I see the elusive shadows of those floating bodies, always there, always hidden. Another age-related disturbance. Which seems obvious to me. My age beI see the elusive shadows of those floating bodies, always there, always hidden. Another age-related disturbance. Which seems obvious to me. My age becomes that of the floating bodies that populated my existence and that remain present and unreal.
Floating bodies (Corps flottants) – is a haunting, sensuous, and elegiac memoir, loosely shaped as a shadow play of impressions, observations and reflections.
A daughter of French expats, Jane Sautière spent her early childhood in Teheran and as an adolescent lived in Phnom Penh between 1967 and 1970 , until Lon Nol’s coup d’état and the start of the Cambodian civil war - a period in her life that is at the heart of this memoir, in which she attempts to face her repression of a past that seeks to sink into oblivion for good, impossible it has become to disconnect it from the killing fields in Cambodia. Starting as a piecing together of personal memories and a reconstruction of parts of her family history, Sautière’s memoir gradually transmutes into a serene and sobering memorial to the two million victims of the Cambodian genocide.
The masses of hitherto unknown fruits, which so accurately portray this earth: longans, lychees, rambutans, mango tans, papayas, sapodillas, cinnamon apples, dragon fruit, mangoes, wonderfully fragrant baby bananas, guavas, jackfruit and the unlikely durian, whose fermented corpse smell made us pinch our noses, but the coconut pulp-covered ice creams di were made from the fruit and served in rice dough cones tasted delectable. As if this listing communicates what the mouth can learn from a soil. The melody played by a tree with the score of the fruit. Constellations, flares, suns.
Initial experiences of the sensory colours and scents – the fauna and flora, streets and food - blend with first love, the unfolding of personal secrets, tragedies and losses, the background of her father (a former resistance fighter) and mother (from a Breton farmer’s family ), the deaths within her family- she was only told about the dead of a sister and a brother when she was twelve -– and of some of her classmates, who were tortured and killed by the Khmer Rouge.
The memories of the dead flow into the reappearing of other memories, both resurfacing as floating bodies into her memory – a memory that to her feels obfuscated, impenetrable, effaced, tightly closed off – because it is forever stained by the bloody pages that the Khmer Rouge added to the history of Cambodia. With the help of books (L'image manquante), films and documentaries of a survivor (Rithy Panh), research, a musical tribute to the victims (Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia) Sautière carefully approaches the world she refused to see and closed herself off to, writing from the intimate and personal towards the horror, her research opening up a breach to the genocide, the years of stifling silence around it, marked by the shame of the survivor, or the shame of looking the other way, even if such seems all too human: Survival is irrevocably a crime.
Reminiscent of Ernaux’s focus on class migration, Sautière’s feelings of loyalty and treason towards the class of her family echo through her experiences (I too remained linked to my class by fleeing it.) In Sautière’s suggestive prose, W.G. Sebald seems to meetMarguerite Duras. Because of some striking parallels with Duras’ youth in Vietnam a few decades earlier – the lives of their mothers uncannily resembling each other - it is not hard to imagine the overwhelming impression that the discovery of the writing of Marguerite Duras had on Sautière. Recollecting her memories, her mind seems in a perpetual mode of dialogue with Duras, the writing of Duras permeating her own memories to an extent that from the first page on the memoir is imbued with allusions to the writing of Duras - waiting on a ferryboat, the Mekong river, the mother, insanity, desire, racism, colonialism. The Sea Wall, The Man Sitting in the Corridor, Practicalities, and ultimately, the crucial encounter with The Lover nurture Sautière’s growing consciousness of her own decisive years in Cambodia.
[image] (Cheanick Nov -Sitting)
Floating bodies should be that, a doubt about the existence of what animated us, the survival of a dance, a joy, a smile of what was also there, without possible return, but present and fragile, leaving us uncertain. The non-material matter (a shadow?) remains floating. We cannot see the floating bodies, they are there, we move our gaze towards them and they move just the same. Accept this approximation and therefore the inescapable failure to write them down. Wondering how to capture the intensity of things that have disappeared. A vacillation truer than certainties, more stable than creeds, more faithful to our lives.
In general, I am rarely inclined to read memoirs , but Jane sautière’s poetic, melancholy and meditative writing lured me to read Floating bodies twice - and browsing through it, it arrests me once more by a turn of phrase, an observation, by an evocation of the suffering and horror. Because Sautière’s style in some places glides into a rather fragmented and elliptical mode, her short book merits slow reading to stay attuned to her train of thought. Her profound admiration for Duras – bordering on an almost possessive love for the author - finally pulled me into reading The Lover – which turned out that beauteous, absorbing and brilliant that I am currently sinking into some Marguerite Duras obsession of my own, being wrapped up in Laure Adler’s bulky Marguerite Duras: A Life....more
Reading Parade is like walking over shards of broken glass sunken to and shattered over the bottom of a lake, a venture tEmbracing the Mundus Inversus
Reading Parade is like walking over shards of broken glass sunken to and shattered over the bottom of a lake, a venture to approach with caution, not only to avert getting wounded but also not to overlook the polished diamonds among the treacherous slivers. Threading along, I found myself highlighting many sentences, lured by their brilliance or struck by their acuity and provocativeness.
The rarity of love. The omnipresence and pluriformity of violence, oppression and cruelty in human relationships. The longing for versus the fighting against death. The creative drive as a ruthless inner force that propels the artist into mania, if not egotism and abuse. The anxiety for conformity. The impossible impasse of motherhood, inexorably traumatising and wrecking both mother and child. Anger and hatred pervading relationships and burning underneath the surface of innocuous words. The universe of Rachel Cusk might be one abound with art, erudition and tantalizing thought, it is also quite brutal, inhospitable and chilly. Nature is mostly hostile and menacing, even dawn brings no hope but curious devastation, a relentless casting of new light on old failures.
Divided in four sections, the book’s fragmented structure and multiple alternating narrative perspectives, the nameless characters and various locations offer the reader little to hold onto, yet Cusk transfixes the reader to the page, unable to stop watching. Perspectives are not simply shifting but erratic, the narrative seems to explode into a shamanic dance between singular and plural narrators, victims and perpetrators, mothers and children, husbands and wives, artists and their family.
This is not a conventional novel, going beyond simple non-linear storytelling, stitching together biographical cut-outs of lives of (real and maybe also fictitious ) artists as in a miniature Künstlerroman, essayistic reflections on art and artists, thematising writing, creativity, storytelling, freedom, the body, gender, identity, responsibility, motherhood, power dynamics within the family and death. The section ‘The Diver’ echoes the party in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, bringing in its own Septimus Smith; I intuit many more literary allusions (Rilke?) and intertextual references which have escaped me can be found by the patient reader.
[image]
A parade of artists – men and women, black people and white people, visual artists as well as writers and directors, all called G, are breaking in (offering a good deal of fun sleuth work for art lovers to identify the artists and their works, Louise Bourgeois’ Maman among them), conjuring up a continuous metamorphosis like in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. On the other hand the namesake G’s render the artists anonymous and hard to differentiate , their individuality merging into one abstract, archetypical Artist. Through their multitude, only distinguishing them in a few strokes, the interchangeability of the G’s acknowledges the artistic credo of one of them (in the section ‘The Spy’), bespeaking the artist’s need to erase the self a to be a good observer (of which I wondered if this is the artistic vision that Cusk takes towards her position as a writer herself):
He began to understand that the discipline of concealment yielded a rare power of observation. The spy sees more clearly and objectively than the others, because he has freed himself from need: the needs of the self in its construction by and participation in experience
While this view defies those artists who are cloak the world in their subjectivity, the aloof stance in its turn is criticized as a criminal luxury, an aesthetic and moral objection to the phenomenon of causation, a running away from an artist’s social and political responsibility:
To conceal identity is to take from the world without paying the costs of self-declaration.
The G’s seem to function as a box of instruments enabling Cusk to dissect the position and role of the artist in both their own work and in the world.
Sometimes Cusk reminds me of a Pythia intoxicated by words, regurgitating the naked truth in fumes of poison and doom. Fortunately she is also showing a dollop of clemency by presenting the grey and imperfect reality of permanent change as the best we can hope for We recognised the ugliness of change; we embraced it, the litter-filled world where truth now lay.
Reading how other reviewers are interconnecting Parade to former work of Rachel Cusk – her essays and novels and especially her The Outline Trilogy: Outline, Transit and Kudos - it was likely unwise to pick this for a first acquaintance with her fiction, nonetheless I would strongly recommend reading Parade, if only out of selfishness, awaiting with bated breath what other readers will unearth from it, particularly on the works of art Rachel Cusk wove into the fabric of her own viscerally celebral piece of art.
Coming back to this now friends have let their light shine on the novel, I strongly recommend reading Katia's stellar review and her comment thread as a companion piece to this challenging novel - her insights (as per usual) - take Cusk's novel to a level one would dearly regret missing.
A big thank you to the author, NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for granting me an ARC of this novel that will be published on 17 June 2024....more
The details opens with the narrator, who lies in bed with a fever, opening a novel in which she discovers a dedicatiAn open sky between every word
The details opens with the narrator, who lies in bed with a fever, opening a novel in which she discovers a dedication of a former lover on the flyleaf. Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy features as the Proustian madeleine, the open sesame that sends the narrator back in time, sparking memories of four people that marked her life.
[image]
Having picked this up because I was intrigued by the pieces of photographs that swirl around the covers of both the English and Dutch translations, it is striking how well those covers reflect the non-linear structure of these slices of life in which the narrator from her sickbed reflects on four relationships that have been so hugely significant in her past.
In four chapters, titled along the names of the four people, the narrator sketches four impressionistic portraits of them, not only giving a glimpse of their relationship with the narrator but also subtly, obliquely, revealing more about the narrator herself.
Relationships end, break down, or people simply vanish in a Modiano fashion from her life, culminating in a moving coda which is an ode to the only one who’s presence was not one of the narrator’s choice and for that even more significant. Unlike the common thought that loss implies losing a part of oneself, Genberg on the contrary sheds a light on the lasting imprint others make on the self and points out how crucial real openness is for true connection: I let myself be impregnated by her way of speaking and being. I let her change me forever. That’s all there is to the self, or the so-called ‘self’: traces of the people we rub up against. I loved Johanna’s words and gestures and let them become part of me, intentionally or not. I suppose that is at the core of every relationship, and the reason that in some sense no relationship ever ends.
[image]
Somehow that melancholic thought of the continuity of the traces others leave in our lives is soothing and helpful to look at loss and transience differently, loved ones who disappear from our lives not taking away a piece of ourselves with them nor diminishing our being, rather changing and enriching our existence in a myriad different ways.
[image]
Perhaps it is a shared sense of generation, of an existence from and for books, or the moments in which the precariousness of life hits, the experience of loss that render some of the narrator’s observations on her life around the turn of the millennium, the sky-high expectations of youth, the careless exaltation of party life, which reminded me uncannily of those bygone times – perhaps because they go together inevitably with the relatable, likewise experiences of the friends and loves lost.
I used to think that a sharper sense of being alive was to be found in the forest, that I would find it while sitting alone on a tree stump with the sun in my eyes, or while gazing out on the sea from some rocks on the shore; that I could only be fully awake among the silent elements. But it turned out that I already had everything right here, in the details around me, that it’s simply a question of being attentive in looking at all of it, of letting myself go and directing my attention outward, and I mean truly outward.That’s where this sharper sense of being alive is found, in the alert gaze on another.
Genberg’s gentle invitation to transcend sterile navel-gazing and turn outwards to connect with others, regardless of the inescapable feelings of pain and loss such brings, touched a chord. The flavour and the depth of her contemplative, crystalline prose makes her brief and thoughtful novel a burst of apricity, the winter sun warming the face and the mind.
I lay back in the grass among fallen trees and the sun on my palm felt like a knife I could use to bleed myself dry wiMotherhood, marriage and madness
I lay back in the grass among fallen trees and the sun on my palm felt like a knife I could use to bleed myself dry with one swift cut to the jugular.
Die, my love intrigues by its title alone and Ariana Hardwick not for one single moment releases the firm grip she puts on the unsuspecting reader, masterly evoking an unfaltering tension and sense of premonition that bad and ugly things will happen - a grip so tight that she made me wish to drop the book out of fear to encounter horrific mental images I couldn’t unread and unable to stop at the same time.
In what reads as a rural anti-idyll set in the French countryside, the reader enters the mind of a woman who cannot cope with the needs of her baby because she is struggling with the terrors of mental disorder. The causes of the narrator’s mental breakdown are not revealed. Rootlessness is suggested (the mother is not French). No possible clue is given why the woman derails from reality and when such started: is it a post-partum psychosis, or did the birth of the child trigger issues that were already present but dormant? There are indications that her fragile mental condition was already there before the marriage and the child. The wrecking effect on her family is more obvious. She never wanted the child. Rage is the prevailing emotion, the relentless stream of consciousness reflects aggression, self-harm, the impossibility to distinguish hallucination from reality.
[image] (Jeannie Tomanek, A thousand cuts)
Motherhood, Adrienne Rich wrote in 1976, is the suffering of ambivalence. As far as I assume such is a thought that many can relate to, I am not sure if I would reckon Ariana Hardwick’s contribution to the debate as one that feels courageous, original or necessary in what came across as a rather run-of-the-mill attempt to demythologize the joys of motherhood and emphasize the negative effects of it on the lives of women. Sure, there are moments the narrator brings Emma Bovary (and her boredom, and escape into adultery) to mind, and her longing for a break in the company of a book instead of her baby might touch a chord, but as a view into the hell that the mind can turn into, her writing didn’t pierce me on a level that matches this thorny subject, despite her hallucinatory imagery which seems to aim at an intensity and brutality expressed in a visceral rage mixed with sexual desire which reminded me of Raduan Nassar’s A Cup of Rage.
Apparently there is a film adaptation in the making, by Martin Scorcese. Yet, just like I never had the nerve to watch Betty blue (based on the book 37°2 le matin), I think it would be wiser for me not to watch it and to read The Shutter of Snow by Emily Holmes Coleman instead. ...more
Trains always imply the sensation of a little travelling and train-reading holds a special pleasure, it is equally delightful as eat-reading, another Trains always imply the sensation of a little travelling and train-reading holds a special pleasure, it is equally delightful as eat-reading, another undervalued form of pleasure that rarely wells up when one is asked about the highest bodily pleasure between heaven and hell. That hell can also be one's own mind, as in this dark story by Sien Volders, in which a young man's inner compass fails and confusion strikes mercilessly.
A train journey to the dreamed-of northern lights leads to the cold and desolation of the Orkney Islands. The savage landscapes and mysterious Neolithic stones pound on the young man with a dislocating force. Understanding expressions of human warmth, help and compassion cannot prevent him from being swallowed up by the inner darkness that torments him.
Sien Volders manages to capture the tragedy and loneliness of mental illness in a gripping, convincing and sensitive way.
Dark is life, dark is death.
[image] [image] (Jeanne Bouza Rose)
De trein is altijd een beetje reizen en treinlezen een bijzonder genoegen, al net zo heerlijk als eetlezen, een andere onvolprezen vorm van genot die zelden opwelt wanneer gevraagd wordt naar het hoogste lichamelijke genot tussen hemel en hel. Die hel kan ook het eigen hoofd zijn, zoals in dit donkere verhaal van Sien Volders, waarin het innerlijke kompas van een jonge man het laat afweten en de verwarring genadeloos toeslaat.
Een treinreis naar het gedroomde noorderlicht voert naar de koude en verlatenheid van de Orkney eilanden. De woeste landschappen en mysterieuze neolithische stenen beuken met een ontregelende kracht op de jonge man in. Begripvolle blijken van menselijke warmte, hulp en medeleven kunnen niet beletten dat hij wordt opgeslokt door het innerlijke duister dat hem kwelt.
Volders weet de tragiek en de eenzaamheid van geestesziekte op een aangrijpende, overtuigende en gevoelvolle manier te vatten, in poëtische contrasten van stilstand en beweging, licht en donker, warmte en koude.
Donker is het leven, donker is de dood. (*** ½)...more
Is love a state of mind, a state of being, a phenomenon, a congeniality that disappears right before our The yearning for what is beyond our reach
Is love a state of mind, a state of being, a phenomenon, a congeniality that disappears right before our eyes into the past, into the backwaters of history?. Love is what Beatriz, the female protagonist in Coetzee’s new novel The Pole wonders about.
Whatever might be the answer, is there is anything else but love that we never seem to tire talking or reading about? It seems only right that Coetzee in his eighties doesn’t waste time and choses to thematise and explore what feels essential to existence, the mysteries of love and connection.
Beatriz, a banker’s wife in her late forties who is wrapped up in a withered marriage and charity works, becomes the object of veneration - almost obsession - of the Polish pianist Witold Walczykiewicz who she is expected to entertain as a host before and after the piano recital her circle organises in Barcelona. He is seventy-two, tall, extravagantly white-haired, massive, once famous as a Chopin interpreter. She isn’t particularly charmed by his measured, unsentimental interpretation of the preludes of Chopin – she prefers the warmer, epic view of Chopin by Claudio Arrau and misses the feeling of rapture she has come to expect of Chopin- nor is she much impressed by Witold’s personality or appearance. Nevertheless she grows intrigued when he seeks to stay in contact with her. One thing leads to another and an uncommon relationship unfolds between them, riddled by questions and doubts and with even a joint stay in Mallorca – another one of the many echoes to Chopin (and George Sand).
[image] (silhouette of Chopin by F. Phillip)
Coetzee focusses mostly on the feelings and thoughts of Beatriz who seems to determine the terms and conditions of the relationship – at least at first sight. She seems common sense impersonated, wondering why her thoughts keep turning to the Pole and reflecting on her own motifs and what she can possibly mean to him – unlike his views on Chopin’s music, a sturdy, taciturn dreamer.
What follows isn’t a romantic tale on infatuation or late in life passion, nor a run-of-the-mill story on adultery. Witold ascribes Beatriz a more lofty role, reminiscent of Dante’s Beatrice (‘Do you remember the poet Dante Alighieri? His Beatrice never gave him a single word and he spent his life loving her’). Does she agree? Is she just a muse to him? Coetzee doesn’t suggest any communion of souls, nor touches on the power of art and music to bring people together. Both are writing their own story. Coetzee explores the relationship between Beatriz and Witold to gauge the human condition and deficiency. Because they don’t speak each other’s language and can only communicate in a shared foreign tongue, Beatriz is permanently aware of the risk of possibly misunderstanding each other, of not reading each other correctly – the need of translation turns both into a leitmotif and metaphor for human communication which is inevitably flawed.
Oscillating between passion and rationality Coetzee’s pared-down, subtle tale conveys masterfully a universal, timeless longing for beauty and grace.
Our beloved remains as unreachable and unfathomable and unknowable as we are to ourselves. (**** ½)...more
I am not sure whether Peter Englund’s bold statement that you probably will never have read a book on the Second World War quite like this one is corrI am not sure whether Peter Englund’s bold statement that you probably will never have read a book on the Second World War quite like this one is correct, but it is certainly rings true for this non-expert reader, as I haven’t come across such a compulsively readable, compound-eyed and kaleidoscopic account on the course of the Second World War through the eyes of a wide range of people who experienced the events themselves before. I burnt through the almost 600 pages in just a couple of days. An English translation of this book will be published in November 2023.
Based on fragments of the diaries, testimonies, memoirs and letters of 39 individuals directly affected by or involved in them, the world-wide events in the crucial month of November 1942 are stitched together from week to week.
The book starts with a photo album of the dramatis personae whom the reader will meet and ends with an overview of what became of them during or after the war– unsurprisingly fate has not been merciful to all of them.
[image] (Hélène Berr)
Englund lets their experiences speak from themselves without further ado, analysis nor explication, evoking the sense of the moment as it must have been experienced by them, still unsure of the outcome, living in uncertainty, having only limited information. Some names will ring a bell because the reader might be familiar with their writing (Helène Berr, Lidiya Ginzburg, Vera Brittain, Vasily Grossman, Ernst Jünger, Keith Douglas, Albert Camus) –and/or because their fate is well-known (Sophie (and Hans) Scholl).
Englund takes the reader from Berlin to Bandung, from Brussels and Paris to Mandalay, Egypt, Stalingrad, Poland and Leningrad following the military at the various fronts on land, air and water (a military doctor, a British bomber; a Finnish foot soldier at the Svir front; an American pilot in Guadalcanal, a Japanese imperial army naval commander, infantrymen at both sides at the Eastern front,, a partisan in the forests of Belarus) and also journalists, a Korean ‘comfort woman’ in a Japanese brothel in Mandalay; a prisoner of Treblinka, housewives on Long Island and Barrow-in-Furness, a member of the resistance in Brussels and a 12 year old Jewish girl who fled to Shanghai with her family.
Interspersed with the experiences from the selected individuals are threads on the making of the film Casablanca, the building of the first nuclear reactor in Chicago (as a step to the Manhattan project), life on the U-boat 604 and shipbuilding of a Liberty ship under the Emergency Shipbuilding program.
[image] (November 8th, 1942 operation torch)
Pointing at El Alamein, Guadalcanal, operation Torch in North-Africa and the encirclement of the tth Army at Stalingrad, Englund’s key premise that the thirty days of November 1942 effectively were a turning point in the second world war, is persuasive. His point of view also echoes what I remember from reading Herman van Goethem’s 1942: Het jaar van de stilte - in which he brings forth the diary of a museum director understanding the tipping of the balance from the radio news and links the changing attitude from the Belgian government in exile, no longer believing in a negotiated compromise peace, to the international events: only in November 1942, El Alamein showing that the Germans weren’t invincible, the government distanced itself clearly from the policy of administrative collaboration with the occupation force, by making clear to which extent local administrators would be punished after the war.
[image] (Allied troops taking cover at El Alamein)
Obviously, focussing on the emotions and experiences of these individuals makes this book a poignant read. There seemed no limits to the suffering human beings could inflict upon each other in this war. In the face of such boundless suffering, words and comprehension fall short. In his prologue, Peter Englund appositely quotes Primo Levi that those who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless. The rest is silence and remembrance, perhaps through the lasting words of poets:
[image]
Canoe
Well, I am thinking this may be my last summer, but cannot lose even a part of pleasure in the old-fashioned art of idleness. I cannot stand aghast at whatever doom hovers in the background; while grass and buildings and the somnolent river who know they are allowed to last for ever, exchange between them the whole subdued sound of this hot time. What sudden fearful fate can deter my shade wandering next year from a return? Whistle and I will hear and come another evening, when this boat travels with you alone towards Iffley: as you lie looking up for thunder again, this cool touch does not betoken rain; it is my spirit that kisses your mouth lightly.
Just like the four books that I read previously of Annie Ernaux, reading her The young man left me conflicted, coaxing me into ruminating more than I Just like the four books that I read previously of Annie Ernaux, reading her The young man left me conflicted, coaxing me into ruminating more than I had suspected on the moment I closed the booklet, a flimsy forty pages one can read in the twinkling of an eye. This account was partly written in 1988-90, immediately after the end of this episode in her life, and picked up again and rewritten in 2022.
Reflecting on the relationship that she had in her early fifties with a student almost thirty years her junior, Ernaux in her typical clinical, pared-down style touches on her usual themes of time, memory, writing, class struggle and social mobility. She needs to write to live and she needs to live to write: "If I don't write them down, things didn't come to an end, they were only lived." Spending their time together in a room in Rouen in front of the hospital where she once had an abortion, being together with the young man catapults her back to her youth, her working class background, her past sexual experiences in shabby and unheated rooms with men that have become as impersonal and fungible in her memory like undergarments.
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Openly affirming the relationship in the outside world, she questions the dominant views in society on relationships between men and women showing a huge age gap: admiring and envious towards older men with a woman at their side who could be their daughter; rueful, unforgiving and taunting towards women who dare to engage in a relationship with a much younger man. In Dutch there is a saying that an old billy goat still likes a green leaf which has rather a playful connotation; for old women comes the expression that an old barn burns easily which has more denigratory and furtive undertones, as if such desire of women at riper age is more dangerous.
In her radical honesty, she doesn’t beat around the bush. She sketches how she uses the young man for her own needs of reviving her youth memories and experiences: "He was the bearer of the memory of my first world". "With him I went through all the ages of life, my life." She revels in being able to dominate him intellectually and economically, also finding pleasure in rivalling with other women about him, cherishing the feeling of being the chosen one when he leaves the companion of his own age for her, enjoying the ambiguity of taking him to the same theater play like she took her son. She is his mistress, not in BDSM, but in initiating him, on her terms, to films, music and literature, more bourgeois food tastes. Somehow she seems to need society’s disapproving gaze, reminding her of dressing provocatively in her youth – maybe that gaze is mostly her own, one that she created in her own mind, a certain desire to be scandalous.
Perhaps unwillingly, in her fervent and ruthless demonstration that she is capable of acting in the same careless way with a younger man as men doing the same to a younger woman, she shows why an age gap might be problematic in a relationship, rather than giving an illustration of (mutual) empowerment and freedom. I admit I find witnessing this kind of instrumentalisation of people discomforting, whatever gender is on the receiving side and serves as a youth exilir - or writing material; it reminded me the undermining effects of toxic leadership in a work context, behaviour which is not a unique predisposition of one gender and of which one can wonder if the possibility of copying such imbalance of power into one’s personal relationships is really something that is desirable, only for the sake of advocating a certain concept of feminism (her statement that writing for her has been a kind of intimate revenge comes to mind).
[image]
The more I read by Annie Ernaux, the harder it becomes to attune to the voice of the persona emerging from her pages, while at the same time she takes me on a train of thought that I cannot stop, igniting a wish to understand why her voice at the same time sounds strangely familiar (the class issues, her political views) and disturbingly alien (the navel-gazing, the egotism) - bien étonné de me trouver ensemble with traditionalist, conservative and right-wing criticism of her prose as being “characterised by semantic poverty and minimal syntax in the service of a self-serving narrative”. (Le Figaro).
While reading this book, I came across a comment from Violeta in which she quotes this observation of Milan Kundera:
"Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the viewpoint of the novel's wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil. Not that the novelist utterly denies that moral judgment is legitimate, but that he refuses it a place in the novel. If you like, you can accuse Panurge of cowardice, accuse Emma Bovary, accuse Rastignac—that's your business; the novelist has nothing to do with it."
Maybe reading Ernaux brings out the old grumpy moralist in me – just because her work isn’t novelistic and it has become impossible to separate the writer from the work. It is uncomfortably true to life, messy, edgy and disruptive. Maybe that is why I continue to read her....more
In their different ways, the twins were beginning to remember. They remembered different things. Or they remembered the same things differently. It seIn their different ways, the twins were beginning to remember. They remembered different things. Or they remembered the same things differently. It seemed to Marigold that you remembered things because they changed. You didn’t need to remember what was right in front of you. And the twins were still too little to have much behind. But Marigold wanted to be prepared for change, which meant you had to learn to remember before you needed to remember.
On the evening of the 13th October the news that Louise Glück (1943- 2023) had died, popped up only a few minutes after I had put Marigold and Rose in my handbag to take with me to read on the train when I would be travelling back home after taking a test for which I had been preparing for a couple of weeks. The news added a sense of timeless and intensity to a couple of themes and ideas that Louise Glück explores in this prose piece.
It is a small book – a mere 52 pages – on big themes (memory, loss, consciousness, family dynamics, siblings, bonding, being (still) wordless and locked-up in oneself but dreaming anyway ) seen through the prism of the reflections of two infants.
Marigold and Rose are infant twins, but as marigolds and roses are a different kind of flowers, they are not the same. They are different kinds of personality – one is introspective, turning inwards, one is more outbound and reaching outwards. Nevertheless the twins might be one as well, two souls in one person, one persona deduplicated in two bodies, showing that every person is a multifaceted creature, defying facile and reductionist labelling in extravert or introvert personalities or other predominant features that do not represent the multiplicity of reality.
[image] (Gustave Klimt, Bauerngarten, 1907)
I was surprised how much I enjoyed reading this piece despite the infant angle, a perspective that I presumed would rather irritate me (as it apparently did some other readers). Indulging in the prospect of having a miniature break from a diet of technical textbooks for studying, this naturally came along as a little treat, a welcome dollop of beauty refreshing my mind after weeks of hard work in which I had to steer clear of the temptation of words that were not directly functional.
As the last published work of Louise Glück before her death, it is tempting to look at this tale from the perspective of a circle that is completed, the fulfilment of the cycle of life, connecting the infant phase and to the end, particularly when connecting this piece with the last poetry collection that she published in 2021, Winter Recipes from the Collective.
While Winter Recipes from the Collective was, as obvious from the title, a wintry book, focussing on old age and death, Marigold and Rose, with its flower symbolism and focus on the baby time is devoted to the beginning of existence. Yet, like in Glücks poetry, childhood doesn’t obfuscate death which is present from the onset on, from the beginning the awareness that everything will disappear is a leitmotif that cannot be unheard.
Thank you so much Jennifer for drawing my attention to this tiny gem....more
Luminous, iridescent, glowing joy. A joyous multitude of shades of green and blue. Art as jubilant as Händel’s music. Is it possible that paint[image]
Luminous, iridescent, glowing joy. A joyous multitude of shades of green and blue. Art as jubilant as Händel’s music. Is it possible that paintings make you want to sing and dance?
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Last year I was thrilled hearing the news that a double exhibition comprising both a broad overview of David Hockney’s work and the I-pad ‘paintings’ Hockney made in Normandy during the first pandemic lockdown in 2020 would come to BOZAR in Brussels from 8 October 2021 until 23 Januany 2022. Hockney’s art had only shortly before caught my attention, when I was reading three episodes of Ali Smith’s seasonal cycle with his colourful arboreal tunnel paintings and the catalogue of the Hockney–Van Gogh exhibition held in Amsterdam in 2019, Hockney/Van Gogh: The Joy of Nature: The Joy of Nature. The possibility of seeing some of his work in the real was quite exciting.
The exhibitions blew me away (and were also a nice occasion to bring into practise what Ben Street taught me in his How to Enjoy Art: A Guide for Everyone : the enlargements of the I-pad prints put me in motion, circling around searching for the optimal distance to look at them). I was so enthralled I went to see the exhibitions three times, each time finding the art works as fresh as the first time and discovering aspects that hadn’t occurred to me the previous time. Forgetting time and space, I didn’t noticed the presence of one of my nephews who was visiting the exhibitions with his girlfriend. Later, gathering with the family at the Christmas table, he revealed he had been there too, poking fun at me for being so transported. Even my daughter, who accompanied me the third time (coaxed by the promise of eating ramen for lunch) and isn’t so keen on staring at paintings was enchanted, disagreeing quite firmly with her teacher of aesthetics who had dismissed Hockney’s work in class as banal and artificial.
Some of the art criticism of the spring works was rather harsh (the prints aren’t true paintings, the style of them is simple and uniform, ugly and unpersuasive, the multitude of them repetitive, the vibrant colour palette synthetic, the register false and fudged). It might just be my (decadent?) proclivity to enjoy art more than nature, but just looking at these pictures made me more happy than actual spring ever did – where I live spring is mostly a mixture of wetness and cold greyness- a period of fruitless yearning for a few (at best watery) beams of sun.
Perhaps because of my gushing about the exhibitions, I was gifted this lovely book which accompanied the exhibition as a birthday present. It includes three short pieces preceding the pictures: a brief, lovely introduction by the organizers of the exhibitions (The London Royal Academy of Arts and Bozar in Brussels), Edith Devaney interviewing David Hockney on what inspired him to create his spring works and his use of the I-pad as a medium to create them and a few pages by the novelist Willam Boyd in praise of David Hockney (a piece somewhat veering into an sweeping mode, stating that the comparison of Hockney’s genius to Mozart’s (a similar kind of effortless, unchallenged mastery of many forms characterising them) goes not quite far enough, ascribing Hockney a ‘shapeshifting liberation that Mozart could never even have dreamed of).
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It are however not these words but the 116 pictures documenting and celebrating the unfolding of spring – grass, ponds, blossoming trees - that are the essence of this book. They are a wonderful memory of the exhibition that will make me return to it time and again.
Following on his spring paintings in Normandy, David Hockney continued creating new work with his I-pad, resulting in a new exhibition to open in galleries in London, Paris, and the US, 20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures, concentrating this time on flower vases he could draw inside and containing this playful autoportrait as a centrepiece.
Even peoples without writing love their libraries.
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Mukamwezi’s silhouette floated and undulated in the grain of the dusty fog like a reflection Even peoples without writing love their libraries.
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Mukamwezi’s silhouette floated and undulated in the grain of the dusty fog like a reflection in the flowing water of a river. At times her pale face seemed to drift away from the rest of her body and hover on the swirls of mist.
Having been wanting to read France-based Rwandan author Scholastique Mukasonga since Katia’s fascinating review on Our Lady of the Nile put her firmly on my radar about five years ago, I was thrilled getting the chance to read Kibogo, the English translation of Kibogo est monté au ciel as a first acquaintance with Mukasonga’s work, as none of her books are available in the local library.
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Kibogo surpassed my (high) hopes and expectations. How to portend that Mukasonga would weave a fairy tale-esque, humorous, satiric folktale out of elements as drought, famine, (German and Belgian) colonisation and the supplanting of Rwandan mythology and cults by forced evangelisation?
Told in four interlocking fragments, Mukasonga’s tale is not only well-composed and written in a gorgeous, gossamer prose larded with Rwandan history and culture, but it is also an astute commentary on colonialism and exploitation. She lampoons Western Christian proselytism, superiority thinking and preposterous appropriation of African historiography. Notwithstanding the import and weight of these topics, this book surprises with its light tone, and so probably shows a quite different side of Mukasonga’s craft than her account on the Rwandan genocide (Cockroaches). The joy of writing this clearly splashes from Mukasonga’s imaginative storytelling. She breathes life into the priestess/sorceress Mukamwezi and the befuddled seminarian Akayezu with panache. Depicting the old men of the village rivalling to tell the tallest stories to give a French professor coming around to jot down their legends - hoping to find traces of cannibalism that fit into his theories - value for his money, she shows her keen eye for colourful detail.
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I was quite amused by the way Mukasonga toys with religious paradigms, drawing parallels between the pagan beliefs and some core points of belief in Christianity, applying her irreverent brush to the twists and connections between them (the worshipping of the statue of Maria, a circle of women as apostles, the self-sacrifice, Ascension and Assumption of Jesus/Mary and Kibogo/Akayezu/Mukawezi). With barbed understatement and irony Mukasonga shows how the padri, the white missionaries, don’t really practise what they preach on the Christian values but rather use their doctrines to scare off and intimidate their newly converted flock into obedience.
The legend of Mukamwezi became part of the storytellers’ nocturnal repertoire. In it, she was reunited with Kibogo and his retinue behind the clouds and dancing on the crest of the mountain, she adorned herself with pearls of rain. And the murmur of the story blended with the dreams of the child Akayezu nestled in his mother’s pagne, half dozing in the warmth of the heart, until they were one and the same.
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A wondrous tribute to the art of storytelling, I couldn’t have dreamt of a more marvellous introduction to a new-to-me writer. (****1/2)
(The illustrations are pictures of the textile art created by women belonging to the Savane Rutongo-Kabuye workshop from a mountain village close to Kigali).
Many thanks to the author, Netgalley and Archipelago Books for generously granting me an ARC....more
And nature, as he used to say, is not a peaceful thing. It’s not a gentle breeze and the sun coming up over the mountains, as they’d have you b[image]
And nature, as he used to say, is not a peaceful thing. It’s not a gentle breeze and the sun coming up over the mountains, as they’d have you believe in children’s books. It is not little pink buds or a rhapsody in green.
A horticulturalist, the personal secretary looks back on his life of service as a personal secretary of one of ‘Latin America’s greatest landscape architects’, particularly focussing on the time of ‘dark years in our country’s history’, in which the country was ruled by an authoritarian regime of generals.
A garden is an arrangement of light, he used to say, one has to think how the sun will set on it, how it will rise, from which direction it will shine, how it will pass through; how every leaf will reveal or obscure.
As illuminated by the title of the Dutch translation of this short story, Clair-obscur (Chiaroscuro), Krauss plays with light-dark contrasts paralleling the shaping of the garden to the ethical conundrum the regime poses for the ambitious landscape architect, thickly emphasised by alluding explicitly to his self-justification for the Faustian bargain he makes in order to realise his dreams: To build a park like this, one has to sleep with the devil. From a twisted, quasi-Darwinian logic he holds up that human cruelty only echoes nature’s:
Nature is a cruel and conniving affair, he used to say to me when we were alone together, which was often. It’s aggressive, and surprisingly fatal. The weak are killed, first tormented and then killed, and the strong are nourished by the rot and decay.
The impact of his choice will be lasting however, his ambivalence and lenience towards the regime resulting in an overwhelming moodiness and outbursts of anger to overstrain his feelings of guilt. Both the secretary and the architect are forever convicted to each other, holding each other captive in the complicity of not-knowing.
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An arrangement of Light appears in Krauss’s collection of short stories To Be a Man: Stories with the title In the Garden – skimming through that story it seems rewritten, the order of some paragraphs has been rearranged and instead of setting the story in an entirely non-descript place, Krauss transports it to a country ‘in Latin-America’, as such enabling for instance a closer association of the generals with the military junta and dirty war in Argentina and casting an additional shadow on the (foreign) landscape architect and his contorted ideas as a possible former Nazi party member.
An arrangement of light might not exactly be subtle and rather heavy in the use of symbols and allegory, I nevertheless enjoyed reading this short story more than Krauss’s novel The History of Love, mostly because of the lyrical beauty and the suggestiveness of Krauss’s writing, evoking the lushness of a garden and its dark, deceptive serenity....more
Galatea is a brutal and icy feminist spin on the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea told from the perspective of the statue, which can be read as a [image]
Galatea is a brutal and icy feminist spin on the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea told from the perspective of the statue, which can be read as a cautionary tale aimed at men who like their women to be ‘pure’, docile and mute: unless it comes in the guise of a tasty mottled cake, marble is cold and can weigh you down – just like a yearning for perfection can.
Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged. (Samuel Johnson)...more
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