Little Glimpses of Reading

There just aren’t enough hours in the week to review all the books I read, and some of them I don’t even feel compelled to review. This weekend I also had two DNF experiences one after the other! However, the ones below fall into the interesting category, so I will share some snippets from them to give you flavour.

Jane Campbell: Cat Brushing

This collection of short stories has a viewpoint that is seldom seen in Western literature: the desires of older women. In the title story, the narrator finds similarities with the once-beautiful, now elderly cat that she brushes, reflecting upon her own sensuous past and how both of them are now unnecessary and ‘on sufferance’ in her son’s household. Several of the stories reflecting on past loves and missed opportunities, but some are also about making the most of the present, even if you are in a care home.

‘All the old people here have exercises recommended for them by our inhouse staff.’

A great wave of hatred surged through me. Was I, having struggled over long years through the heartbreak of lovers deserting me, good fortune eluding me, children disappearing, money slipping from my grasp, of having survived all the random acts of cruelty that life can inflict upon an ordinary person, was I to be denied the luxury of wallowing in a bit of giref and sadness and melancholy if I wanted to?

Aristophanes: Lysistrata, transl. Patric Dickinson

A classic Ancient Greek comedy, and an anti-war pamphlet too. The women of Athens and Sparta (and other Greek cities) resolve to deny their men any sexual fulfillment until they put an end to the civil war ravaging the country. All the more remarkable for the portrayal of militant women, when we know that their status in Ancient Greece was very low, they were not considered full citizens. Amazing also, how current the political statements still are!

Like the raw fleece in the wash tub, first

you must cleanse the city of dirt.

As we beat out the muck and pick out the burrs,

you must pluck out the pace-seekers, sack the spongers

out of their sinecure offices, rip off their heads –

then the common skein of good sense:

blend the good aliens, the allies, the strangers,

even the debtors, into one ball;

consider the colonies scattered threads,

pick up their ends and gather them quick,

make one magnificent bobbin and weave

a garment of government fit for the people!

Javier Marias: Your Face Tomorrow, 2: Dance and Dream, transl. Margaret Jull Costa.

I will almost certainly review the entire trilogy once I finish it, but I’m taking my time to savour reading this. There are so many times that I nod along in recognition when I read those hypnotic, spiralling sentences. He really does get me, this author, and it would be a shame not share at least a fragment of one of those endless sentences as I go along.

No, you are never what you are – not entirely, not exactly – when you’re alone and living abroad and ceaselessly speaking a language not your own or not your first language… the word ‘absence’ loses meaning, depth and force with each hour that passes and that you pass far away from home – and then the expression ‘far away’ also loses meaning, depth and force – the time of our absence accumulates gradually like a strange parenthesis that does not really count and which shelters us only as it might commutable, insubstantial ghosts, and for which, thereferoe, we need render an account to no one, not even to ourselves…

#GermanLitMonth and Books Set ‘Abroad’

While my little household was visited by bronchitis, tonsillitis, RSV, coughing till your rib cage hurts and other such delightful guests, I needed something less demanding to read for German Literature Month. So I turned to the comedic delights of The Peacock by Isabel Bogdan, translated by Annie Rutherford and published by the wonderful V&Q Books.

Lord and Lady McIntosh are renting out parts of their dilapidated estate in the Scottish Highlands, but it all reaches crisis point when a group of investment bankers descend upon them for their off-site teambuilding exercise in the depths of winter, while their housekeeper has broken her arm, a peacock is running riot, and a snowstorm is on its way. Rather than descending into a Golden Age murder mystery (although at times the participants might be tempted to wring each other’s necks), it becomes a comedy of manners with moments of high drama and farce.

It was indeed a fun read, showing that Germans do have a healthy sense of humour: a satire about corporate teambuilding, British plumbing and draughty homes, as well as the renowned British love for animals which lives alongside their love for hunting. It is not at all vicious satire though: every one of the characters is redeemable, despite their obvious flaws. There is depth behind each stereotype: the iron lady boss, the suck-up, the older nerd and so on.

As the translator says in her note at the back of the book, ‘the idea of a German book set in Scotland and translated “back” into English was clearly a novel one’. But why would that be the case? We read books by American and British authors set in foreign countries ALL the time and many of them do not even depict expats: Donna Leon, Victoria Hislop, Alexander McCall Smith, take a bow!

The latest example of this is Berlin by Bea Setton, yet another book in the growing list of ‘expats moving to Berlin in the hope of starting with a blank slate and finding you can’t outrun your own bad habits and impulses’. [Rest assured that when I move to Berlin, I intend to continue the very boring middle-aged life that I have here in the UK – just with more freedom of movement and time to dedicate to literary pursuits.] It forms a perfect counterpoint to The Peacock, as it is almost entirely self-centred rather than focusing on a larger cast of characters. Written in the first person, with an unreliable narrator named Daphne – or, if we’re feeling generous, a narrator who is deceiving herself as much as she is attempting (and often succeeding) at deceiving others – we explore nearly a year in the life she is attempting to create for herself, albeit half-heartedly, in Berlin. The only thing she seems to be serious about is German grammar and vocabulary: she fails to establish any meaningful relationships, she sponges off her wealthy and far too unconcerned parents and therefore doesn’t have to work for a living, and she drifts along, a voyeur to her own life, not even decadent enough to come apart at the seams via clubbing, drugs and wild sex life (like the other Berlin-set expat novels I have read over the past year). The only thing she seems obsessive about is her running and controlling her eating, and inventing various subterfuges to disguise her eating disorder from her acquaintances.

The kind of book that made me feel old and grumpy, as I lost patience with the ‘first world problems of young people from privileged Western backgrounds today’.

This very bare-bones review is my third for #GermanLitMonth, and I hope to write one more on the biography of Marlen Haushofer. Meanwhile, I would recommend The Peacock as a delightfully escapist but not saccharine read – although the author underestimates how much the English investment bankers might drink!

Russians in the Snow: Victor Pelevin

Victor Pelevin: Omon Ra, transl. Andrew Bromfield, Faber, 1996 (original version first published in 1992)

This is my first acquaintance with Victor Pelevin, but I will certainly be reading more by him. From all I hear, he seems to be a somewhat enigmatic character, a writer who stays firmly out of the limelight, yet has won numerous literary prizes for his esoteric, multi-layered work, which nevertheless often mimics genre fiction. He has translated Castaneda’s work and has admitted to a fascination with Buddhism, travelling often to China, Japan and Nepal, but he is not a self-publicising hipster.

He appears to live according to his beliefs and has made much of his older work freely available on the internet. He is incredibly prolific, publishing a book a year on average (maybe because he shuns interviews and public appearances). Under the mantle of science-fiction or fantasy, he is often highly critical and political – not just of the Soviet system, but perhaps of any ideological construct, which he perceives as an illusion, a sop to the masses. He is often compared to Bulgakov, but I detect a much greater similarity (at least in this novel) to the Strugatsky Brothers.

What I find most revealing in the scant biographical detail available about him is that he studied mechanical engineering, which might explain the link to his main protagonist Omon in his debut novel Omon Ra. The young man has always dreamt of becoming a cosmonaut, one of the ultimate aspirations for a boy growing up under the Soviet system, with Yuri Gagarin constantly being presented as a role model. A poor provincial boy, with an indifferent, practically non-existent family, the dream of space travel provides an escape from the drabness of everyday Soviet existence.

I suddenly felt disgusted to think that I was sitting in this lousy little closet that smelt like a garbage dump, disgusted by the fact… that the entire immense country in which I lived was made up of lots and lots of these lousy little closets… and most important of all – it was painful to think that these very same stinking little closets were the settings for those multi-coloured arrays of lights that made me catch my breath in the evenings when I happened to look out of some window set high above the twilit capital. And it all seemed particularly painful in comparison with the beautiful American flying machine in the magazine.

He befriends Mitiok, another ‘outsider’ at his school, who has the same dream as him, and they both join the gruelling training regime of the space cadet academy in Zaraisk. And this is where the disillusionment starts.

The character seems predestined to be made a fool of, with a name like Omon Krivomazov (a pun: Omon is an acronym for a branch of the secret police service, the surname bears similarities to Karamazov, which means ‘black face’, and krivo and maz are Russian words for ‘crooked/wrong’ and ‘unguent/smear’). Sure enough, Omon and Mitiok soon discover that the Soviet space programme is based on lies and deceit, that the cosmonauts are simply disposable and interchangeable tools for the glorification of the Soviet empire, to cover up the lack of advanced computing or technological power.

I don’t want to give too much away, but the narrator digs into layer after layer of deception, some of it hilariously farcical, yet with an undercurrent of tragedy too. There are some utterly surreal moments, not all of them related to space flight. The scene of Henry Kissinger going to hunt bears (although the hunting of wild animals was forbidden by law) is unforgettable. Absurd (and untrue) though that story is, it is very close to a lot of the patently obvious and ridiculous deceptions that happen all over the world in the attempt to appease political tyrants.

I don’t think it would be too much of a reach to say that this novel is also very much about the collapse of certainties, the disappearance of a society that – flawed though it was – provided some sort of values that people could cling to. You long for freedom all your life, and then when freedom comes, it proves to be too much of an unruly beast. You start craving the rules and order you knew before, some commonly accepted values system.

… all my life I’ve been journeying towards the moment when I would soar up over the crowds of what the slogans called the workers and the peasants, the soldiers and the intelligentsia, and now here I am hanging in brilliant blackness on the invisible threads of fate and trajectory – and now I see that becoming a heavenly body is not much different from serving a life sentence in a prison carriage that travels round and round a circular railway line without ever stopping.

A short but powerful novel, which is both a satire of the Soviet society, but also reveals the anxieties and fears of the 1990s in the newly ‘free’ Russian society.

#GermanLitMonth and #NovNov: Jonas Lüscher

Jonas Lüscher: Frühling der Barbaren (Barbarian Spring), 2013. Translated by Peter Lewis and published by Chicago University Press/Haus Publishing.

You might argue that a 192 page book is not a novella, but that is the length of the English-language version. The German version is roughly 120 pages, which makes me wonder whether the English translation also contains some additional notes or simply a larger font and more white spaces.

Lüscher is a contemporary Swiss novelist and essayist. He studied philosophy and therefore seems to delight in writing books that pose a bit of an ethical dilemma or a larger existential question. His second novel, Kraft, is about an aging, out-of-kilter German professor trying to win a prize by demonstrating to a Silicon Valley audience that ‘our world is still, despite all evidence, the best of all possible worlds, and how we might improve it even further through technology’. That should make it clear that the author loves satire, and this is obvious in his first book too, Barbarian Spring.

Written soon after the 2008 financial crash but well before the Brexit referendum and all that followed, the book makes fun of the UK’s banking industry (one might say ‘the pot calling the kettle black’) but has a more profound message about just how quickly our trappings of civilisation can disappear when faced with a crisis. I will share the blurb with you for a plot summary, because I don’t think I can write a better one myself:

Preising, Swiss industrialist and garrulous fusspot, finds himself in Tunisia, attending the wedding of two City traders from London. At an old Berber oasis transformed into a luxury resort, the bride rides in on a camel to take her vows. The ludicrous excesses of these braying, young, high-flying wealth-creators knows no bounds. But as they carouse the night away, sterling stands on the brink of collapse and Britannia looks set to slip beneath the waves of bankruptcy and chaos. Next morning, with thumping heads and their credit cards maxed out, and as the first rumblings of the Arab Spring grip their host country, the Bright Young Neo-Thatcherites stage a revolt of their own with unimaginably grotesque and blackly humorous consequences.

Bill and Ben Books, https://www.billandbenbooks.co.uk/general/0046356-barbarian-spring

The story is told in a rather unusual way. Preising is prattling away, telling his story to the actual first-person narrator. They are both of them recovering from some kind of mental breakdown in a sanatorium. I wasn’t sure why this distancing device was necessary in such a short novel, but it does allow the narrator to comment more critically on Preising’s own interpretation of the story. Not that we are in any doubt that he is a rather unreliable narrator, well-meaning but weak, fairly observant about others, but at the same time rather blind to his own cultural relativism and liberalism ‘shallow as a children’s paddling pool’. He is a complete Mr Average, who has inherited his family’s business, run quite efficiently by the scrappy Bosnian immigrant Prodanovic, who uses him as a figurehead of dependability, but sends him out of the way whenever important decisions are being made.

This is how he ends up in the very upmarket Tunisian resort (designed to resemble what Westerners expect a Berber or Touareg camp to be like, although the architect did point out that there were no Touaregs in Tunisia). Supposedly, he is there to finalise a deal with one of their Tunisian suppliers, who owns the resort (among many other pies), but there doesn’t seem to be much for him to do, so he befriends the parents of the bridegroom of a wedding party, a financial trader who has brought all of his equally swanky, spoilt friends to the resort.

Of course all their luxury and high jinks become a desperate scrabble for survival, as the resort manager – uncertain of ever being paid for the whole wedding party – stops giving them any food and closes the pool and other amenities, while an Arab Spring type uprising turns against the rich and corrupt Tunisian owners as well. Some Lord-of-the-Flies-type scenes follow, including a particularly graphic one involving camel death. Turns out we are never too far from descending into barbarity, but in the end the narrator is left wondering what the whole point of Preising’s story was, and whether there was anything to be learnt from it.

I too couldn’t help but wonder about that. I enjoyed the satirical tone and the scene-setting, but found it took too long to reach the point of economic collapse (aside from the fact that the complete and utter collapse of a country and its currency is rather far-fetched, Argentina, Venezuela and recent examples of bankruptcy and defaulting on debts notwithstanding). ‘While Preising slept, England went under.’ By way of contrast, the scenes following the collapse were rather too rushed, hurtling towards a somewhat unsatisfactory conclusion. The suave swerve into dystopia was not quite as elegant as with J. G. Ballard or Don DeLillo, but it was amusing nonetheless. For UK politics watchers, there was the additional bonus of visualising David Cameron in this scene (it was too early for Boris Johnson):

In effect, what Preising was presenting me with here was a variation on the theme of ‘Where were you when Britain went bankrupt?’. This genre had recently taken over from the earlier ‘Where were you on 9/11?’ […] Likewise, we all now vividly remember the moment when the fresh-faced PM in his baby-blue silk tie – which I always considered an unduly optimistic and frivolous choice under the circumstances – commenced his speech with the words ‘In thirteen hundred and forty-five, when King Edward the Third told his Florentine bankers…’ Sure, it had a far less iconic image than 9/11, but it’s still seared on our collective memory.

It’s these satirical moments about globalism that really lifted the work for me, even when it felt a little top-heavy in terms of structure. A sharp, witty debut, which certainly makes me curious to search for the second novel by this author.

#20Books of Summer: An Entertaining Start

 Kōtarō Isaka: Bullet Train, transl. Sam Malissa

Former assassin Kimura embarks upon the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Morioka (one of the longest direct lines in Japan, over 670 km) with a personal mission of revenge: he wants to shoot schoolboy Satoshi, who bullied his son and made him fall off the rooftop of a building, putting him into a coma in hospital. But the train is full of other paid gangsters, who all seem to be after a suitcase full of money and trying to avoid getting punished by the man mobster boss who hired them. Nanao is the unluckiest criminal in the world, and all too aware of it. Meanwhile, Tangerine and Lemon operate as a pair, look like twins, but are in fact very different, with Tangerine reading serious Russian novels, while Lemon is obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine. When things go wrong, they all have to readjust their plans and end up stalking each other.

The plot is utterly ludicrous and the black comedy is over the top, and you can’t help feeling that the book has been written with an eye firmly on a film adaptation (which, sure enough, the filming for an American action thriller based on the book has just wrapped, starring Brad Pitt and creating a few more feminine roles, which the book sadly lacks). At first, I struggled with the translation, which felt too ‘American’, but then I realised that the Japanese original is probably quite Americanised too, heavily influenced by American film-makers such as Quentin Tarantino or the Coen Brothers. Not forgetting, of course, the Thomas the Tank Engine animated series. For those familiar with Japanese popular culture, however, there are also references to the yakuza and to Naoki Urasawa’s manga (later turned into an anime series) Monster, with the angelic-looking teenage master criminal.

With its fast pace and constant switching of points of view, plus a few unexpected twists, this is sheer entertainment, if you don’t examine the far-fetched plot too closely. Perfect for a train ride!

John Boyne: The Echo Chamber

The Cleverleys are privileged and self-obsessed media addicts: George is an Alan Partridge kind of TV chat show host, who has interviewed everyone who is anyone, consider himself a ‘national treasure’ and is angling for a peerage. His wife Beverley writes soppy, predictable bodice-rippers – or rather, she provides the ‘ideas’ and gets ghostwriters to actually write them. Their three children are all still living at home. Nelson (named after Mandela) suffers from social anxiety and only feels slightly more comfortable if he is wearing a uniform. The daughter Elizabeth is an internet troll but dreams of becoming a media influencer. The youngest, Achilles, is still a schoolboy and uses his good looks to seduce and then blackmail older men.

Through this thoroughly unlikable family, there is a lot of satirising of our obsession with media, but Boyne also takes swipes at ‘wokeness’ and ‘anti-wokeness’, implicit and explicit racism, gender identities, fake news and fake outrage, engaging in charity purely as a way to increase your public profile, media pile-ons and cancel culture… and the Ukrainian outlaw and folk hero Ustym Karmaliuk, believe it or not (who is the name of a tortoise consigned into Beverley’s care).

It is all quite hilarious, although the humour is more farce than subtle. It made me snort with laughter a few times, but about halfway in, it starts to feel like a joke that has gone on for too long. Or perhaps the author is trying to hit too many targets at once with his satire, so it ends up looking and sounding like a long Twitter rant or op-ed. Many of the jokes rely on repetition to be funny, and this also gets monotonous (and predictable) after a while. Still, it’s a quick, fun beach read, a great antidote to checking your social media accounts.

In addition to the two above, which were on my planned list of most recent Netgalley reads, I also read an additional (non-list) book with the same sort of dark humour.

Benoit Philippon: Mamie Luger

This French book features an unpredictable 104-year-old woman who is arrested by the police for trying to shoot her neighbour with a Luger dating from the Second World War. In actual fact, she was creating a diversion, to enable a young couple to escape by stealing the neighbour’s car. However, the frail old lady is by no means a saint, as the police inspector discovers while interviewing her. In fact, she turns out to be a serial killer, with a number of corpses buried in her cellar. Of course, she had perfectly good reasons for murdering each of those men, and is not at all filled with remorse. A rollicking feminist yarn, although at times it descends into stereotypical characters or predictable and repetitive situations.

None of the books above are memorable, but they certainly put me in the holiday mood and proved a welcome distraction at a time when work is very, very demanding.

Karel Čapek: War with the Newts #1936Club

I read reviews of this quite some time ago on Book Around the Corner, Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings, Biblioklept and, more recently, Lizzy’s Literary Life, and I never had the slightest doubt that this would be my kind of book. It is indeed an unforgettable book. Čapek is best-known as a science-fiction writer, but he was also a prolific journalist, essayist, satirist, anti-fascist, anti-militarist writer. He was not only the George Orwell of Czechoslovakia but also contributed so much to making the Czech language a suitable, respectable vehicle for literature.

The story appears, alongside the narrative, in the format of a motley collection of documents, conference papers, drawings, reports, eyewitness accounts etc. As an anthropologist, I really enjoyed the opportunity for the author to have additional swipes at academic papers, journalese, corporate meeting minutes and so on, but I can see why some readers might find it interrupts the plot flow.

Here is a brief summary of the story: A Czech sea captain with a misleadingly Dutch name (one of the recurring jokes that a landlocked nation has seafaring ambitions) comes across a species of large newts who can walk on two feet and seem intelligent enough to be taught to use tools and weapons. He manages to persuade his fellow countryman, millionaire industrialist Bondy, that these newts are ripe for exploitation, but even he could not have imagined just how much this idea expands. Soon they are being bred for the sake of global capitalism. They are keen to learn, multiply easily, can be traded in their tens of thousands and will do work that no one else wants to do. They can also be used to build additional land mass in the oceans and countries start using them to increase their imperial reach. But it turns out humans have not quite thought through the consequences of their actions, and soon they find themselves outnumbered and overpowered by the newts.

I love the way the story can be interpreted in several different ways: some critics see the newts as a symbol of the rise of Fascism, while others see them more as refugees or victims of ruthless capitalism or the imperialism of powerful nations. The truth is, Čapek spares no one, not even Hollywood blockbusters – and is remarkably astute both about the way the world was heading in 1936 but also about the ambitions of different nations of the world.

The author is excellent at picking out the flaws and foibles of each country. Britain, for instance, as a nation of animal lovers, quickly sets up a Salamander Protection Society, under the patronage of the Duchess of Huddersfield, which encourages women to provide the newts with proper clothes, to satisfy prudish sensibilities, admonishes schoolchildren not to throw stones at newts, but also ensures that newt working camps are surrounded by high fences to ‘protect’ the newts and separate them from the human world. Meanwhile, in the United States, newts are accused of raping young girls, so they are hunted down, lynched and burnt at the stake. Of course, they find ways to legitimise and organise this:

In vain the scientists protested against these actions by the mob, pointing out that because of their anatomical structure a crime like that on the part of the Salamanders was physically impossible; many of the girls swore on oath that they had been molested by the Newts, and therefore for every decent American the matter was perfectly clear. Later on public burning of the Newts was restricted… only allowed on Saturdays and under supervision of the fire brigade.

A German professor meanwhile carries out scientific experiments on the newts and writes down all the results in a very disciplined, neutral fashion. In India, the newts rescue humans trapped on a sinking vessel, only to be accused of forbiddenly touching drowning people of a higher caste. The French and the British meanwhile have a massive spat over territorial waters. Of course, private corporations start complaining that they’ve been pampering their newts too much, that there is no need to feed them so expensively, they should cut down on their expenses in newt maintenance and thereby increase their profits.

The row over which language to teach the newts was particularly illuminating. The original newts from the Pacific islands parrotted whatever language the sailors spoke around them, some pidgin English, some Malay. The ones bred for specific markets are taught a kind of Basic English, while the French insist on them learning the language of Corneille ‘not of course on racial grounds, but because it is part of higher education’. Others insist on Esperanto or some other form of Universal Language, but ‘of course there were disputes as to which of these Universal Languages was the most useful, consistent and universal’. Needless to say, it all descends into a battle of egos and chaos, much like the League of Nations at the time.

I was by turns amused and disturbed by this book. The satire, to my mind, is fierce – so accurate, so funny, even though it tries to attack too many targets at once. At the same time, the book left me quite despondent, because it still sounds remarkably current. We humans have not resolved any of this issues, we still behave like that, and we still don’t seem able to take a good long critical look at ourselves.

Just managed to sneak in another review in this week of the #1936Club, but I have been spending most of the month of April dwelling in that year in literature, and have several more reviews forthcoming, even if they are a bit late for this purpose. I leave you with another cover for the War with the Newts which makes me feel like the designer hadn’t quite read the brief… but I suspect Čapek would have loved it and been very much amused.

Russians in July: Yuri Olesha’s Envy

Yuri Olesha seems to have liked living and writing dangerously. This slim satirical novel Envy was published in 1927, just as the Stalinist purges were starting in earnest. Yet he was also born lucky: the satire was interpreted as being at the expense of the bourgeoisie or the parasitic influences in the ideal Soviet society, so he mostly escaped persecution, unlike many of his contemporaries (Zamyatin, Bulgakov, fellow Odessan Isaac Babel).

Andrei appears to be the model Soviet citizen: a party member and trade director of the Food Industry Trust, who seems to have dedicated his life to feeding the Soviet people (35 kopek sausages and communal dining halls, so no one needs to cook at home). He is rather rotund, naive, easy-going, essentially good-natured. He rescues the narrator (of the first part of the novel), Nikolai Kavalerov, who was lying drunk and homeless on the streets, and gives him shelter in exchange for some light editing chores. But Kavalerov is not grateful: instead, he spitefully observes and reports back to us the reader all of the gross personal habits of his benefactor, and mocks his idealism and ability to get excited over the silliest, most trivial of things.

He the ruler, the Communist, was building a new world. And in this new world, glory was sparked because a new kind of sausage had come from the sausage-maker’s hands. I didn’t understand this glory. What did it mean? Biographies, monumnets, history had never told me of glory like this… Did this mean the nature of glory had changed?

Kavalerov is filled with even more hatred for Andrei when he discovers that he is not the first ‘rescue project’. Before he came along, Andrei had for many years been harbouring Volodya Makarov, a young football player, in his home. And should Volodya ever return, then Andrei cheerfully admits that Kavalerov would have to free up the space for him. Suddenly, the younger man realises that he is the perpetual outsider. His thoughts could be interpreted as dripping in self-pity, but they show a man who cannot adapt (or perhaps doesn’t want to) to a society that feels alien to him. The author uses to great effect the ‘wooden language’ of Communist propaganda.

… it suddenly became very clear to me how much I didn’t belong with these people who had been called together on this great and important occasion, the utter irrelevance of my presence amongst them… I have neither hard labour nor a revolutionary past behind me…

Many of the angriest, most over-the-top scenes don’t actually occur in real life, they all take place in Kavalerov’s twisted imagination. He is the nihilist who cannot bear the optimism that is being forced on people in the Soviet system. Then he meets the counterpoint to Andrei: Ivan, the poet and dreamer, who lacks any sense of reality or pragmatism, and who happens to be Andrei’s brother, jealous of his success but not really wanting to adapt to the new world. Ivan too lives with one foot in the past, ‘the dwindling era’. And the author clearly notices and makes fun of the flaws of both the capitalist and communist system.

Author photo.

The story appears to be simple, but is embroidered with flights of fantasy, slapstick farce, unreliable narrators and characters who are prone to sudden rants. First person POV becomes a dubious sort of third person (albeit with long monologues which turn it into first person). The casual (and often hilarious) juxtaposition of sordid realism and flights of fancy, of real and imagined conversations, the tangential connections between episodes reminded me of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.

It’s short, sharp, completely barmy. The best description of the effect the book had on me is in the book itself, when Kavalerov talks about the optical illusions created by street mirrors (are they really a thing?).

You don’t know which way is up, as the saying goes. So suddenly have the rules been broken, so incredibly have the proportions changed. But you rejoice in your dizziness…

I read the NYRB edition of this book, in a new translation by Marian Schwartz and introduced by Ken Kalfus.

#EU27Project: Robert Menasse – The Capital

This book by Austrian writer Robert Menasse (step-brother of Eva Menasse, whom I’ve mentioned previously on this blog), translated by Jamie Bulloch, is the quintessential novel for the #EU27Project – in fact, for the EU 28, because the capital city of the title is Brussels and the United Kingdom is still within the EU, albeit reluctantly.

I won’t say too much about the plot, such as it is: the European Commission is getting ready to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary and wants to boost its image in the public eye. Sadly, the preparations are in chaos, not only because of the usual infighting and stubbornness of competing egos, but because into the mix come runaway pigs, dead bodies and Auschwitz survivors who refuse to conform to the plan. Jamie Bulloch, as always, does an excellent job of making the vicious sound funny, yet injecting a tragic note into the proceedings as well.

The plot is essentially an excuse to send up the complicated hierarchical structures and nationalist impulses of the various countries and their officials within the European Commission. I particularly relished the description of the British delegate.

Like most of the British officials, George Morland wasn’t especially liked in the Commission. The British… only accepted one binding rule: that fundamentally they were an exception. In truth the British were always suspected of neglecting the interests of the Community for the benefit of London’s interests. In many instances the suspicion was justified.

Beneath the farcical situations and humour, there are sharp, swift arrows that pierce the pretentiousness of many bureaucratic ‘types’ as well as nations, not just the Brits.

Strozzi was just plump enough to demonstrate that he was no ascetic, a fact reinforced by the signal red of his waistcoat. Strozzi was an anomaly at this level of power, which was dominated by the ‘Enarques’, graduates of those elite schools such as the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, slim men in discreet, not-too-expensive suits (ascetic in every respect) capable of negotiating for hours on end and all night long too. They appeared to need barely any food and as good as no sleep, they got by with few words few gestures, they avoided sugaring their souls with the sweetness of empthy, they didn’t need a public arena… they eschewed the outside gloss.

Yet, despite the conformity of these faceless bureaucrats, there is a similar cloning effect within the British contingent, with all of the advantages that senior official Grace Atkinson believes it brings:

If the foreign secretary’s private office in London had to reach a decision, the discussion lasted half an hour at most, including all the rituals and small talk at the beginning and end. People there had the same background, they were of comparable stock, which meant they had also been to the same schools, spoke the same language with the same accent by which they recognised each other, they all had spouses from the same social class, between 80 and 90 per cent of their biographical details were identical… But here in Brussels? Around the table there were alwas people with different languages and of different cultural backgrounds, many from working-class and artisan families too, especially from the eastern countries, with very different experiences, and everything that Grace Atkinson was used to resolving in twenty minutes here took hours, days, weeks.

Tongue-in-cheek endorsement of ‘simplicity’ and ‘decisiveness’ over consultation and compromise, clearly!

There are also some idealists, who are about to become disillusioned. There are some outbursts which sound heartfelt, almost as if the author has gone on his own political rant through the mouth of one of his characters. There are opportunities to pause and reflect on the future of the EU – although any luminous vision is punctured instantly by ridiculous suggestions.

All in all, this is a wicked little satire, very similar in vein although less compassionate than the depiction of the UN in Shirley Hazzard’s People in Glass Houses.

Two Contrasting Satirical Works: Spike Milligan and Dan Lungu

One way of dealing with traumatic historical events is by using satire or black humour. The Romanians have an expression for it ‘faci haz de necaz’ – making fun of misery/trouble. Coincidentally, two of the books I read recently for two very different projects #EU27Project and #DavidBowieBookClub, both deal with painful subjects in recent history, but they have very different approaches.

Dan Lungu: Sint o baba comunista! (I’m an Old Communist Biddy)

The collapse of the Berlin wall and the so-called Second World (that uncomfortable compromise between developed First and undeveloped Third World) was accompanied by a near total erasure of Eastern Europe with all that it stood for. It was not just a political system that collapsed but a whole way of life, culture, set of values, and they were replaced virtually overnight by something that wasn’t necessarily always better. Furthermore, things that were flawed but nevertheless precious to this generation were now openly derided, everything they ever built or contributed was sometimes brutally torn apart. So many of them felt that their whole lives had been wasted – a painful realisation.

I have heard this complaint from many of my elderly relatives, and this is described very realistically by Dan Lungu in this book. Ten years after the fall of Communism in Romania, Emilia is an old-age pensioner, who now has to deal with the fact that the world she has known all her life and learnt to live in (with all its imperfections) has gone forever. Her daughter Alice is now settled in Canada, married to a Canadian, and phones to ask her how she is planning to vote. This simple telephone conversation (repeated many, many times over in all of Romania in the late 1990s, early 2000s) represents the perennial struggle between generations – the nostalgia for a past that never quite existed in the way we fondly remember it now vs. the more forward-looking, able to cope with uncertainty and complexity attitude of the younger generation. It triggers some soul-searching in Emilia, as she remembers fragments of her past. Her life had been relatively sheltered: she was working in metallurgy, producing special orders for export, so had access to money and goods, compared to others. For her the fall of Communism has spelled nothing but disillusion and disaster.

Scene from the film adaptation.

‘Don’t you remember the massive queues, going all the way round the corner?’

‘OK, there were queues, but now when you go into a shop, you admire the cutlets, swallow hard and head back out, ‘cos you can’t afford them…I see families starving on TV, with children sleeping on the streets… You wouldn’t see that kind of stuff under Communism.

‘That will change. It takes time – we’re in transition right now, but I’m optimistic.’

‘Of course you’re optimistic when you’re living in Canada or France or America… You just come and live here for a while. You’ll get optimism then with spots on!’

‘What about freedom, Mum? That’s got to be worth something. We were frightened of our own shadows back then. Now you can say whatever you please, write what you want, travel where you like, shout “Down with the government!”‘

‘Travel? Sure, it’s the newly rich who do that, stealing from the things we built. And shouting, of course we can shout till we’re hoarse, no one’s listening anyway.’

There are many funny moments and culture clashes in this story (receiving the Canadian son-in-law in their house is one such classic moment), but it is the kind of ‘sad-funny’ situation that has no resolution. The ending feels a bit rushed – Emilia is questioning her memories of happy life under Communism, or at least understanding that not everyone was equally happy, but there is no real growth or change or resolution. However, it’s a touching portrayal of the dilemma many people were facing at the time (and subsequent corrupt governments have not necessarily made things better.) I’m both happy and sad that it has been translated into English, as I think I would have been the ideal candidate to translate this – I would certainly have loved to do it!

Spike Milligan: Puckoon

As you might expect with Spike Milligan, this is more of a farce than a sad/funny type of satire. It has a very cinematic quality – the detailed descriptions of each character and situation would lend themselves to a madcap TV series, although perhaps some of the (often quite pointless but hilarious) back stories would get lost.

Puckoon is a village in Ireland north east of Sligo. At the time of the partition of Ireland it is accidentally cut in two by the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. This leads to ridiculous situations such as having a funeral procession pass through customs to cross the border which lies between the church and the graveyard.

‘What have you got in the coffin?’

‘You must be joking,’ said the priest, his face going purple with anger…

‘I’m not joking, sir, I am merely doing my duty.’

‘Very well. Inside the coffin is the body of 98-year-old Dan Doonan. Now let us pass!’

‘Not quite finished yet, sir. You intend to bury an Irish citizen in what is now British territory?… I presume the deceased will be staying this side permanently?… Then he will require the following: an Irish passport stamped with a visa, to be renewed annually with a visa for the rest of his – ‘ Barrington almost said ‘life’ – ‘stay,’ he concluded.

While the absurdity of government bureaucracy is really well presented in the excerpt quoted, in other instances the satire is less successful. My objection is perhaps influenced by the fact that the eccentric villagers are so ridiculous and larger than life, that it reinforces stereotypes about the Irish: permanently drunk, garrulous, easy to anger, doing things the wrong way round.

The other thing which made me uncomfortable was that, although the book was published in 1963, so before the Troubles proper started in Ireland, the farcical way in which it handles the rather traumatic subject of national identity and sense of belonging would have made it almost unbearable to read during the period that followed, when violence became so common-place both in Northern Ireland and in England. At heart I suppose I agree with Milligan that nationalism and religious fanaticism is ripe for satire, but I missed the undercurrent of sadness that would turn this into a moral lesson.

The book was adapted for a feature film in 2002, so after the Good Friday agreement, when people could laugh once more about the border. I wonder if it will become once more an unbearable topic in future…

Were My Expectations Too High?

There are some books that come highly recommended, are reasonably well-written, have an intriguing premise, are enjoyable to read… and yet they still fail to quite live up to my expectations. This could be because my expectations for them are simply unrealistic. Or it could be that dreaded statement (which annoys all authors) ‘it’s not quite how I would have written the story’. Anyway, here are some recent reads that were slightly off-the-mark for me, but which others may find much more to their taste.

Bernard Minier: The Circle (Le Cercle)

I loved the claustrophobic wintry atmosphere of Minier’s first novel The Frozen Dead, although the serial killer locked in an asylum trope did seem a little unoriginal. So I was looking forward to this second novel – perhaps too much so. With a sinking heart, I discovered this book started with a prologue about a woman imprisoned in a cell and abused by her captor and was even more dismayed to discover that the spectre of the serial killer from book 1 (the sinister and far-too-clever Julian Hirtmann) makes a reappearance. It just stretched my suspension of disbelief a little bit too far, and there were many moments (such as the holiday of gendarme Irene in Santorini) that seemed to be mere filling, serving no purpose whatsoever. I suppose it was done to give more depth to the characters, but it just added bulk to the book. The characters of the investigators, I felt, were already fairly well-defined and rounded. Some of the secondary characters, however, were mere archetypes and there were simply too many investigations going on simultaneously.

To be fair, there were many things I did enjoy about the book. The season is early summer and it’s thunderstorms rather than avalanches which threaten the closed-in valleys of the Pyrenees. The setting is a quiet university town called Marsac, the so-called Cambridge of the south-west of France (there is a real Marsac not far from there, but this one appears to be imaginary). The character of the main investigator, Martin Servaz, and his relationship with his teenage daughter Margot; the no-nonsense Chinese-Franco-Moroccan sidekick Samira Cheung; the crime scene with the dolls floating face-up in the swimming pool; the brooding forest on the outskirts of town; the backdrop of the 2010 Football World Cup and France’s dismal performance in it… all of these were vividly described and memorable.

I read this in French, but Minotaur Books has the translation coming out on 27th of October, but I have been unable to find out the name of the translator. Maybe Alison Anderson, who also translated the first in the series.

Richard Beard: Acts of the Assassins

Try transposing Jesus’s death and the ulterior fate of his disciples into the present-day. Arm your protagonists with mobile phones, GPS tracking, airplanes and weapons, yet describe a world of gladiators, Roman Empire bureaucracy, simple folk clad in traditional garb. Give it a sceptical but increasingly confused ‘detective’ in the shape of Gallio to track down the remaining disciples and disprove the rumours about Christ’s resurrection. And there you have it: a strange mash-up of ideas and time periods, which raises interesting questions about how to contain a new religion or ideology, predestination and interpretation of events or people’s words.

I really liked the concept and the first half or so of the book felt fresh, different and very funny (whilst also being sad at the same time). However, I felt the ‘joke’ dragged on after a while. I did like the ending, but there was a bit of a sag in the middle, although the ambiguous character of Paul (whom I’ve never felt much traction with) somewhat redeemed matters.

For a more enthusiastic review of this book (which has been shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize for innovative fiction), see here and here. As for me, when it comes to a book blending religion, history and political satire, I prefer The Master and Margarita.