2018 European Reading Challenge Wrapup

Well, it's time to accept I won't be reading any more books this year for Gilion's European Reading Challenge at her blog Rose City Reader. I completed this one at five books a while back, but I was having so much fun I just kept going, ending up with a total of 16 books. And I kept thinking I'd read just one more. There's Iceland (Laxness), Denmark (Nors), and Serbia or Montenegro (Pekič) piled up by my reading chair. And I can't believe I missed Ireland. But I guess those all remain for next year.

Here's my final list:

1.) The Odyssey. (tr. by Emily Wilson) Greece
2.) Arthur Schnitzler's Casanova's Return To Venice. Austria
3.) Jorge Carrión's Bookshops: A Reader's History. Spain
4.) Italo Calvino's The Baron In The Trees. Italy
5.) Amélie Nothomb's Pétronille. Belgium
6.) George Eliot's Silas Marner. UK
7.) Duc de la Rochefoucauld's Maxims. France
8.) Olga Tokarczuk's Flights. Poland
9.) Yevgeny Zamyatin's We. Russia
10.) Herta Müller's The Land Of Green Plums. Romania
11.) Ismail Kadare's Broken April. Albania
12.) Dubravka Ugresic' Fox. Croatia
13.) Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe. Switzerland
14.) Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. Monaco
15.) Jenny Erpenbeck's Go, Went, Gone. Germany
16.) Antonio Tabucchi's Time Ages In A Hurry. Hungary

For me, the best book on that list was probably the least exotic: George Eliot's Silas Marner. Maxims and The Baron In The Trees were rereads (so I must like them.) But there wasn't a bad book on it, and Ugresic' latest novel Fox was a real revelation, as was Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey. Hint: it's not too late to sign up for the new year.

Thanks to Gilion for hosting!

Antonio Tabucchi's Time Ages In A Hurry

Antonio Tabucchi was an Italian professor of Portuguese who taught at the University of Siena. Probably his most famous novel is Pereira Declares (also translated as Pereira Maintains) which is set in Portugal in the early years of the Fascist dictator Salazar. In it the detached and literary Pereira gradually begins to resist the Fascist regime. It is a great novel.

Tabucchi died in 2012 and until then I used to see his name on shortlists for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Time Ages In A Hurry is a book of nine short stories that came out in Italian in 2009 and was translated into English, by Martha Cooley and Antonio Romani, in 2015. The stories relate, as you might guess from that brief synopsis of Pereira Declares, at the intersection of the personal and the political.

For example, "Clouds," my favorite of the stories, is a dialog between tired Italian ex-soldier in his 40s and a precocious young girl. We gradually learn that she's an orphan, from Peru and adopted by an Italian family, and he served as a peacekeeper on that very beach where there is now the resort where they're staying. Presumably this is Croatia, though it's never specified.

-Don't you like going in the water? she asked. I think it's special.
-Special? the man repeated.
-My teacher told us we can't use awesome for everything, that sometimes we might say special, I was about to say awesome, for me going in the water at this beach is special.

In another, an elderly Jewish father in a Tel Aviv nursing home is visited by his son; the son is on a research sabbatical in Rome; the father is only intermittently aware he's no longer in Bucharest.

A public defender of political cases in Communist Poland is pained at the ironic joke of his career, but still manages to do good.

A Stasi agent looks up his own file and discovers his wife had been sleeping with his boss.

László, a Hungarian officer from a military family, manages to hold off the Russians for three days in 1956, even though everyone knows it pointless. That military action is the defining moment of his life.

Very good.

European Reading Challenge. Hungary is the one of those I still need.

Jenny Erpenbeck's Go, Went, Gone

"Where can a person go when he doesn't know where to go?"

The protagonist of Jenny Erpenbeck's novel Go, Went, Gone is Richard, a retired professor of classics who spent most of his professional career at a university in East Berlin. He's a lonely man. Widowed and childless, he has friends, but at first even they seem to be drifting away. He had a mistress, which made the marriage not an entire success, but now she's gone, too. At the beginning of the novel he's just wrapped up all the rituals of retirement.

He passes, without at first noticing, a protest in a Berlin plaza; a group of African refugees are living in the plaza, Occupy Wall Street-style, trying to draw attention to their plight, and maybe acquire residency and work permits. Richard sees the events on television he'd scarcely noticed in person, but decides to draw up a plan for a sociological inquiry, and uses his emeritus status to get the authority to pursue it. Does he mean to do actual research? Not really. It's just to satisfy his curiosity and give him something to do.

And not a lot happens. He interviews refugees. He becomes more involved, maybe does some good, assuages his own loneliness a bit. The novel ends with the refugees no better off than they were 250 pages earlier, but at least not sent back to Italy, where there is poco lavoro, nor to their various home countries in Africa, where they would be at risk of their lives. They've fought the German bureaucracy and didn't win, but at least weren't utterly routed.

Why do we read novels? There's no one answer to that question, of course. There are different answers for different people and even different moods. I read Mrs. Pollifax on Safari a couple of days ago, and today this--very different, and enjoyed both. Sometimes I read for story, or for escape. But then one of the reasons I read novels is to experience and understand the problems of societies, both of others and of mine own. This novel is as close to purely political, even didactic as almost anything I've read, and yet it's still powerful and affecting; part of that comes from the deep, lonely sadness of Richard as he claws his way back into something like life.

Go, Went, Gone came out in German in 2015 and the translation by Susan Bernofsky came out in English last year. Germany is one of the better European countries on accepting immigrants, or at least Angela Merkel made it so, pledging to take in a million asylum-seekers, quite possibly it seems at the cost of her political career and the rise of the party Alternativ für Deutschland. And yet, at least according to Erpenbeck, maybe not all that welcoming. I don't quite know the timeline of all this because I believe it was also 2015 when Merkel made her pledge, so it's likely Erpenbeck was looking at Germany before Merkel's action. In any case the novel shows plenty of institutional resistance to admitting refugees.

Canada patted itself on the back for taking in just 25,000 Syrian refugees (and I entirely approved of that). As for the U.S., well...

A fascinating book.

She's German and it's very caught up with contemporary Germany, so it definitely fits...

#RIPXIII: Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca

Hubert the book prop and Rebecca

Well, I was probably the last person this side of Aldebaran who had neither read the book nor seen the movie. I've fixed that now.

What took me so long? It's clear I should have read this a long time ago.

My defense is: it is a great work of suspense, so suspenseful that I had to read it slowly, pausing at times in dread, particularly the first half. (Up to the scene of the dress. You know what I mean.) It was very nearly painful. It is so very easy to imagine yourself (at least I thought so) into the position of the young narrator arriving at this mysterious, voluptuous house, full of people who understand all the social rules that you do not, uncertain and alone. Haunted and haunting.

Shiver. And du Maurier does it all without ghosts, with just the words, Je reviens. 

The second half was a little easier in a way. While the first half was psychological suspense, the second half was driven more by the suspense of events; it is much faster moving, but for that less emotionally moving. In the immediate aftermath of that scene with the dress, I was on the edge of being exasperated with our narrator, and so events needed to move more rapidly; otherwise the narrator will seem too weak-willed. But events overtake her.

And it moves to a tremendous ending. That final twist? Impressive and sly.

"I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth. This was what I had done."

Read because it was on my Classics Club list and I was double-dared to for #ccdare:

And for RIP XIII:

And those opening scenes where the narrator first falls in love Maxim de Winter occur in Monaco. How many other Monaco books even are there?

Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe

"...as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary production and to the sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings."

That's the dedication for Romain Rolland's Nobel Prize in Literature of 1915. It was largely a prize for his novel Jean-Christophe, serialized in the French magazine Cahiers de la Quinzaine from February of 1902 to October of 1912, and subsequently issued as ten short-ish novels.

Jean-Christophe Krafft, generally referred to as just Christophe, was a musician born in Rhineland Germany around 1870. He flees to Paris when he's young, wanted for taking part in a riot against soldiers stationed in his home town. Later he flees to Switzerland after taking part in a May Day riot in Paris. He also lives for a while in Italy. He has deep friendships and loves, but mostly he composes music and conducts, eventually achieving success and renown. The novel is Christophe's story, but it is also the story of art and culture in Western Europe from 1870 or so to 1912. The handsome, dynamic, heroic figure on the Pocket Book cover is the image Rolland wants to convey. But at the same time Christophe can be short or haughty with people, has a temper, is complicated.

Imagine Beethoven born in 1870.

Rolland conceived the novel as a scholarship student in Rome in 1889 and began it not long after during a trip in Switzerland. After his scholarship was done, he came back to Paris and taught music history at various schools, ending up at the Sorbonne. He wrote plays that went nowhere, and biographies (of Beethoven and Michelangelo among others) that did little better. It wasn't until Jean-Christophe was in progress that he had any reputation; but then...

I took pages of notes as I was reading this, copied out passages, read a biography by Stefan Zweig from 1921. I don't mean to burden you with all of this; I only mention it to suggest that it is a novel that I thought well worth reading; its current obscurity is undeserved. It was both affecting and thought-provoking.

Romain Rolland

That's not to say that it's perfect. Rolland doesn't write well about women, and the female characters too often rely on clichés. If you imagine a continuum between writing too specifically and too generally, Rolland is way over on the side of generalities. (Put Tom Wolfe--or Gary Shteyngart in his newest, Lake Success--with the endless use of brand names, on the side of too specific.) But still Rolland creates characters you care about, and the ending, with the death of Christophe, is powerful.

The novel also needs to be retranslated. The only translation into English, the one I read, is by Gilbert Cannan, and was done as the novel was coming out in the early 1900s. At every translation to burgess for what was bourgeois in the original I cringed. Even where it's not bad, it's out-of-date.

So I would not want to tell you it's a Drop-Everything, Read-Now novel; it's not Anna Karenina or War and Peace by Rolland's master Tolstoy; it's not the equal of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, though it's hard to imagine Doctor Faustus without Jean-Christophe. I only want to suggest that you leave space for it, don't forget it's there, if you're looking for a long novel with characters you care about and insight into its time's art and culture. Something challenging but engaging. A novel about an artist.

Though I find the cover above cool, that's not the edition I read. I bought that for a dollar yesterday (with a bunch of other books...) at the University of Toronto University College book sale pretty much so I could take a picture of it. (Still going on through Sunday for those of you in the Toronto area!) I read the much more boring-looking edition shown. (No abridgements around here! The full 1600 pages for us!)

I discussed the first parts in two earlier instalments. The first three novels (Dawn, Morning, Youth) are looked at here. The next four (Revolt, The Market Place, Antoinette, and The House) are here. I may write a post on Zweig's biography; I'm also reading Rolland's collection of articles against the militarism of World War I, Above the Battle, which may get posted on as well. Everything Rolland-related at the blog should be available here. I found this at the Nobel Prize site informative.

And that's the third-longest book on my Classics Club list done! Woo-hoo!

Dubravka Ugresic

"I admit my head's a bit muddled from the trauma known as Eastern Europe..."

Dubravka Ugresic came to Toronto's public library as part of its Appel Salon series on Friday. The Other Reader and I have been enjoying these events over the last couple of years, and though neither of us had read any Ugresic we decided to go. I assigned myself two books of hers as homework: Fox and Thank You For Not Reading.

I picked the two books at random. Since I had no real knowledge, but wanted to read them in advance, I chose books I could get right away. The Toronto Public Library has a half dozen copies of Fox, her most recent in English, from earlier this year; Thank You For Not Reading came out in English in 2003, and just happened to be available.

Ugresic won the Neustadt Prize in 2016, an author prize that has, I think, a pretty good track record. She's from Croatia, now lives in Amsterdam, and has a, umm, complicated relationship with her country of birth: she left in 1993 after she was harassed and threatened for being insufficiently 'patriotic' during the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

Thank You For Not Reading is a collection of what seem to be occasional essays. My Dalkey Press edition (tr. by Celia Hawkesworth) doesn't give any information about their source, though each of them has a date at the end, ranging from 1996 to 2000. The sections each begin with an epigraph from Winnie-the-Pooh featuring Eeyore, which gives you some idea of Ugresic' mood at the time. Though she does say in the introduction to this edition that were she writing them at that time (2002) she might be a little less Eeyore-ish.

She also says the book is half fiction, though she doesn't identify which half...The essays are about being a writer, the publishing industry, and particularly being a writer in exile. They're uneven. But many are quite funny, and the best are also successfully thoughtful, particularly 'The Writer in Exile.' Occasionally I thought her targets a little easy: did you know (or care) Ivana Trump has written a novel? Me neither. Though that particular essay did pack a double whammy. It seems the same issue of the New York Times that panned Joseph Brodsky's Watermark praised Ivana Trump's novel.

The other weird thing about this book was how badly it was proofread. It was so egregious, I almost wondered if there wasn't some subtle joke going on. Paulo Coelho's name was spelled three different ways, and the French theoretician was identified as 'HBL (Bernard-Henry Levy),' just like that, with the name and contradictory initials right next to each other.

Then I read Fox, her most recent and, I thought, the better book. In fact, a very good book. It's labeled a novel, though the narrator is very much like Dubravka Ugresic, and in discussion at the library, Ugresic simply said the narrator was her. It's divided into six sections and each section she meets or discusses somebody who may be real--or may not--or may be half real and half made up. These figures are all associated with the Russian avant-garde of the early 20th century and range from the very real Boris Pilnyak, whom Ugresic went to Moscow to study before the fall of communism, to the somewhat real DoivBer Levin, a Russian avant-garde writer whose works were lost, to Levin's widow and daughter, who may never have existed at all. At the talk she said that's how it is with other people in our lives: they pass through, you know them only partly and wrongly, and then they're gone. We're all just footnotes to some convoluted, only partly understood story.

As I say, I liked this a lot. You have to like books about writers, books that are melancholy about things lost. But if you do, things like W. G. Sebald's, or Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, I highly recommend this.

"...if the spirit of the fox enters a person, then the person's tribe is accursed. The fox is the writer's totem."

In person, Ugresic is funny and a bit crotchety at things that deserve a good crotchet. About like she is in her books.

A note on spelling. Wikipedia wants to put a caron over the S and a grave accent over the C. Both the English translations I have drop those, though. By the principle of lectio difficilior I'm pretty sure Wikipedia is right, but I couldn't figure out how to type the S with a caron anyway...

This covers Croatia for my Europe challenge, though I'm pretty sure Ugresic would not be pleased. From Thank You For Not Reading:

"At literary gatherings I feel as though I were at the Eurovision song contest and am suddenly anxious that after my reading or talk I will hear a gong and a voice announcing: Croatia, five points. I dream that one day I shall remove the stickers that other people have assiduously attached to me and become just my name. Because that, just a name, is the greatest literary recognition that any writer can earn. For everyone else: Cyprus, five points; Poland, two points; Belgium, ten points..."

Ismail Kadare's Broken April

"She looked out of the window and she thought that it would be hard to find a more suitable setting for a vision of the end of the world than these mountains."

Well, Ismail Kadare isn't winning any friends in the Albanian tourist bureau, I can tell you that.

Broken April (1982, English tr. 1990) is the story of a blood feud in northern Albania in the 1930s. The novel begins when Gjorg, goaded on by his father, kills the member of a rival family, Zef, who had killed Gjorg's own brother. It's the middle of March when the reluctant Gjorg succeeds in his revenge, and blood feuds have such elaborate rules that he knows he's safe for thirty days, but then his April is likely to be broken by his own death. This feud has gone on for seventy years with forty-four graves, half in the Berisha family and half in the Kryeqyqe family.

There was a pronunciation guide, but I still won't even try to pronounce the name Kryeqyqe... When I was a stamp-collecting child there was an Albanian couple living in the apartment below me; they were an important factor in my stamp-collecting prowess. They had (wisely?) changed their name to Harris when they emigrated to Chicago.

According to the Kanun, the ancient law governing the remote highlands of Albania,  Gjorg must travel to the castle to pay the fee for a successful blood feud killing. He is in some doubt whether he'll be able to reach the castle within the prescribed time limit for paying his fee, whether he'll even be able to find the castle. Aha, I said, Kafka! and I see from Wikipedia, I'm not the first to think that: the novel has that sort of grim humor. But Gjorg does reach the castle, and the novel does reach its end. It also presents other perspectives: after following Gjorg for a while, the novel shifts to a sophisticated couple from the capitol, intent on seeing the real folk Albania. Its her perspective on the scene I quote above. Then it shifts again to the steward of the castle, who specializes in all administrative matters related to blood feuds, before returning again to Gjorg at the end.

The novel satirizes the economics involved in paying blood feud fees; it also satirizes, less savagely, the romantic impulse that drives the urban couple to undertake what we might call poverty tourism. Kadare was still living in Albania, and the brutally repressive Enver Hoxha was still the leader of the country, so maybe he thought some of that was necessary. My edition has no introduction or notes beyond that pronunciation guide, so I don't know, but it may be that those things didn't help or only helped so far as they kept him alive. I believe a lot of Kadare's fiction was first published in French and didn't appear in Albania until after the fall of the Communist regime.

My edition also doesn't name the translator, which I find very bad form.

This is the second novel I've read by Kadare, one of those authors who get talked about for the Nobel Prize, should they ever award it again. The other was The File on H. I found them both good, but I liked The File on H better. Kadare sees Albania as a place where classical mythology lives on, which is bound to appeal to me as an ex-classicist. This one, with family blood feuds, alludes to Aeschylus and the Oresteia; the H of The File on H is Homer, who may or may not still exist in Albania.

European Reading Challenge. Albania.

Herta Müller's The Land of Green Plums

Everyone had a friend in every wisp of cloud
that's how it is with friends where the world is full of fear
even my mother said, that's how it is
friends are out of the question
think of more serious things.

--Gellu Naum

This poem, or part of a poem,--I'm uncertain--serves as the epigraph to Müller's novel, but it is also quoted by the narrator and her friends at several points in the novel. Müller's novel is a story of friends in a world of fear.

Herta Müller was born in Nicolae Ceaușescu's Romania in 1953, which was certainly a world of fear. To compound problems, she was part of the German-speaking minority. She got herself in trouble with Romania's secret police, the Securitate, was mostly unable to publish, and was turfed out of her job as a technical translator. She got out to Germany in 1987. This novel appeared there in 1993, and was translated by Michael Hofmann into English in 1996.

My edition includes the speech she gave for her 2009 win of the Nobel Prize in Literature; the novel follows, it seems, pretty closely the events of her life. The narrator, too, gets out, but her friends are not necessarily so lucky. I thought it was a fairly effective presentation of a quite dark, but important story.

The prose is curiously flat. Here's an example, chosen more or less at random:

Between winter and spring I heard about five corpses that got snagged on reeds in the river outside the city. Everybody talked about them, as if they were talking about the dictator's illnesses. They shook their heads and shuddered. Kurt, too.

Michael Hofmann is a major translator, and I assume this represents the German accurately. I didn't go check, not that my German is good enough to do so. But it does feel right: something stylistically more elaborate might very well not be suitable for the subject. The narrator and the other characters are from small-town Romania; they're bright and want to get an education and move to the city, dangerous as that may be, but they are not initially sophisticated. They come across some contraband German books from Germany:

The books in the summerhouse had been smuggled into the country. They were written in German, our mother tongue, the one in which the wind lay down. Not the official language of the country. But not quite the children's bedtime language of the village either. The books were in our mother tongue, but the silence of the villages, which forbids thought, wasn't in them. We imagined the land where the books came from as a land of thinkers.

Her book brings back into German the silence of the villages.

It's the only Herta Müller I've read, so I can't compare, but I would read another. It may be a while, though. I'm not sure I can bear to read about life under maniacal fascist dictators very much just at the moment.

Yevgeny Zamyatin's We

"...true literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics..."

With an attitude like that, it's no wonder that Zamyatin was unable to publish his novel We in the Soviet Union. The quote dates from an essay of Zamyatin's in 1921, around the time he was writing We, and is given in the introduction to my edition. (tr. by Mirra Ginsburg.)

The novel is set in a futuristic world; the characters have only a letter and a number for their name; it's told in a series of diary entries by D-503, a mathematician and the first 'Builder' working on a spaceship, which will carry their society to the stars. That society is horrific, though D-503 doesn't see it: totalitarian, with a great Benefactor who murders opposition; lives, even to the extent of emotions, love and will, subject to the One State; a secret police and a culture of self-impeachment. D-503 comes into contact with the resistance in the person of the beautiful I-330. He falls in love with her, without understanding why she's interested in him, though at least initially it's for his usefulness as the first 'Builder' on the great state project.

I thought the novel was very good.

The conflict is between that totalitarian state and the resistance; there is actual physical conflict; that conflict is reflected in the understanding of D-503. How it's resolved you'll have to read to find out. (And I recommend you do!)

A couple of things: If I were looking for an example novel with an unreliable narrator, right now this is what I'd pick. It's brilliantly well-done. It's not that D-503 is a liar; it's that he doesn't see. But at the same time, he's a smart man and is capable of observation. We might say now he was on the autistic spectrum. We see so much more than he does, and yet without him we couldn't.

And then there's Zamyatin's vision of totalitarianism. It's astonishingly prescient. He's writing this in 1920 and 1921 according to the introduction. Lenin isn't dead; Stalin is not yet in control; the Russian Civil War isn't even over. There's not that much state control; there's barely even a state when he's writing. He builds it up out of Dostoevsky,  (Notes From The Underground, mostly, I'd say), ideas about the Spanish Inquisition, Taylor and Bentham, and early hints of what was to come in the totalitarian future. It's hard to see how it wasn't written from experience in 1937, but it wasn't.

And if I had one of those features "If you liked..." this would definitely trigger Orwell's 1984. I

looked him up in my collected Orwell non-fiction. Zamyatin appears in the index several times. Orwell wrote a review of a French translation of We in January of 1946; he said he was unable to find the English translation. He compared it to Huxley's Brave New World, not being entirely favorable to either novel. (Well, Orwell wasn't the sort of guy to rave about anything, perhaps especially things he liked.) Later he was involved in getting it issued in the UK in an English translation. But most interesting was a quote from a letter to the Russian scholar Gleb Struve in February of 1944: [Struve's book Twenty-Five Years of Soviet Russian Literature] '...has aroused my interest in Zamyatin's We, which I had not heard of before. I am interested in that kind of book, and even keep making notes for one myself that may get written sooner or later." Well, that book did get written, and We definitely influenced it.

Read for all sorts of good reasons, one of them being my Classics Club challenge. But not for that cover. Seriously? Ick.

Olga Tokarczuk's Flights

Two weeks ago the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk's Flights won this year's Man Booker International Prize. Now there's a reason to finish a book I started a while ago...

That's a little unfair, though, because it gives the impression I disliked the book, which isn't true. What is true is that it offers somewhat fewer of the simple narrative pleasures--though not none; it can be essayistic and is not particularly a page turner; there are epigrammatic sections like the following:

A Very Long Quarter Of An Hour

On the plane between 8:45 and 9 a.m. To my mind, it took an hour, or even longer.

Which is amusing, but may not advance the story much.

The frame narrative is told by an unnamed character who, I suppose, is very much like Olga Tokarczuk in person. She travels to conferences on planes and she talks to people in her travels. The stories she is told in these conversations get embedded in the overall narrative. And here Tokarczuk is good at the basic pleasures of storytelling. A woman disappears for a few days with her son during a vacation in Croatia; the narrative follows her husband, who worries, and then becomes jealously obsessed. Another woman, a Russian, is saddled with a handicapped son and a husband back from some war suffering from PTSD. She tries homelessness for a few days. In a third story, a dying man calls on his ex-lover to administer a mercy killing; she sneaks off, leaving her husband for a few days, pretending she's going to a conference on her subject.

I can see how all these fit into our theme of flights.

But then there's a recurring strand about the preservation of bodies. Mummification and the like. Body parts preserved in bottles. This is more gothic in nature, though it's not treated exploitatively, but dispassionately. Chopin's heart after his death is smuggled into Poland. The most extensive of these was the story of Philip Verheyen who in the seventeenth century wrote and illustrated the first comprehensive description of human anatomy. Interesting enough I suppose, though it occasionally pinched at my squeamishness. I also couldn't see how these stories connected to the general theme. They just seemed to stand off to the side.

So I liked it but with reservations. I didn't read any of the competition so I can't say whether the judging committee chose well or poorly. If you like things like The Man Without Qualities or W. G. Sebald this should suit.

La Rochefoucauld's Maxims

Maxims, epigrams, aphorisms, call them what you like: little polished bits of prose that stand by themselves. I've been thinking about them lately.

So what do I think? 1.) That in a collection they can reveal character, 2.) that aphoristic writers tend to repeat themselves over a collection; you might not have said what you had to say perfectly the first time so try again, 3.) that the character type best revealed by aphorisms have changed over the years, 4.) that Nietzsche represents a major point of inflection, 5.) that the attempt to present an argument in fragments, rather than written-through, feels very modern.

Last year I read a collection of aphorisms by the French/Romanian pessimist E. M. Cioran. When you feel that life is going to hell in a hand-basket, the inability to write anything longer than a paragraph feels like the right form: "If disgust for the world conferred sanctity in itself, I fail to see how I could avoid canonization."

I read somewhere that Sarah Manguso's 300 Arguments was an attempt to present a character by the use of aphorisms, so I read that. Though it was not quite what I was looking for, it was very good. "The word fragment is often misused to describe anything smaller than a breadbox, but an eight-hundred page book is no more complete than a ten-line poem. That's confusing size with integrity. An ant is not a fragment of an elephant, except orthographically."

The Portugese poet Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet was one of the best things I read last year. Pessoa may not have intended it to be a book of fragmentary aphorisms, but that's the way it is for us. "I'm astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing; it should inhibit me from even beginning."

In Christopher Miller's Sudden Noises From Inanimate Objects, a very amusing novel, the narrator plans to write a book of aphorisms. None of the aphorisms from his putative book show up, but he does write this: "Life is a gift, and like most gifts it isn't what you would have picked out for yourself, but you have to act pleased with it."

As for the Duc de la Rochefoucauld. His Maxims (1665) is not very modern, but he was writing during the reign of Louis XIV of France, the Sun-King. One wouldn't expect him to be. But he stands at or very near the head of the aphoristic writing tradition. It's easy to imagine him delivering his witty and cynical bon mots in the company of other men dressed like the dapper gentleman on the cover of my edition. Like, for example, maxim #93: "Old men love to give good advice to console themselves for not being able to set bad examples."

I could say more, but then, I shouldn't go on and on, should I?

Amélie Nothomb's Pétronille

A couple of years ago, the movie Tokyo Fiancée played here at the Toronto International Film Festival and I went to see it. I think I'd heard of Amélie Nothomb before that--the film was based on one of her novels which may have been part of the motivation to see that movie in particular. I liked the movie so I thought I should read one of her books sometime.

Well, you know how that goes. It took a while.

I saw Pétronille at a local used book store that specializes in remaindered books, so I got it, but it didn't get read right away and it became part of the TBR pile. Then a couple of days ago that same bookstore had a different Nothomb available, Life Form, and I was going to get that one too, but I decided I should read the other first. (Wasn't that good of me?) So I did and I'm glad I did.

In Pétronille, a character named Amélie, a successful Belgian author now living in Paris (much like our author) decides she needs a friend she can drink champagne with. She meets Pétronille at a book signing. Pétronille is a fan of Amélie's work, but at that time is a graduate student doing research on Elizabethan drama. They seem to hit it off, but it takes one or two other cautious meetings before they become champagne-drinking buddies. Pétronille becomes a novelist in her own right.

Not a whole lot happens; this is not a plot-driven novel. But it is quite funny. The opening sentence gives a good idea of the tone. There's quite an amusing takedown of Vivienne Westwood, the British fashion designer from the punk era. The Amélie character is presented as socially reserved, even a bit diffident. At one point Pétronille suggests they use the informal tu instead of vous with each other; Amélie resists, even though, as Pétronille points out, they've slept in the same bed, and Pétronille has seen Amélie in her orange pajamas. Some of the humor comes from the tension between the diffidence of the Amélie character and the forthrightness of the telling of the story. I mean, she declares she's out to find a champagne-drinking buddy.

The novel takes a surreal turn at the end, the very last few pages. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but you do know that it's a novel.

Fun, and quite a quick read, only 120 pages. Now I'm hoping that pile of Life Form they had at the bookstore still has a copy or two left.

This is my first of Nothomb's novels. (Though it won't be the last.) Does anyone have any sense where this fits in? Is it an especially good one (or poor one)? Favorites?

Italo Calvino's The Baron In The Trees

     Our father leaned out the window. "When you're tired of being up there, you'll change your mind!" he shouted.
     "I'll never change my mind," exclaimed my brother from the branch.
     "You'll see as soon as you come down!"
     "I'll never come down again!" And he kept his word.

That's the end of the first chapter of Calvino's novel, and Cosmo Piovasco di Rondó did keep his word. From that moment in 1767 when Cosimo was twelve and he climbed into a tree rather than eat snails, he stayed in one tree or another. And when his father died, Cosimo became the baron in the trees.

The novel has the delight of something like Robinson Crusoe or Swiss Family Robinson: there's quite a lot of ingenious invention as to how Cosimo carries on his life in the trees. It's a boys' own adventure book with that sort of charm. How he gets around, how he gets food, how he sleeps, how he bathes, eventually how he meets girls--all these things are non-trivial problems and they're fun to watch him (and Calvino) work them out. Initially he has help from his younger brother Biagio, who is also the narrator of the story. He makes friends with the gang of boys who steal fruit from the orchards. He has a relationship with the proud daughter of his father's enemy among the local nobility. (More on her as we go along.)

Eventually, though, Cosimo is reconciled to his parents and they, particularly his mother, help. He becomes famous, first for his eccentricity, but then for his usefulness, in tracking wolves in the winter or preventing fires in a dry summer; then the whole community is his friend.

But the novel also takes place in an interesting time and has gentle intellectual interests. In 1767, the Enlightenment is in full swing, and Cosimo is affected by it. What is his relationship to the church, to learning? These are questions in the air:

'Cosimo...acquired a passion for reading and study which remained with him for the rest of his life. The attitude in which we now usually found him was astride a comfortable branch with a book open in his hand, or leaning over the fork of a tree as if he were on a school bench, with a sheet of paper on a plank and an inkstand in a hole in the tree, writing with a long quill pen.'

I may have perched in a tree and read a book once or twice when I was younger, but I never thought of making a career of it. Maybe I should have!

As an enlightenment thinker, he begins a Project for the Constitution of an Ideal State in the Trees, he writes to Diderot about it, and gets a short note in return. At a later date, Napoleon on one of his marches around Europe decides he wants to meet this baron in the trees. Neither has much to say to the other.

There are love affairs, or rumors of love affairs, but there is only one love: Viola, that proud daughter of the family's enemies. She returns more than once to the story and perhaps the main question is what will happen to them.

Anywho, it's a great novel and I recommend it. I've read it a few times before, and it still has the power to bring me both tears and smiles.

It's recently been retranslated by Ann Goldstein, now spectacularly well known as the translator of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels. I got her translation from the library (and I've read about a third of it and will probably read it all again) and it's quite good, but I don't know that I will need to rush out and buy it to replace my old translation (done by Archibald Colquhoun in 1959) which still seems to me to be fine. I do like the new cover. Although it should be said the Other Reader* in the house prefers the older cover.  Even though I'm not convinced that it needed to be retranslated, any attention it brings is more than welcome. Calvino is not exactly obscure, but he could (and should!) be better known. Almost all Calvino I've found to be great reads, but if I were to recommend one, this would be it.

*for the Other Reader, see Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveler.

Jorge Carrión's Bookshops: A Reader's History

Jorge Carrión is, among other things, a travel writer, and this volume is, among other things, a volume of travel, travel to bookshops. He imagines a passport which has, instead of the stamps of countries, the stamps of bookshops he's visited and there are bookshops in Buenos Aires, in Istanbul, in London, in New York, in Sydney, in San Francisco, in Santiago. He himself lives in Barcelona and, of course, there are bookshops he's visited in Barcelona. He describes the layout, the shelves, the windows, the signs, and most importantly, the stock.

That, of course, is one of the great pleasures of this book for a book lover: the thought of all those bookshops one (I) could go to. The ones I have been to (say 57th Street Books in Chicago) I now want to revisit; the ones I haven't, well, I've made a list.

But there's also a melancholy tone to the book. Carrión emphasizes early on that book selling is a business even though we as book lovers don't always want to see it that way. I may have been known to hoard a book or two that only my heirs and assigns will ever be able to get rid of, but by definition that can't be true of a bookseller: if they don't sell books they don't last in the business for very long.

And plenty of bookstores fail anyway. Increasingly as his book goes along (and as his writing of it went along--he seems to have been working on this book over the course of ten years) the bookshops he once visited have closed. 

Bookstores also take on other functions. He introduced me to the Spanish neologism cafebrería, that combination of a coffee shop and bookstore, a word that could usefully be imported into English. Of course it's a business and one does what one has to. Are these lists of the world's most beautiful bookstores any longer about books? Or have they become tourist destinations? If selling is necessary then can we complain when booksellers do what it takes? Carrión does not take a stand, but only brings up the question.

Anyway, enjoyable, even if I just lost an hour Googling bookstores that no longer exist where I've spent my time and money...

Arthur Schnitzler's Casanova's Return To Venice

Casanova (yes, that Casanova) has been exiled from his home town of Venice for general bad behavior and he's now a middle-aged man of fifty-three; his looks show the fast life he's been living, as does his pocketbook. All he wants to do, he says, is get back to Venice. There's a chance his friends at home will be able to undo his exile, and he's living in a cheap inn in Mantua near to Venice waiting for what he hopes will be a favorable letter.

While he's waiting he runs into Olivo, an old friend and now a successful vintner, whom Casanova had helped to set up once upon a time and with whose wife, Amalia, he slept before Olivo and Amalia were married. Olivo invites Casanova to his vineyard estate at least for those days he's waiting for the letter. Casanova reluctantly agrees.

Casanova is an aging lecher who says all he wants to do his write his pamphlet against Voltaire and go home, but once in the country, there is Amalia, still longing for Casanova, Amalia's daughter, the neighboring Marchesa, and above all Amalia's niece to provide temptations and engender plots.

Schnitzler was an Austrian playwright and novelist with his first works appearing in the late 1800s. He's perhaps best known for his play La Ronde, with scenes in which A has just slept with B, B with C, and so on up to J, completing the circle at the end when we learn J has slept with A. It was made into a movie a couple of times. This earned him no friends in conservative circles, but Schnitzler was enormously successful at the time. Writing about Casanova hardly qualifies as a breach of taste for him.

This work has a melancholy charm to it that was appealing. Casanova is neither condemned exactly, nor praised. He is, however, left lesser than he started. He's thinking of a literary career, a polemic against Voltaire that will make his name, but which everyone knows will go nowhere. His famous work, yet to come at the time the novella is set, The Story of My Life, is alluded to. Without that, Casanova would probably be no more than a curious footnote instead of the catchword for his type.

The work came out originally in 1918. (This translation is from 1930 by Ilsa Barea.) I don't know what happened to Schnitzler during World War I, but I have to assume the melancholy tone is influenced by the time of its writing.

Near the top of my reading pile at the moment is Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, the story of someone else (Marco Polo) longing to return to Venice. It might make an interesting comparison.

Homer's Odyssey (tr. by Emily Wilson)

Emily Wilson's new translation of the Odyssey has been getting a lot of buzz, not least because it seems it's the first published translation of the Odyssey by a woman. This is a little surprising (though, alas, not that surprising) despite the fact Samuel Butler, umm, proved the Odyssey was actually written by a woman.

Well, publicity departments do what they have to, of course. But it should be getting buzz because it's very, very good.

One of the signs of the buzz it has been getting is that it's featured in the window of my local science fiction/fantasy bookstore. Which makes sense, really. It is a fantasy adventure story with monsters and pirates and gods. It's also got one of the all-time great love stories, too. Plus that bit about a young man growing up, a sort of YA opener.

And Emily Wilson's version brings all that across more clearly than any other English version I've read. It's a clear modern English that still feels like poetry. (She writes in blank verse.) Very highly recommended, though treat the introduction as if it were an afterword. You can read the Translator's Note in advance.

From the end of that Translator's Note:

There is a stranger inside your house. He is old, ragged, and dirty. He is tired. He has been wandering, homeless, for a long time, perhaps many years. Invite him inside. You do not know his name. He may be a thief. He may be a murderer. He may be a god. He may remind you of your husband, your father, or yourself. Do not ask questions. Wait. Let him sit on a comfortable chair and warm himself beside your fire. Bring him some food, the best you have, and a cup of wine. Let him eat and drink until he is satisfied. Be patient. When he has finished, let him tell his story. Listen carefully. It may not be as you expect.

And the first line of her translation:

Tell me about a complicated man.