Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books, page 4
August 14, 2012
Crusoe’s Daughter by Jane Gardam
Crusoe s Daughter by Jane Gardam (Europa Editions, 2012. First publ. 1985)
I had read The Man in the Wooden Hat (a sequel to Old Filth, both published by Europa Editions) and fell in love with Jane Gardam’s sensuous style. By “sensuous” I don’t mean “lavish” or “lush.” I simply mean that her writing has a strong capacity to evoke feelings and states, and thus, to appeal to our senses. There are few contemporary writers who give one (me, at least) that feeling of intense pleasure we used to have when we read as children, and Gardam is one of them. This may be because she was herself—as one can see from this novel—a child in love with reading. Crusoe s Daughter is a metaphor for someone (in this case, a woman) who lives in isolation and creates a whole universe in the same way Crusoe created his island and God the world. It is also a testimony to the narrator’s (and I assume, the author’s too) love for this great classic and for reading fiction, in general.
The narrative starts when the protagonist is six years old and, orphaned, moves in with her aunts in a remote yellow house by the sea, and ends when she is in her eighties. The novel’s best parts are probably those in which “nothing happens,” save for the everyday rhythm of life in a small fishermen’s village. The second best are the scenes taking place at the Thwaite villa (Mr. Thwaite is a Dickensian character who, initially, has a marginal role, but in the end—like in those early nineteenth-century novels that have inspired this book—turns out to be closely related to our protagonist). The descriptions of the artists and the poets who are hosted there are witty and funny, and the bohemian atmosphere is so vivid that one can’t help longing for such an idyllic place.
Jane Gardam is one of the wittiest and most talented writers writing in English today.
I had read The Man in the Wooden Hat (a sequel to Old Filth, both published by Europa Editions) and fell in love with Jane Gardam’s sensuous style. By “sensuous” I don’t mean “lavish” or “lush.” I simply mean that her writing has a strong capacity to evoke feelings and states, and thus, to appeal to our senses. There are few contemporary writers who give one (me, at least) that feeling of intense pleasure we used to have when we read as children, and Gardam is one of them. This may be because she was herself—as one can see from this novel—a child in love with reading. Crusoe s Daughter is a metaphor for someone (in this case, a woman) who lives in isolation and creates a whole universe in the same way Crusoe created his island and God the world. It is also a testimony to the narrator’s (and I assume, the author’s too) love for this great classic and for reading fiction, in general.
The narrative starts when the protagonist is six years old and, orphaned, moves in with her aunts in a remote yellow house by the sea, and ends when she is in her eighties. The novel’s best parts are probably those in which “nothing happens,” save for the everyday rhythm of life in a small fishermen’s village. The second best are the scenes taking place at the Thwaite villa (Mr. Thwaite is a Dickensian character who, initially, has a marginal role, but in the end—like in those early nineteenth-century novels that have inspired this book—turns out to be closely related to our protagonist). The descriptions of the artists and the poets who are hosted there are witty and funny, and the bohemian atmosphere is so vivid that one can’t help longing for such an idyllic place.
Jane Gardam is one of the wittiest and most talented writers writing in English today.
August 10, 2012
An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor von Rezzori
An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor von Rezzori (Trans. from the German by Philip Boehm). New York Review Books Classics (2011).
Having read Gregor von Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and The Snows of Yesteryear, I knew I was in for a treat when I bought An Ermine in Czernopol. Like his other books, this one too is largely autobiographical, though it is written as if it were a novel. No doubt, for the sophisticated Rezzori, the current distinctions between “memoir” and “fiction” would have been laughable. In fact, in Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, the narrator states that he doesn’t differentiate between reality and fiction, and often mixes things from other people’s lives with his own. The unspecified genre of An Ermine in Czernopol is part of its originality, and not simply because it mixes memoir and fiction, but because of the way it does so: written in an apparently shapeless way, the narrative seems to be nothing more than the writer’s random memories. For example, when he introduces a character and sketches the role (s)he will play in the story, he also tells us how that character will end. He is not concerned at all with what passes for one of the main rules of storytelling, suspense. At a closer look, however, it becomes clear that the each chapter is centered on a specific character. The shapelessness is only an illusion created by the author, who instead of unspooling a single thread has constructed his story in many layers.
Like Rezzori’s other books, An Ermine in Czernopol is set in his native province of Bucovina. Bucovina had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918 (a few years after Rezzori’s birth) when it was added to Romania, and it now belongs to Ukraine. The portraits Rezzori draws of the particular species of individuals living in the province of Bucovina in the 1920s are the best representation of his genius. Having lived in Romania—albeit at a very different historical time—I can testify that this species, for which wit was at the top of hierarchical values and “lowliness was never a fault,” is not simply a fantastical creation of a writer with great imagination: it does exist. However, the amazing world of Czernopol—with its mixture of Jews, Ukrainians, Poles, Austrians, Hungarians, Germans, Russians, Gypsies, Romanians, and other ethnicities that are now extinguished, such as the Ruthens (most of them peasants who lived in a very traditional way)—has disappeared. Czernopol is a barely veiled version of Cernautzi (its Romanian name—Cernivtsi in Ukrainian, Chernovtsy in Russian and Czernowitz in German and Yiddish). In fact, in one instance the writer slips and calls the city by its real name. The city is brought to life with a descriptive power unequaled in anything else I’ve read.
The main character here being the city itself, the “plot” of the “story” is almost irrelevant. But there is a plot, which is narrated in the voice of a child (presumably, young Rezzori), though the voice doesn’t have the “innocence” one usually associates with childhood, but rather the wisdom and knowledge of adulthood. The child gains this knowledge in a series of narrations by other characters with whom he comes in contact. The pronoun used by Rezzori is “we”—a curious choice, which sometimes includes the narrator’s sister, Tanya, but at other times is hard to explain. Who is “we”? Its usage is reminiscent of the French impersonal pronoun on, which often appears in Proust (with whom Rezzori has much in common). Like Proust, Rezzori often starts a sentence by describing the feeling of his protagonist, and then turns it into a generalization about human beings. The grammatical shift (to “we” or on) allows the story to move from the particular to the universal, and thus to acquire the power of myth.
What could be called the book’s plot is what the child hears and patches together from the adults around him. Tildy, a major of Hungarian (and possibly German) origin, who had served in the Austro-Hungarian army and is now enlisted in the nationalist Romanian army, is the main character. He is the symbol of the now defunct Empire, but also of a system of values that are absent in Czernopol: honor and a high sense of justice. He also happens to be the ideal physical representation of what today we would call a role model for the child-narrator. A handsome, mysterious hussar, Tildy always acts in accordance with an aristocratic code of values for which the city of Czernopol, which only values wit and laughter, has no use.
The underlying social and historical context may be difficult for an American reader to understand because of the complicated ethnic relations in the Bucovina of that era. To oversimplify, Tildy is to a large extent the victim of Romanian nationalism. But, like all heroes, he is also the victim of something that belongs only to him (call it “greatness”) and sets him apart from the society in which he lives. Married to Tamara, a woman just as enigmatic as he, and who suffers, apparently, from a combination of depression and drug abuse, he challenges to a duel a series of Romanians who have insulted both his wife and sister-in-law. The latter is another fascinating character, a beautiful woman who, in spite of being married, is extremely “generous” to all the males in town. For defending the honor of these women, to the people of Czernopol Major Tildy is a fool without a sense of humor. To the narrator Tildy is a character from a vanished world who, in a town like Czernopol, can only meet a tragic end.
The final chapter, “Love and Death of the Ermine,” is masterly in the way it shows Tildy’s demise not as heroic but as pure grotesque. In a city in which the conflict between the hero and the others is a conflict between two systems of a different nature (justice, an ethical value, and wit, an esthetic value), the result can only be grotesque. And the only way the tragic could manifest itself in an amoral city (that is, a city that opposes to the idea of justice the idea of wit) is through the grotesque.
The chapter takes place in a cheap dive with the pretentious and ridiculous name “Etablissement Mon Repos.” Here, Major Tildy and his brother-in-law (a former Professor of Latin who is an alcoholic) drown their sorrows in the company of a young prostitute, Mititika (“the Little One”). The description of this prostitute, the mixture of cheapness and vulgarity but also of beauty and innocence, and of her interaction with Tildy is extraordinary. They fall in love, but this love is as grotesque as its setting. In the morning, as they walk together with the drunken brother-in-law who keeps quoting Latin authors, Tildy saves him from an oncoming streetcar with broken brakes and Tildy is killed. The novel ends, symbolically, with the scene of his body covered by the prostitute’s ermine coat, whose whiteness is soon soaked in blood.
Gregor von Rezzori may be the greatest writer you’ve never heard of.
Having read Gregor von Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and The Snows of Yesteryear, I knew I was in for a treat when I bought An Ermine in Czernopol. Like his other books, this one too is largely autobiographical, though it is written as if it were a novel. No doubt, for the sophisticated Rezzori, the current distinctions between “memoir” and “fiction” would have been laughable. In fact, in Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, the narrator states that he doesn’t differentiate between reality and fiction, and often mixes things from other people’s lives with his own. The unspecified genre of An Ermine in Czernopol is part of its originality, and not simply because it mixes memoir and fiction, but because of the way it does so: written in an apparently shapeless way, the narrative seems to be nothing more than the writer’s random memories. For example, when he introduces a character and sketches the role (s)he will play in the story, he also tells us how that character will end. He is not concerned at all with what passes for one of the main rules of storytelling, suspense. At a closer look, however, it becomes clear that the each chapter is centered on a specific character. The shapelessness is only an illusion created by the author, who instead of unspooling a single thread has constructed his story in many layers.
Like Rezzori’s other books, An Ermine in Czernopol is set in his native province of Bucovina. Bucovina had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918 (a few years after Rezzori’s birth) when it was added to Romania, and it now belongs to Ukraine. The portraits Rezzori draws of the particular species of individuals living in the province of Bucovina in the 1920s are the best representation of his genius. Having lived in Romania—albeit at a very different historical time—I can testify that this species, for which wit was at the top of hierarchical values and “lowliness was never a fault,” is not simply a fantastical creation of a writer with great imagination: it does exist. However, the amazing world of Czernopol—with its mixture of Jews, Ukrainians, Poles, Austrians, Hungarians, Germans, Russians, Gypsies, Romanians, and other ethnicities that are now extinguished, such as the Ruthens (most of them peasants who lived in a very traditional way)—has disappeared. Czernopol is a barely veiled version of Cernautzi (its Romanian name—Cernivtsi in Ukrainian, Chernovtsy in Russian and Czernowitz in German and Yiddish). In fact, in one instance the writer slips and calls the city by its real name. The city is brought to life with a descriptive power unequaled in anything else I’ve read.
The main character here being the city itself, the “plot” of the “story” is almost irrelevant. But there is a plot, which is narrated in the voice of a child (presumably, young Rezzori), though the voice doesn’t have the “innocence” one usually associates with childhood, but rather the wisdom and knowledge of adulthood. The child gains this knowledge in a series of narrations by other characters with whom he comes in contact. The pronoun used by Rezzori is “we”—a curious choice, which sometimes includes the narrator’s sister, Tanya, but at other times is hard to explain. Who is “we”? Its usage is reminiscent of the French impersonal pronoun on, which often appears in Proust (with whom Rezzori has much in common). Like Proust, Rezzori often starts a sentence by describing the feeling of his protagonist, and then turns it into a generalization about human beings. The grammatical shift (to “we” or on) allows the story to move from the particular to the universal, and thus to acquire the power of myth.
What could be called the book’s plot is what the child hears and patches together from the adults around him. Tildy, a major of Hungarian (and possibly German) origin, who had served in the Austro-Hungarian army and is now enlisted in the nationalist Romanian army, is the main character. He is the symbol of the now defunct Empire, but also of a system of values that are absent in Czernopol: honor and a high sense of justice. He also happens to be the ideal physical representation of what today we would call a role model for the child-narrator. A handsome, mysterious hussar, Tildy always acts in accordance with an aristocratic code of values for which the city of Czernopol, which only values wit and laughter, has no use.
The underlying social and historical context may be difficult for an American reader to understand because of the complicated ethnic relations in the Bucovina of that era. To oversimplify, Tildy is to a large extent the victim of Romanian nationalism. But, like all heroes, he is also the victim of something that belongs only to him (call it “greatness”) and sets him apart from the society in which he lives. Married to Tamara, a woman just as enigmatic as he, and who suffers, apparently, from a combination of depression and drug abuse, he challenges to a duel a series of Romanians who have insulted both his wife and sister-in-law. The latter is another fascinating character, a beautiful woman who, in spite of being married, is extremely “generous” to all the males in town. For defending the honor of these women, to the people of Czernopol Major Tildy is a fool without a sense of humor. To the narrator Tildy is a character from a vanished world who, in a town like Czernopol, can only meet a tragic end.
The final chapter, “Love and Death of the Ermine,” is masterly in the way it shows Tildy’s demise not as heroic but as pure grotesque. In a city in which the conflict between the hero and the others is a conflict between two systems of a different nature (justice, an ethical value, and wit, an esthetic value), the result can only be grotesque. And the only way the tragic could manifest itself in an amoral city (that is, a city that opposes to the idea of justice the idea of wit) is through the grotesque.
The chapter takes place in a cheap dive with the pretentious and ridiculous name “Etablissement Mon Repos.” Here, Major Tildy and his brother-in-law (a former Professor of Latin who is an alcoholic) drown their sorrows in the company of a young prostitute, Mititika (“the Little One”). The description of this prostitute, the mixture of cheapness and vulgarity but also of beauty and innocence, and of her interaction with Tildy is extraordinary. They fall in love, but this love is as grotesque as its setting. In the morning, as they walk together with the drunken brother-in-law who keeps quoting Latin authors, Tildy saves him from an oncoming streetcar with broken brakes and Tildy is killed. The novel ends, symbolically, with the scene of his body covered by the prostitute’s ermine coat, whose whiteness is soon soaked in blood.
Gregor von Rezzori may be the greatest writer you’ve never heard of.
July 10, 2012
Dezsö Kosztolányi, The Plaster Angel--short stories
Dezsö Kosztolányi, The Plaster Angel (Noran Libro Kiadó, 2010. Trans. from the Hungarian by Eszter Molnár. Ed. by Peter Doherty)
Some of the best books I ever read are books I discovered on my own, either in a library or a bookstore. In fact, half of the pleasure of reading comes, as far as I am concerned, from the surprise of the discovery, which is why I hate the Internet-based paradigm of “if you liked X, then you might like Y”). Venturing into a bookstore is one of the greatest pleasures of travel for me, even if the books are in languages I don’t read.
This summer I entered a small bookstore in Budapest, and discovered a bilingual edition of Dezsö Kosztolányi’s The Plaster Angel, which includes twenty short stories written as early as 1908. I had read two novels of his translated into English, Skylark and Kornél Esti, plus a novella in French, and he already was on my list of great unknown 20th century European writers, so it was with great joy that I grabbed the book off the shelf, and with even greater joy that I took in its French covers and, after a brief inspection, decided that the translation was professionally done.
A few stories about handicapped people—such as the one in which a “poor little invalid” tortures everyone around him with his demands—bring to mind the complex psychology of Stefan Zweig; others, like “The Fat Judge,” “Feri” and “The Swim” have the quiet soulfulness of Chekhov’s stories; others, like “Heart,” in which the demand of a rich widow to have her heart stabbed with a knife after her death, or “Order” about a man who is so obsessed with order that when his wife changes the position of his armchair, he takes the pistol and shoots her, and later, in the ambulance, he is so disturbed by the esthetic asymmetry that he asks the doctor “to sit parallel with him”!—these stories display typical Eastern European dark humor and an absurdist wit reminiscent of Gogol. And then, there are stories with a hint of postmodern wit avant la lettre, such as “The Wondrous Visitation of KH,” in which a young man who wishes to see again his deceased lover has his wish granted, but realizes that they have nothing to tell each other; or “A Robber,” in which a young man who decides to commit his first robbery ends up applying first aid to the woman he had intended to rob: “All in all he was a very untalented robber.” In “The Liars,” a family of creative and imaginative people transforms reality (in which the father is a charming crook) into a magic world reminding us of Steven Millhauser.
I'd like to end with a quote from Kosztolányi’s fellow writer, Sándor Márai. Márai, who had enormous admiration for Kosztolányi, had met him in Budapest, and wrote about him and the world they shared and which disappeared after WWII:
“Kosztolányi and his contemporaries still perceived something different under the entry-word “Literature” than do those writing today. For them literature was simultaneously play and ritual, conspiracy and craft, Eleusinian rite and complicitous pact sealed with blood.” (Sándor Márai, Memoir of Hungary 19441948. Trans. by Albert Tezla. Budapest: Corvina Books and Central European University Press, 1996)
Some of the best books I ever read are books I discovered on my own, either in a library or a bookstore. In fact, half of the pleasure of reading comes, as far as I am concerned, from the surprise of the discovery, which is why I hate the Internet-based paradigm of “if you liked X, then you might like Y”). Venturing into a bookstore is one of the greatest pleasures of travel for me, even if the books are in languages I don’t read.
This summer I entered a small bookstore in Budapest, and discovered a bilingual edition of Dezsö Kosztolányi’s The Plaster Angel, which includes twenty short stories written as early as 1908. I had read two novels of his translated into English, Skylark and Kornél Esti, plus a novella in French, and he already was on my list of great unknown 20th century European writers, so it was with great joy that I grabbed the book off the shelf, and with even greater joy that I took in its French covers and, after a brief inspection, decided that the translation was professionally done.
A few stories about handicapped people—such as the one in which a “poor little invalid” tortures everyone around him with his demands—bring to mind the complex psychology of Stefan Zweig; others, like “The Fat Judge,” “Feri” and “The Swim” have the quiet soulfulness of Chekhov’s stories; others, like “Heart,” in which the demand of a rich widow to have her heart stabbed with a knife after her death, or “Order” about a man who is so obsessed with order that when his wife changes the position of his armchair, he takes the pistol and shoots her, and later, in the ambulance, he is so disturbed by the esthetic asymmetry that he asks the doctor “to sit parallel with him”!—these stories display typical Eastern European dark humor and an absurdist wit reminiscent of Gogol. And then, there are stories with a hint of postmodern wit avant la lettre, such as “The Wondrous Visitation of KH,” in which a young man who wishes to see again his deceased lover has his wish granted, but realizes that they have nothing to tell each other; or “A Robber,” in which a young man who decides to commit his first robbery ends up applying first aid to the woman he had intended to rob: “All in all he was a very untalented robber.” In “The Liars,” a family of creative and imaginative people transforms reality (in which the father is a charming crook) into a magic world reminding us of Steven Millhauser.
I'd like to end with a quote from Kosztolányi’s fellow writer, Sándor Márai. Márai, who had enormous admiration for Kosztolányi, had met him in Budapest, and wrote about him and the world they shared and which disappeared after WWII:
“Kosztolányi and his contemporaries still perceived something different under the entry-word “Literature” than do those writing today. For them literature was simultaneously play and ritual, conspiracy and craft, Eleusinian rite and complicitous pact sealed with blood.” (Sándor Márai, Memoir of Hungary 19441948. Trans. by Albert Tezla. Budapest: Corvina Books and Central European University Press, 1996)
July 4, 2012
War and War by László Krasznahorkai
War and War by László Krasznahorkai (Trans. from the Hungarian by George Szirtes. New Directions, 2006)
László Krasznahorkai is not an easy author. I am saying this as a lover of Proust (with whom LK has in common those long, twisted sentences) and of Sebald (with whom he shares a gloomy mood and the ability to write fiction by creating a reality-effect via, for example, photos of real objects; incidentally, Sebald was one of the first writers to recognize LK’s genius). But what Krasznahorkai doesn’t have in common with Proust is the latter’s “soft” side, his ruminations on the human heart, and his repetitive love triangles in which are rooted most of the dramatic conflicts in In Search of Lost Time. In fact, in LK’s world there are few women, which may be one of the reasons I find him not always very pleasant to read. But when he does portray women, the portraits are compelling, and perhaps not accidentally one of the most engaging—for me, at least—parts in War and War is the part in which the protagonist falls under the spell of a gorgeous stewardess.
I always believed that to present a novel trough its plot means not only to impoverish it, but to misrepresent it, and this is all the more true for War and War. But, for those interested, here is an attempt: Korin, who works in a records office in Budapest, and who has a PhD in history, finds a manuscript that is so beautifully written and strangely unintelligible that he decides to abandon his entire life, burn all his personal documents, save for his passport, and leave for “the center of the world,” New York. Initially, it is not clear what the relationship between this extraordinary document whose events take place several centuries ago in Italy, and contemporary New York is, and why Korin chooses New York as the location from where he launches the document into eternity via the Internet (when he could do that from anywhere in the world) and where he eventually commits suicide, but, toward the end it appears that the relationship is symbolic, New York being the center of a world system whose beginnings are sketched in the manuscript.
The inadequacy of framing the discussion about a serious piece of literature through a “plot description” is obvious here because the novel is not so much about what happens to Korin as it is about the manuscript. The manuscript tells the story of four friends who travel to Venice—which is described as the city of peace, that is, as a combination of beauty and intelligence—then to Genoa, the city whose genius consists in having invented “the exchanges and credits, the banknotes and the interest, in a word, the borsa generale,” that is, the very foundation of the world we still live in, in which we are no longer dependent “on an external reality, but on intellect alone.” In other words, the invention of the credit and the banking system (which has led to Wall Street) has “spiritualized” the world in the sense that it has made it more abstract. (LK’s reflection on this process of abstraction is concerned only with the notion of money, but it would have been even more interesting to read his thoughts on cyberspace).
The main idea of the novel—which is not spelled as such, but transpires in the very first scene when Korin is attacked by a mob of young thieves who want his money—is: money equals war/violence. As a reflection on war and peace, LK’s title is a deliberate rewriting of Tolstoy’s famous title. Peace is the greatest invention of humankind, says Krasznahorkai. If Venice is the city of peace, Genoa, the city of money, is the city of war. If, in Tolstoy’s world, humanity lived between war and peace, in Krasznahorkai’s world (the world of the new “spiritualized” order) we are caught between war and war—hence, no possibility of hope; hence, the protagonist’s suicide.
But the most powerful aspect of LK’s novel is the unfolding of his enormous sentences, an unfolding best described by the author himself when he comments on the manuscript’s style: “all part of a single monstrous, infernal, all-absorbing sentence that hits you…unreadable…insane…[and yet] extraordinarily beautiful…” Once again, we have to thank George Szirtes for rendering into English this extraordinary beauty.
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...
László Krasznahorkai is not an easy author. I am saying this as a lover of Proust (with whom LK has in common those long, twisted sentences) and of Sebald (with whom he shares a gloomy mood and the ability to write fiction by creating a reality-effect via, for example, photos of real objects; incidentally, Sebald was one of the first writers to recognize LK’s genius). But what Krasznahorkai doesn’t have in common with Proust is the latter’s “soft” side, his ruminations on the human heart, and his repetitive love triangles in which are rooted most of the dramatic conflicts in In Search of Lost Time. In fact, in LK’s world there are few women, which may be one of the reasons I find him not always very pleasant to read. But when he does portray women, the portraits are compelling, and perhaps not accidentally one of the most engaging—for me, at least—parts in War and War is the part in which the protagonist falls under the spell of a gorgeous stewardess.
I always believed that to present a novel trough its plot means not only to impoverish it, but to misrepresent it, and this is all the more true for War and War. But, for those interested, here is an attempt: Korin, who works in a records office in Budapest, and who has a PhD in history, finds a manuscript that is so beautifully written and strangely unintelligible that he decides to abandon his entire life, burn all his personal documents, save for his passport, and leave for “the center of the world,” New York. Initially, it is not clear what the relationship between this extraordinary document whose events take place several centuries ago in Italy, and contemporary New York is, and why Korin chooses New York as the location from where he launches the document into eternity via the Internet (when he could do that from anywhere in the world) and where he eventually commits suicide, but, toward the end it appears that the relationship is symbolic, New York being the center of a world system whose beginnings are sketched in the manuscript.
The inadequacy of framing the discussion about a serious piece of literature through a “plot description” is obvious here because the novel is not so much about what happens to Korin as it is about the manuscript. The manuscript tells the story of four friends who travel to Venice—which is described as the city of peace, that is, as a combination of beauty and intelligence—then to Genoa, the city whose genius consists in having invented “the exchanges and credits, the banknotes and the interest, in a word, the borsa generale,” that is, the very foundation of the world we still live in, in which we are no longer dependent “on an external reality, but on intellect alone.” In other words, the invention of the credit and the banking system (which has led to Wall Street) has “spiritualized” the world in the sense that it has made it more abstract. (LK’s reflection on this process of abstraction is concerned only with the notion of money, but it would have been even more interesting to read his thoughts on cyberspace).
The main idea of the novel—which is not spelled as such, but transpires in the very first scene when Korin is attacked by a mob of young thieves who want his money—is: money equals war/violence. As a reflection on war and peace, LK’s title is a deliberate rewriting of Tolstoy’s famous title. Peace is the greatest invention of humankind, says Krasznahorkai. If Venice is the city of peace, Genoa, the city of money, is the city of war. If, in Tolstoy’s world, humanity lived between war and peace, in Krasznahorkai’s world (the world of the new “spiritualized” order) we are caught between war and war—hence, no possibility of hope; hence, the protagonist’s suicide.
But the most powerful aspect of LK’s novel is the unfolding of his enormous sentences, an unfolding best described by the author himself when he comments on the manuscript’s style: “all part of a single monstrous, infernal, all-absorbing sentence that hits you…unreadable…insane…[and yet] extraordinarily beautiful…” Once again, we have to thank George Szirtes for rendering into English this extraordinary beauty.
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...
May 16, 2012
Stories on Contemporary China
Vertical Motion by Can Xue (Open Letter, 2011. Trans. from the Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping)
The Beijing of Possibilities by Jonathan Tel (Other Press, 2009)
I had read Five Spice Street—one of the most original novels I’ve ever come across—by Can Xue, so I knew what to expect when I opened Vertical Motion. The latter is a rather eclectic collection, from the title story, written in a dry, impersonal tone, in the voice of a “little critter” that lives deep under the earth, to more emotionally-colored stories, such as “Cotton Candy,” in which a child, fascinated with a cotton-candy machine, daydreams about being a vendor.
This collection, although less captivating than Five Spice Street, confirmed my impression that Can Xue is one of the most interesting contemporary world writers. Several months later, the power of her novel is undiminished: I am still thinking about it, in spite of a less-than-average translation (which makes it all the more impressive). Surprisingly, Vertical Motion, which has been translated by the same team, is quite a good translation. I am not sure how to explain this: a better editor, more revisions, or simply the fact that the translators are now more experienced?
Immediately after finishing Vertical Motion, I discovered The Beijing of Possibilities by Jonathan Tel. Considering that this too is about contemporary China, and the stories in both collections have been published roughly around the same time, I thought that a parallel discussion might be interesting.
Tel lives in both Beijing and New York, and, if one is to believe his bio note, he has worked as a quantum physicist and an opera librettist. I am a little skeptical simply because the tone and style of the book are those of someone who could make up his bio. On the other hand, Tel’s writing is so different than that of his American (MFA-ized) contemporaries that maybe he is telling the truth.
The Beijing of Possibilities is one of the wittiest books by an American writer I’ve read in a while. The writing often sounds journalistic (if this were a film, I would say “like a documentary”): few adjectives and apparently simple sentences, but which delve into the described reality in an immediate way (that is, a way that sounds un-mediated, raw and honest); but this narrative approach sometimes takes unexpected turns and veers toward the fairy tale mode or the allegoric-fantastic. I can tell that Jonathan Tel lives in two parallel worlds because the structure of his stories is often “bipolar”: he would start with a story about ancient China, and then move to a story about contemporary China. Little by little the reader realizes that the two are different versions of the same story.
Because of his unusual approach to storytelling, Jonathan Tel has been compared to Sebald and Calvino, but, frankly, I don’t see many parallels, except for the photographs inserted in some of the stories. Personally, I think he is a very original writer, and I am at a loss regarding a possible comparison (which is impressive: how many writers do you know who don’t write like anyone else?)
Whether you are looking for an intelligent book of fiction, or a book on cotemporary China, The Beijing of Possibilities is a great read: as in many places undergoing profound transformations, contemporary Chinese reality is sometimes more surreal than fiction (I’ll only mention the Gorilla man, i.e., a man dressed as a gorilla, whose job is to sing celebratory songs on special occasions to office employees all across the city).
The Beijing of Possibilities by Jonathan Tel (Other Press, 2009)
I had read Five Spice Street—one of the most original novels I’ve ever come across—by Can Xue, so I knew what to expect when I opened Vertical Motion. The latter is a rather eclectic collection, from the title story, written in a dry, impersonal tone, in the voice of a “little critter” that lives deep under the earth, to more emotionally-colored stories, such as “Cotton Candy,” in which a child, fascinated with a cotton-candy machine, daydreams about being a vendor.
This collection, although less captivating than Five Spice Street, confirmed my impression that Can Xue is one of the most interesting contemporary world writers. Several months later, the power of her novel is undiminished: I am still thinking about it, in spite of a less-than-average translation (which makes it all the more impressive). Surprisingly, Vertical Motion, which has been translated by the same team, is quite a good translation. I am not sure how to explain this: a better editor, more revisions, or simply the fact that the translators are now more experienced?
Immediately after finishing Vertical Motion, I discovered The Beijing of Possibilities by Jonathan Tel. Considering that this too is about contemporary China, and the stories in both collections have been published roughly around the same time, I thought that a parallel discussion might be interesting.
Tel lives in both Beijing and New York, and, if one is to believe his bio note, he has worked as a quantum physicist and an opera librettist. I am a little skeptical simply because the tone and style of the book are those of someone who could make up his bio. On the other hand, Tel’s writing is so different than that of his American (MFA-ized) contemporaries that maybe he is telling the truth.
The Beijing of Possibilities is one of the wittiest books by an American writer I’ve read in a while. The writing often sounds journalistic (if this were a film, I would say “like a documentary”): few adjectives and apparently simple sentences, but which delve into the described reality in an immediate way (that is, a way that sounds un-mediated, raw and honest); but this narrative approach sometimes takes unexpected turns and veers toward the fairy tale mode or the allegoric-fantastic. I can tell that Jonathan Tel lives in two parallel worlds because the structure of his stories is often “bipolar”: he would start with a story about ancient China, and then move to a story about contemporary China. Little by little the reader realizes that the two are different versions of the same story.
Because of his unusual approach to storytelling, Jonathan Tel has been compared to Sebald and Calvino, but, frankly, I don’t see many parallels, except for the photographs inserted in some of the stories. Personally, I think he is a very original writer, and I am at a loss regarding a possible comparison (which is impressive: how many writers do you know who don’t write like anyone else?)
Whether you are looking for an intelligent book of fiction, or a book on cotemporary China, The Beijing of Possibilities is a great read: as in many places undergoing profound transformations, contemporary Chinese reality is sometimes more surreal than fiction (I’ll only mention the Gorilla man, i.e., a man dressed as a gorilla, whose job is to sing celebratory songs on special occasions to office employees all across the city).
May 13, 2012
The Moon over the Mountain
The Moon over the Mountain by Atsushi Nakajima (Trans. from the Japanese by Paul McCarthy and Nobuko Ochner, Autumn Hill Books, 2011)
You may be as surprised as I was to find out that stories on classical Chinese topics are a special literary genre in Japan, and their writers enjoy great respect. Atsushi Nakajima is such a writer. Although he died young and published almost nothing during his lifetime, he became very popular after his death in 1942.
The recurrent characters in many of the stories in this collection are representations of famous Chinese historical characters from eras going as far back as the eighth century. Readers somewhat familiar with Chinese classical tales may recognize some of the names and some of the events narrated.
Three stories, in particular, have stayed with me: “The Moon over the Mountain,” in which an unsuccessful poet who keeps complaining about his unhappy fate is turned into a tiger; “The Master,” in which an archer, after having studied this art with two great masters, achieves perfection only when he understands that “Perfect action lies in inaction, perfect speech abandons words, and perfect archery means never shooting;” and “The Disciple,” which tells the story of a disciple of Confucius. For those of us who don’t know much about the latter (whose Chinese name was, apparently, Kong Qiu), the story skillfully presents the life and philosophy of this world-famous man through a captivating narrative. I now understand why it is said that his philosophy is pragmatic: whether he served the rich and powerful (for a while he was a minister) or wandered aimlessly in relative poverty together with his disciples, he tried to do good, but never in an idealistic way. In extreme situations, he always advised his disciples to save their own skin rather than sacrifice themselves for a higher cause. In today’s parlance, he would be called a “realist.”
Last but not least, this is, as far as I can tell, a very good translation. My only objection is that, occasionally, it sounds too contemporary.
You may be as surprised as I was to find out that stories on classical Chinese topics are a special literary genre in Japan, and their writers enjoy great respect. Atsushi Nakajima is such a writer. Although he died young and published almost nothing during his lifetime, he became very popular after his death in 1942.
The recurrent characters in many of the stories in this collection are representations of famous Chinese historical characters from eras going as far back as the eighth century. Readers somewhat familiar with Chinese classical tales may recognize some of the names and some of the events narrated.
Three stories, in particular, have stayed with me: “The Moon over the Mountain,” in which an unsuccessful poet who keeps complaining about his unhappy fate is turned into a tiger; “The Master,” in which an archer, after having studied this art with two great masters, achieves perfection only when he understands that “Perfect action lies in inaction, perfect speech abandons words, and perfect archery means never shooting;” and “The Disciple,” which tells the story of a disciple of Confucius. For those of us who don’t know much about the latter (whose Chinese name was, apparently, Kong Qiu), the story skillfully presents the life and philosophy of this world-famous man through a captivating narrative. I now understand why it is said that his philosophy is pragmatic: whether he served the rich and powerful (for a while he was a minister) or wandered aimlessly in relative poverty together with his disciples, he tried to do good, but never in an idealistic way. In extreme situations, he always advised his disciples to save their own skin rather than sacrifice themselves for a higher cause. In today’s parlance, he would be called a “realist.”
Last but not least, this is, as far as I can tell, a very good translation. My only objection is that, occasionally, it sounds too contemporary.
May 6, 2012
The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto
The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto (trans. from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich, Melville House, 2011)
The Lake confirmed the impression I was left with after having read Asleep and N. P.: Yoshimoto is one of those contemporary writers situated at the border between what one could call (for lack of a better word) “serious” literature and pop fiction. The fact that The Lake was better received than N.P. in this country is at least in part due to the fact that its translator, Michael Emmerich, is considerably more skilled than N. P.’s translator. Still, while reading The Lake, I felt, as I often do when I read translations from the Japanese or the Chinese, that the language shifts in abrupt ways, from the very casual to the very poetic. I know that Yoshimoto has been praised for both her poetic language and her hipness (expressed in the very contemporary style of her dialogues), but I wonder if certain awkward transitions sound the same in the original.
I confess that my feelings about Yoshimoto in general and this book in particular are ambivalent. On the one hand, she does have a gift for creating atmosphere and identifiable characters with only a few simple strokes. She gives the impression that she has hurriedly jotted down some notes, which grab the reader in spite of herself. But then, one also finds passages that seem taken from some teenager’s blog—which may explain the huge following the writer has among young people.
The novel’s plot is simple: a young woman whose mother has recently died begins a relationship with a mysterious young man about whom she knows that he had suffered a big trauma in his childhood. Yoshimoto is very skilled at maintaining the suspense until the very end, when she reveals what had happened in the man’s childhood. More than anything, Yoshimoto’s enormous success among the Japanese comes, I think, from her strong sensibility whose dark side is popular not only for its “gothic” associations, but also because in traditional Japanese culture there is something noble about melancholy and sadness. The same fascination with melancholy characters and a dreamlike atmosphere can be found in Yoko Ogawa’s books, but the latter is a much better writer than Yoshimoto.
The Lake confirmed the impression I was left with after having read Asleep and N. P.: Yoshimoto is one of those contemporary writers situated at the border between what one could call (for lack of a better word) “serious” literature and pop fiction. The fact that The Lake was better received than N.P. in this country is at least in part due to the fact that its translator, Michael Emmerich, is considerably more skilled than N. P.’s translator. Still, while reading The Lake, I felt, as I often do when I read translations from the Japanese or the Chinese, that the language shifts in abrupt ways, from the very casual to the very poetic. I know that Yoshimoto has been praised for both her poetic language and her hipness (expressed in the very contemporary style of her dialogues), but I wonder if certain awkward transitions sound the same in the original.
I confess that my feelings about Yoshimoto in general and this book in particular are ambivalent. On the one hand, she does have a gift for creating atmosphere and identifiable characters with only a few simple strokes. She gives the impression that she has hurriedly jotted down some notes, which grab the reader in spite of herself. But then, one also finds passages that seem taken from some teenager’s blog—which may explain the huge following the writer has among young people.
The novel’s plot is simple: a young woman whose mother has recently died begins a relationship with a mysterious young man about whom she knows that he had suffered a big trauma in his childhood. Yoshimoto is very skilled at maintaining the suspense until the very end, when she reveals what had happened in the man’s childhood. More than anything, Yoshimoto’s enormous success among the Japanese comes, I think, from her strong sensibility whose dark side is popular not only for its “gothic” associations, but also because in traditional Japanese culture there is something noble about melancholy and sadness. The same fascination with melancholy characters and a dreamlike atmosphere can be found in Yoko Ogawa’s books, but the latter is a much better writer than Yoshimoto.
May 2, 2012
Sunflower by Gyula Krúdy
Sunflower by Gyula Krúdy (NYRB, trans. from the Hungarian by John Bátki, introduction by John Lukacs)
Krúdy has been hailed by his fellow Hungarians as not only one of the greatest Hungarian writers, but maybe the greatest. He has been compared to Robert Walser and Bruno Schulz because, like them, he is unclassifiable, and his greatness has been described by Sándor Márai as “almost past comprehension.” Given all the above, the reader may be slightly disappointed by his novel, Sunflower (written in 1918 and published for the first time in English in 1997). Lukacs’s introduction warns us about the difficulties to translate Krúdy’s poetic prose not only because of his style, but also because of the hidden allusions (cultural, historical) that only a Hungarian can understand. With an ambiguous formulation, he tells the reader that the translator “has tried” and “largely succeeded.”
As I read the book, I tried to find in my mind literary equivalents for it, and the only one I came up with was Craii de Curtea Veche by the Romanian writer Mateiu Caragiale, a novel written around the same time and hailed by Romanian writers as an unequaled masterpiece. What these books have in common, aside from a poetic, archaic style, is an atmosphere of fin-de-siècle, of a gone world that the narrators are trying to bring back through the power of words. The world they describe and which triggers their nostalgia is one in which men drink their fill and reminisce about past lovers—in other words, a world that is itself prone to nostalgic remembrance. In this world, the inn is the emblematic space of dramatic encounters, a microcosm from which stories about other worlds unspool, where an old woman spotted at a nearby table triggers a long story about a bygone beauty and the drama that had once surrounded her. This nostalgia about nostalgia creates a dreamlike universe, but this universe is far from being depicted as some kind of idyllic space; on the contrary, there is a crudeness and even an ugliness to the people in it. The apparent contradiction between this nostalgia and the world that is its object makes me think that these two authors may be impossible to translate for an American audience.
And this brings me to the issue of translation, and to whether translating a book from a very different culture and historical time is possible. In this case, I think the answer is no, not because translating the author’s words might be impossible. What is impossible to translate is what the author hasn’t said, and which is, nevertheless, present in the book: a sensibility circumscribed to a certain culture and historical time. The idea of a bygone world and the accompanying nostalgia may be to some degree universal (in American literature, Gone with the Wind is a great example), but what differentiates an American and a Hungarian is that loss gives the latter a perverse pleasure. Compare the spirit of Scarlet O’Hara who, undeterred by all she’s lost, declares courageously, “Tomorrow is another day,” hopeful that she can start all over again, to Krúdy’s characters who will do tomorrow what they are doing today: reminisce about yesterday.
Add to the above the fact that, unlike most novels, Krudy’s novel has several centers from which radiate several stories. For the first half, a woman, Eveline, seems to be the main protagonist, but then, the focus shifts to her neighbor, Pistoli, who becomes the main character. Pistoli is the incarnation of the “old Hungary” whose loss the narrator (and the author) deplores, and with whom most American readers, especially women, would find it hard to identify: an ugly yet impressive man, presumably in his sixties, who venerates the bottle, takes himself for a philosopher (and doesn’t spare the reader his numerous “witticisms”), thinks with nostalgia about the dozens of mistresses from his past, and sometimes visits his former wives, now locked up (by him) in mental institutions. On the other hand, the mating dance of cruelty between Pistoli and Miss Maszkeradi, a wild woman and feminist avant la lettre, is fascinating, as is the relationship between her friend, the suave Eveline and her suitor, Andor Almos-Dreamer (who is, indeed, a dreamer). The novel doesn’t have a plot per se, but a series of events, which don’t really develop toward a climax; rather, they go up and down, and right and left until Pistoli’s death restores a lost equilibrium and brings some hope for the future of Eveline and Almos-Dreamer.
Krúdy has been hailed by his fellow Hungarians as not only one of the greatest Hungarian writers, but maybe the greatest. He has been compared to Robert Walser and Bruno Schulz because, like them, he is unclassifiable, and his greatness has been described by Sándor Márai as “almost past comprehension.” Given all the above, the reader may be slightly disappointed by his novel, Sunflower (written in 1918 and published for the first time in English in 1997). Lukacs’s introduction warns us about the difficulties to translate Krúdy’s poetic prose not only because of his style, but also because of the hidden allusions (cultural, historical) that only a Hungarian can understand. With an ambiguous formulation, he tells the reader that the translator “has tried” and “largely succeeded.”
As I read the book, I tried to find in my mind literary equivalents for it, and the only one I came up with was Craii de Curtea Veche by the Romanian writer Mateiu Caragiale, a novel written around the same time and hailed by Romanian writers as an unequaled masterpiece. What these books have in common, aside from a poetic, archaic style, is an atmosphere of fin-de-siècle, of a gone world that the narrators are trying to bring back through the power of words. The world they describe and which triggers their nostalgia is one in which men drink their fill and reminisce about past lovers—in other words, a world that is itself prone to nostalgic remembrance. In this world, the inn is the emblematic space of dramatic encounters, a microcosm from which stories about other worlds unspool, where an old woman spotted at a nearby table triggers a long story about a bygone beauty and the drama that had once surrounded her. This nostalgia about nostalgia creates a dreamlike universe, but this universe is far from being depicted as some kind of idyllic space; on the contrary, there is a crudeness and even an ugliness to the people in it. The apparent contradiction between this nostalgia and the world that is its object makes me think that these two authors may be impossible to translate for an American audience.
And this brings me to the issue of translation, and to whether translating a book from a very different culture and historical time is possible. In this case, I think the answer is no, not because translating the author’s words might be impossible. What is impossible to translate is what the author hasn’t said, and which is, nevertheless, present in the book: a sensibility circumscribed to a certain culture and historical time. The idea of a bygone world and the accompanying nostalgia may be to some degree universal (in American literature, Gone with the Wind is a great example), but what differentiates an American and a Hungarian is that loss gives the latter a perverse pleasure. Compare the spirit of Scarlet O’Hara who, undeterred by all she’s lost, declares courageously, “Tomorrow is another day,” hopeful that she can start all over again, to Krúdy’s characters who will do tomorrow what they are doing today: reminisce about yesterday.
Add to the above the fact that, unlike most novels, Krudy’s novel has several centers from which radiate several stories. For the first half, a woman, Eveline, seems to be the main protagonist, but then, the focus shifts to her neighbor, Pistoli, who becomes the main character. Pistoli is the incarnation of the “old Hungary” whose loss the narrator (and the author) deplores, and with whom most American readers, especially women, would find it hard to identify: an ugly yet impressive man, presumably in his sixties, who venerates the bottle, takes himself for a philosopher (and doesn’t spare the reader his numerous “witticisms”), thinks with nostalgia about the dozens of mistresses from his past, and sometimes visits his former wives, now locked up (by him) in mental institutions. On the other hand, the mating dance of cruelty between Pistoli and Miss Maszkeradi, a wild woman and feminist avant la lettre, is fascinating, as is the relationship between her friend, the suave Eveline and her suitor, Andor Almos-Dreamer (who is, indeed, a dreamer). The novel doesn’t have a plot per se, but a series of events, which don’t really develop toward a climax; rather, they go up and down, and right and left until Pistoli’s death restores a lost equilibrium and brings some hope for the future of Eveline and Almos-Dreamer.
April 24, 2012
Roxane Beth Johnson's Jubilee
Jubilee by Roxane Beth Johnson (Anhinga Press, 2006)
How can one distinguish between authenticity and fakeness when the latter is shrewd enough to give the appearance of the former? There are no rules for this, and in the world of poetry, fakeness—that is, clever lines giving the semblance of depth, but which, in fact, are hollow; or, seemingly “poetic” structures, which are nothing but imitations of other poets—often rules and fools. So, I can’t tell you how I know that Roxane Beth Johnson is an authentic poet, but I know it.
After reading Jubilee, a collection of (mostly) prose poems, the reader is brimming with Johnson’s world—parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, holy men and bums—and a certain religious feeling that can only come from the union of personal/familial history and the sacredness of a book (an “old black Bible”). “Religion” comes from the Lat. “religare,” i.e., to unite, to tie together, and Johnson’s religiosity is the kind that unites all the above into a whole carried under her skin. Even when she focuses on the formal aspect of a poem, there is something that transcends the surface. Listen to this:
“That old house arrives pure as tea having rinsed off its orchard and crawling vines. Windows are asterisks.”
Jubilee
How can one distinguish between authenticity and fakeness when the latter is shrewd enough to give the appearance of the former? There are no rules for this, and in the world of poetry, fakeness—that is, clever lines giving the semblance of depth, but which, in fact, are hollow; or, seemingly “poetic” structures, which are nothing but imitations of other poets—often rules and fools. So, I can’t tell you how I know that Roxane Beth Johnson is an authentic poet, but I know it.
After reading Jubilee, a collection of (mostly) prose poems, the reader is brimming with Johnson’s world—parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, holy men and bums—and a certain religious feeling that can only come from the union of personal/familial history and the sacredness of a book (an “old black Bible”). “Religion” comes from the Lat. “religare,” i.e., to unite, to tie together, and Johnson’s religiosity is the kind that unites all the above into a whole carried under her skin. Even when she focuses on the formal aspect of a poem, there is something that transcends the surface. Listen to this:
“That old house arrives pure as tea having rinsed off its orchard and crawling vines. Windows are asterisks.”
Jubilee
April 19, 2012
The Twelve Chairs by Ilf and Petrov
The Twelve Chairs by Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, and its sequel, The Golden Calf, have enjoyed an immense popularity in Russia and Eastern Europe. I had read (and greatly enjoyed) The Golden Calf many years ago in Romanian, and as a consequence, I was very excited by the recent publication of a new English translation of The Twelve Chairs (Northwestern, 2011, translated from the Russian by Anne O. Fisher). I wondered, however, whether a satirical Russian novel set in 1927 and published a year later could be understood by a contemporary American reader. Now that I read all its 500 plus pages, I can say that, surprisingly, the answer is yes. The American reader won’t understand all the references, of course, but most of the humor is fairly universal.
The plot is set in motion by the confession of Ippolit Matveevich Vorobyaninov’s mother-in-law on her deathbed: before the Soviet regime forced them out of their home she’d managed to hide her jewels, including her diamonds, in one of the twelve upholstered chairs that were part of a Gambs furniture set. All their possessions, including the chairs, were confiscated by the regime and allocated to various individuals and institutions. The problem is that the woman confessed to both her son-in-law and Father Fyodor, so both of them set out on a journey across the Soviet state, during which their paths sometimes cross, causing hilarious encounters. Vorobyninov is accompanied by Ostap Bender, “the smooth operator,” a self-appointed “technical director” who is one of the greatest crooks in the history of literature (a more vulgar version of Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull). The tragicomic demise of Father Fyodor is paralleled by the absolutely unexpected ending of the novel and of the diamond search. I won’t reveal it here, but suffice it to say that the Communist censors might have had something to do with it.
This journey across nations, cities, mountains and sea(s) allows the writers to depict all the social strata of Soviet society, and to give the reader a good understanding of its functioning in the 1920s. This novel proves, once again, that reading literature is the best way to understand history. Thanks should be given to Anne O. Fischer for her (mostly successful) effort to translate this huge and difficult novel, and for the research she’s done in the process. The book has a long, helpful and non-intrusive list of notes at the end.
[This is not the edition I read, but the link to the new edition is broken]
The plot is set in motion by the confession of Ippolit Matveevich Vorobyaninov’s mother-in-law on her deathbed: before the Soviet regime forced them out of their home she’d managed to hide her jewels, including her diamonds, in one of the twelve upholstered chairs that were part of a Gambs furniture set. All their possessions, including the chairs, were confiscated by the regime and allocated to various individuals and institutions. The problem is that the woman confessed to both her son-in-law and Father Fyodor, so both of them set out on a journey across the Soviet state, during which their paths sometimes cross, causing hilarious encounters. Vorobyninov is accompanied by Ostap Bender, “the smooth operator,” a self-appointed “technical director” who is one of the greatest crooks in the history of literature (a more vulgar version of Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull). The tragicomic demise of Father Fyodor is paralleled by the absolutely unexpected ending of the novel and of the diamond search. I won’t reveal it here, but suffice it to say that the Communist censors might have had something to do with it.
This journey across nations, cities, mountains and sea(s) allows the writers to depict all the social strata of Soviet society, and to give the reader a good understanding of its functioning in the 1920s. This novel proves, once again, that reading literature is the best way to understand history. Thanks should be given to Anne O. Fischer for her (mostly successful) effort to translate this huge and difficult novel, and for the research she’s done in the process. The book has a long, helpful and non-intrusive list of notes at the end.
[This is not the edition I read, but the link to the new edition is broken]
Notes on Books
Book reviews and occasional notes and thoughts on world literature and writers by an American writer of Eastern European origin.
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