Tag Archives: novel

Unforgiving Years

Unforgiving Years – a very suitable title for a novel that is reflecting the lives of the protagonists of Victor Serge’s posthumously published book about a group of life-long revolutionaries that have broken with the Communist Party after the show trials of the years 1936/37 in Moscow and the great purges in the Soviet Union, followed by the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

D – like all Comintern agents he is using several names and passports – has sent his “letter of resignation” to the service, a step that can result in any moment in retribution, i.e. assassination by one of the services loyal agents. Defectors are considered as traitors and have to be eliminated, in pre-War Paris where the novel starts like in any place of the world where Stalin’s long arm is reaching.

The novel consists of four sections, which are like large panels of a painting that shows the ideological, physical and personal devastations of these Unforgiving Years. In the first part, D is preparing his and his partner Noemi’s escape to the New World; the atmosphere is that of growing paranoia: both fear for very good reasons that a killer commando is after them and they are using all stratagems of conspiracy to stay safe. D tries to convince Daria, a close friend and fellow revolutionary whom he knows a long time (and was once in love with) to join them, but to no avail. Daria has made up her mind to go back to the Soviet Union.

In part Two, we are following Daria’s fate in the steppe of Kazakhstan and during the blockade of Leningrad. In part Three, she is on a dangerous mission behing enemy lines in a bombed-out German city during the last days of the war. These parts are full with some of the most impressive pages I have read about WWII; characters like the young officer Klim, the cripple Franz or the girl Brigitte and her fate leave a very strong impression on the reader. In the last part, Daria finally defects too and is joining D and Noemi – they have established themselves as small farmers in a remote part of Mexico – hoping that they have finally escaped the wrath of Stalin and the tentacles of his secret army of agents and killerati.

It is interesting to compare Serge’s novel with a few others written by so-called renegades; authors that were not only “fellow-travelers” of communism but that participated actively as Comintern agents or in other official or secret function in the fight for the revolution (or for Stalin), and that grew more and more disappointed after the trials and the pact with the devil Nazism. Unforgiving Years, Like a Tear in the Ocean (by Manes Sperber), The Great Crusade (by Gustav Regler), Darkness at Noon (by Arthur Koestler), and I could mention also many other works by Silone, Spender, Malraux, Orwell and others – they all have a central character that turns after a long inner fight from a convinced communist and revolutionary into a renegade, a person that objects to brutal and inhumane Stalinist ideology.

Contrary to the other mentioned authors, Serge was a life-long activist and a revolutionary by birth so to say. He was born into a Russian family of emigrants in Brussels – a distant relative was the explosives expert of the anarchist group that assassinated Czar Alexander II -, got involved in the activities of an anarchist group (probably the first one to use cars as escape vehicles during their bank robberies), served some time in prison and went shortly after the October Revolution to the Soviet Union were he became a part of the so-called “Left Opposition”. The later part of his life resembles a lot that of the novel’s main character,

Against all odds, this is also a novel of hope. D is expressing it after Daria arrives at his farm in Mexico and finds him changed and more calm, even philosophical:

“Every bit of basalt has its crown of greenery and flowers sprung from lifeless aridity. It’s a miracle of resurrection, like when the snows melt in our cold countries… For months there was nothing to see but a dried-up desert; who could guess that beneath the calcinated ground, millions of invincible seeds were concealed, ready to germinate. We observe that he true power is not that of darkness, or barrenness, but of life. All that exists cries, whispers, or sings that we must never despair, for true death does not exist.”

For me, Unforgiving Years is first of all a novel about the conscience and responsibility of the individual. Quite in the beginning, D – who is also the narrator of this part – says something that reflects perfectly the author’s opinion of that question, I suppose. And I think it is worth it to quote it in detail:

“What is “conscience”? A residue of beliefs inculcated in us from the time of primitive taboos until today’s mass press? Psychologists have come up with an appropriate term for these imprints deep within us: the superego, they say. I have nothing left to invoke but conscience, and I don’t even know what it is. I feel an ineffectual protest surging up from a deep and unknown part of me to challenge destructive expediency, power, the whole of material reality, and in the name of what? Inner enlightenment? I’m behaving almost like a believer. I cannot do otherwise: Luther’s words. Except that the German visionary who flung his inkwell at the devil went on to add, “God help me!” What will come to help me?”

From his memoirs which I had read long ago, I knew that Serge was an interesting author. Judging from Unforgiving Years it seems that he was even a very accomplished novelist who is still to discover; the very informative preface of the translator explains us that a recent biography on Serge wants to make us believe that “writing, for Serge, was something to do only when he was unable to fight.” (Susan Weissman, The Course Is Set On Hope, Verso 2002). I find this opinion wrong and the biographer’s decision to reduce Serge to anti-Stalinist fighter and propagandist only diminishes this extraordinary novelist without reason.

In a perfect world, the works of Serge and other writers who tried to open the world’s eyes to see the ugly truth about Stalinism, would be read far more widespread – and the works of those authors who started their careers as GPU henchmen that organised the assassination of renegades and ended up as Stalin or Nobel Prize winners would be, where they belong…but, as we all know, the Pablo Neruda industry is still blooming, whereas Serge is still virtually unknown to a big part of the reading public.

Thanks to New York Review Books, at least several of Serge’s books are available in English and we readers can do him justice: Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Midnight in the Century, Conquered City, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and Unforgiving Years, a masterpiece that I can recommend strongly.

Victor Serge: Unforgiving Years, translated by Richard Greeman, New York Review Books, New York 2008

 
© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-5. Unauthorized use and/or 
duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Everything Flows

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Ivan Grigoryevich has just been released after 30 years in the GULag. He is set free after Stalin’s death – if one can call it “freedom” what a former political prisoner experiences in a just slightly changed country that is still run by the basically same dictatorial regime and totalitarian ideology. Ivan Grigoryevich comes back to a life that is physically and morally still devastated by war and terror.

The brilliant novel Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman, based on the fate of Grossman’s brother-in-law, describes the destroyed, almost extinguished life of a man that – like many millions of others – fell victim to the great purges of the 1930s in the Soviet Union, after his release from a slave labor camp in the Kolyma region in the Far North East of Siberia.

We follow Ivan during his train ride to Moscow, listening to the conversations of some typical representatives of the “new” society, a society which is alien and repelling for Ivan.

We meet his cousin with wife, his only relative, who – although not a bad person – made many compromises and committed small acts of treachery in the past in order to make the career he (and his ambitious wife) felt he was entitled to have.

We meet the person who decades ago denounced Ivan (which meant death or long term imprisonment as a slave worker in the GULag; in the case of a death sentence, the families were usually informed that the convicted was being sentenced to “ten years without right of correspondence”).

We see Ivan in front of the house where his big love is living, a woman that long ago stopped to send letters to the prisoner, either because she thought that Ivan is dead or because she simply moved on with her life.

Ivan feels that all these people have got nothing to do with him anymore. But how to live and for what purpose? And how to make sense of this wasted life since the decades that are missing will not come back?

With a little bit of luck, Ivan finds a job in a workshop where he is accepted despite his past. (By the way a bit similar to the workshop in Kharkov in which my father used to work for many years during the Stalin era.)

And he finds against all odds love: he meets the widow Anna and experiences for the first time in his life a form of warmth and tenderness that was unknown to him. But Ivan’s and Anna’s happiness lasts only for a short while…As Anna puts it:

“Happiness doesn’t seem to be our fate in this world.”

Everything flows is an extremely touching novel. It contains many scences that leave their mark on the reader for a very long time.

There is for example the scene when Anna describes how she as a young party activist participated in the so-called “dekulakisation”, i.e. the forced expulsion of the so-called kulaks (usually small landowners) to remote and uninhabited areas, which meant for hundreds of thousands of them death by starvation.

Or the few pages that describe the fate of a gentle, meek, family of Ukrainian farmers in the early 1930s, who – like their whole village and thousands of villages in the Ukraine – became a victim of the so-called Holodomor, the probably biggest man-made killing by starvation in history. (The grain, including the seeds, that the OGPU, Stalin’s ruthless secret police extorted from the farmers was exported – with the money, Stalin bought machinery that should help to modernize the Soviet Union fast. At the same time 5-8 millions of potential “enemies” of the system “disappeared” by starvation and cannibalism.)

The novel contains also a mock trial that sheds a light on the absurdity of the great purge which sent dozens of millions of people to the camps; and chapters that try to explain the nature of the Soviet system by the character of its leaders, especially Lenin. An interesting thought is Grossman’s explanation that progress and slavery in Russia were always combined: periods of great progress (like under Peter the Great or Katharina) were always periods where individual freedom was even more reduced than before – a model which also Stalin seemed to have in mind when he made himself a “Red” Czar that was aiming to exterminate freedom completely in his empire.

Stylistically and regarding its composition the novel is slightly uneven. Grossman was still working on the book when he died, so what we have as readers is not the version that Grossman would have considered as ready for publishing. Anyway, it was obvious that he couldn’t have published this book during his lifetime. Too open is his criticism not only against Stalinism but against the roots of the Soviet system as a whole. Still, despite this unevenness, it is a great and extremely impressive achievement.

Grossman is not condemning anyone that denounced his neighbor, or who was a political activist that participated in what he or she later recognized as monstrous crimes, or who in order to protect his/her own family stopped social contacts with the family members of someone that was arrested. He is particularly sympathetic with the women who became a victim of Stalinism; their fate was frequently even worse than that of the men. He tries to understand why it all happened.

Many Russian authors have written about the GULag (and about its Czarist predecessors in the 19th century). In the West, mainly the books of Alexander Solzhenitsyn about the GULag are known and read; A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a great story, but unfortunately Solzhenitsyn’s other works are too frequently marred by his reactionary, anti-semitic prejudices and rhetoric.

To me, the beautiful novels of Vasily Grossman and the breathtaking stories of Varlam Shalamov about the GULag, are far more important and worth reading.

Vasily Grossman: Everything Flows, translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, with Anna Aslanyan, Vintage, London 2011

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-5. Unauthorized use and/or 
duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Nine Rabbits

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The first part of Virginia Zaharieva’s autobiographical novel Nine Rabbits consists of childhood memories of the narrator. Manda, as everyone calls her, grows up in Nesebar in socialist Bulgaria in a house at the Black Sea coast. The men in the big family are mostly or completely absent. Boris, the Grandfather, a good-natured and friendly man works most of its life abroad and comes home only during holidays for a few weeks. Even later when he gets older and is back in Bulgaria, he avoids to spend too much time at home – he doesn’t get along well with his wife, Nikula. Manda’s parents are divorced and her father lives hundreds of kilometers away in Sofia; also Manda’s mother who works far away is most of the time not at home.

The big family is governed by Grandmother Nikula with a hard hand. Not only is she beating Manda frequently, she is even able to torture her for no apparent reason with needles. Only when she is cooking or baking she seems to become a different person who is more human and less rigid – maybe that’s why Manda loves cooking so much; cooking seems to give her life (and also the novel) a structure even when things are getting otherwise messy and difficult to handle. Manda’s favorite receipes are printed in the book and additionally collected in a small booklet that comes with the novel – the dishes are comparatively easy to prepare and I suppose very delicious.

Beside her mother, who tries to protect her when she is at home, and a few childhood friends, Manda finds support and consolation at a nun’s monastery nearby. The nuns care for Manda’s (physical and psychological) wounds after Grandma has exercised again one of her cruel needle tortures; as a result Grandmother, who is an old activist of the Communist Party gets the monastery closed by the authorities and the nuns dispersed all over the country.

Politics cast a long shadow over this part of the novel – Prague 1968 is anxiously witnessed via the radio transmissions by the summer guests from Czechoslovakia; we read about Manda’s innocent friendship with a boy from the neighborhood; and finally her fate takes a turn to the better: her mother remarries and moves together with Manda to Sofia; later we learn of Grandfather’s and Grandmother’s death – they were divorced in old age.

The second part of the novel sets in decades later. Manda is now a 46-year old writer and therapist in Sofia. She has a son who is in the process to leave the house; a divorced husband (she was married for 13 years); a lover that is sixteen years younger than her; and she is in a serious crisis: writers block, panic attacks, the feeling that something has gone terribly wrong with her life.

While the first part of the novel is very much centered around the house in Nesebar where Manda spent a big part of her childhood, the second part involves changing places quite a lot.

We see Manda in Corfu; traveling with other writers through Europe by train; we see her having another panic attack in Moscow; her life in idyllic Kovachevitsa; her travel to Osaka; her yoga and other esoteric experiences with various groups that search for an alternative life style; we witness her at a performance of a writer colleague (Toma Markov) who reads her poems in a woman’s dress while Manda is serving huge amounts of tomato soup to the audience (“Don’t forget to bring your spoon!” was written on the invitation to the event); sometimes the second part of the novel gets a bit messy – just as the protagonist’s life. But, without wanting to reveal too much, it all ends well for Manda.

This is a book full of energy; the protagonist struggles to getting over the unhappy childhood of hers and the fact that the men in her life were always disappearing or withdrawing themselves; and although fate seems to repeat itself again (her lover Christos becomes more distant by accepting more jobs as an actor that keep him away from Manda over longer periods; and also her beloved son is leaving home), Manda finally seems to accept herself and reinvents herself as a strong, independent woman.

This is also a feminist book, a book that shows the failure of many men to really attach themselves to their wives and families. But it is definitely not the book of a man-hater, but of a rather compassionate person.

There are also plenty of weird, unforgettable moments in the book; a sense for the absurd; and a real wit and humor on many pages. Zaharieva has something to tell us and she has all the technical means at her command to tell her story in an interesting, intelligent, even enticing way. I enjoyed this book therefore very much and can only recommend it to everyone who loves a good novel. As Dubravka Ugrešić puts it:

“What makes this book exceptionally pleasant is Zaharieva’s vitality, her guiltless hunger for life, for every bit of it. It’s a happy book about a happy personal life.”

I read the English edition by Istros Books but compared it also with the original edition. The translation by Angela Rodel is excellent; unfortunately the English version frequently is alluding to the 1840s or 1850s, when in the original version it is referred to the Forties and Fifties (of the 20th century that is); that mistake is quite confusing especially for readers that are not very familiar with Eastern European history.

It is a real pity that all but one of the author’s Chinese calligraphies have disappeared from the English version; I also much preferred the cover of the Bulgarian version to the cover of the Istros edition; my copy contained also an additional (double) set of pages. I don’t want to sound petty, but I pay attention to such small details and it would be great if they could be changed in future editions. –

But these are very small criticisms. Istros is a great, courageous publisher with an excellent program. And English-speaking readers can be grateful that thanks to publishers like Istros, true gems like this one (and many others) are available to them.

Virginia Zaharieva: Nine Rabbits, translated by Angela Rodel, Istros Books, London 2012 (each copy includes the booklet 29 receipes, by Virginia Zaharieva)

This review is part of Stu’s (Winstonsdad’s Blog) Eastern European Lit month: https://winstonsdad.wordpress.com/2015/03/02/welcome-to-eastern-european-lit-month/

 
© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-5. Unauthorized use and/or 
duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

18% Gray

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When you take photos sometimes, you may know or not know that cameras have a light meter. All light meters including those in every camera must be calibrated to assume a certain percentage of light being reflected from the subject you want to photograph.

Each light meter can be used to determine correct exposure so long as the photographer knows the angle of measurement and knows how to isolate what is being measured. In addition to knowing the area from which the reading is taken, it is also important to know the approximate reflectance of that area. This is the part that can make using a reflected meter difficult, since the meter can’t determine subject reflectance for you and you must mentally calculate it.

Or you use a standardized surrogate subject such as the common Kodak Gray Card, which has a stated reflectance of 18%. Hence the title of this book, which has also a metaphorical meaning, as readers will find out.

Zack, the narrator/protagonist of this book – the fact that he has the same name as the author is a hint that probably a part of this novel is autobiographical – has two serious problems at the beginning of this book: Stella, his wife and the big love of his life has left him (and as we later learn: for good), and as a result of that Zack is in a severe crisis; and furthermore he comes unintentionally into possession of a big bag with marijuana.

What follows is a road trip from California to New York, and also a trip into the past of Zack’s and Stella’s lives. A man tries hard to find the woman he loves and whom he has lost (long before she physically left him); but he also tries to find again his vocation as an artist; and besides, he wants to sell the dope at the East Coast and maybe start a new life with the money.

The book is structured in a very interesting way: there is the story of Zack, after Stella left him, and his journey through the country; there are flashbacks that describe Stella’s and Zack’s story from the moment they met, in Varna, Bulgaria – by coincidence also a very important place in my life – , in the last days of the communist regime, their move to the U.S. as students, their attempts to build a new life – Stella as a painter, Zack as a photographer and after this fails, as a supervisor of test results for a pharmaceutical company -, and how their lives are drifting slowly apart; and there are short conversations between Zack and Stella, all recorded in moments when Zack takes photographs of Stella, and which give a clear indication of how their relationship slowly changes.

All three lines of this story have their own typography, so it is very easy for the reader to follow these permanent switches, which structure the texts into quite short sections. Here and also in the very good dialogues the reader feels that the author is also a prolific screen writer. This novel has a movie-like feel, and it is not surprising that it will be made (or is it already made?) into a movie.

The novel touches on many interesting topics: how do relationships change over time, and what can we do to prevent us from losing “it” – the love and also the purpose of life, which for Zack was first the music (when he was in Bulgaria, he started a career as front man of a punk band), later photography, and finally writing; it is also a novel about emigration and how it affects the identity of those who give up their home country and re-invent themselves somewhere else; it is a book about America (there are excellent descriptions not only about California and New York, but especially about the Mid West, Texas and all the other places Zack is crossing); can money really compensate us for other losses – the answer is obvious…; and a few more.

“I now realize that my American West was not a geographical place, but a sacred territory in my dreams. Perhaps everybody has their own Wild West. From a very young age, I knew with certainty that one day I would live in mine. I’d caress the yellow prairie grass and the wind would kiss my face. When did I lose all that? How did I manage to desecrate my West by replacing it with the plastic version of what I’ve been living in for the last few years of my life? “

I like about the book also that it is obviously in the tradition of the Künstlerroman (artist’s novel); but it reminds me at the same time of American road movies. There are plenty of absurd situations and people in the book, and also a kind of roguish humor which is a good antithesis to Zack’s and Stella’s sad story. I also like the somewhat ambiguous end and the wonderful last sentence:

“We watch the world outside through our reflections.”

A great book, if you ask me.

The English translation by Angela Rodel is flawless and excellent.

By the way, I read the English edition published by the Bulgarian publisher Ciela. For the cover they used a photo by the author (now editor-in-chief at the same publishing house) that fits this book very well.

PS: One – minor – correction: Old Firehand is of course NOT “a fictional native American hero” of several Karl May novels, as a footnote on page 190 informs us. “Hugh, ich habe gesprochen!”

Zachary Karabashliev: 18% Gray, transl. by Angela Rodel, Open Letter Books, Rochester 2013, Ciela, Sofia 2015

This review is part of Stu’s (Winstonsdad’s Blog) Eastern European Lit month: https://winstonsdad.wordpress.com/2015/03/02/welcome-to-eastern-european-lit-month/

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-5. Unauthorized use and/or 
duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Diary of a Country Prosecutor

The Case of the General’s Thumb

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“Kiev, night of 20th-21st May, 1997
Sergeant Voronko of the State Vehicle Inspectorate loved his snug little glass booth on Independence Square in the heart of Kiev, and never more than in the small hours, when Khreshchatik Street was free of traffic, and nipping out for a smoke was to experience a vibrant, blanketing silence very different from the fragile night stillness of his home village.”

But on that particular late evening, things turn out to be very different from usual for Sergeant Voronko. First he gets a call to go urgently to another post due to an emergency there, and when he has almost arrived there with his old Zhiguli car, he gets another call to go back again to his glass booth at Khreshchatik Street because his presence at the other post is no longer needed. When he is arriving back at his usual workplace, a corpse is hanging attached to an advertising balloon. The deceased is not only a distinguished general but also a presidential advisor and the circumstances hint at a crime with a political background. And, strangely enough, one of the general’s thumbs is missing. (At the end of the book we will know why.)

It is clear from the very beginning of the book that this is not an ordinary crime. The general’s connections, his links to the Ukrainian and also Russian Intelligence networks are uncovered step by step by the young investigator lieutenant Viktor Slutsky. Slutsky, and not one of his more experienced colleagues is dealing with the case – maybe someone thinks the rookie Slutsky will get (conveniently for certain people) lost in this complicated, entangled and twisted network of relations between all the players involved; or maybe he can be easily directed by someone who is pulling the strings behind the scenes? Both is very probable, and indeed Slutsky gets permanently calls on his mobile phone by a mysterious voice that is always strangely very well informed and tells the lieutenant what to do next. But when Slutsky meets Refat, a mysterious Tartar who works for the Russian Intelligence, he starts to be for the first time keeping a few secrets from the voice on the phone…

The other main line of the story follows Nik, an ethnic Russian that was recently expelled from Tajikistan with his family. Nik, with a background in police/intelligence work and a sound knowledge of German, is trying to get a job in Ukraine where he was born and where he intends to relocate his family too. Luck seems to be on his side when he is offered a job where exactly his abilities and experiences are needed. But he soon realizes, just like lieutenant Slutsky that he is mainly a pawn in a political chess game. He and Sakhno, the other agent he is joining to do some unclear business – including tossing fish over a garden gate, or carting a parrot around – in not exactly exciting German cities like Koblenz, Euskirchen or Trier, are always told what to do without any explanation – and they are also not supposed to ask too many questions.

It would spoil the fun if I would retell the story here in detail, so I better stop here with the synopsis.

You can read Kurkov’s novel like you would read any fast-paced crime/espionage genre novel. It is a real page-turner and I read it in one evening. There is a lot of action, good dialogues, very credible characters and an interesting story. All ingredients you need to enjoy a book of this genre.

But there is also a second, less obvious layer of the story. Kurkov is a master of intertextuality. The book is full of allusions to other works and writers of the genre but also to Russian literature. Ian Fleming, Eric Ambler, John Le Carre, but also Michail Bulgakov, Ilf & Petrov, Yevgeniy Zamyatin, to name just the few references which I have discovered – and I am sure there are much more in the book. If you are well-read, you will enjoy this book therefore even more.

Additionally, there is a dry humor in many scenes, for example in an early chapter when Slutsky goes home after work to his family:

“Now, up to the eigth floor, and supper. The lift had yet to be installed, a fact for which the tenants, except perhaps the elderly couple on the twelfth floor, were physically the fitter.”

And, although on the surface this is not the main topic of the book, the strained relations between Russia and Ukraine cast already their long shadows over the story:

“RUSSIA AND UKRAINE – NEITHER PEACE NOR WAR? Ran the eye-catching Izvestiya headline. It was a question, it appeared, of determining the frontier, or, more exactly, of the two sides being able to agree where it ran.”

In this novel, things are rarely as they seem to be at a first glance. Even an innocent turtle keeps a dark secret.

Kurkov is a compassionate author. Viktor Slutsky and Nik Tsensky, the two main characters in this book share the same dream: to have a normal life in a decent flat with their families. And when Kurkov is granting almost all surviving characters in the story a happy end, it is like he is winking at us readers. They might be pawns in a political chess game, but they keep their dignity, and as a reward deserve a fairy tale-like ending.

Andrey Kurkov was a new discovery for me: it was the first book by him I read, but it will be definitely not the last.

Andrey Kurkov: The Case of the General’s Thumb, transl. by George Bird, Melville House, New York 2012

 
© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-5. Unauthorized use and/or 
duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

The Violins of Saint-Jacques – the fantasy of an Orientalist

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Patrick Leigh Fermor was one of the greatest – if not the greatest – travel writers of the 20th century. The Violins of Saint-Jacques, the book I am reviewing here, is his only novel.

The narrator of the book spends part of his holiday on an Aegean island. He gets acquainted with Berthe, an elderly French lady who lives permanently on the island and who is a very respected figure there.

While dining at her home, the narrator gets interested in one of Berthe’s paintings, a landscape of the Caribbean island of Saint-Jacques. Since the narrator visited this region not long ago, an interesting conversation starts during which Berthe begins to tell the story of her life that is closely connected to Saint-Jacques. She has lived during the most happy and exciting years of her life in this tropical paradise.

Having lost her parents in France at the age of twenty, young Berthe has practically nothing except her good education. An invitation from a relative in Saint-Jacques to work as a governess for his children is accepted by the penniless young woman immediately. The reception by her cousin, Count Serindan, and his family is warm and friendly and the children, just a few years younger as Berthe get soon very attached to the new arrival.

Count Serindan is the richest landowner of Saint-Jacques and also its mayor. Although in his political opinions a monarchist and reactionary, the Count is a charming and warm person who governs his estate (like his family) as a well-meaning father; his black workers – some are actually not so dark as a result of generations of extramarital activities of the Serindans – are treated well and are genuinly fond of the Count; he is also adored by his children and Berthe. (The mother is a somewhat absent person, ill in a vague manner and either on holidays in Europe or withdrawn to her study room.)

The Count is not only a womanizer and philanderer, he is also a man of pleasure in a wider sense. He loves to organize house concerts – he plays several instruments very well -, he is an avid amateur actor, playwright and theater director; he also takes a strong interest in the newest literature from Europe. A kind of well-meaning renaissance ruler, transferred in time and space to the fin-de-siècle Saint-Jacques.

But even on a tropical island paradise not all is well. The count’s oldest daughter falls in love with a do-no-good whose identity is only revealed later; the oldest son falls in love with Berthe; and the arrival of a new Governor of Saint-Jacques from France, a man with considerably different views on politics and a few other things as the Count, trigger the threat of some serious trouble brewing on the island. All is overshadowed by the increasing activities of the volcano towering over Saint-Jacques…

In order to calm down the political tension and reconcile with his opponent, the new Governor, the Count invites for a big carneval celebration that is meticulously planned. And indeed, in the light of the relaxed atmosphere of the Mardi gras, both opponents seem to admit that maybe they thought wrong about their rival; but during the feast, things are happening that put more than one serious threat to the island and the well-being of the Serindan family. (I don’t want to spoil the story by telling too much.)

I have mixed feelings about the book. Leigh Fermor is one of my favorite writers of travel books. Also in this book he shows his excellent craftsmanship on many pages and in many details. The story is exciting, interesting and lively. The characters, especially Berthe and the Count will stay a long time with the reader. The setting on a tropical island and the description of a culture with which most readers will not be familiar, adds to the reader’s entertainment.

Nevertheless, I had two problems with the book.

First – and this is the smaller problem – it was a bit too much for me: political crisis; threatening duel; secret love affair with kidnapping; suicide threat because of unhappy love; the lepers that turn up during the feast and almost provoke a disaster; the threatening volcano. I would have gladly done without one or two of these crisis that all culminate at exactly the same moment – and I bet that would have considerably added to the credibility of the story. Sometimes less is more and this seems also to include the writing of novels.

Second – and this is the bigger problem -: Leigh Fermor presents us the island as a kind of paradise, a world that is in the state of harmony, where more or less everything is in the right place (at least until the arrival of the new Governor).

But let us have a look at the real society of the Creole Caribbean islands at the beginning of the 20th century. The huge majority of the population was excluded from any rights to master their fate and to participate in the nominally democratic elections. Although de jure abolished, de facto the situation of the negro workers was a kind of slavery; and they lived usually in great misery. The picture that Leigh Fermor is presenting us is that of a reactionary imperialist: the paternalistic landowner provides entertainment and alcohol to his black subjects – and they are happy and adore him. For Leigh Fermor this is how life should look like and it is with obvious nostalghia with which he is describing this orientalist fantasy (interracial sex by mutual agreement included – the reality usually looked very different).

Having an oppressor who shows some human decency, reads books, loves music and is a theater addict, like the Count, doesn’t make an oppressive imperialist society any better. Leigh Fermor was a man with conservative, if not reactionary ideas about society. It shows fortunately not (or not much) in his travel books. But it flaws his otherwise very entertaining novel considerably.

Patrick Leigh Fermor: The Violins of Saint-Jacques, John Murray 2008

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-5. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Who Is Martha?

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When the family doctor calls on a Sunday with urgent news, it means usually no good news. The news are indeed so bad that Luka Levadski, the hero of Who Is Martha? has to go to the bathroom and throw up – for the first time since ages.

“The last time it had happened to him, he had still been wearing knickers. What had the girl’s name been? Maria? Sophia? The young girl had allowed her hand to be kissed by a man with a moustache. In front of her a slice of cake. Jealousy had grabbed the schoolboy Levadski by the throat. He had stopped in front of the window of the cafe, taken a bow and spilled the contents of his stomach onto the pavement. Touching his chest, he’d slowly assumed an upright position again.”

The cancer diagnosis for the 96-year old Professor emeritus Luka Levadski, a capacity in the field of ornithology, is certainly devastating for him, but since he lives alone and is without relatives or close friends, it is not an event that makes the world turn upside down at his age. Consulting the shelf with the medical books in his private library, he is considering his situation:

“Cyclophosphamide, sounds like a criminal offense…checks the multiplication of rapidly dividing cells. Side effects: nausea, vomiting, hair loss. May damage the nerves and kidneys and lead to loss of hearing, as well as an irreparable loss of motor function; suppresses bone marrow, can cause anemia and blindness. Well, Bon appetit. Levadski would have liked to call the doctor and chirp down the line.

Tjue-tjue

Ku-Kue-Kue—Ke-tschik-Ke-tschik!

Iju-Iju-Iju-Iju!

Tjue-i-i!

If the doctor had asked him what this was supposed to be, Levadski would have stuck with the truth: A female pygmy owl attracting its mate, you idiot! And hung up. He felt like a real rascal. At the age of ninety-six Levadski was game for playing a prank.”

For Levadski, the decision is obvious: he will have none of these life-prolonging treatments and will die in style. He will buy a walking stick, an elegant new suit and hat, pull a few strings to get a passport and a visa for Vienna quickly and – thanks to the money in his bank account he got for his decades of publishing articles such as On the Red-Backed Shrike’s Humane Art of Impaling Insects and Large Prey on Thorns, or How Global Warming Alters Fish Stocks and Turns North Sea Birds into Cannibals in Western journals – is going on a visit to this place that is filled with childhood memories. Especially the regular visits of the Musikverein with his grand-aunts and the concerts there that, together with the piano lessons of his mother created a second lifelong passion in him: music.

While preparing for his last journey – he has no intention to come back to his flat in Lemberg (Lviv) – we get to know this remarkable person better. Levadski, son of two bird lovers had not an easy but an interesting life: born on the eve of the outbreak of WWI and on the same day when Martha, the last of a rare and now extinct species of passenger pigeons passed on in 1914, he survived two utopias (Austro-Hungary and the Soviet Union), a childhood overshadowed by the early suicide of his father, the war, exile in the mountains of Chechnya and later Siberia, and finally a late career as a professor with international recognition. It was a rather lonely life since Levadski never developed a deep relationship with the female sex:

“That he had a long time ago thought of winning over the opposite sex with his pathetic behavior, when his head had been filled with nothing but the mating dances and brooding habits of birds, was something he did not want to be reminded about. But he did think about it, he thought about it with a hint of bitterness. After a fulfilling academic life he knew: Women would have interested him more if they hadn’t constantly insisted on emphasizing that they were different from men. If they had been like female birds, a touch grayer and quieter than the males, perhaps they would have awakened his interest at the right time. Levadski would gladly have procreated with such a creature. Only he didn’t know to what purpose.”

The second half of the book sees Levadski in his new, last home: an old luxury hotel in Vienna, just around the corner of the Musikverein. We see him enjoying the big bath, bigger than his flat in Lemberg, we see him making acquaintances – with a taxi driver from the Ivory Coast who shares Levadski’s love of the German language; with a cheerful chamber maid from Novi Pazar, a small Balkan town; with Habib, the kind and music-loving Palestinian butler; with another old hotel guest, Mr. Witzturn with whom he is developing a kind of friendship culminating in a joint concert visit at the Musikverein followed by an evening in the hotel bar where they talk their mind about the meaning of life, friendship, and the advantages of gin as a basis to various cocktails.

In the end, Levadski looks back without bitterness. He re-discovered parts of his ego that seemed to be lost a long time ago; memories of happy moments with his parents come back; and he realizes that the gift to make friends even at an old age in the face of the end of his life makes it possible to cross barriers – physical one’s like borders, but also invisible one’s that are imposed to us by society, upbringing or our own prejudices. Or, as Levadski explains on the phone to a young intern of the Konrad Lorenz Institute:

“Barriers, barriers, barriers, you see, Madam, human beings are forever being confronted with limitations, internal or external. Sometimes the shoes are too tight, sometimes the coffin too close, do you understand what I mean?”

Luka Levadski finally breaks the barriers. And he even remembers the name of the girl he thought he had forgotten.

Who Is Martha? is a wonderful book. It is well-written, very entertaining and I read it two times in a row. It breathes sadness, wisdom, humor, and a deep human sympathy for its protagonist and people in general – they are not so different from birds, so they deserve that for sure would Professor Levadski probably say.

Marjana Gaponenko is a young author from Odessa who writes in German – what a great gift to the German language! Who Is Martha? was a big surprise for me and arguably the best book I read in 2014.

A word about the English edition: the translation by Arabella Spencer reads very smoothly and close to the original. New Vessel Press, a small American publisher with an extremely interesting program of translated fiction, is to be congratulated – this book will hopefully gain many readers and the attention it deserves. Also the cover is beautiful. A pleasure to have this book in hands.

I won the review copy of this book in the framework of the Wednesdays-are-wunderbar events of my blogger colleague Lizzy as part of the activities related to the German Literature Month. I am very grateful to have been provided with a copy of this amazing novel.

Marjana Gaponenko: Who Is Martha?, translated by Arabella Spencer, New Vessel Press, New York 2014

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Tschick or Why We Took the Car

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This review is part of the German Literature Month, hosted by Lizzie (Lizzies Literary Life) and Caroline (Beauty is a Sleeping Cat)

Usually I am not quoting from book blurbs. But in this specific case, I’ll gladly make an exception:

“Mike Klingenberg doesn’t get why people think he’s boring. Sure, he
doesn’t have many friends. (Okay, zero friends.) And everyone laughs at
him when he reads his essays out loud in class. And he’s never invited to
parties – including the gorgeous Tatiana’s party of the year.

Andre Tschichatschow, aka Tschick (not even the teachers can pronounce his name), is new in school, and a whole different kind of unpopular. He always looks like he’s just been in a fight, his clothes are tragic, and he never talks to anyone.

But one day Tschick shows up at Mike’s house out of the blue. Turns out he wasn’t invited to Tatiana’s party either, and he’s ready to do something about it. Forget the popular kids: Together, Mike and Tschick are heading out on a road trip. No parents, no map, no destination. Will they get hopelessly lost in the middle of nowhere? Probably. Will they meet crazy people and get into serious trouble? Definitely. But will they ever be called boring again?

Not a chance.”

Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Young Adult novel Why We Took The Car, Winner of the German Teen Literature Prize, sold so far more than one million copies. Again, I am usually not mentioning this kind of facts, But here I had the feeling that there can be nothing wrong with the reading culture when such a well-written book attracts such a big audience of a (partly) juvenile audience.

The novel is a fast and straightforward story of two 14-year old boys that grow up in Berlin.

Mike comes from a wealthy family, although his father is recently “preparing for bankruptcy” because his real estate development project was successfully stopped by some environmentalists (or environmental fascists as Mike’s father, the least endearing personnage in this book calls them.) But living in a decent neighborhood, in their own house with garden and swimming pool doesn’t compensate for the downsides of this idyll: Mike’s mother, although a genuinely loving and funny person, has a serious alcohol addiction that requires regular treatment, and Mike’s father doesn’t even hide it that he has an affair with his “assistant”, a girl just a few years older than Mike.

Tschick (also the title of the novel in German) on the other hand is an immigrant from Russia of German/Russian/Jewish/Gypsy origin – but since this information comes from the notoriously ironic and unreliable Tschick, we cannot be really sure about the truth of this information. Tschick is coming from a completely different social background, although we – like Tschick’s classmates or teachers are for most part left in the dark about the details.

When Tschick turns up surprisingly at Mike’s home in a…ehem…”lent” Lada, a series of events is unfolding that remembered me of a road movie. First the two misfits turn up uninvited at Tatiana’s birthday party, where Mike can hand over his present, a pencil portrait of the singer Beyonce on which he has worked for weeks. Then the two are off to Wallachia, a region somewhere in the European periphery where Tschick has relatives – again this is his own version and we can’t be sure if he is reliable here. (A short remark here: when in German someone wants to express that another person lives in the middle of nowhere, he usually says that this person lives in the “Wallachei”. This coincidence is rather funny, and again we can’t be sure if Tschick’s quest for Wallachia wasn’t meant ironically.)

Without map and with very limited knowledge regarding directions the two boys make their way to the region south of Berlin, once obviously passing by the Lausitz region – they remark street signs in another language without having crossed a border – and on their way they have all kind of odd people meeting them. One of them is Isa, a girl that is so different from the admired Tatiana, and although she is a bit strange, she leaves a lasting impression on Mike. Maybe there is more to girls than just good looks? At least with Isa it is possible to have a real and meaningful conversation and she seems much more grown up than Mike’s other classmates.

Some other meetings Tschick and Mike have on the road will for sure stay also with the reader for a long time. My favorite was the funny family that didn’t go shopping in the only village supermarket but who celebrated each lunch with a kind of quiz show better than in any TV channel. Also Horst Fricke, a former sharpshooter that the two encounter, is quite a number. His slightly hostile approach melts away rather quickly and he gives the two youngsters some practical wisdom about love and life:

“There’s one thing you need to understand, my doves”, he said, finishing up. “Everything is meaningless. Love too. Carpe diem.”

Not surprisingly, the joy ride ends in quite a mess. But although the two friends have a court trial – Tschick has to do time in a youth detention center, but Mike is more lucky since he has to do some community work only – the reader gets the impression that these two boys will make their way in the future. They experienced friendship together, maybe for the first time, and they learned also an important lesson about life:

“Ever since I was a little boy my father had told me that the world was a bad place. The world is bad and people are bad. Don’t trust anyone, don’t talk to strangers, all of that. My parents drilled that into me, even TV drilled that into me. When you watched the local news – people were bad. When you saw primetime investigative shows – people were bad. And maybe it was true, maybe ninety-nine percent of people were bad. But the strange thing was that on this trip, Tschick and I had run into almost only people from the one percent who weren’t bad. And now here I was, getting a random stranger out of bed at four A.M., for no good reason, and he was super nice and even willing to help us. Maybe they should tell you things like that in school too, just so you’re not totally surprised by it.”

I liked particularly about the book that although it is written with a light hand and is full of dialogues that make the reader laugh or smile, it takes its two main characters so serious; there is none of the patronizing attitude and the pseudo-funniness that makes so many books written for Young Adults such a depressing read. To be young is frequently not at all funny, and these two boys are in a way terribly lonely. The good thing is that the book shows that no matter how strange you may think you are, you can still make true friends in life whom you can trust even with your secrets (Tschick has such a secret and that he trusts it to Mike is a great sign of friendship).

Wolfgang Herrndorf (1965-2013) was a painter and illustrator; his writing career started late and gained only momentum when he was already terminally ill with a rare form of brain cancer (glioblastom). I intend to review his book Arbeit und Struktur (Work and Structure) soon. Those of you who read German can have a look at this text that was first published as a blog and documentation of the last months before his suicide here.

My reading copy was provided by Lizzy, the co-host of the German Literary Month as a giveaway of one of her Wednesdays-are-wunderbar events. I am grateful to have had a chance to review this book.

Wolfgang Herrndorf: Why We Took the Car, translated by Tim Mohr, Andersen Press, London 2014

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Joseph Roth’s Rebellion

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This review is part of the German Literature Month, hosted by Lizzie (Lizzies Literary Life) and Caroline (Beauty is a Sleeping Cat)

Joseph Roth is nowadays mostly known as a literary fiction writer but in the 1920s and early 1930s his reputation as one of the most prolific journalists was outshining even his fame as a novelist. To those who want to get to know the full Roth, I recommend therefore his journalistic work; frequently he touches issues in his articles that he later on used as material or inspiration for his literary prose.

Roth was best when it came to social issues, to the living conditions of the ordinary, mostly poor population of Austria, Germany, France, and the other countries he visited. He wrote for example several long pieces for the Frankfurter Zeitung and the socialist Vorwärts about the fate and the living conditions of the crippled and physically handicapped ex-soldiers of WWI – if you know the artwork of Otto Dix or George Grosz you know how terribly millions of men were mutilated for the rest of their mostly miserable lives.

One such victim of WWI is Andreas Pum, the central figure of Rebellion, the novel that was also first printed in Vorwärts before a book edition was published. Andreas lost a leg in the war, but he seems strangely happy. Not only has he survived, he also got a medal (one of those pieces of metal that governments are quick to hand out) and a license to play a barrel organ and so he can make a living from the few coins he gets from the people listening to his repertoire. To him that is fair enough.

Andreas is a simple, uneducated man. He doesn’t reflect his situation and those war cripples that complain about their fate or the lack of support from the government, he considers as malingerers and thieves. Andreas is at this stage the complete negation of the rebel. He just wishes to improve his life a bit and to have a wife and family. A good fate – so it seems to Andreas – sends him a widow whose plump forms attract him and soon he moves in to the widow’s house and can enjoy the life of a husband. He loves the widow’s daughter like his own child and even for Muli, the small donkey that carries his barrel organ, he has tender and friendly feelings. Andreas is a kind man.

Everything could be perfect for Andreas, but one day he is being insulted by a rude passenger in the tram, one word gives another and the verbal argument is followed by physical violence. A policeman is soon on the scene and Andreas will be held responsible by the court for his violent behavior. How Andreas becomes – just by coincidence and certain unpredictable events in combination with the vileness of the public organs such as the police – a victim of a system that always holds people like Andreas down, shows Joseph Roth’s mastery and also his sympathy with people like Andreas, who are always the victims. And who usually even don’t remark it.

To read how Andreas is going through a real ordeal is depressing; although he is just 45 years old, he looks with his completely white hair already like a very old man; but the more he is physically degrading, the more conscious he becomes about his real situation, the more he becomes a rebel – a person who disagrees with the order of things.

When I read the book, I realized that there were certain elements you can find also in most other of Roth’s novels and long stories: the main character slips down like on an inclined plane, the physical degradation corresponds with an awakening in terms of self-consciousness and acts of rebellion (like not praying to God anymore), and the tone of the narrative is always close to the legend. The similarities to Job and Legend of a Holy Drinker in this respect are particularly stunning.

Rebellion might not be the best novel of Joseph Roth, but I found it well written and touching. For those who are familiar with Roth’s oeuvre it will be particularly interesting how in this early work he prefigured many topics and tropes that he was also using in his most mature works of the late 1920s and 1930s.

Joseph Roth: Rebellion, transl. by Michael Hofmann, Picador 2000

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Mytwostotinki

Books – and anything else that interests me…

Tag Archives: novel

Unforgiving Years

Everything Flows

Nine Rabbits

18% Gray

Diary of a Country Prosecutor

The Case of the General’s Thumb

The Violins of Saint-Jacques – the fantasy of an Orientalist

Who Is Martha?

Tschick or Why We Took the Car

Joseph Roth’s Rebellion