Arnon Grunberg - Blog

Dungeon

info@arnongrunberg.com (Arnon Grunberg) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 07:49:39 +0200

Dream

‘I was surprised by how little mileage the filmmakers get out of Brüno’s origins; the best national gag—that all he craves is to live “ze Austrian dream: ‘get a job, find a dungeon, raise ein family in it’ ”—comes not from the film but from his Twitter site,’ Anthony Lane writes in this week’s New Yorker.
Yes, “Brüno” may be less funny and poignant than “Borat” and in hindsight “Borat” might have been less poignant than we first thought, and “Brüno” borrows from Andy Kaufman among others, but “Brüno” is refreshing and shocking, thanks above all to lots and lots of male frontal nudity.
Whether “Brüno” is homophobic is hard to say. I would love to watch the movie with gays from Austria.
If “Brüno” teaches us one lesson it is that the future belongs to swingers.
And yes "ze Austrian dream” is our dream. I already have a job -- as soon as I find a decent dungeon I’ll start a family.

Enemy

info@arnongrunberg.com (Arnon Grunberg) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 05:02:16 +0200

Quest

Johan Tagliabue writes in Friday’s Times: “The so-called enfants de Boches — roughly, children of the Huns — born during the war to French women and German soldiers, are seeking to fill a hole in their lives, hunting for long-lost German fathers they never knew and speaking openly of the maltreatment they suffered from their French neighbors. It is estimated that 200,000 children were born of these wartime love affairs.
Photos of the time depict young women, their heads shorn in shame, being hounded through villages, clutching the children of German fathers. About 20,000 women had their heads shaved. Many rejected the children, gave them up for adoption or placed them in orphanages.”

The same day a friend alerted me to Patrick Buisson’s book “1940-1945 Années érotiques : Vichy ou les infortunes de la vertu”.

Sleeping with the enemy is sometimes just an extension of the quest for freedom.

Sneakers

info@arnongrunberg.com (Arnon Grunberg) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 07:17:16 +0200

Radiant

Tonight I went with a friend to see some dance theater by Shen Wei at Lincoln Center.
I’m not a connoisseur of modern dance, but Shen Wei impressed me.
After the third and final piece Shen Wei himself appeared on stage. He turned out to be a friendly, almost radiant looking Chinese man on sneakers.
My friend said: “I’m pretty sure that the female dancer with the short hair lives in my building.”

“You should ask her the next time you see her,” I said.
Shen Wei had made me happy.

Wife

info@arnongrunberg.com (Arnon Grunberg) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 05:59:37 +0200

Son

Nicole’s on 60th street used to be my favorite restaurant for lunch.
It closed a while ago.
There is still a Nicole’s on 9th avenue and 15th street, but I don’t go there that often.
For some reason I decided to have lunch at Nicole’s this afternoon.
The waiter recognized me from the time that I was a patron of Nicole’s on 60th Street.
“Look who is here,” he said.
And then he asked: “How is your son, big I guess?”

Before he took my order he said: “Give my regards to your wife.”

I don’t have a wife, nor do I have a son. (He must have taken my godson and his mother for my son and my wife.)
But I like to adjust to other people’s expectations. I like to be what they want me to be.
And then I move on. That’s an important part of my job.

Potatoes

info@arnongrunberg.com (Arnon Grunberg) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 06:42:50 +0200

1996

Voilà, the results of yesterday’s cooking exercise in my kitchen. (The first time I cooked in my kitchen in Manhattan since 1996. In yesterday’s entry I wrote since 1999, but the correct date is December 1996. It was Hanukkah, my friend Karol was visiting me; we baked potato pancakes.)
Thanks to the help of my assistant Judith yesterday’s dinner (ceviche, salad with seared tuna, grapes; champagne rosé, rosé) was quite edible.
It turned out that both my assistant and I didn’t know how to cook potatoes. All I can say is that we did cook potatoes and that my guest appeared to be satisfied.
Making the ceviche was an absolute highlight of my life.
I plan to use my kitchen every other year, instead of once in fifteen years.

Kitchen

info@arnongrunberg.com (Arnon Grunberg) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 22:22:09 +0200

Bet

Recently I lost a bet.
It’s because of this lost bet that I have to prepare a meal for a friend tonight.
The friend wants to eat ceviche.
Thank god my assistant Judith will come to help me. (I haven’t prepared a meal in my kitchen in Manhattan since 1999.)
On a different note: my assistant Eva is looking for a sublet in New York from September 1 – September 19.
Help will be rewarded with eternal gratitude, love and tenderness. Eva can be contacted at: evapel@dds.nl

No

info@arnongrunberg.com (Arnon Grunberg) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 05:30:13 +0200

Two

Tonight I had dinner with two lovely women.

At the end of the main course one of them asked: “Do you come from money?”

“No,” I answered, “I come from middle class.”

History

info@arnongrunberg.com (Arnon Grunberg) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 05:30:46 +0200

Memory

A couple of days ago my friend Mark alerted me to this article by Timothy Snyder in the NYRB. It took me a while to finally read the article, which is highly recommended. Mr. Snyder poses important and interesting questions about the difference between memory and history and the disturbing role literature can play in distorting history.
Mr. Snyder writes: “Auschwitz as symbol of the Holocaust excludes those who were at the center of the historical event. The largest group of Holocaust victims—religiously Orthodox and Yiddish-speaking Jews of Poland, or, in the slightly contemptuous German term, Ostjuden—were culturally alien from West Europeans, including West European Jews. To some degree, they continue to be marginalized from the memory of the Holocaust. The death facility Auschwitz-Birkenau was constructed on territories that are today in Poland, although at the time they were part of the German Reich. Auschwitz is thus associated with today's Poland by anyone who visits, yet relatively few Polish Jews and almost no Soviet Jews died there. The two largest groups of victims are nearly missing from the memorial symbol.”

And also: 'Yet as Auschwitz draws attention away from the still greater horrors of Treblinka, the Gulag distracts us from the Soviet policies that killed people directly and purposefully, by starvation and bullets. Of the Stalinist killing policies, two were the most significant: the collectivization famines of 1930–1933 and the Great Terror of 1937–1938. It remains unclear whether the Kazakh famine of 1930–1932 was intentional, although it is clear that over a million Kazakhs died of starvation. It is established beyond reasonable doubt that Stalin intentionally starved to death Soviet Ukrainians in the winter of 1932–1933. Soviet documents reveal a series of orders of October–December 1932 with evident malice and intention to kill. By the end, more than three million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine had died.
What we read of the Great Terror also distracts us from its true nature. The great novel and the great memoir are Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and Alexander Weissberg's The Accused. Both focus our attention on a small group of Stalin's victims, urban Communist leaders, educated people, sometimes known in the West. This image dominates our understanding of the Great Terror, but it is incorrect. Taken together, purges of Communist Party elites, the security police, and military officers claimed not more than 47,737 lives.
The largest action of the Great Terror, Operation 00447, was aimed chiefly at "kulaks," which is to say peasants who had already been oppressed during collectivization. It claimed 386,798 lives.'

And not to forget:

“Poland's capital was the site of not one but two of the major uprisings against German power during World War II: the ghetto uprising of Warsaw Jews in 1943, after which the ghetto was leveled; and the Warsaw Uprising of the Polish Home Army in 1944, after which the rest of the city was destroyed. These two central examples of resistance and mass killing were confused in the German mass media in August 1994, 1999, and 2004, on all the recent five-year anniversaries of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, and will be again in August 2009.”

So far for the fact checkers.

Beaches

info@arnongrunberg.com (Arnon Grunberg) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 05:18:40 +0200

Limits

Tonight I saw the movie “The Beaches of Agnes”, a documentary by Agnès Varda. Her movie “Sans Toit Ni Loi” is my favorite movie about the limits of freedom.
In this documentary about her own life Agnès Varda sometimes reminded me of Ewa Mehl, a Polish sculptor in Amsterdam, who was one of the first people to take my writings seriously.
“The Beaches of Agnes” beautifully shows that true irony is a higher form of melancholy.

Meadow

info@arnongrunberg.com (Arnon Grunberg) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 05:22:20 +0200

Grudges

In an introduction to three works by Richard Yates Richard Price writes: “He was a nurturer of grudges; an incubator of slights.
His personal gods were Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
He was bitter.
He had every right to be bitter.
He was really bitter.”

Richard Yates himself writes in “Revolutionary Road”: “Everything about her seemed determined to prove, with a new flat-footed emphasis, that a sensible middle-class housewife was all she had ever wanted to be and that all she had ever wanted of love was a husband who would get out and cut the grass once in a while, instead of sleeping all day.”

What else is there to want of love but a husband who gets out once in while to cut the grass?

Or should we side with Isaak Babel, who wrote: “Both of us looked upon the world as a meadow in May over which women and horses wander.”

Whether we opt for a husband who cuts the grass or a meadow with women and horses the right to be bitter is a human right.