A collection of four novellas/short stories by Brenner. What stuck out to me - apart from odd words like תאבדע (is that curious?) that have not survivA collection of four novellas/short stories by Brenner. What stuck out to me - apart from odd words like תאבדע (is that curious?) that have not survived in Hebrew - is the theme of people who have made aliya and regret it, the vicissitudes of life in Palestine in the early twentieth century not really easier than the lives they have left behind. As one character in עצבים (Nerves) puts it:
It's a pity that there, in all those places, they talk so much about "our desirable land"…maybe that's why the pain is so great when one comes here…waking from the dream
In בין מים למים (Between the Waters), a poet, Shaul, has made up his mind to leave, and is trying to flirt with two women. Leaving is controversial, but the Jewish community is economically precarious and physically insecure. As the funeral of a watchman looms, a teacher contemplates getting hired as his replacement: the relatively attractive pay is worth the danger. In response to a plague, the residents of Jerusalem plan a "Black Hupa": a wedding between two orphans, held in a cemetery, a custom arousing disgust from the more radical secularists (one of whom calls to tear down the Western Wall). It is a situation where cynical, hardened businesspeople can get by, intellectuals flee to Vienna, and everyone else is trapped in grinding poverty. Shaul compares the situation of those coming to the Land of Israel hoping to remake themselves as farm-labourers to that of a failed poet, all of whose poems are rejected, who is unable to do anything else: the society fundamentally lacks the ability to make it as a self-sustaining farm community. They have bet it all on something they simply have no aptitude for.
In this way all of these stories are existentialist, asking what one does after being failed by the usual reasons for existing. Brenner is a fan of dramatic punctuation and pretty much every paragraph is in this style:
- But why would you…you couldn't…a shame! A disgrace! - And why shouldn't I… Aharon fumed and cried out loudly, his eyes full of blood: - Your homeland is here, not Russia!
In the second story a man hears a friend tell his story of coming to the Holy Land and encountering a widow and her daughters. The journey is tough (they are fleeced by a scammer in Alexandria) and the arrival is tough. Yet, they seem to feel, the rest of the world is also bad for Jews - what else is there to do? When on a train in Berlin the man hears a Litvish letter Shin (pronounced Seen) out of the mouth of one of the young orphans, he just wants to hug her. The story ends with the travellers arriving and meeting their people, sitting down to eat and chat in an ambient glow of landsleit, unzere. They sit around a table and talk, drink coffee, and eat salted fish. With my people, one feels, it will be OK.
המוצא (The Way Out) portrays a miserable situation, where more and more poor immigrants keep arriving, and the community doesn't want to let them in because there are so few resources anyway. A woman has a thin, mosquito-bitten baby, which dies and the narrator volunteers to buries her. In the process he hurts his foot, getting him into a sick bed and exempted from work duties - he has found the titular way out. In עוולה (Injustice), a WWI British officer knocks on the door, fleeing Turkish captivity. The group debates what to do and one of them runs out to rat him out to the Turks. They see him being led away, filled with guilt, until they hear him falsely accuse them of stealing his watch - satisfied that now they are victims of injustice.
Among the great Hebrew writers, Brenner is perhaps the most conflicted. He was unhappy here, and failed as a farm-worker (eventually getting a job as a Hebrew teacher at the Herzliya Gymnasium). He had questions, but no real answers, before he was tragically murdered in 1921. Israel today would be familiar to him, for as much as things have changed, the same questions are still being asked....more
Is this the most Ashkenazi novel ever? The author, Haim Be'er, writes about a protagonist (Haim Be'er) receiving a mysterious invitation to visit an AIs this the most Ashkenazi novel ever? The author, Haim Be'er, writes about a protagonist (Haim Be'er) receiving a mysterious invitation to visit an Austrian castle at the expense of mysterious fish tycoon, a fan of Be'er's best-known work, Havalim (published in English as The Pure Element of Time). He wants to preserve the memory of the shtetl of Ovruch - birthplace of Be'er's father and the tycoon's mother - paying for its remaining Jewish inhabitants to spend their last days in a luxurious retirement in the castle, and hiring Be'er to tell their stories. The story gets increasingly bizarre, and I can't say much more without spoiling things.
Havalim was about Be'er's relationship with his mother; this is an attempt to work through the author's much more difficult relationship with his father. In this it somewhat reminded me of Marco Roth's memoir The Scientists, a literature scholar's unpuzzling of his father that ends up mostly discussing literature. The literary references here are more broad than deep (there are brief discussions of Alterman, Amir Gilboa, Amichai, Isaac Babel, Homer and Joyce). The book is in some way about how an author relates to his past and if it's possible to take back words said to the dead.
Be'er has been praised for his rich prose, mixing in Biblical and Talmudic Hebrew. In general I appreciate this but here I actually found his writing often clunky and overly formal to the point of lifelessness. Rather than enhancing the content, many of these phrases seemed conspicuous and excessive, as if trying to fill a quota. Another small point is the way each Yiddish expression is translated in full in a separate phrase, the longest and most annoying way to do this. (Sort of like this: "'x y z,' she said, informing us that the x is always y when z.")
Also worth mentioning is the surprising self-aggrandisment of the protagonist. Inserting his real self into a magical realist novel gives the writer the chance to have everyone else fawn over his knowledge and talent, and compete for the chance to lavish gifts on him and invite him to expensive dinners. One line that stuck out is when Livorno, the writer's ever so slightly sinister patron, offers him a cigar so rare and expensive that "not even Prime Ministers have had the chance to smoke this". (I couldn't help thinking of Israel's current cigar-loving Prime Minister.) It struck me as a shabby and obvious bit of wish fulfillment. I would have expected a bit more self-awareness from such a sensitive and thoughtful writer....more
Zuleika Dobson* is "not strictly beautiful", but somehow exotic. "An Elizabethan would have called her gipsy". But now, in the Edwardian era, she is aZuleika Dobson* is "not strictly beautiful", but somehow exotic. "An Elizabethan would have called her gipsy". But now, in the Edwardian era, she is an irresistible socialite. (All we know of her background is that her parent's marriage was frowned upon, and she was orphaned early.) After a failed turn as a governess, she learns to do magic tricks and makes a career out of it. The star of European and American society, she drops in on sleepy Oxford to visit her grandfather, Master of the unfortunately named "Judas College" (based on Merton, the author's alma mater).
This is an odd, half-baked book. It is somewhat an affectionate parody of Oxford life - the combination of snobbery and extreme shyness, the obsession with boat races, the manners of the American Rhodes scholars. It's also a reductio ad absurdum of Young Werther, as the entire undergraduate body commits suicide to prove their devotion to Zuleika. Classical references abound. Also, the narrative POV switches twice during the novel, the last time to an omniscient author nominated by Clio to explain some of the supernatural events (such as the two black owls who arrive on the night before the death of a Duke of Dorset). Having said that, it is funny, here are a few lines I laughed at:
If you married me…You would have many strange and fascinating rights. You would go to Court. I admit that the Hanoverian Court is not much. Still, it is better than nothing.
To love and be scorned - does Fate hold for us a greater inconvenience?
(the day before the mass suicide) Sorry, unable. It’s just turning eleven o’clock, and I’ve a lecture. While life lasts, I’m bound to respect Rhodes’ intentions.
(A man sits writing his will) He gnawed his pen, and presently altered the “hereby leave” to “hereby and herewith leave.” Fool!
* Pronounced Zuleeka, per an opening note from the author. In the Islamic tradition, it is the name of the wife of Potiphar who tempted Joseph....more
Is this a memoir? Seemingly so, although the (fantastic) opening line offers something of a caveat:
From my mother I learned that the reality we percei
Is this a memoir? Seemingly so, although the (fantastic) opening line offers something of a caveat:
From my mother I learned that the reality we perceive, the one susceptible to the interference and violence of people, is shallow and wretched; that its power will never match the beauty of stories and events which deserve to have happened, but which owing to the weakness of reality and limits of life never came to fruition.
The author's mother related bits of family history in loving detail, some of which he later discovered to have been impossible - to which she responded, impatiently, "it's a fact".
The essays that follow relate to a childhood in a lost world, the Yekkish traditional Orthodoxy of the South Jerusalem neighbourhoods of Rehavia, Katamon, and Arnona, today mostly filled by luxury condos serving as holiday pieds-à-terre for diaspora Jews. The community existed in between the faultlines of today's religious communities, dismissive of the insufficiently pious Mizrachi and Bnei Akiva (although even they were better than the worst, the religious scouts) and set apart from the Haredi world because of its Hirschian principle of Torah im Derech Eretz - an openness to secular wisdom hard to defend in a polarising religious scene, which gradually wanes as the book progresses.
Today there is little left of this community, which has been absorbed - as so often with compromise positions - into the extremes on both of its flanks. Weiss himself abandoned his faith (the process unfolds in the book) and is today a literature professor at Ben Gurion university. Some of his stories are typical of the time: an elderly Hungarian survivor wandering the streets half-naked, cursing God in Yiddish; or a Mizrahi classmate whose barmitzvah, to the horror and fascination of his peers, features three belly-dancers. But they also illustrate his growing alienation from a religious practice which seems simultaneously boring and meaningless, and also a source of guilt and fear. A parallel theme is his growing love of literature, which culminates in his purchase of a book by David Avidan featuring his poem Yipuy Ko'ach (Power of Attorney):
[To Whom it May Concern]
What justifies above all The loneliness, the great despair The strange bearing of the yoke… Is the simple, decisive fact That we actually have nowhere to go
This book opens with a quote from Borges - I'll get to it in a moment - but it reminded me of another line of his, something about how instead of writThis book opens with a quote from Borges - I'll get to it in a moment - but it reminded me of another line of his, something about how instead of writing some kind of genre-bending, experimental novel, it is more satisfying and more efficient to write a story in which that novel exists, and let the reader imagine it.
This book was a major milestone in Israeli fiction, checking off a lot of the boxes of high-concept, postmodern literature: a mix of styles, ranging from academic to Biblical to demotic; multiple different perspectives, made distinct by typographic cues; several (ostensibly) unrelated plots which share a common theme, thought what it is is left as an exercise to the reader. (It also seems to overlap with some of the events in Shimoni's previous, as yet untranslated novel, מעוף היונה.) Oh, and it's an absolute doorstopper, and the author gives no interviews, but has said once that he supposes a certain painting by Magritte might be similar to the story.
[image]
(Pictured: a candidate...)
The three stories are: firstly, a group of reservists and enlisted soldiers on a remote IDF base work on producing an army safety film. Each has flashbacks to past memories set off in parentheses, which make up the bulk of the story, especially the director, a failed auteur. In parallel a flash-forward has a forensic investigator watching the film, since it led to a fatal fire. Secondly, an art student in Paris shepherds several clochards to a morgue, where he poses them as a masterpiece he has been assigned to copy (Mantegna's Lamentation of Christ).
[image]
The final story is a short, fake academic monologue about an ancient pagan people's attempt to make a giant statue of their god, which fails since even the most ambitious project would belie the unimaginable dimensions of the actual deity.
Shimoni's epigraph is a well-known line from Borges
In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province.
Looking for themes that bind this triptych, we might suggest some kind of fractal infinite regress: the more we look into details of the world, the more details we find. Even hundreds of pages about a scene of a few minutes do not begin to exhaust its actual depths. Or is it about creative hubris? Or some kind of darkly nihilist humour, in the spirit of Beckett?
Who knows? I found it a slog, especially since the all of the characters, of different nationalities, genders and ages, have the same "Yinglish" intonation ("What, I should stay there until I die? I was worth nothing to her, a bone she wouldn't give me…") I'm not sure if this was a deliberate choice by the South African translator Michael Sharp, whose work is overall very impressive. A thought-provoking book, and I'm glad it exists in Hebrew literature, but not convinced it's worth the time....more
Drenched in gloom and squalor; Emily in Paris this is not. (Closer perhaps to Down and Out in Paris and London). An American expat in Paris, runniDrenched in gloom and squalor; Emily in Paris this is not. (Closer perhaps to Down and Out in Paris and London). An American expat in Paris, running away from a messy home life and complicated relationship with his father, and with a vague need to "find himself" ("an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced"), falls into an affair with an Italian bartender. That the narrator, David, is white is alluded to only once, in the opening paragraph:
My ancestors conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe into a darker past.
It's an interesting choice, which Baldwin explained as out of necessity, not being able to challenge the reading public with a hero both black and gay (this coming out soon after the semi-autobiographical Go Tell it on the Mountain). But making David an all-American blonde WASP also underlines his internal conflict, his self-hatred which he takes out on his lover Giovanni, his disgust for the titular (grimy, dim, claustrophobic) room; he always feels that he has a nobler and better life somewhere else, and the central tension of the book is his realisation that he doesn't.
"I would not like to go to Italy - perhaps, after all, for the same reason you do not want to go to the United States."
"But I am going to the United States," I said, quickly. And he looked at me. "I mean, I'm certainly going to go back there one of these days."
"One of these days," he said. "Everything bad will happen - one of these days."
"Why is it bad?"
He smiled, "Why, you will go home and then you will find that home is not home anymore. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home." He played with my thumb and grinned. "N'est-ce pas?"
"Beautiful logic," I said. "You mean I have a home to go to as long as I don't go there?"
He laughed. "Well, isn't it true? You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back."
(Which reminds me of an explanation I once read about why we procrastinate, that to do something in time would require you to do your best effort and thus have no way of explaining any shortcomings in it, whereas rushing it in at the last minute lets you feel that you have only partly invested in it, and could have done better.) Another way to read the book, I guess, is as a portrayal of how anxiety and repressed trauma can prevent people from forming healthy relationships, as they are unable to separate the object of love from their own self-directed feelings of guilt and inadequacy. (This was apparently a reading that Baldwin encouraged.)
Ok, final point: I guess I have an overactive work ethic but I find it really hard to read books about people who spend their lives hanging out in bars and "borrowing" money from wealthy friends. Get a job!...more
Book two out of twelve (or part two within the first of four "movements") from Powell's sprawling, Proustian recreation of the demimonde he was raisedBook two out of twelve (or part two within the first of four "movements") from Powell's sprawling, Proustian recreation of the demimonde he was raised in, starting from school and university days in A Question of Upbringing to early twenties here (in roughly 1928/9). The narrator Nick Jenkins works in London in the rare books world and tries to figure out his quarter-life crisis, while running into old school mates (and getting closer with frenemy Widmerpool), and discussing timely topics like German rearmament and the Earl Haig statue debacle.
It's funny how widely critical opinion ranges on this, with one extreme being that it is as great as Joyce (per Clive James) or Proust (as Perry Anderson argued a few years ago in the LRB); with the other end being "upmarket soap opera" in the words of Auberon Waugh, who called the books a practical joke played by a Welshman on Australian expats such as James trying to grok English culture. My take is that a reasonable thing to want from literature is insights into other minds and unwritten social codes, and this is something Powell delivers in spades. His ability to x-ray a social scene and anatomise everyone's insecurities and motivations - something, obviously, to which upper-class English society readily lends itself - is unmatched. The antihero of Widmerpool is also a brilliant creation, the kind of "sociopathic status-maximiser" (to borrow a friend's term) whose entire personality is subsumed by the desire to get ahead, be recognised, and achieve power. (We all know one or two.) The books are also, despite the long and baroque sentences, incredibly fun and readable.
At the same time, there are other things might want from great literature that is absent here: broader ideas, some kind of ethical or philosophical vision, unique forms of aesthetic and linguistic expression; the hint of subterranean depths beneath the work's surface. Obviously not everyone wants this! But it is the essence of the books I have loved most, and one that pure social observations, no matter how artfully done, do not contain.
Here are some quotes I enjoyed - not necessarily the most representative, just a couple which stuck with me:
She was also fond of remarking: "Eleanor is not a bad old girl when you get to know her," a statement unquestionably true; but, since human life is lived largely at surface level, that encouraging possibility, true or false, did not appreciably lighten the burden of Eleanor’s partners.
However, personally I used to enjoy Barnby’s pronouncements on the subject of feminine psychology, and, when I came to know him well, we used to have endless discussions on that matter. This — as Barnby himself liked to believe - almost scientific approach to the subject of "women" was in complete contrast to Peter Templer’s, and, I think, to Stringham’s too, both of whom were incurious regarding questions of theory. In a different context, the antithesis of approach could be illustrated by quoting a remark of Stringham’s made a dozen or more years later, when we met during the war. "You know, Nick," he said, "I used to think all that was necessary to fire a rifle was to get your eye, sights, and target in line, and press the trigger. Now I find the Army have written a whole book about it."
And here is Powell in his most philosophical mood, which usually appears at the beginning or end of the books:
Certain stages of experience might be compared with the game of Russian billiards, played (as I used to play with Jean, when the time came) on those small green tables, within the secret recesses of which, at the termination of a given passage of time—a quarter of an hour, I think—the hidden gate goes down; after the descent of which, the white balls and the red return no longer to the slot to be replayed; and all scoring is doubled. This is perhaps an image of how we live. For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected, so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity.
A dry, deadpan satire of pompous intellectuals, narrated by a cat. The cat is also fairly pompous: apparently the "I am" of the title, 吾輩は (wagahai, "A dry, deadpan satire of pompous intellectuals, narrated by a cat. The cat is also fairly pompous: apparently the "I am" of the title, 吾輩は (wagahai, "my fellows"), is an affectation that was archaic even when this came out in 1905. The Japanese take pronouns very seriously. As this fascinating article shows, wagahai is nowadays associated mainly with this book, but also with Bowser and Professor Snape.
By the current rules, we're supposed to call the author Sōseki Natsume, but it seems fitting to use the traditional order for a man who served as a bridge between Japanese and British culture. Sōseki spent two years in London, which he found hostile and depressing (sounds about right!) It is the subject of his next book, Rondon Tō (Tower of London). But his love of English literature runs deep (the bore Waverhouse references a pretty obscure work of Meredith, Sandra Belloni). All the names are translated literally (by Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson) to preserve the peculiarity of the Japanese: Waverhouse is 迷亭 (Meitei), Sneaze is 珍野苦沙彌 (Chinno Kushami), Coldspoon 水島寒月 (Mizushima Kangetsu). This book, mostly a parody of pedantic scholars, is full of references to scholarship, mostly Western (although you are never sure: when Waverhouse refers to "that Chinese classic which is constructed from pairs of parallel anecdotes, one ancient and one modern, about famous men"…is this not Plutarch?*)
Like much of Sōseki's work, I Am a Cat is preoccupied with the disorientation of the cultural and intellectual changes that followed the Meiji Restoration. For centuries, the Japanese were "a people dwelling alone", their language and culture totally different from even that of their immediate neighbours. Then they took in a lot of Western ideas very quickly. That's a lot to absorb, even for a cat.
* Another great one is this story I had to look up to believe:
I’m told that years ago when Hannibal was crossing the Alps, the advance of his army was impeded by a gigantic rock inconveniently blocking the mountain path. Hannibal is said to have soused the stone with vinegar and then to have lit a bonfire underneath it. The rock thus softened, he sawed it into segments, like someone slicing fish-paste, and so passed all his army safely on its way.
Bought at a used bookstore in (according to the receipt I used as a bookmark) 2017, out of a vague sense that I remembered the author's name from the Bought at a used bookstore in (according to the receipt I used as a bookmark) 2017, out of a vague sense that I remembered the author's name from the online lit scene of a few years before (HTMLGIANT, Alt Lit Gossip, Hipster Runoff, all now gathering digital dust), and only read it now. It did in fact take me back to that scene, from which Tao Lin is probably the biggest name (although Taylor seems to have fared well: his most recent novel carries praise from Jenny Offill, Lauren Groff and Joshua Cohen). This collection bears all the hallmarks of the genre, for good and ill. (The title, diegetically introduced as graffiti in the first and last stories, is a good indicator.)
It is, above all, irony poisoned: no-one is ever excited, enthusiastic, or God forbid, sincere; they are 20-something ("CLASS OF 2000", one recalls), drunk and high, rootless; anarchist punk musicians, fast food employees, grad students, hobos. One exception works at a hedge fund: he pines unsuccessfully for a masochistic artist, who will not leave her boyfriend for him, before drunkenly acceding to an older gay man. With the exception of that story (set in NYC), the book's backdrop is the middle-class wasteland of Floridian suburbia (and occasionally Tennessee). One character attempts to learn magic, another becomes obsessed with Tetris during some sort of apocalypse, another (in a disappointingly obvious turn) becomes obsessed with videos of prisoner abuse from Abu Ghraib.
The influence of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son shaped a generation of writers, who craved glassy eyes and dysthymic monotones as a mark of authenticity. Then the tide turned; the New Sincerity guys got going, David Foster Wallace wrote his essay on television, and it mostly seems to have gone the way of flannel and long male hair....more
„Vielleicht darf man sagen, dass jedem Gedicht sein «20. Jänner» eingeschrieben bleibt.“ "Perhaps you could say that every poem has its 'January 20th’ „Vielleicht darf man sagen, dass jedem Gedicht sein «20. Jänner» eingeschrieben bleibt.“ "Perhaps you could say that every poem has its 'January 20th’ written inside." Paul Celan's speech is always dark and polysemic; the above line - on receiving the Georg-Büchner-Preis, ostensibly refers to the opening line of Lenz: "On the 20th, he came through the mountains". But might this also have been a reference to the Wannsee Conference - January 20, 1942? Or Celan's later poem on Hölderlin's descent into madness, Tübingen, Jänner?
… Käme, käme ein Mensch, käme ein Mensch zur Welt, heute, mit dem Lichtbart der Patriarchen: er dürfte, spräch er von dieser Zeit, er dürfte nur lallen und lallen, immer-, immerzuzu.
(≈ if a man came into this world with the shining beard of the patriarchs, he could only babble, for ever and ever)
Such a forlorn figure - the lost babbling prophet, outside of his time and mind - fits both Büchner and his subject. A frustrated revolutionary during the suffocating Biedermeier, Büchner is probably best known in the English world for the more overtly political Woyzeck (via Alban Berg's opera). Lenz was a writer of an earlier generation, a pioneer of the Sturm und Drang. After a break with Goethe and failed love affair, his mental health disintegrating, he went to the Steintal in mountainous Alsace to stay with the revered pastor Jean Frédéric Oberlin (who seems to have been a phenomenally kind and patient person). A tradition of writing about writing enshrouds this book. Oberlin's account of the stay served the basis for Büchner's unfinished version; parts of it are recreated verbatim. (To underscore this intertextuality, a recent German edition has actually superimposed Büchner's text onto Oberlin's diary, according to translator Richard Sieburth's excellent afterword to this bilingual edition.) In fragmented, broken prose, the text describes the poet's lurches into religious ecstasy and schizophrenia. It is all times disorientating and intensely poignant, and it has inspired writers such as Christa Wolf and Elias Canetti (for whom its discovery was the great conversion experience of his career). "He did not feel tired, but it sometimes annoyed him that he could not walk on his head." „Mit diesem Satz beginnt die moderne europäische Prosa“ wrote Arnold Zweig: European modernism began here, in the cold Alsatian night....more
Staying in Venice, this one is about the glamour of literary scholarship. An unnamed narrator moves in with an elderly lady and flirts with her spinstStaying in Venice, this one is about the glamour of literary scholarship. An unnamed narrator moves in with an elderly lady and flirts with her spinster niece, plying them with flowers with the long-term goal of getting the older woman's letters from Aspern, a Byronic deceased poet. Some romantic confusion ensues. There is a bit of ambiguity about whether the narrator is a grubby paparazzo or justifiably trying to rescue some literary history from a very unpleasant character. The twist ending is satisfying but bittersweet....more
Why did Isaac Babel go back? In 1935, he was permitted to leave the Soviet Union to address a writers' conference in Paris, where his wife and daughteWhy did Isaac Babel go back? In 1935, he was permitted to leave the Soviet Union to address a writers' conference in Paris, where his wife and daughter were living. Despite pleas to stay, he returned to the Soviet Union; four years later, he was arrested by the NKVD and taken to the Lyubanka, where he was killed, presumably after torture. To understand his decision is to look at the contradictions of his life, the self-censorship. When criticised for his diminished output, he jokingly called himself "a great master of the genre of silence".
Babel was born in the poor neighbourhood of Moldavanka in Odessa. It was the home of the Jewish crime kingpin Mishka Yaponchik, who Babel turned into the character of Benya Krik in short story, theatre and film. As a young writer in Moscow, he met Maxim Gorky, who told him, "it is very clear that you don’t really know anything, but that you are good at guessing quite a lot. What you must now do is go out into the world." Babel listened. His early stories attempt, not quite successfully, to mimic the French and Russian short stories Babel had read; he then signed up with the "Red Cavalry" fighting the Polish-Soviet war of 1920 (the Comintern's first attempt to export Communism, an utter failure) which he fictionalised into a popular series of stories. (Unwisely, since some of the characters whose names he did not change eventually rose to Stalin's inner circle.) He also wrote a series of stories about life in Odessa among Jewish gangsters. After a decade of journalism and travel dispatches in the faltering promise of the new workers' state, he translated Shalom Aleichem and adapted him for film (Wandering Stars), wrote more stories, some autobiographical, and worked on film projects. He was collaborating on Mark Donskoy's famous trilogy about Gorky when he was arrested and declared persona non grata, his name removed the credits and his body disposed of.
Those autobiographical stories (among his best) contain this line (from The Story of my Dovecote):
All the men of our clan had been too trusting of others and too quick to take unconsidered action. We had never had any luck in anything. My grandfather had once been a rabbi in Belaya Tserkov, had been chased out of town for blasphemy, and then lived in scandal and poverty for another forty years, learned foreign languages, and started going insane in his eightieth year. My Uncle Lev, my father's brother, studied at the Yeshiva in Volozhin, evaded conscription in 1892, and abducted the daughter of a quartermaster serving in the Kiev military district. Uncle Lev took this woman to California, to Los Angeles, where he abandoned her, and he died in a madhouse among Negroes and Malays. After his death, the American police sent us his belongings—a large trunk reinforced with brown iron hoops—from Los Angeles. In this trunk were dumbbells, locks of a woman's hair, Uncle's tallith, whips with gilded tips, and herbal tea in little boxes trimmed with cheap pearls. The only men left in the family were mad Uncle Simon, who lived in Odessa, my father, and me...[I]n our family I was my mother's only hope. Like all Jews, I was short in stature, weak, and plagued by headaches from too much study.
This massive paperback brings together all of Babel's extant work: stories, diaries, sketches, scripts, and plays. Translator Peter Constantine, who has said it was his favourite project, has added explanatory notes, and the book includes a preface by Cynthia Ozick and an afterword by Babel's daughter Nathalie which adds some family history. (She has some fairly shocking claims against Ilya Ehernberg, the Stalinist writer and close friend of Babel.) Babel lived a life of secrets - he had not one but two secret families - while navigating a society increasingly hostile to writers and the truth, one he still seems to have truly believed in - as much as we can guess what was in his heart.
After Khruschev came to power Babel was rehabilitated and celebrated in the Soviet Union and the West. (Red Cavalry came out in English in the 50s with an introduction by Lionel Trilling, and Babel has been cited as an influence by American writers such as James Salter, George Saunders and Denis Johnson). His writing remains powerful, mixing violence and kindness, despair and romanticism, the ability of human beings even in the worst privation to admire the moon through some clouds. As is clear from the multiple drafts in this volume, Babel worked hard to pare down his writing to just the lines needed to convey his point, abstracting a hundred gory details into one incident of black humour. As he puts it in Guy de Maupassant (an astonishingly perfect story)
I spoke to her of style, of an army of words, an army in which every type of weapon is deployed. No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.
Begins as a classic Edwardian Rich People story: large green estate, servants on hand, and aesthetes on vac from Oxford. There are definite echoes of Begins as a classic Edwardian Rich People story: large green estate, servants on hand, and aesthetes on vac from Oxford. There are definite echoes of Brideshead Revisited, except that the suppressed homosexual themes of that book are somewhat more overt. (More on that in a minute.) But then part two takes it suddenly forward into 1926, after the death of one of the main characters. So suddenly the book is not about the famous poet Cecil Valance, but about his ghost, and the subsequent three parts carry the story through to around the present day, tracing the effect of Valance's poetry (which has achieved moderate fame) on a circle of his family and admirers. (The book's title comes from a line by Tennyson, And year by year the landscape grow / Familiar to the stranger's child. Valance's poetry is in about the same vein.)
Having finished the novel, I think its closest peer is not Brideshead but L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between, with its similar switch between Edwardian time and the present day, themes of sexual naïveté and awakening, and a similar female character - Hollinghurst's Daphne Sawle bears a striking resemblance to Hartley's Marian Maudsley, though (without spoiling too much) she gets more of a chance to say her piece. (Incidentally, Hollinghurst pulls off the difficult trick of getting into the head of a bitter and grouchy elderly person and making them sympathetic.)
Hollinghurst's prose has a number of famous admirers - Nicholson Baker, Geoff Dyer, James Wood - and there is a Twitter account consisting purely of quotes from his most admired book, The Line of Beauty, which are somehow just as good without context. But he is probably best known as the leading gay writer of his generation, and most of the stories in this book involve gay men (and one woman) struggling within the strictures of society, which gives them increasing acceptance with the passage of time. Cecil and his boyfriend must keep their affair secret; in the final chapter, two married men are not treated as anything unusual. Unlike the gay writers he has written about as a critic (Hollinghurst was previously deputy editor of the TLS, which features briefly in this book) and emulated in his fiction, he has been able to write about gay Britain in a time of liberation. But at the heart of his novels are the same old universal themes: memory, history, and the impermanence of human lives....more
Great, great literary autobiography - whereas it contains almost no personal details at all, mentioning only briefly in passing the author's second wiGreat, great literary autobiography - whereas it contains almost no personal details at all, mentioning only briefly in passing the author's second wife (an editor's note informs us she was originally his secretary, and joined him in suicide in 1942. Of his first we hear nothing at all). Zweig recalls his upbringing in the lost world of Dual Monarchy Vienna, his formation as a writer, and the changes in culture both good and bad that have taken place since. It ends off on an elegiac note, recounting the Nazi depredations that were spreading seemingly unstoppably over Europe at the time of his death (1942), when this was finished. Well-traveled and fluent in German, French, Italian and English, Zweig was a patriotic Austrian but also a proud European, for whom the First World War was a horrifically unnecessary cataclysm, one which destroyed the world he loved; and the Second a sad necessity.
The Nazis banned Zweig's books, perhaps the reason that he is slightly excessive in recalling his success and praise from other authors, and the height of his erstwhile fame. He had written a series of biographies which I hadn't heard of, but which seem to have formed the bulk of his reputation in the period between the wars. Zweig also drops names like confetti, both literary (Rilke, von Hofmannsthal, Joyce, Gorky) and general (Herzl, Rudolf Steiner, Walter Rathenau - the latter the inspiration for Arnheim in The Man without Qualities). A sample quote:
Among the guests whom we welcomed to our house were H.G. Wells, Hofmannsthal, Jakob Wassermann, van Loon, James Joyce, Emil Ludwig, Franz Werfel, Georg Brandes, Paul Valéry, Jane Adams, Shalom Asch and Arthur Schnitzler. Musicians included Ravel and Richard Strauss, Alban Berg, Bruno Walter, Bartók...One day Arturo Toscanini climbed the steep steps of the path up to the house, and that was the beginning of a friendship that made me love, understand and enjoy music more than ever before.
There are also some whose reputations haven't held up as well, such as Romain Roland (Wikipedia informs me that he won the 1915 Nobel Prize). Amusingly, Zweig goes on a pilgrimage to Bath, "that city, where much of England’s glorious literature, above all the works of Fielding, was written". I would venture that few literary visitors today go to that city because of anyone but Jane Austen, intending no disrespect to the pioneering author of Tom Jones.
A last note: Zweig, most famous today for novellas like Amok, makes a bold suggestion I've been advocating for years:
Sometimes, when I was in a thoughtful mood, I could not help wondering what exactly it was that made my books so unexpectedly popular. In the last resort, I think it arose from a personal flaw in me—I am an impatient, temperamental reader. Anything long-winded, high-flown or gushing irritates me, so does everything that is vague and indistinct, in fact anything that unnecessarily holds the reader up, whether in a novel, a biography or an intellectual argument. A book really satisfies me only if it maintains its pace page after page, carrying readers breathlessly along to the end. Nine-tenths of the books that come my way seem to be padded out with unnecessary descriptions, too much loquacious dialogue and superfluous minor characters; they are just not dynamic and exciting enough. I get impatient with many arid, slow-moving passages even in the most famous classic masterpieces, and I have often suggested a bold idea of mine to publishers—why not bring out a series of the great works of international literature, from Homer through Balzac and Dostoevsky to Mann’s , with the unnecessary parts cut? Then all those undoubtedly immortal works would gain a new lease of life in our own time.
Impressively spare, clean imagining of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owens and a couple of other real historical characters (plus a few made up ones) Impressively spare, clean imagining of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owens and a couple of other real historical characters (plus a few made up ones) as they mull the futility and injustice of the war and process the trauma incurred thereby. There's an element of "historical science fiction" (is that a thing? I refer to describing the thought process of a scientist from the past), in this case with the psychologist Rivers. A neat trick and one which requires careful research, which Barker has done but conceals behind stark minimalism. An author's endnote reveals some of the connections; apparently there is a real note with Sassoon's corrections of Anthem for Doomed Youth!...more
Dawns as a dark and cynical take on the writing industry, and it is - one which should be read by anyone considering a livelihood in scribbles. But asDawns as a dark and cynical take on the writing industry, and it is - one which should be read by anyone considering a livelihood in scribbles. But as it draws on the author becomes more attached to his characters, and crafts them into a more traditional Victorian novel. Which is fine: all are realistically drawn and capable of eliciting sympathy, and Gissing's style is sharp and often witty. The Darwinian progression of the novel, though, underlines its central point - that the literary world eats its young.
I thought reading this that the satire that was fresh in 1891 now has a safer aspect: it sticks another spike into a body that has long since lain lifeless. It was striking to find this thoughtful Gissing retrospective from the novel's centenary by George Packer, who, although noting that writing has become more recreation than profession, had a more optimistic take:
[F]ew writers today are in serious danger of starvation - it's a fatter country, and colleges cushion and smother them...Recent years have seen literature poisoned and swollen beyond the bitterest vulgarity of New Grub Street. The seven-figure advances for unwritten novels, the obsequious profiles in "serious" magazines, the power of agents, the editors hopping from house to house to unemployment, the pervasive networking and shopping and thumping and scratching and oiling and rising and falling...a young writer today feels compelled to keep an eye on anyone making a few million a year and hitting .230. All the while, he can't forget the period of waiting six months for computerized rejections from magazines in North Dakota or Arizona.
Things now are a good deal worse than in 1991, for magazine writers and journalists as well as novelists, Who now advances the writing life as a viable profession? As private equity groups pick at the entails of still existing newspapers, and Amazon algorithmically shepherds readers towards profit-maximising genres, abetted by the near absence of professional critics.
Lastly: the audiobook edition (narrated by Nigel Patterson) I listened to is outstanding, nailing subtle changes in tone and character....more
It's hard to imagine a country less likely to produce writers than Australia: a soulless, alcoholic, colonialist nanny-state on a desert island in theIt's hard to imagine a country less likely to produce writers than Australia: a soulless, alcoholic, colonialist nanny-state on a desert island in the furthest edge of the world. But Murnane is the real deal. Many, but not all, of these collected fictions (spanning from 1985 to 2012) form a bildungsroman, in which the author, raised by pragmatic Catholic parents in a remote town, struggles to understand his place in the world, wrestles with religious doubt, and gropes towards a bohemian lifestyle he is only dimly aware exists.
But what will immediately strike the reader is Murnane's highly idiosyncratic writing style. In a clipped and detached monotone, he stretches out long sentences which scrupulously avoid names, and almost all proper nouns (excepting place names in Australia, somehow). Everything is instead described in laborious, backreferential terms. So the result sounds something like this (not a real sentence, but a basically representative pastiche): "The person referred to in the last paragraph, whose surname ended in the 15th letter of the English alphabet, regretted that he had never been able to become connected sexually with the female person mentioned at the end of this piece of fiction."
In some ways, Murnane's cold anti-humanism reminded me of his elective compatriate Coetzee. Both are cold and mechanical misanthropes; but Coetzee seems to possess more active antipathy to humans. (I'm thinking of his fiction and essayistic writing on animal rights, and his frequent theme of the barbarity of humanity). Murnane just seems disconnected; a regional, isolated writer even within Australia, living in a remote hinterland, writing jarring, defamiliarising prose.
A description I found revealing was of an ex-Catholic poet manqué working as a government clerk, finding it impossible to relate to his colleagues' pub chat, unable to share his own world, living an intellectual world he keeps to himself. He is both embarrassed by and jealous of their talk about sex and more active active sexual past. I can't remember if this comes from one of the stories or from several; this is what happens when one reads this entire book (some 600 pp.) in order. It is long, and maybe contains too much of the same style. (Should I have tried one of his novels instead?) There is also some material about Hungary, horse-racing, Aborigines, and an experimental Catholic commune. At times the style did start to wear on me. But this Antipodean oddball is a unique, important voice in the postmodern canon....more
A Caro-esque biography, except it took two people to replace one Caro: a historian (Sherwin), who did an insane amount of research over 25 years, and A Caro-esque biography, except it took two people to replace one Caro: a historian (Sherwin), who did an insane amount of research over 25 years, and writer (Bird) who crafted it all into a smooth, gripping story.
The story can be divided into two halves, the titular "triumph" and "tragedy". The first is the science biography, "Oppie" the prodigy growing up, a brilliant scientist-humanist, who develops the bomb and becomes a household name and symbol of science's Promethean power. Part 2 is a political biography. The combination of Oppenheimer's youthful flirtation with Communism and his postwar nuclear dovishness - combined with the fervid climate of McCarthyite witch-hunts - proved his downfall. He also had the character flaw of arrogance and aloofness towards people he didn't respect (although he was extremely patient towards his students), and made a powerful enemy in Lewis Strauss, the very Caro-esque villain who was on the board of the IAS in Princeton which Oppenheimer led and had Eisenhower's ear.
In fact the saga of the Oppenheimer security hearings, brutally orchestrated by Strauss to humiliate and destroy Oppenheimer, and subsequently dramatised in theatre and television, greatly resembles the scene in Master of the Senate where LBJ uses similar (though more thorough) tactics to prevent Leland Olds' appointment as Federal Power Commissioner. These events happened just five years earlier (1949), and the imbalance of power was much greater. In fact, it's questionable how much Oppenheimer suffered practically from the hearing (as opposed to psychologically). He could have opted out of it by choosing not to challenge the allegations, he was financially comfortable and over time his reputation grew to that of a scientific martyr. His tormenter Strauss paid the price several years later, when McGeorge Bundy and a young JFK torpedoed his nomination as Commerce Secretary, a stinging rebuke in a (slightly) less partisan age.
Two great stories from the "triumph" part of the book: the probably apocryphal story also mentioned in The Strangest Man, where Dirac told the poetry-loving Oppie "in physics you want to say something nobody knew before in words which everyone can understand. In poetry you say something that everybody knows already in words nobody can understand."
And also this:
Once, when questioned about a particular equation on the blackboard, Oppenheimer replied, “No, not that one; the one underneath.” But when perplexed students pointed out that there was no equation underneath, Robert said, “Not below, underneath. I have written over it.”
A thorough, entertaining, inspiring bio, among the best of the genre....more
In the country, he thought, the gods still come to people. A man matters, his experiences matter, but in th
Pretty much every page has lines like this:
In the country, he thought, the gods still come to people. A man matters, his experiences matter, but in the city, where experiences come by the thousands, we can no longer relate them to ourselves; and this is of course the beginning of life’s notorious turning into abstraction.
Which in theory is awesome. Much like The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann was a big Musil fan), this is a novel of ideas, where the characters are mostly just props who represent different ideologies - although in this echt-Viennese novel everyone is a variant on the generic "world-weary but romantic cynic". And here is the problem - many of the discussions seem to go nowhere. Everyone seems to passionately believe they are right, but for this reader at least, all their arguments sounded the same. Protagonist Ulrich is perhaps the most defined: as the eponymous Man Without Qualities, he eschews all movements, is post-everything. Having gone through phases of scientific positivism, militaristic conservatism, and romanticism, he is now not quite a rationalist but a sort of pragmatist, existing primarily as a foil for German nationalists and idealists of other persuasions. The primary tension seems to be about modernity and the disappearance of "magic", or wonder, in an age of capitalist efficiency, but it is deeply rooted in a Teutonic intellectual culture quite remote even, I would assume, for Austrians in 2019 - let alone frivolous. fun-loving Anglophones who didn't grow up with Goethe and Schiller.
So a lot of the intellectual discussions eluded me: the problems, at least, had been clear to me from the outset, but whether any of the characters has any novel answers, or just gloomy but stylish teahouse fatalism, was unclear. Outside of that, is there a plot? Somewhat. There is a campaign to celebrate the Jubilee of the Emperor of "Kakania" (a Musilian neologism made from the "König und Kaiser" of the Dual Monarchy), which leads a salon of the greatest minds to debate the question. Arnheim, a supremely competent author-cum-magnate contemplates adultery with the hostess, while his black valet seduces her Jewish maid. A criminally insane serial killer's ability to stand trial is debated. Several hysterical woman throw themselves at Ulrich's feet; one recalls a history of child abuse. At moments like this I yearned to learn more about her - what does she want in life? But then she retreats behind her veil (metaphorical, although another character literally wears one), exuding yet more multiparagraph Delphic utterances. Once again I was frustrated. Musil is clearly a brilliant polymath, but this is bloated philosophy masquerading as fiction, and comparisons to Proust just perplex me....more
No journeyman biographer like Walter Isaacson, Ellmann writes the life of Joyce out of deep familiarity with his work and Irish literature in general.No journeyman biographer like Walter Isaacson, Ellmann writes the life of Joyce out of deep familiarity with his work and Irish literature in general. "I have yet to meet anyone who has read and digested the whole of Finnegans Wake—except perhaps my friend Richard Ellmann," said Edna O'Brien (thanks Wikipedia!) So this book is naturally stylish and literary throughout. Ellmann, who also wrote lives of Yeats and Wilde, goes back to Synge's Playboy of the Western World, which dropped like a bomb in a parochial and impoverished Ireland.
Sympathetic to Joyce but aware of his foibles, Ellmann portrays his early pretensions, the struggle to create a persona everyone undergoes ("this essay may give heart to adolescents who are searching their own work for evidence of literary immortality and not finding much"), Joyce's half innate, half-put-on flakiness/profligacy, his drinking troubles.
Joyce left Ireland early on to live in self-imposed exile. Although his writing would always look back to it - in the finest detail imaginable - he felt somewhat estranged from it, and was not an ardent Irish nationalist (though he did at least dislike the British). His tender marriage to Nora Barnacle began in Trieste (then part of Austria), where Joyce quickly acclimatised to Italian ways. His dominant mode may be summed up as a love of language, rhyme and wordplay, spilling over from English into other European languages and eventually the invented; a deep interest in describing the mind's interior; and certain themes - sex, guilt, masochism, religious misgivings.
I read Ulysses years ago, knowing nothing about its background or even the bare bones of Homer's story (barely recognisable, but still helpful). I was mostly confused, occasionally enraptured. I think that wasn't the best idea, and that some background (this biography, perhaps, or a guide) would have helped, but I also think that to try understand every word is besides the point. It may be doable with Ullyses, though certainly not with Work in Progress (dramatically revealed in 1939 as Finnegans Wake), but to love Joyce must surely be to connect to his games, his love of assonance and rhyme, to rrrroll the tongue and lips over the words gushing out, riverrun... It ought not to be schoolwork; a scholarly analysis of why Joyce made the Ant and the Grasshopper into the Ondt and the Gracehoper (it exists) interests few. But Work in Progress did have few defenders, even among Joyce's staunchest allies.
This book is crammed with funny anecdotes about Joyce, the long-suffering Nora and brother Stanislaus, and bawdy multilingual jokes. It can also be somber when dealing with his relationship with his parents, his daughter Lucia's tragic mental breakdown, and his eye troubles (the details can get quite gruesome). A classic of literary biography. ...more
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