#ReadingIreland: Audrey Magee’s The Colony

Audrey Magee: The Colony, Faber & Faber, 2022.

Isn’t it funny how we sometimes bear a completely unfounded prejudice against a book? I’d been hearing about this book for the past year or so, I knew it had been longlisted for the Booker, but I was firmly convinced it was something dystopian – about the last few people left alive after a pandemic, perhaps, who have retired to a little island or perhaps to another planet and try to make a go of things. How on earth do we get such wrong impressions – and frightening to think how much else I might be getting wrong! Luckily, at some point I finally read the enthusiastic reviews of some trusted blogger friends more carefully, such as Whispering Gums, Jacqui from JacquiWine and Lisa from ANZLitLovers. Politics, colonialism, art and linguistic anthropology? This is exactly my cup of tea – and no alien planets in sight!

Mr Lloyd is an artist who has come to paint the cliffs and the people of this Gaelic-speaking ‘remote outpost’ in Ireland in the 1970s. He is romantically deluded about the island, insists on coming there in a traditional boat rather than taking the ferry, although he is not a good sailor and feels violently sick. [The conversation with the bemused islanders who bring him over on the boat is hilarious.] He cannot cope with the small windows and dark rooms for his painting, breaks his promise to not draw the islanders almost at once, is grumpy and moody most of the time, but the final straw is when he realises he is not the only outsider who has come to spend the summer there. The much more verbose and extroverted French-Algerian linguist JP Masson is also there, and he is much better regarded, since he is a repeat visitor and speaks Gaelic, which is the subject of his research.

Masson spends most of his time interviewing Bean Ui Fhloinn – the matriarch of the family and the only native speaker who refuses to anglicise her speech. Meanwhile, Lloyd is captivated by the old woman’s granddaughter Mairead, a young widow whom he draws again and again, often as a nude. Three generations of women form the backbone of the island society, especially after the deaths of their fishermen husbands, sons, brothers, but there are some men gravitating around, not just the visitors.

Mairead’s teenage son Seamus is obstinate about anglicising his name to James and dreams of escaping the island and the life of a fisherman. He is fascinated by Lloyd’s art and soon proves to be a promising painter himself, but that is not how Lloyd wants to see him and one of the most moving scenes for me is when James finally sees the painting that Lloyd has made of the islanders and bursts out:

You painted over me, turned me into a fisherman. It’s how you want me to be. How you want me to be seen… An artist can’t over-interpret… I am an exhibit.

These interactions between the islanders and the incomers (each side believing they are tricking the other) – and the animosity or rivalry between the two outsiders themselves – are often quite funny. For example, Englishman Lloyd says at one point: “after everything we have done for this country”, while Masson corrects him “after everything you have done to this country”. But there is always an underlying tinge of sadness or a hint of violence. Mairead’s brother-in-law Francis, who has designs on the widow himself, is quite a sinister figure. Even Masson, who is a child of colonialism himself and therefore more sensitive to nuances of oppression, is using the islanders for his own gain and would ideally like to maintain their language and lifestyle in aspic. Yet you cannot help but feel some pity for his own background, and particularly for his mother’s story.

… a young, beautiful Algerian francophone, Francophile, ripe for my handsome father when he came with the war, with his seed of me that he planted in her, that growth declaring that she was no longer Algerian, no longer one of them, no longer safe as she was different to them… she got into the boat to leave… to land in the country of her dreams, ripe for France as my father had been ripe for her, her reading and thinking ready for the cafes teeming with intellectuals, for the streetcorner politics, the discussion and debate over dinner tables… for the talk of books, of films, of theatre, but found only silence, isolation on the fifth floor apartment that he, the French soldier, had secured for his new family. Although he was no longer a soldier, rather a mechanic who fixed cars, an expert on the deep cleaning of carburettors, rendering her an expert on the removal of oil stains from overalls, fresh overalls every day, his name over the left breast pocket, though her name was nowhere…

This migration because of love and intellectual ideals is presented in parallel with the migration for survival and economic gain, as recounted to Masson by the old matriarch:

My own children, all they could do was talk about America, morning and evening, frantic for it, though I didn’t bother with it. For as long as there is food and a place to rest I see no point in searching the earth for a place to do the same thing, though I know that in times gone by people in these parts had no choice, it was to leave or to starve, but I was born in a more fortunate time, when that was all over and we could eat well enough, though we wouldn’t get fat, mind you, but I’m not sure there’s much good in that, anyhow.

But they can only return triumphant, coming back with something nobody else has – a new hat, better shoes, a bigger belly… My own children have returned from America in that way. Trying to prove that they were right to leave. That we were fools to stay. Suitcases stuffed with fancy clothes and tales of where they’ve been, of who they have met, adamant that their toehold on this earth is higher than ours, of greater value… this hunt for affirmation in a world that affirms little, if anything at all. As though some title could confirm who you are. Some house or car could prove your worth. I suppose it works for some. Men think it attracts women, I suppose, but what type of man is that? And what type of woman is that?

By way of contrast, these scenes are interspersed with factual accounts (like radio news) of sectarian violence during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Just like in The Trees by Percival Everett, where we had a stark enumeration of the names of black people who had been lynched, here too we have a stark enumeration of the victims on both sides during the late 1970s, with their age and any family members they left behind. It culminates with the assassination of Lord Mountbatten, which would place this in 1979, but I think the accounts could be from any year – and would last for many more until the Good Friday Agreement.

The book also reminded me of The Banshees of Inisherin, although in the film the sensible younger woman manages to make her escape to the mainland. There were so many aspects of the book which resonated with me, especially the issue of migration, but I think the ingrained colonialist mentality (or feeling of innate superiority) is the most powerful message here. Unlike political and military colonialists, artists and anthropologists may feel they are being benign and helping to raise awareness of the culture they are depicting or studying. The truth is, however, that their simple presence has an impact and sometimes irrevocably changes the community they claim to want to preserve. But this book asks the even bigger question: who gets to decide whether to preserve or progress? And are the two really such polar opposites?

At first I was put off by the lack of speech marks (and I still don’t quite understand why that was necessary), but this became easier to navigate as I continued reading, since each character has quite a unique style of inner monologue as well as actual way of speaking. As the book ends, I couldn’t help worrying about what future Mairead and James might face – that is how invested I became in those characters.

The painter Lloyd may forever fail to fully capture the light in the waves, but Audrey Magee has certainly managed to flawlessly capture a time and place in her book.

Winding Down and Wrapping Up (Part 2)

It’s amazing how the colours on the covers of the most memorable books I read in the second part of the year also match my mood during that period: much more colourful, even pinkish and coy, although normally I am not a fan of pink. Yes, this was the most optimistic part of the year.

In my teens I was (sort of) diagnosed with bipolar disorder: for me (everyone is slightly different) this typically manifests itself as periods of intense activity, almost manic energy and optimism which has no bearing to reality (the ‘up’ periods), to be followed by far longer periods of utter hopelessness and despondency (the ‘depressive’ periods). I was given lithium to even out these wild mood swings, but that made me feel like it was benumbing me, so I lost all of the positives of being on a high and only very slightly had the edge taken off my depression. Over the next few decades, I learnt to manage my moods with a cocktail of home-made and medical remedies, and over the past decade, I thought I had moved more into depression (partly sparked by external circumstances).

However, this year the manic period reasserted itself with a vengeance, perhaps because I travelled to see my parents for the first time in 2.5 years, or perhaps because I briefly thought I might like to have a relationship again. It was kind of lovely having the energy back, even though I knew about its dangers and limitations. For a couple of months, I felt invincible: I survived on very little sleep, had so many new ideas, wrote love poetry (which I had not done since high school) and so many other things, submitted regularly, took my boys on a trip to Brighton, went to plays and exhibitions, joined the Society of Authors, attended the Translation Day in Oxford, reconnected with old friends, investigated a possible collaboration with a theatre in London and so much more. Helped by the wonderful weather and by better news on the creative front, I was able to handle the growing anxiety about my mother’s incipient dementia or my cat Zoe’s state of health (she had started vomiting far too frequently, but we had not yet diagnosed her with cancer).

All this is reflected in my top reading choices. In April, I chose to focus on Romanian writers, because I spent two weeks in Romania, although some of the reading was entirely serendipitous since I just happened to come across Martha Bibescu’s journals set just before and during the Second World War in my parents’ house. I was also smitten with the two plays by Mihail Sebastian that I had not previously read (one was seldom performed during Communist times, perhaps because it talked about lies being published in newspapers, while the other was unfinished at the time of his death). I also reconnected with the work of surrealist, absurdist writer Urmuz, whose work was published largely posthumously when he committed suicide at the age of 40 and translated a couple of his short pieces (they are all very short, more like flash fiction, even a novella in flash). One of them, I am happy to say, will appear in Firmament, the literary journal issued by Sublunary Editions.

May was all about life in Berlin, often written by expats. The only one that impressed me and which gave me a bit of insight into the history and society of Berlin was The Undercurrents by Kirsty Bell, but I was intrigued by a different kind of expat, namely the anthropologist, in Mischa Berlinski’s rather epic, occasionally uneven but fascinating look at the ‘outsider going native’ Fieldwork.

June was my month for catching up with French writing, and I’d forgotten how eloquent and impressive Simone de Beauvoir can be in describing women’s experiences. Gael Faye’s Petit Pays taught me so much about Rwanda and Burundi and trying to integrate into French life. I also enjoyed books that fell outside my original reading plan (I’ve always been flexible about allowing others in): I surprised myself with how much I enjoyed the relatively simple story about a love affair set in Japan, Emily Itami’s Fault Lines and yearning for love and companionship in Seoul in Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City.

As I said, I might have been susceptible to love stories that trimester, even though mine never got off the ground (with the wisdom of hindsight, I’m inclined to say: thank goodness it didn’t!).

Finally, one crime novel that stuck with me because it was so post-modern and different and sly: True Crime Story by Joseph Knox. The danger with these seasonal summaries (rather than those done by genre, for example), is that crime fiction often gets sidelined. So, several crime novels might have made my ‘best of the year’ list among others of its genre, but they might struggle to compete with Simone de Beauvoir or Mihail Sebastian.

Expats Writing: On the Prowl in Africa

Norman Rush: Mating, 1991.

This is an interesting book about cultural differences, white privilege and domination in post-colonial Africa, but it’s also a love story told from the point of view of a young(ish) brainbox of a female anthropologist. She is completely insufferable and elitist, and has built up a cynical and manipulative shell around her heart, but she can also be very funny and at times quite vulnerable and oddly innocent.

The narrator’s voice is so loud and unique in all its contradictions and complexities, that it’s hard to believe it was written by a man in his late fifties – closer to the age of the narrator’s paramour in the story. It’s an ambitious endeavour – but works well.

The unnamed narrator finds herself somewhat adrift – she has had to abandon her Ph.D., her relationships and friendships are unfulfilling, she does not want to return to the US, she feels twice as intelligent as most of the people she meets (fluent in several languages, well-read, able to quote literature and philosophy at the drop of a hat), and she has quite strong opinions on the types of people she meets in Botswana.

There are more whites in Africa than you might expect, and more in Botswana than most places in Africa… Parliament works and the courts are decent, so the West is hot to help with development projects, so white experts pile in. Botswana has almost the last hunter-gatherers anywhere, so you have anthropologists like me underfoot. From South Africa you get fugitive white and black politicals… And then Botswana is a geographical receptacle for civil service Brits excessed as decolonisation moved ever southward. These are people who are forever structurally maladapted to living in England. This is their last perch in Africa…

The novel is set in the 1980s, so South Africa is still under the apartheid regime, and the Boers and spies play a part in the narrative. The narrator’s thoughts about love and sex are equally unfiltered:

Love is strenuous. Pursuing someone is strenuous… Of course it would be so much easier to play from the male side. They never go after love qua love, ever. They go after women. And for men love is the distillate or description of whatever happened with each woman that was not actually painful in feeling-tone… I don’t know if getting love out of a man is more of a feat of strength now than it used to be or not, except that I do: it is. It’s hideous. It’s an ordeal beyond speech.

Despite her cynical pronouncements about love, she has not quite lost hope of finding a worthy partner – and the one she has decided is worth pursuing is Nelson Denoon, a fellow academic on the cusp of getting divorced, who has established a utopian female-led community called Tsau somewhere in the desert. She embarks upon a somewhat dangerous solo crossing of the desert to find this closed community and is not above resorting to all sorts of lies and subterfuge to be allowed to stay in the community and win this man over.

I had to realize that the male idea of successful love is to get a woman into a state of secure dependency which the male can renew by a touch or pat or gesture now and then while he reserves his major attention for his work in the world or the contemplation of the various forms of surrogate combat men find so transfixing… Equilibrium or perfect mating will come when the male is convinced he is giving less than he feels is really required to maintain dependency and the woman feels she is getting more from him than her servile displays should merit.

My utopia is equal love, equal love between people of equal value… Why is it so difficult? Assortative mating shows there has to be some drive in nature to bring equals together in the toils of love, so why even in the most enlightened and beautifully launched unions are we afraid we hear the master-slave relationship moving its slow thighs somewhere in the vicinity?

The bulk of the book is set in Tsau, which of course is not as idyllic a community as it describes itself (and Nelson believes it to be), and covers her burgeoning relationship with Nelson. The contrast between ideal and reality is present in both their community and in their love affair. I did feel this part of the book got a little bogged down in detail and in the lengthy conversations between the two main protagonists (about right versus left-wing politics and economics and all sorts of topics). Nevertheless, I loved the dry asides – and there were bound to be some on virtually every page:

Even when a woman gets her own order authorized, like Mother Teresa, it’s women who end up doing the cooking and cleaning and nursing and little detachments of men who get to do the fun proselyitzing.

This was an example of not knowing you were having a peak experience at the time you were having it and mistakenly assuming that it was the forerunner of many equal experiences waiting for you onward in life.

…if I died there, no one in his right mind would regard it as a tragedy. I would be in the category of an aerialist falling to her death. Or I would be entitled to the species of commiseration people get who show up at parties on crutches but who got injured skiing at Gstaad… It would be sad but not that sad.

My bet is that, all things considered, no woman would have voted to have the washhouse, the stores house, the central kitchen and the Sekopololo offices located at the top end of a long though gentle ramp. We inhabit male outcomes.

The book was more interesting when it dealt with the tensions and subtle shifts in power within Tsau, and issues of race and gender. Despite the narrator’s understanding of Setswana language and culture (and often trying to educate Nelson about it), most of the couple’s references remain resolutely Eurocentric. The author did spend five years in Botswana, but you know my feelings about ‘it’s not the length, it’s the intensity’ of experience, as I know many expats who spent over twenty years in a place and still didn’t really understand the culture.

I liked the fact that Norman Rush did not feel the need to dumb down his ideas or his prose – this is a very dense piece of work, full of historical and political detail, full of literary and philosophical allusions. It also contains very frank descriptions of sex – although the true seduction here is of two minds in conversation. It feels like a novel in which the author has, just like his creation, poured out the best of himself – everything he had.

The Kalahari Desert, from müvTravel

This unusual book won’t be for everyone: it has an overabundance of style and content. I suppose the best way to think about it is that the narrator is making field notes – that indispensable element in the anthropologist’s toolkit, which is at once an observation of the external – the people around you, the rites and habits and patterns – but also of the internal: how you interact with your surroundings and how you are changed by what you observe. Rush seems to adopt the ‘impressionist’ style of ethnography, i.e. holding back on his own selection and interpretation, and simply giving us the unvarnished writings of the narrator, leaving it to the reader to make of it what they would. I understand why he does that, but I do wish he could have exercised some editing on occasion.

I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.

Expats Writing: Mischa Berlinski’s Fieldwork

After complaining that all of the expat novels I read this month were not anthropological studies (or rather, not exactly complaining, but feeling they were lacking a sense of curiosity about the people they were living amongst), I finally read a novel that is about an anthropologist in the field who ‘goes native’ (i.e. gets too close, too involved and is no longer able to maintain any objectivity). Well, I certainly got more than enough detail and curiosity about people in this novel!

I suspect that I am the perfect audience for it, and that most people will consider it too long, too detailed, and containing too much secondary material about the history of evangelical missionaries in Asia, anthropological methodology for fieldwork and American academic departments. The author is a journalist who spent some time in Thailand, so he is not an anthropologist himself, but he has clearly developed a passion for the subject and immersed himself in the topic – to the point where he can not resist showing off the amount of research he has done, even if it is not entirely necessary to the plot or characterisation. In fact, in the afterword he admits that he originally intended this to be a non-fiction work – a history of the conversion of the Lisu people of northern Thailand to Christianity. However, I am fascinated by all of these subjects, and I enjoyed the set-up of the story as a mystery to be explored.

The narrator, also called Mischa Berlinski, although not to be confused with the actual author, is approached by one of his old college friends while they are both living in Thailand. His friend is puzzled about the suicide of a mixed-race anthropologist Martiya van der Leun in a Thai prison, where she was incarcerated after being charged with murdering a young Christian missionary. The narrator becomes obsessed with delving deeper into the background of these two apparently really nice people, to discover what could have led to this immense fall-out. After reading Martiya’s letters, other documents and interviewing people who knew her, as well as spending time with the missionary’s family, he solves the mystery but along the way he has exposed the power dynamics of First World vs. Third World, the dangers of the ‘anthropological gaze’ and the unknowability of the human heart and mind.

So quite an ambitious endeavour! In essence, this book tries to capture four separate stories, in a system of interlocking boxes: the story of Martiya, who started off as a promising star academic but then loses her way; the story of multiple generations of the Walker family – convinced but pragmatic missionaries; the global nomad existence of the narrator himself, who claims he wants to know the real Thailand and live there forever, but in fact exists largely within an expat bubble; and finally the ‘people being studied’, the fictional Dyalo community, who are ‘having things done to them’ by those outsiders coming and visiting, staying, studying, converting.

By bringing in many different voices and opinions, often contradictory ones, about Martiya, the author can take a swipe at the academic approach to anthropological research:

The department had the attitude that nothing much could prepare you for anthropological fieldwork, and if you couldn’t do fieldwork, then you had no business being an anthropologist. It was a real rite of a passage. If you couldn’t figure out how to get out to the jungle, the desert, or the savannah; if you couldn’t figure out what to ask the natives; if you couldn’t figure out how to build rapport with recalcitrant and suspicious locals – perhaps, the department implied, it was time to think about a nice career in sociology, where the data were unlikely to carry a spear.

To be fair, the author is setting these practices in the 1970s – by the time I encountered anthropology in the 1990s, it was a far more reflective, self-critical discipline, and there were plenty of confessional accounts of fieldwork and its challenges from which we could all draw strength. Also, I suspect this is all tongue-in-cheek. I take a bit of umbrage at the implication that anthropologists study ‘primitive tribes’: first of all, who has the right to label things primitive and how do they define it? Besides, there have been anthropological studies of subgroups within our own societies for many decades (the difference between sociology and anthropology is less to do with the ‘degree of civilisation’ that researcher attribute to their subjects, and more with methodology – and the borders have become more porous nowadays.) And there is the occasional sentence that shows the author really does get it.

The field did to Martiya what the field always does: it scoured her and revealed the person underneath the encrusted layers of culture and ingrained habit and prejudice

Impressionistic travel writing too: lots of local colour, appealing to all the senses, conveying the beauty of the area (and sometimes its more sinister aspects, the inaccessibility, the isolation). It is very evocative, though a tad overwritten at times (and at other times simply an enumeration of things), but it certainly brings a flavour of those places for those of us who have not yet visited them.

Itinerant peddlers pushed handcarts along our suburban streets or balanced long bamboo poles across their narrow shoulders, selling brooms and fans made from wild mountain grass, medicinal herbs, think panccakes, splotchy speckled egges roasted over a charcoal fire, lacquerware pots from Burma, tin locks and metal pans from China and fruit – rose apples, lychees, pineapple, and mango. I woke up one late afternoon to the musical tinkle of the fruit man’s bell.

Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand.

Some of the characters the narrator interviews also capture the exhilaration and addictive nature of anthropological research (which I thought Lily King’s Euphoria also captured in spades):

…they asked her why she had wanted to go and live with a tribe of nomadic boat dwellers in the island of the south Philippines. ‘You mean other than because it’s incredibly fun?… I guess because it pays off for your psyche when you are able to tear down your own system of belief. You’ve got to undo your preconceptions about the world, about who you are, about yourself, about community, about everything. Because when you study a foreign tribe, you’ve got to leave your world behind, you have to be totally open and empty which is – almost impossible.’

In the very next paragraph, however, this exuberance and euphoria are tempered by a harsh return to the reality of academic recognition and progression:

Three years in the Philippines, two years grinding out the dissertation, a few years in a tenure-track job which doesn’t pan out, a bad marriage… what they don’t tell you in grad school is that the free and open empty feeling when everything about humanity seems like grist for the anthropological mill is just temporary, that it’s on loan and goes away… Then throw a divorce into the mix and step just slightly off that pedestal from hot-shot student under hot-shot adviser at a hot-shot university to lecturer with limited publications at a second rate school – and watch how fast a career in anthropology no longer seems like a liberation but like a trap.

What I really liked about the book is the author easily moves from the personal to the political, from satire to controversy, from dark and dangerous to completely relatable and funny. For example, this passage about Martiya starting to get fed up with the 24/7 nature of research, which is certainly one of the greatest challenges of fieldwork.

It wasn’t that the Dyalo weren’t nice. They were very nice… Martiya was quite sure that had a Dyalo anthropologist showed up at her little apartment in Berkeley, camped out on her couch, and aksed her a lot of dopey questions on the order of ‘Why do you close the bathroom door when you defecate?’ she wouldn’t have been half as nice about it… But what she hadn’t thought about back in Berkeley was that there would be Dyalo around all the time, doing tribal things all the time, talking in their weird language all the time. And she could hardly blame them, really: they were here first. This was, after all, their home.

[I remember desperately heading to a McDonald’s after a few months of eating misoshiro and rice morning, noon and night in Japan – and I don’t even like McDo!]

Stephen King loved this novel when it came out and thought the publishers had missed an opportunity to market it properly, claiming they had let it ‘go to waste’. I did not think it was quite as riveting as King says or that I couldn’t stop reading – there were certainly passages that could have done with some pruning in this very small print 372 page edition that I had – but I liked it a lot. If you are interested in the whole issue of ‘othering’ and exploitation, social justice and white privilege, but also want a good story rather than a treatise, this is the book for you.

#6Degrees August 2021: From Postcards from the Edge…

Can’t resist joining in again this month because: a) this is one of my favourite bookish memes of random (or not) literary association, organised monthly by Kate at Books are My Favourite and Best; b) I love Carrie Fisher, so the book we are starting with this month appeals to me.

I think Carrie Fisher was even better as a writer than as an actress. I know she is part of many a childhood fantasy, but I honestly appreciate her more for her wit and candour, which is perfectly displayed in the semi-autobiographical book Postcards from the Edge, which is our starting point this month. She adapted it for the screen herself and the film starred Meryl Streep as the ‘narrator’ and Shirley MacLaine as her mother.

My first book in the chain is another book adapted for film and starring Meryl Streep, namely Out of Africa by Karen Blixen (aka Isak Dinesen), which is also autobiographical. Although the author’s struggles to keep her farm going all by herself sounds quite admirable, I found the book itself somewhat problematic, with its rose-tinted portrayal of Kenya as a white settler’s paradise. Nevertheless, she was ahead of her time in treating the workers on her farm in a respectful way and being genuinely curious about their backgrounds and cultural differences.

Of course I have to sneak in an anthropological book as the next in the chain – a really formative one that I used extensively when preparing my Ph.D. Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process examines the rituals of the Ndembu in Zambia. He is the one who identified the concepts of ‘communitas’ and ‘liminality’ (that in-between space, when rites of passage transition you from one state to another, to take up your place in society).

Airports and airplanes are of course perfect liminal spaces, and one of the books that best describes the thrill but also the dangers of flight is Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Night Flight (Vol de nuit). The author was famously a pilot himself, so certainly knew what he was writing about.

The fourth link is to another book written by an author who had a different day job, which may have influenced his writing, namely Mikhail Bulgakov, who was a doctor. It’s no secret that I am a big fan of his masterpiece The Master and Margarita, but to change things up I will link here to his first book The White Guard, which I have still to read.

I’ve found a double link to the next book: the word ‘white’ in the title, and another book that I only know by reputation rather than through reading. A third link, even: written by another ‘Michael’. Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White is a saga about the social climbing of a prostitute in Victorian London.

Any social climbing literature has to make way for the most ‘hustling’ novel of them all: Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray. Becky Sharp is ruthless and manipulative, far too intelligent and restless for her time and place in society. Above all, she is brutally honest with herself: was only a question of money and fortune which made the difference between her and an honest woman.”I have a gentleman for my husband … But am I much better now than when I wheedled the grocer round the corner for sugar?’

It’s this puncturing of hypocrisy and pretentions that Becky Sharp seems to have in common with Carrie Fisher, so that provides the perfect endpoint for my links this month. I’ve travelled to Kenya, Zambia, Argentina (via France), Russia, Victorian and pre-Victorian London this time. Where will your travels take you?

#SakhalinIsland: The Humanity of Chekhov

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know and appreciate Chekhov. We had an actress family friend who performed in The Seagull, so I saw that at a very tender age. I then went through a spell of imagining myself performing in each one of his plays. Of course, I also appreciated his short stories and I knew some biographical details about his life as a doctor and how he supported his family.

I didn’t, however, realise the full extent of his compassion and humanitarian commitment, until I read his non-fiction book Sakhalin Island as part of a #ChekhovTogether readalong with Yelena Furman, Alok Ranjan, Todd, Elisabeth van der Meer and Herb Randall. This also fits in with my Russians in December reading plan. The next one I’ll be tackling will be The Brothers Karamazov, the only Dostoevsky that I’ve not been able to read so far.

Nobody is quite sure why Chekhov at the age of thirty decided to go on a lengthy trip to the penal colony of Sakhalin in 1890. He was not really a militant journalist and he did not go there in any official capacity as a health expert either, yet the book is both a triumph of social (and medical) anthropology and a remarkable piece of investigative journalism. It almost certainly accelerated the progression of his tuberculosis and robbed him of a few months of life, but it was perhaps partly motivated by the recent death of his brother and the fact that he had recently been diagnosed himself with the same dreaded disease.

What Chekhov has given us here is a clear-eyed, empathetic but by no means sentimental account of daily life in the colony, based on his own statistical and qualitative research. As an anthropologist, you can imagine how much I enjoyed this combination of the general and the very specific examples and personal stories. According to Sakhalin officials, Chekhov possessed a remarkable gift for gaining the prisoners’ confidence. It’s equally undeniable that he was moved (and shocked) by what he saw there, so he continued to study documents about Sakhalin’s history, particularly under the Russian administration, and made recommendations for improving living and working conditions for both convicts and settlers (most often composed of freed exiles). The Tsarist bureaucratic machine obviously feared too much negative publicity and therefore assigned ‘helpers’ to him as he went about his interviewing (under the pretext of census-taking). Chekhov himself was aware of the danger of seeing only what he was allowed to see and described it as ‘seeing everything but missing the elephant’. He sought to be balanced and thoughtful in his approach, but he was quite critical both about the system (and its policies):

It seemed to me that I was seeing the extreme and utmost degree of human degradation, lower than which it is simply impossible to go…

Penalties which humiliate and embitter a criminal, long since acknowledged as injurious to the free population, have been retained for convicts, as if a population of exiles is in less danger of becoming hardened and embittered.

And about the people who implement the policies on the ground: the prison wardens, governors and officials in Sakhalin:

In the labour camps served people who were unscrupulous, unsqueamish, difficult to get on with, to whom it was all the same where they served, as long as they could eat, drink, sleep and play cards.

He really would have made a terrific, empathetic anthropologist. He describes the native populations of the islands as well – or what remained of them – the Gilyaks and the Ainu, and is not complimentary about the way they have been treated by either the Japanese or the Russians in this disputed territory:

General K told me that he wished to Russify the Gilyaks. Why this should be necessary I do not know… proximity to a prison will not Russify, but only totally corrupt…

After claiming that the Russians freed the Ainu from the quasi-serfdom they suffered under the Japanese, he then describes at some length the brutalisation of the Ainu by Cossack Lt. Chorny, who boasts: ‘That’s how we do things in Russia!’

Unsurprisingly, Chekhov is not only able to see the monstrous behaviour in people placed in positions of power, but he is always able to view with compassion the weaknesses of marginalised people, or those labelled by society as ‘monsters’.

I was told that at one time there had been benches standing on the path to the lighthouse, but they had been forced to take them away because, while out strolling, the convicts and settled exiles had written on them and had carved with their knives filthy lampoons and all sorts of obscenities. There are a lot of free lovers of this so-called “wall literature” too, but, in penal servitude, the cynicism surpasses all limits and absolutely no comparison may be made with it. Here, not only benches and the walls of backyards, but even the love letters, are revolting. It is remarkable that a man will write and carve various abominations on a bench while at the same time he is feeling lost, abandoned and profoundly unhappy.

Given the rather grim subject matter, I wasn’t expecting much humour in this book, but there are plenty of wry asides, especially about the inclement weather and unforgiving landscape:

What they say about Sakhalin is that there is no climate here, just bad weather… most inclement spot in Russia… When Nature created Sakhalin the last thing she had in mind was mankind and his benefit.

Yet there are also instances when the writer in Chekhov seems to be awestruck and inspired by the endless solitude:

All around there is not a single living soul, not a bird, not a fly, and it is beyond comprehension who the waves are roaring for, who listens to them at nights here… who they would roar for when I was gone..

Sadly, I understand this remote landscape is no longer quite so pristine, but echoing constantly to the drills of oil and gas companies, both on land and offshore.

Sakhalin-2 Offshore, Gasprom/Shell.

I read this book in a beautiful edition from Alma Classics, with a new translation by Brian Reeve, invaluable annotations/endnotes by both the author and the translator, and further enhanced by the presence of related documents, such as impressions of his trip through Siberia, as well as letters to relatives and friends.

Cross-cultural Observations: Dear Oxbridge

I spent my entire Sunday morning in bed reading the book Dear Oxbridge: Love Letter to England by Nele Pollatscheck that a friend of mine sent me from Germany. I was actually going to be smug about ‘pre-reading’ for #GermanLitMonth for once, but in fact I’ll review it right away, because it says much more about the English than the Germans (yes, mainly the English rather than the British in general).

Photo by Sidharth Bhatia on Unsplash

Instead of filling it with post-it notes while reading, like I usually do, I’ve quote-tweeted extensive passages from the book, because I found it so amusing. I viewed it of course with a wary anthropologist’s eye, so I found it equally revealing about the author and the Germans, as well as often quite spot-on about privilege at Oxbridge, a certain class of Englishman (and it is most often the men she mentions). Bad housing standards and drains, tiny rooms, unmixed taps all make their appearance here, as do private schools, the red trouser brigade of toffs, the stiff upper lip and the constant obsession with the war.  

 

https://twitter.com/i/events/1320325733504385026?s=20

 

Of course, it’s fair to say that during her five years of studying first in Cambridge and then in Oxford, the author was living in a bit of a bubble, so it would be difficult to extrapolate her observations to all of Britain or even all of England.

For example, she says at some point that the upper classes tend to be more direct in their speech: they call a spade a spade and a toilet a toilet, while the working classes try to avoid sounding vulgar by calling it a cloakroom. Which may be somewhat true, but then she goes on to say that it’s mainly gentlemen who swear and cuss, and I thought to myself that she clearly can’t have been exposed very much to a pub in an average English town on a Friday night, where everyone is at it hammer and tongs.

 

I’m also rather unsure about her observation that the NHS oversubscribes anti-depressives because they are the cheapest form of therapy and that so many people use them almost routinely. I found that, on the contrary, the GP tends to push you into the direction of CBT rather than pills, even when there are long waiting lists to see anyone and you get only a small number of appointments on prescription anyway. But perhaps this has changed since she was living in the UK before 2016. (Also, it tends to be a bit of a postcode lottery as to how mental health is viewed and treated.)

 

These are minor issues, however, and on the whole I think she feels a lot of affection for the British, but is still capable of casting cold, clear eyes upon them. Unlike me after my year in Cambridge, when I returned to Romania for a year, saw everything British through rose-tinted glasses and couldn’t wait to plot, plan and arrange to get back to my studies in England. 

 

What struck me most about the book was how much your own cultural background influences what you seek (and find) in another culture. In the final chapter, the author muses about how she discovered she was more German than she had expected (in terms of punctuality, being quite direct and wanting to complain about things), and that what she admired most about the English was ‘kindness’, an almost untranslatable term in German. The Germans, she speculates, are disciplined and correct, they are even kind, but it tends to be more within the inner circle of family and friends. Perhaps the fact that there is no distinction between ‘Sie’ and ‘Du’ when the English say ‘you’, that most people address each other by their first names, makes it easier to add people to your inner circle.

 

To me, coming from a Latin and Balkanic culture, kindness and generosity were not the traits that most struck me about the English. On the contrary, I struggled with the coldness, with what I perceived as lack of hospitality, neighbourliness and genuine willingness to help (I have lived mainly in the South-East, I should say in my defence, and have generally met with much more kindness in other parts of the country.) However, what I did admire was the calm, the wit, the ability to laugh at oneself, the politeness, the non-escalation of conflict – all of the things which I felt were lacking in my own culture.

 

Dear Oxbridge is a farewell letter to Britain and an attempt to explain Brexit to the Germans. Given how critical the author is about Etonians, politicians, the privileged elite and how the British put up with far too much from their ruling classes, I don’t think it will be translated here any time soon.

 

 

 

Through the Decades: Books and Authors that Shaped Me

I recently saw this blog post about ‘Reading through the Decades‘ and was tempted to take part, even though that might disclose the *big* mystery which is my age!

Childhood:

I couldn’t get enough of fairy tales and stories (from all countries: I remember my parents reading 1001 Nights, folktales from Russia, China and Romania, the Greek myths, as well as the usual Grimm, Andersen and Perrault). I went to an English school for a while and my favourite teachers were the ones who would read out loud to us while we did arts and crafts (which I NEVER excelled in), so that I could get lost in the world of Paddington Bear, Olga da Polga, The Wind in the Willows. Luckily, I was always surrounded by international friends, so I grew up with the Moomins, Asterix and Obelix in multiple translations as well as the original, Christiane Nöstlinger (who very sadly died just a few weeks ago), Räuber Hotzenplotz (I had great fun playing him with a drawn-on moustache and beard in a school play), Pippi Longstocking, Emil and the Detectives, White Fang and the Chalet school.

My parents say that at the age of 2-3, I would happily examine the dictionary for hours, so they could nip outside for a quick emergency shop. Although ‘examine’ is perhaps not quite the word for my reading exploits back then.

Teens:

In stark contrast to my happy, diverse and very liberal childhood, I hit a wall when I moved back to Romania during the Communist period. My reading was suddenly censored. I tried to sign up for the British Council library, the French cultural institute, the Goethe Institut, to keep up my languages and love of literature, but my visits there were very carefully monitored, so for a long time I had to rely on other people taking books out for me. (It was OK to go to the Schiller Institut, which was the GDR version of the Goethe). But of course teenagers relish challenges, so this made books (particularly foreign language books) even more precious to me.

I even believed I detected a physical similarity between myself and Anne Sexton…

This was the decade of poetry. With typical adolescent dramatics, I dressed in black as soon as I got out of my school uniform and moodily recited French poetry in particular (Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Verlaine). I WAS Sylvia Plath (at least on those days when I wasn’t Anne Sexton or Colette or Virginia Woolf or Marina Tsvetaeva, all women who inspired me with their poetry and their lifestyles). I also fell in love with Romanian poetry (Octavian Goga, Tudor Arghezi, George Bacovia and Lucian Blaga) and the romantic, lyrical and often quite funny writing of Ionel Teodoreanu’s trilogy of nostalgic novels about life in the Romanian countryside before Communism La Medeleni. 

Twenties:

This was a busy decade. At university I succumbed to the philosophy and lit crit craze and liberally sprinkled my essays and discussions with references to Derrida, Lacan, Chomsky, Julia Kristeva, Emil Cioran, Eliade… basically, anything that was as far removed from dialectical materialism as possible. I also discovered the joys of Japanese literature and quickly developed a passion for Dazai Osamu, Yosano Akiko and Akutagawa which has never left me since. In our small Japanese group of students, there were two camps: the Kawabata fans and the Mishima fans. I have to admit I was (perhaps the only one?) in the latter camp, although I became a much more critical reader later on.

I also discovered social anthropology in this decade and the works of Levi-Strauss, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Max Weber became as exciting to me as any novels. I came to it just on the cusp of the criticism of the paternalistic attitudes, the role of the anthropologist as an observer and the biases that they bring into the field or how their very presence affects the communities which they claim to observe in a non-interfering way.

Thirties:

You might argue that I was exhausted after all of my studies or too tired after having children, but I have no qualms at all about shifting almost entirely to crime fiction in my 30s. I had always read some crime (obvious contenders like Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, Simenon), but now I devoured all of the crime fiction I could find at my local library. I particularly enjoyed books which really captured the atmosphere of a city or country, like Michael Dibdin’s Zen series set in Italy, Ian Rankin’s Rebus of Edinburgh, Martin Beck’s Sweden, Barbara Nadel’s Istanbul, Fred Vargas bringing historical touches to contemporary France, Jakob Arjouni’s beneath-the-surface of boring old Frankfurt, Qiu Xialong’s Shanghai stuck between the past and the present. But I never turned down any of the regional or cosy crime writers either: Veronica Stallwood’s Oxford, for example, or M. C. Beaton’s Agatha Raisin.

Forties:

The decade when I rediscovered writing, as well as reading far more widely, reviewing and blogging. I’ve returned to poetry, I still keep up with crime fiction, I still enjoy books set in the whole wide world, opening me up to new cultures, ideas and ways of being. You can discover many of the new authors I got to appreciate in the past few years by looking back at my blog, for example: Jean-Claude Izzo, Pascal Garnier, Romain Gary, to mention just the French (well, I did spend quite a large chunk of time in France). I’ve discovered far too many new crime fiction authors to mention in one post, and I’ve also stretched my wings to take in more world literature (beyond my comfort zone of Europe and Japan).

I would love to hear about your own bookish journey through the decades, either in the comments below or perhaps on your own blog. It’s funny how you start to see certain patterns emerging…

 

 

The Euphoria of Anthropology

This is a long overdue review of Lily King’s ‘Euphoria’, a novel based on the life and loves of Margaret Mead and her two anthropologist husbands, Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson. It is also a life-lesson for me: don’t leave it too long before you review a book you liked, just because you think you’ll be able to write something wiser, wittier, more in-depth about it.

You won’t. And you’ll have forgotten most of the reasons why you loved it in the first place.

Margaret Mead’s autobiography ‘Blackberry Winter’ is one of the reasons I decided to become an anthropologist. She was one of the superstars of anthropology and, no matter how much subsequent debate there has been about her conclusions, no one doubts her passion and unabashed curiosity for other people and cultures.  Outspoken and candid in most personal matters, she is nevertheless coy about the few months she spent in what must have been a tense relationship triangle with Bateson and Fortune in 1933 in New Guinea. I was somewhat worried that Lily King would romanticise and sensationalise the situation to the detriment of the real people and the anthropology. Would I love a book that reimagined my childhood heroes beyond all recognition?

But love it I did, although I struggled to find my bearings in the opening chapter. Who is doing the observing and the talking? The woman is not named at first, and there are two other women to add to the confusion. Are these characters heading out or coming back? Perhaps this is a deliberate construct, to give the reader an example of what it is like for an anthropologist going into an unknown culture, where none of the usual rules or landmarks make sense.

After that, however, the narrative settled down, and the action is perceived largely through the eyes of Andrew Bankson (the Bateson character), including what he imagines Nell Stone’s (the Margaret Mead character) life in the field to be like, interspersed with extracts from her diary. The rather repulsive husband Fen (the Fortune character) is only ever described by these two main protagonists, so does not get his say. He appears to be struggling to make a lasting impression in anthropology, is envious of his wife’s fame and constantly belittles her work ethic. ‘Got your Novel Prize yet, Nellie?’ he asks whenever she receives her long-delayed mail, and hurts her in rather symbolic ways (damaging her glasses, her typewriter, her body).

Bateson, Mead and Fortune in 1933. Library of Congress.

Atlhough the author imagines a completely different resolution to the story of this explosive trio, I was surprised how closely she stuck to some of the biographical elements. The characteristics of the tribes they visited are accurately described; the Ruth Benedict and Franz Boas mentor characters reappear as Helen and  himself respectively. Bateson was indeed as much affected by the death of his two older brothers as the fictional Bankson is in the book.

The four-fold scheme of cultural ‘temperaments’ were indeed formulated by Margaret and Bateson at the time, based on the manuscript of Benedict’s work ‘Patterns of Culture’, which they received in the field. Although this theoretical model has since been discredited (partly because of the misuse the Nazis made of such models), King does a great job of describing the excitement, the beauty of frenzy, which overcomes researchers when they think they might be on the brink of a great discovery. This is the ‘euphoria’ of the title, although it is also described elsewhere in the book as the moment, typically two months into fieldwork, when a culture suddenly begins to make sense.

It’s a delusion — you’ve only been there eight weeks — and it’s followed by the complete despair of ever understanding anything. But at that moment the place feels entirely yours. It’s the briefest, purest euphoria.

Another aspect of the novel which I enjoyed was the implied contemporary reassessment of the way anthropology was conducted back in the 1930s. Although they mean well, there is an unspoken ‘white man’ arrogance about the way in which the researchers descend upon a village with all of their belongings, rope people into building a treehouse for them, attempt to impose a schedule on them for interviews and observations etc.

The balance between love affair and professional fulfillment is just about right. The author manages to make anthropology – or perhaps just intellectual quest for excellence and meaning – sexy, despite the flies, the malaria, the self-doubts and the lack of plumbing.

The ending, however, diverges sharply from the real life stories – and the love story between Nell and Andrew is perhaps all the more beautiful for it. Back in the real world, Bateson married his princess, and they did do some successful fieldwork together in Bali and they had a daughter (who also became an anthropologist). However, they got divorced ten years later and their grand unifying construct of cultural patterns amounted to nothing.

Fiction! It trumps reality every single time.