Tag: books

The illusion of reality: A Dream of Horses & Other Stories by Aashish Kaul

“A book is an enigma. Words that fill its pages present a shifty, relative universe. Through a reader, they create constructs where the past attempts to meet the future, the present arranging the meeting. In this present, as the reader receives and breaks apart the text – revives the past, contemplates the future – he, unknowingly merges the two and makes the present fluid, expansive, eternal: he defeats time.”

If the author’s medium is words – words strung together to hold a story until it can be read and unleashed by the reader, the reader who ventures into A Dream of Horses & Other Stories by Aashish Kaul is well advised to be prepared to follow those words on the paths they take, the forks they chose to follow, and the dreamscapes they uncover. And, if I advise said reader that they will emerge, in the final tale, on a boat on a lake listening in, no, almost absorbing, an imagined conversation between Jorge Louis Borges and Samuel Beckett, would that offer an indication of the journey in store? It should, but take that as an enticement. This is magical book. A magical book that celebrates the magic of books and traces the joys and heartaches that are bound to the process of translating the imagination into words on the page.

dreamhorsesThis slender collection of seven stories begins with two short tales, a parable about an archer who embarks on what starts out as way to occupy down time between periods of war, and becomes a mystical quest for knowledge; and a fable of sorts about a young child soldier, who wrenched from the opportunity to continue his education, finds himself ready to kill or be killed for the sake of a book. These stories follow a traditional, almost ancient form of storytelling. But from that point on, the influence of the two literary masters whom we will eventually meet on the boat mentioned above begins to infiltrate and inform the narrators, all writers themselves, who will carry us through the remaining tales.

In his enthusiastic introduction to this volume, Scott Esposito describes this collection as “seven dreams that Aashish Kaul has persuaded us to take for reality” but, as we discover, even the narrators often have a difficult time separating dream from reality in their own existences, creating a shifting maze, or labyrinth that must be negotiated. In the end the reader (and the narrator) can do little more than surrender to this blurred line between truth and imagination, and the experience of fiction is laid bare as an act of the suspension of disbelief.

The longer stories that form the centrepiece of this collection highlight Kaul’s ability to create dreamlike environments – landscapes or cityscapes – that contain and unfold for his characters as needed. The natural settings are typically isolated, atop mountains, amid pine forests or in desolate dry locations. Several stories take place, at least in part, in Paris, a ceaselessly romantic backdrop with bridges, wrought iron railings, gardens and the looming structure of the Eiffel Tour. The former become settings of solitude and refuge from the noise, intensity and heartache of the city. Time functions on different measures in different places, compresses or expands, hanging most heavily over the writer who fears he has lost his voice.

In “The Light Ascending”, a writer who is suffering from a creative block, finds himself retracing his steps daily along paths leading from the Institute where he is staying through forests and up hills, seeking answers, inspiration, a clue to the path he should follow. The one book he has published to date had the primary benefit of connecting him with the famed, but elusive writer “JC”. One night, drawn into the woods by the sound of a flute playing he will lose his way and discover that he is “in a dream, mine or another’s, I can’t tell.” He will find himself in a cottage engaged in a most unusual game of chess with JC himself – a game in which he is compelled to begin naming the pieces: Borges, Joyce, Faulkner… Beckett. As his blockage lifts, he is overwhelmed by the enormity of what he has come to realize about his chosen craft.

There is a melancholy chord that sounds throughout these pages. The question of capturing the moment and transmitting it in the written form becomes a philosophical question and a practical concern for several of the narrators. In the title story “A Dream of Horses” and the longest entry, “Tahiti”, our authors each have a story to tell inspired, no compelled, by a lost romantic experience. In the former story, the narrator is recovering from a long illness during which he was simply unable to write. He wants to recapture a particular autumn in his life, but reflects that we “breathe in the present, but are alive only in retrospect, in a time long lost to that treacherous monster: memory.” How then to do justice to this moment in time? When he finally feels up to the task, he finds that the effort is draining:

“How easily I tire. How difficult it seems to move your pen to shape words, sentences, stories. It has become a labour, a mere physical activity. And yet, I have not written, no scribbled, more than a handful of lines. So much the better to roll out words and sentences in your memory, where they float calmly and because they are formless always retain some element of the truth.”

And here he turns, as if abandoning the pen, to address directly the woman whom he met that autumn. In second person, he is able to unfold the story he wants to tell from her perspective. By the end we see why this is the only sensible way to attempt to tell the truth of what lies ahead.

“Tahiti” also involves a writer with a woman from his past who has returned to haunt his imagination. As the story opens he has sought respite from city life in an unnamed Asian country where he has come to live in a compound high atop a mountain. Here he discovers a library perched on the edge of a precipice over a deep ravine tended by a nearly blind librarian who knows and recognizes every volume on the shelves. In this environment our writer is able to rekindle an energy for writing through his conversations with the librarian and the books he borrows. Woven against this narrative is the story of his love affair with the enigmatic woman who calls herself Tahiti. As he moves back and forth in his story, the boundaries between reality and dreams – or rather, the realistic and the fantastic – begin to blur, raising the question whether a narrator is in control of the story he tells or subject to lose his own grounding in reality, whatever that is, before the tale is over.

For the reader of A Dream of Horses & Other Stories, the lines are so subtly shifted and so evocatively rendered that the sensation, as the last story draws to a close, is one of a renewed appreciation for the power of words and the books that contain them to inform, transform, and entertain. The imagined encounter between Borges and Beckett that rounds off the collection is followed with a brief essay in which Kaul compares the two writers, drawing the parallels that he sees in their work. This concluding piece nicely places into perspective much of the imagery and ideas encountered in the preceding work and brings this book to a satisfying conclusion, leaving the reader free to explore his or her own dreams. Maybe even those dreams that are calling to be put into words.

Born in New Dehli, Aashish Kaul presently lives in Sydney, Australia. A Dream of Horses & Other Stories was published in 2014 by Roundfire Books.

Probing the fantastic imagination: Inside the Head of Bruno Schulz by Maxim Biller

“Schulz was incomparably gifted as an explorer of his own inner life.”
– J M Coetzee

The year is 1938. In the dull light of a basement apartment in the town of Drohobycz a man is anxiously penning a letter to his literary hero Thomas Mann. He works at a desk that is too low for him. When he is disturbed and distressed by the sound of birds pecking at the high windows he slips down onto the floor and continues working there until the falling autumn light forces him back up to the desk. On the walls of his room hang drawings he has made – fantastic dark sketches of domineering women and desperate men.

bruno_schulz_paintingThe man is famed Polish writer and artist Bruno Schulz. As he composes his missive to Dr Mann, German author Maxim Biller is conducting a guided tour to the interior thoughts, fantasies and fears – make that Fear with a capital F – that he imagines fueling Schulz’s surreal and creative imagination. The resulting novella, Inside the Head of Bruno Schulz serves as a delightfully inventive introduction to an original and influential writer.

“Ever since he could remember Bruno – for that was the name of the man with the face like a paper kite – had awoken every morning with Fear in his heart. Fear and he had breakfast together in Lisowski’s tearoom, Fear accompanied him to the High School and looked over his shoulder as the boys put their unsuccessful sketches of animals down in front of him, as well as plaster models, covered with black fingerprints, of their sweet little heads.”

Biller paints a portrait of a deeply anxious man… a character that would be at home in one of Schulz’s own stories. When he meet him he is unsuccessfully struggling with a novel. He lives with his sister and her two sons. She still believes her dead husband will return. His students whom he thinks of as “bird-brained” literally appear to him as birds, at his window and in his room. He has a conflicted affection for a sado-masochistic sports and philosophy teacher whom he describes as beautiful despite her hairy monkey face and filthy matted hair. But more critically, he carries an impending sense of doom as it increasingly seems inevitable that Germany will be moving toward Poland. It is with that in mind that he is writing to Thomas Mann.

inside headA most curious and twisted fellow claiming to be the great writer has turned up in this small town, charming the residents with enticing stories and grotesque gatherings. The fictional Bruno is anxious to alert Dr Mann to the existence of this impostor whom he suspects is actually a Nazi spy, and to beseech him to consider offering a poor Polish writer critical assistance. With an opportunity to publish in a prestigious journal or an introduction to an important publisher, the timid Bruno believes he might find the courage to leave Poland. He has even written a story in German to include with his appeal.

Combining biographical facts with a wildly fantastic vision that echoes Schulz’s own dark, dreamlike work, Inside the Head of Bruno Schulz is a lateral approach to the writer’s restless creative energy. A brief biography and two of Schulz’s own short stories, “Birds” and “Cinnamon Shops” follow the primary text, making this short book which clocks in at under 100 pages, an irresistible invitation to explore more of the work of this important Polish writer. Unfortunately a number of stories and the unfinished novel he was at work on in this tale were lost after his death so what remains is limited. However, Schulz himself has resurfaced and been has been re-invented and re-discovered as a writer and artist time and time again in novels by Cynthia Ozick, David Grossman and Philip Roth among others, as well in plays and film. (See the essay “The Strange Afterlife of Bruno Schulz” by Jaimy Gordon for an excellent overview.)

SchulzBruno Schulz was a Polish-Jewish writer born in 1892 in Drohobycz, a town historically part of the kingdom of Poland,  now part of the Ukraine. During his lifetime he published two collections of short stories, The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. He was known to be at work on a novel, The Messiah, which has not survived. He worked as an artist and an art teacher for many years. When the Germans moved into Poland during the Second World War, his artwork granted him temporary protection under the auspices of an admiring Gestapo officer in exchange for the painting a mural in the officer’s home. On November 19, 1942, walking home with a loaf of bread, he was shot in the back of the head by another Gestapo officer, a rival of his protector. He was 50 years-old.

Published by Pushkin Press (April, 2015 in the UK/October 2015 in North America), Inside the Head of Bruno Schulz is translated from the German by Anthea Bell. The stories “Birds” and “Cinnamon Shops” from The Street of Crocodiles, were translated from the Polish by Celina Wieniewska and originally published 1963.

Seeking comfort in isolation: Katherine Carlyle by Rupert Thomson

“My disappearance is like a crime without a motive, and they’re notoriously difficult to solve, aren’t they?”

At the beating heart of Rupert Thomson’s new novel Katherine Carlyle, is one young woman’s unshakeable belief that the measure of her very existence rests in a haunting uncertainty that can only be resolved by physically retracing her origins. For the eponymous heroine of this moody and original tale, the journey is one that will lead her to the darkest coldest place she can find. She is convinced that the only way she can feel whole and find peace in the world is by locating a space that might replicate the atmosphere of the first eight years – not of her life – but of her very existence. For she was the product of IVF, back in the 1980s when the science was in its nascent stages. She is deeply troubled, resentful even, of that fact that she was left to endure many long years of cold storage in a suspended embryonic state before finally being implanted into her mother’s womb. It is this complicated obsession with her origins that drives her mission.

kitWe meet Katherine, or Kit as she is called, in Rome. Born in the UK, she moved to Italy with her parents when her mother was diagnosed with cancer. After putting up a valiant, at times ebullient fight against her illness, her mother eventually succumbed to the disease. Her father, a foreign correspondent, was on the road more than he was ever at home, so the loss of her mother was acute and left her to enter young adulthood with a false sense of maturity and an abiding loneliness that no amount of luxury or youthful glamour could assuage. As she begins to encounter random coincidences or “messages” that she interprets as signposts to a potential resolution of her deep-seated unease, she has no idea where these clues may lead. But one thing is certain, she has does not plan to make her way to Oxford where she is due to start University in the fall.

“It was spring when I first started noticing the messages. Back then, they were cryptic, teasing. While crossing the Piazza Farnese, I found a fifty-euro note that had been folded into a triangle. A few days later, at the foot of the Spanish Steps, I found a small gray plastic elephant with a piece of frayed string round its neck. I found any number of coins, keys, and playing cards. None of these objects had anything specific to communicate. They were just testing my alertness.”

With what seems like a willful complacency, Kit opens herself to all possibilities. She takes risks and discards every “lead” – many of which involve men who cross her path – the moment she decides that the clue, person or place is either misleading or has outlived its usefulness. A chance conversation overheard at the cinema about a man in Berlin sparks her curiosity and gives her a first solid lead, if seeking out a complete stranger with only a name and location can be interpreted as solid. Kit is not easily deterred. She disposes of her computer and her phone, clears out her inheritance from her savings account, and heads to Berlin, intent on erasing her tracks behind her. Once she arrives her beauty and her cool attitude serve her well but her openness to coincidence often borders on recklessness.

“That’s what life is like now. I hold myself in a constant state of readiness. Every occasion – every moment – trembles with a sense of opportunity. I have no idea where the next communication will come from, but I know that one will come – perhaps even from the unwholesome, insidious man who is still standing beside me.”

She does have an uncanny number of convenient encounters. In Berlin she manages to secure a Visa and Letter of Invitation to allow her to enter Russia. Her goal is to aim as far north as possible. Her journey is charmed. She does reach a distant and remote outport, but whether she can actually outrun the cold darkness that she holds inside herself remains to be seen.

There is a subdued fairytale quality here and if that was all this book offered it would be a lightweight offering. But there is more. As Kit narrates her journey, she looks back on her mother’s life and death. Even though a number of years have passed, the loss is still an open wound. She carries a sense of guilt, a belief that the pregnancy and birth that brought her into the world, freeing her from her frozen nearly-non-being, was the cause of her mother’s cancer. She has gone so far as to convince herself that her father also blames her. She hates him for that and wants to punish him by disappearing. Yet as she makes her way north she is continually unspooling a cinematic narrative in her head. Scripting her father’s reaction to her absence and the sketching of an increasingly elaborate imaginary pursuit seems to take a more prominent role in her mind as her own life becomes smaller and simpler.

The language is beautiful, the atmosphere is charged with energy (“The night feels brash, dramatic. Nickel plated.”) Thomson is especially adept at evoking a strong sense of place. The sounds, scents, and sights of the many cities, towns, and barren landscapes his heroine passes through are given colour, texture, and weight. A trail of vivid images is left in her wake. In Kit he has created a complicated character, a mix of wisdom and naïveté. At times I did find her voice a little jarring, as if it did not ring true to her age or gender, but as you come to see just how lost and confused she really is, it is difficult not to fall under the spell of Katherine Carlyle and the book that shares her name.

Other Press, October 2015, 304 pp                                                                               Review copy provided by publisher through NetGalley.

Nothing less than the big questions: A reflection on Signs & Symptoms by Róbert Gál

“He who seeks, shall be found out.

What is not worth speaking about, is not even worth keeping silent about.

Consciousness is a disease of the spirit.

If life were bearable, there would be no death.”

This is not a review in the formal sense, but an attempt to formulate an answer to the question: So what do you think of Signs & Symptoms?

symptomsSimple, yes? Well, yes and no. It cannot be answered in this forum without an overview of the book in question so it will look suspiciously like a review. So be it. A few weeks back I read and reviewed a book entitled On Wing by poetic Slovak philosopher Róbert Gál, a recent release from Dalkey Archive Press. Signs & Symptoms was an earlier work translated into English and published by Prague-based Twisted Spoon Press in 2003. My copy and the question above, are courtesy of the author.

First of all, the book itself is beautiful to look at and to hold. Textured covers, French flaps, thick paper and an ethereal series of black and white photographs created specifically to accompany this work. But more about those later.

The text consists of three separate pieces unified by recurring themes. The first section “Epigraffiti”, is a collection of single-line aphorisms composed between 1995 and 2000. There is a distinctly pessimistic tone here in these simple observations about life, death, God, truth and the measure of possibility against faith, hope and the experience of time:

“Where possibility ends, there the past begins.

Reality is a long-forgotten possibility now being fulfilled.

The future never happened.”

A reflective neurotic, sometimes bitter, despondency prevails. Although this is the simplest section to read, I emerged feeling a slight heaviness in my chest. If this work begins, as the author’s note suggests from a “bottom”, a low place, this earliest segment sets the stage.

The centrepiece of the book is the second section, “Signs & Symptoms” which is, in turn divided into four parts or “circles”. The first circle sets off with a series of short prose pieces which open with an anecdotal feel – fragmented stories and conversations that lead into speculative statements. The philosophical observations soon take over completely.

“Panic is the emotional tremor of a short circuit, a protracted slide into permanent irritation. Not daring to say YES is symptomatic of fearing an expected NO. The moment before is firmly decided on taking a risky leap beyond. Signs speak through expression.”

The second and third circles, still maintain the short fragmented format but engage in much more intense, condensed ontological arguments, frequently requiring careful reading and re-reading. Here we are bluntly confronted with statements about the nature of being, existence as measured in hope, pain and desire. The real meaty stuff. This is where a few reviewers I found fell off the map a little. Me, I grabbed my journal, finding in these sections fuel for honing some of the ontological truths I have encountered in my particular experience of being in the world. Observations that I hope to be able to articulate in a writing project of my own.

Finally, the “fourth circle” opens up the atmosphere again, relaxing the intensity with some very striking observations about the reality of human relationships to the self and others.

The book closes with a section entitled “Postludia”, a collection of single sentence aphorisms and fragmented prose pieces. Distant echoes of themes from the earlier sections resurface here but the atmosphere is quieter, wiser, more poetic. If the author’s intent, as he indicates, is to re-imagine Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, as avant-garde jazz musician John Zorn brought the music of Ornette Coleman “into the present” on his album Spy vs Spy, then it is in this final part of Signs & Symptoms that the contemporary feels especially close at hand and the work as a single experience reaches a sense of completion.

“‘Create a mask in your own image,’ runs the imperative of assimiliation.”

or

“Sympathy means that everyone is to blame for everything. And this excuses us, mitigating our guilt.

Nonethelss, such a purification takes entire lifetimes to carry out…”

Against this philosophical text which, taken as a whole, strikes me as On Wing did, with an inherent musicality (albeit discordant and experimental at times), the illustrations – a series of nude self portraits by Slovak photographer Lucia Nimcová – play against the text like a sort of dance. As illustrations they are intentionally metaphoric, but I found that the contrast of remote or removed images, frequently showing no head or face, against tight close ups, foster a separate and unique philosophical monologue that works well to complement or contradict the text, both being valid and desirable effects.

So, if it isn’t apparent, I would have to say that I found this to be an absorbing and challenging read. It is coming to me just at the right time for a number of reasons. But there is, of course, a fundamental universality to questions about the nature of existence or man would not have been pondering them for millennia. At this moment I am not looking for answers, I am rather focused on exploring and refining a way of posing questions to others.

There was a time, almost 30 years ago I shudder to think, when I completed a degree in Philosophy. It was not my first degree and I proved adept at synthesizing the most complex ideas and re-framing and defending them. I graduated summa cum laude. But I was neither fighting with ideas nor digesting them. On one of my last days I ran into a professor who asked after my plans. I told him I had taken the LSAT and applied to law school (I didn’t go but that’s another story). He nodded and said to me, “Your work is very strong, you can write very well, but you have no questions. A philosopher needs to have questions burning inside him.”

I agreed. He was right. Well, no, I did have questions but they were buried so deep and so close to my identity that I had no words to express them at the time. I did not know you could. As the years went by and those questions finally did break through and my life took paths I had never imagined, I often thought how desperately I would love to be able to go back and do a graduate degree in Philosophy. I had questions, by God! I still do. But by then I was in no position to return to school, I was a single parent and Philosophy is not exactly a fast track to a solid career. Neither is writing, the medium to which I am turning to explore my present questions, but at least I can do it on the cheap.

Signs & Symptoms is a text I suspect I will return to again as I go forward. The translation by Madelaine Hron handles the spirit and the complexity of the material smoothly. With my reading of On Wing, I marveled at the magic maintained in that translation. Here I realized that, of course, translation has long been an intrinsic element in the spread of philosophical ideas. In literary discussions some readers reject works in translation as necessarily less than the original insisting on engagement solely with texts in languages that one can read directly. How myopic to close one’s self off to the exchange of ideas! A book like Signs & Symptoms would have precious little impact knocking around in the borders of a small country like Slovakia where it was first published. Translation into English has set it free to engage a wide and diverse range of readers. A good thing indeed.

So that, Róbert, is what I think about this book. And thank you.

Caught in a vicious circle: Yugoslavia, My Fatherland by Goran Vojnović

As Yugoslavia, My Fatherland, the intensely powerful new release from Istros Books opens, it is the summer of 1991 and 11 year-old Vladan Borojević has, to date, enjoyed an almost idyllic existence in the seaside town of Pula. He and his young friends view the realm of adults as something separate, of interest only if someone is missing an arm or leg, or sports a long beard, excessive tattoos or some other particular curiosity. None of them are aware of the deep seated tensions within their native Yugoslavia that are about to start to fracture and begin a long, bloody period of unrest that will ultimately tear the uneasy Socialist state apart. On the day that he and his friends find the local men gathered around the TV set shouting at the politicians on the screen with an intensity normally reserved only for critical sports matches, Vladan senses something is amiss. His anxiety increases when his father arrives home looking empty and distracted:

“My father never drank at work, and I heard him say, countless times, that only in Yugoslavia would people drink more while at work than after work, and that this would send the country to an early grave. But that day he held me so powerfully in his muscled arms that I thought, in all seriousness, that he must be drunk.”

Vladan’s father Nedelko, of Serbian background, is a proud member of the Yugoslav People’s Army. His mother is a strong willed Slovenian woman, who, against her parents’ wishes, left her homeland and married her young soldier. The stirrings of political insurgency put an immediate end to their happy domestic life in Pula as Nedelko is seconded and the family is moved to a hotel in Belgrade. When it becomes clear that this little trouble is not about to just blow over, Vladan’s father disappears from his life. He and his mother will eventually end up in Slovenia, and within a few years news will come that his father, now a General, has died. Or so he is led to believe.

yugoslavia-my-fatherland_5595627fccf62_250x800rSeventeen years on, Vladan is still living in Ljubljana, Slovenia, but restless and unable to find his footing. He tosses his father’s name into Google. What he discovers turns his fragile world upside down. General Borojević is not dead, but rather he is a fugitive, wanted for war crimes. Rattled by this news Vladan sets out to find his father tracing a trail that links figures from his father’s past, a relative, an assumed identity, and clues to where he lived or may yet be. When his search leads him back close to home, the bits and pieces he gathers raise even more questions, and force him to look deeply inside himself to determine if he even wants the answers he had craved.

This is one of the most impassioned novels I have read in a long time. The author, Goran Vojnović, is a Slovenian poet, screen writer, and film director. He draws on this background to roll out a complex story that deftly weaves back and forth in time, negotiating the highly charged ethnic and geographic divisions that have long defined and divided the Balkan region. With Vladan he has created a recognizable, contemporary narrator who welcomes the reader into his journey with a mixture of vulnerability and wry humour. Traveling on the cheap in a car that just barely manages to cough from point A to point B, his descriptions are often priceless, like this stop at a roadside café:

“I sat at a table covered in a white cloth, as well as aged coffee stains, which lay over an even dirtier red tablecloth. A plastic ashtray sat in the middle, alongside a vase containing plastic flowers from the Yugoslav Mesozoic period. I had to wait, of course, to earn the right to pay for a sour coffee, hand-mixed with a disposable thin plastic spoon, amidst this particular ambience. It was my first time in such a setting.”

Whether he is looking back to his troubled childhood and adolescent years and his increased alienation from his mother, or looking forward to what truths may or may not lie ahead; his emotions are painfully open and honest. Even if he sometimes leans toward the melodramatic, it is hard to resist being pulled into his account of a life torn apart twice over and the pain of the very difficult dilemma he will ultimately face.

Yugoslavia, My Fatherland tells a multi-layered tale. The tragic dissolution of the Borojević family is traced out against the trauma and conflict that would rend the states of the Balkan region apart and still threatens further division in certain areas. He encounters many who bear wounds too deep to heal. But it is much more than that. Questions of personal and national identity are central. Vladan is not only seeking an understanding of himself and his relationship to his ethnic heritage, but he is striving to reconcile his memory of a loving father with a fugitive war criminal. A very human longing for closure and healing drives him to seek out and confront the man who used to be his father, whoever he is. However, somewhere along the way he will have to stop to measure the costs and decide what he is willing to risk.

Translated from the Slovene by Noah Charney, Yugoslavia, My Fatherland is original, ambitious in scope, and another welcome addition to the catalogue of independent UK publisher Istros Books.

Castles in the air? The Folly by Ivan Vladislavić

Imagine an empty lot. A curious stranger arrives one evening. He steps into the lot and makes his way across the dry winter grass, stopping when he hits a large anthill.

“It seemed a pity to waste this discovery, so he stood on top of the hill and turned his face ceremoniously to the four corners of his inheritance. It was a big face, with a crack of a mouth and a stump of a nose, with unfathomable sockets, craggy brows and a bulging forehead dented in the middle, altogether suited to the play of moonlight and shade. His survey revealed a single tree in the elbow of the hedge, and he chose that spot for his camp.”

As this newcomer sets up camp, the residents of the house next door are settled in front of the TV consuming prepared dinners on tray tables while they watch the usual turmoil and violence exploding on the evening news. Yet for Mr and Mrs Malgas, the quiet, unassuming domestic existence they have enjoyed is about to be changed – disturbed, unwound and distorted – by the very presence of this most unconventional new neighbour.

follySuch is the premise of The Folly. Newly released in North America, this haunting modern day fable, originally published in 1993, was the first novel by South African author Ivan Vladislavić. Mr Malgas, the owner of a local hardware store, reaches out to this oddly eccentric character who has suddenly taken up makeshift residency on the dusty patch of veld next door. He imagines the newcomer with the best intentions, excited when he learns that, true to his name, Nieuwenhuizen does in fact plan to construct a “new house” on the vacant lot. The Mrs will not be appeased. She is suspicious at every turn.

When convenient, Malgas’ enthusiastic assistance is welcomed by his fickle neighbour but the building project is unlike anything he has ever known. Nieuwenhuizen is methodical and will not be rushed. He deliberates, meditates and paces around his piece of land, frequently flinging his ungainly long frame about in the most unusual manner. Prancing, jumping, spinning and throwing himself to the ground. All the while Mrs keeps an anxious eye from behind the lace curtains of her lounge. When the “construction phase” finally gets into full swing things get even stranger.

Nieuwenhuizen is an enigmatic character, he can be pleasant and sociable one moment, suddenly turning to shower insults on his eager helpmate the next. Malgas takes it hard. Back at home his wife feels increasingly powerless against this mercurial influence. One evening when her husband, exhausted from a long day working beside his neighbour, collapses in the La-Z-Boy in front of the TV, she confronts the state she has come to:

“Mrs went into the bedroom, seated herself before the winged mirror of her dressing table, and said, ‘Although I appear to be thin and small, and fading away before your eyes, I am a substantial person. At least, it feels that way to me.’

Her pale reflection repeated the lines in triplicate.

Yet she saw through the pretence. It was clear: she was made of glass. And under the bell-jar of her skin, in a rarefied atmosphere, lashed by electrical storms and soused by chemical precipitations, her vital organs were squirming.”

Parable or fable, comparisons to Borges, Calvino and Beckett have been suggested by reviewers, but this timeless allegory owes its intensity to the brilliant descriptive power and sly humour of Vladislavić’s prose. As this tale rises (and falls?) to a stunningly surreal and dramatic climax, we are, as readers, as completely enmeshed in Nieuwenhuizen’s architectural chimera as the hapless Malgas.

Originally published at a pivotal moment in South African political history, it is tempting to read politics into the allegorical dimensions of this tale. I read it more broadly as a parable of our complex anxieties and attractions to others. Malgas is drawn to Nieuwenhuizen immediately. Mystery, curiosity perhaps, but there is a romance in his simple camp life and his creative fashioning of implements out of found objects and trash that evoke the magic of boyhood adventure. As a man ensconced in a secure, if unexciting, domestic life this appeal sets the groundwork that will allow him to be drawn into Nieuwenhuizen’s scheme. The ephemeral success of the envisioning and realization, however fantastic and temporary, of their dream mansion depends on Malgas’ desperate desire to believe and his longing for companionship. For the Mrs however, the new neighbour is a source of fear at first, of danger, and then of loss. He threatens their privacy, their way of life, and ultimately their marriage. The “other” forever holds that mixed appeal and repulsion.

The past two years have seen a growing awareness of and appreciation for Vladislavić’s work outside South Africa. It is well deserved and long overdue. The Folly was released in North America by Archipelago Books in September of 2015, the UK release from And Other Stories is due in November.

Dark brightness and bright darkness: Berlin Stories by Robert Walser

“Up above is a narrow strip of sky, and the smooth, dark ground below looks as if it’s been polished by human destinies. The buildings to either side rise boldly, daintily, and fantastically into architectural heights. The air quivers and startles with worldly life… And always people are walking here. Never in all the time this street has existed has life stopped circulating here. This is the very heart, the ceaselessly respiring breast of metropolitan life. It is a place of deep inhalations and mighty exhalations, as if life itself felt disagreeably constricted by its own pace and course.”

Great cities have their own personalities and in the company of Swiss writer Robert Walser, Berlin of the early twentieth century becomes a living, breathing entity, a dynamic metropolis drawing in the ambitious, the hopeful and the desperate in equal measure. As a guide to the city, its haunts, and its colourful inhabitants, he is endlessly engaging. His name has been surfacing in my consciousness for a while now, but I had not gotten more than a few stories into this collection before I wondered why it had taken me so long to “discover” him for myself.

BerlinBerlin Stories from New York Review of Books is a collection of short stories composed during Walser’s years in Berlin and the first few years after he left, originally edited and organized by German Walser scholar, Jochen Greven. In her introduction to this edition, translator Susan Bernofsky tells us that, with the beginnings of a literary career underway, Robert Walser moved to Berlin in 1907 at the age of 27. His brother had already enjoyed success as a set designer in the thriving theatre scene. The city was bursting with life. Over the next six years he would record that life in short stories or “prose pieces” and three novels. But financial security eluded him and his own eccentricities did not help him secure the patronage that would have benefited him. He returned to Switzerland in 1913.

The pieces in Berlin Stories are divided into four sections or “movements”: The City Streets, The Theatre, Berlin Life and Looking Back. Most of the pieces are quite short, often no more than a page or two. Narrators who may or may not be Walser himself, wander the streets, ride the trams, or take in theatrical performances while offering attentive discourses on the sights and experiences of city life. He can be thoughtful, melancholy, humourous or sarcastic, sometimes striking playful barbs at contemporaries.

As with any collection of short works, especially one with 38 stories, it is hard to capture a sense of the volume in a brief review. There is so much magic in these pages, it is difficult not to marvel at the acuity of Walser’s observations. He is especially gifted at peering behind the glitz and creating moving accounts of what Bernofsky calls the “humbler aspects of city life”. He has an uncanny eye for the small details that play across the faces and animate the actions of the characters he sketches. Sometimes his observations are direct, at other times his intentions are delivered with a deft backhand as in “The Little Berliner” a story in which he takes the voice of a precocious 12 year-old girl, who enjoys a life of wealth and privilege. But all is not as wonderful as one might suspect. She reports that: “For reasons whose depths I cannot understand and consequently cannot evaluate, my parents live apart. Most of the time I live with Father.” She admonishes herself for confessing to her diary, but Father, for all his wealth and charm, is sometimes a very angry and unpleasant man. The observations and attitudes swirling around in her child’s head present a rather caustic view of the rich delievered in a wonderfully clever way.

Another piece I really enjoyed for its pure descriptive power is “Fire”, in which the narrator and his companion get caught up in the excitement of what must have been a fairly regular occurrence at this time – a house on fire. A spectacle drawing the curious, it is an event at once ordinary and extraordinary:

“an entire street is brightly, garishly lit up by it, it resembles a sunset in the distant south, ten evenings ablaze, a host of suns setting in unison. You see the façades of buildings looking like pale-yellow paper, and the bright red glow of the fire approaches, a thick glowing, wounded red, and beside it the street lanterns look like feebly burning damp matches.”

No one is injured in this instance but a distinguished old piece of architecture is lost, a fact greeted by one of the observers as a healthy form of natural selection, clearing out the dead wood and making room for new construction.

I could go and quote from this work at length, there are little gems nestled in almost every piece. More than 100 years on, his work is vital, entertaining and immensely readable. At the height of his career he was a favourite of Kafka, Musil, Hesse and Walter Benjamin. The resonance of his voice has carried on through the influence of those who admired his work giving it the immediacy that feels so surprising when one first encounters him now. In his lifetime which was increasingly spent in mental asylums, Walser seemed to disappear off the radar. Greven’s German scholarship in the 1950s and the first English translation of his work not long before Walser’s death in 1956, brought him to the attention of a new generation of highly influential writers including WG Sebald, Peter Handke and JM Coetzee.

Now, if you have yet to make the acquaintance of Robert Walser, hurry along and check him out. Personally I’m sold and can’t wait to read more.

Unanswerable questions: On Wing by Róbert Gál

“That which we let come in and that which we never allow to enter. The flood of words. The word, like smoke. Always too late. Always already different. The word as a question, not to be posed, the word as an answer, not even given. The word as the only possible testimony, always unquestioned. The fracture, unable to be prepared, always ready to speak out. The fracture of the heart that, cut out of itself, still feels.”

Billed as fiction, On Wing by the Slovak poet-philosopher Róbert Gál eschews all the common precepts of narrative story telling. You might say that this slim volume delights in turning language and ideas inside out, offering a parade of aphorisms, queries, dreams and anecdotes. It might sound disorienting, and if you are looking to impose your preconceptions or to demand an objective truth, you may well be frustrated. Or worse. But I would argue that you don’t want to enter this work as a blank slate. You want to enter it with an openness, and a willingness to be engaged.

gal_on-wingConsider this. The avant-garde musician and composer John Zorn makes a cameo in a dream segment within the first few pages of the book. Gál revisits Zorn at the end. On Wing reads like an improvisation, an exploration of recurring motifs and themes: memory, pain, death, love, identity, faith and all the idiosyncrasies of living. Grounded through stories and recollections he rolls over ideas with an immediacy and recognizable humanity. The aphorisms, the rhetorical questions, and creative reconstructions of language weave in and out of the text; holding their own at times like extended jazz solos.

The attentive reader has to pay close attention. Marvel at the inventive word play:

“Nirvanization.
Sorting out the sporadic.
Undeception.
The transparency of sorrow.
Unexbirthed.”

Wonderful. I want those words.

But you might wonder, does this work? I will confess that I am intrigued by experimental writing, I am interested in exploring the ways that ideas can be entertained outside the traditional narrative. But for a fragmentary exercise such as this one to work, there needs to be an intrinsic continuity, even if, on the surface, there seems to be certain randomness. Humanity and restraint are important, the work must say something about life; raising questions, but not pretending to have the answers. I don’t want a writer, even in more conventional literature, to give me answers. Life doesn’t work that way.

“He: A living question mark, a question mark so full of life as a question can be. The question of who could draw no breath, the question with each suppressed tendency to breathe out. The question to an answer which yields no answer to a question. The question to a question that doesn’t answer, even when it does.

Being asked what he was doing, he answered that he had no time.

Spontaneous obligation.

For everything he is grasping for (as a drowning man) constitutes a breakthrough in his life.

Prior to that which was and after that which shall be.

Empathology.”

Reading On Wing is a singular experience. And unique, I would imagine, to every reader. One reviewer I read seemed to make much of an apparent preoccupation with suffering, anguish, pain. I did not read that book. I was especially drawn to the questions about questions, the musings about memory. Gál presents a humble, somewhat neurotic contemplation of those unanswerable questions of life creating an intimacy with the reader. I thought he was being a little lyrical about death and my marginalia bear me out. But then, less than two months ago I very nearly died. With distance I may feel different.

Somehow words seem to fall short when I try to capture the experience of reading this book. The blurb on the back describes a “restless, searching, ‘improvisational‘ prose whose techniques reflect those of Bernhard, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard”. But if that sounds heavy, fear not. This is a pocket sized book of 109 pages. 109 pages of of ideas, humour and wisdom.

Translated by Mark Kanak, I must make a comment about the translation. I don’t know anything about Slovak, but this is a work that frequently relies heavily on word play and tautological statements, not to mention the re-envisioned words that occur in the text. I could not help but wonder how much the process of translation may have altered the intent or effect of the original. One does not have the sense that this is a translated work, it flows so smoothly. Much of the subject matter is intended to strike a note of universality, presumably in the narrative pieces as well as in the more philosophical elements, and that may contribute to this effect. I don’t know. Maybe that is another one of those questions that is not meant to be answered.

Róbert Gál was born in Bratislava, Slovakia in 1968. He spent time in New York and Jerusalem before settling in Prague. On Wing is published by Dalkey Archive Press.

Other kinds of exile: The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs by Damon Galgut

“Lives are meant to be separate and apart; when the borders break and we overflow into one another, it only leads to trouble and sadness.”

Last month I had worried about easing back into reading following my recent unexpected cardiac arrest, but, in fact, August went well. September has proved much more difficult. I have picked up so many books I thought I wanted to read only to be unable to get beyond a few pages. So it is probably no surprise that I retreated to the comfort zone of re-reading a book by one of my favourite authors. I chose this book on the expectation that a new paper edition was due to be released today in Canada but from reports of the distributor being low or out of stock, the reality of actually seeing it on the shelves may be a long way out. Too bad because when you know a writer has many excellent books to his or her credit it is a shame to see only one, the latest or best known, in stock. Fortunately this title is readily available electronically.

pigsThe Beautiful Screaming of Pigs is the second full length novel by South African writer Damon Galgut. Originally released in 1991 it eventually dropped out of print and, when a new edition was issued in 2005 following the Booker shortlisting of The Good Doctor, Galgut took the opportunity to revise the book, wanting to address his longstanding feeling that the rhythms of the language sounded “discordant”. The result, for whatever it is worth, is a novel that embedded itself into my consciousness with the first reading, and proved to be even richer and more deeply affecting with the second.

Set against the backdrop of the first free elections in Namibia in 1989, 20 year-old Patrick Winter and his mother are heading to the land that he had, only a year before, been fighting for on behalf of the South African Army. That experience has clearly left him emotionally traumatized. He is dependent on Valium to sleep and cope with recurring panic attacks. For his mother the trip is an opportunity to visit her young black lover, the latest of a long string personal explorations she has flirted with since her divorce from Patrick’s father. As the story unfolds he will reflect on his childhood, the horror of his time in the army, his ambiguous feelings about his own politics, and the emerging recognition of the nature his sexuality.

The novel opens as Patrick and his mother arrive at the Afrikaner farm where she grew up and he spent many a summer vacation. His brittle grandmother fusses over his physical and mental health, cannot understand why they are heading north, and stubbornly insists on referring to Namibia as South West Africa, the name by which it was known going back to its years as a German colony. Here Patrick will begin to reveal his family background, his closeness to his mother and his alienation from his rugged, athletic, big game-hunting father and older brother.

When his brother Malcolm joins the army and is killed in a motor vehicle accident, the loss tears the fragile family apart. Patrick and his mother move out, unraveling the tightly wound expectations of marriage by which she had been bound. As she tries to reframe herself with a series of dramatic passions and obsessions, her son is placed in the awkward role of picking up the pieces behind her. So when his own obligation to the army arises, despite the sure knowledge that he is entirely unsuited for the task at hand, he enlists promptly hoping to get his two year commitment out of the way. He won’t last two years, nor will he be able to put the experience behind him.

As he awakes that first morning to a familiar noise on the farm he makes a striking observation about his state of well-being in an unforgettable passage. Outside a pig is being slaughtered:

“There is no sound on earth like the sound of a pig dying. It is a shriek that tears at the primal, unconscious mind. It is the noise of babies being abandoned, of women being taken by force, of the hinges of the world tearing loose. The screaming starts from the moment the pig is seized, as if it knows what is about to happen. The pig squeals and cries, it defecates in terror, but nothing will stop its life converging to a zero on the point of that thin metal stick.”

As a child, the spectacle of a pig being killed never failed to draw him with a fascinated horror. On this day his reaction takes on a different note:

“It was a sign of my state of mind or soul that on this particular morning the screaming of the pig sounded almost beautiful to me. It didn’t evoke violence or fear, but a train of gentle childhood memories.”

After the reverie of a walk around the farm and a hearty breakfast, Patrick and his mother head for Namibia. When they finally reach Windhoek and meet Godfrey in the township where he lives, Patrick is surprised to find that his mother’s lover is not quite what he had imagined and is, in reality, only a few years older than he is. They learn that a white activist who had been working with SWAPO (the South West African Peoples’ Organization) has just been assassinated and Godfrey must attend to details for his funeral and an election rally. This necessitates a further trip on to Swakopmund, a detour that places Patrick in a position to question his own political resolution and bravery, especially poignant in light of the fact that on the border he was engaged in fighting the very forces he is now helping Godfrey support. His mother’s enthusiasm soon wanes into boredom as, for her, the shine starts to come off her latest passion.

Woven into the account of their few days in Namibia, is Patrick’s chronicle of his experiences in the army, beginning with the early days of tedium as the young soldiers pass empty days in their tents “playing cards, writing letters, telling jokes. An old scene, as old as the first village.” Patrick is keenly aware that he does not quite fit into this world of testosterone charged energy. He is hopelessly reminded of the way he felt sidelined as his father and brother tossed a rugby ball on the lawn or boasted about their hunting conquests. He senses a brotherhood of men to which he will never belong. It is not until a young Afrikaner named Lappies arrives that he finds a kindred spirit, makes a friend, and maybe – although he doesn’t realize it at the time – falls in love. Once fighting descends on the camp and strikes with a vengeance; horror, fear and death take their toll. When Patrick’s friend is killed, his grasp on sanity begins to slip. Galgut pulls the reader right into his young narrator’s shattered mind in one of the most intense descriptions of a mental breakdown I have ever read. It happens in fits and starts. Patrick tries to hang on, stubbornly, foolishly until his condition deteriorates to the point that he finds himself hospitalized, first in Pretoria and then in Cape Town. He is discharged from the army.

In the hospital his parents visit. Their responses to their shocked and emotionally injured son are true to form. His father travels to see him Pretoria where he sits awkwardly, shifting from ”buttock to buttock” unable to find anything meaningful to say. His mother has been busy acting in a play and does not make her appearance at his bedside until he is back in Cape Town. She visits him daily and talks about herself. It is here that she will first tell him about Godfrey, hoping to impress or shock him. He has no answer but he remembers the small drama.

“At that moment a shaft of light, blued by the rain, fell on her face: like the actress she was, she turned towards it, finding her spot. Then she smiled, and the smile became a laugh: a round, silvery sound, like a coin, which fell from her throat and tinkled down onto the ground.”

Patrick’s few days in Namibia will not answer all the questions he carries into the shifting sands of the desert one year after his breakdown. But he will emerge from the visit with a sense that it is time for him to define his own sense of personal space and figure out who he is. Borders – those lines between countries defended by force, defined by politics, and blurred between people – feature throughout this novel. True to form, Galgut allows these spaces to exist for the reader to explore. He is a writer of remarkable restraint, a storyteller who matches spare tight prose with simple moments of vivid intensity. In The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs he has created a haunting, intelligent, unforgettable portrait of the relationships between people at a time of great upheaval and impending change in Southern Africa. As Namibians queue with excitement to mark their ballot toward the end of the novel, Godfrey tell Patrick that maybe someday his own country will see the same. That day will still be more than four years away.

What it means to be grown up: Thirteen Cents by K. Sello Duiker

“Grow up. Fast. Very fast. Lightening speed. Everything is always like that. Quick. You must act quickly. Understand quickly. Otherwise someone will fuck you up nicely. They’ll beat you up so that you must always remember.”

Meet Azure. Standing shoeless on of the cusp of manhood, thirteen or about to turn thirteen, he is not really sure when he was born. Both his parents are dead. Murdered. He has made his way from Johannesburg to Cape Town – a mean and ugly Cape Town – where he sleeps near the swimming pool in Sea Point or, later, when that option is denied him, under a bridge in Green Point, home to a wretched collection of thugs and gangsters.

13centsHe makes money primarily picking up tricks, engaging in degrading, often rough sex with closeted married men. He is hardened, tough, able to endure these encounters with a detached resignation. Yet when he looks inside, when he faces the more invisible persistent fears that haunt him as he wanders though the city, past the train station, up Long Street, into the Company’s Gardens; we see what he truly is – a child on the street. His is a coming-of-age story that is relentless, ruthless and, in the end, remarkably redeeming.

As Thirteen Cents, the debut novel by K. Sello Duiker opens, he has taken to looking after nine year-old Bafana, a boy who has run away from home, his life on the streets a drug fueled choice. Azure lectures him on his addictions. The only drug he himself has any interest in marijuana when he can afford it.

“I’m not his father, I say to myself. That laatie is getting under my armpit, under my soft spot. I mustn’t let that happen, I tell myself. I’ve seen too many kids disappear. There’s no point in getting too close.”

Azure knows where to find discarded food, has a few trusted “grown-up” contacts, many of whom will turn out not to be the allies he had thought. In a slice of Cape Town in which each man or woman has to look after themselves first, judging character is a slippery exercise. One that can be brutal, if not fatal, if the shifting rules are not understood or respected. His one friend from home, Vincent, a man who is beholden to the same rules but somewhat older and wiser, manages to impart to young Azure an unusual vision that will ultimately prove more valuable than money or any other form of protection.

In the meantime, his greatest liability is one he cannot control. He has black skin and blue eyes. Hence the name, pronounced he informs us, Ah-zoo-ray. It is a gift he holds from his beloved mother which is stolen when Gerald, the powerful thug currently holding sway over the homeless population, renames him Blue.

“… I can never look at myself too long in the mirror as my blue eyes remind me of the confusing messages they send out to people. I wear my blue eyes with fear because fear is deeper than shame.”

Race is a currency of power in the community in which he has found himself. Gerald who is a coloured man, trading on his lighter skin, straight hair and reputation of exceptional violence, is especially drawn to and maddened by those blue eyes. The punishment he extracts on our young hero is by far the most persistent, horrific, and devastating aspect of this gritty tale. He is beaten, locked up, starved, and abused for days on end for no apparent rational pretext. But the emotional abuse, the attempt to undermine his self worth cuts deeper:

“Why do you feel sad? I ask myself. Because my mother didn’t love me. Gerald is cruel. That is the ugliest thing anyone has ever said to me. It is worse than having a bus crush you. I think of my mother and I feel confused. No. She loved me, I tell myself. And I loved her, no matter what Gerald says.”

As much as Azure/Blue holds to the conviction that he is almost a man, must not cry, must hold within himself the emotions a man can not afford to admit; he continually talks with frustration about “grown-ups”. Their ways allude him, anger him and ultimately drive him on a mission of self healing driven by an almost supernatural desire to destroy all that is trying to destroy him.

As Thirteen Cents moves into its final chapters, the story takes on a folkloric, mythical tone. The stark hyper realism of the earlier account crosses the threshold of magical realism. To escape the horrors existing for him in the city below, Azure makes the first of two ascents up the slopes of Table Mountain where he will spend several nights, have dreams and visions and find, we are led to believe, the beginning of a path out of the life in which he had found himself trapped. The voice that lingers, long after the book is closed, is one of resilience, one of hope.

Sadly his creator could not hold to that same strength. K. Sello Duiker was born in Soweto, South Africa in 1974, raised in middle class black family. His university educated parents wanted to secure a good education for their son. After achieving a degree from Rhodes University he studied briefly in Cape Town where drugs and mental illness disrupted his academic career. He would draw on his experiences in the city to write Thirteen Cents and his other major work, The Quiet Violence of Dreams (TQVOD). Recognized as one of the first important young black voices emerging in post Apartheid South Africa, he ended his own life in 2005 at the age of 30.

The edition of Thirteen Cents that I read, published as part of the Modern African Writing Series of the Ohio University Press, includes an introduction by Stellenbosch University professor of English, Shaun Viljoen which provides an exceptionally helpful context for the placement of Duiker’s work in the evolution of contemporary South African literature along with a glossary of the expressions and slang, mostly Afrikaans, employed throughout the text.

I have not, to date, read many black South African writers, but I brought a selection of titles back from my recent visit to the country. Duiker has long been on my radar and all 600 pages of TQVOD has been stting on my bookshelf for more than a year. I am glad I went back to this novel first, standing as it does in a pivotal context for black South African literature and look forward to reading more of the young voices that have emerged in recent years.

For another positive review of this powerful book, see my friend Penny’s blog.