It is a hundred years since Thomas Mann has written The Magic Mountain (TMM). I’ve read TMM twice. The first time i’ve struggled and the second time IIt is a hundred years since Thomas Mann has written The Magic Mountain (TMM). I’ve read TMM twice. The first time i’ve struggled and the second time I’ve absolutely admired that novel. So i thought it would be a good way to celebrate by reading the newly translated novel by Olga Tokarczuk that was clearly inspired by Mann.
I have to admit that in retrospect i’d prefer i knew nothing about TMM before reading this book as inevitably i could not help but compare this novel to TMM and struggled to appreciate it on its own terms. Olga did not help as for the first half at least she stuck to her version of Mann’s style with detailed descriptions of the surroundings including the meals and physical countenances of her characters. The majority of them could as well be traced to Mann’s characters. She subverted the style and plot of course. But for me she did not do it boldly enough until the later part of her novel.
Also what makes Mann’s work so rich is an exchange of ideas between the characters. All of them are profound, complex and rendered in such a way that the reader would never know Mann’s personal stand on those issues. Olga’s novel is much simpler on that level. Her characters talk about many things as well. But their views are quite shallow, deliberately cartoonish:
“Wojnicz (the main character standing for Hans Castrop in TMM) had noticed that every discussion, whether about democracy, the fifth dimension, the role of religion, socialism, Europe, or modern art, eventually led to women.”
And it seems that for her as well a historical perspective on misogyny is the main area of investigation in this novel. In this she is richly intertextual including the ancient Greeks, witch hunts and of course Mann’s contemporaries. However, i was not sure what was new about it. It is quite likely unfortunately that still there are some men in our times holding such views. It might even have been that they still hold the power in the society. But the criticism of that expressed in such a form does not come across as particularly effective. I do not think they would be shocked out of their convictions by reading that their views were wildly shared between the educated elite of the earlier 20th century. The rest of us are informed and do not need to be convinced.
As a result, the first part of the novel is a bit Disneyland Venice compared to the real Venice - lacking authenticity. Even the death which is grimly present in Mann’s novel is more like a decoration here, the way to approach the uncanny.
But the good news for me was that it seemed she started to write one book but finished writing another. And they transformed into each other relatively seamlessly. The latter part is characteristically Olga’s with her original taste for the uncanny, supernatural and its potential role in human perception. Also the feministic pathos of revenge is played quite nicely.
On its own terms the book was an easy and quick read and quite entertaining. That is as soon as I’ve managed to get out of Mann’s shadow. She writes effortlessly and manages to use interesting narrative voice - it is plural first person, but this she does manage to subvert from Mann’s similar tool rather impressively.
Mann was writing his novel with overshadowing of the WW1. I was thinking how did Olga use a century of hindsight for her benefit. There is misogyny theme of course. But also she clarified the idea of perspective, the absence of the binaries in the world, in human nature and even in human body. She did it in quite a categorical way through a monologue of the Doctor: “If anyone thinks the world is set of stark opposites, he is sick.” The Doctor also explained to Wojnicz how the real world appeared to be: “blurred, out of focus, flickering… depending on one’s point of view." He might have been enlightened about the very recent contemporary findings of the quantum physics. But more likely he projected Olga’s more modern knowledge popularised in many books such as The Order of Time.
Read this book for its plot, sense of humour, sense of place and vivid descriptions. Avoid reading Mann before it if you can. As far as the ideas are concerned, I’ve managed to find a paragraph which resonated and felt fresh:
“Our entire culture has grown out of a feeling of inferiority, out of all those unfulfilled ambitions. And yet it is the other way around: that which is weak in us gives us strength. This constant effort to compensate for weakness governs our entire lives. Demosthenes had a stammer, and that was exactly why he became the greatest speaker of all time. Not in spite of it, but because of it.”
It is a wonderful collection as those things go. I enjoyed the majority of stories and discovered for myself a literary culture I was not familiar witIt is a wonderful collection as those things go. I enjoyed the majority of stories and discovered for myself a literary culture I was not familiar with.
It transported me into the atmosphere full of water and grey sky and endless horizons of the sea and sand. But also the Dutch possess very special sense of humour, dark and cerebral combined with the sensitivity for the place of the absurd in a daily life. I am not sure though whether it is the nation or the author who complied this collection and later took his own life. But the combination of the realistic and absurd, even occasionally the uncanny shines through these tales. There is also a strong satirical element. These authors know how not to spare the punches.
Initially I was lured by absolutely luminous writing in “The young titans” by Nescio. I enjoyed it so much that I’ve read the whole book of his short stories. Unfortunately he did not seem to write that much. But the stories I’ve read were timeless.
Another realistic story I’ve enjoyed was My Brown Friend by Simon Vestdijk. It was a story full of melancholy together with a confused sense akin to the first love combined with teenage angst. But also a story of prejudices in a small town, revenge and loyalty.
A story that I never thought I would like was on a surface an example of nature writing about muskrats (a type of water rats). But it is appeared I loved Maarten ’t Hart’s Castle Muider for its beauty and complexity of its elements. It was not that much about muskrats as about people and human nature in general. It was wonderfully composed, layered and strangely musical.
The grappling with being a nation of colonisers in the past is palpable in many stories. It reveals itself often subtly but very effectively at that. In his story Mulich uses a simple hyperbolic plot that creates a powerful metaphor for facing consequences of one’s actions.
But my heart was taken by Funeral Rights by Belcampo. The story has got this quality of a good fable - being out of time and place. It could happen in Ancient Rome or it could be still happening today in some not very remote corner of the world. In a space of few pages it shows the power of cruelty and the power of love; and in spite of the obvious ending I wanted to believe there were no winners between those two. “A warriors of vanquished peoples” is caught and thrown in the pit.
Besides the fact that the business of war itself is pervaded with deep suffering, there had moreover been the certain realization of fighting against a superior force, in this case, of having to experience the fall of his tribe. To die without issue is already a double death, but to leave a world behind in which your language is being annihilated is the most bitter thing of all. And not because of an inner decline but because of a foreign power.
And then the winners are not satisfied by the victory and having a feast. They want an entertainment and use the beautiful captured females as a bait for the men in the pit. Between these girls the warrior sees someone who again made his life worth living to the end:
Oh, what is it, that powerful thing that suddenly can come into being between two people? A current? A force field? An invisible ladder, in this case? He saw that, among all those women, she was different. No less charming, but dazed and desperate like him. He was the only one who saw this in the midst of the hellish uproar.
The story seems very simple, a story told million times before. But somehow the way it was composed, the words he used has moved me greatly.
And then it was a story by Mensje van Keulen Sand. It was a totally different cattle of fish. After reading the first sentence, I would never be able to predict where all this would end. In fact I would think I could do that and I would be totally wrong. And the author managed to subvert my expectations more than once within this hyper-realistic, almost brutal tale. I think a single of my prediction would still be accurate: I would remember this story for very long. A Very impressive take on marriage and trust in general.
Some of those stories stretch the definition of black humour to the brim. A husband in one story feeds the body of his wife preliminarily frozen in a fridge to a bunch of seagulls. It was a bit too much for my liking.
However the other two stories reveal how such an unpleasant object of daily life like- sorry!!! - a poo could be used effectively in literature and not for gracious gory, but for depiction of very profound side of humanity and the society. There is an apparently controversial fable by Manon Uphoff titled accordingly. But I was more taken by atrocious, angry satirical tale by Frans Kellendonk Foreign Service told by unemployed man. It does not spare the Dutch society of its angry but witty commentary. I think I’d better quote this part of the story in full:
Have you ever met the couple who live upstairs, those two inflated torsos with small, superfluous heads, arms and legs? Those two are unemployed like me. They stopped talking about it years ago. They open their mouths only to shovel food into them. Before long they are likely to come crashing through the floor. Each day the thud of their footsteps grows duller; each day the boards over my head creak more menacingly. They are dutiful people. They take the money the state holds out to them and dutifully convert it into shit. Two digestive tracts, that’s what they are, two tubes connecting the authorities to the sewers. In times of heavy rain, the plumbing can’t handle their excrement – that’s how much effort they put into it. Then the turds float downstairs, through the entranceway, over the doorstep, and into the gutter. Two men from the city sanitation department come by with long bamboo poles, which they screw together. One of the men uses them to poke around in the sewer. ‘Is the sludge coming out yet?’ he asks the other one, who is staring down into the next hole over. He keeps poking and prodding until the sludge comes out and the money can start pouring in again.
And another spot on merciless diagnosis with its implications from the perspective of this angry man. I don’t agree with his suggested “recovery plan”. But the diagnosis might be accurate.
I cannot stand all the indifference around me, any more than he can, and so I too console myself with the illusion that I am hated. His sorrow is my sorrow’s twin, I am what I understand. Isn’t it possible that our solitudes could bring us together? Poor Gamal! If he thinks the Dutch hate him, he overestimates them. The Dutch cannot hate, any more than they can love – all they can do is threaten him with their sluggish indifference. You are the one who hates, Gamal! I too feel hate. The Dutch are so indifferent because democracy has turned them into slow-witted slaves. The politicians call it ‘the least of all evils’. They call that an ideology. They dare to call it a credo! In the Greek polis, the citizens knew each other. That was a place where you could make decisions together. But how do we go about that in this country? Here we are governed by the anonymous power of numbers. The majority rules, but the majority is no one, and no one can hold it accountable. Its delusional decisions are natural disasters against which there is no defence. I’ll take a despot any day of the week – then at least assassination would be an option.
A Room of My Own by Joost de Vries uses another example of unsparing political satire, this time applied to the world scene.
His protagonist meets Henry Kissinger next to the Louvre in Paris.
In that moment I thought about all the things you could know about him. In the thirties he’d fled Germany with his family to escape the Nazis, he’d become a brilliant academic at Harvard, joined Nixon’s government in the late sixties, successfully pursued detente with China and the Soviet Union, let the Vietnam War escalate (squandering tens of thousands of lives) so he could de-escalate it later on his own terms and win a Nobel Peace Prize for it. The peace negotiations had been held here in Paris. Anyone who might see him walking here in the Tuileries knew that. History personified – war and peace. This old man supported fascist regimes in Latin America, probably had Salvador Allende murdered, delayed informing the president so he wouldn’t mediate in the Yom Kippur War, deliberately left thousands to starve to death in Bangladesh. And here he was.
I do not want to finish on this note. So just come back to the beginning and say that the main impression that stayed with me from this collection was the the image of flat but velvet space, sound of waves and sand and the colour of luminous grey....more
It is a slim book containing a handful of stories. The best of them are about being young: “We were heading out to conquer the world, except for HoyerIt is a slim book containing a handful of stories. The best of them are about being young: “We were heading out to conquer the world, except for Hoyer, he was the only one who didn’t believe that, all he knew that he was out for a walk on Zeeburgerdjik, past the slaughterhouse.” And at the same time they are about getting older without yet realising it. It is about finding out one day that your friends as you know them are not there anymore. They turned into Strangers, different people. Or maybe they still hide those ones you knew deep inside but it is not easy to get there anymore. And time has become the major scarcity.
Also, it has been a while since I’ve read someone able to reveal a glimpse of a transcendental, or rather to show someone caught in a struggle with it:
It’s so strange, having that melancholy sound behind you. It’s like the ocean wants something from me, that’s what it’s like. God is in there too. God is calling. It’s really not a walk in the park, he is everywhere, and everywhere he is calling Bavink. You get sick of your own name when it’s called so much. And then Bavink has to paint. Has to get God onto canvas, with paint. Then it’s Bavink who’s calling “God”. So there they are, calling each other. It’s just a game to God, he is everywhere and without end. He just calls. But Bavink has only one stupid head and one stupid right hand and can only work on one stupid painting at a time. And when he thinks he has God, all he has is paint and canvas. It turns out God is everywhere except where Bavink wants him to be. And then some guy comes along and writes that Bavink is privileged… Privileged, right. You know what I wish? I wish I wrote timetables. God leaves people like that alone, they’re not worth the trouble.
It has reminded me how Cortázar has rendered the impossible pain of creating faced by Charlie Parker in The Pursuer. But also it seems these stories anticipate Fosse’s Septology, not in terms of style but in this overwhelming feeling of metaphysical longing and depiction of the power, an intrinsic connection contained in male friendship.
Deep luminous metaphysics entangled with transient beauty of ordinary moments and melancholy of existence. ...more
I am not sure how many times I’ve read this story before. But I’ve always felt I missed something. I could see the trick he had done with intersectingI am not sure how many times I’ve read this story before. But I’ve always felt I missed something. I could see the trick he had done with intersecting two realities and it was clever; but it left me cold. It is appeared I needed to read “The sentimental education” by Flaubert and I needed to know who was Isidore Ducasse (Conde de Lautréamont) to make this short story properly sparkle in front of my eyes. That feeling when wipers have finally cleaned the last drops of rain from the windshield. And the joy of discovery was mixed with the melancholy of something has yet again ended both for the character and for me as well with this tale.
This is a kind of book that i would be pushing into the hands of anybody who reads if I would be the kind of person who does it. Alas, unfortunately IThis is a kind of book that i would be pushing into the hands of anybody who reads if I would be the kind of person who does it. Alas, unfortunately I am not sure her work would be widely read even now. It certainly was not understood in the 60s of the last century when she wrote it. Indirectly or maybe even directly it cost her life. She was a rare talent combined with a fragile soul and almost unearthly physical beauty. It has appeared to be the unforgivable combination.
This novella is as original as it is relatable, another rare combination. I normally do not care for “the relatability” factor. But here it works so naturally and unobtrusively, so penetratively that i was caught almost against my own will.
It also manages to combines lyricism with the precision of language. But the main striking element is the narrator. The story is told by the voice that belongs to someone or something that cannot be easily defined. It/she/he tries to introduce it/her/himself at the beginning:
‘A consciousness has been struck in the flesh like a nail, or merely attached to the forehead like a miner’s lamp... a creature within the creature’
But even this creature finds it impossible be more specific. One can say it has imbedded Julia, the main character. But it would be wrong:
'If she were simply a body and I simply a mind. If only it were as simple as that. But we are a jumble of odd bits and between us we do not even make up a person.'
They are so entangled with each other, this voice and Julia, that it is impossible to separate them. The closest it ever gets to defining the voice is when it said: “I in the third person”. At the very beginning Julia disappeared. In the following pages the voice told their story. And I am as a reader was trying to grasp the relationship between them; every time i got closer it eluded me next minute. But I enjoyed the game. I think the author has managed to convey very successfully this type of internal struggle that happens inside any human being, the contradiction between different parts of self, an internal dialogue or sometimes even an argument that rarely can be articulated for oneself, never mind for anyone else.
There was this wonderful scene when Julia was proposed by her future husband:
'I had no part in it, except for random impressions, the toy ship sailing, a pigeon’s feather, gold candy wrapper and a child’s ribbon at the bottom of the basin. Julia stood by the fountain; the wind blew her hair in her eyes. But Peter Brody didn’t see her face. He was sitting on the rim of the fountain, her skirt touching his cheek, looking up her waist, the swell of her breasts. His hadn’t stroked her skirt, to smooth a fold, to brush off a bit of pollen, or simply to feel the fabric which was part of her. He stroked her skirt, his hand sought hers, their fingers clasped; his arms bent around her waist and he pressed his face against her thigh. A miracle was happening; it was not for them to know it; they were part of it.
It is such a layered passage. The first layer is pure cinema, how vividly the author describes the moment. Each small detail adds to the scene and makes it incredibly moving. Or maybe again it is just the relatability of the first serious love in one’s life, somehow it feels just so real. And the second layer is how the author shows this split within the girl’s perception. Two sides almost but not quite watch each other. The voice notices just external small details such a “gold candy rapper at the bottom of the basin” and looks at Julia as if from outside. While Julia is inside of the moment. But truly again you just cannot separate them. I can think of some moments in my life when i felt like that: both inside and outside of the scene, with all senses heightened and slightly out of synch; but never i felt more whole than it those moments.
I thought i’ve heard a subtle echo of Beckett. So i was not surprised to find out that he was an influence. That she tried to write “the female The Unnamable”. Fortunately, she has totally internalised this influence. Her prose is much less abstract, she is not that interested in depicting silence as Becket is. It is the absence instead of silence she is after. And her “Unnamable” is much more engaged in the world for better or worse. I was happy to find out that Beckett himself knew about her work and called her “an authentic talent without doubt”.
Written almost a decade earlier, this novella also anticipates Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann, almost hauntingly so. Malina might be considered more cryptic and complex. On the surface, its heroine cannot be further from Julia. But essentially they are haunted by the same “spirits”, trapped between the men in their life in a similar way and determined by the ruthlessness logic of time.
“not I or she, only Julia”.
PS There are also a few short stories in this NYRB volume. But I've written only about the novella....more
Now I know what has established the maximalist tradition of the American fiction that is still quite powerful today. I remember how I enjoyed reading Now I know what has established the maximalist tradition of the American fiction that is still quite powerful today. I remember how I enjoyed reading about tennis in Infinite Jest which was supposed to be boring as I was not interested in the game. I can see the beginning of this tradition here with whaling. There is of course a multitude in this novel. I loved the variety of styles and tales. Of course some of them I liked more than the others. I loved how Ahab spoke Shakespearian. In the century, the novel has also penetrated our daily life with Starbucks, Mody's etc. And I need to gather my thoughts properly to write something "smart" about it. Well, maybe soon or maybe if I read it once more....more
This the first volume out of three volumes of these conversations initially recorded for an Argentinian radio. Borges is an old man around 85 years ofThis the first volume out of three volumes of these conversations initially recorded for an Argentinian radio. Borges is an old man around 85 years of age and blind for the 30 of them. Inevitably the conversations are sort of "Borges-light". I didn't not need to focus that much as I do when I read his work. But it is fun to be a part of such a friendly and intelligent conversations nevertheless. The topics are wide from Kafka and Henry James to Melonga, Borges's work, friends, his travels and anything in between.
But I think there are two ideas I will remember the most. Both of them about quotations. The first one the sentence by Carlyle:
"Universal history is a text that we are reading and writing continuously and in which we are also written."
Borges thought it was "terrible" because "That means not only we are writing symbols but also that we are symbols - we are symbols written by Something or Someone." I do not think it necessary needs to be read that way. It might be just that we are so interconnected that the famous "butterfly effect" becomes more and more pronounced. In any case, I liked the quote.
Another one is related to Borges memory. He said: "something that should alarm me although I am not alarmed, and that is this - I tend to remember what I have read and to forget my actions and all that which has actually happened to me." He quoted Emerson:
"Life itself becomes a quotation".
Interestingly, I remember reading A History of Books Murnane's view on the books he has read or kept in his shelves. He actually tends to remember less what the book was about but what exactly was happening with him, what he was thinking about when he read it. Often he does not remember a book at all, just a sentence in it or an image it has brought to his mind. Another way of looking at a quotation.
I think all of us-readers might have an opinion on the subject and what a "life as a quotation" might mean....more
I hope to come back and review this one. It is a great novel, but the touch of almost cartoonish romanticism a la 18th century in the last few chapterI hope to come back and review this one. It is a great novel, but the touch of almost cartoonish romanticism a la 18th century in the last few chapters has created a clash with the gritty realism in my perception of the whole. I preferred realism....more
This selection of the little episodes from the "little" life of a lonely WW1 veteran is funny and sad at the same time. His longing for a company ofteThis selection of the little episodes from the "little" life of a lonely WW1 veteran is funny and sad at the same time. His longing for a company often backfires, his reactions sometimes a bit pathetic. There is something very touching and human in his ineptitude. My only problem with this book was that I wanted to know him better. But it ended before I've managed to understand him. Maybe it was apt by itself....more
It is the one of Altunes's earlier novels majestically translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa. Technically it is not quite to the standard of It is the one of Altunes's earlier novels majestically translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa. Technically it is not quite to the standard of sophistications of his later work with its polyphonic impressionistic unique style. This one is still just one voice. Bu the style is already exquisite: the framing narrative is an encounter in a bar when a lonely protagonist is telling the story of his to the unknown woman he has just met. Later, their meeting is transferred to the man's flat. The woman is never introduced to the reader and shown through the impressions of the man. The main part of his story is the tragedy of his service in Angola during its war for independence. The sentences are so elaborate and beautiful that the book reads like a long poem in spite or partly maybe because of all tragic material it contains. Below are just two fragments, a sentence each:
There are few things I still believe in, and, from three o’clock in the morning on, the future shrinks to the terrifying proportions of a tunnel through which I walk, bellowing out the ancient pain I haven’t yet managed to cure, as ancient as the death that has been growing its sticky, febrile moss inside us since infancy, inviting us to embrace the inertia of the moribund, but there’s also the diffuse, volatile, omnipresent, passionate clarity that you find in Matisse’s paintings and in Lisbon afternoons, which, like the African dust, gets in through every crack and crevice, through closed windows and the soft spaces between the buttons on a shirt, through the porous wall of the eyelids and through silences the texture of murdered glass, and it’s not impossible that the unexpected beauty of a young woman, who, oblivious to your presence, walks past you in the restaurant, where the head of the fish on your plate is gazing at you with imploring, orgasmic eyes, will suddenly awaken in you the fragile miracle of a pang of desire and happiness.
Because, you see, I was always alone, Sofia, during primary school, college, university, hospital, marriage, alone with the books I had read far too many times and with my own vulgar, pretentious poems, with longing to write and the tormenting fear that i couldn’t, that I wouldn’t be able to translate into words what I wanted to bellow into the ears of others: I am here, notice me, I am here, listen to me and understand me even when I’m silent, but you see, Sofia, what isn’t said can’t be understood, people look but don’t understand, they go away, they talk to each other at a distance from us, oblivious to us, and then we feel like a beach in autumn, empty of footprints, on which the sea advances and then retreats with the involuntary motion of a lifeless arm.
What a wonderful atmospheric novel it is. It is written in 1942 and set in Marseille, but it possess this proto-Modiano quality of transience. People What a wonderful atmospheric novel it is. It is written in 1942 and set in Marseille, but it possess this proto-Modiano quality of transience. People searching for those they lost but find someone else instead, gaining new, often false identities, telling each other their stories, melting in the city. But all of them are waiting to leave. And only the lucky ones would. In the deadly shadow of the Nazis their individual fates are decided by absurd and random authorities, endless pointless carousel of ridiculous paperwork. Rarely there is some merciful individual who appeals to sanity and courageous enough to bend the absurd rules.
There are a lot of reasons that this short novel might stay with me. But if there is one message that I find still shockingly and regrettably relevant, it would be this one:
"And what if some of these poor souls , still bleeding physically and spiritually, had fled to this house, what harm could it do to giant nation if a few of these saved souls, worthy, half-worthy, or unworthy, were to join them in their country- how could it possibly harm such a big country?"
It seems it never loses its actuality and this fact hurts. ...more
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