***REGION 24: Europe VI

If you have not read the information on the master thread regarding the intent of these regional threads, please do this first.

***Europe VI: Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovenia

I'm reading Over het doppen van bonen by Wieslaw Mysliwski. It's an impressive monologue by an older man from Poland in which he reveals the story of his life. It's one of the weirdest books I've read so far this year, very enthralling also. I'm not sure if it has been translated in English yet, but it's a prize-winning book in Poland.

Skylark by Dezső Kosztolányi 1924, translation ?, Hungarian

I found this novel, by turns, charming, satiric, and a little bit horrifying in its depiction of an extremely provincial town in Hungary at the end of the 19th century, in the waning years of the Austro-Hungarian empire, focusing on an aging couple and what they do when their ugly and somewhat stupid 35-ish daughter, Skylark, goes to stay with relatives "in the country" for a week. Kosztolányi has a telling eye for the descriptive detail and for the hypocrisy of many of the residents of the town, and the turnaround of the parents cleaning up the evidence of what they did while their child was away is quite funny. But it is a sad book too, and I can't help but find a little bit of a political edge in it as well.

105. Over het doppen van bonen (A Treatise on Shelling Beans) by Wieslaw Mysliwski
This must be one of the strangest books I've read this year. It is one brilliant monologue of an older man in which he tells an anonimous visitor his random thoughts, memories, insights while shelling beans. Little by little we get to know the man and his own history which is also the history of the common man in Poland.

Sometimes I was a bit overwhelmed by the prose which went on and on and on. The book really grabbed me at times, e.g. when the man talked of the drunk music-teacher who conducted the orchestra in silence, or of the dependant pig that was a metaphor of his happy childhood, or of the man who taught him how to play the saxophone, or of the girl from the Red Cross who helped him during the war, or of his uncle who committed suicide. Through his eyes and mouth you sense there is more to these people and, you feel the sorrow, pain, hope, joy and happiness of the individual.
The monologue is not linear and jumps back and forth through time, creating this beautiful, epic image of an ordinary life which proves that no life is ordinary once you dig a bit deeper.
It's a book you should read slowly. It's probably not everybody's cup of tea as it is rather hermetic at times, but if you take the time and are ready to put in the effort, you'll certainly be rewarded.

Just posted this on your personal thread, but will copy it here:

I've just received a book by Wieslaw Mysliwski, Stone upon Stone, from my Archipelago Books subscription. It is quite a tome, so I'm going to have to wait until I have time to read it, especially now that I've read your comments and see it probably needs to be read slowly.

HUNGARY

A Journey Round My Skull by Frigyes Karinthy

In this book, Karinthy, a Hungarian writer, describes his diagnosis of and surgery to remove a brain tumor. Strangely enough, given the subject matter, it is a delightful read. Karinthy's sparkling personality and self-deprecating humor never desert him. He is a talented writer with an original way of saying things, and he never bores.

Poking a little fun at the world-reknowned surgeon who will operate on him he says, tongue in cheek: 'I found it a little humiliating that he was not interested in my own views about my condition. He probably regarded me as a layman who had no opinions on such matters, or perhaps, having heard that I was some kind of poet, he was on his guard against the vagaries of an overheated imagination.'

In fact, Karinthy tries to keep his imagination in check: 'When I put my questions, I used medical terms....I did not ask her what the cowering, terrified Being that lurked somewhere behind my tumour was so plaintively asking below the threshold of consciousness. I did not ask whether the patient screamed like a wild beast and struggled to escape when they split her skull open, whether her blood and brains came pouring out of the wound or whether at last the victim fainted on the torture rack, gasping for breath, with mouth open and staring eyes. Instead, I questioned her about the operation as if it had been some delicate experiment in physics or a job of repairs by a watchmaker.'
(This is about as gorey as the book gets, BTW).

As a writer, he came to realize that, 'for the first time in my life, I was to observe not for the sake of recording that personal vision which the artist calls 'truth'...but for the sake of reality, which remains reality even if we have no means of communicating its message. Never had I been so far from a lyrical state of mind as in this, the most subjective phase of my life."

HUNGARY

The Book of Fathers by Miklos Vamos is a sweeping epic of the Csillag family through twelve generations. They are a little bit haunted by a family trait that gives them flashes of both past and future events (sometimes very far into the past and very far into the future). Each patriarch writes about his life in what the family calls "the book of fathers" for the benefit of his future sons and grandsons.

Very beautiful, very smart, and often very funny amidst the backdrop of tragedy. Reviewed here, if anyone is interested.

Interesting, because I had a completely different reaction to The book of Fathers. Here's what I wrote in my review.

I wanted to read this book after I read a rave review by Jane Smiley in the New York Times Book Review. Alas, I was sorely disappointed. It is the story of 12 generations of a Hungarian family, focusing in each generation on the first-born son who, for most of the book, inherits the magical ability to see into the family's past and sometimes into the future; Hungarian history from the past 300 years is thrown in too. The novel irritated me for several reasons. First of all, it was way too formulaic: each generation is matched up with one of the 12 astrological signs, each chapter begins with a "poetic" look at what is happening in the natural world at the time of that astrological sign, etc. Second, the characters of each of the sons/fathers seemed wooden to me, designed to fit the history and the sign. Finally, I don't know whether it was the author or the translator, but there were a lot of odd, old-fashioned, or out-of-place words and, in the final section, some of which takes place in New York City, some things that were just plain wrong. Still, there was enough going on that I read the whole book just to see how it all worked out.

Edited to fix touchstone.

I actually thought the zodiac framework was lightly applied, and in fact almost lost in translation. As a structure, it felt no more formulaic to me than any other set of interlinked stories. I actually found myself thinking of Chaucer.

I thought the general progression of the characterizations of each generation developed from a kind of folkloric approach to the more modern psychological complexity we require of contemporary fiction. And I found the reactions of the Csillags/Sterns who went through the Holocaust to be very spot on. Both the father who renounced his heritage and his son who spends his life looking for what was lost.

It's worth noting that, as a rule, Jane Smiley and I don't have the same tastes in fiction. At least, that's what I decided after reading her Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, where I disagreed with almost everything she said about every book.

Because of Rebecca's comments here I also read Skylark. This book is a little gem. The characters are somewhat sinister and tragic, the story sometimes humorous, sometimes sarcastic and it leaves the reader with plenty to think about. While the first book I read this year (Sisters of the Sinai) was all about looking for one's purpose that God has created and the joy that comes with it, this book is about the tragedy of people who don't even realize they have a purpose in life and take life as it comes. Recommended if you like literary, slow reading of quality.
(Thanks, Rebecca, for bringing this book to my attention).

POLAND

I just finished Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke, which tells the story of thirty year old Joey Kowalski, who is banished back to the age of seventeen by Professor Pimko. He's sent to school, where rival groups of students argue about whether a schoolboy should be innocent and pure or obscene and mature. He is sent to live with the Youngblood family, a modern couple with a beautiful daughter; then he goes to the countryside with one of his fellow students in search of a farmhand.

I was excited to read this book because Gombrowicz is something of a legend in the history of Argentine literature. He spent a quarter of a century in exile in Buenos Aires, and the original Spanish translation of this book, done by the author himself with the help of his friends in Buenos Aires, was influential on Argentine literature in the second half of the 20th century. I read a more recent English translation done by Danuta Borchardt, and I though it was hilarious and thought-provoking. I hope to find a copy of the Spanish translation soon and try it as well. It's definitely a unique and fun book.

My first post in this section of the Reading Globally group - hello one and all! Really enjoying my first Alan Furst novel - The Polish Officer - it's still early days, but the mood and flavour of occupied Poland during WW2 really comes across. Scenes have both a rural and urban setting and the writing is very good. A satisfying read so far - hope it's as rewarding to the finish.

59. The Pathseeker by Imre Kertesz

This short novella by Nobel Prize winning author, Imre Kertesz, is a different approach to the question of responsibility and guilt in the 20th century. The story begins with "the commissioner", the only name by which we are to know him, interviewing the owner of a hotel about an incident that happened nearby. The hotel owner has lived in the town since boyhood and volunteers information rather feverishly. In fact, he seems relieved to be able to confess his "small part in universal evil", and furthermore to explain his inaction since then. But the commissioner has not come to absolve the hotel owner, rather his intent is to visit the nearby site of the incident, and then continue on his way to a seaside resort with his wife.

The visit to the unnamed site turns out to be a disappointment, however. Nothing remains as it was, and the

Tourists were like ants, diligently carrying off the significance of things, crumb by crumb, wearing away a bit of the unspoken importance investing them with every word they spoke and every single snapshot they took. He should have realized that this was precisely the sort of opportunity they would not leave unexploited.

The commissioner does not find the evidence he is seeking here.

He does, however, spot a veiled woman in the distance with whom he is later to have an unexpected conversation. The woman is mysterious and accusatory. When the commissioner protests that he was only at the site by chance, the woman replies, "There's no such thing as chance. Only injustice." Now it is the commissioner's turn to protest his innocence; but the veiled woman is as uninterested in his excuses as the commissioner was in the hotel owner's.

Finally, spurning his confused but supportive wife, the commissioner seeks to complete his mission by visiting the factory. Finding the factory still working, he feels a brief moment of hope, but then realizes that he has still failed, because all that remains are objects. What is the truth he seeks?

These objects here were holding their peace; like uncommunicative strangers, they were complete and sufficient unto themselves, they were not going to verify his existence. Let him find it in chance or seek it within himself, accept it or reject it-that was now, as ever, a matter of utter indifference to this pitiless landscape and to these obtusely different objects here.

As he waits for the train back to town, he picks up a paper and reads an article about a recent suicide. With that, the commissioner has a moment of panic, but "surely he couldn't be looking for his accusers?" His mission, however, appears complete, and he continues forward, in seeming indifference to all that he has experienced in the last few days.

Kertesz is masterful at exploring the themes of responsibility and guilt without ever becoming specific. By doing so, the unnamed places and people can stand for everyone, for each of us. We all have a role in the story be it spectator, victim, survivor, or tourist. Vague, confusing, and surreal, the story prods the reader to identify with the scenario and ask hard questions of ourselves. Although I can't say I enjoyed this novella, it did make me uncomfortable, and that, I think, is the point.

The Polish Officer was a very enjoyable bit of escapist reading. Alan Furst is a master at generating authentic atmosphere in this espionage novel which spans the first two years of WW2 from Poland to France and back again.

They Were Counted by Miklós Bánffy
HUNGARY, originally published in 1937, English translation 2000

I almost gave up on this book soon after I started it, because I wasn't that interested in the big party of aristocrats at a Hungarian castle in the early years of the 20th century with which it begins. But I kept at it and soon I was hooked, because Bánffy is a marvelous story teller. It is a sprawling tale, with two cousins at its center, but involving dozens of other characters and their relationships, romantic and otherwise, and politics. What makes the book so fascinating, aside from or despite the almost soap-opera-ish aspects of some of the subplots, is the look at the vanished (perhaps deservedly so) world of pre-World War I Hungary and, in particular, the often fought-over province of Transylvania, then under Hungarian rule but largely peopled by ethnic Romanians. These were the waning years of the Austro-Hungarian empire, much written about by Austrians such as Joseph Roth, but this book is told from the Hungarian perspective, and the Hungarians very much felt themselves second-class citizens in the empire. The descriptions of political events, many presumably based on real ones, since Bánffy had himself been a politician from an ancient aristocratic family, show the futility of the political arguments of the time, all focused on the Hungarians' resentment of the Austrian rulers, completely oblivious to the changes in the world outside. (It is my understanding that the next two volumes of this trilogy lead up to and end with the killing of Archduke Ferdinand and the beginning of first world war, which was the death knell of the Austro-Hungarian empire.)

While the stories of the cousins and their families, their lovers and those they want to to be their lovers, their land and their financial issues are, along with the politics, the heart of the novel, I also found the parts dealing with the beauty of the Transylvanian landscape and the lives of peasants, especially those in the mountains, very interesting. What was also interesting, and depressing, was the extremely limited lives women had to lead in those times, the still existing emphasis on the role and importance of the hereditary aristocracy, and the power those aristocrats had over the lives of others.

Despite the blurbs on the copy I have, which compare Bánffy to Tolstoy, this isn't in the same literary league. Part of this may be due to the translation since the English translator (who worked with Bánffy's daughter) says in his introduction that he not only cut parts of the book because it was so long and politically detailed, but also that he realized that "a literal translation in English would give none of the quality of the original and would fail completely to give any idea of the idiom and feeling of the first years of this century in Central Europe . . . anyone tackling it would have to make an English version rather than a literal translation." Nonetheless, it is a compellingly readable story and I am eager to read the next two volumes.

Finally, the edition I read is marred by sloppy proofreading -- words missing, words where they don't belong, typos and/or missed punctuation. It's a shame.

HUNGARY Originally published 1937 and 1940 English translation 2000

They Were Found Wanting by Miklós Bánffy
They Were Divided by Miklós Bánffy

These two novels complete the trilogy begun with They Were Counted and everything I said in my review of that book, above, holds true for these as well.

They Were Found Wanting takes the protagonist, Balint Abady, his cousin Laszlo, and dozens of other characters from the years 1906 to about 1909. As with the earlier volume, their stories and romances are mixed with set pieces of huge parties and hunts, politics within Hungary and in the broader Austro-Hungarian empire, and vivid descriptions of natural environments around the country. What comes out more strongly in this volume is the self-centeredness of Hungarian politics and the internal conflicts that blind people to the larger world outside, as well as Bánffy's goal of painting a complete portrait of a complex world that no longer existed by the time he wrote the novels in the 1930s.

The final, slimmer volume, They Were Divided, covers the period up until the first world war. In this novel, the personal stories continue, as do the political maneuverings and the portraits of nature, but there is also an overwhelming sense of loss and of a period ending, both for individuals and for the country. Bánffy completed this novel in 1940, as a second world war, which would destroy what the first one hadn't, was starting to ravage Europe.

One of Bánffy's points throughout these novels is the impotence of the Hungarian legislature, tied up in partisan politics and obstructionist policies that ignore the good of the country. A reader in the US can't help but see parallels to our own Congress.

Czech Republic: No Saints or Angels by Ivan Klima


One-sentence-summary
A middle-aged dentist, her daughter and her boyfriend are trying to give meaning to their lives in Prague in the 1990s.

My personal thoughts
One of the great things about my European challenge (as well as the global one) is that I get to read books I would never have picked up otherwise. Most of the times, the books are ok because I do evaluate them a bit beforehand, but sometimes I find a book I'll gladly classify as a favourite. No Saints or Angels is one of them. I know the one-sentence-summary sounds awful and not very appealing but it's very misleading because it's actually a story told from three different points of view that gives insight into what life is all about, the insecurities, the search for happiness, the lies, self-esteem, confidence, trust, etc. It also deals with the history of a family and a country. Klima is a great writer. He manages to portray characters in a few lines and to convey the feelings that ordinary human beings have without being heavy-handed. There's no real beginning and no real ending to this story but there are so many thoughts and insights that make it wortwhile. It's a brilliant mixture of humour and food for thought and that's more than enough for me.

Hungary
The Adventures of Sindbad by Gyula Krúdy Written between 1911 and 1919, first published 1944, translation 1998

As Sindbad, an inveterate seducer and lover of women, travels (largely as a ghost), searching for his lost loves, and loving and erotically recalls their appearances and personalities, Krúdy is really exploring the loss of a centuries-old culture. It is the waning days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and change is accelerating and inevitable, but the ancestors whose portraits hang on the walls of ancient homes and the dead in their graves are almost as real as the living.

As in his fascinating and mysterious Sunflower, Krúdy brilliantly evokes the beauty of the Hungarian countryside, the almost soporific quality of life in small villages, the bustling activity in Budapest (or, Buda and Pest) and, in this work, the characters of a huge number of women. As with Sunflower, very little is straightforward. At various times, Sindbad is alive and 300 years old, buried in a grave, traveling as a ghost in a carriage, and even transformed into a sprig of mistletoe. The boundary between life and death is porous, connected by love and longing.

Above all, there is a feeling of melancholy and loss. The stories abound with autumn leaves, dark nights illuminated by the moon, misty landscapes, rivers begging to be jumped into, men and women who have killed themselves for love. Musing about one of his loves, Sindbad recalls that she called him not "to the enjoyments of a quiet life, but rather to death, decay and annihilation, to the dance to exhaustion at the ball of life where the masked guests are encouraged to lie, cheat and steal, to push old people aside, to mislead the inexperienced young, and always to lie and weep alone . ."

Poland
In Red by Magdalena Tulli Published 1998, English translation 2001

I nearly missed my subway stop two days in a row because I was so caught up in the unreal world Magdalena Tulli creates in this gem of a novella that is nonetheless very hard to describe. At the start, the Polish town of Stitchings is always cold and snowy and almost always dark, and it is suspended in an unclear time. Gradually, some of the people of the town come into focus, and the time resolves to around the time of the first world war (although Stitichings is part of a mythical fourth partition of Poland, ruled by the Swedes who are said to be better than the Germans and the Russians). People die but stay alive, businesses thrive and then fall apart, grudges are held for a long time, circus monkeys pass out counterfeit bills, what seems at first to be a small town apparently grows to include many more people of varying kinds, time passes and times get hard and then better and then hard again, the weather changes and it is hot and sunny all day and all night, a bustling port appears but then disappears . . . and so on. Overall, the tone is gloomy, and much that happens is grim, as many characters die, but fun and mysterious things happen too.

What makes this book so remarkable is Tulli's writing. She meshes crystal clear descriptions of people, their actions, and their environment with illusion and allusion, in prose that flows so naturally that even completely unnatural events seem perfectly believable. People can seem real and ephemeral at the same time, even as people who die don't necessarily stay dead. Music plays an important role in the book too, with the sounds of different instruments adding insight into what is going on with different characters. Tulli creates a story that seems grounded in some ways in Poland in the first half of the 20th century but then takes off from there into an into an alternate world of imagination. Having finished this book, I could easily start it all over again, and I'll be looking for other works by Tulli.

Hungary: De nacht voor de scheiding (Válás Budán) by Sandor Marai

This book, first published in 1935, deals with 12 hours in the life of a middle-aged Hungarian judge who prepares to settle the divorce of an acquaintance and his wife he briefly met years ago. In the first part of the book, we get to know the judge, his life, his history and his formal way of thinking, in the second part, we see his encounter with his acquaintance, a doctor, who pays him a nightly visit.
Basically this book deals with the universal themes of ratio vs. feelings, old vs. new, man vs. woman. Marai wraps this up in beautiful prose and razor-sharp observation which turn this book into a brilliant psychological novel. Highly recommended.

Poland Originally published 1992; English translation 2004
Dreams and Stones by Magdalena Tulli

Cross-posted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads



When I read Tulli's In Red last year, I was so absorbed in her creation of an unreal world filled with clearly envisioned people, beautiful writing, and illusion and allusion that I nearly missed my subway stop twice. This novella, her first, also is filled with beautifully poetic writing and illusion and allusion, but I never got that absorbed in it. I am impressed by what Tulli has accomplished, but I am quite sure that I really didn't understand a lot of it.

The book describes the creation, life, and decay of an unnamed city which, as the novella progresses, appears to be a mythical version of Warsaw (described as a city with the straight lines of W's and A's in its name). In the beginning, the dichotomy of tree-like growth (natural, uncontrolled, always branching, balanced by an equally large root system) versus machine-made growth (human-directed, controlled, always increasing, balanced by an "anti-city") is established, and later the dichotomy of dreams and stones. At times the city seems to grow to encompass the world, and the skies and the stars; at times later in the book, it both seems to contain other (named) cities and to be apart from them. There are times when the mood of the people is described, but they are always spoken of generally; there are no individual characters. This description is much more straightforward than the book itself!

As the city grows, there were places where I felt Tulli was commenting on some of the history and politics of Warsaw and Poland itself, although I am not familiar enough with that to catch more than a few allusions. Certainly the determination to destroy the anti-city could allude to the communist era, as could the awards for manual and machine workers who accomplished a lot in little time. The choice of train lines heading east (to Russia) or west (to Paris) could refer to different pulls on the Polish people. But I have to stress that all of this happens in the most allusive way, so it is possible to understand it in different ways.

Tulli's writing is poetic, and a delight to read, and this book is more a collection of imagery and a parable than a novel. Some of the recurring images and ideas are architecture and lines (straight versus meandering), shifts in time and space (also true of In Red), the ephemeral quality of dreams (and us?) and the permanence of stone. Other readers have commented that Tulli has translated Calvino and that there are echoes of his Invisible Cities in this book; I have that on the TBR and will get to it soon.

All in all, I am glad I read this book, but I'm especially glad I read In Red first, as I would not have been so enthusiastic about Tulli I had come to this one first.

Great review of Dreams and Stones, Rebecca. I still haven't read In Red yet, although I did enjoy Flaw.

POLAND

Ashes and Diamonds by Jerzy Andrzejewski
Originally published 1948; English translation 1962; my edition 1991.

Cross-posted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads



Originally published in 1948, and considered one of the best Polish postwar novels, Ashes and Diamonds takes place in a Polish town in the days just before and after the German surrender in May 1945. The Soviet army has liberated the town from the Nazis, and it is still unclear what exactly will happen. The town is awash in former Polish Home Army soldiers (although unnamed as such since the Soviets had already taken over by the time of publication), local and Soviet communists, bureaucrats looking to advance, a somewhat discomfited aristocracy, returnees from Nazi concentration camps, teenagers who grew up in the chaos of the war and seem to have no values, those who seek to make money no matter who is in power, and of course regular folks. The novel switches back and forth between various people and their stories, and it takes a little while to figure out who is who and how they are connected.

Essentially, Andrzewjewski portrays people who have had to confront issues of ethics and conscience during the war, or are continuing to confront them, and how they individually decide to act. There are plots to kill people, plots to betray people, and yet people are intertwined in ways that can be awkward, at best, in the fluid situation; for example, the head of the local communists, mourning the death of his wife in a concentration camp, has to tell her sister about her death, and the sister is one of the local aristocrats. Everyone comes together at the town's hotel, the Monopole, which is striving to recapture prewar days, and they all certainly drink as if there is no tomrrow.

The title of the novel comes from a poem by Cyprian Norwid, that asks:

"Will only ashes and confusion remain,
Leading into the abyss? -- or will there be
In the depths of the ash, a star-like diamond,
The dawning of eternal victory!

It is hard to see the diamond in these ashes.

The edition I read had two introductions: one, by Heinrich Böll, written for an earlier edition, before the Wall came down, and one written by Barbara Niemczyk in the post-Communist era. Both point out that, for Polish readers would have immediately understood the unexpressed reality that the Soviets who "liberated" Poland were the same Soviets who occupied it in the days of the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact. In addition, Niemczyk notes some errors in the translation, including two long sections that were omitted by the original translator. Finally, I found it disconcerting that the Polish names were "translated" into English (sometimes incorrectly as Niemczyk points out); for example, the Polish name Maciek becomes Michael and Jerzy becomes Julius. I would have preferred it if the translator kept the Polish names.

POLAND

Moving Parts by Magdalena Tulli (Originally published 2003, English translation 2005)
Cross-posted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads



In this playful and perceptive novella, Tulli explores what it means to pluck a story out of life, how fiction and reality intersect, and how the past enters the present, and the difficulty, if not impossibility, of telling a story that really represents life. She does this by creating the character of "the narrator," a man who has been hired by some mysterious person or organization to write a story. From the beginning, when the "narrator" tries to figure out who his characters are, he is out of his depth, as the "characters" go off and do things he doesn't necessarily want them to do, as more "characters" enter the "story," and as he finds his way through streets, buildings, stairways, elevators, and basements to try to both follow and constrain them. The time frame is fractured too, as the beginning of the novella seems to be in the present, but towards the end the "characters," including the "narrator," find themselves in wartime Poland, possibly during the Warsaw uprising.

In between, Tulli and the "narrator" meditate on language and grammar, on how they shape both the story and reality. For example, Tulli writes:

The narrator hopes that at this point he'll finally be able to put his foot on the dry land of the past tense, in the kingdom of certainty where facts live and flourish. Only there do they flourish, nowhere else: the past tense is their entire world, the homeland of truths that are incontrovertible though, it must be admitted, usually contradictory. p. 23

They (two of the "characters") would make some tea, and sit in the armchairs, teacups in hand, discussing the worrying suspicion that they would have to relinquish their polished floors and their phonograph and record collection, and they continually cast doubt on something that was blindingly obvious given the ineluctable way in which the future tense turns into the past. They even tried to joke about this process, but their jokes were not entirely successful; they were not funny enough for them to convince themselves they were safely beyond the reach of grammar. p. 95

This is the third of Tulli's books that I've read. All have been fascinating, all have been different. But, in all of them, Tulli writes beautiful, occasionally poetic prose and is an extremely detailed observer of the world around her, particularly of color and architecture, human activities and home furnishings. This was a delightful and thought-provoking read.

HUNGARY

Opium and Other Stories by Géza Csáth
Stories written in Hungarian 1908 to 1912
English translation by Jascha Kessler and Charlotte Rogers 1980

 

Géza Csáth, born 1887, was an upper middle class Hungarian who showed considerable talent as an artist, writer, musician and composer before deciding of his own volition to enter medical school. He devoted his early career to researching the origins of mental disorders, a fascination which carries over to the short stories he was writing at the time. At the same time, however, Csáth became addicted to opium. During the First World War he began his own descent into insanity. In 1919 he killed his wife, was institutionalized, escaped, and then killed himself.

Csáth's short stories are a mixture of the tragic, the absurd, the macabre and the fantastic. The author's mother died when he was a young child, leading evidently to a sense of betrayal that caused him to depict mothers as uncaring. Children are often the principal subjects of his stories, and they are typically angry and sadistic, wreaking violence and death on their pets, their siblings, and especially their mothers. In other stories young men are tantalized with the prospect of sexual pleasures, only to be thwarted by indifferent females, by their own inhibitions, or by waking at the wrong moment to find it was all a dream.

Csáth is not entirely misogynistic, however. In "Festal Slaughter" he presents a remarkably sensitive portrait of a servant girl who must rise in the freezing dawn to prepare for the slaughter of a sow by a visiting butcher. Along with her employer's family she works to exhaustion that day processing the carcass, making sausages, etc., only to be casually raped by the butcher before he leaves. She is just as much a piece of meat to her culture as the sow.

In the title story, "Opium," Csáth praises his favorite drug. Sure it shortens your life, he argues, but it slows time and extends the pleasures of each day. You may live, at most, for ten years, but in those ten years you will experience twenty million years of bliss before letting "your head fall on the icy pillow of eternal annihilation." Other stories present perhaps a more cautionary picture of addiction, such as one in which the narrator is plagued by dreams of a giant, fearsome toad in his kitchen.

There is a bit of black comedy in the collection as well, such as in the story "Father, Son" where a young man returns to Hungary from America to retrieve his father's skeleton from a medical college where it has just been put on display in a classroom. There is social satire too, such as the story "Musicians" wherein the players in a civic orchestra discover that it their politics, not their performance, that will win them new instruments.

I would characterize Géza Csáth as "Poe + Freud," as his macabre, drug-fueled visions are informed by a professional's knowledge and clinical experience with mental illness. His writings also reflect the final convulsions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a dream world of sorts itself. These are not great stories, but many are quite good and would appeal to anyone with an interest in the literature of the period or of drug addiction.

HUNGARY

Out of Oneself by András Pályi
Two novellas published in Hungarian in 1996 and 2001
English translation by Imre Goldstein 2005

 

Out of Oneself is a collection that consists of a pair of novellas that explore erotic desire as a force that is both redemptive and destructive.

"Beyond," the first piece, begins with a priest describing his own funeral. He has killed himself but is being given a church funeral because the provost (his uncle) managed to have him declared insane. Now he is a specter not only looking back on the events that led to his demise, but in some strange way reliving them, even making different choices, but seeing them lead over and over to the same end.

His story begins in 1936 when he has just celebrated his first mass and was approached by a beautiful young actress. In private the woman tells him about being troubled by memories of her childhood, but it is obvious that she is strongly attracted to him. He can't deny that the attraction is mutual, and before long they are having an affair. The priest can't find it in himself to believe that their love is wrong, yet each time he relives it, the end is the same. In his mind this endless destruction and resurrection takes on religious symbolism.

The second story, titled "At the End of the World," is set in Budapest in the 1980s. The principal female character is, again, an actress. On the set of a movie she finds herself attracted to the screenwriter. They are both still in their teens, and they have both left the homes of their foster or step-parents feeling as though they were cast out alone and in the rain. The girl has further anxieties from having been sexually molested by her stepfather since she was a small child.

Their attraction for each other is immediately and intensely physical. "Love is like God, we create it and believe in it. The pure moment is something else. Screaming, fear, pleasure, abandon." But the passion which redeems them from their sense of abandonment turns quickly into something they cannot control. "They had gone from slavery to freedom and then back to slavery. How could that have happened?"

The two stories both explore sexual psychology, but with their repetitive cycles of passion and despair they may also be historical allegories as well. The first instance depicting fascism with its antisemitism, the second communism with its class conflict. The male protagonist in each novella has his own prejudices to blame, in part, for his fate.

Earlier authors such as Georges Bataille have explored the linkage between eroticism, death and religion. These novellas are much in the same vein, and Out of Oneself will appeal to anyone who has enjoyed Bataille's work.

3. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski

To understand these stories, I think it helps to understand the author's background. Tadeusz Borowski was born in the Soviet Ukraine to Polish parents. As a child, his father was interred in one of the harshest Soviet labor camps, above the Arctic Circle, digging the White Sea Canal. When Borowski was eight, his mother was sent to work in Siberia as well. He lived with an aunt until his family was repatriated to Warsaw in the early 1930s. In 1943, Borowski and his fiance were arrested for their participation in underground publications and sent to Auschwitz. Although both survived the camps and later married, Borowski was unable to reconcile his desire to write the truth with the demands of the communist State on authors. At the age of 29, he turned on the gas in his apartment and committed suicide.

This collection of twelve short stories are inspired by the author's experiences in Auschwitz and Dachau. The first two stories were written and published in Poland right after his release. "They produced a shock," writes Jan Kott in his introduction. "The public was expecting martyrologies; the Communist party called for works that were ideological, that divided the world into the righteous and the unrighteous, heroes and traitors, Communists and Fascists. Borowski was accused of amorality, decadence, and nihilism. Yet at the same time it was clear to everyone that Polish literature had gained a dazzling new talent." Borowski eschewed easy answers and wrote about the moral ambiguities that plagued him. He had survived the camps, but at what cost? Three of his stories are written from the perspective of a deputy Kapo, Vorarbeiter Tadeusz. Young, impressionable, and wanting to survive, Vorarbeiter Tadeusz has a minor position over other prisoners that gives him perks of food and clothes which allow him to survive, but at the cost of moral clarity. Small compromises become everyday, violence and lack of compassion become less uncomfortable, and he survives. But some horrors still have the power to shock, which allows Tadeusz to maintain his humanity.

The stories are horrible to read not only because of the situation, but precisely because there are no heroes, and everyone is both a perpetrator and a victim. Borowski learned this first hand in the camps and lived it afterwards in Communist Poland. The moral ambiguity of his position is, perhaps, what caused him to commit suicide. I found this collection extremely depressing, even more so than other Holocaust literature, and challenging in its unflinching look at the dark side of survival.

HUNGARY

Kornél Esti by Dezsõ Kosztolányi
Published 1933; English translation 2011



This book grew on me as I read it. In the first chapter, the unnamed narrator decides to visit his estranged childhood friend Kornél Esti, a fellow writer and indeed an alter ego who looks exactly like him and who encouraged him in all his pranks and bad boy activities as a child and young man. He finds Esti somewhat down on his luck and suggests that they "stick together" from that point onwards and collaborate in writing a book about Esti's exploits. After some discussion of how this will work and whose name will be bigger on the cover, they agree that Esti will tell stories of his life to the narrator, stories that may or may not be true, and the narrator will "edit" them slightly.

The rest of the book takes off from there in a series of episodic chapters, more or less in chronological order. Some of Esti's stories border on the realistic, others are fantastic or metaphorical or whimsical or disturbing -- or a mixture of all of these, and Esti does not always present himself as an admirable person. Written in the early 1930s, itself a time of growing turmoil, the book takes place both before and after the first world war, the war which finally toppled the Austro-Hungarian empire and resulted in the loss of a significant portion of what had been Hungary to neighboring countries. Never alluded to directly, this is nonetheless a dividing line in Hungarian history and in Hungarian self-perception.

Many of the stories are delightful (although always thought-provoking) -- for example, there is a story about a town in which everyone always tells the truth (so that a restaurant might advertize "Inedible food, undrinkable drinks"); one about a magnificent hotel with hundreds of staff members, each of whom resembles (or is) a famous person such as Thomas Edison, Rodin, and Marie Antoinette; one in which he struggles to get rid of an inheritance; one in which a friend who says he will only stay for a few minutes ends up staying for hours; and one in which he carries on a conversation with a Bulgarian train conductor although he speaks not a word of the language. Others depict life in the literary cafes of Budapest, or the attitudes of peasants, or encounters on trains. Still others are more grim in their portrayal of people with mental illness or in dire financial straits. One of my favorite chapters is the one in which Esti describes his time as a student in Germany; his understated satire of German behavior is priceless, and perhaps a little pointed in 1933. The book ends with Esti boarding a tram that is both real and metaphorical for an unnamed destination that turns out to be the "Terminus."

All in all, I enjoyed this book a lot. Unlike the only other book by Kosztolányi which I've read, Skylark, it does not tell a straightforward story but is quite modern in its almost metafictional style. I also enjoyed Kosztolányi's (or Esti's) technique of occasionally mixing story-telling with philosophical thoughts, while providing a fanciful yet serious picture of a world which was already slipping away when he wrote.

POLAND

My Century by Aleksander Wat
Originally published 1977; English translation 1988.



Part prison/internal exile memoir, part intellectual history, this compelling and moving book is most fundamentally an exploration of ethics, human dignity, and religious struggle in the face of the horrors of Stalinism, Nazism, and the second world war. Born in 1900, Wat was the son of assimilated, intellectual Warsaw Jews who first became a futurist/dadist poet in the 1920s and, starting at the end of the decade, flirted with communism as the editor of The Literary Monthly. Arrested by the Poles, he was jailed for the first time, but not for long. Later, he rejected communism, largely because of the people who were executed (although he continued to be called a "Jewish communist")." When the Nazis invaded Poland, he and his wife, Ola, and son fled to L'wow, but became separated, although they did eventually find each other. After some time in L'wow, Wat was arrested by the Soviets and began his journey through a variety of prisons, including Moscow's notorious Lubyanka, before winding up "free" in Alma-Ata and the neighboring town of Ili.

The book is based on a series of lengthy interviews with Wat conducted by fellow Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz in Berkeley and Paris in the mid-1960s, shortly before Wat's death; he was in extreme pain even during the interviews and ultimately chose to commit suicide. Thus, except for two chapters which Wat had the opportunity to edit and make more literary, the reader is hearing Wat's voice as he talked to Milosz. And what a voice it is -- perceptive, informed, rigorously honest about human strengths and failings (including his own), unsentimental, at times prejudiced (but aware of that prejudice, e.g., the idea that Poles are superior to Russians, especially "Asian" Russians), warm, and often poetic.

The early part of the book depicts the literary and political scene in Warsaw in the 1920s and 1930s and was filled with the names of Polish and other intellectuals; this was a little heavy going for someone unfamiliar with that scene (although there is a very helpful list of people mentioned at the end of my NYRB edition). But the story picked up as the war started and the Wats fled. Wat's descriptions of the people he met in various prisons, the horrific conditions in many of them, how to adapt to prison life, the different types of interrogators, how bedbugs behave, the different kinds of lice, and much more are both spare and detailed, fascinating and profoundly depressing. Wat was very acute at picking up signs from people and hypothesized that his interrogator in the Lubyanka was no longer interested in his "crime" but was instead picking his brain about the Polish literary and intellectual scene in anticipation of the Soviets taking over Poland in the future. In prison, he worried terribly about what had happened to his family, engaged in in-depth conversations with other intellectuals, pondered (as all do) who are the informers, and underwent a religious experience in which he saw "the devil in history" and converted to Catholocism. When the Germans approached Moscow, the Lubyanka was evacuated and Wat was sent to a variety of prisons further east. Ultimately released, although barely alive, he traveled to Alma-Ata (despite not having papers to go there) to try to find Ola and his son; after heroic efforts, he did.. Everyone was desperately hungry, struggling to find food. Through connections with the delegation of the Polish government (in exile in London) in Alma-Ata, Wat was able for a time to find some work and some access to supplies the delegation received from foreign sources, but it was a very hand-to-mouth existence both there and in the smaller town of Ili where they wind up. The book ends, because the interviews ended, but the NYRB edition includes an excerpt from Ola Wat's memoirs which describes Wat's role in resisting the Soviet government's efforts to force Soviet passports on Polish citizens in Ili, and both their experiences in prisons, hers more terrifying than his.

The best part of this book is Wat's voice, his warmth, his perception, and his ceaseless self-evaluation. But almost equally fascinating is the varied cast of characters who pass through Wat's life, from Warsaw intellectuals to urks (Russian criminals), from NKVD officers with aristocratic manners to people from poorer walks of life who help him (or despise him), from people going mad from imprisonment to people who somehow learn to live with it. One of the interesting aspects is that everyone is acutely aware not only of each other's social status within the community of the cell, but also of their ethnicity or national background. In prison and elsewhere, Jews gravitate to other Jews, Poles to other Poles, and so on, and Wat is quick to point out if someone has a Mongol-type face, or looks like a Kazakh. This makes the challenge of the Stalinist effort to make all the various nationalities "Soviet" come alive. Finally, I found Wat's thoughts about such varied topics as the similarities between communism and Nazism, how to talk to interrogators, nighttime conversations between a former Polish cavalry captain and an Ukrainian peasant based on their shared love of animals, literary works and people, religion and the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, endlessly fascinating.

5. Miss Silver's Past by Josef Škvorecký, translated from the Czech by Peter Kussi

Karel Leden is complacent. Once a poet, he now works for the State publishing house, trying to maintain his self-respect while at the same time keeping his job. Supporting anything radical could result in his being fired, or worse. His personal life is filled with a string of women whom he loves only when they seem to lose interest in him. A rather boring but likable cad. But then one day at the beach, he meets the elusive Lenka Silver, the object of his best friend's affection. Karel is immediately drawn to her and plots to get in bed with her. Dumping his ballerina girlfriend, Vera, Karel pursues the mysterious Lenka to no avail. Her disinterest only heightens his ardor. Meanwhile things at work are heating up as a new editor tries to sell Karel's boss on a new author whose book pushes the boundary of what is acceptable to the State. The machinations are intense and petty hatreds are inflamed. Then both Karel's private and work worlds collide at a company party near the lake. By morning someone is dead, and only Karel knows who the killer is.

Josef Škvorecký knew first hand the life of a repressed author working in State publishing. His first novel, The Cowards, was met with great acclaim, but was then banned by the Communist Party. He was fired from his job as editor of World Literature and was lucking to be allowed to work at the State Publishing House of Fiction. Škvorecký was able to leave Czechoslovakia after the Russian invasion which crushed the Prague Spring. Miss Silver's Past was his last book to be published in the country.

Although the novel is typical of East European literature of the time, I was surprised by the inclusion of a murder mystery. Between the twists in Karel's love life, the humorous tone, and the murder, I found myself unwilling to put the book down. Entertaining, if not earth-shattering.

Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age by Bohumil Hrabal, translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim

Bohumil Hrabal developed a literary technique that he called palavering: gabbing endlessly in a stream of consciousness fashion. Hrabal called palaverers,

people who, thanks to their madness, transcend themselves through experiment and spontaneity, and through their ridiculousness they achieve a kind of grandeur, because they end up where no one expected them or expects them. Quoted from the introduction by Adam Thirlwell

Hrabal took palavering to the extreme in this short novel which lacks a single period. The narrator of this nonstop monologue is a man nearing seventy who is chatting up some women in a pub/brothel. He is by turns reminiscing, trying to entertain the ladies, and losing himself in the past with a touch of dementia. The stories can be laugh out loud funny, nostalgic, folklorish, or all three at the same time. As the novel winds down, so does the narrator, and one senses the beginning of a repetition that will change the narrator from a funny, harmless rake into a sad, senile old man.

I thoroughly enjoyed this story with it's irreverent pokes at Christianity, the monarchy, and sex. The narrator is wildly entertaining and well worth the concentration it takes to follow his rambling, disjointed speech. After finishing, I read the introduction by Adam Thirlwell, which provides a thorough look at palavering in its historical context (Joyce's Ulysses, Hašek's Good Soldier Svejk, etc.). I would recommend not reading the introduction first, however, as it quotes extensively from the novel, which detracts from the freshness of the narrative.

POLAND

Stone Upon Stone by Wiesław Myśliwski



Winner, 2012 PEN Translation Prize
Winner, 2012 Best Translated Book Award

Having a tomb built. It's easy enough to say. But if you've never done it, you have no idea how much one of those things costs. It's almost as much as a house. Though they say a tomb is a house as well, just for the next life. Whether it's for eternity or not, a person needs a corner to call their own.

Symek Pietruszka has returned to his home village in late 20th century Poland, after a two year hospital stay that has left him crippled but unbowed. He is in the twilight of his remarkable yet largely unfulfilled life, one spent working indifferently on his parents' farm and in different occupations; attending numerous village parties, where excessive drinking, carousing and fighting were essential to an entertaining evening; exchanging favors for mundane, loveless sex with any woman that he could; and gaining some degree of respect from his fellow villagers for his bravery as a soldier in the Polish Army at the start of World War II, and as an often wounded but never defeated freedom fighter during the German occupation, which earned him the nickname "Eagle". He has always lived in the moment, with little concern for his parents, his three brothers, and the villagers who criticize his irresponsible and wayward behaviors.

Upon his return, Symek finds that his parents' house and farm have been completely ransacked by his neighbors, and everything of any value has been taken, in the manner of a pack of hyenas that have completely feasted on a dead animal. He is devastated, yet he remains undeterred in his plan to build a lavish family tomb, one which will house his late parents, his brothers and their wives, and himself.

Symek engages in frequent flashbacks as he tells his story, and he describes his impoverished childhood in which bread was often a desired luxury, his relationship with his deeply religious but troubled parents, his fantastic experiences and numerous escapes, and his past friends and lovers. He also notes the changes that have taken place during his lifetime, and he bemoans the skilled craftsmanship and individualistic lifestyle that have been replaced by modern equipment and collectivism.

Stone Upon Stone is a sweeping and masterful epic of life in a poverty stricken Polish village during most of the 20th century, whose people struggle to survive and are filled with animosity toward their neighbors and families, yet persevere and occasionally thrive. The narration is simple and filled with rustic wisdom, in keeping with the book's rural setting, and it flows seamlessly, due in large part to the expert translation by Bill Johnston, who was rightfully recognized and rewarded for his effort.

HUNGARY

The City Builder by George Konrád
Originally published 1977; English tranlsation 1977.



This was a difficult book to read and is a difficult one to write about. Why? Both because of the structure of the novel and because of Konrád's writing style. The narrator is a city planner in an unnamed Hungarian town who has lived through both World War II and the communist takeover. But the reader doesn't know this at first (except from reading the blurb on the back of the book). Instead, the book begins as the narrator wakes up one morning and muses about various topics including the death of his wife. But he muses in what is essentially a stream of consciousness way, and the whole book is like this, occasionally direct and understandable but more often dream-like and even surrealistic. Additionally, Konrád writes by piling phrase upon phrase, image upon image, and it is often not at all clear what he is writing about or how one topic connects to another.

Essentially, the narrator is reviewing his life, but in a nonchronological manner. The reader learns not only about the death of his wife, but about his childhood, his father, how he met his wife, the nature of his work and how it differs from that of his father who was a pre-communism planner and architect, the nature of socialist planning, wartime, prison, torture, God and religion, and more. The novel is also a meditation on the meaning of life and freedom, history and social revolutions, cities and communities, and fathers and sons. But all of this is enveloped in prose that is hard to decipher, although beautifully written. Here is an example, by far not the most obscure.

For me, this city is a challenge, a parable, an interrogation frozen in space, the messages of my fellow citizens dead and alive, a system of disappearing and regenerating worlds to come, the horizontal delineation of societies replacing one another by sperm, gunfire, senility; a fossilized tug of war, an Eastern European showcase of devastation and reconstruction . . . Because by virtue of my practiced clichés I have become one of its shareholders; though beyond the tenuous links of my existence and surroundings, beyond my father's overdecorated gravestone and the haunting shadow of a cremated woman, beyond my hardened and irremediable blueprints, my myopic utopias, and the procession of figures out of an ever-darkening past, I could well ask: what have I to do with this East-Central European city whose every shame I know so well. p.22

The introduction to my Dalkey Archive edition, by Carlos Fuentes, compares the experience and writing style of Central Europeans to those of writers from Central and South America and contrasts them with writers from the west, and especially those from the US who, to oversimplify, he feels are always seeking happiness. I didn't find his thoughts particularly helpful in understanding Konrád or this book, but I see some parallels between Konrád's writing style and that of Fuentes in Terra Nostra although, of course, they deal with very different subjects.

I felt lost through a lot of this novel but, having finished, I almost feel I should start at the beginning again to more fully appreciate what Konrád was doing. I feel I missed a lot the first time through, but I understood enough to realize what an impressive writer Konrád is and what complicated ideas he was exploring.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera
Originally published 1969; English translation 1974.
Cross-posted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads



It's been many many years since I read any Kundera, and many many years since this original Writers from the Other Europe edition landed on my TBR. I remember really liking the works by Kundera I read back in the 80s?/90s, but I had mixed feelings about this early volume of short stories, all focused on the sexual games people play. Some I found disturbing, such as "The Hitchhiking Game," in which a role-playing game goes a little too psychologically far, "Let the Old Dead Make Way for the New Dead," in which the lead male character ponders whether it's better to have a delightful memory or a less delightful reality, and "Symposium," a multi-voiced tale with some largely thoughtless cruelty. Some I found playful and thought-provoking, such as "Nobody Will Laugh," about a man who starts out playing a largely innocent joke which then spirals out of control, "Doctor Havel in Ten Years," which shows how our state of mind can affect reality, and "Edward and God," which satirizes both religion and atheism while showing what happens to a character who pretends belief to get a girl. The only one that I found both fun and charming, and my favorite (maybe because of the mood I'm in!) was "The Golden Apple of Continuing Desire," in which the chase is all.

In these stories, Kundera explores not only the largely male sexual psyche but also the implications of playing jokes or pretending to be someone else, probing identity. That's the part I appreciated. I also can't help but feel that some of the obsession of the characters with chasing (and getting) women helps relieve some of the political repression they are subject too (although this is almost, but not entirely, off stage in these stories). Of course Kundera has always focused on sex, mixed with philosophy, which I guess makes the sex high-minded. I think what I'm saying is that I liked Kundera better when I was younger.

CZECH REPUBLIC

The Opportune Moment, 1855 by Patrik Ouřednik
Originally published 2006; English translation 2011
Cross-posted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads.



This delightful and thought-provoking novel tells the tale of a "free" settlement of anarchists and others in the Brazilian wilderness in 1855. It starts with a 1902 letter from the now old Italian anarchist who planned these Fraternitas settlements to a woman has always loved; it is full of high-flown language about principles of love and freedom and anarchism, interspersed with some regret. The novel then goes back to 1855 and the diary of an Italian who set off on the journey to the new community.

The diary starts with the two-month sea voyage and the diarist, who we come to learn is named Bruno, is an acute observer of his fellow passengers, who include not only the Italian group but also some French communists, some very poor Germans, and various others, including some Slavs and some "Negro" workers. One of the group is a committed anarchist who believes in complete freedom; another believes they need to have leaders and structure and votes and "reprimands" and lots and lots of meetings. There also is a strong belief in "free love," which more or less amounts to sharing the women in the group, although the women have something to say about this too. Much of this is quite amusing, although fraught, because of the matter-of-fact way in which Bruno reports what's going on. He also becomes interested in a woman on the ship and discusses this most delicately. (Later on, she tells him that she would be willing to sleep with him but is sleeping with someone else because "first she had to get used to it.")

The diary starts again six months into the stay at the settlement, and things have not gone according to plan. Although the reader doesn't realize it ta first, Bruno will tell the story of what has happened and what is happening in several different ways, so the reader doesn't know which is the truth, or if in some way all of them are.

I didn't quite know what to expect when I started this book, but it seems to me that besides being a well-told and intriguing story, it is a meditation on the conflict of ideals and desires -- desires for love, for control, for money -- and a satire as well. And it also could be a comment on some of the more horrific aspects of 20th century history, as when one of the characters thanks "everyone who had voted for the strictest sanction (i.e., execution) and hadn't let themselves be appeased by unconvincing excuses, because humanity is more important than individual human life." And, in one version of what happened to the settlement, Bruno notes that "Individual freedom has been temporarily suspended because it turns out that people aren't ripe for it yet, although it remains our goal in consideration of the fact that it's the first requirement of harmonious development."

But this is the opposite of a dogmatic book. It wears its thoughts lightly and is a fun, if serious, novel.

HUNGARY

War and War by László Krasznahorkai
Originally published 1999, English translation 2006
Cross-posted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads



This is an amazing novel, and unlike anything else I have ever read. It is amazing in its layers of story, its ideas, and its writing style, which consists of sections, often several pages long, each containing only one long sentence.

Korin, through whose mind we see most of the novel, is a former archivist in a town outside Budapest who, for reasons we don't know at first, has come to Budapest as the first leg of a journey to New York City, which he views as the center of the world. He is a man at the very least obsessed -- obsessed with his discovery in the midst of the archives of a manuscript that he believes will change the world, as well as with his own thoughts -- but also possibly quite deranged. His goal, once he gets to New York, is to type the entire manuscript and upload it to the internet so it will live forever, and then kill himself. But that is only the scaffolding on which this novel is hung.

Through Kraznahorkai's writing style, the reader gets inside Korin's mind, as well as the mind of the various other characters he encounters, from a gang of preteen criminals to a former beauty queen flight attendant to a security guard and an interpreter at JFK airport, and more. Mostly, though it is Korin's mind, and the thoughts and ideas just pour out of him in the form of seemingly endless sentences. Much of what he thinks about, and talks about, is the content of the manuscript, chapter by chapter.

And what is this manuscript about? On the surface, it is the story of four companions (Kasser, Bengazza, Falke, and Toót), possibly spies, possibly soldiers, definitely experts in defensive strategies, who appear and reappear in different historical times and places, from Crete on the eve of the volcanic eruption that destroyed Minoan civilization, to Cologne in the late 1800s, on the verge of a war with France, when the building of the cathedral was nearing completion (after having been left unfinished for centuries), to Venice, to Hadrian's Wall at the edges of the Roman empire in Britain (and apparently simultaneously in Portugal in 1493, awaiting the return of Columbus), and more. At each place, a mysterious man named Mastemann appears, and then disappears, seemingly involved in some imminent catastrophe. As I was struggling to figure out what this was all about, I reached this same questioning in Korin's narrative:

and beside that, why, in any case -- Korin's agitation was evident in his expression -- does he describe four characters with such extraordinary clarity then insert them at certain historical moments, and why precisely one moment rather than another, why precisely these four and not some other people; and what is this fog, this miasma, out of which he leads them time after time; and what is the fog into which he drives them; and why the constant repetition; and how does Kasser disappear at the end; and what is this perpetual, continuous secrecy about, and the ever more nagging impatience, increasing chapter on chapter, to discover who Mastemann is, and why each episode concerning him follows the same pattern, as does the narrative too; and, most important of all, why does the writer go completely mad, whoever he is . . ." p.202

As the novel progresses, Kraznohorkai provides a little more, a very little more, of Korin's background, which explains perhaps, his knowledge of history (I, on the other hand, was driven to Wikipedia and Google Translate many times throughout Korin's retelling of the manuscript). It seems that Korin is obsessed by the idea of borders between "civilization" and "barbarians," by the ends of certain phases of history and lost cultures, by the idea of someone evil (the devil?) pulling the strings without being seen, by art as the antidote to money, and by the dangerous idea of money representing goods instead of the goods themselves. But what this all means is as much a mystery to me as it apparently is to Korin.

In Korin's "real" life, as opposed to the fantasy world of the "manuscript" (which comes to seem to be a creation of Korin's imagination), he encounters people who help him (such as the flight attendant in Budapest), but a lot more people who are up to no good, including his mercurial and violent (to his girlfriend) Hungarian landlord; life in the modern world is brutal. He also constantly and endlessly tells otherl people what he is thinking about and what is going on in the manuscript, despite the fact that they completely ignore him (either because they don't understand Hungarian, like the landlord's Puerto Rican girlfriend) or because he appears mad.

Nonetheless, despite all this, Korin is a sympathetic character; he is clearly suffering, as well as mad. When he begins to get some sense of what the "manuscript" is all about, he thinks:

he, in his dense, stupid, unhealthy way had managed to grasp nothing, but nothing of it in the last few days, and the mysterious, cloudy, origins of the text, its powerful poetic energy, and the way it turned its back in the most decided manner on normal literary conventions governing such works, had deafened and blinded him, in fact as good as blasted him out of existence, like having a cannon fired at you, he said and shook his head, although the answer was right there in front of him all the time and he should have seen it, did in fact see it, and, furthermore, admired it, but had failed to understand it, failed to understand what he was looking at and admiring, meaning that the manuscript was interested in one thing only, and that was reality explored to the point of madness, and the experience of all those intense mad details, the engraving by sheer manic repetition into the imagination was, and he meant this literally, Korin explained, as if the writer had written the text not with pen and words but with his nails, scratching the text into the paper and into the mind, all the details, repetitions and intensifications making the process of reading more difficult, while the details it gave, the lists it repeated and the material it intensified was etched into the brain forever . . ." p. 174

Of course, if a book is entitled War and War, one thinks immediately of War and Peace. At first I found this puzzling, because at first there seemed to be no war in this book. But it becomes clearer that Korin perceives the world to be in a state of endless war, although peace is described as "the greatest, the highest, the supreme achievement of man," with the world of beauty represented here and there in the "manuscript" gone forever. In fact, there was a lot of beauty in some of the descriptions. I've only scratched the surface of this remarkable book, and I feel there was a lot that went by me as I read it. It is a challenging book to read, but well worth it.

As a final note, there were a few minor points that annoyed me because they were errors about New York City. For example, nobody arriving at JFK Airport in 1997 had to leave the plane by stairs and take a bus to the terminal as Korin does; the street in upper Manhattan is Fort Washington Avenue, not Washington Avenue; and Puerto Ricans are US citizens and do not have to cross illegally into the US without ID. But these, as I say, are small in the context of the whole.

POLAND

The Issa Valley by Czeslaw Milosz
Originally published 1955; English translation 1978
Cross-posted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads



What a poetic novel this is, perhaps not surprisingly so since Milosz is a poet, and a Nobel Prize-winning one at that. At least partly autobiographical, the novel is at once a coming-of-age story, a paean to nature, a study of character, a history of Lithuania, and a portrait of a rural, largely pre-industrial world that was soon to be utterly destroyed. Milosz was born in Lithuania (then part of the Russian empire) in 1911, but his family had for several generations spoken Polish, and while he was fluent in both languages (as well as several others), he considered himself a Polish poet and wrote in Polish.

In the novel, young Thomas has been sent to live with his maternal grandparents in the Issa Valley, a remote area in Lithuania that is filled with lakes and forests, as his father is fighting with some army (either the Russians or the Poles, who are fighting each other) and his mother is stranded over the border; his paternal grandmother is also living there. He is probably about 9 or 10 when the novel begins, but his age isn't specified until much later. The family was previously better off than it is now, but they own a "manor" house and quite a bit of land, including forests. Later on, this puts them slightly at odds with some of the local population who, inspired no doubt by what little bits of information they have heard about the Russian revolution, are itching for land distribution.

It is probably a lonely time for Thomas, and he first finds comfort in his grandfather's library, discovering books that had been gathering dust on the shelves for decades. Later he becomes completely enamored by nature, learning first about plants and then about birds, loving both his observations of them in their habitats and their names and the whole Linnean naming system. Eventually he meets a neighboring landowner who initiates Thomas into hunting. At first, Thomas is very proud to be included with the grown men, and is fascinated by how hunters creep through the woods, call to birds, and set their dogs to work. Everything about the way Milosz describes the forests and the animals is utterly lyrical. Ultimately, Thomas finds it difficult to kill the birds and other animals they are hunting.

But this novel is about much more than Thomas, and the voice of the novel is not Thomas's but someone who is able to see all of the society of the little town of Gine and its surroundings. The reader sees many of the inhabitants of the area, including the priest who is having an affair with his housekeeper (who comes back to haunt the town), a tormented forester, a bitter and cruel but persuasive poor boy, the local priests, and many others, and gains some knowledge of their histories and characters. Thomas's family is also explored: his maternal grandfather tells him about Lithuanian history, his paternal grandmother meditates on her own life story and her husband and sons, and his mother's sister, his aunt Helen, enjoys some extramarital adventures. The portrait Milosz paints of Thomas's paternal grandmother is particularly rich, and the scene where she is dying is one of the most beautiful and insightful I have read. At the same time, the novel is rich with the spirits, both good and evil, that people still believe guide the residents of the Issa Valley. All in all, this novel is poetry in prose, with much left unsaid.

I was eager to read Milosz after I read My Century, in which Milosz interviews Aleksander Wat, a Polish poet of an earlier generation, and another LTer recommended this novel. I'm glad she did, I'm glad I read it, and I will look for more of Milosz's work.

POLAND

Lucifer Unemployed by Aleksander Wat
Originally published 1927. English translation 1990.
Cross-posted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads.



Wat published this book of short stories in 1927. The Great War (not yet World War I) was over. Nazism had not yet started, and Stalin hadn't reached his murderous heights. Wat, according to his fascinated memoir, My Century, was a futurist and a dadaist, movements which, as far as I can tell, rejected traditional forms in an attempt to reflect the changes in the post-war world and distaste for bourgeois conceptions of art. In these stories, ideas play the central role, along with playfulness and satire, not character or plot.

For example, the title story, which is the last story in the volume, takes the idea that the devil has been put out of business by the modern world, and poor unemployed Lucifer goes around talking to people in various lines of work who illustrate for him why the devil is no longer needed. In the first story, "The Eternally Wandering Jew," Jews take over the Catholic church and start these new Catholics go on to oppress the now ex-Catholics in the same way the church and society formerly oppressed Jews. In "Kings in Exile," the former crowned heads of Europe are exiled to a remote island, where they attempt to recreate the world as they had known, and end up regressing through the stages of civilization. In one of my favorite stories, "The History of the Last Revolution in England," a soccer ball intrudes on a fight between the revolutionaries and the military, and they end up setting themselves up as soccer teams instead. In several of the stories, such as "Has Anyone Seen Pigeon Street?," Wat turns the idea of reality on its head -- with a trick at the end.

In some ways the stories are prescient. Although the worst horrors of the 20th century, horrors that ended up enveloping Wat, were yet to happen, a reader (or maybe only a reader now, who knows what happened next), can feel something ominous hanging over some of the stories. They can be playful, but they are serious, and they don't embrace the modernity they represent.

Wat musing on history and the future:

"Does it always have to be true in human history that the simple, safe, small, insignificant, worthless things excite more passion, kindle more courage, animosity, and heroism; arouse more interest and encourage greater effort than than the dangerous, harmful, great, dignified, deadly things? So be it -- we will say with great solemnity. If that is how things really are, we should be happy, for there are so many harmful and explosive and annihilating things that one should wish that humanity should devote as little attention to them as possible." From "The History of the Last Revolution in England," p. 37.

A quote I appreciated as an editor:

" 'Here I am to offer you my collaboration,' he said to the editor. 'I know all the secrets of creation, and I will reveal things to you no one else knows.'

'Why, that's impossible,' the editor replied. 'We know everything already. To know everything is our raison d'ȇtre. As it is, we have more contributors than subscribers. Maybe some other time.'" From "Lucifer Unemployed," p. 95.

Wat the poet making fun of poets and language:

"Poets and snobs congregated here: poets and snobbery go together as nicely as a thrown rock and ripples in water. This is the place where the wisemen who sucked wisdom out of the pacifier of words got together. What a shame! What a shame that for so long we have lacked a nurse of revelation! Words are tubercular, syphilitic, and preserve in their countless tissues swarming colonies of ambiguous microbes. By means of the same words some pave the way for European Buddhism, others propagate Orthodoxy and Catholicism. The latter are blood brothers to the inventors of deadly dynamite, all of course in the name of pacifism. And even if one finds healthy words in some out-of-the-way place, words securely fastened to the earth, even then poets would unchain them and punch them into the empty, vacant sky. What a shame! What a shame! And it's not as if they were mad dogs. They were only the colored bubbles of words." From "Lucifer Unemployed," pp. 105-106

I had mixed feelings about this book. I admired Wat's language, his wit, and his ideas, but I found it hard to get into the stories themselves.

CZECH REPUBLIC

Case Closed by Patrik Ouředník
Originally published 2006; English translation 2010.
Cross-posted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads.



About two thirds of the way through this fun but mystifying book, Ouředník writes:

"Reader! does our story seem rambling? Do you have the feeling that the plot is at a standstill? That, generally speaking, nothing much is going on in the book you now hold in your hands? Do not despair: Either the author's a fool or you are; the odds are even. Others have died and so shall we, we'll die, oy vey, alack, alas! Who on earth knows how on earth it will turn out? Sometimes a person gets tangled up in his own life without realizing it; and the same is true of characters in novels.

You ask: how will it all end? But that, dear readers, we cannot reveal. We began this story with no clear aim or preconceived idea. How it will turn out, we do not know; whether it will turn out, we haven't a clue. . . . ." p. 90

So what is this book about? On the surface, it is the story of an elderly man who once wrote a book and who lives in what appears to be an apartment building for retired people, a building in which there was a fire that might have been arson, his son who may be somewhat retarded, a cabin they might have owned in the mountains where a crime might have been committed decades ago, and a police detective who is apparently lackadaisically investigating. Chess is somehow involved too, and sex, and some pointed remarks about the Czech and Czech writers.

I read this book almost a week ago, but haven't had time to review it until now, and it's been puzzling me all this time. It seems to be, in some way, about life and death, and I think it tries to mirror the randomness and sometimes meaninglessness of life, and I also think it may be about memory, and how we remember what happened in earlier stages of our life. But really, as Ouředník says above, I haven't a clue.

I did enjoy it, although perhaps not as much as Ouředník's The Opportune Moment, 1855, which I really liked when I read it earlier this year and which inspired me to get this book too. Parts of it are very funny, and Ouředník (and his translator) really have a way with words, as the excerpt I quoted above shows. I really wonder how the translator went about translating all the wordplay; it read very well in English but I do wonder in cases like a line which reads "he couldn't have gotten laid if he'd been an egg," which is very funny in English, but could Czech possibly have the same expression or is this the translator taking a different joke in Czech and finding an English equivalent? I'm not complaining about this because all the wordplay was a lot of fun and so I was impressed by the translation, but I'm just interested in how translation works.

THE PALE OF SETTLEMENT

Selected Short Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer



I've always loved Singer, and this great collection, published by Modern Library in 1966, reminded me why. Singer's stories are exquisite, revealing the wonders and weaknesses of human nature. In these stories, Singer takes us back in time to pre-Holocaust Jewish shtetel life in Russia and Poland. He also introduces us to the magical realism of Jewish mysticism and superstition, as demons and imps play major roles in many of these stores, and indeed even narrate a goodly number.

Singer's use of language and powers of description are often breathtaking, although, as he wrote in Yiddish, readers are dependent on the quality of the translations. At any rate, here is a deft and telling, if hardly cheery, character description that has stayed with me, from the short story, "The Wife Killer":

Some years passed and he didn't remarry. Perhaps he didn't want to, perhaps there was no suitable opportunity; anyway, he remained a widower. Women gloated over this. He became even stingier than before, and so unkempt that it was positively disgusting. He ate a bit of meat on Saturday: scraps or derma. All week he ate dry food. He baked his own bread of corn and bran. He didn't buy wood. Instead, he went out at night with a sack, to pick up the chips near the bakery. He had two deep pockets and whatever he saw, he put into them: bones, bark, string, shards. He hid all these in his attic. He piled heaps of stuff as high as the roof. "Every little thing comes in handy," he used to say. He was a scholar in the bargain, and could quote Scripture on every occasion, though as a rule he talked little.

As the Pale of Settlement stretched from Poland to Russia, Singer's work could be included in the group that includes Russia, but I went with this one because Singer, himself, was born in Poland and began his writing career there, writing in Yiddish, as he continued to do almost his entire life.

Czechoslovakia

Just finished Joseph Škvorecký's collection of inter-connected short tales, The Tenor Saxophonist's Story. Although told with a wry wit and a twinkle in the proverbial eye, these tales end up conveying a rather chilling message of life under a deepening, if absurd, totalitarian system. If you're interested, you can read my more in-depth review on the book's work page or on my 50-Book Challenge thread: http://www.librarything.com/topic/148694

SLOVENIA
De nieuwkomers (The Newcomers) by Lojze Kovacic (1984) – 3 stars

I read this book for my European Challenge. It's a literary autobiography by a Slovenian writer who was born in Switzerland but who, as a 10-year old, had to move to Slovenia with his Slovenian father and his French-German mother and the rest of the family. His father hadn't applied for Swiss citizenship in time and the family was expelled before World War II. This book deals with the migration and the feelings of loss, despair, hopelessness, the hostility, etc. which was touching and impressive.
Although it was written in a beautiful style, I had a problem with this book. The author uses the point of view of a 10-year-old but the way that boy observes things does not correspond with a 10-year-old's mind. It's obvious that the author has added his adult thoughts to the boy's impressions and IMO, that did not feel right. So, I'm having mixed feelings about this book.

The Queen's Necklace by Antal Szerb
Originally published 1942; English translation 2009



I've had this thoroughly delightful and deceptively readable history on my shelves for more than three years, and took it down now thanks to a discussion on Urania's thread which included a picture of a reconstruction of the necklace itself. For this book is not only the story of the queen's necklace (which the queen, Marie Antoinette, never owned or wore) but also witty portraits of the cast of characters and a broad look at the art, culture, social structure, and more of France, mostly Paris, immediately before the Revolution. Szerb writes as if he is conversing with his readers, very often literally addressing them, and the reader (this one, anyway) is caught up in the story, in which, as in conversations, the digressions add to the discussion and come to be the heart of it.

Although Szerb is largely known as novelist and a literary scholar, he notes that history was his greatest interest from the time he was four years old; yet, he adds, "I have always deeply distrusted the subject as a scholarly discipline. If we could travel in time as we do in space, we would surely have some devilish surprises." And, as he noted in document that was found among his posthumous papers (he was killed in a concentration camp less than three years after finishing this book), "People in this country expect scholarly works to be unreadable; from which they are led quite logically to the erroneous conclusion that anything that is readable cannot therefore be scholarly." This book wears its scholarship lightly, but it is steeped in information taken from memoirs by many involved in the scandal, as well as other writers on all subjects and, principally, a work by Frantz Funck-Brentano, a French historian, originally published in 1901.

Szerb writes that "there are two particular periods, the Italian Renaissance and the French Revolution, which are so universally important and seminal that they can be thought of as part of the common inheritance of the entire European race." It is difficult to ignore that Szerb wrote this book in 1941 and 1942 when Hungary was allied with Nazi Germany and the cry of liberté, égalité, fraternité must have seemed far away indeed, especially for Szerb who, although baptized Catholic, had Jewish parents. Although he alludes to the origins of the Revolution, and indeed focuses on a lot of the mood in France prior to it and the role the affair of the necklace played in it, he does not touch on the Revolution itself (or its excesses or outcomes).

What makes this book so delightful is Szerb's wonderful writing; the playful yet scholarly way he interweaves discussions of poetry, theater, gardens, music, modes of speaking, the role of the church, trends in jewelry, and much more into the story of the necklace; his vivid and often ironic portraits of the fascinating major players in the scandal (con men and women are always so interesting); his reflections on life in the Ancien Regime and the origins of the Revolution; and the way he converses with the readers. Of course, the story of the necklace is exciting in itself (and I'm looking forward to reading what is said to be a highly unreliable version by Dumas), but it is so much more compelling to read about it in its context.

Although Szerb is clearly on the side of freedom, in his epilogue he describes the dying days of the Ancien Regime as "one of the most delightful of European centuries."

"And then it begins to dawn on one: this age was as beautiful as the most finely-worked lace, as a piece of Sèvres porcelain with its timeless charm and fragile delicacy; as the noble oozings of the Tokai grape, full and rich with sweetness; as the autumn air in Hungary, when the reddening leaves are scented with the inexpressible sweetness of death." p. 280

HUNGARY

Oliver VII by Antal Szerb
Originally published 1942; English translation 2007.



It is difficult to believe that Szerb could write such a light and witty novel in the dark dark days of 1942, but there is more depth to this book than appears on the surface. The story begins as farce, with the painter Sandoval "rescuing" the elderly Count Antas, enjoying drinks in a cafe with a very much younger lady, as his wife enters the same cafe. But things are not all they seem; Sandoval is in fact spiriting the count off to some rural castle to keep him out of the way when a revolution against the young King Oliver VII takes place. The country of Alturia is in economic disarray, and some of the king's advisers want him to sign a deal with businessman Coltor, of the neighboring country of Norlandia, to pay huge sums to Alturia to essentially take over its economy and run the country. It is this that the revolutionaries are protesting.

But all is not as it seems. It develops that Oliver himself is behind the plot, as he doesn't really want to be king and instead wants to explore what we would now call the world of the 99%. Winding up incognito as Oscar in Venice, he falls in with a group of international con men (and a con woman), and delightful complications ensue, as Oliver pretending to be Oscar pretends to be Oliver. In the course of this ever entertaining novel, Szerb confronts issues of identity, love, loyalty, and friendship, as well as what it means to be a ruler, but does this with such imagination and with such a deft touch that the reader is completely enthralled by the tale itself.

The afterword by the translator (who seems to me to have done an excellent job and who has translated all the Szerb books I've been reading) notes that this book was written after the one that is considered Szerb's masterpiece and further develops some of its themes, Journey by Moonlight. This gave me a little pause, as perhaps I should have read that one first, but at least I have it to look forward to.

SLOVENIA

The Tree with No Name by Drago Jancar
First published in Slovene 2008
English translation by Michael Biggins 2013
Review of an ARC provided via NetGalley

 

Janez Lipnik is an archivist employed by the Slovene government to sort and classify document and to do research. In a collection of documents from Slovene expatriates in Australia he comes across a remarkable journal in which an unidentified man recorded his sexual affairs with over 400 women. But aside from the journal's obvious prurient appeal, what captures Lipnik's attention is that the very first woman mentioned, identified only as a schoolteacher named Zala D., appears to have been Lipnik's own teacher when he was a young boy in the years shortly after World War II. Lipnik becomes obsessed with the idea of verifying this theory to the point that he neglects his job and his wife and gradually loses touch with time and reality.

Lipnik is a man in his 60s, and it is the year 2000 when he comes across the libertine's journal, but the focus of the novel is the confused and violent period in Slovene history during and after World War II when various factions were contending for power. There were the Axis occupying forces, first Italian then German, and the Home Guard, their local allies. Fighting against them and each other were the communist partisans, Serb nationalists, and Yugoslav royalists. Zala D. was one of many women who would be called to account for having loved someone on the losing side. But she will be tormented even more by her own memories, as was Lipnik's father, a partisan who was arrested by the Germans and sent to Auschwitz.

The novel is told in non-linear fashion, much of it interior monologue. Lipnik comes to see himself, not just as an archivist, but as an archive. All of history is present in his consciousness, all of it taking place at once, and he is living all of it. He has "looked into the abyss and beyond wakefulness into dreams, and beyond dreams into the past, beyond his birth." Lipnik loses all contact with the trivial present. "History," he says, "flows through me like an invisible, noiseless river." Events of his own life are magically interwoven with those of Zala D., her mysterious lover, and Lipnik's own father. They are also mixed with elements of Slovene folklore, such as the mythical tree which gives the novel its title.

The Tree with No Name is a mesmerizing confrontation with history, the shameful as well as the heroic, and a reminder that the past will always be a part of us.

crossposted from my CR thread

HUNGARY



Katalin Street by Magda Szabó translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix, 2017
first published as Katalin Utca in 1969

Some believe that those who die suddenly and unexpectedly stay in their temporal world in spirit form until they are reconciled to death, or until those they are watching over join them. The dead though, don't age, while those left behind do; aging inevitably, sometimes dying inside of shame, of grief, of loss of hope. So it was on Katalin Street, where an alert lively girl first watched those she had considered her family grow up, grow old, and alter irrevocably.

In pre WWII Budapest, there were three particular houses facing the river. The sisters Blanka and Irén lived in one, Henriette in another, and a slightly older boy, Bálint, in the third. The children played together, their parents were friends, and the families celebrated small occasions together throughout the year. The three girls all loved Bálint, whose name means Valentine, each in her own way.

If this were a straightforward chronological narrative, the novel would start here. Instead, it starts with Irén, her family, and Bálint on the other side of the river, in Soviet era housing, looking back at their old home. None of them had ever got used to the apartment or grown to like it. They just put up with it, as with so many other things. Although they rarely spoke of it with each other, they all yearned to return to their old homes on Katalin Street, and even more, to return to the people they had been. Henriette, now dead, knew that you can't go back without those who have since died. The past cannot be recreated.

Time can be fluid in our thoughts though. Szabó's book moves back and forth from the 1930s right up to 1968. Nazis come and go to be replaced by the Soviets. People go, but don't always come back: dead or exiled. Even in sections of the book with a date as heading, some characters are in one year, while at the same time others are in another.

What Szabó is telling the reader is a stark message about what we do to each other and what life does to us:

...the most frightening thing of all about the loss of youth is not what is taken away, but what is granted in exchange. Not wisdom. Not sound judgement or tranquillity. Only the awareness of universal disintegration.

For those left behind, There came too the realization that advancing age had taken the past. ... They had discovered too that the difference between the living and the dead is merely qualitative, that it doesn't count for much.

The penultimate sentence of the novel, In everyone's life there is only one person whose name can be cried out in the moment of death, sent me back to the beginning, and an immediate reread, for now the use of that same sentence, first seen early in the novel, gave a different focus and I wanted to follow that path. There are many paths in this book though, and a different one could be taken with each reading. This is the first book I have read by Szabó, but it won't be the last.

>46 SassyLassy: I found Szabó's The Door incredibly haunting. The power that the past has over us is a theme in this novel as well, although it plays out very differently, namely through a middle-aged couple's attempts to relate to their housekeeper, a difficult and fiercely independent woman who is incredibly secretive about her past and her personal life.

>46 SassyLassy:, >47 spiphany: Seconding The Door. It's one of the best books I've ever read.

>48 southernbooklady: Thirding The Door. I haven't read a Szabó novel that I didn't love, but The Door is my favourite. She deserves to be more widely known (and translated).

>47 spiphany: >48 southernbooklady: >49 Dilara86: Gave in and ordered The Door this evening.

Poland

In My Father's Court is Isaac Bashevis Singer's memoir about his childhood in Poland in the years leading up to, and during, World War One. Singer’s father was a Hasidic rabbi and the court of the title was the Beth Din, the traditional court in the Singers' home to which community members came to have their divorces, lawsuits and other disputes arbitrated and their questions about Jewish holy books and law answered and illuminated.

The book is presented as a series of short vignettes, each from five to seven pages in length, told more or less in chronological order, with Singer’s narrative evolving as the small boy begins to grow and to question his surroundings. In the early remembrances, the perspective is kept very tightly on his father’s fierce devotion to God and to Jewish biblical and rabbinical law, custom and mysticism. The tales told are about the people who arrive in the Singers' home, what their problems are, and how his father deals with them.

Soon enough, however, the outside world begins gradually to intrude. The family moves from a small town to the crowded streets of a Jewish Warsaw slum. Next come rumors and then the realities of World War One, with its uncertainties and sharp deprivations. Singer’s older brother becomes more worldly, and young Isaac begins asking questions himself and longing for information about the outside world. Zionism and socialism begin to be discussed among the young, further eroding the hold of the old ways over the community as a whole.

Let me add another contemporary recommendation for Slovenia: Ewald Flisar's My Father's Dreams. As I wrote at World Literature Forum, "My wife and I recently returned from a vacation in Slovenia. Whenever we go somewhere, I spend time in bookstores, looking for works of their national authors in English. I already knew a number of Slovenian authors whose work I enjoyed but had a surprisingly hard time finding anything (a number of their contemporary authors are printed by American publishers and are cheaper here than in Slovenia). This was an exception: never heard of Flisar but will now seek him out. A strange vaguely coming-of-age story, amazingly told. Excellent!"

I am disinclined to rely on Amazon's descriptions of books, but in this case, I will make an exception because I think that this small portion at the end of their (uncredited) blurb is quite on point: "This is a novel that can be read as an off-beat crime story, a psychological horror tale, a dream-like morality fable, or as a dark and ironic account of one man's belief that his personality and his actions are two different things. It can also be read as a story about a boy who has been robbed of his childhood in the cruellest way. It is a book which has the force of myth: revealing the fundamentals without drawing any particular attention to them; an investigation into good and evil, and our inclination to be drawn to the latter."

Let me also take one moment to highly recommend Drago Jancar's works in general (>45 StevenTX:). Another highly regarded writer, rightfully so, imho.

SLOVENIA



The Self-Sown by Prežihov Voranc, translated from the Slovene by Irma M. Ožbalt
Published 1940, English translation 1983, 111 p.

Prežihov Voranc was one of the pseudonyms of Lovro Kuhar, a Slovene socialist with an elementary school education and a passion for political activism that landed him in jails across Europe. Despite keeping a relatively low profile during WWII, a proponent of a ″cultural silence″ during the occupation of Slovenia, he was rounded up and sent to concentration camps. He never recovered and died a few years after the war. He is known for his novels and short stories in the social realist style.

The Self-Sown is the story of Meta, a young housemaid in the wealthy Karničnik household. When she is discovered to be carrying the child of the oldest son, she is tortured and made into a social outcast. Despite subsequent beatings, she continues her relationship with Ožbej and bears him eight more children. She only grows more beautiful in the face of adversity, and her children inherit her strength and goodness. Within a few generations, they are an army of downtrodden peasants with the potential to rise up and claim their rights. They are the self-sown.

CZECH REPUBLIC



A Delayed Life: The powerful memoir of the librarian of Auschwitz by Dita Kraus
Originally published in Czech 2018, English edition 2020; 474 p.

I first learned about Dita Kraus when I read a review on LibraryThing of The Librarian of Auschwitz by Antonio Iturbe. It is a fictionalized account of her life during the Holocaust. The review led to an interesting conversation about ″based on the true story″ literature, the sensationalizing of the Holocaust, and the merits of fictional Holocaust literature. I decided to skip the novel and chose to read her memoir instead.

A Delayed Life is not only, or even primarily, a Holocaust story. The first quarter details her childhood in Prague, from her earliest memories through her thirteenth birthday. The second quarter covers the war years, 1942-45. The last half describes life in Prague after the war, her immigration to Israel, life on a kibbutz, her marriage, and teaching career. Taken in it′s entirety, it is a rich history of both a life and a time period.

Dita Polach was born in 1929, the only child of a middle class secular Jewish family. Her homey descriptions of her childhood in Prague—her relationship with her grandmother, being a picky eater, having her tonsils out, skating dresses, and trips to the countryside—were a delight to read. Little mention is made of political matters, because as a child, she was unaware of them. When she was thirteen, however, the war came crashing down around her, when she and her parents were deported to Terezín. She was thirteen years old.

One of the unique things about Dita is that she is one of the few survivors among the child artists at Terezín. Her drawings are on display in several exhibits around the world. Another is that although she was separated from her parents in Terezín, she was reunited with them in the BIIb or the Terezín
family camp at Auschwitz. Very few families were kept together at Auschwitz, but around 17,500 people from Terezín were transferred there. Unfortunately, only 1,294 survived. Dita and her mother were two of them. They were selected by Mengele for transport to Germany as slave labor and thus they avoided the crematorium. In the spring of 1945, as the front grew closer, the women were transported to Bergen-Belsen where they spent several harrowing and desperate months prior to liberation.

After the war, sixteen-year-old Dita returned to Prague and eventually decided to emigrate to Israel. This was another fascinating part of the book. She describes the process that the now communist Czech government required in order to emigrate: the documents needed, what you could and could not bring, how they traveled. All to end up inside a barbed-wire fence in Israel for months until they were found a place on a kibbutz. Her descriptions of life on the kibbutz were interesting, because although she wanted to succeed there, she was not a Zionist, and saw things without the passion of an idealist. Interestingly, one of her longest jobs there was as a cobbler.

The last part of the book deals with her teaching career, her husband, and children, bringing the reader to the present, 2018. Unfortunately in January of 2021, Dita contracted Covid at the age of 91 and was hospitalized for several weeks. She appears to have recovered. You can listen to an interview with her and see some of her artwork at her website: www.ditakraus.com.

I highly recommend this well-written and readable memoir.

I finished Satan in Goray, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s first novel, originally published in Poland (in Yiddish) in serial form in 1933, and then in novel form in 1935. The novel wasn’t published in English until 1955. Satan in Goray is an historical novel, taking place in 17th Century Poland, and based on two historical facts. One is the uprising of Cossack armies in 1648. They were revolting against Polish rule, but they found their easiest targets among the Jewish towns across the country, and the result was a series of furious attacks and massacres. The other is the rise several years later of Sabbatai Zevi, a charismatic figure who claimed to be the Messiah that Jews had been waiting and praying for since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. The Jews were to be finally redeemed, their suffering on Earth at an end! Zevi gathered a huge following of Jews desperate to believe in the end of their travails.

And so we come to Goray, “the town that lay in the midst of the hills at the end of the world,” and practically obliterated by the pogroms. The action of the story begins 20 years later. The scattered survivors of the town have gradually drifted back to their homes. The town’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Benish Ashkenazi, it’s attempting to restore a sense of normalcy through the age old religious teachings of the Torah that have been followed for centuries. But first one and then another messenger arrive in the town heralding the rise of the new Messiah. Soon, the agony of the Jews will be over. Why follow old laws and old rules of morality? And so the battle is on. It’s a fascinating novel about a tragic, horrifying time and place, but it also tells a deeper tale of good vs. evil, old ways vs. new, and human folly.

I finished The Family Moskat, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s second novel, published originally in 1950, or approximately 15 years after Singer’s immigration from Poland to the U.S. The novel portrays the at first gradual and eventually rapid collapse of the Jewish community of Warsaw in particular and of Poland in general, from the early years of the 20th century through the German invasion in 1939. The novel ends with bombs falling over the city.

The book is alive with detail and movement. Life, fear, lust, squalor, crowds, noise and smells. Near the beginning of the narrative, Singer propels us into the midst of a marketplace in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw as if ejecting us from a carriage with a boot to the small of the back. In an instant we are in the midst of a rousing blast of striving and clamor.

The tale is told through the lense of the life of the titular family. As the book opens, Menshulam Moskat is the late-middle aged financially successful patriarch of a sprawling family. Adult children, in-laws and grandchildren abound, though Menshulam’s right-hand man in business is not a family member at all, but a retainer named Koppel Berman. The family is a mixed bag. Some are still pious Jews, even Chassidim, while others have become more secular, gradually or entirely turning their backs on the old religious ways. At the beginning, the tale of the feuding, fractious but insular family is told in almost comic fashion. And into the mix comes young Asa Heshel Bennett, who comes to Warsaw to get away from the smothering Jewish culture of a small shtetl town on the Polish-Belorusse border and instantly falls in with Abram Moskat, Menshulam’s most ne’er do well son who takes the young newcomer under his wing.

As the decades go by, the family’s fortunes deteriorate, as does the coherent nature of Polish Jewry, as younger generations increasingly (but certainly not entirely) turn their back on old ways. Many become socialists, Communists, Zionists, hedonists, academics . . . the whole range within the whirlpool of European intellectual life in the 20s and 30s.

Singer looks at these phenomena with a complex mix of understanding, criticism and sadness. In his own life, Singer was the son of a Warsaw rabbi and saw these developments at first-hand, himself turning from the religious to the secular/intellectual. I’ll finish up with a lengthy quote that in many ways sums up the sadness that, understandably, runs through The Family Moskat. Here, Asa Heshel has returned to his hometown village to visit his mother:

After the meal . . . Asa Hershel walked off along through the village. For a while he stopped at the study house. Near the door, at a long bare table, a few old men bent over open volumes dimly illuminated with flickering candles. From the shul Asa Hershel turned into the Lublin Road. He halted for a moment at a water pump with a broken handle. There was a legend current in Tereshpol Minor that although the well underneath had long since dried up, once during a fire water had begun to pour from the spout, and the synagogue and the houses around it had been saved from destruction.

He turned to the road that led to the woods. It was lined with great trees, chestnut and oak. Some of them had huge gashes torn in their sides by bolts of lightning. The holes looked dark and mysterious, like the caves of robbers. Some of the older trees inclined their tops down toward the ground, as though they were ready to tumble over, tearing up with them the tangled thickness of their centuries-old roots.

Back to Isaac Bashevis Singer for me with The Slave. The opening setting is the remote rural mountains of southern Poland in the late 17th Century in the years immediately following the Chmielnicki (often spelled Khmelnytsky) Uprising, an invasion by Cossack forces in rebellion against Polish domination. In Jewish history, these events are known as the Chmielnicki Massacres, as the Cossack forces, aided often by the Poles themselves, perpetrated widespread and massive pogroms. Whole villages were essentially obliterated. Our protagonist, Jacob, is a survivor of one such attack on his native village, Josefov. His wife and three children, he believes, have been murdered, but instead of being killed himself, Jacob is captured and sold into slavery to Jan Bzik, a farmer in remote mountain town. Escape into the mountains, whose ways are unknown to him, means certain death, and the villages have sworn to kill Jacob on sight if he is spotted on the wrong side of the river that borders Bzik's land.

For five years Jacob spends his winters in a high mountain cabin tending to Bzik's cattle. His only source of food and water is what is brought up the mountain to him daily by Bzik's daughter, Wanda. Far from Jewish community and the holy books he loves, Jacob strives to maintain a pious Jewish life as best he can, and that include resisting the strong physical attraction that Jacob and Wanda feel for each other. Marriage is out of the question. Jacob would surely be excommunicated by the rabbis for cohabitating with a Gentile, and either or both of the two could be burned alive by the Church. Well, but as we know, such temptation cannot be resisted forever, and certainly not in fiction. And so our tale is launched. The Slave was first published in 1962 and allegorical references to the Holocaust are impossible to ignore. Highly recommended

I've once more returned to my read-through of Isaac B. Singer's novels, this time reading The Manor We are in Poland in the later decades of the 19th century. The novel begins just after an 1863 uprising by the Polish nobility against what had become ongoing Russian rule has ended in humiliating disaster. With this nationalist movement quashed, Poland instead turns to business, and the modern world begins seeping into Poland: mines, factories, railroads begin appearing. For Poland's Jews, the period is one of liberalism. In the town of Jampol, one of the insurrectionists, Count Wladislaw Jampolski, has been banished to Siberia, and a Jew, Calman Jacoby, has managed to win the right to lease the count's large landholding and manor house. He judiciously allows the count's family to continue living in the manor house, in order to avoid offending the local Poles, and he begins making money growing and selling crops on the land and, in particular, selling timber to be used as railroad ties. So begins our tale, with Colman at the center of what becomes a whirlwind of cultural and religious change and the personal crises and moral choices, both good and bad, of an expanding group of characters.

Calman himself is an observant Jew. He expects his children to stay within that community and some do. But the Jewish community as a whole does not stand apart from the modernism taking hold in Poland, and Calman, to his woe, as lived to see a growing divide among Poland's Jews: those who demand adherence to the old ways, and those who look westward with approval at the assimilation of the Jews of France, Germany and elsewhere. To them, the exotic, "Asiatic" dress, the standing apart from Polish society as a whole, is a self-defeating lifestyle of superstition, destined to bring down further antisemitism on all of their heads. To the traditionalists, antisemitism is a constant, sure to come in future waves however they're dressed and however they worship. Faith in God and loyalty to the commandments is the only path. Calman's children, as they grow to adulthood, more or less split down the middle of this divide. One of his daughters goes so far as to run off with the count's son. But the world of the Polish nobility is on no more solid ground than the world of the Hassids. In the meantime, socialism, Zionism, nihilism, anarchism and more are debated and sometimes adopted. The roles of women in this world are changing as well. Although this topic is not made specific, the limitations faced by The Manor's female characters, and the extremely unsatisfactory choices they're forced into, become an undeniable theme of the novel.

I don't want to give the idea that Singer's presentation here is devoid of sympathy and even love for the ways and tribulations of the observant Jews. Indeed, his portrayal is lace strongly with affection and understanding. All in all, highly recommended.