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.
Showing posts with label published 1980s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label published 1980s. Show all posts
21 November 2018
13 November 2018
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.
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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.)
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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.)
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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.)
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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.)
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