Read the Nobels

Tokarczuk, Olga "Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead"

2025-02-08T02:48:00.000-08:00

2009

(Polish: Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych)

Reviewed by Marianne
from Let's Read

I have read one book by Olga Tokarczuk (Primeval and Other Times) when she received her Nobel Prize for Literature. And I wanted to read more by her since then. A bookclub member lent me one now and I read it in more or less one go, it is so exciting. Janina Duszejko is such an interesting character. And the story is starting so quietly, you don't even notice at the beginning that it is a crime story which are not my favourites.

Even though she is the protagonist of the novel, you don't see her as such at the beginning. Janina is a middle-aged, slightly weird woman living in the middle of nowhere in the mountains at the Polish-Czech border where she looks after the summer houses of some rich people. She works with astrology and translates poems by William Blake. She loves animals and she is a conservationist. A remarquable woman.

Where this story leads to, I don't know. But I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in great literature.

From the back cover:

"One of Poland's most imaginative and lyrical writers, Olga Tokarczuk presents us with a detective story with a twist in DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD. After her two dogs go missing and members of the local hunting club are found murdered, teacher and animal rights activist Janina Duszejko becomes involved in the ensuing investigation. Part magic realism, part detective story, DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD is suspenseful and entertaining reimagining of the genre interwoven with poignant and insightful commentaries on our perceptions of madness, marginalised people and animal rights."

And why the German translation is called "Der Gesang der Fledermäuse" (The Song of the Bats) is still a mystery to me.

Olka Tokarczuk received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018 "for her narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life".

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.

Original Post on "Let's Read".

Fosse, Jon "Morning and Evening"

2025-01-25T03:19:00.000-08:00

2001

(Norwegian title: Morgon og kveld)

Reviewed by Marianne
from Let's Read

I had found it after Jon Fosse received the Nobel Prize for literature and then suggested it to the book club. Since we all like to read books by Nobel Prize winners, it was chosen as one of our books.

I have always loved Nobel laureates; there is hardly ever an author among them that I don't care for. And this last one is just the same. A fascinating story about the life and death of a man. A simple story about the passing of an old hardworking fisherman with a humble life. No embellishments needed, a plain reflection on an ordinary life.

Jon Fosse describes all this so wonderfully, his writing is fantastic. A well deserving winner of this most prestigious award.

This is only a novella, even the German translation has only about 120 pages but it is as big as many large books of 500 pages or more (my favourite stories).

Other readers were happy, as well. So, here are some comments:

"At first the writing-style was very offputting, as i am too literal to enjoy poetry and the roundabout way of writing. But then after half the book, I started to understand it, and really enjoyed how much feeling you could get out of the minimalistic text."

"The ending was just stunning."

"It started off annoying me with the style of writing.. the flow of thought, no punctuation... but then about halfway through I was just in awe of the skilful and atmospheric way the story was told."

"The translation to Swedish was a bit special, though, the translator had left a lot of words in the book that are nowadays considered part of the ancient-swedish, and not in normal use anymore."

To be honest, I didn't realize that until I heard this comment. Yes, some of the wording seemed old fashioned even in German but I just considered that the "Scandinavian way".

From the back cover:

"A child who will be named Johannes is born. An old man named Johannes dies. Between these two points, Jon Fosse gives us the details of an entire life, starkly compressed. Beginning with Johannes's father's thoughts as his wife goes into labor, and ending with Johannes's own thoughts as he embarks upon a day in his life when everything is exactly the same, yet totally different, Morning and Evening is a novel concerning the beautiful dream that our lives have meaning."

Jon Fosse received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2023 "for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable".

Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.

Original Post on "Let's Read".

Ernaux, Annie "The Years"

2025-01-11T03:14:00.000-08:00

2008

(French title: Les années)

Reviewed by Marianne
from Let's Read

As so often, I had never heard of Annie Ernaux before she received the Nobel Prize. And that's why I always eagerly await the awards, in 99% of the case, the choice is excellent.

And it was this time. Annie Ernaux is a little older than me but I could find a lot of her experiences in my life. I think most women born in the middle of the last century share them, no matter where they're from. Maybe that's why I liked this book.

It wasn't at all what I expected. While the author grows up, she compares her life with her country, its politics, its developments, especially for women (always to slow). Her memories are haphazard, always in fragments, like a collage or a scrapbook. She uses the third person singular. I think that makes it easier for us to associate with her story, she doesn't give the impression as if she is just speaking about herself.

So, this is not just a biography about Annie Ernaux' life but a history of France after WWII. And a reminder to reflect on our own lives and what our country has done for us and to us. So I am sure it is also interesting for younger people who would like to hear about the generations before them.

I have not studied French (at university, I have learned it at school and speak it) but taken lots of classes and read a lot about French history and politics, visited the country, have friends there. So, not much was totally new for me. But I still enjoyed learning what history and society did to one single person, how she grew up the way she did and became the woman she is today. I will surely read more by her.

Some comments from the discussion:

"Beautiful language and picture of its time. The reading created a feeling of 'participation' or belonging, as she wrote the autobiography mostly in 'we' form.
I have read her biographies about her mother and father, and the abortion. With this The Years, I finally understood her writing style. I found it impressive, starting as glimpses of history, flowing, like a movie, and ended as glimpses again, the person grew along with the story also, reflecting her life in different ages, the perspective growing with the story, as she grew, her perspective of the world grew. Adding more and more observations the wider her perspective and reflection became. Much of the historical references and politics I missed. But an excellent brilliant book, for adults with some reflective skills.
A subjective culture history. I did not feel connected to the 'we' form of participation she tried to bring to the story, like she was taking power she doesn't have. The history interested me, but pop cultural references were not familiar to me.
The modern pop culture and freer availability of products came much earlier in France than in Finland, I felt.
The French perspective on Algeria before and in the later parts of the book felt written from a French born person, very one-sided, that turned around in the modern waves of anti-immigration feelings.
Language was very dense, containing a lot of information in small space of pages. Interesting to read about how influences from different parts of the world arrived and 'affected' the French population. What political news shocked them, what was passed over. What parts of Europe they observed, Yugoslavia, Eastern Europe, etc. and how the feelings and thoughts about these changed. The travelling, the Euro.
It was not an emotional book, but a very verbal one, she kept a distance to her history and feelings from youth, trying to keep neutral. Like a huge amount of source material (her life) summarized into this book, full of specifically chosen sayings and expressions. It made the book a beautiful experience to read or listen to. The translators were also skilled in translating these special sayings.
We also discussed listening to audiobooks, how we feel about it, experience it, and how we felt it affected reading this book.
It was interesting that she analysed her own book in the end, intention to write the book, how she wrote it, what perspective, etc."

From the back cover:

"Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist’s defining work and a breakout bestseller when published in France in 2008.

The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present - even projections into the future - photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from 6 decades of diaries.

Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author’s continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective.

On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir 'written' by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the 'I' for the 'we' (or 'they', or 'one') as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents’ generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents’ generation (and could be writing of her own book): 'From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the 'we' and impersonal pronouns.'"

Annie Ernaux received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022 "for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory".

Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.

Original Post on "Let's Read".

Han, Kang "The Vegetarian"

2024-12-20T02:54:00.000-08:00

2007

(Korean title: 채식주의자/Ch'angbi) - 2007

Reviewed by Marianne
from Let's Read

When I found this book, I thought it might be about a woman who became a vegetarian. And it was. But also, it wasn't. This book has been described as dark and that is correct. But it is also weird. It is hard to follow the thoughts of the protagonists, I always try to empathize with any problem they encounter but I had a hard time doing it in this case.

This story is about two sisters and their husbands, about love and lust. There are three stories about Yeong-hye, the woman who turns vegetarian and whose life takes a strange turn and nobody's life will ever be the same again. The first story is told by her husband, the second by her brother-in-law, the third and last by her sister.

I would have loved to like this book. But I didn't, really.

From the back cover:

"A beautiful, unsettling novel about rebellion and taboo, violence and eroticism, and the twisting metamorphosis of a soul.

Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that’s become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself."

Kang Han received the Booker International Prize in 2016 for "The Vegetarian".

Kang Han received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2024 "for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life".

Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.

Original Post on "Let's Read".

Pamuk, Orhan "To Look Out the Window"

2024-12-14T03:01:00.000-08:00

2008

aka "Pieces from the View: Life, Streets, Literature"
(Turkish title: Manzaradan Parçalar: Hayat, Sokaklar, Edebiyat)

Reviewed by Marianne

from Let's Read

An interesting book by Orhan Pamuk in which he discusses many topics. Whether it's his childhood in Istanbul, his family, politics or his job as a writer, literature, art, he simply has something interesting and worth knowing to say about everything.

That is certainly the main reason why this author is one of my favorites. I hope he writes a new novel soon.

Book description (translated from the German copy):

"Whether it's the crumbling plaster of Istanbul houses or the Turkish flag, whether it's his father or the terrifying nature of Dostoyevsky's demons - with Orhan Pamuk everything becomes a complex universe. Pamuk observes coolly and tells moving stories. Autobiographical, narrative, politics, art and literature: his essays are the sum of different and contradictory experiences - an incredible stroke of luck."

As you can see from my Wikipedia link, there is an English title, though I could not find the book. Still, I hope it has been translated into English.

Orhan Pamuk "who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures" received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006.

Orhan Pamuk received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (Friedenspreis) in 2005.

Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.

Original Post on Let's Read.

Canetti, Elias "Auto-da-Fé"

2024-11-29T07:06:00.000-08:00

1935

(German title: Die Blendung)

Reviewed by Marianne
from Let's Read

What a book! Did I like it? Hm, hard to tell. It is described as grotesk, obscure, weird, … And weird it is.

The book tells the story of Peter Kien, a sinologist and philologist who lives very reclusively in his apartment with his books. He marries his housekeeper but he slides more and more into madness.

Peter's brother Georg is a famous psychologist in Paris. Alerted by one of Peter's acquaintances, he comes to Vienna in order to help but, alas, is not successful.

This is a very complex book that cannot possibly be explained in a few words. Its a book of obsession and criticism, of society at the time but also a warning about what was to come. After all, this was two years after the nazis gained power in Germany and many people, like the author, feared for the future. And they were right, as it turned out.

The meaning of the English title is explained in Wikipedia:
An auto-da-fé was the ritual of public penance carried out between the 15th and 19th centuries of condemned heretics and apostates imposed by the Spanish, Portuguese, or Mexican Inquisition as punishment and enforced by civil authorities. Its most extreme form was death by burning.

The book was first published in English with the title "The Tower of Babel".
The translation of the original titel "Die Blendung" would be translated into "Blinding as a punishment", "Glare", "Deception", or even in the sense of "Verblendung" as "Infatuation". All these words could be used as the title of the book. In the German book description, it is said that "like Joyce's 'Ulysses', 'The Blinding' is a powerful metaphor for the lonely reflective mind's confrontation with reality." Sounds correct to me.

Book Description:

"'Auto-da-Fé' is the story of Peter Kien, a distinguished, reclusive sinologist living in Vienna between the wars. With masterly precision, Canetti reveals Kien's character, displaying the flawed personal relationships which ultimately lead to his destruction.

Manipulated by his illiterate and grasping housekeeper, Therese, who has tricked him into marriage, and Benedikt Pfaff, a brutish concierge, Kien is forced out of his apartment - which houses his great library and one true passion - and into the underworld of the city. In this purgatory he is guided by a chess-playing dwarf of evil propensities, until he is eventually restored to his home. But on his return he is visited by his brother, an eminent psychiatrist who, by an error of diagnosis, precipitates the final crisis...

'Auto-da-Fé' was first published in Germany in 1935 as 'Die Blendung' ('The Blinding' or 'Bedazzlement') and later in Britain in 1947, where the publisher noted Canetti as a 'writer of strongly individual genius, which may prove influential', an observation borne out when the author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. 'Auto-da-Fé' still towers as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, and Canetti's incisive vision of an insular man battling agianst the outside world is as fresh and rewarding today as when first it appeared in print."

Elias Canetti received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981 "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power".

Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.

Original Post on "Let's Read".

The Man Who Would be King (1888), and other stories by Rudyard Kipling

2024-11-23T19:01:00.001-08:00

Have I read Kipling before? I'm sure I did as a child. Perhaps The Jungle Book, or Puck of Pook's Hill or the Just-So Stories. Maybe someone read them to me when I had my eye operation in 1959 and wasn't allowed to read for six months. (What purgatory!)

My mother could recite If (1895) by heart, and quoted it often to her three daughters.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

Anyway, what I remember of Rudyard Kipling (1965-1936) is Mowgli and the exotic settings in India, and the tragic story of his only son John being killed in the trenches on his first day - after his father had wangled a commission for him despite John's poor eyesight. The great writer so closely associated with British imperialism was never the same after that.

The Man Who Would Be King is nowadays a term signifying grandiose ambition, but it comes from this short story of an ordinary man over-reaching himself. Daniel Dravot is an opportunistic rogue who slips away from the British Raj into the wilds of Afghanistan with his mate Peachey Carnehan. There they set in place their absurd ambition to be kings and with guile and cunning convince the tribesmen of Kafiristan that they are gods. The ruse succeeds until Dravot goes too far, and the girl he demands for his pleasure sees through him, not unlike the child who denounces the Emperor who has no clothes. When, in fear of a being she believes to be a god, she bites Dravot and draws blood the game is up. He dies a gruesome death when the Kafirs cut the ropes of a rope bridge on which he is standing, while Peachey is crucified. When he is still alive after twenty-four hours, the natives think it is a miracle, and set him free. When he meets up again with the world-weary narrator he is carrying in his bag Dravot's shrivelled head, complete with crown. He has lost his wits, able only to give a garbled account of events before wandering away, dying shortly thereafter from sunstroke.

The real villain of the story, it seems to me, is the weather which drives men mad. Kipling recreates the misery of the monsoon and its enervating heat as only the yet-to-be-acclimatised can:

It was a pitchy black night, as stifling as a June night can be, and the loo, the red-hot wind from the westward, was booming among the tinder-dry trees and pretending the rain was on its heels. Now and again a spot of almost boiling water would fall on the dust with the flop of a frog, but all our weary world knew that was only pretence. (p120, Wordwoth Classics Edition, 1994)

I wasn't planning to read the rest of the stories because the TBR was overwhelming everything else on the bedside table (that's the bedside TBR, a pale imitation of the real TBR in the Library which now stretches to seven shelves) - but the title of Baa Baa Black Sheep in a collection of stories for adults piqued my interest. It's the story of 'Punch' and Judy, sent from the warm embrace of Mumma and the Ayah to cold and cheerless England and the not-so-loving care of Aunty Rosa and her hideously unforgiving religion. While Uncle Harry is alive there is some solace, but once he is gone there is only endless spite and cruelty. Rosa's boy Harry bullies Punch mercilessly, carries tales home from school, incites other boys to beat him and manufactures lies for which Punch gets the blame. The punishments are so extreme that the boy partially loses his sight, a condition exacerbated by reading to escape his misery.

The story is told from the boy's point of view, charting his blithe optimism and descent into pessimistic misery. Mumma eventually returns from Bombay and there is restitution and recovery, but the damage is done:

For when young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion, and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge. (p115)

Prescient words in 1888 when very little was known about the effects of abuse on young minds.

Wee Willie Winkie was another title that intrigued me. It's also told through the eyes of a child but from a very different perspective. It's about a kind of heroic child beloved by didacts of imperial persuasion in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The child nicknamed Wee Willie Winkie is the precocious son of the Colonel in charge of the 195th Regiment - and he's been brought up with military discipline. When he's naughty his 'good conduct badge' is removed and on the occasion of his accidental firing of a week's hayfeed, the punishment is extended to include being confined to barracks (the house and verandah).

But when the little fellow sees Miss Allardyce, the beloved of his hero Coppy the subaltern, riding off (for reasons not explained) across the river and out of the safety of the cantonment, he breaks his 'arrest' to rescue her and bring her back - for he knows there are Bad Goblins there. He is too little to know that the Goblins he's been warned about are lawless Pashtun Afghans, but he knows she is in peril. When he catches up with her, she has sprained her ankle, and so he sets his pony off with a smack on its rump because he knows it will go home and the alarm will be raised. And then the Pashtun arrive, with plans for kidnap and ransom (and worse, perhaps, unspoken).

The scene that follows betrays Kipling's imperial arrogance at its worst, and is barely credible. The little boy, accustomed to ordering natives about, demands that they stop frightening the Miss Sahib and ride for help. He does this capably because despite his childhood lisp he is fluent in three languages. Instead of thrashing him and abducting her, they recognise that the boy (born to rule?) is precious to the regiment back in the cantonment and that there will be reprisals from the mighty British Raj if they harm him. To complete their humiliation, the rescue party arrives in the nick of time and the Pashtun flee.

Now a 'pukka hero' Wee Willie Winkie rejects his nickname, and is henceforth known as Percival William Williams, thereby designating his manhood and his status as an 'officer and a gentleman'....

It's a good thing I didn't read this one first, or I might not have bothered with the others.

Author: Rudyard Kipling
Title: The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories
Publisher: Wordsworth Classics, 1988
ISBN: 9781853262098, pbk., 224 pages
Source: Personal library

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

The Magic Mountain (1924), by Thomas Mann, translated by John E. Woods

2024-11-23T18:57:00.000-08:00

Well, I've finally finished The Magic Mountain. I've been reading it for ages, about 70 pages a week, along with a group at GoodReads. It's an amazing book.

The plot is actually quite simple. A young man, Hans Castorp, goes to visit his cousin Joachim in an exclusive TB sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, but is diagnosed with the disease himself and ends up staying there for seven years. The sanatorium is a microcosm of European society just before The Great War - which provides Mann with the opportunity to explore an astonishing range of philosophical issues. The novel is often satiric and witty, it bristles with ironies, and there are symbols lurking everywhere. It's the kind of book you could read many times and still discover something new each time you read it.

But I have only read it once, so I must leave the sophisticated analysis to those who have explored it in more depth. I have taken reams of notes in my journal but (especially when I look at the erudite commentary at one of the GoodReads groups), I feel as if I have barely scratched the surface of this great classic work.

Some themes interested me more than others: I especially liked the meditations on time. When Hans arrives at the sanatorium he finds his first day interminable and is puzzled by his cousin's reluctance to acknowledge the duration of his stay. Joachim, a young man whose military career is on hold because of his illness, is otherwise direct and straightforward, but he responds to any suggestions that Hans will be leaving after three weeks with enigmatic remarks that his stay will inevitably be longer. His original plans for a short stay have morphed into months and he has entered into a world where long periods of time suspended in a sort of netherworld, have become normal.

Joachim looks healthy but must now stay a further six months. Hans is alarmed by the calm acceptance of this long suspension of time: his cousin is isolated from normal life, his family and friends, and his promising career. We don't have that much time in life he cries, but Joachim is sanguine: he has become institutionalised already and he accepts the word of his doctors as law. Three weeks are the same as a day to them he says, and it is the same to him too. He has drifted into a life where one day merges into another and the months pass by without anyone noticing. Before long Hans too will dispose of calendars, and eventually not bother to have his watch repaired because the passing of time means nothing.

I was fascinated by Mann's digression about space having the same effect as time. Space, like time, gives birth to forgetfulness, that is, when we travel to somewhere where we are free from relationships, in a free and pristine state, we forget about responsibilities. Time, they say, is water from the River Lethe, but alien air is a similar drink, and if its effects are less profound, it works all the more quickly. (p.4) This 'holiday effect' is what lures us into losing all sense of days passing, an effect exacerbated in the jet age when we travel vast distances across space by plane, a phenomenon unknown to Mann.

The structure of the novel plays with time too. The monotony of Hans' first year at the sanatorium takes up five chapters, but it accelerates after that and the remaining six years whizz through in only two chapters. What's remarkable is the artfulness of depicting monotony in such a fascinating way! The reader learns in considerable detail about the rigid routines of the sanatorium, and how much time must be spent in rest and regular meals. There are very few excursions beyond its walls, and (except for a visit to the Bioscope Theatre), almost no acknowledgment of happenings in the outside world until WW1 looms towards the end. Despite this, the novel never flags because we become absorbed in this microcosm of society and the philosophical enmities which enliven Hans' coming-of-age in this strange world, marooned in snowy isolation with no responsibilities other than to follow doctor's orders ~~and get well.~~

(Why did I cross that out? Because Hans, like most of the other characters, has no ambition to get well. Bizarre as it seems, he becomes comfortable where he is. About half way through the novel Joachim reminds him that they are there to get healthy, not to learn, but Hans responds by saying that the two are not mutually exclusive. What he doesn't recognise in himself is that his desire to participate in the intellectual life of this community contributes to making him reluctant to leave it, and he actually feels betrayed when Joachim leaves).

The sequence at the Bioscope explores the idea that newsreels defy time too. They make the past seem here and now and they are an intrusion that brings the world up into the pristine mountain.

On the screen life flickered before their smarting eyes - all sorts of life, chopped up in hurried, diverting scraps that leapt into fidgety action, lingered, and twitched out of sight in alarm, to the accompaniment of trivial music, which offered present rhythms to match vanishing phantoms from the past and which despite limited means ran the gamut of solemnity, pomposity, passion, savagery, and cooing sensuality. (p. 376)

But when it's over, and the lights go up, and the audience's field of dreams stood before them like an empty blackboard, there was not even the possibility of applause. There was no one there to clap for, to thank, no artistic achievement to reward with a curtain call. (p. 376) Faces seem to see the audience and wave to them, and yet they are not there. The Moroccan woman belongs in the then and there of home' and it is pointless to respond. (p.377) The audience feels a 'sense of helplessness' - a sense of anti-climax which some of us still feel today as the television credits roll.

The characters are splendid. The two most important are Settembrini and Naptha. These mutually hostile characters introduce the impressionable Hans to competing ideologies, but in his maturity when the Dionysian Peeperkorn comes along, Hans is able to see that their abstractions are mutually destructive, and not just because Settembrini and Naptha end up in a bizarre duel. These characters are embodiments of intellectual debates around modernity: Settembrini (who reminds me of Milton's Satan in tone) represents the Enlightenment, and champions humanism, democracy, and human rights. Naptha is a radical Marxist Jew who has a Jesuitical approach to right and wrong but is pro terrorism in what he thinks is the right cause, and he supports totalitarianism because he despises the common man. In his joustings with Settembrini he seems intellectually more rigorous but he is intolerant, and a hypocrite, living a life of luxury further down he mountain rather than put up with the Spartan existence at the sanatorium. (Settembrini lives down the mountain too, but he lives in a shabby garret). Peeperkorn is the one who enlivens proceedings: he becomes Hans' rival for the quixotic affections of Madame Chauchat. An older, unattractive but very wealthy man, he's a party animal, and he trumps Hans, encouraging him to 'seize the day' as it were, instead of going into raptures about symbolic loans of a pencil or fantasising about the glimpse of an arm. But Hans never gets to live his life to the full: his coming-of-age coincides with the slaughter of World War 1 and we never see him as a mature individual because he ends up as one of millions of anonymous conscripts on the battlefield, an insignificant component in the first mechanised war.

It's very hard to write about this magnificent book without seeming reductive. I have no doubt that in universities across the world, there are 5000 word essays and PhDs about single elements of this book. In addition to the themes to which I have so sketchily alluded above, The Magic Mountain ranges across

Meditations on illness and death: while the reader is spared little about the grubbiness of TB, death in the sanatorium is generally remote. Everyone is in denial about it. Until Hans starts visiting the dying later in the book (Chapter 5), the dying are isolated and the other patients see only rare glimpses of the horror. The bodies are whisked away and the rooms are fumigated. (Indeed, another sanatorium further up the mountain briskly disposes of its bodies down the mountain by bob-sled). The medicos say that what matters is to have a dignified death and one should not make a fuss, but Hans rejects this. He thinks that a dying man is entitled to respect, and he likes the solemnity of Latin for death ceremonials. (The irony of this becomes clear when Hans meets his own death on the battlefield). However, the heading 'Danse Macabre' alerts the reader to the fact that Hans is not being a 'ministering angel' but rather is seeking out death and behaving more like an 'Angel of Death' with Joachim as his loyal but unenthusiastic companion. Mann also uses a couple of characters to discuss the morality of paying or not paying for expensive treatments. The penniless Karen Karstedt is 'adopted' by Hans and Joachim because her family has given up on her survival, while The Horseman beggars his wife and family by insisting on expensive oxygen treatments that are only staving off the inevitable.
(Echoing the theme in Buddenbrooks, see my review) the death of the family as a social institution and the loss of its traditions (symbolised by the Castorp baptismal bowl which has no heir because Hans is the last of the line;
The emergence of psychoanalysis, scorned at first by Hans but later becoming part of his regimen. Hans is not aware of just how much the circumstances of his early life has influenced his behaviour and attitudes.
The breakdown of national borders, symbolised by the multi-ethnic patients of the sanatorium, stereotyped by Hans until, for example, he joins the 'noisy' Russians at their table. (Hans is affronted by the noisy passions of Russians in the room next to him: sex - although a major preoccupation - is definitely off-stage in this book). Some nationalities are excluded entirely from the social and intellectual life of the sanatorium by monolingualism, (e.g. the Spanish woman who is known as Tous-les-deux because this is all she can say, having no French or German) while others participate freely using French and English as a lingua franca.
Bourgeois society and class differentiation: These language differences are related to levels of education, and thus to class. Hans is forced to mix with people outside his own class, and he revels in mocking Frau Stöhr as an illiterate who mispronounces her words and makes comic malapropisms. He despises Dr Krakowski's footwear as a betrayal of good taste, and poor dear, this rather indulged dilettante who takes a comfortable life for granted feels that he bears the 'burden of civilisation', as the upper classes do. (Mann has an affectionate tone towards his central character, but Hans has flaws: he is indolent, he is complacent, and he is a bit of a drinker, with a well-established habit of drinking porter far too early in the morning. He is also mildly pompous, and he has a strong tendency to judge others using superficialities.) Hans initially takes walks to avoid having to mix with people not to his taste, but he soon finds that this tires him out.
Love and Sex: Hans is shocked when he attends lectures by Dr Krakowski’s lecture on love - he's never heard the like in mixed company, but gosh! he finds himself distracted by Madame Chauchat's arm. Many of Mann's characters are not attractive (e.g. Madame C has ugly hands and nails) and they are not romanticised: all of them suffer unappealing aspects of having TB, ranging from grotty coughing and wheezing to flushed faces and mealy complexions. But there are liaisons, and although he finds Madame C 'vulgar', Hans is enamoured (as is Joachim of Marusja). Their courtships, however, (if they can be called that), are chaste and glacial. For Hans and Madame C, it consists of looking at, and not looking at each other, with nothing happening for two-or-three days at a time. It is a Big Deal when in the X-ray room, she finally asks him a question about how long they might have to wait, and an Even Bigger Moment when their paths intersect on a walk, and gosh, he gets to say 'excuse me'. For Joachim, it consists of nothing at all until it's all too late.
Music permeates the novel, signified by in-house performances by the patients emulating a soirée, and by the gramophone which defies the need for performance to bring music to any place, any time. There are numerous references to classical and romantic composers, especially Verdi and Wagner, and mournful songs by Schubert. There are also possible allusions to the impressionist composer Debussy, see Wikipedia for some discussion of this. Music is an 'opiate' that dulls the desire to leave and Settembrini always comes late to performances to maintain the illusion that he is free to choose whether to come or not. What I thought was rather droll was the way Hans appropriated control of the newly arrived gramophone - so like the way our menfolk like to have control of the TV remote!
References to aspects of German culture which were unfamiliar to me. The dream sequences, fantasies and grotesque carnival scenes are Faustlike, but I haven't read it yet, (and somehow have always missed the opera when it's in season) so I probably missed heaps of allusions. But I did pick up on allusions that derive from Grimm's Fairy Tales: Hans's quest to learn the first name of Madame Chauchat is an allusion to Rumplestiltskin, and the frequent references to opulent meals (five-per-day, with luxurious courses described in detail) is an allusion to Table-Be-Set, (and also put me in mind of The Magic Pudding though I am quite sure Mann wasn't thinking of it!). Even the way Hans travels up the snowy mountain to the sanatorium is a reminder of all those fairy stories where a young man climbs up a mountain to a castle where his quest towards manhood involves all kinds of perils, but Mann's naïve Hans is not the well-known trickster 'Clever Hans', not at all.
Institutionalisation: Settembrini is alarmed by signs that Hans is succumbing early. Patients undertake their mandatory rest periods wrapped up in a special way, and when Hans goes to buy a blanket to do this too, it is as if he is 'nesting', settling in, mollycoddling himself against the cold because he's preparing to stay. This blanketing is also symbolic of Hans immobilising himself, protecting himself from being able to leave the closed world that he has voluntarily entered.

Much of The Magic Mountain could be read (as Wikipedia says) as a coming-of-age story or a parody of it, because the immature Castorp leaves his home and learns about art, culture, politics, human frailty and love. For all its complexity, it's actually quite easy to read. But what happens over the time it takes to read it (and it's 850+ pages long), is that the ironies start to emerge, the motifs begin to reveal themselves, and the symbolism starts to become apparent. Then what happens, inevitably, is that one begins to realise - just from re-reading bits of it when prompted by something - that there is so much more to discover about it. This includes the possibility that new arrivals are not actually ill at all, but might rather be seduced into staying by the exploitative Dr Berghof and the sanatorium industry, so that - TB being a communicable disease - they eventually become infected.

But this post is already much too long so I shall stop now!

Author: Thomas Mann
Title: The Magic Mountain
Translated by John E. Woods
Introduction by A.S.Byatt
Publisher: Everyman Library, Alfred A. Knopf, 2005
ISBN: 9781857152890
Source: Personal copy

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

The Last Summer (1934), by Boris Pasternak, translated by George Reavey

2024-11-23T18:49:00.000-08:00

The Last Summer is only 90-odd pages long in my Penguin Modern Classics edition of 1960, but it's more than a short story. Titled Povest (A Tale) when first published in 1934, it's not listed among Boris Pasternak's works in the Russian edition of Wikipedia, suggesting that perhaps the original was never published in the USSR as a separate title. (As far as I can tell, that is, using Google Translate's word сказка meaning fairy tale, fable or story). Maybe Povest was published in a journal or a collection, and only published separately as a book when it was translated in 1959 by George Reavey and published by Peter Owen in the afterglow of Pasternak's Nobel Prize in 1959.

The first thing to say about the introduction by Pasternak's sister Lydia Slater is that it's more about legacy-building than about clarifying the story. There are a great many superlatives, and she quotes V.S. Pritchett as saying it is a concerto in prose. She says its central theme is poetry, the essence of which is the suffering woman.

Well, maybe it is. She was at Oxford in 1960, which was the year of Pasternak's death, though I do not know whether when the book went to print he had already died (of lung cancer, see the cigar in his hand in his father's sketch on the book's cover?) People who read Russian may well agree with her comparison of his work with Tolstoy's. But those of us reading the book now, knowing all the weight of Soviet history and the constraints under which he wrote, and making do with the English translation, may beg to differ. Because to me, The Last Summer seems to be—thematically—more than about poetry.

Slater's florid assertions to protect Pasternak's status as a great poet may be because she would have been well aware of Soviet outrage about Doctor Zhivago and the CIA's machinations to ensure that Pasternak got the Nobel Prize. She would have known that Pasternak's wife and daughter were vulnerable to retaliation for Dr Zhivago reaching the west (see Wikipedia re their prompt despatch to the Gulags after his death). Even from the safety of Oxford, it would have been imprudent for Slater to point out any veiled anti-Soviet allusions in The Last Summer.

And they are there, though it takes close reading to find them, in a book difficult to comprehend because it is so clouded by reminiscences loosely interwoven, cutting into each other, brilliant descriptions of people, situations, thunderstorms, and thoughts. I started it three times before I took out my journal and began making copious notes and slowly got the drift of it. By the look of the two- and three-star reviews at Goodreads, most readers struggle with it too.

The Last Summer is bookended by Serezha's return from Moscow to his sister Natasha's house in Ousolie in 1916, a heavily polluted salt-mining place not even granted town status until 1925. This date is significant, because it's (prudently) before the October Revolution in 1917, but after the failed one of 1905. Natasha is depicted as having believed in the aims of the 1905 revolution and as far as she is concerned the revolution has only been postponed. Here she is:

Like all of them, Natasha believed that the most demanding cause of her youth had merely been postponed and that, when the hour struck, it would not pass her by. This belief explained all the faults of Natasha's character. It explained her self-assurance, which was softened only by her complete ignorance of her defect. It also explained those traits of Natasha's aimless righteousness and all-forgiving understanding, which inwardly illuminated her with an inexhaustible light and which yet did not correspond with anything in particular. (p.32)

Natasha, in other words, has no idea what she is in for. (Pasternak, writing in 1934, had by this time, seen Lenin come and go, and had time to see the Soviet state in action. Russia was becoming industrialised, the consequent crisis of agricultural distribution had failed to be ameliorated by collectivisation, and he had witnessed the acquisition of private homes and subsequent overcrowding that he writes about so well in Doctor Zhivago).

Serezha is exhausted by his journey from Moscow and slopes off to bed. But he cannot sleep due to the tumult of his thoughts. The narrator intrudes here to explain why the story absents itself from Ousolie:

...sleep still declined to visit him. It so happened that it was the summer of 1914 which had crept up, and this upset all his calculations. It was impossible to gaze upon that summer, sucking in its soporific clarity through clouded eyes: instead it made him think, and pass from one remembrance to another. For this reason, we too shall absent ourselves for a long time from this flat in Ousolie. (p.29)

In other words, reflecting on that summer makes one think. The implication is that it's good to escape the both the present of the novella (1916) and the present (1934) when Pasternak is writing it. The reader is invited to indulge nostalgic thoughts about 1914, and not just about Serezha's adventures in Moscow with women. Anyone in Russia reading this would connect the summer of 1914 as an idyll before the launch of the first offensive against Germany in August (under Tsar Nicholas) and its disastrous consequences. By 1916 (as elsewhere in the world) enthusiasm for the stalemated war had waned, and no wonder. We hear very little about WW1 losses in Russia, though they were allies against Germany in both world wars.

The losses Russia suffered in the world war were catastrophic. Between 900,000 and 2,500,000 Russians were killed. At least 1,500,000 Russians and possibly up to more than 5 million Russians were wounded. Nearly 4,000,000 Russian soldiers were held as POWs (Britain, France and Germany had 1.3 million POWs combined).

Economically Russia was devastated. 8,000,000,000 rubles in war debts were outstanding, strangling the national economy of its breath. Inflation soared; the gold reserves (then backing the currency) were nearly empty, revenues were exceedingly low while reconstruction costs were huge. Russia was on the verge of complete collapse. (Glossary of Events WW1-Russia, viewed 7/11/18)

By the coming of winter 1916 when Serezha is back home with Natasha, he has had to do the national service that he had preferred not to think about—and has been discharged wounded. He is lucky his leg has healed well. Pasternak makes no mention of the fact that in 1916 there was unrest all over Russia as workers, peasants and soldiers, remained in unwavering support of ending the war. Thousands were arrested. He didn't need to. He and his Soviet readers would have known that it was in the wake of this unrest that the Soviets took power in the October Revolution which led to the Soviet decree of peace in October 1917. An entente not recognised, as we all know, by the Western powers who fought on till November 1918. (Glossary of Events WW1-Russia, viewed 7/11/18).

How do we know that Serezha was dreading his national service? It's easy to miss: Serezha is reminiscing about his joyful release from study when his exams are done. He sallies into the street with a leaping smile and all too easily gets a congenial position as a tutor in a wealthy family. On his first walk on a sunny day in the Smotekh district he encounters two men: one is Kovalenko, and the reader's antennae are alert because he is a newspaper editor and there is discussion about a story which Serezha claims to be writing (but hasn't actually done so, creating his imaginary story in his head as he walks on). Ah, autobiographical elements, thinks the reader, perhaps overlooking the other meeting. But the other man Serezha sees on this walk is one of two brothers he had recently met, the younger one who had told him that on finishing the Commercial school, he must do his army service, but he was not sure whether to volunteer or wait for his call-up. Serezha sees now that this brother is wearing the uniform of a volunteer, and in embarrassment (only partly because he doesn't know the man's family name), he only nods to him across the street. Serezha does not want even to think about doing his national service, and the narrative scampers on. But this non-meeting turns out to be important to the culmination of the story...

At left: Boris Pasternak in his youth (Wikipedia, Russian edition, photo credit*)

Serezha reminisces about his work as a tutor in Moscow, and ponders his dreams of having so much money that he can indulge his philanthropic ambitions to improve the lot of women. He intends that the women to whom he gives these mythical millions will Do The Right Thing and pass it on to others, continuing the good work of redistribution. Is this a sly criticism that the Soviet recipients of redistribution of wealth and property did not always pass it on but hung on to it for themselves?

Pasternak as you can see from his photo was a bit of a dish, and it seems that his character Serezha was too. Noble as his ambitions towards women are, Serezha also explores the professional bed of at least one prostitute, and has a dalliance with his employer's companion which leads to her dismissal but not his. The Last Summer is full of sharp social observations like this.

Most bizarre is the story that Serezha finally writes. Desperately short of money and wary of borrowing even small sums even from an honest source because of the example of Raskolnikov, he decides to chase up the editor Kovalenko and begins outlining his plot in the letter. He becomes so absorbed in the writing that he forgets a vital assignation with his lady love, and pours out his story, switching from letter paper to quarto, thus symbolising his transition to real writing...

The story is about a young man in need of money and so auctions himself off as a slave. The people of his town think it's a joke and spurn it publicly but they all turn up to the auction anyway. The man's name is irrelevant since he is about to hand over the power of life and death to his owner, but he is given the name Mr Y by Serezha. The auctioneer is a loyal friend who doesn't really believe any of this is serious. Mr Y plays astonishingly well on the piano, and he mesmerises the room with his readings of blank verse. He then rises and tells them that they do not love him enough and that he must go through with the auction and make himself a commodity of exchange. He falls to the bid of a philanthropist but it is not at once that this man allows him his freedom...

Am I drawing a long bow when I interpret this as suggesting that the Soviets did not love their artists, writers and musicians enough to protect them from slavery in the Gulags?

This book, as I said at the outset, is less than 100 pages long. I reckon there's a PhD in unpacking all the fascinating snippets in it.

Oh, and Pasternak does write stunning metaphors. Mrs Fresteln's companion always smiles at Serezha like an accomplice. A stifling summer day is a week in-week out stagnating day which had not been hauled away to the police station. A file of empty cabs ascended toward the evening sky like the backbone of some fabled and only just flayed vertebrate and previous tenants in Mrs Fresteln's mansion were welcomed back for the summer like dear corpses miraculously restored to the bosom of the family.

Author: Boris Pasternak
Title: The Last Summer
Translated from the Russian by George Reavey
Introduction by Lydia Slater
Publisher: Penguin Modern Classics, 1960, (1967 reprint), first published in the USSR as Povest (A Tale) in 1934
No ISBN
Source: personal library, OpShopFind.

Image credit: https://www.liveinternet.ru/tags/%E1%EE%F0%E8%F1+%EF%E0%F1%F2%E5%F0%ED%E0%EA/, Общественное достояние, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16547396

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

The Knight (2008), a short story by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft

2024-11-23T18:40:00.000-08:00

Well, it's not often I get to read the work of a Nobel Prize winning author the day after she is awarded the prize! 'The Knight' is a short story by Olga Tokarczuk and translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft. This is the blurb from Words without Borders:

I subscribe to a site called Words without Borders, a source of very interesting writing from all sort of sources. Today, their newsletter contained a short story by Olga Tokarczuk, familiar to many readers for her novel Drive Your Plow [sic] Over the Bones of the Dead, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones or House of Day, House of Night which was shortlisted for the IMPAC Literary Award. But #FailingToKeepUp I haven't read either of these, so I was pleased to have a chance to catch up a little bit...

Olga Tokarczuk, who first appeared in our pages in 2005 with an excerpt from her wrenching tale of wartime survival, Final Stories, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. She then returned in 2008 with this short story, "The Knight," translated by Jennifer Croft. Tokarczuk's explorations of relationships under pressure, whether political or internal, combine a keen sense of character with a sure hand at narrative to capture the essence of humanity. As a couple's alienation plays out over a chessboard, Tokarczuk's deft portrayal of feints and attacks maps a marriage at stalemate.

The opening lines with that single word 'snatched' show the reader where the story is going from the outset:

At first she tried struggling with the locks, but they were obviously not in sync, because when she managed to turn the key in one of them, the other stayed locked—and vice versa. The wind came in gusts off the sea, winding her wool scarf around her face. Finally he set down both bags in the driveway and snatched the keys out of her hand. He managed to get the door open immediately.

Next thing, he's ticking her off for sweeping the sand off the deck. He has decided they won't be using it at that time of the year, and he has decided that he's the one who gets to decide, and he's the one who gets to tell her what she should be doing.

He puts the TV on immediately, and she protests and wants to say something else as well—but she doesn't.

Though the reader's sympathies lie with the woman because we know more about her inner thoughts, she annoys him too. He hates it when she smokes, and he doesn't say anything. Because though their marriage is stale, and their irritability levels are high, there's enough good will to try and make their first night at the beach house a good one, so they don't risk the second bottle of wine and they play chess. She lets him win, and he knows she let him. They decide to play a more serious game, one that might last for days...

In 6000+ words, the story plays out over their walks on the beach, the loss of the knight from the chessboard, and their inconclusive night together in bed. Their mutual hostilities have causes big and small, but the most telling, I thought, was her dislike of the way he photographs her all the time, objectifying her and not really seeing her as a person.

There's not much in this story to show why Tokarczuk is a Nobel laureate. #DuckingForCover Stories of marriages bad, mad or sad, are a bit of yawn IMO, and they're all much like each other. The Nobel citation reads 'for a narrative imagination that with encyclopaedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.' I'm not entirely sure that I know what that means, but one day when I get round to reading one of her books, I might find out!

If you would like to read The Knight too, follow this link to Words without Borders (and subscribe to their site while you're at it).

The Inheritors (1955), by William Golding

2024-11-23T18:36:00.004-08:00

The Inheritors is an astonishing novel. I picked it up from the library shelves on the strength of William Golding's name because Lord of the Flies (see Jennifer's review) is unforgettable and Pincher Martin took my breath away. But even so, the imaginative power of The Inheritors floored me. I've never read anything like it.

This is the blurb:

When the spring came the people - what was left of them - moved back by the old paths from the sea. But this year strange things were happening, terrifying things that had never happened before. Inexplicable sounds and smells; new, unimaginable creatures half glimpsed through the leaves. Seen through the eyes of a small tribe of Neanderthals whose world is hanging in the balance, The Inheritors explores the emergence of a new race — ourselves, Homo sapiens — whose growing dominance threatens an entire way of life.

I had thought that this was going to be a kind of First Contact book, and in some ways it is. But what I had not expected was that Golding tells the story through beings so like and yet unlike ourselves, that the narration is like reading not just a language that I only poorly understand but of a being who does not think as we do. Golding has not just imagined a language which, as John Carey says in the Introduction, incorporates gesture, dance and a kind of telepathy, but also a different way of thinking. The small, fragile band of Neanderthals think in pictures which they can share; they scent like animals do; but they can't connect thoughts or sequence ideas. Carey explains it better than I can:

The greatness of The Inheritors does not depend, however, on Golding imagining what Neanderthals might have been like. It depends on the language he fashions to express it. He accepts the colossal stylistic challenge of seeing everything from a Neanderthal point of view. By feats of language that are at first bewildering he takes us inside a being whose senses, especially smell and hearing, are acute, but who cannot connect sensations into a train of thought. This is a being whose awareness is a stream of metaphors and for whom everything is alive. Intricate verbal manoeuvres force us to share the adventures — and the pathos and the tragedy — of a consciousness that is fearless, harmless, loving, minutely observant and incapable of understanding anything. (John Carey, Introduction, p xi)

This, in Chapter One, shows the reaction to a log bridge rotting in the middle and floating away:

The onyx marsh water was spread before them, widening into the river. The trail along by the river began again on the other side on ground that rose until it was lost in the trees. Lok, grinning happily, took two paces towards the water and stopped. The grin faded and his mouth opened till the lower lip hung down. Liku slid to his knee then dropped to the ground. She put the little Oa's head to her mouth and looked over her.

Lok laughed uncertainly.

"The log has gone away."

He shut his eyes and frowned at the picture of the log. It had lain in the water from this side to that, grey and rotting. When you trod the centre you could feel the water that washed beneath you, horrible water, as deep in places as a man's shoulder. The water was not awake like the river or the fall but asleep, spreading there to the river and waking up, stretching on the right into wildernesses of impassable swamp and thicket and bog. So sure was he of this log the people always used that he opened his eyes again, beginning to smile as if he were waking out of a dream; but the log was gone. (p.2)

Ha is more thoughtful than Lok, the man for an emergency, but when Fa and Nil share a picture of what Ha is thinking, it was this:

He had thought that he must make sure the log was still in position because if the water had taken the log or if the log had crawled off on business of its own then the people would have to trek a day's journey round the swamp and that meant danger or even more discomfort than usual. (p.4)

Only the elderly shaman Mal has a solution, retrieving a childhood picture from his mind. It is not like remembering: it is just an image of a 'wise man' who 'makes men take a tree that has fallen.' But he cannot convey this image to the others. They follow his instructions blindly.

So you can just imagine their bewilderment and admiration when they encounter Homo Sapiens with his paraphernalia of trinkets and tools. The Neanderthals have not made the evolutionary steps towards inventing containers so they can't carry or store food and water. They can't make fire, only carry it and protect it when lightning strikes start it. They have no tools, except a stick to convey food to Mal's mouth when he is so ill he must be fed. But the new people not only have pots for food and water, and fire to cook with, they also have clothes, and necklaces to confer status, and they can make paintings on the rock walls. And — unfortunately for the Neanderthals — they also have spears, bows and arrows for hunting.

And as we saw in Golding's merciless depiction of savagery in Lord of the Flies, these new people already have no compunction about taking what they want and killing the innocent...

William Golding won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983.

Author: William Golding
Title: The Inheritors
Introduction by John Carey
Cover illustration by Neil Gower
Publisher: Faber and Faber, 2011, 223 pages, first published 1955,
ISBN: 9780571273584
Source: Kingston Library

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

The Immoralist (1902), by André Gide, translated by Dorothy Bussy

2024-11-16T23:34:00.000-08:00

1001 Books begins its summary of The Immoralist like this:

A thought-provoking book that still has the power to challenge complacent attitudes and unfounded cultural assumptions, The Immoralist recounts a young Parisian man's attempt to overcome social and sexual conformity. (1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, ABC Books 2006, p.241)

The novella is prefaced by an attempt to explain that the 'problem' of the book existed before it was written. It is then book-ended at the beginning by a pseudo-letter to the Prime Minister that asks what role in society a young man like the hero might have... and completed by that same friend's awkward conclusion after the hero's story has been told. That story is narrated by Michel, who starts out as an austere young scholar and ends up as a defiant hedonist.

The translation, by Dorothy Bussy, uses the term 'hero' in the preface. But it does not seem to me that there is anything heroic about Michel.

BEWARE: SPOILERS

Michel's mother died when he was fifteen, and he was only twenty-four when he married Marceline to please his dying father. He says at the outset that he does not love her. Marceline is a devout Catholic—whose role in the novel is to be a devoted and uncomplaining wife—and she saves Michel's life on their honeymoon in Tunisia when he has his first haemorrhage from undiagnosed TB. This experience makes him re-evaluate his life, and sets him on a path towards pleasure.

And suddenly I was seized with a desire, a craving, something more furious and more imperious than I had ever felt before—to live! I want to live! I will live. I clenched my teeth, my hands, concentrated my whole being in this wild, grief-stricken endeavour towards existence. (p.29)

Through Marceline's attentive care, and his own determination to recover, he begins to recuperate and finds himself enjoying the company of Arab children. Though nothing is explicit, frequent references to bare skin makes it clear that a sensual attraction to these boys is emerging. There is a curious incident with Moktir, who he sees stealing Marceline's scissors. Michel says and does nothing to reprove him, and in a sign that his moral compass is beginning to shift, Moktir becomes his favourite.

(We do not judge novels from 1902 by the moral standards of today, but we note that these are boys not of the same age as Michel, and his money and status in a French colonial society makes for unequal power relations between them.)

At the same time Michel begins to notice how pretty Marceline is, and he pays more attention to her. They have, however, still not consummated their marriage.

Michel's rejection of bourgeois life and the trappings of society becomes clearer when he returns to Europe. They travel through Italy, where Michel realises that he has lost interest in his field of expertise, classical history. By abandoning austerity to indulge only his sensual appetites, he has alienated himself from his education, his family values, and European culture.

While his father was alive, he had lived a simple life and did not even realise that they were wealthy. But his inheritance comes with certain obligations including attention to the family estate, La Morinière in Normandy. This estate is managed by an ageing man called Bocage whose loyalty and honesty have been unquestioned. Michel, however, becomes attracted to his son, Charles, who persuades him that his father's ways are old-fashioned. Michel's behaviour becomes bizarre when he moves on from allowing Charles to make some changes, to indulging his desire to be closer to the earth and the people who work it, to the detriment of the farm and its income. He allows the sloppy team that does the annual tree-lopping to leave the job unfinished so that new growth is sabotaged; he joins Bocage's son Alcide in poaching from his own land while at the same time requiring Bocage to catch the poachers; and he interferes with the management of the tenant farmers so that they end up leaving and the untended farm becomes worthless.

The couple return to Paris and though the inheritance is diminishing, they take very expensive rooms and live in luxury.

Marceline, meanwhile, has been neglected, but when Michel belatedly notices that she has become ill, he rushes her off the alps where the clear air brings some improvement. Alas for Marceline, his boredom resurfaces, and they embark on travels in Europe and North Africa which bring her nothing but bad food, poor hotels, exhaustion and exacerbation of her condition. Reading this section reminds the reader that Michel has recovered from his TB due to attentive care and good management of his condition. His selfish hedonism and distaste for her symptoms means that when she contracts the same disease, her prognosis is entirely different.

Reading the concluding pages also reminded me of the selfish behaviour of John Middleton Murry, that I read about in Kathleen Jones' bio Katherine Mansfield, Storyteller. Murry's insistence on living in England forced Katherine Mansfield to return to its perilous weather when really, she needed to be nurtured in a more benign climate on the continent. The descriptions of Mansfield's struggle for breath and her constant haemorrhages towards the end of her tragic life were in my mind as I read about Marceline.

The reason for Gide's semi-apologetic preface becomes clearer as the narrative deteriorates into self-pity. Michel's freedom from bourgeois constraints and conventional morality has trapped him in a spiral of loss, and with Marceline's death he has nothing to live for and no one to care about him except for these friends to whom in extremis he has turned.

What frightens me, I admit, is that I am still very young. It seems to me sometimes that my real life has not begun. Take me away from here and give me some reason for living. I have none left. I have freed myself. That may be. But what does it signify? This objectless liberty is a burden to me. (p.157)

But the unnamed friend has his doubts:

...we each of us had a strange feeling of uneasiness. We felt, alas, that by telling his story, Michel had made his action more legitimate. Our not having known at what point to condemn it in the course of his long explanation seemed almost to make us his accomplices. We felt, as it were, involved. He finished his story without a quaver in his voice, without an inflection or a gesture to show that he was feeling any emotion whatever; he might have had a cynical pride in not appearing moved or a kind of shyness that made him afraid or arousing emotion in us by his tears, or he might not in fact have been moved. Even now I cannot guess what proportions pride, strength, reserve and want of feeling were combined in him. (p.157)

As 1001 Books concludes:

Michel's attempt to access a deeper truth by repudiating culture, decency and morality results in confusion and loss. In being true to himself, Michel has harmed others. Yet the novel remains as much an indictment of the arbitrary constraints of a hypocritical society as it is of Michel's behaviour. (1001 Books, p.241)

That letter to the Prime Minister makes more sense when we realise that Michel is going to need a job because he's gone through his entire fortune.

The dilemma, to which 1001 Books refers when suggesting that the book has the power to challenge complacent attitudes and unfounded cultural assumptions, is that most contemporary readers would support Michel's discovery of a life beyond the confines mapped out by his father, including exploring his own sexuality and making friendships outside his own class. The problem is that he goes too far: he exploits and then cruelly neglects his wife; he takes advantage of boys too young to exercise any real choice; and he destroys a working farm that provided income to people more vulnerable to poverty than he is. This is distasteful, but Gide had his reasons for framing it this way. As it says at Wikipedia:

Gide exposes to public view the conflict and eventual reconciliation of the two sides of his personality (characterized by a Protestant austerity and a transgressive sexual adventurousness, respectively), which a strict and moralistic education had helped set at odds. Gide's work can be seen as an investigation of freedom and empowerment in the face of moralistic and puritanical constraints, and centres on his continuous effort to achieve intellectual honesty. His self-exploratory texts reflect his search of how to be fully oneself, including owning one's sexual nature, without at the same time betraying one's values. (André Gide page, Wikipedia, viewed 17/1/21)

Author: André Gide

Title: The Immoralist (L'Immoraliste)

Publisher: Penguin Modern Classics, 1960, 1986 reprint, first published in 1902

ISBN: 9780140014976, pbk., 159 pages

Source: personal library, OpShopFind

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

The Bridge on the Drina (1945, Bosnian Trilogy #1) by Ivo Andrić, translated by Lovett F. Edwards

2024-11-16T23:28:00.001-08:00

Another title from 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die!

The Bridge on the Drina, by Nobel Prize winning author Ivo Andrić (1892-1975), is also listed on 'The World's Required Reading List at TEDEd' compiled from books assigned to students around the world, and I've also seen it reviewed at the Global Literature in Libraries blog.

As 1001 Books says, it's more a chronicle than a novel, organised into vignettes describing the life of the local population in Bosnia and Herzegovina and its transformations over the centuries. It's also rather a melancholy experience to read it, because the metaphor of the bridge as a symbol of coexistence, as depicted in the front cover image by Wiktor Sadowski, collapses under the weight of recent history.

(I wouldn't be the only Australian who didn't know where Bosnia was until the Bosnian War (1992-95) erupted. But I learned fast. In the 1990s I taught refugee Bosnian children who had fled dreadful experiences, and long afterwards I was still having to deal with unacceptable hostilities towards them from Serbian children in the playground.)

The book begins with the building of the bridge during the 16th-century Ottoman Empire, and ends with World War I, when it was partially destroyed. For three centuries the bridge is cherished by the villagers as a gift of Mehmed-paša Sokolović, the Grand Vezir, a man who—in forced tribute to the Sultan—was taken as a boy from his Christian family, forced to convert to Islam, given a Turkish name, and served three Sultans during his lifetime. When he rose to great power in the Sultan's court, he sought to assuage the pain that had never left him, by building a magnificent bridge in his homeland.

Designed by the Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan, the bridge was a marvel of engineering and until the funding for it ran out in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire, it boasted a caravanserai (a roadside inn) as a focal point for drinking and gossiping. But the building of it was fraught with tension, and Andrić does not spare the reader the violence that was used on the hapless forced labourers who built it. Legends of children walled up inside it are remembered along with the gruesome torture and death of a man thought to be a saboteur.

Andrić's genius lies in his brilliant juxtapositions of humanity at its best and its worst. There is a story about a man whose high ambitions for his beautiful daughter are compromised by his own vanity. She, unable to contemplate a marriage beneath her yet unable to defy the father she loves, throws herself off the bridge after the ceremony so that she can be true to herself and yet not humiliate him.

Peasants and shopkeepers alike, can be wily and foolish, diligent and lazy, or clever and ignorant. They work hard and prosper, or they gamble away everything they have. There is a great of intemperate drinking, and a general lack of enthusiasm for change. As the years roll by, they weather new imperial ambitions culminating in the Austro-Hungarian Occupation, accommodating some impositions but struggling with others.

In truth the peasants too found it hard to grow accustomed to the railway. They made use of it, but could not feel at ease with it and could not understand its ways and habits. They would come down from the mountains at the first crack of dawn, reaching the town about sunrise, and by the time they reached the first shops they would begin asking everyone they met:

'Has the machine gone?'

'By your life and health, neighbour, it has gone long ago,' the idle shopkeepers lied heartlessly.

'Really gone?'

'No matter. There'll be another tomorrow.'

They asked everyone without stopping for a moment, hurrying onwards and shouting at their wives and children who lagged behind.

They arrived at the station running. One of the railwaymen reassured them and told them that they had been misinformed and there were still three good hours before the departure of the train. Then they recovered their breath and sat down along the walls of the station buildings, took out their breakfasts, ate them, and chatted or dozed, but remained continually alert. Whenever they heard the whistle of some goods engine they would leap to their feet and bundle up their things together, shouting:

'Get up! Here comes the machine!'

The station official on the platform cursed them and drove them out again:

'Didn't I just tell you that it was more than three hours before the train comes? What are you rushing for? Have you taken leave of your senses?'

They went back to their old places and sat down once more, but still suspicious and distrustful. (pp. 213-4)

But though the pages flow easily through the centuries, like an evil thread, the tensions between Christians, Muslims and Jews erupt from time to time. And the story ends with the assassination of the Crown Prince as the catalyst for the destruction of the bridge, summarised best at Wikipedia:

In June 1914, Bosnian Serb student Gavrilo Princip assassinates Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, setting off a chain of events that lead to the outbreak of World War I. Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia, and the local authorities begin to incite Višegrad's non-Serb population against the town's Serb residents. The bridge with the old road to Sarajevo suddenly regains its importance, as the railway line is not adequate to transport all the materiel and soldiers who are preparing to attack Serbia in the autumn of 1914. Austria-Hungary's invasion is swiftly repulsed and the Serbians advance across the Drina, prompting the Austro-Hungarians to evacuate Višegrad and destroy portions of the bridge.

Ivo Andrić's Nobel Prize citation reads "for the epic force with which he has traced themes and depicted human destinies drawn from the history of his country", and indeed, that is just what Andrić does in this unforgettable story.

Author: Ivo Andrić
Title: The Bridge on the Drina
Translated by Lovett F. Edwards
Front cover image by Wiktor Sadowski, design by Joan Sommers
Introduction by William H. McNeill
Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1977, first published 1945
ISBN: 9780226020457, pbk., 314 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from the Book Depository

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

The Aunt’s Story (1948), by Patrick White,

2024-11-16T23:23:00.000-08:00

This review is in two parts, from my first reading of the novel in 2005, and then my second thoughts after reading David Marr's biography of Patrick White.

7th September, 2005

I first read The Aunt's Story years ago, perhaps when I was at university, and my recollection was that it was more accessible than The Tree of Man. Perhaps so, but not as an audio book? I really liked Part I, which retraces Theodora's childhood and girlhood, but Part II in the Hotel Jardin d'Exotique, and Part III in America was very hard to follow.

BEWARE: SPOILERS (though anybody reading PW for the plot is going to be disappointed).

It begins when Theodora Goodman, unmarried aunt to Lou, which is a role she likes, is finally liberated by the death of her tyrannical mother. White is savage in his portrait of this domineering woman, who openly preferred her daughter Fanny, who is pretty and vacuous but marriageable to Frank Porritt, a dull but comfortable farmer. Theodora's father likes his older daughter, and others, such as the travelling salesman, see her interesting personality too, but she is too stubborn to play flirting games with Huntly, and her teacher fears for her future.

Released from her mother, Theodora travels and meets an oddball cast of characters in France. There's Katrina Pavlou, an American divorcée, a Russian military type, a disagreeable Englishwoman. Are these characters real? They reinvent Theodora to suit themselves, e.g. the Russian gent calls her Ludmilla, after his sister, but the conversations are bizarre.

The hotel burns down, and somehow Theodora ends up roaming around in the backblocks of America, where she is taken in by a poverty-stricken family until finally she taken away to an asylum.

What is White on about?? Is it spinsterhood that leads to madness, or eccentricity? Or is Theodora's determination to be herself that alienates her from the shallowness of 'normal' life? I don't know, and from what I've seen of website reviews, I am not alone. [BTW Goodreads didn't launch till Dec 2006, and Library Thing not until August 2005, so I think that this reference is to a now defunct ABC website titled 'Why Bother with Patrick White?']

But I loved Part I. Scathingly funny and brilliant imagery. I shall try to read it again one day.

I finished reading the book and journalled it on the 7th of September, 2005.

It so happens that working my way through the Nobel reviews that I have in my journals and reaching The Aunt's Story coincides with my reading of David Marr's Patrick White, a Life. It's a brilliant biography, and like all good literary bios, it analyses the influences on the novels and delves into the experiences from which they derive. Marr tells me that PW was in Britain when he decided to cut himself free from his mother's ambitions... he had allowed her to think that he concurred with her plan for him to work in the diplomatic service so that he could go to Cambridge, but he wanted to be a writer. This internal drama is explored repeatedly in his writing: heroes are escapees who abandon lives laid down for them. As Theodora does.

Another gem from Marr is that PW was bored by a single PoV, he liked to lose himself by writing the PoVs of a number of characters, and 'acted them' at the typewriter. (Hence the bizarre cast of characters in the Jardin d'Exotique.) But also...

...one of the fundamental assumptions in White's work is that all we value — society, relationships, even fortunes — are sliding into decay. The familiar situation of most of his novels is the lone figure seeking fulfilment in a world drifting towards ugliness and violence, loneliness and poverty.' (p.151)

Marr also explains that the catalyst for The Aunt's Story was a painting he'd bought from his then lover Roy de Maistre. It was called 'The Aunt' and was painted after Roy had visited the site where one of his relatives had been killed by a buzz-bomb late in the war.

On a heap of rubble he found a photograph of the dead woman's mother and from this grim souvenir he painted the portrait of a woman in full Edwardian dress but with a face entirely blank, as if her clothes were on a tailor's dummy.

The image of 'The Aunt' fused in White's mind with a long-planned novel about a wandering spinster going mad in a world on the brink of violence. (p.237)

Theodora was based on PW's godmother: they were both women who thought a great deal but said very little; each was a distinguished creature in spite of her dowdiness and ugliness. Theodora's horrible mother is based on Elizabeth Morrice, the first person to fire his literary imagination. That seems an unkind reward for introducing him to Hamlet, but there you are, that was PW. And Elizabeth Morrice had condemned her daughters to spinsterhood with her snobbery.)

As for Part II of the novel which I found so strange, this is what Marr has to say about Theodora already a little mad in the Jardin d'Exotique:

In this odd garden, Theodora becomes the people she encounters. The writing shifts from the present to the past, from lives lived to lives imagined by the exiles in the hotel. Theodora Goodman discovers, invents and enters their lives, drawing on her small store of experience and a deep well of imagination. These are the hallucinations of a lonely traveller, but also a picture of White's technique as a writer. A name, a glance, a snatch of conversation overheard leads her into these vividly imagined existences. So it was with White, his imagination stimulated by a face in the street, tiny details of gossip, odd names discovered in a newspaper. 'How many of us,' she asks, 'lead more than one of our several lives?'

White drew into the jardin exotique the cross-currents of pre-war Europe. The German Lieselotte was a 'figment or facet' of himself born out of his experience in a world falling apart. 'I had lived in London through the 'Thirties, through the Spanish Civil War (certainly only at a distance), I discovered Spengler, and became fairly intimately involved in Hitler's War. All those experiences contributed to Lieslelotte's remark, 'We must destroy everything, everything, even ourselves. Then at last when there is nothing, perhaps we shall live.' (p.240)

You can see in my initial review that I had glimpsed that characters in Part II were inventing themselves, but it hadn't dawned on me that Theodora was inventing them...

Credits:

The Aunt's Story, by Patrick White, Penguin Books, 1962, first published by Eyre & Spottiswoode UK 1948, ISBN 9780670001064
Patrick White, a life, by David Marr, Random House Australia, 1991, ISBN0091825857, personal copy, purchased second-hand from Diversity Books $25

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

The Adventures of Augie March (1953), by Saul Bellow

2024-11-16T23:11:00.000-08:00

Saul Bellow's third novel, The Adventures of Augie March (1953) was the one that propelled him to fame when it won the (US) National Book Award for Fiction, and it's been on my 1001 Books I Must Read wishlist for a while, so I was quite pleased when it turned up on the display shelf at my library. (The only other Bellow I've ever read was his last novel Ravelstein, (2000) which didn't really excite me, so I hadn't exactly been hunting for Bellows to read). #TrueConfession: I borrowed it expecting not to like it very much, perhaps to eliminate it after 50 pages if it didn't engage me as Ravelstein had failed to do. How nice it is to be so wrong about a book!

The Adventures of Augie March gets its place in 1001 Books because:

This lavish, bustling narrative written in the picaresque tradition reinvents the hero as a modern day Huck Finn. Augie is a handsome and contemplative character who becomes embroiled in a series of increasingly exotic escapades. In an odyssey that takes him from Chicago to Mexico, from Europe to an open boat in the mid-Atlantic, the footloose hero is recruited to a series of crackpot scams that include book stealing, arms trading and being appointed the task of guarding Trotsky.

(1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, Edited by Peter Boxall, 2001 ABC Books edition, p.475)

In the Penguin edition that I read, Christopher Hitchens hesitates in the Introduction to bestow the title of The Great American Novel, but he admires Augie March for its scope, its optimism and its principles:

... 'the universal eligibility to be noble' (eligibility connotes being elected as well as being chosen) is as potent a statement of the American dream as has ever been uttered. (p. viii)

Augie's ambition to be noble on his own terms, like his quest to be an educated man on his own terms, seems like an anachronism in the proudly ignorant amoral era of Trump, but the expression of an ideal, even though largely unrealised, seems refreshing even though the book was written more than half a century ago. The Sensational Snippet that I posted about the possibilities of sharing the great moments of nobility through reading tells us that a triumphant life can be real, even for a poor boy living in Depression era Chicago.

The nobility Augie aspires to can seem lost in the murk of what he actually does. Most of Augie's enterprises, right from when Grandma sends him out for part-time work when he's barely into his teens, involve dishonesty at the least. As a boy he creams off small amounts from a Christmas lucky-dip stall; as a man he's involved in all kinds of shonky business, though he would say that he gets manipulated into it by others. But there are moments: he stops his all-powerful brother kicking a dog; he rescues his mother from a sordid old age; and he loses the prospect of marrying a rich woman when he shoulders responsibility for a girl (who's not his girlfriend) when she needs an abortion and then it's assumed he's the father. She's a friend, and she needs support, and he doesn't just risk criminal prosecution when things go badly wrong for her, he also risks the one relationship that sustains him, the love of his brother Simon.

A critical moment occurs when he finds he admires an American eagle that won't cooperate with his girlfriend's plans for it. He's a man who keeps his thoughts very much to himself, but he can't conceal his dismay about her behaviour with the creatures she wants to exploit, and that's the catalyst for another failed relationship. We see this inclination towards nobility in extremis too, when in the Merchant Marines his ship is blown up by a torpedo and he finds himself stranded in a lifeboat with a madman. It's a gripping episode in an episodic book, probably the one that I will best remember...

The aspiration to be an educated man is curious. He has numerous opportunities to get to college, (and perhaps then to a professional career) and he doesn't take them. He could have been a teacher, but passes that up too. But he reads voraciously, and the book is full of all kinds of allusions, some of which, I bet, made the book frustrating to read in the days before we could Google "wise old man walking in empty fields", +"Netherlands painting" + "Italian gallery"... to find The Misanthrope by Pieter Bruegel the Elder...

There's an old, singular, beautiful Netherlands picture I once saw in an Italian gallery, of a wise old man walking in empty fields, pensive, while a thief behind cuts the string of his purse. The old man, in black, thinking probably of God's City, nevertheless has a foolish length of nose and is much too satisfied with his dream. But the peculiarity of the thief is that he is enclosed in a glass ball, and on the glass ball there is a surmounting cross, and it looks like the emperor's symbol of rule. Meaning that it is earthly power that steals while the ridiculous wise are in a dream about this world and the next, and perhaps missing this one, they will have nothing, neither this nor the next, so there is a sharp pain of satire in this amusing thing, and even the painted field does not have too much charm; it is a flat piece. (p. 190-1.)

This painting is held at the National Museum of Capodimonte in Naples and once I found it at Wikipedia I realised that I'd seen it before somewhere, because it's a famous painting with a moral still very relevant for our times. Vanity tries to steal from a man who wants to relinquish the world. He's not aware of the thief behind him, and he hasn't noticed the caltrops in front of him. But when he finds his purse is gone and he stumbles into those traps, he's going to have to face up to the world he lives in and is part of. He (and we) can't abandon responsibility for the world's difficulties. Like the shepherd guarding the sheep in the background, he has to do his share.

Bellow doesn't just reference paintings: Augie laments that his brother Simon had gotten hold of some English schoolboy notions of honour and that Tom Brown's Schooldays for many years had an influence we were not in a position to afford. Well, most people my age would be familiar with that book. But other allusions are not so obvious. Grandma doesn't want to read Tolstoi on religion. She didn't trust him as a family man because the countess had such trouble with him. Would I have known what this meant if I hadn't read War and Peace and Sonya by Judith Armstrong, a reimagining of Countess Sonya Tolstoy's relationship with her exasperating husband? And this one, selected at random as I write this?

School absorbed [Simon] more, and he had his sentiments anyway, a mixed extract from Natty Bumppo, Quentin Durward, Tom Brown, Clark at Kaskaskia, the messenger who brought the good news from Ratisbon, and so on, that kept him more to himself. (p. 12)

I've looked these up now that I'm online but I didn't recognise them when I was reading the book in bed and I certainly wasn't going to crank up the laptop in the middle of the night to find out. I just let them (and others) wash over me with a vague idea that I might look them up later but of course I haven't because I didn't write them down. I don't think it matters: I enjoyed the allusions I recognised and I passed on the ones I missed.

I liked this book very much, and will one day get to the rest of the Bellows listed in 1001 Books. (He's got seven novels listed in my edition). A good start to my reading year!

Author: Saul Bellow
Title: The Adventures of Augie March
Publisher: Penguin Modern Classics, 2001
ISBN 9780141184869
Source: Kingston Library

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

Suspended Sentences (1988), by Patrick Modiano, translated by Mark Polizzotti

2024-11-16T23:03:00.005-08:00

Suspended Sentences is a trio of linked novellas by Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano, translated by Mark Polizzetti and published by Yale University Press late in 2014. To the best of my knowledge it's the first of Modiano's work to be made available in English here in Australia; no doubt there will soon be more. I am very lucky to have been able to read this book so soon after it became available in Australia - my wonderful library got it in for me within a week of me asking for it to be purchased for their collection! Thank you, Kingston Library:)

One of my reading goals is to eventually read all the Nobel winners (the novelists, that is) and Modiano's win last year was especially interesting to me because of the citation:

"for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation" (Source: Wikipedia)

This is perhaps because the Surrender of the French, the Occupation and the accompanying pro-Nazi Vichy regime has always fascinated me, because it seems incomprehensible. The French experience is quite different to other countries over-run by the Germans and a marked contrast to their previous military and political history. I am intrigued by how they reconcile this shameful aspect of their past, and how/if it shapes contemporary attitudes and literature.

All countries seem to have some shameful events in their histories, and there are differences in how we deal with it. S.A. Jones, in her novel Isabelle of the Moon and Stars, (see my review) raises the issue of how Germany remembers the shameful history of the Holocaust compared to the Czech Republic. Here in Australia even the acknowledgement of the dispossession of the indigenous people is contentious, whereas New Zealand dealt with that issue more than a century ago with the Treaty of Waitangi. In the US the shame of slavery dominates over the shame of indigenous dispossession, and in the UK, the shame of colonisation is still shaping attitudes long after the end of Empire, if Anglo-Indian and Anglo-African literature is anything to go by.

Modiano's three novellas, shaped by shadowy memories of Occupation, exude a discomfited nostalgia for a world that no longer exists. Originally published separately, the stories form a cohesive whole through the narrator's voice and the presence of some recurring characters. All three are permeated by a sense of loss. The novellas are unmistakeably Parisian, but they are located in a Paris that is gone, a city which, in 'Flowers of Ruin' seems now to offer more to tourists than to its residents. Watching a tour bus, the narrator observes that

The Jardins de Luxembourg was just one stop and they had all of Paris to visit. I wanted to follow them on that glorious morning, that harbinger of spring, and be just a simple tourist. No doubt I would have rediscovered a city I had lost, and through its avenues, the feeling I'd once had of being light and carefree. (p.212-3)

He remembers the days preceding his departure from Paris for Vienna, and 'liberating' a small dog from its cage in a kennel in Avenue d'Italie.

I sat down with him at a sidewalk café table. It was June. They hadn't yet dug the foundations for the périphérique, which gives such a feeling of enclosure. Back then, the gates of Paris were all in vanishing perspectives; the city gradually loosened its grip and faded into barren lots. And one could still believe that adventure lay right around every street corner. (p. 213)

(Though perhaps not quite the same, LOL, I can certainly relate to this feeling of entrapment by the périphérique). I have vivid memories of being stuck in it in peak hour when trying to return a hire car to the airport. We only just caught our flight in time despite having left the Loire Valley with hours to spare, which taught us a valuable lesson. Do not ever drive in Paris. Take the train!)

Modiano's underlay of old Paris also holds memories of elusive people. The narrator thinks he sees the false Pacheco leading the tour, a man with eyes that so were so blue they were empty. Pacheco haunts his recollections because he is tied up in some way with a double suicide that took place decades ago in 1933; people and events swirl around in the fog of his memory but nothing is resolved.

This is also true of the other two stories. In 'Afterimage', the un-named narrator reflects on his attempts to engage with the photographer Jansen. They had met in 1964 when aged 19, and he was enthralled by Jansen's photographs documenting a Parisian life that no longer existed, even then. He spends long hours cataloguing these carelessly stored photos because he thinks that Jansen, a student of Robert Capa, is a major artist and that the photos have historic value. But Jansen is indifferent to his own work, and abandons Paris for elsewhere, leaving the narrator with only a catalogue of photos that no longer exist and tantalising image-memories of people whose identity he does not and cannot ever know.

The sense of a mysterious unacknowledged past is even stronger in 'Suspended Sentences'. In this story the narrator remembers his childhood during the Occupation. It has, according to the brief introduction by Polizzotti, biographical correspondences with Modiano's own life, for both narrator and author were brought up in the absence of parents. In the novella, the narrator tries to make sense of strange events but his personal history remains opaque because all traces of the 'gang' that took care of him seems to have vanished. Were they crooks, or were they collaborators? He does not, and cannot ever know.

For many years Australians hid any trace of 'the convict stain' in their family history, and it seems that in France, as in Germany, there are also ominous silences and dead or misleading trails. I'll be interested to read more of Modiano's work, but next time, I want to read a full length novel.

Author: Patrick Modiano

Title: Suspended Sentences
Translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti
Publisher: Yale University Press, 2014, first published in 1988
ISBN: 9780300198058
Source: Kingston Library

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

Handke, Peter "Storm Still"

2024-11-16T02:51:00.000-08:00

2010

(German title: Immer noch Sturm)

Reviewed by Marianne
from Let's Read

A book about the Slovenian minority in Carinthia. We all know that there are areas everywhere with immigrants from all kinds of other countries, but my knowledge of Austria and its foreigners is quite limited. This novel is described as a play, which I can not quite understand. Admittedly, the story is told by different family members, but there is hardly any exchange.

Either way, this is not an easy book to just follow and then get the hang of. You have to strain your gray brain cells to be able to follow the author at all. Handke is a very controversial author, and not everyone welcomed his award of the Nobel Prize for Literature. But he has a certain something. You just want to keep reading. And in the decade that has passed since the book was published, not much has changed, in Austria or elsewhere, it rather got rather worse.

From the back cover:

"Peter Handke, a giant of Austrian literature, has produced decades of fiction, poetry, and drama informed by some of the most tumultuous events in modern history. But even as these events shaped his work, the presence of his mother - a woman whose life spanned the Weimar Republic, both world wars, and the postwar consumer economy - loomed even larger.

In Storm Still, Handke’s most recent work, he returns to the land of his birth, the Austrian province of Carinthia. There on the Jaunfeld, the plain at the center of Austria’s Slovenian settlement, the dead and the living of a family meet and talk. Composed as a series of monologues, Storm Still chronicles both the battle of the Slovene minority against Nazism and their love of the land. Presenting a panorama that extends back to the author’s bitter roots in the region, Storm Still blends penetrating prose and poetic drama to explore Handke’s personal history, taking up themes from his earlier books and revisiting some of their characters. In this book, the times of conflict and peace, war and prewar, and even the seasons themselves shift and overlap. And the fate of an orchard comes to stand for the fate of a people."

Peter Handke received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019 "for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience".

Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.

Original Post on Let's Read.

Strait is the Gate (1909), by André Gide, translated by Dorothy Bussy

2024-11-10T14:33:00.002-08:00

Strait is the Gate is the debut novel of French novelist, essayist, dramatist and Nobel Laureate Andre Gidé (1869-1951). At only 128 pages it's more of a novella than a novel, but it's a wonderful book to read.

Looking back on events from later in life, it tells the story, much of it in epistolary form, of a doomed love between Jerome and his cousin Alissa.

In the wake of his father's death, Jerome forms a pre-pubescent close attachment to Alissa, but it is — and remains — delicate and elusive. Both have unavailable mothers: Jerome's is subsumed by grief, and Alissa's has abandoned the family to take pleasure elsewhere. It seems to both Jerome and Alissa that love is painful and unattainable, but they deal with this in different ways: Jerome is absorbed in intellectual pursuits while Alissa takes on the duty of caring for her devastated father and turns to religion for solace.

Over their years from adolescence to young adulthood, their yearning is expressed in declarations of love within their letters, but when together over long summers of poetry, Bible-reading, books and music, this love is never consummated in anything more than holding hands. As time goes by, their time together is always marked by further distancing at her behest. The future is always postponed.

BEWARE: SPOILERS

Jerome's friend and confidante Abel, meanwhile, falls for Alissa's younger sister Juliette and confidently predicts a double marriage, until he realises that she is in love, hopelessly, with Jerome. Rejecting love as Jerome and Alissa do, but only because it's unattainable, Juliette makes a marriage with an older man of a different class, almost as if to punish herself. She seems contented enough, until the last page, when Jerome tells her that he could only have pretended to love another woman, if he had married.

'Ah!' said she, as though indifferently, then turning her face away from me, she bent it towards the ground, as if she were looking for something she had lost. 'Then you think that one can keep a hopeless love in one's heart for so long as that?'
'Yes, Juliette.'

'And that life can breathe upon it every day, without extinguishing it?' (p.128)

And as in previous conversations with Juliette, Jerome processes these words through the prism of his own feelings about Alissa, noting only that Juliette might have been in tears.

The novel is often interpreted as a cautionary tale against excessive religious fervour. This is because when, finally, Jerome has finished his studies and his military service, and Alissa's father has died so there are no obstacles to fulfilment of what they both desire, she terminates the relationship so that they can give themselves to God.

This is the ultimate fulfilment of a stirring sermon that they heard after Alissa's mother ran away with her lover.

A passage in the sermon, (from which the title of the book is derived) comes from the Gospel of Luke in the Bible: Strive to enter in at the strait gate: for many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in, and shall not be able. Jerome had pledged himself to be virtuous enough to win Alissa, but Alissa ultimately interprets the strait gate as too narrow for two people in love, blocking the entrance to Paradise to both of them because each should dedicate their lives solely to God.

However, knowing that Gide was gay, makes me wonder if there can be a variation on this interpretation. Wikipedia tells us that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947 "for his comprehensive and artistically significant writings, in which human problems and conditions have been presented with a fearless love of truth and keen psychological insight", and goes on to explain:

Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide exposes to public view the conflict and eventual reconciliation of the two sides of his personality, split apart by a straitlaced traducing of education and a narrow social moralism. Gide's work can be seen as an investigation of freedom and empowerment in the face of moralistic and puritanical constraints, and centres on his continuous effort to achieve intellectual honesty. His self-exploratory texts reflect his search of how to be fully oneself, even to the point of owning one's sexual nature, without at the same time betraying one's values. His political activity is informed by the same ethos, as indicated by his repudiation of communism after his 1936 voyage to the USSR. (Wikipedia, Bibliography of André Gide, viewed 31/12/20)

In E.M. Forster's posthumously published Maurice the lovers are in anguish because the church condemns homosexuals to eternal damnation. For a devout Catholic to choose such a love is to close the strait gate to Paradise for both of them. What if Gide was exploring in his novel, a similar anguish, and Alissa symbolises a male lover who refuses to allow his beloved to damn himself — not merely because religion forbids it, but because if that belief is sincerely held, then consummation of that love dooms the beloved to hell for eternity?

Gide was a Symbolist, after all...

Author: André Gide
Title: Strait is the Gate (La porte étroite)
Translated from the French by Dorothy Bussy
Publisher: Penguin Modern Classics, 1973, first published 1909
ISBN: 0140008810, pbk., 128 pages
Source: personal library, OpShopFind

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

Secondhand Time (2013), by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Bela Shayevich

2024-11-10T14:30:00.000-08:00

Svetlana Alexievich was an unusual choice for the Nobel Prize because her work is investigative journalism, whereas the prize is supposed to be in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction. Her win is a further blurring of the definition of literature to mean almost any kind of writing, her citation simply saying that it's for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.

In Secondhand Time, the last of the Soviets, an oral history this polyphonic writing refers to the assemblage of multiple voices from Snatches of Street Noise and Kitchen Conversations to form a commentary on the end of the Soviet era. Part One is called 'The Consolation of Apocalypse' and it consists of 'Ten stories in a Red Interior' covering the period 1991-2001. Part Two is called 'The Charms of Emptiness, from the period 2002-2012. The title comes from the introduction called 'Remarks from an Accomplice' where Alexievich says that she's trying honestly to hear out all the participants of the socialist drama...

Old-fashioned ideas are back in style: the great empire, the ‘iron hand’, the ‘special Russian path’. They brought back the Soviet national anthem; there’s a new Komsomol, only now it’s called Nashi; there’s a ruling party, and it runs the country by the Communist Party playbook; the Russian president is just as powerful as the general secretary used to be, which is to say he has absolute power. Instead of Marxism-Leninism, there’s Russian Orthodoxy…

On the eve of the 1917 Revolution, Alexander Grin wrote, ‘And the future seems to have stopped standing in its proper place.’ Now, a hundred years later, the future is, once again, not where it ought to be. Our time comes to us second-hand. (p.11)

Most of us know feelgood stories about the collapse of the USSR. Soviet people were captivated by opportunities to travel and by the sudden plethora of food choices in supermarkets. Queueing up to buy McDonalds was fun - not like the soul-destroying queues for basic consumer goods which often ran out before the queue did. (See my review of Vladimir Sorokin's sly satire The Queue, published in 1985 as Gorbachev came to power). But what Alexievich does is to put a human face on the legacy of that collapse, which led to an economic crisis and a fall in living standards that was catastrophic for some people. The book amplifies Wikipedia's claim that

According to a 2014 poll, 57 percent of citizens of Russia regretted the collapse of the Soviet Union, while 30 percent said they did not. (Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Wikipedia, viewed 2/8/16)

Nostalgia for the Soviet Union could be expressed in nostalgia for the politics of the Soviet Union, society, lifestyle, culture, or simply the aesthetics of the Soviet epoch. ('Nostalgia for the Soviet Union', Wikipedia, viewed 2/8/16)

Secondhand Time is uniformly grim reading.

There are multiple threads to the book, but an early one intrigued me.

This made me think: what makes a people think they're entitled to consider their country great? It's actually quite a strange thing when you think about it, that we in our separate nations have a sense of entitlement about this, or not. Tossing thoughts around, I suppose that the US thinks it's great because of its democracy and its military and economic might. Perhaps the UK thinks it's great because of its history of empire, the Enlightenment and the peaceful development of universal suffrage. Germany and Japan wanted greatness in the 20th century, cast the globe into bloodshed and are now humbly just concentrating on being respectable. Middle ranking countries like Australia take pride in stuff like *sigh* sport; lots of countries that are, well, insignificant, probably only resent the greatness of others, if they think about it at all. And the Chinese? What are they thinking about this now? And India? Do they have ambitions to be great... and how would they define it?

When you read Secondhand Time you can see that the people of the USSR took great pride in the social experiment of socialism and having a social equality different to anywhere else. They also won the space race and they were a great economic and military power. They had a vast empire, and (maybe they were deluded) they felt a sense of unity and security about the network of Soviet states. They were a rival to the greatness of the USA. They did not have expensive consumer goods and they had to work incredibly hard, but you get the impression from the testimony in this book that they despised people who thought that luxury goods were important, and that they felt they were working hard to accomplish something significant. And then it fell apart, and while the rest of the world cheered them on, the Soviet people felt like catastrophe was at hand. (p.73) It seems like a similar blow to national pride to the way the British felt when their Empire collapsed after WW2, but the impact on ordinary people was entirely different because all the infrastructure of Russian social security collapsed as well. But it wasn't just that oligarchs got rich and poor people starved. It was that beliefs held for decades, and aesthetics such as valuing reading, were invalidated overnight.

All kinds of issues fester. Families were split when the various republics hived off; free travel throughout the USSR has been replaced by the need for a visa, and in the new republics people don't speak the lingua franca - Russian - any more. Russians have found themselves to be foreigners overnight, and in some places they are targeted for violent reprisals.

Treasured memorabilia of the soviet era are labelled relics of totalitarianism and sold as trinkets on the street. Nobody's interested in memories of Soviet achievement, and they don't want to hear about repression under Stalin either. An entire value system - imposed from above but internalised by many all the same - has vanished and been replaced with individualism and consumerism. The sense I get from Secondhand Time is that the change in individual consciousness is as overwhelming as it was after the Revolution. I remember reading Doctor Zhivago (see my review) and getting some idea of it when a middle class family suddenly had to share their house with complete strangers.

There was no referendum on the changes, and some resent this:

What a country they surrendered. An empire! Without a single shot fired ... The thing I don't understand is, Why didn't anyone ask us? I spent my life building a great nation. That's what they told us. They promised. (p.87)

It's surprising to read that some who suffered terribly under Stalinism still regret the end of the USSR. One man, a hero of WW2, was imprisoned as a counter-revolutionary, but released to go to war ...

I came home twice wounded, with three decorations and medals. They called me into the district Party committee, "Unfortunately, we will not be able to return your wife to you, she's died. But you can have your honour back..." And they handed me back my Party membership card. And I was happy! I was so happy! (p. 184)

One woman says:

In reality, for me, I'm just a twit, freedom of speech would have been enough because, as it soon turned out, at heart, I'm a Soviet girl. (p. 157)

Another says:

Under socialism, I was promised that there was a place in the sun for everyone. Now they're singing a different tune. If we live according to Darwin's laws, we will enjoy abundance. Abundance for the fittest. But I'm one of the weak. I'm not a fighter.... There was a plan for me and I was used to living according to plan: school, college, family. My husband and I will save up for an apartment in a cooperative, and after the apartment, we'll save up for a car... Then they cancelled that plan. Threw us to the wolves of capitalism... I have a degree in engineering, I worked at the design institute that everyone called the "women's institute" because it was all women... [...]... but then they started downsizing... They didn't touch the men, there weren't that many of them, or single mothers, or women who only had one or two years left before retirement. They posted lists, and I saw my last name on one of them... (p.294).

She's now given up hope of getting a job. She talks about a colleague who's now a servant, walking a businesswoman's dog. Today, it's embarrassing to be Russian.

And so it goes on. The multiplicity of voices is fascinating, and much of it makes very sobering reading, but I found it frustrating that there was none of the journalistic analysis that I'm used to. Its main value, it seems to me, is in raising awareness that for many people socialism remains an ideal, if it's implemented without Stalinism and repression. But since there's nothing to indicate how widespread these attitudes are - not even a very clear indication of generational differences - the book floats in a bit of a vacuum.

That makes it interesting, but I'm not entirely convinced that it's Nobel-worthy.

Author: Svetlana Alexievich
Title: Secondhand Time, the Last of the Soviets, an Oral History
Translated by Bela Shayevich
Publisher: Text Publishing, 2016, first published 2013
ISBN: 9781925355567
Review copy courtesy of Text Publishing

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

Riders in the Chariot (1961), by Patrick White

2024-11-10T14:23:00.001-08:00

If anybody ever asked Patrick White about Riders in the Chariot as he was working on it, I imagine his response: he would have rolled his great patrician eyebrows and said, 'I am going to make these pseudo-egalitarian Australians know about their underclass, and I am going to make them care about them'.

Because although Riders in the Chariot is a masterly exploration of faith in all its forms, rich in symbolism, powerful in its themes and written in Patrick White's trademark piercing style, it also has four of the most engaging characters in modern literature, and I defy anyone to read to the end and not feel bereaved by it.

BEWARE SPOILERS (not many, but some are essential for what follows).

The book begins with Miss Hare, a tragi-comic figure of fun in the fictional town of Sarsparilla. Heiress to a bizarre crumbling mansion called Xanadu, she is an eccentric in a society that values conformity. Too plain and too odd to have been married off by her equally odd parents she has lived on alone in Xanadu until finally she takes on a housekeeper called Mrs Jolley. Mrs Jolley specialises in working for elderly spinsters in need of a friend to whom a fortune might be bequeathed, but she is taken aback by Xanadu with its fallen masonry, mould covered interiors and invading plant life. Xanadu reminded me of Angkor Wat with its trees inextricably entwined through the walls, and of the gothic ruin in Karen Foxlee's The Midnight Dress.

But simple as she is, Miss Hare has a rich spiritual connection with the earth, the plants and small creatures of her estate. She is the first of four 'Riders' in Patrick White's conception of Ezekiel's chariot and her moments of spiritual ecstasy come upon her when she is at one with nature. Her visions derive from her instincts, her patient observations of the minutiae of life, and the timelessness of her days. The object of patronising gossip at the post office, grubby, foolish Miss Hare in her shabby hats and crumpled stockings is linked to prophecy, punishment, purification and redemption.

Exiled on the outskirts of town, Miss Hare believes she is alone with these visions until she meets with Mordecai Himmelfarb and instinctively recognises him as one of the Chosen because he sees the Chariot too. Himmelfarb is a Jewish refugee and former professor who - wracked with guilt because he survived the Holocaust and his wife did not - is punishing himself with a menial job in a factory, Brighta Bicycle Lamps at Barrenugli. (Yes, White does enjoy himself with the names he has used in this novel).

The only brightness in Himmelfarb's life is the religious vision that sustains him. Denying himself all creature comforts, Himmelfarb lives the abstemious life of an ascetic. His only possessions are the remnants of his religious life: the parchment Hebrew verses on his pitiful doorway (the mezuzah), and the prayer shawl (Tallith) and verses of the Torah (Tephillin) for his morning observances. He carries these with him always, in a battered suitcase, because he could not bear to lose them and he knows that no home is ever safe. His dignity is in sharp contrast to his employer, Harry Rosetree, who along with his shrill wife Shirl, has reinvented a non-Jewish self in Australia, suppressing his original identity as Haïm ben Ya'akov Rosenbaum. It is when the men at the factory crucify Himmelfarb to 'have a joke' at Easter that we understand Shirl Rosetree's panic...

Himmelfarb's life would be one of unrelieved misery were it not for Ruth Godbold. Like the others, she is an outsider in the town. She scrapes a living for herself and her many children as a laundress, and bears her drunken husband's brutality as a penance. Her Catholic faith is almost irrelevant, because she symbolises a humanistic Rider. She cares for Himmelfarb, sharing her pathetic lamb shank in embarrassment at Easter because the shops will be closed and 'Everybody has got to eat. Whatever the time of the year.' (p. 442). Miss Hare puts the town's spectators to shame by entering Himmelfarb's burning house to rescue him but Ruth Godbold was already nursing his battered body after the crucifixion at her own shack. She pre-empts Harry Rosetree's belated restitution by burying him, like any Christian (p. 500), refuting the employer's remonstrations that Himmelfarb was a Jew and should have been buried according to their rites:

'It is the same' she said, and when she had cleared her voice of hoarseness, continued as though she were compelled by much previous consideration: 'Men are the same before they are born. They are the same at birth, perhaps you will agree. It is only the coat they are told to put on that makes them all that different. There are some, of course, that feel they are not suited. They think they will change their coat. But remain the same, in themselves. Only at the end, when everything is taken from them, it seems there was never any need. There are the poor souls, at rest, and all naked again, as they were at the beginning. That is how it strikes me, sir. Perhaps you will remember, on thinking it over, that is how Our Lord himself wished us to see it. (p. 500)

Alf Dubbo is the most enigmatic of White's Riders. He is indigenous, and wholly alone. He was taken from his mother who lived on the banks of a river by a well-meaning but foolish rector- who found himself attracted to the boy as he grew older. Alf fled, and lived an itinerant and sometimes drunken life, fetching up at the factory where Himmelfarb is astonished to find him reading Ezekiel. The moment of connection is brief, for Alf's creative life remains hidden from all:

The abo quickly took the book, and hid it amongst what was apparently a bundle of his private belongings.

Himmelfarb remained spellbound. He was smiling that slow, inward smile, which could exasperate those whom it excluded.
'Interesting,' he had to remark. 'But I shall not ask any questions, as I see you do not wish me to.'

'Where'll it lead?' The abo shrugged. 'I was reared by a parson bloke. That's all. Sometimes I have a read of the Bible, but not for any of his reasons. I read it because you can see it all. And it passes the time.' (p. 350)

What Alf does not tell Himmelfarb is that Reverend Calderon and his widowed sister Mrs Pask had conjured an eccentric education for the boy, based on the premise that it's 'the useful boys who are sought after in later life' (p. 352). So (like most Aboriginal children taken into so-called care in those days) he was taught to do several little jobs but also the conjugation of Latin verbs to build character, reading the Bible (of course) and - crucially - sketching and painting in watercolours by Mrs Pask. For her, after a lifetime of suppressing her own creative tendencies, art is first and foremost a moral force because truth is so beautiful but she prevents the boy painting in oils because they are too sensuous. He persuades her to permit it with an impossible-to-fulfil promise to paint Jesus Christ, and she is horrified by his attempt to depict his own life in oils.

'Dreams! But there is nothing to indicate that they are any such thing. Just a shape. I should have said mis-shapen kidneys!'

So that he was put to worse shame.

'That is because they have not been dreamt yet,' he uttered slowly.

And all the foetuses were palpitating on the porous paper.

'I am afraid it is something unhealthy,' Mrs Pask confided in her brother. 'An untrained mind could not possibly conceive of anything so peculiar unless.' (p. 357)

As an adult, with his meagre factory earnings, Alf saves up to buy paints, hiding them away in his room, where they are alas not safe from marauding art dealers and a greedy landlady. What he paints is his vision of the Chariot, an act of praise...

White's portraits of these four outsiders who are invested with instinctive, religious, humanistic and creative manifestations of faith, share a common humanity. As Mrs Godbold says, they are all the same, they are one. And because - in contrast to his incisive and often bitter portraits of the other characters - White tells the stories of his Riders with such compelling compassion, the reader becomes emotionally engaged. I think this is why this novel is labelled the 'most accessible' of White's novels: it's impossible to read Riders in the Chariot without caring about these characters and to feel empathy for their fate.

Riders in the Chariot won the Miles Franklin Award in 1961. I hope that whatever the judges choose this year lives up to this legacy.

There is much, much more to this novel than I can outline here. Do visit Andrea Goldsmith's website to see her essay The Passions of Patrick, based on her lecture at the Wheeler Centre, which I attended late last year...

Author: Patrick White
Title: Riders in the Chariot
Publisher: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1961.
ISBN: none. (Hardback first edition)
Source: Personal library, from my collection of Miles Franklin winners.

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

Raised from the Ground (1980), by José Saramago, translated by Margaret Jull Costa

2024-11-10T14:17:00.002-08:00

Raised from the Ground, by Nobel Prize winning author José Saramago is a mid-career novel (1980) that has only just been translated into English. It's a beautiful, life-affirming book that gives voice to a segment of society that very rarely is heard.

The novel is said to be the most autobiographical of Saramago's fiction, because it's an affectionate but at times brutally realistic recreation of the lives of his grandparents who were landless peasants in rural Portugal. Like the other books I have read by this author - Blindness, (see my review) and The Double (see my review) - it has a political agenda, but those novels are subversive allegories, while this one is a chronological narrative of the Mau-Tempo (Badweather) family in Alentejo, an agricultural province of Portugal. It traces the family's fortunes from the formation of the Portuguese Republic in the early 20th century to the demise of the dictator Salazar in the mid 1970s.

As Ursula Le Guin says in her review for The Guardian, it is rare for the poor and oppressed to write their own story, most obviously because they tend to be poorly educated. I have just recently acquired a copy of Life Under Russian Serfdom: The Memoirs of Savva Dmitrievich Purlevskii, 1800-68, and in his introduction the translator and editor Boris B. Gorshkov mentions that it wasn't possible to retain the memoir in its original form because the author's writing skills reflected his limited education. The achievement of Raised from the Ground is that Saramago's intimate knowledge of the peasant life his grandparents led, brings it alive. His unique style - very long sentences which segue from one speaker to another - gives the impression of family and village conversations murmuring their way through tumultuous events in Portugal.

I've only been to Lisbon, and that only for a couple of days which I spent mostly in museums and art galleries. Perhaps I went to the wrong ones, but there was nothing there to indicate anything of Portugal's recent history. So it was from Saramago's novel that I learned that they offloaded their monarchy not long before World War I, and that they were carefully neutral in World War II. These events didn't have much impact on the Mau-Tempo family: theirs was a life of unrelenting labour, hunger and privation and the years pass with births, marriages and deaths not with world events.

The characterisation is brilliant. The story starts with the journey of Domingos Mau-Tempo, a feckless cobbler and a drunkard, his stoic wife Sara de Conceição and her babe-in-arms João whose beautiful blue eyes are a throw-back to the rape of a peasant girl by a German five centuries ago. Domingos is no saint: he drinks away what money he has and he beats his wife, but between the lines we gather that although Saramago's sympathies lie with Sara, he understands that Domingo's restlessness derives from the hopelessness of his life. In Alentejo the latifundio is as it has always been and there is no escape from grinding poverty. All João ever gets is a year of schooling and he begins work as a labourer for a brutal overseer when he is still a child.

It is not until after the war that the rumblings of discontent begin to find voice. Saramago was a communist and the villain of this story is the dictator Salazar and the landowners who repressed any attempts by peasants to improve their lot. To put this in context, these events were taking place between 1950 and 1975, half a century after Australians had in 1907 won the right to a basic wage 'that guaranteed them a standard of living which was reasonable for "a human being in a civilised community."' These barely literate peasants were struggling to read inflammatory pamphlets exhorting them to stoic solidarity many decades after we in Australia achieved education that was compulsory, secular and free. (In Victoria, way back in 1870). I was astonished to read that peasants were still enduring twelve-hour days of back-breaking work under a punitive labour system in my lifetime. In Europe!

The struggle to achieve what we in Australia call a 'fair go' - an eight-hour-day and a wage that at least allowed for subsistence - could make for some grim reading. The agitators were rounded up and imprisoned, and the ringleaders were interrogated under torture. And yet the book is suffused with humour and a gentle irony. The narrators ramble through events, muttering under their breath, gossiping, remarking on the obvious, interrupting each other, expressing a philosophical sympathy about events. We learn about their suffering but Saramago does not linger over it.

It's very hard to choose an excerpt to give a sense of his style, for every page is a treat to read. This one is chosen at random: António Mau-Tempo has become a guest-worker in France because he is denied work at home since his arrest (without conviction) as an agitator.

The Carriça estate is in France, that's not what it says on the map, but it's true, if not in Normandy then in Provence, it really doesn't matter, António Mau-Tempo no longer has Miguel Hernández by his side, but Manuel Espada, his brother-in-law and his friend, even though they are very different in character, they are scything, doing piece-work, as we shall see. Gracinda Mau-Tempo is here too, pregnant at last, when it seemed that she would never have children, and the three of them are living, for as long as the harvest lasts, in an abandoned labourer's hut, which Manual Espada has cleaned up to make comfortable for his wife. No one had lived there for five or six years, and it was a real ruin, full of snakes and lizards and all kinds of creepy-crawlies, and when it was ready, Manual Espada, having first sprinkled the floor with water, went to fetch a bundle of rushes to lie down on, and it was so cool inside that he almost fell asleep, it was just an adobe wall with a covering of gorse and straw to serve as a roof, then, suddenly, a snake slithered over him, as thick as my wrist, which is not of the slenderest. He never told Gracinda mau-Tempo, and who can say what she would have done had she known, perhaps it wouldn't even have bothered her, the women in these parts are made of stern stuff, and when she arrived at the hut, she found it all neat and ready, with a truckle bed for the couple, another for António Mau-Tempo, and a large sack to share as blanket, that is how intimately people live on the latifundio. Oh, don't get all hot under the collar, Father Agamedes, where have you been, by the way, these men are not really going to sleep here, if they do lie down on the bed, they will do so simply in order not to die, and now is perhaps the moment to speak about pay and conditions, they're paid so much a day for a week, plus five hundred escudos for the rest of the field, which must all be harvested by Saturday. This may seem complicated, but it couldn't be simpler. For a whole week, Manuel Espada and António Mau-Tempo will scythe all day and all night, and you need to understand exactly what this means, when they are utterly exhausted after a whole day of work, they will go back to the hut for something to eat and then return to the field and spend all night scything, not picking poppies, and when the sun rises, they will go back to the hut to eat something, lie down for perhaps ten minutes, snoring like bellows, then get up, work all day, eat whatever there is to eat, and then again work all night, we know no one is going to believe us, these can't be men, but they are, if they were animals they would have dropped down dead, only three days have passed, and the men are like ghosts standing alone in the moonlight in the half-harvested field, Do you think we'll make it, We have to, and meanwhile Gracinda mau-Tempo, heavily pregnant, is weeding in the rice field, and when she can't weed, she goes to fetch water, and when she can't fetch water, she cooks food for the men, and when she can't cook, she goes back to the weeding, her belly on a level with the water, her son will be born a frog. (p. 305)

Surrendering to enter the world of these characters is an unforgettable experience... Raised from the Ground is sublime.

Author: Jose Saramago
Title: Raised from the Ground
Translated by Margaret Jull Costa
Publisher: Harvill & Secker/Random House, 2012, first published 1980
ISBN: 9781846552496
Source: Review copy courtesy of Random House Australia

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

Radish (2015), by Mo Yan, translated by Howard Goldblatt

2024-11-10T14:12:00.003-08:00

I am not often flummoxed by a book, but Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan's Radish tested my ability to interpret a writer's purpose. It seems to be an allegory for China's Great Leap Forward but this was not something that sprang immediately to mind while I was reading it. Reading it, I was simply overwhelmed by the suffering of the central character, a little boy called Hei-hai, and puzzled by the behaviour of the characters in general.

Radish is one of a series of Penguin Specials, marketed as short books designed to 'fill a gap', and designed to be read in a single sitting. Suitable for the commute, the lunch break, or between dinner and bedtime, they say. Radish is only 86 pages long and the prose is simple and easy to read. But it manages to convey striking ideas, where the reader has enough knowledge of the subtext to recognise them. Like all writers in China, Mo Yan is writing under the constraints of heavy-handed censorship and so there are allusions to events and perhaps to people that are not immediately obvious. The reader has to be in the know, and I think it's a safe bet to say that most westerners don't know much about Chinese history. It's possible that young people in China also aren't much in the know, if their ignorance of their own history is as widespread as Linda Jaivin suggested in The Empress Lover.

Here's an example of allusions that are not immediately obvious. These are the opening lines:

An autumn morning, the air hung humid, a layer of transparent dewdrops clung to blades of grass and roof tiles. Leaves on the scholar tree had begun to turn yellow; a rusty iron bell hanging from a branch was also dew laden. The production team leader, a padded jacket draped over his shoulders, ambled towards the bell, carrying a sorghum flatbread in one hand and clutching a thick-peeled leek in the other. By the time he reached the bell, his hands were empty, but his cheeks were puffed out like a field mouse scurrying away with autumn provisions. He yanked the clapper against the side of the bell, which rang out loudly, - clang, clang, clang. People young and old streamed out of the lanes to converge beneath the bell, eyes fixed on the team leader, like a crowd of marionettes. He swallowed hard, and wiped his stubble-ringed mouth on his sleeve. (p.1)

It took more than one re-reading for me to notice the first allusion. The leaves of the scholar tree turning yellow refers to the autumn of intellectual freedom and the coming Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). This year, 2016, is the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of this disastrous period of China's history .

But you also need to know something about Chinese history to recognise that this team leader is an emblem of corrupt leadership and greed. This is a village in the period of Mao's man-made famine (1958-1961), and this man has his hands full of food. But - even though he is the most powerful person in the village and that power rules all their lives - he has to conceal this abundance of food from the crowd of puppets who must dance to his tune. It helps also to know that Mo Yan was born in 1956, he lived through this period of famine, and his early life was spent working in the fields, dreaming of food. (See Julia Lovell's article in The Asian Review of Books, Sept 2012).

The team leader has gathered the people together to fulfil a quota. The commune is widening the floodgates behind the village and their orders are that the village must send along a mason and an unskilled labourer. You need to know something about the other quotas imposed from on high (the 'higher-ups' as Yan Lianke calls them in The Four Books also set in this period) to know that losing two workers for this new project makes it harder for them to fulfil their existing agricultural quotas and to have some left over for the village food supply. From the team leader's remark that sending 'a woman makes the most sense' we gather that men make a greater contribution to the other work they have to do, but the women are needed to pick the cotton. This is harvest time. His gaze falls on Hei-hai.

A boy of ten or so stood in the corner. He was barefoot and stripped to the waist, wearing only a pair of long, baggy, green-striped white shorts that were stained by grass and dried blood. The shorts ended at his knees, above calves shiny with scars. (p.2)

Hei-hai has a jutting breastbone (p.2) ... a skinny neck that seemed in danger of snapping off from the load it carried (p.3) ... rail-thin arms (p.3) and his bare back makes the villagers feel cold. Even the team leader recognises him as a pitiful thing.(p.3) As the mason explains to 'Director Liu Taiyang', (the commune's cadre in charge of the floodgates project), Hei-hai's father has gone off to the north-east like a man possessed and hasn't been home for three years. He might be bear food by now or lying in the bellies of wolves. (p.7) (I deduce from this that he is 'possessed' by the State and is in detention somewhere or possibly dead, possibly an allusion to Chinese cannibalism in this period). Hei-hai lives with his stepmother who has self-evidently failed to take care of him. She makes him barter their dried yams for alcohol, and she is brutal. Am I reaching too far if, from the mason's ironic rejoinder to the cadre's complaint that the boy is useless, I interpret this step-mother as Socialism?

'All right now, Director Liu Taiyang,' the mason said as he pried the man's hand from Hei-hai's neck. 'The glory of socialism is that everyone eats. Hei-hai comes from three generations of poor peasants. If socialism won't take care of him, who will?' (p. 7)

I think it's quite clear that Hei-hai is an elective mute because he represents the children of China, who were born just before the Revolution and were silenced by it. When one of the women takes an interest in this sorry child, the mason tells her about him:

So, Hei-hai goes to work. But he has a terrible time. He accidentally hammers his own finger when he is breaking rocks, an injury severe enough to be reassigned to working the bellows at the forge where they repair the hammers endlessly damaged by the work of breaking rocks by hand. But his skin and hair become ingrained with coal dust; his bare arms, legs and torso are burned by sparks from the forge, he burns his hand when he picks up a hammer fresh from the fire; he is in and out of the freezing water of the river; and while others rug up against the increasing cold, he has nothing but his shorts to wear. Yet he suffers all this with not a word of complaint, not even a whimper. He seems not to feel anything and has a capacity to endure that is greater than any adult's. He bears his burdens by choosing only to notice what's beautiful around him.

He eats a little better than he would at home because he is assigned the lunchtime job of monitoring the work tools after the theft of a hammer and a bucket. He's also given the risky task of stealing from the commune's field of vegetables, raiding sweet potatoes and radishes. And it is when one of these radishes is left on an anvil during the love-making of the mason and Juzi, a young woman who had tried to mother Hei-hai a little, that the boy has a transcendental experience:

His eyes, big and bright to begin with, now shone like searchlights as he witnessed a strange and beautiful sight: a soft blue-green light suffused the sleek surface of the anvil, on which rested a golden radish. In shape and size it was like a pear, though it had a long tail, every fibre of which was a strand of golden wool. Glittering and transparent, exquisitely limpid, its golden skin revealed a swirling silvery liquid inside. Its contours were clean and elegant; golden rays spread out from its beautiful curves, some long, some short - the long rays like beards of wheat, the short like eyelashes - and all were gold in colour.

No wonder the book cover quotes Mo Yan as saying 'That dark-skinned boy with the superhuman ability to suffer and a superhuman degree of sensitivity represents the soul of my entire fictional output.'

*chuckle* It's taken me three times as long to write this review as it did to read the book!

©Lisa Hill

Author: Mo Yan
Title: Radish
Translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt
Publisher: Penguin, 2015
ISBN: 9780734310798
Source: Personal library, purchased from Benn's Books Bentleigh, $9.99

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

Scenes From a Childhood and other stories (2018) by Jon Fosse

2024-11-08T14:26:00.010-08:00

It’s maybe four o’clock when Trygve and I go out to the old barn. My grandfather built this barn but now it’s falling apart, the unpainted planks in the walls are rotting away, there are holes in the wall you can see through in some places and a couple of roof tiles lying in the nettles, three more sticking out of a mud puddle. A rusty hook is hanging from the door-frame. The door is hanging from the door-frame too, attached with hay-baling cord, swinging crookedly. A warm summer day, afternoon.

Snippets, fragments, glimpses, snapshots, call them what you will, Scenes From a Childhood is littered with such memories, grounded in real life events but fictionalised for effect. Somewhere on the spectrum between autofiction and autobiographical fiction. The anecdotes include memories of first kisses, playing in the snow, tuning a guitar, arguments with parents, teenage hiking trips and the birth of a sibling.

Jon Fosse (pronounced yoon FAW seh) wrote in the 2017 edition that his goal had been to write about his childhood, ‘the way things really happened.’ But,

that turned out to be impossible for me. What I wrote was similar to my own experience in some ways, but not a single one of these pieces ended up being entirely accurate. I cannot help writing fiction. That said, I do, for instance have a younger sister close to my age, and I did once have to play a guitar at a local dance with only five strings on my guitar. Nothing in these stories is made up.

My Fitzcarraldo Editions 2018 publication also includes several of Fosse’s other short stories, bringing them together around the idea of childhood. They are quite different in form and style, which makes this particular edition a great way to get a taste of his writing style and themes to see if you like them or not.

It turns out I do.

The pieces are not presented chronologically, but starts with Scenes From a Childhood (1994). These brief stories are easy to read, presented as they are almost like diary entries.

The next story is barely four pages long. Det var då det byrja (1987) was translated by Damion Searls as How It Started in 2013 and tells of a teenage gathering after an organised youth group meeting with the local pastor’s wife, where a Norwegian version of spin the bottle (Touch, Hug, Kiss) takes place. Uncertain teenage angst and disappointed love is the (usual) result.

Steindroymt (2013) or Dreamt in Stone was translated in 2015. It’s another short story which you can also read on the Granta website. From my limited understanding of Fosse’s writing, these two short stories seem to be moving us closer to the style of writing that he is most famous for.

The stones sing and they don’t sing. Even when the fog is gone the stones lie there, leaning against each other, they lie there so nicely, as though they have been put together by a wonderfully dexterous stonemason, they lay there like that after the avalanche too.

Stream of consciousness, dream-like, unhurried musings that circle around ideas and feelings. One is not quite sure if the protagonist is drugged or drunk or just in that weird stage before dropping off into deep sleep. They are introspective in nature; an enigmatic soul peering out at the world, trying to make sense of their reality.

At this particular point in the book I was happy to continue but still waiting to see what all the Nobel Prize fuss was about. Why did they praise Fosse so highly ‘for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable….his radical reduction of language and dramatic action…[his]… ability to evoke man’s loss of orientation…[his]…great warmth and humour…and…naïve vulnerability’ ?

And then I read Og så kan hunden komme (1991), translated by Searls in 1993 as And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me .

The dog is in the living room looking up at me. He starts running in circles around me, restless, whimpering a little. I can tell he wants to go out. I open the living room door and the dog dashes out into the hall, wagging his tail.

Here, finally, are the long passages of stream of consciousness which I have come to associate with Fosse’s writing (and one of the reasons I was a little nervous about reading him). I need not have worried. I was mesmerised as this story took a dark and unexpected turn. Rage overwhelms our protagonist, fuelling a crazed midnight excursion that is stunning in its simplicity and complexity. The results are tragic. I read these fifty-odd pages in breathless awe, shocked, disconcerted by the inconsistencies that occur in the narrative the longer it goes on. Did this really happen? or not? is it a dream? is he mad? what really happened here?

If this is what the rest of Fosse’s books are like, I’m in!

The final piece, Søster (2000), Little Sister was first published as a children’s book. Over about ten pages, several vignettes describe a young boy (4yrs old) and his 3yr old sister as they push the boundaries of their known world and parental rules – sleeping outside in the long grass at night, walking down to the shore to pick strawberries without any adults, a childish tantrum.

After the dark, immersive, almost hypnotic dog story, this simpler style was almost jarring. It is my only quibble with the book – the dog story should have been saved for last, given how different it is from the other pieces.

Scenes From A Childhood is a fabulous introduction to Fosse’s writing, although the dog story is clearly the best. The other stories may fail to dazzle, but they are easy to read and they gave me a sense of Fosse’s recurring themes and preoccupations, his interiority and the way he layers and circles around ideas, building them up and getting closer to a version of reality before pulling it all down again.

You can read some of the snippets here. Asymptote is an online site for ‘world literature in translation’ and the winner of the 2015 London Book Fair’s International Literary Translation Initaive Award. It’s a site I plan to explore.

Original Title: Prosa frå ein oppvekst
ISBN: 9781910695531
Translator: Damion Searles
Imprint: Fitcarraldo Editions
Published: 2018 (originally published 1994)
Format: Paperback with French flaps
Pages: 156
Dates Read: 17th - 19th October 2024

Morrison, Toni "The Bluest Eye"

2024-11-08T02:40:00.000-08:00

1970

Reviewed by Marianne

from Let's Read

As always, Toni Morrison has written a fantastic story about the troubles of people who suffer from racism. This is not my favourite book by her (that would be "Beloved") but it is still a great story. We follow the family Breedlove and their friends backwards, to see what they have all been through.

The main character is the little girl that would love blue eyes. While I understand that wish, she wants to be accepted and thinks this is the way to get there, I thought the rest of the story was much more important.

From the back cover:

"Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns
for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in. Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife."

Toni Morrison "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality" received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.

Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.

Original Post on Let's Read.

Read more about other books by the author here.

Pincher Martin (1956), by William Golding

2024-11-01T20:37:00.000-07:00

Pincher Martin is a most disconcerting book. First published in 1956, it was William Golding's third novel after his wildly successful debut novel Lord of the Flies (1954) and while it likewise depicts the human condition in extremis it is not, as Wikipedia describes it, merely a novel that records the thoughts of a drowning sailor.

To explain why, I need to depart from my usual practice and consider the plot, spoilers and all. You have been warned...

BEWARE SPOILERS

I read the first few pages both enthralled and appalled: the third person narration describes the desperate struggle of a sailor fighting for his life in the cold waters of the Atlantic. The blurb had told me that he was the sole survivor of a torpedoed destroyer and I could hardly bear to read his frantic efforts to breathe:

He was struggling in every direction, he was the centre of the writhing and kicking knot of his own body. There was no up or down, no light and no air. He felt his mouth open of itself and the shrieked word burst out.
"Help!"

When the air had gone with the shriek, water came in to fill its place - burning water, hard in the throat and mouth as stones that hurt. He hutched his body towards the place where air had been but now it was gone and there was nothing but black, choking welter. His body let loose its panic and his mouth strained open till the hinges of his jaw hurt. Water thrust in, down, without mercy. Air came with it for a moment so that he fought in what might have been the right direction. But water reclaimed him and spun so that knowledge of where might be was erased completely. (p.1)

Even knowing from the blurb that he ends up stranded on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic didn't alleviate the power of this prose to make me think the sailor was going to drown. (It reminded me of Richard Flanagan's Death of a River Guide where Aljaz Cosino is a river guide, trapped in The Cauldron on the Franklin River as the water rises). Christopher 'Pincher' Martin's struggle to clamber onto the rock is epic, as you can see that it would have been, if you Google the 1943 RAF photo of the rock with waves breaking over it. (Golding himself might have seen this rock during his war service in the Royal Navy; it would be an unforgettable sight even from a distance, as I'm sure most prudent navigators would have ensured it was). I am indebted to a reader at Goodreads for the discovery that this rock is thought to be Rockall, and to Wikipedia for its exact location between Ireland and Iceland, which makes it clear just how icy the waters would have been.

Not knowing at the time of reading just how small this rock actually is, I breathed a sigh of relief that Martin wasn't bashed to death against it.

But his troubles are just beginning. He is badly injured from being hurled against the rock by the waves, and he is exhausted. His clothes of course are soaked, and he is freezing. He has to climb from where the waves have deposited him to higher ground and his hands are too cold to feel his way with handholds in the rock. He has nothing in the way of resources, just a knife, his lifebelt and his oilskin. He has to find some source of food and water, find something in the way of shelter, and deal with the threat of his own madness brought on by his total isolation.

And all this is utterly convincing. Even as Martin's mind deteriorates under the stress and loneliness of his situation, Golding makes it completely real, and what's more, he sets up the reader who has to juggle empathy for Martin's ghastly predicament with the revelations through his fractured memories that he is actually a truly horrible person, guilty of dreadful crimes and utterly unrepentant even now that he fears for his life.

And then...

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

And then there is the final chapter which tells us that Martin's body is being recovered to take back to the mainland. The text makes it clear that Martin drowned as soon as he hit the water and that there was never any hope of his survival.

Mr Campbell took his eyes away from the stretcher.

"They are wicked things, those lifebelts. They give a man hope when there is no longer any call for it. They are cruel." (p. 222)

The reader is utterly baffled by this turn of events...

Philippa Gregory in the Afterword puts it like this:

This is an afterword, rather than a foreword, because any study of this extraordinary novel has to consider the ending: the most important section in the novel. Read at their simplest, the final pages are a 'twist in the tail' like the playful reverse of a traditional short story, but these pages are far more than this: they are a shocking revelation to the reader that the whole novel has been an illusion of the narrator Pincher Martin. In place of illusion we suddenly see a snapshot of the real world, and a suggestion of what has really taken place.

The 'twist' is the total inversion of the story. We readers thought that we were reading a story about survival, in which the survival of the material world, of the mind and body of a profoundly materialistic man whose very nickname, 'Pincher' implies grabbing, is the drama and chief concern. It seems to be a novel rather like one of the earliest novels ever written: Robinson Crusoe - a novel about marooning and survival. Shockingly, in the last pages we learn in a few brutal phrases that the story was not, as we thought, about life, but was all along about dying a death so fast that the narrator did not even have time to kick off his seaboots and swim, but was dragged down to drown, and the story which we have followed was nothing more than his last anguished thoughts, as drowning men are said to have. (p.225)

Like Philippa Gregory, who freely confesses that it is a very puzzling novel, I found aspects of the story very confusing indeed, even as I found it utterly compelling in its vivid depictions of Martin's delusions. Like her, I found one reading inadequate, and like her, I found two were not enough. I'd love to hear from other readers who have tackled its mysteries.

William Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983.

Author: William Golding
Title: Pincher Martin
Publisher: Faber & Faber, Faber Modern Classics edition, 2015, first published in 1956.
ISBN: 9780571322749
Review copy courtesy of Faber & Faber via Allen & Unwin Australia

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.