Tag: Rawley Grau

The music of silence: Billiards at the Hotel Dobray by Dušan Šarotar

Charged with a mournful, aching beauty, the opening passages of Slovenian writer Dušan Šarotar’s 2007 novel, Billiards at the Hotel Dobray, clearly set the tone for the story that will follow. The scene is one drenched with misty melancholy. It is late March, 1945. A grey, foggy sky hangs low over the landscape, and a sense of weary dread has settled over the residents of Sóbota, a quiet town, or varaš, nestled on the plains of an otherwise forgotten region of eastern Slovenia, lying between the Mura River and the Raba Valley. The area which had, until the implementation of the Final Solution almost exactly one year earlier, been home to the majority of Slovenia’s small Jewish population, is presently under Hungarian occupation. Now, with rumours that the Russians are advancing and the Germans retreating, no one is certain what to expect next; no one knows what the currents of history are carrying their way.

That night the story of good men and women could barely stand up to the devious wind dispassionately erasing the words on the faded monuments of the law. This mysterious force was stronger than the storms and deeper than the floods that were once talked about here. It came as a vague feeling, or a long, harrowing dream, which burrowed into people’s souls even before they fell asleep or drank themselves into a stupor.

Available in English for the first time in an attentive and sensitive translation by Rawley Grau who also translated Šarotar’s Sebaldian-styled  epic Panorama, this earlier novel is a tale of remembrance, told from a distinctly cinematic perspective, that of a timeless all-seeing eye hovering above the earth, capable of taking in good and evil alluded to in the brief prologue. Not unlike the lens of a camera.

The result is a simple, painfully human story that revolves around two key dates in 1944 and 1945. Touching on critical moments in the lives of a handful of characters — an Auschwitz survivor and former shopkeeper’s return in search of some semblance of home, a young girl’s first infatuation, the secret an aging prostitute has kept from the only other woman still left at the Hotel Dobray, the complicated emotions of the arrogant but ill-prepared leader of a sorry group of fatigued Hungarian soldiers awaiting certain defeat, and an ambitious and prosperous businessman’s unlikely twist of fate – it is a narrative that glances into hearts but never settles for long. The effect is a slowly simmering evocation of the impact of war on a community ground down, torn apart and ultimately upended by events orchestrated from afar. Inevitable because, in the end, we all know how this story ends, the sleepy varaš is ever altered, its Jewish population is all but decimated, and its national identity rewritten. However, unwinding the story as he does, employing careful repetition, connecting events and characters forward and back in time, and gradually revealing a little more with each passage, Šarotar creates an almost unbearable atmosphere of poetic tension.

Central to the story is Franz Schwartz whom we first meet on the road to Sóbota. It has been almost exactly a year since he and his fellow Jewish citizens had been rounded up and sent off, the men to work themselves to death in camps, the women and children to more immediate termination. He knows he will never see his wife and son again, but having escaped the camp he has no place on earth to return to than the town where he was once a proud and successful retailer.

The cold, gaseous sphere hung motionless over the town. The houses, the plane trees and poplars that lined the streets, the bell towers, the man – all were left without shadow. The sharp, blinding light had painfully imprinted an image of the morning on the consciousness of Franz Schwartz. In a succession of short exposures, one after the other as if he was blinking his eyes, the pages of a large photo album were being turned inside him. He stood in the middle of the intersection, entirely alone.

Images of all the familiar streets, buildings and structures return to him, but he carries neither joy nor despair at the prospect of being back. The town has changed and he knows he cannot risk being seen until he gets his bearings.

Meanwhile, Budapest has recently fallen and the Hungarian occupation is on borrowed time. The small military unit presently housed at the Hotel Dobray, under the incompetent command of József Sárdy, secretary of the Office of the Special Military Tribunal, is despondent and all but defeated. They await the advancing Red Army with apprehension. About the only townsperson holding out optimism for the future is Josip Benko, the owner of the local meat factory, former mayor and indefatigable entrepreneur.

As the story unwinds, evidence of a network of complex emotions, complicated loyalties and chronological connections begins to emerge. When the narrative eventually slips back to April of 1944, Franz’s family background and the heartbreaking magnitude of his loss is illuminated. Piece by piece a portrait of the slow motion tragedy that spread over this part of central Europe is brought to life. It is, at once, part of a much larger story and yet distinct and, to the author, inherently personal.

The power of this tale lies in the telling. The somber but lyrical narrative is allowed, when needed, to “creep along like a low-flowing river.” Words are chosen carefully, emotions are numbed, stifled sounds speak volumes. The strains of a song that can no longer be sung or performed permeates the memories of a number of the characters. The music of silence is a recurring motif.

The omniscient, distanced third person perspective of the all-seeing eye only serves to heighten the emotional intensity. Šarotar masterfully maintains this intensity, letting it reverberate like the a violin strung too tight, right through to the end, as all the threads and stories are wound together but ultimately left unresolved, hanging in the air. He ends his narrative with a timeless, unanswerable question. One that, as nationalism is making a resurgence, we would do well to attend to.

Billiards at the Hotel Dobray by Dušan Šarotar, translated by Rawley Grau, is published by Istros Books.

Panorama by Dušan Šarotar—My Numéro Cinq review

My most recent review for Numéro Cinq is now live.

I have only been writing critical reviews for a year and this particular piece represents my most ambitious review to date. The ability to reach into a literary work, to tease out what makes it interesting, what makes it tick, or perhaps what does not quite gel, is a function of a certain chemistry. As a reviewer, when I find that hook— that angle—it is a wonderful feeling. But sometimes the surface is too smooth and I find it difficult to get a critical foothold, and it has nothing to do with how much I might have enjoyed a particular book. I can still write a review, but I wonder if I have done the book justice.

Panorama, by Slovenian writer Dušan Šarotar, is a book that, as a writer, I feel I was meant to read and write about. At the end of the day there was so much I wanted to explore that I wondered if I could pull it off. This is a work that owes an admitted debt to W.G. Sebald; it is a novel that straddles the sensibilities of what we, in English language literature, insist on dividing into fiction and nonfiction—as if one is more true or more valid than the other. This book has, for me, finally opened up and challenged my resistance to blurring those lines in my own writing.

When I think about it now, I am beginning to see this novel as a series of narratives (or if you like vignettes and short stories) recorded by an unnamed narrator. But the narratives function as meditations on a number of key themes, and the stories shared by the characters encountered are neither discrete nor chronological. The narrator’s journey provides an overarching framework, but his account closes, not at the end, but in the middle, and some threads are never fully resolved. Like life, they are left to be.

Here’s a taste of the review, please click through the link at the end to read the rest. A second link leads to an excerpt:

At the Crossing of Words, Landscape & Memory: Review of Dušan Šarotar’s Panorama — Joseph Schreiber

panorama-cover

Some literature defies simple description. Case in point, Panorama, by Slovenian poet and writer Dušan Šarotar. One might be inclined to define it as a meditation within a travelogue within a novel. Or perhaps you would prefer to rearrange those terms, it probably wouldn’t matter, because in spite of its subtitle: A Narrative about the Course of Events, Panorama stands at a curious angle to space and time. It is a novel of remembering, of telling and retelling, narratives within narratives, bound together by a coarse thread of repeating themes that are at once timeless and timely.

One of three Slovenian novels to be released this fall as part of the Peter Owen World Series, a new collaboration between Peter Owen Publishing and Istros Books, Panorama is Sarotar’s fourth novel, and his first to be translated into English. Born in Murska Sobota in northeastern Slovenia in 1968, he studied sociology and philosophy at the University of Ljubljana. In addition to his novels, he has published collections of short stories, poetry, and essays; and has written numerous screenplays. His prose, as exemplified in Panorama, has a poetic and richly cinematic feel.

Continue reading here:

Read an excerpt here:

What no love can heal: Dry Season by Gabriela Babnik

Harmattan: A cold-dry trade wind that blows across the West African subcontinent from the Sahara to the Gulf of Guinea during the winter months bringing dust storms, low humidity and an increased risk of fire outbreaks. This is the trademark wind of the dry season.

dry-season-cover_54aff6fb99d92_250x800rAs Gabriela Babnik’s novel Dry Season opens, we find a 62 year-old Slovenian woman, Ana, lying in bed with a 27 year-old Bukinabé man, and it is immediately clear that her path to reclaim herself will defy conventions. But then, as we come to know her, we realize that she has long been resistant to the constraints of convention. Ana and the young man, Ismael, are not yet lovers, despite the fact that they awake in the same bed. Their first encounter is uncertain, tentative. Across the boundaries of age, race, class, and culture, they have been drawn to each other with their own dark histories lying twisted inside. As these two disparate individuals take turns addressing the reader – that is the most accurate way of describing the manner in which their stories are uncoiled – we gradually begin to learn more about their pasts and their feelings toward one another.

Ismael and his friend are targeting tourists to rob when he first spots Ana. He is drawn to her but does not see her as a potential mark; he does not sense that she is carrying much of monetary value. It is something else, though he is not entirely certain what that is. For Ana, her attraction to black men is rooted in an earlier time in her life: a chance encounter and subsequent affair with a Sudanese man that has left an unfilled and aching space in her memory. It is not clear that she knows, or is ready to confront, what she truly hopes this young man can heal in her:

“But this sleeping man in front of me was from another time. He had a god drawn on his face. I wanted to say that earlier but it slipped my mind. As I was walking toward him from the other side of the avenue, I felt a strong desire for him to touch the secret territory inside me. Ever since I gave birth thirty years ago, I knew I had to put it aside for a while. I mean touching the silky surface of blades of grass with my palm or licking honey slowly from a metal spoon and then looking at my face in it.”

Ana admits that she has literally walked out on her life in Ljubljana, a life she sees as reduced to the design of illustrated throw pillows, trapped an inherited house with a view of the garden. She is haunted by the suicide of her distant mother, the decline and end of her marriage, the return of her long absent father, and the descent into madness of her only child. Behind all of this is a persistent pain, a bitter groundlessness borne of the fact that she was adopted from an orphanage. It colours, perhaps even distorts, a sense of abandonment that no person, place or career can fill. Her escape to Africa is a deliberate attempt to fill this void.

As Ismael takes up his side of the narrative in turn, it becomes evident that these two unlikely lovers share some common demons. His father is unknown to him and this status defines him and his mother in the village in which they live. They are subject to open shaming and abuse until the day when they are finally rescued and removed to a longed for but equally uncertain life in the big city. They take up residence for a while with a man he calls Baba, and who becomes, over time, a sort of surrogate father whose albino son, Malik, will grow to be both a friend and a recklessly dangerous influence. But in the meantime, Ismael’s increasingly unstable mother will flee to the streets. Together they beg on the roadside and sleep under a bridge until his mother is suddenly killed when he is seven years old.

“Not long before they told me that a lorry had run her over – that it was really her, and not one of the night women or morning women – we had grown apart. Or maybe she had grown apart from me, I am not sure. It is possible that I was a burden to her. In our village seven-year-old boys are already responsible for themselves. They bite into green fruit, never meet their mama except in dreams, and eventually get used to her not being around and start paying attention to the things that are around.”

Suspended between an aborted childhood and a tenuous adulthood, Ismael seeks to fill the mother-shaped hole in his life through several women who look after him for a time. He is eager, hungry to learn to read and write, but his opportunities are limited by his circumstances. He drifts back to the street scene, takes on odd jobs, works for a while fixing up old cars, and eventually falls into the pattern of robbing tourists with his friend Malik. Ana is, for him, a respite, possibly even a path out of a life marked by poverty, loneliness, neglect, and extreme brutality.

Dry Season is, in no small way, a sharp break from what one might expect from the literature of a small central European country. Eschewing a linear narrative and conventional storytelling, we are confronted with an unusual blend of metafictional devices – the fact that the action is occurring within the context of a novel is evoked repeatedly, as is a magical realism common in so much African literature, as a way of seeing and accepting ghosts and magic in the world. It is not the Balkan Wars but the tumultuous recent history of Burkina Faso that forms the critical political backdrop. Sex and sexuality are presented with an overt frankness, from the innocent masturbatory explorations of a young boy to the full fleshed desires and needs of a mature woman. Loneliness drives both Ana and Ismael to seek refuge in one another’s bodies, where they find, for a time at least, an intensely passionate release.

The open relationship between a white woman and a black man less than half her age does not go unnoticed on the streets of Ouagadougou. Ana, as the outsider, is forced to confront the reality of the African society against the mythology that has drawn her to the continent and into Ismael’s arms. Once the veil begins to drop in the aftermath of an attack on a cab in which they were riding, she says:

“I was wrong about you, Ismael. I thought you were a quiet, withdrawn fellow, who still walks in a world of timelessness, of gods, of moral certainties and natural laws, and even such constraints as religion and gender, but now I see you are one of them, one of the bandits.”

He counters:

“I am not what you think. I am a man who walks on a reddish road, the man you saw from the cab. I saw you seeing him. You thought, how backward they are, poor things, they learn on the ground, make love on the ground, eat off the ground, but that ground, that earth, which you take in your hand and let crumble through your fingers, it is all we have.”

She finds herself relying on the assistance of street children, who in turn taunt and mock her. She depends so closely on Ismael to be her guide and protector that she easily loses her way in his absence. The risks that they both ultimately face are significant and potentially devastating. There is no escape to a magical wonderland. Especially when the true trauma, the denied reality, lies inside rather than outside of the person longing to escape.

This novel is a demanding and startlingly rewarding read. Both Ana and Ismael have stories that they urgently need to share, that are weighing them down. Both stories contain hidden corners that must be turned, secrets that are difficult to bear. The narrative threads move back and forth in time, building on past experiences repeatedly to flesh out more detail. The novel that is being created in the present moment, if you will, becomes a space of self-examination and revelation for the two narrators. The separate strands become entwined, creating the effect of a tightly braided cord that then begins to fray as the relationship falls apart. The magic fades but the telling grows increasingly surreal, leading up to an exhilarating and shocking revelation in the final pages.

Another stunning release from UK-based Istros Books, Dry Season will be released on November 16, 2015.

This review has been posted on the blog of the Free Word Centre in London.

In partnership with Istros Books, the Free Word Centre is hosting an evening with Gabriela Babnik and translator Rawley Grau on Monday, November 9, 2015. See details here.