Tag: book review

Truth, lies and wild allegations: The Major Refutation by Pierre Senges

In an age when climate denial, an increasing distrust of immigrants, and the epithet “fake news” dominate the headlines, the eloquent arguments ventured forth in the pages of the anonymous Refutatio major (c. 1517–1525) play neatly against the public consciousness, reminding us that, even now, there are still those who hold to a view that the world is flat and the moon landings were fabricated. But none of our contemporary doubters or conspiracy theorists who peddle their “alternate facts” would deny the existence of the New World. . . However, in the decades that followed Christopher Columbus’ fated encounter with a land mass that would soon turn long held assumptions about the geographical reality of the world on their heads, what sort of skeptics might have crawled out of the woodwork?

Well, if you accept the premise French author and playwright, Pierre Senges, is prepared to offer alongside his spirited “translation” of this curious treatise claimed by no one but attributed to Antonio de Guevara, we have a Renaissance-era Latin document that purports to call into question the veracity of the reports, artefacts, and individuals ferried across the ocean from this distant new land by a steady stream of seafaring Spanish and Portuguese adventurers, colonists, and missionaries who have disappeared and reappeared over the watery western horizon since the reported discovery of the Mundus novus. And what an imaginative and persistent defense is waged in this apparent “Epistle to Charles V,” now translated into English by Jacob Siefring as The Major Refutation.

The new world, an enchantment? however when John Day, a good sailor no doubt, but a geographer of little import, announces that somewhere to the west islands have been found where “grass grows,” he is either smirking with deceit, or mocking our rulers, to whom he extends an offer of six square yards of lawn in the guise of a vast kingdom. These men go off into the horizon, where they lose their heads, exert themselves furiously, ravish Indian women, move mountains and entire populations, drown a thousand sailors in their wake, and then come back to us, swearing in magnificent syllables that grass grows on these lands and that in their environs, by the grace of God, rain falls from on high.

Senges is a prolific French writer, but to date little of his work is available in English. With a spirit akin to Borges and Calvino, Senges frequently exploits the possible, potential, and unfinished spaces that exist in history or literature. That porous line between fact and invention is blurred with a nimble oratorical style that lends itself to work with a sharp satirical, critical, and philosophical edge. Throughout the text, the personages and recorded events are real, but it’s the dogged determination to prove that the celebrated New World is an elaborate hoax that forms the heart and soul of this wildly entertaining feat of double imposture.

The magic of The Major Refutation lies in the delight the author (or his surrogate, shall we say) takes in language. The biting, sarcastic humour is infectious. One can imagine our Franciscan chronicler writing with a healthy measure of unholy abandon in this passionate entreaty to Charles V, king and Holy Roman Emperor. Antonio De Guevara (1480–1545), the imagined author of the manuscript at hand, was in truth, no stranger to writing in the voice of another—he infamously penned a text he tried to pass off as original by Marcus Aurelius. Granted free reign he openly attacks anyone, his clerical brethren notwithstanding, who comes within his sights in his effort to prove that the so-called New World is nothing more than a grandly orchestrated act of fraud and collusion. The concessions granted with respect to dominion over the distant vistas fail to impress him:

To the observer, these textual games and universal decrees sitting alongside and contradicting one another, these privileges to a single treasure granted to so many, these supposedly definitive treaties that are deprecated before the year is even up, that manner of signing at just two streets’ remove a couple of decrees that mutually refute one another, all the while perceiving that the world carries on under the weight of such numerous paradoxes, to the solitary witness all of this looks as much like naiveté, as much like a superior ruse. Because to adopt a proprietary attitude towards invisible islands is either proof of blindness, become lately a fashion of the courts & palaces, or it is a deliberate strategy, dictated by the crafty to the envious; to delude the people, it would hence be a question of acting as though the chimerical continents were so valuable they were worth the price of humiliations on their behalf, worth the aristocrats sharing trading posts and territories, like barkers sharing stalls in the marketplace.

With an stirring echo of florid baroque language, The Major Refutation calls in the prominent personages of the day, and implicates the state, merchant bankers, and the Church in the creation and perpetuation of the myth of the new world. Queen Isabella, Columbus’ sponsor, is a favourite suspect to whom the author returns repeatedly. He imagines ingenious means by which the entire enterprise could be facilitated —insisting that once beyond the horizon ships turn south to Cape Verde to hold over before sailing back with gold smuggled out of Spanish coffers and returned again. Of course, the unspoken value of fostering belief in a far off land of untold wealth and opportunity is not lost on him:

The principal reason for the invention of the new world would surely be to send off into the ocean a portion of our great surplus of useless men, who fill our countrysides, our cities, and betwixt the twain our faubourgs, with the speed of a spreading plague. . . . The new world and the enticing advertisements which speak of it so fantastically invite all these beggars & jobless, worthless players to board dinghies, strap a sail to their torso and head due west, without demerit. A steady stream of disfigured men, ugsome-faced knaves and scrawny blackguards have thus quit terra firma, this world for its beyond, in prestigious and ruined galleons.

From the opening “Editor’s Foreword” that places the Refutation into historical context, to the scholarly “Afterword” that vigorously defends the case for Antonio de Guevara, confessor to Charles V, as the probable author while considering less likely alternate candidates, Senges is essentially presenting a carefully designed meditation on the nature of truth—on that which is credible and that which is contrived, on belief and doubt. Selecting de Guevara as his preferred composer, a historical figure with an attempted forgery to his credit, and allowing him to imply that his faith in his own argument is perhaps less than genuine, adds depth to the layers of a deception designed and executed as one thoroughly intelligent and entertaining whole.

Of course, the release of the of “English Version of Refutatio major” in late 2015, ten years after the “original” French version, is especially timely. Conspiracies abound. In saecula saeculorum.

The Major Refutation by Pierre Senges, translated by Jacob Siefring, is published by Contra Mundum Press. And, for the record, the book design and typesetting is exceptional.

Imaginary Cities by Darran Anderson (originally published at TQC)

I’ve been busy reading and writing reviews lately, but everything seems to be directed at the future, scheduled for publication at online literary journals. It’s all good, but you put so much work in and then have to wait to share your thoughts and engage in conversation about the book. My review of Darran Anderson’s monumental Imaginary Cities, published earlier this week in the Spring 2017 issue of The Quarterly Conversation is a case in point. This extended essay on the idea of the city, in all of its possible and impossible incarnations, does not readily lend itself to the confines of a critical review… I know, I’ve had a look around. Originally published in the UK in 2015 (Influx Press), my piece has been written in anticipation of the North American release from University of Chicago Press next month. As I struggled to beat this essay into submission, I cast an eyeball at prior reviews. After all, it is already a well-known and well-loved work. And I was relieved to see that the best anyone can do is skim the surface of Anderson’s rambling, eclectic, and immensely readable tome.

The original publication where this review appeared seems to be offline or closed so my work is reproduced below:

Imaginary Cities by Darran Anderson.  University of Chicago Press. $22.50, 576 pp.

Imagine a city that you cannot contain, a city that forms and reforms itself around you constantly, a city that continues to change while your memories remain lodged in a reality that moves further into the past every day. That is the city of a man with a ten-second memory. I know such a person. Severely injured in an accident more than thirty years ago, this man, a former client, is unable to lay down new memoires. He lives in the continual present, working from a frame of reference decades out of date. But in the moment he is a highly intelligent, logical thinker—he was a young lawyer at the time of his injury. To see him today, his memory impairment is not immediately apparent. He is meticulous about his appearance, well-spoken, and polite. He tries to cover for his confusion as much as possible.

For many years, this man has spent several hours a week volunteering at a downtown law firm. The purpose is to provide him with social stimulation, stave off boredom. He goes to “work” in a suit, briefcase in hand. A special needs taxi delivers him to and from his placement. One day, a storm slowed all traffic, and his ride was late to pick him up. In the driving snow he began to walk toward the last home he could remember. But he had not lived there in years, and downtown, with its signature landmarks, had shifted in the meantime. The city around him no longer conformed to the one he had known, but on its streets he was invisible, a business man like any other, lost in a truly imaginary city.

As one navigates the sprawling streets and avenues that spread out across the pages of Darran Anderson’s ambitious guidebook to the metropolitan ideal—past, present, and future—there is likely to be more than one occasion of disorientation, an invitation to entertain an entirely new way of understanding the possibilities of the urban reality. In this sense, Imaginary Cities is a map that encourages you to get lost. Subtitled A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities, and Everywhere in Between, this journey is an open-ended inquiry into the myriad ways that the idea of the city has been conceived in history, art, literature, social theory, and architectural design—for better or worse.

Unlike the standard guidebook, Anderson offers his traveler no pictures, maps, or diagrams. This is intentional. Side trips are encouraged as the fancy strikes, and generous footnotes are provided for those who wish to follow up on quotes and references. (Of course, there is also the ease of stopping into Google for quick access to an image, biography, or further background material.) Anderson’s extended essay feels like spending time with an entertaining, well-read explorer who has traversed the cities of the imagination and returned with exotic tales that stretch back into pre-history and out into the solar system. We are in the presence of a modern-day Marco Polo who understands that “all cities can, and should be read.” His aim is to help us learn to trace these narratives ourselves.

Our guide is an Irish writer living in Scotland. He is neither an academic nor an architect, but his focus of attention lies in the intersection of culture, architecture, and technology. In a recent podcast, Anderson traced the genesis of this project to long-standing fascinations with cities and with the point at which reality and myth meet. As he became increasingly obsessed with architects and started looking through their plans, he found that beyond their iconic structures, each had drafted countless schemes and designs that would remain, for a variety of reasons, unrealized. With a different set of circumstances, then, the skylines and urban landscapes we know now could have been very different—as they once were in the past and will be in the future. The modern city is in flux and can perhaps best be understood only through a shifting kaleidoscope of angles and perspectives.

Dividing his book into seven sections, Anderson manages to pull together a wide range of interrelated ideas—from sources as diverse as myth, archaeology, art, film, urban studies, science fiction, architectural design, and many others—into a thematically structured, meandering discussion, at once densely packed and tangential. Yet the quality that makes this project so impressive also makes it very difficult to adequately capture in a review. It is a slippery beast. The themes explored are neither exhaustive nor exclusive. Amorphous, the content exceeds the boundary of the pages. Each section necessarily offers more, and less, than it promises—echoing so many of the architectural, community, and metropolitan schemes that come in and out of focus along the way. Dreams cannot be contained—in their fulfilment sacrifices must be made.

Nonetheless, it’s inspiring to see just how much Anderson manages to squeeze into his thematic discussions. For example, the section, “The Tower,” with its twenty-seven chapters, starts with the quixotic. We meet Tommaso Campanella, whose proposed “City of the Sun”—with its utopian vision of a center devoted to intellectual engagement and physical pleasures—landed him in a dungeon as a guest of the Church during the Inquisition. But his mind could not be confined and he continued to construct his designs in his imagination. He was not forgotten, and his ideas would continue to the inspire the civic utopias of his contemporary Francis Bacon and, later, Ivan Ilich Léonidiv, who dreamed up urban plans to try to save himself under Stalin. None of these imagined designs were realized, but that did not lessen their influence.

Subsequent chapters introduce Le Corbusier, the ambitious and eccentric pioneer of Modernism; stop by Mega-City One, the vast metropolis of the Judge Dredd comics; spend time contemplating the Ideal City in Renaissance art and philosophy; and spare a few minutes glancing at various attempts to envision a New Jerusalem before turning to the unfortunate, even tragic, communities founded by messianic leaders and madmen. And at this point, the journey is just getting started. From the ziggurat to the skyscraper, “The Tower” will examine the titular subject both on its own and as an integral part of the cityscape. In later sections, many of the projects and personalities met here will reappear in other contexts.

Ever avoiding the temptation to belabour a point with exhaustive detail, Anderson prefers to paint with broad strokes as he explores concepts and themes. But he continually manages to punctuate his narrative with pointed observations that bring us back, from wherever he has wandered, to moments and ideas we instantly recognize, tying his discursions back into the book’s multifaceted main thread. In the chapter, “Cinematic Dystopia of the Everyday,” for instance, he moves from the surreal silent cityscapes of Metropolis and The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari to the futuristic noir of Blade Runner, then to the soullessness of the consumer-driven society depicted by French director Jacques Tati in his ambitious film Playtime, for which he constructed a set to mimic a modern city:

Tati foresaw it all. Everywhere looks sedately impressive and like nowhere in particular. People are inherently lost. Traffic crawls in barbiturate carousels. The shocking thing watching it back now is not how contrived his sledgehammer and slapstick satire is, but how pertinent. The open plan office floors with their individual cubicles are rife now. The large glass facades, echoing the quiet desolation of Edward Hopper’s paintings, are everywhere. This is life as a glistening empty waiting room and it is a life we are increasingly forced to live all over the globe.

Here we are reminded that, as what once was presented as part of a dystopic (or, for that matter utopian) vision arrives, it soon becomes commonplace. It is easy to forget that the future is now, or rather, to quote William Gibson, “The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.”

The wide, eclectic sweep of Anderson’s project is fueled by an infectious sense of endless curiosity. One of the book’s greatest assets—perhaps the key to its success—lies in its author’s thoughtful, engaging tone. His lyrical, aphoristic prose offers a wealth of memorable lines. This is where his inner Marco Polo, channeled through Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, serves him well. He is an intelligent, witty, and consummate storyteller, never afraid to speculate, raise questions, and entertain ideas without the pressure to define and prove an overarching theory. But there is a persistent theme that runs through the book. It arises naturally from the earliest formations of human settlements and is so fundamental that it has essentially become part of the psycho-topography of the urban space, reflected in our mythologies, stories, and art. That is the endless tension between utopian aspiration and dystopian despair.

One might imagine that these are two opposite ends of the spectrum, but Anderson suggests that utopias and dystopias each imply the quality of the other, that is, every utopia contains its own dystopia and vice versa. Cities are fundamentally heterogeneous places. From their earliest incarnations, such as Uruk in Mesopotamia, they were marked by the production of an agricultural surplus and the development of social classes. Utopian visions with their idealistic, often philosophical or Puritanical agendas—the dream of a world without difference or inequity—tend to deny the very qualities that make city life possible, let alone vibrant and interesting. As a sort of heaven on earth, a utopia is rarely imagined for all, just as hell might be said to exist for those who want to imagine other people burning in it. And it is no question which scenario tends to capture the popular imagination. More visitors follow Dante and Virgil down into the depths of the Inferno than sign on for the subsequent treks through Purgatorio and Paradiso.

In the end, Imaginary Cities, is much more than a book. It is an ongoing project that invites participation. It opens conversations, challenges assumptions, exposes contradictions, and invites readers to lose themselves in the cities they live in, visit, and encounter in their dreams. And the discussion does not end when the final page is turned. Darran Anderson’s Twitter feed, @Oniropolis is a wonderful source of fascinating of images, links, and retweets guaranteed to keep the magic flowing.

 

 

Thoughts on writing about Witness by Robert Rient for Minor Literature[s]

For all its sins, Twitter is still a terrific way to connect with readers, writers, translators and small publishers and, in the process, hear about books you might otherwise miss. Witness by Polish writer and psychologist, Robert Rient, is a case in point. I came to know of it by way of the translator, Frank Garrett, and was immediately intrigued by this story of a man who grew up gay and Jehovah’s Witness in Catholic Poland. I ordered the book and, as soon as it arrived, I had a quick look and immediately knew it was the type of book for which I would want to pitch a critical review.

I am intrigued by original approaches to memoir writing, that is, rrient-witnessintentional writing about ones’ own experience. In Witness, the story is carried by Luke, the writer’s younger self—the boy and young man torn between his faith community and his sexuality—and Robert, the grown man who marks his break with his past and his rebirth as a whole person, true to himself, by taking a new name and identity. Woven through these two narratives is a fascinating look inside the Jehovah’s Witness church. As someone with a dual identity history, albeit different in nature, I found a lot to admire in the telling of this story, as well as in Robert’s honesty and the powerful transformation he chooses to make to mark his move forward into a new authentic life.

My review is now live at Minor Literature[s]. Thank you to Tomoé Hill for entertaining my contribution.

Minor Literature[s] has been repairing its archive so I have reproduced my review here:

Witness by Robert Rient (trans. Frank Garrett)—Joseph Schreiber

Not yet fourteen years old, Luke Zamilski is waiting his turn to climb into a garden swimming pool set up in the middle of a large stadium. Thousands of people fill the stands. He has endured months of interrogation by the elders of his church congregation. He has memorized the precepts of his faith and the Biblical justification and ammunition afforded each one. He is ready. With his baptism, Satan will come to know of his existence, but Luke is eager and enthusiastic because he also knows that, on this day, he will be granted a clean slate. With this expurgation, he trusts that Jehovah will remove the thorn that has been working its way into his flesh through these early years of puberty.

Or maybe not.

Luke’s story begins with the dramatic retelling of a fire that destroys his family home when he is just shy of his fourth birthday. As part of the small Jehovah’s Witness community in Poland, the aid and support of fellow church members is immediate, as is the curiosity and derision of their Catholic neighbours. When the family is eventually settled into a new house, Luke is given a used briefcase in which he is to store his important papers should he ever need to escape a similar circumstance in the future. That same case will also go on to hold his precious diaries, his poetry, and eventually, he tells us, his porno mags, letters, newspapers and more. A place to contain both his documented and his hidden life. Thus, this event sets the stage for the account of a life that is destined to be doubly isolated. He is cut off from the normal social activities and celebrations of his peers by his “feline faith”, and then, as he struggles with his sexuality, he risks being denounced by his church community for falling prey to a sin thought to be worse than murder.

Witness, by Polish psychologist and writer Robert Rient, is at once an original and engaging chronicle about growing up gay, and a disturbing look deep into the manipulative and damaging environment of a religious organization that shares many similarities with other fundamentalist Christian churches, and yet is its own strange entity. However, this is not a case study or a psychological essay. It is, rather, an autobiography in three voices.

Luke carries the immediate and emotional core of the narrative. He agonizes over his inability to refrain from masturbating, and the curse of the ‘thorn’ he carries. He begs to be relieved of his affliction and prays for the imminent arrival of Armageddon, for release from worldly temptation and the corruption of Satan. He throws himself into the church, preaching and witnessing, and yet he is also drawn to the arts, to writing and drama, and eventually chooses to study in the city of Poznan after graduation from high school. There he will vacillate wildly between fanatical commitment to his faith, a desire to succeed in his studies, and a dangerous entanglement with drugs, alcohol and self-harm. Guilt and shame dog him, throughout his youth and on into early adulthood, intensified by the very real threat of disfellowship from the church, and rejection by those he knows and loves. His desperation becomes intense. At the age of sixteen, for instance, he makes the very Biblical pledge to cut off his offending appendage:

I take a knife from the kitchen. I go upstairs to the second story. I enter the bathroom, turn on the light. I drop my pants to the floor, pull down my underwear. I apply the knife to the base of my penis. Wait. I’m scared of the pain, that I’ll bleed to death. I gently drag it across the skin. It stings. It leaves a red line on the flesh. I won’t do it. I’m too weak even for that.

His first confidant is Robert, whom he ‘meets’ at the age of eleven. Somewhere between an alter-ego and an imaginary friend, Luke first summons Robert ‘out of nothing,’ a new identity to step in when the waters become too rough, someone to pick up the pen and write in his journal the thoughts and feelings that he dare not own. Robert carries the second narrative voice, looking back from the present with a certain, almost clinical, detachment at his troubled younger self, providing a grounded counter perspective. His measured tone speaks to his own hard-won peace, but a fondness and affection seep through, along with an abiding sense of loss. Although his parents will ultimately stand by him, and his older brother who also leaves the faith, the rejection of the friends and relatives who stay behind is cold, harsh and unforgiving. The cost is very real.

The third narrative, “Witnesses,” details the inner machinations of the Jehovah’s Witness enterprise—bringing to light textual materials, facts and figures, and unwrapping many of the arcane and disturbing beliefs promulgated within their organization. What is revealed is a misogynistic, sexually repressed, hierarchical system that denies celebration of holidays and birthdays, but permits limited alcohol and abortions (Armageddon is ever imminent after all), and encourages the physical discipline of children as a sign of affection. The church is widely spread across the globe and supported by vast quantities of written materials, most recognizably The Watchtower and Awake!, which are translated into a multitude of languages and distributed by members who are required to spend long hours knocking on doors and standing on street corners.

What we have then, is a memoir presented as an uncanny collaboration between the author, Robert, and Luke, the boy and young man he used to be, along with an exposé of the secretive church ‘they’ were born into. As an affectation, it would risk sounding overly theatrical, but this approach allows a much deeper, more genuine narrative to develop. In Luke’s account, supported by frequent excerpts from his diary, we hear of his youthful enthusiasm for his faith, his anguished attempts to fight his homosexuality, and his pull toward all the temptations and possibilities of a ‘worldly’ existence. By contrast, Robert’s perspective sounds at once insightful and limited. He wants to fill in the gaps, seek out the views of Luke’s former friends, and try to analyze, interpret and defend his fate. He knows how the story will end. In describing his first encounter with Luke, Robert says:

I suppose we already knew that we would meet again and that I would have to live. That he had to die. I didn’t kill him. But had he not died, I wouldn’t have been. Everything that happened to him, every torment, was convenient for me. His weakness and self-loathing were my justification and my provocation. Besides, he wanted to die. He talked about it again and again. I have evidence. I am the witness regarding this matter.

As the narrative alternates between the three voices, the mood shifts. The Witness sections are delivered with neutral authority. At times Luke’s actions are used to illustrate a point, and occasionally the reader is addressed directly, as, for example, in: ‘There exists an informal list of banned books which includes the one you’re reading.’ Both Luke and Robert speak in the first person, and refer to each other as ‘he.’ At times, when appropriate, first person plural is also employed. Luke longs for the comfort of his alternate identity most when he feels isolated and depressed, leaving Robert effectively sidelined, observing from a distance much of the time—a tone that comes through clearly in his sections, setting them apart from Luke’s. As Luke battles addiction, the loss of self-esteem, and suicidal thoughts, one can sense a growing friction between the two voices, as if Robert is slowly coming into sharper focus within their dual existence.

At the end of this powerful account of transformation and rebirth, Robert Rient emerges from the restraints of a religion that rejects his very being, and comes, over time, to accept and love himself as he is. It is his conscious disassociation that provides protection and allows him, with the support of friends and his academic training in psychology, to survive the very tumultuous break with his faith. Once the internal division is no longer required, he sheds his name and identity, along with his past, to claim a new wholeness. And in telling his story in this way, with equal respect for his past and present lives, Rient is able to capture a conflicted, painful journey with a fresh authenticity that reaches beyond the specifics to touch the universality of the experience of striving to be true to one’s self.

It is of note that Frank Garrett’s translation effectively captures the shifting tenor of the narrative, something which is essential to the success of this multilayered approach. He also includes a guide to assist with the pronunciation of the Polish names in the text, and in his afterword, he details the choices that were made with respect to language, and the challenges of accessing the original resources required to render this unique memoir into English.

Light in form but not impact: Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

When God, disgusted with man,
Turned towards heaven,
And man, disgusted with God,
Turned towards Eve,
Things looked like falling apart.

But Crow Crow
Crow nailed them together,
Nailing heaven and earth together-

So man cried, but with God’s voice.
And God bled, but with man’s blood.

Then heaven and earth creaked at the joint
Which became gangrenous and stank-
A horror beyond redemption.

The agony did not diminish.

Man could not be man nor God God.

The agony

Grew.

Crow

Grinned

Crying: “This is my Creation,”

Flying the black flag of himself.

– Ted Hughes, “Crow Blacker than Ever”

I am carrying three griefs—three “conventional” griefs, if there is such a thing. I carry more, I am a walking inventory of grief, but the three “expected” griefs are those that I, and others, anticipate; I lost both of my parents and one of my closest friends within the span of two months last summer. And yet, no two griefs, no two losses are alike. Grief is the Thing with Feathers, Max Porter’s bravely unconventional novel about the impact of a woman’s sudden death on her husband and young sons, is a book that speaks to me—not as a bereaved child, my parents were in their eighties and ailing—but in the loss of my friend Ulla, who ended her life burdened by an unremittent depression and her own private, unresolved griefs.

She would have loved this book. It would not have saved her, but it might have granted her the comfort of wings, even for a moment.

crowTo appreciate the invention and spirit of Feathers, it is useful but not necessary, to have an acquaintance with Ted Hughes and his work Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow. These poems, composed primarily in a span of time bookended by the suicides of his wife, Sylvia Plath, and his partner, Assia Wevill, give inspiration to the corvid character, who inserts himself into the lives of the grieving family. The father is a Hughes scholar, fumbling his way through the completion of a manuscript about the poet’s crow poems in the disorienting aftermath of his wife’s death. Guiding him and his young sons as they struggle to make sense of a world and a family missing such a central figure—partner and parent—is a crude, boisterous, grandiose incarnation of Crow in all his mythological glory. Real or imagined, it matters not. This surreal surrogate houseparent has arrived to ease, tease and prod the troubled family toward healing. He will stay for as long as he is required.

This short novel blurs the lines between prose, poetry and drama. It is narrated by three voices. There is Dad, who, aches for the loss of his friend and lover, and in his uncertainty about the nature of his new role in his fractured little family, questions the possible delusional nature of the presence of Crow. But he recognizes the essential value of his feathered wisdom:

There is a fascinating constant exchange between Crow’s natural self and his civilised self, between the scavenger and the philosopher, the goddess of complete being and the black stain, between Crow and his birdness. It seems to me to the be the self-same exchange between mourning and living, then and now. I could learn a lot from him.

The boys, unnamed and ageless, offer contrasting individual reactions, challenging one another as siblings will, while in unison they form a sort of mini Greek chorus. They fill in gaps, and respond to the loss of their mother with their own magical thinking, express deep concern for their father, and exhibit childish delight with the company of the crusty black bird in their midst:

Once upon a time there were two boys who purposefully misremembered things about their father. It made them feel better if they forgot things about their mother.

And Crow, who, in all his trickster enthusiasm, offers folktale wisdom, philosophical asides, and an abiding concern to preserve the spiritual safety of his charges as he ushers them through the initial stages of grief. At his best he is loud and irreverent:

Gormin’ ere worrying horrid. Hello elair, krip krap krip krap who’s that lazurusting beans of my cut-out? Let me buck flap snutch clat tapa one tapa two, motherless children in my trap, in my apse, in separate stocks for boiling, Enunciate it, rolling and turning it, sadget lips and burning it. Ooh pressure! Must rehearse, must cuss less. The nobility of nature, haha krah haha krap haha, better not.

(I do this, perform some unbound crow stuff, for him. I think he thinks he’s a little bit Stonehenge shamanic, hearing the bird spirit. Fine by me, whatever gets him through.)

From the description of this book alone, I was uncertain how well it would work, or more precisely, how accepting I would be of the premise. I have seen reviewers comment that it is clever, but not an accurate depiction of grief. What is an accurate depiction of grief? Loss is personal; grief is unique. Grief, in this instance, is personified as “that thing with feathers.” Mythology and fable meets the urban reality of contemporary life and becomes something other. And that, I would argue, is exactly what the shock of bereavement (whether it is sudden or foreseen) feels like. Grief is jagged, distorted, time-out-of-placeness.

What insures the success of this original approach to a subject so often steeped in unbearable sorrow and self-pity, is not the absence of these emotions—they are present in measure—but rather the careful sifting of language, tone, and spirit in the magical or surreal elements. Porter employs the poetic energy of Hughes’ poetry, ramping it up and making it his own. Yet, Crow’s presence is more than that. He is aware of his role and his origin in the tale:

“Thank you Crow.”

“All part of the service.”

“Really. Thank you, Crow.”

“You’re welcome. But please remember I am your Ted’s song-legend, Crow of the death-chill, please. The God-eating, trash-licking, word-murdering, carcass-desecrating math-bomb motherfucker, and all that.”

“He never called you a motherfucker.”

“Lucky me.”

Hughes is the father’s hero and a project to anchor his recovery. The poet’s own complicated reputation is not ignored, nor is the shadow of Sylvia Plath’s death, yet there is a self-deprecating humour to Dad’s academic and personal obsession, echoed by Crow’s playful interchanges and his sons’ observations. Without these elements the entire set up would seem contrived, forced. With them, the reading experience is both a heartbreak and a delight.

My friend Ulla lost her mother a few short years after healing a bitter and long estrangement. Every morning she took her coffee and cigarette out to stand by the struggling thorn tree planted in her honour. She would pour a little coffee on the ground where her mother’s ashes had been spread—a daily ritual of connection. The spirit of Crow would have delighted her, I am certain. I regret I cannot share this book with her now. She too has turned to ashes, tossed to the sand and waves of the Indian Ocean along her favourite stretch of the South African shoreline.

Now, if you have read Grief is the Thing with Feathers, you will know why, in the end, this is a book that, for me,  speaks to my loss of one of my dearest friends.

Lament for a lost land: Journal of an Ordinary Grief by Mahmoud Darwish

A place is not only a geographical area; it’s also a state of mind. And trees are not just trees; they are the ribs of childhood. The tears flowed freely from my fingers as the bus passed quickly by. Upon our return, the sadness of my childhood came back. This dream standing before me, why didn’t I just wrap it around myself even once so I could say I have felt the joy that kills? The soldiers were guarding the dream, but I will enter it when they sleep.

2017-02-09-15-32-49Journal of an Ordinary Grief, the first of three major works of prose spanning the career of late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), is a work of intense, heartbreaking loss and pain. Yet this collection of autobiographical essays is more than simple memoir. He chronicles his family’s history, meditates on the meaning of homeland, and focuses on the horror visited upon Arabs in the occupied territories. He talks about being under house arrest, his confrontations with Israeli interrogators, and his time in prison. He talks of the life of the refugee and the exile. As the translator, Ibrahim Muhawi, points out in his Foreword, Darwish makes it clear that Palestine is his cause. He equates his self with his country; the pronouns he uses—I or you—can represent his own personal experience or those of his people. Here the poetic is merged with the political, and the memoir becomes a requiem for a nation, up close and immediate: “In Journal, as in all of Darwish, we are placed in the middle of an encounter between writing and history where writing gives shape to the homeland.”

He approaches the telling, as a poet, with a lyrical force that levels one powerful image after another. The opening piece, “The Moon Did Not Fall into the Well,” sets out as a dialogue, presumably between a father and son:

—What are you doing, father?

—I’m searching for my heart, which fell away that night.

—Do you think you’ll find it here?

—Where else am I going to find it? I bend to the ground and pick it up piece by piece just as the women of the fellahin pick olives in October, one olive at a time.

In the end we realize that this is the poet’s younger self interrogating his older self. The latter speaks of his family, driven into exile in 1948, only to return to find themselves exiles in their own land. Childlike curiosity meets the sorrow born of experience and loss, wisdom and despair.

Attention to the quality and shape of the sentence informs Darwish’s poetic prose. He frequently, and efficiently, employs a dramatic dialogue in a number of his essays. The title piece is largely composed of a series of “conversations”—commonly ironic in tone—that cast light on the political dynamics of racial discrimination and oppression. The impact is strikingly effective:

—Where are you from, brother?

—From Gaza.

—What did you do?

—I threw a grenade at the conqueror’s car, but I blew myself up instead.

—And . . .

—They arrested me and charged me with attempted suicide.

—You confessed, of course.

—Not exactly. I told them the attempted suicide didn’t succeed. So they liberated me out of mercy and sentenced me to life.

—But you were intending to kill, not to commit suicide?

—It seems you don’t know Gaza. Distance there is an imaginary thing.

—I don’t understand.

—It seems you don’t know Gaza. Where are you from?

—From Haifa.

—And what did you do?

—I threw a poem at the conquerors’ car, and it blew them up.

—And . . .

—They arrested me and charged me with mass murder.

And so it goes. Thus the reader/listener is brought into the heart of the political struggle. Later on in this piece, the narrator addresses his audience directly to illustrate the losses of basic freedoms he has experienced: You want to travel to Greece? You want to rent an apartment? You want to visit your mother on a feast day? Other voices enter and play devil’s advocate. There is bitterness and defiance running through the sections of this essay, but the language carries a frightening beauty: “They place you under arrest when you are committing a dream.”

The poetic spirit and sensibility with which Darwish explores the fate of Palestine, and what it means to live, as he does, as an exile in Israel, pushes this memoir closer to the heart, generating more emotional energy than a more conventional first-person narrative essay format would typically allow. As such, the reading experience becomes more intense as one moves through the essays. And, of course, this work is sadly as relevant today, as it was when it was first published in 1973—speaking not only to the roots of the ongoing tensions between Israel and Palestine, but to broader concerns facing Arab refugees forced out of divided and troubled homelands throughout the Middle East, and of those who dare to speak out who risk detention, or worse, in many states:

You write to your imaginary lover: “I wish you despair for you, my love, that you may excel for the desperate are creative. Don’t wait for me. Don’t wait for anyone. Wait for the thought; don’t wait for the thinker. Wait for the poem; don’t wait for the poet. Wait for the revolution; don’t wait for the revolutionary. The thinker may be wrong, the poet may lie, and the revolutionary may get tired. This is the despair I mean.”

By making individual experience universal, and personifying historical tragedy and loss, Mahmoud Darwish—though his poetry and his prose—stands witness to the fate of his people under occupation. “The homeland,” he claims, “is always at its most beautiful when it is on the other side of the barbed wire fence.” He grieves, and his grief is anything but ordinary.

Journal of an Ordinary Grief, translated by Ibrahim Muhawi, is published by Archipelago Books.

You do not own life: Welcome to Our Hillbrow by Phaswane Mpe

The first thing you notice from the opening words of Phaswane Mpe’s only novel, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, is an unusual, and to Western readers, unconventional narrative voice:

If you were still live, Refentše, child of Tiragalong, you would be glad that Bafana Bafana lost to France in the 1998 Soccer World Cup fiasco. Of course you supported the squad. But at least now, you would experience no hardships walking to your flat through the streets of Hillbrow—that locality of just over one square kilometre, according to official records; and according to its inhabitants, at least twice as big and teeming with countless people.

This is not, as some mistakenly assume, a second person perspective, but rather a communal first person plural voice, speaking from a universal omniscient viewpoint to a character who is dead. It is a narrative form that freely moves from the physical to the metaphysical and back again. By drawing on traditional storytelling techniques, language, and expressions to tell a story that is rooted in one of the most crowded, disadvantaged, and violent inner-city neighbourhoods of post-Apartheid Johannesburg, Mpe is able to explore the intersection of complex issues—linguistic and literary marginalization, xenophobia, suicide, AIDS, and rural superstition—with a dazzling immediacy and intensity.

mpeMpe (1970-2004) was born in Limpopopo Province (formerly Pietersburg) in northeastern South Africa and, like his main character, Refentše, he moved to Johannesburg at the age of nineteen to attend the University of Witwatersrand, which had recently opened its doors to black students. Unable to afford accommodation on campus, he lived in Hillbrow. He would go on to complete an MA in publishing at Oxford Brookes in the UK—an experience that he would, in his novel, grant Refilwe, the female character whose life crosses and parallels that of Refentše. Thus, Mpe’s urban and rural experiences, informed by his modern liberal arts education, contributed to the development of a distinctive new literary voice, one which would be cruelly silenced all too early when he died suddenly at the age of thirty-four.

The voice that carries the narrative directly addresses the primary character throughout the course of this short novel, and is at once challenging and understanding. The voice recounts Refentše’s actions and emotions for him, reminding or reinforcing a memory of his experiences because he and  most of the primary characters have met untimely or unfortunate fates by end of the book (or, if you would rather, before the account even begins). This is a narrative to the dead from the dead. This unusual approach not only allows for a surprisingly effective engagement with a tragic tale of unfortunate coincidences, misunderstandings, and consequences, but it also creates a unique dialectical context for the exploration of the deep and critical issues that lie at the core of the story.

In simple terms, although it does not unfold in a straightforward manner, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, follows two main characters: Refentše, who comes to the city to study, and settles in Hillbrow, becoming a sensitive observer of the community; and Refilwe, his childhood friend and former girlfriend, who arrives in the city shortly before his death. He falls in love with Lerato, the “Bone of his Heart,” who is also an academic. But his mother and fellow villagers are not happy to see him with a city woman—urban/rural prejudices are acute. When a couple of unfortunate moments of infidelity “shatter” his enthusiasm for life and lead to his suicide, Refilwe exasperates the situation by implying that Lerato is the daughter of a Nigerian man, a curse that plays into a deep-seated xenophobia toward African migrants that still exists in some black South African communities today. Tribal justice, more suicide, and madness follow in the wake of Refentše’s death. Yet the narrator continues to address him in Heaven, where he is able to observe the action that ensues but is, of course, powerless to intervene.

I do not own life, you often said when you tried to laugh your difficulties away.

Many people could not see that you were not merely throwing jokes around. You did not own your life when you were alive. Now that you are alive in a different realm, you know for sure that you do not own life. You have watched God and Devil, gods and Ancestors, wondering whether *they* owned it, this thing called life. As far as you could see no one seemed to own it, judging by the way they too cast their eyes in the directions of our Hillbrow, Alexandra, and Tiragalong, clicking their tongues in deep sadness or grim amusement as people devoured one another. You were right there with them, still on your way to finding out whether any of them owned life.

The novel opens with a vivid evocation of the riotous atmosphere of Hillbrow, an area populated primarily by migrants from the townships, rural areas, and from beyond the borders of South Africa. Unemployment and poverty prevail. Those who have arrived from other countries, especially Nigeria, are rudely referred to as Makwerekwere, and are accused of bringing drugs, crime, and prostitution. AIDS is also beginning to take a toll, but the disease is poorly understood and also seen as imported by the outsiders. Rural residents, like the villagers of Refentše’s hometown, Tiragalong, believe they are protected from this mysterious ailment because they don’t eat Green Monkey meat as some West Africans are rumoured to do, and they don’t engage in anal sex. Xenophobia and ignorance in the face of the rising AIDS epidemic are two of the key concerns that Mpe sets out to address. The distrust of immigrants is both timeless and exceptionally timely. Refentše often debates the matter with his cousin, who claims that the neighbourhood had been fine before the arrival of the Nigerians with all their drug dealing:

You, Refentše, child of Tiragalong (and, as you insisted in the days just before your death, also of Hillbrow), had never shared such sentiments. It was your opinion that the moral decay of Hillbrow, so often talked about, was in fact no worse than that of Tiragalong.

Think about it, Cousin, you would challenge. How many people are here in Hillbrow? How many of them are criminals? If you consider that the concentration of people in Hillbrow is dense, and work out the number of crimes in relation to the number of people, I tell you, you will find Tiragalong to be just as bad…. And while we’re so busy blaming [the Makwerekwere] for all our sins, hadn’t we better also admit that quite a large percentage of our home relatives who get killed in Hillbrow are in fact killed by other relatives who bring their home grudges with them to Jo’burg. That’s what makes Hillbrow so corrupt…

Refentše tries to remind his cousin that many of those coming into the country are fleeing violence and deprivation elsewhere—they are driven into exile. Yet his cousin’s response echoes that which so often meets refugees, no matter the time or place:

Cousin insisted that people should remain in their own countries and try to sort out the problems of those respective countries, rather than fleeing them; South Africa had too many problems of its own.

During his years in Hillbrow, Refentše completes his studies and becomes a lecturer at the university. He dreams of writing a novel about his neighbourhood, believing it to be the kind of place underrepresented in literature. He only manages to publish one short story, one that explores, through the fate of its female protagonist, the limitations of writing in traditional tongues in a country with eleven official languages, but where only two dominate to the practical exclusion of the others. Mpe quite effectively works his arguments into and against the prevailing dynamics in South African literature: his main character reads Coetzee (Waiting for the Barbarians), while later, in Oxford, Refilwe introduces an Irish barman to Zakes Mda (Ways of Dying). He can be seen as attempting to build a bridge between established authors—with novels that reflect themes in his own work—and a vision of a literature that could be more inclusive of other languages, such as his native Sepedi.

Toward the end of the novel, the narrative zeroes in on Refilwe as she finally has the opportunity to pursue her MA at Oxford, but the narrator(s) will not actually address her directly until the closing passages of the book. Several years have passed since Refentše’s death, and guilt over her treatment of Lerato, plus her experiences living and working in Johannesburg, have softened her own xenophobic tendencies. While she is overseas she meets and falls in love with a Nigerian man. However, their bliss is cut short when they learn they both have AIDS, and would have in fact been HIV positive for many years. Her fate will serve to challenge the prejudices of Tiragalong when she returns home. Subtle shifts in the narrative voice through the final chapter, serve to add power to its heartbreaking conclusion.

The critical examination of contemporary themes, within a narrative shaped by the rhythms and poetry of an African oral tradition, offers readers an experience that is both fresh and deeply moving. Echoes of Mpe’s work, together with that of K. Sello Duiker, another young and tragically short-lived black writer who emerged in the early post-Apartheid years, has continued to resonate through an entire generation of young South African writers who are producing vital and original literature today.

Welcome to Our Hillbrow: A Novel of Postapartheid South Africa, by Phaswane Mpe is available from Ohio University Press, with an excellent introduction by Ghirmai Negash.

2017 Africa Reading Challenge.

Ever returning: Describing the Past by Ghassan Zaqtan

She is my loss and she knows this. She is my absence and knows this too.

From the earliest passages, there is an abiding transience to the narrative flow of Ghassan Zaqtan’s novella, Describing the Past. The language is delicate, the imagery fragile and dream-like. The world his characters inhabit has an eerie timelessness. The past—immediate or distant—is tangible. Ghosts wander the streets, and memories are brought into being as ethereal images or objects that hold a vital presence in the room, breathe, come alive at night. We are among people who have been uprooted once and will be uprooted again; their dreams and recollections sustain them, give them something to hold on to.

ghassan_zaqtanZaqtan, a Palestinian poet, was born a refugee. In 1961, at the age of seven, his family was relocated (for the second time since 1948) from Beit Jala, in the West Bank, to the Karameh refugee camp across from Jericho, in the Jordan River Valley. But, as Fady Joudah indicates in his Foreword, the camp would be burned with the Israeli invasion in 1968. Zaqtan’s tale is set in this community, yet re-imagined and filtered through the chimerical memory of a place, like childhood itself, that no longer exists.

The narrative is carried by three separate voices—designated I, He, and She—each speaking in first person. The central narrator is nicknamed Christian (his mother was Christian, his father Muslim), and his friend, the other young man, is known as the Iraqi’s son after an uncle who identified himself as Iraqi due to his brief role helping the Iraqi Army at the end of the 1948 war, an experience he built into a sustaining myth that coloured his entire family’s identity. The young woman who holds their attention is, at the outset, married to an elderly man who takes her and her mother into his home. When he dies, she will marry the Iraqi’s son and bear him a child before he drowns, leaving her alone. As such, the outline of the plot is simple, much of it alluded to in the first chapter. However, the story is unwrapped slowly, moving back and forth in time, and relying on poetic imagery and the vagaries of memory to sketch out the spaces that exist between these three individuals.

And that is where the magic lies. In the opening section Christian inadvertently chances to see “her”, the young wife of the old man, naked in her room. He had come seeking some tea leaves for his mother and had not realized she was home. Transfixed by the sight of her body he watches her in hiding until she begins to sob and he runs away, terrified and exhilarated by what he has seen. Of course he must tell his friend, who beautifully describes the vividness of the account:

At first I didn’t believe it, it was not his voice. There was a strand of fantasy that glimmered in his words, some current of rash hunger and desire, of fear and fraud. Little by little, like dust growing slowly and insistently into heaps, she started to gather there in the voice toward the point of completion. She became clear and close. I saw her in his voice reclining nude and whole. Her knee flashed at a distance. At the centre of her figure a dark spot of light amassed, turning and breathing. I was there. I saw her in his voice with a clarity that did not exist for him; she was clearer and more complete in his voice than anything he had looked at and beheld.

The narrative glances forward and retreats in time. The voice of the Iraqi’s son who meets an early demise, disappears from the discourse about halfway through. But the dead are never gone. They are greeted in the street. They emerge from photographs. One has the sense of a world crowded with memories, individuals weighed down by what they have lost. The level, steadily-paced poetry of the language enhances this sensation. This novella, only 84 pages long, is best if savoured slowly, allowing the words to be absorbed.

As each of the narrators picks up the pieces of their own stories, the temporal distortion, shifting from chapter to chapter, can be disorienting. “Here” and “now” are terms without a fixed frame of reference. This is intensified because Christian, as the central narrator, rather than providing structure, is the most abstract and philosophical in his manner of being in the world. He is most sensitive to a past that extends beyond his experience. To ghosts. At one point his father had crept into forbidden territory in search of his village, only to find it in ruins, home now to a curtain of cacti and one remaining pomegranate tree. Stuffing his pockets with pomegranates he arrived home covered in juice, clutching one whole fruit:

He placed it on our only table, and the fruit stayed there. We were unable to wound it. We were afraid to cause it, or him, pain. It was in front of us—breathing and remembering—on that squat table, next the knife that my youngest sister had brought and about which we quickly forgot. It was impossible for us to go beyond that. The fruit was completely alive and necessary for him, his only means to make us believe him, to make us believe all those stories he had brought to us—of his house, his village and his land.

Our house, our village, our land.

There is a sense that the three young characters at the centre of Describing the Past are trapped, suspended in lives they cannot control. It is not clear how much time passes. Hopes and ambitions are fleeting when you face an uncertain future in a refugee camp—when the land you live on is shared with ghosts, haunted by memories, and liable to turn to dust without warning. Yet, circular, the dream-like narrative returns, in the end, to complete the fragmentary images that the set up by central narrator in the opening passages. The mood is gently haunting, beautiful and sad.

And it leaves you with chills.

Describing the Past by Ghassan Zaqtan is translated by Samuel Wilder and published by Seagull Books.

Of reality and imagination: To Begin at the Beginning by Javier Marías

In the opening paragraph of her “Postface” to Javier Marías’ recently released contribution to the Cahier Series, To Begin at the Beginning, famed translator Margaret Jull Costa confesses that every time she starts to work on a new Marías novel, she thinks: “I can’t do this.” His work, with its long, convoluted sentences, and its precise, but shifting, language lies ahead of her at the outset of each project, and until she gets back into the flow she feels a sense of anxiety. I must admit that similar sort of uncertainty faces me as a reader. I wonder, am I ready to commit to Marías again right now? Unfortunately, with a few efforts since I was first swept away by A Heart So White many years ago, the answer has been no, not now.

beginSo imagine my delight with this short, reflective essay about the art of taking the stuff of life—the truths and myths that arise from one’s own family history—and using, even re-using them, to tell stories, create literature. I found this Marías, talking about his family, and his approach to the art of writing, so wonderful to read that I’ve mentally added his trilogy to my list of books to read. And that is one of the absolute joys of the Cahier Series: the opportunity to meet, or meet again, a writer or translator, and spend a little time with them as they explore writing or translating, or the intersection of both, in unique and original ways.

Marías, the highly-respected Spanish novelist and translator, sets out in this piece to explain his desire to devote his energies to writing “inventions,” and why, even when he borrows elements from real life, so to speak, he is inclined to break them up, and blend them into his fictional characters and creations rather than putting them in, unaltered.

2017-01-15-02-12-11 He begins by trying to set himself apart from writers who make every effort to make their fictional offerings appear factual, and expresses his dismay whenever presented with the expression: Based on real events. His inevitable reaction? “I’m filled with a feeling of tedium and anticipatory boredom, of distrust and resistance, of suspicion and even scepticism,” he says, going on to be more exacting:

‘What is so strange and unbelievable, so extraordinarily random, arbitrary, and corny about this story that, even though it’s already happened in real life, they still want to tell me about it, even warning me that I have to believe it whether I like it or not, because this is how it was, this is what actually happened?’

2017-01-15-02-13-49Of course, in the essay that follows, he goes on to share aspects of his own family history, reaching back to his Cuban great-grandfather, pulling out some of the stories that have made their way into one or more of his novels. This abbreviated family history is fascinating in its own right (inadvertently causing one to think that any story “true” or otherwise can be magic in the hands of the right storyteller), but his discussion of his process of re-imagining and working people and incidents from the past into his fictions—and the decisions he has faced when handling elements of the real within the world of invention—is equally compelling.

2017-01-15-02-10-09Marías reports that, when he writes, he applies the same principle of knowledge that is at play in life. He does not know if what he writes at page five of a novel will prove to be a good idea at page 200 any more than we can know if what we do at age twenty will seem to have been wise from the vantage point of forty, and so on. In writing, one has the advantage of editing, adjusting events back and forth between earlier and later portions of the work, giving meaning to the capricious and superfluous, as required, so that “what had no meaning at the beginning does have meaning at the end.” Subject as it is to the unforeseeable variables that mould reality, he contends, life makes a very poor novelist. Imagination is a critical mediator—and one of the essential keys to literature— filtering the invented and the actual, rendering everything equal.

To Begin at the Beginning, the twenty-eighth addition to the Cahier Series, offers an opportunity to spend a little time in the company of a renowned novelist and his chief translator. Illustrated by the works of Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam, it will likely be appreciated by Marías’ committed readers. For those who have little or no experience with his novels, it serves as an ideal introduction, or, as in my case, an inspiration to read more.

The Cahier Series is a joint publication from the Center for Writers and Translators of the American University of Paris and Sylph Editions.

“Childhood is ancient”: Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy

The bell rings, we get up. The bell rings again, we go to bed. We retire to our rooms; we saw life pass beneath our windows, observed it in books and on our walks, watched the seasons change. It was always a reflection, a reflection that seemed to freeze on our windowsills. And perhaps now we saw a tall marbly figure stand out before us: it is Frédérique passing through our lives and maybe we’d like to go back, but we don’t need anything, anymore. We imagined the world. What else can we imagine now if not our own deaths? The bell rings and it’s all over.

Switzerland, the Appenzell: the area where Robert Walser took his walks, including his final snowy outing, and the location of the boarding school where the narrator of Fleur Jaeggy’s hauntingly pristine first novel is living, at the age of fourteen. She regrets that they didn’t know of the writer’s existence at the time, but the perfection of his death, and the season, set the tone for the story that she is about to share—a chilling winter tone that persists even as the months and years pass and the harsh, spare beauty of Sweet Days of Discipline works its way right through to the bone.

sweetdaysThis novella is marked by a tightly controlled narrative voice. It is a tale of obsession. There is little action, it is the narrator’s emotional intensity that drives the story forward. Looking back on the years she spent in a series of boarding schools, from the age of eight to seventeen, she zeroes in on this one particular year, at the Bausler Institut, where Frédérique—beautiful, remote, and obedient—first entered her life. She sets out to conquer this newcomer who, only a few months older, has come from the outside with a certain detached worldliness that instantly sets her apart from the other girls.

The narrator, whose education is directed, long distance, by her mother in Brazil, is a seasoned veteran of boarding schools where, as she puts it, “a sort of senile childhood was protracted almost to insanity.” She knows the game, and how to play it, which she does with a healthy measure of cynicism:

Part of your education is learning how to thank with a smile. An awful smile. There is a mortuary look somehow to the faces of the boarders, a faint mortuary smell to even the youngest and most attractive girls. A double image, anatomical and antique. In the one the girl runs about and laughs, in the other she lies on a bed covered in a lace shroud. It’s her own skin has embroidered it.

She is, however, only an average student—a fact that does not trouble her at all. At one point she admits that all she remembers from her school years is Baudelaire. No surprise. She seems to have almost absorbed his dark poetic soul. Her narrative is liberally strewn with metaphorical references to graves, coffins, corpses, and death.

She befriends Frédérique, in good part because the others find the new girl too distant, and keep their distance in return. They take walks together, and she listens with sometimes exhausted attention, as Frédérique talks of literature, philosophy, and travel. Her own obsession borders, she supposes, on love. But it is a chaste, almost brittle affection.

Spring thawThere is a simmering violence that runs beneath the surface of the narrative. The narrator, long neglected by her own family, harbours a bitterness that colours her detailed, frequently nasty, appraisals of the appearance and idiosyncrasies of others—the headmistress and her husband, her German roommate, the little black girl, and more. When Micheline, a gregarious new student arrives, she suddenly turns her back on her precious Frédérique, more it seems, out of a sadistic streak than affection for the newcomer. She registers no remorse until Frédérique’s father dies, causing her to leave the school for good.

This novella is filled with conflicted, often dark, emotion. The tension lies not so much in what happens, as in the sombre frostiness of the prose. Frédérique, it turns out, is deeply troubled; however, the nameless narrator, is perhaps more unsettling and tragic. Either way, the result is a tale—captured so deftly in this translation by Tim Parks—of stark, poetic beauty:

I persevered in the pleasure of taking my sadness to the limit, the way one does with some practical joke. The pleasure of disappointment. It wasn’t new to me. I had been relishing it ever since I was eight years old, a boarder in my first, religious, school. And perhaps they were the best years, I thought. Those years of discipline. There was a kind of elation, faint but constant throughout all those days of discipline, the sweet days of discipline.

Fleur Jaeggy is an Italian speaking, Swiss-born writer. Sweet Days of Discipline is published by New Directions. Two newly translated works will be coming out, July 2017, from New Directions in North America and And Other Stories in the UK. (Sweet Days of Discipline is now available outside North America from And Other Stories)

 

The enigmatic fiction of Roger Lewinter: Story of Love in Solitude and The Attraction of Things

It is unusual to come to the end of a book and be completely at a loss as to how to write about the reading experience one has just had, and yet feel compelled to make some sort of attempt, however indirect or uncertain that might be. And that is exactly how I find myself now, having just finished Roger Lewinter’s novella The Attraction of Things. Together with Story of Love in Solitude, a very brief collection of three short stories, these two recent releases from New Directions (translated by Rachel Careau) serve as an English language introduction to the French writer and translator’s beguiling, meditative, and sometimes simply perplexing, fiction.

lovesolitudeThe latter volume, originally published in 1989, is one of the most unusual and strangely captivating books I read all year. The stories are focused and contained, reading almost like prose poetry, but they offer a taste of Lewinter’s idiosyncratic unspooling sentences that can wind around seemingly unrelated clauses before finding their way, from beginning to end, by such a circuitous route that one often feels inclined to retrace the pattern back to its source. It is an experience akin to untangling a long garden hose, or, more appropriately, following the designs of a richly decorated tapestry such as the Kashmir shawls that Lewinter’s narrator—whose writing and translating projects mirror the author’s so directly that the line between fiction and memoir appear to blur—obsesses over in the story “Passion” and throughout the course of the longer novella. Even attempting to write about Lewinter’s prose invites a tendency to add divertive notes, set off with dashes, not entirely unlike the style he employs.

See? Already it feels as if I am spinning my wheels. The reward though, especially in the shorter pieces, lies in the attention to detail and emotion, often of a detached or self-reflective nature, that is granted the events, objects or individuals with whom the narrator is engaged. The simplest story, the opening titular piece of Story of Love in Solitude, lasts for less than three pages and concerns the persistent presence of a spider. It captures so acutely the type of everyday irritation that quickly turns to a sense of loss when the routine is broken and an odd affection is realized after the fact.

athingsThe other two stories are more complex in the attractions and obsessions they entail and introduce characteristics that are present—and I want to say, more inclined to cause a measure of frustration—throughout the novella: Lewinter’s tendency to use explicit dates and translation projects to track time while he dismantles and reconstructs the chronological (in)consistencies in his stories—one which involves an epic battle against insect infestation and fate to save two camellias, and the other, which traces the protagonist’s drawn out and ultimately fruitless obsession with a young man he observes in the market. What makes these set-pieces work is the way that, for all his musing and meandering, Lewinter writes with an almost symphonic intensity, building tension into his narratives, and bringing each one to a charged conclusion. These small discursive journeys relate ordinary events that are oddly familiar, sensitive, and moving.

The same forces are at play in The Attraction of Things, which is the earlier of the two works, originally published in 1985, and, again, the overlap of characteristics between the narrator of the novella and, at the very least, the literary career of the author, create the sense that this is one voice, an alter-ego or fictionalized version of Lewinter himself. As he states, Attraction is:

…the story of a being who lets himself go toward what attracts him—beings, works, things—and who, through successive encounters, finds the way out of the labyrinth, to the heart, where passion strikes. This is the story of a letting go toward that passion.

The path that this being follows is one that appears to be characterized by an attempt to avoid deep emotional engagement with people by allowing objects—78 RPM records, Kashmir shawls, porcelain collectibles—to distract him. Against this pursuit of things, his mother and father become ill and eventually die, he allows a relationship with a woman to drift away, and lets a man take advantage of him. His passivity approaches denial of mortality, commitment, and sexuality. The flea market and the lure of things is a refuge. So too, is his work, which primarily involves immersing himself in the words of others.

Lewinter, the author and his narrator alike, has translated Karl Kraus, Elias Canetti, Robert Walser, and Rilke among others. But of special significance perhaps, is his deep association with the work of Georg Groddeck (1866-1934), the German physician widely regarded as a pioneer of psychosomatic medicine. If nothing else, this presents a possible context for understanding the manner in which the protagonist and his parents each face, and deal with, illness and physical ailments. There is a strong self-determination and stubbornness shared by the three family members that is, at the same time, a source of frustration to the son in his own distracted state. It is also interesting that Lewinter—separating him from his narrator is becoming redundant in this context—mentions writing about the connection between Bosch and Groddeck in an essay on paradise in psychoanalysis (Groddeck et Le Royaume millénaire de Jérôme Bosch—1974). Immediately this adds a new dimension to the obsession with Kashmir shawls—the colours and designs integrating cardinal points, black hearts, and angels—that runs throughout the novella and resurfaces in the later story “Passion.” To what extent are the textiles collected, cherished and hung on the walls an attempt to reflect a dream of paradise? But, most critically, when winding one’s way through the elliptical sentences that stretch on and on, often for a page or more, the narrator’s absorption with the work of a man who envied Freud’s discovery of psychoanalysis offers a way to “read” Lewinter’s distinct style of writing.

Any quotation from either book that captures a fragment of one of the gloriously nested sentences, would fail to do justice to the effect, or serve as a necessary sample for discussion, so permit me one longer, complete quote (by happy coincidence, this passage, which I selected as I was reading, happens to end a longer excerpt that was reproduced on Lit Hub):

The health of my father, since the previous September, had been deteriorating, the drugs having less and less control over the tremor that was now paralyzing him in spurts, disjointing his day with gaps to which, not wanting to hear of another hospitalization, he reconciled himself, and which I likewise trivialized; while, returning after the three months’ interruption occasioned by Antigone to Le chercheur, I finished the word-for-word translation in June, to find myself confronted with the difficulty unresolved, since I still didn’t know how to convey in French what showed through in the German, in my version rendering, as I was aware, only a state of amazement, not, in its magnetization, the torrent  of a life; and, the more I advanced, the more I was losing my way, when, on August 13, I had to have my father admitted, despite his refusal—“because you die there”—, to Thônex so that they could try, by gradually changing his medication, to stabilize his condition; but it was the balance found upon the death of my mother, three years earlier, that was undoubtedly slipping away.

Lewinter’s narrative clearly fits into the broad category of stream of consciousness writing. It is not as loosely unformed as some variations; the insertion of exact dates and concurrent writing and translation projects provides a structural formality and logic to the account. Not being well acquainted (yet) with the pioneers of the nouveau roman, I am not as well equipped as another reviewer (see John Trefry here) might be to draw refernces from that direction—my reading is necessarily instinctual and informed by the spaces where I related with particular poignancy to the larger story. The way the narrator’s mind wanders is reminiscent of the way we talk to ourselves and allows him to capture something somewhere between unarticulated thoughts and formal discourse. This is the private debate, the ongoing perseveration, the way we justify our obsessions with objects or people, our impatience with others—especially with those closest who invariably raise the most complex emotions—and any other shortcomings we care to catalogue and excuse as we structure our own internal narratives. As we articulate ourselves into being.

As the narrator’s equilibrium is slowly undone, that is, as his father’s deteriorating health challenges him to break down his own defenses, he is forced to finally open himself up and truly embrace the man he must admit he has never really understood. Father and son, mirrors in more ways than either wishes to recognize, are drawn, both resisting the pull, into a full acknowledgement of their affection for one another. And what is the first thing our narrator does to mark this breakthrough? He looks for an object to commemorate the occasion. There is constant interplay between emotional exhilaration and exhaustion that drives The Attraction of Things, at the level of the sentence and across the text as a whole, that to no small degree, contributes to the state in which a reader emerges at the end. In the span of 79 small pages one has experienced something at once fantastic and draining.

Not unlike a session on the analyst’s couch. And very much like the experience of trying to untangle and make sense of our own lives.

Lewinter is not going to be for everyone. If I was uncertain in the early chapters of Things after loving the smaller pieces in Story of Love, I became increasingly engaged as the father’s health deteriorated, in part because there were echoes of my own father’s decline and death over the first six months of this year. At times I almost had to laugh out loud at the older man’s stubborn resolve and refusal to give in to a weakening, crumbling body—my father was exactly the same. Now, having taken the time to write about this novella, I have come to respect and marvel at what it demonstrates about how an essentially ordinary, even mundane story can be told—no, orchestrated—and granted an operatic arc that creates an experience a reader will have a hard time shaking. There is a lot in this slender volume.

In the end, I am not certain I have articulated or elucidated anything especially profound about these two small books. To date, there is one more piece of fiction in Lewinter’s oeuvre and, as I understand it, Rachel Careau is still dedicated to translating his works. I know I will be watching for more.

Story of Love in Solitude and The Attraction of Things are published by New Directions. Each book is bilingual, with the complete French text following the English.