I wouldn’t go back there because the objects that are linked in your memory with the familiar life of former times instantly lose their value when, seI wouldn’t go back there because the objects that are linked in your memory with the familiar life of former times instantly lose their value when, severed from them, you see them again in strange surroundings.
[image] (Cathleen Rehfeld - My Mother’s Silver )
Shortly after the second world war, a young Jewish woman travels to a house to recollect the belongings of her family that have been taken into custody there during the war by a neighbour. She isn’t welcome and finds out more than she wanted to know about human nature.
I read this powerful and perplexing short story because it came up as a source of inspiration for Yael van der Wouden’s recent novel The Safekeep. Like in Marga Minco’s Bitter Herbs, much is left unsaid. Minco’s writing is simple, sober and uncannily effectual- in her storytelling each word counts.
I am still on the fence about reading The Safekeep but these six pages were well-worth reading.
In spring from the black branches of the flowering plum tree the woodthrush issues its routine message of survival. Where does such happinFlowering Plum
In spring from the black branches of the flowering plum tree the woodthrush issues its routine message of survival. Where does such happiness come from as the neighbors’ daughter reads into that singing, and matches? All afternoon she sits in the partial shade of the plum tree, as the mild wind floods her immaculate lap with blossoms, greenish white and white, leaving no mark, unlike the fruit that will inscribe unraveling dark stains in heavier winds, in summer.
She dives deep into the past, as into the depths of the sea. Ever lower, ever further, towards zones of shadow and silence that she thought had been aShe dives deep into the past, as into the depths of the sea. Ever lower, ever further, towards zones of shadow and silence that she thought had been abolished in her memory.
Elle plonge au fond du passé, comme dans les profondeurs de la mer. Toujours plus bas, plus loin, vers des zones d'ombre et de silence, qu'elle croyait abolies dans son souvenir.
This slender book consists of two novellas by Irène Némirovsky (1903-1942). A Kyiv-born novelist whose wealthy family went into exile in France after the Russian revolution, living in Paris and writing in French, Irène Némirovsky was an acclaimed author in France in the interbellum. Nowadays she is best known for Suite Française, a novel eventually published in 2004 of which the unfinished manuscript was kept in a suitcase by her daughters for more than fifty years after their mother perished in Auschwitz.
Drawn from the collection Film parlé, the novellas Ida (1934) and La comédie bourgeoise (1932) sketch a double portrait of two women whose lives at first sight come forth as quite different. Ida Sconin is an aging revue dancer and singer from Eastern European origin, performing in a music hall cabaret in Paris à la Moulin Rouge or Folies Bergère, famous and celebrated but living a lonely and isolated life, while Madeleine is the angel in the house of a prosperous upper middle class family, the daughter of a factory owner, married to the associate of her father, taking care of her parents, husband and son and daughter, living in a small community in rural northern France.
Both Ida and Madeleine deal in a similar way with the societal constraints their class, social position and gender roles impose on them. The taxing daily masquerade with heavy glitter costumes, wigs and feathers and hours of exercising to keep her body stage-fit gradually require more than Ida’s aging body can endure, even if there is no alternative but to carry on. Madeleine, trapped into a marriage of convenience, swallows the double standards on sexual freedom and conjugal fidelity for men and women for the sake of the happiness of others while seeing her life wasting away in the endless repetitiveness of the days, illustrated by her taking the same walks on the same roads in every stage of her life. Both are gritting their teeth to play their part, silently enduring and sacrificing what they hold dear, however rebelling quietly by keeping up to their own standards versus a hypocritical, merciless, and oppressive society and the indifference of their environment for their feelings.
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(Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec – Rousse(La Toilette), 1889))
By highlighting what these women living such different but equally unhappy lives have in common, Irène Némirovsky reveals the unenviable position of women in the early 20th century. Touching on the parallels emerging with Madeleine’s granddaughter, who just like her grandmother is bravely learning to play the piano required in every good bourgeois family – not for pleasure but to please others - she paints a rather pessimistic picture, discerning: no signs of change to expect soon in the future yet.
The melancholic tone and some of the wry turns in the lives of Ida and Madeleine bring Anton Chekhov to mind – Némirovsky wrote a biography on Chekhov that was published posthumously (A Life of Chekhov). The grittiness and the bleak portrayal of Ida’s exploitative milieu and the hypocrisy and suffocating boredom of bourgeois life stifling Madeleine echo Guy de Maupassant, particularly his novel Une vie. La comédie bourgeoise inexorably evokes Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, although Madeleine’s choices are quite unlike Emma’s. Set in the 1920s, Irène Némirovsky’s stories still seem to have one leg in the French 19th century realistic and naturalistic writing, yet they are also cinematographic and the dreamlike interior narrative of Ida slightly reminded me of La Femme de Gilles, the 1937 debut novel by Madeleine Bourdouxhe, a Belgian contemporary of Irène Némirovsky whose writing style however seemed already more in touch with modernity.
Where there is love Even silence Is word Lalla Romano
A silence shared is a brief, intimist and atmospheric novel by the Italian writer and painter Lalla Where there is love Even silence Is word Lalla Romano
A silence shared is a brief, intimist and atmospheric novel by the Italian writer and painter Lalla (Graziella) Romano (1906-2001), in which she solidifies and transforms silence into words, soaked in melancholy, longing and quiet joy – lauding the strength and the solace not to say anything, the consoling feel of tears flowing gently like the thawing of snow, cleansing and washing away waste, the dribble of weakness.
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Taking refuge from the bombings of Turin, perching with her cousins in a taciturn village in the countryside, Giulia, a young woman whose husband Stefano has stayed in Turin for work, befriends Ada and Paolo, a couple that equally fled to stay in the even more remote group of houses of Tetto Murato (the original title). Fascinated by this couple and their obvious differences (the vivid impulsiveness of Ada; the intellectuality and thoughtfulness of Paolo), Giulia, from offering them a helping hand, slips into the intimate orbit of the couple. Ada is an aristocrat of the imagination, a Grand Duchess from a fairy-tale. Communication between the couple Paolo and Ada is scarce, Ada alludes to how little Paolo shares of his thoughts or what he does with her. Soon the reader realises to be in the same position. Paolo is secretive– there are subtle allusions to his activities in the resistance. He stays an enigma to the reader, he leaves people wanting. Yet Giulia’s senses their kindredness, the Elective Affinities that connect her to Paolo, more than to her husband Stefano, whose temperament in turn rather echoes Ada’s than Giulia’s. Giulia’s daily walks to Tetto Murato through the wintry landscape seamlessly flow into her barely going back to her cousins at all, sitting at the couple’s table with other family members, sharing their meagre meals and even their conjugal bed. Isolated, unable to leave the hovel because of Paolo’s illness, cut off from the world physically and psychologically, they withdraw inwardly. The ongoing war, the patrolling of the fascists dissolve into the background, the intensity of unspoken emotions reduce the war and its atrocities to piped music that is not noticed anymore.
Lalla Romano wrote that For me, to write has always been to pluck from the dense and complex fabric of life some image, from the noise of the world some note, and surround them in silence. The English translation took its title from the epigraph Lalla Romano derived from the friend who played an important part in her transition from painting to writing novels, Cesare Pavese (1908-1950): The only true silence is a silence shared.
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Written with subtle elegance, melancholic, unsentimental and detached, reminiscent of Natalia Ginzburg’s recount of her own family’s refuge to the countryside during World War II in the essay Winter in the Abruzzi, A Silence shared is a quiet and sensory study of the impact of unexpected seclusion on relationships and a wonderful tribute to the beauty of life.
Thanks to NetGalley and Pushkin Press for kindly offering an advanced reading copy of this book. (*** ½)...more
Nicole and André, a couple of recently retired teachers, travel for a second time to Moscow. They will speLitte misunderstandings of no importance
Nicole and André, a couple of recently retired teachers, travel for a second time to Moscow. They will spend time with André’s daughter from his first marriage, Masha, who helps her father with some work and learning Russian. Nicole feels sidetracked, old an useless and struggles with boredom. Sulking, the couple represses mutual grudges and friction but tensions rise now their stay in the city seems to reflect the veil of greyness that has descended over their common life and future, exposing political disappointment and fear of aging.
Who is to blame for their mutual misunderstandings and irrations, Nicole or André? Does it matter? Alternating between the viewpoints of André and Nicole, de Beauvoir does not take sides and evokes how both grapple with aging and desillusionment. Looking back at their personal life and choices, the disenchantment is enhanced by the confrontation with the real face of Soviet communism that refutes André’s political ideals and commitment. Nicole questions herself as a woman when observing the smoothness and ease in which the younger generation of women embrace their feminity in unison with their chosen role in the outside world, having it all – independence and natural womanhood, while she feels herself disappear as a sexual being – an experience of the crumbling of identity and emptiness taking over the self, on the other hand creating a new blank canvas to paint on with different strokes.
[image] (photograph by Antanas Sutkus, 1965)
Set in 1966, Misunderstanding in Moscow was written around 1965 and was due to be included in de Beauvoir’s short story collection The Woman Destroyed – the afterword explains it was likely replaced by the third story in that collection, ‘The age of discretion’, which was told solely from the perspective of the woman. The novella was posthumously published in 1992 and conveys some parallels between the fictitious couple and the lives of Sartre and de Beauvoir (their visits to the Soviet Union; the worries of Nicole because of the heavy drinking and smoking of André echo de Beauvoir’s on Sartre’s dangerously unhealthy habits mentioned in Kate Kirkpatrick’s biography Becoming Beauvoir: A Life).
The moon was shining, as was the little star which faithfully accompanies it, and Nicole repeated to herself the lovely lines from Aucassin an Nicolette: ‘I see you tiny star. Drawn closely to the moon.’ That’s the advantage of literature, she told herself: you can take words around with you. Images fade, become distorted, disappear. But she could still find the old words in her throat, precisely as they had been written.
Reflecting on memory, transience, the passing of time and its impact on longstanding relationships, the novella points out some of the difficult questions the need to find a new place in life after retirement engenders and invites the reader to think about how to sort out those questions for oneself, without scooping out any answers. The topics touched upon might seem bleak at first sight but de Beauvoir is remarkably and cheeringly optimistic on the ability to keep on dancing as a couple regardless of age and the experiences of loss such implies. (*** ½)...more
Lately reading an essay of Salman Rushdie on censorship, expounding to his readers that for many of us liberty and frWaiting for an uncertain dawn
Lately reading an essay of Salman Rushdie on censorship, expounding to his readers that for many of us liberty and freedom of speech come as naturally and unnoticed like the air we breathe, this novel, even if set in the early seventies and published in 1975 comes across as written yesterday. It is a trenchant remonstrance not to take personal, political and artistic freedom for granted, even if one is living in a part of the world that is less inclined than the current Turkish authorities to silence writers, journalists and artists, wielding the law against them as a weapon, prosecuting and jailing them.
Having been imprisoned and exiled for her left wing political views after the military coup in 1971(*), the Turkish novelist Sevgi Soysal (1936-1976 ) enrols in the apparently longstanding troublesome relationship the Turkish authorities at diverse periods in the history of the state maintain with some of its writers and intellecuals (Orhan Pamuk, Aslı Erdoğan, Ahmet AltanI Will Never See the World Again).
[image] Wall painting showing the symbols of Adana on the ceilings of Optiumum Outlet Center in Yüreğir, Adana – Turkey
Get yourself out of this. Now! You must choose your battles carefully, very carefully indeed. As carefully as love. You must be open to all battles, see the beauty in the world and its importance. But you must choose the ones you wish to fight. What use will beautiful sentences do me in here? Beauty knows no shadows. It has no place in here.
Rushdie writes that At night, as we fall asleep, we assume we will be free tomorrow, because we were free today. The creative act requires not only freedom but also this assumption of freedom..This novel gives an illustration of the impact on individual lives when that assumption of waking up as a free person is upended.
The novel takes place during one night when a gathering at a dinner party in a house in the south-Eastern Turkish town of Adana is raided by the police and three of those present are taken to the police headquarters for interrogation: Oya, a journalist who was sent to Adana into exile after being imprisoned for a year in Ankara as a political prisoner (as Sevgi Soysal was herself); Mustafa, a teacher who also spent time in prison because of his left wing political activities and was recently released, and Ali, Mustafa’s uncle, a worker and the host of the dinner. During the long night of interrogation they reflect on their lives and beliefs while they are at the mercy of the police . In a stream of consciousness narrative their thoughts wander over past and present traumatising experiences of detainment, humiliation, torture and violence, over feelings of isolation, reflecting on their own revolutionary élan, wishes of reform and defeatism. Oscillating between their reflections and impressions, Sevgi Soysal reveals their different ideological and psychological struggles, vulnerabilities and doubts, intermingled with the points of view of other family members, fellow prisoners they knew in the past and the thoughts of officials and police officers who impose their own agenda, whether or not they abuse their power to guarantee the social and economic order according to martial law or to secure their own position in the hierarchy.
Soysal’s direct and austere prose skilfully draws the reader into the minds of the characters. Touching on power balances between men and women, the dynamics within the family and marriage, the contrasts between town and countryside, the various and contradicting loyalties of people depending on the multiple groups they belong too, torn between traditional and modern ideas, she is strikingly frank and open on sexuality and the body (one of her books was banned for obscenity), making a powerful feminist point through conveying Oya’s anxiety that her period might start and her interrogator might see the blood stains, realising that if we see our own bodies as shameful, if its untold secrets are mysteries even to us, if we censor our thoughts, lest they be judged evil, how are we ever to stand up for our beliefs?. Her depiction of the violence inflicted on the prisoners and how it is varied according to their origin, sex or class is harrowing. Nonetheless the brutality of these scenes, Sevgi Soysal’s realistic evocation of life in prison is interspersed with moments of humour, light, resilience and courage; her prose breathes an indomitable spirit.
The title of this novel can be read literally as well as metaphorically: once the night is gone and dawn arrives, Sevgi Soysal leaves it open what will become of her three protagonists- in some way their uncertain future conjures up questions on what might become of Turkey in the future, once the darkness of the depicted age will lighten up.
The introduction of the translator sheds a light on Sevgi Soysal’s personal activism and experience in prisons, making the fictional rendering of them in the novel even more poignant. Reminiscent of Oriana Fallaci’s A Man (on the detention and subjection to torture of Alexandros Panagoulis, the Greek politican and poet who fought against the Regime of the Colonels (1967-1974)), this book is a powerful testimony that legality isn’t synonymous to legitimacy with regard to human rights.
Oh, the mistakes you can make, when longing for a friendly face grows too strong.
Thanks to Archipelago and NetGalley for giving me the chance to read an ARC of this novel.
(*) In March 1970, senior army officers, concerned by the uncontrolled spread of political violence and a revolt in Kurdish regions of eastern Turkey and fearing that political divisions would spread to the army itself, delivered a warning to the government and a year later forced prime minister Demirel’s resignation. During the next two years, Turkey was ruled by supraparty coalitions of conservative politicians and technocrats who governed with the support of the army and who were primarily concerned with restoring law and order. Martial law was established in several provinces and was not completely lifted until September 1973; there were armed clashes with guerrillas and many arrests and trials; extremist political parties, including the WPT and the Islamic-based National Order Party (NOP), were shut down; and the constitution was amended to limit personal freedoms. Unlike in 1960–61, however, there was no sweeping political reorganization; the constitution, parliament, and major political parties remained. In 1973 the army withdrew to the barracks when its candidate for the presidency was defeated, leaving government once more to the politicians (from www.britannica.com)....more
I did not want to know but I have since come to know that one of the girls, when she wasn’t a girl anymore and hadn’t long been back from honeymoon, wI did not want to know but I have since come to know that one of the girls, when she wasn’t a girl anymore and hadn’t long been back from honeymoon, went into the bathroom, stood in front of the mirror, unbuttoned her blouse, took off her bra and aimed her own father’s gun at her heart, her father at the time was in the dining room with other members of the family and three guests.
Bang! What an explosive entry. From the first deliciously long, savoury, suspenseful sentence Javier Marías had me hooked, holding me dangling on his words like a fish that lost sense of its fish nature, oblivious if it is water or air that is essential for life – or both. Even if I thought having an inkling of what to expect with this second foray into his writing after reading Thus Bad Begins a few years ago, Marías brilliant writing took my breath away.
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Opening with the suicide of the sister of the narrator’s mother – a sister who as well had been married to the narrator father, Ranz, previously - Marías weaves an intriguing tapestry out of family secrets and mysteries, circling around the shady past of Juan’s enigmatic father Ranz and his two – or three? – marriages. At least one of these women being dead, allusions on Bluebeard slowly sneak under the skin. Why does Ranz give Juan the nuptial advice not to share all his secrets with his bride? What is he hiding? Juan’s bewilderment on his family’s past interferes with his feelings of mystification by his own recent marriage with Luisa, his ominous sense of foreboding that disaster looms over them, cunningly drawing the reader in by weaving variations on the book’s epigraph from Macbeth as a leitmotif throughout the novel:
My hands are of your colour; but I Shame To wear A Heart So White
Isn’t one of the pleasures of marriage that one is able to share and talk about ‘everything’ safely and at ease, finding a non-judging listening ear in the intimacy of pillow talk? Why would one keep things to oneself? Once something has been told, it cannot be untold. The listener’s heart might no longer be white, but tainted by knowledge that is unbearable.
The truth never shines forth, as the saying goes, because the only truth is that which is known to no one and which remains untransmitted, that which is not translated into words or images, that which remains concealed and unverified, which is perhaps why we do recount so much or even everything, to make sure that nothing has ever really happened, not once it's been told...
At first, because of the multiple scenes of eavesdropping and voyeurism (an important leitmotif in Marías Thus Bad Begins as well) and the complex and intriguing relationship of Juan with his father Ranz, I was reminded of Alberto Moravia’s The Voyeur. While Moravia’s novel however has heavy Freudian undertones, Marías doesn’t seem interested in such straightforward psychologising. By the figure of the mysterious father he rather evokes the elusiveness and intangibility of life– a point he returns to several times in the novel: We spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate these identical things and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be recounted, either now or at the end of time, and thus can be erased or swept away, the annulment of everything we are and do.
Apart from the flowing sentences meandering the reader through the narrative in a slightly intoxicating pace, what makes this book so delicious are its many echoes, inner resonances of themes, reflections and motifs which are mirrored in Marías’ ample use of repetitions giving the novel the quality of a musical composition. From Juan’s fairly innocent duplicity in his work as a translator to Ranz’ dubious exploits as an art expert, Marías questions the sheer possibility of truth and truthfulness, making the point that one simply cannot know the truth. His irreverent, playful tone seems to suggest best to take the futility of truth and life lightly, but cannot conceal a subtle undertone of melancholy.
The novel is replete with amusing interludes and absurdist, almost slapstick scenes, showing Marías as a lover of the art of stylish digression. From an essay of Jonathan Coe on the book, I gathered that Don Quixote, rather than Tristram Shandy must have been on Marías’ mind as a type of digression (having read neither Don Quixote nor Tristram Shandy, Coe’s observations are a powerful reminder to try to squeeze them in before everything ends, which can happen any moment, Marías’ recent sudden demise a sad memento mori).
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Marriage and secrets, perhaps they are as inseparable as Siamese twins, the one unable to exist without the other?
Does something become true if we repeat it often enough? Revealing more would just spoil the reading pleasure of discovering the many delight this novel has in store for yourself, unnecessarily risking a stain on your reader’s heart still white....more
Recitatif is a suggestive, powerful and deceivingly simple short story that offers the reader a richly filled dish with food for thought. Toni MorrisoRecitatif is a suggestive, powerful and deceivingly simple short story that offers the reader a richly filled dish with food for thought. Toni Morrison hands over some sharp ammunition to question one’s own assumptions and innate biases which seem hard to avoid in the struggle to make sense of the world and comprehend one’s place in society. We seem to need clues, social codes and categories to navigate in the world. The social need to feel part of a whole or a group to know who we are, not to lose ourselves in the amorphousness of the masses collective is a strong one – the flipside of such need to belong however that clinging to collective identity creates a dynamic of insiders versus outsiders and can capsize into cognitive distortion, leading to a generalisation and categorisation and ultimately labelling of people, making one overlook what binds and connects rather than divides, possibly opening a road to cruelty.
Twyla and Roberta encounter each other as roommates in a children’s home at the age of eight. Unlike the other children, they are not orphans but end up in t-Bonny’s for four months because their mothers cannot adequately take care of them: one girl’s mother dances all night, the other girl’s mother is sick. One of them is black. One of them is white. Does it matter? One of them will thrive and live in luxury, one of them will struggle to make ends meet. Later in life they coincidentally will bump into each other again a couple of times, unable to bridge the widening gap between them as the differences between them become as visible as the different colour of their skin. Yet their bond from the past yields common ground, rooted in their shared experience of being disposed of as children and being haunted by a faltering memory of how and why they (mis)treated Maggie, mute and mocked by everyone – and what they both attempt to forget.
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Toni Morrison masterfully conveys how black and white, dichotomous thinking comes in many different shapes and forms, whether related to the colour of the skin, social class or physical (dis)ability. The experiences of Twyla and Roberta show how differences and similarities can both divide as well as unite because social life consists in a dynamic and complex interplay implying the unending and unpredictable shift of power, collective identities and changing affinities, change the only constant we know....more
But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.
Only the name of Araby suffices to evoke the geographyBut my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.
Only the name of Araby suffices to evoke the geography of the dream. Juicy fruit, aromatic spices, sublime fragrances, the intensity of the desert sun, sensual pleasures, the promise of a feast of the senses, the storytelling from the Arabian Nights. Infatuation opens a world beyond children’s play in the muddy, wintry streets of Dublin. Just as evanescent as a few drops of perfume scent however, the dream soon dissipates. Disappointment segues promise.
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A sensuous and bittersweet story about yearning, sexual awakening and youthful expectation in which disenchantment eventually will shine through as the base note of the perfume once the alluring top notes have evaporated. After all, what is perfume more than a blend of alcohol and oil which turns out non-potable, leaving a bitter taste in the mouth when one nonetheless tries to imbibe it?
Is it my fault that I am still a prisoner of my memories?
The after-effects of the collaboration and the Occupation
Written in 1972, Ring Roads is tIs it my fault that I am still a prisoner of my memories?
The after-effects of the collaboration and the Occupation
Written in 1972, Ring Roads is the third part of what has become known as Patrick Modiano’s Occupation Trilogy. As the first part, La Place de l’Étoile, was the first novel I happened to read by Modiano (while travelling by train to Bruges, in the year 2006), it struck me that despite the familiar topics (the sleuth-like search for time and people from the past, nocturnal scenes, memory, the second world war, the collaboration, the strained relationship with a neglectful parent) the tone of Ring Roads turned out quite different from the one I remember from the sardonic La Place de l’Étoile). Ring Roads is composed in a melancholic minor key and its tone leans closer towards his later work (eg So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood, particularly with regard to the shadow hunting for the past and in this case the impossibility to elude the looming weight of the father figure instead of the uninvolved mother.
Multiple echoes of Proust adorn the pages and Freud is looking around the corner too, taking the shape of a what comes across as a volte-face of the Oedipus myth, in which the father attempts to kill the son instead of vice versa, the son appears as an accidental passer-by in the life of father while the son is aware of their kinship and the son acts a guardian angel watching over the father trying to preserve him from the gang of thugs, ex-collaborators and shady creatures of the night that has him in their grubby paws, blackmailing the father because he is on the run.
Set partly in Paris and (probably) Barbizon shortly after the second world war, an atmosphere of menace pervades the nocturnal scenes in which the group gathers. Some of the group members are chased by the authorities and fear the settling of scores, both within the criminal milieu as by the state, requiring them to reckon for their collaboration with the Nazi occupier, having being active as a journalist in the collaborationist press or involved in the French Gestapo (as often, Modiano alludes to the Carlingue, known also as the French Gestapo, which operated in collaboration with the German Gestapo during the occupation. Based at 93 rue Lauriston in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, this group of thugs, gangsters and professional criminals was founded by a corrupt ex-policeman. After a trial at the end of 1944, some group members were executed, but others managed to slip through the net. Some features of Modiano’s characters in Ring Roads are inspired by a couple of those involved in the Carlingue (eg Robert Brasillach, a list can be found here.)
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Try though we might, we will never know peace, the sweet stillness of things. We will walk on quicksand to the end.
Against this background, Modiano explores the father-son relationship, in which the father’s attempt to kill the narrator– as well as the suggestion of another murder - might as well have been merely imaginary or symbolic, not unusual in Modiano’s shadow-hunting which is coloured by the blurring brought by oblivion and the unreliability of memory. Last week, a friend pointed me at the fascinating contrast between Modiano’s evocation of the vagueness of memory versus the very detailed indications of places, squares and streets in his oeuvre (a whole catalogue has been made of the streets in Paris featuring in his novels, Paris dans les pas de Patrick Modiano). Ring Roads is no exception in that respect, although some allusions are more indirect than in his later work.
Have you noticed, Baron, how quiet Paris is tonight? We glide along the empty boulevards. The trees shiver, their branches forming a protective vault above our heads. Here and there a lighted window. The owners have fled have forgotten to turn off the lights. Later, I’ll walk through this city and it will seem as empty to me as it does today. I will lose myself in the maze of streets, searching for your shadow. Until I become one with it.
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Having savoured this excellent episode in my long-standing addiction to/tango with the novels of Patrick Modiano, it is time to read part two of the Occupation Trilogy. Unsurprisingly, I look forward to the new novel of Modiano which will be published in October 2023, La danseuse.
Because I will take a break from reading and reviewing for the coming months in order to study for a couple of exams, this will probably be the last review I’ll post for a while. I hope to return to books and this site in November – in the meantime, I wish all of you happy reading and reviewing ♥.
Novels of Patrick Modiano on which I posted reviews:
To the centre of the city where all roads meet, waiting for you To the depths of the ocean where all hopes sank, searching for you I was moving through the silence without motion, waiting for you In a room with a window in the corner I found truth
In the shadowplay, acting out your own death, knowing no more As the assassins all grouped in four lines, dancing on the floor And with cold steel odour on their bodies made a move to connect But I could only stare in disbelief as the crowds all left
I did everything, everything I wanted to I let them use you for their own ends
To the centre of the city in the night, waiting for you To the centre of the city in the night, waiting for you
And there, when he went walking at nightfall, in the quiet little snowy streets that were filled with a gentle indulgence, he would run his hands lighAnd there, when he went walking at nightfall, in the quiet little snowy streets that were filled with a gentle indulgence, he would run his hands lightly over the red and white bricks of the houses and, clinging to the wall, sidewise, through fear of being indiscreet, he would look through the clear panes into downstairs rooms in which green plants on china saucers had been set in the window, and from where, warm, full, heavy with a mysterious denseness, objects tossed him a small part—to him too, although he was unknown and a stranger—of their radiance; where the corners of a table, the door of a sideboard, the straw seat of a chair emerged from the half-light and consented to become for him, mercifully for him, too, since he was standing there waiting, a little bit of his childhood.
Usually I tend to struggle with writing that is regarded as experimental, even in case the eloquence, erudition or playfulness of it stuns me. A few years ago I pencil-marked lots of lush sentences in the amazingly poetical Passages by Ann Quin because they resonated with me aesthetically, but I was relieved when arriving at the last page of the book, finding it hard to make sense of it and postponing a re-read, assuming a revisit wouldn’t bring much reading joy. So why Sarraute’s fragments, without continuing narrative or plot, without names or identifiable characters - a character could as well be a china doll, a marionette as a human being, there are children, a grabby family friend, a grandfather who holds a grandchild’s hand teaching it how to cross a zebra crossing, cooks, servants, housewives devouring chocolate éclairs in tearooms, only denoted by personal pronouns,‘they’, ‘he’ and ‘she’ – elicited the kind of reading rapture that prompted me to read it a second time within a month after I finished it ?
I was charmed by the lyricism of some of Sarraute’s fragments and the wild variety in moods (unsettling, menacing, tender, pensive, slight disquiet). The evocation of how one bends oneself under expectations of others, of one’s family, especially as a child touched a chord (several fragments reminded me of her autobiographical Enfance, the child sitting on her bed in a room, contemplating, her intellectual greediness). Sarraute opens windows where there are none, observing the characters as living dolls moving around in doll’s house, offering the reader the position of a privileged outsider who can look through the walls of an apartment block and observe how life is lived intensely within the rooms at view, showing slices of life in slow motion, the succinctness of the vignettes intensifying and enlarging the exteriorised inner experience of every day drama. In Sarraute’s own words: “What I tried to do was to show certain inner “movements” by which I had long been attracted; in fact, I might even say that, ever since I was a child, these movements, which are hidden under the commonplace, harmless appearances of every instant of our lives, had struck and held my attention.”
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The changes in perspective, the shape and the observing angle found in these fragments reminded me of some of the few short stories of Virginia Woolf I have read, essentially A Haunted House - Virginia Woolf and The Lady in the Looking-Glass. Sarraute named Woolf as one of her influences and particularly the way both writers conjure up the feeling of being in a room, a subtle sense of how one’s body relates to other bodies, objects, furniture and the intensity and precision of the prose when gracefully evoking detail. However Sarraute’s exploration on the edges of consciousness is a darker and more haunting one, the recurrent dissonances which surface in the fragments in the form of slightly disconcerting animalistic metaphors (jellyfish, hungry pitiless parasites, leeches, slugs stuck everywhere, spreading their mucus on corners of Rimbaud) are as many caveats for the readers not to let themselves soothe asleep. The weight of expectations on children, the burdening pressure to conform, the menace undercutting the false security ostensibly offered in the bosom of the family is tangible in most fragments in which Sarraute outlines the muted inner screams provoked by the everyday madness within the bourgeois family.
A sense of power struggle and subdued domestic violence and oppression pervade some of the fragments. Even a hand gesture speaks volumes, a motionless sitting becomes significant and softness means menace, forcing one to dance to the mute tune of the sitter, a suffocating presence needs to be appeased. He felt that she should be set straight, soothed, at any cost, but that only someone endowed with superhuman strength would be able to do it, someone who would have the nerve to remain there opposite her, comfortably seated, well-settled in another chair, who would dare to look her calmly in the face, catch her eye, not divert his own from her squirming.
The interior responsiveness of characters to others which Sarraute likens to the natural phenomenon of tropisms, in which organisms move in response to an external stimulus such as sunflowers twisting toward a light source, resembles the interacting of dancers in an intricate choreography of push-pull movements, captured in the words which dance on the pages:
How exhausting is all this effort, this perpetual hopping and skipping about in his presence: backwards, forwards, forwards, forwards, and backwards again, now circling about him, then again on his toes, with eyes glued to him, and sidewise and forwards and backwards, to give him this voluptuous pleasure.
The rhythm, the cadence, the dark undercurrents of emotions give the impression that the twenty-four fragments stand on the pages as prose poems, an impression enhanced by the copious use of white space in the edition I read. The lack of narrative arch, some of the pieces seem in close connection to each other, mirroring, enhancing each other, having whispering conversations with each other, reflecting for instance contrasting movements, as in counterpoint, the stillness and powerlessness while sitting on the bed, waiting in fragment V is followed by a hectic power struggle chasing the ones present in fragment VI around. Characters are chirping like birds in an aviary, thoughts patter, shuffle, push away.
When sharing thoughts on a poetry collection, I am often tempted to single out a favourite poem I cherish; trying to do the same with Tropisms, reading it a second time makes it harder to choose just one, as the resonance of the fragments seems to grow reading them once more.
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One of my favourite, more mellow, fragments (XVI) describes an older couple and the little they need:
Now they were old, they were quite worn out, “like old furniture that has seen long usage, that had served its time and accomplished its task”, and sometimes (this was coyness on their part) they heaved a sort of short sigh, filled with resignation and relief, that was like something crackling.
On soft spring evenings, they went walking together, “now that youth was finished, now that the passions were spent”, they went walking quietly, “to take a breath of fresh air before going to bed”, sit down in a café, spend a few moments chatting.
They chose a well-protected corner, taking many precautions (“not here, it’s in a draught, nor there, it’s just beside the lavatory”), they sat down – “Ah! These old bones, we’re getting old. Ah! Ah!”- and they let their cracking be heard.
The place had a cold, dingy glitter, the waiters ran about too fast in a rough, indifferent manner, the mirrors gave back harsh reflections of tired faces and blinking eyes.
But they asked for nothing more, this was it, they knew it well, you shouldn’t expect anything, you shouldn’t demand anything, that’s how it was, there was nothing more this was it, ‘life’.
Nothing else, nothing more, here or there, now they knew it.
You should not rebel, dream, hope, make an effort, flee, you had only to choose carefully (the waiter was waiting) whether it was to be a grenadine or a coffee? With milk or black? While accepting unassumingly to live – here or there – and let time go by.
No wonder this magical work seem to have inspired the name-giving of a bookshop in Brussels.
My edition included as an extra the fragment VI that Sarraute originally published in the 1939 edition but chose to eliminate in the 1957 edition because she thought it too dated by its references to past events.
Powerful and brilliant, the joy of new musical details vibrating in delicate turns of phrases to discover with each reading, Tropisms feels very much as a book to be read again and again....more
This, and much more, she accepted - for after all living did mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case – mere possibThis, and much more, she accepted - for after all living did mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case – mere possibilities of improvement. She thought of the endless waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed, or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer and helplessly have to watch the shadow of his simian stoop leave mangled flowers in its wake, as the monstrous darkness approaches.
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Sublime, sprightly, brilliant – returning to Nabokov again, I am tripping over superlatives. Further thoughts to come....more
Rotating in slow descent, the winged fruit of a linden lit on the tablecloth.
Written in 1936, shortly before Nabokov left Berlin for Paris, The CiRotating in slow descent, the winged fruit of a linden lit on the tablecloth.
Written in 1936, shortly before Nabokov left Berlin for Paris, The Circle is a melancholic, circular story , eating its own tail like the Ouroboros, sending the reader back to the first line – which could also have been the second – as soon as finishing the last line, which could also have been the first.
Nabokov conceived the circle as a digression from the novel he was writing at that moment, The Gift. In Nabokov’s own words it is ‘a small satellite separated itself from the main body of the novel’, a supplement to The Gift. The narrator sinks into the mind of Innokentiy Bychkov, the son of a schoolmaster in pre-revolutionary Russia, now in exile in Paris, surging up memories of his childhood and adolescence and of his unrequited love for Tanya, the daughter of Count Konstantin Godunov-Cherdyntsev and sister of Fyodor Konstantinovitch Godunov-Cherdyntsev (the protagonist of The Gift).
By means of diverting the light to a side character of his novel , Nabokov creates a way to present another perspective on those times and place through the eyes of the rebellious son of the schoolmaster – a view which is waywardly nostalgic with regard to the loss of the motherland and bygone dreams and emotions, subtly echoing Pushkin (the encounter with Tanya reminisces the one of Onegin and Tatyana in Eugene Onegin) and Turgenev (the longing from a distance for one not belonging to one’s own social circle), daintily blended with elegant detail: Hatred (or so it seemed suffocated him when as a youth he used to look across the river at the great manorial park, heavy with ancient privileges and imperial grants, casting the reflection of its black amassments onto the green water (with the creamy blur of a racemose blooming here and there among the fir trees).
Nothing is lost, nothing whatever; memory accumulates treasures.
A gem of a story, replete with luscious imagery painted with a sensuous brush.
In her room Ruth read of cottages blasted by northern winds, of country mansions with spacious lawns, of ParisiaRuth, or the misfortunes of virtue
In her room Ruth read of cottages blasted by northern winds, of country mansions with spacious lawns, of Parisian lodging houses teeming with intrigue and activity, of miners’ back-to-backs vibrating with the heat of banked-up coal fires, of home farms and rectories, of villas and castles, of gardens and pièces d’eau, of journeys and sojourns abroad. Was real life always so untenanted? Or was real life a distillation from ordinary mundane disappointment?
From her fiction debut in 1981 on, Anita Brookner welcomes the reader in her comfortably uncomfortable world of solitude, loneliness, slight disappointment in life and love, dark stuffy flats with heavy furniture and family gloominess counterweighed by books.
If this sounds cozy and appealing enough to avid readers, Brookner doesn’t hide that for some readers books are rather a honey trap, deluding one’s expectations and ideas how life should be – an outright danger, which brings Emma Bovary to mind.
Professor in literature Ruth Weiss is an apt illustration of such a reader, and an easy victim for literary lure, knowing, at forty, that her life had been ruined by literature. Finding herself exactly half-way between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such is probably what is to be expected when your life is reigned by investigating vice and virtue in the novels of Honoré de Balzac. The title that Brookner chose for her debut being the same as the novel Balzac published in 1842 speaks volumes in this respect – and will also turn out rather ironic, both from the point of view of her protagonist Ruth Weiss as for Anita Brookner herself, who before turning to fiction already was an established author in art history.
Disappointment was now built into any hope she might have had left.
Having been mostly brought up by her stern Jewish-German parental grandmother, Ruth Weiss grows up as a scrupulous and thoughtful young woman, torn between her longing for freedom, space and air and the demands that are made on her as a dutiful daughter. When the grandmother dies, her childish, selfish and irresponsible parents force her to become the adult the room, reversing the roles, shamelessly exploiting Ruth like in the nineteenth century novels Ruth reads. The crumbling down of the home into a dirty mess and the depiction of the parents, ever more clumsy in organising ordinary life, joined by a chain-smoking housekeeper who avoids cooking and cleaning, hilariously counterpoises poor Ruth’s earnestness in life.
In this increasingly insane household, in which her mother Helen retreats to living mostly in bed, followed by the father and the housekeeper, Ruth reminded me of Saffy, the serious daughter constantly caring of her immature mother Edina in Absoluty Fabulous. Ruth doesn’t turn cynic though – thanks to her interior conversations with Balzac and the characters of his novels.
Ruth, who knew most of this by instinct, began to think of the world in terms of Balzacian opportunism. Her insights improved. She perceived that most tales of morality were wrong, that even Charles Dickens was wrong, and that the world is not won by virtue. Eternal life, perhaps — but who knows about that? Not the world. If the moral code she had learnt, through the literature she was now beginning to reinterpret, were correct, she should surely have flourished in her heavy unbecoming coat, in her laborious solitude, with her notes and the daily bus ride and the healthful lonely walks.
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From staying for research in Paris and a couple of lovers and the heroines of Balzac, she learns the limits of virtue and duty, experiencing that vice and frivolity might mean more fun. In Paris, she learns that good girls go to heaven and bad girls go everywhere. Nevertheless, Ruth in her heart deplores that virtue isn’t rewarded in real life like it is in books:
Yet she was aware of something out of joint. She would have preferred the books to have been right. The patient striving for virtue, the long term of trial, the ecstasy of earned reward.
Even more than her later novels Hotel du Lac and Family And Friends, A Start in Life reads like a nineteenth century novel, breathing a similar atmosphere of bygone times, including the stays at spa towns like Baden-Baden, or travel destinations for the wealthy with nineteenth century grandeur like Scheveningen, or Vevey, the pearl of the Swiss Riviera. Nevertheless, Ruth Weiss has to find her place as a woman, navigate family, work, romantic love and marriage in times where is there is no manual for morality and the many divergent role models offered by literature leave the modern woman longing for love clueless.
She studied the couple closely, as if they were an unknown species. They were, in fact, an unknown species. They were happy.
Tessa Hadley ranked A start in Life among Anita Brookner’s five best novels. Having only read three so far, I am not sure I would agree, but comfortably uncomfortable like snuggly reading in bed with the crumbs of breakfast digging in your back, Anita Brookner’s witty sense of humour, elegant prose and perceptive observations makes this tragicomedy of manners a delight to read....more
Whoever doesn't live in poetry cannot survive here on earth.
I was elated by this line the moment I first came across it some years ago – and now encouWhoever doesn't live in poetry cannot survive here on earth.
I was elated by this line the moment I first came across it some years ago – and now encountering it at its home, embedded in in this brilliant novel was like a finally visiting a place I have been dreaming of going to for a long time.
Poetry, coffee, irreverent and at times absurd philosophical conversations touching on religion and history, a playful tribute to the Ewig Weibliche – this turned out an excellent and fun holiday reading choice.
The excellent afterword of Susan Sontag singing the praise of it is a lovely bonus - unlike her, I just wouldn't postulate that Under the Glacier is unlike every other book Laxness wrote; the light and witty tone and his toying with the import of poetry and history in Iceland reminded me a lot of Wayward Heroes – besides, both novels made me laugh out loud quite a few times.
Not (yet? or not anymore?) up to forge a review for the time being, I recommend reading this review - it encapsulates this delectable novel better than I ever could, even in my wildest dreams.