The Man Who Would be King (1888), and other stories by Rudyard Kipling

 

Have I read Kipling before?  I'm sure I did as a child.  Perhaps The Jungle Book, or Puck of Pook's Hill or the Just-So Stories.  Maybe someone read them to me when I had my eye operation in 1959 and wasn't allowed to read for six months. (What purgatory!)

My mother could recite If (1895) by heart, and quoted it often to her three daughters.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

Anyway, what I remember of Rudyard Kipling (1965-1936) is Mowgli and the exotic settings in India, and the tragic story of his only son John being killed in the trenches on his first day - after his father had wangled a commission for him despite John's poor eyesight.   The great writer so closely associated with British imperialism was never the same after that.

The Man Who Would Be King is nowadays a term signifying grandiose ambition, but it comes from this short story of an ordinary man over-reaching himself.  Daniel Dravot is an opportunistic rogue who slips away from the British Raj into the wilds of Afghanistan with his mate Peachey Carnehan.  There they set in place their absurd ambition to be kings and with guile and cunning convince the tribesmen of Kafiristan that they are gods.  The ruse succeeds until Dravot goes too far, and the girl he demands for his pleasure sees through him, not unlike the child who denounces the Emperor who has no clothes. When, in fear of a being she believes to be a god, she bites Dravot and draws blood the game is up.  He dies a gruesome death when the Kafirs cut the ropes of a rope bridge on which he is standing, while Peachey is crucified.  When he is still alive after twenty-four hours, the natives think it is a miracle, and set him free.  When he meets up again with the world-weary narrator he is carrying in his bag Dravot's shrivelled head, complete with crown. He has lost his wits, able only to give a garbled account of events before wandering away, dying shortly thereafter from sunstroke.

The real villain of the story, it seems to me, is the weather which drives men mad.  Kipling recreates the misery of the monsoon and its enervating heat as only the yet-to-be-acclimatised can:

It was a pitchy black night, as stifling as a June night can be, and the loo, the red-hot wind from the westward, was booming among the tinder-dry trees and pretending the rain was on its heels.  Now and again a spot of almost boiling water would fall on the dust with the flop of a frog, but all our weary world knew that was only pretence. (p120, Wordwoth Classics Edition, 1994)

I wasn't planning to read the rest of the stories because the TBR was overwhelming everything else on the bedside table (that's the bedside TBR, a pale imitation of the real TBR in the Library which now stretches to seven shelves) - but the title of Baa Baa Black Sheep in a collection of stories for adults piqued my interest.  It's the story of 'Punch' and Judy, sent from the warm embrace of Mumma and the Ayah to cold and cheerless England and the not-so-loving care of Aunty Rosa and her hideously unforgiving religion.  While Uncle Harry is alive there is some solace, but once he is gone there is only endless spite and cruelty.  Rosa's boy Harry bullies Punch mercilessly, carries tales home from school, incites other boys to beat him and manufactures lies for which Punch gets the blame.  The punishments are so extreme that the boy partially loses his sight, a condition exacerbated by reading to escape his misery.

The story is told from the boy's point of view, charting his blithe optimism and descent into pessimistic misery.  Mumma eventually returns from Bombay and there is restitution and recovery, but the damage is done:

For when young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion, and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge. (p115)

Prescient words in 1888 when very little was known about the effects of abuse on young minds.

Wee Willie Winkie was another title that intrigued me.  It's also told through the eyes of a child but from a very different perspective.  It's about a kind of heroic child beloved by didacts of imperial persuasion in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The child nicknamed Wee Willie Winkie is the precocious son of the Colonel in charge of the 195th Regiment - and he's been brought up with military discipline.  When he's naughty his 'good conduct badge' is removed and on the occasion of his accidental firing of a week's hayfeed, the punishment is extended to include being confined to barracks (the house and verandah).

But when the little fellow sees Miss Allardyce, the beloved of his hero Coppy the subaltern, riding off (for reasons not explained) across the river and out of the safety of the cantonment, he breaks his 'arrest' to rescue her and bring her back - for he knows there are Bad Goblins there.  He is too little to know that the Goblins he's been warned about are lawless Pashtun Afghans, but he knows she is in peril.  When he catches up with her, she has sprained her ankle, and so he sets his pony off with a smack on its rump because he knows it will go home and the alarm will be raised.  And then the Pashtun arrive, with plans for kidnap and ransom (and worse, perhaps, unspoken).

The scene that follows betrays Kipling's imperial arrogance at its worst, and is barely credible.  The little boy, accustomed to ordering natives about, demands that they stop frightening the Miss Sahib and ride for help.  He does this capably because despite his childhood lisp he is fluent in three languages.  Instead of thrashing him and abducting her, they recognise that the boy (born to rule?) is precious to the regiment back in the cantonment and that there will be reprisals from the mighty British Raj if they harm him.  To complete their humiliation, the rescue party arrives in the nick of time and the Pashtun flee.

Now a 'pukka hero' Wee Willie Winkie rejects his nickname, and is henceforth known as Percival William Williams, thereby designating his manhood and his status as an 'officer and a gentleman'....

It's a good thing I didn't read this one first, or I might not have bothered with the others.

Author: Rudyard Kipling
Title: The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories
Publisher: Wordsworth Classics, 1988
ISBN: 9781853262098, pbk., 224 pages
Source: Personal library

© Lisa Hill

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

The Magic Mountain (1924), by Thomas Mann, translated by John E. Woods

 

Well, I've finally finished The Magic Mountain.  I've been reading it for ages, about 70 pages a week, along with a group at GoodReads.  It's an amazing book.

The plot is actually quite simple.  A young man, Hans Castorp, goes to visit his cousin Joachim in an exclusive TB sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, but is diagnosed with the disease himself and ends up staying there for seven years.  The sanatorium is a microcosm of European society just before The Great War - which provides Mann with the opportunity to explore an astonishing range of philosophical issues.  The novel is often satiric and witty, it bristles with ironies, and there are symbols lurking everywhere.  It's the kind of book you could read many times and still discover something new each time you read it.

But I have only read it once, so I must leave the sophisticated analysis to those who have explored it in more depth.  I have taken reams of notes in my journal but (especially when I look at the erudite commentary at one of the GoodReads groups),  I feel as if I have barely scratched the surface of this great classic work.

Some themes interested me more than others: I especially liked the meditations on time.  When Hans arrives at the sanatorium he finds his first day interminable and is puzzled by his cousin's reluctance to acknowledge the duration of his stay.  Joachim, a young man whose military career is on hold because of his illness, is otherwise direct and straightforward, but he responds to any suggestions that Hans will be leaving after three weeks with enigmatic remarks that his stay will inevitably be longer.  His original plans for a short stay have morphed into months and he has entered into a world where long periods of time suspended in a sort of netherworld, have become normal.

Joachim looks healthy but must now stay a further six months.  Hans is alarmed by the calm acceptance of this long suspension of time: his cousin is isolated from normal life, his family and friends, and his promising career. We don't have that much time in life he cries, but Joachim is sanguine: he has become institutionalised already and he accepts the word of his doctors as law.  Three weeks are the same as a day to them he says, and it is the same to him too.  He has drifted into a life where one day merges into another and the months pass by without anyone noticing.  Before long Hans too will dispose of calendars, and eventually not bother to have his watch repaired because the passing of time means nothing.

I was fascinated by Mann's digression about space having the same effect as time.  Space, like time, gives birth to forgetfulness, that is, when we travel to somewhere where we are free from relationships, in a free and pristine state, we forget about responsibilities.  Time, they say, is water from the River Lethe, but alien air is a similar drink, and if its effects are less profound, it works all the more quickly. (p.4) This 'holiday effect' is what lures us into losing all sense of days passing, an effect exacerbated in the jet age when we travel vast distances across space by plane, a phenomenon unknown to Mann.

The structure of the novel plays with time too.  The monotony of Hans' first year at the sanatorium takes up five chapters, but it accelerates after that and the remaining six years whizz through in only two chapters.   What's remarkable is the artfulness of depicting monotony in such a fascinating way!  The reader learns in considerable detail about the rigid routines of the sanatorium, and how much time must be spent in rest and regular meals.  There are very few excursions beyond its walls, and (except for a visit to the Bioscope Theatre), almost no acknowledgment of happenings in the outside world until WW1 looms towards the end.  Despite this, the novel never flags because we become absorbed in this microcosm of society and the philosophical enmities which enliven Hans' coming-of-age in this strange world, marooned in snowy isolation with no responsibilities other than to follow doctor's orders and get well.

(Why did I cross that out?  Because Hans, like most of the other characters, has no ambition to get well.  Bizarre as it seems, he becomes comfortable where he is. About half way through the novel Joachim reminds him that they are there to get healthy, not to learn, but Hans responds by saying that the two are not mutually exclusive.  What he doesn't recognise in himself is that his desire to participate in the intellectual life of this community contributes to making him reluctant to leave it, and he actually feels betrayed when Joachim leaves).

The sequence at the Bioscope explores the idea that newsreels defy time too.  They make the past seem here and now and they are an intrusion that brings the world up into the pristine mountain.

On the screen life flickered before their smarting eyes - all sorts of life, chopped up in hurried, diverting scraps that leapt into fidgety action, lingered, and twitched out of sight in alarm, to the accompaniment of trivial music, which offered present rhythms to match vanishing phantoms from the past and which despite limited means ran the gamut of solemnity, pomposity, passion, savagery, and cooing sensuality. (p. 376)

But when it's over, and the lights go up, and the audience's field of dreams stood before them like an empty blackboard, there was not even the possibility of applause.  There was no one there to clap for, to thank, no artistic achievement to reward with a curtain call. (p. 376) Faces seem to see the audience and wave to them, and yet they are not there.  The Moroccan woman belongs in the then and there of home' and it is pointless to respond. (p.377) The audience feels a 'sense of helplessness' - a sense of anti-climax which some of us still feel today as the television credits roll.

The characters are splendid.  The two most important are Settembrini and Naptha.  These mutually hostile characters introduce the impressionable Hans to competing ideologies, but in his maturity when the Dionysian Peeperkorn comes along, Hans is able to see that their abstractions are mutually destructive, and not just because Settembrini and Naptha end up in a bizarre duel.  These characters are embodiments of intellectual debates around modernity: Settembrini (who reminds me of Milton's Satan in tone) represents the Enlightenment, and champions humanism, democracy, and human rights.  Naptha is a radical Marxist Jew who has a Jesuitical approach to right and wrong but is pro terrorism in what he thinks is the right cause, and he supports totalitarianism because he despises the common man.  In his joustings with Settembrini he seems intellectually more rigorous but he is intolerant, and a hypocrite, living a life of luxury further down he mountain rather than put up with the Spartan existence at the sanatorium.  (Settembrini lives down the mountain too, but he lives in a shabby garret).  Peeperkorn is the one who enlivens proceedings: he becomes Hans' rival for the quixotic affections of Madame Chauchat.  An older, unattractive but very wealthy man, he's a party animal, and he trumps Hans, encouraging him to 'seize the day' as it were, instead of going into raptures about symbolic loans of a pencil or fantasising about the glimpse of an arm.   But Hans never gets to live his life to the full: his coming-of-age coincides with the slaughter of World War 1 and we never see him as a mature individual because he ends up as one of millions of anonymous conscripts on the battlefield, an insignificant component in the first mechanised war.

It's very hard to write about this magnificent book without seeming reductive.  I have no doubt that in universities across the world, there are 5000 word essays and PhDs about single elements of this book.  In addition to the themes to which I have so sketchily alluded above, The Magic Mountain ranges across

• Meditations on illness and death: while the reader is spared little about the grubbiness of TB, death in the sanatorium is generally remote.  Everyone is in denial about it.  Until Hans starts visiting the dying later in the book (Chapter 5), the dying are isolated and the other patients see only rare glimpses of the horror.  The bodies are whisked away and the rooms are fumigated.  (Indeed,  another sanatorium further up the mountain briskly disposes of its bodies down the mountain by bob-sled). The medicos say that what matters is to have a dignified death and one should not make a fuss, but Hans rejects this.  He thinks that a dying man is entitled to respect, and he likes the solemnity of Latin for death ceremonials.  (The irony of this becomes clear when Hans meets his own death on the battlefield).  However, the heading 'Danse Macabre' alerts the reader to the fact that Hans is not being a 'ministering angel' but rather is seeking out death and behaving more like an 'Angel of Death' with Joachim as his loyal but unenthusiastic companion.  Mann also uses a couple of characters to discuss the morality of paying or not paying for expensive treatments.  The penniless Karen Karstedt is 'adopted' by Hans and Joachim because her family has given up on her survival, while The Horseman beggars his wife and family by insisting on expensive oxygen treatments that are only staving off the inevitable.
• (Echoing the theme in Buddenbrooks, see my review) the death of the family as a social institution and the loss of its traditions (symbolised by the Castorp baptismal bowl which has no heir because Hans is the last of the line;
• The emergence of psychoanalysis, scorned at first by Hans but later becoming part of his regimen.  Hans is not aware of just how much the circumstances of his early life has influenced his behaviour and attitudes.
• The breakdown of national borders, symbolised by the multi-ethnic patients of the sanatorium, stereotyped by Hans until, for example, he joins the 'noisy' Russians at their table.  (Hans is affronted by the noisy passions of Russians in the room next to him: sex - although a major preoccupation - is definitely off-stage in this book).  Some nationalities are excluded entirely from the social and intellectual life of the sanatorium by monolingualism,  (e.g. the Spanish woman who is known as Tous-les-deux because this is all she can say, having no French or German) while others participate freely using French and English as a lingua franca.
• Bourgeois society and class differentiation: These language differences are related to levels of education, and thus to class.  Hans is forced to mix with people outside his own class, and he revels in mocking Frau Stöhr as an illiterate who mispronounces her words and makes comic malapropisms.  He despises Dr Krakowski's footwear as a betrayal of good taste, and poor dear, this rather indulged dilettante who takes a comfortable life for granted feels that he bears the 'burden of civilisation', as the upper classes do.  (Mann has an affectionate tone towards his central character, but Hans has flaws: he is indolent, he is complacent, and he is a bit of a drinker, with a well-established habit of drinking porter far too early in the morning.  He is also mildly pompous, and he has a strong tendency to judge others using superficialities.)   Hans initially takes walks to avoid having to mix with people not to his taste, but he soon finds that this tires him out.
• Love and Sex: Hans is shocked when he attends lectures by Dr Krakowski’s lecture on love - he's never heard the like in mixed company, but gosh! he finds himself distracted by Madame Chauchat's arm.  Many of Mann's characters are not attractive (e.g. Madame C has ugly hands and nails) and they are not romanticised: all of them suffer unappealing aspects of having TB, ranging from grotty coughing and wheezing to flushed faces and mealy complexions.  But there are liaisons, and although he finds Madame C 'vulgar', Hans is enamoured (as is Joachim of Marusja). Their courtships, however, (if they can be called that), are chaste and glacial.  For Hans and Madame C, it consists of looking at, and not looking at each other, with nothing happening for two-or-three days at a time.  It is a Big Deal when in the X-ray room, she finally asks him a question about how long they might have to wait, and an Even Bigger Moment when their paths intersect on a walk, and gosh, he gets to say 'excuse me'.  For Joachim, it consists of nothing at all until it's all too late.
• Music permeates the novel, signified by in-house performances by the patients emulating a soirée, and by the gramophone which defies the need for performance to bring music to any place, any time.  There are numerous references to classical and romantic composers, especially Verdi and Wagner, and mournful songs by Schubert.  There are also possible allusions to the impressionist composer Debussy, see Wikipedia for some discussion of this.  Music is an 'opiate' that dulls the desire to leave and Settembrini always comes late to performances to maintain the illusion that he is free to choose whether to come or not.  What I thought was rather droll was the way Hans appropriated control of the newly arrived gramophone - so like the way our menfolk like to have control of the TV remote!
• References to aspects of German culture which were unfamiliar to me.  The dream sequences, fantasies and grotesque carnival scenes are Faustlike, but I haven't read it yet, (and somehow have always missed the opera when it's in season) so I probably missed heaps of allusions.  But I did pick up on allusions that derive from Grimm's Fairy Tales: Hans's quest to learn the first name of Madame Chauchat is an allusion to Rumplestiltskin, and the frequent references to opulent meals (five-per-day, with luxurious courses described in detail) is an allusion to Table-Be-Set, (and also put me in mind of The Magic Pudding though I am quite sure Mann wasn't thinking of it!).  Even the way Hans travels up the snowy mountain to the sanatorium is a reminder of all those fairy stories where a young man climbs up a mountain to a castle where his quest towards manhood involves all kinds of perils, but Mann's naïve Hans is not the well-known trickster 'Clever Hans', not at all.
• Institutionalisation: Settembrini is alarmed by signs that Hans is succumbing early.  Patients undertake their mandatory rest periods wrapped up in a special way, and when Hans goes to buy a blanket to do this too, it is as if he is 'nesting', settling in, mollycoddling himself against the cold because he's preparing to stay.  This blanketing is also symbolic of Hans immobilising himself, protecting himself from being able to leave the closed world that he has voluntarily entered.

Much of The Magic Mountain could be read (as Wikipedia says) as a coming-of-age story or a parody of it, because the immature Castorp leaves his home and learns about art, culture, politics, human frailty and love. For all its complexity, it's actually quite easy to read.  But what happens over the time it takes to read it (and it's 850+ pages long), is that the ironies start to emerge, the motifs begin to reveal themselves, and the symbolism starts to become apparent.  Then what happens, inevitably, is that one begins to realise - just from re-reading bits of it when prompted by something - that there is so much more to discover about it.  This includes the possibility that new arrivals are not actually ill at all, but might rather be seduced into staying by the exploitative Dr Berghof and the sanatorium industry, so that - TB being a communicable disease - they eventually become infected.

But this post is already much too long so I shall stop now!

Author: Thomas Mann
Title: The Magic Mountain
Translated by John E. Woods
Introduction by A.S.Byatt
Publisher: Everyman Library, Alfred A. Knopf, 2005
ISBN: 9781857152890
Source: Personal copy

© Lisa Hill

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

The Last Summer (1934), by Boris Pasternak, translated by George Reavey

 

The Last Summer is only 90-odd pages long in my Penguin Modern Classics edition of 1960, but it's more than a short story.  Titled Povest (A Tale) when first published in 1934, it's not listed among Boris Pasternak's works in the Russian edition of Wikipedia, suggesting that perhaps the original was never published in the USSR as a separate title. (As far as I can tell, that is, using Google Translate's word сказка meaning fairy tale, fable or story).  Maybe Povest was published in a journal or a collection, and only published separately as a book when it was translated in 1959 by George Reavey and published by Peter Owen in the afterglow of Pasternak's Nobel Prize in 1959.

The first thing to say about the introduction by Pasternak's sister Lydia Slater is that it's more about legacy-building than about clarifying the story.  There are a great many superlatives, and she quotes V.S. Pritchett as saying it is a concerto in prose. She says its central theme is poetry, the essence of which is the suffering woman.

Well, maybe it is.  She was at Oxford in 1960, which was the year of Pasternak's death, though I do not know whether when the book went to print he had already died (of lung cancer, see the cigar in his hand in his father's sketch on the book's cover?)  People who read Russian may well agree with her comparison of his work with Tolstoy's. But those of us reading the book now, knowing all the weight of Soviet history and the constraints under which he wrote, and making do with the English translation, may beg to differ. Because to me, The Last Summer seems to be—thematically—more than about poetry.

Slater's florid assertions to protect Pasternak's status as a great poet may be because she would have been well aware of Soviet outrage about Doctor Zhivago and the CIA's machinations to ensure that Pasternak got the Nobel Prize.  She would have known that Pasternak's wife and daughter were vulnerable to retaliation for Dr Zhivago reaching the west (see Wikipedia re their prompt despatch to the Gulags after his death).  Even from the safety of Oxford, it would have been imprudent for Slater to point out any veiled anti-Soviet allusions in The Last Summer. 

And they are there, though it takes close reading to find them, in a book difficult to comprehend because it is so clouded by reminiscences loosely interwoven, cutting into each other, brilliant descriptions of people, situations, thunderstorms, and thoughts. I started it three times before I took out my journal and began making copious notes and slowly got the drift of it.  By the look of the two- and three-star reviews at Goodreads, most readers struggle with it too.

The Last Summer is bookended by Serezha's return from Moscow to his sister Natasha's house in Ousolie in 1916, a heavily polluted salt-mining place not even granted town status until 1925.  This date is significant, because it's (prudently) before the October Revolution in 1917, but after the failed one of 1905.  Natasha is depicted as having believed in the aims of the 1905 revolution and as far as she is concerned the revolution has only been postponed. Here she is:

Like all of them, Natasha believed that the most demanding cause of her youth had merely been postponed and that, when the hour struck, it would not pass her by.  This belief explained all the faults of Natasha's character.  It explained her self-assurance, which was softened only by her complete ignorance of her defect.  It also explained those traits of Natasha's aimless righteousness and all-forgiving understanding, which inwardly illuminated her with an inexhaustible light and which yet did not correspond with anything in particular.  (p.32)

Natasha, in other words, has no idea what she is in for.  (Pasternak, writing in 1934, had by this time, seen Lenin come and go, and had time to see the Soviet state in action.  Russia was becoming industrialised, the consequent crisis of agricultural distribution had failed to be ameliorated by collectivisation, and he had witnessed the acquisition of private homes and subsequent overcrowding that he writes about so well in Doctor Zhivago).

Serezha is exhausted by his journey from Moscow and slopes off to bed.  But he cannot sleep due to the tumult of his thoughts.  The narrator intrudes here to explain why the story absents itself from Ousolie:

...sleep still declined to visit him.  It so happened that it was the summer of 1914 which had crept up, and this upset all his calculations.  It was impossible to gaze upon that summer, sucking in its soporific clarity through clouded eyes: instead it made him think, and pass from one remembrance to another. For this reason, we too shall absent ourselves for a long time from this flat in Ousolie. (p.29)

In other words, reflecting on that summer makes one think. The implication is that it's good to escape the both the present of the novella (1916) and the present (1934) when Pasternak is writing it.  The reader is invited to indulge nostalgic thoughts about 1914, and not just about Serezha's adventures in Moscow with women.  Anyone in Russia reading this would connect the summer of 1914 as an idyll before the launch of the first offensive against Germany in August (under Tsar Nicholas) and its disastrous consequences.  By 1916 (as elsewhere in the world) enthusiasm for the stalemated war had waned, and no wonder.  We hear very little about WW1 losses in Russia, though they were allies against Germany in both world wars.

The losses Russia suffered in the world war were catastrophic. Between 900,000 and 2,500,000 Russians were killed. At least 1,500,000 Russians and possibly up to more than 5 million Russians were wounded. Nearly 4,000,000 Russian soldiers were held as POWs (Britain, France and Germany had 1.3 million POWs combined).

Economically Russia was devastated. 8,000,000,000 rubles in war debts were outstanding, strangling the national economy of its breath. Inflation soared; the gold reserves (then backing the currency) were nearly empty, revenues were exceedingly low while reconstruction costs were huge. Russia was on the verge of complete collapse.  (Glossary of Events WW1-Russia, viewed 7/11/18)

By the coming of winter 1916 when Serezha is back home with Natasha, he has had to do the national service that he had preferred not to think about—and has been discharged wounded.  He is lucky his leg has healed well.  Pasternak makes no mention of the fact that in 1916 there was unrest all over Russia as workers, peasants and soldiers, remained in unwavering support of ending the war. Thousands were arrested. He didn't need to.  He and his Soviet readers would have known that it was in the wake of this unrest that the Soviets took power in the October Revolution which led to the Soviet decree of peace in October 1917.  An entente not recognised, as we all know, by the Western powers who fought on till November 1918. (Glossary of Events WW1-Russia, viewed 7/11/18).

How do we know that Serezha was dreading his national service?  It's easy to miss: Serezha is reminiscing about his joyful release from study when his exams are done.  He sallies into the street with a leaping smile and all too easily gets a congenial position as a tutor in a wealthy family.  On his first walk on a sunny day in the Smotekh district he encounters two men: one is Kovalenko, and the reader's antennae are alert because he is a newspaper editor and there is discussion about a story which Serezha claims to be writing (but hasn't actually done so, creating his imaginary story in his head as he walks on).  Ah, autobiographical elements, thinks the reader, perhaps overlooking the other meeting.  But the other man Serezha sees on this walk is one of two brothers he had recently met, the younger one who had told him that on finishing the Commercial school, he must do his army service, but he was not sure whether to volunteer or wait for his call-up. Serezha sees now that this brother is wearing the uniform of a volunteer, and in embarrassment (only partly because he doesn't know the man's family name), he only nods to him across the street.  Serezha does not want even to think about doing his national service, and the narrative scampers on. But this non-meeting turns out to be important to the culmination of the story...

At left: Boris Pasternak in his youth (Wikipedia, Russian edition, photo credit*)

Serezha reminisces about his work as a tutor in Moscow, and ponders his dreams of having so much money that he can indulge his philanthropic ambitions to improve the lot of women.  He intends that the women to whom he gives these mythical millions will Do The Right Thing and pass it on to others, continuing the good work of redistribution.  Is this a sly criticism that the Soviet recipients of redistribution of wealth and property did not always pass it on but hung on to it for themselves?

Pasternak as you can see from his photo was a bit of a dish, and it seems that his character Serezha was too.  Noble as his ambitions towards women are, Serezha also explores the professional bed of at least one prostitute, and has a dalliance with his employer's companion which leads to her dismissal but not his.  The Last Summer is full of sharp social observations like this.

Most bizarre is the story that Serezha finally writes. Desperately short of money and wary of borrowing even small sums even from an honest source because of the example of Raskolnikov, he decides to chase up the editor Kovalenko and begins outlining his plot in the letter.  He becomes so absorbed in the writing that he forgets a vital assignation with his lady love, and pours out his story, switching from letter paper to quarto, thus symbolising his transition to real writing...

The story is about a young man in need of money and so auctions himself off as a slave.  The people of his town think it's a joke and spurn it publicly but they all turn up to the auction anyway.  The man's name is irrelevant since he is about to hand over the power of life and death to his owner, but he is given the name Mr Y by Serezha.  The auctioneer is a loyal friend who doesn't really believe any of this is serious. Mr Y plays astonishingly well on the piano, and he mesmerises the room with his readings of blank verse.  He then rises and tells them that they do not love him enough and that he must go through with the auction and make himself a commodity of exchange.  He falls to the bid of a philanthropist but it is not at once that this man allows him his freedom...

Am I drawing a long bow when I interpret this as suggesting that the Soviets did not love their artists, writers and musicians enough to protect them from slavery in the Gulags?

This book, as I said at the outset, is less than 100 pages long.  I reckon there's a PhD in unpacking all the fascinating snippets in it.

Oh, and Pasternak does write stunning metaphors.  Mrs Fresteln's companion always smiles at Serezha like an accomplice.  A stifling summer day is a week in-week out stagnating day which had not been hauled away to the police station. A file of empty cabs ascended toward the evening sky like the backbone of some fabled and only just flayed vertebrate and previous tenants in Mrs Fresteln's mansion were welcomed back for the summer like dear corpses miraculously restored to the bosom of the family.  

Author: Boris Pasternak
Title: The Last Summer
Translated from the Russian by George Reavey
Introduction by Lydia Slater
Publisher: Penguin Modern Classics, 1960, (1967 reprint), first published in the USSR as Povest (A Tale) in 1934
No ISBN
Source: personal library, OpShopFind.

Image credit: https://www.liveinternet.ru/tags/%E1%EE%F0%E8%F1+%EF%E0%F1%F2%E5%F0%ED%E0%EA/, Общественное достояние, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16547396

© Lisa Hill

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

The Knight (2008), a short story by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft

Well, it's not often I get to read the work of a Nobel Prize winning author the day after she is awarded the prize! 'The Knight' is a short story by Olga Tokarczuk and translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft.  This is the blurb from Words without Borders: 

I subscribe to a site called Words without Borders, a source of very interesting writing from all sort of sources.  Today, their newsletter contained a short story by Olga Tokarczuk, familiar to many readers for her novel Drive Your Plow [sic] Over the Bones of the Dead, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones or House of Day, House of Night which was shortlisted for the IMPAC Literary Award.  But #FailingToKeepUp I haven't read either of these, so I was pleased to have a chance to catch up a little bit...

Olga Tokarczuk, who first appeared in our pages in 2005 with an excerpt from her wrenching tale of wartime survival, Final Stories, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. She then returned in 2008 with this short story, "The Knight," translated by Jennifer Croft. Tokarczuk's explorations of relationships under pressure, whether political or internal, combine a keen sense of character with a sure hand at narrative to capture the essence of humanity. As a couple's alienation plays out over a chessboard, Tokarczuk's deft portrayal of feints and attacks maps a marriage at stalemate.

The opening lines with that single word 'snatched' show the reader where the story is going from the outset:

At first she tried struggling with the locks, but they were obviously not in sync, because when she managed to turn the key in one of them, the other stayed locked—and vice versa. The wind came in gusts off the sea, winding her wool scarf around her face. Finally he set down both bags in the driveway and snatched the keys out of her hand. He managed to get the door open immediately.

Next thing, he's ticking her off for sweeping the sand off the deck. He has decided they won't be using it at that time of the year, and he has decided that he's the one who gets to decide, and he's the one who gets to tell her what she should be doing.

He puts the TV on immediately, and she protests and wants to say something else as well—but she doesn't.

Though the reader's sympathies lie with the woman because we know more about her inner thoughts, she annoys him too.  He hates it when she smokes, and he doesn't say anything.  Because though their marriage is stale, and their irritability levels are high, there's enough good will to try and make their first night at the beach house a good one, so they don't risk the second bottle of wine and they play chess. She lets him win, and he knows she let him.  They decide to play a more serious game, one that might last for days...

In 6000+ words, the story plays out over their walks on the beach, the loss of the knight from the chessboard, and their inconclusive night together in bed.  Their mutual hostilities have causes big and small, but the most telling, I thought, was her dislike of the way he photographs her all the time, objectifying her and not really seeing her as a person.

There's not much in this story to show why Tokarczuk is a Nobel laureate.  #DuckingForCover Stories of marriages bad, mad or sad, are a bit of yawn IMO, and they're all much like each other.  The Nobel citation reads 'for a narrative imagination that with encyclopaedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.' I'm not entirely sure that I know what that means, but one day when I get round to reading one of her books, I might find out!

If you would like to read The Knight too, follow this link to Words without Borders (and subscribe to their site while you're at it).

The Inheritors (1955), by William Golding

 The Inheritors is an astonishing novel.  I picked it up from the library shelves on the strength of William Golding's name because Lord of the Flies (see Jennifer's review) is unforgettable and Pincher Martin took my breath away.  But even so, the imaginative power of The Inheritors floored me.  I've never read anything like it.

This is the blurb:

When the spring came the people - what was left of them - moved back by the old paths from the sea. But this year strange things were happening, terrifying things that had never happened before. Inexplicable sounds and smells; new, unimaginable creatures half glimpsed through the leaves. Seen through the eyes of a small tribe of Neanderthals whose world is hanging in the balance, The Inheritors explores the emergence of a new race — ourselves, Homo sapiens — whose growing dominance threatens an entire way of life.

I had thought that this was going to be a kind of First Contact book, and in some ways it is. But what I had not expected was that Golding tells the story through beings so like and yet unlike ourselves, that the narration is like reading not just a language that I only poorly understand but of a being who does not think as we do.  Golding has not just imagined a language which, as John Carey says in the Introduction, incorporates gesture, dance and a kind of telepathy, but also a different way of thinking.  The small, fragile band of Neanderthals think in pictures which they can share; they scent like animals do; but they can't connect thoughts or sequence ideas.  Carey explains it better than I can:

The greatness of The Inheritors does not depend, however, on Golding imagining what Neanderthals might have been like.  It depends on the language he fashions to express it.  He accepts the colossal stylistic challenge of seeing everything from a Neanderthal point of view.  By feats of language that are at first bewildering he takes us inside a being whose senses, especially smell and hearing, are acute, but who cannot connect sensations into a train of thought.  This is a being whose awareness is a stream of metaphors and for whom everything is alive.  Intricate verbal manoeuvres force us to share the adventures — and the pathos and the tragedy — of a consciousness that is fearless, harmless, loving, minutely observant and incapable of understanding anything.  (John Carey, Introduction, p xi)

This, in Chapter One, shows the reaction to a log bridge rotting in the middle and floating away:

The onyx marsh water was spread before them, widening into the river.  The trail along by the river began again on the other side on ground that rose until it was lost in the trees.  Lok, grinning happily, took two paces towards the water and stopped.  The grin faded and his mouth opened till the lower lip hung down. Liku slid to his knee then dropped to the ground.  She put the little Oa's head to her mouth and looked over her.

Lok laughed uncertainly.

"The log has gone away."

He shut his eyes and frowned at the picture of the log.  It had lain in the water from this side to that, grey and rotting.  When you trod the centre you could feel the water that washed beneath you, horrible water, as deep in places as a man's shoulder.  The water was not awake like the river or the fall but asleep, spreading there to the river and waking up, stretching on the right into wildernesses of impassable swamp and thicket and bog.  So sure was he of this log the people always used that he opened his eyes again, beginning to smile as if he were waking out of a dream; but the log was gone. (p.2)

Ha is more thoughtful than Lok, the man for an emergency, but when Fa and Nil share a picture of what Ha is thinking, it was this:

He had thought that he must make sure the log was still in position because if the water had taken the log or if the log had crawled off on business of its own then the people would have to trek a day's journey round the swamp and that meant danger or even more discomfort than usual. (p.4)

Only the elderly shaman Mal has a solution, retrieving a childhood picture from his mind.  It is not like remembering: it is just an image of a 'wise man' who 'makes men take a tree that has fallen.' But he cannot convey this image to the others.  They follow his instructions blindly.

So you can just imagine their bewilderment and admiration when they encounter Homo Sapiens with his paraphernalia of trinkets and tools.  The Neanderthals have not made the evolutionary steps towards inventing containers so they can't carry or store food and water.  They can't make fire, only carry it and protect it when lightning strikes start it.  They have no tools, except a stick to convey food to Mal's mouth when he is so ill he must be fed.  But the new people not only have pots for food and water, and fire to cook with, they also have clothes, and necklaces to confer status, and they can make paintings on the rock walls.  And — unfortunately for the Neanderthals — they also have spears, bows and arrows for hunting.

And as we saw in Golding's merciless depiction of savagery in Lord of the Flies, these new people already have no compunction about taking what they want and killing the innocent...

William Golding won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983.

Author: William Golding
Title: The Inheritors
Introduction by John Carey
Cover illustration by Neil Gower
Publisher: Faber and Faber, 2011, 223 pages, first published 1955,
ISBN: 9780571273584
Source: Kingston Library

© Lisa Hill

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

The Immoralist (1902), by André Gide, translated by Dorothy Bussy

 

1001 Books begins its summary of The Immoralist like this:

A thought-provoking book that still has the power to challenge complacent attitudes and unfounded cultural assumptions, The Immoralist recounts a young Parisian man's attempt to overcome social and sexual conformity. (1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, ABC Books 2006, p.241)

The novella is prefaced by an attempt to explain that the 'problem' of the book existed before it was written.  It is then book-ended at the beginning by a pseudo-letter to the Prime Minister that asks what role in society a young man like the hero might have... and completed by that same friend's awkward conclusion after the hero's story has been told.  That story is narrated by Michel, who starts out as an austere young scholar and ends up as a defiant hedonist.

The translation, by Dorothy Bussy, uses the term 'hero' in the preface.  But it does not seem to me that there is anything heroic about Michel.

BEWARE: SPOILERS

Michel's mother died when he was fifteen, and he was only twenty-four when he married Marceline to please his dying father.  He says at the outset that he does not love her.  Marceline is a devout Catholic—whose role in the novel is to be a devoted and uncomplaining wife—and she saves Michel's life on their honeymoon in Tunisia when he has his first haemorrhage from undiagnosed TB. This experience makes him re-evaluate his life, and sets him on a path towards pleasure.

And suddenly I was seized with a desire, a craving, something more furious and more imperious than I had ever felt before—to live! I want to live! I will live. I clenched my teeth, my hands, concentrated my whole being in this wild, grief-stricken endeavour towards existence. (p.29)

Through Marceline's attentive care, and his own determination to recover, he begins to recuperate and finds himself enjoying the company of Arab children.  Though nothing is explicit, frequent references to bare skin makes it clear that a sensual attraction to these boys is emerging.  There is a curious incident with Moktir, who he sees stealing Marceline's scissors.  Michel says and does nothing to reprove him, and in a sign that his moral compass is beginning to shift, Moktir becomes his favourite.

(We do not judge novels from 1902 by the moral standards of today, but we note that these are boys not of the same age as Michel, and his money and status in a French colonial society makes for unequal power relations between them.)

At the same time Michel begins to notice how pretty Marceline is, and he pays more attention to her.  They have, however, still not consummated their marriage.

Michel's rejection of bourgeois life and the trappings of society becomes clearer when he returns to Europe. They travel through Italy, where Michel realises that he has lost interest in his field of expertise, classical history.  By abandoning austerity to indulge only his sensual appetites, he has alienated himself from his education, his family values, and European culture.

While his father was alive, he had lived a simple life and did not even realise that they were wealthy.  But his inheritance comes with certain obligations including attention to the family estate, La Morinière in Normandy.  This estate is managed by an ageing man called Bocage whose loyalty and honesty have been unquestioned.  Michel, however, becomes attracted to his son, Charles, who persuades him that his father's ways are old-fashioned.  Michel's behaviour becomes bizarre when he moves on from allowing Charles to make some changes, to indulging his desire to be closer to the earth and the people who work it, to the detriment of the farm and its income.  He allows the sloppy team that does the annual tree-lopping to leave the job unfinished so that new growth is sabotaged; he joins Bocage's son Alcide in poaching from his own land while at the same time requiring Bocage to catch the poachers; and he interferes with the management of the tenant farmers so that they end up leaving and the untended farm becomes worthless.

The couple return to Paris and though the inheritance is diminishing, they take very expensive rooms and live in luxury.

Marceline, meanwhile, has been neglected, but when Michel belatedly notices that she has become ill, he rushes her off the alps where the clear air brings some improvement.  Alas for Marceline, his boredom resurfaces, and they embark on travels in Europe and North Africa which bring her nothing but bad food, poor hotels, exhaustion and exacerbation of her condition.  Reading this section reminds the reader that Michel has recovered from his TB due to attentive care and good management of his condition.  His selfish hedonism and distaste for her symptoms means that when she contracts the same disease, her prognosis is entirely different.

Reading the concluding pages also reminded me of the selfish behaviour of John Middleton Murry, that I read about in Kathleen Jones' bio Katherine Mansfield, Storyteller. Murry's insistence on living in England forced Katherine Mansfield to return to its perilous weather when really, she needed to be nurtured in a more benign climate on the continent.  The descriptions of Mansfield's struggle for breath and her constant haemorrhages towards the end of her tragic life were in my mind as I read about Marceline.

The reason for Gide's semi-apologetic preface becomes clearer as the narrative deteriorates into self-pity.  Michel's freedom from bourgeois constraints and conventional morality has trapped him in a spiral of loss, and with Marceline's death he has nothing to live for and no one to care about him except for these friends to whom in extremis he has turned.

What frightens me, I admit, is that I am still very young. It seems to me sometimes that my real life has not begun. Take me away from here and give me some reason for living. I have none left. I have freed myself. That may be. But what does it signify? This objectless liberty is a burden to me. (p.157)

But the unnamed friend has his doubts:

...we each of us had a strange feeling of uneasiness.  We felt, alas, that by telling his story, Michel had made his action more legitimate.  Our not having known at what point to condemn it in the course of his long explanation seemed almost to make us his accomplices.  We felt, as it were, involved.  He finished his story without a quaver in his voice, without an inflection or a gesture to show that he was feeling any emotion whatever; he might have had a cynical pride in not appearing moved or a kind of shyness that made him afraid or arousing emotion in us by his tears, or he might not in fact have been moved.  Even now I cannot guess what proportions pride, strength, reserve and want of feeling were combined in him.  (p.157)

As 1001 Books concludes:

Michel's attempt to access a deeper truth by repudiating culture, decency and morality results in confusion and loss.  In being true to himself, Michel has harmed others.  Yet the novel remains as much an indictment of the arbitrary constraints of a hypocritical society as it is of Michel's behaviour. (1001 Books, p.241)

That letter to the Prime Minister makes more sense when we realise that Michel is going to need a job because he's gone through his entire fortune.

The dilemma, to which 1001 Books refers when suggesting that the book has the power to challenge complacent attitudes and unfounded cultural assumptions, is that most contemporary readers would support Michel's discovery of a life beyond the confines mapped out by his father, including exploring his own sexuality and making friendships outside his own class.  The problem is that he goes too far: he exploits and then cruelly neglects his wife; he takes advantage of boys too young to exercise any real choice; and he destroys a working farm that provided income to people more vulnerable to poverty than he is.  This is distasteful, but Gide had his reasons for framing it this way.  As it says at Wikipedia:

Gide exposes to public view the conflict and eventual reconciliation of the two sides of his personality (characterized by a Protestant austerity and a transgressive sexual adventurousness, respectively), which a strict and moralistic education had helped set at odds. Gide's work can be seen as an investigation of freedom and empowerment in the face of moralistic and puritanical constraints, and centres on his continuous effort to achieve intellectual honesty. His self-exploratory texts reflect his search of how to be fully oneself, including owning one's sexual nature, without at the same time betraying one's values. (André Gide page, Wikipedia, viewed 17/1/21)

Author: André Gide

Title: The Immoralist (L'Immoraliste)

Publisher: Penguin Modern Classics, 1960, 1986 reprint, first published in 1902

ISBN: 9780140014976, pbk., 159 pages

Source: personal library, OpShopFind

© Lisa Hill

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

 

The Bridge on the Drina (1945, Bosnian Trilogy #1) by Ivo Andrić, translated by Lovett F. Edwards

 

Another title from 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die!

The Bridge on the Drina, by Nobel Prize winning author Ivo Andrić (1892-1975), is also listed on 'The World's Required Reading List at TEDEd' compiled from books assigned to students around the world, and I've also seen it reviewed at the Global Literature in Libraries blog.

As 1001 Books says, it's more a chronicle than a novel, organised into vignettes describing the life of the local population in Bosnia and Herzegovina and its transformations over the centuries. It's also rather a melancholy experience to read it, because the metaphor of the bridge as a symbol of coexistence, as depicted in the front cover image by Wiktor Sadowski, collapses under the weight of recent history.

(I wouldn't be the only Australian who didn't know where Bosnia was until the Bosnian War (1992-95) erupted.  But I learned fast.  In the 1990s I taught refugee Bosnian children who had fled dreadful experiences, and long afterwards I was still having to deal with unacceptable hostilities towards them from Serbian children in the playground.)

The book begins with the building of the bridge during the 16th-century Ottoman Empire, and ends with World War I, when it was partially destroyed.  For three centuries the bridge is cherished by the villagers as a gift of Mehmed-paša Sokolović, the Grand Vezir, a man who—in forced tribute to the Sultan—was taken as a boy from his Christian family, forced to convert to Islam, given a Turkish name, and served three Sultans during his lifetime.  When he rose to great power in the Sultan's court, he sought to assuage the pain that had never left him, by building a magnificent bridge in his homeland.

Designed by the Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan, the bridge was a marvel of engineering and until the funding for it ran out in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire, it boasted a caravanserai (a roadside inn) as a focal point for drinking and gossiping.  But the building of it was fraught with tension, and Andrić does not spare the reader the violence that was used on the hapless forced labourers who built it.  Legends of children walled up inside it are remembered along with the gruesome torture and death of a man thought to be a saboteur.

Andrić's genius lies in his brilliant juxtapositions of humanity at its best and its worst.  There is a story about a man whose high ambitions for his beautiful daughter are compromised by his own vanity.  She, unable to contemplate a marriage beneath her yet unable to defy the father she loves, throws herself off the bridge after the ceremony so that she can be true to herself and yet not humiliate him.

Peasants and shopkeepers alike, can be wily and foolish, diligent and lazy, or clever and ignorant.  They work hard and prosper, or they gamble away everything they have.  There is a great of intemperate drinking, and a general lack of enthusiasm for change.  As the years roll by, they weather new imperial ambitions culminating in the Austro-Hungarian Occupation, accommodating some impositions but struggling with others.

In truth the peasants too found it hard to grow accustomed to the railway.  They made use of it, but could not feel at ease with it and could not understand its ways and habits.  They would come down from the mountains at the first crack of dawn, reaching the town about sunrise, and by the time they reached the first shops they would begin asking everyone they met:

'Has the machine gone?'

'By your life and health, neighbour, it has gone long ago,' the idle shopkeepers lied heartlessly.

'Really gone?'

'No matter.  There'll be another tomorrow.'

They asked everyone without stopping for a moment, hurrying onwards and shouting at their wives and children who lagged behind.

They arrived at the station running.  One of the railwaymen reassured them and told them that they had been misinformed and there were still three good hours before the departure of the train.  Then they recovered their breath and sat down along the walls of the station buildings, took out their breakfasts, ate them, and chatted or dozed, but remained continually alert.  Whenever they heard the whistle of some goods engine they would leap to their feet and bundle up their things together, shouting:

'Get up! Here comes the machine!'

The station official on the platform cursed them and drove them out again:

'Didn't I just tell you that it was more than three hours before the train comes?  What are you rushing for?  Have you taken leave of your senses?'

They went back to their old places and sat down once more, but still suspicious and distrustful. (pp. 213-4)

But though the pages flow easily through the centuries, like an evil thread, the tensions between Christians, Muslims and Jews erupt from time to time.  And the story ends with the assassination of the Crown Prince as the catalyst for the destruction of the bridge, summarised best at Wikipedia:

In June 1914, Bosnian Serb student Gavrilo Princip assassinates Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, setting off a chain of events that lead to the outbreak of World War I. Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia, and the local authorities begin to incite Višegrad's non-Serb population against the town's Serb residents. The bridge with the old road to Sarajevo suddenly regains its importance, as the railway line is not adequate to transport all the materiel and soldiers who are preparing to attack Serbia in the autumn of 1914. Austria-Hungary's invasion is swiftly repulsed and the Serbians advance across the Drina, prompting the Austro-Hungarians to evacuate Višegrad and destroy portions of the bridge.

Ivo Andrić's Nobel Prize citation reads "for the epic force with which he has traced themes and depicted human destinies drawn from the history of his country", and indeed, that is just what Andrić does in this unforgettable story.

Author: Ivo Andrić
Title: The Bridge on the Drina
Translated by Lovett F. Edwards
Front cover image by Wiktor Sadowski, design by Joan Sommers
Introduction by William H. McNeill
Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1977, first published 1945
ISBN: 9780226020457, pbk., 314 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from the Book Depository

© Lisa Hill

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

The Aunt’s Story (1948), by Patrick White,

 

This review is in two parts, from my first reading of the novel in 2005, and then my second thoughts after reading David Marr's biography of Patrick White. 

7th September, 2005

 I first read The Aunt's Story years ago, perhaps when I was at university, and my recollection was that it was more accessible than The Tree of Man.  Perhaps so, but not as an audio book?  I really liked Part I, which retraces Theodora's childhood and girlhood, but Part II in the Hotel Jardin d'Exotique, and Part III in America was very hard to follow.

BEWARE: SPOILERS (though anybody reading PW for the plot is going to be disappointed).

It begins when Theodora Goodman, unmarried aunt to Lou, which is a role she likes, is finally liberated by the death of her tyrannical mother.  White is savage in his portrait of this domineering woman, who openly preferred her daughter Fanny, who is pretty and vacuous but marriageable to Frank Porritt, a dull but comfortable farmer. Theodora's father likes his older daughter, and others, such as the travelling salesman, see her interesting personality too, but she is too stubborn to play flirting games with Huntly, and her teacher fears for her future.

Released from her mother, Theodora travels and meets an oddball cast of characters in France.  There's Katrina Pavlou, an American divorcée, a Russian military type, a disagreeable Englishwoman.  Are these characters real?  They reinvent Theodora to suit themselves, e.g. the Russian gent calls her Ludmilla, after his sister, but the conversations are bizarre.

The hotel burns down, and somehow Theodora ends up roaming around in the backblocks of America, where she is taken in by a poverty-stricken family until finally she taken away to an asylum.

What is White on about?? Is it spinsterhood that leads to madness, or eccentricity?  Or is Theodora's determination to be herself that alienates her from the shallowness of 'normal' life?  I don't know, and from what I've seen of website reviews, I am not alone. [BTW Goodreads didn't launch till Dec 2006, and Library Thing not until August 2005, so I think that this reference is to a now defunct ABC website titled 'Why Bother with Patrick White?']

But I loved Part I.  Scathingly funny and brilliant imagery.  I shall try to read it again one day.

I finished reading the book and journalled it on the 7th of September, 2005.

---

It so happens that working my way through the Nobel reviews that I have in my journals and reaching The Aunt's Story coincides with my reading of David Marr's Patrick White, a Life. It's a brilliant biography, and like all good literary bios, it analyses the influences on the novels and delves into the experiences from which they derive.  Marr tells me that PW was in Britain when he decided to cut himself free from his mother's ambitions... he had allowed her to think that he concurred with her plan for him to work in the diplomatic service so that he could go to Cambridge, but he wanted to be a writer.  This internal drama is explored repeatedly in his writing: heroes are escapees who abandon lives laid down for them.  As Theodora does.

Another gem from Marr is that PW was bored by a single PoV, he liked to lose himself by writing the PoVs of a number of characters, and 'acted them' at the typewriter.  (Hence the bizarre cast of characters in the Jardin d'Exotique.) But also...

...one of the fundamental assumptions in White's work is that all we value — society, relationships, even fortunes — are sliding into decay.  The familiar situation of most of his novels is the lone figure seeking fulfilment in a world drifting towards ugliness and violence, loneliness and poverty.' (p.151)

Marr also explains that the catalyst for The Aunt's Story was a painting he'd bought from his then lover Roy de Maistre.  It was called 'The Aunt' and was painted after Roy had visited the site where one of his relatives had been killed by a buzz-bomb late in the war. 

On a heap of rubble he found a photograph of the dead woman's mother and from this grim souvenir he painted the portrait of a woman in full Edwardian dress but with a face entirely blank, as if her clothes were on a tailor's dummy.

The image of 'The Aunt' fused in White's mind with a long-planned novel about a wandering spinster going mad in a world on the brink of violence. (p.237)

Theodora was based on PW's godmother: they were both women who thought a great deal but said very little; each was a distinguished creature in spite of her dowdiness and ugliness.  Theodora's horrible mother is based on Elizabeth Morrice, the first person to fire his literary imagination. That seems an unkind reward for introducing him to Hamlet, but there you are, that was PW. And Elizabeth Morrice had condemned her daughters to spinsterhood with her snobbery.)

As for Part II of the novel which I found so strange, this is what Marr has to say about Theodora already a little mad in the Jardin d'Exotique:

In this odd garden, Theodora becomes the people she encounters.  The writing shifts from the present to the past, from lives lived to lives imagined by the exiles in the hotel.  Theodora Goodman discovers, invents and enters their lives, drawing on her small store of experience and a deep well of imagination. These are the hallucinations of a lonely traveller, but also a picture of White's technique  as a writer.  A name, a glance, a snatch of conversation overheard leads her into these vividly imagined existences.  So it was with White, his imagination stimulated by a face in the street, tiny details of gossip, odd names discovered in a newspaper.  'How many of us,' she asks, 'lead more than one of our several lives?'

White drew into the jardin exotique the cross-currents of pre-war Europe. The German Lieselotte was a 'figment or facet' of himself born out of his experience in a world falling apart.  'I had lived in London through the 'Thirties, through the Spanish Civil War (certainly only at a distance), I discovered Spengler, and became fairly intimately involved in Hitler's War.  All those experiences contributed to Lieslelotte's remark, 'We must destroy everything, everything, even ourselves.  Then at last when there is nothing, perhaps we shall live.' (p.240)

---

You can see in my initial review that I had glimpsed that characters in Part II were inventing themselves, but it hadn't dawned on me that Theodora was inventing them...

Credits:

• The Aunt's Story, by Patrick White, Penguin Books, 1962, first published by Eyre & Spottiswoode UK 1948, ISBN 9780670001064
• Patrick White, a life, by David Marr, Random House Australia, 1991, ISBN0091825857, personal copy, purchased second-hand from Diversity Books $25

© Lisa Hill

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

The Adventures of Augie March (1953), by Saul Bellow

 

Saul Bellow's third novel, The Adventures of Augie March (1953) was the one that propelled him to fame when it won the (US) National Book Award for Fiction, and it's been on my 1001 Books I Must Read wishlist for a while, so I was quite pleased when it turned up on the display shelf at my library.  (The only other Bellow I've ever read was his last novel Ravelstein, (2000) which didn't really excite me, so I hadn't exactly been hunting for Bellows to read).  #TrueConfession: I borrowed it expecting not to like it very much, perhaps to eliminate it after 50 pages if it didn't engage me as Ravelstein had failed to do.  How nice it is to be so wrong about a book!

The Adventures of Augie March gets its place in 1001 Books because:

This lavish, bustling narrative written in the picaresque tradition reinvents the hero as a modern day Huck Finn.  Augie is a handsome and contemplative character who becomes embroiled in a series of increasingly exotic escapades.  In an odyssey that takes him from Chicago to Mexico, from Europe to an open boat in the mid-Atlantic, the footloose hero is recruited to a series of crackpot scams that include book stealing, arms trading and being appointed the task of guarding Trotsky.

(1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, Edited by Peter Boxall, 2001  ABC Books edition, p.475)

In the Penguin edition that I read, Christopher Hitchens hesitates in the Introduction to bestow the title of The Great American Novel, but he admires Augie March for its scope, its optimism and its principles:

... 'the universal eligibility to be noble' (eligibility connotes being elected as well as being chosen) is as potent a statement of the American dream as has ever been uttered. (p. viii)

Augie's ambition to be noble on his own terms, like his quest to be an educated man on his own terms, seems like an anachronism in the proudly ignorant amoral era of Trump, but the expression of an ideal, even though largely unrealised, seems refreshing even though the book was written more than half a century ago.  The Sensational Snippet that I posted about the possibilities of sharing the great moments of nobility through reading tells us that a triumphant life can be real, even for a poor boy living in Depression era Chicago.

The nobility Augie aspires to can seem lost in the murk of what he actually does.  Most of Augie's enterprises, right from when Grandma sends him out for part-time work when he's barely into his teens, involve dishonesty at the least.  As a boy he creams off small amounts from a Christmas lucky-dip stall; as a man he's involved in all kinds of shonky business, though he would say that he gets manipulated into it by others.  But there are moments: he stops his all-powerful brother kicking a dog; he rescues his mother from a sordid old age; and he loses the prospect of marrying a rich woman when he shoulders responsibility for a girl (who's not his girlfriend) when she needs an abortion and then it's assumed he's the father.  She's a friend, and she needs support, and he doesn't just risk criminal prosecution when things go badly wrong for her, he also risks the one relationship that sustains him, the love of his brother Simon.

A critical moment occurs when he finds he admires an American eagle that won't cooperate with his girlfriend's plans for it.  He's a man who keeps his thoughts very much to himself, but he can't conceal his dismay about her behaviour with the creatures she wants to exploit, and that's the catalyst for another failed relationship.   We see this inclination towards nobility in extremis too, when in the Merchant Marines his ship is blown up by a torpedo and he finds himself stranded in a lifeboat with a madman.  It's a gripping episode in an episodic book, probably the one that I will best remember...

The aspiration to be an educated man is curious.  He has numerous opportunities to get to college, (and perhaps then to a professional career) and he doesn't take them.  He could have been a teacher, but passes that up too.  But he reads voraciously, and the book is full of all kinds of allusions, some of which, I bet, made the book frustrating to read in the days before we could Google "wise old man walking in empty fields", +"Netherlands painting" + "Italian gallery"... to find The Misanthrope by Pieter Bruegel the Elder...

 There's an old, singular, beautiful Netherlands picture I once saw in an Italian gallery, of a wise old man walking in empty fields, pensive, while a thief behind cuts the string of his purse. The old man, in black, thinking probably of God's City, nevertheless has a foolish length of nose and is much too satisfied with his dream. But the peculiarity of the thief is that he is enclosed in a glass ball, and on the glass ball there is a surmounting cross, and it looks like the emperor's symbol of rule. Meaning that it is earthly power that steals while the ridiculous wise are in a dream about this world and the next, and perhaps missing this one, they will have nothing, neither this nor the next, so there is a sharp pain of satire in this amusing thing, and even the painted field does not have too much charm; it is a flat piece. (p. 190-1.)

This painting is held at the National Museum of Capodimonte in Naples and once I found it at Wikipedia I realised that I'd seen it before somewhere, because it's a famous painting with a moral still very relevant for our times.  Vanity tries to steal from a man who wants to relinquish the world.  He's not aware of the thief behind him, and he hasn't noticed the caltrops in front of him.  But when he finds his purse is gone and he stumbles into those traps, he's going to have to face up to the world he lives in and is part of.  He (and we) can't abandon responsibility for the world's difficulties.  Like the shepherd guarding the sheep in the background, he has to do his share.

Bellow doesn't just reference paintings: Augie laments that his brother Simon had gotten hold of some English schoolboy notions of honour and that Tom Brown's Schooldays for many years had an influence we were not in a position to afford.  Well, most people my age would be familiar with that book.   But other allusions are not so obvious.  Grandma doesn't want to read Tolstoi on religion. She didn't trust him as a family man because the countess had such trouble with him. Would I have known what this meant if I hadn't read War and Peace and Sonya by Judith Armstrong, a reimagining of Countess Sonya Tolstoy's relationship with her exasperating husband?  And this one, selected at random as I write this?

School absorbed [Simon] more, and he had his sentiments anyway, a mixed extract from Natty Bumppo, Quentin Durward, Tom Brown, Clark at Kaskaskia, the messenger who brought the good news from Ratisbon, and so on, that kept him more to himself.  (p. 12)

I've looked these up now that I'm online but I didn't recognise them when I was reading the book in bed and I certainly wasn't going to crank up the laptop in the middle of the night to find out.  I just let them (and others) wash over me with a vague idea that I might look them up later but of course I haven't because I didn't write them down. I don't think it matters: I enjoyed the allusions I recognised and I passed on the ones I missed.

I liked this book very much, and will one day get to the rest of the Bellows listed in 1001 Books. (He's got seven novels listed in my edition).  A good start to my reading year!

Author: Saul Bellow
Title: The Adventures of Augie March
Publisher: Penguin Modern Classics, 2001
ISBN 9780141184869
Source: Kingston Library

© Lisa Hill

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

Suspended Sentences (1988), by Patrick Modiano, translated by Mark Polizzotti

 

Suspended Sentences is a trio of linked novellas by Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano, translated by Mark Polizzetti and published by Yale University Press late in 2014.  To the best of my knowledge it's the first of Modiano's work to be made available in English here in Australia; no doubt there will soon be more.  I am very lucky to have been able to read this book so soon after it became available in Australia - my wonderful library got it in for me within a week of me asking for it to be purchased for their collection! Thank you, Kingston Library:)

One of my reading goals is to eventually read all the Nobel winners (the novelists, that is) and Modiano's win last year was especially interesting to me because of the citation:

"for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation" (Source: Wikipedia)

This is perhaps because the Surrender of the French, the Occupation and the accompanying pro-Nazi Vichy regime has always fascinated me, because it seems incomprehensible.  The French experience is quite different to other countries over-run by the Germans and a marked contrast to their previous military and political history. I am intrigued by how they reconcile this shameful aspect of their past, and how/if it shapes contemporary attitudes and literature.

All countries seem to have some shameful events in their histories, and there are differences in how we deal with it.   S.A. Jones, in her novel Isabelle of the Moon and Stars, (see my review) raises the issue of how Germany remembers the shameful history of the Holocaust compared to the Czech Republic.  Here in Australia even the acknowledgement of the dispossession of the indigenous people is contentious, whereas New Zealand dealt with that issue more than a century ago with the Treaty of Waitangi.  In the US the shame of slavery dominates over the shame of indigenous dispossession, and in the UK, the shame of colonisation is still shaping attitudes long after the end of Empire, if Anglo-Indian and Anglo-African literature is anything to go by.

Modiano's three novellas, shaped by shadowy memories of Occupation, exude a discomfited nostalgia for a world that no longer exists.  Originally published separately, the stories form a cohesive whole through the narrator's voice and the presence of some recurring characters.  All three are permeated by a sense of loss.   The novellas are unmistakeably Parisian, but they are located in a Paris that is gone, a city which, in 'Flowers of Ruin' seems now to offer more to tourists than to its residents.  Watching a tour bus, the narrator observes that

The Jardins de Luxembourg was just one stop and they had all of Paris to visit.  I wanted to follow them on that glorious morning, that harbinger of spring, and be just a simple tourist.  No doubt I would have rediscovered a city I had lost, and through its avenues, the feeling I'd once had of being light and carefree.  (p.212-3)

He remembers the days preceding his departure from Paris for Vienna, and 'liberating' a small dog from its cage in a kennel in Avenue d'Italie.

I sat down with him at a sidewalk café table.  It was June.  They hadn't yet dug the foundations for the périphérique, which gives such a feeling of enclosure.  Back then, the gates of Paris were all in vanishing perspectives; the city gradually loosened its grip and faded into barren lots.  And one could still believe that adventure lay right around every street corner. (p. 213) 

(Though perhaps not quite the same, LOL, I can certainly relate to this feeling of entrapment by the périphérique).  I have vivid memories of being stuck in it in peak hour when trying to return a hire car to the airport.  We only just caught our flight in time despite having left the Loire Valley with hours to spare, which taught us a valuable lesson.  Do not ever drive in Paris.  Take the train!)

Modiano's underlay of old Paris also holds memories of elusive people.  The narrator thinks he sees the false Pacheco leading the tour, a man with eyes that so were so blue they were empty.  Pacheco haunts his recollections because he is tied up in some way with a double suicide that took place decades ago in 1933; people and events swirl around in the fog of his memory but nothing is resolved.

This is also true of the other two stories.  In 'Afterimage', the un-named narrator reflects on his attempts to engage with the photographer Jansen.  They had met in 1964 when aged 19, and he was enthralled by Jansen's photographs documenting a Parisian life that no longer existed, even then.  He spends long hours cataloguing these carelessly stored photos because he thinks that Jansen, a student of Robert Capa, is a major artist and that the photos have historic value.  But Jansen is indifferent to his own work, and abandons Paris for elsewhere, leaving the narrator with only a catalogue of photos that no longer exist and tantalising image-memories of people whose identity he does not and cannot ever know.

The sense of a mysterious unacknowledged past is even stronger in 'Suspended Sentences'.  In this story the narrator remembers his childhood during the Occupation.  It has, according to the brief introduction by Polizzotti, biographical correspondences with Modiano's own life, for both narrator and author were brought up in the absence of parents.  In the novella, the narrator tries to make sense of strange events but his personal history remains opaque because all traces of the 'gang' that took care of him seems to have vanished.  Were they crooks, or were they collaborators?  He does not, and cannot ever know.

For many years Australians hid any trace of 'the convict stain' in their family history, and it seems that in France, as in Germany, there are also ominous silences and dead or misleading trails.  I'll be interested to read more of Modiano's work, but next time, I want to read a full length novel.

Author: Patrick Modiano

Title: Suspended Sentences
Translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti
Publisher: Yale University Press, 2014, first published in 1988
ISBN: 9780300198058
Source: Kingston Library 

© Lisa Hill

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.