[3.5] My first Amélie Nothomb book (and the author's 25th novel). I don't think I've ever read a novella which read so much like a short story. Its economy of style and summary descriptions of time passing are like a paradigm of the short form's approach to long durations. In tone and content it feels like an intermingling of realist fable with case studies from psychology and self-help texts.
The focus is family psychodrama. In 1971, beautiful, egotistical teenager Marie has started secretarial college, and can't wait to launch herself into the era's burgeoning youth culture and put her stamp on life: "Wherever you went, you heard: “Make way for the young.”". But within 6 months she is pregnant and married to the local eligible bachelor (a genuinely nice young chap) in her provincial French home town - and she feels that *her* story is over. Thereafter there are only a handful of references to culture or the news, and the reader is placed into the inner life of Marie's perceptive eldest daughter Diane, trying to come to terms with a mother who is jealous of her. The narrative follows Diane from babyhood through her exemplary school career and the birth two siblings - while she spends more and more time with her loving grandparents - to university as a workaholic postgrad medical student, where, with the magnetic female lecturer she assists, she re-enacts her relationship to her mother.
Much like psychological case studies, there are aspects of Diane, Marie and their relatives which can be achingly relatable, or familiar from people one knows, but the story and pattern is a little too tidy. Real people, if one knows them well enough - not just via brief acquaintance or forum posts - don't often conform this neatly to labels; they have bits and pieces that don't fit, or they seem partly like one type and partly like others.
My reading experience oscillated between emotive identification and finding plot points contrived or plasticky. I loved Diane's realisation from an early age that no matter how much you understand the inner workings of a difficult parent, above-average insight and empathy does nothing to change them; apparently you're good at this thing, they may even say so, but it's irrelevant: the brick wall remains steadfast. I've seen a family where a lovely grandma, apparently inexplicably, had also produced a daughter who was very unpleasant to some of her own children, and tried to make up for it. And Mme Aubusson was different enough from Marie - and in the initial descriptions of her similar to several teachers I liked but most other kids were scared of - that I found it wholly believable that Diane might be drawn to her. The book is spot on about the attitudes of some medics of that older generation:
"You’ll see what it’s like, dealing with heart patients: nine times out of ten, the pathology is caused by excess fat, and the treatment means putting the patient on a diet. When you tell them to stop eating butter, they’ll look at you as if you were a murderer. When they come back three months later and you’re surprised there’s been no change, they will tell you a blatant lie: ‘Doctor, I don’t understand, I followed all your recommendations.’"
But deaths and other big changes in the novel occurred at conveniently deus-ex-machina times; the conversations between child siblings read as if the kids already had grounding in psychology. I could absolutely believe little Diane's inner insight, which was beautifully described as an adult might articulate inchoate understanding many years later, but the utterances often read as if the kids had got the concepts from a self-help book, rather than expressing them as experienced, or as if thinking of them anew.
I had recently read this New Statesman interview with Leïla Slimani in which Slimani says she interviewed psychiatrists to help build the sex-addict protagonist of Adèle; this made it seem even more plausible that Nothomb had used case-studies as a starting point for Strike Your Heart, at least as much as the Alfred de Musset quote referenced in the title and which becomes a touchstone for Diane.
Before the last 18 months or so, I was very interested in novels that provided opportunities for psychological processing - but now, I feel like I have gone over the same ground enough times. These books are no longer as compelling as they were, and I'd rather read something with a more outward focus. Not necessarily a stack of state-of-the-nation novels, but a book in which the action is related to the wider world. At the moment, I'm also reading Annie Ernaux's The Years: a 'collective biography' of Frenchwomen born during the Second World War, replete with folk and pop culture, and life lived against a backdrop of politics and social change. That is my catnip, and almost every paragraph is thrilling. Whereas Nothomb's chamber-piece Strike Your Heart - although in its narrow focus appropriately evocative of Marie's effects on Diane, and likely to connect deeply with readers who are in the right place for it - doesn't press the buttons it would have if I'd read it a few years ago, and I'm more aware of its flaws because I hear beyond the chords striking in my head.
As in the Latvian novella Soviet Milk (English tr. 2018, Peirene Press) also about a difficult mother-daughter relationship of the same era in which one of the pair is a doctor (these two books would make a good dual review), I felt that the author doesn't give enough attention to the social and historical circumstances that lead the mother to being in the position she is. i.e. To being a mother in her early twenties when, had she been that age more recently, she may be more likely to have decided motherhood was not for her at all because of her mental health and dedication to work (Soviet Milk) or to postpone it because she wanted to live 'for herself' more first, as has become entirely normal.
This is a book that could be a 5-star experience for the right reader, although it wasn't for me. It doesn't entirely put me off reading more Nothomb, especially as many of her books are short, but if I tried one more and also found this case-study like aspect to it, I wouldn't be keen to read further volumes.
The review on Goodreads
Showing posts with label women in translation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label women in translation. Show all posts
12 February 2019
The Last Children of Tokyo aka The Emissary by Yoko Tawada, tr. Margaret Mitsutani
Winner of the 2018 US National Book Award for Translated Fiction, under its American title, The Emissary.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
A curious blend of dystopia and utopia, with themes extrapolating from recent events and trends. It is set in a contaminated future Japan where the elderly are super-fit and support everyone, and children are plagued by severe health problems. In this world, most countries are isolationist. For its subject, it has an unusually peaceful and quirky tone and atmosphere, one which may be familiar from light Japanese literary fiction.
Many details of its world-building do not fit together logically, and are far from hard SF - but it makes a refreshing change from the standard projections of future technology and society in scenarios of environmental degeneration, which become hackneyed once you have read enough of them, and which are often American, or American-influenced. I was especially alert to the material and world-building aspects of Tawada's novel because recently, I attempted to plan a story starting in 2095; I had wanted to push past the sometimes lazy received wisdom of the usual American collapsitarian guys, and I ideally wanted to be able to have a logical story behind every object around my characters and everything they knew and thought. Where and when was this made, with materials from where and how did it reach them, or how has it survived? Where did they learn what they know? What influences their words and accents? What communications or media reach them and by what logistical and material means? How would social relations develop with and without various items, taking into account that this is also development from the present, not just a reversion to the past? It was overwhelming to try and work out such stuff along with questioning a lot of material I'd previously read, and I felt a surprising sense of relief at some of the cop-outs involved in Tawada's strangely cosy dystopia, in which it's not terribly clear how the economy works, and in where a Japan that apparently does not import anything from abroad nevertheless has solar powered items (although not in vast numbers), and advanced medical care. There's also what seems to be an entirely new type of trade, in which some countries (including South Africa and India - two of the BRICS group, you may notice) export language, but it's never explained what this entails.
The novel's world attains a combination of technology usages which would be particularly desirable to left-leaning environmentalists, via a sleight of hand combining the isolationist policy and a fantastical shift in public opinion and science in which "Electrical appliances had met with disapproval ever since electric current was discovered to cause nervous disorders, numbness in the extremities, and insomnia — a condition generally known as bzzt-bzzt syndrome." (The author evidently recognises how central public demand is for consumer electricals, and that trying to get rid of them with legislation would be incredibly unpopular.) It would have seemed more plausible if this condition only affected the children, who are all very delicate and afflicted with multiple novel medical problems. Or perhaps it's connected to nuclear radiation, which is hinted as the cause of the major disaster in the recent past. But the revolt against electrical machinery seems to be universal, and as a result, the only household appliances are now solar-powered refrigerators (I wonder if Tawada also loves those moments when every machine in the home is switched off apart from the fridge freezer). Almost everything else - other than high-tech disability aids and the remaining, shambolic, public transport - has seen a return to pre-industrial manual technology such as cloth, wood and horse-drawn carts, and it's very common to employ cleaners. (There are many parallels to the appropriate technology movement of the 1970s, which has been having a small revival in recent years.) Manual labour is highly respected, and people such as academics also take turns doing work like cleaning school toilets. Resources such as paper have to be treated carefully and there is no unnecessary consumerist tat, the product of the old "global rat race in which huge corporations turned underground resources into anything they could sell at inhuman speeds while ruthlessly competing to keep the lowest production costs".
It is not only different forms of work that are equally respected: the society has abolished the "distinction between useful and useless people" and children are discouraged from using expressions that might even tangentially support it, such as "putting people to a lot of trouble". All the children seem to be treasured by society at large, and by the grandparents and great-grandparents who look after them, and unlike in the real world for all but the very rich with complex medical issues and disabilities, they never have to contend with anyone misunderstanding or disbelieving their problems, or with delays or blocks to accessing any treatments available in their country. The children tend to be calm and good-natured, but rather than this being some sort of stereotype of disabled people as patient martyrs, I see this as relating to the huge difference in stress levels I've seen between disabled people who have to manage on UK and US benefits and other insecure resources, versus those who have comfortable private income or come from countries with the best welfare states, such as an old online friend from Norway.
This level of respect and provision on an apparently national scale is a relatively recent phenomenon in recorded human history, but as far as other aspects of the book's society are concerned - the isolationism, the pre-industrial technology and the frugal use of resources - it was no surprise when references to the Edo Period (1603-1868) began to appear more and more frequently. From the first few pages onwards, it had already looked as if the novel was alluding to the Edo, and probably to modern usages of the period, where the Edo is held up as a real-life model of a sustainable society: see for example here, here, here, or here, and more informally in the environmental blogosphere. This page mentions in addition that "Today, the Japanese have an insatiable appetite for all things Edo. This goes deeper than the daily long lines outside the Edo-Tokyo Museum or the very popular historical dramas on TV every Sunday evening." Tawada refers to historically inaccurate usages of the Edo for political ends, when the wise great-grandfather protagonist tries to contradict them: " When Yoshiro submitted an essay entitled “Japan Was Not Isolated” to the newspaper, they refused to publish it. He wrote it to show how strong Japan’s connections to the outside world had been during the Edo period, through the channels of Holland and China, but the newspaper’s official scholar refused to give it his stamp of approval. He decided to hang onto the manuscript until the next time a magazine asked him for a contribution, yet strangely enough, all those requests from magazines dried up completely after that."
The allusions to the Edo may be clear, and the contaminated land and health effects strongly suggest radiation (not to mention the blurb's mention of Fukushima) but exactly how and why things became this way is never really explained, and the government is shadowy and faceless - no one is quite sure where it is based any more, and no politicians are ever named, although there are allusions to capricious changes, and policies restricting freedom of speech on certain topics, or the ability to settle outside your home region. This vagueness often reminded me of another odd and not altogether logical literary dystopia, J by Howard Jacobson. However the repressions and changes rarely seem as frightening as in J. Other than people being anxious not to mention a few topics, chiefly to do with abroad, society remains mysteriously ordered, peaceful and in a way friendly, for a country which has gone through major upheaval and has next to no visible police - there isn't the suspicion that anyone may denounce you, which stalks fully totalitarian dystopias. (The police are privatised and now mostly concern themselves with their brass bands.) Foreign words are strictly to be avoided (though writing should be in Chinese characters), likewise mannerisms (waving is now up and down, like a maneki neko, not side-to-side), and travel abroad is forbidden. However, a mixed-race school teacher, Mr Yonatani, does not appear to face discrimination. "Though his mother was so attached to the name Yonatan that she wanted to keep it as her own, at a time when having non-Japanese relatives was enough to bring you under suspicion, such a foreign-sounding surname was sure to be a strike against her. She did, in fact, often feel she was being watched. She would come home to find signs of a break-in; even when nothing had been taken, the police would come round to investigate."
It's hard to tell what is intentional and what is accidental in the generally cosy and sometimes whimsical style of this book. Sometimes we are told that aspects of Yoshiro's life are unpleasant or sad - and it might sound boring to a reader in their twenties - but his life of enduring good physical healthy, jogging with dogs (rented), trying to get decent fruit from the market, having someone to look after for whom state services provide well, and apparently not having to worry about money sounds pretty pleasant compared with a lot of people's lives now, even if there are a few things he needs to be careful not to say. His great-grandson Mumei has a lot of medical problems, but until late in the book, physical pain and discomfort is only rarely mentioned. Before that they seem like logistical matters, described in such a way that the reader doesn't feel them (nor the physical aspects of helping) - and because most kids have similar problems, and schools always have doctors on hand, he doesn't feel unusual or left out. The way the characters are narrated is strangely unembodied. (After mention of Mumei's digestive problems, I thought another oblique Edo reference might appear - the He-gassen or fart scrolls [N.B. link includes thumbnails of pics which in close up are NSFW], but there was nothing like that whatsoever. Ribaldry isn't a big part of this book) As I found the beginning of Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear *too* embodied, uncomfortably so, it was surprising to find the opposite here.
I wasn't sure what the reader was supposed to make of the Emissary scheme. I found myself worrying that the children might not be treated well at the other end - but I'm not sure where that came from. Perhaps because the attitudes and services for them seemed so positive in Japan, and it was easy to imagine things being worse elsewhere, because almost anywhere in the real world, they are.
It would be interesting to hear what Japanese readers think of this book, as it is easy to see it as the novel of a writer living abroad. There are passing references to international concerns such as climate change, or pollution leading to spontaneous sex changes in wildlife, and the book presages a shift away from globalisation and towards nationalism (it was first published in 2014). But in terms of Japanese issues, it appears to be referring to those that are well-known internationally, such as Fukushima, the ageing population, young people refusing to carry on traditions, and restrictions on inward immigration - even the early 2010s youth fashion for grey hair - and Yoshiro's descriptions of central Tokyo and come from the memory of a character who has not been there for years.
This is a strange little book, and its light approaches to (or outright elision of) a number of serious issues have put off some readers. However, if you are getting bored with the typical cli-fi and environmental decline dystopias, while remaining interested in the general idea - and you aren't too irritated by illogical worldbuilding - this may be an interesting change.
----
My response to this book is quite different from that of a lot of Goodreads posters and bloggers.
A lot of people find its scenario wholly negative.
- The kind and generous way disability and chronic illness is treated in the book's society won't be so noticeable to people who haven't had to deal with what the equivalent would be like IRL, service provision problems and so on. The heavy presence of disability and illness in the narrative may be more frightening to those who are not used to disability as a routine part of everyday life. They may focus more on the fact that there is so very much disability about in the book's society - i.e. an entire generation.
-It depends on readers' quality of life and/or what they have witnessed first hand. Aspects of some dystopias (ones that do not have totalitarianism or total societal breakdown) featuring middle-class characters from countries with very high quality of life in the present (Scandinavia is usually the case in point) can seem quite okay compared with difficult real lives. I didn't even get much sense of a class system in this book. It seems rather egalitarian.
- Quite a lot of people will think the return to earlier technologies in many spheres merely sounds frightening. But not only does it work here on a day to day basis and the people are apparently happy with it - it conveniently sidesteps the most common dispute when people advocate such stuff "what about healthcare?', by having advanced tech still around for that. (Even if some characters do think that there might be better advances abroad or possible to create by international collaborative working.)
- In the last few months I have been reading a lot about Stalinism and the Eastern Bloc: the political repression in this novel is not on that level, nor is it presented in as scary a tone.
- A lot of the other reviews focus strongly on the words / language / things characters can't say. If that is the aspect people care and think about most, or personally feel to be most different from now, the scenario in the book will feel worse.
(Read & reviewed Feb 2019. See the review and comment thread on Goodreads.)
⭐⭐⭐⭐
A curious blend of dystopia and utopia, with themes extrapolating from recent events and trends. It is set in a contaminated future Japan where the elderly are super-fit and support everyone, and children are plagued by severe health problems. In this world, most countries are isolationist. For its subject, it has an unusually peaceful and quirky tone and atmosphere, one which may be familiar from light Japanese literary fiction.
Many details of its world-building do not fit together logically, and are far from hard SF - but it makes a refreshing change from the standard projections of future technology and society in scenarios of environmental degeneration, which become hackneyed once you have read enough of them, and which are often American, or American-influenced. I was especially alert to the material and world-building aspects of Tawada's novel because recently, I attempted to plan a story starting in 2095; I had wanted to push past the sometimes lazy received wisdom of the usual American collapsitarian guys, and I ideally wanted to be able to have a logical story behind every object around my characters and everything they knew and thought. Where and when was this made, with materials from where and how did it reach them, or how has it survived? Where did they learn what they know? What influences their words and accents? What communications or media reach them and by what logistical and material means? How would social relations develop with and without various items, taking into account that this is also development from the present, not just a reversion to the past? It was overwhelming to try and work out such stuff along with questioning a lot of material I'd previously read, and I felt a surprising sense of relief at some of the cop-outs involved in Tawada's strangely cosy dystopia, in which it's not terribly clear how the economy works, and in where a Japan that apparently does not import anything from abroad nevertheless has solar powered items (although not in vast numbers), and advanced medical care. There's also what seems to be an entirely new type of trade, in which some countries (including South Africa and India - two of the BRICS group, you may notice) export language, but it's never explained what this entails.
The novel's world attains a combination of technology usages which would be particularly desirable to left-leaning environmentalists, via a sleight of hand combining the isolationist policy and a fantastical shift in public opinion and science in which "Electrical appliances had met with disapproval ever since electric current was discovered to cause nervous disorders, numbness in the extremities, and insomnia — a condition generally known as bzzt-bzzt syndrome." (The author evidently recognises how central public demand is for consumer electricals, and that trying to get rid of them with legislation would be incredibly unpopular.) It would have seemed more plausible if this condition only affected the children, who are all very delicate and afflicted with multiple novel medical problems. Or perhaps it's connected to nuclear radiation, which is hinted as the cause of the major disaster in the recent past. But the revolt against electrical machinery seems to be universal, and as a result, the only household appliances are now solar-powered refrigerators (I wonder if Tawada also loves those moments when every machine in the home is switched off apart from the fridge freezer). Almost everything else - other than high-tech disability aids and the remaining, shambolic, public transport - has seen a return to pre-industrial manual technology such as cloth, wood and horse-drawn carts, and it's very common to employ cleaners. (There are many parallels to the appropriate technology movement of the 1970s, which has been having a small revival in recent years.) Manual labour is highly respected, and people such as academics also take turns doing work like cleaning school toilets. Resources such as paper have to be treated carefully and there is no unnecessary consumerist tat, the product of the old "global rat race in which huge corporations turned underground resources into anything they could sell at inhuman speeds while ruthlessly competing to keep the lowest production costs".
It is not only different forms of work that are equally respected: the society has abolished the "distinction between useful and useless people" and children are discouraged from using expressions that might even tangentially support it, such as "putting people to a lot of trouble". All the children seem to be treasured by society at large, and by the grandparents and great-grandparents who look after them, and unlike in the real world for all but the very rich with complex medical issues and disabilities, they never have to contend with anyone misunderstanding or disbelieving their problems, or with delays or blocks to accessing any treatments available in their country. The children tend to be calm and good-natured, but rather than this being some sort of stereotype of disabled people as patient martyrs, I see this as relating to the huge difference in stress levels I've seen between disabled people who have to manage on UK and US benefits and other insecure resources, versus those who have comfortable private income or come from countries with the best welfare states, such as an old online friend from Norway.
This level of respect and provision on an apparently national scale is a relatively recent phenomenon in recorded human history, but as far as other aspects of the book's society are concerned - the isolationism, the pre-industrial technology and the frugal use of resources - it was no surprise when references to the Edo Period (1603-1868) began to appear more and more frequently. From the first few pages onwards, it had already looked as if the novel was alluding to the Edo, and probably to modern usages of the period, where the Edo is held up as a real-life model of a sustainable society: see for example here, here, here, or here, and more informally in the environmental blogosphere. This page mentions in addition that "Today, the Japanese have an insatiable appetite for all things Edo. This goes deeper than the daily long lines outside the Edo-Tokyo Museum or the very popular historical dramas on TV every Sunday evening." Tawada refers to historically inaccurate usages of the Edo for political ends, when the wise great-grandfather protagonist tries to contradict them: " When Yoshiro submitted an essay entitled “Japan Was Not Isolated” to the newspaper, they refused to publish it. He wrote it to show how strong Japan’s connections to the outside world had been during the Edo period, through the channels of Holland and China, but the newspaper’s official scholar refused to give it his stamp of approval. He decided to hang onto the manuscript until the next time a magazine asked him for a contribution, yet strangely enough, all those requests from magazines dried up completely after that."
The allusions to the Edo may be clear, and the contaminated land and health effects strongly suggest radiation (not to mention the blurb's mention of Fukushima) but exactly how and why things became this way is never really explained, and the government is shadowy and faceless - no one is quite sure where it is based any more, and no politicians are ever named, although there are allusions to capricious changes, and policies restricting freedom of speech on certain topics, or the ability to settle outside your home region. This vagueness often reminded me of another odd and not altogether logical literary dystopia, J by Howard Jacobson. However the repressions and changes rarely seem as frightening as in J. Other than people being anxious not to mention a few topics, chiefly to do with abroad, society remains mysteriously ordered, peaceful and in a way friendly, for a country which has gone through major upheaval and has next to no visible police - there isn't the suspicion that anyone may denounce you, which stalks fully totalitarian dystopias. (The police are privatised and now mostly concern themselves with their brass bands.) Foreign words are strictly to be avoided (though writing should be in Chinese characters), likewise mannerisms (waving is now up and down, like a maneki neko, not side-to-side), and travel abroad is forbidden. However, a mixed-race school teacher, Mr Yonatani, does not appear to face discrimination. "Though his mother was so attached to the name Yonatan that she wanted to keep it as her own, at a time when having non-Japanese relatives was enough to bring you under suspicion, such a foreign-sounding surname was sure to be a strike against her. She did, in fact, often feel she was being watched. She would come home to find signs of a break-in; even when nothing had been taken, the police would come round to investigate."
It's hard to tell what is intentional and what is accidental in the generally cosy and sometimes whimsical style of this book. Sometimes we are told that aspects of Yoshiro's life are unpleasant or sad - and it might sound boring to a reader in their twenties - but his life of enduring good physical healthy, jogging with dogs (rented), trying to get decent fruit from the market, having someone to look after for whom state services provide well, and apparently not having to worry about money sounds pretty pleasant compared with a lot of people's lives now, even if there are a few things he needs to be careful not to say. His great-grandson Mumei has a lot of medical problems, but until late in the book, physical pain and discomfort is only rarely mentioned. Before that they seem like logistical matters, described in such a way that the reader doesn't feel them (nor the physical aspects of helping) - and because most kids have similar problems, and schools always have doctors on hand, he doesn't feel unusual or left out. The way the characters are narrated is strangely unembodied. (After mention of Mumei's digestive problems, I thought another oblique Edo reference might appear - the He-gassen or fart scrolls [N.B. link includes thumbnails of pics which in close up are NSFW], but there was nothing like that whatsoever. Ribaldry isn't a big part of this book) As I found the beginning of Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear *too* embodied, uncomfortably so, it was surprising to find the opposite here.
I wasn't sure what the reader was supposed to make of the Emissary scheme. I found myself worrying that the children might not be treated well at the other end - but I'm not sure where that came from. Perhaps because the attitudes and services for them seemed so positive in Japan, and it was easy to imagine things being worse elsewhere, because almost anywhere in the real world, they are.
It would be interesting to hear what Japanese readers think of this book, as it is easy to see it as the novel of a writer living abroad. There are passing references to international concerns such as climate change, or pollution leading to spontaneous sex changes in wildlife, and the book presages a shift away from globalisation and towards nationalism (it was first published in 2014). But in terms of Japanese issues, it appears to be referring to those that are well-known internationally, such as Fukushima, the ageing population, young people refusing to carry on traditions, and restrictions on inward immigration - even the early 2010s youth fashion for grey hair - and Yoshiro's descriptions of central Tokyo and come from the memory of a character who has not been there for years.
This is a strange little book, and its light approaches to (or outright elision of) a number of serious issues have put off some readers. However, if you are getting bored with the typical cli-fi and environmental decline dystopias, while remaining interested in the general idea - and you aren't too irritated by illogical worldbuilding - this may be an interesting change.
----
My response to this book is quite different from that of a lot of Goodreads posters and bloggers.
A lot of people find its scenario wholly negative.
- The kind and generous way disability and chronic illness is treated in the book's society won't be so noticeable to people who haven't had to deal with what the equivalent would be like IRL, service provision problems and so on. The heavy presence of disability and illness in the narrative may be more frightening to those who are not used to disability as a routine part of everyday life. They may focus more on the fact that there is so very much disability about in the book's society - i.e. an entire generation.
-It depends on readers' quality of life and/or what they have witnessed first hand. Aspects of some dystopias (ones that do not have totalitarianism or total societal breakdown) featuring middle-class characters from countries with very high quality of life in the present (Scandinavia is usually the case in point) can seem quite okay compared with difficult real lives. I didn't even get much sense of a class system in this book. It seems rather egalitarian.
- Quite a lot of people will think the return to earlier technologies in many spheres merely sounds frightening. But not only does it work here on a day to day basis and the people are apparently happy with it - it conveniently sidesteps the most common dispute when people advocate such stuff "what about healthcare?', by having advanced tech still around for that. (Even if some characters do think that there might be better advances abroad or possible to create by international collaborative working.)
- In the last few months I have been reading a lot about Stalinism and the Eastern Bloc: the political repression in this novel is not on that level, nor is it presented in as scary a tone.
- A lot of the other reviews focus strongly on the words / language / things characters can't say. If that is the aspect people care and think about most, or personally feel to be most different from now, the scenario in the book will feel worse.
(Read & reviewed Feb 2019. See the review and comment thread on Goodreads.)
31 January 2019
Soviet Milk by by Nora Ikstena, tr. Margita Gailitis
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.
----
⭐⭐⭐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.)
----
⭐⭐⭐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.)
7 January 2019
Marta by Eliza Orzeszkowa, tr. Anna Gąsienica-Byrcyn & Stephanie Kraft
⭐⭐⭐⭐
A short feminist novel set in 1870s Warsaw, published in English translation by Ohio University Press for the first time in 2018. Marta is a young upper-middle class woman whose husband has just died, leaving her almost no money. She discovers that her perfunctory education in ladies' accomplishments has not equipped her for the limited range of jobs available to women - while working-class women of her age already have years of experience under their belts - and she struggles with increasing desperation to support herself and her small daughter.
Eliza Orzeszkowa is most famous in Poland for On the Niemen (1888), a longer, rural, novel which is on the school curriculum. (It has so far only had a self-published translation to English.) So far as I can tell, Marta is the first new professionally-published English translation of any Orzeszkowa work for decades, which is quite exciting if you want to read Polish classics in English. (There was previously The Forsaken (1980?) and The Argonauts (1901).)
Marta has been variously described as melodrama, as social realism and as naturalistic. Eliza Orzeszkowa was part of the Polish Positivist cultural movement, of realist writing influenced by Dickens, Balzac and Zola, of watchful stoicism about Poland's occupied status, and, as was was popular in much of 19th century Europe, middle-class advocacy for hard work and social and technological progress. The Positivist outlook was also a pragmatic way of staying safe whilst maintaining a public voice, especially under the more repressive Tsarist regime that ruled Warsaw and the rural area where Orzeszkowa lived for most of her adult life. (Somewhat greater latitude was possible in the Austro-Hungarian zone in the south.) As Prof. Grażyna J. Kozaczka explains in the introduction to Marta,
"The Polish intellectual elite, the intelligentsia, found Positivist ideas very attractive as they justified the rejection of military actions in favor of refocusing attention on rebuilding Polish society and ensuring that cultural connections persisted in the nation split among three separate foreign empires. Positivists set their goal on organic work that involved using only legal means to achieve the cultural and economic growth of Polish society."
Marta is based on a "there but for the grace of god go I" scenario. Some years earlier, Orzeszkowa had taken the unusual step of divorcing her husband, and her opportunities were also limited by the ruling Russian regime's restrictions on Poles who, like her, had supported the 1863 uprising. But due to her considerable language skills, she was able to support herself with translation, writing and publishing work. She was aware that similar financial independence was not possible for most of her female peers.
In the years immediately after it was written, Marta had a significant impact in Polish and other Continental European languages. The protagonist's situation was commoner in Poland than in some other countries due to "the loss of estates due to punitive confiscation or poor management in the changing economy", as Kozaczka explains in the introduction; and that it was soon translated into, among others, "Russian, German, Czech, Swedish, Dutch, and even Esperanto". Borkowska says that it "became the bible of German feminist movements".
This pan-European impact was probably enhanced because, as Kozaczka notes, the Polish setting is not strongly emphasised. Locations are mentioned, but the novel's subject is the unprepared woman struggling to stay afloat not in Warsaw in particular, but in the city in general, which "takes on a menacing quality" now she is unprotected by her husband: the late-19th century city a-bustle in the process of industrialising and commercialising.
"the great city assumed the form of a huge hive in which a multitude of human beings moved, surging with life and joining in a race. Each one had his own place for work and for rest, his own goals to reach, and his own tools to forge a way through the crowd."
"Here, as everywhere else, the degree of a worker’s well-being is in direct relation to the excellence of what he produces." [Whilst these days, at the level of work Marta is trying to obtain, consistency, presenteeism and promptness are probably more important provided there is basic competence.]
A handful of features pop out as locally distinctive. There are some attitudes and thoughts more Catholic than Protestant, although none which changes the story. The most noticeable was the preference, even in shops selling goods of feminine interest such as haberdashery, for dapper male staff - who were considered good for business because they were attractive to wealthy female customers; this is also a major feature of The Doll by Bolesław Prus (1890), the greatest Positivist classic. (These men were expected to flirt, but not *too* much.) It contrasts with the popular figure of the late 19th-century and early 20th-century shopgirl in Britain, and Zola's The Ladies' Paradise.
As someone from a professional middle-class background whose capacity for work and earning is, for health reasons, not what I once thought it would be, I expected I would feel a connection and sympathy with Marta, regardless of the story's overt didacticism and its fairly basic style of writing. I also anticipated it would be interesting as a historical document.
In a translation where one is reading both the author and the translators for the first time, and the translators are also quite new to book-length fiction, it's not easy to be sure how much of the style reflects the original. However, the small amount of commentary I've been able access in English suggests that the flaws were in Orzeszkowa's writing. "Her first works are not very well-written and may only be of interest as testimony to the author's sympathy for the trends of modernization,", says Grażyna Borkowska in Ten Centuries of Polish Literature (2004) (p. 182). Czesław Miłosz, in his History of Polish Literature (1969, rev.1983) implies that although novels were her most famous output, they were not, perhaps, her forte: "their technique is old-fashioned and perhaps not up to the level of the exceptional mind which she revealed in her correspondence with the most eminent intellectuals of Poland and Europe" (p.303). She recognised this herself, saying in one letter, "If I was born with a creative faculty, it was a mediocre one. That spark was a little enlivened by considerable intellectual capabilities, and great emotional capabilities, perhaps too much for one heart." (p.314).
Whatever one thinks of Orzeszkowa's writing, she had an interesting life and mind: perhaps a biography would be more interesting than some of her novels, and she may have been better-suited to non-fiction writing. But novels were where the opportunities lay in her day. Between the lines of Miłosz's (and others) descriptions of her, I'm seeing an intellectual writing "accessible" fiction to earn money to live off, and because it got her message across:
"the most open to new intellectual trends, and until her death in 1910 she reacted with understanding to currents which seemed to the Positivists just madness" (p.304)
"her abundant literary production could be qualified as 'populist' although the term has not been used in Polish criticism" (pp.304-305).
The simple style made it readable on occasions when I might have been too tired for more complex writing, and - though it's much long since I read Frances Hodgson Burnett to be wholly confident of similarities - I often thought of A Little Princess when I started reading Marta, not least during the scenes in her new, spartan accommodation. Although unlike a children's book, one shouldn't necessarily expect a happy ending. I always felt that likelihood that made it better and more honest. This feeling was captured by some lines in an article about burnout that went viral the weekend just before I finished writing this post: "In the movie version of this story, this man moves to an island to rediscover the good life, or figures out he loves woodworking and opens a shop. But that’s the sort of fantasy solution that makes millennial burnout so pervasive." Yes, that kind of stuff gets annoying and obscures real problems. I found myself preferring this 19th century story to many contemporary ones, because it seems truer to those who fall through safety-nets, whilst so much recent material still assumes a greater level of security than actually exists now for plenty of people, as compared with 10-20 years ago.
This was one of those novels in which the author seems to be warming up, as the writing becomes more gripping further into the story. Its trajectory follows Marta through increased levels of need, from early stages which will probably be most recognisable to other people originally from comfortable backgrounds, such as trying to refuse wages from a kind employer for work of a low standard, although she had put a lot of time into it and needs the money. It is about the process by which such principles are whittled away as she becomes better acquainted with real need and what it entails. She learns to work backbreakingly hard for a while and survive on a couple of hours' sleep a night for weeks doing two jobs. But because her skills are few, and training opportunities non-existent, there is further to fall.
As the novel's crescendo built towards the end, I found a description of a state of mind I hadn't seen written about so recognisably before - it was possibly the character's background as well as the timing. Of moments of discovering the operation of a clawing, reflex-level, almost spasmodic desperation for the means of further survival - who knew little bits of money could matter that much, not that they looked like little bits any more - in which former care about manners and propriety is sunk and unfelt; and how it feels depersonalised, dreamlike and surreal, for this is not an existence one ever expected - expectations still lodged in a subconscious quite untrained for these circumstances, built for a life in which requests would mostly be answered and sometimes not even necessary. I read much of Marta around the same time as Vernon Subutex 1 - very contemporary but also dealing with a formerly comfortable character's descent into destitution - and for a few days the two novels were a small chorus, showing a situation which is a social problem, but one not seen as so bad now, because these people have been more privileged in the past, and there will always be some decisions people will say they could have made differently (albeit more so in Vernon's case than Marta's).
Kozaczka makes a powerful argument which quotes Kelleter and Mayer from Melodrama!: The Mode of Excess from Early America to Hollywood: “the melodramatic mode has always lent itself to stories of power struggles and to enactments of socio-cultural processes of marginalization and stratification.” There are plenty of occasions when seeing real life in melodramatic terms can be positively disadvantageous on a personal level. But extrapolating from this cultural relationship between melodrama and inequality both prompted me to re-evaluate forms and tropes that have often been derided in more recent times - and to consider that rather than being antiquated, it may be a form and tendency *increasingly* suitable for arts in the contemporary landscape of growing inequality and political polarisation, manifest climate change and mass population movements - shaking up the background complacency remaining after the stability and optimism of recent decades in most Western countries. (The news has already become more melodramatic over the past two and a half years - illustrating some of the drawbacks of melodrama as a real-life format, full of, in Kozaczka's words about the form in general, "the unambiguously drawn conflict between good and evil set on the stage of a “modern metropolis”; the effusive expressions of feelings; and the presence of stock characters who may not have deep “psychological complexity,”¹⁹ such as wealthy villains and beleaguered heroines whose virtue is constantly tested—should not to be discounted altogether.")
Despite what I thought when starting Marta - and my reservations in recommending it for anything other than historical interest - the style and the melodrama doesn't seem to have been an obstacle to other recent English readers either: several, on GR and one in this blog post by a judge for the 2019 US Best Translated Book Award, have also found the book more involving and affecting than expected - so there seems to be something about it; maybe it's not just me.
(Read Oct-Nov 2018; reviewed Jan 2019. The review on Goodreads.
A short feminist novel set in 1870s Warsaw, published in English translation by Ohio University Press for the first time in 2018. Marta is a young upper-middle class woman whose husband has just died, leaving her almost no money. She discovers that her perfunctory education in ladies' accomplishments has not equipped her for the limited range of jobs available to women - while working-class women of her age already have years of experience under their belts - and she struggles with increasing desperation to support herself and her small daughter.
Eliza Orzeszkowa is most famous in Poland for On the Niemen (1888), a longer, rural, novel which is on the school curriculum. (It has so far only had a self-published translation to English.) So far as I can tell, Marta is the first new professionally-published English translation of any Orzeszkowa work for decades, which is quite exciting if you want to read Polish classics in English. (There was previously The Forsaken (1980?) and The Argonauts (1901).)
Marta has been variously described as melodrama, as social realism and as naturalistic. Eliza Orzeszkowa was part of the Polish Positivist cultural movement, of realist writing influenced by Dickens, Balzac and Zola, of watchful stoicism about Poland's occupied status, and, as was was popular in much of 19th century Europe, middle-class advocacy for hard work and social and technological progress. The Positivist outlook was also a pragmatic way of staying safe whilst maintaining a public voice, especially under the more repressive Tsarist regime that ruled Warsaw and the rural area where Orzeszkowa lived for most of her adult life. (Somewhat greater latitude was possible in the Austro-Hungarian zone in the south.) As Prof. Grażyna J. Kozaczka explains in the introduction to Marta,
"The Polish intellectual elite, the intelligentsia, found Positivist ideas very attractive as they justified the rejection of military actions in favor of refocusing attention on rebuilding Polish society and ensuring that cultural connections persisted in the nation split among three separate foreign empires. Positivists set their goal on organic work that involved using only legal means to achieve the cultural and economic growth of Polish society."
Marta is based on a "there but for the grace of god go I" scenario. Some years earlier, Orzeszkowa had taken the unusual step of divorcing her husband, and her opportunities were also limited by the ruling Russian regime's restrictions on Poles who, like her, had supported the 1863 uprising. But due to her considerable language skills, she was able to support herself with translation, writing and publishing work. She was aware that similar financial independence was not possible for most of her female peers.
In the years immediately after it was written, Marta had a significant impact in Polish and other Continental European languages. The protagonist's situation was commoner in Poland than in some other countries due to "the loss of estates due to punitive confiscation or poor management in the changing economy", as Kozaczka explains in the introduction; and that it was soon translated into, among others, "Russian, German, Czech, Swedish, Dutch, and even Esperanto". Borkowska says that it "became the bible of German feminist movements".
This pan-European impact was probably enhanced because, as Kozaczka notes, the Polish setting is not strongly emphasised. Locations are mentioned, but the novel's subject is the unprepared woman struggling to stay afloat not in Warsaw in particular, but in the city in general, which "takes on a menacing quality" now she is unprotected by her husband: the late-19th century city a-bustle in the process of industrialising and commercialising.
"the great city assumed the form of a huge hive in which a multitude of human beings moved, surging with life and joining in a race. Each one had his own place for work and for rest, his own goals to reach, and his own tools to forge a way through the crowd."
"Here, as everywhere else, the degree of a worker’s well-being is in direct relation to the excellence of what he produces." [Whilst these days, at the level of work Marta is trying to obtain, consistency, presenteeism and promptness are probably more important provided there is basic competence.]
A handful of features pop out as locally distinctive. There are some attitudes and thoughts more Catholic than Protestant, although none which changes the story. The most noticeable was the preference, even in shops selling goods of feminine interest such as haberdashery, for dapper male staff - who were considered good for business because they were attractive to wealthy female customers; this is also a major feature of The Doll by Bolesław Prus (1890), the greatest Positivist classic. (These men were expected to flirt, but not *too* much.) It contrasts with the popular figure of the late 19th-century and early 20th-century shopgirl in Britain, and Zola's The Ladies' Paradise.
As someone from a professional middle-class background whose capacity for work and earning is, for health reasons, not what I once thought it would be, I expected I would feel a connection and sympathy with Marta, regardless of the story's overt didacticism and its fairly basic style of writing. I also anticipated it would be interesting as a historical document.
In a translation where one is reading both the author and the translators for the first time, and the translators are also quite new to book-length fiction, it's not easy to be sure how much of the style reflects the original. However, the small amount of commentary I've been able access in English suggests that the flaws were in Orzeszkowa's writing. "Her first works are not very well-written and may only be of interest as testimony to the author's sympathy for the trends of modernization,", says Grażyna Borkowska in Ten Centuries of Polish Literature (2004) (p. 182). Czesław Miłosz, in his History of Polish Literature (1969, rev.1983) implies that although novels were her most famous output, they were not, perhaps, her forte: "their technique is old-fashioned and perhaps not up to the level of the exceptional mind which she revealed in her correspondence with the most eminent intellectuals of Poland and Europe" (p.303). She recognised this herself, saying in one letter, "If I was born with a creative faculty, it was a mediocre one. That spark was a little enlivened by considerable intellectual capabilities, and great emotional capabilities, perhaps too much for one heart." (p.314).
Whatever one thinks of Orzeszkowa's writing, she had an interesting life and mind: perhaps a biography would be more interesting than some of her novels, and she may have been better-suited to non-fiction writing. But novels were where the opportunities lay in her day. Between the lines of Miłosz's (and others) descriptions of her, I'm seeing an intellectual writing "accessible" fiction to earn money to live off, and because it got her message across:
"the most open to new intellectual trends, and until her death in 1910 she reacted with understanding to currents which seemed to the Positivists just madness" (p.304)
"her abundant literary production could be qualified as 'populist' although the term has not been used in Polish criticism" (pp.304-305).
The simple style made it readable on occasions when I might have been too tired for more complex writing, and - though it's much long since I read Frances Hodgson Burnett to be wholly confident of similarities - I often thought of A Little Princess when I started reading Marta, not least during the scenes in her new, spartan accommodation. Although unlike a children's book, one shouldn't necessarily expect a happy ending. I always felt that likelihood that made it better and more honest. This feeling was captured by some lines in an article about burnout that went viral the weekend just before I finished writing this post: "In the movie version of this story, this man moves to an island to rediscover the good life, or figures out he loves woodworking and opens a shop. But that’s the sort of fantasy solution that makes millennial burnout so pervasive." Yes, that kind of stuff gets annoying and obscures real problems. I found myself preferring this 19th century story to many contemporary ones, because it seems truer to those who fall through safety-nets, whilst so much recent material still assumes a greater level of security than actually exists now for plenty of people, as compared with 10-20 years ago.
This was one of those novels in which the author seems to be warming up, as the writing becomes more gripping further into the story. Its trajectory follows Marta through increased levels of need, from early stages which will probably be most recognisable to other people originally from comfortable backgrounds, such as trying to refuse wages from a kind employer for work of a low standard, although she had put a lot of time into it and needs the money. It is about the process by which such principles are whittled away as she becomes better acquainted with real need and what it entails. She learns to work backbreakingly hard for a while and survive on a couple of hours' sleep a night for weeks doing two jobs. But because her skills are few, and training opportunities non-existent, there is further to fall.
As the novel's crescendo built towards the end, I found a description of a state of mind I hadn't seen written about so recognisably before - it was possibly the character's background as well as the timing. Of moments of discovering the operation of a clawing, reflex-level, almost spasmodic desperation for the means of further survival - who knew little bits of money could matter that much, not that they looked like little bits any more - in which former care about manners and propriety is sunk and unfelt; and how it feels depersonalised, dreamlike and surreal, for this is not an existence one ever expected - expectations still lodged in a subconscious quite untrained for these circumstances, built for a life in which requests would mostly be answered and sometimes not even necessary. I read much of Marta around the same time as Vernon Subutex 1 - very contemporary but also dealing with a formerly comfortable character's descent into destitution - and for a few days the two novels were a small chorus, showing a situation which is a social problem, but one not seen as so bad now, because these people have been more privileged in the past, and there will always be some decisions people will say they could have made differently (albeit more so in Vernon's case than Marta's).
Kozaczka makes a powerful argument which quotes Kelleter and Mayer from Melodrama!: The Mode of Excess from Early America to Hollywood: “the melodramatic mode has always lent itself to stories of power struggles and to enactments of socio-cultural processes of marginalization and stratification.” There are plenty of occasions when seeing real life in melodramatic terms can be positively disadvantageous on a personal level. But extrapolating from this cultural relationship between melodrama and inequality both prompted me to re-evaluate forms and tropes that have often been derided in more recent times - and to consider that rather than being antiquated, it may be a form and tendency *increasingly* suitable for arts in the contemporary landscape of growing inequality and political polarisation, manifest climate change and mass population movements - shaking up the background complacency remaining after the stability and optimism of recent decades in most Western countries. (The news has already become more melodramatic over the past two and a half years - illustrating some of the drawbacks of melodrama as a real-life format, full of, in Kozaczka's words about the form in general, "the unambiguously drawn conflict between good and evil set on the stage of a “modern metropolis”; the effusive expressions of feelings; and the presence of stock characters who may not have deep “psychological complexity,”¹⁹ such as wealthy villains and beleaguered heroines whose virtue is constantly tested—should not to be discounted altogether.")
Despite what I thought when starting Marta - and my reservations in recommending it for anything other than historical interest - the style and the melodrama doesn't seem to have been an obstacle to other recent English readers either: several, on GR and one in this blog post by a judge for the 2019 US Best Translated Book Award, have also found the book more involving and affecting than expected - so there seems to be something about it; maybe it's not just me.
(Read Oct-Nov 2018; reviewed Jan 2019. The review on Goodreads.
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.)
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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.)
23 December 2018
Bride & Groom by Alisa Ganieva, tr. Carol Apollonio
This is the second novel from Alisa Ganieva, a Moscow-based Dagestani author in her 30s, to be translated into English by Carol Apollonio and published by Dallas-based Deep Vellum (whose cover designs I love). It was released in Russian in 2015 and in English in 2018.
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I had a great time reading Alisa Ganieva's The Mountain and the Wall around Christmas 2015, and so this December I jumped at the chance to read the second of her books to be translated to English. After reading both books, I'm impressed by her genre-hopping skill, each time firmly within a literary mode; the earlier book was dystopian speculative fiction; this is a romance. (Literary romance is not something you see a lot of these days - or maybe the plotlines of the American and British ones I see don't appeal so I don't really think of them that way, just as blah novels about twentysomethings in Brooklyn or wherever.) Both of her books share a recognisable authorial voice, and are packed with details about both modern and traditional life in Dagestan, an area rarely covered in Western English news - which is what I find so fascinating about them - and also know how to create the kind of mood and suspense associated with their respective genres. Introducing tension into the story of a couple whom the reader knows from the start will get together, and making this felt by a reader who would very rarely pick up a romance novel is, IMO, an achievement. How it would seem, though, to regular readers of romance, I can't say.
Most of the novel is set in a community where arranged marriages are the norm, while its hero and heroine Marat and Patya - young Dagestanis who work in Moscow law and have been summoned home by their respective parents for matchmaking - both have a more secular, liberal outlook than others around them, without being outright rebellious. The general process, aside from specific Dagestani customs, will presumably be familiar to people from cultures where arranged marriages are prevalent. A motif of a veiled bride impersonating another, meaning the groom did not marry his intended, also in Orhan Pamuk's A Strangeness in my Mind, occurs in an anecdote told by one relative - I am not sure how common this kind of story or legend is and what that might signify about the originality versus folkloric basis of the novel to someone who knows the culture better. From a Westernised viewpoint the book makes an interesting juxtaposition of attitudes found in novels from very different eras - a contrast the main characters' experience too in living between different worlds and finding ways to fit partly into both. There is work in the legal profession in Moscow, the struggle with discrimination (his long search for a private apartment in Moscow—his non-Russian name had scared off all the landlords) and at the end of a long train journey, there are people like Granny:
the world in which she dwelt had absolutely nothing in common with ours. In her world people still lived in mountaintop castles with flat roofs, divided up the fields and the harvest strictly according to ancient rules, and sent their sons to the villages of conquered neighbors to feast at their expense; after murders they demanded a vow of purging from forty men and exacted fines measured in units of grain, copper kettles, bulls, and sheep. These reminiscences descended into some infinite depth of the ages, and it was impossible to believe that she had ever personally been a part of that strange life
and the less picturesque hometown:
A sudden gust of wind hurled a cloud of steppe dust at us, along with shreds of cardboard boxes that looked like dry crackers, a faint, simple melody from a distant tape player, and the dreary sound of cows mooing.
(Talking of cows, their sound is once transliterated as “Um-bu-u-u-u!” - which sounds so much more like the real thing than the English 'moo'.)
some steppe village surrounded by abandoned oil towers, or a roadside motel with scorpions rustling within its pitted, sunbaked adobe walls.
I've unfortunately only read one other novel focused in a relatively positive way on arranged marriages in a Muslim country, the chick lit-style Tender Hooks aka Duty Free by Moni Mohsin, which, although it contains a lot more about political events than British chicklit would, doesn’t consider issues with the same level of seriousness as Bride and Groom. As in The Mountain and the Wall, the growth of stricter forms of Islam is a significant part of the background - there are tensions in the characters' small home town between a traditional mosque and the newer Wahhabi mosque "on the other side of the tracks" - as is political and legal corruption, both in Moscow and Dagestan. (In a discussion thread about 2018 London novel In Our Mad & Furious City it was pointed out that very few contemporary British and American novels manage to write about Muslims without any plotlines about radicalisation. While it is overdone in English-language literature, from what I can make out about the reality of Dagestan, it sounds as though, there, is far more genuinely prevalent and influential, and more appropriate to include.)
It is a patriarchal culture, but Ganieva indicates that there were also inspiring women in non-traditional roles.
the late Mashidat Zalova, our literature teacher. She had been six feet tall, an old maid, polyglot, and passionate bibliophile… As the daughter of an enemy of the people, she could not be allowed to work in city schools, but our out-of-the-way suburb was no problem. Rumor had it that she had been wooed by Adik’s widowed grandfather, an architect and veteran of the Great Patriotic War… persistent in his attempts but she had foresworn family life and closed herself in with her dusty tomes and folios.
The Mountain and the Wall indicated the change from Soviet propaganda showing women doing work equal to men's, to more recent religious-inflected pressures, but some families in Bride and Groom value the education of intelligent daughters:
We got you into the top school, hired tutors, helped with university, and set you up with an internship. Could I even have dreamed of such a life? I worked from the age of twelve!”
at the same time as pushing them towards marriage and expecting them to take on a substantial share of household chores. One mother is a senior cardiologist - this is a world in which women like her are expected to do it all, work and housework.
The characters' frequent conversations about recently-imprisoned local bigwig and fixer Khalilbek, who is connected, spider-like, to almost everyone, may in theory be repetitive, but I thought it a realistic impression of how frequently people in a small community would talk about a recent major event. (Some authors might vary the topics more for the sake of it, even if that meant less verisimilitude). The Afterword - which I wish I'd read at the beginning, rather than when I was ¾ of the way through the book - sheds light on the religious conflicts, on Khalilbek and on recurring motifs, by explaining how Ganieva incorporated Sufism into the novel. (The connection she makes between Khidr, Musa/Moses and the Green Man is intriguing but instinctively looks to me like a stretch.) She mentions that there areallusions to Sufi poetry in the text; as I don't know these works myself I can't say how well the references come through in the English translation - but it would be very interesting to read a review of Bride and Groom by someone who has a good knowledge of these texts and of similar cultures.
Unlike The Mountain and the Wall, Bride and Groom doesn't have a glossary. In a way it could do with one - although there were benefits to looking stuff up online: watching videos of the dance the Lezginka, and seeing pictures and articles about the food (there is lots of food in this book, as you might expect from a story about weddings and visits to traditional relatives) and learning more about it, for example that adjika can be considered to be to Russians what salsa is to Americans, and that the Russian equivalent word for spicy also includes flavours such as garlic and vinegar as well as chilli (which makes more sense to me than the English). There are many details that connect regardless of notes: the almost perverse lack of glamour of modern psychics and fortune tellers; the reminiscences of grandparents with a tone familiar to anyone whose family had rural roots only a couple of generations back; parents who bicker in a way familiar from old TV shows.
Ganieva is one to read especially if you enjoy using novels for armchair tourism - in this case to an intriguing area very few people visit in person, due to long-term travel warnings.
(Read & reviewed December 2018. The review on Goodreads.)
----
I had a great time reading Alisa Ganieva's The Mountain and the Wall around Christmas 2015, and so this December I jumped at the chance to read the second of her books to be translated to English. After reading both books, I'm impressed by her genre-hopping skill, each time firmly within a literary mode; the earlier book was dystopian speculative fiction; this is a romance. (Literary romance is not something you see a lot of these days - or maybe the plotlines of the American and British ones I see don't appeal so I don't really think of them that way, just as blah novels about twentysomethings in Brooklyn or wherever.) Both of her books share a recognisable authorial voice, and are packed with details about both modern and traditional life in Dagestan, an area rarely covered in Western English news - which is what I find so fascinating about them - and also know how to create the kind of mood and suspense associated with their respective genres. Introducing tension into the story of a couple whom the reader knows from the start will get together, and making this felt by a reader who would very rarely pick up a romance novel is, IMO, an achievement. How it would seem, though, to regular readers of romance, I can't say.
Most of the novel is set in a community where arranged marriages are the norm, while its hero and heroine Marat and Patya - young Dagestanis who work in Moscow law and have been summoned home by their respective parents for matchmaking - both have a more secular, liberal outlook than others around them, without being outright rebellious. The general process, aside from specific Dagestani customs, will presumably be familiar to people from cultures where arranged marriages are prevalent. A motif of a veiled bride impersonating another, meaning the groom did not marry his intended, also in Orhan Pamuk's A Strangeness in my Mind, occurs in an anecdote told by one relative - I am not sure how common this kind of story or legend is and what that might signify about the originality versus folkloric basis of the novel to someone who knows the culture better. From a Westernised viewpoint the book makes an interesting juxtaposition of attitudes found in novels from very different eras - a contrast the main characters' experience too in living between different worlds and finding ways to fit partly into both. There is work in the legal profession in Moscow, the struggle with discrimination (his long search for a private apartment in Moscow—his non-Russian name had scared off all the landlords) and at the end of a long train journey, there are people like Granny:
the world in which she dwelt had absolutely nothing in common with ours. In her world people still lived in mountaintop castles with flat roofs, divided up the fields and the harvest strictly according to ancient rules, and sent their sons to the villages of conquered neighbors to feast at their expense; after murders they demanded a vow of purging from forty men and exacted fines measured in units of grain, copper kettles, bulls, and sheep. These reminiscences descended into some infinite depth of the ages, and it was impossible to believe that she had ever personally been a part of that strange life
and the less picturesque hometown:
A sudden gust of wind hurled a cloud of steppe dust at us, along with shreds of cardboard boxes that looked like dry crackers, a faint, simple melody from a distant tape player, and the dreary sound of cows mooing.
(Talking of cows, their sound is once transliterated as “Um-bu-u-u-u!” - which sounds so much more like the real thing than the English 'moo'.)
some steppe village surrounded by abandoned oil towers, or a roadside motel with scorpions rustling within its pitted, sunbaked adobe walls.
I've unfortunately only read one other novel focused in a relatively positive way on arranged marriages in a Muslim country, the chick lit-style Tender Hooks aka Duty Free by Moni Mohsin, which, although it contains a lot more about political events than British chicklit would, doesn’t consider issues with the same level of seriousness as Bride and Groom. As in The Mountain and the Wall, the growth of stricter forms of Islam is a significant part of the background - there are tensions in the characters' small home town between a traditional mosque and the newer Wahhabi mosque "on the other side of the tracks" - as is political and legal corruption, both in Moscow and Dagestan. (In a discussion thread about 2018 London novel In Our Mad & Furious City it was pointed out that very few contemporary British and American novels manage to write about Muslims without any plotlines about radicalisation. While it is overdone in English-language literature, from what I can make out about the reality of Dagestan, it sounds as though, there, is far more genuinely prevalent and influential, and more appropriate to include.)
It is a patriarchal culture, but Ganieva indicates that there were also inspiring women in non-traditional roles.
the late Mashidat Zalova, our literature teacher. She had been six feet tall, an old maid, polyglot, and passionate bibliophile… As the daughter of an enemy of the people, she could not be allowed to work in city schools, but our out-of-the-way suburb was no problem. Rumor had it that she had been wooed by Adik’s widowed grandfather, an architect and veteran of the Great Patriotic War… persistent in his attempts but she had foresworn family life and closed herself in with her dusty tomes and folios.
The Mountain and the Wall indicated the change from Soviet propaganda showing women doing work equal to men's, to more recent religious-inflected pressures, but some families in Bride and Groom value the education of intelligent daughters:
We got you into the top school, hired tutors, helped with university, and set you up with an internship. Could I even have dreamed of such a life? I worked from the age of twelve!”
at the same time as pushing them towards marriage and expecting them to take on a substantial share of household chores. One mother is a senior cardiologist - this is a world in which women like her are expected to do it all, work and housework.
The characters' frequent conversations about recently-imprisoned local bigwig and fixer Khalilbek, who is connected, spider-like, to almost everyone, may in theory be repetitive, but I thought it a realistic impression of how frequently people in a small community would talk about a recent major event. (Some authors might vary the topics more for the sake of it, even if that meant less verisimilitude). The Afterword - which I wish I'd read at the beginning, rather than when I was ¾ of the way through the book - sheds light on the religious conflicts, on Khalilbek and on recurring motifs, by explaining how Ganieva incorporated Sufism into the novel. (The connection she makes between Khidr, Musa/Moses and the Green Man is intriguing but instinctively looks to me like a stretch.) She mentions that there areallusions to Sufi poetry in the text; as I don't know these works myself I can't say how well the references come through in the English translation - but it would be very interesting to read a review of Bride and Groom by someone who has a good knowledge of these texts and of similar cultures.
Unlike The Mountain and the Wall, Bride and Groom doesn't have a glossary. In a way it could do with one - although there were benefits to looking stuff up online: watching videos of the dance the Lezginka, and seeing pictures and articles about the food (there is lots of food in this book, as you might expect from a story about weddings and visits to traditional relatives) and learning more about it, for example that adjika can be considered to be to Russians what salsa is to Americans, and that the Russian equivalent word for spicy also includes flavours such as garlic and vinegar as well as chilli (which makes more sense to me than the English). There are many details that connect regardless of notes: the almost perverse lack of glamour of modern psychics and fortune tellers; the reminiscences of grandparents with a tone familiar to anyone whose family had rural roots only a couple of generations back; parents who bicker in a way familiar from old TV shows.
Ganieva is one to read especially if you enjoy using novels for armchair tourism - in this case to an intriguing area very few people visit in person, due to long-term travel warnings.
(Read & reviewed December 2018. The review on Goodreads.)
6 December 2018
Vernon Subutex 1 by Virginie Despentes, tr. Frank Wynne
Shortlisted for the Booker International Prize 2018 - but a novel I wanted to read regardless, as I'd been excited about it since I first caught sight of it in early 2017 as an upcoming translated title.
-------
While I was in the middle of Vernon Subutex One, a book called Destroy All Monsters: The Last Rock Novel appeared in my Goodreads feed. (Thanks Kris.) Vernon Subutex has a strong claim to that subtitle too. In English it's so far been pigeonholed as translated literary fiction about the state of modern life / Western Europe / France / Paris (depending how specific you think its types are), and its Booker International shortlisting cements this - but just as much as being a perceptive take on contemporary society and politics, it faces up to the mythology and glitter of rock and indie as things that belong to the past and the middle-aged, that mass youth culture now has other foci, and many 20th century rock legends and their hangers-on are dead, or suited and booted with sensible jobs and nuclear families, or Peter Pans (of various genders) with levels of financial security ranging from the pampered, to the destitute like the titular former record-shop owner. So Vernon Subutex is also a book / series for people who love reading about the faded glamour of music scenes, and who don't follow translation prizes. It is so much on point about the pop-culture of different age groups that I still can't believe it was first published in 2015 and hadn't just been written a few months ago, as voters tired of - the obviously unmentioned - Macron, from the politics to the fashion (my note says about one female character's wardrobe "man-repeller Cos type clothing as favoured on Mumsnet" although I didn't record the page number that would have helped in quoting Despentes' own description). It would probably also be of interest to those who've enjoyed British topical political novels like Sam Byers' Perfidious Albion, as a similar bulletin from across the Channel.
It's a cartoonish, slangy satire in a 1990s style, but its caricatures are sharper, its characterisation deeper and the observations more true than in 90% of that stuff. I felt as if Despentes had lived as most of these people (and met the rest). It somehow romanticises less than most music books, whilst still being as cool as the best of them. (The blurb's cheesy wording doesn't reflect the understanding of subcultures inside the book, nor is it even wholly accurate about the plot.) It may be told via multiple characters, like a lot of 2010s literary fiction, but it's in close third-person rather than first, and the present-day story progresses chronologically. As long as you can deal with a lot of characters having equal importance, it's more straightforwardly readable and less experimental than might be expected from its current positioning in English. It didn't feel like anything that would be on one of those longlists. It was a bunking-off, guilty-pleasure kind of book I might read instead of anything I *should*. Except the writing, especially the inner life of most characters, is way too good and too convincing for any so-called guilt to come into it. People are just atypical enough to be convincing, for instance, Vernon weirdly finds coke relaxing.
There were a handful of things that perhaps could have been handled better - although as this is only part one of a trilogy, there's plenty of scope for further developments in later books. Recently-deceased rock star Alex Bleach - videos of whom are the novel's mcguffin - was black, yet there's nothing about him as a black artist, or how his stage name, and his cultural positioning identical to that of a white rock star relate to that (the name must be a comment in itself), and his social circle doesn't seem to include any other black people - his friends who appear in the book seem to be mostly white, with a few middle-eastern /Muslim. The novel's observation of political change references the growing acceptability of the far right, especially among the young, for instance, a biography of Bleach is probably "too middle-class hipster for the baby fascists of her generation". I'm not sure whether it's meant to be a close reflection of contemporary Paris or about a slightly different fictional version, just a little more dystopian from the reality where you can still find a homeless person sleeping in your app-hired electric car - but if it's the former, it doesn't have anything about a similar growth in socialist and far-left politics. The character I found least convincing was Patrice, a recently-separated domestic violence perpetrator who puts up the sofa-surfing Vernon for a while. It's possible I'm relying too much on stuff from psychology textbooks in this, but I also haven't knowingly met anyone who contradicts the idea that the high level of self-awareness and honesty, and lack of grandiosity, displayed by Patrice wouldn't co-exist long-term alongside his severely abusive behaviour, because if he were really that aware - and he's not written like someone kidding himself - he would have been able to reform himself more. He would have worked better written in distant third-person, with some of the insights into his behaviour coming from an omniscient narrator rather than from his own thoughts.
I occasionally had doubts about the 5-star rating; it started out as a book I wished I could have written, then at times it was too much, too much like eating some once-favourite treat I didn't now love as much as I used to, and for a while I only read 50 pages every few days. But towards the end, I was impressed with almost everything from the depiction of Vernon's decay (the specifics of which has unfortunately become blended in my memory with the later stages of the fall from prosperity of the title character in 19th-century Polish novel Marta, which I finished a few days later) to the aptness of references such as crap right-wing scriptwriter Xavier's interest in Pierre Drieu la Rochelle - whose politics were similar to those of Subutex's far-right characters and whose most famous work The Fire Within is somewhat echoed in the wanderings and descent of Vernon.
The French original of Vernon Subutex is packed with Parisian slang which was essentially untranslatable to English, as mentioned in this interview with translator Frank Wynne. Something has, in a way, been lost in translation, but, whilst never overegging it, Wynne has produced an English version in a register recognisable and credible, alongside all the reference-dropping (like the character who stole CDs using the method she saw in Christiane F) to anyone who used to read the British music press while it was still decent, and who remembers the work of punkish younger novelists of the 1990s - and as the focal characters are now in their 40s and 50s, Vernon reckons that if someone still listens to Tricky that probably means they're okay, this is a great fit for their heyday, people like the former rock girlfriend who reckons that if the menopause is as tough as they say, she might go back on hard drugs. The novel's interest in understanding all sides, humanising all characters equally, whether they are homeless or far right or trans or devoutly muslim or an ex-porn star or a comfortable middle-class straight couple with kids, is also perhaps more characteristic of this generation's attitudes than of Millenials and Gen Z, of people formed by a different time, when the tail-end of the post-war consensus, and post-modernism, was the order of the day. The trilogy has been compared by its French fans to the work of Zola and Balzac - two writers I've still not read; in the last few months, I've been finding this to be a major gap due to their influence on the classic Polish literature I've been reading - and now on Vernon Subutex.
I would love to see a review of Subutex by Nick Lezard, quondam book critic and writer of columns on middle-aged, middle-class poverty and near-homelessness in the New Statesman - although maybe he'd find it uncomfortably close to the bone, as Vernon's inertia, probably masking low-grade depression, is similar. From the poignant and ruthless years of attrition of a record collection once thought a permanent part of one's identity, as it's listed for eBay sale to buy basic consumables like food, to the weird gulf between who you know and the state of your own life, and the sort of welfare-state fails that left-leaning Brits like to think still don't happen on the Continent, and material artefacts of the rise and fall of personal circumstances like "the goose-down quilt he'd been lugging around since he was 30", Despentes is doing her absolute damndest to get it through to comfortable liberal readers that this stuff isn't nearly as far away from them as they'd like to think: even if you haven't started falling through the safety net, it probably is happening to someone of your acquaintance, and even to people you once admired.
And unlike so many commentators of this age, writing about and for their peers, there's also respect not dismissiveness, just as much for anyone else in the fast-moving cynical entertainment world of this book, for the younger generation on its own terms, here via a venial film director: his own daughter got it into her head to be a "YouTube Beauty Vlogger"… to his shock he discovered a universe of young girls who know exactly how to pose for a camera, how to frame a shot, and how to upload "make-up tutorials" that get up to 56 million hits when filmed in their bedrooms. He realised he was missing a trick, that he needed someone in his office to scour the web for new trends. This is typical of the way a lot is packed in: two characters' perspectives are elucidated simultaneously, whilst saying something kind of soundbitey about the present and moving the story forward. The buzz of every minute of being a twentysomething in the capital who knows quite a few of the right people, while trying to meet more, is vividly alive in the story of up and coming music writer Lydia Bazooka and it made memories of 00s East London flash before my eyes.
I've never read Despentes before (or especially wanted to before I first heard about Vernon Subutex) but vaguely knew of her by repute since Baise-Moi. As a result of enjoying VS1, have looked at a few interviews and other books of hers. Wynne described her as "ornery" and she seems even more so now that her non-fiction writings don't fit with the prevailing trends in late-2010s feminism, especially among younger women who are reacting against the prevalence of online porn (concern about internet porn is referenced here by an ex-porn-star character's idly daft book idea) - and her apparent advocacy of political lesbianism in one interview seemed to puzzle a young journalist. (Apologies if I misinterpreted this reporter.) Her most consciously transgressive move in this book is possibly an FTM character who transitions for somewhat non-standard reasons. Vernon Subutex himself may be a straight man, and the book's characters of various sexualities and genders, so it's not lesbian-focused like some of her earlier work, but there are a number of countercultural lesbian characters, one of whom also appears in Apocalypse Bébé. The sexuality of the formidable homeless Olga is unstated, but she reminded me of a more realist version of the Dog Woman in Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry.
About a month ago in the Times, an article by Laura Freeman asked Is there a great Brexit novel?. My impression is that most literary 'Brexit novels' already published are going for easy wins with a Remainer audience, and are therefore low on social and political complexity. Freeman described something along the lines of what I hoped to read - but which will evidently take longer than two and a half years to emerge, perhaps much longer:
How would Dickens, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Gissing and Orwell have dealt with Project Fear, enemies of the people, the end of experts and the modern Circumlocution Office that is the Department for Exiting the European Union? ... There is something distasteful about that Welsh novelist — a personification of smuggery — in Cusk’s Kudos, repeating the old canard about prospectless leavers being “turkeys voting for Christmas”. A Dickens or an Orwell would ask: “Why vote leave? Why remain?” Today’s novelist howls: “Why, why, why?”
Despentes is not responding to a single political earthquake as are Brits writing about Brexit, or Americans about the Trump presidency, but to shifting trends. She gives considerably more space to one side of aggressively polarised politics than the other (the side on which her audience is less likely to be found, I assume) - but she comes closer to presenting an equivalent panorama of views and characters than anything of which I'm currently aware in English, other than perhaps Byers.
Needless to say, I am looking forward to the next instalment (its character list has already been useful while reading part one) and hope it maintains the momentum and quality of the first. In presenting (Even if reading over this post, as with many of my other 5-star reviews, makes me wonder if liking a book this much results in a fannish babble unlikely to convince others, because some works you simply *get* beyond anything that can be justified with quotes - or you don't.)
(read Nov 2018, reviewed Dec 2018. The review and comment thread on Goodreads.)
-------
While I was in the middle of Vernon Subutex One, a book called Destroy All Monsters: The Last Rock Novel appeared in my Goodreads feed. (Thanks Kris.) Vernon Subutex has a strong claim to that subtitle too. In English it's so far been pigeonholed as translated literary fiction about the state of modern life / Western Europe / France / Paris (depending how specific you think its types are), and its Booker International shortlisting cements this - but just as much as being a perceptive take on contemporary society and politics, it faces up to the mythology and glitter of rock and indie as things that belong to the past and the middle-aged, that mass youth culture now has other foci, and many 20th century rock legends and their hangers-on are dead, or suited and booted with sensible jobs and nuclear families, or Peter Pans (of various genders) with levels of financial security ranging from the pampered, to the destitute like the titular former record-shop owner. So Vernon Subutex is also a book / series for people who love reading about the faded glamour of music scenes, and who don't follow translation prizes. It is so much on point about the pop-culture of different age groups that I still can't believe it was first published in 2015 and hadn't just been written a few months ago, as voters tired of - the obviously unmentioned - Macron, from the politics to the fashion (my note says about one female character's wardrobe "man-repeller Cos type clothing as favoured on Mumsnet" although I didn't record the page number that would have helped in quoting Despentes' own description). It would probably also be of interest to those who've enjoyed British topical political novels like Sam Byers' Perfidious Albion, as a similar bulletin from across the Channel.
It's a cartoonish, slangy satire in a 1990s style, but its caricatures are sharper, its characterisation deeper and the observations more true than in 90% of that stuff. I felt as if Despentes had lived as most of these people (and met the rest). It somehow romanticises less than most music books, whilst still being as cool as the best of them. (The blurb's cheesy wording doesn't reflect the understanding of subcultures inside the book, nor is it even wholly accurate about the plot.) It may be told via multiple characters, like a lot of 2010s literary fiction, but it's in close third-person rather than first, and the present-day story progresses chronologically. As long as you can deal with a lot of characters having equal importance, it's more straightforwardly readable and less experimental than might be expected from its current positioning in English. It didn't feel like anything that would be on one of those longlists. It was a bunking-off, guilty-pleasure kind of book I might read instead of anything I *should*. Except the writing, especially the inner life of most characters, is way too good and too convincing for any so-called guilt to come into it. People are just atypical enough to be convincing, for instance, Vernon weirdly finds coke relaxing.
There were a handful of things that perhaps could have been handled better - although as this is only part one of a trilogy, there's plenty of scope for further developments in later books. Recently-deceased rock star Alex Bleach - videos of whom are the novel's mcguffin - was black, yet there's nothing about him as a black artist, or how his stage name, and his cultural positioning identical to that of a white rock star relate to that (the name must be a comment in itself), and his social circle doesn't seem to include any other black people - his friends who appear in the book seem to be mostly white, with a few middle-eastern /Muslim. The novel's observation of political change references the growing acceptability of the far right, especially among the young, for instance, a biography of Bleach is probably "too middle-class hipster for the baby fascists of her generation". I'm not sure whether it's meant to be a close reflection of contemporary Paris or about a slightly different fictional version, just a little more dystopian from the reality where you can still find a homeless person sleeping in your app-hired electric car - but if it's the former, it doesn't have anything about a similar growth in socialist and far-left politics. The character I found least convincing was Patrice, a recently-separated domestic violence perpetrator who puts up the sofa-surfing Vernon for a while. It's possible I'm relying too much on stuff from psychology textbooks in this, but I also haven't knowingly met anyone who contradicts the idea that the high level of self-awareness and honesty, and lack of grandiosity, displayed by Patrice wouldn't co-exist long-term alongside his severely abusive behaviour, because if he were really that aware - and he's not written like someone kidding himself - he would have been able to reform himself more. He would have worked better written in distant third-person, with some of the insights into his behaviour coming from an omniscient narrator rather than from his own thoughts.
I occasionally had doubts about the 5-star rating; it started out as a book I wished I could have written, then at times it was too much, too much like eating some once-favourite treat I didn't now love as much as I used to, and for a while I only read 50 pages every few days. But towards the end, I was impressed with almost everything from the depiction of Vernon's decay (the specifics of which has unfortunately become blended in my memory with the later stages of the fall from prosperity of the title character in 19th-century Polish novel Marta, which I finished a few days later) to the aptness of references such as crap right-wing scriptwriter Xavier's interest in Pierre Drieu la Rochelle - whose politics were similar to those of Subutex's far-right characters and whose most famous work The Fire Within is somewhat echoed in the wanderings and descent of Vernon.
The French original of Vernon Subutex is packed with Parisian slang which was essentially untranslatable to English, as mentioned in this interview with translator Frank Wynne. Something has, in a way, been lost in translation, but, whilst never overegging it, Wynne has produced an English version in a register recognisable and credible, alongside all the reference-dropping (like the character who stole CDs using the method she saw in Christiane F) to anyone who used to read the British music press while it was still decent, and who remembers the work of punkish younger novelists of the 1990s - and as the focal characters are now in their 40s and 50s, Vernon reckons that if someone still listens to Tricky that probably means they're okay, this is a great fit for their heyday, people like the former rock girlfriend who reckons that if the menopause is as tough as they say, she might go back on hard drugs. The novel's interest in understanding all sides, humanising all characters equally, whether they are homeless or far right or trans or devoutly muslim or an ex-porn star or a comfortable middle-class straight couple with kids, is also perhaps more characteristic of this generation's attitudes than of Millenials and Gen Z, of people formed by a different time, when the tail-end of the post-war consensus, and post-modernism, was the order of the day. The trilogy has been compared by its French fans to the work of Zola and Balzac - two writers I've still not read; in the last few months, I've been finding this to be a major gap due to their influence on the classic Polish literature I've been reading - and now on Vernon Subutex.
I would love to see a review of Subutex by Nick Lezard, quondam book critic and writer of columns on middle-aged, middle-class poverty and near-homelessness in the New Statesman - although maybe he'd find it uncomfortably close to the bone, as Vernon's inertia, probably masking low-grade depression, is similar. From the poignant and ruthless years of attrition of a record collection once thought a permanent part of one's identity, as it's listed for eBay sale to buy basic consumables like food, to the weird gulf between who you know and the state of your own life, and the sort of welfare-state fails that left-leaning Brits like to think still don't happen on the Continent, and material artefacts of the rise and fall of personal circumstances like "the goose-down quilt he'd been lugging around since he was 30", Despentes is doing her absolute damndest to get it through to comfortable liberal readers that this stuff isn't nearly as far away from them as they'd like to think: even if you haven't started falling through the safety net, it probably is happening to someone of your acquaintance, and even to people you once admired.
And unlike so many commentators of this age, writing about and for their peers, there's also respect not dismissiveness, just as much for anyone else in the fast-moving cynical entertainment world of this book, for the younger generation on its own terms, here via a venial film director: his own daughter got it into her head to be a "YouTube Beauty Vlogger"… to his shock he discovered a universe of young girls who know exactly how to pose for a camera, how to frame a shot, and how to upload "make-up tutorials" that get up to 56 million hits when filmed in their bedrooms. He realised he was missing a trick, that he needed someone in his office to scour the web for new trends. This is typical of the way a lot is packed in: two characters' perspectives are elucidated simultaneously, whilst saying something kind of soundbitey about the present and moving the story forward. The buzz of every minute of being a twentysomething in the capital who knows quite a few of the right people, while trying to meet more, is vividly alive in the story of up and coming music writer Lydia Bazooka and it made memories of 00s East London flash before my eyes.
I've never read Despentes before (or especially wanted to before I first heard about Vernon Subutex) but vaguely knew of her by repute since Baise-Moi. As a result of enjoying VS1, have looked at a few interviews and other books of hers. Wynne described her as "ornery" and she seems even more so now that her non-fiction writings don't fit with the prevailing trends in late-2010s feminism, especially among younger women who are reacting against the prevalence of online porn (concern about internet porn is referenced here by an ex-porn-star character's idly daft book idea) - and her apparent advocacy of political lesbianism in one interview seemed to puzzle a young journalist. (Apologies if I misinterpreted this reporter.) Her most consciously transgressive move in this book is possibly an FTM character who transitions for somewhat non-standard reasons. Vernon Subutex himself may be a straight man, and the book's characters of various sexualities and genders, so it's not lesbian-focused like some of her earlier work, but there are a number of countercultural lesbian characters, one of whom also appears in Apocalypse Bébé. The sexuality of the formidable homeless Olga is unstated, but she reminded me of a more realist version of the Dog Woman in Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry.
About a month ago in the Times, an article by Laura Freeman asked Is there a great Brexit novel?. My impression is that most literary 'Brexit novels' already published are going for easy wins with a Remainer audience, and are therefore low on social and political complexity. Freeman described something along the lines of what I hoped to read - but which will evidently take longer than two and a half years to emerge, perhaps much longer:
How would Dickens, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Gissing and Orwell have dealt with Project Fear, enemies of the people, the end of experts and the modern Circumlocution Office that is the Department for Exiting the European Union? ... There is something distasteful about that Welsh novelist — a personification of smuggery — in Cusk’s Kudos, repeating the old canard about prospectless leavers being “turkeys voting for Christmas”. A Dickens or an Orwell would ask: “Why vote leave? Why remain?” Today’s novelist howls: “Why, why, why?”
Despentes is not responding to a single political earthquake as are Brits writing about Brexit, or Americans about the Trump presidency, but to shifting trends. She gives considerably more space to one side of aggressively polarised politics than the other (the side on which her audience is less likely to be found, I assume) - but she comes closer to presenting an equivalent panorama of views and characters than anything of which I'm currently aware in English, other than perhaps Byers.
Needless to say, I am looking forward to the next instalment (its character list has already been useful while reading part one) and hope it maintains the momentum and quality of the first. In presenting (Even if reading over this post, as with many of my other 5-star reviews, makes me wonder if liking a book this much results in a fannish babble unlikely to convince others, because some works you simply *get* beyond anything that can be justified with quotes - or you don't.)
(read Nov 2018, reviewed Dec 2018. The review and comment thread on Goodreads.)
2 December 2018
Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, tr. Jennifer Croft
Winner of the 2018 Man Booker International Prize.
A very 00s, pre-recessionary book. I daresay that's part of the reason for its recent success in the world of English-translated literary prizes. It must be a break from current political stresses for many judges and readers, evoking a liberal prelapsarian time when it never occurred to middle-class frequent travellers with an internationalist outlook that not everyone aspired to or admired their way of life - and when there weren't the grinding financial worries that would emerge for so many in the Global North shortly after its 2007 publication. A time when it didn't seem entirely silly to say: "Soon we may well say that it’s the cities that supplement the airports, as workplaces and places to sleep." In this book from over ten years ago. it is still possible to feel that, when travelling, one is off the radar, inbetween real life and real places: there isn't the always-on wifi and the expectation of being in touch 24/7. Its contemporary elements include, subtly or overtly the travel subculture and its attitudes, things like They weren’t real travellers: they left in order to return. - although unlike many of the travel culture's real-life proponents, Tokarczuk does occasionally mention the environmental impact of flying.
Many of Flights' characters evoke British political writer David Goodhart's frequently cited concept of "anywheres" versus "somewheres" (an explanation for Brexit and similar political shifts). This book is all about "anywheres":
Mostly wealthy tourists, Americans, Germans, Brits, and also those who had lost – in the free flow of money, which they let guide them – any and all defining traits. They were simply attractive, healthy, moving with unsummoned ease from language to language.
In the book's take on 'travel psychology', there are three progressive phases of psychological development in the traveller growing used to waking up away from home - starting with the assumption that one is at home, through the bewilderment at 'I don't know where I am' - to the enlightened ‘It Doesn’t Matter Where I Am,’ it makes no difference. I’m here..
I was fortunate to read Flights late in the year - not in the spring at the time of the Booker International list - and thanks to earlier GR reviewers went into it forewarned about inaccuracies, both those that are strongly contradicted by personal experience, such as the alleged absence of the over-40s from tourist hostels, and errors of factual knowledge across domains including physics, neurology and history. This meant that I always read any unfamiliar, apparently-factual material with some scepticism. I looked up things at times to check, but was not always sufficiently invested in the book to do so thoroughly. (There are stories and passages in Flights which are too much like bog-standard English-language litfic about middle-class families. As one of those readers who likes translated fiction to introduce a little strangeness to English and to fiction, and who reads it to get away from that sort of mundane contemporary British or American novel, this was not my sort of thing. [Have been trying to remember where I got that 'strangeness' from - thought it was a Tim Parks article but searching suggests not.] Although I enjoyed Flights to an extent that would merit 4 stars, the factual errors mean it gets no more than 3. Its reach is polymathic, but it stands up poorly against major 'encyclopaedic' novels that contain significantly fewer mistakes (although it's rare one of these books is found to have none, once let loose for a few years on a reading public with specialist degrees in many subjects. Paid reviewers in the press ought to have the job of thoroughly checking such material in novels they cover, but sadly this doesn't seem to be done.) It is disappointing, too, when there are readers who seek encyclopaedic novels by erudite women, not to be able to recommend this one more strongly due to the number of mistakes. If the 'factual' material were coming from a character's stream of consciousness, it could be fitting (although the errors should really be indicated in some way for the benefit of readers who wouldn't know or check) as there is a Jungian / 'woo' inflection to the book at times, and sometimes a chatty, vague style, which would sit well with half-remembered impressions of facts read years ago.
Tokarczuk has described Flights as a 'constellation novel', probably a new term in English, although the novel of fragments or volume of linked short stories is not a new form. If you enjoy noticing when apparently unrelated books you've read recently mention the same obscure fact, event or motif, you will likely get some fun out of Flights. Its ostensibly separate stories and passages - a mixture of apparently semi-autobiographical anecdotes, contemporary and historical fiction, jottings and epiphanies - are pulled together by similar minor connections. It's inevitably linear on the page (and it would be intriguing to hear how Tokarczuk decided the order for the pieces), but in ideaspace it has the shape of a 3D network diagram, with links between multiple nodes. On a small scale it is like an internet, although the web is only a minor feature in Flights. (An early internet /hypertext novel, 253 by Geoff Ryman (1998) - which I enjoyed more than most people on GR - also took the theme of travel, specifically a London Tube journey and its passengers: the loose structure and sense of movement associated with travel evidently suits these unconventional formats.)
The most apparently impressive connection made in the book is perhaps fictional: that an Italian soprano who sung at Chopin's funeral (his heart having already been removed to be taken to Poland) was also in Vienna during the 1848 revolution in which Angelo Soliman's body, stuffed for display without his consent, was destroyed. I can find nothing about 'Graziella Panini' outside references to Tokarczuk's book - though if someone reading this post has a biography of Chopin which goes into detail about his funeral, they may be able to check if she was mentioned. This string of events is connected to the book's other major theme, anatomy. It is not one I enjoy or find pleasant - but Flights did at least, unlike any other work previously, prompt me to think more rationally about why that might be, when I agree with people knowing and learning it as a topic, and also about its importance in the history of medicine - even if it is not in anatomy but in physiology where advances are still obviously required to understand medical phenomena.
There is some that tinge of exoticisation / orientalism, here of various Asian and North African settings, which is quite common in East European literature (e.g. Cărtărescu, Krasznahorkai) and less examined than it would be in British or North American literary fiction of the same vintage - part of a culture in which this is not discussed and flagged up to the same extent, and where these writers are already notably more liberal than average for their countries.
I once planned to read Tokarczuk's books in English in chronological order. And so far I've read two of them in reverse chronological order - which provided the unexpected fun of spotting motifs from Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009) emerging in Flights two years earlier. There is the 'invisbility' and anonymity of older women: For example, if something crazy were to happen, nobody on the scene would even remember her having been there, or if they did all they’d say would be, ‘some woman’, or ‘somebody else was over there…’; vegetarianism and environmental issues (although Tokarczuk is a member of the Polish Green Party, so these may be perennial in her books); canine [wolf] headed persons reported by early travel writers; and most copiously, an unconventional detective story.
The detective story was the main element that motivated me to keep going enthusiastically through the book; anticipating a resolution near the end (having looked at chapter titles) sustained my interest and goodwill towards the rest of the narrative. And then there wasn't one! This is actually flagged up in Flights' UK blurb, but I hadn't read it properly. It meant that, although these days, in Kunicki's shoes I probably would have let the absence go, assuming a decent store of prior trust and goodwill, I found myself empathising with his frustration and nagging, because I'd read about ¾ of the bloody book waiting for this information too. I was fed up with the narrative for the next several chapters but was eventually back on board after some apposite lines quoted near the beginning of this post.
Whilst it's necessary to have some alertness to notice the connections between stories or vignettes in Flights, most of the pieces of writing are not as intellectually dense as I'd assumed from others' reviews of the book. Some GR posters have said Drive Your Plow is an easier book than Flights, but I would say it is a similar level of difficulty, wearing its learning more lightly but with plenty to uncover for those who've read relevant material (one GR friend pointed out connections to Derrida, which I never would have noticed). Plow is more focused and tightly constructed, and better for it IMO. Flights, like the later book, has paragraphs of intense observation and philosophical musings, although here, there are more of them, and their failure / fancifulness rate is higher. Similarly, there are passages of gorgeous description in Flights - the chapter on plastic bags, described as if they were a species, is outstanding and perversely beautiful - but also some which are a little flat compared with those in the shorter novel. I still find Olga Tokarczuk very likeable: I just wish this book had had more editing, especially fact checking when it was first published. (Factual errors are generally not altered for translation, especially not in fiction.)
(Read Nov-Dec 2018, reviewed Dec 2018. The review and discussion thread on Goodreads.)
A very 00s, pre-recessionary book. I daresay that's part of the reason for its recent success in the world of English-translated literary prizes. It must be a break from current political stresses for many judges and readers, evoking a liberal prelapsarian time when it never occurred to middle-class frequent travellers with an internationalist outlook that not everyone aspired to or admired their way of life - and when there weren't the grinding financial worries that would emerge for so many in the Global North shortly after its 2007 publication. A time when it didn't seem entirely silly to say: "Soon we may well say that it’s the cities that supplement the airports, as workplaces and places to sleep." In this book from over ten years ago. it is still possible to feel that, when travelling, one is off the radar, inbetween real life and real places: there isn't the always-on wifi and the expectation of being in touch 24/7. Its contemporary elements include, subtly or overtly the travel subculture and its attitudes, things like They weren’t real travellers: they left in order to return. - although unlike many of the travel culture's real-life proponents, Tokarczuk does occasionally mention the environmental impact of flying.
Many of Flights' characters evoke British political writer David Goodhart's frequently cited concept of "anywheres" versus "somewheres" (an explanation for Brexit and similar political shifts). This book is all about "anywheres":
Mostly wealthy tourists, Americans, Germans, Brits, and also those who had lost – in the free flow of money, which they let guide them – any and all defining traits. They were simply attractive, healthy, moving with unsummoned ease from language to language.
In the book's take on 'travel psychology', there are three progressive phases of psychological development in the traveller growing used to waking up away from home - starting with the assumption that one is at home, through the bewilderment at 'I don't know where I am' - to the enlightened ‘It Doesn’t Matter Where I Am,’ it makes no difference. I’m here..
I was fortunate to read Flights late in the year - not in the spring at the time of the Booker International list - and thanks to earlier GR reviewers went into it forewarned about inaccuracies, both those that are strongly contradicted by personal experience, such as the alleged absence of the over-40s from tourist hostels, and errors of factual knowledge across domains including physics, neurology and history. This meant that I always read any unfamiliar, apparently-factual material with some scepticism. I looked up things at times to check, but was not always sufficiently invested in the book to do so thoroughly. (There are stories and passages in Flights which are too much like bog-standard English-language litfic about middle-class families. As one of those readers who likes translated fiction to introduce a little strangeness to English and to fiction, and who reads it to get away from that sort of mundane contemporary British or American novel, this was not my sort of thing. [Have been trying to remember where I got that 'strangeness' from - thought it was a Tim Parks article but searching suggests not.] Although I enjoyed Flights to an extent that would merit 4 stars, the factual errors mean it gets no more than 3. Its reach is polymathic, but it stands up poorly against major 'encyclopaedic' novels that contain significantly fewer mistakes (although it's rare one of these books is found to have none, once let loose for a few years on a reading public with specialist degrees in many subjects. Paid reviewers in the press ought to have the job of thoroughly checking such material in novels they cover, but sadly this doesn't seem to be done.) It is disappointing, too, when there are readers who seek encyclopaedic novels by erudite women, not to be able to recommend this one more strongly due to the number of mistakes. If the 'factual' material were coming from a character's stream of consciousness, it could be fitting (although the errors should really be indicated in some way for the benefit of readers who wouldn't know or check) as there is a Jungian / 'woo' inflection to the book at times, and sometimes a chatty, vague style, which would sit well with half-remembered impressions of facts read years ago.
Tokarczuk has described Flights as a 'constellation novel', probably a new term in English, although the novel of fragments or volume of linked short stories is not a new form. If you enjoy noticing when apparently unrelated books you've read recently mention the same obscure fact, event or motif, you will likely get some fun out of Flights. Its ostensibly separate stories and passages - a mixture of apparently semi-autobiographical anecdotes, contemporary and historical fiction, jottings and epiphanies - are pulled together by similar minor connections. It's inevitably linear on the page (and it would be intriguing to hear how Tokarczuk decided the order for the pieces), but in ideaspace it has the shape of a 3D network diagram, with links between multiple nodes. On a small scale it is like an internet, although the web is only a minor feature in Flights. (An early internet /hypertext novel, 253 by Geoff Ryman (1998) - which I enjoyed more than most people on GR - also took the theme of travel, specifically a London Tube journey and its passengers: the loose structure and sense of movement associated with travel evidently suits these unconventional formats.)
The most apparently impressive connection made in the book is perhaps fictional: that an Italian soprano who sung at Chopin's funeral (his heart having already been removed to be taken to Poland) was also in Vienna during the 1848 revolution in which Angelo Soliman's body, stuffed for display without his consent, was destroyed. I can find nothing about 'Graziella Panini' outside references to Tokarczuk's book - though if someone reading this post has a biography of Chopin which goes into detail about his funeral, they may be able to check if she was mentioned. This string of events is connected to the book's other major theme, anatomy. It is not one I enjoy or find pleasant - but Flights did at least, unlike any other work previously, prompt me to think more rationally about why that might be, when I agree with people knowing and learning it as a topic, and also about its importance in the history of medicine - even if it is not in anatomy but in physiology where advances are still obviously required to understand medical phenomena.
There is some that tinge of exoticisation / orientalism, here of various Asian and North African settings, which is quite common in East European literature (e.g. Cărtărescu, Krasznahorkai) and less examined than it would be in British or North American literary fiction of the same vintage - part of a culture in which this is not discussed and flagged up to the same extent, and where these writers are already notably more liberal than average for their countries.
I once planned to read Tokarczuk's books in English in chronological order. And so far I've read two of them in reverse chronological order - which provided the unexpected fun of spotting motifs from Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009) emerging in Flights two years earlier. There is the 'invisbility' and anonymity of older women: For example, if something crazy were to happen, nobody on the scene would even remember her having been there, or if they did all they’d say would be, ‘some woman’, or ‘somebody else was over there…’; vegetarianism and environmental issues (although Tokarczuk is a member of the Polish Green Party, so these may be perennial in her books); canine [wolf] headed persons reported by early travel writers; and most copiously, an unconventional detective story.
The detective story was the main element that motivated me to keep going enthusiastically through the book; anticipating a resolution near the end (having looked at chapter titles) sustained my interest and goodwill towards the rest of the narrative. And then there wasn't one! This is actually flagged up in Flights' UK blurb, but I hadn't read it properly. It meant that, although these days, in Kunicki's shoes I probably would have let the absence go, assuming a decent store of prior trust and goodwill, I found myself empathising with his frustration and nagging, because I'd read about ¾ of the bloody book waiting for this information too. I was fed up with the narrative for the next several chapters but was eventually back on board after some apposite lines quoted near the beginning of this post.
Whilst it's necessary to have some alertness to notice the connections between stories or vignettes in Flights, most of the pieces of writing are not as intellectually dense as I'd assumed from others' reviews of the book. Some GR posters have said Drive Your Plow is an easier book than Flights, but I would say it is a similar level of difficulty, wearing its learning more lightly but with plenty to uncover for those who've read relevant material (one GR friend pointed out connections to Derrida, which I never would have noticed). Plow is more focused and tightly constructed, and better for it IMO. Flights, like the later book, has paragraphs of intense observation and philosophical musings, although here, there are more of them, and their failure / fancifulness rate is higher. Similarly, there are passages of gorgeous description in Flights - the chapter on plastic bags, described as if they were a species, is outstanding and perversely beautiful - but also some which are a little flat compared with those in the shorter novel. I still find Olga Tokarczuk very likeable: I just wish this book had had more editing, especially fact checking when it was first published. (Factual errors are generally not altered for translation, especially not in fiction.)
(Read Nov-Dec 2018, reviewed Dec 2018. The review and discussion thread on Goodreads.)
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.)
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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.)
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