Herta Müller's The Fox Was Ever the Hunter

 "Where does it come from, he asked, this sympathy?"

Adina is a schoolteacher in the late years of Communist Romania. Her circle of friends include Paul, a musician, and Clara, who works in a factory. Paul's band gets in trouble with the secret police because some apparatchik thinks their latest song is about the dictator Ceauşescu, and so Paul, even though he's not the lyricist, ends up in trouble dragging down Adina and the others.

Then somebody, surely the Securitate, start to invade Adina's apartment and cut off the tail and then one by one the legs of a fox fur she's sentimentally attached to. She and Paul decide to flee to a more remote part of the countryside. Do they dare to flee the country? Escapees are frequently shot at the border. 

But they're saved by the bell as it were: 1989 happens, and it's of pictures of the dead Ceauşescus that the question I opened with is asked. Sympathy is hard to imagine.

This is the second novel of Herta Müller's I've read, and the setup is somewhat similar to The Land of Green Plums, which I read earlier: a group of young people in the late years of Communist Romania, potentially intellectuals, oppressed by the secret police. Cooperate? Escape? Lie low? The Land of Green Plums takes place a few years earlier than this and there's no rescue in sight.

I thought this was good, but I was more impressed by The Land of Green Plums (1994 in German).  I felt the characters were better differentiated in that novel, which made the choices feel more poignant. This is a shorter book, only 220 pages, with fairly large margins, practically a novella in length. The opening started with quite a lot of folkloric elements: gypsies who are afraid of hares, the tooth fairy, who's a mouse in Romania, it seems:

"Mouse O mouse bring me a brand new tooth

and you can have my old one."

This felt a little odd at first, like it was more anthropological documentation than dramatically necessary, though in the end I did feel it helped set up the fairly folkloric bit about attacking Adina's fox fur. The novel got better as it went on. Still. The wisdom of the Internet suggests that The Land of Green Plums, The Appointment, and The Hunger Angel are her best works. I'll probably try one of the two of those I haven't read next, but I will try them. She's good.

Müller was born in 1953 to the German-speaking minority in Romania, got out of the country in 1987 and settled in Germany where she still lives. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009.

I was (grimly) amused by this joke one of the characters tells in the novel: a Romanian who's led a bad life is whisked off to Hell after his death where he's buried up to his neck in boiling mud. Once he's settled in, he looks around and sees Nicolae Ceauşescu in the boiling mud, but only up to his shins. Our anonymous Romanian complains to the demon in charge of the boiling mud department, What's up with that? The demon replies, What can you do? He's standing on the shoulders of his wife.

This came out in German in 1992, was translated into English by Philip Boehm in 2016, and is my visit to Romania for 2023.

Two by Patrick Modiano (#NovNov)

So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood

Jean Daragane is an elderly man living on his own, suspicious and irritable. Then a stranger Gilles Ottolini calls up to say that he's found Daragane's address book: could he bring it by? (Daragane had written his phone number and address in the book in the space supplied after 'If found please return to...'). Daragane doesn't want this stranger to come to his house, but they arrange to meet at a café the next day.

Daragane is a well-known writer, famous for his book Le Noir de l'Eté about the Paris demimonde. He has genuinely lost his address book and, despite his suspicions, supposes he should get it back. Ottolini shows up the next day with a 'friend', Chantal Grippay, and it's clear Ottolini knows quite a bit about Daragane. Ottolini has read through the address book and he's interested in a name from it, Guy Torstel, which was also a name that Daragane had used in that famous novel. Who is Torstel? Daragane claims he can barely remember the actual Torstel, and that he remembers nothing about the novel he wrote so many years ago. But he agrees to try to remember something and to meet again with Ottolini when Ottolini's back in town. 

But before that Chantal Grippay comes by and warns him not to trust Ottolini. Daragane tries to work out the connections between Torstel and his mother and the woman (not his mother) who raised him and the other figures from that novel. And what do they have to do with Ottolini and Grippay? And just what has he got himself into? 

Interesting and evocative, but in retrospect not the one to have started with. In the real world, Modiano's first novel was La Place de l'Etoile.

155p. And with rather wide spacing and margins. Translated by Euan Cameron.

In the Café of Lost Youth

Louki is an habituée of the café Condé. The place is a little downmarket even for students, with a somewhat rough clientele of youths, with a few dodgy elders mixed in. Louki seems just a bit more glamorous than the rest of the crowd. But Louki is just a nickname. Who is she?

The novella is structured as four different narrators telling us what they know (or what they want to tell us) about Louki. The first is an actual student: he studies at the École Supérieure des Mines; because he's a student, though one perhaps not entirely committed to his studies, he feels isolated from the core crowd at the café. Still he observes Louki without ever knowing her real name.

The second figure is a private detective who's looking for Louki on behalf of her abandoned husband; he learns Louki is actually Jacqueline Choureau née Delanque, that she'd been in minor trouble with the law as a teenager, that her mother was a dancer at the Moulin Rouge. He has to decide what exactly to report to the abandoned husband.

The third chapter is from the point of view of Louki herself; the last chapter is that of a writer from years later who had hung out with this crowd at the time. We learn Louki's fate.

Wikipedia says the novel is loosely about the circle around the Situationist Guy Debord, philosopher, Marxist, provocateur. In any case, the novella begins with an epigraph from Debord:

"At the halfway point of the journey making up real life, we were surrounded by a gloomy melancholy, one expressed by so very many derisive and sorrowful words in the café of lost youth."

Also evocative, and less dependent on a familiarity with the Modiano oeuvre. Pretty good, I thought and it would have been a better start. (Though as you can see I didn't stop after the first that I did read.)

118p. Translated by Chris Clarke.

Modiano won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014, and I've been meaning to try him out since then. That's all the Modiano I've read, but I liked them both and it made me curious to read more. I'll probably go next to the beginning and read La Place de l'Etoile. (Same title in English.) It's the first in a trilogy, it seems. Do you know Modiano? Is that a good plan? Any others to be sure not to miss?

November is Novellas month!

Two Novellas (Elizabeth Smart, Boris Pasternak) #NovNov

Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

The narrator has fallen in love with the poet on the basis of his poems. She invites the poet and his wife to Monterey, California, where she's living, to meet him. She's just as enthralled by the poet in person as she was when she only knew him through his poetry. But can she do this to his wife?

Oh, yes she can.

The narrator is Elizabeth Smart and the poet is George Barker; his wife is Jessica Barker, and the events more or less follow actual events. So, auto-fiction, avant la lettre?

Yes, but. The prose definitely makes this. You see the Psalms there in the title: is that Grand Central Station or the rivers of Babylon? The Song of Solomon is all over the book. So are the Latin and Greek classics, slyly grandiose: "Jupiter has been with Leda, and now nothing can avert the Trojan Wars."

There's also interesting things happening with metaphors from the natural world. The main events take place in the late 30s, but Smart is writing the book during World War II in England. Comparisons to natural features from North America--the Mississippi, Niagara Falls--are inundating, but positive as a rule; those of Europe--the pools in Epping Forest, e.g.--smaller, withdrawn. All mostly involve water, or its absence: the Mojave Desert makes a metaphorical appearance.

But the occasional funny pinprick from outside the bubble lets us see another side. A policeman (and yes, the police do get involved): "'What a cad,' he said, 'And the girl's a religious maniac.'" Why, now you mention it, quite possibly yes... "Are all Americans chaste? All, by law." "Like Macbeth, I keep remembering that I am their host."

The book was first published in England in 1945. Smart came from a well-to-do Ottawa family, and her mother, appalled Elizabeth was publishing her shame (as she saw it) bought up as many copies of the book as she could get her hands on. It was also the end of the war, so, between those things, not much happened with the book at the time. But when it was reissued in the 60s, its reputation took off. Smart continued her bohemian life, bearing four children to Barker, but never marrying him. (Barker continued his caddishness.) She wrote other works (which I haven't read) but this is considered her masterpiece. She died in 1986.

Weird and wonderful. "Girls in love, be harlots, it hurts less."

112p. including an introduction by Brigid Brophy.

Boris Pasternak's The Last Summer

Serezha has just finished his exams, and takes a job as tutor to the eleven-year-old Harry Fresteln. The Fresteln estate is in the Ural Mountains, well away from Moscow or Saint Petersburg. Serezha finds his duties light, writes and gallivants at night.

Mrs. Anna Tjornskold is the widow of a Danish pastor who died young. Suddenly near destitution she takes a job as paid companion to Mrs. Fresteln, but once she's stuck in the remote Ural Mountain region, she discovers her role is more maid than companion. She feels denigrated and trapped and unhappy.

There's a frame set in 1916, but the main events take place in the summer of 1914, the last summer before everything goes to pieces.

Then Serezha proposes to Anna.

It's a promising enough premise for a story, but I can't recommend it, at least in this form. (Penguin, 1960, reprinted many times.) There's an introduction by Pasternak's younger sister Lydia, interesting, though it doesn't tell you what you want or need to know. 

But the main problem is the translation. I guess I'll credit the translator (George Reavey) with trying to reproduce things he found in the original, but it just doesn't read well in English. There's undigested bits of Russian: izvoschik (a cabman, it seems), mahorka (a coarse tobacco), calatch (still not perfectly sure about this one. Kolach? Maybe.) I don't know how you would have sorted those before the Internet. There's awkward bits of English: 'a tent of tremblingly-moist, sultry-laurel birch trees.' And extravagant words, even if they are English. Canicularly? Know that one? Canicular: having to do with the dog days of summer. -ly, adverb. In retrospect, you can probably see the can- of canine in it, but it's certainly a long ways from Basic English. Is the Russian word in Pasternak equally obscure?

Anyway, it needs notes or a new translation or likely both. I don't know if those things exist.

92p, including Lydia Pasternak Slater's introduction.

Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Slave (#1962Club)

'a slavery that would last as long as he lived'

We first meet Jacob as a literal slave in the Polish hill country near Krakow. His wife and children had been killed in the Cossack Khmelnytsky massacres (1648-1657) in southeastern Poland; Jacob himself had been sold into slavery, technically illegal in Poland at the time, but who was going to say no? He couldn't run away, and didn't know where to run to anyway. He's a learned man, in his late 20s, but now he's a cowherd.

And he falls in love with Wanda, his owner's daughter. She herself is a widow at twenty-five, and she's equally in love with him. But what can they do? He won't convert, and she can't, legally. Jacob's a pious man as well, in his way, and he doesn't know that his wife is dead, though he suspects. After some resistance on his part, they do sleep together, and well, the sex is good. But he feels bad about it.

Then well-to-do Jews recovering in his hometown of Josefov learn of his plight and ransom him. He becomes a teacher, learns his wife actually is dead, and eventually, dreaming that Wanda is about to bear his child, goes to find her and carries her away. Still, where can they live? No Jewish community would accept Wanda; a Christian married to a Jew could bring down new pogroms. 

But Wanda does convert, becomes Sarah, and they are married under Jewish law. They move to a city where they're both unknown. Though Wanda's learned Yiddish, she's speaks with an accent, and she decides to pretend to be a mute so that they don't hear her Yiddish. Their new town assumes she's deaf as well. This, as you can imagine, is a formula for disaster.

The gentiles are terrible, but the Jews little better:

'They wanted to be kind to God and not to man; but what did God need of man and his favors?'

Why do these things happen? 1962 isn't so long after the fall of Nazi Germany. 

'The question that recurred more often than any other was why did the good suffer and the evil prosper?'

And what does a Jew, a good man but not necessarily a saint, do in terrible times? Various possibilities that were in the air occur in the novel: Jacob considers taking up arms, but doesn't; how much should he resist:

'Nowhere is it written that a man must consent to his own destruction.'

He's drawn to Sabbatai Zevi, the purported Jewish Messiah, of the time; he even goes to the Holy Land. Does Sabbataeanism have the answer? The novel covers some of the same ground as Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob. Another book of Jacob.

The novel follows Jacob and Wanda to their deaths. The novel ends by quoting their epitaph:

'Lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided.'

Anyway, a pretty interesting read, a romance with big themes, though I don't think anybody now would consider this one of Singer's major works. Still, it did get its own Wikipedia article, though the article has several errors in the plot summary. But via that, I did read this article in Forward, in which Dylan says he prefers Singer to Kerouac (well, I would, too) and of this novel, "Now Isaac Singer, he wrote a story called 'The Slave.' It must have stayed in my head months afterward." One Nobel Laureate on another. 😉

I've always liked Singer, and went through a serious Singer phase in the 80s, and I've had this in mind since reading Scholem's Sabbatai Sevi, Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob, and Singer's own Satan in Goray relatively recently. But I read it now since it came out in 1962, and this is the week of Simon and Kaggsy's 1962 Club.

But how about that cover? Isn't it delightfully lurid? Wouldn't you just want to read it for that?

Translated from the Yiddish by the author and Cecil Hemley.

Ivo Andrić's Omer Pasha Latas

"After all sorts of hints and rumors, the day finally came when the Ottoman commander in chief, the seraskier Omer Pasha, entered Sarajevo with his army."

That's the opening of Ivo Andrić's Omer Pasha Latas. Omer Pasha spends close to two years (1850-1851) in Bosnia as the agent of the Ottoman sultan; his mission is to implement the sultan's reforms and to get the local feudal aristocracy in line. Whatever it takes is the watchword, and he's led successful missions of this sort before in the Ottoman lands, in Syria, in Kurdistan, in Wallachia.

Omer Pasha Latas is Andrić's last novel, published after his death, maybe not quite complete, though it felt complete to me in this translation by Celia Hawkesworth. 

What is the Bosnia of 1850? 

Of one of the characters, a wandering painter, we're told: 

"Before he left Zagreb, people had given him only negative reports about Bosnia, the terrible roads and uncomfortable inns, the strange people and unusual circumstances,..."

Or:

"Bosnia. Not naturally lush or abundant, a land where few sow and toil, it had been eaten away by both local and foreign idlers, and trodden down by warring armies, so that over the years it had been stripped bare and now resembled stables in which hungry horses gnawed the wood of their mangers."

Those are the thoughts of Idris Effendi, the number two lawyer on Omer Pasha's staff. Or:

"'What is this? What kind of country is this that will devour all? And what kind of scoundrels and criminals have gathered in this residence? All degenerates! Even angels would be corrupted by these idlers and perverts!"

That's the cry of Omer Pasha's wife.

The novel is structured like Andrić's acknowledged masterpiece, The Bridge on the Drina; it's really a collection of stories organized around a central figure. In that novel the central figure is the bridge itself, and the stories take place over four hundred years; in this novel, the central figure is Omer Pasha, and the events take place over that year and a half. But Omer Pasha is not always on the scene.

The back of my copy of the novel gives the backstory to Omer Pasha, but I won't: in the novel itself, it's only gradually revealed over the length of the novel. He was a real historical figure and I linked the Wikipedia article above. But I knew nothing about Omer Pasha Latas before I read this (and I imagine you know nothing, too...😉) and it's likely even to the original audience of the novel he was a bit obscure. So the revelations would and should be revelations and I won't spoil them. But we learn them as we go: Omer Pasha reveals himself to a Montenegran grandée as he's trying to win him over; he meditates on his past while that painter is trying to capture the fire in his eyes; we hear the story of how he met his wife.

At the end of his two years, Omer Pasha and his army march off. Some of the local beys have been killed, some marched in chains to Istanbul. Did the sultan consider the mission a success? We're not really told. But the historical Omer Pasha is still trusted and plays an important role in the Crimean War two years later, though that's outside the frame of the story.

I said the novel is structured like The Bridge on the Drina, and that's true, but it's much darker even than the already quite dark Bridge. Well, a backwater in the later years of the Ottoman empire was probably not a very appealing place. The novel is not quite as good as The Bridge on the Drina, but still awfully good.

Ivo Andrić was born in Sarajevo in 1892, but mostly grew up in Višegrad (also in Bosnia). He got a Ph.D. after WWI in South Slavic history and literature, then served in the diplomatic corps of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961, and died in 1975.  

Covering Bosnia for the European Reading Challenge.

Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob

"But does not every religion have some truth in it? All of them, even the most barbaric, have been permeated by the holy sparks."

Chuck is feeling a little triumphant that he's conquered so large a Nobel-prize winning book...

The Jacob of The Books of Jacob is Jacob Frank (1726-1791). He was born Jacob Leibowicz (spellings vary) in Korolivka, now in the Ukraine, but then in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. His family were Sabbateans, that is, followers of the doctrine of Sabbatai Zevi, the Jewish mystic who converted to Islam in 1666. They were a merchant family, and Frank himself traveled and traded in the Ottoman empire, where he became fluent in Turkish. He met the leaders of the Sabbatean movement at the time, then in Salonika. It was while in Ottoman lands, he took on the name Frank; a frank to the Ottomans was any Western, non-Islamic foreigner.

He also underwent several religious experiences, and eventually proclaimed himself the heir to Sabbatai Zevi, the third in a series of Jewish Messiahs. It might take a fourth to bring about salvation, a female to embody Shekinah, or wisdom. 

Frank considered the Talmud to be outdated--this was also the belief of Sabbateans in general--and it was a virtuous act to violate Mosaic law: eat pork, not fast on holy days, speak the name of the Lord. Expectedly enough this got him in trouble with more orthodox Jewish rabbis, and he was declared a heretic. Political in-fighting ensued, and Frank with his followers converted to Christianity, while still intending to retain something of their separate Jewish identity. (Sabbatai Zevi had converted to Islam, but the Sabbataean community remained largely separate.) This was the ultimate repudiation of Mosaic law. You can imagine this as either evil apostasy or noble ecumenicism, and both points of view were to be found at the time and are present in the novel. 

Converting to Christianity brought Frank protectors, but they weren't strong enough or didn't care enough, and Frank ended up jailed for thirteen years, only released by a Russian general at the first partition of Poland in 1772. Frank and many of his followers left Poland, settling first in Austro-Hungarian lands, before being pushed on to Offenbach-am-Main, now in Germany, where he died.

The novel has a few modes: much of it is in a standard free indirect that follows Jacob Frank, his followers, or other historical figures; there are also sections from the writings of Nahman of Busk, who is the theologian to Frank's mystic. There are letters, particularly those between Fr. Chmielowski, a Jesuit and author of the first Polish encyclopedia, and Elżbieta Drużbacka, a poetess. (Both historical figures, though the letters are imaginary.) Tokarczuk takes the religious experiences seriously, and within the framework of the novel, one is meant to believe they are real. Jewish folk magic also works in the novel, with particular impact on Jacob Frank's grandmother. 

Various historical figures you might know do show up: for example Empress Maria Theresa and Kasimir Pulaski (who also fought in the American Revolution) are perhaps the two most notable. Frank meets both of them.

It's the third Tokarczuk novel I've read; it's easily the biggest, but also the best. (Though I think I'd start with Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead. Flights was my least favorite of the three, though still impressive.) It's a fascinating and convincing look at a historical place and period that I knew next to nothing about, with multiple generations and characters that change, grow and/or shrink, over the course of forty years. No character is a moral saint, no one is a thorough-going villain. (Though some very bad things do happen.) It does not end with a bang: Frank dies of ill-health at 65 or so, his followers, acquaintances, enemies and supporters do as well, each in their turn.

I thought the translation (by Jennifer Croft) was superb.

At 965 pages, it's definitely a Big Book of Summer, and though I have hopes for at least one more big book this summer, it will certainly be the biggest.

There's also my European Reading Challenge. It's one of those border-crossing books that could fit into practically any slot. Frank spends significant periods in places that are now in the Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, and Germany. Still, Tokarczuk is Polish and writes in Polish; it's in Warsaw that Frank converts, and those thirteen years he's imprisoned it's in Częstochowa in Poland. So Poland it is!

And one I actually put on my 20 Books of Summer list!

-o- 

"If people could read the same books, they would inhabit the same world."

-o- 

    "'Is all this true?' the lovely and talented Maria Szymanowska, née Wołowska, the pianist, asked him many years later,...

    'Madam, it is a novel. It is literature.'"

-o-

"Nonetheless it is written that any person who toils over matters of Messiahs, even failed ones, even just to tell their stories, will be treated just the same as he who studies the eternal mysteries of light." 

Wisława Szymborska's The Onion

 

The Onion

The onion, now that's something else.

Its innards don't exist.

Nothing but pure onionhood

fills this devout onionist.

Oniony on the inside,

onionesque it appears.

It follows its own daimonion

without our human tears.

Our skin is just a cover-up

for the land where none dare go,

an internal inferno,

the anathema of anatomy.

In an onion there's only onion

from its top to its toe,

onionymous monomania,

unanimous omninudity.

At peace, of a piece,

internally at rest.

Inside it, there's a smaller one

of undiminished worth.

The second holds a third one,

the third contains a fourth.

A centripetal fugue.

Polyphony compressed.

Nature's rotundest tummy,

its greatest success story,

the onion drapes itself in its

own aureoles of glory.

We hold veins, nerves, and fat,

secretions' secret sections.

Not for us such idiotic

onionoid perfections.

-Wisława Szymborska (tr. Claire Cavanaugh and Stanley Barańczak)

That poem just makes me giggle. 'Nature's rotundest tummy', 'daimonion'. Often the smaller one inside is not just of 'undiminished worth', it's even better. The outer layers are generally damaged or dry.

Wisława Szymborska (1923-2012) was a Polish Nobel Prize winner, best known as a poet. I've scheduled this post in advance, but I'm off-grid as this appears; I picked this, not just because it's fun, but also because I'm likely reading a rather large volume by another female Nobel Prize winner from Poland...

Of the Time of Nero (#ccspin)

 

Here we have Hubert arbiting some elegances 

My spin book this time was Henryk Sienkiewicz' Quo Vadis, which set off a mini-reading project.

Petronius' The Satyricon

I knew Caius Petronius was a major character in Quo Vadis, and I thought I'd reread The Satyricon in advance. It's mostly accepted (though not universally) that Petronius, author of The Satyricon, is that Caius Petronius mentioned as the Elegantiae Arbiter of Nero's court in Tacitus. (Though maybe not: it's a common enough family name in Rome.)

What we have of The Satyricon is pretty fragmentary; parts, we're told, of Books XV and XVI, amounting to 164 pages in William Arrowsmith's translation. Even the exact meaning of the title is uncertain. For a Roman (as also a bit for us) it probably suggests several things: Satyrs (and thus lechery), satire, but also satura, a Roman word meaning heap or medley. The longest continuous surviving stretch is the dinner at Trimalchio's, who is a freedman working for the Imperial court, with lots of money and little taste and maudlin when drunk. It's amusing to see the sort of thing a rich Roman would have been eating at the time. It makes turducken look like an exercise in restraint.

It's not possible to say much with certainty about the work. If the note attached to the late medieval manuscript is correct about books XV and XVI,  it would be a very long work, even if there were only 16 books--and 24 would be a significant number for an ancient author.  Encolpius--the (loosely speaking) hero--of the book cons his way through life, cadging free dinners where he can, and sleeping (or trying to) with anything that moves. He hangs out with grammarians, professors of rhetoric, poets, so he seems to be an educated man, but there's something criminal in his background. Also he's managed to offend the god Priapus, with an unwelcome effect on his, umm, priapic appendage, and is on a quest to get back in good with the god, and go on sleeping around. (Probably. The book is fragmentary.) It is a severe judgment of its society. I find it funny in places, but your mileage may vary: some of the jokes are pretty insider-y Roman.

I took an undergraduate class on Petronius. We read a good chunk of the book in Latin, and as well as all of it in Arrowsmith's translation. I must have read the introduction--which is quite good--but I was amused now with how engaged Arrowsmith was with Lolita. (His translation comes out in 1959.) He calls Lolita a failure--twice. I'm sure I hadn't read Lolita at the time. It's not a comparison that would have occurred to me though. The sexual abuse of children is the meeting point, I suppose, but they're not really very much alike. Rather The Satyricon's embedded poetry, commentary thereon, and comically epic plot is more Pale Fire than Lolita. (Though The Satyricon is not either of them, of course.)

Tacitus' Annals

I enjoyed The Satyricon, but in the end I don't think rereading it brought much to Quo Vadis. Sienkiewicz accepts the attribution to Caius Petronius, but it doesn't otherwise feel like it impacts. Much more useful were the Annals, Tacitus' history of Rome from the death of Augustus to the death of Nero. (A.D. 14 - A.D. 68). Moses Hadas, in his introduction, notes that "Sienkiewicz' Quo Vadis... [has] long sections which are but adaptations of Tacitus." True that, Moze.

I thought one of the best things in Quo Vadis was the portrait of Petronius. Sienkiewicz is certainly taking off from Tacitus:

"His [Petronius'] days he passed in sleep, his nights in business and pleasures of life. Indolence had raised him to fame, as energy raises others, and he was reckoned not a debauchee and spendthrift, like most who squander their substance, but a man of refined luxury. And indeed his talk and his doings, the freer they were and the more show of carelessness they exhibited, were the better liked, for their look of natural simplicity...Then falling back into vice or affecting vice, he was chosen by Nero to be on of his few intimate associates, as a critic in matters of taste, while the emperor thought nothing charming or elegant in luxury unless Petronius had expressed to him his approval of it." [Annals 16.18, tr. Church and Broadribb]

Also, the great fire of Rome during Nero's reign. (July, A.D. 64) Tacitus would have been somewhere around six years old at time, but he doesn't use his own memories of the event (assuming he had some); instead he draws on earlier histories. It's a vivid moment in the book. Tacitus doubts Nero was responsible for the fire, but notes the rumors of Nero's guilt spring up almost immediately. The persecution of the Christians after the fire--Tacitus is our earliest source for this--he attributes to Nero's need to find a scapegoat to stifle those rumors.

The other thing that struck me (though irrelevant to Quo Vadis) was how important Armenia was in Roman thinking at the time. It was an ally, practically a client state, stuck on Rome's eastern border, wedged between Rome and the Arsacid-ruled empire of Parthia (corresponding roughly to modern Iran) who were a major rival to Rome at the time. Quite a lot of energy is devoted to keeping a friendly king in Armenia.

Tacitus is a famously difficult author in Latin. The (small) amount of his Latin I read in grad school impressed me; his tricky sentences frequently end with a sharp ironic sting in their tail. He reminded me of George Eliot, though of course the lines of influence run the other way, and I'm quite sure George Eliot knew her Tacitus perfectly well. The Church and Broadribb translation is fine, but it doesn't capture what I remember of the magic of Tacitus' prose.

Henryk Sienkiewicz' Quo Vadis

And on to the main event...

The handsome soldier Marcus Vinicius meets Callina (also called Lygia) and his knees tremble such as they never did in battle; the beautiful Lygia blushes bright pink and scampers off without a word out of Marcus' presence. "Ah, ha!" says the trained literary mind. "What we have here is Romantic Comedy!"

In romantic comedy the Question is what keeps our lovers apart and what it takes to get them together again in the end. Well, in Nero's Rome, there are plenty of things to keep them apart, maybe, just possibly, too many...

Not least is the fact that Lygia is a secret Christian. Years before she had been handed over to the Romans as a hostage and guarantee of a treaty between the Lygii and the Iazyges. The Romans were a neutral party in that conflict. But Lygia's father dies in battle and her mother dies as well, so Lygia, though an official state hostage, is more or less forgotten, raised by a nice Roman couple of the senatorial class.

Lygia is dark-haired with blue eyes and is so good-looking everyone is worried when she's in a room with Nero for a couple of hours he will fall into uncontrollable lust. Ah, but Petronius has a plan for that. (I suspected, and later verified, that the Lygii inhabited what is now Poland. A little Polish boosterism on the part of our author.) What Petronius didn't take into account was that the equally good-looking Marcus would attract the eye of Poppaea, the empress. Complications ensue.

This lightness doesn't last, though. (Well, the subtitle does say it's a narrative of the time of Nero.) The great fire and the persecution of the Christians are yet to come. For the purposes of the novel Sienkiewicz always assumes of the worst of Nero. Every time when Tacitus says some historians say this and some say that, Sienkiewicz always chooses the darker that, even when Tacitus says the milder this is likely true. For instance, the fire is started at the instigation of Nero, and, according to Sienkiewicz, he really does fiddle (or at least play a lyre) while Rome burns.

If it's not already clear, I preferred the earlier, lighter part of the novel. There were even some of those insider-y Roman jokes. When Petronius says of something it involves more fish than even Apicius ate in his life, I laughed. But it helps to know Apicius was the author of a cookbook. Petronius also snarks about Lucan's skill as a poet.

Later I felt it descended a bit into religious tract. The Christians (which include Peter and Paul) are all annoyingly noble, with the partial exception of Crispus, a fire and brimstone type who gets the occasional reprimand. Saint Paul asks Petronius (and we're reminded of it a second time), "If Caesar [Nero] were a Christian, would ye not all feel safer?" I'm afraid I wouldn't, and, alas, I don't think the question was meant ironically. The torture scenes began to feel a little voyeuristic. I was also a bit alarmed by Sienkiewicz' handling of Poppaea's purported Judaism. Josephus, the Jewish historian, is the source for this, and he meant it as a compliment. It doesn't come across that way in the novel.

Still, the later part has more portraits of well-known people and more big events. Not just Peter and Paul and Petronius. Nero and Poppaea do make good villains, even if their villainy is a bit played up. Seneca and Lucan have small roles. The danger and drama do pick up.

And as for our lovers? Well, you'll just have to read it and see... (if you haven't already.)

Antonine Propaganda

There's an exhibit on currently about Nero at the British Museum. I won't get to see it, but I did read the recent New Yorker article... It reminds us it's the winners who get to write the history. Tacitus, the most balanced of the surviving historians covering the period still clearly hates the Julio-Claudian emperors (that sequence of emperors who were descended somehow from Julius Caesar. Nero was the last.) Suetonius makes no pretence of balance. Both Tacitus and Suetonius flourished under the Flavian and then even more under the Antonine emperors, dynasties that were happy to have the previous guys slandered. It's just possible Nero wasn't quite *so* bad. Augustus had Maecenas, his PR guy, and consequently got pretty good press. The rest of the Julio-Claudians not so much. It doesn't necessarily matter for a novel, but it's worth keeping in mind.

Bit of a rainy week at the Internet-Free Zone so lots of reading. But there was a moment of sun when we caught this guy catching some rays...

Independent People

 "The chief point and the point to which I have always directed my course, is independence. And a man is independent if the hut he lives in is his own." [65]

That's Bjartur of Summerhouses speaking, the protagonist of Halldór Laxness' Independent People, and the most independent of the lot. After eighteen years of indentured servitude, he owns his own croft and flock of sheep. 

You learn what it's like to live in a thatched roof croft in a remote valley far from Reykjavík. It's around the year 1900. It's not pleasant. Cooped up all winter with wormy sheep, a leaky roof, and a fire that smokes. This is realism.

But it also connects to a more mythic era in Iceland's history. Bjartur composes poetry in the old style; I think it's supposed to be pretty good in Icelandic. People do actually believe in elves and trolls. The land Bjartur's house is on is supposedly cursed by Saint Columba (Columcille in Irish) who has been re-branded by the locals as the demon Kolumkilli. Bjartur sneers at this as mere superstition, but isn't entirely able himself to disbelieve.

The Fell King (a neighbor, always referred to as the Fell King, and at this time Bjartur's father-in-law) goes on after Bjartur makes his declaration:

"The love of freedom and independence has always been a characteristic of the Icelandic people. Iceland was originally colonized by freeborn chieftains who would rather live and die in isolation than serve a foreign king. They were the same sort of men as Bjartur."

Ah, Bjartur, the iconic Icelander. But then the Fell King goes on to ask his daughter Rosa, Bjartur's wife, how she likes life in the croft.

"'Oh, it's very free, of course,' she replied, and sniffed." [66]

So, the book is grim, mythic, and often laugh-out loud funny. 

Rosa dies in childbirth, but the daughter survives. Bjartur names her Asta Sollilja, ('beloved sun lily') a rather exotic name. She's the beginning of a considerable amount of flower imagery.

Some years pass, and Bjartur has remarried. Now in addition to Asta Sollilja, he has three sons who have survived their infant years, Helgi, Gvendur, and Nonni. His second wife's mother also lives with them. There's some comic business with a cow--Bjartur is very much a sheep man--whom the local grandee tries to give to Bjartur. Bjartur insists on paying for the cow, though he can't really afford it. (There's also backstory here between Bjartur and the grandee.) Briefly life looks up with the cow, but then an especially bad winter comes that nearly wipes out Bjartur (and does wipe out some of the family.)

The co-op movement comes to Iceland; Bjartur remains loyal to the merchant from whom he buys goods and to whom he sells sheep. The co-op movement is much celebrated in Denmark; it's a bit more ambiguous in the novel. Eventually World War I comes and in Iceland, which remained neutral, it's suddenly boom times.

Bjartur: "Oh, let them squabble, damn them. I only hope they keep it up as long as they can. They aren't half so particular about what they eat now that they're face to face with the realities of life. They'll eat anything now. They'll buy anything from you. Prices are soaring everywhere. Soon they'll be buying muck from your middens." [374]

Not the usual view on the first World War, but not necessarily wrong for that...

Bjartur is stubborn and sure of himself. How good a man is he? He does real damage. Both his wives die young, and while the poverty is so great that high mortality is unsurprising, Bjartur bears some responsibility. "You've always been a cross-grained swine," someone tells him at some point, and it's true. 

He meets with triumph and disaster, and mostly treats those two impostors just the same, but not entirely. His opinions get him and others into trouble, but if he'd stuck to his opinions (especially on debt) just a little more, he might have been better off. But it's also the case that forces outside of his control, that are too big for an independent person, dominate his life. Well, the novel did come out in two parts in the 30s. Maybe it was important to gang together to deal with tough times. The fates of Bjartur's three sons suggest the possibilities of rural Icelandic crofters at the time.

The reprint edition has an introduction by Brad Leithauser, which is interesting and informative. Leithauser met the author late in Laxness' life--Laxness was already starting to suffer from the Alzheimer's that would eventually do him in:

"When I spoke of my admiration for Bjartur, a look of perplexity gave way to one of alarm. 'Oh, but he's so stupid!' he [Laxness] objected.

'Oh, but he's so wonderfully stupid!" I replied, and the old man peered at me and pondered darkly a moment; then his features cleared and he abruptly laughed with pleasure."

That does give a good sense. But on the whole the introduction gives away too much. It's not especially a plot-driven novel, but there is one half-hidden mystery that is gradually revealed over the first third of the novel, and it's not until near the end that we fully understand what Bjartur knows. Leithauser spills the beans. Save the introduction for an afterword. 

The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andrić

 

"...this is not a building like any other, but one of those erected by God's will and for God's love; a certain time and certain men built it, and another time and other men will destroy it." [208]

The Bridge on the Drina is a novel about the Mehmed Pasha Sokolović bridge in Višegrad, Bosnia. The novel begins with the bridge's construction, starting in 1571, and relates its history from then until 1914, at the start of the first World War. The introduction, by William H. McNeill, says that there are over 200 characters in the novel (in just over 300 pages) but suggests, and I agree, that the real protagonist of the novel is the bridge itself. 

Mehmed Pasha Sokolovič, who funded the bridge, was born in the area, but was abducted as a child and forcibly converted to Islam for service under Ottoman Sultans. But he was good at it, eventually rising to become the Grand Vizier of the empire. He remembered his homeland, funded the building of the bridge, and left estates to pay for its upkeep. In the middle of the bridge there's a wide place, the kapia, with an engraved dedication, which you can sort of make out in the picture.

It's the novel that, more or less, won Andrić the Nobel Prize of 1961; they declared it an epic, but Andrić himself demurred; he said it was instead a chronicle, which is a pretty good description. But not one line per year as in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, but one with stories. Families and roles recur: the local Orthodox priest, the town rabbi, the administrator of the bridge's trust fund. 

Bosnia is of course a country with a dark and troubled history, and Andrić doesn't let you forget that, but he does allow for the possibility of good, and the bridge is its symbol:

"Even the least of the townsmen felt as if his powers were suddenly multiplied, as if some wonderful, superhuman exploit was brought within the measure of his powers and with the limits of everyday life, as if besides the well-known elements of earth, water, and sky, one more were open to him, as if by some beneficent effort each one of them could suddenly realize one of his dearest desires, that ancient dream of man--to go over the water and to be master of space." [66]

This is at the completion of the bridge, in 1577. But even to get there, a symbolic three lives were lost: Radisav, a Serbian Orthodox, tries to sabotage the construction, is caught, tortured and executed. The master mason's assistant, an Arab, dies in an industrial accident. And an unnamed gypsy child dies from eating too much halva at the party for the opening of the bridge. 

The life of the town centers around the bridge and in particular, that kapia, where hawkers sell food, where the townsfolk gather to talk, where boys meet girls.  One of the best stories is of Fata Avdagina:

"It has always been the case with us that at least one girl in every generation passes into legend and song because of her beauty, her qualities and her nobility." [104]

The story is alluded to in the summary on the back, though I don't think the summarist got it quite right. 😉  But according to the back cover she died from an unhappy marriage.

"For some time the townspeople talked about the incident and then began to forget it. All that remained was a song about a girl whose beauty and wisdom shone above the world as if it were immortal." [112]

The song of Fata Avdagina is sung on later occasions in the book. 

Wars and floods challenge the bridge. The bridge laughs off the floods, despite the occasional dire prediction. The town doesn't always. 

Wars are more problematic. The estates whose income funded the bridge maintenance were in Hungary, and when the Ottomans are forced to retreat from Hungary, that money dries up. The bridge was built with an associated caravanserai; with no money to maintain it, the caravanserai falls apart. 

Višegrad is near the Serbian border, and the various rebellions and wars that led to Serbian independence in 1878 trouble Višegrad as well and the bridge, a chokepoint, is used for the control of people's movement. The kapia is converted into a bunkhouse or a customs check.

That same Treaty of Berlin that formalized Serbian independence resulted in the transfer of Bosnia to the Austro-Hungarians. Financially this marks a major step up for Višegrad, and immigrants from elsewhere in Austria-Hungary start to arrive, Ashkenazi Jews (the town's Jews before were Sephardic), Croats, Italians. New businesses are established, though this includes a whorehouse.

But the frontier with Serbia remains just as troubled. The renowned Serbian rebel Jakov crosses the bridge while Fedun, an Austro-Hungarian soldier from the Ukraine is on duty. He's detained pending his court martial, but Fedun commits suicide before that happens. "Thus the young man who had made his mistake on the kapia remained for ever in the town." [169]

The years leading up to World War I are particularly poignant and interesting. These are times of Andrić's own youth, and he captures well the discussions that must have been taking place at the time.

"It is now 1914, the last year in the chronicle of the bridge on the Drina." [265]

Serb artillery is able to shell the town, and the bridge is partly blown up to prevent Serb armies from advancing. Another time and other men destroyed it. The bridge was restored after World War I (and after the novel ends), but was damaged even more in World War II, only to be restored again.

Ivo Andrić himself was an interesting figure. A Catholic, which to current thinking would make him a Croat, he saw himself as a Yugoslav and, at least in his later years, disliked the divisions between the various ethnic strands in Yugoslavia and refused to identify as a Croat. Certainly the happiest moments in the novel are when the various ethnic and religious groups in the city are able to live together in peace:

"'They are as close as the priest and the hodja'; and this saying became a proverb with them." [129]

And the priest and the hodja (a Muslim cleric) were especially close at that time. I was also amused when the town rabbi was given the title Hajji (one who has performed the haj or the pilgrimage to Mecca) as a title of respect. 

Ivo Andrić was born in 1892 in Sarajevo. His father died when he was two; his mother was impoverished and felt unable to raise him by herself, so he was given over to his mother's sister and her husband in Višegrad. Andrić felt these were his happiest years. He returned to Sarajevo when he got a scholarship for his studies. He was a friend of Gavrilo Princip, Franz Ferdinand's assassin, and a member of the same secret society as Princip; he seems to have known nothing about the assassination in advance, nevertheless he was arrested by the Austro-Hungarians, imprisoned first in a prison and then later house arrest before being granted clemency in 1917. After the war he earned a Ph.D. (at Graz) and joined the new kingdom of Yugoslavia's diplomatic service, serving in various posts before ending up as the ambassador to Nazi Germany just as Yugoslavia was invaded by Germany. In occupied Yugoslavia he lived in retirement, wrote three novels (including this one) which were only published at the end of the war. He held a few ceremonial posts in Tito's Yugoslavia, but mostly wrote. 

And in 1961 he won the Nobel prize. 

Very highly recommended. Maybe he was one of those who actually deserved the Nobel prize...

Since I was just reading about guslars recently in Kanigel's biography of Milman Parry, I was amused to see this:

"From the deep pocket of his cloak the Montenegrin drew out a gusle, a tiny primitive fiddle, clumsy and small as the palm of a man's hand, and a short bow." [33]

A second guslar shows up later as well.

I was intending a different Andrić novel for my twenty books of summer list, but this one crept in first. I might still read Omar Pasha Latas, though. It also covers Bosnia for my European reading tour this year.

Love In The Time of Cholera

"Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don't last your whole life."

Love in the Time of Cholera is funny, romantic, and wise about love in all its seasons: young, old, and in-between; in sickness and in health, etc.

But I also have to admit I had higher hopes for the book.

In the approved fashion, the book begins in medias res, or not exactly the middle since our main characters are in their 70s, but certainly not at the beginning nor at the end.

Fermina Daza and Dr. Juvenal Urbino are an old married couple. They're tender with each other, though she's getting frail and his memory is going. As an old married couple their relationship is not without its grumbles, but they still care for each other.

Then Dr. Urbino dies in a tragic, but also comic, accident involving a parrot.

Immediately after the funeral Florentino Ariza proposes to Fermina Daza. He's waited, he says, fifty-one years, nine months, and four days for this moment.

The chapter ends and the novel flashes back to when Florentino and Fermina first met as teenagers and they fell passionately in love. He lurks where she might see him; composes a violin sonata in her honor and plays where she might hear it; and most of all, writes her love letters, dropping them off where he knows she will find them.

Eventually Fermina's father gets wind of this budding romance and drags her off--Florentino is a bastard son and has yet to make his fortune--and Florentino is left in Colombia, heartbroken. (That's Florentino's mother quoted at the top.)

Trips to remote lands so that one party gets over some inappropriate love is a frequent trope in novels and we know how that works in general: it doesn't. Except this time it does. Fermina comes back two years later, looks at the badly dressed Florentino, figuratively slaps her forehead, and says, "What was I thinking!" 

At the end of the book, the novel returns to the now mature romance of Fermina and Florentino. This newly refounded romance surprises, and is also handled with tenderness and humor.

It's all the stuff in the middle I had my doubts about. Florentino makes his everlasting pile in the steamboat business. That was expected. He romances some vast binder of women--we're given a number--but all that flesh never diminishes his longing for the lost Fermina. (Well, maybe once, a little bit, but before long he returns to Fermina even in his thoughts.) It was not very convincing, but worse: I thought it was dull. I'd have liked better a book that was a hundred pages shorter with less incidencing in the middle.

Ah, well. Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a Nobel prize winner and I'm a...blogger. Maybe I'm wrong...

The Other Reader read the book earlier in the year and liked it better than I did. One question we discussed was how seriously were we to take Florentino's writing talents. I thought we were to assume he was effective: the start of Fermina's love is with the letters. Well, they were teenagers, perhaps not especially discriminating, but it certainly wasn't his clothes, or his looks, or his manners that Fermina found engaging. Later we learn that Florentino writes love letters for hire in town; they work; and several love matches are engendered by the letters he wrote. He becomes the godfather to a child whose parental romance he facilitated. The widowed Fermina is appalled by Florentino's proposal after the funeral; understandably; Florentino is balding and constipated and not the substance of love, but it's his written philosophical meditations on mortality that first put Fermina back on the hook.

The Other Reader, though, argued that none of these people are especially discerning; that we're told Florentino read everything, even the worst sort of romantic trash, and modelled his love letters on that. 

I dunno. I suppose a book that people can read differently in serious ways has something going for it. 

If you've read it, what did you think?

Churchill's Novel

Churchill in 1895.
Not yet the bulldog
he became later.

Did you know there were two Winston Churchills? I didn't until recently. I was reading Mencken's A Book of Prefaces (1917) and he kept talking about Winston Churchill as a well-known American novelist. This threw me off. In the usual Mencken way, he referred to Churchill dismissively, as kind of a hack, though maybe not the worst hack. Really? I thought. Churchill? 

I knew Churchill's mother was American, but still this seemed odd. Some googling later and I realized there was an American Winston Churchill (1871-1947) who wrote a bunch of novels and was once upon a time more famous, and the Winston S. Churchill we all know wrote one novel, a Ruritanian romance, in 1897.

I'm a sucker for Ruritanian romances and Project Gutenberg was there for me.

In Savrola, A Tale of the Revolution in Laurania, General Antonio Molara is well on his way to becoming president for life. Five years earlier there was a revolution; Molara led it and seized power. Molara has no real intention of going away. But the country is growing restive and demands the restoration of elections. Molara agrees, but cuts the voter rolls in half, figuring if he can get rid of the wrong sort of voter he can still win an election. (Where have I heard that sort of thing?)

The Reform Committee comes to the presidential palace to register a formal protest but are dismissed with nothing. Savrola is the leader of the Reform Committee. Savrola is a magnetic figure, with a Europe-wide reputation; Molara needs to know just how close Savrola is to the people who are ready to pick up guns. Arresting Savrola would be bad publicity, possibly dangerous. He sends his wife Lucile, beautiful and lively, to flirt with Savrola and pick up what information she can. Just how far does Molara intend for his wife to go? Lucile assumes it's just to talk to the man.

Savrola knows who the men with the guns are--Strelitz is just across the border with his rebel troops itching to return--but he would prefer a more peaceful change of power. Lucile learns little, though, and returns impressed with Savrola. 

Events intervene.

Laurania is somewhere on the Mediterranean; the names are mostly Spanish-sounding or Italian. The country has a colony on the east coast of Africa, reachable only via the Suez Canal. A crisis precipitated by the U.K. means that the navy has to steam off to solve that. The navy is loyal to Molara; nobody's sure about the army. With the navy leaving, Strelitz crosses the border, and the revolution, against Savrola's wishes, begins. 

Churchill writes well about the house-to-house fighting in the capital; the siege of the palace is well-handled, I thought. Well, he was a war correspondent at the time. The politics are reasonably well thought out. The romance part of it was OK, but not as good. You can see the outlines of the triangle Molara/Lucile/Savrola in my description of the setup, but there wasn't much surprise there. The final ending of the revolution owed more to realism than romance. Anthony Hope (The Prisoner of Zenda, the original Ruritanian romance) has nothing to worry about. At the same time the politics showed nothing of the sophistication found in that novel set in Costaguana. 

Ah, well. Wikipedia tells me that Churchill wrote in a volume of his autobiography, "I have consistently urged my friends to abstain from reading it." He was doing himself a disservice--it's better than that. If you like the Ruritanian, Graustarkian, Orsinian, Fenwickian sort of story, the Lauranian isn't a bad addition.

Lucky Per

Peter Andreas Sidenius (Per) is a middle child in a large family. His father is a severe and pious minister; his mother, an invalid. They live in a small town in the south of Jutland, which was then, as now, considered the sticks of Denmark.

Prayers and hymns are the order of the day for the family, but not for Per, who rebels against all that. We feel Per is an irritable and objectionable young man, but his sins, while in his home town, are pretty minor: with a gang of boys, he steals apples from a farmer's tree; he sneaks out of the house to go sledding after dinner. Nevertheless his father shames him publicly for these transgressions. Per is determined to get to Copenhagen as soon as he can; he's going to be an engineer, none of this piety for him.

But when he gets to Copenhagen and university, he can't be bothered with classes or even exams; instead he spends all his time drafting a proposal to create a canal network for Jutland. As far as we can judge such things the canal network seems clever, but Per hasn't the patience to master the preparatory training and offends the financial and political powers he will need to make things happen.

(Weirdly my professional career as a computer consultant involved three business areas; two of them were shipping and finance. I would say Pontoppidan, who trained as an engineer, understood shipping--canal dredging in this case--in a deep way; his knowledge of financial markets and stock issuances feels pretty shallow.)

Per is a pretty objectionable hero, and the narrative voice doesn't let us forget that. There's a lot Nietzschean-sounding language: is Per an Übermensch who will remake the world if only all those little people get out of his way? Sometimes he thinks so. Still we care about him. He definitely does some bad things, but some of the worst are only fantasized: he thinks about dumping his rich fiancée to chase after an even richer girl, but doesn't. Like many a young man he can't bring himself to say, "I love you." Too socially maladroit to say it, he writes her a rather charming love letter, but decides it's all sentiment and burns it rather than send it.

And whatever he does brings on the clucking condemnation of his father and his oldest brother.

That rich fiancée is Jakobe, the daughter of a Jewish merchant, and is a fascinating character in her own right. She has a younger, more conventionally pretty sister, Nanny, who attracts all the boys, including Per, until Per decides he's more interested in her more serious-minded older sister. I was reminded of Dorothea (though Nanny is flightier--and less likeable--than Celia) from Middlemarch, though the other Eliot comparison is clearly Daniel Deronda (a point made in the Introduction as well) and here Pontoppidan wins hands down. Pontoppidan's view of the Jewish community is equally sympathetic as Eliot's but far more nuanced and convincing.

Too much more of the plot would start to feel spoilerish, so I'll refrain, though I will say the novel surprised me all the way through. Even thirty pages from the end I couldn't see how Pontoppidan would end it, but end it he did and more than satisfactorily. (Though there may have been a little too much forgiveness at the end. I don't know. But maybe.)

Hans im Glück from my student edition of Grimm's Fairy
Tales. Clearly I once knew what vorteilhaft meant, but
had to look it up to reread the tale.

One of the questions in the novel is which fairy tale best represents Per's trajectory. (You can decide if you think Nietzsche just another fairy tale.) It seems that an issue at the time was whether Scandinavian literature was all just fairy tales, or did it address real people with real problems. Pontoppidan suggests, why choose?

Is Per the stable boy who does a service for the king, marries the princess, and gains half the kingdom? Or--apparently a well-known Scandinavian fairy tale, though unknown to me--is he the troll that crawls out from under his rock, looks around, and then decides to crawl back under? Or a Cain doomed to wander? His father calls him that at one point. The German translation of the novel uses Hans im Glück for its title, one of Grimm's fairy tales, which would seem a bit to give it away, except after rereading the Grimm Brothers tale, I'm not so sure it's a perfect match either.

Lucky Per came out in in eight volumes from 1898 to 1904 (eight volumes making just under 600 pages in this edition) and is, I read, one of Henrik Pontoppidan's major novels. But it's only one of them. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1917. Still the novel wasn't translated into English until 2010 and I don't know that even then it made much noise; Modern Library reissued it last year and that seems to have helped. I know a group of bloggers read it last year; James Wood reviewed it in The New Yorker; etc., etc. Those other novels haven't yet been translated into English. For something that seems to me quite clearly great this is pretty shocking. Germans were better served and took notice: my Modern Library edition features a rave blurb by Thomas Mann, and Georg Lukacs looked at the novel in depth in his The Story of the Novel.

So, yes, read it. It's touching, with love and ambition and philosophical questions (Nietzsche, but also very much Kierkegaard) on the go, it's troubling and thoughtful, and at least sometimes funny--forgot to mention funny earlier--and you care about the fate of the characters, Per and Jakobe, particularly.

But. I feel like I've been complaining about translations a lot recently, and I hate to grumble (no, of course, I like to grumble, I just don't want to be thought a grumbler) but the translation didn't strike me as very good. Garth Risk Hallberg, author of City on Fire, who wrote the introduction, says it's considered a stylistic masterpiece in Danish, and our Danish friend (also from rural Jutland in fact) told us the same. In English, it's not. Now I have no Danish, and I'm unlikely to learn Danish in this lifetime, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but there were a number of ungainly moments. Nanny eventually marries Dyhring, an editor and publisher:

"There was no question, on either side, of real passion. Dyhring's love expressed itself, after a while, mostly as a kind of impudent affection, and, despite the comparative meaninglessness of this inclination, Nanny showed herself willing to accept his provocative kisses. In fact, it was really the exigent satisfying of their mutual vanity that bound them together." [295]

This is funny, or meant to be, but 'showed herself willing'? And 'exigent'? Surely the register doesn't come across as so Latinate and pedantic in Danish. Or if it does, it's probably even more over the top, as satire.

Or this:

"When it was revealed that the cakes on the table were Frøken Inger's own handiwork, the baroness and her sister vied with each other to eulogize them,..." [427]

Now it's true the cakes were about to die the death all cakes deserve--thrown headlong down the gullet--but is a eulogy quite what's implied in Danish? I ask you.

There were a few slangy Americanisms that pulled me up ("cut him some slack") but on the other hand The Beautiful Game was called football and not soccer.

Now maybe all of these translation choices can be defended on the basis of the Danish--I don't know and can't tell you--but then there was this:

"By this famous, snaking drive, they reached the Janiculum, with the wonderful view of all of Rome and mile-wide vista from the Campagna to the shining Albanian mountains in the distance." [302]

Wow, I thought! Was the pollution really so much less in Rome in 1885 that you could see the Albanian mountains? Surely not!

And, indeed, not. Even on Rome's clearest day you can't see the mountains of Albania from the Janiculum. The Apennines are in the way. What you can see is the Alban Hills. This is simply illiterate, both geographically and verbally. Sigh.

Oh, dear. Well, #NameTheTranslator...though maybe I shouldn't. But it's Naomi Lebowitz; she's an emerita professor from Washington University who wrote about European literature, and in particular, Scandinavian literature. She ought to be good. I'm afraid I don't feel she was.

Nevertheless, having slagged this translation (a slangy Britishism--probably out of date, too) I would note it took us a century to get to this first translation into English. The novel really is great. Don't wait for the next.

I know some of you have already read it. (I'm late to the party as usual.) Am I getting it right?

John Galsworthy's To Let (The Forsyte Saga 3)

"Soames Forsyte emerged from the Knightsbridge Hotel, where he was staying, in the afternoon of the 12th of May, 1920, with the intention of visiting a collection of pictures in a Gallery off Cork Street, and looking into the Future."

That's the opening of the third novel, To Let, of Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga. Twenty years--and World War I--have passed since the events of the second novel, and the Future is that much more present--and ominous. "The new generation mocked at anything solid and tenacious."

At least for Soames. Painting has moved beyond even the Impressionists and post-Impressionists, which were nothing but blurs and dots anyway. Taxes are going up and Labour could be elected on a platform of the confiscation of all property, at least as Soames sees it. And his beloved daughter Fleur is now nineteen, and looking for new males to conquer. Her father is no longer enough.

We remembered, or, if not, we're quickly reminded, there are two strands of the Forsyte family that don't get along at all: cousins Jolyon Forsyte and Soames Forsyte. Soames Forsyte is still absorbed in the idea of Irene, his first wife, who went on to marry Jolyon. Indeed there are two and only two women in Soames' life: his ex-wife Irene and his daughter Fleur. His second and current wife Annette exists on a distinctly lower plane.

Jolyon has a son, another Jolyon, called Jon, who's the same age as Fleur, and as that epigraph from Romeo and Juliet,

"From out the fatal loins of those two foes
A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life"

ought to make very clear, they're destined to meet and fall in love. Of course in Shakespeare, 'take their life' has a double meaning. Does it in To Let? Well, that would be telling.

Neither young Jon nor Fleur have any notion of the nature of the quarrel; at the beginning they barely know they even have these cousins. Various adults suggest they need to be told, but they aren't, and the lure of the forbidden only adds spice to the romance between these two eighteen-year-olds.

Unlike in Romeo and Juliet where the nature of the feud is largely unexplained--chalk it up to the sort of clannish political rivalry found in Renaissance towns--we know perfectly well why Soames and Irene can't bear the sight of each other. The drama is driven by how Future discovers the Past still exists and will impact its Present.

I thought this was very good, better than the second and as good as the first. (Well, a middle novel. What can you do?) Soames is rather a villain all the way through, uncertain to himself why, and certainly unable to articulate it. But I felt the second novel rather stacked the deck against him, while in the this one he was once again able to make his own mistakes.

Now I need to see the BBC mini-series version.

One other thing I wanted to note. I briefly alluded to it in my first post on the saga, and that's the prose. I mostly think it's pretty effective, but there are certainly some odd quirks in how he handles free indirect discourse:

"Where was Annette? With that chap, for all he knew--she was a young woman! Impressed with the queer charity of that thought, he entered the summerhouse and sat down. The fact was--and he admitted it--Fleur was so much to him that his wife was very little--very little; French--had never been much more than a mistress, and he was getting indifferent to that side of things! It was odd how, with all his ingrained care for moderation and secure investment, Soames ever put his emotional eggs into one basket. First Irene--now Fleur. He was dimly conscious of it, sitting there, conscious of its odd dangerousness. It had brought him to wreck and scandal once, but now--now it should save him! ... [skipped a spoilerish couple of sentences here] ... Fleur's future! 'I want fair sailing for her,' he thought. 'Nothing else matters at my time of life.' A lonely business--life! What you had you could never keep to yourself! As you warned one off, you let another in. One could make sure of nothing! He reached up and pulled a red rambler rose from a cluster which blocked the window. Flowers grew and dropped--Nature was a queer thing!"

There are eight (!) exclamation marks in that passage. A shocking thing! I was told by at least one writing teacher--advice I ignored--never to use them--ever. (Another said no dashes, and especially unpaired dashes. Oops.) It's pretty clear Galsworthy uses them to distinguish what are Soames' thoughts in free indirect discourse from the general flow of the paragraph. It's not the only thing he uses: repetition and dashes also function for that purpose: "very little--very little;" or "but now--now."

But the exclamation mark gives a certain breathlessness to Soames' thoughts. That may be OK in this passage. In the early part of the passage, we're told Soames' thoughts in something close to an authorial voice: "Impressed with the queer charity of that thought" or "he admitted it" or "dimly conscious." Later Soames' thoughts are actually quoted in words: "'I want fair sailing for her,' he thought." Also the use of exclamation marks builds up over its length so that most of them occur near the end of what I've quoted, at the moment of that rather symbolic rose. So well and good.

But Galsworthy uses exclamation marks to indicate everyone's interior consciousness in free indirect discourse! This isn't the only passage! So is everyone thinking breathlessly and excitedly? No--no, certainly not! Or, at least, not at all times! So, it's also a bit of a tick, one that I'm not sure Galsworthy has worked through and has entirely under his control. At the very least reading the Saga one needs to diminish in one's mind the significance of the exclamation mark.

Thoughts?

Posts on the three volumes of the Forsyte Saga collected here. But for me there are still more Forsytes to go, (A Modern Comedy, et al.) and I will most definitely be going...