I would skip back and re-read with that context. It didn't go into much depth in describing how the mother felt in being away from the city and not fulfilling her youthful ambitions. She was living in what, to many, could seem like an idyllic location doing useful work with lower pressure than in an urban setting (the sort of life of which great memoirs are made - being a rural doctor with a great rapport with patients in a vanished world). I had to try and extrapolate, and remember that while that sounds idyllic to me now, I'd have felt exiled too if I'd had no choice but to live in such an area much before the age of 35 (she is only about 25 at the start). But it's a psychological novel: shouldn't it be saying what that meant to her? Should the reader have to mess around with guesswork and projection? Better for it to be a memoir in which the narrator says openly that she didn't understand such and such about her mother, or she imagined her mother might have felt like____. But fiction has more of an international market than memoir, so if you are writing in a small language, autofiction is a cannier choice.
As my irritation decreased, a day or two after finishing the book, it became easier to see a few positives. The mother is presented as excellent at her job and worthy of respect for that. It is absolutely not some kind of searing indictment of her as a person. It shows without telling the paradox that her child gave her motivation to live and do useful work despite her severe depression, at the same time that she wasn't terribly good or suitable as a mother (although there are also many worse out there). In a society where motherhood was not put on a pedestal, she perhaps would have made a conscious decision not to have a kid. The mother is an example of a sort of person known in psychological literature to be especially sensitive to conditions around her, conditions which don't affect the majority that way. It's previously been difficult to provide accessible supporting links for this idea, but this recent review of a new book, The Orchid and the Dandelion, now makes it possible. In Soviet Milk there isn't any of that romanticisation or overt association between mental illness and brilliance which is common in western literature, including medical memoir, see for example Kay Redfield Jamison. (The mother's bosses are instead puzzled by their coexistence in one person.) The mother's abilities academically and in bedside manner, and the severity of her depression, are both major features of her life, but they are not seen as inevitably interdependent.
The background feelings about Communism and independence were particularly similar to those I've previously encountered in Estonian literature (e.g. Sofie Oksanen). I guess this is inevitable given the similar circumstances and location of the countries, and the shortness of this book not providing more space to explore what is distinctively Latvian. There are a couple of Latvian books I've been thinking about reading for years, High Tide by Inga Ābele, and Flesh-Coloured Dominoes by Zigmunds Skujiņš, but Soviet Milk is the first time I've actually got round to reading one. For the first experience of reading a book from a country, there was surprisingly little that felt new about it. Although it would take more than one novella to get a feel for a country's literature and its distinctiveness.
I am puzzled by the very high average rating for Soviet Milk. It strikes me as a work similar to Guguły by Wioletta Greg: a short autobiographical or semi-autobiographical book about a girl growing up in the later years of the Communist Bloc, containing both lyrical descriptions and tough experiences - one which is going to connect strongly with some readers but not be overwhelmingly special to others. Yet Greg's book has an average of 3.79. In Soviet Milk, there is more material on the psychological repressiveness and occasional benefits of the Communist regime, because the family was more directly affected, and because the writer is five years older, but this subject had been documented in many novels before. There must be something unusual about Soviet Milk within the context of Latvian literature, and which I am missing. It would be good to know more background about it.
(Read Jan 2019, reviewed Feb 2019; the review on Goodreads.)
Showing posts with label autofiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label autofiction. Show all posts
31 January 2019
26 December 2018
Swallowing Mercury by Wioletta Greg, tr. Eliza Marciniak
This short Polish autofiction was longlisted for the 2017 Booker International Prize, although I had wanted to read it since I first heard of it the previous year.
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Wioletta Greg's writing owes a fair bit to Bruno Schulz… but Schulz's stories are wonderful and so is this: often charming and adorable, yet with dark currents running through it. It's not quite so verbally acrobatic, but still full of enthralling descriptions of the narrator's eccentric family, and life at home and in the immediate environs. I'm guessing native readers of Polish might be more used to this sort of thing, given Schulz's centrality to literature in Poland. Olga Tokarczuk said in a recent interview [I wrote most of this post in late October or early November, just after I read the book] he "raised the Polish language to a completely different level. I love him but I also hate him because there’s no way to compete with him. He’s the genius of the Polish language."
But, as an English-language reader who has nowhere near exhausted what's available in translation from Poland, this Schulz-influenced style delightful and novel. I was already predisposed to be interested the book, being near the author's age and having heritage from the south of Poland, but the style of writing on top of that made it one of my favourite reads of the year. Any cultural references were a joy to look up, knowing they were things I'd have also heard of in childhood had I lived in, or maybe just spent more time in Poland myself; I recognised a few items as souvenirs, and I felt nervous on Wiola's behalf when she submitted an unintentionally-suspicious painting to a Communist children's art competition.
Whether this small semi-autobiographical book is a novella in sequential snapshots (I prefer to see it that way) or a short story collection, it shares something else with Schultz's first collection. Both volumes have delicious, appetising titles in Polish that reflect the almost edible quality of the cosiest and most beautiful moments of the narrative, but in English, have been retitled in a way that suggests something horrorish. Cinnamon Shops v The Street of Crocodiles; Unripe Fruit v Swallowing Mercury. I would say inexplicably, except that I'd guess English-language publishers of the 1960s thought Cinnamon Shops sounded girly or Christmassy, where they saw the market for East European literature as masculine and serious, and certainly not seasonal. I wondered what the process for this book might have been. Did someone think that Unripe Fruit was an icky title in English for a book about a pre-teen and teenage girl, even though the author chose it herself and the protagonist actively rejects unwanted incursions on her sexuality? It's a translated literary novella rather than a book likely to get the attention of the sort of Twitter mobs that pick over every choice of word by Neil Gaiman. (The title of another story, Sour Cherries would have suited the book rather well too, for its combination of appetitising-and-not, and especially its Polishness, but I guess that would have had similar implications about a young woman if the translator and/or publisher were approaching the title from that same angle. Instead, in English it has been retitled according to the most traumatic story in the book, an event by which I think it's evident that Wiola-the-protagonist would not define herself.
I needlessly put off reading Schultz for maybe 20 years, assuming the content quite different from what it was; whilst not scary, something that wasn't my idea of fun: jagged Buñuel-esque surrealism in which pedestrians were bitten by crocodiles. But it only took me about 18 months from publication to read Wioletta Greg's book, as I had read the beginning of it when it was first released and previously liked her writing in online literary journals.
And 2018 was a better time to read it: I'm not sure I'd have appreciated it as much, or in the same ways, had I read it as part of the 2017 Booker International longlist. I found it a more feminist work than many novels that are explicitly described as such. Gregorszewska takes a style of idyllic reminiscence about growing up strongly associated with male authors, and includes as brief incidents starting periods, and sexual assaults by adult acquaintances, the sort of thing which often get chapters or whole books to themselves dwelling on them with much commentary. (To me the assaults seemed bizarrely many, but the many #metoo accounts of the past year or so indicate that hers probably wasn't an unusual experience. And besides, this was a country in which girls had traditionally married earlier on average than in Western Europe and so may have been viewed as sexual earlier on by more people.) In tone the book is also similar to Cider With Rosie: broadly idyllic, but actually doesn't shy away from the darker aspects of life at the time, including poor housing conditions and human behaviour. Adolescent Wiola goes on with her life in many ways as she had as a child less subject to norms of femininity: the narrative integrates starting her periods in what I felt was a subtly very effective way: it's not a weird thing that seems to make her feel different or even think that she should feel different; she just keeps living and acting much as she pleases, and doing tomboy activities like going about the countryside collecting scrap metal for a school project. Unlike in the reminiscences of older female authors I seem to recall reading when I was younger - but whom I couldn't now specify - it never separates her from tearing about the countryside, or from a sense of her own story and not being beholden to others which historically one saw more often in narratives of growing up by respected male authors. Nor does she even have to discuss this. She just does. Likewise she gets on with other things in life despite being somewhat disturbed by the assaults (the effects are shown by actions rather than introspective writing) and she is entirely absorbed in various projects and other events. I really liked the way Wiola is obsessive about collecting, whether for herself or for school projects, in a way I could strongly relate to, but which popular culture often associates with boys and men.
There are many ways in which to the British reader, the levels of technology make it seem like the story is set decades earlier than the 1980s. (Although it is not surprising if you saw Poland just after the fall of Soviet communism, when horses and carts went about the roads in some areas routinely, whilst in the UK they'd have seemed like apparitions, or wanderers from the set of a costume drama - and dusty slum villages that were like something from a news item filmed in Romania, or outside Europe.) Kids in their early teens still have outdoor and cooking skills worthy of Arthur Ransome or Enid Blyton protagonists. However, glue-sniffing was evidently a problem common to Western and Eastern Europe back then; it was kind of strange seeing what I had thought of as a British social problem of the 1980s pop up in the midst of this half-mythic world - although it is also part of the novel's trajectory, in which modernisation gradually changes the world of Wiola's village , and she becomes less sheltered in her teens.
Unlike in a lot of Polish literature, there's no hint of racial issues being handled with attitudes any different from those in Western Europe, perhaps because Wiola's father likes to talk about his Sinti heritage, and the family was slightly disadvantaged by this under the Communist regime.
As in several of the Central/ East European novels I've read over the past few months, the grandmother is an almost folkloric being and embodiment of ancient ways. Wiola's grandmother wears seven skirts, hosts feathering evenings - where local old women pluck feathers for home-made pillows and quilts - makes traditional dishes such as buckwheat blood pudding and sour rye and potato soup, and puts a red blanket on the bed of an ailing child to draw out the fever. Meanwhile, Communist woman is encouraged to be a worker equal to men, as evinced by Wiola's mother's job making paving slabs at the start of the book.
Her grandfather, an old maker and mender of stoves, is benign and more practical and measured than the narrator's father, an amateur taxidermist and genial, ramshackle eccentric, who is the presiding spirit of the book (just as Bruno Schulz's father is in his first collection).
"He showed me a different kind of geometry of the world, where boundaries are not marked by field margins overgrown with thistles and goosefoot, by cobbled roads, fences or tracks trodden by humans, but instead by light, sound and the elements."
Conflict is usually in the background so that the narrative often retains its picturesque quality despite events:
"my father took over the running of the farm and, to my grandmother’s dismay, began to introduce reforms, gradually turning our homestead into an unruly and exuberant zoo"
and
"since his return from military detention, Dad had been living in two houses: one was a stone ruin wobbling unsteadily over its limestone foundations, while the other, which for years had been forming in his head, was a clean brick house with central heating, an attic scented with resin and a shiny bathroom tiled from floor to ceiling."
However, there is grit too when necessary:
"All that was left of the half-mile of bunting were muddy shreds soaking in the ditch next to empty vodka bottles and cigarette ends."
some of it of the sort you'll recognise if you know less glamorous side of the countryside: "the bones of a rusty harrow protruded from under a tarpaulin among young nettles."
I've rarely encountered a book which contains so much loveliness whilst also not shying away from very unpleasant aspects of life, and I am very impressed by this combination of romanticising-and-not. I was always going to have something of a soft spot for it - if it had been from almost anywhere else I might never have read it due to the English title - but my expectations were surpassed, and I'm glad to see that the sequel, the better-named Accommodations is out in English next year, even if, so far, only a US publication is evident.
(read Oct 2018, review finished Dec 2018. The review and comment thread on Goodreads.)
----
Wioletta Greg's writing owes a fair bit to Bruno Schulz… but Schulz's stories are wonderful and so is this: often charming and adorable, yet with dark currents running through it. It's not quite so verbally acrobatic, but still full of enthralling descriptions of the narrator's eccentric family, and life at home and in the immediate environs. I'm guessing native readers of Polish might be more used to this sort of thing, given Schulz's centrality to literature in Poland. Olga Tokarczuk said in a recent interview [I wrote most of this post in late October or early November, just after I read the book] he "raised the Polish language to a completely different level. I love him but I also hate him because there’s no way to compete with him. He’s the genius of the Polish language."
But, as an English-language reader who has nowhere near exhausted what's available in translation from Poland, this Schulz-influenced style delightful and novel. I was already predisposed to be interested the book, being near the author's age and having heritage from the south of Poland, but the style of writing on top of that made it one of my favourite reads of the year. Any cultural references were a joy to look up, knowing they were things I'd have also heard of in childhood had I lived in, or maybe just spent more time in Poland myself; I recognised a few items as souvenirs, and I felt nervous on Wiola's behalf when she submitted an unintentionally-suspicious painting to a Communist children's art competition.
Whether this small semi-autobiographical book is a novella in sequential snapshots (I prefer to see it that way) or a short story collection, it shares something else with Schultz's first collection. Both volumes have delicious, appetising titles in Polish that reflect the almost edible quality of the cosiest and most beautiful moments of the narrative, but in English, have been retitled in a way that suggests something horrorish. Cinnamon Shops v The Street of Crocodiles; Unripe Fruit v Swallowing Mercury. I would say inexplicably, except that I'd guess English-language publishers of the 1960s thought Cinnamon Shops sounded girly or Christmassy, where they saw the market for East European literature as masculine and serious, and certainly not seasonal. I wondered what the process for this book might have been. Did someone think that Unripe Fruit was an icky title in English for a book about a pre-teen and teenage girl, even though the author chose it herself and the protagonist actively rejects unwanted incursions on her sexuality? It's a translated literary novella rather than a book likely to get the attention of the sort of Twitter mobs that pick over every choice of word by Neil Gaiman. (The title of another story, Sour Cherries would have suited the book rather well too, for its combination of appetitising-and-not, and especially its Polishness, but I guess that would have had similar implications about a young woman if the translator and/or publisher were approaching the title from that same angle. Instead, in English it has been retitled according to the most traumatic story in the book, an event by which I think it's evident that Wiola-the-protagonist would not define herself.
I needlessly put off reading Schultz for maybe 20 years, assuming the content quite different from what it was; whilst not scary, something that wasn't my idea of fun: jagged Buñuel-esque surrealism in which pedestrians were bitten by crocodiles. But it only took me about 18 months from publication to read Wioletta Greg's book, as I had read the beginning of it when it was first released and previously liked her writing in online literary journals.
And 2018 was a better time to read it: I'm not sure I'd have appreciated it as much, or in the same ways, had I read it as part of the 2017 Booker International longlist. I found it a more feminist work than many novels that are explicitly described as such. Gregorszewska takes a style of idyllic reminiscence about growing up strongly associated with male authors, and includes as brief incidents starting periods, and sexual assaults by adult acquaintances, the sort of thing which often get chapters or whole books to themselves dwelling on them with much commentary. (To me the assaults seemed bizarrely many, but the many #metoo accounts of the past year or so indicate that hers probably wasn't an unusual experience. And besides, this was a country in which girls had traditionally married earlier on average than in Western Europe and so may have been viewed as sexual earlier on by more people.) In tone the book is also similar to Cider With Rosie: broadly idyllic, but actually doesn't shy away from the darker aspects of life at the time, including poor housing conditions and human behaviour. Adolescent Wiola goes on with her life in many ways as she had as a child less subject to norms of femininity: the narrative integrates starting her periods in what I felt was a subtly very effective way: it's not a weird thing that seems to make her feel different or even think that she should feel different; she just keeps living and acting much as she pleases, and doing tomboy activities like going about the countryside collecting scrap metal for a school project. Unlike in the reminiscences of older female authors I seem to recall reading when I was younger - but whom I couldn't now specify - it never separates her from tearing about the countryside, or from a sense of her own story and not being beholden to others which historically one saw more often in narratives of growing up by respected male authors. Nor does she even have to discuss this. She just does. Likewise she gets on with other things in life despite being somewhat disturbed by the assaults (the effects are shown by actions rather than introspective writing) and she is entirely absorbed in various projects and other events. I really liked the way Wiola is obsessive about collecting, whether for herself or for school projects, in a way I could strongly relate to, but which popular culture often associates with boys and men.
There are many ways in which to the British reader, the levels of technology make it seem like the story is set decades earlier than the 1980s. (Although it is not surprising if you saw Poland just after the fall of Soviet communism, when horses and carts went about the roads in some areas routinely, whilst in the UK they'd have seemed like apparitions, or wanderers from the set of a costume drama - and dusty slum villages that were like something from a news item filmed in Romania, or outside Europe.) Kids in their early teens still have outdoor and cooking skills worthy of Arthur Ransome or Enid Blyton protagonists. However, glue-sniffing was evidently a problem common to Western and Eastern Europe back then; it was kind of strange seeing what I had thought of as a British social problem of the 1980s pop up in the midst of this half-mythic world - although it is also part of the novel's trajectory, in which modernisation gradually changes the world of Wiola's village , and she becomes less sheltered in her teens.
Unlike in a lot of Polish literature, there's no hint of racial issues being handled with attitudes any different from those in Western Europe, perhaps because Wiola's father likes to talk about his Sinti heritage, and the family was slightly disadvantaged by this under the Communist regime.
As in several of the Central/ East European novels I've read over the past few months, the grandmother is an almost folkloric being and embodiment of ancient ways. Wiola's grandmother wears seven skirts, hosts feathering evenings - where local old women pluck feathers for home-made pillows and quilts - makes traditional dishes such as buckwheat blood pudding and sour rye and potato soup, and puts a red blanket on the bed of an ailing child to draw out the fever. Meanwhile, Communist woman is encouraged to be a worker equal to men, as evinced by Wiola's mother's job making paving slabs at the start of the book.
Her grandfather, an old maker and mender of stoves, is benign and more practical and measured than the narrator's father, an amateur taxidermist and genial, ramshackle eccentric, who is the presiding spirit of the book (just as Bruno Schulz's father is in his first collection).
"He showed me a different kind of geometry of the world, where boundaries are not marked by field margins overgrown with thistles and goosefoot, by cobbled roads, fences or tracks trodden by humans, but instead by light, sound and the elements."
Conflict is usually in the background so that the narrative often retains its picturesque quality despite events:
"my father took over the running of the farm and, to my grandmother’s dismay, began to introduce reforms, gradually turning our homestead into an unruly and exuberant zoo"
and
"since his return from military detention, Dad had been living in two houses: one was a stone ruin wobbling unsteadily over its limestone foundations, while the other, which for years had been forming in his head, was a clean brick house with central heating, an attic scented with resin and a shiny bathroom tiled from floor to ceiling."
However, there is grit too when necessary:
"All that was left of the half-mile of bunting were muddy shreds soaking in the ditch next to empty vodka bottles and cigarette ends."
some of it of the sort you'll recognise if you know less glamorous side of the countryside: "the bones of a rusty harrow protruded from under a tarpaulin among young nettles."
I've rarely encountered a book which contains so much loveliness whilst also not shying away from very unpleasant aspects of life, and I am very impressed by this combination of romanticising-and-not. I was always going to have something of a soft spot for it - if it had been from almost anywhere else I might never have read it due to the English title - but my expectations were surpassed, and I'm glad to see that the sequel, the better-named Accommodations is out in English next year, even if, so far, only a US publication is evident.
(read Oct 2018, review finished Dec 2018. The review and comment thread on Goodreads.)
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